Baruchwas now in love. He had fallen in love with Clara suddenly and totally. His tendency to reflectiveness did not diminish his passion: it rather augmented it. The men and women whose thoughts are here and there continually are not the people to feel the full force of love. Those who do feel it are those who are accustomed to think of one thing at a time, and to think upon it for a long time. ‘No man,’ said Baruch once, ‘can love a woman unless he loves God.’ ‘I should say,’ smilingly replied the Gentile, ‘that no man can love God unless he loves a woman.’ ‘I am right,’ said Baruch, ‘and so are you.’
But Baruch looked in the glass: his hair, jet black when he was a youth, was marked with grey, and once more the thought came to him—this time with peculiar force—that he could not now expect a woman to love him as she had a right to demand that he should love, and that he must be silent. He was obliged to call upon Barnes in about a fortnight’s time. He still read Hebrew, and he had seen in the shop a copy of the Hebrew translation of theMoreh Nevochimof Maimonides, which he greatly coveted, but could not afford to buy. Like every true book-lover, he could not make up his mind when he wished for a book which was beyond his means that he ought once for all to renounce it, and he was guilty of subterfuges quite unworthy of such a reasonable creature in order to delude himself into the belief that he might yield. For example, he wanted a new overcoat badly, but determined it was more prudent to wait, and a week afterwards very nearly came to the conclusion that as he had not ordered the coat he had actually accumulated a fund from which theMoreh Nevochimmight be purchased. When he came to the shop he saw Barnes was there, and he persuaded himself he should have a quieter moment or two with the precious volume when Clara was alone. Barnes, of course, gossiped with everybody.
He therefore called again in the evening, about half an hour before closing time, and found that Barnes had gone home. Clara was busy with a catalogue, the proof of which she was particularly anxious to send to the printer that night. He did not disturb her, but took down the Maimonides, and for a few moments was lost in revolving the doctrine, afterwards repeated and proved by a greater than Maimonides, that the will and power of God are co-extensive: that there is nothing which might be and is not. It was familiar to Baruch, but like all ideas of that quality and magnitude—and there are not many of them—it was always new and affected him like a starry night, seen hundreds of times, yet for ever infinite and original.
But was it Maimonides which kept him till the porter began to put up the shutters? Was he pondering exclusively upon God as the folio lay open before him? He did think about Him, but whether he would have thought about Him for nearly twenty minutes if Clara had not been there is another matter.
‘Do you walk home alone?’ he said as she gave the proof to the boy who stood waiting.
‘Yes, always.’
‘I am going to see Marshall to-night, but I must go to Newman Street first. I shall be glad to walk with you, if you do not mind diverging a little.’
She consented and they went along Oxford Street without speaking, the roar of the carriages and waggons preventing a word.
They turned, however, into Bloomsbury, and were able to hear one another. He had much to say and he could not begin to say it. There was a great mass of something to be communicated pent up within him, and he would have liked to pour it all out before her at once. It is just at such times that we often take up as a means of expression and relief that which is absurdly inexpressive and irrelevant.
‘I have not seen your sister yet; I hope I may see her this evening.’
‘I hope you may, but she frequently suffers from headache and prefers to be alone.’
‘How do you like Mr Barnes?’
The answer is not worth recording, nor is any question or answer which was asked or returned for the next quarter of an hour worth recording, although they were so interesting then. When they were crossing Bedford Square on their return Clara happened to say amongst other commonplaces,—
‘What a relief a quiet space in London is.’
‘I do not mind the crowd if I am by myself.’
‘I do not like crowds; I dislike even the word, and dislike “the masses” still more. I do not want to think of human beings as if they were a cloud of dust, and as if each atom had no separate importance. London is often horrible to me for that reason. In the country it was not quite so bad.’
‘That is an illusion,’ said Baruch after a moment’s pause.
‘I do not quite understand you, but if it be an illusion it is very painful. In London human beings seem the commonest, cheapest things in the world, and I am one of them. I went with Mr Marshall not long ago to a Free Trade Meeting, and more than two thousand people were present. Everybody told me it was magnificent, but it made me very sad.’ She was going on, but she stopped. How was it, she thought again, that she could be so communicative? How was it? How is it that sometimes a stranger crosses our path, with whom, before we have known him for more than an hour, we have no secrets? An hour? we have actually known him for centuries.
She could not understand it, and she felt as if she had been inconsistent with her constant professions of wariness in self-revelation.
‘It is an illusion, nevertheless—an illusion of the senses. It is difficult to make what I mean clear, because insight is not possible beyond a certain point, and clearness does not come until penetration is complete and what we acquire is brought into a line with other acquisitions. It constantly happens that we are arrested short of this point, but it would be wrong to suppose that our conclusions, if we may call them so, are of no value.’
She was silent, and he did not go on. At last he said,—
‘The illusion lies in supposing that number, quantity and terms of that kind are applicable to any other than sensuous objects, but I cannot go further, at least not now. After all, it is possible here in London for one atom to be of eternal importance to another.’
They had gone quite round Bedford Square without entering Great Russell Street, which was the way eastwards. A drunken man was holding on by the railings of the Square. He had apparently been hesitating for some time whether he could reach the road, and, just as Baruch and Clara came up to him, he made a lurch towards it, and nearly fell over them. Clara instinctively seized Baruch’s arm in order to avoid the poor, staggering mortal; they went once more to the right, and began to complete another circuit. Somehow her arm had been drawn into Baruch’s, and there it remained.
‘Have you any friends in London?’ said Baruch.
‘There are Mrs Caffyn, her son and daughter, and there is Mr A. J. Scott. He was a friend of my father.’
‘You mean the Mr Scott who was Irving’s assistant?’
‘Yes.’
‘An addition—’ he was about to say, ‘an additional bond’ but he corrected himself. ‘A bond between us; I know Mr Scott.’
‘Do you really? I suppose you know many interesting people in London, as you are in his circle.’
‘Very few; weeks, months have passed since anybody has said as much to me as you have.’
His voice quivered a little, for he was trembling with an emotion quite inexplicable by mere intellectual relationship. Something came through Clara’s glove as her hand rested on his wrist which ran through every nerve and sent the blood into his head.
Clara felt his excitement and dreaded lest he should say something to which she could give no answer, and when they came opposite Great Russell Street, she withdrew her arm from his, and began to cross to the opposite pavement. She turned the conversation towards some indifferent subject, and in a few minutes they were at Great Ormond Street. Baruch would not go in as he had intended; he thought it was about to rain, and he was late. As he went along he became calmer, and when he was fairly indoors he had passed into a despair entirely inconsistent—superficially—with the philosopher Baruch, as inconsistent as the irrational behaviour in Bedford Square. He could well enough interpret, so he believed, Miss Hopgood’s suppression of him. Ass that he was not to see what he ought to have known so well, that he was playing the fool to her; he, with a grown-up son, to pretend to romance with a girl! At that moment she might be mocking him, or, if she was too good for mockery, she might be contriving to avoid or to quench him. The next time he met her, he would be made to understand that he waspitied, and perhaps he would then learn the name of the youth who was his rival, and had won her. He would often meet her, no doubt, but of what value would anything he could say be to her. She could not be expected to make fine distinctions, and there was a class of elderly men, to which of course he would be assigned, but the thought was too horrible.
