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A PRESENCE YET NOT A PRESENCE.
The twilight had fallen while he wrote, and the wind had risen. It
was now blowing a gale. When he could no longer see, he rose to
light his lamp, and looked out of the window. All was dusk around
him. Above and below was nothing to be distinguished from the mass;
nothing and something seemed in it to share an equal uncertainty. He
heard the wind, but could not see the clouds that swept before it,
for all was cloud overhead, and no change of light or feature showed
the shifting of the measureless bulk. Gray stormy space was the
whole idea of the creation. He was gazing into a void--was it not
rather a condition of things inappreciable by his senses? A strange
feeling came over him as of looking from a window in the wall of the
visible into the region unknown, to man shapeless quite, therefore
terrible, wherein wander the things all that have not yet found or
form or sensible embodiment, so as to manifest themselves to eyes or
ears or hands of mortals. As he gazed, the huge shapeless hulks of
the ships of chaos, dimly awful suggestions of animals uncreate, yet
vaguer motions of what was not, came heaving up, to vanish, even
from the fancy, as they approached his window. Earth lay far below,
invisible; only through the night came the moaning of the sea, as
the wind drove it, in still enlarging waves, upon the flat shore, a
level of doubtful grass and sand, three miles away. It seemed to his
heart as if the moaning were the voice of the darkness, lamenting,
like a repentant Satan or Judas, that it was not the light, could
not hold the light, might not become as the light, but must that
moment cease when the light began to enter it. Darkness and moaning
was all that the earth contained! Would the souls of the mariners
shipwrecked this night go forth into the ceaseless turmoil? or would
they, leaving behind them the sense for storms, as for all things
soft and sweet as well, enter only a vast silence, where was nothing
to be aware of but each solitary self? Thoughts and theories many
passed through Donal's mind as he sought to land the conceivable
from the wandering bosom of the limitless; and he was just arriving
at the conclusion, that, as all things seen must be after the
fashion of the unseen whence they come, as the very genius of
embodiment is likeness, therefore the soul of man must of course
have natural relations with matter; but, on the other hand, as the
spirit must be the home and origin of all this moulding,
assimilating, modelling energy, and the spirit only that is in
harmonious oneness with its origin can fully exercise the deputed
creative power, it can be only in proportion to the eternal life in
them, that spirits are able to draw to themselves matter and clothe
themselves in it, so entering into full relation with the world of
storms and sunsets;--he was, I say, just arriving at this hazarded
conclusion, when he started out of his reverie, and was suddenly all
ear to listen.--Again!--Yes! it was the same sound that had sent him
that first night wandering through the house in fruitless quest! It
came in two or three fitful chords that melted into each other like
the colours in the lining of a shell, then ceased. He went to the
door, opened it, and listened. A cold wind came rushing up the
stair. He heard nothing. He stepped out on the stair, shut his door,
and listened. It came again--a strange unearthly musical cry! If
ever disembodied sound went wandering in the wind, just such a sound
must it be! Knowing little of music save in the forms of tone and
vowel-change and rhythm and rime, he felt as if he could have
listened for ever to the wild wandering sweetness of its
lamentation. Almost immediately it ceased--then once more came
again, apparently from far off, dying away on the distant tops of
the billowy air, out of whose wandering bosom it had first issued.
It was as the wailing of a summer-wind caught and swept along in a
tempest from the frozen north.
The moment he ceased to expect it any more, he began to think
whether it must not have come from the house. He stole down the
stair--to do what, he did not know. He could not go following an
airy nothing all over the castle: of a great part of it he as yet
knew nothing! His constructive mind had yearned after a complete
idea of the building, for it was almost a passion with him to fit
the outsides and insides of things together; but there were suites
of rooms into which, except the earl and lady Arctura were to leave
home, he could not hope to enter. It was little more than
mechanically therefore that he went vaguely after the sound; and ere
he was half-way down the stair, he recognized the hopelessness of
the pursuit. He went on, however, to the schoolroom, where tea was
waiting him.
