Alfred Pretor

“ In the drawing-room Marion sang to me my favourite songs, amongst them, of course, ‘The Message’ and ‘The Requital.’ Last of all I asked for ‘My Queen,’ the song which above all others realises the entire self-abandonment which is the very hall-mark of love. For a love that is true and worth the name will impose on itself no restrictions and no limitations, giving itself wholly and unreservedly, without asking the reason why and wherefore, to the object of its worship. ”

“ Only quite lately, long after the idea of luncheon had been stereotyped upon my brain, I found out that the so-called luncheon was, after all, no luncheon at all, but only a retarded breakfast. Our Rector being a late riser, and having a five-mile walk before him, could find no opportunity of taking it in comfort till he had reached the haven of the parish reading desk.
A cigar was the indispensable accompaniment of the second Lesson, during which period its fumes could be seen ascending like “curling incense” to the blackened rafters of the roof. ”

“ And, like a true lover, I abandoned the Rectory trout to their own devices, while I mused and dreamed over my lady’s perfections. “Of course,” I said to myself, “Shakespeare is right, as he always is. Fancy is engendered in the eye; at least it was in my case; born before I had seen any reasons for its birth, in fact, in spite of many reasons to the contrary, as I recalled the well-remembered shock of Reggie’s love-scene. And it may either die in its cradle, or else turn to love, as mine did. Then how is it that the unattractive women find their husbands? ”

“ It is the scare and shadow of war that is the curse without the blessing.
Thorne, as a minute in his company would prove to you, is a hard-headed journalist; witty, and an excellent talker; facile, of course, with his pen, and ready to turn out a new theology as easily as he could write an article on the last discovered butterfly or grub.
Andrews is a graduate of London University, spending with Eastonville the remnant of a holiday. Fairly humorous and incorrigibly deaf—never more so (his friends say) than when a subject bores him—he is himself a trifle of a bore to-night. ”

“ Stay your words before you utter that of which all the life that is left you will be too little for repentance. Have you no greater faith in God’s love and mercy than in your own? Nay—less, far less, for even you would have pardoned him. An angry word, that dropt from him in great stress of terror and excitement—is that to weigh against the record of a life that was a model to all of us in brave unselfish effort? ”

“ It was a chimney stablewards that had gone, crashing through a hay loft and lumber room right down on the top of our ghostly carriage, and clearing Broadwater of spiders for the period of our lives. Even the uncle himself could find no plea for extending his protection to a mass of shivered fragments. If the powers of darkness had destroyed their own handiwork, or failed in ability to protect it, there was no reason to suppose that the hand of man would be more successful. ”

“ What most impressed me was the terrible truthfulness with which he had realised the details. Surely, such total collapse, such limp and inert limbs, such lights and shadows on the livid skin, were never the outcome of the painter’s consciousness? Death alone, and death that was only just not life, had been the model from which he drew. ”

“ I pray that I may never stand face to face with cholera again. Overhead, a sky like brass, and, veiling the town, a dusky, steel-blue haze, almost as palpable as gauze: the distinctive colour (I’ve been told) of a cholera atmosphere. They died like flies, crowded in their close, evil-smelling dwellings, though we lighted fires in the streets to clear the air; an idea I borrowed, I believe, from ‘Old St. Paul’s.’
“Late one evening I hurried from a sick room to get a breath of air in the theatre below. My friend, the old priest, was there before me. ”

“ And there we said good-bye. “I shall never marry, Harold,” Marion said, “till you come back again to claim me. For come again you surely will. And never think I blame you for this parting. In honour you could not have done otherwise than leave me now. And hard as it is, dear, for us to part so soon, my love (if that be possible) is only made the stronger by the parting.”
And so she left me—with none of the prayers and protests that would only have made my duty harder for me. ”

“ Just when we want you most, your voice will be gone, and you’ll have spoiled us for all other singing, precisely as the great Sarah has spoiled us for any acting but her own. If we could only forget and start fresh with each week, how nice and pleasant everything would be. I believe Nelly is right in ‘Cometh up,’ when she says that memory is often a cruel gift. No one would choose to remember a feeble show, or to spoil his enjoyment of average singing by a recollection of the best. ”

“ How, Edgar, you can possibly justify the cruelty of hunting an animal which you can’t eat, or use for any purpose when you’ve killed it, I can’t conceive. Talk of a bull-fight—nonsense, why it’s a fair fight by comparison. The bull is Master of Ceremonies up to the time of its death, and then it’s killed painlessly by a single blow. And its flesh serves the best purpose imaginable, for it’s distributed round among the poor of the city, who, but for the chance, would never taste any meat but pork from one year’s end to another. ”

