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Title: Bones and I
or, the skeleton at home
Author: G. J. Whyte-Melville
Illustrator: A. Forestier
Release date: October 3, 2023 [eBook #71789]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1901
Credits: Bob Taylor, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
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Transcriber’s Note
Italic text displayed as: _italic_
Bones and I
[Illustration: “Contemplating my companion.” Page 65.)
_Bones and I._] [_Frontispiece_
]
Bones and I
or
The Skeleton at Home
By
G. J. Whyte-Melville
Author of “Market Harborough,” “Katerfelto,” “Cerise,”
“Satanella,” etc.
Illustrated by A. Forestier
London
Ward, Lock & Co., Limited
New York and Melbourne
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
Introduction 7
I. “On Waste” 15
II. Through the Mill 32
III. Gourds 48
IV. A Vampire 65
V. Gold for Silver 102
VI. A Day that is Dead 122
VII. The Four-leaved Shamrock 140
VIII. Rus in Urbe 162
IX. Haunted 184
X. Weight Carriers 201
XI. Shadows 220
XII. Guinevere 237
‘BONES AND I’
_OR, THE SKELETON AT HOME_
INTRODUCTION
Long ago, visiting the monastery of La Trappe, I was struck with
the very discontented appearance of its inmates. In some of their
faces, indeed, I detected no expression whatever, but on none could
I perceive the slightest gleam of satisfaction with their lot. No
wonder: few men are of the stuff that makes a good recluse. The human
animal is naturally gregarious, like the solan goose, the buffalo,
the monkey, or the mackerel. Put him by himself, he pines for lack of
mental aliment, just as a flower fades for want of daylight in the
dark. A multitude of fools forms an inspiriting spectacle, a solitary
specimen becomes a sad and solemn warning. If the Trappists, who are
not entirely isolated from their kind, thus wither under the rigour
of those repressive rules enjoined by the Order, what must have been
the condition of such hermits and anchorites as passed whole months,
and even years together, in the wilderness, unvisited by anything more
human than the distempered phantoms of their dreams? No shave, no
wash, no morning greeting, and no evening wine. How many, I wonder,
preserved their sanity in the ordeal? How many, returning dazed and
bewildered to the haunts of men, tottered about in helpless, wandering,
maundering imbecility? Were there not some hard, boisterous natures who
plunged wildly into the excesses of a world so long forsworn, with all
the appetite of abstinence, all the reckless self-abandonment of the
paid-off man-of-war’s man on a spree? No; few people are qualified for
recluses. I am proud to be amongst the number.
I live in a desert, but my desert is in the very heart of London. The
waste is all round me though; I have taken good care of that. Once,
indeed, it blossomed like the rose, for a thousand fertilising streams
trickled through its bright expanse. Do not you as I did. I turned all
the streams into one channel, “in the sweet summer-time long ago,” and
“sat by the river,” like those poor fools in the song, and said, “Go
to! Now I shall never thirst again!” But in the night there came a
landslip from the upper level, and choked the river, turning its course
through my neighbour’s pastures, so that the meadows, once so green and
fresh, are bare and barren now for evermore. I speak in parables, of
course; and the value of “this here observation,” like those of Captain
Bunsby, “lies in the application of it.” I need not observe, the street
in which I hide myself is a _cul de sac_. A man who sells chickweed,
perhaps I should say, who would sell chickweed if he could, is the only
passenger. Of the houses on each side of me, one is unfinished, the
other untenanted. Over the way, I confront the dead wall at the back
of an hospital. Towards dusk in the late autumn, when the weather is
breaking, I must admit the situation is little calculated to generate
over-exuberance of animal spirits. Sequestered, no doubt, shady too,
particularly in the short days, and as remote from the noise or traffic
of the town as John o’ Groat’s house, but enlivening—No.
On first beginning to reside here, I confess I felt at times a little
lonely and depressed. Therefore I brought home “Bones” to come and live
with me. And who _is_ “Bones”? Ah! that is exactly what I have never
been able to find out. Contemplative, affable, easily pleased, and an
admirable listener, he is yet on some points reserved to a degree that
might almost be termed morose; while in his personal appearance there
is a dignity of bearing, an imposing presence, which forbids the most
intimate associate to attempt a liberty.
I will describe him as I see him at this moment, reclining in an easy
attitude on the cushions of my favourite arm-chair, benevolently
interested, it would seem, in my lightest movements, while I sit
smoking silently by the fire. Neither of us are great talkers quite so
early in the evening.
He is a well-formed and very complete skeleton of middle height—perfect
in every respect, and in all his articulations, with the exception of
two double teeth absent from the upper jaw. The arch of his lower ribs
is peculiarly symmetrical, and his vertebræ are put in with a singular
combination of flexibility and strength. As I look at him now leaning
back in a graceful attitude, with one thigh-bone thrown carelessly
over the other, he reminds me of so many people I knew when I lived
in the world, that I seem to fancy myself once more a denizen of that
revolving purgatory which goes by the name of general society. Poor
A—— was almost as fleshless, B—— much more taciturn, and C—— decidedly
not so good-looking. “Bones,” however, possesses a quality that I have
never found in any other companion. His tact is beyond praise. Under no
circumstances does he become a bore—that is why we get on so admirably
together. Like a ghost, he speaks only when spoken to. Unlike a wife,
refrains from monopolising the last word. If he didn’t rattle so on the
slightest movement—a fault of anatomy, indeed, rather than temper—as a
companion he would be—perfection.
It is a dull, close evening. Were it not so near winter one might
predict a thunderstorm. The smoke from my meerschaum winds upwards in
thin blue wreaths, uninfluenced by a breath of outward air, though
the windows are open to the deserted street, black and silent as the
grave. My lamp is not yet lit (we both affect a congenial gloom), the
fire is burning out, but there is a dull red glow like a fever-spot
lowering under a volcanic arch of cinders; and looking into it
with unwinking eyes, I see the long-drawn, weary, beaten road that
leads backward through a life. I see a child set down to run alone,
half-frightened, laughing, trusting, almost happy, and altogether
gay. I see a youth bold, healthful, courageous, full of an impossible
chivalry, a romantic generosity that delights to lavish no matter
what—money, love, hope, happiness, coining heart and intellect into
gold that he may squander it on the passers-by. I see a strong man
crushed—a proud head grovelling in the dust, a high spirit broken, a
cowering wretch imploring that his punishment may be lightened ever
such a little, trembling and wincing like a slave beneath the scourge.
At this moment the fire falls in with a crash, while a pale yellow
flame leaps flickering out of the midst, and starting from my seat
to light our lamp for the rest of the evening, I demand aloud, “What
then is the purpose of Creation? From a quenched rushlight to an
extinct volcano, from the squeak of a mouse to yesterday’s leading
article, from a mite smothered in a cheese to an Emperor murdered in
Mexico, is the march of Time but the destructive progress of a bull in
a china-shop? Are the recurring centuries but so many ciphers added
to the sum of a thriftless, objectless expenditure? Is the so-called
economy of the universe but an unbridled, haphazard course of boundless
and incalculable waste?”
His backbone creaks uncomfortably while he moves in his chair. “Waste?”
he repeats in the hushed, placid tones that make him so invaluable as
a companion—“Waste? The subject is by no means limited. I have some
experience in it of my own. Would you favour me with your ideas?”—and I
go off at score with—
CHAPTER I
“ON WASTE”
“Why are these things so?” I exclaim, plumping down again into my
seat. “Why have the times been out of joint ever since Hamlet’s first
appearance on the stage, with black tights and rosettes in his shoes?
Why is the whole world still at sixes and sevens? What is the object
of it all? _Cui bono? cui bono? cui bono?_ Is there the slightest
appearance of a result? Any tendency towards a goal? Shall we ever
get _anywhere_, or are we travelling perpetually in a circle, like
squirrels in a cage, convicted pickpockets on the treadmill? By the
way, who convicted the pickpockets, and sentenced them? The sitting
magistrate, of course; and do the awards of that worthy functionary
produce any definite result in the direction of good order and
morality, or must his daily incubation, too, be wasted upon addled
eggs? Do you remember the story of the man who cut his throat because
he was so tired of dressing and undressing every day? Don’t shake
your head—I beg pardon, your skull—you told it me yourself. I can
appreciate his prejudices, but how did he know there might not be
buttons and buttonholes where he was going? That is, supposing he went
anywhere—if he didn’t, he was wasted altogether. If he did, perhaps he
was of no use when he got there. Wasted again—only a human life after
all. Not much when you think of it amongst the millions that cling
about this old globe of ours, rising, swarming, disappearing like the
maggots on a dead horse, but of no light importance to the bearer when
you remember its weight of sorrows, anxieties, disappointments, and
responsibilities, not to mention the Black Care sitting heavily at the
top to keep the whole burden in its place. Life is a bubble, they say.
Very well—-but is it blown from a soap-dish by a school-boy, rising
heavenward, tinted with rainbow hues, to burst only when at its most
beautiful and its best? Or is it not rather a bubble gurgling to the
surface from the agonised lungs of some struggling wretch drowning far
below in the dark, pitiless water,
‘Unknell’d, uncoffin’d, and unknown’?
—Wasted, too, unless the fish eat him, and then who knows? None of us
perhaps may ever eat the fish.
“Listen to me. I won’t make your flesh creep, for unanswerable reasons.
I don’t even think I shall freeze the marrow in your bones. I could
tell you some strange stories, but I dare say your own experiences
are more remarkable than mine. I will only ask you to reflect on the
amount of suffering that came under our daily notice when we lived in
the world, and say whether every pang of mind or body, every tear shed
or swallowed down, every groan indulged or repressed, were anything
but sheer waste? Can you not recall a hundred instances of strength
sapped by drink, of intellect warped by madness, of beauty fading under
neglect, or withered by disappointment? Here a pair of lives are wasted
because they must needs run out their course in different grooves—there
two more are utterly thrown away, because, encompassed in a golden
link, they can by no means shake themselves free. The fairest of all,
it may be, and the most promising, never blooms into perfection for
want of its congenial comrade (wasted too, perhaps, at the antipodes),
and failing thus to reach maturity, dwindles, dwarfed and unmated, to
the grave. Think of Beauty wasted on the Beast—the Beast, too, utterly
out of his element, that he must roll on the garden sward rather than
labour in the teeming furrow. Look at Hercules spell-bound in the lap
of Omphale, broad-fronted Antony enervated by black-browed Cleopatra.
Consider the many Messrs. Caudle who lavish as much good-humour as
would set up a dozen households on their legal nightmares, and do not
forget poor Miss Prettyman pining in lonely spinsterhood over the way.
See the mother training up her child, impressing on him, far more
forcibly than she feels them for herself, lessons of honour, truth,
probity, and the unspeakable blessing of faith—praying her heart out
for that wilful little urchin, night and morning on her knees. A good
Christian with humble hopes of heaven, does she know that, far more
lavishly than those heathen termagants in hell, she is pouring water in
a sieve? Does she know she may live to see that smooth, soft, wondering
brow scored deep with sorrow, or lowering black with sin—that round
rosy cheek hollowed by depravity, or bloated with excess? Worst of all,
the merry, guileless heart embittered by falsehood, and hardened with
ill-usage till it has ceased to feel for others, even for itself! Great
Heaven! have we not seen them—these simple, honest, manly hearts,
taken by some soft-eyed demon with loving ways, and sweet angelic
smile, to be kept carefully, to be watched jealously, till their fabric
has been thoroughly studied, then broken deftly and delicately, yet
with such nice art that they can never mend again, and so, politely
‘Returned, with thanks’?
“Forgive me: on such anatomical outrages I have no right to expect you
should feel so warmly as myself.
“Millions of creatures, beautiful exceedingly, scour over the desert
plains of explored Africa; in its unknown regions, millions more may
be supposed to feed, and gambol, and die. What is the use of them? If
you come to that, what was the use of the Emperor Theodore, or the King
of the Cannibal Islands, or any other potentate who remains utterly
unimpressed when we threaten ‘to break off diplomatic relations’?
“Myriads of insects wheel about us in the sun’s declining rays every
summer’s evening. Again, what is the use of them? What is the use
of the dragon-fly, the bumble-bee, the speckled toad, the blue-nosed
monkey, the unicorn, the wild elephant,—or, indeed, the Ojibbeway
Indians?”
Here, contrary to his custom, “Bones” interrupted me in full career.
“One moment,” said he, with his courteous grin. “Allow me to point
out that yours is inadmissible, as being simply an _argumentum ad
absurdum_. It would hold equally good with Léotard, Mr. Beales, or any
other public exhibitor—nay, you might advance it for suppression of the
Lord Mayor or the Archbishop of Canterbury.”
He bowed reverentially while he mentioned the last-named dignitary; and
I confess I was inclined to admit the truth of his remark.
“Then I waive the question,” I replied, “as regards the brute creation,
though I think I could find something to say, too, about the weasel
sucking rabbits, the heron gobbling fish, the hawk striking its quarry,
or the hounds running into their fox. But we will suppose that the
whole animal world, from the angler’s lob-worm to the costermonger’s
donkey, is enjoying its paradise _here_, and return to our own kind,
their sorrows, their sufferings, and, natural consequence of sorrow and
suffering, their sins.”
He shook his skull gently, and muttered something in his spinal
vertebræ about “a cart” and “a horse,” but I took no notice, and
proceeded with dignity—
“I have learnt my Latin Grammar, and almost the only one of its
precepts I have not forgotten impresses on me that—
‘Spades turn up wealth, the stimulant of crime.’
I suppose you will not dispute that the root of all evil is money?”
“Most emphatically,” he exclaimed, and his articulations rattled with
startling vehemence. “Most emphatically I deny the position. A man may
roll in wealth and be none the worse for it. On the contrary, poverty,
but for the unremitting labour it demands, would be far more conducive
to crime than a sufficiency, or even a superfluity of means. No; the
real enemy with whom every man has to contend confronts him in the
morning at his glass, and sticks persistently to him throughout the
day. The source of most unhappiness, the cause of all ill-doing, the
universal origin of evil, is _not_ money, but self——”
“You mean selfishness,” I retorted; “and I am surprised to hear a
man of the world—I mean of the _other_ world, or, indeed, of _any_
world whatever—assert so obvious a fallacy. Just as the liver, and
not the heart, is the seat of our real well-being, so I maintain that
self-indulgence, and not self-sacrifice, is the origin, the mainspring,
the motive power of all effort, progress, improvement, moral, social,
and physical. Researches of science, triumphs of art, masterpieces of
genius,—what are these but results of the same instinct that directs
the bee to the flower-garden, the vulture to the carcase? To eat is the
first necessity of man. He labours that he may live. Grant this, as
you cannot but concede the position to be unassailable, and you talk to
me in vain of sentiment, philanthropy, benevolence, all the loathsome
affectations of sympathy with which the earth-worm tries to impose upon
its kind. A man begins by being honest. Why? Because without honesty,
down the particular groove in which he spins, he cannot earn his daily
bread. When he has enough of this and to spare, he turns his attention
to decent apparel, a commodious house, a general appearance of
respectability; that is, he aims at being respectable—in other words,
at imposing on those who have been less successful in the universal
scramble than himself. Soon he buys a warming-pan, a Dutch oven, china
ornaments for his chimney-piece, and the History of the Prodigal to
hang about his walls. By degrees, as wealth increases, he moves into a
larger residence, he rolls upon wheels, he replaces the china ornaments
with a French clock; the Prodigal Son with modern oil-paintings, and
hides the warming-pan in the housemaid’s closet up-stairs. About this
period he begins to subscribe to charitable institutions, to give away
what he does not want, to throw little pellets of bread at the monster
who is always famished and always roaring out of doors, lest it should
come in, and snatch the roast beef off his table. Some day a team of
black horses with nodding plumes, and a red-nosed driver, come to take
him away, ‘very much respected,’ and, forgive the personality, there
is an end of him, as far as _we_ are concerned. Will you tell me that
man’s life has not been a continual concession to self?—waste, waste,
utter waste, from the pap-boat that preserved his infancy, to the
brass-nailed coffin that protects his putridity from contact with the
earth to which he returns? Why his very virtues, as he called them,
were but payments, so to speak, keeping up the insurance for his own
benefit, which he persuaded himself he had effected on the other world.
“Now, supposing the pap-boat had been withheld, or the nurse had tucked
him into his cradle upside down, or—thus saving some harmless woman
a deal of inconvenience and trouble—supposing he had never been born
at all, would he have been missed, or wanted? Would not the world
have gone on just as well without him? Has not his whole existence
been a mistake? The food he ate, the clothes he wore, the house he
lived in—were not these simply wasted? His efforts were waste, his
wear-and-tear of body and mind were waste, above all, his sorrows and
his sufferings were sheer, unpardonable waste. Yes; here I take my
stand. I leave you every enjoyment to be found in creation, physical,
moral, and intellectual. I make you a present of the elephant wallowing
in his mud-bath, and the midge wheeling in the sun; I give you Juliet
at her window, and Archimedes in his study; but I reserve the whale
in her death-flurry, and the worm on its hook. I appeal to Jephthah
sorrowing for his darling, and Rachel weeping for her children. I
repeat, if that self-care, which indeed constitutes our very identity,
be the object of existence, then all those tearful eyes that blur the
light of every rising sun—all those aching hearts that long only for
night to be eternal—are but so many witnesses to the predominance in
creation of a lavish and unaccountable waste.”
Like many thoughtful and deliberate natures, I am persuaded that in
early life “Bones” must have been a snuff-taker. He affects a trick of
holding his fleshless finger and thumb pressed together and suspended
in air, before he delivers himself of an opinion, that can only have
originated in a practice he has since been compelled, for obvious
reasons, to forego. Pausing during several seconds in this favourite
attitude, he sank gravely back in his chair, and replied—
“False logic, my good friend. False premises, and a false conclusion.
I deny them all; but the weather, even in _my_ light attire, feels
somewhat too close for wordy warfare. Besides, I hold with you, that
an ounce of illustration is worth a pound of argument. I will ask you,
therefore, as I know you have been in Cheshire, High Leicestershire,
and other cattle-feeding countries, whether you ever watched a
dairymaid making a cheese? If so, you must have observed how strong
and pitiless a pressure is required to wring the moisture out of its
very core. My friend, the human heart is like a cheese! To be good for
anything, the black drop must be wrung out of it, however tight the
squeeze required, however exquisite the pain. Therefore it is, that we
so often see the parable of the poor man’s ewe lamb enacted in daily
life. One, having everything the world can bestow, is nevertheless
further endowed with that which his needy brother would give all the
rest of the world to possess. For the first, the pressure has not yet
been put on, though his time, too, may come by-and-by. For the second,
that one darling hope, it may be, represents the little black drop
left, and so it must be wrung out, though the heart be crushed into
agony in the process. You talk of suffering being pure waste; I tell
you it is all pure gain. You talk of self as the motive to exertion; I
tell you it is the abnegation of self which has wrought out all that
is noble, all that is good, all that is useful, nearly all that is
ornamental in the world. Shut the house-door on him, and the man must
needs go forth to work in the fields. It is not the dreamer wrapped in
his fancied bliss, from whom you are to expect heroic efforts, either
of mind or body. You must dig your goad into the ox to make him use
his latent strength; you must drive your spurs into the horse to get
out of him his utmost speed. Wake the dreamer roughly—drive spurs and
goad into his heart. He will wince and writhe, and roll and gnash his
teeth, but I defy him to lie still. He must up and be doing, from sheer
torture, flying to one remedy after another till he gets to work, and
so finds distraction, solace, presently comfort, and, after a while,
looking yet higher, hope, happiness, and reward.
“Self, indeed! He is fain to forget self, because that therewith
is bound up so much, it would drive him mad to remember; and thus
sorrow-taught, he merges his own identity in the community of which
he is but an atom, taking his first step, though at a humble and
immeasurable distance, in the sacred track of self-sacrifice, on which,
after more than eighteen hundred years, the footprints are still fresh,
still ineffaceable. Waste, forsooth! Let him weep his heart out if he
will! I tell you that the deeper the furrows are scored, the heavier
shall be the harvest, the richer the garnered grain. I tell you, not
a tear falls but it fertilises some barren spot, from which hereafter
shall come up the fresh verdure of an eternal spring in that region
‘Where there’s fruit in the gardens of heaven, from the hope that
on earth was betrayed;
Where there’s rest for the soul, life-wearied, that hath striven,
and suffered, and prayed.’
“I’m rather tired. I won’t discuss the question any further. I’ll go
back into my cupboard, if you please. Good-night!”
CHAPTER II
THROUGH THE MILL
Most people are ashamed of their skeletons, hiding them up in
their respective cupboards as though the very ownership were a
degradation—alluding to them, perhaps, occasionally in the domestic
circle, but ignoring them utterly before the world—a world that knows
all about them the while,—that has weighed their skulls, counted their
ribs, and can tell the very recesses in which they are kept. Now, in
my opinion, to take your skeleton out and air him on occasion, is very
good for both of you. It brings him to his proper dimensions, which are
apt to become gigantic if he is hidden too scrupulously in the dark,
and it affords opportunities for comparison with other specimens of
the same nature entertained by rival proprietors in the line. If I kept
mine, as some do, in close confinement, I should be in a continual
fidget about his safety; above all, I should dread his breaking out
at untoward seasons, when he was least expected, and least desired.
But “Bones and I” have no cause to be ashamed of each other. There is
no disgrace nor discomfort attached to either of us in our cheerful
companionship. He is good enough to express satisfaction with his
present lodging, and even affirms that he finds it airy and commodious,
as compared with his last; while it is a real pleasure to me, living
as I do so much alone, to have a quiet, intelligent companion, with
whom I can discuss the different phases of existence, speculative and
real,—the sower who never reaps—the fools who are full of bread, roses
for one, thorns for another; here over-ripe fruit, there grapes sour,
though by no means out of reach; successful bows drawn at a venture,
well-aimed shafts that never attain the mark, impossible hopes,
unavailing regrets—the baseless mirage of the Future, and the barren
reality of the Past.
It was colder last night. The wind was getting up in those fitful howls
which denote the commencement of a two-days’ gale; veering besides
from east by north to east northeast. So we made fast the shutters,
stirred the fire, and drew our chairs in for a comfortable chat.
Something in the sound of that waking blusterer out of doors recalled
to me, I know not why, the image of a good ship, many long years ago,
beating on the wide Atlantic against a head-wind, that seemed to baffle
her the more for every plunge she made. No steam had she to help her
struggle against the elements; tough hemp, patched canvas, and spars
as yet unsprung, were all her reliance; and these strained, flapped,
and creaked to some purpose while she battled foot by foot to lie her
course. Again I seemed to watch the dark wave race by our quarter,
with its leaping crest of foam, the trickling deck, the battened hold,
the diving bowsprit, the dripping spars, the soaking canvas, with
its row of reef-points like the notes on a music-score. And the grey,
sullen curtain of mist and rain, walking on the waters, nearer, nearer,
till it dashed its needle-pointed drops into my face. Again I looked
admiringly on the men at the wheel, with their pea-jackets, glazed
hats, sea-going mits, keen, wary glances, and minute wrinkles about
the eyes. Again I heard the pleasant voice of the bravest, cheeriest
skipper that ever stood five feet two, and weighed fifteen stone,
while he accosted me with his “Dirty weather, sir, and looks sulky to
windward still. Makes her drive piles, as we say, and speak Spanish
about the bows; but she behaves beautifully! Bless you, she likes it!
Yes, I expect we shall have it hotter and heavier too, after sundown. A
head-wind, no doubt. I’ve just been jotting off the reckoning; you’ll
find the chart below, in my cabin. We’ve made a longer leg than common
on the starboard tack. I’ve left a pencil-mark at the exact spot where
we went about. Steady, men” (this to the glazed hats). “Luff, and be
d——d to you! Can’t ye see it coming?”
So I went below and conned the captain’s chart thoughtfully enough,
comparing our great expenditure of energy with the small results
attained, and wondering how we were ever to make our port at last.
The scene thus conjured up awoke its corresponding fancies.
“Have you never reflected,” said I, “on the utter fallacy of that
French proverb which affirms, ‘Ce n’est que le premier pas qui coûte’?
Unless indeed it refers to immorality, the downward career of which
beats the rolling stone of Sisyphus in a canter. But on all other
journeys through life, it seems to me that not only the first steps,
but the first leagues, are intensely laborious and unsatisfactory.
Disappointment lies in wait at every milestone, and the traveller
feels tired already ere he has reached the crest of the first hill.
All crowns, I grant you, like those of the Isthmian Games, are mere
parsley at best; but in these days no competitor ever wins that
worthless head-dress till he is so bald that common decency demands
a covering. Where are the heaven-born statesmen now, to rule the
destinies of continents at twenty-six? the generals and admirals, who
became world-wide heroes within ten years of corporal punishment at
school? the poets full-fledged in immortality before their whiskers
were grown? Where, in short, will you point me out a single instance
of any individual attaining fame until his zest for it has passed
away—winning his pedestal till his poor legs are too tired to stand
straight thereon—making his fortune till he is too old to enjoy it; or,
indeed, getting anything he wants _when_ he wants it? Lazarus has no
dinner—Dives has no appetite—Struggler, who thinks he has both, is sure
to be kept waiting that extra half-hour, which sickens him, and finds
he can’t eat his soup when it comes!
