A REVELATION OF A PREVIOUS LIFE.
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,
The soul that rises in us, our life's star,
Has had elsewhere its setting,
And cemeth from afar.”
—Wordsworth.
The death of a lady, in a foreign land, leaves me at
liberty to narrate the circumstances which follow.
A few words of previous explanation, however.
I am inclined to believe, from conversations on the
subject with many sensible persons, that there are few
men who have not had, at different intervals in their
lives, sudden emotions, currents of thought, affections
of mind and body, which, not only were wholly disconnected
with the course of life thus interrupted, but
seemed to belong to a wholly different being.
Perhaps I shall somewhere touch the reader's experience
by describing rather minutely, and in the first
person, some sensations of this kind not unusual to
myself.
Walking in a crowded street, for example, in perfect
health, with every faculty gayly alive, I suddenly lose
the sense of neighborhood. I see—I hear—but I
feel as if I had become invisible where I stand, and
was, at the same time, present and visible elsewhere.
I know everything that passes around me, but I seem
disconnected and (magnetically speaking) unlinked
from the human beings near. If spoken to at such a
moment, I answer with difficulty. The person who
speaks seems addressing me from a world to which I
no longer belong. At the same time, I have an irresistible
inner consciousness of being present in another
scene of every-day life—where there are streets, and
houses, and people—where I am looked on without
surprise as a familiar object—where I have cares,
fears, objects to attain—a different scene altogether,
and a different life, from the scene and life of which I
was a moment before conscious. I have a dull ache
at the back of my eyes for the minute or two that this
trance lasts, and then, slowly and reluctantly, my
absent soul seems creeping back, the magnetic links
of conscious neighborhood, one by one, re-attach, and
I resume my ordinary life, but with an irrepressible
feeling of sadness.
It is in vain that I try to fix these shadows as they
recede. I have struggled a thousand times in vain to
particularize and note down what I saw in the strange
city to which I was translated. The memory glides
from my grasp with preternatural evasiveness.
In a book called “The Man of Two Lives,” similar
sensations to these are made the basis of the story.
Indeed, till I saw that book, the fear of having my
sanity suspected sealed my lips on the subject.
I have still a reserve in my confession. I have
been conscious, since boyhood, of a mental peculiarity
which I fear to name while I doubt that it is possessed
by others than myself—which I should not allude to
now, but that it forms a strange link of identity
between me and another being to be mentioned in this
story.
I may say, also, without attaching any importance
to it, except as it bears upon this same identity, that,
of those things which I have no occasion to be taught,
or which I did, as the common phrase is, by intuition,
drawing was the easiest and most passionately followed
of my boyish pursuits.
With these preliminaries, and probably some similar
experience of his own, the reader may happily form
a woof on which to embroider the following circumstances.
Travelling through Styria, some years since, I
chanced to have, for a fellow-occupant of the coupé
of a diligence, a very courteous and well-bred person, a
gentleman of Gratz. As we rolled slowly along on the
banks of the Muer, approaching his native town, he
very kindly invited me to remain with him a day or
two, offering me, as an inducement, a presentation at
the soirée of a certain lady of consequence, who was
to receive, on the night of our arrival, and at whose
house I should see some fair specimens of the beauty
of Styria.
Accepted.
It was a lovely summer's night, when we strolled
through the principal street toward our gay destination,
and as I drew upon my friend's arm to stop him
while the military band of the fortress finished a delicious
waltz (they were playing in the public square),
he pointed out to me the spacious balconies of the
countess's palace, whither we were going, crowded
with the well-dressed company, listening silently to
the same enchanting music. We entered, and after
an interchange of compliments with the hostess, I
availed myself of my friend's second introduction to
take a stand in one of the balconies beside the person I
was presented to, and under cover of her favor, to hear
out the unfinished music of the band.
As the evening darkened, the lights gleamed out
from the illuminated rooms more brightly, and most
of the guests deserted the balconies and joined the
gayer circles within. The music ceased at the beat
of the drum. My companion in the balcony was a
very quiet young lady, and, like myself, she seemed
subdued by the sweet harmonies we had listened to,
and willing to remain without the shadow of the curtain.
