Thomas Wingfold, Curate Part 14

She went quietly out by the front door, walked slowly, softly, statelily along the street and out of the town, and entered the park by the lodge-gate. She saw Rachel at her work in the kitchen as she pa.s.sed, and heard her singing in a low and weak but very sweet voice, which went to her heart like a sting, making the tall, handsome, rich lady envy the poor distorted atom who, through all the fogs of her winter, had yet something in her that sought such utterance. But, indeed, if all her misery had been swept away like a dream, Helen might yet have envied the dwarf ten times more than she did now, had she but known how they stood compared with each other. For the being of Helen to that of Rachel was as a single, untwined primary cell to a finished brain; as the peeping of a chicken to the song of a lark--I had almost said, to a sonata of Beethoven.

"Good day, Rachel," she said, calling as she pa.s.sed, in a kindly, even then rather condescending voice, through the open door, where a pail of water, just set down, stood rocking the sun on its heaving surface, and flashing it out again into the ocean of the light. It seemed to poor Helen a squalid abode, but it was a home-like palace, and fairly furnished, in comparison with the suburban villa and shop-upholstery which typified the house of her spirit--now haunted by a terrible secret walking through its rooms, and laying a b.l.o.o.d.y hand upon all their whitenesses.

There was no sound all the way as she went but the noise of the birds, and an occasional clank from the new building far away. At last, with beating heart and scared soul, she was within the high garden-wall, making her way through the rank growth of weeds and bushes to the dismal house. She entered trembling, and the air felt as if death had been before her. Hardly would her limbs carry her, but with slow step she reached the hidden room. He lay as she had left him. Was he asleep, or dead? She crept near and laid her hand on his forehead. He started to his feet in an agony of fright. She soothed and rea.s.sured him as best she was able. When the paroxysm relaxed--

"You didn't whistle," he said.

"No; I forgot," answered Helen, shocked at her own carelessness. "But if I had, you would not have heard me: you were fast asleep."

"A good thing I was! And yet no! I wish I had heard you, for then by this time I should have been beyond their reach."

Impulsively he showed her the short dangerous looking weapon he carried.

Helen stretched out her hand to take it, but he hurriedly replaced it in his pocket.

"I will find some water for you to wash with," said Helen. "There used to be a well in the garden, I remember. I have brought you a shirt."

With some difficulty she found the well, all but lost in matted weeds under an ivy-tod, and in the saucer of a flower-pot she carried him some water, and put the garment with the horrible spot in her bag, to take it away and destroy it. Then she made him eat and drink. He did whatever she told him, with a dull, yet doglike obedience. His condition was much changed; he had a stupefied look, and seemed only half awake to his terrible situation. Yet he answered what questions she put to him even too readily--with an indifferent matter-of-factness, indeed, more dreadful than any most pa.s.sionate outburst. But at the root of the apparent apathy lay despair and remorse,--weary, like gorged and sleeping tigers far back in their dens. Only the dull torpedo of misery was awake, lying motionless on the bottom of the deepest pool of his spirit.

The mood was favourable to the drawing of his story from him, but there are more particulars in the narrative I am now going to give than Helen at that time learned.

CHAPTER XXVI.

LEOPOLD'S STORY.

While yet a mere boy, scarcely more than sixteen, Leopold had made acquaintance with the family of a certain manufacturer, who, having retired from business with a rapidly-gained fortune, had some years before purchased an estate a few miles from Goldswyre, his uncle's place. Their settling in the neighbourhood was not welcome to the old-fashioned, long-rooted family of the Lingards; but although they had not called upon them, they could not help meeting them occasionally.

Leopold's a.s.sociation with them commenced just after he had left Eton, between which time and his going up to Cambridge he spent a year in reading with his cousins' tutor. It was at a ball he first saw Emmeline, the eldest of the family. She had but lately returned from a school at which from the first she had had for her bedfellow a black ewe. It was not a place where any blackness under that of pitch was likely to attract notice, being one of those very ordinary and very common schools where everything is done that is done, first for manners, then for accomplishments, and lastly for information, leaving all the higher faculties and endowments of the human being as entirely unconsidered as if they had no existence. Taste, feeling, judgment, imagination, conscience, are in such places left to look after themselves, and the considerations presented to them, and duties required of them as religious, are only fitted to lower still farther such moral standard as they may possess. Schools of this kind send out, as their quota of the supply of mothers for the ages to come, young women who will consult a book of etiquette as to what is ladylike; who always think what is the mode, never what is beautiful; who read romances in which the wickedness is equalled only by the shallowness; who write questions to weekly papers concerning points of behaviour, and place their whole, or chief delight in making themselves attractive to men. Some such girls look lady-like and interesting, and many of them are skilled in the arts that meet their fullest development in a nature whose sense of existence is rounded by its own reflection in the mirror of self-consciousness falsified by vanity. Once understood, they are for a sadness or a loathing, after the nature that understands them; till then, they are to the beholder such as they desire to appear, while under the fair outside lies a nature whose vulgarity, if the most thorough of changes do not in the meantime supervene, will manifest itself hideously on the approach of middle age, that is, by the time when habituation shall have destroyed the restraints of diffidence. Receiving ever fresh and best a.s.surance of their own consequence in the attention and admiration of men, such girls are seldom capable of any real attachment, and the marvel is that so few of them comparatively disgrace themselves after marriage.

