“If,” says a great thinker (Degerando, “Du Perfectionment Moral,”
chapter ix., “On the Difficulties we encounter in Self-Study”)—“if
one concentrates reflection too much on one’s self, one ends by no
longer seeing anything, or seeing only what one wishes. By the very
act, as it were, of capturing one’s self, the personage we believe
we have seized escapes, disappears. Nor is it only the complexity
of our inner being which obstructs our examination, but its
exceeding variability. The investigator’s regard should embrace all
the sides of the subject, and perseveringly pursue all its phases.”
It is the race-week in Humberston, a county town far from Gatesboro’, and in the north of England. The races last three days: the first day is over; it has been a brilliant spectacle; the course crowded with the carriages of provincial magnates, with equestrian betters of note from the metropolis; blacklegs in great muster; there have been gaming-booths on the ground, and gypsies telling fortunes; much champagne imbibed by the well-bred, much soda-water and brandy by the vulgar. Thousands and tens of thousands have been lost and won: some paupers have been for the time enriched; some rich men made poor for life. Horses have won fame; some of their owners lost character. Din and uproar, and coarse oaths, and rude passions,—all have had their hour. The amateurs of the higher classes have gone back to dignified country-houses, as courteous hosts or favoured guests. The professional speculators of a lower grade have poured back into the county town, and inns and taverns are crowded. Drink is hotly called for at reeking bars; waiters and chambermaids pass to and fro, with dishes and tankards and bottles in their hands. All is noise and bustle, and eating and swilling, and disputation and slang, wild glee, and wilder despair, amongst those who come back from the race-course to the inns in the county town. At one of these taverns, neither the best nor the worst, and in a small narrow slice of a room that seemed robbed from the landing-place, sat Mrs. Crane, in her iron-gray silk gown. She was seated close by the open window, as carriages, chaises, flies, carts, vans, and horsemen succeeded each other thick and fast, watching the scene with a soured, scornful look. For human joy, as for human grief, she had little sympathy. Life had no Saturnalian holidays left for her. Some memory in her past had poisoned the well-springs of her social being. Hopes and objects she had still, but out of the wrecks of the natural and healthful existence of womanhood, those objects and hopes stood forth exaggerated, intense, as are the ruling passions in monomania. A bad woman is popularly said to be worse than a wicked man. If so, partly because women, being more solitary, brood more unceasingly over cherished ideas, whether good or evil; partly also, for the same reason that makes a wicked gentleman, who has lost caste and character, more irreclaimable than a wicked clown, low-born and lowbred, namely, that in proportion to the loss of shame is the gain in recklessness: but principally, perhaps, because in extreme wickedness there is necessarily a distortion of the reasoning faculty; and man, accustomed from the cradle rather to reason than to feel, has that faculty more firm against abrupt twists and lesions than it is in woman; where virtue may have left him, logic may still linger; and he may decline to push evil to a point at which it is clear to his understanding that profit vanishes and punishment rests; while woman, once abandoned to ill, finds sufficient charm in its mere excitement, and, regardless of consequences, where the man asks, “Can I?” raves out, “I will!” Thus man may be criminal through cupidity, vanity, love, jealousy, fear, ambition; rarely in civilized, that is, reasoning life, through hate and revenge; for hate is a profitless investment, and revenge a ruinous speculation. But when women are thoroughly depraved and hardened, nine times out of ten it is hatred or revenge that makes them so. Arabella Crane had not, however, attained to that last state of wickedness, which, consistent in evil, is callous to remorse; she was not yet unsexed. In her nature was still that essence, “varying and mutable,” which distinguishes woman while womanhood is left to her. And now, as she sat gazing on the throng below, her haggard mind recoiled perhaps from the conscious shadow of the Evil Principle which, invoked as an ally, remains as a destroyer. Her dark front relaxed; she moved in her seat uneasily. “Must it be always thus?” she muttered,—“always this hell here! Even now, if in one large pardon I could include the undoer, the earth, myself, and again be human,—human, even as those slight triflers or coarse brawlers that pass yonder! Oh, for something in common with common life!”
