CONCLUSION
The wind was high that morning. The rain came in gray rings, through
which we worked on the fretted surface of crumbling seas, heaving up and
plunging, without an outlook.
I remember having thought of the barque Priscilla as I watched our lithe
Dalmatians slide along the drenched decks of the Verona frigate. At
night it blew a gale. I could imagine it to have been sent
providentially to brush the torture of the land from my mind, and make me
feel that men are trifles.
What are their passions, then? The storm in the clouds--even more short-
lived than the clouds.
I philosophized, but my anguish was great.
Janet's 'Good-bye, Harry,' ended everything I lived for, and seemed to
strike the day, and bring out of it the remorseless rain. A featureless
day, like those before the earth was built; like night under an angry
moon; and each day the same until we touched the edge of a southern
circle and saw light, and I could use my brain.
The matter most present to me was my injustice regarding my poor father's
speech in the City hall. He had caused me to suffer so much that I
generally felt for myself when he appealed for sympathy, or provoked some
pity: but I was past suffering, and letting kindly recollection divest
the speech of its verbiage, I took it to my heart. It was true that he
had in his blind way struck the keynote of his position, much as I myself
had conceived it before. Harsh trials had made me think of my own
fortunes more than of his. This I felt, and I thought there never had
been so moving a speech. It seemed to make the world in debt to us.
What else is so consolatory to a ruined man?
In reality the busy little creature within me, whom we call self, was
digging pits for comfort to flow in, of any kind, in any form; and it
seized on every idea, every circumstance, to turn it to that purpose, and
with such success, that when by-and-by I learnt how entirely inactive
special Providence had been in my affairs, I had to collect myself before
I could muster the conception of gratitude toward the noble woman who
clothed me in the illusion. It was to the Princess Ottilia, acting
through Count Kesensky, that I owed both my wafting away from England at
a wretched season, and that chance of a career in Parliament! The
captain of the Verona hinted as much when, after a year of voyaging, we
touched at an East Indian seaport, and von Redwitz joined the vessel to
resume the post I was occupying. Von Redwitz (the son of Prince Ernest's
Chancellor, I discovered) could have told me more than he did, but he
handed me a letter from the princess, calling me home urgently, and even
prescribing my route, and bidding me come straight to Germany and to
Sarkeld. The summons was distasteful, for I had settled into harness
under my scientific superiors, and had proved to my messmates that I was
neither morose nor over-conceited. Captain Martinitz persuaded me to
return, and besides, there lay between the lines of Ottilia's letter a
signification of welcome things better guessed at than known. Was I not
bound to do her bidding? Others had done it: young von Redwitz, for
instance, in obeying the telegraph wires and feigning sickness to
surrender his place to me, when she wished to save me from misery by
hurrying me to new scenes with a task for my hand and head;--no mean
stretch of devotion on his part. Ottilia was still my princess; she my
providence. She wrote:
'Come home, my friend Harry: you have been absent too long. He who
intercepts you to displace you has his career before him in the vessel,
and you nearer home. The home is always here where I am, but it may now
take root elsewhere, and it is from Ottilia you hear that delay is now
really loss of life. I tell you no more. You know me, that when I say
come, it is enough.'
A simple adieu and her name ended the mysterious letter. Not a word of
Prince Hermann. What had happened? I guessed at it curiously and
incessantly and only knew the nature of my suspicion by ceasing to hope
as soon as I seemed to have divined it. I did not wrong my soul's high
mistress beyond the one flash of tentative apprehension which in
perplexity struck at impossibilities. Ottilia would never have summoned
me to herself. But was Janet free? The hope which refused to live in
that other atmosphere of purest calm, sprang to full stature at the bare
thought, and would not be extinguished though all the winds beset it.
Had my girl's courage failed, to spare her at the last moment? I fancied
it might be: I was sure it was not so. Yet the doubt pressed on me with
the force of a world of unimagined shifts and chances, and just kept the
little flame alive, at times intoxicating me, though commonly holding me
back to watch its forlorn conflict with probabilities known too well. It
cost me a struggle to turn aside to Germany from the Italian highroad.
I chose the line of the Brenner, and stopped half a day at Innsbruck to
pay a visit to Colonel Heddon, of whom I had the joyful tidings that two
of his daughters were away to go through the German form of the betrothal
of one of them to an Englishman. The turn of the tide had come to him.
