The Flight of the Shadow

“Of my brother she would speak as of a poor creature not for a moment to be compared with myself. How I could have believed her true when she spoke thus, knowing that in the mirror I could not have told myself from my brother, knowing also that our minds, tastes, and faculties bore as strong a resemblance as our bodies, I cannot tell, but she fooled me to a fool through the indwelling folly of my self-love. At other times, wishing to tighten the bonds of my thraldom that she might the better work her evil end, proving herself a powerful devil, she would rouse my jealousy by some sign of strong admiration of Edmund. She must have acted the same way with my brother. I saw him enslaved just as I—knew we were faring alike—knew the very thoughts as well as feelings in his heart, and instead of being consumed with sorrow, chuckled at the knowledge that I was the favoured one! I suspect now that she showed him more favour than myself, and taught him to put on the look of the hopeless one. I fancied I caught at times a covert flash in his eye: he knew what he knew! If so, poor Edmund, thou hadst the worst of it every way!

“Shall I ever get her kisses off my lips, her poison out of my brain! From my heart, her image was burned in a moment, as utterly as if by years of hell!

“The estrangement between us was sudden; there were degrees only in the widening of it. First came embarrassment at meeting. Then all commerce of wish, thought, and speculation, ended. There was no more merrymaking jugglery with identity; each was himself only, and for himself alone. Gone was all brother-gladness. We avoided each other more and more. When we must meet, we made haste to part. Heaven was gone from home. Each yet felt the same way toward the other, but it was the way of repelling, not drawing. When we passed in the street, it was with a look that said, or at least meant—‘You are my brother! I don’t want you!’ We ceased even to nod to each other. Still in our separation we could not separate. Each took a room in another part of the town, but under the same pseudonym. Our common lodging was first deserted, then formally 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, that she and the other were laughing at him.

“We locked in a deadly struggle, with what object I cannot tell. I do not believe either of us had an object. It was a mere blind conflict of pointless enmity, in which each cared but to overpower the other. Which first laid hold, which, if either, began to drag, I have not a suspicion. The next thing I know is, we were in the water, each in the grasp of the other, now rolling, now sweeping, now tumbling along, in deadly embrace.

“The shock of the ice-cold water, and the sense of our danger, brought me to myself. I let my brother go, but he clutched me still. Down we shot together toward the sheer descent. Already we seemed falling. The terror of it over-mastered me. It was not the crash I feared, but the stayless rush through the whistling emptiness. In the agony of my despair, I pushed him from me with all my strength, striking at him a fierce, wild, aimless blow—the only blow struck in the wrestle. His hold relaxed. I remember nothing more.”

At this point of the verbal narrative, my uncle Edmund again spoke.

“You never struck me, Ed,” he cried; “or if you did, I was already senseless. I remember nothing of the water.”

“When I came to myself,” the manuscript goes on, “I was lying in a pebbly shoal. The moon was aloft in heaven. I was cold to the heart, cold to the marrow of my bones. I could move neither hand nor foot, and thought I was dead. By slow degrees a little power came back, and I managed at length, after much agonizing effort, to get up on my feet—only to fall again. After several such failures, I found myself capable of dragging myself along like a serpent, and so got out of the water, and on the next endeavour was able to stand. I had forgotten everything; but when my eyes fell on the darting torrent, I remembered all—not as a fact, but as a terrible dream from which I thanked heaven I had come awake.

“But as I tottered along, I came slowly to myself, and a fearful doubt awoke. If it was a dream, where had I dreamt it? How had I come to wake where I found myself? How had the dream turned real about me? Where was I last in my remembrance? Where was my brother? Where was the lady in the moonlight? No, it was not a dream! If my brother had not got out of the water, I was his murderer! I had struck him!—Oh, the horror of it! If only I could stop dreaming it—three times almost every night!”

Again uncle Edmund interposed—not altogether logically:

“I tell you, I don’t believe you struck me, Ed! And you must remember, neither of us would have got out if you hadn’t!”

