Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland

The following is from Volume XVII of Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland: Historical, Traditionary, & Imaginative revised by Alexander Leighton, One of the Original Editors and Contributors:

The Surgeon's Tales

The Bereaved

(Alexander Leighton)

By looking over the memorial of my professional life; and writing out the extended details of my experience, I am, in effect, living my life over again. Most of the scenes I witnessed left such an impression upon my mind, that it requires only the touch of the caduceus of the witching power of memory, to call them all up again with a vividness scarcely less than that by which they were formerly presented to me. There is only this difference, that my remembered experiences, now invested with a species of borrowed light, seem like scenery which one has seen in the glance of a mid-day sun, presented again to the dreamy "evening sense" under the soft blue effulgence of the waning harvest-moon; the trees with the sere leaf rustling under the fluttering wing of the night bird; and the dead silence, which is not broken by the internal voice speaking the words that have been spoken by those who lie under the yew tree. In an early leaf of my journal, I find some broken details of a visit I paid to Mr B----, a rich manufacturer in the town where I began my practice; but which I left when I had more confidence in those humble powers of ministering to the afflicted, which have raised me to an honourable station, and supplied me with the means of passing my old age in affluence. This individual had lost his wife--a very amiable woman, with whom he had lived a period of twenty-five years--and took on grief so heavily, that he was unfit to attend the funeral. He lay in bed, and would not be comforted. Having attended his wife, I continued my attentions to the husband. Three days had passed since his wife had been buried, and during all that time, he had eaten nothing; and, what augured gloomily for his fate, he had never been heard to speak, or sigh, or even to give vent to his sufferings in a single groan. There seemed to have fallen over him a heavy load, which, pressing with deadly force upon the issues of life, defied those reacting energies of nature, which usually struggle, by sighs and groans, to throw off the incubus of extraordinary griefs.

I have met with many wiseacre-sceptics who laugh at the idea of what is vulgarly called a "broken heart," as a direct consequence either of unrequited love or extraordinary grief--admitting, however, in their liberality, that death may ensue from great griefs operating merely as an inductive original cause, which destroying gradually the foundations of health, bring on a train of other ailments, that may, in the end, prove mortal. The admission cares for nothing, as a matter of every-day experience; and the original proposition to which it is objected as a qualification, remains as a truth which may humble the pride of man, and speak to the sceptic through the crushed heart of a fatal experience. I have seen many instances of the fatal effects of grief as a direct mortal agent, killing, by its own unaided energies, as certainly, though not in so short a time, as a blow or a wound in the vital organs of the human body. The common nosologies contain no name for the disease, because, in truth, it cannot properly be called a disease, any more than a stab with a sword can deserve that name; and this, combined with the fact that it is only in a very few instances that the coup works by itself, without the aid of some ailment generated by it, that young practitioners often homologate the vulgar notions that prevail upon this important subject.

Among all the many causes of grief to which mankind are daily exposed, I know not that there is one that strikes so deeply into the secret recesses of the vital principle as the loss of a dearly-beloved wife, who has lived with a man for a lengthened period, through early adversity and late prosperity--borne him a family which have bound closer the tie that was knitted by early affection, and who has left him to tread the last weary stages of existence alone, and without that support which almost all men derive from woman. The effects are often supposed to be proportioned to the affection; yet I doubt if this solves the curious problem of the diversity of consequences resulting from this great privation. There are many men of strong powers of mind, who are so constituted that they cannot but press heavily on the support of another. They seem almost to live through the thoughts and feelings of their helpmates; and the energies they take credit for in the busy affairs of the world, have their source--unknown often to themselves--in the bosom of wedded affection. It is in proportion to the strength of the habit of this leaning, combined, doubtless, with the coexistent affection, that the effects of the loss of a helpmate, in the later period of life, work with such varied influence on the survivor. It may also seem a curious fact, and I have no doubt of the truth of it, that a man when advanced in years is much more apt to break suddenly down under this visitation than a woman; while, again, the consequence would seem to be reversed if the calamity has overtaken them in the more early stages of the connection. These are grounds for speculation. At present I have only to do with facts.

