Basil

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Hearing, but not heeding him, I left the house. No voice that ever
spoke, could have called me back from the course on which I was now
bound. The waiter watched me vigilantly from the door, as I went out.
Seeing this, I made a circuit, before I returned to the spot where, as
I had suspected, the cab they had ridden in was still waiting for
them.

The driver was asleep inside. I awoke him; told him I had been sent to
say that he was not wanted again that night: and secured his ready
departure, by at once paying him on his own terms. He drove off; and
the first obstacle on the fatal path which I had resolved to tread
unopposed, was now removed.

As the cab disappeared from my sight, I looked up at the sky. It was
growing very dark. The ragged black clouds, fantastically parted from
each other in island shapes over the whole surface of the heavens,
were fast drawing together into one huge, formless, lowering mass, and
had already hidden the moon for, good. I went back to the street, and
stationed myself in the pitch darkness of a passage which led down a
mews, situated exactly opposite to the hotel.

In the silence and obscurity, in the sudden pause of action while I
now waited and watched, my Thought rose to my lips, and my speech
mechanically formed it into words. I whispered softly to myself: _I
will kill him when he comes out._ My mind never swerved for an instant
from this thought--never swerved towards myself; never swerved towards
_her._ Grief was numbed at my heart; and the consciousness of my own
misery was numbed with grief. Death chills all before it--and Death
and my Thought were one.

Once, while I stood on the watch, a sharp agony of suspense tried me
fiercely.

Just as I had calculated that the time was come which would force them
to depart, in order to return to North Villa by the appointed hour, I
heard the slow, heavy, regular tramp of a footstep advancing along the
street. It was the policeman of the district going his round. As he
approached the entrance to the mews he paused, yawned, stretched his
arms, and began to whistle a tune. If Mannion should come out while he
was there! My blood seemed to stagnate on its course, while I thought
that this might well happen. Suddenly, the man ceased whistling,
looked steadily up and down the street, and tried the door of a house
near him--advanced a few steps--then paused again, and tried another
door--then muttered to himself, in drowsy tones--"I've seen all safe
here already: it's the other street I forgot just now." He turned, and
retraced his way. I fixed my aching eyes vigilantly on the hotel,
while I heard the sound of his footsteps grow fainter and fainter in
the distance. It ceased altogether; and still there was no
change--still the man whose life I was waiting for, never appeared.

Ten minutes after this, so far as I can guess, the door opened; and I
heard Mannion's voice, and the voice of the lad who had let me in.
"Look about you before you go out," said the waiter, speaking in the
passage; "the street's not safe for you." Disbelieving, or affecting
to disbelieve, what he heard, Mannion interrupted the waiter angrily;
and endeavoured to reassure his companion in guilt, by asserting that
the warning was nothing but an attempt to extort money by way of
reward. The man retorted sulkily, that he cared nothing for the
gentleman's money, or the gentleman either. Immediately afterwards an
inner door in the house banged violently; and I knew that Mannion had
been left to his fate.

There was a momentary silence; and then I heard him tell his
accomplice that he would go alone to look for the cab, and that she
had better close the door and wait quietly in the passage till he came
back. This was done. He walked out into the street. It was after
twelve o'clock. No sound of a strange footfall was audible--no soul
was at hand to witness, and prevent, the coming struggle. His life was
mine. His death followed him as fast as my feet followed, while I was
now walking on his track.

He looked up and down, from the entrance to the street, for the cab.
Then, seeing that it was gone, he hastily turned back. At that instant
I met him face to face. Before a word could be spoken, even before a
look could be exchanged, my hands were on his throat.

He was a taller and heavier man than I was; and struggled with me,
knowing that he was struggling for his life. He never shook my grasp
on him for a moment; but he dragged me out into the road--dragged me
away eight or ten yards from the street. The heavy gasps of
approaching suffocation beat thick on my forehead from his open mouth:
he swerved to and fro furiously, from side to side; and struck at me,
swinging his clenched fists high above his head. I stood firm, and
held him away at arm's length. As I dug my feet into the ground to
steady myself, I heard the crunching of stones--the road had been
newly mended with granite. Instantly, a savage purpose goaded into
fury the deadly resolution by which I was possessed. I shifted my hold
to the back of his neck, and the collar of his coat, and hurled him,
with the whole impetus of the raging strength that was let loose in
me, face downwards, on to the stones.

