"Something new! something new!" cried the Athenians; and across two
thousand years we catch up and echo their greedy cry. But why do we?
We all know well enough that there is nothing new; there was not even
in King Solomon's time--not even in all his treasure-house, nor among
his seven hundred wives. What an advantage those ancients who saw the
world's infancy had over us--over us, who have to content ourselves
with the lees of the wine, which the few dropped ears scattered about
the great reaped harvest field! Who would not fain have lived in the
days when nothing had yet been said--when everything, consequently,
remained to be said? Who could be trite then, in that blest epoch when
platitudes were unborn, when _Tupper_ was an impossibility, and even
the statement that two and two make four had something startlingly
novel about it? _Then_ a man's thoughts were his own, his _very_ own,
his own by the best of all rights--creation; _now_ they are the bastard
product of ten thousand buried men's dead ideas.
Original is a pleasant word, is it not?--fair and well-sounding; but it
is like the sample figs at the top of the box: it represents nothing,
or something infinitely smaller than itself behind and underneath it.
Is it too much to say that it is impossible to find an original idea in
any writer we wot of? You meet, perhaps, some day in a book a thought,
an image that strikes you. You say, "This is this thinker's own; there
is the stamp of this one individual mind upon it;" when lo! mayhap but
a few hours later you are reading the thoughts of some elder scribe,
one that has been dust nigh ten or twenty centuries back, and you find
the same thought, half fledged or quarter fledged, only in the egg,
perhaps--but still it is there. There is nothing new under the sun.
And if this is true of other subjects, how much truer of that most
outworn, threadbare old theme, Love! The world has been spinning
round six thousand years at the lowest, most exploded computation;
in any thousand years there have been thirty or forty generations,
and each unit in every one of those generations, if he has lived to
man's estate, has surely loved after one fashion or another. Whosoever
has done any worthy thing, whosoever has sent out his thoughts in
writing or speech or action to the world, has felt the stirrings of
this strange instinct; unconsciously it has moulded and permeated his
deeds and his words: and yet, old as it is, we are not tired of it,
any more than we are of the back-coming green of the spring, or the
never-extinguished lamps of the stars.
"The harvest is past, the summer is ended;" at least well nigh ended.
Jack and Esther are at breakfast: outside the scarlet geraniums are
blazing away in the morning sun, trying their best to shine as brightly
as he is doing, and the gnats are dancing round and round on the
buoyant floor of their ball-room--the air. I wonder that that incessant
valsing does not make them giddy. I am not sure that human beings, like
the lions and tigers and uneasy black bears in the Zoological, look
their best at feeding-time; but such as they are, here they are.
Esther in a chintz gown, sown all over with little red carnations as
thickly as the firmament with heavenly bodies. She looks as fresh as
a daisy--as an Englishwoman, to whom morning _déshabille_, wrapper,
slippers, undressed hair, are unknown Gallic abominations--and is
eating porridge with a spoon. Jack reading his letters, which look all
bills and circulars, after the fashion of men's correspondence; for
what man made after the fashion of a man, would sit down to indite an
epistle to another man, were it his _alter ego_ unless he had something
to say about a horse or a dog or a gun? Presently he finishes this
cursory survey, crumples up the last blue envelope in his hand, flings
it with manly untidiness into the summer-dressed grate, and says,
resuming a conversation which had been interrupted a quarter of an hour
ago by the entrance of prayers and the urn, "I cannot imagine what you
have done to the fellow! he used not to be half a bad fellow to talk
to. Never a genius, you know, but still I used to like to have him to
walk over the farm with me--not that he knows a swede from a mangold:
don't see much sign of his old mother's farming mantle falling upon
him. But now he has not a word to throw to a dog; he is as stupid as a
stuck pig."
"I have not cut out his tongue or tied it up in a bag, if that is what
you are hinting at," says Esther, with a smile as confused as a dog's,
when, not quite sure of his reception, he sneaks up to you sideways,
lifting his upper lip, and from tail to muzzle one nervous wriggle.
