Tongues of Conscience

by Robert Hichens

"If he only knew what I am waiting for!" she murmured to herself. "Will it ever come?"

She sank down on the broad, old-fashioned window seat, and leaned her cheek against the leaded panes of glass. The bees were humming outside. She listened to their music. It was dull and dreamy, heavy like a golden noon in summer time. And then the white lids fell over her eyes, and the hum of the bees faded from her ears, and she heard another music that made her woman's heart leap up, she heard the first tiny murmur of a new-born child.

It was sweeter than the hum of bees. It was sweeter than the soul the lute gave up to the ears of Nature when Orpheus touched the strings. It was so sweet that tears came stealing from under Lily's eyelids and dropped down upon her clasped hands. She sat there motionless till the twilight came over the moor, and Maurice entered, white and weary, to ask impatiently of what she was dreaming.

As Maurice wished it, they returned the next day to Brayfield and settled into the house that was to be their home. It stood on a low cliff overlooking the sea; a broad green lawn, on which during the season a band played and people promenaded, lay in front of it. Beyond, the waves danced in the sunshine. The situation of the house was almost absurdly cheerful, and the house itself was new and prettily furnished. But the life into which Lily entered was strangely at variance with the surroundings, strangely antagonistic to the brightness of the sea, the sweetness of the air, the holiday gaiety that pervaded the little town in the summer. For work did not abolish, did not even lull the sound of the voice that pursued Maurice with an inexorable persistence. It was obvious that on his return home after the honeymoon, he made a tremendous effort to get the better of his enemy. He called up all his manhood, all his strength of character. He refused to hear the voice. When it cried in his ears, he went to sit with Lily, and plunged into conversation on subjects that interested them both. He made her play to him, or sing to him in the twilight. He read aloud to her. This was at night. By day he worked unremittingly. When he was not driving to see patients he laboured to increase his knowledge of medicine. He pursued the most subtle investigations into the causes of obscure diseases, and specially directed his enquiries towards the pathology of the brain. He analysed the multitudinous developments of madness and traced them back to their beginnings; and when, as was often the case, he discovered that the mad man or woman whose malady was laid bare to him had inherited this curse of humanity, he smiled with a momentary thrill of joy. His ancestors on both sides of the family had been sane. Yet one of the commonest, most invariable delusions of the insane was the imaginary idea that they were pursued by voices, ordering them to do this or that, suggesting crimes to them or weeping in their ears over some tragedy of the past. Maurice knew that the mind which does not inherit a legacy of insanity may yet be overturned by some terrible incident, by a great shock, or by an unexpected bereavement. But surely such a mind would be aware of its transformation, even as a man who, from an accident, becomes disfigured is aware of the alteration of his face from beauty to desolation. Maurice was not aware that his mind had been transformed. Deliberately, calmly, he asked himself, "Am I insane?" Deliberately, calmly, his soul answered, "No." Yet the cry of the child rang in his ears, pursued his goings out and comings in, filled his days with lamentation, and his nights with horror.

Then, leaving the subject of madness, Maurice began to institute a close investigation into the subject of alleged hauntings of human beings by apparitions and by sounds. He read of the actress, whose lover, who had slain himself in despair at her cruelty, remained for ever with her, manifesting his presence, although invisible, by cries, curses, and clappings of the hands. He read of the clergyman who was haunted by the footsteps of his murdered sweetheart, which even ascended the pulpit stairs behind him, and pattered furtively about him when he knelt to pray for pardon of his sin. He filled his mind with visionary terrors, but they seemed remote or even ridiculous to him, and he said to himself that they were the clever inventions of imaginative people. They were worked up. They were moulded into conventional stories. They pleased the magazines of their time. He alone was really haunted of all men in the world, so far as he knew. And then a great and greedy desire came upon him to meet some other man in a like case, to hear from live lips the true and undecorated history of a despair like his own, one of those bald and terse narratives which pierce the imagination of the hearer like a sword, with no tinselled scabbard of exaggeration and of lies. He wondered whether upon the earth a man walked in a darkness similar to that which fell round him like a veil. He wondered whether he was unique, even as he felt. Sometimes he caught himself looking furtively at a harmless stranger, a bright girl tanned by the sea, or a lad just back from a fishing excursion to Raynor's Bay, and saying to himself low and drearily: "Does any spirit trouble you, I wonder? Does any spirit cry to you in the night?" But neither his work, his excursions of the imagination, nor the presence of Lily in his house, availed to cleanse the life of Maurice from the stain of sound, that ever widened and spread upon it. He fought for freedom for a while, strenuously, with all his heart and soul. But the lost battle left him with his energies exhausted, his courage broken. One night he said to Lily:

"Do you know all I have been doing since we came back here?"

"Yes, Maurice, I know."

"And that it has all been in vain," he said, with a passion of bitterness that he could not try to conceal.

"That too I understand, Maurice—I knew it would be in vain."

He looked at her almost as at an enemy, for his heart was so full of misery, his mind was so worn with weariness, that he began to lose the true appreciation of human relations, and to confuse the beauty near him with the ugliness that companioned him so closely.