Peak’s destination was Peckham Rye. On quitting the railway, he had a walk of some ten minutes along a road which smelt of new bricks and stucco heated by the summer sun; an obscure passage led him into a street partly of dwelling-houses, partly of shops, the latter closed. He paused at the side door of one over which the street lamp dimly revealed—‘Button, Herbalist’.
His latch-key admitted him to total darkness, but he moved forward with the confidence of long use. He softly ascended two flights of stairs, opened a door, struck a match, and found himself in a comfortable sitting-room, soon illumined by a reading-lamp. The atmosphere, as throughout the house, was strongly redolent of dried simples. Anyone acquainted with the characteristics of furnished lodgings must have surmised that Peak dwelt here among his own moveables, and was indebted to the occupier of the premises for bare walls alone; the tables and chairs, though plain enough, were such as civilisation permits; and though there were no pictures, sundry ornaments here and there made strong denial of lodging-house affinity. It was at once laboratory, study, and dwelling-room. Two large cabinets, something the worse for transportation, alone formed a link between this abode and the old home at Twybridge. Books were not numerous, and a good microscope seemed to be the only scientific instrument of much importance. On door-pegs hung a knapsack, a botanist’s vasculum, and a geologist’s wallet.
A round table was spread with the materials of supper, and here again an experienced lodger must have bestowed contemplative scrutiny, for no hand of common landlady declared itself in the arrangement. The cloth was spotless, the utensils tasteful and carefully disposed. In a bowl lay an appetising salad, ready for mingling; a fragment of Camembert cheese was relieved upon a setting of green leafage; a bottle of ale, with adjacent corkscrew, stood beside the plate; the very loaf seemed to come from no ordinary baker’s, or was made to look better than its kin by the fringed white cloth in which it nestled.
The custom of four years had accustomed Peak to take these things as a matter of course, yet he would readily have admitted that they were extraordinary enough. Indeed, he even now occasionally contrasted this state of comfort with the hateful experiences of his first six years in London. The subject of lodgings was one of those on which (often intemperate of speech) he spoke least temperately. For six years he had shifted from quarter to quarter, from house to house, driven away each time by the hateful contact of vulgarity in every form,—by foulness and dishonesty, by lying, slandering, quarrelling, by drunkenness, by brutal vice,—by all abominations that distinguish the lodging-letter of the metropolis. Obliged to practise extreme economy, he could not take refuge among self-respecting people, or at all events had no luck in endeavouring to find such among the poorer working-class. To a man of Godwin’s idiosyncrasy the London poor were of necessity abominable, and it anguished him to be forced to live among them.
Rescue came at last, and in a very unexpected way. Resident in the more open part of Bermondsey (winter mornings made a long journey to Rotherhithe intolerable), he happened to walk one day as far as Peckham Rye, and was there attracted by the shop window of a herbalist. He entered to make a purchase, and got into conversation with Mr. Button, a middle-aged man of bright intelligence and more reading than could be expected. The herbalist led his customer to an upper room, in which were stored sundry curiosities, and happened casually to say that he was desirous of finding a lodger for two superfluous chambers. Peak’s inquiries led to his seeing Mrs. Button, whom he found to be a Frenchwoman of very pleasing appearance; she spoke fluent French-English, anything but disagreeable to an ear constantly tormented by the London vernacular. After short reflection he decided to take and furnish the rooms. It proved a most fortunate step, for he lived (after the outlay for furniture) at much less expense than theretofore, and in comparative luxury. Cleanliness, neatness, good taste by no means exhausted Mrs. Button’s virtues; her cooking seemed to the lodger of incredible perfection, and the infinite goodwill with which he was tended made strange contrast with the base usage he had commonly experienced.
In these ten years he had paid but four visits to Twybridge, each of brief duration. Naturally there were changes among his kinsfolk: Charlotte, after an engagement which prolonged itself to the fifth twelvemonth, had become Mrs. Cusse, and her husband now had a draper’s shop of his own, with two children already born into the world of draperdom. Oliver, twice fruitlessly affianced, had at length (when six-and-twenty) wedded a young person whom his mother and his aunt both regarded as a most undesirable connection, the daughter (aged thirty-two) of a man who was drinking himself to death on such money as he could earn by casual reporting for a Twybridge newspaper. Mrs. Peak the elder now abode with her sister at the millinery shop, and saw little of her two married children. With Oliver and Charlotte their brother had no sympathy, and affected none; he never wrote to them, nor they to him; but years had strengthened his regard for his mother, and with her he had fairly regular correspondence. Gladly he would have seen her more often, but the air of shopkeeping he was compelled to breathe when he visited Twybridge nauseated and repelled him. He recognised the suitability both of Oliver and Charlotte for the positions to which life had consigned them—they suffered from no profitless aspiration; but it seemed to him a just cause of quarrel with fate that his kindred should thus have relapsed, instead of bettering the rank their father had bequeathed to them. He would not avow to such friends as Moxey and Earwaker the social standing of his only recognised relatives.
As for the unrecognised, he had long ago heard with some satisfaction that Andrew Peak, having ultimately failed in his Kingsmill venture, returned to London. Encounter with the fatal Andrew had been spared him ever since that decisive day when Master Jowey Peak recited from Coleridge and displayed his etymological genius.
For himself, he had earned daily bread, and something more; he had studied in desultory fashion; he had seen a good deal of the British Isles and had visited Paris. The result of it all was gnawing discontent, intervals of furious revolt, periods of black despair.
He had achieved nothing, and he was alone.
Young still, to be sure; at twenty-nine it is too early to abandon ambitions which are supported by force of brain and of will. But circumstances must needs help if the desires of his soul were to be attained. On first coming to London, received with all friendliness by Christian Moxey, he had imagined that it only depended upon himself to find admission before long to congenial society—by which he then understood the companionship of intelligent and aspiring young men. Christian, however, had himself no such circle, and knew that the awkward lad from Twybridge could not associate with the one or two wealthy families to which he could have presented him. The School of Mines was only technically useful; it helped Godwin to get his place with Bates & Sons, but supplied no friendships. In the third year, Moxey inherited means and left the chemical works for continental travel.
By tormenting attraction Godwin was often led to walk in the wealthy districts of London. Why was no one of these doors open to him? There were his equals; not in the mean streets where he dwelt. There were the men of culture and capacity, the women of exquisite person and exalted mind. Was he the inferior of such people? By heaven, no!
He chanced once to be in Hyde Park on the occasion of some public ceremony, and was brought to pause at the edge of a gaping plebeian crowd, drawn up to witness the passing of aristocratic vehicles. Close in front of him an open carriage came to a stop; in it sat, or rather reclined, two ladies, old and young. Upon this picture Godwin fixed his eyes with the intensity of fascination; his memory never lost the impress of these ladies’ faces. Nothing very noteworthy about them; but to Godwin they conveyed a passionate perception of all that is implied in social superiority. Here he stood, one of the multitude, of the herd; shoulder to shoulder with boors and pick-pockets; and within reach of his hand reposed those two ladies, in Olympian calm, seeming unaware even of the existence of the throng. Now they exchanged a word; now they smiled to each other. How delicate was the moving of their lips! How fine must be their enunciation! On the box sat an old coachman and a young footman; they too were splendidly impassive, scornful of the multitudinous gaze.—The block was relieved, and on the carriage rolled.
They were his equals, those ladies, merely his equals. With such as they he should by right of nature associate.
In his rebellion, he could not hate them. He hated the malodorous rabble who stared insolently at them and who envied their immeasurable remoteness. Of mere wealth he thought not; might he only be recognised by the gentle of birth and breeding for what he really was, and be rescued from the promiscuity of the vulgar!
Yet at this time he was drawn into connection with the movement of popular Radicalism which revolts against religious respectability. Inherited antipathy to all conventional forms of faith outweighed his other prejudices so far as to induce him to write savage papers for The Liberator. Personal contact with artisan freethinkers was disgusting to him. From the meeting of emancipated workmen he went away with scorn and detestation in his heart; but in the quiet of his lodgings he could sit down to aid their propaganda. One explanation of this inconsistency lay in the fact that no other channel was open to his literary impulses. Pure science could not serve him, for he had no original results to announce. Pure literature seemed beyond his scope, yet he was constantly endeavouring to express himself. He burned with the desire of fame, and saw no hope of achieving it save as an author. The Liberator would serve him as a first step. In time he might get foothold in the monthly reviews, and see his name side by side with those of the leaders of thought.
Occasions, of course, offered when he might have extended his acquaintance, but they were never of a kind that he cared to use; at best they would only have admitted him to the homes of decent, semi-educated families, and for such society he was altogether unfitted. The licence of the streets but seldom allured him. After his twenty-fourth year he was proof against the decoys of venal pleasure, and lived a life of asceticism exceedingly rare in young and lonely men. When Christian Moxey returned to London and took the house at Notting Hill, which he henceforth occupied together with his sister, a possibility of social intercourse at length appeared. Indeed it was a substantial gain to sit from time to time at a civilised table, and to converse amid graceful surroundings with people who at all events followed the intellectual current of the day. Careless hitherto of his personal appearance, he now cultivated an elegance of attire in conformity with his aristocratic instincts, and this habit became fixed. When next he visited Twybridge, the change in his appearance was generally remarked. Mrs. Peak naturally understood it as a significant result of his intercourse with Miss Moxey, of whom, as it seemed to her, he spoke with singular reticence.
But Marcella had no charm for Godwin’s imagination, notwithstanding that he presently suspected a warmth of interest on her side which he was far from consciously encouraging. Nor did he find among his friends any man or woman for whose acquaintance he greatly cared. The Moxeys had a very small circle, consisting chiefly of intellectual inferiors. Christian was too indolent to make a figure in society, and his sister suffered from peculiarities of mind and temperament which made it as difficult for her as for Peak himself to form intimate friendships.
When chance encounter brought him into connection with Earwaker, the revival of bygone things was at first doubtfully pleasant. Earwaker himself, remarkably developed and become a very interesting man, was as welcome an associate as he could have found, but it cost him some effort to dismiss the thought of Andrew Peak’s eating-house, and to accept the friendly tact with which the journalist avoided all hint of unpleasant memories. That Earwaker should refrain from a single question concerning that abrupt disappearance, nearly ten years ago, sufficiently declared his knowledge of the unspeakable cause, a reflection which often made Godwin writhe. However, this difficulty was overcome, and the two met very frequently. For several weeks Godwin enjoyed better spirits than he had known since the first excitement of his life in London faded away.
One result was easily foreseen. His mind grew busy with literary projects, many that he had long contemplated and some that were new. Once more he aimed at contributing to the ‘advanced’ reviews, and sketched out several papers of sociological tenor. None of these were written. As soon as he sat down to deliberate composition, a sense of his deficiencies embarrassed him. Godwin’s self-confidence had nothing in common with the conceit which rests on imaginary strength. Power there was in him; of that he could not but be conscious: its true direction he had not yet learned. Defect of knowledge, lack of pen-practice, confusion and contradictoriness of aims, instability of conviction,—these faults he recognised in himself at every moment of inward scrutiny.
On his table this evening lay a library volume which he had of late been reading, a book which had sprung into enormous popularity. It was called Spiritual Aspects of Evolution, and undertook, with confidence characteristic of its kind, to reconcile the latest results of science with the dogmas of Oriental religion. This work was in his mind when he spoke so vehemently at Moxey’s; already he had trembled with an impulse to write something on the subject, and during his journey home a possible essay had begun to shape itself. Late as was the hour he could not prepare for sleep. His brain throbbed with a congestion of thought; he struggled to make clear the lines on which his satire might direct itself. By two o’clock he had flung down on paper a conglomerate of burning ideas, and thus relieved he at length went to bed.
Two days later came a note from Staple Inn, inviting him to meet Malkin the next evening. By this time he had made a beginning of his critical essay, and the exordium so far satisfied him that he was tempted to take it for Earwaker’s judgment. But no; better his friend should see the thing when it was complete.
About eight o’clock he reached the journalist’s chambers. Malkin had not yet arrived. Peak amused himself with examining certain tropical products which the traveller had recently cast pell-mell into his friend’s sitting-room. Then sounded a knock at the door, but it was not such as would have heralded the expected man.
‘A telegram,’ observed Earwaker, and went to take it in.
He returned with hoarse sounds of mirth.
‘Our friend excuses himself. Read this characteristic despatch.’
Peak saw with surprise that the telegram far exceeded familiar dimensions. ‘Unspeakably grieved,’ it began. ‘Cannot possibly with you. At moment’s notice undertaken escort two poor girls Rouen. Not even time look in apologise. Go via Dieppe and leave Victoria few minutes. Hope be back Thursday. Express sincerest regret Mr. Peak. Lament appearance discourtesy. Will apologise personally. Common humanity constrains go Rouen. Will explain Thursday. No time add another word. Rush tickets train.’
‘There you have the man!’ cried Earwaker. ‘How do you class such a mind as that? Ten to one this is some Quixotic obligation he has laid upon himself, and probably he has gone without even a handbag.’
‘Vocally delivered,’ said Peak, ‘this would represent a certain stage of drunkenness. I suppose it isn’t open to such an explanation?’
‘Malkin never was intoxicated, save with his own vivacity.’
They discussed the singular being with good-natured mirth, then turned by degrees to other topics.
‘I have just come across a passage that will delight you,’ said Earwaker, taking up a book. ‘Perhaps you know it.’
He read from Sir Thomas Brown’s Pscudodoxia Epidemica. ‘“Men’s names should not only distinguish them. A man should be something that all men are not, and individual in somewhat beside his proper name. Thus, while it exceeds not the bound of reason and modesty, we cannot condemn singularity. Nos numerus sumus is the motto of the multitude, and for that reason are they fools.”’
Peak laughed his approval.
‘It astonishes me,’ he said, lighting his pipe, ‘that you can go on writing for this Sunday rag, when you have just as little sympathy with its aims as I have. Do get into some less offensive connection.’
‘What paper would you recommend?’ asked the other, with his significant smile.
‘Why need you journalise at all?’
‘On the whole, I like it. And remember, to admit that the multitude are fools is not the same thing as to deny the possibility of progress.’
‘Do you really believe yourself a democrat, Earwaker?’
‘M—m—m! Well, yes, I believe the democratic spirit is stronger in me than any other.’
Peak mused for a minute, then suddenly looked up.
‘And what am I?’
‘I am glad nothing much depends on my successfully defining you.’
They laughed together.
‘I suppose,’ said Godwin, ‘you can’t call a man a democrat who recognises in his heart and soul a true distinction of social classes. Social, mark. The division I instinctively support is by no means intellectual. The well-born fool is very often more sure of my respect than the working man who struggles to a fair measure of education.’
Earwaker would have liked to comment on this with remarks personal to the speaker, but he feared to do so. His silence, however, was eloquent to Peak, who resumed brusquely.
‘I am not myself well-born,—though if my parents could have come into wealth early in their lives, perhaps I might reasonably have called myself so. All sorts of arguments can be brought against my prejudice, but the prejudice is ineradicable. I respect hereditary social standing, independently of the individual’s qualities. There’s nothing of the flunkey in this, or I greatly deceive myself. Birth in a sphere of refinement is desirable and respectable; it saves one, absolutely, from many forms of coarseness. The masses are not only fools, but very near the brutes. Yes, they can send forth fine individuals—but remain base. I don’t deny the possibility of social advance; I only say that at present the lower classes are always disagreeable, often repulsive, sometimes hateful.’
‘I could apply that to the classes above them.’
‘Well, I can’t. But I am quite ready to admit that there are all sorts of inconsistencies in me. Now, the other day I was reading Burns, and I couldn’t describe what exaltation all at once possessed me in the thought that a ploughman had so glorified a servant-girl that together they shine in the highest heaven, far above all the monarchs of earth. This came upon me with a rush—a very rare emotion. Wasn’t that democratic?’
He inquired dubiously, and Earwaker for a moment had no reply but his familiar ‘M—m—m!’
‘No, it was not democratic,’ the journalist decided at length; ‘it was pride of intellect.’
‘Think so? Then look here. If it happens that a whining wretch stops me in the street to beg, what do you suppose is my feeling? I am ashamed in the sense of my own prosperity. I can’t look him in the face. If I yielded to my natural impulse, I should cry out, “Strike me! spit at me! show you hate me!—anything but that terrible humiliation of yourself before me!” That’s how I feel. The abasement of which he isn’t sensible affects me on his behalf. I give money with what delicacy I can. If I am obliged to refuse, I mutter apologies and hurry away with burning cheeks. What does that mean?’
Earwaker regarded him curiously.
‘That is mere fineness of humanity.’
‘Perhaps moral weakness?’
‘I don’t care for the scalpel of the pessimist. Let us give it the better name.’
Peak had never been so communicative. His progress in composition these last evenings seemed to have raised his spirits and spurred the activity of his mind. With a look of pleasure he pursued his self-analysis.
‘Special antipathies—sometimes explicable enough—influence me very widely. Now, I by no means hate all orders of uneducated people. A hedger, a fisherman, a country mason,—people of that kind I rather like to talk with. I could live a good deal with them. But the London vulgar I abominate, root and branch. The mere sound of their voices nauseates me; their vilely grotesque accent and pronunciation—bah! I could write a paper to show that they are essentially the basest of English mortals. Unhappily, I know so much about them. If I saw the probability of my dying in a London lodging-house, I would go out into the sweet-scented fields and there kill myself.’
Earwaker understood much by this avowal, and wondered whether his friend desired him so to do.
‘Well, I can’t say that I have any affection for the race,’ he replied. ‘I certainly believe that, socially and politically, there is less hope of them than of the lower orders in any other part of England.’
‘They are damned by the beastly conditions of their life!’ cried Godwin, excitedly. ‘I don’t mean only the slum-denizens. All, all Hammersmith as much as St. George’s-inthe-East. I must write about this; I must indeed.’
‘Do by all means. Nothing would benefit you more than to get your soul into print.’
Peak delayed a little, then:
‘Well, I am doing something at last.’
And he gave an account of his projected essay. By this time his hands trembled with nervous agitation, and occasionally a dryness of the palate half choked his voice.
‘This may do very well,’ opined Earwaker. ‘I suppose you will try The Critical?’
‘Yes. But have I any chance? Can a perfectly unknown man hope to get in?’
They debated this aspect of the matter. Seeing Peak had laid down his pipe, the journalist offered him tobacco.
‘Thanks; I can’t smoke just yet. It’s my misfortune that I can’t talk earnestly without throwing my body into disorder.’
‘How stolid I am in comparison!’ said Earwaker.
‘That book of M’Naughten’s,’ resumed the other, going back to his subject. ‘I suppose the clergy accept it?’
‘Largely, I believe.’
Peak mused.
‘Now, if I were a clergyman’—
But his eye met Earwaker’s, and they broke into laughter.
‘Why not?’ pursued Godwin. ‘Did I ever tell you that my people originally wished to make a parson of me? Of course I resisted tooth and nail, but it seems to me now that I was rather foolish in doing so. I wish I had been a parson. In many ways the position would have suited me very well.’
‘M—m—m!’
‘I am quite serious. Well, if I were so placed, I should preach Church dogma, pure and simple. I would have nothing to do with these reconciliations. I would stand firm as Jeremy Taylor; and in consequence should have an immense and enthusiastic congregation.’
‘I daresay.’
‘Depend upon it, let the dogmas do what they still can. There’s a vast police force in them, at all events. A man may very strongly defend himself for preaching them.’
The pursuit of this argument led Earwaker to ask:
‘What proportion of the clergy can still take that standing in stolid conscientiousness?’
‘What proportion are convinced that it is untenable?’ returned Peak.
‘Many wilfully shut their eyes to the truth.’
‘No, they don’t shut their eyes!’ cried Godwin. ‘They merely lower a nictitating membrane which permits them to gaze at light without feeling its full impact.’
‘I recommend you to bring that into your paper,’ said the journalist, with his deep chuckle.
An hour later they were conversing with no less animation, but the talk was not so critical. Christian Moxey had come up as a topic, and Earwaker was saying that he found it difficult to divine the man’s personality.
‘You won’t easily do that,’ replied Peak, ‘until you know more of his story. I can’t see that I am bound to secrecy—at all events with you. Poor Moxey imagines that he is in love, and the fancy has lasted about ten years.
‘Ten years?’
‘When I first knew him he was paying obvious attentions to a rather plain cousin down at Twybridge. Why, I don’t know, for he certainly was devoted to a girl here in London. All he has confessed to me is that he had given up hopes of her, but that a letter of some sort or other revived them, and he hastened back to town. He might as well have stayed away; the girl very soon married another man. Less than a year later she had bitterly repented this, and in some way or other she allowed Moxey to know it. Since then they have been Platonic lovers—nothing more, I am convinced. They see each other about once in six months, and presumably live on a hope that the obnoxious husband may decease. I only know the woman as “Constance”; never saw her.’
‘So that’s Moxey? I begin to understand better.’
‘Admirable fellow, but deplorably weak. I have an affection for him, and have had from our first meeting.’
‘Women!’ mused Earwaker, and shook his head.
‘You despise them?’
‘On the whole, I’m afraid so.’
‘Yes, but what women?’ cried the other with impatience. ‘It would be just as reasonable to say that you despise men. Can’t you see that?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Now look here; the stock objections to women are traditional. They take no account of the vast change that is coming about. Because women were once empty-headed, it is assumed they are all still so en masse. The defect of the female mind? It is my belief that this is nothing more nor less than the defect of the uneducated human mind. I believe most men among the brutally ignorant exhibit the very faults which are cried out upon as exclusively feminine. A woman has hitherto been an ignorant human being; that explains everything.’
‘Not everything; something, perhaps. Remember your evolutionism. The preservation of the race demands in women many kinds of irrationality, of obstinate instinct, which enrage a reasoning man. Don’t suppose I speak theoretically. Four or five years ago I had really made up my mind to marry; I wasted much valuable time among women and girls, of anything but low social standing. But my passions were choked by my logical faculty. I foresaw a terrible possibility—that I might beat my wife. One thing I learned with certainty was that the woman, qua woman, hates abstract thought—hates it. Moreover (and of consequence) she despises every ambition that has not a material end.’
He enlarged upon the subject, followed it into all its ramifications, elaborated the inconsistencies with which it is rife. Peak’s reply was deliberate.
‘Admitting that some of these faults are rooted in sex, I should only find them intolerable when their expression took a vulgar form. Between irrationality and coarseness of mind there is an enormous distinction.’
‘With coarse minds I have nothing to do.’
‘Forgive me if I ask you a blunt question,’ said Peak, after hesitating. ‘Have you ever associated with women of the highest refinement?’
