The major shook his head with a quick gesture 46 of impatience, just as if some insect had lighted on his forehead; beyond this, for any evidence of his being annoyed by it, Mr. Fullarton’s last remark might have related to missionary prospects or Chinese politics. The steady color on his swarthy face neither lost nor gained a shade. There was not a sign of anger, or shame, or confusion in his clear, bold eyes; and, when he answered, there was not one fresh furrow on the brow that, at lighter provocation, was so apt to frown.
“I give you credit for being utterly ignorant of what you are talking about, Mr. Fullarton. You could not possibly guess how disagreeable the subject would be to me. As it can’t be in the least interesting to any one else, suppose we change it?”
Just the same cold, measured voice as ever, with only a slight sarcastic inflection to vary the deep, grave tones; but a very close observer might have seen his fingers clench the handle of a knife while he was speaking, as if their gripe would have dinted the ivory.
It was hardly to be expected that the rest of the party would emulate the sang-froid of the Cool Captain. Sailing under false colors is a convenient practice enough, and productive sometimes of many prizes; but divers penalties attach to its detection, on land as well as on sea. Indeed, it involves the necessity of somebody’s appearing as a convicted impostor. On the present occasion—as the actor for whom the character was cast utterly declined to play it—the part fell to poor Harry Molyneux, who certainly looked it to perfection. In all his little difficulties and troubles, when hard pressed, he was wont to fall back upon the reserve of la mignonne, sure of meeting there with sympathy, if not with succor. He dared not do so now. He dared not encounter the reproach of the beautiful, gentle eyes that had never looked into his own otherwise than trustfully since they first told the secret that she loved him dearly. The half-smothered cry that broke from Fanny’s lips when the chaplain made his disclosure went straight to the heart of her treacherous husband. He felt as if he deserved that those pretty lips should never smile upon him again.
Oh, all my readers!—masculine especially—whose patience has carried you thus far, remark, I beseech you, the dangers that attend any dereliction from the duty of matrimonial confidence. What right have we to lock up the secrets of our most intimate friends, far less our own, instead of pouring them into the bosom of the βαθύκολπος ἄκοιτις, which is capacious enough to hold them all, were they tenfold more numerous and weighty? Such reticence is rife with awful peril. In our folly and blindness, we fancy ourselves secure, while the ground is mined under our guilty feet, and the explosion is even now preparing, from which only our disjecta membra will emerge. Of course, some cold-hearted caviler will begin to quote instances of carefully-planned and promising conspiracies, which miscarried solely because the details reached a feminine ear. It may have been so; but I don’t see what business conspiracies have to succeed at all. Long live the Constitution! Truly, such delightful confidences must be something one-sided, for the mildest Griselda of them all would be led as a “Martha to the Stakes” sooner than concede to her husband the unrestricted supervision of her correspondence. I have indeed a dim recollection of having heard of one bride of seventeen, who, during the honeymoon, was weak and (selon les dames) wicked enough to submit to profane male eyes epistles received from the friends of her youth, in their simple entirety, instead of reading out an expurgated edition of the same. She had been brought up in a very dungeon of decorum by a terrible grandmother, a rigid moralist, whom no man ever yet beheld without a shiver; and during those first few weeks after her escape she was probably intoxicated by the novel sense of freedom, besides which, she was perfectly infatuated about “Reginald;” but all this could not exculpate her when arraigned before her peers. She lived long enough to repent and to reassert, to some extent, her lost matronly dignity, but she died very young—let us hope in fair course of nature. She had violated the first law of a guild more numerous and influential than that of the Freemasons. Examples are necessary from time to time, and, though the Vehme-gericht may pity the offender, it may not therefore linger in its vengeance. Nevertheless, my brethren, our course is clear. Let us resign to the chatelaine the key of the letter-bag and the censorship thereof. If, after due warning, our light-minded friends will write to us in terms that mislike that excellent and punctilious inspectress, they must aby it in the cold looks and bitter innuendoes which will be their portion when they come to us in the next hunting season. Our conscience, at least, will be pure and undefiled, and we shall pass to the end of our pilgrimage sans peur, though perchance, even then, not sans reproche. “Servitudes,” as Miggs, the veteran vestal remarked, “is no inheritance,” but there are natures who thrive rarely in this tranquil and inglorious condition. Such men live, as a rule, pretty contentedly to a great old age, and die in the odor of intense respectability. Salubrious, it seems, as well as creditable to the patient, is a régime of moderate hen-pecking, only it is necessary that he should be of the intermediate species between Socrates and Georges Dandin.
