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

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

  Your most affectionate aunt,

  HELENA MIDHURST

  XXIX Francis Cheyne to Lady Midhurst

  Lidcombe, Feb. 15th.

  MY DEAR AUNT HELENA:

  I SHALL be clear of this place to-morrow; I am going for a fortnight or so to Blocksham. I quite agree it will be best for me not to have the pleasure of seeing Amicia. You will, I hope, tell her how thoroughly and truly glad I am; and that if I could have known earlier how things were to turn out it would have simply saved me some unpleasant time. As to meeting, when it can be pleasant to her, I shall be very grateful for leave to come-and till then it is quite good enough to hear of her doing well again. Only one thing could add to my perfectly sincere pleasure at this change-to know I had been able to bring it about by my own will and deed; as I would have done long since. I hope she will get all right again, and the sooner for being back here. I shall not pretend to suppose you don’t know now that I care more about her and what happens to her than about most things in the world. If all goes well with her nothing will go far wrong with me while I live. I dare say I shall do well enough for the professions yet, when I fall to and try a turn with them; and I cannot say, honestly, how thankful I am to be well rid of a name and place that I never could have been glad of. We have more to thank you for than your kindness as to this. I have seen my sister since you wrote, and she has shown me some part of your letter. I do not think we shall have any more trouble at home. My brother-in-law knows nothing of it. She has written I believe to Reginald; I must say she was angry enough, but insists on no notice. If she were ever to find home all but too comfortless to put up with, I could not well wonder; she has little there to look to or lean upon. We are out of the fighting times, but if M. de Saverny or any other man living were to try and make base use of her kindness and innocence, I suppose no one could well blame or laugh at me if I exacted atonement from him. As it is, I declare if he comes in her way, and I find he has not kept entire silence as to the letters written when she was too young and too good to dream what baseness and stupidity there is among people, I will prevent him from going about and holding up his head again as a man of honour. Any one from this time forth who gives her any trouble by writing or by word of mouth shall at once answer to me for it. I have no right to say that I believe or do not believe she has never felt a regret or a wish. She is answerable to no man for that. I do say she has given nobody reason to think of her, or a right to speak of her, except with all honour-and if necessary I wish people to know I intend to stand by what I say. She is quite content, and I believe determined, to see no more of R. H. for some time; quite ready too to allow that accident and a time of trouble let him perhaps too much into the secret of an uncongenial household life, and that she was over ready to look for companionship where it was hardly wise to look for it. Few men (as she says) at his age could have had the sense or chivalrous feeling to understand all and presume upon nothing. She said it simply, but in a way to make any one ashamed of mistaking for an instant such a quiet noble nature as she has. I have only now to thank you for helping us both to get quit of the matter without trouble or dispute. I should be ashamed to thank you for doing my sister the simple justice not to misconstrue her share in it. If there ever was any evil-speaking, I hope and suppose it is now broken up for good. For the rest, I have agreed to leave it at present in your hands and hers-but if ever she wants help or defence, I shall, of course, be on the outlook to give it. I have only to add messages from us both, and remain, my dear aunt,

  Your affectionate nephew,

  FR. CHEYNE

  XXX Lady Midhurst to Lady Cheyne

  Lidcombe, Feb. 25th.

  MY DEAR CHILD:

  FIRST salute the fellow-baby in my name, and then you shall have news. I assume that is done, and will begin. Two days here with your father have put me up to the work there is to do. I shall not take you into council as to estate affairs, madame la baronne. When the heir is come to ripe boyhood you may take things in hand for yourself. Meantime we shall keep you both in tutelage, and grow fat on privy peculation; so that if you find no holes in the big Lidcombe cheese when you cut it, it will not be the fault of our teeth. So much for you and your bald imp; but you want news, I suppose, of friends. I called at Blocksham, and saw the Radworths in the flesh-that is, in the bones and cosmetics; for the male is gone to bone, and the female to paint. The poor man calls aloud for an embalmer: the poor woman cries pitifully for an enameller. They get on well enough again by this time, I believe. To use her own style, she is dead beat, and quite safe; viciously resigned. I think we may look for peace. She would have me racked if she could, no doubt, but received me smiling from the tips of her teeth outwards, and with a soft dry pressure of the fingers. Not a hint of anything kept back. Evidently, too, she holds her brother well in leash. Frank pleased me: he was courteous, quiet, without any sort of affectation, dissembled or displayed. I gave him sufficient accounts, and he was grateful; could not have taken the position and played a rather hard part more gracefully than he did. We said little, and came away with all good speed.

