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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Lifted Veil, by George Eliot
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Lifted Veil
+
+
+Author: George Eliot
+
+Release Date: April 20, 2005  [eBook #2165]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFTED VEIL***
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1921 Oxford University Press edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+THE LIFTED VEIL
+
+
+   Give me no light, great Heaven, but such as turns
+   To energy of human fellowship;
+   No powers beyond the growing heritage
+   That makes completer manhood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+The time of my end approaches.  I have lately been subject to attacks of
+_angina pectoris_; and in the ordinary course of things, my physician
+tells me, I may fairly hope that my life will not be protracted many
+months.  Unless, then, I am cursed with an exceptional physical
+constitution, as I am cursed with an exceptional mental character, I
+shall not much longer groan under the wearisome burthen of this earthly
+existence.  If it were to be otherwise--if I were to live on to the age
+most men desire and provide for--I should for once have known whether the
+miseries of delusive expectation can outweigh the miseries of true
+provision.  For I foresee when I shall die, and everything that will
+happen in my last moments.
+
+Just a month from this day, on September 20, 1850, I shall be sitting in
+this chair, in this study, at ten o'clock at night, longing to die, weary
+of incessant insight and foresight, without delusions and without hope.
+Just as I am watching a tongue of blue flame rising in the fire, and my
+lamp is burning low, the horrible contraction will begin at my chest.  I
+shall only have time to reach the bell, and pull it violently, before the
+sense of suffocation will come.  No one will answer my bell.  I know why.
+My two servants are lovers, and will have quarrelled.  My housekeeper
+will have rushed out of the house in a fury, two hours before, hoping
+that Perry will believe she has gone to drown herself.  Perry is alarmed
+at last, and is gone out after her.  The little scullery-maid is asleep
+on a bench: she never answers the bell; it does not wake her.  The sense
+of suffocation increases: my lamp goes out with a horrible stench: I make
+a great effort, and snatch at the bell again.  I long for life, and there
+is no help.  I thirsted for the unknown: the thirst is gone.  O God, let
+me stay with the known, and be weary of it: I am content.  Agony of pain
+and suffocation--and all the while the earth, the fields, the pebbly
+brook at the bottom of the rookery, the fresh scent after the rain, the
+light of the morning through my chamber-window, the warmth of the hearth
+after the frosty air--will darkness close over them for ever?
+
+Darkness--darkness--no pain--nothing but darkness: but I am passing on
+and on through the darkness: my thought stays in the darkness, but always
+with a sense of moving onward . . .
+
+Before that time comes, I wish to use my last hours of ease and strength
+in telling the strange story of my experience.  I have never fully
+unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to
+trust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men.  But we have all a chance of
+meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead:
+it is the living only who cannot be forgiven--the living only from whom
+men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard
+east wind.  While the heart beats, bruise it--it is your only
+opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist, timid
+entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that
+delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in
+the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering
+compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative
+brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for
+brotherly recognition--make haste--oppress it with your ill-considered
+judgements, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations.
+The heart will by and by be still--"ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor
+lacerare nequit"; the eye will cease to entreat; the ear will be deaf;
+the brain will have ceased from all wants as well as from all work.  Then
+your charitable speeches may find vent; then you may remember and pity
+the toil and the struggle and the failure; then you may give due honour
+to the work achieved; then you may find extenuation for errors, and may
+consent to bury them.
+
+That is a trivial schoolboy text; why do I dwell on it?  It has little
+reference to me, for I shall leave no works behind me for men to honour.
+I have no near relatives who will make up, by weeping over my grave, for
+the wounds they inflicted on me when I was among them.  It is only the
+story of my life that will perhaps win a little more sympathy from
+strangers when I am dead, than I ever believed it would obtain from my
+friends while I was living.
+
+My childhood perhaps seems happier to me than it really was, by contrast
+with all the after-years.  For then the curtain of the future was as
+impenetrable to me as to other children: I had all their delight in the
+present hour, their sweet indefinite hopes for the morrow; and I had a
+tender mother: even now, after the dreary lapse of long years, a slight
+trace of sensation accompanies the remembrance of her caress as she held
+me on her knee--her arms round my little body, her cheek pressed on mine.
+I had a complaint of the eyes that made me blind for a little while, and
+she kept me on her knee from morning till night.  That unequalled love
+soon vanished out of my life, and even to my childish consciousness it
+was as if that life had become more chill I rode my little white pony
+with the groom by my side as before, but there were no loving eyes
+looking at me as I mounted, no glad arms opened to me when I came back.
+Perhaps I missed my mother's love more than most children of seven or
+eight would have done, to whom the other pleasures of life remained as
+before; for I was certainly a very sensitive child.  I remember still the
+mingled trepidation and delicious excitement with which I was affected by
+the tramping of the horses on the pavement in the echoing stables, by the
+loud resonance of the groom's voices, by the booming bark of the dogs as
+my father's carriage thundered under the archway of the courtyard, by the
+din of the gong as it gave notice of luncheon and dinner.  The measured
+tramp of soldiery which I sometimes heard--for my father's house lay near
+a county town where there were large barracks--made me sob and tremble;
+and yet when they were gone past, I longed for them to come back again.
+
+I fancy my father thought me an odd child, and had little fondness for
+me; though he was very careful in fulfilling what he regarded as a
+parent's duties.  But he was already past the middle of life, and I was
+not his only son.  My mother had been his second wife, and he was five-
+and-forty when he married her.  He was a firm, unbending, intensely
+orderly man, in root and stem a banker, but with a flourishing graft of
+the active landholder, aspiring to county influence: one of those people
+who are always like themselves from day to day, who are uninfluenced by
+the weather, and neither know melancholy nor high spirits.  I held him in
+great awe, and appeared more timid and sensitive in his presence than at
+other times; a circumstance which, perhaps, helped to confirm him in the
+intention to educate me on a different plan from the prescriptive one
+with which he had complied in the case of my elder brother, already a
+tall youth at Eton.  My brother was to be his representative and
+successor; he must go to Eton and Oxford, for the sake of making
+connexions, of course: my father was not a man to underrate the bearing
+of Latin satirists or Greek dramatists on the attainment of an
+aristocratic position.  But, intrinsically, he had slight esteem for
+"those dead but sceptred spirits"; having qualified himself for forming
+an independent opinion by reading Potter's _AEschylus_, and dipping into
+Francis's _Horace_.  To this negative view he added a positive one,
+derived from a recent connexion with mining speculations; namely, that a
+scientific education was the really useful training for a younger son.
+Moreover, it was clear that a shy, sensitive boy like me was not fit to
+encounter the rough experience of a public school.  Mr. Letherall had
+said so very decidedly.  Mr. Letherall was a large man in spectacles, who
+one day took my small head between his large hands, and pressed it here
+and there in an exploratory, auspicious manner--then placed each of his
+great thumbs on my temples, and pushed me a little way from him, and
+stared at me with glittering spectacles.  The contemplation appeared to
+displease him, for he frowned sternly, and said to my father, drawing his
+thumbs across my eyebrows--
+
+"The deficiency is there, sir--there; and here," he added, touching the
+upper sides of my head, "here is the excess.  That must be brought out,
+sir, and this must be laid to sleep."
+
+I was in a state of tremor, partly at the vague idea that I was the
+object of reprobation, partly in the agitation of my first hatred--hatred
+of this big, spectacled man, who pulled my head about as if he wanted to
+buy and cheapen it.
+
+I am not aware how much Mr. Letherall had to do with the system
+afterwards adopted towards me, but it was presently clear that private
+tutors, natural history, science, and the modern languages, were the
+appliances by which the defects of my organization were to be remedied.  I
+was very stupid about machines, so I was to be greatly occupied with
+them; I had no memory for classification, so it was particularly
+necessary that I should study systematic zoology and botany; I was hungry
+for human deeds and humane motions, so I was to be plentifully crammed
+with the mechanical powers, the elementary bodies, and the phenomena of
+electricity and magnetism.  A better-constituted boy would certainly have
+profited under my intelligent tutors, with their scientific apparatus;
+and would, doubtless, have found the phenomena of electricity and
+magnetism as fascinating as I was, every Thursday, assured they were.  As
+it was, I could have paired off, for ignorance of whatever was taught me,
+with the worst Latin scholar that was ever turned out of a classical
+academy.  I read Plutarch, and Shakespeare, and Don Quixote by the sly,
+and supplied myself in that way with wandering thoughts, while my tutor
+was assuring me that "an improved man, as distinguished from an ignorant
+one, was a man who knew the reason why water ran downhill."  I had no
+desire to be this improved man; I was glad of the running water; I could
+watch it and listen to it gurgling among the pebbles, and bathing the
+bright green water-plants, by the hour together.  I did not want to know
+_why_ it ran; I had perfect confidence that there were good reasons for
+what was so very beautiful.
+
+There is no need to dwell on this part of my life.  I have said enough to
+indicate that my nature was of the sensitive, unpractical order, and that
+it grew up in an uncongenial medium, which could never foster it into
+happy, healthy development.  When I was sixteen I was sent to Geneva to
+complete my course of education; and the change was a very happy one to
+me, for the first sight of the Alps, with the setting sun on them, as we
+descended the Jura, seemed to me like an entrance into heaven; and the
+three years of my life there were spent in a perpetual sense of
+exaltation, as if from a draught of delicious wine, at the presence of
+Nature in all her awful loveliness.  You will think, perhaps, that I must
+have been a poet, from this early sensibility to Nature.  But my lot was
+not so happy as that.  A poet pours forth his song and _believes_ in the
+listening ear and answering soul, to which his song will be floated
+sooner or later.  But the poet's sensibility without his voice--the
+poet's sensibility that finds no vent but in silent tears on the sunny
+bank, when the noonday light sparkles on the water, or in an inward
+shudder at the sound of harsh human tones, the sight of a cold human
+eye--this dumb passion brings with it a fatal solitude of soul in the
+society of one's fellow-men.  My least solitary moments were those in
+which I pushed off in my boat, at evening, towards the centre of the
+lake; it seemed to me that the sky, and the glowing mountain-tops, and
+the wide blue water, surrounded me with a cherishing love such as no
+human face had shed on me since my mother's love had vanished out of my
+life.  I used to do as Jean Jacques did--lie down in my boat and let it
+glide where it would, while I looked up at the departing glow leaving one
+mountain-top after the other, as if the prophet's chariot of fire were
+passing over them on its way to the home of light.  Then, when the white
+summits were all sad and corpse-like, I had to push homeward, for I was
+under careful surveillance, and was allowed no late wanderings.  This
+disposition of mine was not favourable to the formation of intimate
+friendships among the numerous youths of my own age who are always to be
+found studying at Geneva.  Yet I made _one_ such friendship; and,
+singularly enough, it was with a youth whose intellectual tendencies were
+the very reverse of my own.  I shall call him Charles Meunier; his real
+surname--an English one, for he was of English extraction--having since
+become celebrated.  He was an orphan, who lived on a miserable pittance
+while he pursued the medical studies for which he had a special genius.
+Strange! that with my vague mind, susceptible and unobservant, hating
+inquiry and given up to contemplation, I should have been drawn towards a
+youth whose strongest passion was science.  But the bond was not an
+intellectual one; it came from a source that can happily blend the stupid
+with the brilliant, the dreamy with the practical: it came from community
+of feeling.  Charles was poor and ugly, derided by Genevese _gamins_, and
+not acceptable in drawing-rooms.  I saw that he was isolated, as I was,
+though from a different cause, and, stimulated by a sympathetic
+resentment, I made timid advances towards him.  It is enough to say that
+there sprang up as much comradeship between us as our different habits
+would allow; and in Charles's rare holidays we went up the Saleve
+together, or took the boat to Vevay, while I listened dreamily to the
+monologues in which he unfolded his bold conceptions of future experiment
+and discovery.  I mingled them confusedly in my thought with glimpses of
+blue water and delicate floating cloud, with the notes of birds and the
+distant glitter of the glacier.  He knew quite well that my mind was half
+absent, yet he liked to talk to me in this way; for don't we talk of our
+hopes and our projects even to dogs and birds, when they love us?  I have
+mentioned this one friendship because of its connexion with a strange and
+terrible scene which I shall have to narrate in my subsequent life.
+
+This happier life at Geneva was put an end to by a severe illness, which
+is partly a blank to me, partly a time of dimly-remembered suffering,
+with the presence of my father by my bed from time to time.  Then came
+the languid monotony of convalescence, the days gradually breaking into
+variety and distinctness as my strength enabled me to take longer and
+longer drives.  On one of these more vividly remembered days, my father
+said to me, as he sat beside my sofa--
+
+"When you are quite well enough to travel, Latimer, I shall take you home
+with me.  The journey will amuse you and do you good, for I shall go
+through the Tyrol and Austria, and you will see many new places.  Our
+neighbours, the Filmores, are come; Alfred will join us at Basle, and we
+shall all go together to Vienna, and back by Prague" . . .
+
+My father was called away before he had finished his sentence, and he
+left my mind resting on the word _Prague_, with a strange sense that a
+new and wondrous scene was breaking upon me: a city under the broad
+sunshine, that seemed to me as if it were the summer sunshine of a long-
+past century arrested in its course--unrefreshed for ages by dews of
+night, or the rushing rain-cloud; scorching the dusty, weary, time-eaten
+grandeur of a people doomed to live on in the stale repetition of
+memories, like deposed and superannuated kings in their regal
+gold-inwoven tatters.  The city looked so thirsty that the broad river
+seemed to me a sheet of metal; and the blackened statues, as I passed
+under their blank gaze, along the unending bridge, with their ancient
+garments and their saintly crowns, seemed to me the real inhabitants and
+owners of this place, while the busy, trivial men and women, hurrying to
+and fro, were a swarm of ephemeral visitants infesting it for a day.  It
+is such grim, stony beings as these, I thought, who are the fathers of
+ancient faded children, in those tanned time-fretted dwellings that crowd
+the steep before me; who pay their court in the worn and crumbling pomp
+of the palace which stretches its monotonous length on the height; who
+worship wearily in the stifling air of the churches, urged by no fear or
+hope, but compelled by their doom to be ever old and undying, to live on
+in the rigidity of habit, as they live on in perpetual midday, without
+the repose of night or the new birth of morning.
+
+A stunning clang of metal suddenly thrilled through me, and I became
+conscious of the objects in my room again: one of the fire-irons had
+fallen as Pierre opened the door to bring me my draught.  My heart was
+palpitating violently, and I begged Pierre to leave my draught beside me;
+I would take it presently.
+
+As soon as I was alone again, I began to ask myself whether I had been
+sleeping.  Was this a dream--this wonderfully distinct vision--minute in
+its distinctness down to a patch of rainbow light on the pavement,
+transmitted through a coloured lamp in the shape of a star--of a strange
+city, quite unfamiliar to my imagination?  I had seen no picture of
+Prague: it lay in my mind as a mere name, with vaguely-remembered
+historical associations--ill-defined memories of imperial grandeur and
+religious wars.
+
+Nothing of this sort had ever occurred in my dreaming experience before,
+for I had often been humiliated because my dreams were only saved from
+being utterly disjointed and commonplace by the frequent terrors of
+nightmare.  But I could not believe that I had been asleep, for I
+remembered distinctly the gradual breaking-in of the vision upon me, like
+the new images in a dissolving view, or the growing distinctness of the
+landscape as the sun lifts up the veil of the morning mist.  And while I
+was conscious of this incipient vision, I was also conscious that Pierre
+came to tell my father Mr. Filmore was waiting for him, and that my
+father hurried out of the room.  No, it was not a dream; was it--the
+thought was full of tremulous exultation--was it the poet's nature in me,
+hitherto only a troubled yearning sensibility, now manifesting itself
+suddenly as spontaneous creation?  Surely it was in this way that Homer
+saw the plain of Troy, that Dante saw the abodes of the departed, that
+Milton saw the earthward flight of the Tempter.  Was it that my illness
+had wrought some happy change in my organization--given a firmer tension
+to my nerves--carried off some dull obstruction?  I had often read of
+such effects--in works of fiction at least.  Nay; in genuine biographies
+I had read of the subtilizing or exalting influence of some diseases on
+the mental powers.  Did not Novalis feel his inspiration intensified
+under the progress of consumption?
+
+When my mind had dwelt for some time on this blissful idea, it seemed to
+me that I might perhaps test it by an exertion of my will.  The vision
+had begun when my father was speaking of our going to Prague.  I did not
+for a moment believe it was really a representation of that city; I
+believed--I hoped it was a picture that my newly liberated genius had
+painted in fiery haste, with the colours snatched from lazy memory.
