In after-days I thought with bitter regret that if I had foreseen

something more or something different--if instead of that hideous vision
which poisoned the passion it could not destroy, or if even along with it
I could have had a foreshadowing of that moment when I looked on my
brother's face for the last time, some softening influence would have
been shed over my feeling towards him: pride and hatred would surely have
been subdued into pity, and the record of those hidden sins would have
been shortened.  But this is one of the vain thoughts with which we men
flatter ourselves.  We try to believe that the egoism within us would
have easily been melted, and that it was only the narrowness of our
knowledge which hemmed in our generosity, our awe, our human piety, and
hindered them from submerging our hard indifference to the sensations and
emotions of our fellows.  Our tenderness and self-renunciation seem
strong when our egoism has had its day--when, after our mean striving for
a triumph that is to be another's loss, the triumph comes suddenly, and
we shudder at it, because it is held out by the chill hand of death.

Our arrival in Prague happened at night, and I was glad of this, for it
seemed like a deferring of a terribly decisive moment, to be in the city
for hours without seeing it.  As we were not to remain long in Prague,
but to go on speedily to Dresden, it was proposed that we should drive
out the next morning and take a general view of the place, as well as
visit some of its specially interesting spots, before the heat became
oppressive--for we were in August, and the season was hot and dry.  But
it happened that the ladies were rather late at their morning toilet, and
to my father's politely-repressed but perceptible annoyance, we were not
in the carriage till the morning was far advanced.  I thought with a
sense of relief, as we entered the Jews' quarter, where we were to visit
the old synagogue, that we should be kept in this flat, shut-up part of
the city, until we should all be too tired and too warm to go farther,
and so we should return without seeing more than the streets through
which we had already passed.  That would give me another day's
suspense--suspense, the only form in which a fearful spirit knows the
solace of hope.  But, as I stood under the blackened, groined arches of
that old synagogue, made dimly visible by the seven thin candles in the
sacred lamp, while our Jewish cicerone reached down the Book of the Law,
and read to us in its ancient tongue--I felt a shuddering impression that
this strange building, with its shrunken lights, this surviving withered
remnant of medieval Judaism, was of a piece with my vision.  Those
darkened dusty Christian saints, with their loftier arches and their
larger candles, needed the consolatory scorn with which they might point
to a more shrivelled death-in-life than their own.

As I expected, when we left the Jews' quarter the elders of our party
wished to return to the hotel.  But now, instead of rejoicing in this, as
I had done beforehand, I felt a sudden overpowering impulse to go on at
once to the bridge, and put an end to the suspense I had been wishing to
protract.  I declared, with unusual decision, that I would get out of the
carriage and walk on alone; they might return without me.  My father,
thinking this merely a sample of my usual "poetic nonsense," objected
that I should only do myself harm by walking in the heat; but when I
persisted, he said angrily that I might follow my own absurd devices, but
that Schmidt (our courier) must go with me.  I assented to this, and set
off with Schmidt towards the bridge.  I had no sooner passed from under
the archway of the grand old gate leading an to the bridge, than a
trembling seized me, and I turned cold under the midday sun; yet I went
on; I was in search of something--a small detail which I remembered with
special intensity as part of my vision.  There it was--the patch of
rainbow light on the pavement transmitted through a lamp in the shape of
a star.




CHAPTER II


Before the autumn was at an end, and while the brown leaves still stood
thick on the beeches in our park, my brother and Bertha were engaged to
each other, and it was understood that their marriage was to take place
early in the next spring.  In spite of the certainty I had felt from that
moment on the bridge at Prague, that Bertha would one day be my wife, my
constitutional timidity and distrust had continued to benumb me, and the
words in which I had sometimes premeditated a confession of my love, had
died away unuttered.  The same conflict had gone on within me as
before--the longing for an assurance of love from Bertha's lips, the
dread lest a word of contempt and denial should fall upon me like a
corrosive acid.  What was the conviction of a distant necessity to me?  I
trembled under a present glance, I hungered after a present joy, I was
clogged and chilled by a present fear.  And so the days passed on: I
witnessed Bertha's engagement and heard her marriage discussed as if I
were under a conscious nightmare--knowing it was a dream that would
vanish, but feeling stifled under the grasp of hard-clutching fingers.

