“Much adoe there was, God wot;
He wold love and she wold not.”
—NICHOLAS BRETON.
Extension, we know, is a very imperfect measure of things; and the
length of the sun’s journeying can no more tell us how life has
advanced than the acreage of a field can tell us what growths may be
active within it. A man may go south, and, stumbling over a bone, may
meditate upon it till he has found a new starting-point for anatomy; or
eastward, and discover a new key to language telling a new story of
races; or he may head an expedition that opens new continental
pathways, get himself maimed in body, and go through a whole heroic
poem of resolve and endurance; and at the end of a few months he may
come back to find his neighbors grumbling at the same parish grievance
as before, or to see the same elderly gentleman treading the pavement
in discourse with himself, shaking his head after the same percussive
butcher’s boy, and pausing at the same shop-window to look at the same
prints. If the swiftest thinking has about the pace of a greyhound, the
slowest must be supposed to move, like the limpet, by an apparent
sticking, which after a good while is discerned to be a slight
progression. Such differences are manifest in the variable intensity
which we call human experience, from the revolutionary rush of change
which makes a new inner and outer life, to that quiet recurrence of the
familiar, which has no other epochs than those of hunger and the
heavens.
Something of this contrast was seen in the year’s experience which had
turned the brilliant, self-confident Gwendolen Harleth of the Archery
Meeting into the crushed penitent impelled to confess her unworthiness
where it would have been her happiness to be held worthy; while it had
left her family in Pennicote without deeper change than that of some
outward habits, and some adjustment of prospects and intentions to
reduced income, fewer visits, and fainter compliments. The rectory was
as pleasant a home as before: and the red and pink peonies on the lawn,
the rows of hollyhocks by the hedges, had bloomed as well this year as
last: the rector maintained his cheerful confidence in the good will of
patrons and his resolution to deserve it by diligence in the
fulfillment of his duties, whether patrons were likely to hear of it or
not; doing nothing solely with an eye to promotion except, perhaps, the
writing of two ecclesiastical articles, which having no signature, were
attributed to some one else, except by the patrons who had a special
copy sent them, and these certainly knew the author but did not read
the articles. The rector, however, chewed no poisonous cud of suspicion
on this point: he made marginal notes on his own copies to render them
a more interesting loan, and was gratified that the Archdeacon and
other authorities had nothing to say against the general tenor of his
argument. Peaceful authorship!—living in the air of the fields and
downs, and not in the thrice-breathed breath of criticism—bringing no
Dantesque leanness; rather, assisting nutrition by complacency, and
perhaps giving a more suffusive sense of achievement than the
production of a whole _Divina Commedia_. Then there was the father’s
recovered delight in his favorite son, which was a happiness
outweighing the loss of eighteen hundred a year. Of whatever nature
might be the hidden change wrought in Rex by the disappointment of his
first love, it was apparently quite secondary to that evidence of more
serious ambition which dated from the family misfortune; indeed, Mr.
Gascoigne was inclined to regard the little affair which had caused him
so much anxiety the year before as an evaporation of superfluous
moisture, a kind of finish to the baking process which the human dough
demands. Rex had lately come down for a summer visit to the rectory,
bringing Anna home, and while he showed nearly the old liveliness with
his brothers and sisters, he continued in his holiday the habits of the
eager student, rising early in the morning and shutting himself up
early in the evenings to carry on a fixed course of study.
“You don’t repent the choice of the law as a profession, Rex?” said his
father.
“There is no profession I would choose before it,” said Rex. “I should
like to end my life as a first-rate judge, and help to draw up a code.
I reverse the famous dictum. I should say, ‘Give me something to do
with making the laws, and let who will make the songs.’”
“You will have to stow in an immense amount of rubbish, I
suppose—that’s the worst of it,” said the rector.
“I don’t see that law-rubbish is worse than any other sort. It is not
so bad as the rubbishy literature that people choke their minds with.
It doesn’t make one so dull. Our wittiest men have often been lawyers.
