Cary

“ A nice kid. He’s all fussed up about it. Mr. Cary is a regular tin god to him. You know what the rest of ’em are saying. Mr. Cary hit the beach last night and got soused. His first trip down this way, and the Cartagena rum slipped one over on him. He’ll turn up with a head on him before the ship sails. It will sure put him in wrong with the old man.”
“Who dares say these wicked things?” blazed Teresa. “Mr. Cary is not a common sailor bum. ”

“ Cary. “He is just across the river a few miles. Do you know him?”
“No, I do not. Not personally, that is. What sort of a man is he?”
“Well, sir, he does not stand very well,” answered Dr. Cary, deliberately.
“Ah! Why, if I may ask?” Major Welch was stiffening a little.
“Well, he went off to the radicals,” said Dr. Cary, slowly, and Ruth was amused at the look on her father’s face.
“But surely a man may be a republican and not be utterly bad?” said Major Welch. ”

“ His finger paused in tracing the outline of the sword.
"Oh, you mustn't say that," cried Cary, "you must remember what you've done already—more than many older officers do in their whole lives. And then—"
He interrupted her.
"That sounds well," he said. "But life isn't worth much to a man when he's laid on the shelf just when he's beginning to live— But the wasted years and the inactive life ahead!" He went on rapidly, beating the fist of one hand against the palm of the other. "Oh, think what inactivity will mean after the life I've been trained to, and worked for, and loved!" ”

“ Cary was a man of action and did not let the grass grow under his feet. He rode straight to the Knight Marshal's lodging by Charing Cross, where he slept till morning. At nine o'clock he heard that the Lords of the Council were in the old orchard at Whitehall, and he sent the Marshal to tell them that he awaited their commands. They were determined that Cary should not move; but they told the Marshal to send for him, as if they meant to dispatch him at once to King James. ”

“ There were a goodly number of officers in her audience, mostly lounging in the rear of the ranks upon the grass, but none the less for that foemen worthy of her steel. She had every opportunity to use her fascinations with one end, and only one, in view. In satisfying her own love of excitement, she could easily, under the guise of entertainment, do these boys in uniform more harm than good. To tell the honest truth it was with this fear in mind that Cary now watched her. ”

“ Drivers and nurses and doctors—these were the characters whom Cary had chosen with which to make his appeal to the laggard nation of us at home.
The Englishwoman, the Belgian mother with her little starving children, the French officer, the dying French poilu—these were the foils for the actress, torn from her stage by a message brought by one of the American ambulance men to the hospital that her brother was passing. It was her part to create the scene with which to stir the blood, hers to cry to the French officer: “Why are the Americans not here to prevent his dying? ”

“ But once a courtier always a courtier. Throughout these stirring years Cary was perpetually haunted by anxiety as to how he stood in the Queen's favour, and when he could spare the time would go South to show himself at Court. At the end of the year 1602 he was in London and found Elizabeth very ill. ”

“ I care not a pin for my own life; and hard as you are you would never have the heart to destroy your own little Caryl. He may be called Caryl—you will not deny him that, although he has no right to be called Carne. ”

“ Instantly they were in a group of welcomers, gentlemen, servants, and dogs; negro boys running; dogs frisking and yelping and young men laughing about the door of the newly arrived carriage. While through it all sounded the placid voice of Dr. Cary reassuring the visitors and inviting [18] them in. He brought the host to them, and presented them:
“My friends, Mr. Welch and young Mr. Middleton—my cousin and friend, Mr. Gray.” It was his customary formula in introducing. All men were his friends. ”

“ They pleaded that they might see Cary once. The post surgeon tried an experiment.
"The child's strength is going fast for lack of sleep," he told Mrs. Stewart, "We'll see what your boys can do."
He brought Rob in first, and Trevelyan's son stood at the foot of the bed, and was silent as they had bidden him to be; but they could see that he trembled.
Cary's eyes, bright with delirious fever, rested on him for a moment. Then she started up in bed.
"It's Rob, dear," said Rob's aunt, bending over her.
"No, it isn't!" cried Cary. "No—it—isn't! Take him away; away—a-w-a-y!" ”