We were not alone there, however. A tall
lady, of very stately presence, and with the remains of
remarkable beauty, stood on the opposite side of the
balcony, and she, too, seemed to shrink from the glare
within, and cling to the dewy darkness of the summer
night.
After the cessation of the music, there was no
longer an excuse for intermittent conversation, and,
starting a subject which afforded rather freer scope, I
did my best to credit my friend's flattering introduction.
I had discoursed away for half an hour very
unreservedly, before I discovered that, with her hand
upon her side, in an attitude of repressed emotion, the
tall lady was earnestly listening to me. A third person
embarrasses even the most indifferent dialogue. The
conversation languished, and my companion rose and
took my arm for a promenade through the rooms.
Later in the evening, my friend came in search of
me to the supper-room.
“Mon ami!” he said, “a great honor has fallen out
of the sky for you. I am sent to bring you to the
beau reste of the handsomest woman of Styria—
Margaret, Baroness R—, whose chateau I pointed
out to you in the gold light of yesterday's sunset.
She wishes to know you—why I can not wholly divine—
for it is the first sign of ordinary feeling that she has
given in twenty years. But she seems agitated, and
sits alone in the countess's boudoir. Allons-y!”
As we made our way through the crowd, he hastily
sketched me an outline of the lady's history: “At
seventeen taken from a convent for a forced marriage
with the baron whose name she bears; at eighteen a
widow, and, for the first time, in love—the subject of
her passion a young artist of Vienna on his way to
Italy. The artist died at her chateau—they were to
have been married—she has ever since worn weeds
for him. And the remainder you must imagine—for
here we are!”
The baroness leaned with her elbow upon a small
table of or molu, and her position was so taken that I
seated myself necessarily in a strong light, while her
features were in shadow. Still, the light was sufficient
to show me the expression of her countenance.
She was a woman apparently about forty-five, of noble
physiognomy, and a peculiar fulness of the eyelid—
something like to which I thought I remembered to
have seen in a portrait of a young girl, many years
before. The resemblance troubled me somewhat.
“You will pardon me this freedom,” said the baroness
with forced composure, “when I tell you
that—a friend—whom I have mourned twenty-five
years—seems present to me when you speak.”
I was silent, for I knew not what to say. The baroness
shaded her eyes with her hand, and sat silent
for a few moments, gazing at me.
“You are not like him in a single feature,” she
resumed, “yet the expression of your face, strangely,
very strangely, is the same. He was darker—
slighter”—
“Of my age?” I inquired, to break my own silence.
For there was something in her voice which gave me
the sensation of a voice heard in a dream.
“Oh God! that voice! that voice!” she exclaimed
wildly, burying her face in her hands, and giving way
to a passionate burst of tears.
“Rodolph,” she resumed, recovering herself with
a strong effort, “Rodolph died with the promise on
his lips that death should not divide us. And I have
seen him! Not in dreams—not in revery—not at
times when my fancy could delude me. I have seen
him suddenly before me in the street—in Vienna—
here—at home at noonday—for minutes together,
gazing on me. It is more in latter years that I have
been visited by him; and a hope has latterly sprung
into being in my heart—I know not how—that in
person, palpable and breathing, I should again hold
converse with him—fold him living to my bosom.
Pardon me! You will think me mad!”
I might well pardon her; for, as she talked, a vague
sense of familiarity with her voice, a memory, powerful,
though indistinct, of having before dwelt on
those majestic features, an impulse of tearful passionateness
to rush to her embrace, well nigh overpowered
me. She turned to me again.
“You are an artist?” she said, inquiringly.
“No; though intended for one, I believe, by nature.”
“And you were born in the year —.”
“I was!”
With a scream she added the day of my birth, and
waiting an instant for my assent, dropped to the floor
and clung convulsively and weeping to my knees.
“Rodolph! Rodolph!” she murmured faintly, as
her long gray tresses fell over her shoulders, and her
head dropped insensible upon her breast.
Her cry had been heard, and several persons entered
the room. I rushed out of doors. I had need to be
in darkness and alone.
It was an hour after midnight when I re-entered my
hotel. A chasseur stood sentry at the door of my
apartment with a letter in his hand. He called me by
name, gave me his missive, and disappeared. It was
from the baroness, and ran thus:—
“You did not retire from me to sleep. This letter
will find you waking. And I must write, for my heart
and brain are overflowing.
