CHAPTER IV

Reckage was dining at home that evening with Orange, whose marriage was

to take place at the Alberian Embassy on the morrow. The young man was

not in good spirits at his friend's step, for he himself was about to

take a wife also, and much of the apprehension which he felt on his own

account found its vent in dreary soliloquies on the risk, sacrifices,

responsibilities, and trouble involved by the single act of saddling

oneself for a lifetime with some one woman. Reckage, for his own part,

had loved one lady very well, yet not so madly that he could resign

himself to loving her only, to the exclusion of all others. He walked

along toward Almouth House in a mood of many vexations, cursing the

impudence of Bradwyn and Ullweather, wondering whether he had done

wisely, after all, in engaging himself to the blameless Miss Carillon,

sighing a little over a rumour which had reached him about Sara de

Treverell and the Duke of Marshire, deploring the obstinacy of Robert

Orange where Mrs. Parflete was concerned. He admitted that Mrs. Parflete

was an exceedingly beautiful, young, and, as it happened, rich person.

He owned her delightfulness for a man of Robert's dreamy, romantic,

intense temperament. But marriage between two idealists so highly

strung, and so passionately attached as these two beings were--what

would happen? No doubt they would be able to endure the inevitable

disillusions--(inevitable because Nature is before all things sensual

and has no care for mental prejudices one way or the other)--the

inevitable disillusions of family life. It was scarcely possible that

the devotion of Robert and Mrs. Parflete would not waver or seem less

exquisite under this discipline. Their dream of love would become

unparadised. It would gain a sadness, a melancholy, a note of despair

hard to endure and most difficult to repress. Reckage had no

transcendentalism in his own philosophy: he divided men into two

classes--those who read, and those who could not stand, Dante. He

included himself among the latter with a frankness at once astonishing

and welcome even to numbers who thought him, in most matters, a

hypocrite. The hold of the world was growing daily stronger upon him.

His ambitions were already sullied by many unworthy and deadening ideas.

He dwelt a great deal on the fleetingness of life, and the wisdom of

making the best of its few charming things. Food, and wine, and money,

and fine houses, and amusements were subjects on which he expended a

large amount of silent enthusiasm. But, for all this, he could still

see much to admire--perhaps to envy--in Robert's more spiritual mind,

and he dreaded--as men often do dread in such cases--the effect of a

woman's companionship on so ascetic a character.

"He knows nothing about women--nothing," he told himself. "He has no

experience. He takes them too seriously."

He was, while he admitted his own unreasonableness, a little shocked at

the very notion of Orange with a wife and children. It went against the

grain, and upset the ideals of austerity which he had carefully

planned--not for himself, but for his friend. Robert, he urged, was born

to be an example--an encouragement to those who were called, by the

mercy of God, to less rigorous vocations. Reckage suffered many scruples

of conscience on Robert's account; he surveyed him with a sense of

disappointment; he had always supposed that he would ultimately turn

Jesuit in sober earnest, and die a martyr's death in the Far East. This

would, in his opinion, have been a fine end to a Quixotic, very

touching, most remarkable life. Would he now immaturely fall a victim to

an enticing face and the cares of a household? Would he be able to

sustain his character? One thing was certain. He could never again

expect to exercise precisely the same potent influence as he had in the

past, over his earth-bound, self-indulgent friends. Self-indulgent

people always exacted unusual privations from those who would seek to

move them--and Robert's call was clearly to materialists rather than to

the righteous. Pusey married, it was true. Keble married. No one thought

the less of them on that account. Even the judicious Hooker married. And

they were clergymen. Reckage called them priests. But Newman did not

marry, and, while Reckage was unable to agree in the main with Newman's

views, he had a fixed notion that he was the strong man--the master

spirit--among them. And another consideration. The passion of love has a

danger for very sensitive, reserved, and concentrated minds unknown to

creatures of more volatile, expansive, and unreflecting disposition.