Her lips closed, and her eyes again fell upon the crowded street. At that moment three or four heavy vans or wagons filled with operatives or labourers and their wives, coming back from the race-course, obstructed the way; two outriders in satin jackets were expostulating, cracking their whips, and seeking to clear space for an open carriage with four thoroughbred impatient horses. Towards that carriage every gazer from the windows was directing eager eyes; each foot-passenger on the pavement lifted his hat: evidently in that carriage some great person! Like all who are at war with the world as it is, Arabella Crane abhorred the great, and despised the small for worshipping the great. But still her own fierce dark eyes mechanically followed those of the vulgar. The carriage bore a marquess’s coronet on its panels, and was filled with ladies; two other carriages bearing a similar coronet, and evidently belonging to the same party, were in the rear. Mrs. Crane started. In that first carriage, as it now slowly moved under her very window, and paused a minute or more till the obstructing vehicles in front were marshalled into order, there flashed upon her eyes a face radiant with female beauty in its most glorious prime. Amongst the crowd at that moment was a blind man, adding to the various discords of the street by a miserable hurdy-gurdy. In the movement of the throng to get nearer to a sight of the ladies in the carriage, this poor creature was thrown forward; the dog that led him, an ugly brute, on his own account or his master’s took fright, broke from the string, and ran under the horses’ hoofs, snarling. The horses became restive; the blind man made a plunge after his dog, and was all but run over. The lady in the first carriage, alarmed for his safety, rose up from her seat, and made her outriders dismount, lead away the poor blind man, and restore to him his dog. Thus engaged, her face shone full upon Arabella Crane; and with that face rushed a tide of earlier memories. Long, very long, since she had seen that face,—seen it in those years when she herself, Arabella Crane, was young and handsome.
The poor man,—who seemed not to realize the idea of the danger he had escaped,—once more safe, the lady resumed her seat; and now that the momentary animation of humane fear and womanly compassion passed from her countenance, its expression altered; it took the calm, almost the coldness, of a Greek statue. But with the calm there was a listless melancholy which Greek sculpture never gives to the Parian stone: stone cannot convey that melancholy; it is the shadow which needs for its substance a living, mortal heart.
Crack went the whips: the horses bounded on; the equipage rolled fast down the street, followed by its satellites. “Well!” said a voice in the street below, “I never saw Lady Montfort in such beauty. Ah, here comes my lord!”
Mrs. Crane heard and looked forth again. A dozen or more gentlemen on horseback rode slowly up the street; which of these was Lord Montfort?—not difficult to distinguish. As the bystanders lifted their hats to the cavalcade, the horsemen generally returned their salutation by simply touching their own: one horseman uncovered wholly. That one must be the Marquess, the greatest man in those parts, with lands stretching away on either side that town for miles and miles,—a territory which in feudal times might have alarmed a king. He, the civilest, must be the greatest. A man still young, decidedly good-looking, wonderfully well-dressed, wonderfully well-mounted, the careless ease of high rank in his air and gesture. To the superficial gaze, just what the great Lord of Montfort should be. Look again! In that fair face is there not something that puts you in mind of a florid period which contains a feeble platitude?—something in its very prettiness that betrays a weak nature and a sterile mind?
The cavalcade passed away; the vans and the wagons again usurped the thoroughfare. Arabella Crane left the window, and approached the little looking-glass over the mantelpiece. She gazed upon her own face bitterly; she was comparing it with the features of the dazzling marchioness.
The door was flung open, and Jasper Losely sauntered in, whistling a French air, and flapping the dust from his boots with his kid glove.
“All right,” said he, gayly. “A famous day of it!”
“You have won,” said Mrs. Crane, in a tone rather of disappointment than congratulation.
“Yes. That L100 of Rugge’s has been the making of me.”
“I only wanted a capital just to start with!” He flung himself into a chair, opened his pocket-book, and scrutinized its contents. “Guess,” said he, suddenly, “on whose horse I won these two rouleaux? Lord Montfort’s! Ay, and I saw my lady!”
“So did I see her from this window. She did not look happy!”
“Not happy!—with such an equipage,—neatest turn-out I ever set eyes on; not happy, indeed! I had half a mind to ride up to her carriage and advance a claim to her gratitude.”
“Gratitude? Oh, for your part in that miserable affair of which you told me?”
“Not a miserable affair for her; but certainly I never got any good from it. Trouble for nothing! Basta! No use looking back.”
“No use; but who can help it?” said Arabella Crane, sighing heavily; then, as if eager to change the subject, she added abruptly, “Mr. Rugge has been here twice this morning, highly excited the child will not act. He says you are bound to make her do so!”
“Nonsense. That is his look-out. I see after children, indeed!”
