When Argemone rose in the morning, her first thought was of
Lancelot. His face haunted her. The wild brilliance of his
intellect struggling through foul smoke-clouds, had haunted her
still more. She had heard of his profligacy, his bursts of fierce
Berserk-madness; and yet now these very faults, instead of
repelling, seemed to attract her, and intensify her longing to save
him. She would convert him; purify him; harmonise his discords.
And that very wish gave her a peace she had never felt before. She
had formed her idea; she had now a purpose for which to live, and
she determined to concentrate herself for the work, and longed for
the moment when she should meet Lancelot, and begin--how, she did
not very clearly see.
It is an old jest--the fair devotee trying to convert the young
rake. Men of the world laugh heartily at it; and so does the devil,
no doubt. If any readers wish to be fellow-jesters with that
personage, they may; but, as sure as old Saxon women-worship remains
for ever a blessed and healing law of life, the devotee may yet
convert the rake--and, perhaps, herself into the bargain.
Argemone looked almost angrily round at her beloved books and
drawings; for they spoke a message to her which they had never
spoken before, of self-centred ambition. 'Yes,' she said aloud to
herself, 'I have been selfish, utterly! Art, poetry, science--I
believe, after all, that I have only loved them for my own sake, not
for theirs, because they would make me something, feed my conceit of
my own talents. How infinitely more glorious to find my work-field
and my prize, not in dead forms and colours, or ink-and-paper
theories, but in a living, immortal, human spirit! I will study no
more, except the human heart, and only that to purify and ennoble
it.'
True, Argemone; and yet, like all resolutions, somewhat less than
the truth. That morning, indeed, her purpose was simple as God's
own light. She never dreamed of exciting Lancelot's admiration,
even his friendship for herself. She would have started as from a
snake, from the issue which the reader very clearly foresees, that
Lancelot would fall in love, not with Young Englandism, but with
Argemone Lavington. But yet self is not eradicated even from a
woman's heart in one morning before breakfast. Besides, it is not
'benevolence,' but love--the real Cupid of flesh and blood, who can
first
'Touch the chord of self which, trembling,
Passes in music out of sight.'
But a time for all things; and it is now time for Argemone to go
down to breakfast, having prepared some dozen imaginary dialogues
between herself and Lancelot, in which, of course, her eloquence
always had the victory. She had yet to learn, that it is better
sometimes not to settle in one's heart what we shall speak, for the
Everlasting Will has good works ready prepared for us to walk in, by
what we call fortunate accident; and it shall be given us in that
day and that hour what we shall speak.
Lancelot, in the meantime, shrank from meeting Argemone; and was
quite glad of the weakness which kept him upstairs. Whether he was
afraid of her--whether he was ashamed of himself or of his crutches,
I cannot tell, but I daresay, reader, you are getting tired of all
this soul-dissecting. So we will have a bit of action again, for
the sake of variety, if for nothing better.
Of all the species of lovely scenery which England holds, none,
perhaps, is more exquisite than the banks of the chalk-rivers--the
perfect limpidity of the water, the gay and luxuriant vegetation of
the banks and ditches, the masses of noble wood embosoming the
villages, the unique beauty of the water-meadows, living sheets of
emerald and silver, tinkling and sparkling, cool under the fiercest
sun, brilliant under the blackest clouds.--There, if anywhere, one
would have expected to find Arcadia among fertility, loveliness,
industry, and wealth. But, alas for the sad reality! the cool
breath of those glittering water-meadows too often floats laden with
poisonous miasma. Those picturesque villages are generally the
perennial hotbeds of fever and ague, of squalid penury, sottish
profligacy, dull discontent too stale for words. There is luxury in
the park, wealth in the huge farm-steadings, knowledge in the
parsonage: but the poor? those by whose dull labour all that luxury
and wealth, ay, even that knowledge, is made possible--what are
they? We shall see, please God, ere the story's end.
But of all this Lancelot as yet thought nothing. He, too, had to be
emancipated, as much as Argemone, from selfish dreams; to learn to
work trustfully in the living Present, not to gloat sentimentally
over the unreturning Past. But his time was not yet come; and
little he thought of all the work which lay ready for him within a
mile of the Priory, as he watched the ladies go out for the
afternoon, and slipped down to the Nun's-pool on his crutches to
smoke and fish, and build castles in the air.
The Priory, with its rambling courts and gardens, stood on an island
in the river. The upper stream flowed in a straight artificial
channel through the garden, still and broad, towards the Priory
mill; while just above the Priory wall half the river fell over a
high weir, with all its appendages of bucks and hatchways, and eel-
baskets, into the Nun's-pool, and then swept round under the ivied
walls, with their fantastic turrets and gables, and little loopholed
windows, peering out over the stream, as it hurried down over the
shallows to join the race below the mill. A postern door in the
walls opened on an ornamental wooden bridge across the weir-head--a
favourite haunt of all fishers and sketchers who were admitted to
the dragon-guarded Elysium of Whitford Priors. Thither Lancelot
went, congratulating himself, strange to say, in having escaped the
only human being whom he loved on earth.
He found on the weir-bridge two of the keepers. The younger one,
Tregarva, was a stately, thoughtful-looking Cornishman, some six
feet three in height, with thews and sinews in proportion. He was
sitting on the bridge looking over a basket of eel-lines, and
listening silently to the chat of his companion.
