Pages from a Journal with Other Papers

[This is an abstract of an essay four times as long written many years ago.  Although so much has been struck out, the substance is unaltered, and the conclusion is valid for the author now as then.]

Byron above almost all other poets, at least in our day, has been set down as immoral.  In reality he is moral, using the word in its proper sense, and he is so, not only in detached passages, but in the general drift of most of his poetry.  We will take as an example “The Corsair.”

Conrad is not a debauched buccaneer.  He was not—

               “by Nature sent
To lead the guilty—guilt’s worst instrument.”

He had been betrayed by misplaced confidence.

“Doom’d by his very virtues for a dupe,
He cursed those virtues as the cause of ill,
And not the traitors who betray’d him still;
Nor deem’d that gifts bestow’d on better men
Had left him joy, and means to give again,
Fear’d—shunn’d—belied—ere youth had lost her force,
He hated man too much to feel remorse,
And thought the voice of wrath a sacred call,
To pay the injuries of some on all.”

Conrad was not, and could not be, mean and selfish.  A selfish Conrad would be an absurdity.  His motives are not gross—

      “he shuns the grosser joys of sense,
His mind seems nourished by that abstinence.”

He is protected by a charm against undistinguishing lust—

“Though fairest captives daily met his eye,
He shunn’d, nor sought, but coldly pass’d them by;”

and even Gulnare, his deliverer, fails to seduce him.

Mr. Ruskin observes that Byron makes much of courage.  It is Conrad, the leader, who undertakes the dangerous errand of surprising Seyd; it is he who determines to save the harem.  His courage is not the mere excitement of battle.  When he is captured—

“A conqueror’s more than captive’s air is seen,”

and he is not insensible to all fear.

“Each has some fear, and he who least betrays,
The only hypocrite deserving praise.

* * * * *

One thought alone he could not—dared not meet—
‘Oh, how these tidings will Medora greet?’”

Gulnare announces his doom to him, but he is calm.  He cannot stoop even to pray.  He has deserted his Maker, and it would be baseness now to prostrate himself before Him.

“I have no thought to mock his throne with prayer
Wrung from the coward crouching of despair;
It is enough—I breathe—and I can bear.”

He has no martyr-hope with which to console himself; his endurance is of the finest order—simple, sheer resolution, a resolve that with no reward, he will never disgrace himself.  He knows what it is

“To count the hours that struggle to thine end,
With not a friend to animate, and tell
To other ears that death became thee well,”

but he does not break down.

Gulnare tries to persuade him that the only way by which he can save himself from tortures and impalement is by the assassination of Seyd, but he refuses to accept the terms—

“Who spares a woman’s seeks not slumber’s life”—

and dismisses her.  When she has done the deed and he sees the single spot of blood upon her, he, the Corsair, is unmanned as he had never been in battle, prison, or by consciousness of guilt.

“But ne’er from strife—captivity—remorse—
From all his feelings in their inmost force—
So thrill’d—so shudder’d every creeping vein,
As now they froze before that purple stain.
That spot of blood, that light but guilty streak,
Had banish’d all the beauty from her cheek!”

The Corsair’s misanthropy had not destroyed him.  Small creatures alone are wholly converted into spite and scepticism by disappointment and repulse.  Those who are larger avenge themselves by devotion.  Conrad’s love for Medora was intensified and exalted by his hatred of the world.

“Yes, it was Love—unchangeable—unchanged,
Felt but for one from whom he never ranged;”

and she was worthy of him, the woman who could sing—

“Deep in my soul that tender secret dwells,
Lonely and lost to light for evermore,
Save when to thine my heart responsive swells,
Then trembles into silence as before.

There, in its centre, a sepulchral lamp
Burns the slow flame, eternal—but unseen;
Which not the darkness of despair can damp,
Though vain its ray as it had never been.”

He finds Medora dead, and—

         “his mother’s softness crept
To those wild eyes, which like an infant’s wept.”

If his crimes and love could be weighed in a celestial balance, weight being apportioned to the rarity and value of the love, which would descend?

The points indicated in Conrad’s character are not many, but they are sufficient for its delineation, and it is a moral character.  We must, of course, get rid of the notion that the relative magnitude of the virtues and vices according to the priest or society is authentic.  A reversion to the natural or divine scale has been almost the sole duty preached to us by every prophet.  If we could incorporate Conrad with ourselves we should find that the greater part of what is worst in us would be neutralised.  The sins of which we are ashamed, the dirty, despicable sins, Conrad could not have committed; and in these latter days they are perhaps the most injurious.

