Inchbracken: The Story of a Fama Clamosa

by Robert Cleland

His cheeks were flushed with incipient fever, and the tangled hair hung about his face in matted locks. His eyes were closed, and his lips moved in inaudible mutterings, as he turned restlessly from one side to the other. He complained of an acute pain in his side which caught his breath, and a dull aching that smouldered like fire in his bones and joints, which he fancied he could count by their separate twingings.

The sight of his sister seemed to do him good, and when he felt the coolness of her hand on his brow, he closed his eyes and fell into a kind of slumber; but the sleep was not of very long duration, and it was restless and disturbed. The nightmares of the night before fell on him again; groaning and muttering he tossed to and fro, and presently awoke.

The surgeon arrived in due course, and shook his head gravely, while he enjoined the greatest care, as pleurisy or rheumatic fever, or both, appeared to be impending. Roderick lay and muttered, righting with the dismal visions that floated like mists about his brain, and struggling to keep hold of the reality.

In that, however, he found little solace, it seemed more dismal than aught a fevered fancy could conjure up to distress him. Visions of Cain driven forth from home and kindred, to wander over the face of the earth an outcast and a stranger; Abram sent forth to find him a new home in a strange and unknown country, turning his back on all that he had ever known or loved; Job with his children all slain in a single hour; those who had cast away a right hand or plucked out a right eye for the sake of the kingdom of righteousness; all the forlorn and desolate and bereaved he had ever heard or dreamed of, passed in melancholy procession before him, and hailed him as their fellow. He looked upon the stricken train, and questioning each as to the nature of his sorrow; it seemed to him that in their misery, they all had justice or hope or consolation. But his? It stood alone among them all, unmerited, unreasonable, without purpose and without pity. There was nothing he had held too dear to part with, nothing he had kept back, when he laid down all to follow his Church into the wilderness. Then why had this new grief come upon him? and what good end was to be served by enacting anew in his case the parable of the prophet Nathan, and robbing him of the one ewe lamb he cherished in his bosom? Since his boyhood, the whole pure love of his heart had been given to Sophia. Her image had filled a shrine in his inmost thoughts, and he had clothed it in all he knew of pure and holy, and held it for a symbol of unseen good. He had waited till in all reasonableness and truth he could win her for his wife, and she and her parents, in some unspoken measure at least, had consented to his resolve.

Now, all of a sudden he hears from the lips of her own mother, wrung from them, as it were unawares, under the dread pre-occupation of impending danger, that another man's suit is entertained or courted, and so utterly trivial are any pretensions of his held to be, that their very existence is overlooked, and himself made the confidant of the mother's views. Oh, how can he resign himself? How pluck away the image around which all his hopes and dreams, the very roots and tendrils of his being have entwined themselves for so many years? Pluck out an eye? It were to pluck out his very heart, and cast it from him--to cease to think--to cease to live. Yet if she were to become another man's wife he would have to do it. He groaned. The universe seemed falling in on him, his head swam, and he fell into a dose.

When he next awoke the emotional strain was somewhat relaxed. His thoughts would run in no other channel, but he began now to muse, and plan, and question. Was it indeed decided? Or was it as yet but a plan of the mother? Had Sophia consented? And even if she had, was it of her own free will, and with the concurrence of her affections? Or was it a mere compliance with the wishes of her parents, while she had no sufficient reason to admit a preference elsewhere? For the unmaidenliness, as he would have called it, of loving unsought, was not to be dreamed of in the case of Sophia.

'Ah!' he cried aloud, 'Who knows? I have never spoken, or----' the rest would not frame itself in words, but a vision arose before his mind's eye, or rather many visions, remembrances of all the sweetest and most endearing looks, or what he regarded as such, that she had ever given him; and as he thought, his poor chilled soul grew warmer and more at ease, and the throbbing in his head grew easier.

'The venture is worth making,' he said presently. And thereupon he rose from bed and sat down before his desk, which, as already mentioned, was in another part of the same room.

Mary was not present at the moment, so there was no one to offer opposition. He drew to him some paper and prepared to write. His mind had been seething with emotion, but as he took the pen in his hand, the thoughts grew hazy, and refused to shape themselves in words,---they refused to be written down. Fluttering and whirling before him like the disordered gleams in a moving prism, they would not be caught, and yet kept tantalizing him by settling upon his pen, till he tried to write them, when they would dissipate again in a new and perturbed whirl of tempestuous feeling. He clasped his hands upon his aching brow, but it ached worse than ever, and he sat stupified in blank despair.

Words came after a while, and by and by he began to write, but the writing when it was done had to be torn up, and the work begun again anew. Sheet after sheet was written and destroyed, and the scattered flakes gathered like snowdrifts about his chair. He wearied himself in abortive efforts, but at least he deadened the acuteness of his misery. The fantastic pains and throes of composition were an anodyne to the more real agonies of his mind. By dividing its action in the endeavour to express its workings, he reduced their intensity. As he grew weary, therefore, he began to grow calmer, and was able with some sort of coherence to say the thing he meant. It was no great achievement in the way of a love-letter, but under the circumstances a great achievement was impossible. He was too much under the direct influence of his emotion,--whatever of mental force he had was expended in the suffering, the jealousy, the hopelessness and the longing, and but a fraction could be abstracted to express his meaning.