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London: Chatto & Windus, 111 St. Martin's Lane, W.C.
Love’s Cross-Currents
Love’s
Cross-Currents
A Year’s Letters
By Algernon Charles Swinburne
LondonChatto & Windus
1905
To Theodore Watts-Dunton
As it has pleased you to disinter this buried
bantling of your friend’s literary youth, and to find it
worth resurrection, I must inscribe it to you as the person
responsible for its revival. Were it not that a friend’s
judgment may always seem liable to be coloured by the
unconscious influence of friendship, I should be reassured
as to its deserts by the approval of a master from whose
verdict on a stranger’s attempt in the creative art of
fiction there could be no reasonable appeal—and who, I
feel bound to acknowledge with gratitude and satisfaction,
has honoured it by the sponsorial suggestion of a new and a
happier name. As it is, I can only hope that you may not be
for once mistaken in your favourable opinion of a study
thrown into the old epistolary form which even the giant
genius of Balzac could not restore to
the favour it
enjoyed in the days of Richardson and
of Laclos. However that may be, I am
content to know that you agree with me in thinking that in
the world of literary creation there is a legitimate place
for that apparent compromise between a story and a play by
which the alternate agents and patients of the tale are made
to express what befalls them by word of mouth or of pen. I
do not forget that the king of men to whose hand we owe the
glorious history of Redgauntlet began it in
epistolary form and changed the fashion of his tale to direct
and forthright narrative when the story became too strong
for him, and would no longer be confined within the limits
of conceivable correspondence: but his was in its ultimate
upshot a historic and heroic story. And I have always
regretted that we have but one specimen of the uncompleted
series of letters out of which an earlier novel, the
admirable Fortunes of Nigel, had grown up
into immortality. The single sample which
Lockhart saw fit to vouchsafe
us is so great a masterpiece of dramatic humour and living
imagination that the remainder of a fragment which might
well suffice for the fame of any lesser man ought surely to
have been long since made public. We could not dispense with
the doubtless more generally amusing and interesting
narrative which superseded it: but the true and thankful and
understanding lover of Scott must and
will readily allow or affirm that there are signs of even
rarer and finer genius in the cancelled fragment of the
rejected study. But these are perhaps too high and serious
matters to be touched upon in a note of acknowledgment
prefixed to so early an attempt in the great art of fiction
or creation that it would never have revisited the light or
rather the twilight of publicity under honest and legitimate
auspices, if it had not found in you a sponsor and a
friend.
Contents
Page
Prologue
1
I.
LADY MIDHURST TO MRS. RADWORTH
41
II.
MRS. RADWORTH TO FRANCIS CHEYNE
51
III.
LADY MIDHURST TO LADY CHEYNE
55
IV.
FRANCIS CHEYNE TO MRS. RADWORTH
65
V.
LADY CHEYNE TO FRANCIS CHEYNE
69
VI.
LADY MIDHURST TO REGINALD HAREWOOD
72
VII.
REGINALD HAREWOOD TO EDWARD AUDLEY
84
VIII.
FRANCIS CHEYNE TO MRS. RADWORTH
88
IX.
LADY MIDHURST TO LADY CHEYNE
92
X.
LADY MIDHURST TO LADY CHEYNE
100
XI.
REGINALD HAREWOOD TO MRS. RADWORTH
110
XII.
MRS. RADWORTH TO REGINALD HAREWOOD
114
XIII.
FRANCIS CHEYNE TO LADY CHEYNE
122
XIV.
LADY MIDHURST TO REGINALD HAREWOOD
126
XV.
LADY CHEYNE TO FRANCIS
141
XVI.
MRS. RADWORTH TO LADY MIDHURST
144
XVII.
LADY MIDHURST TO LADY CHEYNE
148
XVIII.
LADY MIDHURST TO FRANCIS CHEYNE
159
XIX.
FRANCIS CHEYNE TO MRS. RADWORTH
164
XX.
REGINALD HAREWOOD TO LADY CHEYNE
168
Page
XXI.
LADY MIDHURST TO MRS. RADWORTH
179
XXII.
CAPTAIN HAREWOOD TO REGINALD
190
XXIII.
FRANCIS CHEYNE TO MRS. RADWORTH
197
XXIV.
LADY CHEYNE TO MRS. RADWORTH
203
XXV.
REGINALD HAREWOOD TO EDWARD AUDLEY
207
XXVI.
LADY CHEYNE TO REGINALD HAREWOOD
217
XXVII.
REGINALD HAREWOOD TO MRS. RADWORTH
222
XXVIII.
LADY MIDHURST TO MRS. RADWORTH
228
XXIX.
FRANCIS CHEYNE TO LADY MIDHURST
244
XXX.
LADY MIDHURST TO LADY CHEYNE
248
PROLOGUE
I
In the spring of 1849, old
Lord Cheyne, the noted philanthropist, was, it will
be remembered by all those interested in social
reform, still alive and energetic. Indeed, he had
some nine years of active life before him—public
baths, institutes, reading-rooms, schools,
lecture-halls, all manner of improvements, were yet
to bear witness to his ardour in the cause of
humanity. The equable eye of philosophy has long
since observed that the appetite of doing good,
unlike those baser appetites which time effaces and
enjoyment allays, gains in depth and vigour with
advancing years—a cheering truth, attested alike by
the life and death of this excellent man. Reciprocal
amelioration, he was wont to say, was the aim of
every acquaintance he made—of every act of
benevolence he allowed himself. Religion alone was
wanting to complete a
character almost painfully perfect. The mutual moral
friction of benefits bestowed and blessings received
had, as it were, rubbed off the edge of those
qualities which go to make up the religious
sentiment. The spiritual cuticle of this truly good
man was so hardened by the incessant titillations of
charity, and of that complacency with which virtuous
people look back on days well spent, that the
contemplative emotions of faith and piety had no
effect on it; no stimulants of doctrine or
provocatives of devotion could excite his fancy or
his faith—at least, no clearer reason than this has
yet been assigned in explanation of a fact so
lamentable.
His son Edmund, the late lord, was nineteen at the above
date. Educated in the lap of philanthropy, suckled
at the breasts of all the virtues in turn, he was
even then the worthy associate of his father in all
schemes of improvement; only, in the younger man,
this inherited appetite for goodness took a somewhat
singular turn. Mr. Cheyne was a Socialist—a Democrat
of the most advanced kind. The father was quite
happy in the construction of a model cottage; the
son was busied with plans for the equalization of
society. The wrongs of women gave him many a
sleepless night; their cause excited in him an
interest all
the more commendable when we
consider that he never enjoyed their company in the
least, and was, in fact, rather obnoxious to them
than otherwise. The fact of this mutual repulsion
had nothing to do with philanthropy. It was
undeniable; but, on the other hand, the
moral-sublime of this young man’s character was
something incredible. Unlike his father, he was much
worried by religious speculations—certain phases of
belief and disbelief he saw fit to embody in a
series of sonnets, which were privately printed
under the title of Aspirations,
by a Wayfarer. Very flabby
sonnets they were, leaving in the mouth a taste of
chaff and dust; but the genuine stamp of a sincere
and single mind was visible throughout; which was no
small comfort.
The wife of Lord Cheyne, not unnaturally, had died in
giving birth to such a meritorious portent.
Malignant persons, incapable of appreciating the
moral-sublime, said that she died of a plethora of
conjugal virtue on the part of her husband. It is
certain that less sublime samples of humanity did
find the society of Lord Cheyne a grievous
infliction. Reform, emancipation, manure, the right
of voting, the national burden, the adulteration of
food, mechanics,
farming, sewerage, beetroot
sugar, and the loftiest morality formed each in turn
the staple of that excellent man’s discourse. If an
exhausted visitor sought refuge in the son’s
society, Mr. Cheyne would hold forth by the hour on
divorce, Church questions, pantheism, socialism
(Christian or simple), the equilibrium of society,
the duties of each class, the mission of man, the
balance of ranks, education, development, the stages
of faith, the meaning of the age, the relation of
parties, the regeneration of the priesthood, the
reformation of criminals, and the destiny of woman.
Had fate or date allowed it,—but stern chronology
forbade,—he would assuredly have figured as
president, as member, or at least as correspondent
of the Society for the Suppression of Anatomy, the
Society for the Suppression of Sex, or the Ladies’
Society for the Propagation of Contagious Disease
(Unlimited). But these remarkable associations, with
all their potential benefits to be conferred on
purblind and perverse humanity, were as yet
unprofitably dormant in the sluggish womb of time.
Nevertheless, the house decidedly might have been
livelier than it was.
Not that virtue wanted its reward. Lord Cheyne was in
daily correspondence with some
dozen of societies for the
propagation and suppression of Heaven knows what;
Professor Swallow, Dr. Chubbins, and Mr. Jonathan
Bloman were among his friends. His son enjoyed the
intimacy of M. Adrien Laboissière, secretary of the
committee of a minor democratic society; and Mdlle
Clémence de Massigny, the too-celebrated authoress
of Rosine et Rosette,Confidences d’un
Fauteuil, and other dangerous books, had, when in
the full glow of her brief political career, written
to the young son of pale and brumous Albion,
pays des libertés tronquées
et des passions châtrées, an epistle of some twenty pages, in which
she desired him, not once or twice, to kiss the
paper where she had left a kiss for him—baiser chaste et
frémissant, she averred, étreinte altière et douce
de l’esprit dégagé des pièges hideux de la
matière, témoin et sceau d’un amour
idéal.O poëte! she exclaimed elsewhere, versons sur cette triste
humanité la rosée rafraîchissante de nos pleurs;
mêlons sur nos lèvres le soupir qui console au
sourire qui rayonne. Chaque larme qui tombe peut
rouler dans une plaie qu’elle soulagera. Les
voluptés âcres et sévères de l’attendrissement
valent bien le plaisir orageux des sens
allumés. All this was astonishing but satisfactory to
the
recipient, and worth at least
any two of his father’s letters. Chubbins, Bloman,
and the rest, practical men enough in their way,
held in some contempt the infinite and the ideal,
and were incapable of appreciating the absolute
republic and the forces of the future.
The arid virtue of the two chiefs was not common to the
whole of the family. Mr. John Cheyne, younger
brother to the noted philanthropist, had lived at a
great rate for years; born in the regency period, he
had grasped the receding skirt of its fashions;
he had made friends with his time, and sucked his orange
to some purpose before he came to the rind. He
married well, not before it was high time; his
finances, inherited from his mother, and originally
not bad for a younger son, were shaken to the last
screw that kept both ends together; he was turned of
forty, and his wife had a decent fortune: she was a
Miss Banks, rather handsome, sharp and quick in a
good-natured way. She brought him a daughter in
1836, and a son in 1840; then, feeling, no doubt,
that she had done all that could be looked for from
a model wife, completed her good work by dying in
1841. John Cheyne consoled himself with the
reflection that she might have done worse; his own
niece, the
wife of a neighbour and friend, had
eloped the year before, leaving a boy of two on her
husband’s hands. For the reasons of this we must go
some way back and bring up a fresh set of
characters, so as to get things clear at starting.
A reference to the Peerage will give us, third on the
Cheyne family list of a past generation, the name of
Helena, born 1800, married in 1819 Sir Thomas
Midhurst, Bart., by whom (deceased) she had one
daughter, Amicia, born 1820, married in May, 1837,
to Captain Philip Harewood, by whom she had issue
Reginald-Edward, born April 7, 1838. This marriage
was dissolved in 1840 by Act of Parliament.
And, we may add, Mrs. Harewood was married in the
same year to Frederick Stanford, Esq., of Ashton
Hildred, co. Bucks, to whom, in 1841, she presented
a daughter, named after herself at the father’s
desire, who in 1859 married the late Lord Cheyne,
just ten months after his father’s lamented decease.
Lady Midhurst, then already widowed, took up her
daughter’s cause energetically at the time of the
divorce. Her first son-in-law was her favourite
abhorrence; with her second she had always been on
the best of terms, residing, indeed, now for many
years past with him and his wife, an honoured inmate
for the term of her natural life,
and in a quiet though
effectual way mistress of the whole household. It
was appalling to hear her hold forth on the topic of
the unhappy Captain Harewood. She had known him
intimately before he married her daughter; at that
time he thought fit to be delightful. After the
marriage he unmasked at once, and became detestable.
(Fan and foot, clapping down together, used to keep
time to this keen-voiced declaration.) He had used
his wife dreadfully; at this day his treatment of
the poor boy left in his hands was horrible,
disgraceful for its stupidity and cruelty—such a
nice little fellow the child was, too, not the least
like him, but the image of his mother and of her
(Lady Midhurst), which of course was reason enough
for that ruffian to ill-use his own son. There was
one comfort, she had leave to write to the boy, and
go now and then to see him; and she took care to
encourage him in his revolt against his father’s
style of training. In effect, as far as she could,
Lady Midhurst tried to instil into her grandson her
own views of his father’s character; it was not
difficult, seeing that father and son were utterly
unlike and discordant. Old Lord Cheyne (who took
decidedly the Harewood side, and used sometimes to
have the boy over to Lidcombe, where
he revelled about the stables all
day long) once remonstrated with his sister on this
course of tactics. My dear Cheyne, she
replied, in quite a surprised voice, you forget
Captain Harewood’s estate is entailed. He was
an ex-captain; his elder brother had died before he
paid court to Miss Midhurst, and, when he married,
the captain had land to settle on. As a younger
brother, Lady Midhurst had liked him extremely; as a
man of marriageable income, she gave him her
daughter, and fell at once to hating him.
Capricious or not, she was a beautiful old woman to look
at; something like her brother John, who had been
one of the handsomest men of his day; her daughter
and grand-daughter, both women of singular beauty
and personal grace, inherited their looks and
carriage from her. Clear-skinned, with pure regular
features, and abundant bright white hair (it turned
suddenly some ten years after this date, in the
sixtieth of her age), she was a study for old
ladies. People liked to hear her talk; she was not
unwilling to gratify them. At one time of her life,
she had been known to say, her tongue got her into
some trouble, and her style of sarcasm involved her
in various unpleasant little differences and
difficulties. All that was ever said
against her she managed
somehow to outlive, and at fifty and upwards she was
generally popular, except, indeed, with religious
and philanthropic persons. These, with the natural
instinct of race, smelt out at once an enemy in her.
At sight of her acute attentive smile and reserved
eyes a curate would become hot and incoherent,
finally dumb; a lecturer nervous, and voluble to the
last.
II
The two children of Mr.
John Cheyne enjoyed somewhat less of their aunt’s
acquaintance and care than did her grandchildren, or
even her other nephew, Lord Cheyne’s
politico-philanthropic son and successor. They were
brought up in the quietest way possible; Clara with
a governess, who took her well in hand at an early
age, and kept her apart from all influence but her
own; Frank under the lazy kind incurious eyes of his
father, who coaxed him into a little shaky Latin at
his spare hours, with a dim vision before him of
Eton as soon as the boy should be fit. Lord Cheyne
now and then exchanged visits with his brother, but
not often; and the children not unnaturally were
quite incapable of appreciating the earnest
single-minded philanthropy of the excellent
man—their father hardly relished it more than they
did. But there was one man, or boy, whom John Cheyne
held in deeper and sincerer abhorrence than he did
his brother; and this was his brother’s son. Mr.
Cheyne called between whiles at his uncle’s, but was
hardly received with a decent welcome. A
clearer-
sighted or more speculative man than
John Cheyne would have scented a nascent inclination
on his nephew’s part towards his daughter. There was
a sort of weakly weary gentleness of manner in the
young philanthropist which the girl soon began to
appreciate. Clara showed early enough a certain
acuteness, and a relish of older company, which gave
promise of some practical ability. At thirteen she
had good ideas of management, and was a match for
her father in most things. But she could not make
him tolerate his nephew; she could only turn his
antipathy to profit by letting it throw forward into
relief her own childish friendliness. There was the
composition of a good intriguer in the girl from the
first; she had a desirable power of making all that
could be made out of every chance of enjoyment. She
was never one to let the present slip. Few children
have such a keen sense as she how infinitely
preferable is the smallest limping skinny
half-moulted sparrow in the hand to the fattest
ortolan in the bush. She was handsome too, darker
than her father’s family; her brother had more of
the Cheyne points about him. Frank was not a bad
sort of boy, quiet, idle, somewhat excitable and
changeable, with a good deal of floating affection
in him, and a fund of respect
for his sister. Lady Midhurst,
after one of her visits (exploring cruises in search
of character, she called them), set him down in a
decisive way as flat, fade, wanting in spice and salt; the sort of
boy always to do decently well under any
circumstances, to get creditably through any work
he might have to do; a fellow who would never
tumble because he never jumped; well enough
disposed, no doubt, and not a milksop exactly—
certain to get on comfortably with most people, if
there were not more of his father latent in the
boy than she saw yet; whereas, if he really had
inherited anything of her brother John’s head-strong
irresolute nature, she was sure he had no
strong qualities to counterbalance or modify
it.
Lady Midhurst rather piqued herself on this exhaustive
elaborate style of summary; and had, indeed, a good
share of insight and analytic ability. Her character
of Frank was mainly unfair; but that quality of
always doing well enough under any
circumstances the boy really had in some
degree: a rather valuable quality too. His aunt
would have admitted the value of it at once; but he
was not her sort, she would have added; she liked
people who made their own scrapes for themselves
before they fell into them, and then got out without
being fished
for. Frank would get into
trouble sometimes, no doubt, but he would just slip
in. Now it was always better to fall than to slip.
You got less dirty, and were less time about it;
besides, an honest tumble was less likely to give
you a bad sprain. This philosophic lady had a deep
belief in the discipline of circumstances, and was
disposed to be somewhat more than lenient towards
any one passing (not unsoiled) through his time of
probation and training. Personally, at this time,
Frank was a fair, rather short boy, with light hair
and grey eyes, usually peaceable and amiable in his
behaviour; his sister, tall, brown, thin, with clear
features, and something of an abrupt decisive air
about her. They had few friends, and saw little
company; Captain Harewood, who in former days had
been rather an intimate of John Cheyne’s, hardly
ever now rode over to see his ex-friend; not that he
had any quarrel with the uncle of his divorced wife,
but he now scarcely ever stirred out or sought any
company beyond a few professional men of his own
stamp and a clergyman or two, having lately taken up
with a rather acrid and dolorous kind of religion.
Lady Midhurst, one regrets to say, asserted that her
enemy made a mere pretence of austerity in
principle, and spent his time, under cover of
seclusion,
in the voluptuous pastime of
torturing his unlucky boy and all his miserable
subordinates. The man was always one of those
horrid people who cannot live without giving pain;
she remembered he was famous for cruelty in his
profession, and certainly he had always been the
most naturally cruel and spiteful man she ever
knew; she had not an atom of doubt he really had
some physical pleasure in the idea of others’
sufferings; that was the only way to explain the
whole course of his life and conduct. Once
launched on the philosophy of this subject, Lady
Midhurst went on to quote instances of a like taste
from history and tradition. As to the unfortunate
Captain Harewood, nothing could be falser than such
an imputation; he was merely a grave, dry, shy,
soured man, severe and sincere in his sorrowful
distaste for company. Perhaps he did enjoy his own
severity and moroseness, and had some occult
pleasure in the sense that his son was being trained
up sharply and warily; but did not a boy with such
blood in his veins need it?
Thus there was one source of company cut off, for the
first years of their life, from the young Cheynes.
The only companion they were usually sure of was not
much to count on in the way of amusement, being a
large, heavy, solitary boy of
sixteen or more, a son of
their neighbour on the left—Mr. Radworth, of
Blocksham. These Radworths were allies of old Lord
Cheyne’s, who had a great belief in the youth’s
genius and promise. He had developed, when quite
young, a singular taste and aptitude for science,
abstract and mechanical; had carried on this study
at school in the teeth of his tutors and in defiance
of his school-fellows, keeping well aloof from all
other learning and taking little or no rest or
relaxation. His knowledge and working power were
wonderful; but he was a slow, unlovely, weighty,
dumb, grim sort of fellow, and had already
overtasked his brain and nerves, besides ruining his
eyes. He never went anywhere but to the Cheynes’,
and there used to pay a dull puzzled homage to the
girl, who set very light by him. There was always a
strong flavour of the pedant and the philistin
about Ernest Radworth, which his juniors were of
course quick enough to appreciate.
Mr. John Cheyne, though on very fair terms with his
sister, did not visit the Stanfords; he had never
seen his niece since the time of the divorce; Lady
Midhurst was the only member of the household at
Ashton Hildred who ever came across to his place.
The two children hardly knew the name of their small
second cousin, Amicia Stanford;
she was a year younger than Frank
Cheyne, and the petted pupil of her grandmother.
Mrs. Stanford, a gentle handsome woman, placid and
rather shy in her manner, gave the child up wholly
to the elder lady’s care, and spent her days chiefly
in a soft sleepy kind of housekeeping. A moral
observer would have deplored the evident quiet
happiness of her life. She never thought at all
about her first husband, or the three years of her
life which Lady Midhurst used to call her
pre-Stanford period, except on those occasions when
her mother broke out with some fierce reference to
Captain Harewood, or some angry expression of
fondness for his son. Then Mrs. Stanford would cry a
little, in a dispassionate graceful manner; no doubt
she felt at times some bitter tender desire and
regret towards the first of her children, gave way
between whiles to some unprofitable memory of him,
small sorrows that had not heart enough in them to
last long. At one time, perhaps, she had wept away
all the tears she had in her; one may doubt if there
ever had been a great store of them for grief to
draw upon. She was of a delicate impressible nature,
but not fashioned so as to suffer sharply for long
together. If there came any sorrow in her way she
dropped down (so to speak)
at the feet of it, and bathed
them in tears till it took pity on her tender beauty
and passed by on the other side without doing her
much harm. She was quite unheroic and rather
unmaternal, but pleasantly and happily put together,
kind, amiable, and very beautiful; and as fond as
she could ever be, not only of herself, but also of
her husband, her mother, and her daughter. The
husband was a good sort of man, always deep in love
of his wife and admiration of her mother; never
conspicuous for any event in his life but that
elopement; and how matters even then had come to a
crisis between two such lovers as they were,
probably only one person on earth could have told;
and this third person certainly was not the bereaved
captain. The daughter was from her birth of that
rare and singular beauty which never changes for the
worse in growing older. She was one of the few girls
who have no ugly time. In this spring of 1849 she
was the most perfect child of eight that can be
imagined. There was a strange grave beauty and
faultless grace about her, more noticeable than the
more usual points of childish prettiness: pureness
of feature, ample brilliant hair, perfect little
lips, serious and rounded in shape, and wonderful
unripe beauty of chin and throat. Her grandmother,
who was fond of French
phrases when excited or especially
affectionate (a trick derived from recollections of
her own French mother and early friends among French
relatives—she had a way of saying, “Hein?” and glancing up
or sideways with an eye at once bird-like and
feline), asserted that “Amy was faite à peindre—faite à
croquer—faite à manger de baisers.” The
old life-worn philosophic lady seemed absolutely to
riot and revel in her fondness for the child. There
was always a certain amiably cynical side to her
affections, which showed itself by and by in the
girl’s training; but the delight and love aroused in
her at the sight of her pupil were as true and
tender as such emotions could be in such a woman.
Lady Midhurst was really very much fonder of her two
grandchildren than of any one else alive. Redgie was
just her sort of boy, she said, and Amy just her
sort of girl. It would have been delicious to bring
them up together (education, superintendence,
training of character, guidance of habit, in young
people, were passions with the excellent lady); and
if the boy’s father would just be good enough to
come to some timely end——. She had been godmother to
both children, and both were as fond of her as
possible. “Enfin!
she said, hopelessly.
III
They were to have enough to
do with each other in later life, these three
scattered households of kinsfolk; but the mixing
process only began on a late spring day of 1849, at
the country house which Mr. John Cheyne had
inherited from his wife. This was a little old
house, beautifully set in among orchards and
meadows, with abundance of roses now all round it,
under the heavy leaves of a spring that June was
fast gaining upon. A wide soft river divided the
marsh meadows in front of it, full of yellow
flag-flowers and moist fen-blossom. Behind, there
slanted upwards a small broken range of hills, the
bare green windy lawns of them dry and fresh under
foot, thick all the way with cowslips at the right
time. It was a splendid place for children; better
perhaps than Ashton Hildred with its huge old
brick-walled gardens and wonderful fruit-trees
blackened and dotted with lumps or patches of
fabulous overgrown moss, and wild pleasure-grounds
stifled with beautiful rank grass; better decidedly
than Lord Cheyne’s big brilliant Lidcombe, in spite
of royal shooting-grounds and the admirable slopes
of high bright
hill-country behind it, green sweet
miles of park and embayed lake, beyond praise for
riding and boating; better incomparably than Captain
Harewood’s place, muffled in woods, with a grim sad
beauty of its own, but seemingly knee-deep in sere
leaves all the year round, wet and weedy and dark
and deep down, kept hold of somehow by autumn in the
midst of spring; only the upper half of it clear out
of the clutch of winter even in the hottest height
of August weather, with a bitter flavour of frost
and rain in it all through summer. It was wonderful,
Lady Midhurst said, how any child could live there
without going mad or moping. She was thankful the
boy went to school so young, though no doubt his
father had picked out the very hardest sort of
school that he decently could select. Anything was
better than that horrid wet hole of a place, up to
the nose and eyes in black damp woods, and with
thick moist copses of alder and birch trees growing
against the very windows; and such a set of people
inside of it! She used to call there about three
times a year, during the boy’s holidays; get him
apart from his father and tutor, and give him
presents and advice and pity and encouragement of
all sorts, mixed with histories of his mother and
half-sister, the whole spiced not sparingly with
bitter allusions to his father, to
which one may fear there was
some response now and then on the boy’s part.
It was after one of these visits that Captain Harewood
first brought his son over to his old friend’s.
Perhaps he thought at length that the boy might as
well see some one about his own age in holiday-time.
Reginald was growing visibly mutinous and hard to
keep down by preachings and punishments; had begun
evidently to wince and kick under the domestic rod.
His father and the clerical tutor who came over
daily to look after the boy’s holiday task could
hardly keep him under by frequent flogging and much
serious sorrowful lecturing. He was not a specially
fast boy, only about as restless and insubordinate
as most fellows at his age; but this was far more
than his father was prepared to stand. Let him see
some one else outside home than Lady Midhurst; it
would do him no harm, and the boy was always
vicious, and jibbed frightfully, for some days after
his grandmother’s visits. So before the holidays
were out the Captain trotted him over to make
friends with Mr. Cheyne’s son. The visit was a
matter of keen and rather frightened interest to
Frank. Clara, on hearing the boy was her junior,
made light of it, and was out of the way when
Captain Harewood came in with his son. The two boys
eyed each
other curiously under close brows
and with lips expressive of a grave doubt on either
side. The visitor was a splendid-looking fellow,
lithe and lightly built, but of a good compact make,
with a sunburnt oval face, and hair like unspun
yellow silk in colour, but one mass of short rough
curls; eyebrows, eyes, and eyelashes all dark,
showing quaintly enough against his golden hair and
bright pale skin. His mouth, with a rather full red
under lip for a child, had a look of such impudent
and wilful beauty as to suggest at once the frequent
call for birch in such a boy’s education. His eyes
too had a defiant laugh latent under the lazy light
in them. Rather well got-up for the rest and
delicately costumed, though with a distinct school
stamp on him, but by no means after the
muscle-manful type.
This boy had a short whip in one hand, which was of
great and visible comfort to him. To switch his leg
in a reflective measured way was an action at once
impressive in itself and likely to meet and obviate
any conversational necessity that might turn up. No
smaller boy could accost him lightly while in that
attitude.
At last, with a gracious gravity, seeing both elders in
low-voiced talk, he vouchsafed five valuable words: “I say, what’s your name?” Frank
gave his name in with
meekness, having a just sense of his relative
insignificance. He was very honest and easy to
dazzle.
“Mine’s Reginald—Reginald Edward Harewood. It doesn’t
sound at all well” (this with a sententious
suppressed flourish in his voice as of one who
blandly deprecates a provoked contradiction)—” no,
not at all; because there’s such a lot of ‘D’s’ in
it. Yours is a much better name. How old are you?”
The abject Frank apologetically suggested “Nine.”
“You just look it,” said Reginald Harewood, with an
awful calm, indicative of a well-grounded contempt
for that time of life, restrained for the present by
an exquisite sense of social courtesy. “I’m
eleven—rising twelve—eleven last month. Suppose we
go out?”
IV
Once out in the garden,
Reginald became more wonderful than ever. Any one
not two years younger, and half a head shorter, must
have doubled up with laughter before he had gone
three steps. Our friend’s patronage of the sunlight,
his tolerance of the roses, his gentle thoughtful
condescension towards the face of things in general,
were too sublime for words.
When they came to the parapet of an old broad terrace,
Reginald, still in a dignified way, got astride it,
not without a curious grimace and some seeming
difficulty in adjusting his small person; tapped his
teeth with his whip-handle, and gave Frank for a
whole minute the full benefit of his eyes. Frank
stood twisting a rose-branch, and looked meek.
The result of Reginald’s scrutiny was this question,
delivered with much solemn effect.
“I say. Were you ever swished?”
“Swished?” said Frank, with a rapid heat in his
cheeks.
“Swished,” said Reginald, in his decided voice. ”
Birched.”
“Do you mean flogged?”
Frank asked this very diffidently, and as if the query
singed his lips.
“Well, flogged, if you like that better,” said
Reginald, conscious of a neat point. “Flogged. But
I mean a real, right-down swishing, you know. If a
fellow says flogged, it may be a whip, don’t you
see, or a strap. That’s caddish. But you can call it
flogging, if you like; only not at school, mind.
It’s all very well before me.”
Reverting from these verbal subtleties to the main
point, Reginald put the grand query again in a
modified shape, but in a tone of courteous
resolution, not to be evaded by any boy.
“Does your father often flog you?”
“I never was flogged in my life,” said Frank, sensible
of his deep degradation.
Reginald, as a boy of the world, could stand a good deal
without surprise; experience of men and things had
inured him to much that was curious and out of the
usual way. But at the shock of this monstrous and
incredible assertion he was thrown right off his
balance. He got off the parapet, leaned his
shoulders against it, and gazed upon the boy, to
whom birch was a dim dubious myth, a jocose threat
after dinner, with
eyebrows wonderfully high up, and
distended eyelids. Then he said,—
“Good—God!” softly, and dividing the syllables with
hushed breath.
Goaded to insanity by the big boy’s astonishment,
agonized by his silence, Frank tenderly put a timid
foot in it.
“Were you?” he asked, with much awe.
