Light, Descending

by Octavia Randolph

  Her voice was as light as she could make it. John’s head snapped up in astonishment.

  “Going? But––why?” he asked. Effie was easy for him to talk to; in fact she talked constantly. Over these last weeks he had gotten used to her being there, enlarging the constrictive family circle of the three Ruskins. Yet Effie was decidedly not part of the family. She was altogether more interesting than his cousin Mary had ever been; he had never taken her down to tea.

  “Because Mama and Papa want me,” she answered, and brought herself to smile at him. Mrs. Ruskin was bobbing her head.

  “But so suddenly––” he said. “Mother, make her stay,” he appealed.

  “I’ll not get in the way of any child’s duty to their parents,” Margaret Ruskin said, and speared her fish.

  Now that Effie was clearing out, the family evening was as pleasant as before, at least for John’s parents, who showed her quite their old warmth and familiarity. She was seething within, and John’s mooniness and monosyllabic responses to his parents’ remarks did nothing to cool her sense of insult.

  She’d told him she’d go alone to the station, insisting a maid would be adequate chaperonage, but he dismissed the idea with something approaching vehemence. He handed her into the family carriage and she moved in so that when he was seated their arms did not touch. She kept her eyes fixed ahead, out the little isinglass window by the driver. As the carriage rolled forward John surprised himself by taking her hand. He was sorry that she wanted to go. She had been lively and fresh and now she was curt and brittle and he did not like the change. He’d reached for her hand to reassure himself that the affection and ease they had known could remain.

  This may have been a moment for a declaration, and the young lady waited with pounding heart for the sudden action to translate to words. But her companion said nothing, merely held her hand with steady pressure. If he was going to let her be driven out of the house like this, Miss Gray was glad to go. She withdrew her hand, and he did not seek it again.

  South suburban London’s quiet gave way to increasingly busier streets. The iron-laced windows of Euston Station were filmed with grime, despite the unsparing efforts of a few boys at work with rags and pails. Once inside they were almost immediately engulfed by travellers clutching carpet bags, and hemmed by wheeled carts tottering with crates. Blasts of steam issued wheezily from waiting engines, temporarily obscuring their vision. Construction of a larger terminus surrounded them as they picked their way to the platform, the shouts of workers and driving of rivets adding to the din. Her locomotive stood steaming, poised North.

  “I despise railroads,” John said, appalled at the noise and smoke. “No one with any sense of beauty should be forced to travel by them.” But he was telling Effie nothing she did not already know. They parted after he had seen her to her rail carriage with little more than a brotherly embrace.

  Alone with his parents that night John looked at the silent piano. Neither his mother nor father had mentioned Effie’s name since his return from seeing her off. John James Ruskin was in fact gauging the amount of time required before it would be seemly to again mention Miss Charlotte Lockhart to his son.

  John, sitting glumly across from the piano with a newspaper on his knee, was indeed thinking of that lady, but in briefest consideration. Miss Lockhart was nothing more than a shadow cast upon a wall, part of very short procession of such shadows. The shadow Adèle Domecq had cast had fallen across his heart. As a boy he’d had it so badly broken by her that as the years rolled on he wondered if he could ever wed. Then last year Charlotte Lockhart had swum into his ken, and because he knew it would make his father happy he tried to woo her. Miss Lockhart had never given him the faintest hope; during his recent visit to her in Scotland they had spent their time together sitting on a unyielding sofa while she asked his opinion of another man.

  Now Effie, a girl he had known since her childhood, had come back into his life, active and bright and making him feel young again just as he was thinking himself old at twenty-eight. He wanted to love. He wanted a woman to say Yes to him.

