Struggling to bear the fate which I had met, I turned as manfully as I might, and retraced my steps down the thronging street, within whose limits I now learned that my freedom was confined. It was a sickening discovery. I had been a man of will so developed and freedom so sufficient that helplessness came upon me like a change of temperament; it took the form of hopelessness almost at once.
What was death? The secret of life. What knew I of the system of things on which a blow upon the head had ushered me all unready, reluctant, and uninstructed as I was? No more than the ruddiest live stockbroker in the street, whose blood went bounding, that fresh morning, to the antics of the Santa Ma. I was not accustomed to be uninformed; my ignorance appalled me. Even in the deeps of my misery, I found space for a sense of humiliation; I felt profoundly mortified. In that spot, in that way, of all others, why was I withheld? Was it the custom of the black country called Death, which we mark "unexplored" upon the map of life,—was it the habit to tie a man to the place where he had died? But this was not the spot where I had died. It was the spot where I had learned that I had died. It was the place where the consciousness of death had wrought itself, not upon the nerves of the body, but upon the faculties of the mind. I had been dead twelve hours before I found it out.
I looked up and down the street, where the living men scurried to and fro upon their little errands. These seemed immeasurably small. I looked upon them with disgust. Fettered to that pavement, like a convict to his ball-and-chain, I passed and repassed in wretchedness whose quality I cannot express, and would not if I could.
"I am punished," I said; "I am punished for that which I have done. This is my doom. I am imprisoned here."
Sometimes I broke into uncontrollable misery, crying upon my wife's dear name. Then I would hush the outbreak, lest some one overhear me; and then I would remember that no one could overhear. I looked into the faces of the people whom I met and passed, with such longings for one single sign of recognition as are not to be described. It even occurred to me that among them all one might be found of whom my love and grief and will might make a messenger to Helen. But I found none such, or I gained no such power; and, sick at heart, I turned away.
Suddenly, as I threaded the thick of the press, beating to and fro, and up and down, as dead leaves move before the wind, some one softly touched my hand.
It was the St. Bernard, the broker's dog. This time, as before, he looked into my face with signs of pleasure or of pity, or of both, and made as if he would caress me.
"Lion!" I cried, "youknow me, don't you? Bless you, Lion!"
Now, at the dumb thing's recognition, I could have wept for pleasure. The dog, when I spoke to him, followed me; and for some time walked up and down and athwart the street, beside me. This was a comfort to me. At last his master came out upon the sidewalk and looked for him. Brake whistled merrily, and the dog, at the first call, went bounding in.
Ordinary writers upon usual topics, addressing readers of their own condition, have their share of difficulties; at best one conquers the art of expression as a General conquers an enemy. But the obstacles which present themselves to the recorder of this narrative are such as will be seen at once to have peculiar force. Almost at the outset they dishearten me. How shall I tell the story unless I be understood? And how should I be understood if I told the story? Were it for me, a man miserable and erring, gone to his doom as untrained for its consequences, or for the use of them, as a drayman for the use of hypnotism in surgery,—were it for me to play the interpreter between life and death? Were it for me to expect to be successful in that solemn effort which is as old as time, and as hopeless as the eyes of mourners?
What shall I say? It is willed that I shall speak. The angel said unto me: Write. How shall I obey, who am the most unworthy of any soul upon whom has been laid the burden of the higher utterance? Sacred be the task. Would that its sacredness could sanctify the unfitness of him who here fulfils it.
The experience which I have already narrated was followed by an indefinite period of great misery. How long I remained a prisoner in that unwelcome spot I cannot accurately tell.
What are called by dwellers in the body days and nights, and dawns and darks, succeeded each other, little remarked by my wretchedness, or by the sense of remoteness from these things which now began to grow upon me. The life of what we call a spirit had begun for me in the form of a moral dislocation. The wrench, the agony, the process of setting the nature under its new conditions, took place in due order, but with bitter laggardness. The accident of death did not heal in my soul by what surgeons call "the first intention." I retained for a long time the consciousness of being an injured creature.
As I paced and repaced the narrow street where the money-makers and money-lovers of the town jostled and thronged, a great disgust descended upon me. The place, the springs of conduct, wearied me, something in the manner that an educated person is wearied by low conversation. It seemed to be like this:—that the moral motives of the living created the atmosphere of the dead therein confined. It was as if I inhaled the coarse friction, the low aspiration, the feverishness, the selfishness, the dishonour, that the getting of gain, when it became the purpose of life, involved. I experienced a sense of being stifled, and breathed with difficulty; much as those live men would have done, if the gas-pipes had burst in the street.
It did not detract from this feeling of asphyxia that I was aware of having, to a certain extent, shared the set of moral compounds which I now found resolved to their elements, by the curious chemistry of death.
I had loved money and the getting of money, as men of the world, and of success in it, are apt to do. I was neither better nor worse than others of my sort. I had speculated with the profits of my profession, idly enough, but hotly, too, at times. I had told myself that I did this out of anxiety for the future of my family. I had viewed myself in the light of the model domestic man, who guards his household against an evil day. It had never occurred to me to classify myself with the mere money-changers, into whose atmosphere I had elected to put myself.
Now, as I glided in and out among them, unseen, unheard, unrecognized, a spirit among their flesh, there came upon me a humiliating sense of my true relation to them. Was it thus, I said, or so? Did I this or that? Was the balance of motives so disproportionate after all? Was there so little love of wife and child? So much of self and gain? Was the item of the true so small? The sum of the false so large? Had I been so much less that was noble, so much more that was low?
