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George Bernard Shaw - "The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors"

George Bernard Shaw - "The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors"

Samuel Butler - "Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces"

Arthur B. Reeve - "Constance Dunlap"

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, Complete

G >> George Meredith >> The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, Complete







CHAPTER XV

He had landed on an island of the still-vexed Bermoothes. The world lay
wrecked behind him: Raynham hung in mists, remote, a phantom to the vivid
reality of this white hand which had drawn him thither away thousands of
leagues in an eye-twinkle. Hark, how Ariel sang overhead! What splendour
in the heavens! What marvels of beauty about his enchanted brows! And, O
you wonder! Fair Flame! by whose light the glories of being are now first
seen....Radiant Miranda! Prince Ferdinand is at your feet.

Or is it Adam, his rib taken from his side in sleep, and thus
transformed, to make him behold his Paradise, and lose it?...

The youth looked on her with as glowing an eye. It was the First Woman to
him.

And she--mankind was all Caliban to her, saving this one princely youth.

So to each other said their changing eyes in the moment they stood
together; he pale, and she blushing.

She was indeed sweetly fair, and would have been held fair among rival
damsels. On a magic shore, and to a youth educated by a System, strung
like an arrow drawn to the head, he, it might be guessed, could fly fast
and far with her. The soft rose in her cheeks, the clearness of her eyes,
bore witness to the body's virtue; and health and happy blood were in her
bearing. Had she stood before Sir Austin among rival damsels, that
Scientific Humanist, for the consummation of his System, would have
thrown her the handkerchief for his son. The wide summer-hat, nodding
over her forehead to her brows, seemed to flow with the flowing heavy
curls, and those fire-threaded mellow curls, only half-curls, waves of
hair call them, rippling at the ends, went like a sunny red-veined
torrent down her back almost to her waist: a glorious vision to the
youth, who embraced it as a flower of beauty, and read not a feature.
There were curious features of colour in her face for him to have read.
Her brows, thick and brownish against a soft skin showing the action of
the blood, met in the bend of a bow, extending to the temples long and
level: you saw that she was fashioned to peruse the sights of earth, and
by the pliability of her brows that the wonderful creature used her
faculty, and was not going to be a statue to the gazer. Under the dark
thick brows an arch of lashes shot out, giving a wealth of darkness to
the full frank blue eyes, a mystery of meaning--more than brain was ever
meant to fathom: richer, henceforth, than all mortal wisdom to Prince
Ferdinand. For when nature turns artist, and produces contrasts of colour
on a fair face, where is the Sage, or what the Oracle, shall match the
depth of its lightest look?

Prince Ferdinand was also fair. In his slim boating-attire his figure
looked heroic. His hair, rising from the parting to the right of his
forehead, in what his admiring Lady Blandish called his plume, fell away
slanting silkily to the temples across the nearly imperceptible upward
curve of his brows there--felt more than seen, so slight it was--and gave
to his profile a bold beauty, to which his bashful, breathless air was a
flattering charm. An arrow drawn to the head, capable of flying fast and
far with her! He leaned a little forward, drinking her in with all his
eyes, and young Love has a thousand. Then truly the System triumphed,
just ere it was to fall; and could Sir Austin have been content to draw
the arrow to the head, and let it fly, when it would fly, he might have
pointed to his son again, and said to the world, "Match him!" Such keen
bliss as the youth had in the sight of her, an innocent youth alone has
powers of soul in him to experience.

"O Women!" says The Pilgrim's Scrip, in one of its solitary outbursts,
"Women, who like, and will have for hero, a rake! how soon are you not to
learn that you have taken bankrupts to your bosoms, and that the
putrescent gold that attracted you is the slime of the Lake of Sin!"

If these two were Ferdinand and Miranda, Sir Austin was not Prospero, and
was not present, or their fates might have been different.

So they stood a moment, changing eyes, and then Miranda spoke, and they
came down to earth, feeling no less in heaven.

She spoke to thank him for his aid. She used quite common simple words;
and used them, no doubt, to express a common simple meaning: but to him
she was uttering magic, casting spells, and the effect they had on him
was manifested in the incoherence of his replies, which were too foolish
to be chronicled.

The couple were again mute. Suddenly Miranda, with an exclamation of
anguish, and innumerable lights and shadows playing over her lovely face,
clapped her hands, crying aloud, "My book! my book!" and ran to the bank.

Prince Ferdinand was at her side. "What have you lost?" he said.

