NATURE SPEAKS
Briareus reddening angrily over the sea--what is that vaporous
Titan? And Hesper set in his rosy garland--why looks he so
implacably sweet? It is that one has left that bright home to go
forth and do cloudy work, and he has got a stain with which he dare
not return. Far in the West fair Lucy beckons him to come. Ah,
heaven! if he might! How strong and fierce the temptation is! how
subtle the sleepless desire! it drugs his reason, his honour. For he
loves her; she is still the first and only woman to him. Otherwise
would this black spot be hell to him? otherwise would his limbs be
chained while her arms are spread open to him. And if he loves her,
why then what is one fall in the pit, or a thousand? Is not love the
password to that beckoning bliss? So may we say; but here is one
whose body has been made a temple to him, and it is desecrated.
A temple, and desecrated! For what is it fit for but for a dance of
devils? His education has thus wrought him to think.
He can blame nothing but his own baseness. But to feel base and
accept the bliss that beckons--he has not fallen so low as that.
Ah, happy English home! sweet wife! what mad miserable Wisp of the
Fancy led him away from you, high in his conceit? Poor wretch! that
thought to be he of the hundred hands, and war against the absolute
Gods. Jove whispered a light commission to the Laughing Dame; she
met him; and how did he shake Olympus? with laughter?
Sure it were better to be Orestes, the Furies howling in his ears,
than one called to by a heavenly soul from whom he is for ever
outcast. He has not the oblivion of madness. Clothed in the lights
of his first passion, robed in the splendour of old skies, she meets
him everywhere; morning, evening, night, she shines above him;
waylays him suddenly in forest depths; drops palpably on his heart.
At moments he forgets; he rushes to embrace her; calls her his
beloved, and lo, her innocent kiss brings agony of shame to his
face.
Daily the struggle endured. His father wrote to him, begging him by
the love he had for him to return. From that hour Richard burnt
unread all the letters he received. He knew too well how easily he
could persuade himself: words from without might tempt him and quite
extinguish the spark of honourable feeling that tortured him, and
that he clung to in desperate self-vindication.
To arrest young gentlemen on the downward slope is both a dangerous
and thankless office. It is, nevertheless, one that fair women
greatly prize, and certain of them professionally follow. Lady
Judith, as far as her sex would permit, was also of the Titans in
their battle against the absolute Gods; for which purpose, mark you,
she had married a lord incapable in all save his acres. Her
achievements she kept to her own mind: she did not look happy over
them. She met Richard accidentally in Paris; she saw his state; she
let him learn that she alone on earth understood him. The
consequence was that he was forthwith enrolled in her train. It
soothed him to be near a woman. Did she venture her guess as to the
cause of his conduct, she blotted it out with a facility women have,
and cast on it a melancholy hue he was taught to participate in. She
spoke of sorrows, personal sorrows, such as he might speak of
his--vaguely, and with self-blame. And she understood him. How the
dark unfathomed wealth within us gleams to a woman's eye! We are at
compound interest immediately: so much richer than we knew!--almost
as rich as we dreamed! But then the instant we are away from her we
find ourselves bankrupt, beggared. How is that? We do not ask. We
hurry to her and bask hungrily in her orbs. The eye must be feminine
to be thus creative: I cannot say why. Lady Judith understood
Richard, and he feeling infinitely vile, somehow held to her more
feverishly, as one who dreaded the worst in missing her. The spirit
must rest; he was weak with what he suffered.
Austin found them among the hills of Nassau in Rhineland: Titans,
male and female, who had not displaced Jove, and were now adrift,
prone on floods of sentiment. The blue-frocked peasant swinging
behind his oxen of a morning, the gaily-kerchiefed fruit-woman, the
jackass-driver, even the doctor of those regions, have done more for
their fellows. Horrible reflection! Lady Judith is serene above it,
but it frets at Richard when he is out of her shadow. Often
wretchedly he watches the young men of his own age trooping to their
work. Not cloud-work theirs! Work solid, unambitious, fruitful!
Lady Judith had a nobler in prospect for the hero. He gaped
blindfolded for anything, and she gave him the map of Europe in
tatters. He swallowed it comfortably. It was an intoxicating
cordial. Himself on horseback over-riding wrecks of Empires! Well
might common sense cower with the meaner animals at the picture.
