Watersprings, Arthur Christopher Benson [free novels .txt] 📗

record. Mr. Sandys assented to everything, and the number of times that he exclaimed "True, true! admirably said!" exceeded belief. He said to Howard afterwards that the unmixed wine of intellect had proved a potent beverage. "One must drink it down," he said, "and trust to assimilating it later. It has been a glorious week for me, my dear Howard, thanks to you! Quite rejuvenating indeed! I carry away with me a precious treasure of thought--just a few notes of suggestive trains of inquiry have been scribbled down, to be dealt with at leisure. But it is the atmosphere, the rarefied atmosphere of high thought, which has braced and invigorated me. It has entirely obliterated from my mind that odious escapade of Jack's--so judiciously handled! The kindness of these eminent men, these intellectual giants, is profoundly touching and inspiring. I must not indeed hope to trespass on it unduly. Your Master--what a model of self-effacing courtesy--your Vice-Master--what a fine, rugged, uncompromising nature; and the rest of your colleagues"--with a wave of his hand--"what an impression of reserved and restrained force it all gives one! It will often sustain me," said the good Vicar in a burst of confidence, "in my simple labours, to think of all this tide of unaffected intellectual life ebbing and flowing so tranquilly and so systematically in old alma mater! The way in which you have laid yourself out to entertain me is indeed gratifying. If there is a thing I reverence it is intellect, especially when it is framed in modesty and courtesy."

Howard went with him to his lodgings, and just went in to say good-bye to Maud. Jack had been dining with her, but he was gone. He and Guthrie were going to the station to give them a send-off. "A charming young fellow, Guthrie!" said Mr. Sandys. "He has been constantly with us, and it is very pleasant to find that Jack has such an excellent friend. His father is, I believe, a man of wealth and influence? You would hardly have guessed it! That a young man of that sort should have given up so much time to entertaining a country parson and his daughter is really very gratifying--a sign of the growing humanity of the youth of England. I fear we should not have been so tolerant at dear old Pembroke. I like your young men, Howard. They are unduly careless, I think, about dress; but in courtesy and kindness, irreproachable!"

Howard only had a few words with Maud, of a very commonplace kind. She had enjoyed herself very much, and it was good of him to have given up so much time to them. She seemed to him reserved and preoccupied, and he could not do anything to restore the old sense of friendship. He was tired himself; it had been a week of great strain. Far from getting any nearer to Maud, he felt that he had drifted away from her, and that some intangible partition kept them apart. The visit, he felt, had been a mistake from beginning to end.


XVII


SELF-SUPPRESSION

As soon as the term was over, Howard went down to Windlow. He was in a very unhappy frame of mind. He could not capitulate; but the more that he thought, the more that he tried to analyse his feelings, the more complex they became. It really seemed to him at times as if two perfectly distinct people were arguing within him. He was afraid of love; his aim had always been to simplify his life as far as possible, and to live in a serene and cheerful spirit, for the day and in the day. His work, his relations with colleagues and pupils, had all amused and interested him; he had cared for people, he had many friends; but it was all a cool, temperate, unimpassioned kind of caring. People had drifted in and out of his life; with his frank and easy manner, his excellent memory for the characteristics and the circumstances of others, it had been easy for him to pick up a relationship where he had laid it down; but it was all a very untroubled business, and no one had ever really entered into his life; he did not like dropping people, and took some trouble by means of letters to keep up communication with his old pupils; but his friendships had never reached the point at which the loss of a friend would have been a severe blow. He felt that he was always given credit for more affection than he possessed, and this had made him careful not to fail in any duty of friendship. He was always ready to take trouble, to advise, to help his old pupils in their careers; but it had been done more from a sense of courtesy than from any deeper motive.

Now, however, it was very different; he felt himself wholly preoccupied by the thought of Maud; and he found himself looking into the secret of love, as a man might gaze from a hill-top into a chasm where the rocky ridges plunged into mist, doubting of his way, and mistrusting his own strength to pursue the journey. He did not know what the quality of his love was; he recognised an intense kind of passion, but when he looked beyond that, and imagined himself wedded to Maud, what was the emotion that would survive the accomplishment of his desires? Would he find himself longing for the old, comfortable, isolated life again? did he wish his life to be inextricably intertwined with the life of another? He was not sure. He had a dread of having to concede an absolute intimacy, he wished to give only as much as he chose; and then, too, he told himself that he was too old to marry so young a girl, and that she would be happier if she could find a more equal partner for her life. Yet even so the thought of yielding her to another sickened him. He believed that she had been attracted by Guthrie, and that he had but to hold his hand and keep his distance, and the relation might broaden into marriage. He wondered if love could begin so, so easily and simply. He would like to have believed it could not, yet it was just so that love did begin! And then, too, he did not know what was the nature of Maud's feelings to himself. He thought that she had been attracted to him, but in a sisterly sort of way; that he had come across her when she was feeling cramped and dissatisfied, and that a friendship with him had seemed to offer her a chance of expansion and interest.

