Nora Rowley, when she went to bed, after her walk to Niddon Park in company with Hugh Stanbury, was full of wrath against, him. But she could not own her anger to herself, nor could she even confess to herself though she was breaking her heart that there really existed for her the slightest cause of grief. But why had he been so stern to her? Why had he gone out of his way to be uncivil to her? He had called her ‘dainty’ meaning to imply by the epithet that she was one of the butterflies of the day, caring for nothing but sunshine, and an opportunity of fluttering her silly wings. She had understood well what he meant. Of course he was right to be cold to her if his heart was cold, but he need not have insulted her by his ill-concealed rebukes. Had he been kind to her, he might have rebuked her as much as he liked. She quite appreciated the delightful intimacy of a loving word of counsel from the man she loved — how nice it is, as it were, to play at marriage, and to hear beforehand something of the pleasant weight of gentle marital authority. But there had been nothing of that in his manner to her. He had told her that she was dainty and had so told it her, as she thought, that she might, learn thereby, that under no circumstances would he have any other tale to tell her. If he had no other tale, why had he not been silent? Did he think that she was subject to his rebuke merely because she lived under his mother’s roof? She would soon shew him that her residence at the Clock House gave him no such authority over her. Then amidst her wrath and despair, she cried herself asleep.
While she was sobbing in bed, he was sitting, with a short, black pipe stuck into his mouth, on the corner of the churchyard wall opposite. Before he had left the house he and Priscilla had spoken together for some minutes about Mrs Trevelyan. ‘Of course she was wrong to see him’ said Priscilla. ‘I hesitate to wound her by so saying, because she has been ill-used, though I did tell her so, when she asked me. She could have lost nothing by declining his visit.’
‘The worst of it is that Trevelyan swears that he will never receive her again if she received him.’
‘He must unswear it’ said Priscilla, ‘that is all. It is out of the question that a man should take a girl from her home, and make her his wife, and then throw her off for so little of an offence as this. She might compel him by law to take her back’
‘What would she get by that?’
‘Little enough’ said Priscilla; ‘and it was little enough she got by marrying him. She would have had bread, and meat, and raiment without being married, I suppose.’
‘But it was a love-match.’
‘Yes and now she is at Nuncombe Putney, and he is roaming about in London. He has to pay ever so much a year for his love-match, and she is crushed into nothing by it. How long will she have to remain here, Hugh?’
‘How can I say? I suppose there is no reason against her remaining as far as you are concerned?’
‘For me personally, none. Were she much worse than I think she is, I should not care in the least for myself, if I thought that we were doing her good helping to bring her back. She can’t hurt me. I am so fixed, and dry, and established that nothing anybody says will affect me. But mamma doesn’t like it.’
‘What is it she dislikes?’
‘The idea that she is harbouring a married woman, of whom people say, at least, that she has a lover.’
‘Is she to be turned out because people are slanderers?’
‘Why should mamma suffer because this woman, who is a stranger to her, has been imprudent? If she were your wife, Hugh —’
‘God forbid!’
‘If we were in any way bound to her, of course we would do our duty. But if it makes mamma unhappy I am sure you will not press it. I think Mrs Merton has spoken to her. And then Aunt Stanbury has written such letters!’
‘Who cares for Aunt Jemima?’
‘Everybody cares for her except you and I. And now this man who has been here asking the servant questions has upset her greatly. Even your coming has done so, knowing, as she does, that you have come, not to see us, but to make inquiries about Mrs Trevelyan. She is so annoyed by it, that she does not sleep.
‘Do you wish her to be taken away at once?’ asked Hugh almost in an angry tone.
‘Certainly not. That would be impossible. We have agreed to take her, and must bear with it. And I would not have her moved from this, if I thought that if she stayed awhile it might be arranged that she might return from us direct to her husband.’
‘I shall try that, of course now.’
‘But if he will not have her, if he be so obstinate, so foolish, and so wicked, do not leave her here longer than you can help. Then Hugh explained that Sir Marmaduke and Lady Rowley were to be in England in the spring, and that it would be very desirable that the poor woman should not be sent abroad to look for a home before that. ‘If it must be so, it must’ said Priscilla. ‘But eight months is a long time.’