Old Harry Verney, the other keeper, was a character in his way, and
a very bad character too, though he was a patriarch among all the
gamekeepers of the vale. He was a short, wiry, bandy-legged,
ferret-visaged old man, with grizzled hair, and a wizened face
tanned brown and purple by constant exposure. Between rheumatism
and constant handling the rod and gun, his fingers were crooked like
a hawk's claws. He kept his left eye always shut, apparently to
save trouble in shooting; and squinted, and sniffed, and peered,
with a stooping back and protruded chin, as if he were perpetually
on the watch for fish, flesh, and fowl, vermin and Christian. The
friendship between himself and the Scotch terrier at his heels would
have been easily explained by Lessing, for in the transmigration of
souls the spirit of Harry Verney had evidently once animated a dog
of that breed. He was dressed in a huge thick fustian jacket,
scratched, stained, and patched, with bulging, greasy pockets; a
cast of flies round a battered hat, riddled with shot-holes, a dog-
whistle at his button-hole, and an old gun cut short over his arm,
bespoke his business.
'I seed that 'ere Crawy against Ashy Down Plantations last night,
I'll be sworn,' said he, in a squeaking, sneaking tone.
'Well, what harm was the man doing?'
'Oh, ay, that's the way you young 'uns talk. If he warn't doing
mischief, he'd a been glad to have been doing it, I'll warrant. If
I'd been as young as you, I'd have picked a quarrel with him soon
enough, and found a cause for tackling him. It's worth a brace of
sovereigns with the squire to haul him up. Eh? eh? Ain't old Harry
right now?'
'Humph!' growled the younger man.
'There, then, you get me a snare and a hare by to-morrow night,'
went on old Harry, 'and see if I don't nab him. It won't lay long
under the plantation afore he picks it up. You mind to snare me a
hare to-night, now!'
'I'll do no such thing, nor help to bring fake accusations against
any man!'
'False accusations!' answered Harry, in his cringing way. 'Look at
that now, for a keeper to say! Why, if he don't happen to have a
snare just there, he has somewhere else, you know. Eh? Ain't old
Harry right now, eh?'
'Maybe.'
'There, don't say I don't know nothing then. Eh? What matter who
put the snare down, or the hare in, perwided he takes it up, man?
If 'twas his'n he'd be all the better pleased. The most
notoriousest poacher as walks unhung!' And old Harry lifted up his
crooked hands in pious indignation.
'I'll have no more gamekeeping, Harry. What with hunting down
Christians as if they were vermin, all night, and being cursed by
the squire all day, I'd sooner be a sheriff's runner, or a negro
slave.'
'Ay, ay! that's the way the young dogs always bark afore they're
broke in, and gets to like it, as the eels does skinning. Haven't I
bounced pretty near out of my skin many a time afore now, on this
here very bridge, with "Harry, jump in, you stupid hound!" and
"Harry, get out, you one-eyed tailor!" And then, if one of the
gentlemen lost a fish with their clumsiness--Oh, Father! to hear 'em
let out at me and my landing-net, and curse fit to fright the devil!
Dash their sarcy tongues! Eh! Don't old Harry know their ways?
Don't he know 'em, now?'
'Ay,' said the young man, bitterly. 'We break the dogs, and we load
the guns, and we find the game, and mark the game,--and then they
call themselves sportsmen; we choose the flies, and we bait the
spinning-hooks, and we show them where the fish lie, and then when
they've hooked them, they can't get them out without us and the
spoonnet; and then they go home to the ladies and boast of the lot
of fish they killed--and who thinks of the keeper?'
'Oh! ah! Then don't say old Harry knows nothing, then. How nicely,
now, you and I might get a living off this 'ere manor, if the
landlords was served like the French ones was. Eh, Paul?' chuckled
old Harry. 'Wouldn't we pay our taxes with pheasants and grayling,
that's all, eh? Ain't old Harry right now, eh?'
The old fox was fishing for an assent, not for its own sake, for he
was a fierce Tory, and would have stood up to be shot at any day,
not only for his master's sake, but for the sake of a single
pheasant of his master's; but he hated Tregarva for many reasons,
and was daily on the watch to entrap him on some of his peculiar
points, whereof he had, as we shall find, a good many.
What would have been Tregarva's answer, I cannot tell; but Lancelot,
who had unintentionally overheard the greater part of the
conversation, disliked being any longer a listener, and came close
to them.
'Here's your gudgeons and minnows, sir, as you bespoke,' quoth
Harry; 'and here's that paternoster as you gave me to rig up.
Beautiful minnows, sir, white as a silver spoon.--They're the ones
now, ain't they, sir, eh?'
'They'll do!'
'Well, then, don't say old Harry don't know nothing, that's all,
eh?' and the old fellow toddled off, peering and twisting his head
about like a starling.
'An odd old fellow that, Tregarva,' said Lancelot.
'Very, sir, considering who made him,' answered the Cornishman,
touching his hat, and then thrusting his nose deeper than ever into
the eel-basket.
'Beautiful stream this,' said Lancelot, who had a continual longing-
-right or wrong--to chat with his inferiors; and was proportionately
sulky and reserved to his superiors.
'Beautiful enough, sir,' said the keeper, with an emphasis on the
first word.
'Why, has it any other fault?'
'Not so wholesome as pretty, sir.'
'What harm does it do?'