When I was not in Bertha's presence--and I was with her very often, for
she continued to treat me with a playful patronage that wakened no
jealousy in my brother--I spent my time chiefly in wandering, in
strolling, or taking long rides while the daylight lasted, and then
shutting myself up with my unread books; for books had lost the power of
chaining my attention.  My self-consciousness was heightened to that
pitch of intensity in which our own emotions take the form of a drama
which urges itself imperatively on our contemplation, and we begin to
weep, less under the sense of our suffering than at the thought of it.  I
felt a sort of pitying anguish over the pathos of my own lot: the lot of
a being finely organized for pain, but with hardly any fibres that
responded to pleasure--to whom the idea of future evil robbed the present
of its joy, and for whom the idea of future good did not still the
uneasiness of a present yearning or a present dread.  I went dumbly
through that stage of the poet's suffering, in which he feels the
delicious pang of utterance, and makes an image of his sorrows.

I was left entirely without remonstrance concerning this dreamy wayward
life: I knew my father's thought about me: "That lad will never be good
for anything in life: he may waste his years in an insignificant way on
the income that falls to him: I shall not trouble myself about a career
for him."

One mild morning in the beginning of November, it happened that I was
standing outside the portico patting lazy old Caesar, a Newfoundland
almost blind with age, the only dog that ever took any notice of me--for
the very dogs shunned me, and fawned on the happier people about me--when
the groom brought up my brother's horse which was to carry him to the
hunt, and my brother himself appeared at the door, florid, broad-chested,
and self-complacent, feeling what a good-natured fellow he was not to
behave insolently to us all on the strength of his great advantages.

"Latimer, old boy," he said to me in a tone of compassionate cordiality,
"what a pity it is you don't have a run with the hounds now and then!  The
finest thing in the world for low spirits!"

"Low spirits!" I thought bitterly, as he rode away; "that is the sort of
phrase with which coarse, narrow natures like yours think to describe
experience of which you can know no more than your horse knows.  It is to
such as you that the good of this world falls: ready dulness, healthy
selfishness, good-tempered conceit--these are the keys to happiness."

The quick thought came, that my selfishness was even stronger than his--it
was only a suffering selfishness instead of an enjoying one.  But then,
again, my exasperating insight into Alfred's self-complacent soul, his
freedom from all the doubts and fears, the unsatisfied yearnings, the
exquisite tortures of sensitiveness, that had made the web of my life,
seemed to absolve me from all bonds towards him.  This man needed no
pity, no love; those fine influences would have been as little felt by
him as the delicate white mist is felt by the rock it caresses.  There
was no evil in store for _him_: if he was not to marry Bertha, it would
be because he had found a lot pleasanter to himself.

Mr. Filmore's house lay not more than half a mile beyond our own gates,
and whenever I knew my brother was gone in another direction, I went
there for the chance of finding Bertha at home.  Later on in the day I
walked thither.  By a rare accident she was alone, and we walked out in
the grounds together, for she seldom went on foot beyond the trimly-swept
gravel-walks.  I remember what a beautiful sylph she looked to me as the
low November sun shone on her blond hair, and she tripped along teasing
me with her usual light banter, to which I listened half fondly, half
moodily; it was all the sign Bertha's mysterious inner self ever made to
me.  To-day perhaps, the moodiness predominated, for I had not yet shaken
off the access of jealous hate which my brother had raised in me by his
parting patronage.  Suddenly I interrupted and startled her by saying,
almost fiercely, "Bertha, how can you love Alfred?"

She looked at me with surprise for a moment, but soon her light smile
came again, and she answered sarcastically, "Why do you suppose I love
him?"

"How can you ask that, Bertha?"

"What! your wisdom thinks I must love the man I'm going to marry?  The
most unpleasant thing in the world.  I should quarrel with him; I should
be jealous of him; our _menage_ would be conducted in a very ill-bred
manner.  A little quiet contempt contributes greatly to the elegance of
life."

"Bertha, that is not your real feeling.  Why do you delight in trying to
deceive me by inventing such cynical speeches?"

"I need never take the trouble of invention in order to deceive you, my
small Tasso"--(that was the mocking name she usually gave me).  "The
easiest way to deceive a poet is to tell him the truth."

She was testing the validity of her epigram in a daring way, and for a
moment the shadow of my vision--the Bertha whose soul was no secret to
me--passed between me and the radiant girl, the playful sylph whose
feelings were a fascinating mystery.  I suppose I must have shuddered, or
betrayed in some other way my momentary chill of horror.

"Tasso!" she said, seizing my wrist, and peeping round into my face, "are
you really beginning to discern what a heartless girl I am?  Why, you are
not half the poet I thought you were; you are actually capable of
believing the truth about me."

The shadow passed from between us, and was no longer the object nearest
to me.  The girl whose light fingers grasped me, whose elfish charming
face looked into mine--who, I thought, was betraying an interest in my
feelings that she would not have directly avowed,--this warm breathing
presence again possessed my senses and imagination like a returning siren
melody which had been overpowered for an instant by the roar of
threatening waves.  It was a moment as delicious to me as the waking up
to a consciousness of youth after a dream of middle age.  I forgot
everything but my passion, and said with swimming eyes--

"Bertha, shall you love me when we are first married?  I wouldn't mind if
you really loved me only for a little while."

