Moreover, pathos is a tide: often it carries the awakener of it off his feet, and whirls him over and over armour and all in ignominious attitudes of helpless prostration, whereof he may well be ashamed in the retrospect. We cannot quite preserve our dignity when we stoop to the work of calling forth tears. Moses had probably to take a nimble jump away from the rock after that venerable Law-giver had knocked the water out of it.
However, it was imperative in his mind that he should be sure he had the power to move her.
He began; clumsily at first, as yonder gauntletted knight attempting the briny handkerchief.
‘What are we! We last but a very short time. Why not live to gratify our appetites? I might really ask myself why. All the means of satiating them are at my disposal. But no: I must aim at the highest: – at that which in my blindness I took for the highest. You know the sportsman’s instinct, Laetitia; he is not tempted by the stationary object. Such are we in youth, toying with happiness, leaving it, to aim at the dazzling and attractive.’
‘We gain knowledge,’ said Laetitia.
‘At what a cost!’
The exclamation summoned self-pity to his aid, and pathos was handy.
‘By paying half our lives for it and all our hopes! Yes, we gain knowledge, we are the wiser; very probably my value surpasses now what it was when I was happier. But the loss! That youthful bloom of the soul is like health to the body; once gone, it leaves cripples behind. Nay, my friend and precious friend, these four fingers I must retain. They seem to me the residue of a wreck: you shall be released shortly: absolutely, Laetitia, I have nothing else remaining – We have spoken of deception; what of being undeceived? – when one whom we adored is laid bare, and the wretched consolation of a worthy object is denied to us. No misfortune can be like that. Were it death, we could worship still. Death would be preferable. But may you be spared to know a situation in which the comparison with your inferior is forced on you to your disadvantage and your loss because of your generously giving up your whole heart to the custody of some shallow, light-minded, self – !… We will not deal in epithets. If I were to find as many bad names for the serpent as there are spots on his body, it would be serpent still, neither better nor worse.
The loneliness! And the darkness! Our luminary is extinguished. Self-respect refuses to continue worshipping, but the affection will not be turned aside. We are literally in the dust, we grovel, we would fling away self-respect if we could; we would adopt for a model the creature preferred to us; we would humiliate, degrade ourselves; we cry for justice as if it were for pardon…’
‘For pardon! when we are straining to grant it!’ Laetitia murmured, and it was as much as she could do. She remembered how in her old misery her efforts after charity had twisted her round to feel herself the sinner, and beg forgiveness in prayer: a noble sentiment, that filled her with pity of the bosom in which it had sprung. There was no similarity between his idea and hers, but her idea had certainly been roused by his word ‘pardon’, and he had the benefit of it in the moisture of her eyes. Her lips trembled, tears fell.
He had heard something; he had not caught the words, but they were manifestly favourable; her sign of emotion assured him of it and of the success he had sought. There was one woman who bowed to him to all eternity! He had inspired one woman with the mysterious, man-desired passion of self-abandonment, self-immolation! The evidence was before him. At any instant he could, if he pleased, fly to her and command her enthusiasm.
He had, in fact, perhaps by sympathetic action, succeeded in striking the same springs of pathos in her which animated his lively endeavour to produce it in himself.
He kissed her hand; then released it, quitting his chair to bend above her soothingly.
‘Do not weep, Laetitia, you see that I do not; I can smile. Help me to bear it; you must not unman me.’
She tried to stop her crying, but self-pity threatened to rain all her long years of grief on her head, and she said: ‘I must go… I am unfit… good-night, Sir Willoughby.’
Fearing seriously that he had sunk his pride too low in her consideration, and had been carried farther than he intended on the tide of pathos, he remarked: ‘We will speak about Crossjay to-morrow. His deceitfulness has been gross. As I said, I am grievously offended by deception. But you are tired. Good-night, my dear friend.’
‘Good-night, Sir Willoughby.’
She was allowed to go forth.
Colonel De Craye coming up from the smoking-room, met her and noticed the state of her eyelids, as he wished her good-night. He saw Willoughby in the room she had quitted, but considerately passed without speaking, and without reflecting why he was considerate.
