At the head of Wensleydale, where rolling moor grows mountainous toward
the marches of Yorkshire and Westmorland, stands the little market-town
named Hawes. One winding street of houses and shops, grey,
hard-featured, stout against the weather; with little byways climbing
to the height above, on which rises the rugged church, stern even in
sunshine; its tower, like a stronghold, looking out upon the
brooding-place of storms. Like its inhabitants, the place is harsh of
aspect, warm at heart; scornful of graces, its honest solidity speaks
the people that built it for their home. This way and that go forth the
well-kept roads, leading to other towns, their sharp tracks shine over
the dark moorland, climbing by wind-swept hamlets, by many a lonely
farm; dipping into sudden hollows, where streams become cascades, and
guiding the wayfarers by high, rocky passes from dale to dale. A
country always impressive by the severe beauty of its outlines;
sometimes speaking to the heart in radiant stillness, its moments of
repose mirthful sometimes, inspiring joyous life, with the gleams of
its vast sky, the sweet, keen breath of its heaths and pastures; but
for the most part shadowed, melancholy, an austere nurse of the
striving spirit of man, with menace in its mountain-rack, in the
rushing voice of its winds and torrents.
Here, in a small, plain cottage, stone-walled, stone-roofed, looking
over the wide and deep hollow of a stream--a beck in the local
language--which at this point makes a sounding cataract on its course
from the great moor above, lived Jerome Otway. It had been his home for
some ten years. He lived as a man of small but sufficient means, amid
very plain household furniture, and with no sort of social pretence.
With him dwelt his wife, and one maidservant.
On an evening of midsummer, still and sunny, the old man sat among his
books; open before him the great poem of Dante. His much-lined face,
austere in habitual expression, yet with infinite possibilities of
radiance in the dark eyes, of tenderness on the mobile lips, was
crowned with hair which had turned iron-grey but remained wonderfully
thick and strong; the moustache and beard, only a slight growth, were
perfectly white. He had once been of more than average stature; now his
bent shoulders and meagre limbs gave him an appearance of shortness,
whilst he suffered on the score of dignity by an excessive disregard of
his clothing. He sat in a round-backed wooden chair at an ordinary
table, on which were several volumes ranked on end, a large blotter,
and an inkstand. The room was exclusively his, two bookcases and a few
portraits on the walls being almost the only other furniture; but at
this moment it was shared by Mrs. Otway, who, having some sort of
woman's work on her lap, sat using her fingers and her tongue with
steady diligence. She looked about forty, had a colourless but healthy
face, not remarkable for charm, and was dressed as a sober,
self-respecting gentlewoman. In her accents sounded nothing harsh,
nothing vehement; she talked quietly, without varied inflections, as if
thoughtfully expounding an agreeable theme; such talk might well have
inclined a disinterested hearer to somnolence. But her husband's
visage, and his movements, betokened no such peaceful tendency; every
moment he grew more fidgety, betrayed a stronger irritation.
"I suppose," Mrs. Otway was saying, "there are persons who live without
any religious conscience. It seems very strange; one would think that
no soul could be at rest in utter disregard of its Maker, in complete
neglect of the plainest duties of a creature endowed with human
intelligence--which means, of course, power to perceive spiritual
truths. Yet such persons seem capable of going through a long life
without once feeling the impulse to worship, to render thanks and
praise to the Supreme Being. I suppose they very early deaden their
spiritual faculties; perhaps by loose habits of life, or by the
indulgence of excessive self-esteem, or by----"
Jerome made a quick gesture with his hands, as if defending himself
against a blow; then he turned to his wife, and regarded her fixedly.
"Will it take you much longer," he asked, with obvious struggle for
self-command, but speaking courteously, "to exhaust this theme?"
"It annoys you?" said the lady, very coldly, straightening herself to
an offended attitude.
"I confess it does. Or rather, it worries me. If I may beg----"
"I understood you to invite me to your room."
"I did. And the fact of my having done so ought, I should think, to
have withheld you from assailing me with your acrid tedium."
