"OH, MY COUSIN, SHALLOW-HEARTED!"
Roland Lansdell dined with his uncle and cousin at Lowlands upon the day
after the picnic; but he said very little about his afternoon ramble in
Hurstonleigh Grove. He lounged upon the lawn with his cousin Gwendoline,
and played with the dogs, and stared at the old pictures in the long
dreary billiard-room, where the rattle of the rolling balls had been
unheard for ages; and he entered into a languid little political
discussion with Lord Ruysdale, and broke off--or rather dropped out of
it--in the middle with a yawn, declaring that he knew very little about
the matter, and was no doubt making a confounded idiot of himself, and
would his uncle kindly excuse him, and reserve his admirable arguments
for some one better qualified to appreciate them?
The young man had no political enthusiasm. He had been in the great
arena, and had done his little bit of wrestling, and had found himself
baffled, not by the force of his adversaries, but by the _vis inerticæ_
of things in general. Eight or nine years ago Roland Lansdell had been
very much in earnest,--too much in earnest, perhaps,--for he had been
like a racehorse that goes off with a rush and makes running for all the
other horses, and then breaks down ignominiously midway betwixt the
starting-post and the judge's chair. There was no "stay" in this bright
young creature. If the prizes of life could have been won by that fiery
rush, he would have won them; but as it was, he was fain to fall back
among the ranks nameless, and let the plodders rush on towards the
golden goal.
Thus it was that Roland Lansdell had been a kind of failure and
disappointment. He had begun so brilliantly, he had promised so much.
"If this young man is so brilliant at one-and-twenty," people had said
to one another, "what will he be by the time he is forty-five?" But at
thirty Roland was nothing. He had dropped out of public life altogether,
and was only a drawing-room favourite; a lounger in gay Continental
cities; a drowsy idler in fair Grecian islands; a scribbler of hazy
little verses about pretty women, and veils, and fans, and daggers, and
jealous husbands, and moonlit balconies, and withered orange-flowers,
and poisoned chalices, and midnight revels, and despair; a beautiful
useless, purposeless creature; a mark for manoeuvring mothers; a hero
for sentimental young ladies,--altogether a mockery, a delusion, and a
snare.
This was the man whom Lady Gwendoline and her father had found at Baden
Baden, losing his money _pour se distraire_. Gwendoline and her father
were on their way back to England. They had gone abroad for the benefit
of the Earl's income; but Continental residence is expensive nowadays,
and they were going back to Lowlands, Lord Ruysdale's family seat, where
at least they would live free of house-rent, and where they could have
garden-stuff and dairy produce, and hares and partridges, and silvery
trout from the fish-ponds in the shrubberies, for nothing: and where
they could have long credit from the country tradesfolk, and wax or
composition candles for something less than tenpence apiece.
Lord Ruysdale persuaded Roland to return with them, and the young man
assented readily enough. He was tired of the Cantinent; he was tired of
England too, for the matter of that; but those German gaming-places,
those Grecian islands, those papist cities where the bells were always
calling the faithful to their drowsy devotions in darksome old
cathedrals, were his last weariness, and he said, Yes; he should be glad
to see Mordred again; he should enjoy a month's shooting; and he could
spend the winter in Paris. Paris was as good as any other place in the
winter.
He had so much money and so much leisure, and so little knew what to do
with himself. He knew that his life was idle and useless; but he looked
about him, and saw that very little came of other men's work; he cried
with the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem, "Behold, all is
vanity and vexation of spirit, and there is no profit under the sun:
that which is crooked cannot be made straight, and that which is wanting
cannot be numbered: the thing that has been, it is that which shall be."
Do you remember that saying of Mirabeau's which Mr. Lewes has put upon
the title-page of his wonderful Life of Robespierre: "This man will do
great things," said the statesman,--I quote loosely from memory,--"for
he believes in himself?" Roland Lansdell did not believe in himself; and
lacking that grand faculty of self-confidence, he had grown to doubt and
question all other things, as he doubted and questioned himself.
"I will do my best to lead a good life, and be useful to my
fellow-creatures," Mr. Lansdell said, when he left Magdalen College,
Oxford, with a brilliant reputation, and the good wishes of all the
magnates of the place.
He began life with this intention firmly implanted in his mind. He knew
that he was a rich man, and that there was a great deal expected of him.