+Suppose I were to fix my mind on some other place--Venice, for example,
+which was far more familiar to my imagination than Prague: perhaps the
+same sort of result would follow.  I concentrated my thoughts on Venice;
+I stimulated my imagination with poetic memories, and strove to feel
+myself present in Venice, as I had felt myself present in Prague.  But in
+vain.  I was only colouring the Canaletto engravings that hung in my old
+bedroom at home; the picture was a shifting one, my mind wandering
+uncertainly in search of more vivid images; I could see no accident of
+form or shadow without conscious labour after the necessary conditions.
+It was all prosaic effort, not rapt passivity, such as I had experienced
+half an hour before.  I was discouraged; but I remembered that
+inspiration was fitful.
+
+For several days I was in a state of excited expectation, watching for a
+recurrence of my new gift.  I sent my thoughts ranging over my world of
+knowledge, in the hope that they would find some object which would send
+a reawakening vibration through my slumbering genius.  But no; my world
+remained as dim as ever, and that flash of strange light refused to come
+again, though I watched for it with palpitating eagerness.
+
+My father accompanied me every day in a drive, and a gradually
+lengthening walk as my powers of walking increased; and one evening he
+had agreed to come and fetch me at twelve the next day, that we might go
+together to select a musical box, and other purchases rigorously demanded
+of a rich Englishman visiting Geneva.  He was one of the most punctual of
+men and bankers, and I was always nervously anxious to be quite ready for
+him at the appointed time.  But, to my surprise, at a quarter past twelve
+he had not appeared.  I felt all the impatience of a convalescent who has
+nothing particular to do, and who has just taken a tonic in the prospect
+of immediate exercise that would carry off the stimulus.
+
+Unable to sit still and reserve my strength, I walked up and down the
+room, looking out on the current of the Rhone, just where it leaves the
+dark-blue lake; but thinking all the while of the possible causes that
+could detain my father.
+
+Suddenly I was conscious that my father was in the room, but not alone:
+there were two persons with him.  Strange!  I had heard no footstep, I
+had not seen the door open; but I saw my father, and at his right hand
+our neighbour Mrs. Filmore, whom I remembered very well, though I had not
+seen her for five years.  She was a commonplace middle-aged woman, in
+silk and cashmere; but the lady on the left of my father was not more
+than twenty, a tall, slim, willowy figure, with luxuriant blond hair,
+arranged in cunning braids and folds that looked almost too massive for
+the slight figure and the small-featured, thin-lipped face they crowned.
+But the face had not a girlish expression: the features were sharp, the
+pale grey eyes at once acute, restless, and sarcastic.  They were fixed
+on me in half-smiling curiosity, and I felt a painful sensation as if a
+sharp wind were cutting me.  The pale-green dress, and the green leaves
+that seemed to form a border about her pale blond hair, made me think of
+a Water-Nixie--for my mind was full of German lyrics, and this pale,
+fatal-eyed woman, with the green weeds, looked like a birth from some
+cold sedgy stream, the daughter of an aged river.
+
+"Well, Latimer, you thought me long," my father said . . .
+
+But while the last word was in my ears, the whole group vanished, and
+there was nothing between me and the Chinese printed folding-screen that
+stood before the door.  I was cold and trembling; I could only totter
+forward and throw myself on the sofa.  This strange new power had
+manifested itself again . . . But _was_ it a power?  Might it not rather
+be a disease--a sort of intermittent delirium, concentrating my energy of
+brain into moments of unhealthy activity, and leaving my saner hours all
+the more barren?  I felt a dizzy sense of unreality in what my eye rested
+on; I grasped the bell convulsively, like one trying to free himself from
+nightmare, and rang it twice.  Pierre came with a look of alarm in his
+face.
+
+"Monsieur ne se trouve pas bien?" he said anxiously.
+
+"I'm tired of waiting, Pierre," I said, as distinctly and emphatically as
+I could, like a man determined to be sober in spite of wine; "I'm afraid
+something has happened to my father--he's usually so punctual.  Run to
+the Hotel des Bergues and see if he is there."
+
+Pierre left the room at once, with a soothing "Bien, Monsieur"; and I
+felt the better for this scene of simple, waking prose.  Seeking to calm
+myself still further, I went into my bedroom, adjoining the _salon_, and
+opened a case of eau-de-Cologne; took out a bottle; went through the
+process of taking out the cork very neatly, and then rubbed the reviving
+spirit over my hands and forehead, and under my nostrils, drawing a new
+delight from the scent because I had procured it by slow details of
+labour, and by no strange sudden madness.  Already I had begun to taste
+something of the horror that belongs to the lot of a human being whose
+nature is not adjusted to simple human conditions.
+
+Still enjoying the scent, I returned to the salon, but it was not
+unoccupied, as it had been before I left it.  In front of the Chinese
+folding-screen there was my father, with Mrs. Filmore on his right hand,
+and on his left--the slim, blond-haired girl, with the keen face and the
+keen eyes fixed on me in half-smiling curiosity.
+
+"Well, Latimer, you thought me long," my father said . . .
+
+I heard no more, felt no more, till I became conscious that I was lying
+with my head low on the sofa, Pierre, and my father by my side.  As soon
+as I was thoroughly revived, my father left the room, and presently
+returned, saying--
+
+"I've been to tell the ladies how you are, Latimer.  They were waiting in
+the next room.  We shall put off our shopping expedition to-day."
+
+Presently he said, "That young lady is Bertha Grant, Mrs. Filmore's
+orphan niece.  Filmore has adopted her, and she lives with them, so you
+will have her for a neighbour when we go home--perhaps for a near
+relation; for there is a tenderness between her and Alfred, I suspect,
+and I should be gratified by the match, since Filmore means to provide
+for her in every way as if she were his daughter.  It had not occurred to
+me that you knew nothing about her living with the Filmores."
+
+He made no further allusion to the fact of my having fainted at the
+moment of seeing her, and I would not for the world have told him the
+reason: I shrank from the idea of disclosing to any one what might be
+regarded as a pitiable peculiarity, most of all from betraying it to my
+father, who would have suspected my sanity ever after.
+
+I do not mean to dwell with particularity on the details of my
+experience.  I have described these two cases at length, because they had
+definite, clearly traceable results in my after-lot.
+
+Shortly after this last occurrence--I think the very next day--I began to
+be aware of a phase in my abnormal sensibility, to which, from the
+languid and slight nature of my intercourse with others since my illness,
+I had not been alive before.  This was the obtrusion on my mind of the
+mental process going forward in first one person, and then another, with
+whom I happened to be in contact: the vagrant, frivolous ideas and
+emotions of some uninteresting acquaintance--Mrs. Filmore, for
+example--would force themselves on my consciousness like an importunate,
+ill-played musical instrument, or the loud activity of an imprisoned
+insect.  But this unpleasant sensibility was fitful, and left me moments
+of rest, when the souls of my companions were once more shut out from me,
+and I felt a relief such as silence brings to wearied nerves.  I might
+have believed this importunate insight to be merely a diseased activity
+of the imagination, but that my prevision of incalculable words and
+actions proved it to have a fixed relation to the mental process in other
+minds.  But this superadded consciousness, wearying and annoying enough
+when it urged on me the trivial experience of indifferent people, became
+an intense pain and grief when it seemed to be opening to me the souls of
+those who were in a close relation to me--when the rational talk, the
+graceful attentions, the wittily-turned phrases, and the kindly deeds,
+which used to make the web of their characters, were seen as if thrust
+asunder by a microscopic vision, that showed all the intermediate
+frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the struggling chaos of
+puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and indolent make-shift
+thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge like leaflets covering
+a fermenting heap.
+
+At Basle we were joined by my brother Alfred, now a handsome,
+self-confident man of six-and-twenty--a thorough contrast to my fragile,
+nervous, ineffectual self.  I believe I was held to have a sort of half-
+womanish, half-ghostly beauty; for the portrait-painters, who are thick
+as weeds at Geneva, had often asked me to sit to them, and I had been the
+model of a dying minstrel in a fancy picture.  But I thoroughly disliked
+my own physique and nothing but the belief that it was a condition of
+poetic genius would have reconciled me to it.  That brief hope was quite
+fled, and I saw in my face now nothing but the stamp of a morbid
+organization, framed for passive suffering--too feeble for the sublime
+resistance of poetic production.  Alfred, from whom I had been almost
+constantly separated, and who, in his present stage of character and
+appearance, came before me as a perfect stranger, was bent on being
+extremely friendly and brother-like to me.  He had the superficial
+kindness of a good-humoured, self-satisfied nature, that fears no
+rivalry, and has encountered no contrarieties.  I am not sure that my
+disposition was good enough for me to have been quite free from envy
+towards him, even if our desires had not clashed, and if I had been in
+the healthy human condition which admits of generous confidence and
+charitable construction.  There must always have been an antipathy
+between our natures.  As it was, he became in a few weeks an object of
+intense hatred to me; and when he entered the room, still more when he
+spoke, it was as if a sensation of grating metal had set my teeth on
+edge.  My diseased consciousness was more intensely and continually
+occupied with his thoughts and emotions, than with those of any other
+person who came in my way.  I was perpetually exasperated with the petty
+promptings of his conceit and his love of patronage, with his
+self-complacent belief in Bertha Grant's passion for him, with his half-
+pitying contempt for me--seen not in the ordinary indications of
+intonation and phrase and slight action, which an acute and suspicious
+mind is on the watch for, but in all their naked skinless complication.
+
+For we were rivals, and our desires clashed, though he was not aware of
+it.  I have said nothing yet of the effect Bertha Grant produced in me on
+a nearer acquaintance.  That effect was chiefly determined by the fact
+that she made the only exception, among all the human beings about me, to
+my unhappy gift of insight.  About Bertha I was always in a state of
+uncertainty: I could watch the expression of her face, and speculate on
+its meaning; I could ask for her opinion with the real interest of
+ignorance; I could listen for her words and watch for her smile with hope
+and fear: she had for me the fascination of an unravelled destiny.  I say
+it was this fact that chiefly determined the strong effect she produced
+on me: for, in the abstract, no womanly character could seem to have less
+affinity for that of a shrinking, romantic, passionate youth than
+Bertha's.  She was keen, sarcastic, unimaginative, prematurely cynical,
+remaining critical and unmoved in the most impressive scenes, inclined to
+dissect all my favourite poems, and especially contemptous towards the
+German lyrics which were my pet literature at that time.  To this moment
+I am unable to define my feeling towards her: it was not ordinary boyish
+admiration, for she was the very opposite, even to the colour of her
+hair, of the ideal woman who still remained to me the type of loveliness;
+and she was without that enthusiasm for the great and good, which, even
+at the moment of her strongest dominion over me, I should have declared
+to be the highest element of character.  But there is no tyranny more
+complete than that which a self-centred negative nature exercises over a
+morbidly sensitive nature perpetually craving sympathy and support.  The
+most independent people feel the effect of a man's silence in heightening
+their value for his opinion--feel an additional triumph in conquering the
+reverence of a critic habitually captious and satirical: no wonder, then,
+that an enthusiastic self-distrusting youth should watch and wait before
+the closed secret of a sarcastic woman's face, as if it were the shrine
+of the doubtfully benignant deity who ruled his destiny.  For a young
+enthusiast is unable to imagine the total negation in another mind of the
+emotions which are stirring his own: they may be feeble, latent,
+inactive, he thinks, but they are there--they may be called forth;
+sometimes, in moments of happy hallucination, he believes they may be
+there in all the greater strength because he sees no outward sign of
+them.  And this effect, as I have intimated, was heightened to its utmost
+intensity in me, because Bertha was the only being who remained for me in
+the mysterious seclusion of soul that renders such youthful delusion
+possible.  Doubtless there was another sort of fascination at work--that
+subtle physical attraction which delights in cheating our psychological
+predictions, and in compelling the men who paint sylphs, to fall in love
+with some _bonne et brave femme_, heavy-heeled and freckled.
+
+Bertha's behaviour towards me was such as to encourage all my illusions,
+to heighten my boyish passion, and make me more and more dependent on her
+smiles.  Looking back with my present wretched knowledge, I conclude that
+her vanity and love of power were intensely gratified by the belief that
+I had fainted on first seeing her purely from the strong impression her
+person had produced on me.  The most prosaic woman likes to believe
+herself the object of a violent, a poetic passion; and without a grain of
+romance in her, Bertha had that spirit of intrigue which gave piquancy to
+the idea that the brother of the man she meant to marry was dying with
+love and jealousy for her sake.  That she meant to marry my brother, was
+what at that time I did not believe; for though he was assiduous in his
+attentions to her, and I knew well enough that both he and my father had
+made up their minds to this result, there was not yet an understood
+engagement--there had been no explicit declaration; and Bertha
+habitually, while she flirted with my brother, and accepted his homage in
+a way that implied to him a thorough recognition of its intention, made
+me believe, by the subtlest looks and phrases--feminine nothings which
+could never be quoted against her--that he was really the object of her
+secret ridicule; that she thought him, as I did, a coxcomb, whom she
+would have pleasure in disappointing.  Me she openly petted in my
+brother's presence, as if I were too young and sickly ever to be thought
+of as a lover; and that was the view he took of me.  But I believe she
+must inwardly have delighted in the tremors into which she threw me by
+the coaxing way in which she patted my curls, while she laughed at my
+quotations.  Such caresses were always given in the presence of our
+friends; for when we were alone together, she affected a much greater
+distance towards me, and now and then took the opportunity, by words or
+slight actions, to stimulate my foolish timid hope that she really
+preferred me.  And why should she not follow her inclination?  I was not
+in so advantageous a position as my brother, but I had fortune, I was not
+a year younger than she was, and she was an heiress, who would soon be of
+age to decide for herself.
+
+The fluctuations of hope and fear, confined to this one channel, made
+each day in her presence a delicious torment.  There was one deliberate
+act of hers which especially helped to intoxicate me.  When we were at
+Vienna her twentieth birthday occurred, and as she was very fond of
+ornaments, we all took the opportunity of the splendid jewellers' shops
+in that Teutonic Paris to purchase her a birthday present of jewellery.
+Mine, naturally, was the least expensive; it was an opal ring--the opal
+was my favourite stone, because it seems to blush and turn pale as if it
+had a soul.  I told Bertha so when I gave it her, and said that it was an
+emblem of the poetic nature, changing with the changing light of heaven
+and of woman's eyes.  In the evening she appeared elegantly dressed, and
+wearing conspicuously all the birthday presents except mine.  I looked
+eagerly at her fingers, but saw no opal.  I had no opportunity of
+noticing this to her during the evening; but the next day, when I found
+her seated near the window alone, after breakfast, I said, "You scorn to
+wear my poor opal.  I should have remembered that you despised poetic
+natures, and should have given you coral, or turquoise, or some other
+opaque unresponsive stone."  "Do I despise it?" she answered, taking hold
+of a delicate gold chain which she always wore round her neck and drawing
+out the end from her bosom with my ring hanging to it; "it hurts me a
+little, I can tell you," she said, with her usual dubious smile, "to wear
+it in that secret place; and since your poetical nature is so stupid as
+to prefer a more public position, I shall not endure the pain any
+longer."
+
+She took off the ring from the chain and put it on her finger, smiling
+still, while the blood rushed to my cheeks, and I could not trust myself
+to say a word of entreaty that she would keep the ring where it was
+before.
+
+I was completely fooled by this, and for two days shut myself up in my
+own room whenever Bertha was absent, that I might intoxicate myself
+afresh with the thought of this scene and all it implied.
+
+I should mention that during these two months--which seemed a long life
+to me from the novelty and intensity of the pleasures and pains I
+underwent--my diseased anticipation in other people's consciousness
+continued to torment me; now it was my father, and now my brother, now
+Mrs. Filmore or her husband, and now our German courier, whose stream of
+thought rushed upon me like a ringing in the ears not to be got rid of,
+though it allowed my own impulses and ideas to continue their
+uninterrupted course.  It was like a preternaturally heightened sense of
+hearing, making audible to one a roar of sound where others find perfect
+stillness.  The weariness and disgust of this involuntary intrusion into
+other souls was counteracted only by my ignorance of Bertha, and my
+growing passion for her; a passion enormously stimulated, if not
+produced, by that ignorance.  She was my oasis of mystery in the dreary
+desert of knowledge.  I had never allowed my diseased condition to betray
+itself, or to drive me into any unusual speech or action, except once,
+when, in a moment of peculiar bitterness against my brother, I had
+forestalled some words which I knew he was going to utter--a clever
+observation, which he had prepared beforehand.  He had occasionally a
+slightly affected hesitation in his speech, and when he paused an instant
+after the second word, my impatience and jealousy impelled me to continue
+the speech for him, as if it were something we had both learned by rote.
+He coloured and looked astonished, as well as annoyed; and the words had
+no sooner escaped my lips than I felt a shock of alarm lest such an
+anticipation of words--very far from being words of course, easy to
+divine--should have betrayed me as an exceptional being, a sort of quiet
+energumen, whom every one, Bertha above all, would shudder at and avoid.
