Wilfrid Cumbermede by George MacDonald

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'Is her father or mother with her?'

'No. They are to fetch her away--next week, I think it is.' I had now
no fear of my communication falling into other hands, and therefore
sent the song by post, with a note, in which I begged her to let me
know if I had done anything to offend her. Next morning I received the
following reply:

'No, Wilfrid--for Charley's sake, I must call you by your name--you
have done nothing to offend me. Thank you for the song. I did not want
you to send it, but I will keep it. You must not write to me again. Do
not forget what we used to write about. God's ways are not ours. Your
friend, Mary Osborne.'

I rose and went out, not knowing whither. Half-stunned, I roamed the
streets. I ate nothing that day, and when towards night I found myself
near my chambers, I walked in as I had come out, having no intent, no
future. I felt very sick, and threw myself on my bed. There I passed
the night, half in sleep, half in helpless prostration. When I look
back, it seems as if some spiritual narcotic must have been given me,
else how should the terrible time have passed and left me alive? When I
came to myself, I found I was ill, and I longed to hide my head in the
nest of my childhood. I had always looked on the Moat as my refuge at
the last; now it seemed the only desirable thing--a lonely nook, in
which to lie down and end the dream there begun--either, as it now
seemed, in an eternal sleep, or the inburst of a dreary light. After
the last refuge it could afford me it must pass from my hold; but I was
yet able to determine whither. I rose and went to Marston.

'Marston,' I said, 'I want to make my will.'

'All right!' he returned; 'but you look as if you meant to register it
as well. You've got a feverish cold; I see it in your eyes. Come along.
I'll go home with you, and fetch a friend of mine, who will give you
something to do you good.'

'I can't rest till I have made my will,' I persisted.

'Well, there's no harm in that,' he rejoined. 'It won't take long, I
dare say.'

'It needn't anyhow. I only want to leave the small real property I have
to Miss Osborne, and the still smaller-personal property to yourself.'

He laughed.

'All right, old boy! I haven't the slightest objection to your willing
your traps to me, but every objection in the world to your _leaving_
them. To be sure, every, man, with anything to leave, ought to make his
will betimes;--so fire away.'

In a little while the draught was finished.

'I shall have it ready for your signature by to-morrow,' he said.

I insisted it should be done at once. I was going home, I said. He
yielded. The will was engrossed, signed, and witnessed that same
morning; and in the afternoon I set out, the first part of the journey
by rail, for the Moat.

CHAPTER LVII.

ANOTHER DREAM.

The excitement of having something to do had helped me over the
morning, and the pleasure of thinking of what I had done helped me
through half the journey; but before I reached home I was utterly
exhausted. Then I had to drive round by the farm, and knock up Mrs
Herbert and Styles.

I could not bear the thought of my own room, and ordered a fire in my
grandmother's, where they soon got me into bed. All I remember of that
night is the following dream.

I found myself at the entrance of the ice-cave. A burning sun beat on
my head, and at my feet flowed the brook which gathered its life from
the decay of the ice. I stooped to drink; but, cool to the eye and hand
and lips, it yet burned me within like fire. I would seek shelter from
the sun inside the cave. I entered, and knew that the cold was all
around me; I even felt it; but somehow it did not enter into me. My
brain, my very bones, burned with fire. I went in and in. The blue
atmosphere closed around me, and the colour entered into my soul till
it seemed dyed with the potent blue. My very being swam and floated in
a blue atmosphere of its own. My intention--I can recall it
perfectly--was but to walk to the end, a few yards, then turn and again
brave the sun; for I had a dim feeling of forsaking my work, of playing
truant, or of being cowardly in thus avoiding the heat. Something else
too was wrong, but I could not clearly tell what. As I went on, I began
to wonder that I had not come to the end. The gray walls yet rose about
me, and ever the film of dissolution flowed along their glassy faces to
the runnel below; still before me opened the depth of blue atmosphere,
deepening as I went. After many windings, the path began to branch, and
soon I was lost in a labyrinth of passages, of which I knew not why I
should choose one rather than another. It was useless now to think of
returning. Arbitrarily I chose the narrowest way, and still went on.

