Theodore Somm,
Christian Trowm.
CHAPTER I
RESURRECTIONS
GOD, God! how Thy past clings to us like shadows, turn we as we may forever to the sunrise! Out of the night and from beyond it come forms that seem buried below the reach of grave-desecrating memory; they plead with us and claim us as their kin, and all the nobleness we have laboured after succumbs to the witchery of their piteous appeals.
It was indeed pathetic to see his face as he struggled with a past that had been dead for a generation. He thrust it from him and it would return. He reached out for dim features of it he had loved, and they eluded him. At last came out of the wreckage of dreams the solidarity of life and law.
How tyrannous the bond of nature is! What love my mother bore me, and how the memory of it wells over the desert of my youth! Had she lived, I never could have broken with my European life. It is maternal love that binds age to age. A torrent of inborn feeling wakes in me for the old graveyard where she lies overlooking the sea. I know she is not there, and yet I could kiss the dear earth that covers her ashes. From her I drew all that was best in me; to her, only a fisherman’s daughter, I looked for every thought that controlled me in boyhood. My father, the earl’s son, disowned for his lowly love and marriage, was only a phantom to me, honoured but unreal; for he died soon after I was born. Nor could I ever own the churlish stock that thrust him forth for loyalty to a peasant. Often did the crabbed old grandsire try to woo me from the sea-smelling hut to his great castle; as often was his pride wounded by refusal. What had I to do with a race still savage in its adherence to caste, and incapable of seeing the beauty of a character apart from position? All my being belonged to the gentler, more civilised nature of my mother; I was obstinately democratic in my sympathies, hating even the shadow of primeval aristocracy that rests upon childhood and youth.
One thing he succeeded in doing. He drove my mother, by dint of threats, expostulations, and reasonings, to send me for a few years to one of the large English public schools. And this period was the purgatory of my life, such despotisms and persecutions demonised over the unconforming nucleus of my character. And, when summer came, her love, the uncouth sympathy of the fishermen, the rhythmic sea, and the steadfast foreheads of the cliffs cooled the fever of my wronged spirit. Only the persistence of the old fire-eater with his instinctive valuation of the still savage virtues of his caste could keep her from yielding to my never-ending entreaties. Not till palsy shut the gates of his expression did she take courage to resist his influence, and let me remain with her and solitude as my teachers.
A few years more and his iron spirit left its long-dead tenement. His title and mansion and great estates were thrust upon me. But I refused to acknowledge the position except so far as to divide the revenue amongst the poor. What did I or my mother need more than we had? Why should we leave our lowly friends, and our comradeship with the sea? What good purpose could it serve to spend these vast sums every year on personal enjoyment that would be none to us? We stayed in our little dwelling perched in a nook of the cliffs, and I followed my ancestral calling over the ever-moving element that had nursed me. Courage and lowliness and love of mankind sank deeper and deeper into my system. Books and thought and the ever-changeful waves tutored my spirit and widened the issues of life. I began to feel strangely dissatisfied with all that was called civilisation, seeing how far it fell short of justice and truth and liberty. I was harassed with my own destiny and even more with that of mankind. How could I better my thoughts by heaping the responsibilities of lucre upon them? The everlasting antagonism between our longing for rest and our need of labour goaded me as it did all others. And how was change of sphere or multiplication of financial cares to effect a truce? No; it seemed to me, in my youthful romancing, that the possibility of cure lay not in increasing the desires and their means of satisfaction, but in reducing the needs. The denominator in this poor fraction of the universe called human life was more plastic than the numerator. What was the acquisition of wealth and influence but the insertion of ciphers in our little decimal of existence? What could the world do for the inborn sickness of the human spirit?