+But I magnified, as usual, the impression any word or deed of mine could
+produce on others; for no one gave any sign of having noticed my
+interruption as more than a rudeness, to be forgiven me on the score of
+my feeble nervous condition.
+
+While this superadded consciousness of the actual was almost constant
+with me, I had never had a recurrence of that distinct prevision which I
+have described in relation to my first interview with Bertha; and I was
+waiting with eager curiosity to know whether or not my vision of Prague
+would prove to have been an instance of the same kind.  A few days after
+the incident of the opal ring, we were paying one of our frequent visits
+to the Lichtenberg Palace.  I could never look at many pictures in
+succession; for pictures, when they are at all powerful, affect me so
+strongly that one or two exhaust all my capability of contemplation.  This
+morning I had been looking at Giorgione's picture of the cruel-eyed
+woman, said to be a likeness of Lucrezia Borgia.  I had stood long alone
+before it, fascinated by the terrible reality of that cunning, relentless
+face, till I felt a strange poisoned sensation, as if I had long been
+inhaling a fatal odour, and was just beginning to be conscious of its
+effects.  Perhaps even then I should not have moved away, if the rest of
+the party had not returned to this room, and announced that they were
+going to the Belvedere Gallery to settle a bet which had arisen between
+my brother and Mr. Filmore about a portrait.  I followed them dreamily,
+and was hardly alive to what occurred till they had all gone up to the
+gallery, leaving me below; for I refused to come within sight of another
+picture that day.  I made my way to the Grand Terrace, since it was
+agreed that we should saunter in the gardens when the dispute had been
+decided.  I had been sitting here a short space, vaguely conscious of
+trim gardens, with a city and green hills in the distance, when, wishing
+to avoid the proximity of the sentinel, I rose and walked down the broad
+stone steps, intending to seat myself farther on in the gardens.  Just as
+I reached the gravel-walk, I felt an arm slipped within mine, and a light
+hand gently pressing my wrist.  In the same instant a strange
+intoxicating numbness passed over me, like the continuance or climax of
+the sensation I was still feeling from the gaze of Lucrezia Borgia.  The
+gardens, the summer sky, the consciousness of Bertha's arm being within
+mine, all vanished, and I seemed to be suddenly in darkness, out of 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;
+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 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
+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 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 midday 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.
+
+
+
+
+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?  I
+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 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 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."
+
+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 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
+patience which was born of my pity for him, won upon his affection, and
+he began to please himself with the endeavour to make me fill any
+brother's place as fully as my feebler personality would admit.  I saw
+that the prospect which by and by presented itself of my becoming
+Bertha's husband was welcome to him, and he even contemplated in my case
+what he had not intended in my brother's--that his son and daughter-in-
+law should make one household with him.  My softened feelings towards my
+father made this the happiest time I had known since childhood;--these
+last months in which I retained the delicious illusion of loving Bertha,
+of longing and doubting and hoping that she might love me.  She behaved
+with a certain new consciousness and distance towards me after my
+brother's death; and I too was under a double constraint--that of
+delicacy towards my brother's memory and of anxiety as to the impression
+my abrupt words had left on her mind.  But the additional screen this
+mutual reserve erected between us only brought me more completely under
+her power: no matter how empty the adytum, so that the veil be thick
+enough.  So absolute is our soul's need of something hidden and uncertain
+for the maintenance of that doubt and hope and effort which are the
+breath of its life, that if the whole future were laid bare to us beyond
+to-day, the interest of all mankind would be bent on the hours that lie
+between; we should pant after the uncertainties of our one morning and
+our one afternoon; we should rush fiercely to the Exchange for our last
+possibility of speculation, of success, of disappointment: we should have
+a glut of political prophets foretelling a crisis or a no-crisis within
+the only twenty-four hours left open to prophecy.  Conceive the condition
+of the human mind if all propositions whatsoever were self-evident except
+one, which was to become self-evident at the close of a summer's day, but
+in the meantime might be the subject of question, of hypothesis, of
+debate.  Art and philosophy, literature and science, would fasten like
+bees on that one proposition which had the honey of probability in it,
+and be the more eager because their enjoyment would end with sunset.  Our
+impulses, our spiritual activities, no more adjust themselves to the idea
+of their future nullity, than the beating of our heart, or the
+irritability of our muscles.
+
+Bertha, the slim, fair-haired girl, whose present thoughts and emotions
+were an enigma to me amidst the fatiguing obviousness of the other minds
+around me, was as absorbing to me as a single unknown to-day--as a single
+hypothetic proposition to remain problematic till sunset; and all the
+cramped, hemmed-in belief and disbelief, trust and distrust, of my
+nature, welled out in this one narrow channel.
+
+And she made me believe that she loved me.  Without ever quitting her
+tone of _badinage_ and playful superiority, she intoxicated me with the
+sense that I was necessary to her, that she was never at ease, unless I
+was near her, submitting to her playful tyranny.  It costs a woman so
+little effort to beset us in this way!  A half-repressed word, a moment's
+unexpected silence, even an easy fit of petulance on our account, will
+serve us as _hashish_ for a long while.  Out of the subtlest web of
+scarcely perceptible signs, she set me weaving the fancy that she had
+always unconsciously loved me better than Alfred, but that, with the
+ignorant fluttered sensibility of a young girl, she had been imposed on
+by the charm that lay for her in the distinction of being admired and
+chosen by a man who made so brilliant a figure in the world as my
+brother.  She satirized herself in a very graceful way for her vanity and
+ambition.  What was it to me that I had the light of my wretched
+provision on the fact that now it was I who possessed at least all but
+the personal part of my brother's advantages?  Our sweet illusions are
+half of them conscious illusions, like effects of colour that we know to
+be made up of tinsel, broken glass, and rags.
+
+We were married eighteen months after Alfred's death, one cold, clear
+morning in April, when there came hail and sunshine both together; and
+Bertha, in her white silk and pale-green leaves, and the pale hues of her
+hair and face, looked like the spirit of the morning.  My father was
+happier than he had thought of being again: my marriage, he felt sure,
+would complete the desirable modification of my character, and make me
+practical and worldly enough to take my place in society among sane men.
+For he delighted in Bertha's tact and acuteness, and felt sure she would
+be mistress of me, and make me what she chose: I was only twenty-one, and
+madly in love with her.  Poor father!  He kept that hope a little while
+after our first year of marriage, and it was not quite extinct when
+paralysis came and saved him from utter disappointment.
+
+I shall hurry through the rest of my story, not dwelling so much as I
+have hitherto done on my inward experience.  When people are well known
+to each other, they talk rather of what befalls them externally, leaving
+their feelings and sentiments to be inferred.
+
+We lived in a round of visits for some time after our return home, giving
+splendid dinner-parties, and making a sensation in our neighbourhood by
+the new lustre of our equipage, for my father had reserved this display
+of his increased wealth for the period of his son's marriage; and we gave
+our acquaintances liberal opportunity for remarking that it was a pity I
+made so poor a figure as an heir and a bridegroom.  The nervous fatigue
+of this existence, the insincerities and platitudes which I had to live
+through twice over--through my inner and outward sense--would have been
+maddening to me, if I had not had that sort of intoxicated callousness
+which came from the delights of a first passion.  A bride and bridegroom,
+surrounded by all the appliances of wealth, hurried through the day by
+the whirl of society, filling their solitary moments with
+hastily-snatched caresses, are prepared for their future life together as
+the novice is prepared for the cloister--by experiencing its utmost
+contrast.
+
+Through all these crowded excited months, Bertha's inward self remained
+shrouded from me, and I still read her thoughts only through the language
+of her lips and demeanour: I had still the human interest of wondering
+whether what I did and said pleased her, of longing to hear a word of
+affection, of giving a delicious exaggeration of meaning to her smile.
+But I was conscious of a growing difference in her manner towards me;
+sometimes strong enough to be called haughty coldness, cutting and
+chilling me as the hail had done that came across the sunshine on our
+marriage morning; sometimes only perceptible in the dexterous avoidance
+of a _tete-a-tete_ walk or dinner to which I had been looking forward.  I
+had been deeply pained by this--had even felt a sort of crushing of the
+heart, from the sense that my brief day of happiness was near its
+setting; but still I remained dependent on Bertha, eager for the last
+rays of a bliss that would soon be gone for ever, hoping and watching for
+some after-glow more beautiful from the impending night.
+
+I remember--how should I not remember?--the time when that dependence and
+hope utterly left me, when the sadness I had felt in Bertha's growing
+estrangement became a joy that I looked back upon with longing as a man
+might look back on the last pains in a paralysed limb.  It was just after
+the close of my father's last illness, which had necessarily withdrawn us
+from society and thrown us more on each other.  It was the evening of
+father's death.  On that evening the veil which had shrouded Bertha's
+soul from me--had made me find in her alone among my fellow-beings the
+blessed possibility of mystery, and doubt, and expectation--was first
+withdrawn.  Perhaps it was the first day since the beginning of my
+passion for her, in which that passion was completely neutralized by the
+presence of an absorbing feeling of another kind.  I had been watching by
+my father's deathbed: I had been witnessing the last fitful yearning
+glance his soul had cast back on the spent inheritance of life--the last
+faint consciousness of love he had gathered from the pressure of my hand.
+What are all our personal loves when we have been sharing in that supreme
+agony?  In the first moments when we come away from the presence of
+death, every other relation to the living is merged, to our feeling, in
+the great relation of a common nature and a common destiny.
+
+In that state of mind I joined Bertha in her private sitting-room.  She
+was seated in a leaning posture on a settee, with her back towards the
+door; the great rich coils of her pale blond hair surmounting her small
+neck, visible above the back of the settee.  I remember, as I closed the
+door behind me, a cold tremulousness seizing me, and a vague sense of
+being hated and lonely--vague and strong, like a presentiment.  I know
+how I looked at that moment, for I saw myself in Bertha's thought as she
+lifted her cutting grey eyes, and looked at me: a miserable ghost-seer,
+surrounded by phantoms in the noonday, trembling under a breeze when the
+leaves were still, without appetite for the common objects of human
+desires, but pining after the moon-beams.  We were front to front with
+each other, and judged each other.  The terrible moment of complete
+illumination had come to me, and I saw that the darkness had hidden no
+landscape from me, but only a blank prosaic wall: from that evening
+forth, through the sickening years which followed, I saw all round the
+narrow room of this woman's soul--saw petty artifice and mere negation
+where I had delighted to believe in coy sensibilities and in wit at war
+with latent feeling--saw the light floating vanities of the girl defining
+themselves into the systematic coquetry, the scheming selfishness, of the
+woman--saw repulsion and antipathy harden into cruel hatred, giving pain
+only for the sake of wreaking itself.
+
+For Bertha too, after her kind, felt the bitterness of disillusion.  She
+had believed that my wild poet's passion for her would make me her slave;
+and that, being her slave, I should execute her will in all things.  With
+the essential shallowness of a negative, unimaginative nature, she was
+unable to conceive the fact that sensibilities were anything else than
+weaknesses.  She had thought my weaknesses would put me in her power, and
+she found them unmanageable forces.  Our positions were reversed.  Before
+marriage she had completely mastered my imagination, for she was a secret
+to me; and I created the unknown thought before which I trembled as if it
+were hers.  But now that her soul was laid open to me, now that I was
+compelled to share the privacy of her motives, to follow all the petty
+devices that preceded her words and acts, she found herself powerless
+with me, except to produce in me the chill shudder of repulsion--
+powerless, because I could be acted on by no lever within her
+reach.  I was dead to worldly ambitions, to social vanities, to all the
+incentives within the compass of her narrow imagination, and I lived
+under influences utterly invisible to her.
+
+She was really pitiable to have such a husband, and so all the world
+thought.  A graceful, brilliant woman, like Bertha, who smiled on morning
+callers, made a figure in ball-rooms, and was capable of that light
+repartee which, from such a woman, is accepted as wit, was secure of
+carrying off all sympathy from a husband who was sickly, abstracted, and,
+as some suspected, crack-brained.  Even the servants in our house gave
+her the balance of their regard and pity.  For there were no audible
+quarrels between us; our alienation, our repulsion from each other, lay
+within the silence of our own hearts; and if the mistress went out a
+great deal, and seemed to dislike the master's society, was it not
+natural, poor thing?  The master was odd.  I was kind and just to my
+dependants, but I excited in them a shrinking, half-contemptuous pity;
+for this class of men and women are but slightly determined in their
+estimate of others by general considerations, or even experience, of
+character.  They judge of persons as they judge of coins, and value those
+who pass current at a high rate.
+
+After a time I interfered so little with Bertha's habits that it might
+seem wonderful how her hatred towards me could grow so intense and active
+as it did.  But she had begun to suspect, by some involuntary betrayal of
+mine, that there was an abnormal power of penetration in me--that
+fitfully, at least, I was strangely cognizant of her thoughts and
+intentions, and she began to be haunted by a terror of me, which
+alternated every now and then with defiance.  She meditated continually
+how the incubus could be shaken off her life--how she could be freed from
+this hateful bond to a being whom she at once despised as an imbecile,
+and dreaded as an inquisitor.  For a long while she lived in the hope
+that my evident wretchedness would drive me to the commission of suicide;
+but suicide was not in my nature.  I was too completely swayed by the
+sense that I was in the grasp of unknown forces, to believe in my power
+of self-release.  Towards my own destiny I had become entirely passive;
+for my one ardent desire had spent itself, and impulse no longer
+predominated over knowledge.  For this reason I never thought of taking
+any steps towards a complete separation, which would have made our
+alienation evident to the world.  Why should I rush for help to a new
+course, when I was only suffering from the consequences of a deed which
+had been the act of my intensest will?  That would have been the logic of
+one who had desires to gratify, and I had no desires.  But Bertha and I
+lived more and more aloof from each other.  The rich find it easy to live
+married and apart.
+
+That course of our life which I have indicated in a few sentences filled
+the space of years.  So much misery--so slow and hideous a growth of
+hatred and sin, may be compressed into a sentence!  And men judge of each
+other's lives through this summary medium.  They epitomize the experience
+of their fellow-mortal, and pronounce judgment on him in neat syntax, and
+feel themselves wise and virtuous--conquerors over the temptations they
+define in well-selected predicates.  Seven years of wretchedness glide
+glibly over the lips of the man who has never counted them out in moments
+of chill disappointment, of head and heart throbbings, of dread and vain
+wrestling, of remorse and despair.  We learn _words_ by rote, but not
+their meaning; _that_ must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed
+in the subtle fibres of our nerves.
+
+But I will hasten to finish my story.  Brevity is justified at once to
+those who readily understand, and to those who will never understand.
+
+Some years after my father's death, I was sitting by the dim firelight in
+my library one January evening--sitting in the leather chair that used to
+be my father's--when Bertha appeared at the door, with a candle in her
+hand, and advanced towards me.  I knew the ball-dress she had on--the
+white ball-dress, with the green jewels, shone upon by the light of the
+wax candle which lit up the medallion of the dying Cleopatra on the
+mantelpiece.  Why did she come to me before going out?  I had not seen
+her in the library, which was my habitual place for months.  Why did she
+stand before me with the candle in her hand, with her cruel contemptuous
+eyes fixed on me, and the glittering serpent, like a familiar demon, on
+her breast?  For a moment I thought this fulfilment of my vision at
+Vienna marked some dreadful crisis in my fate, but I saw nothing in
+Bertha's mind, as she stood before me, except scorn for the look of
+overwhelming misery with which I sat before her . . . "Fool, idiot, why
+don't you kill yourself, then?"--that was her thought.  But at length her
+thoughts reverted to her errand, and she spoke aloud.  The apparently
+indifferent nature of the errand seemed to make a ridiculous anticlimax
+to my prevision and my agitation.
+
+"I have had to hire a new maid.  Fletcher is going to be married, and she
+wants me to ask you to let her husband have the public-house and farm at
+Molton.  I wish him to have it.  You must give the promise now, because
+Fletcher is going to-morrow morning--and quickly, because I'm in a
+hurry."
+
+"Very well; you may promise her," I said, indifferently, and Bertha swept
+out of the library again.
