She was silent too. “I must speak of it to Cecil!” she presently said.
Cecil is Mr. Highmore, who then entertained, I knew, strong views on
the inadjustability of circumstances in general to the idiosyncrasies of
Mrs. Stannace. He held it supremely happy that in an important relation
she should have met her match. Her match was Ray Limbert--not much of a
writer but a practical man. “The dear things still think, you know,”
my companion continued, “that the book will be the beginning of their
fortune. Their illusion, if you’re right, will be rudely dispelled.”
“That’s what makes me dread to face them. I’ve just spent with his
volumes an unforgettable night. His illusion has lasted because so many
of us have been pledged till this moment to turn our faces the other
way. We haven’t known the truth and have therefore had nothing to say.
Now that we do know it indeed we have practically quite as little.
I hang back from the threshold. How can I follow up with a burst of
enthusiasm such a catastrophe as Mr. Bousefield’s visit?”
As I turned uneasily about my neighbour more comfortably snuggled.
“Well, I’m glad then I haven’t read him and have nothing unpleasant to
say!” We had come back to Limbert’s door, and I made the coachman stop
short of it. “But he’ll try again, with that determination of his: he’ll
build his hopes on the next time.”
“On what else has he built them from the very first? It’s never the
present for him that bears the fruit; that’s always postponed and for
somebody else: there has always to be another try. I admit that his
idea of a ‘new line’ has made him try harder than ever. It makes no
difference,” I brooded, still timorously lingering; “his achievement of
his necessity, his hope of a market will continue to attach themselves
to the future. But the next time will disappoint him as each last time
has done--and then the next and the next and the next!”
I found myself seeing it all with a clearness almost inspired: it
evidently cast a chill on Mrs. Highmore. “Then what on earth will become
of him?” she plaintively asked.
“I don’t think I particularly care what may become of _him_,” I returned
with a conscious, reckless increase of my exaltation; “I feel it almost
enough to be concerned with what may become of one’s enjoyment of him. I
don’t know in short what will become of his circulation; I am only quite
at my ease as to what will become of his work. It will simply keep all
its quality. He’ll try again for the common with what he’ll believe to
be a still more infernal cunning, and again the common will fatally
elude him, for his infernal cunning will have been only his genius in an
ineffectual disguise.” We sat drawn up by the pavement, facing poor
Limbert’s future as I saw it. It relieved me in a manner to know the
worst, and I prophesied with an assurance which as I look back upon it
strikes me as rather remarkable. “_Que voulez-vous?_” I went on; “you
can’t make a sow’s ear of a silk purse! It’s grievous indeed if you
like--there are people who can’t be vulgar for trying. _He_ can’t--it
wouldn’t come off, I promise you, even once. It takes more than
trying--it comes by grace. It happens not to be given to Limbert to
fall. He belongs to the heights--he breathes there, he lives there, and
it’s accordingly to the heights I must ascend,” I said as I took leave
of my conductress, “to carry him this wretched news from where _we_
move!”
V
A few months were sufficient to show how right I had been about his
circulation. It didn’t move one, as I had said; it stopped short in the
same place, fell off in a sheer descent, like some precipice gaped up at
by tourists. The public in other words drew the line for him as sharply
as he had drawn it for Minnie Meadows. Minnie has skipped with a
flouncing caper over his line, however; whereas the mark traced by a
lustier cudgel has been a barrier insurmountable to Limbert. Those
next times I had spoken of to Jane Highmore, I see them simplified by
retrocession. Again and again he made his desperate bid--again and again
he tried to. His rupture with Mr. Bousefield caused him, I fear, in
professional circles to be thought impracticable, and I am perfectly
aware, to speak candidly, that no sordid advantage ever accrued to him
from such public patronage of my performances as he had occasionally
been in a position to offer. I reflect for my comfort that any injury I
may have done him by untimely application of a faculty of analysis which
could point to no converts gained by honourable exercise was at least
equalled by the injury he did himself. More than once, as I have hinted,
I held my tongue at his request, but my frequent plea that such favours
weren’t politic never found him, when in other connections there was an
opportunity to give me a lift, anything but indifferent to the danger
of the association. He let them have me in a word whenever he could;
sometimes in periodicals in which he had credit, sometimes only at
dinner. He talked about me when he couldn’t get me in, but it was
always part of the bargain that I shouldn’t make him a topic. “How can
I successfully serve you if you do?” he used to ask: he was more afraid
than I thought he ought to have been of the charge of tit for tat. I
didn’t care, for I never could distinguish tat from tit; but as I have
intimated I dropped into silence really more than anything else because
there was a certain fascinated observation of his course which was
quite testimony enough and to which in this huddled conclusion of it he
practically reduced me.