“ So soon as one predominant idea has passed from the brain, its place must be occupied by another, for good or else for evil. Which of the two it may be, seems almost a matter of indifference; it is the law, so to speak, of their being that it should be indifferent.
I almost wished in those days that I could fall ill myself. Five or six months of nursing under Bindo’s hand would have been a lazy delight to me, and (selfish as it may seem) better far for him than the life he was leading. ”

“ Perhaps the brightest beds in a nobleman’s parterre might suggest the colouring. But the stiff arrangement and orderly rows of bloom are the very antipodes of Nature’s handiwork. A flush of crimson mountain-ash, thrusting itself in irregular patches between groups of dusky pines, and these in their turn lost among beeches of burnished gold, with oak and hornbeam and ash to give the softer intermediate tones is, at best, a poverty-stricken catalogue of the colours that flamed all round us on that autumn day. ”

“ But, if fate was against him, and the wind light, and the cigar drew slowly, he had no false shame in appearing on the chancel steps to announce with all the dignity of a formal notice that the last two verses of the hymn would be repeated. After which he disappeared into the churchyard again.
The sermon was to me, as a boy, full of the most delightful interest. It had an infinity of anticipation. No one knew what was coming—least of all the Rector himself. We felt stimulated by the chance of any and every possibility. ”

“ Agostino was to be immortalised as the painter, Cecco as the model. And their love for each other made them wholly unselfish; each hoped for success solely in the interest of his friend. Nothing short of a perfect likeness would satisfy Agostino, nothing short of a perfect picture would satisfy Cecco’s ambition for his friend. ”

“ Lashed into foam, and its voice drowned by the wind, it parts with much of its majesty, and becomes merely a symbol of turmoil and unrest. What it gains in wildness, it loses in self-control, like the seething rapids of Niagara before they compose themselves into dignity prior to the final plunge. ”

“ The Old Inn where we met was a picturesque thatched cottage, that had crept up beside the p. 52churchyard porch, either to shelter itself beneath the churchyard trees, or to sanctify its reputation by the proximity of things divine. And as it lay embowered in a valley three miles from our western shore, it was cheered rather than saddened by a gentle sighing from the sea, alternating at times with a deep and hollow roar when a storm was on its way towards the coast. ”

“ He was now a handsome young fellow, living quietly and sedately with his uncle at Broadwater; not easy to recognise as the lad who had discomfited an itinerant preacher, and played the stable-boy on the race-course at Bayview. But the spirit of Bohemianism dies hard, and I was possessed with the idea that, even in the act of “placing himself” for life, Ronald would make opportunity for a final fling. He was having a really bad time of it with his uncle, and, in spite of occasional outbursts, when the Viking blood got the better of him, had been fairly amenable to discipline. ”

“ These ruins lay within the precincts of the Manor House. But just outside the boundary, on the summit of an adjoining hill, there rose into the thin air the wondrous shape of a tiny chapel, beside the perfection of which even the Refectory itself looked coarse and material. Coloured by a growth of lichen of the same soft tones, and with all its delicate tracery untouched by the lapse of some five hundred p. ”

“ The next day a ragged little hound, called “Judy,” was selected from the kennels at Thorpe Hill, and despatched to the protégé in question. Pure white she was, and so small, that, at a shift, you could hold her in the hollow of your hand. A veritable little mongrel, of course, if ever there was one. Indeed, nothing but a mongrel would have had the capacity for so delicate a mission. For, as we all know, it is to the mongrel that we look for intelligence and originality. The consciousness of inherited merit is fatal to intellectual progress in an animal of pedigree. ”

“ Eric, for one, had demonstrated its incompleteness. I had thought him p. 219weak and vacillating. And his weakness, if ever it existed, had become his strength. Strong he had shown himself (in spite of his own words) both for the friend of his youth and the woman of his choice; strong to build himself a grand career; strong above all to conquer a temptation before which the strongest might have fallen; strong finally to fall and rise again, which is greater and grander, I take it, than not to fall. ”

“ Judy often came on a visit to Thorpe Hill, where she regularly spent an hour after dinner in digging at the root of a favourite beech tree, with the energy of a dog that is close on a prize. From which I inferred that she was a truffle-terrier in disguise, who would make all our fortunes, and set Matthew to dig in her place till he blasphemed against Judy and the truffles and me. But Matthew didn’t put his heart into his work, or realise the fact that Judy’s credit was at stake. ”

“ If, instead of the ‘glad tidings’ that there exists a Being in whom all the excellences which the highest human mind can conceive exist in a degree inconceivable to us, I am informed that the world is ruled by a Being whose attributes are infinite, but what they are we cannot learn, nor what are the principles of his government, except that ‘the highest human morality which we are capable of conceiving’ does not sanction them ”

“ She was the last person ever to think of self. Still it does look unfeeling to go to her straight from all this light and merriment. Yet I feel it less than most would. Life and death seem to me so closely mixed, that wherever one is there you may expect the other. ”