dwelt for many of my days on their boudoir cushions, and eaten of their
dainty little dinners, and been smuggled under their robes even into
operas, balls, and churches, tell you that is an utter fallacy. They do
not choose you to know that they know it, very probably; but there is
nothing that is hidden from them, I promise you.
* * *
Don't you know that whilst broad, intellectual scepticism is masculine,
narrow, social scepticism is feminine? To get hearty, reverent, genuine
belief in the innocence of a slandered woman, go to a man: where the
world has once doubted, women, the world-worshippers, will for ever
after doubt also. You can never bring women to see that the pecked-at
fruit is always the richest and sweetest; they always take the benison
of the wooing bird to be the malison of the hidden worm!
* * *
Not very long ago I was down away in the vale of Belvoir. I stayed with
my friends at a great stately place, owned by as gallant a gentleman as
ever swung himself into saddle. His wife was a beautiful woman, and he
treated her with the courtliest tenderness: indeed, I often heard their
union cited as one of almost unequalled felicity. "He never had a
thought that he did not tell me," I heard his wife once say to a friend.
"Not a single thought, I know, all these twelve years of our marriage."
It was a happy belief--many women have the like--but it was an
unutterably foolish one; for the minds of the best and truest amongst
you are, in many things, as sealed books to those whom you care for the
most.
One bitter, black hunting-day, a day keen and cold, with frost, as men
feared, in the air, and with the ground so hard that even the Duke's
peerless "dandies," perfect hounds though they are, scarcely could keep
the scent, there came terrible tidings to the Hall--he had met with a
crashing fall. His horse had refused at timber, and had fallen upon him,
kicking his head with the hind hoofs repeatedly. They had taken him to
the nearest farmhouse, insensible; even dead already, they feared. His
wife and the elder amongst the beautiful children fled like mad
creatures across the brown fallows, and the drear blackened meadows. The
farm, happily, was not far: I sped with them.
When they reached him he was not quite lifeless, but he knew none of
them; his head had been beaten in by the plates of the kicking hoofs;
and they waited for his death with every moment, in the little old dusky
room, with its leaded lattices, and its odour of dried lavender, and its
bough of holly above the hearth. For this had chanced upon Christmas
Eve.
To his wife's agonies, to his children's moans, he was silent: he knew
nothing; he lay with closed eyes and crushed brain--deaf, blind, mute.
Suddenly the eyes opened, and stared at the red winter sun where it
glowed dimly through the squares of the lattice-panes. "Dolores!" he
cried aloud; "Dolores! Dolores!" It was the name of none there.
"My God! What woman is it he calls?" his wife asked in her torture. But
none ever knew. Through half the night his faint pulse beat, his faint
breath came and went; but consciousness never more returned, and for
ever he muttered only that one name, that name which was not her own.
And when they laid the dead body in its shroud, they found on the left
arm above the elbow the word "Dolores" marked on the skin, as sailors
stamp letters in their flesh. But whose it was, or what woe or passion
it recorded, none ever knew--not even his wife, who had believed she
shared his every thought. And to his grave his dead and secret love went
with him.
This man was but a gay, frank, high-spirited gentleman, of no great
knowledge, and of no great attainments, riding fearlessly, laughing
joyously, living liberally; not a man, one would have said, to know any
deep passions, to treasure any bitter memories--and yet he had loved one
woman so well that he had never spoken of her, and never forgotten her;
never--not even in his death-hour, when the poor, stunned, stifled brain
had forgotten all other things of earth.
And so it seems to me that it is very often with you, and that you bear
with you through your lifetime the brand of an unforgotten name, branded
deep in, in days of passion, that none around you ever wot of, and that
the wife who sleeps on your heart never knows.
It is dead--the old love--long dead. And yet, when your last hour shall
come, and your senses shall be dizzy with death, the pale loves of the
troth and the hearth will fade from you, and this love alone will abide.
* * *
"Modern painters do not owe you much, sir," said a youngster to him
once, writhing under the _Midas'_ ruthless flagellation of his first
Academy picture.
"On the contrary," said the great censor, taking his snuff; "they owe me
much, or might have owed me much. If they had only listened to me, they
would have saved every shilling that they have thrown away on canvas!"
