Ghosts by Gaslight (31 page)

Some may wonder, if personal matters were excluded, what on earth we had to talk about, to which the answer is: everything under the sun, but more particularly anything and everything that either of us had ever read or written or, in his case, dreamed of writing, for I doubt there was ever a poet with a deeper sense of his vocation than Maurice Trevelyan. Yet he was at the same time so self-effacing as to be almost impossible to describe. Put a pen or a manuscript in his hand, and you could not doubt his force of character: about a passage of writing he could not prevent himself from telling the exact truth, however discomforting to the writer; but on any other subject he would happily yield the floor to men twenty years his junior. Even his physical appearance was not easy to capture; he was unremarkably slender, moderately tall, with dark hair receding at the temples, and fine but regular features, save only that the left side of his face looked strangely seared: I do not mean withered or scarred, but rather marked by a fixed pallor, as though he had come too close to a fire whose flames burned cold instead of hot. At any rate I can put it no better than that, and on the evening in question, as we sat gazing into the flames, our occasional silences filled by the creak and crackle of burning coals and the faint snores of the bishop dreaming peacefully on the far side of the hearth, it remained among the topics that had never been raised between us.

Instead we spoke—or rather Maurice spoke, as he would do only when we were alone—of the unwritten poem that, in various guises, had haunted him all his life. Everything good that he had ever done—and he was the most exacting, indeed ruthless critic of his own writing—seemed to him, at certain moments, only the shadow of this other work whose outlines he constantly glimpsed, but whose substance he could never capture. He believed in the community of all true poets through the ages, and sometimes spoke as if all true poems were but fragments of some great ur-poem, or Platonic quintessence of the art; at other times as if our language, in all its richness and beauty, existed in a fallen state, like some great ruin of antiquity, mere broken remnants of a celestial tongue we had once known, and lost; to this end he was fond of quoting Shelley’s remark about the fading coal, or the close of “Kubla Khan”: he had an especial sympathy for poets who had left behind great but unfinished works. He agreed, up to a point, with Pater, that all art aspires to the condition of music, but believed that there was a poem, destined for him and him alone to write, that would be the fulfilment of his life and the perfection of his art, and yet be expressible in ordinary English words, however extraordinary the effect of the whole might be. There were moments, he said, in which he could hear the rhythm of its lines falling as clearly as footsteps passing along a hall, and feel certain that if his inner ear were only a little more acute, he could catch the words before their echoes faded.

To some, this fascination with the unattainable might have become a torment, but Maurice seemed content with his lot. I had often wondered what he would make of the remainder of his life if that one perfect poem were ever to swoop down from the heavens and alight upon his outstretched wrist, but I never quite liked to ask, for it seemed an intrusion upon that privacy which, it sometimes struck me, we shared so intimately without ever mentioning.

We sat, then, watching the coals brighten and fade, which put me in mind, as often, of Shelley; almost simultaneously, Maurice began softly to speak the lines from “Adonais”:

The One remains, the many change and pass;

Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of Eternity . . .

where he ceased, for which I was grateful, for the trampling of the dome always seems to me wanton and wrong. It may be pagan to think so, but to me the beauty is in the whole: the One
and
the Many, the pure sunlight streaming through stained glass; heaven’s light would be poorer without earth’s shadows. Though perhaps heaven’s light may be as far beyond mere sunlight as the many-coloured dome surpasses a shop window. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.”

I did not realise I had spoken the last words aloud until I became aware of a stillness on my right. I looked up from the coals to find Maurice staring at me as if I had become a ghost.

“Laura”—he spoke my name as if suddenly uncertain of its meaning—“how did you know my thought?”

“I did not,” I said, “or not knowingly.”

