to prove its sincerity to be accepted."
"You believe in public penance?" said Sabran, with some impatience and
contempt.
"Not necessarily public," she said, with a sense of perplexity at the
turn his words had taken. "But of what use is it for one to say he
repents unless in some measure he makes atonement?"
"But where atonement is impossible?"
"That could never be."
"Yes. There are crimes whose consequences can never be undone. What
then? Is he who did them shut out from all hope?"
"I am no casuist," she said, vaguely troubled. "But if no atonement were
possible I still think--nay, I am sure--a sincere and intense regret
which is, after all, what we mean by repentance, must be accepted, must
be enough."
"Enough to efface it in the eyes of one who had never sinned?"
"Where is there such a one? I thought you spoke of heaven."
"I spoke of earth. It is all we can be sure to have to do with; it is
our one poor heritage."
"I hope it is but an antechamber which we pass through, and fill with
beautiful things, or befoul with dust and blood, at our own will."
"Hardly at our own will. In your antechamber a capricious tyrant waits
us all at birth. Some come in chained; some free."
* * *
"Do not compare the retreat of the soldier tired of his wounds, of the
gambler wearied by his losses, with the poet or the saint who is at
peace with himself and sees all his life long what he at least believes
to be the smile of God. Loyola and Francis d'Assisi are not the same
thing, are not on the same plane."
"What matter what brought them," she said softly, "if they reach the
same goal?"
* * *
"You bade me do good at Romaris. Candidly, I see no way to do it except
in saving a crew off a wreck, which is not an occasion that presents
itself every week. I cannot benefit these people materially, since I am
poor; I cannot benefit them morally, because I have not their faith in
the things unseen, and I have not their morality in the things
tangible. They are God-fearing, infinitely patient, faithful in their
daily lives, and they reproach no one for their hard lot, cast on an
iron shore and forced to win their scanty bread at the risk of their
lives. They do not murmur either at duty or mankind. What should I say
to them? I, whose whole life is one restless impatience, one petulant
mutiny against circumstance? If I talk with them I only take them what
the world always takes into solitude--discontent. It would be a cruel
gift, yet my hand is incapable of holding out any other. It is a homely
saying that no blood comes out of a stone; so, out of a life saturated
with the ironies, the contempt, the disbelief, the frivolous
philosophies, the hopeless negations of what we call Society, there can
be drawn no water of hope and charity, for the well-head--belief--is
dried up at its source. Some pretend, indeed, to find in humanity what
they deny to exist as Deity, but I should be incapable of the illogical
exchange. It is to deny that the seed sprang from a root; it is to
replace a grand and illimitable theism by a finite and vainglorious
bathos. Of all the creeds that have debased mankind, the new creed that
would centre itself in man seems to me the poorest and the most baseless
of all. If humanity be but a _vibrion_, a conglomeration of gases, a
mere mould holding chemicals, a mere bundle of phosphorus and carbon,
how can it contain the elements of worship? what matter when or how each
bubble of it bursts? This is the weakness of all materialism when it
attempts to ally itself with duty. It becomes ridiculous. The _carpi
diem_ of the classic sensualists, the morality of the 'Satyricon' or the
'Decamerone,' are its only natural concomitants and outcome; but as yet
it is not honest enough to say this. It affects the soothsayer's long
robe, the sacerdotal frown, and is a hypocrite."
In answer she wrote back to him:
"I do not urge you to have my faith: what is the use? Goethe was right.
It is a question between a man and his own heart. No one should venture
to intrude there. But taking life even as you do, it is surely a casket
of mysteries. May we not trust that at the bottom of it, as at the
bottom of Pandora's, there may be hope? I wish again to think with
Goethe that immortality is not an inheritance, but a greatness to be
achieved like any other greatness, by courage, self-denial, and purity
of purpose--a reward allotted to the just. This is fanciful, may be, but
it is not illogical. And without being either a Christian or a
Materialist, without beholding either majesty or divinity in humanity,
surely the best emotion that our natures know--pity--must be large
enough to draw us to console where we can, and sustain where we can, in
view of the endless suffering, the continual injustice, the appalling
contrasts, with which the world is full. Whether man be the _vibrion_ or
the heir to immortality, the bundle of carbon or the care of angels, one
fact is indisputable: he suffers agonies, mental and physical, that are
wholly out of proportion to the brevity of his life, while he is too
often weighted from infancy with hereditary maladies, both of body and
of character. This is reason enough, I think, for us all to help each
other, even though we feel, as you feel, that we are as lost children,
wandering in a great darkness, with no thread or clue to guide us to the
end."