Perhaps his love for Clara might be genuine; perhaps it was not. He had hoped that as he grew older he might be able really toseea woman, but he was once more like one of the possessed. It was not Clara Hopgood who was before him, it was hair, lips, eyes, just as it was twenty years ago, just as it was with the commonest shop-boy he met, who had escaped from the counter, and was waiting at an area gate. It was terrible to him to find that he had so nearly lost his self-control, but upon this point he was unjust to himself, for we are often more distinctly aware of the strength of the temptation than of the authority within us, which falteringly, but decisively, enables us at last to resist it.
Then he fell to meditating how little his studies had done for him. What was the use of them? They had not made him any stronger, and he was no better able than other people to resist temptation. After twenty years continuous labour he found himself capable of the vulgarest, coarsest faults and failings from which the remotest skiey influence in his begetting might have saved him.
Clara was not as Baruch. No such storm as that which had darkened and disheartened him could pass over her, but she could love, perhaps better than he, and she began to love him. It was very natural to a woman such as Clara, for she had met a man who had said to her that what she believed was really of some worth. Her father and mother had been very dear to her; her sister was very dear to her, but she had never received any such recognition as that which had now been offered to her: her own self had never been returned to her with such honour. She thought, too—why should she not think it?—of the future, of the release from her dreary occupation, of a happy home with independence, and she thought of the children that might be. She lay down without any misgiving. She was sure he was in love with her; she did not know much of him, certainly, in the usual meaning of the word, but she knew enough. She would like to find out more of his history; perhaps without exciting suspicion she might obtain it from Mrs Caffyn.
Mr Frank Palmerwas back again in England. He was much distressed when he received that last letter from Mrs Caffyn, and discovered that Madge’s resolution not to write remained unshaken. He was really distressed, but he was not the man upon whom an event, however deeply felt at the time, could score a furrow which could not be obliterated. If he had been a dramatic personage, what had happened to him would have been the second act leading to a fifth, in which the Fates would have appeared, but life seldom arranges itself in proper poetic form. A man determines that he must marry; he makes the shop-girl an allowance, never sees her or her child again, transforms himself into a model husband, is beloved by his wife and family; the woman whom he kissed as he will never kiss his lawful partner, withdraws completely, and nothing happens to him.
Frank was sure he could never love anybody as he had loved Madge, nor could he cut indifferently that other cord which bound him to her. Nobody in society expects the same paternal love for the offspring of a housemaid or a sempstress as for the child of the stockbroker’s or brewer’s daughter, and nobody expects the same obligations, but Frank was not a society youth, and Madge was his equal. A score of times, when his fancy roved, the rope checked him as suddenly as if it were the lasso of a South American Gaucho. But what could he do? that was the point. There were one or two things which he could have done, perhaps, and one or two things which he could not have done if he had been made of different stuff; but there was nothing more to be done which Frank Palmer could do. After all, it was better that Madge should be the child’s mother than that it should belong to some peasant. At least it would be properly educated. As to money, Mrs Caffyn had told him expressly that she did not want it. That might be nothing but pride, and he resolved, without very clearly seeing how, and without troubling himself for the moment as to details, that Madge should be entirely and handsomely supported by him. Meanwhile it was of great importance that he should behave in such a manner as to raise no suspicion. He did not particularly care for some time after his return from Germany to go out to the musical parties to which he was constantly invited, but he went as a duty, and wherever he went he met his charming cousin. They always sang together; they had easy opportunities of practising together, and Frank, although nothing definite was said to him, soon found that his family and hers considered him destined for her. He could not retreat, and there was no surprise manifested by anybody when it was rumoured that they were engaged. His story may as well be finished at once. He and Miss Cecilia Morland were married. A few days before the wedding, when some legal arrangements and settlements were necessary, Frank made one last effort to secure an income for Madge, but it failed. Mrs Caffyn met him by appointment, but he could not persuade her even to be the bearer of a message to Madge. He then determined to confess his fears. To his great relief Mrs Caffyn of her own accord assured him that he never need dread any disturbance or betrayal.
‘There are three of us,’ she said, ‘as knows you—Miss Madge, Miss Clara and myself—and, as far as you are concerned, we are dead and buried. I can’t say as I was altogether of Miss Madge’s way of looking at it at first, and I thought it ought to have been different, though I believe now as she’s right, but,’ and the old woman suddenly fired up as if some bolt from heaven had kindled her, ‘I pity you, sir—you, sir, I say—more nor I do her. You little know what you’ve lost, the blessedest, sweetest, ah, and the cleverest creature, too, as ever I set eyes on.’
‘But, Mrs Caffyn,’ said Frank, with much emotion, ‘it was not I who left her, you know it was not, and, and even—’
The word ‘now’ was coming, but it did not come.
‘Ah,’ said Mrs Caffyn, with something like scorn, ‘Iknow, yes, I do know. It was she, you needn’t tell me that, but, God-a-mighty in heaven, if I’d been you, I’d have laid myself on the ground afore her, I’d have tore my heart out for her, and I’d have said, “No other woman in this world but you”—but there, what a fool I am! Goodbye, Mr Palmer.’
She marched away, leaving Frank very miserable, and, as he imagined, unsettled, but he was not so. The fit lasted all day, but when he was walking home that evening, he met a poor friend whose wife was dying.
‘I am so grieved,’ said Frank ‘to hear of your trouble—no hope?’
‘None, I am afraid.’
‘It is very dreadful.’
‘Yes, it is hard to bear, but to what is inevitable we must submit.’
This new phrase struck Frank very much, and it seemed very philosophic to him, a maxim, for guidance through life. It did not strike him that it was generally either a platitude or an excuse for weakness, and that a nobler duty is to find out what is inevitable and what is not, to declare boldly that what the world oftentimes affirms to be inevitable is really evitable, and heroically to set about making it so. Even if revolt be perfectly useless, we are not particularly drawn to a man who prostrates himself too soon and is incapable of a little cursing.
As it was impossible to provide for Madge and the child now, Frank considered whether he could not do something for them in the will which he had to make before his marriage. He might help his daughter if he could not help the mother.
But his wife would perhaps survive him, and the discovery would cause her and her children much misery; it would damage his character with them and inflict positive moral mischief. The will, therefore, did not mention Madge, and it was not necessary to tell his secret to his solicitor.
The wedding took place amidst much rejoicing; everybody thought the couple were most delightfully matched; the presents were magnificent; the happy pair went to Switzerland, came back and settled in one of the smaller of the old, red brick houses in Stoke Newington, with a lawn in front, always shaved and trimmed to the last degree of smoothness and accuracy, with paths on whose gravel not the smallest weed was ever seen, and with a hot-house that provided the most luscious black grapes. There was a grand piano in the drawing-room, and Frank and Cecilia became more musical than ever, and Waltham Lodge was the headquarters of a little amateur orchestra which practised Mozart and Haydn, and gave local concerts. A twelvemonth after the marriage a son was born and Frank’s father increased Frank’s share in the business. Mr Palmer had long ceased to take any interest in the Hopgoods. He considered that Madge had treated Frank shamefully in jilting him, but was convinced that he was fortunate in his escape. It was clear that she was unstable; she probably threw him overboard for somebody more attractive, and she was not the woman to be a wife to his son.
