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gun to recover -a conviction which would have been altogether unwelcome, but for the poor shadow of a reviving hope which accompanied it. Such a dream, come whence it might, could not but bring comfort with it. The hope grew, and was my sole medicine.

Before the evening I felt better, and, though still very feeble, managed to write to Marston, letting him know I was safe, and requesting him to forward any letters that might arrive.

The next day, I rose, but was unable to work. The very thought of writing sickened me. Neither could I bear the thought of returning to London. I tried to read, but threw aside book after book, without being able to tell what one of them was about. If for a moment I seemed to enter into the subject, before I reached the bottom of the page, I found I had not an idea as to what the words meant or whither they tended. After many failures, unwilling to give myself up to idle brooding, I fortunately tried some of the mystical poetry of the seventeenth century: the difficulties of that I found rather stimulate than repel me; while, much as there was in the form to displease the taste, there was more in the matter to rouse the intellect. I found also some relief in resuming my mathematical studies: the abstraction of them acted as an anodyne. But the days dragged wearily.

moved. But when the ice drew nigh me, and would have closed around me, my heart leaped for joy; and when the heat of my lingering life repelled it, my heart sunk within me, and I said to myself: "Death will not have me. I may not join her even in the land of cold forgetfulness: I may not even be nothing with her." The tears began to flow down my face, like the thin veil of water that kept ever flowing down the face of the ice; and as I wept, the water before me flowed faster and faster, till it rippled in a sheet down the icy wall. Faster and yet faster it flowed, falling, with the sound as of many showers, into the runnel below, which rushed splashing and gurgling away from the foot of the vanishing wall. Faster and faster it flowed, until the solid mass fell in a foaming cataract and swept in a torrent across the cave. I followed the retreating wall, through the seething water at its foot. Thinner and thinner grew the dividing mass; nearer and nearer came the form of my Mary. "I shall yet clasp her," I cried; "her dead form will kill me, and I too shall be inclosed in the friendly ice. I shall not be with her, alas; but neither shall I be without her, for I shall depart into the lovely nothingness." Thinner and thinner grew the dividing wall. The skirt of her shroud hung like a wet weed in the falling torrent. I kneeled in the river, and crept nearer, with outstretched arms: when the vanishing ice set the dead form free, it should rest in those arms - the last gift of the life-dream - for then, surely I must die. "Let me pass in the agony of a lonely embrace!" I cried. As I spoke she moved. I started to my feet, stung into life by the agony of a new hope. Slowly the ice released her, and gently she rose to her feet. The torrents of water ceased they had flowed but to set her free. Her eyes were still closed, but she made one blind step towards me, I had not for a long time thought about and laid her left hand on my head, her one of the questions which had so much right hand on my heart. Instantly, body occupied Charley and myself - that of imand soul, I was cool as a summer eve after mortality. As to any communication bea thunder-shower. For a moment, pre- tween the parted, I had never, during his cious as an æon, she held her hands upon life pondered the possibility of it, although me - then slowly opened her eyes. Out I had always had an inclination to believe of them flashed the living soul of my that such intercourse had in rare instances Athanasia. She closed the lids again taken place: former periods of the world's slowly over the lovely splendour; the history, when that blinding self-consciouswater in which we stood rose around us; ness which is the bane of ours was yet and on its last billow she floated away | undeveloped, must, I thought, have been through the winding passage of the cave. far more favourable to its occurrence. I sought to follow her, but could not. I cried aloud and awoke.

But the burning heat had left me; I felt that I had passed a crisis, and had be

As soon as I was able to get on horseback, the tone of mind and body began to return. I felt as if into me some sort of animal healing passed from Lilith; and who can tell in how many ways the lower animals may not minister to the higher?

One night I had a strange experience. I give it without argument, perfectly aware that the fact may be set down to the disordered state of my physical nature, and that without injustice.