* * *
In your clubs and your camps, in your mischievous moods and your
philosophic moods, always indeed theoretically, you consider all women
immoral (except just, of course, your own mothers); but practically,
when your good-feeling is awakened, or your honest faith honestly
appealed to, you will believe in a woman's honour with a heartiness and
strength for which she will look in vain in her own sex. According to
your jests, the world is one vast harem, of which all the doors are open
to every man, and whose fair inmates are all alike impressionable to the
charm of intrigue or to the chink of gold. But, in simple earnest and
reality, I have heard the wildest and most debonair amongst you--once
convinced of the honour and innocence looking from a woman's eyes--stand
up in defence of these when libelled in her absence, with a zeal and a
stanchness that did my heart good.
* * *
His simple creed, "the good faith of a gentleman," forbade him to injure
what lay defenceless at his mercy.
Ah! revile that old faith as you will, it has lasted longer than any
other cultus; and whilst altars have reeled, and idols been shattered,
and priests changed their teachings, and peoples altered their gods, the
old faith has lasted through all; and the simple instinct of the Greek
eupatrid and of the Roman patrician still moves the heart of the English
gentleman--the instinct of _Noblesse oblige_.
* * *
"The exception proves the rule," runs your proverb; but why, I wonder,
is it that you always only believe in the rule, and are always utterly
sceptical as to the existence of the exception?
* * *
The sun shone in over the roofs; the bird in its cage began a low
tremulous song; the murmur of all the crowded streets came up upon the
silence; and Nellie lay there dead;--the light upon her curly hair, and
on her mouth the smile that had come there at his touch.
"Ah, my dear!" said Fanfreluche, as she ceased her story, with a
half-soft and half-sardonic sadness, "she was but a little, ignorant,
common player, who made but three pounds a week, and who talked the
slang of the streets, and who thought shrimps and tea a meal for the
gods, and who made up her own dresses with her own hands, out of tinsel
and tarlatanes and trumperies, and who knew no better than to follow the
blind, dumb instincts of good that, self-sown and uncultured, lived in
her--God knows how!--as the harebells, with the dew on them, will live
amidst the rank, coarse grass of graveyards. She was but a poor little
player, who tried to be honest where all was corruption, who tried to
walk straightly where all ways were crooked. So she died to-day in a
garret, my dear."
* * *
If all men in whose hearts lives a dull, abiding grief, whose throbs
death and death only ever will still, deserted for desert or ocean your
world of fame and of fashion, how strangely that world would look! How
much eloquence would be dumb in your senatorial chambers; how many a
smile would be missing from your ball-rooms and hunting-fields; how many
a frank laugh would die off for ever from your ear; how many a
well-known face would vanish from your clubs, from your park, from your
dinner-tables, from your race-stands!
And how seldom would it be those that you had pitied who would go!--how
often would the vacant place be that place where so many seasons through
you had seen, and had envied, the gayest, the coldest, the most
light-hearted, the most cynical amongst you!
Ah! let Society be thankful that men in their bitterness do not now fly,
as of old, to monastery or to hermitage; for, did they do so, Society
would send forth her gilded cards to the wilderness.
* * *
"_Une vie manquée!_" says the world.
Is there any threnody over a death half so unutterably sad as that one
jest over a life?
"_Manquée!_"--the world has no mercy on a hand that has thrown the die
and has lost; no tolerance for the player who, holding fine cards, will
not play them by the rules of the game. "_Manquée!_" the world says,
with a polite sneer, of the lives in which it beholds no blazoned
achievement, no public success.
And yet, if it were keener of sight, it might see that those lives, not
seldom, may seem to have missed of their mark, because their aim was
high over the heads of the multitude; or because the arrow was sped by
too eager a hand in too rash a youth, and the bow lies unstrung in that
hand when matured. It might see that those lives which look so lost, so
purposeless, so barren of attainment, so devoid of object or fruition,
have sometimes nobler deeds in them and purer sacrifice than lies in
the home-range of its own narrowed vision. "_Manquée!_"--do not cast
that stone idly: how shall you tell, as you look on the course of a life
that seems to you a failure, because you do not hear its "_Io triumphe_"
on the lips of a crowd, what sweet dead dreams, what noble vain desires,
what weariness of futile longing, what conscious waste of vanished
years--nay, what silent acts of pure nobility, what secret treasures of
unfathomed love--may lie within that which seems in your sight even as a
waste land untilled, as a fire burnt out, as a harp without chords, as a
bird without song?
* * *
Genius is oftentimes but a poor fool, who, clinging to a thing that
belongs to no age, Truth, does oftentimes live on a pittance and die in
a hospital; but whosoever has the gift to measure aright their
generation is invincible--living, they shall enjoy all the vices
undetected; and dead, on their tombstones they shall possess all the
virtues.