"Thank you," said Mrs. Otway, as she rose to her full height. "I will
leave you to your own tedium, which must be acrid enough, I imagine, to
judge from the face you generally wear."
And she haughtily withdrew.
A scene of this kind--never more violent, always checked at the right
moment--occurred between them about once every month. During the rest
of their time they lived without mutual aggression; seldom conversing,
but maintaining the externals of ordinary domestic intercourse. Nor was
either of them acutely unhappy. The old man (Jerome Otway was
sixty-five, but might have been taken for seventy) did not, as a rule,
wear a sour countenance; he seldom smiled, but his grave air had no
cast of gloominess; it was profoundly meditative, tending often to the
rapture of high vision. The lady had her own sufficient pursuits, chief
among them a rigid attention to matters ecclesiastical, local and
national. That her husband held notably aloof from such interests was
the subject of Mrs. Otway's avowed grief, and her peculiar method of
assailing his position brought about the periodical disturbance which
seemed on the whole an agreeable feature of her existence.
He lived much in the past, brooding upon his years of activity as
author, journalist, lecturer, conspirator, between 1846 and 1870. He
talked in his long days of silence with men whose names are written in
history, men whom he had familiarly known, with whom he had struggled
and hoped for the Better Time. Mazzini and Herzen, Kossuth and
Ledru-Rollin, Bakounine, Louis Blanc, and a crowd of less eminent
fighters in the everlasting war of human emancipation. The war that
aims at Peace; the strife that assails tyranny, and militarism, and
international hatred. Beginning with Chartism (and narrowly escaping
the fierce penalties suffered by some of his comrades), he grew to
wider activities, and for a moment seemed likely to achieve a bright
position among the liberators of mankind; but Jerome Otway had more
zeal than power, and such powers as he commanded were scattered over
too wide a field of enthusiastic endeavour. He succeeded neither as man
of thought nor as man of action. His verses were not quite poetry; his
prose was not quite literature; personally he interested and exalted,
but without inspiring confidence such as is given to the born leader.
And in this year 1886, when two or three letters on the Irish Question
appeared over his signature, few readers attached any meaning to the
name. Jerome Otway had fought his fight and was forgotten.
He married, for the first time, at one-and-twenty, his choice being the
daughter of an impoverished "county" family, a girl neither handsome
nor sweet-natured, but, as it seemed, much in sympathy with his
humanitarian views. Properly speaking, he did not choose her; the men
who choose, who deliberately select a wife, are very few, and Jerome
Otway could never have been one of them. He was ardent and impulsive;
marriage becoming a necessity, he clutched at the first chance which in
any way addressed his imagination; and the result was calamitous. In a
year or two his wife repented the thoughtlessness with which she had
sacrificed the possibilities of her birth and breeding for marriage
with a man of no wealth. Narrow of soul, with a certain frothy
intelligence, she quickly outgrew the mood of social rebellion which
had originated in personal discontent, and thenceforward she had
nothing but angry scorn for the husband who allowed her to live in
poverty. Two sons were born to them; the elder named Daniel (after
O'Connell), the second called Alexander (after the Russian Herzen). For
twelve years they lived in suppressed or flagrant hostility; then Mrs.
Otway died of cholera. To add to the bitterness of her fate, she had
just received, from one of her "county" relatives, a legacy of a couple
of thousand pounds.
This money, which became his own, Otway invested in a newspaper then
being started by certain of his friends; a paper, as it seemed, little
likely to have commercial success, but which, after many changes of
editorship, ultimately became an established organ of Liberalism. The
agitator retained an interest in this venture, and the small income it
still continued to yield him was more than enough for his personal
needs; it enabled him to set a little aside, year after year, thus
forming a fund which, latterly, he always thought of as destined to
benefit his youngest son--the child of his second marriage.