As best I could, I retraced my steps for him, but he continued to stare at me with that stricken intensity until I trailed off, at a loss to understand how such a familiar verse could trouble him so profoundly. Gradually he recovered himself and began to look at me in his accustomed way; and then he took my hand, something he did not commonly do except at meeting and parting. His hand was very cold, despite the heat of the fire, and instinctively I sought to cover it with both of mine. But still the prohibition that had nurtured our friendship kept me from speaking.

“Those lines of Shelley’s,” he resumed, after a long pause, “how often have I read them over or heard them spoken, and yet never until tonight . . . I
saw
”—pointing with his other hand into the heart of the fire—“the dome shatter and re-form into—a thing of darkness. And then you spoke, of all verses, that one. ‘Face to Face’ is the title of a manuscript I once read—in part. A tale, I must call it, though it was not like any tale I have ever read; indeed it was not like
anything
I have ever read. It was, in its effect upon the reader, the exact reverse, the most sinister inversion”—he shivered slightly, and I noticed that the seared place below his cheekbone looked paler than usual—“of that perfect poem we were discussing just now. And it was written by the woman I once dreamed of marrying.”

I had not meant to release his hand, but found that I had done so. In the shadows opposite, the bishop slept on.

“You must first understand,” said Maurice, as if answering some objection on my part, “in what extremity she was driven to—manifest it. Her mother and mine were close friends; in a manner of speaking we grew up together. Her letters were extraordinarily vivid. She was nineteen, and I twenty-one, when they came to live in London, and from then on I saw her frequently, until all was changed by the sudden death of her father, whose passing left them in a precarious position. My own father did what he could, but his means were very limited. I felt I could not . . . at any rate I did not . . . suffice to say,” he continued somewhat hurriedly, “that my friend came to the notice of Sir Lewis Wainwright, a wealthy man some thirty years older than herself. He had, I think, had some business dealing with her late father; it was certainly within his power to secure not only her future but that of her mother and her two younger sisters. I did not—perhaps could not—believe that she ever loved him. From the first he struck me as cold, indeed evil in the very emanations of his being; I felt in him that capacity to wither and shrivel with a glance, to inspire the shrinking that flesh instinctively feels from sharpened steel, or serpents. To the casual eye, no doubt, he was simply a tall, distinguished gentleman still in the prime of life, immaculately and fastidiously dressed, perfectly courteous in manner; yet how she could have been so deceived . . . it was like watching a sleepwalker moving slowly towards the brink of a precipice and finding oneself unable to move or cry out. My consciousness of my own position kept me silent, and even made me doubt what in my heart of hearts I could not doubt; and besides, what could I have said? A poor student who could barely meet the cost of his own subsistence? Yet I
should
have spoken—”

Though he had kept his voice low, the last words escaped him as a cry of anguish. I glanced uneasily towards the bishop, but our oblivious companion did not stir.

“Maurice,” I ventured, when he did not immediately continue, “you have sketched this malignant suitor all too vividly, and yet I have no picture of your—your friend: you have not so much as mentioned her name.”

“Her name was Claire,” he said slowly, as if struggling with some inhibition on his own side. “She was—dark, and slender—about your own height—quiet, and studious, and yet she—really I cannot, one cannot catch the essence of another. She was gentle, and virtuous, and I watched the jaws of the trap closing upon her, and did nothing. Remember that the fortunes of her mother and sisters were at stake in this; her mother was not, I think, easy about the match, rightly fearing some element of self-sacrifice on Claire’s part. The constraint between us grew more tangible once the engagement had been announced. At the wedding—I wish to God I had not been there—she looked serene and calm, but very pale, whilst Sir Lewis gazed upon her with the air of a collector about to lock away some new and greatly coveted acquisition.

“They went immediately abroad, where they remained for some months; and how different her letters, with their dutiful descriptions of scenery and formal professions of happiness, seemed from those I had once received! When we called upon them after their return to London, I knew immediately that she was unhappy, but she contrived, then and afterwards, never to be alone with me. Sir Lewis, furthermore, made it subtly plain to me that I would be a tolerated rather than a welcome visitor. His reptilian eyes seemed to draw out the very feelings I strove most desperately to conceal in his presence, and to flicker distrustfully from her to me.

