And for what? For a most insufficient reason, as all the world thought.
What was the abnormal incident which had brought about this dislocation of his whole life, which had made havoc of all previous aims and prospects? Merely the too highly wrought imagination of a girl—of a silly girl, people would doubtless say.
Well, they could hardly so describe Hypatia Tollemache, who had proved the possession of one of the finest intellects of the day, and had taken almost unprecedented academical honours.
At any rate, she might come under the biting regal deliverance, Toujours femme varie, bien fol qui s'y fie. But was she changeable? He could not say so with any show of sincerity.
She had been true—too true—to her ideal. Would that she had not been so steadfast to a vain imagining, an emotional craze!
A dream, a vision that she was destined by example, precept, self-sacrifice, what not, to elevate her sex in particular, the toiling masses in general, the helpless poor, the forgotten captives, despairing, tortured, chained to the oar of the blood-stained galley, "Civilization," falsely so called! Confessedly a lofty ideal. Yet how needless a devotion of her glorious beauty, her precious, all too fleeting youth, her divine intellect, to the thankless task of helping those to whom Providence had denied the power of helping themselves; of expending these God-given treasures upon feeble or deformed natures, who, when all had been lavished, were less grateful for the abundant bounty than envious of the higher life, grudgingly displeased that more had not been dispensed.
However, the fiat had gone forth. She must be the arbiter of her own fate. He disdained to beg for a final reconsideration of his suit. Only, he could not have borne to remain and continue the daily round of country life, the rides and drives, the tennis and afternoon teas, the fishing, the shooting, when he knew the exact number of pheasants in each spinney, the woodcocks expected in every copse. The hunting was nearly as bad, except for the advantages of a turn more danger.
No; a new land, a new world, for him! Complete change and wild adventure; no ordinary derangement of conditions would medicine the mind diseased which was ever abiding with the form of Roland Massinger. His passage was already secured in one of the staunch seaboats which justify the maritime pride of the Briton; he was pledged to sail for the uttermost inhabited lands of the South in less than a week's time. The matter settled, he continued to devote himself assiduously to acquiring information, and felt partially at ease as to his future.
The most desirable colony still seemed to be a kind of ignis fatuus.
He read blue-books, compilations, extracts from letters of correspondents—all and everything which purported to direct in the right path the undecided emigrant—with the general result of confusing his mind, and delaying any advance to a purpose which he might have gained. Finally, he fixed, half by chance, upon Britain's farthest southern possession—New Zealand—the Britain of the South, as it had been somewhat pretentiously styled by a Company, more or less historical, which had essayed to monopolize its fertile lands and "civilize" its tameless inhabitants.