The individual whose case has suggested these observations, presented, when I saw him first after the funeral of his wife, the symptom--present in all cases of an utterly crushed spirit--of a wish to die. I was the first to whom he had uttered a syllable since the day on which she had been carried out of the house which she had so long filled with the spirit of cheerfulness and comfort. His only daughter, Martha, a fine young woman, had contributed but little to his relief--if she had not, indeed, increased his depression by her own emotions, which she had no power to conceal; and his only son had gone off to Edinburgh, to attend his classes in the college, where he intended to graduate as a physician. He was thus, in a manner, left in a great degree alone; for his daughter sought her apartment at every opportunity, to weep over her sorrows unobserved; and she had naturally thought that her father's grief, attended by no exacerbations of groaning or weeping like her own, presented less appearance of intensity than that which convulsed her own heart, and got relief by nature's appointed modes of alleviation. When the heart is stricken with a certain force, all forms of presenting less gloomy views of the condition of the individual, will generally be found to be totally unavailing in affording relief. Nay, I am satisfied that there was genuine philosophy in the custom of the Greeks and the ancient Germans, in forcing victims of great sorrows to weep out the rankling barbed shaft. These had a species of licensed mourners, whose duty it was to soften the heart by melting strains of mournful melody, whereby, as by the application of a bland liniment, the rigid issues of the feelings were softened and opened, and the oppressed organ, the heart, was relieved of the load which defies the force of argument, and even the condolence of friendship. The curing of cold-nips by the appliance of snow, and of burns by the application of heat, could not have appeared more fraught with ridicule to the old women of former days, than would the custom I have here cited to the comforters of modern times. If I cannot say that, amongst some bold remedies, I have recommended it, I have, at least, avoided, on all occasions, officious endeavours to counteract the oppressing burden, by wrenching the mind from the engrossing thought--a process generally attended with no other result than making it adhere with increased force.

The greatest triumph that can be effected with the truly heart-stricken victim, to whom is denied the usual bursts that indicate a bearable misfortune, or, at least, one whose intensity is partly abated, is the bringing about of that more natural condition of the heart, which, indeed, is generally most feared by the ordinary paraclete. In the case of the bereaved husband, there is no charm so powerful in its effects as the vivid portrayment of the virtues of her who has gone down to the grave; and it may well be said, that the heart that will not give out its feelings to the impassioned description of the amiable properties of the departed helpmate, is all but incurable. The sister of Mr B----, who saw the necessity of administering relief, tried to awaken him to a sense of religious consolation; but he was as yet unfit even for that sacred ministration; and all her efforts having failed to rouse him, even from the deathlike stupor in which he lay, she had recourse, by my advice, to probing the wound, to take off the stricture by which the natural humours were pent up. She discoursed pathetically on the qualities of the departed, which, she said, would be the passport of her spirit to a sphere where he would again contemplate them unclouded by the dingy vapours of earthly feelings. She kept in the same strain for a lengthened period; but declared to me, when I visited him again, that he exhibited no signs of being moved by her discourse. He, once or twice, turned his eyes on her for a moment, drew occasionally a heavy sigh, that told, by the difficulty of the operation, the load with which he was oppressed; but his eyes were dry, no groan escaped from him, or any other sign of the heart being aided in an effort to restore the current of natural feeling. The coup de peine had too clearly taken the very core of the heart; the lamp of hope had been dashed out violently, and, under the cloud of his great evil, all things that remained to him upon earth were tinged with its dark hues. He presented all the appearances--except the dilation of the pupil of the eye--of one whose brain had been concussed by a deep fall, or laboured under a fracture of the bones of the cranium. The few words he spoke to me came slowly, with a heavy oppressive sound, as if spoken through a hollow tube; and what may, to some, be remarkable, though certainly not to me, they embraced not the slightest allusion to his bereavement--a symptom almost invariably attendant upon those deeper strokes of grief, which, being but seldom witnessed, are much less understood in their effects than the more ordinary oppressions, whose intense demonstrations and allusions to the cause of the evil, mark the victims as objects for the portrayments of poets.

