IT was now far into June, and Madge and Frank extended their walks and
returned later. He had come down to spend his last Sunday with the
Hopgoods before starting with his father for Germany, and on the Monday
they were to leave London.
Wordsworth was one of the divinities at Stoke Newington, and just before
Frank visited Fenmarket that week, he had heard the _Intimations of
Immortality_ read with great fervour. Thinking that Madge would be
pleased with him if she found that he knew something about that famous
Ode, and being really smitten with some of the passages in it, he learnt
it, and just as they were about to turn homewards one sultry evening he
suddenly began to repeat it, and declaimed it to the end with much
rhetorical power.
‘Bravo!’ said Madge, ‘but, of all Wordsworth’s poems, that is the one for
which I believe I care the least.’
Frank’s countenance fell.
‘Oh, me! I thought it was just what would suit you.’
‘No, not particularly. There are some noble lines in it; for example—
“And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!”
But the very title—_Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of
Early Childhood_—is unmeaning to me, and as for the verse which is in
everybody’s mouth—
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;”
and still worse the vision of “that immortal sea,” and of the children
who “sport upon the shore,” they convey nothing whatever to me. I find
though they are much admired by the clergy of the better sort, and by
certain religiously-disposed people, to whom thinking is distasteful or
impossible. Because they cannot definitely believe, they fling
themselves with all the more fervour upon these cloudy Wordsworthian
phrases, and imagine they see something solid in the coloured fog.’
It was now growing dark and a few heavy drops of rain began to fall, but
in a minute or two they ceased. Frank, contrary to his usual wont, was
silent. There was something undiscovered in Madge, a region which he had
not visited and perhaps could not enter. She discerned in an instant
what she had done, and in an instant repented. He had taken so much
pains with a long piece of poetry for her sake: was not that better than
agreement in a set of propositions? Scores of persons might think as she
thought about the ode, who would not spend a moment in doing anything to
gratify her. It was delightful also to reflect that Frank imagined she
would sympathise with anything written in that temper. She recalled what
she herself had said when somebody gave Clara a copy in ‘Parian’ of a
Greek statue, a thing coarse in outline and vulgar. Clara was about to
put it in a cupboard in the attic, but Madge had pleaded so pathetically
that the donor had in a measure divined what her sister loved, and had
done her best, although she had made a mistake, that finally the statue
was placed on the bedroom mantelpiece. Madge’s heart overflowed, and
Frank had never attracted her so powerfully as at that moment. She took
his hand softly in hers.
‘Frank,’ she murmured, as she bent her head towards him, ‘it is really a
lovely poem.’
Suddenly there was a flash of forked lightning at some distance, followed
in a few seconds by a roll of thunder increasing in intensity until the
last reverberation seemed to shake the ground. They took refuge in a
little barn and sat down. Madge, who was timid and excited in a
thunderstorm, closed her eyes to shield herself from the glare.
The tumult in the heavens lasted for nearly two hours and, when it was
over, Madge and Frank walked homewards without speaking a word for a good
part of the way.
‘I cannot, cannot go to-morrow,’ he suddenly cried, as they neared the
town.
‘You _shall_ go,’ she replied calmly.
‘But, Madge, think of me in Germany, think what my dreams and thoughts
will be—you here—hundreds of miles between us.’
She had never seen him so shaken with terror.
‘You _shall_ go; not another word.’
‘I must say something—what can I say? My God, my God, have mercy on me!’
‘Mercy! mercy!’ she repeated, half unconsciously, and then rousing
herself, exclaimed, ‘You shall not say it; I will not hear; now,
good-bye.’
They had come to the door; he went inside; she took his face between her
hands, left one kiss on his forehead, led him back to the doorway and he
heard the bolts drawn. When he recovered himself he went to the ‘Crown
and Sceptre’ and tried to write a letter to her, but the words looked
hateful, horrible on the paper, and they were not the words he wanted.
He dared not go near the house the next morning, but as he passed it on
the coach he looked at the windows. Nobody was to be seen, and that
night he left England.
‘Did you hear,’ said Clara to her mother at breakfast, ‘that the
lightning struck one of the elms in the avenue at Mrs Martin’s yesterday
evening and splintered it to the ground?’