“Here is your room, young man,” said Mrs. Locke.
It was a large, rather neglected chamber, at the end of a long passage on the second floor—the very room out of which one midnight he had been borne in terror, twenty years before, by the woman he called his mother.
“And I hope you will find yourself comfortable,” continued the old lady, in a tone that implied—“You ought to be!”—“If you want anything, or have anything to complain of, let me know,” she added. “—I thought it better not to put you in the servant's quarters!”
“Thank you, ma'am,” said Richard. “This is a beautiful room for me! Do you know, ma'am, where I'm to work?”
“I have not been informed,” she answered, as she left the room. “Mr. Lestrange will see to that.”
Richard went to the window. Before him spread an extensive but somewhat bare park, for the trees in it were rather few. Some of them, however, were grand ones: many had been cut down, but a few of the finest left. A sea of grass lay in every direction, with islands of clumps and thickets, and vague shores of hedge and wood and ploughed field. On the grass were cattle and sheep and fallow deer. On this side, nothing came between the park and the house.
The day was late in the spring; summer was close at hand. There had been rain all the morning and afternoon, but the clouds were clearing away as now the sun went down. Everything was wet, but the undried tears of the day flashed in the sunset. Nature looked a child whose gladness had come, but who could not stop crying: so heartily had she gone in for sorrow, that her mind was shaped to weeping. Most of the clouds, late so dark and sullen, were putting on garments of light, as if resolved to forgive and forget, and leave no doubt of it. But the sun did not look satisfied with his day's work. Slant across the world to Richard's window came the last of his vanishing rays, blinding him as he brooded, and obliterating all between them in a throbbing splendour; yet somehow the sun seemed sad, as if atonement had come too late. The edge extreme of the glory vanished; a moment's cloud followed; and then, when the radiance of him who was gone grew rosy and golden above his grave, Richard began to see much that his presence had been hiding. But the revelation did not linger long. The clouds closed on the twilight, the world grew almost dismal, and the sadness crept into Richard; or was it not rather that his own hidden sadness rose up to meet the sadness of the world? Yet, even as he became aware of it, something in him recognised it as a thing foreign to the human heart: “We were not made for this!” he said. “—We are not here, I mean,” he corrected himself, “—we have not sprung into being in order to be sad! There is no reason in sadness! There is cause enough, man at least knows, but essential reason at the heart of its existence there is none!—Whence, then, comes this mistake, this sadness?” he went on with himself. “Why should there be so much of it in the world? Is it that, as for all other good things, a man must put forth his will for joy? It is plain a man must assert what is highest in him, else he cannot lay hold of the best: must a man will to be glad, else deserve to be sorrowful?” He began to whistle. “I will be glad!” he said, “even in the midst of a world of rain!—Yet again, why should the mere look of a rainy night make it needful for me to assert joy and resist sadness?—After all, what is there to be merry about, in this best of possible worlds? I like going to the theatre; but if I don't like the play, am I to be pleased all the same, sit it out with smiles, and applaud at the end?—I don't see what there is to make me miserable, and I don't see what there is to make me glad!”
Would it have cast any light either on Richard's gloom or his perplexity, had he been told that, in the place where he stood staring out on the gray, formless twilight, his mother had often sought refuge, and tasted the comfort of an assuagement of splendour. She had not appropriated the room, and it was some time before the household knew that she was in the way of going there: it was awkwardly situated in a remote part of the house and rarely used—which made its attraction for lady Lestrange. But the faithful sister did not forget where she had once found her on her knees weeping, and chose it for herself and her charge when she was gone.
In a few minutes Richard arrived at the conclusion that he would be all right as soon as he got among the wine-bins of the library. He did not reflect how little of a man is he whose sense of well-being is at the mercy of a Scotch mist or a cloudy twilight. Neither did he put to himself the question whether the mending of the old leather bottles in which lie stored the varied wines of the human spirit, ought to be labour and gladness enough for the soul of a man. It is a poor substitute for food that helps us to forget the want of it. But how can we wonder when he would have no father, and claimed the black Negation, the grandmother of Chaos, as his mother! Yet was it the presence all the time of that father he refused that made it possible for him to drink the water of any poorest little well of salvation that sprang in the field of his life; and such a well was his work among books.