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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
