The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. Volume 3. George Meredith

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СКАЧАТЬ fetched a breath and continued: "You had in your infancy a great loss." Father and son coloured simultaneously. "To make that good to you I chose to isolate myself from the world, and devote myself entirely to your welfare; and I think it is not vanity that tells me now that the son I have reared is one of the most hopeful of God's creatures. But for that very reason you are open to be tempted the most, and to sink the deepest. It was the first of the angels who made the road to hell."

      He paused again. Richard fingered at his watch.

      "In our House, my son, there is peculiar blood. We go to wreck very easily. It sounds like superstition; I cannot but think we are tried as most men are not. I see it in us all. And you, my son, are compounded of two races. Your passions are violent. You have had a taste of revenge. You have seen, in a small way, that the pound of flesh draws rivers of blood. But there is now in you another power. You are mounting to the table-land of life, where mimic battles are changed to real ones. And you come upon it laden equally with force to create and to destroy." He deliberated to announce the intelligence, with deep meaning: "There are women in the world, my son!"

      The young man's heart galloped back to Raynham.

      "It is when you encounter them that you are thoroughly on trial. It is when you know them that life is either a mockery to you, or, as some find it, a gift of blessedness. They are our ordeal. Love of any human object is the soul's ordeal; and they are ours, loving them, or not."

      The young man heard the whistle of the train. He saw the moon-lighted wood, and the vision of his beloved. He could barely hold himself down and listen.

      "I believe," the baronet spoke with little of the cheerfulness of belief, "good women exist."

      Oh, if he knew Lucy!

      "But," and he gazed on Richard intently, "it is given to very few to meet them on the threshold—I may say, to none. We find them after hard buffeting, and usually, when we find the one fitted for us, our madness has misshaped our destiny, our lot is cast. For women are not the end, but the means, of life. In youth we think them the former, and thousands, who have not even the excuse of youth, select a mate—or worse—with that sole view. I believe women punish us for so perverting their uses. They punish Society."

      The baronet put his hand to his brow as his mind travelled into consequences.

      'Our most diligent pupil learns not so much as an earnest teacher,' says The Pilgrim's Scrip; and Sir Austin, in schooling himself to speak with moderation of women, was beginning to get a glimpse of their side of the case.

      Cold Blood now touched on love to Hot Blood.

      Cold Blood said, "It is a passion coming in the order of nature, the ripe fruit of our animal being."

      Hot Blood felt: "It is a divinity! All that is worth living for in the world."

      Cold Blood said: "It is a fever which tests our strength, and too often leads to perdition."

      Hot Blood felt: "Lead whither it will, I follow it."

      Cold Blood said: "It is a name men and women are much in the habit of employing to sanctify their appetites."

      Hot Blood felt: "It is worship; religion; life!"

      And so the two parallel lines ran on.

      The baronet became more personal:

      "You know my love for you, my son. The extent of it you cannot know; but you must know that it is something very deep, and—I do not wish to speak of it—but a father must sometimes petition for gratitude, since the only true expression of it is his son's moral good. If you care for my love, or love me in return, aid me with all your energies to keep you what I have made you, and guard you from the snares besetting you. It was in my hands once. It is ceasing to be so. Remember, my son, what my love is. It is different, I fear, with most fathers: but I am bound up in your welfare: what you do affects me vitally. You will take no step that is not intimate with my happiness, or my misery. And I have had great disappointments, my son."

      So far it was well. Richard loved his father, and even in his frenzied state he could not without emotion hear him thus speak.

      Unhappily, the baronet, who by some fatality never could see when he was winning the battle, thought proper in his wisdom to water the dryness of his sermon with a little jocoseness, on the subject of young men fancying themselves in love, and, when they were raw and green, absolutely wanting to be—that most awful thing, which the wisest and strongest of men undertake in hesitation and after self-mortification and penance— married! He sketched the Foolish Young Fellow—the object of general ridicule and covert contempt. He sketched the Woman—the strange thing made in our image, and with all our faculties—passing to the rule of one who in taking her proved that he could not rule himself, and had no knowledge of her save as a choice morsel which he would burn the whole world, and himself in the bargain, to possess. He harped upon the Foolish Young Fellow, till the foolish young fellow felt his skin tingle and was half suffocated with shame and rage.

      After this, the baronet might be as wise as he pleased: he had quite undone his work. He might analyze Love and anatomize Woman. He might accord to her her due position, and paint her fair: he might be shrewd, jocose, gentle, pathetic, wonderfully wise: he spoke to deaf ears.

      Closing his sermon with the question, softly uttered: "Have you anything to tell me, Richard?" and hoping for a confession, and a thorough re- establishment of confidence, the callous answer struck him cold: "I have not."

      The baronet relapsed in his chair, and made diagrams of his fingers.

      Richard turned his back on further dialogue by going to the window. In the section of sky over the street twinkled two or three stars; shining faintly, feeling the moon. The moon was rising: the woods were lifting up to her: his star of the woods would be there. A bed of moss set about flowers in a basket under him breathed to his nostril of the woodland keenly, and filled him with delirious longing.

      A succession of hard sighs brought his father's hand on his shoulder.

      "You have nothing you could say to me, my son? Tell me, Richard! Remember, there is no home for the soul where dwells a shadow of untruth!"

      "Nothing at all, sir," the young man replied, meeting him with the full orbs of his eyes.

      The baronet withdrew his hand, and paced the room.

      At last it grew impossible for Richard to control his impatience, and he said: "Do you intend me to stay here, sir? Am I not to return to Raynham at all to-night?"

      His father was again falsely jocular:

      "What? and catch the train after giving it ten minutes' start?"

      "Cassandra will take me," said the young man earnestly. "I needn't ride her hard, sir. Or perhaps you would lend me your Winkelried? I should be down with him in little better than three hours."

      "Even then, you know, the park-gates would be locked."

      "Well, I could stable him in the village. Dowling knows the horse, and would treat him properly. May I have him, sir?"

      The cloud cleared off Richard's face as he asked. At least, if he missed his love that night he would be near her, breathing the same air, marking what star was above her bedchamber, hearing the hushed night-talk of the trees about her dwelling: looking on the distances that were like hope half fulfilled and a bodily presence bright as Hesper, since he knew her. There were two swallows under the eaves shadowing Lucy's chamber-windows: two swallows, СКАЧАТЬ