"What a noble boy!" said he, after looking, not without honest admiration, upon the sleeping child, who had kicked off his bed-clothes, and lay in a wild graceful attitude, as children are wont to lie; just like an old Greek statue of Cupid, "It all depends upon you, madam, now."
"On me?" she asked, in a startled, suspicious tone.
"Yes. He is a magnificent boy: but—I can only give palliatives. It depends upon your care now."
"He will have that, at least, I should hope," she said, nettled.
"And on your influence ten years hence," went on Tom.
"My influence?"
"Yes; only keep him steady, and he may grow up a magnificent man. If not—you will excuse me—but you must not let him live as freely as his father; the constitutions of the two are very different."
"Don't talk so, sir. Steady? His father makes him drunk now, if he can; teaches him to swear, because it is manly—God help him and me!"
Tom's cunning and yet kind shaft had sped. He guessed that with a coarse woman like Mrs. Trebooze his best plan was to come as straight to the point as he could; and he was right. Ere half an hour was over, that woman had few secrets on earth which Tom did not know.
"Let me give you one hint before I go," said he at last. "Persuade your husband to go into a militia regiment."
"Why? He would see so much company, and it would be so expensive."
"The expense would repay itself ten times over. The company which he would see would be sober company, in which he would be forced to keep in order. He would have something to do in the world; and he'd do it well. He is just cut out for a soldier, and might have made a gallant one by now, if he had had other men's chances. He will find he does his militia work well; and it will be a new interest, and a new pride, and a new life to him. And meanwhile, madam, what you have said to me is sacred. I do not pretend to advise or interfere. Only tell me if I can be of use—how, when, and where—and command me as your servant."
And Tom departed, having struck another root; and was up at four the next morning (he never worked at night; for, he said, he never could trust after-dinner brains), drawing out a detailed report of the Pentremochyn cottages, which he sent to Lord Minchampstead with—
"And your lordship will excuse my saying, that to put the cottages into the state in which your lordship, with your known wish for progress of all kinds, would wish to see them is a responsibility which I dare not take on myself, as it would involve a present outlay of not less than £450. This sum would be certainly repaid to your Lordship and your tenants, in the course of the next three years, by the saving in poor-rates; an opinion for which I subjoin my grounds drawn from the books of the medical officer, Mr. Heale: but the responsibility and possible unpopularity, which employing so great a sum would involve, is more than I can, in the present dependent condition of poor-law medical officers, dare to undertake, in justice to Mr. Heale my employer, save at your special command. I am bound, however, to inform your lordship, that this outlay would, I think, perfectly defend the hamlets, not only from that visit of the cholera which we have every reason to expect next summer, but also from those zymotic diseases which (as your lordship will see by my returns) make up more than sixty-five per cent of the aggregate sickness of the estate."
Which letter the old Cotton Lord put in his pocket, rode into Whitbury therewith, and showed it to Mark Armsworth.
"Well, Mr. Armsworth, what am I to do?"
"Well, my Lord; I told you what sort of a man you'd have to do with; one that does his work thoroughly, and, I think, pays you a compliment, by thinking that you want it done thoroughly."
Lord Minchampstead was of the same opinion; but he did not say so. Few, indeed, have ever heard Lord Minchampstead give his opinion: though many a man has seen him act on it.
"I'll send down orders to my agent."
"Don't."
"Why, then, my good friend?"
"Agents are always in league with farmers, or guardians, or builders, or drain-tile makers, or attorneys, or bankers, or somebody; and either you'll be told that the work don't need doing; or have a job brewed out of it, to get off a lot of unsaleable drain-tiles, or cracked soil-pans; or to get farm ditches dug, and perhaps the highway rates saved building culverts, and fifty dodges beside. I know their game; and you ought, too, by now, my lord, begging your pardon."
"Perhaps I do, Mark," said his lordship with a chuckle.
"So, I say, let the man that found the fox, run the fox, and kill the fox, and take the brush home."
"And so it shall be," quoth my Lord Minchampstead.
But what was the mysterious bond between La Cordifiamma and the American, which had prevented Scoutbush from following the example of his illustrious progenitor, and taking a viscountess from off the stage?
Certainly, any one who had seen her with him on the morning after Scoutbush's visit to the Mellots, would have said that, if the cause was love, the love was all on one side.
She was standing by the fireplace in a splendid pose, her arm resting on the chimney-piece, the book from which she had been reciting in one hand, the other playing in her black curls, as her eyes glanced back ever and anon at her own profile in the mirror. Stangrave was half sitting in a low chair by her side, half kneeling on the footstool before her, looking up beseechingly, as she looked down tyrannically.
"Stupid, this reciting? Of course it is! I want realities, not shams; life, not the stage; nature, not art."
"Throw away the book, then, and words, and art, and live!"
She knew well what he meant; but she answered as if she had misunderstood him.
"Thanks, I live already, and in good company enough. My ghost-husbands are as noble as they are obedient; do all which I demand of them, and vanish on my errands when I tell them. Can you guess who my last is? Since I tired of Egmont, I have taken Sir Galahad, the spotless knight. Did you ever read the Mort d'Arthur?"
"A hundred times."
"Of course!" and she spoke in a tone of contempt so strong that it must have been affected. "What have you not read! And what have you copied. No wonder that these English have been what they have been for centuries, while their heroes have been the Galahads, and their Homer the Mort d'Arthur."
"Enjoy your Utopia!" said he bitterly. "Do you fancy they acted up to their ideals? They dreamed of the Quest of the Sangreal: but which of them ever went upon it?"
"And does it count for nothing that they felt it the finest thing in the world to have gone on it, had it been possible? Be sure if their ideal was so self-sacrificing, so lofty, their practice was ruled by something higher than the almighty dollar."
"And so are some other men's, Marie," answered he reproachfully.
"Yes, forsooth;—when the almighty dollar is there already, and a man has ten times as much to spend every day as he can possibly invest in French cookery, and wines, and fine clothes, then he begins to lay out his surplus nobly on self-education, and the patronage of art, and the theatre—for merely aesthetic purposes, of course; and when the lust of the flesh has been satisfied, thinks himself an archangel, because he goes on to satisfy the lust of the eye and the pride of life. Christ was of old the model, and Sir Galahad was the hero. Now the one is exchanged for Goethe, and the other for Wilhelm Meister."
"Cruel! You know that my Goethe fever is long past. How would you have known of its existence if I had not confessed it to you as a sin of old years? Have I not said to you, again and again, show me the thing which you would have me do for your sake, and see if I will not do it!"
"For my sake? A noble reason! Show yourself the thing which you will do for its own sake; because it ought to be done. Show it yourself, I say; I cannot show you. If your own eyes cannot see the Sangreal, and the angels who are bearing it before you, it is because they are dull and gross; and am I Milton's archangel, to purge them with euphrasy and rue? If you have a noble heart, you will find for yourself the noblest Quest. If not, who can prove to you that it is noble?" And tapping impatiently with her foot, she went on to herself—
"'A gentle sound, an awful light!Three angels bear the holy Grail;With folded feet, in stoles of white,On sleeping wings they sail.
