“And have you never found opportunities for remorse?” Mrs. Wyndwood asked, scathingly.
“Alas! often, I tell you. Remorse for the sins I couldn’t do. The remorse of your religious person is too often like the snivelling repentance of the condemned criminal. That murderer felt a truer remorse who was unexpectedly reprieved after indulging in an indigestible breakfast.”
Olive laughed heartily. “That must go into the comedy.”
It had become their stock phrase. Then remembering her part in the comedy was to score off Herbert, she capped his anecdote of the condemned criminal by another about the politeness of a Frenchman, who, ascending the scaffold, said to his neighbor in the tumbril, “Après vous.”
Eleanor raised the talk to a more elevated plane, insisting on the value of remorse, and of suffering generally. “I would not recall one of my sufferings,” said she, with her simple earnestness. “If I didn’t suffer I shouldn’t think I had grown.” And her eyes instinctively sought Matthew’s, and he thought she was reminding him of the educative efficacy of his own sufferings as well, and again Herbert’s philosophy jarred.
And whatever she was saying or doing she always fell naturally into some attitude that enchanted his eye by its unaffected grace; always wore an expression whose sweetness and candor softened him in worship. Her beauty—to a painter’s soul the miracle of miracles—she wore with a royal unconsciousness; he could not understand it. She was so simple, just like a human being. He saw her, not in her society drapings, but in all moods and weathers, and she bore the test. On fishing days they would draw up the boat in the centre of the nearest ley, where perch and “rudd” abounded, the former avid of the gentles, the latter only less eager for the paste, but demanding an iota of skill when hooked. Olive would take no hand in this mild sport; she had given up hunting and fishing, she said, when she rose in the ethical scale. Challenged as to her readiness to eat meat and fish, she failed to see the relevancy of the criticism. The reason she wouldn’t kill other creatures was not that it gave them pain, but that it gave her pain; to eat them, on the contrary, gave her pleasure. Mrs. Wyndwood, however, though not callous enough to impale her own worms, was persuaded by Matthew to take a rod, and beguiled numbers of perch, and admitted to a thrill of savage joy each time she hauled up a leaping flash of silver. She was glad, though, she said, that the poor little fishes had horny membranes for gills, so that the hook should not hurt them; when it passed through the eye, she trusted that the cornea was insensitive, too.
“But how would you feel,” Olive once remonstrated, “if, sitting at dinner, just after swallowing a mouthful of mayonnaise, and in the middle of a remark to your neighbor about the Rhine or the Pre-Raphaelites, you were suddenly to find yourself rising towards the ceiling, at the end of a rope fixed by a hook to your upper lip, and arriving slowly but surely, despite your kicking and writhing, into a stratum of air totally devoid of oxygen?”
Herbert Strang thought one would feel like a fish out of water, but Matthew Strang eluded the point by drawing a pike across the track. The bait of a captured roach had fetched the monster, whose struggles interested even Olive, while Eleanor was wrought up to a wild enthusiasm for Matthew’s prowess, and regretted that in Scotland she had always refused to go to see the grouse-shooting.
“I hear they are doing badly this year,” Olive observed.
“Oh no, Olive,” cried Mrs. Wyndwood. “Didn’t we hear at the Archdeacon’s yesterday that they were making excellent bags?”