Our hero’s review of the scene made him, on the whole, satisfied with his part in it. Of his power upon one woman he was now perfectly sure: – Clara had agonized him with a doubt of his personal mastery of any. One was a poor feast, but the pangs of his flesh during the last few days and the latest hours caused him to snatch at it, hungrily if contemptuously. A poor feast, she was yet a fortress, a point of succour, both shield and lance; a cover and an impetus. He could now encounter Clara boldly. Should she resist and defy him, he would not be naked and alone; he foresaw that he might win honour in the world’s eye from his position – a matter to be thought of only in most urgent need. The effect on him of his recent exercise in pathos was to compose him to slumber. He was for the period well satisfied.
His attendant imps were well satisfied likewise, and danced around about his bed after the vigilant gentleman had ceased to debate on the question of his unveiling of himself past forgiveness of her to Laetitia, and had surrendered to sleep the present direction of his affairs.
CHAPTER 32
Laetitia Dale Discovers a Spiritual Change and Dr Middleton a Physical
CLARA tripped over the lawn in the early morning to Laetitia to greet her. She broke away from a colloquy with Colonel De Craye under Sir Willoughby’s windows. The colonel had been one of the bathers, and he stood like a circus-driver flicking a wet towel at Crossjay capering.
‘My dear, I am very unhappy!’ said Clara.
‘My dear, I bring you news,’ Laetitia replied.
‘Tell me. But the poor boy is to be expelled! He burst into Crossjay’s bedroom last night and dragged the sleeping boy out of bed to question him, and he had the truth. That is one comfort: only Crossjay is to be driven from the Hall, because he was untruthful previously – for me; to serve me; really, I feel it was at my command. Crossjay will be out of the way to-day, and has promised to come back at night to try to be forgiven. You must help me, Laetitia.’
‘You are free, Clara! If you desire it, you have but to ask for your freedom.’
‘You mean…’
‘He will release you.’
‘You are sure?’
‘We had a long conversation last night.’
‘I owe it to you?’
‘Nothing is owing to me. He volunteered it.’
Clara made as if to lift her eyes in apostrophe. ‘Professor Crooklyn! Professor Crooklyn! I see. I did not guess that.’
‘Give credit for some generosity, Clara; you are unjust.’
‘By and by: I will be more than just by and by. I will practise on the trumpet: I will lecture on the greatness of the souls of men when we know them thoroughly. At present we do but half know them, and we are unjust. You are not deceived, Laetitia? There is to be no speaking to papa? no delusions? You have agitated me. I feel myself a very small person indeed. I feel I can understand those who admire him. He gives me back my word simply? clearly? without – Oh, that long wrangle in scenes and letters? And it will be arranged for papa and me to go not later than to-morrow? Never shall I be able to explain to any one how I fell into this! I am frightened at myself when I think of it. I take the whole blame: I have been scandalous. And, dear Laetitia! you came out so early in order to tell me?’
‘I wished you to hear it.’
‘Take my heart.’
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br /> ‘Present me with a part – but for good!’
‘Fie! But you have a right to say it.’
‘I mean no unkindness; but is not the heart you allude to an alarmingly searching one?’
‘Selfish it is, for I have been forgetting Crossjay. If we are going to be generous, is not Crossjay to be forgiven? If it were only that the boy’s father is away fighting for his country, endangering his life day by day, and for a stipend not enough to support his family, we are bound to think of the boy! Poor dear silly lad! with his “I say, Miss Middleton, why wouldn’t (some one) see my father when he came here to call on him, and had to walk back ten miles in the rain?” – I could almost fancy that did me mischief… But we have a splendid morning after yesterday’s rain. And we will be generous. Own, Laetitia, that it is possible to gild the most glorious day of creation.’
‘Doubtless the spirit may do it and make its hues permanent,’ said Laetitia.
‘You to me, I to you, he to us. Well, then, if he does, it shall be one of my heavenly days. Which is for the probation of experience. We are not yet at sunset.’
