Chapter XII

The travellers went on their way. No comments were made on the day they had passed, or the company they had left, yet both were thinking thoughts, and the thoughts of each were regarding the other. The thoughts of Henry were spoken at last.

It was at the close of a day spent on one of the lakes. They sat at a window which commanded a view of great beauty, and were watching a glorious sunset--Henry and his sightless companion. Henry described the beauties of the scene, and became animated as he described the various changes from black to violet, to rose, to scarlet, to gold, as the clouds caught the beams of the dying sun. He had enjoyed the two days of sight-seeing. His spirits had risen, and his own vivid enjoyment had been yet more excited, by finding he had power to kindle the imagination of his companion by his exclamations and descriptions.

It was suddenly, as the sun’s last beam vanished and left the landscape beautiful but grey, that he said,

“I wonder that you do not marry, Fanshawe?”

“That I do not marry!” Stephen repeated with a dry smile. “Easily said. As if a whole life’s welfare was not shut up in the idea! Who do you suppose would take me; and whom--though it would seem this question ought to be more easily settled--would I take?”

“I have had a thought,” Henry said, hesitatingly; “it has been much in my mind--especially to-day. There are persons to whom I think the literal words of being ‘sight to the blind’ would be bliss; so ardent seems their desire to spend themselves in doing good. With them, that one thing which makes you feel you are not as other men, would, so far from being a drawback, be an added attraction.”

“There are such, no doubt,” he said, with a melancholy smile. “But where are they to be found?”

There are occasions when people have an insuperable dislike to naming names. They hope to be understood by vague terms. Henry had hoped that Stephen would at once jump to the conclusion to which he wished his vague description to lead him.

There was a flush on his cheek, and a slight effort in his voice as he said,

“You must guess of who I was thinking. I mean Miss Smith.”

“Yes, I guessed that she was the person to whom your description applied. I guessed it, because I had once the same thought. But it was in vain.”

And a faint tinge, for the first time, flushed his own cheek.

“You surely mistake?” Henry cried, earnestly. “I do not think it would be in vain. I am almost certain it would not be so.”

“It _was_ in vain. I asked the question, and she told me so.”

Henry looked as if he did not believe it. He was trying to recall that last day at Riddlemere, when, to his eyes, Nora and Stephen had seemed on peculiar terms; so friendly, and yet so--he hardly knew how to term it--but the mingled friendliness and timidity had struck him.

“Then women are strange beings,” at last he observed.

“In what way?” Stephen asked, smiling.

“It is so impossible to argue upon them. Their tastes have no reason in them. What do you think of my sister, Letitia, for instance?” he added, suddenly and gratefully changing the subject; for he felt he had been upon ground as dangerous with Stephen as it was unpleasant to himself. “It is utterly impossible for a _man_ to conceive the state of heart and taste, and affection, which makes her endure that wretch, her husband. And not only endure. I can understand her having married him. She was wretched. Any escape was a temptation to her. But having married him, and knowing, as she fully must, how base and mean his nature is, how she can love him,--and she does love him,--is a thing that is to me utterly incomprehensible! A man might do his duty if he was a well-principled man in such circumstances; but he could not love, as Letitia does, a thing so utterly unworthy.”

“I think not. There is, I fancy, a radical difference in that respect between a man’s and a woman’s nature; and it is lucky it is so. What would become of this world if there was not the self-devotion of women to help and heal it. I am very sorry for your sister’s fate; but her case is too common a one for me to call it strange. There are things which I think stranger, far.”

“What things?” Henry asked; for the words were said with that sort of magnetism which forces the inquiry that is wanted.

“I think men are sometimes strange; and I think you are strange; and among strange things there is none that I think stranger than that you should not love Miss Smith.”

“I marry Miss Smith!” Henry said, colouring violently, and speaking with that old passionate excitement which his general conduct led his friends to believe had evaporated from his character. “If there was no other woman left in the world, I do not think it could be.”

“I said nothing of marriage,” Stephen replied, calmly. “Marriage requires the consent of two persons. I was speaking only of yourself, your tastes, your feelings. I think it strange, in the position you have been, knowing Miss Smith as you have cause to know her, and with that singular tinge of romance in your relations--I think it strange, I say, that she should not have caught your fancy; have excited you, in short, to love.”

“The positions may have been in fault,” Henry said, after a short pause. “There are some positions which make love impossible.”

