John Oliver Hobbes

“ To go now was misery, yet she dared not stay away. The sunny morning mixed with her mood, which was one of determination to risk all in order to win all. Driven by a sense of her capabilities for endurance, she faced, with a kind of exultation, the possible disaster or remorse which might follow her action. Was there not a possible joy also? For ten days now she had been ill in body as well as mind; she had suffered a hard struggle. She knew now that she could not, could not, could not, no matter what happened, become the wife of Lord Reckage. ”

“ The result of great self-delusion for so long a period was a condition of mind in which she was practically unable to distinguish between candour and disingenuousness. Any appearance of deceit—which she regarded as wrong in itself—always excited her scorn, but desperation now urged a step which might lead, she thought, to much good or much evil. That it could lead to more evil than a loveless marriage was not, however, to be feared. She started from the house with feverish cheeks, a beating pulse, and a new strange consciousness of power—power over herself, her fate, the world. ”

“ He thought he had obtained a mystic recognition of the terrorless but uncommunicating Joy of life which while men live they pursue, desiring it with the one human craving which survives every misfortune, every thwarted hope, all enslavement of the heart's small freedom—the thirst for happiness. Was man, whom God had made in His own Image, but a shadow on the unstable wind? Could it be true that he came in with vanity and departed in darkness, his soul bereft of God, knowing not his time, finding not the work that is done under the sun, born to companion worms in the dust? ”

“ I am ashamed to talk so much about myself.”
“In his case, I see no help but resignation to the will of God,” said Pensée.
“But that resignation is an awful thing,” said Reckage. “It is a shade better than the atheism of despair; yet only a shade better.”
By degrees Pensée was learning why Robert had such a strong, tenacious attachment to this man. He was always faithful to his mood. All he did and all he said represented accurately all he thought and all he felt. Some live a dual life—he lived but one; and, with his faults, peculiarities, and egoism, there was never the least dissimulation. ”

“ Brigit's lovely face gained intensity only under the influence of sorrow. Then it became human. At other times it was merely exquisite. Now Sara's countenance had all the changing qualities of nature itself. She had, too, the instinctive arts of sympathy which are so much rarer than the actual gift. Far enough was Sara from the triumph which she was imagining; far enough was Orange from the least disloyalty; but he was fully alive to the danger of regarding her as a woman to be fought against. To fight in such cases is to admit fear of conquest. ”

“ The recurrence of familiar sentiments on the essentials that make up the condition known as happiness would neither convince, nor inspire, the powers of an imagination which, with all its richness, was, apart from the purely artistic faculty, analytical and foreboding. Self-doubt, however, has no part in passion. Of the many miseries it may bring, this, perhaps the worst of human woes, can never be in its train. Men in love—and women also—may distrust all things and all creatures, but their own emotion, like the storm, proves the reality of its force by the mischief it wreaks. ”

“ While we have our Howards, our Talbots, and our Poulets—to say nothing of the De Courcys and Cliftons—it would surely seem excessively absurd to endure the intrusion of French émigrés into our midst.”
“How I hate the great world!” exclaimed Sara, with vehemence; “how I dislike the class which ambition, wealth, and pride separate from the rest of humanity! My only happiness now is found in solitude.”
“Your mother, dear Sara, had—or fancied so—this same desire to shun companionship and be alone. Her delicate health after our marriage made her fear society.” ”

“ At any rate, I hope this confidence will increase your kindness toward me.”
“I have no kindness toward you—none at all,” said Sara. “I have no kindness toward any living creature. I should like to die and come to an end. I wasn't born to put up with make-shifts. Other women may be resigned to that paltry way of existing. If they can't have what they want, they will take what they don't want; they will take what they hate, and grin—yes, they will grin and bear it. And after a little while, because they become gradually drunk with suffering, they begin to think they are noble. ”

“ I begin to see that I have been called to make every sacrifice—marriage, ambition, happiness, all must be abandoned: abandoned while I live, not after I have made myself, by years of self-discipline, indifferent to such considerations.... But for its piety, the Imitation is, I think, the most pessimistic book in the world. The Exercises of St. Ignatius (perhaps because he was a saint) produce quite an opposite effect upon me; they exhort us to hope, action, courage. They make one a citizen of both worlds. Merely to read him is a campaign in the open air against a worthy foe. ”