One day Cecilia was turning out some drawers belonging to her husband, and she found a dainty little slipper wrapped up in white tissue paper. She looked at it for a long time, wondering to whom it could have belonged, and had half a mind to announce her discovery to Frank, but she was a wise woman and forbore. It lay underneath some neckties which were not now worn, two or three silk pocket handkerchiefs also discarded, and some manuscript books containing school themes. She placed them on the top of the drawers as if they had all been taken out in a lump and the slipper was at the bottom.
‘Frank my dear,’ she said after dinner, ‘I emptied this morning one of the drawers in the attic. I wish you would look over the things and decide what you wish to keep. I have not examined them, but they seem to be mostly rubbish.’
He went upstairs after he had smoked his cigar and read his paper. There was the slipper! It all came back to him, that never-to-be-forgotten night, when she rebuked him for the folly of kissing her foot, and he begged the slipper and determined to preserve it for ever, and thought how delightful it would be to take it out and look at it when he was an old man. Even now he did not like to destroy it, but Cecilia might have seen it and might ask him what he had done with it, and what could he say? Finally he decided to burn it. There was no fire, however, in the room, and while he stood meditating, Cecilia called him. He replaced the slipper in the drawer. He could not return that evening, but he intended to go back the next morning, take the little parcel away in his pocket and burn it at his office. At breakfast some letters came which put everything else out of mind. The first thing he did that evening was to revisit the garret, but the slipper had gone. Cecilia had been there and had found it carefully folded up in the drawer. She pulled it out, snipped and tore it into fifty pieces, carried them downstairs, threw them on the dining-room fire, sat down before it, poking them further and further into the flames, and watched them till every vestige had vanished. Frank did not like to make any inquiries; Cecilia made none, and thence-forward no trace existed at Waltham Lodge of Madge Hopgood.
Baruchwent neither to Barnes’s shop nor to the Marshalls for nearly a month. One Sunday morning he was poring over theMoreh Nevochim, for it had proved too powerful a temptation for him, and he fell upon the theorem that without God the Universe could not continue to exist, for God is its Form. It was one of those sayings which may be nothing or much to the reader. Whether it be nothing or much depends upon the quality of his mind.
There was certainly nothing in it particularly adapted to Baruch’s condition at that moment, but an antidote may be none the less efficacious because it is not direct. It removed him to another region. It was like the sight and sound of the sea to the man who has been in trouble in an inland city. His self-confidence was restored, for he to whom an idea is revealed becomes the idea, and is no longer personal and consequently poor.
His room seemed too small for him; he shut his book and went to Great Ormond Street. He found there Marshall, Mrs Caffyn, Clara and a friend of Marshall’s named Dennis.
‘Where is your wife?’ said Baruch to Marshall.
‘Gone with Miss Madge to the Catholic chapel to hear a mass of Mozart’s.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Caffyn. ‘I tell them they’ll turn Papists if they do not mind. They are always going to that place, and there’s no knowing, so I’ve hear’d, what them priests can do. They aren’t like our parsons. Catch that man at Great Oakhurst a-turnin’ anybody.’
‘I suppose,’ said Baruch to Clara, ‘it is the music takes your sister there?’
‘Mainly, I believe, but perhaps not entirely.’
‘What other attraction can there be?’
‘I am not in the least disposed to become a convert. Once for all, Catholicism is incredible and that is sufficient, but there is much in its ritual which suits me. There is no such intrusion of the person of the minister as there is in the Church of England, and still worse amongst dissenters. In the Catholic service the priest is nothing; it is his office which is everything; he is a mere means of communication. The mass, in so far as it proclaims that miracle is not dead, is also very impressive to me.’
‘I do not quite understand you,’ said Marshall, ‘but if you once chuck your reason overboard, you may just as well be Catholic as Protestant. Nothing can be more ridiculous than the Protestant objection, on the ground of absurdity, to the story of the saint walking about with his head under his arm.’
The tea things had been cleared away, and Marshall was smoking. Both he and Dennis were Chartists, and Baruch had interrupted a debate upon a speech delivered at a Chartist meeting that morning by Henry Vincent.
Frederick Dennis was about thirty, tall and rather loose-limbed. He wore loose clothes, his neck-cloth was tied in a big, loose knot, his feet were large and his boots were heavy. His face was quite smooth, and his hair, which was very thick and light brown, fell across his forehead in a heavy wave with just two complete undulations in it from the parting at the side to the opposite ear. It had a trick of tumbling over his eyes, so that his fingers were continually passed through it to brush it away. He was a wood engraver, or, as he preferred to call himself, an artist, but he also wrote for the newspapers, and had been a contributor to theNorthern Star. He was well brought up and was intended for the University, but he did not stick to his Latin and Greek, and as he showed some talent for drawing he was permitted to follow his bent. His work, however, was not of first-rate quality, and consequently orders were not abundant. This was the reason why he had turned to literature. When he had any books to illustrate he lived upon what they brought him, and when there were no books he renewed his acquaintance with politics. If books and newspapers both failed, he subsisted on a little money which had been left him, stayed with friends as long as he could, and amused himself by writing verses which showed much command over rhyme.
‘I cannot stand Vincent,’ said Marshall, ‘he is too flowery for me, and he does not belong to the people. He is middle-class to the backbone.’
‘He is deficient in ideas,’ said Dennis.
‘It is odd,’ continued Marshall, turning to Cohen, ‘that your race never takes any interest in politics.’
‘My race is not a nation, or, if a nation, has no national home. It took an interest in politics when it was in its own country, and produced some rather remarkable political writing.’
‘But why do you care so little for what is going on now?’
‘I do care, but all people are not born to be agitators, and, furthermore, I have doubts if the Charter will accomplish all you expect.’
‘I know what is coming’—Marshall took the pipe out of his mouth and spoke with perceptible sarcasm—‘the inefficiency of merely external remedies, the folly of any attempt at improvement which does not begin with the improvement of individual character, and that those to whom we intend to give power are no better than those from whom we intend to take it away. All very well, Mr Cohen. My answer is that at the present moment the stockingers in Leicester are earning four shillings and sixpence a week. It is not a question whether they are better or worse than their rulers. They want something to eat, they have nothing, and their masters have more than they can eat.’
‘Apart altogether from purely material reasons,’ said Dennis, ‘we have rights; we are born into this planet without our consent, and, therefore, we may make certain demands.’
‘Do you not think,’ said Clara, ‘that the repeal of the corn laws will help you?’
Dennis smiled and was about to reply, but Marshall broke out savagely,—
‘Repeal of the corn laws is a contemptible device of manufacturing selfishness. It means low wages. Do you suppose the great Manchester cotton lords care one straw for their hands? Not they! They will face a revolution for repeal because it will enable them to grind an extra profit out of us.’
