CHAPTER IX: HARRY VERNEY HEARS HIS LAST SHOT FIRED
The day after the Lavingtons’ return, when Lancelot walked up to the Priory with a fluttering heart to inquire after all parties, and see one, he found the squire in a great state of excitement.
A large gang of poachers, who had come down from London by rail, had been devastating all the covers round, to stock the London markets by the first of October, and intended, as Tregarva had discovered, to pay Mr. Lavington’s preserves a visit that night. They didn’t care for country justices, not they. Weren’t all their fines paid by highly respectable game-dealers at the West end? They owned three dog-carts among them; a parcel by railway would bring them down bail to any amount; they tossed their money away at the public-houses, like gentlemen; thanks to the Game Laws, their profits ran high, and when they had swept the country pretty clean of game, why, they would just finish off the season by a stray highway robbery or two, and vanish into Babylon and their native night.
Such was Harry Verney’s information as he strutted about the courtyard waiting for the squire’s orders.
‘But they’ve put their nose into a furze-bush, Muster Smith, they have. We’ve got our posse-commontaturs, fourteen men, sir, as’ll play the whole vale to cricket, and whap them; and every one’ll fight, for they’re half poachers themselves, you see’ (and Harry winked and chuckled); ‘and they can’t abide no interlopers to come down and take the sport out of their mouths.’
‘But are you sure they’ll come to-night?’
‘That ’ere Paul says so. Wonder how he found out—some of his underhand, colloguing, Methodist ways, I’ll warrant. I seed him preaching to that ’ere Crawy, three or four times when he ought to have hauled him up. He consorts with them poachers, sir, uncommon. I hope he ben’t one himself, that’s all.’
‘Nonsense, Harry!’
‘Oh? Eh? Don’t say old Harry don’t know nothing, that’s all. I’ve fixed his flint, anyhow.’
‘Ah! Smith!’ shouted the squire out of his study window, with a cheerful and appropriate oath. ‘The very man I wanted to see! You must lead these keepers for me to-night. They always fight better with a gentleman among them. Breeding tells, you know—breeding tells.’
Lancelot felt a strong disgust at the occupation, but he was under too many obligations to the squire to refuse.
‘Ay, I knew you were game,’ said the old man. ‘And you’ll find it capital fun. I used to think it so, I know, when I was young. Many a shindy have I had here in my uncle’s time, under the very windows, before the chase was disparked, when the fellows used to come down after the deer.’
Just then Lancelot turned and saw Argemone standing close to him. He almost sprang towards her—and retreated, for he saw that she had overheard the conversation between him and her father.
‘What! Mr. Smith!’ said she in a tone in which tenderness and contempt, pity and affected carelessness, were strangely mingled. ‘So! you are going to turn gamekeeper to-night?’
Lancelot was blundering out something, when the squire interposed.
‘Let her alone, Smith. Women will be tender-hearted, you know. Quite right—but they don’t understand these things. They fight with their tongues, and we with our fists; and then they fancy their weapons don’t hurt—Ha! ha! ha!’
‘Mr. Smith,’ said Argemone, in a low, determined voice, ‘if you have promised my father to go on this horrid business—go. But promise me, too, that you will only look on, or I will never—’
Argemone had not time to finish her sentence before Lancelot had promised seven times over, and meant to keep his promise, as we all do.
About ten o’clock that evening Lancelot and Tregarva were walking stealthily up a ride in one of the home-covers, at the head of some fifteen fine young fellows, keepers, grooms, and not extempore ‘watchers,’ whom old Harry was marshalling and tutoring, with exhortations as many and as animated as if their ambition was ‘Mourir pour la patrie.’
‘How does this sort of work suit you, Tregarva, for I don’t like it at all! The fighting’s all very well, but it’s a poor cause.’
‘Oh, sir, I have no mercy on these Londoners. If it was these poor half-starved labourers, that snare the same hares that have been eating up their garden-stuff all the week, I can’t touch them, sir, and that’s truth; but these ruffians—And yet, sir, wouldn’t it be better for the parsons to preach to them, than for the keepers to break their heads?’
‘Oh?’ said Lancelot, ‘the parsons say all to them that they can.’
Tregarva shook his head.
‘I doubt that, sir. But, no doubt, there’s a great change for the better in the parsons. I remember the time, sir, that there wasn’t an earnest clergyman in the vale; and now every other man you meet is trying to do his best. But those London parsons, sir, what’s the matter with them? For all their societies and their schools, the devil seems to keep ahead of them sadly. I doubt they haven’t found the right fly yet for publicans and sinners to rise at.’
A distant shot in the cover.
‘There they are, sir. I thought that Crawy wouldn’t lead me false when I let him off.’
