Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. XI.—April, 1851—Vol. II.

PHANTOMS AND REALITIES. – AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

(Continued from Page 468.)

PART THE FIRST – MORNING

VII

"I am not about to relate a family history," he began; "but there are some personal circumstances to which I must allude. At nineteen, I was left the sole protector of two sisters, and of a ward of my father, whose guardianship also devolved upon me. It was a heavy responsibility at so early an age, and pressed hard upon a temperament better adapted for gayety and enjoyment. I discharged it, however, with the best judgment I could, and with a zeal that has bequeathed me, among many grateful recollections, one source of lasting and bitter repentance."

"Repentance, Forrester?" I cried, involuntarily.

"You may understand the sort of dangers to which these young creatures were exposed in the spring-tide of their beauty, protected only by a stripling, who knew little more of the world than they did themselves. Upon that point, perhaps, I was too sensitive. I knew what it was to struggle against the natural feelings of youth, and was not disposed to place much trust in the gad-flies who gathered about my sisters. Well – I watched every movement, and I was right. Yet, with all my care, it so happened that an offense – an insult such as your heartless libertines think they may inflict with impunity on unprotected women – was offered to one of my sisters. Our friendless situation was a mark for general observation, and it was necessary that society should know the terms I kept with it. My enemy – for I made him so on the instant – would have appeased me, but I was inaccessible to apologies. We met; I was wounded severely – my opponent fell. This fearful end of the quarrel affected my sister's health. She had a feeling of remorse about being the cause of that man's death, and her delicate frame sunk under it."

"Perhaps," said I, "there might have been other feelings, which she concealed."

"That fear has cast a shadow over my whole life. But we will not talk of it. I must hasten on. There was a fatal malady in our family – the treacherous malady which is fed so luxuriously by the climate of England. My remaining sister, plunged into grief at our bereavement, became a prey to its wasting and insidious influence. You saw that the servant who opened the door was in mourning? I have mentioned these particulars that you may understand I was not alone in the world, as I am now, when the lady you have seen came to reside in my house. At that time, my sisters were living."

"And she?"

"Was my father's ward, of whom I have spoken. During the early part of her life she lived in Scotland, where she had friends. Now listen to me attentively. Gertrude Hastings lost her mother in her childhood; and upon the death of her father, being a minor, her education and guardianship devolved upon my father, who was trustee to her fortune. At his death, which took place soon afterward, the trust came into my hands. It was thought advisable, under these circumstances, that she should have the benefit of wiser counsel than my own, and for several years she was placed in the house of her mother's sister, who lived at no great distance from the English Border. It was my duty to visit her sometimes." He hesitated, and his voice trembled as he spoke.

"Well – I entreat you to proceed."

"Let me collect myself. I visited her sometimes – at first at long intervals, then more frequently. Every man in his youth forms some ideal, false or true, of the woman to whom he would devote his love. Such dreams visited me, but my situation forbade me to indulge in them, and I resolved to devote myself to the charge I had undertaken, and to forego all thoughts of marriage. I never found this conflict beyond my strength until I saw Gertrude Hastings."

I was struck with horror at these words, and shuddered at what I feared was yet to come. He perceived the effect they took upon me, and went on:

"You are precipitate in your judgment, and I must beg that you will hear me patiently to the end. I will be brief, for I am more pained by the disclosure than you can be. Why should I prolong a confession which you have already anticipated? I loved her; and every time I saw her, I loved her more and more. I was justified by the circumstances that drew us together – the equality of our births – the connection of our families. She was free to choose – so was I. I knew of no impediment, and there was none at the time she inspired me with that fatal passion which, when it grew too strong to be concealed from her, she was unable to return."

I breathed more freely; but seeing the emotion under which poor Forrester was laboring, I kept silence, and waited for him to resume.