‘I agree with you entirely,’ said Dennis, turning to Clara, ‘that a tax upon food is wrong; it is wrong in the abstract. The notion of taxing bread, the fruit of the earth, is most repulsive; but the point is—what is our policy to be? If a certain end is to be achieved, we must neglect subordinate ends, and, at times, even contradict what our own principles would appear to dictate. That is the secret of successful leadership.’
He took up the poker and stirred the fire.
‘That will do, Dennis,’ said Marshall, who was evidently fidgety. ‘The room is rather warm. There’s nothing in Vincent which irritates me more than those bits of poetry with which he winds up.
“God made the man—man made the slave,”
“God made the man—man made the slave,”
and all that stuff. If God made the man, God made the slave. I know what Vincent’s little game is, and it is the same game with all his set. They want to keep Chartism religious, but we shall see. Let us once get the six points, and the Established Church will go, and we shall have secular education, and in a generation there will not be one superstition left.’
‘Theological superstition, you mean?’ said Clara.
‘Yes, of course, what others are there worth notice?’
‘A few. The superstition of the ordinary newspaper reader is just as profound, and the tyranny of the majority may be just as injurious as the superstition of a Spanish peasant, or the tyranny of the Inquisition.’
‘Newspapers will not burn people as the priests did and would do again if they had the power, and they do not insult us with fables and a hell and a heaven.’
‘I maintain,’ said Clara with emphasis, ‘that if a man declines to examine, and takes for granted what a party leader or a newspaper tells him, he has no case against the man who declines to examine, or takes for granted what the priest tells him. Besides, although, as you know, I am not a convert myself, I do lose a little patience when I hear it preached as a gospel to every poor conceited creature who goes to your Sunday evening atheist lecture, that he is to believe nothing on one particular subject which his own precious intellect cannot verify, and the next morning he finds it to be his duty to swallow wholesale anything you please to put into his mouth. As to the tyranny, the day may come, and I believe is approaching, when the majority will be found to be more dangerous than any ecclesiastical establishment which ever existed.’
Baruch’s lips moved, but he was silent. He was not strong in argument. He was thinking about Marshall’s triumphant inquiry whether God is not responsible for slavery. He would have liked to say something on that subject, but he had nothing ready.
‘Practical people,’ said Dennis, who had not quite recovered from the rebuke as to the warmth of the room, ‘are often most unpractical and injudicious. Nothing can be more unwise than to mix up politics and religion. If youdo,’ Dennis waved his hand, ‘you will have all the religious people against you. My friend Marshall, Miss Hopgood, is under the illusion that the Church in this country is tottering to its fall. Now, although I myself belong to no sect, I do not share his illusion; nay, more, I am not sure’—Mr Dennis spoke slowly, rubbed his chin and looked up at the ceiling—‘I am not sure that there is not something to be said in favour of State endowment—at least, in a country like Ireland.’
‘Come along, Dennis, we shall be late,’ said Marshall, and the two forthwith took their departure in order to attend another meeting.
‘Much either of ’em knows about it,’ said Mrs Caffyn when they had gone. ‘There’s Marshall getting two pounds a week reg’lar, and goes on talking about people at Leicester, and he has never been in Leicester in his life; and, as for that Dennis, he knows less than Marshall, for he does nothing but write for newspapers and draw for picture-books, never nothing what you may call work, and he does worrit me so whenever he begins about poor people that I can’t sit still.Ido know what the poor is, having lived at Great Oakhurst all these years.’
‘You are not a Chartist, then?’ said Baruch.
‘Me—me a Chartist? No, I ain’t, and yet, maybe, I’m something worse. What would be the use of giving them poor creatures votes? Why, there isn’t one of them as wouldn’t hold up his hand for anybody as would give him a shilling. Quite right of ’em, too, for the one thing they have to think about from morning to night is how to get a bit of something to fill their bellies, and they won’t fill them by voting.’
‘But what would you do for them?’
‘Ah! that beats me! Hang somebody, but I don’t know who it ought to be. There’s a family by the name of Longwood, they live just on the slope of the hill nigh the Dower Farm, and there’s nine of them, and the youngest when I left was a baby six months old, and their living-room faces the road so that the north wind blows in right under the door, and I’ve seen the snow lie in heaps inside. As reg’lar as winter comes Longwood is knocked off—no work. I’ve knowed them not have a bit of meat for weeks together, and him a-loungin’ about at the corner of the street. Wasn’t that enough to make him feel as if somebody ought to be killed? And Marshall and Dennis say as the proper thing to do is to give him a vote, and prove to him there was never no Abraham nor Isaac, and that Jonah never was in a whale’s belly, and that nobody had no business to have more children than he could feed. And what goes on, and what must go on, inside such a place as Longwood’s, with him and his wife, and with them boys and gals all huddled together—But I’d better hold my tongue. We’ll let the smoke out of this room, I think, and air it a little.’
She opened the window, and Baruch rose and went home.
Whenever Mrs Caffyn talked about the labourers at Great Oakhurst, whom she knew so well, Clara always felt as if all her reading had been a farce, and, indeed, if we come into close contact with actual life, art, poetry and philosophy seem little better than trifling. When the mist hangs over the heavy clay land in January, and men and women shiver in the bitter cold and eat raw turnips, to indulge in fireside ecstasies over the divine Plato or Shakespeare is surely not such a virtue as we imagine it to be.
Baruchsat and mused before he went to bed. He had gone out stirred by an idea, but it was already dead. Then he began to think about Clara. Who was this Dennis who visited the Marshalls and the Hopgoods? Oh! for an hour of his youth! Fifteen years ago the word would have come unbidden if he had seen Clara, but now, in place of the word, there was hesitation, shame. He must make up his mind to renounce for ever. But, although this conclusion had forced itself upon him overnight as inevitable, he could not resist the temptation when he rose the next morning of plotting to meet Clara, and he walked up and down the street opposite the shop door that evening nearly a quarter of an hour, just before closing time, hoping that she might come out and that he might have the opportunity of overtaking her apparently by accident. At last, fearing he might miss her, he went in and found she had a companion whom he instantly knew, before any induction, to be her sister. Madge was not now the Madge whom we knew at Fenmarket. She was thinner in the face and paler. Nevertheless, she was not careless; she was even more particular in her costume, but it was simpler. If anything, perhaps, she was a little prouder. She was more attractive, certainly, than she had ever been, although her face could not be said to be handsomer. The slight prominence of the cheek-bone, the slight hollow underneath, the loss of colour, were perhaps defects, but they said something which had a meaning in it superior to that of the tint of the peach. She had been reading a book while Clara was balancing her cash, and she attempted to replace it. The shelf was a little too high, and the volume fell upon the ground. It contained Shelley’sRevolt of Islam.
‘Have you read Shelley?’ said Baruch.
‘Every line—when I was much younger.’
‘Do you read him now?’
‘Not much. I was an enthusiast for him when I was nineteen, but I find that his subject matter is rather thin, and his themes are a little worn. He was entirely enslaved by the ideals of the French Revolution. Take away what the French Revolution contributed to his poetry, and there is not much left.’