‘Well, fight away, then, and win. I have promised Miss Lavington not to lift a hand in the business.’
‘Then you’re a lucky man, sir. But the squire’s game is his own, and we must do our duty by our master.’
There was a rustle in the bushes, and a tramp of feet on the turf.
‘There they are, sir, sure enough. The Lord keep us from murder this night!’ And Tregarva pulled off his neckcloth, and shook his huge limbs, as if to feel that they were all in their places, in a way that augured ill for the man who came across him.
They turned the corner of a ride, and, in an instant, found themselves face to face with five or six armed men, with blackened faces, who, without speaking a word, dashed at them, and the fight began; reinforcements came up on each side, and the engagement became general.
‘The forest-laws were sharp and stern,
The
forest blood was keen,
They lashed together for life and death
Beneath
the hollies green.
‘The metal good and the walnut-wood
Did
soon in splinters flee;
They tossed the orts to south and north,
And
grappled knee to knee.
‘They wrestled up, they wrestled down,
They
wrestled still and sore;
The herbage sweet beneath their feet
Was
stamped to mud and gore.’
And all the while the broad still moon stared down on them grim and cold, as if with a saturnine sneer at the whole humbug; and the silly birds about whom all this butchery went on, slept quietly over their heads, every one with his head under his wing. Oh! if pheasants had but understanding, how they would split their sides with chuckling and crowing at the follies which civilised Christian men perpetrate for their precious sake!
Had I the pen of Homer (though they say he never used one), or even that of the worthy who wasted precious years in writing a Homer Burlesqued, what heroic exploits might not I immortalise! In every stupid serf and cunning ruffian there, there was a heart as brave as Ajax’s own; but then they fought with sticks instead of lances, and hammered away on fustian jackets instead of brazen shields; and, therefore, poor fellows, they were beneath ‘the dignity of poetry,’ whatever that may mean. If one of your squeamish ‘dignity-of-poetry’ critics had just had his head among the gun-stocks for five minutes that night, he would have found it grim tragic earnest enough; not without a touch of fun though, here and there.
Lancelot leant against a tree and watched the riot with folded arms, mindful of his promise to Argemone, and envied Tregarva as he hurled his assailants right and left with immense strength, and led the van of battle royally. Little would Argemone have valued the real proof of love which he was giving her as he looked on sulkily, while his fingers tingled with longing to be up and doing. Strange—that mere lust of fighting, common to man and animals, whose traces even the lamb and the civilised child evince in their mock-fights, the earliest and most natural form of play. Is it, after all, the one human propensity which is utterly evil, incapable of being turned to any righteous use? Gross and animal, no doubt it is, but not the less really pleasant, as every Irishman and many an Englishman knows well enough. A curious instance of this, by the bye, occurred in Paris during the February Revolution. A fat English coachman went out, from mere curiosity, to see the fighting. As he stood and watched, a new passion crept over him; he grew madder and madder as the bullets whistled past him; at last, when men began to drop by his side, he could stand it no longer, seized a musket, and rushed in, careless which side he took,—
‘To drink delight of battle with his peers.’
He was not heard of for a day or two, and then they found him stiff and cold, lying on his face across a barricade, with a bullet through his heart. Sedentary persons may call him a sinful fool. Be it so. Homo sum: humani nihil à me alienum puto.
Lancelot, I verily believe, would have kept his promise, though he saw that the keepers gave ground, finding Cockney skill too much for their clumsy strength; but at last Harry Verney, who had been fighting as venomously as a wild cat, and had been once before saved from a broken skull by Tregarva, rolled over at his very feet with a couple of poachers on him.
‘You won’t see an old man murdered, Mr. Smith?’ cried he, imploringly.
Lancelot tore the ruffians off the old man right and left. One of them struck him; he returned the blow; and, in an instant, promises and Argemone, philosophy and anti-game-law prejudices, were swept out of his head, and ‘he went,’ as the old romances say, ‘hurling into the midst of the press,’ as mere a wild animal for the moment as angry bull or boar. An instant afterwards, though, he burst out laughing, in spite of himself, as ‘The Battersea Bantam,’ who had been ineffectually dancing round Tregarva like a gamecock spurring at a bull, turned off with a voice of ineffable disgust,—
‘That big cove’s a yokel; ta’nt creditable to waste science on him. You’re my man, if you please, sir,’—and the little wiry lump of courage and conceit, rascality and good humour, flew at Lancelot, who was twice his size, ‘with a heroism worthy of a better cause,’ as respectable papers, when they are not too frightened, say of the French.
* * * * *
‘Do you want any more?’ asked Lancelot.