Whether it was the swarthy side of his nature, early ripened under the hot Indian sun, that found itself irresistibly drawn to the widening of its humanity in the flaxen fairness of Emmeline, or the Saxon element in him seeking back to its family--it might indeed have been both, our nature admitting of such marvellous complexity in its unity,--he fell in love with her, if not in the n.o.blest yet in a very genuine, though at the same time very pa.s.sionate way; and as she had, to use a Scots proverb, a crop for all corn, his attentions were acceptable to her. Had she been true-hearted enough to know anything of that love whose name was for ever suffering profanation upon her lips, she would, being at least a year and a half older than he, have been too much of a woman to encourage his approaches--would have felt he was a boy and must not be allowed to fancy himself a man. But to be just, he did look to English eyes older than he was. And then he was very handsome, distinguished-looking, of a good family, which could in no sense be said of her,--and with high connections--at the same time a natural contrast to herself, and personally attractive to her. The first moment she saw his great black eyes blaze, she accepted the homage, laid it on the altar of her self-worship, and ever after sought to see them lighted up afresh in worship of her only divinity. To be feelingly aware of her power over him, to play upon him as on an instrument, to make his cheek pale or glow, his eyes flash or fill, as she pleased, was a game almost too delightful.

One of the most potent means for producing the humano-atmospheric play in which her soul thus rejoiced, and one whose operation was to none better known than to Emmeline, was jealousy, and for its generation she had all possible facilities--for there could not be a woman in regard of whom jealousy was more justifiable on any ground except that of being worth it. So far as it will reach, however, it must be remembered, in mitigation of judgment, that she had no gauge in herself equal to the representation of a t.i.the of the misery whose signs served to lift her to the very Paradise of falsehood: she knew not what she did, and possibly knowledge might have found in her some pity and abstinence. But when a woman, in her own nature cold, takes delight in rousing pa.s.sion, she will, selfishly confident in her own safety, go to strange lengths in kindling and fanning the flame which is the death of the other.

It is far from my intention to follow the disagreeable topic across the pathless swamp through which an elaboration of its phases would necessarily drag me. Of morbid anatomy, save for the setting forth of cure, I am not fond, and here there is nothing to be said of cure. What concerns me as a narrator is, that Emmeline consoled and irritated and re-consoled Leopold, until she had him her very slave, and the more her slave that by that time he knew something of her character. The knowledge took from him what little repose she had left him; he did no more good at school, and went to Cambridge with the conviction that the woman to whom he had given his soul, would be doing things in his absence the sight of which would drive him mad. Yet somehow he continued to live, rea.s.sured now and then by the loving letters she wrote to him, and relieving his own heart while he fostered her falsehood by the pa.s.sionate replies he made to them.

From a sad accident of his childhood, he had become acquainted with something of the influences of a certain baneful drug, to the use of which one of his attendants was addicted, and now at college, partly from curiosity, partly from a desire to undergo its effects, but chiefly in order to escape from ever-gnawing and pa.s.sionate thought, he began to make EXPERIMENTS in its use. Experiment called for repet.i.tion--in order to verification, said the fiend,--and repet.i.tion led first to a longing after its effects, and next to a mad appet.i.te for the thing itself; so that, by the time of which my narrative treats, he was on the verge of absolute slavery to its use, and in imminent peril of having to pa.s.s the rest of his life in alternations of ecstasy and agony, divided by dull s.p.a.ces of misery, the ecstasies growing rarer and rarer, and the agonies more and more frequent, intense, and lasting; until at length the dethroned Apollo found himself chained to a pillar of his own ruined temple, which the sirocco was fast filling with desert sand.

CHAPTER XXVII.

LEOPOLD'S STORY CONCLUDED.