"I despise what is called superstition," he said, "as much as any of those bald philosophers we are in the habit of meeting. When they, or you, or I, talk of supernatural agencies, we must each of us be judged by the measure of our knowledge. Ignorance and unbelief evade the question they fear to examine by the easy process of rejecting the evidence on which it rests. If the evidence be trustworthy, if it be clear and coherent in every particular, if it be such as we should be bound to admit upon matters that come within the range of our experience, I have yet to learn upon what grounds it can be rejected when it relates to matters of which we know nothing. Our inability to refute it should make us pause before we heap odium on the witnesses who vouch for its truth."

Forrester was proceeding in this strain, apparently under an apprehension that the disclosure he was about to make required some prologue of this kind to bespeak credit for it, little suspecting that there were incidents in my own life which rendered me too easy a recipient of such statements. But I interrupted him by an assurance that I was quite prepared to believe in things much more extraordinary than any which he could have to relate. He then returned to the narrative.

"Gertrude's aunt had been bred up in Scotland, and was a staunch supporter of the old customs, and a stickler for the popular faith in the ceremonies that are practiced there on certain anniversaries. On one of these occasions, Gertrude, whose imagination had, probably, been affected by the stories she had heard concerning them, was induced, half in play and half in earnest, to try the virtue of one of the charms prescribed for the Eve of All Hallows. We might safely smile at these things, if they did not sometimes, as in this instance, lead to serious results. You see I am relating it to you calmly and circumstantially, although it has blighted my existence. The charm worked out its ends to a miracle. The table was laid out with supper, the necessary incantations having been previously performed, and Gertrude, hiding behind a screen, waited for the appearance of the lover who was to decide her future destiny. They say there was a long pause – at least it seemed so to her – and then a footstep was heard, and then the figure of a man entered the room, and seated himself at the table. Trembling with terror, she looked out from her hiding-place, and saw him clearly within two or three yards of her. The chair had been so placed that his face was exactly opposite to her. She scanned his features so accurately, that she remembered the minutest particulars, to the color of his hair and eyes, and the exact form of his mouth, which had a peculiar expression in it. The figure moved, as if to rise from the chair, and Gertrude, struck to the heart with fear, uttered a loud shriek, and fell in a swoon upon the ground. Her friends, who were watching outside, rushed into the room, but it was empty."

"And that figure – has she never seen it since?"

"Never till to-night. She recognized you in an instant."

My amazement at this narrative nearly deprived me of the power of speech.

"What followed this?" I inquired.

"A delusion that has occupied her thoughts ever since. It took such complete possession of her, that all arguments were useless. When she was asked if she believed it to be real, her invariable answer was that it was real to her. I suffered her to indulge this fancy, hoping that one day or another she would recover from what I regarded as a trance of the mind; but I was mistaken. She always said she was sure of your existence; and looked forward to the realization of her destiny, like one who lived under an enchantment. By slow degrees I relinquished all hopes, and resolved to sacrifice my own happiness to hers, if the opportunity should ever arrive. After this she came to London, broken down in health, and rapidly wasting away under the influence of the protracted expectation that was destroying her. Then it was I first met you. I had some misgiving about you from the beginning, and prevailed upon her to describe to me again and again the person of my spectral rival. It was impossible to mistake the portrait. My doubts were cleared up, and the duty I had to perform was obvious. But I determined to make further inquiry before I revealed to either what I knew of both, and having heard you speak of your birth-place and residence, I went into the country, satisfied myself on all points respecting you, and at the same time learned the whole particulars of your life. Still I delayed from day to day my intention of bringing you together, knowing that when it was accomplished my own doom would be sealed forever. While I delayed, however, she grew worse, and I felt that it would be criminal to hesitate any longer. I have now fulfilled my part – it remains for you to act upon your own responsibility. My strength exerted for her has carried me so far – I can go no further."

As he uttered these words he rose and turned away his head. I grasped his hand and tried to detain him. He stood and listened while I expressed the unbounded gratitude and admiration with which his conduct inspired me, and explained, hurriedly, the fascination that had held me in a similar trance to that which he had just described. But he made no observation on what I said. It appeared as if he had resolved to speak no more on the subject; and he exhibited such signs of weariness and pain that I thought it would be unreasonable to solicit his advice at that moment. And so we parted for the night.