Ah, blessed vision! blood of God!The spirit beats her mortal bars,As down dark tides, the glory slides,And star-like mingles with the stars.'
"Why, there was not a knight of the round table, was there, who did not give up all to go upon that Quest, though only one was found worthy to fulfil it? But now-a-days, the knights sit drinking hock and champagne, or drive sulky-wagons, and never fancy that there is a Quest at all."
"Why talk in these parables?"
"So the Jews asked of their prophets. They are no parables to my ghost-husband, Sir Galahad. Now go, if you please; I must be busy, and write letters."
He rose with a look, half of disappointment, half amused, and yet his face bore a firmness which seemed to say, "You will be mine yet." As he rose, he cast his eye upon the writing-table, and upon a letter which lay there: and as he did so, his cheek grew pale, and his brows knitted.
The letter was addressed to "Thomas Thurnall, Esq., Aberalva."
"Is this, then, your Sir Galahad?" asked he, after a pause, during which he had choked down his rising jealousy, while she looked first at herself in the glass, and then at him, and then at herself again, with a determined and triumphant air.
"And what if it be?"
"So he, then, has achieved the Quest of the Sangreal?"
Stangrave spoke bitterly, and with an emphasis upon the "he;" and—
"What if he have? Do you know him?" answered she, while her face lighted up with eager interest, which she did not care to conceal, perhaps chose, in her woman's love of tormenting, to parade.
"I knew a man of that name once," he replied, in a carefully careless tone, which did not deceive her; "an adventurer—a doctor, if I recollect—who had been in Texas and Mexico, and I know not where besides. Agreeable enough he was; but as for your Quest of the Sangreal, whatever it may be, he seemed to have as little notion of anything beyond his own interest as any Greek I ever met."
"Unjust! Your words only show how little you can see! That man, of all men I ever met, saw the Quest at once, and followed it, at the risk of his own life, as far at least as he was concerned with it:—ay, even when he pretended to see nothing. Oh, there is more generosity in that man's affected selfishness, than in all the noisy good-nature which I have met with in the world. Thurnall! oh, you know his nobleness as little as he knows it himself."
"Then he, I am to suppose, is your phantom-husband, for as long, at least, as your present dream lasts?" asked he, with white, compressed lips.
"He might have been, I believe," she answered carelessly, "if he had even taken the trouble to ask me."
"Marie, this is too much! Do you not know to whom you speak? To one who deserves, if not common courtesy, at least common mercy."
"Because he adores me, and so forth? So has many a man done; or told me that he has done so. Do you know that I might be a viscountess to-morrow, so Sabina informs me, if I but chose?"
"A viscountess? Pray accept your effete English aristocrat, and, as far as I am concerned, accept my best wishes for your happiness."
"My effete English aristocrat, did I show him that pedigree of mine which I have ere now threatened to show you, would perhaps be less horrified at it than you are."
"Marie, I cannot bear this! Tell me only what you mean. What care I for pedigree? I want you—worship you—and that is enough, Marie!"
"You admire me because I am beautiful. What thanks do I owe you for finding out so patent a fact? What do you do more to me than I do to myself?" and she glanced back once more at the mirror.
"Marie, you know that your words are false; I do more—"
"You admire me," interrupted she, "because I am clever. What thanks to you for that, again? What do you do more to me than you do to yourself?"
"And this, after all—"
"After what? After you found me, or rather I found you—you, the critic, the arbiter of the greenroom, the highly-organised do-nothings—teaching others how to do nothing most gracefully; the would-be Goethe who must, for the sake of his own self-development, try experiments on every weak woman whom he met. And I, the new phenomenon, whom you must appreciate to show your own taste, patronise to show your own liberality, develop to show your own insight into character. You found yourself mistaken! You had attempted to play with the tigress—and behold she was talons; to angle for the silly fish—and behold the fish was the better angler, and caught you."
"Marie, have mercy! Is your heart iron?"
"No; but fire, as my name shows:" and she stood looking down on him with a glare of dreadful beauty.
"Fire, indeed!"
"Yes, fire, that I may scorch you, kindle you, madden you, to do my work, and wear the heart of fire which I wear day and night!"
Stangrave looked at her startled. Was she mad? Her face did not say so; her brow was white, her features calm, her eye fierce and contemptuous, but clear, steady, full of meaning.
"So you know Mr. Thurnall?" said she, after a while.
"Yes; why do you ask?"
"Because he is the only friend I have on earth."
"The only friend, Marie?"
"The only one," answered she calmly, "who, seeing the right, has gone and done it forthwith. When did you see him last?"
"I have not been acquainted with Mr. Thurnall for some years," saidStangrave, haughtily.
"In plain words, you have quarrelled with him?"
Stangrave bit his lip.
"He and I had a difference. He insulted my nation, and we parted."
She laughed a long, loud, bitter laugh, which rang through Stangrave's ears.
"Insulted your nation? And on what grounds, pray?"
"About that accursed slavery question!"
La Cordifiamma looked at him with firm-closed lips a while.
"So then! I was not aware of this! Even so long ago you saw the Sangreal, and did not know it when you saw it. No wonder that since then you have been staring at it for months, in your very hands, played with it, admired it, made verses about it, to show off your own taste: and yet were blind to it the whole time! Farewell, then!"
"Marie, what do you mean?" and Stangrave caught both her hands.
"Hush, if you please. I know you are eloquent enough, when you choose, though you have been somewhat dumb and monosyllabic to-night in the presence of the actress whom you undertook to educate. But I know that you can be eloquent, so spare me any brilliant appeals, which can only go to prove that already settled fact. Between you and me lie two great gulfs. The one I have told you of; and from it I shrink. The other I have not told you of; from it you would shrink."
"The first is your Quest of the Sangreal."
She smiled assent, bitterly enough.
"And the second?"
She did not answer. She was looking at herself in the mirror; and Stangrave, in spite of his almost doting affection, flushed with anger, almost contempt, at her vanity.
And yet, was it vanity which was expressed in that face? No; but dread, horror, almost disgust, as she gazed with side-long, startled eyes, struggling, and yet struggling in vain, to turn her face from some horrible sight, as if her own image had been the Gorgon's head.
"What is it? Marie, speak!"
But she answered nothing. For that last question she had no heart to answer; no heart to tell him that in her veins were some drops, at least, of the blood of slaves. Instinctively she had looked round at the mirror—for might he not, if he had eyes, discover that secret for himself? Were there not in her features traces of that taint? And as she looked,—was it the mere play of her excited fancy,—or did her eyelid slope more and more, her nostril shorten and curl, her lips enlarge, her mouth itself protrude?
