Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 18

by Unknown

When a woman of sensibility says she loves a man, she has told, through a medium that works out the conditions of the responding powers of our common nature, the heart, more than all the eulogistic eloquence of the tongue could achieve, to show the estimate she forms of the qualities of the object of her affections; but when she adds that that love originated in the friendship of children, grew with the increase of the powers of mind and body, and entered as a part into every feeling that actuated the young hearts, she has expressed the terms of an endearment so pure, tender, exclusive, and lasting, that it transcends all the ordinary forms of the communion of spirits on earth. The attachment is different from all others—it stands by itself; and to endeavour to conceive its purity and force by any factitious mixture of friendship, and the ordinary endearments of limited time and favourable circumstances of meeting, would be as vain as all hypothetical investigation into the nature of feeling must ever be. I cannot tell when I first knew the young man whose name I have mentioned under an emotion that shakes my frame; the syllables were a part of my early lispings, and I cannot yet think that they are unconnected with a being that has now no local habitation upon earth. Our parents were intimate neighbours; and the woods and waters of ——, if their voices—sweeter than articulated intelligence—could imitate the accents of man, would tell best when they wooed us into that communion, which they cherished, and witnessed, with an apparent participation of our joy, to open into an early affection. The power of mutual objects of pleasure and interest, especially if they are a part of the lovely province of nature—the rural landscape, secluded and secreted from the eyes of all the world besides, with its dells and fountains, birds and flowers—in increasing the attachment of young hearts, has been often observed and described; but we felt it. These inanimate objects are generally, and were to us, not only a tie, but they shared a part of our love, as if in some mysterious way they had become connected with, and a part of us. The often imputed association of ideas is a poor and inadequate solution of this work of nature: it is the effect put for the cause; the common, boasted philosophy of man, who invents terms of familiar sound to explain secrets eternally hidden from him. If we who felt, as few have ever felt, the influence of these green, umbrageous shades—with their nut-trees, bushes, flowers, and gowany leas; their singing birds, and nests with speckled eggs; their half-concealed fountains of limpid water, and running streams, and beds of white pebbles—in nourishing and increasing our young loves, could not tell how or why they were invested with such power; the philosopher, I deem, may resign the task, and say, with a sigh, that it was nature, and nature alone, who did all this; and the secret will remain unexplained.

We enjoyed ten years of this intercourse—I calculate from the fifth to the fifteenth year of our youth—and every one of these years, as it evolved the ripening powers of our minds, so it strengthened the mingling affections of our hearts. We became lovers long before we knew the sanctions and rights, and duties of pledged faith; we were each other's by a troth, a thousand times spoken; exchanged and felt in the throbbing embrace, the burning sighs, and the eloquent looks, that were but the natural impulses of a feeling we rejoiced in, yet scarcely comprehended. My heart, recoiling from the thoughts of after years, luxuriates in the memory of these blissful hours; and, were not the theme exhausted a thousand times by the eloquence of rapt feeling, speaking with the tongue of inspiration, I could dwell on these early rejoicings of unsullied spirits for ever.

My dream was not scattered—it was only changed in its form and hues, when my youthful betrothed was removed from home, to go through a course of navigation to fit him for the service of the sea, to which the intentions of his father, and his own early wishes, led him. I could have doubted my existence sooner than the faith of his heart; and he was only gone to make those preparations for attaining a position in society that would enable him to realize those fond and bright prospects we had indulged in contemplating among the woods that resounded to pledges exchanged in the face of heaven. The first place of his destination was London, from whence, for a period of about three years, I heard from him regularly by letters, which breathed with an increased warmth the same sentiments we had repeated and interchanged so often during the long period of our prior intercourse. Some time after this, he sailed to India; then were my thoughts first tinged by the changing hues of solitude; and my hopes and fears bound to the wayward circumstances of a world which had as yet been to me a paradise.

I heard nothing from him for two long years after he left London. A portrayment of my thoughts during that period would be a thousand times more difficult than for the painter to seize and represent the changing hues of the gem that, thrown on a tropic strand, reflects the endless hues of the earth and sky. I trembled and hoped by turns but every idea and every feeling were so strongly mingled with reminiscences of former pleasures, the prospects of future happiness, the fears of a change in his affections, or of his death, that I could not pronounce my mind as being, at any given moment, aught but a medium of impressions that I could not seize or fix, so as to contemplate myself. All I can say is, that he was the presiding genius of every emotion with which my heart was influenced; and, to those who have loved, that may be sufficient to shew the utter devotion of every pulse of my being to the deified image enshrined within my bosom. Now came the period of the realizing of my dreams. George Cunninghame came back, and married me.

