In London he had never felt any temptation to go with Killigrew when that young man frankly announced his intention of making a night of it with some girl he had picked up at the Café Riche or Cremorne; distaste had been his dominant instinct, yet many of the suggestive things he had apparently passed through unscathed came crowding back on him now. When he was not actually driving himself to physical labour his mind would fill with pictures that he was able to conjure up without knowing how; sometimes Blanche would partner him in those imaginings, sometimes some stranger woman of his invention. He felt ashamed of these ideas, but that did not prevent them coming, and sometimes he would deliberately give way and allow himself hours to elaborate them, from which he would rouse himself worn out and fevered. From these mental orgies he would feel so intense a reaction of disgust that he knew how keenly he would feel the same if he gave way actually, in some hidden house by Penzance harbour, where men that he knew sometimes went. Physical satisfaction and the fact that Nature had been allowed her way would not have saved him from the aftermath, and he did not delude himself that it would. He looked sometimes at John-James, sitting so placidly opposite him at meals, and wondered about him, whether his physical nature did not perhaps follow his mental and remain untroubled. Yet this thing seemed in every man…. He wondered, but never asked, and, by dint of hard work and a resolute cleansing of his mind, kept the thing at bay.
The summer was a singularly perfect one, and the contrast between its emptiness and that time only a year ago when he came down from London and was expecting Blanche to follow, pricked him at every turn. He felt convinced he no longer cared for Blanche; he was regaining interest in the world without, but she had left this legacy of reaction behind her. He told himself that this too must be borne with, but all the time his youth and natural disposition to get all that was possible out of life were preparing him for fresh enterprise. He could no longer be happy over nothing but the sheer joy of life, yet simple pleasures began to appeal to him once more, as Boase noted thankfully. The daily expectation, that absurd delicious hope, that "something" would happen, had not yet deserted him, and once again he began to live on it.
One day there arrived a letter from Vassie—a letter written in superlatives, a letter that made Ishmael and John-James both feel relief in their different ways and that made the Parson very glad. Vassie had achieved her end, the great end of mid-Victorian womanhood, and more vital to her even than most—she was engaged to be married, and to a man whose social position seemed, as far as her judgment could be trusted, satisfactory. Mr. Daniel O'Connell Flynn was, according to Vassie, more than she could have dared hope for, and if she said little as to any personal feelings for him, Ishmael knew how unimportant that would be to her compared with the satisfaction of her ambitions. For, as his name denoted, he was engaged in politics—an Irish-Canadian, a Free Trader, a Home Ruler, perhaps even a Chartist, for all Vassie said to the contrary. The third Derby Ministry was in power, and Mr. Flynn was for the time agitating in the Opposition; but at least he was a member of Parliament, and what glory that was to Vassie.
Poor Vassie! What, after all, was her ambition but to attain what should have come to her by right as daughter of the Squire of Cloom? She had had to make it the end of her desires, for it she had had to appear what she was not—what she ought to have been without any striving. If Mr. Flynn were a man to whom Vassie's beauty outweighed her defects, and if it were nothing but that with him, then was the outlook for her ultimate happiness poor; but she was her own mistress and had to be judge of that. At least she had not deceived him, for there came a postscript to the rather worldly raptures. "P.S.—He knows about it all, and says it does not matter; what he wants is me."
After Ishmael, the person most affected by the news, both in herself and her prospects, would be Phoebe. Ishmael put the letter in his pocket, though he guessed she too would have had one, and went over to Vellan-Clowse, Wanda at his heels.
As he went the realisation of how this would affect him grew upon him; losing Vassie, his life at Cloom would not only be lonely, but, without her resolute insistence on the niceties, might all too easily slip into some such slough of boorishness as had overtaken it in his father's day. If Blanche had only been different, if she had been the Blanche he once thought her, how sweetly would the whole problem—of loneliness and a standard of decency and of this tormenting thing that pricked at him—have been solved. Even the removal of his mother, though a relief, added to the sense of total disruption which weighed on him. Cloom, the old Cloom that had been so jolly in spite of everything, the Cloom of the first three contested, arduous years, then the delightful Cloom glorified by that summer of Blanche and Killigrew and Vassie and little Judith, was dead, and everyone else had flown to other fields while he alone was left among the ruins. Of all the old atmosphere Phoebe was the only one remaining—little, soft, admiring Phoebe, whom he had hardly noticed all this past winter.
Ishmael was one of those to whom the ending even of a not altogether congenial atmosphere was fraught with sadness; had he been left to himself he would probably never have moved far out of an accustomed circle, thus much of the peasant was potent in his blood. Now he felt, with the finality of youth, that everything had been stripped from around him, and that no new scheme of life formed itself before his eyes.
When he came to the top of the cliff above his plateau he turned off down the narrow goat-track that led to it, and when there flung himself on his face upon the turf, chin on hands, and brooded. His thoughts took no definite shape; rather were they the vague unsettled desires for he knew not what. Just that "something," anything, would happen.
He lay staring at the grass, covered with tiny blossoms of self-heal and rest-harrow: behind and a hundred feet below him the sea swirled, its deep peacock hue patterned with milky wreaths of foam; half around him reared a semi-circle of pale cliff. He stared at the miniature forest of blade and leaf beneath his eyes, and could hear faint rustlings as tiny insects thrust their way through it or climbed aimlessly up stalks that only led them into air. On the fragile curve of a feathery bent a pair of Spotted Burnet moths were at their mating—lovely creatures of the iridescent green of lapis-lazuli, their folded wings of greyer green decorated with splashes of purest crimson, their long glossy antennæ shining in the sunlight. Immobile they clung together for what must have been, in their measuring of time, hours of love. Beyond them, on other grass-stems, orange-hued flies took their pleasure, and the whole air was quick with the wings of butterflies and moths. The quiet little circle of turf was athrill with life; the air, the warm soil, the clumps of bracken whence the hidden crickets shrilled, the pinkish grasses which bore the tiny interlocked bodies of the mating flies—everything told of life, life, life. This place seemed an amphitheatre for the display of the secret of Nature—life, and yet more life, in splendid prodigality. Ishmael watched and wondered. Was this, then, the blind end of creation—to create again? If life were only valuable for the production of more, then what it created was not valuable either, and the whole thing became an illogical absurdity. There must be some definite value in each life apart from its reproductive powers, or the reproductions were better left in the void. Blind pleasure, like blind working, was not a possible solution to one of his blood and habit of mind.
Yet he knew as he lay there that not for ever would he be able to go on as so far he had. He told himself that if it were possible to stamp on desire now it would continue to be possible; that if one were not put into the world to get what one wanted at least it should be possible to grit the teeth on the fact. It was childish enough to cry for the moon—it was pitiable to hanker after its reflection in a cesspool. Chastity to Ishmael, by the nature of his training and his circumstances, was a vital thing; the ever-present miseries of home resulting from his father's offence, the determination to keep clean himself and bring clean children to the inheritance, had grown with him. If he lost it he lost far more than most men, because to him it had been more.