‘You,’ I said with a touch of annoyance; ‘you’re good for another thirty or forty years.’
‘Exactly so,’ he rejoined quickly, ‘and so is she. Her life’s as good as mine, you’ll see – she won’t die.’
At dusk on the next day she died. He was with her; he had not left her since he had told me that she would not die. He was sitting by her holding her hand. She had been unconscious for some time, when suddenly she dragged her hand from his, raised herself in bed, and cried out in a tone of acutest anguish – ‘John! John! Let me go! For Heaven’s sake let me go!’
Then she fell back dead.
He would not understand – would not believe; he still sat by her, holding her hand, and calling on her by every name that love could teach him. I began to fear for his brain. He would not leave her, so by-and-by I brought him a cup of coffee in which I had mixed a strong opiate. In about an hour I went back and found him fast asleep with his face on the pillow close by the face of his dead wife. The gardener and I carried him down to my bedroom, and I sent for a woman from the village. He slept for twelve hours. When he awoke his first words were – ‘She is not dead! I must go to her!’
I hoped that the sight of her – pale, and beautiful, and still – with the white asters about her, and her cold hands crossed on her breast, would convince him; but no. He looked at her and said – ‘Bernard, you’re no fool; you know as well as I do that this is not death. Why treat it so? It is some form of catalepsy. If she should awake and find herself like this the shock might destroy her reason.’
And, to the horror of the woman from the village, he flung the asters on to the floor, covered the body with blankets, and sent for hot-water bottles.
I was now quite convinced that his brain was affected, and I saw plainly enough that he would never consent to take the necessary steps for the funeral.
I began to wonder whether I had not better send for another doctor, for I felt that I did not care to try the opiate again on my own responsibility, and something must be done about the funeral.
I spent a day in considering the matter – a day passed by John Hurst beside his wife’s body. Then I made up my mind to try all my powers to bring him to reason, and to this end I went once more into the chamber of death. I found Hurst talking wildly, in low whispers. He seemed to be talking to someone who was not there. He did not know me, and suffered himself to be led away. He was, in fact, in the first stage of brain fever. I actually blessed his illness, because it opened a way out of the dilemma in which I found myself. I wired for a trained nurse from town, and for the local undertaker. In a week she was buried, and John Hurst still lay unconscious and unheeding; but I did not look forward to his first renewal of consciousness.
Yet his first conscious words were not the inquiry I dreaded. He only asked whether he had been ill long, and what had been the matter. When I had told him, he just nodded and went off to sleep again.
A few evenings later I found him excited and feverish, but quite himself, mentally. I said as much to him in answer to a question which he put to me – ‘There’s no brain disturbance now? I’m not mad or anything?’
‘No, no, my dear fellow. Everything is as it should be.’
‘Then,’ he answered slowly, ‘I must get up and go to her.’
My worst fears were realised.
In moments of intense mental strain the truth sometimes overpowers all one’s better resolves. It sounds brutal, horrible. I don’t know what I meant to say; what I said was – ‘You can’t; she’s buried.’
He sprang up in bed, and I caught him by the shoulders.
‘Then it’s true!’ he cried, ‘and I’m not mad. Oh, great God in heaven, let me go to her; let me go! It’s true! It’s true!’
I held him fast, and spoke. ‘I am strong – you know that. You are weak and ill; you are quite in my power – we’re old friends, and there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to serve you. Tell me what you mean; I will do anything you wish.’ This I said to soothe him.
‘Let me go to her,’ he said again.
‘Tell me all about it,’ I repeated. ‘You are too ill to go to her. I will go, if you can collect yourself and tell me why. You could not walk five yards.’
He looked at me doubtfully.
‘You’ll help me? You won’t say I’m mad, and have me shut up? You’ll help me?’
‘Yes, yes – I swear it!’ All the time I was wondering what I should do to keep him from his mad purpose.