Then, with straightened shoulders and raised chin,
Reginald Harewood took up his parable. Some of his
filial expressions must be forgiven to youthful
excitement, and for the sake of accuracy; boys, when
voluble on a tender point, are awfully accurate in
their choice of words. Reginald was very voluble by
nature, and easy to excite on this painfully
personal matter.
“Ah, yes, I should think so. My good fellow, you ought
to have seen me yesterday. I was swished twice in
the morning. Can’t you see in a man’s eyes? My
father is—the—most—awful—Turk. He likes to swish
me—he does really. What you’ll do when you get to
school” (here a pause), “God knows.” (This in a
pensive and devout manner, touched with pity.)
“You’ll sing out—by Jove!—won’t you sing out the
first time you catch it! I used to—I do sometimes
now. For it hurts most awfully. But I can
stand a good lot of it. My
father can always draw blood at the third or fourth
cut. It’s just like a swarm of mad bees stinging you
at once. At school, if you kick, or if you wince
even, or if you make the least bit of row, you get
three cuts over. I always did when I was your age.
The fellows used to call me all manner of chaffy
names. Not the young ones, of course; I should lick
them. I say, I wish you were going to school. You’d
be letting fellows get you into the most awful
rows—ah! wouldn’t you? When I was your age I used
to get swished twice a week regular. The masters
spite me. I know one of them does, because he told
one of the big fellows he did. At least he said I
was a curse to my division, and I was ruining all
the young ones. He did really, on my word. I was the
fellow’s fag that he said it to, and he called me up
that night and licked me with a whip; with a whip
like this. He was a most awful bully. I don’t think
I’ll tell you what he did once to a boy. You
wouldn’t sleep well to-night.”
“Oh, do!” said Frank, quivering. The terrific interest
of Reginald’s confidences suspended his heart at his
lips; he beheld the Complete Schoolboy with a
breathless reverence. As for pity, he
would as soon have ventured to pity
a crowned head.
“No,” said the boy of the world, shaking considerate
curls; “I won’t tell a little fellow, I think : it’s
a shame to go and put them in a funk. Some fellows
are always trying it on, for a spree. I never do.
No, my good fellow, you’d better not ask me. You had
really.”
Reginald sucked his whip-handle with a relish, and eyed
the universe in a conscious way.
“Do, please,” pleaded the younger.” I don’t mind; I’ve heard
of—that is, I’ve read of—all kinds of awful things.
I don’t care about them the least bit.”
“Well, young one,” said Reginald, “don’t blame me
then, that’s all, if you have bad dreams. There was
one fellow ran away from school when he heard of
it—on my word.” And Reginald proceeded to recite
certain episodes—apocryphal or canonical—from the
life of a lower boy, giving the details with a
dreadful unction. No description can express the
full fleshy sound of certain words in his mouth. He
talked of “cuts” with quite
a liquorish accent, and gave the technical word “swish” with a twang in which
the hissing sound of a falling birch became sharply
audible. The boy was immeasurably proud of his
floggings, and
relished the subject of
flagellation as few men relish rare wine. As for
shame, he had never for a second thought of it. A
flogging was an affair of honour to him; if he came
off without tears, although with loss of blood, he
regarded the master with chivalrous pity, as a brave
enemy worsted. A real tormentor always revelled in
the punishment of Reginald. Those who plied the
birch with true loving delight in the use of it
enjoyed whipping such a boy intensely. Orbilius
would have feasted on his flesh—dined off him.
He looked Frank between the eyes as he finished and gave
a great shrug.
“I said you’d better not. You look
blue and green, upon my honour you do. It’s your
fault, my good fellow. I’m very sorry. I know some
fellows can’t stand things. I knew you couldn’t by
the look of your eyes. I could have taken my oath of
it. It isn’t in you. It’s not your fault; I dare say
you’ve no end of pluck, but you’re nervous, don’t
you see? I don’t mean you funk exactly; things
disagree with you—that’s it.”
Here Reginald strangled a discourteous and compromising
chuckle, and gave himself a cut with his whip that
made his junior wink.
“Ah, now, you see, that makes you wince. Now, look
here, you just take hold of that whip
and give me a cut as hard as you
possibly can. You just do that. I should like it.
Do, there’s a good fellow. I want to see if you
could hurt me. Hit hard, mind. Now then,” and he
presented a bending broadside to the shot.
The trodden worm turned and stung. Driven mad by
patronage, and all the more savage because of his
deep admiration, Frank could not let the chance
slip. He took sharp aim, set his teeth, and,
swinging all his body round with the force of the
blow as he dealt it, brought down the whip on the
tightest part he could pick out, with a vicious
vigour and stinging skill.
He had a moment’s sip of pure honey; Reginald jumped a
foot high, and yelled.
But in another minute, before Frank had got his breath
again, the boy turned round, rubbing hard with one
hand, patted him, and delivered a “Well done!”
more stinging than a dozen cuts. Frank succumbed.
“I say, just let me feel your muscle,” said Reginald,
passing scientific finger-tips up the arm of his
companion. “Ah, very good muscle you’ve got; you
ought just to keep it up, you see, and you’ll do
splendidly. Bend your arm up; so. I’ll tell you what
now; you ought to make no end of a good hitter in
time. But you wouldn’t
have hurt me a bit if I hadn’t
come to such grief yesterday. It was a jolly good
rod, and quite fresh, with no end of buds on; but
you see you can’t understand. Of course you can’t.
Then, you see, there was the ride over here. Riding
doesn’t usually make me lose leather; but to-day,
you know—that is, you don’t know. But you will.”
Reginald gave a pathetic nod, indicative of untold
horrors.
Frank had begun a meek excuse, which was cut short with
imperious grace.
“My dear fellow, don’t bother yourself. I don’t mind.
You’ll have to learn how to stand a cut before you
leave home; or the first time you’re sent up, by
Jove! how you will squeak! There was a fellow like
you last half (Audley his name was), who had never
been flogged till he came to school; he was a nice
sort of fellow enough, but when they told him to go
down—look here, he went in this way.” And Reginald
proceeded to enact the whole scene, making an
inoffensive laurel-bush represent the flagellated
novice, whose yells and contortions he rendered with
fearful effect, plying his whip vigorously between
whiles, till a rain of gashed leaves inundated the
gravel, and giving at the same time vocal imitations
of
the swish of the absent birch-twigs
and the voice of the officiating master, as it
fulminated words of objurgation and jocose contumely
at every other cut. The vivid portraiture of the
awful thing, and Redgie’s subsequent description
(too graphic and terrible in its naked realism to be
reproduced) of the culprit’s subsequent appearance
and demeanour, and of his usage at the hands of
indignant schoolboys, whose sense of propriety his
base behaviour under punishment had outraged in its
tenderest part, all this made the youthful hearer’s
blood shiver deliciously, and his nerves tingle with
a tremulous sympathy. He was grateful for this
experience, and felt older than five minutes since.
Reginald, too, remarking and relishing the
impression made, felt kindly towards his junior, and
promised, by implication, a continuance of his
patronage.
When they went in to luncheon, Redgie examined his
friend’s sister with the acute eyes of a boy of the
world, and evidently approved of her; became,
indeed, quite subdued, “lowly and serviceable,” on
finding that thirteen took a high tone with eleven,
and was not prepared to permit advances on an equal
footing. Frank, meantime, was scrutinizing under
timid eyelids the awful Captain Harewood, in whose
hand the
eye of his fancy saw, instead
of knife and fork, a lifted birch, the twigs worn
and frayed, and spotted with filial blood.
Redgie’s father was thirty-eight that year, nine years
older than his ex-wife, but looking much more. Mrs.
Stanford had a fresh equable beauty which might have
suited a woman ten years younger. The Captain was a
handsome tall man, square in build, with a hard
forehead; the black eyes and eyebrows he had
bequeathed to his son, but softened; his own eyes
were metallic, and the brows heavy, shaggy even. He
had a hard mouth, with large locked lips; a tight
chin, a full smooth moustache, and a wide cheek,
already furrowed and sad-looking. Something of a
despot’s justice in the look of him, and something
of bitter doubt and regret. His host, a man twelve
years older, had worn much better than he had.
When the boys were again by themselves, Redgie was
pleased to express his sense of the merits of
Frank’s sister; a tribute gratefully accepted. Clara
was stunning for a girl, her brother added—but was
cautious of over-praising her.
“I’ve got a sister,” Reginald stated; “I believe she’s
a clipper, but I don’t know. Oh, I say,
isn’t my grandmother an aunt of
yours or something?”
“Aunt Helena?” said her nephew, who held her in a
certain not unfriendly awe. “That’s her,” said
Redgie, using a grammatical construction which,
occurring in a Latin theme, would have brought down
birch on his bare skin to a certainty. “Isn’t she a
brick? I think she’s the greatest I know—that’s
about what she is.”
Frank admitted she was kind.
“Kind? I should think she was, too. She’s a trump. But
do you know she hates my governor like mad. They
hardly speak when she comes to our crib. Last time
she came she gave me a fiver; she did really.”
(Redgie at that age wanted usually some time to get
up his slang in, but when it once began, he was
great at it, considering he had never got into a
very slang set.) “Well, she says my sister is no
end of a good one to look at by this time; but I
think yours must be the jolliest. I’ve known lots of
girls” (the implied reticence of accent was, as Lady
Midhurst would have said, impayable), “but I never
saw such a stunner as she is. She makes a fellow
feel quite shut up and spooney.”
This amorous confidence was brought up short
by the sudden advent of the
two fathers. Meeting the eye of his, Redgie felt his
face, and tingled with the anticipated smart of it.
All his last speech had too clearly dropped word by
word into the paternal ear; the wretched boy’s face
reddened with biting blushes to the very chin and
eyelids and hair. When some twenty minutes later
they parted at the hall-door, Redgie gave his friend
a pitiful private wink and sadly comic shrug, so
suggestive of his impending doom and the inevitable
ceremony to be gone through when he reached home
again that Frank, having seen him ride off quite
silently a little behind his father, turned back
into the house with his own flesh quivering, and a
fearful vague vision before his eyes of Reginald
some hours later twisting his bared limbs under the
torture.
He was eager to gather the household verdict on his
friend; but Reginald had scarcely made much of a
success in other quarters. Clara thought him silly
and young of his age (a verdict which would have
finished him at once if he had known of it), but
admitted he was a handsome boy, much prettier and
pleasanter to have near one than Ernest Radworth.
Mr. Cheyne was sorry for the boy, but could hardly
put up with such a sample of the new race. Redgie’s
conceit
and gracious impudence (though it
was not really a case of bad tone, he allowed) had
evidently been too much for him. The Captain, too,
had expressed uneasiness about his boy, and a sense
of vexatious outlooks ahead.
After all there grew up no great intimacy out of this
first visit; a mere childish interlude, which
seemingly had but just result enough to establish a
certain tie at school afterwards between young
Cheyne and his second cousin—a tie considerably
broken in upon by various squabbles, and strained
often almost to snapping; but, for all that, the
visit had left its mark on both sides, and had its
consequences.
V
We have taken a flying view
of these domestic affairs and the people involved in
them, as they stood twelve years or so before the
date of the ensuing correspondence. Something may
now be understood of the characters and positions of
the writers; enough, no doubt, to make the letters
comprehensible without interloping notes or
commentaries. Much incident is not here to be looked
for; what story there is to tell ought at least to
be given with clearness and coherence. There remains
only by way of preface to sum up the changes that
fell out between 1849 and 1861.
At the latter date two deaths and two marriages had
taken place; old Lord Cheyne, much bewept by earnest
and virtuous men of all classes, had died, laborious
to the last in the great cause of human improvement,
and his son, a good deal sobered by the lapse of
time and friction of accident, had married, in May
1859, within a year of his accession as aforesaid,
his cousin Mrs. Stanford’s daughter; she was married
on her eighteenth birthday, and there was no great
ado made about it. John Cheyne had died a year
before his brother, having lived
long enough to see his daughter well married, in
1857, to Mr. Ernest Radworth, whose fame as a man of
science had gone on increasing ever since he came
into his property in 1853, at the age of twenty-one.
His researches in osteology were of especial value
and interest; he was in all ways a man of great
provincial mark.
There is not much else to say; unless it may be worth
adding that Francis Cheyne was at college by this
time, with an eye to the bar in years to come; his
father’s property had been much cut into by the
share assigned to his sister, and there was just a
fair competence left him to start upon. When not at
Oxford, he lived usually at Lidcombe or at
Blocksham, seldom by himself at home; but had for
some little time past shown a distinct preference of
his cousin’s house to his brother-in-law’s, Lord
Cheyne and he being always on the pleasantest terms.
With this cousin, eighteen years older than himself,
he got on now much better than with his old
companion Reginald Harewood, whose Oxford career had
just ended in the passing over his hapless head of
the untimely plough, and whose friends, all but Lady
Midhurst, had pretty well washed their hands of him.
LOVE’S CROSS-CURRENTS
A YEAR’S LETTERS
I Lady Midhurst to Mrs.
Radworth
Ashton Hildred, Jan. 12th, ’61.
My Dear Niece:
I write to beg a favour
of you, and you are decidedly the one woman alive
I could ask it of. There is no question of me in
the matter, I assure you; I know how little you
owe to a foolish old aunt, and would on no account tax your
forbearance so far as to assume the very least air
of dictation. You will hardly remember what good
friends we used to be when you were a very small member of society
indeed. If I ever tried then to coax you into
making it up with your brother after some baby
dispute, I recollect I always broke down in a
lamentable way. The one chance at that time was to
put the thing before you on rational grounds. I am
trying to act on that experience now.
This is rather a stupid grand sort of beginning, when all I really
have to say is that I want to see the whole family
on comfortable terms again—especially to make you
and Amicia friends. For you know it is hopeless to
persuade an old woman who is not quite in her
dotage that there has not been a certain
coldness—say coolness—of late in the relations
between you and those Lidcombe people. Since my
poor brother’s death, no doubt, the place has not
had those attractions for Mr. Radworth which it
had when there was always some scientific or
philanthropic gathering there; indeed, I suppose
your house has supplanted Lidcombe as the
rallying-point of provincial science for miles. By
all I hear you are becoming quite eminent in that
line, and it must be delicious for you personally
to see how thoroughly your husband begins to be
appreciated. I quite envy you the society you must
see, and the pleasure you must take in seeing and
sharing Mr. Radworth’s enjoyment of it. (I trust
his sight is improving steadily.) But for all this
you should not quite cast off less fortunate
people who have not the same tastes and pursuits.
You and Cheyne were once so comfortable and
intimate that I am certain
he must frequently regret this change; and Amicia,
as you know, sets far more
store by you than any other friend
she could have about her. Do be prevailed upon to
take pity on the poor child : her husband is a
delightful one, and most eager to amuse and
gratify, but I know she wants a companion. At her
age, my dear, I could not have lived without one;
and at yours, if you were not such a philosopher,
you ought to be as unable as I was. Men have their
uses and their merits, I allow, but you cannot
live on them. My friend, by the by, was not a good
instance to cite, for she played me a fearful
trick once; Lady Wells her name was; I had to give
her up in the long run; but she was charming at
one time, wonderfully bright in her ways, at once
quick and soft, as it were—just my idea of Madame
de Léry, in “Un
Caprice.” She was idolized by all sorts
of people, authors particularly, for she used to
hunt them down with a splendid skill, and make
great play with them when caught; but the things
the woman used to say! and then the people about
her went off and set them all down in their books.
The men actually took her stories as samples of
what went on daily in a certain circle, and wrote
them down, altering the names, as if they had been
gospel. She told me some before they got into
print; there was nobody she would not mix up in
them,
and we had to break with her
at last in a peaceable way. If you ever see an old
novel called (I think) ”
Vingt-et-Un,” or some such name—I know
there are cards in it—you
will find a picture there of your aunt, painted by
the author (a Mr. Caddell) after a design by Lady
Wells. I am the Lady Manhurst of that nice book. I
cheat at cards; I break the heart of a rising poet
(that is, I never would let Sir Thomas invite Mr.
Caddell); and I make two brothers fight a duel,
and one is killed through my direct agency. I run
away with a Lord Avery; I am not certain that my
husband dies a natural death; I rather think,
indeed, that I poison him in the last chapter but
one. Finally, I become a Catholic; and Lord Avery
recognizes me in the conventual garb, the day
after my noviciate is out, and immediately takes
leave of his senses. I hope I died penitent; but I
really forget about that. You see what sort of
things one could make people believe in those
days; I suppose there is no fear of a liaison dangereuse of that
sort between you and poor little Amicia. She has
not much of the Lady Wells type in her.
I have a graver reason, as you probably imagine
by this time, for wishing you to see a little of
Amicia just now. It is rather difficult to
write about, but I am sure you will
see things better for yourself than I could make
you if I were to scribble for ever in this
cautious roundabout way; and I can trust so
thoroughly in your good feeling and good sense and
acuteness, that I know you will do what is right
and useful and honourable. It is a great thing to
know of anybody who has a head that can be
relied upon. Good hearts and good feelings are
easy to pick up, but a good clear sensible head is
a godsend. Nothing else could ever get us through
this little family business in reasonable quiet.
I fear you must have heard some absurd running
rumours about your brother’s last stay at
Lidcombe. People who always see what never exists
are beginning to talk of his devotion to poor dear Amicia. Now I of
course know, and you of course know, that there
never could be anything serious on foot in such a
quarter. The boy is hardly of age, and might be at
school as far as that goes. Besides, Cheyne and
Amicia are devoted to each other, as we all see.
My only fear would be for poor Frank himself. If
he did get any folly of a certain kind into his
head it might cause infinite personal trouble, and
give serious pain to more people than one. I have
seen more than once how much real harm can come
out of
such things. I wonder if you
ever heard your poor father speak of Mrs. Askew,
Walter Askew’s wife, who was a great beauty in our
time? Both my brothers used to rave about her;
she had features of that pure long type you get in
pictures, and eyes that were certainly mieux
fendus than any I ever saw, dim deep
grey, half lighted under the heaviest eyelids,
with a sleepy sparkle in them: faulty in her
carriage, very; you had to look at her sitting to
understand the effect she used to make. Her
husband was very fond of her, and a cleverish sort
of man, but too light and lazy to do all he should
have done. Well, a Mr. Chetwood, the son of a very
old friend of mine (they used to live here),
became infatuated about her. Spent days and days
in pursuit of her; made himself a perfect jest.
Everywhere she went there was this wretched man
hanging on at her heels. They were not much to
hang on to, by the by, for she had horrid feet. To
this day I believe he never got anything by it; if
the woman ever cared for anybody in her life it
was your father; but Mr. Askew had to take notice
of it at last; the other got into a passion and
insulted him (I am afraid they were both
over-excited—it was after one of my husband’s huge
dinners, and they came up in a most dreadful state
of rage, and
trying to behave well, with their
faces actually trembling all over and the most
fearful eyes), and there was a duel and the
husband was killed, and Chetwood had to fly the
country, people made it out such a bad case, and
he was ruined—died abroad within the year; he had
spent all his money before the last business. The
woman afterwards married Dean Bainbridge, the
famous Waterworth preacher, you know, who used to
be such a friend of my friend Captain Harewood’s
for the last year or two of his life; he had
buried his third wife by that time; Mrs. A. was
the second. He was a
detestable man, and had a voice exactly like a cat
with a bad cold in the head.
Now if anything of this sort were to happen to
Francis (not that I am afraid of my two nephews
cutting each other’s throats—but so much may
happen short of that), it is just the kind of
thing he might never get well over. He and Amy are
about the same age, I think, or he may be a year
older. In a case like this, of amicable intimacy
between two persons, one married, there is
necessarily a certain floating amount of ridicule
implied, even where there is nothing more; and the
whole of this ridicule must fall in the long run
upon the elder person of the two. I am not sure,
of course, that there is any
ground for fear just now, but to avoid the least
chance of scandal, still more of ridicule, it is
always worth while being at any pains. Nobody knows how well worth while it is till they are
turned of thirty. Now you must see, supposing
there is anything in this unfortunate report, that
I cannot possibly be of the least use. Imagine me
writing to that poor child to say she must not see
so much of her cousin, or to Frank imploring him
to spare the domestic peace of Lidcombe! It would
be too absurd for me to seem as if I saw or heard
anything of the matter. A screeching, cackling
grandmother, running round the yard with all her
frowsy old feathers ruffled at the sight of such a
miserable red rag as that, would be a thing to
laugh at for a year; and I have no intention of
helping people to a laugh at my white hairs (they
are quite white now).
Or would you have me write to Cheyne? La bonne farce! as Redgie Harewood says, since he has
been in Paris. Conceive the delicate impressive
way one would have to begin the letter in, so as
not to arouse the dormant serpents in a husband’s
heart. Think of the soft suggestive Iago style one
would have to adopt, so as to intimate the
awfullest possibilities without any hard
flat assertion. Poor good Edmund too,
of all people! Imagine the bewildered way in
which he would begin the part of Othello, without
in the least knowing how—without so much as an
Ethiopian dye to help him out! You must allow
that in writing to you I have done all I could;
more, I do believe and hope, than there was any
need of my doing; but I look to your goodness and
affection for your brother to excuse me. I want
merely to suggest that you should keep a quiet
friendly watch over Frank, so as to save him any
distress or difficulty in the future. A sister
rather older and wiser than himself ought really
to be about the best help and mainstay a boy of
his age can have. If I had had but five years or
so more to back me, I might have saved your father
some scrapes at that time of life.
I have one more petition to my dear niece : be
as patient with my garrulous exigeance
as you can. If you see Reginald Harewood this
winter, as I dare say you will—he is pretty sure
to be at Lidcombe before the month is out—may I
beg your bienveillance towards the poor boy? He
is “sat upon” (as he says) just now to such an
extent that it is a real charity in any one to
show him a little kindness. I know his brilliant
college career is not a prepossessing episode in
his history; but so
many boys do so much worse—and
come off so much better! That insufferable Captain
Harewood behaves as if every one else’s son had
made the most successful studies, and at the end
of three years saved up a small but decent income
out of his annual allowance. If my father had only
had to pay two hundred for the college debts of
yours! I cannot conceive what parents will be in
the next generation: I am sure we were
good-natured enough in ours, and you see what our
successors are.
If Mr. Radworth has spare time enough, in the
intervals of his invaluable labours, to be
reminded of an old woman’s unprofitable existence,
will you remember me to him in the kindest way?
and, if you have toiled through my letter, accept
the love and apologies of your affectionate aunt.
II Mrs. Radworth to Francis
Cheyne
Blocksham, Jan.
16th.
My Dear Frank:
If you had taken my
advice you would have arranged either to stay up
at Oxford during the vacation, or at least to be
back by the beginning of next term. Of course, we
should like of all things to have you here as long
as you chose to stay, and it would be nicer for
you, I should think, than going back to fog and
splashed snow in London; but our half engagement
to Lidcombe upsets everything. Ernest is perfectly
restless just now; between his dislike of moving
and his wish to see the old Lidcombe museum again,
he does nothing but papillonner about the
house in a beetle-headed way, instead of sticking
to his cobwebs, as a domestic spider should. Are
you also bent upon Lidcombe? For, if you go, we
go. Make up your mind to that. If you don’t, I can
easily persuade Ernest that his museum has
fallen to dust and tatters
under the existing dynasty, which, indeed, is not
so unlikely to be true. Amicia writes very engagingly to me, just the
sort of letter one would have expected, limp,
amiable, rather a smirking style; flaccid
condescension; evidently feels herself agreeable
and gracious. I am rather curious to see how
things get on there. You seem to have impressed
people somehow with an idea that during your last
visit the household harmony suffered some blow or
other which it has not got over yet. Is there any
truth in the notion? But of course, if there
were, I should have known of it before now, if I
were ever to know it at all.
I have had a preposterous letter from Aunt
Midhurst; the woman is really getting past her
work: her satire is vicious, stupid, pointless to
a degree. Somebody has been operating on her
fangs, I suppose, and extracting the venom. It is
curious to remember what one always heard about
her wit and insight and power of reading
character; she has fallen into a sort of hashed
style, between a French portière and a Dickens
nurse. It makes one quite sorry to read the sort
of stuff she has come to writing, and think that
she was once great as a talker and letter-writer—
like looking at her grey fierce old face (museau
de louve, as she called it
once to me) and remembering that she was thought a
beauty. Still you know some people to this day
talk about the softness and beauty of her face and
looks, and I suppose she is different to them. To
me she always looked like a cat, or some bad sort
of bird, with those greyish-green eyes and their
purple pupils.
I need hardly tell you that since you were here
last the place has been most dismal. Ernest has
taken to insects now; il me manquait cela. He
has a room full of the most dreadful specimens. In
the evenings he reads me extracts from his MS.
treatise on the subject, which is to be published
in the “County Philosophical and Scientific
Transactions.” C’est réjouissant! After
all, I think you are right not to come here more
than you can help. The charity your coming would
be to me you must know; but no doubt it would have
to be too dearly paid for.
Lady Midhurst tells me that your ex-ally in old
days, and my ex-enemy, Reginald Harewood, is to be
at Lidcombe by the end of this month. Have you
seen him since the disgraceful finale of his Oxford studies? I
remember having met him a month or two since when
I called on her in London,
and he did not seem to me much
improved. One is rather sorry
for him, but it is really too much to be expected
to put up with that kind of young man because of
his disadvantages. I hope you do not mean to renew
that absurd sort of intimacy which he had drawn
you into at one time.
I am rather anxious to see Lidcombe in its
present state, so I think we shall have to go; but
seriously, if people are foolish enough to talk
about your relations
there, I would not go, in your place. I am not
going to write you homilies after the fashion of
Lady M., or appeal to your good feeling on the absurd subject; I never did go
in for advice. Do as you like, but I don’t think
you ought to go.
Ernest no doubt would send you all sorts of
messages, but I am not going to break in upon the
room sacred to beetles and bones; so you must be
content with my love and good wishes for the year.
III Lady Midhurst to Lady
Cheyne
Ashton Hildred,
Jan. 24th.
My Dear Child:
You are nervous about
your husband’s part in the business; cela se
voit; but I hardly see why you are to
come crying to an old woman like me about the
matter. Tears on paper are merely blots, please
remember; you cannot write them out gracefully.
Try to compress your style a little; be as
sententious as you can—terse complaints are really
effective. I never cried over a letter but once,
and then it was over one of my husband’s! Poor
good Sir Thomas was naturally given to the curt
hard style, and yet one could see he was almost
out of his mind with distress. I suppose you know
we lived apart in a quiet way for the last ten
years of his life. It was odd he should take it to
heart in the way he did; for I know he was quite seriously in love with a
most horrid little French
actress that had been
(I believe she was Irish
myself, but she called herself Mlle des Grèves—such a name! I’m almost certain her real one
was Ellen Greaves—a dreadful wretch of a woman,
with a complexion like bad fruit, absolutely a
greenish brown when you saw her in some lights);
and the poor man used to whimper about Hélène to
his friends in a perfectly abject way. Captain H.
told me so; he was of my
friends at that epoch; he was courting your
mother, and in consequence hers also. Indeed, I
believe he was in love with me at the time, though
I am ten years older; however, I imagine it looks
the other way now. When I saw him last he was
greyer than Ernest Radworth. That wife of his (E.
R.’s, I mean) is enough to turn any man’s hair
grey; I assure you, my dear child, she makes my
three hairs stand on end. Her style is something
too awful, like the most detestable sort of young
man. She will be the ruin of poor dear Redgie if
we don’t pick him up somehow and keep him out of
her way. He was quite the nicest boy I ever knew,
and used to make me laugh by the hour; there was a
splendid natural silliness in him, and quantities
of verve and fun—what Mrs.
Radworth, I suppose, calls pluck or go. Still,
when one thinks she is breaking Ernest’s heart and
bringing Captain Harewood’s
first grey hairs to the
grave with vexation, I declare I could forgive her
a good deal if she were only a lady. But she isn’t
in the least, and I am ashamed to remember she is
my niece; her manners are exactly what Mlle
Greaves’s must have been, allowing for the
difference of times. I am quite certain she will
be the death of poor Redgie. He was always the
most unfortunate boy on this earth; I dare say you
remember how he was brought up—always worried and
punished and sermonized, ever since he was a
perfect baby; enough to drive any boy mad, and get
him into an infinity of the most awful scrapes
when he grew up : but I did think he might have
kept out of this one. Clara Radworth must be at
least six years older than he is. I believe she
has taken to painting already. If there was only a
little bit of scandal in the matter! but that is
past praying for. It is a regular quiet amicable
innocent alliance; the very worst thing for such a
boy in the world.
I have gone on writing about your poor brother
and all those dreadful people, and quite forgotten
all I meant to say to you : but really I want you
to exert your influence over Redgie. Get him to
come and stay with you at once, before the
Radworths arrive; I wish to Heaven
he could come here to be
talked round. I know I could manage him. Didn’t I
manage him when he was fourteen, and ran away from
home over here, and you brought him in? You were
delicious at eleven, my dear, and fell in love
with him on the spot, like your (and his) old
grandmother. Didn’t I send him back at once,
though I saw what a state he was in, poor dear
boy, and in spite of you and his mother? I could
cry to this day when I think what a beautiful boy
he was to look at, and how hard it was to pack him
off in that way, knowing as we all did that he
would be three-quarters murdered when he got home
(and I declare Captain Harewood ought to have been
put in the pillory for the way he used to whip
that boy every day in the week—I firmly believe it
was all out of spite to his mother and me); and
you all thought me and your father desperately
cruel people, you know, as bad as Redgie’s father;
but I was nearly as soft at heart as either of
you, and after he went away in the gig I cried for
five minutes by myself. Never cry in public (that
is, of course, not irrepressibly) as your mother
did then, and if you ever have children don’t put
your arms round their necks and make scenes; it
never did any good, and people always get angry,
for it makes them look
fools, and they give you an absurd
reputation in the boiled-milk line. Your father
was quite put out with her after that
demonstrative scene with Redgie, and it only made
matters worse for the boy at parting, without
saving him a single cut of the rod when he got
home, poor fellow! I never was sorrier for
anybody myself; he was such a pretty boy; you
ought to remember : for after all he is your
half-brother, and might have been a whole one if
Captain H. had not been such a ruffian. Your poor
mother never was the best of managers, but she had
a great deal to bear.
Here I have got off again on the subject of my
stupid old affection for Redgie, and made you
think me the most unbearable of grandmothers. I
must try and show you that there are some sparks
of sense left in the ashes of my old woman’s
twaddle. But do you know you have made it really
difficult for me to advise you? You write asking
what to do, and I have only to think what I want
you to avoid; for of course you will do the
reverse of what I tell you. And in effect it seems
to me to matter very little what you do just now.