Reckage knew well that he was himself too selfish a man to let affection

for any one creature come between his soul and its God. There was no

self-discipline required in his case when a choice had to be made

between a human being and his own advantage--whether temporal or

eternal. He had never--since he was a youth--felt an immoderate fondness

for anybody; he had likes and dislikes, admirations and partialities,

jealousies, too, and well-defined tastes where feminine beauty was in

question, but it was not in him to err from excess of charity. The

imaginative and visionary parts of life--and no one is wholly without

them--soon turned into severe reality whenever he found himself

confronted with that sole absorbing interest--his career. Marriage, in

his own case, seemed an imperative duty. He was an eldest son, the heir

to an earldom and a vast estate; he wished to lead a distinguished,

comfortable, and edifying existence. His wife would be a helpmate, not a

snare; the mother of his children, not the light of his eyes. But what a

difference in Robert's case--with his capacity for worship, for really

intense and absorbing passion. All this was especially transparent to

Reckage, who, as a man of the world, had watched his friend for months,

detecting the shattering physical effects of an iron restraint imposed

on every thought, mood, and inclination. He had enjoyed the spectacle:

it was a good fight--this sharp, unceasing struggle between mere human

nature, young, vigorous, sane, indefatigable, and an upright soul full

of tenderness, yet forced to live in constant warfare. Awe, too, had

mingled in Reckage's sensations while he looked on; something of pity

and terror stirred under the callous muscle which he called his heart at

the sight of a voiceless, stifled despair outside the range of his

personal experience, though not entirely beyond his sympathy. All men

did not love after this fashion, he knew, but humanity was full of

surprises, and he had been too calm a student of other men's lives to

feel astonishment at any fresh revelation either of their pain, their

perversity, or their humours. He had felt so sure, however, that Robert

would, in the end, get the better of that unhappy attachment; everything

in the process of time had to surrender to reason, and it was not

possible, he thought, that a strong, self-reliant man could long remain

subdued by a mere infatuation.

"And why doesn't he think of his health?" insisted Reckage; "it is

really going between all this sleeplessness, and fasting, and over-work.

Flesh and blood cannot bear the strain. He is never idle for one moment.

He is afraid of brooding."

It was with these sentiments of fear for the one creature he believed

in, and hostility toward the woman who had presumed to interfere with

the progress of that clear spirit, that he found himself at Almouth

House. The blinds of the dining-room were but partially down. He could

see the menservants within preparing the table which, set for two

covers, showed a pretty display of cut-glass, flowers, old silver, and

shining damask under the yellow rays of the lit candles. Some family

portraits by Gainsborough and Reynolds, a Holbein, and a Vandyck, with

lamps shining like footlights beneath them, were darkly visible on the

dull blue walls. The famous mantelpiece inlaid with uncut turquoise was

also within sight; and the sideboard with its load of Sevres china and

gold dishes. Reckage took great pride in these possessions, but it

shocked his sense of dignity to see them thus exposed to the vulgar

gaze.

He let himself into the mansion with a latchkey, stormed at the servants

for their carelessness, and made what is commonly known as a scene.

Then he crossed the hall, and went into another fine room, which led by

steps into a garden, and caught the sunset.

Here, standing by the window with his back to the door, looking at the

clouds, greyer than a gull's wing, which fled like driven souls across

the sky, stood Orange.

He turned as the latch moved, and Reckage, coming in, perceived the pale

face, resolute, a little proud, and thoroughly inscrutable of his former

secretary. Of fine height and broad-shouldered, Robert bore himself with

peculiar firmness and ease. His brown eyes, with their brilliant,

defiant glance, his close, dark beard, and powerful aquiline features;

the entire absence of vanity, or the desire to produce an impression

which showed itself in every line of his face and every movement of his

body, indicated a type of individual more likely to attract the

confidence of men than the sentimentality of women.

The two young men greeted each other pleasantly, but with a certain

reserve on each side.

"So you are here!" said Reckage, seating himself. "I am sorry to be

late. The fact is I caught sight of old Garrow and Sara de Treverell

driving together in the Park, and it suddenly occurred to me to ask 'em

to dine with us to-night. I raced after their brougham, but my brute of

a horse--Pluto: you know the beast--gave me such a lot of trouble that I

couldn't speak to them. How are you? You don't look very fit. Perhaps

you are glad that we are alone. But Sara is a nice girl, and full of

kindness. She's a good friend, too--just the friend for your wife. I

thought of that."

