Harold Frederic

“ Do not think we need go away from England, if you want to stay; there will always be money enough—with your wisdom in controlling it. Perhaps we may even be able to restore Caermere. But if we are not, still it can be one of the noblest and most beautiful residences in England, when we learn together to understand its charm, and make it our home. Oh, when you see the magnificent hills and forests shutting it in on all sides—and the grim, fine old walls and towers of the castle itself! ”

“ I shall meet them, and know them, and not feel that I am bound to them at all—whereas Emanuel is like a brother to me, whom I have been with and loved all my life. And you,” he added, with a smile in his eyes—“you are more than any sister to me.”
“Well, then, let me talk to you like a sister,” she rejoined.
He thought he had not seen her before in precisely the mood which was discernible in her face and tone this morning. Outwardly she was as gay and light-hearted as ever, and certainly she had not seemed on any previous day to come so near being beautiful as well. ”

“ Everywhere about him was the historic impact of the Torrs. Their ashes were here—their banners and shields and tilting-helmets, their symbolical quarterings of the best arms of the West, their own proudest device of all. Their white bull on the green ground was familiar in England long before the broom-corn of the Angevins had been thought of. The clerkly pun on Tor and Taurus was as like as not older than the English language itself. All this made something mightier, more imposing and enduring, than any edifice to be reared by man alone. ”

“ I shall love no one in my life, or in another life, but you. I will not live without you. I will not willingly spend a day in all my years away from you. You are truly my other half—the companion, the friend, the love, the wife, without whom nothing exists for me. I am not young as you say I am, and I shall never be old—for in this love there is no youth or age for either of us. ”

“ There is such a thing as having too much past—especially when it is of the wrong sort. Caermere is as tenacious of its memories as a prison—and they are as unpleasant. It forces upon you its air of never forgetting a single one of its miseries and injuries—and you feel that it cannot remember any compensating joys. I could see how the effect of it got into your blood, and broke your nerve. Under ordinary circumstances men do not kiss their butlers, or even sob on their bosoms. But I understood perfectly how old Barlow appealed to you. ”

“ And you will make it all clear to me, will you not? in every detail what it is I am to do?”
“Oh, hardly to that length,” said Emanuel. He smiled once more—that grave, sweet, introspective smile of his, which suggested humor as little as it did flippancy—and spoke more freely, as if conscious that the irksome part of his task lay behind him. “We dream a great dream of you, but it would be folly to attempt to dictate to you at every stage of its realization. That would do you more harm than good, and it would be unfair to both parties, into the bargain. ”

“ He would no longer be pointed out and classified as somebody’s grandson—somebody’s cousin or grand-nephew. The world would recognize him as being himself. He felt assured, for example, upon reflection that Lady Cressage would not dream of questioning the fashion of the clothes in which he came to see her. She would perceive at once that he had developed beyond the silly pupilary stage of subordination to his coat and hat. She was so clever and sympathetic a woman, he felt intuitively, that these symbols of his emancipated condition would delight her. ”

“ When you go up to London, you must do as I have done since I was a youth: take a walk of a bright afternoon along Regent Street and Oxford Street, where the great millinery and drapers’ and jewelers’ shops are, and study the faces of the thousands of well-dressed and well-connected women whom you will see passing from one show-window to another. There will be many beautiful faces, and many more which are deeply interesting. ”

“ Looking perfunctorily across the chasm of death, their glances sought to, make interest with the living. He hated them both on the instant. As they wheeled, and by their measured steps forward drew slowly in their wake the bearers of the pall, the chant of the elder—“I am the Resurrection and the Life”—came vaguely to his ears, and found them hostile.
The interior of the old church—dim, cool, cloistral—was larger than Christian had assumed from its outer aspect. ”

“ Christian, struggling after his guide, wondered what else there was to see.
After a time it became obvious to him that the women who formed so large an element of the lazily shifting crowd were also the occasion of its being. They walked about, looking the men in the face with a cold, free, impassive scrutiny upon which, even if he had never seen it before, intuition would have fixed a label for him. Other women, from the plush seats on the outer edge of the circle, bent upon the whole moving mass of promenaders the same stoical, inscrutable gaze. ”

“ If ever there had been a youth bred and narrowed to the walks of peace, he was that young person. He who had never struck another human being in his life, that he could remember—what would such a tame sheep be doing in the open field, against the unknown, ferocious Osmanli Turk? The gross absurdity of the picture flared upon him, momentarily—and then the whole notion of armed adventure had vanished from his mind. ”

“ Christian wondered if he ought to put into words the comment which rose in his mind. “But you, and your father,” he ventured—“you personally—”
“Ah,” interposed Emanuel, with a rapt softening of expression in face and tone, “when women like my mother and my wife appear—that lifts us away from the earth and things earthly, altogether. But they are as rare as a great poem—or a comet. If they were plentiful there would be no need of any System. The human race would never have fallen into the mud. We should all be angels.” ”

“ But I am going to do it—I am going to know for myself what the real London and the real England are like. A thousand gentlemen in black clothes and silk hats, a thousand ladies with low-cut dresses and feathers in their hair—all thinking and talking about themselves and their own little affairs—that does not mean London. And a few large houses in the country, where these same people spend a few months riding after the hounds and shooting tame birds and wearying each other with idle, sleepy talk—that does not represent England. ”