We do not understand how moral it is to yield unreservedly to enthusiasm, to the impression which great objects would fain make upon us, and to embody that impression in worthy language.  It is rare to meet now even with young people who will abandon themselves to a heroic emotion, or who, if they really feel it, do not try to belittle it in expression.  Byron’s poetry, above most, tempts and almost compels surrender to that which is beyond the commonplace self.

It is not true that “The Corsair” is insincere.  He who hears a note of insincerity in Conrad and Medora may have ears, but they must be those of the translated Bottom who was proud of having “a reasonable good ear in music.”  Byron’s romance has been such a power exactly because men felt that it was not fiction and that his was one of the strongest minds of his day.  He was incapable of toying with the creatures of the fancy which had no relationship with himself and through himself with humanity.

A word as to Byron’s hold upon the people.  He was able to obtain a hearing from ordinary men and women, who knew nothing even of Shakespeare, save what they had seen at the theatre.  Modern poetry is the luxury of a small cultivated class.  We may say what we like of popularity, and if it be purchased by condescension to popular silliness it is nothing.  But Byron secured access to thousands of readers in England and on the Continent by strength and loveliness, a feat seldom equalled and never perhaps surpassed.  The present writer’s father, a compositor in a dingy printing office, repeated verses from “Childe Harold” at the case.  Still more remarkable, Byron reached one of this writer’s friends, an officer in the Navy, of the ancient stamp; and the attraction, both to printer and lieutenant, lay in nothing lower than that which was best in him.  It is surely a service sufficient to compensate for many more faults than can be charged against him that wherever there was any latent poetic dissatisfaction with the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life he gave it expression, and that he has awakened in the people lofty emotions which, without him, would have slept.  The cultivated critics, and the refined persons who have schrecklich viel gelesen, are not competent to estimate the debt we owe to Byron.

(Reprinted, with corrections, by permission from the “Contemporary Review,” August, 1881.)

A fatal plague devastated the city.  The god had said that it would continue to rage until atonement for a crime had been offered by the sacrifice of a man.  He was to be perfect in body; he must not desire to die because he no longer loved life, or because he wished for fame.  A statue must not be erected to his memory; no poem must be composed for him; his name must not appear in the city’s records.

A few volunteers presented themselves, but none of them satisfied all the conditions.  At last a young man came who had served as the model for the image of the god in his temple.  There was no question, therefore, of soundness of limb, and when he underwent the form of examination no spot nor blemish was found on him.  The priest asked him whether he was in trouble, and especially whether he was disappointed in love.  He said he was in no trouble; that he was betrothed to a girl to whom he was devoted, and that they had intended to be married that month.  “I am,” he declared, “the happiest man in the city.”  The priest doubted and watched him that evening, but he saw him walking side by side with this girl, and the two were joyous as a youth and a maiden ought to be in the height of their passion.  She sat down and sang to him he played to her, and they embraced one another tenderly at parting.

The next morning was the day on which he was to be slain.  There was an altar in front of the temple, and a great crowd assembled, ranked round the open space.  At the appointed hour the priest appeared, and with him was the youth, holding his beloved by the hand, but she was blindfolded.  He let go her hand, knelt down, and in a moment the sacrificial knife was drawn across his throat.  His body was placed upon the wood, and the priest was about to kindle it when a flash from heaven struck it into a blaze with such heat that when the fire dropped no trace of the victim remained.  The girl, too, had disappeared, and was never seen again.

In accordance with the god’s decree, no statue was erected, no poem was composed, and no entry was made in the city records.  But tradition did not forget that the saviour of the city was he who survived in the great image on which the name of the god was inscribed.

An aged tree, whose companions had gone, having still a little sap in its bark and a few leaves which grew therefrom, prayed it might see yet another spring.  Its prayer was granted: and spring came, but the old tree had no leaves save one or two near the ground, and a great fungus fixed itself on its trunk.  It had a dull life in its roots, but not enough to know that its moss and fungus were not foliage.  It stood there, an unlovely mass of decay, when the young trees were all bursting.  “That rotten thing,” said the master, “ought to have been cut down long ago.”

“Conscience,” said I, “her conscience would have told her.”

