“A. Morgan, F.R.C.S.”
No sooner had he read this terrible communication than he was rendered as rigid as a statue. The only movement that could have been observed in him was in the fingers of the right hand, as it crumpled up the paper by the spasm of the muscles acting involuntarily. His eye was fixed without an object to claim it, and his teeth were clenched as if he had been seized by lockjaw. Conditions which we use strong words to describe, as we toil in vain after an expression which must always be inadequate, even though the words are furnished by the unhappy victim himself. We try a climax by using such expressions as “palsied brain” and so forth, all the while forgetting that we are essaying to convey a condition of inward feeling by external signs, the thing and the sign being in different categories. As he still sat under the stunning effect of the letter, the waiter entered to clear the table, but when he saw the letter in the clenched hand he retreated from the scene of a private grief, which a foreign interference would only have tended to irritate; but probably the noise of the closing door helped the reaction which comes sooner or later to all victims of moral assaults, and by and by he began to think—to see the whole details of the tragedy—to be conscious of the full extent of his misery. It was not yet time for the beginning of relief, for these conditions are subject to the law of recurrence. Like the attacks of an ague they exhaust themselves by repetition, and Nature’s way is at best but a cruel process of wearing out the sensibility of the palpitating nerve.
How long these oscillations lasted before the unhappy victim was able to leave his seat, we cannot tell. But as all thought is motion, so is all motion action. He could not retreat from the inevitable destiny. He must move on in the maze of the puppets. He must face the dead body of his wife. He must bury her, if he should never be able to lay the haunting spirit of memory. All business must be suspended, to leave the soul to the energies necessary for encountering the ordeal. A certain hardness, which belongs to the last feelings of despair, enabled him, even with something like deliberation, to go through the preparations of departure; but in this he exhibited merely the regularity of a machine, which obeys the imposed power behind. At eleven o’clock he was seated in the coach, as one placed there to be moved on and on, mile by mile, to see the dead body of a wife, whose smiling face, as he had seen it last, was still busy with his fancy, and whose voice, as he had heard her sing at the parting supper, still rang in his ears.
Nor were his feelings ameliorated by the journey, to remove the tediousness of which, at that slow time, the passengers were obliged to talk even against sheer Scotch taciturnity. He sat and heard, whether he would or not, the account of one who was going to bring home a wife; of another who had been away for ten years, and who was to be met at the coach-door by one who was dying to clasp him in her arms. All which were to him as sounds in another world wide apart from that one occupied by him, where he was, as he could not but think, the one solitary inhabitant, with one dead companion by his side. By and by, as the conversation flagged, he fell into that species of monomania where the brooding spirit, doomed to bear a shock, conjures up and holds before its view the principal feature of a tragedy. That feature was the image of his Jean’s face. It was paler than the palest of corpses, to suit the condition of the disease of which she had died. The lips were tinged with the blood of the fatal hemorrhage. The eyes were blank and staring, as if filled with the surprise and terror of the sudden attack. Over all, the fixedness of the muscles,—the contrast of death to the versatile movements, which were obedient to the laugh of pleasure when he last drew indescribable joy from the changes of her humour. No effort could relieve him from that one haunting image. The conversation of the party seemed to render it more steadfast—more bright—more harrowing. Nor when he tried to realise his feelings, in the personal encounter of facing the reality, could he find in himself any promise of a power to enable him to bear up against the terrible sight. It seemed to him, as the coach moved slowly on, as if he were being dragged towards a scaffold draped in black, where he was to suffer death.