"My book!" she answered, her delicious curls swinging across her
shoulders to the stream. Then turning to him, "Oh, no, no! let me entreat
you not to," she said; "I do not so very much mind losing it." And in her
eagerness to restrain him she unconsciously laid her gentle hand upon his
arm, and took the force of motion out of him.

"Indeed, I do not really care for the silly book," she continued,
withdrawing her hand quickly, and reddening. "Pray, do not!"

The young gentleman had kicked off his shoes. No sooner was the spell of
contact broken than he jumped in. The water was still troubled and
discoloured by his introductory adventure, and, though he ducked his head
with the spirit of a dabchick, the book was missing. A scrap of paper
floating from the bramble just above the water, and looking as if fire
had caught its edges and it had flown from one adverse element to the
other, was all he could lay hold of; and he returned to land
disconsolately, to hear Miranda's murmured mixing of thanks and pretty
expostulations.

"Let me try again," he said.

"No, indeed!" she replied, and used the awful threat: "I will run away if
you do," which effectually restrained him.

Her eye fell on the fire-stained scrap of paper, and brightened, as she
cried, "There, there! you have what I want. It is that. I do not care for
the book. No, please! You are not to look at it. Give it me."

Before her playfully imperative injunction was fairly spoken, Richard had
glanced at the document and discovered a Griffin between two
Wheatsheaves: his crest in silver: and below--O wonderment immense! his
own handwriting!

He handed it to her. She took it, and put it in her bosom.

Who would have thought, that, where all else perished, Odes, Idyls,
Lines, Stanzas, this one Sonnet to the stars should be miraculously
reserved for such a starry fate--passing beatitude!

As they walked silently across the meadow, Richard strove to remember the
hour and the mood of mind in which he had composed the notable
production. The stars were invoked, as seeing and foreseeing all, to tell
him where then his love reclined, and so forth; Hesper was complacent
enough to do so, and described her in a couplet--

"Through sunset's amber see me shining fair,
As her blue eyes shine through her golden hair."

And surely no words could be more prophetic. Here were two blue eyes and
golden hair; and by some strange chance, that appeared like the working
of a divine finger, she had become the possessor of the prophecy, she
that was to fulfil it! The youth was too charged with emotion to speak.
Doubtless the damsel had less to think of, or had some trifling burden on
her conscience, for she seemed to grow embarrassed. At last she drew up
her chin to look at her companion under the nodding brim of her hat (and
the action gave her a charmingly freakish air), crying, "But where are
you going to? You are wet through. Let me thank you again; and, pray,
leave me, and go home and change instantly."

"Wet?" replied the magnetic muser, with a voice of tender interest; "not
more than one foot, I hope. I will leave you while you dry your stockings
in the sun."

At this she could not withhold a shy laugh.

"Not I, but you. You would try to get that silly book for me, and you are
dripping wet. Are you not very uncomfortable?"

In all sincerity he assured her that he was not.

"And you really do not feel that you are wet?"

He really did not: and it was a fact that he spoke truth.

She pursed her dewberry mouth in the most comical way, and her blue eyes
lightened laughter out of the half-closed lids.

"I cannot help it," she said, her mouth opening, and sounding harmonious
bells of laughter in his ears. "Pardon me, won't you?"

His face took the same soft smiling curves in admiration of her.

"Not to feel that you have been in the water, the very moment after!" she
musically interjected, seeing she was excused.

"It's true," he said; and his own gravity then touched him to join a duet
with her, which made them no longer feel strangers, and did the work of a
month of intimacy. Better than sentiment, laughter opens the breast to
love; opens the whole breast to his full quiver, instead of a corner here
and there for a solitary arrow. Hail the occasion propitious, O British
young! and laugh and treat love as an honest God, and dabble not with the
sentimental rouge. These two laughed, and the souls of each cried out to
other, "It is I it is I."

They laughed and forgot the cause of their laughter, and the sun dried
his light river clothing, and they strolled toward the blackbird's copse,
and stood near a stile in sight of the foam of the weir and the
many-coloured rings of eddies streaming forth from it.

Richard's boat, meanwhile, had contrived to shoot the weir, and was
swinging, bottom upward, broadside with the current down the rapid
backwater.

"Will you let it go?" said the damsel, eying it curiously.

"It can't be stopped," he replied, and could have added: "What do I care
for it now!"

His old life was whirled away with it, dead, drowned. His new life was
with her, alive, divine.

She flapped low the brim of her hat. "You must really not come any
farther," she softly said.

