Part 5

The sparrow twittered again. Birds in the wood—small procuresses to Sentiment! What a trollop she was, that Sentiment! He had known ethereal creatures go from picking the bones of stuffed larks, to moralize sweetly on the song of nightingales under the moon. For himself, barring his natural asceticism, he would have no remorse whatever in devouring nightingales. Such emotions were born of surfeit, and the moral of them all was that a bird in the stomach was worth two, or two hundred, in the bush. The one was the decoy which brought the many into notice. Why, he himself, when flushed with passion——

Harder than steel, hard as flesh can be, he stepped back to the table.

Yes, there was no longer doubt about it. He must decide quickly. Decide! What was there in all his life to warrant in him a moment’s indecision? His pledge to to-morrow was paramount over his pledge to yesterday. It was by very virtue of the past that he owed everything to the future. The _Cause_ was himself, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. As she had made _her_self one with him, so must she consummate the gift. He chose to believe, even, that she would not hesitate could she know. He grasped his knife.

Her hair! He had said some foolish things about it once. In a sudden fury he seized it, and sliced it off close by her head, and flung it aside. She looked strangely innocent and boyish thus shorn. He had a momentary grotesque thought that he would excuse himself to himself by pretending that she was a boy. It passed on the instant. What excuse was necessary? He remembered how once, to his idle amusement, when she had fancied herself secure of him, she had coveted greatness for his future. Well, it was within his grasp at length, and by her final means.

Damn the sparrow! What was there in all the murky town to tempt his twittering? He had blunted his knife’s edge on the hair. He must fetch another.

As he came back with it, the bird seemed to flutter and cry out against his very door. In a swift access of passion he strode to it, and opened. Whether old, or wounded, or poisoned in the drooping fog, there lay the little thing, gasping, with outspread wings, upon the pavement. One moment the Professor hesitated; then, crushing out the tiny shrieking life under his foot, he relocked the door and returned with a firm step to the table.

* * * * *

His treatise, read the next day before an august body, was said masterly to resolve an intricate and long obscure physiologic problem.

It brought him additional and great honour, and, what he prized above all, that gift of the Society’s gold medal, which is only granted to discoveries of the first importance. But then, it must be remembered, he had given his soul to the Cause. The stain of its sacrifice was yet red on the stones outside his door.

A GHOST-CHILD

In making this confession public, I am aware that I am giving a butterfly to be broken on a wheel. There is so much of delicacy in its subject, that the mere resolve to handle it at all might seem to imply a lack of the sensitiveness necessary to its understanding; and it is certain that the more reverent the touch, the more irresistible will figure its opportunity to the common scepticism which is bondslave to its five senses. Moreover one cannot, in the reason of things, write to publish for Aristarchus alone; but the gauntlet of Grub Street must be run in any bid for truth and sincerity.

On the other hand, to withhold from evidence, in these days of what one may call a zetetic psychology, anything which may appear elucidatory, however exquisitely and rarely, of our spiritual relationships, must be pronounced, I think, a sin against the Holy Ghost.

All in all, therefore, I decide to give, with every passage to personal identification safeguarded, the story of a possession, or visitation, which is signified in the title to my narrative.

Tryphena was the sole orphaned representative of an obscure but gentle family which had lived for generations in the east of England. The spirit of the fens, of the long grey marshes, whose shores are the neutral ground of two elements, slumbered in her eyes. Looking into them, one seemed to see little beds of tiny green mosses luminous under water, or stirred by the movement of microscopic life in their midst. Secrets, one felt, were shadowed in their depths, too frail and sweet for understanding. The pretty love-fancy of babies seen in the eyes of maidens, was in hers to be interpreted into the very cosmic dust of sea-urchins, sparkling like chrysoberyls. Her soul looked out through them, as if they were the windows of a water-nursery.