Any orderly way of looking at things as cases and evidence seems to me
better than a perpetual wash of odds and ends bearing on nothing in
particular. And then, from a higher point of view, the foundations and
the growth of law make the most interesting aspects of philosophy and
history. Of course there will be a good deal that is troublesome,
drudging, perhaps exasperating. But the great prizes in life can’t be
won easily—I see that.”
“Well, my boy, the best augury of a man’s success in his profession is
that he thinks it the finest in the world. But I fancy it so with most
work when a man goes into it with a will. Brewitt, the blacksmith, said
to me the other day that his ’prentice had no mind to his trade; ‘and
yet, sir,’ said Brewitt, ‘what would a young fellow have if he doesn’t
like the blacksmithing?”
The rector cherished a fatherly delight, which he allowed to escape him
only in moderation. Warham, who had gone to India, he had easily borne
parting with, but Rex was that romance of later life which a man
sometimes finds in a son whom he recognizes as superior to himself,
picturing a future eminence for him according to a variety of famous
examples. It was only to his wife that he said with decision: “Rex will
be a distinguished man, Nancy, I am sure of it—as sure as Paley’s
father was about his son.”
“Was Paley an old bachelor?” said Mrs. Gascoigne.
“That is hardly to the point, my dear,” said the rector, who did not
remember that irrelevant detail. And Mrs. Gascoigne felt that she had
spoken rather weakly.
This quiet trotting of time at the rectory was shared by the group who
had exchanged the faded dignity of Offendene for the low white house
not a mile off, well enclosed with evergreens, and known to the
villagers, as “Jodson’s.” Mrs. Davilow’s delicate face showed only a
slight deepening of its mild melancholy, her hair only a few more
silver lines, in consequence of the last year’s trials; the four girls
had bloomed out a little from being less in the shade; and the good
Jocosa preserved her serviceable neutrality toward the pleasures and
glories of the world as things made for those who were not “in a
situation.”
The low narrow drawing-room, enlarged by two quaint projecting windows,
with lattices wide open on a July afternoon to the scent of monthly
roses, the faint murmurs of the garden, and the occasional rare sound
of hoofs and wheels seeming to clarify the succeeding silence, made
rather a crowded, lively scene, Rex and Anna being added to the usual
group of six. Anna, always a favorite with her younger cousins, had
much to tell of her new experience, and the acquaintances she had made
in London, and when on her first visit she came alone, many questions
were asked her about Gwendolen’s house in Grosvenor Square, what
Gwendolen herself had said, and what any one else had said about
Gwendolen. Had Anna been to see Gwendolen after she had known about the
yacht? No:—an answer which left speculation free concerning everything
connected with that interesting unknown vessel beyond the fact that
Gwendolen had written just before she set out to say that Mr.
Grandcourt and she were going yachting on the Mediterranean, and again
from Marseilles to say that she was sure to like the yachting, the
cabins were very elegant, and she would probably not send another
letter till she had written quite a long diary filled with _dittos_.
Also, this movement of Mr. and Mrs. Grandcourt had been mentioned in
“the newspaper;” so that altogether this new phase of Gwendolen’s
exalted life made a striking part of the sisters’ romance, the
book-devouring Isabel throwing in a corsair or two to make an adventure
that might end well.
But when Rex was present, the girls, according to instructions, never
started this fascinating topic, and to-day there had only been animated
descriptions of the Meyricks and their extraordinary Jewish friends,
which caused some astonished questioning from minds to which the idea
of live Jews, out of a book, suggested a difference deep enough to be
almost zoological, as of a strange race in Pliny’s Natural History that
might sleep under the shade of its own ears. Bertha could not imagine
what Jews believed now; and she had a dim idea that they rejected the
Old Testament since it proved the New; Miss Merry thought that Mirah
and her brother could “never have been properly argued with,” and the
amiable Alice did not mind what the Jews believed, she was sure she
“couldn’t bear them.” Mrs. Davilow corrected her by saying that the
great Jewish families who were in society were quite what they ought to
be both in London and Paris, but admitted that the commoner unconverted
Jews were objectionable; and Isabel asked whether Mirah talked just as
they did, or whether you might be with her and not find out that she
was a Jewess.
