Basil

W >> Wilkie Collins >> Basil

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26

At last the hour of starting came. Clara seemed afraid to trust
herself even to look at me now. She hurriedly drew down her veil the
moment the carriage was announced. My father shook hands with me
rather coldly. I had hoped he would have said something at parting;
but he only bade me farewell in the simplest and shortest manner. I
had rather he would have spoken to me in anger than restrained himself
as he did, to what the commonest forms of courtesy required. There was
but one more slight, after this, that he could cast on me; and he did
not spare it. While my sister was taking leave of me, he waited at the
door of the room to lead her down stairs, as if he knew by intuition
that this was the last little parting attention which I had hoped to
show her myself.

Clara whispered (in such low, trembling tones that I could hardly hear
her):

"Think of what you promised in your study, Basil, whenever you think
of _me:_ I will write often."

As she raised her veil for a moment, and kissed me, I felt on my own
cheek the tears that were falling fast over hers. I followed her and
my father down stairs. When they reached the street, she gave me her
hand--it was cold and powerless. I knew that the fortitude she had
promised to show, was giving way, in spite of all her efforts to
preserve it; so I let her hurry into the carriage without detaining
her by any last words. The next instant she and my father were driven
rapidly from the door.

When I re-entered the house, my watch showed me that I had still an
hour to wait, before it was time to go to North Villa.

Between the different emotions produced by my impressions of the scene
I had just passed through, and my anticipations of the scene that was
yet to come, I suffered in that one hour as much mental conflict as
most men suffer in a life. It seemed as if I were living out all my
feelings in this short interval of delay, and must die at heart when
it was over. My restlessness was a torture to me; and yet I could not
overcome it. I wandered through the house from room to room, stopping
nowhere. I took down book after book from the library, opened them to
read, and put them back on the shelves the next instant. Over and over
again I walked to the window to occupy myself with what was passing
in the street; and each time I could not stay there for one minute
together. I went into the picture-gallery, looked along the walls, and
yet knew not what I was looking at. At last I wandered into my
father's study--the only room I had not yet visited.

A portrait of my mother hung over the fireplace: my eyes turned
towards it, and for the first time I came to a long pause. The picture
had an influence that quieted me; but what influence I hardly knew.
Perhaps it led my spirit up to the spirit that had gone from
us--perhaps those secret voices from the unknown world, which only the
soul can listen to, were loosed at that moment, and spoke within me.
While I sat looking up at the portrait, I grew strangely and suddenly
calm before it. My memory flew back to a long illness that I had
suffered from, as a child, when my little cradle-couch was placed by
my mother's bedside, and she used to sit by me in the dull evenings
and hush me to sleep. The remembrance of this brought with it a dread
imagining that she might now be hushing my spirit, from her place
among the angels of God. A stillness and awe crept over me; and I hid
my face in my hands.

The striking of the hour from a clock in the room, startled me back to
the outer world. I left the house and went at once to North Villa.

Margaret and her father and mother were in the drawing-room when I
entered it. I saw immediately that neither of the two latter had
passed the morning calmly. The impending event of the day had
exercised its agitating influence over them, as well as over me. Mrs.
Sherwin's face was pale to her very lips: not a word escaped her. Mr.
Sherwin endeavoured to assume the self-possession which he was
evidently far from feeling, by walking briskly up and down the room,
and talking incessantly--asking the most common-place questions, and
making the most common-place jokes. Margaret, to my surprise, showed
fewer symptoms of agitation than either of her parents. Except when
the colour came and went occasionally on her cheek, I could detect no
outward evidences of emotion in her at all.

The church was near at hand. As we proceeded to it, the rain fell
heavily, and the mist of the morning was thickening to a fog. We had
to wait in the vestry for the officiating clergyman. All the gloom and
dampness of the day seemed to be collected in this room--a dark, cold,
melancholy place, with one window which opened on a burial-ground
steaming in the wet. The rain pattered monotonously on the pavement
outside. While Mr. Sherwin exchanged remarks on the weather with the
clerk, (a tall, lean man, arrayed in a black gown), I sat silent, near
Mrs. Sherwin and Margaret, looking with mechanical attention at the
white surplices which hung before me in a half-opened cupboard--at the
bottle of water and tumbler, and the long-shaped books, bound in brown
leather, which were on the table. I was incapable of
speaking--incapable even of thinking--during that interval of
expectation.