‘Quite a pleasure, sir, to meet a scientific gen’lman. Beg your pardon, sir; stay a moment while I wipes my face. Now, sir, time, if you please.’
Alas for the little man! in another moment he tumbled over and lay senseless—Lancelot thought he had killed him. The gang saw their champion fall, gave ground, and limped off, leaving three of their party groaning on the ground, beside as many Whitford men.
As it was in the beginning, so is it to be to the end, my foolish brothers! From the poacher to the prime minister—wearying yourselves for very vanity! The soldier is not the only man in England who is fool enough to be shot at for a shilling a day.
But while all the rest were busy picking up the wounded men and securing the prisoners, Harry Verney alone held on, and as the poachers retreated slowly up the ride, he followed them, peering into the gloom, as if in hopes of recognising some old enemy.
‘Stand back, Harry Verney; we know you, and we’d be loth to harm an old man,’ cried a voice out of the darkness.
‘Eh? Do you think old Harry’d turn back when he was once on the track of ye? You soft-fisted, gin-drinking, counter-skipping Cockney rascals, that fancy you’re to carry the county before you, because you get your fines paid by London-tradesmen! Eh? What do you take old Harry for?’
‘Go back, you old fool!’ and a volley of oaths followed. ‘If you follow us, we’ll fire at you, as sure as the moon’s in heaven!’
‘Fire away, then! I’ll follow you to—!’ and the old man paced stealthily but firmly up to them.
Tregarva saw his danger and sprang forward, but it was too late.
‘What, you will have it, then?’
A sharp crack followed,—a bright flash in the darkness—every white birch-stem and jagged oak-leaf shone out for a moment as bright as day—and in front of the glare Lancelot saw the old man throw his arms wildly upward, fall forward, and disappear on the dark ground.
‘You’ve done it! off with you!’ And the rascals rushed off up the ride.
In a moment Tregarva was by the old man’s side, and lifted him tenderly up.
‘They’ve done for me, Paul. Old Harry’s got his gruel. He’s heard his last shot fired. I knowed it ’ud come to this, and I said it. Eh? Didn’t I, now, Paul?’ And as the old man spoke, the workings of his lungs pumped great jets of blood out over the still heather-flowers as they slept in the moonshine, and dabbled them with smoking gore.
‘Here, men,’ shouted the colonel, ‘up with him at once, and home! Here, put a brace of your guns together, muzzle and lock. Help him to sit on them, Lancelot. There, Harry, put your arms round their necks. Tregarva, hold him up behind. Now then, men, left legs foremost—keep step—march!’ And they moved off towards the Priory.
‘You seem to know everything, colonel,’ said Lancelot.
The colonel did not answer for a moment.
‘Lancelot, I learnt this dodge from the only friend I ever had in the world, or ever shall have; and a week after I marched him home to his deathbed in this very way.’
‘Paul—Paul Tregarva,’ whispered old Harry, ‘put your head down here: wipe my mouth, there’s a man; it’s wet, uncommon wet.’ It was his own life-blood. ‘I’ve been a beast to you, Paul. I’ve hated you, and envied you, and tried to ruin you. And now you’ve saved my life once this night; and here you be a-nursing of me as my own son might do, if he was here, poor fellow! I’ve ruined you, Paul; the Lord forgive me!’
‘Pray! pray!’ said Paul, ‘and He will forgive you. He is all mercy. He pardoned the thief on the cross—’
‘No, Paul, no thief,—not so bad as that, I hope, anyhow; never touched a feather of the squire’s. But you dropped a song, Paul, a bit of writing.’
Paul turned pale.
‘And—the Lord forgive me!—I put it in the squire’s fly-book.’
‘The Lord forgive you! Amen!’ said Paul, solemnly.
Wearily and slowly they stepped on towards the old man’s cottage. A messenger had gone on before, and in a few minutes the squire, Mrs. Lavington, and the girls, were round the bed of their old retainer.
They sent off right and left for the doctor and the vicar; the squire was in a frenzy of rage and grief.
‘Don’t take on, master, don’t take on,’ said old Harry, as he lay; while the colonel and Honoria in vain endeavoured to stanch the wound. ‘I knowed it would be so, sooner or later; ’tis all in the way of business. They haven’t carried off a bird, squire, not a bird; we was too many for ’em—eh, Paul, eh?’
‘Where is that cursed doctor?’ said the squire. ‘Save him, colonel, save him; and I’ll give you—’
Alas! the charge of shot at a few feet distance had entered like a bullet, tearing a great ragged hole.—There was no hope, and the colonel knew it; but he said nothing.
‘The second keeper,’ sighed Argemone, ‘who has been killed here! Oh, Mr. Smith, must this be? Is God’s blessing on all this?’