Her look of astonishment, as she loosed my hand and started away from me,
recalled me to a sense of my strange, my criminal indiscretion.

"Forgive me," I said, hurriedly, as soon as I could speak again; "I did
not know what I was saying."

"Ah, Tasso's mad fit has come on, I see," she answered quietly, for she
had recovered herself sooner than I had.  "Let him go home and keep his
head cool.  I must go in, for the sun is setting."

I left her--full of indignation against myself.  I had let slip words
which, if she reflected on them, might rouse in her a suspicion of my
abnormal mental condition--a suspicion which of all things I dreaded.  And
besides that, I was ashamed of the apparent baseness I had committed in
uttering them to my brother's betrothed wife.  I wandered home slowly,
entering our park through a private gate instead of by the lodges.  As I
approached the house, I saw a man dashing off at full speed from the
stable-yard across the park.  Had any accident happened at home?  No;
perhaps it was only one of my father's peremptory business errands that
required this headlong haste.

Nevertheless I quickened my pace without any distinct motive, and was
soon at the house.  I will not dwell on the scene I found there.  My
brother was dead--had been pitched from his horse, and killed on the spot
by a concussion of the brain.

I went up to the room where he lay, and where my father was seated beside
him with a look of rigid despair.  I had shunned my father more than any
one since our return home, for the radical antipathy between our natures
made my insight into his inner self a constant affliction to me.  But
now, as I went up to him, and stood beside him in sad silence, I felt the
presence of a new element that blended us as we had never been blent
before.  My father had been one of the most successful men in the money-
getting world: he had had no sentimental sufferings, no illness.  The
heaviest trouble that had befallen him was the death of his first wife.
But he married my mother soon after; and I remember he seemed exactly the
same, to my keen childish observation, the week after her death as
before.  But now, at last, a sorrow had come--the sorrow of old age,
which suffers the more from the crushing of its pride and its hopes, in
proportion as the pride and hope are narrow and prosaic.  His son was to
have been married soon--would probably have stood for the borough at the
next election.  That son's existence was the best motive that could be
alleged for making new purchases of land every year to round off the
estate.  It is a dreary thing onto live on doing the same things year
after year, without knowing why we do them.  Perhaps the tragedy of
disappointed youth and passion is less piteous than the tragedy of
disappointed age and worldliness.

As I saw into the desolation of my father's heart, I felt a movement of
deep pity towards him, which was the beginning of a new affection--an
affection that grew and strengthened in spite of the strange bitterness
with which he regarded me in the first month or two after my brother's
death.  If it had not been for the softening influence of my compassion
for him--the first deep compassion I had ever felt--I should have been
stung by the perception that my father transferred the inheritance of an
eldest son to me with a mortified sense that fate had compelled him to
the unwelcome course of caring for me as an important being.  It was only
in spite of himself that he began to think of me with anxious regard.
There is hardly any neglected child for whom death has made vacant a more
favoured place, who will not understand what I mean.

Gradually, however, my new deference to his wishes, the effect of that
patience which was born of my pity for him, won upon his affection, and
he began to please himself with the endeavour to make me fill any
brother's place as fully as my feebler personality would admit.  I saw
that the prospect which by and by presented itself of my becoming
Bertha's husband was welcome to him, and he even contemplated in my case
what he had not intended in my brother's--that his son and daughter-in-
law should make one household with him.  My softened feelings towards my
father made this the happiest time I had known since childhood;--these
last months in which I retained the delicious illusion of loving Bertha,
of longing and doubting and hoping that she might love me.  She behaved
with a certain new consciousness and distance towards me after my
brother's death; and I too was under a double constraint--that of
delicacy towards my brother's memory and of anxiety as to the impression
my abrupt words had left on her mind.  But the additional screen this
mutual reserve erected between us only brought me more completely under
her power: no matter how empty the adytum, so that the veil be thick
enough.  So absolute is our soul's need of something hidden and uncertain
for the maintenance of that doubt and hope and effort which are the
breath of its life, that if the whole future were laid bare to us beyond
to-day, the interest of all mankind would be bent on the hours that lie
between; we should pant after the uncertainties of our one morning and
our one afternoon; we should rush fiercely to the Exchange for our last
possibility of speculation, of success, of disappointment: we should have
a glut of political prophets foretelling a crisis or a no-crisis within
the only twenty-four hours left open to prophecy.  Conceive the condition
of the human mind if all propositions whatsoever were self-evident except
one, which was to become self-evident at the close of a summer's day, but
in the meantime might be the subject of question, of hypothesis, of
debate.  Art and philosophy, literature and science, would fasten like
bees on that one proposition which had the honey of probability in it,
and be the more eager because their enjoyment would end with sunset.  Our
impulses, our spiritual activities, no more adjust themselves to the idea
of their future nullity, than the beating of our heart, or the
irritability of our muscles.

