Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series)

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

  Yours most affectionately,

  H. MIDHURST

  XXII Captain Harewood to Reginald

  Plessey, Oct. 22nd.

  MY DEAR REGINALD:

  YOU will at once begin preparing for your work, unless you wish to throw this chance too over, and incur my still more serious displeasure. That is all the answer I shall make you. You must be very well aware that for years back you have disgracefully disappointed me in every hope and every plan I have formed with regard to you. Of your school and college career I shall have a few words to say presently. It is against my expressed wish and expectation that you are now in London instead of being here under my eye: and even after all past experience of your utter disregard of discipline and duty, I cannot but feel surprise at your present proposal. If you do visit the Radworths before returning home, you will do so in direct defiance of my desire. That course, understand, is distinctly forbidden you. After our last interview on the subject I can only consider the very suggestion as an act of an insolent and rebellious nature. I know the construction to which your conduct towards your cousin has not unnaturally exposed you; and you know that I know it. Upon her and upon yourself your inexcusable and puerile behaviour has already drawn down remark and reproach. I am resolved, and I intend that you shall remember I am, to put an end to this. I have come upon a letter from your grandmother, dated some time back-I think before the miserable catastrophe in which you were mixed up at Portsmouth-bearing immediately in every line upon this affair: and I have read it with attention. Secrets of that kind you have no right to have or to keep; and I have every right and reason to investigate them. Another time, if you intend to pursue a furtive line of action, you will do well to make it a more cautious one: the letter I speak of was left actually under my hand, not so much as put away among other papers. Upon the style of Lady Midhurst’s address to you I shall not here remark; but you must expect, I should think, to hear that my view of such things is far enough from being the same as hers. Rightly or wrongly. I consider the sort of relationship she appears to contemplate in that letter as at once criminal and contemptible: and I cannot pretend to observe it with indifference or toleration. You seem to me to have written and acted childishly indeed, but not the less sinfully. However, I am not now about to preach to you. The One safeguard against natural evil and antidote to natural unwisdom you have long been encouraged to neglect and overlook. All restrictions placed around you by the care of others and of myself you have even thus early chosen to discard. It is poor comfort to reflect that, as far as I know, you have not as yet fallen into the more open and gross vices which many miserable young fools think it almost laudable to indulge in. This can but be at best the working of a providential accident, not the outcome of any real self-denial or manly self-restraint on your part. Without this I count all fortuitous abstinence from sin worth very little. In a wiser eye than man’s many a seemingly worse character may be purer than yours. From childhood upwards, I must once for all remind you, you have thwarted my wishes and betrayed my trust. Prayer, discipline, confidence, restraint, hourly vigilance, untiring attention, one after another, failed to work upon you. Affectionate enough by nature, and with no visibly vicious tendencies, but unstable, luxurious, passionate, and indolent, you set at naught all guidance, and never in your life would let the simple noble sense of duty take hold of you. At school you were incessantly under punishment; at home you were constantly in disgrace. Pain and degradation could not keep you right; to disgrace the most frequent, to pain the most severe, you opposed a deadly strength of sloth and tacit vigour of rebellion. So your boyhood passed; I have yet in my ear the remark of one of your tutors-” Severity can do little for the boy; indulgence, nothing.” What the upshot of your college