The Flight Of The Shadow by George MacDonald (reading e books txt) 📖

given up by each. Always what one did, that did the other, though no longer intending to act in consort with him. He could not help it though he tried, for the other tried also, and did the same thing. One of us might for months have played the part of both without detection-especially if it had been understood that we had parted company; but I think it was never suspected, although now we were rarely for a moment together, and still more rarely spoke. A few weeks sufficed to bring us to the verge of madness.

"To this day I doubt if the woman, our common disease, knew the one of us from the other. That in any part of her being there was the least approach to a genuine womanly interest in either of us, I do not believe. I am very sure she never cared for me. Preference I cannot think possible; she could not, it seems to me, have felt anything for one of us without feeling the same for both; I do not see how, with all she knew of us, we could have made two impressions upon her moral sensorium.

"It was at length the height of summer, and every one sought change of scene and air. It was time for us to go home; but I wrote to my father, and got longer leave."

"I wrote too," interposed my uncle Edmund at this point of the story, when my own uncle was telling it that evening in Paris.

"The day after the date of his answer to my letter, my father died. But Edmund and I were already on our way, by different routes, to the mountain-village whither the lady had preceded us; and having, in our infatuation, left no address, my brother never saw the letter announcing our loss, and I not for months.

"A few weeks more, and our elder brother, who had always been delicate, followed our father. This also remained for a time unknown to me. My mother had died many years before, and we had now scarce a relation in the world. Martha Moon is the nearest relative you and I have. Besides her and you, there were left therefore of the family but myself and your uncle Edmund-both absorbed in the same worthless woman.

"At the village there were two hostelries. I thought my brother would go to the better; he thought I would go to the better; so we met at the worse! I remember a sort of grin on his face when we saw each other, and have no doubt the same grin was on mine. We always did the same thing, just as of old. The next morning we set out, I need hardly say each by himself, to find the lady.

"She had rented a small chalet on the banks of a swift mountain-stream, and thither, for a week or so, we went every day, often encountering. The efforts we made to avoid each other being similar and simultaneous, they oftener resulted in our meeting. When one did nothing, the other generally did nothing also, and when one schemed, the other also schemed, and similarly. Thus what had been the greatest pleasure of our peculiar relation, our mental and moral resemblance, namely, became a large factor in our mutual hate. For with self-loathing shame, and a misery that makes me curse the day I was born, I confess that for a time I hated the brother of my heart; and I have but too good ground for believing that he also hated me!"

"I did! I did!" cried uncle Edmund, when my own uncle, in his verbal narrative, mentioned his belief that his brother hated him; whereupon uncle Edward turned to me, saying-

"Is it not terrible, my little one, that out of a passion called by the same name with that which binds you and John Day, the hellish smoke of such a hate should arise! God must understand it! that is a comfort: in vain I seek to sound it. Even then I knew that I dwelt in an evil house. Amid the highest of such hopes as the woman roused in me, I scented the vapours of the pit. I was haunted by the dim shape of the coming hour when I should hate the woman that enthralled me, more than ever I had loved her. The greater sinner I am, that I yet yielded her dominion over me. I was the willing slave of a woman who sought nothing but the consciousness of power; who, to the indulgence of that vilest of passions, would sacrifice the lives, the loves, the very souls of men! She lived to separate, where Jesus died to make one! How weak and unworthy was I to be caught in her snares! how wicked and vile not to tear myself loose! The woman whose touch would defile the Pharisee, is pure beside such a woman!"

I return to his manuscript.

"The lady must have had plenty of money, and she loved company and show; I cannot but think, therefore, that she had her design in choosing such a solitary place: its loveliness would subserve her intent of enthralling thoroughly heart and soul and brain of the fools she had in her toils. I doubt, however, if the fools were alive to any beauty but hers, if they were not dead to the wavings of God's garment about them. Was I ever truly aware of the presence of those peaks that dwelt alone with their whiteness in the desert of the sky-awfully alone-of the world, but not with the world? I think we saw nothing save with our bodily eyes, and very little with them; for we were blinded by a passion fitter to wander the halls of Eblis, than the palaces of God.

