At the age of twenty-five Lord Julius Torr, engaged in the listless pursuit of that least elusive of careers, called diplomacy, found himself at The Hague, and yawned his way about its brightly scrubbed solitudes for some months, until, upon the eve of his resolve to have done with the whole business, and buy a commission in a line regiment, he encountered a young woman who profoundly altered all his plans in life. It was by the merest and unlikeliest of accidents that he came to know the Ascarels, father and daughter, and at the outset his condescension had seemed to him to be involved as well. They were of an old family in the Netherlands, Jewish in race but now for some generations estranged from, the synagogue, and reputed to be extraordinarily wealthy. It was said of them too that they were sternly exclusive, but to the brother of an English duke this had not appeared to possess much meaning. He had previously been of some official service to the father, in a matter wherein Dutch and English interests touched each other at Sumatra; from this he came to meet the daughter. He had been told by the proud father that she was of the blood of the immortal Spinoza, and had been so little impressed that he had not gone to the trouble of finding out who Spinoza was.
The marriage of young Torr, of the Foreign Office, to some Dutch-Jewish heiress a half-year later, received only a trifle more notice in England than did the news of his retirement from his country’s diplomatic service. The duke had already four sons, and the brother, when it seemed that he intended to live abroad, was not at all missed. Nearly fifteen years elapsed before a mature Lord Julius reappeared in England—a Lord Julius whom scarcely any one found recognizable. He bore small visible relation to the aimless and indolent young attaché whom people, by an effort of memory, were able to recall; still less did he resemble anything else that the Torr family, within recollection, had produced. He took a big old house in Russell Square, and in time it became understood that very learned and intellectual people paid pilgrimages thither to sit at the feet of Lady Julius, and learn of her. Smart London rarely saw this Lady Julius save at a distance—in her carriage or at the opera. The impression it preserved of her was of a short, swarthy woman, increasingly stout as years went on, who peered with near-sighted earnestness through a large pince-nez of unusual form. On her side, it seemed doubtful if she had formed even so succinct an impression as this of smart London. She was content with Bloomsbury to the end of her days; and made no effort whatever to establish relations with the West End. Indeed, tales came to be told of the effectual resistance she offered, in later years, to amiable interested advances from that quarter. It grew to be believed that she had made an eccentric will, and would leave untold millions to Atheist charities. The rumor that she was among the most highly cultivated women of her time, and that the most illustrious scientists and thinkers would quit the society of kings to travel post-haste across Europe at her bidding, did not, it must regretfully be added, seem incompatible with this theory about a crazy will. Finally, when she died in 1885, something was printed by the papers about her philanthropy, and much was said in private speculation about her disposition of her vast fortune, but it did not come out that any will whatever was proved, and London ceased to think of the matter.
The outer world had in truth been wrong from the beginning. Lady Julius was not a deeply learned woman, and the limited circle of friends she gathered about her contained hardly one distinguished figure, in the popular use of the phrase; her opinions were not notably advanced or unconventional; she did not shun society upon philosophic principles, but merely because it failed to attract a nature at once shy and practical; so far from being rich in her own right, she had insisted many years before her death upon transferring every penny of her fortune to her husband.
Inside her own household, this dark, stout little woman with the eye-glasses was revered as a kind of angel. She was plainfaced almost to ugliness in the eyes of strangers. Her husband and her son never doubted that she was beautiful. Now, when she had been a memory for ten years and more, these two talked of her lovingly and with no constraint of gloom, as if she were still the pivot round which their daily life turned.
The elder man particularly delighted in dwelling upon the details of that earlier change in him, under her influence, to which allusion has been made. Emanuel had in his mind, from boyhood, no vision more distinct or familiar than this selfpainted picture of his father—the idle, indifferent, unschooled, paltry-ideaed young gentleman of fashion—meeting all unawares this overpowering new force, and kneeling in awed yet rapturous submission before it. To the boy’s imagination it became a historical scene, as fixed and well known in its lines of composition as that of Nelson’s death in the cockpit. He saw his beardless father in dandified clothes of the Corn-Laws-caricature period, proceeding along the primrose path of dalliance, like some flippant new Laodicean type of Saul of Tarsus—when “suddenly there shined around him a light from heaven.” Lord Julius, indeed, thought and spoke of it in much that same spirit. The recollection that he had not known who Spinoza was tenderly amused him: it was the symbol of his vast oceanic ignorance of all things worth knowing.
“Ah, yes,” the son used to say, “but if you had not had within yourself all the right feelings—only lacking the flash to bring them out—you would not have seen how wonderful she was. You would not have understood at all, but just passed on, and nothing would have happened.”
And the father, smiling in reverie, and stroking his great beard, would answer: “I don’t see that that follows. I remember what I was like quite vividly, and really there was nothing in me to explain the thing at all. I was a young blood about town, positively nothing more. No, Emanuel, we may say what we like, but there are things supernatural—that is, beyond what we can see, and are prepared for, in nature. It was as unaccountable as magic, the effect your mother produced upon me from the beginning. At the end of a few hours, when it was time for me to take my leave, and I turned—there was a gulf in front of me, cutting me off from where I had been before I came to her, that very day. It was so wide, it seemed that I could barely see across it.”
To any listener but Emanuel such language must have been extravagant. To him there were no words for overpraise of his mother. It was not alone that he had never seen her in anger or even vexation; that he had never known her to be in error in any judgment, or suspected in her an uncharitable or unkindly thought. These were mere negations, and the memory of her was full of positive influences, all wise and pure and lofty. Very early in life, when he began to look about the world he found himself in, he learned to marvel that there were no other such women anywhere to be seen. She had been so perfect, with seemingly no effort to herself! Why should other women not even try?
Emanuel had been born some ten years after the marriage of his parents, and they thus came into his baby consciousness as persons of middle age, in appearance and its suggested authority at least, by comparison with the parents of other children he saw about him. Nowhere else, however, either then or in later years, did he see another home so filled from center to circumference with love, and tender gentleness of eye and word and deed. The perception that this environment was unique colored all his boyhood. It became a habit with him to set in contrast his own charmed existence against the unconsidered and uneven experiences of other children, and to ponder the meaning of the difference. As he grew up, the importance of this question expanded in his mind and took possession of it. He was consumed with the longing to make some effective protest against the peevish folly with which humanity mismanaged its brief innings of life. From the cradle to the grave the race swarmed stupidly along, elbowing and jostling in an aimless bustle, hot and ill-tempered through exertions which had no purpose; trampling down all weaker than themselves and cursing those who, in turn, had the strength to push them under; coming wearily at the end to the gate and the outer darkness of extinction, a futile and disappointed mob—having seen nothing, comprehended nothing, profited nothing.
The progress of a generation across the span of life might be made so serene and well-ordered and fruitful an affair! What else had man to concern himself about than this one thing—that “peace on earth, good will to men,” should rule in his time? And how was it that this alone, of all possible problems, received from him no attention at all?