A discoloration of the ice attracted my attention, and as I looked it
seemed to retreat into the solid mass. There was something not ice
within it, which grew more and more distinct as I gazed, until at last
I plainly distinguished the form of my grandmother lying as then when
my aunt made me touch her face. A few yards further on lay the body of
my uncle, as I saw him in his coffin. His face was dead white in the
midst of the cold clear ice, his eyes closed, and his arms straight by
his side. He lay like an alabaster king upon his tomb. It _was_ he, I
thought, but he would never speak to me more--never look at me---never
more awake. There lay all that was left of him--the cold frozen memory
of what he had been, and would never be again. I did not weep. I only
knew somehow in my dream that life was all a wandering in a frozen
cave, where the faces of the living were dark with the coming
corruption, and the memories of the dead, cold and clear and hopeless
evermore, alone were lovely.

I walked further; for the ice might possess yet more of the past--all
that was left me of life. And again I stood and gazed, for, deep
within, I saw the form of Charley--at rest now, his face bloodless, but
not so death-like as my uncle's. His hands were laid palm to palm over
his bosom, and pointed upwards, as if praying for comfort where comfort
was none: here at least were no flickerings of the rainbow fancies of
faith and hope and charity! I gazed in comfortless content for a time
on the repose of my weary friend, and then went on, inly moved to see
what further the ice of the godless region might hold. Nor had I
wandered far when I saw the form of Mary, lying like the rest, only
that her hands were crossed on her bosom. I stood, wondering to find
myself so little moved. But when the ice drew nigh me, and would have
closed around me, my heart leaped for joy; and when the heat of my
lingering life repelled it, my heart sunk within me, and I said to
myself: 'Death will not have me. I may not join her even in the land of
cold forgetfulness: I may not even be nothing _with_ her.' The tears
began to flow down my face, like the thin veil of water that kept ever
flowing down the face of the ice; and as I wept, the water before me
flowed faster and faster, till it rippled in a sheet down the icy wall.
Faster and yet faster it flowed, falling, with the sound as of many
showers, into the runnel below, which rushed splashing and gurgling
away from the foot of the vanishing wall. Faster and faster it flowed,
until the solid mass fell in a foaming cataract, and swept in a torrent
across the cave. I followed the retreating wall through the seething
water at its foot. Thinner and thinner grew the dividing mass; nearer
and nearer came the form of my Mary. 'I shall yet clasp her,' I cried;
'her dead form will kill me, and I too shall be inclosed in the
friendly ice. I shall not be with her, alas! but neither shall I be
without her, for I shall depart into the lovely nothingness.' Thinner
and thinner grew the dividing wall. The skirt of her shroud hung like a
wet weed in the falling torrent. I kneeled in the river, and crept
nearer with outstretched arms: when the vanishing ice set the dead form
free, it should rest in those arms--the last gift of the
life-dream--for then, surely, I _must_ die. 'Let me pass in the agony
of a lonely embrace!' I cried. As I spoke she moved. I started to my
feet, stung into life by the agony of a new hope. Slowly the ice
released her, and gently she rose to her feet. The torrents of water
ceased--they had flowed but to set her free. Her eyes were still
closed, but she made one blind step towards me, and laid her left hand
on my head, her right hand on my heart. Instantly, body and soul, I was
cool as a Summer eve after a thunder-shower. For a moment, precious as
an aeon, she held her hands upon me--then slowly opened her eyes. Out
of them flashed the living soul of my Athanasia. She closed the lids
again slowly over the lovely splendour; the water in which we stood
rose around us; and on its last billow she floated away through the
winding passage of the cave. I sought to follow her, but could not. I
cried aloud and awoke.

But the burning heat had left me; I felt that I had passed a crisis,
and had begun to recover--a conviction which would have been altogether
unwelcome, but for the poor shadow of a reviving hope which accompanied
it. Such a dream, come whence it might, could not but bring comfort
with it. The hope grew, and was my sole medicine.

Before the evening I felt better, and, though still very feeble,
managed to write to Marston, letting him know I was safe, and
requesting him to forward any letters that might arrive.

The next day, I rose, but was unable to work. The very thought of
writing sickened me. Neither could I bear the thought of returning to
London. I tried to read, but threw aside book after book, without being
able to tell what one of them was about. If for a moment I seemed to
enter into the subject, before I reached the bottom of the page, I
found I had not an idea as to what the words meant or whither they
tended. After many failures, unwilling to give myself up to idle
brooding, I fortunately tried some of the mystical poetry of the
seventeenth century. The difficulties of that I found rather stimulate
than repel me; while, much as there was in the form to displease the
taste, there was more in the matter to rouse the intellect. I found
also some relief in resuming my mathematical studies: the abstraction
of them acted as an anodyne. But the days dragged wearily.

