CHAPTER X.
A LOVE STORY IN HELL.
"And shall my sense pierce love,—the last relay
And ultimate outpost of eternity?"—D.G. Rossetti.
Some years ago, a near relative of mine, the editor of a certain paper, was taken seriously ill, and was told by the doctors that complete rest was absolutely necessary for his recovery. As I had frequently assisted him in the preparation of "copy," and was acquainted with the routine of his office, it was arranged that I should attend on certain days in each week, and be answerable for the work during his absence. The journal was one which was made up largely of extracts from other papers, and my duties consisted less in the selection of original matter, than in the more prosaic plying of paste-brush and scissors; but the number of manuscripts received was large, and for a week or two at least I tried conscientiously to give each separate packet something like a fair consideration. I remember that the very first manuscript on which I was called to pronounce judgment was one entitled, "The Strange Confessions of a Bachelor." It is too lengthy to be printed here in full, but as the love-story from which my chapter takes its heading was largely attributable to the publication of this manuscript, I have transcribed some paragraphs from it, which I think will serve to give the reader a general idea of its tone.
The Strange Confessions of a Bachelor.
"Yes, I am in love, although as yet I could not tell what the name of my love is or will be. But in every inspired poem or perfect picture, in the soaring and sobbing of music, in sunrise and sunset, or in the sighing of the wind upon my cheek, there is something which speaks to me of her, and which beckons my spirit forth in search of her, as if by the leading of an unseen hand. And sometimes, but only in my dreaming, musing moments, my thoughts, as they wander forth into the blue expanse around me, take colour and shape, and I see her standing by a tiny cot in a cosy room where the warm firelight flickers on walls gay with pictures. I see her bend with eyes that brim with tears of blessing to fold two dimpled hands together, and to listen to a baby voice which whispers after hers the hallowed words to 'Our Father in Heaven.' And as the little voice dies away into the holy hush of the last Amen, and the little lids droop like the petals of a primrose over the tired eyes, my dream-picture changes again, and I am rambling among the walks I love so well, but no longer alone, no longer wrapt in melancholy musing for—now trudging cheerily along with hand clasped fast in mine and face upturned to listen, now darting bird-like aside in search of fly or flower—there journeys ever with me my little son and hers. We wander merrily through that sunny stretch of meadow—the children's meadow, as we call it—where the grass grows lush and long, and where the blithe day through the skylark ever sings and soars; we cross the stile and enter the shady shelter of the 'Lover's Lane,' dark, as it always is, with the dense green of overarching ash and hazel, and then we reach that sunny, wind-swept and sloping hillside, where he and I love to linger, watching the slow sailing of stately clouds above, or listening to the tinkle and purl of the brooklet which ripples over the pebbles in the valley far below. In the joyous wonder of the child heart beside me at all that is beautiful in this beautiful world, I forget the books and the making of books with which my brain is busied; and when the first flush of rapture is over and the little brain has sobered into calm, I tell my boy of the Brother-Lord who loves him, and who was once such a little child as he, and of the dear Lord-Father by whom all that is beautiful was made."
The writer of the "Confessions" then goes on to speak of love, and of the woman he loves; but as his concluding paragraph will sufficiently serve to give an idea of his thoughts on the subject, it is hardly necessary to quote the passage in full. "Yes, I love her, I love her truly, and she too loves me, or will. It is not blind love, or foolish idolatry. She knows all my faults—the pitiful paltriness of my life, the selfish acts and foolish words, the vanity and the vice—she knows them all, and yet she loves me, me, not them, but the true me which these faults cannot altogether conceal from her, for she knows that they are not my life, but the trouble of it. So also is my love for her. I love her not only for her present self, but for the sake of the self she is seeking to be—the self which in some measure indeed she now is; for that which in our truer moments we have striven to be; the Ideal upon which our eyes are ever fixed, to which (no matter how sorely we may have sinned against it in the struggle of the day) our thoughts return at night with but the more unutterable if despairing longing and love—that in some manner we are, and shall be, notwithstanding our ever-recurrent failure and sin.
