Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  After her confession to her mother she began to discover the value of that ingenious lady’s experience and tact. At first, indeed, she felt a modest hesitation in coolly doing what she was told, as a means of winning George’s heart, but she soon found out that her mother was always right and that she herself was generally wrong.

  “There is only one way of doing things,” said Totty, one day, “and that is the right way. There is only one thing that a man really hates, and that is, being bored. And men are very easily bored, my dear. A man likes to have everything done for him in the most perfect way, but it spoils his enjoyment to feel that it is done especially for him and for nobody else. If you are afraid he will catch cold, do not run after him with his hat, as though he were an invalid. That is only an example, Mamie. Men have an immense body of tradition to sustain, and they do it by keeping up appearances as well as they can. All men are supposed to be brave, strong, honourable, enduring and generous. They are supposed never to feel hot when we do, nor to catch cold when we should. It is a part of their stage character never to be afraid of anything, and many of them are far more timid than we are. I do not mean to say that dear George has not all the qualities a man ought to have. Certainly not. He is quite the finest fellow I ever knew. But he does not want you to notice the fact. He wants you to take it for granted, just as much as little Tippy Skiffington does, who is afraid of a mouse and would not touch a dog that had no muzzle on for all he is worth, which is saying a great deal. Dear George would not like it to be supposed that he cares for terrapin and dry champagne any more than for pork and beans — and yet the dear fellow is keenly alive to the difference. He does not want it to be thought he could ever be bored by you or me, but he knows that we know that he might be, and he expects us to use tact and to leave him alone sometimes, even for a whole day. He will be much more glad to see us the next time we meet him and will show it by giving himself much more trouble to be agreeable. It is not true that if you run away men will follow you. They are far too lazy for that. You must come to them, but not too often. What they most want is amusement, and between their amusements, to be allowed to do exactly what their high and mighty intellects suggest to them, without comment. Never ask a man where he has been, what he has seen, nor what he has heard. If he has anything to tell, he will tell you, and if he has not you only humiliate him by discovering the emptiness of his thoughts. Always ask his opinion. If he has none himself, he knows somebody who has, no matter what the subject may be. The difference between men and women is very simple, my dear. Women look greater fools than they are, and men are greater fools than they look — except in the things they know how to do and do well.”

  “George is not a fool about anything!” said Mamie indignantly. She had been listening with considerable interest to her mother’s homily.

  “George, my dear,” answered Totty, “is very foolish not to be in love with you at the present moment. Or, if he is, he is very foolish to hide it.”

  “I wish you would not talk like that, mamma! I am not half good enough for him.”

  Nevertheless Mamie consulted her mother and was guided by her. George would ride — should she accept his proposal and go with him or not? A word, a glance decided the matter for her, and George was none the wiser. He could not help thinking, however, that Mamie was becoming an extremely tactful young person, as well as a most agreeable companion. One day he could not resist his inclination to tell her so.

  “How clever you are, Mamie!” he exclaimed after a pause in the conversation.

  “I? Clever?” The girl’s face expressed her innocent astonishment at the compliment.

  “Yes. You are a most charming person to live with. How in the world did you know that I wanted to be alone yesterday, and that I wanted you to come with me to-day?” George laughed. “Do I not always ask you to come with me in precisely the same tone? Do I not always look as though I wanted you to come? How do you always know?”

  Mamie was conscious that she blushed even more than she usually did when she was momentarily embarrassed. Indeed, the blush had two distinct causes on the present occasion. She had at first been delighted by the compliment he had paid her, and then, immediately afterwards, when he explained what he meant, she had felt her shame burning in her face. On the previous day, as on the present afternoon, she had blindly followed her mother’s advice, given by an almost imperceptible motion of the head and eyes that had indicated a negation on the first occasion and assent on the second. She was silent now, and could find no words with which to answer his question.

  “How do you do it?” he asked again, wondering at her embarrassment, and slackening the pace at which he rowed, for they were in a boat together towards sunset.

  Mamie’s eyes suddenly filled with hot tears and she hid her face with her small hands.

  “Why, Mamie dear, what is it?” George asked, resting on his oars and leaning forward.

  “O George,” she sobbed, “if you only knew!”

  CHAPTER XVII.

  GEORGE DID NOT forget Mamie’s strange behaviour in the boat, and he devoted much time to the study of the problem it presented. To judge from the girl’s conduct alone, she must be in love with him, and yet he did not like the idea and took the greatest pains to keep it out of his mind. He was not in the humour in which it is a pleasant surprise to a man to discover unexpected affection for himself in a quarter where he has not expected to find it. Moreover, if he had once made sure that Mamie loved him, he would probably have thought it his duty to go away as quickly as possible. Such a decision would have deprived him of much that he enjoyed and it was desirable in the interests of his selfishness that it should be put off as long as possible.

