The Ordeal of Richard Feverel — Complete. George Meredith

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СКАЧАТЬ there been a woman in it. He would shun vast expanses, and seek shade, concealment, solitude. The desire for distances betokens emptiness and undirected hunger: when the heart is possessed by an image we fly to wood and forest, like the guilty.”

      Adrian's report accused his pupil of an extraordinary access of cynicism.

      “Exactly,” said the baronet. “As I foresaw. At this period an insatiate appetite is accompanied by a fastidious palate. Nothing but the quintessences of existence, and those in exhaustless supplies, will satisfy this craving, which is not to be satisfied! Hence his bitterness. Life can furnish no food fitting for him. The strength and purity of his energies have reached to an almost divine height, and roam through the Inane. Poetry, love, and such-like, are the drugs earth has to offer to high natures, as she offers to low ones debauchery. 'Tis a sign, this sourness, that he is subject to none of the empiricisms that are afloat. Now to keep him clear of them!”

      The Titans had an easier task in storming Olympus. As yet, however, it could not be said that Sir Austin's System had failed. On the contrary, it had reared a youth, handsome, intelligent, well-bred, and, observed the ladies, with acute emphasis, innocent. Where, they asked, was such another young man to be found?

      “Oh!” said Lady Blandish to Sir Austin, “if men could give their hands to women unsoiled—how different would many a marriage be! She will be a happy girl who calls Richard husband.”

      “Happy, indeed!” was the baronet's caustic ejaculation. “But where shall I meet one equal to him, and his match?”

      “I was innocent when I was a girl,” said the lady.

      Sir Austin bowed a reserved opinion.

      “Do you think no girls innocent?”

      Sir Austin gallantly thought them all so.

      “No, that you know they are not,” said the lady, stamping. “But they are more innocent than boys, I am sure.”

      “Because of their education, madam. You see now what a youth can be. Perhaps, when my System is published, or rather—to speak more humbly—when it is practised, the balance may be restored, and we shall have virtuous young men.”

      “It's too late for poor me to hope for a husband from one of them,” said the lady, pouting and laughing.

      “It is never too late for beauty to waken love,” returned the baronet, and they trifled a little. They were approaching Daphne's Bower, which they entered, and sat there to taste the coolness of a descending midsummer day.

      The baronet seemed in a humour for dignified fooling; the lady for serious converse.

      “I shall believe again in Arthur's knights,” she said. “When I was a girl I dreamed of one.”

      “And he was in quest of the San Greal?”

      “If you like.”

      “And showed his good taste by turning aside for the more tangible San Blandish?”

      “Of course you consider it would have been so,” sighed the lady, ruffling.

      “I can only judge by our generation,” said Sir Austin, with a bend of homage.

      The lady gathered her mouth. “Either we are very mighty or you are very weak.”

      “Both, madam.”

      “But whatever we are, and if we are bad, bad! we love virtue, and truth, and lofty souls, in men: and, when we meet those qualities in them, we are constant, and would die for them—die for them. Ah! you know men but not women.”

      “The knights possessing such distinctions must be young, I presume?” said Sir Austin.

      “Old, or young!”

      “But if old, they are scarce capable of enterprise?”

      “They are loved for themselves, not for their deeds.”

      “Ah!”

      “Yes—ah!” said the lady. “Intellect may subdue women—make slaves of them; and they worship beauty perhaps as much as you do. But they only love for ever and are mated when they meet a noble nature.”

      Sir Austin looked at her wistfully.

      “And did you encounter the knight of your dream?”

      “Not then.” She lowered her eyelids. It was prettily done.

      “And how did you bear the disappointment?”

      “My dream was in the nursery. The day my frock was lengthened to a gown I stood at the altar. I am not the only girl that has been made a woman in a day, and given to an ogre instead of a true knight.”

      “Good God!” exclaimed Sir Austin, “women have much to bear.”

      Here the couple changed characters. The lady became gay as the baronet grew earnest.

      “You know it is our lot,” she said. “And we are allowed many amusements. If we fulfil our duty in producing children, that, like our virtue, is its own reward. Then, as a widow, I have wonderful privileges.”

      “To preserve which, you remain a widow?”

      “Certainly,” she responded. “I have no trouble now in patching and piecing that rag the world calls—a character. I can sit at your feet every day unquestioned. To be sure, others do the same, but they are female eccentrics, and have cast off the rag altogether.”

      Sir Austin drew nearer to her. “You would have made an admirable mother, madam.”

      This from Sir Austin was very like positive wooing.

      “It is,” he continued, “ten thousand pities that you are not one.”

      “Do you think so?” She spoke with humility.

      “I would,” he went on, “that heaven had given you a daughter.”

      “Would you have thought her worthy of Richard?”

      “Our blood, madam, should have been one!”

      The lady tapped her toe with her parasol. “But I am a mother,” she said. “Richard is my son. Yes! Richard is my boy,” she reiterated.

      Sir Austin most graciously appended, “Call him ours, madam,” and held his head as if to catch the word from her lips, which, however, she chose to refuse, or defer. They made the coloured West a common point for their eyes, and then Sir Austin said:

      “As you will not say 'ours,' let me. And, as you have therefore an equal claim on the boy, I will confide to you a project I have lately conceived.”

      The announcement of a project hardly savoured of a coming proposal, but for Sir Austin to confide one to a woman was almost tantamount to a declaration. So Lady Blandish thought, and so said her soft, deep-eyed smile, as she perused the ground while listening to the СКАЧАТЬ