"Perhaps he is like the birds, and gets silent towards the end of the
summer."
"Why you keep him dangling after you, like the tail of a kite, I
cannot conceive," Mr. Craven cries, crumbling his bread with a little
irritation. "It must be such a nuisance having a great long thing like
him knocking about under your feet morning, noon, and night."
Esther is silent; only her head droops lower, lower, till her little
nose almost immerses itself in her stirabout.
"Whereas," pursues Jack, helping himself to a great deal of cold
beef, "if you were to give him his _congé_ now (Jack is by no means
neglectful of the _g_ in the French word), he would be all right again
in a fortnight, ready for the shooting."
"He would, would he?" says Esther, lifting up her nose and reddening
with vexation.
No woman likes to think of her empire as anything short of eternal.
"If you don't like to do it yourself, I'll do it for you," pursues her
brother, making a magnanimously handsome offer. "I would say to him,
'My dear fellow, it is no good, she does not seem to care about you,'
as soon as look at him."
"What a delicate way of breaking the news!" cries Esther, ironically.
"Commend me to a man for gentle _finesse_."
"I don't believe in _breaking_ news," replies Jack, sturdily. "If
you were to go off in a fit, or the bay colt was to break his leg, or
anything to go wrong, I'd far sooner people would tell me so without
any humming and hawing and keeping me on the tenter hooks. Breaking
news is like half cutting your throat before you are hanged, making you
die two deaths instead of one."
"But suppose I do seem to care a little about him?" suggests Esther,
blushing furiously, but holding up her head bravely, and looking
straight at her brother.
"Suppose the cow jumped over the moon," replies Jack with incredulity.
"I don't know whether the cow has accomplished her feat, but I have
accomplished mine," says Esther, trying to make her face as brass, and
failing signally.
Jack puts up his hand, and strokes the future birthplace of his
moustache, to hide an unavoidable smile.
"I don't wish to be rude," he says; "but may I ask, since when? Was it
a week ago, or less, that you requested me to accompany you on one of
your joint excursions to that everlasting wood, and told me you thought
your watch wanted cleaning, the time seemed to go so slow?"
"A week!" cries his sister, indignantly. "Three weeks, or a month, at
least."
"Wrong, Essie, wrong; it was this day fortnight, Ryvel Horse Fair,
which was the reason why I had to decline your invitation."
"What does a week one way or another signify?" she cries, becoming
irrational, as a worsted woman mostly does.
"Nothing to a woman or a--weathercock."
This last insult is too much for Miss Craven.
"I see you are determined to turn me into ridicule; I see you don't
believe me!" she cries, preparing to rush from the room like a tornado.
"My good Essie," says Jack, jumping up, taking her two hands, and
manfully repressing his inclination to laugh--"here I am; tell me
_anything_, and I'll swear by the tomb of my grandmother to believe it."
"Why should not I like him? What is there in him so hateful as to make
my being fond of him incredible?" asks Essie, unreasonable and sobbing.
"Nothing that I know of--except his _boots_, and you told me _they_
were--"
"So they are," she says, smiling through her tears--"more than hateful;
they haunt one like a bad dream."
"He is not the least penitent about them, I can tell you: only
yesterday he showed them me with ungodly glee, told me he had got them
at Hugh Hughes's, at Naullan, and advised me to go and do likewise."
"But--but--his boots are not he; he is not his boots, I mean," remarks
Miss Craven, with meek suggestion; "mercifully, they are separable."
"He was not born in them, you mean? I did not suppose he was; he would
have been worse than Richard the Third, who made his appearance with
all his teeth in his head--didn't he?--if he had."
"It is quite true--perfectly true," continues Esther, leaning her
two hands on the back of a chair, and tilting it up and down, "what
you say about his being so stupid; he _is_ extremely stupid: often
I feel inclined to box his ears, for the thing he says, and for not
understanding things, and having to have them explained to him; but
after all, do you know, I am not sure that it is the people who say
clever things, and snap one up all in a minute, that are the best to
live with."