As soon as I was able to get on horseback, the tone of mind and body
began to return. I felt as if into me some sort of animal healing
passed from Lilith; and who can tell in how many ways the lower animals
may not minister to the higher?

One night I had a strange experience. I give it without argument,
perfectly aware that the fact may be set down to the disordered state
of my physical nature, and that without injustice.

I had not for a long time thought about one of the questions which had
so much occupied Charley and myself--that of immortality. As to any
communication between the parted, I had never, during his life,
pondered the possibility of it, although I had always had an
inclination to believe that such intercourse had in rare instances
taken place. Former periods of the world's history, when that blinding
self-consciousness which is the bane of ours was yet undeveloped, must,
I thought, have been far more favourable to its occurrence. Anyhow I
was convinced that it was not to be gained by effort. I confess that,
in the unthinking agony of grief after Charley's death, many a time
when I woke in the middle of the night and could sleep no more, I sat
up in bed and prayed him, if he heard me, to come to me, and let me
tell him the truth--for my sake to let me know, at least, that he
lived, for then I should be sure that one day all would be well. But if
there was any hearing, there was no answer. Charley did not come; the
prayer seemed to vanish in the darkness; and my more self-possessed
meditations never justified the hope of any such being heard.

One night I was sitting in my grannie's room, which, except my uncle's,
was now the only one I could bear to enter. I had been reading for some
time very quietly, but had leaned back in my chair, and let my thoughts
go wandering whither they would, when all at once I was possessed by
the conviction that Charley was near me. I saw nothing, heard nothing;
of the recognized senses of humanity not one gave me a hint of a
presence; and yet my whole body was aware--so, at least, it seemed--of
the proximity of another _I_. It was as if some nervous region
commensurate with my frame, were now for the first time revealed by
contact with an object suitable for its apprehension. Like Eliphaz, I
felt the hair of my head stand up--not from terror, but simply, as it
seemed, from the presence and its strangeness. Like others also of whom
I have read, who believed themselves in the presence of the
disembodied, I could not speak. I tried, but as if the medium for sound
had been withdrawn, and an empty gulf lay around me, no word followed,
although my very soul was full of the cry--_Charley! Charley!_ And
alas! in a few moments, like the faint vanishing of an unrealized
thought, leaving only the assurance that something half-born from out
the unknown had been there, the influence faded and died. It passed
from me like the shadow of a cloud, and once more I knew but my poor
lonely self, returning to its candles, its open book, its burning fire.

CHAPTER LVIII.

THE DARKEST HOUR.

Suffering is perhaps the only preparation for suffering: still I was
but poorly prepared for what followed.

Having gathered strength, and a certain quietness which I could not
mistake for peace, I returned to London towards the close of the
Spring. I had in the interval heard nothing of Mary. The few letters
Marston had sent on had been almost exclusively from my publishers. But
the very hour I reached my lodging, came a note, which I opened
trembling, for it was in the handwriting of Miss Pease.

DEAR SIR,--I cannot, I think, be wrong in giving you a piece of
information which will be in the newspapers to-morrow morning. Your old
acquaintance, and my young relative, Mr Brotherton, was married this
morning, at St George's, Hanover Square, to your late friend's sister,
Miss Mary Osborne. They have just left for Dover on their way to
Switzerland. Your sincere well-wisher,
'JANE PEASE.'

Even at this distance of time, I should have to exhort myself to write
with calmness, were it not that the utter despair of conveying my
feelings, if indeed my soul had not for the time passed beyond feeling
into some abyss unknown to human consciousness, renders it unnecessary.
This despair of communication has two sources--the one simply the
conviction of the impossibility of expressing _any_ feeling, much more
such feeling as mine then was--and is; the other the conviction that
only to the heart of love can the sufferings of love speak. The attempt
of a lover to move, by the presentation of his own suffering, the heart
of her who loves him not, is as unavailing as it is unmanly. The poet
who sings most wailfully of the torments of the lover's hell, is but a
sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal in the ears of her who has at best
only a general compassion to meet the song withal--possibly only an
individual vanity which crowns her with his woes as with the trophies
of a conquest. True, he is understood and worshipped by all the other
wailful souls in the first infernal circle, as one of the great men of
their order--able to put into words full of sweet torment the dire
hopelessness of their misery; but for such the singer, singing only for
ears eternally deaf to his song, cares nothing; or if for a moment he
receives consolation from their sympathy, it is but a passing weakness
which the breath of an indignant self-condemnation--even contempt, the
next moment sweeps away. In God alone there must be sympathy and cure;
but I had not then--have I indeed yet found what that cure is? I am at
all events now able to write with calmness. If suffering destroyed
itself, as some say, mine ought to have disappeared long ago; but to
that I can neither pretend nor confess.