And it comes to me, too, in a fresh spring tide whenever I have to speak
of others instead of this everlastingly recurring I of the
autobiographer, of which the complacent penman has felt it to be his duty
to expose the mechanism when out of action, and which, like so many of
our sins of commission, appears in the shape of a terrible offence when
the occasion for continuing it draws to a close. The pleasant narrator
in the first person is the happy bubbling fool, not the philosopher who
has come to know himself and his relations toward the universe. The
words of this last are one to twenty; his mind is bent upon the causes of
events rather than their progress. As you see me on the page now, I
stand somewhere between the two, approximating to the former, but with
sufficient of the latter within me to tame the delightful expansiveness
proper to that coming hour of marriage-bells and bridal-wreaths. It is a
sign that the end, and the delivery of reader and writer alike, should
not be dallied with.
The princess had invited Lucy Heddon to Sarkeld to meet Temple, and
Temple to meet me. Onward I flew. I saw the old woods of the lake-
palace, and, as it were, the light of my past passion waning above them.
I was greeted by the lady of all nobility with her gracious warmth, and
in his usual abrupt manful fashion by Prince Hermann. And I had no time
to reflect on the strangeness of my stepping freely under the roof where
a husband claimed Ottilia, before she led me into the library, where sat
my lost and recovered, my darling; and, unlike herself, for a moment, she
faltered in rising and breathing my name.
We were alone. I knew she was no bondwoman. The question how it had
come to pass lurked behind everything I said and did; speculation on the
visible features, and touching of the unfettered hand, restrained me from
uttering or caring to utter it. But it was wonderful. It thrust me back
on Providence again for the explanation--humbly this time. It was
wonderful and blessed, as to loving eyes the first-drawn breath of a
drowned creature restored to life. I kissed her hand. 'Wait till you
have heard everything, Harry,' she said, and her voice was deeper,
softer, exquisitely strange in its known tones, as her manner was, and
her eyes. She was not the blooming, straight-shouldered, high-breathing
girl of other days, but sister to the day of her 'Good-bye, Harry,' pale
and worn. The eyes had wept. This was Janet, haply widowed. She wore
no garb nor a shade of widowhood. Perhaps she had thrown it off, not to
offend an implacable temper in me. I said, 'I shall hear nothing that
can make you other than my own Janet--if you will?'
She smiled a little. 'We expected Temple's arrival sooner than yours,
Harry.!
'Do you take to his Lucy?'
'Yes, thoroughly.'
The perfect ring of Janet was there.
Mention of Riversley made her conversation lively, and she gave me
moderately good news of my father, quaint, out of Julia Bulsted's latest
letter to her.
'Then how long,' I asked astonished, 'how long have you been staying with
the princess?'
She answered, colouring, 'So long, that I can speak fairish German.'
'And read it easily?'
'I have actually taken to reading, Harry.'
Her courage must have quailed, and she must have been looking for me on
that morning of miserable aspect when I beheld the last of England
through wailful showers, like the scene of a burial. I did not speak of
it, fearing to hurt her pride, but said, 'Have you been here--months?'
'Yes, some months,' she replied.
'Many?'
'Yes,' she said, and dropped her eyelids, and then, with a quick look at
me, 'Wait for Temple, Harry. He is a day behind his time. We can't
account for it.'
I suggested, half in play, that perhaps he had decided, for the sake of a
sea voyage, to come by our old route to Germany on board the barque
Priscilla, with Captain Welsh.
A faint shudder passed over her. She shut her eyes and shook her head.
Our interview satisfied my heart's hunger no further. The Verona's
erratic voyage had cut me off from letters.
Janet might be a widow, for aught I knew. She was always Janet to me;
but why at liberty? why many months at Sarkeld, the guest of the
princess? Was she neither maid nor widow--a wife flown from a brutal
husband? or separated, and forcibly free? Under such conditions Ottilia
would not have commanded my return but what was I to imagine? A boiling
couple of hours divided me from the time for dressing, when, as I
meditated, I could put a chance question or two to the man commissioned
to wait on me, and hear whether the English lady was a Fraulein. The
Margravine and Prince Ernest were absent. Hermann worked in his museum,
displaying his treasures to Colonel Heddon. I sat with the ladies in the
airy look-out tower of the lake-palace, a prey to intense speculations,
which devoured themselves and changed from fire to smoke, while I
recounted the adventures of our ship's voyage, and they behaved as if
there were nothing to tell me in turn, each a sphinx holding the secret I
thirsted for. I should not certainly have thirsted much if Janet had met
me as far half-way as a delicate woman may advance. The mystery lay in
her evident affection, her apparent freedom and unfathomable reserve, and
her desire that I should see Temple before she threw off her feminine
armour, to which, judging by the indications, Ottilia seemed to me to
accede.