At length the clergyman arrived, and we went into the church--the
church, with its desolate array of empty pews, and its chill, heavy,
week-day atmosphere. As we ranged ourselves round the altar, a
confusion overspread all my faculties. My sense of the place I was in,
and even of the ceremony in which I took part, grew more and more
vague and doubtful every minute. My attention wandered throughout the
whole service. I stammered and made mistakes in uttering the
responses. Once or twice I detected myself in feeling impatient at the
slow progress of the ceremony--it seemed to be doubly, trebly longer
than its usual length. Mixed up with this impression was another, wild
and monstrous as if it had been produced by a dream--an impression
that my father had discovered my secret, and was watching me from some
hidden place in the church; watching through the service, to denounce
and abandon me publicly at the end. This morbid fancy grew and grew on
me until the termination of the ceremony, until we had left the church
and returned to the vestry once more.

The fees were paid; we wrote our names in the books and on the
certificate; the clergyman quietly wished me happiness; the clerk
solemnly imitated him; the pew-opener smiled and curtseyed; Mr.
Sherwin made congratulatory speeches, kissed his daughter, shook hands
with me, frowned a private rebuke at his wife for shedding tears, and,
finally, led the way with Margaret out of the vestry. The rain was
still falling, as they got into the carriage. The fog was still
thickening, as I stood alone under the portico of the church, and
tried to realise to myself that I was married.

_Married!_ The son of the proudest man in England, the inheritor of a
name written on the roll of Battle Abbey, wedded to a linen-draper's
daughter! And what a marriage! What a condition weighed on it! What a
probation was now to follow it! Why had I consented so easily to Mr.
Sherwin's proposals? Would he not have given way, if I had only been
resolute enough to insist on my own conditions?

How useless to inquire! I had made the engagement and must abide by
it--abide by it cheerfully until the year was over, and she was mine
for ever. This must be my all-sufficing thought for the future. No
more reflections on consequences, no more forebodings about the effect
of the disclosure of my secret on my family--the leap into a new life
had been taken, and, lead where it might, it was a leap that could
never be retraced!

Mr. Sherwin had insisted, with the immovable obstinacy which
characterises all feeble-minded people in the management of their
important affairs, that the first clause in our agreement (the leaving
my wife at the church-door) should be performed to the letter. As a
due compensation for this, I was to dine at North Villa that day. How
should I employ the interval that was to elapse before the
dinner-hour?

I went home, and had my horse saddled. I was in no mood for remaining
in an empty house, in no mood for calling on any of my friends--I was
fit for nothing but a gallop through the rain. All my wearing and
depressing emotions of the morning, had now merged into a wild
excitement of body and mind. When the horse was brought round, I saw
with delight that the groom could hardly hold him. "Keep him well in
hand, Sir," said the man, "he's not been out for three days." I was
just in the humour for such a ride as the caution promised me.

And what a ride it was, when I fairly got out of London; and the
afternoon brightening of the foggy atmosphere, showed the smooth,
empty high road before me! The dashing through the rain that still
fell; the feel of the long, powerful, regular stride of the horse
under me; the thrill of that physical sympathy which establishes
itself between the man and the steed; the whirling past carts and
waggons, saluted by the frantic barking of dogs inside them; the
flying by roadside alehouses, with the cheering of boys and
half-drunken men sounding for an instant behind me, then lost in the
distance--this was indeed to occupy, to hurry on, to annihilate the
tardy hours of solitude on my wedding day, exactly as my heart
desired!

I got home wet through; but with my body in a glow from the exercise,
with my spirits boiling up at fever heat. When I arrived at North
Villa, the change in my manner astonished every one. At dinner, I
required no pressing now to partake of the sherry which Mr. Sherwin
was so fond of extolling, nor of the port which he brought out
afterwards, with a preliminary account of the vintage-date of the
wine, and the price of each bottle. My spirits, factitious as they
were, never flagged. Every time I looked at Margaret, the sight of her
stimulated them afresh. She seemed pre-occupied, and was unusually
silent during dinner; but her beauty was just that voluptuous beauty
which is loveliest in repose. I had never felt its influence so
powerful over me as I felt it then.