He lay back on his pillows, white and ghastly; his thin features and sunken eyes showed hawklike above the rough growth of his four weeks’ beard. I took his hand. His pulse was rapid, and his lean fingers clenched themselves round mine.
‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I don’t know – There aren’t any words to tell you how true it is. I am not mad, I am not wandering. I am as sane as you are. Now listen, and if you’ve a human heart in you, you’ll help me. When I married her I gave up hypnotism and all the old studies; she hated the whole business. But before I gave it up I hypnotised her, and when she was completely under my control I forbade her soul to leave its body till my time came to die.’
I breathed more freely. Now I understood why he had said, ‘She cannot die.’
‘My dear old man,’ I said gently, ‘dismiss these fancies, and face your grief boldly. You can’t control the great facts of life and death by hypnotism. She is dead; she is dead, and her body lies in its place. But her soul is with God who gave it.’
‘No!’ he cried, with such strength as the fever had left him. ‘No! no! Ever since I have been ill I have seen her, every day, every night, and always wringing her hands and moaning, “Let me go, John – let me go”.’
‘Those were her last words, indeed,’ I said; ‘it is natural that they should haunt you. See, you bade her soul not leave her body. It has left it, for she is dead.’
His answer came almost in a whisper, borne on the wings of a long breathless pause.
‘She is dead, but her soul has not left her body.’
I held his hand more closely, still debating what I should do.
‘She comes to me,’ he went on; ‘she comes to me continually. She does not reproach, but she implores, “Let me go, John – let me go!” And I have no more power now; I cannot let her go, I cannot reach her. I can do nothing, nothing. Ah!’ he cried, with a sudden sharp change of voice that thrilled through me to the ends of my fingers and feet: ‘Ah, Kate, my life, I will come to you! No, no, you shan’t be left alone among the dead. I am coming, my sweet.’
He reached his arms out towards the door with a look of longing and love, so really, so patently addressed to a sentient presence, that I turned sharply to see if, in truth, perhaps – nothing, of course – nothing.
‘She is dead,’ I repeated stupidly. ‘I was obliged to bury her.’
A shudder ran through him.
‘I must go and see for myself,’ he said.
Then I knew – all in a minute – what to do.
‘I will go,’ I said. ‘I will open her coffin, and if she is not – is not as other dead folk, I will bring her body back to this house.’
‘Will you go now?’ he asked, with set lips.
It was nigh on midnight. I looked into his eyes.
‘Yes, now,’ I said; ‘but you must swear to lie still till I return.’
‘I swear it.’ I saw I could trust him, and I went to wake the nurse. He called weakly after me, ‘There’s a lantern in the tool-shed – and, Bernard –’
‘Yes, my poor old chap.’
‘There’s a screwdriver in the sideboard drawer.’
I think until he said that I really meant to go. I am not accustomed to lie, even to mad people, and I think I meant it till then.
He leaned on his elbow, and looked at me with wide-open eyes.
‘Think,’ he said, ‘what she must feel. Out of the body, and yet tied to it, all alone among the dead. Oh, make haste, make haste; for if I am not mad, and I have really fettered her soul
, there is but one way!’
‘And that is?’
‘I must die too. Her soul can leave her body when I die.’
I called the nurse, and left him. I went out, and across the wold to the church, but I did not go in. I carried the screwdriver and the lantern, lest he should send the nurse to see if I had taken them. I leaned on the churchyard wall, and thought of her. I had loved the woman, and I remembered it in that hour.
As soon as I dared I went back to him – remember I believed him mad – and told the lie that I thought would give him most ease.
‘Well?’ he said eagerly, as I entered.
I signed to the nurse to leave us.
‘There is no hope,’ I said. ‘You will not see your wife again till you meet her in heaven.’
I laid down the screwdriver and the lantern, and sat down by him.
‘You have seen her?’
‘Yes.’
‘And there’s no doubt?’
‘There is no doubt.’
‘Then I am mad; but you’re a good fellow, Bernard, and I’ll never forget it in this world or the next.’
