by George Moore
CHAPTER IV.
“DUNGORY CASTLE, GORT, “Co. Galway.
“MY DEAREST ALICE, — I was so delighted to hear from you; it was very good of you to write to me. I was deeply interested in your description of the Dublin festivities, and must try and tell you all the news.
“Everybody here is talking of Olive and Lord Kilcarney. It is said that he proposed to her at the Drawing-room. Is this true! I hope so, for she seems to have set her heart on the match. But she is a great deal too nice for him. They say that when he is in London he does nothing but go about from bar-room to bar-room drinking brandies and sodas. It is also said that he used to spend much of his time with actresses. I hope these stories are false, but I cannot help thinking.... Well, we have often talked over these things, and you know what my opinions of men are. I hope I am not doing wrong in speaking like this; but a piece of news has reached me that forces my thoughts back into the old ways — ways that I know you have often reproved me for letting my mind wander in. In a word, darling Alice, I hear that you are very much taken up with a Mr. Harding, a writer, or painter, or something of that sort. Now, will you promise to write and tell me if this be true? I would sooner know the worst at once — hear that you love him madly, passionately, as I believe some women love men. But you, who are so nice, so good, so beautiful, you could not love a man thus. I cannot think you could — I will not think you do. I have been crying all the morning, crying bitterly; horrible thoughts have forced themselves on my mind. I have seen (but it was not true though it seemed so clear; visions are not always true) this man kissing you! Oh! Alice, let me warn you, let me beg of you to think well before you abandon yourself to a man’s power, to a man’s love. It is a vile and degrading thing. How women can endure it I don’t know; the thought fills me with horror. Women are pure, men are obscene animals. Their love is our degradation. Love! a nice name they give it. How can a sentiment that is merely a gratification of the lowest passions be love? And that is all they seek; I know it; in their heart of hearts they despise us.
“But you, Alice; you who are so noble, so pure, so lofty-minded, you would not soil yourself by giving way to such a sentiment. Write! you will write, and tell me that what I saw in vision was a lie, an abominable lie! Nay, you do not love Mr. Harding. You will not marry him; surely you will not. Oh! to be left here alone, never to see you again — I could not hear it, I should die. You will not leave me to die, Alice, dear, you will not; write and tell me you will not. And what grieves me doubly is that it must seem to you, dear, that I am only thinking of myself. I am not; I think of you, I wish to save you from what must be a life of misery and, worse still, of degradation; for every man is a degradation when he approaches a woman. I know you couldn’t hear up against this; you are too refined, too pure — I can sympathise with you. I know, poor little cripple though I be, the horrors of married life. I know what men are — you smile your own kind, sweet smile; I see it as I write; but you are wrong: I know nothing of men in particular, but I know what the sex is — I know nothing of individuals, but I know what life is. I express myself badly, but you guess what I mean. The very fact of being forced to live apart has helped me to realise how horrible life is, and how the passions of men make it vile and abominable. All their tender little words and attentions are but lust in disguise. I hate them! I could whip, I could beat, I would torture them; and when I had done my worst I should not have done enough to punish them for the wrongs they have done to my sex.
“I know, Alice, dear, I am writing violently, that I am letting my temper get the better of me, and this is very wrong; you have often told me it is very wrong; but I cannot help it, my darling, when I think of the danger you are in. I cannot tell you how, but I do know you are in danger; something, some instinct has put me in communication with you: there are moments when I see you, yes, see you sitting by that man — I see you now: — the scene is a long blue Drawing-room all aglow with gold mirrors and wax candles — he is sitting by you, I see you smiling upon him — my blood boils, Alice — I fear I am going mad; my head drops on the table, and I strive to shut out the odious sight, but I cannot, I cannot, I cannot —
“I am calmer now: you will forgive me, Alice, dear? I know I am wrong to write to you in this way, but there are moments when I realise things with such horrible vividness that I am, as it were, maddened with pain. Sometimes I awake in the night, and then I see life in all its hideous nakedness, revealed, as it were, by a sudden flash of lightning. Oh, it is terrible to think we are thus. Good-bye, dear, I know you will forgive me, and I hope you will write at once, and will not leave me in suspense: that is the worst torture. “With love to our friends Olive, May, and Violet, believe me, darling Alice, “Yours affectionately, “CECILIA CULLEN.”
Alice read steadily, word by word; then she let the letter and her hands fall on her lap; and, engrossed in the picture it revealed of Cecilia’s obscured and perturbed mind, she forgot the imminent happiness that played, that flashed like a sunbeam about her. It was a sweet and radiant delight to dream that Harding loved her; but she knew he did not love her: still, why should she force the knife into her soul, and, turning from it, she looked into the gloomy and distorting mirror that Cecilia held menacingly to her: and very sinister life and love seemed therein. “And to live in eternal communion with such a picture,” thought the gill; “and if it be a true reflection!”
