For three weeks Richard had to remain in town and endure the teachings
of the System in a new atmosphere. He had to sit and listen to men of
science who came to renew their intimacy with his father, and whom of
all men his father wished him to respect and study; practically
scientific men being, in the baronet’s estimation, the only minds
thoroughly mated and enviable. He had to endure an introduction to the
Grandisons, and meet the eyes of his kind, haunted as he was by the
Foolish Young Fellow. The idea that he might by any chance be
identified with him held the poor youth in silent subjection. And it
was horrible. For it was a continued outrage on the fair image he had
in his heart. The notion of the world laughing at him because he loved
sweet Lucy stung him to momentary frenzies, and developed premature
misanthropy in his spirit. Also the System desired to show him whither
young women of the parish lead us, and he was dragged about at
nighttime to see the sons and daughters of darkness, after the fashion
prescribed to Mr. Thompson; how they danced and ogled down the high
road to perdition. But from this sight possibly the teacher learnt more
than his pupil, since we find him seriously asking his meditative
hours, in the Note-book: “Wherefore Wild Oats are only of one gender?”
a question certainly not suggested to him at Raynham; and
again—“Whether men might not be attaching too rigid an
importance?”...to a subject with a dotted tail apparently, for he gives
it no other in the Note-book. But, as I apprehend, he had come to plead
in behalf of women here, and had deduced something from positive
observation. To Richard the scenes he witnessed were strange wild
pictures, likely if anything to have increased his misanthropy, but for
his love.
Certain sweet little notes from Lucy sustained the lover during the
first two weeks of exile. They ceased; and now Richard fell into such
despondency that his father in alarm had to take measures to hasten
their return to Raynham. At the close of the third week Berry laid a
pair of letters, bearing the Raynham post-mark, on the breakfast-table,
and, after reading one attentively, the baronet asked his son if he was
inclined to quit the metropolis.
“For Raynham, air?” cried Richard, and relapsed, saying, “As you will!”
aware that he had given a glimpse of the Foolish Young Fellow.
Berry accordingly received orders to make arrangements for their
instant return to Raynham.
The letter Sir Austin lifted his head from to bespeak his son’s wishes
was a composition of the wise youth Adrian’s, and ran thus:
“Benson is doggedly recovering. He requires great indemnities. Happy
when a faithful fool is the main sufferer in a household! I quite agree
with you that our faithful fool is the best servant of great schemes.
Benson is now a piece of history. I tell him that this is indemnity
enough, and that the sweet Muse usually insists upon gentlemen being
half-flayed before she will condescend to notice them; but Benson, I
regret to say, rejects the comfort so fine a reflection should offer,
and had rather keep his skin and live opaque. Heroism seems partly a
matter of training. Faithful folly is Benson’s nature: the rest has
been thrust upon.
“The young person has resigned the neighbourhood. I had an interview
with the fair Papist myself, and also with the man Blaize. They were
both sensible, though one swore and the other sighed. She is pretty. I
hope she does not paint. I can affirm that her legs are strong, for she
walks to Bellingham twice a week to take her Scarlet bath, when, having
confessed and been made clean by the Romish unction, she walks back the
brisker, of which my Protestant muscular system is yet aware. It was on
the road to Bellingham I engaged her. She is well in the matter of
hair. Madam Godiva might challenge her, it would be a fair match. Has
it never struck you that Woman is nearer the vegetable than Man?—Mr.
Blaize intends her for his son a junction that every lover of fairy
mythology must desire to see consummated. Young Tom is heir to all the
agremens of the Beast. The maids of Lobourne say (I hear) that he is a
very Proculus among them. Possibly the envious men say it for the
maids. Beauty does not speak bad grammar—and altogether she is better
out of the way.”
The other letter was from Lady Blandish, a lady’s letter, and said:
“I have fulfilled your commission to the best of my ability, and
heartily sad it has made me. She is indeed very much above her
station—pity that it is so! She is almost beautiful—quite beautiful at
times, and not in any way what you have been led to fancy. The poor
child had no story to tell. I have again seen her, and talked with her
for an hour as kindly as I could. I could gather nothing more than we
know. It is just a woman’s history as it invariably commences. Richard
is the god of her idolatry. She will renounce him, and sacrifice
herself for his sake. Are we so bad? She asked me what she was to do.
