The evening passed on, Colin could not very well tell how; and he began
to see a prospect of escaping a little, and gaining a moment’s breathing
time, to realize, if he could, the astonishing revolution which had
taken place. Alice, who was an invalid, retired early; and after that
the conversation flagged, and the three men who had so little in common,
and who had been, on the sole occasion which had brought them into
contact with each other before, so entirely in opposition, found it hard
to know what to say, so as to cultivate all the friendly feelings that
were possible and dissipate the disagreeable reminiscences. Mr. Meredith
betook himself to the only subject that seemed to him practicable--his
son’s book, which Colin had edited so carefully; but then it is already
known to the readers of this history that Colin’s opinions were by no
means those of the “Voice from the Grave.” And then the young man was
burning to escape--to get out of doors and feel the wind on his face,
and endeavour in the silence and darkness to realize his position. He
had to escape not only from Mr. Meredith, who watched him with the
anxiety of a man who fears to see his last hope escape him, but also
from Lauderdale, who was concerned less for Alice than for Colin, and
whose anxiety, now that his mind had been fully awakened, was as great
that Colin should not risk his own happiness, as was Mr. Meredith’s
anxiety that the happiness of Alice should be secured. Of the two, it
was the latter whom Colin could meet with most ease; for it was in no
way necessary that he should open his heart to a man who sought him only
as he might have sought a physician; and, indeed, there was a certain
relief to his mind in the expression of some irritation and resentment
towards Mr. Meredith, who had once insulted him, and was friendly now
only from the most interested motives. When he at last found it possible
to leave the room, and had actually opened the door to escape into the
open air, it was Mr. Meredith who detained him. “Pardon me,” he said;
“but, if you would but give me five minutes in my own room--I have a
great deal to say to you.” Colin was obliged to yield, though his
impatience was unspeakable; and he followed Mr. Meredith into the
library, which, like all the other rooms in the house, was but partially
lighted. Here Alice’s father gave his guest a chair with solemnity, as
for an important conference; and this was more than Colin’s powers of
self-restraint could bear.
“I must ask you to pardon _me_,” he said, putting his hand on the back
of the chair. “You will, perhaps, understand that all that has happened
to-day has disturbed my calculations a little. A man cannot go back four
years of his life in so unexpected a way without feeling a little off
his equilibrium. May I ask you to postpone till to-morrow what you have
to say?”
“Only a moment--only three words,” said Mr. Meredith; “I hope you have
forgiven me for the mistake which I have regretted ever since. I meant
no slight to you, whom I did not know. I was naturally excited to find
my daughter in such circumstances; and, Mr. Campbell, I am sure you are
generous; you will not let a mere mistake prejudice you against me.”
“It was not a mistake,” said Colin coldly; “you were right enough in
everything but the motives you imputed to me; and I am almost as poor a
man now as I was then, with very little chance of being richer--I may
say with no chance,” he went on, with a certain pleasure in exaggerating
his disadvantages. “A Scotch minister can make no advance in his
profession. Instead of finding fault with what you did then, I feel
disposed to bid you weigh well the circumstances now.”
Mr. Meredith smiled, with a little air of protection, and drew a long
breath of relief. “Alice will have enough for both,” he said; “and
Providence has taught me by many severe lessons the vanity of riches.
She will have enough for both.”
It was at this moment that all the bitterness of the sacrifice he was
making rushed upon Colin’s mind--rushed upon him like a flood, quenching
even the natural courtesy of his disposition, and giving him a certain
savage satisfaction in wreaking his vengeance upon the rich man, whose
riches he despised, and whose money smelt of spoliation and wrong. All
the silent rage against his fate which possessed Colin--all the
reluctance and disappointment which a higher principle kept in abeyance
in presence of the innocent Alice--blazed up against her father in a
momentary glare which appalled the victim. Colin might give up his ideal
and his dreams for tender friendship and honour and compassion; but the
idea of any sordid inducement mingled with these motives drove him the
length of passion. It was, however, not with any noisy demonstration,
but in a white heat of bitterness and angry resistance that he spoke.
“It will be better that we should understand each other clearly on this
point,” said Colin. “I am not your judge, to say you have done well or
ill; but it is a matter on which I may be permitted to have my own
opinion. I will not accept a shilling of your fortune. If Alice is
content to have me as I am, she shall have all the care, all the
tenderness that I can give her; but--pardon me, it is necessary to speak
plainly--I will take nothing from you.”
