Basil

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25th.--All yesterday I had not energy enough even to add a line to
this journal. The strength to control myself seems to have gone from
me. The slightest accidental noise in the house, throws me into a fit
of trembling which I cannot subdue. Surely, if ever the death of one
human being brought release and salvation to another, the death of
Mannion has brought them to me; and yet, the effect left on my mind by
the horror of having seen it, is still not lessened--not even by the
knowledge of all that I have gained by being freed from the deadliest
and most determined enemy that man ever had.

26th.--Visions--half waking, half dreaming--all through the night.
Visions of my last lonely evening in the fishing-hamlet--of Mannion
again--the livid hands whirling to and fro over my head in the
darkness--then, glimpses of home; of Clara reading to me in my
study--then, a change to the room where Margaret died--the sight of
her again, with her long black hair streaming over her face--then,
oblivion for a little while--then, Mannion once more; walking
backwards and forwards by my bedside--his death, seeming like a dream;
his watching me through the night like a reality to which I had just
awakened--Clara walking opposite to him on the other side--Ralph
between them, pointing at me.

27th.--I am afraid my mind is seriously affected; it must have been
fatally weakened before I passed through the terrible scenes among the
rocks of the promontory. My nerves must have suffered far more than I
suspected at the time, under the constant suspense in which I have
been living since I left London, and under the incessant strain and
agitation of writing the narrative of all that has happened to me.
Shall I send a letter to Ralph? No--not yet. It might look like
impatience, like not being able to bear my necessary absence as calmly
and resolutely as I ought.

28th.--A wakeful night--tormented by morbid apprehensions that the
reports about me in the fishing-village may spread to this place; that
inquiries may be made after Mannion; and that I may be suspected of
having caused his death.

29th.--The people at the inn have sent to get me medical advice. The
doctor came to-day. He was kindness itself; but I fell into a fit of
trembling, the moment he entered the room--grew confused in attempting
to tell him what was the matter with me--and, at last, could not
articulate a single word distinctly. He looked very grave as he
examined me and questioned the landlady. I thought I heard him say
something about sending for my friends, but could not be certain.

31st.--Weaker and weaker. I tried in despair, to-day, to write to
Ralph; but knew not how to word the letter. The simplest forms of
expression confused themselves inextricably in my mind. I was obliged
to give it up. It is a surprise to me to find that I can still add
with my pencil to the entries in this Journal! When I am no longer
able to continue, in some sort, the employment to which I have been
used for so many weeks past, what will become of me? Shall I have lost
the only safeguard that keeps me in my senses?

* * * * *

Worse! worse! I have forgotten what day of the month it is; and cannot
remember it for a moment together, when they tell me--cannot even
recollect how long I have been confined to my bed. I feel as if my
heart was wasting away. Oh! if I could only see Clara again.

* * * * *

The doctor and a strange man have been looking among my papers.

My God! am I dying? dying at the very time when there is a chance of
happiness for my future life?

* * * * *

Clara!--far from her--nothing but the little book-marker she worked
for me--leave it round my neck when I--

I can't move, or breathe, or think--if I could only be taken back--if
my father could see me as I am now! Night again--the dreams that will
come--always of home; sometimes, the untried home in heaven, as well
as the familiar home on earth--

* * * * *

Clara! I shall die out of my senses, unless Clara--break the news
gently--it may kill her--

Her face so bright and calm! her watchful, weeping eyes always looking
at me, with a light in them that shines steady through the quivering
tears. While the light lasts, I shall live; when it begins to die
out--*

NOTE BY THE EDITOR.

* There are some lines of writing beyond this point; but they are
illegible.

LETTERS IN CONCLUSION.

LETTER I.

FROM WILLIAM PENHALE, MINER, AT BARTALLOCK, IN CORNWALL, TO HIS WIFE
IN LONDON.