However, read over this next paragraph; construe
it carefully by contraries; and see what you think
of that in the way of advice.
Invite Frank to Lidcombe, as soon as the
Radworths come; get up your
plan of conduct after some French novel—Balzac is
a good model if you can live up to him; encourage
Mrs. Radworth, don’t snub her in any way, let her
begin patronizing you again; she will if you
manage her properly; be quite the child with her,
and, if you can, be the fool with her husband; but
you must play this stroke very delicately, just
the least push in the world, so as to try for a
cannon off the cushion; touch these two very
lightly so as to get them into a nice place for
you, when you must choose your next stroke. I
should say, get the two balls into the middle
pocket—if I thought there was a chance of your
understanding. But I can hear you saying, “Middle pocket? such an absurd
way of trying at wit!—and what does it mean after
all?” My dear, there is a moral middle pocket in
every nice well-regulated family; always remember
and act on this. If Lord Cheyne or Mrs. Radworth,
or either of them, can but be got into it quietly,
there is your game. The lower pocket would spoil
all, however neatly you played for it; but this I
know you will never understand. And yet I assure
you all the beauty of the game depends on it.
If you don’t like this style—I should be very
sorry if you did, and it would give me the worst
opinion of your head—I can only give you little practical
hints, on the chance of their being useful. You
know I never had any great liking for my nephew
Francis. His father was certainly the stupider of
my two brothers; and, my dear, you have no idea
what that implies. If you had known your husband’s
father, your own great-uncle, you would not
believe me when I say his brother was stupider.
But John was; I suppose there never was a greater
idiot than John. Rather a clever idiot, too, and
used to work and live desperately hard on
occasion; but, good Heavens! And I can’t help
thinking the children take after him in some
things. Clara to be sure is the image of her
mother—a portentous image it is, and I do
sometimes think one ought to try and be sorry for
Ernest Radworth, but I positively cannot; and
Frank is not without his points of likeness to
her. Still the father will crop out, as people say
nowadays in their ugly slang. Keep an eye on the
father, my dear, and compare him with your husband
when he does turn up. I don’t want you to be rude
to anybody, or to put yourself out of the way in
the least. Only not to trust either of those two
cousins too far. As for Cheyne’s liking for Clara
Radworth, I wouldn’t vex myself about that. She
cares more just now
for the younger bird—I declare
the woman makes me talk her style, at sixty and a
little over. There is certainly something very
good about her, whatever we two may think. If you
will hold her off Redgie while he is in the house
(do, for my sake, I entreat of you) I will warrant
your husband against her. She will not try
anything in that quarter unless she has something
else in hand. Cheyne is an admirable double; any
pleasant sort of woman can attract him to her, but no human power
will attract him from you.
There is your comfort—or your curse, as you choose
to make it. C. R. would never think of him except
as a background in one of her pictures. He would
throw out Redgie, for
example, beautifully, and give immense life and
meaning to the composition of her effects. But as
I know you have no other visitor at Lidcombe who
is human in any
mentionable degree, I imagine she will rest on her
oars—if you do but keep her off my poor Redgie.
You see I want you to have a sight of them
together, that you may study and understand her—on
that ground only I
authorize you to invite her and Ernest while
Redgie is still with you (besides you will be
better able to help him if you see it beginning
again under your face);
not in the least because the Radworths’ being
there is a pretext for inviting Frank
Cheyne, and Clara a good firescreen for you;
à Dieu ne
plaise, I am not quite such a liberal
old woman as that.
But I want you to be light in your handling of C. R.; give her
play : it will be a
charming education for you. If you do this—even
supposing I am wrong about your husband’s devotion to you—you are sure
of him. Item: if you can once come over her (but for Heaven’s sake don’t
irritate or really frighten her) she will be a
capital friend for you. Find out, too, how her
brother feels towards her, and write me word, that
I may form my own ideas as to him. If he
appreciates without overrating her there must be
some sense in him. She is one of those women who
are usually overrated by the men, and underrated
by the women, capable of appreciating them. Mind
you never take to despising any character of that sort. I mean if there
is a character in the
case.
I have written you a shamefully long letter, and
hardly a word to the point in it I dare say you
think; besides, I am not at all sure I should have
written part of it to a good young married woman;
there is one comfort, you won’t see what I mean in
the least. One thing you must take on trust, that
I do seriously with all my heart hope and mean to
serve you, my dear child, and
help you to live well and
wisely and happily—as I must say you ought. Do
take care of Redgie; I regard that boy as at least
three years younger than you instead of three
years older. Love to both of you, from your mother
and
Your very affectionate
H. MIDHURST.
IV Francis Cheyne to Mrs.
Radworth
London, Jan.
25th.
My Dearest Clara:
I am off to Lidcombe in a
fortnight’s time, and shall certainly not return
to Oxford (if I do at all) till the summer term. I
really wonder you should think it worth while to
dwell for a second on what Lady Midhurst may
choose to say : for I cannot suppose you have any
other grounds to go on than this letter of hers;
and certainly I do not intend to alter my plans in
the least on account of her absurdities. You must
remember what our father used to say about her ”
impotent incontinence of tongue.” I should be
ashamed to let a vicious, virulent old aunt
influence me in any way. I am fond of our cousins,
and enjoy being with them; it is a nice house to
stay at, and, as long as we all enjoy being there
together, I cannot see why we should listen to any
spiteful and senseless commentaries. To meet you
there will of course make it all the pleasanter; I
need not fear that
you will take the overseer
line with me, whatever our aunt’s wisdom may
suggest. As to Amicia, I think she is very
delightful to be with, and fond of us all in a
friendly amiable way; and I know she is very
beautiful and agreeable to look at or talk to,
which never spoils anything; but as to falling in
love, you must have the sense to know that nobody
over eighteen, or out of a bad French novel, would
run his head into such a mess : to say nothing of
the absurdity or the villainy of such a thing. It
all comes of the ridiculous and infamous sort of
reading which I have no doubt the dear aunt
privately indulges in. I do hope you will never
quote her authority to me again, even in chaff. I
never can believe that she really had the bringing
up of Amicia in her own hands; it is wonderful how
little of the Midhurst mark has been left on her. I suppose her father was
a nicer sort of fellow to begin with; for as to
our cousin Mrs. Stanford, one can hardly suppose
that she bequeathed Amy an antidote to her own
blood. I am sure her son has enough of the
original stamp on him: I do not wonder at Lady
M.’s liking for him, considering. You decidedly
need not be in the least afraid of any excessive
intimacy between us. Redgie Harewood
has been some weeks in town it seems,
and I have met him two or three times. I agree
with you that he is just what he used to be, only
on a growing scale. At school I remember he used
simply to flâner nine days out of ten, and on the
tenth either get into some serious row, or turn up
with a decent set of verses for once in a way. I
dare say he will be rather an available sort of
inmate at Lidcombe : you will have to put up with
him at all events if you go, for I believe he is
there already. Really, if you can get on with him
at first, I think you will find there are worse
fellows going. It appears, for one thing, that his
admiration of you is immense. He does me the
honour to seek me out, rather with a view I
suppose of getting me to talk about you. That
meeting here in London, after his final flight
from Oxford mists in the autumn term, seems to
have done for him just now. So, if you ever begin
upon the subject of Amicia to me, I shall retort
upon you with that desirable brother of hers. I
should like to see old Harewood’s face if his son
were ever to treat him to such a rhapsody as was
inflicted upon me the last time Reginald was in my
rooms here.
I start next week, so probably I shall be at
Lord Cheyne’s before you. Come
as soon as you can after me, and take care of
Ernest. Do as you like for the rest, but pray
write no more Midhurst letters at second-hand to
Your affectionate brother,
FRANCIS CHEYNE.
V Lady Cheyne to Francis
Cheyne
Lidcombe, Feb.
1st.
You know, I hope, that we
expect your sister and Mr. Radworth in the course
of the week? I have had the kindest letter from
her, and it will be a real pleasure to see
something more of them at last. I have always
liked your brother-in-law very much; I never could
understand your objection to scientific men. They
seem to me the most quiet, innocuous, good sort of
people one could wish to see. I quite understand
Clara’s preferring one to a political or poetical
kind of man. You and Reginald are oppressive with
your violent theories and enthusiasms, but a nice
peaceable spirit of research never puts out
anybody. I remember thinking Mr. Radworth’s
excitement and delight about his last subject of
study quite touching; I am sure I should enter
into his pursuits most ardently if I were his
wife. It is strange to me to remember I have not
seen either of them since they called last at
Ashton
Hildred, a few months before
my marriage. I suspect your sister has a certain
amount of contempt for my age and understanding;
all I hope is that I shall not disgrace myself in
the eyes of such a clever person as she is. Clara
is one of the people I have always been a little
in awe of; and I quite believe, if the truth were
known, you are rather of the same way of feeling
yourself. However, I look to you to help me, and I
dare say she will be lenient on the whole. Her
letter was very gracious.
I suppose you have heard of Reginald’s arrival?
He is wild at the notion of seeing your sister
again. I never saw anybody so excited or so
intense in his way of expressing admiration. It
seems she is his idea of perfect grace and charm;
I am very glad he has such a good one, but he is
dreadfully unflattering to me in the meantime, and
wants to form everybody upon her model. I hope you
are not so inflammable on European matters as he
seems to be; but I know you used to be worse.
Since he has taken up with Italy, there is no
living with him on conservative terms. Last year
he was in such a state of mind about Garibaldi and
the Sicilian business that he would hardly take
notice of such insignificant people as we are. My
husband has gone through
all that stage (he says he has), and
is now rather impatient of the sort of thing; he
has become a steady ally, on principle, of strong
governments. No doubt, as he says, men come to see
things differently at thirty, and understand their
practical bearing; but nothing will get Reginald
to take a sane view of the question, or (as Cheyne
puts it) to consider possibilities and make
allowance for contingent results. So, you see, you
are wanted dreadfully to keep peace between the
factions. Redgie is quite capable of challenging
his brother-in-law to mortal combat on the issue
of the Roman question.
Lord Cheyne is busy just now with some private
politics of his own, about which he admits of no
advice. If he should ever take his seat, and throw
his weight openly into the scale of his party, I
suppose neither you nor Reginald would ever speak
to either of us? I wish there were no questions in the world; but
after all I think they hardly divide people as
much as they threaten to do. So we must hope to
retain our friends as long as they will endure us,
in spite of opinions, and make the most of them in
the interval. We look for you on the fifth.
Believe me, ever your affectionate
cousin,
A. CHEYNE.
VI Lady Midhurst to Reginald
Harewood
Ashton Hildred, Feb. 21st.
Oh, if you were but five
or six years younger (you know you were at school six years ago, my
dear boy)! what a letter I would write your tutor! Upon my word I should like of all
things to get
you a good sound flogging. It is the only way to
manage you, I am persuaded. I wish to Heaven I had
the handling of you: when I think how sorry we all
were for you when you were a boy and your father
used to flog you! You wrote me the comicallest
letters in those days; I have got some still. If I
had only known how richly you deserved it! Captain
Harewood always let you off too easily, I have not
an atom of doubt. How any one can be such a mere
schoolboy at your age I cannot possibly conceive.
People have no business to treat you like a man.
You are nothing but a great dull dunce of a
fifth-form boy (lower fifth, if you
please), and ought to be treated like
one. You don’t look at things in a grown-up way.
I want to know what on earth took you to
Lidcombe when those Radworths were there? Of
course you can’t say. Now I tell you, you had
better have put that harebrained absurd boy’s head
of yours into a wasps’ nest—do you remember a
certain letter of yours to me, nine years ago,
about wasps, and what a jolly
good swishing you got for running your head
into a nest of them, against all orders? you
thought it no end of a
chouse then (I kept your letter, you see; I
do keep children’s letters sometimes, they are
such fun—I could show you some of Amicia’s that
are perfect studies) to be birched for getting
stung, though it was only a good wholesome
counter-irritant; if all the smart had been in
your face, I have no doubt you would have been
quite ill for a week; luckily your dear good
father knew of a counter-cure for inflammation of
the skin. Well, I can tell you now that what you
suffered at that tender age was nothing to what
you will have to bear now if you don’t run at once. Neither the
stinging of wasps nor the stinging of birch rods
is one quarter so bad as the hornets’ stings and
vipers’ bites you are running the risk of. You
will say I can’t know that, not
having your experience as to
one infliction at least; but I have been stung,
and I have been talked of; and if any quantity of
whipping you ever got made you smart more than the
latter process has made me, all I can say is that
between your father and the birch you must
assuredly have got your deserts for once, in a way
to satisfy even me if I had seen it. I hope you
have, once or twice, in your younger days; if so,
you must have been flogged within an inch of your
life.
However that may be, I assure you I have been
talked within an inch of mine more than once. And
so will you if you go on. I entreat and implore
you to take my silly old word for it. Of course I
am well enough aware you don’t mind; boys never do
till they are eaten up body and bones. But you
really (as no doubt you were often told in the old
times of Dr. Birkenshaw)—you really must be made
to mind, my dear Redgie. It is a great deal worse
for a man than for a woman to get talked about in
such a way as you two will be. If there was any
real danger for your cousin you don’t suppose I
would let Amicia have you both in the house at
once? But as you are the only person who can
possibly come to harm through this nonsensical
business, I can only write to you and bore you to
death. I have no doubt you are riding
with Clara at this minute; or writing
verses—Amicia sent me your last seaside
sonnet—detestable it was; or boating; or doing
something dreadful. It is really exceedingly bad
for you: I wish to goodness you had a profession,
or were living in London at least. If you could
but hear me talking you over with Mr. Stanford!
and the heavy smiling sort of way in which he ”
regrets that young Harewood should be wasting his
time in that lamentable manner—believes there was
some good in him at one time, but this miserable
vie de
flâneur, Lady Midhurst” (I always bow
when he speaks French in his fearful accent, and
that stops him), “would ruin any boy. Is very
glad Amicia should see something of him now and
then, but if he is always to be on those terms
with his father—most disgraceful,” and so forth.
Now, do be good for once, and think it over. I
don’t mean what your stepfather says (at least,
the man who ought to have been your stepfather, if
your filial fondness will forgive me for the
hint), but the way people will look at it. I
suppose I should pique you dreadfully if I were to
tell you that nobody in the whole earth imagines
for a second that there is a serious side to the
business. You are not a compromising sort of
person—you
won’t be for some years yet;
and you cannot compromise
Clara. She knows that. So does Amicia. So does
Ernest Radworth even, or he ought, if he has
anything behind his spectacles whatever, which I
have always felt uncertain of. I wonder if I may
give you a soft light suggestion or two about the
object of your vows and verse? I take my courage
in both hands and begin. C. R. (you will remember
I saw nearly as much of her when she was a girl as
I did of Amicia, and I always made a point of
getting my nephews and nieces off by heart) is one
of the cleverest stupid
women I know, but nothing more. Her tone is,
distinctly, bad. She has the sense to know this,
but not to improve it. The best thing I have ever
noticed about her is that, under these
circumstances, she resolves to make the most of
it. And I quite allow she is very effective when
at her best—very taking, especially with boys.
When she was quite little, she was the delight of
male playfellows; girls always detested her, as
women do now. (You may put down my harsh judgment
of her to the score of my being a woman, if you
think one can be a woman at my age—a thing I
believe to be impossible, if one has had the very
smallest share of brains to start with.) She can’t
be better
than her style, but she won’t be
worse. I prefer Amicia, I must say; but, when one
thinks she might have been like Lady Frances Law—
I assure you I do Clara justice when I recollect
the existence of that woman,—or Lucretia Fielding
(you must have seen her at Lidcombe); but, if I
had had a niece like that, I should have died of
her. A rapid something in phobia—neptiphobia
would it be? I suppose not; it sounds barbaric,
but my Greek was always very shaky. I learned of
my husband; he had been consul at some horrible
hole or other; but, anyhow, it would have carried
me off—in ten days, at the outside. And I hope she
would have been hanged.
The upshot of all this is just that our dear C.
R. is one of the safest
women alive. Not for other people, mind; not safe
for you; not safe by any means for her husband;
but as safe for herself as I am, or as the Queen
is. She knows her place, and keeps to it; and any
average man or woman who will just do that can do
anything. She is a splendid manager in her way—a
bad, petty, rather unwise way, I must and do
think; but she is admirable in it. Like a genre painter. Her forte is Murillo beggar-boys;
don’t you sit to her. A slight sketch now and then
in the
Leech sporting manner is all
very well. Even a single study between whiles in
the Callot style may pass. But the gypsy sentiment
I cannot stand. Seriously, my dear Redgie, I will
not have it. When she has posed for the ordinary
fastish woman, she goes in
for a sort of Madonna-Gitana, a cross of Raphael
with Bohemia. It will not do for you.
Shall I tell you the real, simple truth once for
all? I have a great mind, but I am really afraid
you will take to hating me. Please don’t, my dear
boy, if you can help, for I had always a great
weakness for you, honestly. I hope you will always
be decently fond of me in the long run, malgré all
the fast St. Agneses in gypsydom. Well, then, she
never was in love but once, and never will be
again. It was with my nephew Edmund—Amicia knows
it perfectly—when his father was alive. She fought
for the title and the man with a dexterity and
vigour and suppleness of intellect that was really
beautiful in such a girl as she was—delicious to
see. I have always done justice to her character
since then. My brother would not hear of cousins
marrying, probably because he had married one of
our mother’s French connections, who must have
been a second cousin, at least, of his own. So
Cheyne had to give her up; he was a
moral and social philosopher in those days, and an
attachment more or less was not much to him—he was
off with her in no time. But, take my word for it,
at one time he had been on with her, and things
had gone some distance; people began to talk of
her as Lady Cheyne that was to be. She was a still
better study after that defeat than when in the
thick of the fight. It steadied her for life, and
she married Ernest Radworth in six months. Three
years after my poor brother died, and the year
after that I married Edmund to our dear good
little Amicia, as I mean to marry you some day to
a Queen of Sheba.
When I say Clara’s failure steadied her, you
know what I mean; it made her much more fast and loud than she was before—helped in my poor
opinion to spoil her style, but that is beside the
question; the real point is that it made her
sensible. She is wonderfully sensible for a clever
person who is (I must maintain) naturally stupid,
or she would have gone on a higher tack altogether
and been one of the most noticeable people alive.
It is exquisite, charming to an old woman, to
observe how thoroughly she is up to all the points
of all her games. She amuses herself in all sorts
of the most ingenious ways; makes
that wretch Ernest’s life an
Egyptian plague by constant friction of his inside
skin and endless needle-probings of his sore
mental places: enjoys all kinds of fun, sparingly
and heartily at once, like a thoroughly initiated
Epicurean (that woman is an esoteric of the
Garden): and never for an instant slips aside from
the strait gate and narrow way, while she has all
the flowers and smooth paving of the broad one—at
least all the enjoyment of them; or perhaps
something better. She is sublime; anything you
like; but she is not wholesome. If she were only
the least bit cleverer than she is I would never
say a word. Indeed, it would be the best training
in the world for you to fall into the hands of a
real and high genius. But you must wait. Show me
Athénaïs de Montespan and I will allow you any folly on her account; but
with Louise de la Vallière I will not let you commit yourself.
You will say C. R. is something more than this
last; I know she is; but not enough. If you had
had your English history well flogged into you, as
it should have been if I had had the managing of
matters—and I should have if your father had not
been the most—never mind—you would have learnt to
appreciate her. She is quite Elizabethan, weakened
by a dash of Mary Stuart.
At your age you cannot possibly
understand how anybody can be at once excitable
and cold. If you will take my word for that fact,
I will throw you another small piece of experience
into the bargain. A person who does happen to
combine those two qualities has the happiest
temperament imaginable.
She can enjoy herself, her excitability secures
that; and she will never enjoy herself too much or
pay too high a price for anything. These people
are always exceedingly acute, unless they are
absolute dunces, and then they hardly count. I
don’t mean that their acuteness prevents them from
being fools, especially if they have a strong
stupid element in them, as many clever excitable
people have, notamment ladite Marie,
who was admirably and fearfully foolish for such a
clever cold intellect as she had. I fancy our
friend has more of the Elizabeth in her; quite as
dangerous a variety. If she ever does get an
impulse, God help her friends; but there will be
no fear even then for herself: not the least. Only
do you take care; you have not the stuff to make a
Leicester; and I don’t want you to play Essex to a
silver-gilt Elizabeth. Silver?—she is just
pinchbeck all through. As to heart, that is, and
style; her wits are well enough.
Now, if you have got thus far
(but I am convinced you will not), you ought to
understand (but I would lay any wager you don’t)
what my judgment of her is, and what yours ought
to be. She is admirable, I repeat again and again,
but she ought not to be adorable to you; the great
points about her are just those which appeal to
the experience of an old woman. The side of her
that a boy like you can see of himself is just the
side he ought not to care about. Of course he will
like it if he is not warned; but I have warned
you: quite in vain, I am fully prepared to hear.
If you are in effect allured and fascinated by the
bad weak side of her I can’t help it: liberavi animam
meam; I suppose even my dunce of the
lower fifth (at twenty-three) can construe that.
My hand aches, and you may thank Heaven it does,
or you would get a fresh dressing (as people call it) on paper. Do,
my dear, try to make sense of this long dawdling
wandering scrawl: I meant to be of some use when I
began. I don’t want to have my nice old Redgie
made into a burnt-offering on the twopenny
tinselled side-altar of St. Agnes of Bohemia.
I send no message to the Lidcombe people, as I
wrote to Amicia yesterday. Give my compliments
to your father if you dare. I must
really be very good to waste my time and trouble
on a set of girls and boys who are far above
caring to understand what an old woman means by
her advice. You seem to me, all of you, even
younger than your ages; I wish you would stick to
dolls and cricket. Cependant, as to you, my
dear boy, I am always
Your affectionate grandmother,
HELENA MIDHURST.
P.S.—You can show this
letter to dear Clara if you like.
VII Reginald Harewood to Edward
Audley
Lidcombe, March
1st.
Did you see last year in
the Exhibition a portrait by Fairfax of my cousin
Mrs. Radworth? You know of course I am perfectly
well aware the man is an exquisite painter, with
no end of genius and great qualities in his work;
but I declare he made a mull of that picture. It
was what fellows call a fiasco—complete. Imagine
sticking her into a little crib of a room with a
window and some flowers and things behind her, and
all that splendid hair of hers done up in some
beastly way. And then people say the geraniums and
the wainscot were stunning pieces of colour, or
some such rot; when the fellow ought to have
painted her out of doors, or on horseback, or
something. I wish I could sit a horse half as
well; she is the most graceful and the pluckiest
rider you ever saw. I rode with her yesterday to
Hadleigh, down by the sea, and we
had a gallop over the sands; three
miles good, and all hard sand; the finest ground
possible; when I was staying here as a boy I used
to go out with the grooms before breakfast, and
exercise the horses there instead of taking them
up to the downs. She had been out of spirits in
the morning, and wanted the excitement to set her
up. I never saw her look so magnificent; her hair
was blown down and fell in heavy uncurling heaps
to her waist; her face looked out of the frame of
it, hot and bright, with the eyes lighted,
expanding under the lift of those royal wide
eyelids of hers. I could hardly speak to her for
pleasure, I confess; don’t show my avowals. I rode
between her and the sea, a thought behind; a gust
of wind blowing off land drove a wave of her hair
across my face, upon my lips; she felt it somehow,
I suppose, for she turned and laughed. When we
came to ride back, and had to go slower (that
Nourmahal of hers is not my notion of what her
horse should be—I wish one could get her a real
good one), she changed somehow, and began to talk
seriously at last; I knew she was not really over
happy. Fancy that incredible fool Ernest Radworth
never letting her see any one when they are at
home, except some of his scientific
acquaintances—not a lady in the
whole countryside for her to
speak to. You should have heard her account of the
entertainments in that awful house of theirs,
about as much life as there used to be at my
father’s. Don’t I remember the holiday dinners
there!—a parson, a stray military man of the
stodgier kind, my tutor, and the pater; I kept
after dinner to be chaffed, or lectured, or
examined—a jolly time that was. Well, I imagine
her life is about as pleasant; or worse, for she
can hardly get out to go about at all. People come
there with cases of objects, curiosities, stones
and bones and books, and lumber the whole place.
She had to receive three scientific professors
last month; two of them noted osteologists, she
said, and one a comparative ichthyologist, or
something—a man with pink eyes and a mouth all on
one side, who was always blinking and talking—a
friend of my great-uncle’s, it seems, who
presented him years ago to that insane ass
Radworth. Think of the pair of them, and of Clara
obliged to sit and be civil! She became quite sad
towards the end of our ride; said how nice it had
been here, and that sort of thing, till I was
three-quarters mad. She goes in three or four
days. I should like to
follow her everywhere, and be her
footman or her groom, and see her constantly. I
would clean knives and black boots for her. If I
had no fellow to speak or write to, I can’t think
how I should stand things at all.
VIII Francis Cheyne to Mrs.
Radworth
London, March
15th.
You don’t suppose I want
you to quarrel with me, my dear Clara? It is
folly to tax me with trying (as you say) to
brouiller you with the Stanfords or
with Redgie Harewood. As to the latter, you know
we are on good enough terms together; I never was
hand and glove with him that I recollect. Do as
you like about Portsmouth. I will join you if I
can after some time.
But about my extra fortnight at Lidcombe I must
write to you. Lord Cheyne is quite gracious, with
a faint flavour of impertinence; I never saw one
side of him before. (Since I left I have heard
twice—once from him and once from Amicia. They
talk of coming up. Cheyne thinks of beginning to
speak again. I believe myself he never got over
your cruel handling of his eloquence six years
ago. I remember quite well once during the Easter
holidays hearing you
and Lady Midhurst laugh about it by
the hour.) Amicia is, I more than suspect, touched
more deeply than we fancied by the things that
were said this winter. Her manner is often queer
and nervous, with a way of catching herself up she
has lately taken to—breaking off her sentences and
fretting her lip or hand. I wish at times I had
never come back. If I had stayed up last Christmas
to read, as I thought of doing, there would have
been nothing for people to talk of. Now I
certainly shall not think of reading for a degree.
Perhaps I may go abroad, with Harewood if I can
get no one else. He is the sort of fellow to go
anywhere, and make himself rather available than
otherwise, in case of worry.
Tenez, I suppose I may as well say what
I meant to begin upon at once, without shirking or
fidgeting. Well, you were right enough about my
staying after you left; it did lead to scenes. In
a quiet way, of course; subdued muffled-up scenes.
I was reading to her once, and Cheyne came in; she
grew hot, not very red, but hot and nervous, and I
caught the feeling of her; he wanted us to go on,
and, as we began talking of other things, left us
rather suddenly. We sat quiet for a little, and
then somehow or other found ourselves talking
about you—I think
à
propos of Cheyne’s preferences; and she
laughed over some old letter of Lady Midhurst’s
begging her to take care of Redgie Harewood, and
prevent his getting desperately in love with you.
I said Lady M. always seemed to me to live and
think in a yellow-paper French novel cover, with
some of the pages loose in sewing; then A. said
there was a true side to that way of looking at
things. So you see we were in the thick of
sentiment before we knew it. And she is so very
beautiful to my thinking; that clear pale face and
full eyebrows, well apart, making the eyes so
effective and soft, and her cheeks so perfect in
cutting. I cannot see the great likeness of
feature to her brother that people talk of; but I
believe you are an admirer of his. It was after
this that the dim soft patronizing manner of
Cheyne’s which I was referring to began to show
itself, or I began to fancy it. We used to get on
perfectly together, and he was never at all gracious to me till just now,
when he decidedly is.
Make Radworth come up to London before you go to
Portsmouth or Ryde, or wherever it is. And do
something or other in the Ashton Hildred
direction, for I am certain, by things I
heard Amicia say, that Lady Midhurst
“means venom.” So lay in a stock of antidotes. I
wish there was a penal colony for women who
outlive a certain age, unless they could produce a
certificate of innocuous imbecility.
IX Lady Midhurst to Lady
Cheyne
Ashton Hildred, March 18th.
So you have made a clear
house of them all, my dear child, and expect my
applause in consequence? Well, I am not sure you
could have done much better. And Cheyne is perfect
towards you, is he? That is gratifying for me
(who made the match) to hear of, but I never
doubted him. As for the two boys, I should like to
have them in hand for ten minutes; they seem to
have gone on too infamously. I retire from the
field for my part; I give up Redgie; he must and
will be eaten up alive, and I respect the woman’s
persistence. Bon appétit! I bow to
her, and retire. She has splendid teeth. I suppose
she will let him go some day? She can hardly
think of marrying him when Ernest Radworth is
killed off. If I thought she did, I would write
straight to Captain Harewood. Do
you think the Radworth has two years’
vitality left him?
I am too old to appreciate your state of mind as
to your cousin. You know, too, that I have a
weakness for clear accurate accounts, and your
style is of the vaguest. It is impossible you can
be so very foolish as to become amourachée
of a man in any serious sense. Remember, when you
write in future, that I shall not for a second
admit that idea. Married ladies, in modern English
society, cannot fail in
their duties to the conjugal relation. Recollect
that you are devoted to your husband, and he to
you. I assume this when I address you, and you
must write accordingly. The other hypothesis is
impossible to take into
account. As to being in love, frankly, I don’t
believe in it. I believe that stimulant drinks
will intoxicate, and rain drench, and fire singe;
but not in any way that one person will fascinate
another. Avoid all folly; accept no traditions;
take no sentiment on trust. Here is a bit of
social comedy in which you happen to have a part
to play; act as well as you can, and in the style
now received on the English boards. Above all,
don’t indulge in tragedy out of season. Resolve,
once for all, in any little difficulty of life,
that there shall be
nothing serious in it; you
will find it depends on you whether there is to be
or not. Keep your head clear, and don’t confuse
things; use your reason—determine that, come what
may, nothing shall happen of a nature to involve
or embarrass you. As surely as you make this
resolve and act on it, you will find it pay.
I must say I wish you had been more attentive to
my hint with regard to your brother. Study of the
Radworth interior, and the excitement (suppose) of
a little counterplot, would have kept you amused
and left you sensible. I see too clearly that that
affair is going all wrong—I wish I saw as clearly
how to bring it all right. Reginald is a hopeless
specimen—I never saw a boy so fairly ensorcelé.
These are the little pointless endless things that
people get ruined by. Now if you would but have
taken notice of things you might have righted the
whole matter at once. If I could have seen you
good friends with Clara I should have been
content. But as soon as you saw there was no fear
of her making an affair with your husband (or, if
you prefer it, of his being tolerably courteous to
her) you threw up your cards at once. At least you
might have kept an eye on the remaining players; a
little interest in their game would have given
you something better to think about
than Frank. As it is, you seem to have worked
yourself into a sort of vague irritable moral
nervousness which is not wholesome by any means.