Bertha, the slim, fair-haired girl, whose present thoughts and emotions
were an enigma to me amidst the fatiguing obviousness of the other minds
around me, was as absorbing to me as a single unknown to-day--as a single
hypothetic proposition to remain problematic till sunset; and all the
cramped, hemmed-in belief and disbelief, trust and distrust, of my
nature, welled out in this one narrow channel.

And she made me believe that she loved me.  Without ever quitting her
tone of _badinage_ and playful superiority, she intoxicated me with the
sense that I was necessary to her, that she was never at ease, unless I
was near her, submitting to her playful tyranny.  It costs a woman so
little effort to beset us in this way!  A half-repressed word, a moment's
unexpected silence, even an easy fit of petulance on our account, will
serve us as _hashish_ for a long while.  Out of the subtlest web of
scarcely perceptible signs, she set me weaving the fancy that she had
always unconsciously loved me better than Alfred, but that, with the
ignorant fluttered sensibility of a young girl, she had been imposed on
by the charm that lay for her in the distinction of being admired and
chosen by a man who made so brilliant a figure in the world as my
brother.  She satirized herself in a very graceful way for her vanity and
ambition.  What was it to me that I had the light of my wretched
provision on the fact that now it was I who possessed at least all but
the personal part of my brother's advantages?  Our sweet illusions are
half of them conscious illusions, like effects of colour that we know to
be made up of tinsel, broken glass, and rags.

We were married eighteen months after Alfred's death, one cold, clear
morning in April, when there came hail and sunshine both together; and
Bertha, in her white silk and pale-green leaves, and the pale hues of her
hair and face, looked like the spirit of the morning.  My father was
happier than he had thought of being again: my marriage, he felt sure,
would complete the desirable modification of my character, and make me
practical and worldly enough to take my place in society among sane men.
For he delighted in Bertha's tact and acuteness, and felt sure she would
be mistress of me, and make me what she chose: I was only twenty-one, and
madly in love with her.  Poor father!  He kept that hope a little while
after our first year of marriage, and it was not quite extinct when
paralysis came and saved him from utter disappointment.

I shall hurry through the rest of my story, not dwelling so much as I
have hitherto done on my inward experience.  When people are well known
to each other, they talk rather of what befalls them externally, leaving
their feelings and sentiments to be inferred.

We lived in a round of visits for some time after our return home, giving
splendid dinner-parties, and making a sensation in our neighbourhood by
the new lustre of our equipage, for my father had reserved this display
of his increased wealth for the period of his son's marriage; and we gave
our acquaintances liberal opportunity for remarking that it was a pity I
made so poor a figure as an heir and a bridegroom.  The nervous fatigue
of this existence, the insincerities and platitudes which I had to live
through twice over--through my inner and outward sense--would have been
maddening to me, if I had not had that sort of intoxicated callousness
which came from the delights of a first passion.  A bride and bridegroom,
surrounded by all the appliances of wealth, hurried through the day by
the whirl of society, filling their solitary moments with
hastily-snatched caresses, are prepared for their future life together as
the novice is prepared for the cloister--by experiencing its utmost
contrast.

Through all these crowded excited months, Bertha's inward self remained
shrouded from me, and I still read her thoughts only through the language
of her lips and demeanour: I had still the human interest of wondering
whether what I did and said pleased her, of longing to hear a word of
affection, of giving a delicious exaggeration of meaning to her smile.
But I was conscious of a growing difference in her manner towards me;
sometimes strong enough to be called haughty coldness, cutting and
chilling me as the hail had done that came across the sunshine on our
marriage morning; sometimes only perceptible in the dexterous avoidance
of a _tete-a-tete_ walk or dinner to which I had been looking forward.  I
had been deeply pained by this--had even felt a sort of crushing of the
heart, from the sense that my brief day of happiness was near its
setting; but still I remained dependent on Bertha, eager for the last
rays of a bliss that would soon be gone for ever, hoping and watching for
some after-glow more beautiful from the impending night.

