Robert Orange
over-mastering human magnetism. To love well is a quality in
temperament, just as to preach well, or to conduct a siege well, or to
tend the sick well, or, in fact, to do anything well, is a special
distinction, a ruling motive in the great pursuit of absolute
felicity--a pursuit which is the inalienable right of all human
creatures, whether fixed mistakenly in this world, or wisely in the
next. No calling can be obeyed without suffering, but as in the old
legend each man's cross was found exquisitely fitted to his own back, so
a vocation is found to be just when, on the whole, one has fewer
misgivings that way than in any other. By the exercise of
self-discipline one may do much that is not repulsive only but
suicidal--a man may so treat his spirit that it becomes a sort of
petrified vapour. When, however, he has dosed, reduced, tortured, and
killed every vital instinct in his nature till he is an empty shape and
nothing more, he must not flatter himself that he has accomplished a
great work. Life is not for the dead, but for the living, and in
crucifying our flesh we have to be quite certain that we are playing no
ghost's farce, inflicting airy penalties on some handfuls of harsh
dust. Robert could not feel that absorbing interest in himself which
enables so many to cut themselves adrift, painfully, no doubt, from
every creature and all impersonal anxieties. If he wished for fame,
power, wealth, it was that he might use them to the advantage of his
friends, or for the reparation, in some degree, of his father's sin. But
all the joy and all the melancholy in love give a free rein to egoism,
and now that he had gained, as he believed, the desire of his eyes, the
confused, tyrannical, inexplicable, triumphant selfishness dormant in
him, as in all of us, began to assert its terrible power. He forgot the
agonies, storms, and fevers of the past. Work had not always been able
to dominate his unrest. There had been times when he had been compelled
to follow the beckoning dreams; when, in tightening his clasp about the
mockeries of his hope, he lost the pale happiness which he held already.
Whole days had passed when some oppressive thought had spread its dark
wings, as a bird of prey, over his whole being, crushing him gradually
down to the earth. Now the occasion, the solitude, the glory of the
night cast their spell over his soul. For the first time his emotion, so
long dumb and imprisoned, found speech. Brigit listened, almost afraid,
to his burning words, which, new and strange to her, were, in reality,
but the echo of his interior life, his secret intimate thoughts, the
pent-up eloquence of a latent habitual devotion long distrusted for its
very strength and kept till that hour in strict silence, lest in the
torrent of feeling it should say too much. The love to which he had long
since surrendered himself now had complete possession of him. He spoke
as he had never spoken before--as he never spoke again. The storm was
restrained, subservient possibly still, but it was there, not to be
forbidden, denied, or gainsayed. One has to be very strong in order to
support the realisation of a long deferred, almost abandoned, hope.
Affliction seems to intensify a personality, adding to it a
distinctness, a power altogether commanding and irresistible, but even
in our purest happiness we lose something of ourselves, and become,
momentarily at least, less our own masters, and more pliant to the
reproof of chance, the sport of destiny. As Robert uttered his
passionate confession, he was conscious that much in him which had once
seemed strong was conquerable enough, and, in the torture of the
indescribable variety of vague, menacing feelings which this suspicion
called forth, he revolted against the influence which held him, which
left him neither liberty, nor security; which, for a few days of mad
exultation, cost him a thousand bewildering, desolating fears. Did he
guess that when one most eagerly desires happiness, one is most near to
it? Already, he remembered, with a sudden pallor, and a sharp
contraction of the lips, that death, in time, would certainly claim both
of them, and his soul was pierced at the thought, for nothing seemed
imaginably so perfect as the wild gladness of that poor human hour then
gliding, with pitiless beats, toward the past. Already the moon had
ceased to weave her magic; the sun rose over the unrebukable sea, and
the distant coast, obscured in a purple vapour, seemed but a line of
darkness against the flushed horizon. The sky was grey, opalescent in
the north, tenderest green and azure in the east, while large,
motionless clouds, as blue as vine-clad hills, shadowed in great
clusters the vast canopy. But if the dawn of day wrought a progressive
disenchantment of the dreamer, Robert felt with the recurrence of the
morning the usual prayer rise to his lips in a long weeping,
inarticulate cry to God--"Thou knowest that I love Thee: Thou knowest
that all my life is but a desire of Thee: Thy Will, not mine." And he
heard again the promise: "_Thou art My servant, I have chosen thee, and
not cast thee away. Fear thou not, for I am with thee: be not dismayed,
for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee: yea, I will help thee._" As
the silent disquietude of night gave place to the intense tranquillity
of day, the impenetrable secret of life, though still profound,
unviolated, and eluding, was hidden in a shining, though not a blinding,
mist. Was night less night because it paled gloriously before the sun?
Was day less day because it darkened into evening? Was joy a false thing
because it passed? Did not sorrow pass also? If that sweet journey was
the first and last in all his life, was it not still a miracle of
blessing, nay, every blessing, to have known even once the power of
mortal happiness?