In the drawing-room, Margaret's manner grew more familiar, more
confident towards me than it had ever been before. She spoke to me in
warmer tones, looked at me with warmer looks. A hundred little
incidents marked our wedding-evening--trifles that love treasures
up--which still remain in my memory. One among them, at least, will
never depart from it: I first kissed her on that evening.

Mr. Sherwin had gone out of the room; Mrs. Sherwin was at the other
end of it, watering some plants at the window; Margaret, by her
father's desire, was showing me some rare prints. She handed me a
magnifying glass, through which I was to look at a particular part of
one of the engravings, that was considered a master-piece of delicate
workmanship. Instead of applying the magnifying test to the print, for
which I cared nothing, I laughingly applied it to Margaret's face. Her
lovely lustrous black eye seemed to flash into mine through the glass;
her warm, quick breathing played on my cheek--it was but for an
instant, and in that instant I kissed her for the first time. What
sensations the kiss gave me then!--what remembrances it has left me
now!

It was one more proof how tenderly, how purely I loved her, that,
before this time, I had feared to take the first love-privilege which
I had longed to assert, and might well have asserted, before. Men may
not understand this; women, I believe, will.

The hour of departure arrived; the inexorable hour which was to
separate me from my wife on my wedding evening. Shall I confess what I
felt, on the first performance of my ill-considered promise to Mr.
Sherwin? No: I kept this a secret from Margaret; I will keep it a
secret here.

I took leave of her as hurriedly and abruptly as possible--I could not
trust myself to quit her in any other way. She had contrived to slip
aside into the darkest part of the room, so that I only saw her face
dimly at parting.

I went home at once. When I lay down to sleep--then the ordeal which I
had been unconsciously preparing for myself throughout the day, began
to try me. Every nerve in my body, strung up to the extremest point of
tension since the morning, now at last gave way. I felt my limbs
quivering, till the bed shook under me. I was possessed by a gloom and
horror, caused by no thought, and producing no thought: the thinking
faculty seemed paralysed within me, altogether. The physical and
mental reaction, after the fever and agitation of the day, was so
sudden and severe, that the faintest noise from the street now
terrified--yes, literally terrified me. The whistling of the
wind--which had risen since sunset--made me start up in bed, with my
heart throbbing, and my blood all chill. When no sounds were audible,
then I listened for them to come--listened breathlessly, without
daring to move. At last, the agony of nervous prostration grew more
than I could bear--grew worse even than the child's horror of walking
in the darkness, and sleeping alone on the bed-room floor, which had
overcome me, almost from the first moment when I laid down. I groped
my way to the table and lit the candle again; then wrapped my
dressing-gown round me, and sat shuddering near the light, to watch
the weary hours out till morning.

And this was my wedding-night! This was how the day ended which had
begun by my marriage with Margaret Sherwin!

PART II.

I.

AN epoch in my narrative has now arrived. Up to the time of my
marriage, I have appeared as an active agent in the different events I
have described. After that period, and--with one or two exceptional
cases--throughout the whole year of my probation, my position changed
with the change in my life, and became a passive one.

During this interval year, certain events happened, some of which, at
the time, excited my curiosity, but none my apprehension--some
affected me with a temporary disappointment, but none with even a
momentary suspicion. I can now look back on them, as so many timely
warnings which I treated with fatal neglect. It is in these events
that the history of the long year through which I waited to claim my
wife as my own, is really comprised. They marked the lapse of time
broadly and significantly; and to them I must now confine myself, as
exclusively as may be, in the present portion of my narrative.

It will be first necessary, however, that I should describe what was
the nature of my intercourse with Margaret, during the probationary
period which followed our marriage.

Mr. Sherwin's anxiety was to make my visits to North Villa as few as
possible: he evidently feared the consequences of my seeing his
daughter too often. But on this point, I was resolute enough in
asserting my own interests, to overpower any resistance on his part. I
required him to concede to me the right of seeing Margaret every
day--leaving all arrangements of time to depend on his own
convenience. After the due number of objections, he reluctantly
acquiesced in my demand. I was bound by no engagement whatever,
limiting the number of my visits to Margaret; and I let him see at the
outset, that I was now ready in my turn, to impose conditions on him,
as he had already imposed them on me.

