Adela Cathcart Volume Iii Part 24

"For his sake I am very sorry to hear it; but for my own, I cannot help thinking it the luckiest thing that could have happened."

"I am not so sure of that. It might increase the difficulty."

At this moment I thought I heard the handle of the door move, but there was a screen between us and it. I went on.

"That is, if you still want to marry her, you know."

"Marry her!" he said. "If she were a beggar-maid, I would be proud as King Cophetua to marry her to-morrow."

There was a rustle in the twilight, and a motion of its gloom. With a quick gliding, Adela drew near, knelt beside Harry, and hid her eyes on his knee. I thought it better to go.

Was this unmaidenly of her?

I say "No, for she knew that he loved her."

As I left the room, I heard the colonel call--

"Adela."

And when I returned, I found them both standing by the bedside, and the old man holding a hand of each.

"Now, John Smith," I said to myself, "you may go when you please."

Before we, that is, I and my reader, part, however, my reader may be inclined to address me thus:

"Pray, Mr. Smith, do you think it was your wonderful prescription of story-telling, that wrought Miss Cathcart's cure?"

"How can I tell?" I answer. "Probably it had its share. But there were other things to take into the account. If you went on to ask me whether it was not Harry's prescriptions; or whether it was not the curate's sermons; or whether it was not her falling in love with the doctor; or whether even her father's illness and the loss of their property had not something to do with it; or whether it was not the doctor's falling in love with her; or that the cold weather suited her; I should reply in the same way to every one of the interrogatories."

But I retort another question:

"Did you ever know anything whatever resulting from the operation of one separable cause?"

In regard to any good attempt I have ever made in my life, I am content to know that the end has been gained. Whether _I_ have succeeded or not is of no consequence, if I have tried well.--In the present case, Adela recovered; and my own conviction is, that the cure was effected mainly from within. Except in physics, we can put nothing to the _experimentum crucis_, and must be content with conjecture and probability.

The night before I left, I had a strange dream. I stood in a lonely cemetery in a pine-forest. Dark trees that never shed their foliage rose all around--strange trees that mourn for ever, because they never die. The dream light that has no visible source, because it is in the soul that dreams, showed all in a dim blue-grey dawn, that never grew clearer. The night wind was the only power abroad save myself. It went with slow intermitting, sigh-like gusts, through the tops of the dreaming trees; for the trees seemed, in the midst of my dream, to have dreams of their own.

Now this burial-place was mine. I had tended it for years. In it lay all the men and women whom I had honoured and loved.

And I was a great sculptor. And over every grave I had placed a marble altar, and upon every altar the marble bust of the man or woman who lay beneath; each in the supreme beauty which all the defects of birth and of time and of incompleteness, could not hide from the eye of the prophetic sculptor. Each was like a half-risen glorified form of the being who had there descended into the realms of Hades. And through these glimmering rows of the dead I walked in the dream-light; and from one to another I went in the glory of having known and loved them; now weeping sad tears over the loss of the beautiful; now rejoicing in the strength of the mighty; now exulting in the love and truth which would yet dawn upon me when I too should go down beneath the visible, and emerge in the realms of the actual and the unseen? All the time I was sensible of a wondrous elevation of being, a glory of life and feeling hitherto unknown to me.

I had entered the secret places of my own hidden world by the gate of sleep, and walked about them in my dream.

Gradually I became aware that a foreign sound was mingling with the sighing of the tree-tops overhead. It grew and grew, till I recognized the sound of wheels--not of heavenly chariots, but of earthly motion and business. I heard them stop at the lofty gates of my holy place, and by twoes and threes, or in solitary singleness, came people into my garden of the dead. And who should they be but the buried ones?--all those whose marble busts stood in ghostly silence, within the shadows of the everlasting pines? And they talked and laughed and jested. And my city of the dead melted away. And lo! we stood in the midst of a great market-place; and I knew it to be the market-place in which the children had sat who said to the other children:

"We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented."

And to my misery, I saw that the faces of my fathers and brothers, my mothers and sisters, had not grown n.o.bler in the country of the dead, in which I had thought them safe and shining. Cares, as of this world, had so settled upon them, that I could hardly recognize the old likeness; and the dim forms of the ideal glory which I had reproduced in my marble busts, had vanished altogether. Ah me! my world of the dead! my city of treasures, hid away under the locks and bars of the unchangeable! Was there then no world of realities?--only a Vanity Fair after all? The glorious women went sweeping about, smiling and talking, and buying and adorning, but they were glorious no longer; for they had common thoughts, and common beauties, and common language and aims and hopes; and everything was common about them. And ever and anon, with a kind of shiver, as if to keep alive my misery by the sight of my own dreams, the marble busts would glimmer out, faintly visible amidst the fair, as if about to reappear, and, dispossessing the vacuity of folly, a.s.sert the n.o.ble and the true, and give me back my dead to love and worship once more, in the loneliness of the pine-forest. Side by side with a greedy human face, would shimmer out for a moment the ghostly marble face; and the contrast all but drove me mad with perplexity and misery.

"Alas!" I cried, "where is my future? Where is my beautiful death?"

All at once I saw the face of a man who went round and round the skirts of the market, and looked earnestly in amongst the busy idlers. He was head and shoulders taller than any there; and his face was a pale face, with an infinite future in it, visible in all its grief. I made my way through the crowd, which regarded me with a look which I could not understand, and came to the stranger. I threw myself at his feet and sobbed: "I have lost them all. I will follow thee." He took me by the hand, and led me back. We walked up and down the fair together. And as we walked, the tumult lessened, and lessened. They made a path for us to go, and all eyes were turned upon my guide. The tumult sank, and all was still. Men and women stood in silent rows. My guide looked upon them all, on the right and on the left. And they all looked on him till their eyes filled with tears. And the old faces of my friends grew slowly out of the worldly faces, until at length they were such as I had known of yore.

Suddenly they all fell upon their knees, and their faces changed into the likeness of my marble faces. Then my guide waved his hand--and lo!

we were in the midst of my garden of the dead; and the wind was like the sound of a going in the tops of the pine trees; and my white marbles glimmered glorified on the altars of the tombs. And the dream vanished, and I came awake.

And I will not say here whose face the face of my guide was like.

THE END.