"The chalet stood in a little valley, high in the mountains, whose surface was gently undulating, with here and there the rocks breaking through its rich-flowering meadows. Down the middle of it ran the deep swift stream, swift with the weight of its fullness, as well as the steep slope of its descent. It was not more than seven or eight feet across, but a great body of water went rushing along its deep course. About a quarter of a mile from the chalet, it reached the first of a series of falls of moderate height and slope, after which it divided into a number of channels, mostly shallow, in a wide pebbly torrent-bed. These, a little lower down, reunited into a narrower and yet swifter stream-a small fierce river, which presently, at one reckless bound, shot into the air, to tumble to a valley a thousand feet below, shattered into spray as it fell.

"The chalet stood alone. The village was at no great distance, but not a house was visible from any of its windows. It had no garden. The meadow, one blaze of colour, softened by the green of the mingling grass, came up to its wooden walls, and stretched from them down to the rocky bank of the river, in many parts to the very water's-edge. The chalet stood like a yellow rock in a green sea. The meadow was the drawing-room where the lady generally received us.

"One lovely evening, I strolled out of the hostelry, and went walking up the road that led to the village of Auerbach, so named from the stream and the meadow I have described. The moon was up, and promised the loveliest night. I was in no haste, for the lady had, in our common hearing, said, she was going to pass that night with a friend, in a town some ten miles away. I dawdled along therefore, thinking only to greet the place, walk with the stream, and lie in the meadow, sacred with the shadow of her demonian presence. Quit of the restless hope of seeing her, I found myself taking some little pleasure in the things about me, and spent two hours on the way, amid the sound of rushing water, now swelling, now sinking, all the time.

"It had not crossed me to wonder where my brother might be. I banished the thought of him as often as it intruded. Not able to help meeting, we had almost given up avoiding each other; but when we met, our desire was to part. I do not know that, apart, we had ever yet felt actual hate, either to the other.

"The road led through the village. It was asleep. I remember a gleam in just one of the houses. The moonlight seemed to have drowned all the lamps of the world. I came to the stream, rushing cold from its far-off glacier-mother, crossed it, and went down the bank opposite the chalet: I had taken a fancy to see it from that side. Glittering and glancing under the moon, the wild little river rushed joyous to its fearful fall. A short distance away, it was even now falling-falling from off the face of the world! This moment it was falling from my very feet into the void-falling, falling, unupheld, down, down, through the moonlight, to the ghastly rock-foot below!

"The chalet seemed deserted. With the same woefully desolate look, it constantly comes back in my dreams. I went farther down the valley. The full-rushing stream went with me like a dog. It made no murmur, only a low gurgle as it shot along. It seemed to draw me with it to its last leap. As I looked at its swiftness, I thought how hard it would be to get out of. The swiftness of it comes to me yet in my dreams.

"I came to a familiar rock, which, part of the bank whereon I walked, rose some six or seven feet above the meadow, just opposite a little hollow where the lady oftenest sat. Two were on the grass together, one a lady seated, the other a man, with his head in the lady's lap. I gave a leap as if a bullet had gone through my heart, then instinctively drew back behind the rock. There I came to myself, and began to take courage. She had gone away for the night: it could not be she! I peeped. The man had raised his head, and was leaning on his elbow. It was Edmund, I was certain! She stooped and kissed him. I scrambled to the top of the rock, and sprang across the stream, which ran below me like a flooded millrace. Would to God I had missed the bank, and been swept to the great fall! I was careless, and when I lighted, I fell. Her clear mocking laugh rang through the air, and echoed from the scoop of some still mountain. When I rose, they were on their feet.

"'Quite a chamois-spring!' remarked the lady with derision.

"She saw the last moment was come. Neither of us two spoke.

"'I told you,' she said, 'neither of you was to trouble me to-night: you have paid no regard to my wish for quiet! It is time the foolery should end! I am weary of it. A woman cannot marry a double man-or half a man either-without at least being able to tell which is which of the two halves!'

"She ended with a toneless laugh, in which my brother joined. She turned upon him with a pitiless mockery which, I see now, must have left in his mind the conviction that she had been but making game of him; while I never doubted myself the dupe. Not once had she received me as I now saw her: though the night was warm, her deshabille was yet a somewhat prodigal unmasking of her beauty to the moon! The conviction in each of us was,