+
+I always shrank from the sight of a new person, and all the more when it
+was a person whose mental life was likely to weary my reluctant insight
+with worldly ignorant trivialities.  But I shrank especially from the
+sight of this new maid, because her advent had been announced to me at a
+moment to which I could not cease to attach some fatality: I had a vague
+dread that I should find her mixed up with the dreary drama of my
+life--that some new sickening vision would reveal her to me as an evil
+genius.  When at last I did unavoidably meet her, the vague dread was
+changed into definite disgust.  She was a tall, wiry, dark-eyed woman,
+this Mrs. Archer, with a face handsome enough to give her coarse hard
+nature the odious finish of bold, self-confident coquetry.  That was
+enough to make me avoid her, quite apart from the contemptuous feeling
+with which she contemplated me.  I seldom saw her; but I perceived that
+she rapidly became a favourite with her mistress, and, after the lapse of
+eight or nine months, I began to be aware that there had arisen in
+Bertha's mind towards this woman a mingled feeling of fear and
+dependence, and that this feeling was associated with ill-defined images
+of candle-light scenes in her dressing-room, and the locking-up of
+something in Bertha's cabinet.  My interviews with my wife had become so
+brief and so rarely solitary, that I had no opportunity of perceiving
+these images in her mind with more definiteness.  The recollections of
+the past become contracted in the rapidity of thought till they sometimes
+bear hardly a more distinct resemblance to the external reality than the
+forms of an oriental alphabet to the objects that suggested them.
+
+Besides, for the last year or more a modification had been going forward
+in my mental condition, and was growing more and more marked.  My insight
+into the minds of those around me was becoming dimmer and more fitful,
+and the ideas that crowded my double consciousness became less and less
+dependent on any personal contact.  All that was personal in me seemed to
+be suffering a gradual death, so that I was losing the organ through
+which the personal agitations and projects of others could affect me.  But
+along with this relief from wearisome insight, there was a new
+development of what I concluded--as I have since found rightly--to be a
+provision of external scenes.  It was as if the relation between me and
+my fellow-men was more and more deadened, and my relation to what we call
+the inanimate was quickened into new life.  The more I lived apart from
+society, and in proportion as my wretchedness subsided from the violent
+throb of agonized passion into the dulness of habitual pain, the more
+frequent and vivid became such visions as that I had had of Prague--of
+strange cities, of sandy plains, of gigantic ruins, of midnight skies
+with strange bright constellations, of mountain-passes, of grassy nooks
+flecked with the afternoon sunshine through the boughs: I was in the
+midst of such scenes, and in all of them one presence seemed to weigh on
+me in all these mighty shapes--the presence of something unknown and
+pitiless.  For continual suffering had annihilated religious faith within
+me: to the utterly miserable--the unloving and the unloved--there is no
+religion possible, no worship but a worship of devils.  And beyond all
+these, and continually recurring, was the vision of my death--the pangs,
+the suffocation, the last struggle, when life would be grasped at in
+vain.
+
+Things were in this state near the end of the seventh year.  I had become
+entirely free from insight, from my abnormal cognizance of any other
+consciousness than my own, and instead of intruding involuntarily into
+the world of other minds, was living continually in my own solitary
+future.  Bertha was aware that I was greatly changed.  To my surprise she
+had of late seemed to seek opportunities of remaining in my society, and
+had cultivated that kind of distant yet familiar talk which is customary
+between a husband and wife who live in polite and irrevocable alienation.
+I bore this with languid submission, and without feeling enough interest
+in her motives to be roused into keen observation; yet I could not help
+perceiving something triumphant and excited in her carriage and the
+expression of her face--something too subtle to express itself in words
+or tones, but giving one the idea that she lived in a state of
+expectation or hopeful suspense.  My chief feeling was satisfaction that
+her inner self was once more shut out from me; and I almost revelled for
+the moment in the absent melancholy that made me answer her at cross
+purposes, and betray utter ignorance of what she had been saying.  I
+remember well the look and the smile with which she one day said, after a
+mistake of this kind on my part: "I used to think you were a clairvoyant,
+and that was the reason why you were so bitter against other
+clairvoyants, wanting to keep your monopoly; but I see now you have
+become rather duller than the rest of the world."
+
+I said nothing in reply.  It occurred to me that her recent obtrusion of
+herself upon me might have been prompted by the wish to test my power of
+detecting some of her secrets; but I let the thought drop again at once:
+her motives and her deeds had no interest for me, and whatever pleasures
+she might be seeking, I had no wish to baulk her.  There was still pity
+in my soul for every living thing, and Bertha was living--was surrounded
+with possibilities of misery.
+
+Just at this time there occurred an event which roused me somewhat from
+my inertia, and gave me an interest in the passing moment that I had
+thought impossible for me.  It was a visit from Charles Meunier, who had
+written me word that he was coming to England for relaxation from too
+strenuous labour, and would like too see me.  Meunier had now a European
+reputation; but his letter to me expressed that keen remembrance of an
+early regard, an early debt of sympathy, which is inseparable from
+nobility of character: and I too felt as if his presence would be to me
+like a transient resurrection into a happier pre-existence.
+
+He came, and as far as possible, I renewed our old pleasure of making
+_tete-a-tete_ excursions, though, instead of mountains and glacers and
+the wide blue lake, we had to content ourselves with mere slopes and
+ponds and artificial plantations.  The years had changed us both, but
+with what different result!  Meunier was now a brilliant figure in
+society, to whom elegant women pretended to listen, and whose
+acquaintance was boasted of by noblemen ambitious of brains.  He
+repressed with the utmost delicacy all betrayal of the shock which I am
+sure he must have received from our meeting, or of a desire to penetrate
+into my condition and circumstances, and sought by the utmost exertion of
+his charming social powers to make our reunion agreeable.  Bertha was
+much struck by the unexpected fascinations of a visitor whom she had
+expected to find presentable only on the score of his celebrity, and put
+forth all her coquetries and accomplishments.  Apparently she succeeded
+in attracting his admiration, for his manner towards her was attentive
+and flattering.  The effect of his presence on me was so benignant,
+especially in those renewals of our old _tete-a-tete_ wanderings, when he
+poured forth to me wonderful narratives of his professional experience,
+that more than once, when his talk turned on the psychological relations
+of disease, the thought crossed my mind that, if his stay with me were
+long enough, I might possibly bring myself to tell this man the secrets
+of my lot.  Might there not lie some remedy for me, too, in his science?
+Might there not at least lie some comprehension and sympathy ready for me
+in his large and susceptible mind?  But the thought only flickered feebly
+now and then, and died out before it could become a wish.  The horror I
+had of again breaking in on the privacy of another soul, made me, by an
+irrational instinct, draw the shroud of concealment more closely around
+my own, as we automatically perform the gesture we feel to be wanting in
+another.
+
+When Meunier's visit was approaching its conclusion, there happened an
+event which caused some excitement in our household, owing to the
+surprisingly strong effect it appeared to produce on Bertha--on Bertha,
+the self-possessed, who usually seemed inaccessible to feminine
+agitations, and did even her hate in a self-restrained hygienic manner.
+This event was the sudden severe illness of her maid, Mrs. Archer.  I
+have reserved to this moment the mention of a circumstance which had
+forced itself on my notice shortly before Meunier's arrival, namely, that
+there had been some quarrel between Bertha and this maid, apparently
+during a visit to a distant family, in which she had accompanied her
+mistress.  I had overheard Archer speaking in a tone of bitter insolence,
+which I should have thought an adequate reason for immediate dismissal.
+No dismissal followed; on the contrary, Bertha seemed to be silently
+putting up with personal inconveniences from the exhibitions of this
+woman's temper.  I was the more astonished to observe that her illness
+seemed a cause of strong solicitude to Bertha; that she was at the
+bedside night and day, and would allow no one else to officiate as head-
+nurse.  It happened that our family doctor was out on a holiday, an
+accident which made Meunier's presence in the house doubly welcome, and
+he apparently entered into the case with an interest which seemed so much
+stronger than the ordinary professional feeling, that one day when he had
+fallen into a long fit of silence after visiting her, I said to him--
+
+"Is this a very peculiar case of disease, Meunier?"
+
+"No," he answered, "it is an attack of peritonitis, which will be fatal,
+but which does not differ physically from many other cases that have come
+under my observation.  But I'll tell you what I have on my mind.  I want
+to make an experiment on this woman, if you will give me permission.  It
+can do her no harm--will give her no pain--for I shall not make it until
+life is extinct to all purposes of sensation.  I want to try the effect
+of transfusing blood into her arteries after the heart has ceased to beat
+for some minutes.  I have tried the experiment again and again with
+animals that have died of this disease, with astounding results, and I
+want to try it on a human subject.  I have the small tubes necessary, in
+a case I have with me, and the rest of the apparatus could be prepared
+readily.  I should use my own blood--take it from my own arm.  This woman
+won't live through the night, I'm convinced, and I want you to promise me
+your assistance in making the experiment.  I can't do without another
+hand, but it would perhaps not be well to call in a medical assistant
+from among your provincial doctors.  A disagreeable foolish version of
+the thing might get abroad."
+
+"Have you spoken to my wife on the subject?" I said, "because she appears
+to be peculiarly sensitive about this woman: she has been a favourite
+maid."
+
+"To tell you the truth," said Meunier, "I don't want her to know about
+it.  There are always insuperable difficulties with women in these
+matters, and the effect on the supposed dead body may be startling.  You
+and I will sit up together, and be in readiness.  When certain symptoms
+appear I shall take you in, and at the right moment we must manage to get
+every one else out of the room."
+
+I need not give our farther conversation on the subject.  He entered very
+fully into the details, and overcame my repulsion from them, by exciting
+in me a mingled awe and curiosity concerning the possible results of his
+experiment.
+
+We prepared everything, and he instructed me in my part as assistant.  He
+had not told Bertha of his absolute conviction that Archer would not
+survive through the night, and endeavoured to persuade her to leave the
+patient and take a night's rest.  But she was obstinate, suspecting the
+fact that death was at hand, and supposing that he wished merely to save
+her nerves.  She refused to leave the sick-room.  Meunier and I sat up
+together in the library, he making frequent visits to the sick-room, and
+returning with the information that the case was taking precisely the
+course he expected.  Once he said to me, "Can you imagine any cause of
+ill-feeling this woman has against her mistress, who is so devoted to
+her?"
+
+"I think there was some misunderstanding between them before her illness.
+Why do you ask?"
+
+"Because I have observed for the last five or six hours--since, I fancy,
+she has lost all hope of recovery--there seems a strange prompting in her
+to say something which pain and failing strength forbid her to utter; and
+there is a look of hideous meaning in her eyes, which she turns
+continually towards her mistress.  In this disease the mind often remains
+singularly clear to the last."
+
+"I am not surprised at an indication of malevolent feeling in her," I
+said.  "She is a woman who has always inspired me with distrust and
+dislike, but she managed to insinuate herself into her mistress's
+favour."  He was silent after this, looking at the fire with an air of
+absorption, till he went upstairs again.  He stayed away longer than
+usual, and on returning, said to me quietly, "Come now."
+
+I followed him to the chamber where death was hovering.  The dark
+hangings of the large bed made a background that gave a strong relief to
+Bertha's pale face as I entered.  She started forward as she saw me
+enter, and then looked at Meunier with an expression of angry inquiry;
+but he lifted up his hand as it to impose silence, while he fixed his
+glance on the dying woman and felt her pulse.  The face was pinched and
+ghastly, a cold perspiration was on the forehead, and the eyelids were
+lowered so as to conceal the large dark eyes.  After a minute or two,
+Meunier walked round to the other side of the bed where Bertha stood, and
+with his usual air of gentle politeness towards her begged her to leave
+the patient under our care--everything should be done for her--she was no
+longer in a state to be conscious of an affectionate presence.  Bertha
+was hesitating, apparently almost willing to believe his assurance and to
+comply.  She looked round at the ghastly dying face, as if to read the
+confirmation of that assurance, when for a moment the lowered eyelids
+were raised again, and it seemed as if the eyes were looking towards
+Bertha, but blankly.  A shudder passed through Bertha's frame, and she
+returned to her station near the pillow, tacitly implying that she would
+not leave the room.
+
+The eyelids were lifted no more.  Once I looked at Bertha as she watched
+the face of the dying one.  She wore a rich _peignoir_, and her blond
+hair was half covered by a lace cap: in her attire she was, as always, an
+elegant woman, fit to figure in a picture of modern aristocratic life:
+but I asked myself how that face of hers could ever have seemed to me the
+face of a woman born of woman, with memories of childhood, capable of
+pain, needing to be fondled?  The features at that moment seemed so
+preternaturally sharp, the eyes were so hard and eager--she looked like a
+cruel immortal, finding her spiritual feast in the agonies of a dying
+race.  For across those hard features there came something like a flash
+when the last hour had been breathed out, and we all felt that the dark
+veil had completely fallen.  What secret was there between Bertha and
+this woman?  I turned my eyes from her with a horrible dread lest my
+insight should return, and I should be obliged to see what had been
+breeding about two unloving women's hearts.  I felt that Bertha had been
+watching for the moment of death as the sealing of her secret: I thanked
+Heaven it could remain sealed for me.
+
+Meunier said quietly, "She is gone."  He then gave his arm to Bertha, and
+she submitted to be led out of the room.
+
+I suppose it was at her order that two female attendants came into the
+room, and dismissed the younger one who had been present before.  When
+they entered, Meunier had already opened the artery in the long thin neck
+that lay rigid on the pillow, and I dismissed them, ordering them to
+remain at a distance till we rang: the doctor, I said, had an operation
+to perform--he was not sure about the death.  For the next twenty minutes
+I forgot everything but Meunier and the experiment in which he was so
+absorbed, that I think his senses would have been closed against all
+sounds or sights which had no relation to it.  It was my task at first to
+keep up the artificial respiration in the body after the transfusion had
+been effected, but presently Meunier relieved me, and I could see the
+wondrous slow return of life; the breast began to heave, the inspirations
+became stronger, the eyelids quivered, and the soul seemed to have
+returned beneath them.  The artificial respiration was withdrawn: still
+the breathing continued, and there was a movement of the lips.
+
+Just then I heard the handle of the door moving: I suppose Bertha had
+heard from the women that they had been dismissed: probably a vague fear
+had arisen in her mind, for she entered with a look of alarm.  She came
+to the foot of the bed and gave a stifled cry.
+
+The dead woman's eyes were wide open, and met hers in full recognition--
+the recognition of hate.  With a sudden strong effort, the hand that
+Bertha had thought for ever still was pointed towards her, and the
+haggard face moved.  The gasping eager voice said--
+
+"You mean to poison your husband . . . the poison is in the black cabinet
+. . . I got it for you . . . you laughed at me, and told lies about me
+behind my back, to make me disgusting . . . because you were jealous . . .
+are you sorry . . . now?"
+
+The lips continued to murmur, but the sounds were no longer distinct.
+Soon there was no sound--only a slight movement: the flame had leaped
+out, and was being extinguished the faster.  The wretched woman's heart-
+strings had been set to hatred and vengeance; the spirit of life had
+swept the chords for an instant, and was gone again for ever.  Great God!
+Is this what it is to live again . . . to wake up with our unstilled
+thirst upon us, with our unuttered curses rising to our lips, with our
+muscles ready to act out their half-committed sins?
+
+Bertha stood pale at the foot of the bed, quivering and helpless,
+despairing of devices, like a cunning animal whose hiding-places are
+surrounded by swift-advancing flame.  Even Meunier looked paralysed; life
+for that moment ceased to be a scientific problem to him.  As for me,
+this scene seemed of one texture with the rest of my existence: horror
+was my familiar, and this new revelation was only like an old pain
+recurring with new circumstances.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Since then Bertha and I have lived apart--she in her own neighbourhood,
+the mistress of half our wealth, I as a wanderer in foreign countries,
+until I came to this Devonshire nest to die.  Bertha lives pitied and
+admired; for what had I against that charming woman, whom every one but
+myself could have been happy with?  There had been no witness of the
+scene in the dying room except Meunier, and while Meunier lived his lips
+were sealed by a promise to me.
+
+Once or twice, weary of wandering, I rested in a favourite spot, and my
+heart went out towards the men and women and children whose faces were
+becoming familiar to me; but I was driven away again in terror at the
+approach of my old insight--driven away to live continually with the one
+Unknown Presence revealed and yet hidden by the moving curtain of the
+earth and sky.  Till at last disease took hold of me and forced me to
+rest here--forced me to live in dependence on my servants.  And then the
+curse of insight--of my double consciousness, came again, and has never
+left me.  I know all their narrow thoughts, their feeble regard, their
+half-wearied pity.
+
+* * * * *
+
+It is the 20th of September, 1850.  I know these figures I have just
+written, as if they were a long familiar inscription.  I have seen them
+on this pace in my desk unnumbered times, when the scene of my dying
+struggle has opened upon me . . .