I want you to go up to London for some little
time, and see the season out. Encourage Cheyne’s
idea of public life; it is an admirable one for
both of you. The worst thing you could do would be
to stay down at Lidcombe, and then (as you seem to
think of doing) join your cousins again in some
foolish provincial or continental expedition. I
had hoped to have seen you and Clara pull
together, as they say now, better than you do; I
have failed in the attempt to make you; but at
least, as it seems you two can have no real mutual
influence or rational amicable apprehension of
each other, I do trust you will not of your own
accord put yourself in her way for no mortal
purpose. Is it worth while meeting on the ground
of mutual indifference? I recommend you on all
accounts to keep away from both brother and
sister.
Not that I underrate him, whatever you may
think. I see he is a nice boy; very faithful,
brave, and candid; with more of a clear natural
stamp on him than I thought. The mother has left
him enough of her quick blood and wit, and
it has got well mixed into the
graver affection and sense of honour that he
inherits from our side. I like and approve him;
but you must observe that all this does not excuse
absurdities on either hand. Of course he is very
silly; at his age a man must be a fool or nothing
: by the nothing I mean a
pedant either of the head or the heart species
(avoid pedants of the heart kind, by the way), or
a coquin
manqué. I have met the latter; Alfred
Wandesford, your father’s friend, was one of that
sort at Frank’s age; you know his book had made a
certain false noise—gone off with a blank
report—flashed powder in people’s eyes for a
minute; and, being by nature lymphatic and
malleable at once, he assumed a whole sham suit of
vices, cut out after other men’s proportions, that
hung flapping on him in the flabbiest pitiable
fashion; but he meant as badly as possible; I
always did him the justice, when he was accused of
mere pasteboard sins and scene-painters’
profligacy, to say that his wickedness was sincere
but clumsy. It was something more than wickedness
made to order. Such a man is none the less a
rascal because he has not yet found out the right
way to be a rascal, or even because he never does
find it out, and dies a baffled longing scoundrel
with clean hands. Wandesford did
neither, but turned rational and became a virtuous
and really fortunate man of letters, whom one was
never sorry to see about: and I don’t know that he
ever did any harm, though he was rather venomous
and vulgar. One or two of his things are still
worth your reading.
Now, because Frank is neither a man of this sort
nor of the pedant sort, but one with just the dose
of folly proper to his age, and that folly of
rather a good kind, I want him not to get
entangled in the way that would be more dangerous
for him than for any other sort of young man. I
wish to Heaven there were some surgical process
discoverable by which one could annihilate or
amputate sentiment. Passion, impulse, vice of
appetite or conformation, nothing you can define
in words is so dangerous. Without sentiment one
would do all the good one did either by principle
or by instinct, and in either case the good deed
would be genuine and valuable. Sinning in the same
way, one’s very errors would be comprehensible,
respectable, reducible to rule. But to act on
feeling is ruinous. Feeling is neither impulse nor
principle—a sickly, deadly, mongrel breed between
the two—I hate the very word sentiment. The
animalist and
the moralist I can appreciate,
but what, on any ground, am I to make of the
sentimentalist?
Decide what you will do. Look things and people
in the face. Give up what has to be given up; bear
with what has to be borne with; do what has to be
done. Remember that I am addressing you now with
twenty years of the truest care and affection
behind me to back up my advice. Remember that I do
truly and deeply care about the least thing that
touches you. To me you are two; you carry your
mother about you.
Let us see what your last letter really amounts
to. You have seen a good deal of your cousin for
the last six weeks, and are vaguely unhappy at his
going. (Once or twice, I am to infer, there has
been a touch of softer sentiment in your relations
to each other.) Not, I presume, that either has
dreamt of falling in love : but you live in a bad
time for intimacies; a time seasoned with
sentiment to that extent that you can never taste
the natural flavour of a sensation. You were
afraid of Clara too, a little; disliked her; left
her to Cheyne or to Reginald, as the case might be
(one result of which, by the by, is that I shall
have to extricate your brother, half eaten, from
under her very teeth); and let
yourself be drawn, by a sort of dull
impulse, without a purpose under it, towards her
brother. Purpose I am, of course, convinced there
was none on either side. I should like to have
some incidents to lay hold of; but I am quite
aware that incidents never do happen. I wish they
did; anything rather than this gradual steady
slide of monotonous sentiment down a groove of
uneventful days. The recollection that you have
not given me a single incident—nothing by way of
news but a frightened analysis of feeling and
record of sentimental experience—makes me
seriously uneasy. Write again and tell me your
plans: but for Heaven’s sake begin moving; get
something done; engage yourself in some active way
of amusement. Have done with the country and its
little charities and civilities—at least for the
present. London is a wholesomer and more
reasonable home for you just now.
X Lady Midhurst to Lady
Cheyne
Ashton Hildred, April 6th.
Well, I have been to
London and back, my dear child, with an eye to the
family complications, and have come to some
understanding of them. When I wrote to you last
month I was out of spirits, and no doubt very
stupid and obscure. I had a dim impression of
things being wrong, and no means of guessing how
to get them right. Now, I must say I see no real
chance of anything unfortunate or unpleasant. You
must be cautious, though, of letting people begin
to talk of it again. I have a project for getting
both the boys well out of the way on some good
long summer tour. Frank is very nice and sensible;
I would undertake to manage him for life by the
mere use of reasoning. As to Reginald, c’est une tête
fêlée; it may get soldered up in ten
years’ time, but wants beating about first; I
should like to break it myself. Actually, I had to
encourage
his verse-making—pat that rampant
young Muse of his on the back—and stroke him down
with talk of publication till he purred under my
fingers. It is a mercy there is that escape-valve
of verse. I think between that and his sudden
engouement for foreign politics and
liberation campaigns, and all that sort of thing,
he may be kept out of the worst sort of mess:
though I know one never can count upon that kind
of boy. I should quite like to enrol him in real
earnest in some absurd legion of volunteers, and
set him at the Quadrilateral with some scores of
horrid disreputable picciotti to back him. I dare say he would
fight decently enough if he were taken into
training. Imagine the poor child in a red rag of a
shirt, and shoeless, marching au pas over the fallen
dynasties to the tune of a new and noisier
Marseillaise! It would serve him right to get
rubbed against the sharp edges of his theory; and
if he were killed we should have a mad martyr in
the family, and when the red republic comes in we
might appeal to the Committees of Public Safety to
spare us for the sake of his memory. His father
would die of it, for one thing; I do think Redgie
is fated to make him crever with rage and shame and horror;
so you see I shall always have a weak side in the
boy’s favour. But if you knew
how absurd all this
recandescence of revolution in the young people of
the day seems to me! My dear Amy, I have known
men who had been dipped in the old revolution—
J’ai
connu des vivants à qui Danton parlait.
You remember that great verse of Hugo’s; I showed
it to Reginald the last time he was declaiming to
me on Italy, and confuted him out of the master’s
mouth. It is true of me, really; both my own
father and my dear old friend, Mr. Chetwood, had
been in Paris at dangerous times. They had seen
the great people of the period, and the strange
sights of it.
I have run off into all this talk about old
recollections, and forgotten, as usual, my
starting-point; I was thinking of the last
interview I had with Reginald. But I suppose you
want some account of my stay in London. You know I
had your house to myself (it was excellent on
Cheyne’s part to renew his offer of lending it,
and spare an ancient relative the trouble of
asking you to get her the loan of it from him);
and, as your father came up with me, I travelled
pleasantly enough, though we had fearful
companions. I rested for a day or two, and then
called upon the Radworths. Ernest looks fifty; if he had the wit to
think of
it, I should say he must always have
understated his real age. I have no doubt, though,
he will live for ages (I don’t mean his
reputation, but his bodily frame); unless, indeed,
she poisons him—I am certain she would, if she
durst. She herself looks older; I trust, in a year
or two, she will have ceased to be at all
dangerous, even for boys. We had a curious
interview; not that day, but a week after. I saw
Reginald next day; he is mad on that score, quite.
I like to see such a capacity for craziness; it
looks as if a man had some corresponding capacity
for being reasonable when his time came. He never
saw such noble beauty and perfection of grace, it
appears; there is an incomparable manner about the
least thing she does. She is gloriously good,
too—has a power of sublime patience, a sense of
pity, a royal forbearance, a divine defiance of
evil, and various qualities which must ennoble any
man she speaks to. To look at her is to be made
brave and just; to hear her talk is a lay baptism,
out of which the spirit of the auditor comes forth
purged, with invulnerable armour on; to sit at her
side is to become fit for the grandest things; to
shake hands with her makes one feel incapable of a
mean wish. Base things die of her; she is
poisonous to them. All the best part of one, all
that makes a man fit to live,
comes out in flower at the sight of her eyes.
Accepting these assertions as facts (remarkable
perhaps, but indisputable), I desired to know
whether Ernest Radworth was my friend’s ideal of
the glorified man?—heroic as a martyr he
certainly was, I allowed, in a passive way. If a
passing acquaintance becomes half deified by the
touch of her, I put it to him frankly, what must
not her husband have grown into by this time,
after six years of marriage? Reginald was of
opinion that on him the divine influence must have
acted the wrong way. The man being irredeemably
bad, abject, stupid, there was nothing noble to be
called out and respond to her. The only result,
therefore, of being always close to the noblest
nature created was, in men like him, a justly
ordained increase of degradation. Those that under
such an influence cannot kindle into the
superhuman must, it seems,
harden into the animal. This, Redgie averred, was
his deliberate belief. Experience of character,
study of life, the evidence of common sense,
combined to lead him unwilling to this awful
inference. But then, how splendid was her conduct,
how laudable her endurance of him, how admirable
in every way her conjugal position! I suggested
children. The boy went off into absolute
incoherence.
I could not quite gather his reasons,
but it seems the absence of children is an
additional jewel in her crown. He is capable of
finding moral beauty in a hump, and angelic
meaning in a twisted foot. And all the time it is
too ludicrously evident that the one point of
attraction is physical. Her good looks, such as
they are, lie at the bottom of all this rant and
clatter. We have our own silly sides, no doubt;
but I do think we should be thankful we were not
born males.
After this specimen of the prevalent state of
things I felt of course bound to get hold of her
and hear what she had to say. She had a good deal.
I always said she could talk well; this time she
talked admirably. She went into moral anatomy with
the appetite of sixty; and she is under
thirty—that I admit. She handled the question in
an abstract indifferent way wonderful to see. The
whole thing was taken up on high grounds, and
treated in a grand spirit of research—worthy of
her husband. She did not even profess to regard
Redgie as a brother—or friend. In effect she did
not profess anything: a touch of real genius, as I
thought at once. He amused her; she liked him,
believed in him, admired his best points;
altogether appreciated the value of
such a follower by way of
change in a life which was none of the liveliest.
Not that she made any complaint; she is far too
sharp to poser à l’incomprise. I told her the
sort of thing was not a game permitted by the
social authorities of the time and country; the
cards would burn her fingers after another deal or
two. She took the hint exquisitely: was evidently
not certain she understood, but had a vague
apprehension of the thing meant; fell back finally
upon a noble self-reliance, and took the pure
English tone. The suggestion of any harm resulting
was of course left untouched: such a chance as
that we were neither of us called upon to face.
The whole situation was harmless, creditable even;
which is perfectly true, and that is the worst of
it. As in most cases of Platonism, there is
something to admire on each hand. And the
existence of this single grain of sense and
goodness makes the entire affair more dangerous
and difficult to deal with. She is very clever to
manage what she does manage, and Reginald is some
way above the run of boys. At his age they are
usually made of soft mud or stiff clay.
When we had got to this I knew it was hopeless
dissecting the matter any further, and began
talking of things at large, and so in time of her
brother and his outlooks. She was
affectionate and hopeful. It seems he has told her
of an idea which I encouraged; that of travelling
for some months at least. How tenderly we went
over the ground I need not tell you. Clara does
not think him likely to be carried off his feet
for long. Console yourself, if you want the
comfort; we have no thought of marrying him. He is
best unattached. At the present writing he no
doubt thinks more of you than she would admit. I regret it; but he does.
Do you, my dear child, take care and keep out of
the way just now. I hear (from Ernest Radworth;
his wife said nothing of it; in fact, when he
began speaking the corners of her mouth and
eyelids flinched with vexation—just for a breath
of time) that there is some talk now of a summer
seaside expedition. Redgie of course; Frank of
course; the Radworths, and you two. I beg you not
to think of it. Why on earth should you all lounge
and toss about together in that heavy way? You
are off to London at last, or will be in ten days’
time, you say; at least, before May begins. Stay
there till it breaks up; and then go either north
or abroad. Yachts are ridiculous, and I know you
will upset yourself. To be sure sentiment can
hardly get mixed into the situation if you do.
The soupir entrecoupé de
spasmes is not telling in a cabin; you
sob the wrong way. Think for a second of too
literal heart-sickness. Cheyne is fond of the
plan, it seems: break him of that leaning. He and
Redgie devised it at Lidcombe, Ernest says (he has
left off saying Harewood; not the best of signs;
fœnum
habet—never mind how tied on; if he does
go mad we will adjust it; but I forgot I never let
you play at Latin. Rub out this for me; I never
erase, as you know, it whets and frets curiosity;
and I can’t begin again).
Frank, when I saw him, pleased me more than I
had hoped. I made talk to him for some time; he is
unusually reticent and rational; a rest and
refreshment after that insane boy whom we can
neither of us drive or hold as yet (but I shall
get him well in hand soon, et puis gare aux ruades!
Kick he will, but his mouth shall ache and his
flanks bleed for it). No display or flutter of any
kind; a laudable, peaceable youth, it seems to me.
Very shy and wary; would not open up in the least
at the mention of you: talked of his sister very
well indeed. I see the points of resemblance now
perfectly, and the sides of character where the
likeness breaks down. He is clever as well as she,
but less rapid and loud; the notes of
his voice pleasant and of a good
compass, not various. I should say a far better
nature; more liberal, fresher, clearer altogether,
and capable of far more hard work. Miss Banks
comes out in both their faces alike, though
corrected of course by John, which makes her very
passable.
Is there much more to say? As you must be
getting tired again, I will suppose there is not.
Will you understand if I suggest that in case of
any silent gradual breach beginning between Cheyne
and Frank, you ought to help it to widen and
harden in a quiet wise way? I think you ought. I
don’t mean a coolness; but just that sort of
relation which swings safe in full midway between
intimacy and enmity. We all trust, you know, that
he is never to be the heir; you must allow us to
look for the reverse of that. Then, don’t you see
for yourself, it must be best for him to get a
good standing for himself on his own ground, and
not hover and flicker
about Lidcombe too much? I know my dear child
will see the sense of what I say. Not, I hope and
suppose, that she needs to see it on her own
account. Goodnight, dearest; be wise and happy:
but I don’t bid you trouble your head overmuch
with the heavy hoary counsels of
Your most affectionate,
H. M.
XI Reginald Harewood to Mrs.
Radworth
London, April
15th.
You promised me a letter
twice; none has come yet. I want the sight of your
handwriting more than you know. Sometimes I lie
all night thinking where you are, and sometimes I
dare not lie down for the horror of the fancy. If
I could but entreat and pray you to come
away—knowing what I do. Even if I dared hope the
worst of all was what it
cannot be—a hideous false fear of mine—I could
hardly bear it. As it is I am certain of one thing
only in the world, that this year cannot leave us
where the last did. If I must be away from you,
and if you must remain with him, I cannot pretend
to live in the way of other men. It is too
monstrous and shameful to see things as they are
and let them go on. Old men may play with such
things if they dare. We cannot live and lie. You
are brave enough for any act of noble justice. You
told me once I
knew you to the heart, and ought to
give up dreaming and hoping—but I might be sure,
you said, of what I had. I do know you perfectly,
as I love you: but I hope all the more. If hope
meant anything ignoble, could I let it touch on
you for a moment? I look to you to be as great as
it is your nature to be. It is not for myself—I am
ashamed to write even the denial—that I summon you
to break off this hideous sort of compromise you
are living in. What you are doing insults God, and
maddens men who see it. Think what it is to endure
and to act as you do! I ask you what right you
have to let him play at husband with you? You
know he has no right; why
should you have? Would you let him try force to
detain you if your mind were made up? You are
doing as great a wrong as that would be, if you
stay of your own accord. Who could blame you if
you went? Who can help blaming you now? I say
you cannot live with him always. If I thought you
could, could I think you incapable of baseness?
and you know, I am certain you do in your inmost
heart know, that you have shown me by clear proof
how infinitely you are the noblest of all women.
Do all prefer a brave and blameless sorrow, with
the veil close over it, to a shameful sneaking
happiness under
the mask? There was a time
when I thought I could have worn it if I had
picked it up at your feet. The recollection makes
me half mad with shame. To have conceived of a
possible falsehood in your face is degradation
enough for me. Now that you have set me right (and
I would give my life to show you how much more I
have loved you ever since) I come to ask you to be
quite brave. Only that. I implore you now to go
without disguise at all. You cannot speak falsely,
I know; but to be silent is of itself a sort of
pretence. Speak, for Heaven’s sake, that all who
ever hear of you may adore you as I shall. Think
of the divine appeal against wrong and all
falsehood that you will be making!—a protest that
the very meanest must be moved and transformed by.
It is so easy to do, and so noble. Say why you go,
and then go at once. Put it before your brother.
Go straight to him when you leave the hateful
house you are in. He is very young, I know, but he
must see the greatness of what you do. Perhaps one
never sees how grand such things are—never
appreciates the reality of their greatness—better
than one does at his age. I think boys see right
and wrong as keenly as men do; he will exult that
you are compelled to turn to him and choose him to
serve
you. As for me, I must be glad enough
if you let me think I have taken any part in
bringing about that which will make all men look
upon you as I do—with a perfect devotion of
reverence and love. I believe you will let me see
you sometimes. I would devote my whole life to
Radworth—give up all I have in the world to him.
Even him I suppose nothing
could comfort for the loss of you; but if it ought
to be? At least we would find something to do. I
entreat you to read this, and answer me. There can
be but one answer. I wish to God I knew what to do
that you would like done, or how to say what I do
know—that I love you as no woman ever has been
loved by any man. What to call you or how to sign
this, I cannot think. I am afraid to write more.
R. E. H.
XII Mrs. Radworth to Reginald
Harewood
Blocksham, April
28th.
My Dear Cousin:
One word at starting. I
must not have you think I feel obliged to answer
you at all. I do write, as you see; but not
because I am afraid of you. And I am not going to
pretend you put me out. You shall not see me crane at the gaps. Your fences
are pretty full of them. Seriously, what can you
mean? What you want, I know. But how can you hope
I am to listen to such talk? Run away from
nothing? I see no sort of reason for changing.
You take things one says in the oddest way. I no
more mean to leave home because Ernest and I might
have more in common, than I should have thought of
marrying a man for his beaux yeux or for a
title. I hate hypocrisy. You are quite wrong about
me. Because I am simple and frank, because I like
(for a change) things and people with some
movement in them,
you take me for a sort of tied-up
tigress, a woman of the Sand breed, a prophetess
with some dreadful mission of revolt in her, a
trunk packed to the lid with combustibles, and
labelled with the proof-mark of a new morality :
not at all. I am neither oppressed nor passionate.
I don’t want delivering in the least. One would
think I was in the way of being food for a dragon.
Even if I were, how could you get me off? We are
born to what we bear; I read that and liked it, a
day since, in de Blamont’s last book. I mean to
bear things. We all make good pack-horses in time
: I shall see you at the work yet. Suppose I have
to drudge and drag. Suppose I am fast to the rock
with a beast coming up “out of the sad unmerciful
sea.” Better women live so, and so they die. Can
you kill my beast for me? I suspect not. It is
not cruel. It means me no great harm : but you it
will be the ruin of. It feeds on the knight rather
than his lady. Do you pass by. Be my friend in a
quiet way, and always. I shall be gratefuller for
a kind thought of yours than for a sheer blow. The
first you can afford; the last hardly. All
goodwill and kindly feeling does give comfort and
a pleasure to natural people who are not of a bad
make to begin with. I am glad of any, for my part
: and take it when
I can. What more could you do
for me? what better could I want? Can you change
me my life from the opening of it? It began
before yours was thought of; you know I am older;
have been told how much, no doubt; something
perhaps a thought over the truth—what matter?
I will tell you what I would have done, and
would do, if I could. I would begin better; I
would be richer, handsomer, braver, nicer to look
at and stay near, pleasanter to myself. I would be
the first woman alive, and marry the first man:
not an Eve though, nor Joan of Arc or Cleopatra,
but something new and great. I would live more
grandly than great men think. I should have all
the virtues then, no doubt. I would have all I
wanted, and the right and the power to feel
reverence and love and honour of myself into the
bargain. And my life and death should make up “a
kingly poem in two perfect books.” That would be
something better than I can make my life now. I
dare say I might have had a grander sort of man
for my companion than I have (a better I think
hardly); but then I might have been born a grander
sort of woman. There is no end to all that, you
see. I am very well as I am; all the better that I
have good friends.
I began as lightly as I could, and said nothing
of your tone of address and advice
being wrong or out of place; but now you will let
me say it was a little absurd. Your desire seems
to be that, because I have not all I might have
(whereas I also am not all I might be), I should
leave my husband and live alone, in the
cultivation of noble sentiments and in vindication
of female freedom and universal justice. How does
it sound to you now? I do not ask you if such a
proposal ever was made before. I do not even ask
you if it ought ever to be listened to. I make no
appeal to the opinions of the world. I say nothing
of the immediate unavoidable consequences. Suppose
I can go, and (on some grounds) ought to go. Are
there not also reasons why I ought to stay?
Reflect for a minute on results. Think, and decide
for yourself whether I could leave Ernest. For no
cause. Just because I can
leave him, and like to show that I know I can. I ask you, is that
base or not? I should be disgracing him, spoiling
his life and his pleasure in it, and using my
freedom to comfort my vanity at the cost of his
just self-esteem and quiet content; both of which
I should have robbed him of at once. I will do no
such thing. I will not throw over the man who
trusted and respected me—loved me in a way—gave me
the
care of his life. When he
married me he reserved nothing. I have been used
generously; I have received, at all events, more
than I have given. I wish, for my own sake
chiefly, that I had had more to give him. But what
I have given, at least I will not take away.
No, we must bear with the realities of things.
We are not the only creditors. Something is due to
all men that live. How much of their due do you
suppose the greater part of them ever get? Was it
not you who showed me long ago that passage in
Chalfont’s Essays where he says—I have just
looked it out again; my copy has a slip of paper
at the page with your initials on it.
“You are aware the gods owe you something,
which they have not paid you as yet—all you have
received at their hands being hitherto
insufficient? It appears also that you can help
yourself to the lacking portion of happiness. Cut
into the world’s loaf, then, with sharp
bread-knife, with steady hand; but at what cost?
Living flesh as sensitive of pain as yours, living
hearts as precious as your heart, as capable of
feeling wrong, must be carved and cloven through.
Their blood, if you dare spill it for your own
sake, doubtless it shall make you fat. They, too,
want something; take from them all they have,
and you shall want nothing. At this
price only shall a man become rich even to the
uttermost fulness of his desire, that he shall
likewise become content to rob the poor.”
Ah, after the reading of such words as those,
can we turn back to think of our own will and
pleasure? Dare we remember our own poor wants and
likings? I might be happier away from here; what
then, my dear cousin? I might even respect myself
more, feel more honourable; and this, no doubt, is
the greatest personal good one can enjoy or
desire: but can I take from the man who relies on
me the very gift that I covet for myself? A gift,
too, this one, which all may win and keep who are
resolved not to lose it by their own fault. I, for
one, Reginald, will not throw it away; but I will
not rob others to heighten my relish of it with
the stolen salt of their life. Do you remember
that next bit?
“And suppose now that you have eaten and are
full; digesting gravely and gladly the succulence
and savour of your life. Is this happiness that
you have laid hold of? Look at it; one day you
will have to look at it again; and other eyes than
yours will. The terror of a just judgment is this,
that it is a just one. The
sting of the sentence is that you, your own soul
and spirit,
must recognize and allow that
it is rightly given against you. Fear not the
other eyes, not God’s nor man’s, if what is done
remain right for ever in your own. Few, even among
cowards, are really afraid of injustice. The
meanest of them are afraid mainly of that which
does at first sight look just. But is this right
in your eyes, to have cut your own share out of
the world in this fashion? But what sort of
happiness, then, is this that you have caught hold
of? The fairest, joyfullest, needfullest thing
created is fire; and the fist that closes on it
burns. Let go, I counsel you, the bread of cunning
and violence, the sweet sources of treason and
self-seeking; there are worse ends than the death
of want. A soul poisoned is worse off than a
starved soul.”
You used to praise this man to me, saying there
was no grander lover of justice in the world.
Surely to such a writer liberty and truth are as
dear as to you or me : and this is what he
admires. An American too, as he says himself, fed
with freedom, full of the love of his own right;
but all great men would say as he says, and all
good men would do so. I shall try at least. ”
There is an end of time, and an end of the evil
thereof : and when joy is gone out of thee, then
shall not thy sorrow endure for long. Nevertheless
thou
sayest, grief shall remain with me
now that I have made an end of my pleasure; but
grief likewise shall not abide with thee. For
before the beginning a little sorrow was ordained
for thee, and also a very little pleasure; but
there is nothing of thine that endureth for ever.”
Do you know where I found that? In a book of my
husband’s, the Sayings of Aboulfadir, in a
collection of translations headed The Wise Men of
the East. You see I am growing as philosophic as
need be, and as literary. We know better than that
last sentence, but is not the rest most true? You will forgive my
preacher’s tone; it was hopeless trying to answer
such a letter as you wrote me in a sustained light
manner.
I hope you are not put out with me; I may say,
in ending, how sorry I should be for that. You
must find other things to think of, without
forgetting and throwing over old friendship.
“Plenty of good work feasible in the world
somehow,” says your friend. For my poor little
part, I have just to hold fast to what I have, and
at least forbear doing harm. Again I ask you to
forgive me if this letter has hurt you anywhere.
Of course you can never show it. Farewell.
XIII Francis Cheyne to Lady
Cheyne
London, May
7th.
I have read your letter
twice over carefully, and cannot see why we should
alter our plans. My sister, I know, counts upon
you. But I can imagine from what quarter the
objection comes: and I hardly like to think you
will let it act upon you in this way. Indeed, I
for one have promised your brother to meet him
half way, on the understanding that we were all to
be at Portsmouth or Ryde together. He for one
would be completely thrown out, if our project
were to break up. Is Lord Cheyne tired of the
plan, do you think? If so, I suppose there is no
more to say. You speak so uncertainly of “having
to give it up,” and “not being sure of the
summer,” that I have perhaps missed out some such
hint. Of course a word must be enough for us; but
I fear it will not be easy to get over Reginald.
He is hot on the notion; I think he must have a
touch of the
sea-fever. In our schooldays he used to bewail his
fate in being cut off from the sea as a profession.
May
8th.
I left off yesterday because I wanted to go on
differently. Now, as I mean to finish this and
send it off at all hazards, I must speak out once
for all. I do not think you can mean to break with
all our hopes and recollections, and change the
whole look of life for me. I do not suppose you
have more regard for me than for any other kinsman
or chance friend. And I do not appeal to you on
the score of my own feeling. You are no coward to
be afraid of words, or of harmless things—I can
say safely, that if I could die to save you
trouble or suffering I should thank God. I love
nothing seriously that does not somehow belong to
you; all that does not seems done in play, or to
get the time through. But I am not going to plead
with you on this ground. I ask nothing of you; if
you were to die to-night I should still have had
more than my fair share of luck in life. If I am
to see you again, I can only be as glad of it as I
am now, when I think of you. I cannot understand
why I should not have this too to be glad of. What
can people say, as things are?—unless, indeed,
there were
to be a change of appearances.
Then they might get vicious, and talk idiocy. But
you know what I shall do. It is not I who have to
set you right; we neither of us want stupid words
or anything like the professional clack of love.
I think sometimes you might come to care for me
a little more. I know you detest that. Perhaps the last word
above had no business where it came in. I remember
your way of saying what things you hated.
I see Reginald often now; I suppose he is all
right. I am fond of him, but don’t envy his way of
taking things. I like to look at him and make out
why he is thought so like you : and, I think, when
he is with me he talks more of you than he used. I
can hardly think he is older than I am when I see
how much less he knows or feels of one thing.
May
9th.
I have let this lie over another day. I have
nothing to say but that I can say nothing. When I begin to write, I
seem to hear you speaking. I believe at times I
can tell, by the sensation, what you are doing at
Lidcombe. I have heard you speak twice since I sat
down, and I know
the dress you have on. Do not write
unless you want. I can see how you will take this.
I cannot help it, you understand. There is
Reginald’s knock; but this shall go to-day, and I
will not touch it again.
XIV Lady Midhurst to Reginald
Harewood
Ashton Hildred, May 12th.
My Dear Boy:
You are, without
exception, the best fun I know. I have been
laughing for the last two hours over your letter
and its enclosure. You are not to fly out at me,
mind; I regard you with all just esteem, I think
all manner of good things of you, but you are fun,
you will allow. Old friends may remark on such
points of character, and yet draw no blood.
Now, my dear Redgie, what do you think I got by
post exactly three days before this epistle of
yours, with Clara’s valuable bit of English prose
composition so neatly inserted? I am humane, and
will not let your brains tingle with curiosity for
a minute. I got this; a
note (not ill worded by any means) from my
affectionate and anxious niece, C. R., enclosing
your last letter to her. She threw herself upon me
(luckily
the space between us softened the
shock of her weight, enabling me to bear up) with
full confidence and
gratitude. I could explain and advise; I could
support and refresh. I was to say whether she were
right or not. To Mr. Radworth she could not turn
for sustenance or counsel. Ought a wife to—would a
wife be justified if she did—do so and so?
Through all this overture to her little
performance one could hear thrill the tone of
British matronhood, tremulously strong and
tenderly secure. I did think it was all over with
some of you, but found rapid relief. She put it to
me; was she to notice it? Was she to try to bring
you to reason, appealing to the noble mismanaged
nature of you? Could she treat your letter as
merely insulting or insane? My private answer
came at once—Decidedly she could not; but I never
wrote it down—it went off in a little laugh,
quietly. She wound up with an intimation that I
was thus taken into confidence in order to give me
a just and clear idea of her conduct and position; this she owed to
herself (the debt was well paid, and I receipted
it by return of post), but she would rather say
as little of your folly as she could avoid. Of
course, she put it twice as prettily, and in a
very neat, soft way; but I
give you the real upshot. She
understood—Clara, you see, did—that I felt warmly
and fondly towards you; she was aware that I could
not but know the way in which your conduct would
affect her, Clara; and on your account, on mine
(by no means, I need not say, on her own), she now
felt—various things in the sensation line
eminently creditable to her.
