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Wilfrid Cumbermede

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'Is your sister at home?'

'No. She's at school at Clapham--being sand-papered into a saint, I
suppose.'

His mouth twitched and quivered. He was not pleased with himself for
talking as he did.

'Your father means it for the best,' I said.

'I know that. He means _his_ best. If I thought it _was_ the best, I
should cut my throat and have done with it.'

'But, Charley, couldn't we do something to find out, after all?'

'Find out what, Wilfrid?'

'The best thing, you know; what we are here for.'

'I'm sick of it all, Wilfrid. I've tried till I am sick of it. If you
should find out anything, you can let me know. I am busy trying not to
think. I find that quite enough. If I were to think, I should go mad.'

'Oh, Charley! I can't bear to hear you talk like that,' I exclaimed;
but there was a glitter in his eye which I did not like, and which made
me anxious to change the subject.--'Don't you like being here?' I
asked, in sore want of something to say.

'Yes, well enough,' he replied. 'But I don't see what's to come of it,
for I can't work. Even if my father were a millionnaire, I couldn't go
on living on him. The sooner that is over, the better!'

He was looking down, and gnawing at that tremulous upper lip. I felt
miserable.

'I wish we were at the same college, Charley!' I said.

'It's better as it is,' he rejoined. 'I should do you no good. You go
in for reading, I suppose?'

'Well, I do. I mean my uncle to have the worth of his money.'

Charley looked no less miserable than I felt. I saw that his conscience
was speaking, and I knew he was the last in the world to succeed in
excusing himself. But I understood him better than he understood
himself, and believed that his idleness arose from the old unrest, the
weariness of that never satisfied questioning which the least attempt
at thought was sure to awaken. Once invaded by a question, Charley
_must_ answer it, or fail and fall into a stupor. Not an ode of Horace
could he read without finding himself plunged into metaphysics.
Enamoured of repose above all things, he was from every side stung to
inquiry which seldom indeed afforded what seemed solution. Hence, in
part at least, it came that he had begun to study not merely how to
avoid awakening the Sphinx, but by what opiates to keep her stretched
supine with her lovely woman face betwixt her fierce lion-paws. This
also, no doubt, had a share in his becoming the associate of Geoffrey
Brotherton, from whose company, if he had been at peace with himself,
he would have recoiled upon the slightest acquaintance. I am at some
loss to imagine what could have made Geoffrey take such a liking to
Charley; but I presume it was the confiding air characterizing all
Charley's behaviour that chiefly pleased him. He seemed to look upon
him with something of the tenderness a coarse man may show for a
delicate Italian greyhound, fitted to be petted by a lady.

That same evening Charley came to my rooms. His manner was constrained,
and yet suggested a whole tide of pent-up friendship which, but for
some undeclared barrier, would have broken out and overflowed our
intercourse. After this one evening, however, it was some time before I
saw him again. When I called upon him next he was not at home, nor did
he come to see me. Again I sought him, but with like failure. After a
third attempt I desisted, not a little hurt, I confess, but not in the
least inclined to quarrel with him. I gave myself the more diligently
to my work.

And now Oxford began to do me harm. I saw so much idleness, and so much
wrong of all kinds about me, that I began to consider myself a fine
exception. Because I did my poor duty--no better than any honest lad
must do it--I became conceited; and the manner in which Charley's new
friend treated me not only increased the fault, but aided in the
development of certain other stems from the same root of
self-partiality. He never saluted me with other than what I regarded as
a supercilious nod of the head. When I met him in company with Charley,
and the latter stopped to speak to me, he would walk on without the
least change of step. The indignation which this conduct aroused drove
me to think as I had never thought before concerning my social
position. I found it impossible to define. As I pondered, however, a
certainty dawned upon me, rather than was arrived at by me, that there
was some secret connected with my descent, upon which bore the history
of the watch I carried, and of the sword I had lost. On the mere
possibility of something, utterly forgetful that, if the secret existed
at all, it might be of a very different nature from my hopes, I began
to build castles innumerable. Perceiving, of course, that one of a
decayed yeoman family could stand no social comparison with the heir to
a rich baronetcy, I fell back upon absurd imaginings; and what with the
self-satisfaction of doing my duty, what with the vanity of my baby
manhood, and what with the mystery I chose to believe in and interpret
according to my desires, I was fast sliding into a moral condition
contemptible indeed.

