INDICATES THE APPROACHES OF FEVER
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 night-time 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, sir?" 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 him.
"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 it is 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 Balaam, 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, wherein 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.