She sits down before her looking-glass, and stares desperately, with inner eyes, at the blank ruin of her life; with outer eyes at the ruin mirrored in her sunken, altered face, that the old looking-glass, blurred with rust stains, makes look more sunken and altered still. Involuntarily she lifts her thumb and forefinger, and lays them in the hollows of her cheek, as if seeking for the red carnations that used to flower so fairly there. She has noticed before the decay of her beauty—noticed it with apathy, as who should say, "Everything else is gone, why should not this go too?" But now she observes it with a sick pang, as at the parting with a friend; she would give ten years of her life to reach it back again. "It was only for my beauty he liked me," she says, still speaking aloud; "it was only for my beauty that anybody could like me; there is nothing else to like in me. I never was clever, or said witty things, or sang, or played: I was only pretty. Now that that is gone, everything is gone!"
As one shipwrecked, floating about on a plank among the weltering waves of some great plunging, grey-green sea, strains his eyes along the horizon to see some sail-speck, some misty palm-island, that looks as though it were hung midway in air; so she strains her mental eyes to catch sight of some friendly ship that may take her off from this rock of her despair. This world is full of pairs, but some oversight has left a good many odd ones also; Esther is an odd one. Her road has come to a blank wall, and there stopped. Is there no ladder that can overclimb this wall?—no gap in all the thickness of its brick-and-mortar?—no outlet?
She rises and stands by the fire; her eyes down-dropped on the blue-and-white Dutch tiles—on the hobs, and queer brass-inlaid dogs: involuntarily she raises them, and they rest upon the little laudanum-bottle on the chimneypiece. Quick as lightning, an answer to her thought-question seems flashed across her mind. There is a ladder that can overclimb any wall; there is a gap that can give egress through the stoutest masonries; there is an outlet from the deepest dungeon; and this ladder, this gap, this outlet, men call Death. Over the sea of her memory the housemaid's words float back: "I hope you'll be careful not to take an overdose, 'm, or you might chance never to wake again!" They had been spoken in careful warning; to her they seemed words of persuasive promise. Never to wake again! Never to say again in the evening, "Would God it were morning!" and in the morning, "Would God it were evening!"
To Esther, the great sting of death had always laid in his pain—in his gasping breath, twitched features, writhen unfleshed limbs; but this death that comes in sleep can be no bitterer than a mother that lifts her little slumbering child out of his small bed (he not knowing), and bears him away softly. The idea of self-slaughter, when first suggested, has always something terrific, especially to us, who from our birth have been taught to look upon it as a crime hardly second to murder; to us, to whom Cato's great heroism and Lucretia's chaste martyrdom seem as sins. Some vague idea that suicide is forbidden in the Scriptures runs through Esther's mind. She sits down at the table, and, drawing a Bible towards her, searches long among the partial, temporary, and local prohibitions and commands of the Books of the Law, and still longer among the universal, all-applying prohibitions and commands of Gospel and Epistle. Whether it be that she search ill, or that there is nought therein written on the subject she seeks, she knows not; only she finds nothing; and, closing the book, she leans her pale cheek on her closed white hand. Her brain feels strangely calm, and she even forgets the darkness of the night, musing on a deeper darkness.
What is this death, that we write in such great black letters? After all, what is it that we know about him, for or against? Is it fair to condemn him unheard, unknown? Why should we give him any embodiment?—why should we personify him at all? He is but an ending: what is there in the end of anything more terrifying than in its beginning, or its middle? Death is but the end of life, as birth is its beginning, and as some unnoticed moment in its course is its middle.
Why are the waters in which we set our feet at the last more coldly awful than those out of which we stepped at the first? Both—both, are they not portions of the great sea of Eternity that floweth ever round Time's little island? A clock is wound up for a certain number of hours; when that number of hours has elapsed, it stops. Our more complicated machinery is wound up to go for a certain number of years, months, days; when that number of years, months, and days is elapsed, we stop—that is all. What is this life, about the taking or keeping of which we make such a clamour, as if it were some great, costly, goodly thing?
"It is but a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep."
It is cowardly, disloyal, say they, for a soldier to desert the post at which he has been set. Ay, but the galley-slave, chained to an oar, if he can but break his chain and be gone, may flee away, and none blame him. A prisoner that is not on parole, what shall hinder him from escaping? If he can but burst his bars, and draw his strong bolts, may he not out and away into the free air? If, before our birth, in that unknown pre-existence of ours at which backward-reaching memory catches not, we, standing looking into life, had said, "Oh, Master, give me of this life! I know not what it is, but I would fain taste it; and if Thou givest it to me, I swear to Thee to keep and guard it carefully, as long as I may——." But have we ever so asked for it? Has it not been thrust upon us, undesiring, unconsulted, as a gift that is neither of beauty nor of price? Who can chide us, if, laying it down meekly at the everlasting feet, we say, "Oh, Great Builder! take back that house in which, a reluctant tenant, Thou hast placed me. Resume Thy gift; it is a burden too heavy for me! Lay it, I pray Thee, on shoulders that mayhap may bear it stoutlier!"
She lifts the bottle, having uncorked it, to her lips and tastes. It has a deathly, sickly flavour, not enticing. Hesitating, she holds it in her hand, half-frightened, half-allured; while her heart beats loud and hard. "It is the key to all my doubts," she says within herself, looking steadfastly at it; "it is the answer to all my questions. If I do but drink this little draught, I shall have all knowledge; I shall never wonder again! I shall know where Jack is; I shall be with him! But shall I?" Ay, that's the rub! Even in this small world, to be alive at the same time with another person is not necessarily, or even probably, to be with him. Wide continents, high mountains, deep rivers often sever those that are closest of kin; and in the world of the dead, which, being so much more populous, must be so much the greater, is it not likely that still wider continents, higher mountains, deeper rivers, may part two that would fain be together? What if, before her time, she incur the abasement of death, the dishonour of corruption, and yet attain not the object for whose sake she is willing desperately to lay her comely head in the dust?
She changes her attitude, puts down the bottle, and again stoops her small flower-face on her bent fingers—her thoughts varying their channel a little: "If I go, I shall leave no gap behind me, any more than a teacupful of water taken out of a great pool leaves a gap behind. If it is disgraceful to go willingly out of the world, instead of being dragged unwillingly out of it, my disgrace is my own. I involve no one else in it; there is no one of my name left to be ashamed of me. I leave no work undone in the world. Hundreds of others can carry air-cushions, and read to a deaf old man far more patiently than I have done. My fifty pounds a year will go to put daily bread into some other poor woman's mouth, to whom it may perhaps taste sweeter than it has done to me." Her head sinks forward again on her outstretched arms.... "It is awful to go out into the dark all by oneself," she thinks, with a pang of intense self-pity, as she feels the warm, gentle life throbbing in her round, tender limbs: "and I, that hate the dark so——, is it very wicked of me to think of this thing? People will say so, but I will not hear them. Where shall I be to-morrow at even?"