DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS.
THE fair river that wound like a broad ribbon of silver through the
lands of Harold Jerningham was not more tranquil than the course of
existence at the bailiff’s cottage. M. de Bergerac’s great book grew
slowly and steadily in bulk, and developed day by day from chaos into
form; while Helen’s simple life went on, eventless and purposeless
perhaps, if measured by the ordinary standard by which the world
measures existence, every hour filled with pleasant occupation, every
morning bringing with it some new delight. Her father, her books,
her dog, her piano, her birds, her dairy, her poultry-yard,--these
were the delights of Helen’s life, and these left her no leisure for
the ordinary aspirations of young-ladyhood. It is not to be supposed
that so charming a damsel was neglected or ignored by neighbouring
families. Helen had to receive an occasional morning visitor, and
was obliged sometimes to withdraw the declaration that she never
visited, in favour of some friendly matron hunting pretty girls for a
garden-party, or presentable pianistes for a musical evening. But she
went out very seldom. Her home-life was inexpressibly dear to her,
and an evening’s absence from the beloved father’s side seemed like a
break in her existence. What could people give her at garden-parties or
musical evenings that was equal to her father’s society?
“I meet no one who can talk like you, papa,” she said on returning,
blooming and radiant, from a neighbouring mansion, not elated because
she had been enjoying herself especially abroad, but because she was
pleased to come home. “Why should I take the trouble to put on this
white dress, and crush all the little flounces that poor Nanon insists
upon ironing with her own hands, in order to hear people say stupid
things, when I am always so much happier with you in this dear old
room? I am afraid I must be a blue-stocking, papa, for I cannot enjoy
the perpetual talk about operas and morning-concerts, and new curates
and croquet-parties, that I hear whenever I go out.”
It was very pleasant to Eustace Thorburn to discover that the country
society had so little fascination for his employer’s daughter. It had
been anguish to him to see her borne away to halls of dazzling light,
or paradisaic croquet-grounds, whither he might not follow. He loved
her with a young man’s love--pure, honest, and enthusiastic. The
depth and intensity, the abnegation of self, which constitutes the
religion of love, were as yet only latent in his breast. It was the
summer-morning of life, and the barque that bore the lovers onward
upon the enchanted waters was floating with the stream. The hour of
the turning tide would be the hour to test the strength of Eustace
Thorburn’s devotion. At present all was smooth and bright and happy,
and the affection which these young people felt for one another grew
imperceptibly in the hearts of each. Helen did not know why her life
seemed to her so perfect in its calm happiness. Eustace believed that
he was battling manfully with his own weakness, and that every day
brought him nearer to the hour of victory.
“I am resigned to the thought that Helen de Bergerac may never be my
wife,” he said to himself; “and yet I am almost happy.”
He might have said, quite happy; for a happiness more perfect than
any man can hope to experience twice in his life made his new home a
paradise for him. He was happy because, unknown to himself, he still
hoped; he was happy because he was still the friend and companion of
his idol.
“What is to become of me when my task here is finished?” he asked
himself. But this was a line of thought which he dared not pursue;
beyond that bright home all was darkness.
M. de Bergerac looked on at the little Arcadian comedy, and wondered.
The scholar was too unskilled in the study of youthful hearts to read
the mysterious cipher in which the secret thoughts of lovers are
written. He saw that the young people were very well pleased with each
other’s society, but he saw no more; nor did he disturb himself by
doubts or apprehensions. Harold Jerningham contemplated the same comedy
with angry feelings in his breast; he envied these young people the
brightness of their morning. The feeling was mean and detestable. Mr.
Jerningham knew this, and hated himself; but the bitter envy of youth
and happiness was not to be banished from his heart. “The heart is
deceitful above all things and desperately wicked,” cries the Prophet;
and if it was even so with the people of God, what must it be with
such a man as Mr. Jerningham, who had never recognized any other god
than himself, and the fancy or the passion of the hour, and who at his
best had known for his only law that vague instinct--half pride, half
shame--which bad men call honour?
It is quite impossible that a man who performs no duty and cherishes
no ambition can escape that fatal decline which leads to the region
of moral darkness. Harold Jerningham had cherished some faint hope
of distinction at the beginning of his life. He had made his venture
in the lottery, and had drawn, not exactly a blank, but a number so
infinitely beneath his expectation that it seemed to him as worthless.