We had scarcely been two months married when my husband, whom I loved more and more every day, got, by the influence of powerful friends, the command of a large vessel—the Griffin—engaged in the trade to India. It was arranged that I should accompany him, that, as we had been associated from our earliest infancy, (our separation had been only that of the body, and interfered not with the union of the immaterial essence), we should still be together. In this resolution I rejoiced; and, though by nature a coward, my love overcame all my terrors of the great deep. The day was fixed for our departure. A lady passenger and two servants were to go with us to the Cape, from whose society I expected pleasure; and every preparation which love could suggest was made to render me happy. We left the Downs on a calm day of December, and went down the Channel with a rattling gale from the north. Life on board of an Indiaman has been a thousand times described; and, would to heaven I had nothing to detail but the ordinary conduct of civilized men! Our chief officer was one Crawley, and our second a person of the name of Buist—the only individual my husband had no confidence in being Hans Kreutz, the steward, a German, who was whispered to have been engaged as a maritime venatic, or pirate, in the West Indies: and, if any man's character might be detected in his countenance, this foreigner's disposition might have been read in lineaments marked by the graver of passion. Part of what I have now said may have been the result of after experience; yet I could perceive shadowings of evil at this time, which I had not the knowledge of human nature to enable me to turn to any account.

With a series of gentle breezes and fine weather, we came to the Cape, where Mrs Hardy and her two servants were put ashore. One of the servants had agreed to accompany me to Madras, and was to have come on board again, to join us, before we left Table Bay. Whether she had changed her mind, or been detained by some unforeseen cause, I know not, but the boat came off without her; and all the information that I could get was, that she was not to be found. I trembled to be left on board of a vessel without a female companion, and strongly insisted upon George to delay his departure until another effort should be made to endeavour to find a servant in Cape Town; but, a favourable wind having sprung up at that moment, Crawley remonstrated, in his peculiar mode of abject petitioning; and my husband, having himself seen the advantage of seizing the favourable opportunity for taking and accomplishing the passage of the Mozambique, we departed, under a stiff gale; and, in a short time, reached the middle of that famous Channel, where the fears of the seamen have been so often excited by the reputed cannibalism of the natives of Madagascar. At this time I was strangely beset by nightly visions of terror, which I could impute to no other cause than the stories that George had repeated to me of the wild character of these savages. During the day, but more especially during the blue, sulphurous, flame-coloured twilight of that region—I often fixed my eye on the long, dark, umbrageous coast—followed the ranges of receding heights—threaded the deep recesses of the valleys, that seemed to end in dark caves, and peopled every haunt with festive savages performing their unholy rites over a human victim, destined to form food for creatures bearing that external impress of God's finger which marks the lords of the creation. Those visions were always connected, in some way, with myself; and I could not banish the idea, which clung to me with a morbid power of adherence, that I might, alone and unprotected, be cast into some of these cimmerian recesses, and be subjected to the unutterable miseries of a fate a thousand times worse than death, and what might follow death, by the usages of of eaters of human beings. There was no cause for any such apprehensions; and I am now satisfied that these dark creations of my fancy were in some mysterious way connected with a disordered state of my physical economy; but I was not then aware of such predisposing causes of mental gloom, and still brooded over my imagined horrors, till I drove rest and sleep from my pillow, and disturbed my husband with my pictured images of a danger that he said was far removed from me. From him I got some support and relief; but the faces of the men I saw around me, and especially those of Crawley and Kreutz, seemed, to me, rather to reflect a corroboration of my fears, than to afford me encouragement and support. The grim visions retained their power over me; and, the wind having fallen off almost to a dead calm, I found myself fixed in the very midst of the scenes that thus nourished and perpetuated them. The depression of mind produced by these frightful day-dreams and nightmares, made me sickly and weak. I could scarcely take any food; every piece of flesh presented to me, reminded me of the feasts of the inhabitants of that dark, dismal island that lay stretching before me in the vapours of a tropical climate, like a land of enchantment called up by fiends from the great deep; the dyspeptic nausea of sickness was the very food of my gloomy thoughts; and the co-operative powers of mind and body tended to the increase of my misery, till I seemed a victim of confirmed hypochondria.

We were still fixed immovably in the same place: all motive powers seemed to have forsaken the elements—the sea was like a sheet of glass, the sails hung loose from the masts, and the men lay listless about, overcome with heat, and yawning in lethargy. It was impossible to keep me below. I required air to keep me breathing, and felt a strange melancholy relief from fixing my eyes on the very scene of my terrors. Every effort to occupy my mind was vain; and I lay, for hours at a time, with my eyes fixed on the shore, piercing the deep, wooded hollows, following the faint traces of the savages as they disappeared among the thick trees, and investing every naked demon with all the characteristics of the followers of the mysterious midnight rites in which I conceived they engaged when the hour of their orgies came. I often saw individuals—rendered gigantic by the magnifying medium of the thick vapour—come down to the beach, and fix their gaze on us for a time, and then pace back again to the wooded recesses. Sometimes, when unable to sleep, I crept up from the cabin, and sat and surveyed the silent scene around me—the hazy moon, throwing her thick beams over the calm sea—the dark shadows of unknown birds sailing slowly through the air, and uttering at intervals sounds I had never heard before—the fires of the inhabitants among the trees on the coast, that sent up a long column of red light through the atmosphere, and exhibited the flitting bodies of the naked beings as they danced round the objects of their rites. It is impossible for me, by any language of which I have the power, to convey an adequate conception of my feelings during these hours. They were realities to me; and, therefore, whatever may be said against fanciful creations, I have a right to claim attention to states of the mind and feelings that belong to our nature in certain positions. At a late hour one night, I was engaged in those gloomy watchings and reveries, when Kreutz came to me, and said the captain had been taken suddenly ill. I turned my eyes from the scene along the shore I was surveying, and fixed them for a moment on his face, where the light of the moon sat in deep contrast with the long bushy hair that flowed round his temples. A shudder—that might have been accounted for from the state of my mind and the nature of the communication he had made to me, but which I instinctively attributed, at the time, to the expression of his face—passed over me, and, starting up, I hurried into the cabin off the cuddy, where I found George under the grasp of relentless spasms of the chest and stomach. He was stretched along on the floor, grasping the carpet, which he had wound up into a coil, and vomiting violently into a bason which he had hurriedly seized before he fell.

