by George Moore
For in the chapter she had just read it was related how the heroine’s bedchamber was in a distant wing of the house, only one other bedchamber being near it, and that as the heroine passed she knocked at the door of the spare room; and while waiting for her lover, began her preparations for the night before a toilet table covered with cut-glass bottles. And before this table, the lady, garbed in the finest muslin, sat combing her hair with tortoiseshell combs and brushing it with ivory brushes for the admiration of her lover, who sat watching, flattered that his lady should deem him worthy of so much thought and expensive care.
Again Emily paused in her reading to ponder on the woman represented in the book, and to remember the words of a man she had heard discourse at the table d’hôte at Aix. The subject of his discourse was that men and women were made of the same stuff in all ages, the stuff coming into the world the same, to be immediately modified by circumstance; and in proof of his theory, he told that France had produced in the sixteenth century the most beautiful poetry that the world had ever known, reciting some short poems which had seemed very beautiful to her so far as she could judge. Yet poetry, the man said, had left France like a migrating bird, not to return again for more than two hundred years. If men, he continued, were able to lose the poetic sense for two hundred years, might we not infer that they might lose their moral sense, to return to it later, and to lose it again? And now, making application of what she had heard at Aix to the woman in the book, Emily sat thinking that though men and women might be immoral in France, they might be moral in Ireland. It seemed to her hard to believe that a woman had ever lived in Ireland so licentious as the woman in the book, even during the Protestant ascendancy. It was impossible to believe that Aunt Clara, for instance, or Aunt Margaret, or Aunt Jane, had ever conducted themselves as the woman in the book did, or would have found pleasure in reading this book that Priscilla had brought home from France.
Emily sat thinking, almost forgetful of the people in the fiction, admitting, however, to herself that the book was written in a style that beguiled the reader, one which she could appreciate. She would have liked to read on for the sake of the style, but Priscilla had never read for style. She was not interested in literature for its own sake, and the questions that Priscilla had put to her about married life, asking why James would not consent to live with them both, left no doubt in her mind that Priscilla was altogether ignorant of the relations between men and women. It was therefore extraordinary that such a book as this should have come into Priscilla’s hands, and that she should have taken enough pleasure in the reading of it to buy a dictionary. She was dying, it is true, and knew that she was dying, and no doubt felt death to be near her, almost impending. Might she not therefore have availed herself of the chance that had put this book into her hands to learn before she died something of the world she was about to leave? A morbid desire, no doubt, hardly legitimate, but comprehensible. She might have felt, Emily continued, that she had never looked on the true face of life, but on a mask, and that of the true face she could only catch a glimpse in a book. It would have been better, perhaps, if the book had not come into her hands, for what did it profit her to learn what the world was? Better that she should have gone out of it thinking it pure, good, and kind — much better.
But how did the book come into Priscilla’s hands? Did a man give it to her? But Priscilla was intimate with no man; she hardly answered when spoken to at the table d’hote. The mystery seemed to grow denser.
The book must have been given to her, Emily continued, or she must have found it. But where could she find it? In her bedroom — there was nowhere else. And then — ?
Emily struggled to carry the story on, but she could not move it a step further, till one day there came a great rush of thought. Some previous occupant of Priscilla’s room at Aix might have forgotten the book; it might have been left in a wardrobe or chest of drawers. But the housemaids could not have overlooked it. Another rush of thought! The book may have dropped behind the chest of drawers and was caught between it and the wall, and when Priscilla moved the chest of drawers the book fell. This conjecture seemed more in character with what she knew of Priscilla than any other. But much remained to be accounted for, and she could not think how it was that Priscilla had brought back to England a book that did not belong to her. Several days passed in vain conjectures, and she remembered at last that having found the book Priscilla could not take it downstairs to the office and say: A previous occupant left this book in my room. The proprietress would open it, and would at once suspect that Priscilla had read it; nor could Priscilla leave the book where she had found it, for when the room was next turned out the story would begin to run that the quiet English girl, as demure as an image, read improper books in her bedroom. A moment after, Emily discovered another link. Priscilla could not burn the book, for there were no fires; she was ashamed to confess to her sister that she had seen the book, and thinking that she could get rid of it in Ireland she had slipped it into her placket and travelled over with it, to her great inconvenience. Her thought might have been to bury it in the garden when she had finished reading it. But she had never finished it, and Emily was glad that Priscilla was spared the end. She had read enough, however, to know that the book was a disgrace.