"And will you go, and not tell me who you are?" he asked, growing bold as
the fears of losing her came across him. "And will you not tell me before
you go"--his face burned--"how you came by that--that paper?"

She chose to select the easier question for answer: "You ought to know
me; we have been introduced." Sweet was her winning off-hand affability.

"Then who, in heaven's name, are you? Tell me! I never could have
forgotten you."

"You have, I think," she said.

"Impossible that we could ever have met, and I forget you!"

She looked up at him.

"Do you remember Belthorpe?"

"Belthorpe! Belthorpe!" quoth Richard, as if he had to touch his brain to
recollect there was such a place. "Do you mean old Blaize's farm?"

"Then I am old Blaize's niece." She tripped him a soft curtsey.

The magnetized youth gazed at her. By what magic was it that this divine
sweet creature could be allied with that old churl!

"Then what--what is your name?" said his mouth, while his eyes added, "O
wonderful creature! How came you to enrich the earth?"

"Have you forgot the Desboroughs of Dorset, too?" she peered at him from
a side-bend of the flapping brim.

"The Desboroughs of Dorset?" A light broke in on him. "And have you grown
to this? That little girl I saw there!"

He drew close to her to read the nearest features of the vision. She
could no more laugh off the piercing fervour of his eyes. Her volubility
fluttered under his deeply wistful look, and now neither voice was high,
and they were mutually constrained.

"You see," she murmured, "we are old acquaintances."

Richard, with his eyes still intently fixed on her, returned, "You are
very beautiful!"

The words slipped out. Perfect simplicity is unconsciously audacious. Her
overpowering beauty struck his heart, and, like an instrument that is
touched and answers to the touch, he spoke.

Miss Desborough made an effort to trifle with this terrible directness;
but his eyes would not be gainsaid, and checked her lips. She turned away
from them, her bosom a little rebellious. Praise so passionately spoken,
and by one who has been a damsel's first dream, dreamed of nightly many
long nights, and clothed in the virgin silver of her thoughts in bud,
praise from him is coin the heart cannot reject, if it would. She
quickened her steps.

"I have offended you!" said a mortally wounded voice across her shoulder.

That he should think so were too dreadful.

"Oh no, no! you would never offend me." She gave him her whole sweet
face.

"Then why--why do you leave me?"

"Because," she hesitated, "I must go."

"No. You must not go. Why must you go? Do not go."

"Indeed I must," she said, pulling at the obnoxious broad brim of her
hat; and, interpreting a pause he made for his assent to her rational
resolve, shyly looking at him, she held her hand out, and said,
"Good-bye," as if it were a natural thing to say.

The hand was pure white--white and fragrant as the frosted blossom of a
Maynight. It was the hand whose shadow, cast before, he had last night
bent his head reverentially above, and kissed--resigning himself
thereupon over to execution for payment of the penalty of such daring--by
such bliss well rewarded.

He took the hand, and held it, gazing between her eyes.

"Good-bye," she said again, as frankly as she could, and at the same time
slightly compressing her fingers on his in token of adieu. It was a
signal for his to close firmly upon hers.

"You will not go?"

"Pray, let me," she pleaded, her sweet brows suing in wrinkles.

"You will not go?" Mechanically he drew the white hand nearer his
thumping heart.

"I must," she faltered piteously.

"You will not go?"

"Oh yes! yes!"

"Tell me. Do you wish to go?"

The question was a subtle one. A moment or two she did not answer, and
then forswore herself, and said, Yes.

"Do you--you wish to go?" He looked with quivering eyelids under hers.

A fainter Yes responded.

"You wish--wish to leave me?" His breath went with the words.

"Indeed I must."

Her hand became a closer prisoner.

All at once an alarming delicious shudder went through her frame. From
him to her it coursed, and back from her to him. Forward and back love's
electric messenger rushed from heart to heart, knocking at each, till it
surged tumultuously against the bars of its prison, crying out for its
mate. They stood trembling in unison, a lovely couple under these fair
heavens of the morning.

When he could get his voice it said, "Will you go?"

But she had none to reply with, and could only mutely bend upward her
gentle wrist.

"Then, farewell!" he said, and, dropping his lips to the soft fair hand,
kissed it, and hung his head, swinging away from her, ready for death.

Strange, that now she was released she should linger by him. Strange,
that his audacity, instead of the executioner, brought blushes and timid
tenderness to his side, and the sweet words, "You are not angry with me?"

"With you, O Beloved!" cried his soul. "And you forgive me, fair
charity!"

"I think it was rude of me to go without thanking you again," she said,
and again proffered her hand.