  At that time George began to feel the desire for work creeping upon him once more. During a few weeks only had it been in his power to put away the habit of writing, and to close his eyes to all responsibility. Those had been days when the whole world had seemed to be upside down, as in a dream, while he himself moved in the midst of a disordered creation, uncertainty, like a soulless creature, without the capacity for independent action nor the intelligence to form any distinct intention from one moment to another. He took what he found in his way without understanding, though not without an odd appreciation of what was good, very much as Eastern princes receive European hospitality. He was grateful at least that his life should be made so smooth for the time, for he was dimly conscious that anything outwardly rough or coarse would have exasperated him to madness. He believed that he thought a great deal about the past, but when he attempted to give his meditations a shape, they would accept none. In reality he was not thinking, though the mirror of his memory was filled with fleeting reflections of his former life, some clear and startlingly vivid, others distorted and broken, but all more or less beautified by the shadowy presence of a being he had loved better than himself, and from whom he was separated for ever.

  With such a man, however, idleness was as impossible as the desire for expression was irresistible. Since he had written his first book, and had discovered what it was that he was born to do, he had taken up a burden which he could not lay down and had sworn allegiance to a master from whom he could not escape. Not even the bitter and overwhelming disappointment that had come upon him could kill the desire to write. He was almost ashamed of it at first, for he felt that though everything he loved best in the world were dead before him, he should be driven within a few weeks to take up his pen again and open his inner eyes and ears to the play of his mind’s stage.

  The power to do certain things is rarely separated from the necessity for doing them, and the fact that they are well done by no means proves that the doer has forgotten the blow that recently overwhelmed his heart in darkness and his daily life in an almost uncontrollable grief. There are two lives for most men, whatever their careers may be, and the absence of either of these lives makes a man produce an impression of incompleteness upon those who know him. When any one lives only by the existence of the heart, wit
hout active occupation, without manifesting inclination, taste or talent for outward things, we say that he has no interest in life, and is much to be pitied. But we say that a man is heartless and selfish who appears to devote every thought to his occupation and every moment to increasing the chances of his success. In the lives of great men we search with an especial pleasure for all that can show us the working of their hearts, and we remember with delight whatever we find that indicates a separate and inner chain of events, of which the links have been loves and friendships kept secret from the world. The more nearly the two lives have coincided, the more happy we judge the man to have been, the more out of tune and discordant with each other, the more we feel that his existence must have seemed a failure in his own eyes; and when we are told only of his doings before the world, without one touch of softer feeling, we lay aside the book of his biography and say that it is badly written and that we are surprised to find that a man so uninteresting in himself should have exercised so much influence over his times.

  George Wood had neither forgotten Constance, nor had he recovered from the wound he had received, and yet within a day or two of his resuming his work, he found that his love of it was not diminished nor his strength to do it abated. It was not happiness to write, but it was satisfaction. His hesitation was gone now, and his hand had recovered its cunning. He no longer sat for hours before a blank sheet of paper, staring at the wall and racking his brain in the hope that a character of some sort would suddenly start into shape and life from the chaotic darkness he was facing. Until the first difficulties that attend the beginning of a book were overcome, he had still a lingering and unacknowledged suspicion that he could do nothing good without the daily criticism and unfailing applause he had been accustomed to receive from Constance during his former efforts. When he was fairly launched, he felt proud of being able to do without her. For the first time he was depending solely upon his own judgment, as he had always relied upon his own ideas, and his judgment decided that what he did was good.

  From that time the arrangement of his day took again the definite shape in which he had always known it, and the mere distribution of his hours between work and rest gave him back confidence in himself. He began to see his surroundings from a more intelligent point of view, and to take a keener interest in things and people. Though he had by no means recovered from the first great shock of his life, and though in his heart he was as bitter as ever against her who had inflicted it, yet his mind was already convalescent and was being rapidly restored to its former vigour. There was power in his imagination, strength in his language and harmony in his style. What he thought took shape, and the shape found expression.

  He soon found that under these circumstances life was bearable, and often enjoyable. Very gradually, as his concentrated attention became absorbed in his own creations, the face of Constance Fearing appeared less often in his dreams, and the heartbroken tones of her voice rang less continually in his ears. He was not forgetting, but the physical impressions of sight and sound upon his senses were wearing off. Occasionally indeed they would return with startling force and vividness, awakening in him for one moment the reality of all he had suffered. At such times he could see again, as though face to face, her expression at the instant when she had seemed to relinquish the attempt to soften him, and he could hear again the plaintive accents of her words and the painful cadence of her sobbing voice. But such visitations grew daily more rare and at last almost ceased altogether.

