For three weeks Richard had to remain in town and endure the teachings of
the System in a new atmosphere. He had to sit and listen to men of
science who came to renew their intimacy with his father, and whom of all
men his father wished him to respect and study; practically scientific
men being, in the baronet's estimation, the only minds thoroughly mated
and enviable. He had to endure an introduction to the Grandisons, and
meet the eyes of his kind, haunted as he was by the Foolish Young Fellow.
The idea that he might by any chance be identified with him held the poor
youth in silent subjection. And it was horrible. For it was a continued
outrage on the fair image he had in his heart. The notion of the world
laughing at him because he loved sweet Lucy stung him to momentary
frenzies, and developed premature misanthropy in his spirit. Also the
System desired to show him whither young women of the parish lead us, and
he was dragged about at nighttime to see the sons and daughters of
darkness, after the fashion prescribed to Mr. Thompson; how they danced
and ogled down the high road to perdition. But from this sight possibly
the teacher learnt more than his pupil, since we find him seriously
asking his meditative hours, in the Note-book: "Wherefore Wild Oats are
only of one gender?" a question certainly not suggested to him at
Raynham; and again--"Whether men might not be attaching too rigid an
importance?"...to a subject with a dotted tail apparently, for he gives
it no other in the Note-book. But, as I apprehend, he had come to plead
in behalf of women here, and had deduced something from positive
observation. To Richard the scenes he witnessed were strange wild
pictures, likely if anything to have increased his misanthropy, but for
his love.
Certain sweet little notes from Lucy sustained the lover during the first
two weeks of exile. They ceased; and now Richard fell into such
despondency that his father in alarm had to take measures to hasten their
return to Raynham. At the close of the third week Berry laid a pair of
letters, bearing the Raynham post-mark, on the breakfast-table, and,
after reading one attentively, the baronet asked his son if he was
inclined to quit the metropolis.
"For Raynham, air?" cried Richard, and relapsed, saying, "As you will!"
aware that he had given a glimpse of the Foolish Young Fellow.
Berry accordingly received orders to make arrangements for their instant
return to Raynham.
The letter Sir Austin lifted his head from to bespeak his son's wishes
was a composition of the wise youth Adrian's, and ran thus:
"Benson is doggedly recovering. He requires great indemnities. Happy
when a faithful fool is the main sufferer in a household! I quite agree
with you that our faithful fool is the best servant of great schemes.
Benson is now a piece of history. I tell him that this is indemnity
enough, and that the sweet Muse usually insists upon gentlemen being
half-flayed before she will condescend to notice them; but Benson, I
regret to say, rejects the comfort so fine a reflection should offer, and
had rather keep his skin and live opaque. Heroism seems partly a matter
of training. Faithful folly is Benson's nature: the rest has been thrust
upon.
"The young person has resigned the neighbourhood. I had an interview
with the fair Papist myself, and also with the man Blaize. They were
both sensible, though one swore and the other sighed. She is pretty. I
hope she does not paint. I can affirm that her legs are strong, for she
walks to Bellingham twice a week to take her Scarlet bath, when, having
confessed and been made clean by the Romish unction, she walks back the
brisker, of which my Protestant muscular systems is yet aware. It was on
the road to Bellingham I engaged her. She is well in the matter of hair.
Madam Godiva might challenge her, it would be a fair match. Has it never
struck you that Woman is nearer the vegetable than Man?--Mr. Blaize
intends her for his son a junction that every lover of fairy mythology
must desire to see consummated. Young Tom is heir to all the agremens of
the Beast. The maids of Lobourne say (I hear) that he is a very Proculus
among them. Possibly the envious men say it for the maids. Beauty does
not speak bad grammar--and altogether she is better out of the way."
The other letter was from Lady Blandish, a lady's letter, and said:
"I have fulfilled your commission to the best of my ability, and heartily
sad it has made me. She is indeed very much above her station--pity that
it is so! She is almost beautiful--quite beautiful at times, and not in
any way what you have been led to fancy. The poor child had no story to
tell. I have again seen her, and talked with her for an hour as kindly
as I could. I could gather nothing more than we know. It is just a
woman's history as it invariably commences. Richard is the god of her
idolatry. She will renounce him, and sacrifice herself for his sake.