Earwaker laughed.
‘I don’t know what that phrase means. It sounds rather odd on your lips.’
‘Well, women of the highest class of commoners. With peeresses we needn’t concern ourselves.’
‘You imagine that social precedence makes all that difference in women?’
‘Yes, I do. The daughter of a county family is a finer being than any girl who can spring from the nomad orders.’
‘Even supposing your nomads produce a Rachel or a Charlotte Brontee?’
‘We are not talking of genius,’ Peak replied.
‘It was irrelevant, I know.—Well, yes, I have conversed now and then with what you would call well-born women. They are delightful creatures, some of them, in given circumstances. But do you think I ever dreamt of taking a wife drenched with social prejudices?’
Peak’s face expressed annoyance, and he said nothing.
‘A man’s wife,’ pursued Earwaker, ‘may be his superior in whatever you like, except social position. That is precisely the distinction that no woman can forget or forgive. On that account they are the obstructive element in social history. If I loved a woman of rank above my own she would make me a renegade; for her sake I should deny my faith. I should write for the St. James’s Gazette, and at last poison myself in an agony of shame.’
A burst of laughter cleared the air for a moment, but for a moment only. Peak’s countenance clouded over again, and at length he said in a lower tone:
‘There are men whose character would defy that rule.’
‘Yes—to their own disaster. But I ought to have made one exception. There is a case in which a woman will marry without much regard to her husband’s origin. Let him be a parson, and he may aim as high as he chooses.’
Peak tried to smile. He made no answer, and fell into a fit of brooding.
‘What’s all this about?’ asked the journalist, when he too had mused awhile. ‘Whose acquaintance have you been making?’
‘No one’s.’
The suspicion was inevitable.
‘If it were true, perhaps you would be justified in mistrusting my way of regarding these things. But it’s the natural tendency of my mind. If I ever marry at all, it will be a woman of far higher birth than my own.’
‘Don’t malign your parents, old fellow. They gave you a brain inferior to that of few men. You will never meet a woman of higher birth.’
‘That’s a friendly sophism. I can’t thank you for it, because it has a bitter side.’
But the compliment had excited Peak, and after a moment’s delay he exclaimed:
‘I have no other ambition in life—no other! Think the confession as ridiculous as you like; my one supreme desire is to marry a perfectly refined woman. Put it in the correct terms: I am a plebeian, and I aim at marrying a lady.’
The last words were flung out defiantly. He quivered as he spoke, and his face flushed.
‘I can’t wish you success,’ returned his friend, with a grave smile.
‘You couldn’t help it sounding like a sneer, if you did. The desire is hopeless, of course. It’s because I know that, that I have made up my mind to travel for a year or two; it’ll help me on towards the age when I shall regard all women with indifference. We won’t talk about it any more.’
‘One question. You seriously believe that you could find satisfaction in the life to which such a marriage would condemn you?’
‘What life?’ asked Peak, impatiently.
‘That of an average gentleman, let us say, with house in town and country, with friends whose ruling motive was social propriety.’
‘I could enjoy the good and throw aside the distasteful.’
‘What about the distastefulness of your wife’s crass conventionalism, especially in religion?’
‘It would not be crass, to begin with. If her religion were genuine, I could tolerate it well enough; if it were merely a form, I could train her to my own opinions. Society is growing liberal—the best of it. Please remember that I have in mind a woman of the highest type our civilisation can produce.’
‘Then you mustn’t look for her in society!’ cried Earwaker.
‘I don’t care; where you will, so long as she had always lived among people of breeding and high education, and never had her thoughts soiled with the vile contact of poverty.’
Earwaker started up and reached a volume from a shelf. Quickly finding the desired page, he began to read aloud:
‘Dear, had the world in its caprice Deigned to proclaim—I know you both, Have recognised your plighted troth, Am sponsor for you; live in peace!’—
He read to the end of the poem, and then looked up with an admiring smile.
‘An ideal!’ exclaimed Peak. ‘An ideal akin to Murger’s and Musset’s grisettes, who never existed.’
‘An ideal, most decidedly. But pray what is this consummate lady you have in mind? An ideal every bit as much, and of the two I prefer Browning’s. For my own part, I am a polygamist; my wives live in literature, and too far asunder to be able to quarrel. Impossible women, but exquisite. They shall suffice to me.’
Peak rose, sauntered about the room for a minute or two, then said:
‘I have just got a title for my paper. I shall call it “The New Sophistry.”’
‘Do very well, I should think,’ replied the other, smiling. ‘Will you let me see it when it’s done?’
‘Who knows if I shall finish it? Nothing I ever undertook has been finished yet—nothing won that I ever aimed at. Good night. Let me hear about Malkin.’
In a week’s time Godwin received another summons to Staple Inn, with promise of Malkin’s assured presence. In reply he wrote:
‘Owing to a new arrangement at Bates’s, I start tomorrow for my holiday in Cornwall, so cannot see you for a few weeks. Please offer Malkin my apologies; make them (I mean it) as profuse as those he telegraphed. Herewith I send you my paper, “The New Sophistry”, which I have written at a few vehement sittings, and have carelessly copied. If you think it worth while, will you have the kindness to send it for me to The Critical? I haven’t signed it, as my unmeaning name would perhaps indispose the fellow to see much good in it. I should thank you if you would write in your own person, saying that you act for a friend; you are probably well known in those quarters. If it is accepted, time enough to claim my glory. If it seems to you to have no chance, keep it till I return, as I hate the humiliation of refusals.—Don’t think I made an ass of myself the other night. We will never speak on that subject again. All I said was horribly sincere, but I’m afraid you can’t understand that side of my nature. I should never have spoken so frankly to Moxey, though he has made no secret with me of his own weaknesses. If I perish before long in a South American swamp, you will be able to reflect on my personality with completer knowledge, so I don’t regret the indiscretion.’
‘Pereunt et imputantur.’
Godwin Peak read the motto beneath the clock in Exeter Cathedral, and believed it of Christian origin. Had he known that the words were found in Martial, his rebellious spirit would have enjoyed the consecration of a phrase from such an unlikely author. Even as he must have laughed had he stood in the Vatican before the figures of those two Greek dramatists who, for ages, were revered as Christian saints.
His ignorance preserved him from a clash of sentiments. This afternoon he was not disposed to cynicism; rather he welcomed the softening influence of this noble interior, and let the golden sunlight form what shapes it would—heavenly beam, mystic aureole—before his mind’s eye. Architecture had no special interest for him, and the history of church or faith could seldom touch his emotions; but the glorious handiwork of men long dead, the solemn stillness of an ancient sanctuary, made that appeal to him which is independent of names.
‘Pereunt et imputantur.’
He sat down where the soft, slow ticking of the clock could guide his thoughts. This morning he had left London by the earliest train, and after a night in Exeter would travel westward by leisurely stages, seeing as much as possible of the coast and of that inland scenery which had geological significance. His costume declared him bent on holiday, but, at the same time, distinguished him with delicate emphasis from the tourist of the season. Trustworthy sartorial skill had done its best for his person. Sitting thus, he had the air of a gentleman who enjoys no unwonted ease. He could forget himself in reverie, and be unaware of soft footfalls that drew near along the aisle.
But the sound of a young voice, subdued yet very clear, made claim upon his attention.
‘Sidwell!—Sidwell!’
She who spoke was behind him; on looking up, he saw that a lady just in front had stopped and turned to the summons; smiling, she retraced her steps. He moved, so as to look discreetly in the backward direction, and observed a group of four persons, who were occupied with a tablet on the wall: a young man (not long out of boyhood), a girl who might be a year or two younger, and two ladies, of whom it could only be said that they were mature in the beauty of youth, probably of maidenhood—one of them, she who had been called back by the name of ‘Sidwell’.
Surely an uncommon name. From a guide-book, with which he had amused himself in the train, he knew that one of the churches of Exeter was dedicated to St. Sidwell, but only now did his recollection apprise him of a long past acquaintance with the name of the saint. Had not Buckland Warricombe a sister called Sidwell? And—did he only surmise a connection between the Warricombes and Devon? No, no; on that remote day, when he went out with Buckland to the house near Kingsmill, Mr. Warricombe spoke to him of Exeter,—mentioning that the town of his birth was Axminster, where William Buckland, the geologist, also was born; whence the name of his eldest son. How suddenly it all came back!
He rose and moved apart to a spot whence he might quietly observe the strangers. ‘Sidwell’, once remarked, could not be confused with the companion of her own age; she was slimmer, shorter (if but slightly), more sedate in movement, and perhaps better dressed—though both were admirable in that respect. Ladies, beyond a doubt. And the young man—
At this distance it was easy to deceive oneself, but did not that face bring something back? Now, as he smiled, it seemed to recall Buckland Warricombe—with a difference. This might well be a younger brother; there used to be one or two.
They were familiar with the Cathedral, and at present appeared to take exclusive interest in certain mural monuments. For perhaps ten minutes they lingered about the aisle, then, after a glance at the west window, went forth. With quick step, Godwin pursued them; he issued in time to see them entering an open carriage, which presently drove away towards High Street.
For half an hour he walked the Cathedral Close. Not long ago, on first coming into that quiet space, with its old houses, its smooth lawns, its majestic trees, he had felt the charm peculiar to such scenes—the natural delight in a form of beauty especially English. Now, the impression was irrecoverable; he could see nothing but those four persons, and their luxurious carriage, and the two beautiful horses which had borne them—whither? As likely as not the identity he had supposed for them was quite imaginary; yet it would be easy to ascertain whether a Warricombe family dwelt at Exeter. The forename of Buckland’s father—? He never had known it. Still, it was worth while consulting a directory.
He walked to his hotel.
Yes, the name Warricombe stood there, but it occurred more than once. He sought counsel of the landlord. Which of these Warricombes was a gentleman of position, with grown-up sons and daughters? To such a description answered Martin Warricombe, Esquire, well known in the city. His house was in the Old Tiverton Road, out beyond St Sidwell’s, two miles away; anyone in that district would serve as guide to it.
With purpose indefinite, Godwin set forth in the direction suggested. At little more than a saunter, he passed out of High Street into its continuation, where he soon descried the Church of St. Sidwell, and thence, having made inquiry, walked towards the Old Tiverton Road. He was now quite beyond the town limits, and few pedestrians came in sight; if he really wished to find the abode of Martin Warricombe, he must stop the first questionable person. But to what end this inquiry? He could not even be certain that Martin was the man he had in mind, and even were he right in all his conjectures, what had he to do with the Warricombes?
Ten years ago the family had received him courteously as Buckland’s fellow-student; he had spent an hour or two at their house, and subsequently a few words had passed when they saw him on prize-day at Whitelaw. To Buckland he had never written; he had never since heard of him; that name was involved in the miserable whirl of circumstances which brought his College life to a close, and it was always his hope that Buckland thought no more of him. Even had there been no disagreeable memories, it was surely impossible to renew after this interval so very slight an acquaintance. How could they receive him, save with civilly mild astonishment?
An errand-boy came along, whistling townwards, a big basket over his head. No harm in asking where Mr. Warricombe lived. The reply was prompt: second house on the right hand, rather a large one, not a quarter of a mile onward.
Here, then. The site was a good one. From this part of the climbing road one looked over the lower valley of the Exe, saw the whole estuary, and beyond that a horizon of blue sea. Fair, rich land, warm under the westering sun. The house itself seemed to be old, but after all was not very large; it stood amid laurels, and in the garden behind rose a great yew-tree. No person was visible; but for the wave-like murmur of neighbouring pines, scarce a sound would have disturbed the air.
Godwin walked past, and found that the road descended into a deep hollow, whence between high banks, covered with gorse and bracken and many a summer flower, it led again up a hill thick planted with firs; at the lowest point was a bridge over a streamlet, offering on either hand a view of soft green meadows. A spot of exquisite retirement: happy who lived here in security from the struggle of life!
It was folly to spoil his enjoyment of country such as this by dreaming impossible opportunities. The Warricombes could be nothing to him; to meet with Buckland would only revive the shame long ago outlived. After resting for a few minutes he turned back, passed the silent house again, delighted himself with the wide view, and so into the city once more, where he began to seek the remnants of its old walls.
The next morning was Sunday, and he had planned to go by the Plymouth train to a station whence he could reach Start Point; but his mood was become so unsettled that ten o’clock, when already he should have been on his journey, found him straying about the Cathedral Close. A mere half-purpose, a vague wavering intention, which might at any moment be scattered by common sense, drew his steps to the door of the Cathedral, where people were entering for morning service; he moved idly within sight of the carriages which drew up. Several had discharged their freightage of tailoring and millinery, when two vehicles, which seemed companions, stopped at the edge of the pavement, and from the second alighted the young ladies whom Godwin had yesterday observed; their male companion, however, was different. The carriage in advance also contained four persons: a gentleman of sixty, his wife, a young girl, and the youth of yesterday. It needed but a glance to inform Godwin that the oldest of the party was Mr. Warricombe, Buckland’s father; ten years had made no change in his aspect. Mrs. Warricombe was not less recognisable. They passed at once into the edifice, and he had scarcely time to bestow a keen look upon Sidwell.
That was a beautiful girl; he stood musing upon the picture registered by his brain. But why not follow, and from a neighbouring seat survey her and the others at his leisure? Pooh! But the impulse constrained him. After all, he could not get a place that allowed him to see Sidwell. Her companion, however, the one who seemed to be of much the same age, was well in view. Sisters they could not be; nothing of the Warricombe countenance revealed itself in those handsome but strongly-marked features. A beautiful girl, she also, yet of a type that made slight appeal to him. Sidwell was all he could imagine of sweet and dignified; more modest in bearing, more gracile, more—
Monday at noon, and he still walked the streets of Exeter. Early this morning he had been out to the Old Tiverton Road, and there, on the lawn amid the laurels, had caught brief glimpse of two female figures, in one of which he merely divined Sidwell. Why he tarried thus he did not pretend to explain to himself. Rain had just come on, and the lowering sky made him low-spirited; he mooned about the street under his umbrella.
And at this rate, might vapour away his holiday. Exeter was tedious, but he could not make up his mind to set forth for the sea-shore, where only his own thoughts awaited him. Packed away in his wallet lay geological hammer, azimuth compass, clinometer, miniature microscope,—why should he drag all that lumber about with him? What to him were the bygone millions of ages, the hoary records of unimaginable time? One touch of a girl’s hand, one syllable of musical speech,—was it not that whereof his life had truly need?
As remote from him, however, as the age of the pterodactyl. How often was it necessary to repeat this? On a long voyage, such as he had all but resolved to take, one might perchance form acquaintances. He had heard of such things; not impossibly, a social circle might open to him at Buenos Ayres. But here in England his poor origin, his lack of means would for ever bar him from the intimacy of people like the Warricombes.
He loitered towards the South-Western station, dimly conscious of a purpose to look for trains. Instead of seeking the time-tables he stood before the bookstall and ran his eye along the titles of new novels; he had half a mind to buy one of Hardy’s and read himself into the temper which suited summer rambles. But just as his hand was stretched forth, a full voice, speaking beside him, made demand for a London weekly paper. Instantly he turned. The tones had carried him back to Whitelaw; the face disturbed that illusion, but substituted a reality which threw him into tremor.
His involuntary gaze was met with one of equal intensity. A man of his own years, but in splendid health and with bright eyes that looked enjoyment of life, suddenly addressed him.
‘Godwin Peak—surely—?’
‘Buckland Warricombe, no less surely.’
They shook hands with vigour, laughing in each other’s faces; then, after a moment’s pause, Warricombe drew aside from the bookstall, for sake of privacy.
‘Why did we lose sight of each other?’ he asked, flashing a glance at Godwin’s costume. ‘Why didn’t you write to me at Cambridge? What have you been doing this half-century?’
‘I have been in London all the time.’
‘I am there most of the year. Well, I rejoice to have met you. On a holiday?’
‘Loitering towards Cornwall.’
‘In that case, you can come and have lunch with me at my father’s house. It’s only a mile or two off. I was going to walk, but we’ll drive, if you like.’
There was no refusing, and no possibility of reflection. Buckland’s hearty manner made the invitation in itself a thoroughly pleasant one, and before Peak could sufficiently command his thoughts to picture the scene towards which he was going they were walking side by side through the town. In appearance, Warricombe showed nothing of the revolutionary which, in old days, he aimed at making himself, and his speech had a suavity which no doubt resulted from much intercourse with the polished world; Godwin was filled with envious admiration of his perfect physique, and the mettle which kept it in such excellent vigour. Even for a sturdy walker, it was no common task to keep pace with Buckland’s strides; Peak soon found himself conversing rather too breathlessly for comfort.
‘What is your latest record for the mile?’ he inquired.
Warricombe, understanding at once the reference to his old athletic pastime and its present application, laughed merrily, and checked his progress.
‘A bad habit of mine; it gets me into trouble with everyone. By-the-bye, haven’t you become a stronger man than used to seem likely? I’m quite glad to see how well you look.’
The sincerity of these expressions, often repeated, put Godwin far more at his ease than the first moment’s sensation had promised. He too began to feel a genuine pleasure in the meeting, and soon bade defiance to all misgivings. Delicacy perhaps withheld Warricombe from further mention of Whitelaw, but on the other hand it was not impossible that he knew nothing of the circumstances which tormented Godwin’s memory. On leaving the College perchance he had lost all connection with those common friends who might have informed him of subsequent jokes and rumours. Unlikely, to be sure; for doubtless some of his Whitelaw contemporaries encountered him at Cambridge; and again, was it not probable that the younger Warricombe had become a Whitelaw student? Then Professor Gale—no matter! The Warricombes of course knew all about Andrew Peak and his dining-rooms, but they were liberal-minded, and could forgive a boy’s weakness, as well as overlook an acquaintance’s obscure origin. In the joy of finding himself exuberantly welcomed by a man of Buckland’s world he overcame his ignoble self-consciousness.
‘Did you know that we were in this part of the country?’ Warricombe asked, once more speeding ahead.
‘I always thought of you in connection with Kingsmill.’
‘We gave up Thornhaw seven years ago. My father was never quite comfortable out of Devonshire. The house I am taking you to has been in our family for three generations. I have often tried to be proud of the fact, but, as you would guess, that kind of thing doesn’t come very natural to me.’
In the effort to repudiate such sentiment, Buckland distinctly betrayed its hold upon him. He imagined he was meeting Godwin on equal ground, but the sensibility of the proletarian could not thus be deceived. There was a brief silence, during which each looked away from the other.
‘Still keep up your geology?’ was Warricombe’s next question.
‘I can just say that I haven’t forgotten it all.’
‘I’m afraid that’s more than I can. During my Cambridge time it caused disagreeable debates with my father. You remember that his science is of the old school. I wouldn’t say a word to disparage him. I believe the extent of his knowledge is magnificent; but he can’t get rid of that old man of the sea, the Book of Genesis. A few years ago I wasn’t too considerate in argument, and I talked as I oughtn’t to have done, called names, and so on. The end of it was, I dropped science altogether, having got as much out of it as I needed. The good old pater has quite forgiven my rudeness. At present we agree to differ, and get on capitally. I’m sure he’ll be delighted to see you. There are some visitors with us; a Miss Moorhouse and her brother. I think you’ll like them. Couldn’t you stay overnight?’
Godwin was unable to reply on the instant, and his companion proceeded with the same heartiness.
‘Just as you like, you know. But do stay if you can. On Wednesday morning I must go back to town. I act as secretary to Godolphin, the member for Slacksea.’
Peak’s acquaintance with current politics was slight, but Mr. Ellis Godolphin, the aristocratic Radical, necessarily stood before his imagination with some clearness of outline. So this was how life had dealt with Buckland. The announcement was made with a certain satisfaction, as if it implied more than the hearer would readily appreciate. Again there was a slight shrinking on Godwin’s part; it would be natural for him to avow his own position, and so leave no room for misunderstandings, but before he could shape a phrase Buckland was again questioning.
‘Do you ever see any of the old fellows?’
‘I have met one or two of them, by chance.’
As if his tact informed him that this inquiry had been a mistake, Warricombe resumed the subject of his family.
‘My brother Louis is at home—of course you can’t remember him; he was a youngster when you were at Thornhaw. The younger boy died some years ago, a pony accident; cut up my father dreadfully. Then there’s my sister Sidwell, and my sister Fanny—that’s all of us. I can’t quite answer for Louis, but the rest are of the old school. Liberal enough, don’t be afraid. But—well, the old school.’
As Godwin kept silence, the speaker shot a glance at him, keenly scrutinising. Their eyes did not meet; Peak kept his on the ground.
‘Care much about politics nowadays?’
‘Not very much.’
‘Can’t say that I do myself,’ pursued Buckland. ‘I rather drifted into it. Godolphin, I daresay, has as little humbug about him as most parliamentarians; we stick to the practical fairly well. I shall never go into the House on my own account. But there’s a sort of pleasure in being in the thick of public movements. I’m not cut out for debate; should lose my temper, and tell disagreeable truths—which wouldn’t do, you know. But behind the scenes—it isn’t bad, in a way.’
A longer pause obliged Godwin to speak of himself.
‘My life is less exciting. For years I have worked in a manufacturing laboratory at Rotherhithe.’
‘So science has carried the day with you, after all. It used to be very doubtful.’
This was a kind and pleasant way of interpreting necessity. Godwin felt grateful, and added with a smile:
‘I don’t think I shall stick to it much longer. For one thing, I am sick of town. Perhaps I shall travel for a year or two; perhaps—I’m in a state of transition, to tell the truth.’
Buckland revolved this information; his face told that he found it slightly puzzling.
‘You once had thoughts of literature.’
‘Long given up.’
‘Leisure would perhaps revive them?’
‘Possibly; but I think not.’
They were now quitting the town, and Peak, unwilling to appear before strangers in a state of profuse perspiration, again moderated his friend’s speed. They began to talk about the surrounding country, a theme which occupied them until the house was reached. With quick-beating heart, Godwin found himself at the gate by which he had already twice passed. Secure in the decency of his apparel, and no longer oppressed by bashfulness, he would have gone joyously forward but for the dread of a possible ridiculous association which his name might revive in the thoughts of Mr. and Mrs. Warricombe. Yet Buckland—who had no lack of kindly feeling—would hardly have brought him here had the reception which awaited him been at all dubious.
‘If we don’t come across anyone,’ said Warricombe, ‘we’ll go straight up to my room.’
But the way was not clear. Within the beautiful old porch sat Sidwell Warricombe and her friend of the striking countenance, whom Godwin now knew as Miss Moorhouse. Buckland addressed his sister in a tone of lively pleasure.