Anyhow I was convinced that it was not to be gained by effort. I confess that, in the unthinking agony of grief after Charley's death, many a time when I woke in

the middle of the night and could sleep no more, I sat up in bed and prayed him, if he heard me, to come to me, and let me tell him the truth-for my sake to let me know at least that he lived, for then I should be sure that one day all would be well. But if there was any hearing, there was no answer. Charley did not come; the prayer seemed to vanish in the darkness; and my more self-possessed meditations never justified the hope of any such being heard.

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most exclusively from my publishers. But the very hour I reached my lodging, came a note, which I opened trembling, for it was in the handwriting of Miss Pease.

"Dear Sir, I cannot, I think, be wrong in giving you a piece of information which will be in the newspapers to-morrow morning. Your old acquaintance, and my young relative, Mr. Brotherton, was married this morning, at St. George's, Hanover Square, to your late friend's sister, Miss Mary Osborne. They have just left for Dover on their way to Switzerland. Your sincere well-wisher,

JANE PEASE."

One night I was sitting in my grannie's room, which, except my uncle's, was now the only one I could bear to enter. I had been reading for some time very Even at this distance of time, I should quietly, but had leaned back in my chair, have to exhort myself to write with calmand let my thoughts go wandering whither ness, were it not that the utter despair of they would, when all at once I was pos- conveying my feelings, if indeed my soul sessed by the conviction that Charley was had not for the time passed beyond feelnear me. I saw nothing, heard nothing; ing into some abyss unknown to human of the recognized senses of humanity not consciousness, renders it unnecessary. one gave me a hint of a presence; and yet This dispair of communicaton has two my whole body was aware- -so at least it sources - the one simply the conviction seemed of the proximity of another I. of the impossibility of expressing any feelIt was as if some nervous region commen-ing, much more such feeling as mine then surate with my frame, were now for the first time revealed by contact with an object suitable for its apprehension. Like Eliphaz, I felt the hair of my head stand up not from terror, but simply, as it seemed, from the presence and its strangeness. Like others also of whom I have read, who believed themselves in the presence of the disembodied, I could not speak. I tried, but as if the medium for sound had been withdrawn, and an empty gulf lay around me, no word followed, although my very soul was full of the cry Charley! Charley! And alas! in a few moments, like the faint vanishing of an unrealized thought, leaving only the assurance that something half-born from out the unknown had been there, the influence faded and died. It passed from me like the shadow of a cloud, and once more I knew but my poor lonely self, returning to its candles, its open book, its burning fire.

CHAPTER LVIII.

THE DARKEST HOUR.

SUFFERING is perhaps the only preparation for suffering: still I was but poorly prepared for what followed.

was-and is; the other the conviction that only to the heart of love can the sufferings of love speak. The attempt of a lover to move, by the presentation of his own suffering, the heart of her who loves him not, is as unavailing as it is unmanly. The poet who sings most wailfully of the torments of the lover's hell, is but a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal in the ears of her who has at best only a general compassion to meet the song withal possibly only an individual vanity which crowns her with his woes as with the trophies of a conquest. True, he is understood and worshipped by all the other wailful souls in the first infernal circle, as one of the great men of their orderable to put into words full of sweet torment the dire hopelessness of their misery; but for such the singer, singing only for ears eternally deaf to his song, cares nothing; or if for a moment he receive consolation from their sympathy, it is but a passing weakness which the breath of an indignant self-condemnation

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even con

tempt, the next moment sweeps away. In God alone there must be sympathy and cure; but I had not then have I indeed yet found what that cure is? I am at all events now able to write with calmness. Having gathered strength, and a cer- If suffering destroyed itself, as some say, tain quietness which I could not mistake mine ought to have disappeared long ago; for peace, I returned to London towards but to that I can neither pretend nor conthe close of the spring. I had in the in- fess.

terval heard nothing of Mary. The few For the first time, after all I had enletters Marston had sent on had been al-countered, I knew what suffering could be.

