The Portent and Other Stories
Home - George MacDonald - The Portent and Other StoriesChapter XVI
The Clanking Shoe.
Time passed. We began to feel very secure in that room, watched as it was by the sleepless sentry, Fear. One night I ventured to take a light with me.
"How nice to have a candle!" she said as I entered. "I hope they are all in bed, though. It will drive some of them into fits if they see the light."
"I wanted to show you something I found in the library to-day."
"What is it?"
I opened a book, and showed her a paper inside it, with some verses written on it.
"Whose writing is that?" I asked.
"Yours, of course. As if I did not know your writing!"
"Will you look at the date?"
"_Seventeen hundred and ninety-three.'_ You are making game of me, Duncan. But the paper does look yellow and old."
"I found it as you see it, in that book. It belonged to Lord Hilton's brother. The verses are a translation of part of the poem beside which they lie--one by Von Salis, who died shortly before that date at the bottom. I will read them to you, and then show you something else that is strange about them. The poem is called Psyche's Sorrow. Psyche means the soul, Alice."
"I remember. You told me about her before, you know."
"Psyche's sighing all her prison darkens; She is moaning for the far-off stars; Fearing, hoping, every sound she hearkens-- Fate may now be breaking at her bars.
Bound, fast bound, are Psyche's airy pinions: High her heart, her mourning soft and low-- Knowing that in sultry pain's dominions Grow the palms that crown the victor's brow;
That the empty hand the wreath encloses; Earth's cold winds but make the spirit brave; Knowing that the briars bear the roses, Golden flowers the waste deserted grave.
In the cypress-shade her myrtle groweth; Much she loves, because she much hath borne; Love-led, through the darksome way she goeth-- On to meet him in the breaking morn.
She can bear--"
"Here the translation ceases, you see; and then follows the date, with the words in German underneath it--'How weary I am!' Now what is strange, Alice, is, that this date is the very month and year in which I was born."
She did not reply to this with anything beyond a mere assent. Her mind was fixed on the poem itself. She began to talk about it, and I was surprised to find how thoroughly she entered into it and understood it. She seemed to have crowded the growth of a lifetime into the last few months. At length I told her how unhappy I had felt for some time, at remaining in Lord Hilton's house, as matters now were.
"Then you must go," she said, quite quietly.
This troubled me.
"You do not mind it?"
"No. I shall be very glad."
"Will you go with me?" I asked, perplexed.
"Of course I will."
I did not know what to say to this, for I had no money, and of course I should have none of my salary. She divined at once the cause of my hesitation.
"I have a diamond bracelet in my room," she said, with a smile, "and a few guineas besides."
"How shall we get away?"
"Nothing is easier. My old nurse, whom I mentioned to you before, lives at the lodge gate."
"Oh! I know her very well," I interrupted. "But she's not Scotch?"
"Indeed she is. But she has been with our family almost all her life. I often go to see her, and sometimes stay all night with her. You can get a carriage ready in the village, and neither of us will be missed before morning."
I looked at her in renewed surprise at the decision of her invention. She covered her face, as she seldom did now, but went on:
"We can go to London, where you will easily find something to do. Men always can there. And when I come of age--"
"Alice, how old are you?" I interrupted.
"Nineteen", she answered. "By the way," she resumed, "when I think of
it--how odd!--that"--pointing to the date on the paper--"is the very
month in which I too was born."
I was too much surprised to interrupt her, and she continued:
"I never think of my age without recalling one thing about my birth, which nurse often refers to. She was going up the stair to my mother's room, when she happened to notice a bright star, not far from the new moon. As she crossed the room with me in her arms, just after I was born, she saw the same star almost on the tip of the opposite horn. My mother died a week after. Who knows how different I might have been if she had lived!"
It was long before I spoke. The awful and mysterious thoughts roused in my mind by the revelations of the day held me silent. At length I said, half thinking aloud:
"Then you and I, Alice, were born the same hour, and our mothers died together."
Receiving no answer, I looked at her. She was fast asleep, and breathing gentle, full breaths. She had been sitting for some time with her head lying on my shoulder and my arm around her. I could not bear to wake her.
We had been in this position perhaps for half an hour, when suddenly a cold shiver ran through me, and all at once I became aware of the far-off gallop of a horse. It drew nearer. On and on it came--nearer and nearer. Then came the clank of the broken shoe!
At the same moment, Alice started from her sleep and, springing to her feet, stood an instant listening. Then crying out, in an agonised whisper,--"The horse with the clanking shoe!" she flung her arms around me. Her face was white as the spectral moon which, the moment I put the candle out, looked in through a clear pane beside us; and she gazed fearfully, yet wildly-defiant, towards the door. We clung to each other. We heard the sound come nearer and nearer, till it thundered right up to the very door of the room, terribly loud. It ceased. But the door was flung open, and Lord Hilton entered, followed by servants with lights.