But still my heart was true to Charley. When, after late hours of hard
reading, I retired at last to my bed, and allowed my thoughts to wander
where they would, seldom was there a night on which they did not turn
as of themselves towards the memory of our past happiness. I vowed,
although Charley had forsaken me, to keep his chamber in my heart ever
empty, and closed against the entrance of another. If ever he pleased
to return, he should find he had been waited for. I believe there was
much of self-pity, and of self-approval as well, mingling with my
regard for him; but the constancy was there notwithstanding, and I
regarded the love I thus cherished for Charley as the chief saving
element in my condition at the time.

One night--I cannot now recall with certainty the time or season--I
only know it was night, and I was reading alone in my room--a knock
came to the door, and Charley entered. I sprang from my seat and
bounded to meet him.

'At last, Charley!' I exclaimed.

But he almost pushed me aside, left me to shut the door he had opened,
sat down in a chair by the fire, and began gnawing the head of his
cane. I resumed my seat, moved the lamp so that I could see him, and
waited for him to speak. Then first I saw that his face was unnaturally
pale and worn, almost even haggard. His eyes were weary, and his whole
manner as of one haunted by an evil presence of which he is ever aware.

'You are an enviable fellow, Wilfrid,' he said at length, with
something between a groan and a laugh.

'Why do you say that, Charley?' I returned. 'Why am I enviable?'

'Because you can work. I hate the very sight of a book. I am afraid I
shall be plucked. I see nothing else for it. And what will the old man
say? I have grace enough left to be sorry for him. But he will take it
out in sour looks and silences.'

'There's time enough yet. I wish you were not so far ahead of me: we
might have worked together.'

'I can't work, I tell you. I hate it. It will console my father, I
hope, to find his prophecies concerning me come true. I've heard him
abuse me to my mother.'

'I wish you wouldn't talk so of your father, Charley. It's not like
you. I can't bear to hear it.'

'It's not like what I used to be, Wilfrid. But there's none of that
left. What do you take me for--honestly now?'

He hung his head low, his eyes fixed on the hearth-rug, not on the
fire, and kept gnawing at the head of his cane.

'I don't like some of your companions,' I said. 'To be sure I don't
know much of them.'

'The less you know, the better! If there be a devil, that fellow.
Brotherton will hand me over to him--bodily, before long.'

'Why don't you give him up?' said I.

'It's no use trying. He's got such a hold of me. Never let a man you
don't know to the marrow pay even a toll-gate for you, Wilfrid.'

'I am in no danger, Charley. Such people don't take to me,' I said,
self-righteously. 'But it can't be too late to break with him. I know
my uncle would--I could manage a five-pound note now, I think.'

'My dear boy, if I had borrowed--. But I have let him pay for me again
and again, and I don't know how to rid the obligation. But it don't
signify. It's too late anyhow.'

'What have you done, Charley? Nothing very wrong, I trust.'

The lost look deepened.

'It's all over, Wilfrid,' he said. 'But it don't matter. I can take to
the river when I please.'

'But then you know you might happen to go right through the river,
Charley.'

'I know what you mean,' he said, with a defiant sound like nothing I
had ever heard.

'Charley!' I cried, 'I can't bear to hear you. You can't have changed
so much already as not to trust me. I will do all I can to help you.
What have you done?'

'Oh, nothing!' he rejoined, and tried to laugh: it was a dreadful
failure. 'But I can't bear to think of that mother of mine! I wish I
could tell you all; but I can't. How Brotherton would laugh at me now!
I can't be made quite like other people, Wilfrid! _You_ would never
have been such a fool.'

'You are more delicately made than most people, Charley--"touched to
finer issues," as Shakspere says.'

'Who told you that?'

'I think a great deal about you. That is all you have left me.'

'I've been a brute, Wilfrid. But you'll forgive me, I know.'

'With all my heart, if you'll only put it in my power to serve you.
Come, trust me, Charley, and tell me all about it. I shall not betray
you.'

'I'm not afraid of that,' he answered, and sunk into silence once more.

I look to myself presumptuous and priggish in the memory. But I did
mean truly by him. I began to question him, and by slow degrees, in
broken hints, and in jets of reply, drew from him the facts. When at
length he saw that I understood, he burst into tears, hid his face in
his hands, and rocked himself to and fro.