"What are you thinking of?" asked Brigit suddenly, touching his arm with
her hand.
"I am thinking that there is but one way of resisting the woe of
life--the infinite must oppose the infinite. Infinite sorrow must be met
by infinite love."
"I suppose we have the sorrow, and the infinite love is God's. We
mustn't call even our love infinite, Robert."
He hesitated for a few moments before he replied--
"I call it no name."
"Still," she said, "the very book in which the vanity of all things is
most insisted on has lived itself nearly three thousand years. Solomon
has given the lie to his own despair of being remembered. This is why I
never feel sad now when I think about the other fears which made him
discontented."
"Were they fears? I believe he wanted to conquer the world, which is
strong, and his own weakness, which was even stronger, as an adversary.
We must know the measure of a man's desires before we can sound the
depths of his regrets."
Again she put out her hand, but this time she took his, following the
instinct of a child who finds itself with a trusted companion in a
gloomy road.
"Nothing unknown can be wished for," she said gently, "and so, if some
few things did not last, we should not have this dissatisfaction at the
thought of their perishing. But what is troubling you? The greatest
cross is to be without a cross. You, dearest, are never at ease unless
you are at least suffering tortures for some friend."
"I am thinking of myself now--myself only. I can't forget that every
supreme blessing must be bought with long sadness, both before and
after, and now we are together, I am wondering what I should do--if--if
we were separated. I must have the courage to face that thought. I can't
put it away because it has defied me, and when a thought defies me, I
have to meet it fairly. I do not believe in denying its force, or
running away in an opposite direction. I hear its argument and I try to
answer it."
She moved towards him and said in a low voice--
"I have one prayer, and this is that I may outlive you. When you die, I
shall soon follow you. It won't seem so very long. But if I should die
first I should have to wait, because you would never yield, and your
grief would cut sharply and slowly, a little more and a little more each
day. And although I might be with you, you could not see me. I should
know all your thoughts and yet I could say nothing. Almighty God is too
kind to let me be so unhappy after I am dead. This is 'the confidence
wherein I trust.' This is why I have no fears now. We may have great
trials--how can we expect to be exempt from them? But we must help each
other to bear them and then they will seem more precious than joys. You
see, don't you? You understand, don't you?"
He could not trust himself to reply. There are certain utterances,
certain turns of thought, which are so restricted to one sex or the
other, so exclusively feminine or masculine, as the case may be, that
their entire comprehension by both sexes is not possible. Intuition,
imagination, sympathy may help a great deal; men and women will accept
much from each other which they cannot to their reasoning satisfaction
account for, and, if the difference serves only to enhance, by its
mystery, the melodiousness of the eternal human duet, it also proves
that, while the singers may be in harmony, they are never in absolute
unison.
"You know how much I love you," said Brigit, "you know it. Yet there is
an interior cloister of your mind which you keep wholly to yourself. You
never ask me there. I watch your face--it tells me nothing. You have not
yet made me your friend. If you were in trouble you would go to Pensee,
because she is older and she is used to responsibilities. But you hide
things from me because you are afraid of giving me pain."
"There is reason enough why I should not tell you of every passing mood,
nor draw you into some invincible personal sadness, and why I should not
invite you into the 'interior cloister' of my mind. Nobody deliberates
to do what he cannot help. There is always something questioning within
me, and a truth is not to be set aside by any other truth whatever. We
can only fix our jaws and grip our hands in useless wonder at the
contradictions of the soul. I would tell you all my heart," he added,
with a laugh, "but it would take too long!"
He had been startled by the acuteness of her perception. Too probably he
had carried his reserve to the selfish pitch, and in over-mastering,
with silence, his own moods, afflicted her who had become now, by love,
inseparable from his spiritual as well as his outward life. But there is
something in beauty--just as there is something in youth--which one
fears to disturb, lest a change should alter, or mar, in the faintest
degree, the sufficient loveliness, the unconscious charm. Is it not for
this cause that many dependent natures find classic perfection cold,
superb scenery unsympathetic, and the spectacle of careless happiness
embittering? Others, of imaginative temperament, prefer that their idols
should remain impassive, and, granted the inspiration arising from a
fair appearance, ask no more, but find their delight in bestowing, from
the riches of their own gratitude, adorable attributes and endless
worship. Orange, as many other men of idealising tendencies, took his
human solace for the discouragements, fatigues, and ordeals of life in
the mere existence of the woman he loved. He was at the moment of
humility which is the first and last in all really great passions. He
asked for nothing; it was all too glorious even to have the privilege of
offering gifts, of feeling the readiness to die ten deaths for her sake,
of finding all the recompenses of eternity in the soft depths of her
bright eyes. But as he was too much in earnest to analyse these
sentiments, he could neither gauge his own reticence nor justify it to
Brigit herself. Nor could she, with all her tenderness and womanly