WHEREIN MY FATHER BRINGS ABOUT HIS DENOUEMENT.
"It is no use in the world," said my father, "to know all the
languages expounded in grammars and splintered up into lexicons, if we
don't learn the language of the world. It is a talk apart, Kitty,"
cried my father warming up. "It is an ANAGLYPH--a spoken anaglyph, my
dear! If all the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians had been A B C to you,
still if you did not know the anaglyph, you would know nothing of the
true mysteries of the priests.[1]
"Neither Roland nor I knew one symbol-letter of the anaglyph. Talk,
talk--talk on persons we never heard of, things we never cared for.
All _we_ thought of importance, puerile or pedantic trifles--all we
thought so trite and childish, the grand momentous business of life!
If you found a little schoolboy, on his half holiday, fishing for
minnows with a crooked pin, and you began to tell him of all the
wonders of the deep, the laws of the tides, and the antediluvian
relics of iguanodon and ichthyosaurus--nay, if you spoke but of pearl
fisheries, and coral banks, or water-kelpies and naiads, would not the
little boy cry out peevishly, 'Don't tease me with all that nonsense!
let me fish in peace for my minnows.' I think the little boy is right
after his own way--it was to fish for minnows that he came out, poor
child, not to hear about iguanodons and water-kelpies!
"So the company fished for minnows, and not a word could we say about
our pearl fisheries and coral banks! And as for fishing for minnows
ourselves, my dear boy, we should have been less bewildered if you had
asked us to fish for a mermaid! Do you see, now, one reason why I have
let you go thus early into the world? Well, but amongst these
minnow-fishers there was one who fished with an air that made the
minnows look larger than salmons.
"Trevanion had been at Cambridge with me. We were even intimate. He
was a young man like myself, with his way to make in the world. Poor
as I--of a family upon a par with mine--old enough but decayed. There
was, however, this difference between us. He had connexions in the
great world--I had none. Like me his chief pecuniary resource was a
college fellowship. Now, Trevanion had established a high reputation
at the university; but less as a scholar, though a pretty fair one,
than as a man to rise in life. Every faculty he had was an energy. He
aimed at every thing--lost some things, gained others. He was a great
speaker in a debating society, a member of some politico-economical
club. He was an eternal talker--brilliant, various, paradoxical,
florid--different from what he is now. For, dreading fancy, his career
since has been an effort to curb it. But all his mind attached itself
to something that we Englishmen call solid; it was a large mind--not,
my dear Kitty, like a fine whale sailing through knowledge from the
pleasure of sailing--but like a polypus, that puts forth all its
feelers for the purpose of catching hold of something. Trevanion had
gone at once to London from the university: his reputation and his
talk dazzled his connexions, not unjustly. They made an effort--they
got him into parliament: he had spoken, he had succeeded. He came to
Compton with the flush of his virgin fame. I cannot convey to you, who
know him now--with his care-worn face, and abrupt dry manner,--reduced
by perpetual gladiatorship to the skin and bone of his former
self--what that man was when he first stepped into the arena of life.
"You see, my listeners, that you have to recollect that we middle-aged
folks were young then--that is to say, we were as different from what
we are now, as the green bough of summer is from the dry wood, out
of which we make a ship or a gate-post. Neither man nor wood comes to
the uses of life till the green leaves are stripped and the sap gone.
And then the uses of life transform us into strange things with other
names: the tree is a tree no more--it is a gate or a ship; the youth
is a youth no more, but a one-legged soldier; a hollow-eyed statesman;
a scholar spectacled and slippered! When Micyllus--(here the hand
slides into the waistcoat again!)--when Micyllus," said my father,
"asked the cock that had once been Pythagoras,[2] if the affair of
Troy was really as Homer told it, the cock replied scornfully, 'How
could Homer know any thing about it?--at that time he was a camel in
Bactria.' Pisistratus, according to the doctrine of metempsychosis,
you might have been a Bactrian camel--when that which to my life was
the siege of Troy saw Roland and Trevanion before the walls.
"Handsome you can see that Trevanion has been; but the beauty of his
countenance then was in its perpetual play, its intellectual
eagerness; and his conversation was so discursive, so various, so
animated, and, above all, so full of the things of the day! If he had
been a priest of Serapis for fifty years, he could not have known the
Anaglyph better! Therefore he filled up every crevice and pore of that
hollow society with his broken, inquisitive, petulant light. Therefore
he was admired, talked of, listened to; and everybody said, 'Trevanion
is a rising man.'
"Yet I did not do him then the justice I have done since--for we
students and abstract thinkers are apt too much, in our first youth,
to look to the _depth_ of a man's mind or knowledge, and not enough to
the _surface_ it may cover. There may be more water in a flowing
stream, only four feet deep, and certainly more force and more health,
than in a sullen pool, thirty yards to the bottom! I did not do
Trevanion justice. I did not see how naturally he realised Lady
Ellinor's ideal. I have said that she was like many women in one.
Trevanion was a thousand men in one. He had learning to please her
mind, eloquence to dazzle her fancy, beauty to please her eye,
reputation precisely of the kind to allure her vanity, honour and
conscientious purpose to satisfy her judgment. And, above all, he was
ambitious. Ambitious not as I--not as Roland was, but ambitious as
Ellinor was: ambitious, not to realise some grand ideal in the silent
heart, but to grasp the practical positive substances that lay
without.