“ What vision did those staring eyes see but unutterable, unpenetrable blackness? What speech could that grinning mouth ever form again? What sound could pierce the seal laid on the hearing?
They had told him that the trooper had a sweetheart waiting for him somewhere off in Ireland. Well, even love could not break the bonds of death, and make him speak and hear and caress her as of old.
There was something mightier than love after all—mightier even than the love he had for Cary. ”

“ At school he was “always thinking about home,” and when the family moved again to Walthamstow, within a short distance of his first home, and to a house boasting a moat and a wooded island, he was eagerly responsive to the poetic suggestions conveyed by these romantic accessories. When at the [Pg 11] end of 1851 he left school to prepare under a private tutor for Oxford, he renewed his early familiarity with Epping Forest and spent most of his holidays among the trees that had not apparently changed since the time of Edward the Confessor. ”

“ Thus, this prose romance, of all that Morris wrote, is warmest and most personal. The historical setting is an aid, not an obstacle, to the imagination. The pathos of the real life touched [Pg 203] upon, the knowledge that the hopeful spirit of the preacher was once alive in the land, and that the response of the men of Kent was given in truth and with the might of angry, living hearts, lends a certain solidity and vitality to the figures and inspires Morris to a sturdier treatment of his material than legends could force from him. ”

“ The third of nine children, he was born at Walthamstow, in Essex, England, on the 24th of March, 1834. On the Morris side he came of Welsh ancestry, a fact accounting perhaps for the mingled gloom and romance of his temperament. His father was a discount broker in opulent circumstances, and his mother was descended from a family of prosperous merchants and landed proprietors. On the maternal side a strong talent for music existed, but in the Morris family no more artistic quality can be traced than a devotion to general excellence, to which William Morris certainly fell heir. ”

“ The true spirit of that past it is hardly necessary to say he did not revive,—no writer has ever revived the true spirit of any age antecedent to his own,—and Morris, with his remarkable faculty for eliminating from his mental conceptions whatever did not please his taste, was wholly unfitted by temperament, however well fitted by his acquirements, to carry through successfully a task so tremendous. ”

“ It is not altogether surprising to find some of Morris’s most loyal followers admitting that they can make nothing of books written in this archaic prose.
In the subsequent romances the comparative sturdiness imparted by the writings of the North gives place to a mildness and grace suggestive of those early French romances the charm of which Morris had always keenly felt. We still have much the same vocabulary and more or less use of the same magic arts, “skin-changing” holding its own as a favourite method of overcoming otherwise insuperable difficulties ”

“ All minor accessories were thoughtfully considered and for the most part designed by Morris or by friends pressed into service at his eager demand. He found little to content him in the articles of commerce on sale at the orthodox shops in the early sixties. “In looking at an old house,” he says in one of his books, “we please ourselves by thinking of all the generations of men that have passed through it, remembering how it has received their joy and borne their sorrow and not even their folly has left sourness on it ”

“ The friendship thus spontaneously formed on the verge of [Pg 24] manhood lasted until Morris died. In their studies, in their truant reading, in their later aims and work, the two, diametrically as they differed in aspect and in temperament and in quality of mind, were sympathetic and dear companions. Together they joined a group of other happily gifted men—Fulford, Faulkner, Dixon, Cormell Price, and Macdonald—who met in one another’s rooms for the disputatious lounge over the exuberant ideals by which they were in common inspired. ”

“ This fact alone might be sufficient to establish the seat of the poem; but there cannot remain a doubt in any unprejudiced mind, when the following are added; viz. that the character of the village-preacher, the above-named Henry, (the brother of the poet,) is copied from nature. He is described exactly as he lived; and his "modest mansion" as it existed. Burn, the name of the village-master, and the site of his school-house, and Catherine Giraghty, a lonely widow;
The wretched matron forced in age for bread
To strip the brook with mantling cresses spread ”

