George Gissing

“ Clarendon. Oh, how did she consent to be rich on those terms?”
“Ada, you must try and think tenderly of her,” said Meres, with the softness which always marked his voice when he spoke of Isabel. “I have told you of her early poverty. She was a beautiful girl, and without the education which might have given her high aims; the pleasant things of the world tempted her, and frivolous society did its best to ruin her. It did not touch her heart; that has always been pure, and generous, and womanly. Try never to think of her failings.”
“I wish I were not a woman!” Ada exclaimed. ”

“ He had no passion left, which was worse.
He did at times think of Isabel, and with strange coldness. He had lost the power of realising her to his mind’s eye; she was more of an abstraction than a living woman. In certain moods there came to him the temptation to dwell upon those tenderest memories, to try and hear the voice which had once haunted him only too persistently, to see her face as a living thing. He could not; her very features escaped him, when he closed his eyes to fix them on the darkness. It was all so remote, that happiness and suffering ”

“ Her lips trembled; as he came and knelt by her, she knew again an impulse of pure devotion.
“Bernard, do you wish me to go back again? Shall I go to Knightswell?”
“How can I say yes? It is your happiness to be here. You feel and enjoy your power.”
“Bid me leave London, and I will not remain another day.”
She feared his answer, yet longed to arouse in him the energy which should make her subject. A woman cannot be swayed against her instincts by mere entreaty, but she will bow beneath the hand that she loves. ”

“ The evening that followed was one of suffering for Mary, the beginning of a martyrdom. She knew already that her hasty step had been a mistake; to-day the slow-gathering consciousness became a fixed centre of pain. She had looked from her brother to her husband and back again; she understood that the difference between the two men was the measure of the gulf set between herself and the world to which she rightly belonged. Her husband’s amiability became vulgar self-complacence; his features, his demeanour, his interests, all bore the ineffaceable stamp of vulgarity. ”

“ He understood well enough the narrowness of this spirit; he knew that his culture should have endowed him with tolerant forbearance; but it was a matter of temperament. He dreaded to leave his room and descend, lest he should meet one of the Bolt family; he felt the impossibility of behaving with decent courtesy. Aristocracy of race cannot compare in pervasive intensity with aristocracy which comes only of the influence of intellect and temperament. Kingcote would have chosen death rather than an existence elbow to elbow with people such as these he found in the house. ”

“ Men—all men—see her so differently.”
“Ada Warren!” he grasped the arm of his chair convulsively, speaking in sudden forgetfulness of everything but his passion, “if by my death I could save her from the most trifling pain I would gladly die this hour!”
She gazed at him with a daughters tenderness, and sighed:
“I shall never hear such words as those.”
“My child, your reward is in the future. Fate has given you nobility alike of heart and brain, and, if you live, you will lack no happiness that time has in its bestowal. Go, now, Ada, and leave me to myself. ”

“ Mary could gather from the last words a sense he did not consciously put into them. She had her own explanation of her brother’s dreadful state. Dreadful it was, no less. His face was wasted as if by consumption. He scarcely ate enough to support life. His sleeplessness had become a disease. He never smiled, and spoke for the most part in a weary, listless tone. Mary believed that there was death in his hands.
There came the day for leave-taking; he was to go to her—Isabel wrote—in the afternoon, and she would be at home to no one else. ”

“ She stirred herself to factitious passion, excited all the glowing instincts, all the dormant ardours, of her being—and shivered before the flame. Every motive that could render marriage desirable she dwelt upon till it should become part of her hourly consciousness. The life she would lead when marriage had given her freedom was her constant forethought. She was made for enjoyment, and would enjoy. For her should exist no petty social rules, no conventional hypocrisies. In London her house should be a gathering-place of Bohemians. ”

“ He visioned a happiness which has no existence. Men win happiness, but not thus. To woo and win as pastime in the pauses of the world’s battle, to make hearth and home a retreat in ill-hap, a place of rest between the combats of day and day, to kindly regard a wife for her usefulness, and children for the pride they satisfy, thus, and not otherwise, do men come to content. Content that is not worth much, perhaps; but what is the price current of misery?
Isabel wrote in reply to each letter; King-cote would have liked to pay in gold the village postman who brought her writing to his door. ”

“ He raised his hand in playful warning.
“Life is full of tragedies. The tragedy, I have always thought, is not where two who love each other die for the sake of their love. That is glorious triumph. But where love itself dies, blown upon by the cold breath of the world, and those who loved live on with hearts made sepulchres—that is tragedy.”
“I shall always love you.” She repeated it under her breath, convincing herself.
“On Tuesday I go to London,” Kingcote said, seating himself by her. ”

“ His reading was no longer study, but mere pastime in idle pages; books which demanded thought or suggested a high and energetic ideal, he put aside. This habit of mind, at first involuntary, he was beginning to take consciously for his direction; it preserved to him an even calm, which was now the most desirable of things.
“Do not tell me of your work,” he wrote to Gabriel in London. “It will seem unfriendly that I should not wish to Hear of it, but your progress and achievements I take for granted; they are the essence of the distinction between your world and my own. ”