“Shall I write to you as a stranger?—you whom I
have strained so often to my bosom—you whom I have
loved and still love with the utmost idolatry of mortal
passion—you who have once given me the soul that,
like a gem long lost, is found again, but in a newer
casket! Mine still—for did we not swear to love
for ever!
“But I am taking counsel of my own heart only.
You may still be unconvinced. You may think that
a few singular coincidences have driven me mad.
You may think that, though born in the same hour
that my Rodolph died, possessing the same voice, the
same countenance, the same gifts—though by irresistible
consciousness I know you to be him—my lost
lover returned in another body to life—you may still
think the evidence incomplete—you may, perhaps,
even now, be smiling in pity at my delusion. Indulge
me one moment.
“The Rodolph Isenberg whom I lost, possessed a
faculty of mind, which, if you are he, answers with the
voice of an angel to my appeal. In that soul resided,
and wherever it be, must now reside, the singular
power”
(The reader must be content with my omission of
this fragment of the letter. It contained a secret
never before clothed in language—a secret that will die
with me, unless betrayed by what indeed it may lead
to—madness! As I saw it in writing—defined accurately
and inevitably in the words of another—I felt as
if the innermost chamber of my soul was suddenly
laid open to the day—I abandoned doubt—I answered
to the name by which she called me—I believed in the
previous existence of which my whole life, no less than
these extraordinary circumstances, had furnished me
with repeated evidence. But, to resume the letter.)
“And now that we know each other again—now
that I can call you by name, as in the past, and be
sure that your inmost consciousness must reply—
a new terror seizes me! Your soul comes back,
youthfully and newly clad, while mine, though of
unfading freshness and youthfulness within, shows to
your eye the same outer garment, grown dull with
mourning and faded with the wear of time. Am I
grown distasteful? Is it with the sight only of this
new body that you look upon me? Rodolph!—spirit
that was my devoted and passionate admirer! soul
that was sworn to me for ever!—am I—the same Margaret,
refound and recognised, grown repulsive? Oh
God! What a bitter answer would this be to my
prayers for your return to me!
“I will trust in Him whose benign goodness smiles
upon fidelity in love. I will prepare a fitter meeting
for two who parted as lovers. You shall not see me
again in the house of a stranger and in a mourning
attire. When this letter is written, I will depart at
once for the scene of our love. I hear my horses
already in the court-yard, and while you read this I
am speeding swiftly home. The bridal dress you were
secretly shown the day before death came between us,
is still freshly kept. The room where we sat—the
bowers by the stream—the walks where we projected
our sweet promise of a future—they shall all be made
ready. They shall be as they were! And I—oh
Rodolph, I shall be the same! My heart is not
grown old, Rodolph! Believe me, I am unchanged
in soul! And I will strive to be—I will strive to
look — God help me to look and be — as of
yore!
“Farewell now! I leave horses and servants to
wait on you till I send to bring you to me. Alas, for
any delay! but we will pass this life and all other
time together. We have seen that a vow of eternal
union may be kept—that death can not divide those
who will to love for ever! Farewell now!
Circumstances compelled me to read this letter
with but one feeling, exquisite pain! Love lasts till
death, but it is mortal! The affections, however
intense and faithful (I now know), are part of the
perishable coil, forgotten in the grave. With the
memory of this love of another life, haunting me
through my youth, and keeping its vow of visitation,
I had given the whole heart of my second youth to
another. Affianced to her, waited for by her, bound
to her by vows which death had not divided, I had but
one course to pursue. I left Gratz in an hour, never
to return.
A few days since I was walking alone in the
crowded thoroughfare of the city where I live. Suddenly
my sense of presence there fell off me. I
walked on, but my inward sight absorbed all my consciousness.
A room which was familiar to me shut
me in, and a bed hung in mourning became apparent.
In another instant a figure laid out in a winding-sheet,
and partially covered with a velvet pall, grew distinct
through the dimness, and in the low-laid head I recognised,
what a presentiment had already betrayed to
me, the features of Margaret, Baroness R—. It
will be still months before I can see the announcement
of her death. But she is dead.
