CONCLUSION
The wind was high that morning. The rain came in gray rings, through
which we worked on the fretted surface of crumbling seas, heaving up
and plunging, without an outlook.
I remember having thought of the barque Priscilla as I watched our
lithe Dalmatians slide along the drenched decks of the Verona frigate.
At night it blew a gale. I could imagine it to have been sent
providentially to brush the torture of the land from my mind, and make
me feel that men are trifles.
What are their passions, then? The storm in the clouds—even more
short-lived than the clouds.
I philosophized, but my anguish was great.
Janet's 'Good-bye, Harry,' ended everything I lived for, and seemed to
strike the day, and bring out of it the remorseless rain. A featureless
day, like those before the earth was built; like night under an angry
moon; and each day the same until we touched the edge of a southern
circle and saw light, and I could use my brain.
The matter most present to me was my injustice regarding my poor
father's speech in the City hall. He had caused me to suffer so much
that I generally felt for myself when he appealed for sympathy, or
provoked some pity: but I was past suffering, and letting kindly
recollection divest the speech of its verbiage, I took it to my heart.
It was true that he had in his blind way struck the keynote of his
position, much as I myself had conceived it before. Harsh trials had
made me think of my own fortunes more than of his. This I felt, and I
thought there never had been so moving a speech. It seemed to make the
world in debt to us. What else is so consolatory to a ruined man?
In reality the busy little creature within me, whom we call self, was
digging pits for comfort to flow in, of any kind, in any form; and it
seized on every idea, every circumstance, to turn it to that purpose,
and with such success, that when by-and-by I learnt how entirely
inactive special Providence had been in my affairs, I had to collect
myself before I could muster the conception of gratitude toward the
noble woman who clothed me in the illusion. It was to the Princess
Ottilia, acting through Count Kesensky, that I owed both my wafting
away from England at a wretched season, and that chance of a career in
Parliament! The captain of the Verona hinted as much when, after a year
of voyaging, we touched at an East Indian seaport, and von Redwitz
joined the vessel to resume the post I was occupying. Von Redwitz (the
son of Prince Ernest's Chancellor, I discovered) could have told me
more than he did, but he handed me a letter from the princess, calling
me home urgently, and even prescribing my route, and bidding me come
straight to Germany and to Sarkeld. The summons was distasteful, for I
had settled into harness under my scientific superiors, and had proved
to my messmates that I was neither morose nor over-conceited. Captain
Martinitz persuaded me to return, and besides, there lay between the
lines of Ottilia's letter a signification of welcome things better
guessed at than known. Was I not bound to do her bidding? Others had
done it: young von Redwitz, for instance, in obeying the telegraph
wires and feigning sickness to surrender his place to me, when she
wished to save me from misery by hurrying me to new scenes with a task
for my hand and head;—no mean stretch of devotion on his part. Ottilia
was still my princess; she my providence. She wrote:
'Come home, my friend Harry: you have been absent too long. He who
intercepts you to displace you has his career before him in the vessel,
and you nearer home. The home is always here where I am, but it may now
take root elsewhere, and it is from Ottilia you hear that delay is now
really loss of life. I tell you no more. You know me, that when I say
come, it is enough.'
A simple adieu and her name ended the mysterious letter. Not a word of
Prince Hermann. What had happened? I guessed at it curiously and
incessantly and only knew the nature of my suspicion by ceasing to hope
as soon as I seemed to have divined it. I did not wrong my soul's high
mistress beyond the one flash of tentative apprehension which in
perplexity struck at impossibilities. Ottilia would never have summoned
me to herself. But was Janet free? The hope which refused to live in
that other atmosphere of purest calm, sprang to full stature at the
bare thought, and would not be extinguished though all the winds beset
it. Had my girl's courage failed, to spare her at the last moment? I
fancied it might be: I was sure it was not so. Yet the doubt pressed on
me with the force of a world of unimagined shifts and chances, and just
kept the little flame alive, at times intoxicating me, though commonly
holding me back to watch its forlorn conflict with probabilities known
too well. It cost me a struggle to turn aside to Germany from the
Italian highroad.