“What up-hill work it is, that beginning of the pilgrimage. And how
confidently we start in the glorious ignorance of youth, heads erect,
backs straightened, footsteps springing like a deer, with an utter
disregard of warning, a sovereign contempt for advice. Like myself,
I doubt not you have scaled many a hill, even when you carried more
flesh than you do now. Don’t you remember, in the clear, pure mountain
air, how near the top looked from the valley down below? Don’t you
remember how, about noonday, still full of strength and spirit, though
having done a stalwart spell of work, you spied the ridge that you
were convinced must be your goal, and strained on, panting, heated,
labouring, yet exultant, because success was so nearly within your
grasp? A few more strides—hurrah! your chin is level with the ridge,
and lo! there is another precisely similar to be surmounted at about
the same angle and the same distance. Not yet discouraged, only a
little startled and annoyed; till another and another have been
gained, and so surprise becomes disappointment, vexation, misgiving,
discomfiture, and lastly, but to the strongest natures, despair! Even
with these, when the real summit has been at length attained, all
their long-looked-for enjoyment resolves itself into the negative
satisfaction of rest; and for one who thus arrives exhausted at his
destination, think how many a footsore, quivering, way-wearied wanderer
must lie out all night shelterless, on the barren, wind-swept hill.
“It seems that the process, termed at Newmarket ‘putting a race-horse
through the mill,’ is practised with the human subject till he has
learned the disheartening lesson that labour pushed to exhaustion
borders on pain—that heartbreaking efforts, while they lower the tone
of our whole system, are apt to destroy the very efficiency they are
intended to enhance. I have heard good judges affirm that even at
Newmarket they are apt to overtrain their horses. Do you not think that
we, too, should run the race of life on better terms were we not put so
pitilessly ‘through the mill’?”
Here my companion allowed himself a mild gesture of dissent, clasping
his bony fingers over his knotted knees, as if prepared to go into the
subject at length. “You are one of those people,” said he, “who seem
to think the world is intended for a place of uninterrupted rest and
enjoyment—a sort of ‘Fiddler’s Green,’ as sailors term their paradise,
where it is to be ‘beer and skittles’ every day and all day long. You
would have no ‘small end to the horn,’ as my friends over the water
say; and what sort of music do you think you could blow out of it? You
would have food without hunger, rest without labour, energy without
effort. You would be always going down-hill, instead of up. And think
where your journey would end at last! You object to the mill, you say,
and yet it is that same process of grinding which converts the grain
into flour fit for bread. Look at the untried man, the youth embarking
on his career, vain, ignorant, sanguine, over-confident, prejudiced.
How is he to learn his own powers, his capabilities of endurance, his
energy under difficulties, above all, his readiness of resource, save
by repeated disappointment and reverse? You have alluded to statesmen,
commanders, and poets, who, in seven-leagued boots, as it were,
reached the top of the hill at one stride. But Pitt’s was an abnormal
temperament—a grey head upon green shoulders—an old man’s heart beating
its regular pulsations within the slender compass of a young man’s
waistcoat. Nelson’s chivalrous and romantic disposition preserved
him from the overweening vanity and self-esteem that might have been
looked for as the result of such brilliant achievements at so early an
age. His mad, absorbing passion, too, may have scored many a furrow
in the hero’s heart, while his young brow remained smooth and fair as
marble. ‘On vieillit bientôt sur le champ de bataille!’ and the first
Napoleon’s aphorism holds good no surer on the field of honour than in
the lists of love. Shelley’s fate was scarcely an enviable one; and did
you like Byron any better after you had read his letters and learned
the demoralising effects, even on such genius as his, of temples
crowned by an immortal Fame, ere yet the beard had sprouted on his chin?
“Alexander of Macedon, indeed, conquered the world before he was
thirty, and—drank himself to death ere he had reached his prime!
“The fact that he does not care one straw about it, is the very
antidote to preserve a man from the subtle poison of success. He who
has been long climbing the ladder finds that when he looks over the
parapet all sense of elevation and consequent giddiness is gone.
Whatever others may think, to his own perceptions he is on a level with
the rest of his kind—can judge of them, and for them, from the same
point of view; and, more important still, experiences no misgivings
that he may topple down and break his neck. Ambition is a glorious
lure, no doubt, tempting the climber to noble efforts, skilful,
vigorous, and well-sustained. But when he has reached the fancied
resting-place so ardently desired, what does he find? A keener air,
a scantier foothold, a sentry-box instead of a feather-bed, a stern
necessity for further exertion, where he expected indulgence and
enjoyment and repose.
“Duty is a cold-eyed monitress, reserved, inflexible, severe; Ambition,
a high-born lady, haughty, capricious, unfeeling, like those dainty
dames of old patrician Rome,
‘Who in Corinthian mirrors their own proud smiles behold;
Who breathe of Capuan odours, and shine in Spanish gold;’
Pleasure, a laughing, lavish courtesan, gay, gaudy, thoughtless, slave
to the impression of the hour. This last you may buy at your will for
a handful of silver, or, at most, a talent of gold; and there are few,
alas! who have not learned how soon her false smile palls upon the
fancy, her painted cheek grows irksome to the eye. The second you must
woo, with many a stealthy footstep, many a cringing bow, offering
at her shrine truth, honour, self-respect, to find, if you are so
fortunate as not to be discarded like a pair of worn-out gloves, that
you have only gathered a nut without a kernel, after all. For the
first, you must serve as Jacob served, through long years of labour,
patience, and self-denial; but when you have won your Rachel at last,
she discloses for you all her glorious, unfading beauty, cleaving to
you, true and constant, through good and evil, the warmth and comfort
of your hearth, the light of your happy home.
“When the courtesan has been paid off and dismissed in early youth,
the haughty lady wooed through long years of manhood, and won, to be
despised, in middle life, this is the goddess you claim to be your
bride, and once wedded, you will never leave her till you die.
“The Isthmian crown was indeed woven from humble parsley, but do you
think it could have borne a higher value had every leaf consisted of
beaten gold? Which would you rather wear, the bronze Victoria Cross, or
the Star and Ribbon of the Garter? Depend upon it, that to the young
champion of the games, flushed, exulting, treading upon air, that
vegetable coronal represented everything most desirable and precious in
earth or heaven. No; it is the old experienced athlete, the winner of
a thousand prizes, who has learned the intrinsic value of the article,
and who knows that its worth consists not in itself, nor even in the
victory it represents, but in the strength of frame, the speed of foot
attained by training for its pursuit. From many a long summer’s day of
toil and abstinence, from panting lungs and aching muscles, from brows
covered with sweat, and feet with dust, he has wrested the endurance of
the camel, the strength of the ox, and the footfall of the deer. Does
he grudge his past labour? Not he, thankful that he has been ‘through
the mill.’
“I grant you the process is not entirely pleasant; I grant you that
effort is with many men a sensation of discomfort almost amounting to
pain; that self-denial is very difficult to most, disappointment simply
disgusting to all. When the body feels weary, the brain overtasked,
we are apt to think the meal is being bolted too fine, the grinding
becoming unnecessarily severe; above all, when that pitiless millstone
comes crushing down upon the heart, and pounds it to powder, we cry
aloud in our agony, and protest that no sorrow was ever so unbearable
as ours. What mole working underground is so blind as humanity to its
own good? Why, that same grinding to powder is the only means by which
the daintiest flour can be obtained. The finest nature, like the truest
steel, must be tempered in the hottest furnace; so much caloric would
be thrown away on an inferior metal. Capacity for suffering infers
also capacity for achievement; and who would grudge the pain about his
brows, when it reminded him he was wearing an imperial crown?
“Sooner or later the process must be undergone by all. With some it
goes on through a lifetime; others get the worst of it over in a few
years. One man may have done with it altogether before his strength of
mind or body has failed with declining age—
‘Dum nova canities—dum prima et recta senectus.’
“His neighbour may have one foot in the grave before the grain has
been thoroughly purged and sifted, and refined to its purest quality,
but through the mill he must pass. It is just as much a necessity of
humanity as hunger or thirst, or sorrow or decay. There is no escape.
However long protracted, it is inexorable, unavoidable, and effectual,
for
‘Though the mills of God grind slowly,
Yet they grind exceeding small.’”
CHAPTER III
GOURDS
So Jonah was exceeding glad of the Gourd. I can understand his feelings
perfectly. Does it not happen to most of us, at least once in a
lifetime, thus to be “exceeding glad of the Gourd,” and in ninety-nine
cases out of a hundred with the same result? “_Nil violentum est
perpetuum._” So surely as it comes up in a night, so surely must it
wither in a day. You have been in a hot climate? I don’t intend any
disagreeable allusion, I mean the tropics, I give you my honour! Do you
not remember the delight of getting out of your tent, or “booth” as we
still call them at our village merry-makings, to sit under anything
like a tree or shrub, where, shaded from the sun, you could catch the
welcome breath of every breeze that blew? The French officers in the
Crimea used to build for themselves trellised out-houses of branches
interlaced, swearing volubly the while, and appearing to derive from
these bowers no small comfort and refreshment. I can imagine the
astonishment of “_mon lieutenant_” when, on waking in his tent, he
should have discovered, like “Jack and the Beanstalk,” that one of
these had sprung up for him, unsolicited, in a night. How he would have
stared, and shrugged, and gesticulated, and cursed his star with less
asperity, and been “exceeding glad of the Gourd!”
They are of many kinds, these excrescences that grow up with such
marvellous celerity to afford us an intense and illusive delight; but
they all resemble their prototype at Nineveh, in so far that, ere the
seed has yet germinated, the worm is already prepared which shall smite
the gourd, and cause it to wither away. There were hundreds of them
shot to gigantic dimensions and exploded with the South Sea bubble of
the last century. Thousands owed their birth and disappearance to the
railway fever of five-and-twenty years ago. Not a few were called into
existence by a blockade of the Southern ports, during the late war of
opinion in the United States, and destroyed by its suspension at the
peace. It seems to be a law in the moral as in the physical world that
the endurance of things must be in proportion to the length of time
required to bring them to maturity. The oak is said to be three hundred
years in arriving at its prime, and that its vigour is still unimpaired
after a thousand changes of foliage we have ocular demonstration in
many parts of England; while the mustard-and-cress, which can be raised
in twenty minutes on a square of flannel dipped in hot water, wastes
and withers away in an hour.
The same in the animal creation. Like Minerva from the brain of Jove,
the butterfly springs into its sunny existence, winged, armed, and
clothed in gorgeous apparel, all at once; but when the night-breeze
shakes the perfume from your garden-flowers, and the evening bank
of clouds is coming up from the west, you look for that ephemeral
masterpiece in vain. Now the elephant only attains his majority, so
to speak, when between forty and fifty years of age; therefore he
has hardly become an “old rogue” at two hundred, and the identical
proboscis that saluted Clyde, or curled round the crushed remains
of Tippoo Sahib’s victims, is to-day lowered in honour of our own
_jeunesse dorée_, with whom a run through British India is considered
little more of an expedition than a jaunt into Welsh Wales.
Cornaro, if I remember right, fixes the normal duration of life, in
the Mammalia, at a term of five times the number of years required
to reach their prime. Thus a dog, he says, comes to maturity at two,
and lives till ten; a horse at five, and lives till five-and-twenty;
and, arguing by analogy, a man, who only attains his full strength at
twenty-three or four, should not, therefore, if he led a natural and
rational life, succumb till he had arrived at a hundred and fifteen or
twenty years.
Forbid it, Atropos! for their sakes as well as ours. Think of the old
fogies, now sufficiently numerous, who would overflow the clubs! Think,
when it came to our own turn, of the numbers of Gourds we should have
raised, outlived, buried, but, alas! not forgotten.
“A fine old man, sir!” said one of the best judges of human nature that
ever fathered a proverb. “There’s no such thing. If his head or his
heart had been worth anything, they would have worn him out years ago!”
“You have got off the subject as usual,” objected Bones, “and are
trenching on a topic of which you are far less qualified to speak than
myself. What do you know about the duration of life, the ceaseless
wear-and-tear, the gradual decay, the last flickers of the candle,
leaping up, time after time, with delusive strength, until it goes out
once for all? You can tell where Noah was, but do you know where the
candle went to when it left the great sea-captain in the dark? Not you!
Never mind, don’t fret, you will find out some day sure enough, and
be as wise as ‘Tullus, Ancus, good Eneas,’ and the rest of us! In the
meantime stick to your text. The morbid spirit possesses you, and well
I know it will only come out of the man with much talking. If it does
you any good, never mind _me_—fire away! Tell us something more about
the Gourd, and the worm that smote it. That is what you are driving at,
I feel sure.”
“‘Morbid!’” I repeated, somewhat indignantly. “And why _morbid_,
I should like to know? A man takes his stand, as you and I do,
outside of, and apart from, the circling, shifting mass of his
fellow-creatures, and makes his own observations, uninfluenced by
their clamour, their customs, their ridiculous prejudices and opinions,
confiding those observations unreservedly to one who should, _ex
officio_ indeed, be entirely free from the earthly trammels that
cumber liberal discussion in general society, and he is to be called
_morbid_, forsooth! It was only one of your ghastly jests, was it?
Enough! I am satisfied. There can be no bone of contention—I mean
no subject of dispute—between you and me—we have not the ghost of a
reason—I mean the shadow of a cause—for disagreement. I confess my
weakness: I own to a fatal tendency to digression. One thought leads
to another, and they follow in a string, like wild geese, or heirs of
entail, ‘_velut unda supervenit undam_.’ By the way, this very subject,
the association of ideas, opens up a boundless field for speculation.
But I refrain—I return to my Gourd—I am back in Nineveh with the
prophet once more. Nineveh, in its imperial splendour, gorgeous in
Eastern colouring, sublime with Eastern magnificence, glittering with
Eastern decorations—solemn, gloomy, and gigantic; grand in the massive
dignity of size, winged bulls hewn from the solid rock guard the long
perspective of a thousand avenues, leading to palaces that rise, tier
upon tier, into the glowing sky. Lavish profusion—marble, and bronze,
and gold—gleams and dazzles and flashes in the streets. The palm-tree
bends her graceful head earthward; the aloe aims her angry spikes at
heaven; the camel, with meek appealing eyes, seems to protest against
the bales of costly merchandise with which its back is piled; the white
elephant in scarlet trappings, stolid and sagacious, stands patient,
waiting for its lord; throngs of dusky, half-naked Asiatics pass to and
fro along the baking causeways; loud bleatings of sheep, lowings of
oxen, cries of parched, thirsty animals resound in the suburbs; while
over all a Southern sun blazes down with scorching fury, and an east
wind off the Desert comes blustering in, hot and stifling, like a
blast from hell.
“So the prophet is ‘exceeding glad of his Gourd.’ He will rest in its
shade; he will look pitifully on the broiling passers-by; he will hug
himself in that sense of comfort which human nature, alas! is too apt
to experience from the very fact that others are in a worse condition
than its own; but even while he thus rejoices, the worm has done its
work—the Gourd is withered up, the sirocco suffocates his lungs, the
sun beats on his head, and, like the rest of us when we lose that which
we choose to consider the one thing essential to our happiness, he
shows the white feather on the spot, and says, ‘It is better for me to
die than to live.’
“Death never seems to come for those who wish it—though perhaps if the
Great Liberator felt bound to appear every time he was invoked, the cry
might not be raised quite so often. Who is there that has not bowed his
head in misery, and wondered whether he could be so wretched anywhere
else as here, in the mocking sunlight, with his Gourd withered before
his face? It is gone—gone. See! There is the very spot on which it
stood but yesterday, so green, so fresh, so full of life, so rich in
promise! And to-day—a blank! It seems impossible! Ay, that is perhaps
the worst of the suffering—that numbed, stupefied state, which refuses
for a time to grasp the extent of its affliction—that perverse and
cowardly instinct which clings to a thread that it yet knows is wholly
severed—which turns even Hope to a curse, because it makes her a bar to
resignation. Few of us can boast more courage than Jonah when the Gourd
is fairly withered away.
“For one it has been riches, perhaps, comprising luxury, position,
variety—all the advantages that spring from an abundance of worldly
goods. Some fine morning, Fortune, ‘_ludem insolentem ludere
pertinax_,’ gives her wings a shake, spreads them, and flits away;
leaving in her place haggard Want, gaunt Ruin, bailiffs in the
drawing-room, furniture ticketed for sale up-stairs. The children’s
rocking-horse, the wife’s pianoforte, all the well-known trifles of
daily use and ornament, must be cast into the chasm, as the Romans
threw their effects into that awkward rent in the Forum. And the
master of the household is fortunate if he be not compelled, like
Curtius, to leap in after his goods. His friends are astonished, and
bless themselves. His relations had predicted the catastrophe long
ago. These, of course, turn their backs on him, incontinently, from
motives of self-respect, no doubt, but a few of the former, such as had
professed to love him least, lend a helping hand. Nevertheless, the
Gourd is withered, and the man, faint and sick unto death, only wishes
his hour was come and he might lie down to be at rest.
“Or it has been a child—God forbid it should have been an only one!
Some golden-headed darling that used to patter down-stairs with you
every morning to breakfast, and stand at your elbow every night after
dinner. Whose dancing eyes never met your own but with the merry,
saucy, confiding glances that seldom outlast a fifth birthday, and to
whom you could no more have said an unkind word than you could cut off
your right hand. Yesterday it was chasing butterflies across the lawn,
and you carried it yourself with laughing triumph, rosy, happy, and
hungry, in to tea. But the worm had begun its work, even then. This
morning you missed the glad little voice at breakfast, and, looking
at the jam on the table, a sad misgiving, stifled as soon as born,
shot through you like a knife. It was pitiful to watch all day, in the
nursery, by the little bed,—to see the golden head lying so listless,
the chubby hands so waxen and still, the heavy lids drooping so wearily
over the blue eyes that yet shone with a light you never saw in them
before. There rose a mist to dim your own when the patient little voice
asked gently, ‘Is that papa?’—and noticing two or three neglected
playthings on the counterpane, you walked to the window and wept.
“So the afternoon wore on, and the doctor came, and there was cruel
hope and torturing suspense, and a wrench that so stupefied you, it is
difficult to remember anything clearly afterwards, though you have a
dim perception of a pair of scissors severing some golden curls, while
nurse went down on her knees to pray.
“And at sundown you walk out into your garden along the very path that
brought you both home yesterday, but you walk like a man in a dream,
for ringing in your ears is the wail that was heard of old in Ramah,
and you know your darling is with the angels, wondering feebly why that
knowledge cannot console you more.
“Or perhaps your Gourd was ‘only a woman’s love!’—not a growth,
certainly, however exuberant, on which a wise man should place so much
dependence as on lignum vitæ, for instance, or heart-of-oak. But, so
far as I can see, either wise men do not fall in love, or they allow
wisdom to slip out of their grasp in the very act of making that
fatal stumble. So, in defiance of all theory, warning, and practical
experience, you may have congratulated yourself with insane vehemence
on the upspringing of this delicate exotic, and looked forward to
the passing of many happy hours under its shade. You shut your eyes
wilfully, of course, to the obvious fact that you never _are_ happy,
even when in full accomplishment of your wishes you stretch your lazy
length at the feet of your Gourd. There is sure to be an insect that
stings, or a sunbeam that dazzles, or a cold wind in the nape of your
neck. Nevertheless, the vegetable, so long as it exists, is not only
the delight of your heart, but the very sustenance of your brain. That
is the fatal part of the disease. Your Gourd connects itself with
everything you think, or do, or say, spreading her roots, as it were,
over every foot of land you possess, shutting out earth’s horizon with
her slender stem, and, worse than all, poking her dainty head between
you and heaven.
“Then, when she withers up—a disappointment which, to do her justice,
she is capable of inflicting in the loveliest weather and at the
shortest notice—you find to your dismay that, with her, all the fair
side of creation has withered too. There is no more freshness in the
meadows, no more promise in the smile of spring. The scent is gone from
the garden-flowers, the music from the song of birds. Summer’s vivid
glow has faded, and the russet of autumn is no longer edged with gold.
Hope’s rosy hues have ceased to tinge the morning, and the glory has
departed from noonday.
“Like Jonah, you ‘do well to be angry!’ and it is well for you if you
can be very angry indeed. That stimulant will do more to heal your
wound over than any other remedy I can think of, except the planting of
a fresh seedling to await another failure; but God help you if yours
is a nature less susceptible of wrath than of sorrow! If you are brave,
generous, forgiving, confiding, ‘Je vous en fais mon compliment!’ There
is no more to be said. Where your Gourd grew, nothing green will ever
spring up again! What say you, Bones? I think you and I are well out of
the whole thing!”
He waved his fleshless hand gently, with the gesture of one who puts
from him some dim and distant recollection.
“There is a bitter flavour,” said he, “about that remark which I should
hardly have expected, and which is by no means to my taste. You and
I can surely afford to look at these things from a comprehensive,
philosophical, and indulgent point of view. No more Gourds are likely
to grow for either of us; and although your style of figure is,
perhaps, less entitled to defy the worm than mine, yet I think you
have but little to fear from the kind which caused such an outbreak
of temper in the disgusted prophet. The whole story of the Gourd, I
need not point out to you, is a lesson. It was intended as a lesson
for Jonah, it is intended as a lesson for ourselves. Forgive me for
observing that you seem to have entirely lost the point of it, and, as
usual in our discussions, you have sacrificed argument to declamation.
It is weak, of course, to be too much delighted with the Gourd, it is
cowardly to be too much afraid of the worm, but——”
“There is one kind of worm I am horribly afraid of,” I interrupted, for
I admit I was a little nettled and out of temper.
“And that?” he asked, with the courtesy which distinguishes his manner
under all circumstances.
“Is the borer-worm!” I replied, brutally enough; and I am afraid he was
a little hurt, for he rose at once and went into his cupboard, while I
walked off moodily to bed.
CHAPTER IV
A VAMPIRE
Leaning idly against the chimney-piece the other night, contemplating
my companion in his usual attitude, my elbow happened to brush
off the slab a Turkish coin of small value and utterly illegible
inscription. How strangely things come back to one! I fancied myself
once more on the yellow wave of the broad Danube; once more threading
those interminable green hills that fringe its banks; once more
wondering whether the forest of Belgrade had been vouchsafed to
Eastern Europe as a type of Infinity, while its massive fortress,
with frowning rampart and lethargic Turkish sentries, was intended to
represent the combination of courage and sloth, of recklessness and
imperturbability, of apparent strength and real inefficiency, which
distinguishes most arrangements of the Ottoman Empire.
“Bakaloum” and “Bismillah!” “Take your chance!” and “Don’t care a d—n,”
seem to be the watchwords of this improvident Government. It lets the
ship steer herself; and she makes, I believe, as bad weather of it as
might be expected under such seamanship.
Engrossed far less, I admit, with political considerations than
with the picturesque appearance of a Servian population attending
their market, I rather startled my friend with the abruptness of the
following question:
“Do you believe there is such a thing as a Vampire?”
He rattled a little and almost rose to his feet, but re-seating
himself, only rejoined,
“Why do you ask?”
“I was thinking,” I replied, “of that romantic-looking peasantry I
used to see thronging the market-place of Belgrade. Of those tall,
handsome men, with the scowl never off their brows, their hands never
straying far from the bellyful of weapons they carried in their
shawls. Of those swarthy wild-eyed women, with their shrill, rapid
voices, their graceful, impatient gestures, carrying each of them the
available capital of herself and family strung in coins about her
raven hair, while on every tenth face at least, of both sexes, could
not fail to be observed the wan traces of that wasting disease which
seems to sap strength and vitality, gradually, and almost surely, as
consumption itself. Yes, I think for every score of peasants I could
have counted two of these ‘fever-faces,’ as the people themselves call
their ague-ridden companions, though I ascertained after a while,
when I came to know them better, that they attributed this decimation
of their numbers, and faded appearance of the victims, rather to
supernatural visitation than epidemic disease. They believe that in
certain cases, where life has been unusually irregular, or the rites
of religion reprehensibly neglected, the soul returns after death
to its original tenement, and the corpse becomes revivified under
certain ghastly conditions of a periodical return to the tomb and a
continual warfare against its kind. An intermittent existence is only
to be preserved at the expense of others, for the compact, while it
permits reanimation, withholds the blood, ‘which is the life thereof.’
The stream must therefore be drained from friends, neighbours, early
companions, nay, is most nourishing and efficacious when abstracted
from the veins of those heretofore best beloved. So the Vampire, as
this weird being is called, must steal from its grave in the dead
of night, to sit by some familiar bedside till the sleeper shall be
steeped in the unconsciousness of complete repose, and then puncturing
a minute orifice in the throat, will suck its fill till driven back
to its resting-place by the crimson streaks of day. Night after night
the visits must be repeated; and so, week by week, the victim pines
and droops and withers gradually away. There is no apparent illness,
no ostensible injury, but the frame dwindles, the muscles fall, the
limbs fail, the cheek fades, and the death-look, never to be mistaken,
comes into the great haggard, hollow, wistful eyes. I have repeatedly
asked the peasants whether they had ever met any of these supernatural
visitants, for they spoke of them so confidently, one might have
supposed the famished ghouls were flitting about the villages nightly;
but though presumptive evidence was forthcoming in volumes, I was
never fortunate enough to find an actual eye-witness. The sister of
one had been frightened by them repeatedly; the cousin of another
he had himself carried to her tomb, drained of her last life-drops
by a relative buried some weeks before; and the grandmother of a
third had not only met and talked with this inconvenient connection,
expostulating with it on its depraved appetites, and generally arguing
the point on moral as well as sanitary grounds, but had induced it by
her persuasions, and the power of a certain amulet she wore, to abstain
from persecuting a damsel in the neighbouring village for the same
ghastly purpose, or, at least, to put off its visits till the horrid
craving should be no longer endurable. Still I could meet nobody who
had actually seen one in person; and that is why I asked you just now
if you believed there was such a thing as a Vampire?”