“Yes,” said my father.  “The strongest amongst the many objections to the Roman Catholic doctrine of confession is that it weakens our dependence on the conscience.  If we seek for an external command to do what ought to be done in obedience to that inward monitor, whose voice is always clear if we will but listen, its authority will gradually be lost, and in the end it will cease to speak.”

“Conscience,” said my grandmother musingly (turning to my father).  “You will remember Phyllis Eyre?  She was one of my best friends, and it is now two years since she died, unmarried.  She was once governess to the children of Sir Robert Walsh, but remained in the house as companion to Lady Walsh long after her pupils had grown up.  She was, in fact, more than a companion, for Lady Walsh trusted her and loved her.  She was by birth a lady; she had been well educated, and, like her mistress, she was devoutly and evangelically pious.  She was also very handsome, and this you may well believe, for, as you know, she was handsome as an old woman, stately and erect, with beautiful, undimmed eyes.  When Evelina Walsh, the eldest daughter, was about one and twenty, Charles Fysshe, the young heir to the Fysshe property, came to stay with her brother, and Phyllis soon discovered, or thought she discovered, that he was in love with Evelina.  He seemed to court her society, and paid her attentions which could be explained on one hypothesis only.  Phyllis was delighted, for the match in every way was most suitable, and must gladden the hearts of Evelina’s parents.  The young man would one day be the possessor of twenty thousand acres; he had already taken a position in the county, and his soul was believed to be touched with Divine grace.  Evelina certainly was in love with him, and Phyllis was not backward in urging his claims.  She congratulated herself, and with justice, that if the marriage should ever take place, it would be acknowledged that she had had a hand in it.  It might even be doubted whether Evelina, without Phyllis’s approval, would have permitted herself to indulge her passion, for she was by nature diffident, and so beset with reasons for and against when she had to make up her mind on any important matter, that a decision was always most difficult to her.

“Charles stayed for about six weeks, and was then called home.  He promised that he would pay another visit of a week in the autumn, when Sir Robert was to entertain the Lord Lieutenant and there were to be grand doings at the Hall.  Conversation naturally turned upon him during his absence, and Phyllis, as usual, was warm in his praise.  One evening, after she had reached her own room and had lain down to sleep, a strange apparition surprised her.  It was something more than a suspicion that she herself loved Charles.  She strove to rid herself of this intrusion: she called to mind the difference in their rank; that she was five years his senior, and that if she yielded she would be guilty of treachery to Evelina.  It was all in vain; the more she resisted the more vividly did his image present itself, and she was greatly distressed.  What was the meaning of this outbreak of emotion, not altogether spiritual, of this loss of self-possession, such as she had never known before?  Her usual remedies against evil thoughts failed her, and, worst of all, there was the constant suggestion that these particular thoughts were not evil.  Hitherto, when temptation had attacked her, she was sure whence it came, but she was not sure now.  It might be an interposition of Providence, but how would it appear to Evelina?  I myself, my dears, have generally found that to resist the devil is not difficult if I am quite certain that the creature before me is the devil, but it does tax my wits sometimes to find out if he is really the enemy or not.  When Apollyon met Christian he was not in doubt for an instant, for the monster was hideous to behold: he had scales like a fish, wings like a dragon, feet like a bear, out of his belly came fire and smoke, and his mouth was as the mouth of a lion.  After some parleying he cast his dreadful dart, but Christian, without more ado, put up his shield, drew his sword, and presently triumphed.  If Satan had turned himself, from his head to his ankles, into a man, and had walked by Christian’s side, and had talked with him, and had agreed with him in everything he had to say, the bear’s claws might have peeped out, but Christian, instead of fighting, would have begun to argue with himself whether the evidence of the face or the foot was the stronger.  He would have been just as likely to trust the face, and in a few moments he would have been snapped up and carried off to hell.  To go on with my story: the night wore on in sophistry and struggle, and no inner light dawned with the sun.  Phyllis was much agitated, for in the afternoon Charles was to return, and although amidst the crowd of visitors she might be overlooked, she could not help seeing him.  She did see him, but did not speak to him.  He sat next to Evelina at dinner, who was happy and expectant.  The next day there was a grand meet of the hounds, and almost all the party disappeared.  Phyllis pleaded a headache, and obtained permission to stay at home.  It was a lovely morning in November, without a movement in the air, calm and cloudless, one of those mornings not uncommon when the year begins to die.  She went into the woods at the outer edge of the park, and had scarcely entered them, when lo! to her astonishment, there was Charles.  She could not avoid him, and he came up to her.