He seemed calmer, and fell asleep with my hand on his. His last word was a ‘Thank you’, that cut me like a knife.
When I went into his room next morning he was gone. But on his pillow a letter lay, painfully scrawled in pencil, and addressed to me.
‘You lied. Perhaps you meant kindly. You didn’t understand. She is not dead. She has been with me again. Though her soul may not leave her body, thank God it can still speak to mine. That vault – it is worse than a mere churchyard grave. Goodbye.’
I ran all the way to the church, and entered by the open door. The air was chill and dank after the crisp October sunlight. The stone that closed the vault of the Hursts of Hurstcote had been raised, and was lying beside the dark gaping hole in the chancel floor. The nurse, who had followed me, came in before I could shake off the horror that held me moveless. We both went down into the vault. Weak, exhausted by illness and sorrow, John Hurst had yet found strength to follow his love to the grave. I tell you he had crossed that wold alone, in the grey of the chill dawn; alone he had raised the stone and had gone down to her. He had opened her coffin, and he lay on the floor of the vault with his wife’s body in his arms.
He had been dead some hours.
The brown eyes filled with tears when I told my wife this story.
‘You were quite right, he was mad,’ she said. ‘Poor things! Poor lovers!’
But sometimes when I wake in the grey morning, and, between waking and sleeping, think of all those things that I must shut out from my sleeping and my waking thoughts, I wonder was I right or was he? Was he mad, or was I idiotically incredulous? For – and it is this thing that haunts me – when I found them dead together in the vault, she had been buried five weeks. But the body that lay in John Hurst’s arms, among the mouldering coffins of the Hursts of Hurstcote, was perfect and beautiful as when first he clasped her in his arms, a bride.
The Ebony Frame
To be rich is a luxurious sensation – the more so when you have plumbed the depths of hard-up-ness as a Fleet Street hack, a picker-up of unconsidered pars, a reporter, an unappreciated journalist – all callings utterly inconsistent with one’s family feeling and one’s direct descent from the Dukes of Picardy.
When my Aunt Dorcas died and left me seven hundred a year and a furnished house in Chelsea, I felt that life had nothing left to offer except immediate possession of the legacy. Even Mildred Mayhew, whom I had hitherto regarded as my life’s light, became less luminous. I was not engaged to Mildred, but I lodged with her mother, and I sang duets with Mildred, and gave her gloves when it would run to it, which was seldom. She was a dear good girl, and I meant to marry her some day. It is very nice to feel that a good little woman is thinking of you – it helps you in your work – and it is pleasant to know she will say ‘Yes’ when you say ‘Will you?’
But, as I say, my legacy almost put Mildred out of my head, especially as she was staying with friends in the country just then.
Before the first gloss was off my new mourning I was seated in my aunt’s own armchair in front of the fire in the dining-room of my own house. My own house! It was grand, but rather lonely. I did think of Mildred just then.
The room was comfortably furnished with oak and leather. On the walls hung a few fairly good oil-paintings, but the space above the mantelpiece was disfigured by an exceedingly bad print, ‘The Trial of Lord William Russell’, framed in a dark frame. I got up to look at it. I had visited my aunt with dutiful regularity, but I never remembered seeing this frame before. It was not intended for a print, but for an oil-painting. It was of fine ebony, beautifully and curiously carved.
I looked at it with growing interest, and when my aunt’s housemaid – I had retained her modest staff of servants – came in with the lamp, I asked her how long the print had been there.
‘Mistress only bought it two days afore she was took ill,’ she said; ‘but the frame – she didn’t want to buy a new one – so she got this out of the attic. There’s lots of curious old things there, sir.’
‘Had my aunt had this frame long?’
‘Oh yes, sir. It come long afore I did, and I’ve been here seven years come Christmas. There was a picture in it – that’s upstairs too – but it’s that black and ugly it might as well be a chimney-back.’
I felt a desire to see this picture. What if it were some priceless old master in which my aunt’s eyes had only seen rubbish?
Directly after breakfast next morning I paid a visit to the lumber-room.