He had returned to his room, and was sitting again at work, now
reading and meditating, when, in one of the lulls of the storm, he
became aware of another sound--one most unusual to his ears, for he
never required any attendance in his room--that of steps coming up
the stair--heavy steps, not as of one on some ordinary errand. He
waited listening. The steps came nearer and nearer, and stopped at
his door. A hand fumbled about upon it, found the latch, lifted it,
and entered. To Donal's wonder--and dismay as well, it was the earl.
His dismay arose from his appearance: he was deadly pale, and his
eyes more like those of a corpse than a man among his living
fellows. Donal started to his feet.
The apparition turned its head towards him; but in its look was no
atom of recognition, no acknowledgment or even perception of his
presence; the sound of his rising had had merely a half-mechanical
influence upon its brain. It turned away immediately, and went on to
the window. There it stood, much as Donal had stood a little while
before--looking out, but with the attitude of one listening rather
than one trying to see. There was indeed nothing but the blackness
to be seen--and nothing to be heard but the roaring of the wind,
with the roaring of the great billows rolled along in it. As it
stood, the time to Donal seemed long: it was but about five minutes.
Was the man out of his mind, or only a sleep-walker? How could he be
asleep so early in the night?
As Donal stood doubting and wondering, once more came the musical
cry out of the darkness--and immediately from the earl a response--a
soft, low murmur, by degrees becoming audible, in the tone of one
meditating aloud, but in a restrained ecstacy. From his words he
seemed still to be hearkening the sounds aerial, though to Donal at
least they came no more.
"Yet once again," he murmured, "once again ere I forsake the flesh,
are my ears blest with that voice! It is the song of the eternal
woman! For me she sings!--Sing on, siren; my soul is a listening
universe, and therein nought but thy voice!"
He paused, and began afresh:--
"It is the wind in the tree of life! Its leaves rustle in words of
love. Under its shadow I shall lie, with her I loved--and killed!
Ere that day come, she will have forgiven and forgotten, and all
will be well!
"Hark the notes! Clear as a flute! Full and stringent as a violin!
They are colours! They are flowers! They are alive! I can see them
as they grow, as they blow! Those are primroses! Those are
pimpernels! Those high, intense, burning tones--so soft, yet so
certain--what are they? Jasmine?--No, that flower is not a note! It
is a chord!--and what a chord! I mean, what a flower! I never saw
that flower before--never on this earth! It must be a flower of the
paradise whence comes the music! It is! It is! Do I not remember the
night when I sailed in the great ship over the ocean of the stars,
and scented the airs of heaven, and saw the pearly gates gleaming
across myriads of wavering miles!--saw, plain as I see them now, the
flowers on the fields within! Ah, me! the dragon that guards the
golden apples! See his crest--his crest and his emerald eyes! He
comes floating up through the murky lake! It is Geryon!--come to
bear me to the gyre below!"
He turned, and with a somewhat quickened step left the room, hastily
shutting the door behind him, as if to keep back the creature of his
vision.
Strong-hearted and strong-brained, Donal had yet stood absorbed as
if he too were out of the body, and knew nothing more of this earth.
There is something more terrible in a presence that is not a
presence than in a vision of the bodiless; that is, a present ghost
is not so terrible as an absent one, a present but deserted body. He
stood a moment helpless, then pulled himself together and tried to
think. What should he do? What could he do? What was required of
him? Was anything required of him? Had he any right to do anything?
Could anything be done that would not both be and cause a wrong? His
first impulse was to follow: a man in such a condition was surely
not to be left to go whither he would among the heights and depths
of the castle, where he might break his neck any moment!
Interference no doubt was dangerous, but he would follow him at
least a little way! He heard the steps going down the stair, and
made haste after them. But ere they could have reached the bottom,
the sound of them ceased; and Donal knew the earl must have left the
stair at a point from which he could not follow him.
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