The parable of the Talents was not without its import to him, though he
had no belief in the divinity of the Teacher. There was no great
enthusiasm in his nature, but he was very sincere; and he went into
Parliament as a progressive young Liberal, and set to work honestly to
help his fellow-creatures.
Alas for poor humanity! he found the task more wearisome than the labour
of Sisyphus, or the toil of the daughters of Danäus. The stone was
always rolling back upon the labourer; the water was perpetually pouring
out of the perforated buckets. He cultivated the working man, and
founded a club for him, where he might have lectures upon geology and
astronomy, and where, after twelve hours' bricklaying or road-making, he
might improve his mind with the works of Stuart Mill or M'Culloch, and
where he could have almost anything; except those two simple things
which he especially wanted,--a pint of decent beer and a quiet puff at
his pipe. Roland Lansdell was the last man to plan any institution upon
puritanical principles; but he _did not believe in himself_, so he took
other people's ideas as the basis of his work; and by the time he opened
his eyes to the necessity of beer and tobacco, the workman had grown
tired and had abandoned him.
This was only one of many schemes which Mr. Lansdell attempted while he
was still very young, and had a faint belief in his fellow-creatures:
but this is a sample of the rest. Roland's schemes were not successful;
they were not successful because he had no patience to survive
preliminary failure, and wade on to ultimate success through a slough of
despond and discouragement. He picked his fruit before it was ripe, and
was angry when he found it sour, and would hew down the tree that bore
so badly, and plant another. His fairest projects fell to the ground,
and he left them there to rot; while he went away somewhere else to
build new schemes and make fresh failures.
Moreover, Mr. Lansdell was a hot-headed, impulsive young man, and there
were some things which he could not endure. He could bear ingratitude
better than most people, because he was generous-minded, and set a very
small price upon the favours he bestowed; but he could not bear to find
that the people whom he sought to benefit were bored by his endeavours
to help them. He had no ulterior object to gain, remember. He had no
solemn conviction of a sacred duty to be performed at any cost to
himself, in spite of every hindrance, in the face of every opposition.
He only wanted to be useful to his fellow-creatures; and when he found
that they repudiated his efforts, he fell away from them, and resigned
himself to be useless, and to let his fellow-creatures go their own
wilful way. So, almost immediately after making a brilliant speech about
the poor-laws, at the very moment when people were talking of him as one
of the most promising young Liberals of his day, Mr. Lansdell abruptly
turned his back upon St. Stephen's, accepted the Chiltern Hundreds, and
went abroad.
He had experienced another disappointment besides the failure of his
philanthropic schemes,--a disappointment that had struck home to his
heart, and had given him an excuse for the cynical indifference, the
hypochondriacal infidelity, which grew upon him from this time.
Mr. Lansdell had been his own master from his earliest manhood, for his
father and mother had died young. The Lansdells were not a long-lived
race; indeed, there seemed to be a kind of fatality attached to the
masters of Mordred Priory: and in the long galleries where the portraits
of dead-and-gone Lansdells looked gravely down upon the frivolous
creatures of to-day, the stranger was apt to be impressed by the youth
of all the faces--the absence of those grey beards and bald foreheads
which give dignity to most collections of family portraits. The
Lansdells of Mordred were not a long-lived race, and Roland's father had
died suddenly when the boy was away at Eton; but his mother, Lady Anna
Lansdell, only sister of the present Earl of Ruysdale, lived to be her
son's companion and friend in the best and brightest years of his life.
His life seemed to lose its brightness when he lost her; and I think
this one great grief, acting upon a naturally pensive temperament, must
have done much to confirm that morbid melancholy which overshadowed Mr.
Lansdell's mind.
His mother died; and the grand inducement to do something good and
great, which might have made her proud and happy, died with her. Roland
said that he left the purest half of his heart behind him in the
Protestant cemetery at Nice. He went back to England, and made those
brilliant speeches of which I have spoken; and was not too proud to seek
for sympathy and consolation from the person whom he loved next best to
her whom he had lost,--that person was Lady Gwendoline Pomphrey, his
betrothed wife, the beloved niece of his dead mother.