Are we so bad? She asked me what she was to do. She would do whatever
was imposed upon her--all but pretend to love another, and that she never
would, and, I believe, never will. You know I am sentimental, and I
confess we dropped a few tears together. Her uncle has sent her for the
Winter to the institution where it appears she was educated, and where
they are very fond of her and want to keep her, which it would be a good
thing if they were to do. The man is a good sort of man. She was
entrusted to him by her father, and he never interferes with her
religion, and is very scrupulous about all that pertains to it, though,
as he says, he is a Christian himself. In the Spring (but the poor child
does not know this) she is to come back, and be married to his lout of a
son. I am determined to prevent that. May I not reckon on your promise
to aid me? When you see her, I am sure you will. It would be sacrilege
to look on and permit such a thing. You know, they are cousins. She
asked me, where in the world there was one like Richard? What could I
answer? They were your own words, and spoken with a depth of conviction!
I hope he is really calm. I shudder to think of him when he comes, and
discovers what I have been doing. I hope I have been really doing right!
A good deed, you say, never dies; but we cannot always know--I must rely
on you. Yes, it is; I should think, easy to suffer martyrdom when one is
sure of one's cause! but then one must be sure of it. I have done
nothing lately but to repeat to myself that saying of yours, No. 54, C.
7, P.S.; and it has consoled me, I cannot say why, except that all wisdom
consoles, whether it applies directly or not:
"'For this reason so many fall from God, who have attained to Him; that
they cling to Him with their Weakness, not with their Strength.'
"I like to know of what you are thinking when you composed this or that
saying--what suggested it. May not one be admitted to inspect the
machinery of wisdom? I feel curious to know how thoughts--real thoughts
--are born. Not that I hope to win the secret. Here is the beginning of
one (but we poor women can never put together even two of the three ideas
which you say go to form a thought): 'When a wise man makes a false step,
will he not go farther than a fool?' It has just flitted through me.
"I cannot get on with Gibbon, so wait your return to recommence the
readings. I dislike the sneering essence of his writings. I keep
referring to his face, until the dislike seems to become personal.
How different is it with Wordsworth! And yet I cannot escape from the
thought that he is always solemnly thinking of himself (but I do
reverence him). But this is curious; Byron was a greater egoist, and yet
I do not feel the same with him. He reminds me of a beast of the desert,
savage and beautiful; and the former is what one would imagine a superior
donkey reclaimed from the heathen to be--a very superior donkey, I mean,
with great power of speech and great natural complacency, and whose
stubbornness you must admire as part of his mission. The worst is that
no one will imagine anything sublime in a superior donkey, so my simile
is unfair and false. Is it not strange? I love Wordsworth best, and yet
Byron has the greater power over me. How is that?"
("Because," Sir Austin wrote beside the query in pencil, "women are
cowards, and succumb to Irony and Passion, rather than yield their hearts
to Excellence and Nature's Inspiration.")
The letter pursued:
"I have finished Boiardo and have taken up Berni. The latter offends me.
I suppose we women do not really care for humour. You are right in
saying we have none ourselves, and 'cackle' instead of laugh. It is true
(of me, at least) that 'Falstaff is only to us an incorrigible fat man.'
I want to know what he illustrates. And Don Quixote--what end can be
served in making a noble mind ridiculous?--I hear you say--practical. So
it is. We are very narrow, I know. But we like wit--practical again!
Or in your words (when I really think they generally come to my aid--
perhaps it is that it is often all your thought); we 'prefer the rapier
thrust, to the broad embrace, of Intelligence.'"
He trifled with the letter for some time, re-reading chosen passages as
he walked about the room, and considering he scarce knew what. There are
ideas language is too gross for, and shape too arbitrary, which come to
us and have a definite influence upon us, and yet we cannot fasten on the
filmy things and make them visible and distinct to ourselves, much less
to others. Why did he twice throw a look into the glass in the act of
passing it? He stood for a moment with head erect facing it. His eyes
for the nonce seemed little to peruse his outer features; the grey
gathered brows, and the wrinkles much action of them had traced over the
circles half up his high straight forehead; the iron-grey hair that rose
over his forehead and fell away in the fashion of Richard's plume. His
general appearance showed the tints of years; but none of their weight,
and nothing of the dignity of his youth, was gone. It was so far
satisfactory, but his eyes were wide, as one who looks at his essential
self through the mask we wear.