“ Parflete would not waver or seem less exquisite under this discipline. Their dream of love would become unparadised. It would gain a sadness, a melancholy, a note of despair hard to endure and most difficult to repress. Reckage had no transcendentalism in his own philosophy: he divided men into two classes—those who read, and those who could not stand, Dante. He included himself among the latter with a frankness at once astonishing and welcome even to numbers who thought him, in most matters, a hypocrite. The hold of the world was growing daily stronger upon him. ”

“ But I find a box-office, and machinery, and vulgarity everywhere, though they are called by other names.”
Sara coloured and looked away.
“I am getting stronger now,” continued Brigit. “I can lift up my head and see the world as it is. I like it—yes, with all its griefs and its horrors—I like it. When one is ill or sentimental one hates it, because it wasn't made for the sick, and it was not created us a playground for lovers. One may love—yes, but one must work. I intend to love and work at the same time.” ”

“ The bitter pleasures of a conscience which caresses its worst burden were the only real ones of her daily existence. When she could say, at the end of the day, “I have fooled them all: they think I am happy, I am not: they think Reckage amuses me, he doesn't. They think I delight in these dull dinners and balls, I hate them,” a sort of exultation—the pride of a spirit singing under torture—would fill her whole being. All youth that is strong and thoughtful has much of this instinct of dissimulation. ”

“ In conceivable circumstances it might be a duty to dissever such a bond; it might be a duty to die of starvation rather than steal a loaf, and, as death would ultimately quench the craving stomach, so a broken soul, in time, would cease lamenting for its maimed energy. Let heart-sickness pass beyond a certain bitter-point and the heart loses its life for ever. Had Robert's marriage been impossible, had he decided, on that account, to go away [156] from Brigit's influence, had he vowed, in some paroxysm of despair, to see her no more, to pluck out his eye—to forget her—what would have happened? ”

“ A great flame, successive flames, of terror swept over her, as she feigned placid sleep in the little cabin, at the thought of the news poor Reckage would have to break on the morrow. How would Robert bear it? That he would act a noble and true part she could not doubt. But at a certain degree of suffering, the strongest man can think of nothing except himself, and she felt already, in anticipation, the dumb torture she would have to endure in looking on, helpless and unnoticed, at an agony which she could neither share nor relieve. ”

“ All men did not love after this fashion, he knew, but humanity was full of surprises, and he had been too calm a student of other men's lives to feel astonishment at any fresh revelation either of their pain, their perversity, or their humours. He had felt so sure, however, that Robert would, in the end, get the better of that unhappy attachment; everything in the process of time had to surrender to reason, and it was not possible, he thought, that a strong, self-reliant man could long remain subdued by a mere infatuation. ”

“ The peculiar tenderness of her voice was in itself a charm against ill-humour. A rush of bitter self-reproach told Robert that his dissatisfaction had been the inevitable result of too many blessings on a base nature. He tried to speak; he watched instead, with a desperate, eager gaze, the play of her expressive features.
“I wonder,” she said, “what our life is to be? Not that I wish to pry into the future, but, for some reason, I can never feel settled. Every morning is a surprise. I think, too, about your character ... your career. ”

“ Not prudish, not morbid, not envious, not sentimental, and not indolent, she was perhaps especially endowed for the tantalising career which the stage offers to the ambitious of both sexes. Acting came to her as music comes to the true musician. She never considered whether she would become a great actress or a rejected one: the art in itself was her delight, and she found more happiness in reciting Molière and Shakespeare alone in her own room than she ever received, even at the height of her fame, from her triumphs before the world. ”

“ She was wretched in Orange's company [357] because every moment so spent showed her that his heart was fixed far indeed from her. But the wretchedness suffered that way was stifled in the torments she endured when she wondered, miserably, in loneliness, what he was thinking, doing, saying; where he was, with whom he was, and how he was. The despair of unrequited love was thrice intensified by jealousy. “Why did he like that little adventuress, that white china Rahab?” she asked herself again and again. “It is just because she has bewitched him. It is not real love—it isn't any kind of love. ”