VIII

I pondered all night upon the history related to me by Forrester. In the desire to escape from the clouds which still darkened my judgment, I endeavored to persuade myself at one moment that Forrester was trying to impose upon me, and at another that he must be laboring under a mental aberration. The pride of reason revolted from the incredible particulars of that extraordinary narrative; yet certain coincidences, which seemed to confirm their truth, made me hesitate in my skepticism. If I had related to him what had happened to myself, he would have had as good a right to doubt my sanity or veracity as I had to doubt his. This was what staggered me.

I sifted every particle of the story, and was compelled to confess that there was nothing in it which my own experience did not corroborate. The fetch, or wraith, or whatever it was that had appeared to Gertrude, was a counterpart illusion to the figure that had appeared to me. Upon her memory, as upon mine, it had made so vivid an impression, that our recognition of each other was mutual and instantaneous. That fact was clear, and placed the truth of Forrester's statement beyond controversy. It was competent to others, who had no personal evidence of such visitations, to treat with indifference the mysteries of the spiritual world; but I was not free, however much I desired it, to set up for a philosophical unbeliever. All that remained, therefore, was to speculate in the dark on the circumstances which were thus shaping out our destiny, and which, inscrutable as they were, commanded the submission of my reason and my senses.

It occurred to me that, as Gertrude's residence beyond the border might not have been distant many miles from the spot where I imagined I had seen her, it was possible – barely possible – that her appearance there might have been a reality after all. This supposition was a great relief to me, for I would gladly have accepted a natural solution of the phenomenon, and I accordingly resolved to question her upon the subject.

I thought the next day would never come, yet I shuddered at its coming. I was eager to see her again, although I dreaded the interview; and I will frankly acknowledge, that when I approached the house I trembled like a man on the eve of a sentence which was to determine the issue of life or death.

The blinds were down in all the windows, and the aspect of the whole was chill and dismal. Where sickness is, there, too, must be cheerlessness and fear. The passion which had so long possessed me was as strong as ever, but it was dashed with a hideous terror; there was so much to explain and to be satisfied upon before either of us could rightly comprehend our situation.

I knocked faintly. There was no answer. I knocked again, more loudly, but still lowly, and with increasing apprehension. The door was opened by Forrester. He looked dreadfully haggard, as if he had been sitting up all night, worn by grief and watching. I spoke to him, something broken and hardly articulate: he bent his head, and, raising his hand in token of silence, beckoned me to follow him. He was evidently much agitated, and a suspicion crossed my mind that he already repented the sacrifice he had made. But I did him wrong.

When we reached the door of the room in which we had seen Gertrude on the preceding night Forrester paused, as if to gather up his manhood for what was to follow; then, putting forward his hand, he pushed open the door.

"Go in – go in," he cried, in a choking voice; and hurrying me on he retreated back into the shadow, as if he wished to avoid being present at our meeting.

The room was in deep twilight. The curtains were drawn together over the windows, and there was less disorder in the apartment than when I had last seen it. The evidences of illness which I had observed scattered about were removed, and the furniture was more carefully arranged. The atmosphere was heavy, and affected me painfully. But I thought nothing of these things, although the slightest incident did not escape me. Gertrude still lay upon the sofa, and appeared to be more tranquil and composed. There was a solemn hush over her as she lay perfectly calm and motionless. I fancied she was asleep, and approached her gently. Her hands were stretched down by her sides, and I ventured to raise one of them to my lips. I shall never forget the horror of that touch. A thrill shot through my veins, as if a bolt of ice had struck upon my heart and frozen up its current at the fountain. It was the hand of a corpse.

