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