‘As a man he is not very attractive to me.’
‘Nor to me; I never shall forgive his treatment of Harriet.’
‘I suppose he had ceased to love her, and he thought, therefore, he was justified in leaving her.’
Madge turned and fixed her eyes, unobserved, on Baruch. He was looking straight at the bookshelves. There was not, and, indeed, how could there be, any reference to herself.
‘I should put it in this way,’ she said, ‘that he thought he was justified in sacrificing a woman for the sake of animpulse. Call this a defect or a crime—whichever you like—it is repellent to me. It makes no difference to me to know that he believed the impulse to be divine.’
‘I wish,’ interrupted Clara, ‘you two would choose less exciting subjects of conversation; my totals will not come right.’
They were silent, and Baruch, affecting to study a Rollin’sAncient History, wondered, especially when he called to mind Mrs Caffyn’s report, what this girl’s history could have been. He presently recovered himself, and it occurred to him that he ought to give some reason why he had called. Before, however, he was able to offer any excuse, Clara closed her book.
‘Now, it is right,’ she said, ‘and I am ready.’
Just at that moment Barnes appeared, hot with hurrying.
‘Very sorry, Miss Hopgood, to ask you to stay for a few minutes. I recollected after I left that the doctor particularly wanted those books sent off to-night. I should not like to disappoint him. I have been to the booking-office, and the van will be here in about twenty minutes. If you will make out the invoice and check me, I will pack them.’
‘I will be off,’ said Madge. ‘The shop will be shut if I do not make haste.’
‘You are not going alone, are you?’ said Baruch. ‘May I not go with you, and cannot we both come back for your sister?’
‘It is very kind of you.’
Clara looked up from her desk, watched them as they went out at the door and, for a moment, seemed lost. Barnes turned round.
‘Now, Miss Hopgood.’ She started.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Fabricius,J. A.Bibliotheca Ecclesiastica in qua continentur.’
‘I need not put in the last three words.’
‘Yes, yes.’ Barnes never liked to be corrected in a title. ‘There’s anotherFabricius BibliothecaorBibliographia. Go on—Basili opera ad MSS. codices, 3 vols.’
Clara silently made the entries a little more scholarly. In a quarter of an hour the parcel was ready and Cohen returned.
‘Your sister would not allow me to wait. She met Mrs Marshall; they said they should have something to carry, and that it was not worth while to bring it here. I will walk with you, if you will allow me. We may as well avoid Holborn.’
They turned into Gray’s Inn, and, when they were in comparative quietude, he said,—
‘Any Chartist news?’ and then without waiting for an answer, ‘By the way, who is your friend Dennis?’
‘He is no particular friend of mine. He is a wood-engraver, and writes also, I believe, for the newspapers.’
‘He can talk as well as write.’
‘Yes, he can talk very well.’
‘Do you not think there was something unreal about what he said?’
‘I do not believe he is actually insincere. I have noticed that men who write or read much often appear somewhat shadowy.’
‘How do you account for it?’
‘What they say is not experience.’
‘I do not quite understand. A man may think much which can never become an experience in your sense of the word, and be very much in earnest with what he thinks; the thinking is an experience.’
‘Yes, I suppose so, but it is what a person has gone through which I like to hear. Poor Dennis has suffered much. You are perhaps surprised, but it is true, and when he leaves politics alone he is a different creature.’
‘I am afraid I must be very uninteresting to you?’
‘I did not mean that I care for nothing but my friend’s aches and pains, but that I do not care for what he just takes up and takes on.’
‘It is my misfortune that my subjects are not very—I was about to say—human. Perhaps it is because I am a Jew.’
‘I do not know quite what you mean by your “subjects,” but if you mean philosophy and religion, they are human.’
‘If they are, very few people like to hear anything about them. Do you know, Miss Hopgood, I can never talk to anybody as I can to you.’
Clara made no reply. A husband was to be had for a look, for a touch, a husband whom she could love, a husband who could give her all her intellect demanded. A little house rose before her eyes as if by Arabian enchantment; there was a bright fire on the hearth, and there were children round it; without the look, the touch, there would be solitude, silence and a childless old age, so much more to be feared by a woman than by a man. Baruch paused, waiting for her answer, and her tongue actually began to move with a reply, which would have sent his arm round her, and made them one for ever, but it did not come. Something fell and flashed before her like lightning from a cloud overhead, divinely beautiful, but divinely terrible.
‘I remember,’ she said, ‘that I have to call in Lamb’s Conduit Street to buy something for my sister. I shall just be in time.’ Baruch went as far as Lamb’s Conduit Street with her. He, too, would have determined his own destiny if she had uttered the word, but the power to proceed without it was wanting and he fell back. He left her at the door of the shop. She bid him good-bye, obviously intending that he should go no further with her, and he shook hands with her, taking her hand again and shaking it again with a grasp which she knew well enough was too fervent for mere friendship. He then wandered back once more to his old room at Clerkenwell. The fire was dead, he stirred it, the cinders fell through the grate and it dropped out all together. He made no attempt to rekindle it, but sat staring at the black ashes, not thinking, but dreaming. Thirty years more perhaps with no change! The last chance that he could begin a new life had disappeared. He cursed himself that nothing drove him out of himself with Marshall and his fellowmen; that he was not Chartist nor revolutionary; but it was impossible to create in himself enthusiasm for a cause. He had tried before to become a patriot and had failed, and was conscious, during the trial, that he was pretending to be something he was not and could not be. There was nothing to be done but to pace the straight road in front of him, which led nowhere, so far as he could see.
Amonthafterwards Marshall announced that he intended to pay a visit.
‘I am going,’ he said, ‘to see Mazzini. Who will go with me?’
Clara and Madge were both eager to accompany him. Mrs Caffyn and Mrs Marshall chose to stay at home.
‘I shall ask Cohen to come with us,’ said Marshall. ‘He has never seen Mazzini and would like to know him.’ Cohen accordingly called one Sunday evening, and the party went together to a dull, dark, little house in a shabby street of small shops and furnished apartments. When they knocked at Mazzini’s door Marshall asked for Mr — for, even in England, Mazzini had an assumed name which was always used when inquiries were made for him. They were shown upstairs into a rather mean room, and found there a man, really about forty, but looking older. He had dark hair growing away from his forehead, dark moustache, dark beard and a singularly serious face. It was not the face of a conspirator, but that of a saint, although without that just perceptible touch of silliness which spoils the faces of most saints. It was the face of a saint of the Reason, of a man who could be ecstatic for rational ideals, rarest of all endowments. It was the face, too, of one who knew no fear, or, if he knew it, could crush it. He was once concealed by a poor woman whose house was surrounded by Austrian soldiers watching for him. He was determined that she should not be sacrificed, and, having disguised himself a little, walked out into the street in broad daylight, went up to the Austrian sentry, asked for a light for his cigar and escaped. He was cordial in his reception of his visitors, particularly of Clara, Madge and Cohen, whom he had not seen before.
