The Lifted Veil | Page 9

folding-screen there was my father, with Mrs. Filmore on his right hand,
and on his left--the slim, blond-haired girl, with the keen face and the
keen eyes fixed on me in half-smiling curiosity.
"Well, Latimer, you thought me long," my father said . . .
I heard no more, felt no more, till I became conscious that I was lying
with my head low on the sofa, Pierre, and my father by my side. As
soon as I was thoroughly revived, my father left the room, and
presently returned, saying -
"I've been to tell the ladies how you are, Latimer. They were waiting in
the next room. We shall put off our shopping expedition to-day."
Presently he said, "That young lady is Bertha Grant, Mrs. Filmore's
orphan niece. Filmore has adopted her, and she lives with them, so you
will have her for a neighbour when we go home--perhaps for a near
relation; for there is a tenderness between her and Alfred, I suspect, and
I should be gratified by the match, since Filmore means to provide for
her in every way as if she were his daughter. It had not occurred to me
that you knew nothing about her living with the Filmores."
He made no further allusion to the fact of my having fainted at the
moment of seeing her, and I would not for the world have told him the
reason: I shrank from the idea of disclosing to any one what might be
regarded as a pitiable peculiarity, most of all from betraying it to my
father, who would have suspected my sanity ever after.
I do not mean to dwell with particularity on the details of my
experience. I have described these two cases at length, because they
had definite, clearly traceable results in my after-lot.
Shortly after this last occurrence--I think the very next day--I began to
be aware of a phase in my abnormal sensibility, to which, from the
languid and slight nature of my intercourse with others since my illness,
I had not been alive before. This was the obtrusion on my mind of the

mental process going forward in first one person, and then another,
with whom I happened to be in contact: the vagrant, frivolous ideas and
emotions of some uninteresting acquaintance--Mrs. Filmore, for
example--would force themselves on my consciousness like an
importunate, ill-played musical instrument, or the loud activity of an
imprisoned insect. But this unpleasant sensibility was fitful, and left me
moments of rest, when the souls of my companions were once more
shut out from me, and I felt a relief such as silence brings to wearied
nerves. I might have believed this importunate insight to be merely a
diseased activity of the imagination, but that my prevision of
incalculable words and actions proved it to have a fixed relation to the
mental process in other minds. But this superadded consciousness,
wearying and annoying enough when it urged on me the trivial
experience of indifferent people, became an intense pain and grief
when it seemed to be opening to me the souls of those who were in a
close relation to me--when the rational talk, the graceful attentions, the
wittily-turned phrases, and the kindly deeds, which used to make the
web of their characters, were seen as if thrust asunder by a microscopic
vision, that showed all the intermediate frivolities, all the suppressed
egoism, all the struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague
capricious memories, and indolent make-shift thoughts, from which
human words and deeds emerge like leaflets covering a fermenting
heap.
At Basle we were joined by my brother Alfred, now a handsome, self-
confident man of six-and-twenty--a thorough contrast to my fragile,
nervous, ineffectual self. I believe I was held to have a sort of
half-womanish, half-ghostly beauty; for the portrait-painters, who are
thick as weeds at Geneva, had often asked me to sit to them, and I had
been the model of a dying minstrel in a fancy picture. But I thoroughly
disliked my own physique and nothing but the belief that it was a
condition of poetic genius would have reconciled me to it. That brief
hope was quite fled, and I saw in my face now nothing but the stamp of
a morbid organization, framed for passive suffering--too feeble for the
sublime resistance of poetic production. Alfred, from whom I had been
almost constantly separated, and who, in his present stage of character
and appearance, came before me as a perfect stranger, was bent on

being extremely friendly and brother-like to me. He had the superficial
kindness of a good-humoured, self-satisfied nature, that fears no rivalry,
and has encountered no contrarieties. I am not sure that my disposition
was good enough for me to have been quite free from envy towards
him, even if