In the first feeling of madness and despair which seized upon me I ran my hands wildly over her arms, and even touched her face and lips, doubting whether the form that lay before me was of this world. Some such wild apprehension traversed my brain; but the witnesses of death in the flesh were too palpable in many ways to admit of any superstitious incredulity. The violent surprise and emotion of the night before had proved too much for her wasted strength, and she had sunk suddenly under the fearful re-action.

The shock overwhelmed me. Not only was she taken from me at the very instant of discovery and possession, but all hope of mutual explanation was extinguished forever. Upon one point alone had I arrived at certainty, but that only rendered me more anxious to clear up the rest. I had seen her living, had spoken to her, and heard her voice; and now she was dead, the proof of her actual humanity was palpable. It was some comfort to know that she to whom I had dedicated myself under the influence of a sort of sorcery, was a being actuated by passions like my own, and subject to the same natural laws; but it was the extremity of all conceivable wretchedness to lose her just as I had acquired this consoling knowledge. The phantom had scarcely become a reality when it again faded into a phantom.

A few days afterward, for the second time, I followed a hearse to the grave. The only persons to whom I had consecrated my love were gone; and this last bereavement seemed to me at the time as if it were final, and as if there was nothing left for me but to die. My reason, however, had gained some strength by my rough intercourse with the world; and even in the midst of the desolation of that melancholy scene I felt as if a burden had been taken off my mind, and I had been released from a harassing obligation. At all events I had a consciousness, that as the earth closed over the coffin of Gertrude, I passed out of the region of dreams and deceptions, and that whatever lay in advance of me, for good or evil, was of the actual, toiling, practical world. The exodus of my delusion seemed to open to me a future, in which imagination would be rebuked by the presence of stern and harsh realities. I felt like a manumitted slave, who goes forth reluctantly to the hard work of freedom, and would gladly fall back, if he could, upon the supine repose which had spared him the trouble of thinking for himself.

Forrester bore his agony with heroic endurance. I, who knew what was in his heart, knew what he suffered. But his eyes were still and his lips were fixed, and not a single quiver of his pulses betrayed his anguish to the bystanders. When the last rites were over, and we turned away, he wrung my hand without a word of leave-taking, and departed. A few days afterward he left England. The associations connected with the scenes of his past life – with the country that contained the ashes of all he loved – embittered every hour of his life, and he wisely sought relief in exile. I was hurt at not having received some communication from him before he went away; but I knew he was subject to fits of heavy depression, and his silence, although it pained me at the time, did not diminish the respect and sympathy inspired by his conduct.

I will not dwell upon the immediate effect which the dissolution of Gertrude, and the phantoms connected with her, had upon my mind. Shattered and subdued, I re-entered the world, which I was now resolved, out of cowardice and distrust of myself, not to leave again; taking mental exercise, as an invalid, slowly recovering from the prostration of a long illness, tests his returning strength in the open air. I had a great fear upon me of going into the country, and being once more alone. The tranquillity of Nature would have thrown me back into despair, while the crowded haunts of London kept me in a state of activity that excluded the morbid influences I had so much reason to dread. Of my new experiences in the second phase of my life, as different from the former as light from darkness, I shall speak with the same fidelity which I have hitherto strictly observed.

PART THE SECOND – NOON

I

When I had deposited Gertrude in the grave I was a solitary tree, singled out by the lightning, from the rest of the forest, and blasted through every part of its articulation. There was no verdure in my soul. I was dead to the world around me. I lived in what was gone – I had no interest in what was to come. I believed that the fatal spell that had exercised such a power over my thoughts and actions had accomplished its catastrophe, and that there was nothing further for me to fulfill but death. My Idol had perished in her beauty and her love. She had withered before my eyes, destroyed by the supernatural passion which had bound us to each other. How then could I live, when that which was my life had vanished like a pageant in the sky? I thought I could not survive her. Yet I did. And seeing things as I see them now, and knowing the supremacy of time over affliction, I look back and wonder at the thought which desolated my heart under the immediate pressure of a calamity that appeared irreparable, but for which the world offered a hundred appeasing consolations.

