ATTEMPTS AND COINCIDENCES.
It was months before I could resume my work. Not until Charley’s
absence was, as it were, so far established and accepted that hope had
begun to assert itself against memory; that is, not until the form of
Charley ceased to wander with despairful visage behind me and began to
rise amongst the silvery mists before me, was I able to invent once
more, or even to guide the pen with certainty over the paper. The
moment, however, that I took the pen in my hand another necessity
seized me.
Although Mary had hardly been out of my thoughts, I had heard no word
of her since her brother’s death. I dared not write to her father or
mother after the way the former had behaved to me, and I shrunk from
approaching Mary with a word that might suggest a desire to intrude the
thoughts of myself upon the sacredness of her grief. Why should she
think of me? Sorrow has ever something of a divine majesty, before
which one must draw nigh with bowed head and bated breath:
Here I and sorrows sit;
Here is my throne: bid kings come bow to it.
But the moment I took the pen in my hand to write, an almost agonizing
desire to speak to her laid hold of me. I dared not yet write to her,
but, after reflection, resolved to send her some verses which should
make her think of both Charley and myself, through the pages of a
magazine which I knew she read.
Oh, look not on the heart I bring--
It is too low and poor;
I would not have thee love a thing
Which I can ill endure.
Nor love me for the sake of what
I would be if I could;
O’er peaks as o’er the marshy flat,
Still soars the sky of good.
See, love, afar, the heavenly man
The will of God would make;
The thing I must be when I can,
Love now, for faith’s dear sake.
But when I had finished the lines, I found the expression had fallen so
far short of what I had in my feeling, that I could not rest satisfied
with such an attempt at communication. I walked up and down the room,
thinking of the awful theories regarding the state of mind at death in
which Mary had been trained. As to the mere suicide, love ever finds
refuge in presumed madness; but all of her school believed that at the
moment of dissolution the fate is eternally fixed either for bliss or
woe, determined by the one or the other of two vaguely defined
attitudes of the mental being towards certain propositions; concerning
which attitudes they were at least right in asserting that no man could
of himself assume the safe one. The thought became unendurable that
Mary should believe that Charley was damned--and that for ever and
ever. I must and would write to her, come of it what might. That my
Charley, whose suicide came of misery that the painful flutterings of
his half-born wings would not bear him aloft into the empyrean, should
appear to my Athanasia lost in an abyss of irrecoverable woe; that she
should think of God as sending forth his spirit to sustain endless
wickedness for endless torture;--it was too frightful. As I wrote, the
fire burned and burned, and I ended only from despair of utterance. Not
a word can I now recall of what I wrote:--the strength of my feelings
must have paralyzed the grasp of my memory. All I can recollect is that
I closed with the expression of a passionate hope that the God who had
made me and my Charley to love each other, would somewhere, some day,
somehow, when each was grown stronger and purer, give us once more to
each other. In that hope alone, I said, was it possible for me to live.
By return of post I received the following:--
SIR,
After having everlastingly ruined one of my children, body and soul,
for _your_ sophisms will hardly alter the decrees of divine justice,
once more you lay your snares--now to drag my sole remaining child into
the same abyss of perdition. Such wickedness--wickedness even to the
pitch of blasphemy against the Holy Ghost--I have never in the course
of a large experience of impenitence found paralleled. It almost drives
me to the belief that the enemy of souls is still occasionally
permitted to take up his personal abode in the heart of him who
wilfully turns aside from revealed truth. I forgive you for the ruin
you have brought upon our fondest hopes, and the agony with which you
have torn the hearts of those who more than life loved him of whom you
falsely called yourself the friend. But I fear you have already gone
too far ever to feel your need of that forgiveness which alone can
avail you. Yet I say--Repent, for the mercy of the Lord is infinite.
Though my boy is lost to me for ever, I should yet rejoice to see the
instrument of his ruin plucked as a brand from the burning.
Your obedient well-wisher,
CHARLES OSBORNE.
‘P.S.--I retain your letter for the sake of my less experienced
brethren, that I may be able to afford an instance of how far the
unregenerate mind can go in its antagonism to the God of Revelation.’