'Fever, and ague, and rheumatism, sir.'
'Where?' asked Lancelot, a little amused by the man's laconic
answers.
'Wherever the white fog spreads, sir.'
'Where's that?'
'Everywhere, sir.'
'And when?'
'Always, sir.'
Lancelot burst out laughing. The man looked up at him slowly and
seriously.
'You wouldn't laugh, sir, if you'd seen much of the inside of these
cottages round.'
'Really,' said Lancelot, 'I was only laughing at our making such
very short work of such a long and serious story. Do you mean that
the unhealthiness of this country is wholly caused by the river?'
'No, sir. The river-damps are God's sending; and so they are not
too bad to bear. But there's more of man's sending, that is too bad
to bear.'
'What do you mean?'
'Are men likely to be healthy when they are worse housed than a
pig?'
'No.'
'And worse fed than a hound?'
'Good heavens! No!'
'Or packed together to sleep, like pilchards in a barrel?'
'But, my good fellow, do you mean that the labourers here are in
that state?'
'It isn't far to walk, sir. Perhaps some day, when the May-fly is
gone off, and the fish won't rise awhile, you could walk down and
see. I beg your pardon, sir, though, for thinking of such a thing.
They are not places fit for gentlemen, that's certain.' There was a
staid irony in his tone, which Lancelot felt.
'But the clergyman goes?'
'Yes, sir.'
'And Miss Honoria goes?'
'Yes, God Almighty bless her!'
'And do not they see that all goes right?'
The giant twisted his huge limbs, as if trying to avoid an answer,
and yet not daring to do so.
'Do clergymen go about among the poor much, sir, at college, before
they are ordained?'
Lancelot smiled, and shook his head.
'I thought so, sir. Our good vicar is like the rest hereabouts.
God knows, he stints neither time nor money--the souls of the poor
are well looked after, and their bodies too--as far as his purse
will go; but that's not far.'
'Is he ill-off, then?'
'The living's worth some forty pounds a year. The great tithes,
they say, are worth better than twelve hundred; but Squire Lavington
has them.'
'Oh, I see!' said Lancelot.
'I'm glad you do, sir, for I don't,' meekly answered Tregarva. 'But
the vicar, sir, he is a kind man, and a good; but the poor don't
understand him, nor he them. He is too learned, sir, and, saving
your presence, too fond of his prayer-book.'
'One can't be too fond of a good thing.'
'Not unless you make an idol of it, sir, and fancy that men's souls
were made for the prayer-book, and not the prayer-book for them.'
'But cannot he expose and redress these evils, if they exist?'
Tregarva twisted about again.
'I do not say that I think it, sir; but this I know, that every poor
man in the vale thinks it--that the parsons are afraid of the
landlords. They must see these things, for they are not blind; and
they try to plaster them up out of their own pockets.'
'But why, in God's name, don't they strike at the root of the
matter, and go straight to the landlords and tell them the truth?'
asked Lancelot.
'So people say, sir. I see no reason for it except the one which I
gave you. Besides, sir, you must remember, that a man can't quarrel
with his own kin; and so many of them are their squire's brothers,
or sons, or nephews.'
'Or good friends with him, at least.'
'Ay, sir, and, to do them justice, they had need, for the poor's
sake, to keep good friends with the squire. How else are they to
get a farthing for schools, or coal-subscriptions, or lying-in
societies, or lending libraries, or penny clubs? If they spoke
their minds to the great ones, sir, how could they keep the parish
together?'
'You seem to see both sides of a question, certainly. But what a
miserable state of things, that the labouring man should require all
these societies, and charities, and helps from the rich!--that an
industrious freeman cannot live without alms!'
'So I have thought this long time,' quietly answered Tregarva.
'But Miss Honoria,--she is not afraid to tell her father the truth?'
'Suppose, sir, when Adam and Eve were in the garden, that all the
devils had come up and played their fiends' tricks before them,--do
you think they'd have seen any shame in it?'
'I really cannot tell,' said Lancelot, smiling.
'Then I can, sir. They'd have seen no more harm in it than there
was harm already in themselves; and that was none. A man's eyes can
only see what they've learnt to see.'
Lancelot started: it was a favourite dictum of his in Carlyle's
works.
'Where did you get that thought, my friend'
'By seeing, sir.'
'But what has that to do with Miss Honoria?'
'She is an angel of holiness herself, sir; and, therefore, she goes
on without blushing or suspecting, where our blood would boil again.
She sees people in want, and thinks it must be so, and pities them
and relieves them. But she don't know want herself; and, therefore,
she don't know that it makes men beasts and devils. She's as pure
as God's light herself; and, therefore, she fancies every one is as
spotless as she is. And there's another mistake in your charitable
great people, sir. When they see poor folk sick or hungry before
their eyes, they pull out their purses fast enough, God bless them;
for they wouldn't like to be so themselves. But the oppression that
goes on all the year round, and the want that goes on all the year
round, and the filth, and the lying, and the swearing, and the
profligacy, that go on all the year round, and the sickening weight
of debt, and the miserable grinding anxiety from rent-day to rent-
day, and Saturday night to Saturday night, that crushes a man's soul
down, and drives every thought out of his head but how he is to fill
his stomach and warm his back, and keep a house over his head, till
he daren't for his life take his thoughts one moment off the meat
that perisheth--oh, sir, they never felt this; and, therefore, they
never dream that there are thousands who pass them in their daily
walks who feel this, and feel nothing else!'