Tacitly they agreed to recast the civilized globe. The quality of
vapour is to melt and shape itself anew; but it is never the quality
of vapour to reassume the same shapes. Briareus of the hundred
unoccupied hands may turn to a monstrous donkey with his hind legs
aloft, or twenty thousand jabbering apes. The phantasmic groupings
of the young brain are very like those we see in the skies, and
equally the sport of the wind. Lady Judith blew. There was plenty of
vapour in him, and it always resolved into some shape or other. You
that mark those clouds of eventide, and know youth, will see the
similitude: it will not be strange, it will barely seem foolish to
you, that a young man of Richard's age, Richard's education and
position, should be in this wild state. Had he not been nursed to
believe he was born for great things? Did she not say she was sure
of it? And to feel base, yet born for better, is enough to make one
grasp at anything cloudy. Suppose the hero with a game leg. How
intense is his faith in quacks! with what a passion of longing is he
not seized to break somebody's head! They spoke of Italy in low
voices. "The time will come," said she. "And I shall be ready," said
he. What rank was he to take in the liberating army? Captain,
colonel, general in chief, or simple private? Here, as became him,
he was much more positive and specific than she was. Simple private,
he said. Yet he saw himself caracoling on horseback. Private in the
cavalry, then, of course. Private in the cavalry over-riding wrecks
of Empires. She looked forth under her brows with mournful
indistinctness at that object in the distance. They read Petrarch to
get up the necessary fires. Italia mia! Vain indeed was this
speaking to those thick and mortal wounds in her fair body, but
their sighs went with the Tiber, and Arno, and the Po, and their
hands joined. Who has not wept for Italy? I see the aspirations of a
world arise for her, thick and frequent as the puffs of smoke from
cigars of Pannonian sentries!
So when Austin came Richard said he could not leave Lady Judith,
Lady Judith said she could not part with him. For his sake, mind!
This Richard verified. Perhaps he had reason to be grateful. The
high road of Folly may have led him from one that terminates worse.
He is foolish, God knows; but for my part I will not laugh at the
hero because he has not got his occasion. Meet him when he is, as it
were, anointed by his occasion, and he is no laughing matter.
Richard felt his safety in this which, to please the world, we must
term folly. Exhalation of vapours was a wholesome process to him,
and somebody who gave them shape and hue a beneficent Iris. He told
Austin plainly he could not leave her, and did not anticipate the
day when he could.
"Why can't you go to your wife, Richard?"
"For a reason you would be the first to approve, Austin."
He welcomed Austin with every show of manly tenderness, and sadness
at heart. Austin he had always associated with his Lucy in that
Hesperian palace of the West. Austin waited patiently. Lady Judith's
old lord played on all the baths in Nassau without evoking the tune
of health. Whithersoever he listed she changed her abode. So
admirable a wife was to be pardoned for espousing an old man. She
was an enthusiast even in her connubial duties. She had the brows of
an enthusiast. With occasion she might have been a Charlotte Corday.
So let her also be shielded from the ban of ridicule. Nonsense of
enthusiasts is very different from nonsense of ninnies. She was
truly a high-minded person, of that order who always do what they
see to be right, and always have confidence in their optics. She was
not unworthy of a young man's admiration, if she was unfit to be his
guide. She resumed her ancient intimacy with Austin easily, while
she preserved her new footing with Richard. She and Austin were not
unlike, only Austin never dreamed, and had not married an old lord.
The three were walking on the bridge at Limburg on the Lahn, where
the shadow of a stone bishop is thrown by the moonlight on the water
brawling over slabs of slate. A woman passed them bearing in her
arms a baby, whose mighty size drew their attention.
"What a wopper!" Richard laughed.
"Well, that is a fine fellow," said Austin, "but I don't think he's
much bigger than your boy."
"He'll do for a nineteenth-century Arminius," Richard was saying.
Then he looked at Austin.
"What was that you said?" Lady Judith asked of Austin.
"What have I said that deserves to be repeated?" Austin
counterqueried quite innocently.