* * *
"We do not cultivate music one-half enough among the peasantry. It
lightens labour; it purifies and strengthens the home life; it sweetens
black bread. Do you remember that happy picture of Jordaens' 'Where the
old sing, the young chirp,' where the old grandfather and grandmother,
and the baby in its mother's arms, and the hale five-year-old boy, and
the rough servant, are all joining in the same melody, while the goat
crops the vine-leaves off the table? I should like to see every cottage
interior like that when the work was done. I would hang up an etching
from Jordaens where you would hang up, perhaps, the programme of
Proudhon."
Then she walked back with him through the green sun-gleaming woods.
"I hope that I teach them content," she continued. "It is the lesson
most neglected in our day. '_Niemand will ein Schuster sein; Jedermann
ein Dichter._' It is true we are very happy in our surroundings. A
mountaineer's is such a beautiful life, so simple, healthful, hardy, and
fine; always face to face with nature. I try to teach them what an
inestimable joy that alone is. I do not altogether believe in the
prosaic views of rural life. It is true that the peasant digging his
trench sees the clod, not the sky; but then when he does lift his head
the sky is there, not the roof, not the ceiling. That is so much in
itself. And here the sky is an everlasting grandeur; clouds and domes of
snow are blent together. When the stars are out above the glaciers how
serene the night is, how majestic! even the humblest creature feels
lifted up into that eternal greatness. Then you think of the home-life
in the long winters as dreary; but it is not so. Over away there, at
Lahn, and other places on the Hallstadtersee, they do not see the sun
for five months; the wall of rock behind them shuts them from all light
of day; but they live together, they dance, they work. The young men
recite poems, and the old men tell tales of the mountains and the French
war, and they sing the homely songs of the _Schnader-hüpfeln_. Then when
winter passes, when the sun comes up again over the wall of rocks, when
they go out into the light once more, what happiness it is! One old man
said to me, 'It is like being born again!' and another said, 'Where it
is always warm and light I doubt they forget to thank God for the
sunshine;' and quite a young child said, all of his own accord, 'The
primroses live in the dusk all the winter, like us, and then when the
sun comes up we and they run out together, and the Mother of Christ has
set the water and the little birds laughing.' I would rather have the
winter of Lahn than the winter of Belleville."
* * *
If the Venus de Medici could be animated into life women would only
remark that her waist was large.
* * *
Tedium is the most terrible and the most powerful foe love ever
encounters.
* * *
"Life is after all like baccarat or billiards," he said to himself. "It
is no use winning unless there be a _galerie_ to look on and applaud."
* * *
Time hung on his hands like a wearisome wallet of stones.
When all the habits of life are suddenly rent asunder, they are like a
rope cut in two. They may be knotted together clumsily, or they may be
thrown altogether aside and a new strand woven, but they will never be
the same thing again.
* * *
The greatness of a great race is a thing far higher than mere pride. Its
instincts are noble and supreme, its obligations are no less than its
privileges; it is a great light which streams backward through the
darkness of the ages, and if by that light you guide not your footsteps,
then are you thrice accursed, holding as you do that lamp of honour in
your hands.
* * *
Even to those who care nothing for Society, and dislike the stir and
noise of the world about them, there is still always a vague sense of
depression in the dispersion of a great party; the house seems so
strangely silent, the rooms seem so strangely empty, servants flitting
noiselessly here and there, a dropped flower, a fallen jewel, an
oppressive scent from multitudes of fading blossoms, a broken vase
perhaps, or perhaps a snapped fan--these are all that are left of the
teeming life crowded here one little moment ago. Though one may be glad
they are gone, yet there is a certain sadness in it. "_Le lendemain de
la fête_" keeps its pathos, even though the _fête_ itself has possessed
no poetry and no power to amuse.