This outburst was uttered with an earnestness and majesty which
astonished Lancelot. He forgot the subject in the speaker.
'You are a very extraordinary gamekeeper!' said he.
'When the Lord shows a man a thing, he can't well help seeing it,'
answered Tregarva, in his usual staid tone.
There was a pause. The keeper looked at him with a glance, before
which Lancelot's eyes fell.
'Hell is paved with hearsays, sir, and as all this talk of mine is
hearsay, if you are in earnest, sir, go and see for yourself. I
know you have a kind heart, and they tell me that you are a great
scholar, which would to God I was! so you ought not to condescend to
take my word for anything which you can look into yourself;' with
which sound piece of common-sense Tregarva returned busily to his
eel-lines.
'Hand me the rod and can, and help me out along the buck-stage,'
said Lancelot; 'I must have some more talk with you, my fine
fellow.'
'Amen,' answered Tregarva, as he assisted our lame hero along a huge
beam which stretched out into the pool; and having settled him
there, returned mechanically to his work, humming a Wesleyan hymn-
tune.
Lancelot sat and tried to catch perch, but Tregarva's words haunted
him. He lighted his cigar, and tried to think earnestly over the
matter, but he had got into the wrong place for thinking. All his
thoughts, all his sympathies, were drowned in the rush and whirl of
the water. He forgot everything else in the mere animal enjoyment
of sight and sound. Like many young men at his crisis of life, he
had given himself up to the mere contemplation of Nature till he had
become her slave; and now a luscious scene, a singing bird, were
enough to allure his mind away from the most earnest and awful
thoughts. He tried to think, but the river would not let him. It
thundered and spouted out behind him from the hatches, and leapt
madly past him, and caught his eyes in spite of him, and swept them
away down its dancing waves, and let them go again only to sweep
them down again and again, till his brain felt a delicious dizziness
from the everlasting rush and the everlasting roar. And then below,
how it spread, and writhed, and whirled into transparent fans,
hissing and twining snakes, polished glass-wreaths, huge crystal
bells, which boiled up from the bottom, and dived again beneath long
threads of creamy foam, and swung round posts and roots, and rushed
blackening under dark weed-fringed boughs, and gnawed at the marly
banks, and shook the ever-restless bulrushes, till it was swept away
and down over the white pebbles and olive weeds, in one broad
rippling sheet of molten silver, towards the distant sea. Downwards
it fleeted ever, and bore his thoughts floating on its oily stream;
and the great trout, with their yellow sides and peacock backs,
lounged among the eddies, and the silver grayling dimpled and
wandered upon the shallows, and the may-flies flickered and rustled
round him like water fairies, with their green gauzy wings; the coot
clanked musically among the reeds; the frogs hummed their ceaseless
vesper-monotone; the kingfisher darted from his hole in the bank
like a blue spark of electric light; the swallows' bills snapped as
they twined and hawked above the pool; the swift's wings whirred
like musket-balls, as they rushed screaming past his head; and ever
the river fleeted by, bearing his eyes away down the current, till
its wild eddies began to glow with crimson beneath the setting sun.
The complex harmony of sights and sounds slid softly over his soul,
and he sank away into a still daydream, too passive for imagination,
too deep for meditation, and
'Beauty born of murmuring sound,
Did pass into his face.'
Blame him not. There are more things in a man's heart than ever get
in through his thoughts.
On a sudden, a soft voice behind him startled him.
'Can a poor cockney artist venture himself along this timber without
falling in?'
Lancelot turned.
'Come out to me, and if you stumble, the naiads will rise out of
their depths, and "hold up their pearled wrists" to save their
favourite.'
The artist walked timidly out along the beams, and sat down beside
Lancelot, who shook him warmly by the hand.
'Welcome, Claude Mellot, and all lovely enthusiasms and symbolisms!
Expound to me, now, the meaning of that water-lily leaf and its
grand simple curve, as it lies sleeping there in the back eddy.'
'Oh, I am too amused to philosophise. The fair Argemone has just
been treating me to her three hundred and sixty-fifth philippic
against my unoffending beard.'
'Why, what fault can she find with such a graceful and natural
ornament?'
'Just this, my dear fellow, that it is natural. As it is, she
considers me only "intelligent-looking." If the beard were away, my
face, she says, would be "so refined!" And, I suppose, if I was
just a little more effeminate and pale, with a nice retreating
under-jaw and a drooping lip, and a meek, peaking simper, like your
starved Romish saints, I should be "so spiritual!" And if, again,
to complete the climax, I did but shave my head like a Chinese, I
should be a model for St. Francis himself!'
'But really, after all, why make yourself so singular by this said
beard?'
'I wear it for a testimony and a sign that a man has no right to be
ashamed of the mark of manhood. Oh, that one or two of your
Protestant clergymen, who ought to be perfect ideal men, would have
the courage to get up into the pulpit in a long beard, and testify
that the very essential idea of Protestantism is the dignity and
divinity of man as God made him! Our forefathers were not ashamed
of their beards; but now even the soldier is only allowed to keep
his moustache, while our quill-driving masses shave themselves as
close as they can; and in proportion to a man's piety he wears less
hair, from the young curate who shaves off his whiskers, to the
Popish priest who shaves his crown!'
'What do you say, then, to cutting off nuns' hair?'