She would do whatever was imposed upon her—all but pretend to love
another, and that she never would, and, I believe, never will. You know
I am sentimental, and I confess we dropped a few tears together. Her
uncle has sent her for the Winter to the institution where it appears
she was educated, and where they are very fond of her and want to keep
her, which it would be a good thing if they were to do. The man is a
good sort of man. She was entrusted to him by her father, and he never
interferes with her religion, and is very scrupulous about all that
pertains to it, though, as he says, he is a Christian himself. In the
Spring (but the poor child does not know this) she is to come back, and
be married to his lout of a son. I am determined to prevent that. May I
not reckon on your promise to aid me? When you see her, I am sure you
will. It would be sacrilege to look on and permit such a thing. You
know, they are cousins. She asked me, where in the world there was one
like Richard? What could I answer? They were your own words, and spoken
with a depth of conviction! I hope he is really calm. I shudder to
think of him when he comes, and discovers what I have been doing. I
hope I have been really doing right! A good deed, you say, never dies;
but we cannot always know—I must rely on you. Yes, it is; I should
think, easy to suffer martyrdom when one is sure of one’s cause! but
then one must be sure of it. I have done nothing lately but to repeat
to myself that saying of yours, No. 54, C. 7, P.S.; and it has consoled
me, I cannot say why, except that all wisdom consoles, whether it
applies directly or not:
“‘For this reason so many fall from God, who have attained to Him; that
they cling to Him with their Weakness, not with their Strength.’
“I like to know of what you are thinking when you composed this or that
saying—what suggested it. May not one be admitted to inspect the
machinery of wisdom? I feel curious to know how thoughts—real
thoughts—are born. Not that I hope to win the secret. Here is the
beginning of one (but we poor women can never put together even two of
the three ideas which you say go to form a thought): ‘When a wise man
makes a false step, will he not go farther than a fool?’ It has just
flitted through me.
“I cannot get on with Gibbon, so wait your return to recommence the
readings. I dislike the sneering essence of his writings. I keep
referring to his face, until the dislike seems to become personal. How
different is it with Wordsworth! And yet I cannot escape from the
thought that he is always solemnly thinking of himself (but I do
reverence him). But this is curious; Byron was a greater egoist, and
yet I do not feel the same with him. He reminds me of a beast of the
desert, savage and beautiful; and the former is what one would imagine
a superior donkey reclaimed from the heathen to be—a very superior
donkey, I mean, with great power of speech and great natural
complacency, and whose stubbornness you must admire as part of his
mission. The worst is that no one will imagine anything sublime in a
superior donkey, so my simile is unfair and false. Is it not strange? I
love Wordsworth best, and yet Byron has the greater power over me. How
is that?”
(“Because,” Sir Austin wrote beside the query in pencil, “women are
cowards, and succumb to Irony and Passion, rather than yield their
hearts to Excellence and Nature’s Inspiration.”)
The letter pursued:
“I have finished Boiardo and have taken up Berni. The latter offends
me. I suppose we women do not really care for humour. You are right in
saying we have none ourselves, and ‘cackle’ instead of laugh. It is
true (of me, at least) that ‘Falstaff is only to us an incorrigible fat
man.’ I want to know what he illustrates. And Don Quixote—what end can
be served in making a noble mind ridiculous?—I hear you say—practical.
So it is. We are very narrow, I know. But we like wit—practical again!
Or in your words (when I really think they generally come to my
aid—perhaps it is that it is often all your thought); we ‘prefer the
rapier thrust, to the broad embrace, of Intelligence.’”
He trifled with the letter for some time, re-reading chosen passages as
he walked about the room, and considering he scarce knew what. There
are ideas language is too gross for, and shape too arbitrary, which
come to us and have a definite influence upon us, and yet we cannot
fasten on the filmy things and make them visible and distinct to
ourselves, much less to others. Why did he twice throw a look into the
glass in the act of passing it? He stood for a moment with head erect
facing it. His eyes for the nonce seemed little to peruse his outer
features; the grey gathered brows, and the wrinkles much action of them
had traced over the circles half up his high straight forehead; the
iron-grey hair that rose over his forehead and fell away in the fashion
of Richard’s plume. His general appearance showed the tints of years;
but none of their weight, and nothing of the dignity of his youth, was
gone. It was so far satisfactory, but his eyes were wide, as one who
looks at his essential self through the mask we wear.