Lancelot said nothing. The old man lighted up at Argemone’s voice.
‘There’s the beauty, there’s the pride of Whitford. And sweet Miss Honor, too,—so kind to nurse a poor old man! But she never would let him teach her to catch perch, would she? She was always too tender-hearted. Ah, squire, when we’re dead and gone,—dead and gone,—squire, they’ll be the pride of Whitford still! And they’ll keep up the old place—won’t you, my darlings? And the old name, too! For, you know, there must always be a Lavington in Whitford Priors, till the Nun’s pool runs up to Ashy Down.’
‘And a curse upon the Lavingtons,’ sighed Argemone to herself in an undertone.
Lancelot heard what she said.
The vicar entered, but he was too late. The old man’s strength was failing, and his mind began to wander.
‘Windy,’ he murmured to himself, ‘windy, dark and windy—birds won’t lie—not old Harry’s fault. How black it grows! We must be gone by nightfall, squire. Where’s that young dog gone? Arter the larks, the brute.’
Old Squire Lavington sobbed like a child.
‘You will soon be home, my man,’ said the vicar. ‘Remember that you have a Saviour in heaven. Cast yourself on His mercy.’
Harry shook his head.
‘Very good words, very kind,—very heavy gamebag, though. Never get home, never any more at all. Where’s my boy Tom to carry it? Send for my boy Tom. He was always a good boy till he got along with them poachers.’
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘listen! There’s bells a-ringing—ringing in my head. Come you here, Paul Tregarva.’
He pulled Tregarva’s face down to his own, and whispered,—
‘Them’s the bells a-ringing for Miss Honor’s wedding.’
Paul started and drew back. Harry chuckled and grinned for a moment in his old foxy, peering way, and then wandered off again.
‘What’s that thumping and roaring?’ Alas! it was the failing pulsation of his own heart. ‘It’s the weir, the weir—a-washing me away—thundering over me.—Squire, I’m drowning,—drowning and choking! Oh, Lord, how deep! Now it’s running quieter—now I can breathe again—swift and oily—running on, running on, down to the sea. See how the grayling sparkle! There’s a pike! ’Tain’t my fault, squire, so help me—Don’t swear, now, squire; old men and dying maun’t swear, squire. How steady the river runs down? Lower and slower—lower and slower: now it’s quite still—still—still—’
His voice sank away—he was dead!
No! once more the light flashed up in the socket. He sprang upright in the bed, and held out his withered paw with a kind of wild majesty, as he shouted,—
‘There ain’t such a head of hares on any manor in the county. And them’s the last words of Harry Verney!’
He fell back—shuddered—a rattle in his throat—another—and all was over.
CHAPTER X: ‘MURDER WILL OUT,’ AND LOVE TOO
Argemone need never have known of Lancelot’s share in the poaching affray; but he dared not conceal anything from her. And so he boldly went up the next day to the Priory, not to beg pardon, but to justify himself, and succeeded. And, before long, he found himself fairly installed as her pupil, nominally in spiritual matters, but really in subjects of which she little dreamed.
Every day he came to read and talk with her, and whatever objections Mrs. Lavington expressed were silenced by Argemone. She would have it so, and her mother neither dared nor knew how to control her. The daughter had utterly out-read and out-thought her less educated parent, who was clinging in honest bigotry to the old forms, while Argemone was wandering forth over the chaos of the strange new age,—a poor homeless Noah’s dove, seeking rest for the sole of her foot and finding none. And now all motherly influence and sympathy had vanished, and Mrs. Lavington, in fear and wonder, let her daughter go her own way. She could not have done better, perhaps; for Providence had found for Argemone a better guide than her mother could have done, and her new pupil was rapidly becoming her teacher. She was matched, for the first time, with a man who was her own equal in intellect and knowledge; and she felt how real was that sexual difference which she had been accustomed to consider as an insolent calumny against woman. Proudly and indignantly she struggled against the conviction, but in vain. Again and again she argued with him, and was vanquished,—or, at least, what is far better, made to see how many different sides there are to every question. All appeals to authority he answered with a contemptuous smile. ‘The best authorities?’ he used to say. ‘On what question do not the best authorities flatly contradict each other? And why? Because every man believes just what it suits him to believe. Don’t fancy that men reason themselves into convictions; the prejudices and feelings of their hearts give them some idea or theory, and then they find facts at their leisure to prove their theory true. Every man sees facts through narrow spectacles, red, or green, or blue, as his nation or his temperament colours them: and he is quite right, only he must allow us the liberty of having our spectacles too. Authority is only good for proving facts. We must draw our own conclusions.’ And Argemone began to suspect that he was right,—at least to see that her opinions were mere hearsays, picked up at her own will and fancy; while his were living, daily-growing ideas. Her mind was beside his as the vase of cut flowers by the side of the rugged tree, whose roots are feeding deep in the mother earth. In him she first learnt how one great truth received into the depths of the soul germinates there, and bears fruit a thousandfold; explaining, and connecting, and glorifying innumerable things, apparently the most unlike and insignificant; and daily she became a more reverent listener, and gave herself up, half against her will and conscience, to the guidance of a man whom she knew to be her inferior in morals and in orthodoxy. She had worshipped intellect, and now it had become her tyrant; and she was ready to give up every belief which she once had prized, to flutter like a moth round its fascinating brilliance.