It is still at moments an agony as of hell | serpent, be the cure for the sting of its to recall this and the other thought that living countepart? But alas! where was then stung me like a white-hot arrow: the the certainty? Could I slay myself! shafts have long been drawn out, but the This outer breathing form I could dismiss barbed heads are still there. I neither but the pain was not there. I was not stormed nor maddened. I only felt a mad, and I knew that a deeper death than freezing hand lay hold of my heart, and that could give, at least than I had any gripe it closer and closer till I should have assurance that could give, alone could sickened, but that the pain ever stung me bring repose. For, impossible as I had into fresh life; and ever since I have gone always found it actually to believe in about the world with that hard lump immortality, I now found it equally imsomewhere in my bosom into which the possible to believe in annihilation. And griping hand and the griped heart have even if annihilation should be the final grown and stiffened. result, who could tell but it might require ages of a horrible slow-decaying dreamconsciousness, to kill the living thing which felt itself other than its body?

I fled at once back to my solitary house, looking for no relief in its solitude, only the negative comfort of escaping the eyes of men. I could not bear the sight of my fellow-creatures. To say that the world had grown black to me, is as nothing: ceased I will not say to believe in God, for I never dared say that mighty thing but I ceased to hope in God. The universe had grown a negation which yet forced its presence upon me- a death that bred worms. If there were a God anywhere, this universe could be nothing more than his forsaken moth-eaten garment. He was a God who did not care. Order was all an invention of phosphorescent human brains; light itself the mocking smile of a Jupiter over his writhing sacrifices. At times I laughed at the tortures of my own heart, saying to it, "Writhe on, worm; thou deservest thy writhing in that thou writhest. Godless creature, why dost thou not laugh with me? Am I not merry over thee and the world in that ye are both rottenness to the core?" The next moment my heart and I would come together with a shock, and I knew it was myself that scorned myself.

Until now, I had always accepted what seemed the natural and universal repugInance to absolute dissolution, as the strongest argument on the side of immortality; for why should a man shrink from that which belonged to his nature? But now annihilation seemed the one lovely thing, the one sole only lonely thought in which lay no blackness of burning darkness. Oh for one eternal unconscious sleep! the nearest likeness we can cherish of that inconceivable nothingnessever denied by the very thinking of it— by the vain attempt to realize that whose very existence is the knowing nothing of itself! Could that dagger bave insured me such repose, or had there been any draught of Lethe, utter Lethe, whose blessed poison would have assuredly dissipated like a fume this conscious, selftormenting me, I should not now be writhing anew, as in the clutches of an old grief, clasping me like a corpse, stung to simulated life by the galvanic battery of recollection. Vivid as it seems-all I suffer as I write is but a faint phantasm of what I then endured.

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Such being my mood, it will cause no surprise if I say that I too was tempted to suicide; the wonder would have been if it I learned therefore that to some minds had been otherwise. The soft keen curves the argument for immortality drawn from of that fatal dagger, which had not only the apparently universal shrinking from slain Charley but all my hopes for had annihilation must be ineffectual, seeing he lived this horror could not have been they themselves do not shrink from it. - grew almost lovely in my eyes. Until Convince a man that there is no God — or, now it had looked cruel, fiendish, hateful; for I doubt if that be altogether possible but now I would lay it before me and con- -make it, I will say, impossible for him template it. In some griefs there is a won- to hope in God-and it cannot be that derful power of self-contemplation, which annihilation should seem an evil. If there indeed forms their only solace; the mo- is no God, annihilation is the one thing to ment it can set the sorrow away from itself sufficiently to regard it, the tortured heart begins to repose; but suddenly, like a waking tiger, the sorrow leaps again into its lair, and the agony commences anew. The dagger was the type of my grief and its torture: might it not, like the brazen

be longed for with all that might of longing which is the mainspring of human action. In a word it is not immortality the human heart cries out after, but that immortal eternal thought whose life is its life, whose wisdom is its wisdom, whose ways and whose thoughts shall-must

one day become its ways and its thoughts. Dissociate immortality from the living Immortality and it is not a thing to be desired — not a thing that can on those terms, or even on the fancy of those terms, be desired.