For he did not long remain solitary, and his next adventure was
somewhat in keeping with the character he had earned in public
estimate. Living for a time in Switzerland, he there met with a young
Englishwoman, married, but parted from her husband, who was maintaining
herself at Geneva as a teacher of languages; Jerome was drawn to her,
wooed her, and won her love. The husband, a Catholic, refused her legal
release, but the irregular union was a true marriage. It had lasted for
about four years when their only child was born. In another
twelvemonth, Jerome was again a widower. A small sum of money which had
belonged to the dead woman, Jerome, at her wish, put out at interest
for their boy, if he should attain manhood. The child's name was Piers;
for Jerome happened at that time to be studying old Langland's
"Vision," with delight in the brave singer, who so long ago cried for
social justice--one of the few in Christendom who held by the spirit of
Christ.
He was now forty-five years old; he mourned the loss of his comrade, a
gentle, loving woman, whom, though she seldom understood his views of
life, his moods and his aims, he had held in affection and esteem. For
eight years he went his way alone; then, chancing to be at a seaside
place in the north of England, he made the acquaintance of a mother and
daughter who kept a circulating library, and in less than six months
the daughter became Mrs. Otway. Aged not quite thirty, tall, graceful,
with a long, pale face, distinguished by its air of meditative
refinement, this lady probably never made quite clear to herself her
motives in accepting the wooer of fifty-three, whose life had passed in
labours and experiences with which she could feel nothing like true
sympathy. Perhaps it was that she had never before received offer of
marriage; possibly Jerome's eloquent dark eyes, of which the gleam was
not yet dulled, seconded the emotional language of his lips, and
stirred her for the moment to genuine feeling. For a few months they
seemed tolerably mated, then the inevitable divergence began to show
itself. Jerome withdrew into his reveries, became taciturn, absorbed
himself at length in the study of Dante; Mrs. Otway, resenting this
desertion, grew critical, condemnatory, and, as if to atone for her
union with a man who stood outside all the creeds, developed her mild
orthodoxy into a peculiarly virulent form of Anglican puritanism. The
only thing that kept them together was their common inclination for a
retired existence, and their love of the northern moorland.
Looking back upon his marriages, the old man wondered sadly. Why had he
not--he who worshipped the idea of womanhood--sought patiently for his
perfect wife? Somewhere in the world he would have found her, could he
but have subdued himself to the high seriousness of the quest. In a
youthful poem, he had sung of Love as "the crown of life," believing it
fervently; he believed it now with a fervour more intense, because more
spiritual. That crown he had missed, even as did the multitude of
mankind. Only to the elect is it granted--the few chosen, where all are
called. To some it falls as if by the pure grace of Heaven, meeting
them as they walk in the common way. Some, the fewest, attain it by
merit of patient hope, climbing resolute until, on the heights of noble
life, a face shines before them, the face of one who murmurs "_Guardami
ben_!"
He thought much, too, about his offspring. The two children of his
first marriage he had educated on the approved English model, making
them "gentlemen." Partly because he knew not well how else to train
them, for Jerome was far too weak on the practical side to have shaped
a working system of his own--a system he durst rely upon; and partly,
too, because they seemed to him to inherit many characteristics from
their mother, and so to be naturally fitted for some conventional
upper-class career. The result was grievous failure. In the case of
Piers, he decided to disregard the boy's seeming qualifications, and,
after having him schooled abroad for the sake of modern languages, to
put him early into commerce. If Piers were marked out for better
things, this discipline could do him no harm. And to all appearances,
the course had been a wise one. Piers had as yet given no cause for
complaint. In wearying of trade, in aiming at something more liberal,
he claimed no more than his rights.
With silent satisfaction, Jerome watched the boy's endeavours, his
heart warming when he received one of those well-worded and dutiful,
yet by no means commonplace letters, which came from Geneva and from
London. On Piers he put the hope of his latter day; and it gladdened
him to think that this, his only promising child, was the offspring of
the union which he could recall with tenderness.