MY DEAR MARY,

I received your letter yesterday, and was more glad than I can say, at
hearing that our darling girl Susan has got such a good place in
London, and likes her new mistress so well. My kind respects to your
sister and her husband, and say I don't grumble about the money that's
been spent in sending you with Susan to take care of her. She was too
young, poor child, to be trusted to make the journey alone; and, as I
was obliged to stop at home and work to keep the other children, and
pay back what we borrowed for the trip, of course you were the proper
person, after me, to go with Susan--whose welfare is a more precious
possession to us than any money, I am sure. Besides, when I married
you, and took you away to Cornwall, I always promised you a trip to
London to see your friends again; and now that promise is performed.
So, once again, don't fret about the money that's been spent: I shall
soon pay it back.

I've got some very strange news for you, Mary. You know how bad work
was getting at the mine, before you went away--so bad, that I thought
to myself after you had gone, "Hadn't I better try what I can do in
the fishing at Treen?" And I went there; and, thank God, have got on
well by it. I can turn my hand to most things; and the fishing has
been very good this year. So I have stuck to my work. And now I come
to my news.

The landlady at the inn here, is, as you know, a sort of relation of
mine. Well, the third afternoon after you had gone, I was stopping to
say a word to her at her own door, on my way to the beach, when we saw
a young gentleman, quite a stranger, coming up to us. He looked very
pale and wild-like, I thought, when he asked for a bed; and then got
faint all of a sudden--so faint and ill, that I was obliged to lend a
hand in getting him upstairs. The next morning I heard he was worse:
and it was just the same story the morning after. He quite frightened
the landlady, he was so restless, and talked to himself in such a
strange way; specially at night. He wouldn't say what was the matter
with him, or who he was: we could only find out that he had been
stopping among the fishing people further west: and that they had not
behaved very well to him at last--more shame for them! I'm sure they
could take no hurt from the poor young fellow, let him be whom he may.
Well, the end of it was that I went and fetched the doctor for him
myself, and when we got into his room, we found him all pale and
trembling, and looking at us, poor soul, as if he thought we meant to
murder him. The doctor gave his complaint some hard names which I
don't know how to write down; but it seems there's more the matter
with his mind than his body, and that he must have had some great
fright which has shaken his nerves all to pieces. The only way to do
him good, as the doctor said, was to have him carefully nursed by his
relations, and kept quiet among people he knew; strange faces about
him being likely to make him worse. The doctor asked where his friends
lived; but he wouldn't say, and, lately, he's got so much worse that
he can't speak clearly to us at all.

Yesterday evening, he gave us all a fright. The doctor hearing me
below, asking after him, said I was to come up stairs and help to move
him to have his bed made. As soon as I raised him up (though I'm sure
I touched him as gently as I could), he fainted dead away. While he
was being brought to, a little piece of something that looked like
card-board, prettily embroidered with beads and silk, came away from a
string that held it round his neck, and dropped off the bedside. I
picked it up; for I remembered the time, Mary, when you and I were
courting, and how precious the least thing was to me that belonged to
you. So I took care of it for him, thinking it might be a keepsake
from his sweetheart. And sure enough, when he came to, he put up his
thin white hands to his neck, and looked so thankful at me when I tied
the little thing again to the string! Just as I had done that, the
doctor beckons me to the other end of the room.

"This won't do," says he to me in a whisper. "If he goes on like this,
he'll lose his reason, if not his life. I must search his papers, to
find out what friends he has; and you must be my witness."

So the doctor opens his little bag, and takes out a square sealed
packet first; then two or three letters tied together; the poor soul
looking all the while as if he longed to prevent us from touching
them. Well, the doctor said there was no occasion to open the packet,
for the direction was the same on all the letters, and the name
corresponded with his initials marked on his linen.

"I'm next to certain this is where he lives, or did live; so this is
where I'll write," says the doctor.

"Shall my wife take the letter, Sir?" says I. "She's in London with
our girl, Susan; and, if his friends should be gone away from where
you are writing to, she may be able to trace them."

"Quite right, Penhale!" says he; "we'll do that. Write to your wife,
and put my letter inside yours."

I did as he told me, at once; and his letter is inside this, with the
direction of the house and the street.

Now, Mary, dear, go at once, and see what you can find out. The
direction on the doctor's letter may be his home; and if it isn't,
there may be people there who can tell you where it is. So go at once,
and let us know directly what luck you have had, for there is no time
to be lost; and if you saw the young gentleman, you would pity him as
much as we do.