‘Whom do you think I have met and brought home with me? Here is my old friend, Godwin Peak.’
Under the two pairs of female eyes, Godwin kept a calm, if rather stern, face.
‘I should have had no difficulty in recognising Mr. Peak,’ said Sidwell, holding out her hand. ‘But was the meeting quite by chance?’
To Godwin himself the question was of course directed, with a look of smiling interest—such welcome as could not have been improved upon; she listened to his reply, then presented him to Miss Moorhouse. A slight languor in her movements and her voice, together with the beautiful coldness of her complexion, made it probable that she did not share the exuberant health manifest in her two brothers. She conversed with mature self-possession, yet showed a slight tendency to abstractedness. On being addressed, she regarded the speaker steadily for an instant before shaping her answer, which always, however trifling the subject, seemed carefully worded. In these few moments of dialogue, Godwin reached the conclusion that Sidwell had not much sense of humour, but that the delicacy of her mind was unsurpassable.
In Miss Moorhouse there was no defect of refinement, but her conversation struck a note of sprightliness at once more energetic and more subtle than is often found in English girls. Thus, though at times she looked so young that it might be doubted whether she had long been out of her teens, at others one suspected her older than Sidwell. The friends happened to be as nearly as possible of an age, which was verging to twenty-six.
When he spoke to Miss Moorhouse, Buckland’s frank tone subdued itself. He watched her face with reverent attention, smiled when she smiled, and joined in her laughter with less than his usual volume of sound. In acuteness he was obviously inferior to her, and there were moments when he betrayed some nervousness under her rejoinders. All this was matter of observation for Peak, who had learnt to exercise his discernment even whilst attending to the proprieties.
The sounding of the first luncheon-bell left the young men free to go upstairs. When at length they presented themselves in the drawing-room, Mrs. Warricombe and her younger daughter sat there alone. The greeting of his hostess did not quite satisfy Godwin, though it was sufficiently courteous; he remembered that ten years ago Mrs. Warricombe had appeared to receive him with some restraint, and his sensation in renewing her acquaintance was one of dislike. But in a moment the master of the house joined them, and no visitor could have had a more kindly welcome than that he offered to his son’s friend. With genial tact, Mr. Warricombe ignored the interval since his last conversation with Godwin, and spoke as if this visit were the most natural thing in the world.
‘Do you already know the country about Exeter?’
‘I have seen very little of it yet.’
‘Oh, then, we must show you our points of view. Our own garden offers a glimpse of the river-mouth and a good prospect of Haldon—the ridge beyond the Exe; but there are many much better points within easy reach. You are in no hurry, I hope?’
Louis Warricombe and Miss Moorhouse’s brother were away on a long walk; they did not return for lunch. Godwin was glad of this, for time had wrought the change in him that he felt more at ease in female society than under the eyes of young men whose social position inclined them to criticism. The meal proved as delightful as luncheon is wont to be in a luxurious country-house, when brilliant sunshine gleams on the foliage visible from windows, and the warmth of the season sanctions clear colours in costume. The talk was wholly of country pleasures. It afforded the visitor no little satisfaction to be able to make known his acquaintance with parts of England to which the Warricombes had not penetrated. Godwin learnt that the family were insular in their tastes; a mention by Miss Moorhouse of continental scenes led the host to avow a strong preference for his own country, under whatever aspect, and Sidwell murmured her sympathy.
No less introspective than in the old days, though he could better command his muscles, Peak, after each of his short remarks, made comparison of his tone and phraseology with those of the other speakers. Had he still any marks of the ignoble world from which he sprang? Any defect of pronunciation, any native awkwardness of utterance? Impossible to judge himself infallibly, but he was conscious of no vulgar mannerism. Though it was so long since he left Whitelaw, the accent of certain of the Professors still remained with him as an example: when endeavouring to be graceful, he was wont to hear the voice of Dr Nares, or of Professor Barber who lectured on English Literature. More recently he had been observant of Christian Moxey’s speech, which had a languid elegance worth imitating in certain particulars. Buckland Warricombe was rather a careless talker, but it was the carelessness of a man who had never needed to reflect on such a matter, the refinement of whose enunciation was assured to him from the nursery. That now was a thing to be aimed at. Preciseness must be avoided, for in a young man it seemed to argue conscious effort: a loose sentence now and then, a colloquialism substituted for the more grammatical phrase.
Heaven be thanked that he was unconcerned on the point of garb! Inferiority in that respect would have been fatal to his ease. His clothes were not too new, and in quality were such as he had the habit of wearing. The Warricombes must have immediately detected any pretentiousness, were it but in a necktie; that would impress them more unfavourably than signs of poverty. But he defied inspection. Not Sidwell herself, doubtless sensitive in the highest degree, could conceive a prejudice against him on this account.
His misgivings were overcome. If these people were acquainted with the ‘dining-rooms’ joke, it certainly did not affect their behaviour to him, and he could hope, by the force of his personality, to obliterate from their minds such disagreeable thoughts as they might secretly entertain. Surely he could make good his claim to be deemed a gentleman. To Buckland he had declared his position, and no shame attached to it. A man of scientific tastes, like Mr. Warricombe, must consider it respectable enough. Grant him a little time, and why should he not become a recognised friend of this family?
If he were but resident in Exeter.
For the first time, he lost himself in abstraction, and only an inquiry from Sidwell recalled him.
‘You have seen the Cathedral, Mr. Peak?’
‘Oh yes! I attended service there yesterday morning.’
Had he reflected, perhaps he would not have added this circumstance; even in speaking he suffered a confused doubtfulness. But as soon as the words were uttered, he felt strangely glad. Sidwell bestowed upon him an unmistakable look of approval; her mother gazed with colder interest; Mr. Warricombe regarded him, and mused; Buckland, a smile of peculiar meaning on his close lips, glanced from him to Miss Moorhouse.
‘Ah, then, you heard Canon Grayling,’ remarked the father of the family, with something in his tone which answered to Sidwell’s facial expression. ‘How did you like his sermon?’
Godwin was trifling with a pair of nut-crackers, but the nervousness evident in his fingers did not prevent him from replying with a natural air of deliberation.
‘I was especially struck with the passage about the barren fig-tree.’
The words might have expressed a truth, but in that case a tone of sarcasm must have winged them. As it was, they involved either hypocrisy or ungenerous irony at the expense of his questioner. Buckland could not but understand them in the latter sense; his face darkened. At that moment, Peak met his eye, and encountered its steady searching gaze with a perfectly calm smile. Half-a-dozen pulsings of his heart—violent, painful, and the fatal hour of his life had struck.
‘What had he to say about it?’ Buckland asked, carelessly.
Peak’s reply was one of those remarkable efforts of mind—one might say, of character—which are sometimes called forth, without premeditation, almost without consciousness, by a profound moral crisis. A minute or two ago he would have believed it impossible to recall and state in lucid terms the arguments to which, as he sat in the Cathedral, he had barely given ear; he remembered vaguely that the preacher (whose name he knew not till now) had dwelt for a few moments on the topic indicated, but at the time he was indisposed to listen seriously, and what chance was there that the chain of thought had fixed itself in his memory? Now, under the marvelling regard of his conscious self, he poured forth an admirable rendering of the Canon’s views, fuller than the original—more eloquent, more subtle. For five minutes he held his hearers in absorbed attention, even Buckland bending forward with an air of genuine interest; and when he stopped, rather suddenly, there followed a silence.
‘Mr. Peak,’ said the host, after a cough of apology, ‘you have made that clearer to me than it was yesterday. I must thank you.’
Godwin felt that a slight bow of acknowledgment was perhaps called for, but not a muscle would obey his will. He was enervated; perspiration stood on his forehead. The most severe physical effort could not have reduced him to a feebler state.
Sidwell was speaking:
‘Mr. Peak has developed what Canon Grayling only suggested.’
‘A brilliant effort of exegesis,’ exclaimed Buckland, with a good-natured laugh.
Again the young men exchanged looks. Godwin smiled as one might under a sentence of death. As for the other, his suspicion had vanished, and he now gave way to frank amusement. Luncheon was over, and by a general movement all went forth on to the lawn in front of the house. Mr. Warricombe, even more cordial than hitherto, named to Godwin the features of the extensive landscape.
‘But you see that the view is in a measure spoilt by the growth of the city. A few years ago, none of those ugly little houses stood in the mid-distance. A few years hence, I fear, there will be much more to complain of. I daresay you know all about the ship-canal: the story of the countess, and so forth?’
Buckland presently suggested that the afternoon might be used for a drive.
‘I was about to propose it,’ said his father. ‘You might start by the Stoke Canon Road, so as to let Mr. Peak have the famous view from the gate; then go on towards Silverton, for the sake of the reversed prospect from the Exe. Who shall be of the party?’
It was decided that four only should occupy the vehicle, Miss Moorhouse and Fanny Warricombe to be the two ladies. Godwin regretted Sidwell’s omission, but the friendly informality of the arrangement delighted him. When the carriage rolled softly from the gravelled drive, Buckland holding the reins, he felt an animation such as no event had ever produced in him. No longer did he calculate phrases. A spontaneous aptness marked his dialogue with Miss Moorhouse, and the laughing words he now and then addressed to Fanny. For a short time Buckland was laconic, but at length he entered into the joyous tone of the occasion. Earwaker would have stood in amazement, could he have seen and heard the saturnine denizen of Peckham Rye.
The weather was superb. A sea-breeze mitigated the warmth of the cloudless sun, and where a dark pine-tree rose against the sky it gave the azure depths a magnificence unfamiliar to northern eyes.
‘On such a day as this,’ remarked Miss Moorhouse, dividing her look between Buckland and his friend, ‘one feels that there’s a good deal to be said for England.’
‘But for the vile weather,’ was Warricombe’s reply, ‘you wouldn’t know such enjoyment.’
‘Oh, I can’t agree with that for a moment! My capacity for enjoyment is unlimited. That philosophy is unworthy of you; it belongs to a paltry scheme called “making the best of things”.’
‘In which you excel, Miss Moorhouse.’
‘That she does!’ agreed Fanny—a laughing, rosy-cheeked maiden.
‘I deny it! No one is more copious in railing against circumstances.’
‘But you turn them all to a joke,’ Fanny objected.
‘That’s my profound pessimism. I am misunderstood. No one expects irony from a woman.’
Peak found it difficult not to gaze too persistently at the subtle countenance. He was impelled to examine it by a consciousness that he himself received a large share of Miss Moorhouse’s attention, and a doubt as to the estimation in which she held him. Canon Grayling’s sermon and Godwin’s comment had elicited no remark from her. Did she belong to the ranks of emancipated women? With his experience of Marcella Moxey, he welcomed the possibility of this variation of the type, but at the same time, in obedience to a new spirit that had strange possession of him, recognised that such phenomena no longer aroused his personal interest. By the oddest of intellectual processes he had placed himself altogether outside the sphere of unorthodox spirits. Concerning Miss Moorhouse he cared only for the report she might make of him to the Warricombes.
Before long, the carriage was stopped that he might enjoy one of the pleasantest views in the neighbourhood of the city. A gate, interrupting a high bank with which the road was bordered, gave admission to the head of a great cultivated slope, which fell to the river Exe; hence was suddenly revealed a wide panorama. Three well-marked valleys—those of the Creedy, the Exe, and the Culm—spread their rural loveliness to remote points of the horizon; gentle undulations, with pasture and woodland, with long winding roads, and many a farm that gleamed white amid its orchard leafage, led the gaze into regions of evanescent hue and outline. Westward, a bolder swell pointed to the skirts of Dartmoor. No inappropriate detail disturbed the impression. Exeter was wholly hidden behind the hill on which the observers stood, and the line of railway leading thither could only be descried by special search. A foaming weir at the hill’s foot blended its soft murmur with that of the fir branches hereabouts; else, no sound that the air could convey beyond the pulsing of a bird’s note.
All had alighted, and for a minute or two there was silence. When Peak had received such geographical instruction as was needful, Warricombe pointed out to him a mansion conspicuous on the opposite slope of the Exe valley, the seat of Sir Stafford Northcote. The house had no architectural beauty, but its solitary lordship amid green pastures and tracts of thick wood declared the graces and privileges of ancestral wealth. Standing here alone, Godwin would have surveyed these possessions of an English aristocrat with more or less bitterness; envy would, for a moment at all events, have perturbed his pleasure in the natural scene. Accompanied as he was, his emotion took a form which indeed was allied to envy, but had nothing painful. He exulted in the prerogatives of birth and opulence, felt proud of hereditary pride, gloried that his mind was capable of appreciating to the full those distinctions which, by the vulgar, are not so much as suspected. Admitted to equal converse with men and women who represented the best in English society, he could cast away the evil grudge, the fierce spirit of self-assertion, and be what nature had proposed in endowing him with large brain, generous blood, delicate tissues. What room for malignancy? He was accepted by his peers, and could regard with tolerance even those ignoble orders of mankind amid whom he had so long dwelt unrecognised.
A bee hummed past him, and this sound—of all the voices of nature that which most intenerates—filled his heart to overflowing. Moisture made his eyes dim, and at the impulse of a feeling of gratitude, such as only the subtlest care of psychology could fully have explained, he turned to Buckland, saying:
‘But for my meeting with you I should have had a lonely and not very cheerful holiday. I owe you a great deal.’
Warricombe laughed, but as an Englishman does when he wishes to avoid show of emotion.
‘I am very glad indeed that we did meet. Stay with us over tomorrow. I only wish I were not obliged to go to London on Wednesday.—Look, Fanny, isn’t that a hawk, over Cowley Bridge?’
‘Do you feel you would like to shoot it?’ asked Miss Moorhouse—who a moment ago had very closely examined Peak’s face.
‘To shoot it—why do you ask that?’
‘Confess that you felt the desire.’
‘Every man does,’ replied Buckland, ‘until he has had a moment to recover himself. That’s the human instinct.’
‘The male human instinct. Thank you for your honesty.’
They drove on, and by a wide circuit, occasionally stopping for the view, returned to the Old Tiverton Road, and so home. By this time Louis Warricombe and Mr. Moorhouse were back from their walk. Reposing in the company of the ladies, they had partaken of such refreshments as are lawful at five o’clock, and now welcomed with vivacity the later arrivals. Moorhouse was something older than Buckland, a sallow-cheeked man with forehead and eyes expressive of much intelligence. Till of late he had been a Cambridge tutor, but was now privately occupied in mathematical pursuits. Louis Warricombe had not yet made up his mind what profession to follow, and to aid the process of resolve had for the present devoted himself to physical exercise.
Tea-cup in hand, Godwin seated himself by Sidwell, who began by inquiring how the drive had pleased him. The fervour of his reply caused her to smile with special graciousness, and their conversation was uninterrupted for some minutes. Then Fanny came forward with a book of mosses, her own collection, which she had mentioned to Peak as they were talking together in the carriage.
‘Do you make special study of any science?’ Sidwell asked, when certain remarks of Godwin’s had proved his familiarity with the things he was inspecting.
‘It is long since I worked seriously at anything of the kind,’ he answered; adding in a moment, ‘except at chemistry—that only because it is my business.’
‘Organic or inorganic chemistry?’ inquired Fanny, with the promptness of a schoolgirl who wishes to have it known that her ideas are no longer vague.
‘Organic for the most part,’ Godwin replied, smiling at her. ‘And of the most disagreeable kind.’
Sidwell reflected, then put another question, but with some diffidence.
‘I think you were once fond of geology?’
It was the first allusion to that beginning of their acquaintance, ten years ago. Peak succeeded in meeting her look with steadiness.
‘Yes, I still like it.’
‘Father’s collections have been much improved since you saw them at Thornhaw.’
‘I hope Mr. Warricombe will let me see them.’
Buckland came up and made an apology for drawing his friend aside.
‘Will you let us send for your traps? You may just as well have a room here for a night or two.’
Perpetually imagining some kind chance that might associate him with civilised people, Godwin could not even pack his portmanteau for a ramble to Land’s End without stowing away a dress suit. He was thus saved what would have been an embarrassment of special annoyance. Without hesitation, he accepted Buckland’s offer, and named the hotel at which the luggage was deposited.
‘All right; the messenger shall explain. Our name’s well enough known to them. If you would like to look up my father in his study, he’ll be delighted to go over his collections with you. You still care for that kind of thing?’
‘Most certainly. How can you doubt it?’
Buckland smiled, and gave no other reply.
‘Ask Fanny to show you the way when you care to go.’ And he left the room.
Sidwell had fallen into conversation with Mr. Moorhouse. Miss Moorhouse, Mrs. Warricombe, and Louis were grouped in animated talk. Observing that Fanny threw glances towards him from a lonely corner, Peak went over to her, and was pleased with the smile he met. Fanny had watched eyes, much brighter than Sidwell’s; her youthful vivacity blended with an odd little fashion of schoolgirl pedantry in a very piquant way. Godwin’s attempts at conversation with her were rather awkward; he found it difficult to strike the suitable note, something not too formal yet not deficient in respect.
‘Do you think,’ he asked presently, ‘that I should disturb your father if I went to him?’
‘Oh, not at all! I often go and sit in the study at this time.’
‘Will you show me the way?’
Fanny at once rose, and together they crossed the hall, passed through a sort of anteroom connecting with a fernery, and came to the study door. A tap was answered by cheerful summons, and Fanny looked in.
‘Well, my ladybird? Ah, you are bringing Mr. Peak; come in, come in!’
It was a large and beautiful room, its wide windows, in a cushioned recess, looking upon the lawn where the yew tree cast solemn shade. One wall presented an unbroken array of volumes, their livery sober but handsome; detached bookcases occupied other portions of the irregular perimeter. Cabinets, closed and open, were arranged with due regard to convenience. Above the mantelpiece hung a few small photographs, but the wall-space at disposal was chiefly occupied with objects which illustrated Mr. Warricombe’s scientific tastes. On a stand in the light of the window gleamed two elaborate microscopes, provocative of enthusiasm in a mind such as Godwin’s.
In a few minutes, Fanny silently retired. Her father, by no means forward to speak of himself and his pursuits, was led in that direction by Peak’s expressions of interest, and the two were soon busied with matters which had a charm for both. A collection of elvans formed the starting-point, and when they had entered upon the wide field of palaeontology it was natural for Mr. Warricombe to invite his guest’s attention to the species of homalonotus which he had had the happiness of identifying some ten years ago—a discovery now recognised and chronicled. Though his sympathy was genuine enough, Godwin struggled against an uneasy sense of manifesting excessive appreciation. Never oblivious of himself, he could not utter the simplest phrase of admiration without criticising its justice, its tone. And at present it behoved him to bear in mind that he was conversing with no half-bred sciolist. Mr Warricombe obviously had his share of human weakness, but he was at once a gentleman and a student of well-stored mind; insincerity must be very careful if it would not jar upon his refined ear. So Godwin often checked himself in the utterance of what might sound too much like flattery. A young man talking with one much older, a poor man in dialogue with a wealthy, must under any circumstances guard his speech; for one of Godwin’s aggressive idiosyncrasy the task of discretion had peculiar difficulties, and the attitude he had assumed at luncheon still further complicated the operations of his mind. Only at moments could he speak in his true voice, and silence meant for the most part a studious repression of much he would naturally have uttered.
Resurgent envy gave him no little trouble. On entering the room, he could not but exclaim to himself, ‘How easy for a man to do notable work amid such surroundings! If I were but thus equipped for investigation!’ And as often as his eyes left a particular object to make a general survey, the same thought burned in him. He feared lest it should be legible on his countenance.
Taking a pamphlet from the table, Mr. Warricombe, with a humorous twinkle in his eyes, inquired whether Peak read German; the answer being affirmative:
‘Naturally,’ he rejoined, ‘you could hardly have neglected so important a language. I, unfortunately, didn’t learn it in my youth, and I have never had perseverance enough to struggle with it since. Something led me to take down this brochure the other day—an old attempt of mine to write about the weathering of rocks. It was printed in ‘76, and no sooner had it seen the light than friends of mine wanted to know what I meant by appropriating, without acknowledgement, certain facts quite recently pointed out by Professor Pfaff of Erlangen! Unhappily, Professor Pfaff’s results were quite unknown to me, and I had to get them translated. The coincidences, sure enough, were very noticeable. Just before you came in, I was reviving that old discomfiture.’
Peak, in glancing over the pages, murmured with a smile:
‘Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt!’
‘Even so!’ exclaimed Mr. Warricombe, laughing with a subdued heartiness which was one of his pleasant characteristics. And, after a pause, he inquired, ‘Do you find any time to keep up your classics?’
‘By fits and starts. Sometimes I return to them for a month or two.’
‘Why, it’s pretty much the same with me. Here on my table, for instance, lies Tacitus. I found it mentioned not long ago that the first sentence of the Annals is a hexameter—did you know it?—and when I had once got hold of the book I thought it a shabby thing to return it to the dust of its shelf without reading at least a few pages. So I have gone on from day to day, with no little enjoyment. Buckland, as you probably know, regards these old fellows with scorn.’
‘We always differed about that.’
‘I can’t quite decide whether he is still sincere in all he says about them. Time, I suspect, is mellowing his judgment.’
They moved to the shelves where Greek and Latin books stood in serried order, and only the warning dinner-bell put an end to their sympathetic discussion of the place such authors should hold in modern educational systems.
‘Have they shown you your room?’ Mr. Warricombe asked.
But, as he spoke, the face of his eldest son appeared at the door.
‘Your traps have safely arrived, Peak.’
The bedroom to which Godwin was conducted had a delicious fragrance, of source indeterminable. When he had closed the door, he stood for a few moments looking about him; it was his first experience of the upper chambers of houses such as this. Merely to step upon the carpet fluttered his senses: merely to breathe the air was a purification. Luxury of the rational kind, dictated by regard for health of body and soul, appeared in every detail. On the walls were water-colours, scenery of Devon and Cornwall; a hanging book-case held about a score of volumes poets, essayists, novelists. Elsewhere, not too prominent, lay a Bible and a Prayer-book.
He dressed, as never before, with leisurely enjoyment of the process. When the mirror declared him ready, his eyes returned frequently to an inspection of the figure he presented, and it seemed to him that he was not unworthy to take his place at the dinner-table. As for his visage, might he not console himself with the assurance that it was of no common stamp? ‘If I met that man in a room, I should be curious about him; I should see at once that he didn’t belong to the vulgar; I should desire to hear him speak.’ And the Warricombes were not lacking in discernment. He would compare more than favourably with Mr. Moorhouse, whose aspect, bright and agreeable enough, made no promise of originality.—It must be time to go down. He left the room with an air of grave self-confidence.
