“What! Is she lost for such a small matter? The curate did not stay ten minutes. I know nothing about any of your sects; but I am sure that there is only one bon Dieu for all of us; and Benson thinks so too.”
Jedediah’s grief is not less deep but more reasonable. It is he who performs the service when, on a snowy evening, Lilian is buried in Bethnal Green Cemetery.
But the sensational story has a cynical epilogue. Kind Mrs Benson, qui sent son Dickens, never forgets her young lodger. One Sunday, as her husband is reading Lloyd’s News, which he spells out conscientiously from the “premier Londres of M. Jerrold to the last line of the advertisements,” he exclaims at a paragraph stating that a clergyman, named North, formerly of the Isle of Wight, had been caught trying to break images over the altar of Exeter Cathedral, and sent to an asylum as a madman. Nothing is heard of Jedediah, and we can only trust that he duly succeeded to the Newport pastorate and found some consoling helpmeet in the congregation. Of Harry there is no news till some years later, when the Bensons go to Cardiff to meet a married daughter returning from New Zealand. Calling at the Gordons’ house, they learn that the father is dead, and that Harry, now his own master, is about to marry a Miss Jones of Ryde, not indeed the proud Arabella, but her younger sister Florence, to whom time has transferred his facile affections.
The last scene introduces Miss Florence going over the house soon to be her own, and finding in a drawer an old black glove torn and soiled. Harry denies all knowledge of it, but when his new beloved proposes to throw it away, he shows that it has some value for him. The suspicious damsel sulks, plays off on his jealousy a cousin in the Scots Greys, refuses to waltz with her fiancé, except at the price of his giving up that glove. He sighs as a widower, but obeys as a wooer. Giving one secret kiss to poor Lilian’s glove, he resigns it to the triumphant Miss Jones, who flings it on the fire, and holds out her white fingers for the forgiven Harry to kiss, yet not without a smiling stab at that unknown rival’s memory—“Her hand was larger than mine!”
Now for the moral of this realistic romance. “Let him who has never committed a cowardice of the kind, who has never sacrificed a memory to a hope, the forgotten love to the fresh one, the dead to the living, let him cast at Harry the first stone!” To which poor Jedediah will not say Amen.
The latest scene for fiction set in the Isle of Wight—All Moonshine, by Richard Whiteing—is no photograph of actual society like that just reduced, but a most imaginative romance, not to say a wild nightmare inspired by the dangers of over-population, and based on the statistical claim quoted in my first chapter, that the world’s eighteen hundred millions or so could all find room to meet in this Island. The author, falling asleep at Ventnor, dreams of such a universal rendezvous as coming about in the form of astral bodies from all ends of the earth, when some very strange things happen among the unsubstantial multitude. At one moment it seems as if the ghostly armies of England and Germany were about to close here in a lurid Armageddon; but they are fain to fraternise before the general peril of an earthquake announced at Shide as threatening to crack the globe and overwhelm civilisation in waves of fire let loose from hell. The dreamer awakes to find the world what it is, with nations and classes seeking to fatten on their neighbours’ poverty, kings and statesmen watching each other’s armaments in mutual suspicion, priests hoisting flags on their churches in exultation over the slaughter of fellow-Christians, and only an unpractical poet or romancer to cry here and there—
Ah! when shall all men’s good
Be each man’s rule, and universal peace
Lie like a shaft of light across the land,
And like a lane of beams athwart the sea,
Thro’ all the circle of the golden year.