I see it all foreshortened, his wonderful remainder--see it from the end
backward, with the direction widening toward me as if on a level with
the eye. The migration to the country promised him at first great
things--smaller expenses, larger leisure, conditions eminently conducive
on each occasion to the possible triumph of the next time. Mrs.
Stannace, who altogether disapproved of it, gave as one of her reasons
that her son-in-law, living mainly in a village on the edge of a
goose-green, would be deprived of that contact with the great world
which was indispensable to the painter of manners. She had the showiest
arguments for keeping him in touch, as she called it, with good society;
wishing to know with some force where, from the moment he ceased to
represent it from observation, the novelist could be said to be. In
London fortunately a clever man was just a clever man; there were
charming houses in which a person of Ray’s undoubted ability, even
though without the knack of making the best use of it, could always be
sure of a quiet corner for watching decorously the social kaleidoscope.
But the kaleidoscope of the goose-green, what in the world was that,
and what such delusive thrift as drives about the land (with a fearful
account for flys from the inn) to leave cards on the country magnates?
This solicitude for Limbert’s subject-matter was the specious colour
with which, deeply determined not to affront mere tolerance in a
cottage, Mrs. Stannace overlaid her indisposition to place herself under
the heel of Cecil Highmore. She knew that he ruled Upstairs as well as
down, and she clung to the fable of the association of interests in the
north of London. The Highmores had a better address--they lived now in
Stanhope Gardens; but Cecil was fearfully artful--he wouldn’t hear of
an association of interests nor treat with his mother-in-law save as
a visitor. She didn’t like false positions; but on the other hand she
didn’t like the sacrifice of everything she was accustomed to. Her
universe at all events was a universe full of card-leavings and charming
houses, and it was fortunate that she couldn’t Upstairs catch the sound
of the doom to which, in his little grey den, describing to me his
diplomacy, Limbert consigned alike the country magnates and the
opportunities of London. Despoiled of every guarantee she went to
Stanhope Gardens like a mere maidservant, with restrictions on her very
luggage, while during the year that followed this upheaval Limbert,
strolling with me on the goose-green, to which I often ran down, played
extravagantly over the theme that with what he was now going in for
it was a positive comfort not to have the social kaleidoscope. With a
cold-blooded trick in view what had life or manners or the best society
or flys from the inn to say to the question? It was as good a place as
another to play his new game. He had found a quieter corner than any
corner of the great world, and a damp old house at sixpence a year,
which, beside leaving him all his margin to educate his children, would
allow of the supreme luxury of his frankly presenting himself as a poor
man. This was a convenience that _ces dames_, as he called them, had
never yet fully permitted him.
It rankled in me at first to see his reward so meagre, his conquest so
mean; but the simplification effected had a charm that I finally felt;
it was a forcing-house for the three or four other fine miscarriages
to which his scheme was evidently condemned. I limited him to three or
four, having had my sharp impression, in spite of the perpetual broad
joke of the thing, that a spring had really snapped in him on the
occasion of that deeply disconcerting sequel to the episode of his
editorship. He never lost his sense of the grotesque want, in the
difference made, of adequate relation to the effort that had been the
intensest of his life. He had from that moment a charge of shot in him,
and it slowly worked its way to a vital part. As he met his embarrassments
each year with his punctual false remedy I wondered periodically
where he found the energy to return to the attack. He did it every time
with a rage more blanched, but it was clear to me that the tension must
finally snap the cord. We got again and again the irrepressible work of
art, but what did _he_ get, poor man, who wanted something so different?
There were likewise odder questions than this in the matter, phenomena
more curious and mysteries more puzzling, which often for sympathy if
not for illumination I intimately discussed with Mrs. Limbert. She had
her burdens, dear lady: after the removal from London and a considerable
interval she twice again became a mother. Mrs. Stannace too, in a more
restricted sense, exhibited afresh, in relation to the home she had
abandoned, the same exemplary character. In her poverty of guarantees
at Stanhope Gardens there had been least of all, it appeared, a proviso
that she shouldn’t resentfully revert again from Goneril to Regan. She
came down to the goose-green like Lear himself, with fewer knights, or
at least baronets, and the joint household was at last patched up. It
fell to pieces and was put together on various occasions before Ray
Limbert died. He was ridden to the end by the superstition that he had
broken up Mrs. Stannace’s original home on pretences that had proved
hollow and that if he hadn’t given Maud what she might have had he could
at least give her back her mother. I was always sure that a sense of the
compensations he owed was half the motive of the dogged pride with which
he tried to wake up the libraries. I believed Mrs. Stannace still had
money, though she pretended that, called upon at every turn to retrieve
deficits, she had long since poured it into the general fund. This
conviction haunted me; I suspected her of secret hoards, and I said to
myself that she couldn’t be so infamous as not some day on her deathbed
to leave everything to her less opulent daughter. My compassion for the
Limberts led me to hover perhaps indiscreetly round that closing scene,
to dream of some happy time when such an accession of means would make
up a little for their present penury.
