Chaste as Ice, Pure as Snow: A Novel

by C. Despard

That was a memorable moment in his history. With the impulsiveness of youth he extinguished his cigar and repaired in haste to Mrs. Churchill's handsome residence. He found her alone in her drawing-room, pensive but loftily kind, and soon extracted from her what she would so much rather have kept to herself—that she was acting in Adèle's interests; the dear girl was impressionable, the relationship dangerous; much as she loved her nephew, she must not forget that a mother's first duty was to watch over her child; and much more of a like nature, to all of which Arthur listened dutifully. Of course he was no match for his aunt; before the evening of that day had arrived he occupied the position of an accepted lover, blessed by a happy parent, and possessed what perhaps, on some future day, he might possibly be led to imagine the dear-bought privilege of a free entrée into Aunt Ellen's house. Since then matters had progressed satisfactorily, as far as Mrs. Churchill was concerned, though Adèle, who took almost a motherly interest in her lover and future husband, was inclined to lament the absolute aimlessness of his life.

Women, generally speaking, have a quicker mental growth than men. The mind of a girl of eighteen is in many cases more mature than that of a man of twenty. Arthur had passed his twenty years without much thought beyond himself. Adèle, with the like luxurious surroundings, had already begun to look past herself—to feel that there was a world of which she knew nothing, but with which, nevertheless, she was very closely connected—a world of want and suffering, where wrong was too often triumphant.

She was fond of reading. Perhaps some of these thoughts had crept in through the medium of poet and historian. For Adèle's insight told her that there were many higher and nobler lives for a man and woman to lead than that of self-pleasing. She sometimes longed to be a man, that she might do something worth doing in a world that wanted the active and the strong. But the little she could do she did, and had she known how many blessed her for her gentle words and timely aid, she might have been less desponding about a woman's ability to take some place in the world.

For the rest she looked to Arthur, the hero of her imagination. Poor Adèle! Her hero did not quite see as she did the necessity for exertion. He took life languidly, and could not conceive why people should excite themselves about what did not concern them; at least this was what he always said when she tried to instill into him some of her ideas about human wrongs and human service.

But Adèle did not despair; she had a woman's supreme faith in "the to-come." Something would arouse Arthur's dormant energies and bring out the latent fire of his nature.

In the mean time she, with the rest of his world, was pleased to notice his growing interest in the fine arts, though she, wiser than they, felt inclined to put down his constant haunting of the picture-galleries to a growing restlessness that meant uneasiness with the aimless life of self-gratification he was leading and a stretching-out after something higher.

And Adèle was partially right. Arthur was changed. Perhaps it was more the sadness than the beauty of that fair woman's face which haunted him so strangely, mingling with all his thoughts a certain self-reproach which he found it very difficult to understand.

It may have been that in the pale, calm face, resolute in endurance, he saw for one moment what was going on for ever around him; he read the mystic law of nature—sacrifice of self. For life is glad; where gladness is not life may be borne, but not loved or rejoiced in, and in the calm surrender of life's gladness to the call of life's necessity there is a surrender of life itself, the most beautiful part of life.

Something of this he had seen in Margaret's pale face. A joy put away, surrendered, a burden taken up and patiently borne. This it was that filled his mind when the first impression of her loveliness had in a manner passed. He saw the suffering, and beside the suffering he saw himself, self-indulgent, careless, free of hand, light of spirit, with no thought, in a general way, beyond the enjoyment of the present hour.

Often before Arthur had expressed something of this: lolling in a luxurious arm-chair with his feet on the fender, while Adèle amused him by a song or read to him something that had been charming her, he would say with a comfortable sigh, "What a good-for-nothing sort of fellow I am, Adèle!"