"Richard has a son?"
"You didn't know it?"
"His modesty goes very far," said Lady Judith, sweeping the shadow
of a curtsey to Richard's paternity.
Richard's heart throbbed with violence. He looked again in Austin's
face. Austin took it so much as a matter of course that he said
nothing more on the subject.
"Well!" murmured Lady Judith.
When the two men were alone, Richard said in a quick voice: "Austin!
you were in earnest?"
"You didn't know it, Richard?"
"No."
"Why, they all wrote to you. Lucy wrote to you: your father, your
aunt. I believe Adrian wrote too."
"I tore up their letters," said Richard.
"He's a noble fellow, I can tell you. You've nothing to be ashamed
of. He'll soon be coming to ask about you. I made sure you knew."
"No, I never knew." Richard walked away, and then said: "What is he
like?"
"Well, he really is like you, but he has his mother's eyes."
"And she's----"
"Yes. I think the child has kept her well."
"They're both at Raynham?"
"Both."
Hence fantastic vapours! What are ye to this! Where are the dreams
of the hero when he learns he has a child? Nature is taking him to
her bosom. She will speak presently. Every domesticated boor in
these hills can boast the same, yet marvels the hero at none of his
visioned prodigies as he does when he comes to hear of this most
common performance. A father? Richard fixed his eyes as if he were
trying to make out the lineaments of his child.
Telling Austin he would be back in a few minutes, he sallied into
the air, and walked on and on. "A father!" he kept repeating to
himself: "a child!" And though he knew it not, he was striking the
key-notes of Nature. But he did know of a singular harmony that
suddenly burst over his whole being.
The moon was surpassingly bright: the summer air heavy and still. He
left the high road and pierced into the forest. His walk was rapid:
the leaves on the trees brushed his cheeks; the dead leaves heaped
in the dells noised to his feet. Something of a religious joy--a
strange sacred pleasure--was in him. By degrees it wore; he
remembered himself: and now he was possessed by a proportionate
anguish. A father! he dared never see his child. And he had no
longer his phantasies to fall upon. He was utterly bare to his sin.
In his troubled mind it seemed to him that Clare looked down on
him--Clare who saw him as he was; and that to her eyes it would be
infamy for him to go and print his kiss upon his child. Then came
stern efforts to command his misery and make the nerves of his face
iron.
By the log of an ancient tree half buried in dead leaves of past
summers, beside a brook, he halted as one who had reached his
journey's end. There he discovered he had a companion in Lady
Judith's little dog. He gave the friendly animal a pat of
recognition and both were silent in the forest-silence.
It was impossible for Richard to return; his heart was surcharged.
He must advance, and on he footed, the little dog following.
An oppressive slumber hung about the forest-branches. In the dells
and on the heights was the same dead heat. Here where the brook
tinkled it was no cool-lipped sound, but metallic, and without the
spirit of water. Yonder in a space of moonlight on lush grass, the
beams were as white fire to sight and feeling. No haze spread
around. The valleys were clear, defined to the shadows of their
verges; the distances sharply distinct, and with the colours of day
but slightly softened. Richard beheld a roe moving across a slope of
sward far out of rifle-mark. The breathless silence was significant,
yet the moon shone in a broad blue heaven. Tongue out of mouth
trotted the little dog after him; couched panting when he stopped an
instant; rose weariedly when he started afresh. Now and then a large
white night-moth flitted through the dusk of the forest.
On a barren corner of the wooded highland looking inland stood grey
topless ruins set in nettles and rank grass-blades. Richard
mechanically sat down on the crumbling flints to rest, and listened
to the panting of the dog. Sprinkled at his feet were emerald
lights: hundreds of glow-worms studded the dark dry ground.
He sat and eyed them, thinking not at all. His energies were
expended in action. He sat as a part of the ruins, and the moon
turned his shadow Westward from the South. Overhead, as she
declined, long ripples of silver cloud were imperceptibly stealing
toward her. They were the van of a tempest. He did not observe them
or the leaves beginning to chatter. When he again pursued his course
with his face to the Rhine, a huge mountain appeared to rise sheer
over him, and he had it in his mind to scale it. He got no nearer to
the base of it for all his vigorous outstepping. The ground began to
dip; he lost sight of the sky. Then heavy thunder-drops struck his
cheek, the leaves were singing, the earth breathed, it was black
before him and behind. All at once the thunder spoke. The mountain
he had marked was bursting over him.
