The Lifted Veil | Page 4

and strength
in telling the strange story of my experience. I have never fully
unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged
to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men. But we have all a
chance of meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity,
when we are dead: it is the living only who cannot be forgiven--the
living only from whom men's indulgence and reverence are held off,
like the rain by the hard east wind. While the heart beats, bruise it--it is
your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with
moist, timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the
ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still
take in the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering
compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative
brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for
brotherly recognition--make haste--oppress it with your ill- considered
judgements, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations.
The heart will by and by be still--"ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor
lacerare nequit"; the eye will cease to entreat; the ear will be deaf; the
brain will have ceased from all wants as well as from all work. Then
your charitable speeches may find vent; then you may remember and
pity the toil and the struggle and the failure; then you may give due

honour to the work achieved; then you may find extenuation for errors,
and may consent to bury them.
That is a trivial schoolboy text; why do I dwell on it? It has little
reference to me, for I shall leave no works behind me for men to
honour. I have no near relatives who will make up, by weeping over my
grave, for the wounds they inflicted on me when I was among them. It
is only the story of my life that will perhaps win a little more sympathy
from strangers when I am dead, than I ever believed it would obtain
from my friends while I was living.
My childhood perhaps seems happier to me than it really was, by
contrast with all the after-years. For then the curtain of the future was
as impenetrable to me as to other children: I had all their delight in the
present hour, their sweet indefinite hopes for the morrow; and I had a
tender mother: even now, after the dreary lapse of long years, a slight
trace of sensation accompanies the remembrance of her caress as she
held me on her knee--her arms round my little body, her cheek pressed
on mine. I had a complaint of the eyes that made me blind for a little
while, and she kept me on her knee from morning till night. That
unequalled love soon vanished out of my life, and even to my childish
consciousness it was as if that life had become more chill I rode my
little white pony with the groom by my side as before, but there were
no loving eyes looking at me as I mounted, no glad arms opened to me
when I came back. Perhaps I missed my mother's love more than most
children of seven or eight would have done, to whom the other
pleasures of life remained as before; for I was certainly a very sensitive
child. I remember still the mingled trepidation and delicious excitement
with which I was affected by the tramping of the horses on the
pavement in the echoing stables, by the loud resonance of the groom's
voices, by the booming bark of the dogs as my father's carriage
thundered under the archway of the courtyard, by the din of the gong as
it gave notice of luncheon and dinner. The measured tramp of soldiery
which I sometimes heard--for my father's house lay near a county town
where there were large barracks--made me sob and tremble; and yet
when they were gone past, I longed for them to come back again.

I fancy my father thought me an odd child, and had little fondness for
me; though he was very careful in fulfilling what he regarded as a
parent's duties. But he was already past the middle of life, and I was not
his only son. My mother had been his second wife, and he was
five-and-forty when he married her. He was a firm, unbending,
intensely orderly man, in root and stem a banker, but with a flourishing
graft of the active landholder, aspiring to county influence: one of those
people who are always like themselves from day to day, who are
uninfluenced by the weather, and neither know melancholy nor high
spirits. I held him in great awe, and appeared more timid and sensitive
in his presence than