And it was to burn that book that her spirit has kept me here, Emily said, raising her eyes to the clock, which was striking twelve, two hours after her usual bedtime. Yet she could not go to bed before she had accomplished some of her duty to Priscilla, and she sat up till one, tearing paper from the book and watching the text disappear into black ashes. But a book is not burnt quickly, and she had to take a large remnant of it to her room, for she did not dare leave it torn for the servants to look into, since they might suspect something, though it was in French. Nowhere would it be safe except under her pillow; and if she were to die that night and be found dead with it under her pillow!
But death did not come to take her that night, and the next evening what remained of the book perished in the grate, and as the last page curled and blackened, she began to apprehend all that the burning of the book meant to her. Now that it was gone she was free to leave this dusty old house and the dusty conventions in which half her life had been spent. She was free to return to Aix and to live like other English spinsters on a small income, travelling whither she listed, from one boarding-house to another, seeking — Does anybody do more than to seek and to find, mayhap, something? Does any woman find even the shadow of her dream at thirty-five? she asked. Her thoughts began to doze again, and whilst she dozed the day returned to the garden and the blackbird whistled again in the dusk. But would she be able to match that bird’s song again? Once, ah, once; and between waking and dream she rose to her feet and went upstairs, forgetful of all things but her bed.
HUGH MONFERT
I
DR. KNIGHT WILL save me from Minor Orders, thought Hugh Monfert as he stood shaving before a small mirror in a white-washed, cell-like room, a young man of two-and-twenty, tall, thick-set, round-headed, and shortnecked, whose curved nose hung flag-like over a long, loose mouth when he tightened his upper lip and drew the razor across it. I must have a priest’s advice and none can advise me better than Dr. Knight. How odd that I didn’t think of him last night. He dipped his shaving brush into the jug of hot water and was about to start a second shaving, but before lathering again he stopped so that he might better think out the letter he was minded to send, anon laying the razor down to consider what answer he would give to his mother if she were to ask him why he had thought of inviting the President to Wotton Hall, for he had never expressed a wish to do so before and it was three years since he had left Stanislaus College. Of course he had a right to invite whom he pleased to his own house, but his plans would come to naught if his mother suspected that the priest was asked to Wotton Hall to mediate. But why should she refuse Dr. Knight’s mediation if I am willing to accept it? We cannot go on wrangling for ever about an heir. An heir is the bee in he
r bonnet, he growled. Every woman who comes here is considered by her as a possible wife and mother, and it’s getting upon my nerves; it’s driving me out of my wits. And once more forgetful of his shaving, he stood like a stock, his face a blank, asking himself why his mother could not wait, allowing things to take their course. He was not averse from marriage but he would like to be allowed to marry when and whom he pleased, for his pleasure and not for the sake of an heir. Surely this is reasonable? he asked, for after all I am but two-and-twenty. The human mind is a very strange thing, he reflected; ideas drop into it, and we do not know how or whence they come. His face became still more overcast, and he sought the cause of his mother’s anxiety to see him married — Married to anybody, for it is not my happiness she seeks but her own ends.