“‘Why, Miss Eyre, what are you doing here?’

“‘I had a headache; I could not go with the others, and came out for a stroll.’

“‘I, too, was not very well, and have been left behind.’

“They walked together side by side.

“‘I wanted to speak to you, Miss Eyre.  I wonder if you have suspected anything lately.’

“‘Suspected?  I do not quite comprehend: you are very vague.’

“‘Well, must I be more explicit?  Have you fancied that I care more for somebody you know than I care for all the world besides?  I suppose you have not, for I thought it better to hide as much as possible what I felt.’

“‘I should be telling an untruth if I were to say I do not understand you, and I trust you will pardon me if I tell you that a girl more worthy of you than Evelina, and one more likely to make you happy, I have never seen.’

“‘Gracious God! what have I done? what a mistake!  Miss Eyre, it is you I mean; it is you I love.’

“There was not an instant’s hesitation.

“‘Sir, I thank you, but I can answer at once.  Never can I be yours.  That decision is irrevocable.  I admire you, but cannot love you.’

“She parted from him abruptly, but no sooner had she left him than she was confounded, and wondered who or what it was which gave that answer.  She wavered, and thought of going back, but she did not.  Later on in the day she heard that Charles had gone home, summoned by sudden business.  Two years afterwards his engagement with Evelina was announced, and in three years they were married.  It was not what I should call a happy marriage, although they never quarrelled and had five children.  To the day of her death Phyllis was not sure whether she had done right or wrong, nor am I.”

In the year 1850 I was living as governess in the small watering-place S., on the south coast of England.  Amongst my friends was a young doctor, B., who had recently come to the town.  He had not bought a practice, but his family was known to one or two of the principal inhabitants, and he had begun to do well.  He deserved his success, for he was skilful, frank, and gentle, and he did not affect that mystery which in his elder colleagues was already suspected to be nothing but ignorance.  He was one of the early graduates of the University of London, and representative of the new school of medical science, relying not so much upon drugs as upon diet and regimen.  I was one of his first patients.  I had a severe illness lasting for nearly three months; he watched over me carefully and cured me.  As I grew better he began to talk on other matters than my health when he visited me.  We found that we were both interested in the same books: he lent me his and I lent him mine.  It is almost impossible, I should think, for a young man and a young woman to be friends and nothing more, and I confess that my sympathy with him in his admiration of the Elizabethan poets, and my gratitude to him for my recovery passed into affection.  I am sure also that he felt affection for me.  He became confidential, and told me all his history and troubles.  There was one peculiarity in his conversation which was new to me: he never talked down to me, and he was not afraid at times to discuss subjects that in the society to which I had been accustomed were prohibited.  Not a word that was improper ever escaped his lips, but he treated me in a measure as if I were a man, and I was flattered that he should put me on a level with himself.  It is true that sometimes I fancied he was so unreserved with me because he was sure he was quite safe, for I was poor, and although I was not ugly I was not handsome.  However, on the whole, I was very happy in his society, and there was more than a chance that I should become his wife.

After six months of our acquaintanceship had passed, M., an old schoolfellow of mine, took lodgings near me for the summer.  She was a remarkable girl.  If she was not beautiful, she was better-looking than I was, and she possessed a something, I know not what, more powerful than beauty to fascinate men.  Perhaps it was her unconstrained naturalness.  In walking, sitting, standing—whatever she did—her movements and attitudes were not impeded or unduly masked by artificial restrictions.  I should not have called her profound, but what she said upon the commonest subjects was interesting, because it was so entirely her own.  If she disliked a neighbour, she almost always disliked her for a reason which we saw, directly it was pointed out to us, to be just, but it was generally one which had not been given before.  Her talk upon matters externally trivial was thus much more to me than many discourses upon the most important topics.  On moral questions she expressed herself without any regard to prejudices.  She did not controvert the authenticity of the ordinary standards, but nevertheless behaved as if she herself were her only law.  The people in R., her little native borough, considered her to be dangerous, and I myself was once or twice weak enough to wonder that she held on a straight course with so little help from authority, forgetting that its support, in so far as it possesses any vital strength, is derived from the same internal source which supplied strength to her.