In the mad triumph of that moment, I had already stooped towards him,
as he lay insensible beneath me, to lift him again, and beat out of
him, on the granite, not life only, but the semblance of humanity as
well; when, in the blank stillness that followed the struggle, I heard
the door of the hotel in the street open once more. I left him
directly, and ran back from the square--I knew not with what motive,
or what idea--to the spot.

On the steps of the house, on the threshold of that accursed place,
stood the woman whom God's minister had given to me in the sight of
God, as my wife.

One long pang of shame and despair shot through my heart as I looked
at her, and tortured out of its trance the spirit within me. Thousands
on thousands of thoughts seemed to be whirling in the wildest
confusion through and through my brain--thoughts, whose track was a
track of fire--thoughts that struck me with a hellish torment of
dumbness, at the very time when I would have purchased with my life
the power of a moment's speech. Voiceless and tearless, I went up to
her, and took her by the arm, and drew her away from the house. There
was some vague purpose in me, as I did this, of never quitting my hold
of her, never letting her stir from me by so much as an inch, until I
had spoken certain words to her. What words they were, and when I
should utter them, I could not tell.

The cry for mercy was on her lips, but the instant our eyes met, it
died away in long, low, hysterical moanings. Her cheeks were ghastly,
her features were rigid, her eyes glared like an idiot's; guilt and
terror had made her hideous to look upon already.

I drew her onward a few paces towards the Square. Then I stopped,
remembering the body that lay face downwards on the road. The savage
strength of a few moments before, had left me from the time when I
first saw her. I now reeled where I stood, from sheer physical
weakness. The sound of her pantings and shudderings, of her abject
inarticulate murmurings for mercy, struck me with a supernatural
terror. My fingers trembled round her arm, the perspiration dripped
down my face, like rain; I caught at the railings by my side, to keep
myself from falling. As I did so, she snatched her arm from my grasp,
as easily as if I had been a child; and, with a cry for help, fled
towards the further end of the street.

Still, the strange instinct of never losing hold of her, influenced
me. I followed, staggering like a drunken man. In a moment, she was
out of my reach; in another, out of my sight. I went on, nevertheless;
on, and on, and on, I knew not whither. I lost all ideas of time and
distance. Sometimes I went round and round the same streets, over and
over again. Sometimes I hurried in one direction, straight forward.
Wherever I went, it seemed to me that she was still just before; that
her track and my track were one; that I had just lost my hold of her,
and that she was just starting on her flight.

I remember passing two men in this way, in some great thoroughfare.
They both stopped, turned, and walked a few steps after me. One
laughed at me, as a drunkard. The other, in serious tones, told him to
be silent; for I was not drunk, but mad--he had seen my face as I
passed under a gas-lamp, and he knew that I was mad.

"MAD!"--that word, as I heard it, rang after me like a voice of
judgment. "MAD!"--a fear had come over me, which, in all its frightful
complication, was expressed by that one word--a fear which, to the man
who suffers it, is worse even than the fear of death; which no human
language ever has conveyed, or ever will convey, in all its horrible
reality, to others. I had pressed onward, hitherto, because I saw a
vision that led me after it--a beckoning shadow, ahead, darker even
than the night darkness. I still pressed on, now; but only because I
was afraid to stop.

I know not how far I had gone, when my strength utterly failed me, and
I sank down helpless, in a lonely place where the houses were few and
scattered, and trees and fields were dimly discernible in the
obscurity beyond. I hid my face in my hands, and tried to assure
myself that I was still in possession of my senses. I strove hard to
separate my thoughts; to distinguish between my recollections; to
extricate from the confusion within me any one idea, no matter
what--and I could not do it. In that awful struggle for the mastery
over my own mind, all that had passed, all the horror of that horrible
night, became as nothing to me. I raised myself, and looked up again,
and tried to steady my reason by the simplest means--even by
endeavouring to count all the houses within sight. The darkness
bewildered me. Darkness?--_Was_ it dark? or was day breaking yonder,
far away in the murky eastern sky? Did I know what I saw? Did I see
the same thing for a few moments together? What was this under me?
Grass? yes! cold, soft, dewy grass. I bent down my forehead upon it,
and tried, for the last time, to steady my faculties by praying; tried
if I could utter the prayer which I had known and repeated every day
from childhood--the Lord's Prayer. The Divine Words came not at my
call--no! not one of them, from the beginning to the end! I started up
on my knees. A blaze of lurid sunshine flashed before my eyes; a
hell-blaze of brightness, with fiends by millions, raining down out of
it on my head; then a rayless darkness--the darkness of the
blind--then God's mercy at last--the mercy of utter oblivion.