There had been a time when the master of Greenlands, fresh from a
successful university career, and steeped to the very lips in Greek
verse, had fancied himself a poet. The dream, which was so sweet to
Eustace Thorburn, had shed its glamour over his pathway. Even the
sweets of fame had come to him in some small measure, but not that
laurel-crown which he had hoped to win; so he shrugged his shoulders,
laughed at his critics, and wandered away to the sunny lands where
life itself is unwritten poetry. Young Jerningham of Brazenose was
a very brilliant young man, but he lacked that divine spark, that
touch of the superhuman, which men call genius. He had not the
fire, the pluck, the energy, the passion of that young lordling who
answered his contemptuous critics, not with _English Bards and
Scotch Reviewers_--that was only the _tour de force_ of a
pamphleteer--but with _Childe Harold_, the inspired verse of a
poet supremely unconscious of public and of critics, under the sway of
a possession no less potent than that which gave prophetic voice to
Cassandra.
Mr. Jerningham had discovered that a handsome face, a manner eminently
successful in feminine society, an intimate acquaintance with classic
literature, a fine fortune, and some ambition for literary fame, do
not make a Byron; and to be anything less than Byron seemed to Mr.
Jerningham synonymous with failure. “I am like the tiger,” said Byron.
“If I do not succeed with the first spring, I go back growling to my
cave.” Mr. Jerningham was also like the tiger. He went back to his
cave, and remained there. “Cæsar or nothing,” he had said to himself,
when he made his venture. The result was nothing.
The fact that he had thus aspired and failed, may have had some slight
influence upon his feelings on the subject of Eustace Thorburn. The
young man’s ambitious hopes were never paraded. It was only by the glow
upon his face, and the warmth of his words, when he praised the poets
of the past, that he unconsciously revealed the bent of his mind. For
the rest, Mr. Jerningham heard a great deal about the young poet’s
hopes and dreams from Helen, who was his confidante and adviser.
“He helps me so kindly with all my studies, that it is the least I
can do to be interested in his poems,” Helen said, as if she felt
herself bound to apologize for the warmth of her interest in this
subject. “He is writing a long poem, something in the style of Mrs.
Browning’s _Aurora Leigh_, only with a much prettier story for the
groundwork; and he has read me little bits--such noble verses! And then
he writes an occasional short poem, just as the fancy strikes him. Some
of the short poems have been published in the magazines. Perhaps you
would like to see them?”
Helen rose as if to go in search of the magazines, but Mr. Jerningham
stopped her with a hasty gesture of deprecation.
“Please spare me the short poems, my dear Helen,” he said. “I have
given up reading my Horace and Catullus, since I have passed the poetic
age. Don’t ask me to read magazine verses.”
Helen looked very much disappointed.
“I dare say, two thousand years hence, learned men will be disputing
about a false quantity in one of Mr. Thorburn’s poems,” said her
father. “Not every poet can hope to be thought great in his own
century. Do you remember that preface of Webster’s to the _White
Devil_, in which he names all the dramatists of the day, and last
of all, ‘without wrong so to be named, the right happy and copious
industry of master Shakspeare’?”
“Yes,” answered Mr. Jerningham. “I don’t think either Shakspeare or
Molière had the faintest suspicion that he was to be immortal. It is
only once in a thousand years that a poet drinks the cup of triumph
that Byron drained to the very lees. He tasted the lees, and died
with the bitterness of them on his lips. He might have tasted nothing
but lees had he lived longer. For one man who dies too soon, a hundred
die too late. There is a golden opportunity for effective death in
every man’s career, but few are wise enough to seize it. If the first
Napoleon had fallen at Austerlitz, he would have taken high rank among
the demi-gods; nay, De Quincey suggests that even Commodus might have
made a shred of character for himself by dying immediately after a
triumphant display of his genius as a toxophilite.”
Mr. Jerningham’s distaste for his friend’s secretary did not keep him
away from the cottage. He came at all times and seasons, and if his
only possibility of happiness had been found in that house, he could
not have seemed less inclined to leave it, or more eager to return to
it. Weeks, and even months, passed, and he still remained in England,
spending a few days every now and then at the bijou house in Park
Lane, but making Greenlands his headquarters. Capricious in all his
movements, he came when he pleased, and departed when he pleased.