I mingled with the mass of haggard men at a large stock auction which half the street attended. The panic had spread. Sleeplessness and anxiety had carved the crowding faces with hard chisels. The shouts, the scramble, the oaths, the clinched hands, the pitiful pushing, affected me like a dismal spectacular play on some barbarian stage. How shall I express the sickening aspect of the scene to a man but newly dead?
The excitement waxed with the morning. The old and placid Santa Ma throbbed like any little road of yesterday. The stock had gained 32 points in ten minutes, and down again, and up again to Heaven knows what. Men ran from despair to elation, and behaved like maniacs in both. Men who were gentlemen at home turned savages here. Men who were honourable in society turned sharpers here. Madness had them, as I watched them. A kind of pity for them seized me. I glided in among them, and lifted my whole heart to stay them if I could. I stretched the hands that no one saw. I raised the voice that none could hear.
"Gentlemen!" I cried, "count me the market value of it—on the margin of two lives! By the bonds wherewith you bind yourselves you shall be bound!... What is the sum of wealth represented within these walls to-day? Name it to me.... The whole of it, for the power to leave this place! The whole of it, the whole of it, for one half-hour in a dead man's desolated home! A hundred-fold the whole of it for"—
But here I lost command of myself, and fleeing from the place where my presence and my misery and my entreaty alike were lost upon the attention of the living throng as were the elements of the air they breathed, I rushed into the outer world again; there to wander up and down the street, and hate the place, and hate myself for being there, and hate the greed of gain I used to love, and hate myself for having loved it; and yet to know that I was forced to act as if I loved it still, and to be the ghost before the ghost of a desire.
"It is my doom," I said. "I am punished. I am fastened to this worldly spot, and to this awful way of being dead."
Now, while I spoke these words, I came, in the stress of my wretchedness, fleeing to the head of the street; and there, I cannot tell you how, I cannot answer why, as the arrow springs from the bow, or the conduct from the heart, or the spirit from the flesh,—in one blessed instant I knew that I was free to leave the spot, and crying, "Helen, Helen!" broke from it.
But no. Alas, no, no! I was and was not free. All my soul turned toward her, but something stronger than my soul constrained me. It seemed to me that I longed for her with such longing as might have killed a live man, or might have made a dead one live again. This emotion added much to my suffering, but nothing to my power to turn one footstep toward her or to lift my helpless face in her direction. It was not permitted to me. It was not willed.
Now this, which might in another temperament have produced a sense of fear or of desire to placate the unknown Force which overruled me, created in me at first a stinging rage. This is the truth, and the truth I tell.
In my love and misery, and the shock of this disappointment—against the unknown opposition to my will, I turned and raved; even as when I was a man among men I should have raved at him who dared my purpose.
"You are playing with me!" I wailed. "You torture a miserable man. Who and what are you, that make of death a bitterer thing than life can guess? Show me what I have to fight, and let me wrestle for my liberty,—though I am a ghost, let me wrestle like a man! Let me to my wife! Give way, and let me seek her!"
Shocking and foreign as words like these must be to many of those who read these pages, it must be remembered that they were uttered by one to whom faith and the knowledge that comes by way of it were the leaves of an abandoned text-book. For so many years had the tenets of the Christian religion been put out of my practical life, even as I put aside the opinions of the laity concerning the treatment of disease, that I do not over-emphasize; I speak the simplest truth in saying that my first experience of death had not in any sense revived the vividness of lost belief to me. As the old life had ended had the new begun. Where the tree had fallen it did lie. What was habit before death was habit after. What was natural then was natural now. What I loved living I loved dead. That which interested Esmerald Thorne the man interested Esmerald Thorne the spirit. The incident of death had raised the temperature of intellect; it had, perhaps, I may say, by this time quickened the pulse of conscience; but it had in no wise wrought any miracle upon me, nor created a religious believer out of a worldly and indifferent man of science. Dying had not forthwith made me a devout person. Incredible as it may seem, it is the truth that up to this time I had not, since the moment of dissolution, put to myself the solemn queries concerning my present state which occupy the imaginations of the living so much, while yet death is a fact remote from their experience.
It was the habit of long years with me, after the manner of my kind, to settle all hard questions by a few elastic phrases, which, once learned, are curiously pliable to the intellectual touch. "Phenomena," for instance,—how plastic to cover whatever one does not understand! "Law,"—how ready to explain away the inexplicable! Up to this point death had struck me as a most unfortunate phenomenon. Its personal disabilities I found it easy to attribute to some natural law with which my previous education had left me unfamiliar. Now, standing baffled there in that incredible manner half of tragedy, half of the absurd,—even the petty element of the undignified in the position adding to my distress,—a houseless, homeless, outcast spirit, struck still in the heart of that great town, where in hundreds of homes was weeping for me, where I was beloved and honoured and bemoaned, and where my own wife at that hour broke her heart with sorrow for me and for the manner of my parting from her,—then and there to be beaten back, and battered down, and tossed like an atom in some primeval flood, whithersoever I would not,—what a situation was this!
Now, indeed, I think for the first time, my soul lifted itself, as a sick man lifts himself upon his elbows, in his painful bed. Now, flashing straight back upon the outburst of my defiance and despair, like the reflex action of a strong muscle, there came into my mind, if not into my heart, these impulsive and entreating words:—
"What art Thou, who dost withstand me? I am a dead and helpless man. What wouldst Thou with me? Where gainest Thou Thy force upon me? Art Thou verily that ancient Myth which we were wont to call Almighty God?"