Hugh went out to smoke his pipe on the church-wall in a moody, unhappy state of mind. He had hoped to have done so well in regard to Mrs Trevelyan. Till he had met Colonel Osborne, he felt sure, almost sure, that she would have refused to see that pernicious trouble of the peace of families. In this he found that he had been disappointed; but he had not expected that Priscilla would have been so much opposed to the arrangement which he had made about the house, and then he had been buoyed up by the anticipation of some delight in meeting Nora Rowley. There was, at any rate, the excitement of seeing her to keep his spirits from flagging. He had seen her, and had had the opportunity of which he had so long been thinking. He had seen her and had had every possible advantage on his side. What could any man desire better than the privilege of walking home with the girl he loved through country lanes of a summer evening? They had been an hour together or might have been, had he chosen to prolong the interview. But the words which had been spoken between them had had not the slightest interest unless it were that they had tended to make the interval between him and her wider than ever. He had asked her — he thought that he had asked — whether it would grieve her to abandon that delicate, dainty mode of life to which she had been accustomed; and she had replied that she would never abandon it of her own accord. Of course she had intended him to take her at her word.
He blew forth quick clouds of heavy smoke, as he attempted to make himself believe that this was all for the best. What would such a one as he was do with a wife? Or, seeing as he did see, that marriage itself was quite out of the question, how could it be good either for him or her that they should be tied together by a long engagement? Such a future would not at all suit the purpose of his life. In his life absolute freedom would be needed, freedom from unnecessary ties, freedom from unnecessary burdens. His income was most precarious and he certainly would not make it less so by submission to any closer literary thraldom. And he believed himself to be a Bohemian, too much of a Bohemian to enjoy a domestic fireside with children and slippers. To be free to go where he liked, and when he liked, to think as he pleased, to be driven nowhere by conventional rules, to use his days, Sundays as well as Mondays, as he pleased to use them; to turn Republican, if his mind should take him that way or Quaker, or Mormon or Red Indian, if he wished it, and in so turning to do no damage to any one but himself — that was the life which he had planned for himself. His aunt Stanbury had not read his character altogether wrongly, as he thought, when she had once declared that decency and godliness were both distasteful to him. Would it not be destruction to such a one as he was, to fall into an interminable engagement with any girl, let her be ever so sweet?
But yet, he felt as he sat there filling pipe after pipe, smoking away till past midnight, that though he could not bear the idea of trammels, though he was totally unfit for matrimony, either present or in prospect, he felt that he had within his breast a double identity, and that that other division of himself would be utterly crushed if it were driven to divest itself of the idea of love. Whence was to come his poetry, the romance of his life, the springs of clear water in which his ignoble thoughts were to be dipped till they should become pure, if love was to be banished altogether from the list of delights that were possible to him? And then he began to speculate on love — that love of which poets wrote, and of which he found that some sparkle was necessary to give light to his life. Was it not the one particle of divine breath given to man, of which he had heard since he was a boy? And how was this love to be come at, and was it to be a thing of reality, or merely an idea? Was it a pleasure to be attained or a mystery that, charmed by the difficulties of the distance, a distance that never could be so passed, that the thing should really be reached? Was love to be ever a delight, vague as is that feeling of unattainable beauty which far-off mountains give, when you know that you can never place yourself amidst their unseen valleys? And if love could be reached, the love of which the poets sing, and of which his own heart was ever singing, what were to be its pleasures? To press a hand, to kiss a lip, to clasp a waist, to hear even the low voice of the vanquished, confessing loved one as she hides her blushing cheek upon your shoulder — what is it all but to have reached the once mysterious valley of your far-off mountain, and to have found that it is as other valleys, rocks and stones, with a little grass, and a thin stream of running water? But beyond that pressing of the hand, and that kissing of the lips, beyond that short-lived pressure of the plumage which is common to birds and men, what could love do beyond that? There were children with dirty faces and household bills, and a wife, who must, perhaps, always darn the stockings and be sometimes cross. Was love to lead only to this, a dull life, with a woman who had lost the beauty from her cheeks, and the gloss from her hair, and the music from her voice, and the fire from her eye and the grace from her step, and whose waist an arm should no longer be able to span? Did the love of the poets lead to that, and that only? Then, through the cloud of smoke, there came upon him some dim idea of self-abnegation that the mysterious valley among the mountains, the far-off prospect of which was so charming to him, which made the poetry of his life, was, in fact, the capacity of caring more for other human beings than for himself. The beauty of it all was not so much in the thing loved, as in the loving. ‘Were she a cripple, hunchbacked, eyeless’ he said to, himself, ‘it might be the same. Only she must be a woman.’ Then he blew off a great cloud of smoke, and went into bed lost amid poetry, philosophy, love, and tobacco.
It had been arranged overn............