"You contemplate living with him then, eh? Last time I was favoured
with your plans, you were to be a vestal to the end of the chapter."
"A provision for old age: I cannot expect you to be satisfied with
me always," she answers, with rather a sad smile. "And when I am
superseded, a good worthy simpleton, with obsolete chivalrous ideas
of _Woman_ in the abstract--_Woman_ with a big _W_--who will laugh at
my worst jokes whether he sees them or not, and make none himself, is
better than nothing."
"All right," says Jack, calmly, walking towards the door, and unfolding
the _Times_ with a crackling that nearly drowns his voice: "please
yourself and you'll please me: only be so good as to tell me when the
wedding day is fixed, as I must get a new coat. I suppose that the one
I had for Uncle John's funeral will not do, will it?"
Who is it says in the "Tempest," if neither Ferdinand nor any
other beautiful young Prince had come on the scene, yet if Miranda
had remained alone with her father, and the storms and winds and
water-spirits, she would have ended by loving Caliban? I do not know
about Miranda, but I am sure that if Esther had been in Miranda's place
she would have so ended; would have carried faggots in her slender arms
for the shaggy monster--have called him caressing diminutives, and
asked him little interested questions about his dam Sycorax.
The desire to be loved is strong enough in us all; in this girl
it amounted to madness: it is the key to all the foolish, wicked,
senseless things you will find her doing through this history's short
course. If she could have had her will, every man, woman, and child,
every cow and calf and dog and cat that met her, would have watched her
coming with joy and her going with grief. Add to which, in the summer
time most women like to have a lover; it is almost as necessary to them
as warm clothes at Christmas. In winter the fire is lover enough for
any one. The frosty splendour of the stars and the chill flashing of
the northern lights provoke no yearning in any one human soul towards
any other; we peep at them through our icy casements, then drop the
curtain shivering, and leave them alone to their high cold play in the
sky. But who can look at a July moon alone?
You will say that Esther was not alone, that she had her brother
to look at it with her; but who will deny that a brother who makes
agricultural remarks about the Queen of Night, and observes that
the haze round her royal head looks well for the turnips, is worse,
immeasurably worse than nobody? To me it seems that there is nothing
absolute, positive in all this shifting, kaleidoscope world; everything
is comparative. There is nothing either good, bad, pretty, ugly, large,
small, except as compared with something better, worse, prettier,
uglier, larger, smaller. Measure two men together, and you find one
tall and the other short; put the short one by himself or among a world
of pigmies, and straightway he grows tall. Lacking a standard to go by,
we make egregious errors. I have known many a woman to pass through
life with a pigmy beside her, taking him for a giant all the while, nor
undeceived to the end. Esther has no man to measure her Robert by; none
at all, save the cowman, the carter, and the groom. Intellectually,
morally, physically, he outtops them in stature, and that is all she
can as yet know about him. Moonlight, propinquity, total absence of
objects of comparison--these three must be Esther's excuses.
Robert is not much like her ideal, certainly--the ideal whose picture
she has been painting life-size on the canvas of her mind during the
vacant moments of the last two transitional years; but if we all waited
to be wed till our ideal came knocking at our doors, the world would
be shortly dispeopled of legitimate inhabitants. Miss Craven's ideal
is dark; at seventeen, most ideals are dark: he has long, fierce,
sleepy, unfathomable eyes. Robert is straw-coloured: his eyes are
blue; very wide awake: they say exactly what his tongue does, neither
more nor less, and there is absolutely no harm in them--a doubtful
recommendation to a woman. The ideal's nose is fine cut, delicately
chiselled; his cheeks are a little haggard, slightly hollowed and
paled by five and thirty years or so of the reckless life of one that
has lived, not existed. Robert's nose is broad and blunt; his cheeks
have the roundness and bloom of a countryman's five and twenty. The
ideal breaks most of the commandments with easy grace; is inclined to
be sceptical and a little sarcastic over the old world beliefs, and
facts hoary with time and reverence. Robert nightly prays on bent knees
to be "not led into temptation but delivered from evil;" he believes
firmly every thing that he ever was taught, from the Peep of Day
upwards, and he could no more shape his honest lips into a sneer than
he could square the circle. Before the fell shafts of the ideal's eyes
women lie slain as thick as Greeks lay beneath the arrows of Apollo in
the Iliad's opening clash; the number of Robert's female victims is
represented by a duck's egg.
