CHAPTER II.
La raison, dit saint Augustin, ne se soumettroit jamais, si elle ne jugeoit qu’il y a des occasions où elle doit se soumettre. Il est donc juste qu’elle se soumette quand elle juge qu’elle doit se soumettre; et qu’elle ne se soumette pas, quand elle juge avec fondement qu’elle ne doit pas le faire: mais il faut prendre garde à ne pas se tromper.—Pascal.
Gower ceased reading. A few irregular remarks and questions followed the short silence. Willoughby expressed his wish that Atherton were with them, and was echoed by the lady of Ashfield. Kate received Atherton’s bulky letter from Gower’s hands, and began to look it over for herself, as we always do with newspapers, however fully read aloud. Mrs. Lowestoffe was cutting out some ingenious paper figures, destined to throw little Kate into rapturous glee, and her husband had just petitioned for music, when the deep bark of Lion was heard in the court-yard; then the muffled sound of hoofs and wheels over the snow, and a tearing peal of the bell.
It was Atherton, who, released sooner than he had hoped, had followed his epistle at speed, sweeping with the wind, through the whitening hills, for two-thirds of the December day.
In half an hour he was among his guests—had refreshed him after his journey—been upstairs to kiss his sleeping child—and now appeared, blithesome and ruddy, diffusing smiles. Enthroned in his favourite arm-chair, he amused them with the story of what he had seen, and heard, and done; nothing uncommon, certainly, but full of life and humour in his style of telling. On his way home that, day he had met with an entertaining companion in the railway carriage, a little spherical old gentleman, exhibiting between upper and nether masses of fur a narrow segment of face,—gruff and abrupt in speech—ferocious about stoppages and windows,—who had been in India, and knew everybody who was ‘anybody’ there.
‘We talked,’ said Atherton, ‘about Brahmins and Buddhists, about the Bhilsa Topes and Major Cunningham, about the civil service, and what not. On every topic he was surprisingly well informed, and gave me, in his brief way, just the facts I wanted to know. A propos of Ceylon and the famous cinnamon breezes, he said that when he was on board the Bungagunga Indiaman, they stood one day out at sea, some miles off the island, when the wind was blowing, mark you, right on the land. A group among the passengers began to dispute about these said breezes—were they a poetic fiction, or an olfactory fact? With that, my old gentleman slips away slyly, rubs a little oil of cinnamon on the weather hammock nettings, and has the satisfaction of presently seeing the pro-cinnamon party in full triumph, crying, with distended nostrils and exultant sniffs, ‘There! don’t you smell them now?’ One of them, he told me (his multitudinous envelopes shaking the while), actually published an account when he got home, relating his own experience of those spicy gales, said to perfume the ocean air so far away.’
Gower. Amusing enough. Just the blunder, by the way, of our mystics,—mistaking what exists only on board their own personality for something real that operates from without. Their pleasurable emotions can be nothing less than precious odours—miraculous benisons, breathed from some island of the blest.
Lowestoffe. They seem to me a most monotonous set of gentry—those same mystics. Accept my congratulations on your having nearly done with them. As far as I understand them, they go round one old circuit for ever, in varying forms,—just like your gold fish there, Mrs. Atherton, now looking so big about it, and the next moment tapered off to a mere tail. See that fellow now, magnified almost to the size of his glass world, with his huge eyes, like a cabbage rose in spectacles; and now, gone again on his way round and round,—always the same, after all.
Atherton. And yet religious extravagances, with all their inordinate Quixotism, or worse, are full of instruction. Your favourite botanical books should hint that much to you; for the vegetable physiologists all say that no little light has been thrown on the regularly developed organism by the study of monstrous and aberrant forms of growth.
Lowestoffe. There is something in that. But these irregularities you speak of have repeatedly broken out in the conduct, have they not, as well as in imagination or opinion?