“Her only child, a daughter, was born before the first anniversary of their wedding, and became the one source of light in the darkness closing upon her; that, and the knowledge that her mother and sisters were now securely provided for, though at a price they would never willingly have paid. We were all of us aware that Claire was deeply unhappy, and yet her manner of bearing it seemed to exact from us a vow of silence, not only in her presence, but between ourselves. We looked at one another and knew that we knew and could not speak of it. Or at least I could not, until the third year of her marriage was drawing to its close, when we began to see even less of her, and that only in the presence of her husband. His manner, formally speaking, remained perfectly polite, yet in his presence all conversation withered and died; you could feel the malevolent force of his personality raying out across the room.

“We had, however, an ally within his house: Claire’s maid Rosina, who had been with the family since she was scarcely more than a child. Rosina was quick, observant, and entirely devoted to her mistress, and it was through her eyes that we saw the final scenes of the tragedy unfold.

“Claire had written a great deal before her marriage; though she would always dismiss her work as ‘scribbling,’ she had shown me some chapters of a novel which I thought very fine. And it seems that in that last autumn, as she became more and more a prisoner, she turned once again to her pen for solace and began secretly to compose—we shall never know what, for despite her precautions he discovered, read, and then destroyed her manuscript. There followed a terrible scene, in which Claire turned at last upon her tormentor and declared her resolution to leave him. He swore that if she did so she would never see her child again, and that her mother and sisters would be turned out into the street. Coldly advising her to reconsider, he left the room.

“That same night, the child was stricken by a raging fever. Doctors were summoned, and every possible remedy tried, but in vain; less than twenty-four hours later, she was dead. Rosina, who had not left her mistress’s side throughout the long night and the dreadful day that followed, said that Sir Lewis did not once appear in the sickroom until the poor child’s ordeal had ceased. Claire’s grief had overwhelmed her, but as he appeared in the doorway, she ceased to weep, and a terrible stillness came over her. She took the dead child in her arms, and though she seemed not even to see her husband looming directly in her path, such was her expression that he fell back and spoke not a word as she bore her daughter’s body from the room and slowly descended the stair to her private sitting room, whence came the snap of the key turning in the lock.

“Sir Lewis seemed, for once, at a loss. Slowly recovering his self-possession, he descended the stair in his turn and stood irresolutely at Claire’s door. Twice he raised his hand as if to knock, but did not do so; finally, he continued on down and disappeared into his own private domain. Rosina then made haste to rejoin her mistress, expecting Claire to respond when she tapped with their special signal upon the door, and called softly to ask if she could be of help, but there was no reply. The house was very quiet, and as she waited at the door she became aware of a very faint scratching sound from within. She tapped once more, but there was again no response, and the faint scratching or rustling sound continued without pause.

“Several times during the next few hours, as afternoon gave way to evening and darkness fell, Rosina returned to the sitting-room door, with the same result. The rest of the house remained deathly quiet; no one came to give her any orders; no bells were rung. Finally, she went miserably upstairs to her own quarters, where she fell at last into an exhausted sleep.

“Next morning she was awakened by the maidservant with whom she shared the attic with the news that the lock of her mistress’s room was about to be forced. Dressing hastily, Rosina was just in time to see this done. A footman broke open the door and stood back to allow Sir Lewis to pass. From her position on the stair, Rosina saw her mistress lying motionless upon a sofa, with her dead child in her arms. Unable to restrain herself, she ran into the room, to be roughly ejected by Sir Lewis’s valet, but not before she had taken in the scene in one terrible glimpse: the dead mother and child in their last embrace; the empty vial of laudanum; and on the writing table nearby, a pile of handwritten pages surrounded by several pens, sheets of blotting paper, and an open bottle of ink.