Lord Alistair's Rebellion

Lord Alistair stood on the deck of a Channel steamer and watched the coast of England melt into the night.

His mood was burthened with that indignant melancholy which swelled the heart of Byron and of Whistler, and many another exile whom the builders of the Raj have rejected from their midst. In the Tate Gallery hangs a painting which he had often gazed upon, a symbolic masterpiece of Watts’. It represents hard-heartedness sitting crowned with gold and robed in scarlet on the throne of the world. The painter has called his figure “Mammon”; it came before Alistair just then as the image of England—the England that stones her prophets and worships her swindlers; the England that made Burns a gauger and one Perceval Prime Minister; that chained the dying Napoleon on an ocean rock, and rejected the last prayer of Nelson; England, with her shop-keeper’s conscience, where art is a sin and generosity a crime.

A sense of exultation and relief accompanied his thoughts. He was escaping from the Puritan prison against whose bars his spirit had so often bruised its wings. In the obtuse self-satisfaction, in the unctuous mercy, of its keepers he had felt something more merciless than in all the recorded cruelties of furious saints and frantic Emperors. Not the snow-peaks of Switzerland, he told himself, not the Shakespearean cadences of Venice, nor Rome with her memories and marbles, afforded that zest to wandering which greets us like a scent on foreign soil. It was the sense of freedom from that chain of custom and convention which we forge upon ourselves. The Mediterranean filled her coasts with pleasure cities which were cities of refuge from the middle class. The Niagara of gold that poured from England was the price the English tradesman pays for his vindictive respectability. It was the tax on spite.

A moist wind thick with delicious sea-smells, that mounted in the brain like wine, lifted him out of his vexed meditation as the steamer drew clear of the tangled lights of Spithead and came out on the wide moonlit pavement of the sea. His mother joined him on the deck, and they sat and watched the broad moon sail aloft like a luminous balloon scattering glory.

“I should like it to be like this always,” Alistair sighed in ecstasy.

A sense of utter peace had fallen on his spirit, worn out with striving. The molten orb, lifting beyond the shadow of the earth, seemed to drag his soul upward as a spar is sucked in the wake of a great ship. He looked up and longed after that visible Elysium, that floating Island of the Blest on which the happy dead voyaged in light for ever across a sea buoyed with stars. That ship of souls, on what far coasts did it touch? within what magic roadsteads anchor? What wondrous cities went forth to greet the mariners of that immortal Odyssey?

The yearnings of a thousand generations who have spelled in the heavens for some divine boding of the fates of men; the mystic soundings of devout astronomers in temple labyrinths beside old Nile; the vision conned upon the starlit terraces of Babylonian towers—all these forgotten intimations from his pre-natal life surged in upon him in waves of deep emotion, and floated his consciousness from its moorings among the things of every day.

Caroline sat beside her son and did not break the silence. She, too, was happy. Her prayers had been granted; the prodigal had found his way home. Within the compass of her simple mind there was room for only one ending to the story. Conversion would follow on repentance, and a happy marriage would insure a regular and fortunate career.

Her agitated joy over his return to Colonsay House had moved Alistair, if not to repentance, to a wish that he could change his nature in accordance with the life his mother wanted him to lead. In the first moments of united tenderness he even persuaded himself that this might be so. He was wearied and disheartened by his warfare with society, and he hoped that the truce might ripen into a peace.

The Duke of Trent’s reception of his brother had been courteous, if not very cordial. He bade him welcome to the house, and on the following evening informed him in their mother’s presence that the family solicitor had taken charge of his affairs.

Alistair saw that he was expected to be grateful, and he succeeded in appearing so, though in his heart he was half sorry to accept his brother’s favours for the sake of his creditors.

“If it were not for you I would not let Trent give a penny to these people,” he told his mother when they were by themselves.

“It is not only us you have to think of,” the Duchess seized the opportunity to suggest. “We hope you may find a wife who will make your life happy, and you would not like to go to her with any mark against your name.”

The Home Secretary had never spoken of Sir Bernard Vanbrugh’s refusal. His repulse had mortified him deeply, but he took it sedately as he took most other things. He blamed himself for not having made sure of Hero in the first place, and with a certain obstinacy he still clung to the idea that she would sooner or later be his.

Sir Bernard had been equally silent on his side. He did not know which way his daughter’s inclination went, and wanted to avoid a disagreement.

The Duchess, whose diplomacy was of the simplest order, went on to say to Alistair:

“Don’t you think you would like to come abroad for a little time? The Vanbrughs have a house at Dinard, and it would be very pleasant if you would take me over there.”

Alistair gazed at his mother in doubt. He could hardly misunderstand her drift, and the light in his eyes was a sufficient revelation to her of his own wishes. But the gossip which had reached him concerning his brother and Hero Vanbrugh held him back.

“What about Trent?” he said.

“He can’t leave town till Parliament rises, of course. He may join us afterwards, perhaps.”

Alistair was puzzled by his mother’s indifferent tone.

“Will he like me to be there in his absence?” he asked.

The Duchess was equally puzzled.

“Why, what difference does it make to him?” she returned.

“Isn’t there something? I thought—I heard that he and Miss Vanbrugh——”

The Duchess looked at him in surprise.