“ When I announce to Emanuel that I reject his plans for my future, then I am left to myself to be that most ridiculous of objects—a man with a great station and no money to keep it up. That is what I must be here in England. But in other countries, that will not be the case. There will always be enough money for me to live like a prince upon—so long as I travel about, in my own yacht if I like, or reside simply and happily in the beautiful places of the earth, here and there, as the fancy possesses me. ”

“ He was in truth finishing the last stage of a journey into the unknown, the strange possibilities of which had for a week kept his nerves on the rack. The curtain of only one more night hung now between him and the revealed lineaments of destiny. To be alone with his perturbed thoughts, on this culminating day of anxious hopes and dreads, had been his controlling idea at Rouen. It was for this that he had bought the coupé seat, upon the rumor of the station that solitude was thus to be commanded. ”

“ He looked at her in silence. The face half turned from him, with its broad brow, its shapely and competent profile, the commanding light in its gray eyes, the firm lips drawn into tightened curves of proud resistance to any weakness of quivering—it was the face that had made so profound an impression upon him at the outset of that wonderful journey from Rouen. The memory became on the instant inexpressibly touching to him. She was almost as she had been then—it might well be the same sober gray frock, the same hat, save that the ribbon now was black instead of fawn. ”

“ This is Duke Street, which you must live in. This is the hour to get up, this is the hour to make calls, this is the corner of your card to turn down, this is the list of people at whose houses you must dine, these are your friends ready-made for you out of a book.’ And truly what is it all?—utter, utter emptiness. You are really not alive at all! You have no more personal sensation of your own existence than an insect. It is all this that I rebel against.”
She reclined a little in her chair, and covered him with a meditative gaze. ”

“ It was colder than they had thought, and the morning air was at once misty and fresh. In Leicester Square the scent of lilacs came to them; beside the pale, undefined bulk of the squat statue they caught the lavender splash of color which was sister to the perfume.
“By Jove, it’s spring!” said Dicky. He pointed out the flowers, and then, still drawing Christian’s arm to turn his attention to the square, recalled to him as they moved that this was the oldtime haunt of foreigners in London. ”

“ Christian kept a rapt gaze upon the prospect, and strove in silence to grasp the meaning of the words.
“On the land that you see before you,” Emanuel went on, “in one capacity or another, nearly two thousand human beings have homes. On your grandfather’s estates there must be nearly if not quite ten times that number. Think what this means. You will be in a position to affect the prosperity, the happiness, the well-being, body and soul, of fifteen or twenty thousand people. It is a little nation—a small kingdom—of which you will be the head.” ”

“ The old flowers are gone, and yet they are not gone. In the same way, my mother has been dead for sixty years, and yet this is still her garden, and she is still here—here in the person of me, her son, and of Christian, her great-grandson.”
“And I,” commented Lady Cressage, upon a sudden smiling impulse, “I alone am an intruding new species—like one of Cheltnam’s ‘niphetos’ buds on the old rose. I hasten to extricate myself.” And with a bright little nod and mock half-courtesy, she caught her gown in one hand, wheeled round and moved quickly down the path and through the hedge. ”

“ My dear creature, it is a grave, a mausoleum, a place of skulls and dead men’s bones! You have never seen such a family vault in all your days. When I even begin to think of undertaking the task of brightening it into life again, I grow dizzy. The immensity of the work unnerves me. And now I do not know if I shall ever put my hand to it. The country-gentleman idea—which you make so much of in England—it does not appeal to me. It is too idle—too purposeless. Of course my cousin Emanuel, he makes a terrible toil of it—and does some wonderful things, beyond doubt. ”

“ Even those who doubted most, shrank from hearing the prophecies of evil they felt prone to utter. Men who nourished almost buoyant hopes still hesitated to create a confidence which must be so precarious. While the faint sustained recitative of the priest in the church could be heard, insistent and disturbing like the monotone of a distant insect, and then the sounds of the organ once more, and of singing, fell upon the sunlit green, the horsemen spoke cautiously about the hounds. Even before Lord Porlock’s death, things had not been what they should have been. ”

“ Neither Lord Julius nor Emanuel has anything hostile to say about Edith Cressage, but she doesn’t quite appeal to their imagination, and so they find nothing of any sort to say. But it is only fair to remember that they are both men with peculiar and exacting standards for women. They would be equally silent about a hundred other ladies of unblemished character, and of beauty and wit untold. It is nothing at all against her that she hasn’t excited their enthusiasm. I do not know her at all well, but I think she is very nice. ”

“ It is that way with such men—I have seen that they hold themselves aloof—and others do not come freely near them. It frightens me—the thought of living without friends. I say to you solemnly that I would give it all—the position, the authority and dignity, the estates, Caermere, everything—for the assurance of one warm, human heart answering in every beat to mine! ”

“ The profile of this countenance, outlined for the moment against a cluster of vividly purple pleroma blossoms, had the delicacy of a rare flower, but it conveyed also the impression of resolute and enduring force. If the dome above could have generated voices of its own, these would have murmured to one another that here at last was a woman whom Caermere could not break or even easily bend. ”

“ They just like to be together—even though they may not speak for hours, and may be as different in temperament as chalk and cheese. That is the essence of friendship—and you cannot have love without it. The man and the woman must have the all-powerful sense of ideal companionship between them. They must be able to say with truth to themselves that the world will always be richer to them together than apart. ”