CHAPTER XXV. AGAMEMNON AND IPHIGENIA.
We can imagine how the fabric, sedulously raised by Constantine’s pursuit of his family’s fortune and advancement, tottered, shook, and fell utterly to pieces upon that one exchanged look between Inarime and Gustav. He in the world, and she the wife of another man! She loathed herself that such should have been deemed possible of her. She acknowledged her father’s right to her obedience, and it was difficult for her to imagine her will in disjunction from his. But surely there are limits to a daughter’s obligations—most wise limits set by nature, whose laws are still more imperative than man’s. We may defy the laws of man, and sometimes their defiance is proof of nobler instinct. But the laws of nature—these are inexorable, and her punishments are fatally swift. Body and mind were set in revolution against this cold commercial alliance. Her soul in arms told her that it would be a bodily degradation under which her mind would inevitably sink.
She had been trained to reason and to think, to hold her words in subjection to her reason, and restrain the impulsiveness of her sex. Expediency, she had been taught, may be a qualified virtue, though founded on the meanest basis, and she had been recommended to weigh its component parts in particular cases, before pronouncing judgment. Hitherto she had been wise to detect the logical issues of any situation presented to her for the reading, and thus had gained, in the mind of the villagers, the reputation of a wise young counsellor, whose head was filled with all the natural precepts of sagacity. But that swift, immediate contact with flame and fire, the frantic surrender to an untried glance, threw her back upon herself, with shaken faith, in the grasp of wavering moods of stupefaction and self-contempt lit by the lamp of burning bliss.
She saw her folly but did not repudiate it—the goddesses of old had yielded to the sovereign passion upon as little pressure. One of the features of Immortality is its royal dispensation with the tedious form of wooing invented by the weak mortals. Nineteen years of a purity as glacial as Artemis’ before she had given that one kiss to the sleeping boy, were as an unremembered dream, blotted from her mind without regret or shame, upon meeting of eyes that held her own in glad subjection. The thrill of captured maidenhood was still upon her, and O, faithlessness most grievous to the noble captor! she had half pledged herself to take a husband.
“I cannot!” she cried aloud, stung keenly by the horror and the gracelessness of such submission.
And then, to accentuate her anguish, the figure of Oïdas for the first time rose sharp and distinct upon her vision, to fix her in the travail of repugnance. Until now he had passed before her, a scarce-recognised nonentity, wafted past her upon sugary strains of Verdi and Bellini, through the odours of many flowers. Now he stood out in cruel relief against the background of a holy memory. She saw his high shoulders, with a slight outward droop curving suddenly inward, and making a grotesque narrowness of chest, like a bird of prey curved in upon its wings, and she caught herself smiling at the picture. She detected the material contentions of the oily simper and too affable expression in the small black eyes, noted ruthlessly the uncertainty of the spindle shanks that did lean duty for legs, and the ungraceful flow of the long loose frock coat.
It was borne in then upon her that she unconquerably disliked Oïdas, and that pressure would change that dislike to positive and passionate aversion. Does not youth demand youth for its mate? strength and beauty their like? Was she to stand tamely by, and let her youth and strength and beauty be given away to mean and dwindling age such as his? He had not even the godlike attribute of power upon which she could let herself be whirled into possession, shutting her eyes in the make-believe of fatality. Theseus may carry off an unloving Helen, but at least he is a hero. Helen may repine and revolt, but she feels that the arms that imprison her are strong and conquering arms. She may hate, but she will not despise,—and contempt is the one thing women will not endure. Let the ravisher but possess superb qualities, and pardon may eventually be his. Pride, sitting apart, is nourished on their contemplation though the heart be starving, and it is a fine thing to be able to sustain alien pride in a woman. But a man like Oïdas, the epitome of male commonplace, held out no future hope of an honourable compromise between pride and the heart’s exactions. Tied to him, she would pass through life a mean and pitiable figure, read in the light of her ignoble choice. It is not given to many women to wed romance, and the curious want of fastidiousness with which the sex may be charged, its readiness to take shabby and uninteresting mates, is one of the best proofs that any man can get a wife. But if a woman once let her glance dwell upon a live figure of a romance, it is astonishing how complete will be her discovery of the general ill looks and unattractiveness of men. Until Inarime had seen Gustav, she had not remarked whether nature favoured men physically or not. But now it was the appearance of Oïdas that told most emphatically against him. Nature had shown her what she could do for a man when she chose to be in a poetic mood, and she was not disposed to accept the exchange of a monkey shivering in a frock-coat.
The warm blood running fire through her now petulant veins taught her how mad was her former belief that she could meet the sacrifice her father proposed with resigned endurance. The revolt of her body was as fierce as that of her soul. Marriage was not like a commercial partnership in which each party lives on certain ground a life apart. It was the complete enslavement of an existence, the surrendering of private thought, of the sanctuaries of mind and person. No escape. Concealment would be subterfuge, the man’s dishonour the wife’s. Habit would be tyranny, the faintest demonstration of an unshared affection an oppression. She rose up at this thought with cheeks dyed scarlet, so acute was her apprehension of its meaning, and then dropped among her pillows, and hurried to hide from the shame of it under the protecting sheets.