"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 s.e.xual 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 a.s.sumed no superiority. He demanded her a.s.sent 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sion as love. It was a curious feature of lower humanity, which she might investigate and a.n.a.lyse 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-abas.e.m.e.nt. 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 pa.s.sages 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 h.e.l.l, to escape from the more awful spiritual h.e.l.l within him,--to buy back that pearl of innocence which he had cast recklessly to be trampled under the feet of his own swinish pa.s.sions! 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 G.o.d, 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 t.i.tan-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 appet.i.tes, as G.o.d-given and G.o.dlike symbols. She could not but listen and admire, when he introduced her to the sheer paganism of Schiller"s G.o.ds 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 G.o.d"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 ill.u.s.tration of a spiritual truth. And, in time, every fresh lesson on the Odyssey was accompanied by its ill.u.s.tration,--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 b.u.t.terfly 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 n.o.bler 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 br.i.m.m.i.n.g 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 s.e.x.
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 secretaire.
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 subst.i.tute, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d"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 beguinage, 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 inst.i.tuted by G.o.d merely to be trampled under foot on the path to holiness, and cannot well have inst.i.tuted 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 inst.i.tuted 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 beguinage, 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 impa.s.sive fanaticism, that "he was surprised at her putting a mother"s selfish feelings in compet.i.tion with the sanct.i.ty 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 G.o.d service, while he was pampering the poor girl"s l.u.s.t 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 a.s.suming 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 antic.i.p.ating 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.