When she came to S. she was unwell, and consulted my friend B.  He did not at first quite like attending her, and she reported to me with great laughter how she had been told that he had made some inquiries about her from one of her neighbours at home with whom he happened to be acquainted, and how he had manœuvred in his visits to get the servants or the landlady into the room.  I met him soon afterwards, and he informed me that he had a new patient.  When he heard that I knew her—I did not say how much I knew—he became inquisitive, and at last, after much beating about the bush, knitting his eyebrows and lowering his voice, he asked me whether I was aware that she was not quite—quite above suspicion!  My goodness, how I flamed up!  I defended her with vehemence: I exaggerated her prudence and her modesty; I declared, what was the simple truth, that she was the last person in the world against whom such a scandalous insinuation should be directed, and that she was singularly inaccessible to vulgar temptation.  I added that notwithstanding her seeming lawlessness she was not only remarkably sensitive to any accusation of bad manners, but that upon certain matters she could not endure even a joke.  The only quarrel I remember to have had with her was when I lapsed into some commonplace jest about her intimacy with a music-master who gave her lessons.  The way in which she took that jest I shall never forget.  If I had made it to any other woman, I should have passed on, unconscious of anything inconsistent with myself, but she in an instant made me aware with hardly half a dozen words that I had disgraced myself.  I was ashamed, not so much because I had done what was in the abstract wrong, but because it was something which was not in keeping with my real character.  I hope it will not be thought that I am prosing if I take this opportunity of saying that the laws peculiar to each of us are those which we are at the least pains to discover and those which we are most prone to neglect.  We think we have done our duty when we have kept the commandments common to all of us, but we may perhaps have disgracefully neglected it.

Oh, how that afternoon with B. burnt itself into my memory for ever!  I was sitting on my little sofa with books piled round me.  He removed a few of the books, and I removed the others.  He sat down beside me, and, taking my hand, said he hoped I had forgiven him, and that I would remember that in such a little place he was obliged to be very careful, and to be quite sure of his patients, if they were women.  He trusted I should believe that there was no other person in the world (the emphasis on that word!) to whom he would have ventured to impart such a secret.  I was appeased, especially when, after a few minutes’ silence, he took my hand and kissed it, the first and last kiss.  He said nothing further, and departed.  The next time I saw him he was more than usually deferential, more than ever desirous to come closer to me, and I thought the final word must soon be spoken.

M. remained in S. till far into the autumn, but I did not see much of her.  My work had begun again.  B. continued to call on me as my health was not quite re-established.  We had agreed to read the same author at the same time, in order that we might discuss him together whilst our impressions were still fresh.  Somehow his interest in these readings began to flag; he informed me presently that I had now almost, entirely recovered, and weeks often passed without meeting him.  One afternoon I was surprised to find M. in my room when I returned from a walk with my pupils.  She had been waiting for me nearly half an hour, and I could not at first conjecture the reason.  Gradually she drew the conversation towards B. and at last asked me what I thought of him.  Instantly I saw what had happened.  What I imagined was once mine had been stolen, stolen perhaps unconsciously, but nevertheless stolen, my sole treasure.  She was rich, she had a father and mother, she had many friends and would certainly have been married had she never seen B.  I, as I have said, was almost penniless; I was an orphan, with few friends; he was my first love, and I knew he would be my last.

I was condemned, I foresaw, henceforth to solitude, and that most terrible of all calamities, heart-starvation.  What B. had said about M. came into my mind and rose to my lips.  I knew, or thought I knew, that if I revealed it to her she would be so angry that she would cast him off.  Probably I was mistaken, but in my despair the impulse to disclose it was almost irresistible.  I struggled against it, however, and when she pressed me, I praised him and strove in my praise to be sincere.  Whether it was something in my tone, quite unintentional, I know not, but she stopped me almost in the middle of a sentence and said she believed I had kept something back which I did not wish her to hear; that she was certain he had talked to me about her, and that she wished to know what he had said.  I protested he had never uttered a word which could be interpreted as disparaging her, and she seemed to be content.  She kissed me a little more vehemently than usual, and went away.  We ought always, I suppose, to be glad when other people are happy, but God knows that sometimes it is very difficult to be so, and that their happiness is hard to bear.