He nodded gravely. “They are rare,” said he; “but I believe in such
beings, because I have not only seen one, but had the advantage of its
personal notice, and a very pretty, pleasing acquaintance it was! You
would like to know something more? Well, it compromises nobody. You
will not quote me, of course. Indeed I don’t see how you can, for I
still mention no real names. I don’t mind telling you the story of a
life, such as I knew it; a life that by some fatality seemed to drag
down every other that came within the sphere of its attractions to
sorrow, humiliation, and disgrace. I have no brain to swim, no pulses
to leap, no heart to ache left, and yet the memory stirs me painfully
even now.
“In early manhood,” he continued, bending down, as though to scan
his own fleshless proportions, with an air of consciousness that was
almost grotesque, “I paid as much heed to my personal appearance, and
flourished it about in public places as persistently as others of like
age and pursuits. Whether I should do so if I had my time to come
again, is a different question, but we will let that pass. Being then
young, tolerably good-looking, sufficiently conceited, and exceedingly
well-dressed, I had betaken myself one evening to your Italian Opera,
the best, and I may add the dearest, in Europe. I was fond of music and
knew something about it, but I was fonder still of pretty women, though
concerning these I enjoyed my full share of that ignorance which causes
men so to exaggerate their qualities both good and bad; an ignorance it
is worth while to preserve with as much care as in other matters we
take to acquire knowledge, for there is no denying, alas! that those
who know them best always seem to respect them least.
“I rose, therefore, from my stall at the first opportunity and turned
round to survey the house. Ere I had inspected a quarter of it, my
glasses were up, and I will tell you what they showed me—the most
perfect face I ever saw. Straight nose, thin and delicately cut,
large black eyes, regular eyebrows, faultless chin, terminating a
complete oval, the whole set in a frame of jet-black hair. Even my next
neighbour, who, from an observation he let fall to a friend, belonged
apparently to the Household Troops, could not refrain from ejaculating,
‘By Jove, she’s a ripper!’ the moment he caught sight of the object on
which my gaze was fixed.
“I saw something else too. I saw that the lady by her side was a
foreigner with whom I had long been acquainted; so edging my way into
the passages, in two minutes I was tapping at their box-door like a man
who felt pretty sure of being let in.
“The foreigner introduced me to her friend, and as the second act of
the opera was already in progress, told me to sit down and hold my
tongue. We were four in the box. Another gentleman was placed close
behind the lady who first attracted my attention. I had only eyes just
then, however, for the wild, unearthly beauty of my new acquaintance.
“I have seen hundreds of pretty women, and even in youth my heart, from
temperament, perhaps, rather than reflection, was as hard as my ribs;
but this face fascinated me—I can use no other word. My sensations were
so strangely compounded of admiration, horror, interest, curiosity,
attraction, and dislike. The eyes were deep and dark, yet with the
glitter in them of a hawk’s, the cheek deadly pale, the lips bright
red. She was different from anything I had ever seen, and yet so
wonderfully beautiful! I longed to hear her speak. Presently she
whispered a few words to the man behind her, and I felt my flesh creep.
Low as they were modulated, there was in every syllable a tone of such
utter hopelessness, such abiding sorrow, regret, even remorse, always
present, always kept down, that I could have imagined her one of those
lost spirits for whom is fixed the punishment of all most cruel, most
intolerable, that they can never forget they are formed for better
things. Her gestures, too, were in accordance with the sad, suggestive
music of her voice—quiet, graceful, and somewhat listless in the
repose, as it seemed, rather of unhappiness than of indolence. I tell
you I was not susceptible; I don’t think boys generally are. In love,
more than in any other extravagance, ‘there is no fool like an old one.’
“I was as little given to romance as a ladies’ doctor; and yet, sitting
in that box watching the turn of her beautiful head as she looked
towards the stage, I said to myself, ‘I’ll take good care she never
gets the upper hand of _me_. If a man once allowed himself to like
her at all, she is just the sort of woman who would blight his whole
life for him, and hunt the poor devil down to his grave!’ Somebody else
seemed to have no such misgivings, or to have arrived at a stage of
infatuation when all personal considerations had gone by the board. If
ever I saw a calf led to the slaughter it was Count V——, a calf, too,
whose throat few women could have cut without compunction. Handsome,
manly, rich, affectionate, and sincere, worshipping his deity with all
the reckless devotion, all the unscrupulous generosity of his brave
Hungarian heart, I saw his very lip quiver under its heavy moustache
when she turned her glittering eyes on him with some allusion called up
by the business of the stage, and the proud, manly face that had never
quailed before an enemy grew white in the intensity of its emotion.
What made me think of a stag I once found lying dead in a Styrian pass,
and a golden eagle feasting on him with her talons buried in his heart?
“The Gräfinn, to whom the box belonged, noticed my abstraction. ‘Don’t
fall in love with her,’ she whispered; ‘I can’t spare you just yet.
Isn’t she beautiful?’
“‘You introduced me,’ was my answer, ‘but you never told me her name.’
“‘How stupid!’ said the Gräfinn. ‘At present she is a Madame _de_ St.
Croix, an Englishwoman, nevertheless, and a widow, but not likely to
remain so long.’ And with a mischievous laugh she gave me her hand
as I left the box, bowing to Madame _de_ St. Croix and also to the
Hungarian, who in his happy pre-occupation was perfectly unconscious of
my politeness.
“I saw them again in the crush-room. The Gräfinn had picked up an
_attaché_ to some legation, who put her dutifully into her carriage.
The Hungarian was still completely engrossed with Madame _de_ St.
Croix. I have not yet forgotten the look on his handsome face when she
drove off with her friend. ‘He’s a fool,’ I said to myself; ‘and yet a
woman might well be proud to make a fool of such a man as that.’
“I left London in the middle of the season and thought no more of
Madame _de_ St. Croix. I had seen a pretty picture, I had heard a
strain of sweet music, I had turned over the page of an amusing
romance—there was an end of it.
“The following winter I happened to spend in Vienna. Of course I went
to one of the masked balls of _The Redouten-Saal_. I had not been ten
minutes in the room when my ears thrilled to the low, seductive accents
of that well-remembered voice. There she was again, masked, of course,
but it was impossible to mistake the slim, pliant figure, the graceful
gestures, the turn of the beautiful head, and the quiet energy that
betrayed itself, even in the small, gloved hand. She was talking to a
well-known Russian magnate less remarkable for purity of morals than
diplomatic celebrity, boundless extravagance, and devotion to the other
sex. To be on terms of common friendship with such a man was at least
compromising to any lady under sixty years of age; and it is needless
to say that his society was courted and appreciated accordingly.
“Madame _de_ St. Croix seemed well satisfied with her neighbour; and
though in her outward manner the least demonstrative of women, I could
detect through her mask the same cruel glitter in her dark eyes that
had so fascinated me, six months before, in the Gräfinn’s opera-box.
The Russian talked volubly, and she leaned towards him, as those do
who are willing to hear more. _Château qui parle_ furls its banner,
_femme qui écoute_ droops her head. Directly opposite, looking very
tall and fierce as he reared himself against the doorway, stood Count
V——. The Hungarian was pale as death. On his face, so worn and haggard,
so cruelly altered since I saw it last, was set the stamp of physical
pain, and he gnawed the corner of his brown moustache with that tension
of the muscles about the mouth which denotes a paroxysm bravely kept
down. As friends accosted him in passing, he bowed his head kindly and
courteously while his whole face softened, but it was sad to see how
soon the gleam passed away and the cloud came back, darker and heavier
than before. The man’s heart, you see, was generous, kindly, and full
of trust—such a heart as women like Madame _de_ St. Croix find it an
interesting amusement to break.
“I think he must have made her some kind of appeal; for later in the
evening I observed them together, and he was talking earnestly in
German, with a low pleading murmur, to which I thought few women could
have listened unmoved. She answered in French; and I was sorry for
him when she broke up the colloquy with a little scornful shrug of
her shoulders, observing in a hard, unfeeling tone not like her usual
voice, ‘Que voulez-vous? Enfin, c’est plus fort que moi!’
“The Russian put her into her sledge, for there was a foot of snow in
the streets, and Count V—— walked home through it, with a smile on his
face and his head up, looking strangely elated, I thought, for a man,
the last strand of whose moorings had lately parted and left him adrift.
“I had not then learned there is no temporary stimulant so powerful as
despair, no tonic so reviving as a _parti pris_.
“Next day, lounging into the _Chancellerie_ of the Embassy for my usual
gossip, I found little Hughes, an unpaid _attaché_ (who earned, indeed,
just as much as he received), holding forth with considerable spirit
and energy.
“‘Curse him!’ said this indomitable young Briton. ‘If it had been
swords, I should like to have fought him myself. I hate him! I tell
you. Everybody hates him. And V—— was the best chap between here
and Orsova. He was almost like an Englishman. Wouldn’t he just have
polished him off if they’d had swords. That old muff, Bergheimer of
the Cuirassiers, ought to be hanged. Do you think, if _I’d_ been his
second, I’d have put him up with pistols against the best shot in
Europe?—and at the barrier too! It’s not like at home, you know. I
never knew such a mull as they made of it amongst them. This cursed
Calmuck gets the pull all through, and poor V——, who had lost his
fortune already, loses his lady-love and his life. What a rum world it
is!’
“Here the orator rolled and lit a cigarette, thus affording me a moment
to inquire into the cause of his indignation. I then learned that, in
consequence of a trifling dispute after last night’s ball, a duel had
been fought at daybreak, in the snow, between Count V—— and a Russian
nobleman, in which the former was shot through the heart.
“‘Never got _one_ in at all!’ said Hughes, again waxing eloquent on
his friend’s wrongs. ‘I’ve seen both the seconds since. They were
to walk up to a handkerchief, and the Russian potted him at forty
yards the first step he made. They may say what they like about the
row originating in politics—I know better. They quarrelled because
Madame _de_ St. Croix had left V—— and taken up with this snub-nosed
Tartar. First, she ruined my poor friend. I know all about it. He
hadn’t a rap left; for if she’d asked him for the shirt off his back,
he’d have stripped like beans! Then she broke his heart—the cheeriest,
jolliest, kindest fellow in Europe—to finish up by leaving him for
another man, who kills him before breakfast without a scruple; and if
the devil don’t get hold of _her_ some fine day, why he’s a disgrace to
his appointment, that’s all! and they ought to make him Secretary of
Legation here, or pension him off somewhere and put him out of the way!
Have another cigarette!’
“Ten years afterwards I was sitting in the gardens of the Tuileries,
one fine morning towards the middle of May, wondering, as English
people always do wonder, on a variety of subjects—why the cigars were
so bad in Paris, and the air so exhilarating—why the tender green
leaves quivering over those deep alleys should have a sunshine of
their own besides that which they reflected from above—why the _bonnes_
and nursery-maids wore clean caps every day—why the railings always
looked as if they had been re-gilt the same morning, and why the sentry
at the gate should think it part of his duty to leer at every woman who
passed, like a satyr?
“Indeed I believe I was almost asleep, when I started in my chair,
and rubbed my eyes to make sure it was not a dream. There, within ten
paces of me, sat Madame _de_ St. Croix, if I was still to call her so,
apparently not an hour older than the first time we met. The face was
even paler, the lips redder, the cruel eyes deeper and darker, but in
that flickering light the woman looked more beautiful than ever. She
was listening quietly and indolently, as of old, to a gentleman who
sat with his back to me, telling his own story, whatever it might be,
in a low, earnest, impressive voice. I raised my hat when I caught her
eye, and she bowed in return politely enough, but obviously without
recognition. The movement caused her companion to turn round, and in
two strides he was by my chair, grasping me cordially by the hand.
He was an old and intimate friend, a colonel in the French army, by
whose side I had experienced more than one strange adventure, both in
Eastern Europe and Asia-Minor—a man who had served with distinction,
of middle age, a widower, fond of society, field-sports, speculation,
and travelling; essentially _bon camarade_, but thoroughly French in
his reflections and opinions. The last man in the world, I should
have thought, to be made a fool of by a woman. Well, there he was,
her bounden slave! Absurdly happy if she smiled, miserable when she
frowned, ready to fetch and carry like a poodle, perfectly childish
about her, and utterly contemptible. If she had really cared for
him, the temptation must have been irresistible, and she would have
bullied him frightfully. But no, there was always the same repose of
manner, the same careless kindness, the same melancholy, the same
consciousness of an unquestionable superiority. One of his reasons, he
soon confided to me, for being so fond of her was, that they never had
an angry word! For a week or two I saw a good deal of them. Paris was
already empty, and we did our plays, our Opéra Comique, and our little
dinners pleasantly enough. She was always the same, and I found myself,
day by day, becoming more conscious of that nameless charm about her,
which I should despair of being able to describe. Yet as often as I met
the glance of those deep, dark, unearthly eyes, a shudder crept over
me, such as chills you when you come face to face with a ghost in your
dreams. The colonel, I have said, was devoted to her. He was rarely
absent from her side, but if by chance alone with me, would talk of her
by the hour.
“He had found, he declared, fortunately before he was too old to
appreciate it, the one inestimable treasure the earth contained. He had
cherished his fancies, committed his follies, of course, _tout comme
un autre_, but he had never experienced anything like this. It was his
haven, his anchorage, his resting-place, and he might glide down into
old age, and on to death, perfectly happy, because confident, that with
_her_ heart and _her_ force of character, she would never change. He
could not be jealous of her. Oh no! She was so frank, so confiding,
so sincere. She, too, _passé par là_, had told him so; unlike other
women, had confessed to him not only her last, but her many former
attachments. He knew all about poor V——, who was shot in a duel, and
the Russian general, banished to Siberia. How fortunate she had broken
with him before his disgrace, because, in the loyalty of her nature,
she would surely have followed him into exile, although she never cared
for him in her heart, never! No, nor for any of the others; never had
been fairly touched till now. Him, the colonel, she really _did_ love.
He had proved his devotion so thoroughly (I found out afterwards,
though not from him, that my friend had been fool enough to sacrifice
both fortune and profession for her sake), he was so reliable, she
said, so kind, and so _good_. In short, he was perfectly happy, and
could see no cloud in his horizon, look which way he would.
“When I left Paris they accompanied me to the railway station; and the
last I saw of them was their two heads very close over a railway guide,
projecting a trip into a lonely part of Switzerland, where they would
have no society but their own.
“Six months afterwards ‘Galignani’ informed me that my friend the
colonel had been reinstated in the French army and appointed to a
regiment of Chasseurs d’Afrique then serving in Algeria, where, before
the Tuileries Gardens were again green, I learned from the same source
he had already solved the great problem in an affair of outposts with
the Khabyles. Long years elapsed, and there were streaks of grey in my
hair and whiskers ere I saw Madame _de_ St. Croix again. I had heard
of her, indeed, at intervals both in London and Paris. I am bound
to say her name was always coupled with those who were distinguished
by birth, talent, or success. She was very choice, I believe, in the
selection of her victims, despising equally an easy conquest and one
of which the ravages could be readily repaired. The women hated her,
the men said she was charming. For my part I kept out of her way: we
were destined to meet, nevertheless. I had embarked in a Peninsular and
Oriental steamer at Marseilles very much indisposed, and retiring at
once to my berth never quitted it till we were entering the Straits of
Buoni-faccio. Here I came on deck, weak, exhausted, but convalescent,
drinking in the sunshine and the scenery with that thirst for the
beautiful which becomes so fierce after the confinement of recent
illness. I literally revelled in the Mediterranean air, and basked in
the warmth of those bright colours so peculiar to the shores of that
summer sea. I was approaching middle age; I had ventured body and mind
freely enough in the great conflict; and yet, I thank heaven, had
hitherto been spared the crushing sorrow that makes a mockery of the
noblest and purest enjoyments of earth, causing a man to turn from all
that is fairest in sight and sense and sound with the sickness of a
dead hope curdling at his heart. But then I had kept clear of Madame
_de_ St. Croix.
“When my eyes were at last sated with the gaudy hues of the coast and
the golden glitter of the water, I was a little surprised to see that
lady sitting within three paces of me reading a yellow-bound French
novel. Great heaven! what was the woman’s secret? She looked younger
than ever! Even in the searching glare of a southern noon not a line
could be detected on the pure, pale forehead, not a crease about the
large, wistful, glittering eyes. That she was gifted with perennial
youth I could see for myself; that she was dangerous even to the
peace of a grey-haired man, I might have found out to my cost had
our voyage been retarded by contrary winds or any such unavoidable
delay, for she was good enough to recognise me on this occasion, and
to give me a large share of her conversation and companionship. Thus
it was I learned to own the spell under which so many had succumbed,
to appreciate its power, not to understand, far less describe, its
nature. Fortunately for me, ere its work could be completed, we arrived
at Athens, and at Athens lay a trim, rakish-looking English yacht,
with her ensign flying and her foretopsail loosed, waiting only the
steamer’s arrival to spread her wings and bear off this seductive
sorceress to some garden of paradise in the Egean Sea.
“The owner of the yacht I had often heard of. He was a man remarkable
for his enterprise and unfailing success in commerce as for his
liberality, and indeed extravagance, in expenditure. He chose to have
houses, pictures, horses, plate, everything of the best, was justly
popular in society, and enormously rich.
“I never asked and never knew the port to which that yacht was
bound. When we steamed out of the harbour she was already hull-down
in the wake of a crimson sunset that seemed to stain the waters with
a broad track of blood; but I saw her sold within eighteen months at
Southampton, for her late owner’s name had appeared in the ‘Gazette,’
and the man himself, I was told, might be found, looking very old and
careworn, setting cabbages at Hanwell, watching eagerly for the arrival
of a lady who never came.
“You may believe I thought more than once of the woman whose strange
destiny it had been thus to enslave generation after generation of
fools, and to love whom seemed as fatal as to be a priest of Aricia
or a favourite of Catharine II. Nevertheless, while time wore on,
I gradually ceased to think of her beauty, her heartlessness, her
mysterious youth, or her magic influence over mankind. Presently,
amongst a thousand engrossing occupations and interests, I forgot her
as if she had never been.
“I have driven a good many vehicles in my time, drags, phaetons,
dogcarts, down to a basket-carriage drawn by a piebald pony with a
hog-mane. Nay, I once steered a hansom cab up Bond Street in the early
morning, freighted with more subalterns than I should like to specify
of her Majesty’s Household Troops, but I never thought I should come to
a bath chair!
“Nevertheless I found myself at last an inside passenger of one of
these locomotive couches, enjoying the quiet and the air of the
gardens at Hampton Court in complete and uninterrupted solitude. The
man who dragged me to this pleasant spot having gone to ‘get his
dinner,’ as he called it, and the nursery-maids, with their interesting
charges, having retired from their morning, and not yet emerged for
their afternoon stroll, I lay back, and thought of so many things—of
the strength and manhood that had departed from me for ever; of the
strange, dull calm that comes on with the evening of life, and contents
us so well we would not have its morning back if we could; of the
_gradual clairvoyance_ that shows us everything in its true colours
and at its real value; of the days, and months, and years so cruelly
wasted, but that their pleasures, their excitements, their sins, their
sorrows, and their sufferings, were indispensable for the great lesson
which teaches us _to see_. Of these things I thought, and through them
still, as at all times, moved the pale presence of an unforgotten face,
passing like a spirit, dim and distant, yet dear as ever, across the
gulf of years—a presence that, for good or evil, was to haunt me to the
end.
“Something in the association of ideas reminded me of Madame _de_ St.
Croix, and I said to myself, ‘At last age must have overtaken that
marvellous beauty, and time brought the indomitable spirit to remorse,
repentance, perhaps even amendment. What can have made me think of her
in a quiet, peaceful scene like this?’
“Just then a lady and gentleman crossed the gravel walk in front of
me, and took their places on a seat under an old tree not a dozen yards
off. It was a lovely day in early autumn; the flowers were still ablaze
with the gaudiest of their summer beauty, the sky was all dappled grey
and gold, earth had put on the richest dress she wears throughout the
year; but here and there a leaf fell noiseless on the sward, as if
to testify that she too must shed all her glories in due season, and
yield, like other beauties, her unwilling tribute to decay.
“But there was nothing of autumn in the pair who now sat opposite my
couch, chatting, laughing, flirting, apparently either ignoring or
disregarding my proximity. The man was in all the bloom and beauty of
youth; the woman, though looking a few years older, did not yet seem
to have attained her prime. I could scarcely believe my eyes! Yes,
if ever I beheld Madame _de_ St. Croix, there she sat with her fatal
gaze turned on this infatuated boy, leading him gradually, steadily,
surely, to the edge of that chasm into which those who plunged came
to the surface nevermore. It was the old story over again. How well
I remembered, even after such an interval, the tender droop of the
head, the veiling eyelashes, the glance so quickly averted, yet, like
a snapshot, telling with such deadly effect; the mournful smile, the
gentle whisper, the quiet confiding gesture of the slender hand,
all the by-play of the most accomplished and most unscrupulous of
actresses. There was no more chance of escape for her companion than
for a fisherman of the North Sea, whose skiff has been sucked into the
Maëlstrohm, with mast unshipped and oars adrift half a mile astern.
By sight, if not personally, I then knew most of the notabilities of
the day. The boy, for such I might well call him in comparison with
myself, seemed too good for his fate, and yet I saw well enough it
was inevitable. He had already made himself a name as a poet of no
mean pretensions, and held besides the character of a high-spirited,
agreeable, and unaffected member of society. Add to this, that he was
manly, good-looking, and well-born; nothing more seemed wanting to
render him a fit victim for the altar at which he was to be offered up.
Like his predecessors, he was fascinated. The snake held him in her
eye. The poor bird’s wings were fluttering, its volition was gone, its
doom sealed. Could nothing save it from the destroyer? I longed to have
back, if only for a day, the powers which I had regretted so little
half-an-hour ago. Weak, helpless, weary, and worn-out, I yet determined
to make an effort, and save him if I could.
“They rose to go, but found the gate locked through which they had
intended to pass. She had a way of affecting a pretty wilfulness in
trifles, and sent him to fetch the key. Prompt to obey her lightest
wish, he bounded off in search of it, and following slowly, she passed
within two paces of my chair, bending on its helpless invalid a look
that seemed to express far less pity for his condition than a grudging
envy of his lot. I stopped her with a gesture that in one more
able-bodied would have been a bow, and, strange to say, she recognised
me at once. There was not a moment to lose. I took courage from a
certain wistful look that gave softness to her eyes, and I spoke out.
“‘We shall never meet again,’ I said; ‘we have crossed each other’s
paths at such long intervals, and on such strange occasions, but I know
this is the last of them! Why time stands still for _you_ is a secret
I cannot fathom, but the end must come some day, put it off however
long you will. Do you not think that when you become as I am, a weary
mortal, stumbling with half-shut eyes on the edge of an open grave, it
would be well to have one good deed on which you could look back, to
have reprieved one out of the many victims on whom you have inflicted
mortal punishment for the offence of loving you so much better than you
deserve? Far as it stretches behind you, every footstep in your track
is marked with sorrow—more than one with blood. Show mercy now, as you
may have to ask it hereafter. Life is all before this one, and it seems
cruel thus to blast the sapling from its very roots. He is hopeful,
trustful, and fresh-hearted—spare him and let him go.’
“She was fitting the glove on her faultless little hand. Her brow
seemed so calm, so soft and pure, that for a moment I thought I had
conquered, but looking up from her feminine employment, I recognised
the hungry glitter in those dark, merciless eyes, and I knew there was
no hope.
“‘It is too late,’ she answered, ‘too late to persuade either him or
me. It is no fault of mine. It is fate. For him—for the others—for all
of us. Sometimes I wish it had not been so. Mine has been an unhappy
life, and there seems to be no end, no resting-place. I can no more
help myself than a drowning wretch, swept down by a torrent; but I am
too proud to catch at the twigs and straws that would break off in my
hand. I would change places with you willingly. Yes—you in that bath
chair. I am so tired sometimes, and yet I dare not wish it was all
over. Think of me as forbearingly as you can, for we shall not cross
each other’s path again.’
“‘And this boy?’ I asked, striving to detect something of compunction
in the pitiless face that was yet so beautiful.
“‘He must take his chance with the rest,’ she said. ‘Here he
comes—good-bye.’
“They walked away arm-in-arm through the golden autumn weather, and a
chill came into my very heart, for I knew what that chance was worth.
“A few months, and the snow lay six inches deep over the grave of him
whose opening manhood had been so full of promise, so rich in all that
makes youth brightest, life most worth having; while a woman in deep
mourning was praying there, under the wintry sky; but this woman was
his mother, and her heart was broken for the love she bore her boy.
“His death had been very shocking, very sudden. People talked of a
ruptured blood-vessel, a fall on his bedroom floor, a doctor not
to be found when sent for; a series of fatalities that precluded
the possibility of saving him; but those who pretended to know best
affirmed that not all the doctors in Europe could have done any good,
for when his servant went to call him in the morning he found his
master lying stark and stiff, having been dead some hours. There was
a pool of blood on his carpet; there were ashes of burnt letters in
his fireplace; more, they whispered with meaning shrugs and solemn,
awe-struck faces—
‘There was that across his throat
Which you had hardly cared to see.’
“You can understand now that I believe in Vampires.”
“What became of her?” I asked, rather eagerly, for I was interested
in this Madame _de_ St. Croix. I like a woman who goes into extremes,
either for good or evil. Great recklessness, equally with great
sensibility, has its charm for such a temperament as mine. I can
understand, though I cannot explain, the influence possessed by very
wicked women who never scruple to risk their own happiness as readily
as their neighbours’. I wanted to know something more about Madame
_de_ St. Croix, but he was not listening; he paid no attention to my
question. In a tone of abstraction that denoted his thoughts were many
miles away, he only murmured,
“Insatiate—impenetrable—pitiless. The others were bad enough in all
conscience, but I think she might have spared the boy!”