'Charley! Charley! don't give in like that,' I cried. 'Be as sorry as
you like; but don't go on as if there was no help. Who has not failed
and been forgiven--in one way if not in another?'

'Who is there to forgive me? My father would not. And if he would, what
difference would it make? I have done it all the same.'

'But God, Charley--' I suggested, hesitating.

'What of him? If he should choose to pass a thing by and say nothing
about it, that doesn't undo it. It's all nonsense. God himself can't
make it that I didn't do what I did do.'

But with what truthful yet reticent words can I convey the facts of
Charley's case? I am perfectly aware it would be to expose both myself
and him to the laughter of men of low development who behave as if no
more _self-possession_ were demanded of a man than of one of the lower
animals. Such might perhaps feel a certain involuntary movement of
pitifulness at the fate of a woman first awaking to the consciousness
that she can no more hold up her head amongst her kind: but that a
youth should experience a similar sense of degradation and loss, they
would regard as a degree of silliness and effeminacy below contempt, if
not beyond belief. But there is a sense of personal purity belonging to
the man as well as to the woman; and although I dare not say that in
the most refined of masculine natures it asserts itself with the awful
majesty with which it makes its presence known in the heart of a woman,
the man in whom it speaks with most authority is to be found amongst
the worthiest; and to a youth like Charley the result of actual offence
against it might be utter ruin. In his case, however, it was not merely
a consciousness of personal defilement which followed; for, whether his
companions had so schemed it or not, he supposed himself more than
ordinarily guilty.

'I suppose I must marry the girl,' said poor Charley with a groan.

Happily I saw at once that there might be two sides to the question,
and that it was desirable to know more ere I ventured a definite reply.

I had grown up, thanks to many things, with a most real although vague
adoration of women; but I was not so ignorant as to be unable to fancy
it possible that Charley had been the victim. Therefore, after having
managed to comfort him a little, and taken him home to his rooms, I set
about endeavouring to get further information.

I will not linger over the affair--as unpleasant to myself as it can be
to any of my readers. It had to be mentioned, however, not merely as
explaining how I got hold of Charley again, but as affording a clue to
his character, and so to his history. Not even yet can I think without
a gush of anger and shame of my visit to Brotherton. With what
stammering confusion I succeeded at last in making him understand the
nature of the information I wanted, I will not attempt to describe; nor
the roar of laughter which at length burst bellowing--not from himself
only, but from three or four companions as well to whom he turned and
communicated the joke. The fire of jests, and proposals, and
interpretations of motive which I had then to endure, seems yet to
scorch my very brain at the mere recollection. From their manner and
speech, I was almost convinced that they had laid a trap for Charley,
whom they regarded as a simpleton, to enjoy his consequent confusion.
With what I managed to find out elsewhere, I was at length satisfied,
and happily succeeded in convincing Charley, that he had been the butt
of his companions, and that he was far the more injured person in any
possible aspect of the affair.

I shall never forget the look or the sigh of relief which proved that
at last his mind had opened to the facts of the case.

'Wilfrid,' he said, 'you have saved me. We shall never be parted more.
See if I am ever false to you again!'

And yet it never was as it had been. I am sure of that now. Henceforth,
however, he entirely avoided his former companions. Our old friendship
was renewed. Our old talks arose again, And now that he was not alone
in them, the perplexities under which he had broken down when left to
encounter them by himself were not so overwhelming as to render him
helpless. We read a good deal together, and Charley helped me much in
the finer affairs of the classics, for his perceptions were as delicate
as his feelings. He would brood over an Horatian phrase as Keats would
brood over a sweet pea or a violet; the very tone in which he would
repeat it would waft me from it an aroma unperceived before. When it
was his turn to come to my rooms, I would watch for his arrival almost
as a lover for his mistress.

For two years more our friendship grew; in which time Charley had
recovered habits of diligence. I presume he said nothing at home of the
renewal of his intimacy with me: I shrunk from questioning him. As if
he had been an angel who who had hurt his wing and was compelled to
sojourn with me for a time, I feared to bring the least shadow over his
face, and indeed fell into a restless observance of his moods. I
remember we read _Comus_ together. How his face would glow at the
impassioned praises of virtue! and how the glow would die into a grey
sadness at the recollection of the near past! I could read his face
like a book.