The Elizabethan studies had now altogether come to an end.  In about a couple of months I heard that M. and B. were engaged.  M. went home, and B. moved into a larger town.  In a twelvemonth the marriage took place, and M. wrote to me after her wedding trip.  I replied, but she never wrote again.  I heard that she had said that I had laid myself out to catch B. and that she was afraid that in so doing I had hinted there was something against her.  I heard also that B. had discouraged his wife’s correspondence with me, no other reason being given than that he would rather the acquaintanceship should be dropped.  The interpretation of this reason by those to whom it was given can be guessed.  Did he fear lest I should boast of what I had been to him or should repeat his calumny?  Ah, he little knew me if he dreamed that such treachery was possible to me!

I remained at the vicarage for three years.  The children grew up and I was obliged to leave, but I continued to teach in different families till I was about five-and-forty.  After five-and-forty I could not obtain another situation, and I had to support myself by letting apartments at Brighton.  My strength is now failing; I cannot look after my servant properly, nor wait upon my lodgers myself.  Those who have to get their living by a lodging-house know what this means and what the end will be.  I have occasionally again wished I could have seen my way partially to explain myself to M., and have thought it hard to die misrepresented, but I am glad I have not spoken.  I should have disturbed her peace, and I care nothing about justification or misrepresentation now.  With eternity so near, what does it matter?

Inscription On The Envelope.

“To my niece Judith,—You have been so kind to your aunt, the only human being, at last, who was left to love her, that she could not refrain from telling you the one passage in her history which is of any importance or interest.”

“It is all a lie, and it is hard to believe that people who preach it do not know it to be a lie.”

So said James Forbes to Elizabeth Castleton, the young woman to whom he was engaged.  She was the daughter of a clergyman, and James, who had been brought up at Rugby and Oxford, was now in his last year at a London hospital, and was going to be a doctor.

“I am sure my father does not know it to be a lie, and I do not myself know it to be a lie.”

“I was not thinking of your father, but of the clergy generally, and you do know it to be a lie.”

“It is not true of my brother, and, excepting my father and brother, you have not been in company with parsons, as you call them, for half an hour in your life.”

“Do you mean to tell me you have any doubts about this discredited rubbish?”

“If I have I would rather not speak about them now.  Jim, dear Jim, let us drop the subject and talk of something else.”

He was walking by her side, with his hands in his coat pockets.  She drew out one of his hands; he did not return the pressure, and presently released himself.

“I thought you were to be my intellectual companion.  I have heard you say yourself that a marriage which is not a marriage of mind is no marriage.”

“But, Jim, is there nothing in the world to think about but this?”

“There is nothing so important.  Are we to be dumb all our lives about what you say is religion?”

They separated and soon afterwards the engagement was broken off.  Jim had really loved Elizabeth, but at that time he was furious against what he called “creeds.”  He waited for three or four years till he had secured a fair practice, and then married a clever and handsome young woman who wrote poems, and had captivated him by telling him a witty story from Heine.  Elizabeth never married.

Thirty years passed, and Jim, now a famous physician, had to go a long distance down the Great Western Railway to attend a consultation.  At Bath an elderly lady entered the carriage carrying a handbag with the initials “E. C.” upon it.  She sat in the seat farthest away from him on the opposite side, and looked at him steadfastly.  He also looked at her, but no word was spoken for a minute.  He then crossed over, fell on his knees, and buried his head with passionate sobbing on her knees.  She put her hands on him and her tears fell.

“Five years,” at last he said; “I may live five years with care.  She has left me.  I will give up everything and go abroad with you.  Five years; it is not much, but it will be something, everything.  I shall die with your face over me.”

The train was slackening speed for Bristol; she bent down and kissed him.

“Dearest Jim,” she whispered, “I have waited a long time, but I was sure we should come together again at last.  It is enough.”

“You will go with me, then?”

Again she kissed him.  “It must not be.”

Before he could reply the train was stopping at the platform, and a gentleman with a lady appeared at the door.  Miss Castleton stepped out and was at once driven away in a carriage with her companions.

He lived three years and then died almost suddenly of the disease which he had foreseen would kill him.  He had no children, but few relatives, and his attendant was a hospital nurse.  But the day before his death a lady appeared who announced herself as a family friend, and the nurse was superseded.  It was Elizabeth: she came to his bedside, and he recognised her.

“Not till this morning,” she said, “did I hear you were ill.”

“Happy,” he cried, “though I die to-night.”

Soon afterwards—it was about sundown—he became unconscious; she sat there alone with him till the morning broke, and then he passed away, and she closed his eyes.

