A STRANGE STORY.

BY THE AUTHOR OF "MY NOVEL," "RIENZI," &C.

CHAPTER LXXIV.

MY Work, my Philosophical Work—the
ambitious hope of my intellectual life—how eagerly
I returned to it again! Far away from my
household grief, far away from my haggard
perplexities. Neither a Lilian nor a Margrave there!
As I went over what I had before written,
each link in its chain of reasoning seemed so
serried, that to alter one were to derange all:
and the whole reasoning was so opposed to the
possibility of the wonders I myself had
experienced, so hostile to the subtle hypotheses of a
Faber, or the childlike belief of an Amy, that I
must have destroyed the entire work if I had
admitted such contradictions to its design!

But the work was I myself! I, in my solid,
sober, healthful mind, before the brain had been
perplexed by a phantom. Were phantoms to be
allowed as testimonies against science? No;
in returning to my Book, I returned to my
former Me!

How strange is that contradiction between our
being as man and our being as author! Take
any writer enamoured of a system—a thousand
things may happen to him every day which might
shake his faith in that system; and while he
moves about as mere man, his faith is shaken.
But when he settles himself back into the phase
of his being as author, the mere act of taking
pen in hand and smoothing the paper before
him, restores his speculations to their ancient
mechanical train. The system, the beloved
system, re-asserts its tyrannic sway, and he
either ignores, or moulds into fresh proofs of
his theory as author, all which, an hour before,
had given his theory the lie in his living
perceptions as man.

I adhered to my system: I continued my
work. Here, in the barbarous desert, was a link
between me and the Cities of Europe. All else
might break down under me. The love I had
dreamed of was blotted out from the world and
might never be restored; my hearth might be
lonely, my life be an exile's. My reason might,
at last, give way before the spectres which awed
my senses, or the sorrows which stormed my
heart. But here, at least, was a monument of
my rational thoughtful Me—of my individualised
identity in multiform creation. And
my mind, in the noon of its force, would shed
its light on the earth when my form was
resolved to its elements. Alas! in this very yearning
for the Hereafter, though but the Hereafter
of a Name, could I see only the craving of Mind,
and hear not the whisper of Soul?

The avocations of a colonist, usually so active,
had little interest for me. This vast territorial
lordship, in which, could I have endeared its
possession by the hopes that animate a Founder,
I should have felt all the zest and the pride of
ownership, was but the run of a common to
the passing emigrant, who would leave no sons
to inherit the tardy products of his labour. I
was not goaded to industry by the stimulus of
need. I could only be ruined if I risked all my
capital in the attempt to improve. I lived,
therefore, amongst my fertile pastures, as
careless of culture as the English occupant of the
Highland moor, which he rents for the range of
its solitudes.

I knew, indeed, that if ever I became
avaricious, I might swell my modest affluence into
absolute wealth. I had revisited the spot in which
I had discovered the nugget of gold, and had
found the precious metal in rich abundance just
under the first coverings of the alluvial soil.
I concealed my discovery from all. I knew that
did I proclaim it, the charm of my Bush-life
would be gone. My fields would be infested by
all the wild adventurers who gather to gold as the
vultures of prey round a carcase; my servants
would desert rne, my very flocks would be
shepherdless!

Months again rolled on months. I had just
approached the close of my beloved Work, when
it was again suspended, and by an anguish
keener than all which I had previously known.

Lilian became alarmingly ill. Her state of
health, long gradually declining, had hitherto
admitted chequered intervals of improvement,
and exhibited no symptoms of actual danger.
But now she was seized with a kind of chronic
fever, attended with absolute privation of
sleep, an aversion to even the lightest nourishment,
and an acute nervous susceptibility to
all the outward impressions, of which she had
long seemed so unconscious; morbidly alive to
the faintest sound, shrinking from the light as
from a torture. Her previous impatience at my
entrance into her room became aggravated into
vehement emotions, convulsive paroxysms of