“I know it. I suppose no man naturally loves an heiress. He may do it by force of will, or he may do it even because he is determined against it; but marriage with a very great heiress can never be a position natural to a man. In this case, however, there are so many circumstances of a modifying kind, that I do think your hardness strange. I will not speak of youth and beauty, and gifts of mind, and grace of manner--these others may have--but I do think there is a something in the manner in which she bears her wealth which is uncommon, and which is the more striking from the fact that her character, irrespective of her wealth, is proud and independent. She always seems to me, so far from glorying in her riches, to be apologizing for them.”

He paused a moment, but as Henry made no observation went on--

“And in other respects, there is so much to win a man. Her character, in spite of her good intellect and clear judgment, and her determination not to be tyrannized over when she does not trust, is one of the most confiding I ever met with; the most easy to lead and guide, and convince. Where she loved, she would love with the submission of her whole being. And then the loneliness of her position; her longing for affection and protection; the failure of all her efforts to win the friendship that others naturally have.”

He paused again for a moment, and then said in an altered voice,

“It was my sense of her isolation in this world that first won me, and at last led me to dare to approach her with my love. I felt that I, even I, cut off as I am from all that makes a man attractive, might yet protect her in her difficulties, and comfort her in loneliness. That she thought otherwise, has not altered my feelings. The gentleness with which she warned me against hope, has but made me love her more.”

There was a long silence after he ceased to speak. Henry had been moved and carried on by his words; he hardly knew for a few moments how to answer him. He knew what he felt, but the ground seemed to have been cut away from under his feet.

At last he said,

“Every man has his own feelings. I hardly know why we are to wonder one at another.”

“You began,” said his companion, smiling; “I did but turn upon you. My answer was, alas! easily given. As to you, do not answer me at all, unless you please. What reason, you truly remark, have we to wonder one at another! Each man is a whole by himself, as well as a member of Adam.”

“I do not mind answering you,” Henry said, perversely. “I do not love, nor do I even wish to love, Miss Smith. Do not suppose”--and though he was trying to speak calmly and temperately, there was a touch of heat in his voice--“that I do not see her with eyes of admiration, perhaps of homage, worship, or whatever a poor mortal feels towards a superior being; but homage is not always love. Do you remember some lines of Shakespeare--they are in ‘Julius Cæsar,’ I suppose--no, I think they are in ‘Antony and Cleopatra;’ it is where he describes the feelings of Antony in Cæsar’s presence. Antony was a great man everywhere else, but there he was small. Stay--they struck me much, because they describe what I feel when I am with _her_:--

‘Thy demon (that thy spirit which keeps thee) is
Noble, courageous, high, unmatchable,
Where Cæsar’s is not; but near him thy angel
Becomes a fear, as being o’erpowered; therefore
Make space enough between you.’”

Henry spoke these lines with a force of expression difficult to describe, as if they had indeed engrained themselves upon his mind.

“There is more of it,” he said, “but to the same purpose. That is what I feel when I am with _her_. With such feelings a man does not love, nor would he marry, even though a fairy made other impossibilities possible.”

“Most true. Marriage in such a case would be far from a heaven. I had never looked on Miss Smith in that light. It was the other side of her character which affected me.”

“It may have been so with you. You would not naturally look on her as I do. I---- Have you forgotten all the strange dealings which I and my family have had with her? It would seem as if between us a great gulf had been fixed--had been ordered, as well as fixed.”

“My dear Henry--forgive me for still calling you so, but you speak unreasonably--your poor father’s faults were never yours.”

“I cannot say that,” Henry replied, with passion and bitterness. “If you could know what it is to me to look back on my past life! I found some old verses in a book of Annabella’s the other day. I copied them, and carry them about with me. They are the only words I ever saw which express what I feel about myself.”

He drew a paper from his pocket, and all unconsciously held it out to Stephen. The blind man smiled, and Henry, colouring, withdrew it. The lines were these:--

“When I look back, and in myself behold
The wandering ways which youth could not descry,
And mark the fearful course that youth did hold,
And melt in mind the steps youth strayed awry,
My knees I bow, and from my heart I call--
O God, forgive these faults and follies all!

“For now I see how void youth is of skill--
How vain, also, his prime-time and his end.
I do confess my fault and all my ill,
And sorrow sore for that I did offend;
And with a heart repentant of all crimes,
Pardon I ask for youth ten thousand times.”

“Will you read them?” Stephen had said, and Henry had done so--very calmly, he thought, but, in truth, with his whole heart in what he repeated.

“We may all feel that,” was the remark, gravely made.

“No, we may not,” Henry replied. “It is my own special folly and madness, which is tied like a clog about my neck, and makes my life a burden to me. But let us have done now and for ever with this subject.”

“Certainly, for ever, if you wish it.”