CHAPTER VI.
TELLS OF MY FIRST AWFUL AWAKENING IN HELL, AND OF THE SHAMEFUL SIN WHICH BROUGHT ME THITHER.
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and, proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
Shakespeare's 129th Sonnet.
Time, which is the name we give to our petty portion of Eternity, has no existence in that Eternity which has been defined as the "lifetime of the Almighty"; and so it was that though I remained in the spirit realm but two days, it seemed to me as if weeks, months, years, had elapsed between my death and the hour when I first became conscious of that death.
I have told you that as I lay a-dying, I felt my life slowly but steadily ebbing away, until at last there came a time—the moment of death, I believe it to have been—when the outward and deathward-setting tide seemed to reach its climax, and when I felt myself swept shoreward and lifeward again. I know there are some who will say that the turning-point which I have called the moment of death was nothing more or less than the moment which marked the decline of the disease, and the return of vitality, but this theory, plausible and even probable as it seems, leaves the strangest part of my experience unexplained, and I cannot entertain it; neither, I think, will the reader, when he has heard me out.
Whether my death was succeeded by a season of slumber, in which certain divinely ordered dreams were caused to be dreamed by me, or whether God caused the hands on the dial of Time to be put back for a space in order that I might see the past as He sees it, I neither knew nor know; but I distinctly remember that the first thing of which I was conscious after my dissolution was that the events of my past life were rising before me. Yes, it was my past life, which I saw in that awful moment, my past life standing out in its own naked and intolerable horror, an abomination in the sight of God, and of my own conscience.
The hands on the dial of Time went back half a score, a score, and finally a score and a half of years, and once more I was a young man of twenty-one. The chambers in which I was then living were situated in one of the well-known Inns off Holborn, and the housekeeper of the wing where I was quartered was a widow, who, with her daughter Dorothy, a girl of seventeen, resided on the premises.
As it was Dorothy's part to wait upon the occupants of the chambers, she had occasion to come to my room several times in the day, and I could not help noticing her loveliness, which, indeed, reminded me not a little of my favourite Greuze picture. When I first knew her she seemed maidenly and modest, but was vain beyond a question, and her manner to the opposite sex was shy and self-conscious, with occasional dashes of an artless and even childish coquetry which was most bewitching. By this girl I was irresistibly and fatally fascinated. I was young, susceptible, and singularly impressionable to female beauty, whilst the loneliness and the monotony of the life I was leading were in themselves elements of considerable danger; and to make matters worse, it was only too evident that Dorothy was not indifferent to my admiration. As I knew that it was but the fascination of form and feature which attracted me, and that nothing but mischief was likely to come of such a passion, I strove my hardest to steel myself against her; but Fate seemed adverse, for one summer evening while I was sitting in my study, waiting for a friend, there burst over London the most fearful thunderstorm which I have ever witnessed. The lightning was so vivid and the thunder so terrific, that even I, who am by no means nervous about such things, felt strangely moved and unsettled; and I was not a little glad, therefore, to hear what I took to be my friend's knock. When I went to the door, however, I found that it was not he, but Dorothy, and that she was white with fear, and trembling from head to foot. "Oh, sir," she sobbed, "mother's out, and there's no one else in but you, and I'm so frightened that I can't stay by myself. If you'll only let me be here till she comes back, I'll be very quiet and not disturb you in any way."
Knowing my weakness and her great beauty, I had up to that moment studiously refrained from allowing so much as a wandering glance to rest on her; but I could not avoid looking at her now, and I remember that her eyes, bright and pitiful and beseeching, "her bosom's gentle neighbourhood," and the very consciousness of her presence as she stood before me, set my heart beating so wildly, that it was all I could do to refrain from taking her in my arms then and there, and telling her (forgive the profanation of a holy word) that I "loved" her.