I chose the line of the Brenner, and stopped half a day at Innsbruck to
pay a visit to Colonel Heddon, of whom I had the joyful tidings that
two of his daughters were away to go through the German form of the
betrothal of one of them to an Englishman. The turn of the tide had
come to him. And it comes to me, too, in a fresh spring tide whenever I
have to speak of others instead of this everlastingly recurring I of
the autobiographer, of which the complacent penman has felt it to be
his duty to expose the mechanism when out of action, and which, like so
many of our sins of commission, appears in the shape of a terrible
offence when the occasion for continuing it draws to a close. The
pleasant narrator in the first person is the happy bubbling fool, not
the philosopher who has come to know himself and his relations toward
the universe. The words of this last are one to twenty; his mind is
bent upon the causes of events rather than their progress. As you see
me on the page now, I stand somewhere between the two, approximating to
the former, but with sufficient of the latter within me to tame the
delightful expansiveness proper to that coming hour of marriage-bells
and bridal-wreaths. It is a sign that the end, and the delivery of
reader and writer alike, should not be dallied with.
The princess had invited Lucy Heddon to Sarkeld to meet Temple, and
Temple to meet me. Onward I flew. I saw the old woods of the
lake-palace, and, as it were, the light of my past passion waning above
them. I was greeted by the lady of all nobility with her gracious
warmth, and in his usual abrupt manful fashion by Prince Hermann. And I
had no time to reflect on the strangeness of my stepping freely under
the roof where a husband claimed Ottilia, before she led me into the
library, where sat my lost and recovered, my darling; and, unlike
herself, for a moment, she faltered in rising and breathing my name.
We were alone. I knew she was no bondwoman. The question how it had
come to pass lurked behind everything I said and did; speculation on
the visible features, and touching of the unfettered hand, restrained
me from uttering or caring to utter it. But it was wonderful. It thrust
me back on Providence again for the explanation—humbly this time. It
was wonderful and blessed, as to loving eyes the first-drawn breath of
a drowned creature restored to life. I kissed her hand. 'Wait till you
have heard everything, Harry,' she said, and her voice was deeper,
softer, exquisitely strange in its known tones, as her manner was, and
her eyes. She was not the blooming, straight-shouldered, high-breathing
girl of other days, but sister to the day of her 'Good-bye, Harry,'
pale and worn. The eyes had wept. This was Janet, haply widowed. She
wore no garb nor a shade of widowhood. Perhaps she had thrown it off,
not to offend an implacable temper in me. I said, 'I shall hear nothing
that can make you other than my own Janet—if you will?'
She smiled a little. 'We expected Temple's arrival sooner than yours,
Harry!'
'Do you take to his Lucy?'
'Yes, thoroughly.'
The perfect ring of Janet was there.
Mention of Riversley made her conversation lively, and she gave me
moderately good news of my father, quaint, out of Julia Bulsted's
latest letter to her.
'Then how long,' I asked astonished, 'how long have you been staying
with the princess?'
She answered, colouring, 'So long, that I can speak fairish German.'
'And read it easily?'
'I have actually taken to reading, Harry.'
Her courage must have quailed, and she must have been looking for me on
that morning of miserable aspect when I beheld the last of England
through wailful showers, like the scene of a burial. I did not speak of
it, fearing to hurt her pride, but said, 'Have you been here—months?'
'Yes, some months,' she replied.
'Many?'
'Yes,' she said, and dropped her eyelids, and then, with a quick look
at me, 'Wait for Temple, Harry. He is a day behind his time. We can't
account for it.'
I suggested, half in play, that perhaps he had decided, for the sake of
a sea voyage, to come by our old route to Germany on board the barque
Priscilla, with Captain Welsh.
A faint shudder passed over her. She shut her eyes and shook her head.
Our interview satisfied my heart's hunger no further. The Verona's
erratic voyage had cut me off from letters.
Janet might be a widow, for aught I knew. She was always Janet to me;
but why at liberty? why many months at Sarkeld, the guest of the
princess? Was she neither maid nor widow—a wife flown from a brutal
husband? or separated, and forcibly free? Under such conditions Ottilia
would not have commanded my return but what was I to imagine? A boiling
couple of hours divided me from the time for dressing, when, as I
meditated, I could put a chance question or two to the man commissioned
to wait on me, and hear whether the English lady was a Fräulein. The
Margravine and Prince Ernest were absent. Hermann worked in his museum,
displaying his treasures to Colonel Heddon. I sat with the ladies in
the airy look-out tower of the lake-palace, a prey to intense
speculations, which devoured themselves and changed from fire to smoke,
while I recounted the adventures of our ship's voyage, and they behaved
as if there were nothing to tell me in turn, each a sphinx holding the
secret I thirsted for. I should not certainly have thirsted much if
Janet had met me as far half-way as a delicate woman may advance. The
mystery lay in her evident affection, her apparent freedom and
unfathomable reserve, and her desire that I should see Temple before
she threw off her feminine armour, to which, judging by the
indications, Ottilia seemed to me to accede.