* * * * *

When I recovered my consciousness, I was lying on the couch in my own
study. My father was supporting me on the pillow; the doctor had his
fingers on my pulse; and a policeman was telling them where he had
found me, and how he had brought me home.

PART III.

I.

WHEN the blind are operated on for the restoration of sight, the same
succouring hand which has opened to them the visible world,
immediately shuts out the bright prospect again, for a time. A bandage
is passed over the eyes, lest in the first tenderness of the recovered
sense, it should be fatally affected by the sudden transition from
darkness to light. But between the awful blank of total privation of
vision, and the temporary blank of vision merely veiled, there lies
the widest difference. In the moment of their restoration, the blind
have had one glimpse of light, flashing on them in an overpowering
gleam of brightness, which the thickest, closest veiling cannot
extinguish. The new darkness is not like the void darkness of old; it
is filled with changing visions of brilliant colours and ever-varying
forms, rising, falling, whirling hither and thither with every second.
Even when the handkerchief is passed over them, the once sightless
eyes, though bandaged fast, are yet not blinded as they were before.

It was so with my mental vision. After the utter oblivion and darkness
of a deep swoon, consciousness flashed like light on my mind, when I
found myself in my father's presence, and in my own home. But, almost
at the very moment when I first awakened to the bewildering influence
of that sight, a new darkness fell upon my faculties--a darkness, this
time, which was not utter oblivion; a peopled darkness, like that
which the bandage casts over the opened eyes of the blind.

I had sensations, I had thoughts, I had visions, now--but they all
acted in the frightful self-concentration of delirium. The lapse of
time, the march of events, the alternation of day and night, the
persons who moved about me, the words they spoke, the offices of
kindness they did for me--all these were annihilated from the period
when I closed my eyes again, after having opened them for an instant
on my father, in my own study.

My first sensation (how soon it came after I had been brought home, I
know not) was of a terrible heat; a steady, blazing heat, which seemed
to have shrivelled and burnt up the whole of the little world around
me, and to have left me alone to suffer, but never to consume in it.
After this, came a quick, restless, unintermittent toiling of obscure
thought, ever in the same darkened sphere, ever on the same
impenetrable subject, ever failing to reach some distant and visionary
result. It was as if something were imprisoned in my mind, and moving
always to and fro in it--moving, but never getting free.

Soon, these thoughts began to take a form that I could recognise.

In the clinging heat and fierce seething fever, to which neither
waking nor sleeping brought a breath of freshness or a dream of
change, I began to act my part over again, in the events that had
passed, but in a strangely altered character. Now, instead of placing
implicit trust in others, as I had done; instead of failing to
discover a significance and a warning in each circumstance as it
arose, I was suspicious from the first--suspicious of Margaret, of her
father, of her mother, of Mannion, of the very servants in the house.
In the hideous phantasmagoria of my own calamity on which I now
looked, my position was reversed. Every event of the doomed year of my
probation was revived. But the doom itself, the night-scene of horror
through which I had passed, had utterly vanished from my memory. This
lost recollection, it was the one unending toil of my wandering mind
to recover, and I never got it back. None who have not suffered as I
suffered then, can imagine with what a burning rage of determination I
followed past events in my delirium, one by one, for days and nights
together,--followed, to get to the end which I knew was beyond, but
which I never could see, not even by glimpses, for a moment at a time.

However my visions might alter in their course of succession, they
always began with the night when Mannion returned from the continent
to North Villa. I stood again in the drawing-room; I saw him enter; I
marked the slight confusion of Margaret; and instantly doubted her. I
noticed his unwillingness to meet her eye or mine; I looked on the
sinister stillness of his face; and suspected him. From that moment,
love vanished, and hatred came in its place. I began to watch; to
garner up slight circumstances which confirmed my suspicions; to wait
craftily for the day when I should discover, judge, and punish them
both--the day of disclosure and retribution that never came.

Sometimes, I was again with Mannion, in his house, on the night of the
storm. I detected in every word he spoke an artful lure to trap me
into trusting him as my second father, more than as my friend. I heard
in the tempest sounds which mysteriously interrupted, or mingled
with, my answers, voices supernaturally warning me of my enemy, each
time that I spoke to him. I saw once more the hideous smile of triumph
on his face, as I took leave of him on the doorstep: and saw it, this
time, not as an illusion produced by a flash of lightning, but as a
frightful reality which the lightning disclosed.