MRS. CRANE (with a visible effort).—“Listen to me, Jasper Losely. I have no reason to love that child, as you may suppose. But now that you so desert her, I think I feel compassion for her; and when this morning I raised my hand to strike her for her stubborn spirit, and saw her eyes unflinching, and her pale, pale, but fearless face, my arm fell to my side powerless. She will not take to this life without the old man. She will waste away and die.”
LOSELY.—“How you bother me! Are you serious? What am I to do?”
MRS. CRANE.—“You have won money you say; revoke the contract; pay Rugge back his L100. He is disappointed in his bargain; he will take the money.”
LOSELY.—“I dare say he will indeed! No: I have won to-day, it is true, but I may lose to-morrow; and besides I am in want of so many things: when one gets a little money, one has an immediate necessity for more—ha! ha! Still I would not have the child die; and she may grow up to be of use. I tell you what I will do; if, when the races are over, I find I have gained enough to afford it, I will see about buying her off. But L100 is too much! Rugge ought to take half the money, or a quarter, because, if she don’t act, I suppose she does eat.”
Odious as the man’s words were, he said them with a laugh that seemed to render them less revolting,—the laugh of a very handsome mouth, showing teeth still brilliantly white. More comely than usual that day, for he was in great good-humour, it was difficult to conceive that a man with so healthful and fair an exterior was really quite rotten at heart.
“Your own young laugh,” said Arabella Crane, almost tenderly. “I know not how it is, but this day I feel as if I were less old,—altered though I be in face and mind. I have allowed myself to pity that child; while I speak, I can pity you. Yes! pity,—when I think of what you were. Must you go on thus? To what! Jasper Losely,” she continued, sharply, eagerly, clasping her hands, “hear me: I have an income, not large, it is true, but assured; you have nothing but what, as you say, you may lose to-morrow; share my income! Fulfil your solemn promises: marry me. I will forget whose daughter that girl is; I will be a mother to her. And for yourself, give me the right to feel for you again as I once did, and I may find a way to raise you yet,—higher than you can raise yourself. I have some wit, Jasper, as you know. At the worst you shall have the pastime, I the toil. In your illness I will nurse you: in your joys I will intrude no share. Whom else can you marry? to whom else could you confide? who else could—”
She stopped short as if an adder had stung her, uttering a shriek of rage, of pain; for Jasper Losely, who had hitherto listened to her, stupefied, astounded, here burst into a fit of merriment, in which there was such undisguised contempt, such an enjoyment of the ludicrous, provoked by the idea of the marriage pressed upon him, that the insult pierced the woman to her very soul.
Continuing his laugh, despite that cry of wrathful agony it had caused, Jasper rose, holding his sides, and surveying himself in the glass, with very different feelings at the sight from those that had made his companion’s gaze there a few minutes before so mournful.
“My dear good friend,” he said, composing himself at last, and wiping his eyes, “excuse me, but really when you said whom else could I marry—ha! ha!—it did seem such a capital joke! Marry you, my fair Crane! No: put that idea out of your head; we know each other too well for conjugal felicity. You love me now: you always did, and always will; that is, while we are not tied to each other. Women who once love me, always love me; can’t help themselves. I am sure I don’t know why, except that I am what they call a villain! Ha! the clock striking seven: I dine with a set of fellows I have picked up on the race-ground; they don’t know me, nor I them; we shall be better acquainted after the third bottle. Cheer up, Crane: go and scold Sophy, and make her act if you can; if not, scold Rugge into letting her alone. Scold somebody; nothing like it, to keep other folks quiet, and one’s self busy. Adieu! and pray, no more matrimonial solicitations: they frighten me! Gad,” added Losely, as he banged the door, “such overtures would frighten Old Nick himself!”
Did Arabella Crane hear those last words,—or had she not heard enough? If Losely had turned and beheld her face, would it have startled back his trivial laugh? Possibly; but it would have caused only a momentary uneasiness. If Alecto herself had reared over him her brow horrent with vipers, Jasper Losely would have thought he had only to look handsome and say coaxingly, “Alecto, my dear,” and the Fury would have pawned her head-dress to pay his washing-bill.
After all, in the face of the grim woman he had thus so wantonly incensed, there was not so much menace as resolve. And that resolve was yet more shown in the movement of the hands than in the aspect of the countenance; those hands—lean, firm, nervous hands—slowly expanded, then as slowly clenched, as if her own thought had taken substance, and she was locking it in a clasp—tightly, tightly—never to be loosened till the pulse was still.
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