It was more than the play of fancy; for Stangrave saw it as well as she. Her actress's imagination, fixed on the African type with an intensity proportioned to her dread of seeing it in herself, had moulded her features, for the moment, into the very shape which it dreaded. And Stangrave saw it, and shuddered as he saw.
Another half minute, and that face also had melted out of the mirror, at least for Marie's eyes; and in its place an ancient negress, white-haired, withered as the wrinkled ape, but with eyes closed—in death. Marie knew that face well; a face which haunted many a dream of hers; once seen, but never forgotten since; for to that old dame's coffin had her mother, the gay quadroon woman, flaunting in finery which was the price of shame, led Marie when she was but a three years' child; and Marie had seen her bend over the corpse, and call it her dear old granny, and weep bitter tears.
Suddenly she shook off the spell, and looked round and down, terrified, self-conscious. Her eye caught Stangrave's; she saw, or thought she saw, by the expression of his face, that he knew all, and burst away with a shriek.
He sprang up and caught her in his arms. "Marie! Beloved Marie!" She looked up at him struggling; the dark expression had vanished, and Stangrave's love-blinded eyes could see nothing in that face but the refined and yet rich beauty of the Italian.
"Marie, this is mere madness; you excite yourself till you know not what you say, or what you are—"
"I know what I am," murmured she: but he hurried on unheeding.
"You love me, you know you love me; and you madden yourself by refusing to confess it!" He felt her heart throb as he spoke, and knew that he spoke truth. "What gulfs are these you dream of? No; I will not ask. There is no gulf between me and one whom I adore, who has thrown a spell over me which I cannot resist, which I glory in not resisting; for you have been my guide, my morning star, which has awakened me to new life. If I have a noble purpose upon earth, if I have roused myself from that conceited dream of self-culture which now looks to me so cold, and barren, and tawdry, into the hope of becoming useful, beneficent—to whom do I owe it but to you, Marie? No; there is no gulf, Marie! You are my wife, and you alone!" And he held her so firmly, and gazed down upon her with such strong manhood, that her woman's heart quailed; and he might, perhaps, have conquered then and there, had not Sabina, summoned by her shriek, entered hastily.
"Good heavens! what is the matter?"
"Wait but one minute, Mrs. Mellot," said he; "the next, I shall introduce you to my bride."
"Never! never! never!" cried she, and breaking from him, flew intoSabina's arms. "Leave me, leave me to bear my curse alone!"
And she broke out into such wild weeping, and refused so wildly to hear another word from Stangrave, that he went away in despair, the prize snatched from his grasp in the very moment of seeming victory.
He went in search of Claude, who had agreed to meet him at the Exhibition in Trafalgar Square. Thither Stangrave rolled away in his cab, his heart full of many thoughts. Marie's words about him, though harsh and exaggerated, were on the whole true. She had fascinated him utterly. To marry her was now the one object of his life: she had awakened in him, as he had confessed, noble desires to be useful: but the discovery that he was to be useful to the negro, that abolition was the Sangreal in the quest of which he was to go forth, was as disagreeable a discovery as he could well have made.
From public life in any shape, with all its vulgar noise, its petty chicanery, its pandering to the mob whom he despised, he had always shrunk, as so many Americans of his stamp have done. He had no wish to struggle, unrewarded and disappointed, in the ranks of the minority; while to gain place and power on the side of the majority was to lend himself to that fatal policy which, ever since the Missouri Compromise of 1820, has been gradually making the northern states more and more the tools of the southern ones. He had no wish to be threatened in Congress with having his Northerner's "ears nailed to the counter, like his own base coin," or to be informed that he, with the 17,000,000 of the north, were the "White Slaves" of a southern aristocracy of 350,000 slaveholders. He had enough comprehension of, enough admiration for the noble principles of the American Constitution to see that the democratic mobs of Irish and Germans, who were stupidly playing into the hands of the Southerners, were not exactly carrying them out; but he had no mind to face either Irish or Southerners. The former were too vulgar for his delicacy; the latter too aristocratic for his pride. Sprung, as he held (and rightly), from as fine old English blood as any Virginian (though it did happen to be Puritan, and not Cavalier), he had no lust to come into contact with men who considered him much further below them in rank than an English footman is below an English nobleman; who, indeed, would some of them look down on the English nobleman himself as a mushroom of yesterday. So he compounded with his conscience by ignoring the whole matter, and by looking on the state of public affairs on his side of the Atlantic with a cynicism which very soon (as is usual with rich men) passed into Epicureanism. Poetry and music, pictures and statues, amusement and travel, became his idols, and cultivation his substitute for the plain duty of patriotism, and wandering luxuriously over the world, he learnt to sentimentalise over cathedrals and monasteries, pictures and statues, saints and kaisers, with a lazy regret that such "forms of beauty and nobleness" were no longer possible in a world of scrip and railroads: but without any notion that it was his duty to reproduce in his own life, or that of his country, as much as he could of the said beauty and nobleness. And now he was sorely tried. It was interesting enough to "develop" the peculiar turn of Marie's genius, by writing for her plays about liberty, just as he would have written plays about jealousy, or anything else for representing which she had "capabilities." But to be called on to act in that Slavery question, the one in which he knew (as all sensible Americans do) that the life and death of his country depended, and which for that very reason he had carefully ignored till a more convenient season, finding in its very difficulty and danger an excuse for leaving it to solve itself:—to have this thrust on him, and by her, as the price of the thing which he must have, or die! If she had asked for his right hand, he would have given it sooner; and he entered the Royal Academy that day in much the same humour as that of a fine lady who should find herself suddenly dragged from the ball-room into the dust-hole, in her tenderest array of gauze and jewels, and there peremptorily compelled to sift the cinders, under the superintendence of the sweep and the pot-boy.
Glad to escape from questions which he had rather not answer too soon, he went in search of Claude, and found him before one of those pre-Raphaelite pictures, which Claude does not appreciate as he ought.
"Desinit in Culicem mulier formosa supernè," said Stangrave, as he looked over Claude's shoulder; "but I suppose he followed nature, and copied his model."
"That he didn't," said Claude, "for I know who his model was: but if he did he had no business to do so. I object on principle to these men's notion of what copying nature means. I don't deny him talent. I am ready to confess that there is more imagination and more honest work in that picture than in any one in the room. The hysterical, all but grinning joy upon the mother's face is a miracle of truth; I have seen the expression more than once; doctors see it often, in the sudden revulsion from terror and agony to certainty and peace; I only marvel where he ever met it: but the general effect is unpleasing, marred by patches of sheer ugliness, like that child's foot. There is the same mistake in all his pictures. Whatever they are, they are not beautiful; and no magnificence of surface-colouring will make up, in my eyes, for wilful ugliness of form. I say that nature is beautiful; and therefore nature cannot have been truly copied, or the general effect would have been beautiful also. I never found out the fallacy till the other day, when looking at a portrait by one of them. The woman for whom it was meant was standing by my side, young and lovely; the portrait hung there neither young nor lovely, but a wrinkled caricature twenty years older than the model."