‘The English,’ he said, after some preliminary conversation, ‘are a curious people. As a nation they are what they call practical and have a contempt for ideas, but I have known some Englishmen who have a religious belief in them, a nobler belief than I have found in any other nation. There are English women, also, who have this faith, and one or two are amongst my dearest friends.’
‘I never,’ said Marshall, ‘quite comprehend you on this point. I should say that we know as clearly as most folk what we want, and we mean to have it.’
‘That may be, but it is not Justice, as Justice which inspires you. Those of you who have not enough, desire to have more, that is all.’
‘If we are to succeed, we must preach what the people understand.’
‘Pardon me, that is just where you and I differ. Whenever any real good is done it is by a crusade; that is to say, the cross must be raised and appeal be made to somethingabovethe people. No system based on rights will stand. Never will society be permanent till it is founded on duty. If we consider our rights exclusively, we extend them over the rights of our neighbours. If the oppressed classes had the power to obtain their rights to-morrow, and with the rights came no deeper sense of duty, the new order, for the simple reason that the oppressed are no better than their oppressors, would be just as unstable as that which preceded it.’
‘To put it in my own language,’ said Madge, ‘you believe in God.’
Mazzini leaned forward and looked earnestly at her.
‘My dear young friend, without that belief I should have no other.’
‘I should like, though,’ said Marshall, ‘to see the church which would acknowledge you and Miss Madge, or would admit your God to be theirs.’
‘What is essential,’ replied Madge, ‘in a belief in God is absolute loyalty to a principle we know to have authority.’
‘It may, perhaps,’ said Mazzini, ‘be more to me, but you are right, it is a belief in the supremacy and ultimate victory of the conscience.’
‘The victory seems distant in Italy now,’ said Baruch. ‘I do not mean the millennial victory of which you speak, but an approximation to it by the overthrow of tyranny there.’
‘You are mistaken; it is far nearer than you imagine.’
‘Do you obtain,’ said Clara, ‘any real help from people here? Do you not find that they merely talk and express what they call their sympathy?’
‘I must not say what help I have received; more than words, though, from many.’
‘You expect, then,’ said Baruch, ‘that the Italians will answer your appeal?’
‘If I had no faith in the people, I do not see what faith could survive.’
‘The people are the persons you meet in the street.’
‘A people is not a mere assemblage of uninteresting units, but it is not a phantom. A spirit lives in each nation which is superior to any individual in it. It is this which is the true reality, the nation’s purpose and destiny, it is this for which the patriot lives and dies.’
‘I suppose,’ said Clara, ‘you have no difficulty in obtaining volunteers for any dangerous enterprise?’
‘None. You would be amazed if I were to tell you how many men and women at this very moment would go to meet certain death if I were to ask them.’
‘Women?’
‘Oh, yes; and women are of the greatest use, but it is rather difficult to find those who have the necessary qualifications.’
‘I suppose you employ them in order to obtain secret information?’
‘Yes; amongst the Austrians.’
The party broke up. Baruch manœuvred to walk with Clara, but Marshall wanted to borrow a book from Mazzini, and she stayed behind for him. Madge was outside in the street, and Baruch could do nothing but go to her. She seemed unwilling to wait, and Baruch and she went slowly homewards, thinking the others would overtake them. The conversation naturally turned upon Mazzini.
‘Although,’ said Madge, ‘I have never seen him before, I have heard much about him and he makes me sad.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he has done something worth doing and will do more.’
‘But why should that make you sad?’
‘I do not think there is anything sadder than to know you are able to do a little good and would like to do it, and yet you are not permitted to do it. Mazzini has a world open to him large enough for the exercise of all his powers.’
‘It is worse to have a desire which is intense but not definite, to be continually anxious to do something, you know not what, and always to feel, if any distinct task is offered, your incapability of attempting it.’
‘A man, if he has a real desire to be of any service, can generally gratify it to some extent; a woman as a rule cannot, although a woman’s enthusiasm is deeper than a man’s. You can join Mazzini to-morrow, I suppose, if you like.’
‘It is a supposition not quite justifiable, and if I were free to go I could not.’
‘Why?’
‘I am not fitted for such work; I have not sufficient faith. When I see a flag waving, a doubt always intrudes. Long ago I was forced to the conclusion that I should have to be content with a life which did not extend outside itself.’
‘I am sure that many women blunder into the wrong path, not because they are bad, but simply because—if I may say so—they are too good.’
‘Maybe you are right. The inability to obtain mere pleasure has not produced the misery which has been begotten of mistaken or baffled self-sacrifice. But do you mean to say that you would like to enlist under Mazzini?’
‘No!’
Baruch thought she referred to her child, and he was silent.
‘You are a philosopher,’ said Madge, after a pause. ‘Have you never discovered anything which will enable us to submit to be useless?’
‘That is to say, have I discovered a religion? for the core of religion is the relationship of the individual to the whole, the faith that the poorest and meanest of us is a person. That is the real strength of all religions.’
‘Well, go on; what do you believe?’
‘I can only say it like a creed; I have no demonstration, at least none such as I would venture to put into words. Perhaps the highest of all truths is incapable of demonstration and can only be stated. Perhaps, also, the statement, at least to some of us, is a sufficient demonstration. I believe that inability to imagine a thing is not a reason for its non-existence. If the infinite is a conclusion which is forced upon me, the fact that I cannot picture it does not disprove it. I believe, also, in thought and the soul, and it is nothing to me that I cannot explain them by attributes belonging to body. That being so, the difficulties which arise from the perpetual and unconscious confusion of the qualities of thought and soul with those of body disappear. Our imagination represents to itself souls like pebbles, and asks itself what count can be kept of a million, but number in such a case is inapplicable. I believe that all thought is a manifestation of the Being, who is One, whom you may call God if you like, and that, as It never was created, It will never be destroyed.’
‘But,’ said Madge, interrupting him, ‘although you began by warning me not to expect that you would prove anything, you can tell me whether you have any kind of basis for what you say, or whether it is all a dream.’
‘You will be surprised, perhaps, to hear that mathematics, which, of course, I had to learn for my own business, have supplied something for a foundation. They lead to ideas which are inconsistent with the notion that the imagination is a measure of all things. Mind, I do not for a moment pretend that I have any theory which explains the universe. It is something, however, to know that the sky is as real as the earth.’
They had now reached Great Ormond Street, and parted. Clara and Marshall were about five minutes behind them. Madge was unusually cheerful when they sat down to supper.
‘Clara,’ she said, ‘what made you so silent to-night at Mazzini’s?’ Clara did not reply, but after a pause of a minute or two, she asked Mrs Caffyn whether it would not be possible for them all to go into the country on Whitmonday? Whitsuntide was late; it would be warm, and they could take their food with them and eat it out of doors.
‘Just the very thing, my dear, if we could get anything cheap to take us; the baby, of course, must go with us.
‘I should like above everything to go to Great Oakhurst.’
‘What, five of us—twenty miles there and twenty miles back! Besides, although I love the place, it isn’t exactly what one would go to see just for a day. No! Letherhead or Mickleham or Darkin would be ever so much better. They are too far, though, and, then, that man Baruch must go with us. He’d be company for Marshall, and he sticks up in Clerkenwell and never goes nowhere. You remember as Marshall said as he must ask him the next time we had an outing.’