“You ask me how I lost my foot?  You I see that dog?”—an unattractive beast lying before the fire—“well, when I tell you how I came by him you will know how I lost it;” and he then related the following story:—

I was in Westmoreland with my wife and children for a holiday and we had brought our dog with us, for we knew he would be unhappy with the strangers to whom we had let our house.  The weather was very wet and our lodgings were not comfortable; we were kept indoors for days together, and my temper, always irritable, became worse.  My wife never resisted me when I was in these moods and the absence of opposition provoked me all the more.  Had she stood up against me and told me I ought to be ashamed of myself it would have been better for me.  One afternoon everything seemed to go wrong.  A score of petty vexations, not one of which was of any moment, worked me up to desperation.  I threw my book across the room, to the astonishment of my children, and determined to go out, although it was raining hard.  My dog, a brown retriever, was lying on the mat just outside the door, and I nearly fell over him.  “God damn you!” said I, and kicked him.  He howled with pain, but, although he was the best of house-dogs and would have brought down any thief who came near him, he did not growl at me, and quietly followed me.  I am not squeamish, but I was frightened directly the oath had escaped my lips.  I felt as if I had created something horrible which I could not annihilate, and that it would wait for me and do me some mischief.  The dog kept closely to my heels for about a mile and I could not make him go on in front.  Usually the least word of encouragement or even the mere mention of his name would send him scampering with delight in advance.  I began to think of something else, but in about a quarter of an hour I looked round and found he was not behind me.  I whistled and called, but he did not come.  In a renewed rage, which increased with every step I took, I turned back to seek him.  Suddenly I came upon him lying dead by the roadside.  Never shall I forget that shock—the reproach, the appeal of that poor lifeless animal!  I stroked him, I kissed him, I whispered his name in his ear, but it was all in vain.  I lifted up his beautiful broad paw which he was wont to lay on my knee, I held it between my hands, and when I let it go it fell heavily to the ground.  I could not carry him home, and with bitter tears and a kind of dread I drew him aside a little way up the hill behind a rock.  I went to my lodgings, returned towards dusk with a spade, dug his grave in a lonely spot near the bottom of a waterfall where he would never be disturbed, and there I buried him, reverently smoothing the turf over him.  What a night that was for me!  I was haunted incessantly by the vivid image of the dead body and by the terror which accompanies a great crime.  I had repaid all his devotion with horrible cruelty.  I had repented, but he would never know it.  It was not the dog only which I had slain; I had slain Divine faithfulness and love.  That God damn you sounded perpetually in my ears.  The Almighty had registered and executed the curse, but it had fallen upon the murderer and not on the victim.  When I rose in the morning I distinctly felt the blow of the kick in my foot, and the sensation lasted all day.  For weeks I was in a miserable condition.  A separate consciousness seemed to establish itself in this foot; there was nothing to be seen and no pain, but there was a dull sort of pressure of which I could not rid myself.  If I slept I dreamed of the dog, and generally dreamed I was caressing him, waking up to the dreadful truth of the corpse on the path in the rain.  I got it into my head—for I was half-crazy—that only by some expiation I should be restored to health and peace; but how to make any expiation I could not tell.  Unhappy is the wretch who longs to atone for a sin and no atonement is prescribed to him!

One night I was coming home late and heard the cry of “Fire!”  I ran down the street and found a house in flames.  The fire-escape was at the window, and had rescued a man, his wife and child.  Every living creature was safe, I was told, save a dog in the front room on the ground-floor.  I pushed the people aside, rushed in, half-blinded with smoke, and found him.  I could not escape by the passage, and dropped out of the window into the area with him in my arms.  I fell heavily on that foot, and when I was helped up the steps I could not put it to the ground.  “You may have him for your pains,” said his owner to me; “he is a useless cur.  I wouldn’t have ventured the singeing of a hair for him.”  “May I?” I replied, with an eagerness which must have seemed very strange.  He was indeed not worth half a crown, but I drew him closely to me and took him into the cab.  I was in great agony, and when the surgeon came it was discovered that my ankle was badly fractured.  An attempt was made to set it, but in the end it was decided that the foot must be amputated.  I rejoiced when I heard the news, and on the day on which the operation was performed I was calm and even cheerful.  Our own doctor who came with the surgeon told him I had “a highly nervous temperament,” and both of them were amazed at my fortitude.  The dog is a mongrel, as you see, but he loves me, and if you were to offer me ten thousand golden guineas I would not part with him.