A STRANGE STORY.

  BY THE AUTHOR OF "MY NOVEL," "RIENZI," &c.
                     CHAPTER   LXXV.

I FOUND Mrs. Ashleigh waiting for me in our
usual sitting-room. She was in tears. She had
begun to despond of Lilian's recovery, and she
infected me with her own alarm. However, I
disguised my participation in her fears, soothed
and sustained her as I best could, and persuaded
her to retire to rest, I saw Faber for a few
minutes before I sought my own chamber. He
assured me that there was no perceptible change
for the worse in Lilian's physical state since he
had last seen me, and that her mind, even within
the last few hours, had become decidedly more
clear. He thought that, within the next twenty-
four hours, the reason would make a strong and
successful effort for complete recovery; but he
declined to hazard more than a hope that the
effort would not exhaust the enfeebled powers of
the frame. He himself was so in need of a few
hours of rest that I ceased to harass him with
questions which he could not answer, and fears
which he could not appease. Before leaving
him for the night, I told him briefly that there
was a traveller in my hut smitten by a disease
which seemed to me so grave that I would ask
his opinion of the case, if he could accompany
me to the hut the next morning.

My own thoughts that night were not such as
would suffer me to sleep.

Before Margrave's melancholy state much of
my former fear and abhorrence faded away. This
being, so exceptional that fancy might well invest
him with preternatural attributes, was now
reduced by human suffering to human sympathy
and comprehension. Yet his utter want of
conscience was still as apparent as in his day of
joyous animal spirits. With what hideous
candour he had related his perfidy and ingratitude
to the man to whom, in his belief, he owed an
inestimable obligation, and with what insensibility
to the signal retribution which in most
natures would have awakened remorse!

And by what dark hints and confessions did
he seem to confirm the incredible memoir of Sir
Philip Derval! He owned that he had borne
from the corpse of Haroun the medicament to
which he ascribed his recovery from a state yet
more hopeless than that under which he now
laboured! He had alluded, rapidly, obscurely,
to some knowledge at his command "surer than
man's!" And now, even now, the mere wreck
of his former existence—by what strange charm
did he still control and confuse my reason!
And how was it that I felt myself murmuring,
again and again, "But what, after all, if his
hope be no chimera, and if Nature do hide a
secret by which I could save the life of my
beloved Lilian?"

And again and again, as that thought would
force itself on me, I rose, and crept to Lilian's
threshold, listening to catch the faintest sound
of her breathing. All still, all dark! and the great
physician doubts whether recognised science
can turn aside from her couch the stealthy
tread of death, while in yon log-hut one whose
malady recognised science could not doubt to
be mortal has composed himself to sleep
confident of life! Recognised science! recognised
ignorance! The science of to-day is the
ignorance of to-morrow! Every year some bold
guess lights up a truth to which, but the year
before, the schoolmen of science were as blinded
as moles.

"What, then," my lips kept repeating—
"what if Nature do hide a secret by which the
life of my life can be saved? What do we know
of the secrets of Nature? What said Newton
himself of his knowledge? 'I am like a child
picking up pebbles and shells on the sand, while
the great ocean of Truth lies all undiscovered
around me!' And did Newton himself, in the
ripest growth of his matchless intellect, hold the
creed of the alchemists in scorn? Had he not
given to one object of their research, in the
transmutation of metals, his days and his
nights? Is there proof that he ever convinced
himself that the research was the dream which
we, who are not Newtons, call it?* And that

* " Besides the three great subjects of Newton's
labours—the fluxional calculus, physical astronomy,
and optics—a very large portion of his time, while
resident in his college, was devoted to researches of
which scarcely a trace remains. Alchemy, which
had fascinated so many eager and ambitious minds,
seems to have tempted Newton with an overwhelming
force. What theories he formed, what experiments
he tried, in that laboratory where, it is said,
the fire was scarcely extinguished for weeks
together, will never be known. It is certain that no
success attended his labours; and Newton was not
a man—like Kepler—to detail to the world all the
hopes and disappointments, all the crude and
mystical fancies, which mixed themselves up with