Mrs. Humphry Ward

“ Haven't you any thanks for Faversham?"
"I never asked him to do it! How can I look after all that! It'll kill me. I want to sing! I want to go on the stage!"
He sat down beside her. Her dark head covered with its silky curls, her very black eyes and arched brows in her small pink face, the pointed chin, and tiny mouth, made a very winning figure of her, as she sat there, under a garden vase, and an overhanging yew. And that, although the shawl was huddled round her shoulders, and the eyes were red with tears.
"You will be able to do anything you like, Felicia. You will be terribly rich." ”

“ She could not forget the handsome head as she had seen it last at the door of Melrose's library; or the melodramatic black and white of the face, of the small, peaked beard, the dark brows, pale lantern cheeks, and heavy-lidded eyes. All the picturesque adventurers of the world betray something, she thought, of a common stamp.
At last one evening, when Tatham was away on county business, and Felicia had gone to bed, Victoria suddenly unburdened herself to Cyril Boden, as they sat one on either side of a November fire, while a southwesterly gale from the high fells blustered and raged outside. ”

“ Lydia's face, as she sat on the grass at Lady Tatham's feet, looking toward the fells, was scarcely visible to her companion. Victoria could only admire the beauty of the girl's hair, as the wind played with it, and the grace of her young form.
"I am afraid he is disappointing all his friends," she said gravely.
"Is it his fault?" exclaimed Lydia. "Mr. Melrose must be mad!"
"I wonder if that excuses Mr. Faversham?"
"It's horrible for him!" said Lydia in a low, smothered voice. "He wants to put things right?" ”

“ But "Life at her grindstone" had been busy with Faversham, and in the sifted and sharpened soul laid bare to her, the woman recognized her mate indeed. Face to face with cruelty and falsehood, in others, and with the potentialities of them in his own nature; dazzled by money and power; and at last, delivered from the tyranny of the as though by some fierce gaol-delivering angel, Faversham had found himself; and such a self as could never have been reasonably prophesied for the discontented idler who in the May meadows had first set eyes on Lydia Penfold. ”

“ Impossible—if she were in love with or on the point of an engagement to Harry Tatham.
She had forgiven him for his touch of jealous ill-temper! As they stood together at the last in the Duddon garden, she had said, "I must hear about to-night! send me a word!" And he carried still, stamped upon his mind, the vision of her—half shy, half eager—looking up.
For the rest, the passion that was rapidly rising in the veins of a man full of life and will, surprised the man himself, excited in him a new complacency and self-respect. For years he had said to himself that he could only marry money. ”

“ Melrose resumed, "I want a secretary—I want a companion—I want some one who will help me to arrange the immense, the priceless collections there are stacked in this house—unknown to anybody—hardly known, in the lapse of years, even to myself. I desire to unravel my own web, so to speak—to spin off my own silk—to examine and analyze what I have accumulated. There are rooms here—containing masterpieces—unique treasures—that have never been opened for years—whose contents I have myself forgotten. That's why people call me a madman. ”

“ Melrose was late.
Faversham rose and hobbled to the window, his hands on his sides, frowning—a gaunt figure in the rainy light. With the return of physical strength there had come a passionate renewal of desire—desire for happiness and success. The figure of Lydia Penfold hovered perpetually in his mind. Marriage!—his whole being, moral and physical, cried out for it. But how was he ever to marry?—how could he ever give such a woman as that the setting and the scope she could reasonably claim? ”

“ Undershaw observed him, with an amusement carefully concealed. He had suspected from the beginning that in these possessions of the poor stricken youth means might be found for taming the formidable master of the Tower. For himself he scorned "la curiosité," and its devotees, as mere triflers and shell-gatherers on shores bathed by the great ocean of science. But like all natural rulers of men he was quick to seize on any weakness that suited his own ends; and he said to himself that Faversham was safe.
"They are valuable?" he asked, as Melrose still sat absorbed. ”

“ They plunged into the subject of the estate; and Faversham stood amazed at her knowledge of the dales-folk, their lives and their grievances. At the end, he drew a long breath.
"By George!—can I do it?"
"Oh, yes, yes, yes!" said Lydia eagerly, driving her needle into the sofa cushion. "You'll reform him!"
Faversham laughed.
"He's a tough customer. He has already warned me I am not to manage his estates like a Socialist."
"No—but like a human being!" cried Lydia, indignantly—"that's all we want. Come and talk to Lord Tatham!" ”