"I do not ask or expect that she shall be always true to her high ideal, for I know that to none of us is it given to walk with unfaltering feet. I remember, too, that she is no angel, but a woman with womanly weakness and human faults, for all of which I am touched with true and tender sympathy, to love her not the less, but the more. But that she should have such an ideal, and be capable of such an aim—for that reason, if for no other, I must love and honour her with the deepest love and honour of my soul. I am not so blind as to suppose it will be all summer and sunshine in the life which she and I will, I hope, one day lead together. I know my own evil nature too well not to be aware that there will be times when she will find it hard to prevent love being turned into loathing and confidence into contempt; and I think, with sinking of spirit, of the sore disappointment she will feel when she finds what a shabby-souled common-place creature her husband is, compared with the being into whom her love had idealized him. At such times of despondency, however, I try to remember what Miss Muloch has said about wedded life—and who has written more helpful words than she? 'I would have every woman marry,' she says, 'not merely liking a man well enough to accept him as a husband, but loving him so wholly that, wedded or not, she feels she is at heart his wife, and none other's, to the end of her life. So faithful that she can see all his little faults (though she takes care no one else shall see them), yet would as soon think of loving him the less for these, as of ceasing to look up to heaven because there are a few clouds in the sky. So true and so fond that she needs neither to vex him with her constancy nor burden him with her love, since both are self-existent and entirely independent of anything he gives or takes away. Thus she will marry neither from liking nor esteem, nor gratitude for his love, but from the fulness of her own. If they never marry, as sometimes happens ... God will cause them to meet in the next existence. They cannot be parted; they belong to one another.'
"These are helpful words, and true; but there is a passage by poor George Eliot (alas for that adjective!), which to me is still more beautiful, and with which I cannot do better than conclude. 'What greater thing is there,' she says, 'for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life, to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain,' and, 'to be one with each other in silent, unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?'"
I was interested in this article as well as in the writer, and asked him for further contributions. He responded by sending a couple of sonnets, and although the "swing of his arm" was, to quote Rossetti, "freer in prose than in verse," I accepted, and printed them in the journal of which I had charge. When I came to know him afterwards, I found that he was young, and of that highly-strung nervous and poetic temperament which often proves little less than a calamity to its possessor. A more morbidly sensitive being I never met. The emotional part of his nature seemed in excess, and he felt all—the small as well as the great, the pleasant as well as the painful—intensely. His nervous vitality was too near the surface. He was easily "worked-up," and took life, or rather its incidents, too seriously. The one intellectual thing which men of such a temperament would be wise to refrain from doing, is not seldom the very thing they do—abandon themselves passionately to the pursuit of poetry. After that there is little hope for them. The world may be the richer by many a work of art, but from thenceforth and for ever Sorrow will have them for her own. "Poetry strikes as nothing else does, deep into the roots of things," says Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and "one finds everywhere some strain at the roots of one's heart." Moreover, the pursuit of poetry is a practice which as surely grows upon one as does the use of drug or opiate, and my advice to the men and women of a highly-strung and supersensitive temperament—if they wish to make comfort their first consideration—is, "Avoid poetry as you would poison, making instead a study of that which is animal and coarse. Music and all other 'softening' influences you will, in accordance with the contention of Plato in 'The Republic,' deliberately eschew, striving rather to acquire that delightful pachydermatous condition of feeling and enviable indifference to the susceptibilities of others, which add so immeasurably to the comfort of life."