* * *
In every one of her villages she had her schools on this principle, and
they throve, and the children with them. Many of these could not read a
printed page, but all of them could read the shepherd's weather-glass in
sky and flower; all of them knew the worm that was harmful to the crops,
the beetle that was harmless in the grass; all knew a tree by a leaf, a
bird by a feather, an insect by a grub.
Modern teaching makes a multitude of gabblers. She did not think it
necessary for the little goat-herds, and dairymaids, and foresters, and
charcoal-burners, and sennerins, and carpenters, and cobblers, to study
the exact sciences or draw casts from the antique. She was of opinion,
with Pope, that "a little learning is a dangerous thing," and that a
smattering of it will easily make a man morose and discontented, whilst
it takes a very deep and lifelong devotion to it to teach a man content
with his lot. Genius, she thought, is too rare a thing to make it
necessary to construct village schools for it, and whenever or wherever
it comes upon earth, it will surely be its own master.
She did not believe in culture for little peasants who have to work for
their daily bread at the plough-tail or with the reaping-hook. She knew
that a mere glimpse of a Canaan of art and learning is cruelty to those
who never can enter into and never even can have leisure to merely gaze
on it. She thought that a vast amount of useful knowledge is consigned
to oblivion whilst children are taught to waste their time in picking up
the crumbs of a great indigestible loaf of artificial learning. She had
her scholars taught their "ABC," and that was all. Those who wished to
write were taught, but writing was not enforced. What they were made to
learn was the name and use of every plant in their own country; the
habits and ways of all animals; how to cook plain food well, and make
good bread; how to brew simples from the herbs of their fields and
woods, and how to discern the coming weather from the aspect of the
skies, the shutting-up of certain blossoms, and the time of day from
those "poor men's watches," the opening flowers. In all countries there
is a great deal of useful household and out-of-door lore that is fast
being choked out of existence under books and globes, and which, unless
it passes by word of mouth from generation to generation, is quickly and
irrevocably lost. All this lore she had cherished by her
school-children. Her boys were taught in addition any useful trade they
liked--boot-making, crampon-making, horse-shoeing, wheel-making, or
carpentry. This trade was made a pastime to each. The little maidens
learned to sew, to cook, to spin, to card, to keep fowls and sheep and
cattle in good health, and to know all poisonous plants and berries by
sight.
"I think it is what is wanted," she said. "A little peasant child does
not need to be able to talk of the corolla and the spathe, but he does
want to recognise at a glance the flower that will give him healing and
the berries that will give him death. His sister does not in the least
require to know why a kettle boils, but she does need to know when a
warm bath will be good for a sick baby or when hurtful. We want a new
generation to be helpful, to have eyes, and to know the beauty of
silence. I do not mind much whether my children reap or not. The
labourer that reads turns Socialist, because his brain cannot digest the
hard mass of wonderful facts he encounters. But I believe every one of
my little peasants, being wrecked like Crusoe, would prove as handy as
he."
* * *
"Can you inform me how it is that women possess tenacity of will in
precise proportion to the frivolity of their lives? All these
butterflies have a volition of iron."
"It is egotism. Intensely selfish people are always very decided as to
what they wish. That is in itself a great force; they do not waste their
energies in considering the good of others."
* * *
"I am not like you, my dear Olga," she wrote to her relative the
Countess Brancka. "I am not easily amused. That _course effrénée_ of the
great world carries you honestly away with it; all those incessant
balls, those endless visits, those interminable conferences on your
toilettes, that continual circling of human butterflies round you, those
perpetual courtships of half a score of young men; it all diverts you.
You are never tired of it; you cannot understand any life outside its
pale. All your days, whether they pass in Paris or Petersburgh, at
Trouville, at Biarritz, or at Vienna or Scheveningen, are modelled on
the same lines; you must have excitement as you have your cup of
chocolate when you wake. What I envy you is that the excitement excites
you. When I was amidst it I was not excited; I was seldom ever diverted.
