Mrs. Oliphant

“ Writers of fiction, and those whose work it is to realise and exhibit, as far as in them lies, the vicissitudes and alterations of life, are more usually employed in illustrating the advance of that tide—in showing how it is caught or lost, and with what an impetus, and what accompaniments it flings itself higher and higher up upon the beach, with the sunshine triumphant in the whirl of the big wave as it turns over and breaks into foam, and the flood claps its hands with a rejoicing noise. ”

“ A moment is like an hour in such a horror of discovery; the idea that was too dreadful to entertain becomes possible, certain, familiar, before you have had time to draw a second breath. His father not dead—not a shameful suicide to cheat the insurance companies as his son had once feared—but a still more shameful survivor, having cheated them, having saved his family and cleared his name by the most dreadful, the most false of frauds, the most tremendous of lies. ”

“ All this time he kept himself carefully away from speech or look of Janet, who had been, strange as it was, less affected by the calamity than any one in the house, and had a look in her dry eyes which Fred could not understand. His heart revolted against her; a woman without feeling, who had no tears for the man who had surrounded her with comforts and ensured her well-being for her life—the man who was her child, whom she had nursed, but never mourned.{242} A sort of hatred sprang up in the lad’s mind towards this old woman. ”

“ It does not often happen that the women have the lightest part to bear in any such calamity. But in this case it was so. Mrs. Dalyell mourned her husband most sincerely and deeply, forgetting every little flaw in his character, and gradually elevating him into the position of a perfect man—the best husband, the kindest father! And the girls mourned him with torrents of youthful tears, with a conviction that they never could smile again, never get beyond the blackness of the first grief, the awful sensation of the catastrophe. ”

“ The moment when we first perceive that our individual tide has turned is one which few persons will find it possible to forget. We look on with a piteous surprise to see our little triumphs, our not-little hopes, the future we had still believed in, the past in which we thought our name and fame would still be to the good, whatever happened, all floating out to sea to be lost there, out of sight of men. ”

“ Sandford’s gentle contempt came back upon him with a shock of humiliation and shame. To sneer at a man who had suffered by him, who had given money for his unsaleable work—a man who had thus shown himself a better man than he: for Daniells had never said a word, probably never would have said a word, listened to the painter’s calm assumptions and taken no notice, having it in his power all the time to shame him! ”

“ If it were possible to imagine the case of a man who, walking serenely over a wide and peaceful country, should suddenly, with the softest, scarcely audible, roll of the pebbles under his feet, see the earth yawn before him and find himself on the brink of a fearful precipice, that would have been like his case: but not so bad as his case, for the man would have it in his power to draw back, to retire to the peaceful fields behind: whereas, to Mr. Sandford, there were no peaceful fields, but a gulf all round that one spot of undermined earth on which he stood. ”

“ Sandford was surprised—he was taken unawares, and the greeting touched his heart. “After all, perhaps it isn’t that,” he said to himself.
“What a piece of luck that you should have come in just then! Why, that’s Sir William Bloomfield—just the very man for you to know.”
“Why for me more than another? I know his name, of course,” said Mr. Sandford, “and he seems pleasant; but I’m too old for new friends.”
“Too old; stuff and nonsense! You’re always a-harping on that string. He’s just the man for you, just the man,” said Daniells, rubbing his hands. ”

“ It seems to breathe of a time when the familiar person will be gone for ever. And how much more when the beloved occupant has gone mysteriously—absent, lost in the unknown—no one knowing where he has passed the night! Mrs. Dalyell was not a fanciful woman, she was not given to morbid imaginations, but when she glanced into her husband’s dressing-room next morning her heart sank for a moment with this chill, that would not be reasoned away. ”

“ For the insurance money would never have been paid to the representatives of a suicide. Poor Bob! poor Bob! it was unworthy, it was dreadful to associate that title with his honest name. And yet—if it had been a planned thing, it was not an honest thing, although he had paid for it by the sacrifice of his life. This thought rankled in Mr. Wedderburn’s mind. Dalyell had been, so to speak, absolved by public opinion from that guilt. ”

“ Mrs. Sandford herself was a little indignant too. Her sympathies were all with the children. She saw disapproval in his subdued looks, and was ready at any moment to spring to arms in defence of her children. And indeed sometimes, in his great trouble, which no one divined, Mr. Sandford would sometimes become impatient.
“I wish,” he would say, “that Jack would do something—does he never do anything at all? It frets me to see a young man so idle.”
“My dear Edward!” cried his wife, “it is the Long Vacation. What should he have to do?”
“And Harry?” Mr. Sandford said. ”

“ A great trail of yellow nasturtium, dropping from the vase at the corner, showed even in the dark a ghost of colour, and thrust its pungent odour into Fred’s nostril. The faint billows of the trees stretched out dark and darker over the landscape below, and the cold clear light in the sky seemed to look on like a spectator who knows far more than the actors what is and is going to be. ”

“ The tramp of its mighty feet across the wastes of the sea, bringing the man home to his wife, the son to his mother, is poetry, is joy to this eager spirit. I am disposed in moderation to accept the belief of the young author who has a most broad and manful perception of life as something more than love-making, and to acknowledge the mysterious monstrous thing which he makes heroic. ”

