JUDAEUS APELLA.
ON the stillest summer day did you ever see nature quite still, even
that circumscribed nature that hems you round with densest trees, as you
lounge on your rustic seat, in lazy contemplation, amid the shorn grass
of your flower-beds, while all things are oppressed and stifled with
heat and slumber? Look attentively, and you will see a little quiver
like a dying pulse, in the hanging flower-bells, and a light faint
tremble in this leaf and that. Of nature, which is, being interpreted,
life, the law is motion, and this law controls the moral as well as the
physical world. Thus it is that there is nowhere any such thing as
absolute repose, and everywhere we find change and action.
Over Malory, if anywhere, broods the spirit of repose. Buried in deep
forest--fenced on one side by the lonely estuary--no town or village
lying beyond it; seaward the little old-world road that passes by it is
quite forsaken by traffic. Even the sound of children's laughter and
prattle is never heard there, and little but the solemn caw of the rooks
and the baying of the night-dog. Yet chance was then invading that quiet
seclusion with an unexpected danger.
A gentleman driving that day to the "George Inn" at Cardyllian, from a
distant station on the Great London line, and having picked up from his
driver, a Cardyllian man, all he could about Malory, and an old Mrs.
Mervyn who lived there, stopped suddenly at the corner of the old road,
which, two miles below Cardyllian, turns off inland, and rambles with
many pleasant windings into the road that leads to Penruthyn Priory.
This gentleman, whose dress was in the cheap and striking style, and
whose jewellery was conspicuous, was high-shouldered, with a very
decided curve, though not exactly a hunch. He was small, with rather
long arms. His hair, whiskers, and beard were glossy black, and his
features Jewish. He switched and twirled a black walking-cane, with
silver knobs on it, in his hand, and he had two or three rings on his
fingers.
His luggage had gone on to the "George," and whenever opportunity
occurred along that solitary road he renewed his inquiries about
Malory, with a slight peculiarity of accent which the unsophisticated
rustics in that part of the world had never heard before.
By this time it was evening, and in the light of the approaching sunset,
he might now, as the view of the sea and the distant mountains opened,
have enjoyed a pleasure for which, however, he had no taste; these
evening glows and tints were to him but imperfect light, and he looked
along the solemn and shadowy hills as he would have run his eye along
the shops in Cheapside--if with any interest, simply to amuse himself
with a calculation of what they might be worth in money.
He was now passing the pretty church-yard of Llanderris. The gray
head-stones and grass-grown graves brought home to him no passing
thought of change and mortality; death was to him an arithmetical
formula by which he measured annuities and reversions and policies. And
now he had entered the steep road that leads down with an irregular
curve to Malory.
He looked down upon the grand old wood. He had a smattering of the value
of timber, and remembered what a hit Rosenthal and Solomons had made of
their purchase of the wood at East Milton, when the railway was about to
be made there; and what a nice bit of money they had made of their
contract for sleepers and all sorts of other things. Could not Jos.
Larkin, or some better man, be found to get up a little branch line from
Llwynan to Cardyllian? His large mouth almost watered as he thought of
it; and how that eight or nine miles of rail would devour every inch of
timber that grew there--not a branch would be lost.
But now he was descending toward Malory, and the banks at the right hand
and the left shut out the view. So he began to descend the slope at his
leisure, looking up and about him and down at the worn road for material
for thought, for his mind was bustling and barren.
The road is not four steps across. It winds steeply between high banks.
Over these stoop and mingle in the perspective, the gray stems of tall
ash trees mantled in ivy, which here and there climbs thickly among the
boughs, and makes a darker umbrage among the foliage of the trees.
Beneath, ascending the steep banks, grow clumps of nettles, elder,
hazel, and thorn. Only down the slope of the road can the passenger see
anything of the country it traverses, for the banks out-top him on
either side. The rains have washed its stones so bare, wearing a sort of
gulley in the centre, as to give it the character in some sort of a
forest ravine.
The sallow, hatchet-faced man, with prominent black eyes, was walking up
this steep and secluded road. Those sharp eyes of his were busy. A wild
bee hummed over his head, and he cut at it pleasantly with his stick,
but it was out of reach, and he paused and eyed its unconscious flight,
with an ugly smile, as if he owed it a grudge for having foiled him.
There was little life in that secluded and dark track. He spied a small
dome-shaped black beetle stumbling through the dust and pebbles, across
it.
The little man drew near and peered at it with his piercing eyes and a
pleasant grin. He stooped. The point of his pale nose was right over it.