Two or three days passed off in this way, without the slightest amelioration of his condition. The efforts of Miss B---- had been repeated often without effect. As she expressed herself to me, he would neither eat nor speak, sleep nor weep. "He has not," she added, "even muttered her name. His heart seems utterly broken; and time and the power of Heaven alone will effect a change." Such is the common philosophy of sorrow: time is held forth as all-powerful, all-saving; and while I admit its force, I only insist for the certainty of the existence of exceptions. The eighth day had passed without any support having been taken to sustain the system. A course of maceration, that had been going on during his wife's illness, was thus continued; yet, in the few words I occasionally drew from him, there was no indication of anything like the sullen determination of the suicide; the cause lay in the total cessation of the powers of the stomach--a consequence of the cerebral pressure, whose action is felt not where it operates primarily, but in the heart and other organs, where it works merely by sympathy.

It was on the evening of the eighth day after the funeral, as I have it noted, that I called to see if any change for the better had been effected by the ministrations of his sister. She sat by his bedside, with the Bible placed before her, from which she had been reading passages to him. His face was turned to the front of the bed, but he did not seem to be in any way moved by my entrance. All the efforts his sister had made to get him to enter into the spirit of the passages she had been reading had been fruitless; nor had he as yet made the slightest allusion to the cause of his illness, or mentioned the name of his deceased partner. A few words of no importance, and not related to the circumstances of his grief, were wrung from him painfully by my questions; but it seemed as if the language that represents the things of the world had lost all power of charming the ear; the deadness that had overtaken the heart like a palsy, was felt from the fountain of feelings, to the minute endings of the nerves; and the external senses, which are the ministers of the soul, had renounced their ordinary ministrations to the spirit that heeded them not. Only once his sister had observed a slight moisture rise for a moment in his eye, as she touched some tender traits of the character of the departed; but it passed away rather as an evidence of the utter powerlessness of nature, in a faint heave of the reactive energy, telling at once how little she could perform, yet how much was necessary to overcome the weight by which she was oppressed. I sat for some moments silent by the side of the bed, and meditated a recourse to some more strenuous effort directed to his sense of duty as a parent; though I was aware, that until the heart is in some degree relieved, all such appeals are too often vain, if not rather attended with unfavourable effects, but, in extreme cases, we are not entitled to rest upon the generality of theories where so various and mutable an essence as the human mind is the object to which they are to be applied. I was on the point of making a trial, by recurring to the position of his son and daughter, when I heard the sound of a horse's feet approaching, with great rapidity, the door. The sister started; and I could hear Martha open the window above, to ascertain who might be the visiter. In another moment the outer door opened with a loud clang. Some one approached along the passage, in breathless haste. He entered. It was George B----, under the excitement of some strong internal emotion; his eyes gleaming with a fearful light, and his limbs shaking violently. He stood for a moment as if he were gathering his energies to speak; but the words stuck in his throat, the sounds died away amidst the noise of an indistinct jabbering. I noticed the eye of his father fixed upon him, betraying only a very slight increase of animation; but even this extraordinary demeanour of his son did not draw from him a question; so utterly dead to all external impulses had his grief made him, that the harrowing cause of so much excitement in his son, remained unquestioned by the feelings of the parent. In another moment the youth was stretched across the bed, locking the father in his embrace, and sobbing out inarticulate words, none of which I could understand. The aunt was as much at a loss to solve the mystery of the violent paroxysm as myself; for some time neither of us could put a question; the sobbings of the youth seemed to chain up our tongues by the charm of the eloquence of nature's impassioned language. Meanwhile, Martha entered, ran forward to the bedside, lifted her brother from the position which he occupied, and seated him, by the application of some force, on the empty chair that stood by the side of the bed.

"What is the matter, George?" she cried; the question was repeated by the aunt, and the eyes of the parent sought languidly the face of the youth, which was, however, now covered by his hands. The question was more than once repeated by both the aunt and myself; the father never spoke, nor could I perceive a single ray of curiosity in his eye. He seemed to await the issue of the son's explanation, heedless what it might be--whether the announcement of a great or a lesser evil--its magnitude, though transcending the bounds of ordinary bearing, comprehending every other misfortune that fate could have in store for him, being, whatever its proportions, as nothing to the death-stricken heart of one whose hope was buried.