She was always a child among children, in heart and knowledge most innocent, until Jason came and stood in her field of vision. Then, spirit of the neutral ground as she was, inclining to earth or water with the sway of the tides, she came wondering and dripping, as it were, to land, and took up her abode for final choice among the daughters of the earth. She knew her woman’s estate, in fact, and the irresistible attraction of all completed perfections to the light that burns to destroy them.

Tryphena was not only an orphan, but an heiress. Her considerable estate was administered by her guardian, Jason’s father, a widower, who was possessed of this single adored child. The fruits of parental infatuation had come early to ripen on the seedling. The boy was self-willed and perverse, the more so as he was naturally of a hot-hearted disposition. Violence and remorse would sway him in alternate moods, and be made, each in its turn, a self-indulgence. He took a delight in crossing his father’s wishes, and no less in atoning for his gracelessness with moving demonstrations of affection.

Foremost of the old man’s most cherished projects was, very naturally, a union between the two young people. He planned, manœuvred, spoke for it with all his heart of love and eloquence. And, indeed, it seemed at last as if his hopes were to be crowned. Jason, returning from a lengthy voyage (for his enterprising spirit had early decided for the sea, and he was a naval officer), saw, and was struck amazed before, the transformed vision of his old child-playfellow. She was an opened flower whom he had left a green bud—a thing so rare and flawless that it seemed a sacrilege for earthly passions to converse of her. Familiarity, however, and some sense of reciprocal attraction, quickly dethroned that eucharist. Tryphena could blush, could thrill, could solicit, in the sweet ways of innocent womanhood. She loved him dearly, wholly, it was plain—had found the realization of all her old formless dreams in this wondrous birth of a desire for one, in whose new-impassioned eyes she had known herself reflected hitherto only for the most patronized of small gossips. And, for her part, fearless as nature, she made no secret of her love. She was absorbed in, a captive to, Jason from that moment and for ever.

He responded. What man, however perverse, could have resisted, on first appeal, the attraction of such beauty, the flower of a radiant soul? The two were betrothed; the old man’s cup of happiness was brimmed.

Then came clouds and a cold wind, chilling the garden of Hesperis. Jason was always one of those who, possessing classic noses, will cut them off, on easy provocation, to spite their faces. He was so proudly independent, to himself, that he resented the least assumption of proprietorship in him on the part of other people—even of those who had the best claim to his love and submission. This pride was an obsession. It stultified the real good in him, which was considerable. Apart from it, he was a good, warm-tempered fellow, hasty but affectionate. Under its dominion, he would have broken his own heart on an imaginary grievance.

He found one, it is to be supposed, in the privileges assumed by love; in its exacting claims upon him; perhaps in its little unreasoning jealousies. He distorted these into an implied conceit of authority over him on the part of an heiress who was condescending to his meaner fortunes. The suggestion was quite base and without warrant; but pride has no balance. No doubt, moreover, the rather childish self-depreciations of the old man, his father, in his attitude towards a match he had so fondly desired, helped to aggravate this feeling. The upshot was that, when within a few months of the date which was to make his union with Tryphena eternal, Jason broke away from a restraint which his pride pictured to him as intolerable, and went on a yachting expedition with a friend.

Then, at once, and with characteristic violence, came the reaction. He wrote, impetuously, frenziedly, from a distant port, claiming himself Tryphena’s, and Tryphena his, for ever and ever and ever. They were man and wife before God. He had behaved like an insensate brute, and he was at that moment starting to speed to her side, to beg her forgiveness and the return of her love.

He had no need to play the suitor afresh. She had never doubted or questioned their mutual bondage, and would have died a maid for his sake. Something of sweet exultation only seemed to quicken and leap in her body, that her faith in her dear love was vindicated.

But the joy came near to upset the reason of the old man, already tottering to its dotage; and what followed destroyed it utterly.

The yacht, flying home, was lost at sea, and Jason was drowned.