“ Sinætha, weaving spells by the moon, was not more determined or more irretrievably in love than Sara. The danger of such wild moods is as attractive to the very young as it is terrifying to the more mature. Perfectly conscious of her beauty, she felt able to defy, sue, and conquer at the same moment. Orange had never seen her to such brilliant advantage. The instant he entered the room and met her eyes, which shone with a most touching kind of timidity and a most flattering joy, he had to realise the need of strict discipline where [277] constancy is a rule of existence. ”

“ She laughed with real joyousness and clung more closely to his arm.
“I didn't tell you,” she exclaimed, “because you would have said just what you are saying now. You are the one. All the rest is a means of forgetting you. It is something resembling happiness to be alone in the turmoil of the world with one unspoilt illusion. This illusion in my case is a little idea that I could be a great actress—perhaps! Don't look grave, Robert. It makes you sad when I talk this way.”
“Those who can be disillusioned have no convictions. Disillusion is the failure of a half-belief. ”

“ The more she had seen of Brigit Parflete the more she had been struck with her—struck with her moodiness, struck with her contempt for received opinions, her vigour and independence of will. Was she the wife to further the advance of a man of extraordinary ability, already much handicapped on the world's course by a proud spirit, a [127] reckless, impetuous disdain of creatures generally considered the pink of human excellence? He was passionately in love, and the strength of this sentiment carried, for the time, every thought of his being along with it. ”

“ The sombre sentimentality which lurks in most young girls of seventeen was not in her character at all, and in its stead she possessed the gaiety and carelessness of feeling which belongs to imaginative rather than to sensuous natures. A boy-like spirit showed itself in all her words, movements, moods; her womanhood still slept, and thus, while her intelligence made her an unusual companion and her beauty presented a constant appeal to all that is romantic, it was inevitable that melancholy and reserve should enter largely into the passionate love which Robert felt for her. ”

“ In those last sharp moments of introspection she had gained such a knowledge of suffering that a fire seemed to have consumed her vision of life, reducing it to a frightful desert of eternal woe and unavailing sacrifice. Partially stunned, and partially blinded by misery, she felt the awful helplessness and pain of what is sometimes called the second birth, a crisis in all human development when the first true realisation comes that the soul is a stranger, a rebel, strong as eternity, weak as the flesh, free as the illimitable air. ”

“ Sara, in black velvet and sable, with ostrich plumes and golden beads, with flashing eyes and a gipsy's flush, with all the self-command of a woman trained for society, living for it and in it, with all the self-assurance of a woman in an unassailable position, handsome, rich, flattered, spoiled, domineering, and unscrupulous, with all the insolence of an egoism which no human force could humiliate and no human antagonist terrify, Sara seemed the one who was destined to succeed superbly in the war of life. ”

“ Reckage was very touched by this tribute.
“And her best feelings,” said he, “ought to make us—at our best—very humble.”
Pensée lifted her veil just above her eyes, clasped her hands tightly together, and kept her earnest glance full upon his.
“I believe,” she continued, “that if it were in man, or woman, to command the heart, you would have her entire affection. I believe she is unhappy. During the last week she has had many ups and downs. She has passed with astonishing rapidity from the lowest despair to the height of joy. She has tried to distract her mind by incessant occupation. ”

“ My dear friend, all the trouble in life is due to forced affection. Look at Beauclerk! Think of Agnes Carillon! What fiery fierceness of sorrow in both their hearts! Papa and I were at Lady Churleigh's last Sunday. Agnes was there, looking, believe me, lovely. No portrait does her justice. One finds marvellous beauty, now and again, in the middle classes. She is an exquisite bourgeoise. She is not clever enough to feel bored; she is too well brought up to be fascinating; too handsome to insist on homage. Plain women are exacting and capricious—they make themselves worth while. ”

“ There is a time in love—just as there is a period in life—when it seems enough in itself. It is independent of circumstances and persons. O, but that time soon passes! As you learn more, you look for more. And work is no cure for dissatisfaction. If you can live through it you will just be a machine with one refrain—‘I know nothing! I have nothing! I am nothing!’”
The two young girls did not look at each other. Brigit could recognise an agitation of the soul in the imperceptible sadness of the voice, and she guessed poor Sara's secret. ”