At dinner he was careful to attempt no repetition of the display which had done very well at luncheon; it must not be thought that he had the habit of talking for effect. Mrs. Warricombe, unless he mistook, had begun to view him more favourably; her remarks made less distinction between him and the other guests. But he could not like his hostess; he thought her unworthy to be the mother of Sidwell and Fanny, of Buckland and Louis; there was a marked strain of the commonplace in her. The girls, costumed for the evening, affected him with a return of the awe he had all but overcome. Sidwell was exquisite in dark colours, her sister in white. Miss Moorhouse (addressed by her friends as ‘Sylvia’) looked older than in the day-time, and had lost something of her animation; possibly the country routine had begun to weary her a little.
Peak was at a vast distance from the hour which saw him alight at Exeter and begin his ramble about the city. He no longer felt himself alone in the world; impossible to revive the mood in which he deliberately planned to consume his economies in a year or two of desert wandering; far other were the anticipations which warmed his mind when the after-dinner repose attuned him to unwonted hopefulness. This family were henceforth his friends, and it depended only upon himself to make the connection lasting, with all manner of benefits easily imagined. Established in the country, the Warricombes stood to him in quite a different relation from any that could have arisen had he met with them in London. There he would have been nothing more than a casual dinner-guest, welcomed for the hour and all but forgotten when he had said good-night. For years he had understood that London offered him no prospect of social advancement. But a night passed under this roof practically raised him to a level whence he surveyed a rich field of possible conquest. With the genial geologist he felt himself on excellent terms, and much of this was ascribable to a singular chance which had masked his real being, and represented him, with scarce an effort of his own, in a light peculiarly attractive to Mr. Warricombe. He was now playing the conscious hypocrite; not a pleasant thing to face and accept, but the fault was not his—fate had brought it about. At all events, he aimed at no vulgar profit; his one desire was for human fellowship; he sought nothing but that solace which every code of morals has deemed legitimate. Let the society which compelled to such an expedient bear the burden of its shame.
That must indeed have been a circle of great intellects amid which Godwin Peak felt himself subordinate. He had never known that impression, and in the Warricombe family was no one whom he could regard even as his equal. Buckland, doubtless, had some knowledge of the world, and could boast of a free mind; but he lacked subtlety: a psychological problem would easily puzzle him. Mr. Warricombe’s attainments were respectable, but what could be said of a man who had devoted his life to geology, and still (in the year 1884) remained an orthodox member of the Church of England? Godwin, as he sat in the drawing-room and enjoyed its atmosphere of refinement, sincerely held himself of far more account as an intellectual being than all the persons about him.
But if his brain must dwell in solitude his heart might compass worthy alliances—the thing most needful to humanity. One may find the associates of his intellect in libraries—the friend of one’s emotions must walk in flesh and blood. Earwaker, Moxey—these were in many respects admirable fellows, and he had no little love for them, but the world they represented was womanless, and so of flagrant imperfection. Of Marcella Moxey he could not think emotionally; indeed she emphasised by her personality the lack which caused his suffering. Sidwell Warricombe suggested, more completely than any woman he had yet observed, that companionship without which life must to the end taste bitter. His interest in her was not strictly personal; she moved and spoke before him as a typical woman, not as the daughter of Martin Warricombe and the sister of Buckland. Here at last opened to his view that sphere of female society which he had known as remotely existing, the desperate aim of ambition.
Conventional women—but was not the phrase tautological? In the few females who have liberated their souls, was not much of the woman inevitably sacrificed, and would it not be so for long years to come? On the other hand, such a one as Sidwell might be held a perfect creature, perfect in relation to a certain stage of human development. Look at her, as she sat conversing with Moorhouse, soft candle-light upon her face; compare her on the one hand with an average emancipated girl, on the other with a daughter of the people. How unsatisfying was the former; the latter, how repulsive! Here one had the exquisite mean, the lady as England has perfected her towards the close of this nineteenth century. A being of marvellous delicacy, of purest instincts, of unsurpassable sweetness. Who could not detail her limitations, obvious and, in certain moods, irritating enough? These were nothing to the point, unless one would roam the world a hungry idealist; and Godwin was weary of the famined pilgrimage.
The murmur of amiable voices softened him to the reception of all that was good in his present surroundings, and justified in the light of sentiment his own dishonour. This English home, was it not surely the best result of civilisation in an age devoted to material progress? Here was peace, here was scope for the kindliest emotions. Upon him—the born rebel, the scorner of average mankind, the consummate egoist—this atmosphere exercised an influence more tranquillising, more beneficent, than even the mood of disinterested study. In the world to which sincerity would condemn him, only the worst elements of his character found nourishment and range; here he was humanised, made receptive of all gentle sympathies. Heroism might point him to an unending struggle with adverse conditions, but how was heroism possible without faith? Absolute faith he had none; he was essentially a negativist, guided by the mere relations of phenomena. Nothing easier than to contemn the mode of life represented by this wealthy middle class; but compare it with other existences conceivable by a thinking man, and it was emphatically good. It aimed at placidity, at benevolence, at supreme cleanliness,—things which more than compensated for the absence of higher spirituality. We can be but what we are; these people accepted themselves, and in so doing became estimable mortals. No imbecile pretensions exposed them to the rebuke of a social satirist; no vulgarity tainted their familiar intercourse. Their allegiance to a worn-out creed was felt as an added grace; thus only could their souls aspire, and the imperfect poetry of their natures be developed.
He took an opportunity of seating himself by Mrs. Warricombe, with whom as yet he had held no continuous dialogue.
‘Has there been anything of interest at the London theatres lately?’ she asked.
‘I know so little of them,’ Godwin replied, truthfully. ‘It must be several years since I saw a play.’
‘Then in that respect you have hardly become a Londoner.’
‘Nor in any other, I believe,’ said Peak, with a smile. ‘I have lived there ten years, but am far from regarding London as my home. I hope a few months more will release me from it altogether.’
‘Indeed!—Perhaps you think of leaving England?’
‘I should be very sorry to do that—for any length of time. My wish is to settle somewhere in the country, and spend a year or two in quiet study.’
Mrs. Warricombe looked amiable surprise, but corrected herself to approving interest.
‘I have heard some of our friends say that their minds get unstrung, if they are long away from town, but I should have thought that country quietness would be much better than London noise. My husband certainly finds it so.’
‘People are very differently constituted,’ said Godwin. ‘And then it depends much on the nature of one’s work.’
Uttering these commonplaces with an air of reflection, he observed that they did not cost him the self-contempt which was wont to be his penalty for concession to the terms of polite gossip; rather, his mind accepted with gratitude this rare repose. He tasted something of the tranquil self-content which makes life so enjoyable when one has never seen a necessity for shaping original remarks. No one in this room would despise him for a platitude, were it but recommended with a pleasant smile. With the Moxeys, with Earwaker, he durst not thus have spoken.
When the hour of separation was at hand, Buckland invited his guest to retire with him to a part of the house where they could smoke and chat comfortably.
‘Moorhouse and Louis are fagged after their twenty mile stretch this morning; I have caught both of them nodding during the last few minutes. We can send them to bed without apology.’
He led the way upstairs to a region of lumber-rooms, whence a narrow flight of steps brought them into a glass-house, octangular and with pointed tops, out upon the roof. This, he explained, had been built some twenty years ago, at a time when Mr. Warricombe amused himself with photography. A few indications of its original purposes were still noticeable; an easel and a box of oil-colours showed that someone—doubtless of the younger generation—had used it as a painting-room; a settee and deep cane chairs made it an inviting lounge on a warm evening like the present, when, by throwing open a hinged wall, one looked forth into the deep sky and tasted the air from the sea.
‘Sidwell used to paint a little,’ said Buckland, as his companion bent to examine a small canvas on which a landscape was roughed in. It lay on a side table, and was half concealed by an ordnance map, left unfolded. ‘For the last year or two I think she has given it up. I’m afraid we are not strong in matters of art. Neither of the girls can play very well, though of course they both tinkle for their own amusement. Maurice—the poor lad who was killed—gave a good deal of artistic promise; father keeps some little water-colours of his, which men in that line have praised—perhaps sincerely.’
‘I remember you used to speak slightingly of art,’ said Godwin, as he took an offered cigar.
‘Did I? And of a good many other things, I daresay. It was my habit at one time, I believe, to grow heated in scorn of Euclid’s definitions. What an interesting book Euclid is! Half a year ago, I was led by a talk with Moorhouse to go through some of the old “props”, and you can’t imagine how they delighted me. Moorhouse was so obliging as to tell me that I had an eminently deductive mind.’
He laughed, but not without betraying some pleasure in the remark.
‘Surprising,’ he went on, ‘how very little such a mind as Moorhouse’s suggests itself in common conversation. He is really profound in mathematics, a man of original powers, but I never heard him make a remark of the slightest value on any other subject. Now his sister—she has studied nothing in particular, yet she can’t express an opinion that doesn’t bear the stamp of originality.’
Godwin was contented to muse, his eyes fixed on a brilliant star in the western heaven.
‘There’s only one inconsistency in her that annoys and puzzles me,’ Buckland pursued, speaking with the cigar in his mouth. ‘In religion, she seems to be orthodox. True, we have never spoken on the subject, but—well, she goes to church, and carries prayer-books. I don’t know how to explain it. Hypocrisy is the last thing one could suspect her of. I’m sure she hates it in every form. And such a clear brain!—I can’t understand it.’
The listener was still star-gazing. He had allowed his cigar, after the first few puffs, to smoulder untasted; his lips were drawn into an expression very unlike the laxity appropriate to pleasurable smoking. When the murmur of the pines had for a moment been audible, he said, with a forced smile:
‘I notice you take for granted that a clear brain and religious orthodoxy are incompatible.’
The other gave him a keen look.
‘Hardly,’ was Buckland’s reply, spoken with less ingenuousness of tone than usual. ‘I say that Miss Moorhouse has undeniably a strong mind, and that it is impossible to suspect her of the slightest hypocrisy.’
‘Whence the puzzle that keeps you occupied,’ rejoined Peak, in a voice that sounded like assumption of superiority, though the accent had an agreeable softness.
Warricombe moved as if impatiently, struck a match to rekindle his weed, blew tumultuous clouds, and finally put a blunt question:
‘What do you think about it yourself?’
‘From my point of view, there is no puzzle at all,’ Godwin replied, in a very clear voice, smiling as he met the other’s look.
‘How am I to understand that?’ asked Buckland, good-naturedly, though with a knitting of his brows.
‘Not as a doubt of Miss Moorhouse’s sincerity. I can’t see that a belief in the Christian religion is excluded by any degree of intellectual clearness.’
‘No—your views have changed, Peak?’
‘On many subjects, this among them.’
‘I see.’
The words fell as if involuntarily from Warricombe’s lips. He gazed at the floor awhile, then, suddenly looking up, exclaimed:
‘It would be civil to accept this without surprise, but it is too much for me. How has it come about?’
‘That would take me a long time to explain.’
‘Then,’ pursued his companion, watching him closely, ‘you were quite in sympathy with that exposition you gave at lunch today?’
‘Quite. I hope there was nothing in my way of speaking that made you think otherwise?’
‘Nothing at all. I couldn’t help wondering what it meant. You seemed perfectly in earnest, yet such talk had the oddest sound on your lips—to me, I mean. Of course I thought of you as I used to know you.’
‘Naturally.’ Peak was now in an attitude of repose, his legs crossed, thumb and forefinger stroking his chin. ‘I couldn’t very well turn aside to comment on my own mental history.’
Here again was the note of something like genial condescension. Buckland seemed sensible of it, and slightly raised his eyebrows.
‘I am to understand that you have become strictly orthodox in matters of religious faith?’
‘The proof is,’ replied Godwin, ‘that I hope before long to take Orders.’
Again there was silence, and again the sea-breath made its whispering in the pines. Warricombe, with a sudden gesture, pointed towards the sky.
‘A shooting star—one of the brightest I ever saw!’
‘I missed it,’ said Peak, just glancing in that direction.
The interruption enabled Buckland to move his chair; in this new position he was somewhat further from Peak, and had a better view of his face.
‘I should never have imagined you a clergyman,’ he said, thoughtfully, ‘but I can see that your mind has been developing powers in that direction.—Well, so be it! I can only hope you have found your true work in life.’
‘But you doubt it?’
‘I can’t say that I doubt it, as I can’t understand you. To be sure, we have been parted for many years. In some respects I must seem much changed’—
‘Greatly changed,’ Godwin put in, promptly.
‘Yes,’ pursued the other, correctively, ‘but not in a way that would seem incredible to anyone whatever. I am conscious of growth in tolerance, but my attitude in essentials is unchanged. Thinking of you—as I have often enough done—I always kept the impression you made on me when we were both lads; you seemed most distinctly a modern mind—one of the most modern that ever came under my notice. Now, I don’t find it impossible to understand my father, when he reconciles science with religion; he was born sixty years ago. But Godwin Peak as a—a—’
‘Parson,’ supplied Peak, drily.
‘Yes, as a parson—I shall have to meditate much before I grasp the notion.’
‘Perhaps you have dropped your philosophical studies?’ said Godwin, with a smile of courteous interest.
‘I don’t know. Metaphysics have no great interest for me, but I philosophise in a way. I thought myself a student of human nature, at all events.’
‘But you haven’t kept up with philosophical speculation on the points involved in orthodox religion?’
‘I confess my ignorance of everything of the kind—unless you include Bishop Blougram among the philosophers?’
Godwin bore the gaze which accompanied this significant inquiry. For a moment he smiled, but there followed an expression of gravity touched with pain.
‘I hadn’t thought of broaching this matter,’ he said, with slow utterance, but still in a tone of perfect friendliness. ‘Let us put it aside.’
Warricombe seemed to make an effort, and his next words had the accent of well-bred consideration which distinguished his ordinary talk.
‘Pray forgive my bad joke. I merely meant that I have no right whatever to argue with anyone who has given serious attention to such things. They are altogether beyond my sphere. I was born an agnostic, and no subtlety of demonstration could incline me for a moment to theological views; my intellect refuses to admit a single preliminary of such arguments. You astonish me, and that’s all I am justified in saying.’
‘My dear Warricombe, you are justified in saying whatever your mind suggests. That is one of the principles which I hold unaltered—let me be quite frank with you. I should never have decided upon such a step as this, but for the fact that I have managed to put by a small sum of money which will make me independent for two or three years. Till quite lately I hadn’t a thought of using my freedom in this way; it was clear to me that I must throw over the old drudgery at Rotherhithe, but this resolve which astonishes you had not yet ripened—I saw it only as one of the possibilities of my life. Well, now, it’s only too true that there’s something of speculation in my purpose; I look to the Church, not only as a congenial sphere of activity, but as a means of subsistence. In a man of no fortune this is inevitable; I hope there is nothing to be ashamed of. Even if the conditions of the case allowed it, I shouldn’t present myself for ordination forthwith; I must study and prepare myself in quietness. How the practical details will be arranged, I can’t say; I have no family influence, and I must hope to make friends who will open a way for me. I have always lived apart from society; but that isn’t natural to me, and it becomes more distasteful the older I grow. The probability is that I shall settle somewhere in the country, where I can live decently on a small income. After all, it’s better I should have let you know this at once. I only realised a few minutes ago that to be silent about my projects was in a way to be guilty of false pretences.’
The adroitness of this last remark, which directed itself, with such show of candour, against a suspicion precisely the opposite of that likely to be entertained by the listener, succeeded in disarming Warricombe; he looked up with a smile of reassurance, and spoke encouragingly.
‘About the practical details I don’t think you need have any anxiety. It isn’t every day that the Church of England gets such a recruit. Let me suggest that you have a talk with my father.’
Peak reflected on the proposal, and replied to it with grave thoughtfulness:
‘That’s very kind of you, but I should have a difficulty in asking Mr. Warricombe’s advice. I’m afraid I must go on in my own way for a time. It will be a few months, I daresay, before I can release myself from my engagements in London.’
‘But I am to understand that your mind is really made up?’
‘Oh, quite!’
‘Well, no doubt we shall have opportunities of talking. We must meet in town, if possible. You have excited my curiosity, and I can’t help hoping you’ll let me see a little further into your mind some day. When I first got hold of Newman’s Apologia, I began to read it with the utmost eagerness, flattering myself that now at length I should understand how a man of brains could travel such a road. I was horribly disappointed, and not a little enraged, when I found that he began by assuming the very beliefs I thought he was going to justify. In you I shall hope for more logic.’
‘Newman is incapable of understanding such an objection,’ said Peak, with a look of amusement.
‘But you are not.’
The dialogue grew chatty. When they exchanged good-night, Peak fancied that the pressure of Buckland’s hand was less fervent than at their meeting, but his manner no longer seemed to indicate distrust. Probably the agnostic’s mood was one of half-tolerant disdain.
Godwin turned the key in his bedroom door, and strayed aimlessly about. He was fatigued, but the white, fragrant bed did not yet invite him; a turbulence in his brain gave warning that it would be long before he slept. He wound up his watch; the hands pointed to twelve. Chancing to come before the mirror, he saw that he was unusually pale, and that his eyes had a swollen look.
The profound stillness was oppressive to him; he started nervously at an undefined object in a dim corner, and went nearer to examine it; he was irritable, vaguely discontented, and had even a moment of nausea, perhaps the result of tobacco stronger than he was accustomed to smoke. After leaning for five minutes at the open window, he felt a soothing effect from the air, and could think consecutively of the day’s events. What had happened seemed to him incredible; it was as though he revived a mad dream, of ludicrous coherence. Since his display of rhetoric at luncheon all was downright somnambulism. What fatal power had subdued him? What extraordinary influence had guided his tongue, constrained his features? His conscious self had had no part in all this comedy; now for the first time was he taking count of the character he had played.
Had he been told this morning that—Why, what monstrous folly was all this? Into what unspeakable baseness had he fallen? Happily, he had but to take leave of the Warricombe household, and rush into some region where he was unknown. Years hence, he would relate the story to Earwaker.
For a long time he suffered the torments of this awakening. Shame buffeted him on the right cheek and the left; he looked about like one who slinks from merited chastisement. Oh, thrice ignoble varlet! To pose with unctuous hypocrisy before people who had welcomed him under their roof, unquestioned, with all the grace and kindliness of English hospitality! To lie shamelessly in the face of his old fellow-student, who had been so genuinely glad to meet him again!
Yet such possibility had not been unforeseen. At the times of his profound gloom, when solitude and desire crushed his spirit, he had wished that fate would afford him such an opportunity of knavish success. His imagination had played with the idea that a man like himself might well be driven to this expedient, and might even use it with life-long result. Of a certainty, the Church numbered such men among her priests,—not mere lukewarm sceptics who made religion a source of income, nor yet those who had honestly entered the portal and by necessity were held from withdrawing, though their convictions had changed; but deliberate schemers from the first, ambitious but hungry natures, keen-sighted, unscrupulous. And they were at no loss to defend themselves against the attack of conscience. Life is a terrific struggle for all who begin it with no endowments save their brains. A hypocrite was not necessarily a harm-doer; easy to picture the unbelieving priest whose influence was vastly for good, in word and deed.
But he, he who had ever prided himself on his truth-fronting intellect, and had freely uttered his scorn of the credulous mob! He who was his own criterion of moral right and wrong! No wonder he felt like a whipped cur. It was the ancestral vice in his blood, brought out by over-tempting circumstance. The long line of base-born predecessors, the grovelling hinds and mechanics of his genealogy, were responsible for this. Oh for a name wherewith honour was hereditary!
His eyes were blinded by a rush of hot tears. Down, down—into the depths of uttermost despondency, of self-pity and self-contempt! Had it been practicable, he would have fled from the house, leaving its occupants to think of him as they would; even as, ten years ago, he had fled from the shame impending over him at Kingsmill. A cowardly instinct, this; having once acted upon it gave to his whole life a taint of craven meanness. Mere bluster, all his talk of mental dignity and uncompromising scorn of superstitions. A weak and idle man, whose best years were already wasted!
He gazed deliberately at himself in the glass, at his red eyelids and unsightly lips. Darkness was best; perhaps he might forget his shame for an hour or two, ere the dawn renewed it. He threw off his garments heedlessly, extinguished the lamp, and crept into the ready hiding-place.
‘Why are you obstinately silent? [wrote Earwaker, in a letter addressed to Godwin at his Peckham lodgings]. I take it for granted that you must by this time be back from your holiday. Why haven’t you replied to my letter of a fortnight ago? Nothing yet from The Critical. If you are really at work as usual, come and see me tomorrow evening, any time after eight. The posture of my affairs grows dubious; the shadow of Kenyon thickens about me. In all seriousness I think I shall be driven from The Weekly Post before long. My quarrels with Runcorn are too frequent, and his blackguardism keeps more than pace with the times. Come or write, for I want to know how things go with you.
Tuissimus, J.E.E.’
Peak read this at breakfast on a Saturday morning. It was early in September, and three weeks had elapsed since his return from the west of England. Upon the autumn had fallen a blight of cold and rainy weather, which did not enhance the cheerfulness of daily journeying between Peckham Rye and Rotherhithe. When it was necessary for him to set forth to the train, he muttered imprecations, for a mood of inactivity possessed him; he would gladly have stayed in his comfortable sitting-room, idling over books or only occupied with languid thought.
In the afternoon he was at liberty to follow his impulse, and this directed him to the British Museum, whither of late he had several times resorted as a reader. Among the half-dozen books for which he applied was one in German, Reusch’s Bibel und Natur. After a little dallying, he became absorbed in this work, and two or three hours passed before its hold on his attention slackened. He seldom changed his position; the volume was propped against others, and he sat bending forward, his arms folded upon the desk. When he was thus deeply engaged, his face had a hard, stern aspect; if by chance his eye wandered for a moment, its look seemed to express resentment of interruption.
At length he threw himself back with a sudden yielding to weariness, crossed his legs, sank together in the chair, and for half-an-hour brooded darkly. A fit of yawning admonished him that it was time to quit the atmosphere of study. He betook himself to a restaurant in the Strand, and thence about eight o’clock made his way to Staple Inn, where the journalist gave him cheerful welcome.
‘Day after day I have meant to write,’ thus he excused himself. ‘But I had really nothing to say.’
‘You don’t look any better for your holiday,’ Earwaker remarked.
‘Holiday? Oh, I had forgotten all about it. When do you go?’