  In October John made pilgrimage to Perth, asking to see Miss Gray. She filled Bowerswell with her friends and admirers for his visit. Chattering girls in their prettiest frocks were flanked by dashingly uniformed Scots Guardsmen and Dragoons, and Effie was at the centre of it. She wore a yellow gown streaming with ribbons, and dressed her hair with little Michaelmas daisies. Her brother George greeted John warmly, but she was as cool and remote as if he had been a stranger with a questionable reputation. How Effie suffered that day! George played piano as she danced one mazurka after another with every man there but John. It made her miserable to see him so miserable, leaning up against the arched doorway to the dining room, clutching his punch cup on the fringe of the gaiety! But she had felt the sting of being cast a fortune-hunter, and didn’t mind wounding herself or John, if that was what it took to persuade the Ruskins they were wrong.

  A week later came his letter from London, filled with such ardent proclamations of love, and assurances of his parents’ support in pursuit of her that she felt the strain would break her. She wrote back Yes.

  Huddled over his crowded study desk John answered with expressions of profound gratitude, which in his innocence he did not recognize as a portent. Effusive thanks were followed with a lover’s declaration of eternal devotion. He was not at all certain from what well these proclamations were emanating, only that they must find utterance; and that in Miss Gray he had at last an eager recipient. He realised there was a fundamental variance in their natures. Before he loved her he could recall watching her dance at parties or chat at galleries and thinking her ideal future was as a diplomat’s wife, such was her ease of charm and manner. He did believe her the bewitching figure he had accused her of being, but being bewitched by a lady who seemed almost as devoted to him as he was to her was a novel and most agreeable experience. And she was very young, nineteen, quick and malleable; she would form around him.

  After Effie accepted John she received a letter every day. His letters began with passages that left her blushing before devolving, sometimes abruptly, into practical matters. They ended in lengthy spiritual meditations which struck her with awe at the depth of his religious feeling, and his familiarity with Scripture. Despite their firmly held evangelical beliefs her future in-laws clung to the hope that John would enter the Anglican Church, and his mother now confided to Effie that she dreamt of her son as the Archbishop of Canterbury. Effie was grateful this intelligence had been conveyed to her in a letter, for she laughed aloud trying to picture John, equally fixed in his interests in art and natural philosophy, at Lambeth Palace.

  He was planning their wedding trip. After a few days alone together, John wrote her, they would leave for the Continent, and as his parents would be joining them she must remember that her dresses ought not to be so wide as to make travel in a carriage for four uncomfortable. Effie had not quite imagined they would be travelling à quatre on their wedding trip, but the Ruskins always took their annual continental trip en famille, and John had made it clear this custom would continue.

  Their first stop would be France, and he urged her to concentrate on her French language studies so as to be useful. They would then proceed to Switzerland to hike in the lower Alps. She had to laugh at his list of stipulations on her dress; he was so fearful of treading on her hem as they went along mountain paths. Didn’t he know she’d been raised in an active household of younger children, and they’d romped and tramped long miles through the Highlands?

  Sometimes he tried to imagine their life ahead.

  Only six more weeks to wait! But who knows what we may be in six years! I haven’t the slightest ideas of what will become of us––perhaps we shall get quite cool––and may have quarrelled so often that we shall do it as a matter of course––about everything––As to will I always love you as I do now––It will depend upon yourself and how you change––I can think of y
ou or conceive of you as old––50 or sixty––and fancy myself a lover still––at 70––But to tell you the very truth––I cannot look fairly in the face of the Great Fact that you must one day––(God willing)––be Forty. It sounds very unpleasant indeed––to be sure––I shall be 50––if I see that day, and I don’t know what of my views in general–and of you in particular, may be by that time. But for now my sweet I feel I should faint away for love of you––and become a mist or a smoke, like the Genie in the Arabian nights––Goodbye––Only about 45 more Goodbyes–

  This word of warning went unrecognized by Effie. The warm exuberance of youth did not admit the chill attendant on her lover’s fears for her maturity. She did pause however for a moment to consider her own mother, who at forty-two remained not only slender and attractive but, expecting her 13th child, highly fecund.