"Je ne comprends pas l'amour sans effroi," says one of the characters
in the best French novel I have read this many a day. The ideal
inspires fear equally with love; you can imagine his being harsh,
fierce, cruel, to the woman he loves. In none of the most hard-hearted
of created beings could Robert provoke alarm. Children who see him for
the first time come and thrust their little dimpled hands into his,
and laugh up with confident impudence in his face. Dogs to whom he
has never been introduced come and rub their shaggy heads against his
knees, and curl and wriggle about his friendly feet.
Esther can indulge no faintest hope that he will bully her. The ideal
rides straight as a die, and is as much a part of his horse as a
centaur. Robert is very fond of getting a day's hunting when he can
afford the two guineas requisite for the hiring of a horse, which is
not very often; and he likes to get his money's worth by blundering
blindly over everything that comes in his way, but he has about as
much idea of _riding_ as a tailor or a cow. The ideal is an idol to be
set up and worshipped--a Baal to be adored with tears and blood and
knife-gashings. Robert is a worshipper to be encouraged by a cold look
and smile flung to him every now and then, like a bone to a dog, or
spurned away with disapproving foot, as Cain was from his unaccepted
altar. To worship is to a woman always sweeter than to be worshipped.
To worship one must look up; to be worshipped one must look down....
Come with me this August Sunday through the wood from Glan-yr-Afon to
Plas Berwyn--from Esther's home to Robert's. It is but a few hundred
yards of shade and shine, a small, scarce trodden wood-path whose
narrow, faint track the ripe grasses and the seeded ferns have wellnigh
obliterated, flinging themselves across it in all the _abandon_ of
their unspeakable grace. The apples' round faces are reddening in the
little Plas Berwyn orchard; the shorn fields slope barely, slantwise
along the hill-side in their yellow stubble. For weeks and weeks the
corn has been whitening under the sun's hard, veilless stare, and now
at last it has fallen; the barley has bowed its bearded head beneath
the sickle's stroke, and the oats their tremulous ringlets. They are
all gathered in, and garnered in Mrs. Brandon's stout, well-thatched
stacks; to thatch a stack is the one thing a Welshman can do.
It is an hour past noon, and the Reverend Evan Evans has released the
bodies of his congregation from that white-washed, tumble-down old barn
that he is pleased to call his church, and their minds from the tension
necessary to take in the ill-strung-together, misapplied texts that he
is pleased to call his sermon.
Plas Berwyn is a house of about the same size as Glan-yr-Afon, but
the rooms do not look so large, they are so full of large things and
large people. The dining-room is crowded up with a great mahogany
table, a great mahogany sideboard, great mahogany chairs--inconvenient
relics, fondly clung to by people who from a larger house have subsided
into a smaller one--a sort of warranty of past respectability like
the cottager's japanned tea-tray and brass candlesticks. There is an
atmosphere of lumbersome age and gravity about the whole place; none
of the fragrance and light and melody that youth, sheer youth, even
divorced from any other attractive qualities, brings with it.
Of all the gods of the Greek mythology I will bring my votive crowns
and my salt cakes to Bacchus. Not the bloated old gentleman striding
drunk over a barrel, as we figure him, but Bacchus eternally young.
What is there so worthy of adoration in this aging, wrinkling world as
never ending youth?