+
+(1859)
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Lifted Veil, by George Eliot
+#4 in our series by George Eliot [Mary Anne Evans]
+
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+The Lifted Veil
+
+by George Eliot [Mary Anne Evans]
+
+April, 2000 [Etext #2165]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Lifted Veil, by George Eliot
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+
+
+THE LIFTED VEIL
+
+by George Eliot [Mary Anne Evans]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+
+The time of my end approaches.  I have lately been subject to
+attacks of angina pectoris; and in the ordinary course of things,
+my physician tells me, I may fairly hope that my life will not be
+protracted many months.  Unless, then, I am cursed with an
+exceptional physical constitution, as I am cursed with an
+exceptional mental character, I shall not much longer groan under
+the wearisome burthen of this earthly existence.  If it were to be
+otherwise--if I were to live on to the age most men desire and
+provide for--I should for once have known whether the miseries of
+delusive expectation can outweigh the miseries of true provision.
+For I foresee when I shall die, and everything that will happen in
+my last moments.
+
+Just a month from this day, on September 20, 1850, I shall be
+sitting in this chair, in this study, at ten o'clock at night,
+longing to die, weary of incessant insight and foresight, without
+delusions and without hope.  Just as I am watching a tongue of blue
+flame rising in the fire, and my lamp is burning low, the horrible
+contraction will begin at my chest.  I shall only have time to
+reach the bell, and pull it violently, before the sense of
+suffocation will come.  No one will answer my bell.  I know why.
+My two servants are lovers, and will have quarrelled.  My
+housekeeper will have rushed out of the house in a fury, two hours
+before, hoping that Perry will believe she has gone to drown
+herself.  Perry is alarmed at last, and is gone out after her.  The
+little scullery-maid is asleep on a bench:  she never answers the
+bell; it does not wake her.  The sense of suffocation increases:
+my lamp goes out with a horrible stench:  I make a great effort,
+and snatch at the bell again.  I long for life, and there is no
+help.  I thirsted for the unknown:  the thirst is gone.  O God, let
+me stay with the known, and be weary of it:  I am content.  Agony
+of pain and suffocation--and all the while the earth, the fields,
+the pebbly brook at the bottom of the rookery, the fresh scent
+after the rain, the light of the morning through my chamber-window,
+the warmth of the hearth after the frosty air--will darkness close
+over them for ever?
+
+Darkness--darkness--no pain--nothing but darkness:  but I am
+passing on and on through the darkness:  my thought stays in the
+darkness, but always with a sense of moving onward . . .
+
+Before that time comes, I wish to use my last hours of ease and
+strength in telling the strange story of my experience.  I have
+never fully unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been
+encouraged to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men.  But we
+have all a chance of meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some
+charity, when we are dead:  it is the living only who cannot be
+forgiven--the living only from whom men's indulgence and reverence
+are held off, like the rain by the hard east wind.  While the heart
+beats, bruise it--it is your only opportunity; while the eye can
+still turn towards you with moist, timid entreaty, freeze it with
+an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that delicate messenger to
+the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the tones of
+kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, or
+envious affectation of indifference; while the creative brain can
+still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for
+brotherly recognition--make haste--oppress it with your ill-
+considered judgements, your trivial comparisons, your careless
+misrepresentations.  The heart will by and by be still--"ubi saeva
+indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit"; the eye will cease to
+entreat; the ear will be deaf; the brain will have ceased from all
+wants as well as from all work.  Then your charitable speeches may
+find vent; then you may remember and pity the toil and the struggle
+and the failure; then you may give due honour to the work achieved;
+then you may find extenuation for errors, and may consent to bury
+them.
+
+That is a trivial schoolboy text; why do I dwell on it?  It has
+little reference to me, for I shall leave no works behind me for
+men to honour.  I have no near relatives who will make up, by
+weeping over my grave, for the wounds they inflicted on me when I
+was among them.  It is only the story of my life that will perhaps
+win a little more sympathy from strangers when I am dead, than I
+ever believed it would obtain from my friends while I was living.
+
+My childhood perhaps seems happier to me than it really was, by
+contrast with all the after-years.  For then the curtain of the
+future was as impenetrable to me as to other children:  I had all
+their delight in the present hour, their sweet indefinite hopes for
+the morrow; and I had a tender mother:  even now, after the dreary
+lapse of long years, a slight trace of sensation accompanies the
+remembrance of her caress as she held me on her knee--her arms
+round my little body, her cheek pressed on mine.  I had a complaint
+of the eyes that made me blind for a little while, and she kept me
+on her knee from morning till night.  That unequalled love soon
+vanished out of my life, and even to my childish consciousness it
+was as if that life had become more chill I rode my little white
+pony with the groom by my side as before, but there were no loving
+eyes looking at me as I mounted, no glad arms opened to me when I
+came back.  Perhaps I missed my mother's love more than most
+children of seven or eight would have done, to whom the other
+pleasures of life remained as before; for I was certainly a very
+sensitive child.  I remember still the mingled trepidation and
+delicious excitement with which I was affected by the tramping of
+the horses on the pavement in the echoing stables, by the loud
+resonance of the groom's voices, by the booming bark of the dogs as
+my father's carriage thundered under the archway of the courtyard,
+by the din of the gong as it gave notice of luncheon and dinner.
+The measured tramp of soldiery which I sometimes heard--for my
+father's house lay near a county town where there were large
+barracks--made me sob and tremble; and yet when they were gone
+past, I longed for them to come back again.
+
+I fancy my father thought me an odd child, and had little fondness
+for me; though he was very careful in fulfilling what he regarded
+as a parent's duties.  But he was already past the middle of life,
+and I was not his only son.  My mother had been his second wife,
+and he was five-and-forty when he married her.  He was a firm,
+unbending, intensely orderly man, in root and stem a banker, but
+with a flourishing graft of the active landholder, aspiring to
+county influence:  one of those people who are always like
+themselves from day to day, who are uninfluenced by the weather,
+and neither know melancholy nor high spirits.  I held him in great
+awe, and appeared more timid and sensitive in his presence than at
+other times; a circumstance which, perhaps, helped to confirm him
+in the intention to educate me on a different plan from the
+prescriptive one with which he had complied in the case of my elder
+brother, already a tall youth at Eton.  My brother was to be his
+representative and successor; he must go to Eton and Oxford, for
+the sake of making connexions, of course:  my father was not a man
+to underrate the bearing of Latin satirists or Greek dramatists on
+the attainment of an aristocratic position.  But, intrinsically, he
+had slight esteem for "those dead but sceptred spirits"; having
+qualified himself for forming an independent opinion by reading
+Potter's AEschylus, and dipping into Francis's Horace.  To this
+negative view he added a positive one, derived from a recent
+connexion with mining speculations; namely, that a scientific
+education was the really useful training for a younger son.
+Moreover, it was clear that a shy, sensitive boy like me was not
+fit to encounter the rough experience of a public school.  Mr.
+Letherall had said so very decidedly.  Mr. Letherall was a large
+man in spectacles, who one day took my small head between his large
+hands, and pressed it here and there in an exploratory, auspicious
+manner--then placed each of his great thumbs on my temples, and
+pushed me a little way from him, and stared at me with glittering
+spectacles.  The contemplation appeared to displease him, for he
+frowned sternly, and said to my father, drawing his thumbs across
+my eyebrows -
+
+"The deficiency is there, sir--there; and here," he added, touching
+the upper sides of my head, "here is the excess.  That must be
+brought out, sir, and this must be laid to sleep."
+
+I was in a state of tremor, partly at the vague idea that I was the
+object of reprobation, partly in the agitation of my first hatred--
+hatred of this big, spectacled man, who pulled my head about as if
+he wanted to buy and cheapen it.
+
+I am not aware how much Mr. Letherall had to do with the system
+afterwards adopted towards me, but it was presently clear that
+private tutors, natural history, science, and the modern languages,
+were the appliances by which the defects of my organization were to
+be remedied.  I was very stupid about machines, so I was to be
+greatly occupied with them; I had no memory for classification, so
+it was particularly necessary that I should study systematic
+zoology and botany; I was hungry for human deeds and humane
+motions, so I was to be plentifully crammed with the mechanical
+powers, the elementary bodies, and the phenomena of electricity and
+magnetism.  A better-constituted boy would certainly have profited
+under my intelligent tutors, with their scientific apparatus; and
+would, doubtless, have found the phenomena of electricity and
+magnetism as fascinating as I was, every Thursday, assured they
+were.  As it was, I could have paired off, for ignorance of
+whatever was taught me, with the worst Latin scholar that was ever
+turned out of a classical academy.  I read Plutarch, and
+Shakespeare, and Don Quixote by the sly, and supplied myself in
+that way with wandering thoughts, while my tutor was assuring me
+that "an improved man, as distinguished from an ignorant one, was a
+man who knew the reason why water ran downhill."  I had no desire
+to be this improved man; I was glad of the running water; I could
+watch it and listen to it gurgling among the pebbles, and bathing
+the bright green water-plants, by the hour together.  I did not
+want to know WHY it ran; I had perfect confidence that there were
+good reasons for what was so very beautiful.
+
+There is no need to dwell on this part of my life.  I have said
+enough to indicate that my nature was of the sensitive, unpractical
+order, and that it grew up in an uncongenial medium, which could
+never foster it into happy, healthy development.  When I was
+sixteen I was sent to Geneva to complete my course of education;
+and the change was a very happy one to me, for the first sight of
+the Alps, with the setting sun on them, as we descended the Jura,
+seemed to me like an entrance into heaven; and the three years of
+my life there were spent in a perpetual sense of exaltation, as if
+from a draught of delicious wine, at the presence of Nature in all
+her awful loveliness.  You will think, perhaps, that I must have
+been a poet, from this early sensibility to Nature.  But my lot was
+not so happy as that.  A poet pours forth his song and BELIEVES in
+the listening ear and answering soul, to which his song will be
+floated sooner or later.  But the poet's sensibility without his
+voice--the poet's sensibility that finds no vent but in silent
+tears on the sunny bank, when the noonday light sparkles on the
+water, or in an inward shudder at the sound of harsh human tones,
+the sight of a cold human eye--this dumb passion brings with it a
+fatal solitude of soul in the society of one's fellow-men.  My
+least solitary moments were those in which I pushed off in my boat,
+at evening, towards the centre of the lake; it seemed to me that
+the sky, and the glowing mountain-tops, and the wide blue water,
+surrounded me with a cherishing love such as no human face had shed
+on me since my mother's love had vanished out of my life.  I used
+to do as Jean Jacques did--lie down in my boat and let it glide
+where it would, while I looked up at the departing glow leaving one
+mountain-top after the other, as if the prophet's chariot of fire
+were passing over them on its way to the home of light.  Then, when
+the white summits were all sad and corpse-like, I had to push
+homeward, for I was under careful surveillance, and was allowed no
+late wanderings.  This disposition of mine was not favourable to
+the formation of intimate friendships among the numerous youths of
+my own age who are always to be found studying at Geneva.  Yet I
+made ONE such friendship; and, singularly enough, it was with a
+youth whose intellectual tendencies were the very reverse of my
+own.  I shall call him Charles Meunier; his real surname--an
+English one, for he was of English extraction--having since become
+celebrated.  He was an orphan, who lived on a miserable pittance
+while he pursued the medical studies for which he had a special
+genius.  Strange! that with my vague mind, susceptible and
+unobservant, hating inquiry and given up to contemplation, I should
+have been drawn towards a youth whose strongest passion was
+science.  But the bond was not an intellectual one; it came from a
+source that can happily blend the stupid with the brilliant, the
+dreamy with the practical:  it came from community of feeling.
+Charles was poor and ugly, derided by Genevese gamins, and not
+acceptable in drawing-rooms.  I saw that he was isolated, as I was,
+though from a different cause, and, stimulated by a sympathetic
+resentment, I made timid advances towards him.  It is enough to say
+that there sprang up as much comradeship between us as our
+different habits would allow; and in Charles's rare holidays we
+went up the Saleve together, or took the boat to Vevay, while I
+listened dreamily to the monologues in which he unfolded his bold
+conceptions of future experiment and discovery.  I mingled them
+confusedly in my thought with glimpses of blue water and delicate
+floating cloud, with the notes of birds and the distant glitter of
+the glacier.  He knew quite well that my mind was half absent, yet
+he liked to talk to me in this way; for don't we talk of our hopes
+and our projects even to dogs and birds, when they love us?  I have
+mentioned this one friendship because of its connexion with a
+strange and terrible scene which I shall have to narrate in my
+subsequent life.
+
+This happier life at Geneva was put an end to by a severe illness,
+which is partly a blank to me, partly a time of dimly-remembered
+suffering, with the presence of my father by my bed from time to
+time.  Then came the languid monotony of convalescence, the days
+gradually breaking into variety and distinctness as my strength
+enabled me to take longer and longer drives.  On one of these more
+vividly remembered days, my father said to me, as he sat beside my
+sofa -
+
+"When you are quite well enough to travel, Latimer, I shall take
+you home with me.  The journey will amuse you and do you good, for
+I shall go through the Tyrol and Austria, and you will see many new
+places.  Our neighbours, the Filmores, are come; Alfred will join
+us at Basle, and we shall all go together to Vienna, and back by
+Prague" . . .
+
+My father was called away before he had finished his sentence, and
+he left my mind resting on the word PRAGUE, with a strange sense
+that a new and wondrous scene was breaking upon me:  a city under
+the broad sunshine, that seemed to me as if it were the summer
+sunshine of a long-past century arrested in its course--unrefreshed
+for ages by dews of night, or the rushing rain-cloud; scorching the
+dusty, weary, time-eaten grandeur of a people doomed to live on in
+the stale repetition of memories, like deposed and superannuated
+kings in their regal gold-inwoven tatters.  The city looked so
+thirsty that the broad river seemed to me a sheet of metal; and the
+blackened statues, as I passed under their blank gaze, along the
+unending bridge, with their ancient garments and their saintly
+crowns, seemed to me the real inhabitants and owners of this place,
+while the busy, trivial men and women, hurrying to and fro, were a
+swarm of ephemeral visitants infesting it for a day.  It is such
+grim, stony beings as these, I thought, who are the fathers of
+ancient faded children, in those tanned time-fretted dwellings that
+crowd the steep before me; who pay their court in the worn and
+crumbling pomp of the palace which stretches its monotonous length
+on the height; who worship wearily in the stifling air of the
+churches, urged by no fear or hope, but compelled by their doom to
+be ever old and undying, to live on in the rigidity of habit, as
+they live on in perpetual midday, without the repose of night or
+the new birth of morning.
+
+A stunning clang of metal suddenly thrilled through me, and I
+became conscious of the objects in my room again:  one of the fire-
+irons had fallen as Pierre opened the door to bring me my draught.
+My heart was palpitating violently, and I begged Pierre to leave my
+draught beside me; I would take it presently.
+
+As soon as I was alone again, I began to ask myself whether I had
+been sleeping.  Was this a dream--this wonderfully distinct vision-
+-minute in its distinctness down to a patch of rainbow light on the
+pavement, transmitted through a coloured lamp in the shape of a
+star--of a strange city, quite unfamiliar to my imagination?  I had
+seen no picture of Prague:  it lay in my mind as a mere name, with
+vaguely-remembered historical associations--ill-defined memories of
+imperial grandeur and religious wars.
+
+Nothing of this sort had ever occurred in my dreaming experience
+before, for I had often been humiliated because my dreams were only
+saved from being utterly disjointed and commonplace by the frequent
+terrors of nightmare.  But I could not believe that I had been
+asleep, for I remembered distinctly the gradual breaking-in of the
+vision upon me, like the new images in a dissolving view, or the
+growing distinctness of the landscape as the sun lifts up the veil
+of the morning mist.  And while I was conscious of this incipient
+vision, I was also conscious that Pierre came to tell my father Mr.
+Filmore was waiting for him, and that my father hurried out of the
+room.  No, it was not a dream; was it--the thought was full of
+tremulous exultation--was it the poet's nature in me, hitherto only
+a troubled yearning sensibility, now manifesting itself suddenly as
+spontaneous creation?  Surely it was in this way that Homer saw the
+plain of Troy, that Dante saw the abodes of the departed, that
+Milton saw the earthward flight of the Tempter.  Was it that my
+illness had wrought some happy change in my organization--given a
+firmer tension to my nerves--carried off some dull obstruction?  I
+had often read of such effects--in works of fiction at least.  Nay;
+in genuine biographies I had read of the subtilizing or exalting
+influence of some diseases on the mental powers.  Did not Novalis
+feel his inspiration intensified under the progress of consumption?
+
+When my mind had dwelt for some time on this blissful idea, it
+seemed to me that I might perhaps test it by an exertion of my
+will.  The vision had begun when my father was speaking of our
+going to Prague.  I did not for a moment believe it was really a
+representation of that city; I believed--I hoped it was a picture
+that my newly liberated genius had painted in fiery haste, with the
+colours snatched from lazy memory.  Suppose I were to fix my mind
+on some other place--Venice, for example, which was far more
+familiar to my imagination than Prague:  perhaps the same sort of
+result would follow.  I concentrated my thoughts on Venice; I
+stimulated my imagination with poetic memories, and strove to feel
+myself present in Venice, as I had felt myself present in Prague.