This has got to be such a long letter, that I have no room left to
write any more. God bless you, Mary, and God bless my darling Susan!
Give her a kiss for father's sake, and believe me, Your loving
husband,

WILLIAM PENHALE.

-----

LETTER II.

FROM MARY PENHALE TO HER HUSBAND

DEAREST WILLIAM,

Susan sends a hundred kisses, and best loves to you and her brothers
and sisters. She's getting on nicely; and her mistress is as kind and
fond of her as can be. Best respects, too, from my sister Martha, and
her husband. And now I've done giving you all my messages, I'll tell
you some good news for the poor young gentleman who is so bad at
Treen.

As soon as I had seen Susan, and read your letter to her, I went to
the place where the doctor's letter directed me. Such a grand house,
William! I was really afraid to knock at the door. So I plucked up
courage, and gave a pull at the bell; and a very fat, big man, with
his head all plastered over with powder, opened the door, almost
before I had done ringing. "If you please, Sir," says I, showing him
the name on the doctor's letter, "do any friends of this gentleman
live here?" "To be sure they do," says he; "his father and sister live
here: but what do you want to know for?" "I want them to read this
letter," says I. "It's to tell them that the young gentleman is very
bad in health down in our country." "You can't see my master," says
he, "for he's confined to his bed by illness: and Miss Clara is very
poorly too--you had better leave the letter with me." Just as he said
this, an elderly lady crossed the hall (I found out she was the
housekeeper, afterwards), and asked what I wanted. When I told her,
she looked quite startled. "Step this way, ma'am," says she; "you will
do Miss Clara more good than all the doctors put together. But you
must break the news to her carefully, before she sees the letter.
Please to make it out better news than it is, for the young lady is in
very delicate health." We went upstairs--such stair-carpets! I was
almost frightened to step on them, after walking through the dirty
streets. The housekeeper opened a door, and said a few words inside,
which I could not hear, and then let me in where the young lady was.

Oh, William! she had the sweetest, kindest face I ever saw in my life.
But it was so pale, and there was such a sad look in her eyes when she
asked me to sit down, that it went to my heart, when I thought of the
news I had to tell her. I couldn't speak just at first; and I suppose
she thought I was in some trouble--for she begged me not to tell her
what I wanted, till I was better. She said it with such a voice and
such a look, that, like a great fool, I burst out crying, instead of
answering as I ought. But it did me good, though, and made me able to
tell her about her brother (breaking it as gently as I could) before I
gave her the doctor's letter. She never opened it; but stood up before
me as if she was turned to stone--not able to cry, or speak, or move.
It frightened me so, to see her in such a dreadful state, that I
forgot all about the grand house, and the difference there was between
us; and took her in my arms, making her sit down on the sofa by
me--just as I should do, if I was consoling our own Susan under some
great trouble. Well! I soon made her look more like herself,
comforting her in every way I could think of: and she laid her poor
head on my shoulder, and I took and kissed her, (not remembering a bit
about its being a born lady and a stranger that I was kissing); and
the tears came at last, and did her good. As soon as she could speak,
she thanked God her brother was found, and had fallen into kind hands.
She hadn't courage to read the doctor's letter herself, and asked me
to do it. Though he gave a very bad account of the young gentleman, he
said that care and nursing, and getting him away from a strange place
to his own home and among his friends, might do wonders for him yet.
When I came to this part of the letter, she started up, and asked me
to give it to her. Then she inquired when I was going back to
Cornwall; and I said, "as soon as possible," (for indeed, it's time I
was home, William). "Wait; pray wait till I have shown this letter to
my father!" says she. And she ran out of the room with it in her hand.