Theodore de Bergerac loved and trusted him, as it was his nature to
love and trust those whom he thought worthy of his friendship. The
welcome that awaited him was always equally cordial. He had never
imagined so calm a haven.
“If I could spend the rest of my life here, I might die a good
Christian,” he said to himself; until, little by little, he came to
understand that those feelings which made the bailiff’s cottage so
pleasant to him were not altogether Christian like.
He hated Eustace Thorburn. He envied him his youth, his hopefulness,
his chances of future distinction; above all, he envied him the love
of Helen de Bergerac. Yes, there was the sting. Youth, hope, chances
of future glory, might all have been given to this young man, and
Harold Jerningham would have let him go by with a careless sneer. But
Eustace Thorburn had more than these gifts; he had the love of a pure
and bright young creature, whose purity and brightness had touched the
heart of this middle-aged sybarite as it had never been touched before.
His fancy, his vanity, his pride of conquest, had been the motive power
to sustain him in bygone victories. He had dreamed his dreams, and had
awakened suddenly to see Fancy’s radiant vision vanish before the chill
gray light of Reality’s cheerless dawn.
But this time the dream was fairer than any of those old, forgotten
visions. This time the heart of the man, and not the poet’s fancy only,
was touched and subjugated. It was many years since the master of
Greenlands had bade a formal farewell to the follies and delusions of
youth, and he had believed the farewell eternal. And now, in a moment,
unbidden, dreams, delusions, and folly returned to hold him with fatal
sway; and in his self-communings he confessed that it was no common
sentiment which made Helen’s presence so delightful, and no common
prejudice that rendered Eustace Thorburn so odious.
He confessed to himself as much as this; and knowing this, he lingered
at Greenlands, and came day after day to sit beside his friend’s
hearth, or loiter in his friend’s garden. And why should he not snatch
the brief hours of happiness which yet remained for him--the Indian
summer of his life?
“I am an old man,” he said to himself; “at least, in the eyes of this
girl I must seem an old man. She will never know that I regard her
with any warmer sentiment than a fatherly kind of friendship. She will
dream her own dreams, and think her own thoughts, unconscious of her
influence on mine. And by and by, after a few months of sentimental
flirtation, she will marry this young secretary, or some other man,
young, self-satisfied, good-looking, empty-headed, and utterly unable
to understand how divine a treasure the fates have bestowed upon him.”
With such philosophy as this did Mr. Jerningham trifle with his
conscience, or rather that vague sense of honour which stood him
instead of conscience. But there were times when philosophy gave poor
comfort to the soul of this unprincipled egotist, who until now had
never known what it was to set a seal upon his lips or a curb upon
his will. There were hours of envious rage, of dark remorse, of vain,
passionate broodings on the things that might have been; there were
hours in which the spirits of evil claimed Harold Jerningham for their
own, and walked about with him, and hovered around his bed as he slept,
and made his dreams hideous with shapeless horrors. He looked back upon
his early dreams, and laughed at their folly. He was like that French
libertine who, in writing of his youthful caprices, said, “My hour for
loving truly and profoundly had not yet come.” That fateful hour, which
comes to every man, had come to this one too late.
What special charm in this girl enthralled his mind and melted his
heart? He did not know. It could scarcely be her beauty, for his life
had been spent amongst beautiful women, and his heart had long ago
become impervious to the fascination of a fair and noble face. It may
have been her innocence, her youth, her gentleness, that had subdued
this world-weary cynic--the poetic charm of her surroundings, the sweet
repose which seemed a part of the very atmosphere she breathed.
Yes, in this youthful purity there lurked the potent charm that held
Harold Jerningham. The girl, with her sweet, confiding face and pure
thoughts, the rustic life, the perfume of Arcadia, composed the
subtle charm that had intoxicated Mr. Jerningham’s senses. What is
so delightful as novelty to an idle, _blasé_ creature of the
Jerningham type? The life at Greenlands had all the charm of novelty;
it was fresh, piquant, exhilarating, because of its very innocence; and
as it had never been in Mr. Jerningham’s creed to deny himself any
pleasure, he lingered at the neglected house in which his father and
mother had died. He spent his evenings at the bailiffs cottage, and
left the issue to fate.
“She will never know how tenderly her father’s old friend loves her,”
he said to himself; “and at the worst I may prevent her throwing
herself away upon an adventurer.”