career was you must remember only too well, and I still hope not without some regret and shame. Absolute inert idleness and wilful vanity, after a long course of violated discipline in small matters, brought you in time to the dishonourable failure you had been at no pains to avoid. And yet you know well enough whether or no I have done and purpose, even yet, to do all for you that I can; whether I have not always been but too ready to palliate and indulge; whether, from the very first, the utmost, tenderest allowance has not been made for you, and the least possible share of your own faults laid to your own charge. This, I say, you do, in your conscience and heart, know, and must needs bear me witness to the truth of it. I must confess I have not now much hope left. Little comfort and little pleasure have you ever given me, and I expect to get less and less from you as our lives go on. One thing, though, I can, at worst, be sure of: that my own duty shall be done. As long as I can hold them at all, I will not throw the reins upon your neck. I will not, while I can help it, allow you to speak, to act, if possible to think, in a way likely to injure others. I desire you not to go to the house of a man whom I know you profess, out of your own inordinate impertinence and folly, to dislike and contemn; I trust you, at least, as a gentleman, to respect my opinion and my confidence, if I cannot count on your obedience as my son; on these grounds I do believe and expect you will not visit Blocksham. Mr. Ernest Radworth is a man infinitely your superior in every way. For many years he has led a most pure, laborious, and earnest life. The truly great and genuine talents accorded to him at his birth he has submitted to the most conscientious culture, and turned to the utmost possible advantage. To himself he has been consistently and admirably true; to others I believe he has invariably been most helpful, beneficent, exemplary in all his dealings. By one simple process of life he has kept himself pure and made all near him happy. From first to last he was the stay and pride of his family; and since he has been left alone in his father’s place he has nobly kept up the distinction which, in earliest youth, and even boyhood, he very deservedly acquired. A fit colleague and a fit successor, this one, (as you would acknowledge if you were capable of seeing) for the greatest labourers in the field of English science. Excellent and admirable in all things, he is in none more worthy of respect than in his private and domestic relations. There is not a man living for whom I entertain a more heartfelt regard-I had well nigh said reverence-than for Mr. Radworth. I verily believe he has not a thing, humanly speaking, to be ashamed of in looking back upon his past life. Every hour, so to say, has had its share of noble toil-and, therefore, also its share of immediate reward. For these men work for the world’s sake, not for their own: and from the world, not from themselves, they do in time receive their full wages. There is no more unsullied and unselfish glory on earth than that of the faithful and reverent scientific workman: and to such one can always reasonably hope that the one thing which may perhaps be wanting will in due time be supplied. The contempt or disrelish of a young, idle, far from noteworthy man for such a character as that of Ernest Radworth is simply a ludicrous and deplorable phenomenon. You are incompetent to appreciate for one moment even a tenth part of his excellence. But I am resolved you shall make no unworthy use of a friendship you are incapable of deserving. Of your cousin I will here say only that I trust she may in time learn fully to apprehend the value of such a heart and such a mind. By no other path than this of both repentant and retrospective humility can she ever hope to attain real happiness or honour. I should, for Ernest’s sake, truly regret being compelled to adopt Lady Midhurst’s sufficiently apparent opinion that she is not worthy to perceive and decide on such a path. You now know my desire; and I do not choose to add any further appeal. Expecting, for the sake at least of your own immediate prospects, that you will follow it,