Across the desert the beetle was toiling. His path was a right line. The
little man looked across to see what he was aiming at, or where was his
home. There was nothing particular that he could perceive in the grass
and weeds at the point witherward he was tending in a right line. The
beetle sprawled and stumbled over a little bead of clay, recovered his
feet and his direction, and plodded on in a straight line. The little
man put his stick, point downward, before him. The beetle rounded it
carefully, and plodded on inflexibly in the same direction. Then he of
the black eyes and long nose knocked him gently in the face, and again
and again, jerking him this way or that. Still, like a prize-fighter he
rallied between the rounds, and drove right on in his old line. Then the
little man gave him a sharper knock, which sent him a couple of feet
away, on his back; right and left sprawled and groped the short legs of
the beetle, but alas! in vain. He could not right himself. He tried to
lurch himself over, but in vain. Now and then came a frantic gallop with
his little feet; it was beating the air. This was pleasant to the man
with the piercing eyes, who stooped over, smiling with his wide mouth,
and showing his white fangs. I wonder what the beetle thought of his
luck--what he thought of it all. The paroxysms of hope, when his feet
worked so hard, grew shorter. The intervals of despair and inaction grew
longer. The beetle was making up his mind that he must lie on his back
and die slowly, or be crushed under a hoof, or picked up and swallowed
by a wandering farm-yard fowl.
Though it was pleasant to witness his despair, the man with the
prominent eyes tired of the sight, he gave him a poke under the back,
and tumbled him up again on his feet, and watched him. The beetle seemed
a little bothered for a while, and would have shaken himself I'm sure if
he could. But he soon came to himself, turned in his old direction, and,
as it seemed to the observer, marched stumbling on with indomitable
perseverance toward the selfsame point. I know nothing of beetle habits.
I can make no guess why he sought that particular spot. Was it merely a
favourite haunt, or were there a little beetle brood, and a wife
awaiting him there? A strong instinct of some sort urged him, and a most
heroic perseverance.
And now I suppose he thought his troubles over, and that his journey was
about surely to be accomplished. Alas! it will never be accomplished.
There is an influence near which you suspect not. The distance is
lessening, the green grass, and dock leaves, and mallows, very near.
Alas! there is no sympathy with your instinct, with the purpose of your
life, with your labours and hopes. An inverted sympathy is _there_; a
sympathy with the difficulty--with "the Adversary"--with death. The
little man with the sharp black eyes brought the point of his stick near
the beetle's back, having seen enough of his pilgrimage, and squelched
him.
The pleasure of malice is curious. There are people who flavour their
meals with their revenges, whose future is made interesting by the hope
that this or that person may come under their heel. Which is
pleasantest, building castles in the air for ourselves, or dungeons in
pandemonium for our enemies? It is well for one half of the human race
that the other has not the disposal of them. More rare, more grotesque,
more exquisitely fiendish, is that sport with the mysteries of agony,
that lust of torture, that constitute the desire and fruition of some
monstrous souls.
Now, having ended that beetle's brief life in eternal darkness, and
reduced all his thoughts and yearnings to cypher, and dissolved his
persevering and resolute little character, never to be recombined, this
young gentleman looked up among the yellow leaves in which the birds
were chirping their evening gossip, and treated them to a capital
imitation of a wild cat, followed by a still happier one of a
screech-owl, which set all the sparrows in the ivy round twittering in
panic; and having sufficiently amused himself, the sun being now near
the horizon, he bethought him of his mission to Malory. So on he marched
whistling an air from an opera, which, I am bound to admit, he did with
the brilliancy and precision of a little flageolet, in so much that it
amounted to quite a curiously pretty accomplishment, and you would have
wondered how a gentleman with so unmistakeable a vein of the miscreant
in him, could make such sweet and bird-like music.
A little boy riding a tired donkey into Cardyllian, pointed out to him
the gate of the old place, and with a jaunty step, twirling his cane,
and whistling as he went, he reached the open space before the door
steps.
The surly servant who happened to see him as he hesitated and gaped at
the windows, came forth, and challenged him with tones and looks the
reverse of hospitable.
"Oh! Mrs. Mervyn?" said he; "well, she doesn't live here. Get ye round
that corner there, and you'll see the steward's house with a hatch-door
to it, and you may ring the bell, and leave, d'ye mind, by the back way.
You can follow the road by the rear o' the house."
So saying, he warned him off peremptorily with a flunkey's contempt for
a mock gentleman, and the sallow man with the black eyes and beard, not
at all put out by that slight treatment, for he had seen all sorts of
adventures, and had learned unaffectedly to despise contempt, walked
listlessly round the corner of the old house, with a somewhat
knock-kneed and ungainly stride, on which our bandy friend sneered
gruffly.