Simultaneously with the utterance of these words that blast of Will to which I have referred fell heavily upon me. A Power not myself overshadowed me and did environ me. Guided whithersoever I would not, I passed forth upon errands all unknown to me, rebelling and obeying as I went.
"I am become what we used to call a spirit," I thought, bitterly, "and this is what it means. Better might one become a molecule, for those, at least, obey the laws of the universe, and do not suffer."
Now, as I took my course, it being ordered on me, it led me past the door of a certain open church, whence the sound of singing issued. The finest choir in the city, famous far and near, were practising for the Sunday service, and singing like the sons of God, indeed, as I passed by. With the love of the scientific temperament for harmony alert in me, I lingered to listen to the anthem which these singers were rendering in their customary great manner. With the instinct of the musically educated, I felt pleasure in this singing, and said:—
"Magnificently done!" as I went on. It was some moments before the words which the choir sang assumed any vividness in my mind. When they did I found that they were these;—
"For God is a Spirit. God is a Spirit: and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit"—
Now it fell out that my steps were directed to the hospital; and to the hospital I straightway went. I experienced some faint comfort at this improvement in my lot, and hurried up the avenue and up the steps and into the familiar wards with eagerness. All the impulses of the healer were alive in me. I felt it a mercy for my nature to be at its own again. I hastened in among my sick impetuously.
The hospital had been a favourite project of mine; from its start, unreasonably dear to me. Through the mounting difficulties which blockade such enterprises, I had hewn and hacked, I had fathered and doctored, I had trusteed and collected, I had subscribed and directed and persisted and prophesied and fulfilled, as one ardent person must in most humanitarian successes; and I had loved the success accordingly. I do not think it had ever once occurred to me to question myself as to the chemical proportions of my motives in this great and popular charity. Now, as I entered the familiar place, some query of this nature did indeed occupy my mind; it had the strangeness of all mental experiences consequent upon my new condition, and somewhat, if I remember, puzzled me.
The love of healing? The relief of suffering? Sympathy with the wretched? Chivalry for the helpless? Generosity to the poor? Friendship to the friendless? Were these the motives, all the motives, thewholemotives, of him who had in my name ministered in that place so long? Even the love of science? Devotion to a therapeutic creed? Sacrifice for a surgical doctrine? Enthusiasm for an important professional cause? Did these, and only these, sources of conductexplainthe great hospital? Or the surgeon who had created and sustained it?
Where did the motive deteriorate? Where did the alloy come in? How did the sensitiveness to self, the passion for fame, the joy of power, amalgamate with all that noble feeling? How much residuum was there in the solution of that absorption which (outside of my own home) I had thought the purest and highest of my interests in life?
For the first of all the uncounted times that I had entered the hospital for now these many years, I crossed the threshold questioning myself in this manner, and doubting of my fitness to be there, or to be what I had been held to be in that place. Life had carried me gaily and swiftly, as it carries successful men. I had found no time, or made none, to cross-question the sources of conduct. My success had been my religion.
I had the conviction of a prosperous person that the natural emotions of prosperity were about right. Added to this was something of the physician's respect for what was healthful in human life. Good luck, good looks, good nerves, a good income, an enviable reputation for professional skill, personal popularity, and private happiness,—these things had struck me as so wholesome that they must be admirable. Behind the painted screen which a useful and successful career sets before the souls of men I had been too busy or too light of heart to peer. Now it was as if, in the act or the fact of dying, I had moved a step or two, and looked over the edge of the bright shield.
Thoughts like these came to me so quietly and so naturally, now, that I wondered why I had not been familiar with them before; it even occurred to me that being very busy did not wholly excuse a live man for not thinking; and it was something in the softened spirit of this strange humility that I opened the noiseless door, and found myself among my old patients in the large ward.
Never before had I entered that sad place that the electric thrill of welcome, which only a physician knows, had not pulsated through it, preceding me, from end to end of the long room. The peculiarlightingof the ward that flashes with the presence of a favourite doctor; the sudden flexible smile on pain-pinched lips; the yearning motion of the eyes in some helpless body where only the eyes can stir; the swift stretching-out of wasted hands; the half-inaudible cry of welcome: "The doctor's come!" "Oh, there's the doctor!" "Why, it's thedoctor!"—the loving murmur of my name; the low prayer of blessing on it,—oh, never before had I entered my hospital, and missed the least of these.
I thought I was prepared for this, but it was not without a shock that I stood among my old patients, mute and miserable, glancing piteously at them, as they had so often done at me; seeking for their recognition, which I might not have; longing for their welcome, which was not any more for me.
The moans of pain, the querulous replies to nurses, the weary cough or plethoric breathing, the feeble convalescent laughter,—these greeted me; and only these. Like the light that entered at the window, or the air that circulated through the ward, I passed unnoticed and unthanked. Some one called out petulantly that a door had got unfastened, and bade a nurse go shut it, for it blew on her. But when I came up to the bedside of this poor woman, I saw that she was crying.
"She's cried herself half-dead," a nurse said, complainingly. "Nobody can stop her. She's taking on so for Dr. Thorne."