CHAPTER V
GOLD FOR SILVER
“The African Magician never minded all their scoffs and holloaings,
or all they could say to him, but still cry’d _Who’ll change old
Lamps for new ones?_ which he repeated so often about the Princess
_Badroulbondour’s_ Palace, that that Princess, who was then in the
Hall with the four-and-twenty Windows, hearing a Man cry something,
and not being able to distinguish his Words, by reason of the
holloaing of the Mob about him, sent one of her Women Slaves down to
know what he cry’d.
“The Slave was not long before she return’d, and ran into the Hall,
laughing so heartily, that the Princess could not forbear herself.
‘Well, Gigler,’ said the Princess, ‘will you tell me what you laugh
at?’ ‘Alas! Madam,’ answered the Slave, laughing still, ‘who can
forbear laughing to see a Fool with a Basket on his Arm, full of fine
new Lamps, ask to change them for old ones, which makes the Children
and Mob make such a Noise about him?’”
What a fool they thought him, and no wonder. Yet surely a magician need
not come all the way from Africa to teach the public this strange rate
of exchange. In Europe, Asia, and America too, as far as it has yet
been colonised, such one-sided bargains are made every day.
Old lamps for new, kicks for halfpence—“Heads I win, Tails you
lose”—such are the laws of equity by which man deals with his
neighbour; and so the contest goes on, if, indeed, as Juvenal says,
that can be called a contest—
“Ubi tu pulsas, ego vapulo tantum.”[1]
The slave of the princess with the long name had passed more of her
life in the palace than the streets, or she would not have found the
magician’s cry so strange: would have felt uncomfortably conscious
that the day might come when she, too, would barter new lamps for old,
perhaps humbly on her knees, entreating permission to make the unequal
exchange. In all the relations of life, but chiefly in those with
which the affections are concerned, we constantly see gold for silver
offered with both hands.
That “it is better to give than to receive” we have Scriptural warrant
for asserting. That—
“Sure the pleasure is as great
In being cheated as to cheat,”
we learn from Butler’s quaint and philosophical couplets. I am not
going to assert that the man who puts down sovereigns and takes up
shillings has really the worst of it; I only maintain that the more
freely he “parts” with the former, the more sparing will he find the
latter doled out to him in return.
Perhaps the strongest case in point is that of parent and child.
In the animal world I know few arrangements of Nature more beautiful
than the absolute devotion of maternity to its offspring, so long,
though _only_ so long, as its assistance is required. A bird feeding
her young, a tigress licking her cubs, a mare wheeling round her
foal—each of these affords an example of loving care and tenderness,
essentially feminine in its utter forgetfulness of self. Each of
these squanders such gold as it possesses, the treasure of its deep
instinctive affection, on ingratitude and neglect. The nestlings
gape with hungry little beaks, when they hear the flap of wings, not
to greet the coming provider, but that they may eat and be filled.
The cubs huddle themselves up to their mother’s side for warmth and
comfort, not for her cruel beauty nor her fierce protecting love. The
foal, when it gets on its long legs, will follow your horse or mine as
readily as its dam. They take all, to give back nothing in exchange.
And no sooner can the bird use its wings, the beast its limbs, than it
abandons at once and for ever the parent whose sustaining care is no
longer necessary to its existence.
With the human race, although I am far from affirming that, even in
this age of bronze, filial piety has fled with other virtues from
the earth, something of the same unequal barter holds good in the
relationship of parent and child. The former gives gold, the latter
does not always return silver. Do not deceive yourself. You love
your children more than your children love you. I can prove it in
three words. They are dearer to you than your own parents. And this
inequality of affection is but one more of the beautiful arrangements
made by that Providence which bestows good so liberally in proportion
to evil. Under the common law of Nature, you are likely to die first,
and the aggregate amount of suffering is, therefore, much less than
it would be did the course of domestic affection flow the other way.
So you toil, and slave, and scheme for the child’s benefit, forgiving
its errors, repairing its follies, re-establishing its fortunes, just
as, long ago, you used to rebuild with loving patience those houses
of cards the urchin blew down with such delight. But, as of all human
affections, this, if not the strongest, is certainly the deepest and
most abiding, so when wounded does it inflict on our moral being the
sharpest and most enduring pain. “Is there any cause in Nature that
makes these hard hearts?” says poor King Lear, forced, against his own
instincts, to acknowledge the venomed bite of that “serpent’s tooth”
with which elsewhere he compares a “thankless child.” I have known
men, and women too, accept with courage every sample of misfortune and
disgrace—in the language of the prize-ring, “come up smiling” after
every kind of knock-down blow—but I cannot remember an instance in
which the ingratitude of children has not produced wrinkles and grey
hairs, in the proportion of ten to one, for every other sorrow of any
description whatever.
There is no prospect of alleviation to amuse his fancy—no leavening of
pique to arouse his pride. Hurt to the death, the sufferer has scarce
manhood enough left to conceal his wounds.
In that conflict between man and woman which is perpetually going on,
and without which the world, if more comfortable, would undoubtedly
be less populous, gold is invariably given for silver with a lavish
extravagance, akin to the absurdity of the whole thing.
Why is love like the handle of a teapot?—Because it is all on one
side. The game has yet to be invented in which both players can win;
and perhaps were it not for the discomfort, anxiety, worry, sorrow,
and suffering entailed by the unequal pastime, it would cease to be
so popular. As it exists at present, there is nothing to complain
of on the score of flagging interest. At first, indeed, before the
cards are cut, the adversaries sit down calmly and pleasantly enough.
An hour hangs heavy on their hands, and they think thus to drive it
agreeably away—beginning simply for “distraction,” as the French call
it, though ending in the English acceptation of that uncomfortable
word. Ere the first tricks are turned, however, the game grows
exciting. “I propose.” “How many?” “Hearts are trumps.” “I mark the
king.” The stakes increase rapidly in value, and presently gold comes
pouring lavishly out of one player’s pocket, against silver dribbling
unwillingly from the other’s. The winner, too, like all gamblers,
seldom cares to keep the fruit of his good fortune, but loses it again
at another table to some stronger adversary, who is beggared in turn
elsewhere.
Yet still in all places, and under all circumstances, wherever this
game is played there is the same inequality in the stakes. “Gold for
silver.” Such are the terms; and the old players, to do them justice,
those who have lost and won many a heavy wager, are generally careful
to begin at least by venturing the commoner metal. But even of these
the discretion is not to be trusted as the game goes on. Touched by the
magic rod, maddened by the spell against which Wisdom is often less
proof than Folly, the sternest and the sagest will throw their gold
about as recklessly as if every piece were not stamped with the impress
of their honour and their happiness, precious as the very drops of
life-blood at their heart.
Perhaps it is wiser to stick to any other pursuit in the world
than the one in question; but if you must needs sit down to this
“beggar-my-neighbour” kind of amusement, is it better to lose or to
win? to give or accept the gold for silver passing so freely from hand
to hand? Will you have the satisfaction hereafter of standing on the
higher ground? of feeling you have nothing to reproach yourself with,
nothing to be ashamed of? or will you take comfort in reflecting that
while the storm raged above your head you had been careful to shelter
cunningly from the blast? Will you exult in your forethought, your
philosophy, the accurate knowledge of human nature, that has preserved
you scatheless through the combat? or will you take pride in your
generosity, your magnanimity, and the self-devoted courage that bids
you accept the stab of ingratitude in addition to the pain of neglect?
It depends entirely on character and temperament.
Men and women vary so much in this, as in every other phase of
feeling. The latter, when they do take the more generous view of their
position—when they can bring themselves to choose “the better part,”
accept it, I think, with a more complete abandonment of _pique_ than
the former. Perhaps their pride is of a nobler order: no doubt their
vanity is less egotistical than our own. With us, except in the highest
natures—and these, as has been well remarked, have ever a leavening of
the feminine element in their organisation—there is always something of
irritation left after a wound of the affections has healed up—something
that stints and rankles, and looks to reprisals of one kind or
another for relief. I have read an old tale of chivalry so thoroughly
exemplifying this state of feeling, and affording so natural an example
of the changes and counterchanges with which gold and silver are
staked against each other in the dangerous game, that I cannot forbear
quoting it here.
“A certain knight had long loved a damsel at the court of the King of
France; but she, albeit accepting the service of none other, treated
him with such coldness and _duresse_, that he at length obtained the
title of the ‘Patient Knight,’ and she of the ‘Scornful Ladye.’ In vain
he sat at her feet in hall; in vain wore her colours in the lists; in
vain added to his cognisance the motto ‘_Sans espérance_,’ above the
representation of a dungeon-grate, to signify the hopelessness of his
captivity. She looked upon him coldly as the winter moon looks on a
frozen lake; she turned from him pitilessly as the bending poplar turns
from the south wind, whispering its longing and its sorrows, wooing her
even with its tears.
“So minstrels sang in their lays of his constancy, and knights
marvelled at his subjection, and ladies pitied—it may be despised him
also a little for his long-suffering: but still the ‘Patient Knight’
struck hard and shouted high for the renown of her he loved; and
still the ‘Scornful Ladye’ accepted his homage, and took credit for
his deeds-of-arms with scant courtesy, and cruel neglect, and high
imperious disdain.
“So the King bade his knights and nobles to a feast; and because there
was to be a solemn passage-of-arms held on the morrow, he entertained
them with a fight of wild beasts in the Carrousel, whereon lords and
ladies looked down in safety from the galleries above. But many a soft
cheek grew pale none the less, when a lion and a tiger were let loose
to battle for their lives.
“Now even while they glared on each other ere they closed, the
‘Scornful Ladye’ dropped her glove between the beasts of prey. Quoth
she, with a mocking smile, ‘An I had a bachelor here who loved me well,
he would fetch me back this glove that the wind hath blown from my
hand.’
“Then the ‘Patient Knight’ made no more ado, but drew his good sword
and leapt lightly down into the Carrousel, where he picked the glove
from the earth, and returning scatheless to his place, laid it in
silence at her feet.
“Then the ‘Scornful Ladye’ wept sweet and happy tears; for his great
love had conquered at last, and she would follow him meekly now to the
end of the world.
“But she shed bitter tears on the morrow, when he rode into the lists
with another’s sleeve in his helmet, another’s colours on his housings,
and his shield blazoned with the fresh device of a broken fetter and
the motto, ‘_Tout lasse—tout casse—tout passe!_’”
So, you see, these adversaries changed places at last; and you will
probably be of opinion that the Knight had the best of it in the end.
Perhaps it “served her right.” And yet to me it seems that there may
come a time when to have given gold for silver in every relation of
life shall be the one consoling reflection that enables us to quit it
without misgivings for the future, without regret for the past,—a time
perhaps of hushed voices, stealthy footsteps, and a darkened room,
growing yet strangely darker with every breath we draw. Or a time of
eager comrades, trampling squadrons, short sharp words of command, a
bugle sounding the Advance, a cocked-hat glancing through the smoke; a
numb sick helplessness that glues the cheek into the dust where it has
fallen, and a roll of musketry, feebler, farther, fainter, and more
confused, till its warlike echoes die out in the hush of another world.
Or a time of earth-stained garments, and bespattered friends proffering
silver hunting-flasks in sheer dismay, and a favourite horse brought
back with flying stirrups, dangling rein, and its mane full of mud,
while the dull grey sky wheels above, and the dank, tufted grass heaves
below, nor in the intervals of a pain, becoming every moment less
keen, can we stifle the helpless consciousness that before our crushed
frame shall be lifted from its wet, slippery resting-place, it will be
time to die.
At such moments as these, I say, to have given gold for silver while we
could, can surely be no matter of regret.
I recollect a quaint old tombstone—I beg your pardon for the
allusion—on which I once read the following inscription:—
“What I spent I _had_—what I saved I _lost_—what I gave I _have_.”
Surely this sentiment will bear analysing. “What I spent I _had_.”
I enjoyed it, wasted it, got rid of it: derive from it now as much
enjoyment as can ever be extracted from past pleasures of which
self-indulgence was the motive—that is to say, none at all! “What I
saved I _lost_.” Undoubtedly. Mortgages, Consols, building-leases,
railway scrip—it was locked up in securities that I could by no
means bring with me here. It has been an error of judgment, a bad
speculation, a foolish venture, a dead loss. “But what I gave I
_have_.” Ah! There I did good business: took the turn of the market;
invested my capital in a bank that pays me cent. per cent. even
now; and this, not only for the dross we call money, but for the
real treasures of the heart—affection, kindliness, charity, help to
the needy, sympathy with the sorrowful, protection to the weak, and
encouragement to the forlorn. The silver I had in return has been left
long ago on earth: perhaps there was barely enough to make a plate for
my coffin; but the gold I gave is in my own possession still, and has
been beaten into a crown for me in heaven.
Yes. “It is better to give than to receive.” With few exceptions the
great benefactors of mankind have been in this world defrauded of their
wages. Columbus died perhaps the poorest man in the whole kingdom he
had spent his lifetime to enrich. Socrates sold the treasures of his
intellect—the deductions of the greatest mind in antiquity—for a
draught of hemlock on a prison floor. The fable of Prometheus has been
enacted over and over again. Those who scale the heavens that they may
bring down fire to enlighten and comfort their fellow-men, must not
hope to escape the vulture and the rock. I have always thought that
wondrous story the deepest and the most suggestive in the whole heathen
mythology. Its hero was the first discoverer, the first free-thinker,
the first reformer. He was even proof against the seductions of woman,
and detected in Pandora’s box the multiplicity of evils that secured
the presence of Hope within its compass, and prevented her flying
back to the heaven whence she came. The only Olympian deity he would
condescend to worship was the Goddess of Wisdom; and she it was who
taught her votary to outwit Jupiter, the great principle of what may
be termed physical nature. By science man baffles the elements, or
renders them subservient to his purpose. He was a herbalist, a doctor,
a meteorologist, and universal referee for gods and men. He taught the
latter all the arts necessary to extort a livelihood from the earth;
showed them how to yoke their oxen and bridle their steeds. He was
wise, laborious, provident, and paternal—the first philosopher, the
great benefactor of his time, and—his reward was to lie in chains on
Mount Ætna with a vulture sheathing her beak in his heart.
Can we not see in this heathen parable some glimmering of the Great
Hope which was never entirely obscured to the ancient world?—some faint
foresight of, some vague longing after, the great Example which has
since taught its holy lesson of self-abnegation and self-sacrifice? It
is not for me to enlarge on a topic so sacred and so sublime. Enough
for us and such as we are, if by lavishing gold for silver freely on
our brother, we can cast but one humble mite into the treasury of our
God.
There is much talk in the world about ingratitude. People who do good
to others at cost or inconvenience to themselves are apt to expect a
great flow of thanks, a great gush of sentiment in return. They are
generally disappointed. Those natures which feel benefits the most
deeply are often the least capable of expressing their feelings, and a
speechless tongue is with them the result of a full heart. Besides, you
are sure to be repaid for a good action at some time or another. Like
seed sown in the Nile, “the bread cast upon the waters,” it may not
come back to you for many days, but come back at last it most certainly
_will_. Would you like your change in silver or in gold? Will you have
it in a few graceful, well-chosen expressions, or in the sterling coin
of silent love with its daily thoughts and nightly prayers; or, better
still even than these, will you waive your claim to it down here, and
have it carried to your account above? I am supposing yours is not
one of those natures which have arrived at the highest, the noblest
type of benevolence, and give their gold neither for silver nor for
copper, but freely without return at all. To these I can offer no
encouragement, no advice. Their grapes are ripened, their harvest is
yellow, the light is already shining on them from the golden hills of
heaven.
CHAPTER VI
A DAY THAT IS DEAD
I have been burning old letters to-night; their ashes are fluttering
in the chimney even now; and, alas! while they consume, fleeting and
perishable like the moments they record, “each dying ember” seems
to have “wrought its ghost” upon my heart. Oh! that we could either
completely remember or completely forget. Oh! that the image of
Mnemosyne would remain close enough for us to detect the flaws in her
imperishable marble, or that she would remove herself so far as to be
altogether out of sight. It is the golden haze of “middle distance”
that sheds on her this warm and tender light. She is all the more
attractive that we see her through a double veil of retrospection and
regret, none the less lovely because her beauty is dimmed and softened
in a mist of tears.
Letter after letter they have flared, and blackened, and shrivelled up.
There is an end of them—they are gone. Not a line of those different
handwritings shall I ever see again. The bold, familiar scrawl of the
tried friend and more than brother; why does he come back to me so
vividly to-night? The stout heart, the strong arm, the brave, kind
face, the frank and manly voice. We shall never tread the stubble nor
the heather side by side again; never more pull her up against the
stream, nor float idly down in the hot summer noons to catch the light
air off the water on our heated faces; to discourse, like David and
Jonathan, of all and everything nearest our hearts. Old friend! old
friend! wherever you are, if you have consciousness you must surely
sometimes think of _me_; I have not forgotten _you_. I cannot believe
you have forgotten me even _there_.
And the pains-taking, up-and-down-hill characters of the little
child—the little child for whom the angels came so soon, yet found
it ready to depart, whose fever-wasted lips formed none but words of
confidence and affection, whose blue eyes turned their last dim, dying
looks so fondly on the face it loved.
And there were letters harder to part with than these. Never mind, they
are burnt and done with; letters of which even the superscription once
made a kind heart leap with pleasure so intense it was almost pain;
letters crossed and re-crossed in delicate, orderly lines, bearing
the well-known cipher, breathing the well-known perfume, telling the
old, false tale in the old, false phrases, so trite and worn-out, yet
seeming always so fresh and new.
The hand that formed them has other tasks to occupy it now; the
heart from which they came is mute and cold. Hope withers, love
dies—times are altered. What would you have? It is a world of change.
Nevertheless this has been a disheartening job; it has put me in low
spirits; I must call “Bones” out of his cupboard to come and sit with
me.
“What is this charm,” I ask him, “that seems to belong so exclusively
to the past?—this ‘tender grace of a day that is dead’? and must
I look after it down the gulf into which it has dropped with such
irrepressible longing only because it will never come back to me?
Is a man the greater or wiser that he lived a hundred years ago or
a thousand? Are reputations, like wine, the mellower and the more
precious for mere age, even though they have been hid away in a cellar
all the time? Is a thing actually fairer and better because I have
almost forgotten how it looked when present, and shall never set eyes
on it again? I entertain the greatest aversion to Horace’s _laudator
temporis acti_, shall always set my face against the superstition that
‘there were giants in those days’; and yet wherever I went in the world
previous to my retirement here that I might live with you, I found the
strange maxim predominate, that everything was very much better before
it had been improved!
“If I entered a club and expressed my intention of going to the Opera,
for instance, whatever small spark of enthusiasm I could kindle was
submitted to a wet blanket on the spot. ‘Good heavens!’ would exclaim
some venerable philosopher of the Cynic and Epicurean schools, ‘there
_is_ no opera now, nor _ballet_ neither. My good sir, the thing is
done; it’s over. We haven’t an artist left. Ah! you should have seen
Taglioni dance; you should have heard Grisi sing; you should have lived
when Plancus was consul. In short, you should be as old as I am, and as
disgusted, and as gouty, and as disagreeable!’
“Or I walked into the smoking-room of that same resort, full of some
athletic gathering at Holland Park, some ’Varsity hurdle-race, some
trial of strength or skill amongst those lively boys, the subalterns of
the Household Brigade; and ere I could articulate ‘brandy and soda’ I
had Captain Barclay thrown body and bones in my face. ‘Walk, sir! You
talk of walking?’ (I didn’t, for there had been barely time to get a
word in edgeways, or my parable would have exhausted itself concerning
a running high leap.) ‘But there is nothing like a real pedestrian
left; they don’t breed ’em, sir, in these days: can’t grow them, and
don’t know how to train them if they could! Show me a fellow who would
make a match with Barclay to-day. Barclay, sir, if he were alive, would
walk all your best men down after he came in from shooting. Ask your
young friends which of ’em would like to drive the mail from London to
Edinburgh without a greatcoat! I don’t know what’s come to the present
generation. It must be the smoking, or the light claret, perhaps.
They’re done, they’re used up, they’re washed out. Why, they go to
covert by railway, and have their grouse driven to them on a hill! What
would old Sir Tatton or Osbaldeston say to such doings as these? I was
at Newmarket, I tell you, when the Squire rode his famous match—two
hundred miles in less than nine hours! I saw him get off old Tranby,
and I give you my honour the man looked fresher than the horse! Don’t
tell me. He was rubbed down by a couple of prize-fighters (there were
real bruisers in those days, and the best man used to win), dressed,
and came to dinner just as _you_ would after a five-mile walk. Pocket
Hercules, you call him—one in a thousand? There were hundreds of such
men in my day. Why, I recollect in Tom Smith’s time that I myself——’
“But at this point I used to make my escape, because there are two
subjects on which nobody is so brilliant as not to be prolix, so
dull as not to be enthusiastic—his doings in the saddle and his
adventures with the fair. To honour either of these triumphs he blows a
trumpet-note loud and long in proportion to the antiquity of the annals
it records. Why must you never again become possessed of such a hunter
as Tally-Ho? Did that abnormal animal really carry you as well as you
think, neither failing when the ground was deep nor wavering when the
fences were strong? Is it strictly true that no day was ever too long
for him? that he was always in the same field with the hounds? And
have not the rails he rose at, the ditches he covered so gallantly,
increased annually in height and depth and general impossibility ever
since that fatal morning when he broke his back, under the Coplow in a
two-foot drain?
“You can’t find such horses now? Perhaps you do not give them so
liberal a chance of proving their courage, speed, and endurance.
“On the other topic it is natural enough, I dare say, for you to ‘yarn’
with all the more freedom that there is no one left to contradict.
People used enormous coloured silk handkerchiefs in that remote period,
when you threw yours with such Oriental complacency, and the odalisques
who picked it up are probably to-day so old and stiff they could not
bend their backs to save their lives. But were they really as fond,
and fair, and faithful as they seem to you now? Had they no caprices
to chill, no whims to worry, no rivals on hand, to drive you mad? Like
the sea, those eyes that look so deep and blue at a distance, are green
and turbid and full of specks when you come quite close. Was it all
sunshine with Mary, all roses with Margaret, all summer with Jane? What
figures the modern women make of themselves, you say. How they offend
your eye, those bare cheek-bones, those clinging skirts, those hateful
_chignons_! Ah! the cheeks no longer hang out a danger-signal when you
approach; the skirts are no more lifted, ever such a little, to make
room for you in the corner of the sofa next the fire; and though you
might have had locks of hair enough once to have woven a parti-coloured
_chignon_ of your own, it would be hopeless now to beg as much as would
make a finger-ring for Queen Mab. What is it, I say, that causes us
to look with such deluded eyes on the past? Is it sorrow or malice,
disappointment or regret? Are our teeth still on edge with the sour
grapes we have eaten or forborne? Do we glower through the jaundiced
eyes of malevolence, or is our sight failing with the shades of a
coming night?”
Bones seldom delivers himself of his opinion in a hurry. “I think,”
he says very deliberately, “that this, like many other absurdities of
human nature, originates in that desire for the unattainable which is,
after all, the mainspring of effort, improvement, and approach towards
perfection. Man longs for the impossible, and what is so impossible as
the past? That which hath vanished becomes therefore valuable, that
which is hidden attractive, that which is distant desirable. There is
a strange lay still existing by an old Provençal troubadour, no small
favourite with iron-handed, lion-hearted King Richard, of which the
refrain, ‘_so far away_,’ expresses very touchingly the longing for the
absent, perhaps only _because_ absent, that is so painful, so human,
and so unwise. The whole story is wild and absurd to a degree, yet
not without a saddened interest, owing to the mournful refrain quoted
above. It is thus told in the notes to Warton’s _History of English
Poetry_:—
“‘Jeffrey Rudell, a famous troubadour of Provence, who is also
celebrated by Petrarch, had heard from the adventurers in the Crusades
the beauty of a Countess of Tripoli highly extolled. He became
enamoured from imagination, embarked for Tripoli, fell sick on the
voyage through the fever of expectation, and was brought on shore at
Tripoli, half-expiring. The countess, having received the news of the
arrival of this gallant stranger, hastened to the shore and took him by
the hand. He opened his eyes, and at once overpowered by his disease
and her kindness, had just time to say inarticulately that _having
seen her he died satisfied_. The countess made him a most splendid
funeral, and erected to his memory a tomb of porphyry inscribed with
an epitaph in Arabian verse. She commanded his sonnets to be richly
copied and illuminated with letters of gold, was seized with a profound
melancholy, and turned nun. I will endeavour to translate one of the
sonnets he made on his voyage, “Yret et dolent m’en partray,” etc. It
has some pathos and sentiment. “I should depart pensive but for this
love of mine _so far away_, for I know not what difficulties I may
have to encounter, my native land being _so far away_. Thou who hast
made all things and who formed this love of mine _so far away_, give
me strength of body, and then I may hope to see this love of mine _so
far away_. Surely my love must be founded on true merit, as I love one
_so far away_. If I am easy for a moment, yet I feel a thousand pains
for her who is _so far away_. No other love ever touched my heart than
this for her _so far away_. A fairer than she never touched any heart,
either so near or _so far away_.’”
“It is utter nonsense, I grant you, and the doings of this love-sick
idiot seem to have been in character with his stanzas, yet is there a
mournful pathos about that wailing _so far away_ which, well-worded,
well-set, and well-performed, would make the success of a drawing-room
song.