Who can blame her, poor girl? For Lancelot’s humility was even more irresistible than his eloquence. He assumed no superiority. He demanded her assent to truths, not because they were his opinions, but simply for the truth’s sake; and on all points which touched the heart he looked up to her as infallible and inspired. In questions of morality, of taste, of feeling, he listened not as a lover to his mistress, but rather as a baby to its mother; and thus, half unconsciously to himself, he taught her where her true kingdom lay,—that the heart, and not the brain, enshrines the priceless pearl of womanhood, the oracular jewel, the ‘Urim and Thummim,’ before which gross man can only inquire and adore.
And, in the meantime, a change was passing upon Lancelot. His morbid vanity—that brawl-begotten child of struggling self-conceit and self-disgust—was vanishing away; and as Mr. Tennyson says in one of those priceless idyls of his, before which the shade of Theocritus must hide his diminished head,—
‘He was altered, and began
To move about
the house with joy,
And with the certain step of man.’
He had, at last, found one person who could appreciate him. And in deliberate confidence he set to work to conquer her, and make her his own. It was a traitorous return, but a very natural one. And she, sweet creature! walked straight into the pleasant snare, utterly blind, because she fancied that she saw clearly. In the pride of her mysticism, she had fancied herself above so commonplace a passion as love. It was a curious feature of lower humanity, which she might investigate and analyse harmlessly as a cold scientific spectator; and, in her mingled pride and purity, she used to indulge Lancelot in metaphysical disquisitions about love and beauty, like that first one in their walk home from Minchampstead, from which a less celestially innocent soul would have shrunk. She thought, forsooth, as the old proverb says, that she could deal in honey, without putting her hand to her mouth. But Lancelot knew better, and marked her for his own. And daily his self-confidence and sense of rightful power developed, and with them, paradoxical as it may seem, the bitterest self-abasement. The contact of her stainless innocence, the growing certainty that the destiny of that innocence was irrevocably bound up with his own, made him shrink from her whenever he remembered his own guilty career. To remember that there were passages in it which she must never know—that she would cast him from her with abhorrence if she once really understood their vileness? To think that, amid all the closest bonds of love, there must for ever be an awful, silent gulf in the past, of which they must never speak!—That she would bring to him what he could never, never bring to her!—The thought was unbearable. And as hideous recollections used to rise before him, devilish caricatures of his former self, mopping and mowing at him in his dreams, he would start from his lonely bed, and pace the room for hours, or saddle his horse, and ride all night long aimlessly through the awful woods, vainly trying to escape himself. How gladly, at those moments, he would have welcomed centuries of a material hell, to escape from the more awful spiritual hell within him,—to buy back that pearl of innocence which he had cast recklessly to be trampled under the feet of his own swinish passions! But, no; that which was done could never be undone,—never, to all eternity. And more than once, as he wandered restlessly from one room to another, the barrels of his pistols seemed to glitter with a cold, devilish smile, and call to him,—
‘Come to us! and with one touch of your finger, send that bursting spirit which throbs against your brow to flit forth free, and nevermore to defile her purity by your presence!’
But no, again: a voice within seemed to command him to go on, and claim her, and win her, spite of his own vileness. And in after years, slowly, and in fear and trembling, he knew it for the voice of God, who had been leading him to become worthy of her through that bitter shame of his own unworthiness.
As One higher than them would have it, she took a fancy to read Homer in the original, and Lancelot could do no less than offer his services as translator. She would prepare for him portions of the Odyssey, and every day that he came up to the Priory he used to comment on it to her; and so for many a week, in the dark wainscoted library, and in the clipt yew-alleys of the old gardens, and under the brown autumn trees, they quarried together in that unexhausted mine, among the records of the rich Titan-youth of man. And step by step Lancelot opened to her the everlasting significance of the poem; the unconscious purity which lingers in it, like the last rays of the Paradise dawn; its sense of the dignity of man as man; the religious reverence with which it speaks of all human ties, human strength and beauty—ay, even of merely animal human appetites, as God-given and Godlike symbols. She could not but listen and admire, when he introduced her to the sheer paganism of Schiller’s Gods of Greece; for on this subject he was more eloquent than on any. He had gradually, in fact, as we have seen, dropped all faith in anything but Nature; the slightest fact about a bone or a weed was more important to him than all the books of divinity which Argemone lent him—to be laid by unread.