"I don't blame her," said a little patient from a wheeled-chair. "Everybody knows what he did for her. She's got one of her attacks,—and look at her! There can't anybody but him stop it. Whatever we're going to do without the doctor"—
Her own lip quivered, though she was getting well.
"I don't see how the doctorcoulddie!" moaned the very sick woman, weeping afresh, "when there's those that nobody but him can keep alive. It hadn't oughter to be let to be. How are sick folks going to get along without their doctor? It ain'tright!"
"Lord have mercy on ye, poor creetur," said an old lady from the opposite cot. "Don't take on so. It don'thelpit any. It ain't agoing to bring the doctor back!"
Sobs arose at this. I could hear them from more beds than I cared to count. Sorrow sat heavily in the ward for my sake. It distressed me to think of the effect of all this depression upon the nervous systems of these poor people. I passed from case to case, and watched the ill-effects of the general gloom with a sense of professional disappointment which only physicians will understand as coming uppermost in a man's mind under circumstances such as these.
My discomfort was increased by the evidences of what I considered mistakes in treatment on the part of my colleagues; some of which had peculiarly disagreed with certain patients since my death had thrown them into other hands. My helplessness before these facts chafed me sorely.
I made no futile effort to make myself known to any of the hospital patients. I had learned too well the limitations of my new condition now. I had in no wise learned to bear them. In truth, I think I bore them less, for my knowledge that these poor creatures did truly love me, and leaned on me, and mourned for me; I found it hard. I think it even occurred to me that a dead man might not be able to bear it to see his wife and child.
"Doctor!" said a low, sweet voice, "Doctor?" My heart leaped within me, as I turned. Where was the highly organized one of all my patients, who had baffled death for love of me? Who had the clairvoyance or clairaudience, or the wonderful tip in the scale of health and disease, which causes such phenomena?
With hungry eyes I gazed from cot to cot. No answering gaze returned to me. Craving their recognition more sorely than they had ever, in the old life, craved mine, in such need of their sympathy as never had the weakest of the whole of them for mine, I scanned them all. No—no. There was not a patient in the ward who knew me. No.
Stung with the disappointment, I sank into a chair beside the weeping woman's bed, and bowed my face upon my hands. At this instant I was touched upon the shoulder.
"Doctor! Why, Doctor!" said the voice again.
I sprang and caught the speaker by the hands. It was Mrs. Faith. She stood beside me, sweet and smiling.
"The carriage overturned," she said in her quiet way, "I was badly hurt. I only died an hour ago. I started out at once to find you. I want you to see Charley. Charley's still alive. Those doctors don't understand Charley. There's nobody I'd trust him to but you. You can save him. Come! You can't think how he asked for you, and cried for you.... I thought I should find you at the hospital. Come quickly, Doctor! Come!"
Some homesick traveller in a foreign land, where he is known of none and can neither speak nor understand the language of the country; taken ill, let us say, at a remote inn, his strength and credit gone, and he, in pain and fever, hears, one blessed day, the voice of an old friend in the court below. Such a man may think he has—but I doubt if he have—some crude conception of the state of feeling in which I found myself, when recognized in this touching manner by my old patient.
My emotion was so great that I could not conceal it; and she, in her own quick and delicate way, perceiving this almost before I did myself, made as if she saw it not, and lightly adding:
"Hurry, Doctor! I will go before you. Let us lose no time!" led me at once out of the hospital and rapidly away.
In an incredibly, almost confusingly short space of time, we reached her house; this was done by some method of locomotion not hitherto experienced by me, and which I should, at that time, have found it difficult to describe, unless by saying that she thought us where we wished to be. Perhaps it would be more exact to say,She felt us. It was as if the great power of the mother's love in her had become a new bodily faculty by which she was able, with extraordinary disregard of the laws of distance, to move herself and to draw another to the suffering child. I should say that I perceived at once, in the presence of this sweet woman, that there were possibilities and privileges in the state immediately succeeding death, which had been utterly denied to me, and were still unknown to me. It was easy to see that her personal experience in the new condition differed as much from mine as our lives had differed in the time preceding death. She had been a patient, unworldly, and devout sufferer; a chronic invalid, who bore her lot divinely. Her soul had been as full of trust and gentleness, of the forgetting of self and the service of others, of the scorn of pain, and of what she called trust in Heaven, as any woman's soul could be.
I had never seen the moment when I could withhold my respect from the devout nature of Mrs. Faith, any more than I could from her manner of enduring suffering; or, I might add, if I could expect the remark to be properly understood,—from her strong and intelligent trust in me. Physicians know what sturdy qualities it takes to make a good patient. Perhaps they are, to some extent, the same which go to make a good believer; but in this direction I am less informed.
During our passage from the hospital to the house, Mrs. Faith had not spoken to me; her whole being seemed, as nearly as I could understand it, to be absorbed in the process of getting there. It struck me that she was still unpractised in the use of a new and remarkable faculty, which required strict attention from her, like any other as yet unlearned art.
"Youare not turned out of your own home it seems!" I exclaimed impulsively, as we entered the house together.
"Oh, no,no!" she cried. "Who is? Who could be? Why, Doctor, areyou?"
"Death is a terrible respecter of persons," I answered drearily. I could not further explain myself at that moment.
"I have been away from Charley a good while," she anxiously replied; "it is the first time I have left him since I died. But I had to find you, Doctor. Charley should not die—I can't have Charley die—for his poor father's sake. But I feel quite safe about him now I have got you."