The sweet heaven-bird shivered out his song above him. The gracious glory
of heaven fell upon his soul. He touched her hand, not moving his eyes
from her, nor speaking, and she, with a soft word of farewell, passed
across the stile, and up the pathway through the dewy shades of the
copse, and out of the arch of the light, away from his eyes.

And away with her went the wild enchantment. He looked on barren air. But
it was no more the world of yesterday. The marvellous splendours had sown
seeds in him, ready to spring up and bloom at her gaze; and in his bosom
now the vivid conjuration of her tones, her face, her shape, makes them
leap and illumine him like fitful summer lightnings ghosts of the
vanished sun.

There was nothing to tell him that he had been making love and declaring
it with extraordinary rapidity; nor did he know it. Soft flushed cheeks!
sweet mouth! strange sweet brows! eyes of softest fire! how could his
ripe eyes behold you, and not plead to keep you? Nay, how could he let
you go? And he seriously asked himself that question.

To-morrow this place will have a memory--the river and the meadow, and
the white falling weir: his heart will build a temple here; and the
skylark will be its high-priest, and the old blackbird its glossy-gowned
chorister, and there will be a sacred repast of dewberries. To-day the
grass is grass: his heart is chased by phantoms and finds rest nowhere.
Only when the most tender freshness of his flower comes across him does
he taste a moment's calm; and no sooner does it come than it gives place
to keen pangs of fear that she may not be his for ever.

Erelong he learns that her name is Lucy. Erelong he meets Ralph, and
discovers that in a day he has distanced him by a sphere. He and Ralph
and the curate of Lobourne join in their walks, and raise classical
discussions on ladies' hair, fingering a thousand delicious locks, from
those of Cleopatra to the Borgia's. "Fair! fair! all of them fair!" sighs
the melancholy curate, "as are those women formed for our perdition! I
think we have in this country what will match the Italian or the Greek."
His mind flutters to Mrs. Doria, Richard blushes before the vision of
Lucy, and Ralph, whose heroine's hair is a dark luxuriance, dissents, and
claims a noble share in the slaughter of men for dark-haired Wonders.
They have no mutual confidences, but they are singularly kind to each
other, these three children of instinct.




CHAPTER XVI

Lady Blandish, and others who professed an interest in the fortunes and
future of the systematized youth, had occasionally mentioned names of
families whose alliance according to apparent calculations, would not
degrade his blood: and over these names, secretly preserved on an open
leaf of the note-book, Sir Austin, as he neared the metropolis, distantly
dropped his eye. There were names historic and names mushroomic; names
that the Conqueror might have called in his muster-roll; names that had
been, clearly, tossed into the upper stratum of civilized lifer by a
millwheel or a merchant-stool. Against them the baronet had written M. or
Po. or Pr.--signifying, Money, Position, Principles, favouring the latter
with special brackets. The wisdom of a worldly man, which he could now
and then adopt, determined him, before he commenced his round of visits,
to consult and sound his solicitor and his physician thereanent; lawyers
and doctors being the rats who know best the merits of a house, and on
what sort of foundation it may be standing.

Sir Austin entered the great city with a sad mind. The memory of his
misfortune came upon him vividly, as if no years had intervened, and it
were but yesterday that he found the letter telling him that he had no
wife and his son no mother. He wandered on foot through the streets the
first night of his arrival, looking strangely at the shops and shows and
bustle of the world from which he had divorced himself; feeling as
destitute as the poorest vagrant. He had almost forgotten how to find his
way about, and came across his old mansion in his efforts to regain his
hotel. The windows were alight--signs of merry life within. He stared at
it from the shadow of the opposite side. It seemed to him he was a ghost
gazing upon his living past. And then the phantom which had stood there
mocking while he felt as other men--the phantom, now flesh and blood
reality, seized and convulsed his heart, and filled its unforgiving
crevices with bitter ironic venom. He remembered by the time reflection
returned to him that it was Algernon, who had the house at his disposal,
probably giving a card-party, or something of the sort. In the morning,
too, he remembered that he had divorced the world to wed a System, and
must be faithful to that exacting Spouse, who, now alone of things on
earth, could fortify and recompense him.

Mr. Thompson received his client with the dignity and emotion due to such
a rent-roll and the unexpectedness of the honour. He was a thin stately
man of law, garbed as one who gave audience to acred bishops, and
carrying on his countenance the stamp of paternity to the parchment
skins, and of a virtuous attachment to Port wine sufficient to increase
his respectability in the eyes of moral Britain. After congratulating Sir
Austin on the fortunate issue of two or three suits, and being assured
that the baronet's business in town had no concern therewith, Mr.
Thompson ventured to hope that the young heir was all his father could
desire him to be, and heard with satisfaction that he was a pattern to
the youth of the Age.