Up started the whole forest in violet fire. He saw the country at
the foot of the hills to the bounding Rhine gleam, quiver,
extinguished. Then there were pauses; and the lightning seemed as
the eye of heaven, and the thunder as the tongue of heaven, each
alternately addressing him; filling him with awful rapture. Alone
there--sole human creature among the grandeurs and mysteries of
storm--he felt the representative of his kind, and his spirits rose,
and marched, and exulted, let it be glory, let it be ruin! Lower
down the lightened abysses of air rolled the wrathful crash: then
white thrusts of light were darted from the sky, and great curving
ferns, seen steadfast in pallor a second, were supernaturally
agitated, and vanished. Then a shrill song roused in the leaves and
the herbage. Prolonged and louder it sounded, as deeper and heavier
the deluge pressed. A mighty force of water satisfied the desire of
the earth. Even in this, drenched as he was by the first outpouring,
Richard had a savage pleasure. Keeping in motion, he was scarcely
conscious of the wet, and the grateful breath of the weeds was
refreshing. Suddenly he stopped short, lifting a curious nostril. He
fancied he smelt meadow-sweet. He had never seen the flower in
Rhineland--never thought of it; and it would hardly be met with in a
forest. He was sure he smelt it fresh in dews. His little companion
wagged a miserable wet tail some way in advance. He went on slowly,
thinking indistinctly. After two or three steps he stooped and
stretched out his hand to feel for the flower, having, he knew not
why, a strong wish to verify its growth there. Groping about, his
hand encountered something warm that started at his touch, and he,
with the instinct we have, seized it, and lifted it to look at it.
The creature was very small, evidently quite young. Richard's eyes,
now accustomed to the darkness, were able to discern it for what it
was, a tiny leveret, and he supposed that the dog had probably
frightened its dam just before he found it. He put the little thing
on one hand in his breast, and stepped out rapidly as before.
The rain was now steady; from every tree a fountain poured. So cool
and easy had his mind become that he was speculating on what kind of
shelter the birds could find, and how the butterflies and moths
saved their coloured wings from washing. Folded close they might
hang under a leaf, he thought. Lovingly he looked into the dripping
darkness of the coverts on each side, as one of their children. He
was next musing on a strange sensation he experienced. It ran up one
arm with an indescribable thrill, but communicated nothing to his
heart. It was purely physical, ceased for a time, and recommenced,
till he had it all through his blood, wonderfully thrilling. He grew
aware that the little thing he carried in his breast was licking his
hand there. The small rough tongue going over and over the palm of
his hand produced the strange sensation he felt. Now that he knew
the cause, the marvel ended; but now that he knew the cause, his
heart was touched and made more of it. The gentle scraping continued
without intermission as on he walked. What did it say to him? Human
tongue could not have said so much just then.
A pale grey light on the skirts of the flying tempest displayed the
dawn. Richard was walking hurriedly. The green drenched weeds lay
all about in his path, bent thick, and the forest drooped
glimmeringly. Impelled as a man who feels a revelation mounting
obscurely to his brain, Richard was passing one of these little
forest-chapels, hung with votive wreaths, where the peasant halts to
kneel and pray. Cold, still, in the twilight it stood, rain-drops
pattering round it. He looked within, and saw the Virgin holding her
Child. He moved by. But not many steps had he gone ere his strength
went out of him, and he shuddered. What was it? He asked not. He was
in other hands. Vivid as lightning the Spirit of Life illumined
him. He felt in his heart the cry of his child, his darling's touch.
With shut eyes he saw them both. They drew him from the depths; they
led him a blind and tottering man. And as they led him he had a
sense of purification so sweet he shuddered again and again.
When he looked out from his trance on the breathing world, the small
birds hopped and chirped: warm fresh sunlight was over all the
hills. He was on the edge of the forest, entering a plain clothed
with ripe corn under a spacious morning sky.