‘The situation is comical. I feel sure that if I leave town, my connection with the Post will come to an end. I shall have a note from Runcorn saying that we had better take this opportunity of terminating my engagement. On the whole I should be glad, yet I can’t make up my mind to be ousted by Kenyon—that’s what it means. They want to get me away, but I stick on, postponing holiday from week to week. Runcorn can’t decide to send me about my business, yet every leader I write enrages him. But for Kenyon, I should gain my point; I feel sure of it. It’s one of those cases in which homicide would be justified by public interest. If Kenyon gets my place, the paper becomes at once an organ of ruffiandom, the delight of the blackguardry.’
‘How’s the circulation?’ inquired Peak.
‘Pretty sound; that adds to the joke. This series of stories by Doubleday has helped us a good deal, and my contention is, if we can keep financially right by help of this kind, why not make a little sacrifice for the sake of raising our political tone? Runcorn won’t see it; he listens eagerly to Kenyon’s assurance that we might sell several thousand more by striking the true pot-house note.’
‘Then pitch the thing over! Wash your hands, and go to cleaner work.’
‘The work I am doing is clean enough,’ replied Earwaker. ‘Let me have my way, and I can make the paper a decent one and a useful one. I shan’t easily find another such chance.’
‘Your idealism has a strong root,’ said Godwin, rather contemptuously. ‘I half envy you. There must be a distinct pleasure in believing that any intellectual influence will exalt the English democracy.’
‘I’m not sure that I do believe it, but I enjoy the experiment. The chief pleasure, I suppose, is in fighting Runcorn and Kenyon.’
‘They are too strong for you, Earwaker. They have the spirit of the age to back them up.’
The journalist became silent; he smiled, but the harassment of conflict marked his features.
‘I hear nothing about “The New Sophistry”,’ he remarked, when Godwin had begun to examine some books that lay on the table. ‘Dolby has the trick of keeping manuscripts a long time. Everything that seems at the first glance tolerable, he sends to the printer, then muses over it at his leisure. Probably your paper is in type.’
‘I don’t care a rap whether it is or not. What do you think of this book of Oldwinkle’s?’
He was holding a volume of humorous stories, which had greatly taken the fancy of the public.
‘It’s uncommonly good,’ replied the journalist, laughing. ‘I had a prejudice against the fellow, but he has overcome me. It’s more than good farce—something like really strong humour here and there.’
‘I quite believe it,’ said Peak, ‘yet I couldn’t read a page. Whatever the mob enjoys is at once spoilt for me, however good I should otherwise think it. I am sick of seeing and hearing the man’s name.’
Earwaker shook his head in deprecation.
‘Narrow, my boy. One must be able to judge and enjoy impartially.’
‘I know it, but I shall never improve. This book seems to me to have a bad smell; it looks mauled with dirty fingers. I despise Oldwinkle for his popularity. To make them laugh, and to laugh with them—pah!’
They debated this point for some time, Peak growing more violent, though his friend preserved a smiling equanimity. A tirade of virulent contempt, in which Godwin exhibited all his powers of savage eloquence, was broken by a visitor’s summons at the door.
‘Here’s Malkin,’ said the journalist; ‘you’ll see each other at last.’
Peak could not at once command himself to the look and tone desirable in meeting a stranger; leaning against the mantelpiece, he gazed with a scowl of curiosity at the man who presented himself, and when he shook hands, it was in silence. But Malkin made speech from the others unnecessary for several minutes. With animated voice and gesture, he poured forth apologies for his failure to keep the appointment of six or seven weeks ago.
‘Only the gravest call of duty could have kept me away, I do assure you! No doubt Earwaker has informed you of the circumstances. I telegraphed—I think I telegraphed; didn’t I, Earwaker?’
‘I have some recollection of a word or two of scant excuse,’ replied the journalist.
‘But I implore you to consider the haste I was in,’ cried Malkin; ‘not five minutes, Mr. Peak, to book, to register luggage, to do everything; not five minutes, I protest! But here we are at last. Let us talk! Let us talk!’
He seated himself with an air of supreme enjoyment, and began to cram the bowl of a large pipe from a bulky pouch.
‘How stands the fight with Kenyon and Co.?’ he cried, as soon as the tobacco was glowing.
Earwaker briefly repeated what he had told Peak.
‘Hold out! No surrender and no compromise! What’s your opinion, Mr Peak, on the abstract question? Is a popular paper likely, or not, to be damaged in its circulation by improvement of style and tone—within the limits of discretion?’
‘I shouldn’t be surprised if it were,’ Peak answered, drily.
‘I’m afraid you’re right. There’s no use in blinking truths, however disagreeable. But, for Earwaker, that isn’t the main issue. What he has to do is to assert himself. Every man’s first duty is to assert himself. At all events, this is how I regard the matter. I am all for individualism, for the development of one’s personality at whatever cost. No compromise on points of faith! Earwaker has his ideal of journalistic duty, and in a fight with fellows like Runcorn and Kenyon he must stand firm as a rock.’
‘I can’t see that he’s called upon to fight at all,’ said Peak. ‘He’s in a false position; let him get out of it.’
‘A false position? I can’t see that. No man better fitted than Earwaker to raise the tone of Radical journalism. Here’s a big Sunday newspaper practically in his hands; it seems to me that the circumstances give him a grand opportunity of making his force felt. What are we all seeking but an opportunity for striking out with effect?’
Godwin listened with a sceptical smile, and made answer in slow, careless tones.
‘Earwaker happens to be employed and paid by certain capitalists to increase the sale of their paper.’
‘My dear sir!’ cried the other, bouncing upon his seat. ‘How can you take such a view? A great newspaper surely cannot be regarded as a mere source of income. These capitalists declare that they have at heart the interests of the working classes; so has Earwaker, and he is far better able than they to promote those interests. His duty is to apply their money to the best use, morally speaking. If he were lukewarm in the matter, I should be the first to advise his retirement; but this fight is entirely congenial to him. I trust he will hold his own to the last possible moment.’
‘You must remember,’ put in the journalist, with a look of amusement, ‘that Peak has no sympathy with Radicalism.’
‘I lament it, but that does not affect my argument. If you were a high Tory, I should urge you just as strongly to assert yourself. Surely you agree with this point of mine, Mr. Peak? You admit that a man must develop whatever strength is in him.’
‘I’m not at all sure of that.’
Malkin fixed himself sideways in the chair, and examined his collocutor’s face earnestly. He endeavoured to subdue his excitement to the tone of courteous debate, but the words that at length escaped him were humorously blunt.
‘Then of what are you sure?’
‘Of nothing.’
‘Now we touch bottom!’ cried Malkin. ‘Philosophically speaking, I agree with you. But we have to live our lives, and I suppose we must direct ourselves by some conscious principle.’
‘I don’t see the necessity,’ Peak replied, still in an impassive tone. ‘We may very well be guided by circumstances as they arise. To be sure, there’s a principle in that, but I take it you mean something different.’
‘Yes I do. I hold that the will must direct circumstances, not receive its impulse from them. How, then, are we to be guided? What do you set before yourself?’
‘To get through life with as much satisfaction and as little pain as possible.’
‘You are a hedonist, then. Well and good! Then that is your conscious principle’—
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘How am I to understand you?’
‘By recognising that a man’s intellectual and moral principles as likely as not tend to anything but his happiness.’
‘I can’t admit it!’ exclaimed Malkin, leaping from his chair. ‘What is happiness?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Earwaker, what is happiness? What is happiness?’
‘I really don’t know,’ answered the journalist, mirthfully.
‘This is trifling with a grave question. We all know perfectly well that happiness is the conscious exertion of individual powers. Why is there so much suffering under our present social system? Because the majority of men are crushed to a dead level of mechanical toil, with no opportunity of developing their special faculties. Give a man scope, and happiness is put within his reach.’
‘What do you mean by scope?’ inquired Godwin.
‘Scope? Scope? Why, room to expand. The vice of our society is hypocrisy; it comes of over-crowding. When a man isn’t allowed to be himself, he takes refuge in a mean imitation of those other men who appear to be better off. That was what sent me off to South America. I got into politics, and found that I was in danger of growing dishonest, of compromising, and toadying. In the wilderness, I found myself again.—Do you seriously believe that happiness can be obtained by ignoring one’s convictions?’
He addressed the question to both, snuffing the air with head thrown back.
‘What if you have no convictions?’ asked Peak.
‘Then you are incapable of happiness in any worthy sense! You may graze, but you will never feast.’
The listeners joined in laughter, and Malkin, after a moment’s hesitation, allowed his face to relax in good-humoured sympathy.
‘Now look here!’ he cried. ‘You—Earwaker; suppose you sent conscience to the devil, and set yourself to please Runcorn by increasing the circulation of your paper by whatever means. You would flourish, undoubtedly. In a short time you would be chief editor, and your pockets would burst with money. But what about your peace of mind? What about happiness?’
‘Why, I’m disposed to agree with Peak,’ answered the journalist. ‘If I could take that line, I should be a happier man than conscientiousness will ever make me.’
Malkin swelled with indignation.
‘You don’t mean it! You are turning a grave argument into jest!—Where’s my hat? Where the devil is my hat? Send for me again when you are disposed to talk seriously.’
He strode towards the door, but Earwaker arrested him with a shout.
‘You’re leaving your pipe!’
‘So I am. Where is it?—Did I tell you where I bought this pipe?’
‘No. What’s the wood?’
On the instant Malkin fell into a cheerful vein of reminiscence. In five minutes he was giving a rapturous description of tropical scenes, laughing joyously as he addressed now one now the other of his companions.
‘I hear you have a mind to see those countries, Mr. Peak,’ he said at length. ‘If you care for a travelling companion—rather short-tempered, but you’ll pardon that—pray give me the preference. I should enjoy above all things to travel with a man of science.’
‘It’s very doubtful whether I shall ever get so far,’ Godwin replied, musingly.
And, as he spoke, he rose to take leave. Earwaker’s protest that it was not yet ten o’clock did not influence him.
‘I want to reflect on the meaning of happiness,’ he said, extending his hand to Malkin; and, in spite of the smile, his face had a sombre cast.
The two who were left of course discussed him.
‘You won’t care much for Peak,’ said Earwaker. ‘He and I suit each other, because there’s a good deal of indifferentism in both of us. Moral earnestness always goes against the grain with him; I’ve noticed it frequently.’
‘I’m sorry I spoke so dogmatically. It wasn’t altogether good manners. Suppose I write him a short letter, just expressing my regret for having been led away’—
‘Needless, needless,’ laughed the journalist. ‘He thinks all the better of you for your zeal. But happiness is a sore point with him; few men, I should think, have known less of it. I can’t imagine any circumstances which would make him thoroughly at peace with himself and the world.’
‘Poor fellow! You can see something of that in his face. Why doesn’t he get married?’
‘A remarkable suggestion!—By the way, why don’t you?’.
‘My dear boy, there’s nothing I wish more, but it’s a business of such fearful precariousness. I’m one of those men whom marriage will either make or ruin. You know my characteristics; the slightest check upon my independence, and all’s up with me. The woman I marry must be perfectly reasonable, perfectly good-tempered; she must have excellent education, and every delicacy of breeding. Where am I to find this paragon?’
‘Society is open to you.’
‘True, but I am not open to society. I don’t take kindly to the people of my own class. No, I tell you what—my only chance of getting a suitable wife is to train some very young girl for the purpose. Don’t misunderstand me, for heaven’s sake! I mean that I must make a friendship with some schoolgirl in whose education I can have a voice, whose relatives will permit me to influence her mind and develop her character. What do you think of this idea?’
‘Not bad, but it demands patience.’
‘And who more patient than I? But let us talk of that poor Mrs. Jacox and her girls. You feel that you know them pretty well from my letters, don’t you? Nothing more monstrous can be imagined than the treatment to which this poor woman has been subjected! I couldn’t have believed that such dishonesty and brutality were possible in English families of decent position. Her husband deserted her, her brother robbed her, her sister-inlaw libelled her,—the whole story is nauseating!’
‘You’re quite sure that she tells you the truth?’
Malkin glared with sudden resentment.
‘The truth? What! you also desire to calumniate her? For shame, Earwaker! A poor widow toiling to support herself in a foreign country, with two children dependent on her.’
‘Yes, yes, yes; but you seem to know very little of her.’
‘I know her perfectly, and all her circumstances!’
Mrs. Jacox was the mother of the two girls whom Malkin had escorted to Rouen, after an hour or so of all but casual acquaintance. She and her history had come in a very slight degree under the notice of certain good-natured people with whom Malkin was on friendly terms, and hearing that the children, Bella and Lily, aged fourteen and twelve respectively, were about to undertake alone a journey to the Continent, the erratic hero felt it incumbent upon him to see them safe at their mother’s side. Instead of returning forthwith, he lingered in Normandy for several weeks, striking off at length, on the summons of a friend, to Orleans, whence he was only today returned. Two or three letters had kept Earwaker informed of his movements. Of Mrs. Jacox he wrote as he now spoke, with compassionate respect, and the girls, according to him, were exquisite models of budding maidenhood.
‘You haven’t told me,’ said Earwaker, calmly fronting the indignant outburst, ‘what her circumstances are—at present.’
‘She assists an English lady in the management of a boardinghouse,’ Malkin replied, with an air which forbade trivial comment. ‘Bella and Lily will of course continue their studies. I daresay I shall run over now and then to see them.’
‘May I, without offence, inquire if either of these young ladies seems suitable for the ideal training of which you spoke?’
Malkin smiled thoughtfully. He stood with his legs apart and stroked his blond beard.
‘The surmise is not unnatural. Well, I confess that Bella has inspired me with no little interest. She is rather mature, unfortunately; I wish she had been Lily’s age. We shall see; we shall see.’
Musing, he refilled his pipe, and gossip was prolonged till something after one o’clock. Malkin was never known to retire willingly from an evening’s congenial talk until the small hours were in progress.
Peak, on reaching home about eleven, was surprised to see a light in his sitting-room window. As he entered, his landlady informed him that Mr. Moxey had been waiting upstairs for an hour or two. Christian was reading. He laid down the book and rose languidly. His face was flushed, and he spoke with a laugh which suggested that a fit of despondency (as occasionally happened) had tempted him to excess in cordials. Godwin understood these signs. He knew that his friend’s intellect was rather brightened than impaired by such stimulus, and he affected not to be conscious of any peculiarity.
‘As you wouldn’t come to me,’ Christian began, ‘I had no choice but to come to you. My visit isn’t unwelcome, I hope?’
‘Certainly not. But how are you going to get home? You know the time?’
‘Don’t trouble. I shan’t go to bed to-night. Let me sit here and read, will you? If I feel tired I can lie down on the sofa. What a delightful book this is! I must get it.’
It was a history of the Italian Renaissance, recently published.
‘Where does this phrase come from?’ he continued, pointing to a scrap of paper, used as a book-mark, on which Godwin had pencilled a note. The words were: ‘Foris ut moris, intus ut libet.’
‘It’s mentioned there,’ Peak replied, ‘as the motto of those humanists who outwardly conformed to the common faith.’
‘I see. All very well when the Inquisition was flourishing, but sounds ignoble nowadays.’
‘Do you think so? In a half-civilised age, whether the sixteenth or the nineteenth century, a wise man may do worse than adopt it.’
‘Better be honest, surely?’
Peak stood for a moment as if in doubt, then exclaimed irritably:
‘Honest? Honest? Who is or can be honest? Who truly declares himself? When a man has learnt that truth is indeterminable, how is it more moral to go about crying that you don’t believe a certain dogma than to concede that the dogma may possibly be true? This new morality of the agnostics is mere paltry conceit. Why must I make solemn declaration that I don’t believe in absolute knowledge? I might as well be called upon to inform all my acquaintances how I stand with regard to the theories of chemical affinity. One’s philosophy has nothing to do with the business of life. If I chose to become a Church of England clergyman, what moral objection could be made?’
This illustration was so amusing to Moxey, that his surprise at what preceded gave way to laughter.
‘I wonder,’ he exclaimed, ‘that you never seriously thought of a profession for which you are so evidently cut out.’
Godwin kept silence; his face had darkened, and he seated himself with sullen weariness.
‘Tell me what you’ve been doing,’ resumed Moxey. ‘Why haven’t I heard from you?’
‘I should have come in a day or two. I thought you were probably out of town.’
‘Her husband is ill,’ said the other, by way of reply. He leaned forward with his arms upon the table, and gazed at Godwin with eyes of peculiar brightness.
‘Ill, is he?’ returned Godwin, with slow interest. ‘In the same way as before?’
‘Yes, but much worse.’
Christian paused; and when he again spoke it was hurriedly, confusedly.
‘How can I help getting excited about it? How can I behave decently? You’re the only man I ever speak to on the subject, and no doubt I both weary and disgust you; but I must speak to some one. My nerves are strung beyond endurance; it’s only by speaking that I can ease myself from the intolerable strain.’
‘Have you seen her lately?’
‘Yesterday, for a moment, in the street. It’s ten months since the last meeting.’
‘Well,’ remarked Godwin, abruptly, ‘it’s probable the man will die one of these days, then your trials will have a happy end. I see no harm in hoping that his life may be short—that’s a conventional feeling. If two people can be benefited by the death of a single person, why shouldn’t we be glad in the prospect of his dying? Not of his suffering—that’s quite another thing. But die he must; and to curtail the life of a being who at length wholly ceases to exist is no injury. You can’t injure a nonentity. Do you think I should take it ill if I knew that some persons were wishing my death? Why, look, if ever I crush a little green fly that crawls upon me in the fields, at once I am filled with envy of its fate—sincerest envy. To have passed so suddenly from being into nothingness—how blessed an extinction! To feel in that way, instinctively, in the very depths of your soul, is to be a true pessimist. If I had ever doubted my sincerity in pessimism, this experience, several times repeated, would have reassured me.’
Christian covered his face, and brooded for a long time, whilst Godwin sat with his eyes on vacancy.
‘Come and see us tomorrow,’ said the former, at length.
‘Perhaps.’;
‘Why do you keep away?’
‘I’m in no mood for society.’
‘We’ll have no one. Only Marcella and I.’
Again a long silence.
‘Marcella is going in for comparative philology,’ Christian resumed, with the gentle tone in which he invariably spoke of his sister. ‘What a mind that girl has! I never knew any woman of half her powers.’
Godwin said nothing.
‘No,’ continued the other fervently, ‘nor of half her goodness. I sometimes think that no mortal could come nearer to our ideal of moral justice and purity. If it were not for her, I should long ago have gone to perdition, in one way or another. It’s her strength, not my own, that has saved me. I daresay you know this?’
‘There’s some truth in it, I believe,’ Peak answered, his eye wandering.
‘See how circumstances can affect one’s judgment. If, just about the time I first knew you, I had abandoned myself to a life of sottish despair, of course I should have charged Constance with the blame of it. Now that I have struggled on, I can see that she has been a blessing to me instead of a curse. If Marcella has given me strength, I have to thank Constance for the spiritual joy which otherwise I should never have known.’
Peak uttered a short laugh.
‘That is only saying that she might have been ruinous, but in the course of circumstances has proved helpful. I envy your power of deriving comfort from such reflections.’
‘Well, we view things differently. I have the habit of looking to the consolatory facts of life, you to the depressing. There’s an unfortunate lack in you, Peak; you seem insensible to female influence, and I believe that is closely connected with your desperate pessimism.’
Godwin laughed again, this time with mocking length of note. ‘Come now, isn’t it true?’ urged the other. ‘Sincerely, do you care for women at all?’
‘Perhaps not.’
‘A grave misfortune, depend upon it! It accounts for nearly everything that is unsatisfactory in your life. If you had ever been sincerely devoted to a woman, be assured your powers would have developed in a way of which you have no conception. It’s no answer to tell me that I am still a mere trifler, never likely to do anything of account; I haven’t it in me to be anything better, and I might easily have become much worse. But you might have made yourself a great position—I mean, you might do so; you are still very young. If only you knew the desire of a woman’s help.’
‘You really think so?’ said Godwin, with grave irony.
‘I am sure of it! There’s no harm in repeating what you have often told me—your egoism oppresses you. A woman’s influence takes one out of oneself. No man can be a better authority on this than I. For more than eleven years I have worshipped one woman with absolute faithfulness’——
‘Absolute?’ interrupted Godwin, bluntly.
‘What exception occurs to you?’
‘As you challenge inquiry, forgive me for asking what your interest was in one of your cousins at Twybridge?’
Christian started, and averted his face with a look of embarrassment.
‘Do you mean to say that you knew anything about that?’
‘I was always an observer,’ Peak replied, smiling. ‘You don’t remember, perhaps, that I happened to be present when a letter had just arrived for you at your uncle’s house—a letter which evidently disturbed you?’
‘This is astonishing! Peak, you’re a terrible fellow! Heaven forbid that I should ever be at your mercy! Yes, you are quite right,’ he continued, despondently. ‘But that was no real unfaithfulness. I don’t quite know how to explain it. I did make love to poor Janet, and with the result that I have never since seen any of the family. My uncle, when he found I had drawn back, was very savage—naturally enough. Marcella and I never again went to Twybridge. I liked Janet; she was a good, kind girl. I believed just then that my love for Constance was hopeless; my mood impelled me to the conviction that the best thing I could do was to marry Janet and settle down to a peaceful domestic life. Then came that letter—it was from Constance herself. It meant nothing, yet it was enough to revive all my hopes. I rushed off—! How brutally I had behaved! Poor little Janet!’
He let his face fall upon his hands.
‘Allow me an indiscreet question,’ said Peak, after a silence. ‘Have you any founded hope of marrying Constance if she becomes a widow?’
Christian started and looked up with wide eyes.
‘Hope? Every hope! I have the absolute assurance of her love.’
‘I see.’
‘But I mustn’t mislead you,’ pursued the other, hurriedly. ‘Our relations are absolutely pure. I have only allowed myself to see her at very long intervals. Why shouldn’t I tell you? It was less than a year after her marriage; I found her alone in a room in a friend’s house; her eyes were red with weeping. I couldn’t help holding my hand to her. She took it, and held it for a moment, and looked at me steadily, and whispered my name—that was all. I knew then that she repented of her marriage—who can say what led her into it? I was poor, you know; perhaps—but in spite of all, she did love me. There has never since been anything like a scene of emotion between us—that her conscience couldn’t allow. She is a noble-minded woman, and has done her duty. But if she is free’—
He quivered with passionate feeling.
‘And you are content,’ said Godwin, drily, ‘to have wasted ten years of your life for such a possibility?’
‘Wasted!’ Christian exclaimed. ‘Come, come, Peak; why will you affect this wretched cynicism? Is it waste of years to have lived with the highest and purest ideal perpetually before one’s mind? What can a man do better than, having found an admirable woman, to worship her thenceforth, and defy every temptation that could lead him astray? I don’t like to seem boastful, but I have lived purely and devotedly. And if the test endured to the end of my life, I could sustain it. Is the consciousness of my love nothing to Constance? Has it not helped her?’
