Lord Alistair's Rebellion

by Allen Upward

For a year past Alistair had inspired his mother with hopes that he was ripening for the change of mind which she called conversion. He had become more serious; his gaiety was sometimes dashed with melancholy; he wrote verses which she treasured up as evidences of the direction his intelligence was taking. The verses were echoes of the poets whom she had placed in his hands, and her favourite poets were Miss Havergal and Dr. Bonar. He had taken to wandering much by himself in the park; sometimes on returning from these rambles he posed her with strange questions about the nature of the Deity and the contradictions that abound in every positive system of the universe.

The mother drew happy auguries. Like Hannah, she dedicated her son to the Lord, and wrote to the Archbishop who was his godfather, to interest him in the boy.

All this time one half of life had been carefully hidden from Alistair. Of the great mystery of life he knew less than an animal knows. For him, as for all his generation, the divine lore which was once communicated in solemn temples and amid consecrated groves, which is still given the character of a revelation among the worshipping millions beneath the Himalayas, lay under the blight of the great ascetic frenzy which spread round the Mediterranean zone two thousand years ago. The temple had long been a stew, the revelation a vulgar jest bandied about on furtive lips; the groves were cut down, the torches were blown out, the musical instruments were broken, and the rite of initiation had passed from the holy places into the sewers. The road of darkness was esteemed the road of safety; and Alistair walked upon it in ignorance alike of the law of Heaven and of the taboo of man.

The Garden of Eden is like that flying island of Arabian geography which descends unawares in front of the adventurer, and tempts him to tread its enamelled turf, surrendering his senses to the hymeneal music of its birds, and the perfume of its myriad flowers. The earth was changed for Alistair by a keeper’s daughter, a girl of his own age, with a face fair as an apple-blossom, in whose heart the seed of ambition had been early sown by a vain mother’s hand. All through one summer-tide they met by stealth among the woods of Trent; while she, intoxicated by the young lord’s notice, listened with uncomprehending ears to that passionate romance which youth pours out at the first touch of love: and for him the sunshine sprinkled all the air with orange-blossoms through the green network overhead, the silver birch-stems rose like rejoicing fountains in the glimmering shade, the hum of insects lapped his enamoured ear like the vague music of a shell, the very ground distilled a rapturous scent, and all his pulses sang within him as his life swept into the great throb of the universal world.

The retribution which followed on discovery tortured him still in the remembrance. What such a discovery must have cost a mother like his, he could not gauge. He only knew that every sacred feeling in his own breast had been outraged, the innermost sanctuary had been profaned, the delicate blossoms had been uprooted and trampled in the mire. He had a recollection of hideous scenes, of questions that were intolerable insults, of a visit from the Archbishop, who came too late to mediate, and, finally, of a term of penal servitude passed in an institution abroad, from which Alistair returned a Roman Catholic.

In his mother’s eyes this was a moral bankruptcy. Fresh influences were brought to bear on the perverted one; the rest of his youth was passed in drifting from one guardianship to another, under a perpetual cloud, and manhood found him without faith and without a career.

That his mother had loved him throughout Alistair knew well, though even he did not know how much she loved him. Perhaps the love between them had been strengthened by the tragedy of the past. It seemed to Alistair now to have been the old story of the hen that has hatched out a duckling from the shell. He thought of his mother with a painful mingling of wrath and tenderness, believing her to have been cruel to him, and knowing that she had been cruel to herself for his sake. The mother whom his instinct taught him to demand was one of those mothers of the passionate races, who live only to be the slaves of their sons, to hear their confessions, to soothe their remorse, to abet them in their worst crimes. His grievance against his own mother was that she had not taken him for what he was. The changeling had been tormented in the hope of giving it a human soul.

When he came of age he took the problem out of her hands. “You do not understand me,” he told her one day; “I must live my own life.”

His brother, Trent, had granted him an allowance of a thousand a year, which his tradesmen raised to five thousand. The contents of every shop in London were at the command of the brother of the Duke of Trent and Colonsay, on condition that the brother of the Duke paid double for them. The shopkeepers began by cheating him, as though they foresaw that he would end by cheating them.

Stuart hardly knew that he was extravagant. Most of the ways in which he spent money were ways in which he heard other men praised for spending it. He collected miniatures; he bought old cabinets, which were repaired for him by skilful workmen; he published tiny volumes with his own poems, in which a strain of southern passion mingled with the dreamy melancholy of the northern seas. His pleasures were those of a poet, not a man about town. He lent money to those about him, to the poets whose names were unknown to the readers of magazines, to the painters whose pictures were abhorred by the Royal Academy, to the musicians who could not make bright tunes. Such men have no right to live; but Stuart fed them at his table, and rejoiced in the incense of their praise.