Clara had not forgotten it.
‘Ah,’ continued Mrs Caffyn, ‘I should just love to show you Mickleham.’
Mrs Caffyn’s heart yearned after her Surrey land. The man who is born in a town does not know what it is to be haunted through life by lovely visions of the landscape which lay about him when he was young. The village youth leaves the home of his childhood for the city, but the river doubling on itself, the overhanging alders and willows, the fringe of level meadow, the chalk hills bounding the river valley and rising against the sky, with here and there on their summits solitary clusters of beech, the light and peace of the different seasons, of morning, afternoon and evening, never forsake him. To think of them is not a mere luxury; their presence modifies the whole of his life.
‘I don’t see how it is to be managed,’ she mused; ‘and yet there’s nothing near London as I’d give two pins to see. There’s Richmond as we went to one Sunday; it was no better, to my way of thinking, than looking at a picture. I’d ever so much sooner be a-walking across the turnips by the footpath from Darkin home.’
‘Couldn’t we, for once in a way, stay somewhere over-night?’
‘It might as well be two,’ said Mrs Marshall; ‘Saturday and Sunday.’
‘Two,’ said Madge; ‘I vote for two.’
‘Wait a bit, my dears, we’re a precious awkward lot to fit in—Marshall and his wife me and you and Miss Clara and the baby; and then there’s Baruch, who’s odd man, so to speak; that’s three bedrooms. We sha’n’t do it—Otherwise, I was a-thinking—’
‘What were you thinking?’ said Marshall.
‘I’ve got it,’ said Mrs Caffyn, joyously. ‘Miss Clara and me will go to Great Oakhurst on the Friday. We can easy enough stay at my old shop. Marshall and Sarah, Miss Madge, the baby and Baruch can go to Letherhead on the Saturday morning. The two women and the baby can have one of the rooms at Skelton’s, and Marshall and Baruch can have the other. Then, on Sunday morning, Miss Clara and me we’ll come over for you, and we’ll all walk through Norbury Park. That’ll be ever so much better in many ways. Miss Clara and me, we’ll go by the coach. Six of us, not reckoning the baby, in that heavy ginger-beer cart of Masterman’s would be too much.’
‘An expensive holiday, rather,’ said Marshall.
‘Leave that to me; that’s my business. I ain’t quite a beggar, and if we can’t take our pleasure once a year, it’s a pity. We aren’t like some folk as messes about up to Hampstead every Sunday, and spends a fortune on shrimps and donkeys. No; when I go away, itisaway, maybe it’s only for a couple of days, where I can see a blessed ploughed field; no shrimps nor donkeys for me.’
Soit was settled, and on the Friday Clara and Mrs Caffyn journeyed to Great Oakhurst. They were both tired, and went to bed very early, in order that they might enjoy the next day. Clara, always a light sleeper, woke between three and four, rose and went to the little casement window which had been open all night. Below her, on the left, the church was just discernible, and on the right, the broad chalk uplands leaned to the south, and were waving with green barley and wheat. Underneath her lay the cottage garden, with its row of beehives in the north-east corner, sheltered from the cold winds by the thick hedge. It had evidently been raining a little, for the drops hung on the currant bushes, but the clouds had been driven by the south-westerly wind into the eastern sky, where they lay in a long, low, grey band. Not a sound was to be heard, save every now and then the crow of a cock or the short cry of a just-awakened thrush. High up on the zenith, the approach of the sun to the horizon was proclaimed by the most delicate tints of rose-colour, but the cloud-bank above him was dark and untouched, although the blue which was over it, was every moment becoming paler. Clara watched; she was moved even to tears by the beauty of the scene, but she was stirred by something more than beauty, just as he who was in the Spirit and beheld a throne and One sitting thereon, saw something more than loveliness, although He was radiant with the colour of jasper and there was a rainbow round about Him like an emerald to look upon. In a few moments the highest top of the cloud-rampart was kindled, and the whole wavy outline became a fringe of flame. In a few moments more the fire just at one point became blinding, and in another second the sun emerged, the first arrowy shaft passed into her chamber, the first shadow was cast, and it was day. She put her hands to her face; the tears fell faster, but she wiped them away and her great purpose was fixed. She crept back into bed, her agitation ceased, a strange and almost supernatural peace overshadowed her and she fell asleep not to wake till the sound of the scythe had ceased in the meadow just beyond the rick-yard that came up to one side of the cottage, and the mowers were at their breakfast.
Neither Mrs Caffyn nor Clara thought of seeing the Letherhead party on Saturday. They could not arrive before the afternoon, and it was considered hardly worth while to walk from Great Oakhurst to Letherhead merely for the sake of an hour or two. In the morning Mrs Caffyn was so busy with her old friends that she rather tired herself, and in the evening Clara went for a stroll. She did not know the country, but she wandered on until she came to a lane which led down to the river. At the bottom of the lane she found herself at a narrow, steep, stone bridge. She had not been there more than three or four minutes before she descried two persons coming down the lane from Letherhead. When they were about a couple of hundred yards from her they turned into the meadow over the stile, and struck the river-bank some distance below the point where she was. It was impossible to mistake them; they were Madge and Baruch. They sauntered leisurely; presently Baruch knelt down over the water, apparently to gather something which he gave to Madge. They then crossed another stile and were lost behind the tall hedge which stopped further view of the footpath in that direction.
‘The message then was authentic,’ she said to herself. ‘I thought I could not have misunderstood it.’
On Sunday morning Clara wished to stay at home. She pleaded that she preferred rest, but Mrs Caffyn vowed there should be no Norbury Park if Clara did not go, and the kind creature managed to persuade a pig-dealer to drive them over to Letherhead for a small sum, notwithstanding it was Sunday. The whole party then set out; the baby was drawn in a borrowed carriage which also took the provisions, and they were fairly out of the town before the Letherhead bells had ceased ringing for church. It was one of the sweetest of Sundays, sunny, but masses of white clouds now and then broke the heat. The park was reached early in the forenoon, and it was agreed that dinner should be served under one of the huge beech trees at the lower end, as the hill was a little too steep for the baby-carriage in the hot sun.
‘This is very beautiful,’ said Marshall, when dinner was over, ‘but it is not what we came to see. We ought to move upwards to the Druid’s grove.’
‘Yes, you be off, the whole lot of you,’ said Mrs Caffyn. ‘I know every tree there, and I ain’t going there this afternoon. Somebody must stay here to look after the baby; you can’t wheel her, you’ll have to carry her, and you won’t enjoy yourselves much more for moiling along with her up that hill.’
‘I will stay with you,’ said Clara.
Everybody protested, but Clara was firm. She was tired, and the sun had given her a headache. Madge pleaded that it was she who ought to remain behind, but at last gave way for her sister looked really fatigued.
‘There’s a dear child,’ said Clara, when Madge consented to go. ‘I shall lie on the grass and perhaps go to sleep.’
‘It is a pity,’ said Baruch to Madge as they went away, ‘that we are separated; we must come again.’
