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Page 43
"His was a soul, sir, nobler than his fate. I followed him not without
love from boyhood--a youth almost too fine of spirit; shrinking
from all violence, over-nicely; eloquent, yet chary of speech,
and of a dark profundity of thought. The questions he would
patter!--unanswerable, searching earth and heaven through.... And who
now was it told me the traitor Judas's hair was red?--yet not red his,
but of a reddish chestnut, fine and bushy. Children have played their
harmless hands at hide-and-seek therein. O sea of many winds!
"For come gloom on the hills, floods, discolouring mist; breathe but
some grandam's tale of darkness and blood and doubleness in his
hearing: all changed. Flame kindled; a fevered unrest drove him out;
and Ambition, that spotted hound of hell, strained at the leash
towards the Pit.
"So runs the world--the ardent and the lofty. We are beyond earth's
story as 'tis told, sir. All's shallower than the heart of man....
Indeed, 'twas one more shattered altar to Hymen."
"'Hymen!'" I said.
He brooded long and silently, clipping his small beard. And while he
was so brooding, a mouse, a moth, dust--I know not what, stirred the
listening strings of his viol to sound, and woke him with a start.
"I vowed, sir, then, to dismiss all memory of such unhappy deeds from
mind--never to speak again that broken lady's name. Oh! I have seen
sad ends--pride abased, splendour dismantled, courage to terror come,
guilt to a crying guilelessness."
"'Guilelessness?'" I said. "Lady Macbeth at least was past all
changing."
The doctor stood up and cast a deep scrutiny on me, which yet,
perhaps, was partly on himself.
"Perceive, sir," he said, "this table--broader, longer, splendidly
burdened; and all adown both sides the board, thanes and their
ladies, lords, and gentlemen, guests bidden to a royal banquet. 'Twas
then in that bleak and dismal country--the Palace of Forres. Torches
flared in the hall; to every man a servant or two: we sat in pomp."
He paused again, and gravely withdrew behind the tapestry.
"And presently," he cried therefrom, suiting his action to the word,
"to the blast of hautboys enters the king in state thus, with his
attendant lords. And with all that rich and familiar courtesy of which
he was master in his easier moods he passed from one to another,
greeting with supple dignity on his way, till he came at last softly
to the place prepared for him at table. And suddenly--shall I ever
forget, it, sir?--it seemed silence ran like a flame from mouth to
mouth as there he stood, thus, marble-still, his eyes fixed in a
leaden glare. And he raised his face and looked once round on us all
with a forlorn astonishment and wrath, like one with a death-wound--I
never saw the like of such a face.
"Whereat, beseeching us to be calm, and pay no heed, the queen laid
her hand on his and called him. And his orbs rolled down once more
upon the empty place, and stuck as if at grapple with some horror seen
within. He muttered aloud in peevish altercation--once more to heave
up his frame, to sigh and shake himself, and lo!--"
The viol-strings rang to his "lo!"
"Lo, sir, the Unseen had conquered. His lip sagged into his beard, he
babbled with open mouth, and leaned on his lady with such an impotent
and slavish regard as I hope never to see again man pay to woman....
We thought no more of supper after that....
"But what do I--?" The doctor laid a cautioning finger on his mouth.
"The company was dispersed, the palace gloomy with night (and they
were black nights at Forres!), and on the walls I heard the sentinel's
replying.... In the wood's last glow I entered and stood in his
self-same station before the empty stool. And even as I stood thus, my
hair creeping, my will concentred, gazing with every cord at stretch,
fell a light, light footfall behind me." He glanced whitely over his
shoulder.
"Sir, it was the queen come softly out of slumber on my own unquiet
errand."
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