Christian fiction; Wingfold, Thomas (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
I must mention that no one whatever knew the degree of his intimacy with
Emmeline, or that he had any ground for considering her engaged to him.
Secrecy added much to the zest of Emmeline’s pleasures. Everyone knew
that he was a devoted admirer--but therein to be classed with a host.
For concealment, he contented himself with a large travelling-cloak, a
tall felt hat, and a black silk mask.
He entered the grounds with an arrival of guests, and knowing the place
perfectly, contrived to see something of her behaviour, while he watched
for an opportunity of speaking to her alone,--a quest of unlikely
success. Hour after hour he watched, and all the time never spoke or was
spoken to.
Those who are acquainted with the mode of operation of the drug to which
I have referred, are aware that a man may be fully under its influences
without betraying to the ordinary observer that he is in a condition
differing from that of other men. But, in the living dream wherein he
walks, his feeling of time and of space is so enlarged, or perhaps, I
rather think, so subdivided to the consciousness, that everything about
him seems infinite both in duration and extent; the action of a second
has in it a multitudinous gradation of progress, and a line of space
is marked out into millionths, of every one of which the consciousness
takes note. At the same time his senses are open to every impression
from things around him, only they appear to him in a strangely exalted
metamorphosis, the reflex of his own mental exaltation either in bliss
or torture, while the fancies of a man mingle with the facts thus
introduced and modify and are in turn modified by them; whereby out of
the chaos arises the mountain of an Earthly Paradise, whose roots are in
the depths of hell; and whether the man be with the divine air and the
clear rivers and the thousand-hued flowers on the top, or down in the
ice-lake with the tears frozen to hard lumps in the hollows of his eyes
so that he can no more have even the poor consolation of weeping, is but
the turning of a hair, so far at least as his will has to do with it.
The least intrusion of anything painful, of any jar that cannot be
wrought into the general harmony of the vision, will suddenly alter its
character, and from the seventh heaven of speechless bliss the man
may fall plumb down into gulfs of horrible and torturing, it may be
loathsome imaginings.
Now Leopold had taken a dose of the drug on his journey, and it was
later than usual, probably because of the motion, ere it began to take
effect. He had indeed ceased to look for any result from it, when all
at once, as he stood amongst the laburnums and lilacs of a rather late
spring, something seemed to burst in his brain, and that moment he was
Endymion waiting for Diana in her interlunar grove, while the music of
the spheres made the blossoms of a stately yet flowering forest, tremble
all with conscious delight.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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