  The house is a grievous sort of place now, and likely to stay so. I have no doubt she will set all her wits to work and punish him for her failure. She will hardly get up a serious affair again, or it might be a charity to throw her some small animal by way of lighter food. It would not surprise me if she fell to philanthropic labour, or took some devotional drug by way of stimulant. The bureau d’amourettes is a bankrupt concern, you see: her sensation-shop is closed for good. I prophesy she will turn a decent worrying wife of the simpler Anglican breed; home-keeping, sharp-edged, earnestly petty and drily energetic. Negro-worship now, or foreign missions, will be about her mark; perhaps too a dash and sprinkle of religious feeling, with the chill just off; with a mild pinch of the old Platonic mixture now and then to flavour and leaven her dead lump of life: I can imagine her stages well enough for the next dozen or score of years. Pity she had not more stock in hand to start with. I have been at Plessey too; one could not be content with seeing half a result. Captain H. was more gracious to me than you would believe. I suspect the man has wit enough to see that but for my poor offices his boy would be now off Heaven knows whither, and stuck up to the ears in such a mess as nothing could ever have scraped him thoroughly clean of. He and Redgie are at last on the terms of an armed peace-very explosive terms, you know; but decent while they last, and preferable to a tooth-and-nail system. I will say I behaved admirably to him; asked what plans he had for our boy-what he thought the right way to take with him-assented and consented, and suggested and submitted; altogether, made myself a model. It is a fact that at this day he thinks Redgie might yet be, in time, bent and twisted and melted down into the Church mould of man-cut close to the fit of a surplice. Now I truly respect and enjoy a finished sample of clergy; no trade makes better company; I have known them a sort of cross between artist and diplomate which is charming. Then they have always about them a suppressed sense of something behind-some hint of professional reserve which does not really change them, but does colour them; something which fails of being a check on their style, but is exquisitely serviceable as a sauce to it. A cleric who is also a man of this world, and has nothing of the cross-bone type, is as perfect company as you can get or want. But conceive Redgie at any imaginably remote date coming up recast in that state out of the crucible of time! I kept a bland face though, and hardly sighed a soft semidissent. At least, I said we might turn him to something good yet; that I did hope and think. The fatherly nerve was touched; he warmed to me expressively. I am sure now the poor man thought he had been too hard on me all these years in his private mind, put bitter constructions on very innocent conduct of mine-had something, after all, to atone for on his side. He grew quite softly confidential and responsive before our talk was out. Ah, my dear, if you could see what odd, tumbled, shapeless recollections it brought up, to find myself friendly with him and exchanging wishes and hopes of mine against his, in all sympathy and rel
iance! I have not earned a stranger sensation for years. Ages ago, before any of your set were born,- before he married your mother: when he was quite young, poor, excitable, stupid, and pleasant-infinite ages ago, when the country and I were in our thirties and he in his twenties, we used to talk in that way. I felt ready to turn and look round for things I had missed since I was six years old. I should hardly have been taken aback if my brothers had come in and we had set to playing together like babies. To be face to face with such a dead and buried bit of life as that was so quaint that stranger things even would have fallen flat after it. However, there was no hoisting of sentimental colours on either side: though I suppose no story ever had a stranger end to it than ours. To this day I don’t know why I made him or let him marry your mother. I told him I must see Redgie and take him in hand by private word of mouth. He was quite nice about it, and left the boy to me, smiling even as he turned us over to each other; more benign than he ever was when I came over to see Redgie in his schooldays: a time that seemed farther off now than the years before his birth. I can’t tell you how odd it was to be thrown back into ‘52 without warning-worse than the proverbial middle of next week. I will say for Redgie he was duly ashamed, and never looked sillier in his boyish time than when I took him to task. Clara, I told him, had, as far as I knew, behaved excellently; but I wanted to have facts. Dismissal was legible on him all over; but the how I was bent on making out. So in time I got to some fair guess at the manner of her final stroke. It was sharp and direct. She wrote not exactly after my dictation (which I never thought she need do, or would), but simply in the resolute sacrificial style. She forbade him to answer; refused to read him, or reply if she read; would never see him till all had blown over for good. It seems she could not well deny that not