'Good God, Isabella!' he exclaimed, 'what is this? I am dying. That villain Cr'——

And, whether from weakness or prudence, he stopped, with the guttural sound of these two letters, Cr, which applied equally to Crawley as to Kreutz, and left me in doubt which of them he meant. At this moment Buist the mate entered the cabin; and my agitation and the necessity of affording relief to the sufferer, took my mind off the fearful subject hinted at by the broken sentence I had heard. With the assistance of Buist, I got him placed on the bed. There was no doctor on board, and I was left to the suggestions of my own mind, for adopting means to save him. These were applied, but without imparting any relief. The painful symptoms continued, and he got every moment worse. Neither Crawley nor Kreutz appeared; and when Buist went out to bring what was deemed necessary for the patient, I hung over him, and asked him what he conceived to have been the cause of his illness; but my question startled him—he looked up wildly in my face; his mind was directed towards heaven; and the means of salvation through the redeeming influence of a believed divinity of Him who died on the cross, was the subject alone on which he would speak. The scene, at this moment, around me was extraordinary, and, though I cannot say I had any distinct perception of the individual circumstances that combined to make up the sum of my horrors, I can now see, as through a dark medium, the co-operating elements. There was no candle in the cabin; the light of the moon through the windows filling the apartment with a blue glare, and tinging his pallid face with its hues. My mind, wrought up by the dreamy visions I had indulged in previously, and labouring under a disease which imparted to every feeling its own eliminated gloom, saw even the darkest circumstances of my condition in a false and unnatural aspect. The scenes of our youth and early love; the impressions of the religious sentiments he was muttering in broken snatches; the view of his approaching death; the dark means by which it was accomplished; my condition after he should die, in the power of men I feared; the orgies of the natives I had been contemplating; the deep grave, so fearful in its dead calmness; and the monsters that revelled in it, to which he would be consigned—all flitted through my brain; but with such rapidity—driving out, by short energies, the more engrossing thoughts concerned in the manner of his recovery—that I could not particularize them, while I drew, by some synthetic process of the mind, their general attributes, and thus increased the terror of the scene.

Two hours passed, and every moment made it more apparent that my husband was posting to death. There was no sound heard throughout the ship except the dull tread of the watch; and, at intervals, the whispers of Crawley, as he communed stealthily with Buist, who went out of the cabin repeatedly, to carry intelligence of the state of the sufferer. For about three quarters of an hour he had been raving wildly. The detached words he uttered raised, by their electric power, the working of my fancy which filled up, by a train of thoughts scarcely more within the province of reason, the chain of his wandering ideas. No connected discourse on the subject of his illness, though mixed up with all the reminiscences of an affection that had lasted since the period of infancy, or the prospects that awaited me in the unprecedented position in which I was about to be thrown, could have distracted me in the manner effected by these insulated vocables, wrung by madness from expiring life and reason. They ring in my ears even yet, when the beams of the moon shine through the casements; and, even now, I think I see that dimly lighted cabin, and my husband lying before me in the agonies of death. I became, as if by some secret sympathy, as much deranged as himself. As I watched him, I cast rapid looks around me—out upon the still deep, in the direction of the fearful island—upon the articles of domestic use lying in confusion, and exhibiting dimly-illuminated sides and dark shades. It seemed to me some frightful dream; and, when I turned my eyes again on the pale face which had been the object of my excited fancy for so many years, saw the struggles of expiring nature, and heard the wild accents that still came from his parched lips, I screamed, and tore my hair in handfuls from my head. In that condition, I saw him die; and the increase of my frenzy, produced by that consummation of all evils, made me rush out, and forward to the side of the ship. I felt all the stinging madness of the resolution to die—to fly from the man who, I feared, had murdered him—to escape from that island of cannibals, where I thought I would be left by my relentless foes, by plunging into the deep, when Crawley, who had heard of his demise, seized me, and dragged me back.