It was crammed with old furniture enough to stock a curiosity shop. All the house was furnished solidly in the early Victorian style, and in this room everything not in keeping with the ‘drawing-room suite’ ideal was stowed away. Tables of papier mâché and mother-of-pearl, straight-backed chairs with twisted feet and faded needlework cushions, firescreens of old-world design, oak bureaux with brass handles, a little work-table with its faded, moth-eaten silk flutings hanging in disconsolate shreds; on these and the dust that covered them blazed the full daylight as I drew up the blinds. I promised myself a good time in re-enshrining these household gods in my parlour, and promoting the Victorian suite to the attic. But at present my business was to find the picture as ‘black as the chimney-back’; and presently, behind a heap of hideous still-life studies, I found it.
Jane the housemaid identified it at once. I took it downstairs carefully and examined it. No subject, no colour was distinguishable. There was a splodge of a darker tint in the middle, but whether it was figure or tree or house no man could have told. It seemed to be painted on a very thick panel bound with leather. I decided to send it to one of those persons who pour on rotting family portraits the water of eternal youth – mere soap and water Mr Besant tells us it is; but even as I did so the thought occurred to me to try my own restorative hand at a corner of it.
My bath-sponge, soap, and nailbrush vigorously applied for a few seconds showed me that there was no picture to clean! Bare oak presented itself to my persevering brush. I tried the other side, Jane watching me with indulgent interest. The same result. Then the truth dawned on me. Why was the panel so thick? I tore off the leather binding, and the panel divided and fell to the ground in a cloud of dust. There were two pictures – they had been nailed face to face. I leaned them against the wall, and the next moment I was leaning against it myself.
For one of the pictures was myself – a perfect portrait – no shade of expression or turn of feature wanting. Myself – in a cavalier dress, ‘love-locks and all!’ When had this been done? And how, without my knowledge? Was this some whim of my aunt’s?
‘Lor’, sir!’ the shrill surprise of Jane at my elbow; ‘what a lovely photo it is! Was it a fancy ball, sir?’
‘Yes,’ I stammered. ‘I – I don’t think I want anything more now. You can go.’
She went; and I turned, still with my heart beating violently, to t
he other picture. This was a woman of the type of beauty beloved of Burne-Jones and Rossetti – straight nose, low brows, full lips, thin hands, large deep luminous eyes. She wore a black velvet gown. It was a full-length portrait. Her arms rested on a table beside her, and her head on her hands; but her face was turned full forward, and her eyes met those of the spectator bewilderingly. On the table by her were compasses and instruments whose uses I did not know, books, a goblet, and a miscellaneous heap of papers and pens. I saw all this afterwards. I believe it was a quarter of an hour before I could turn my eyes away from hers. I have never seen any other eyes like hers. They appealed, as a child’s or a dog’s do; they commanded, as might those of an empress.
‘Shall I sweep up the dust, sir?’ Curiosity had brought Jane back. I acceded. I turned from her my portrait. I kept between her and the woman in the black velvet. When I was alone again I tore down ‘The Trial of Lord William Russell’, and I put the picture of the woman in its strong ebony frame.
Then I wrote to a frame-maker for a frame for my portrait. It had so long lived face to face with this beautiful witch that I had not the heart to banish it from her presence; from which it will be perceived that I am by nature a somewhat sentimental person.
The new frame came home, and I hung it opposite the fireplace. An exhaustive search among my aunt’s papers showed no explanation of the portrait of myself, no history of the portrait of the woman with the wonderful eyes. I only learned that all the old furniture together had come to my aunt at the death of my great-uncle, the head of the family; and I should have concluded that the resemblance was only a family one, if everyone who came in had not exclaimed at the ‘speaking likeness’. I adopted Jane’s ‘fancy ball’ explanation.
And there, one might suppose, the matter of the portraits ended. One might suppose it, that is, if there were not evidently a good deal more written here about it. However, to me, then, the matter seemed ended.