* * *
Cant, naked, is honoured throughout England. Cant, clothed in gold, is a
king never in England resisted.
* * *
"Ben Dare, he be dead?" he asked suddenly. "They telled me so by
Darron's side."[A]
[A] The river Derwent.
Ambrose bent his head, silently.
"When wur't?"
"Last simmar-time, i' th' aftermath."
"It were a ston' as killed him?"
"Ay," said Ambrose, softly shading his eyes with his hand from the sun
that streamed through the aisles of pine.
"How wur't?"
"They was a blastin'. He'd allus thoct as he'd dee that way, you know.
They pit mair pooder i' quarry than common; and the ston' it split, and
roared, and crackit, wi' a noise like tha crack o' doom. And one bit on
't, big as ox, were shot i' th' air, an' fell, unlookit for like, and
dang him tew the groun', and crushit him,--a-lyin' richt athwart his
brist."
"An' they couldna stir it?"
"They couldna. I heerd tha other min screech richt tew here, an' I knew
what it wur, tha shrill screech comin' jist i' top o' tha blastin' roar;
an' I ran, an' ran--na gaze-hound fleeter. An' we couldna raise it--me
an' Tam, an' Job, an' Gideon o' the Mere, an' Moses Legh o' Wissen Edge,
a' strong min and i' our prime. We couldna stir it, till Moses o' Wissen
Edge he thoct o' pittin' fir-poles underneath--poles as was sharp an'
slim i' thur ends, an' stout an' hard further down. Whin tha poles was
weel thrust under we heaved, an' heaved, an' heaved, and got it slanted
o' one side, and drawed him out; an' thin it were too late, too late! A'
tha brist was crushit in--frushed flesh and bone together. He jist
muttered i' his throat, 'Tha little lass, tha little lass!' and then he
turned him on his side, and hid his face upo' the sod. When we raised
him he wur dead."
The voice of Ambrose sank very low; and where he leaned over his smithy
door the tears fell slowly down his sun-bronzed cheeks.
"Alack a day!" sighed Daffe, softly. "Sure a better un niver drew breath
i' the varsal world!"
"An' that's trew," Ambrose made answer, his voice hushed and very
tender.
"He was varra changed like," murmured Daffe, his hand wandering amongst
the golden blossoms of the stonecrop. "He niver were the same crittur
arter the lass went awa'. He niver were the same--niver. Ta seemed tew
mak an auld man o' him a' at once."
"It did," said Ambrose, brokenly. "He couldna bear tew look na tew spik
to nane o' us. He were bent i' body, an' gray o' head, that awfu' night
when he kem back fra' the waking. It were fearfu' tew see; and we
couldna dew naught. Th' ony thing as he'd take tew were Trust."
"Be dog alive?"
"Na. Trust he'd never quit o' Ben's grave. He wouldna take bit na drop.
He wouldna be touchit; not whin he was clem would he be tempted awa'.
And he died--jist tha fifth day arter his master."
"An' the wench? Hev' 'ee e'er heerd on her?"
"Niver--niver. Mappen she's dead and gone tew. She broke Ben's heart for
sure; long ere tha ston' crushit life out o't."
"And wheer may he lie?"
Ambrose clenched his brawny hand, his eyes darkened, his swarthy face
flushed duskily.
"Wheer? What think 'ee, Daffe? When we took o' him up for the burial, ta
tha church ower theer beyant tha wood, the passon he stoppit us, a' tha
gate of tha buryin' field. The passon he med long words, and sed as how
a unb'liever sud niver rest i' blessed groun', sin he willna iver enter
into the sight o' tha Lord. He sed as how Ben were black o' heart and
wicked o' mind, an' niver set fute i' church-door, and niver ate o' tha
sacrament bread, and niver not thocht o' God nor o' Devil; an' he
wouldna say tha rites o'er him an' 'twere iver so, an' he wouldna let
him lie i' tha holy earth, nor i' tha pale o' tha graveyard. Well, we
couldna gae agin him--we poor min, an' he a squire and passon tew. Sae
we took him back, five weary mile; and we brocht him here, and we dug
his grave under them pines, and we pit a cross o' tha bark to mark the
place, and we laid old Trust, when he died, by his side. I were mad with
grief like, thin; it were awfu' ta ha' him forbad Christian burial."
"Dew it matter?" asked the gentle Daffe, wistfully. He had never been
within church-doors himself.
Ambrose gave a long troubled sigh.