“ But that would be just like Bob D’yell—ready enough to come to you if you were in trouble, to give all his mind to what was to be done: but not if the trouble was his own: more likely then to hide himself, to think shame of it, as if misfortune was a man’s own fault. Mr. Wedderburn did not know what to do, whether to hurry into Edinburgh to make inquiries, or to wait on, and see whether he would arrive by the late train. ”

“ His wife would believe that her husband, a great painter, one of the first of the day, had fully earned that recognition, and would be proud of the pension or the money raised for her as of a monument in his honour. And then the insurances. There could be no doubt, he said to himself, with a rueful smile, that so much substantial money would be much better to have than a man who could earn nothing, who had become incapable, whose work nobody wanted. ”

“ Whatever trouble there may be in the mind respecting a man who has been in his grave for more than a year, it dies away under the progress of gentle time. To keep up the pressure of such misery there must be new events occurring or to be{266} dreaded. What is altogether past affects the spirit in a different way. If there was a tragic secret unrevealed in the story of Robert Dalyell’s death, it was hidden for ever in the bitter waves that had swallowed him up: and the course of his young life had gradually swept from Fred’s mind the burden of his father’s tragedy. ”

“ Sandford sat a little outside of that lively circle with a book in his hand. But he was not reading; he was watching them with a strange fascination;{101} not willing to check them; oh no! feeling a helpless sort of wonder that they should play such pranks on the edge of the precipice, and that none of them should divine—that even his wife should not divine! The animated group, full in the light of the lamps—girls and young men in the frank familiarity of the family interrupting each other, contradicting each other, discussing and arguing—was as charming a study as a painter could have desired ”

“ A man in such straits may sometimes save himself as Hamlet would have done, with a bare bodkin, had not the thought of that something after death which might be worse even than present calamity deterred him; but if he is of other mettle and cannot run away, or leave his post save at the lawful summons, the question, What he is to do? is overwhelming. No hope of being carried to any island valley of Avillion by stately queens in that boat which is going out with the tide. And no rebellion against fate will do him the slightest service. ”

“ Dalyell, was roused a little by the desperate self-repression with which Fred received the official announcement. “My boy,” he said, “it may vex you that there should be any change, but what we are doing is no wrong to you—nor to any man.”
“I have not said it was,” said Fred sullenly.
“No, you have not said it was—but you seem to think it’s an unpardonable step. It is nothing of the kind,” said Mr. Wedderburn, indignant. “The time will come when you will think fit to marry, and then your mother will be turned out of her house; and that will seem the most natural thing in the world. ”

“ In an artist’s life there are often hair-breadth ’scapes, and now and then the most prosperous comes, as it were, to a dead wall—which is always battered through by a little perseverance or else opens by itself, melting asunder at the touch of some heaven-sent patron or happy accident, and so all goes on more prosperously than before. Mr. Sandford had passed through many such crises at the beginning of his career, and even when fully established had never been{62} entirely certain from whence his next year’s income was to come. ”

“ The flood which in its rise seemed almost individual, pervaded by something like conscious life of force and pleasure, becomes like an abstract relentless fate when it pours back into the deep gulf of a sea of forgetfulness, with a rush of whitened pebbles dragged from the beach, or a long expanse of uncovered sands left bare, studded with slippery fragments of rock and the bones of shipwrecked boats. ”

“ In the morning all might seem as sure to go on for ever—that is, for our time, which means the same thing—as the sky over{10} us, or the earth beneath our feet; but before evening there was a different story, and the tide was in full retreat, carrying with it both convictions of the past and hope in the future, not only our little laurels, all tossed and withered, and our little projects, but also the very heart of exertion, our confidence in ourselves and providence. ”

“ Dalyell. “Where did she hear such a word? Amatory!”
“It means friendship,” cried Susie, with a burning blush. “I know—I know it does! I mean Davie has such lots of friends—and Fred has none; or at least none that would be of any use if we were to have a ball.”
“But we are not going to have a ball,” said the mother; “it is a great deal too much trouble. Ask the Scrymgeours what they think a week hence. The whole house will be turned upside down, and the servants put out of the way, and everybody made wretched. No, Susie, there will be no ball.” ”

“ But, indeed, to say old is merely to express a comparative quality, for Mr. Dalyell of Yalton was a man under fifty, in the full force and vigour of life.{154}
“Ah, yes,” he said, “Fred, it’s fine times for you now, my boy. But you must remember that life is not made up of bumps and bump-suppers, and that there are worse things than a proctor waiting for you, perhaps, round the next corner. I don’t want you not to play—but you must learn to work a little, too.” ”

“ The sense of a dreadful humiliation, far more than was reasonable, filled the painter’s mind. The man whom he had always liked, but partly despised—Daniells, who was as ignorant as a pig, who knew a picture indeed when he saw it, but had not a notion why he liked it, nor could render a reason or tell how he knew one to be bad or another good—that he should be losing by his kindness, should be out of pocket, burdened by three “Sandfords” with their faces against the wall! ”