'I say, that extremes meet, and prudish Manichaeism always ends in
sheer indecency. Those Papists have forgotten what woman was made
for, and therefore, they have forgotten that a woman's hair is her
glory, for it was given to her for a covering: as says your friend,
Paul the Hebrew, who, by the bye, had as fine theories of art as he
had of society, if he had only lived fifteen hundred years later,
and had a chance of working them out.'
'How remarkably orthodox you are!' said Lancelot, smiling.
'How do you know that I am not? You never heard me deny the old
creed. But what if an artist ought to be of all creeds at once? My
business is to represent the beautiful, and therefore to accept it
wherever I find it. Yours is to be a philosopher, and find the
true.'
'But the beautiful must be truly beautiful to be worth anything; and
so you, too, must search for the true.'
'Yes; truth of form, colour, chiaroscuro. They are worthy to occupy
me a life; for they are eternal--or at least that which they
express: and if I am to get at the symbolised unseen, it must be
through the beauty of the symbolising phenomenon. If I, who live by
art, for art, in art, or you either, who seem as much a born artist
as myself, am to have a religion, it must be a worship of the
fountain of art--of the
"Spirit of beauty, who doth consecrate
With his own hues whate'er he shines upon."'
'As poor Shelley has it; and much peace of mind it gave him!'
answered Lancelot. 'I have grown sick lately of such dreary tinsel
abstractions. When you look through the glitter of the words, your
"spirit of beauty" simply means certain shapes and colours which
please you in beautiful things and in beautiful people.'
'Vile nominalist! renegade from the ideal and all its glories!' said
Claude, laughing.
'I don't care sixpence now for the ideal! I want not beauty, but
some beautiful thing--a woman perhaps,' and he sighed. 'But at
least a person--a living, loving person--all lovely itself, and
giving loveliness to all things! If I must have an ideal, let it
be, for mercy's sake, a realised one.'
Claude opened his sketch-book.
'We shall get swamped in these metaphysical oceans, my dear dreamer.
But lo, here come a couple, as near ideals as any in these
degenerate days--the two poles of beauty: the milieu of which would
be Venus with us Pagans, or the Virgin Mary with the Catholics.
Look at them! Honoria the dark--symbolic of passionate depth;
Argemone the fair, type of intellectual light! Oh, that I were a
Zeuxis to unite them instead of having to paint them in two separate
pictures, and split perfection in half, as everything is split in
this piecemeal world!'
'You will have the honour of a sitting this afternoon, I suppose,
from both beauties?'
'I hope so, for my own sake. There is no path left to immortality,
or bread either, now for us poor artists but portrait-painting.'
'I envy you your path, when it leads through such Elysiums,' said
Lancelot.
'Come here, gentlemen both!' cried Argemone from the bridge.
'Fairly caught!' grumbled Lancelot. 'You must go, at least; my
lameness will excuse me, I hope.'
The two ladies were accompanied by Bracebridge, a gazelle which he
had given Argemone, and a certain miserable cur of Honoria's
adopting, who plays an important part in this story, and, therefore,
deserves a little notice. Honoria had rescued him from a watery
death in the village pond, by means of the colonel, who had revenged
himself for a pair of wet feet by utterly corrupting the dog's
morals, and teaching him every week to answer to some fresh
scandalous name.
But Lancelot was not to escape. Instead of moving on, as he had
hoped, the party stood looking over the bridge, and talking--he took
for granted, poor thin-skinned fellow--of him. And for once his
suspicions were right; for he overheard Argemone say--
'I wonder how Mr. Smith can be so rude as to sit there in my
presence over his stupid perch! Smoking those horrid cigars, too!
How selfish those field-sports do make men!'
'Thank you!' said the colonel, with a low bow. Lancelot rose.
'If a country girl, now, had spoken in that tone,' said he to
himself, 'it would have been called at least "saucy"--but Mammon's
elect ones may do anything. Well--here I come, limping to my new
tyrant's feet, like Goethe's bear to Lili's.'
She drew him away, as women only know how, from the rest of the
party, who were chatting and laughing with Claude. She had shown
off her fancied indifference to Lancelot before them, and now began
in a softer voice--
'Why will you be so shy and lonely, Mr. Smith?'
'Because I am not fit for your society.'
'Who tells you so? Why will you not become so?'
Lancelot hung down his head.
'As long as fish and game are your only society, you will become
more and more morne and self-absorbed.'
'Really fish were the last things of which I was thinking when you
came. My whole heart was filled with the beauty of nature, and
nothing else.'
There was an opening for one of Argemone's preconcerted orations.
'Had you no better occupation,' she said gently, 'than nature, the
first day of returning to the open air after so frightful and
dangerous an accident? Were there no thanks due to One above?'
Lancelot understood her.
'How do you know that I was not even then showing my thankfulness?'
'What! with a cigar and a fishing-rod?'
'Certainly. Why not?'
Argemone really could not tell at the moment. The answer upset her
scheme entirely.
'Might not that very admiration of nature have been an act of
worship?' continued our hero. 'How can we better glorify the worker
than by delighting in his work?'
'Ah!' sighed the lady, 'why trust to these self-willed methods, and
neglect the noble and exquisite forms which the Church has prepared
for us as embodiments for every feeling of our hearts?'
'EVERY feeling, Miss Lavington?'