I breathed a deep breath, and laid the letter down, mainly concerned as
to whether Mary had had the chance of reading mine. I could believe any
amount of tyranny in her father--even to perusing and withholding her
letters; but in this I may do him injustice, for there is no common
ground known to me from which to start in speculating upon his probable
actions. I wrote in answer something nearly as follows:--
SIR,
That you should do me injustice can by this time be no matter of
surprise to me. Had I the slightest hope of convincing you of the fact,
I should strain every mental nerve to that end. But no one can labour
without hope, and as in respect of _your_ justice I have none, I will
be silent. May the God in whom I trust convince you of the cruelty of
which you have been guilty: the God in whom you profess to believe,
must be too like yourself to give any ground of such hope from him.
Your obedient servant,
‘WILFRID CUMBERMEDE.’
If Mary had read my letter, I felt assured her reading had been very
different from her father’s. Anyhow she could not judge me as he did,
for she knew me better. She knew that for Charley’s sake I had tried
the harder to believe myself.
But the reproaches of one who had been so unjust to his own son could
not weigh very heavily on me, and I now resumed my work with a
tolerable degree of calmness. But I wrote badly. I should have done
better to go down to the Moat, and be silent. If my reader has ever
seen what I wrote at that time, I should like her to know that I now
wish it all unwritten--not for any utterance contained in it, but
simply for its general inferiority.
Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing
as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully
neglected. Abraham, seated in his tent door in the heat of the day,
would be to the philosophers of the nineteenth century an object for
uplifted hands and pointed fingers. They would see in him only the
indolent Arab, whom nothing but the foolish fancy that he saw his Maker
in the distance, could rouse to run.
It was clearly better to attempt no further communication with Mary at
present; and I could think but of one person from whom, without giving
pain, I might hope for some information concerning her.
* * * * *
Here I had written a detailed account of how I contrived to meet Miss
Pease, but it is not of consequence enough to my story to be allowed to
remain. Suffice it to mention that one morning at length I caught sight
of her in a street in Mayfair, where the family was then staying for
the season, and overtaking addressed her.
She started, stared at me for a moment, and held out her hand.
‘I didn’t know you, Mr Cumbermede. How much older you look! I beg your
pardon. Have you been ill?’
She spoke hurriedly, and kept looking over her shoulder now and then,
as if afraid of being seen talking to me.
‘I have had a good deal to make me older since we met last, Miss
Pease,’ I said. ‘I have hardly a friend left in the world but you--that
is, if you will allow me to call you one.’
‘Certainly, certainly,’ she answered, but hurriedly, and with one of
those uneasy glances. ‘Only you must allow, Mr Cumbermede,
that--that--that--’
The poor lady was evidently unprepared to meet me on the old footing,
and, at the same time, equally unwilling to hurt my feelings.
‘I should be sorry to make you run a risk for my sake,’ I said. ‘Please
just answer me one question. Do you know what it is to be
misunderstood--to be despised without deserving it?’
She smiled sadly, and nodded her head gently two or three times.
‘Then have pity on me, and let me have a little talk with you.’
Again she glanced apprehensively over her shoulder.
‘You are afraid of being seen with me, and I don’t wonder,’ I said.
‘Mr Geoffrey came up with us,’ she answered. ‘I left him at breakfast.
He will be going across the park to his club directly.’
‘Then come with me the other way--into Hyde Park,’ I said.
With evident reluctance, she yielded and accompanied me.
As soon as we got within Stanhope Gate, I spoke.
‘A certain sad event, of which you have no doubt heard, Miss Pease, has
shut me out from all communication with the family of my friend Charley
Osborne. I am very anxious for some news of his sister. She is all that
is left of him to me now. Can you tell me anything about her?’
‘She has been very ill,’ she replied.
‘I hope that means that she is better,’ I said.
‘She is better, and, I hear, going on the Continent, as soon as the
season will permit. But, Mr Cumbermede, you must be aware that I am
under considerable restraint in talking to you. The position I hold in
Sir Giles’s family, although neither a comfortable nor a dignified
one--’
‘I understand you perfectly, Miss Pease,’ I returned, ‘and fully
appreciate the sense of propriety which causes your embarrassment. But
the request I am about to make has nothing to do with them or their
affairs whatever. I only want your promise to let me know if you hear
anything of Miss Osborne.’
‘I cannot tell--what--’
‘What use I may be going to make of the information you give me. In a
word, you do not trust me.’