Perhaps he was speculating as he looked on the sort of aspect he
presented to the lady’s discriminative regard. Of her feelings he had
not a suspicion. But he knew with what extraordinary lucidity women
can, when it pleases them, and when their feelings are not quite
boiling under the noonday sun, seize all the sides of a character, and
put their fingers on its weak point. He was cognizant of the total
absence of the humorous in himself (the want that most shut him out
from his fellows), and perhaps the clear-thoughted, intensely
self-examining gentleman filmily conceived, Me also, in common with the
poet, she gazes on as one of the superior—grey beasts!
He may have so conceived the case; he was capable of that
great-mindedness, and could snatch at times very luminous glances at
the broad reflector which the world of fact lying outside our narrow
compass holds up for us to see ourselves in when we will. Unhappily,
the faculty of laughter, which is due to this gift, was denied him; and
having seen, he, like the companion of friend Balsam, could go no
farther. For a good wind of laughter had relieved him of much of the
blight of self-deception, and oddness, and extravagance; had given a
healthier view of our atmosphere of life; but he had it not.
Journeying back to Bellingham in the train, with the heated brain and
brilliant eye of his son beside him, Sir Austin tried hard to feel
infallible, as a man with a System should feel; and because he could
not do so, after much mental conflict, he descended to entertain a
personal antagonism to the young woman who had stepped in between his
experiment and success. He did not think kindly of her. Lady Blandish’s
encomiums of her behaviour and her beauty annoyed him. Forgetful that
he had in a measure forfeited his rights to it, he took the common
ground of fathers, and demanded, “Why he was not justified in doing all
that lay in his power to prevent his son from casting himself away upon
the first creature with a pretty face he encountered?” Deliberating
thus, he lost the tenderness he should have had for his experiment—the
living, burning youth at his elbow, and his excessive love for him took
a rigorous tone. It appeared to him politic, reasonable, and just, that
the uncle of this young woman, who had so long nursed the prudent
scheme of marrying her to his son, should not only not be thwarted in
his object but encouraged and even assisted. At least, not thwarted.
Sir Austin had no glass before him while these ideas hardened in his
mind, and he had rather forgotten the letter of Lady Blandish.
Father and son were alone in the railway carriage. Both were too
preoccupied to speak. As they neared Bellingham the dark was filling
the hollows of the country. Over the pine-hills beyond the station a
last rosy streak lingered across a green sky. Richard eyed it while
they flew along. It caught him forward: it seemed full of the spirit of
his love, and brought tears of mournful longing to his eyelids. The sad
beauty of that one spot in the heavens seemed to call out to his soul
to swear to his Lucy’s truth to him: was like the sorrowful visage of
his fleur-de-luce as he called her, appealing to him for faith. That
tremulous tender way she had of half-closing and catching light on the
nether-lids, when sometimes she looked up in her lover’s face—a look so
mystic-sweet that it had grown to be the fountain of his dreams: he saw
it yonder, and his blood thrilled.
Know you those wand-like touches of I know not what, before which our
grosser being melts; and we, much as we hope to be in the Awaking,
stand etherealized, trembling with new joy? They come but rarely;
rarely even in love, when we fondly think them revelations. Mere
sensations they are, doubtless: and we rank for them no higher in the
spiritual scale than so many translucent glorious polypi that quiver on
the shores, the hues of heaven running through them. Yet in the harvest
of our days it is something for the animal to have had such mere
fleshly polypian experiences to look back upon, and they give him an
horizon—pale seas of luring splendour. One who has had them (when they
do not bound him) may find the Isles of Bliss sooner than another.
Sensual faith in the upper glories is something. “Let us remember,”
says The Pilgrim’s Scrip, “that Nature, though heathenish, reaches at
her best to the footstool of the Highest. She is not all dust, but a
living portion of the spheres. In aspiration it is our error to despise
her, forgetting that through Nature only can we ascend. Cherished,
trained, and purified, she is then partly worthy the divine mate who is
to make her wholly so. St. Simeon saw the Hog in Nature, and took
Nature for the Hog.”
It was one of these strange bodily exaltations which thrilled the young
man, he knew not how it was, for sadness and his forebodings vanished.
The soft wand touched him. At that moment, had Sir Austin spoken
openly, Richard might have fallen upon his heart. He could not.
He chose to feel injured on the common ground of fathers, and to pursue
his System by plotting. Lady Blandish had revived his jealousy of the
creature who menaced it, and jealousy of a System is unreflecting and
vindictive as jealousy of woman.