My old friend was spied first by his sweetheart Lucy, winding
dilatorily over the hill away from Sarkeld, in one of the carriages
sent to meet him. He was guilty of wasting a prodigious number of
minutes with his trumpery 'How d'ye do's,' and his glances and excuses,
and then I had him up in my room, and the tale was told; it was not
Temple's fault if he did not begin straightforwardly.
I plucked him from his narrator's vexatious and inevitable
commencement: 'Temple, tell me, did she go to the altar?'
He answered 'Yes!'
'She did? Then she's a widow?'
'No, she isn't,' said Temple, distracting me by submitting to the lead
I distracted him by taking.
'Then her husband's alive?'
Temple denied it, and a devil seized him to perceive some comicality in
the dialogue.
'Was she married?'
Temple said 'No,' with a lurking drollery about his lips. He added,
'It's nothing to laugh over, Richie.'
'Am I laughing? Speak out. Did Edbury come to grief overnight in any
way?'
Again Temple pronounced a negative, this time wilfully enigmatical: he
confessed it, and accused me of the provocation. He dashed some
laughter with gravity to prepare for my next assault.
'Was Edbury the one to throw up the marriage? Did he decline it?'
'No,' was the answer once more.
Temple stopped my wrath by catching at me and begging me to listen.
'Edbury was drowned, Richie.'
'Overnight?'
'No, not overnight. I can tell it all in half-a-dozen words, if you'll
be quiet; and I know you're going to be as happy as I am, or I
shouldn't trifle an instant. He went overnight on board the barque
Priscilla to see Mabel Sweetwinter, the only woman he ever could have
cared for, and he went the voyage, just as we did. He was trapped,
caged, and transported; it's a repetition, except that the poor old
Priscilla never came to land. She foundered in a storm in the North
Sea. That's all we know. Every soul perished, the captain and all. I
knew how it would be with that crew of his some day or other. Don't you
remember my saying the Priscilla was the kind of name of a vessel that
would go down with all hands, and leave a bottle to float to shore? A
gin-bottle was found on our East coast—the old captain must have
discovered in the last few moments that such things were on board—and
in it there was a paper, and the passengers' and crew's names in his
handwriting, written as if he had been sitting in his parlour at home;
over them a line—“_The Lord's will is about to be done;_” and
underneath—“_We go to His judgement resigned and cheerful_.” You know
the old captain, Richie?
Temple had tears in his eyes. We both stood blinking for a second or
two.
I could not but be curious to hear the reason for Edbury's having
determined to sail.
'Don't you understand how it was, Richie?' said Temple. 'Edbury went to
persuade her to stay, or just to see her for once, and he came to
persuasions. He seems to have been succeeding, but the captain stepped
on board and he treated Edbury as he did us two: he made him take the
voyage for discipline's sake and “his soul's health.”'
'How do you know all this, Temple?'
'You know your friend Kiomi was one of the party. The captain sent her
back on shore because he had no room for her. She told us Edbury
offered bribes of hundreds and thousands for the captain to let him and
Mabel go off in the boat with Kiomi, and then he took to begging to go
alone. He tried to rouse the crew. The poor fellow cringed, she says;
he threatened to swim off. The captain locked him up.'
My immediate reflections hit on the Bible lessons Edbury must have had
to swallow, and the gaping of the waters when its truths were suddenly
and tremendously brought home to him.
An odd series of accidents! I thought.
Temple continued: 'Heriot held his tongue about it next morning. He was
one of the guests, though he had sworn he wouldn't go. He said
something to Janet that betrayed him, for she had not seen him since.'
'How betrayed him?' said I.