"This is scarcely a time or an occasion, George," said I, "for the manifestation of these emotions. If the cause lies in the grief, come back with increased force, for the death of your mother, you should have known that there is one lying there whose load is still greater, and who is, unfortunately, as yet, beyond the relief which, as your agitation indicates, nature in the young heart is working for you."

"The death!--the death!" he muttered in a choking voice; "but there is something after the death that is worse than the death itself."

"Are you distracted, George?" said the aunt. "This Bible was the hand-book and the rule of your mother's conduct in this world. A better woman never offered up her prayers at the fountain of the waters of immortal life; noone that ever lived had a better right to draw from the blessing, or better qualified for enjoying it as she now enjoys it. She is in heaven; and will you say that that is worse than death?"

"You speak of her spirit, aunt," replied he, as he still covered his face with his hands. "Her spirit is there!"--and he took away one of his hands from his face and pointed to heaven--"There, where the saints rest, does my mother's soul rest; but, O God, where--where is the body?"

A thought struck me on the instant. I was afraid to utter it. I looked at the father, and suspected, from the sudden light of animation that started to his eye, that the gloom of his mind had at last been penetrated by the thought which had suggested itself to me.

"Where is the body!" responded the aunt. "Why, George, where should it be but in C---- churchyard, beneath the stone that has told the virtues of her ancestors, and will, in a short time, declare her own, greater than those of her kindred that have gone before?"

"It is on Dr M----'s table!" cried the youth, starting to his feet, and again throwing himself violently on the chair. "I purchased it; paid the price for it; and recognised it only when the dissecting-knife was in my hand!" Every one started aghast; terror froze up the issues of speech; a deep groan issued from the bed-ridden patient; he beckoned me to his ear. "Tell the women to go out," he whispered, as he twisted his body convulsively among the bedclothes.

I complied with his request; and the aunt, seizing Martha, who stood as if she had been transfixed to the floor, dragged her out of the room. In the passage, I heard a loud scream; and, in a moment, all was again silence. Mr B----, without uttering a word, raised his feeble body from the bed, and came forth, the spectre of what he was only a few weeks before. His limbs, which were reduced to bony shanks, covered with shrivelled skin, seemed totally unable to support even the decayed, emaciated frame. He staggered as he reached the floor; but, recovering himself, stood firm, and then proceeded to his wardrobe, from which he drew his vestments, and proceeded to attire himself.

"An hour since," he said, in a slow, solemn voice, "I thought these clothes would never again be on my body. My only hope was the winding-sheet, and that grave which has been robbed."

"George may have been deceived," said I, as he was proceeding to dress himself. "I have often thought that I saw resemblances to deceased friends in the features of subjects in the dissecting-room."

"The grave will test it," answered he, with a deep groan, as he proceeded slowly, but resolutely, to put one garment after another on his skeleton body.

He was at length dressed; and, proceeding to the kitchen, he appeared again, in a short time, with a lighted lantern in his hand, the light of which, as it threw its beam on his sallow face--for the candle had, meanwhile, burned down into the socket--exhibited, in its lurid glare, the deep-sunken eyes and protruding bones of his emaciated countenance.

"Come, we shall proceed to the grave of my Isabella," said he.

"You are unable," said I. "Your limbs will not carry you that length; and you are, besides, unfitted by the state of your mind and feelings, for an investigation of this kind. Stay here with your son, and I will go to the churchyard and satisfy myself of the deception under which George, doubtless, labours."

"I feel now more than my former strength," he replied. "I am awakened from a death-stupor of the soul; and I feel that within me which will enable me to go through this trial. I will look into my Isabella's grave; will meet with those eyes again--that countenance through which I have read the workings of love in a spirit that is now far from the precincts of the clay. Deny me not; I will be satisfied of this, if I should come back from her grave to complete that which is begun, and is already visible in these shrunken members, that now obey a supernatural power."