I once saw Tryphena about this time. She lived with her near mindless charge, lonely, in an old grey house upon the borders of a salt mere, and had little but the unearthly cries of seabirds to answer to the questions of her widowed heart. She worked, sweet in charity, among the marsh folk, a beautiful unearthly presence; and was especially to be found where infants and the troubles of child-bearing women called for her help and sympathy. She was a wife herself, she would say quaintly; and some day perhaps, by grace of the good spirits of the sea, would be a mother. None thought to cross her statement, put with so sweet a sanity; and, indeed, I have often noticed that the neighbourhood of great waters breeds in souls a mysticism which is remote from the very understanding of land-dwellers.

How I saw her was thus:—

I was fishing, on a day of chill calm, in a dinghy off the flat coast. The stillness of the morning had tempted me some distance from the village where I was staying. Presently a sense of bad sport and healthy famine “plumped” in me, so to speak, for luncheon, and I looked about for a spot picturesque enough to add a zest to sandwiches, whisky, and tobacco. Close by, a little creek or estuary ran up into a mere, between which and the sea lay a cluster of low sand-hills; and thither I pulled. The spot, when I reached it, was calm, chill desolation manifest—lifeless water and lifeless sand, with no traffic between them but the dead interchange of salt. Low sedges, at first, and behind them low woods were mirrored in the water at a distance, with an interval between me and them of sheeted glass; and right across this shining pool ran a dim, half-drowned causeway—the sea-path, it appeared, to and from a lonely house which I could just distinguish squatting among trees. It was Tryphena’s home.

Now, paddling dispiritedly, I turned a cold dune, and saw a mermaid before me. At least, that was my instant impression. The creature sat coiled on the strand, combing her hair—that was certain, for I saw the gold-green tresses of it whisked by her action into rainbow threads. It appeared as certain that her upper half was flesh and her lower fish; and it was only on my nearer approach that this latter resolved itself into a pale green skirt, roped, owing to her posture, about her limbs, and the hem fanned out at her feet into a tail fin. Thus also her bosom, which had appeared naked, became a bodice, as near to her flesh in colour and texture as a smock is to a lady’s-smock, which some call a cuckoo-flower.

It was plain enough now; yet the illusion for the moment had quite startled me.

As I came near, she paused in her strange business to canvass me. It was Tryphena herself, as after-inquiry informed me. I have never seen so lovely a creature. Her eyes, as they regarded me passing, were something to haunt a dream: so great in tragedy—not fathomless, but all in motion near their surfaces, it seemed, with green and rooted sorrows. They were the eyes, I thought, of an Undine late-humanized, late awakened to the rapturous and troubled knowledge of the woman’s burden. Her forehead was most fair, and the glistening thatch divided on it like a golden cloud revealing the face of a wondering angel.

I passed, and a sand-heap stole my vision foot by foot. The vision was gone when I returned. I have reason to believe it was vouchsafed me within a few months of the coming of the ghost-child.

On the morning succeeding the night of the day on which Jason and Tryphena were to have been married, the girl came down from her bedroom with an extraordinary expression of still rapture on her face. After breakfast she took the old man into her confidence. She was childish still; her manner quite youthfully thrilling; but now there was a new-born wonder in it that hovered on the pink of shame.

“Father! I have been under the deep waters and found him. He came to me last night in my dreams—so sobbing, so impassioned—to assure me that he had never really ceased to love me, though he had near broken his own heart pretending it. Poor boy! poor ghost! What could I do but take him to my arms? And all night he lay there, blest and forgiven, till in the morning he melted away with a sigh that woke me; and it seemed to me that I came up dripping from the sea.”

“My boy! He has come back!” chuckled the old man. “What have you done with him, Tryphena?”

“I will hold him tighter the next time,” she said.

But the spirit of Jason visited her dreams no more.

That was in March. In the Christmas following, when the mere was locked in stillness, and the wan reflection of snow mingled on the ceiling with the red dance of firelight, one morning the old man came hurrying and panting to Tryphena’s door.

“Tryphena! Come down quickly! My boy, my Jason, has come back! It was a lie that they told us about his being lost at sea!”

