Idonia: A Romance of Old London

by Arthur Frederick Wallis

Within a week, or perhaps a little over, we were all returned to the Court, where Idonia was at once proclaimed mistress; and a week after Easter we were married. My father was for giving up to us the great room, hung about with tapestries, he had always used, but neither Idonia nor I would allow of it, preferring for our own chamber that high narrow attic in the tower that had been mine before, and was, moreover, as wholesome and sweet a place as any man could lead a wife to, with a rare prospect of meadow and moorland from the window; too, and away up the deep valley to where it is closed in ascending ranks of pines.

Here yet we live, Idonia and I: "Idonia of Petty Wales" I have named her, and Simon is therefore wondrous pleased to suppose some affinity in her to his wild ancestors, of whom he now tells her, as he formerly did me, incredible long legends; yet none so out of all compass of belief as is the story we might have told him, had we chosen, of that ruinous secret house over against the Galley Quay, where she dwelt so long, pure and brave, amidst desperate evil men.

Here we live, as I say, Idonia and I, but no longer my father, who after we had been married but a year, died. Worn out by that lingering malady of which I have spoken, and having been for so long a while confined to that poor shelter where, I learned, was to be had the merest necessaries but nothing to foster his strength, he soon gave manifest signs that the betterment of his fortune had come too late to advantage him. To himself it had of necessity been well known, but the knowledge neither discouraged him at all, nor caused him to exchange his habitual discourse for those particular sentences that men in such case will sometimes burden their speech withal.

In Idonia's company he seemed to take an extraordinary quiet pleasure, and indeed spoke with her (as she afterwards told me) of matters he had seldom enlarged upon with me, but to which she opened so ready an apprehension as drew him on from familiar chat to reveal to her the most cherished speculations of his mind. To me he continued as I always remember him, using that gentle satire that was a sauce to all his sayings. He would oftenwhiles question me of the difficulties and dangers of my sojourn in London, but although he would hear me attentively, I knew he took small pleasure in tales of tumult and strife. There was in his nature that touch of woman that, however, is not womanliness but rather is responsive to the best a woman hath; and thus it was, in the perfect sympathy that marked his converse with Idonia, I read, more clearly than I had done in all the years we had lived together, the measure of his loss in losing his wife, and the pitiful great need which he endeavoured so continuously, in his reading, to fill.

I had supposed him to be a complete Stoick, and to have embraced without reservation the teaching of that famous school; but Idonia, to whom I spoke of it, told me that it was not altogether so.

"For," she said, "it was but a week since, as we sat together on the side of the moor yonder, that he repeated to me a sentence of the Roman Emperor's, whose works he ever carrieth about with him, in which he bids a wise man expect each day to meet with idle men and fools and busybodies and arrogant men. But that, your father said, was to bid a man shut himself up alone in a high tower, whence he should look down upon his fellows instead of mixing with them and trying to understand them. Expect rather, he said, to meet each day with honest, kindly men; in which expectation if you be disappointed, then consider whether the cause of offence lieth not in you; the other man being full as likely to be inoffensive as yourself."

Of time he was wont to say, "When one says to you: There is no time like the present, reply to him that indeed there is no time but the present: future and past being but as graven figures on a milestone which a man readeth and passeth upon his road."

"In order to the greatest happiness in this life," he said, "it is well freely to give to others all they shall require at your hands, being well assured that they will readily leave you in the enjoyment of that the only real possession of yours, which is your thoughts."

To Idonia, who once asked him why he had never written down the rules he lived by, he answered with his grave smile that rules were the false scent, subtle or obvious, with which the escaping outlaw, thought, deludes its pursuers, sworn of the law.

But the speech that hath struck the deepest in me was spoken when he gave Idonia, as he did, that picture of my mother, of whom he said (but not of himself) that she had known a world of sorrow, and after awhile added that "he believed ere she died she had found her sorrow fashioned to a splendid gift."