There seemed to be no gainsaying him; his manner was inspired and resolute; and I proceeded to accompany him to C---- churchyard. George, who, in the meantime, had been tossing himself in the chair, rose to make one of the party. The agitation under which he still laboured was in direct contrast to the cold stillness of his father; yet the one was a more living expression than the other; and, while my eye shrunk not from the ordinary indications of suffering, I--maugre all the experience of misery I had had--could scarcely look on the animated corpse thus preparing to visit the grave where the object of all his hopes and affections in this world had been buried, and might now be found to have been desecrated by the knife of the anatomist. We went forth together. George's horse still stood at the door, reeking and bloody. I requested Mr B---- to mount, as we had a full mile to go to the burying-ground, and I deemed it utterly impossible that he could accomplish the distance. He did not answer me, but proceeded onwards with a firm step, in the face of a cold, bleak, east wind, that moaned mournfully among a clump of trees that skirted the road. Some flakes of snow were winging through the air--driven now by the breeze, or lingering over our heads as if afraid to be soiled by the earth, which we were bent to open where the dead then lay--or some time before lay--a mass of putrefaction; yet dear to the feelings of the bereaved, and sought now with greater avidity than when the body was arrayed in the smiles of beauty, and filled with living, breathing love. The husband spoke nothing; and George was silent, save for the deep sobs that burst from him as he looked upon the woe-worn form of his father, who stalked away before us like a creature hurrying to the grave to seek the home there from which a troubled spirit had removed him in the dark hour of night. In this way we wandered on. I was not in a mood to speak. The occasion and the scene depressed me more than ever did the prospect of a deathbed, or the sight of a patient about to submit to a painful and dangerous operation. My habits of thought are little conversant with the poetry of nature, or of man's condition in this stage of suffering--the duties of an arduous profession are exclusive of those dreamy moods of the mind, which have little in common with the doings of every-day life; yet, on this occasion, I felt all the inspiration of the sad muse; and, were I to endeavour to account for it, I could only seek for the cause in the aspect of the night, and the unusual nature of the vocation, operating, at the moment, on a mind loosened from the cares of my profession.

In a much less time than I could have anticipated, from the weak condition of Mr B----, we arrived at the churchyard--a solitary spot, surrounded with an old grey dyke, at the back of which rose in deep shade a wood of firs. The snow lay on the top of the walls, and on the higher branches of the firs, reminding one of streaks of white clouds in the sky, as the darkness of the night, enveloping the lower portions, kept them almost from our view. From a small house at the ridge of the fir-belt, a slight ray of light beamed forth, and, striking upon the top of a monument placed against the wall, exhibited the left all around in deeper gloom. Without uttering a word, Mr B---- made up to the house, and, knocking at the door, a young female appeared. She uttered a scream, and ran back, doubtless from the pale and death-like appearance presented by the face of the visiter. Her place was momentarily supplied by the sexton, who, the moment he saw Mr B----, shrunk back in what I conceived to be conscious fear. I was standing behind, and noticing, what I thought, the guilty expression of the man's face, concluded unfavourably for the sad hope of my friend.

"I have reason to believe that there have been resurrectionists in your churchyard, James," said Mr B---- mournfully.

"Impossible!" replied the sexton; "we have been guarding the ground for some time past. It is a dream, Mr B----; many relations are troubled by the same fears. It was only yesterday that I opened a grave to satisfy the wishes of Mrs G----, whose husband was buried a week ago. The body was as safe as if it had been in her own keeping. Take my advice; be satisfied there is no cause of apprehension; you forget the sacred nature of my trust."

"I can only be satisfied by an examination of the grave," replied Mr B----. "I insist upon having this satisfaction. The cemetery is my property, and I have a right to examine it."

The man hesitated, and said that his assistant was from home. But the bereaved husband was not to be thus diverted from his purpose. He stood resolutely with the lantern in his hand, and demanded admittance into the churchyard. The man at length reluctantly took down the key from a nail in the passage, and bringing another lantern with him, led us to the door, which, in the midst of many grumblings, he opened. He then led the way over the snowy hillocks to nearly the middle of the burying-ground, where the grave of Mrs B----, headed by an ornamented stone, was exhibited to us. Mr B---- bent down, and, moving the lantern backwards and forwards, examined it slowly and carefully, casting his eye over the snow, which presented an unbroken appearance, and examining every chink, as if he there found an evidence of the truth of George's statement.