"Aweel! at first it seemed awfu'--awfu'! And to think as Ben 'ud niver
see the face o' his God was mair fearfu' still. But as time gees on and
on--I can see his grave fra' here, tha cross we cut is tha glimmer o'
white on that stem ayont,--it dew seem as 'tis fitter like fer him to
lie i' tha fresh free woods, wi' tha birds a' chirmin' abuve him, an' a'
tha forest things as he minded a flyin', an' nestin', an' runnin', an'
rejoicin' arount him. 'Tis allus so still there, an' peacefu'. 'Tis blue
and blue now, wi' tha hy'cinths; and there's one bonnie mavis as dew
make her home wi' each spring abuve the gravestone. 'Bout not meetin'
his God, I dunno--I darena saw nowt anent it--but, for sure, it dew seem
to me that we canna meet Him no better, nor fairer, than wi' lips that
ha ne'er lied to man nor to woman, and wi' hands as niver hae harmed the
poor dumb beasts nor the prattlin' birds. It dew seem so. I canna tell."
As the words died off his lips the sun fell yet more brightly through
the avenues of the straight, dark, odorous pines; sweet silent winds
swept up the dewy scents of mosses, and of leaves, and of wild
hyacinths; and on the stillness of that lonely place there came one
tremulous, tender sound. It was the sound of the mavis singing.
"I canna tell; but for sure it is well with him?" said Ambrose; and he
bared his head, and bowed it humbly, as though in the voice of the mavis
he heard the answer of God:
"It is well."
Ah! I trust that it may be so for you; that the sweetness of your
arrogant dreams of an unshared eternity be not wholly a delusion; that
for you--although to us you do deny it--there may be found pity,
atonement, compensation, in some great Hereafter.
* * *
"I have heard a very great many men and women call the crows carrion
birds, and the jackals carrion beasts, with an infinite deal of disgust
and much fine horror at what they were pleased to term 'feasting on
corpses;' but I never yet heard any of them admit their own appetite for
the rotten 'corpse' of a pheasant, or the putrid haunch of a deer, to be
anything except the choice taste of an epicure!"
"But they do cook the corpses!" I remonstrated; whereupon she grinned
with more meaning than ever.
"Exactly what I am saying, my dear. Their love of synonyms has made them
forget that they are _carnivori_, because they talk so sweetly of the
_cuisine_. A poor, blundering, honest, ignorant lion only kills and eats
when the famine of his body forces him to obey that law of slaughter
which is imposed on all created things, from the oyster to the man, by
what we are told is the beautiful and beneficent economy of Creation. Of
course, the lion is a brutal and bloodthirsty beast of prey, to be
hunted down off the face of the earth as fast as may be. Whereas
man--what does he do? He devours the livers of a dozen geese in one
_pâté_; he has lobsters boiled alive, that the scarlet tint may look
tempting to his palate; he has fish cut up or fried in all its living
agonies, lest he should lose one _nuance_ of its flavour; he has the
calf and the lamb killed in their tender age, that he may eat dainty
sweetbreads; he has quails and plovers slaughtered in the
nesting-season, that he may taste a slice of their breasts; he crushes
oysters in his teeth whilst life is in them; he has scores of birds and
animals slain for one dinner, that he may have the numberless dishes
which fashion exacts; and then--all the time talking softly of _rissôle_
and _mayonnaise_, of _consommé_ and _entremet_, of _croquette_ and
_côtelette_--the dear _gourmet_ discourses on his charming science, and
thanks God that he is not as the parded beasts that prey!"
"Well," said I, sulkily, for I am fond myself of a good
_vol-au-vent_,--"well, you have said that eating is a law in the
economies--or the waste--of creation. Is it not well to clothe a
distasteful and barbaric necessity in a refining guise and under an
elegant nomenclature?"
"Sophist!" said Fanfreluche, with much scorn, though she herself is as
keen an epicure and as suave a sophist, for that matter, as I know,--"I
never denied that it was well for men to cheat themselves, through the
art of their cooks, into believing that they are not brutes and beasts
of prey--it is well exceedingly--for their vanity. Life is sustained
only by the destruction of life. Cookery, the divine, can turn this
horrible fact into a poetic idealism; can twine the butcher's knife with
lilies, and hide the carcass under roses. But I do assuredly think that,
when they sit down every night with their _menu_ of twenty services,
they should not call the poor lion bad names for eating an antelope once
a fortnight."
And, with the true consistency of preachers, Fanfreluche helped herself
to a Madeira stewed kidney which stood amongst other delicacies on the
deserted luncheon table.