Sometimes, I was again in the garden at North Villa accidentally
overhearing the conversation between Margaret and her
mother--overhearing what deceit she was willing to commit, for the
sake of getting a new dress--then going into the room, and seeing her
assume her usual manner on meeting me, as if no such words as I had
listened to but the moment before, had ever proceeded from her lips.
Or, I saw her on that other morning, when, to revenge the death of her
bird, she would have killed with her own hand the one pet companion
that her sick mother possessed. Now, no generous, trusting love
blinded me to the real meaning of such events as these. Now, instead
of regarding them as little weaknesses of beauty, and little errors of
youth, I saw them as timely warnings, which bade me remember when the
day of my vengeance came, that in the contriving of the iniquity on
which they were both bent, the woman had been as vile as the man.

Sometimes, I was once more on my way to North Villa, after my week's
absence at our country house. I saw again the change in Margaret since
I had left her--the paleness, the restlessness, the appearance of
agitation. I took the hand of Mannion, and started as I felt its
deadly coldness, and remarked the strange alteration in his manner.
When they accounted for these changes by telling me that both had been
ill, in different ways, since my departure, I detected the miserable
lie at once; I knew that an evil advantage had been taken of my
absence; that the plot against me was fast advancing towards
consummation: and that, at the sight of their victim, even the two
wretches who were compassing my dishonour could not repress all
outward manifestation of their guilt.

Sometimes, the figure of Mrs. Sherwin appeared to me, wan and weary,
and mournful with a ghostly mournfulness. Again I watched her, and
listened to her; but now with eager curiosity, with breathless
attention. Once more, I saw her shudder when Mannion's cold eyes
turned on her face--I marked the anxious, imploring look that she cast
on Margaret and on me--I heard her confused, unwilling answer, when I
inquired the cause of her dislike of the man in whom her husband
placed the most implicit trust--I listened to her abrupt, inexplicable
injunction to "watch continually over my wife, and keep bad people
from her." All these different circumstances occurred again as vividly
as in the reality; but I did not now account for them, as I had once
accounted for them, by convincing myself that Mrs. Sherwin's mind was
wandering, and that her bodily sufferings had affected her intellect.
I saw immediately, that she suspected Mannion, and dared not openly
confess her suspicions; I saw, that in the stillness, and abandonment,
and self-concentration of her neglected life, she had been watching
more vigilantly than others had watched; I detected in every one of
her despised gestures, and looks, and halting words, the same
concealed warning ever lying beneath the surface; I knew they had not
succeeded in deceiving her; I was determined they should not succeed
in deceiving me.

It was oftenest at this point, that my restless memory recoiled before
the impenetrable darkness which forbade it to see further--to see on
to the last evening, to the fatal night. It was oftenest at this
point, that I toiled and struggled back, over and over again, to seek
once more the lost events of the End, through the events of the
Beginning. How often my wandering thoughts thus incessantly and
desperately traced and retraced their way over their own fever track,
I cannot tell: but there came a time when they suddenly ceased to
torment me; when the heavy burden that was on my mind fell off; when a
sudden strength and fury possessed me, and I plunged down through a
vast darkness into a world whose daylight was all radiant flame. Giant
phantoms mustered by millions, flashing white as lightning in the
ruddy air. They rushed on me with hurricane speed; their wings fanned
me with fiery breezes; and the echo of their thunder-music was like
the groaning and rending of an earthquake, as they tore me away with
them on their whirlwind course.

Away! to a City of Palaces, to measureless halls, and arches, and
domes, soaring one above another, till their flashing ruby summits are
lost in the burning void, high overhead. On! through and through these
mountain-piles, into countless, limitless corridors, reared on pillars
lurid and rosy as molten lava. Far down the corridors rise visions of
flying phantoms, ever at the same distance before us--their raving
voices clanging like the hammers of a thousand forges. Still on and
on; faster and faster, for days, years, centuries together, till there
comes, stealing slowly forward to meet us, a shadow--a vast, stealthy,
gliding shadow--the first darkness that has ever been shed over that
world of blazing light! It comes nearer--nearer and nearer softly,
till it touches the front ranks of our phantom troop. Then in an
instant, our rushing progress is checked: the thunder-music of our
wild march stops; the raving voices of the spectres ahead, cease; a
horror of blank stillness is all about us--and as the shadow creeps
onward and onward, until we are enveloped in it from front to rear, we
shiver with icy cold under the fiery air and amid the lurid lava
pillars which hem us in on either side.