  I remain your anxious and affectionate father,

  PHILIP HAREWOOD

  XXIII Francis Cheyne to Mrs. Radworth

  Lidcombe, Nov. 13th.

  I HAVE just read your letter. Come by all means next month, and stay as long as you can. Every day spent here by myself is a heavier and more subtle irritation to me than the one before. Reginald will come for a few days, at least; his foreign outlook seems to have fallen back into vapour and remote chance. The Captain was over h
ere lately, looking pinched and hard-a head to make children recoil and wince at the sight of it. He is still of great help to me. As to Madame de Rochelaurier, to be quite open, I had rather not meet her just now; so you will not look for me before the day they leave you. Afterwards I may come over to escort you and Ernest, if it turns out worth while. Anything to get about a little, without going out of reach. News, I suppose, must come from Ashton Hildred before very long. At such a time I have no heart to spare for thinking over plans or people.

  Your praise of Mademoiselle de Rochelaurier is, of course, all right and just. She is a very jolly sort of girl, and sufficiently handsome; and if Redgie does marry her I shall just stop short of envying him. Does Madame really want me to take such a gift at her hand? Well and good; it is incomparably obliging; but then, when I am looking at Mademoiselle Philomène, and letting myself go to the sound of her voice like a song to the tune, unhappily there gets up between us such an invincible exquisite memory of a face ten times more beautiful and loveable to have in sight of one; pale when I saw it last, as if drawn down by its hair, heavily weighted about the eyes with a presage of tears, sealed with sorrow, and piteous with an infinite unaccomplished desire. The old deep-gold hair and luminous grey-green eyes shot through with colours of seawater in sunlight, and threaded with faint keen lines of fire and light about the pupil, beat for me the blue-black of Mademoiselle de Rochelaurier’s. Then that mouth of hers and the shadow made almost on the chin by the underlip -such sad perfect lips, full of tender power and faith, and her wonderful way of lifting and dropping her face imperceptibly, flower-fashion, when she begins or leaves off speaking; I shall never hear such a voice in the world, either. I cannot, and need not now, pretend to dissemble or soften down what I feel about her. I do love her with all my heart and might. And now that, after happy years, she is fallen miserable and ill, dangerously ill, for aught I know, and incurably miserable-who can say?-it is not possible for me, sitting here in her house that I have had to drive her out of, to think very much of anything else, or to think at all of any other woman in the way of liking. This is mere bare truth, not sentiment or excited fancy by any means, and you will not take it for such a sort of thing. If I can never marry the one woman perfectly pleasant to me and faultlessly fit for me in the whole beautiful nature of her, I will never insult her and my own heart by marrying at all. Aunt Midhurst’s view of the Rochelaurier family has no great weight with me; but I have a little hope now, after reading what she says to you, that, as she is clearly set against the chance of any other marriage for me, she may, perhaps, be some day brought to think of the one desire of my whole life as a possible thing to fulfil. Even to you I dare not well hint at such a hope as that; but you must now understand for good how things are with me; if not that, then nothing.

  You take her reference to Redgie Harewood to be a feint, and meant spitefully. I think not; she has the passion of intrigue and management still strong; likes nothing so well, evidently, as the sense of power to make and break matches, build schemes and overset them. I should like to see Harewood married, and peace again at Plessey; he is not a bad fellow; and she was always fond of him. I will say he earned that at Portsmouth, but I hate to hear of his being able to write to her now, and then see and think how much there is between us to get over. If I could get at her by any way possible, I could keep her up still-but I can hardly see how he is to help her much. Then, again, if he were to marry, they might see each other; and in no end of ways it would be a good thing for him. His idolatry is becoming a bore, if not worse; you should find him an ideal to draw his worship off you a little. I know so well now how miserable it is to feel on a sudden the thing turn serious, and have to fight it before one has time to see how. If it were fair to tell you all I have had to remember and regret only since this year began and only because I knew how, after Cheyne’s death, her gentle goodness would make her wretched at the thought of past discontent with him-and Heaven knows she could not but have felt him to be less than she was; and perfect she was to him always. I wish people would blame her to me, and let me fight them. I can’t fight her for blaming herself. I write the awfullest stuff, because I am really past writing at all. If I could fall to work and forget, leave off thinking for good, turn brute, it would be only rational for me. I, who have helped to hurt her, and would have set myself against the world to spare her, what do you conceive she thinks of me? This air that has nothing of her left it chafes me to breathe. I know how sometimes somewhere she remembers and misses things that she had got used to-little chance things that were about her in her husband’s time. A book or two of hers were left; you will see them when you come; I cannot write, and cannot send them without a word. I am more thoroughly afraid of hearing from Lady M. again than I ever was of anything on earth-no child could dread any torture as I do that. It is quite clear, you know, that they expect a confinement-in some months’ time, perhaps. God knows I wish there had been a son! Only they will not say it; so I must stay here and take my trouble. It does not startle me; nothing can well be worse for me or better than it is now. There is no such pleasure to be had out of my name or house that I need want to fight for it or hold to it. I do hope they will make things good to her. You need hardly express anger about the poor aunt. Those two are her children, and she always rather hated us for their sakes. Indeed, as about Reginald, I am not sure she is so far out of the way. You must see that Ernest flinches now and then when he is talked of; and, without any fear of scandal, one may want to avoid the look of it. He is not the sort of fellow to be sure of; not that he is a bad sort. Enfin (as she says), you know what it means-Ernest is not great in the way of company, and Redgie and you are just good friends; the woman is not really fool enough to think evil, though she is rather of the vulturine order as to beak and diet. For the rest, I know how wise and kind you are-it is a shame to lean on you as I do, but you are safe to come to.