The Best Horrors by F. Marion Crawford. Francis Marion Crawford
cases is hardly ever felt in practice by. poets, never by scientists. It follows that, at a comparatively small cost, thousands of millions are made perfectly happy in the belief that they are great. Even when idiots do not obtain appreciation, which rarely occurs, they find pleasant consolation in attributing their lack of success to the stupidity of others. There are more ways of believing oneself great than by obtaining praise from one's contemporaries, or money for one's works. I received forty copies, free of charge, as sole and entire payment for my first book of verses, after another publisher had refused to print it altogether; but when I was correcting the proofs I felt that I was a much greater man than before, and I have never since felt so great as on that day. I had a considerable reputation when my excellent uncle remarked of me to a friend that 'if the silly boy had ever learned anything he would not have needed to write books.' I had reputation, I say, and yet I was so much struck by the truth of the remark, that I would have accepted the post of theological adviser and attorney-general to the king of the cannibals, had it been offered to me—anything for a respectable profession, as I said to myself. But the last theological adviser had chanced to disagree with the king about an hour after the Sunday meal, and on taking medical advice and consulting the family butcher I lost confidence in myself and did not apply. ' Uncle Solomon Heine also thought there was truth in his saying and repeated it frequently. I was then a man of one book, but he was a man of one joke. I afterwards wrote other books, but my uncle's jest did not multiply. Still, that one joke elevates him; he stood upon it as on a pedestal; and the pedestal bore to him about the same relation as the Vendome column bears to the statue of Napoleon."
There was something so good-natured in his story of the facetious uncle Solomon, that all the party laughed a little, except Diana, who was dreaming of something very far away. Heine noticed her silence.
"What were you thinking of?" he asked, turning towards her.
"I will not tell you — you would be angry," she answered.
"I? angry?" exclaimed the poet in some surprise. " Dead men are never angry. Anger is an emotion, and there are no emotions of that kind for us. We have lost the power of influencing our surroundings, and we perform no actions which can be influenced by them. We shed tears sometimes, and sometimes we laugh a little — but we are never angry. What were you thinking of?"
"I was thinking — wondering about the dead Maria," said Diana in a low voice.
"Yes," resumed Heine, softly, "I wonder too —I wonder why I suffered as I did. But no one knows the story. I regret the suffering now that it is gone, and I wish it were with me again. When I was alive I used to think that she came back from the dead in the silent evenings — evenings like this — and that she sat with me and spoke with me as she used to speak. Now that I am dead I cannot find her — I have long given up the search. I sometimes fancy I hear her voice singing — it is a strange, sweet voice, like a nightingale's last notes, full of silky tones that make me tremble with a sort of creeping fear, tones that seem to come from a bleeding heart, that wind and spin themselves among my thoughts like soft, beseeching memories. And her dear face that seemed modelled by a Greek master out of the perfumed mist of white roses, delicate as though breathed into shape, noble beyond all thought — and the passionate eyes illuminating the classic splendour of her beauty — I remember all. Her hand, too! There were little blue veins under the polished, high-born skin. It was not like a little girl's vegetable-animal hand — half lamb, half rose — thoughtless and fair; there was something spiritual in the white fingers, something that suggested a story of sympathy, like the hands of beautiful persons who are excessively refined or have suffered terribly — and yet it had a look of pathetic innocence, and if I touched it, it shrank delicately under the gentlest pressure. She was dead when I saw her last — she was so beautiful when she was dead, so terribly, so fascinatingly beautiful, as she lay among the roses on her bed. She died before I could reach her, but I saw her dead. She loved me once — I thought she loved me in the end, though she took another. They respected me—they left me alone with her. Old Ursula looked at me once, strangely I thought, and she went out. The shaded lamp stood on a table. A purple flower drooped in a glass beside it, and gave out a faint unnatural perfume. I stood by the bedside. I thought of the dark-robed knight who would have kissed his dead love to life again. I gazed long, and at last I bent down and I pressed my lips on her cold mouth. Suddenly the lamp was extinguished — it must have been the breeze from the open window, for I know I was alone — I felt cold, icy cold, arms go round my neck— I heard a name spoken. It was her voice, it was not my name. —The rest? I do not know the rest, for I fled from the house, from the town, from the country. They told me she was not dead. She was dead to me — dead as I am now. To me she is always dead, always, always! These are not tears, the moon casts queer lights on dead men's faces."
His voice trembled and ceased, and silence fell upon the little company that sat in the May moonlight over the sea. The story of human suffering is ever old, yet ever new — the dead man who had been telling his long-dead tale had himself said so, and it is true. Each of those who heard him, heard him differently; yet each felt in the story the whole depth of the pain for him which they could have felt had they stood beside him nearly seventy years ago when it all happened, when the woman he loved was suddenly restored to life with another's name upon her lips, when he himself was wounded in the first spring of his youth with a wound that never healed.
But it was not his manner when alive to excite sympathy for his own sufferings, nor was he now willing to let his tale end thus.
"You are silent," he said, "and you are sorry for me. I thank you. Sympathy exists in the human heart, unexplained by learned treatises about the pursuit of happiness. We shudder at the sight of a ghastly wound, and the tears rise to our eyes as we listen to the story of a broken heart. It is not for me that you are sad — it is for what I have told you. There are many sad stories — not all mine."
"Tell us a sad story," said Diana. "I love sad stories."
"I saw a beggar die upon the high road. His story was sad enough. He had seen many misfortunes, many troubles; many pains had had their will of his racked body, many days and years of suffering had piled their load upon his aching shoulders; grief knew him and tracked him down, and sorrow, the pitiless driver of men, had stung each galled wound of his soul with cunning cruelty, goading and sparing not as he came near to the end. The silver hairs were few which hung straggling from beneath the torn brim of his battered hat, and the furrows were many and deep upon his colourless face. His dim eyes peered from their worn and sunken sockets as though still faintly striving, striving to the very last, to understand those things which it was not given him to understand. Feebly his two hands clasped his crooked staff, road-worn and splintered by the flints; upon one foot still clung the fragments of a shoe, the other had no shoe at all, and as he stood he lifted the foot that was bare and tried to rest it upon the scanty bit of dusty leather which only half covered the other, as though to ease it from the cruel road, while he steadied himself feebly with his stick. Had there been the least fragment of a wall near him, a bit of fence, even a tree, he would have tried to lean upon it; but there was nothing — nothing but the broad flinty road, with the ditch dug deep upon each side, nothing but the cold grey sky, the black north wind that began to whirl up the dust, scattering here and there big flakes of wet snow, and, far away behind, the barking of the dogs that had driven him from the gate while the churls who lingered there after their day's work laughed and made rough jokes upon him. A little boy, the son of one of those fellows, had taken a stone and had thrown it after the old man — the missile had struck him in the back and he had bowed himself lower and limped away; he was used to it — people often threw stones at him, and sometimes they hit him. What was one blow more to him, one wound more ? The end could not be far.
"So he rested his naked foot upon the other, now that he was out of reach of harm. He could hear the dogs barking still, but dogs never chased him long; they would not come after him now. The boy could not throw stones to such a distance either, and would not take the trouble to pursue him, though one of the men had laughed when the old man was hit, and another had said it was a good shot. He might rest for a while, if it were rest to lean upon his staff and feel the bitter wind driving the snowflakes through the rents in his clothing, and whirling up the half frozen flint dust to his sore and weary eyes. The night was coming on. He would have to sleep in the ditch. It would not be the