“Put aside regrets now. Go and break the news to your wife: support, comfort her; you alone can. I have not dared to tell her.”
Henry sighed and went, no longer joyous, but with slow step and paling cheek, to the place where Clara stood. We saw him bend over the hand she held out to him, kiss it humbly, and then passing his arm round her waist, he drew her away into the farther recesses of the garden, and both disappeared from our eyes.
“No,” said I, “he is not happy; like us all, he finds that things coveted have no longer the same charm when they are things possessed. Clara is avenged already. But you have done wisely. Let him succeed or let him fail, you have removed from Clara her only rival. If you had debarred him from honour you would have estranged him from love. Now you have bound him to Clara for life. She has ceased to be an obstacle to his dreams, and henceforth she herself will be the dream which his waking life will sigh to regain.”
“Heaven grant he may come back, with both his legs and both his arms; and, perhaps, with a bit of ribbon, or five shillings’ worth of silver on his breast,” said Percival, trying hard to be lively. “Of all my kinsmen, I think I like him the best. He is rough as the east wind, but honest as the day. Heigho! they will both leave us in an hour or two. Clara’s voice is so sweet; I wonder when she will sing again! What a blank the place will seem without those two young faces! As soon as they are gone, we two will be off. Aunt Gertrude does not like Bellevue, and will pay a visit for a few days to a cousin of hers on the other side of the county. I must send on before to let the housekeeper at Bellevue prepare for our coming. Meanwhile, pardon me if I leave you—perhaps you have letters to write; if so, despatch them.”
I was in no humour for writing letters, but when Percival left me I strolled from the house into the garden, and, reclining there on a bench opposite one of the fountains, enjoyed the calm beauty of the summer morning. Time slipped by. Every now and then I caught sight of Henry and Clara among the lilacs in one of the distant walks, his arm still round her waist, her head leaning on his shoulder. At length they went into the house, doubtless to prepare for their departure.
I thought of the wild folly with which youth casts away the substance of happiness to seize at the shadow which breaks on the wave that mirrors it; wiser and happier surely the tranquil choice of Gray, though with gifts and faculties far beyond those of the young man who mistook the desire of fame for the power to win it. And then my thoughts settling back on myself, I became conscious of a certain melancholy. How poor and niggard compared with my early hopes had been my ultimate results! How questioned, grudged, and litigated, my right of title to every inch of ground that my thought had discovered or my toils had cultivated! What motive power in me had, from boyhood to the verge of age, urged me on “to scorn delight and love laborious days?” Whatever the motive power once had been, I could no longer trace it. If vanity—of which, doubtless, in youth I had my human share—I had long since grown rather too callous than too sensitive to that love of approbation in which vanity consists. I was stung by no penury of fortune, influenced by no feverish thirst for a name that should outlive my grave, fooled by no hope of the rewards which goad on ambition. I had reached the age when Hope weighs her anchor and steers forth so far that her amplest sail seems but a silvery speck on the last line of the horizon. Certainly I flattered myself that my purposes linked my toils to some slight service to mankind; that in graver efforts I was asserting opinions in the value of which to human interests I sincerely believed, and in lighter aims venting thoughts and releasing fancies which might add to the culture of the world—not, indeed, fruitful harvests, but at least some lowly flowers. But though such intent might be within my mind, could I tell how far I unconsciously exaggerated its earnestness—still less could I tell how far the intent was dignified by success? “Have I done aught for which mankind would be the worse were it swept into nothingness to-morrow?”—is a question which many a grand and fertile genius may, in its true humility, address mournfully to itself. It is but a negative praise, though it has been recorded as a high one, to leave
“No line which, dying, we would wish to blot.”
If that be all, as well leave no line at all. He has written in vain who does not bequeath lines that, if blotted, would be a loss to that treasure-house of mind which is the everlasting possession of the world. Who, yet living, can even presume to guess if he shall do this? Not till at least a century after his brain and his hand are dust can even critics begin to form a rational conjecture of an author’s or a statesman’s uses to his kind. Was it, then, as Gray had implied, merely the force of habit which kept me in movement? if so, was it a habit worth all the sacrifice it cost? Thus meditating, I forgot that if all men reasoned thus and acted according to such reasoning, the earth would have no intermediate human dwellers between the hewers and diggers, and the idlers, born to consume the fruits which they do not plant. Farewell, then, to all the embellishments and splendours by which civilised man breathes his mind and his soul into nature. For it is not only the genius of rarest intellects which adorns and aggrandises social states, but the aspirations and the efforts of thousands and millions, all towards the advance and uplifting and beautifying of the integral, universal state, by the energies native to each. Where would be the world fit for Traceys and Grays to dwell in, if all men philosophised like the Traceys and the Grays? Where all the gracious arts, all the generous rivalries of mind, that deck and animate the bright calm of peace? Where all the devotion, heroism, self-sacrifice in a common cause, that exalt humanity even amidst the rage and deformities of war, if, throughout well-ordered, close-welded states, there ran not electrically, from breast to breast, that love of honour which is a part of man’s sense of beauty, or that instinct towards utility which, even more than the genius too exceptional to be classed amongst the normal regulations of social law, creates the marvels of mortal progress? Not, however, I say, did I then address to myself these healthful and manly questions. I felt only that I repined, and looked with mournful and wearied eyes along an agitated, painful, laborious past. Rousing myself with an effort from these embittered contemplations, the charm of the external nature insensibly refreshed and gladdened me. I inhaled the balm of an air sweet with flowers, felt the joy of the summer sun, from which all life around seemed drawing visible happiness, and said to myself gaily, “At least to-day is mine—this blissful sunlit day—
‘Nimium breves
Flores amænæ ferre jube rosæ,