This however was crude comfort, as in the first place I had nothing
definite to go by and in the second I held it for more and more
indicated that Ray wouldn’t outlive her. I never ventured to sound him
as to what in this particular he hoped or feared, for after the crisis
marked by his leaving London I had new scruples about suffering him
to be reminded of where he fell short. The poor man was in truth
humiliated, and there were things as to which that kept us both silent.
In proportion as he tried more fiercely for the market the old plaintiff
arithmetic, fertile in jokes, dropped from our conversation. We joked
immensely still about the process, but our treatment of the results
became sparing and superficial. He talked as much as ever, with
monstrous arts and borrowed hints, of the traps he kept setting, but we
all agreed to take merely for granted that the animal was caught. This
propriety had really dawned upon me the day that after Mr. Bousefield’s
visit Mrs. Highmore put me down at his door. Mr. Bousefield in that
juncture had been served up to me anew, but after we had disposed of him
we came to the book, which I was obliged to confess I had already
rushed through. It was from this moment--the moment at which my terrible
impression of it had blinked out at his anxious query--that the image of
his scared face was to abide with me. I couldn’t attenuate then--the
cat was out of the bag; but later, each of the next times, I did, I
acknowledge, attenuate. We all did religiously, so far as was possible;
we cast ingenious ambiguities over the strong places, the beauties that
betrayed him most, and found ourselves in the queer position of admirers
banded to mislead a confiding artist. If we stifled our cheers however
and dissimulated our joy our fond hypocrisy accomplished little, for
Limbert’s finger was on a pulse that told a plainer story. It was a
satisfaction to have secured a greater freedom with his wife, who at
last, much to her honour, entered into the conspiracy and whose sense
of responsibility was flattered by the frequency of our united appeal to
her for some answer to the marvellous riddle. We had all turned it over
till we were tired of it, threshing out the question why the note he
strained every chord to pitch for common ears should invariably insist
on addressing itself to the angels. Being, as it were, ourselves the
angels we had only a limited quarrel in each case with the event;
but its inconsequent character, given the forces set in motion, was
peculiarly baffling. It was like an interminable sum that wouldn’t
come straight; nobody had the time to handle so many figures. Limbert
gathered, to make his pudding, dry bones and dead husks; how then was
one to formulate the law that made the dish prove a feast? What was the
cerebral treachery that defied his own vigilance? There was some obscure
interference of taste, some obsession of the exquisite. All one could
say was that genius was a fatal disturber or that the unhappy man had
no effectual _flair_. When he went abroad to gather garlic he came home
with heliotrope.
I hasten to add that if Mrs. Limbert was not directly illuminating
she was yet rich in anecdote and example, having found a refuge from
mystification exactly where the rest of us had found it, in a more
devoted embrace and the sense of a finer glory. Her disappointments and
eventually her privations had been many, her discipline severe; but she
had ended by accepting the long grind of life and was now quite willing
to take her turn at the mill. She was essentially one of us--she
always understood. Touching and admirable at the last, when through the
unmistakable change in Limbert’s health her troubles were thickest, was
the spectacle of the particular pride that she wouldn’t have exchanged
for prosperity. She had said to me once--only once, in a gloomy hour in
London days when things were not going at all--that one really had to
think him a very great man because if one didn’t one would be rather
ashamed of him. She had distinctly felt it at first--and in a very
tender place--that almost every one passed him on the road; but I
believe that in these final years she would almost have been ashamed of
him if he had suddenly gone into editions. It is certain indeed that her
complacency was not subjected to that shock. She would have liked the
money immensely, but she would have missed something she had taught
herself to regard as rather rare. There is another remark I remember her
making, a remark to the effect that of course if she could have chosen
she would have liked him to be Shakespeare or Scott, but that failing
this she was very glad he wasn’t--well, she named the two gentlemen, but
I won’t. I daresay she sometimes laughed out to escape an alternative.