“If the Countess of Tripoli, who seems also to have owned a susceptible
temperament, had been his cousin and lived next door, he would probably
not have admired her the least, would certainly never have wooed her
in such wild and pathetic verse; but he gave her credit for all the
charms that constituted his own ideal of perfection, and sickened even
to death for the possession of his distant treasure, simply and solely
because it was _so far away_!
“What people all really love is a dream. The stronger the imagination
the more vivid the phantom that fills it; but on the other hand, the
waking is more sudden and more complete. If I were a woman instead
of a—a—specimen, I should beware how I set my heart upon a man of
imagination, a quality which the world is apt to call genius, with
as much good sense as there would be in confounding the sparks from a
blacksmith’s anvil with the blacksmith himself. Such a man takes the
first doll that flatters him, dresses her out in the fabrications of
his own fancy, falls down and worships, gets bored, and gets up, pulls
the tinsel off as quick as he put it on; being his own he thinks he may
do what he likes with it, and finds any other doll looks just as well
in the same light and decked with the same trappings. Narcissus is not
the only person who has fallen in love with the reflection, or what he
believed to be the reflection, of himself. Some get off with a ducking,
some are drowned in sad earnest for their pains.
“Nevertheless, as the French philosopher says, ‘There is nothing so
real as illusion.’ The day that is dead has for men a more actual,
a more tangible, a more vivid identity than the day that exists,
nay, than the day as yet unborn. One of the most characteristic and
inconvenient delusions of humanity is its incapacity for enjoyment
of the present. Life is a journey in which people are either looking
forward or looking back. Nobody has the wisdom to sit down for
half-an-hour in the shade listening to the birds overhead, examining
the flowers underfoot. It is always ‘How pleasant it was yesterday!
What fun we shall have to-morrow!’ Never ‘How happy we are to-day!’ And
yet what _is_ the past, when we think of it, but a dream vanished into
darkness—the future but an uncertain glimmer that may never brighten
into dawn?
“It is strange how much stronger in old age than in youth is the
tendency to live in the hereafter. Not the real hereafter of another
world, but the delusive hereafter of this. Tell a lad of eighteen that
he must wait a year or two for anything he desires very eagerly, and
he becomes utterly despondent of attaining his wish; but an old man of
seventy is perfectly ready to make arrangements or submit to sacrifices
for his personal benefit to be rewarded in ten years’ time or so, when
he persuades himself he will still be quite capable of enjoying life.
The people who purchase annuities, who plant trees, who breed horses
for their own riding are all past middle age. Perhaps they have seen
so many things brought about by waiting, more particularly when the
deferred hope had caused the sick heart’s desire to pass away, that
they have resolved for them also must be ‘a good time coming,’ if only
they will have patience and ‘wait a little longer.’ Perhaps they look
forward because they cannot bear to look back. Perhaps in such vague
anticipations they try to delude their own consciousness, and fancy
that by ignoring and refusing to see it they can escape the inevitable
change. After all, this is the healthiest and most invigorating
practice of the two. Something of courage seems wanting in man or beast
when either is continually looking back. To the philosopher ‘a day that
is dead’ has no value but for the lesson it affords; to the rest of
mankind it is inestimably precious for the unaccountable reason that
it can never come again.”
“Be it so,” I answered; “let me vote in the majority. I think with the
fools, I honestly confess, but I have also a theory of my own on this
subject, which I am quite prepared to hear ridiculed and despised. My
supposition is that ideas, feelings, delusions, name them how you will,
recur in cycles, although events and tangible bodies, such as we term
realities, must pass away. I cannot remember in my life any experience
that could properly be called a new sensation. When in a position of
which I had certainly no former knowledge I have always felt a vague,
dreamy consciousness that something of the same kind must have happened
to me before. Can it be that my soul has existed previously, long ere
it came to tenant this body that it is so soon about to quit? Can it be
that its immortality stretches both ways, as into the future so into
the past? May I not hope that in the infinity so fitly represented by
a circle, the past may become the future as the future most certainly
must become the past, and the day that is dead, to which I now look
back so mournfully, may rise again newer, fresher, brighter than ever
in the land of the morning beyond that narrow paltry gutter which we
call the grave?” I waited anxiously for his answer. There are some
things we would give anything to know, things on which certainty would
so completely alter all our ideas, our arrangements, our hopes, and our
regrets. Ignorant of the coast to which we are bound, its distance,
its climate, and its necessities, how can we tell what to pack up and
what to leave behind? To be sure, regarding things material, we are
spared all trouble of selection; but there is yet room for much anxiety
concerning the outfit of the soul. For the space of a minute he seemed
to ponder, and when he did speak, all he said was this—
“I know, but I must not tell,” preserving thereafter an inflexible
silence till it was time to go to bed.
CHAPTER VII
THE FOUR-LEAVED SHAMROCK
We are all looking for it; shall we ever find it? Can it be cultivated
in hothouses by Scotch head-gardeners with high wages and Doric accent?
or shall we come upon it accidentally, peeping through green bulrushes,
lurking in tangled woodlands, or perched high on the mountain’s crest,
far above the region of grouse and heather, where the ptarmigan folds
her wings amongst the silt and shingle in the clefts of the bare grey
rock? We climb for it, we dive for it, we creep for it on our belly,
like the serpent, eating dust to any amount in the process; but do we
ever succeed in plucking such a specimen as, according to our natures,
we can joyfully place in our hats for ostentation or hide under our
waistcoats for true love?
Do you remember Sir Walter Scott’s humorous poem called the “Search
after Happiness”? Do you remember how that Eastern monarch who strove
to appropriate the shirt of a contented man visited every nation
in turn till he came to Ireland, the native soil indeed of all the
shamrock tribe; how his myrmidons incontinently assaulted one of the
“bhoys” whose mirthful demeanour raised their highest hopes, and how
“Shelelagh, their plans was well-nigh after baulking,
Much less provocation will set it a-walking;
But the odds that foiled Hercules foiled Paddywhack.
They floored him, they seized him, they stripped him, alack!
Up, bubboo! _He hadn’t a shirt to his back!_”
Mankind has been hunting the four-leaved shamrock from the very
earliest times on record. I believe half the legends of mythology, half
the exploits of history, half the discoveries of science, originate in
the universal search. Jason was looking for it with his Argonauts when
he stumbled on the Golden Fleece; Columbus sailed after it in the track
of the setting sun, scanning that bare horizon of an endless ocean,
day after day, with sinking heart yet never-failing courage, till the
land-weeds drifting round his prow, the land-birds perching on his
spars, brought him their joyous welcome from the undiscovered shore;
Alexander traversed Asia in his desire for it; Cæsar dashed through the
Rubicon in its pursuit; Napoleon well-nigh grasped it after Austerlitz,
but the frosts and fires of Moscow shrivelled it into nothing ere his
hand could close upon the prize. To find it, sages have ransacked their
libraries, adepts exhausted their alembics, misers hoarded up their
gold. It is not twined with the poet’s bay-leaves, nor is it concealed
in the madman’s hellebore. People have been for it to the Great Desert,
the Blue Mountains, the Chinese capital, the interior of Africa, and
returned empty-handed as they went. It abhors courts, camps, and
cities; it strikes no root in palace nor in castle; and if more likely
to turn up in a cottage-garden, who has yet discovered the humble plot
of ground on which it grows?
Nevertheless, undeterred by warning, example, and the experience of
repeated failures, human nature relaxes nothing of its persevering
quest. I have seen a dog persist in chasing swallows as they skimmed
along the lawn; but then the dog had once caught a wounded bird, and
was therefore acting on an assured and tried experience of its own.
If you or I had ever found one four-leaved shamrock, we should be
justified in cherishing a vague hope that we might some day light upon
another.
The Knights of the Round Table beheld with their own eyes that vision
of the Holy Vessel, descending in their midst, which scattered those
steel-clad heroes in all directions on the adventure of the Sangreal;
but perhaps the very vows of chivalry they had registered, the very
exploits they performed, originated with that restless longing they
could not but acknowledge in common with all mankind for possession of
the four-leaved shamrock.
“And better he loved, that monarch bold,
On venturous quest to ride
In mail and plate, by wood and wold,
Than with ermine trapped and cloth of gold
In princely bower to bide.
The bursting crash of a foeman’s spear
As it shivered against his mail,
Was merrier music to his ear
Than courtier’s whispered tale.
And the clash of Caliburn more dear,
When on hostile casque it rung,
Than all the lays to their monarch’s praise
The harpers of Reged sung.
He loved better to bide by wood and river,
Than in bower of his dame Queen Guenevere;
For he left that lady, so lovely of cheer,
To follow adventures of danger and fear,
And little the frank-hearted monarch did wot
That she smiled in his absence on brave Launcelot.”
Oh! those lilting stanzas of Sir Walter’s, how merrily they ring on
one’s ear, like the clash of steel, the jingling of bridles, or the
measured cadence of a good steed’s stride! We can fancy ourselves
spurring through the _mêlée_ after the “selfless stainless” king, or
galloping with him down the grassy glades of Lyonesse on one of his
adventurous quests for danger, honour, renown—and—the four-leaved
shamrock.
Obviously it did not grow in the tilt-yards at Caerleon or the palace
gardens of Camelot; nay, he had failed to find it in the posy lovely
Guenevere wore on her bosom. Alas! that even Launcelot, the flower of
chivalry, the brave, the courteous, the gentle, the sorrowing and the
sinful, must have sought for it there in vain.
Everybody begins life with a four-leaved shamrock in view, an ideal
of his own, that he follows up with considerable wrong-headedness
to the end. Such fiction has a great deal to answer for in the way
of disappointment, dissatisfaction, and disgust. Many natures find
themselves completely soured and deteriorated before middle age, and
why? Because, forsooth, they have been through the garden with no
better luck than their neighbours. I started in business, we will
say, with good connections, sufficient capital, and an ardent desire
to make a fortune. Must I be a saddened, morose, world-wearied man
because, missing that unaccountable rise in muletwist, and taking the
subsequent fall in grey shirtings too late, I have only realised a
competency, while Bullion, who didn’t want it, made at least twenty
thou.? Or I wooed Fortune as a soldier, fond of the profession,
careless of climate, prodigal of my person, ramming my head wherever
there was a chance of having it knocked off, “sticking to it like a
leech, sir; never missing a day’s duty, by Jove! while other fellows
were getting on the staff, shooting up the country, or going home on
sick leave.” So I remain nothing but an overworked field-officer,
grim and grey, with an enlarged liver, and more red in my nose than
my cheeks, while Dawdle is a major-general commanding in a healthy
district, followed about by two aides-de-camp, enjoying a lucrative
appointment with a fair chance of military distinction. Shall I
therefore devote to the lowest pit of Acheron the Horse Guards, the
War Office, H.R.H. the Commander-in-Chief, and the service of Her
Majesty the Queen? How many briefless barristers must you multiply to
obtain a Lord Chancellor, or even a Chief Baron? How many curates go
to a bishop? How many village practitioners to a fashionable doctor in
a London-built brougham? Success in every line, while it waits, to a
certain extent, on perseverance and capacity, partakes thus much in the
nature of a lottery, that for one prize there must be an incalculable
number of blanks.
I will not go so far as to say that you should abstain from the liberal
professions of arts or arms, that you should refrain from taking your
ticket in the lottery, or in any way rest idly in mid-stream, glad to
“Loose the sail, shift the oar, let her float down,
Fleeting and gliding by tower and town;”
but I ask you to remember that the marshal’s baton can only be in one
conscript’s knapsack out of half a million; that wigs and mitres,
and fees every five minutes, fall only to one in ten thousand; that
although everybody has an equal chance in the lottery, that chance
may be described as but half a degree better than the cipher which
represents zero.
There is an aphorism in everybody’s mouth about the man who goes to
look for a straight stick in the wood. Hollies, elms, oaks, ashes, and
alders he inspects, sapling after sapling, in vain. This one has a
twist at the handle, that bends a little towards the point; some are
too thick for pliancy, some too thin for strength. Several would do
very well but for the abundant variety that affords a chance of finding
something better. Presently he emerges at the farther fence, having
traversed the covert from end to end, but his hands are still empty,
and he shakes his head, thinking he may have been over-fastidious in
his choice. A straight stick is no easier to find than would be a
four-leaved shamrock.
The man who goes to buy a town house or rent a place in the country
experiences the same difficulty. Up-stairs and down-stairs he travels,
inspecting kitchen-ranges, sinks and sculleries, attics, bedrooms,
boudoirs, and housemaids’ closets, till his legs ache, his brain swims,
and his temper entirely gives way. In London, if the situation is
perfect, there is sure to be no servants’ hall, or the accommodation
below-stairs leaves nothing to be desired, but he cannot undertake to
reside so far from his club. These difficulties overcome, he discovers
the butler’s pantry is so dark no servant of that fastidious order
will consent to stay with him a week. In the country, if the place is
pretty the neighbourhood may be objectionable: the rent is perhaps
delightfully moderate, but he must keep up the grounds and pay the
wages of four gardeners. Suitable in every other respect, he cannot
get the shooting; or if no such drawbacks are to be alleged, there
is surely a railway through the park, and no station within five
miles. Plenty of shamrocks grow, you see, of the trefoil order, green,
graceful, and perfectly symmetrical. It is that fourth leaf he looks
for, which creates all his difficulties.
The same with the gentleman in search of a horse, the same with
Cœlebs in search of a wife. If the former cannot be persuaded to put
up with some little drawback of action, beauty, or temper, he will
never know that most delightful of all partnerships, the sympathy
existing between a good horseman and his steed. If the latter expects
to find a perfection really exist, which he thinks he has discovered
while dazzled by the glamour surrounding a man in love, he deserves
to be disappointed, and he generally is. Rare, rare indeed are the
four-leaved shamrocks in either sex; thrice happy those whom Fate
permits to win and wear them even for a day!
What is it we expect to find? In this matter of marriage more than
in any other our anticipations are so exorbitant that we cannot be
surprised if our “come-down” is disheartening in proportion.
“Where is the maiden of mortal strain
That may match with the Baron of Triermain?
She must be lovely, constant, and kind,
Holy and pure, and humble of mind,” etc.
(How Sir Walter runs in my head to-night.) Yes, she must be all
this, and possess a thousand other good qualities, many more than
are enumerated by Iago, so as never to descend for a moment from the
pedestal on which her baron has set her up. Is this indulgent? is it
even reasonable? Can he expect any human creature to be always dancing
on the tight-rope? Why is Lady Triermain not to have her whims, her
temper, her fits of ill-humour, like her lord? She must not indeed
follow his example and relieve her mind by swearing “a good, round,
mouth-filling oath,” therefore she has the more excuse for feeling at
times a little captious, a little irritable, what she herself calls a
little _cross_. Did he expect she was an angel? Well, he often called
her one, nay, she looks like it even now in that pretty dress, says my
lord, and she smiles through her tears, putting her white arms round
his neck so fondly that he really believes he _has_ found what he
wanted till they fall out again next time.
Men are very hard in the way of exaction on those they love. All “take”
seems their motto, and as little “give” as possible. If they would but
remember the golden rule and expect no more than should be expected
from themselves, it might be a better world for everybody. I have
sometimes wondered in my own mind whether women do not rather enjoy
being coerced and kept down. I have seen them so false to a kind heart,
and so fond of a cruel one. Are they slaves by nature, do you conceive,
or only hypocrites by education? I suppose no wise man puzzles his head
much on that subject. They are all incomprehensible and all alike!
“How unjust!” exclaims Bones, interrupting me with more vivacity than
usual. “How unsupported an assertion, how sweeping an accusation, how
unfair, how unreasonable, and how like a _man_! Yes, that is the way
with every one of you; disappointed in a single instance, you take
refuge from your own want of judgment, your own mismanagement, your
own headlong stupidity, in the condemnation of half the world! You
open a dozen oysters, and turn away disgusted because you have not
found a pearl. You fall an easy prey to the first woman who flatters
you, and plume yourself on having gained a victory without fighting a
battle. The fortress so easily won is probably but weakly garrisoned,
and capitulates ere long to a fresh assailant. When this has happened
two or three times, you veil your discomfiture under an affectation
of philosophy and vow that women are all alike, quoting perhaps a
consolatory scrap from Catullus—
‘Quid levius plumâ? pulvis. Quid pulvere? ventus.
Quid vento? mulier. Quid muliëre? nihil?’
But Roman proverbs and Roman philosophy are unworthy and delusive.
There _is_ a straight stick in the wood if you will be satisfied with
it when found; there _is_ a four-leaved shamrock amongst the herbage
if you will only seek for it honestly on your knees. Should there be
but one in a hundred women, nay, one in a thousand, on whom an honest
heart is not thrown away, it is worth while to try and find her. At
worst, better be deceived over and over again than sink into that
deepest slough of depravity in which those struggle who, because their
own trust has been outraged, declare there is no faith to be kept with
others; because their own day has been darkened, deny the existence of
light.
“You speak feelingly,” I observe, conscious that such unusual
earnestness denotes a conviction he will get the worst of the debate.
“You have perhaps been more fortunate than the rest. Have _you_
found her, then, this hundredth woman, this prize, this pearl, this
black swan, glorious as the phœnix and rare as the dodo? Forgive my
_argumentum ad hominem_, if I may use the expression, and forgive my
urging that such good fortune only furnishes one of those exceptions
which, illogical people assert, prove the rule.” There is a vibration
of his teeth wanting only lips to become a sneer, while he replies—
“In my own case I was _not_ so lucky, but I kept my heart up and went
on with my search to the end.”
“Exactly,” I retort in triumph; “you, too, spent a lifetime looking for
the four-leaved shamrock, and never found it after all. But I think
women are far more unreasonable than ourselves in this desire for the
unattainable, this disappointment when illusion fades into reality.
Not only in their husbands do they expect perfection, and that, too,
in defiance of daily experience, of obvious incompetency, but in
their servants, their tradespeople, their carriages, their horses,
their rooms, their houses, the dinners they eat, and the dresses they
wear. With them an avowal of incapacity to reconcile impossibilities
stands for wilful obstinacy, or sheer stupidity at best. They believe
themselves the victims of peculiar ill-fortune if their coachman gets
drunk, or their horses go lame; if milliners are careless or ribbons
unbecoming; if chimneys smoke, parties fall through, or it rains when
they want to put on a new bonnet. They never seem to understand that
every ‘if’ has its ‘but,’ every _pro_ its _con_. My old friend, Mr.
Bishop, of Bond Street, the Democritus of his day (and may he live as
long!), observed to me many years ago, when young people went mad about
the polka, that the new measure was a type of everything else in life,
‘What you gain in dancing you lose in turning round.’ Is it not so
with all our efforts, all our undertakings, all our noblest endeavours
after triumph and success? In dynamics we must be content to resign
the _maximum_ of one property that we may preserve the indispensable
_minimum_ of another, must allow for friction in velocity, must
calculate the windage of a shot. In ethics we must accept fanaticism
with sincerity, exaggeration with enthusiasm, over-caution with unusual
foresight, and a giddy brain with a warm, impulsive heart. What we
take here we must give yonder; what we gain in dancing we must lose in
turning round!
“But no woman can be brought to see this obvious necessity. For the
feminine mind nothing is impracticable. Not a young lady eating bread
and butter in the school-room but cherishes her own vision of the
prince already riding through enchanted forests in her pursuit. The
prince may turn out to be a curate, a cornet, or a count, a duke or a
dairy-farmer, a baronet or a blacking-maker, that has nothing to do
with it. Relying on her limitless heritage of the possible, she feels
she has a prescriptive right to the title, the ten thousand a year,
the matrimonial prize, the four-leaved shamrock. Whatever else turns
up, she considers herself an ill-used woman for life, unless all the
qualities desirable in man are found united in the person and fortunes
of her husband; nay, he must even possess virtues that can scarce
possibly co-exist. He must be handsome and impenetrable, generous and
economical, gay and domestic, manly but never from her side, wise yet
deferring to her opinion in all things, quick-sighted, though blind
to any drawbacks or shortcomings in herself. Above all, must he be
superlatively content with his lot, and unable to discover that by any
means in his matrimonial venture, ‘what he gained in dancing he has
lost in turning round.’
“I declare to you I think if Ursidius[2] insists on marrying at all,
that he had better select a widow; at least he runs at even weights
against his predecessor, who, being a man, must needs have suffered
from human weakness and human infirmities. The chances are that the
dear departed went to sleep after dinner, hated an open carriage, made
night hideous with his snores under the connubial counterpane, and
all the rest of it. A successor can be no worse, may possibly appear
better; but if he weds a maiden, he has to contend with the female
ideal of what a man _should_ be! and from such a contest what can
accrue but unmitigated discomfiture and disgrace?
“Moreover, should he prove pre-eminent in those manly qualities women
most appreciate, he will find that even in those they prefer to accept
the shadow for the substance, consistently mistaking assertion for
argument, volubility for eloquence, obstinacy for resolution, bluster
for courage, fuss for energy, and haste for speed.
“On one of our greatest generals, remarkable for his gentle, winning
manner in the drawing-room as for his cool daring in the field, before
he had earned his well-merited honours, I myself heard this verdict
pronounced by a jury of maids and matrons: ‘Dear! he’s such a quiet
creature, I’m sure he wouldn’t be _much use in a battle_!’ No; give
them Parolles going to recover his drum, and they have a champion and
a hero exactly to their minds, but they would scarcely believe in
Richard of the Lion-Heart if he held his peace and only set his teeth
hard when he laid lance in rest.
“Therefore it is they tug so unmercifully at the slender thread that
holds a captive, imagining it is by sheer strength the quiet creature
must be coerced. Some day the pull is harder than usual, the thread
breaks, and the wild bird soars away, free as the wind down which it
sails, heedless of lure and whistle, never to return to bondage any
more. Then who so aghast as the pretty, thoughtless fowler, longing and
remorseful, with the broken string in her hand?
“She fancied, no doubt, her prisoner was an abnormal creature,
rejoicing in ill-usage; that because it was docile and generous it must
therefore be poor in spirit, slavish in obedience, and possessing no
will of its own. She thought she had found a four-leaved shamrock, and
this is the result!
“But I may talk for ever and end where I began. Men you _may_ convince
by force of argument, if your logic is very clear and your examples or
illustrations brought fairly under their noses; but with the other sex,
born to be admired and not instructed, you might as well pour water
into a sieve. Can you remember a single instance in which with these,
while a word of entreaty gained your point forthwith, you might not
have exhausted a folio of argument in vain?”
He thinks for a minute, and then answers deliberately, as if he had
made up his mind—
“I never knew but one woman who could understand reason, _and she
wouldn’t listen to it_!”
CHAPTER VIII
RUS IN URBE
_Romæ Tibur Amem, ventosus. Tibure Romam!_ quoth the Latin satirist,
ridiculing his own foibles, like his neighbour’s, with the laughing,
half-indulgent banter that makes him the pleasantest, the chattiest,
and the most companionable of classic writers. How he loved the
cool retirement of his Sabine home, its grassy glades, its hanging
woodlands, its fragrant breezes wandering and whispering through those
summer slopes, rich in the countless allurements of a landscape that—
“Like Albunea’s echoing fountain,
All my inmost heart hath ta’en;
Give me Anio’s headlong torrent,
And Tiburnus’ grove and hills,
And its orchards sparkling dewy,
With a thousand wimpling rills,”
as Theodore Martin translates his Horace, or thus, according to Lord
Ravensworth—
“Like fair Albunea’s sybil-haunted hall,
By rocky Anio’s echoing waterfall,
And Tibur’s orchards and high-hanging wood,
Reflected graceful in the whirling flood.”
His lordship, you observe, who can himself write Latin lyrics as though
he had drunk with Augustus, and capped verses with Ovid, makes the
second syllable of Albunea long, and a very diffuse argument might be
held on this disputed quantity. Compare these with the original, and
say which you like best—
“Quam domus Albuneæ resonantis,
Et præceps Anio ac Tiburni lucus et uda
Mobilibus pomaria rivis.”
By the way, nobody who has not endeavoured to render Latin poetry into
English can appreciate the vigour and terseness of the older language.
Here are six lines in the one version and four in the other, required
to translate three of the original, perhaps without producing after all
so full a meaning or so complete a picture.
Nevertheless, and notwithstanding his poetical predilections for the
country, Horace, like many other people, seems of his two homes to have
always preferred the one at which he was _not_. An unhappy prejudice
little calculated to enhance the comfort and content of daily life.
Had he settled anywhere in the neighbourhood of our hermitage here,
he need not have accused himself of this fickle longing, which he
denounces by the somewhat ludicrous epithet of “ventose.” He might have
combined the advantages of town and country, alternating the solitude
of the desert with the society of his fellow-men, blowing the smoke
out of his lungs while inhaling the fresh breezes off the Serpentine,
stretching his own limbs and his horses’ by walks and rides round
Battersea, Victoria, and Hyde Parks.
