Robert Orange
in his own sorrowful thoughts, she striving vainly to distract him by a
tinkling prattle on every topic except the one nearest his heart. Oh,
how fearfully wide asunder they were! A sensation of the enormous
distance which can exist between two souls in daily companionship filled
her with a sickening, shivering heaviness. She thought she would have to
cry out because of the slow fire which seemed to scorch her dry and
aching eyes. Robert would never really need her, never really care about
her. This new trouble would take him farther away than ever. He would
burn all his ships, and any poor little tenderness he might have had in
the past for her, with them. Some great revulsion would take place in
his character; he would perhaps grow silent, reserved, enigmatic, his
face would show to the world the terrible, false, unknowable peace which
is the veil of the dead. It was useless to smooth her difficulties which
existed. It was foolish and wrong to encourage herself in unreal ideas
about him. It was best always to be straightforward and admit the
truth--no matter how bitter. And yet he had been kind and helpful to her
in a way in which scarce any one else could have been. She clung to the
belief that she would be able to do something to make his hour of trial
less severe. The hope which insinuates itself into every unrequited love
still lingered. He could at least always talk to her about Brigit: that
common memory would be a constant link between them. She had earned his
esteem, and perhaps with his esteem an affection deeper than he himself
realised. Under the pressure of a sudden and tragical necessity, he
would turn to her with the certainty that she would not fail him. She
was modest enough about her own powers. A remark she had once heard
Reckage pass, to the effect that religious women of devoted lives were
unhappily conspicuous, as a rule, for feebleness of mind and strength of
prejudice, haunted her as a kind of doom from which there was no appeal.
She knew, too, the verdict usually passed on those of either sex who
have the courage to maintain an unselfish attitude whether toward God or
some fellow-creature. But here she comforted herself by deciding that
her utter isolation in this universe rested on the fact that she did not
much deserve to be loved by anybody. This granted--not without a
pang--she felt the signs of weariness in her heart, but none of
wavering. She resolved to be foolish in the eyes of the self-satisfied.
Lord Reckage meanwhile was pacing the deck. His conversation with Pensee
had cast a darkness over his spirit. He had made up his mind, weeks
before, that the marriage years of his life would be the best, the most
distinguished, and most useful. With the utmost pains he had chosen a
wife. He had acted with the greatest caution in no weak or superficial,
or haphazard, or fitful way. Nevertheless, the outlook was dismal. This
first step in decline from his ideal caused him much pain and
restlessness, and led him to think cynically of many doctrines to which,
in serene moments, he had unconditionally subscribed. He compared his
own case with Robert's. Robert, in his headstrong passion, had certainly
rattled up sleeping lions, heedless of all consequences, and in defiance
of every warning. He had now met, poor fellow, with an appalling
chastisement, but could any one pretend that he had not brought it, to a
great extent, upon himself? He (Reckage), however, had behaved, from
first to last, in an unexceptionable manner. He had studiously avoided
the one girl of whom he was inclined to be immoderately fond. It was
true that he had practised this restraint less in her interest than his
own. But this was because he feared--as every creature will fear by
instinct its mortal enemy--the power of an ardent attachment. His mind
had revolted in a panic at the thought of becoming dependent on a
woman's humours. The noblest of the sex were capricious, and far and
away the best course was to select a partner whose unavoidable nonsense
would leave one, merely from indifference, undisturbed. Sara de
Treverell, in the past, had been, by her vagaries, directly responsible
for several sleepless nights, and a sleepless night was one of the few
things he simply could not stand. Thoughts of her had seemed to unfit
him for his work, to weaken his nerves, to act, in various ways, to his
disadvantage. She had been exacting in her demands upon his nature. They
were not uttered demands, or demands which he could formulate, but he
had been conscious of them always. He had been obliged to pause and ask
himself at every thought, at every step--"What would Sara say to this?"
