George Gissing

“ He lived all but in loneliness, and when the change had had time to work upon him his thoughts began to revert to Adela, to her alone of those who stood on the other side of the gulf. She came before his eyes as a vision of purity; it was soothing to picture her face and to think of her walking in the spring meadows. He thought of her as of a white rose, dew-besprent, and gently swayed by the sweet air of a sunny morning; a white rose newly spread, its heart virgin from the hands of shaping Nature. He could not decide what quality, what absence of thought, made Adela so distinct to him. ”

“ Since the abandonment of the house in Wilton Square, Kate had incessantly railed in this way; it was a joy to her to have discovered new matter for invective. Emma’s persistent silence maddened her; even now not a word was to be got from the girl.
‘Can’t you speak?’ shrilled Mrs. Clay. ‘If you don’t do something, I let you know that I shall! I’m not going to stand this kind o’ thing, don’t think it. If they talk ill of you they’ll do the same of me. It’s time that devil had something for himself. You might be made o’ stone! I only hope I may meet him in the streets, that’s all! ”

“ He knew well enough that it was impossible for her to: admire him; he was conscious of the thousand degrading things he had said and done, every one of them stored in her memory. Perhaps not once since that terrible day in the Pentonville lodgings had he looked her straight in the eyes. Yes, her beauty appealed to him less than even a year ago; Adela knew it, and it was the one solace in her living death. Perhaps occasion could again have stung him into jealousy, but Adela was no longer a vital interest in his existence. He lived in external things, his natural life. ”

“ Boys on the egg-trail are not wont to pay much attention to the features of the country; but Hubert remembered that at a certain meadow-gate he had always rested for a moment to view the valley, some mute presage of things unimagined stirring at his heart. Was it even then nineteenth century? Not for him, seeing that the life of each of us reproduces the successive ages of the world. Belwick, roaring a few miles away, was but an isolated black patch on the earth’s beauty, not, as he now understood it, a malignant cancer-spot, spreading day by day, corrupting, an augury of death. ”

“ For Adela was not by nature a social enthusiast. When her heart leapt at Stella’s chant, it was not in truth through contagion of sympathy, but in admiration and love of the noble woman who could thus think and speak. Adela—and who will not be thankful for it?—was, before all things, feminine; her true enthusiasms were personal. It was a necessity of her nature to love a human being, this or that one, not a crowd. She had been starving, killing the self which was her value. ”

“ No dream of suspicions on his part had come to her, but it was enough that something had happened to intensify his dislike of Hubert. Of her many fears, here was one which couched dark and shapeless in the background.
A feeble woman would have chosen anyone—her mother, her brother—rather than Mutimer himself for the first participant in such a discovery. Adela was not feeble, and the very danger, though it might chill her senses, nerved her soul. Was she not making him too ignoble? Was she not herself responsible for much of the strangeness in his behaviour of late? ”

“ What was the use of wealth if it did not exempt one from the petty laws binding on miserable hand to mouth toilers! He would have done with Emma Vine; his time was of too much value to the world to be consumed in wranglings about a work-girl. What if here and there someone believed the calumny? Would it do Emma any harm? That was most unlikely. On the whole, the misunderstanding was useful; let it take its course. Men with large aims cannot afford to be scrupulous in small details. Was not New Wanley a sufficient balance against a piece of injustice, which, after all, was only one of words? ”

“ As Alice had done, Mrs. Waltham noticed before long that Adela was far brighter than usual. She remarked upon it.
‘You begin to look really well, my love. It makes me happy to see you. How much we have to be thankful for! I’ve had a letter this morning from poor Lizzie Henbane; I must show it you. They’re in such misery as never was. Her husband’s business is all gone to nothing, and he is cruelly unkind to her. How thankful we ought to be!’
‘Surely not for poor Lizzie’s unhappiness!’ said Adela, with a return of her maiden archness. ”

“ Youth and disappointment weighed in the scale of unreason. Mutimer, on the other hand, though fortune helped him to forbearance, saw, or believed he saw, the very essence of all he most hated in this proud-eyed representative of a county family. His own rough-sculptured comeliness corresponded to the vigour and practicality and zeal of a nature which cared nothing for form and all for substance; the essentials of life were to him the only things in life, instead of, as to Hubert Eldon, the mere brute foundation of an artistic super structure. ”

“ It was the most pity-moving of all tragedies, a noble nature overcome by sordid circumstances. She was deficient in the strength of character which will subdue all circumstances; her strength was of the kind that supports endurance rather than breaks a way to freedom. Every day, every hour, is some such tragedy played through; it is the inevitable result of our social state. Adela could have wept tears of blood; her shame was like a branding iron upon her flesh.
She was on the second floor of a lodging-house in Pentonville, making tea for her husband. ”

“ Hubert was thoughtful.
‘What is before us?’ he murmured.
‘Evil; of that I am but too firmly assured. Progress will have its way, and its path will be a path of bitterness. A pillar of dark cloud leads it by day, and of terrible fire by night. I do not say that the promised land may not lie ahead of its guiding, but woe is me for the desert first to be traversed! Two vices are growing among us to dread proportions—indifference and hatred: the one will let poverty anguish at its door, the other will hound on the vassal against his lord. ”