If you look for _rus in urbe_, where will you find it in such
perfection as within a mile of the Wellington statue in almost any
direction you please to take? If you choose to saunter on a hot June
day towards the Ranger’s Lodge or the powder-magazine, I could show
you a spot from which I defy you to see houses, spires, gas-towers,
or chimneys, anything, indeed, but green grass and blue sky, and
towering elms motionless, in black massive shade, or quivering in
golden gleams of light. A spot where you might lie and dream of nymph
and faun, wood-god and satyr, Daphne pursued by Phœbus, Actæon flying
before Diana, of Pan and Syrinx and Echo, and all the rustic joys of
peaceful Arcady—or of elves and brownies, fair princesses and cruel
monsters, Launcelot, Modred, and Carodac, Sir Gawain the courteous
with his “lothely ladye,” the compromising cup, the misfitting mantle,
all the bright pageantry, quaint device, and deep, tender romance that
groups itself round good King Arthur and the Knights of his Round
Table—or of Thomas the Rhymer as he lay at length under the “linden
tree,” and espied, riding towards him on a milk-white palfrey, a dame
so beautiful, that he could not but believe she was the mother of his
lord, till undeceived by her own confession, he won from her the fatal
gift of an unearthly love. And here, perhaps, you branch off into some
more recent vision, some dream of an elfin queen of your own, who also
showed you the path to heaven, and gave you an insight into the ways
of purgatory, ere she beckoned you down the road to Fairyland, that
leads—ah! who knows where? From this sequestered nook you need not
walk a bowshot to arrive at the seaboard of the Serpentine; and here,
should there be a breath of air, if you have any taste for yachting,
you may indulge it to your heart’s content. The glittering water is
dotted with craft of every rig and, under a certain standard, of almost
every size. Yawls, cutters, schooners, barques, brigs, with here and
there a three-masted ship. On a wind and off a wind, close-hauled and
free, rolling, pitching, going about, occasionally missing stays, and
only to be extricated from the “doldrums” by a blundering, over-eager
water-dog, the mimic fleet, on its mimic ocean, carries out its
illusion so completely that you can almost fancy the air off the water
feels damp to your forehead, and tastes salt upon your lips.
An ancient mariner who frequents the beach below the boat-house feels,
I am convinced, thoroughly persuaded that his occupation is strictly
professional, that he is himself a necessity, not of amusement, but
business. He will tell you that when the wind veers round like that,
“suddenways, off Kensington Gardens, you may look out for squalls;”
that “last Toosday was an awful wild night, and some on ’em broke from
their moorings afore he could turn out. The _Bellerophon_, bless ye,
was as nigh lost as could be, and that there _Water Lily_, the sweetest
thing as ever swam—she sprang her boom, damaged her bowsprit, and broke
her nose. He was refitting all Wens’day, he was, up to two o’clock, and
a precious job he had!”
Every one who constantly “takes his walks abroad” in the Great City,
becomes a philosopher in spite of himself, of the Peripatetic School,
no doubt, but still a philosopher; so you sympathise mildly with the
mariner’s troubles; for to you no human interests are either great or
small, nor does one pursuit or person bore you more than another. You
hazard an opinion, therefore, that the _Water Lily_ is somewhat too
delicate and fragile a craft to encounter boisterous weather, even on
such an inland sea as this, and find, to your dismay, that so innocent
an observation stamps you in his opinion as not only ignorant, but
presumptuous. He considers her both “wholesome,” as he calls it, and
“weatherly,” urging on you many considerations of sea-worthiness, such
as her false keel, her bulwarks, her breadth of beam, and general
calibre. “Why, she’s seven-and-twenty,” says he, rolling a peppermint
lozenge round his tongue, just as a real seaman turns a quid; “now look
at the _Sea-Sarpent_ lying away to the eastward yonder, just beyond
the point where the gravel’s been washed adrift. She’s fifty-two, she
is, but I wouldn’t trust her, not in lumpy water, you know, like the
schooner. No. If I was a-building of one now, what I call, for all work
and all weathers, thirty would be my mark, or from that to thirty-five
at the outside!”
“Thirty-five what? Tons?” you ask, a little abashed, and feeling you
have committed yourself.
“Tons!” he repeats, in a tone of intense disgust—“tons be blowed!
h’inches! I should have thought any landsman might ha’ knowed
that—h’inches!” and lurching sulkily into his cabin under the
willow-tree, disappears to be seen no more.
Later, when September has begun to tinge the topmost twigs with gold,
and autumn, like a beautiful woman, then indeed at her loveliest, who
is just upon the wane, dresses in her deepest colours, and her richest
garments, go roaming about in Kensington Gardens, and say whether you
might not fancy yourself a hundred miles from any such evidences of
civilisation as a pillar-post or a cab-stand.
It was but the other day I sauntered through the grove that stands
nearest the Uxbridge Road, and, while an afternoon mist limited my
range of vision and deadened the sounds of traffic on my ears, I could
hardly persuade myself that in less than five minutes I might if I
liked make the thirteenth in an omnibus.
Alone? you ask—of course I was. Yet, stay, not quite alone, for with
me walked the shadow that, when we have learned to prefer solitude to
society, accompanies us in all our wanderings, teaching us, I humbly
hope, the inevitable lesson, permanent and precious in proportion to
the pain with which the poor scholar gets his task by heart.
Well, I give you my word, the endless stems, the noiseless solitude,
the circumscribed horizon, reminded me of those forest ranges in North
America that stretch interminable from the waters of the St. Ann’s and
the Batsicon to the wild waves breaking dark and sullen on the desert
seaboard of Labrador.
I am not joking. I declare to you I was once more in moccasins,
blanket-coat, and _bonnet-rouge_, with an axe in my belt, a pack on
my shoulders, and a rifle in my hand, following the track of the
_treborgons_[3] on snow-shoes, in company with Thomas, the French
Canadian, and François, the half-breed, and the Huron chief with
a name I could never pronounce, that neither I nor any man alive
can spell. Ah! it was a merry life we led on those moose-hunting
expeditions, in spite of hard work, hard fare, and, on occasion, more
than a sufficiency of the discomfort our retainers called expressively
_misère_. There was a strange charm in the marches through those silent
forests, across those frozen lakes, all clothed alike in their winter
robe of white and diamonds. There was a bold, free, joyous comfort in
the hole we dug through a yard and a half of snow, wherein to build
our fire, boil our kettle, fry our pork (it is no use talking of such
things to you, but I was going to say, never forget a frying-pan on
these expeditions; it is worth all the kitchen-ranges in Belgravia), to
smoke our tobacco, ay, and to take our rest.
There was something of sweet adventurous romance in waking at midnight
to see the stars flash like brilliants through the snow-encrusted
branches overhead, wondering vaguely where and why and what were all
those countless worlds of flame. Perhaps to turn round again and dream
of starry eyes in the settlements, then closed in sleep, or winking
drowsily at a night-light, while the pretty watcher pondered, not
unmindful of ourselves, pitying us, it may be, couching here in the
bush, and thinking in her ignorance how cold we were!
Then when we reached our hunting-ground and came up with our game at
last, though, truth to tell, the sport as sport was poor enough, there
was yet a wild delightful triumph in overtaking and slaying a gigantic
animal that had never seen the face of man. The chase was exciting,
invigorating, bracing; the idea grand, heroic, Scandinavian.
“An elk came out of the pine-forest;
He snuffed up east, he snuffed up west,
Stealthy and still;
His mane and his horns were shaggy with snow,
I laid my arrow across my bow,
Stealthily and still;
The bowstring rattled—the arrow flew,
And it pierced his blade-bone through and through,
Hurrah!
I sprang at his throat like a wolf of the wood,
And I dipped my hands in the smoking blood,
Hurrah!”
Kingsley had not written _Hypatia_ then. Kingsley never went
moose-hunting in his life. How could he so vividly describe the gait
and bearing of a forest elk stalking warily, doubtfully, yet with a
kingly pride through his wintry haunts? Probably from the instinctive
sense of fitness, the intuition peculiar to poets, that enabled him
to feel alike with a fierce Goth sheltering in his snow-trench, and
a soft, seductive southern beauty, languishing, lovely and beloved,
in spite of dangerous impulses and tarnished fame, in spite of wilful
heart, reckless self-abandonment, woman weakness, and the fatal saffron
shawl.
I tell you that I could not have been more completely alone in
Robinson Crusoe’s island than I found myself here within a rifle-shot
of Kensington Palace, during a twenty minutes’ walk, to and fro, up
and down, threading the stems of those tall, metropolitan trees; nor
when my solitude was at last disturbed could I find it in me to grudge
the intruders their share of my retreat. More especially as they
were themselves thoroughly unconscious of everything but their own
companionship, sauntering on, side by side, with murmured words, and
loving looks, and steps that dwelt and lingered on the path, because
impossible roses seemed springing into bloom beneath their very feet,
and that for them Kensington Gardens were indeed as the gardens of
Paradise.
I knew right well for _me_ the mist was gathering round, ghostly and
damp and chill. It struck through my garments, it crept about my heart,
but for these, thank God! the sky was bright as a midsummer noon. They
were basking in the warmth and light of those gleams that come once
or twice in a lifetime to remind us of what we might be, to reproach
us, perhaps, gently for what we are. They did not speak much, they
laughed not at all. Their conversation seemed a little dull, trite, and
commonplace, yet I doubt if either of them has forgotten a word of it
yet. It was pleasant to observe how happy they were, and I am sure they
thought it was to last for ever. Indeed I wish it may!
But the reflections of a man on foot are to those of a man on horseback
as the tortoise to the hare, the mouse to the lion, tobacco to opium,
chalk to cheese, prose to poetry.
“As moonshine is to sunshine, and as water is to wine.”
Get into the saddle, leap on a thorough-bred horse, if you have got
one. Never mind his spoiling you for every other animal of meaner
race, and come for a “spin” up the Ride from Hyde Park Corner to
Kensington Gate, careful only to steady him sufficiently for the safety
of Her Majesty’s subjects, and the inquisition, not very rigorous,
of the policemen on duty. For seven months in the year, at least,
this is perhaps the only mile and a half in England over which you
may gallop without remorse for battering legs and feet to pieces on
the hard ground. Away you go, the breeze lifting your whiskers from
the very roots (I forgot, you have no whiskers, nor indeed would such
superfluities be in character with the severe style of your immortal
beauty). Never mind, the faster you gallop the keener and cooler comes
the air. Sit well down, just feel him on the curb, let him shake his
pretty head and play with his bridle, sailing away with his hind-legs
under your stirrup-irons, free, yet collected, so that you could let
him out at speed, or have him back in a canter within half-a-dozen
strides; pat him lovingly just where the hair turns on his glossy
neck like a knot in polished woodwork, and while he bends to meet the
caress, and bounds to acknowledge it, tell me that dancing is the
poetry of motion if you dare!
Should it not be the London season—and I am of opinion that the _rus
in urbe_ is more enjoyable to both of us at the “dead time of year”
than during the three fashionable months—do not, therefore, feel
alarmed that you will have the ride to yourself, or that if you come
to grief there will be nobody to pick you up! Here you will meet some
Life-Guardsman “taking the nonsense” out of a charger he hates; there
some fair girl, trim of waist, blue of habit, and golden of _chignon_,
giving her favourite “a breather,” ready and willing to acknowledge
that she is happier thus, speeding along in her side-saddle, than
floating round a ball-room to Coote and Tinney’s softest strains with
the best waltzer in London for a partner.
But your horse has got his blood up, and you yourself feel that rising
within, which reminds you of the merry youthful days, when everything
in life was done, so to speak, at a gallop. You long to have _a
lark_—you cannot settle down without a jump or two at least. You look
wistfully at the single iron rail that guards the footway, but refrain:
and herein you are wise. Nevertheless, you shall not be disappointed;
you have but to jog quietly out of the Park, through Queen’s Gate,
turning thereafter to your right, and within a quarter of a mile you
shall find what you require. Yes, in good truth, our _rus in urbe_, to
be the more complete, is not without a little hunting-ground of its
own. Mr. Blackman has laid out a snug enclosure, walled in on all sides
and remote from observation, where man and horse may disport themselves
with no more fear of being crowded and jostled than in Launde Woods
or Rockingham Forest during the autumnal months. Here you will find
every description of fence in miniature, neat and new and complete,
like the furniture in a doll’s baby-house—a little hedge, a little
ditch, a little double, and a very little gate, cunningly constructed
on mechanical principles so as to let you off easily should you tamper
with its top bar, the whole admirably adapted to encourage a timid
horse or steady a bold one.
All this is child’s-play, no doubt—the merest child’s-play, compared
with the real thing. Yet there is much in the association of ideas; and
a round or two over this mimic country cannot but bring back to you the
memory of the merriest, ay, and the _happiest_, if not the _sweetest_,
moments of your life. Mounted, with a good start, in a grass country,
after a pack of foxhounds, there is no discord in the melody, no
bitter in the cup—your keenest anxiety the soundness of the level
water-meadow, your worst misgiving the strength of the farther rail,
the width of the second ditch. The goddess of your worship bids your
pulses leap and your blood thrill, but never makes your heart ache, and
the thorns that hedge the roses of Diana can only pierce skin-deep.
Wasn’t it glorious, though you rode much heavier then than you do
now,—wasn’t it glorious, I say, to view a gallant fox going straight
away from Lilburne, Loatland Wood, Shankton Holt, John-o’-Gaunt, or any
covert you please to name that lies in the heart of a good-scenting,
fair-fenced, galloping country? Yourself, sheltered and unseen, what
keen excitement to mark his stealing, easy action, gliding across
the middle of the fields, nose, back, and brush carried in what
geometricians call a “right” line, to lead you over what many people
would call a “serious” one! A chorus ringing from some twenty couple of
tongues becomes suddenly mute, and the good horse beneath you trembles
with delight while the hounds pour over the fence that bounds the
covert, scattering like a conjuror’s pack of cards, ere they converge
in the form of an arrow, heads and sterns down, racing each other for a
lead, and lengthening out from the sheer pace at which a burning scent
enables them to drive along!
They have settled to it now. You may set to and ride without
compunction or remorse. A dozen fields, as many fences, a friendly
gate, and they have thrown their heads up in a lane. Half-a-score of
sportsmen, one plastered with mud, and the huntsman now come up; you
feel conscious, though you know you are innocent, that _he_ thinks you
have been driving them! You remark, also, that there is more red than
common in the men’s faces and the horses’ nostrils; both seem to be
much excited and a little blown.
The check, however, is not of long duration. Fortunately, the hounds
have taken the matter in hand for themselves, ere the only person
qualified to do so has had time to interfere. _Rarpsody_, as he calls
her, puts her nose down and goes off again at score. You scramble
out of the lane, post-haste, narrowly escaping a fall. Your horse
has caught his wind with that timely pull. He is going as bold as a
lion, as easy as a bird, as steady as a rock. You seem to have grown
together, and move like one creature to that long swinging stride,
untiring and regular as clock-work. A line of grass is before you, a
light east wind in your face, two years’ condition and the best blood
of Newmarket in his veins render you confident of your steed’s enduring
powers, while every field as he swoops over it, every fence as he
throws it lightly behind him, convinces you more and more of his speed,
mettle, and activity. What will you have? The pleasures of imagination,
at least, are unlimited. Shall it be two-and-twenty minutes up wind
and to ground as hard as they can go? Shall it be thirty-five without
another check, crossing the best of the Vale, and indulging the good
horse with never a pull till you land in the field where old Rhapsody,
with flashing eyes and bristles all on end, runs into her quarry,
rolling him over and herself with him, to be buried in the rush of her
eager worrying followers? Would you prefer twelve miles from point to
point, accomplished in an hour and a half, comprising every variety of
country, every vicissitude of the chase, and ending only when the crows
are hovering and swooping over a staunch, courageous, travel-wearied
fox, holding on with failing strength but all-undaunted spirit for
the forest that another mile would reach but that he is never to see
again? You may take your choice. Holloa! he has disappeared!—he has
taken refuge in his cupboard. Not even such a skeleton as mine can
sustain the exorcism of so powerful a spell as fox-hunting! So be it.
Who-whoop! Gone to ground? I think we will leave him there for the
present. It is better not to dig him out!
CHAPTER IX
HAUNTED
A hundred years ago there was scarce a decent country house in
England or Scotland that did not pride itself on two advantages—the
inexhaustible resources of its cellar and the undoubted respectability
of its ghost. Whether the generous contents of the one had not
something to do with the regular attendance of the other, I will not
take upon me to decide; but in those times hall, castle, manor-house,
and even wayside inn were haunted every one. The phantoms used to be as
various, too, as the figures in a pantomime. Strains of unaccountable
music sometimes floated in the air. Invisible carriages rolled into
courtyards at midnight, and door-bells rang loudly, pulled by
unearthly visitors, who were heard but never seen. If you woke at
twelve o’clock you were sure to find a nobleman in court-dress, or a
lady in farthingale and high-heeled shoes, warming a pair of ringed
and wasted hands at the embers of your wood-fire; failing these, a
favourite sample of the supernatural consisted of some pale woman in
white garments, with her black hair all over her shoulders and her
throat cut from ear to ear. In one instance I remember a posting-house
frequented by the spirit of an ostler with a wooden leg; but perhaps
the most blood-chilling tale of all is that which treats of an
empty chamber having its floor sprinkled with flour to detect the
traces of its mysterious visitant, and the dismay with which certain
horror-stricken watchers saw footsteps printing themselves off, one by
one, on the level spotless surface—footsteps plain and palpable, but of
the Fearful Presence nothing more!
As with houses in those, so is it with men in these days. Most of the
people I have known in life were haunted; so haunted, indeed, that
for some the infliction has led at last to madness, though in most
instances productive only of abstracted demeanour, wandering attention,
idiotic cross-purposes, general imbecility of intellect, and, on
occasion, reckless hilarity, with quaint, wild, incoherent talk. These
haunted head-pieces, too, get more and more dilapidated every day;
but how to exorcise them, that is the difficulty! What spells shall
have power to banish the evil spirit from its tenement, and lay it in
the Red Sea? if indeed that is the locality to which phantoms should
properly be consigned. Haunted men are, of all their kind, the most
unhappy; and you shall not walk along a London street without meeting
them by the dozen.
The dwelling exclusively on one idea, if not in itself an incipient
symptom, tends to produce, ere long, confirmed insanity. Yet how
many people have we seen going about with the germs of so fearful a
calamity developing into maturity! This man is haunted by hope, that by
fear,—others by remorse, regret, remembrance, desire, or discontent.
Each cherishes his ghost with exceeding care and tenderness, giving
it up, as it were, room after room in the house, till by degrees it
pervades the whole tenement, and there is no place left for a more
remunerative lodger, healthy, substantial, and real. I have seen people
so completely under the dominion of expectation, that in their morbid
anticipation of the Future, they could no more enjoy the pleasures
afforded by the Present than the dead. I have known others for whom
the brightest sunshine that ever shone was veiled by a cloud of
apprehension, lest storms should be lurking below their horizon the
while, who would not so much as confess themselves happy because of a
conviction such happiness was not to last,—and for whom time being—as
is reasonable—only temporal could bring neither comfort nor relief. It
is rarer to find humanity suffering from the tortures of remorse, a
sensation seldom unaccompanied, indeed, by misgivings of detection and
future punishment; still, when it does fasten on a victim, this Nemesis
is of all others the most cruel and vindictive. Regret, however, has
taken possession of an attic, in most of our houses, and refuses
obstinately to be dislodged. It is a quiet, well-behaved ghost enough,
interfering but little with the ordinary occupations of the family,
content to sit in a dark corner, weeping feebly and wringing its hands,
but with an inconvenient and reprehensible tendency to emerge on
special occasions of rejoicing and festivity, to obtrude its unwelcome
presence when the other inmates are gladdened by any unusual beauty of
sight or sound.
Discontent, perhaps, should hardly be dignified with the title of a
ghost. He resembles rather those Brownies and Lubbers of northern
superstition, who, unsightly and even ludicrous in appearance, were
not yet without their use in performing the meaner offices of a
household. If properly treated and never dragged into undue notice,
the Brownie would sweep up the hearth, bring in the fuel, milk the
cows, and take upon him the rough work generally, in an irregular,
uncouth, but still tolerably efficient style. So perhaps a spirit
of discontent, kept within proper bounds, may prove the unsuspected
mainspring of much useful labour, much vigorous effort, much eventual
success. The spur is doubtless a disagreeable instrument to the horse,
and its misapplication has lost many a race ere now; but there is no
disputing that it can rouse into action such dull torpid temperaments
as, thus unstimulated, would never discover their own powers nor exert
themselves to do their best.
But I should draw a wide distinction between the discontent which
instigates us to improve our lot, and the desire, the _desiderium_, the
poisonous mixture of longing and sorrow, defiance and despair, which
bids us only rend our garments, scatter ashes on our heads, and sit
down in the dust unmanly to repine. It is the difference between the
Brownie and the Fiend. Of all evil spirits I think this last is the
most fatal, the most accursed. We can none of us forget how our father
Abraham, standing at his tent door on the plains of Mamre, entertained
three angels unawares. And we, too, his descendants, are always on the
look-out for the visitors from heaven. Do they ever tarry with any of
us for more than a night’s lodging? Alas! that the very proof of our
guest’s celestial nature is the swiftness with which he vanishes at
daybreak like a dream. But oftener the stranger we receive, though
coming from another world, is not from above. His beauty, indeed, seems
angelic, and he is clad in garments of light. For a while we are glad
to be deceived, cherishing and prizing our guest, the more perhaps for
those very qualities which should warn us of his origin. So we say to
him, “Thou art he for whom we have been looking. Abide with us here
for ever.” And he takes us at our word.
Henceforth the whole house belongs to the ghost. When we go to dinner,
he sits at the head of the table. Try to shame him away with laughter,
and you will soon know the difference between mirth and joy. Try
to drown him with wine. No. Don’t try that. It is too dangerous an
experiment, as any doctor who keeps a private mad-house will tell you.
Our duties we undertake hopelessly and languidly, because of his sneer,
which seems to say, “What is the use? Am I not here to see that you
reap no harvest from your labour, earn no oblivion with your toil?”
And for our pleasures—how can we have any pleasures in that imperious
presence, under the lash of that cruel smile?
Even if we leave our home and walk abroad, in hope to free ourselves
from the tenacious incubus, it is in vain. There is beauty in the
outside world, quiet in the calm distant skies, peace in the still
summer evening, but not for us—nevermore for us—
“Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad bright sun,
When that strange shape drove suddenly
Betwixt us and the sun.”
Ay, therein lurks our curse. We bear the presence well enough when cold
winds blow and snow falls, or when all the landscape about is bleak and
bare and scathed by bitter frosts. The cruel moment is that in which
we feel a capability of enjoyment still left but for our affliction,
a desire to bask in his rays, a longing to turn our faces towards his
warmth—
“When that strange shape drives suddenly
Betwixt us and the sun.”
There is no exorciser from without who can help us. Alas! that we can
so seldom help ourselves. The strength of Hercules could not preserve
the hero from his ghastly fate. Our ghost is no more to be got rid of
by main force than was Dejanira’s fatal tunic, clinging, blistering,
wrapping its wearer all the closer, that he tore away the smarting
flesh by handfuls. Friends will advise us to make the best of it, and
no doubt their counsel is excellent though gratuitous, wanting indeed
nothing but the supplementary information, how we are to make the best
of that which is confessedly at its worst. Enemies opine that we are
weak fools, and deserve to be vanquished for our want of courage—an
argument that would hold equally good with every combatant overpowered
by superior strength; and all the time the ghost that haunted us sits
aloft, laughing our helplessness to scorn, cold, pitiless, inexorable,
and always
“Betwixt us and the sun.”
If we cannot get rid of him, he will sap our intellects and shorten our
lives; but there is a spell which even this evil spirit has not power
to withstand, and it is to be found in an inscription less imitated
perhaps than admired by the “monks of old.”
“_Laborare est orare_,” so runs the charm. Work and worship, and a
stern resolve to ignore his presence, will eventually cause this devil
to “come out of the man.” Not, be sure, till he has torn and rent him
cruelly—not till he has driven him abroad to wander night and day
amongst the tombs, seeking rest, poor fevered wretch, and finding none,
because of his tormentor—not till, in utter helplessness and sheer
despair, stunned, humbled, and broken-hearted, the demoniac has crept
feebly to the Master’s feet, will he find himself delivered from his
enemy, weary, sore, and wasted, but “clothed, and in his right mind.”
Amongst the many ghost stories I have read there is one of which I only
remember that it turned upon the inexplicable presence of a window too
much in the front of a man’s house. This individual had lately taken
a farm, and with it a weird, long-uninhabited dwelling in which he
came to reside. His first care, naturally enough, was to inspect the
building he occupied, and he found, we will say, two rooms on the
second floor, each with two windows. The rooms were close together,
and the walls of not more than average thickness. It was some days ere
he made rather a startling discovery. Returning from the land towards
his own door, and lifting the eyes of proprietorship on his home, he
counted on the second story _five_ windows in front instead of four!
The man winked and stared and wondered. Knowing he was not drunk, he
thought he must be dreaming, and counted them over again—still with the
same result. Entering his house, he ran up-stairs forthwith, and made a
strict investigation of the second floor. There were the two rooms, and
there were the four windows as usual. Day after day he went through the
same process, till by degrees his wonder diminished, his apprehensions
vanished; his daily labour tired him so that he could have slept sound
in a graveyard, and by the time his harvest was got in, the subject
never so much as entered his head.
Now this is the way to treat the haunted chamber in our own brain.
Fasten its door; if necessary, brick up its window. Deprive it of air
and light. Ignore it altogether. When you walk along the passage never
turn your head in its direction, no, not even though the dearest hope
of your heart lies dead and cold within; but if duty bids you, do not
shrink from entering—walk in boldly! Confront the ghost, and show
it that you have ceased to tremble in its presence. Time after time
the false proportions, once so ghastly and gigantic, will grow less
and less—some day the spectre will vanish altogether. Mind, I do not
promise you another inmate. While you live the tenement will probably
remain bare and uninhabited; but at the worst an empty room is surely
better than a bad lodger! It is difficult, you will say, thus to ignore
that of which both head and heart are full. So it is. Very difficult,
very wearisome, very painful, yet not impossible! Make free use of the
spell. Work, work, till your brain is so overwrought it cannot think,
your body so tired it must rest or die. Pray humbly, confidingly,
sadly, like the publican, while your eyes can hardly keep open, your
hands droop helpless by your side, and your sleep shall be sound,
holy, unhaunted, so that with to-morrow’s light you may rise to the
unremitting task once more.
