Mrs. Oliphant

“ It is he that has taken her away. No, it is not her fault, it is your fault!” cried Harry. “I should have grown a good man. I should have given up everything she did not like; and now you have made up some devilish conspiracy, and you have taken her away.”
“Harry, do you remember that you are talking to your mother?” cried Lady Augusta, with trembling lips.
“My mother! A mother helps one, loves one, makes things easy for one!” he cried. “That’s the ordinary view. Excuses you, and does her best for you, not her worst; when you take up your rôle as you ought, I’ll take mine. ”

“ Cousin Edgar, what will you think of me? I have always been poor, and Charles is poor—how can I put that out of my mind?”
“I do not blame you,” said Edgar, feeling ashamed both of himself and her. And then he added, “He is a rich man’s son, but his father is not old; and he would not receive you gladly into his family. Forgive me that I say so—I ought to tell you that I am not a fair judge. I am going to marry Harry’s sister, and they object very much to me.”
“Object to you!—they are ill to please,” cried Margaret, with simple natural indignation. ”

“ He stopped short, half-appalled, half-satisfied that he had spoken his mind.
“Harry, how dare you?” cried Gussy, facing him. “Do you not see how you are wounding mamma? Has there ever been a time when she has not stood up for you? And now because she is grieved to think that you are going to ruin yourself, unwilling that you should throw yourself away——”
“All this comes beautifully from you!” cried Harry, with a sneer—“you who have never thought of throwing yourself away. But I am sorry for you, Gussy. I don’t triumph over you. ”

“ A man may sacrifice his own happiness, but has he any right to sacrifice the woman he loves? It sounds vain, does it not?—but if she chooses to think this her happiness, am I to contradict her? I will do all that becomes a man,” cried Edgar, unconsciously adopting, in his excitement, the well-known words, “but do you mean to say it is a man’s duty to crush, and balk, and stand out against the woman he loves?”
“You are getting excited,” said Mr. Tottenham.{162} “Speak lower, for heaven’s sake! Earnshaw; don’t let poor Mary hear of it to-night.” ”

“ What a strange world it is, and how doubly strange is human nature! Willie had but to hold up a finger, and Margaret would follow him to the end of the earth; though the rest of his friends judged him rightly enough, and though even little Jeanie, though she loved, could scarcely approve her brother, Margaret was ready to give up even her hope of wealth and state, which she loved, for this Sultan’s notice. Strange influence, which no man could calculate upon, which no prudence restrained, nor higher nor lower sentiment could quite subdue! ”

“ Why should not people love and marry, without all these frightful complications? Beatrice was not so melancholy as the rest. She got a certain amount of pleasure out of the imbroglio; she even hoped that for herself there might be preparing something else even more romantic than Gussy’s—more desperate than Harry’s. Fate, which had long forgotten the Thornleigh household, and permitted them to trudge on in perfect quiet, had now roused out of sleep, and seemed to intend to give them their turn of excitement again. ”

“ There could not be a better listener, or a more delightful disciple; she might not perhaps know a great deal herself, but then she was so willing to adopt your views, or at least to be enlightened by them. Lady Mary sat by, and looked at her after the promenade round the conservatories, with all a woman’s admiration for beauty of the kind which women love. This, as all the world knows, is not every type; but Margaret’s drooping shadowy figure, her pathetic eyes, her soft paleness, and gentle deferential manner, were all of the kind that women admire. ”

“ Those regrets and longings for what might have been, which Lady Mary could not prevent from influencing her, even when she sincerely wished that the might have been should never be, were summarily extinguished in Harry’s treatment. Of course the old must crop up, and confront the new, and of course the complication must be faced and put up with, not run away from. Such was the young man of the world’s philosophy. Edgar sat long after he was gone, once more feeling himself the instrument on which every one played, rather than a conscious actor in the imbroglio. ”

“ Tottenham, too, had departed to his private retirement, and Edgar, not knowing, any more than Harry himself did, that young Thornleigh was set over him as a sentinel, to guard him from all possibility of mischief, was but too glad to find himself with an uninstructed bystander, from whom he could have those bare “news” without consciousness or under-current of meaning, which convey so much more information than the scrap of enlightenment which well-meaning friends dole out with more and more sparing hands, in proportion as the feelings of the hearer are supposed to be more or less concerned. ”

“ In short, Clare, though she acted with a determination and steadiness which seemed to add force to her character, and showed her natural powers as nothing else had ever done, was not, for the first time in her life, a free agent. She had been taken possession of by a passionate sense of injury, which seized upon her as an evil spirit might seize upon its victim. In the very fierceness of her individual resentment, she ceased to be an individual, and became an abstraction, a woman wronged, capable of feeling, knowing, thinking of nothing but her wrong. ”

