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;
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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
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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.
In after-days I thought with bitter regret that if I had foreseen
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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
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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 mid-day 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.
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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? l
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
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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
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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."
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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
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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