‘Have you seen Mr Whitford this morning?’
‘He passed me.’
‘Do not imagine him ever ill-tempered.’
‘I had a governess, a learned lady, who taught me in person the picturesqueness of grumpiness. Her temper was ever perfect, because she was never in the wrong, but I being so, she was grumpy. She carried my iniquity under her brows, and looked out on me through it. I was a trying child.’
Laetitia said, laughing: ‘I can believe it!’
‘Yet I liked her and she liked me: we were a kind of foreground and background: she threw me into relief, and I was an apology for her existence.’
‘You picture her to me.’
‘She says of me now that I am the only creature she has loved. Who knows that I may not come to say the same of her?’
‘You would plague her and puzzle her still.’
‘Have I plagued and puzzled Mr Whitford?’
‘He reminds you of her?’
‘You said you had her picture.’
‘Ah, do not laugh at him. He is a true friend.’
‘The man who can be a friend is the man who will presume to be a censor.’
‘A mild one.’
‘As to the sentence he pronounces, I am unable to speak, but his forehead is Rhadamanthine condemnation.’
‘Dr Middleton!’
Clara looked round. ‘Who? I? Did you hear an echo of papa? He would never have put Rhadamanthus over European souls, because it appears that Rhadamanthus judged only the Asiatic; so you are wrong, Miss Dale. My father is infatuated with Mr Whitford. What can it be? We women cannot sound the depths of scholars, probably because their pearls have no value in our market; except when they deign to chasten an impertinent; and Mr Whitford stands aloof from any notice of small fry. He is deep, studious, excellent; and does it not strike you that if he descended among us he would be like a Triton ashore?’
Laetitia’s habit of wholly subservient sweetness, which was her ideal of the feminine, not yet conciliated with her acuter character, owing to the absence of full pleasure from her life – the unhealed wound she had sustained and the cramp of a bondage of such old date as to seem iron – induced her to say, as if consenting: ‘You think he is not quite at home in society?’ But she wished to defend him strenuously, and as a consequence she had to quit the self-imposed ideal of her daily acting, whereby – the case being unwonted, very novel to her – the lady’s intelligence became confused through the process that quickened it; so sovereign a method of hoodwinking our bright selves is the acting of a part, however naturally it may come to us! and to this will each honest autobiographical member of the animated world bear witness.
She added: ‘You have not found him sympathetic? He is. You fancy him brooding, gloomy? He is the reverse, he is cheerful, he is indifferent to personal misfortune. Dr Corney says there is no laugh like Vernon Whitford’s, and no humour like his. Latterly he certainly… But it has not been your cruel word grumpiness. The truth is, he is anxious about Crossjay: and about other things; and he wants to leave. He is at a disadvantage beside very lively and careless gentlemen at present, but your “Triton ashore” is unfair, it is ugly. He is, I can say, the truest man I know.’
‘I did not question his goodness, Laetitia.’
‘You throw an accent on it.’
‘Did I? I must be like Crossjay, who declares he likes fun best.’
‘Crossjay ought to know him, if anybody should. Mr Whitford has defended you against me, Clara, even since I took to calling you Clara. Perhaps when you supposed him so like your ancient governess, he was meditating how he could aid you. Last night he gave me reasons for thinking you would do wisely to confide in Mrs Mountstuart. It is no longer necessary. I merely mention it. He is a devoted friend.’
‘He is an untiring pedestrian.’
‘Oh!’
Colonel De Craye, after hovering near the ladies in the hope of seeing them divide, now adopted the system of making three that two may come of it.
As he joined them with his glittering chatter, Laetitia looked at Clara to consult her, and saw the face rosy as a bride’s.
The suspicion she had nursed sprung out of her arms a muscular fact on the spot.
‘Where is my dear boy?’ Clara said.
‘Out for a holiday,’ the colonel answered in her tone.
‘Advise Mr Whitford not to waste his time in searching for Crossjay, Laetitia. Crossjay is better out of the way to-day. At least, I thought so just now. Has he pocket-money, Colonel De Craye?’
