R. D. Blackmore

“ They hauled Octavius Pell up in the manner of a cod–fish, and he was so bruised and stupefied, that he could not tell what he had gone for. They only saw floating timber and gear, and wreck of every sort drifting, till just for one sight–flash a hoary head, whiter than driven waters, leaped out of the comb of the billow. A naval man, or a military—who knows, and to whom does it matter?
Brave men ashore, all waiting ready, dashed down the steep of death to save him, if the great wave should toss up its plaything. All Rushford strained at the cables that held them from the savage recoil. ”

“ Then he looked away from Sir Cradockʼs eyes, and asked, “Is it possible that you have ever thought so?”
“I have tried not,” answered Sir Cradock, with his wasted bosom heaving. “God knows that I have struggled against it. Garnet, have pity upon me. If you have any of our blood in you, tell me the truth, what you think.”
“I not only think, but know, that the devil only could have suggested such an idea to you. Man, for the sake of the God that made you, and made me as well as your brother, and every one of us brethren, rather put a pistol to your heart than that damned idea. In cold blood! ”

“ Will there ever be an age when chemists metaphysical will weigh—no more by troy weight, and carat, as now the mode is, but by subtle heart–gas—our liking for a woman? Let us hope there never will be.
That soft Georgiana Corklemore, so lively, lovely, and gushing, focussed all her fascinations upon Rufus Hutton. She knew that she had to deal with a man of much inborn acuteness, and who must have seen a hundred ladies quite as fair as Georgie. But had he seen one with her—well, she knew not what to call it, though she thoroughly knew how to use it? So she magnetized him with all her skill ”

“ The most fearful thing, for a new hand, was, of course, the night–work; and Stephen Morshead, delighted to have such a mate at last, had begged to leave Cradock the day–spell, at least for the first three weeks; for to Stephen the moon was as good as the sun, and sweet sleep fell like wool when plucked at, and hushed the tramping steeds of the day–god. ”

“ Now for your acting, Georgie; now for your self–command. We shall admire, henceforth, or laugh at you, according to your present conduct.
She was equal to the emergency. She commanded her eyes, and her lips, and bosom, after that one expansion, even her nerves, to the utmost fibre—everything but her colour. The greatest actor ever seen, when called on to act in real life, can never command colour if the skin has proper spiracles. The springs of our heart will come up and go down, as God orders the human weather. ”

“ I see you want to be off quite as much as fair Polly does. Ah, what a thing it is to have a happy home!”
Here Mrs. Corklemore sighed very deeply. If a woman who always has her own way, and a woman who is always scheming, can be happy, she, Georgie, must be so; but she wanted to stir compassion.
“Come,” she said, after turning away, for she had such a jacket on—the most bewitching thing; it was drawn in tight at her round little waist, and seemed made like a horseʼs body–clothes, on purpose for her to trot out in,—“come, Dr. Hutton, say good–bye, and forgive me for beating you.” ”

“ If, at the time Sir Cradock condemned his only son so cruelly, he had looked at him once, and read the sorrow so unmistakeable in his face, the old man might have repented, and wept, and saved a world of weeping. A tear in time saves ninety–nine; but who has the sense to yield it?
Soaked and tired out at last, he reached his little lodgings—quite large enough for him, though—and found Black Wena warming the chair, the only chair he had to sit on. Unluckily, he did not do what a man who cared for himself would have done. ”

“ And they say that the poor—poor darling who is gone, was himself attached—let us hope that it was not so; however, I cannot believe, Uncle Cradock, that you have not even been told of it.”
“But I tell you, Georgie, that it is so. Perhaps you disbelieve me in your anxiety to screen them?”
“You know better than that, dear uncle. I believe you, before all the world. And I will screen them no longer, for I think it bad and ungrateful of them. And after all you have done for them! Why, surely, you gave them the living! It makes me feel quite ill. Ingratitude always does.” ”

“ And believing that Pearl had loved Clayton Nowell, and was grieving for him bitterly, how could Amy help contrasting that misery with her own happiness?
For Amy was nice and happy now, in spite of Cradockʼs departure, and the trouble he had departed in. He loved her almost half as much, she believed, as she loved him; and was not that enough for anybody? His troubles would flow by in time; who on earth could doubt it, unless they doubted God? He was gone to make his way in the world, and her only fear was lest he should make it too grand for Amy to share in. ”