He had always looked upon his mother as the most unselfish of women, and to find her one of the most selfish frightened him; and his thoughts passing on he was drawn to seek excuses for her willingness to sacrifice his happiness. She is some years over fifty, and if she is to enjoy her grandchildren no time must be lost; that is her point of view, and she is so absorbed in her dream of grandchildren that she forgets me. He laughed aloud and repeated her words: You are the last. Her passion for grandchildren could be nothing else than it is, he added, for she married that the family might linger on for another couple of hundred years, having no thought for the fact that everything ends sooner or later, even the glorious name of Montferrat. And his thoughts deviating a little, he remembered her father, Joe Huxtable, a peasant who had amassed great wealth in the corn trade and who had had the wit to see that when the corn laws were abolished the next fortunes to be made would come from under the earth. He had gone to the north to make another fortune out of coal, and continued to pile up money till homesickness brought him back to his native County, Essex. If God had given him a son it might have been otherwise, but having given him only one daughter it was but natural that he should, when he was alone and depressed, fall to thinking of some Earl or Lord or Marquess as his daughter’s husband, and if none of these were to be gotten, of some great family that would accept Betty, she being no wise an ill-looking young woman and of a great fortune, enough to pay the debts of an encumbered estate.... Such thoughts as these must have come to his grandfather, Joe Huxtable, and there being an almost extinct family at his door, the Monferts of Wotton Hall, now represented by an old man of sixty, living in four or five rooms of the great mansion on what his creditors would allow him, the thought must have come into Joe Huxtable’s mind: There’s many things to be said against this marriage, as there is against all marriages, but there’s many things to be said for it, too. And Hugh, who still retained a faint memory of his grandfather, could easily imagine the old man saying: It is fitting that the youngest family in England should come to the help of the oldest. But the Huxtables were Protestants, and the Monferts, though an improvident lot in the eighteenth century, had always kept themselves aloof from Protestants. Even his father, Hugh thought, Edward Monfert, in his decadence, with bailiffs oftener in his house than out of it and some illegitimate children in the village, would not have dared to break the family tradition by marrying a Protestant — he was certain of that. All the same, he was glad the circumstance had not arisen. His mother had not married for love, but for admiration of the ancestry his father represented; her wish was, and it was her father’s wish too, that the Huxtable should come to the help of the Monfert, and when a child he had heard his mother say, in speaking of her conversion, that she would never have felt herself to be a Monfert if she had not been received into the Roman Catholic Church. Was it the desire to raise herself socially? It may have been that. The romantic story of Hugues de Montferrat appealed to her imagination; she had said something herself that led him to think so. But he might be mistaken, and he began to consider his mother’s marriage from another point of view; that feeling herself drawn to the true Church she had perhaps wedded his father as much for his religious faith as for his ancestry. It is always wrong, he continued in his thought, to attribute motives, for we can never know the true ones, only God can know them; and to atone for the thought that had come into his mind unasked, he dwelt on his mother’s devotion to the Church of her adoption and upon her wise administration of his estates — how she lived during the long years of his minority upon a mere pittance in three or four rooms of the Hall with two maidservants, who had brought her husband a hundred thousand pounds on her marriage and another hundred and fifty thousand at her father’s death. All this money she had applied to the redemption of the estates from debts, hoarding year in year out so that when he came of age he might have a large sum of money for the rebuilding of Wotton Hall; her whim this was, no doubt, and her pleasure; it could not be else than that she had enjoyed living in poverty, for her poverty reminded her all the while that her life was following its predestined course — not lessening her merit thereby, he’d be sorry to think that; and he remembered having heard her speak of the rebuilding of Wotton Hall as his lot, when they walked together in the avenue three years after her husband’s death, when he was a child of six.