My old friend was spied first by his sweetheart Lucy, winding dilatorily
over the hill away from Sarkeld, in one of the carriages sent to meet
him. He was guilty of wasting a prodigious number of minutes with his
trumpery 'How d' ye do's,' and his glances and excuses, and then I had
him up in my room, and the tale was told; it was not Temple's fault if he
did not begin straightforwardly.
I plucked him from his narrator's vexatious and inevitable commencement:
'Temple, tell me, did she go to the altar?'
He answered 'Yes!'
'She did? Then she's a widow?'
'No, she isn't,' said Temple, distracting me by submitting to the lead I
distracted him by taking.
'Then her husband's alive?'
Temple denied it, and a devil seized him to perceive some comicality in
the dialogue.
'Was she married?'
Temple said 'No,' with a lurking drollery about his lips. He added,
'It 's nothing to laugh over, Richie.'
'Am I laughing? Speak out. Did Edbury come to grief overnight in any
way?'
Again Temple pronounced a negative, this time wilfully enigmatical: he
confessed it, and accused me of the provocation. He dashed some laughter
with gravity to prepare for my next assault.
'Was Edbury the one to throw up the marriage? Did he decline it?'
'No,' was the answer once more.
Temple stopped my wrath by catching at me and begging me to listen.
'Edbury was drowned, Richie.'
'Overnight?'
'No, not overnight. I can tell it all in half-a-dozen words, if you'll
be quiet; and I know you're going to be as happy as I am, or I shouldn't
trifle an instant. He went overnight on board the barque Priscilla to
see Mabel Sweetwinter, the only woman he ever could have cared for, and
he went the voyage, just as we did. He was trapped, caged, and
transported; it's a repetition, except that the poor old Priscilla never
came to land. She foundered in a storm in the North Sea. That 's all we
know. Every soul perished, the captain and all. I knew how it would be
with that crew of his some day or other. Don't you remember my saying
the Priscilla was the kind of name of a vessel that would go down with
all hands, and leave a bottle to float to shore? A gin-bottle was found
on our East coast-the old captain must have discovered in the last few
moments that such things were on board--and in it there was a paper, and
the passengers' and crew's names in his handwriting, written as if he had
been sitting in his parlour at home; over them a line--"The Lord's will
is about to be done"; and underneath--"We go to His judgement resigned
and cheerful." You know the old captain, Richie?
Temple had tears in his eyes. We both stood blinking for a second or
two.
I could not but be curious to hear the reason for Edbury's having
determined to sail.
'Don't you understand how it was, Richie?' said Temple. 'Edbury went to
persuade her to stay, or just to see her for once, and he came to
persuasions. He seems to have been succeeding, but the captain stepped
on board and he treated Edbury as he did us two: he made him take the
voyage for discipline's sake and "his soul's health."'
'How do you know all this, Temple?'
'You know your friend Kiomi was one of the party. The captain sent her
back on shore because he had no room for her. She told us Edbury offered
bribes of hundreds and thousands for the captain to let him and Mabel go
off in the boat with Kiomi, and then he took to begging to go alone. He
tried to rouse the crew. The poor fellow cringed, she says; he
threatened to swim off. The captain locked him up.'
My immediate reflections hit on the Bible lessons Edbury must have had to
swallow, and the gaping of the waters when its truths were suddenly and
tremendously brought home to him.
An odd series of accidents! I thought.
Temple continued: 'Heriot held his tongue about it next morning. He was
one of the guests, though he had sworn he wouldn't go. He said something
to Janet that betrayed him, for she had not seen him since.'
'How betrayed him?' said I.
'Why,' said Temple, 'of course it was Heriot who put Edbury in Kiomi's
hands. Edbury wouldn't have known of Mabel's sailing, or known the
vessel she was in, without her help. She led him down to the water and
posted him in sight before she went to Captain Welsh's; and when you and
Captain Welsh walked away, Edbury rowed to the Priscilla. Old Heriot is
not responsible for the consequences. What he supposed was likely
enough. He thought that Edbury and Mabel were much of a pair, and
thought, I suppose, that if Edbury saw her he'd find he couldn't leave
her, and old Lady Kane, who managed him, would stand nodding her plumes
for nothing at the altar. And so she did: and a pretty scene it was.
She snatched at the minutes as they slipped past twelve like fishes, and
snarled at the parson, and would have kept him standing till one P.M., if
Janet had not turned on her heel. The old woman got in front of her to
block her way. "Ah, Temple," she said to me, "it would be hard if I
could not think I had done all that was due to them." I didn't see her
again till she was starting for Germany. And, Richie, she thinks you can
never forgive her. She wrote me word that the princess is of another
mind, but her own opinion, she says, is based upon knowing you.'