Such profound sincerity was astonishing to Peak. He did not admire it, for it seemed to him, in this case at all events, the fatal weakness of a character it was impossible not to love. Though he could not declare his doubts, he thought it more than probable that this Laura of the voiceless Petrarch was unworthy of such constancy, and that she had no intention whatever of rewarding it, even if the opportunity arrived. But this was the mere speculation of a pessimist; he might be altogether wrong, for he had never denied the existence of high virtue, in man or woman.
‘There goes midnight!’ he remarked, turning from the subject. ‘You can’t sleep, neither can I. Why shouldn’t we walk into town?’
‘By all means; on condition that you will come home with me, and spend tomorrow there.’
‘Very well.’
They set forth, and with varied talk, often broken by long silences, made their way through sleeping suburbs to the dark valley of Thames.
There passed another month, during which Peak was neither seen nor heard of by his friends. One evening in October, as he sat studying at the British Museum, a friendly voice claimed his attention. He rose nervously and met the searching eye of Buckland Warricombe.
‘I had it in mind to write to you,’ said the latter. ‘Since we parted down yonder I have been running about a good deal, with few days in town. Do you often read here?’
‘Generally on Saturday afternoon.’
Buckland glanced at the open volume, and caught a heading, ‘Apologetic Theology.’
‘Still at the works?’
‘Yes; I shall be there till Christmas—no longer.’
‘Are you by chance disengaged tomorrow? Could you dine with me? I shall be alone; perhaps you don’t mind that? We could exchange views on “fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute”.’
Godwin accepted the invitation, and Warricombe, unable to linger, took leave of him.
They met the next evening in Buckland’s rooms, not far from the Houses of Parliament. Commonplace comfort was the note of these quarters. Peak wondered that a man who had it in his power to surround himself with evidences of taste should be content to dwell thus. His host seemed to detect this thought in the glances Godwin cast about him.
‘Nothing but a pied-a-terre. I have been here three or four years, but I don’t think of it as a home. I suppose I shall settle somewhere before long: yet, on the whole, what does it matter where one lives? There’s something in the atmosphere of our time that makes one indisposed to strike roots in the old way. Who knows how long there’ll be such a thing as real property? We are getting to think of ourselves as lodgers; it’s as well to be indifferent about a notice to quit.’
‘Many people would still make a good fight for the old homes,’ replied Peak.
‘Yes; I daresay I should myself, if I were a family man. A wife and children are strong persuasions to conservatism. In those who have anything, that’s to say. Let the families who have nothing learn how they stand in point of numbers, and we shall see what we shall see.’
‘And you are doing your best to teach them that.’
Buckland smiled.
‘A few other things at the same time. One isn’t necessarily an anarchist, you know.’
‘What enormous faith you must have in the metaphysical powers of the multitude!’
‘Trenchant! But say, rather, in the universal self-interest. That’s the trait of human nature which we have in mind when we speak of enlightenment. The aim of practical Radicalism is to instruct men’s selfishness. Astonishing how capable it is of being instructed! The mistake of the Socialist lies in his crediting men with far too much self-esteem, far too little perception of their own limits. The characteristic of mankind at large is humility.’
Peak began to understand his old acquaintance; he had imagined him less acute. Gratified by the smile of interest, Warricombe added:
‘There are forces of madness; I have shown you that I make allowance for them. But they are only dangerous so long as privilege allies itself with hypocrisy. The task of the modern civiliser is to sweep away sham idealisms.’
‘I agree with you,’ Godwin replied.
With sudden change of mood, Buckland began to speak of an indifferent topic of the day, and in a few minutes they sat down to dinner.
Not till the welcome tobacco blended its aroma with that of coffee did a frankly personal note sound in their conversation.
‘So at Christmas you are free,’ said Warricombe. ‘You still think of leaving London?’
‘I have decided to go down into Devonshire.’
‘The seaside?’
‘I shall stay first of all in Exeter,’ Godwin replied, with deliberation; ‘one can get hold of books there.’
‘Yes, especially of the ecclesiastical colour.’
‘You are still unable to regard my position with anything but contempt?’ Peak asked, looking steadily at the critical face.
‘Come now; what does it all mean? Of course I quite understand how tolerant the Church is becoming: I know what latitude it permits in its servants. But what do you propose to yourself?’
‘Precisely what you call the work of the civiliser—to attack sham ideals.’
‘As for instance—?’
‘The authority of the mob,’ answered Peak, suavely.
‘Your clericalism is political, then?’
‘To a great extent.’
‘I discern a vague sort of consistency in this. You regard the Church formulas as merely symbolical—useful for the purposes of the day?’
‘Rather for the purposes of eternity.’
‘In the human sense.’
‘In every sense.’
Warricombe perceived that no directness of questioning would elicit literal response, and on the whole this relieved him. To hear Godwin Peak using the language of a fervent curate would have excited in him something more than disgust. It did not seem impossible that a nature like Peak’s—intellectually arrogant, vehemently anti-popular—should have been attracted by the traditions, the social prestige, of the Anglican Church; nor at all unlikely that a mind so constituted should justify a seeming acceptance of dogmas, which in the strict sense it despised. But he was made uneasy by his ignorance of Peak’s private life during the years since their parting at College. He did not like to think of the possible establishment of intimacy between this man of low origin, uncertain career, boundless ambition, and the household of Martin Warricombe. There could be no doubt that Peak had decided to go to Exeter because of the social prospects recently opened to him. In the vulgar phrase, he had probably ‘taken stock’ of Mr. Warricombe’s idiosyncrasy, and saw therein a valuable opportunity for a theological student, who at the same time was a devotee of natural science. To be sure, the people at Exeter could be put on their guard. On the other hand, Peak had plainly avowed his desire to form social connections of the useful kind; in his position such an aim was essential, a mere matter of course.
Godwin’s voice interrupted this train of thought.
‘Let me ask you a plain question. You have twice been kind enough to introduce me to your home as a friend of yours. Am I guilty of presumption in hoping that your parents will continue to regard me as an acquaintance? I trust there’s no need to assure you that I know the meaning of discretion.’
An appeal to Buckland’s generosity seldom failed. Yes, it was true that he had more than once encouraged the hope now frankly expressed. Indulging a correspondent frankness, he might explain that Peak’s position was so distasteful to him that it disturbed the future with many kinds of uncertainty. But this would be churlish. He must treat his guest as a gentleman, so long as nothing compelled him to take the less agreeable view.
‘My dear Peak, let us have none of these formalities. My parents have distinctly invited you to go and see them whenever you are in the neighbourhood. I am quite sure they will help to make your stay in Exeter a pleasant one.’
Therewith closed the hazardous dialogue. Warricombe turned at once to a safe topic—that of contemporary fiction, and they chatted pleasantly enough for the rest of the evening.
Not many days after this, Godwin received by post an envelope which contained certain proof sheets, and therewith a note in which the editor of The Critical Review signified his acceptance of a paper entitled ‘The New Sophistry’. The communication was originally addressed to Earwaker, who had scribbled at the foot, ‘Correct, if you are alive, and send back to Dolby.’
The next morning he did not set out as usual for Rotherhithe. Through the night he had not closed his eyes; he was in a state of nervousness which bordered on fever. A dozen times he had read over the proofs, with throbbing pulse, with exultant self-admiration: but the printer’s errors which had caught his eye, and a few faults of phrase, were still uncorrected. What a capital piece of writing it was! What a flagellation of M’Naughten and all his tribe! If this did not rouse echoes in the literary world—
Through the long day he sat in languor or paced his room like one made restless by pain. Only when the gloom of nightfall obliged him to light his lamp did he at length sit down to the table and carefully revise the proofs, pen in hand. When he had made up the packet for post, he wrote to Earwaker.
‘I had forgotten all about this thing. Proofs have gone to Dolby. I have not signed; probably he would object to my doing so. As it is, the paper can be ascribed to anyone, and attention thus excited. We shall see paragraphs attributing it to men of mark—perhaps scandal will fix it on a bishop. In any case, don’t let out the secret. I beg this seriously, and for a solid reason. Not a word to anyone, however intimate. If Dolby betrays your name, grin and bear it. I depend upon your friendship.’
In a by-way which declines from the main thoroughfare of Exeter, and bears the name of Longbrook Street, is a row of small houses placed above long strips of sloping garden. They are old and plain, with no architectural feature calling for mention, unless it be the latticed porch which gives the doors an awkward quaintness. Just beyond, the road crosses a hollow, and begins the ascent of a hill here interposed between the city and the inland-winding valley of Exe. The little terrace may be regarded as urban or rural, according to the tastes and occasions of those who dwell there. In one direction, a walk of five minutes will conduct to the middle of High Street, and in the other it takes scarcely longer to reach the open country.
On the upper floor of one of these cottages, Godwin Peak had made his abode. Sitting-room and bedchamber, furnished with homely comfort, answered to his bachelor needs, and would allow of his receiving without embarrassment any visitor whom fortune might send him. Of quietness he was assured, for a widow and her son, alike remarkable for sobriety of demeanour, were the only persons who shared the house with him. Mrs. Roots could not compare in grace and skill with the little Frenchwoman who had sweetened his existence at Peckham Rye, but her zeal made amends for natural deficiency, and the timorous respect with which she waited upon him was by no means disagreeable to Godwin. Her reply to a request or suggestion was always, ‘If you please, sir.’ Throughout the day she went so tranquilly about her domestic duties, that Godwin seldom heard anything except the voice of the cuckoo-clock, a pleasant sound to him. Her son, employed at a nurseryman’s, was a great sinewy fellow with a face of such ruddiness that it seemed to diffuse warmth; on Sunday afternoon, whatever the state of the sky, he sat behind the house in his shirt-sleeves, and smoked a pipe as he contemplated the hart’s-tongue which grew there upon a rockery.
‘The gentleman from London’—so Mrs. Roots was wont to style her lodger in speaking with neighbours—had brought his books with him; they found place on a few shelves. His microscope had its stand by the window, and one or two other scientific implements lay about the room. The cabinets bequeathed to him by Mr. Gunnery he had sent to Twybridge, to remain in his mother’s care. In taking the lodgings, he described himself merely as a student, and gave his landlady to understand that he hoped to remain under her roof for at least a year. Of his extreme respectability, the widow could entertain no doubt, for he dressed with aristocratic finish, attended services at the Cathedral and elsewhere very frequently, and made the most punctual payments. Moreover, a casual remark had informed her that he was on friendly terms with Mr. Martin Warricombe, whom her son knew as a gentleman of distinction. He often sat up very late at night, but, doubtless, that was the practice of Londoners. No lodger could have given less trouble, or have acknowledged with more courtesy all that was done for his convenience.
No one ever called upon Mr. Peak, but he was often from home for many hours together, probably on visits to great people in city or country. It seemed rather strange, however, that the postman so seldom brought anything for him. Though he had now been more than two months in the house, he had received only three letters, and those at long intervals.
Noticeable was the improvement in his health since his arrival here. The pallor of his cheeks was giving place to a wholesome tinge; his eye was brighter; he showed more disposition to converse, and was readier with pleasant smiles. Mrs. Roots even heard him singing in his bedroom—though, oddly enough, it was a secular song on Sunday morning. The weekly bills for food, which at first had been very modest, grew richer in items. Godwin had, in fact, never felt so well. He extended his walks in every direction, sometimes rambling up the valley to sleepy little towns where he could rest in the parlours of old inns, sometimes striking across country to this or that point of the sea-coast, or making his way to the nearer summits of Dartmoor, noble in their wintry desolation. He marked with delight every promise of returning spring. When he could only grant himself a walk of an hour or two in the sunny afternoon, there was many a deep lane within easy reach, where the gorse gleamed in masses of gold, and the little oak-trees in the hedges were ruddy with last year’s clinging leafage, and catkins hung from the hazels, and the fresh green of sprouting ivy crept over bank and wall. Had he now been in London, the morning would have awakened him to the glow of sunrise, he felt the sweet air breathing health into fog and slush and misery. As it was, when he looked out upon his frame and vigour into his mind. There were moments when he could all but say of himself that he was at peace with the world.
As on a morning towards the end of March, when a wind from the Atlantic swept spaces of brightest blue amid the speeding clouds, and sang joyously as it rushed over hill and dale. It was the very day for an upland walk, for a putting forth of one’s strength in conflict with boisterous gusts and sudden showers, that give a taste of earth’s nourishment. But Godwin had something else in view. After breakfast, he sat down to finish a piece of work which had occupied him for two or three days, a translation from a German periodical. His mind wrought easily, and he often hummed an air as his pen moved over the paper. When the task was completed, he rolled his papers and the pamphlet together, put them into the pocket of his overcoat, and presently went forth.
Twenty minutes’ walk brought him to the Warricombes’ house. It was his second call within the present week, but such assiduity had not hitherto been his wont. Though already summoned twice or thrice by express invitation, he was sparing of voluntary visits. Having asked for Mr. Warricombe, he was forthwith conducted to the study. In the welcome which greeted his appearance, he could detect no suspicion of simulated warmth, though his ear had unsurpassable discrimination.
‘Have you looked through it?’ Martin exclaimed, as he saw the foreign periodical in his visitor’s hand.
‘I have written a rough translation’——
‘Oh, how could you think of taking such trouble! These things are sent to me by the dozen—I might say, by the cartload. My curiosity would have been amply satisfied if you had just told me the drift of the thing.’
‘It seemed to me,’ said Peak, modestly, ‘that the paper was worth a little careful thought. I read it rapidly at first, but found myself drawn to it again. It states the point of view of the average scientific mind with such remarkable clearness, that I wished to think it over, and the best way was to do so pen in hand.’
‘Well, if you really did it on your own account’——
Mr. Warricombe took the offered sheets and glanced at the first of them.
‘My only purpose,’ said Godwin ‘in calling again so soon was to leave this with you.’
He made as though he would take his departure.
‘You want to get home again? Wait at least till this shower is over. I enjoy that pelting of spring rain against the window. In a minute or two we shall have the laurels flashing in the sunshine, as if they were hung with diamonds.’
They stood together looking out on to the garden. Presently their talk returned to the German disquisition, which was directed against the class of quasi-scientific authors attacked by Peak himself in his Critical article. In the end Godwin sat down and began to read the translation he had made, Mr. Warricombe listening with a thoughtful smile. From time to time the reader paused and offered a comment, endeavouring to show that the arguments were merely plausible; his air was that of placid security, and he seemed to enjoy the irony which often fell from his lips. Martin frequently scrutinised him, and always with a look of interest which betokened grave reflection.
‘Here,’ said Godwin at one point, ‘he has a note citing a passage from Reusch’s book on The Bible and Nature. If I am not mistaken, he misrepresents his author, though perhaps not intentionally.’
‘You know the book?’
‘I have studied it carefully, but I don’t possess it. I thought I remembered this particular passage very well.’
‘Is it a work of authority?’
‘Yes; it is very important. Unfortunately, it hasn’t yet been translated. Rather bulky, but I shouldn’t mind doing it myself if I were sure of finding a publisher.’
‘The Bible and Nature,’ said Martin, musingly. ‘What is his scheme? How does he go to work?’
Godwin gave a brief but lucid description of the book, and Mr Warricombe listened gravely. When there had been silence for some moments, the latter spoke in a tone he had never yet used when conversing with Peak. He allowed himself, for the first time, to betray a troubled doubt on the subject under discussion.
‘So he makes a stand at Darwinism as it affects man?’
Peak had yet no means of knowing at what point Martin himself ‘made a stand’. Modes of reconcilement between scientific discovery and religious tradition are so very numerous, and the geologist was only now beginning to touch upon these topics with his young acquaintance. That his mind was not perfectly at ease amid the conflicts of the day, Godwin soon perceived, and by this time he had clear assurance that Martin would willingly thrash out the whole debate with anyone who seemed capable of supporting orthodox tenets by reasoning not unacceptable to a man of broad views. The negativist of course assumed from the first that Martin, however respectable his knowledge, was far from possessing the scientific mind, and each conversation had supplied him with proofs of this defect; it was not at all in the modern spirit that the man of threescore years pursued his geological and kindred researches, but with the calm curiosity of a liberal intellect which has somehow taken this direction instead of devoting itself to literary study. At bottom, Godwin had no little sympathy with Mr. Warricombe; he too, in spite of his militant instincts, dwelt by preference amid purely human interests. He grasped with firm intelligence the modes of thought which distinguish scientific men, but his nature did not prompt him to a consistent application of them. Personal liking enabled him to subdue the impulses of disrespect which, under other circumstances, would have made it difficult for him to act with perfection his present part. None the less, his task was one of infinite delicacy. Martin Warricombe was not the man to unbosom himself on trivial instigation. It must be a powerful influence which would persuade him to reveal whatever self-questionings lay beneath his genial good breeding and long-established acquiescence in a practical philosophy. Godwin guarded himself against his eager emotions; one false note, one syllable of indiscretion, and his aims might be hopelessly defeated.
‘Yes,’ was his reply to the hesitating question. ‘He argues strenuously against the descent of man. If I understand him, he regards the concession of this point as impossible.’
Martin was deep in thought. He held a paper-knife bent upon his knee, and his smooth, delicate features wore an unquiet smile.
‘Do you know Hebrew, Mr. Peak?’
The question came unexpectedly, and Godwin could not help a momentary confusion, but he covered it with the tone of self-reproach.
‘I am ashamed to say that I am only now taking it up seriously.’
‘I don’t think you need be ashamed,’ said Martin, good-naturedly. ‘Even a mind as active as yours must postpone some studies. Reusch, I suppose, is sound on that head?’
The inquiry struck Godwin as significant. So Mr. Warricombe attached importance to the verbal interpretation of the Old Testament.
‘Distinctly an authority,’ he replied. ‘He devotes whole chapters to a minute examination of the text.’
‘If you had more leisure,’ Martin began, deliberately, when he had again reflected, ‘I should be disposed to urge you to undertake that translation.’
Peak appeared to meditate.
‘Has the book been used by English writers?’ the other inquired.
‘A good deal.—It was published in the sixties, but I read it in a new edition dated a few years ago. Reusch has kept pace with the men of science. It would be very interesting to compare the first form of the book with the latest.’
‘It would, very.’
Raising his head from the contemplative posture, Godwin exclaimed, with a laugh of zeal:
‘I think I must find time to translate him. At all events, I might address a proposal to some likely publisher. Yet I don’t know how I should assure him of my competency.’
‘Probably a specimen would be the surest testimony.’
‘Yes. I might do a few chapters.’
Mr. Warricombe’s lapse into silence and brevities intimated to Godwin that it was time to take leave. He always quitted this room with reluctance. Its air of luxurious culture affected his senses deliciously, and he hoped that he might some day be permitted to linger among the cabinets and the library shelves. There were so many books he would have liked to take down, some with titles familiar to him, others which kindled his curiosity when he chanced to observe them. The library abounded in such works as only a wealthy man can purchase, and Godwin, who had examined some of them at the British Museum, was filled with the humaner kind of envy on seeing them in Mr. Warricombe’s possession. Those publications of the Palaeontological Society, one volume of which (a part of Davidson’s superb work on the Brachiopoda) even now lay open within sight—his hand trembled with a desire to touch them! And those maps of the Geological Surveys, British and foreign, how he would have enjoyed a day’s poring over them!
He rose, but Martin seemed in no haste to bring the conversation to an end.
‘Have you read M’Naughten’s much-discussed book?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you see the savage attack in The Critical not long ago?’
Godwin smiled, and made quiet answer:
‘I should think it was the last word of scientific bitterness and intolerance.’
‘Scientific?’ repeated Martin, doubtfully. ‘I don’t think the writer was a man of science. I saw it somewhere attributed to Huxley, but that was preposterous. To begin with, Huxley would have signed his name; and, again, his English is better. The article seemed to me to be stamped with literary rancour; it was written by some man who envies M’Naughten’s success.’
Peak kept silence. Martin’s censure of the anonymous author’s style stung him to the quick, and he had much ado to command his countenance.
‘Still,’ pursued the other, ‘I felt that much of his satire was only too well pointed. M’Naughten is suggestive; but one comes across books of the same purpose which can have no result but to injure their cause with all thinking people.’
‘I have seen many such,’ remarked Godwin.
Mr. Warricombe stepped to a bookcase and took down a small volume.
‘I wonder whether you know this book of Ampare’s, La Grace, Rome, et Dante? Delightful for odd moments!—There came into my mind a passage here at the beginning, apropos of what we were saying: “Il faut souvent un vrai courage pour persister dans une opinion juste en depit de ses defenseurs.”—Isn’t that capital?’
Peak received it with genuine appreciation; for once he was able to laugh unfeignedly. The aphorism had so many applications from his own point of view.
‘Excellent!—I don’t remember to have seen the book.’
‘Take it, if you care to.’
This offer seemed a distinct advance in Mr. Warricombe’s friendliness. Godwin felt a thrill of encouragement.
‘Then you will let me keep this translation for a day or two?’ Martin added, indicating the sheets of manuscript. ‘I am greatly obliged to you for enabling me to read the thing.’
They shook hands. Godwin had entertained a slight hope that he might be asked to stay to luncheon; but it could not be much past twelve o’clock, and on the whole there was every reason for feeling satisfied with the results of his visit. Before long he would probably receive another invitation to dine. So with light step he went out into the hall, where Martin again shook hands with him.
The sky had darkened over, and a shrilling of the wind sounded through the garden foliage—fir, and cypress, and laurel. Just as Godwin reached the gate, he was met by Miss Warricombe and Fanny, who were returning from a walk. They wore the costume appropriate to March weather in the country, close-fitting, defiant of gusts; and their cheeks glowed with health. As he exchanged greetings with them, Peak received a new impression of the sisters. He admired the physical vigour which enabled them to take delight in such a day as this, when girls of poorer blood and ignoble nurture would shrink from the sky’s showery tumult, and protect their surface elegance by the fireside. Impossible for Sidwell and Fanny to be anything but graceful, for at all times they were perfectly unaffected.
‘There’ll be another storm in a minute,’ said the younger of them, looking with interest to the quarter whence the wind came. ‘How suddenly they burst! What a rush! And then in five minutes the sky is clear again.’
Her eyes shone as she turned laughingly to Peak.
‘You’re not afraid of getting wet? Hadn’t you better come under cover?’
‘Here it is!’ exclaimed Sidwell, with quieter enjoyment. ‘Take shelter for a minute or two, Mr. Peak.’