Her heart leapt like a candle-flame! What new delusion of the old man’s was this? She hurried over her dressing and descended. A garrulous old voice mingled with a childish treble in the breakfast-room. Hardly breathing, she turned the handle of the door, and saw Jason before her.

But it was Jason, the prattling babe of her first knowledge; Jason, the flaxen-headed, apple-cheeked cherub of the nursery; Jason, the confiding, the merry, the loving, before pride had come to warp his innocence. She fell on her knees to the child, and with a burst of ecstasy caught him to her heart.

She asked no question of the old man as to when or whence this apparition had come, or why he was here. For some reason she dared not. She accepted him as some waif, whom an accidental likeness had made glorious to their hungering hearts. As for the father, he was utterly satisfied and content. He had heard a knock at the door, he said, and had opened it and found this. The child was naked, and his pink, wet body glazed with ice. Yet he seemed insensible to the killing cold. It was Jason—that was enough. There is no date nor time for imbecility. Its phantoms spring from the clash of ancient memories. This was just as actually his child as—more so, in fact, than—the grown young figure which, for all its manhood, had dissolved into the mist of waters. He was more familiar with, more confident of it, after all. It had come back to be unquestioningly dependent on him; and that was likest the real Jason, flesh of his flesh.

“Who are you, darling?” said Tryphena.

“I am Jason,” answered the child.

She wept, and fondled him rapturously.

“And who am I?” she asked. “If you are Jason, you must know what to call me.”

“I know,” he said; “but I mustn’t, unless you ask me.”

“I won’t,” she answered, with a burst of weeping. “It is Christmas Day, dearest, when the miracle of a little child was wrought. I will ask you nothing but to stay and bless our desolate home.”

He nodded, laughing.

“I will stay, until you ask me.”

They found some little old robes of the baby Jason, put away in lavender, and dressed him in them. All day he laughed and prattled; yet it was strange that, talk as he might, he never once referred to matters familiar to the childhood of the lost sailor.

In the early afternoon he asked to be taken out—seawards, that was his wish. Tryphena clothed him warmly, and, taking his little hand, led him away. They left the old man sleeping peacefully. He was never to wake again.

As they crossed the narrow causeway, snow, thick and silent, began to fall. Tryphena was not afraid, for herself or the child. A rapture upheld her; a sense of some compelling happiness, which she knew before long must take shape on her lips.

They reached the seaward dunes—mere ghosts of foothold in that smoke of flakes. The lap of vast waters seemed all around them, hollow and mysterious. The sound flooded Tryphena’s ears, drowning her senses. She cried out, and stopped.

“Before they go,” she screamed—“before they go, tell me what you were to call me!”

The child sprang a little distance, and stood facing her. Already his lower limbs seemed dissolving in the mists.

“I was to call you ‘mother’!” he cried, with a smile and toss of his hand.

Even as he spoke, his pretty features wavered and vanished. The snow broke into him, or he became part with it. Where he had been, a gleam of iridescent dust seemed to show one moment before it sank and was extinguished in the falling cloud. Then there was only the snow, heaping an eternal chaos with nothingness.

Tryphena made this confession, on a Christmas Eve night, to one who was a believer in dreams. The next morning she was seen to cross the causeway, and thereafter was never seen again. But she left the sweetest memory behind her, for human charity, and an elf-like gift of loveliness.

HIS CLIENT’S CASE

The “Personal Reminiscences” of the late Mr. Justice Ganthony, now in process of being edited, are responsible for the following drollery:—

My first “chambers” were on the top, not to say the attic, floor of a house in (the now defunct) Furnival’s Inn. I called _it_ “chambers,” in the plural, on the strength of a coal-cellar, in the window-seat, and a turn-up bedstead which became a cupboard by day. That accounted for two rooms, and “the usual offices,” as the house-agents say, when they refer to a kitchen six feet by eight in the basement. Trousers, after all, are only one garment, although they are called a pair.