She contributed passionately to the capture of the second manner,
foraging for him further afield than he could conveniently go, gleaning
in the barest stubble, picking up shreds to build the nest and in
particular in the study of the great secret of how, as we always said,
they all did it laying waste the circulating libraries. If Limbert had
a weakness he rather broke down in his reading. It was fortunately not
till after the appearance of _The Hidden Heart_ that he broke down in
everything else. He had had rheumatic fever in the spring, when the book
was but half finished, and this ordeal in addition to interrupting his
work had enfeebled his powers of resistance and greatly reduced his
vitality. He recovered from the fever and was able to take up the book
again, but the organ of life was pronounced ominously weak and it was
enjoined upon him with some sharpness that he should lend himself to no
worries. It might have struck me as on the cards that his worries would
now be surmountable, for when he began to mend he expressed to me a
conviction almost contagious that he had never yet made so adroit a bid
as in the idea of _The Hidden Heart_. It is grimly droll to reflect that
this superb little composition, the shortest of his novels but perhaps
the loveliest, was planned from the first as an “adventure-story” on
approved lines. It was the way they all did the adventure-story that
he tried most dauntlessly to emulate. I wonder how many readers ever
divined to which of their book-shelves _The Hidden Heart_ was so
exclusively addressed. High medical advice early in the summer had been
quite viciously clear as to the inconvenience that might ensue to him
should he neglect to spend the winter in Egypt. He was not a man to
neglect anything; but Egypt seemed to us all then as unattainable as
a second edition. He finished _The Hidden Heart_ with the energy of
apprehension and desire, for if the book should happen to do what “books
of that class,” as the publisher said, sometimes did he might well have
a fund to draw on. As soon as I read the deep and delicate thing I knew,
as I had known in each case before, exactly how well it would do. Poor
Limbert in this long business always figured to me an undiscourageable
parent to whom only girls kept being born. A bouncing boy, a son and
heir was devoutly prayed for and almanacks and old wives consulted; but
the spell was inveterate, incurable, and _The Hidden Heart_ proved, so
to speak, but another female child. When the winter arrived accordingly
Egypt was out of the question. Jane Highmore, to my knowledge, wanted to
lend him money, and there were even greater devotees who did their best
to induce him to lean on them. There was so marked a “movement”
among his friends that a very considerable sum would have been at his
disposal; but his stiffness was invincible: it had its root, I think,
in his sense, on his own side, of sacrifices already made. He had
sacrificed honour and pride, and he had sacrificed them precisely to the
question of money. He would evidently, should he be able to go on, have
to continue to sacrifice them, but it must be all in the way to which
he had now, as he considered, hardened himself. He had spent years in
plotting for favour, and since on favour he must live it could only be
as a bargain and a price.
He got through the early part of the season better than we feared, and I
went down in great elation to spend Christmas on the goose-green.
He told me late on Christmas eve, after our simple domestic revels had
sunk to rest and we sat together by the fire, that he had been visited
the night before in wakeful hours by the finest fancy for a really good
thing that he had ever felt descend in the darkness. “It’s just the
vision of a situation that contains, upon my honour, everything,” he
said, “and I wonder that I’ve never thought of it before.” He didn’t
describe it further, contrary to his common practice, and I only knew
later, by Mrs. Limbert, that he had begun _Derogation_ and that he was
completely full of his subject. It was a subject however that he was
not to live to treat. The work went on for a couple of months in happy
mystery, without revelations even to his wife. He had not invited her to
help him to get up his case--she had not taken the field with him as on
his previous campaigns. We only knew he was at it again but that less
even than ever had been said about the impression to be made on the
market. I saw him in February and thought him sufficiently at ease. The
great thing was that he was immensely interested and was pleased with
the omens. I got a strange, stirring sense that he had not consulted
the usual ones and indeed that he had floated away into a grand
indifference, into a reckless consciousness of art. The voice of the
market had suddenly grown faint and far: he had come back at the last,
as people so often do, to one of the moods, the sincerities of his
prime. Was he really with a blurred sense of the urgent doing something
now only for himself? We wondered and waited--we felt that he was a
little confused. What had happened, I was afterwards satisfied, was that
he had quite forgotten whether he generally sold or not. He had merely
waked up one morning again in the country of the blue and had stayed
there with a good conscience and a great idea. He stayed till death
knocked at the gate, for the pen dropped from his hand only at the
moment when from sudden failure of the heart his eyes, as he sank back
in his chair, closed for ever. _Derogation_ is a splendid fragment; it
evidently would have been one of his high successes. I am not prepared
to say it would have waked up the libraries.