When the coach at length stopped in the High Street, he was roused as from a dream, but the consciousness was even worse than the monomaniac condition in which he had been for hours. It was twelve at night; the bell of St Giles’s sounded solemnly in the stillness of the sleeping city. Every one of the passengers hurried off each to his home or inn, all glad of the release. To him it was no release; he would have ridden on and on, for days and weeks, if for nothing else than to prolong the interval, at the end of which the ordeal he feared so much awaited him. Whither now? He stood in the middle of the dark and silent street with his portmanteau in his hand, for he was really uncertain whether to proceed to his sister’s house in Galloway’s Close, and get her to go with him to his own house, as a kind of medium, to break the effect of the vision—or to proceed homewards alone. He turned his steps towards Galloway’s Close, and soon found that the family had gone to bed; at least, all was dark yet. Might not his sister be at his house “sitting up” with the corpse? It was not unlikely, and so he turned and proceeded towards home, his steps being forced, as if his will had no part in his ambulation. Arriving at Warrender’s Close, he stood at the foot of his own stair, and, looking up to the windows, he found here, too, all dark; nor were there any neighbours astir who might address to him some human speech, if not sympathy. The silence was as complete as the darkness, and both seemed to derive the dull charm of their power from the chamber of death. At length he forced himself, step by step, up the stairs, every moment pausing, as well from the exhaustion produced by his moral cowardice, as to listen for a stray sound of the human voice. He had now got to the landing, and, entering the dark passage leading to the door of his own flat, he groped his way along by applying his unoccupied hand to the wall. He now felt his nerves fast giving way, his heart beat audibly, his limbs shook, and though he tried to correct this fear, he felt he had no power, though naturally a man of great physical courage.
He must persevere, and a step or two more brought him to the door, which he found partially open,—a circumstance he thought strange, but could account for by supposing that there were neighbours inside—gossips who meet round death-beds to utter wise saws with dry eyes. Yet, though he listened, he heard no sounds. He now pushed open the door, and so quietly, as if he feared that a grating hinge would break the silence. The lobby was still darker than outside, and his first step was towards the kitchen, the door of which he pushed back. There was no one there,—a cruse which hung upon the wall was giving forth the smallest glimmer of a dying light. There was a red peat in the grate, smouldering into white ashes. Turning to the servant’s bed, he found it unoccupied, with the clothes neatly folded down, no doubt by Peggy’s careful hands, and no doubt, too, Peggy had solemn work to do “ben the house.” He next crossed the lobby, partly by groping, and reached a parlour, the door of which he opened gently. Dark too, and no one within. The same process was gone through with the dining-room, and with the same negative result. The last door was that of the bed-room, where he was to encounter what he feared. It was partially open. He placed his ear to the chink and listened, but he heard nothing. There was no living voice there, and death speaks none. He pushed the door open, and looked fearfully in. A small rushlight on the side-table opposite the bed threw some flickering beams around the room, bringing out indistinctly the white curtains of the bed. He approached a little, and could discover vaguely the form of his wife lying there. Would he take up the rushlight, and, with the necessary courage, go forward and examine the features? He had arrived at the spot, and at the moment, portrayed prospectively in his waking dream during his journey, and a few steps, with the rushlight in his hand, would realise the image he had brooded over so long. He struggled with himself, but without avail. Any little courage he had been for the last few minutes trying to summon up utterly gave way. There rushed into his mind vague fancies and fears,—creatures of the darkness and the death-like stillness around him, which he could neither analyse nor stay. He even thought he heard some sound from the bed where the corpse lay,—the consequence of all which was total loss of self-possession, approaching to something like a panic, and the effect of this, again, was a retreat. He sought the door, groped his way again through the inside lobby, got to the outer door, along the outer passage, down the stair to the street.
Nor when he got there did he pull up and begin to think of the extreme pusillanimity, if not folly, of his conduct. Even if he had tried, he could only have wound up his self-crimination by the ordinary excuse—that he could not help it. The house, with its stretched corpse, deserted rooms, its darkness and silence, was frightful to him. He could not return until he found some one to accompany him; and he satisfied himself of the reasonableness of this condition by the fact that the servant herself had fled in fear from the dismal scene. He began to move, though almost involuntarily, down the Canongate, his step quick and hurried, after the manner of those who are pursued by some danger, the precise nature of which they do not stop to examine. He even found a slight relief in the muscular exertion, and thus hurrying on, he reached the Duke’s Walk, and came to the heap of stones called Muschet’s Cairn, from Nichol Muschet of Boghall, who there murdered his wife. With no object but movement to dispel his misery, it was indifferent to him whither he should go; and hurrying to Arthur’s Seat, he began to climb the hill, regardless of the dangerous characters often encountered there at night, any one of whom he had courage enough to have throttled at the moment he was flying from what was little more than a mere phantom.