Most people are cross and most people are unusually hungry on Sunday.
I do not know why it is, but if you observe your acquaintance you
will find it to be true. Hungry or not, the Brandons are at dinner,
dining frugally and sparely on cold roast beef and cold apple tart.
Nothing hot ever figures on the Brandons' Sabbath table, not even
potatoes; indeed, unless they boiled themselves, and hopped out of
the pot judiciously when they found themselves done, I do not see how
they could, as on the Sabbath morn every living soul at Plas Berwyn,
every reluctant scullion and recalcitrant housemaid, is trundled off to
church, the house-door locked, and the key deposited in Mrs. Brandon's
pocket.
All the Brandons hate dining in the middle of the day, consequently
they always dine in the middle of the day on Sunday. Everybody knows
that there are few things more distinctly unpleasant than to sit in
the same room in which you have your meals; to live with the unending
smell and steam of departed viands up your nose and eyes and ears:
consequently the Brandons always sit in the dining-room on Sunday.
Sunday is to them a sort of aggravated Ash Wednesday and Good Friday
rolled into one. On Saturday night Miss Bessy Brandon swoops down upon
all novels, travels, biographies, magazines, poetry books, that may be
lying about, makes a clean sweep of them and consigns them to disgrace
and a cupboard till the return of Monday releases them.
The Brandon family at the present moment have got their Sunday faces
and their Sunday clothes on, and they misbecome most of them very
sorely. Very few men look their best in their Go-to-Meeting clothes.
For some unexplained reason, a black coat made by a country tailor
shows its shortcomings more plainly than a coloured one. The garment
that cases Bob's broad shoulders would draw tears from Mr. Poole's
eyes, could he see it. As for Mrs. Brandon, she always has more or less
of a Sunday face on--which I do not say in any dispraise, but merely
to express a sober, steadfast face, unfurrowed by any violent gust of
mirth or blast of anger. She is like Enid and her mother,
"clad all in faded silk,"
and on her breast she has a miniature of the departed Brandon, in
Geneva gown and bands, about as big as a teacup, and with two small
glutinous curls of the departed's hair at the back. It is so long ago
since he died, that she must have forgotten all about him--what he was
like, even; but she still wears his effigy, as an old inn continues to
hang out the sign of the Saracen's Head, though it is centuries since
ever a Saracen has been seen on the earth's face.
Opposite each other, like little bad mirrors of one another, sit the
Misses Brandon, in melancholy little gowns of no particular stuff and
no particular colour, and little wisps of thin, fine hair well down
over their ears, and minute chignons on the napes of their necks--their
little, bustless, waistless, hipless figures, long plaintive noses, and
meek, dull eyes proclaiming them of that virgin band to whom St. Paul
has awarded the palm of excellence. The Sunday literature is scattered
about on the hard-bottomed chairs. "Stop the Leak" lies on the pit of
its stomach, open at the spot where Miss Bessy abandoned it in favour
of the cold beef; the "Saturday Night of the World," with its mouth
open, and a paper-knife in it.
"Cut two or three good large slices, Bob, dear; they will be so nice
for old John Owen," Mrs. Brandon is saying, in her benignant, cracked,
old voice.
"We can leave them as we go by to church; Bob can carry them," says
Miss Brandon, with authority.
Robert is silent.
"Bob does not like the idea of being seen carrying a basket; he thinks
it would spoil his appearance."
"Hang the appearance!" says Bob, with an easy laugh. "If a man is a
gentleman, it does not make him any the less a gentleman even if he
were seen wheeling a perambulator down Regent Street; but, to tell the
truth, I don't think I shall go to church this afternoon."
"Not go to church! Not go to church!! Not go to church!!!" in three
different keys, rising from astonishment to horrified incredulity.