“ Our own staunch hearths rocked under us, and we looked for the walls to fall in upon us, as every mad rush came plunging.
Miss Eudoxia sat with Amy, near the kitchen fire; at least where the fire should have been, but the wind had quenched it long ago. Near them cowered Jemima and Jenny, begging not to be sent to bed. They had crawled up–stairs to see about it, and the floor came up to them—so they said—like the shifting plate of the oven. The parlour chimney–stack had fallen; but, in Godʼs mercy, clear and harmless from the roof of the house. ”

“ So rector and curate, old man and young man, trudged along together, each bending low, and throwing his weight, like a quoit, against the wind; each stopping and crouching at every tenth yard, as the blast irresistible broke on them. Crusted with hunks of froth pell–mell, like a storm of eggs on the hustings, drenched by pelting sheets of spray, deafened by the thundering surf, and often obliged to fly with the wind from a wave that rushed up scolloping, they battled for that scoop of the bay where the ship must be flung by the indraught. ”

“ Cradock went away, of course, now her own father was come; and the savage bargee would have gone on his knees, and crawled in that fashion—wherein all fashion crawls—down the rough stairs, every one of them, if the young man would only have let him. We are just beginning to scorn the serfdom of one mind to another. We begin to desire that no man should, without fair argument, accept our dicta as equal to his own in wisdom. ”

“ If I could suppose it any disgrace to me, I should deserve to be kicked by your errand–boy all round this shop, Mrs. Ducksacre; and I am surprised you misunderstand me so. Why, I know this little girl well; and her name is Louisa Jupp.”
“Tiss Loo,” said the little child, standing up on tiptoe, and spreading out her arms to Cradock. All the children loved him, as the little ones at Nowelhurst would run after Mr. Rosedew. Children are even better judges of character than dogs. ”

“ Nowell Corklemore—so proud of having obtained at last an invitation to Nowelhurst, so confident that, once let in, you can wedge out all before you, like Alexanderʼs phalanx—call a halt, and shape your wiles, and look to belt and buckler, have every lance fresh set and burnished, every sword like a razor; for verily the fight is hard, when art does battle with nature. ”

“ When Bull Garnet read this letter—handed to him, with three great bows of the Chinese pattern, by the pompous Major Blazeater—his face flushed to a deep amethyst tinge, which subsided to the colour of cork. Then he rolled his great eyes, and placed one strong finger across the deep channels of his forehead, and said, “Let me think, sir!”
“Hurrah,” said the Major to himself, “now we shall have something to redeem the honour of the age. It is a disgrace for a fellow to live in a country where he can never get satisfaction, although he gets plenty of insult.” ”

“ The soft–hearted parson was shocked at this apparent apathy; and thought her no true woman. Who is not wrong sometimes? It was a very rare thing for John Rosedew to judge man or woman harshly. But only half an hour ago that poor woman had been up–stairs, neglecting till, present and future, estranging some excellent customers, leaving a wanton shop–boy to play marbles with Spanish chestnuts, while she did her most misguided best to administer to sick Cradock soup wildly beyond her own economy, and furiously beyond his powers of deglutition. ”

“ But he havenʼt done that these three days now; too weak, Iʼm afeard, too weak for it.”
John Rosedew sighed heavily for the bright young mind, so tried above what it was able to bear; then, as he kissed the flaming forehead—sometimes flaming and sometimes icy—he thought that it might be the Fatherʼs mercy to obliterate sense of the evil. For the mind of the insane, or at least its precious part, is with Him, who showers afar both pain and pleasure, but keeps at home the happiness. ”

“ Nay, and I could almost swear there were two bast mats from Covent Garden, gloriously fixed as bed curtains, mats from that noble market where a rat prays heaven vainly to grant him the coat of a water–rat.
There, by Cradock Nowellʼs bed, sat the faithful untiring nurse, the woman who had absorbed such a quantity of strap, and had so kindly assimilated it. Meek–spirited Rachel Jupp waited and watched by the bed of him through whom she had been enfranchised. Since Issachar Jupp became a Christian she had not tasted the buckle–end once, and scarcely twice the tongue–end. ”

