Wilfrid Cumbermede Part 60

CHAPTER XLII.

A TALK ABOUT SUICIDE.

In the same excited mood, but repressing it with all the energy I could gather, I returned to the Hall and made my way to the library. There Charley soon joined me.

'Why didn't you come to breakfast?' he asked.

'I've been home, and changed my clothes,' I answered. 'I couldn't well appear in a tail-coat. It's bad enough to have to wear such an ugly thing by candle-light.'

'What's the matter with you?' he asked again, after an interval of silence, which I judge from the question must have been rather a long one.

'What is the matter with me, Charley?'

'I can't tell. You don't seem yourself somehow.'

I do not know what answer I gave him, but I knew myself what was the matter with me well enough. The form and face of the maiden of my dream, the Athanasia lost that she might be found, blending with the face and form of Mary Osborne, filled my imagination so that I could think of nothing else. Gladly would I have been rid of even Charley's company, that, while my hands were busy with the books, my heart might brood at will now upon the lovely dream, now upon the lovely vision to which I awoke from it, and which, had it not glided into the forms of the foregone dream, and possessed it with itself, would have banished it altogether. At length I was aware of light steps and sweet voices in the next room, and Mary and Clara presently entered.

How came it that the face of the one had lost the half of its radiance, and the face of the other had gathered all that the former had lost.

Mary's countenance was as still as ever; there was not in it a single ray of light beyond its usual expression; but I had become more capable of reading it, for the coalescence of the face of my dream with her dreaming face had given me its key; and I was now so far from indifferent, that I was afraid to look for fear of betraying the attraction I now found it exercise over me. Seldom surely has a man been so long familiar with and careless of any countenance to find it all at once an object of absorbing interest! The very fact of its want of revelation added immensely to its power over me now--for was I not in its secret? Did I not know what a lovely soul hid behind that unexpressive countenance? Did I not know that it was as the veil of the holy of holies, at times reflecting only the light of the seven golden lamps in the holy place; at others almost melted away in the rush of the radiance unspeakable from the hidden and holier side--the region whence come the revelations. To draw through it, if but once, the feeblest glimmer of the light I had but once beheld, seemed an ambition worthy of a life. Knowing her power of reticence, however, and of withdrawing from the outer courts into the penetralia of her sanctuary, guessing also at something of the aspect in which she regarded me, I dared not now make any such attempt. But I resolved to seize what opportunity might offer of convincing her that I was not so far out of sympathy with her as to be unworthy of holding closer converse; and I now began to feel distressed at what had given me little trouble before, namely, that she should suppose me the misleader of her brother, while I knew that, however far I might be from an absolute belief in things which she seemed never to have doubted, I was yet in some measure the means of keeping him from flinging aside the last cords which held him to the faith of his fathers. But I would not lead in any such direction, partly from the fear of hypocrisy, partly from horror at the idea of making capital of what little faith I had. But Charley himself afforded me an opportunity which I could not, whatever my scrupulosity, well avoid.

'Have you ever looked into that little book, Charley?' I said, finding in my hands an early edition of the _Christian Morals_ of Sir Thomas Browne.--I wanted to say something, that I might not appear distraught.

'No,' he answered, with indifference, as he glanced at the t.i.tle-page.

'Is it anything particular?'

'Everything he writes, however whimsical in parts, is well worth more than mere reading,' I answered. 'It is a strangely latinized style, but has its charm notwithstanding.'

He was turning over the leaves as I spoke. Receiving no response, I looked up. He seemed to have come upon something which had attracted him.

'What have you found?' I asked.

'Here's a chapter on the easiest way of putting a stop to it all,' he answered.

'What do you mean?'

'He was a medical man--wasn't he? I'm ashamed to say I know nothing about him.'

'Yes, certainly he was.'

'Then he knew what he was about.'

'As well probably as any man of his profession at the time.'

'He recommends drowning,' said Charley, without raising his eyes from the book.

'What do you mean?'

'I mean for suicide.'

'Nonsense, He was the last man to favour that. You must make a mistake.

He was a thoroughly Christian man.'

'I know nothing about that. Hear this.'

He read the following pa.s.sages from the beginning of the thirteenth section of the second part.