I have but a very confused remembrance of what followed. I heard a vile word from the lips of Lord Hilton; I felt my fingers on his throat; I received a blow on the head; and I seem to remember a cry of agony from Alice as I fell. What happened next I do not know.
When I came to myself, I was lying on a wide moor, with the night wind blowing about me. I presume that I had wandered thither in a state of unconsciousness, after being turned out of the Hall, and that I had at last fainted from loss of blood. I was unable to move for a long time. At length the morning broke, and I found myself not far from the Hall. I crept back, a mile or two, to the gates, and having succeeded in rousing Alice's old nurse, was taken in with many lamentations, and put to bed in the lodge. I had a violent fever; and it was all the poor woman could do to keep my presence a secret from the family at the Hall.
When I began to mend, my first question was about Alice. I learned, though with some difficulty--for my kind attendant was evidently unwilling to tell me all the truth--that Alice, too, had been very ill; and that, a week before, they had removed her. But she either would not or could not tell me where they had taken her. I believe she could not. Nor do I know for certain to this day.
Mrs. Blakesley offered me the loan of some of her savings to get me to London. I received it with gratitude, and as soon as I was fit to travel, made my way thither. Afraid for my reason, if I had no employment to keep my thoughts from brooding on my helplessness, and so increasing my despair, and determined likewise that my failure should not make me burdensome to any one else, I enlisted in the Scotch Greys, before letting any of my friends know where I was. Through the help of one already mentioned in my story, I soon obtained a commission. From the field of Waterloo, I rode into Brussels with a broken arm and a sabre-cut in the head.
As we passed along one of the streets, through all the clang of iron-shod hoofs on the stones around me, I heard the ominous clank. At the same moment, I heard a cry. It was the voice of my Alice. I looked up. At a barred window I saw her face; but it was terribly changed. I dropped from my horse. As soon as I was able to move from the hospital, I went to the place, and found it was a lunatic asylum. I was permitted to see the inmates, but discovered no one resembling her. I do not now believe that she was ever there. But I may be wrong. Nor will I trouble my reader with the theories on which I sought to account for the vision. They will occur to himself readily enough.
For years and years I know not whether she was alive or dead. I sought her far and near. I wandered over England, France, and Germany, hopelessly searching; listening at tables-d'hôte; lurking about mad-houses; haunting theatres and churches; often, in wild regions, begging my way from house to house; I did not find her.
Once I visited Hilton Hall. I found it all but deserted. I learned that Mrs. Wilson was dead, and that there were only two or three servants in the place. I managed to get into the house unseen, and made my way to the haunted chamber. My feelings were not so keen as I had anticipated, for they had been dulled by long suffering. But again I saw the moon shine through those windows of stained glass. Again her beams were crowded with ghosts. She was not amongst them. "My lost love!" I cried; and then, rebuking myself, "No; she is not lost. They say that Time and Space exist not, save in our thoughts. If so, then that which has been, is, and the Past can never cease. She is mine, and I shall find her--what matters it where, or when, or how? Till then, my soul is but a moon-lighted chamber of ghosts; and I sit within, the dreariest of them all. When she enters, it will be a home of love. And I wait--I wait."
I sat and brooded over the Past, till I fell asleep in the phantom-peopled night. And all the night long they were about me--the men and women of the long past. And I was one of them. I wandered in my dreams over the whole house, habited in a long old-fashioned gown, searching for one who was Alice, and yet would be some one else. From room to room I wandered till weary, and could not find her. At last, I gave up the search, and, retreating to the library, shut myself in. There, taking down from the shelf the volume of Von Salis, I tried hard to go on with the translation of Pysche's Sorrow, from the point where the student had left it, thinking it, all the time, my own unfinished work.
When I woke in the morning, the chamber of ghosts, in which I had fallen asleep, had vanished. The sun shone in through the windows of the library; and on its dusty table lay Von Salis, open at Pysche's Trauer. The sheet of paper with the translation on it, was not there. I hastened to leave the house, and effected my escape before the servants were astir.
Sometimes I condensed my whole being into a single intensity of will--that she should come to me; and sustained it, until I fainted with the effort. She did not come. I desisted altogether at last, for I bethought me that, whether dead or alive, it must cause her torture not to be able to obey it.
Sometimes I questioned my own sanity. But the thought of the loss of my reason did not in itself trouble me much. What tortured me almost to the madness it supposed was the possible fact, which a return to my right mind might reveal--that there never had been a Lady Alice. What if I died, and awoke from my madness, and found a clear blue air of life, a joyous world of sunshine, a divine wealth of delight around and in me--but no Lady Alice--she having vanished with all the other phantoms of a sick brain! "Rather let me be mad still," I said, "if mad I am; and so dream on that I have been blessed. Were I to wake to such a heaven, I would pray God to let me go and live the life I had but dreamed, with all its sorrows, and all its despair, and all its madness, that when I died again, I might know that such things had been, and could never be awaked from, and left behind with the dream." But I was not mad, any more than Hamlet; though, like him, despair sometimes led me far along the way at the end of which madness lies.