For the first time, after all I had encountered, I knew what suffering
could be. It is still at moments an agony as of hell to recall this and
the other thought that then stung me like a white-hot arrow: the shafts
have long been drawn out, but the barbed heads are still there. I
neither stormed nor maddened. I only felt a freezing hand lay hold of
my heart, and gripe it closer and closer till I should have sickened,
but that the pain ever stung me into fresh life; and ever since I have
gone about the world with that hard lump somewhere in my bosom into
which the griping hand and the griped heart have grown and stiffened.

I fled at once back to my solitary house, looking for no relief in its
solitude, only the negative comfort of escaping the eyes of men. I
could not bear the sight of my fellow-creatures. To say that the world
had grown black to me, is as nothing: I ceased---I will not say _to
believe_ in God, for I never dared say that mighty thing--but I ceased
to hope in God. The universe had grown a negation which yet forced its
presence upon me--death that bred worms. If there were a God anywhere,
this universe could be nothing more than his forsaken moth-eaten
garment. He was a God who did not care. Order was all an invention of
phosphorescent human brains; light itself the mocking smile of a
Jupiter over his writhing sacrifices. At times I laughed at the
tortures of my own heart, saying to it, 'Writhe on, worm; thou
deservest thy writhing in that thou writhest. Godless creature, why
dost thou not laugh with me? Am I not merry over thee and the world--in
that ye are both rottenness to the core?' The next moment my heart and
I would come together with a shock, and I knew it was myself that
scorned myself.

Such being my mood, it will cause no surprise if I say that I too was
tempted to suicide; the wonder would have been if it had been
otherwise. The soft keen curves of that fatal dagger, which had not
only slain Charley but all my hopes--for had he lived this horror could
not have been--grew almost lovely in my eyes. Until now it had looked
cruel, fiendish, hateful; but now I would lay it before me and
contemplate it. In some griefs there is a wonderful power of
self-contemplation, which indeed forms their only solace; the moment it
can set the sorrow away from itself sufficiently to regard it, the
tortured heart begins to repose; but suddenly, like a waking tiger, the
sorrow leaps again into its lair, and the agony commences anew. The
dagger was the type of my grief and its torture: might it not, like the
brazen serpent, be the cure for the sting of its living counterpart?
But alas! where was the certainty? Could I slay _myself?_ This outer
breathing form I could dismiss--but the pain was not _there_. I was not
mad, and I knew that a deeper death than that could give, at least.
than I had any assurance that could give, alone could bring repose.
For, impossible as I had always found it actually to believe in
immortality, I now found it equally impossible to believe in
annihilation. And even if annihilation should be the final result, who
could tell but it might require ages of a horrible slow-decaying
dream-consciousness to kill the living thing which felt itself other
than its body?

Until now, I had always accepted what seemed the natural and universal
repugnance to absolute dissolution as the strongest argument on the
side of immortality;--for why should a man shrink from that which
belonged to his nature? But now annihilation seemed the one lovely
thing, the one sole only lonely thought in which lay no blackness of
burning darkness. Oh, for one eternal unconscious sleep!--the nearest
likeness we can cherish of that inconceivable nothingness--ever denied
by the very thinking of it--by the vain attempt to realize that whose
very existence is the knowing nothing of itself! Could that dagger have
insured me such repose, or had there been any draught of Lethe, utter
Lethe, whose blessed poison would have assuredly dissipated like a fume
this conscious self-tormenting _me_, I should not now be writhing anew,
as in the clutches of an old grief, clasping me like a corpse, stung to
simulated life by the galvanic battery of recollection. Vivid as it
seems--all I suffer as I write is but a faint phantasm of what I then
endured.

I learned, therefore, that to some minds the argument for immortality
drawn from the apparently universal shrinking from annihilation must be
ineffectual, seeing they themselves do not shrink from it. Convince a
man that there is no God--or, for I doubt if that be altogether
possible--make it, I will say, impossible for him to hope in God--and
it cannot be that annihilation should seem an evil. If there is no God,
annihilation is the one thing to be longed for, with all that might of
longing which is the mainspring of human action. In a word, it is not
immortality the human heart cries out after, but that immortal eternal
thought whose life is its life, whose wisdom is its wisdom, whose ways
and whose thoughts shall--must one day--become its ways and its
thoughts. Dissociate immortality from the living Immortality, and it is
not a thing to be desired--not a thing that can on those terms, or even
on the fancy of those terms, be desired.