He knew from her letters that they were going to give a ball, at which as many as pleased should be welcome in fancy dresses, and masked if they chose. The night before it he had a dream, under the influence of his familiar no doubt, which made him so miserable and jealous that he longed to see her as a wounded man longs for water, and the thought arose of going down to the ball, not exactly in disguise, for he had no mind to act a part, but masked so that he should not be recognised as uninvited, and should have an opportunity of watching Emmeline, concerning whose engagement with a young cavalry officer there had lately been reports, which, however, before his dream, had caused him less uneasiness than many such preceding. The same moment the thought was a resolve.

I must mention that no one whatever knew the degree of his intimacy with Emmeline, or that he had any ground for considering her engaged to him.

Secrecy added much to the zest of Emmeline's pleasures. Everyone knew that he was a devoted admirer--but therein to be cla.s.sed with a host.

For concealment, he contented himself with a large travelling-cloak, a tall felt hat, and a black silk mask.

He entered the grounds with an arrival of guests, and knowing the place perfectly, contrived to see something of her behaviour, while he watched for an opportunity of speaking to her alone,--a quest of unlikely success. Hour after hour he watched, and all the time never spoke or was spoken to.

Those who are acquainted with the mode of operation of the drug to which I have referred, are aware that a man may be fully under its influences without betraying to the ordinary observer that he is in a condition differing from that of other men. But, in the living dream wherein he walks, his feeling of time and of s.p.a.ce is so enlarged, or perhaps, I rather think, so subdivided to the consciousness, that everything about him seems infinite both in duration and extent; the action of a second has in it a mult.i.tudinous gradation of progress, and a line of s.p.a.ce is marked out into millionths, of every one of which the consciousness takes note. At the same time his senses are open to every impression from things around him, only they appear to him in a strangely exalted metamorphosis, the reflex of his own mental exaltation either in bliss or torture, while the fancies of a man mingle with the facts thus introduced and modify and are in turn modified by them; whereby out of the chaos arises the mountain of an Earthly Paradise, whose roots are in the depths of h.e.l.l; and whether the man be with the divine air and the clear rivers and the thousand-hued flowers on the top, or down in the ice-lake with the tears frozen to hard lumps in the hollows of his eyes so that he can no more have even the poor consolation of weeping, is but the turning of a hair, so far at least as his will has to do with it.

The least intrusion of anything painful, of any jar that cannot be wrought into the general harmony of the vision, will suddenly alter its character, and from the seventh heaven of speechless bliss the man may fall plumb down into gulfs of horrible and torturing, it may be loathsome imaginings.

Now Leopold had taken a dose of the drug on his journey, and it was later than usual, probably because of the motion, ere it began to take effect. He had indeed ceased to look for any result from it, when all at once, as he stood amongst the laburnums and lilacs of a rather late spring, something seemed to burst in his brain, and that moment he was Endymion waiting for Diana in her interlunar grove, while the music of the spheres made the blossoms of a stately yet flowering forest, tremble all with conscious delight.

Emboldened by his new condition, he drew nigh the house. They were then pa.s.sing from the ball to the supper-room, and he found the tumult so distasteful to his mood of still ecstasy that he would not have entered had he not remembered that he had in his pocket a note ready if needful to slip into her hand, containing only the words, "Meet me for one long minute at the circle,"--a spot well known to both: he threw his cloak Spanish fashion over his left shoulder, slouched his hat, and entering stood in a shadowy spot she must pa.s.s in going to or from the supper-room. There he waited, with the note hid in his hand--a long time, yet not a weary one, such visions of loveliness pa.s.sed before his entranced gaze. At length SHE also pa.s.sed--lovely as the Diana whose dress she had copied--not quite so perfectly as she had abjured her manners. She leaned trustingly on the arm of some one, but Leopold never even looked at him. He slid the note into her hand, which hung ungloved as inviting confidences. With an instinct quickened and sharpened tenfold by much practice, her fingers instantly closed upon it, but, not a muscle belonging to any other part of her betrayed the intrusion of a foreign body: I do not believe her heart gave one beat the more to the next minute. She pa.s.sed graceful on, her swan's-neck shining; and Leopold hastened out to one of the windows of the ball-room, there to feast his eyes upon her loveliness. But when he caught sight of her whirling in the waltz with the officer of dragoons whose name he had heard coupled with hers, and saw her flash on him the light and power of eyes which were to him the windows of all the heaven he knew, as they swam together in the joy of the rhythm, of the motion, of the music, suddenly the whole frame of the dream wherein he wandered, trembled, shook, fell down into the dreary vaults that underlie all the airy castles that have other foundation than the will of the eternal Builder.