  Despite their continued generosity in the manner of gifts, and the handsome settlement made over to her, Effie had not outgrown the nagging suspicion that she was a poor substitute in every sense of the word for the daughter-in-law the Ruskins truly wanted. As winter deepened so did her domestic responsibilities at Bowerswell; her mother had been heavily pregnant when she had returned home and now had a new son. Effie had charge of a household of young brothers and sisters who struggled with ear-aches, tummy upsets, and even the scarlet fever which in past years had carried off five of her siblings. Her brother George was reduced to seeking work as a clerk, and to her chagrin Mr. Ruskin, who she had hoped might procure him a position in trade at London, showed no inclination to do so. Worse than all was her dear father’s deepening gloom over the financial morass he had driven the family into. His income from his law practice couldn’t adequately provide for their large family, and his investments in the building of new railways had so far proved an almost dead loss. Effie lay tossing in her bed at night over all this. Now her hair was shedding at an alarming rate.

  John wished to know how soon they might wed. At his urging she set a date for Spring, but not as early as his February birthday as he hoped. April 10th 1848, a Monday, was fixed as the date. All would be well, the prospective bride believed, once they were wed.

  John James Ruskin need not knock upon his departing son’s dressing room door. The panelled door was open to the bronze-striped papered walls within. Nonetheless he stood on the threshold and cleared his throat, and John turned from where he stood before his open trunk. His man, George Hobbs, was kneeling and fitting shoes into the trunk’s compartmentalized interior.

  “No need to stop, George,” John James said at the man’s rising. “Go on with your work.”

  His son still stood where he had turned, a smile on his face and a small notebook in his hand. The boy’s piercing blue eyes seemed to have absorbed some extra depth and shine. If not for the pallor of his skin John James Ruskin would have suspected incipient fever, and he had to stop himself from lifting his hand to his son’s brow. John was wearing a new bottle green coat, with a new and very blue stock wrapped round his neck. Even fully dressed he looked as slight as a boy to his father’s eyes.

  “A wedding gift for Phemy,” John James said, and extended the flat leather jewel case he had in his own hand. Between the Gray and Ruskin families the girl had always been Phemy. John James saw no reason to adopt his son’s fanciful moniker for her; it confused him in his letters to her father to have two names in currency for the same young woman.

  John slipped his notebook into his pocket and took the case. “A wedding gift?” he repeated. “After all you have done for us?” The blue eyes glittered and John James feared his own might mist with tears. There had been entirely too much effort over this affair, the old man thought; it had disrupted the household and he was mightily glad it was nearly at an end. He cleared his throat, loudly, in response. Hobbs, an alert servant, rose and quit the room.

  John snapped open the lid to reveal the garnet and gold necklace that lay within. It was his father’s taste, the taste of an earlier generation, and a rich and costly piece. He could not imagine Effie caring for it, but he was moved nonetheless. “Most appropriate,” he said, looking upon it. A moment passed before he lifted his gaze back to his father. He saw how old his father looked, and felt how unhappy he was making him.

  John Ruskin did not know exactly why he had fallen in love with Euphemia Gray. Awakening in the cold light of various London mornings over these past weeks, he had wondered if simple propinquity had played a part: Effie happened to be there before him, and within reach. Lying in bed night after night he had fantasised her as the object of his pining, and long after she had accepted him he cast her in his imagination in the role of a dangerous and unattainable fata morgana. To remake her, and himself, to the extent that he could deem himself helpless against her charms had been an increasingly urgent desire. With Adèle he had been a force acted upon, and with Effie he felt he could act upon her. Love was never equal, not in Scott’s romances at any rate, and he did not hope that the yearning he had found himself expressing to Effie could be equally returned by her. But he wanted to love, and the hope that she might indeed want that love made her tantalizing. He worked himself into a fever over her, and she had accepted him, and now he still felt tantalized but also that the fever had subsided.