But such thoughts as these were far from me then. I lived because I
despaired of death. I ate by a sort of blind animal instinct, and so
lived. The time had been when I would despise myself for being able to
eat in the midst of emotion; but now I cared so little for the emotion
even, that eating or not eating had nothing to do with the matter. I
ate because meat was set before me; I slept because sleep came upon me.
It was a horrible time. My life seemed only a vermiculate one, a
crawling about of half-thoughts-half-feelings through the corpse of a
decaying existence. The heart of being was withdrawn from me, and my
life was but the vacant pericardium in which it had once throbbed out
and sucked in the red fountains of life and gladness.

I would not be thought to have fallen to this all but bottomless depth
only because I had lost Mary. Still less was it because of the fact
that in her, around whom had gathered all the devotion with which the
man in me could regard woman, I had lost all womankind. It was _the
loss_ of Mary, as I then judged it, not, I repeat, the fact that _I_
had lost her. It was that she had lost herself. Thence it was, I say,
that I lost my hope in God. For, if there were a God, how could he let
purity be clasped in the arms of defilement? how could he marry my
Athanasia--not to a corpse, but to a Plague? Here was the man who had
done more to ruin her brother than any but her father, and God had
given her to _him!_ I had had--with the commonest of men--some notion
of womanly purity--how was it that hers had not instinctively shuddered
and shrunk? how was it that the life of it had not taken refuge with
death to shun bare contact with the coarse impurity of such a nature as
that of Geoffrey Brotherton? My dreams had been dreams indeed! Was my
Athanasia dead, or had she never been? In my thought, she had 'said to
Corruption, Thou art my father; to the worm, Thou art my mother and my
sister.' Who should henceforth say of any woman that she was impure?
She _might_ love him--true; but what was she then who was able to love
such a man? It was this that stormed the citadel of my hope, and drove
me from even thinking of a God.

Gladly would I now have welcomed any bodily suffering that could hide
me from myself; but no illness came. I was a living pain, a conscious
ill-being. In a thousand forms those questions would ever recur, but
without hope of answer. When I fell asleep from exhaustion, hideous
visions of her with Geoffrey would start me up with a great cry,
sometimes with a curse on my lips. Nor were they the most horrible of
those dreams in which she would help him to mock me. Once, and only
once, I found myself dreaming the dream of _that_ night, and I knew
that I had dreamed it before. Through palace and chapel and
charnel-house, I followed her, ever with a dim sense of awful result;
and when at the last she lifted the shining veil, instead of the face
of Athanasia, the bare teeth of a skull grinned at me from under a
spotted shroud, through which the sunlight shone from behind, revealing
all its horrors. I was not mad--my reason had not given way: _how_
remains a marvel.

CHAPTER LIX.

THE DAWN.

All places were alike to me now--for the universe was but one dreary
chasm whence I could not escape. One evening I sat by the open window
of my chamber, which looked towards those trees and that fatal Moldwarp
Hall. My suffering had now grown dull by its own excess, and I had
moments of restless vacuity, the nearest approach to peace I had yet
experienced. It was a fair evening of early summer--but I was utterly
careless of nature as of all beyond it. The sky was nothing to me--and
the earth was all unlovely. There I sat, heavy, but free from torture;
a kind of quiet had stolen over me. I was roused by the tiniest breath
of wind on my cheek, as if the passing wing of some butterfly had
fanned me; and on that faintest motion came a scent as from
long-forgotten fields, a scent like as of sweet-peas or wild roses, but
of neither: flowers were none nearer me than the gardens of the Hall. I
started with a cry. It was the scent of the garments of my Athanasia,
as I had dreamed it in my dream! Whence that wind had borne it, who
could tell? but in the husk that had overgrown my being it had found a
cranny, and through that cranny, with the scent, Nature entered. I
looked up to the blue sky, wept, and for the first time fell on my
knees. 'O God!' I cried, and that was all. But what are the prayers of
the whole universe more than expansions of that one cry? It is not what
God can give us, but God that we want. Call the whole thing fancy if
you will; it was at least no fancy that the next feeling of which I was
conscious was compassion: from that moment I began to search heaven and
earth and the soul of man and woman for excuses wherewith to clothe the
idea of Mary Osborne. For weeks and weeks I pondered, and by degrees
the following conclusions wrought themselves out in my brain:--

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