Perhaps he was speculating as he looked on the sort of aspect he
presented to the lady's discriminative regard. Of her feelings he had
not a suspicion. But he knew with what extraordinary lucidity women can,
when it pleases them, and when their feelings are not quite boiling under
the noonday sun, seize all the sides of a character, and put their
fingers on its weak point. He was cognizant of the total absence of the
humorous in himself (the want that most shut him out from his fellows),
and perhaps the clear-thoughted, intensely self-examining gentleman
filmily conceived, Me also, in common with the poet, she gazes on as one
of the superior--grey beasts!
He may have so conceived the case; he was capable of that great-
mindedness, and could snatch at times very luminous glances at the broad
reflector which the world of fact lying outside our narrow compass holds
up for us to see ourselves in when we will. Unhappily, the faculty of
laughter, which is due to this gift, was denied him; and having seen, he,
like the companion of friend Balsam, could go no farther. For a good
wind of laughter had relieved him of much of the blight of self-
deception, and oddness, and extravagance; had given a healthier view of
our atmosphere of life; but he had it not.
Journeying back to Bellingham in the train, with the heated brain and
brilliant eye of his son beside him, Sir Austin tried hard to feel
infallible, as a man with a System should feel; and because he could not
do so, after much mental conflict, he descended to entertain a personal
antagonism to the young woman who had stepped in between his experiment
and success. He did not think kindly of her. Lady Blandish's encomiums
of her behaviour and her beauty annoyed him. Forgetful that he had in a
measure forfeited his rights to it, he took the common ground of fathers,
and demanded, "Why he was not justified in doing all that lay in his
power to prevent his son from casting himself away upon the first
creature with a pretty face he encountered?" Deliberating thus, he lost
the tenderness he should have had for his experiment--the living, burning
youth at his elbow, and his excessive love for him took a rigorous tone.
It appeared to him politic, reasonable, and just, that the uncle of this
young woman, who had so long nursed the prudent scheme of marrying her to
his son, should not only not be thwarted in his object but encouraged and
even assisted. At least, not thwarted. Sir Austin had no glass before
him while these ideas hardened in his mind, and he had rather forgotten
the letter of Lady Blandish.
Father and son were alone in the railway carriage. Both were too
preoccupied to speak. As they neared Bellingham the dark was filling the
hollows of the country. Over the pine-hills beyond the station a last
rosy streak lingered across a green sky. Richard eyed it while they flew
along. It caught him forward: it seemed full of the spirit of his love,
and brought tears of mournful longing to his eyelids. The sad beauty of
that one spot in the heavens seemed to call out to his soul to swear to
his Lucy's truth to him: was like the sorrowful visage of his fleur-de-
luce as he called her, appealing to him for faith. That tremulous tender
way she had of half-closing and catching light on the nether-lids, when
sometimes she looked up in her lover's face--as look so mystic-sweet that
it had grown to be the fountain of his dreams: he saw it yonder, and his
blood thrilled.
Know you those wand-like touches of I know not what, before which our
grosser being melts; and we, much as we hope to be in the Awaking, stand
etherealized, trembling with new joy? They come but rarely; rarely even
in love, when we fondly think them revelations. Mere sensations they
are, doubtless: and we rank for them no higher in the spiritual scale
than so many translucent glorious polypi that quiver on the shores, the
hues of heaven running through them. Yet in the harvest of our days it
is something for the animal to have had such mere fleshly polypian
experiences to look back upon, and they give him an horizon--pale seas of
luring splendour. One who has had them (when they do not bound him) may
find the Isles of Bliss sooner than another. Sensual faith in the upper
glories is something. "Let us remember," says The Pilgrim's Scrip, "that
Nature, though heathenish, reaches at her best to the footstool of the
Highest. She is not all dust, but a living portion of the spheres. In
aspiration it is our error to despise her, forgetting that through Nature
only can we ascend. Cherished, trained, and purified, she is then partly
worthy the divine mate who is to make her wholly so. St. Simeon saw the
Hog in Nature, and took Nature for the Hog."
It was one of these strange bodily exaltations which thrilled the young
man, he knew not how it was, for sadness and his forebodings vanished.
The soft wand touched him. At that moment, had Sir Austin spoken openly,
Richard might have fallen upon his heart. He could not.
He chose to feel injured on the common ground of fathers, and to pursue
his System by plotting. Lady Blandish had revived his jealousy of the
creature who menaced it, and jealousy of a System is unreflecting and
vindictive as jealousy of woman.