Accordingly, it was settled that Margaret and I were to meet every
day. I usually saw her in the evening. When any alteration in the hour
of my visit took place, that alteration was produced by the necessity
(which we all recognised alike) of avoiding a meeting with any of Mr.
Sherwin's friends.

Those portions of the day or the evening which I spent with Margaret,
were seldom passed altogether in the Elysian idleness of love. Not
content with only enumerating his daughter's school-accomplishments to
me at our first interview, Mr. Sherwin boastfully referred to them
again and again, on many subsequent occasions; and even obliged
Margaret to display before me, some of her knowledge of
languages--which he never forgot to remind us had been lavishly paid
for out of his own pocket. It was at one of these exhibitions that the
idea occurred to me of making a new pleasure for myself out of
Margaret's society, by teaching her really to appreciate and enjoy the
literature which she had evidently hitherto only studied as a task. My
fancy revelled by anticipation in all the delights of such an
employment as this. It would be like acting the story of Abelard and
Heloise over again--reviving all the poetry and romance in which those
immortal love-studies of old had begun, with none of the guilt and
none of the misery that had darkened their end.

I had a definite purpose, besides, in wishing to assume the direction
of Margaret's studies. Whenever the secret of my marriage was
revealed, my pride was concerned in being able to show my wife to
every one, as the all-sufficient excuse for any imprudence I might
have committed for her sake. I was determined that my father,
especially, should have no other argument against her than the one
ungracious argument of her birth--that he should see her, fitted by
the beauty of her mind, as well as by all her other beauties, for the
highest station that society could offer. The thought of this gave me
fresh ardour in my project; I assumed my new duties without delay, and
continued them with a happiness which never once suffered even a
momentary decrease.

Of all the pleasures which a man finds in the society of a woman whom
he loves, are there any superior, are there many equal, to the
pleasure of reading out of the same book with her? On what other
occasion do the sweet familiarities of the sweetest of all
companionships last so long without cloying, and pass and re-pass so
naturally, so delicately, so inexhaustibly between you and her? When
is your face so constantly close to hers as it is then?--when can your
hair mingle with hers, your cheek touch hers, your eyes meet hers, so
often as they can then? That is, of all times, the only time when you
can breathe with her breath for hours together; feel every little
warming of the colour on her cheek marking its own changes on the
temperature of yours; follow every slight fluttering of her bosom,
every faint gradation of her sighs, as if _her_ heart was beating,
_her_ life glowing, within yours. Surely it is then--if ever--that we
realize, almost revive, in ourselves, the love of the first two of our
race, when angels walked with them on the same garden paths, and their
hearts were pure from the pollution of the fatal tree!

Evening after evening passed away--one more happily than another--in
what Margaret and I called our lessons. Never were lessons of
literature so like lessons of love We read oftenest the lighter
Italian poets--we studied the poetry of love, written in the language
of love. But, as for the steady, utilitarian purpose I had proposed to
myself of practically improving Margaret's intellect, that was a
purpose which insensibly and deceitfully abandoned me as completely as
if it had never existed. The little serious teaching I tried with her
at first, led to very poor results. Perhaps, the lover interfered too
much with the tutor; perhaps, I had over-estimated the fertility of
the faculties I designed to cultivate--but I cared not, and thought
not to inquire where the fault lay, then. I gave myself up
unreservedly to the exquisite sensations which the mere act of looking
on the same page with Margaret procured for me; and neither detected,
nor wished to detect, that it was I who read the difficult passages,
and left only a few even of the very easiest to be attempted by her.

Happily for my patience under the trial imposed on me by the terms on
which Mr. Sherwin's restrictions, and my promise to obey them, obliged
me to live with Margaret, it was Mrs. Sherwin who was generally
selected to remain in the room with us. By no one could such
ungrateful duties of supervision as those imposed on her, have been
more delicately and more considerately performed.