"I surely know the portrait you mean; Lady D——'s."
"Yes. He had simply, under pretence of following nature, caricatured her into a woman twenty years older than she is."
"But did you ever see a modern portrait which more perfectly expressed character; which more completely fulfilled the requirements which you laid down a few evenings since?"
"Never; and that makes me all the more cross with the wilful mistake of it. He had painted every wrinkle."
"Why not, if they were there?"
"Because he had painted a face not one-twentieth of the size of life. What right had he to cram into that small space all the marks which nature had spread over a far larger one?"
"Why not, again, if he diminished the marks in proportion?"
"Just what neither he nor any man could do, without making them so small as to be invisible, save under a microscope: and the result was, that he had caricatured every wrinkle, as his friend has in those horrible knuckles of Shem's wife. Besides, I deny utterly your assertion that one is bound to paint what is there. On that very fallacy are they all making shipwreck."
"Not paint what is there? And you are the man who talks of art being highest when it copies nature."
"Exactly. And therefore you must paint, not what is there, but what you see there. They forget that human beings are men with two eyes, and not daguerreotype lenses with one eye, and so are contriving and striving to introduce into their pictures the very defect of the daguerreotype which the stereoscope is required to correct."
"I comprehend. They forget that the double vision of our two eyes gives a softness, and indistinctness, and roundness, to every outline."
"Exactly so; and therefore, while for distant landscapes, motionless, and already softened by atmosphere, the daguerreotype is invaluable (I shall do nothing else this summer but work at it), yet for taking portraits, in any true sense, it will be always useless, not only for the reason I just gave, but for another one which the pre-Raphaelites have forgotten."
"Because all the features cannot be in focus at once?"
"Oh no, I am not speaking of that. Art, for aught I know, may overcome that; for it is a mere defect in the instrument. What I mean is this: it tries to represent as still what never yet was still for the thousandth part of a second: that is, the human face; and as seen by a spectator who is perfectly still, which no man ever yet was. My dear fellow, don't you see that what some painters call idealising a portrait is, if it be wisely done, really painting for you the face which you see, and know, and love; her ever-shifting features, with expression varying more rapidly than the gleam of the diamond on her finger; features which you, in your turn, are looking at with ever-shifting eyes; while, perhaps, if it is a face which you love and have lingered over, a dozen other expressions equally belonging to it are hanging in your memory, and blending themselves with the actual picture on your retina:—till every little angle is somewhat rounded, every little wrinkle somewhat softened, every little shade somewhat blended with the surrounding light, so that the sum total of what you see, and are intended by Heaven to see, is something far softer, lovelier—younger, perhaps, thank Heaven—than it would look if your head was screwed down in a vice, to look with one eye at her head screwed down in a vice also:—though even that, thanks to the muscles of the eye, would not produce the required ugliness; and the only possible method of fulfilling the pre-Raphaelite ideal would be, to set a petrified Cyclops to paint his petrified brother."
"You are spiteful."
"Not at all. I am standing up for art, and for nature too. For instance: Sabina has wrinkles. She says, too, that she has grey hairs coming. The former I won't see, and therefore don't. The latter I can't see, because I am not looking for them."
"Nor I either," said Stangrave smiling. "I assure you the announcement is new to me."
"Of course. Who can see wrinkles in the light of those eyes, that smile, that complexion?"
"Certainly," said Stangrave, "if I asked for her portrait, as I shall do some day, and the artist sat down and painted the said 'wastes of time,' on pretence of their being there, I should consider it an impertinence on his part. What business has he to spy out what nature has taken such charming trouble to conceal?"
"Again," said Claude, "such a face as Cordifiamma's. When it is at rest, in deep thought, there are lines in it which utterly puzzle one—touches which are Eastern, Kabyle, almost Quadroon."
Stangrave started. Claude went on unconscious:—
"But who sees them in the light of that beauty? They are defects, no doubt, but defects which no one would observe without deep study of the face. They express her character no more than a scar would; and therefore when I paint her, as I must and will, I shall utterly ignore them. If, on the other hand, I met the same lines in a face which I knew to have Quadroon blood in it, I should religiously copy them; because then they would be integral elements of the face. You understand?"
"Understand?—yes," answered Stangrave, in a tone which made Claude look up.
That strange scene of half an hour before flashed across him. What if it were no fancy? What if Marie had African blood in her veins? And Stangrave shuddered, and felt for the moment that thousands of pounds would be a cheap price to pay for the discovery that his fancy was a false one.
"Yes—oh—I beg your pardon," said he, recovering himself. "I was thinking of something else. But, as you say, what if she had Quadroon blood?"
"I? I never said so, or dreamt of it."
"Oh! I mistook. Do you know, though, where she came from?"
"I? You forget, my dear fellow, that you yourself introduced her to us."
"Of course; but I thought Mrs. Mellot might—women always makes confidences."
"All we know is, what I suppose you knew long ago, that her most intimate friend, next to you, seems to be an old friend of ours, named Thurnall."
"An old friend of yours?"
"Oh yes; we have known him these fifteen years. Met him first at Paris; and after that went round the world with him, and saw infinite adventures. Sabina and I spent three months with him once, among the savages in a South-sea Island, and a very pretty romance our stay and our escape would make. We were all three, I believe, to have been cooked and eaten, if Tom had not got us off by that wonderful address which, if you know him, you must know well enough."
"Yes," answered Stangrave, coldly, as in a dream; "I have knownMr. Thurnall in past years; but not in connection with La SignoraCordifiamma. I was not aware till this moment—this morning, Imean—that they knew each other."
"You astound me; why, she talks of him to us all day long, as of one to whom she has the deepest obligations; she was ready to rush into our arms when she first found that we knew him. He is a greater hero in her eyes, I sometimes fancy, than even you are. She does nothing (or fancies that she does nothing, for you know her pretty wilfulness) without writing for his advice."
"I a hero in her eyes? I was really not aware of that fact," said Stangrave, more coldly than ever; for bitter jealousy had taken possession of his heart. "Do you know, then, what this same obligation may be?"
"I never asked. I hate gossiping, and I make a rule to inquire into no secrets but such as are voluntarily confided to me; and I know that she has never told Sabina."
"I suppose she is married to him. That is the simplest explanation of the mystery."
"Impossible! What can you mean? If she ever marries living man, she will marry you."
"Then she will never marry living man," said Stangrave to himself."Good-bye, my dear fellow; I have an engagement at the Traveller's."And away went Stangrave, leaving Claude sorely puzzled, but littledreaming of the powder-magazine into which he had put a match.
But he was puzzled still more that night, when by the latest post a note came—
"From Stangrave!" said Claude. "Why, in the name of all wonders!"—and he read:—
"Good-bye. I am just starting for the Continent, on sudden and urgent business. What my destination is I hardly can tell you yet. You will hear from me in the course of the summer."
Claude's countenance fell, and the note fell likewise. Sabina snatched it up, read it, and gave La Cordifiamma a look which made her spring from the sofa, and snatch it in turn.
