'I have reason to know,' continued Philip, 'that she is alive—and you know that she is so, as well as I do. Miss Durham, this fellow had no right to marry you. His legitimate wife is still alive; no countess, but a vulgar old woman who owns and works a coal-barge on the Keld-dale Canal. He has a son by her. One good turn deserves another, and as you did me a real kindness at the hospice I repay it by freeing you from a degrading union just contracted with this wretched man, who is a mere adventurer and swindler. And now, one word with you, Schofield. The evidence of your bigamy is at hand. Take care that you never show your face at Mergatroyd to annoy me or my wife, or that you trouble Janet—if you do I shall have you immediately arrested on a charge of felony, for what you have done to-day.'
CHAPTER LII.
THE DEVIL'S KNELL.
In Carisbrooke Castle is a deep well, three hundred feet in depth, and, in order to draw the water, there is contrived a great wooden drum or wheel, which, when turned, draws up the bucket. Within the wheel stands a donkey, and it turns it by stepping on as if walking, although, in fact, the animal never advances an inch, for, as it moves, the wheel revolves under its feet. One ass was known to perform this task for fifty years, and another for forty years. There is, unless we guard against it, a tendency in ourselves to fall into the same routine—tramping, tramping on, over the same ground, in the same unambitious manner, neither advancing in our course, nor varying our horizon.
The acquaintance with Miss Durham had wrought much good in Salome as well as in Philip. She had opened his eyes to see his ignorance of himself, and hers to her ignorance of the world. Salome's previous existence had been within a narrow sphere. Shut off by peculiar circumstances from forming many acquaintances and having many friends, with her horizon contracted almost within the walls of the dingy and ugly red-brick house occupied by the Pennycomequicks, uncle and nephew, there can be no doubt but that she would in time have settled into a condition little superior to that of the Carisbrooke ass. Her mind would have trotted round and round in the same drum, and have accommodated itself without a murmur or a thought of resistance to it. In the course of years she would have become almost as ordinary, as petty-minded as the deceased Mrs. Cusworth. But contact with Miss Durham had startled her out of this intellectual donkeydom. She saw in the American girl a vivacity of interest, a breadth of view, a sparkle of intelligence, a receptivity for novel ideas, and a knowledge of the world and of the things in the world—the currents that circulated in it, the forces that propelled its waves and directed its tides, to which she had been completely strange. And this stimulated in her the desire to know. An American gentleman once said to the writer, 'We have no prejudices, therefore we are always learning.' That is the secret of American success in every branch of activity. Self-conceit breeds pig-headedness, which raises mountains of prejudice in our way, preventing us from seeing, as the Germans have it, that there are men beyond these mountains. Salome had noticed that Miss Durham was able at once, and without effort, to arrest the interest and enchain the attention of Philip, and this she attributed to the possession of qualities in the Chicago girl which were dormant, if not non-existent, in herself. She had the shrewdness to perceive, and the good sense to acknowledge, her own ignorance and inability to take part in conversation when it turned on politics, natural history, on music, art, or social questions of the day. She could talk about recipes for tapioca and semolina puddings, what proportion of water should be put with milk for a baby, the delinquencies of servants, the sermons she heard, the hymns she sang in church, the cutting-out and style of a dress, but not on much beyond. Being humble-minded, she was ready to take to heart what she recognised, and she studied Miss Durham with attention, to ascertain the points in which she was accomplished above her own acquirements.
When ale in bottle turns flat, housewives put in a raisin, and this at once restores the effervescence. A prudent spouse should have a reserve of raisins ever by her to pop into her husband's spirits whenever they are down. Some wives, however, act on the reverse principle, and perforate the corks, or knock off the necks of all the sparkling liquors in the cellars of their husbands' hearts. They cannot endure to see their good men cheery, sanguine, interested, hopeful; they reduce them all to the state of lymph and insipidity. Such wives when they find their husbands strung to concert pitch play the domestic accompaniment a semitone lower, so that the daily music of the household is a discord. They take the edge off their husband's wit with a sneer, overshadow his spirits when they sparkle, lash him to anger when he is pleased, and goad and spur him to madness when they find him jaded and desirous of repose. By a native perversity they seek to be always at cross purposes with their husbands, and then grumble because their victims do not smile and sing on the bed of nettles they have strewn for them.
But Salome was not one who could degenerate into such a mar-peace as this. In her lowly mind she acknowledged her deficiencies, and as she was endowed with energy and with excellent abilities, she determined to remedy these shortcomings in herself, and had the capacity to accomplish what she resolved.
The forethought of Jeremiah Pennycomequick came to her aid opportunely. He also, by his holiday of two years, had been thrown out of his drum, and had found that there was another and a brighter world than that of the tread-mill. He had discovered, late in life, that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, and not a dull boy only, but a cantankerous one.
Man is a lantern, and the vivid intellect within is the light; by nature he is a lantern with many sides, through all of which the interior light streams, irradiating and bringing into prominence a thousand surrounding objects. But the pressure of modern life forces him to blacken over one after another of these sides, and to line each with a reflector, so as to focus the light, and cast it through a single lens. The stress of competition, the strain of the social struggle, combine to make of each man a bull's-eye lantern. It is true that the light so concentrated illumines such objects as fall within the radius of the beam with superior brilliancy, but it leaves everything else in more profound darkness. What is gained in intensity is lost in the periphery. Jeremiah had discovered this, and more than this. He had learned by his own weakness to take a more kindly interest in others, to be pitiful towards their infirmities, patient with their mistakes and even follies.
Having himself tottered irresolute on the edge of the commission of an extreme act of folly, from which he had been rescued solely by a providential intervention, he was able to make allowances for lack of judgment or weakness of resolve in others.