+But in vain.  I was only colouring the Canaletto engravings that
+hung in my old bedroom at home; the picture was a shifting one, my
+mind wandering uncertainly in search of more vivid images; I could
+see no accident of form or shadow without conscious labour after
+the necessary conditions.  It was all prosaic effort, not rapt
+passivity, such as I had experienced half an hour before.  I was
+discouraged; but I remembered that inspiration was fitful.
+
+For several days I was in a state of excited expectation, watching
+for a recurrence of my new gift.  I sent my thoughts ranging over
+my world of knowledge, in the hope that they would find some object
+which would send a reawakening vibration through my slumbering
+genius.  But no; my world remained as dim as ever, and that flash
+of strange light refused to come again, though I watched for it
+with palpitating eagerness.
+
+My father accompanied me every day in a drive, and a gradually
+lengthening walk as my powers of walking increased; and one evening
+he had agreed to come and fetch me at twelve the next day, that we
+might go together to select a musical box, and other purchases
+rigorously demanded of a rich Englishman visiting Geneva.  He was
+one of the most punctual of men and bankers, and I was always
+nervously anxious to be quite ready for him at the appointed time.
+But, to my surprise, at a quarter past twelve he had not appeared.
+I felt all the impatience of a convalescent who has nothing
+particular to do, and who has just taken a tonic in the prospect of
+immediate exercise that would carry off the stimulus.
+
+Unable to sit still and reserve my strength, I walked up and down
+the room, looking out on the current of the Rhone, just where it
+leaves the dark-blue lake; but thinking all the while of the
+possible causes that could detain my father.
+
+Suddenly I was conscious that my father was in the room, but not
+alone:  there were two persons with him.  Strange!  I had heard no
+footstep, I had not seen the door open; but I saw my father, and at
+his right hand our neighbour Mrs. Filmore, whom I remembered very
+well, though I had not seen her for five years.  She was a
+commonplace middle-aged woman, in silk and cashmere; but the lady
+on the left of my father was not more than twenty, a tall, slim,
+willowy figure, with luxuriant blond hair, arranged in cunning
+braids and folds that looked almost too massive for the slight
+figure and the small-featured, thin-lipped face they crowned.  But
+the face had not a girlish expression:  the features were sharp,
+the pale grey eyes at once acute, restless, and sarcastic.  They
+were fixed on me in half-smiling curiosity, and I felt a painful
+sensation as if a sharp wind were cutting me.  The pale-green
+dress, and the green leaves that seemed to form a border about her
+pale blond hair, made me think of a Water-Nixie--for my mind was
+full of German lyrics, and this pale, fatal-eyed woman, with the
+green weeds, looked like a birth from some cold sedgy stream, the
+daughter of an aged river.
+
+"Well, Latimer, you thought me long," my father said . . .
+
+But while the last word was in my ears, the whole group vanished,
+and there was nothing between me and the Chinese printed folding-
+screen that stood before the door.  I was cold and trembling; I
+could only totter forward and throw myself on the sofa.  This
+strange new power had manifested itself again . . . But WAS it a
+power?  Might it not rather be a disease--a sort of intermittent
+delirium, concentrating my energy of brain into moments of
+unhealthy activity, and leaving my saner hours all the more barren?
+I felt a dizzy sense of unreality in what my eye rested on; I
+grasped the bell convulsively, like one trying to free himself from
+nightmare, and rang it twice.  Pierre came with a look of alarm in
+his face.
+
+"Monsieur ne se trouve pas bien?" he said anxiously.
+
+"I'm tired of waiting, Pierre," I said, as distinctly and
+emphatically as I could, like a man determined to be sober in spite
+of wine; "I'm afraid something has happened to my father--he's
+usually so punctual.  Run to the Hotel des Bergues and see if he is
+there."
+
+Pierre left the room at once, with a soothing "Bien, Monsieur"; and
+I felt the better for this scene of simple, waking prose.  Seeking
+to calm myself still further, I went into my bedroom, adjoining the
+salon, and opened a case of eau-de-Cologne; took out a bottle; went
+through the process of taking out the cork very neatly, and then
+rubbed the reviving spirit over my hands and forehead, and under my
+nostrils, drawing a new delight from the scent because I had
+procured it by slow details of labour, and by no strange sudden
+madness.  Already I had begun to taste something of the horror that
+belongs to the lot of a human being whose nature is not adjusted to
+simple human conditions.
+
+Still enjoying the scent, I returned to the salon, but it was not
+unoccupied, as it had been before I left it.  In front of the
+Chinese folding-screen there was my father, with Mrs. Filmore on
+his right hand, and on his left--the slim, blond-haired girl, with
+the keen face and the keen eyes fixed on me in half-smiling
+curiosity.
+
+"Well, Latimer, you thought me long," my father said . . .
+
+I heard no more, felt no more, till I became conscious that I was
+lying with my head low on the sofa, Pierre, and my father by my
+side.  As soon as I was thoroughly revived, my father left the
+room, and presently returned, saying -
+
+"I've been to tell the ladies how you are, Latimer.  They were
+waiting in the next room.  We shall put off our shopping expedition
+to-day."
+
+Presently he said, "That young lady is Bertha Grant, Mrs. Filmore's
+orphan niece.  Filmore has adopted her, and she lives with them, so
+you will have her for a neighbour when we go home--perhaps for a
+near relation; for there is a tenderness between her and Alfred, I
+suspect, and I should be gratified by the match, since Filmore
+means to provide for her in every way as if she were his daughter.
+It had not occurred to me that you knew nothing about her living
+with the Filmores."
+
+He made no further allusion to the fact of my having fainted at the
+moment of seeing her, and I would not for the world have told him
+the reason:  I shrank from the idea of disclosing to any one what
+might be regarded as a pitiable peculiarity, most of all from
+betraying it to my father, who would have suspected my sanity ever
+after.
+
+I do not mean to dwell with particularity on the details of my
+experience.  I have described these two cases at length, because
+they had definite, clearly traceable results in my after-lot.
+
+Shortly after this last occurrence--I think the very next day--I
+began to be aware of a phase in my abnormal sensibility, to which,
+from the languid and slight nature of my intercourse with others
+since my illness, I had not been alive before.  This was the
+obtrusion on my mind of the mental process going forward in first
+one person, and then another, with whom I happened to be in
+contact:  the vagrant, frivolous ideas and emotions of some
+uninteresting acquaintance--Mrs. Filmore, for example--would force
+themselves on my consciousness like an importunate, ill-played
+musical instrument, or the loud activity of an imprisoned insect.
+But this unpleasant sensibility was fitful, and left me moments of
+rest, when the souls of my companions were once more shut out from
+me, and I felt a relief such as silence brings to wearied nerves.
+I might have believed this importunate insight to be merely a
+diseased activity of the imagination, but that my prevision of
+incalculable words and actions proved it to have a fixed relation
+to the mental process in other minds.  But this superadded
+consciousness, wearying and annoying enough when it urged on me the
+trivial experience of indifferent people, became an intense pain
+and grief when it seemed to be opening to me the souls of those who
+were in a close relation to me--when the rational talk, the
+graceful attentions, the wittily-turned phrases, and the kindly
+deeds, which used to make the web of their characters, were seen as
+if thrust asunder by a microscopic vision, that showed all the
+intermediate frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the
+struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague capricious
+memories, and indolent make-shift thoughts, from which human words
+and deeds emerge like leaflets covering a fermenting heap.
+
+At Basle we were joined by my brother Alfred, now a handsome, self-
+confident man of six-and-twenty--a thorough contrast to my fragile,
+nervous, ineffectual self.  I believe I was held to have a sort of
+half-womanish, half-ghostly beauty; for the portrait-painters, who
+are thick as weeds at Geneva, had often asked me to sit to them,
+and I had been the model of a dying minstrel in a fancy picture.
+But I thoroughly disliked my own physique and nothing but the
+belief that it was a condition of poetic genius would have
+reconciled me to it.  That brief hope was quite fled, and I saw in
+my face now nothing but the stamp of a morbid organization, framed
+for passive suffering--too feeble for the sublime resistance of
+poetic production.  Alfred, from whom I had been almost constantly
+separated, and who, in his present stage of character and
+appearance, came before me as a perfect stranger, was bent on being
+extremely friendly and brother-like to me.  He had the superficial
+kindness of a good-humoured, self-satisfied nature, that fears no
+rivalry, and has encountered no contrarieties.  I am not sure that
+my disposition was good enough for me to have been quite free from
+envy towards him, even if our desires had not clashed, and if I had
+been in the healthy human condition which admits of generous
+confidence and charitable construction.  There must always have
+been an antipathy between our natures.  As it was, he became in a
+few weeks an object of intense hatred to me; and when he entered
+the room, still more when he spoke, it was as if a sensation of
+grating metal had set my teeth on edge.  My diseased consciousness
+was more intensely and continually occupied with his thoughts and
+emotions, than with those of any other person who came in my way.
+I was perpetually exasperated with the petty promptings of his
+conceit and his love of patronage, with his self-complacent belief
+in Bertha Grant's passion for him, with his half-pitying contempt
+for me--seen not in the ordinary indications of intonation and
+phrase and slight action, which an acute and suspicious mind is on
+the watch for, but in all their naked skinless complication.
+
+For we were rivals, and our desires clashed, though he was not
+aware of it.  I have said nothing yet of the effect Bertha Grant
+produced in me on a nearer acquaintance.  That effect was chiefly
+determined by the fact that she made the only exception, among all
+the human beings about me, to my unhappy gift of insight.  About
+Bertha I was always in a state of uncertainty:  I could watch the
+expression of her face, and speculate on its meaning; I could ask
+for her opinion with the real interest of ignorance; I could listen
+for her words and watch for her smile with hope and fear:  she had
+for me the fascination of an unravelled destiny.  I say it was this
+fact that chiefly determined the strong effect she produced on me:
+for, in the abstract, no womanly character could seem to have less
+affinity for that of a shrinking, romantic, passionate youth than
+Bertha's.  She was keen, sarcastic, unimaginative, prematurely
+cynical, remaining critical and unmoved in the most impressive
+scenes, inclined to dissect all my favourite poems, and especially
+contemptous towards the German lyrics which were my pet literature
+at that time.  To this moment I am unable to define my feeling
+towards her:  it was not ordinary boyish admiration, for she was
+the very opposite, even to the colour of her hair, of the ideal
+woman who still remained to me the type of loveliness; and she was
+without that enthusiasm for the great and good, which, even at the
+moment of her strongest dominion over me, I should have declared to
+be the highest element of character.  But there is no tyranny more
+complete than that which a self-centred negative nature exercises
+over a morbidly sensitive nature perpetually craving sympathy and
+support.  The most independent people feel the effect of a man's
+silence in heightening their value for his opinion--feel an
+additional triumph in conquering the reverence of a critic
+habitually captious and satirical:  no wonder, then, that an
+enthusiastic self-distrusting youth should watch and wait before
+the closed secret of a sarcastic woman's face, as if it were the
+shrine of the doubtfully benignant deity who ruled his destiny.
+For a young enthusiast is unable to imagine the total negation in
+another mind of the emotions which are stirring his own:  they may
+be feeble, latent, inactive, he thinks, but they are there--they
+may be called forth; sometimes, in moments of happy hallucination,
+he believes they may be there in all the greater strength because
+he sees no outward sign of them.  And this effect, as I have
+intimated, was heightened to its utmost intensity in me, because
+Bertha was the only being who remained for me in the mysterious
+seclusion of soul that renders such youthful delusion possible.
+Doubtless there was another sort of fascination at work--that
+subtle physical attraction which delights in cheating our
+psychological predictions, and in compelling the men who paint
+sylphs, to fall in love with some bonne et brave femme, heavy-
+heeled and freckled.
+
+Bertha's behaviour towards me was such as to encourage all my
+illusions, to heighten my boyish passion, and make me more and more
+dependent on her smiles.  Looking back with my present wretched
+knowledge, I conclude that her vanity and love of power were
+intensely gratified by the belief that I had fainted on first
+seeing her purely from the strong impression her person had
+produced on me.  The most prosaic woman likes to believe herself
+the object of a violent, a poetic passion; and without a grain of
+romance in her, Bertha had that spirit of intrigue which gave
+piquancy to the idea that the brother of the man she meant to marry
+was dying with love and jealousy for her sake.  That she meant to
+marry my brother, was what at that time I did not believe; for
+though he was assiduous in his attentions to her, and I knew well
+enough that both he and my father had made up their minds to this
+result, there was not yet an understood engagement--there had been
+no explicit declaration; and Bertha habitually, while she flirted
+with my brother, and accepted his homage in a way that implied to
+him a thorough recognition of its intention, made me believe, by
+the subtlest looks and phrases--feminine nothings which could never
+be quoted against her--that he was really the object of her secret
+ridicule; that she thought him, as I did, a coxcomb, whom she would
+have pleasure in disappointing.  Me she openly petted in my
+brother's presence, as if I were too young and sickly ever to be
+thought of as a lover; and that was the view he took of me.  But I
+believe she must inwardly have delighted in the tremors into which
+she threw me by the coaxing way in which she patted my curls, while
+she laughed at my quotations.  Such caresses were always given in
+the presence of our friends; for when we were alone together, she
+affected a much greater distance towards me, and now and then took
+the opportunity, by words or slight actions, to stimulate my
+foolish timid hope that she really preferred me.  And why should
+she not follow her inclination?  I was not in so advantageous a
+position as my brother, but I had fortune, I was not a year younger
+than she was, and she was an heiress, who would soon be of age to
+decide for herself.
+
+The fluctuations of hope and fear, confined to this one channel,
+made each day in her presence a delicious torment.  There was one
+deliberate act of hers which especially helped to intoxicate me.
+When we were at Vienna her twentieth birthday occurred, and as she
+was very fond of ornaments, we all took the opportunity of the
+splendid jewellers' shops in that Teutonic Paris to purchase her a
+birthday present of jewellery.  Mine, naturally, was the least
+expensive; it was an opal ring--the opal was my favourite stone,
+because it seems to blush and turn pale as if it had a soul.  I
+told Bertha so when I gave it her, and said that it was an emblem
+of the poetic nature, changing with the changing light of heaven
+and of woman's eyes.  In the evening she appeared elegantly
+dressed, and wearing conspicuously all the birthday presents except
+mine.  I looked eagerly at her fingers, but saw no opal.  I had no
+opportunity of noticing this to her during the evening; but the
+next day, when I found her seated near the window alone, after
+breakfast, I said, "You scorn to wear my poor opal.  I should have
+remembered that you despised poetic natures, and should have given
+you coral, or turquoise, or some other opaque unresponsive stone."
+"Do I despise it?" she answered, taking hold of a delicate gold
+chain which she always wore round her neck and drawing out the end
+from her bosom with my ring hanging to it; "it hurts me a little, I
+can tell you," she said, with her usual dubious smile, "to wear it
+in that secret place; and since your poetical nature is so stupid
+as to prefer a more public position, I shall not endure the pain
+any longer."
+
+She took off the ring from the chain and put it on her finger,
+smiling still, while the blood rushed to my cheeks, and I could not
+trust myself to say a word of entreaty that she would keep the ring
+where it was before.
+
+I was completely fooled by this, and for two days shut myself up in
+my own room whenever Bertha was absent, that I might intoxicate
+myself afresh with the thought of this scene and all it implied.
+
+I should mention that during these two months--which seemed a long
+life to me from the novelty and intensity of the pleasures and
+pains I underwent--my diseased anticipation in other people's
+consciousness continued to torment me; now it was my father, and
+now my brother, now Mrs. Filmore or her husband, and now our German
+courier, whose stream of thought rushed upon me like a ringing in
+the ears not to be got rid of, though it allowed my own impulses
+and ideas to continue their uninterrupted course.  It was like a
+preternaturally heightened sense of hearing, making audible to one
+a roar of sound where others find perfect stillness.  The weariness
+and disgust of this involuntary intrusion into other souls was
+counteracted only by my ignorance of Bertha, and my growing passion
+for her; a passion enormously stimulated, if not produced, by that
+ignorance.  She was my oasis of mystery in the dreary desert of
+knowledge.  I had never allowed my diseased condition to betray
+itself, or to drive me into any unusual speech or action, except
+once, when, in a moment of peculiar bitterness against my brother,
+I had forestalled some words which I knew he was going to utter--a
+clever observation, which he had prepared beforehand.  He had
+occasionally a slightly affected hesitation in his speech, and when
+he paused an instant after the second word, my impatience and
+jealousy impelled me to continue the speech for him, as if it were
+something we had both learned by rote.  He coloured and looked
+astonished, as well as annoyed; and the words had no sooner escaped
+my lips than I felt a shock of alarm lest such an anticipation of
+words--very far from being words of course, easy to divine--should
+have betrayed me as an exceptional being, a sort of quiet
+energumen, whom every one, Bertha above all, would shudder at and
+avoid.  But I magnified, as usual, the impression any word or deed
+of mine could produce on others; for no one gave any sign of having
+noticed my interruption as more than a rudeness, to be forgiven me
+on the score of my feeble nervous condition.
