IN THE STORM.
The mind of George Osborne was vigorous, fearless, and candid. He had
the perception of the poet without the poet's mobility. Once he had
built up an idea, he could not alter the parts without endangering the
whole. He was in everything conservative, except when he was
revolutionary. If corruption existed in an institution, rather than
try to eradicate the evil he would abolish the institution itself.
Without being wrong-headed or a bigot, he could not readily see how
there might be two tolerably fair views to any subject. If he thought
he was right, he felt himself to be entirely right. He would give
perfect liberty to another man to differ from him, but he could not
allow there existed any likelihood the other man was right. He saw all
questions in their totality, not in detail. If it was morally wrong to
hang a man for murder, why not abolish hanging to-morrow morning? If
it was not morally wrong, and if it was necessary for the protection
of the community that murderers should be hung, why, then it must be
fools who could have any aversion from the office of hangman.
He had been brought up in a small, rigid home, and in a dull,
monotonous way. He had bean a student of books, those immutable echoes
of eternal voices. He had been a lover of Nature, which week after
week moves onward to well-ascertained stations, producing anticipated
results. He had rarely been from home, and never far. He knew
absolutely nothing of the world until mighty London surged round him.
Even then he could not realise the magnitude of the great riddle of
man being worked at and abandoned daily by the millions living round
him. It was like giving a man sight for the first time in the middle
of the Atlantic, and expecting him to be able to draw outlines of the
American and European coasts.
In the little town the ordinary affairs of man, the births, deaths,
and marriages, went on in regular routine. No foreign armies camped in
the tree-sheltered fields. To him the news of wars and battles sounded
old-world and obsolete. There had been no sounds of fight here for
many score years. No great famine visited the place, no great
pestilence. Folk died in their beds, and had decent funerals. Neither
great poverty nor great riches distinguished the inhabitants. As a
rule, they went soberly through their lives, and usually left a little
money behind them. There were no fleets arriving from wonderful
climes. All the produce of the East was denationalised by the grocer
or the druggist or the jeweller. For these people there was no place
farther off than London, whence all exotic produce found its way to
the town.
As with all places possessing an ancient fame, which is much visited
by strangers, the popular mind of Stratford was continually driven
back to the days of its idol, when the house of Tudor held the sceptre
of England, and the man of Stratford held the imperial baton in the
universe of song. In the windows, as one walked along the street,
appeared Shakespeare collars and Shakespeare cuffs, and Shakespeare
drinking-cups, and Shakespeare plates, and Shakespeare chairs.
Everything one looked upon drove the mind back to Queen Bess. But it
was not to the weapon named after the virgin queen. Here was no
compulsion to think of foreign wars or approaching Armada. No discords
and bloody broils of armed men broke in upon the ears. This was a
wayside village hard by the Forest of Arden. At the other side of that
hill stood the 'wood not far from Athens.'
No one was in haste here, not even American tourists. The town had
plenty of time for all it had to do. Strangers, when they came to the
place, assumed a grave and deliberate manner. They looked up and down
streets with conciliatory eyes, as though embryo poets might be coming
those ways, and it were only meet to show respect to those of
Shakespeare's cloth. It was a place where the strangers listened and
the inhabitants talked, and talked of little else than Shakespeare. It
was the business of Stratford to do honour to all things which, in
point of time, approach her great son, and to regard the things of
to-day as mere shadows passing across that splendid background formed
by the achievements of her immortal son.
With such a mind and in such a place, George Osborne had reached the
prime of manhood. Had he been dull, or vicious, or fond of pleasure,
he might have braved all the dangers of a plunge from such a history
into London. But he was intellectual rather than intelligent, as Marie
had told him. He dwelt within himself rather than went forth to seek
new things. He had no mastering evil passion, and consequently nothing
which at once gave him an object of pursuit and a reason for darkening
his conscience. He was not a frivolous man, and could not be put off
with toys and bubbles.
But he was religious, profoundly religious. In the presence of the
object of his worship he felt pride in his manhood, diffidence in
himself. He believed that if a man were thoroughly good, that man
could worship worthily. He lifted his eyes and asked help or sympathy
fearlessly when he thought of his manhood; when he thought of himself
he bent his eyes upon the ground. He aspired with all his soul to rise
above evil; the daily routine of petty cares and petty passions
dragged him down. He would have given up his life freely any day for
his fellow-man.
Upon this man, when all the faculties of his intellect, all the
sensibilities of his emotions, had come to their full development, had
burst the passion of love. He was no raw school-boy, sighing after a
pretty face or a neat figure, but a strong man of mature thought,
overwhelmingly convinced by his intellect as well as by his emotions
that this woman alone could save his future life from being a
desert, could make it full of the richest, fullest, most abounding
life. 'Drunk or mad,' as he had said--he did not care what it was
called--drunk or mad, he wanted her; and, if he won her, he could walk
through life with a triumphant tread; without her he could do nothing
but shamble into the grave.
He prospered in his love; and then came that spiritual upheaval,
wherein the records of his life were swallowed up, and all the palaces
he had built thrown down. He stood aghast before the awful ruin. He
had never before conceived so stupendous a disaster. His nerves were
shattered, his reason was shaken. As soon as he got a moment's
respite, a returning ray of faith, he thought of this woman, for the
lightest pain of whose body he would give up his life. He thought she
had been careless once, and if ever she married a man like Parkinson
she would lose all. So at their betrothal, he swore her never to wed
outside the church.
After this came his complete downfall; and then he stood face to face
with the confounding problem: Should he lose his love to save her
faith, or snatch at the woman he loved, and imperil the future
happiness, perhaps, of one for whose sake he would die a thousand
times? It was during this fierce struggle he had behaved so
inexplicably, and asked her to give him time.
At that point he had thought his reason would utterly break down.
This day, on the journey, the question wholly lost its spiritual
aspect. All through the day, at dinner, and during the early part of
that interview in the conservatory, he had been more happy than ever
in all his life before, as he told her. But in those few simple words,
alluding to his infidel ideas, 'I promised not to marry you while you
held them,' a key had been struck which had never been sounded before.
The positions of her and him had been reversed.
He had been trying to save her; now she was trying to save him. This
situation caused all the old agony to flow in upon him, and he did not
hear or see anything until she fell.