To Life, who hath given to us so gloriously.
Not so for thee—within whose heart lie deep
As ingots ‘neath the waves, thoughts true and fair.
Nor ever let thy soul the burden bear,
Of having life to live yet choosing sleep:
Yea even if thine the dark and slippery stair,
Better to toil and climb than wormlike creep.
In the early spring my husband was laid low with scarlet fever and phlebitis. Recovery was slow, and at the press view of the Royal Academy he caught a severe chill; the next day he was in the grip of a prolonged attack of rheumatic fever. For many days his life hung in the balance.
During much of the suffering and tedium of those long weeks the sick man passed in a dream-world of his own; for he had the power at times of getting out of or beyond his normal consciousness at will. At first he imagined himself the owner of a gipsy travelling-van, in which he wandered over the to him well-known and much-loved solitudes of Argyll, resting where the whim dictated and visiting his many fisher and shepherd friends. Later, during the long crises of the illness, though unconscious often of all material surroundings, he passed through other keen inner phases of consciousness, through psychic and dream experiences that afterward to some extent were woven into the Fiona Macleod writings, and, as he believed, were among the original shaping influences that produced them. For a time he felt himself to be practically dead to the material world, and acutely alive “on the other side of things” in the greater freer universe. He had no desire to return, and rejoiced in his freedom and greater powers; but, as he described it afterward, a hand suddenly restrained him: “Not yet, you must return.” And he believed he had been “freshly sensitised” as he expressed it; and knew he had—as I had always believed—some special work to do before he could again go free.
The illusion of his wanderings with the travelling van was greatly helped by the thoughtfulness of his new friend Ernest Rhys who brought him branches of trees in early leaf from the country. These I placed upright in the open window; and the fluttering leaves not only helped his imagination but also awoke “that dazzle in the brain,” as he always described the process which led him over the borderland of the physical into the “gardens” of psychic consciousness or, as he called it, “into the Green Life.”
At the end of ten weeks he left his bed. As soon as possible I took him to Northbrook, Micheldever, the country house of our kind friends Mr. and Mrs. Henryson Caird, who put it at our disposal for six weeks. Slowly his strength came back in these warm summer days, as he lay contentedly in the sunshine. But as he began to exert himself new disquieting symptoms developed. His heart proved to be badly affected and his recovery was proportionately retarded.
The Autumn found us face to face with problems hard to solve, how to meet not only current expenses but also serious debt, with a limited stock of precarious strength. At the moment of blackest outlook the invalid received a generous friendly letter from Mr. Alfred Austin enclosing a substantial cheque. The terms in which it was offered were as kindly sympathetic as the thought which prompted them. He had, he said, once been helped in a similar way with the injunction to repay the loan not to the donor but to some one else who stood in need. Therefore he now offered it with the same conditions attached. During the long months of illness it had been a constant source of regret to us that we were unable to see Philip Marston or to read to him as was our habit. We were anxious, too, for in the autumn he had been prostrated by a heat stroke, followed by an epileptic seizure. At last, on Christmas day 1886 William Sharp went to see him and spent an hour or so with him. As he tells in his prefatory Memoir to Marston’s “Song-tide” (Canterbury Poets): “He was in bed and I was shocked at the change—as nearly a year had elapsed since I had seen him I found the alteration only too evident.... Throughout the winter his letters had been full of foreboding: ‘You will miss me, perhaps, when I am gone, but you need not mourn for me. I think few lives have been so deeply sad as mine, though I do not forget those who have blessed it.’”
This was the keynote to each infinitely sad letter.