CHAPTER V
HE
For twenty years of my life I have embraced the phantom of the fairest
woman that ever drew breath. I have submitted to her whims, I have
worshipped her feet, I have, I believe, strengthened her principle. I
have done all in my devotion but adopt her religious faith. And I have,
as I trusted some time since, awakened to perceive that those twenty
years were a period of mere sentimental pastime, perfectly useless,
fruitless, unless, as is possible, it has saved me from other follies.
But it was a folly in itself. Can one’s nature be too stedfast? The
question whether a spice of frivolousness may not be a safeguard has
often risen before me. The truth, I must learn to think, is, that my
mental power is not the match for my ideal or sentimental apprehension
and native tenacity of attachment. I have fallen into one of the pits of
a well-meaning but idle man. The world discredits the existence of pure
platonism in love. I myself can barely look back on those twenty years
of amatory servility with a full comprehension of the part I have been
playing in them. And yet I would not willingly forfeit the exalted
admiration of Louise for my constancy: as little willingly as I would
have imperilled her purity. I cling to the past as to something in which
I have deserved well, though I am scarcely satisfied with it. According
to our English notions I know my name. English notions, however, are not
to be accepted in all matters, any more than the flat declaration of a
fact will develop it in alt its bearings. When our English society
shall have advanced to a high civilization, it will be less expansive
in denouncing the higher stupidities. Among us, much of the social
judgement of Bodge upon the relations of men to women is the stereotyped
opinion of the land. There is the dictum here for a man who adores a
woman who is possessed by a husband. If he has long adored her, and
known himself to be preferred by her in innocency of heart; if he has
solved the problem of being her bosom’s lord, without basely seeking to
degrade her to being his mistress; the epithets to characterise him in
our vernacular will probably be all the less flattering. Politically we
are the most self-conscious people upon earth, and socially the frankest
animals. The terrorism of our social laws is eminently serviceable, for
without it such frank animals as we are might run into bad excesses.
I judge rather by the abstract evidence than by the examples our fair
matrons give to astounded foreigners when abroad.
Louise writes that her husband is paralysed. The Marquis de Mazardouin
is at last tasting of his mortality. I bear in mind the day when he
married her. She says that he has taken to priestly counsel, and, like
a woman, she praises him for that. It is the one thing which I have
not done to please her. She anticipates his decease. Should she be
free--what then? My heart does not beat the faster for the thought.
There are twenty years upon it, and they make a great load. But I have
a desire that she should come over to us. The old folly might rescue me
from the new one. Not that I am any further persecuted by the dread that
I am in imminent danger here. I have established a proper mastery over
my young lady. ‘Nous avons change de role’. Alice is subdued; she laughs
feebly, is becoming conscious--a fact to be regretted, if I desired to
check the creature’s growth. There is vast capacity in the girl. She
has plainly not centred her affections upon Charles, so that a man’s
conscience might be at ease if--if he chose to disregard what is due to
decency. But, why, when I contest it, do I bow to the world’s opinion
concerning disparity of years between husband and wife? I know
innumerable cases of an old husband making a young wife happy. My
friend, Dr. Galliot, married his ward, and he had the best wife of any
man of my acquaintance. She has been publishing his learned manuscripts
ever since his death. That is an extreme case, for he was forty-five
years her senior, and stood bald at the altar. Old General Althorpe
married Julia Dahoop, and, but for his preposterous jealousy of her,
might be cited in proof that the ordinary reckonings are not to be a
yoke on the neck of one who earnestly seeks to spouse a fitting mate,
though late in life. But, what are fifty years? They mark the prime of a
healthy man’s existence. He has by that time seen the world, can decide,
and settle, and is virtually more eligible--to use the cant phrase of
gossips--than a young man, even for a young girl. And may not some fair
and fresh reward be justly claimed as the crown of a virtuous career?
I say all this, yet my real feeling is as if I were bald as Dr. Galliot
and jealous as General Althorpe. For, with my thorough knowledge of
myself, I, were I like either one of them, should not have offered
myself to the mercy of a young woman, or of the world. Nor, as I am and
know myself to be, would I offer myself to the mercy of Alice Amble.
When my filleule first drove into Dayton she had some singularly
audacious ideas of her own. Those vivid young feminine perceptions and
untamed imaginations are desperate things to encounter. There is nothing
beyond their reach. Our safety from them lies in the fact that they are
always seeing too much, and imagining too wildly; so that, with a little
help from us, they may be taught to distrust themselves; and when they
have once distrusted themselves, we need not afterwards fear them: their
supernatural vitality has vanished. I fancy my pretty Alice to be in
this state now. She leaves us to-morrow. In the autumn we shall have her
with us again, and Louise will scan her compassionately. I desire that
they should meet. It will be hardly fair to the English girl, but, if
I stand in the gap between them, I shall summon up no small quantity of
dormant compatriotic feeling. The contemplation of the contrast, too,
may save me from both: like the logic ass with the two trusses of hay on
either side of him.