In those early years, till he went to Stanislaus College, they had walked together in the avenue every day between lesson time and luncheon; and the image of himself and his mother leading their lonely life together rose up in his thoughts clear and distinct. He could still hear her voice if he listened for it, telling him that she was saving money every year so that his estates might be free from mortgages, and he have a big sum of money in hand for the rebuilding of the Hall, his lot; for his father had had no thought for his great ancestry, not even for Hugues de Montferrat, who came over with the Conqueror and lived in a castle defended by moat and drawbridge. He could hear his childish voice pleading for seven towers and a portcullis when the house was rebuilt, and then the scene flitted from the long reach of avenue to the morning-room, where his mother taught him his lessons and where they sat in the evening in two big armchairs in front of the fire. He was then old enough to follow a story read from a book, but he liked to hear her tell stories better than to hear her read them: Mother, what you are reading to me is not nearly so funny as what happened to Hugues de Montferrat’s grandsons, who followed Richard Coeur de Lion. Tell me again the story of the minstrel who discovered the King’s prison. But I have told you the story, Hugh; you know it by this time as well as I do. No, mother, I don’t remember how the King escaped from prison, and I don’t think you ever told it to me, not properly. Her cry often echoed in his thoughts: Hugh, you should have been in bed hours ago! Come, let me put you to bed at once. Again the scene flitted — from his bedside, with himself repeating a Hail Mary after his mother, to Stanislaus College, not to the first but to the last years he spent there, when his mind was set upon Oxford, to the day when his mother wrote telling him that he must forgo Oxford and return to Wotton Hall, the builder having told her that the chimney stacks were not safe and that a winter storm might overthrow one of them; if that happened it would not stop falling until it reached the bottom. He had had to give up Oxford, and he and his mother had spent fifteen thousand pounds rebuilding Wotton Hall. And the end of it all was that they might have to separate, leaving the house to fall into ruins after all the money had been spent upon it, for his mother could not live in the Hall alone; and he stood, razor in hand, appalled by the calamity. Mother would never forgive me, and he thought of her kind but unyielding nature, and how the calamity that faced them could be averted by Dr. Knight, who might he able to persuade her that if she and her son were to continue to live together, she must remember his rights, for he had rights in Wotton Hall, which was big enough to hold their different selves. If, he cried, there is give and take. I must be allowed to live my own life in Wotton Hall as I please; there can be no going back on that. And what I ask is so little — merely to marry when and whom I please. All I ask (and again he began to shave himself) is not to he reminded that I am the last and that if I do not produce an heir the rebuilding of Wotton Hall wil
l have been but a vanity. She can have her friends down for week-ends; I will meet them at meals and be agreeable and rattle out all the small talk that she loves, but after meals I think I should be allowed to retire to the Barn, the only part of the house I ask for. She has and can continue to have all the rest for herself, friends, and sundry. I make no objection to the week-enders, but I do not want them to be brought up here to see my collection of armour, my statues, my pictures, and to ask stupid questions; and to be told by my mother if I don’t answer them or give evasive replies, that I am rude and unworthy of my ancestry.
A sudden sense of the humour of this quarrel obliged him to stop shaving, and whilst thinking of the conditions that Dr. Knight must lay down, the inviolability of the Barn being one of them, he recalled that the first time he had summoned courage to withstand his mother outright was the day that he and she had climbed to the third storey of Wotton Hall to consider if the rooms could be utilised as servants’ quarters. He had followed the passage into which the garret rooms opened, finding himself at last in a great, unceilinged room, fifty or sixty feet of space by forty, which he instinctively named the Barn. He had called to his mother, expecting her to share his admiration of the rafters. But, my dear Hugh, she said, you forget that all the maidservants’ rooms will open on to the passage leading to this huge — what do you call it? The Barn, he answered. I don’t think you would care for such promiscuity. But of course, mother, I should have the whole storey to myself. I shouldn’t think of sitting here reading and drawing late at night if the other rooms were occupied by maidservants. Then you’ll have to put your hand into your pocket, Hugh, and build new servants’ quarters.... That was how he was treated in Wotton Hall; and he stood thinking whether it would be advisable to tell his mother that he was going to write to Dr. Knight. To tell her that I am going to write to him, he said, stopping on the staircase, is unnecessary, for it is ten chances to one he’ll answer that his duties keep him in Staffordshire for the present, but that later, during the summer vacation, he will be glad to spend a few days with us — something of that sort.