“ Loch Arroch and all its homely circumstances became as a scene of the Scriptures to Gussy; she seemed to see a glory of ideal hills and waters, and the moonlight filling the sky and earth, and the loveliness of the night which made it look “but a step” between earth and heaven. Her heart grew so full over those details that Edgar, unsuspicious, never discovered the compunction which mingled in that sympathetic grief. ”

“ But Lady Mary, superior to ordinary prejudices as she was, was not so superior as to be altogether just to Margaret, who, though she deserved blame, got more blame than she deserved. The Thornleighs all believed that she had “laid herself out” to “entrap” Harry—which was not the case; and Lady Mary looked coldly upon the woman who had permitted herself to be loved by a man so far above her sphere. And then Lady Mary disliked the doctor, who never could think even of the most interesting “case” so much as to be indifferent to what people were thinking of himself. ”

“ A woman sharp and clever to make the best of her bargain; a man trying legal cheats upon her; two people drawn together by some semblance of what is called passion, yet each watching and scheming, how best, on either side, to outwit the other. Never was tale of misery and despair so pitiful; for this was all baseness, meanness, calculation on both hands. They were fitly matched, and it was little worth any man’s while to interfere between them—but, O heaven! to think of the other fate involved in theirs. This roused Edgar to an excitement which was almost maddening. ”

“ Then she tried to take a little comfort from his laughter, and said, with a faint smile, though still trembling, “You are laughing at me, you unkind boy!”
“I am not laughing at all!” cried Harry, “except, indeed, at the misfortune which gave her such a name. It is one of Aunt Mary’s favourite jokes.” Then he changed his tone, and took his mother’s hand and put it up caressingly to his cheek to hide the hot flush that covered it. “Mother, you don’t know how I love her. She is the only woman I will ever marry, though I should live a hundred years.” ”

“ Harry did not know how he made his exit. One moment, it seemed to him he was surrounded with an atmosphere of light and sadness from those wonderful blue eyes, and the next he was driving along the darkling road, with the sound of the wheels and the ponies’ hoofs ringing all about him, and unsympathetic laughter breaking from under Lady Mary’s veil by his side.{44}
“Mrs. Smith!” she cried; “what a prodigious anti-climax! It was all I could do to keep my gravity till I got outside. That wonderful creature with such eyes, and her pretty plaintive voice. It is too absurd. Mrs. Smith!” ”

“ Sims came in, pushing the door open before her, with the tray in her arms; upon which there was much bread and butter of which he partook, finding it delightful, with a weakness common to young men in the amiable company of the objects of their affection. He drew his chair to the table opposite to Margaret, and set Sibby up on an elevated seat at the other side, and felt a bewildering sensation come over him as if they belonged to him. It was not a very high ideal of existence to sit round a red and blue table in a cottage parlour of a winter’s afternoon, and eat bread and butter ”

“ I do not know why it should be humbling for a woman to love without return, when it is not humbling for a man; but it is certain that for nothing in the world would Margaret have breathed the cause of her lingering unwillingness to do anything which should separate her from Willie; and that Edgar felt hot and ashamed for her, and turned away his eyes, that she might not see any insight in them. ”

“ Little though Edgar was disposed to resume the strange relationship which linked him to the little party of homely people in the farm parlour, with whom he felt so little sympathy, he had no alternative but to obey. The early dinner was spread when he got downstairs, and a large gathering of the family assembled round the table. All difference of breeding and position disappear, we are fond of saying, in a common feeling—a touch of nature makes the whole world kin; but Edgar felt, I am afraid, more like the unhappy parson at tithing time, in Cowper’s verses, than any less prosaic hero. ”

“ Without knowing anything of the real facts of the story, the Thornleighs were admitted to see her, on Clare’s own suggestion; for her warped mind was cunning to see where an advantage could be drawn from partial publicity. They found her on her sofa, looking, in the paleness which had now become habitual to her, like a creature vanishing out of the living world.
“Why did you not let us know you were ill? You must have been suffering long, and never complained!” cried Lady Augusta, moved almost to tears. ”

“ In Italy the stars take more interest in human life than they do in this colder sphere. Those that were proper to that space of heaven, crowded together, Edgar thought to himself, to see his bride. On the horizon the sea and sky blended in one infinite softness and blueness ”

“ Not in vain did Harry flatter himself on being a man of the world. He was fond of Edgar, but he would have considered his sister’s choice of him, in present circumstances, as too ludicrous to be thought of. And there can be little doubt that Harry’s demeanour had an influence upon Edgar far more satisfactory for Lady Augusta than her sister’s intervention had been. All the visionary possibilities that had revealed themselves in Lady Mary’s warning, disappeared before the blank suavity of Harry. ”