After some time, she came back with her face all of a flush, like;
looking quite different to what she did before, and saying that I had
done more to make the family happy by coming with that letter, than
she could ever thank me for as she ought. A gentleman followed her in,
who was her eldest brother (she said); the pleasantest, liveliest
gentleman I ever saw. He shook hands as if he had known me all his
life; and told me I was the first person he had ever met with who had
done good in a family by bringing them bad news. Then he asked me
whether I was ready to go to Cornwall the next morning with him, and
the young lady, and a friend of his who was a doctor. I had thought
already of getting the parting over with poor Susan, that very day: so
I said, "Yes." After that, they wouldn't let me go away till I had had
something to eat and drink; and the dear, kind young lady asked me all
about Susan, and where she was living, and about you and the children,
just as if she had known us like neighbours. Poor thing! she was so
flurried, and so anxious for the next morning, that it was all the
gentleman could do to keep her quiet, and prevent her falling into a
sort of laughing and crying fit, which it seems she had been liable to
lately. At last they let me go away: and I went and stayed with Susan
as long as I could before I bid her good-bye. She bore the parting
bravely--poor, dear child! God in heaven bless her; and I'm sure he
will; for a better daughter no mother ever had.

My dear husband, I am afraid this letter is very badly written; but
the tears are in my eyes, thinking of Susan; and I feel so wearied and
flurried after what has happened. We are to go off very early
to-morrow morning in a carriage, which is to be put on the railway.
Only think of my riding home in a fine carriage, with
gentlefolks!--how surprised Willie, and Nancy, and the other children
will be! I shall get to Treen almost as soon as my letter; but I
thought I would write, so that you might have the good news, the first
moment it could get to you, to tell the poor young gentleman. I'm sure
it must make him better, only to hear that his brother and sister are
coming to fetch him home.

I can't write any more, dear William, I'm so very tired; except that I
long to see you and the little ones again; and that I am,

Your loving and dutiful wife,
MARY PENHALE.

LETTER III.

TO MR. JOHN BERNARD, FROM THE WRITER OF THE FORE-GOING AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

[This letter is nearly nine years later in date than the letters which
precede it.]

Lanreath Cottage, Breconshire.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

I find, by your last letter, that you doubt whether I still remember
the circumstances under which I made a certain promise to you, more
than eight years ago. You are mistaken: not one of those circumstances
has escaped my memory. To satisfy you of this, I will now recapitulate
them. You will own, I think, that I have forgotten nothing.

After my removal from Cornwall (shall I ever forget the first sight of
Clara and Ralph at my bedside!), when the nervous malady from which I
suffered so long, had yielded to the affectionate devotion of my
family--aided by the untiring exercise of your skill--one of my first
anxieties was to show that I could gratefully appreciate your
exertions for my good, by reposing the same confidence in you, which I
should place in my nearest and dearest relatives. From the time when
we first met at the hospital, your services were devoted to me,
through much misery of mind and body, with the delicacy and the
self-denial of a true friend. I felt that it was only your due that
you should know by what trials I had been reduced to the situation in
which you found me, when you accompanied my brother and sister to
Cornwall--I felt this; and placed in your hands, for your own private
perusal, the narrative which I had written of my error and of its
terrible consequences. To tell you all that had happened to me, with
my own lips, was more than I could do then--and even after this lapse
of years, would be more than I could do now.

After you had read the narrative, you urged me, on returning it into
my possession, to permit its publication during my lifetime. I granted
the justness of the reasons which led you to counsel me thus; but I
told you, at the same time, that an obstacle, which I was bound to
respect, would prevent me from following your advice. While my father
lived, I could not suffer a manuscript in which he was represented (no
matter under what excess of provocation) as separating himself in the
bitterest hostility from his own son, to be made public property. I
could not suffer events of which we never afterwards spoke ourselves,
to be given to others in the form of a printed narrative which might
perhaps fall under his own eye. You acknowledged, I remember, the
justice of these considerations and promised, in case I died before
him, to keep back my manuscript from publication as long as my father
lived. In binding yourself to that engagement, however, you
stipulated, and I agreed, that I should reconsider your arguments in
case I outlived him. This was my promise, and these were the
circumstances under which it was made. You will allow, I think, that
my memory is more accurate than you had imagined it to be.

