Part 19 (1/2)
'Windy,' he murmured to himself, 'windy, dark and windy--birds won't lie--not old Harry's fault. How black it grows! We must be gone by nightfall, squire. Where's that young dog gone? Arter the larks, the brute.'
Old Squire Lavington sobbed like a child.
'You will soon be home, my man,' said the vicar. 'Remember that you have a Saviour in heaven. Cast yourself on His mercy.'
Harry shook his head.
'Very good words, very kind,--very heavy gamebag, though. Never get home, never any more at all. Where's my boy Tom to carry it? Send for my boy Tom. He was always a good boy till he got along with them poachers.'
'Listen,' he said, 'listen! There's bells a-ringing--ringing in my head. Come you here, Paul Tregarva.'
He pulled Tregarva's face down to his own, and whispered,--
'Them's the bells a-ringing for Miss Honor's wedding.'
Paul started and drew back. Harry chuckled and grinned for a moment in his old foxy, peering way, and then wandered off again.
'What's that thumping and roaring?' Alas! it was the failing pulsation of his own heart. 'It's the weir, the weir--a-was.h.i.+ng me away--thundering over me.--Squire, I'm drowning,--drowning and choking! Oh, Lord, how deep! Now it's running quieter--now I can breathe again--swift and oily--running on, running on, down to the sea. See how the grayling sparkle! There's a pike! 'Tain't my fault, squire, so help me--Don't swear, now, squire; old men and dying maun't swear, squire. How steady the river runs down? Lower and slower--lower and slower: now it's quite still--still--still--'
His voice sank away--he was dead!
No! once more the light flashed up in the socket. He sprang upright in the bed, and held out his withered paw with a kind of wild majesty, as he shouted,--
'There ain't such a head of hares on any manor in the county. And them's the last words of Harry Verney!'
He fell back--shuddered--a rattle in his throat--another--and all was over.
CHAPTER X: 'MURDER WILL OUT,' AND LOVE TOO
Argemone need never have known of Lancelot's share in the poaching affray; but he dared not conceal anything from her. And so he boldly went up the next day to the Priory, not to beg pardon, but to justify himself, and succeeded. And, before long, he found himself fairly installed as her pupil, nominally in spiritual matters, but really in subjects of which she little dreamed.
Every day he came to read and talk with her, and whatever objections Mrs. Lavington expressed were silenced by Argemone. She would have it so, and her mother neither dared nor knew how to control her.
The daughter had utterly out-read and out-thought her less educated parent, who was clinging in honest bigotry to the old forms, while Argemone was wandering forth over the chaos of the strange new age,- -a poor homeless Noah's dove, seeking rest for the sole of her foot and finding none. And now all motherly influence and sympathy had vanished, and Mrs. Lavington, in fear and wonder, let her daughter go her own way. She could not have done better, perhaps; for Providence had found for Argemone a better guide than her mother could have done, and her new pupil was rapidly becoming her teacher.
She was matched, for the first time, with a man who was her own equal in intellect and knowledge; and she felt how real was that s.e.xual difference which she had been accustomed to consider as an insolent calumny against woman. Proudly and indignantly she struggled against the conviction, but in vain. Again and again she argued with him, and was vanquished,--or, at least, what is far better, made to see how many different sides there are to every question. All appeals to authority he answered with a contemptuous smile. 'The best authorities?' he used to say. 'On what question do not the best authorities flatly contradict each other? And why?
Because every man believes just what it suits him to believe. Don't fancy that men reason themselves into convictions; the prejudices and feelings of their hearts give them some idea or theory, and then they find facts at their leisure to prove their theory true. Every man sees facts through narrow spectacles, red, or green, or blue, as his nation or his temperament colours them: and he is quite right, only he must allow us the liberty of having our spectacles too.