“You might have let me go!” said the other.

“On the way down the Degenfall, perhaps!” rejoined uncle Edmund. “—I believe it was that blow brought me to my senses, and made me get out!”

“Thank you, Ed!” said uncle Edward.

Once more I write from the manuscript.

“I said to myself he must have got out! It could not be that I had drowned my own brother! Such a ghastly thing could not have been permitted! It was too terrible to be possible!

“How, then, had we been living the last few months? What brothers had we been? Had we been loving one another? Had I been a neighbour to my nearest? Had I been a brother to my twin? Was not murder the natural outcome of it all? He that loveth not his brother is a murderer! If so, where the good of saving me from being in deed what I was in nature? I had cast off my brother for a treacherous woman! My very thought sickened within me.

“My soul seemed to grow luminous, and understand everything. I saw my whole behaviour as it was. The scales fell from my inward eyes, and there came a sudden, total, and absolute revulsion in my conscious self—like what takes place, I presume, at the day of judgment, when the God in every man sits in judgment upon the man. Had the gate of heaven stood wide open, neither angel with flaming sword, nor Peter with the keys to dispute my entrance, I would have turned away from it, and sought the deepest hell. I loathed the woman and myself; in my heart the sealed fountain of old affection had broken out, and flooded it.

“All the time this thinking went on, I was crawling slowly up the endless river toward the chalet, driven by a hope inconsistent with what I knew of my brother. What I felt, he, if he were alive, must be feeling also: how then could I say to myself that I should find him with her? It was the last dying hope that I had not killed him that thus fooled me. ‘She will be warming him in her bosom!’ I said. But at the very touch, the idea turned and presented its opposite pole. ‘Good God!’ I cried in my heart, ‘how shall I compass his deliverance? Better he lay at the bottom of the fall, than lived to be devoured by that serpent of hell! I will go straight to the den of the monster, and demand my brother!’”

But to see the eyes of uncle Edmund at this point of the story!

“At last I approached the chalet. All was still. A handkerchief lay on the grass, white in the moonlight. I went up to it, hoping to find it my brother’s. It was the lady’s. I flung it from me like a filthy rag.

“What was the passion worth which in a moment could die so utterly!

“I turned to the house. I would tear him from her: he was mine, not hers!

“My wits were nigh gone. I thought the moonlight was dissolving the chalet, that the two within might escape me. I held it fast with my eyes. The moon drew back: she only possessed and filled it! No; the moon was too pure: she but shone reflected from the windows; she would not go in! I would go in! I was Justice! The woman was a thief! She had broken into the house of life, and was stealing!

“I stood for a moment looking up at her window. There was neither motion nor sound. Was she gone away, and my brother with her? Could she be in bed and asleep, after seeing us swept down the river to the Degenfall! Could he be with her and at rest, believing me dashed to pieces? I must be resolved! The door was not bolted; I stole up the stair to her chamber. The door of it was wide open. I entered, and stood. The moon filled the tiny room with a clear, sharp-edged, pale-yellow light. She lay asleep, lovely to look at as an angel of God. Her hair, part of it thrown across the top-rail of the little iron bed, streamed out on each side over the pillow, and in the midst of it lay her face, a radiant isle in a dark sea. I stood and gazed. Fascinated by her beauty? God forbid! I was fascinated by the awful incongruity between that face, pure as the moonlight, and the charnel-house that lay unseen behind it. She was to me, henceforth, not a woman, but a live Death. I had no sense of sacredness, such as always in the chamber even of a little girl. How should I? It was no chamber; it was a den. She was no woman, but a female monster. I stood and gazed.

“My presence was more potent than I knew. She opened her eyes—opened them straight into mine. All the colour sank away out of her face, and it stiffened to that of a corpse. With the staring eyes of one strangled, she lay as motionless as I stood. I moved not an inch, spoke not a word, drew not a step nearer, retreated not a hair’s-breadth. Motion was taken from me. Was it hate that fixed my eyes on hers, and turned my limbs into marble? It certainly was not love, but neither was it hate.