Mrs. Danvers would certainly have indulged openly in that immoderate exultation to which all minor prophets are prone when their predictions chance to be verified, but this was checked by her constitutional timidity. She was horribly afraid of the effect that the revelation might have on her patroness; therefore what precise meaning was implied by the complicated contortions of her countenance no mortal can guess or know. Her sensations probably resolved themselves into an excess of admiration for the pastor in his new character of a denouncer of detected guilt and champion of imperiled innocence, added to which was a vague desire to lanch her own anathema maranatha at Royston Keene.
Dick Tresilyan took the whole thing with remarkable coolness, not to say complacency. He nodded his head, and smiled, and winked cunningly aside at Molyneux, as if to intimate that he had known all about it long ago, and, indeed, so far he had been admitted into the major’s confidence on the night when the latter was supposed to have “lost his head.” By what sophistries Royston had succeeded in masking his purpose and making his case good, even to such an unsuspicious mind and easy morality, 47 the devil could best tell, who in such schemes had rarely failed him.
We have left Cecil to the last. My proud, beautiful Cecil—was she not born for better things than to be made the prize of all those plottings and counter-plottings—to surrender the key of her heart’s treasures to one who was unworthy to kiss the hem of her robe—and now to have her self-command tried so cruelly to gratify the wounded vanity of a weak, shallow enthusiast?
She did not flinch or start when Mr. Fullarton’s words caught her ear, but a heavy, chill faintness stole over her, till she felt all her limbs benumbed, and every thing before her eyes grew misty and dim. The numbness passed away almost immediately, but still the figures around her appeared distorted and fantastically exaggerated; they seemed to be tossing and whirling round one steadfast centre, as the dead leaves in winter eddy round the marble head of a statue; that single centre-object remained, throughout, distinct and unaltered in its aspect, while all else was confused and uncertain—the face of Royston Keene. The sight of that face—not defiant or even stern, but immutable in its cold tranquillity—acted on Cecil as a magical restorative; it seemed as though he were able, by some mesmeric influence, to impart to her a portion of his own miraculous self-control. Before his reply to the chaplain was ended, she threw back her proud head with the old imperial gesture, as if scorning her own momentary weakness; no mist or shadow clouded the brilliant violet eyes; she might speak safely now, without risking a false note in the music. It was no light peril that she escaped; the betrayal of emotion under such circumstances would have weighed down a meeker spirit than The Tresilyan’s with a sense of ineffaceable shame; for remember—however marked her partiality for Keene might have been—there had been no suspicion of an engagement between them. Had she broken down then, she would not have forgiven Royston to her dying day: she never did forgive the chaplain. As it was—by a strange anomaly—at the very moment when she became aware of having been deluded and misled, in intention if not by actually spoken words—when she had most reason to hate or despise the “enemy who had done her this dishonor”—she felt his hold upon her heart strengthened, as though he had justified his right to command it. Not to women alone, but to all beautiful, wild creatures, the ancient aphorism applies: the harder they are to discipline, the better they love their tamer. Cecil thought, “there is not another man alive whose eyes could meet mine so daringly:” and the haughty spirit bowed itself, and did obeisance to its suzerain. Different in many respects as good can be from evil—in one, those two were as fairly matched as Thiodolf and Isolde. Who can tell what wealth of happiness might have been stored up for both, if they had only not met—too late?
These two words seem to me the most of any that are written or spoken. They strike the key-note of so many human agonies, that they might form a motto, apter than Dante’s, for the gates of hell. Very few may hear them without a melancholy thrill; well—if they do not bring a bitter pang. Like those awful conjurations that blanched in utterance the lips of the boldest magi, they have a fearful power to wake the dead. Lo! they are scarcely syllabled when there is a stir in the grave-yard where sad or guilty memories lie buried; the air is alive with phantoms; the watcher may close his eyes if he will: not the less is he sensible of the presence of those pale ghosts that come trooping to their vengeance. Many, many hours must pass before the spell is learned that will send them back to their tombs again.