They led the way to the portico, where Godwin stood with them and watched the squall. A moment’s downpour of furious rain was followed by heavy hailstones, which drove horizontally before the shrieking wind. The prospect had wrapped itself in grey gloom. At a hundred yards’ distance, scarcely an object could be distinguished; the storm-cloud swooped so low that its skirts touched the branches of tall elms, a streaming, rushing raggedness.
‘Don’t you enjoy that?’ Fanny asked of Godwin.
‘Indeed I do.’
‘You should be on Dartmoor in such weather,’ said Sidwell. ‘Father and I were once caught in storms far worse than this—far better, I ought to say, for I never knew anything so terrifically grand.’
Already it was over. The gusts diminished in frequency and force, the hail ceased, the core of blackness was passing over to the eastern sky. Fanny ran out into the garden, and pointed upward.
‘Look where the sunlight is coming!’
An uncloaked patch of heaven shone with colour like that of the girl’s eyes—faint, limpid blue. Reminding himself that to tarry longer in this company would be imprudent, Godwin bade the sisters good-morning. The frank heartiness with which Fanny pressed his hand sent him on his way exultant. Not too strong a word; for, independently of his wider ambitions, he was moved and gratified by the thought that kindly feeling towards him had sprung up in such a heart as this. Nor did conscience so much as whisper a reproach. With unreflecting ingenuousness he tasted the joy as if it were his right. Thus long he had waited, through years of hungry manhood, for the look, the tone, which were in harmony with his native sensibilities. Fanny Warricombe was but an undeveloped girl, yet he valued her friendship above the passionate attachment of any woman bred on a lower social plane. Had it been possible, he would have kissed her fingers with purest reverence.
When out of sight of the house, he paused to regard the sky again. Its noontide splendour was dazzling; masses of rosy cloud sailed swiftly from horizon to horizon, the azure deepening about them. Yet before long the west would again send forth its turbulent spirits, and so the girls might perhaps be led to think of him.
By night the weather grew more tranquil. There was a full moon, and its radiance illumined the ever-changing face of heaven with rare grandeur. Godwin could not shut himself up over his books; he wandered far away into the country, and let his thoughts have freedom.
He was learning to review with calmness the course by which he had reached his now steadfast resolve. A revulsion such as he had experienced after his first day of simulated orthodoxy, half a year ago, could not be of lasting effect, for it was opposed to the whole tenor of his mature thought. It spoilt his holiday, but had no chance of persisting after his return to the atmosphere of Rotherhithe. That he should have been capable of such emotion was, he said to himself, in the just order of things; callousness in the first stages of an undertaking which demanded gross hypocrisy would signify an ignoble nature—a nature, indeed, which could never have been submitted to trial of so strange a kind. But he had overcome himself; that phase of difficulty was outlived, and henceforth he saw only the material obstacles to be defied by his vindicated will.
What he proposed to himself was a life of deliberate baseness. Godwin Peak never tried to play the sophist with this fact. But he succeeded in justifying himself by a consideration of the circumstances which had compelled him to a vile expedient. Had his project involved conscious wrong to other persons, he would scarcely even have speculated on its possibilities. He was convinced that no mortal could suffer harm, even if he accomplished the uttermost of his desires. Whom was he in danger of wronging? The conventional moralist would cry: Everyone with whom he came in slightest contact! But a mind such as Peak’s has very little to do with conventional morality. Injury to himself he foresaw and accepted; he could never be the man nature designed in him; and he must frequently submit to a self-contempt which would be very hard to bear. Those whom he consistently deceived, how would they suffer? Martin Warricombe to begin with. Martin was a man who had lived his life, and whose chief care would now be to keep his mind at rest in the faiths which had served him from youth onwards. In that very purpose, Godwin believed he could assist him. To see a young man, of strong and trained intellect, championing the old beliefs, must doubtless be a source of reassurance to one in Martin’s position. Reassurance derived from a lie?—And what matter, if the outcome were genuine, if it lasted until the man himself was no more? Did not every form of content result from illusion? What was truth without the mind of the believer?
Society, then—at all events that part of it likely to be affected by his activity? Suppose him an ordained priest, performing all the functions implied in that office. Why, to think only of examples recognised by the public at large, how would he differ for the worse from this, that, and the other clergyman who taught Christianity, all but with blunt avowal, as a scheme of human ethics? No wolf in sheep’s clothing he! He plotted against no man’s pocket, no woman’s honour; he had no sinister design of sapping the faith of congregations—a scheme, by-the-bye, which fanatic liberators might undertake with vast self-approval. If by a word he could have banished religious dogma from the minds of the multitude, he would not have cared to utter it. Wherein lay, indeed, a scruple to be surmounted. The Christian priest must be a man of humble temper; he must be willing, even eager, to sit down among the poor in spirit as well as in estate, and impart to them his unworldly solaces. Yes, but it had always been recognised that some men who could do the Church good service were personally unfitted for those meek ministrations. His place was in the hierarchy of intellect; if he were to be active at all, it must be with the brain. In his conversation with Buckland Warricombe, last October, he had spoken not altogether insincerely. Let him once be a member of the Church militant, and his heart would go with many a stroke against that democratic movement which desired, among other things, the Church’s abolition. He had power of utterance. Roused to combat by the proletarian challenge, he could make his voice ring in the ears of men, even though he used a symbolism which he would not by choice have adopted.
For it was natural that he should anticipate distinction. Whatever his lot in life, he would not be able to rest among an inglorious brotherhood. If he allied himself with the Church, the Church must assign him leadership, whether titular or not was of small moment. In days to come, let people, if they would, debate his history, canvass his convictions. His scornful pride invited any degree of publicity, when once his position was secure.
But in the meantime he was leaving aside the most powerful of all his motives, and one which demanded closest scrutiny. Not ambition, in any ordinary sense; not desire of material luxury; no incentive recognised by unprincipled schemers first suggested his dishonour. This edifice of subtle untruth had for its foundation a mere ideal of sexual love. For the winning of some chosen woman, men have wrought vehemently, have ruined themselves and others, have achieved triumphs noble or degrading. But Godwin Peak had for years contemplated the possibility of baseness at the impulse of a craving for love capable only of a social (one might say, of a political) definition. The woman throned in his imagination was no individual, but the type of an order. So strangely had circumstances moulded him, that he could not brood on a desire of spiritual affinities, could not, as is natural to most cultivated men, inflame himself with the ardour of soul reaching to soul; he was preoccupied with the contemplation of qualities which characterise a class. The sense of social distinctions was so burnt into him, that he could not be affected by any pictured charm of mind or person in a woman who had not the stamp of gentle birth and breeding. If once he were admitted to the intimacy of such women, then, indeed, the canons of selection would have weight with him; no man more capable of disinterested choice. Till then, the ideal which possessed him was merely such an assemblage of qualities as would excite the democrat to disdain or fury.
In Sidwell Warricombe this ideal found an embodiment; but Godwin did not thereupon come to the conclusion that Sidwell was the wife he desired. Her influence had the effect of deciding his career, but he neither imagined himself in love with her, nor tried to believe that he might win her love if he set himself to the endeavour. For the first time he was admitted to familiar intercourse with a woman whom he could make the object of his worship. He thought much of her; day and night her figure stood before him; and this had continued now for half a year. Still he neither was, nor dreamt himself, in love with her. Before long his acquaintance would include many of her like, and at any moment Sidwell might pale in the splendour of another’s loveliness.
But what reasoning could defend the winning of a wife by false pretences? This, his final aim, could hardly be achieved without grave wrong to the person whose welfare must in the nature of things be a prime motive with him. The deception he had practised must sooner or later be discovered; lifelong hypocrisy was incompatible with perfect marriage; some day he must either involve his wife in a system of dishonour, or with her consent relinquish the false career, and find his happiness in the obscurity to which he would then be relegated. Admit the wrong. Grant that some woman whom he loved supremely must, on his account, pass through a harsh trial—would it not be in his power to compensate her amply? The wife whom he imagined (his idealism in this matter was of a crudity which made the strangest contrast with his habits of thought on every other subject) would be ruled by her emotions, and that part of her nature would be wholly under his governance. Religious fanaticism could not exist in her, for in that case she would never have attracted him. Little by little she would learn to think as he did, and her devotedness must lead her to pardon his deliberate insincerities. Godwin had absolute faith in his power of dominating the woman whom he should inspire with tenderness. This was a feature of his egoism, the explanation of those manifold inconsistencies inseparable from his tortuous design. He regarded his love as something so rare, so vehement, so exalting, that its bestowal must seem an abundant recompense for any pain of which he was the cause.
Thus, with perfect sincerity of argument, did Godwin Peak face the undertaking to which he was committed. Incidents might perturb him, but his position was no longer a cause of uneasiness—save, indeed, at those moments when he feared lest any of his old acquaintances might hear of him before time was ripe. This was a source of anxiety, but inevitable; one of the risks he dared.
Had it seemed possible, he would have kept even from his mother the secret of his residence at Exeter; but this would have necessitated the establishment of some indirect means of communication with her, a troublesome and uncertain expedient. He shrank from leaving her in ignorance of his whereabouts, and from passing a year or two without knowledge of her condition. And, on the whole, there could not be much danger in this correspondence. The Moxeys, who alone of his friends had ever been connected with Twybridge, were now absolutely without interests in that quarter. From them he had stolen away, only acquainting Christian at the last moment, in a short letter, with his departure from London. ‘It will be a long time before we again see each other—at least, I think so. Don’t trouble your head about me. I can’t promise to write, and shall be sorry not to hear how things go with you; but may all happen as you wish!’ In the same way he had dealt with Earwaker, except that his letter to Staple Inn was much longer, and contained hints which the philosophic journalist might perchance truly interpret. ‘“He either fears his fate too much”—you know the old song. I have set out on my life’s adventure. I have gone to seek that without which life is no longer worth having. Forgive my shabby treatment of you, old friend. You cannot help me, and your displeasure would be a hindrance in my path. A last piece of counsel: throw overboard the weekly rag, and write for people capable of understanding you.’ Earwaker was not at all likely to institute a search; he would accept the situation, and wait with quiet curiosity for its upshot. No doubt he and Moxey would discuss the affair together, and any desire Christian might have to hunt for his vanished comrade would yield before the journalist’s surmises. No one else had any serious reason for making inquiries. Probably he might dwell in Devonshire, as long as he chose, without fear of encountering anyone from his old world.
Occasionally—as to-night, under the full moon—he was able to cast off every form of trouble, and rejoice in his seeming liberty. Though every step in the life before him was an uncertainty, an appeal to fortune, his faith in himself grasped strongly at assurance of success. Once more he felt himself a young man, with unwearied energies; he had shaken off the burden of those ten frustrate years, and kept only their harvest of experience. Old in one sense, in another youthful, he had vast advantages over such men as would henceforth be his competitors—the complex brain, the fiery heart, passion to desire, and skill in attempting. If with such endowment he could not win the prize which most men claim as a mere matter of course, a wife of social instincts correspondent with his own, he must indeed be luckless. But he was not doomed to defeat! Foretaste of triumph urged the current of his blood and inflamed him with exquisite ardour. He sang aloud in the still lanes the hymns of youth and of love; and, when weariness brought him back to his lonely dwelling, he laid his head on the pillow, and slept in dreamless calm.
As for the details of his advance towards the clerical state, he had decided to resume his career at the point where it was interrupted by Andrew Peak. Twice had his education received a check from hostile circumstances: when domestic poverty compelled him to leave school for Mr. Moxey’s service, and when shame drove him from Whitelaw College. In reflecting upon his own character and his lot he gave much weight to these irregularities, no doubt with justice. In both cases he was turned aside from the way of natural development and opportunity. He would now complete his academic course by taking the London degree at which he had long ago aimed; the preliminary examination might without difficulty be passed this summer, and next year he might write himself Bachelor of Arts. A return to the studies of boyhood probably accounted in some measure for the frequent gaiety which he attributed to improving health and revived hopes. Everything he undertook was easy to him, and by a pleasant self-deception he made the passing of a school task his augury of success in greater things.
During the spring he was indebted to the Warricombes’ friendship for several new acquaintances. A clergyman named Lilywhite, often at the Warricombes’ house, made friendly overtures to him; the connection might be a useful one, and Godwin made the most of it. Mr. Lilywhite was a man of forty well—read, of scientific tastes, an active pedestrian. Peak had no difficulty in associating with him on amicable terms. With Mrs. Lilywhite, the mother of six children and possessed of many virtues, he presently became a favourite,—she saw in him ‘a great deal of quiet moral force’. One or two families of good standing made him welcome at their houses; society is very kind to those who seek its benefits with recognised credentials. The more he saw of these wealthy and tranquil middle-class people, the more fervently did he admire the gracefulness of their existence. He had not set before himself an imaginary ideal; the girls and women were sweet, gentle, perfect in manner, and, within limits, of bright intelligence. He was conscious of benefiting greatly, and not alone in things extrinsic, by the atmosphere of such homes.
Nature’s progress towards summer kept him in a mood of healthful enjoyment. From the window of his sitting-room he looked over the opposite houses to Northernhay, the hill where once stood Rougemont Castle, its wooded declivities now fashioned into a public garden. He watched the rooks at their building in the great elms, and was gladdened when the naked branches began to deck themselves, day by day the fresh verdure swelling into soft, graceful outline. In his walks he pried eagerly for the first violet, welcomed the earliest blackthorn blossom; every common flower of field and hedgerow gave him a new, keen pleasure. As was to be expected he found the same impulses strong in Sidwell Warricombe and her sister. Sidwell could tell him of secret spots where the wood-sorrel made haste to flower, or where the white violet breathed its fragrance in security from common pilferers. Here was the safest and pleasantest matter for conversation. He knew that on such topics he could talk agreeably enough, revealing without stress or importunity his tastes, his powers, his attainments. And it seemed to him that Sidwell listened with growing interest. Most certainly her father encouraged his visits to the house, and Mrs. Warricombe behaved to him with increase of suavity.
In the meantime he had purchased a copy of Reusch’s Bibel und Natur, and had made a translation of some fifty pages. This experiment he submitted to a London publishing house, with proposals for the completion of the work; without much delay there came a civil letter of excuse, and with it the sample returned. Another attempt again met with rejection. This failure did not trouble him. What he really desired was to read through his version of Reusch with Martin Warricombe, and before long he had brought it to pass that Martin requested a perusal of the manuscript as it advanced, which it did but slowly. Godwin durst not endanger his success in the examination by encroaching upon hours of necessary study; his leisure was largely sacrificed to Bibel und Natur, and many an evening of calm golden loveliness, when he longed to be amid the fields, passed in vexatious imprisonment. The name of Reusch grew odious to him, and he revenged himself for the hypocrisy of other hours by fierce scorn, cast audibly at this laborious exegetist.
It occasionally happens that a woman whose early life has been directed by native silliness and social bias, will submit to a tardy education at the hands of her own children. Thus was it with Mrs Warricombe.
She came of a race long established in squirearchic dignity amid heaths and woodlands. Her breeding was pure through many generations of the paternal and maternal lines, representative of a physical type, fortified in the males by much companionship with horse and hound, and by the corresponding country pursuits of dowered daughters. At the time of her marriage she had no charms of person more remarkable than rosy comeliness and the symmetry of supple limb. As for the nurture of her mind, it had been intrusted to home-governesses of respectable incapacity. Martin Warricombe married her because she was one of a little circle of girls, much alike as to birth and fortune, with whom he had grown up in familiar communication. Timidity imposed restraints upon him which made his choice almost a matter of accident. As befalls often enough, the betrothal became an accomplished fact whilst he was still doubting whether he desired it or not. When the fervour of early wedlock was outlived, he had no difficulty in accepting as a matter of course that his life’s companion should be hopelessly illogical and at heart indifferent to everything but the small graces and substantial comforts of provincial existence. One of the advantages of wealth is that it allows husband and wife to keep a great deal apart without any show of mutual unkindness, a condition essential to happiness in marriage. Time fostered in them a calm attachment, independent of spiritual sympathy, satisfied with a common regard for domestic honour.
Not that Mrs. Warricombe remained in complete ignorance of her husband’s pursuits; social forms would scarcely have allowed this, seeing that she was in constant intercourse, as hostess or guest, with Martin’s scientific friends. Of fossils she necessarily knew something. Up to a certain point they amused her; she could talk of ammonites, of brachiopods, and would point a friend’s attention to the Calceola sandalina which Martin prized so much. The significance of palaeontology she dimly apprehended, for in the early days of their union her husband had felt it desirable to explain to her what was meant by geologic time and how he reconciled his views on that subject with the demands of religious faith. Among the books which he induced her to read were Buckland’s Bridgewater Treatise and the works of Hugh Miller. The intellectual result was chaotic, and Mrs. Warricombe settled at last into a comfortable private opinion, that though the record of geology might be trustworthy that of the Bible was more so. She would admit that there was no impiety in accepting the evidence of nature, but held to a secret conviction that it was safer to believe in Genesis. For anything beyond a quasi-permissible variance from biblical authority as to the age of the world she was quite unprepared, and Martin, in his discretion, imparted to her nothing of the graver doubts which were wont to trouble him.
But as her children grew up, Mrs. Warricombe’s mind and temper were insensibly modified by influences which operated through her maternal affections, influences no doubt aided by the progressive spirit of the time. The three boys—Buckland, Maurice, and Louis—were distinctly of a new generation. It needed some ingenuity to discover their points of kindred with paternal and maternal grandparents; nor even with father and mother had they much in common which observation could readily detect. Sidwell, up to at least her fifteenth year, seemed to present far less change of type. In her Mrs. Warricombe recognised a daughter, and not without solace. But Fanny again was a problematical nature, almost from the cradle. Latest born, she appeared to revive many characteristics of the youthful Buckland, so far as a girl could resemble her brother. It was a strange brood to cluster around Mrs. Warricombe. For many years the mother was kept in alternation between hopes and fears, pride and disapproval, the old hereditary habits of mind, and a new order of ideas which could only be admitted with the utmost slowness. Buckland’s Radicalism deeply offended her; she marvelled how such depravity could display itself in a child of hers. Yet in the end her ancestral prejudices so far yielded as to allow of her smiling at sentiments which she once heard with horror. Maurice, whom she loved more tenderly, all but taught her to see the cogency of a syllogism—amiably set forth. And Louis, with his indolent good-nature, laughed her into a tolerance of many things which had moved her indignation. But it was to Sidwell that in the end she owed most. Beneath the surface of ordinary and rather backward girlhood, which discouraged her father’s hopes, Sidwell was quietly developing a personality distinguished by the refinement of its ethical motives. Her orthodoxy seemed as unimpeachable as Mrs Warricombe could desire, yet as she grew into womanhood, a curiosity, which in no way disturbed the tenor of her quietly contented life, led her to examine various forms of religion, ancient and modern, and even systems of philosophy which professed to establish a moral code, independent of supernatural faith. She was not of studious disposition—that is to say, she had never cared as a schoolgirl to do more mental work than was required of her, and even now it was seldom that she read for more than an hour or two in the day. Her habit was to dip into books, and meditate long on the first points which arrested her thoughts. Of continuous application she seemed incapable. She could read French, but did not attempt to pursue the other languages of which her teachers had given her a smattering. It pleased her best when she could learn from conversation. In this way she obtained some insight into her father’s favourite sciences, occasionally making suggestions or inquiries which revealed a subtle if not an acute intelligence.
Little by little Mrs. Warricombe found herself changing places with the daughter whom she had regarded as wholly subject to her direction. Sidwell began to exercise an indeterminate control, the proofs of which were at length manifest in details of her mother’s speech and demeanour. An exquisite social tact, an unfailing insensibly as the qualities of pure air: these were the points of sincerity of moral judgment, a gentle force which operated as character to which Mrs. Warricombe owed the humanisation observable when one compared her in 1885 with what she was, say, in 1874, when the sight of Professor Walsh moved her to acrimony, and when she conceived a pique against Professor Gale because the letter P has alphabetical precedence of W. Her limitations were of course the same as ever, and from her sons she had only learnt to be ashamed of announcing them too vehemently. Sidwell it was who had led her to that degree of genuine humility, which is not satisfied with hiding a fault but strives to amend it.
Martin Warricombe himself was not unaffected by the growth about him of young men and maidens who looked upon the world with new eyes, whose world, indeed, was another than that in which he had spent the better part of his life. In his case contact with the young generation tended to unsettlement, to a troublesome persistency of speculations which he would have preferred to dismiss altogether. At the time of his marriage, and for some years after, he was content to make a broad distinction between those intellectual pursuits which afforded him rather a liberal amusement than the pleasures of earnest study and the questions of metaphysical faith which concerned his heart and conscience. His native prejudices were almost as strong, and much the same, as those of his wife; but with the vagueness of emotional logic natural to his constitution, he satisfied himself that, by conceding a few inessential points, he left himself at liberty to follow the scientific movements of the day without damage to his religious convictions. The tolerant smile so frequently on his countenance was directed as often in the one quarter as in the other. Now it signified a gentle reproof of those men of science who, like Professor Walsh, ‘went too far’, whose zeal for knowledge led them ‘to forget the source of all true enlightenment’; now it expressed a forbearing sympathy with such as erred in the opposite direction, who were ‘too literal in their interpretation of the sacred volume’. Amiable as the smile was, it betrayed weakness, and at moments Martin became unpleasantly conscious of indisposition to examine his own mind on certain points. His life, indeed, was one of debate postponed. As the realm of science extended, as his intercourse with men who frankly avowed their ‘infidelity’ grew more frequent, he ever and again said to himself that, one of these days, he must sit down and ‘have it out’ in a solemn self-searching. But for the most part he got on very well amid his inconsistencies. Religious faith has rarely any connection with reasoning. Martin believed because he believed, and avoided the impact of disagreeable arguments because he wished to do so.
The bent of his mind was anything but polemical; he cared not to spend time even over those authors whose attacks on the outposts of science, or whose elaborate reconcilements of old and new, might have afforded him some support. On the other hand, he altogether lacked that breadth of intellect which seeks to comprehend all the results of speculation, to discern their tendency, to derive from them a consistent theory of the nature of things. Though a man be well versed in a science such as palaeontology it does not follow that he will view it in its philosophical relations. Martin had kept himself informed of all the facts appertaining to his study which the age brought forth, but without developing the new modes of mental life requisite for the recognition of all that such facts involved. The theories of evolution he did not venture openly to resist, but his acceptance of them was so half-hearted that practically he made no use of their teaching. He was no man of science, but an idler among the wonders which science uses for her own purposes.
