initial commit of ebook 2165HEADmain

1 files changed, 2004 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/old/lftvl10.txt b/old/lftvl10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a364046
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/lftvl10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,2004 @@
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Lifted Veil, by George Eliot
+#4 in our series by George Eliot [Mary Anne Evans]
+
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
+the copyright laws for your country before posting these files!!
+
+Please take a look at the important information in this header.
+We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
+electronic path open for the next readers.  Do not remove this.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*
+
+Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
+further information is included below.  We need your donations.
+
+
+The Lifted Veil
+
+by George Eliot [Mary Anne Evans]
+
+April, 2000 [Etext #2165]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Lifted Veil, by George Eliot
+*****This file should be named lftvl10.txt or lftvl10.zip******
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, lftvl11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, lftvl10a.txt
+
+
+This etext was prepared by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions,
+all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a
+copyright notice is included.  Therefore, we do usually do NOT! keep
+these books in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+We are now trying to release all our books one month in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+
+Please note:  neither this list nor its contents are final till
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.  To be sure you have an
+up to date first edition [xxxxx10x.xxx] please check file sizes
+in the first week of the next month.  Since our ftp program has
+a bug in it that scrambles the date [tried to fix and failed] a
+look at the file size will have to do, but we will try to see a
+new copy has at least one byte more or less.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.  This
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If our value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour this year as we release thirty-six text
+files per month, or 432 more Etexts in 1999 for a total of 2000+
+If these reach just 10% of the computerized population, then the
+total should reach over 200 billion Etexts given away this year.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
+Files by December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000 = 1 Trillion]
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only ~5% of the present number of computer users.
+
+At our revised rates of production, we will reach only one-third
+of that goal by the end of 2001, or about 3,333 Etexts unless we
+manage to get some real funding; currently our funding is mostly
+from Michael Hart's salary at Carnegie-Mellon University, and an
+assortment of sporadic gifts; this salary is only good for a few
+more years, so we are looking for something to replace it, as we
+don't want Project Gutenberg to be so dependent on one person.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+
+All donations should be made to "Project Gutenberg/CMU": and are
+tax deductible to the extent allowable by law.  (CMU = Carnegie-
+Mellon University).
+
+For these and other matters, please mail to:
+
+Project Gutenberg
+P. O. Box  2782
+Champaign, IL 61825
+
+When all other email fails. . .try our Executive Director:
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+hart@pobox.com forwards to hart@prairienet.org and archive.org
+if your mail bounces from archive.org, I will still see it, if
+it bounces from prairienet.org, better resend later on. . . .
+
+We would prefer to send you this information by email.
+
+******
+
+To access Project Gutenberg etexts, use any Web browser
+to view http://promo.net/pg.  This site lists Etexts by
+author and by title, and includes information about how
+to get involved with Project Gutenberg.  You could also
+download our past Newsletters, or subscribe here.  This
+is one of our major sites, please email hart@pobox.com,
+for a more complete list of our various sites.
+
+To go directly to the etext collections, use FTP or any
+Web browser to visit a Project Gutenberg mirror (mirror
+sites are available on 7 continents; mirrors are listed
+at http://promo.net/pg).
+
+Mac users, do NOT point and click, typing works better.
+
+Example FTP session:
+
+ftp sunsite.unc.edu
+login: anonymous
+password: your@login
+cd pub/docs/books/gutenberg
+cd etext90 through etext99
+dir [to see files]
+get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
+GET GUTINDEX.??  [to get a year's listing of books, e.g., GUTINDEX.99]
+GET GUTINDEX.ALL [to get a listing of ALL books]
+
+***
+
+**Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor**
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here?  You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault.  So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you.  It also tells you how
+you can distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement.  If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from.  If you received this etext on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-
+tm etexts, is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor
+Michael S. Hart through the Project Gutenberg Association at
+Carnegie-Mellon University (the "Project").  Among other
+things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
+under the Project's "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works.  Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects".  Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] the Project (and any other party you may receive this
+etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from.  If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy.  If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS".  NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors,
+officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost
+and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or
+indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause:
+[1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification,
+or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word pro-
+     cessing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the
+     net profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Association/Carnegie-Mellon
+     University" within the 60 days following each
+     date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare)
+     your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time,
+scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty
+free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution
+you can think of.  Money should be paid to "Project Gutenberg
+Association / Carnegie-Mellon University".
+
+*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
+
+
+
+
+
+This etext was prepared by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+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
+