'Why,' said Temple, 'of course it was Heriot who put Edbury in Kiomi's
hands. Edbury wouldn't have known of Mabel's sailing, or known the
vessel she was in, without her help. She led him down to the water and
posted him in sight before she went to Captain Welsh's; and when you
and Captain Welsh walked away, Edbury rowed to the Priscilla. Old
Heriot is not responsible for the consequences. What he supposed was
likely enough. He thought that Edbury and Mabel were much of a pair,
and thought, I suppose, that if Edbury saw her he'd find he couldn't
leave her, and old Lady Kane, who managed him, would stand nodding her
plumes for nothing at the altar. And so she did: and a pretty scene it
was. She snatched at the minutes as they slipped past twelve like
fishes, and snarled at the parson, and would have kept him standing
till one P.M., if Janet had not turned on her heel. The old woman got
in front of her to block her way. “Ah, Temple,” she said to me, “it
would be hard if I could not think I had done all that was due to
them.” I didn't see her again till she was starting for Germany. And,
Richie, she thinks you can never forgive her. She wrote me word that
the princess is of another mind, but her own opinion, she says, is
based upon knowing you.'
'Good heaven! how little!' cried I.
Temple did me a further wrong by almost thanking me on Janet's behalf
for my sustained love for her, while he praised the very qualities of
pride and a spirited sense of obligation which had reduced her to dread
my unforgivingness. Yet he and Janet had known me longest. Supposing
that my idea of myself differed from theirs for the simple reason that
I thought of what I had grown to be, and they of what I had been
through the previous years? Did I judge by the flower, and they by root
and stem? But the flower is a thing of the season; the flower drops
off: it may be a different development next year. Did they not
therefore judge me soundly?
Ottilia was the keenest reader. Ottilia had divined what could be
wrought out of me. I was still subject to the relapses of a not
perfectly right nature, as I perceived when glancing back at my thought
of 'An odd series of accidents!' which was but a disguised fashion of
attributing to Providence the particular concern, in my fortunes: an
impiety and a folly! This is the temptation of those who are rescued
and made happy by circumstances. The wretched think themselves spited,
and are merely childish, not egregious in egoism. Thither on leads to a
chapter—already written by the wise, doubtless. It does not become an
atom of humanity to dwell on it beyond a point where students of the
human condition may see him passing through the experiences of the
flesh and the brain.
Meantime, Temple and I, at two hand-basins, soaped and towelled, and I
was more discreet toward him than I have been to you, for I reserved
from him altogether the pronunciation of the council of senators in the
secret chamber of my head. Whether, indeed, I have fairly painted the
outer part of myself waxes dubious when I think of his spluttering
laugh and shout; 'Richie, you haven't changed a bit—you're just like a
boy!' Certain indications of external gravity, and a sinking of the
natural springs within characterized Temple's approach to the
responsible position of a British husband and father. We talked much of
Captain Welsh, and the sedate practical irony of his imprisoning one
like Edbury to discipline him on high seas, as well as the singular
situation of the couple of culprits under his admonishing regimen, and
the tragic end. My next two minutes alone with Janet were tempered by
it. Only my eagerness for another term of privacy persuaded her that I
was her lover instead of judge, and then, having made the discovery
that a single-minded gladness animated me in the hope that she and I
would travel together one in body and soul, she surrendered, with her
last bit of pride broken; except, it may be, a fragment of reserve
traceable in the confession that came quaintly after supreme
self-blame, when she said she was bound to tell me that
possibly—probably, were the trial to come over again, she should again
act as she had done.
Happily for us both, my wits had been sharpened enough to know that
there is more in men and women than the stuff they utter. And blessed
privilege now! if the lips were guilty of nonsense, I might stop them.
Besides, I was soon to be master upon such questions. She admitted it,
admitting with an unwonted emotional shiver, that absolute freedom
could be the worst of perils. 'For women?' said I. She preferred to
say, 'For girls,' and then 'Yes, for women, as they are educated at
present.' Spice of the princess's conversation flavoured her speech.
The signs unfamiliar about her for me were marks of the fire she had
come out of; the struggle, the torture, the determined sacrifice,
through pride's conception of duty. She was iron once. She had come out
of the fire finest steel.
'Riversley! Harry,' she murmured, and my smile, and word, and squeeze
in reply, brought back a whole gleam of the fresh English morning she
had been in face, and voice, and person.
Was it conceivable that we could go back to Riversley single?
Before that was answered she had to make a statement; and in doing it
she blushed, because it involved Edbury's name, and seemed to involve
her attachment to him; but she paid me the compliment of speaking it
frankly. It was that she had felt herself bound in honour to pay
Edbury's debts. Even by such slight means as her saying, 'Riversley,
Harry,' and my kiss of her fingers when a question of money was in
debate, did we burst aside the vestiges of mutual strangeness, and
recognize one another, but with an added warmth of love. When I pleaded
for the marriage to be soon, she said, 'I wish it, Harry.'