I drew breath after this, and then laid hold of
your letter. It did not upset me, you will like to
hear; indeed, I compliment you on such a
“selfless” and stainless form of devotion. You
play Launcelot in a suit of Arthur’s armour—or
rather in his new clothes after the well-known cut
of modern tailordom, which I grieve to see are
already cast wear, or how should you come by them?
The vividness and loftiness of view throughout is
idyllic. In effect,
considering your heat of head and violence of
sentiment, I think you behave—and write—nicely,
nobly even, if you like to be told so. It is right
you should take things in the way you do, now you
are first plunged into them. I am glad you do
persuade yourself of the justice and reality of
your passionate paradoxes and crude conceptions
about social rights and wrongs. Naturally, being
in love, like the bad specimen you are,
you find institutions criminal, and
revolt desirable. It is better, taking your age
into account, than trying to sneak under shelter
of them within reach of the forbidden fruit. Storm
the place if you can, but no shooting behind
walls; a good plan for you, as I am glad you see.
Altogether, if you are cracked, I should say you
have no unsound side; a fool you may be, but you
get through your fooleries like a gentleman. You
are “brave enough” too, as you said; it was no
coward’s letter, that one. I should not forgive
you otherwise; but I was always sure, so far, of
my old Redgie—you never had any of the makings of
a coward about you. I like the hopeless
single-sighted daring of your proposals; also your
way of feeling what disgrace would be. Except in
the vulgarest surface fashion, she, for one, will
never understand that—never get to see the gist of
your first few lines, for instance, as I do; but
don’t you get on that ground again, my dear boy. I
like you all the better; and that has nothing to
do with it, you see. In a word—allow that you
were outside of all reason in writing the letter,
and I will admit you have kept well inside the
lines of honour. So far, there is nothing to
forgive (which is tant soit peu lowering),
and not much to punish (which is at worst
painful). There is a school
copy for you; make me an exercise in C.’s style on
that head.
So much for you; now for her side; and I do beg
you to read this patiently, and do me justice as
far as you can. You send me her answer to your
letter in a rapture of admiration, with a view of
altering and ennobling my estimate of her, which
you know to be hitherto of a moderate kind. I am
to read and kindle, acknowledge and adore. Is she
not noble? Let us see. Ought we not to do honour
to such grand honesty and purity, such a sublime
goodness? I am not over sure. You write to me as
to your first best friend (and effectively, my
dear old child, I don’t think you have a better
one—I do feel parental on
your score), wishing to set my mistakes right and
bring me to an equitable and generous tone of
mind: you do me the honour to think me capable of
conversion, worthy to worship if I did but see the
altar as it really stands. Being such as I am, I
cannot but appreciate greatness and high devotion
if I can but be brought face to face with them.
That I think is what you mean, or rather what you
had floating in your head when you wrote to me.
Well, we must hope you were right. I am no doubt
flattered; and will try to be deserving.
Then, I must now see things as you
do, and admit the sublimities of behaviour you
have made out in C. R. to be real discoveries, and
not flies in your telescope. Her noble letter to
you—a letter so fearless of misconception, so
gently worded, so devoted, and so just—must compel
me to allow this much. Wait; you shall have my
poor verdict as to that by and by.
But now, what have you to say about her letter
to me? Why do you suppose she sends me your
epistle to her? I should like to know. To me,
honestly, it does seem like a resolution to be
quit of all personal damage, or risk, or other
moral discomfort; also it does seem very like a
keen apprehension—very laudably keen—of a chance
given her to right herself, or to raise herself
in my judgment, by submitting the whole matter to
me. I, as arbitress, must decide, on receiving
such an appeal from her, backed by such proofs,
that she had gone on splendidly—was worthy of all
manner of praise—and that you, as a crazy boy in
the “salad days” of sentiment, were alone
blameworthy. Now, frankly, do you believe she had
any other meaning? Why need she appeal to me at
all? Certainly I am her nearest female relation.
Après? And we have always been on the
nicest terms. What then? There
was no call for her to refer to anybody. She is
old enough, at all events (and that she will hardly deny, or insinuate a
denial of), to manage by herself for herself. Do
you imagine she wrote on your account; applied to
me for your sake? I do not. How could I help her
? How could I settle you? Favour me by
considering that. One thing I could do, and that
she knew well enough. I could change my mind as to
her (she was always clever enough to know what my
honest opinion of her was) and prevent, by simply
expressing approval, if not applause, of her, any
chance of annoyance she might otherwise have run
the risk of. Do you see? it was no bad stroke;
just the kind of sharpness you know I always gave
her credit for. Very well played too by forwarding
me your letter; she was aware I should hardly have
relied on extracts or summaries of her making, and
was not such a fool as to appeal to me in a vague
virtuous way. Upon the whole, as it seemed to her,
she could not fail to come out admirably from the
test in my eyes. I confess, for the sort of woman,
she is far-sighted and sharp-sighted. Only, there
is one thing to be taken into account; that I have
known both her and you since you were the
tiniest thinking animals possible.
She was not hard upon you; not in the least. I was
to draw all the inferences for myself.
And now for her letter to you. Luckily I had
read all this before I came to it. And after all I
am surprised; not admiringly by any means. I
looked for better of her, considering. As she
could not decently assume alarm and anger, and was
not the woman to write in the simple Anglican
fashion, you see there was nothing for it but to
mix audacity with principle. She begins fairly on
that score : the opening is not bad. But how could
you swallow the manner?
Was there ever such a way of writing? The chaff,
as you others call it, is so poor, so ugly and
paltry—the tone of rebuke such a dead failure; the
air of sad satisfaction so ill put on; the touches
of sentiment so wretchedly coloured. I wonder she
could do no better; she gets up her effects with
trouble enough, and is not a fool. As to the
magnanimous bits—I do really want to know if it
has never crossed your
mind for a second that they were absolute
impertinences? Were you quite taken in by that talk about “man who
trusted and respected,” “just self-esteem,”
“used generously,” and such like? “Received more
than she has given”! “Not the only creditor”!—why, my poor boy, I tell you
again she married the man tooth and nail; took him
as a kite takes a chaffinch. Certainly he wanted
her; but as to having wind enough to run her down! It upsets me to write about it.
Throw him over!
It is perfect impudence to imagine she can make
any living creature above twelve suppose that
regard for Ernest keeps her what one calls a good
wife. She looks it when you come upon them
anywhere. But your age has no eyes. Sense of duty
?—she cares for the duties and devotions no more
than I should care for her reputation if she were
not unhappily my relative. It is a grievous thing
to see you taking to such a plat d’argot
réchauffé. For pure street slang it is,
not even the jargon of a rational society. Do you
know what ruin means? or compromise even? And
she is not the woman, by nature or place, to risk
becoming tarée in the slightest degree. She is
thoroughly equable and cautious, beyond a certain
point. The landmark is a good bit on this side of
serious love-making; hardly outside the verge of
common sentiment. I assure you there is nothing to
be made of her in any other way. She will keep you
on and off eternally to no further purpose.
Upon the whole I don’t know that her letter
could well have been a worse piece of
work than it is. Why, if you would but observe it,
she runs over into quotation before she gets a
good start; and I never saw this modern fashion of
mournful, satirical, introspective writing more
ungraciously assumed. Her sad smiles crack, and show the enamel.
You know how an old wretch with her face glazed looks if she ventures
to laugh or cry? at least you can imagine if you
will think of me with a coating of varnish on my
cheeks and lips, listening to you for five
minutes. Well, just in the same way the dried
paint of her style splits
and spoils the whole look of her letter at the
tender semi-rident passages. It is too miserably
palpable. Don’t you see her trying to write up to
tradition?—say what she has to say in the soft
pungent manner she thinks proper to her part as a
strong-minded, clear-headed, somewhat rapid humourist (don’t suppose
I meant to write vapid), with a touch of the
high-minded unpretentious social martyr? I must
tell you a bit of verse I kept thinking of while I
ran over this epistle of hers—Musset, you know—
Triste! oh, triste en vérité! —Triste,
abbé? Vous avez le vin triste? If you
had but the wit to take it in that way, and answer
her accordingly! Elle a l’amour triste,
like most of her sort. For you
must allow she is making love, though in the
unpractical way. If I could but see an end of this
dolorous kind of verbal virtue and compromised
sentiment—this tender tension of the moral
machine, worse for the nerves than the headiest
draughts of raw sensation! But it all comes of
your books; I thank Heaven we were reared on
sounder stuff. Confess that her American sermons
were too much for you. As for Aboulfadir, I never
was so nearly hysterical since the decease of your
grandfather. I actually saw
her looking out the bit. And your initials on
the slip of paper, you remember? Oh, you utter
idiot!
Allow me one more question before you tear me
up. Has it yet struck you what her last words mean? “You can never show this”; that is, in
Heaven’s name forward this to old Aunt Midhurst
next time she writes spitefully about me. Now,
Reginald, I will not have bad language. You know
she meant that; the woman capable of inditing that
letter must be capable of thinking it good enough
to influence any reader,
upset any prejudice. You
were to send it (you must admit you did), and it
was to complete the grand work of refutation begun
a week before by her appeal to me on the occasion
of your
letter. Now, I do hope you see: it was really a
passable stroke of wit. The whole thing was cooked
with a view to its being served up stewed in the
same sauce. No doubt, after the great conception,
her brain swelled with the sense of supreme
diplomacy. Perhaps a man might have been taken in.
Evidently a boy was. For my part I think it
personally insulting to have supposed my opinion
of her was to be affected by such a cheap specimen
of the scene-shifter’s professional knack. I see
as well as ever how she wants to play her hand
out.
I give you a month, my dear boy, to get over
your rage at me; then I shall expect you to behave
equably. Till that time I suppose I must let you ”
chew the thrice-turned cud of wrath.” Otherwise I
should beg you not to make one of the south-coast
party I hear of. Also, if you did go, to stick
close to your sister. As it is, I see you will
join the rest, and waste your time and wits,
besides sinking chin-deep in Platonic sloughs of
love. Some day I may succeed in pulling you out. I
dare say it ought to be a comfort to me to reflect
that you are doing no great harm; dirtier you
might get, but scarcely wetter. The quagwater of
sentiment will soak you to the bone. In earnest,
if you go to Portsmouth
or elsewhere with the Cheynes,
you are to let me hear now and then. I hope there
is enough love or liking between us two to stand a
little sharp weather between whiles. Even though I
am unbearably vicious and shamefully stupid with
regard to your cousin, you ought to try and
overlook it. Recollect my age, I entreat you. Can
you expect sound judgment and accurate relish of
the right thing from such an old critic as I am?
You might as well hope to make me see her beauty
with your eyes as appreciate her goodness in your
fashion. And then, bad as I may be, we have been
friends too long to break off. If I had ever had a
son in my younger years things would have gone
differently; as it was, I have always had to put
up with you instead. A bad substitute you make,
too; but somehow one gets used to that. If I could
have taken you with me from the first, and reared
you under shelter of your mother (nice work I
should have had of it, by the by; but all that labour fell to your
father’s share), I would have broken you in
better. I would, regardless of all expense in
birch; though as to that the Captain did his duty
to you liberally, I will say. When you were born I
could not realize your mother’s age to myself in
the least; I myself was only
thirty-eight (look me out in the
dates, if you won’t take my word for it), and I
could not make her out old enough to have a son.
Besides, I had always hungered after a boy. So I
took to you from the beginning in an idiotic way,
and by this time no doubt my weakness is
developing into senile dotage. I don’t say I
always stood by you; but you must remember, my
dear Redgie, I could not always. Your ill-luck was
mine as to that, and your mother’s too. I wish I
could have kept by you when you did want some of
us at hand; not that I suppose the softest-hearted
boy feels deeply the want of a superincumbent
grandmother. Still, we should all have got on the
better for it, I conceive. No doubt, too, I have
not always done the best for you—only my best: but that I did always
want to do. In a word, you know I love you as
dearly as need be: and you may as well put up with
me for fault of a better.
Take this into account when you feel furious,
and endeavour to make the best you can of me. I
perceive this letter is running to seed, and my
tattle fast lapsing into twaddle. After all, I
don’t suppose my poor shots at the pathetic will
bring down much game of the sentimental kind. I
might bubble and boil over with feeling
long enough (I suspect) before
you melted. Besides, what does it matter, I should
be glad to know? However, I do trust you will be
as good a boy as you can, and not bring me to an
untimely grave in the flower of my wrinkles.
XV Lady Cheyne to
Francis
Portsmouth, May
28th.
Do not write, and do not
persist in trying to speak to me again. If you
care for any of us, you will not stay here. I can
do nothing. When my husband speaks to me, it turns
me hot and sick with fear. I am ashamed of every
breath I draw. If you cannot have mercy, do, for
God’s sake, think of your own honour. If you stay
here, you may as well show this letter at once. I
wish Cheyne would kill me. But, even if he saw
what I am thinking of when I look at him, I
believe he would not. He is so fearfully good to
me. Oh, if I were to die, I should never forget
that! I don’t know that it matters much what I
do. I have broken my faith to him in thought, and,
if justice were done, I ought to be put away from
him. I look at my hand while I write, and think it
ought to be cut off—my ring burns. I cannot think
how things can be as dreadful as
they are. I suppose, if I can
live through this, I shall live to see them become
worse. If I could but see what to do, I should be
content with any wretchedness. I never meant to be
a bad wife. When I woke this morning, I felt mad.
People would say there was nothing to repent of;
but I know. It is worse not to love him than it
would be to leave him. What have you done to me?
for I never lied and cheated till now. After such
horrible falsehood and treason I don’t see what
crime is to stop me. If I had known that another
woman was like me at heart I could not have borne
to let her look at me. I feel as if I must go away and hide myself.
If only something would give me an excuse for
going home! At least, if I must stay with my
husband, I implore you to leave me. Tell your
sister you must go. Say
you are tired. Or go to London to-morrow with
Cheyne, and don’t return. You can so easily excuse
yourself from the sailing party. He stays in town
one night, and comes down in time for it the day
after. You can make a pretext for remaining. If
you have any pity, you will. I have nothing to
help me in the world. It would kill me to appeal
to Reginald. No one could understand. I am sure,
if you knew how I do want and trust to be
kept right, and what a fearful life I
have of it with this sense of a secret wearing me
out, you would be sorry for me. And if you love me
so much, knowing what you know now, you ought to
be sorry. It is too late for me to get happy
again, but I may come not to feel such unbearable
shame as I do now, and shall while you stay.
Promise you will not try to see me. I wonder if
God will be satisfied, supposing you never do see
me again? I shall have tried to be good. I think
He ought to have pity on me, too. But, if I live
to grow old, I shall want to see you then.
XVI Mrs. Radworth to Lady
Midhurst
Portsmouth, June
3rd.
You will have heard, my
dear aunt, of our wretched loss, and the fearful
bereavement of poor Amicia. I wish I could give a
reassuring account of her, but she appears to be
quite broken; it is miserable to see her. She sits
for whole hours in her own room; I did hope at
first it was to seek the consolation of prayer,
but that comfort, I fear greatly, she is not yet
capable of feeling. She looks quite like death. I
suggested she should go into the room where he is
lying, and take her last look of him, but she
turned absolutely whiter than she was, shuddered,
and seemed quite sick. My brother is hardly less
overcome. On a servant addressing him yesterday by
his title, he actually sank into a chair, and gave
way in a manner which I could not but regret. I am
certain he would sacrifice worlds to restore his
cousin to life.
Mr. Harewood has been throughout most
kind. He has done all that the best friend of our
poor child could do. Amicia will hardly see anyone
but him. Mr. Radworth offered to relieve him of
some part of the wretched trouble and business he
has undertaken to spare dear Amicia (Francis, I
must tell you, seems incapable of moving); but he
refuses to share it. I cannot express to you the
admiration we all feel for his beautiful
management of her, poor child. Who could remember
at such a time the former folly which he must
himself have forgotten? I am constantly reminded
that you alone always did him justice.
I suppose you will wish to know the sad detail,
and it had better perhaps be given at once by me
than by another. We had decided, as you know, to
take Saturday last as the day of our projected
sail. Francis seemed curiously unwilling to go at
first, and it was only at poor Lord Cheyne’s
repeated request that he assented. Amicia was very
quiet, and I thought rather depressed—I have no
doubt in consequence of the sudden reaction from a
continued strain on her spirits. It was a very
dull party altogether; only Mr. Harewood and poor
Edmund seemed to have any spirits to enjoy it.
They talked
a great deal, especially about
summer plans. Quite suddenly, we heard ahead what
I fancied was the noise of the overfalls, and
began passing out of smooth water. I thought it
looked dangerous, but they would put inshore. Feeling the waves run
rapidly a little higher and higher, I said
something to Amicia, who I knew was a bad sailor,
and as she scarcely answered, but lay back in the
boat, I feared the discomfort to her of rough
water had begun. I stooped forward, as well as I
remember, to sign to my husband to make Lord
Cheyne look at her. Ernest, in his nervous absent
way, failed to catch my meaning, and, in rising to
speak to me, was pitched forwards with a jerk, and
came full against Mr. Harewood, who was helping to
shift a sail. Then I really saw nothing more but
that the sail-yard (is it a yard they call the bit
of wood a sail is tied to?1)
swung round, and I screamed and caught hold of
Amicia, and next second I saw poor Lord Cheyne in
the water. He caught at Francis, who was next him,
and missed. Mr. Harewood jumped in after him with
his coat on, but he could hardly make the least
way because of the ground swell. They had to pull
him in again almost stifled, and
Note
(editor)
1NOTE (? by Lady Midhurst).—”Too
ingenuous by half for the situation.”
I feared insensible. Before I came to
myself so as to see what anybody was doing, they
had got the body on board, and Francis and the
sailors and Ernest were trying to revive it.
Amicia, who was shaking dreadfully, kept hold of
her brother, chafing and kissing his face and
hands. How we ever got back God knows. Amicia
seemed quite stunned; she never so much as touched
her husband’s hand. When we came to get out, I
thought Francis and my husband would have had to
support her, but Mr. Radworth was quite useless, and poor
Francis could not bear even to look at her misery.
So Mr. Harewood (who was really unfit to walk
himself) and one of the sailors had to carry her
up to the house. The funeral takes place
to-morrow; I trust my brother may be able to
attend, but really he seems at times perfectly
broken down in health and everything.
XVII Lady Midhurst to Lady
Cheyne
Ashton Hildred, June 6th.
My Dearest Child:
I would not let your
mother go, or she would have been with you before
this. It must have done
her harm. She is not well enough even to write; we
have had to take her in hand. It is a bad time for
us all; we must live it down as we best may. I
thought of advising your father to be with you
before the funeral, but she would hardly like him to leave her. I
shall start myself to-morrow, and take you home
with me. You had better not go to Lidcombe. With
us you will at least have thorough quiet, and time
to recover by degrees. Now no doubt you are past
being talked to. I only hope those people do their
best for you. It is well now that nothing ever
came between poor Cheyne and you. I suppose you
have had as quiet and unbroken a time since your
marriage as any one ever does get. The change is
sharp; all changes are that
turn upon a death. I know, too, that
he loved you very truly, and was always good,
just, and tender to all he knew; a man to be
seriously and widely regretted. It may be that you
are just now inclining to believe you will never
get over the pain of such a loss. Now, in my life,
I have lost many people and many things I would
have given much to keep. I have repented and
lamented much that I have done, and more that has
happened to me—sometimes through my own fault. But
one thing I do know, and would have you lay to
heart—that nobody living need retain in his
dictionary the word irretrievable. Strike it out, I advise you;
I erased it from mine long ago. Self-reproach and
the analysis of regret are most idle things.
Abstain at least from confidences and complaints.
Bear what you have to bear steadily, with locked
teeth as it were. This minute may be even graver
than you think. I know how expansion follows on
the thaw of sudden sorrow. I am always ready to
hear and help you to the best of my poor old
powers; but, even to me, I would not have you
overflow too much. I write in all kindness and
love to you, my poor child, and I know my sort of
counselling is harsh, heathen, mundane—I can
hardly help your way of looking at it. No
one is sorrier than I am; no
one would give more to recall irrevocable things.
But once again I assure you what cannot be
recalled may be retrieved. Only the retrieving
must come from you: show honour and regard to
Cheyne’s memory by controlling and respecting
yourself to begin with. If you have some floating
desire to make atonement of any kind, atone in
that way. But if you have any such feeling, there
is a morbid nerve; you should labour to deaden it—
by no means to stimulate.
I am more thankful than I can say that you have
Reginald with you. The boy is affectionate, and
not of an unhealthy nature. He ought to be of use
and comfort; I am sure he is good for you. I can
well believe you see no more of others than you
can help. It was nice for me to hear from any
quarter that Redgie had done his part well. There
ought always to be a bond between you two. Family
ties are invaluable—where they are anything: and
neither of you could have a better stay in any
time of need than the other. As to friendships of
a serious nature (very deeply serious that is)
between man and man, or between woman and woman, I
have no strong belief in their existence—none
whatever in their possible usefulness.
I shall be with you in two days at latest; will
you understand if I ask you to wait for me? Till
I come, do nothing for yourself; say nothing to
anybody. For your mother’s sake and mine, who have
some claims to be thought of—I add no other name;
I don’t want to appeal on any grounds but these;
but you know why you should spare her. Restraint and reserve at
present will be well made up to you afterwards. I
can imagine you may want some one to lean upon; I
dare say it is hard now to be shut up and
self-reliant; but I would not on any account have
you expand in a wrong
direction. I could wish to write you a
softer-toned letter of comfort than this; but one
thing I must say: do not let your grief hurry you
even for one minute beyond the reach of advice. As
for comfort, my dearest child, what can I well say
? I have always hated condolence myself : where it
is anything, it is bad—helpless and senseless at
best. A grievous thing has happened; we can say no
more when all comment has been run through. To us
for some time—I say to us, callous as you are now
thinking me—the loss and misfortune will seem even
greater than they are. You have the worst of it.
Nevertheless, it is not the end of all things. The
world will dispense with us some day; but it
shall not while we can hold
out. Things must go on when we have dropped off;
but, while we can, let us keep up with life. These
are cold scraps enough to feed regret with; but
they are at least solid of their kind, which is
more than I would say of some warmer and lighter
sorts of moral diet. As for what is called
spiritual comfort, I would have you by all means
take and use it, if you can get it, and if the
flavour of it is natural to you: I know the way
most people have of proffering and pressing it
upon one; for my part I never pretended to deal in
it. I know only what I think and feel myself; I do
not profess to keep moral medicines on hand
against a time of sickness. Heaven knows I would
give much, or do much, or bear much, to heal you.
But indeed at these times, when one must speak (as
I have now to do), I prefer things of the cold
sharp taste to the faint tepid mixtures of
decocted sentiment which religious or verbose
people serve out so largely and cheaply. I may be
the worse comforter for this; but to me comments,
either pious or tender, usually leave a sickly
sense after them, as of some flat, unwholesome
drug. I am not preaching paganism; I would have
you seek all reasonable comfort or support
wherever it seems good to you. But I for one
cannot write
or talk about hopes of reunion,
better life, expiation, faith, and such other
things. I believe that those who cannot support
themselves cannot be supported. Those who say they
are upheld by faith say they are upheld by a kind
of energy natural to them. This I do entirely
allow; and a good working quality it is. But any
one who is utterly without self-reliance will
collapse. There can be nothing capable of helping
the helpless. So you must be satisfied with the
best I can give you in the way of comfort.
I see well enough that I am heathenish and hard.
But I know your trouble is a great one, and I will
not play with it. It would be easy to write after
the received models, if the thing were not so
serious. Time will help us; there is no other
certain help. Some day when you are old enough to
reconsider past sorrows you will admit that there
was a touch of truth in my shreds of pagan
consolation. Stoicism is not an exploded system of
faith. It may be available still when resignation
in the modern sense breaks down. Resign yourself
by all means to the unavoidable; take patiently
what will come; refuse yourself the relaxation of
complaint. Have as little as you can to do with
fear, or repentance, or retrospection of any kind.
Fear is unprofitable; to
look back will weaken your
head. As to repentance, it never did good or undid
harm. Do not persuade yourself either that your
endurance of things that are is in any way a
sacrifice of Christian resignation offered to the
supreme powers. That is the unhealthy side of
patience; the fortitude of the feeble. Be content
to endure without pluming yourself on a sense of
submission. For, indeed, submission without
compulsion can never be anything but the vicious
virtue of sluggards. We submit because we must,
and had better not flatter ourselves with the
fancy that we submit out of goodness. If we could
fight our fate we all would. It is not the desire
to resist that we fail in, but the means; we have
no fighting material. It would not be rebellion,
but pure idiocy or lunacy, for us to begin
spluttering and kicking against the pricks; but,
on the other hand, that is no reason why we should
grovel and blubber. It is a child’s game to play
at making a virtue of necessity. I say that if we
could rebel against what happens to us we would
rebel. Christian or heathen, no man would really
submit to sorrow if he could help it. Neither you
nor I would, and therefore do not try to believe
you are resigned, as people call it, to God’s will
in the strict religious sense. For if submission
means anything that a Stoic had not
it means something that no one ever had or ought
to have. Courage, taking the word how you will, I
have always put at the head of the virtues. Any
sort of faith or humility that interferes with it,
or impairs its working power, I have no belief in.
But, above all things, I would have you always
keep as much as you can of liberty. Give up all
for that; sacrifice it to nothing—to no religious
theory, to no moral precept. All slavishness,
whether of body or of spirit, leaves a taint where
it touches. It is as bad to be servile to God as
it is to be servile to man. Accept what you must
accept, and obey where you must obey; but make no
pretence of a “freewill offering.” That sort of
phrase and that sort of feeling I hold in real
abhorrence. Weak people and cowards play with such
expressions and sentiments just as children do
with tin soldiers. It is their substitute for
serious fighting; because they cannot struggle,
they say and believe they would not if they could;
most falsely. Give in to no such fancies: cherish
no such forms of thought. Liberty and courage of
spirit are better worth keeping than any
indulgence in hope and penitence. I suppose this
tone of talk is unchristian; I know it is
wholesome though, for all that. God knows, our
scope of
possible freedom is poor and
small enough; that is no reason why we should
labour to circumscribe it further. We are beaten
upon by necessity every day of our lives: we
cannot get quit of circumstances; we cannot better
the capacities born with us; all the less on that
very account need we try to impair them. Because
we are all purblind, more or less, must we pluck
out our eyes to be led about by the ear? Is it any
comfort, when we look through spectacles that show
us nothing but shapeless blurs and blots, to be
told we ought to see clearly by their help, and
must at least take it for granted that others do?
Rather I would have you endure as much as you can,
and hope for as little as you can. All wise and
sober courage ends in that. Do, in Heaven’s name,
try to keep free of false hopes and feeble fears.
Face things as they are; think for yourself when
you think of life and death, joy and sorrow, right
and wrong. These things are dark by the nature of
them; it is useless saying they can be lit up by a
candle held in your eyes. You are only the
blinder; they are none the clearer. What liberty
to act and think is left us, let us keep fast hold
of; what we cannot have, let us agree to live
without.
This is a strange funeral sermon for me to
preach to you across a grave so
suddenly opened. Only once or twice in the many
years of one’s life the time comes for speaking
out, if one will see it—these are matters I seldom
think over and never talk about, wishing to keep
my head and eyes clear. But my mind was made up,
if I did write to you, to keep back nothing I had
to say, and affect nothing I had not to say. You
are worth counsel and help, such as I can give;
the occasion, too, is worth open and truthful
speech. I do not pray that you may have strength
sent you; you must take your own share of work and
endurance; you have to make your strength for
yourself. I say again, time will help you, and we
should survive this among other lamentable things.
But for me, now that I have said my say and prayed
my prayers over the dead, I shall not preach on
this text again. What my love and thought for you
can do in the way of honest help has been done. If
you want more in this time of your danger and
sorrow, you will not ask it of me. Suppose I were
now dying, I could not add a word more to leave
you by way of comfort or comment. For once I have
written fully, and shown you what I really think
and look for as to these matters. I shall never
open up again in the same way to any one while I
live. I have unpacked my bag for you; now I put it
away for
good, under lock and seal.
When we meet, and as long as we live together, let
us do the best we can in silence.
I add no message; all that would be said you
know without that. It could only weaken you and
sharpen the pain of the day to you to receive
tender words and soft phrases copied out to no
purpose. I have told your mother she had best not
write—forgive me if you regret it. Indeed, I doubt
whether she would have tried. When you are here,
we must all manage to gain in strength and sense.
If this letter of mine strikes cold upon your
sorrow, I can but hope you may find, in good time,
something or some one able really to soothe and
support you better than I can. Meantime, if you
read it with patience, I hope it may help to
settle you; save you from the useless self-torture
of penitent perplexity and the misery of a petted
retrospect; and lighten your head, at all events,
of some worry, if it cannot just now affect you at
heart for the better, as other comforters might
profess to do. No one, to my thinking, can “help
the heart “—wise phrase of a wiser poet than your
brother ever will make.
There, I suppose, you must suffer at present.
How things are to go with us later on, I cannot
say or see. But while you live, and whatever you
do, believe at least in the love I have for you.
XVIII Lady Midhurst to Francis
Cheyne
Ashton Hildred, July 28th.
My Dear Frank:
I would not have you
write to Amicia about those minor arrangements you
speak of. Matters had better be settled with me,
or by means of your sister. We know you will do
all you can in the best possible way; and she is
not yet well enough to bear worry. I fear, indeed,
that she has more to bear physically than we had
thought of. She keeps getting daily more white and
wretched, and we hardly know how to handle her.