It was a tyranny--if not a species of witchcraft. And so he had
determined to see her no more. Following the usual, most correct method
in such procedures, he went abroad. After a week of irritating
meditations, furtive, all but unconquerable desires, after he had passed
the day on which it had been his custom for months to call upon her,
after he had learned how to discipline the hours he had used to spend
riding with her in the Row, he felt as a convalescent after some
exhausting malady--quiescent, dulled, possessed by a drowsy stupidity,
inaccessible to any serious emotion. He was cured of his fancy, although
no effort of will could protect the soreness of the bruise. He had
persevered in his course of treatment--congratulating himself, at the
end, on his escape from a dangerous obsession. The picture of Sara grew
paler and paler before his eyes--indeed, it seemed to fade all too
quickly, and, with the perversity of consistent egoism, he felt many
twinges of sadness to think that he had forgotten her so soon. His
vanity would have preferred a longer combat--for even the most shallow
admit the romantic admirableness of an obstinate love. Still, what could
he ask better than this triumph over a cruel, an obstructive memory? He
had regained, so he believed, his old independence as the man of action,
energetic, self-controlled, moved by one passion only, and that the
finest of all--ambition. In surveying once more the great design of his
career, he found it an effort to bring up--from the far recesses of his
experience--the poor little sentimental episode, so insignificant and
commonplace, which, in a kind of aberration, he had taken for an affair
of the heart. He returned to England. He threw himself with vigour into
the questions which were then disturbing Churchmen. He revived a
touching acquaintance with Agnes Carillon, an acquaintance which was
peculiarly soothing to his preoccupied mind. Here was a girl, he
thought, who could be a fit helpmate. She asked for nothing,
absorbed nothing, and gave a great deal of gentle, kind companionship
when he wanted it. When he did not want it, she understood
perfectly--possessing, in an eminent degree, the rare domestic art of
being able to make herself scarce--alike in his thoughts and his
engagements. The truths did not occur to him that a woman in love could
never have been so unnaturally prudent, or that a woman whom he loved
could not have interested him so slightly. He took great pride in her
perfect skin and hair and eyes, in her beautiful, graceful, and gracious
manners, but his soul never kindled at her approach, his pulse beat no
slower at her departure. He requited her agreeableness with respect. And
so they had become engaged--to the unbounded gratification of all his
relatives, amidst the congratulations of his friends. There seemed a
certain shadowiness in his conception of their future existence together
as man and wife: something which he recognised as an interior voice
chimed in, from time to time, with provoking interrogations, mostly
unanswerable. A plaintive need of happiness, melancholy, obscure, but
recurrent, mixed in his fluctuating thoughts. Finally, it pursued him,
haunted him, and caught him with the strange tenacity of an incorporeal
grasp. Sara, now dethroned from her place of power, loomed in all his
dreams. Irresistibly, he was drawn toward the forbidden recollection of
her delightfulness. There seemed no longer any danger in these musings.
He had entrusted his actual life to the safe-keeping of the nicest woman
he had ever known. Where then was the harm in harking back, merely in
reverie, to the frivolous, amusing phantom of a renounced sentiment?
Yet, after a reverie of the kind, why did he often wonder how he and
Agnes could look in one another's faces and pretend to any sort of real
intimacy? Sara knew him better than he knew himself. Her sympathy ran
into a hundred sinuosities--she understood his silence as well as his
conversation. He was never conscious of the smallest strain, the least
dissimulation, in her society. Beneath their curious disparities an
identity seemed to unite them. There was an unrepenting quality in her
conscience which braced and stimulated his moral courage. Agnes, on the
contrary, with her instinct of behaviour, made him over-cautious and
encouraged the tendency to indecision which interfered with the
comfortable balance of his soul. And he wished his faculties to work
with astronomic punctuality. It is certain, however, that he would have
accepted his choice as a thing settled beyond any readjustment, but for
the news of the Duke of Marshire's proposal, and the sight of Sara
herself on the fatal afternoon when he was feeling especially forlorn.
She had thrown him a glance in which defiance, disdain, and an
indistinct affection were blended in one provoking dart. He was a
moralist who believed that there is always, between men and women, the
dormant principles of mistrust and hatred. He had discussed this theory
frequently with Robert, who found the notion as repulsive as it was
false. But it seemed a truth beyond contradiction to Reckage, who
possessed, in his own mind, constant irrefutable testimony in support of
the view. Sara had never before defied him. She had never before seemed
to feel her power as a creature incomparably superior in brilliancy to
all the other girls in their circle. She had never before seemed to
pity him as a man who had feared to do what Marshire--a being considered
remarkable only for his family and his fortune--had boldly, gladly
volunteered to carry out to the ultimate consequence. That glance
pierced his self-love, his pride, his will. After his long hesitations,
after the wearisome, interminable debates between his judgment and his
inclination, he decided suddenly, all at once, without further
reflection, that he no longer belonged to himself. He was the slave once
more of doubts, fears, and temptations. His excited nerves and troubled
senses asserted their right to be regarded as threads, at least, in the
web of destiny. From the hour of that chance encounter in the Park, till
he and Sara met at Lord Garrow's that day, he had not been able to
escape from the inexorable cruelty of an ill-used passion, once more, in
full command. Every individual has his rule--could one but find it
out--and a rule to which there are no exceptions. With Reckage it was
simple enough: he invariably followed the line of his own glory. The
distress he suffered--really, and not colourably--took its rise from the
intervention of Marshire. He felt as a racing man feels when he sees a
friendless horse, which he might have purchased, beat the Derby
favourite by some three lengths and a half. He winced at the suspicion
that he had committed an error in judgment, and lost a great
opportunity. The words of Sir Piers Harding on the subject of audacity
in love had fallen on his ears with startling force. It was an
illustration of that old saying--"The appetite, the occasion, and the
ripe fruit." Convinced now that his reputation, his career, and his
comfort depended on his conduct toward Sara, all hesitation left him. He