There had been so complete a sympathy between Lady Anna Lansdell and her
son, that the young man had suffered himself, half unconsciously, to be
influenced by his mother's predilections. She was very fond of
Gwendoline; and when the two families were in Midlandshire, Gwendoline
spent the greater part of her life with her aunt. She was two years
older than Roland, and she was a very beautiful young woman. A
fragile-looking, aristocratic beauty, with a lofty kind of gracefulness
in all her movements, and with cold blue eyes that would have frozen the
very soul of an aspiring young Lawrence. She was handsome,
self-possessed, and accomplished; and Lady Anna Lansdell was never tired
of sounding her praises. So young Roland, newly returned from Oxford,
fell--or imagined himself to have fallen--desperately in love with her;
and while his brief access of desperation lasted, the whole thing was
arranged, and Mr. Lansdell found himself engaged.
He was engaged, and he was very much in love with his cousin. That two
years' interval between their ages gave Gwendoline an immense advantage
over her lover; she practised a thousand feminine coquetries upon this
simple generous lad, and was proud of her power over him, and very fond
of him after her own fashion, which was not a very warm one. She was by
no means a woman to consider the world well lost for love. Her father
had told her all about Roland's circumstances, and that the settlements
would be very handsome. She was only sorry that poor Roland was a mere
nobody, after all; a country gentleman, who prided himself upon the
length of his pedigree and the grandeur of his untitled race; but whose
name looked very insignificant when you saw it at the tail of a string
of dukes and marquises in the columns of the "Morning Post."
But then he might distinguish himself in Parliament. There was something
in that; and Lady Gwendoline brought all her power to bear upon the
young man's career. She fanned the faint flames of his languid ambition
with her own fiery breath. This girl, with her proud Saxon beauty, her
cold blue eyes, her pale auburn hair, was as ardent and energetic as
Joan of Arc or Elizabeth of England. She was a grand ambitious creature,
and she wanted to marry a ruler, and to rule him; and she was
discontented with her cousin because a crown did not drop on to his
brows the moment he entered the arena. His speeches had been talked
about; but, oh, what languid talk it had been! Gwendoline wanted all
Europe to vibrate with the clamour of the name that was so soon to be
her own.
At the end of his second session Roland went abroad with his dying
mother. He came back alone, six weeks after his mother's death, and went
straight to Gwendoline for consolation. He found her in deep mourning;
all a-glitter with bracelets and necklaces of shining jet; looking very
fair and stately in her trailing black robes; but he found her
drawing-room filled with callers, and he left her wounded and angry. He
thought her so much a part of himself, that he had expected to find her
grief equal to his own. He went to her again, in a passionate outbreak
of grief and anger; told her that she was cold-hearted and ungrateful,
and that she had never loved the aunt who had been almost a mother to
her. Lady Gwendoline was the last woman in the world to submit to any
such reproof. She was astounded by her lover's temerity.
"I loved my aunt very dearly, Mr. Lansdell," she said; "so dearly that I
could endure a great deal for her sake; but I can _not_ endure the
insolence of her son."
And then the Earl of Ruysdale's daughter swept out of the room, leaving
her cousin standing alone in a sunlit window, with the spring breezes
blowing in upon him, and the shrill voice of a woman crying primroses
sounding in the street below.
He went home, dispirited, disheartened, doubtful of himself, doubtful of
Lady Gwendoline, doubtful of all the world; and early the next morning
he received a letter from his cousin coolly releasing him from his
engagement. The experience of yesterday had proved that they were
unsuited to each other, she said; it was better that they should part
now, while it was possible for them to part friends. Nothing could be
more dignified or more decided than the dismissal.
Mr. Lansdell put the letter in his breast; the pretty perfumed letter,
with the Ruysdale arms emblazoned on the envelope, the elegant ladylike
letter, which recorded his sentence without a blot or a blister, without
one uncertain line to mark where the hand had trembled. The hand may
have trembled, nevertheless; for Lady Gwendoline was just the woman to
write a dozen copies of her letter rather than send one that bore the
faintest evidence of her weakness. Roland put the letter in his breast,
and resigned himself to his fate. He was a great deal too proud to
appeal against his cousin's decree; but he had loved her very sincerely,
and if she had recalled him, he would have gone back to her and would
have forgiven her. He lingered in England for a week or more after all
the arrangements for his departure had been made; he lingered in the
expectation that his cousin would recall him: but one morning, while he
was sitting in the smoking-room at his favourite club, with his face
hidden behind the pages of the "Post," he burst into a harsh strident
laugh.