He often thought of telling the whole story to his aunt; but like many people who seem extraordinarily frank about their feelings and fancies, and speak easily even of their emotions, he found himself condemned to silence about any emotion or experience that had any serious or tragic quality. Most people would have thought him communicative, and even lacking in reticence. But he knew in himself that it was not so; he could speak of his intimate ideas very readily upon slight acquaintance, because they were not to him matters of deep feeling; but the moment that they really moved him, he felt absolutely dumb and tongue-tied.

He established himself at Windlow, and became at once aware that his aunt perceived that there was something amiss. She gave him opportunities of speaking to her, but he could not take them. He shrank with a painful dumbness from displaying his secret wound. It seemed to him undignified and humiliating to confess his weakness. He hoped vaguely that the situation would solve itself, and spare him the necessity of a confession.

He tried to occupy himself in his book, but in vain. Now that he was confronted with a real and urgent dilemma, the origins of religion seemed to him to have no meaning or interest. He did not feel that they had any bearing whatever upon life; and his pain seemed to infect all his perceptions. The quality of beauty in common things, the hill-shapes, the colour of field and wood, the lights of dawn and eve, the sailing cloud, the tints of weathered stone, the old house in its embowered garden, with the pure green lines of the down above, had no charm or significance for him any more. Again and again he said to himself, "How beautiful that would be, if I could but feel it to be so!" He saw, as clearly and critically as ever, the pleasant forms and hues and groupings of things, but it was dull and savourless, while all the attractive ideas that sprang up like flowers in his mind, the happy trains of thought, in which some single fancy ramified and extended itself into unsuspected combinations and connections, these all seemed hardly worth recognising or pursuing. He found himself listless and distracted, just able by an effort to talk, to listen, to exchange thoughts, but utterly without any zest or energy.

Jack had gone off for a short visit, and Howard was thus left mostly alone. He went once or twice to the Vicarage, but found Mr. Sandys an unmixed trial; there seemed something wholly puerile about his absurd energies and activities. The only boon of his society was that he expected no reply to his soliloquies. Maud was there too, a distant graceful figure; but she, too, seemed to have withdrawn into her own thoughts, and their talk was mostly formal. Yet he was painfully and acutely conscious of her presence. She, too, seemed to be clouded and sad. He found himself unable to talk to her unconstrainedly. He could only dumbly watch her; she appeared to avert her eyes from him; and yet he drew from these meetings an infinite series of pictures, which were as if engraved upon his brain. She became for him in these days like a lily drooping in a shadowed place and in a thunderous air; something fading away mutely and sorrowfully, like the old figure of Mariana in the Grange, looking wearily through listless hours for something which had once beckoned to her with a radiant gesture, but which did not return. There were brighter hours, when in the hot July days a little peace fell on him, a little sense of the fragrance and beauty of the world. He took to long and solitary walks on the down in search of bodily fatigue. There was one day in particular which he long remembered, when he had gone up to the camp, and sate in the shade of the thicket on the crisp turf, looking out over the valley, unutterably quiet and peaceful in the hot air. The trees were breathlessly still; the hamlet roofs peeped out above the orchards, the hot air quivered on the down. There were little figures far below moving about the fields. It all looked lost in a sweetness of serene repose; and the thoughts that had troubled him rose with a bitter poignancy, that was almost a physical pain. The contrast between the high summer, the rich life of herb and tree, and his own weary and arid thoughts, fell on him like a flash. Would it not be better to die, to close one's eyes upon it all, to sink into silence, than thus to register the awful conflict of will and passion with the tranquil life that could not surrender its dreams of peace? What did he need and desire? He could not tell; he felt almost a hatred of the slender, quiet girl, with her sweet look, her delicate hands, her noiseless movements. She had made no claim, she did not come in radiant triumph, with impressive gestures and strong commanding influences into his life; she had