When she arrived, she had a sort of nervous look
of strength, which begins now to fail her
completely; spoke little, except to me, but fed
and slept like a rationally afflicted person. Now I see her
get purplish about the eyes, and her cheeks going
in perceptibly. It will take years to set her
straight if this is to go on. She is past all
medicine of mine. I dare say she will begin to
develope a spiritual tendency—she reads
the unwholesomest books. The truth is, she is
far too young to be a widow. That grey and cynical
condition of life sits well only upon shoulders of
thirty or forty. She is between shadow and sun, in
the dampest place there is. Mist and dew begin to
tell upon her brain : there is the stuff of a
conversion in her just now. I tell you this
because you have known her so well, and were such
good friends with her that you will be able to
take my meaning. I am sure you do want to hear,
and sincerely wish all things right with her
again. I hope they may be in time—we must take
them as they are now. Meantime, it is piteous
enough to see her. She comes daily to sit with me
for hours, and has a way of looking up and sighing
between whiles which is grievous to me. Again, at
times, I seem to have glimpses of some avowal or
appeal risen almost to her lips, and as suddenly
resigned. Her words have tears in them somehow,
even when she talks peaceably. I had no suspicion of so deep or
keen a regard on her part. Our poor Edmund can
hardly have given her as much, one would say. But
who knows what he had in him? He was strange
always, with his gentle cold manner, and had rare
qualities. “I forget things,” she said one day on
a sudden to me—I never know what she
does think of. Another time, “I wish
one could see backwards.”
I am glad you went at once to Lidcombe; you will
make them a good lord there. Edmund always hung
loose on the place. Some day, I suppose, you will
have to marry, but you are full young as yet. I
should like to see what the house will hold in ten
years’ time, but do not much expect the luck.
Early deaths age people who hear of them. I feel
the greyer for this month’s work. They tell me you
have had Captain Harewood to help you in settling
down and summing-up. As he was, in a manner, your
guardian for a year or two after the death of your
father, I suppose he is the man for such work. I
believe he had always a good clear head and
practical wit. That wretched boy of his doubtless
lost his chance of inheriting it through my fault.
We came in there and spoilt the blood. I fancy you
have something of the same good gift. It is one I
have always coveted, and always failed of, that
ready and steady capacity for decisive work. Your
mother was a godsend to our family—we never had
the least touch of active
sense among us. All my brother’s, now, was loose
muddled good sense, running over into nonsense
when he fell to work. The worst
of him was his tendency to
vacuous verbose talk; he was nearly as
long-breathed, and as vague in his chatter, as I
am. Not such a thorn in the flesh of
correspondents, though, I imagine. I hear Reginald
is with his father at Plessey. The place is just
endurable in these hot months, but always gives me
a notion of thawing-time and webbed feet. It is
vexatious, not being able to send for the boy
here. Amy would be all the better for him; but of
course it is past looking for. She talks of him
now and then in a very tender and grateful way.”
Redgie was very good; I wonder what his wife will
be?” she said, once. There was no chance of such
luck for him in sight, I suggested; but she turned
to me with singular eyes, and said, “I should like
her if she would marry him soon.” She has a
carte de
visite of him, which is made much of.
Her husband never would sit for one, I recollect.
It seems Redgie was useful when nobody else could
have done much good. Those few days were hideous.
I never shall forget that white dried face of
hers, and the heavy look of all her limbs. Poor
child, I had to talk her into tears. She had the
ways of old people for some time after. Even now
she is bad enough; worse, as I told you, in some
things. It is great amiability to
express such feeling about turning her out as you do. No
help for it, you know. She would have had more to
bear at Lidcombe; and you will soon fit well into
the old place. Very fond of it she certainly was,
and some day, perhaps, I may take her over to see
you. That will be years hence. Your wife must be
good to the dowagers—I dare say she will. It will
be curious to meet there anyhow. One thing is a
pity, that Amicia can never have a child to keep
her company; for I think she can hardly marry
again, young as she is. A daughter would have done
you no harm, and left her with one side of life
filled up—she would have made a perfect mother. I
used to think she had much of the social type of
Englishwoman. It is such a broken-up sort of life
that one anticipates for her. And there was such a
tender eager delight in affection, such a soft and
warm spirit, such pure pleasure in being and doing
good—it is the most delicious nature I know. But
you know her, too. Love to your sister from both,
if she is still with you. Or did they leave when
the Plessey people went?
XIX Francis Cheyne to Mrs.
Radworth
Lidcombe, Aug.
16th.
I do not see how I can
possibly stay here. If you had not gone so soon we
might have got on; now it is unbearable. There is
a network of lawyers’ and over-lookers’ business
to be got through still. I go about the place like
a thief, and people throw the title in my face
like a buffet at every turn. And I keep thinking
of Amicia; her rooms have the sound of her in
them. I went down to the lake at sunset and took a
pull by myself. The noise of the water running off
and drawing under was like some one that sobs and
chokes. I went home out of all temper with things.
And there was a letter waiting from Aunt Midhurst
that would have made one half mad at the best of
times. She is right to strike if she pleases; but
her sort of talk hits hard. I felt hot and sick
with the sense of meanness when I had done. These
things are the worst one
has to bear. She tells me what to do;
gives news of Amicia that would kill one to think
of, if thought did kill; mixes allusions in a way
that she only could have the heart to do. I
believe she knows or thinks the worst, and always
has. And there is nothing one can say in reply to
her. It is horrid to lie at her mercy as we do.
Their life in that house must be intolerable. I
can see Amy sitting silent under her eyes and
talk; sick and silent, without crying, like a
woman held fast and forced to look on while some
one else was under torture. I know so well by
myself how she must take the suffering; with a
blind, bruised soul, and a sort of painful wonder
and pity; divided from herself; beaten and broken
down and tired out. If she were to go mad I should
know why. And I cannot come near her, and you know
how I love her. I would kill myself to save her
pain, and I know she is in pain hourly, and I sit
here where she used to be. If I had never been
born at all she would have been happy enough with
her husband alive. I tell you, God knows how good
she was to him. If only one of their people here
would insult me, I should be thankful. But the
place seems to accept me, and they tolerate a new
face; I did think some one would show vexation or
sorrow—do or say
something by way of showing
they remembered. I was Quixotic, I suppose, for
all the old things made way for me. Except the one
day when Redgie Harewood came over with his
father; he did seem to think I had no business
here, and I never liked him so well. You recollect
how angry it made you. People ought to remember. I
was glad he would not stay in the house. That was
the only time any one has treated me as I want to
be treated. I shall come and stay with you if you
will have me. I cannot go about yet, and I hate
every comer of this house. When I ride I do
literally feel now and then tempted to try and get
thrown. Last winter we were all here together, and
she used to sing at this time in this room. The
voice and the sound of her dress come and go in my
hearing. I see her face and all her hair glitter
and vibrate as she keeps singing. Her hands and
her throat go up and down, and her eyes turn and
shine. Then she leaves off playing and comes to
me, and I cannot see her near enough; but I feel
her hands touch me, and hear her crying. I can do
nothing but dream in this way. I want my life and
my love back. I am wretched enough now, and she
must be unhappier than I am; she is so much
better. Her beautiful tender nature must be a
pain to her every day. I suppose she
is sorry for me. I would die to-day if I could
make her forget. My dear sister, you must let me
write to you as I can, and not mind what I say. I
could not well write to a man now; and I never was
friends enough with any one to open out as I can
to you. I must get strength and sense in time, or
make an end somehow. I wish to God I could give
all this away and be rid of things at once.
XX Reginald Harewood to Lady
Cheyne
Plessey, Aug.
24th.
I was over at Lidcombe
again last week. Frank was to leave to-day for his
sister’s: the Radworths have asked him for some
time. I am also pressed to go, but I hardly like
being with him. Unfair, I suppose, but reasonable
when one thinks of it. He is a good deal pulled
down, and makes very little of his succession :
asks after you always, and seems rather to cling
to company. All the legal work is over; and I hope
you will not be bothered with any more letters. If
you care to hear, I may tell you there is some
chance of my getting to work after all. They want
to diplomatize me : I am to have some
secretaryship or other under Lord Fotherington. If
anything comes of it I shall leave England next
month. I shall have Arthur Lunsford for a
colleague, and one or two other fellows I know
about me. A. L.
was a great swell in our schooldays,
and used to ride over the heads of us lower boys
with spurs on. I wonder if Frank remembers what a
tremendous licking he got once for doing
Lunsford’s verses for him without a false quantity, so that when they
were shown up he was caught out and came to awful
grief. I don’t know if I ever believed in anything
as I did once in the get-up of that fellow. To
have him over one again will be very comic; he
never could get on without
fags. Do you think the service admits of his
licking them? I suspect he might thrash me still
if he tried: you know what a splendid big fellow
he is. Audley says he is attaché to Lady F., not to the embassy;
and makes his way by dint of his songs and his
shoulders. People adore a huge musical man.
Muscles and music matched will help one to
bestride the world. Aimè! I wish
I could buy either of them, cheap.
Do you remember an old Madame de Rochelaurier,
who used to claim alliance with you through some
last-century Cheyne, and was great on old
histories?—a lank old lady, with a half-shaved
chin and eyes that our grandmother called
vulturine—old hard eyes, that turned on springs in
her head without appearing to look? She
has turned up again this year
in England, and means to marry her daughter to
Frank, the Radworths say. I have seen the
daughter, and she is admirable; the most perfect
figure, and hair like the purple of a heartsease;
her features are rather too like a little cat’s
for me; she is white and supple and soft, and I
suppose could sparkle and scratch if one rubbed up
her fur when the weather was getting electric.
Clara thinks her figure must be an English
inheritance: she is hardly over seventeen. They do
not think Frank will take up with her, though C.
would push the match if she could on his account.
You would have heard of this from her if I had not
written. Madame de Rochelaurier is one-third
English, you know, and avows her wishes in the
plainest way. She is immense fun, and very bland
towards me. She gave me one bit of family history
which I must send you : it seems she had it from
the great-uncle—“homme
impayable, et dont mon coeur porte toujours le
deuil—rapiécé.” (She really said it
unprovoked; Frank is a faded replica of his father, in her eyes; “mais Claire! c’est son portrait
vivant—fait d’après Courbet.” Which I
could not make out; why Courbet? and she would
not expound.) Here is the story:—
The Lady Cheyne of James I.’s time
was a great beauty, as we know by that
portrait—the one with heaps of full deep-yellow
hair, you remember, and opals under the throat. It
seems also she was a proverb for goodness, in
spite of having to husband that unbeautiful ”
William, tenth Baron,” with the gaunt beard and
grisly collar—that bony-cheeked head we always
thought the ugly one of the lot. That was why they
gave her the motto “sans reproche” on the
frame. She had two fellows in love with her—the
one a Sir Edmund Brackley, and the other, one
regrets to say, the old Reginald Harewood I was
christened after, who wrote those poems my father
keeps under key, and will not let the Herbert
Society have to print. I knew he had a story, and
that the old miniature of him, with long curls,
once had some inscription, which my grandfather
got rubbed out. He was a fastish sort of fellow
evidently, and rather a trump; he had some
tremendous duel at nineteen with a Scot of the
King’s household, and killed his man; never could
show his face at Court afterwards. The old account
was that he lost heart after six months’ suit, and
killed himself for love of her: but the truth
seems to be this; that our perfect Lady
Margaret lost her own head,
and fell seriously in love with his rhymes and his
sword-hand; and one time (this is the Rochelaurier
version) let him in at a wrong hour. Then, in the
late night, she went to Lord Cheyne and roused him
out of sleep, bidding him come now and be judge
between her and all the world. So he got up and
followed (in no end of a maze one would think),
and she brought him to a room where her lover was
lying asleep with his sword unfastened. Then she
said,—if he believed her good and honest, let him
strike a stroke for her and kill this fellow. And
the man held off (you should have heard your uncle
tell it, Madame de Rochelaurier said; her own old
eyes caught fire, and her hand beat up and down);
he stood back and had pity on him, for he was so
noble to look at, and had such a boy’s face as he
lay sleeping along. But she bade him do her right,
and that did he, though it were with tears. For
the lover had hired that night a gentlewoman of
hers to betray her into his hands before it was
yet day; and she had just got wind of the device.
(But really she had let him in herself in the
maid’s dress, and just then left him. “Quelle tête!” Madame de
Rochelaurier observed.) Then her husband
struck him and roused him, and made
him stand up there and fight, and before the poor
boy had got his tackling ready, ran him through at
the first pass under the heart. Then he took his
wife’s hand and made her dip it into the wound and
sprinkle the blood over his face. And the fellow
just threw up his eyes and winced as she wetted
her hand, and said “Farewell, the most sweet and
bitter thing upon earth,” and so died. After that
she was held in great honour, and most of all by
her old suitor, Sir Edmund, who became friends
with her husband till the civil war, when they
took up separate sides, and people believed that
Brackley (who was of the Parliament party) killed
Lord Cheyne at Naseby with his own hand. His
troopers, at all events, did, if he missed. The
story goes, too, that Cheyne lived to get at the
truth about his wife by means of her servant, and
“never had any great joy of his life afterwards.”
Madame de Rochelaurier gave me a little copy of
verses sent from my namesake “To his most
excellent and perfect lady, the Lady Margaret
Cheyne”; she got them from our uncle, who had
looked up the story in some old papers once, on a
rainy visit at Lidcombe. I copied them for you,
thinking it
might amuse you when you have
time on hand to look them over.
IFair face, fair head, and goodly gentle
brows,Sweet beyond speech and
bitter beyond measure;A thing to make all vile things
virtuous,Fill fear with force
and pain’s heart’s blood with pleasure;Unto thy love my love takes flight, and
flyingBetween thy lips alights and falls to
sighing.
IIBreathe, and my soul spreads wing upon
thy breath;Withhold it, in thy
breath’s restraint I perish;Sith life indeed is life, and death is
death,As thou shalt choose to
chasten them or cherish;As thou shalt please; for what is good in
theseExcept they fall and flower as thou shalt
please?
IIIDay’s eye, spring’s forehead, pearl above
pearls’ price,Hide me in thee where
sweeter things are hidden,Between the rose-roots and the roots of
spice,Where no man walks but
holds his foot forbidden;Where summer snow, in August
apple-closes,Nor frays the fruit nor ravishes the
roses.
IVYea, life is life, for thou hast life in
sight;And death is death, for
thou and death are parted.I love thee not for love of my
delight,But for thy praise, to
make thee holy-hearted;Praise is love’s raiment, love the body
of praise,The topmost leaf and chaplet of his
days.
VI love thee not for love’s sake, nor for
mine,Nor for thy soul’s sake
merely, nor thy beauty’s;But for that honour in me which is
thine,To make men praise me
for my loving duties;Seeing neither death nor earth nor time
shall coverThe soul that lived on love of such a
lover.
VISo shall thy praise be more than all it
is,As thou art tender and
of piteous fashion.Not that I bid thee stoop to pluck my
kiss,Too pale a fruit for
thy red mouth’s compassion;But till love turn my soul’s pale cheeks
to red,Let it not go down to the dusty dead.
R.H.
Finis
The thing is dated 1625, and he was killed next
year, being just my age at the time. I do call it
a shame; but Madame de Rochelaurier says it was
worth her while, and would make a good story,
which one might call “The Cost of a Reputation.”
“C’était décidément une
femme forte,” she said placidly. That is
true, I should say, but the presence of mind was
rather horribly admirable; she must have had great
pluck of a certain sort to go straight off to her
husband and put the thing into his head; no wonder
they called her “sans reproche.” I
should put “sans
merci” on the frame if it were mine.
Those verses of his read oddly by the light of the
story; I have rather a weakness for that pink and
perfumed sort of poem that smells of dead spice
and preserved leaves; it reads like opening an old
jar of pot-pourri, with its stiff scented turns of
verse and tags of gold embroidery gone tawny in
the dust and rust. And in spite of all the old
court-stuff about apples and roses and the rest,
there is a kind of serious twang in it here and
there, as if the man did care to mean something. I
suppose he didn’t mind, and liked his life the
better on account of her; would have gone on all
the same if he had known; fellows do get to be
such fools. I don’t think I should have cared much
either. Conceive Ernest not liking his wife to
talk about it. He found the verses in a book of
hers, and wanted to burn them: then sat down and
read Prodgers on Pantology, or something in that
way, for two hours instead, till Madame de
Rochelaurier called, Clara told me that evening. A
treatise on the use of fish-bones as manure I
think it was. She will not take the Rochelaurier
view at all, and says Lady Margaret ought to have
been hanged or burnt. As for my forefather, she
calls him the perfectest knight and fool on
record: the
sort of man one could have risked
being burnt for with pleasure. She would have been
a noble châtelaine in the castle days. One would
have taken the chance for her sake; rather. And if
ever anything were said about her—all such natures
do get ill-used—I think and trust you for one
would stand by her and speak up for her. She is
too good to let the world be very good to her.
Tears and brilliant light mixed in her eyes when
she talked of that bit of story: the beautifullest
pity and anger and passionate compassion. She
might have kept sans reproche on her
shield, and never written sans merci on her heart.
I believe she could do anything great. She wanted
to be at Naples last year; would have outdone
Madame Mario in that splendid labour of hers. She
says if she were not in mourning already she would
put on deeper black for Cavour now; I told her
not. If she had been born an Italian, and had the
chance given her, she would have gone into battle
as gladly as the best men. That Venice visit last
year set the stamp on it. I never saw her so
nearly letting tears really fall as when she
quoted that about the “piteous ruinous beauty of
all sights in the fair-faced city that death and
love fought for when it was alive, and love was
beaten, but comes back always to
look at the sweet killed body
left there adrift between sea and sunset.” I am
certain Ernest wears her out; the miserable day’s
work does tell upon her, and the nerves and head
will fail bit by bit if it goes on. Men would
trust in her and honour her if she were a man; why
cannot women as it is? Whatever comes, she ought
to look to us at least; to you and me.
XXI Lady Midhurst to Mrs.
Radworth
Ashton Hildred, Sept. 10th.
I wish my news were of a
better sort; but I can only say, in answer to your
nice kind letter, that Amicia is in a very bad way
indeed. At least, I think so; she has not held up
her head for weeks, and her face seems to me
changing, as some unusually absurd poet of your
generation has observed, “from the lily-leaf to
the lily-stem.” Stalk he might at least have said,
but he wanted a sort of villainous rhyme to ”
flame.” A letter from Reginald the other day put
some light and colour into her for a minute, but
seemed to leave her worse than ever when the
warmth was taken off. Next day she could not come
down: I, with some conventional brutality, forced
a way into her room and found her just asleep, her
face crushed into the wet pillow, with the fever
of tears on the one cheek uppermost—leaden and
bluish with crying and watching. I tell her that
to weep herself green is no widow’s duty, and
no sign of ripeness; but she
keeps wearing down; is not visibly thinner yet,
but must be soon. Her eyelids will get limp and
her eyelashes ragged at this rate; she speaks with
a sort of hard low choke in the notes of her voice
which is perfectly ruinous. Very few things seem
to excite her for a second; she can hardly read at
all: sits with her chin down and eyes half drawn
over like a sleepy sick child. I should not wonder
to see her hair beginning to go: she actually
looks sharp : one might
expect her brows and chin to become obtrusive in
six months’ time. Even the rumour we hear (not at
first hand you know) about a Rochelaurier revival did not seem to rouse
or amuse her. If there is
anything in the chatter, one can only be glad of
such an improvement in the second generation; for
I cannot well conceive Frank’s marrying, or your
approving, a new edition of Mademoiselle Armande
de Castigny. Fabien de Rochelaurier was the most victimized,
unhappiest specimen of a husband I ever saw: a
Prudhomme-Coquardeau of good company, if you can
take—and will tolerate—the Gavarni metaphor. The
life she led him is unknown; half her exploits, I believe
devoutly, never reached the light—many I suspect
never would bear the air. You must know what people say of that
young M. de Saverny, who goes about
with them—the man you used to get on so well with
two years ago? He never
turned up during Madame de Saverny’s life
anywhere—and months after
the poor wretched lady’s death his father produces
this child of four, and takes him about as his
orphaned heir, and presents him—notamment
to the Rochelauriers, who make an infinite ado
about the child ever after. Why, at one time he
wanted to marry the girl himself—had played with
her in childhood—plighted troth among budding
roses—chased butterflies together—Paul et
Virginie, nothing less. This was a year ago, just
after he went back to France, she being barely out
of her convent. Do you want to know why, and how,
it was broken off? Look in the table of
affinities.
Of course, if the girl is nice, tant
mieux. Remembering my dear mother, it is
not for me to object to a French Lady Cheyne. But
a Rochelaurier—if Rochelaurier it is to be—you
will allow is rather startling. Old M. de Saverny
is dead, certainly, which is one safeguard, and
really a thing to be thankful for. He was awful.
Valfons, Lauzun, Richelieu’s own self, hardly more
compromising. And here the mother tells.
Unluckily, but so it is. Taking one thing with
another into account, though,
Philomène might get over this well enough.
Ce nom tramontain et dévot
m’a toujours crispé les nerfs. But if
Frank likes her, well and good. People do not
always inherit things. Your friend, for instance,
the amiable Octave, is not very like that
exquisite and infamous old father. Only I should
be inclined to take time, and look well about me.
Here, again, you may be invaluable to the boy. By
what I remember, I should hardly have thought
Philomène de Rochelaurier would turn out the sort
of girl to attract him. Pretty I have no doubt she
is. Octave I always thought unbearable; that
complexion of singed white
always gives me the notion of a sheet of
note-paper flung on the fire by mistake, and
snatched off with the edges charred. Et puis ces yeux de lapin. Et cette
voix de serin. The blood is running out,
evidently. M. de Saverny père was great in his
best days. They used to say last year that Count
Sindrakoff had supplanted his ghost auprès de la
Rochelaurier. She is nearly my age. But
I believe the Russian was a young man of the
Directory or thereabouts. I am getting horridly
scandalous, but Armande was always too much for my
poor patience. She thinks herself one of Balzac’s
women, and gets
up affairs to order. Besides, she
always fell short of diplomacy through pure
natural lack of brain; and yet was always drawing
blunt arrows to the head, and taking shaky aim at
some shifting public bull’s-eye. I wrote a little
thing about her some years since, and labelled it,
“La Femme de Cinquante
Ans, Étude “; it got sent to Jules de
Versac, who touched it up, and put it in the Timon—it was the best sketch I
ever made. I dare say she knows I wrote it. It
amuses me ineffably to find her taking up with
Redgie Harewood; I suppose by way of paying
indirect court to us. I know he has more than the
usual boy’s weakness for women twice his age, but
surely there can be nothing of the sort here?
They seem exquisitely confidential by his own
innocent account. She always did like lamb and
veal. The daughter must be too young for him. A
woman with natural red and without natural grey is
no doubt not yet worth his looking at—that is,
unless there were circumstances which made it
wrong and unsafe—but I speak of serious things. I
thought at one time he was sure to upset all kinds
of women with that curious personal beauty of his,
as his poor sister used to upset men; he is such a
splendid boy to look at,
as to face; but now I see his
lot in life lies the other way, and he will always
be the footstool and spindle of any woman who may
choose to have him. Less mischief will come of him
that way, which is consoling to remember. Indeed,
I doubt now if he ever will do any; but if he gets
over thirty without some damage to himself I shall
be only too thankful. Really, I think, in default
of better, I would rather see him than Frank
married to Mademoiselle de Rochelaurier. Lord
Cheyne has time and room to beat about in, and
choose from right or left. Now Redgie, I begin to
believe, will have to marry before long. It would
be something to keep him out of absurdities. We
know too well what a head it is when any windmill
is set spinning inside it. And, without irony, I
am convinced Madame de Rochelaurier must have a
real kindly feeling about him. She was out of her
depth in love with your father in 1825, and Redgie
now and then reminds me a little of him; Frank is
placider, and not quite such a handsome fellow as
my brother used to be. It is so like her to come
out with old family histories and relics as the
best means of astonishing the boy’s weak mind; but
I did not know she had still any actual and
tangible memorials of the time by her. I have
been trying to recollect the date of
her daughter’s birth; she was extant in ’46, for I
saw her in Paris, a lean child in the rose blonde line. Three, I
should think, at the time, or perhaps five—a good
ten years younger than Octave de Saverny. Redgie’s
three or four years over would just tell in the
right way—Frank I should call too young. I want
you to tell me honestly how you look at it. To me
it seems he might brush about the world a little
more before he begins marrying. Only this instant
come of age, you know. The attachment might be a
good thing enough for him. Mademoiselle Philomène
I suppose must be clever; there is no reason to
presume she can have inherited the poor old
vicomte’s flaccidity of head and tongue. Very
spiritually Catholic, and excitable on general
matters, the girl ought to be by this time;
Armande, I remember, was a tremendous legitimist
(curious for her) of late years, and has doubtless
undertaken to convert Reginald to sane views, and
weed out his heresies and democracies. I should
like to see and hear the process. Since the empire
came in I believe she has put lilies on her
carpets, and rallied her crew round the old
standard with a will. Henri V. must be truly
thankful for her. Desloches, the religious
journalist, was one of her converts—
the man whom Sindrakoff, with
hyperborean breadth of speech, once indicated to
me as a cochon manqué. Ever since the Légende des
Siècles came out I have called him
Sultan Mourad’s pig. One might suggest as a motto
for his paper that line, Le pourceau
misérable et Dieu se regardèrent. Edmond
Ramel made me a delicious sketch of the subject,
with Armande de Rochelaurier, in sultanic apparel
and with a beard beyond all price or praise,
flapping the flies off, her victims (social and
otherwise) strewing the background. On apercevait en haut, parmi des
étoiles, le bon Dieu qui larmoyait, tout en
s’essuyant l’œil gauche d’un mouchoir azuré, au
coin duquel on voyait brodé le chiffre du journal
de Desloches, numéro cent. Cette figure béate
avait les traits—devinez—du pauvre vieux vicomte
Fabien. Je n’ai jamais ri de si bon coeur. Que
Victor Hugo me pardonne!
As I suppose nobody thinks just yet of
betrothals or such like, I want to hear what you
think of doing for the next month or so. It is a
pity to leave Lidcombe bare and void all the
autumn weeks. The place is splendid then, with a
sad and noble sort of beauty in all the corners
of it. Such hills and fields, as
Redgie neatly expressed himself in that last
remarkable lyric of his, “shaken and sounded
through by the trumpets of the sea.” The Hadleigh
sands are worth seeing about the equinox; only,
Heaven knows, we have all had sight enough of the
sea for one year. Still, Frank ought to be about
the place now and then, or they will never grow
together properly. Why can you not go down
together, and set up house in a quiet sisterly
fashion for a little?—he has hardly stayed there
ten days in all since the spring. After living
more than six weeks with you, except that little
Lidcombe interlude at the end of July and those
few days in London, it is his turn to play host.
Or, if any sort of feeling stands in the way of
it, why not go to Lord Charnworth’s, as you did
last year? If there is anything sound in the
Rochelaurier business, it will grow all the better
for a little separation—I am sure I for one would
not for worlds mettre des
bâtons dans les roues. But if it is a
mere bit of intrigue on the mother’s part (and I
can hardly believe Armande a trustworthy person),
surely it is better cut loose at once, and let
drift. I shall try and see Philomène this winter,
whether they return or stay. The Charnworths are
perfect people, and will be only
too glad of you all. A
cousin’s death is no absolute reason for going
into a modem Thebaid, nice as he was. And I hardly
suppose you still retain your old preference of
Octave de Saverny to Lord Charnworth in the days
before the latter poor man married—entirely, I
have always believed, a result of your early
cruelty. Now, if you stay at home and keep up, in
or out of London, the intimacy that seems to be
getting renewed, I predict you will have the whole
maison Rochelaurier et
Cie upon
your hands at Blocksham before you know where to
turn. Science will be blown up heaven-high, and
Mr. Radworth will commit suicide.
I am getting too terrible in my anticipations,
and must come to a halt before all my colours have
run to black. Besides, our doctor has just left,
and the post begins to clamour for its prey. He
gives us very singular auguries about his patient.
For my own part, I must say I had begun to have a
certain dim prevision in the quarter to which he
seems to point. At all events, it appears she is
in no present danger, and we must not press the
doubt. I trust you not to intimate the least hope
or fear of such a thing happening, and only refer
to it here to relieve the anxious feeling I might
have given
you by the tone of my first
sentences. It would be unpardonable to excite
uneasiness or pity to no purpose. False alarms,
especially in the posthumous way, are never things
to be excused on any hand. You can just let Frank
know that we none of us apprehend any actual risk:
which is more than I, at least, would have said a
month since. She is miserably reticent and
depressed. I must end now, with all loves, as
people used to say ages ago. Take good care of
them all, and still better care of yourself—on
many accounts—and think in the kindest way you can
of
Yours most affectionately,
H. MIDHURST.
XXII Captain Harewood to
Reginald
Plessey, Oct.
22nd.
My Dear Reginald:
You will at once begin
preparing for your work, unless you wish to throw
this chance too over, and incur my still more
serious displeasure. That is all the answer I
shall make you. You must be very well aware that
for years back you have disgracefully disappointed
me in every hope and every plan I have formed with
regard to you. Of your school and college career I
shall have a few words to say presently. It is
against my expressed wish and expectation that you
are now in London instead of being here under my
eye : and even after all past experience of your
utter disregard of discipline and duty, I cannot
but feel surprise at your present proposal. If you
do visit the Radworths before returning home, you
will do so in direct defiance of my desire. That
course, understand, is distinctly forbidden you.
After our last interview on the
subject I can only consider the very
suggestion as an act of an insolent and rebellious
nature. I know the construction to which your
conduct towards your cousin has not unnaturally
exposed you; and you know that I know it. Upon her
and upon yourself your inexcusable and puerile
behaviour has already drawn down remark and
reproach. I am resolved, and I intend that you
shall remember I am, to put an end to this. I have
come upon a letter from your grandmother, dated
some time back—I think before the miserable
catastrophe in which you were mixed up at
Portsmouth—bearing immediately in every line upon
this affair : and I have read it with attention.
Secrets of that kind you have no right to have or
to keep; and I have every right and reason to
investigate them. Another time, if you intend to
pursue a furtive line of action, you will do well
to make it a more cautious one : the letter I
speak of was left actually under my hand, not so
much as put away among other papers. Upon the
style of Lady Midhurst’s address to you I shall
not here remark; but you must expect, I should
think, to hear that my view of such things is far
enough from being the same as hers. Rightly or
wrongly, I consider the sort of relationship she
appears to contemplate
in that letter as at once
criminal and contemptible: and I cannot pretend to
observe it with indifference or toleration. You
seem to me to have written and acted childishly
indeed, but not the less sinfully. However, I am
not now about to preach to you. The One safeguard
against natural evil and antidote to natural
unwisdom you have long been encouraged to neglect
and overlook. All restrictions placed around you
by the care of others and of myself you have even
thus early chosen to discard. It is poor comfort
to reflect that, as far as I know, you have not as
yet fallen into the more open and gross vices
which many miserable young fools think it almost
laudable to indulge in. This can but be at best
the working of a providential accident, not the
outcome of any real self-denial or manly
self-restraint on your part. Without this I count
all fortuitous abstinence from sin worth very
little. In a wiser eye than man’s many a seemingly
worse character may be purer than yours. From
childhood upwards, I must once for all remind you,
you have thwarted my wishes and betrayed my trust.