‘What do you believe in?’ she asked him one day, sadly.
‘In this!’ he said, stamping his foot on the ground. ‘In the earth I stand on, and the things I see walking and growing on it. There may be something beside it—what you call a spiritual world. But if He who made me intended me to think of spirit first, He would have let me see it first. But as He has given me material senses, and put me in a material world, I take it as a fair hint that I am meant to use those senses first, whatever may come after. I may be intended to understand the unseen world, but if so, it must be, as I suspect, by understanding the visible one: and there are enough wonders there to occupy me for some time to come.’
‘But the Bible?’ (Argemone had given up long ago wasting words about the ‘Church.’)
‘My only Bible as yet is Bacon. I know that he is right, whoever is wrong. If that Hebrew Bible is to be believed by me, it must agree with what I know already from science.’
What was to be done with so intractable a heretic? Call him an infidel and a Materialist, of course, and cast him off with horror. But Argemone was beginning to find out that, when people are really in earnest, it may be better sometimes to leave God’s methods of educating them alone, instead of calling the poor honest seekers hard names, which the speakers themselves don’t understand.
But words would fail sometimes, and in default of them Lancelot had recourse to drawings, and manifested in them a talent for thinking in visible forms which put the climax to all Argemone’s wonder. A single profile, even a mere mathematical figure, would, in his hands, become the illustration of a spiritual truth. And, in time, every fresh lesson on the Odyssey was accompanied by its illustration,—some bold and simple outline drawing. In Argemone’s eyes, the sketches were immaculate and inspired; for their chief, almost their only fault, was just those mere anatomical slips which a woman would hardly perceive, provided the forms were generally graceful and bold.
One day his fancy attempted a bolder flight. He brought a large pen-and-ink drawing, and laying it silently on the table before her, fixed his eyes intensely on her face. The sketch was labelled, the ‘Triumph of Woman.’ In the foreground, to the right and left, were scattered groups of men, in the dresses and insignia of every period and occupation. The distance showed, in a few bold outlines, a dreary desert, broken by alpine ridges, and furrowed here and there by a wandering watercourse. Long shadows pointed to the half-risen sun, whose disc was climbing above the waste horizon. And in front of the sun, down the path of the morning beams, came Woman, clothed only in the armour of her own loveliness. Her bearing was stately, and yet modest; in her face pensive tenderness seemed wedded with earnest joy. In her right hand lay a cross, the emblem of self-sacrifice. Her path across the desert was marked by the flowers which sprang up beneath her steps; the wild gazelle stept forward trustingly to lick her hand; a single wandering butterfly fluttered round her head. As the group, one by one, caught sight of her, a human tenderness and intelligence seemed to light up every face. The scholar dropt his book, the miser his gold, the savage his weapons; even in the visage of the half-slumbering sot some nobler recollection seemed wistfully to struggle into life. The artist caught up his pencil, the poet his lyre, with eyes that beamed forth sudden inspiration. The sage, whose broad brow rose above the group like some torrent furrowed Alp, scathed with all the temptations and all the sorrows of his race, watched with a thoughtful smile that preacher more mighty than himself. A youth, decked out in the most fantastic fopperies of the middle age, stood with clasped hands and brimming eyes, as remorse and pleasure struggled in his face; and as he looked, the fierce sensual features seemed to melt, and his flesh came again to him like the flesh of a little child. The slave forgot his fetters; little children clapped their hands; and the toil-worn, stunted, savage woman sprung forward to kneel at her feet, and see herself transfigured in that new and divine ideal of her sex.
Descriptions of drawings are clumsy things at best; the reader must fill up the sketch for himself by the eye of faith.
Entranced in wonder and pleasure, Argemone let her eyes wander over the drawing. And her feelings for Lancelot amounted almost to worship, as she apprehended the harmonious unity of the manifold conception,—the rugged boldness of the groups in front, the soft grandeur of the figure which was the lodestar of all their emotions—the virginal purity of the whole. And when she fancied that she traced in those bland aquiline lineaments, and in the crisp ringlets which floated like a cloud down to the knees of the figure, some traces of her own likeness, a dream of a new destiny flitted before her,—she blushed to her very neck; and as she bent her face over the drawing and gazed, her whole soul seemed to rise into her eyes, and a single tear dropped upon the paper. She laid her hand over it, and then turned hastily away.