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bodily suffering that could hide me from myself; but no illness came. I was a living pain, a conscious ill-being. In a thousand forms those questions would ever recur, but without hope of answer. When I fell asleep from exhaustion, hideous visions But such thoughts as these were far of her with Geoffrey would start me up enough from me then. I lived because I with a great cry, sometimes with a curse despaired of death. I ate by a sort of on my lips. Nor were they the most horblind animal instinct, and so lived. The rible of those dreams in which she would time had been when I would depise my- help him to mock me. Once, and only self for being able to eat in the midst of once, I found myself dreaming the dream emotion; but now I cared so little for the of that night, and I knew that I had emotion even, that eating or not eating dreamed it before. Through palace and had nothing to do with the matter. I ate chapel and charnel-house, I followed her, because meat was set before me; I slept be- ever with a dim sense of awful result; cause sleep came upon me. It was a hor- and when at the last she lifted the shining rible time. My life seemed only a vermicu- veil, instead of the face of Athanasia, the late one, a crawling about of half-thoughts- bare teeth of a skull grinned at me from half-feelings through the corpse of a decay-under a spotted shroud, through which the ing existence. The heart of being was sunlight shone from behind, revealing all withdrawn from me, and my life was but its horrors. I was not mad-my reason the vacant pericardium in which it had had not given way: how remains a maronce throbbed out and sucked in the red vel. fountains of life and gladness.

I would not be thought to have fallen to this all but bottomless depth only because I had lost Mary. Still less was it because of the fact that in her, around whom had gathered all the devotion with which the man in me could regard woman, I had lost all womankind. It was the loss of Mary, as I then judged it, not, I repeat, the fact that I had lost her. It was that she had lost herself. Thence it was, I say, that I lost my hope in God. For, if there were a God, how could he let purity be clasped in the arms of defilement? how could he marry my Athanasia not to a corpse, but to a Plague? Here was the man who had done more to ruin her brother than any but her father, and God had given her to him! I had had — with the commonest of men — some notion of womanly purity -how was it that hers had not instinctively shuddered and shrunk? how was it that the life of it had not taken refuge with death to shun bare contact with the coarse impurity of such a nature as that of Geoffrey Brotherton? My dreams had been dreams indeed! Was my Athanasia dead, or had she never been? In my thought, she had " "said to Corruption, Thou art my father; to the worm, thou art my mother and my sister." Who should henceforth say of any woman that she was impure? She might love him true; but what was she then who was able to love such a man? It was this that stormed the citadel of my hope, and drove me from even thinkimg of a God.

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Gladly would I now have welcomed any

CHAPTER LIX.

THE DAWN.

ALL places were alike to me now for the universe was but one dreary chasm whence I could not escape. One evening I sat by the open window of my chamber, which looked towards those trees and that fatal Moldwarp Hall. My suffering had now grown dull by its own excess, and I had moments of listless vacuity, the nearest approach to peace I had yet experienced. It was a fair evening of early summer but I was utterly careless of nature as of all beyond it. The sky was nothing to me and the earth was all unlovely. There I sat, heavy, but free from torture; a kind of quiet had stolen over me. I was roused by the tiniest breath of wind on my cheek, as if the passing wing of some butterfly had fanned me; and on that faintest motion came a scent as from long-forgotten fields, a scent like as of sweet-peas or wild roses, but of neither: flowers were none nearer me than the gardens of the Hall. I started with a cry. It was the scent of the garments of my Athanasia, as I had dreamed it in my dream! Whence that wind had borne it, who could tell? but in the husk that had overgrown my being it had found a cranny, and through that cranny, with the scent, Nature entered. I looked up to the blue sky, wept, and for the first time fell on my knees. "O God!" I cried, and that was all. But what are the prayers of the whole universe more than expansions of