She read it through, with trembling hands, and blanching cheeks, and then dropped fainting upon the floor.
They laid her on the sofa, and while they were recovering her, Claude told Sabina the only clue which he had to the American's conduct, namely, that afternoon's conversation.
Sabina shook her head over it; for to her, also, the American's explanation had suggested itself. Was Marie Thurnall's wife? Or did she—it was possible, however painful—stand to him in some less honourable relation, which she would fain forget now, in a new passion for Stangrave? For that Marie loved Stangrave, Sabina knew well enough.
The doubt was so ugly that it must be solved; and when she had got the poor thing safe into her bedroom she alluded to it as gently as she could.
Marie sprang up in indignant innocence.
"He! Whatever he may be to others, I know not: but to me he has been purity and nobleness itself—a brother, a father! Yes; if I had no other reason for trusting him, I should love him for that alone; that however tempted he may have been, and Heaven knows he was tempted, he could respect the honour of his friend, though that friend lay sleeping in a soldier's grave ten thousand miles away."
And Marie threw herself upon Sabina's neck, and under the pressure of her misery sobbed out to her the story of her life. What it was need not be told. A little common sense, and a little knowledge of human nature, will enable the reader to fill up for himself the story of a beautiful slave.
Sabina soothed her, and cheered her; and soothed and cheered her most of all by telling her in return the story of her own life; not so dark a one, but almost as sad and strange. And poor Marie took heart, when she found in her great need a sister in the communion of sorrows.
"And you have been through all this, so beautiful and bright as you are! You whom I should have fancied always living the life of the humming-bird: and yet not a scar or a wrinkle has it left behind!"
"They were there once, Marie! but God and Claude smoothed them away."
"I have no Claude,—and no God, I think, at times."
"No God, Marie! Then how did you come hither?"
Marie was silent, reproved; and then passionately—
"Why does He not right my people?"
That question was one to which Sabina's little scheme of the universe had no answer; why should it, while many a scheme which pretends to be far vaster and more infallible has none as yet?
So she was silent, and sat with Marie's head upon her bosom, caressing the black curls, till she had soothed her into sobbing exhaustion.
"There; lie there and rest: you shall be my child, my poor Marie. I have a fresh child every week; but I shall find plenty of room in my heart for you, my poor hunted deer."
"You will keep my secret?"
"Why keep it? No one need be ashamed of it here in free England."
"But he—he—you do not know, Sabina! Those Northerners, with all their boasts of freedom, shrink from us just as much as our own masters."
"Oh, Marie, do not be so unjust to him! He is too noble, and you must know it yourself."
"Ay, if he stood alone; if he were even going to live in England; if he would let himself be himself; but public opinion," sobbed the poor self-tormentor—"It has been his God, Sabina, to be a leader of taste and fashion—admired and complete—the Crichton of Newport and Brooklyn. And he could not bear scorn, the loss of society. Why should he bear it for me? If he had been one of the abolitionist party, it would have been different: but he has no sympathy with them, good, narrow, pious people, or they with him: he could not be satisfied in their society—or I either, for I crave after it all as much as he—wealth, luxury, art, brilliant company, admiration,—oh, inconsistent wretch, that I am! And that makes me love him all the more, and yet makes me so harsh to him, wickedly cruel, as I was to-day; because when I am reproving his weakness, I am reproving my own, and because I am angry with myself, I grow angry with him too—envious of him, I do believe at moments, and all his success and luxury!"
And so poor Marie sobbed out her confused confession of that strange double nature which so many Quadroons seem to owe to their mixed blood; a strong side of deep feeling, ambition, energy, an intellect rather Greek in its rapidity than English in sturdiness; and withal a weak side, of instability, inconsistency, hasty passion, love of present enjoyment, sometimes, too, a tendency to untruth, which is the mark, not perhaps of the African specially, but of every enslaved race.
Consolation was all that Sabina could give. It was too late to act. Stangrave was gone, and week after week rolled by without a line from the wanderer.
Elsley Vavasour is sitting one morning in his study, every comfort of which is of Lucia's arrangement and invention, beating the home-preserve of his brains for pretty thoughts. On he struggles through that wild, and too luxuriant cover; now brought up by a "lawyer," now stumbling over a root, now bogged in a green spring, now flushing a stray covey of birds of Paradise, now a sphinx, chimaera, strix, lamia, fire-drake, flying-donkey, two-headed eagle (Austrian, as will appear shortly), or other portent only to be seen now-a-days in the recesses of that enchanted forest, the convolutions of a poet's brain. Up they whir and rattle, making, like most game, more noise than they are worth. Some get back, some dodge among the trees; the fair shots are few and far between: but Elsley blazes away right and left with trusty quill; and, to do him justice, seldom misses his aim, for practice has made him a sure and quick marksman in his own line. Moreover, all is game which gets up to-day; for he is shooting for the kitchen, or rather for the London market, as many a noble sportsman does now-a-days, and thinks no shame. His new volume of poems ("The Wreck" included) is in the press: but behold, it is not as long as the publisher thinks fit, and Messrs. Brown and Younger have written down to entreat in haste for some four hundred lines more, on any subject which Mr. Vavasour may choose. And therefore is Elsley beating his home covers, heavily shot over though they have been already this season, in hopes that a few head of his own game may still be left: or in default (for human nature is the same, in poets and in sportsmen), that a few head may have strayed in out of his neighbours' manors.
At last the sport slackens; for the sportsman is getting tired, and hungry also, to carry on the metaphor; for he has seen the postman come up the front walk a quarter of an hour since, and the letters have not been brought in yet.
At last there is a knock at the door, which he answers by a somewhat testy "come in." But he checks the coming grumble, when not the maid, but Lucia enters.
Why not grumble at Lucia? He has done so many a time.
Because she looks this morning so charming; really quite pretty again, so radiant is her face with smiles. And because, also, she holds triumphant above her head a newspaper.
She dances up to him—
"I have something for you."
"For me? Why, the post has been in this half-hour."
"Yes, for you, and that's just the reason why I kept it myself. D'ye understand my Irish reasoning?"
"No, you pretty creature," said Elsley, who saw that whatever the news was, it was good news.
"Pretty creature, am I? I was once, I know; but I thought you had forgotten all about that. But I was not going to let you have the paper till I had devoured every word of it myself first."
"Every word of what?"
"Of what you shan't have unless you promise to be good for a week. Such a Review; and from America! What a dear man he must be who wrote it! I really think I should kiss him if I met him."
"And I really think he would not say no. But as he's not here, I shall act as his proxy."
"Be quiet, and read that, if you can, for blushes;" and she spread out the paper before him, and then covered his eyes with her hands. "No, you shan't see it; it will make you vain."
Elsley had looked eagerly at the honeyed columns; (as who would not have done?) but the last word smote him. What was he thinking of? his own praise, or his wife's love?