"What the deuce is the matter with you, Lansdell?" asked a young man who
had been startled by that sudden outbreak of unharmonious hilarity.
"Oh, nothing particular; I was looking at the announcement of my cousin
Gwendoline's approaching marriage with the Marquis of Heatherland. I'm
rejoiced to see that our family is getting up in the world."
"Oh, yes, that's been in the wind a long time," the lounger answered,
coolly. "Everybody saw that Heatherland was very far gone six months
ago. He's been mooning about your cousin ever since they met at The
Bushes, Sir Francis Luxmoor's Leicestershire place. They used to say you
were rather sweet in that quarter; but I suppose it was only a cousinly
flirtation."
"Yes," said Mr. Lansdell, throwing down the paper, and taking out his
cigar-case; "I suppose it was only what Gwendoline would call a
flirtation. You see, I have been abroad six months attending the
deathbed of my mother. I could scarcely expect to be remembered all that
time. Will you give me a light for my cigar?"
The faces of the two young men were very close together as Roland
lighted his cigar. Mr. Lansdell's pale-olive complexion had blanched a
little, but his hand was quite steady, and he smoked half his Trabuco
before he left the club-room. The blow was sharp and unexpected, but
Lady Gwendoline's lover bore it like a philosopher.
"I am unhappy because I have lost her," he thought; "but should I have
been happy with her, if I had married her? Have I ever been happy in my
life, or is there such a thing as happiness upon this unequally divided
earth? I have played all my cards, and lost the game. Philanthropy,
ambition, love, friendship--I have lost upon every one of them. It is
time that I should begin to enjoy myself."
Thus it was that Mr. Lansdell accepted the Chiltern Hundreds, and turned
his back upon a country in which he had never been especially happy. He
had plenty of friends upon the Continent; and being rich, handsome, and
accomplished, was fêted and caressed wherever he went. He was very much
admired, and he might have been beloved; but that first disappointment
had done its fatal work, and he did not believe that there was in all
the world any such thing as pure and disinterested affection for a young
man with a landed estate and fifteen thousand a year.
So he lounged and dawdled away his time in drawing-rooms and boudoirs,
on moonlit balconies, in shadowy orange-groves, beside the rippling
Arno, in the colonnades of Venice, on the Parisian boulevards, under the
lime-trees of Berlin, in any region where there was life and colour and
gaiety, and the brightness of beautiful faces, and where a man of a
naturally gloomy temperament might forget himself and be amused. He
started with the intention of doing no harm; but with no better guiding
principle than the intention to be harmless, a man can contrive to do a
good deal of mischief.
Mr. Lansdell's life abroad was neither a good nor a useful one. It was
an artificial kind of existence, with spurious pleasures, spurious
brilliancy,--a life whose brightest moments but poorly compensated for
the dismal reaction that followed them. And in the meanwhile Lady
Gwendoline did not become Marchioness of Heatherland; for, only a month
before the day appointed for the wedding, young Lord Heatherland broke
his neck in an Irish steeple-chase.
It was a terrible and bitter disappointment; but Lady Gwendoline showed
her high breeding and her philosophy at the same time. She retired from
the world in which her career had been hitherto so brilliantly
successful, and bore her sorrow in silence. She, too, had played her
best card, and had lost; and now that the Marquis was dead, and Rowland
Lansdell far away, people began to say that the lady had jilted her
cousin, and that the loss of her titled lover was Heaven's special
judgment upon her iniquity,--though why poor Lord Heatherland should be
sacrificed to Lady Gwendoline Pomphrey's sin is rather a puzzling
question.
It may be that Lord Ruysdale's daughter hoped her cousin would return
when he heard of the Marquis's death. She knew that Roland had loved
her: and what was more likely than that he should come back to her, now
that he knew she was once more free to be his wife? Lady Gwendoline kept
the secrets of her own heart, and no one knew which of her two lovers
had been dearest to her. She kept her own secrets; and, by-and-by, when
she reappeared in the world, people saw that her beauty had suffered
very little from her sorrow for her disappointment.