However, to return to the writer of "The Strange Confessions." The number of the journal containing his article had not been published more than a couple of days, before I received a letter signed by a lady who was unknown to me, asking that I would favour her with the address of the contributor. I replied, of course, that I could not do so without his permission, but that if she wished to be put into communication with him, and would send a letter addressed to the office of the paper, it should be duly forwarded. She did so, and when, as was natural enough, he wrote a cordial reply, she found something else in his letter about which to question him, and a correspondence consequently ensued. Whether she was or was not a heartless and accomplished flirt I never knew; but if ever a woman deliberately set herself to win, and—as subsequent events showed—to break a man's heart, it was this lady. I learned afterwards that she was very beautiful, and as she herself wrote occasional tales and verses for the magazines, it was not to be wondered at that my contributor should be greatly interested in her epistles. She succeeded before long in making his acquaintance, and set herself to carry on in earnest the work which her insinuating letters had begun. She did not, however, find him quite the easy prey which she had perhaps expected; for though it is certain that he loved her from the moment of meeting, he was shy and self-depreciatory, and sought persistently to avoid her. But she paused at nothing to effect her purpose. She had set her heart upon "a scalp," and by looks, words, and deeds, she strove to convince him that she loved him, and strove at last successfully. I remember meeting him one morning, and thinking, as I watched the light which came into his face when he spoke of her, of the graceful lines in Mr. Austin Dobson's "Story of Rosina." In the poem, however, it is the woman, and not the man, who is heart-broken:—
"As for the girl, she turned to her new being,
Came, as a bird that hears its fellow call;
Blessed as the blind that blesses God for seeing;
Grew as a flower on which the sun-rays fall,
Loved if you will; she never named it so;
Love comes unseen, we only see it go."
When I saw him again all was over. I had sought him out in his chambers, not having heard from him for a month, and he did not hear me enter. Her portrait (the one she had given him) was before him, and he had fallen by the table, half-kneeling, half-lying, with his head on his arm. It is a fearful thing to hear a strong man sob as he was sobbing then! God grant that I may never hear another, or see a face of such hopeless haggard misery as was his when he raised it!
It is not of him, however, that I wish now to speak, but of her. Of all the faces which I saw in hell, there was one which had for me a fascination beyond any other. It was the face of a beautiful woman, queenly of manner and fair of figure as a full-blown lily, and with those deep dark eyes that seem to shine out from soul-depths, deep as the distant heaven, and yet may mean no more than does the shallow facing of quicksilver behind a milliner's mirror. I recognised her instantly by the portrait, and never out of hell have I seen such misery on any woman's face as I saw on hers. The sentence in punishment of her sin was a strange one. It was that she should now love him whose heart she had broken, with the same passionately intense but hopeless love with which he had loved her. It was a just but awful retribution. As some death-stricken and hunted creature presses frantically on as if to escape the arrow that it carries in its breast, so, heedless of all that was passing around her, heedless of shadow or shine, she pressed on and on through the realms of hell, her eyes fixed and wide-distended in agony, and her hands clutching ceaselessly at her bosom, as if the heart of her were being riven in twain. "O God!" I heard her cry, as she passed me, "my heart is broken! my heart is broken! and, alas, one cannot die of a broken heart in hell."
I saw her once again. She had fallen to the ground, and with hopeless hands pressed against burning brows was writhing as if in physical pain, and with her very soul consumed of passion. One whom I knew—it was his sister—was kneeling beside her, and with gentle words besought her to calm herself, but she pushed the ministering hand away despairingly, crying out: "A heart cannot break as mine is breaking without a shriek. If I had loved him, and he me, and he had died," she said, "I could have borne it, knowing that I should meet him hereafter, but to live loveless through a loveless Eternity, that is the thought which kills me;" and then with a great cry of, "Oh! why should a merciful God let any of His creatures suffer as I am suffering now?" she rose up, and fled away before me.
I never saw her again, nor do I know whether or not it was given her to win back the love she had lost; but, after she had gone, I turned to his sister—the woman who had striven to comfort her brother's betrayer—saying that I thought the punishment greater than the sin.
"Greater than the sin!" was the reply. "It may be that, being his sister, I judge her harshly; but if yours is the most awful crime which your sex can commit against womanhood, then it seems to me that hers—a like breach of trust—is the blackest sin which a woman can commit against a man. Nor can it be said of hers that it was the deed of a moment—a moment of over-mastering passion, for it was deliberate and cruel. I say that that woman killed my brother!" she cried fiercely; "killed him body and soul, and sent him away heart-broken, and bereft of faith in womanhood and in God. And to gratify what? her vanity—a passion as selfish and hateful, if less brutal, than your own. You have recognised the loathsomeness of your act; but she, God help her! thinks of nothing but herself, and while she so thinks, heaven itself would be but hell to her, and in all hell there is as yet for her no hope of heaven."