"Too true," he cried, looking up at her. "You dear creature! Vain I am, God forgive me: but before I look at a word of this I must have a talk with you."
"I can't stop; I must run back to the children. No; now don't look cross;" as his brow clouded, "I only said that to tease you. I'll stop with you ten whole minutes, if you won't look so very solemn and important. I hate tragedy faces. Now what is it?"
As all this was spoken while both her hands were clasped roundElsley's neck, and with looks and tones of the very sweetest as wellas the very sauciest, no offence was given, and none taken: butElsley's voice was sad as he asked,—
"So you really do care for my poems?"
"You great silly creature? Why else did I marry you at all? As if I cared for anything in the world but your poems; as if I did not love everybody who praises them; and if any stupid reviewer dares to say a word against them I could kill him on the spot. I care for nothing in the world but what people say of you.—And yet I don't care one pin; I know what your poems are, if nobody else does; and they belong to me, because you belong to me, and I must be the best judge, and care for nobody, no not I!"—And she began singing, and then hung over him, tormenting him lovingly while he read.
It was a true American review, utterly extravagant in its laudations, whether from over-kindness, or from a certain love of exaggeration and magniloquence, which makes one suspect that a large proportion of the Transatlantic gentlemen of the press must be natives of the sister isle: but it was all the more pleasant to the soul of Elsley.
"There," said Lucia, as she clung croodling to him; "there is a pretty character of you, sir! Make the most of it, for it is all those Yankees will ever send you."
"Yes," said Elsley, "if they would send one a little money, instead of making endless dollars by printing one's books, and then a few more by praising one at a penny a line."
"That's talking like a man of business: if instead of the review, now, a cheque for fifty pounds had come, how I would have rushed out and paid the bills!"
"And liked it a great deal better than the review?"
"You jealous creature! No. If I could always have you praised, I'd live in a cabin, and go about the world barefoot, like a wild Irish girl."
"You would make a very charming one."
"I used to, once, I can tell you, Valencia and I used to run about without shoes and stockings at Kilanbaggan, and you can't think how pretty and white this little foot used to look on a nice soft carpet of green moss."
"I shall write a sonnet to it."
"You may if you choose, provided you don't publish it."
"You may trust me for that. I am not one of those who anatomise their own married happiness for the edification of the whole public, and make fame, if not money, out of their own wives' hearts."
"How I should hate you, if you did! Not that I believe their fine stories about themselves. At least, I am certain it's only half the story. They have their quarrels, my dear, just as you and I have but they take care not to put them into poetry."
"Well, but who could? Whether they have a right or not to publish the poetical side of their married life, it is too much to ask them to give you the unpoetical also."
"Then they are all humbugs, and I believe, if they really love their wives so very much, they would not be at all that pains to persuade the world of it."
"You are very satirical and spiteful, ma'am."
"I always am when I am pleased. If I am particularly happy, I always long to pinch somebody. I suppose it's Irish—
"'Comes out, meets a friend, and for love knocks him down.'"
"But you know, you rogue, that you care to read no poetry but love poetry."
"Of course not every woman does, but let me find you publishing any such about me, and see what I will do to you! There, now I must go to my work, and you go and write something extra superfinely grand, because I have been so good to you. No. Let me go; what a bother you are. Good-bye."
And away she tripped, and he returned to his work, happier than he had been for a week past.
His happiness, truly, was only on the surface. The old wound had been salved—as what wound cannot be?—by woman's love and woman's wit but it was not healed. The cause of his wrong doing, the vain, self-indulgent spirit, was there still unchastened, and he was destined, that very day, to find that he had still to bear the punishment of it.
Now the reader must understand, that though one may laugh at Elsley Vavasour, because it is more pleasant than scolding at him, yet have Philistia and Fogeydom neither right nor reason to consider him a despicable or merely ludicrous person, or to cry, "Ah, if he had been as we are!"
Had he been merely ludicrous, Lucia would never have married him; and he could only have been spoken of with indignation, or left utterly out of the story, as a simply unpleasant figure, beyond the purposes of a novel, though admissible now and then into tragedy. One cannot heartily laugh at a man if one has not a lurking love for him, as one really ought to have for Elsley. How much value is to be attached to his mere power of imagination and fancy, and so forth, is a question; but there was in him more than mere talent: there was, in thought at least, virtue and magnanimity.
True, the best part of him, perhaps almost all the good part of him, spent itself in words, and must be looked for, not in his life, but in his books. But in those books it can be found; and if you look through them, you will see that he has not touched upon a subject without taking, on the whole, the right, and pure, and lofty view of it. Howsoever extravagant he may be in his notions of poetic licence, that licence is never with him a synonym for licentiousness. Whatever is tender and true, whatever is chivalrous and high-minded, he loves at first sight, and reproduces it lovingly. And it may be possible that his own estimate of his poems was not altogether wrong; that his words may have awakened here and there in others a love for that which is morally as well as physically beautiful, and may have kept alive in their hearts the recollection that, both for the bodies and the souls of men forms of life far nobler and fairer than those which we see now are possible; that they have appeared, in fragments at least, already on the earth; that they are destined, perhaps, to reappear and combine themselves in some ideal state, and in
"One far-off divine event,Toward which the whole creation moves."
This is the special and proper function of the poet; that he may do this, does God touch his lips with that which, however it may be misused, is still fire from off the altar beneath which the spirits of his saints cry,—"Lord, how long?" If he "reproduce the beautiful" with this intent, however so little, then is he of the sacred guild. And because Vavasour had this gift, therefore he was a poet.
But in this he was weak: that he did not feel, or at least was forgetting fast, that this gift had been bestowed on him for any practical purpose. No one would demand that he should have gone forth with some grand social scheme, to reform a world which looked to him so mean and evil. He was not a man of business, and was not meant to be one. But it was ill for him that in his fastidiousness and touchiness he had shut himself out from that world, till he had quite forgotten how much good there was in it as well as evil; how many people—commonplace and unpoetical it may be—but still heroical in God's sight, were working harder than he ever worked, at the divine drudgery of doing good, and that in dens of darkness and sloughs of filth, from which he would have turned with disgust; so that the sympathy with the sinful and fallen which marks his earlier poems, and which perhaps verges on sentimentalism, gradually gives place to a Pharisaic and contemptuous tone; a tone more lofty and manful in seeming, but far less divine in fact. Perhaps comparative success had injured him. Whilst struggling himself against circumstances, poor, untaught, unhappy, he had more fellow-feeling, with those whom circumstance oppressed. At least, the pity which he could once bestow upon the misery which he met in his daily walks, he now kept for the more picturesque woes of Italy and Greece.