"Ellinor was a child of the great world, and so was he. I saw not all
this, nor did Roland; and Trevanion seemed to pay no particular court
to Ellinor.
"But the time approached when I ought to speak. The house began to
thin. Lord Rainsforth had leisure to resume his easy conferences with
me; and one day walking in his garden he gave me the opportunity. For
I need not say, Pisistratus," said my father, looking at me earnestly,
"that before any man of honour, especially if of inferior worldly
pretensions, will open his heart seriously to the daughter, it is his
duty to speak first to the parent, whose confidence has imposed that
trust." I bowed my head and coloured.
"I know not how it was," continued my father, "but Lord Rainsforth
turned the conversation on Ellinor. After speaking of his expectations
from his son, who was returning home, he said 'But he will of course
enter public life,--will, I trust, soon marry, have a separate
establishment, and I shall see but little of him. My Ellinor!--I
cannot bear the thought of parting wholly with her. And that, to say
the selfish truth, is one reason why I have never wished her to marry
a rich man, and so leave me for ever. I could hope that she will give
herself to one who may be contented to reside at least a great part of
the year with me--who may bless me with another son, not steal from me
a daughter. I do not mean that he should waste his life in the
country; his occupations would probably lead him to London. I care not
where my _house_ is, all I want is to keep my _home_. You know' (he
added, with a smile that I thought meaning,) 'how often I have
implied to you that I have no vulgar ambition for Ellinor. Her portion
must be very small, for my estate is strictly entailed, and I have
lived too much up to my income all my life to hope to save much now.
But her tastes do not require expense; and while I live, at least,
there need be no change. She can only prefer a man whose talents,
congenial to hers, will win their own career, and ere I die that
career may be made.' Lord Rainsforth paused, and then--how, in what
words I know not,--but out all burst!--my long-suppressed, timid,
anxious, doubtful, fearful love. The strange energy it had given to a
nature till then so retiring and calm! My recent devotion to the
law,--my confidence that, with such a prize, I could succeed,--it was
but a transfer of labour from one study to another. Labour could
conquer all things, and custom sweeten them in the conquest. The bar
was a less brilliant career than the senate. But the first aim of the
poor man should be independence. In short, Pisistratus, wretched
egotist that I was, I forgot Roland in that moment; and I spoke as one
who felt his life was in his words.
"Lord Rainsforth looked at me, when I had done, with a countenance
full of affection--but it was not cheerful.
"'My dear Caxton,' said he, tremulously, 'I own that I once wished
this--wished it from the hour I knew you; but why did you so long--I
never suspected that--nor I am sure did Ellinor.' He stopped short,
and added quickly--'However, go and speak, as you have spoken to me,
to Ellinor. Go, it may not yet be too late. And yet--but go.'
"Too late--what meant those words? Lord Rainsforth had turned hastily
down another walk, and left me alone, to ponder over an answer which
concealed a riddle. Slowly I took my way towards the house, and sought
Lady Ellinor, half hoping, half dreading, to find her alone. There was
a little room communicating with a conservatory, where she usually sat
in the morning. Thither I took my course.
"That room, I see it still!--the walls covered with pictures from her
own hand, many were sketches of the haunts we had visited
together--the simple ornaments, womanly but not effeminate--the very
books on the table that had been made familiar by dear associations.
Yes, there the _Tasso_ in which we had read together the episode of
_Clorinda_--there the _AEschylus_ in which I translated to her the
_Prometheus_. Pedantries these might seem to some: pedantries,
perhaps, they were; but they were proofs of that congeniality which
had knit the man of books to the daughter of the world. That room--it
was the home of my heart! Such, in my vanity of spirit, methought
would be the air round a home to come. I looked about me, troubled and
confused, and, halting timidly, I saw Ellinor before me, leaning her
face on her hand, her cheek more flushed than usual, and tears in her
eyes. I approached in silence, and as I drew my chair to the table, my
eye fell on a glove on the floor. It was a man's glove. Do you know,"
said my father, "that once, when I was very young, I saw a Dutch
picture called The Glove, and the subject was of murder. There was a
weed-grown marshy pool, a desolate dismal landscape, that of itself
inspired thoughts of ill deeds and terror. And two men, as if walking
by chance, came to this pool, the finger of one pointed to a
blood-stained glove, and the eyes of both were fixed on each other, as
if there were no need of words. That glove told its tale! The picture
had long haunted me in my boyhood, but it never gave me so uneasy and
fearful a feeling as did that real glove upon the floor. Why? My dear
Pisistratus, the theory of forebodings involves one of those questions
on which we may ask 'why' for ever. More chilled than I had been in
speaking to her father, I took heart at last and spoke to Ellinor"----
My father stopped short; the moon had risen, and was shining full into
the room and on his face. And by that light the face was changed;
young emotions had brought back youth--my father looked a young man.
But what pain was there! If the memory alone could raise what, after
all, was but the ghost of suffering, what had been its living reality!
Involuntarily I seized his hand: my father pressed it convulsively,
and said, with a deep breath, "It was too late; Trevanion was Lady
Ellinor's accepted, plighted, happy lover. My dear Katherine, I do not
envy him now; look up, sweet wife, look up!"