Argemone hesitated. She had made the good old stock assertion, as
in duty bound; but she could not help recollecting that there were
several Popish books of devotion at that moment on her table, which
seemed to her to patch a gap or two in the Prayer-book.
'My temple as yet,' said Lancelot, 'is only the heaven and the
earth; my church-music I can hear all day long, whenever I have the
sense to be silent, and "hear my mother sing;" my priests and
preachers are every bird and bee, every flower and cloud. Am I not
well enough furnished? Do you want to reduce my circular infinite
chapel to an oblong hundred-foot one? My sphere harmonies to the
Gregorian tones in four parts? My world-wide priesthood, with their
endless variety of costume, to one not over-educated gentleman in a
white sheet? And my dreams of naiads and flower-fairies, and the
blue-bells ringing God's praises, as they do in "The story without
an End," for the gross reality of naughty charity children, with
their pockets full of apples, bawling out Hebrew psalms of which
they neither feel nor understand a word?'
Argemone tried to look very much shocked at this piece of bombast.
Lancelot evidently meant it as such, but he eyed her all the while
as if there was solemn earnest under the surface.
'Oh, Mr. Smith!' she said, 'how can you dare talk so of a liturgy
compiled by the wisest and holiest of all countries and ages! You
revile that of whose beauty you are not qualified to judge!'
'There must be a beauty in it all, or such as you are would not love
it.'
'Oh,' she said hopefully, 'that you would but try the Church system!
How you would find it harmonise and methodise every day, every
thought for you! But I cannot explain myself. Why not go to our
vicar and open your doubts to him?'
'Pardon, but you must excuse me.'
'Why? He is one of the saintliest of men!'
'To tell the truth, I have been to him already.'
'You do not mean it! And what did he tell you?'
'What the rest of the world does--hearsays.'
'But did you not find him most kind?'
'I went to him to be comforted and guided. He received me as a
criminal. He told me that my first duty was penitence; that as long
as I lived the life I did, he could not dare to cast his pearls
before swine by answering my doubts; that I was in a state incapable
of appreciating spiritual truths; and, therefore, he had no right to
tell me any.'
'And what did he tell you?'
'Several spiritual lies instead, I thought. He told me, hearing me
quote Schiller, to beware of the Germans, for they were all
Pantheists at heart. I asked him whether he included Lange and
Bunsen, and it appeared that he had never read a German book in his
life. He then flew furiously at Mr. Carlyle, and I found that all
he knew of him was from a certain review in the Quarterly. He
called Boehmen a theosophic Atheist. I should have burst out at
that, had I not read the very words in a High Church review the day
before, and hoped that he was not aware of the impudent falsehood
which he was retailing. Whenever I feebly interposed an objection
to anything he said (for, after all, he talked on), he told me to
hear the Catholic Church. I asked him which Catholic Church? He
said the English. I asked him whether it was to be the Church of
the sixth century, or the thirteenth, or the seventeenth or the
eighteenth? He told me the one and eternal Church which belonged as
much to the nineteenth century as to the first. I begged to know
whether, then, I was to hear the Church according to Simeon, or
according to Newman, or according to St. Paul; for they seemed to me
a little at variance? He told me, austerely enough, that the mind
of the Church was embodied in her Liturgy and Articles. To which I
answered, that the mind of the episcopal clergy might, perhaps, be;
but, then, how happened it that they were always quarrelling and
calling hard names about the sense of those very documents? And so
I left him, assuring him that, living in the nineteenth century, I
wanted to hear the Church of the nineteenth century, and no other;
and should be most happy to listen to her, as soon as she had made
up her mind what to say.'
Argemone was angry and disappointed. She felt she could not cope
with Lancelot's quaint logic, which, however unsound, cut deeper
into questions than she had yet looked for herself. Somehow, too,
she was tongue-tied before him just when she wanted to be most
eloquent in behalf of her principles; and that fretted her still
more. But his manner puzzled her most of all. First he would run
on with his face turned away, as if soliloquising out into the air,
and then suddenly look round at her with most fascinating humility;
and, then, in a moment, a dark shade would pass over his
countenance, and he would look like one possessed, and his lips
wreathe in a sinister artificial smile, and his wild eyes glare
through and through her with such cunning understanding of himself
and her, that, for the first time in her life, she quailed and felt
frightened, as if in the power of a madman. She turned hastily away
to shake off the spell.
He sprang after her, almost on his knees, and looked up into her
beautiful face with an imploring cry.
'What, do you, too, throw me off? Will you, too, treat the poor
wild uneducated sportsman as a Pariah and an outcast, because he is
not ashamed to be a man?--because he cannot stuff his soul's hunger
with cut-and-dried hearsays, but dares to think for himself?--
because he wants to believe things, and dare not be satisfied with
only believing that he ought to believe them?'
She paused, astonished.
'Ah, yes,' he went on, 'I hoped too much! What right had I to
expect that you would understand me? What right, still more, to
expect that you would stoop, any more than the rest of the world, to
speak to me, as if I could become anything better than the wild hog
I seem? Oh yes!--the chrysalis has no butterfly in it, of course!