'Good heaven! how little!' cried I.
Temple did me a further wrong by almost thanking me on Janet's behalf for
my sustained love for her, while he praised the very qualities of pride
and a spirited sense of obligation which had reduced her to dread my
unforgivingness. Yet he and Janet had known me longest. Supposing that
my idea of myself differed from theirs for the simple reason that I
thought of what I had grown to be, and they of what I had been through
the previous years? Did I judge by the flower, and they by root and
stem? But the flower is a thing of the season; the flower drops off: it
may be a different development next year. Did they not therefore judge
me soundly?
Ottilia was the keenest reader. Ottilia had divined what could be
wrought out of me. I was still subject to the relapses of a not
perfectly right nature, as I perceived when glancing back at my thought
of 'An odd series of accidents!' which was but a disguised fashion of
attributing to Providence the particular concern, in my fortunes: an
impiety and a folly! This is the temptation of those who are rescued and
made happy by circumstances. The wretched think themselves spited, and
are merely childish, not egregious in egoism. Thither on leads to a
chapter--already written by the wise, doubtless. It does not become an
atom of humanity to dwell on it beyond a point where students of the
human condition may see him passing through the experiences of the flesh
and the brain.
Meantime, Temple and I, at two hand-basins, soaped and towelled, and I
was more discreet toward him than I have been to you, for I reserved from
him altogether the pronunciation of the council of senators in the secret
chamber of my head. Whether, indeed, I have fairly painted the outer
part of myself waxes dubious when I think of his spluttering laugh and
shout; ' Richie, you haven't changed a bit--you're just like a boy!'
Certain indications of external gravity, and a sinking of the natural
springs within characterized Temple's approach to the responsible
position of a British husband and father. We talked much of Captain
Welsh, and the sedate practical irony of his imprisoning one like Edbury
to discipline him on high seas, as well as the singular situation of the
couple of culprits under his admonishing regimen, and the tragic end. My
next two minutes alone with Janet were tempered by it. Only my eagerness
for another term of privacy persuaded her that I was her lover instead of
judge, and then, having made the discovery that a single-minded gladness
animated me in the hope that she and I would travel together one in body
and soul, she surrendered, with her last bit of pride broken; except, it
may be, a fragment of reserve traceable in the confession that came
quaintly after supreme self-blame, when she said she was bound to tell me
that possibly--probably, were the trial to come over again, she should
again act as she had done.
Happily for us both, my wits had been sharpened enough to know that there
is more in men and women than the stuff they utter. And blessed
privilege now! if the lips were guilty of nonsense, I might stop them.
Besides, I was soon to be master upon such questions. She admitted it,
admitting with an unwonted emotional shiver, that absolute freedom could
be the worst of perils. 'For women?' said I. She preferred to say, 'For
girls,' and then 'Yes, for women, as they are educated at present.' Spice
of the princess's conversation flavoured her speech. The signs
unfamiliar about her for me were marks of the fire she had come out of;
the struggle, the torture, the determined sacrifice, through pride's
conception of duty. She was iron once. She had come out of the fire
finest steel.
'Riversley! Harry,' she murmured, and my smile, and word, and squeeze in
reply, brought back a whole gleam of the fresh English morning she had
been in face, and voice, and person.
Was it conceivable that we could go back to Riversley single?
Before that was answered she had to make a statement; and in doing it she
blushed, because it involved Edbury's name, and seemed to involve her
attachment to him; but she paid me the compliment of speaking it frankly.
It was that she had felt herself bound in honour to pay Edbury's debts.
Even by such slight means as her saying, 'Riversley, Harry,' and my kiss
of her fingers when a question of money was in debate, did we burst aside
the vestiges of mutual strangeness, and recognize one another, but with
an added warmth of love. When I pleaded for the marriage to be soon, she
said, 'I wish it, Harry.'
Sentiment you do not obtain from a Damascus blade. She most cordially
despised the ladies who parade and play on their sex, and are for ever
acting according to the feminine standard:--a dangerous stretch of
contempt for one less strong than she.
Riding behind her and Temple one day with the princess, I said, 'What
takes you most in Janet?'
She replied, 'Her courage. And it is of a kind that may knot up
every other virtue worth having. I have impulses, and am capable of
desperation, but I have no true courage: so I envy and admire, even if I
have to blame her; for I know that this possession of hers, which
identifies her and marks her from the rest of us, would bear the ordeal
of fire. I can imagine the qualities I have most pride in withering and
decaying under a prolonged trial. I cannot conceive her courage failing.