I remember--how should I not remember?--the time when that dependence and
hope utterly left me, when the sadness I had felt in Bertha's growing
estrangement became a joy that I looked back upon with longing as a man
might look back on the last pains in a paralysed limb.  It was just after
the close of my father's last illness, which had necessarily withdrawn us
from society and thrown us more on each other.  It was the evening of
father's death.  On that evening the veil which had shrouded Bertha's
soul from me--had made me find in her alone among my fellow-beings the
blessed possibility of mystery, and doubt, and expectation--was first
withdrawn.  Perhaps it was the first day since the beginning of my
passion for her, in which that passion was completely neutralized by the
presence of an absorbing feeling of another kind.  I had been watching by
my father's deathbed: I had been witnessing the last fitful yearning
glance his soul had cast back on the spent inheritance of life--the last
faint consciousness of love he had gathered from the pressure of my hand.
What are all our personal loves when we have been sharing in that supreme
agony?  In the first moments when we come away from the presence of
death, every other relation to the living is merged, to our feeling, in
the great relation of a common nature and a common destiny.

In that state of mind I joined Bertha in her private sitting-room.  She
was seated in a leaning posture on a settee, with her back towards the
door; the great rich coils of her pale blond hair surmounting her small
neck, visible above the back of the settee.  I remember, as I closed the
door behind me, a cold tremulousness seizing me, and a vague sense of
being hated and lonely--vague and strong, like a presentiment.  I know
how I looked at that moment, for I saw myself in Bertha's thought as she
lifted her cutting grey eyes, and looked at me: a miserable ghost-seer,
surrounded by phantoms in the noonday, trembling under a breeze when the
leaves were still, without appetite for the common objects of human
desires, but pining after the moon-beams.  We were front to front with
each other, and judged each other.  The terrible moment of complete
illumination had come to me, and I saw that the darkness had hidden no
landscape from me, but only a blank prosaic wall: from that evening
forth, through the sickening years which followed, I saw all round the
narrow room of this woman's soul--saw petty artifice and mere negation
where I had delighted to believe in coy sensibilities and in wit at war
with latent feeling--saw the light floating vanities of the girl defining
themselves into the systematic coquetry, the scheming selfishness, of the
woman--saw repulsion and antipathy harden into cruel hatred, giving pain
only for the sake of wreaking itself.

For Bertha too, after her kind, felt the bitterness of disillusion.  She
had believed that my wild poet's passion for her would make me her slave;
and that, being her slave, I should execute her will in all things.  With
the essential shallowness of a negative, unimaginative nature, she was
unable to conceive the fact that sensibilities were anything else than
weaknesses.  She had thought my weaknesses would put me in her power, and
she found them unmanageable forces.  Our positions were reversed.  Before
marriage she had completely mastered my imagination, for she was a secret
to me; and I created the unknown thought before which I trembled as if it
were hers.  But now that her soul was laid open to me, now that I was
compelled to share the privacy of her motives, to follow all the petty
devices that preceded her words and acts, she found herself powerless
with me, except to produce in me the chill shudder of repulsion--
powerless, because I could be acted on by no lever within her
reach.  I was dead to worldly ambitions, to social vanities, to all the
incentives within the compass of her narrow imagination, and I lived
under influences utterly invisible to her.

She was really pitiable to have such a husband, and so all the world
thought.  A graceful, brilliant woman, like Bertha, who smiled on morning
callers, made a figure in ball-rooms, and was capable of that light
repartee which, from such a woman, is accepted as wit, was secure of
carrying off all sympathy from a husband who was sickly, abstracted, and,
as some suspected, crack-brained.  Even the servants in our house gave
her the balance of their regard and pity.  For there were no audible
quarrels between us; our alienation, our repulsion from each other, lay
within the silence of our own hearts; and if the mistress went out a
great deal, and seemed to dislike the master's society, was it not
natural, poor thing?  The master was odd.  I was kind and just to my
dependants, but I excited in them a shrinking, half-contemptuous pity;
for this class of men and women are but slightly determined in their
estimate of others by general considerations, or even experience, of
character.  They judge of persons as they judge of coins, and value those
who pass current at a high rate.

After a time I interfered so little with Bertha's habits that it might
seem wonderful how her hatred towards me could grow so intense and active
as it did.  But she had begun to suspect, by some involuntary betrayal of
mine, that there was an abnormal power of penetration in me--that
fitfully, at least, I was strangely cognizant of her thoughts and
intentions, and she began to be haunted by a terror of me, which
alternated every now and then with defiance.  She meditated continually
how the incubus could be shaken off her life--how she could be freed from
this hateful bond to a being whom she at once despised as an imbecile,
and dreaded as an inquisitor.  For a long while she lived in the hope
that my evident wretchedness would drive me to the commission of suicide;
but suicide was not in my nature.  I was too completely swayed by the
sense that I was in the grasp of unknown forces, to believe in my power
of self-release.  Towards my own destiny I had become entirely passive;
for my one ardent desire had spent itself, and impulse no longer
predominated over knowledge.  For this reason I never thought of taking
any steps towards a complete separation, which would have made our
alienation evident to the world.  Why should I rush for help to a new
course, when I was only suffering from the consequences of a deed which
had been the act of my intensest will?  That would have been the logic of
one who had desires to gratify, and I had no desires.  But Bertha and I
lived more and more aloof from each other.  The rich find it easy to live
married and apart.