long since he might have carried her off her feet-which feet she had now happily regained. Heaven knows, my dear child, what she could or could not deny if she chose: I confess I cannot yet make up my mind whether or no she ever had an idea of decamping, and divorcing with all ties: it is not like her; but who can be sure? She has none now. Honestly, I do suspect that a personal bias of liking did at times get mixed up with her sentimental spirit of intrigue; and that she would have done things for Redgie which a fellow ten years older or a thought less handsome would never have made her think of: in effect, that she was in love with him. She is quite capable of being upset by simple beauty if ever she were to have a real lover now, I believe he would be a fool and very nice-featured. It is the supreme Platonic retribution-the Nemesis of sentimental talent, which always clutches such runners as she is before they turn the post. There was a small grain of not dubious pathos in her letter: she was fond enough of him to regret what she did not quite care to fight for. What she told him I don’t know, nor how she put it: I can guess, though. She has done for his first love, at any rate. He knows he was a fool, and I did not press for his opinion of her. One may suppose she put him upon honour, and made the best of herself. I should guess, too, that she gave hints of what he might do in the way of annoyance if he were not ready to forgive and make friends at a distance. That you see would prick him on the chivalrous side, and he would obey and hold his tongue and hand at once-as he has done. Anyhow, the thing is well killed and put under ground, with no fear of grave-stealers; there is not even bone enough left of it to serve the purpose of a moral dissection. The chief mourner (if he did but know it) should be Ernest Radworth. I could cry over that wretchedest of husbands and students when I think of the thorns in his pillow, halters in his pew, and ratsbane in his porridge, which a constant wife will now have to spend her time in getting ready. Redgie was very fair about her; would have no abuse and no explanation. “ You see,” he said, “ she tells me what she chooses to tell, and that one is bound to take; but I have no sort of business now to begin peeping and snuffing at anything beyond. I thought once, you know, we both had a right to ask or answer; that was when she seemed to care about it. One can’t be such a blackguard as to try and take it out of her for changing her mind. She was quite right to think twice and do as she chose; and the best I can do now is to keep off and not get in her way.” Of course the boy talks as if the old tender terms between them had been broken off for centuries, and their eyes were now meeting across a bottomless pit of change. I shall not say another word on the matter: all is as straight and right as it need be, though I know that only last month he was writing her the most insane letters. These, one may hope, she will think fit to burn. To him I believe she had the sense never to write at any length or to any purpose but twice, this last time being one. And so our little bit of comedy slips off the stage without noise, and the curtain laps down over it. Lucky it never turned to the tearful style, as it once threatened to do. I need not say that Redgie does not expect to love seriously again. Not that he says it; he has just enough sense of humour to keep the assertion down; but evidently he thinks it. Some one has put a notion into the Captain’s head about Philomène de Rochelaurier-Clara herself, perhaps, for aught I know; she is quite ingenious enough to have tried that touch while the real play was still in rehearsal. Nothing will come of that, though; I shall simply reconquer the boy, and hold him in hand till I find a woman fit to have charge of him. I hope he will turn to some good, seriously. Some of his friends are not bad friends for him: I like that young Audley well enough, and he seems to believe in Redgie at a quite irrational rate. Perhaps I do too. He must take his way, or make it; and we shall see. As to the marriage matter, I have thought lately that Armande might be given her own way and Frank married to the girl-if they are all of one mind about it. It sounds rather Louis Quinze to bâcler a match in this fashion, but I don’t see why it should not come to good. He may as well marry now as later. I don’t at all know what he will make in the professional line; and he can hardly throw over all thoughts of it. I did think of proposing he should be at the head of the estates for a time, in the capacity of chief manager and overlooker; but there were rubs in the way of that plan. It is a nice post, and might be made a nice sinecure-or demicure, with efficient business people under and about one; not bad work for a cadet de famille, and has been taken on like terms before now. We owe him something; however, we may look for time to pay it. I will confess to you that if the child had been a girl I meant to have brought you together at some future day. You must forgive me; for the heir’s marrying the dowager would have made our friends open their eyes and lips a little; and things are much better as they are.