She was still very handsome, but her prestige was gone. Impertinent
young _débutantes_ of eighteen called this splendid creature of
four-and-twenty "quite old." Wasn't she engaged to a Mr. Lansdell ever
so long ago, and then to the Marquis of Heatherland? Poor thing, how
very sad! They wondered she did not go over to Rome, or join Miss
Sellon's sisterhood, or something of that kind. Lady Gwendoline's
portrait still held its place in books of beauty, and she could see
herself smiling in West-end printshops, with a preternaturally high
forehead, and very long ringlets; but she felt that she was old--very
old. Gossipping dowagers talked aristocratic scandal openly before her,
and said, "We don't mind _your_ hearing it, Gwendoline dear, for of
course you know the world, and that such things _do_ happen;" and a
woman has seen the last of her youth when people say that sort of thing
to her.
She felt that she was very old. She had led a high-pressure kind of
existence, in which a year stands for a decade; and now in her lonely
old age she discovered that her father was very poor, and that his
estates were mortgaged, and that henceforth her existence must be a
wretched hand-to-mouth business, unless some distant relation, from whom
Lord Ruysdale had expectations, would be good enough to die.
The distant relation had died within the last twelve months, and the
fortune inherited from him, though by no means a large one, had set the
Earl's affairs tolerably straight; so he had returned to Lowlands, after
selling the lease and furniture of his town-house. It was absurd to keep
the town-house any longer for the sake of Gwendoline, who was
two-and-thirty years of age, and never likely to marry. Lord Ruysdale
argued. So he had paid his debts, and had released his estate from some
of its many incumbrances, and had come back to the home of his boyhood,
to set up as a model farmer and country gentleman.
So, in the bright July sunshine, Gwendoline and her cousin lounged upon
the lawn, and talked of old pleasures and old acquaintances, and the
things that happened to them when they were young. If the lady ever
cherished any hope that Roland would return to his allegiance, that hope
has now utterly vanished. He has forgiven her for all the past, and they
are friends and first-cousins again; but there is no room for hope that
they can ever be again what they have been. A man who can forgive so
generously must have long ceased to love: that strange madness, so
nearly allied to hatred, and jealousy, and rage, and despair, has no
kindred with forgiveness. Lady Gwendoline knew that her chance was gone.
She knew this; and there was a secret bitterness in her heart when she
thought of it, and she was jealous of her cousin's regard, and exacting
in her manner to him. He bore it all with imperturbable good temper. He
had been hot-headed and fiery-tempered long ago, when he was young and
chivalrous, and eager to be useful to his fellow-creatures; but now he
was only a languid loiterer upon the earth, and his creed was the creed
of the renowned American who has declared that "there is nothing new,
and nothing true; and it don't signify."
What did it matter? The crooked sticks would never be straight: that
which was wanting would never be numbered. Roland Lansdell suffered from
a milder form of that disease in a wild paroxysm of which Swift wrote
"Gulliver," and Byron horrified society with "Don Juan." He suffered
from that moody desperation of mind which came upon Hamlet after his
mother's wedding, and neither man nor woman delighted him.
But do not suppose that this young man gave himself melancholy or
Byronic airs upon the strength of the aching void at his own weary
heart. He was a sensible young man; and he did not pose himself _à la_
Lara, or turn down his collars, or let his beard grow. He only took life
very easily, and was specially indulgent to the follies and vices of
people from whom he expected so very little.
He had gone back to Midlandshire because he was tired of his Continental
wanderings; and now he was tired of Mordred already, before he had been
back a week. Lady Gwendoline catechised him rather closely as to what he
had done with himself upon the previous afternoon; and he told her very
frankly that he had strolled into Hurstonleigh Grove to see Mr. Raymond,
and had spent an hour or two talking with his old friend, while Mr. and
Mrs. Gilbert and the children enjoyed themselves, and prepared a rustic
tea, which would have been something like Watteau, if Watteau had been a
Dutchman.
"It was very pretty, Gwendoline, I assure you," he said. "Mrs. Gilbert
made tea, and we drank it in a scalding state; and the two children were
all of a greasy radiance with bread-and-butter. The doctor seems to be
an excellent fellow; his moral region is something tremendous, Raymond
tells me, and he entertained us at tea with a most interesting case of
fester."
"Oh, the doctor? that's Mr. Gilbert, is it not?" said Lady Gwendoline;
"and what do you think of his wife, Roland? You must have formed some
opinion upon that subject, I should think, by the manner in which you
stared at her."