"A difficult time of life, Sir Austin!" said the old lawyer, shaking his
head. "We must keep our eyes on them--keep awake! The mischief is done in
a minute."

"We must take care to have seen where we planted, and that the root was
sound, or the mischief will do itself in site of, or under the very
spectacles of, supervision," said the baronet.

His legal adviser murmured "Exactly," as if that were his own idea,
adding, "It is my plan with Ripton, who has had the honour of an
introduction to you, and a very pleasant time he spent with my young
friend, whom he does not forget. Ripton follows the Law. He is articled
to me, and will, I trust, succeed me worthily in your confidence. I bring
him into town in the morning; I take him back at night. I think I may say
that I am quite content with him."

"Do you think," said Sir Austin, fixing his brows, "that you can trace
every act of his to its motive?"

The old lawyer bent forward and humbly requested that this might be
repeated.

"Do you"--Sir Austin held the same searching expression--"do you
establish yourself in a radiating centre of intuition: do you base your
watchfulness on so thorough an acquaintance with his character, so
perfect a knowledge of the instrument, that all its movements--even the
eccentric ones--are anticipated by you, and provided for?"

The explanation was a little too long for the old lawyer to entreat
another repetition. Winking with the painful deprecation of a deaf man,
Mr. Thompson smiled urbanely, coughed conciliatingly, and said he was
afraid he could not affirm that much, though he was happily enabled to
say that Ripton had borne an extremely good character at school.

"I find," Sir Austin remarked, as sardonically he relaxed his inspecting
pose and mien, "there are fathers who are content to be simply obeyed.
Now I require not only that my son should obey; I would have him
guiltless of the impulse to gainsay my wishes--feeling me in him stronger
than his undeveloped nature, up to a certain period, where my
responsibility ends and his commences. Man is a self-acting machine. He
cannot cease to be a machine; but, though self-acting, he may lose the
powers of self-guidance, and in a wrong course his very vitalities hurry
him to perdition. Young, he is an organism ripening to the set mechanic
diurnal round, and while so he needs all the angels to hold watch over
him that he grow straight and healthy, and fit for what machinal duties
he may have to perform"...

Mr. Thompson agitated his eyebrows dreadfully. He was utterly lost. He
respected Sir Austin's estates too much to believe for a moment he was
listening to downright folly. Yet how otherwise explain the fact of his
excellent client being incomprehensible to him? For a middle-aged
gentleman, and one who has been in the habit of advising and managing,
will rarely have a notion of accusing his understanding; and Mr. Thompson
had not the slightest notion of accusing his. But the baronet's
condescension in coming thus to him, and speaking on the subject nearest
his heart, might well affect him, and he quickly settled the case in
favour of both parties, pronouncing mentally that his honoured client had
a meaning, and so deep it was, so subtle, that no wonder he experienced
difficulty in giving it fitly significant words.

Sir Austin elaborated his theory of the Organism and the Mechanism, for
his lawyer's edification. At a recurrence of the word "healthy" Mr.
Thompson caught him up:

"I apprehended you! Oh, I agree with you, Sir Austin! entirely! Allow me
to ring for my son Ripton. I think, if you condescend to examine him, you
will say that regular habits, and a diet of nothing but law-reading--for
other forms of literature I strictly interdict--have made him all that
you instance."

Mr. Thompson's hand was on the bell. Sir Austin arrested him.

"Permit me to see the lad at his occupation," said he.

Our old friend Ripton sat in a room apart with the confidential clerk,
Mr. Beazley, a veteran of law, now little better than a document, looking
already signed and sealed, and shortly to be delivered, who enjoined
nothing from his pupil and companion save absolute silence, and sounded
his praises to his father at the close of days when it had been rigidly
observed--not caring, or considering, the finished dry old document that
he was, under what kind of spell a turbulent commonplace youth could be
charmed into stillness for six hours of the day. Ripton was supposed to
be devoted to the study of Blackstone. A tome of the classic legal
commentator lay extended outside his desk, under the partially lifted lid
of which nestled the assiduous student's head--law being thus brought
into direct contact with his brain-pan. The office-door opened, and he
heard not; his name was called, and he remained equally moveless. His
method of taking in Blackstone seemed absorbing as it was novel.