But seldom has Mr. Brandon missed attending divine service from the
auspicious day, two and twenty years ago, when, at the tender age of
three years, being, Eutychus-like, overcome with sleep, he fell down
with much clamour from a high bench, and raised a mountainous red lump
on his baby forehead, coming into contact with the hard pew floor:
"And his head, as he tumbled, went knicketty-knock,
Like a pebble in Carisbrook well."
Robert feels the weight of public opinion to be heavy, but he sticks
like a man to what he said.
"Not to-day, mother, I think. Esther said she would be coming in
by-and-by to say good-bye to you all, and, as it is her last day, I
thought I might as well have as much as I could of her."
"What _do_ you mean, Bob? Is the girl going to die to-night?" inquires
Miss Brandon, perking up her little tow-coloured head sharply.
"God forbid!" he cries, with a hasty shudder; "don't suggest anything
so frightful; but she is off to-morrow for a week or ten days on a
visit to some friends."
"Going away without mentioning a word about it!"
"Going away _now!_"
These two sentences shoot out with simultaneous velocity from two
mouths.
"Are you surprised at her not telling _us_ where she is going? Does she
ever tell _us_ anything? Does she make _us_ her confidants!" subjoins
Miss Bessy, with mild spite.
Spite is permissible on the Sabbath, though hot potatoes and novels are
not.
"She did not know herself till yesterday," says Bob, briefly, cutting
away rather viciously at the beef.
"But who are these sudden friends that have sprung up all at once? What
are their names? Where do they live? Tell us all about them, dear boy,"
says the old woman, gently, seeing that her son is chafed.
"Their names are Sir Thomas and Lady Gerard; they are old friends of
the Cravens' father, and they live in ----shire; that is all I know
about them."
"A steady-going old couple, I suppose? Will not that be rather dull for
a little gay thing like Esther?"
"There is a girl of about her own age, I believe, a ward of Sir
Thomas's."
"A ward!--oh!"
"And also a son."
"A son! o--h!"
"Well, why should not there be a son? What harm is there in that?" asks
Robert, raising his voice a little in irritation.
"No harm whatever! Much better thing than a daughter! Can push his own
way in the world. Not that I know in the least what you are talking
about," cries a young, saucy voice, which, with the little sleek, dark
head it belongs to, appears uninvited at the door at this juncture.
"Oh! I see you are all at dinner, so I'll stay outside till you have
finished; it is so horrible to be watched when one is eating, isn't
it? I hate it myself." And the head and the voice disappear again as
quickly as they came.
A ruddier tinge rushes into Robert's already ruddy cheek--ruddy as King
David's when he tended his few sheep in the Syrian pastures, before the
weight of the heavy Israelitish crown, and of his own wars and murders
had blanched it. Down go the carving knife and fork with a clatter,
and, "like a doting mallard," he flies after the little vision, banging
the door behind him with an impetus that makes his sisters bound up
from their horsehair chairs like two small parched peas. Presently he
brings her back in triumph.
"So you are going to run away from us, my love?" says Mrs. Brandon,
holding Esther's young white hand in her old veiny one.
"Yes, I'm afraid so; it is a great bore, isn't it?" answers Esther,
trying her best to lengthen her round face and look miserable.
"If it is a bore, why do you go?" inquires Miss Bessy, drily.
"Because I think I ought to make some friends for myself; I never
met anybody before that had no friends, as Jack and I have not; we
literally have not one--except all of you, of course," she ends with a
happy after-thought.
"When you come to my age, my dear," says Mrs. Brandon, shaking her
head, and all the innumerous stiff frillings of her cap, and bringing
to bear on Esther's sanguine youth the weight of her own gloomy
experiences, in the infuriating way that old people do, "you will have
found out that a few good friends are worth more than a great many
indifferent ones."
"But why should not these people be good friends?" asks the girl, a
little incredulously. "Who knows? Surely there must be more good people
in the world than bad ones; so the chances are in favour of them."
"We are expressly forbidden to judge," begins Miss Bessy, charitably;
"otherwise----There's the first bell beginning; we had better go and
put on our things, Jane."