Chapter XLIV: Joy and Fear

Was this man mad, that he, an invalid, propped up in his chair, and scarcely able to move a wine-glass out of his way, should play pranks with the whole created order of things, tossing about solar systems as if they were no more than juggler's balls, and making universal systems of philosophy jump through hoops as if he were a lion tamer in a den? These poor women did not know where to catch him. Violet used to say that he was like a prism, taking the ordinary daylight of life and splitting it up into a thousand gay and glancing colors. That was all very well as a spectacular exhibition; but how when he was apparently instructing them in some serious matter? Was it fair to these tender creatures who had so lovingly nursed him, that he should assume the airs of a teacher, and gravely lead out his trusting disciples into the desert places of the earth, when his only object was to get them into a bog and then suddenly reveal himself as a will-o'-the-wisp, laughing at them with a fiendish joy?

What, for example, was all this nonsense about the land question--about the impossibility of settling it in England so long as the superstitious regard for land existed in the English mind? They were quite ready to believe him. They deprecated that superstition most sincerely. They could not understand why a moneyed Englishman's first impulse was to go and buy land; they could give no reason for the delusion existing in the bosom of every Englishman that he, if no one else, could make money out of the occupation of a farm that had ruined a dozen men in succession. All this was very well; but what were they to make of his sudden turning round and defending that superstition as the most beautiful sentiment in human nature? It was, according to him, the sublimest manifestation of filial love--the instinct of affection for the great mother of us all. And then the flowers became our small sisters and brothers; and the dumb look of appeal in a horse's eye, and the singing of a thrush at the break of day--these were but portions of the inarticulate language now no longer known to us. What was any human being to make of this rambling nonsense?

It all came of the dress coat, and of his childish vanity in his white wristbands. It was the first occasion on which he had ceremoniously dressed for dinner; and Violet had come over; and he was as proud of his high and stiff collar, and of his white necktie, as if they had been the ribbon and star of a royal order. And then they were all going off the next morning--Miss North included--to a strange little place on the other side of the Isle of Wight; and he had gone "clean daft" with the delight of expectation. There was nothing sacred from his mischievous fancy. He would have made fun of a bishop. In fact he did; for, happening to talk of inarticulate language, he described having seen "the other day," in Buckingham Palace road, a bishop who was looking at some china in a shop window; and he went on to declare how a young person driving a perambulator, and too earnestly occupied with a sentry on the other side of the road, incontinently drove that perambulator right on to the carefully swathed toes of the bishop; and then he devoted himself to analyzing the awful language which he _saw_ on the afflicted man's face.

"But, uncle," said Amy Warrener, with the delightful freshness of fifteen, "how could you see anybody in Buckingham Palace road the other day, when you haven't been out of the house for months?"

"How?" said he, not a whit abashed. "How could I see him? I don't know, but I tell you I did see him. With my eyes, of course."

He lost his temper, however, after all.

"To-morrow," he was saying, "I bid good-by to my doctor. I bear him no malice; may he long be spared from having to meet in the next world the people he sent there before him! But look here, Violet--to-morrow evening we shall be _free_--and we shall celebrate our freedom, and our first glimpse of a seashore, in Scotch whiskey--in hot Scotch whiskey--in Scotch whiskey with the boilingest of boiling water, just caught at the proper point of cooling. You don't know that point; I will teach you; it is perfection. Don't you know that we have just caught the cooling point of the earth--just that point in its transition from being a molten mass to its becoming a chilled and played out stone that admits of our living----"

"But, uncle," said Amy, "I thought the earth used to be far colder than it is now. Remember the glacial period," added this profound student of physics.

This was too much.

"Dear, dear me!" he exclaimed. "Am I to be brought up at every second by a pert schoolgirl when I am expounding the mysteries of life? What have your twopenny-halfpenny science primers to do with the grand secret of toddy? I tell you we must _catch it at the cooling point_; and then, Violet--for you are a respectful and attentive student--if the evening is fine, and the air warm, and the windows open and looking out to the south--do you think the doctor could object to that one first, faint trial of a cigarette, just to make us think we are up again in the August nights--off Isle Ornsay--with Aleck up at the bow singing that hideous and melancholy song of his, and the Sea Pyot slowly creeping along by the black islands?"

She did not answer at all; but for a brief moment her lip trembled. Amid all this merriment she had sat with a troubled face, and with a sore and heavy heart. She had seen in it but a pathetic bravado. He would drink Scotch whiskey--he would once more light a cigarette--merely to assure her that he was getting thoroughly well again; his laughter, his jokes, his wild sallies were all meant, and she knew it, to give her strength of heart and cheerfulness. She sat and listened, with her eyes cast down. When she heard him talk lightly and playfully of all that he meant to do, her heart throbbed, and she dared not lift her eyes to his face, lest they should suddenly reveal to him that awful conflict within of wild, and piteous, and agonizing doubt.

Then that reference to their wanderings in the northern seas--he did not know how she trembled as he spoke. She could never even think of that strange time she had spent up there, and of the terrible things that had come of it, without a shudder. If she could have cut it out of her life and memory altogether, that would have been well; but how could she forget the agony of that awful farewell; the sense of utter loneliness with which she saw the shores recede; the conviction then borne in upon her--and never wholly eradicated from her mind--that some mysterious doom had overtaken her, from which there was no escape. The influence of that time, and of the time that succeeded it, still dwelt upon her, and overshadowed her with its gloom. She had almost lost the instinct of hope. She never doubted, when they carried young Dowse into that silent room, but that he would die: was it not her province to bring misery to all who were associated with her? And she had got so reconciled to this notion that she did not argue the matter with herself; she had, for example, no sense of bitterness in contrasting this apparent "destiny" of hers with the most deeply-rooted feeling in her heart; namely, a perfectly honest readiness to give up her own life if only that could secure the happiness of those she loved. She did not even feel injured because this was impossible. Things were so; and she accepted them.

But sometimes, in the darkness of her room, in the silence of the night-time, when her heart seemed to be literally breaking with its conflict of anxious love and returning despair, some wild notion of propitiation--doubtless derived from ancient legends--would flash across her mind; and she would cry in her agony, "If one must be taken, let it be me! The world cares for him. What am I?" If she could only go out into the open place of the city, and bare her bosom to the knife of the priest, and call on the people to see how she had saved the life of her beloved--surely that would be to die happy. What she had done, now that she came to look back over it, seemed but too poor an expression of her great love and admiration. What mattered it that a girl should give up her friends and her home? Her life--her very life--that was what she desired, when these wild fancies possessed her, to surrender freely, if only she could know that she was rescuing him from the awful portals that her despairing dread saw open before him, and was giving him back--as she bade him a last farewell--to health, and joy, and the comfort of many friends.

With other wrestlings in spirit, far more eager and real than these mere fancies derived from myths, it is not within the province of the present writer to deal; they are not for the house-tops or the market-places. But it may be said that in all directions the gloomy influences of that past time pursued her; wherever she went she was haunted by a morbid fear that all her resolute will could not shake off. Where, for example, could she go for sweeter consolation, for more cheering solace than to the simple and reassuring services of the church? But before she entered, eager to hear words of hope and strengthening, there was the graveyard to pass through, with the misery of generations recorded on its melancholy stones.