Sentiment you do not obtain from a Damascus blade. She most cordially
despised the ladies who parade and play on their sex, and are for ever
acting according to the feminine standard:—a dangerous stretch of
contempt for one less strong than she.
Riding behind her and Temple one day with the princess, I said, 'What
takes you most in Janet?'
She replied, 'Her courage. And it is of a kind that may knot up every
other virtue worth having. I have impulses, and am capable of
desperation, but I have no true courage: so I envy and admire, even if
I have to blame her; for I know that this possession of hers, which
identifies her and marks her from the rest of us, would bear the ordeal
of fire. I can imagine the qualities I have most pride in withering and
decaying under a prolonged trial. I cannot conceive her courage
failing. Perhaps because I have it not myself I think it the rarest of
precious gifts. It seems to me to imply one half, and to dispense with
the other.'
I have lived to think that Ottilia was right. As nearly right, too, in
the wording of her opinion as one may be in three or four sentences
designed to be comprehensive.
My Janet's readiness to meet calamity was shown ere we reached home
upon an evening of the late autumn, and set eye on a scene, for her the
very saddest that could have been devised to test her spirit of
endurance, when, driving up the higher heath-land, we saw the dark sky
ominously reddened over Riversley, and, mounting the ridge, had the
funeral flames of the old Grange dashed in our faces. The blow was
evil, sudden, unaccountable. Villagers, tenants, farm-labourers, groups
of a deputation that had gone to the railway station to give us
welcome; and returned, owing to a delay in our arrival, stood gazing
from all quarters. The Grange was burning in two great wings, that
soared in flame-tips and columns of crimson smoke, leaving the central
hall and chambers untouched as yet, but alive inside with mysterious
ranges of lights, now curtained, now made bare—a feeble contrast to the
savage blaze to right and left, save for the wonder aroused as to its
significance. These were soon cloaked. Dead sable reigned in them, and
at once a jet of flame gave the whole vast building to destruction. My
wife thrust her hand in mine. Fire at the heart, fire at the wings—our
old home stood in that majesty of horror which freezes the limbs of
men, bidding them look and no more.
'What has Riversley done to deserve this?' I heard Janet murmur to
herself. 'His room!' she said, when at the South-east wing, where my
old grandfather had slept, there burst a glut of flame. We dove down to
the park and along the carriage-road to the first red line of gazers.
They told us that no living creatures were in the house. My aunt
Dorothy was at Bulsted. I perceived my father's man Tollingby among the
servants, and called him to me; others came, and out of a clatter of
tongues, and all eyes fearfully askant at the wall of fire, we gathered
that a great reception had been prepared for us by my father: lamps,
lights in all the rooms, torches in the hall, illuminations along the
windows, stores of fireworks, such a display as only he could have
dreamed of. The fire had broken out at dusk, from an explosion of
fireworks at one wing and some inexplicable mismanagement at the other.
But the house must have been like a mine, what with the powder, the
torches, the devices in paper and muslin, and the extraordinary
decorations fitted up to celebrate our return in harmony with my
father's fancy.
Gentlemen on horseback dashed up to us. Captain Bulsted seized my hand.
He was hot from a ride to fetch engines, and sang sharp in my ear,
'Have you got him?' It was my father he meant. The cry rose for my
father, and the groups were agitated and split, and the name of the
missing man, without an answer to it, shouted. Captain Bulsted had left
him bravely attempting to quench the flames after the explosion of
fireworks. He rode about, interrogating the frightened servants and
grooms holding horses and dogs. They could tell us that the cattle were
safe, not a word of my father; and amid shrieks of women at fresh falls
of timber and ceiling into the pit of fire, and warnings from the men,
we ran the heated circle of the building to find a loophole and offer
aid if a living soul should be left; the night around us bright as day,
busier than day, and a human now added to elemental horror. Janet would
not quit her place. She sent her carriage-horses to Bulsted, and sat in
the carriage to see the last of burning Riversley. Each time that I
came to her she folded her arms on my neck and kissed me silently.
We gathered from the subsequent testimony of men and women of the
household who had collected their wits, that my father must have
remained in the doomed old house to look to the safety of my aunt
Dorothy. He was never seen again.