Prayer, discipline, confidence, restraint, hourly
vigilance, untiring attention, one after another,
failed to work upon you. Affectionate enough by
nature, and with
no visibly vicious tendencies, but
unstable, luxurious, passionate, and indolent, you
set at naught all guidance, and never in your life
would let the simple noble sense of duty take hold
of you. At school you were incessantly under
punishment; at home you were constantly in
disgrace. Pain and degradation could not keep you
right; to disgrace the most frequent, to pain the
most severe, you opposed a deadly strength of
sloth and tacit vigour of rebellion. So your
boyhood passed; I have yet in my ear the remark of
one of your tutors—” Severity can do little for
the boy; indulgence, nothing.” What the upshot of
your college career was you must remember only too
well, and I still hope not without some regret and
shame. Absolute inert idleness and wilful vanity,
after a long course of violated discipline in
small matters, brought you in time to the
dishonourable failure you had been at no pains to
avoid.
And yet you know well enough whether or no I
have done and purpose, even yet, to do all for you
that I can; whether I have not always been but too
ready to palliate and indulge; whether, from the
very first, the utmost, tenderest allowance has
not been made for you, and the least possible
share of your own faults
laid to your own charge. This,
I say, you do, in your conscience and heart, know,
and must needs bear me witness to the truth of it.
I must confess I have not now much hope left.
Little comfort and little pleasure have you ever
given me, and I expect to get less and less from
you as our lives go on. One thing, though, I can,
at worst, be sure of: that my own duty shall be
done. As long as I can hold them at all, I will
not throw the reins upon your neck. I will not,
while I can help it, allow you to speak, to act,
if possible to think, in a way likely to injure
others. I desire you not to go to the house of a
man whom I know you profess, out of your own
inordinate impertinence and folly, to dislike and
contemn; I trust you, at least, as a gentleman, to
respect my opinion and my confidence, if I cannot
count on your obedience as my son; on these
grounds I do believe and expect you will not visit
Blocksham. Mr. Ernest Radworth is a man infinitely
your superior in every way. For many years he has
led a most pure, laborious, and earnest life. The
truly great and genuine talents accorded to him at
his birth he has submitted to the most
conscientious culture, and turned to the utmost
possible advantage. To himself he has been
consistently and admirably
true; to others I believe he has
invariably been most helpful, beneficent,
exemplary in all his dealings. By one simple
process of life he has kept himself pure and made
all near him happy. From first to last he was the
stay and pride of his family; and since he has
been left alone in his father’s place he has nobly
kept up the distinction which, in earliest youth,
and even boyhood, he very deservedly acquired. A
fit colleague and a fit successor, this one, (as
you would acknowledge if you were capable of
seeing) for the greatest labourers in the field of
English science. Excellent and admirable in all
things, he is in none more worthy of respect than
in his private and domestic relations. There is
not a man living for whom I entertain a more
heartfelt regard—I had well nigh said
reverence—than for Mr. Radworth. I verily believe
he has not a thing, humanly speaking, to be
ashamed of in looking back upon his past life.
Every hour, so to say, has had its share of noble
toil—and, therefore, also its share of immediate
reward. For these men work for the world’s sake,
not for their own: and from the world, not from
themselves, they do in time receive their full
wages. There is no more unsullied and unselfish
glory on earth than that of the faithful and
reverent
scientific workman: and to
such one can always reasonably hope that the one
thing which may perhaps be wanting will in due
time be supplied. The contempt or disrelish of a
young, idle, far from noteworthy man for such a
character as that of Ernest Radworth is simply a
ludicrous and deplorable phenomenon. You are
incompetent to appreciate for one moment even a
tenth part of his excellence. But I am resolved
you shall make no unworthy use of a friendship you
are incapable of deserving. Of your cousin I will
here say only that I trust she may in time learn
fully to apprehend the value of such a heart and
such a mind. By no other path than this of both
repentant and retrospective humility can she ever
hope to attain real happiness or honour. I should,
for Ernest’s sake, truly regret being compelled to
adopt Lady Midhurst’s sufficiently apparent
opinion that she is not worthy to perceive and
decide on such a path.
You now know my desire; and I do not choose to
add any further appeal. Expecting, for the sake at
least of your own immediate prospects, that you
will follow it,
I remain your anxious and affectionate
father,
PHILIP HAREWOOD.
XXIII Francis Cheyne to Mrs.
Radworth
Lidcombe, Nov.
13th.
I have just read your
letter. Come by all means next month, and stay as
long as you can. Every day spent here by myself is
a heavier and more subtle irritation to me than
the one before. Reginald will come for a few days,
at least; his foreign outlook seems to have fallen
back into vapour and remote chance. The Captain
was over here lately, looking pinched and hard—a
head to make children recoil and wince at the
sight of it. He is still of great help to me. As
to Madame de Rochelaurier, to be quite open, I had
rather not meet her just now; so you will not look
for me before the day they leave you. Afterwards I
may come over to escort you and Ernest, if it
turns out worth while. Anything to get about a
little, without going out of reach. News, I
suppose, must come from Ashton Hildred before very
long. At such a time I have no heart to spare for
thinking over plans or people.
Your praise of Mademoiselle de
Rochelaurier is, of course, all right and just.
She is a very jolly sort of girl, and sufficiently
handsome; and if Redgie does marry her I shall
just stop short of envying him. Does Madame really
want me to take such a gift at her hand? Well and
good; it is incomparably obliging; but then, when
I am looking at Mademoiselle Philomène, and
letting myself go to the sound of her voice like a
song to the tune, unhappily there gets up between
us such an invincible exquisite memory of a face
ten times more beautiful and loveable to have in
sight of one; pale when I saw it last, as if drawn
down by its hair, heavily weighted about the eyes
with a presage of tears, sealed with sorrow, and
piteous with an infinite unaccomplished desire.
The old deep-gold hair and luminous grey-green
eyes shot through with colours of seawater in
sunlight, and threaded with faint keen lines of
fire and light about the pupil, beat for me the
blue-black of Mademoiselle de Rochelaurier’s. Then
that mouth of hers and the shadow made almost on
the chin by the underlip—such sad perfect lips,
full of tender power and faith, and her wonderful
way of lifting and dropping her face
imperceptibly, flower-fashion, when she begins or
leaves off speaking; I shall
never hear such a voice in the world,
either. I cannot, and need not now, pretend to
dissemble or soften down what I feel about her. I
do love her with all my heart and might. And now
that, after happy years, she is fallen miserable
and ill, dangerously ill, for aught I know, and
incurably miserable—who can say?—it is not
possible for me, sitting here in her house that I
have had to drive her out of, to think very much
of anything else, or to think at all of any other
woman in the way of liking. This is mere bare
truth, not sentiment or excited fancy by any
means, and you will not take it for such a sort of
thing. If I can never marry the one woman
perfectly pleasant to me and faultlessly fit for
me in the whole beautiful nature of her, I will
never insult her and my own heart by marrying at
all. Aunt Midhurst’s view of the Rochelaurier
family has no great weight with me; but I have a
little hope now, after reading what she says to
you, that, as she is clearly set against the
chance of any other marriage for me, she may,
perhaps, be some day brought to think of the one
desire of my whole life as a possible thing to
fulfil. Even to you I dare not well hint at such a
hope as that; but you must now understand for good
how things are with me; if not that, then nothing.
You take her reference to
Redgie Harewood to be a feint, and meant
spitefully. I think not; she has the passion of
intrigue and management still strong; likes
nothing so well, evidently, as the sense of power
to make and break matches, build schemes and
overset them. I should like to see Harewood
married, and peace again at Plessey; he is not a
bad fellow; and she was always fond of him. I will
say he earned that at Portsmouth, but I hate to
hear of his being able to write to her now, and
then see and think how much there is between us to
get over. If I could get at her by any way
possible, I could keep her up still—but I can
hardly see how he is to help her much. Then,
again, if he were to marry, they might see each
other; and in no end of ways it would be a good
thing for him. His idolatry is becoming a bore, if
not worse; you should find him an ideal to draw
his worship off you a little. I know so well now
how miserable it is to feel on a sudden the thing
turn serious, and have to fight it before one has
time to see how. If it were fair to tell you all I
have had to remember and regret only since this
year began, and only because I knew how, after
Cheyne’s death, her gentle goodness would make her
wretched at the thought of past discontent with
him—and Heaven knows she could not
but have felt him to be less than she was; and
perfect she was to him always. I wish people would
blame her to me, and let me fight them. I can’t
fight her for blaming
herself. I write the awfullest stuff, because I am
really past writing at all. If I could fall to
work and forget, leave off thinking for good, turn
brute, it would be only rational for me. I, who
have helped to hurt her, and would have set myself
against the world to spare her, what do you
conceive she thinks of me? This air that has
nothing of her left it chafes me to breathe. I
know how sometimes somewhere she remembers and
misses things that she had got used to—little
chance things that were about her in her husband’s
time. A book or two of hers were left; you will
see them when you come; I cannot write, and cannot
send them without a word. I am more thoroughly
afraid of hearing from Lady M. again than I ever
was of anything on earth—no child could dread any
torture as I do that. It is quite clear, you know,
that they expect a confinement—in some months’
time, perhaps. God knows I wish there had been a
son! Only they will not say it; so I must stay
here and take my trouble. It does not startle
me; nothing can well be worse
for me or better than it is now. There is no such
pleasure to be had out of my name or house that I
need want to fight for it or hold to it. I do hope
they will make things good to her. You need hardly
express anger about the poor aunt. Those two are
her children, and she always rather hated us for
their sakes. Indeed, as about Reginald, I am not
sure she is so far out of the way. You must see
that Ernest flinches now and then when he is
talked of; and, without any fear of scandal, one
may want to avoid the look of it. He is not the
sort of fellow to be sure of; not that he is a bad
sort. Enfin (as she says), you know what it
means—Ernest is not great in the way of company,
and Redgie and you are just good friends; the
woman is not really fool enough to think evil,
though she is rather of the vulturine order as to
beak and diet. For the rest, I know how wise and
kind you are—it is a shame to lean on you as I do,
but you are safe to come to.
XXIV Lady Cheyne to Mrs.
Radworth
Ashton Hildred, Nov. 22nd.
My Dear Clara:
I have got leave to write
and thank you. Nothing has made me so happy for a
long time as to know how kind you have been, and
that you are still such good friends with me. It
was no want of thankfulness to you that made me
leave Portsmouth in that horrid way to get home
here. I knew how good you had been, and you are
not to make me out too bad. To hear from you, even
such a little word, was nicer than to get the
things you sent. But I was as glad as I could be
to have some of them back. I would never have let
any one send for them to Lidcombe, so it was all
the kinder of you to do it this way. I hope you
will all be well there, and quite happy while you
stay. It is nice to think of people about the poor
house. They are all bent on making me out ill. I
am not ill in the least; only faint now and then,
and always very tired.
I am terribly tired now all my
life through, awake and asleep. I feel as if there
was nothing nice to think of in the world, and as
if it were easier to begin crying than thinking.
It is only because I am foolish naturally and
afraid to face things. If people were less good to
me I should be just as afraid to feel at all, or
at least to say I did. But good as they are now,
my own nearest friends here could not have been
better to me than I know
you were then—writing
letters and nursing and saving me all sorts of
wretched things. You were as good as Reginald, and
I had only you two to help me through, but you did
all that could be done, both of you, and I knew
you did. When I am most tired and would like to
let go of everything else,
I try to hold on to my remembrance of that. If I
had not been a little worthy to be pitied, I hope
now and then you would not have been quite so
good.
I am sorrier than I can say to hear how foolish
you think him. Ever since that I have thought of
you two together. You say it so kindly, too, that
it is wretched to hear said. I do hope it is only
his silly candid habit of showing things he feels
and thinks—he always thought about you so much and
in such an excited way. You are so much beyond me,
and except us
two he never had any close ally among
his own relations; there are hardly any other
women, you know. If I had been like you it would
have been different; but so few people will take
him at his best, poor boy, and I am so little use,
though he is fond of me.
I had got a sort of hint from my grandmother
which broke the surprise of the news you send me.
I hope, as you seem to wish for it, that
Mademoiselle de Rochelaurier and your brother may
have all things turn out as they would like; and I
shall be as happy as possible to know they do. It
is not the least a painful hearing to me that
there will be a wedding at the right time. I am
only too glad there should be some one there, and
I am sure, if you both are so fond of her, she
must be perfectly nice. Tell me when to
congratulate. I wish I had ever seen her; nobody
here knows at all what she is like. But I seem to
have heard people say her mother is not pretty.
They will not let me write any more—my pen is to
be dragged off if I try. And really there is this
much reason in it, that I am most stupidly tired,
and see myself opposite too hideous to speak of. I
feel as if I were running
down; but I don’t mean to run out for some
time yet. So
don’t let there be any one put
out on such a foolish account as that. I hope Mr.
Radworth’s head and eyes keep better; they are of
rather more value than mine, and I am always sorry
to hear of his going back in health. My love to
Redgie, and try to make him good.
XXV Reginald Harewood to Edward
Audley
Lidcombe, Dec.
15th.
I am not coming out at
all. I can’t now; the whole concern is blown up. I
have had a most awful row with my father; you know
the sort of way he always does write and talk; and
two months ago he gave me the most incredible
blowing up—I suppose no fellow ever got such a
letter. So I just dropped into him by return of
post, and let the whole thing lie over. He chose
to pitch into her too, in the most offensive way.
Now I’m not going to behave like a sneak to her
because she is too good for them. She trusts me in
the most beautiful way. I would give up the whole
earth for her. Frank would have made an end of
that fellow long ago if he had the right sort of
pluck. And you see a man can’t let himself be
bullied into skulking. It’s all fair chaffing
about it if you please, but you don’t in the least
know what the real thing is like. Here she is tied
down and obliged to let
that sort of animal talk to
her, and go about with her, and take her by the
hand or arm—I tell you I have seen it. It was like
seeing a stone thrown at her. And she speaks to
him without wincing. I do think the courage of
women is something unknown. I should run twenty
times a day if I couldn’t fight. He brings her
specimens of things. You can’t conceive what a
voice and face and manner the fellow has. She lets
him talk about his symptoms. He tells me he wishes
he could eat what I can. It would be all very well
if he had anything great about him. I suppose
women can put up with men that have; but a mere
ingenious laborious pedant and prig, and a fellow
that has hardly human ways, imagine worshipping
that! I believe he is a clever sort of half-breed
between ape and beaver. But the sort of thing
cannot go on. I found her yesterday by herself in
the library here, looking out references for him.
The man was by way of being ill upstairs. She
spoke to me with a sort of sad laugh in her eyes,
not smiling; and her brows winced, as they never
do for him, whatever he says. She is so gentle and
perfect when he is there; and I feel like getting
mad. Well, somehow I let her see I knew what an
infernal shame it was, and she
said wives were meant for the work.
Then I began and told her she had no sort of right
to take it in that way, and she couldn’t expect
any fellow to stand and look on while such things
were—and I would as soon have looked on at Haynau
any day. I dare say I talked no end of folly, but
I was regularly off my head. Unless she throws me
over I will never give her up. She never will let
her brother know how things are with her. But to
see him sit by her ought to be enough for a man
with eyes and a heart. I know you were a good deal
in love last year, but Miss Charnworth couldn’t
have put anybody into such a tender fever of pity
as this one puts me; you can’t be sorry for her;
and I don’t think you can absolutely worship
anything you are not a little sorry for. To have
to pity what is such a way above you, no one could
stand that. It gives one the wish to be hurt for
her. I think I should let him insult me and strike
me if she wanted it. Nothing hurts me now but the
look of her. She has sweet heavy eyes, like an
angel’s in some great strange pain; eyes without
fear or fault in them, which look out over coming
tears that never come. There is a sort of look
about her lips and under the eyelids as if some
sorrow had pressed there with his finger, out of
love for her beauty, and left
the mark. I believe she knew I wanted her to come
away. If there were only somewhere to take her to
and hide her, and let her live in her own way, out
of all their sight and reach, that would do for
me. I tell you, she took my hands sadly into hers
and never said a word, but looked sideways at the
floor, and gave a little beginning kind of sigh
twice; and I got mad. I don’t know how I prayed to
her to come then. But she turned on me with her
face trembling and shining, and eyes that looked
wet without crying, and made me stop. Then she
took the books and went out, and up to him. Do you
imagine I can be off and on, or play tricks with
my love, for such a woman as that? Because of my
father, perhaps, or Ernest Radworth? She has a
throat like pearl-colour, with flower-colour over
that; and a smell of blossom and honey in her
hair. No one on earth is so infinitely good as she
is. Her fingers leave a taste of violets on the
lips. She is greater in her mind and spirit than
men with great names. Only she never lets her
greatness of heart out in words. I don’t think now
that her eyes are hazel. She has in her the royal
scornful secret of a great silence. Her hair and
eyelashes change colour in the sun. I shall never
come to know all she thinks of. I
believe she is doing good somewhere with her
thoughts. She is a great angel, and has charge of
souls. She has clear thick eyebrows that grow well
down, coming full upon the upper lid, with no gap
such as there is above some women’s eyes before
you come to the brow. They have an inexplicable
beauty of meaning in them, and the shape of the
arch of them looks tender. She has charge of me
for one. I must have been a beast or a fool if
there had not been such a face as that in the
world. She has the texture and colour of
rose-leaves crushed deep into the palms of her
hands. She can forgive and understand and be angry
at the right time : things that women never can
do. You know Lady Midhurst is set dead against
her, and full of the most infernal prejudice. The
best of them are cruel and dull about each other.
I let out at her (Lady M., that is), one day when
we spoke of it, and she stopped me. “She is always
very good to you,” she said; which is true enough.
“You and your sister are her children, and she
always rather hated Frank and me for your sakes. I
like her none the worse, for my part. I don’t know
that she is so far wrong about you. Once I could
have wanted her to like me, but we must put up
with people’s
deficiencies. It is very
unreasonable, of course, but she does not like me
in the least, I quite know “: and the way she
smiled over this no one could understand without
knowing her. “Only there is one thing to be sorry
about: that hard pointed way of handling things
leaves her with the habit of laughter that shrinks
up the heart she has by inches.” Those words stuck
to me. “If she believed or felt more than she
does, her cleverness and kindness would work so
much better. As it is, one can never go to her for
warmth or rest; and one cannot live on the sharp
points of phrases. She has edges in her eyes, and
thorns in her words. That perpetual sardonic
patience which sits remarking on right and wrong
with cold folded hands and equable observant eyes,
half contemptuous in an artistic way of those who
choose either—that cruel tolerance and unmerciful
compassion for good and bad—that long tacit
inspection, as of a dilettante cynic bidden
report critically on the creatures in the world,
that custom of choosing her point of view where
she can see the hard side of things glitter and
the hard side of characters refract light in her
eyes, till she comes (if one durst say so) to
patronize God by dint of despising men—oh, it gets
horrid after a time! It takes
the heart out of all great work. Her
world would stifle the Garibaldis. It is all dust
and sand, jewels and iron, dead metal and stone,
and dry sunshine: like some fearful rich no-man’s
land. I could as soon read the ‘Chartreuse de Parme’ as
listen to her talk long; it is Stendhal diluted
and transmuted; and I never could read cynicism.”
You see how her thoughts get hold of one; I was
reminded of her first words, and the whole thing
came back on me. She said just that; I know the
turn of her eyes and head as she spoke, and how
her cheeks and neck quivered here and there. Then
she made all excuses, the gentlest wise
allowances; you see what a mind and spirit she
has. She keeps always splendid and right. She can
understand unkindness to herself, you see; never
dreaming that nothing can be so unnatural as that;
but not a dry ignoble tone of heart and narrow
hardness of eye. Not to love greatness and abhor
baseness, each for its own sake—that is the sort
of thing she finds unforgivable and
incomprehensible. She would make all things that
are not evil and have not to be gone right at and
fought with till they give in brave and just, full
of the beauty of goodness and a noble liberty :
all men fit men to honour, and all women fit women
to adore.
That is what she is. Only if I
were to write for ever, and find you in heavy
reading for centuries, I should never get to
express a thing about her. Fancy any one talking
about that little Rochelaurier girl. She does, and
to me, or did till I made her see it was no use,
and I didn’t like it as chaff. Philomène is a good
pretty child, and as to heart and mind believes in
Pius Iscariot and the vermin run to earth this
year at Gaeta. They think my father might put up
with that. He used to admire the men of December
till they did something to frighten the ruminant
British bull at his fodder, and set that sweet
animal lowing and thrusting out volunteer
bayonets, by way of horns, in brute self-defence.
I remember well how he spoke once of the
Beauharnais to me, à propos of my reading
the Châtiments one vacation. It was before
you went down, I think, that we had a motion up
about that pickpocket. My father believes in the
society that was saved; he holds tight to the
salvation-by-damnation theory. “A strong man and
born master “—all that style of thing, you know.
Liberty means cheese to one’s bread, then honey,
then turtle-fat. Libre à
vous, MM. les doctrinaires! What
infinite idiocy and supreme imbecility to get
hanged, burnt, crucified, for
one’s cause! You want proof you are a
fool?—you are beaten; all’s said. The smoke of
the martyr’s pile is the refutation of the
martyr—in the nostrils of a pig. And when people
have ideas like that, and act on them, how can one
expect them to see the simplest things rightly?
How should they know a great spirit or noble
intellect from a base little one? Souls don’t
carry badges for such people to know them by; and
whatever does not walk in uniform or livery they
cannot take into account.
As to me, and I suppose all men who are not spoilt
or fallen stolid are much the same, when I see a
great goodness I know it—when I meet my betters I
want to worship them at once, and I can always
tell when any one is born my better. When I fall
in with a nature and powers above me, I cannot
help going down before it. I do like admiring;
service of one’s masters must be good for one, it
is so perfectly pleasant. Then, too, one can never
go wrong on this tack. I feel my betters in my
blood; they send a heat and sting all through one
at first sight. And the delight of feeling small
and giving in when one does get sight of them is
beyond words—it seems to me all the same whether
they beat one in wisdom and great gifts and power,
or in having
been splendid soldiers or
great exiles, or just in being beautiful. It is
just as reasonable to worship one sort as the
other; they are all one’s betters, and were made
for one to come down on one’s knees to, clearly
enough. Victor Hugo or Miss Cherbury the actress,
Tennyson or a fellow who rode in the Balaklava
charge when you and I were in the fifth form, we
must knock under and be thankful for having them
over our heads somewhere in the world; and small
thanks to us. But when men who are by no means our
betters won’t do so much as this, and want to walk
into us for doing it, I don’t see at all that one
is bound to stand that. So that if I am ever to be
turned out of my way, it won’t be by anything my
father may say or do.
I suspect you repent of writing and reading by
this time; but please remember how you did go into
me last year about Eleanor; and you know by this
time there was not so much even for a fellow in
love to say about her.
Yours always,
R. E. HAREWOOD.
XXVI Lady Cheyne to Reginald
Harewood
Ashton Hildred, Jan. 14th, 1862.
My Dearest
Reginald:
I am writing to-day
instead of our grandmother. She is very unwell,
and wants you to hear from us. They will not let
her trouble or exert herself in any way, but she
is bent on your getting a word; so, as I am well
enough to write, I must take her place. I am
afraid she is upset on your account. I think she
has even exchanged letters with your father about
it. They seem to fear something very bad for you.
You know by this time how much we both love you,
and ought to care a little for us. I know I must
not talk now as if I could fall back on
self-esteem or self-reliance. I don’t the least
want to appeal in that style, but just to plead
with you as well as I may. I am stupid enough,
too, and can’t put things well; only, except the
people here at home, you are the one person left
me that I
may let myself love. I am very
grateful to you, and I beg you to let me come in
this way to you. You must see that there is nobody
now that I love as well. I want you to remember as
I do how good you were once. If I am ill it comes
of miserable thought. You talk of her
compassionate noble nature. Dearest, if she has
any mercy, let her show it and save you. It is
cruel to make people play with poison in this way.
I would not blame her for worlds. I want to thank
her and keep good friends, but she must not let
you run to ruin. Think what imaginable good end
can there be to this? I suppose she is infinitely
clever and brave, as you say, but how can she face
things for you? Every one
would say the horridest things. Do you want shame
for her? It would break your life up at the
beginning. I have no right to accuse—should have
none anyhow—but one has always a right to be
sorry. I see you could not be happy even if all
were given up on both sides. Don’t let her give
all up. I dare say she might; and that of course
is braver than any treason. If you knew my own
great misery! Sometimes I feel the whole air hot
about me; I should like to cry and moan out loud,
or beat myself. I am not old, and if I live all my
time out I shall never feel as if my
face had a natural look. I wish I
were very old, and gone foolish. I was false in
every word and thought I had. I cannot kill
myself, you see, even by writing it down. Thinking
of it only hurts, without doing harm; I want to be
done harm to. I never spoke to you at Portsmouth.
If you never did know, you see now. I thought you
all knew. I seemed to myself to have the eyes of a
woman who has been cheating and lying to some one
just dead. I was penitent enough to have had the
mark on me. It would be better than playing false,
to leave her husband. But then she takes you—your
life and all. I do think she must not be let. I
hate repeating what was said viciously; and God
knows I must not talk or think scandal: but Madame
de Rochelaurier, her own friend and yours, says
things about her and M. de Saverny; it is no
unkindness of my grandmother’s. She does not like
Clara now, but she is clear of all that, quite.
And there were letters, certainly. Madame de
Rochelaurier said so; they were the cleverest she
ever saw, but not good to write. It was two or
three years ago; M. de Saverny let her see them.
It was base and wretched, and he keeps them. He is
a detestable man; but you cannot get over that. I
believe no harm of her; only you will not let
her take you from us. You must
see it would be the end of all our pleasure and
hope. People would laugh too. If you want to stand by C., as you say, how
can you begin by helping people to scandal? I am
so sorry for you, I know you are too fond of her
and good to her, and would never give her up; and
I am not fit to help. Still, whatever I am, I do
know there must be right and wrong somehow in the
world. You should not make so much misery. I don’t
mean as to the people nearest you both. On your
side of course I cannot tell you how to look at
things; and as to hers I can only be sorry, and am very. But you know,
after all, my mother is something to you while she
lives; you are my very own brother and dearest one
friend. I wish you might see her. She is so full
of the tenderest beautiful ways. I know what she
hears hurts her. She shows little, but she cried
when our grandmother gave her letters to read. You
might be so good to us, for we can never do
anything or be much to you. If evil comes of this
I shall think we were all born to it. There will
be no one left to think of
or speak to without some afterthought or
aftertaste of memory and shame. The names nearest
ours will have stings in them to make us wince. It
is not good for us to try and face the world. It
has beaten all that
ever took heart to stand up against
it. Surely there is something just and good in it,
whatever we think or say, let it look ever so
unfair and press ever so hard. I write this as
well as I can, but it is very hard to write. I
cannot make way any further: my head and hand and
eyes ache, and the sight of the words written down
makes me feel sick; the letters seem to get in at
my eyes and burn behind them. You must be good and
bear with my letter.
With all our loves, I remain Your
affectionate sister,
A.C.
XXVII Reginald Harewood to Mrs.
Radworth
London, Jan.
19th.
I will wait for you till
your own time; only, my dearest, I will not have
you wait out of pity or fear. All that is done
with: my time is here, with me; I have the day by
the hand, and hold it by the hair. We have counted
all and found nothing better than love. I do just
hope there may be something for me to give up or
go without: I see nothing yet. You are so far much
better to me than all I ever knew of. I sit and
make your face out between the words, and stop
writing to look. You ought to have given me that
broken little turquoise thing you used to have
hung to your watch. I wonder all men who ever saw
you do not come to get you away from me—fight me
for you at least; for I shall never let you out of
my hands when I have you well in them. If one had
seen you and let you slip! I knew I should get you
some day or die.
Because I was never the least worth
it. Because you need not have been so good, when
you were so beautiful that nothing you did could
set you off. But you know I loved you ages first.
When I was a boy, and got sight of you, I knew
stupidly somehow you were the best thing there
was. You were very perfect as a child; I know the
clear look of your temples under the hair; and the
fresh delicious tender girl’s hair drawn off and
made a crown with. I want to know what one was to
have done without that? I don’t think you cared
about me a year ago—not the least, my love that is
now. I had to play Palomydes to your Iseult a good
bit; but are you ever going to be afraid of the
old king in Cornwall after this? as if we were
not any one’s match, and anything we please.
Je serai grand, et toi riche,Puisque nous nous aimerons.
You shall scent me out the
music to that some day; the song made of the sound
of flowers and colour of music: you ought to know
the notes that go to the other version of it. We
shall have such a love in our life that all the
ends of it will be sweet. You will not care too
much about the people that could be of no use to
you. Could a brother save you when
you wanted saving? Besides, I
have hold of you. The whole world has no claim or
right in it any longer to set against mine. Let
those come that want you, and see if I let go of
you for any man. There will not be an inch of
time, not a corner of our life, without some
delicious thing in it. Let them tell us what we
are to have instead if we give each other up. I
shall get to be worth something to you in time.
You say now you never found anything yet that had
the likeness of your mate. I have much more of you
than all the earth could deserve; I should like to
see myself jealous of old fancies in a dead dream.
That poor child at A. H. writes me piteous little
letters, in the silliest helpless way, about the
wrong of this and the right of that; she has been
set upon and stung by some poisonous tale-bearing
or other; she wants one to forbear loving for
others’ sake, and absolutely cites her own poor
terrified little repentance after her husband’s
death, on remembering some unborn-baby-ghost of a
flirtation which she never told—some innocuous preference which sticks
to the childish little recollection like a sort of
remorse. It is pitiable enough, but too laughable
as well; for on the strength of it she falls at
once to quoting vicious phrases and transcribing
mere bat-like
infamies and stupidities of the
owl-eyed prurient sort, the base bitter talk of
women without even such a soul as serves for salt
to the carrion of their mind. We know where such
promptings start from. What is it to me, if I am
to be the man fit to match with you by the right
of my delight in you, that you have tried to find
help or love before we came together, and failed
of it? Let them show me letters to disprove that
I love you, and I will read them. Till they do
that I mean to hold to you, and make you hold to
me. I thought there had been more in her than one
sees; but she has a pliable, soft sort of mind,
not unlike her over-tender, cased-up, exotic sort
of beauty. I don’t want women to carry the
sign-mark of them all over, even to the hair. Hers
always looks sensitive hair, and has changes of
colour in it. A woman should keep to the deep
sweet dark, with such a noble silence of colour in
the depth of it—rich reserved hair, with a shadow
and a sense of its own, that wants no gilt setting
of sunbeams to throw out the secret beauty in it.