Do not hope you are to gain the victory in a day. It may take months.
It may take years. Inch by inch, and step by step, the battle must be
fought. Over and over again you will be worsted and give ground, but do
not therefore yield. Resolve never to be driven back quite so far as
you have advanced. Imperceptibly, the foe becomes weaker, while you are
gaining strength. The time will come at last, when you can look back on
the struggle with a half-pitying wonder that he could ever have made so
good a fight. Do not then forget to be grateful for the aid you prayed
so earnestly might be granted at your need; and remember also, for your
comfort, that the harder won the victory, the less likely it is you
will ever have to wage such cruel battle again.
“Would it not be wiser,” observed Bones quietly, “never to begin the
conflict? Not to take possession of the haunted house at all?”
There is a pseudo-philosophy about some of his remarks that provokes me
intensely.
“Would it not be wiser,” I repeated, in high disdain, “to sit on the
beach than put out to sea, to walk afoot than ride on horseback, to
loll on velvet cushions in the gallery, than go down under shield
into the lists, and strike for life, honour, and renown? No. It would
_not_ be wiser. True wisdom comes by experience. He who shrinks from
contact with his fellow-men—who fears to take his share of their
burdens, their sorrows, their sufferings, is but a poor fool at best.
He may be learned in the learning of the schools, but he is a dunce
in all that relates to ‘the proper study of mankind’; he is ignorant
of human nature, its sorrows, its passions, its feelings, its hidden
vein of gold, lying under a thick crust of selfishness and deceit;
above all, he knows nothing of his inmost heart, nothing of the fierce,
warlike joy in which a bold spirit crushes and tramples out its own
rebellion—nothing of that worshipper’s lofty courage who
‘Gives the first watch of the night
To the red planet Mars,’
who feels a stern and dogged pride in the consciousness that he
‘Knows how sublime a thing it is
To suffer and be strong.’
No: in the moral as in the physical battle, though you be pinned to the
earth, yet writhe yourself up against the spear, like the ‘grim Lord
of Colonsay,’ who, in his very death-pang, swung his claymore, set his
teeth, and drove his last blow home.
“Besides, if you are to avoid the struggle entirely, how are you ever
to learn the skill of self-defence, by which a thrust may be parried
or returned? the art of tying an artery or stanching a wound? How are
you to help others who cannot help yourself? A man is put into this
world to do a certain share of the world’s work; to stop a gap in
the world’s fencing; to form a cog, however minute, in the world’s
machinery. By the defalcation even of the humblest individual, some
of its movements must be thrown out of gear. The duty is to be got
through, and none of us, haunted or unhaunted, ghost or no ghost, may
shirk our share. Stick to your post like a Roman soldier during the
watches of the night. Presently morning will come, when every phantom
must vanish into air, every mortal confront that inevitable reality for
which the dream we call a lifetime is but a novitiate and a school.”
CHAPTER X
WEIGHT CARRIERS
Fifty years ago, when the burning of a bishop at Smithfield would
scarce have created more sensation in clerical circles than a
Ritualistic Commission or a Pan-Anglican Synod, our divines took their
share of secular pastime far more freely than at present. It was the
parson who killed his thirty brace of partridges, and this, too, with a
flint-and-steel gun, over dogs of his own breaking, on the broiling 1st
of September. It was the parson who alone got to the end of that famous
five-and-forty minutes from “The Church Spinneys,” when a large field
were beat off to a man, and the squire broke his horse’s back. It was
the parson who knew more about rearing pheasants, circumventing wild
ducks, otter-hunting, fly-fishing, even rat-catching, than any one else
in the parish; and it was the parson, too, who sometimes took the odds
about a flyer at Newmarket, and landed a good stake by backing his own
sound ecclesiastical opinion.
Concerning one of these racing divines I remember the following
anecdote:—
Returning from afternoon service on a Sunday, he happened to witness a
trial of speed between two of his school-children. Unequally matched in
size, the big boy, as was natural, beat the little one, but only by a
couple of yards. The parson stood still, watched them approvingly, and
meditated.
“Come here,” said he to the winner. “Go into my study, and fetch me my
big Bible.”
The urchin obeyed, and returned bearing a ponderous quarto volume.
“Now,” continued his reverence, “start fair, and run it over again.”
The competitors wished no better fun, and finished this time with a
dead heat.
“Good boys! Good boys!” said the parson, reflectively. “Ah! I thought
the weight would bring you together.”
Yes; how surely the weight brings us together! How often have we not
seen the universal handicap run out over the course of daily life? Some
of us start so free, so light-hearted, so full of hope and confidence,
expecting no less than to gallop in alone. Presently the weight begins
to tell; the weight that we have voluntarily accepted, or the weight
imposed on us by the wisdom of superior judgment. We labour, we
struggle, we fail; we drop back to those whom we thought so meanly of
as our competitors; they reach us, they pass us, and though punishment
be not spared, they gain the post at last, perhaps many, many lengths
ahead! And even if we escape the disgrace of having thus to succumb,
even if our powers be equal to the tax imposed on them, we are not to
expect an easy victory; there is no “winning in a canter” here. Every
effort tells on mettle, nerve, and spirits; on heart, body, and brain.
We want them all, we summon them, we use them freely, and then, it may
be within one stride of victory, comes the cruel and irretrievable
breakdown.
Men, like horses, must be content to carry weight. Like horses, too,
though some are far more adapted than others to the purpose, all learn
in time to accommodate themselves, so to speak, in pace and action
to their inevitable burden. How they fight under it at first! How
eager, and irritable, and self-willed it renders them; how violent and
impetuous, as if in haste to get the whole thing over and done with.
But in a year or two the back accustoms itself to the burden; the head
is no longer borne so high, the proud neck bends to the curb, and
though the stride be shortened, the dashing, bird-like buoyancy gone
for ever, a gentle, docile temper has taken its place, with sufficient
courage and endurance for all reasonable requirements left. Neither
animal, indeed, is ever so brilliant again; but thus it is that both
become steady, plodding, useful creatures, fit to perform honestly and
quietly their respective duties in creation.
We think we know a great deal in England of athletics, pedestrianism,
and the art of training in general. It may astonish us to learn how a
Chinese postman gets himself into condition for the work he has to do.
The Celestials, it would appear, like meaner mortals, are extremely
particular, not to say fidgety, about the due transmission of their
correspondence. Over that vast empire extend postal arrangements,
conducted, I believe, as in our own country, by some mandarin of high
rank, remarkable for their regularity and efficiency. The letters
travel at a uniform rate of more than seven English miles an hour; and
as they are conveyed by runners on foot, often through thinly-populated
districts in which it is impossible to establish frequent relays,
the pedestrian capabilities of these postmen are of the greatest
importance. This is how a Chinaman prepares himself to accomplish his
thirty miles in less than four hours.
He has a quantity of bags constructed which he disposes over his whole
person, like Queen Mab’s pinches—
“Arms, legs, back, shoulders, sides, and shins.”
Into these he dribbles handfuls of flour before he starts for walking
exercise, increasing the quantity little by little every day till
the bags are quite full, and he carries clinging to every part of
his body several pounds of dead weight, nor considers himself fit
for his situation till he can move under it with the freedom and
elasticity of a naked man. He will then tell you that, on throwing off
his self-imposed burden, he finds all his muscles so invigorated by
their own separate labours, his strength so stimulated, his wind so
clear, his condition so perfect, that he shoots away over the plains,
mountains, and tea-gardens of the Flowery Land less like John Chinaman
with a letter-bag than an arrow from a bow. What would our old friend
Captain Barclay, of peripatetic memory, say to such a system as this?
I doubt if the Chinaman’s theory of training be founded on sound
principles; but I am quite sure that in bearing our moral burden we
cannot dispose it over too extended a surface, or in too many separate
parcels. I see fathers of families carrying surprising weights, such
as make the bachelor’s hair stand on end from sheer dismay, with a
buoyancy of step and carelessness of demeanour only to be accounted for
by an equal distribution of pressure over the entire victim. A man who
has his own business to attend to, his domestic affairs to regulate,
half-a-dozen hungry children to feed, and a couple of poor relations or
so to assist with sympathy, counsel, and occasional aid, finds no time
to dwell upon any one difficulty, no especial inconvenience from any
one burden, because each has its fellow and its counterpoise elsewhere.
It is not only in pharmacy that the principle of counter-irritation
produces beneficial results. A man with two grievances never pities
himself so much as a man with one; and a man with half-a-dozen treats
them all with a good-humoured indifference little removed from positive
satisfaction.
Some people even appear to glory in the multitude of their afflictions,
as though the power to sustain so much ill-luck shed a certain
reflected lustre on themselves. I recollect, long ago, meeting an old
comrade hanging about the recruiting taverns in Westminster. The man
was a clean, smart, active, efficient non-commissioned officer enough,
with the average courage and endurance of the British dragoon. A year
before I had parted with him, languid, unhappy, and depressed, longing
only to return to England but not yet under orders for home. Now he
looked cheerful, contented, almost radiant. I stopped to inquire after
his welfare.
“I landed a fortnight ago, sir,” said he, with something of triumph in
his voice, “and a happy home I found waiting for me! I haven’t a friend
or a relation left in the world. My father’s absconded, my mother’s
dead, my brother-in-law’s ruined, and my sister gone into a mad-house!”
It sounded melancholy enough, yet I felt convinced the man reaped some
unaccountable consolation from his pre-eminence in misfortune, admired
his own endurance, and was proud of his power to carry so heavy a
weight.
Custom, no doubt, in these as in all other inflictions, will do much to
lighten the load. There is a training of the mind, as of the body, to
bear and to endure. With wear and tear the heart gets hardened like the
muscles, and the feelings become blunted by ill-usage, just as the skin
grows callous on an oarsman’s hands. There is some shadow of truth in
the fallacious story of him who carried a calf every day till it became
a cow. None of us know what we can do till we try; and there are few
but would follow the example of the patient camel, and refuse to rise
from the sand, if they knew how heavy a weight is to be imposed on them
ere they can reach the longed-for diamond of the desert, gushing and
glittering amongst the palms! It is fortunate for us that the packages
are not all piled up at once. Little by little we accustom ourselves to
the labour as we plod sullenly on with the tinkling caravan, ignorant,
till too late to turn back, of the coming hardships, the endless
journey, or the many times that cruel _mirage_ must disappoint our
fainting, thirsting spirits ere we reach the welcome resting-place
where the cool spring bubbles through its fringe of verdure—where
we shall drink our fill of those life-bestowing waters, and stretch
ourselves out at last for long, unbroken slumbers under the “shadow of
a great rock in a weary land.”
But the worst method of all in which to carry our load is to build it
up on the pack-saddle so as to attract notice and commiseration from
those who travel alongside. The Turkish _hamals_, indeed, may be seen
staggering about Constantinople under enormous bales of merchandise,
twice the height and apparently three times the weight of the herculean
bearer; but a Turkish _hamal_, notwithstanding his profession, ignores
the meaning of a sore back, moral or physical. Other jades may wince,
but, under all circumstances, you may swear _his_ withers are unwrung.
To be sure, the first article of his creed is resignation. Fatalism
lulls him like opium, though, kinder than that pernicious drug, it
leaves no torment of reaction to succeed its soothing trance. Hard
work, hard fare, hard bed, hard words, hard lines in general, a
tropical sun and the atmosphere of a jungle, it is all in the day’s
work with _him_! _Backsheesh_ he will accept with a smile if he can get
it, or he will do without, consoling himself that it is _kismet_, for
“There is one God, and Mahomet is His prophet.” With this philosopher,
indeed, “a contented mind is a perpetual feast,” otherwise how could
he sustain his stalwart proportions on a morsel of black bread and
a slice of watermelon? His dissipations, too, are mild as his daily
meals. A screw of weak tobacco, folded in a paper cigarette, wraps him
in a foretaste of his anticipated paradise; a mouthful of thick, black,
bitter coffee stands him in lieu of beer, porter, half-and-half, early
purl, blue ruin, and dog’s-nose. Once a week, or maybe once a month,
he goes to the bath for two hours of uninterrupted enjoyment, emerging
healthy, happy, refreshed, and clean as a new pin.
Perhaps it is his frugal, temperate life, perhaps it is his calm,
acquiescent disposition, that enables him thus to carry weight so
complacently. He never fights under it, not he! Through the narrow
lanes of Stamboul, across the vibrating wooden bridge of the Golden
Horn, up the filthy stairs, not streets, of Pera, he swings along with
regulated step and snorting groans, delivered in discordant cadence
at each laborious footfall; but he carries his weight, that is the
great point—he carries a great deal of it, and he carries it remarkably
well—an example of humility and patience to the Christian who employs
him, an object of comparison, not much in favour of the latter, between
the votaries of the Crescent and the Cross.
When I protest, however, against making a display and a grievance of
the load you have to bear, I am far from maintaining that you are to
keep it a profound secret, and hide it away in unsuitable places under
your clothes. A man can carry a hundred-weight on his shoulders with
less inconvenience than a few pounds about his heart. If you doubt
this, order cold plum-pudding for luncheon, and you will be convinced!
A secret, too, is always a heavy substance to take abroad with you, and
your own seems to incommode you more than another’s, probably because
you are less indifferent about letting it fall. As for attempting to
dance lightly along with the jaunty air of an unweighted novice, be
assured the effort is not only painful but ridiculous. No, never be
ashamed of your burden, not even though your own folly should have
clapped an additional half-hundred on the top of it. Get your shoulders
well under the heaviest part, walk as upright as you may, but do not
try to swagger; and if you have a friend who likes you well enough to
give his assistance, let him catch hold at one end, and so between you
move on with it the best way you can.
Some packages grow all the lighter, like a contraband trunk at the
Douane, for being weighed and examined, or, as our neighbours call it,
“pierced and plumbed.” Some again gather increased proportions when we
enlarge upon them; but it is only those of which we dare not speak,
those which no friend must seem to see, for which no brother must offer
a hand, that sink our failing strength, that crush us down humbled and
helpless in the mire. There is but one place for such burdens as these,
and we never lay them there till we have tried everything else in vain;
just as we offer the remnants of a life from which we expect no more
pleasure, where we ought to have given all the promise and vigour of
our youth, or take an aching, hopeless, worn-out heart back to our only
friend, as the crying child runs to its parent with a broken toy.
“The ox toils through the furrow,
Obedient to the goad;
The patient ass up flinty paths
Plods with its weary load,”
says Macaulay in his glorious _Lays of Ancient Rome_, and something in
the nature of both these animals fits them especially for the endurance
of labour and the imposition of weight. It is well for a man when he
has a little of the bovine repose of character, a good deal of the
asinine thickness of skin and insensibility to hard usage. Such a
disposition toils on contentedly enough, obedient indeed to the goad
so far as moderately to increase the staid solemnity of his gait,
taking the flinty path and the weary load as necessary conditions of
life, with a serene equanimity for which he has the philosophical
example of the ass! The ways are rough, you know, and the journey long.
Depend upon it these animals arrive at its termination with less wear
and tear, more safety, and even more despatch, than the sensitive,
high-spirited, and courageous horse, wincing from the lash, springing
to the voice, striving, panting, sweating, straining every muscle to
get home.
In the parable of the _Ancient Mariner_—for is it not indeed the
wildest, dreamiest, and most poetical of parables?—you remember the
hopelessness of the weight he carried when
“Instead of the cross the albatross
About his neck was hung.”
It was not his misfortune, you see, but his crime that bore him
down. Its consciousness lay far heavier on his spirit than did his
after-punishment, when, weary and desolate, he wailed that he was
“Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide, wide sea,
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.”
The saints, indeed, might not have heard him; how do we know about
that? but he _was_ heard nevertheless, and thus he got rid of his
burden to raise his head once more in the face of heaven.
He looked upon beauty, nature, animate life, the wonders of the deep,
the creatures of his Maker, and “blessed them unaware!”
Enough. The hideous dream vanishes, the unholy spell is broken, and he
cries exulting—
“That self-same moment I could pray,
And from my neck so free
The albatross fell off, and sunk
Like lead into the sea.”
I sometimes think that women bear their burdens with less apparent
struggle, less toil or complaint than men; and this although they
own more of the horse’s anxious temperament than the sluggish nature
of the ox and the ass. If they have less “nerve” than ourselves—less
of the coolness which springs from constitutional insensibility to
danger—they have more of that mettlesome spirit which is sometimes
called “pluck,” that indomitable courage which acknowledges no failure
for defeat, which never sleeps upon its post, which can bear up bravely
even against the sickness and depression of unremitting pain. It is
proverbial that in all phases of mere bodily suffering they show twice
the patience and twice the fortitude of the stronger sex; while who
shall say how much of silent sorrow they can cherish and conceal in
troubled hearts while they go about their daily business with smiles on
their gentle faces, with a tranquil, staid demeanour seeming to chant
in soft, harmonious cadence the watchword of “All’s Well!”
Do you not think they too keep their favourite skeletons (far less
perfect than yourself) hoarded, hidden away, locked up, but not to be
buried or forgotten for the worth of kingdoms? Do you suppose they
never bring them out to be hugged, and fondled, and worshipped, and
wept over?
“In the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof.”
Bah! It is a world of shams. If a woman is not a hypocrite she must be
a stone!
We should give them greater credit though could we learn more of
the weights they have to carry. But their training is known only to
themselves; their trials come off in secret; the saddles they wear are
jealously locked up, and they take care to keep the key! I think the
reason they run so kindly is that they apply themselves very frequently
to the last resource of the Ancient Mariner when he saw no escape from
his punishment, when he was overweighted with his curse.
I know not: I only know that the quiet courage, the generous spirit,
the untiring endurance with which they perform the journey of life is
too generally ignored, unappreciated, and thrown away. How often have
we not seen a thorough-bred horse ridden by a butcher? a being little
lower than an angel submitting, gentle and patient, to a creature
little higher than a brute.
CHAPTER XI
SHADOWS
“Coming events cast their shadows before,” says a favourite adage of
that proverbial philosophy which is often so quaint and truthful,
sometimes so contradictory and far-fetched. In the present instance
the maxim, I think, is contradicted by our individual convictions
and general experience. For my own part I protest I am no believer
in presentiments. That is a beautiful fiction of poetry, completely
unsubstantiated by the prosaic events of life, which represents the
predestined sufferer as one who
“Still treads the shadow of his foe,”
while the arm of the avenger, uplifted though unseen, intercepts the
light of heaven ere yet its blow descends. Poets, no doubt, lay their
foundations on a basis of truth, but, as befits their profession, do
not scruple to raise a superstructure in magnificent disproportion to
the limits of their ground-plan. I will appeal to nine people out of
every ten whose lot it has been to sustain severe affliction—and I
think it is nearly nine-tenths of the human race—whether they have not
found themselves staggered or prostrated by blows as sudden as they
were overwhelming; whether the dagger has not always been a more deadly
weapon than the sword, the marksman behind the hedge a more fatal enemy
than the battery on its eminence, the hidden reef a worse disaster than
the adverse gale, and whether their hopes, their happiness, or their
fortunes, have not failed them at the very moment when the false waves
smiled serenely at the calm skies overhead—
“Like ships that on a summer sea
Have gone down sailing tranquilly.”
No; these forthcoming shadows need not disturb our repose. They owe
their origin neither to heart nor brain, but proceed from liver, and I
should think must be quite unknown to him who “lives on sixpence a day
and earns it!”
What a life we should lead if we could look an inch before our noses!
Of all curses to humanity the bitterest would be the gift of foresight.
I often think a man’s progress towards his grave is like that of a
sculler labouring up-stream, we will say from Richmond to Teddington
Lock. By taking the established and conventional course he avoids
collision with his kind and proceeds in comparative safety. By certain
side-glances and general knowledge of the river, which we may compare
to the warnings of experience and the reasonings of analogy, he obtains
an inkling, far removed from certainty, of much approaching trouble
to which his back is turned. By observing the track of his own boat
rippling the surface many a yard astern, he learns to guide his course,
just as he would correct his conduct by the lessons of the past. Now
the stream runs hard against him, and he must work his way foot by foot
with honest, unremitting toil. Now he shoots along through slack water,
much to his own content and self-approval, but under no circumstances,
however formidable, must he completely relax his efforts, for the
current would soon float him back to the place from whence he came.
Many a scene of beauty, many a lovely nook, and sunny lawn, and
fairy palace glides by him as he goes—fading, vanishing, shut out by
the intervening point, to leave but a memory of their attractions,
dispelled in turn by ever-recurring beauties of meadow, wood, and water.
So he plods steadily on, accepting the labour, enjoying the pleasures
of his trip, and nearing with every stroke the haven he is to reach at
last.
However healthy and invigorating the toil, however varied and
delightful the passage, I think he will not be sorry to arrive at
Teddington Lock, there to ship his oars, moor his boat under the
willows, and so, lulled by the murmur of the ever-flowing waters, with
folded arms, upturned face, and eyes wandering drowsily heavenwards,
fall peacefully asleep.
But the shadows which cross our path to our greatest deception and
detriment are those for which we so willingly abandon the substances
whereof they are but the fading phantoms as the dog in the fable
dropped a piece of meat out of his jaws to snatch a like morsel from
the other dog he saw reflected in the water. Every day men grasp at
clouds as did Ixion, bartering eagerly for that which they know to be
illusive, the solid joys and advantages of life. How many people in the
possession of sufficient incomes deprive themselves of common comfort
in an attempt to appear richer and more liberal than they really are!
How many forego the society of friends in which they find honest
pleasure for that of mere acquaintances with whom they have scarce a
thought in common, because the latter, perhaps themselves sacrificed
to the same illusion, move in a higher and more ostentatious class of
society! With one the shadow is a reputation for wealth, with another
for taste. Here it is a house in Belgravia, there a villa on the
Thames; sometimes a position in the county, a seat in parliament, or a
peerage long dormant in a race of squires.
Whatever it may be, the pursuer follows it at the best speed he can
command, finding, usually, that the faster he goes the faster it flies
before him; and when he comes up with it at last to enfold the phantom
in his longing embrace, behold it crumbles away to disappointment in
his very arms.
I have seen Cerito dancing her famous shadow-dance; I have watched
a child following its own retreating figure, lengthened to gigantic
proportions in an afternoon sun, with shouts of wonder and delight;
I once observed, perhaps the prettiest sight of the three, a
thorough-bred foal gallop up to some park-palings, to wince and scour
away from the distorted representation of a race-horse it met there,
in the wild, graceful freedom of a yet unbridled youth; and I have
thought of the many shadows that lure us all, between the cradle and
the grave, only to impose on us in their fullest signification the
different sentiments of disbelief, dis-illusion, and disgust. When
Peter Schlemihl made his ill-advised bargain with the devil, that
shrewd purchaser quietly rolled up his victim’s shadow and put it in
his own pocket. When Michael Scott, in the completion of his education
at Padua, had mastered certain intricacies of the black art, his
fellow-students observed to their consternation that while they walked
in the college gardens with the wise north-countryman,
“His form no darkening shadow cast
Athwart the sunny wall.”
The first step in supernatural learning, the first condition for the
attainment of superhuman power, seems to have been the dismissal of so
inconvenient and unmeaning an appurtenance as a shadow.
How many people have I known, and these not the least endearing and
capable of their kind, over whose whole life the shadow of a memory,
though growing fainter day by day, has yet been dark enough to throw a
gloom that the warmest rays of friendship and affection were powerless
to dispel! Sometimes, indeed, that darkness seems dearer to them than
the glories of the outer world; sometimes, and this is the hardest fate
of all, they cling to it the closer that they feel the illusion has
been to them a more reliable possession than the reality. There is a
world of tender longing, bitter experience, and sad, suggestive pathos
in Owen Meredith’s lament—
“How many a night ’neath her window have I walked in the wind and
the rain,
Only to look on her shadow fleet over the lighted pane!
Alas! ’twas the shadow that rested—’twas _herself_ that fleeted,
you see—
And now I am dying—I know it! Dying—and where is she?”
The shadow he had worshipped so fondly was not more fleeting than the
dream on which he had anchored a man’s honest hopes, and wasted a
man’s generous, unsuspecting heart.
Then we see our shadows at points of view so peculiar to ourselves, in
lights that so distort and disguise their proportions, it is no wonder
if for us they become phantoms of formidable magnitude and overpowering
aspect. The demon of the Hartz Mountains is said to be nothing more
than the reflection or shadow of the traveller’s own person, as seen
under certain abnormal conditions of refraction against a morning or
evening sky. Such demons most of us keep of our own, and we take care
never to look at them but at the angle which magnifies them out of all
reasonable proportions. When you see mine and I yours, each of us is
surprised at the importance attached to his spectral illusion by the
other. Yours seems to me a diminutive and contemptible little devil
enough; and doubtless, although you never may have entertained a high
opinion of my mental powers or moral force of character, both are
fallen fifty per cent. in your estimation since you have been brought
face to face with the bugbear by which they are overridden and kept
down. If we could but change shadows we should both of us get back into
the sun. Alas! that all the magic art of Michael Scott himself would
fail to effect such a trick of legerdemain. Alas! that we must bear as
best we can, each for himself, the gloomy presence that makes us so
dull of cheer, so sad of countenance, and so cold about the heart.