"Did I stare at her?" cried Mr. Lansdell, with supreme carelessness. "I
dare say I did; I always stare at pretty women. Why should a man go into
all manner of stereotyped raptures about a Raffaelle or a Guido, and yet
feel no honest thrill of disinterested admiration when he looks at a
picture fresh from the hands of the supreme painter, Nature? who, by the
way, makes as many failures, and is as often out of drawing, as any
other artist. Yes, I admire Mrs. Gilbert, and I like to look at her. I
don't suppose she's any better than other people, but she's a great deal
prettier. A beautiful piece of animated waxwork, with a little machinery
inside, just enough to make her say, 'Yes, if you please,' and 'No,
thank you.' A lovely non-entity with yellow-black eyes. Did you observe
her eyes?"
"No!" Lady Gwendoline answered, sharply; "I observed nothing except that
she was a very dowdy-looking person. What, in Heaven's name, is Mr.
Raymond's motive for taking her up? He's always taking up some
extraordinary person."
"But Mrs. Gilbert is not an extraordinary person: she's very stupid and
commonplace. She was nursery-maid, or nursery-governess, or something of
that kind, to that dear good Raymond's penniless nieces."
There was no more said about Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert. Lady Gwendoline did
not care to talk about these common people, who came across her dull
pathway, and robbed her of some few accidental rays of that light which
was now the only radiance upon earth for her,--the light of her cousin's
presence.
Ah, me! with what a stealthy step, invisible in the early sunshine,
pitiless Nemesis creeps after us, and glides past us, and goes on before
to wait for us upon the other side of the hill, amidst the storm-clouds
and the darkness! From the very first Gwendoline had loved her cousin
Roland better than any other living creature upon this earth: but the
chance of bringing down the bird at whose glorious plumage so many a
fair fowler had levelled her rifle had dazzled and tempted her. The true
wine of life was not that mawkish, sickly-sweet compound of rose-leaves
and honey called Love, but an effervescing, intoxicating beverage known
as Success, Lady Gwendoline thought: and in the triumph of her splendid
conquest it seemed such an easy thing to resign the man she loved. But
now it was all different. She looked back, and remembered what her life
might have been: she looked forward, and saw what it was to be: and the
face of Nemesis was very terrible to look upon.
Thus it was that Lady Gwendoline was exacting of her cousin's attention,
impatient of his neglect. Oh, if she could have brought him back! if she
could have kindled a new flame in the cold embers! Alas! she knew that
to do that would be to achieve the impossible. She looked in the glass,
and saw that her aristocratic beauty was pale and faded; she felt that
the story of her life was ended. The sea might break against the crags
for ever and for ever; but the tender grace of a day that was dead could
never return to her.
"He loved me once," she thought, as she sat in the summer twilight,
watching her cousin strolling on the lawn, smoking his after-dinner
cigar, and looking so tired--so tired of himself and everything in the
world. "He loved me once; it is something to remember that."
The day was very dull at Lowlands, Mr. Lansdell thought. There was a
handsome house, a little old and faded, but very handsome
notwithstanding; and there was a well-cooked dinner, and good wines; and
there was an elegant and accomplished woman always ready to talk to him
and amuse him;--and yet, somehow, it was all flat, stale, and
unprofitable to this young man, who had lived the same kind of life for
ten years, and had drained its pleasures to the very dregs.
"We should laugh at a man who went on writing epic poems all his life,
though people refused to read a line of his poetry; and no man can be
expected to go on trying to improve the position of people who don't
want to be improved. I've tried my hand at the working-man, and he has
rejected me as an intrusive nuisance. I've no doubt he was 'in his
right.' How should I like a reformer who wanted to set _me_ straight,
and lay out my leisure hours by line and rule, and spend my money for
me, and show me how to get mild Turkish, and German wines, in the best
and cheapest market?"
Mr. Lansdell often thought about his life. It is not natural that a man,
originally well disposed, should lead a bad and useless life without
thinking of it. Mr. Lansdell was subject to gloomy fits of melancholy,
in which the Present seemed a burden, and the Future a blank,--a great
blank desert, or a long dreary bridge, like that which the genius showed
to Mirza in his morning vision, with dreadful pitfalls every here and
there, down which unwary foot-passengers sank, engulfed in the dreadful
blackness of a bottomless ocean.