+
+While this superadded consciousness of the actual was almost
+constant with me, I had never had a recurrence of that distinct
+prevision which I have described in relation to my first interview
+with Bertha; and I was waiting with eager curiosity to know whether
+or not my vision of Prague would prove to have been an instance of
+the same kind.  A few days after the incident of the opal ring, we
+were paying one of our frequent visits to the Lichtenberg Palace.
+I could never look at many pictures in succession; for pictures,
+when they are at all powerful, affect me so strongly that one or
+two exhaust all my capability of contemplation.  This morning I had
+been looking at Giorgione's picture of the cruel-eyed woman, said
+to be a likeness of Lucrezia Borgia.  I had stood long alone before
+it, fascinated by the terrible reality of that cunning, relentless
+face, till I felt a strange poisoned sensation, as if I had long
+been inhaling a fatal odour, and was just beginning to be conscious
+of its effects.  Perhaps even then I should not have moved away, if
+the rest of the party had not returned to this room, and announced
+that they were going to the Belvedere Gallery to settle a bet which
+had arisen between my brother and Mr. Filmore about a portrait.  I
+followed them dreamily, and was hardly alive to what occurred till
+they had all gone up to the gallery, leaving me below; for I
+refused to come within sight of another picture that day.  I made
+my way to the Grand Terrace, since it was agreed that we should
+saunter in the gardens when the dispute had been decided.  I had
+been sitting here a short space, vaguely conscious of trim gardens,
+with a city and green hills in the distance, when, wishing to avoid
+the proximity of the sentinel, I rose and walked down the broad
+stone steps, intending to seat myself farther on in the gardens.
+Just as I reached the gravel-walk, I felt an arm slipped within
+mine, and a light hand gently pressing my wrist.  In the same
+instant a strange intoxicating numbness passed over me, like the
+continuance or climax of the sensation I was still feeling from the
+gaze of Lucrezia Borgia.  The gardens, the summer sky, the
+consciousness of Bertha's arm being within mine, all vanished, and
+I seemed to be suddenly in darkness, out of 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; 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 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
+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 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.
+
+
+
+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 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 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."
+
+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 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 patience which was born of my pity for him, won upon his
+affection, and he began to please himself with the endeavour to
+make me fill any brother's place as fully as my feebler personality
+would admit.  I saw that the prospect which by and by presented
+itself of my becoming Bertha's husband was welcome to him, and he
+even contemplated in my case what he had not intended in my
+brother's--that his son and daughter-in-law should make one
+household with him.  My softened feelings towards my father made
+this the happiest time I had known since childhood;--these last
+months in which I retained the delicious illusion of loving Bertha,
+of longing and doubting and hoping that she might love me.  She
+behaved with a certain new consciousness and distance towards me
+after my brother's death; and I too was under a double constraint--
+that of delicacy towards my brother's memory and of anxiety as to
+the impression my abrupt words had left on her mind.  But the
+additional screen this mutual reserve erected between us only
+brought me more completely under her power:  no matter how empty
+the adytum, so that the veil be thick enough.  So absolute is our
+soul's need of something hidden and uncertain for the maintenance
+of that doubt and hope and effort which are the breath of its life,
+that if the whole future were laid bare to us beyond to-day, the
+interest of all mankind would be bent on the hours that lie
+between; we should pant after the uncertainties of our one morning
+and our one afternoon; we should rush fiercely to the Exchange for
+our last possibility of speculation, of success, of disappointment:
+we should have a glut of political prophets foretelling a crisis or
+a no-crisis within the only twenty-four hours left open to
+prophecy.  Conceive the condition of the human mind if all
+propositions whatsoever were self-evident except one, which was to
+become self-evident at the close of a summer's day, but in the
+meantime might be the subject of question, of hypothesis, of
+debate.  Art and philosophy, literature and science, would fasten
+like bees on that one proposition which had the honey of
+probability in it, and be the more eager because their enjoyment
+would end with sunset.  Our impulses, our spiritual activities, no
+more adjust themselves to the idea of their future nullity, than
+the beating of our heart, or the irritability of our muscles.
+
+Bertha, the slim, fair-haired girl, whose present thoughts and
+emotions were an enigma to me amidst the fatiguing obviousness of
+the other minds around me, was as absorbing to me as a single
+unknown to-day--as a single hypothetic proposition to remain
+problematic till sunset; and all the cramped, hemmed-in belief and
+disbelief, trust and distrust, of my nature, welled out in this one
+narrow channel.
+
+And she made me believe that she loved me.  Without ever quitting
+her tone of BADINAGE and playful superiority, she intoxicated me
+with the sense that I was necessary to her, that she was never at
+ease, unless I was near her, submitting to her playful tyranny.  It
+costs a woman so little effort to beset us in this way!  A half-
+repressed word, a moment's unexpected silence, even an easy fit of
+petulance on our account, will serve us as hashish for a long
+while.  Out of the subtlest web of scarcely perceptible signs, she
+set me weaving the fancy that she had always unconsciously loved me
+better than Alfred, but that, with the ignorant fluttered
+sensibility of a young girl, she had been imposed on by the charm
+that lay for her in the distinction of being admired and chosen by
+a man who made so brilliant a figure in the world as my brother.
+She satirized herself in a very graceful way for her vanity and
+ambition.  What was it to me that I had the light of my wretched
+provision on the fact that now it was I who possessed at least all
+but the personal part of my brother's advantages?  Our sweet
+illusions are half of them conscious illusions, like effects of
+colour that we know to be made up of tinsel, broken glass, and
+rags.
+
+We were married eighteen months after Alfred's death, one cold,
+clear morning in April, when there came hail and sunshine both
+together; and Bertha, in her white silk and pale-green leaves, and
+the pale hues of her hair and face, looked like the spirit of the
+morning.  My father was happier than he had thought of being again:
+my marriage, he felt sure, would complete the desirable
+modification of my character, and make me practical and worldly
+enough to take my place in society among sane men.  For he
+delighted in Bertha's tact and acuteness, and felt sure she would
+be mistress of me, and make me what she chose:  I was only twenty-
+one, and madly in love with her.  Poor father!  He kept that hope a
+little while after our first year of marriage, and it was not quite
+extinct when paralysis came and saved him from utter
+disappointment.
+
+I shall hurry through the rest of my story, not dwelling so much as
+I have hitherto done on my inward experience.  When people are well
+known to each other, they talk rather of what befalls them
+externally, leaving their feelings and sentiments to be inferred.
+
+We lived in a round of visits for some time after our return home,
+giving splendid dinner-parties, and making a sensation in our
+neighbourhood by the new lustre of our equipage, for my father had
+reserved this display of his increased wealth for the period of his
+son's marriage; and we gave our acquaintances liberal opportunity
+for remarking that it was a pity I made so poor a figure as an heir
+and a bridegroom.  The nervous fatigue of this existence, the
+insincerities and platitudes which I had to live through twice
+over--through my inner and outward sense--would have been maddening
+to me, if I had not had that sort of intoxicated callousness which
+came from the delights of a first passion.  A bride and bridegroom,
+surrounded by all the appliances of wealth, hurried through the day
+by the whirl of society, filling their solitary moments with
+hastily-snatched caresses, are prepared for their future life
+together as the novice is prepared for the cloister--by
+experiencing its utmost contrast.
+
+Through all these crowded excited months, Bertha's inward self
+remained shrouded from me, and I still read her thoughts only
+through the language of her lips and demeanour:  I had still the
+human interest of wondering whether what I did and said pleased
+her, of longing to hear a word of affection, of giving a delicious
+exaggeration of meaning to her smile.  But I was conscious of a
+growing difference in her manner towards me; sometimes strong
+enough to be called haughty coldness, cutting and chilling me as
+the hail had done that came across the sunshine on our marriage
+morning; sometimes only perceptible in the dexterous avoidance of a
+tete-a-tete walk or dinner to which I had been looking forward.  I
+had been deeply pained by this--had even felt a sort of crushing of
+the heart, from the sense that my brief day of happiness was near
+its setting; but still I remained dependent on Bertha, eager for
+the last rays of a bliss that would soon be gone for ever, hoping
+and watching for some after-glow more beautiful from the impending
+night.
+
+I remember--how should I not remember?--the time when that
+dependence and hope utterly left me, when the sadness I had felt in
+Bertha's growing estrangement became a joy that I looked back upon
+with longing as a man might look back on the last pains in a
+paralysed limb.  It was just after the close of my father's last
+illness, which had necessarily withdrawn us from society and thrown
+us more on each other.  It was the evening of father's death.  On
+that evening the veil which had shrouded Bertha's soul from me--had
+made me find in her alone among my fellow-beings the blessed
+possibility of mystery, and doubt, and expectation--was first
+withdrawn.  Perhaps it was the first day since the beginning of my
+passion for her, in which that passion was completely neutralized
+by the presence of an absorbing feeling of another kind.  I had
+been watching by my father's deathbed:  I had been witnessing the
+last fitful yearning glance his soul had cast back on the spent
+inheritance of life--the last faint consciousness of love he had
+gathered from the pressure of my hand.  What are all our personal
+loves when we have been sharing in that supreme agony?  In the
+first moments when we come away from the presence of death, every
+other relation to the living is merged, to our feeling, in the
+great relation of a common nature and a common destiny.
+
+In that state of mind I joined Bertha in her private sitting-room.
+She was seated in a leaning posture on a settee, with her back
+towards the door; the great rich coils of her pale blond hair
+surmounting her small neck, visible above the back of the settee.
+I remember, as I closed the door behind me, a cold tremulousness
+seizing me, and a vague sense of being hated and lonely--vague and
+strong, like a presentiment.  I know how I looked at that moment,
+for I saw myself in Bertha's thought as she lifted her cutting grey
+eyes, and looked at me:  a miserable ghost-seer, surrounded by
+phantoms in the noonday, trembling under a breeze when the leaves
+were still, without appetite for the common objects of human
+desires, but pining after the moon-beams.  We were front to front
+with each other, and judged each other.  The terrible moment of
+complete illumination had come to me, and I saw that the darkness
+had hidden no landscape from me, but only a blank prosaic wall:
+from that evening forth, through the sickening years which
+followed, I saw all round the narrow room of this woman's soul--saw
+petty artifice and mere negation where I had delighted to believe
+in coy sensibilities and in wit at war with latent feeling--saw the
+light floating vanities of the girl defining themselves into the
+systematic coquetry, the scheming selfishness, of the woman--saw
+repulsion and antipathy harden into cruel hatred, giving pain only
+for the sake of wreaking itself.
+
+For Bertha too, after her kind, felt the bitterness of disillusion.
+She had believed that my wild poet's passion for her would make me
+her slave; and that, being her slave, I should execute her will in
+all things.  With the essential shallowness of a negative,
+unimaginative nature, she was unable to conceive the fact that
+sensibilities were anything else than weaknesses.  She had thought
+my weaknesses would put me in her power, and she found them
+unmanageable forces.  Our positions were reversed.  Before marriage
+she had completely mastered my imagination, for she was a secret to
+me; and I created the unknown thought before which I trembled as if
+it were hers.  But now that her soul was laid open to me, now that
+I was compelled to share the privacy of her motives, to follow all
+the petty devices that preceded her words and acts, she found
+herself powerless with me, except to produce in me the chill
+shudder of repulsion--powerless, because I could be acted on by no
+lever within her reach.  I was dead to worldly ambitions, to social
+vanities, to all the incentives within the compass of her narrow
+imagination, and I lived under influences utterly invisible to her.
+
+She was really pitiable to have such a husband, and so all the
+world thought.  A graceful, brilliant woman, like Bertha, who
+smiled on morning callers, made a figure in ball-rooms, and was
+capable of that light repartee which, from such a woman, is
+accepted as wit, was secure of carrying off all sympathy from a
+husband who was sickly, abstracted, and, as some suspected, crack-
+brained.  Even the servants in our house gave her the balance of
+their regard and pity.  For there were no audible quarrels between
+us; our alienation, our repulsion from each other, lay within the
+silence of our own hearts; and if the mistress went out a great
+deal, and seemed to dislike the master's society, was it not
+natural, poor thing?  The master was odd.  I was kind and just to
+my dependants, but I excited in them a shrinking, half-contemptuous
+pity; for this class of men and women are but slightly determined
+in their estimate of others by general considerations, or even
+experience, of character.  They judge of persons as they judge of
+coins, and value those who pass current at a high rate.
+
+After a time I interfered so little with Bertha's habits that it
+might seem wonderful how her hatred towards me could grow so
+intense and active as it did.  But she had begun to suspect, by
+some involuntary betrayal of mine, that there was an abnormal power
+of penetration in me--that fitfully, at least, I was strangely
+cognizant of her thoughts and intentions, and she began to be
+haunted by a terror of me, which alternated every now and then with
+defiance.  She meditated continually how the incubus could be
+shaken off her life--how she could be freed from this hateful bond
+to a being whom she at once despised as an imbecile, and dreaded as
+an inquisitor.  For a long while she lived in the hope that my
+evident wretchedness would drive me to the commission of suicide;
+but suicide was not in my nature.  I was too completely swayed by
+the sense that I was in the grasp of unknown forces, to believe in
+my power of self-release.  Towards my own destiny I had become
+entirely passive; for my one ardent desire had spent itself, and
+impulse no longer predominated over knowledge.  For this reason I
+never thought of taking any steps towards a complete separation,
+which would have made our alienation evident to the world.  Why
+should I rush for help to a new course, when I was only suffering
+from the consequences of a deed which had been the act of my
+intensest will?  That would have been the logic of one who had
+desires to gratify, and I had no desires.  But Bertha and I lived
+more and more aloof from each other.  The rich find it easy to live
+married and apart.
+
+That course of our life which I have indicated in a few sentences
+filled the space of years.  So much misery--so slow and hideous a
+growth of hatred and sin, may be compressed into a sentence!  And
+men judge of each other's lives through this summary medium.  They
+epitomize the experience of their fellow-mortal, and pronounce
+judgment on him in neat syntax, and feel themselves wise and
+virtuous--conquerors over the temptations they define in well-
+selected predicates.  Seven years of wretchedness glide glibly over
+the lips of the man who has never counted them out in moments of
+chill disappointment, of head and heart throbbings, of dread and
+vain wrestling, of remorse and despair.  We learn WORDS by rote,
+but not their meaning; THAT must be paid for with our life-blood,
+and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.
+
+But I will hasten to finish my story.  Brevity is justified at once
+to those who readily understand, and to those who will never
+understand.
+
+Some years after my father's death, I was sitting by the dim
+firelight in my library one January evening--sitting in the leather
+chair that used to be my father's--when Bertha appeared at the
+door, with a candle in her hand, and advanced towards me.  I knew
+the ball-dress she had on--the white ball-dress, with the green
+jewels, shone upon by the light of the wax candle which lit up the
+medallion of the dying Cleopatra on the mantelpiece.  Why did she
+come to me before going out?  I had not seen her in the library,
+which was my habitual place for months.  Why did she stand before
+me with the candle in her hand, with her cruel contemptuous eyes
+fixed on me, and the glittering serpent, like a familiar demon, on
+her breast?  For a moment I thought this fulfilment of my vision at
+Vienna marked some dreadful crisis in my fate, but I saw nothing in
+Bertha's mind, as she stood before me, except scorn for the look of
+overwhelming misery with which I sat before her . . . "Fool, idiot,
+why don't you kill yourself, then?"--that was her thought.  But at
+length her thoughts reverted to her errand, and she spoke aloud.
+The apparently indifferent nature of the errand seemed to make a
+ridiculous anticlimax to my prevision and my agitation.
+
+"I have had to hire a new maid.  Fletcher is going to be married,
+and she wants me to ask you to let her husband have the public-
+house and farm at Molton.  I wish him to have it.  You must give
+the promise now, because Fletcher is going to-morrow morning--and
+quickly, because I'm in a hurry."
+
+"Very well; you may promise her," I said, indifferently, and Bertha
+swept out of the library again.