Heath-roots and pines breathed sharp in the cool autumn evening about
the Bellingham station. Richard stood a moment as he stepped from the
train, and drew the country air into his lungs with large heaves of the
chest. Leaving his father to the felicitations of the station-master,
he went into the Lobourne road to look for his faithful Tom, who had
received private orders through Berry to be in attendance with his
young master’s mare, Cassandra, and was lurking in a plantation of firs
unenclosed on the borders of the road, where Richard, knowing his
retainer’s zest for conspiracy too well to seek him anywhere but in the
part most favoured with shelter and concealment, found him furtively
whiffing tobacco.
“What news, Tom? Is there an illness?”
Tom sent his undress cap on one side to scratch at dilemma, an old
agricultural habit to which he was still a slave in moments of abstract
thought or sudden difficulty.
“No, I don’t want the rake, Mr. Richard,” he whinnied with a false
grin, as he beheld his master’s eye vacantly following the action.
“Speak out!” he was commanded. “I haven’t had a letter for a week!”
Richard learnt the news. He took it with surprising outward calm, only
getting a little closer to Cassandra’s neck, and looking very hard at
Tom without seeing a speck of him, which had the effect on Tom of
making him sincerely wish his master would punch his head at once
rather than fix him in that owl-like way.
“Go on!” said Richard, huskily. “Yes? She’s gone! Well?”
Tom was brought to understand he must make the most of trifles, and
recited how he had heard from a female domestic at Belthorpe of the
name of Davenport, formerly known to him, that the young lady never
slept a wink from the hour she knew she was going, but sat up in her
bed till morning crying most pitifully, though she never complained.
Hereat the tears unconsciously streamed down Richard’s cheeks. Tom said
he had tried to see her, but Mr. Adrian kept him at work, ciphering at
a terrible sum—that and nothing else all day! saying, it was to please
his young master on his return. “Likewise something in Lat’n,” added
Tom. “Nom’tive Mouser!—’nough to make ye mad, sir!” he exclaimed with
pathos. The wretch had been put to acquire a Latin declension.
Tom saw her on the morning she went away, he said: she was very
sorrowful-looking, and nodded kindly to him as she passed in the fly
along with young Tom Blaize. “She have got uncommon kind eyes, sir,”
said Tom, “and cryin’ don’t spoil them.” For which his hand was
wrenched.
Tom had no more to tell, save that, in rounding the road, the young
lady had hung out her hand, and seemed to move it forward and back, as
much as to say, Good-bye, Tom! “And though she couldn’t see me,” said
Tom, “I took off my hat. I did take it so kind of her to think of a
chap like me.” He was at high-pressure sentiment—what with his
education for a hero and his master’s love-stricken state.
“You saw no more of her, Tom?”
“No, sir. That was the last!”
“That was the last you saw of her, Tom?”
“Well, sir, I saw nothin’ more.”
“And so she went out of sight!”
“Clean gone, that she were, sir.”
“Why did they take her away? what have they done with her? where have
they taken her to?”
These red-hot questionings were addressed to the universal heaven
rather than to Tom.
“Why didn’t she write?” they were resumed. “Why did she leave? She’s
mine. She belongs to me! Who dared take her away? Why did she leave
without writing?—Tom!”
“Yes, sir,” said the well-drilled recruit, dressing himself up to the
word of command. He expected a variation of the theme from the change
of tone with which his name had been pronounced, but it was again,
“Where have they taken her to?” and this was even more perplexing to
Tom than his hard sum in arithmetic had been. He could only draw down
the corners of his mouth hard, and glance up queerly.
“She had been crying—you saw that, Tom?”
“No mistake about that, Mr. Richard. Cryin’ all night and all day, I
sh’d say.”
“And she was crying when you saw her?”
“She look’d as if she’d just done for a moment, sir.”
“But her face was white?”
“White as a sheet.”
Richard paused to discover whether his instinct had caught a new view
from these facts. He was in a cage, always knocking against the same
bars, fly as he might. Her tears were the stars in his black night. He
clung to them as golden orbs. Inexplicable as they were, they were at
least pledges of love.
The hues of sunset had left the West. No light was there but the
steadfast pale eye of twilight. Thither he was drawn. He mounted
Cassandra, saying: “Tell them something, Tom. I shan’t be home to
dinner,” and rode off toward the forsaken home of light over Belthorpe,
whereat he saw the wan hand of his Lucy, waving farewell, receding as
he advanced. His jewel was stolen,—he must gaze upon the empty box.