Authority is only good for proving facts. We must draw our own conclusions.' And Argemone began to suspect that he was right,--at least to see that her opinions were mere hearsays, picked up at her own will and fancy; while his were living, daily-growing ideas. Her mind was beside his as the vase of cut flowers by the side of the rugged tree, whose roots are feeding deep in the mother earth. In him she first learnt how one great truth received into the depths of the soul germinates there, and bears fruit a thousandfold; explaining, and connecting, and glorifying innumerable things, apparently the most unlike and insignificant; and daily she became a more reverent listener, and gave herself up, half against her will and conscience, to the guidance of a man whom she knew to be her inferior in morals and in orthodoxy. She had wors.h.i.+pped intellect, and now it had become her tyrant; and she was ready to give up every belief which she once had prized, to flutter like a moth round its fascinating brilliance.
Who can blame her, poor girl? For Lancelot's humility was even more irresistible than his eloquence. He a.s.sumed no superiority. He demanded her a.s.sent to truths, not because they were his opinions, but simply for the truth's sake; and on all points which touched the heart he looked up to her as infallible and inspired. In questions of morality, of taste, of feeling, he listened not as a lover to his mistress, but rather as a baby to its mother; and thus, half unconsciously to himself, he taught her where her true kingdom lay,- -that the heart, and not the brain, enshrines the priceless pearl of womanhood, the oracular jewel, the 'Urim and Thummim,' before which gross man can only inquire and adore.
And, in the meantime, a change was pa.s.sing upon Lancelot. His morbid vanity--that brawl-begotten child of struggling self-conceit and self-disgust--was vanis.h.i.+ng away; and as Mr. Tennyson says in one of those priceless idyls of his, before which the shade of Theocritus must hide his diminished head,--
'He was altered, and began To move about the house with joy, And with the certain step of man.'
He had, at last, found one person who could appreciate him. And in deliberate confidence he set to work to conquer her, and make her his own. It was a traitorous return, but a very natural one. And she, sweet creature! walked straight into the pleasant snare, utterly blind, because she fancied that she saw clearly. In the pride of her mysticism, she had fancied herself above so commonplace a pa.s.sion as love. It was a curious feature of lower humanity, which she might investigate and a.n.a.lyse harmlessly as a cold scientific spectator; and, in her mingled pride and purity, she used to indulge Lancelot in metaphysical disquisitions about love and beauty, like that first one in their walk home from Minchampstead, from which a less celestially innocent soul would have shrunk. She thought, forsooth, as the old proverb says, that she could deal in honey, without putting her hand to her mouth. But Lancelot knew better, and marked her for his own. And daily his self-confidence and sense of rightful power developed, and with them, paradoxical as it may seem, the bitterest self-abas.e.m.e.nt. The contact of her stainless innocence, the growing certainty that the destiny of that innocence was irrevocably bound up with his own, made him shrink from her whenever he remembered his own guilty career. To remember that there were pa.s.sages in it which she must never know--that she would cast him from her with abhorrence if she once really understood their vileness? To think that, amid all the closest bonds of love, there must for ever be an awful, silent gulf in the past, of which they must never speak!--That she would bring to him what he could never, never bring to her!--The thought was unbearable. And as hideous recollections used to rise before him, devilish caricatures of his former self, mopping and mowing at him in his dreams, he would start from his lonely bed, and pace the room for hours, or saddle his horse, and ride all night long aimlessly through the awful woods, vainly trying to escape himself. How gladly, at those moments, he would have welcomed centuries of a material h.e.l.l, to escape from the more awful spiritual h.e.l.l within him,--to buy back that pearl of innocence which he had cast recklessly to be trampled under the feet of his own swinish pa.s.sions! But, no; that which was done could never be undone,-- never, to all eternity. And more than once, as he wandered restlessly from one room to another, the barrels of his pistols seemed to glitter with a cold, devilish smile, and call to him,--
'Come to us! and with one touch of your finger, send that bursting spirit which throbs against your brow to flit forth free, and nevermore to defile her purity by your presence!'