I should like to see yours painted; that would
beat the best of them. Promise I shall have sight
of it again soon. I want you as a beggar wants
bread to eat; I have the sort of desire after your
face that wounded men must
have after water. I wish there
were some mark of you carved on me that I might
look at. Now this is come to me, I wonder all day
long at all the world. Nobody else has this; but
they live in a sort of way. I do think, at times,
that last year my poor little plaything of a
sister and your brother were almost ready to
believe they knew what it was—as you hear children
say. They had the look and behaviour of a girl and
boy playing themselves into belief in their play.
And all the while we have drawn the lot and can
turn the prize over, toss and catch it in our
hands. All little loves are such poor food to keep
alive on: our great desire and delight—infinite
faith and truth and pleasure—will last our lives
out without running short. You know who says there
are only three things any lover has to say:
Je t’aime; aime-moi;
merci. I say the last over for ever when
I fall to writing. I thank you always with all my
heart and might, my darling, for being so perfect
to me. We will go to France. There will be money.
Write me word when you will. And I love you. We
will have a good fight with the world if it comes
in our way. Let us have the courage of our love,
knowing it for the best thing there is. There is
so little, after all has been thought of, either
to brave or to resign.
I shall make you wear your hair the
way we like. Your sort of walk and motion and way
of sitting has just made me think of the doves at
Venice settling in the square, as we shall see
them before summer. There is a head like you in
San Zanipolo; a portrait head in the right corner
of a picture of the Virgin crowned : we shall see
that. Only it has thick curled gold hair, like my
sister’s. You had that hair when you sat to
Carpaccio; you have had time to grow perfecter in
since. I can smell the sweetness of the sea when I
think of our journey. I like signing my name, now
it has to do with you. My name is a chattel of
yours, and yours a treasure of mine. Let it be
before spring; and love me as well as you can.
REGINALD EDW. HAREWOOD.
XXVIII Lady Midhurst to Mrs.
Radworth
Ashton Hildred, Jan. 30th.
My Dear Clara:
I have not yet made up my
mind whether or no you will be taken at unawares
by the news I have to send you. You must make up
yours to accept it with fortitude. Amy has just
enriched the nation, and impoverished your
brother, by the production of a child—male. In
spite of her long depression and illness, it is a
very sufficient infant, admirable in all their
eyes here. Frank, I am sure, expected to hear of
this in time. While there was any doubt as to the
child’s (I mean Amy’s, and should say the
mother’s) state of health, we could not resolve on
publishing the prospect of her confinement. I may
all but say it was a game of counter-chances. That
it has come to no bad end you will, I am sure, be
as glad as we are. Eight months of mourning were
enough to make one thoroughly anxious. The boy
does us as much credit as anything so fat
and foolish, so red and ridiculous,
as a new baby in good health can do. I suppose we
shall be inundated with troubles because of this
totally idiotic fragment of flesh and fluff, which
my daughter has the front and face to assert
resembles its father’s family—such is the instant
fruit of sudden promotion to grandmotherhood. And
I am a great-grandmother; and not sixty-two till
the month after next. Armande will never allow me
my rank as junior again; yet I recollect her
grown-up patronage of your father and me when we
were barely past school age, and she barely
out—la dame aux belles
cousines I called her, and him le petit Jean de—what is
it?—Saintré?
I suppose my son-in-law will be guardian. I do
hope nobody will feel upset at this—our dear Frank
is too good a knight to grudge the baby its birth.
Poor little soft animal, one could wish for all
our sakes some of its belongings off the small
shoulder of it; but as it has chosen to come, they
must stick to it. Amy is in a noticeable flutter
of impatience to get the christening of it well
over; she has high views of the matter, picked up
of late in some religious quarter. Edmund Reginald
we mean to have it made into, and I must have
Redgie Harewood to come and vow things for it—he
will make an
admirable surety for another
boy’s behaviour; and the name will do very well to
be washed under—unless, indeed, Frank would be
chivalrous enough to halve the charge; then we
might bracket his name with the poor father’s.
Don’t ask him if you think he would rather keep
off; we don’t want felicitation, only forgiveness;
that we must have. If I had not been tricked and
caught in the springe of a sudden promise to take
the weighty spiritual office on myself, I should
implore you to be godmother. As it is, I suppose
the sins and the sermons must all come under my
care. Break the news as softly as you can; there
must always be something abrupt, questionable,
vexatious, in a business of the sort. It is hard
to have to oust one’s friends and shift one’s
point of view at a week’s notice. However, here
the child is, and we must set about the management
of it. I shall make Frederick undertake the main
work at once as guardian and grandfather. He
writes to Lidcombe by this post. Amy is already
better than she has been for months, and very
little pulled down, in spite of a complete
surprise. She makes a delicious double to her
baby, lying in a tumbled tortuous nest or net of
hair with golden linings, with tired relieved eyes
and a face that flashes and subsides
every five minutes with a weary
pleasure—she glitters and undulates at every sight
of the child as if it were the sun and she water
in the light of it. You see how lyrical one may
become at an age when one’s grandchildren have
babies. I should have thought her the kind of
woman to cry a fair amount of tears at such a
time, but happily she refrains from that
ceremonial diversion. She is the image of that
quivering rest which follows on long impassive
trouble, and the labour of days without
deeds—quiet, full of life, eager and at ease. I
imagine she has no memory or feeling left her from
the days that were before yesterday. She and the
baby were born at one birth, and know each as much
as the other of the people and things that went on
before that.
Get your husband to take a human view of the
matter—I suppose his ideas of a baby which is
neither zoophyte nor fossil are rather of the
vaporous and twilight order of thought—and bring
him down for the christianizing part of the show,
if he will condescend so far. He could take a note
or two on the process of animal development by
stages, and the decidedly misty origin of that
comic species to which our fat present sample of
fleshly goods may belong.
About Reginald : I may as well now say, once
for all, that I think I can
promise to relieve you for good of any annoyance
in that quarter. We must both of us by this time
be really glad of any excuse to knock his folly
about you on the head. Here is my plan of action,
to be played out if necessary; if you have a
better, please let me know of it in time, before I
shuffle and deal; you see I show you my hand in
the most perfectly frank way. That dear good
Armande, who really has an exquisite comprehension
of us all and our small difficulties, has got
(Heaven I hope knows how,
but I need hardly say I don’t) a set of old
letters out of the hands of the sémillant
and seductive M. de Saverny fils, and
put them into mine, where you cannot doubt they
are in much better keeping. Octave is not exactly
the typical braggart, but there is a dash in him
of that fearful man in Madame
Bovary—the first lover, I mean; varnished of
course, and well kept down, but the little grain
of that base nature does leaven and flavour the
whole man. He will never have, never so much as
understand, the splendid courtesy and noble
reticence of a past age. His father had twice his
pretensions and less than half his pretension; and
so it will be with all the race. Knowing as you do
now that the papers exist, you must feel
reasonably glad to be well out
of his hands. Not, of course, my dear
niece, that I could for one second conceive you
have what people would call any reason to be glad
of such a thing, or that I would, in the remotest
way, insinuate that there was even so much as
seeming indiscretion on one side. But when you
permitted Octave to open up on that tack, you were
not old or stupid enough to see, what duller eyes
could hardly have missed of, the use your
innocence might be put to—a thing, to me, touching
and terrible to think of. Cleverness, like
goodness, makes the young less quick to apprehend
wrong or anticipate misconstruction than stupid
old people are. In this case my heavy-headed
experience might have been a match for your rapid
bright sense. I have hardly looked at your
correspondence; had not other eyes been there
before mine, nothing, of course, could induce me
to look now; but I know Madame de Rochelaurier
well enough to be sure she has not skipped a word.
I must look over my hand, you see, as it is. It
was hard enough to get them from her at all, as
you may imagine; I hardly know myself how I did
get it done; mais on a ses
moyens. What I have seen, in the
meantime, is quite enough to show me that one of
these letters would fall like a flake of thawed
ice
on the most feverish of a
boy’s rhapsodies. With the least of these small
ink-and-paper pills, I will undertake to clear
your suitor’s head at once, and bring him to a
sane and sound view of actual things. I know what
boys want. They will bear with any imaginable
antecedent except one which makes their own grand
passion look like a pale late proof taken off at a
second or third impression. All the proofs before
letters you left in Octave’s hands long ago—your
sentiment (excuse, but this is the way he will
take it) has come down now to the common print.
Show him what the old friend really was to you,
and he will congeal at once. I don’t imagine you
ever meant actually to let him thaw and distil
into a tender dew of fine feeling at your feet;
you would no doubt always have checked him in
time—if he would always have let you. But then,
upon the whole, it is as well to have a weapon at
hand. I believe he has grown all but frantic of
late, and has wild notions of the future—amusing
to you no doubt while they last, but not good to
allow of. Now, I should not like to lay the
Saverny letters before him, and refrigerate his
ideas by that process; one had rather dispense
with it while one can; but sooner than let his
derangement grow to confirmed mania and become the
practical ruin of him, I must use my
medicines. I know, after he had taken them, he
would be sensible again, and give up his dream of
laws broken and lives united. Still, I had rather
suppress and swamp altogether the
Saverny-Rochelaurier episode, and all that hangs
on to it—rather escape being mixed up in the
matter at all, if I can. There is a better way,
supposing you like to take it. Something you will
see must be done; suppose you do this. Write a
quiet word to Reginald, in a way to put an end to
all this folly for good. Say he must leave off
writing; we know (thanks to your own excellent
feeling and sense) that he does write. Lay it on
your husband, if you like—but make it credible.
Leave no room for appeal. Put it in this way,
suppose, as you could do far better than I can for
you. That an intimacy cannot last which cannot
exist without exciting unpleasant, unfriendly
remark. That you have no right, no reason, and no
wish to be offered up in the Iphigenia manner for
the sake of arousing the adverse winds of rumour
and scandal to the amusement of a matronly public.
That you are sorry to désillusionner even “a
fool of his folly,” and regret any vexation you
may give, but do not admit (I would just intimate
this much, as I am
sure you can so well afford to
do) that he ever had reason for his unreason.
That, in a word, for your sake and his and other
people’s, you must pass for the present from
intimates into strangers, and may hope, if both
please, to lapse again in course of time from
strangers into friends. I think this will do for
the ground-plan—add any intimation or decoration
you like, I for one will never find or indicate a
fault. Only be unanswerable, leave no chance of
room for resistance or reply, shut him up, as you
say, at once on any plea, and I will accept your
point of action and act after it—he need never,
and never shall, be made wiser on the subject than
you please. The old letters shall never have
another chance of air or light. If you don’t like
writing to silence him, I can but use them
faute de
mieux—for, of course, the boy must be brought up short; but
I think my way is the better and more graceful. Do
not you?
It is a pity that in putting a stop to folly we
must make an end of pleasant intercourse and the
friendly daily habits of intimate acquaintance. I
can quite imagine and appreciate the sort of
regret with which one resigns oneself to any such
rupture. For my part it is simply the canon of our
Church about men’s grandmothers which
keeps me safe on Platonic terms with
our friend. Some day I shall console and revenge
myself by writing a novel fit to beat M. Feydeau
out of the field on that tender topic. Figure to
yourself the exquisite effects that might so well
be made. The grandmother might at last see my
hero’s ardour cooling after a bright brief
interval of birdlike pleasure and butterfly
love—volupté suprême et
touchante où les rides se fondent sous les baisers
et les lois s’effacent sous les larmes—
all that style; and when compelled to unclasp her
too tender arms from the neck of her jeune
premier, the venerable lady might sadly and
resignedly pass him on, shall we suppose to his
aunt? A pathetic intrigue might be worked out, by
which she would (without loving him) seduce her
son-in-law so as to leave the coast clear for the
grandson who had forsaken her, and with a heart
wrung to the core by self-devoted love prepare her
daughter’s mind to accept a nephew’s homage:
finally see the young people made happy in each
other and an assenting uncle, and take arsenic,
or, at sight of her work completed, die of a
cerebral congestion (one could make more surgery out of that), invoking
on the heads of child and grandchild a supreme
benediction, baptized in the sacred tears which
drop on
the grave of her own love.
Upon my word I think it an idea which might bear
splendid fruit in the hands of a great realistic
novelist. I see my natural profession now, but I
fear too late.
In good earnest I am sorry this must be the end.
A year ago I was too glad to enlist your kindness
on Reginald’s behalf; and I can see how that
kindness led you in time to put up with his folly.
I am sure I can but feel the more tenderly and
thankfully towards you if indeed you have ever
come to regret for a moment that things were as
they are. I have no right to reproach, and no
heart: no one has the right; no one should have
the heart. You know my lifelong abhorrence of the
rampant Briton, female or male; and my perfect
disbelief in the peculiar virtue of the English
hearth and home. There is no safeguard against the
natural sense of liking. But the time to count up
and pay down comes for us all; we have no
pleasures of our own; we hold no comforts but on
sufferance. Things are constant only to division
and decline. The quiet end of a friendship I have
at times thought sadder than the stormiest end of
a love-match. Chi sa? But I do know
which I had rather keep by me while I can. It is a
pity you
two poor children are not to be given
more play, or to see much more of each other. He
will miss his friend, her sense and grace and wit,
the exquisite companionship of her, when he has
done with the fooleries of sentiment. You, I must
rather hope for his sake, may miss the sight of
him for a time, the ardent ways and eager faiths
and fancies, all the freshness and colour and
fervour of his time and temperament; perhaps even
a little the face and eyes and hair; ce sont là des choses qui ne gâtent
jamais rien; we never know when we begin or cease to care
for such things. I too have had everything
handsome about me, and I have had losses. You see,
my dear, the flowers (and weeds) will grow over
all this in good time. One thing and one time we
may be quite sure of seeing—the day when we shall
have well forgotten everything. It is not
uncomfortable, as one gets old, to recollect that
we shall not always remember. The years will do
without us; and we are not fit to keep the counsel
of the Fates. In good time we shall be out of the
way of things, and have nothing in all the world
to desire or deplore. When recollection makes us
sorry, we can remember that we shall forget. I
never did much harm, or good perhaps, in my life;
so at least I think and hope;
but I should be sorry to
suppose I had to live for ever in sight of the
memory of it. Few could rationally like to face
that likelihood if they once realized it. There is
no fear; for a time is sure to come which will
have to take no care of the best of us, as our
time has to take none of plenty who were better. I
showed you, now some eighteen months since, when
it first appeared, I think, that most charming
song of Love and Age, the one bit of verse that
I have liked well enough for years to dream even
of crying over; the sweetest, noblest piece of
simple sense and manly music, to my poor thinking,
that this age of turbulent metrical machinery has
ever turned out; and it, by the by, hardly belongs
to you. Your people have not the secret of such
clear pure language, such plain pellucid words and
justice of feeling. Since my first reading of it,
the cadences that open and close it come back
perpetually into my ears like the wash of water on
shingle up and down, when I think of times gone or
coming. I never coveted a verse till I read that
in Gryll Grange; there is in it such an
exquisite absence of the wrong thing and presence
of the right thing throughout—just enough words
for the thought and just enough thought for the
matter; a wise, sweet, strong
piece of work. We shall leave the
years to come nothing much better than that. What
is said there about love and time and all the rest
of it is the essence, incomparably well distilled,
of all that we can reasonably want or mean to say.
We must let things pass; when their time is come
for going, or when if they stay they can but turn
to poison, we must help them to be gone. And then
we had best forget.
It is a dull, empty end; a blank upshot; but you
know what good authority we have for saying there
are no such things as catastrophes. I admit it is
rather a case of girl’s head and fish’s tail; but
you must see how deep and acute that eye of
Balzac’s was for such things. His broad maxims are
the firmest-footed and least likely to slip of any
great thinker’s I know; they have such tough root
and tight hold on facts. As to our year’s work and
wages, we may all say truly enough, Le dénoûment c’est qu’il n’y a pas
de dénoûment. I prophesied that last
year, when there first seemed to be a likelihood
of some domestic romance getting under way. The
point of such things, as I told Amy, is just that
they come to nothing. There were very pretty
scandalous materials; the making of an excellent
roman de mœurs—intime et
tant soit peu
scabreux. Amy and
your brother, you doubtless remember, gave
symptoms of being touched, as flirting warmed to
feeling; they had begun playing the game of
cousins with an over-liberal allowance of
sentiment. Redgie again was mad to upset
conventions and vindicate his right of worshipping
you; had no idea, for his part, of keeping on the
sunny side of elopement. Joli ménage! one might have said at
first sight—knowing this much, and not knowing what Englishwomen
are here well known to be. And here we are at the
last chapter with no harm done as yet. You end as
model wife, she as model mother; you wind up your
part with a suitor to dismiss, she hers with a
baby to bring up. All is just as it was, as far as
we all go; the one difference, lamentable enough
as it is, between this and last year is the simple
doing of chance, and quite outside of any doing of
ours. But for poor Edmund’s accidental death,
which I am fatalist enough to presume must have
happened anyhow, we should all be just where we
were. Not an event in the whole course of things;
not, I think, so much as an incident; very meagre
stuff for a French workman to be satisfied with.
We must be content never to make a story, and may
instead reflect with pride what a far better
thing it is to live in the light of
English feeling and under the rule of English
habit.
You will give Frank my best love and excuses in
the name of us all. He must write to me before too
long. For yourself, accept this as I mean it; act
as you like or think wise, and believe me at all
times
Your most affectionate aunt,
HELENA MIDHURST.
XXIX Francis Cheyne to Lady
Midhurst
Lidcombe, Feb.
15th.
My Dear Aunt
Helena:
I shall be clear of this
place to-morrow; I am going for a fortnight or so
to Blocksham. I quite agree it will be best for me
not to have the pleasure of seeing Amicia. You
will, I hope, tell her how thoroughly and truly
glad I am; and that if I could have known earlier
how things were to turn out it would have simply
saved me some unpleasant time. As to meeting, when
it can be pleasant to her, I shall be very
grateful for leave to come—and till then it is
quite good enough to hear of her doing well again.
Only one thing could add to my perfectly sincere
pleasure at this change—to know I had been albe to
bring it about by my own will and deed; as I would
have done long since. I hope she will get all
right again, and the sooner for being back here. I
shall not pretend to suppose you don’t know now
that I care more about her and
what happens to her than about most
things in the world. If all goes well with her
nothing will go far wrong with me while I live. I
dare say I shall do well enough for the
professions yet, when I fall to and try a turn
with them; and I cannot say, honestly, how
thankful I am to be well rid of a name and place
that I never could have been glad of.
We have more to thank you for than your kindness
as to this. I have seen my sister since you wrote,
and she has shown me some part of your letter. I
do not think we shall have any more trouble at
home. My brother-in-law knows nothing of it. She
has written I believe to Reginald; I must say she
was angry enough, but insists on no notice. If she
were ever to find home all but too comfortless to
put up with, I could not well wonder; she has
little there to look to or lean upon. We are out
of the fighting times, but if M. de Saverny or any
other man living were to try and make base use of
her kindness and innocence, I suppose no one could
well blame or laugh at me if I exacted atonement
from him. As it is, I declare if he comes in her
way, and I find he has not kept entire silence as
to the letters written when she was too young and
too good to dream what baseness and
stupidity there is among
people, I will prevent him from going about and
holding up his head again as a man of honour. Any
one from this time forth who gives her any trouble
by writing or by word of mouth shall at once
answer to me for it. I have no right to say that I
believe or do not believe she has never felt a
regret or a wish. She is answerable to no man for
that. I do say she has given nobody reason to
think of her, or a right to speak of her, except
with all honour—and if necessary I wish people to
know I intend to stand by what I say.
She is quite content, and I believe determined,
to see no more of R. H. for some time; quite ready
too to allow that accident and a time of trouble
let him perhaps too much into the secret of an
uncongenial household life, and that she was over
ready to look for companionship where it was
hardly wise to look for it. Few men (as she says)
at his age could have had the sense or chivalrous
feeling to understand all and presume upon
nothing. She said it simply, but in a way to make
any one ashamed of mistaking for an instant such a
quiet noble nature as she has. I have only now to
thank you for helping us both to get quit of the
matter without trouble or dispute. I should be
ashamed to
thank you for doing my sister the
simple justice not to misconstrue her share in it.
If there ever was any evil-speaking, I hope and
suppose it is now broken up for good. For the
rest, I have agreed to leave it at present in your
hands and hers—but if ever she wants help or
defence, I shall, of course, be on the outlook to
give it. I have only to add messages from us both,
and remain, my dear aunt,
Your affectionate nephew,
FR. CHEYNE.
XXX Lady Midhurst to Lady
Cheyne
Lidcombe, Feb.
25th.
My Dear Child:
First salute the
fellow-baby in my name, and then you shall have
news. I assume that is done, and will begin. Two
days here with your father have put me up to the
work there is to do. I shall not take you into
council as to estate affairs, madame la baronne. When
the heir is come to ripe boyhood you may take
things in hand for yourself. Meantime we shall
keep you both in tutelage, and grow fat on privy
peculation; so that if you find no holes in the
big Lidcombe cheese when you cut it, it will not
be the fault of our teeth. So much for you and
your bald imp; but you want news, I suppose, of
friends. I called at Blocksham, and saw the
Radworths in the flesh—that is, in the bones and
cosmetics; for the male is gone to bone, and the
female to paint. The poor man calls aloud for
an embalmer: the poor woman cries
pitifully for an enameller. They get on well
enough again by this time, I believe. To use her
own style, she is dead
beat, and quite safe; viciously resigned. I
think we may look for peace. She would have me
racked if she could, no doubt, but received me
smiling from the tips of her teeth outwards, and
with a soft dry pressure of the fingers. Not a
hint of anything kept back. Evidently, too, she
holds her brother well in leash. Frank pleased me:
he was courteous, quiet, without any sort of
affectation, dissembled or displayed. I gave him
sufficient accounts, and he was grateful; could
not have taken the position and played a rather
hard part more gracefully than he did. We said
little, and came away with all good speed. The
house is a grievous sort of place now, and likely
to stay so. I have no doubt she will set all her
wits to work and punish him for her failure. She
will hardly get up a serious affair again, or it
might be a charity to throw her some small animal
by way of lighter food. It would not surprise me
if she fell to philanthropic labour, or took some
devotional drug by way of stimulant. The bureau
d’amourettes is a bankrupt concern, you
see : her sensation-shop is
closed for good. I prophesy
she will turn a decent worrying wife of the
simpler Anglican breed; home-keeping, sharp-edged,
earnestly petty and drily energetic. Negro-worship
now, or foreign missions, will be about her mark;
perhaps too a dash and sprinkle of religious
feeling, with the chill just off; with a mild
pinch of the old Platonic mixture now and then to
flavour and leaven her dead lump of life: I can
imagine her stages well enough for the next dozen
or score of years. Pity she had not more stock in
hand to start with.
I have been at Plessey too; one could not be
content with seeing half a result. Captain H. was
more gracious to me than you would believe. I
suspect the man has wit enough to see that but for
my poor offices his boy would be now off Heaven
knows whither, and stuck up to the ears in such a
mess as nothing could ever have scraped him
thoroughly clean of. He and Redgie are at last on
the terms of an armed peace—very explosive terms,
you know; but decent while they last, and
preferable to a tooth-and-nail system. I will say
I behaved admirably to him; asked what plans he
had for our boy—what he thought the right way to
take with him—assented
and consented, and suggested and
submitted; altogether, made myself a model. It is
a fact that at this day he thinks Redgie might yet
be, in time, bent and twisted and melted down into
the Church mould of man—cut close to the fit of a
surplice. Now I truly respect and enjoy a finished
sample of clergy; no trade makes better company; I
have known them a sort of cross between artist and
diplomate which is charming. Then they have always
about them a suppressed sense of something
behind—some hint of professional reserve which
does not really change them, but does colour them;
something which fails of being a check on their
style, but is exquisitely serviceable as a sauce
to it. A cleric who is also a man of this world,
and has nothing of the cross-bone type, is as
perfect company as you can get or want. But
conceive Redgie at any imaginably remote date
coming up recast in that state out of the crucible
of time! I kept a bland face though, and hardly
sighed a soft semi-dissent. At least, I said we
might turn him to something good yet; that I did
hope and think. The fatherly nerve was touched; he
warmed to me expressively. I am sure now the poor
man thought he had been too hard on me all these
years in his private mind, put
bitter constructions on very innocent conduct of
mine—had something, after all, to atone for on his
side. He grew quite softly confidential and
responsive before our talk was out. Ah, my dear,
if you could see what odd, tumbled, shapeless
recollections it brought up, to find myself
friendly with him and exchanging wishes and hopes
of mine against his, in all sympathy and reliance!
I have not earned a stranger sensation for years.
Ages ago, before any of your set were born,—
before he married your mother: when he was quite
young, poor, excitable, stupid, and
pleasant—infinite ages ago, when the country and I
were in our thirties and he in his twenties, we
used to talk in that way. I felt ready to turn and
look round for things I had missed since I was six
years old. I should hardly have been taken aback
if my brothers had come in and we had set to
playing together like babies. To be face to face
with such a dead and buried bit of life as that
was so quaint that stranger things even would have
fallen flat after it. However, there was no
hoisting of sentimental colours on either side:
though I suppose no story ever had a stranger end
to it than ours. To this day I
don’t know why I made him or let him
marry your mother.
I told him I must see Redgie and take him in
hand by private word of mouth. He was quite nice
about it, and left the boy to me, smiling even as
he turned us over to each other; more benign than
he ever was when I came over to see Redgie in his
schooldays: a time that seemed farther off now
than the years before his birth. I can’t tell you
how odd it was to be thrown back into ’52 without
warning—worse than the proverbial middle of next
week. I will say for Redgie he was duly ashamed,
and never looked sillier in his boyish time than
when I took him to task. Clara, I told him, had,
as far as I knew, behaved excellently; but I
wanted to have facts. Dismissal was legible on him
all over; but the how I was bent on making out. So
in time I got to some fair guess at the manner of
her final stroke. It was sharp and direct. She
wrote not exactly after my dictation (which I
never thought she need do, or would), but simply
in the resolute sacrificial style. She forbade him
to answer; refused to read him, or reply if she
read; would never see him till all had blown over
for good. It seems she could not well deny that
not
long since he might have
carried her off her feet—which feet she had now
happily regained. Heaven knows, my dear child,
what she could or could not deny if she chose : I
confess I cannot yet make up my mind whether or no
she ever had an idea of decamping, and divorcing
with all ties: it is not
like her; but who can be sure? She has none now.
Honestly, I do suspect that a personal bias of
liking did at times get
mixed up with her sentimental spirit of intrigue;
and that she would have done things for Redgie
which a fellow ten years older or a thought less
handsome would never have made her think of: in
effect, that she was in love with him. She is
quite capable of being upset by simple beauty if
ever she were to have a real lover now, I believe
he would be a fool and very nice-featured. It is
the supreme Platonic retribution—the Nemesis of
sentimental talent, which always clutches such
runners as she is before they turn the post. There
was a small grain of not dubious pathos in her
letter : she was fond enough of him to regret what
she did not quite care to fight for. What she told
him I don’t know, nor how she put it: I can guess,
though. She has done for his first love, at any
rate. He knows he was a
fool, and I did not press for his
opinion of her. One may suppose she put him upon
honour, and made the best of herself. I should
guess, too, that she gave hints of what he might
do in the way of annoyance if he were not ready to
forgive and make friends at a distance. That you
see would prick him on the chivalrous side, and he
would obey and hold his tongue and hand at once—as
he has done. Anyhow, the thing is well killed and
put under ground, with no fear of grave-stealers;
there is not even bone enough left of it to serve
the purpose of a moral dissection. The chief
mourner (if he did but know it) should be Ernest
Radworth. I could cry over that wretchedest of
husbands and students when I think of the thorns
in his pillow, halters in his pew, and ratsbane in
his porridge, which a constant wife will now have
to spend her time in getting ready.
Redgie was very fair about her; would have no
abuse and no explanation. “You see,” he said,
“she tells me what she chooses to tell, and that
one is bound to take; but I have no sort of
business now to begin peeping and snuffing at
anything beyond. I thought once, you know, we both
had a right to ask or answer; that was
when she seemed to care about
it. One can’t be such a blackguard as to try and
take it out of her for changing her mind. She was
quite right to think twice and do as she chose;
and the best I can do now is to keep off and not
get in her way.” Of course the boy talks as if the
old tender terms between them had been broken off
for centuries, and their eyes were now meeting
across a bottomless pit of change. I shall not say
another word on the matter : all is as straight
and right as it need be, though I know that only last month he
was writing her the most insane letters. These,
one may hope, she will think fit to burn. To him I
believe she had the sense never to write at any
length or to any purpose but twice, this last time
being one. And so our little bit of comedy slips
off the stage without noise, and the curtain laps
down over it. Lucky it never turned to the tearful
style, as it once threatened to do.
I need not say that Redgie does not expect to
love seriously again. Not that he says it; he has
just enough sense of humour to keep the assertion
down; but evidently he thinks it. Some one has put
a notion into the Captain’s head about Philomène
de Rochelaurier—Clara herself, perhaps, for aught
I know; she is quite
ingenious enough to have tried that
touch while the real play was still in rehearsal.
Nothing will come of that, though; I shall simply
reconquer the boy, and hold him in hand till I
find a woman fit to have charge of him. I hope he
will turn to some good, seriously. Some of his
friends are not bad friends for him: I like that
young Audley well enough, and he seems to believe
in Redgie at a quite irrational rate. Perhaps I do
too. He must take his way, or make it; and we
shall see.
As to the marriage matter, I have thought lately
that Armande might be given her own way and Frank
married to the girl—if they are all of one mind
about it. It sounds rather Louis Quinze to
bâcler a match in this fashion, but I
don’t see why it should not come to good. He may
as well marry now as later. I don’t at all know
what he will make in the professional line; and he
can hardly throw over all thoughts of it. I did
think of proposing he should be at the head of the
estates for a time, in the capacity of chief
manager and overlooker; but there were rubs in the
way of that plan. It is a nice post, and might be
made a nice sinecure—or demicure, with efficient
business people under and
about one; not bad work for a
cadet de
famille, and has been taken on like
terms before now. We owe him something; however,
we may look for time to pay it. I will confess to
you that if the child had been a girl I meant to
have brought you together at some future day. You
must forgive me; for the heir’s marrying the
dowager would have made our friends open their
eyes and lips a little; and things are much better
as they are.
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