That course of our life which I have indicated in a few sentences filled
the space of years.  So much misery--so slow and hideous a growth of
hatred and sin, may be compressed into a sentence!  And men judge of each
other's lives through this summary medium.  They epitomize the experience
of their fellow-mortal, and pronounce judgment on him in neat syntax, and
feel themselves wise and virtuous--conquerors over the temptations they
define in well-selected predicates.  Seven years of wretchedness glide
glibly over the lips of the man who has never counted them out in moments
of chill disappointment, of head and heart throbbings, of dread and vain
wrestling, of remorse and despair.  We learn _words_ by rote, but not
their meaning; _that_ must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed
in the subtle fibres of our nerves.

But I will hasten to finish my story.  Brevity is justified at once to
those who readily understand, and to those who will never understand.

Some years after my father's death, I was sitting by the dim firelight in
my library one January evening--sitting in the leather chair that used to
be my father's--when Bertha appeared at the door, with a candle in her
hand, and advanced towards me.  I knew the ball-dress she had on--the
white ball-dress, with the green jewels, shone upon by the light of the
wax candle which lit up the medallion of the dying Cleopatra on the
mantelpiece.  Why did she come to me before going out?  I had not seen
her in the library, which was my habitual place for months.  Why did she
stand before me with the candle in her hand, with her cruel contemptuous
eyes fixed on me, and the glittering serpent, like a familiar demon, on
her breast?  For a moment I thought this fulfilment of my vision at
Vienna marked some dreadful crisis in my fate, but I saw nothing in
Bertha's mind, as she stood before me, except scorn for the look of
overwhelming misery with which I sat before her . . . "Fool, idiot, why
don't you kill yourself, then?"--that was her thought.  But at length her
thoughts reverted to her errand, and she spoke aloud.  The apparently
indifferent nature of the errand seemed to make a ridiculous anticlimax
to my prevision and my agitation.

"I have had to hire a new maid.  Fletcher is going to be married, and she
wants me to ask you to let her husband have the public-house and farm at
Molton.  I wish him to have it.  You must give the promise now, because
Fletcher is going to-morrow morning--and quickly, because I'm in a
hurry."

"Very well; you may promise her," I said, indifferently, and Bertha swept
out of the library again.

I always shrank from the sight of a new person, and all the more when it
was a person whose mental life was likely to weary my reluctant insight
with worldly ignorant trivialities.  But I shrank especially from the
sight of this new maid, because her advent had been announced to me at a
moment to which I could not cease to attach some fatality: I had a vague
dread that I should find her mixed up with the dreary drama of my
life--that some new sickening vision would reveal her to me as an evil
genius.  When at last I did unavoidably meet her, the vague dread was
changed into definite disgust.  She was a tall, wiry, dark-eyed woman,
this Mrs. Archer, with a face handsome enough to give her coarse hard
nature the odious finish of bold, self-confident coquetry.  That was
enough to make me avoid her, quite apart from the contemptuous feeling
with which she contemplated me.  I seldom saw her; but I perceived that
she rapidly became a favourite with her mistress, and, after the lapse of
eight or nine months, I began to be aware that there had arisen in
Bertha's mind towards this woman a mingled feeling of fear and
dependence, and that this feeling was associated with ill-defined images
of candle-light scenes in her dressing-room, and the locking-up of
something in Bertha's cabinet.  My interviews with my wife had become so
brief and so rarely solitary, that I had no opportunity of perceiving
these images in her mind with more definiteness.  The recollections of
the past become contracted in the rapidity of thought till they sometimes
bear hardly a more distinct resemblance to the external reality than the
forms of an oriental alphabet to the objects that suggested them.