See the misfortune that it is to be born with a grave nature! I am as
serious as Marcus Antoninus. You will say that it comes of having
learned Latin and Greek. I do not think so; I fear I was born
unamusable. I only truly care about horses and trees, and they are both
grave things, though a horse can be playful enough sometimes when he is
allowed to forget his servitude. Your friends, the famous tailors, send
me admirably-chosen costumes which please that sense in me which Titians
and Vandycks do (I do not mean to be profane); but I only put them on as
the monks do their frocks. Perhaps I am very unworthy of them; at least,
I cannot talk toilette as you can with ardour a whole morning and every
whole morning of your life. You will think I am laughing at you; indeed
I am not. I envy your faculty of sitting, as I am sure you are sitting
now, in a straw chair on the shore, with a group of _boulevardiers_
around you, and a crowd making a double hedge to look at you when it is
your pleasure to pace the planks. My language is involved. I do not envy
you the faculty of doing it, of course; I could do it myself to-morrow.
I envy you the faculty of finding amusement in doing it, and finding
flattery in the double hedge."
* * *
"No doubt a love of nature is a triple armour against self-love. How can
I say how right I think your system with these children? You seem not to
believe me. There is only one thing in which I differ with you; you
think the 'eyes that see' bring content. Surely not! surely not!"
"It depends on what they see. When they are wide open in the woods and
fields, when they have been taught to see how the tree-bee forms her
cell and the mole her fortress, how the warbler builds his nest for his
love and the water-spider makes his little raft, how the leaf comes
forth from the hard stem and the fungi from the rank mould, then I think
that sight is content--content in the simple life of the woodland place,
and in such delighted wonder that the heart of its own accord goes up in
peace and praise to the Creator. The printed page may teach envy,
desire, coveteousness, hatred, but the Book of Nature teaches
resignation, hope, willingness to labour and live, submission to die.
The world has gone farther and farther from peace since larger and
larger have grown its cities, and its shepherd kings are no more."
* * *
She remained still, her hands folded on her knees, her face set as
though it were cast in bronze. The great bedchamber, with its hangings
of pale blue plush and its silver-mounted furniture, was dim and shadowy
in the greyness of a midwinter afternoon. Doors opened, here to the bath
and dressing chambers, there to the oratory, yonder to the apartments of
Sabran. She looked across to the last, and a shudder passed over her; a
sense of sickness and revulsion came on her.
She sat still and waited; she was too weak to go farther than this room.
She was wrapped in a long loose gown of white satin, lined and trimmed
with sable. There were black bearskins beneath her feet; the atmosphere
was warmed by hot air, and fragrant with some bowls full of forced
roses, which her women had placed there at noon. The grey light of the
fading afternoon touched the silver scrollwork of the bed, and the
silver frame of one large mirror, and fell on her folded hands and on
the glister of their rings. Her head leaned backward against the high
carved ebony of her chair. Her face was stern and bitterly cold, as that
of Maria Theresa when she signed the loss of Silesia.
He approached from his own apartments, and came timidly and with a slow
step forward. He did not dare to salute her, or go near to her; he stood
like a banished man, disgraced, a few yards from her seat.
Two months had gone by since he had seen her. When he entered he read on
her features that he must leave all hope behind.
Her whole frame shrank within her as she saw him there, but she gave no
sign of what she felt. Without looking at him she spoke, in a voice
quite firm, though it was faint from feebleness.
"I have but little to say to you, but that little is best said, not
written."
He did not reply; his eyes were watching her with a terrible appeal, a
very agony of longing. They had not rested on her for two months. She
had been near the gates of the grave, within the shadow of death. He
would have given his life for a word of pity, a touch, a regard--and he
dared not approach her!
She dared not look at him. After that first glance, in which there had
been so much of horror, of revulsion, she did not once look towards him.
Her face had the immutability of a mask of stone; so many wretched days
and haunted nights had she spent nerving herself for this inevitable
moment that no emotion was visible in her; into her agony she had poured
her pride, and it sustained her, as the plaster poured into the dry
bones at Pompeii makes the skeleton stand erect, the ashes speak.