And now, you write to remind me of _my_ part of our
agreement--forbearing, with your accustomed delicacy, to introduce the
subject, until more than six months have elapsed since my father's
death. You have done well. I have had time to feel all the consolation
afforded to me by the remembrance that, for years past, my life was of
some use in sweetening my father's; that his death has occurred in the
ordinary course of Nature; and that I never, to my own knowledge, gave
him any cause to repent the full and loving reconciliation which took
place between us, as soon as we could speak together freely after my
return to home.

Still I am not answering your question:--Am I now willing to permit
the publication of my narrative, provided all names and places
mentioned in it remained concealed, and I am known to no one but
yourself, Ralph, and Clara, as the writer of my own story? I reply
that I am willing. In a few days, you will receive the manuscript by a
safe hand. Neither my brother nor my sister object to its being made
public on the terms I have mentioned; and I feel no hesitation in
accepting the permission thus accorded to me. I have not glossed over
the flightiness of Ralph's character; but the brotherly kindness and
manly generosity which lie beneath it, are as apparent, I hope, in my
narrative as they are in fact. And Clara, dear Clara!--all that I have
said of her is only to be regretted as unworthy of the noblest subject
that my pen, or any other pen, can have to write on.

One difficulty, however, still remains:--How are the pages which I am
about to send you to be concluded? In the novel-reading sense of the
word, my story has no real conclusion. The repose that comes to all of
us after trouble--to _me,_ a repose in life: to others, how often a
repose only in the grave!--is the end which must close this
autobiography: an end, calm, natural, and uneventful; yet not,
perhaps, devoid of all lesson and value. Is it fit that I should set
myself, for the sake of effect, to _make_ a conclusion, and terminate
by fiction what has begun, and thus far, has proceeded in truth? In
the interests of Art, as well as in the interests of Reality, surely
not!

Whatever remains to be related after the last entry in my journal,
will be found expressed in the simplest, and therefore, the best form,
by the letters from William and Mary Penhale, which I send you with
this. When I revisited Cornwall, to see the good miner and his wife, I
found, in the course of the inquiries which I made as to the past,
that they still preserved the letters they had written about me, while
I lay ill at Treen. I asked permission to take copies of these two
documents, as containing materials, which I could but ill supply from
my own resources, for filling up a gap in my story. They at once
consented; telling me that they had always kept each other's letters
after marriage, as carefully as they kept them before, in token that
their first affection remained to the last unchanged. At the same time
they entreated me, with the most earnest simplicity, to polish their
own homely expressions; and turn them, as they phrased, it, into
proper reading. You may easily imagine that I knew better than to do
this; and you will, I am sure, agree with me that both the letters I
send should be printed as literally as they were copied by my hand.

Having now provided for the continuation of my story to the period of
my return home, I have a word or two to say on the subject of
preparing the autobiography for press. Failing in the resolution, even
now, to look over my manuscript again, I leave the corrections it
requires to others--but on one condition. Let none of the passages in
which I have related events, or described characters, be either
softened or suppressed. I am well aware of the tendency, in some
readers, to denounce truth itself as improbable, unless their own
personal experience has borne witness to it; and it is on this very
account that I am firm in my determination to allow of no cringing
beforehand to anticipated incredulities. What I have written is Truth;
and it shall go into the world as Truth should--entirely
uncompromised. Let my style be corrected as completely as you will;
but leave characters and events which are taken from realities, real
as they are.

In regard to the surviving persons with whom this narrative associates
me, I have little to say which it can concern the reader to know. The
man whom I have presented in the preceding pages under the name of
Sherwin is, I believe, still alive, and still residing in
France--whither he retreated soon after the date of the last events
mentioned in my autobiography. A new system had been introduced into
his business by his assistant, which, when left to his own unaided
resources, he failed to carry out. His affairs became involved; a
commercial crisis occurred, which he was wholly unable to meet; and he
was made a bankrupt, having first dishonestly secured to himself a
subsistence for life, out of the wreck of his property. I accidentally
heard of him, a few years since, as maintaining among the English
residents of the town he then inhabited, the character of a man who
had undeservedly suffered from severe family misfortunes, and who bore
his afflictions with the most exemplary piety and resignation.

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