In this, too, he was weak; that he had altogether forgotten that the fire from off the altar could only be kept alight by continual self-restraint and self-sacrifice, by continual gentleness and humility, shown in the petty matters of everyday home-life; and that he who cannot rule his own household can never rule the Church of God. And so it befell, that amid the little cross-blasts of home squabbles the sacred spark was fast going out. The poems written after he settled at Penalva are marked by a less definite purpose, by a lower tone of feeling: not, perhaps, by a lower moral tone; but simply by less of any moral tone at all. They are more and more full of merely sensuous beauty, mere word-painting, mere word-hunting. The desire of finding something worth saying gives place more and more to that of saying something in a new fashion. As the originality of thought (which accompanies only vigorous moral purpose) decreases, the attempt at originality of language increases. Manner, in short, has taken the place of matter. The art, it may be, of his latest poems is greatest: but it has been expended on the most unworthy themes. The later are mannered caricatures of the earlier, without their soul; and the same change seems to have passed over him which (with Mr. Ruskin's pardon) transformed the Turner of 1820 into the Turner of 1850.
Thus had Elsley transferred what sympathy he had left from needle-women and ragged schools, dwellers in Jacob's Island and sleepers in the dry arches of Waterloo Bridge, to sufferers of a more poetic class. Whether his sympathies showed thereby that he had risen or fallen, let my readers decide each for himself. It is a credit to any man to feel for any human being; and Italy, as she is at this moment, is certainly one of the most tragic spectacles which the world has ever seen. Elsley need not be blamed for pitying her; only for holding, with most of our poets, a vague notion that her woes were to be cured by a hair of the dog who bit her; viz., by homoeopathic doses of that same "art" which has been all along her morbid and self-deceiving substitute for virtue and industry. So, as she had sung herself down to the nether pit, Elsley would help to sing her up again; and had already been throwing off, ever since 1848, a series of sonnets which he entitled Eurydice, intimating, of course, that he acted as the Orpheus. Whether he had hopes of drawing iron tears down Pluto Radetzky's cheek, does not appear; but certainly the longer poem which had sprung from his fancy, at the urgent call of Messrs. Brown and Younger, would have been likely to draw nothing but iron balls from Radetzky's cannon; or failing so vast an effect, an immediate external application to the poet himself of that famous herb Pantagruelion, cure for all public ills and private woes, which men call hemp. Nevertheless, it was a noble subject; one which ought surely to have been taken up by some of our poets, for if they do not make a noble poem of it, it will be their own fault. I mean that sad and fantastic tragedy of Fra Dolcino and Margaret, which Signor Mariotti has lately given to the English public, in a book which, both for its matter and its manner, should be better known than it is. Elsley's soul had been filled (it would have been a dull one else) with the conception of the handsome and gifted patriot-monk, his soul delirious with, the dream of realising a perfect Church on earth; battling with tongue and pen, and at last with sword, against the villanies of pope and kaiser, and all the old devourers of the earth, cheered only by the wild love of her who had given up wealth, fame, friends, all which render life worth having, to die with him a death too horrible for words. And he had conceived (and not altogether ill) a vision, in which, wandering along some bright Italian bay, he met Dolcino sitting, a spirit at rest but not yet glorified, waiting for the revival of that dead land for which he had died; and Margaret by him, dipping her scorched feet for ever in the cooling wave, and looking up to the hero for whom she had given up all, with eyes of everlasting love. There they were to prophesy to him such things as seemed fit to him, of the future of Italy and of Europe, of the doom of priests and tyrants, of the sorrows and rewards of genius unappreciated and before its age; for Elsley's secret vanity could see in himself a far greater likeness to Dolcino, than Dolcino—the preacher, confessor, bender of all hearts, man of the world and man of action, at last crafty and all but unconquerable guerilla warrior—would ever have acknowledged in the self-indulgent dreamer. However, it was a fair conception enough; though perhaps it never would have entered Elsley's head, had Shelley never written the opening canto of the Revolt of Islam.
So Elsley, on a burning July forenoon, strolled up the lane and over the down to King Arthur's Nose, that he might find materials for his sea-shore scene. For he was not one of those men who live in such quiet, everyday communication with nature, that they drink in her various aspects as unconsciously as the air they breathe; and so can reproduce them, out of an inexhaustible stock of details, simply and accurately, and yet freshly too, tinged by the peculiar hue of the mind in which they have been long sleeping. He walked the world, either blind to the beauty round him, and trying to compose instead some little scrap of beauty in his own self-imprisoned thoughts; or else he was looking out consciously and spasmodically for views, effects, emotions, images; something striking and uncommon which would suggest a poetic figure, or help out a description, or in some way re-furnish his mind with thought. From which method it befell, that his lamp of truth was too often burnt out just when it was needed; and that, like the foolish virgins, he had to go and buy oil when it was too late; or failing that, to supply its place with some baser artificial material.
That day, however, he was fortunate enough; for wandering and scrambling among the rocks, at a dead low spring tide, he came upon a spot which would have made a poem of itself better than all Elsley ever wrote, had he, forgetting all about Fra Dolcino, Italy, priests, and tyrants, set down in black and white just what he saw; provided, of course, that he had patience first to see the same.
It was none other than that ghastly chasm across which Thurnall had been so miraculously swept, on the night of his shipwreck. The same ghastly chasm: but ghastly now no longer; and as Elsley looked down, the beauty below invited him, and the coolness also; for the sun beat on the flat rock above till it scorched the feet, and dazzled the eye, and crisped up the blackening sea-weeds; while every sea-snail crept to hide itself under the bladder-tangle, and nothing dared to peep or stir save certain grains of gunpowder, which seemed to have gone mad, so merrily did they hop about upon the surface of the fast evaporating salt-pools. That wonder, indeed, Elsley stooped to examine, and drew back his hands with an "ugh!" and a gesture of disgust, when he found that they were "nasty little insects." For Elsley held fully the poet's right to believe that all things are not very good; none, indeed, save such as suited his eclectic and fastidious taste; and to hold (on high aesthetic grounds, of course) toads and spiders in as much abhorrence as does any boarding-school girl. However, finding some rock ledges which formed a natural ladder, down he scrambled, gingerly enough, for he was neither an active nor a courageous man. But, once down, I will do him the justice to say, that for five whole minutes he forgot all about Fra Dolcino, and, what was better, about himself also.
The chasm may have been fifteen feet deep, and above, about half that breadth; but below, the waves had hollowed it into dark overhanging caverns. Just in front of him a huge boulder spanned the crack; and formed a natural doorway, through which he saw, like a picture set in a frame, the far-off blue sea softening into the blue sky among brown Eastern haze. Amid the haze a single ship hung motionless, like a white cloud. Nearer, a black cormorant floated sleepily along, and dived, and rose again. Nearer again, long lines of flat tide-rock, glittering and quivering in the heat, sloped gradually under the waves, till they ended in half-sunken beds of olive oar-weed, which bent their tangled stems into a hundred graceful curves, and swayed to and fro slowly and sleepily. The low swell slid whispering among their floating palms, and slipped on toward the cavern's mouth, as if asking wistfully (so Elsley fancied) when it would be time for it to return to that cool shade, and hide from all the blinding blaze outside. But when his eye was enough accustomed to the shade within, it withdrew gladly from the glaring sea and glaring tide-rocks to the walls of the chasm itself; to curved and polished sheets of stone, rich brown, with snow-white veins, on which danced for ever a dappled network of pale yellow light; to crusted beds of pink coralline; to caverns, in the dark crannies of which hung branching sponges and tufts of purple sea-moss; to strips of clear white sand, bestrewn with shells; to pools, each a gay flower-garden of all hues, where branching sea-weeds reflected blue light from every point, like a thousand damasked sword-blades; while among them, dahlias and chrysanthemums, and many another mimic of our earth-born flowers, spread blooms of crimson, and purple, and lilac, and creamy grey, half-buried among feathered weeds as brightly coloured as they; and strange and gaudy fishes shot across from side to side, and chased each other in and out of hidden cells.