Besides, for the last year or more a modification had been going forward
in my mental condition, and was growing more and more marked.  My insight
into the minds of those around me was becoming dimmer and more fitful,
and the ideas that crowded my double consciousness became less and less
dependent on any personal contact.  All that was personal in me seemed to
be suffering a gradual death, so that I was losing the organ through
which the personal agitations and projects of others could affect me.  But
along with this relief from wearisome insight, there was a new
development of what I concluded--as I have since found rightly--to be a
provision of external scenes.  It was as if the relation between me and
my fellow-men was more and more deadened, and my relation to what we call
the inanimate was quickened into new life.  The more I lived apart from
society, and in proportion as my wretchedness subsided from the violent
throb of agonized passion into the dulness of habitual pain, the more
frequent and vivid became such visions as that I had had of Prague--of
strange cities, of sandy plains, of gigantic ruins, of midnight skies
with strange bright constellations, of mountain-passes, of grassy nooks
flecked with the afternoon sunshine through the boughs: I was in the
midst of such scenes, and in all of them one presence seemed to weigh on
me in all these mighty shapes--the presence of something unknown and
pitiless.  For continual suffering had annihilated religious faith within
me: to the utterly miserable--the unloving and the unloved--there is no
religion possible, no worship but a worship of devils.  And beyond all
these, and continually recurring, was the vision of my death--the pangs,
the suffocation, the last struggle, when life would be grasped at in
vain.

Things were in this state near the end of the seventh year.  I had become
entirely free from insight, from my abnormal cognizance of any other
consciousness than my own, and instead of intruding involuntarily into
the world of other minds, was living continually in my own solitary
future.  Bertha was aware that I was greatly changed.  To my surprise she
had of late seemed to seek opportunities of remaining in my society, and
had cultivated that kind of distant yet familiar talk which is customary
between a husband and wife who live in polite and irrevocable alienation.
I bore this with languid submission, and without feeling enough interest
in her motives to be roused into keen observation; yet I could not help
perceiving something triumphant and excited in her carriage and the
expression of her face--something too subtle to express itself in words
or tones, but giving one the idea that she lived in a state of
expectation or hopeful suspense.  My chief feeling was satisfaction that
her inner self was once more shut out from me; and I almost revelled for
the moment in the absent melancholy that made me answer her at cross
purposes, and betray utter ignorance of what she had been saying.  I
remember well the look and the smile with which she one day said, after a
mistake of this kind on my part: "I used to think you were a clairvoyant,
and that was the reason why you were so bitter against other
clairvoyants, wanting to keep your monopoly; but I see now you have
become rather duller than the rest of the world."

I said nothing in reply.  It occurred to me that her recent obtrusion of
herself upon me might have been prompted by the wish to test my power of
detecting some of her secrets; but I let the thought drop again at once:
her motives and her deeds had no interest for me, and whatever pleasures
she might be seeking, I had no wish to baulk her.  There was still pity
in my soul for every living thing, and Bertha was living--was surrounded
with possibilities of misery.

Just at this time there occurred an event which roused me somewhat from
my inertia, and gave me an interest in the passing moment that I had
thought impossible for me.  It was a visit from Charles Meunier, who had
written me word that he was coming to England for relaxation from too
strenuous labour, and would like too see me.  Meunier had now a European
reputation; but his letter to me expressed that keen remembrance of an
early regard, an early debt of sympathy, which is inseparable from
nobility of character: and I too felt as if his presence would be to me
like a transient resurrection into a happier pre-existence.

He came, and as far as possible, I renewed our old pleasure of making
_tete-a-tete_ excursions, though, instead of mountains and glacers and
the wide blue lake, we had to content ourselves with mere slopes and
ponds and artificial plantations.  The years had changed us both, but
with what different result!  Meunier was now a brilliant figure in
society, to whom elegant women pretended to listen, and whose
acquaintance was boasted of by noblemen ambitious of brains.  He
repressed with the utmost delicacy all betrayal of the shock which I am
sure he must have received from our meeting, or of a desire to penetrate
into my condition and circumstances, and sought by the utmost exertion of
his charming social powers to make our reunion agreeable.  Bertha was
much struck by the unexpected fascinations of a visitor whom she had
expected to find presentable only on the score of his celebrity, and put
forth all her coquetries and accomplishments.  Apparently she succeeded
in attracting his admiration, for his manner towards her was attentive
and flattering.  The effect of his presence on me was so benignant,
especially in those renewals of our old _tete-a-tete_ wanderings, when he
poured forth to me wonderful narratives of his professional experience,
that more than once, when his talk turned on the psychological relations
of disease, the thought crossed my mind that, if his stay with me were
long enough, I might possibly bring myself to tell this man the secrets
of my lot.  Might there not lie some remedy for me, too, in his science?
Might there not at least lie some comprehension and sympathy ready for me
in his large and susceptible mind?  But the thought only flickered feebly
now and then, and died out before it could become a wish.  The horror I
had of again breaking in on the privacy of another soul, made me, by an
irrational instinct, draw the shroud of concealment more closely around
my own, as we automatically perform the gesture we feel to be wanting in
another.