‘You do not like it! I have been too bold,’—said Lancelot, fearfully.
‘Oh, no! no! It is so beautiful—so full of deep wisdom! But—but—You may leave it.’
Lancelot slipped silently out of the room, he hardly knew why; and when he was gone, Argemone caught up the drawing, pressed it to her bosom, covered it with kisses, and hid it, as too precious for any eyes but her own, in the farthest corner of her secrétaire.
And yet she fancied that she was not in love!
The vicar saw the growth of this intimacy with a fast-lengthening face; for it was very evident that Argemone could not serve two masters so utterly contradictory as himself and Lancelot, and that either the lover or the father-confessor must speedily resign office. The vicar had had great disadvantages, by the bye, in fulfilling the latter function; for his visits at the Priory had been all but forbidden; and Argemone’s ‘spiritual state’ had been directed by means of a secret correspondence,—a method which some clergymen, and some young ladies too, have discovered, in the last few years, to be quite consistent with moral delicacy and filial obedience. John Bull, like a stupid fellow as he is, has still his doubts upon the point; but he should remember that though St. Paul tells women when they want advice to ask their husbands at home, yet if the poor woman has no husband, or, as often happens, her husband’s advice is unpleasant, to whom is she to go but to the next best substitute, her spiritual cicisbeo, or favourite clergyman? In sad earnest, neither husband nor parent deserves pity in the immense majority of such cases. Woman will have guidance. It is her delight and glory to be led; and if her husband or her parents will not meet the cravings of her intellect, she must go elsewhere to find a teacher, and run into the wildest extravagances of private judgment, in the very hope of getting rid of it, just as poor Argemone had been led to do.
And, indeed, she had, of late, wandered into very strange paths: would to God they were as uncommon as strange! Both she and the vicar had a great wish that she should lead a ‘devoted life;’ but then they both disdained to use common means for their object. The good old English plan of district visiting, by which ladies can have mercy on the bodies and souls of those below them, without casting off the holy discipline which a home, even the most ungenial, alone supplies, savoured too much of mere ‘Protestantism.’ It might be God’s plan for christianising England just now, but that was no reason, alas! for its being their plan: they wanted something more ‘Catholic,’ more in accordance with Church principles (for, indeed, is it not the business of the Church to correct the errors of Providence!); and what they sought they found at once in a certain favourite establishment of the vicar’s, a Church-of-England béguinage, or quasi-Protestant nunnery, which he fostered in a neighbouring city, and went thither on all high tides to confess the young ladies, who were in all things nuns, but bound by no vows, except, of course, such as they might choose to make for themselves in private.
Here they laboured among the lowest haunts of misery and sin, piously and self-denyingly enough, sweet souls! in hope of ‘the peculiar crown,’ and a higher place in heaven than the relations whom they had left behind them ‘in the world,’ and unshackled by the interference of parents, and other such merely fleshly relationships, which, as they cannot have been instituted by God merely to be trampled under foot on the path to holiness, and cannot well have instituted themselves (unless, after all, the Materialists are right, and this world does grind of itself, except when its Maker happens to interfere once every thousand years), must needs have been instituted by the devil. And so more than one girl in that nunnery, and out of it, too, believed in her inmost heart, though her ‘Catholic principles,’ by a happy inconsistency, forbade her to say so.
In a moment of excitement, fascinated by the romance of the notion, Argemone had proposed to her mother to allow her to enter this béguinage, and called in the vicar as advocate; which produced a correspondence between him and Mrs. Lavington, stormy on her side, provokingly calm on his: and when the poor lady, tired of raging, had descended to an affecting appeal to his human sympathies, entreating him to spare a mother’s feelings, he had answered with the same impassive fanaticism, that ‘he was surprised at her putting a mother’s selfish feelings in competition with the sanctity of her child,’ and that ‘had his own daughter shown such a desire for a higher vocation, he should have esteemed it the very highest honour;’ to which Mrs. Lavington answered, naively enough, that ‘it depended very much on what his daughter was like.’—So he was all but forbidden the house. Nevertheless he contrived, by means of this same secret correspondence, to keep alive in Argemone’s mind the longing to turn nun, and fancied honestly that he was doing God service, while he was pampering the poor girl’s lust for singularity and self-glorification.
But, lately, Argemone’s letters had become less frequent and less confiding; and the vicar, who well knew the reason, had resolved to bring the matter to a crisis.