Within and without all was at rest; the silence was broken only by the timid whisper of the swell, and by the chime of dropping water within some unseen cave: but what a different rest! Without, all lying breathless, stupefied, sun-stricken, in blinding glare; within, all coolness, and refreshing sleep. Without, all simple, broad, and vast; within, all various, with infinite richness of form and colour.—An Hairoun Alraschid's bower, looking out upon the—
Bother the fellow! Why will he go on analysing and figuring in this way? Why not let the blessed place tell him what it means, instead of telling it what he thinks? And—why, he is actually writing verses, though not about Fra Dolcino!
"How rests yon rock, whoso half-day's bath is done,With broad bright sight, beneath the broad bright sun,Like sea-nymph tired, on cushioned mosses sleeping.Yet, nearer drawn, beneath her purple tresses,From down-bent brows we find her slowly weeping,So many a heart for cruel man's caressesMust only pine and pine, and yet must bearA gallant front beneath life's gaudy glare."
Silly fellow! Do you think that Nature had time to think of such a far-fetched conceit as that while it was making that rock and peopling it with a million tiny living things, of which not one falleth to the ground without your Father's knowledge, and each more beautiful than any sea-nymph whom you ever fancied? For, after all, you cannot fancy a whole sea nymph (perhaps in that case you could make one), but only a very little scrap of her outside. Or if, as you boast, you are inspired by the Creative Spirit, tell us what the Creative Spirit says about that rock, and not such verse as that, the lesson of which you don't yourself really feel. Pretty enough it is, perhaps: but in your haste to say a pretty thing, just because it was pretty, you have not cared to condemn yourself out of your own mouth. Why were you sulky, sir, with Mrs. Vavasour this very morning, after all that passed, because she would look over the washing-books, while you wanted her to hear about Fra Dolcino? And why, though she was up to her knees among your dirty shirts when you went out, did you not give her one parting kiss, which would have transfigured her virtuous drudgery for her into a sacred pleasure? One is heartily glad to see you disturbed, cross though you may look at it, by that sturdy step and jolly whistle which burst in on you from the other end of the chasm, as Tom Thurnall, with an old smock frock over his coat and a large basket on his arm, comes stumbling and hopping towards you, dropping every now and then on hands and knees, and turning over on his back, to squeeze his head into some muddy crack, and then withdraw it with the salt water dripping down his nose.
Elsley closed his eyes, and rested his head on his hand in a somewhat studied "pose." But as he wished not to be interrupted, it may not have been altogether unpardonable to pretend sleep. However, the sleeping posture had exactly the opposite effect to that which he designed.
"Ah, Mr. Vavasour!"
"Humph!" quoth he slowly, if not sulkily.
"I admire your taste, sir; a charming summerhouse old Triton has vacated for your use; but let me advise you not to go to sleep in it."
"Why then, sir?"
"Because—it's no business of mine, of course: but the tide has turned already; and if a breeze springs up old Triton will be back again in a hurry, and in a rage also; and—I may possibly lose a good patient."
Elsley, who knew nothing about the tides, save that "the moon wooed the ocean," or some such important fact, thanked him coolly enough, and returned to a meditative attitude. Tom saw that he was in the seventh heaven, and went on: but he had not gone three steps before he pulled up short, slapping his hands together once, as a man does who has found what he wants; and then plunged up to his knees in a rock pool, and then began working very gently at something under water.
Elsley watched him for full five minutes with so much curiosity, that, despite of himself, he asked him what he was doing.
Tom had his whole face under water, and did not hear, till Elsley had repeated the question.
"Only a rare zoophyte," said he at last, lifting his dripping visage, and gasping for breath; and then he dived again.
"Inexplicable pedantry of science!" thought Elsley to himself, while Tom worked on steadfastly, and at last rose, and, taking out a phial from his basket, was about to deposit in it something invisible.
"Stay a moment; you really have roused my curiosity by your earnestness. May I see what it is for which you have taken so much trouble?"
Tom held out on his finger a piece of slimy crust the size of a halfpenny. Elsley could only shrug his shoulders.
"Nothing to you, sir, I doubt not; but worth a guinea to me, even if it be only to mount bits of it as microscopic objects."
"So you mingle business with science?" said Elsley, rather in a contemptuous tone.
"Why not? I must live, and my father too; and it is as honest a way of making money as any other: I poach in no man's manor for my game."
"But what is your game! What possible attraction in that bit of dirt can make men spend their money on it?"
"You shall see," said Tom, dropping it into the phial of salt water, and offering it to Elsley, with his pocket magnifier.
"Judge for yourself."
Elsley did so, and beheld a new wonder—a living plant of crystal, studded with crystal bells, from each of which waved a crown of delicate arms. It was the first time that Elsley had ever seen one of those exquisite zoophytes which stud every rock and every tuft of weed.
"This is most beautiful," said he at length.
"Humph! why should not Mr. Vavasour write a poem about it?"
"Why not indeed?" thought Elsley.
"It's no business of mine, no man's less: but I often wonder why you poets don't take to the microscope, and tell us a little more about the wonderful things which are here already, and not about those which are not, and which, perhaps, never will be."
"Well," said Elsley, after another look: "but, after all, these things have no human interest in them."
"I don't know that; they have to me, for instance. These are the things which I would write about if I had any turn for verse, not about human nature, of which I know, I'm afraid, a little too much already. I always like to read old Darwin's 'Loves of the Plants;' bosh as it is in a scientific point of view, it amuses one's fancy without making one lose one's temper, as one must when one begins to analyse the microscopic ape called self and friends.
"You would like, then, the old Cosmogonies, the Eddas and the Vedas," said Elsley, getting interested, as most people did after five minutes' talk with the cynical doctor. "I suppose you would not say much for their science; but, as poetry, they are just what you ask for—the expression of thoughtful spirits, who looked round upon nature with awe-struck, childlike eyes, and asked of all heaven and earth the question, 'What are you? How came you to be?' Yet—it may be my fault—while I admire them, I cannot sympathise with them. To me, this zoophyte is as a being of another sphere; and till I can create some link in my own mind between it and humanity it is as nothing in my eyes."