When Meunier's visit was approaching its conclusion, there happened an
event which caused some excitement in our household, owing to the
surprisingly strong effect it appeared to produce on Bertha--on Bertha,
the self-possessed, who usually seemed inaccessible to feminine
agitations, and did even her hate in a self-restrained hygienic manner.
This event was the sudden severe illness of her maid, Mrs. Archer.  I
have reserved to this moment the mention of a circumstance which had
forced itself on my notice shortly before Meunier's arrival, namely, that
there had been some quarrel between Bertha and this maid, apparently
during a visit to a distant family, in which she had accompanied her
mistress.  I had overheard Archer speaking in a tone of bitter insolence,
which I should have thought an adequate reason for immediate dismissal.
No dismissal followed; on the contrary, Bertha seemed to be silently
putting up with personal inconveniences from the exhibitions of this
woman's temper.  I was the more astonished to observe that her illness
seemed a cause of strong solicitude to Bertha; that she was at the
bedside night and day, and would allow no one else to officiate as head-
nurse.  It happened that our family doctor was out on a holiday, an
accident which made Meunier's presence in the house doubly welcome, and
he apparently entered into the case with an interest which seemed so much
stronger than the ordinary professional feeling, that one day when he had
fallen into a long fit of silence after visiting her, I said to him--

"Is this a very peculiar case of disease, Meunier?"

"No," he answered, "it is an attack of peritonitis, which will be fatal,
but which does not differ physically from many other cases that have come
under my observation.  But I'll tell you what I have on my mind.  I want
to make an experiment on this woman, if you will give me permission.  It
can do her no harm--will give her no pain--for I shall not make it until
life is extinct to all purposes of sensation.  I want to try the effect
of transfusing blood into her arteries after the heart has ceased to beat
for some minutes.  I have tried the experiment again and again with
animals that have died of this disease, with astounding results, and I
want to try it on a human subject.  I have the small tubes necessary, in
a case I have with me, and the rest of the apparatus could be prepared
readily.  I should use my own blood--take it from my own arm.  This woman
won't live through the night, I'm convinced, and I want you to promise me
your assistance in making the experiment.  I can't do without another
hand, but it would perhaps not be well to call in a medical assistant
from among your provincial doctors.  A disagreeable foolish version of
the thing might get abroad."

"Have you spoken to my wife on the subject?" I said, "because she appears
to be peculiarly sensitive about this woman: she has been a favourite
maid."

"To tell you the truth," said Meunier, "I don't want her to know about
it.  There are always insuperable difficulties with women in these
matters, and the effect on the supposed dead body may be startling.  You
and I will sit up together, and be in readiness.  When certain symptoms
appear I shall take you in, and at the right moment we must manage to get
every one else out of the room."

I need not give our farther conversation on the subject.  He entered very
fully into the details, and overcame my repulsion from them, by exciting
in me a mingled awe and curiosity concerning the possible results of his
experiment.

We prepared everything, and he instructed me in my part as assistant.  He
had not told Bertha of his absolute conviction that Archer would not
survive through the night, and endeavoured to persuade her to leave the
patient and take a night's rest.  But she was obstinate, suspecting the
fact that death was at hand, and supposing that he wished merely to save
her nerves.  She refused to leave the sick-room.  Meunier and I sat up
together in the library, he making frequent visits to the sick-room, and
returning with the information that the case was taking precisely the
course he expected.  Once he said to me, "Can you imagine any cause of
ill-feeling this woman has against her mistress, who is so devoted to
her?"

"I think there was some misunderstanding between them before her illness.
Why do you ask?"

"Because I have observed for the last five or six hours--since, I fancy,
she has lost all hope of recovery--there seems a strange prompting in her
to say something which pain and failing strength forbid her to utter; and
there is a look of hideous meaning in her eyes, which she turns
continually towards her mistress.  In this disease the mind often remains
singularly clear to the last."

"I am not surprised at an indication of malevolent feeling in her," I
said.  "She is a woman who has always inspired me with distrust and
dislike, but she managed to insinuate herself into her mistress's
favour."  He was silent after this, looking at the fire with an air of
absorption, till he went upstairs again.  He stayed away longer than
usual, and on returning, said to me quietly, "Come now."

I followed him to the chamber where death was hovering.  The dark
hangings of the large bed made a background that gave a strong relief to
Bertha's pale face as I entered.  She started forward as she saw me
enter, and then looked at Meunier with an expression of angry inquiry;
but he lifted up his hand as it to impose silence, while he fixed his
glance on the dying woman and felt her pulse.  The face was pinched and
ghastly, a cold perspiration was on the forehead, and the eyelids were
lowered so as to conceal the large dark eyes.  After a minute or two,
Meunier walked round to the other side of the bed where Bertha stood, and
with his usual air of gentle politeness towards her begged her to leave
the patient under our care--everything should be done for her--she was no