'With what shifts and pains we come into the world, we remember not; but 'tis commonly found no easy matter to get out of it. Many have studied to exasperate the ways of death, but fewer hours have been spent to soften that necessity.'--'Ovid, the old heroes, and the Stoicks, who were so afraid of drowning, as dreading thereby the extinction of their soul, which they conceived to be a fire, stood probably in fear of an easier way of death; wherein the water, entering the possessions of air, makes a temporary suffocation, and kills as it were without a fever. Surely many, who have had the spirit to destroy themselves, have not been ingenious in the contrivance thereof.'--'Cato is much to be pitied, who mangled himself with poniards; and Hannibal seems more subtle, who carried his delivery, not in the point but the pummel of his sword.'

'Poison. I suppose,' he said, as he ended the extract.

'Yes, that's the story, if you remember,' I answered; 'but I don't see that Sir Thomas is favouring suicide. Not at all. What he writes there is merely a speculation on the comparative ease of different modes of dying. Let me see it.'

I took the book from his hands, and, glancing over the essay, read the closing pa.s.sage.

'But to learn to die, is better than to study the ways of dying. Death will find some ways to untie or cut the most gordian knots of life, and make men's miseries as mortal as themselves: whereas evil spirits, as undying substances, are unseparable from their calamities; and, therefore, they everlastingly struggle under their angustias, and, bound up with immortality, can never get out of themselves.'

'There! I told you so!' cried Charley. Don't you see? He is the most cunning arguer--beats Despair in the _Fairy Queen_ hollow!'

By this time, either attracted by the stately flow of Sir Thomas's speech, or by the tone of our disputation, the two girls had drawn nearer, and were listening.

'What _do_ you mean, Charley?' I said, perceiving, however, the hold I had by my further quotation given him.

'First of all, he tells you the easiest way of dying, and then informs you that it ends all your troubles. He is too cunning to say in so many words that there is no hereafter, but what else can he wish you to understand when he says that in dying we have the advantage over the evil spirits, who cannot by death get rid of their sufferings? I will read this book,' he added, closing it and putting it in his pocket.

'I wish you would,' I said: 'for although I confess you are logically right in your conclusions, I know Sir Thomas did not mean anything of the sort. He was only misled by his love of ant.i.thesis into a hasty and illogical remark. The whole tone of his book is against such a conclusion. Besides, I do not doubt he was thinking only of good people, for whom he believed all suffering over at their death.'

'But I don't see, supposing he does believe in immortality, why you should be so anxious about his orthodoxy on the other point. Didn't Dr Donne, as good a man as any, I presume, argue on the part of the suicide?'

'I have not read Dr Donne's essay, but I suspect the obliquity of it has been much exaggerated.'

'Why should you? I never saw any argument worth the name on the other side. We have plenty of expressions of horror--but those are not argument. Indeed, the ma.s.s of the vulgar are so afraid of dying that, apparently in terror lest suicide should prove infectious, they treat in a brutal manner the remains of the man who has only had the courage to free himself from a burden too hard for him to bear. It is all selfishness--nothing else. They love their paltry selves so much that they count it a greater sin to kill oneself than to kill another man--which seems to me absolutely devilish. Therefore, the _vox populi_, whether it be the _vox Dei_ or not, is not nonsense merely, but absolute wickedness. Why shouldn't a man kill himself?'

Clara was looking on rather than listening, and her interest seemed that of amus.e.m.e.nt only. Mary's eyes were wide-fixed on the face of Charley, evidently tortured to find that to the other enormities of his unbelief was to be added the justification of suicide. His habit of arguing was doubtless well enough known to her to leave room for the mitigating possibility that he might be arguing only for argument's sake, but what he said could not but be shocking to her upon any supposition.

I was not ready with an answer. Clara was the first to speak.

'It's a cowardly thing, anyhow,' she said.

'How do you make that out, Miss Clara?' asked Charley. 'I'm aware it's the general opinion, but I don't see it myself.'

'It's surely cowardly to run away in that fashion.'

'For my part,' returned Charley, 'I feel that it requires more courage than _I_'ve got, and hence it comes, I suppose, that I admire any one who has the pluck.'