Stamp on the ugly motionless thing! And yet--you look so beautiful
and good!--are all my dreams to perish, about the Alrunen and
prophet-maidens, how they charmed our old fighting, hunting
forefathers into purity and sweet obedience among their Saxon
forests? Has woman forgotten her mission--to look at the heart and
have mercy, while cold man looks at the act and condemns? Do you,
too, like the rest of mankind, think no-belief better than
misbelief; and smile on hypocrisy, lip-assent, practical Atheism,
sooner than on the unpardonable sin of making a mistake? Will you,
like the rest of this wise world, let a man's spirit rot asleep into
the pit, if he will only lie quiet and not disturb your smooth
respectabilities; but if he dares, in waking, to yawn in an
unorthodox manner, knock him on the head at once, and "break the
bruised reed," and "quench the smoking flax"? And yet you
churchgoers have "renounced the world"!'
'What do you want, in Heaven's name?' asked Argemone, half
terrified.
'I want YOU to tell me that. Here I am, with youth, health,
strength, money, every blessing of life but one; and I am utterly
miserable. I want some one to tell me what I want.'
'Is it not that you want--religion?'
'I see hundreds who have what you call religion, with whom I should
scorn to change my irreligion.'
'But, Mr. Smith, are you not--are you not wicked?--They tell me so,'
said Argemone, with an effort, 'And is that not the cause of your
disease?'
Lancelot laughed.
'No, fairest prophetess, it is the disease itself. "Why am I what I
am, when I know more and more daily what I could be?"--That is the
mystery; and my sins are the fruit, and not the root of it. Who
will explain that?'
Argemone began,--
'The Church--'
'Oh, Miss Lavington,' cried he, impatiently, 'will you, too, send me
back to that cold abstraction? I came to you, however presumptuous,
for living, human advice to a living, human heart; and will you pass
off on me that Proteus-dream the Church, which in every man's mouth
has a different meaning? In one book, meaning a method of
education, only it has never been carried out; in another, a system
of polity,--only it has never been realised;--now a set of words
written in books, on whose meaning all are divided; now a body of
men who are daily excommunicating each other as heretics and
apostates; now a universal idea; now the narrowest and most
exclusive of all parties. Really, before you ask me to hear the
Church, I have a right to ask you to define what the Church is.'
'Our Articles define it,' said Argemone drily.
'The "Visible Church," at least, it defines as "a company of
faithful men, in which," etc. But how does it define the
"Invisible" one? And what does "faithful" mean? What if I thought
Cromwell and Pierre Leroux infinitely more faithful men in their
way, and better members of the "Invisible Church," than the
torturer-pedant Laud, or the facing bothways Protestant-Manichee
Taylor?'
It was lucky for the life of young Love that the discussion went no
further: Argemone was becoming scandalised beyond all measure.
But, happily, the colonel interposed,--
'Look here; tell me if you know for whom this sketch is meant?'
'Tregarva, the keeper: who can doubt?' answered they both at once.
'Has not Mellot succeeded perfectly?'
'Yes,' said Lancelot. 'But what wonder, with such a noble subject!
What a grand benevolence is enthroned on that lofty forehead!'
'Oh, you would say so, indeed,' interposed Honoria, 'if you knew
him! The stories that I could tell you about him! How he would go
into cottages, read to sick people by the hour, dress the children,
cook the food for them, as tenderly as any woman! I found out, last
winter, if you will believe it, that he lived on bread and water, to
give out of his own wages--which are barely twelve shillings a week-
-five shillings a week for more than two months to a poor labouring
man, to prevent his going to the workhouse, and being parted from
his wife and children.'
'Noble, indeed!' said Lancelot. 'I do not wonder now at the effect
his conversation just now had on me.'
'Has he been talking to you?' said Honoria eagerly. 'He seldom
speaks to any one.'
'He has to me; and so well, that were I sure that the poor were as
ill off as he says, and that I had the power of altering the system
a hair, I could find it in my heart to excuse all political
grievance-mongers, and turn one myself.'
Claude Mellot clapped his white woman-like hands.
'Bravo! bravo! O wonderful conversion! Lancelot has at last
discovered that, besides the "glorious Past," there is a Present
worthy of his sublime notice! We may now hope, in time, that he
will discover the existence of a Future!'
'But, Mr. Mellot,' said Honoria, 'why have you been so unfaithful to
your original? why have you, like all artists, been trying to soften
and refine on your model?'
'Because, my dear lady, we are bound to see everything in its ideal-
-not as it is, but as it ought to be, and will be, when the vices of
this pitiful civilised world are exploded, and sanitary reform, and
a variety of occupation, and harmonious education, let each man
fulfil in body and soul the ideal which God embodied in him.'
'Fourierist!' cried Lancelot, laughing. 'But surely you never saw a
face which had lost by wear less of the divine image? How
thoroughly it exemplifies your great law of Protestant art, that
"the Ideal is best manifested in the Peculiar." How classic, how
independent of clime or race, is its bland, majestic self-
possession! how thoroughly Norse its massive squareness!'
'And yet, as a Cornishman, he should be no Norseman.'
'I beg your pardon! Like all noble races, the Cornish owe their
nobleness to the impurity of their blood--to its perpetual loans
from foreign veins. See how the serpentine curve of his nose, his
long nostril, and protruding, sharp-cut lips, mark his share of
Phoenician or Jewish blood! how Norse, again, that dome-shaped
forehead! how Celtic those dark curls, that restless gray eye, with
its "swinden blicken," like Von Troneg Hagen's in the Niebelungen
Lied!'
He turned: Honoria was devouring his words. He saw it, for he was
in love, and young love makes man's senses as keen as woman's.