There I sat among the cobwebs, like a spider, and waited for my first brief. In the meanwhile, I lived as the spiders do—on hope, flavoured with a little attic salt. It was not a cheering repast; but, such as it was, there was no end to it. By and by I was almost convinced (of what I had been friendlily advised) that it was a forlorn hope—the sort that leads to glory and the grave; probably by starvation. A spider has always, as a last resource, his web to roll up and devour. I ate up my chambers by degrees; that is to say, I dined, figuratively, day in day out, at the sign of the Three Balls. But this was to consume my own hump, like the camel. When that should be all gone, what next? There is a vulgar expression for prog, which is “belly-timber.” I only realized its applicability to my own case when my chairs and tables, and other furniture, had gone the primrose way of digestion. It was the brass fender, a “genuine antique,” that sat heaviest on my chest.

Furnival’s Inn was not a cheerful place to starve in. There was an atmosphere of gloom and decay about it, which derived, no doubt, from its former dealings in Chancery. In the days of its prosperity it had fed the Inns of Court, as Winchester feeds New College; in my time it could not feed itself. The rats were at it, and the bugs, which are the only things I know of that can thrive on crumbling plaster. I had the distinction of providing some of their rare debauches to the latter; but that was before I began to crumble myself. Some of my blood was certainly incorporated in the ancient walls, and was included in their downfall.

My view, from Furnival’s Inn, was dismally introspective. It commanded, in the first place, a quadrangle of emptiness; and included, in the second, an array of lowering and mouldy tenements like my own, at whose stark windows hungry expectant faces would glimmer fitfully, and scan the yard for the clients who never came, and disappear.

There was a decrepit inn, of another and the social type, budded, like a vicious intestinal growth, within Furnival’s. I used to speculate, as I looked down at night on its tottering portico, and solemn old frequenters, and the lights blinking behind its blinds like corpse-candles, if it were not a half-way house of call for the dead. For, by day, all business seemed withdrawn from it, and its upper rooms might have been mortuaries for any life they exhibited. No cheery housemaid ever looked from their windows to chaff the amorous Boots below. There was none to chaff. The dead need no boots.

Furnival’s Inn had one gullet, by which the roar of the world came in from Holborn. Little else came in but tradesmen, and bailiffs, and an occasional policeman in a thoughtful archæological mood. But the gullet was a vent as much of exit as of entrance; and by it one could escape from the madness of ghostly isolation, and mingle with the world, and look in the pastry-cooks’ windows. Whenever I was moved to one of these chameleonic foraging expeditions, I would pin a ticket on my door: “Called away. Please leave message with housekeeper,” and light my pipe with it when I returned. I wonder if any one ever read the fatuous legends? To Hope’s eyes, I am sure, they must have been dinted, like phonographic records, with the echoes of all the footsteps that ever sounded on the stairs during my absences.

Those footsteps! How they marked the measure of my desperation! They were not many, and they were far between; but not one in all the dreary tale ever reached my attic. Why should they, indeed? I am free to acknowledge its moral inaccessibility. Jurisprudence does not, in its convincing phases, inhabit immediately under the roof. The higher one lives, in practice, the lower one’s practice is like to be. The law is not an elevating pursuit.

I recognized this in the end; and the moment I recognized it I got my first client.

One November evening, very depressed at last, I was sitting smoking, and ruminating over my doleful fate, and thinking if I had not better shut myself up for good and all in the bed-cupboard, when I heard steps enter the hall below. My ears pricked, of course, from force of habit, and from force of habit I uttered a scornful stage laugh—for the withering of Fortune, if she happened to be by. But, in spite of my scorn, the steps, ignoring the architects’ offices on the ground floor (Frost and Driffel, contractors for Castles in Spain), ascended and continued to ascend—past the deed-engrosser’s closet on the half-way landing; past the empty chambers immediately below mine (whence, on gusty nights, the tiny creaking of the rope, by which the last tenant had hanged himself from a beam, would speak through the floor under my bed), and higher yet, right up to my door.