A silence, like no silence ever known on earth; a darkening of the
shadow, blacker than the blackest night in the thickest wood--a
pause--then, a sound as of the heavy air being cleft asunder; and
then, an apparition of two figures coming on out of the shadow--two
monsters stretching forth their gnarled yellow talons to grasp at us;
leaving on their track a green decay, oozing and shining with a sickly
light. Beyond and around me, as I stood in the midst of them, the
phantom troop dropped into formless masses, while the monsters
advanced. They came close to me; and I alone, of all the myriads
around, changed not at their approach. Each laid a talon on my
shoulder--each raised a veil which was one hideous net-work of twining
worms. I saw through the ghastly corruption of their faces the look
that told me who they were--the monstrous iniquities incarnate in
monstrous forms; the fiend-souls made visible in
fiend-shapes--Margaret and Mannion!

A moment more! and I was alone with those two. Not a wreck of the
phantom-multitude remained; the towering city, the gleaming corridors,
the fire-bright radiance had vanished. We stood on a wilderness--a
still, black lake of dead waters was before us; a white, faint, misty
light shone on us. Outspread over the noisome ground lay the ruins of
a house, rooted up and overthrown to its foundations. The demon
figures, still watching on either side of me, drew me slowly forward
to the fallen stones, and pointed to two dead bodies lying among them.

My father!--my sister!--both cold and still, and whiter than the white
light that showed them to me. The demons at my side stretched out
their crooked talons, and forbade me to kneel before my father, or to
kiss Clara's wan face, before I went to torment. They struck me
motionless where I stood--and unveiled their hideous faces once more,
jeering at me in triumph. Anon, the lake of black waters heaved up and
overflowed, and noiselessly sucked us away into its central
depths--depths that were endless; depths of rayless darkness, in which
we slowly eddied round and round, deeper and deeper down at every
turn. I felt the bodies of my father and my sister touching me in cold
contact: I stretched out my arms to clasp them and sink with them; and
the demon pair glided between us, and separated me from them. This
vain striving to join myself to my dead kindred when we touched each
other in the slow, endless whirlpool, ever continued and was ever
frustrated in the same way. Still we sank apart, down the black gulphs
of the lake; still there was no light, no sound, no change, no pause
of repose--and this was eternity: the eternity of Hell!

* * * * *

Such was one dream-vision out of many that I saw. It must have been at
this time that men were set to watch me day and night (as I afterwards
heard), in order that I might be held down in my bed, when a paroxysm
of convulsive strength made me dangerous to myself and to all about
me. The period too when the doctors announced that the fever had
seized on my brain, and was getting the better of their skill, must
have been _this_ period.

But though they gave up my life as lost, I was not to die. There came
a time, at last, when the gnawing fever lost its hold; and I awoke
faintly one morning to a new existence--to a life frail and helpless
as the life of a new-born babe.

I was too weak to move, to speak, to open my eyes, to exert in the
smallest degree any one faculty, bodily or mental, that I possessed.
The first sense of which I regained the use, was the sense of hearing;
and the first sound that I recognised, was of a light footstep which
mysteriously approached, paused, and then retired again gently outside
my door. The hearing of this sound was my first pleasure, the waiting
for its repetition my first source of happy expectation, since I had
been ill. Once more the footsteps approached--paused a moment--then
seemed to retire as before--then returned slowly. A sigh, very faint
and trembling; a whisper of which I could not yet distinguish the
import, caught my ear--and after that, there was silence. Still I
waited (oh, how happily and calmly!) to hear the whisper soon
repeated, and to hear it better when it next came. Ere long, for the
third time, the footsteps advanced, and the whispering accents sounded
again. I could now hear that they pronounced my name--once, twice,
three times--very softly and imploringly, as if to beg the answer
which I was still too weak to give. But I knew the voice: I knew it
was Clara's. Long after it had ceased, the whisper lingered gently on
my ear, like a lullaby that alternately soothed me to slumber, and
welcomed me to wakefulness. It seemed to be thrilling through my frame
with a tender, reviving influence--the same influence which the
sunshine had, weeks afterwards, when I enjoyed it for the first time
out of doors.

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