Rest Harrow: A Comedy of Resolution

by Maurice Hewlett

It was not so odd as it may seem that her intimates had always been men. That reticence of hers which repelled her own sex was precisely that in her which attracted, by provoking, the other. After her dumb childhood, to which she never looked back, came her opening girlhood, and on the threshold of that stood Jack Senhouse, the loyal servitor, the one man who had loved her without an ounce of self-seeking. Then came Nevile Ingram, and swallowed her up for a while, and when he had tired of her she was once more without a friend. To Chevenix afterwards, rather than to Mrs. Devereux, she had struggled to utter herself. That cry of distress, “he wants me, to ravage me,” would never have been made by her to a woman. She would have died of it sooner. And now came the Pole, Morosine, and by taking for granted (as even Lady Maria could not have done) much that could not have been explained, put her at her ease. She found him a Jack without the spirit—without the divine spark. She could never have loved him, though she liked him well, and she had no idea that he thought of nothing but the greatness of his reward when, after patient toiling, she might fall into his arms. Every nerve in her body was now strung up to obedience to Jack's idea of her. She saw, as clearly as if it was printed, her fate before her. She was to put herself under the law. Jack should not have loved in vain her “dear obsequious head.” Nevile would come back and require her. For Jack's sake, who had seen her too noble to be touched by sin, she would dip herself deep in sin.

Morosine, who frankly desired her to be the wife of a man she did not love in order that she might the more easily find consolation in himself afterwards, had the wit to see that she needed some of his sophistry, though not enough to know exactly why. It was perfectly true. Her churchgoing was an ointment. It could soothe but not heal her. Sanchia had a mind. To do wrong by the world because it had seemed right to her was not to be remedied by doing a right by it now, which to her reasoning would glare before her as a monstrous sin. She forgot that Senhouse had also taught her that the great sin of all was insincerity. She could not have afforded to remember that. All her present desire was to be, as nearly as she might, what she had been when Jack had seen her first, what he had found excellent in her and love-worthy—pious, bowing her head in a fair place, obsequious, obedient to the law. He had loved her, of course, whatever she did—outraging the law as well as keeping it, loving Nevile, letting himself go away. She could not remember that. He had loved her meek; she would be meek. That was what her heart told her; and Morosine, to serve his own ends, lulled her head with his sophisticated anodynes, and sent her brain to sleep.

That he should know her story, as he obviously did, was not so disconcerting to her as it would have been to most young women. Taciturn as she was, it was not by reason of timidity, but rather that her own motives seemed too clear to her to be worth stating. She was, perhaps, rather given to assume her prerogative right to be different. Her first thought, therefore, was that she was saved the trouble of explaining herself, and her second that it was satisfactory to have a friend who understood her without explanations.

As for Morosine, he may or may not have felt that he had broken the ice; he pushed forward, at any rate, as if he had clear water in front of him. Sanchia felt, when she next met him, that their acquaintance had entered on a new phase.

Then suddenly, before she knew where she was, her fate was upon her.

It was in the Park on a fine Sunday forenoon in February. She was with Lady Maria, and had met with Melusine and Gerald Scales. Morosine also, seeing her and meeting her eyes, instantly left his companion and came to greet her, hat in hand. He addressed himself to her exclusively, having saluted Lady Maria; but she named her sister, and he saluted her too. Gerald Scales, bronzed, plump, and very full in the eye, having looked the newcomer over, decided against him, and gave him a shoulder. “Foreign beggar,” was the conclusion he came to, which does credit to his perspicacity, because the Pole had a very English appearance, and Scales himself the look of a Jew.

When they turned to walk, Morosine took the side next Sanchia, and though he talked to both ladies, so contrived that she should read more in what he said than her sister. He did it deftly, but continuously. Sanchia was entertained, slightly excited, and ended by taking part in the game of skill. It is impossible to say by how much this sort of thing increased the intimacy already established between the pair. It was by so much, at least, that when Melusine joined her husband, by dropping behind and waiting for him to come up with, the old lady, it came as no sort of shock to Sanchia that he took up the talk where he had ended it in the gallery.

“You have been to church, I see. But you are not a Christian?” He did not look at her.

Nor did she turn her head to reply. “I don't know. Nominally, at least; fitfully, at the most.”

“That must be the outside of it,” he continued. “The thing is the antithesis of the Hellenic ideal—which is yours. Your seemingly passive martyr is really in an ecstasy. He aims at outraging Nature; begins by despising and ends by dreading it. Nature, however, has ways of revenging herself.”