‘My lord can command his inn.’
‘How thoughtful you are!’
Laetitia’s bosom swelled upon a mute exclamation, equivalent to: ‘Woman! woman! snared ever by the sparkling and frivolous! undiscerning of the faithful, the modest and beneficent!’
In the secret musings of moralists this dramatic rhetoric survives.
The comparison was all of her own making, and she was indignant at the contrast, though to what end she was indignant she could not have said, for she had no idea of Vernon as a rival of De Craye in the favour of a plighted lady. But she was jealous on behalf of her sex: her sex’s reputation seemed at stake, and the purity of it was menaced by Clara’s idle preference of the shallower man. When the young lady spoke so carelessly of being like Crossjay, she did not perhaps know that a likeness, based on a similarity of their enthusiasms, loves, and appetites, had been established between women and boys. Laetitia had formerly chafed at it, rejecting it utterly, save when now and then in a season of bitterness she handed here and there a volatile young lady (none but the young) to be stamped with the degrading brand. Vernon might be as philosophical as he pleased. To her the gaiety of these two, Colonel De Craye and Clara Middleton, was distressingly musical: they harmonized painfully. The representative of her sex was hurt by it.
She had to stay beside them: Clara held her arm. The colonel’s voice dropped at times to something very like a whisper. He was answered audibly and smoothly. The quick-witted gentleman accepted the correction: but in immediately paying assiduous attentions to Miss Dale, in the approved intriguer’s fashion, he showed himself in need of another amounting to a reproof. Clara said: ‘We have been consulting, Laetitia, what is to be done to cure Professor Crooklyn of his cold.’ De Craye perceived that he had taken a wrong step, and he was mightily surprised that a lesson in intrigue should be read to him of all men. Miss Middleton’s audacity was not so astonishing: he recognized grand capabilities in the young lady. Fearing lest she should proceed further and cut away from him his vantage-ground of secrecy with her, he turned the subject and was adroitly submissive.
Clara’s manner of meeting Sir Willoughby expressed a timid disposition to friendliness upon a veiled inquiry, understood by none save Laetitia, whose brain was racked to convey assurances to herself of her not having misinterpreted him. Could there be any doubt? She re
solved that there could not be; and it was upon this basis of reason that she fancied she had led him to it. Legitimate or not, the fancy sprang from a solid foundation. Yesterday morning she could not have conceived it. Now she was endowed to feel that she had power to influence him, because now, since the midnight, she felt some emancipation from the spell of his physical mastery. He did not appear to her as a different man, but she had grown sensible of being a stronger woman. He was no more the cloud over her, nor the magnet; the cloud once heaven-suffused, the magnet fatally compelling her to sway round to him. She admired him still: his handsome air, his fine proportions, the courtesy of his bending to Clara and touching of her hand, excused a fanatical excess of admiration on the part of a woman in her youth, who
is never the anatomist of the hero’s lordly graces. But now she admired him piecemeal. When it came to the putting of him together, she did it coldly. To compassionate him was her utmost warmth. Without conceiving in him anything of the strange old monster of earth which had struck the awakened girl’s mind of Miss Middleton, Laetitia classed him with other men; he was ‘one of them’. And she did not bring her disenchantment as a charge against him. She accused herself, acknowledged the secret of the change to be, and her youthfulness was dead: – otherwise could she have given him compassion, and not herself have been carried on the flood of it? The compassion was fervent, and pure too. She supposed he would supplicate; she saw that Clara Middleton was pleasant with him only for what she expected of his generosity. She grieved. Sir Willoughby was fortified by her sorrowful gaze as he and Clara passed out together to the laboratory arm in arm.
Laetitia had to tell Vernon of the uselessness of his beating the house and grounds for Crossjay. Dr Middleton held him fast in discussion upon an overnight’s classical wrangle with Professor Crooklyn, which was to be renewed that day. The Professor had appointed to call expressly to renew it. ‘A fine scholar,’ said the Rev. Doctor, ‘but crotchety, like all men who cannot stand their Port.’
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