“Agony had been burrowing in me like a mole; the half of what I felt I have not told you: I came to find my brother, and found only, in a sweet sleep, the woman who had just killed him. The bewilderment, of it all, with my long insensibility and wet garments, had taken from me either the power of motion or of volition, I do not know which: speechless in the moonlight, I must have looked to the wretched woman both ghostly and ghastly.

“Two or three long moments she gazed with those horror-struck eyes; then a frightful shriek broke from her drawn, death-like lips. She who could sleep after turning love into hate, life into death, would have fled into hell to escape the eyes of the dead! Insensibility is not courage. Wake in the scornfullest mortal the conviction that one of the disembodied stands before him, and he will shiver like an aspen-leaf. Scream followed scream. Volition or strength, whichever it was that had left me, returned. I backed from the room, went noiseless from the house, and fled, as if she had been the ghost, and I the mortal. Would I had been the spectre for which she took me!”

Here uncle Edward again spoke.

“Small wonder she screamed, the wretch!” he cried: “that was her second dose of the horrible that night! You found the door unbolted because I had been there before you. I too entered her room, and saw her asleep as you describe. I went close to her bedside, and cried out, ‘Where is my brother?’ She woke, and fainted, and I left her.”

“Then,” said I, “when she came to herself, thinking she had had a bad dream, she rearranged her hair, and went to sleep again!”

“Just so, I daresay, little one!” answered uncle Edward.

“I had not yet begun to think what I should do, when I found myself at our little inn,” the manuscript continues. “No idea of danger to myself awoke in my mind, nor was there any cause to heed such an idea, had it come. Nobody there knew the one from the other of us. Not many would know there were two of us. Any one who saw me twice, might well think he had seen us both. If my brother’s body were found in the valley stream, it was not likely to be recognized, or to be indeed recognizable. The only one who could tell what happened at the top of the fall, would hardly volunteer information. But, while I knew myself my brother’s murderer, I thought no more of these sheltering facts than I did of danger. I made it no secret that my brother had gone over the fall. I went to the foot of the cataract, thence to search and inquire all down the stream, but no one had heard of any dead body being found. They told me that the poor gentleman must, before morning, have been far on his way to the Danube.

“Giving up the quest in despair, I resigned myself to a torture which has hitherto come no nearer expending itself than the consuming fire of God.

“I dared not carry home the terrible news, which must either involve me in lying, or elicit such confession as would multiply tenfold my father’s anguish, and was in utter perplexity what to do, when it occurred to me that I ought to inquire after letters at the lodging where last we had lived together. Then first I learned that both my father and my elder brother, your father, little one, were dead.

“The sense of guilt had not destroyed in me the sense of duty. I did not care what became of the property, but I did care for my brother’s child, and the interests of her succession.

“Your father had all his life been delicate, and had suffered not a little. When your mother died, about a year after their marriage, leaving us you, it soon grew plain to see that, while he loved you dearly, and was yet more friendly to all about him than before, his heart had given up the world. When I knew he was gone, I shed more tears over him than I had yet shed over my twin: the worm that never dies made my brain too hot to weep much for Edmund. Then first I saw that my elder brother had been a brother indeed; and that we twins had never been real to each other. I saw what nothing but self-loathing would ever have brought me to see, that my love to Edmund had not been profound: while a man is himself shallow, how should his love be deep! I saw that we had each loved our elder brother in a truer and better fashion than we had loved each other. One of the chief active bonds between us had been fun; another, habit; and another, constitutional resemblance—not one of them strong. Underneath were bonds far stronger, but they had never come into conscious play; no strain had reached them. They were there, I say; for wherever is the poorest flower of love, it is there in virtue of the perfect root of love; and love’s root must one day blossom into love’s perfect rose. My chief consolation under the burden of my guilt is, that I love my brother since I killed him, far more than I loved him when we were all to each other. Had we never quarrelled, and were he alive, I should not be loving him thus!