Colin stood up with his hand on the back of his chair, and delivered his
charge full into the breast of his unsuspecting opponent. Perhaps it was
cruel; but there are circumstances under which it is a relief to be
cruel to somebody, and the pain in his soul found for itself a certain
expression in these words. As for the unhappy victim who received them,
the sense of surprise almost deadened the effect for the moment; he
could not believe that he had heard rightly. Mr. Meredith was of the Low
Church, and was used to say every day that wealth was vanity, and that
the true treasure had to be laid up above; but still experience had not
shown him that poor young priests of any creed were generally so far
moved by these sentiments as to despise the fortune which a wife might
bring them. He was so much amazed that he gave a gasp of consternation
at the young man who thus defied him, and grew not pale but grey with an
emotion which was more wonder than anger. Mr. Meredith was not a bad
man, notwithstanding that he had ruined several households, and made
himself rich at other people’s expense; and, even had he felt the full
force of the insult personally, his anxiety about Alice would have made
him bear it. That fatherly dread and love made him for the moment a
great deal more Christian than Colin, who had thus assaulted him in the
bitterness of his heart.
“Mr. Campbell,” he replied, when he had sufficiently recovered himself
to speak, “I don’t know what you have heard about me. I don’t mean to
enter upon any defence of myself. My poor boy, I know, misunderstood
some transactions, not knowing anything about business. But, so far as I
can see, that matters very little between you and me. I have explained
to you that my conduct in reference to yourself was founded on a
mistake. I have expressed my gratitude to you in respect to my son; and
now, if we are to be more closely connected----”
“That depends upon Miss Meredith,” said Colin, hastily. “You have opened
your doors to me voluntarily, and not by my solicitation; and now it is
to _her_ that I have a right to address myself. Otherwise it would have
been better if you had not asked me to come here.”
“Yes, yes,” said Mr. Meredith. He thought he saw a doubtful gleam in
Colin’s eye, and an accent of repugnance in his voice, and he trembled
to the bottom of his heart lest perhaps, after all, he might lose this
chance of preserving his daughter. “Yes, yes,” he said with a smile,
which it cost him a little trouble to assume, and which looked horribly
out of place to Colin; “I ought to have learned by this time that it
does not do to interfere between lovers. I allow that it lies entirely
between her and you.”
He might have said a great deal more if his young hearer would have
given him time; but Colin was only too glad to escape. The word “lovers”
which Mr. Meredith used, the smile which he was so far from meaning, the
lighter tone which belied his feelings quite as much as Colin’s, drove
the young man half frantic with impatience and disgust. At last he
managed to get his will, and escaped out of doors, with the cigar which
was an excuse for his thoughts. The night was dark, and agitated by a
ghostly wind, and the country, utterly unknown, which lay round the
house in the darkness, and which neither memory nor imagination
presented to the mind of the stranger, increased the natural effect of
the gloom and the solitude. He went down through the long straight
opening of the avenue, which was a little less black than the
surrounding world, with a sensation of loneliness which was as strange
as it was painful. He did not seem to know himself or his life
henceforward any more than he knew the wild, strange country over which
the night and the wind ruled supreme. It seemed to him as if the solace
of friendship, the consolation of sympathy, were all ended for ever; he
could not talk, even to those who were most dear to him, of his
betrothed, or of his marriage--if, indeed, that was what it must come
to. He had walked up and down the avenue two or three times, from one
end to another, before even a little coherence came to his thoughts. All
was so strange and unbelievable as yet; so like a trick of magic played
upon him by some malign magician. He was not capable of thinking; but
everything passed before him like a vision, appearing and disappearing
out of the darkness. His old freedom, his impulses of revolution, the
force and fulness of life with which he was young enough to sport, even
in its most serious strength, and all the sweet wealth of imagination
that had lain hoarded up for him among the clouds--these were things
that belonged to yesterday. To-night it was another world that seemed to
lie before him in the gloom, a separate sphere from the actual world in
which he was standing. Vague limitations and restrictions which he could
not identify were awaiting him; and he saw no way of escaping, and yet
did not know how he was to bear the future thraldom.
As this ferment calmed down a little, Colin began to think of Alice,
sweet and patient, and dutiful as she always was. He even resented, for
her sake, his own indifference and repugnance, and said bitterly to
himself that it was hard that such a woman should be accepted as a
necessary burden, and not longed for as a crown of blessing; but yet,
with all that, he could not cheat his own heart, or persuade himself
that he wanted to marry her, or that it was less than the sacrifice of
all his individual hopes to enter again upon the old relationship, and
fulfil the youthful bond. When, however, he attempted to ask himself if
he could escape, the same heart which sank at the thought of this bond
baffled and stopped him in his question. He would not harm _her_, should
it kill him.
“He loved her with all love, except the love
Of men and women when they love the best.”