She said these words in her old bright, trustful way. The thought of my helplessness to justify such trust smote me sorely; but I said nothing then to undeceive her,—how could I?—and we made haste together to the bedside of the injured child.
I saw at a glance that the child was in a bad case. Halt was there, and Dr. Gazell; they were consulting gloomily. The father, haggard with his first bereavement, seemed to have accepted the second as a foregone conclusion; he sat with his face in his hands, beside the little fellow's bed. The boy called for his mother at intervals. A nurse hung about weeping. It was a dismal scene; there was not a spark of hope, or energy, or fight in the whole room. I cried out immoderately that it was enough to kill the well, and protested against the management of the case with the ardent conviction to which my old patient was so used, and in which she believed more thoroughly than I did myself. "They are giving the wrong remedy," I hotly said. "This surgical fever could be controlled,—the boy need not die. But he will! You may as well make up your mind to it, Mrs. Faith. Gazell doesn't understand the little fellow's constitution, and Halt doesn't understand anything."
Now it was that, as I had expected, the mother turned upon me with all a mother's hopeless and heart-breaking want of logic. Surely, I, and only I, could save the boy. Why, I had always taken care of Charley! Was it possible that I could stand by and see Charleydie?Sheshould not have died herself if I had been there. She depended upon me to find some way—there must be a way. She never thought I was the kind of a man to be so changed by—by what had happened.
I used to be so full of hope and vigour, and so inventive in a sick-room. It was not reasonable! It was not right! It was not possible that, just because I was a spirit, I could not control the minds or bodies of those live men who were so inferior to me. Why, she thought I could controlanybody. She thought I could conqueranything.
"I don't understand it, Doctor," she said, with something like reproach. "You don't seem to be able to do as much—you don't even know as much asIdo, now. And you know what a sick and helpless little woman I've always been,—how ignorant, beside you! I thought you were so wise, so strong, so great. Where has it all gone to, Doctor? What has become of your wisdom and your power? Can't you help me? Can't you"—
"I can do nothing," I interrupted her,—"nothing. I am shorn of it all. It has all gone from me, like the strength of Samson. Spare me, and torment me not.... I cannot heal your child. I am not like you. I was not prepared for—this condition of things. I did not expect to die. I never thought of becoming a spirit. I find myself extraordinarily embarrassed by it. It is the most unnatural state I ever was in."
"Why, I find it as natural as life," she said, more gently. She had now moved to the bedside, and taken the little fellow in her arms.
"You are not as I," I replied morosely. "We differed—and we differ. Truly, I believe that if there is anything to be done for your boy, it rests with you, and not with me."
Halt and Gazell were now consulting in an undertone, touching the selection of a certain remedy; no one noticed them, and they droned on.
The mother crooned over the child, and caressed him, and breathed upon his sunken little face, and poured her soul out over him in precious floods and wastes of tenderness as mothers do.
"Live, my little son!" she whispered. "Live, live!"
But I, meanwhile, was watching the two physicians miserably. "There!" I said, "they have dropped the phial on the floor. See, that is the one they ought to have. It rolled away. They don't mean to take it. They will give him the wrong thing. Oh, how can they?"
But now the mother, when she heard me speak, swiftly and gently removed her arms from beneath the boy, and, advancing to the hesitating men, stood silently between them, and laid a hand upon the arm of each. While she stood there she had a rapt, high look of such sort that I could in no wise have addressed her.
"Are yousure, Dr. Gazell?" asked Halt.
"Ithinkso," said Gazell.
He stooped, after a moment's hesitation, and picked up the phial from the floor, read its label; laid it down, looked at the child, and hesitated again.
The mother at this juncture sunk upon her knees and bowed her shining face. I thought she seemed to be at prayer. I too bowed my head; but it was for reverence at the sight of her. It was long since I had prayed. I did not find it natural to do so. A strange discontent, something almost like an inclination to prayer, came upon me. But that was all. I would rather have had the power to turn those two men out of the room, and pour the saving remedy upon my little patient's burning tongue with my own flesh-and-blood fingers, and a hearty objurgation on the professional blunder which I had come in time to rectify.
"Dr. Halt," said Dr. Gazell, slowly, "with your approval I think I will change my mind. On the whole, the indications point to—this. I trust it is the appropriate remedy."
He removed the cork from the phial as he spoke, and, rising, passed quickly to the bedside of the child.
The mother had now arisen from her knees, and followed him, and got her arms about the boy again, and set her soul to brooding over him in the way that loving women have. I was of no further service to her, and I had vanished from her thought, which had no more room at that moment for anything except the child than the arms with which she clasped him.
It amazed me—I was going to say it appalled me—that no person in the room should seem to have consciousness of her presence. She was like an invisible star. How incredible that love like that, and the power of it, could be dependent upon the paltry senses of what are called live people for so much as the proofs of its existence.
"It is not scientific," I caught myself saying, as I turned away, "there is a flaw in the logic somewhere. There seems to be a snapped link between two sets of facts. There is no deficiency of data; the difficulty lies wholly in collating them."
How, indeed, should I—how did I but a few days since—myself regard such "data" as presumed to indicate the continuance of human life beyond the point of physical decay!
"After all," I thought, as I wandered from the house in which I felt myself forgotten and superfluous, and pursued my lonely way, I knew not whither and I knew not why,—"after all, there is another life. I really did not think it."