"After that which you have told me," she said, after a moment's silence
in which he fancied she must hear the throbbing of his heart, "you must
know that my life cannot be lived out beside yours. The law gives you
many rights, no doubt, but I believe you will not be so base as to
enforce them."
"I have no rights!" he muttered. "I am a criminal before the law. The
law will free you from me, if you choose."
"I do not choose," she said coldly; "you understand me ill. I do not
carry my wrongs or my woes to others. What you have told me is known
only to Prince Vásárhely and to the Countess Brancka. He will be silent;
he has the power to make her so. The world need know nothing. Can you
think that I shall be its informant?"
"If you divorce me"---- he murmured.
A quiver of bitter anger passed over her features, but she retained her
self-control.
"Divorce? What could divorce do for me? Could it destroy the past?
Neither Church or Law can undo what you have done. Divorce would make me
feel that in the past I had been your mistress, not your wife, that is
all."
She breathed heavily, and again pressed her hand on her breast.
"Divorce!" she repeated. "Neither priest nor judge can efface a past as
you clean a slate with a sponge! No power, human or divine, can free
_me_, purify _me_, wash your dishonoured blood from your children's
veins."
She almost lost her self-control; her lips trembled, her eyes were full
of flame, her brow was black with passion. With a violent effort she
restrained herself; invective or reproach seemed to her low and coarse
and vile.
He was silent; his greatest fear, the torture of which had harassed him
sleeping and waking ever since he had placed his secret in her hands,
was banished at her words. She would seek no divorce--the children would
not be disgraced--the world of men would not learn his shame; and yet as
he heard a deeper despair than any he had ever known came over him. She
was but as those sovereigns of old who scorned the poor tribunals of
man's justice because they held in their own might the power of so much
heavier chastisement.
"I shall not seek for a legal separation," she resumed; "that is to say,
I shall not, unless you force me to do so to protect myself from you. If
you fail to abide by the conditions I shall prescribe, then you will
compel me to resort to any means that may shelter me from your demands.
But I do not think you will endeavour to force on me conjugal rights
which you obtained over me by a fraud."
All that she desired was to end quickly the torture of this interview,
from which her courage had not permitted her to shrink. She had to
defend herself because she would not be defended by others, and she only
sought to strike swiftly and unerringly so as to spare herself and him
all needless or lingering throes. Her speech was brief, for it seemed to
her that no human language held expression deep and vast enough to
measure the wrong done to her, could she seek to give it utterance.
She would not have made a sound had any murderer stabbed her body; she
would not now show the death-wound of her soul and honour to this man
who had stabbed both to the quick. Other women would have made their
moan aloud, and cursed him. The daughter of the Szalras choked down her
heart in silence, and spoke as a judge speaks to one condemned by man
and God.
"I wish no words between us," she said, with renewed calmness. "You know
your sin; all your life has been a lie. I will keep me and mine back
from vengeance; but do not mistake--God may pardon you, I never! What I
desired to say to you is that henceforth you shall wholly abandon the
name you stole; you shall assign the land of Romaris to the people; you
shall be known only as you have been known here of late, as the Count
von Idrac. The title was mine to give, I gave it you; no wrong is done
save to my fathers, who were brave men."
He remained silent; all excuse he might have offered seemed as if from
him to her it would be but added outrage. He was her betrayer, and she
had the power to avenge betrayal; naught that she could say or do could
seem unjust or undeserved beside the enormity of her irreparable wrongs.
"The children?" he muttered faintly, in an unuttered supplication.
"They are mine," she said, always with the same unchanging calm that was
cold as the frozen earth without. "You will not, I believe, seek to
enforce your title to dispute them with me?"
He gave a gesture of denial.
He, the wrong-doer, could not realise the gulf which his betrayal had
opened betwixt himself and her. On him all the ties of their past
passion were sweet, precious, unchanged in their dominion. He could not
realise that to her all these memories were abhorred, poisoned, stamped
with ineffable shame; he could not believe that she, who had loved the
dust that his feet had brushed, could now regard him as one leprous and
accursed. He was slow to understand that his sin had driven him out of
her life for evermore.