The virtuous determination to be on our guard against some besetting sin or constitutional failing comes to us generally, not during the moment of temptation, when we are most in need of such a moral reminder, but after the event, and when the determination is too late; but on this occasion I heard the inward monitor speak out a timely warning, and that with no uncertain tongue. By a great effort I nerved myself to my accustomed control, and though I knew Dorothy would think me churlish and cruel, I told her coldly that she had better go downstairs and wait the return of her mother. The words had scarcely time to pass my lips (I doubt, indeed, if she could have heard them), before they were lost in a terrific thunder-peal, following almost instantaneously upon a blinding flash of lightning. It had been better for both of us, as I have often since thought, if that flash had struck us dead as we stood there; for, with one cry of passion and fear, and calling me by my name—my Christian name—in a tone that none could misinterpret, Dorothy flung her arms around me, and the next moment I found myself pressing her to my heart with a fierce and almost savage exultation, and telling her, amid a score of burning kisses, that I loved her.
Almost immediately afterwards we heard the opening of doors, which indicated her mother's home-coming, but not before Dorothy had time to tell me in return that she too loved me, and had always done so. And then she slipped from my arms, and tripped away with tumbled hair and flaming cheeks to join her mother, turning as she reached the door to look back with a shy smile and to say—innocently and unsuspectingly enough as I knew well—that the room directly over mine was her own, and that she often lay awake at night listening to my restless pacing to and fro, and wondering what could keep me up so late.
Of the hellish thought which rose in my heart as I listened—the thought that she would not refuse me admittance to her room should I seek her there that night—she could have had no suspicion, for it was a thought of which, at any other time, I should have deemed myself incapable. I remember that I did not fling the hateful suggestion from me, as I should have done an hour earlier, although, passion-maddened as I was, I recoiled from it, and vowed that I would never entertain it. But I brooded over the horrible idea, and sketched out how easily it might be acted upon, were I the foul thing to do it, which I still declared to myself I was not. Had I arisen in trembling horror, and thrust the vile conception from me, she and I might even then have been saved, but I let it enter and take up its abode in my heart, and from thenceforward I strove to drive it forth in vain.
Oh! in God's name, in the name of Love and Truth and Purity, when any such evil or impure thought so much as casts the shadow of its approaching presence on your soul, then, in all the strength of your manhood, arise and thrust it out, ere it be too late! Argue not, delay not, listen not, but hurl the loathsome whisper from you as though it were some poisonous reptile, and bid it be gone for ever!
From the moment that I gave audience to that messenger of Satan, hell and its furies laid hold on me. Sometimes I seemed to be gaining ground, sometimes I seemed to be recovering my balance of mind. "I will do the right!" I cried, "I will not be guilty of this accursed thing!" but even as I strove to fix my feeble purpose to the sticking point, some moral screw seemed to give way within me, and I felt that purpose ebbing away like life-blood from a fatal wound.
At last the struggle seemed to cease, and there was borne in upon me a sense of peace, deep, and sweet, and restful. I know now that it was but exhaustion consequent upon the strain I had endured, that it was nothing more than the inevitable reaction from the high soul-tension to which I had been subjected. To me, however, it seemed as the very peace of God and as a sign from heaven, and lulled into a false security, I let my thoughts wander back to dwell again upon the temptation. Need I tell the remainder of my story? Need I say that my passion had but simulated defeat, as passion often does, in order that it might turn in an unguarded moment, and rend me with redoubled fury? The next moment I saw my last gasping effort to will the right sink amid the tempestuous sea of sinful wishes, as a drowning man sinks after he has risen for the third time; and deliberately thrusting away, in the very doggedness of despair, the invisible hand which yet strove to stay me, I arose and sought the room that I had prayed I might never enter.