It seemed now to have been an extraordinary narrowness of intellect in me that I had not at least attached more weight to the universal human hypothesis. I did not precisely wonder from a personal point of view that I had not definitely believed it; but I wondered that I had not given the possibility the sort of attention which a view of so much dignity deserved. It really annoyed me that I had made that kind of mistake.
We, at least, were alive,—my old patient and I. Whether others, or how many, or of what sort, I could not tell; I had yet seen no other spirit. What was the life-force in this new condition of things? Where was the central cell? Whatmadeus go on living? Habit? Or selection? Thought? Emotion? Vigour? If the last, what species of vigour? What was that in the individual which gave it strength to stay? Whence came the reproductive power which was able to carry on the species under such terrible antagonism as the fact of death? If in the body, where was the common element between that attenuated invalid and my robust organization? If in the soul, between the suffering saint and the joyous man of the world, where again was our common moral protoplasm?
Nothing occurred to me at the time, at least, as offering any spiritual likeness between myself and Mrs. Faith, but the fact that we were both people of strong affections which had been highly cultivated. Might not a womanloveherself into continued existence who felt for any creature what she did for that child?
And I—God knew, if there were a God, how it was with me. If I had never done anything, if I had never been anything, if I had never felt anything else in all my life, that was fit tolast, I had loved one woman, and her only, and had thought high thoughts for her, and felt great emotions for her, and forgotten self for her sake, and thought it sweet to suffer for her, and been a better man for love of her. And I had loved her,—oh, I had so loved her, that I knew in my soul ten thousand deaths could not murder that living love.
And I had spoken to her—I had said to her—like any low and brutal fellow, any common wife-tormentor—I had gone from her dear presence to this mute life wherein there was neither speech nor language; where neither earth, nor heaven, nor my love, nor my remorse, nor all my anguish, nor my shame, could give my sealed lips the power to say, Forgive.
Now, while I was cast thus abroad upon the night,—for it was night,—sorely shaken and groaning in spirit, taking no care where my homeless feet should lead me, I lifted my eyes suddenly, and looked straight on before me, and behold! shining afar, fair and sweet and clear, I saw and recognized the lights of my own home.
I was still at some distance from the spot, and, beside myself with joy, I started to run unto it. With the swift motions which spirits make, and which I was beginning now to master in a clumsy manner and low degree, I came, compassing the space between myself and all I loved or longed for, and so brought myself tumultuously into the street where the house stood; there, at a stone's throw from it, I felt myself suddenly stifled with my haste, or from some cause, and, pausing (as we used to say) to gather breath, I found that I was stricken back, and fettered to the ground.
There was no wind. The night was perfectly still. Not a leaf quivered on the topmost branch of the linden which tapped our chamber-window. Yet a Power like a mighty rushing blast gainsaid me and smote me where I was.
Not a step, though I writhed for it, not a breath nearer, though my heart should break for it, could I take or make to reach her. This was my doom. Within clasp of her dear arms, within sight of her sweet face,—for there! while I stood struggling, I saw a woman's shadow rise and stir upon the dimly lighted wall,—thus to be denied and bidden back from her seemed to me more than heart could bear.
While I stood, quite unmanned by what had happened, incredulous of my punishment, and yearning to her through the little distance, and stretching out my hands toward her, and brokenly babbling her dear name, she moved, and I saw her quite distinctly, even as I had seen her that last time. She stood midway between the unlighted parlour and the lighted library beyond. The drop-light with the scarlet shade blazed behind her.
I noticed that to-night, as on that other night, the baby was not with her; and I wondered why. She stood alone. She moved up and down the room; she had a weary step. Her dress, I saw, was black, dead black. Her white hands, clasped before her, shone with startling brilliancy upon the sombre stuff she wore. Her lovely head was bent a little, and she seemed to be gazing at me whom she could not see. Then I cried with such a cry, it seemed as if the very living must needs hear:—
"Helen! Helen!Helen!"
But she stood quite still; leaning her pale face toward me, like some listening creature that was stricken deaf.
The sight was more sorrowful than I could brave; for the first time since I had died I succumbed into something like a swoon, and lost my miserable consciousness in the street before her door.
When I came again to myself I found that what I should once have called a "phenomenon" had taken place. The city, the dim street, the familiar architecture of my home, the streams of light from the long windows, the leaves of the linden tapping on the glass, the woman's shadow on the wall, and the stirring toward me of the form and face I loved,—these had vanished.
I was in a strange place; and I was a stranger in it. It seemed rather a lonely place at first, though it was not unpleasing to me as I looked abroad. The scenery was mountainous and solemn, but it was therefore on a large scale and restful to the eye. It had more grandeur than beauty, to my first impression; but I remembered that I was not in a condition of mind to be receptive of the merely beautiful, which might exist for me without my perception of it, even as the life of the dead existed without the perception of the living. Death, if it had taught me less up to that time than it might have done to nobler men, had at least done so much as this: it had accustomed me to respect the unseen, and to regard its possible action upon the seen as a matter of import. As I looked forth upon the hills and skies, the plains and forests, and on to the distant signs of human habitation in the scenery about me, I thought:—
"I am in a world where it is probable that there exist a thousand things which I cannot understand to one which I can."
It seemed to me a very uncomfortable state of affairs, whatever it was. I felt estranged from this place, even before I was acquainted with it. Nothing in my nature responded to its atmosphere; or, if so, petulantly and with a kind of helpless antagonism, like the first cry of the new-born infant in the old life.