Rex, who had no partisanship with the Israelites, having made a
troublesome acquaintance with the minutiae of their ancient history in
the form of “cram,” was amusing himself by playfully exaggerating the
notion of each speaker, while Anna begged them all to understand that
he was only joking, when the laughter was interrupted by the bringing
in of a letter for Mrs. Davilow. A messenger had run with it in great
haste from the rectory. It enclosed a telegram, and as Mrs. Davilow
read and re-read it in silence and agitation, all eyes were turned on
her with anxiety, but no one dared to speak. Looking up at last and
seeing the young faces “painted with fear,” she remembered that they
might be imagining something worse than the truth, something like her
own first dread which made her unable to understand what was written,
and she said, with a sob which was half relief,
“My dears, Mr. Grandcourt—” She paused an instant, and then began
again, “Mr. Grandcourt is drowned.”
Rex started up as if a missile had been suddenly thrown into the room.
He could not help himself, and Anna’s first look was at him. But then,
gathering some self-command while Mrs. Davilow was reading what the
rector had written on the enclosing paper, he said,
“Can I do anything, aunt? Can I carry any word to my father from you?”
“Yes, dear. Tell him I will be ready—he is very good. He says he will
go with me to Genoa—he will be here at half-past six. Jocosa and
Alice, help me to get ready. She is safe—Gwendolen is safe—but she
must be ill. I am sure she must be very ill. Rex, dear—Rex and
Anna—go and and tell your father I will be quite ready. I would not
for the world lose another night. And bless him for being ready so
soon. I can travel night and day till we get there.”
Rex and Anna hurried away through the sunshine which was suddenly
solemn to them, without uttering a word to each other: she chiefly
possessed by solicitude about any reopening of his wound, he struggling
with a tumultuary crowd of thoughts that were an offence against his
better will. The tumult being undiminished when they were at the
rectory gate, he said,
“Nannie, I will leave you to say everything to my father. If he wants
me immediately, let me know. I shall stay in the shrubbery for ten
minutes—only ten minutes.”
Who has been quite free from egoistic escapes of the imagination,
picturing desirable consequences on his own future in the presence of
another’s misfortune, sorrow, or death? The expected promotion or
legacy is the common type of a temptation which makes speech and even
prayer a severe avoidance of the most insistent thoughts, and sometimes
raises an inward shame, a self-distaste that is worse than any other
form of unpleasant companionship. In Rex’s nature the shame was
immediate, and overspread like an ugly light all the hurrying images of
what might come, which thrust themselves in with the idea that
Gwendolen was again free—overspread them, perhaps, the more
persistently because every phantasm of a hope was quickly nullified by
a more substantial obstacle. Before the vision of “Gwendolen free” rose
the impassable vision of “Gwendolen rich, exalted, courted;” and if in
the former time, when both their lives were fresh, she had turned from
his love with repugnance, what ground was there for supposing that her
heart would be more open to him in the future?
These thoughts, which he wanted to master and suspend, were like a
tumultuary ringing of opposing chimes that he could not escape from by
running. During the last year he had brought himself into a state of
calm resolve, and now it seemed that three words had been enough to
undo all that difficult work, and cast him back into the wretched
fluctuations of a longing which he recognized as simply perturbing and
hopeless. And at this moment the activity of such longing had an
untimeliness that made it repulsive to his better self. Excuse poor
Rex; it was not much more than eighteen months since he had been laid
low by an archer who sometimes touches his arrow with a subtle,
lingering poison. The disappointment of a youthful passion has effects
as incalculable as those of small-pox which may make one person plain
and a genius, another less plain and more foolish, another plain
without detriment to his folly, and leave perhaps the majority without
obvious change. Everything depends—not on the mere fact of
disappointment, but—on the nature affected and the force that stirs
it. In Rex’s well-endowed nature, brief as the hope had been, the
passionate stirring had gone deep, and the effect of disappointment was
revolutionary, though fraught with a beneficent new order which
retained most of the old virtues; in certain respects he believed that
it had finally determined the bias and color of his life. Now, however,
it seemed that his inward peace was hardly more than that of republican
Florence, and his heart no better than the alarm-bell that made work
slack and tumult busy.