Robert resumed his post at the window, and studied the heavens. But if

he sought for any answer to the many impassioned questions which were

thronging his heart and mind at that moment, he looked in vain. For

himself the struggles of the last year had been to a great degree

subconscious. He had been like a sick man who, ignorant of the real

gravity of his condition, fights death daily without a thought of the

unequal strife, or the suspense of his physicians. He had abandoned

himself to study, immersed himself in work; he was neither morbid nor an

amorist; and while he felt a stinging misery for ever in his heart, he

bore it with manly reticence, without complaint, without despair. Love,

in his case, had meant the idealisation of the whole of life--the life

of action and the life within the soul. It had transfigured the world,

lit up and illumined every dark corner, answered every turbulent doubt.

From the habit of this wholly mental emotion, he had lost, little by

little, the sense of the actual bodily existence of the woman herself.

It is true that he thought of her always as some one modestly beautiful,

of childish form, with a face like a water-nymph's--imperious, magical,

elusive, yet, whenever he found himself in her presence, she seemed

further away than when they were, in fact, apart. The kiss he had given

her on the day of their betrothal had been as strange, indefinable, and

irrealisable as the passing of one hour into the next. There had been

the time before he kissed her, there was the time afterwards, but the

transition had been so swift, and so little recognised, so inevitable,

that while it drew both their lives down deep into the wild, pitiless

surge of human feeling, she still remained more dearly and completely

his by intuition than when he held her--a true woman--in his arms. The

moral training of a lifetime, the unceasing, daily discipline of a mind

indulgent to others, but most severe with itself, had given him a

self-mastery in impulse and desire which, although the aspect of affairs

had changed, he could not easily, or even willingly, relax. His soul

drew back from its new privileges, sweet as they were--and he was too

honest to deny their overpowering sweetness--they seemed like the

desecration of a most sacred thought. Vainly he reasoned, vainly he

admitted the folly of such scruples. They remained. Asceticism is a

faithful quality. It is won by slow and painful stages, with bitter

distress and mortifying tears, but once really gained, the losing is

even harder than the struggle for its acquisition.

And so the young man found himself in that hard position when judgment

and prejudice stand opposed so utterly that victory either way must mean

a lasting regret. Perhaps he was not the first bridegroom who felt

loath, on the eve of his marriage, to change the delicate, almost

ethereal tenderness of betrothed lovers for the close and intimate

association of husband and wife. The one relationship has something in

it immaterial, exquisite, and unearthly, a bond invisible and yet as

potent as the winds we cannot see and the melodies we only hear. The

other, with its profound appeals to mortality, its demands upon all that

is strongest in affection and eternal in courage, its irreparableness,

suffering, and constancy, might, indeed, have the grandeur of all human

tragedy, and the dignity of a holy state; but that it could ever be so

beautiful as the love which is a silent influence was to Robert then, at

least, an inconceivable idea. He felt upon him and around him, in his

flesh and in his spirit, in the air and in the whole world, the

all-enveloping shadow of remorse. The dormant possibilities of his own

fanatical nature rose up before him--pale, inarticulate fiercenesses

crushed so long, and now trembling eagerly under his breath at the

prospect of a little more liberty in loving. A suspicion that already he

loved perhaps too well and far too passionately thrilled through his

conscience, and tortured a heart to whom thought was a refuge and

feeling a martyrdom.

Reckage, watching Robert from a corner of the room, grew irritated at

the silence, and wondered, with a cruel and jealous curiosity, what was

passing in his mind. He wondered whether he was praying. An impulse,

which had something in it of brute fury, urged him to tear open that

still face and drag the thoughts behind it to the light. Why was it

that one could never, by any sense, enter into another's spirit?

The same torturing mystery had often disturbed him during the

half-hours--outwardly placid and commonplace--which he spent, out of

etiquette, with his future bride. She, too, retired behind the veil of

her countenance to live a hidden life that he could never hope to join.

How lonely was companionship in these conditions, and how desolate

marriage!

He could not resist the temptation to break in, with a touch of crude

satire, upon his friend's solitude.

"What is the matter?" he exclaimed, "are you hungry?"

"No," said Robert, so well accustomed to such violent jars that they

could no longer disturb him; "I was only thinking...."

"About what?"

"All sorts of things."

Reckage turned pale from dissatisfied inquisitiveness.

"I think, too," he answered, "but I can throw out a word now and again."

Then, making the remark that he was not dressed for dinner, he left the

room.