With the suddenness of the dark that follows the lightning, the music changed to a dissonant clash of mult.i.tudinous cymbals, the resounding clang of brazen doors, and the hundred-toned screams of souls in torture. The same moment, from halls of infinite scope, where the very air was a soft tumult of veiled melodies ever and anon twisted into inextricable knots of harmony--under whose skyey domes he swept upborne by chords of sound throbbing up against great wings mighty as thought yet in their motions as easy and subtle, he found himself lying on the floor of a huge vault, whose black slabs were worn into many hollows by the bare feet of the d.a.m.ned as they went and came between the chambers of their torture opening off upon every side, whence issued all kinds of sickening cries, and mingled with the music to which, with whips of steel, h.e.l.lish executioners urged the dance whose every motion was an agony. His soul fainted within him, and the vision changed. When he came to himself, he lay on the little plot of gra.s.s amongst the lilacs and laburnums where he had asked Emmeline to meet him. Fevered with jealousy and the horrible drug, his mouth was parched like an old purse, and he found himself chewing at the gra.s.s to ease its burning and drought.

But presently the evil thing resumed its sway and fancies usurped over facts. He thought he was lying in an Indian jungle, close by the cave of a beautiful tigress, which crouched within, waiting the first sting of reviving hunger to devour him. He could hear her breathing as she slept, but he was fascinated, paralyzed, and could not escape, knowing that, even if with mighty effort he succeeded in moving a finger, the motion would suffice to wake her, and she would spring upon him and tear him to pieces. Years upon years pa.s.sed thus, and he still lay on the gra.s.s in the jungle, and still the beautiful tigress slept. But however far apart the knots upon the string of time may lie, they must pa.s.s: an angel in white stood over him, his fears vanished, the waving of her wings cooled him, and she was the angel whom he had loved and loved from all eternity, in whom was his ever-and-only rest. She lifted him to his feet, gave him her hand, they walked away, and the tigress was asleep for ever. For miles and miles, as it seemed to his exaltation, they wandered away into the woods, to wander in them for ever, the same violet blue, flashing with roseate stars, for ever looking in through the tree-tops, and the great leafy branches hushing, ever hushing them, as with the voices of child-watching mothers, into peace, whose depth is bliss.

"Have you nothing to say now I am come?" said the angel.

"I have said all. I am at rest," answered the mortal.

"I am going to be married to Captain Hodges," said the angel.

And with the word, the forests of heaven vanished, and the halls of Eblis did not take their place:--a worse h.e.l.l was there--the cold reality of an earth abjured, and a worthless maiden walking by his side.

He stood and turned to her. The shock had mastered the drug. They were only in the little wooded hollow, a hundred yards from the house. The blood throbbed in his head as from the piston of an engine. A horrid sound of dance-music was in his ears. Emmeline, his own, stood in her white dress, looking up in his face, with the words just parted from her lips, "I am going to be married to Captain Hodges." The next moment she threw her arms round his neck, pulled his face to hers, and kissed him, and clung to him.

"Poor Leopold!" she said, and looked in his face with her electric battery at full power; "does it make him miserable, then?--But you know it could not have gone on like this between you and me for ever! It was very dear while it lasted, but it must come to an end."

Was there a glimmer of real pity and sadness in those wondrous eyes? She laughed--was it a laugh of despair or of exultation?--and hid her face on his bosom. And what was it that awoke in Leopold? Had the drug resumed its power over him? Was it rage at her mockery, or infinite compa.s.sion for her despair? Would he slay a demon, or ransom a spirit from hateful bonds? Would he save a woman from disgrace and misery to come? or punish her for the vilest falsehood? Who can tell? for Leopold himself never could. Whatever the feeling was, its own violence erased it from his memory, and left him with a knife in his hand, and Emmeline lying motionless at his feet. It was a knife the Scotch highlanders call a skean-dhu, sharp-pointed as a needle, sharp-edged as a razor, and with one blow of it he had cleft her heart, and she never cried or laughed any more in that body whose charms she had degraded to the vile servitude of her vanity. The next thing he remembered was standing on the edge of the shaft of a deserted coalpit, ready to cast himself down.

Whence came the change of resolve, he could not tell, but he threw in his cloak and mask, and fled. The one thought in his miserable brain was his sister. Having murdered one woman, he was fleeing to another for refuge. Helen would save him.

How he had found his way to his haven, he had not an idea. Searching the newspapers, Helen heard that a week had elapsed between the "mysterious murder of a young lady in Yorkshire" and the night on which he came to her window.

CHAPTER XXVIII.