* * *
"If this play should succeed it will be a triumph of true art," said
another critical writer to Dudley Moore.
That great personage tapped his Louis-Quinze snuffbox with some
impatience.
"Pardon me, but it is not possible to have art at all on the stage. Art
is a pure idealism. You can have it in a statue, a melody, a poem; but
you cannot have it on the stage, which is at its highest but a graphic
realism. The very finest acting is only fine in proportion as it is an
exact reproduction of physical life. How, then, can it be art, which is
only great in proportion as it escapes from the physical life into the
spiritual?"
"But may not dramatic art escape thither also?" asked the critic, who
was young, and deferred to him.
"Impossible, sir. It is shackled with all the forms of earth, and--worse
still--with all its shams and commonplaces. When we read _Othello_, we
only behold the tempest of the passions and the wreck of a great soul;
but when we see _Othello_, we are affronted by the colour of the Moor's
skin, and are brought face to face with the vulgarities of the bolster!"
"Then there is no use in a stage at all?"
"I am not prepared to conclude that. It is agreeable to a vast number of
people: as a Frith or an O'Neil is agreeable to a vast number of people
to whom an Ary Scheffer or a Delaroche would be unintelligible. It is
better, perhaps, that this vast number should look at Friths and O'Neils
than that they should never look on any painting at all. Now the stage
paints rudely, often tawdrily; still it does paint. It is better than
nothing. I take it that the excellence, as the end, of histrionic art is
to portray, to the minds of the many, poetic conceptions which, without
such realistic rendering, would remain unknown and impalpable to all
save the few. Histrionic art is at its greatest only when it is the
follower and the interpreter of literature; the actor translates the
poet's meanings into the common tongue that is understood of the people.
But how many on the miserable stage of this country have ever had either
humility to perceive, or capability to achieve this?"
The other critic smiled.
"I imagine not one, in our day. Their view of their profession is
similar to Mrs. Delamere's, when Max Moncrief wrote that sparkling
comedy for her. 'My dear,' she said to him, 'why did you trouble
yourself to put all that wit and sense into it? We didn't want _that_. I
shall wear all my diamonds, and I have ordered three splendid new
dresses!'"
* * *
All day long the fowls kept it alive with sound and movement; for of all
mercurial and fussy things there is nothing on the face of the earth to
equal cocks and hens. They have such an utterly exaggerated sense, too,
of their own importance; they make such a clacking and clucking over
every egg, such a scratching and trumpeting over every morsel of
treasure-trove, and such a striding and stamping over every bit of
well-worn ground. On the whole, I think poultry have more humanity in
them than any other race, footed or feathered; and cocks certainly must
have been the first creatures that ever hit on the great art of
advertising. Myself I always fancy that the souls of this feathered
tribe pass into the bodies of journalists; but this may be a mere
baseless association of kindred ideas in my mind.
* * *
She kissed the dog on the forehead; then pointed to the kreel of shells
and seaweed on the red, smooth piece of rock.
"Take care of them, dear Bronze," she murmured; "and wait till I come
back. Wait here."
She did not mean to command; she only meant to console him by the
appointment of some service.
Bronze looked in her face with eyes of woe and longing; but he made no
moan or sound, but only stretched himself beside the kreel on guard. I
am always glad to think that as she went she turned, and kissed him once
again.
The boat flew fast over the water. When boats leave you, and drag your
heart with them, they always go like that; and when they come, and your
heart darts out to meet them, then they are so slow!
The boat flew like a seagull, the sun bright upon her sail. Bronze, left
upon the rock, lifted his head and gave one long, low wail. It echoed
woefully and terribly over the wide, quiet waters. They gave back no
answer--not even the poor answer that lies in echo.
It was very still there. Nothing was in sight except that single little
sail shining against the light, and flying--flying--flying.
Now and then you could hear a clock striking in the distant village, the
faint crow of a cock, the far-off voices of children calling to one
another.
The little sea-mouse stole athwart a pool; the grey sea-crabs passed
like a little army; the tiny sea creatures that dwelt in rosy shells
thrust their delicate heads from their houses to peep and wonder at the
sun. But all was noiseless. How dared they make a sound, when that great
sea, that was at once their life and death, was present with its
never-ceasing "Hush!"
Bronze never moved, and his eyes never turned from the little boat that
went and left him there--the little boat that fast became merely a flash
and speck of white against the azure air, no bigger than the breadth of
a seagull's wings.