And it was he himself who had knitted in youthful generosity and
indiscretion the chain that now lay on his limbs like iron. Alice had
done nothing unmaidenly, nothing that in all honour and delicacy she
ought not to have done. To be sure, another man as honourable as Colin
might have given her to understand, or permitted her to find out, the
change which had taken in his sentiments. But Colin could not even
assert with any truth that his sentiments had changed. For he was almost
as conscious that she was not the woman of his imagination when he led
her home from the ilex avenue on the day which determined their fortunes
as he was now after the long separation which had not broken the link
between them. He had known in his heart that it was not broken, even
when he had most felt his freedom; and now what could he do? Perhaps
that morning, after the carriage had passed him, after the little cry of
recognition which convinced his heart, but which his mind could still
have struggled against, he might have turned back as he had once thought
of doing, and fled ignominiously. But that moment was past, and there
was nothing to be done but accept the results of his own youthful
rashness. Such were the thoughts that went through his mind as he walked
up and down the avenue between the two long lines of trees, hearing the
wind roar among the branches overhead, and feeling that henceforward
there must always be a secret in his heart, something which nobody must
discover, a secret which neither now nor any time could be breathed into
any sympathetic ear. This sense of something to conceal weighed harder
upon Colin than if it had been a crime--for there is no crime so
terrible but a human creature may entertain the hope some time of
relieving his mind of it, and breathing it into the ear of some
confidant, consecrated either by love or religion, who will not shrink
from him in consequence of that revelation. The sting of Colin’s burden
was that he could never relieve himself of it, that all the questions
raised by it must absolutely confine themselves to his own mind, and
must lie unnamed and even unsuggested between him and those friends from
whom he had never hidden anything but this.
All this he revolved in his mind as he contemplated his position. So far
from seeking sympathy, it would be his business to refuse and ignore it,
should it be given by any implication, and to seek congratulations,
felicitations, instead. All this he was going to do for Alice’s sake;
and yet he did not love Alice. He looked up at a faintly-lighted window,
where there seemed to be a shaded light as in an invalid’s room, and
thought of her with a mixture of bitterness and sweetness, of tender
affection and unconquerable reluctance, of loyalty almost fantastic and
the most painful sense of hardship, which it would be impossible to
describe. She, for her part, was lying down to rest with her heart full
of the sweetest content and thankfulness, thinking with thoughts so
different from his how her life had changed since the morning, and how
the almost-forgotten sunshine had come back again, to remain for ever.
This was how Alice was looking at the matter, and Colin knew it in his
heart. If she could but wake out of that soft paradise to see the
darkness and the turmoil in his mind! But that was what she must never
find out.
And thus Colin made up his mind, if he could ever be said to have had
any doubt in his mind, as to what was to be done. He did not even cheat
himself by the hope that anything could happen to deliver him. It was
Providence, as Alice had said. Perhaps it might come darkly into the
young man’s mind to wonder whether those severe lessons which Mr.
Meredith said he had had in his family--whether all those fatal losses
and sorrows which Alice regarded with awe, yet with a certain devout
admiration as God’s mysterious way of bringing about her own happiness,
could be designed to effect an end which did not make him happy; for, in
such a question, personal content or dissatisfaction has a great deal to
do with the way in which a man regards the tenor of Providence. Had he
been as happy as Alice was, perhaps he too would have concluded that
this was but another instance how all things work together for good.
But, as he was not happy, he plunged into a world of more painful
questions, and returned again as before, after his favourite
speculations had beguiled him for a little out of the immediate matter
in hand, to realize, as if by a flash of lightning, all the facts of the
case, and all the necessities before him. There may be many people who
will condemn Colin both for remaining indifferent to Alice, and for
remaining faithful to her in his indifference. But this is not a defence
nor eulogium of him, but simply a history. It was thus his mind acted
under the circumstances. He could conduct himself only according to his
own nature; and this is all that there is to say.
All this time Lauderdale was standing at his window, watching in the
darkness for an occasional glimpse of something moving among the trees.
He had put out his light by instinct, that Colin might not think he was
being watched. He kept looking out upon the wild tree-tops swaying about
in the wind, and upon the wilder clouds, dashed and heaped about the
sky, with a great sadness in his heart. Colin’s nature was not like his;
yet by dint of a sympathy which had been expanding and growing with the
young man’s growth, and a knowledge of him and his ways, which no one in
the world possessed to the same extent, Lauderdale had very nearly
divined what was in his friend’s heart. He divined at the same time that
he must never divine it, nor betray by word or look that such an idea
had ever entered his mind. And that was why he put his light out, and,
watching long till Colin had come in, said his prayers in the dark, and
went to rest without seeking any communication with him, though his
heart was yearning over him. It was Colin, and not Lauderdale, who was
the hero of that silent struggle. Yet perhaps there was no single pang
in the young man’s suffering so exquisite as that which thrilled through
his companion as he resigned himself to an appearance of repose, and
denied himself so much as a look at his friend, to whom he had been like
a father. At such a moment a look might have been a betrayal; and now it
was Lauderdale’s business to second Colin’s resolution--to avoid all
confidence, and to save him even from himself.