At length the time arrived when we had to part, he to study for the
Bar, I to remain at Oxford another year, still looking forward to a
literary life.

When I commenced writing my story, I fancied myself so far removed from
it that I could regard it as the story of another, capable of being
viewed on all sides, and conjectured and speculated upon. And so I
found it as long as the regions of childhood and youth detained me. But
as I approach the middle scenes, I begin to fear the revival of the old
torture; that, from the dispassionate reviewer, I may become once again
the suffering actor. Long ago I read a strange story of a man condemned
at periods unforeseen to act again, and yet again, in absolute
verisimilitude each of the scenes of his former life: I have a feeling
as if I too might glide from the present into the past without a sign
to warn me of the coming transition.

One word more ere I pass to the middle events, those for the sake of
which the beginning is and the end shall be recorded. It is this--that
I am under endless obligations to Charley for opening my eyes at this
time to my overweening estimate of myself. Not that he spoke--Charley
could never have reproved even a child. But I could tell almost any
sudden feeling that passed through him. His face betrayed it. What he
felt about me I saw at once. From the signs of his mind, I often
recognized the character of what was in my own; and thus seeing myself
through him, I gathered reason to be ashamed; while the refinement of
his criticism, the quickness of his perception, and the novelty and
force of his remarks, convinced me that I could not for a moment
compare with him in mental gifts. The upper hand of influence I had
over him I attribute to the greater freedom of my training, and the
enlarged ideas which had led my uncle to avoid enthralling me to his
notions. He believed the truth could afford to wait until I was capable
of seeing it for myself; and that the best embodiments of truth are but
bonds and fetters to him who cannot accept them as such. When I could
not agree with him, he would say with one of his fine smiles, 'We'll
drop it, then, Willie. I don't believe you have caught my meaning. If I
am right, you will see it some day, and there's no hurry.' How could it
be but Charlie and I should be different, seeing we had fared so
differently! But, alas! my knowledge of his character is chiefly the
result of after-thought.

I do not mean this manuscript to be read until after my death; and even
then--although partly from habit, partly that I dare not trust myself
to any other form of utterance, I write as if for publication--even
then, I say, only by one. I am about to write what I should not die in
peace if I thought she would never know; but which I dare not seek to
tell her now for the risk of being misunderstood. I thank God for that
blessed invention, Death, which of itself must set many things right,
and gives a man a chance of justifying himself where he would not have
been heard while alive. Lest my manuscript should fall into other
hands, I have taken care that not a single name in it should contain
even a side-look or hint at the true one; but she will be able to
understand the real person in every case.




CHAPTER XXV.


MY WHITE MARE.

I passed my final examinations with credit, if not with honour. It was
not yet clearly determined what I should do next. My goal was London,
but I was unwilling to go thither empty-handed. I had been thinking as
well as reading a good deal; a late experience had stimulated my
imagination; and at spare moments I had been writing a tale. It had
grown to be a considerable mass of manuscript, and I was anxious,
before going, to finish it. Hence, therefore, I returned home with the
intention of remaining there quietly for a few months before
setting-out to seek my fortune.

Whether my uncle in his heart quite favoured the plan, I have my
doubts, but it would have been quite inconsistent with his usual grand
treatment of me to oppose anything not wrong on which I had set my
heart. Finding now that I took less exercise than he thought desirable,
and kept myself too much to my room, he gave me a fresh proof of his
unvarying kindness, He bought me a small grey mare of strength and
speed. Her lineage was unknown; but her small head, broad fine chest,
and clean limbs indicated Arab blood at no great remove. Upon her I
used to gallop over the fields, or saunter along the lanes, dreaming
and inventing.

And now certain feelings, too deeply rooted in my nature for my memory
to recognize their beginnings, began to assume colour and condensed
form, as if about to burst into some kind of blossom. Thanks to my
education and love of study, also to a self-respect undefined yet
restraining, nothing had occurred to wrong them. In my heart of hearts
I worshipped the idea of womanhood. I thank Heaven, if ever I do thank
for anything, that I still worship thus. Alas! how many have put on the
acolyte's robe in the same temple, who have ere long cast dirt upon the
statue of their divinity, _then_ dragged her as defiled from her lofty
pedestal, and left her lying dishonoured at its foot! Instead of
feeding with holy oil the lamp of the higher instinct, which would
glorify and purify the lower, they feed the fire of the lower with vile
fuel, which sends up its stinging smoke to becloud and blot the higher.