  The elder Ruskin was innocent of John’s meditations. He’d felt forced to give his consent last year when he’d seen him sickening for love. Although the old man was loath to admit it, John’s symptoms had been disturbingly close to the behaviour exhibited by John’s grandfather, and that dark mental malady had deepened until it ended in madness and death. It was a loss of vitality combined with an unassuageable restlessness; lassitude one moment and frenetic yet unfocussed activity the next. If the boy wasn’t watched carefully next thing he’d be spitting up blood again. The lack of appetite and snappishness sealed it; John James and Margaret Ruskin not only relented but urged the boy to press his suit at once in hopes of bringing the sufferings of all three to an end. And Miss Gray accepted John readily enough––it would have been insult if she had not––but John looked no better for that. He looked scarcely fit for the trip to Perth. But the sooner he was there and wed, the sooner out of danger.

  John held the open box between them, and spoke. “Can you forgive me, father–– for doing what is displeasing to you?”

  John James did not expect this question, but John could get right to the point of the sabre when he wanted to, making it damnably awkward. What was he supposed to say? He and the boy’s mother had always assumed a brilliant match for John; with his rising literary reputation and the social circles he was increasingly sought in, a Lord’s daughter was not out of the question. More to his own taste would have been that Lockhart girl––what better match than marrying into Sir Walter Scott’s line?

  His son spared his father from answering.

  “Effie will be, I know, the perfect help-mate,” John was now saying. “She can draw well enough to help me in my architectural studies, and I mean to perfect her in that art. Her vision is sharp and she can save my own eyes by transcribing notes of the buildings I’ve measured.”

  These tasks were already performed by George Hobbs, who accompanied John everywhere, and John James might have scoffed to hear his son’s bride spoken of as almost another paid assistant if the entire matter hadn’t been so trying.

  But now his son broached the more pressing particular surrounding his union with Phemy. “Her father’s current circumstances are indeed unfortunate, but I need not tell you they in no way reflect his character, or even long-term prospects,” he told his father.

  John James grunted. A good man with a good solid law practice like Gray gone to smash––and all on the veritable lottery of railway shares! It was madness, he thought, this speculation on new lines that would be built, so-called investors staking their arduously gained money on the hopes that two points so connected via iron rails and belching smoke might win them ease! Half the time the lines never got finished, or t
he cotton manufacturer who had promised to build his odious factory at the end of it changed his mind, and the whole thing evaporated. He was ashamed that last year he himself had quietly lost £1000 on such shares. Gray’s speculations had exceeded even the domestic lunacy running rampant today––he had sunk the bulk of the family’s fortune into shares in Boulogne! And here was France in revolution instead, and everything gone to smash. It was all utter waste and gambling, trying to get rich without labouring for it.

  The elder Ruskin had been astounded when Gray had written to tell him Phemy would be entering his family with no dowry at all, but at that point John was so close to going into a decline over the girl that he felt all he could do was offer his own settlement to give her a start in her married life. Britain had a seemingly unslakable thirst for his sherry; he could well afford the £10,000 he put on Phemy. To be sure, as a good man of business he stipulated that the interest be made over to John, and disbursed to Phemy quarterly in instalments of £25, but as she had been living on £30 per annum from her father this seemed more than handsome. Still, it confounded the old man that John had gotten into such a fix with a pauper’s daughter. The boy had just refused the suit of his late Spanish partner’s daughter Caroline––a lass who would have brought no less than £30,000 per annum with her. He’d refused even to meet with her, who he hadn’t seen since she was a little child. John James suspected that he had never gotten over her sister Adèle, a flighty enough girl who never paid the slightest attention to John. If he was still pining for the older sister, how could one expect he would now settle for the younger? And true, Caroline Domecq had been raised in the Romanish church. John’s mother had made it entirely clear to both male Ruskins that she’d be dead before she’d allow such a union; but the Domecqs had been keen enough on the match that the girl was willing to put aside her Papist superstitions.