Rex’s love had been of that sudden, penetrating, clinging sort which
the ancients knew and sung, and in singing made a fashion of talk for
many moderns whose experience has by no means a fiery, demonic
character. To have the consciousness suddenly steeped with another’s
personality, to have the strongest inclinations possessed by an image
which retains its dominance in spite of change and apart from
worthiness—nay, to feel a passion which clings faster for the tragic
pangs inflicted by a cruel, reorganized unworthiness—is a phase of
love which in the feeble and common-minded has a repulsive likeness to
his blind animalism insensible to the higher sway of moral affinity or
heaven-lit admiration. But when this attaching force is present in a
nature not of brutish unmodifiableness, but of a human dignity that can
risk itself safely, it may even result in a devotedness not unfit to be
called divine in a higher sense than the ancient. Phlegmatic
rationality stares and shakes its head at these unaccountable
prepossessions, but they exist as undeniably as the winds and waves,
determining here a wreck and there a triumphant voyage.
This sort of passion had nested in the sweet-natured, strong Rex, and
he had made up his mind to its companionship, as if it had been an
object supremely dear, stricken dumb and helpless, and turning all the
future of tenderness into a shadow of the past. But he had also made up
his mind that his life was not to be pauperized because he had had to
renounce one sort of joy; rather, he had begun life again with a new
counting-up of the treasures that remained to him, and he had even felt
a release of power such as may come from ceasing to be afraid of your
own neck.
And now, here he was pacing the shrubbery, angry with himself that the
sense of irrevocableness in his lot, which ought in reason to have been
as strong as ever, had been shaken by a change of circumstances that
could make no change in relation to him. He told himself the truth
quite roughly,
“She would never love me; and that is not the question—I could never
approach her as a lover in her present position. I am exactly of no
consequence at all, and am not likely to be of much consequence till my
head is turning gray. But what has that to do with it? She would not
have me on any terms, and I would not ask her. It is a meanness to be
thinking about it now—no better than lurking about the battle-field to
strip the dead; but there never was more gratuitous sinning. I have
nothing to gain there—absolutely nothing. Then why can’t I face the
facts, and behave as they demand, instead of leaving my father to
suppose that there are matters he can’t speak to me about, though I
might be useful in them?”
The last thought made one wave with the impulse that sent Rex walking
firmly into the house and through the open door of the study, where he
saw his father packing a traveling-desk.
“Can I be of any use, sir?” said Rex, with rallied courage, as his
father looked up at him.
“Yes, my boy; when I’m gone, just see to my letters, and answer where
necessary, and send me word of everything. Dymock will manage the
parish very well, and you will stay with your mother, or, at least, go
up and down again, till I come back, whenever that may be.”
“You will hardly be very long, sir, I suppose,” said Rex, beginning to
strap a railway rug. “You will perhaps bring my cousin back to
England?” He forced himself to speak of Gwendolen for the first time,
and the rector noticed the epoch with satisfaction.
“That depends,” he answered, taking the subject as a matter-of-course
between them. “Perhaps her mother may stay there with her, and I may
come back very soon. This telegram leaves us in ignorance which is
rather anxious. But no doubt the arrangements of the will lately made
are satisfactory, and there may possibly be an heir yet to be born. In
any case, I feel confident that Gwendolen will be liberally—I should
expect, splendidly—provided for.”
“It must have been a great shock for her,” said Rex, getting more
resolute after the first twinge had been borne. “I suppose he was a
devoted husband.”
“No doubt of it,” said the rector, in his most decided manner. “Few men
of his position would have come forward as he did under the
circumstances.”
Rex had never seen Grandcourt, had never been spoken to about him by
any one of the family, and knew nothing of Gwendolen’s flight from her
suitor to Leubronn. He only knew that Grandcourt, being very much in
love with her, had made her an offer in the first weeks of her sudden
poverty, and had behaved very handsomely in providing for her mother
and sisters. That was all very natural and what Rex himself would have
liked to do. Grandcourt had been a lucky fellow, and had had some
happiness before he got drowned. Yet Rex wondered much whether
Gwendolen had been in love with the successful suitor, or had only
forborne to tell him that she hated being made love to.