I went again into the bustle – the strife of vanities, ambitions, passions, and interests. At first I merely suffered myself to be carried away by the tide; my plank was launched, and I drifted with the current. But in a little time I began to be excited by the roar and jubilee of the waters.

For many months Gertrude was ever present to me, in moments of respite and solitude. As certain as the night returned, the stillness of my chamber was haunted by her smiles. The tomb seemed to give up its tenant in the fresh bloom and sweet confidence of life, and she would come in her star-light brightness, smiling sadly, as if she had a feeling of something wanted in that existence to which death had translated her, and looking reproachfully, but sweetly down upon me for lingering so long behind her. By degrees, as time wore on, her form grew less and less distinct, and, wearied of watching and ruminating, I would fall asleep and lose her; and so, between waking and sleeping, the floating outlines vanished, and she visited me no more. At last I almost forgot the features which were once so deeply portrayed upon my heart. Poor human love and grief, how soon their footprints are washed away!

I resided entirely in London, without any settled plan of life, tossed about upon the living surge, and indifferent whither it swept me. I lived from hour to hour, and from day to day, upon the incidents that chanced to turn up. People thought there was something singular in my manner, and that my antecedents were ambiguous; consequently I was much sought after, and invited abroad. My table was covered with cards. I was plagued with inquiries, and found that ladies were especially anxious to know more about me than I chose to tell. My silence and reserve piqued their curiosity. Had I been a romantic exile, dressed in a bizarre costume, with an interesting head of hair, and an impenetrable expression of melancholy in my face, I could not have been more flattered by their inconvenient attentions. Out of this crush of civilities I made my own election of friends. My acquaintance was prodigious – my intimacies were few. Wherever I went I met a multitude of faces that were quite familiar to me, and to which I was expected to bow, but very few individuals whom I really knew. I had not the kind of talent that can carry away a whole London Directory in its head. I could never remember the names of the mob of people I was acquainted with. I recognized their faces, and shook their hands, and was astonished to find how glibly they all had my name, although I hardly recollected one of theirs, and this round of nods and how-d'ye-do's constituted the regular routine of an extensive intercourse with society. The clatter, frivolous as it was, kept me in motion, and there was health in that; but it was very wearisome. A man with a heart in his body desires closer and more absorbing ties. But we get habituated to these superficialities, and drop into them with surprising indifference; knowing or hoping that the sympathy we long for will come at last, and that, if it never comes, it is not so bad a thing after all, to be perpetually stopped on the journey of life by lively gossips, who will shake you by the hand, and insist upon asking you how you are, just as cordially as if they cared to know.

There was one family I visited more frequently than the rest of my miscellaneous acquaintance. I can hardly explain the attraction that drew me so much into their circle, for there was little in it that was lovable in itself, or that harmonized with my tastes. But antagonisms are sometimes as magnetic as affinities in the moral world. They were all very odd, and did nothing like other people. They were so changeable and eccentric that they scarcely appeared to me for two evenings in succession to be the same individuals. They were perpetually shifting the slides of character, and exhibiting new phases. Their amusements and occupations resembled the incessant dazzle of a magic lantern. They were never without a novelty of some kind on hand – a new whim, which they played with like a toy till they got tired of it – a subtle joke, with a little malicious pleasantry in it – or a piece of scandal, which they exhausted till it degenerated into ribaldry. Their raillery and mirth, even when they happened to be in their most good-natured moods, were invariably on the side of ridicule. They took delight in distorting every thing, and never distorted any thing twice in the same way. They laughed at the whole range of quiet, serious amiabilities, as if all small virtues were foibles and weaknesses; and held the heroic qualities in a sort of mock awe that was more ludicrous and humiliating than open scoffing and derision. In this way they passed their lives, coming out with fresh gibes every morning, and going to bed at night in the same harlequinade humor. It seemed as if they had no cares of their own, and made up for the want of them by taking into keeping the cares of their neighbors; which they tortured so adroitly that, disrelish it as you might, it was impossible to resist the infection of their grotesque satire.