Meanwhile the moon had risen, and was illuminating at intervals the north-east side of the hill, leaving all in comparative darkness again as she got behind the thick clouds which hung heavily in the sky; but the light was of no value to one who was moved only by the impulse of a distraction. Yet, as he stood for a moment, and looked back upon the city, with that Warrender’s Close in the heart of it, and that house in the close, and that room with the rushlight within the house, and that bed in the room, and that figure so still and silent in the bed, he became conscious of a circumstance which had escaped him. He found that in his wild wandering, apparently without any other aim than to allay unbearable feelings by exertion, he had been unconsciously following, step by step, the very track which he and his now lost Jean had taken in a walk of the afternoon of the Sunday preceding his departure for Glasgow. The thought thus coming as a discovery was in itself a mystery, and he felt it to be a kind of duty—though with what sanction of a higher power he knew not—to continue that same track of the Sunday walk which had been consecrated by the sweet intercourse of two loving hearts. In execution of which purpose he kept moving towards the east shoulder of the hill, and such hold had this religious fancy taken of him, that he looked about for places in the track where some part of their conversation had occurred, which, from some peculiarity in it, had remained upon his memory. Nay, so weak did he become in his devotion, that he threw himself down on the cold grass at spots where Jean had required a rest, and had leant her head upon his shoulder, and had been repaid by some note of endearment. But in these reclining postures, which assumed the form of a species of worship, he remained only till the terrible thought of his privation again rose uppermost in his mind, forcing him to start to his feet by a sudden spring, and to go on again, and brush through the whins that grew on the hill-side, as if he courted their obstruction as a relief.
It is said that our ideas produce time, and our feelings devour it; and this is true at least where the feelings are of apprehension and fear of some inevitable event to occur in the future. He had still the ordeal to pass through. The sun would rise, in the light of which he would be forced to look on the dead face, and in place of considering the time occupied by these wanderings to and fro long and weary, the moments, minutes, hours, passed with such rapidity that the moon had gone far on in her journey, and the gray streaks of dawn were opening up a view to the east, before he could realise the passage of the time which had been, as it were, swallowed up by his desire to postpone what, by the laws of nature and society, he was bound to endure. How many times he had gone round the hill and up to the top, and down to Duddingstone, and along by the village road, and in through the bog, to begin his rounds again, he could not have told. But at length the sun glared threateningly in his face. Time defied him, and at length he saw the smoke of the chimneys begin to rise from the city. The red peat he had seen in the grate of his own kitchen would at least yield none. The household gods had deserted his hearth. Death and silence now reigned there. He heard eight o’clock sound from St Giles’s. The people were beginning to move in all directions—all in search of pleasure, the ultimate end of all man’s exertions—and he could no longer find a refuge in darkness or distance; so he began to move in the direction of the town with the weariness and lassitude of exhaustion rendering his legs rigid and his feet heavy, in addition to the hopelessness of a stricken heart. When he got to the Watergate, he began to see faces of people whom he knew, and who knew him; but he felt no desire to speak, and they doubtless from delicacy passed, without showing any desire to stop him. At length he arrived at the head of Warrender’s Close, and now he felt as if he were more submissive to the necessity of what seemed to be fate, moving his limbs with more will—even with something like a wish on his mind to put an end to a long agony. Down and down step by step, the drooping head responsive in its nods to the movement of his body; up the stair step after step deliberately, resolutely; along the outer passage; now opposite his own door. That door was now closed, giving indication that the servant, or some friend or neighbour, had been in the house since he left. He tapped gently. The door was opened almost upon the instant, and Mr John Dalrymple was immediately encompassed by the arms of a woman screaming in the exultation of immoderate joy.
“John, dear John, how delighted I am to see you,—for oh, we have been in such dreadful fear about you since Peggy found your portmanteau in the lobby; but, thank God, you are come at last, and just in time for a fine warm breakfast.”