'Look! look at him now!' said Claude, in a low voice. 'How he sits,
with his hands on his knees, the enormous size of his limbs quite
concealed by the careless grace, with his Egyptian face, like some
dumb granite Memnon!'
'Only waiting,' said Lancelot, 'for the day-star to arise on him and
awake him into voice.'
He looked at Honoria as he spoke. She blushed angrily; and yet a
sort of sympathy arose from that moment between Lancelot and
herself.
Our hero feared he had gone too far, and tried to turn the subject
off.
The smooth mill-head was alive with rising trout.
'What a huge fish leapt then!' said Lancelot carelessly; 'and close
to the bridge, too!'
Honoria looked round, and uttered a piercing scream.
'Oh, my dog! my dog! Mops is in the river! That horrid gazelle has
butted him in, and he'll be drowned!'
Alas! it was too true. There, a yard above the one open hatchway,
through which the whole force of the stream was rushing, was the
unhappy Mops, alias Scratch, alias Dirty Dick, alias Jack Sheppard,
paddling, and sneezing, and winking, his little bald muzzle turned
piteously upward to the sky.
'He will be drowned!' quoth the colonel.
There was no doubt of it; and so Mops thought, as, shivering and
whining, he plied every leg, while the glassy current dragged him
back and back, and Honoria sobbed like a child.
The colonel lay down on the bridge, and caught at him: his arm was
a foot too short. In a moment the huge form of Tregarva plunged
solemnly into the water, with a splash like seven salmon, and Mops
was jerked out over the colonel's head high and dry on to the
bridge.
'You'll be drowned, at least!' shouted the colonel, with an oath of
Uncle Toby's own.
Tregarva saw his danger, made one desperate bound upward, and missed
the bridge. The colonel caught at him, tore off a piece of his
collar--the calm, solemn face of the keeper flashed past beneath
him, and disappeared through the roaring gate.
They rushed to the other side of the bridge--caught one glimpse of a
dark body fleeting and roaring down the foam-way. The colonel leapt
the bridge-rail like a deer, rushed out along the buck-stage, tore
off his coat, and sprung headlong into the boiling pool, 'rejoicing
in his might,' as old Homer would say.
Lancelot, forgetting his crutches, was dashing after him, when he
felt a soft hand clutching at his arm.
'Lancelot! Mr. Smith!' cried Argemone. 'You shall not go! You are
too ill--weak--'
'A fellow-creature's life!'
'What is his life to yours?' she cried, in a tone of deep passion.
And then, imperiously, 'Stay here, I command you!'
The magnetic touch of her hand thrilled through his whole frame.
She had called him Lancelot! He shrank down, and stood spell-bound.
'Good heavens!' she cried; 'look at my sister!'
Out on the extremity of the buck-stage (how she got there neither
they nor she ever knew) crouched Honoria, her face idiotic with
terror, while she stared with bursting eyes into the foam. A shriek
of disappointment rose from her lips, as in a moment the colonel's
weather-worn head reappeared above, looking for all the world like
an old gray shiny-painted seal.
'Poof! tally-ho! Poof! poof! Heave me a piece of wood, Lancelot,
my boy!' And he disappeared again.
They looked round, there was not a loose bit near. Claude ran off
towards the house. Lancelot, desperate, seized the bridge-rail,
tore it off by sheer strength, and hurled it far into the pool.
Argemone saw it, and remembered it, like a true woman. Ay, be as
Manichaean-sentimental as you will, fair ladies, physical prowess,
that Eden-right of manhood, is sure to tell upon your hearts!
Again the colonel's grizzled head reappeared,--and, oh joy! beneath
it a draggled knot of black curls. In another instant he had hold
of the rail, and quietly floating down to the shallow, dragged the
lifeless giant high and dry on a patch of gravel.
Honoria never spoke. She rose, walked quietly back along the beam,
passed Argemone and Lancelot without seeing them, and firmly but
hurriedly led the way round the pool-side.
Before they arrived at the bank, the colonel had carried Tregarva to
it. Lancelot and two or three workmen, whom his cries had
attracted, lifted the body on to the meadow.
Honoria knelt quietly down on the grass, and watched, silent and
motionless, the dead face, with her wide, awestruck eyes.
'God bless her for a kind soul!' whispered the wan weather-beaten
field drudges, as they crowded round the body.
'Get out of the way, my men!' quoth the colonel. 'Too many cooks
spoil the broth.' And he packed off one here and another there for
necessaries, and commenced trying every restorative means with the
ready coolness of a practised surgeon; while Lancelot, whom he
ordered about like a baby, gulped down a great choking lump of envy,
and then tasted the rich delight of forgetting himself in admiring
obedience to a real superior.
But there Tregarva lay lifeless, with folded hands, and a quiet
satisfied smile, while Honoria watched and watched with parted lips,
unconscious of the presence of every one.
Five minutes!--ten!
'Carry him to the house,' said the colonel, in a despairing tone,
after another attempt.
'He moves!' 'No!' 'He does!' 'He breathes!' 'Look at his
eyelids!'
Slowly his eyes opened.
'Where am I? All gone? Sweet dreams--blessed dreams!'
His eye met Honoria's. One big deep sigh swelled to his lips and
burst. She seemed to recollect herself, rose, passed her arm
through Argemone's, and walked slowly away.