He regarded with surprise and anxiety the tendencies early manifested in his son Buckland. Could he have had his way the lad would have grown up with an impossible combination of qualities, blending the enthusiasm of modern research with a spirit of expansive teleology. Whilst Buckland was still of boyish years, the father treated with bantering good-humour such outbreaks of irreverence as came immediately under his notice, weakly abstaining from any attempt at direct argument or influence. But, at a later time, there took place serious and painful discussions, and only when the young man had rubbed off his edges in the world’s highways could Martin forget that stage of most unwelcome conflict.
At the death of his younger boy, Maurice, he suffered a blow which had results more abiding than the melancholy wherewith for a year or two his genial nature was overshadowed. From that day onwards he was never wholly at ease among the pursuits which had been wont to afford him an unfailing resource against whatever troubles. He could no longer accept and disregard, in a spirit of cheerful faith, those difficulties science was perpetually throwing in his way. The old smile of kindly tolerance had still its twofold meaning, but it was more evidently a disguise of indecision, and not seldom touched with sadness. Martin’s life was still one of postponed debate, but he could not regard the day when conclusions would be demanded of him as indefinitely remote. Desiring to dwell in the familiar temporary abode, his structure of incongruities and facile reconcilements, he found it no longer weather-proof. The times were shaking his position with earthquake after earthquake. His sons (for he suspected that Louis was hardly less emancipated than Buckland) stood far aloof from him, and must in private feel contemptuous of his old-fashioned beliefs. In Sidwell, however, he had a companion more and more indispensable, and he could not imagine that her faith would ever give way before the invading spirit of agnosticism. Happily she was no mere pietist. Though he did not quite understand her attitude towards Christianity, he felt assured that Sidwell had thought deeply and earnestly of religion in all its aspects, and it was a solace to know that she found no difficulty in recognising the large claims of science. For all this, he could not deliberately seek her confidence, or invite her to a discussion of religious subjects. Some day, no doubt, a talk of that kind would begin naturally between them, and so strong was his instinctive faith in Sidwell that he looked forward to this future communing as to a certain hope of peace.
That a figure such as Godwin Peak, a young man of vigorous intellect, preparing to devote his life to the old religion, should excite Mr. Warricombe’s interest was of course to be anticipated; and it seemed probable enough that Peak, exerting all the force of his character and aided by circumstances, might before long convert this advantage to a means of ascendency over the less self-reliant nature. But here was no instance of a dotard becoming the easy prey of a scientific Tartufe. Martin’s intellect had suffered no decay. His hale features and dignified bearing expressed the mind which was ripened by sixty years of pleasurable activity, and which was learning to regard with steadier view the problems it had hitherto shirked. He could not change the direction nature had given to his thoughts, and prepossession would in some degree obscure his judgment where the merits and trustworthiness of a man in Peak’s circumstances called for scrutiny; but self-respect guarded him against vulgar artifices, and a fine sensibility made it improbable that he would become the victim of any man in whom base motives predominated.
Left to his own impulses, he would still have proceeded with all caution in his offers of friendly services to Peak. A letter of carefully-worded admonition, which he received from his son, apprising him of Peak’s resolve to transfer himself to Exeter, scarcely affected his behaviour when the young man appeared. It was but natural—he argued—that Buckland should look askance on a case of ‘conversion’; for his own part, he understood that such a step might be prompted by interest, but he found it difficult to believe that to a man in Peak’s position, the Church would offer temptation thus coercive. Nor could he discern in the candidate for a curacy any mark of dishonourable purpose. Faults, no doubt, were observable, among them a tendency to spiritual pride—which seemed (Martin could admit) an argument for, rather than against, his sincerity. The progress of acquaintance decidedly confirmed his favourable impressions; they were supported by the remarks of those among his friends to whom Peak presently became known.
It was not until Whitsuntide of the next year, when the student had been living nearly five months at Exeter, that Buckland again came down to visit his relatives. On the evening of his arrival, chancing to be alone with Sidwell, he asked her if Peak had been to the house lately.
‘Not many days ago,’ replied his sister, ‘he lunched with us, and then sat with father for some time.’
‘Does he come often?’
‘Not very often. He is translating a German book which interests father very much.’
‘Oh, what book?’
‘I don’t know. Father has only mentioned it in that way.’
They were in a little room sacred to the two girls, very daintily furnished and fragrant of sweet-brier, which Sidwell loved so much that, when the season allowed it, she often wore a little spray of it at her girdle. Buckland opened a book on the table, and, on seeing the title, exclaimed with a disparaging laugh:
‘I can’t get out of the way of this fellow M’Naughten! Wherever I go, there he lies about on the tables and chairs. I should have thought he was thoroughly smashed by an article that came out in The Critical last year.’
Sidwell smiled, evidently in no way offended.
‘That article could “smash” nobody,’ she made answer. ‘It was too violent; it overshot the mark.’
‘Not a bit of it!—So you read it, eh? You’re beginning to read, are you?’
‘In my humble way, Buckland.’
‘M’Naughten, among other things. Humble enough, that, I admit.’
‘I am not a great admirer of M’Naughten,’ returned his sister, with a look of amusement.
‘No? I congratulate you.—I wonder what Peak thinks of the book?’
‘I really don’t know.’
‘Then let me ask another question. What do you think of Peak?’
Sidwell regarded him with quiet reflectiveness.
‘I feel,’ she said, ‘that I don’t know him very well yet. He is certainly interesting.’
‘Yes, he is. Does he impress you as the kind of man likely to make a good clergyman?’
‘I don’t see any reason why he should not.’
Her brother mused, with wrinkles of dissatisfaction on his brow.
‘Father gets to like him, you say?’
‘Yes, I think father likes him.’
‘Well, I suppose it’s all right.’
‘All right?’
‘It’s the most astounding thing that ever came under my observation,’ exclaimed Buckland, walking away and then returning.
‘That Mr. Peak should be studying for the Church?’
‘Yes.’
‘But do reflect more modestly!’ urged Sidwell, with something that was not quite archness, though as near it as her habits of tone and feature would allow. ‘Why should you refuse to admit an error in your own way of looking at things? Wouldn’t it be better to take this as a proof that intellect isn’t necessarily at war with Christianity?’
‘I never stated it so broadly as that,’ returned her brother, with impatience. ‘But I should certainly have maintained that Peak’s intellect was necessarily in that position.’
‘And you see how wrong you would have been,’ remarked the girl, softly.
‘Well—I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘I mean that I can’t acknowledge what I can’t understand.’
‘Then do try to understand, Buckland!—Have you ever put aside your prejudice for a moment to inquire what our religion really means? Not once, I think—at all events, not since you reached years of discretion.’
‘Allow me to inform you that I studied the question thoroughly at Cambridge.’
‘Yes, yes; but that was in your boyhood.’
‘And when does manhood begin?’
‘At different times in different persons. In your case it was late.’
Buckland laughed. He was considering a rejoinder, when they were interrupted by the appearance of Fanny, who asked at once:
‘Shall you go to see Mr. Peak this evening, Buckland?’
‘I’m in no hurry,’ was the abrupt reply.
The girl hesitated.
‘Let us all have a drive together—with Mr. Peak, I mean—like when you were here last.’
‘We’ll see about it.’
Buckland went slowly from the room.
Late the same evening he sat with his father in the study. Mr Warricombe knew not the solace of tobacco, and his son, though never quite at ease without pipe or cigar, denied himself in this room, with the result that he shifted frequently upon his chair and fell into many awkward postures.
‘And how does Peak impress you?’ he inquired, when the subject he most wished to converse upon had been postponed to many others. It was clear that Martin would not himself broach it.
‘Not disagreeably,’ was the reply, with a look of frankness, perhaps over-emphasised.
‘What is he doing? I have only heard from him once since he came down, and he had very little to say about himself.’
‘I understand that he proposes to take the London B.A.’
‘Oh, then, he never did that? Has he unbosomed himself to you about his affairs of old time?’
‘No. Such confidences are hardly called for.’
‘Speaking plainly, father, you don’t feel any uneasiness?’
Martin deliberated, fingering the while an engraved stone which hung upon his watch-guard. He was at a disadvantage in this conversation. Aware that Buckland regarded the circumstances of Peak’s sojourn in the neighbourhood with feelings allied to contempt, he could neither adopt the tone of easy confidence natural to him on other occasions of difference in opinion, nor express himself with the coldness which would have obliged his son to quit the subject.
‘Perhaps you had better tell me,’ he replied, ‘whether you are really uneasy.’
It was impossible for Buckland to answer as his mind prompted. He could not without offence declare that no young man of brains now adopted a clerical career with pure intentions, yet such was his sincere belief. Made tolerant in many directions by the cultivation of his shrewdness, he was hopelessly biassed in judgment as soon as his anti-religious prejudice came into play—a point of strong resemblance between him and Peak. After fidgeting for a moment, he exclaimed:
‘Yes, I am; but I can’t be sure that there’s any cause for it.’
‘Let us come to matters of fact,’ said Mr. Warricombe, showing that he was not sorry to discuss this side of the affair. ‘I suppose there is no doubt that Peak had a position till lately at the place he speaks of?’
‘No doubt whatever. I have taken pains to ascertain that. His account of himself, so far, is strictly true.’
Martin smiled, with satisfaction he did not care to disguise.
‘Have you met some acquaintance of his?’
‘Well,’ answered Buckland, changing his position, ‘I went to work in rather an underhand way, perhaps—but the results are satisfactory. No, I haven’t come across any of his friends, but I happened to hear not long ago that he was on intimate terms with some journalists.’
His father laughed.
‘Anything compromising in that association, Buckland?’
‘I don’t say that—though the fellows I speak of are hot Radicals.’
‘Though?’
‘I mean,’ replied the young man, with his shrewder smile, ‘that they are not exactly the companions a theological student would select.’
‘I understand. Possibly he has journalised a little himself?’
‘That I can’t say, though I should have thought it likely enough. I might, of course, find out much more about him, but it seemed to me that to have assurance of his truthfulness in that one respect was enough for the present.’
‘Do you mean, Buckland,’ asked his father, gravely, ‘that you have been setting secret police at work?’
‘Well, yes. I thought it the least objectionable way of getting information.’
Martin compressed his lips and looked disapproval.
‘I really can’t see that such extreme measures were demanded. Come, come; what is all this about? Do you suspect him of planning burglaries? That was an ill-judged step, Buckland; decidedly ill-judged. I said just now that Peak impressed me by no means disagreeably. Now I will add that I am convinced of his good faith—as sure of it as I am of his remarkable talents and aptitude for the profession he aims at. In spite of your extraordinary distrust, I can’t feel a moment’s doubt of his honour. Why, I could have told you myself that he has known Radical journalists. He mentioned it the other day, and explained how far his sympathy went with that kind of thing. No, no; that was hardly permissible, Buckland.’
The young man had no difficulty in bowing to his father’s reproof when the point at issue was one of gentlemanly behaviour.
‘I admit it,’ he replied. ‘I wish I had gone to Rotherhithe and made simple inquiries in my own name. That, all things considered, I might have allowed myself; at all events, I shouldn’t have been at ease without getting that assurance. If Peak had heard, and had said to me, “What the deuce do you mean?” I should have told him plainly, what I have strongly hinted to him already, that I don’t understand what he is doing in this galley.’
‘And have placed yourself in a position not easy to define.’
‘No doubt.’
‘All this arises, my boy,’ resumed Martin, in a tone of grave kindness, ‘from your strange inability to grant that on certain matters you may be wholly misled.’
‘It does.’
‘Well, well; that is forbidden ground. But do try to be less narrow. Are you unable then to meet Peak in a friendly way?’
‘Oh, by no means! It seems more than likely that I have wronged him.’
‘Well said! Keep your mind open. I marvel at the dogmatism of men who are set on overthrowing dogma. Such a position is so strangely unphilosophic that I don’t know how a fellow of your brains can hold it for a moment. If I were not afraid of angering you,’ Martin added, in his pleasantest tone, ‘I would quote the Master of Trinity.’
‘A capital epigram, but it is repeated too often.’
Mr. Warricombe shook his head, and with a laugh rose to say good-night.
‘It’s a great pity,’ he remarked next day to Sidwell, who had been saying that her brother seemed less vivacious than usual, ‘that Buckland is defective on the side of humour. For a man who claims to be philosophical he takes things with a rather obtuse seriousness. I know nothing better than humour as a protection against the kind of mistake he is always committing.’
The application of this was not clear to Sidwell.
‘Has something happened to depress him?’ she asked.
‘Not that I know of. I spoke only of his general tendency to intemperate zeal. That is enough to account for intervals of reaction. And how much sounder his judgment of men would be if he could only see through a medium of humour now and then! You know he is going over to Budleigh Salterton this afternoon?’
Sidwell smiled, and said quietly:
‘I thought it likely he would.’
At Budleigh Salterton, a nook on the coast some fifteen miles away, Sylvia Moorhouse was now dwelling. Her mother, a widow of substantial means, had recently established herself there, in the proximity of friends, and the mathematical brother made his home with them. That Buckland took every opportunity of enjoying Sylvia’s conversation was no secret; whether the predilection was mutual, none of his relatives could say, for in a matter such as this Buckland was by nature disposed to reticence. Sidwell’s intimacy with Miss Moorhouse put her in no better position than the others for forming an opinion; she could only suspect that the irony which flavoured Sylvia’s talk with and concerning the Radical, intimated a lurking kindness. Buckland’s preference was easily understood, and its growth for five or six years seemed to promise stability.
Immediately after luncheon the young man set forth, and did not reappear until the evening of the next day. His spirits had not benefited by the excursion; at dinner he was noticeably silent, and instead of going to the drawing-room afterwards he betook himself to the studio up on the roof, and smoked in solitude. There, towards ten o’clock, Sidwell sought him. Heavy rain was beating upon the glass, and a high wind blended its bluster with the cheerless sound.
‘Don’t you find it rather cold here?’ she asked, after observing her brother’s countenance of gloom.
‘Yes; I’m coming down.—Why don’t you keep up your painting?’
‘I have lost interest in it, I’m afraid.’
‘That’s very weak, you know. It seems to me that nothing interests you permanently.’
Sidwell thought it better to make no reply.
‘The characteristic of women,’ Buckland pursued, with some asperity, throwing away the stump of his cigar. ‘It comes, I suppose, of their ridiculous education—their minds are never trained to fixity of purpose. They never understand themselves, and scarcely ever make an effort to understand any one else. Their life is a succession of inconsistencies.’
‘This generalising is so easy,’ said Sidwell, with a laugh, ‘and so worthless. I wonder you should be so far behind the times.’
‘What light have the times thrown on the subject?’
‘There’s no longer such a thing as woman in the abstract. We are individuals.’
‘Don’t imagine it! That may come to pass three or four generations hence, but as yet the best of you can only vary the type in unimportant particulars. By the way, what is Peak’s address?’
‘Longbrook Street; but I don’t know the number. Father can give it you, I think.’
‘I shall have to drop him a note. I must get back to town early in the morning.’
‘Really? We hoped to have you for a week.’
‘Longer next time.’
They descended together. Now that Louis no longer abode here (he had decided at length for medicine, and was at work in London), the family as a rule spent very quiet evenings. By ten o’clock Mrs Warricombe and Fanny had retired, and Sidwell was left either to talk with her father, or to pursue the calm meditations which seemed to make her independent of companionship as often as she chose.
‘Are they all gone?’ Buckland asked, finding a vacant room.
‘Father is no doubt in the study.’
‘It occurs to me—. Do you feel satisfied with this dead-alive existence?’
‘Satisfied? No life could suit me better.’
‘You really think of living here indefinitely?’
‘As far as I am concerned, I hope nothing may ever disturb us.’
‘And to the end of your life you will scent yourself with sweetbrier? Do try a bit of mint for a change.’
‘Certainly, if it will please you.’
‘Seriously, I think you might all come to town for next winter. You are rusting, all of you. Father was never so dull, and mother doesn’t seem to know how to pass the days. It wouldn’t be bad for Louis to be living with you instead of in lodgings. Do just think of it. It’s ages since you heard a concert, or saw a picture.’
Sidwell mused, and her brother watched her askance.
‘I don’t know whether the others would care for it,’ she said, ‘but I am not tempted by a winter of fog.’
‘Fog? Pooh! Well, there is an occasional fog, just now and then, but it’s much exaggerated. Who ever thinks of the weather in England? Fanny might have a time at Bedford College or some such place-she learns nothing here. Think it over. Father would be delighted to get among the societies, and so on.’
He repeated his arguments in many forms, and Sidwell listened patiently, until they were joined by Mr. Warricombe, whereupon the subject dropped; to be resumed, however, in correspondence, with a persistency which Buckland seldom exhibited in anything which affected the interests of his relatives. As the summer drew on, Mrs Warricombe began to lend serious ear to this suggestion of change, and Martin was at all events moved to discuss the pros and cons of half a year in London. Sidwell preserved neutrality, seldom making an allusion to the project; but Fanny supported her brother’s proposal with sprightly zeal, declaring on one occasion that she began distinctly to feel the need of ‘a higher culture’, such as London only could supply.
In the meantime there had been occasional interchange of visits between the family and their friends at Budleigh Salterton. One evening, when Mrs. Moorhouse and Sylvia were at the Warricombes’, three or four Exeter people came to dine, and among the guests was Godwin Peak—his invitation being due in this instance to Sylvia’s express wish to meet him again.
‘I am studying men,’ she had said to Sidwell not long before, when the latter was at the seaside with her. ‘In our day this is the proper study of womankind. Hitherto we have given serious attention only to one another. Mr. Peak remains in my memory as a type worth observing; let me have a chance of talking to him when I come next.’
She did not neglect her opportunity, and Mrs. Moorhouse, who also conversed with the theologian and found him interesting, was so good as to hope that he would call upon her if ever his steps turned towards Budleigh Salterton.
After breakfast next morning, Sidwell found her friend sitting with a book beneath one of the great trees of the garden. At that moment Sylvia was overcome with laughter, evidently occasioned by her reading.
‘Oh,’ she exclaimed, ‘if this man isn’t a great humorist! I don’t think I ever read anything more irresistible.’
The book was Hugh Miller’s Testimony of the Rocks, a richly bound copy belonging to Mrs. Warricombe.
‘I daresay you know it very well; it’s the chapter in which he discusses, with perfect gravity, whether it would have been possible for Noah to collect examples of all living creatures in the ark. He decides that it wouldn’t—that the deluge must have spared a portion of the earth; but the details of his argument are delicious, especially this place where he says that all the insects could have been brought together only “at enormous expense of miracle”! I suspected a secret smile; but no—that’s out of the question. “At enormous expense of miracle”!’
Sylvia’s eyes winked as she laughed, a peculiarity which enhanced the charm of her frank mirth. Her dark, pure complexion, strongly-marked eyebrows, subtle lips, were shadowed beneath a great garden hat, and a loose white gown, with no oppressive moulding at the waist, made her a refreshing picture in the glare of mid-summer.
‘The phrase is ridiculous enough,’ assented Sidwell. ‘Miracle can be but miracle, however great or small its extent.’
‘Isn’t it strange, reading a book of this kind nowadays? What a leap we have made! I should think there’s hardly a country curate who would be capable of bringing this argument into a sermon.’
‘I don’t know,’ returned Sidwell, smiling. ‘One still hears remarkable sermons.’
‘What will Mr. Peak’s be like?’
They exchanged glances. Sylvia wore a look of reflective curiosity, and her friend answered with some hesitation, as if the thought were new to her:
‘They won’t deal with Noah, we may take that for granted.’
‘Most likely not with miracles, however little expensive.’
‘Perhaps not. I suppose he will deal chiefly with the moral teaching of Christianity.’
‘Do you think him strong as a moralist?’ inquired Sylvia.
‘He has very decided opinions about the present state of our civilisation.’
‘So I find. But is there any distinctly moral force in him?’
‘Father thinks so,’ Sidwell replied, ‘and so do our friends the Lilywhites.’
Miss Moorhouse pondered awhile.
‘He is a great problem to me,’ she declared at length, knitting her brows with a hint of humorous exaggeration. ‘I wonder whether he believes in the dogmas of Christianity.’
Sidwell was startled.
‘Would he think of becoming a clergyman?’
‘Oh, why not? Don’t they recognise nowadays that the spirit is enough?’
There was silence. Sidwell let her eyes wander over the sunny grass to the red-flowering creeper on the nearest side of the house.
‘That would involve a great deal of dissimulation,’ she said at length. ‘I can’t reconcile it with what I know of Mr. Peak.’
‘And I can’t reconcile anything else,’ rejoined the other.
‘He impresses you as a rationalist?’
‘You not?’
‘I confess I have taken his belief for granted. Oh, think! He couldn’t keep up such a pretence. However you justify it, it implies conscious deception. It would be dishonourable. I am sure he would think it so.’
‘How does your brother regard him?’ Sylvia asked, smiling very slightly, but with direct eyes.
‘Buckland can’t credit anyone with sincerity except an aggressive agnostic.’
‘But I think he allows honest credulity.’
Sidwell had no answer to this. After musing a little, she put a question which indicated how her thoughts had travelled.
‘Have you met many women who declared themselves agnostics?’
‘Several.’
Sylvia removed her hat, and began to fan herself gently with the brim. Here, in the shade, bees were humming; from the house came faint notes of a piano—Fanny practising a mazurka of Chopin.
‘But never, I suppose, one who found a pleasure in attacking Christianity?’
‘A girl who was at school with me in London,’ Sylvia replied, with an air of amused reminiscence. ‘Marcella Moxey. Didn’t I ever speak to you of her?’
‘I think not.’
‘She was bitter against religion of every kind.’
‘Because her mother made her learn collects, I dare say?’ suggested Sidwell, in a tone of gentle satire.
‘No, no. Marcella was about eighteen then, and had neither father nor mother.—(How Fanny’s touch improves!)—She was a born atheist, in the fullest sense of the word.’
‘And detestable?’
‘Not to me—I rather liked her. She was remarkably honest, and I have sometimes thought that in morals, on the whole, she stood far above most women. She hated falsehood—hated it with all her heart, and a story of injustice maddened her. When I think of Marcella it helps me to picture the Russian girls who propagate Nihilism.’
‘You have lost sight of her?’
‘She went abroad, I think. I should like to have known her fate. I rather think there will have to be many like her before women are civilised.’
‘How I should like to ask her,’ said Sidwell, ‘on what she supported her morality?’
‘Put the problem to Mr. Peak,’ suggested the other, gaily. ‘I fancy he wouldn’t find it insoluble.’
Mrs. Warricombe and Mrs. Moorhouse appeared in the distance, walking hither under parasols. The girls rose to meet them, and were presently engaged in less interesting colloquy.