The Essential George Meredith Collection. George Meredith
world, so that all may know you superior to this human nature that has deceived you. For it is the shameless deception, not the marriage, that has wounded you."
"Ay!" answered the baronet, "the shameless deception, not the marriage: wicked and ruinous as it must be; a destroyer of my tenderest hopes! my dearest schemes! Not the marriage--the shameless deception!" and he crumpled up his son's letter to him, and tossed it into the fire.
How are we to distinguish the dark chief of the Manichaeans when he talks our own thoughts to us?
Further he whispered, "And your System:--if you would be brave to the world, have courage to cast the dream of it out of you: relinquish an impossible project; see it as it is--dead: too good for men!"
"Ay!" muttered the baronet: "all who would save them perish on the Cross!"
And so he sat nursing the devil.
By and by he took his lamp, and put on the old cloak and cap, and went to gaze at Ripton. That exhausted debauchee and youth without a destiny slept a dead sleep. A handkerchief was bound about his forehead, and his helpless sunken chin and snoring nose projected up the pillow, made him look absurdly piteous. The baronet remembered how often he had compared his boy with this one: his own bright boy! And where was the difference between them?
"Mere outward gilding!" said his familiar.
"Yes," he responded, "I daresay this one never positively plotted to deceive his father: he followed his appetites unchecked, and is internally the sounder of the two."
Ripton, with his sunken chin and snoring nose under the light of the lamp, stood for human nature, honest, however abject.
"Miss Random, I fear very much, is a necessary establishment!" whispered the monitor.
"Does the evil in us demand its natural food, or it corrupts the whole?" ejaculated Sir Austin. "And is no angel of avail till that is drawn off? And is that our conflict--to see whether we can escape the contagion of its embrace, and come uncorrupted out of that?"
"The world is wise in its way," said the voice.
"Though it look on itself through Port wine?" he suggested, remembering his lawyer Thompson.
"Wise in not seeking to be too wise," said the voice.
"And getting intoxicated on its drug of comfort!"
"Human nature is weak."
"And Miss Random is an establishment, and Wild Oats an institution!"
"It always has been so."
"And always will be?"
"So I fear! in spite of your very noble efforts."
"And leads--whither? And ends--where?"
Richard's laugh, taken up by horrid reverberations, as it were through the lengths of the Lower Halls, replied.
This colloquy of two voices in a brain was concluded by Sir Austin asking again if there were no actual difference between the flower of his hopes and yonder drunken weed, and receiving for answer that there was a decided dissimilarity in the smell of the couple; becoming cognizant of which he retreated.
Sir Austin did not battle with the tempter. He took him into his bosom at once, as if he had been ripe for him, and received his suggestions and bowed to his dictates. Because he suffered, and decreed that he would suffer silently, and be the only sufferer, it seemed to him that he was great-minded in his calamity. He had stood against the world. The world had beaten him. What then? He must shut his heart and mask his face; that was all. To be far in advance of the mass, is as fruitless to mankind, he reflected, as straggling in the rear. For how do we know that they move behind us at all, or move in our track? What we win for them is lost; and where we are overthrown we lie!
It was thus that a fine mind and a fine heart at the bounds of a nature not great, chose to colour his retrogression and countenance his shortcoming; and it was thus that he set about ruining the work he had done. He might well say, as he once did, that there are hours when the clearest soul becomes a cunning fox. For a grief that was private and peculiar, he unhesitatingly cast the blame upon humanity; just as he had accused it in the period of what he termed his own ordeal. How had he borne that? By masking his face. And he prepared the ordeal for his son by doing the same. This was by no means his idea of a man's duty in tribulation, about which he could be strenuously eloquent.
But it was his instinct so to act, and in times of trial great natures alone are not at the mercy of their instincts. Moreover it would cost him pain to mask his face; pain worse than that he endured when there still remained an object for him to open his heart to in proportion; and he always reposed upon the Spartan comfort of bearing pain and being passive. "Do nothing," said the devil he nursed; which meant in his case, "Take me into you and don't cast me out." Excellent and sane is the outburst of wrath to men, when it stops short of slaughter. For who that locks it up to eat in solitary, can say that it is consumed? Sir Austin had as weak a digestion for wrath, as poor Hippias for a green duckling. Instead of eating it, it ate him. The wild beast in him was not the less deadly because it did not roar, and the devil in him not the less active because he resolved to do nothing.
He sat at the springs of Richard's future, in the forlorn dead-hush of his library there, hearing the cinders click in the extinguished fire, and that humming stillness in which one may fancy one hears the midnight Fates busily stirring their embryos. The lamp glowed mildly on the bust of Chatham.
Toward morning a gentle knock fell at his door. Lady Blandish glided in. With hasty step she came straight to him, and took both his hands.
"My friend," she said, speaking tearfully, and trembling, "I feared I should find you here. I could not sleep. How is it with you?"
"Well! Emmeline, well!" he replied, torturing his brows to fix the mask.
He wished it had been Adrian who had come to him. He had an extraordinary longing for Adrian's society. He knew that the wise youth would divine how to treat him, and he mentally confessed to just enough weakness to demand a certain kind of management. Besides, Adrian, he had not a doubt, would accept him entirely as he seemed, and not pester him in any way by trying to unlock his heart; whereas a woman, he feared, would be waxing too womanly, and swelling from tears and supplications to a scene, of all things abhorred by him the most. So he rapped the floor with his foot, and gave the lady no very welcome face when he said it was well with him.
She sat down by his side, still holding one hand firmly, and softly detaining the other.
"Oh, my friend! may I believe you? May I speak to you?" She leaned close to him. "You know my heart. I have no better ambition than to be your friend. Surely I divide your grief, and may I not claim your confidence? Who has wept more over your great and dreadful sorrows? I would not have come to you, but I do believe that sorrow shared relieves the burden, and it is now that you may feel a woman's aid, and something of what a woman could be to you...."
"Be assured," he gravely said, "I thank you, Emmeline, for your intentions."
"No, no! not for my intentions! And do not thank me. Think of him...think of your dear boy... Our Richard, as we have called him.--Oh! do not think it a foolish superstition of mine, but I have had a thought this night that has kept me in torment till I rose to speak to you... Tell me first you have forgiven him."
"A father bears no malice to his son, Emmeline."
"Your heart has forgiven him?"
My heart has taken what he gave."
"And quite forgiven him?"
"You will hear no complaints of mine."
The lady paused despondingly, and looked at him in a wistful manner, saying with a sigh, "Yes! I know how noble you are, and different from others!"