“ We are never so eloquent for another as when our own hearts are moved deeply by the feeling of wrong to ourselves; unless, indeed, we are very small, and that subject excludes all others.
So it came to pass that the grand new carriage was ordered to the door, and Sir Cradock would himself have gone—only Rufus Hutton had left him, and the eloquence was oozing. The old man, therefore, turned back on the threshold, saying to himself that it would be hardly decent to appear in public yet; and Mrs. OʼGaghan was sent instead, sitting inside, and half afraid to breathe for fear of the crystal. ”

“ Nowell Corklemore. He felt, as he crossed the hall with her, that the beauty of his waistcoat had raised some artistic emotion in a bosom as beautiful as its own. Oh, Rufus, think of Rosa!
Let none be alarmed at those ominous words. The tale of Cradock Nowellʼs life shall be pure as that life itself was. The historian may be rough, and blunt, and sometimes too intense, in the opinion of those who look at life from a different point of view. But be that as it will, his other defects (I trust and pray) will chiefly be deficiencies. ”

“ Nor less the solid, heavy powers that have to stay and break the storm, no less did they, the beechen clump, the funnelled glens, the heathery breastwork, even the depths of forest night—whence common winds shrink back affrighted—even the bastions of Norman oak, scarred by many a tempest–siege, and buckled by the mighty gale of 1703,—one and all they whispered of the stress of heaven impending. ”

“ By it, and with his face and eyes set towards the earth, a tall and powerful man, stripped to the waist, was leaning, with one great arm beneath his forehead, and bloody stripes across his back. The drooping of his figure, the woe in every vein of it, the deep and everlasting despair in every bone—it was an extremity of our human nature, which neither chisel nor pen may approach, nor even the mind of man conceive, until it has been through it. ”

“ John Rosedew caught his darling child, and drew her to his knees, with the frying–pan in her hand; and then he made her look at him, and she tried to have her eyes dry. Do what she might she could not speak, only to let her neck rise, and her drooping eyelids tremble.
“My own lifeʼs love, I have told you the worst. God is very good to us. Cradock has been at the point of death, but now he is better a little. Only his mind is in danger. And it must come home very slowly, if it comes at all. Now, darling, you know everything [315] .” ”

“ The parson approached it cautiously, for he knew that desperate men, and criminals under a ban, still harboured sometimes in the Forest. As he drew nearer, the feeble light, glimmering through the entrance, showed him at once what tree it was, because the rays glanced through two [308] dark holes under the bulging and beetling brow, which peasants call “the eyes of God.”
John Rosedew was as brave a man as ever wept for anotherʼs grief, or with the word of God assuaged it. No man could have less superstition, unless (as some would have us believe) all religion is that. ”

“ They had hunted her to her grave. Who may contend with destiny? She lay down under a moving coal–train, and resigned herself to die. But first she must ask for sympathy, although so unlikely to get it. She looked once more at her wounded foot, and shivered and sobbed with the agony; and then gave vent to one long low cry, to ask if no one loved a poor dog there.
Cradock heard it, and started so that it was nearly all up with him too. Thoroughly he knew the cry, wherein she had wailed for Clayton. He flung down his book, and dashed to the place, and there he saw Wena, and she saw him. ”

“ Wena sat waiting and nodding upwards, on the yard and a half of brown drugget, which now was her chiefest pulvinar, and once or twice she nudged her master, and whined about supper and bedtime. But Cradock only patted her, and improved the turn of his sentence. He was making one last effort to save from waste and ridicule his tastes and his education. A craftsman, if he have self–respect, is worthy, valuable, admirable, nearer to the perception of simple truth than some men of high refinement. ”

“ Few are the good who have such luck—for the success is not of merit, any more than it is in other things; more often indeed some fish–tailed coxcomb is a womanʼs Dagon, doubly worshipped for crushing her—but when that luck does fall to the lot of a simple and honest young fellow, he piles his triple mountains up to the everlasting heaven, but makes no Babel of them. A man who chatters about his love soon exhausts himself or his subject.
John Rosedew, after receiving that letter, shut every book on his table, chairs, and desk, and chimney–piece. ”