She shuddered. “But no; things are only as we choose to see them;” and, on strong bright wings, her thoughts rose out of the abyss into which they had been, for a moment, forced to gaze; and through all the terrors of original ignorance her confidence in humanity remained unshaken. Is not a good man — and there are good men — of all knowable things the highest? Then why should we turn away from the highest good? Thus Alice reasoned — she who denied the Bethlehem man-god, and was content to accept this poor miserable terrene life of ours as the end of all consciousness, while Cecilia, she who cried out angrily against the flesh, as if it were a foul and leprous thing, bowed in complete humbleness of spirit before that most human of all gods — human even unto bastardy — that a foolish world has accepted as divine.
How various and how intricate are the questions with which we find ourselves confronted in the course of any cerebral investigation! How curiously mental characteristics stop short where you would expect to find a long continuity! how mysteriously they wander from their natal lines into crooked devious ways, and then, suddenly, how they come flowing back in a great stream, differing absolutely in colour and current, from the source from which they started! And yet, if these apparent contradictions were to be pursued closely through the deeps of the night of creation, each could he demonstrated as logical as any theorem in Euclid, either by heredity, or by accidental variations of the physical nature, which in turn react upon the brain. But here we must he brief; and in our diagnosis of the origin of the mind of the writer of the letter, and that of the reader, it will be only necessary to call attention to the fundamental and main lines on which each brain was constructed.
Alice Barton’s power to judge between right and wrong, her love of sentiment, her collectedness, yes, I will say her reasoned collectedness were, as has been already partially shown, the consequence of the passivity of the life and nature of her grandfather (the historian); her power of will, and her clear, concise intelligence were inherited from her mother, and these qualities being placed in a perfectly healthy subject, a subject in whom every organ functioned admirably, the result was a mind that turned instinctively from mysticism and its adjuncts — foolish hope and wild aspiration — to the natural duties and interests of life, its plain and simple rectitudes as she saw them revealed in the general history of mankind. And Cecilia’s dark and illogical mind can also be accounted for. Her hatred of all that concerned sexual passion was consequent on her father’s age and her mother’s loathing for him during conception and pregnancy; and then, if it be considered that this transmitted hatred was planted and left to germinate in a mi
sshapen body, it will be understood how a weird love of the spiritual, of the mystical, was the almost inevitable psychical characteristic that a human being born under such circumstances would possess.
Alice sat on a low chair, her feet set against the fender, and her hands laid on Cecilia’s letter. Her vision was not precise, but there were flashes of sun in it, and her thoughts loomed and floated away. She thought of herself, of Harding, of their first meeting. The first time she had seen him he was sitting in the same place and in the same chair as she was sitting in now. She remembered the first words that had been spoken: the scene was as clear to her as if it were etched upon her brain; and as she mused she thought of the importance of that event. Harding was to her what a mountain is to the level plain. From him she now looked forward and back. “So people say that I am in love with him! well, supposing I were I do not know that I should feel ashamed of myself.”
The reflection was an agreeable one, and in it her thoughts floated away like red-sailed barges into the white mists that veil with dreamy enchantment the wharves and the walls of an ancient town. But suddenly she began to think definitely. What did she know of him? Nothing! He was to her as much, but no more than the author of a book in which she was deeply interested: with this difference: — she could hear him reply to her questions; but his answers were only like other books, and revealed nothing of his personality. She would have liked to have known the individual man surrounded with his individual hopes and sufferings, but of these she knew nothing. They had talked of all things, but it seemed to her that of the real man she had never had a glimpse. Never did he unbend, never did he lift the mask he wore. He was interesting, but very unhuman, and be paraded his ideas and his sneers as the lay figures did the mail armour on the castle stairway. She did not know if he were a good or a bad man; she fancied he was not very good, and then she grew angry with herself for suspecting him. Alice was very loyal. But honest or dishonest, she was sure he could love no one, and a bitter heart-pang brought her thoughts to a pause; and she strove to recall his face. She could remember nothing but the cold merciless eyes — eyes that were like the palest blue porcelain: “Why had he been so nice if be meant no more? But how ungrateful I am,” thought the girl, and she checked the bitter flow of reproaches that rose in her mind.
It was in the ladies’ drawing-room. Two old ladies sat on the sofa under the window, their white hair and white caps coming out very white upon the grey Irish day. They knitted methodically; and around the ottoman the young ladies, Gladys and Zoe Brennan, one of the Miss Duffys, and the girl in red, yawned over circulating novels. They longed that a man might come in — not with hope that he would interest them — but because they were accustomed to think of all time as wasted that was not spent in talking to a man.
Nor were they awakened from their languid hopes until Olive came rushing into the room with a large envelope in her hand.
“Oh, I see,” she said, “you have got a letter from Cecilia. What does she say? I got one this morning from Barnes;” and, bending her head, Olive whispered in Alice’s ear:— “She says that everyone is talking in Galway of when I shall be a marchioness!”
“Is that the letter?” asked Alice, innocently.
“No, you silly, this is a Castle invitation.”
The Brennans and the girl in red looked up.
“Ah, is it for to-night or to-morrow?” said the latter.
“For to-morrow.”
“Now, I wonder if there will be one for me. Is it to dinner or to the dance?”
“To dinner.”