+
+I always shrank from the sight of a new person, and all the more
+when it was a person whose mental life was likely to weary my
+reluctant insight with worldly ignorant trivialities.  But I shrank
+especially from the sight of this new maid, because her advent had
+been announced to me at a moment to which I could not cease to
+attach some fatality:  I had a vague dread that I should find her
+mixed up with the dreary drama of my life--that some new sickening
+vision would reveal her to me as an evil genius.  When at last I
+did unavoidably meet her, the vague dread was changed into definite
+disgust.  She was a tall, wiry, dark-eyed woman, this Mrs. Archer,
+with a face handsome enough to give her coarse hard nature the
+odious finish of bold, self-confident coquetry.  That was enough to
+make me avoid her, quite apart from the contemptuous feeling with
+which she contemplated me.  I seldom saw her; but I perceived that
+she rapidly became a favourite with her mistress, and, after the
+lapse of eight or nine months, I began to be aware that there had
+arisen in Bertha's mind towards this woman a mingled feeling of
+fear and dependence, and that this feeling was associated with ill-
+defined images of candle-light scenes in her dressing-room, and the
+locking-up of something in Bertha's cabinet.  My interviews with my
+wife had become so brief and so rarely solitary, that I had no
+opportunity of perceiving these images in her mind with more
+definiteness.  The recollections of the past become contracted in
+the rapidity of thought till they sometimes bear hardly a more
+distinct resemblance to the external reality than the forms of an
+oriental alphabet to the objects that suggested them.
+
+Besides, for the last year or more a modification had been going
+forward in my mental condition, and was growing more and more
+marked.  My insight into the minds of those around me was becoming
+dimmer and more fitful, and the ideas that crowded my double
+consciousness became less and less dependent on any personal
+contact.  All that was personal in me seemed to be suffering a
+gradual death, so that I was losing the organ through which the
+personal agitations and projects of others could affect me.  But
+along with this relief from wearisome insight, there was a new
+development of what I concluded--as I have since found rightly--to
+be a provision of external scenes.  It was as if the relation
+between me and my fellow-men was more and more deadened, and my
+relation to what we call the inanimate was quickened into new life.
+The more I lived apart from society, and in proportion as my
+wretchedness subsided from the violent throb of agonized passion
+into the dulness of habitual pain, the more frequent and vivid
+became such visions as that I had had of Prague--of strange cities,
+of sandy plains, of gigantic ruins, of midnight skies with strange
+bright constellations, of mountain-passes, of grassy nooks flecked
+with the afternoon sunshine through the boughs:  I was in the midst
+of such scenes, and in all of them one presence seemed to weigh on
+me in all these mighty shapes--the presence of something unknown
+and pitiless.  For continual suffering had annihilated religious
+faith within me:  to the utterly miserable--the unloving and the
+unloved--there is no religion possible, no worship but a worship of
+devils.  And beyond all these, and continually recurring, was the
+vision of my death--the pangs, the suffocation, the last struggle,
+when life would be grasped at in vain.
+
+Things were in this state near the end of the seventh year.  I had
+become entirely free from insight, from my abnormal cognizance of
+any other consciousness than my own, and instead of intruding
+involuntarily into the world of other minds, was living continually
+in my own solitary future.  Bertha was aware that I was greatly
+changed.  To my surprise she had of late seemed to seek
+opportunities of remaining in my society, and had cultivated that
+kind of distant yet familiar talk which is customary between a
+husband and wife who live in polite and irrevocable alienation.  I
+bore this with languid submission, and without feeling enough
+interest in her motives to be roused into keen observation; yet I
+could not help perceiving something triumphant and excited in her
+carriage and the expression of her face--something too subtle to
+express itself in words or tones, but giving one the idea that she
+lived in a state of expectation or hopeful suspense.  My chief
+feeling was satisfaction that her inner self was once more shut out
+from me; and I almost revelled for the moment in the absent
+melancholy that made me answer her at cross purposes, and betray
+utter ignorance of what she had been saying.  I remember well the
+look and the smile with which she one day said, after a mistake of
+this kind on my part:  "I used to think you were a clairvoyant, and
+that was the reason why you were so bitter against other
+clairvoyants, wanting to keep your monopoly; but I see now you have
+become rather duller than the rest of the world."
+
+I said nothing in reply.  It occurred to me that her recent
+obtrusion of herself upon me might have been prompted by the wish
+to test my power of detecting some of her secrets; but I let the
+thought drop again at once:  her motives and her deeds had no
+interest for me, and whatever pleasures she might be seeking, I had
+no wish to baulk her.  There was still pity in my soul for every
+living thing, and Bertha was living--was surrounded with
+possibilities of misery.
+
+Just at this time there occurred an event which roused me somewhat
+from my inertia, and gave me an interest in the passing moment that
+I had thought impossible for me.  It was a visit from Charles
+Meunier, who had written me word that he was coming to England for
+relaxation from too strenuous labour, and would like too see me.
+Meunier had now a European reputation; but his letter to me
+expressed that keen remembrance of an early regard, an early debt
+of sympathy, which is inseparable from nobility of character:  and
+I too felt as if his presence would be to me like a transient
+resurrection into a happier pre-existence.
+
+He came, and as far as possible, I renewed our old pleasure of
+making tete-a-tete excursions, though, instead of mountains and
+glacers and the wide blue lake, we had to content ourselves with
+mere slopes and ponds and artificial plantations.  The years had
+changed us both, but with what different result!  Meunier was now a
+brilliant figure in society, to whom elegant women pretended to
+listen, and whose acquaintance was boasted of by noblemen ambitious
+of brains.  He repressed with the utmost delicacy all betrayal of
+the shock which I am sure he must have received from our meeting,
+or of a desire to penetrate into my condition and circumstances,
+and sought by the utmost exertion of his charming social powers to
+make our reunion agreeable.  Bertha was much struck by the
+unexpected fascinations of a visitor whom she had expected to find
+presentable only on the score of his celebrity, and put forth all
+her coquetries and accomplishments.  Apparently she succeeded in
+attracting his admiration, for his manner towards her was attentive
+and flattering.  The effect of his presence on me was so benignant,
+especially in those renewals of our old tete-a-tete wanderings,
+when he poured forth to me wonderful narratives of his professional
+experience, that more than once, when his talk turned on the
+psychological relations of disease, the thought crossed my mind
+that, if his stay with me were long enough, I might possibly bring
+myself to tell this man the secrets of my lot.  Might there not lie
+some remedy for me, too, in his science?  Might there not at least
+lie some comprehension and sympathy ready for me in his large and
+susceptible mind?  But the thought only flickered feebly now and
+then, and died out before it could become a wish.  The horror I had
+of again breaking in on the privacy of another soul, made me, by an
+irrational instinct, draw the shroud of concealment more closely
+around my own, as we automatically perform the gesture we feel to
+be wanting in another.
+
+When Meunier's visit was approaching its conclusion, there happened
+an event which caused some excitement in our household, owing to
+the surprisingly strong effect it appeared to produce on Bertha--on
+Bertha, the self-possessed, who usually seemed inaccessible to
+feminine agitations, and did even her hate in a self-restrained
+hygienic manner.  This event was the sudden severe illness of her
+maid, Mrs. Archer.  I have reserved to this moment the mention of a
+circumstance which had forced itself on my notice shortly before
+Meunier's arrival, namely, that there had been some quarrel between
+Bertha and this maid, apparently during a visit to a distant
+family, in which she had accompanied her mistress.  I had overheard
+Archer speaking in a tone of bitter insolence, which I should have
+thought an adequate reason for immediate dismissal.  No dismissal
+followed; on the contrary, Bertha seemed to be silently putting up
+with personal inconveniences from the exhibitions of this woman's
+temper.  I was the more astonished to observe that her illness
+seemed a cause of strong solicitude to Bertha; that she was at the
+bedside night and day, and would allow no one else to officiate as
+head-nurse.  It happened that our family doctor was out on a
+holiday, an accident which made Meunier's presence in the house
+doubly welcome, and he apparently entered into the case with an
+interest which seemed so much stronger than the ordinary
+professional feeling, that one day when he had fallen into a long
+fit of silence after visiting her, I said to him -
+
+"Is this a very peculiar case of disease, Meunier?"
+
+"No," he answered, "it is an attack of peritonitis, which will be
+fatal, but which does not differ physically from many other cases
+that have come under my observation.  But I'll tell you what I have
+on my mind.  I want to make an experiment on this woman, if you
+will give me permission.  It can do her no harm--will give her no
+pain--for I shall not make it until life is extinct to all purposes
+of sensation.  I want to try the effect of transfusing blood into
+her arteries after the heart has ceased to beat for some minutes.
+I have tried the experiment again and again with animals that have
+died of this disease, with astounding results, and I want to try it
+on a human subject.  I have the small tubes necessary, in a case I
+have with me, and the rest of the apparatus could be prepared
+readily.  I should use my own blood--take it from my own arm.  This
+woman won't live through the night, I'm convinced, and I want you
+to promise me your assistance in making the experiment.  I can't do
+without another hand, but it would perhaps not be well to call in a
+medical assistant from among your provincial doctors.  A
+disagreeable foolish version of the thing might get abroad."
+
+"Have you spoken to my wife on the subject?" I said, "because she
+appears to be peculiarly sensitive about this woman:  she has been
+a favourite maid."
+
+"To tell you the truth," said Meunier, "I don't want her to know
+about it.  There are always insuperable difficulties with women in
+these matters, and the effect on the supposed dead body may be
+startling.  You and I will sit up together, and be in readiness.
+When certain symptoms appear I shall take you in, and at the right
+moment we must manage to get every one else out of the room."
+
+I need not give our farther conversation on the subject.  He
+entered very fully into the details, and overcame my repulsion from
+them, by exciting in me a mingled awe and curiosity concerning the
+possible results of his experiment.
+
+We prepared everything, and he instructed me in my part as
+assistant.  He had not told Bertha of his absolute conviction that
+Archer would not survive through the night, and endeavoured to
+persuade her to leave the patient and take a night's rest.  But she
+was obstinate, suspecting the fact that death was at hand, and
+supposing that he wished merely to save her nerves.  She refused to
+leave the sick-room.  Meunier and I sat up together in the library,
+he making frequent visits to the sick-room, and returning with the
+information that the case was taking precisely the course he
+expected.  Once he said to me, "Can you imagine any cause of ill-
+feeling this woman has against her mistress, who is so devoted to
+her?"
+
+"I think there was some misunderstanding between them before her
+illness.  Why do you ask?"
+
+"Because I have observed for the last five or six hours--since, I
+fancy, she has lost all hope of recovery--there seems a strange
+prompting in her to say something which pain and failing strength
+forbid her to utter; and there is a look of hideous meaning in her
+eyes, which she turns continually towards her mistress.  In this
+disease the mind often remains singularly clear to the last."
+
+"I am not surprised at an indication of malevolent feeling in her,"
+I said.  "She is a woman who has always inspired me with distrust
+and dislike, but she managed to insinuate herself into her
+mistress's favour."  He was silent after this, looking at the fire
+with an air of absorption, till he went upstairs again.  He stayed
+away longer than usual, and on returning, said to me quietly, "Come
+now."
+
+I followed him to the chamber where death was hovering.  The dark
+hangings of the large bed made a background that gave a strong
+relief to Bertha's pale face as I entered.  She started forward as
+she saw me enter, and then looked at Meunier with an expression of
+angry inquiry; but he lifted up his hand as it to impose silence,
+while he fixed his glance on the dying woman and felt her pulse.
+The face was pinched and ghastly, a cold perspiration was on the
+forehead, and the eyelids were lowered so as to conceal the large
+dark eyes.  After a minute or two, Meunier walked round to the
+other side of the bed where Bertha stood, and with his usual air of
+gentle politeness towards her begged her to leave the patient under
+our care--everything should be done for her--she was no longer in a
+state to be conscious of an affectionate presence.  Bertha was
+hesitating, apparently almost willing to believe his assurance and
+to comply.  She looked round at the ghastly dying face, as if to
+read the confirmation of that assurance, when for a moment the
+lowered eyelids were raised again, and it seemed as if the eyes
+were looking towards Bertha, but blankly.  A shudder passed through
+Bertha's frame, and she returned to her station near the pillow,
+tacitly implying that she would not leave the room.
+
+The eyelids were lifted no more.  Once I looked at Bertha as she
+watched the face of the dying one.  She wore a rich peignoir, and
+her blond hair was half covered by a lace cap:  in her attire she
+was, as always, an elegant woman, fit to figure in a picture of
+modern aristocratic life:  but I asked myself how that face of hers
+could ever have seemed to me the face of a woman born of woman,
+with memories of childhood, capable of pain, needing to be fondled?
+The features at that moment seemed so preternaturally sharp, the
+eyes were so hard and eager--she looked like a cruel immortal,
+finding her spiritual feast in the agonies of a dying race.  For
+across those hard features there came something like a flash when
+the last hour had been breathed out, and we all felt that the dark
+veil had completely fallen.  What secret was there between Bertha
+and this woman?  I turned my eyes from her with a horrible dread
+lest my insight should return, and I should be obliged to see what
+had been breeding about two unloving women's hearts.  I felt that
+Bertha had been watching for the moment of death as the sealing of
+her secret:  I thanked Heaven it could remain sealed for me.
+
+Meunier said quietly, "She is gone."  He then gave his arm to
+Bertha, and she submitted to be led out of the room.
+
+I suppose it was at her order that two female attendants came into
+the room, and dismissed the younger one who had been present
+before.  When they entered, Meunier had already opened the artery
+in the long thin neck that lay rigid on the pillow, and I dismissed
+them, ordering them to remain at a distance till we rang:  the
+doctor, I said, had an operation to perform--he was not sure about
+the death.  For the next twenty minutes I forgot everything but
+Meunier and the experiment in which he was so absorbed, that I
+think his senses would have been closed against all sounds or
+sights which had no relation to it.  It was my task at first to
+keep up the artificial respiration in the body after the
+transfusion had been effected, but presently Meunier relieved me,
+and I could see the wondrous slow return of life; the breast began
+to heave, the inspirations became stronger, the eyelids quivered,
+and the soul seemed to have returned beneath them.  The artificial
+respiration was withdrawn:  still the breathing continued, and
+there was a movement of the lips.
+
+Just then I heard the handle of the door moving:  I suppose Bertha
+had heard from the women that they had been dismissed:  probably a
+vague fear had arisen in her mind, for she entered with a look of
+alarm.  She came to the foot of the bed and gave a stifled cry.
+
+The dead woman's eyes were wide open, and met hers in full
+recognition--the recognition of hate.  With a sudden strong effort,
+the hand that Bertha had thought for ever still was pointed towards
+her, and the haggard face moved.  The gasping eager voice said--
+
+"You mean to poison your husband . . . the poison is in the black
+cabinet . . . I got it for you . . . you laughed at me, and told
+lies about me behind my back, to make me disgusting . . . because
+you were jealous . . . are you sorry . . . now?"
+
+The lips continued to murmur, but the sounds were no longer
+distinct.  Soon there was no sound--only a slight movement:  the
+flame had leaped out, and was being extinguished the faster.  The
+wretched woman's heart-strings had been set to hatred and
+vengeance; the spirit of life had swept the chords for an instant,
+and was gone again for ever.  Great God!  Is this what it is to
+live again . . . to wake up with our unstilled thirst upon us, with
+our unuttered curses rising to our lips, with our muscles ready to
+act out their half-committed sins?
+
+Bertha stood pale at the foot of the bed, quivering and helpless,
+despairing of devices, like a cunning animal whose hiding-places
+are surrounded by swift-advancing flame.  Even Meunier looked
+paralysed; life for that moment ceased to be a scientific problem
+to him.  As for me, this scene seemed of one texture with the rest
+of my existence:  horror was my familiar, and this new revelation
+was only like an old pain recurring with new circumstances.
+
+* * *
+
+Since then Bertha and I have lived apart--she in her own
+neighbourhood, the mistress of half our wealth, I as a wanderer in
+foreign countries, until I came to this Devonshire nest to die.
+Bertha lives pitied and admired; for what had I against that
+charming woman, whom every one but myself could have been happy
+with?  There had been no witness of the scene in the dying room
+except Meunier, and while Meunier lived his lips were sealed by a
+promise to me.
+
+Once or twice, weary of wandering, I rested in a favourite spot,
+and my heart went out towards the men and women and children whose
+faces were becoming familiar to me; but I was driven away again in
+terror at the approach of my old insight--driven away to live
+continually with the one Unknown Presence revealed and yet hidden
+by the moving curtain of the earth and sky.  Till at last disease
+took hold of me and forced me to rest here--forced me to live in
+dependence on my servants.  And then the curse of insight--of my
+double consciousness, came again, and has never left me.  I know
+all their narrow thoughts, their feeble regard, their half-wearied
+pity.
+
+* * *
+
+It is the 20th of September, 1850.  I know these figures I have
+just written, as if they were a long familiar inscription.  I have
+seen them on this pace in my desk unnumbered times, when the scene
+of my dying struggle has opened upon me . . .
+
+(1859)
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Lifted Veil, by George Eliot
+
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