On this night, seated at the table, and discussing the wealth and position of his accomplished young friend, the thought crossed Mr. Crowe’s mind, “Were I but free, I should not despair of winning Mildred Lee and her wealth!”
These are dangerous thoughts to enter any man’s mind who has a troublesome wife, especially when that man has no other consideration than for himself alone. He wandered out of the Alhambra grounds and strolled along the road, over the hill, past the massive old red towers which had seen so many tragedies and had heard so often the din of battle for their mastery. He was not romantic, but had read deeply in Spanish history, and knew something of the world which had once been enclosed by those mouldering walls and fortresses. The soothing melody of falling waters and the whispering of the many streams which descend through the richly-wooded slopes to fall into the Genil, down to Granada, make a night under the shadow of the Alhambra a never-to-be-forgotten pleasure, like no other for kindling poetical thoughts and romantic ideas. But not poetry nor romance stirred, this autumn night, the breast of Mr. Crowe. The greed of gold, the thought of all he could achieve if he had the tenth of this woman’s wealth, was moving within him, and he went out to meditate on the matter. Past the gardens of the Generalife, up the hill, through vineyards and fields of prickly pear, by the cactus hedges and the clumps of aloes, under the soft shade of olive groves, on towards the Sierra Nevada, which lifts its sunny peaks to heaven like thrones of pearl above the Alhambra hill, till he found the road stopped by the cemetery wall. Seeking the entrance, he found himself for the first time within a Spanish place of burial. How unlike the quiet solemnity of an English churchyard! The ground was rough and untended; a few aloes were scattered here and there, but with no attempt at orderly arrangement. And where were the graves? In place of the sacred six feet of earth, planted with flowers and marked by beautiful sculpture, inscribed with the touching memorials of the dead, he saw innumerable cells, built in the thickness of the massive walls which surrounded the place, each cell hermetically sealed with a marble tablet, on which were recorded the name and titles of the departed whose remains it inclosed, together with some verses, or quotations from the Missal, in memory of the lost ones. An unpleasant, business-like way of economising space, far too suggestive of lockers in a store, and giving one a sense of insecurity against violation when the space occupied by the corpse should be required for a fresh tenant. As Mr. Crowe was an advocate of cremation, and considered land which would grow potatoes far too valuable to waste on dead people, his susceptibilities were exercised merely by the novelty of the arrangements, and not in any way by a sense of their impropriety. Any way, he considered them good enough for Spaniards, who were far too conservative to have any claim on an advanced thinker like himself.
Running his eye over the long rows of marble tablets which served to seal the openings of the cells which held the coffins, he was struck by the fact that two departed wives of doctors of medicine were amongst those deposited in the west wall. Nothing extraordinary in this—nothing to excite the least remark for most observers; but in Mr. Crowe’s present condition it set him wondering how much longer it would be ere he would be relieved of the now almost intolerable burden of a sick wife. Who stood a better chance with Mildred Lee than he, the old friend of the heiress’s father, himself her tutor? Admired by her for his science he knew he was—why not admired for himself, perhaps, if only free? He had never really loved his wife; he had married her for her fortune, and had been disappointed in its amount. He was not capable of loving anything but wealth and fame. He ardently longed to make some discovery which should bring him prominently before the medical world. To upset the theory of the last German or Frenchman whose work made any noise in the literature of the day, and to establish on the ruins of his reputation a better and more consistent one of his own: this was worth his days and nights of anxious thought, and his toilsome and patient investigation.
So morbid had he become that he looked upon all mankind from a pathological point of view, and it was seldom that he could not detect abnormal processes at work in those with whom he came in contact. His work absorbed him; and when he desired to hold converse with any one, it was on those topics connected with it alone. Possessed of a small patrimony, worth to him some £250 a year, he was compelled to add to his income by taking pupils to “coach” for the higher professional examinations. In this work he was very successful, for he was a painstaking and impressive teacher. He was withal a skilful surgeon, and had made many wonderful cures. He had rooms in a well-known street of doctors, but was consulted with extreme infrequency. His appointment as surgeon to St. Bernard’s did him little good in a pecuniary sense, for no patient liked him; and no man or maid-servant whose health had been restored under his care ever took the least pains to get master or mistress to call him to any case of sickness. Nobody ever thanked him for a cure; nobody ever gave him credit for curing him. A great many poor hospital patients gave him the credit for anything that went wrong with them while under his treatment; but their blame or their praise was equally a matter of indifference to him, who occupied himself only, as he said, with Man in general, especially man in the future, to the utter disregard of the man particular and the man present.
How often man with the big M has robbed and murdered the body and soul of the individual of the race! Was he happy? He had no idea of the meaning of the word; enough for him that complete mental occupation stifled and subdued the rising thoughts ever struggling in his heart to torment him.
* * * * *
He turned to leave the cemetery. The sun was sinking behind the distant mountains that bounded the western Vega. Amid scenes not to be surpassed for grandeur and beauty on this planet of ours, his thoughts were selfish and mean, and untinged by one ray of the romance or poetry which the surroundings should have imparted to the least cultured mind. He, the distinguished man of science, whose name was known in every physiological laboratory of Europe, beheld all this glory unthrilled by emotion, and scarcely troubled to think, except of the purely physical causes of what he knew were to others sources of the profoundest and most entrancing sentiment. It can be killed—the love of goodness! It can be stifled, suppressed, and destroyed—the heart’s throb of delight at loveliness and grandeur which awakens the emotions of even the untutored savage! And it can be stifled, suppressed, and killed by no surer method than that of coldly formulating, analysing, and materializing, till the sentiments of wonder and worship are dissipated into their elements. To-day, as he turned to leave the cemetery, he thought of his visit, when a boy, to a little churchyard on Bantry Bay, where straying once on a walking tour, he shed tears of joy at first beholding such a wealth of loveliness as met his eyes when they took in the glorious vision.
“I was a little fool then,” he thought.
Behind him was the pearl-crowned range of Nevada; around him were the richest tropical forms of flowers and fruit; below, the towers of the Alhambra, whose every stone was moss-grown with legend and cemented with story. Still below, the grand old city, fragrant with the odour of knightly deeds; and far beyond, stretching into illimitable distance, the lovely Vega, dying away into the vapoury west, behind whose mountain cincture was sinking the sun in a glorious wealth of colour and a momentarily varying richness of shade unimaginable to those who have not watched it set from that same spot where he stood. And he thought but of the spectrum, of Frauenhofer’s lines, of refraction and the absorption of light. His curse was on him, and fructifying. To lose the sense of feeling another’s pain is, in its culmination, to lose the sense of ever feeling pleasure one’s self. As the poet says,—
“Put pain from out the world, what room were left