‘I neither trust nor distrust you, Mr Cumbermede. But I am afraid of
being drawn into a correspondence with you.’
‘Then I will ask no promise. I will hope in your generosity. Here is my
address. I pray you, as you would have helped him who fell among
thieves, to let me know anything you hear about Mary Osborne.’
She took my card, and turned at once, saying,
‘Mind, I make no promise.’
‘I imagine none,’ I answered. ‘I will trust in your kindness.’
And so we parted.
Unsatisfactory as the interview was, it yet gave me a little hope. I
was glad to hear that Mary was going abroad, for it must do her good.
For me, I would endure and labour and hope. I gave her to God, as
Shakspere says somewhere, and set myself to my work. When her mind was
quieter about Charley, somehow or other I might come near her again.--I
could not see how.
I took my way across the Green Park.
I do not believe we notice the half of the coincidences that float past
us on the stream of events. Things which would fill us with
astonishment, and probably with foreboding, look us in the face and
pass us by, and we know nothing of them.
As I walked along in the direction of the Mall, I became aware of a
tall man coming towards me, stooping, as if with age, while the length
of his stride indicated a more vigorous period. He passed without
lifting his head, but, in the partial view of the wan and furrowed
countenance, I could not fail to recognize Charley’s father. Such a
worn unhappiness was there depicted that the indignation which still
lingered in my bosom went out in compassion. If his sufferings might
but teach him that to brand the truth of the kingdom with the private
mark of opinion must result in persecution and cruelty! He mounted the
slope with strides at once eager and aimless, and I wondered whether
any of the sure-coming compunctions had yet begun to overshadow the
complacency of his faith; whether he had yet begun to doubt if it
pleased the Son of Man that a youth should be driven from the gates of
truth because he failed to recognize her image in the faces of the
janitors.
Aimless also, I turned into the Mall, and again I started at the sight
of a known figure. Was it possible?--could it be my Lilith betwixt the
shafts of a public cabriolet? Fortunately it was empty. I hailed it,
and jumped up, telling the driver to take me to my chambers.
My poor Lilith! She was working like one who had never been loved! So
far as I knew she had never been in harness before. She was badly
groomed and thin, but much of her old spirit remained. I soon entered
into negotiations with the driver, whose property she was, and made her
my own once more, with a delight I could ill express in plain
prose--for my friends were indeed few. I wish I could draw a picture of
the lovely creature, when at length, having concluded my bargain, I
approached her, and called her by her name! She turned her head
sideways towards me with a low whinny of pleasure, and when I walked a
little away, walked wearily after me. I took her myself to livery
stables near me, and wrote for Styles. His astonishment when he saw her
was amusing.
‘Good Lord! Miss Lilith!’ was all he could say--for some moments.
In a few days she had begun to look like herself, and I sent her home
with Styles. I should hardly like to say how much the recovery of her
did to restore my spirits; I could not help regarding it as a good
omen.
And now, the first bitterness of my misery having died a natural death,
I sought again some of the friends I had made through Charley, and
experienced from them great kindness. I began also to go into society a
little, for I had found that invention is ever ready to lose the forms
of life, if it be not kept under the ordinary pressure of its
atmosphere. As it is, I doubt much if any of my books are more than
partially true to those forms, for I have ever heeded them too little;
but I believe I have been true to the heart of man. At the same time, I
have ever regarded that heart more as the fountain of aspiration than
the grave of fruition. The discomfiture of enemies and a happy marriage
never seemed to me ends of sufficient value to close a history
withal--I mean a fictitious history, wherein one may set forth joys and
sorrows which in a real history must walk shadowed under the veil of
modesty; for the soul, still less than the body, will consent to be
revealed to all eyes. Hence, although most of my books have seemed true
to some, they have all seemed visionary to most.
A year passed away, during which I never left London. I heard from Miss
Pease--that Miss Osborne, although much better, was not going to return
until after another Winter. I wrote and thanked her, and heard no more.
It may seem I accepted such ignorance with strange indifference; but,
even to the reader for whom alone I am writing, I cannot, as things
are, attempt to lay open all my heart. I have not written and cannot
write how I thought, projected, brooded, and dreamed--all about _her_;
how I hoped when I wrote that she might read; how I questioned what I
had written, to find whether it would look to her what I had intended
it to appear.