that one cry? It is not what God can give but alas! I was such a poor creature! A us but God that we want. Call the whole dabbler in the ways of the world, a writer thing fancy if you will; it was at least no of tales which even those who cared to fancy that the next feeling of which I was read them counted fantastic and Utopian, conscious was compassion: from that mo- who was I to weave a single silken thread ment I began to search heaven and earth into the web of her life? How could I and the soul of man and woman for ex-bear her one poorest service? Never in cuses wherewith to clothe the idea of Mary this world could I approach her near Osborne. For weeks and weeks I pon- enough to touch yet once again the hem dered, and by degrees the following conclusions wrought themselves out in my brain:

That she had never seen life as a whole; that her religious theories had ever been eating away and absorbing her life, so preventing her religion from interpenetrating and glorifying it; that in regard to certain facts and consequences she had been left to an ignorance which her innocence rendered profound; that, attracted by the worldly splendour of the offer, her father and mother had urged her compliance, and, broken in spirit by the fate of Charley, and having always been taught that self-denial was in itself a virtue, she had taken the worldly desires of her parents for the will of God, and blindly yielded; that Brotherton was capable, for his ends, of representing himself as possessed of religion enough to satisfy the scruples of her parents, and, such being satisfied, she had resisted her own as evil things.

Whether his hatred of me had any share in his desire to possess her, I hardly thought of inquiring.

Of course I did not for a single moment believe that Mary had had the slightest notion of the bitterness, the torture, the temptation of Satan it would be to me. Doubtless the feeling of her father concerning the death of Charley had seemed to hollow an impassable gulf between us. Worn and weak, and not knowing what she did, my dearest friend had yielded herself to the embrace of my deadliest foe. If he was such as I had too good reason for believing him, she was far more to be pitied than I. Lonely she must be lonely as I for who was there to understand and love her? Bitterly too by this time she must have suffered, for the dove can never be at peace in the bosom of the vulture, or cease to hate the carrion of which he must ever carry about with him at least the disgusting memorials. Alas! I too had been her enemy, and had cried out against her; but now I would love her more and better than ever! Oh! if I knew but something I could do for her, some service which on the bended knees of my spirit I might offer her! I clomb the heights of my grief, and looked abroad,

of her garment. All I could do was to
love her. No-I could and did suffer for
her. Alas! that suffering was only for
myself, and could do nothing for her! It
was indeed some consolation to me that
my misery came from her hand; but if
she knew it, it would but add to her pain.
In my heart I could only pray her pardon
for my wicked and selfish thoughts con-
cerning her, and vow again and ever to re-
gard her as my Athanasia.
- But yes!
there was one thing I could do for her: I
would be a true man for her sake; she
should have some satisfaction in me; I
would once more arise and go to my Fa-
ther.

The instant the thought arose in my mind, I fell down before the possible God in an agony of weeping. All complaint of my own doom had vanished, now that I began to do her the justice of love. Why should I be blessed - here and now at least according to my notions of blessedness? Let the great heart of the universe do with me as it pleased! Let the Supreme take his own time to justify himself to the heart that sought to love him! I gave up myself, was willing to suffer, to be a living pain, so long as he pleased; and the moment I yielded, half the pain was gone; I gave my Athanasia yet again to God, and all might yet, in some high, far-off, better-world-way, be well. I could wait and endure. If only God was, and was God, then it was, or would be, well with Mary - well with me!

But, as I still sat, a flow of sweet sad repentant thought passing gently through my bosom, all at once the self to which, unable to confide it to the care of its own very life, the God conscious of himself an 1 in himself conscious of it, I had been for months offering the sacrifices of despair and indignation, arose in spectral hideousness before me. I saw that I, a child of the infinite, had been worshipping the finiteand therein dragging down the infinite towards the fate of the finite. I do not mean that in Mary Osborne I had been worshipping the finite. It was the eternal, the lovely, the true that in her I had been worshipping: in myself I had been wor

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