He never had a more horrid shock than when one day she proved the reality of her indifference, terribly proved it, by speaking contemplatively of devoting her money to the cause of Russian freedom, and of making her own living by teaching. “It seems to me that one would face life more directly—more truly—like that,” remarked Miss Grey.
He controlled the demonstration of his dismay and for several days argued with her on the duties of even such small wealth as hers, its responsibilities and opportunities. He always impressed Miss Grey; she was the least arrogant of beings, and in spite of her steady seeing of life, took people exactly at their own valuation. She, too, thought Mr. Merrick very “cultivated and high-minded”; she equipped him further with a “great soul,” and, unconsciously to her maiden heart, thought him, too, very beautiful in his wise persuasiveness.
He persuaded her that a larger, richer, more helpful life was to be lived with money than without it, and, a few days later, that that life should be lived with him.
So Miss Grey went to England as Mrs. Austin Merrick, and she and her husband built the Greek temple on the bit of hill-top land that came to Austin through his mother, and in the Greek temple, under the rather pinched conditions that its erection left them in, Mrs. Austin passed fourteen very perplexed, helpless, and unhappy years.
She never recovered from the perplexity. Trying always to see great meanings, only small ones met her eyes. Not only was the mollusc-like routine of the life about her bewildering, for it was a dull country-side, but her husband’s character. She never doubted the great soul, but she never seemed clearly to see it. He was loving and devoted; he thought her perfect, as he thought all his possessions; she did not know that it was her echo of his imaginary self that he prized, that she was the living surety of his own worth, never felt that the key-note of his character was an agile vanity that sprang to defend him from any attack that might mean self-revelation. He was always clever enough to see her worth, but not clever enough to see that her intelligence grew blurred and groping when it turned its light upon the objects of her affection.
Her husband’s idleness bewildered Mrs. Merrick; not that she so saw it, or his shrinking from the test of action; but his life, in spite of its pompous premisses, had, in reality, little more actual significance than the lives of any of the neighbouring squires—if as much. What did she and Austin do in the world? her thoughts fumbled with the knife-like question.
She still saw in him the lofty thinker; but Austin Merrick’s mind was a lazy one, unfit for constructive affirmation; and as he happened to be surrounded by minds as lazy, unfit for any effort of destructive criticism, he found the attitude of superiority more attainable by opposition. He did most of his thinking in youth, when the current of scientific agnosticism caught him; he had gone with it, not helping it in any way, merely borne along, and he had gone no farther than it had gone, drifting into a sleepy backwater of its once flowing tide, unable to follow it into deepened channels. His mental development had stopped at an epoch newly conscious of the inflexibility of natural law and the ruin of the dogmas that seemed to contradict it, and Mr. Merrick had not, in reality, advanced beyond this first crude negation. The largeness of his doubts was the result not of deep thinking, but of a lazy lack of thought. His pessimism was caused more by the ignorant optimism he saw about him than by any thwarted spiritual demand of his own nature. He was, indeed, in the position, dubiously fortunate for him, of being twenty years behind the best thought of his time and fifty ahead of that of his neighbours, to many of whom Darwinism was still a looming, half-ludicrous monkey-monster, to be dispatched at the hands of a vigorous clergy, and naturalistic determinism an hypothesis that did not even remotely impinge upon the outskirts of their consciousness. But with all his complacencies, indolences, and attitudes, Austin Merrick was intelligent, dependent and affectionate, soured only by indifference, angered only by ridicule, and his wife in her relation to him knew nothing worse than that abiding sense of perplexity. She saw with difficulty the ironic side of life; the deepest draught of bitterness was spared her. She only dimly felt that life was tragic. Her small daughter surmised very early that it was grotesque as well as tragic. Felicia was thirteen when her mother died, leaving her with a radiant, pathetic memory. She always thought of her as a very young girl, and indeed Mrs. Austin with her clear gaze, rounded cheek, thick braids of hair coiled in school-girl fashion at the back of her head, looked hardly more than twenty when she died.
Felicia remembered the gaze, so funnily astonished in its tenderness, with which she watched her daughter, the gaze of a school-girl who had never quite grasped the fact of her own maternity. She was very tender, very loving, and poured all the baffled energies of her life into the uprearing of her daughter, who had been treated with the gentleness due to a child, the Emersonian reverence due to a human soul. Felicia remembered the naïvely sententious aphorisms with which she armed her. “In this life to fail is to triumph,” was one, and the pathos to Felicia was in seeing that the aphorism was an unrealized truth in her mother’s own life. She had indeed “carried her soul like a white bird,” through the painful deserts of disillusion, a disillusion that only her daughter apprehended.
She left life ardent, loving and perplexed. The young Felicia was also ardent and loving, but not at all perplexed. Her clearness of vision did not trouble her steadfastness. She was very fond of her father, and she thought him very foolish; she resented keenly the fact that people more foolish than he should criticize him. She never mistook jackasses for lions, and her only title to commendation in her own eyes was that she, at all events, did not bray.