As I got myself languidly to my feet, and idly trod the path which lay before me, for lack of knowing any better thing to do, I began to perceive that others moved about the scene; that I was not, as I had thought, alone, but one of a company, each going on his errand as he would. I only seemed to have no errand; and I was at a great distance from these people, whose presence, however, though so remote, gave me something of the sense of companionship which one whose home is in a lonely spot upon a harbour coast has in watching the head-lights of anchored ships upon dark nights. Communication there is none, but desolation is less for knowing that there could be, or for fancying that there might.
Across the space between us, I looked upon my fellow-citizens in this new country, with a dull emotion not unlike gratitude for their existence; but I felt little curiosity about them. I was too unhappy to be so easily diverted. It seemed to me that the memory of my wife would become a mania to me, if I could in no way make known to her how utterly I loved her and how I scorned myself. I cannot say that I felt much definite interest in the novel circumstances surrounding me, except as possible resources for some escape from the situation, as it stood between herself and me. If I could compass any means of communicating with her, I believed that I could accept my doom, let it take me where it might or make of me what it would.
Walking thus drearily, alone, and not sorry to be alone in that unfamiliar company, lost in the fixed idea of my own misery, I suddenly heard light footsteps hurrying behind me. I thought:—
"There is another spirit; one more of the newly dead, come to this strange place."
But I did not find it worth my while to turn and greet him, being so wrapt in my own fate; and when a soft hand touched my arm, I moved from it with something like dismay.
"Why, Doctor!" said the gentle voice of Mrs. Faith, "did I startle you? I have been hunting for you everywhere," she added, laughing lightly. "I was afraid you would feel rather desolate. It is a pity. Now, I am ashappy!"
"Did Charley live?" I asked immediately.
"Oh yes, Charley lived; what we used to call living, when we were there. Poor Charley! I keep thinking how he would enjoy everything if he were here with me. But his father needed him. It makes me so happy! I am very happy! Tell me, Doctor, what do you think of this place? How does it strike you?"
"It is a foreign country," I said sadly.
"Is it, Doctor? Poor Doctor! Why, I feel so much athome!"
She lifted a radiant face to me; it was touching to see her expression, and marvellous to behold the idealization of health on features for so many years adjusted to pain and patience.
"Dear Doctor!" she cried joyously, "you never thought to see mewell! They call this death. Why, I never knew what it was to bealivebefore!"
"I must make you acquainted with some of the people who live here," she added, quickly recalling herself from her own interests to mine, with her natural unselfishness, "it is pitiful to come into this place—as you have done. You always knew so many people. You had such friends about you. I never saw you walk alone in all your life before."
"I wish to be alone," I answered moodily. "I care nothing for this place, or for the men who live here. It is all unfamiliar to me. I am not happy in it. I am afraid I have not been educated for it. It is the most unhomelike place I ever saw."
Her eyes filled; she did not answer me at once; when she did it was to say:
"It will be better. It will be better by and by. Have you seen"—
She stopped and hesitated.
"Have you seen the Lord?" she asked, in a low voice. She was wont, I remember, to use this word in a way peculiarly her own; as if she were referring to some personal acquaintance, near to her heart. I shook my head, looking drearily upon her.
"Don't youwantto see Him?"
"I want to see my wife!"
"Oh, I am sorry for you," she said, with forbearing gentleness. "It is pretty hard. But I wish youwantedHim."
"I want to see my wife! I want to see my wife!" I interrupted bitterly. And with this I turned away from her and hid my face, for I could speak no more. When I lifted my eyes, she had gone from me, and I was again alone. When it was thus too late, it occurred to me that I had lost an opportunity which might not easily return to me, and I sought far and wide for Mrs. Faith. I did not find her, though I aroused myself to the point of accosting some of the inhabitants of the country, and making definite inquiries for her. I was answered with great courtesy and uncommon warmth of manner, as if it were the custom of this place to take a genuine interest in the affairs of strangers; but I was not able, by any effort on my part, to bring myself in proximity to her. This trifling disappointment added to my sense of helplessness in the new life on which I had entered; and I was still as incredulous of helplessness and as galled by it as I should have been by the very world of woe which had formed so irritating a dogma to me in the theology of my day on earth, and which I had regarded as I did the nightmares of a dyspeptic patient.
In this state of feeling, it was the greatest comfort to me when, at some period of time which I have no means of defining, but which could not have been long afterward, Mrs. Faith came suddenly again across my path. She radiated happiness and health and beauty, and when she held out both her hands to me in greeting they seemed to glitter, as if she had stepped from a bath of delight.
"Oh," she said joyously, "have you seen Himyet?" It embarrassed me to be forced to answer in the negative; it gave me a strange feeling, as if I had been a convict in the country, and denied the passport of honourable men. I therefore waived her question as well as I might, and proceeded to make known to her the thought which had been occupying me.
"Youhave theentréeof the dear earth," I said sadly. "They do not treat you in the—in the very singular manner with which I am treated. It is important beyond explanation that I get a message to my wife. A beggar in the street may be admitted to her charity,—I saw one at the door the night I stood there. I, only I, am forbidden to enter. Whatever may be the natural laws which are sot in opposition to me, they have extraordinary force; I can do nothing against them. I suppose I do not understand them. If I had an opportunity to study them—but I have no opportunities at anything. It is a new experience to me to be so—so disregarded by the general scheme of things. I seem to be of no more consequence in this place than a bootblack was in the world, or a paralytic person. It seems useless for me to fly in the face of fate, since this is fate. I have no hope of being able to reach my wife. You have privileges in this condition which are evidently far superior to mine. I have been thinking that possibly you may be able—and willing—to approach her for me?"