"That grave has not been touched," said the man. "The head of it is the part to judge by. You will find the turf lies whole and unbroken under the wreath."

"It may be as you say," replied Mr B----, as he bent down in his examination; "but the late snow may have removed the traces of the opening. I cannot return home till I am satisfied. My own bones must mix with those of my Isabella. Proceed to open the grave; I myself will assist you."

At that moment a figure was seen gliding alone amidst the tombstones. It had all the legitimate whiteness like the ideal spirit. I stood and gazed at it, and George's eyes were also fixed upon it; Mr B---- paid no attention; he was too intent upon the investigation he was engaged in; and the grave-digger, whose head was down, did not notice it. I said nothing; but George, pointing to it as it approached, cried--

"See, see! what is that?"

The sexton looked up, and cried--"It is David. He has been out, and is covered with snow. He comes in good time."

It was even so. The man approached, and the implements having been procured, they set about opening the grave. Mr. B---- stood motionless, his head hanging down, and deep sighs occasionally coming from his breast, mixed with the quick breathing of the men, as they plied their shovels. He still held the lantern in his hand, by the light of which the group before me is brought out in faint relief. The silence around was signally that of a churchyard; for the fir belt shrouded the scene from the night breeze, and there was only occasionally heard a low, mournful gust, as it died among the branches of the trees. On that spot only there was quick breathing action. The men had got down pretty far into the grave; and, as they brought their heads within the ray of the lantern, in their acts of throwing up the earth, their flushed faces contrasted strongly with the cadaverous countenance of the husband, who leant over them, watching every motion, and intent upon the expected stroke of the shovel upon the coffin lid. The recollection of the attributes of the German ghoul came over me; nor did the difference between the beings, the motives, and the actions, prevent me from conjuring up the similitude, so unlike a human being did he appear in his complexion, his fixed, dead-like stare into the grave, and the perfect stillness of his body, as he crouched down to be nearer to the object of his search. At length, the sound was heard, the rattle on the coffin lid. The victim's ear seemed chained to the sound, as if he could have augured from it whether or not the chest was empty. In a short time,

"The heavy moil that shrouds the dead"

was entirely removed. The sexton now took his own lamp down into the grave. The screw-nails were undone, the lid was raised, and the body of Mrs B----, arrayed in her winding-sheet and scalloped sere-clothes, was seen, by the sickly, yellow gleam of the lantern, lying in the stillness and placidity of death--

"For still, still she lay,
With a wreath on her bosom."

One of the men now came out, and Mr B---- descended into the grave. He lifted off the face-cloth, gazed on the clay-cold face, touched it, and now was opened the

"Sacred source of sympathetic tears."

He burst into a loud paroxysm; and, as if nature had been to take her revenge for her sufferings, under the freezing influence of his sorrow, he wept as if there had been to be no end of his weeping. It was latterly found necessary to force him out of the grave; though, as I was informed by George, he had shrunk from the view of the dead body of his wife, while it lay in the house, and before it was interred. The lid was again placed on the coffin, the screws fixed, and the grave filled up. Mr B---- slipped a guinea into the hand of the sexton, and we took our way back to the town. George informed us, as we went, that he had been for several nights haunted by the image of his mother; and could only thus account for the conviction that had seized him, that the body of the female he had seen in the dissecting-room was that of his parent. It is a remarkable fact, and the one which chiefly induced me to give this narrative, that the scene I have now described wrought so powerfully on the feelings of Mr B----, that the form of his grief was entirely changed. During the whole of the subsequent night, he wept intensely--nature was relieved--his sorrow was mollified into one of those

"Moods that speak their softened woes;"

and time soon wrought its accustomed amelioration. I never saw one who seemed more certainly doomed to the fate of the heart-stricken; and, however fanciful it may seem, I attribute to the mistake of his son the restoration of the father.

The Surgeon's Tales--The Condemned (Alexander Leighton)