One lovely Spring morning, the buds half out, and the wind blowing
fresh and strong, the white clouds scudding across a blue gulf of sky,
and the tall trees far away swinging as of old, when they churned the
wind for my childish fancy, I looked up from my book and saw it all.
The gladness of nature entered into me, and my heart swelled so in my
bosom that I turned with distaste from all further labour. I pushed my
papers from me, and went to the window. The short grass all about was
leaning away from the wind, shivering and showing its enamel. Still, as
in childhood, the wind had a special power over me. In another moment I
was out of the house and hastening to the farm for my mare. She neighed
at the sound of my step. I saddled and bridled her, sprung on her back,
and galloped across the grass in the direction of the trees.

In a few moments I was within the lodge gates, walking my mare along
the gravelled drive, and with the reins on the white curved neck before
me, looking up at those lofty pines, whose lonely heads were swinging
in the air like floating but fettered islands. My head had begun to
feel dizzy with the ever-iterated, slow, half-circular sweep, when,
just opposite the lawn stretching from a low wire fence up to the door
of the steward's house, my mare shied, darted to the other side of the
road, and flew across the grass. Caught thus lounging on my saddle, I
was almost unseated. As soon as I had pulled her up, I turned to see
what had startled her, for the impression of a white flash remained
upon my mental sensorium. There, leaning on the little gate, looking
much diverted, stood the loveliest creature, in a morning dress of
white, which the wind was blowing about her like a cloud. She had no
hat on, and her hair, as if eager to join in the merriment of the day,
was flying like the ribbons of a tattered sail. A humanized Dryad!--one
that had been caught young, but in whom the forest-sap still asserted
itself in wild affinities with the wind and the swaying branches, and
the white clouds careering across! Could it be Clara? How could it be
any other than Clara? I rode back.

I was a little short-sighted, and had to get pretty near before I could
be certain; but she knew me, and waited my approach. When I came near
enough to see them, I could not mistake those violet eyes.

I was now in my twentieth year, and had never been in love. Whether I
now fell in love or not, I leave to my reader.

Clara was even more beautiful than her girlish loveliness had promised.
'An exceeding fair forehead,' to quote Sir Philip Sidney; eyes of which
I have said enough; a nose more delicate than symmetrical; a mouth
rather thin-lipped, but well curved; a chin rather small, I
confess;--but did any one ever from the most elaborated description
acquire even an approximate idea of the face intended? Her person was
lithe and graceful; she had good hands and feet; and the fairness of
her skin gave her brown hair a duskier look than belonged to itself.

Before I was yet near enough to be certain of her, I lifted my hat, and
she returned the salutation with an almost familiar nod and smile.

'I am very sorry,' she said, speaking first--in her old half-mocking
way, 'that I so nearly cost you your seat.'

'It was my own carelessness,' I returned. 'Surely I am right in taking
you for the lady who allowed me, in old times, to call her Clara? How I
could ever have had the presumption I cannot imagine.'

'Of course that is a familiarity not to be thought of between
full-grown people like us, Mr Cumbermede,' she rejoined, and her smile
became a laugh.

'Ah, you do recognize me, then?' I said, thinking her cool, but
forgetting the thought the next moment.

'I guess at you. If you had been dressed as on one occasion, I should
not have got so far as that.'

Pleased at this merry reference to our meeting on the Wengern Alp, I
was yet embarrassed to find that nothing more suggested itself to be
said. But while I was quieting my mare, which happily afforded me some
pretext at the moment, another voice fell on my ear--hoarse, but breezy
and pleasant.

'So, Clara, you are no sooner back to old quarters than you give a
rendezvous at the garden-gate--eh, girl?'

'Rather an ill-chosen spot for the purpose, papa,' she returned,
laughing, 'especially as the gentleman has too much to do with his
horse to get off and talk to me.'

'Ah! our old friend Mr Cumbermede, I declare! Only rather more of him!'
he added, laughing, as he opened the little gate in the wire fence, and
coming up to me, shook hands heartily. 'Delighted to see you, Mr
Cumbermede. Have you left Oxford for good?'

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