Men adopt a great many different methods to get rid of their respective
shadows, approximating more or less to the conclusive plan of Peter
Schlemihl aforesaid, who sold his outright to the devil. Some try to
lose it amongst a crowd of fellow-creatures, all with the same familiar
attendants of their own; others struggle with it in solitude, and find
themselves halting and maimed after the conflict, like him who wrestled
of old with the angel at Penuel “until the breaking of the day.” One
thinks to stifle his tormentor in business, another to lull him with
pleasure, a third to drown him in wine. None of these remedies seem to
answer the purpose desired. Blue-books, bankers’ books, betting-books
are unable to break the spell; over the pages of each he throws the
all-pervading gloom. Neither is he to be worsted by the gleam of many
candles flashing only less brightly than the sparkle of Beauty’s
jewels and the lustre of her soft eyes in “halls of dazzling light.”
On the contrary, it is here that, maybe from the force of contrast, he
asserts his power with the greatest determination, coming out, as is
but natural, under the vivid glare thrown on him in a stronger and more
uncompromising relief. To steep him in wine is often but to increase
his dimensions out of all reasonable proportions, and at best only gets
rid of him for a night that he may return in the morning refreshed and
invigorated to vindicate his sovereignty over the enfeebled rebel he
controls. There are means of dispelling the darkness, no doubt, but I
fear they are not to be found in the resources of study, certainly not
in the distractions of dissipation nor the feverish delirium of vice.
It must be a warm, genial, and unusually generous disposition which is
not warped and dwarfed by a shadow cast upon it in youth, or indeed at
any period of life; but for animate as for inanimate nature there are
black frosts as well as white. The latter evaporate with the morning
sun in light wreaths of vapour and perhaps a few tears sparkling like
diamonds, to be succeeded by brilliant sunshine, unclouded till the
close of its short winter’s day; the former, grim, grey, and lowering,
parch and wither up the life of every green thing, drawing her shroud,
as it were, over the cold dead face of earth ere she is buried in the
darkness of approaching night.
It is hard upon youth to see its rosy morning overcast by the shadow;
but it has many hours yet to look forward to before noon, and can
afford to wait for brighter weather. Far more cruelly does age feel the
withdrawal of that light it had trusted in to cheer its declining day;
a light it can never hope to welcome again, because long ere the shadow
shall be withdrawn from the chilled and weary frame, its sun will have
gone down for ever into the ocean of eternity.
People talk a great deal about that physical impossibility which they
are pleased to term “a broken heart”; and the sufferer who claims their
sympathy under such an abnormal affliction is invariably a young person
of the gentler sex. I have no doubt in my own mind, nevertheless, that
a severe blow to the fortunes, the self-esteem, the health or the
affections, is far more severely felt after forty than before thirty;
and yet who ever heard of an elderly gentleman breaking his heart? Any
thing else you please—his word, his head, his waistcoat-strings, or
even his neck, but his heart! Why, the assumption is ludicrous. If you
consult the statistics of suicide, however, you will be surprised to
find in how many instances this most reckless of crimes is committed
by persons of mature age, though it is strange that those whose span
in the course of nature is likely to be so short should think it worth
while to curtail it with their own hand. There is another shadow, too,
which, apart from all finer feelings of the heart or intellect, has
a pernicious effect on our interests and welfare. It is cast by our
own opaque substances when we persist in an inconvenient attitude,
commonly called “standing in our own light.” Parents and guardians,
those who have the care of young people, generally are well aware
of its irritating persistency and disagreeable consequences. It is
provoking to find all your efforts thwarted by the very person on whose
behalf they are made. After much trouble, and the eating of more dirt
than you can digest in comfort, you obtain for a lad a high stool in
a counting-house, an appointment to the Indian army, or a berth in a
Chinese merchantman, fondly hoping that in one way or another he is
provided for, and off your hands at last. But after a while behold
him back again, like a consignment of damaged goods! He has been too
fast for the clerkship, too idle for the army, not sober enough for
the sea. With a fine chance and everything in his favour, he “stood in
his own light,” and must abide by the gloom he has himself made. Or
perhaps, though this is a rarer case, because women’s perceptions of
their own interest are usually very keen, it is your Blanche, or your
Rose, or your Violet who thus disappoints the magnificent expectations
you have founded on her beauty, her youth, her eyes, her figure, and
her general fascinations. The peer with his unencumbered estate and
his own personal advantages would have proposed to a certainty, was
only waiting for an opportunity—he told his sister so—when that last
ten minutes at croquet with Tom, those half-dozen extra rounds in the
cotillon with Harry, scared this shy bird from the decoy, and he went
off to Melton in disgust. Rose, Blanche, or Violet “stood in her own
light,” and must be content for the rest of her career to burn tallow
instead of wax.
The shadows, however, which ladies preserve for their own private
annoyance cast surprisingly little gloom over their pretty persons
while they are before the world. A new dress, a coming ball, a
race-meeting, or a picnic, are sufficient to dispel them at a moment’s
notice; and though doubtless when these palliatives are exhausted,
when they put their candles out at night, the darkness gathers all the
thicker for its lucid interval of distraction, it is always something
to have got rid of it even for an hour.
That women feel very keenly, nobody who knows anything about them can
doubt. That they feel very _deeply_ is a different question altogether.
In some rare instances they may indeed be found, when the light they
love is quenched, to sit by preference in darkness for evermore; but as
a general rule the feminine organisation is thoroughly appreciative of
the present, somewhat forgetful of the past, and exceedingly reckless
of the future.
For both sexes, however, there must in their course through life be
shadows deep in proportion to the brilliancy of the sunshine in which
they bask. “Shall we receive good at the hand of God,” says Job, “and
shall we not receive evil?” thereby condensing into one pithy sentence
perhaps the profoundest system of philosophy ever yet submitted to
mankind. The evil always seems to us greater than the good, the
shadows more universal than the sunshine; but with how little reason
we need only reflect for a moment to satisfy ourselves. There is a
gleam in which we often fondly hope to dispel our shadows, delusive
as the “will-o’-the-wisp,” a light “that never yet was seen on sea
or shore,” which is cruelly apt to lure us on reefs and quicksands,
to guide us only to eventual shipwreck; but there is also a glimmer,
faint and feeble here, yet capable of dispelling the darkest shadows
that ever cross our path, which if we will only follow it truthfully
and persistently for a very brief journey, shall cheer us heartily and
guide us steadfastly till it widens and brightens into the glory of
eternal day.
CHAPTER XII
GUINEVERE
Amongst all the works of our great poet, works in which criticism,
searching diligently for flaws, discovers every day new beauties,
surely this noble poem is the very crown and masterpiece.
Compared even with the productions of his own genius, Guinevere always
seems to me like a statue in the midst of oil-paintings. So lofty is it
in conception, so grand in treatment, so fair, so noble, so elevating,
and yet so real. As the Californian digger in his “prospect” washes,
and sifts, and searches, till from a mass of rubbish and impurities he
separates the nugget of virgin ore, so from the lavish confusion of
rich material to be found in that collection of early romance called
_La Morte d’Arthur_, the Laureate has wrought out a poem precious
in its own intrinsic merit as the purest metal that was ever beaten
into a crown of gold. One other has been over the same ground before
him, the great magician who with a wave of his wand has created for
us gleaming blade and glittering hauberk, mail and plate, and managed
steeds caparisoned, lances shivered to the grasp, sweet pale faces
looking down on the mimic war beneath, and all the pomp, panoply, and
_prestige_ of an ideal chivalry, when
“The champions, armed in martial sort,
Have thronged into the list,
And but three knights of Arthur’s court
Are from the tourney missed.
And still those lovers’ fame survives
For faith so constant shown;
There were two that loved their neighbours’ wives,
And one that loved his own.”
Alas! that the very first of these in arms, in courtesy, in personal
advantages, and, but for the one foul blot, in honourable fame, should
have been Lancelot de Lac, the ornament of chivalry. Alas! that the
lady of his guilty love should have been that
“Flower of all the west and all the world,”
whose rightful place was on the bosom of “the stainless king.”
Their fatal passion, that grew so insensibly in those fair May-days
long ago, when the pair
“Rode under groves that looked a paradise
Of blossom, over sheets of hyacinth,
That seemed the heavens upbreaking thro’ the earth,”
has struck root now, deep, deep in the hearts of both, and spreading
like the deadly upas-tree, has blighted every other sentiment and
affection beneath its shade. There is no happiness for Lancelot without
Guinevere, no sweetness in the breath of evening nor speculation in the
stars of night, no gladness in the summer, no glamour in the greenwood,
no glory in the day. Her whisper lurks in the hollow of his helmet
when he shouts his war-cry, her image rouses his desire for fame, and
points his trusty lance. But for the keen, unholy stimulant his arm
would be nerveless and his courage dull, while all the time
“The great and guilty love he bare the queen,
In battle with the love he bare his lord,
Hath marred his face, and marked it ere his time.”
Yes, there is retribution even here for the sweet, seductive sin. “The
worm that dieth not, the fire that is not quenched,” begin their work
long ere the cup has been emptied of its tempting poison; and the one
gnaws fiercer, the other burns deeper, in proportion to the capability
of good from which the sinner has fallen—in proportion to the truth and
tenderness of the tortured heart that seems meant for better things.
And Guinevere. Who can fathom that woman’s anguish, her shame, her
self-reproach, her bitter, hopeless remorse, for whom the holy plighted
love that should have made her shield, her honour, and her happiness
through life, has been pierced, and shattered, and defiled by that
other love which drags her to perdition, and to which she yet clings
closer and closer with a warped instinct of womanly fidelity for the
very sorrow and suffering it entails? The sense of personal degradation
is perhaps the least of her punishment, for it is her nature when she
loves to merge her own identity in another; but what of her children,
if she have any? How can she bear the clear, guileless faces, the
little hands clasped in prayer on her knee, the loving, trustful eyes
of those simple believers to whom she, the sinner, is in the place
of God? Many a woman, hesitating and hovering on the very brink of
ruin, has been withheld by the tiny clasp of an infant’s hand. If that
last chance should have failed her, such failure has been ever after
the heaviest and least endurable of the penalties she has brought on
herself.
But she may be childless, she may be spared the bitter pain of
estrangement from those who are indeed part and parcel of her being.
What, then, of her husband? The man whom once she believed she
loved, who has cherished her, trusted her, given up for her sake
many of the realities and all the illusions of life, whose care has
surrounded her so constantly every day and all day long, that, like
the air she breathes, she can only be made sensible of its existence
when withdrawn, whose indulgence was perhaps so unvaried as to escape
notice, whose affection, expressed by deeds, not words, she has
forgotten because it has not been repeated, like that other love, in
burning whispers every hour. So she not only strikes him a deadly
blow, such as his bitterest enemy would scarce deal in fair fight,
but poisons her weapon besides, and leaves it sticking in the wound
to burn and rankle and fester, that every passing hand in careless
jest or wanton outrage may inflict on him mortal agony at will. Once,
perhaps, she was proud of that brave, kind face, which she could not
imagine blanched by fear nor clouded with shame. Can she bear to think
of it now, quivering at the chance allusion of every idle tongue,
warped into agony, like that of a man shot through the lungs, when
her own name is spoken, purposely or otherwise, by some impertinent
gossip or some rancorous, ungenerous foe? His sorrow has become a jest;
that offence will soon pass away to make room for fresher scandal. His
home is broken up; he can make himself another. The woman he loved has
left him, yet there are plenty more as fond and fair ready to pity and
console; but his trust is broken, and not even in an angel from heaven
can he believe again. This is the worst injury of all. The strongest,
the purest, the noblest of earthly motives to well-doing has failed
him, and from henceforth the man is but a lamp without a light, a
watch without a mainspring, a body without a soul. It is well for him
now if he have some lofty aspiration, some great and generous object,
to lift him out of his depth of sorrow, to rouse him from his apathy
of despair. Thus only can he wrestle with the demon that has entered
into his heart, thus only cast him out and, trampling on him, so rise
to a higher sphere than that from which he has been dragged down. In
self-sacrifice and self-devotion he shall find the talisman to set him
free, not at once, but, like other permanent results, gradually and
in the lapse of time; so, mounting step by step and gaining strength
as he ascends, he shall look down from the unassailable heights of
forgiveness on the lesser souls that can never reach to wound him
now—forgiveness, free, complete, and unconditional as that which he
himself pleads for from his God.
And here it is that the character of Arthur, as drawn by Tennyson,
exemplifies the noblest type of Christianity, chivalry, and manhood
with which we are acquainted in the whole range of fiction. Poetry has
yet to disclose to us a more godlike, more elevating sentiment than the
king’s pardon to his guilty and repentant wife. It breathes the very
essence of all those qualities which humanity, at best “a little lower
than the angels,” is ever striving unsuccessfully to attain. There is
courage, abiding by the award of its own conscience, and appealing
to a higher tribunal than the verdict of its kind; there is contempt
for consequences; there is scrupulous, unswerving persistence in the
path of duty, such as constitutes the soldier and the hero; there is
large-hearted, far-seeing benevolence, that weighs its own crushed
happiness and blighted life but as dust in the balance against the
well-being of its fellows. Above all, there is that grand trust in a
better world and an immortal identity, without which man, despite his
strength of will and pride of intellect, were little superior to the
beasts of the field. Such is the diapason, so to speak, of this mighty
march of feeling—the march of an unconquered spirit and a kingly soul;
while through it all, ever present, though ever modulated and kept
down, runs the wild, mournful accompaniment, the wail of a kindly,
tortured heart, of a love that can never die—
“And in thy bowers of Camelot or of Usk
Thy shadow still would glide from room to room,
And I should evermore be vext with thee,
In hanging robe—or vacant ornament,
Or ghostly footfall echoing on the stair.
For think not, though thou wouldst not love thy lord,
Thy lord has wholly lost his love for thee.
I am not made of such slight elements.
Yet must I leave thee, woman, to thy shame.”
How wonderful, how exhaustive, and how practical seems the familiarity
of great poets with the niceties and workings of the human heart! It
has been said of them, prettily enough, that
“They learn in suffering what they teach in song.”
God forbid! If it were so, their lot would indeed be unenviable; and
what an eternity of torture would such a genius as Byron, or Shelley,
or Tennyson himself have condensed into a single life! No, theirs must
be rather the intuitive knowledge that springs from sympathy with
all things, animate and inanimate, in summer and winter, in light
and darkness, in sorrow and in joy—a sympathy receiving freely as it
gives, and thus cozening them out of nine-tenths of their own private
sorrows, which such finer temperaments as theirs would otherwise be too
sensitive to endure.
The wide scope of this sympathy, the facility with which genius can
handle extreme contrasts of the same passion with equal skill, is, I
think, finely exemplified in the two poems of “Maud” and “Guinevere.”
I have already compared the latter to an exquisite piece of sculpture.
The former seems to me like a wild, fanciful, highly-coloured painting,
in which some true artist has striven to embody the unattainable
conceptions of a dream. Was ever colouring mixed on palette more vivid
and glowing than this description of a lover waiting for his mistress
in her garden—
“There falls a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate;
She is coming—my dove, my dear!
She is coming—my life, my fate!
The red rose cries, She is near—she is near!
The white rose weeps,—She is late!
The larkspur listens,—I hear—I hear!
And the lily whispers,—I wait!”
Is there not in these lines, besides grace, sentiment, pathos,
tenderness, a wealth of pictorial fancy, such as Landseer himself has
not outdone in his magical representation of clown and elves and stars
and flowers grouped round Titania in Fairyland?
As in “clear-faced Arthur” is rendered the ideal dignity of love, so
in Maud’s hapless suitor we find exemplified its mad enthusiasm and
passion. With both, self is unhesitatingly sacrificed to the welfare
of another. When the fatal shot has been fired, and the exile faces
a foreign shore in utter hopelessness that he shall ever look on
the face he loves again, the pity for himself that cannot but chill
his sorrowing heart merges in anxiety and tenderness for Maud. Even
now—perhaps now more than ever—in grief, danger, and privation, his
first thought flies to the idol for whom he has built his life into a
throne, that she may reign there unrivalled and supreme. May _his_ be
the shame, the sorrow, and the suffering!—such is his wild, pathetic
prayer—and let the treasure of his heart go free. If there be danger,
let it lower round _his_ unprotected head. If there be punishment, let
_him_ bear it for both! Ay, though she may never reward him for it,
never even know it; for in this world these two are surely parted not
to meet again. What of that? She is still his queen—his goddess—his
love—the aim of his existence, the darling of his care.
“Comfort her, comfort her, all things good,
While I am over the sea;
Let me and my passionate love go by,
But speak to her all things holy and high,
Whatever happen to me.
Me and my harmful love go by,
But come to her waking, or find her asleep,
Powers of the height, powers of the deep,
And comfort her though I die.”
Surely this is the pure, unadulterated metal. Alas! that it should
sometimes lack the glitter of that counterfeit which women grasp at so
eagerly in preference to the true gold. So, in extremity of danger,
shattered in battle against the chosen friend and comrade whose
treachery was only less galling to his noble heart than the disloyalty
of his queen, beset by
“The godless hosts
Of heathen swarming o’er the Northern sea,”
stern old foes of himself and Christendom, erst by prowess of that
“glorious company,”
“The Table Round,
In twelve great battles ruining overthrown,”
now panting for reprisal and revenge, menaced with open rebellion by
a sister’s son, his army melting, his adherents failing, his sceptre
sliding from his grasp, Arthur can yet provide tenderly and carefully
for her safety who has brought down on him all this shame, ruin, and
defeat.
“And many more when Modred raised revolt,
Forgetful of their troth and fealty, clave
To Modred, and a remnant stays with me.
And of this remnant will I leave a part—
True men who love me still, for whom I live—
To guard thee in the wild hour coming on;
Lest but a hair of this low head be harmed.
Fear not: thou shalt be guarded till my death.”
Well might the Queen, when he had passed from her sight for ever,
reflect bitterly on the comparative merits of lover and husband,
having, like all such women, proved to extremity of torture the
devotion of both.
“I wanted warmth and colour, which I found
In Lancelot. Now I see thee what thou art—
Thou art the highest, and most human, too,
Not Lancelot, nor another.”
Could she but have seen him as he really was in the golden days long
ago, when her court formed the centre of all that was bravest and
fairest in the world of Christendom, when her life seemed one long
holiday of dance and revel in the lighted halls of Camelot, of tilt
and tournament and pageantry of mimic war, held in honour of her own
peerless beauty, in the Lists of Caerleon, of horn and hound and
rushing chase and willing palfrey speeding over the scented moors
of Cornwall, or through the sunny glades of Lyonesse, of sweet May
mornings when she went forth fresh and lovely, fairer than the very
smile of spring, amongst her courtiers, all
“Green-suited, but with plumes that mocked the may,”
to walk apart, nevertheless, with flushing cheek and eyes cast down,
while she listened to _his_ whispers, whose voice was softer and
sweeter than fairy music in her ears! Could she but have known then
where to seek her happiness and find it! Alas! that we see things so
differently in different lights and surroundings—in serge and velvet,
in the lustre of revelry and the pale cold grey of dawn, in black
December frosts and the rich glow of June. Alas for us, that so seldom,
till too late to take our bearings and avoid impending shipwreck, can
we make use of that fearful gift described by another great poet as
“The telescope of truth,
Which strips the distance of its fantasies,
And brings life near, in utter nakedness,
Making the cold reality too real!”
but still _reality_, and, as such, preferable to all the baseless
visions of fancy, all the glitter and glamour and illusion of romance.
We mortals must have our dreams; doubtless it is for a good purpose
that they are so fair and sweet, that their duration is so short, the
waking from them so bitter and forlorn. But at last most of us find
ourselves disenchanted, weary, hopeless, memory-haunted, and seeking
sanctuary after all, like Guinevere, when Lancelot had gone
“Back to his land, but she to Almesbury
Fled all night long by glimmering waste and weald,
And heard the spirits of the waste and weald
Moan as she fled, or thought she heard them moan,—
And in herself she moaned—‘Too late! too late!’”
What a picture of desolation and despair! Mocking phantoms all about
her, now gibing, now pitying, now goading her to the recklessness of
despair. Before her, darkness uncheered by a single beacon; behind
her, the sun of life and love gone down to rise no more, and, lifting
helpless, hopeless eyes above,
“A blot in heaven, the raven flying high.”
Deep must be the guilt for which such hours as these are insufficient
to atone!
But the queen’s penance hath only just begun, for the black drop is
not yet wrung out of her heart, and even in her cloister at Almesbury
it is remorse rather than repentance that drives the iron into her
soul. As it invariably does in moments of extreme feeling, the
master-passion takes possession of her once more, and “my Lancelot”
comes back in all his manly beauty and his devoted tenderness, so
touching and so prized, that for him, too, it must make the sorrow
of a lifetime. Again, she sees him in the lists, best, bravest, and
knightliest lance of all the Round Table. Again, sitting fair and
courtly and gentle among dames in hall, his noble face none the less
winsome, be sure, to _her_, for that she could read on it the stamp of
sorrow set there by herself as her own indelible seal.
Again she tastes the bitter torture of their parting agony, and her
very spirit longs only to be released that it may fly to him for ever,
far away in his castle beyond the sea.
This, with true dramatic skill, is the moment chosen by the poet for
the arrival of her injured, generous, and forgiving lord—
“While she brooded thus,
And grew half guilty in her thoughts again,
There rode an armed warrior to the doors.”
And now comes that grand scene of sorrow and penitence and pardon, for
which this poem seems to me unequalled and alone.
Standing on the brink of an uncertainty more ghastly than death, for
something tells him that he is now to lead his hosts in his last
battle, and that the unearthly powers to whom he owes birth, fame, and
kingdom, are about to reclaim him for their own, he stretches the hands
of free forgiveness, as it were, from the other world.
How short, in the face of doom so imminent, so inevitable, appears that
span of life, in which so much has been accomplished! Battles have
been fought, victories gained, a kingdom established, a bulwark raised
against the heathen, an example set to the whole of Christendom, and
yet it seems but yesterday
“They found a naked child upon the sands
Of wild Dundagil by the Cornish sea,
And that was Arthur.”
Now in the height of glory, in the fulfilment of duty, in the prime of
manhood, such sorrows have overtaken him, as must needs whisper their
prophetic warning that his task is done, and it is time to go. _Where_,
he sees not, cares not. True to himself and his knighthood, he is ready
now, as always, to follow the path of honour, wherever it may lead, and
meet unflinching
“Death, or I know not what mysterious doom.”
Arthur, dethroned, ruined, heart-broken, mortally wounded, and
unhorsed, will be no less Arthur than when on Badon Hill he stood
“High on a heap of slain, from spur to plume,
Red as the rising sun with heathen blood,”
and shouted victory with a great voice in the culminating triumph of
his glory.
[Illustration: “‘We two may meet before high God.’”
_Bones and I._] [_Page 257_
]
For him, too, at this supreme moment the master-passion asserts its
sway, and even that great soul thrills to its centre with the love that
has been wasted for half a lifetime on her who is only now awaking to
a consciousness of its worth. He cannot leave her for ever without
bidding farewell to his guilty queen. So riding through the misty
night to the convent where she has taken refuge, he looks his last in
this world on her from whom in his great loyalty of affection neither
her past disgrace nor his own approaching death shall part him for
ever. With that instinct of pure love which clings to a belief in
its eternity, he charges her to cleanse her soul with repentance and
sustain her hopes with faith, that
“Hereafter in that world where all are pure
We two may meet before high God, and thou
Wilt spring to me, and claim me thine, and know
I am thine husband.”
Thus, with all his soul flowing to his lips, this grand heroic nature
blesses the guilty woman, grovelling in the dust, and moves off
stately and unflinching to confront the doom of Fate.
Then, true to the yearning nature of her sex, yearning ever with
keenest longings for the lost and the impossible, Guinevere leaps to
her feet, the tide of a new love welling up in her wayward heart,
fierce, cruel, and irresistible, because it must be henceforth utterly
hopeless and forlorn. With her own hand she has put away her own
happiness; and what happiness it might have been she feels too surely,
now that no power on earth can ever make it hers again!
Oh! for one word more from the kind, forgiving voice! Oh! for one look
in the brave, clear, guileless face! But no. It is never to be. Never,
never more! She rushes indeed to the casement, but Arthur is already
mounted and bending from the saddle, to give directions for _her_
safety and _her_ comfort.
“So she did not see the face,
Which then was as an angel, but she saw—
Wet with the mists and smitten by the lights—
The dragon of the great Pendragon-ship
Blaze, making all the night a steam of fire.
And even then he turned; and more and more
The moony vapours rolling round the king,
Who seemed the phantom of a giant in it,
Enwound him, fold by fold, and made him gray
And grayer, till himself became as mist
Before her, moving ghostlike to his doom.”
“I think I like it better without your explanations and remarks,”
observed Bones. “There is a proverb, my friend, about ‘refined gold,’
and ‘the lily,’ that you would do well to remember. Hang it! man, do
you think nobody understands or appreciates poetry but yourself?”
Perhaps I have over-aired him lately; but it seems to me that Bones
is a good deal “above himself.” If I can only get him back into the
cupboard, I have more than half a mind to lock him up for good and all.
THE END
RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON & BUNGAY.
FOOTNOTES:
[1]
“If that’s a fight indeed,
Where you strike hard, and I stand still and bleed.”
[2]
“Cogitat Ursidius, sibi dote jugare puellam,
Ut placeat domino, cogitat Ursidius.”
[3] A narrow board, on which provisions, etc. are packed, to be dragged
through the woods on these expeditions in the snow.
Transcriber’s Notes
pg 9 Changed: the value of “this here obserwation
to: the value of “this here observation
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