"I don't think it would succeed, Doctor," replied my old patient quickly. "I'ddoit! You know I would! But if I were Helen—She is a very reserved person; she never talks about her husband, as different women do; her feeling is of such a sort; I do not think she wouldunderstand, if another woman were to speak from you to her."
"Perhaps not," I sighed.
"I am afraid it would be the most hopeless experiment you could make," said Mrs. Faith. "She loves you too much for it," she added, with the divination of her sex. Comforted a little by Mrs. Faith, I quickly abandoned this project; indeed, I soon abandoned every other which concerned itself with Helen, and yielded myself with a kind of desperate lethargy, if I may be allowed the expression, to the fate which separated me from her. Of resignation I knew nothing. Peace was the coldest stranger in that strange land to me. I yielded because I could not help it, not because I would have willed it; and with that dull strength which grows into the sinews of the soul from necessity, sought to adjust myself in such fashion as I might to my new conditions. It occurred to me from time to time that it would have been an advantage if I had felt more interest in the conditions themselves; that it would even have spared me something if I had ever cultivated any familiarity with the possibilities of such a state of existence. I could not remember that I had in the old life satisfactorily proved that anothercouldnot follow it. It seemed to me that if I had only so much as exercised my imagination upon the possible course of events in case another did, it would have been of some practical service to me now. I was in the position of a man who is become the victim of a discovery whose rationality he has contemptuously denied. It was like being struck by a projectile while one is engaged in disproving the existence of gunpowder.
If a soul may properly be said to be stunned, mine at this time, was that soul.
In this condition solitude was still so natural to me that I made no effort to approach the people of the place, and contented myself with observing them and their affairs from a distance. They seemed a very happy people. There could be no mistake about that. I did not see a clouded countenance; nor did I hear an accent of discomfort, or of pain. I wondered at their joyousness, which I found it as impossible to share as the sick find it impossible to share what has been called "the insolence of health." It did, indeed, appear to me as something almost impertinent, as possession always appears to denial. But I had never been denied before. I perceived, also, that the inhabitants of this country were a busy people. They came and went, they met and parted, with the eagerness of occupation; though there was a conspicuous absence of the fretful haste to which I had been used in the conduct of business. I looked upon the avocations of this strange land, and wondered at them. I could not see with what they were occupied, or why, or to what end. They affected me perhaps something as the concerns of the human race may affect the higher animals. I looked on with an unintelligent envy.
One day, as I was strolling miserably about, a child came up and spoke to me. He, like myself, was alone. He was a beautiful child,—a little boy; he seemed scarcely more than an infant. He appeared to be in search of some one or of something; his brilliant eyes roved everywhere; he had a noble little head, and carried himself courageously. He gave no evidence of fear or sadness at his isolated position but ran right on,—for he was running when I saw him,—as if he had gone forth upon some happy, childish errand.
But at sight of me he paused; regarded me a moment with the piercing candour of childhood, as if he took my moral measure after some inexplicable personal scale of his own; then came directly and put his hand into my own.
I grasped it heartily,—who could have helped it?—and lifting the little fellow in my arms kissed him affectionately, as one does a pretty stranger child. This seemed to gratify him rather than to satisfy him; he nestled in my neck, but moved restlessly, slipping to the ground, and back again into my arms; jabbering incoherently and pleasantly; seeming to be diverted rather than comforted; ready to stay, but alert to go; in short, behaving like a baby on a visit. After awhile the child adjusted himself to the situation; grew quiet, and clung to me; and at last, putting both his arms about my neck, he gave the long, sweet sigh of healthy infant weariness, and babbling something to the general effect that Boy was tired, he dropped into a sound and happy sleep.
Here, indeed, was a situation! It drew from me the first smile which had crossed my lips since I had died. What, pray, was I, who seemed to be of no consequence whatever in this amazing country, and who had more than I knew how to do in looking after myself, under its mysterious conditions,—what was I to do with the spirit-baby gone to sleep upon my neck?
"I must go and find the Orphan Asylum," I 'thought; "doubtless they have them in this extraordinary civilization. I must take the little fellow to some women as soon as possible." At this juncture, my friend Mrs. Faith appeared, making a mock of being out of breath, and laughing heartily.
"He ran away from me," she merrily explained. "I had the care of him, and he ran on; he came straight to you. I couldn't hold him. What a comfort he will be to you!... Why, Doctor! Do you mean to say you don't know who the childis?"
"It seems to me," she added, with a mother's sublime superiority, "Ishould know my own baby! If I were so fortunate as to find one here!—How much less you know," she proceeded naively, "than I used to think you did!"
"Did the childdie?" I asked, trembling so that I had to put the little fellow down lest he should fall from my startled arms. "Did something really ail him that night when his mother—that miserable night?"
"The child died," she answered gravely. "Dear little Boy! Take him up again, Doctor. Don't you see? He is uneasy unless you hold him fast."
I took Boy up; I held him close; I kissed him, and I clung to him, and melted into unintelligible cries above him, never minding Mrs. Faith, for I quite forgot her.
But what I felt was for my child's poor mother, and all my thought was for her, and my heart broke for her, that she should be so bereft.