  For what he had done himself he felt no remorse. His mind was not made like hers, and he would never be able to understand that she had done violence to her own heart in casting him off. He would learn perhaps some day to describe what she had done, to analyse her motives from his own point of view, but he would never be able to think of her as she thought of herself. In his eyes she would always be a little contemptible, even when time’s charitable mists should have descended upon the past and softened all its outlines. He was cut off from her by one of the most impassable barriers which can be raised in the human heart, by his resentment against himself for having been deceived.

  He did not ask himself whether he could ever love again. There was a strength in his present position, which almost pleased him. He had done with love and was free to speak of it as he chose, without regard for any one’s feelings, without respect for the passion itself, if it suited his humour. There had been nothing boyish in the pure and passionate affection under which he had lived during two of the most important years in his life. He had felt all that a man can feel in the deep devotion to one spotless object. There would never again be anything so high and noble and untainted in all the years that were to come for him, and he knew it. The determination he had felt to be necessary in the first moment of his anger had carried itself out almost without any direction from his will. The Constance he had loved so dearly, was not the Constance who had refused to marry him, and who had dealt him such a cruel blow. The two were separated and he could still love the one, while hating and despising the other. But although he might meet the girl whose face and form and look and voice were those of her he had lost, this second Constance could never take the other’s place. A word from her could not put fire into his heart, nor raise in his brain the vision of a magnificent inspiration. A touch from her hand could send no thrill of pleasure through his frame, there would be no joy in looking upon her fair face when next he saw it. She might say to him all that he had once said to her, she might appeal passionately to the love that was now dead, she might offer him her heart, her body and her soul. He wanted none of the three now. The break had been final and definite, love’s path had broken off upon the edge of the precipice, and though she might stand on the old familiar way and beckon to him to come over and meet her, there was that between them which no man could cross.

  Like all great passions the one through which George Wood had passed had produced upon him a definite effect, which could be appreciated, if not accurately measured. He was older in every way now than he had been two years and a half earlier, but older chiefly in his understanding of human nature. He knew, now, what men and women felt in certain circumstances, his instinct told him truly what it had formerly only vaguely suggested. The inevitable logic of life had taken him up as a problem, had dealt with him as with a subject fitted to its hand, and had forced upon him a solution of himself. Where he had entertained doubts, he now felt certainty, where he had hesitated in expressing the judgment of his tastes he now found his verdicts already considered and only awaiting delivery. Many months later, when the book he was now writing was published it was a new surprise to his readers. His first attempts had been noticeable for their beauty, his last book was remarkable for its truth.

  Meanwhile his intimacy with Mamie grew unheeded by himself. During the many hours of each day in which he had no fixed occupation, he was almost constantly with her, and their conversation was at last only interrupted each evening to begin again the next afternoon, when he had done his work and came out of his room in search of relaxation. He had never found any explanation for her embarrassment on that day when he had been rowing her about on the river, and after a time he had ceased to seek for one. His brain was too busy with other things, and what he wanted when he was with her was rest rather than exercise for his curiosity in trying to solve the small enigmas of her girlish thoughts. She was a very pleasant companion, and that was all he cared to know. She brought about him an atmosphere of genuine and affectionate admiration that gave him confidence in himself and smoothed the furrows of his imagination when he had been giving that faculty more to do than was good for it.

  Mamie, too, was happier than she had been a month earlier. She had no longer to suffer the humiliation of taking her mother’s advice about what she should do, and she could enjoy George’s company without feeling that she had been told to enjoy it in her own interest. As she learned to love him more and more, she was quick also to understand his ways. Signs that had formerly escaped her altogethe
r were now as clear to her comprehension as words themselves. She knew, now, almost before he knew it himself, whether he wanted her to join him, or not, whether he preferred to talk or to be silent, whether he would like this question or that which she thought of asking him, or whether he would resent it and make her feel that she had made a mistake. One day, she ventured to mention Constance’s name.

  George had never visited the Fearings in their country-place, and was not aware until he came to stay with his cousin that they lived on the opposite shore of the river. Their house was not visible from the Trimms’ side, as it was surrounded by trees, and the stream was at that point nearly two miles in width. Totty, however, who always had a view to avoiding any possibility of anything disagreeable, had very soon communicated the information to George in an unconcerned way, while pointing out and naming to him the various country-seats that could be seen from her part of the shore. George did not forget what he had been told, and if he ever crossed the river and rowed along the other bank, he was careful to keep away from the Fearings’ land, in order to guard against any unpleasant meetings.

  Now it chanced that on a certain afternoon he was pulling leisurely up stream towards a place where the current was slack, and where he occasionally moored the wherry to an old landing in order to rest himself and talk more at his ease. Mamie of course was seated in the stern, leaning back comfortably amongst her cushions and holding the tiller-ropes daintily between the thumb and finger of each hand. She could steer very well when it was necessary, and she could even row well enough to make some headway against the stream, but George had been accustomed to being alone in a boat, and gave her very little to do when he was rowing.