She always kept far enough away to be out of hearing when we whispered
to each other. We rarely detected her even in looking at us. She had a
way of sitting for hours together in the same part of the room,
without ever changing her position, without occupation of any kind,
without uttering a word, or breathing a sigh. I soon discovered that
she was not lost in thought, at these periods (as I had at first
supposed): but lost in a strange lethargy of body and mind; a
comfortless, waking trance, into which she fell from sheer physical
weakness--it was like the vacancy and feebleness of a first
convalescence, after a long illness. She never changed: never looked
better, never worse. I often spoke to her: I tried hard to show my
sympathy, and win her confidence and friendship. The poor lady was
always thankful, always spoke to me gratefully and kindly, but very
briefly. She never told me what were her sufferings or her sorrows.
The story of that lonely, lingering life was an impenetrable mystery
for her own family--for her husband and her daughter, as well as for
me. It was a secret between her and God.

With Mrs. Sherwin as the guardian to watch over Margaret, it may
easily be imagined that I felt none of the heavier oppressions of
restraint. Her presence, as the third person appointed to remain with
us, was not enough to repress the little endearments to which each
evening's lesson gave rise; but was just sufficiently perceptible to
invest them with the character of stolen endearments, and to make them
all the more precious on that very account. Mrs. Sherwin never knew, I
never thoroughly knew myself till later, how much of the secret of my
patience under my year's probation lay in her conduct, while she was
sitting in the room with Margaret and me.

In this solitude where I now write--in the change of life and of all
life's hopes and enjoyments which has come over me--when I look back
to those evenings at North Villa, I shudder as I look. At this moment,
I see the room again--as in a dream--with the little round table, the
reading lamp, and the open books. Margaret and I are sitting together:
her hand is in mine; my heart is with hers. Love, and Youth, and
Beauty--the mortal Trinity of this world's worship--are there, in that
quiet softly-lit room; but not alone. Away in the dim light behind, is
a solitary figure, ever mournful and ever still. It is a woman's form;
but how wasted and how weak!--a woman's face; but how ghastly and
changeless, with those eyes that are vacant, those lips that are
motionless, those cheeks that the blood never tinges, that the
freshness of health and happiness shall never visit again! Woeful,
warning figure of dumb sorrow and patient pain, to fill the background
of a picture of Love, and Beauty, and Youth!

I am straying from my task. Let me return to my narrative: its course
begins to darken before me apace, while I now write.

The partial restraint and embarrassment, caused at first by the
strange terms on which my wife and I were living together, gradually
vanished before the frequency of my visits to North Villa. We soon
began to speak with all the ease, all the unpremeditated frankness of
a long intimacy. Margaret's powers of conversation were generally only
employed to lead me to exert mine. She was never tired of inducing me
to speak of my family. She listened with every appearance of interest,
while I talked of my father, my sister, or my elder brother; but
whenever she questioned me directly about any of them, her inquiries
invariably led away from their characters and dispositions, to their
personal appearance, their every-day habits, their dress, their
intercourse with the gay world, the things they spent their money on,
and other topics of a similar nature.

For instance; she always listened, and listened attentively, to what I
told her of my father's character, and of the principles which
regulated his life. She showed every disposition to profit by the
instructions I gave her beforehand, about how she should treat his
peculiarities when she was introduced to him. But, on all these
occasions, what really interested her most, was to hear how many
servants waited on him; how often he went to Court; how many lords and
ladies he knew; what he said or did to his servants, when they
committed mistakes; whether he was ever angry with his children for
asking him for money; and whether he limited my sister to any given
number of dresses in the course of the year?

Again; whenever our conversation turned on Clara, if I began by
describing her kindness, her gentleness and goodness, her simple
winning manners--I was sure to be led insensibly into a digression
about her height, figure, complexion, and style of dress. The latter
subject especially interested Margaret; she could question me on it,
over and over again. What was Clara's usual morning dress? How did she
wear her hair? What was her evening dress? Did she make a difference
between a dinner party and a ball? What colours did she prefer? What
dressmaker did she employ? Did she wear much jewellery? Which did she
like best in her hair, and which were most fashionable, flowers or
pearls? How many new dresses did she have in a year; and was there
more than one maid especially to attend on her?

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26