So he wrote earnestly and peremptorily to his pupil, urging her, with all his subtle and refined eloquence, to make a final appeal to her mother, and if that failed, to act ‘as her conscience should direct her;’ and enclosed an answer from the superior of the convent, to a letter which Argemone had in a mad moment asked him to write. The superior’s letter spoke of Argemone’s joining her as a settled matter, and of her room as ready for her, while it lauded to the skies the peaceful activity and usefulness of the establishment. This letter troubled Argemone exceedingly. She had never before been compelled to face her own feelings, either about the nunnery or about Lancelot. She had taken up the fancy of becoming a Sister of Charity, not as Honoria might have done, from genuine love of the poor, but from ‘a sense of duty.’ Almsgiving and visiting the sick were one of the methods of earning heaven prescribed by her new creed. She was ashamed of her own laziness by the side of Honoria’s simple benevolence; and, sad though it may be to have to say it, she longed to outdo her by some signal act of self-sacrifice. She had looked to this nunnery, too, as an escape, once and for all, from her own luxury, just as people who have not strength to be temperate take refuge in teetotalism; and the thought of menial services towards the poor, however distasteful to her, came in quite prettily to fill up the little ideal of a life of romantic asceticisms and mystic contemplation, which gave the true charm in her eyes to her wild project. But now—just as a field had opened to her cravings after poetry and art, wider and richer than she had ever imagined—just as those simple childlike views of man and nature, which she had learnt to despise, were assuming an awful holiness in her eyes—just as she had found a human soul to whose regeneration she could devote all her energies,—to be required to give all up, perhaps for ever (and she felt that if at all, it ought to be for ever);—it was too much for her little heart to bear; and she cried bitterly; and tried to pray, and could not; and longed for a strong and tender bosom on which to lay her head, and pour out all her doubts and struggles; and there was none. Her mother did not understand—hardly loved her. Honoria loved her; but understood her even less than her mother. Pride—the pride of intellect, the pride of self-will—had long since sealed her lips to her own family. . . .
And then, out of the darkness of her heart, Lancelot’s image rose before her stronger than all, tenderer than all; and as she remembered his magical faculty of anticipating all her thoughts, embodying for her all her vague surmises, he seemed to beckon her towards him.—She shuddered and turned away. And now she first became conscious how he had haunted her thoughts in the last few months, not as a soul to be saved, but as a living man—his face, his figure, his voice, his every gesture and expression, rising clear before her, in spite of herself, by day and night.
And then she thought of his last drawing, and the looks which had accompanied it,—unmistakable looks of passionate and adoring love. There was no denying it—she had always known that he loved her, but she had never dared to confess it to herself. But now the earthquake was come, and all the secrets of her heart burst upward to the light, and she faced the thought in shame and terror. ‘How unjust I have been to him! how cruel! thus to entice him on in hopeless love!’
She lifted up her eyes, and saw in the mirror opposite the reflection of her own exquisite beauty.
‘I could have known what I was doing! I knew all the while! And yet it is so delicious to feel that any one loves me! Is it selfishness? It is selfishness, to pamper my vanity on an affection which I do not, will not return. I will not be thus in debt to him, even for his love. I do not love him—I do not; and even if I did, to give myself up to a man of whom I know so little, who is not even a Christian, much less a Churchman! Ay! and to give up my will to any man! to become the subject, the slave, of another human being! I, who have worshipped the belief in woman’s independence, the hope of woman’s enfranchisement, who have felt how glorious it is to live like the angels, single and self-sustained! What if I cut the Gordian knot, and here make, once for all, a vow of perpetual celibacy?’
She flung herself on her knees—she could not collect her thoughts.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I am not prepared for this. It is too solemn to be undertaken in this miserable whirlwind of passion. I will fast, and meditate, and go up formally to the little chapel, and there devote myself to God; and, in the meantime, to write at once to the superior of the Béguines; to go to my mother, and tell her once for all—What? Must I lose him?—must I give him up? Not his love—I cannot give up that—would that I could! but no! he will love me for ever. I know it as well as if an angel told me. But to give up him! Never to see him! never to hear his voice! never to walk with him among the beech woods any more! Oh, Argemone! Argemone! miserable girl! and is it come to this?’ And she threw herself on the sofa, and hid her face in her hands.
Yes, Argemone, it is come to this; and the best thing you can do, is just what you are doing—to lie there and cry yourself to sleep, while the angels are laughing kindly (if a solemn public, who settles everything for them, will permit them to laugh) at the rickety old windmill of sham-Popery which you have taken for a real giant.
At that same day and hour, as it chanced, Lancelot, little dreaming what the said windmill was grinding for him, was scribbling a hasty and angry answer to a letter of Luke’s, which, perhaps, came that very morning in order to put him into a proper temper for the demolishing of windmills. It ran thus,—
‘Ay, my good Cousin,—So I expected—