When Mrs. Otway had withdrawn with her sour dignity, the old man sighed
and lost himself in melancholy musing. The house was, as usual, very
still, and from without the only sound was that of the beck, leaping
down over its stony ledges. Jerome loved this sound. It tuned his
thoughts; it saved him from many a fit of ill-humour. It harmonised
with the melody of Dante's verses, fit accompaniment to many a passage
of profound feeling, of noble imagery. Even now he had been brooding
the anguish of Maestro Adamo who hears for ever
Li ruscelletti che de' verdi colli
Del Casentin discendon giuso in Arno--"
and the music of the Tuscan fountains blended with the voice of this
moorland stream.
There was a knock at the door; the maid-servant handed him a letter; it
came from Piers. The father read it, and, after a few lines, with grave
visage. Piers began by saying that, a day or two ago, he had all but
resolved to run down to Hawes, for he had something very serious to
speak about; on the whole, it seemed better to make the communication
in writing.
"I have abandoned the examination, and all thought of the Civil
Service. If I invented reasons for this, you would not believe them,
and you would think ill of me. The best way is to tell you the plain
truth, and run the risk of being thought a simpleton, or something
worse. I have been in great trouble, have gone through a bad time. Some
weeks ago there came to stay here a girl of eighteen or nineteen, the
daughter of Dr. Lowndes Derwent (whose name perhaps you know). She is
very beautiful, and I was unlucky enough--if I ought to use such a
phrase--to fall in love with her. I won't try to explain what this
meant to me; you wouldn't have patience to read it; but it stopped my
studies, utterly overthrew my work. I was all but ill; I suffered
horribly. It was my first such experience; I hope it may be the
last--in that form. Indeed, I believe it will, for I can't imagine that
I shall ever feel towards anyone else in the same way, and--you will
smile, no doubt--I have a conviction that Irene Derwent will remain my
ideal as long as I live."
"Enough of that. It being quite clear to me that I simply could not go
in for the examination, I hit upon another scheme; one, it seemed to
me, which might not altogether displease you. I went to see Mr.
Tadworth, and told him that I had decided to go back into business;
could he, I asked, think of giving me a place in their office at
Odessa? If necessary, I would work without salary till I had thoroughly
learned Russian, and could substantially serve them. Well, Mr. Tadworth
was very kind, and, after a little questioning, promised to send me out
to Odessa in some capacity or other, still to be determined. I am to go
in about ten days."
"This, father, is my final decision. I shall give myself to the
business, heartily and energetically. I think there is no harm in
telling you that I hope to make money. If I do so, it will be done, I
think, honourably, as the result of hard work. I had better not see
you; I should be ashamed. But I beg you will write to me soon. I hope I
shall not have overtried your patience. Bear with me, if you can, and
give me the encouragement I value."
Jerome pondered long. He looked anything but displeased: there was
tenderness in his smile, and sympathy; something, too, of pride. Very
much against his usual practice, he wrote a reply the same day.
"So be it, my dear lad! I have no fault to find, no criticism to offer.
Your letter is an honest one, and it has much moved me. Let me just say
this: you rightly doubt whether you should call yourself unlucky. If,
as I can imagine, the daughter of Dr. Derwent is a girl worth your
homage, nothing better could have befallen you than this discovery of
your 'ideal.' Whether you will be faithful to it, the gods alone know.
If you _can_ be, even for a few years of youth, so much the happier and
nobler your lot!
"Work at money-making, then. And, as I catch a glimmer of your meaning
in this resolve, I will tell you something for your comfort. If you
hold on at commerce, and verily make way, and otherwise approve
yourself what I think you, I promise that you shall not lack
advancement. Plainly, I have a little matter of money put by, for
sundry uses; and, if the day comes when something of capital would
stead you (after due trial, as I premise), it shall be at your disposal.
"Write to me with a free heart. I have lived my life; perchance I can
help you to live yours better. The will, assuredly, is not wanting.
"Courage, then! Pursue your purpose--
'Con l'animo che vince ogni battaglia,
Se col suo grave corpo non s'accascia.'
"And, believe me that you could have no better intimate for leisure
hours than the old Florentine, who knew so many things; among them,
your own particular complaint."