“ Recollections of a small bare house in the Apuan Alps above Lucca, and of all that she and Felicia had endured there, ran through her mind, mingled with visions of Threlfall as she had known it of old, its choked passages—the locked room from which she had stolen the Hermes—the great table in Edmund's room with its litter of bric-à-brac—Edmund himself....
She trembled; alternately desperate, and full of fears. The thought that Melrose was only a few miles from her—that she was going to face and brave him after all these years—turned her cold with terror. And yet misery had made her reckless. ”

“ Then take Melrose. He too is determined by his relation to wealth. Wealth has just ruined him—burnt him up—made out of him so much refuse for the nether fires. Faversham again! Wealth, the crucial, deciding factor! The testing with him is still going on. He seems, from your account, to be coming out badly. And lastly, the girl—who, like you, is indifferent to wealth, but for different reasons; who probably hates and shrinks from it; like a wild bird that fears the cage. You, my dear lady—you and Harry—have got so used to wealth, its trammels no longer gall you. ”

“ Felicia, sitting in a corner behind her mother's sofa, could not take her eyes from him. The tall, fair English youth, six foot two, and splendidly developed, the pink of health, modesty, and kindly courtesy, was different from all other beings that had ever swum into her view. She watched him close and furtively—his features, his dress, his gestures; comparing the living man in her mind with the photograph upstairs, and so absorbed in her study of him that she scarcely heard a word of the triangular discussion going on between her mother, Tatham, and Victoria. ”

“ XXII Boden was just coming to the end of his evidence. The adjourned inquest on Melrose, held in the large parlour of the old Whitebeck inn, was densely crowded, and the tension of a charged moment might be felt. Men sat gaping, their eyes wandering from the jury to the witness or the gray-haired coroner; to young Lord Tatham sitting beside the tall dark man who had been Mr. Melrose's agent, and was now the inheritor of his goods; to the alert and clean-shaven face of Undershaw, listening with the concentration of the scientific habit to the voice from the witness-box. ”

“ Lydia hesitated, and in the soft light he saw her flush.
"He said something. Of course it would be a great, great honour!"
"An honour to him," said Tatham hotly.
"I'm afraid you don't know how to respect great men!" she said laughing, as they drew out of the shadow of the Italian garden with its clipped yews and cypresses, and reached a broad terrace whence the undulations of the park stretched westward and upward into the purple fissures and clefts of the mountains. ”

“ Penfold, looking across at Lydia. Youth, happiness, manly strength came in with him. He had no features to speak of—round cheeks, a mouth generally slightly open, and given to smiling, a clear brow, a red and white complexion, a babyish chin, thick fair hair, and a countenance neither reserved nor foolishly indiscreet. Tatham's physical eminence—and it was undisputed—lay not in his plain, good-tempered face, but in the young perfection of his athlete's form. Among spectacles, his mother, at least, asked nothing better than to see him on horseback or swinging a golf-club. ”

“ Netta, accustomed to Edmund's "queerness," and determined to hold her own, settled herself deliberately opposite her visitor, and was soon complaining in her shrill voice of the loneliness of the place and the damp of the climate. Melrose never once looked at his wife. He was paler than usual, with an eager combative aspect, quite new to Netta. He seemed for once to be unsure of his ground—both to expect attack, even to provoke it—and to shrink from it. His eyes were fixed upon Lady Tatham, and followed her every movement. ”

“ Melrose continued, in a deliberately even voice, "concerns a fortune of rather more—than a million sterling—allowing little or nothing for the contents of this house. I inherited a great deal, and by the methods I have adopted—not the methods, my dear Faversham, I may say, that you have been recommending to me to-night. I have more than doubled it. I have given nothing away to worthless people, and no sloppy philanthropies have stood between me and the advantages to which my knowledge and my brains entitled me. ”

“ Melrose took up the lamp, and carried it once more through the ground-floor of the Tower. Save for the dying fires, and the sputtering lamp, everything was dark and still in the spacious house. The storm was dying down in fitful gusts that seemed at intervals to invade the shadowy spaces of the corridor, driving before them the wisps of straw and paper that had been left here and there by the unpacking of the great writing-table. There could be no ghosts in the house, for nothing but a fraction of it had ever sheltered life ”