You may wonder, perhaps, how it is that I am able to recall so vividly the circumstances of an event which happened many years ago. You would cease so to wonder, had you seen, as I have seen, the ghost of your dead self rise up to cry for vengeance against you, and to condemn you before the judgment seat of God, and of your own conscience. For this was my first glimpse of Hell; this was my Day of Judgment. The recording angel of my own indestructible and now God-awakened memory showed me my past life as God saw it, and as it appeared when robbed of the loathsome disguises with which I had so long contrived to hide my own moral nakedness. "Sin looks much more terrible to those who look at it, than to those who do it," says the author of the "Story of an African Farm." "A convict, or a man who drinks, seems something so far off and horrible when we see him, but to himself he seems quite near to us, and like us. We wonder what kind of a creature he is, but he is just we ourselves." It was so indeed that I had thought and wondered. I had read often of "adulterers" and "murderers" in the newspapers, and had thought of them as I thought of lepers or of cannibals, in no way imagining that my youthful escapade could render such words applicable to me. I had accustomed myself to calling my crime "gallantry" in my own thoughts, and I should have regarded one who used harsher language as wanting in delicacy and in breeding; and now I found myself branded as "Murderer" and "Seducer" to all Eternity!
"Murderer!" you say. Yes, murderer, for seduction is moral murder; and the man who has thus sinned against a woman is fit only to stand side by side with him who has taken a life. Ay, and his is not seldom the more awful punishment, for God will as surely require the spiritual life at the hands of the seducer, as He will the bodily life at the hand of the murderer.
The one thing of all others which added to the unutterable horror of that moment, was the memory of the false and lying excuses with which I had striven to palliate my sin to myself. I remember that such excuses took form and shape, and haunted and tortured me like devils—as indeed they were—of my own begetting. "The relation of the sexes," I had often said when striving to silence an uneasy conscience, "Bah! it is but a yoke of man's imposing. I take the woman I love to live with me, and she and I are shunned as lepers. Yonder is a man who follows the same precedent and from the same motive; and because a priest has murmured a few words of sanction over the contract, he and his partner are fêted and flattered. How can the indulgence of a natural passion which in one set of circumstances is fair and honourable, in another be sinful and foul? Fair is fair, and foul is foul, and no muttering of a man can transform the one into the other."
This is the way in which I had repeatedly striven to silence my conscience, and it is but one instance of the way in which many others on this earth are now striving to silence theirs. "For God's sake," I would say to them, "beware!" Such hardening of the heart against the Holy Spirit, such God-murdering (for it is the wish to kill God, and to silence His voice for ever) is the one unpardonable sin which is a thousand-fold more awful in its consequences than is the crime which it seeks to conceal. It was the foulest stain on the soul of him who hung by the dying Saviour, and it is, I believe at this moment, the one and only thing which still keeps Hell Hell, and Satan Satan.
Must I write further of the torture-throes of that awful moment, when I first saw my sin in its true light? God only knows how even now I shudder and shrink at the mere thought of it; but I have told you of my crime, and it is right that I should speak also of my punishment. I remember that when the realization of what I was, and what I had done, was first borne in upon me, I fell to the ground and writhed and shrieked in agony. The tortures of a material hell,—of a thousand material hells,—I would have endured with joyfulness could such torture have drowned for one moment the thought-anguish that tore me. Nay, mere physical suffering—physical suffering meted out to me as punishment, and in which, though it were powerless to expiate, I could at least participate by enduring—I would have welcomed with delirious gladness, but of such relief or diversion of thought there was none. From the mere mention of annihilation—the personal annihilation of soul and body, of thought and sensation—I had ever shrunk with abject loathing and dread; but to annihilation, had it been then within my reach, I would have fought my way through a thousand devils. But in hell there is no escape through annihilation; suicide, the last refuge of tyrannous and cowardly despair, is of none avail,
"And death once dead there's no more dying then."
What had to be endured I found must be endured, and that unto the uttermost, for in all horrid hell there was no nook or cranny into which I could creep to hide myself from the hideous spectres of the past. I remember that I rose up in my despair, and stretching vain hands to the impotent heavens, shrieked out as only one can shriek who is torn by hell-torture and despair. I fell to the ground and writhed and foamed in convulsive and bloody agony. I dug my cruel nails deep into my burning eyeballs, and tearing those eyeballs from their tender sockets, flung them bleeding from me; but not thus could I blind myself to the sights of hell, nor could mere physical pain wipe out from my brain the picture of the ruin I had wrought.
And then—but no, I am sick, I am ill, I am fainting; I cannot, I cannot write more.