Perhaps because I have it not myself I think it the rarest of precious
gifts. It seems to me to imply one half, and to dispense with the
other.'
I have lived to think that Ottilia was right. As nearly right, too, in
the wording of her opinion as one may be in three or four sentences
designed to be comprehensive.
My Janet's readiness to meet calamity was shown ere we reached home upon
an evening of the late autumn, and set eye on a scene, for her the very
saddest that could have been devised to test her spirit of endurance,
when, driving up the higher heath-land, we saw the dark sky ominously
reddened over Riversley, and, mounting the ridge, had the funeral flames
of the old Grange dashed in our faces. The blow was evil, sudden,
unaccountable. Villagers, tenants, farm-labourers, groups of a
deputation that had gone to the railway station to give us welcome; and
returned, owing to a delay in our arrival, stood gazing from all
quarters. The Grange was burning in two great wings, that soared in
flame-tips and columns of crimson smoke, leaving the central hall and
chambers untouched as yet, but alive inside with mysterious ranges of
lights, now curtained, now made bare--a feeble contrast to the savage
blaze to right and left, save for the wonder aroused as to its
significance. These were soon cloaked. Dead sable reigned in them, and
at once a jet of flame gave the whole vast building to destruction. My
wife thrust her hand in mine. Fire at the heart, fire at the wings--our
old home stood in that majesty of horror which freezes the limbs of men,
bidding them look and no more.
'What has Riversley done to deserve this?' I heard Janet murmur to
herself. 'His room !' she said, when at the South-east wing, where my
old grandfather had slept, there burst a glut of flame. We dove down to
the park and along the carriage-road to the first red line of gazers.
They told us that no living creatures were in the house. My aunt Dorothy
was at Bulsted. I perceived my father's man Tollingby among the
servants, and called him to me; others came, and out of a clatter of
tongues, and all eyes fearfully askant at the wall of fire, we gathered
that a great reception had been prepared for us by my father: lamps,
lights in all the rooms, torches in the hall, illuminations along the
windows, stores of fireworks, such a display as only he could have
dreamed of. The fire had broken out at dusk, from an explosion of
fireworks at one wing and some inexplicable mismanagement at the other.
But the house must have been like a mine, what with the powder, the
torches, the devices in paper and muslin, and the extraordinary
decorations fitted up to celebrate our return in harmony with my father's
fancy.
Gentlemen on horseback dashed up to us. Captain Bulsted seized my hand.
He was hot from a ride to fetch engines, and sang sharp in my ear, 'Have
you got him?' It was my father he meant. The cry rose for my father, and
the groups were agitated and split, and the name of the missing man,
without an answer to it, shouted. Captain Bulsted had left him bravely
attempting to quench the flames after the explosion of fireworks. He
rode about, interrogating the frightened servants and grooms holding
horses and dogs. They could tell us that the cattle were safe, not a
word of my father; and amid shrieks of women at fresh falls of timber and
ceiling into the pit of fire, and warnings from the men, we ran the
heated circle of the building to find a loophole and offer aid if a
living soul should be left; the night around us bright as day, busier
than day, and a human now added to elemental horror. Janet would not
quit her place. She sent her carriage-horses to Bulsted, and sat in the
carriage to see the last of burning Riversley. Each time that I came to
her she folded her arms on my neck and kissed me silently.
We gathered from the subsequent testimony of men and women of the
household who had collected their wits, that my father must have remained
in the doomed old house to look to the safety of my aunt Dorothy. He was
never seen again.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Absolute freedom could be the worst of perils
Add on a tired pipe after dark, and a sound sleep to follow
Allowed silly sensitiveness to prevent the repair
As little trouble as the heath when the woods are swept
Bade his audience to beware of princes
But the flower is a thing of the season; the flower drops off
But to strangle craving is indeed to go through a death
Is it any waste of time to write of love?
Not to do things wholly is worse than not to do things at all
Payment is no more so than to restore money held in trust
Self, was digging pits for comfort to flow in
Tears are the way of women and their comfort
The love that survives has strangled craving
The wretch who fears death dies multitudinously
There is more in men and women than the stuff they utter
Those who are rescued and made happy by circumstances
To kill the deer and be sorry for the suffering wretch is common
Twice a bad thing to turn sinners loose
What a man hates in adversity is to see 'faces'
What else is so consolatory to a ruined man?
Who shuns true friends flies fortune in the concrete
Would he see what he aims at? let him ask his heels
You may learn to know yourself through love