“ That golden fusion of all the upper air; that "intermingling of Heaven's pomp," spread on the great slopes of Skiddaw—red and bronze and purple, shot through each other, and glorified by excess of light; that sharpness of the larch green on the lower slopes; that richness of the river fields; that shining pageantry of cloud, rising or sinking with the mountain line: pondering these things, absorbing them, she looked at her drawing from time to time in a smiling despair; the happy despair of the artist, who amid the failure of to-day looks forward with passion to the effort of to-morrow. ”

“ What Susy said to her unwillingness to go south was partly true. She would have liked to stay and watch the progress of things on the Melrose estates; to be at hand if Mr. Faversham wanted her. She thought of Mainstairs—that dying girl—the sickly children—the helpless old people. Indignant pity gripped her. That surely would be the first—the very first step; a mere question of weeks—or days. It was so simple, so obvious! Mr. Melrose would be shamed into action! Mr. Faversham could not fail there.
But she must go. She had her profession; and she must earn money. ”

“ Rose-pink, white and crimson, the waves of colour roll among the rocks, till Cumbria might seem Kashmir. Lydia's looks sparkled, as she spoke of it. The artist in her had feasted.
"Won't you come and paint it?" said Tatham bending forward eagerly. "You'd make a glorious thing of it. Mother could send a motor for you so easily. Couldn't you, mother?"
"Delighted," said Lady Tatham, rather perfunctorily. "They are just in their glory—they ought to be painted." ”

“ The thought of what would—what must be—Uncle Mackworth's judgment on his present position, was perhaps the most tormenting element in Faversham's consciousness. He faced it, however, with frankness. His uncle would have condemned him—wholly. The notion of serving a bad man, for money, would have been simply inconceivable to that straight and innocent soul. Are there not still herbs to be eaten under hedgerows, with the sauce of liberty and self-respect?
No doubt. But man is entitled to self-fulfilment; and men pursue vastly different ways of obtaining it. ”

“ The jests of the nurse, as to the practical difficulties of living in such a house, enlightened him further. Melrose, it appeared, lived like a peasant, and spent like a peasant. They brought him tales of the locked rooms, of the passages huddled and obstructed with bric-à-brac, of the standing feuds between Melrose and his tenants. None of the ordinary comforts of life existed in the Tower, except indeed a vast warming apparatus which kept it like an oven in winter; the only personal expenditure, beyond bare necessaries, that Melrose allowed himself. ”

“ Trees, fells, grass were steeped in a wan, gold light, a mingling of sunset and moonrise. The sky was clear; the gradations of colour on the hills ethereally distinct. From a clump of trees came a soft hooting of owls; and close behind them a tall hedge of roses red and white made a bower for Lydia's light form, and filled the night with perfume.
"What do great men matter?" said Tatham incoherently as they paused; "what does anything matter—but—Lydia!" ”

“ But she was, before everything, one of those persons who thrill under the appeal of beauty to a degree that often threatens or suspends practical energy. Save for the conscience in her, she could have lived from day to day just for the moments of delight, the changes in light and shade, in colour and form, that this beautiful world continually presents to senses as keen as hers. Lydia's conscience, however, was strong ”

“ So she's refused Harry—and Duddon?"
"Which no doubt will commend her to you!" said Victoria, not without a certain bristling of her feathers.
"It does," said Boden quietly. "Upon my word, it was a fine thing to do."
"Just because we happen to be rich?" Victoria's eyelids fluttered a little.
"No! but because it throws a little light on what we choose to call the soul. It brings one back to a faint belief in the existence of the thing. ”

“ The painter jerked away his cigar, and sat up. "The multitude is a brute beast!"
"A just beast," murmured Boden.
"Anything but!" said the painter. "But you know my views. In every generation, so far as art is concerned, there are about thirty men who matter—in all the world!"
"Artists?" The voice was Lucy Manisty's.
"Good heavens, no! Artists—and judges—together. The gate of art is a deal straiter than the gate of Heaven."
Boden caught Victoria's laugh.
"Let him alone," he said, indulgently. "His is the only aristocracy I can stand—with apologies to my hostess." ”