“ Fate has brought us together, and fate will help us—have no fear!”
“Fate is not often benevolent,” said King-cote, smiling cheerlessly.
“But are not we the exceptions? I feel—I know—that there is happiness for us; I won’t listen to a single down-hearted word! You came to Winstoke because my love was waiting for you; you are going now to London because something is prepared which we cannot foresee. Look brighter, dear; it is all well.”
“Isabel, I will not see you again before I go.” ”

“ Kingcote felt that they gave him a new understanding of pathos.
She would not speak more of the dead man, knowing how her brother had regarded him. At his bidding she sat on the sofa, and by degrees overcame her weakness; he comforted her.
“What shall I do, Bernard?” she asked, appealing to him with tearful eyes. “What is to become of the children? What is before us?”
“At first, rest,” was his kind answer. “Don’t let a thought of the future trouble you; that is my affair. You shall never want whilst I live, Mary.” ”

“ It was only on the surface that she was weak; she was susceptible to every kind of suffering, but had a corresponding power of enduring. Few women could have lived as she had done, from seventeen to seven-and-twenty, and have preserved so much cleanliness of soul.
She could not pardon Mrs. Bolt, whose offence, in her eyes, consisted far more in the extortion practised on her brother than in a display of unabashed sordidness. To that good woman’s surprise, Mary refrained from intercourse with her throughout the fortnight that she remained in the house. ”

“ There was the grace of pure worship, the lyric rapture of passion and desire, the soft rhythm of resigned longing, the sweet sadness of apprehension; but the note of an exquisite tenderness was ever recurrent, with it the music began and ended. They were the love letters of a poet, one in whom melancholy mingled with every emotion, whose brightest visions of joy were shadowed by brooding mortality. There was nothing masterful, no exaction, no distinctly masculine fervour. If a dread fell upon him lest the happiness promised was too great, it found voice in passionate entreaty. ”

“ It was the termination of a serious attempt to live by herself. Since receiving and answering Kingcote’s last letter (it came to her on the morning of her departure for Scotland, and in hurriedly opening the envelope she had not even noticed that the post-mark was not of London) , she had been in ceaseless nervousness of anticipation; that Kingcote would maintain silence, she could not believe. By every post she expected a letter, in which he would once more overwhelm himself with reproaches, and implore the continuance of her love. ”

“ The great Queen Anne dwellings on the Embankment have their charm, and just beyond them one sees the gardens of Chelsea Hospital, adjoining those which were once called Ranelagh. Heavy-laden barges go up or down stream, as the tide may be, sometimes hoisting a ruddy sail; men toil at the long barge oars. Steamers fret their way from pier to pier, rather suggestive of pleasure than business. Very little traffic is within sight or hearing; when the church clock strikes it is not drowned by the uproar of streets, but comes clearly on the wind with old-world melody. ”

“ Isabel was of them.
“How long does Miss Warren intend to stay in London?” he inquired, as they seated themselves.
“Indefinitely.”
“Her friends there are congenial?”
“Entirely so. Mr. Meres is a clever man; he has more influence over her than any one else.”
“You give that as an illustration of his cleverness?”
“No; as the result of it. Ada wants intellectual society; she has no pleasure in talking of anything but books and art. And he has always been a sort of guide to her.” ”

“ It was something for Mary to have her children with her, yet as often as not the sight of them was an added misery. What would become of her and of them if Bernard died? Kingcote was a frail reed to represent the support in life of any mortal. It was anything but clear how, if he lived, the responsibilities which had come upon him would be discharged. But his sister had all the shrinking from the world’s demands which marked Kingcote himself, heightened by the sensibilities and incapacity of a gently-nurtured woman. ”

“ I am glad you share my dislike to settling down at once either at Knightswell or in London. My idea is that we should spend at least a year in travelling. We will go to the East. I believe Oriental modes of life will exactly suit my temperament. I dislike activity; to dream away days in some delightful spot within view of the Bosphorus, with a hookah near at hand, and you reading poetry to me—I think I could make that last a long time. ”

“ Vissian and Percy, who saw him depart, to his first glimpse of the grimy south-west end of London—including twenty minutes’ pacing of a platform when he had to change—a dull absentmindedness had possessed him, a sense of unreality in his progress, an indifference to the objects about him. At Waterloo he let the other occupants of the carriage all descend before he moved; when at last obliged to stir, it cost him an effort to overcome his inertia. ”

“ Isabel exclaimed, with growing good humour. “As if you would allow such a scheme to be overthrown just because one of the party failed you! I can suggest half a dozen delightful people who will be happy to go with you.”
“No doubt; but I wanted you.”
“Robert, you are undeniably Oriental; the despotic habit still clings to you. If one swallow doesn’t make a summer, neither does one day’s hunting make an Englishman.” ”

“ In Rhoda and Hilda the influence of their father and of Ada Warren was evident; they appeared absolutely free from unreasoning kinds of prejudice, and were strong in the faith of the beautiful, which is woman’s salvation.
This visit Kingcote repeated twice before the end of July, not oftener, though he had invitations to do so. In the days through which he now began to live, it was seldom that he could regain the mood in which it was possible to mingle with society of any kind, even though the process might have relieved him. ”