It was Audrey's fate to be condemned by those whom she had most cared
for. Ted and Vincent, Langley and Katherine, and lastly Mr. Flaxman
Reed, they had all judged her--harshly, imperfectly, as human nature
judges. Of the five, perhaps Vincent, because he was a child of Nature,
and Katherine, because she was a good woman, alone appreciated the more
pathetic of Audrey's effects. She presented the moving spectacle of a
small creature struggling with things too great for her. Love, art,
nature, religion, she had never really given herself up to any one of
them; but she had called upon them all in turn, and instead of
sustaining, they had overwhelmed her.
And it seemed that Mr. Flaxman Reed, as the minister of the religion in
which she had sought shelter for a day, had failed her the most
unexpectedly, and in her direst necessity. And yet he had done more for
her than any of the others. She had lied to all of them; he had made it
possible for her to be true. Flaxman Reed would certainly not have
called himself a psychological realist; but by reason of his one
strength, his habit of constant communion with the unseen, he had
solved Langley Wyndham's problem. It would never have occurred to the
great novelist, in his search for the real Audrey, to look deeper than
the "primitive passions," or to suspect that the secret of personality
could lie in so pure a piece of mechanism as the human conscience.
Soon after her confession Audrey left town for the neighbourhood of
Oxford. She may have perceived that London was too vast a stage for her
slender performances; or she may have had some idea of following up a
line slanting gently between the two paths pointed out to her by Langley
Wyndham and Flaxman Reed, who had been the strongest forces in her life.
She had come to herself, but she was not the stuff of which renunciants
are made.
It was about three years later that Mr. Langley Wyndham, looking over
his "Times" one morning, had the joy of reading the announcement of Miss
Audrey Craven's marriage with Algernon Jackson, Esq., of Broughton
Poggs, in the county of Oxfordshire.
It was true. After all, Audrey had married a nonentity: it was the end
of her long quest of the eminent and superlative.
Mr. Jackson was certainly not an eminent person, and he was superlative
only in so far as he passed for "the biggest bore in the county"; but he
had the positive merit of being a gentleman, which in these days of a
talented democracy amounts almost to genius. Since that night when, as a
guileless undergraduate, he had interfered with Audrey's first
introduction to Langley Wyndham, Mr. Jackson's career had been
simplicity itself. He had tried most of the learned professions, and
failed in all he tried. He then took up model goose-farming on a large
scale, and achieved success amidst the jeers of his family and friends.
The echo of that derision was soon lost in the jingle of Algernon's
guineas. Not every one can attain a golden mediocrity; and it was a
great step for a man who had hitherto ranked as a nonentity. On the
strength of it he asked the beautiful Miss Craven to be his wife, and no
one was more surprised than himself when she consented. She was his
first and last love--of a series of loves. For Mr. Jackson had never
read "Laura"; indeed he read but few books, and if you had told him of
Langley Wyndham's masterpiece to-day, he would have forgotten all about
it by to-morrow; he would certainly never have thought of identifying
its heroine with his wife.
Nobody ever understood why Audrey made that marriage. For any one who
had enjoyed the friendship of such men as Langley Wyndham and Flaxman
Reed, there was bathos in the step; it seemed an ugly concession to
actuality. It may have been; for Audrey was nothing if not modern, the
daughter of an age that has flirted with half-a-dozen ideals, all
equally fascinating, and finally decided in favour of a mature realism.
She may have learned that hardest lesson of the schools, the translation
of life's drama from fancy into fact; found out that all the time the
grey old chorus has been singing, not of love and joy, as she once in
her ignorance imagined, but of unspeakable rest on the great consoling
platitudes of life, where there is no more revelation because there is
no mystery, and no despair because there is no hope. The text of that
chorus is often corrupt, but the meaning is never hopelessly obscure. In
other words, she may have married Mr. Jackson in a fit of pessimism.
Or perhaps--perhaps she had profited by the more cheerful though equally
important lesson of the playground; learned that whether the game of
life be fast or slow, dull or amusing, matters little when you are
knocked out in the first round (she herself had had many rounds, not
counting Mr. Jackson); that in these circumstances one may still find
considerable entertainment in looking on; and that in any case the
player is not for the game, but the game for the player. The player--who
may be left on the ground long after all games have been played out. But
this is to suppose that Audrey was a philosopher, which is manifestly
absurd.
Perhaps! More likely than not her revelation came when she was least
looking for it, stumbling by the merest accident on one of "the great
things of life," the eternal, the incomprehensible; for of these some
say that the greatest is love. It is certainly the most
incomprehensible. She may have loved Mr. Jackson. If she did not, she
has never let him know it.
THE END
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| |
| Transcriber's note |
| |
| The spelling of the following words which appear to be |
| printers errors has been changed. |
| |
| gods to goods |
| effection to affection |
| it to if |
| undergratuate to undergraduate |
| |
| |
| Other inconsistencies are as in the original. The author's |
| spelling has been maintained. |
| |
| |
| Passages in italic font are indicated by _italic_. |
| |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+