‘Yes, I am sorry, but perhaps it is better she should be where she is; she is not particularly strong, and is obliged to be very careful.’
In due time they all came to the famous yews, and sat down on one of the seats overlooking that wonderful gate in the chalk downs through which the Mole passes northwards.
‘We must go,’ said Marshall, ‘a little bit further and see the oak.’
‘Not another step,’ said his wife. ‘You can go it you like.’
‘Content; nothing could be pleasanter than to sit here,’ and he pulled out his pipe; ‘but really, Miss Madge, to leave Norbury without paying a visit to the oak is a pity.’
He did not offer, however, to accompany her.
‘It is the most extraordinary tree in these parts,’ said Baruch; ‘of incalculable age and with branches spreading into a tent big enough to cover a regiment. Marshall is quite right.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Not above a couple of hundred yards further; just round the corner.’
Madge rose and looked.
‘No; it is not visible here; it stands a little way back. If you come a little further you will catch a glimpse of it.’
She followed him and presently the oak came in view. They climbed up the bank and went nearer to it. The whole vale was underneath them and part of the weald with the Sussex downs blue in the distance. Baruch was not much given to raptures over scenery, but the indifference of Nature to the world’s turmoil always appealed to him.
‘You are not now discontented because you cannot serve under Mazzini?’
‘Not now.’
There was nothing in her reply on the face of it of any particular consequence to Baruch. She might simply have intended that the beauty of the fair landscape extinguished her restlessness, or that she saw her own unfitness, but neither of these interpretations presented itself to him.
‘I have sometimes thought,’ continued Baruch, slowly, ‘that the love of any two persons in this world may fulfil an eternal purpose which is as necessary to the Universe as a great revolution.’
Madge’s eyes moved round from the hills and they met Baruch’s. No syllable was uttered, but swiftest messages passed, question and answer. There was no hesitation on his part now, no doubt, the woman and the moment had come. The last question was put, the final answer was given; he took her hand in his and came closer to her.
‘Stop!’ she whispered, ‘do you know my history?’
He did not reply, but fell upon her neck. This was the goal to which both had been journeying all these years, although with much weary mistaking of roads; this was what from the beginning was designed for both! Happy Madge! happy Baruch! There are some so closely akin that the meaning of each may be said to lie in the other, who do not approach till it is too late. They travel towards one another, but are waylaid and detained, and just as they are within greeting, one of them drops and dies.
They left the tree and went back to the Marshalls, and then down the hill to Mrs Caffyn and Clara. Clara was much better for her rest, and early in the evening the whole party returned to Letherhead, Clara and Mrs Caffyn going on to Great Oakhurst. Madge kept close to her sister till they separated, and the two men walked together. On Whitmonday morning the Letherhead people came over to Great Oakhurst. They had to go back to London in the afternoon, but Mrs Caffyn and Clara were to stay till Tuesday, as they stood a better chance of securing places by the coach on that day. Mrs Caffyn had as much to show them as if the village had been the Tower of London. The wonder of wonders, however, was a big house, where she was well known, and its hot-houses. Madge wanted to speak to Clara, but it was difficult to find a private opportunity. When they were in the garden, however, she managed to take Clara unobserved down one of the twisted paths, under pretence of admiring an ancient mulberry tree.
‘Clara,’ she said, ‘I want a word with you. Baruch Cohen loves me.’
‘Do you love him?’
‘Yes.’
‘Without a shadow of a doubt?’
‘Without a shadow of a doubt.’
Clara put her arm round her sister, kissed her tenderly and said,—
‘Then I am perfectly happy.’
‘Did you suspect it?’
‘I knew it.’
Mrs Caffyn called them; it was time to be moving, and soon afterwards those who had to go to London that afternoon left for Letherhead. Clara stood at the gate for a long time watching them along the straight, white road. They came to the top of the hill; she could just discern them against the sky; they passed over the ridge and she went indoors. In the evening a friend called to see Mrs Caffyn, and Clara went to the stone bridge which she had visited on Saturday. The water on the upper side of the bridge was dammed up and fell over the little sluice gates under the arches into a clear and deep basin about forty or fifty feet in diameter. The river, for some reason of its own, had bitten into the western bank, and had scooped out a great piece of it into an island. The main current went round the island with a shallow, swift ripple, instead of going through the pool, as it might have done, for there was a clear channel for it. The centre and the region under the island were deep and still, but at the farther end, where the river in passing called to the pool, it broke into waves as it answered the appeal, and added its own contribution to the stream, which went away down to the mill and onwards to the big Thames. On the island were aspens and alders. The floods had loosened the roots of the largest tree, and it hung over heavily in the direction in which it had yielded to the rush of the torrent, but it still held its grip, and the sap had not forsaken a single branch. Every one was as dense with foliage as if there had been no struggle for life, and the leaves sang their sweet song, just perceptible for a moment every now and then in the variations of the louder music below them. It is curious that the sound of a weir is never uniform, but is perpetually changing in the ear even of a person who stands close by it. One of the arches of the bridge was dry, and Clara went down into it, stood at the edge and watched that wonderful sight—the plunge of a smooth, pure stream into the great cup which it has hollowed out for itself. Down it went, with a dancing, foamy fringe playing round it just where it met the surface; a dozen yards away it rose again, bubbling and exultant.
She came up from the arch and went home as the sun was setting. She found Mrs Caffyn alone.
‘I have news to tell you,’ she said. ‘Baruch Cohen is in love with my sister, and she is in love with him.’
‘The Lord, Miss Clara! I thought sometimes that perhaps it might be you; but there, it’s better, maybe, as it is, for—’
‘For what?’
‘Why, my dear, because somebody’s sure to turn up who’ll make you happy, but there aren’t many men like Baruch. You see what I mean, don’t you? He’s always a-reading books, and, therefore, he don’t think so much of what some people would make a fuss about. Not as anything of that kind would ever stop me, if I were a man and saw such a woman as Miss Madge. He’s really as good a creature as ever was born, and with that child she might have found it hard to get along, and now it will be cared for, and so will she be to the end of their lives.’
The evening after their return to Great Ormond Street, Mazzini was surprised by a visit from Clara alone.
‘When I last saw you,’ she said, ‘you told us that you had been helped by women. I offer myself.’
‘But, my dear madam, you hardly know what the qualifications are. To begin with, there must be a knowledge of three foreign languages, French, German and Italian, and the capacity and will to endure great privation, suffering and, perhaps, death.’
‘I was educated abroad, I can speak German and French. I do not know much Italian, but when I reach Italy I will soon learn.’
‘Pardon me for asking you what may appear a rude question. Is it a personal disappointment which sends you to me, or love for the cause? It is not uncommon to find that young women, when earthly love is impossible, attempt to satisfy their cravings with a love for that which is impersonal.’
‘Does it make any difference, so far as their constancy is concerned?’
‘I cannot say that it does. The devotion of many of the martyrs of the Catholic church was repulsion from the world as much as attraction to heaven. You must understand that I am not prompted by curiosity. If you are to be my friend, it is necessary that I should know you thoroughly.’