GODFREY WARDOUR.
The property of which Thornwick once formed a part was then large and
important; but it had, by not very slow degrees, generation following
generation of unthrift, dwindled and shrunk and shriveled, until at
last it threatened to disappear from the family altogether, like a
spark upon burnt paper. Then came one into possession who had some
element of salvation in him; Godfrey's father not only held the poor
remnant together, but, unable to add to it, improved it so greatly that
at length, in the midst of the large properties around, it resembled
the diamond that hearts a disk of inferior stones. Doubtless, could he
have used his wife's money, he would have spent it on land; but it was
under trustees for herself and her children, and indeed would not have
gone far in the purchase of English soil.
Considerably advanced in years before he thought of marrying, he died
while Godfrey, whom he intended bringing up to a profession, was yet a
child; and his widow, carrying out his intention, had educated the boy
with a view to the law. Godfrey, however, had positively declined
entering on the studies special to a career he detested; nor was it
difficult to reconcile his mother to the enforced change of idea, when
she found that his sole desire was to settle down with her, and manage
the two hundred acres his father had left him. He took his place in the
county, therefore, as a yeoman-farmer--none the less a gentleman by
descent, character, and education. But while in genuine culture and
refinement the superior of all the landed proprietors in the
neighborhood, and knowing it, he was the superior of most of them in
this also, that he counted it no derogation from the dignity he valued
to put his hands upon occasion to any piece of work required about the
place.
His nature was too large, however, and its needs therefore too many, to
allow of his spending his energies on the property; and he did not
brood over such things as, so soon as they become cares, become
despicable. How much time is wasted in what is called thought, but is
merely care--an anxious idling over the fancied probabilities of
result! Of this fault, I say, Godfrey was not guilty--more, however, I
must confess, from healthful drawings in other directions, than from
philosophy or wisdom: he was _a reader_--not in the sense of a man who
derives intensest pleasure from the absorption of intellectual
pabulum--one not necessarily so superior as some imagine to the
_gourmet_, or even the _gourmand_: in his reading Godfrey nourished
certain of the higher tendencies of his nature--read with a constant
reference to his own views of life, and the confirmation, change, or
enlargement of his theories of the same; but neither did he read with
the highest aim of all--the enlargement of reverence, obedience, and
faith; for he had never turned his face full in the direction of
infinite growth--the primal end of a man's being, who is that he may
return to the Father, gathering his truth as he goes. Yet by the simple
instincts of a soul undebased by self-indulgence or low pursuits, he
was drawn ever toward things lofty and good; and life went calmly on,
bearing Godfrey Wardour toward middle age, unruffled either by anxiety
or ambition.
To the forecasting affection of a mother, the hour when she must yield
the first place both in her son's regards and in the house-affairs
could not but have often presented itself, in doubt and pain--perhaps
dread. Only as year after year passed and Godfrey revealed no tendency
toward marriage, her anxiety changed sides, and she began to fear lest
with Godfrey the ancient family should come to an end. As yet, however,
finding no response to covert suggestion, she had not ventured to speak
openly to him on the subject. All the time, I must add, she had never
thought of Letty either as thwarting or furthering her desires, for in
truth she felt toward her as one on whom Godfrey could never condescend
to look, save with the kindness suitable for one immeasurably below
him. As to what might pass in Letty's mind, Mrs. Wardour had neither
curiosity nor care: else she might possibly have been more considerate
than to fall into the habit of talking to her in such swelling words of
maternal pride that, even if she had not admired him of herself, Letty
could hardly escape coming to regard her cousin Godfrey as the very
first of men.
It added force to the veneration of both mother and cousin--for it was
nothing less than veneration in either--that there was about Godfrey an
air of the inexplicable, or at least the unknown, and therefore
mysterious. This the elder woman, not without many a pang at her
exclusion from his confidence, attributed, and correctly, to some
passage in his life at the university; to the younger it appeared only
as greatness self-veiled from the ordinary world: to such as she, could
be vouchsafed only an occasional peep into the gulf of his knowledge,
the grandeur of his intellect, and the imperturbability of his courage.
The passage in Godfrey's life to which I have referred as vaguely
suspected by his mother, I need not present in more than merest
outline: it belongs to my history only as a component part of the soil
whence it springs, and as in some measure necessary to the
understanding of Godfrey's character. In the last year of his college
life he had formed an attachment, the precise nature of which I do not
know. What I do know is, that the bonds of it were rudely broken, and
of the story nothing remained but disappointment and pain, doubt and
distrust. Godfrey had most likely cherished an overweening notion of
the relative value of the love he gave; but being his, I am certain it
was genuine--by that, I mean a love with no small element of the
everlasting in it. The woman who can cast such a love from her is not
likely to meet with such another. But with this one I have nothing to
do.
It had been well if he had been left with only a wounded heart, but in
that heart lay wounded pride. He hid it carefully, and the keener in
consequence grew the sensitiveness, almost feminine, which no stranger
could have suspected beneath the manner he wore. Under that bronzed
countenance, with its firm-set mouth and powerful jaw--below that clear
blue eye, and that upright easy carriage, lay a faithful heart haunted
by a sense of wrong: he who is not perfect in forgiveness must be
haunted thus; he only is free whose love for the human is so strong
that he can pardon the individual sin; he alone can pray the prayer,
"Forgive us our trespasses," out of a full heart. Forgiveness is the
only cure of wrong. And hand in hand with Sense-of-injury walks ever
the weak sister-demon Self-pity, so dear, so sweet to many--both of
them the children of Philautos, not of Agape. But there was no hate, no
revenge, in Godfrey, and, I repeat, his weakness he kept concealed. It
must have been in his eyes, but eyes are hard to read. For the rest,
his was a strong poetic nature--a nature which half unconsciously
turned ever toward the best, away from the mean judgments of common
men, and with positive loathing from the ways of worldly women. Never
was peace endangered between his mother and him, except when she
chanced to make use of some evil maxim which she thought experience had
taught her, and the look her son cast upon her stung her to the heart,
making her for a moment feel as if she had sinned what the theologians
call the unpardonable sin. When he rose and walked from the room
without a word, she would feel as if abandoned to her wickedness, and
be miserable until she saw him again. Something like a spring-cleaning
would begin and go on in her for some time after, and her eyes would
every now and then steal toward her judge with a glance of awe and
fearful apology. But, however correct Godfrey might be in his judgment
of the worldly, that judgment was less inspired by the harmonies of the
universe than by the discords that had jarred his being and the
poisonous shocks he had received in the encounter of the noble with the
ignoble. There was yet in him a profound need of redemption into the
love of the truth for the truth's sake. He had the fault of thinking
too well of himself--which who has not who thinks of himself at all,
apart from his relation to the holy force of life, within yet beyond
him? It was the almost unconscious, assuredly the undetected,
self-approbation of the ordinarily righteous man, the defect of whose
righteousness makes him regard himself as upright, but the virtue of
whose uprightness will at length disclose to his astonished view how
immeasurably short of rectitude he comes. At the age of thirty, Godfrey
Wardour had not yet become so displeased with himself as to turn
self-roused energy upon betterment; and until then all growth must be
of doubtful result. The point on which the swift-revolving top of his
thinking and feeling turned was as yet his present conscious self, as a
thing that was and would be, not as a thing that had to become.
Naturally the pivot had worn a socket, and such socket is sure to be a
sore. His friends notwithstanding gave him credit for great
imperturbability; but in such willfully undemonstrative men the evil
burrows the more insidiously that it is masked by a constrained
exterior.