“ In one form or another he was constantly trying to embody them that others might see them with his eyes and worship them with his devotion. “The spirit of the new days, of our days,” says the old man in News from Nowhere, “was to be delight in the life of the world, intense and almost overweening love of the very skin and surface of the earth on which man dwells.”
[Pg 21]
CHAPTER II. OXFORD LIFE.
Like the majority of the students who went up to Oxford in the fifties, Morris matriculated with the definite intention of taking holy orders. ”

“ But neither I nor you can settle that, nor the King, for kings and men alone,” she laughed gently, “cannot make a man’s fate.”
“I thank you, Madame. His Majesty, I hope, will know that I am his servant always, but my decision is already taken, and from to-day I shall not live at Versailles nor Paris; De Nérac is to be my home, and perhaps some day Beau Séjour.”
Madame had dropped the roll of paper in an astonishment she failed to master. Her lips parted as she looked him in the face.
“Yes,” André repeated. “The Marquise de Beau Séjour and I have decided. Nothing can alter that decision.” ”

“ He had now long been happy in work calling out all this enthusiasm, but the world was going on without, to use his own words, “beautiful and strange and [Pg 145] dreadful and worshipful.” He was approaching the time when his conscience would no longer let him rest in the thought that he was “not born to set the crooked straight.”
[Pg 146]
CHAPTER VII. PUBLIC LIFE AND SOCIALISM.
In the autumn of 1876, just after the publication of Sigurd the Volsung, Morris took his first dip in the ocean of public affairs, the waves of which were presently almost to submerge him. ”

“ The eyes the color of the blue velvet bonnet were turned full upon Henry Lord, Ph.D. They swam in tears and the color came and went in her cheek; she was forty, but it was a lovely cheek still.
"I will think it over," he replied with some embarrassment as he wrapped the picture again and handed it to her. "Meantime I am certainly very much obliged to you. You seem to have an uncommon knowledge of young people. May I ask if you are, or have been, a teacher?" "Oh, no!" Mrs. Carey remarked with a smile, "I am just a mother,—that's all! Good night." ”

“ They are soon to be put to the test, as in the wood they come upon Atra and their other friends, who have set out to seek them, being anxious for their welfare, and who have been overcome by caitiffs and bound and held prisoners. ”

“ Carey gave a cough, and stood up. He pointed to a wreath at the foot of the bed.
"That's from the Squire," he said. He spoke in a low voice as though he were in church, but one felt that, as a clergyman, he found himself quite at home. "I expect tea is ready." ”

“ And comes and looks the way she looks,
And fears the thing she fears:
Till a glad shout from the bearers
Thrills the stricken man and wife—
"Give thanks, for your son has saved our land,
And God has saved his life!" ”

“ A hero in the uniform of a Chevau-léger de la Garde with a naked sword and I—a woman—defenceless, alone. You an English officer—you—you!”
She had slipped from his side. The table with the smoking lantern was between them.
[114] “Monsieur le Vicomte de Nérac,” she whispered, “any woman can make a fool of you.”
André slammed the door behind him. “Traitress,” he swore. “Your last hour has come.”
She gazed at him calmly. “Listen,” she said, “listen! Monsieur Spy. To-morrow you will be shot by the English—and the papers”—she laughed—“will still help towards the ruin of France.” ”

“ She stared at the money incredulously.
“There, girl,” he urged, for a woman’s distress, even though she were only a peasant, hurt him, “be happy and buy a fat and spotted cow.”
She kneeled to kiss his hand. “Monseigneur,” she sobbed, “is kind to a poor wench. Surely the good God has sent him to me,” and she poured her hot tears of gratitude on the ruffles of his sleeve.
“I am happy again,” she murmured. “Yes, I will buy a cow and be happy,” and she began to sing, flinging the coarse matted hair out of her eyes.
André watched her contentedly; it was pleasant to see her joy. ”