“Oh, no!” she declared with confidence. “There has never been any idea of that kind. He likes her very much as a friend, but he would not think of anything more. I know exactly what his views are; he has often told me. He means to marry a great fortune. Hero will have money, no doubt,” she was quick to add. “Her father is rich for a professional man, I believe. But, of course, he could not give her enough for Trent.”

Alistair received the assurance with a throb of delight, as his mother’s project suddenly shone out to him in the bright light of hope. But a misgiving of another kind assailed him, and one which he found it more difficult to explain to her. He found himself ashamed to pass straight from the side of Molly Finucane to such a girl as Hero Vanbrugh. It would be almost an insult, he thought; it would be acting as though he sought Hero, not for her own sake, but as a sort of refuge, a substitute for the woman he had left.

The sense of shame which Hero alone had been able to rouse in him returned in its full force at the idea of presenting himself before her with all the stains of his past life still showing, with Molly’s kisses fresh upon his lips. He felt a desire to go away first and purge his life in other scenes, to renew himself in some atmosphere of sweet and strong endeavour from which he could hope to emerge fitter for Hero’s love.

Alistair wondered that his mother did not perceive the indelicacy of such a course as she had proposed, and Caroline on her part wondered at the strange embarrassment with which Alistair at last gave his consent to her plans. It was not easy for these two to understand each other.

During the few days that elapsed before their departure the Duchess did succeed in getting a glimpse at what was weighing on Alistair’s mind. She saw with secret concern that he really did doubt if he were worthy of such a girl as Hero, and that this doubt might even prove an obstacle to the fulfilment of her desires. It was necessary to encourage him, and give him confidence in himself, and the conscientious mother was surprised to find herself in the strange part of an apologist, extenuating instead of aggravating her son’s misdoing. Her first faltering attempts in this direction brought about a beautiful change in the whole intercourse between the pair. Caroline was deeply touched to see how the prodigal son’s nature softened and expanded under this rare indulgence. They began to be happy together; the poor woman secretly feared that she must be doing wrong.

When Alistair rose on the first morning in their new home, and stepped out of his bedroom window on to the little balcony that overlooked the Emerald Coast, he repeated to himself the two lines of Keats in which the essence of all poetry is distilled:

The house, which had been Hero’s choice for them, stood on the far edge of a little headland dividing a sandy bay from the broad haven of the Rance. The surrounding sea was ringed with a crescent of rocks and islets in the midst of which green Cézembre glowed—

“The captain jewel in the carcanet.”

Something, that seemed the mast of a wrecked ship, rose up in melancholy memorial from one seaweed-covered ledge on which the waves were now foaming softly, like a child that tries to kiss away the recollection of its passion. On his right hand, across the shallow glistening tides of the estuary, the tall spire of St. Malo lifted itself like a more stately mast above the white walls of the islet city of the corsairs. Far to the west the grey cape of Freher watched the Atlantic billows, like a grim warder of the Breton coast. And over all the summer haze lay like a spell of strong imagination, and conjured up a legendary world.

It was a leaf of poetry that lay outspread before him, and he read it with a poet’s eye. The faculty of toil, the long labour of the midnight lamp, the fortunate strategy of words, had been denied to Alistair Stuart, and therefore he was not a poet. Remained the gift of wonder and of worship, and by that talisman he still had power to people the sweeping landscape with mysterious life; the Tritons rose and called each other from the waves, old Proteus lifted a slumbering head and listened from his cave, and on the rocks the Sirens sang.

He had risen in that happy mood when every little thing becomes a spring of joy. The coffee foaming in its thick white cup, that woke him with its fragrance, and the shell-like bread, were delightful reminders that he had come to a lighter-hearted land. He dressed himself in pearl-grey flannels, and wandered out into the garden with a wide-rimmed panama over his brows, and drank the scent of roses and carnations, intoxicated by all the beauty round him, like a man risen from a sick-bed. His thoughts went back to the life he had just left, and he wondered that he could have lived it for so long. All the dark speculations, the impulses that had moved him to go down into sheol, seemed to have suddenly become as unreal as the imaginary dangers of the night forest are to the traveller coming out on the broad highway at dawn.

When the Duchess joined him in the garden walk that overlooked the sea, she gazed on her boy with secret pride. As he stood there in the sunshine, the light breeze playing in his hair, and in his eyes the dawn of joy and hope, he seemed to her mother’s heart a Prince Charming who had only to stretch out his hand and pluck the fairest flower in the garden of love.

Alistair found himself too much excited to remain at home waiting for the advent of the Princess. With a lover’s superstition he believed that the way to hasten her coming was to go out himself. He kissed his mother, and went down a rock-hewn stairway at the foot of which a wooden gate let him out on the sands.

The little Plage, enclosed between the two headlands which Dinard thrusts out into the sea like a snail’s horns, was bustling like a fair. The French had made a miniature village of the beach, with streets of little huts in which they read, and sewed, and called upon each other, and carried on their family life. Children were burrowing in the sand like rabbits, and bathers clad in the bright hues of butterflies fluttered on the sea’s edge.

“And I might live this life always!” Alistair murmured, with a sort of wonder at his own past blundering, as he stepped among this glad throng, as glad as they.

Hero came towards him, walking beside her father, dressed in white with one blue flower at her throat and a red flower in her heart.

“We were just coming to see you!” she cried gaily.

“I could not wait for you, you see!” cried Alistair.

And they two looked at each other through the magic casement of love.