Heath-roots and pines breathed sharp in the cool autumn evening about the
Bellingham station. Richard stood a moment as he stepped from the train,
and drew the country air into his lungs with large heaves of the chest.
Leaving his father to the felicitations of the station-master, he went
into the Lobourne road to look for his faithful Tom, who had received
private orders through Berry to be in attendance with his young master's
mare, Cassandra, and was lurking in a plantation of firs unenclosed on
the borders of the road, where Richard, knowing his retainer's zest for
conspiracy too well to seek him anywhere but in the part most favoured
with shelter and concealment, found him furtively whiffing tobacco.
"What news, Tom? Is there an illness?"
Tom sent his undress cap on one side to scratch at dilemma, an old
agricultural habit to which he was still a slave in moments of abstract
thought or sudden difficulty.
"No, I don't want the rake, Mr. Richard," he whinnied with a false grin,
as he beheld his master's eye vacantly following the action.
"Speak out!" he was commanded. "I haven't had a letter for a week!"
Richard learnt the news. He took it with surprising outward calm, only
getting a little closer to Cassandra's neck, and looking very hard at Tom
without seeing a speck of him, which had the effect on Tom of making him
sincerely wish his master would punch his head at once rather than fix
him in that owl-like way.
"Go on!" said Richard, huskily. "Yes? She's gone! Well?"
Tom was brought to understand he must make the most of trifles, and
recited how he had heard from a female domestic at Belthorpe of the name
of Davenport, formerly known to him, that the young lady never slept a
wink from the hour she knew she was going, but sat up in her bed till
morning crying most pitifully, though she never complained. Hereat the
tears unconsciously streamed down Richard's cheeks. Tom said he had
tried to see her, but Mr. Adrian kept him at work, ciphering at a
terrible sum--that and nothing else all day! saying, it was to please his
young master on his return. "Likewise something in Lat'n," added Tom.
"Nom'tive Mouser!--'nough to make ye mad, sir!" he exclaimed with pathos.
The wretch had been put to acquire a Latin declension.
Tom saw her on the morning she went away, he said: she was very
sorrowful-looking, and nodded kindly to him as she passed in the fly
along with young Tom Blaize. "She have got uncommon kind eyes, sir,"
said Tom, "and cryin' don't spoil them." For which his hand was
wrenched.
Tom had no more to tell, save that, in rounding the road, the young lady
had hung out her hand, and seemed to move it forward and back, as much as
to sap, Good-bye, Tom! "And though she couldn't see me," said Tom, "I
took off my hat. I did take it so kind of her to think of a chap like
me." He was at high-pressure sentiment--what with his education for a
hero and his master's love-stricken state.
"You saw no more of her, Tom?"
"No, sir. That was the last!"
"That was the last you saw of her, Tom?"
"Well, sir, I saw nothin' more."
"And so she went out of sight!"
"Clean gone, that she were, sir."
"Why did they take her away? what have they done with her? where have
they taken her to?"
These red-hot questionings were addressed to the universal heaven rather
than to Tom.
"Why didn't she write?" they were resumed. "Why did she leave? She's
mine. She belongs to me! Who dared take her away? Why did she leave
without writing?--Tom!"
"Yes, sir," said the well-drilled recruit, dressing himself up to the
word of command. He expected a variation of the theme from the change of
tone with which his name had been pronounced, but it was again, "Where
have they taken her to?" and this was even more perplexing to Tom than
his hard sum in arithmetic had been. He could only draw down the corners
of his mouth hard, and glance up queerly.
"She had been crying--you saw that, Tom?"
"No mistake about that, Mr. Richard. Cryin' all night and all day, I
sh'd say."
"And she was crying when you saw her?"
"She look'd as if she'd just done for a moment, sir."
"But her face was white?"
"White as a sheet."
Richard paused to discover whether his instinct had caught a new view
from these facts. He was in a cage, always knocking against the same
bars, fly as he might. Her tears were the stars in his black night. He
clung to them as golden orbs. Inexplicable as they were, they were at
least pledges of love.
The hues of sunset had left the West. No light was there but the
steadfast pale eye of twilight. Thither he was drawn. He mounted
Cassandra, saying: "Tell them something, Tom. I shan't be home to
dinner," and rode off toward the forsaken home of light over Belthorpe,
whereat he saw the wan hand of his Lucy, waving farewell, receding as he
advanced. His jewel was stolen,--he must gaze upon the empty box.