“ In Stella’s presence all that vanished; listening to Stella’s voice she could lay firm hold on the truth that there is a work in the cause of humanity other than that which goes on so clamorously in lecture halls and at street corners, other than that which is silently performed by faithful hearts and hands in dens of misery and amid the horrors of the lazar-house; the work of those whose soul is taken captive of loveliness, who pursue the spiritual ideal apart from the world’s tumult, and, ever ready to minister in gentle offices, know that they serve best when nearest home. ”

“ Wyvern did she occasionally speak without constraint, though not of course without reserve; speech of that kind she feared would never again be possible to her. Still she felt that the vicar saw far into her life. On some topics she was more open than she had hitherto ventured to be; a boldness, almost a carelessness, for which she herself could not account, possessed her at such times.
Late in June she received from Stella Westlake a pressing invitation to come and spend a fortnight in London. It was like sunshine to her heart; almost without hesitation she re solved to accept it. ”

“ Near at hand there grew a silver birch Hubert Eldon, on one of the occasions when he talked here with Adela and Letty, had by chance let his eyes wander from Adela to the birch tree, and his fancy, just then active among tender images, suggested a likeness between that graceful, gleaming stem with its delicately drooping foliage and the sweet-featured girl who stood before him with her head bowed in unconscious loveliness. As the silver birch among the trees of the wood, so was Adela among the men and women of the world. ”

“ Here, too, was Adela at length; every time his name was uttered, perforce she heard; every encomium bestowed upon him by the various speakers was to him like a new bud on the tree of hope. After all, why should he feel this humility towards her? What man of prominence, of merit, at all like his own would ever seek her hand? The semblance of chivalry which occasionally stirred within him was, in fact, quite inconsistent with his reasoned view of things; the English working class has, on the whole, as little of that quality as any other people in an elementary stage of civilisation. ”

“ There was a word Letty could not hear, only her listening heart divined it.
‘Dear Adela! pray for strength, and it will be sure to come to you. How hard it is to know myself so happy when you have so much trouble!’
‘I could have borne it better but for this new pain. I don’t think I should ever have shown it; even you wouldn’t have known all I felt, Letty. I should have hoped for him—I don’t mean hoped on my own account, but that he might know how wicked he had been. How—how can a man do things so unworthy of himself, when it’s so beautiful to be good and faithful? ”

“ Other women had drawn his eyes, had captured him with the love of a day; but the deep still affection which is independent of moods and impressions flowed ever towards Adela. As easily could he have become indifferent to his mother as to Adela. As a married woman she was infinitely more to him than she had been as a girl; from her conversation, her countenance, he knew how richly she had developed, how her intelligence had ripened how her character had established itself in maturity. ”

“ In her house at Wimbledon she perished of ennui, for she was as lonely as Adela in Holloway. Much lonelier; she had no resources in herself. Rodman was away all day in London, and very often he did not return at night; when the latter was the case, Alice cried miserably in her bed for hours, so that the next morning her face was like that of a wax doll that has suffered ill-usage. She had an endless supply of novels, and day after day bent over them till her head ached. ”

“ Adela went down and was alone with ‘Arry for half-an-hour. She was young to undertake such an office, but suffering had endowed her with gravity and understanding beyond her years, and her native sweetness was such that she could altogether forget herself in pleading with another for a good end. No human being, however perverse, could have taken ill the words that were dictated by so pure a mind, and uttered in so musical and gentle a voice. ”

“ After Mutimer, Alfred Waltham had probably more genuine satisfaction in the ceremony than any one else present. Mr. Westlake he was not quite satisfied with; there was a mildness and restraint about the style of the address which to Alfred’s taste smacked of feebleness; he was for Cambyses’ vein. Still it rejoiced him to hear the noble truths of democracy delivered as it were from the bema. To a certain order of intellect the word addressed by the living voice to an attentive assembly is always vastly impressive; when the word coincides with private sentiment it excites enthusiasm. ”

“ Waltham went early to her daughter’s room. Adela was sitting with her Bible before her—had sat so since coming upstairs, yet had not read three consecutive verses. Her face showed no effect of tears, for the heat of a consuming suspense had dried the fountains of woe.
‘I don’t like to occupy your mind with such things, my dear,’ began her mother, ‘but perhaps as a warning I ought to show you the news Alfred spoke of. It pleases Providence that there should be evil in the world, and for our own safety we must sometimes look it in the face, especially we poor women, Adela. ”

“ In the church of the Insurgents there are many orders. To rise to the supreme passion of revolt, two conditions are indispensable: to possess the heart of a poet, and to be subdued by poverty to the yoke of ignoble labour. But many who fall short of the priesthood have yet a share of the true spirit, bestowed upon them by circumstances of birth and education, developed here and there by the experience of life, yet rigidly limited in the upshot by the control of material ease, the fatal lordship of the comfortable commonplace. Of such was Hubert Eldon. ”

“ Honour and obedience she might render him, but what of love? The question arose, what did love mean? Could there be such a thing as love of an unworthy object? Was she not led astray by the spirit of perverseness which was her heritage?
Adela could not bring herself to believe that ‘to love’ in the sense of the marriage service and to ‘be in love’ as her heart understood it were one and the same thing. The Puritanism of her training led her to distrust profoundly those impulses of mere nature. And the circumstances of her own unhappy affection tended to confirm her in this way of thinking. ”