“Ah, really. — . — . yes, very lucky.” Her eyes fell, and her look was expressive of her deep disappointment. A dance — yes, but a dinner and a dance!
Then she continued:— “Ah, the Castle treats ns all very badly. I am glad sometimes when I hear the Land League abusing it. We come up here, and spend all our money on dresses, and we get nothing for it except two State balls, and it is no compliment to ask us to them — they are obliged to. But what do you think of my little coat? It is this that keeps me warm,” and Miss O’Reilly held out her sealskin for the company to feel the texture. For the last three weeks she had not failed, on all occasions, to call attention to this garment—” Signor Parisina had said it was lovely.” Here she sighed — Signor Parisina had left the hotel. “And I have a new dress coming home — it is all red — a cardinal silk — you know nothing but red suits me!”
“Is the hall-porter distributing the invitations?” asked Gladys Brennan. “Did he give you yours?”
“No, ours was, of course, directed to mamma; I found it in her room.”
“Then perhaps”... Zoe did not finish the sentence, and both sisters rolled up their worsted-work preparatory to going upstairs.
In Dublin, during six weeks of the year, the arrival of these large official envelopes is watched with an eagerness that words cannot describe. These envelopes are the balm of Gilead; and the Land League, and the hopelessness of matchmaking are merged and lost for a moment in an exquisite thrill of triumph or despair. An invitation to the Castle means much. The grey-headed official who takes you down to dinner may bore you, and, at the dance, you may find yourself without a partner; but the delight of asking your friends if you may expect to meet them on such a night, of telling them afterwards of your successes, are the joys of Dublin; and armed with their invitation, the Bartons scored heavily over the Scullys and the Goulds, who were only asked to the dance.
“And what will the dinner be like, mamma?” asked Olive.
“It will be very grand. Lord Cowper does things in very good style indeed; and our names will be given in the papers. But I don’t think it will amuse you, dear. All the officials have to be asked — judges, police-officers, &c. You will probably go down with some old fellow of sixty: but that can’t be helped. At the dance after, we’ll see the marquis.”
“I told you, mamma, didn’t I, that Barnes wrote that everybody in Galway said he was in love with me, and had proposed!”
“You did, dear; and it does no harm for the report to have got about, for if a thing gets very much spoken of — it forces a man to come to the point. You will wear your red tulle. I don’t know that you look better in anything else.”
Whatever Mrs. Barton’s faults may have been, she did her duty, as she conceived it, by her daughter; and during the long dinner, through the leaves of the flowering plants, she watched her Olive anxiously. A hundred-and-twenty people were present. Mothers and eligible daughters, judges, lords, police-officers, earls, poor-law inspectors, countesses, and Castle officials. Around the great white-painted, gold-listed walls the table, in the form of a horseshoe, was spread. In the soothing light of the shaded lamps, the white glitter of the piled-up silver danced over the talking faces, and descended in silvery waves into the bosoms of the women. Salmon and purple-coloured liveries passed quickly; and in the fragrance of soup and the flavours of sherry, in the lascivious pleasing of the waltz tunes that Liddell’s band poured from a top gallery, the goodly company of time-servers, panders, and others, forgot their fears of the Land League, and the doom that was now waxing to fulness.
To the girls the dinner seemed interminable, but at the “private dance” afterwards those who were known in official circles, or were fortunate enough to meet their friends, amused themselves. It took place in the Throne Room. As the guests arrived they scanned each other narrowly. People, who had known each other from childhood upwards, as they met on the landing, affected a look of surprise:— “Oh! so you are here? I wonder how you got your invitation? Well, I suppose you are better than I took you to be!” Acquaintances saluted each other more cordially than was their wont: he or she who had dined at the Castle took his or her place at once among the élite: he or she who had come to dance was henceforth considered worthy of a bow in Grafton Street. For Dublin is a city without a conviction, without an opinion. Things are right and wrong according to the dictum of the nearest official. If it be not absolutely ill-bred to say you thin
k this, or are inclined to take such or such a view, it is certainly more advisable to say that the Attorney-General thinks so, or that on one occasion you heard the State Steward, the Chamberlain, or any other equally distinguished underling express this or that opinion. Castle tape is worn in time of mourning and in the time of feasting. Every gigman in the Kildare Street wears it in his buttonhole, and the ladies of Herrion Square are found to be gartered with it.
Mrs. Barton’s first thought was to get Olive partners. Milord and Lord Rosshill were sent hither and thither, and with such good result that the whole evening the beauty was beset with A.D.C.s. But the marquis had danced three times with Violet Scully, and Mrs. Barton vented her anger on poor Alice. The girl knew no one, nor was there time to introduce her to men. She was consequently sent off with milord to see where the marquis was hiding; and she was commissioned to tell her sister to answer thus when Lord Kilcarney asked for another dance: “I am engaged, cher marquis, but for you of course I shall have to throw some poor fellow over.” Mrs. Barton knew not how to play a waiting game. Her tactics were always to grapple with the enemy. She was a Hannibal: she risked all to gain all. Mrs. Scully, on the contrary, watched the combat from afar — as Moltke did the German lines when they advanced upon Paris.
