Court Royal/Chapter LIII
CHAPTER LIII.
ANOTHER DISAPPOINTMENT.
Charles Cheek returned to Court Royal Lodge. He had lost his brightness. He was troubled about himself and about Joanna. He had become engaged to Lady Grace without being really in love with her. He liked a free and easy life, and the formalities of Court Royal were intolerable to him. He liked variety, and one day at the Park was like another. He was naturally of a joyous and careless spirit, and he was forced by circumstances to think, and think seriously; hating responsibilities, he had entangled himself in a net of them, and saw no way of escape out of them.
The Duke said one day to his daughter, that it was well to encourage the young man to be at the Court, for he heard he was very well off, and it was high time for Lucy to get married.
‘He is gentlemanly and agreeable. He knows his place. We must not be selfish and keep Lucy to ourselves.’
Lady Grace turned her face aside. It did not occur to the Duke as possible that young Cheek looked higher.
‘Should this come about, as I hope it will,’ said the old man, ‘it will be our duty and pleasure to make a handsome provision for Lucy. She has been devoted to you and to our whole house. We must not deal shabbily in the matter. I will speak to Worthivale about it.’
‘For pity’s sake, papa, not a word,’ entreated his daughter, laying her delicate hands on his arm, whilst a little colour fluttered about her face, like the flush of the cloud when touched by the setting sun.
‘As you will,’ said the Duke; ‘I only suggested it; but in these delicate matters a stranger’s hand must not meddle.’
Lucy watched her friend closely. She knew that Lady Grace had no dislike to Charles; she knew also that she did not love him. Lucy was able to read her heart like an open letter, and she saw that Grace was sacrificing herself solely for the sake of her father and brother. Did she realise the greatness of the sacrifice? Was the preservation of the estates worth it?
Lucy was glad of an opportunity to be with her brother one day to talk to him on the subject.
Beavis was looking careworn and sad. He knew that Lady Grace was engaged to Charles Cheek. The money advanced on the security of the furniture and plate had assured him of that. He took Lucy’s arm. They were walking in the garden under a brick wall, against which oranges and limes were trained. The scent of orange flowers was on the air. During a frost mats were placed over these trees, otherwise they were exposed, and flowered and fruited in the open air. Lucy plucked a twig of orange blossom, and, holding it between her fingers lightly, looked into the flower. ‘Beavis,’ she said, ‘I shall be picking these blossoms some time this year for the adornment of Grace. I had as soon be putting them about her in her coffin. You also would be happier that it were so.’
She did not look at her brother.
Though they were comparatively seldom together, she and her brother thought alike, felt alike, loved alike, as twins, each with the same disinterested and transparent love.
‘No, Lucy,’ answered Beavis, ‘it is well as it is. The family must be saved, and no salvation is possible without sacrifice. The sacrifice the gods demand is always of the best and purest. They refused that of Saltcombe; it was great, but not great enough. Iphigenia must suffer that the wind may swell the slack sails again.’
‘But the Duke will never consent.’
‘He must consent. He will do so under protest to save the family; that is always the first consideration with him. He would cheerfully sacrifice himself, if called to do so, in such a cause.’
‘Would it not be best that the sacrifice should be made by him—that the bulk of the property should be sold rather than that dear Grace herself should be forced into this most unsuitable connection?’
‘I do not think she will be unhappy. Charles is amiable; he is not brilliant, and she will lead him.’
‘I am sure she does not love him.’
‘I am not sure that he loves her. He is struck with her, that is all. He cannot ask of her what he does not give himself.
‘I hope,’ said Lucy, warmly, ‘with all my heart I do hope that it will never come off.’
‘I see no other means of escape open. It must take place.’
Lucy was not happy. She took an opportunity of speaking alone to Charles Cheek.
‘Mr. Cheek, you must excuse my temerity. I have been brought up with Lady Grace from childhood, and I care for her as my own soul. I do, do hope you love her.’
‘Of course I do. But now,’ said the young man, gravely, ‘now that I have you all to myself, Cousin Lucy, you must be candid with me. I want particularly to know what are Lady Grace’s feelings towards me.’
‘She regards you very highly.’
‘If the property could be saved without the incumbrance of Charles Cheek, I suppose she would be well content?’
‘That is not a fair question to ask, and I will not answer it.’
‘Cousin Lucy,’ he said, ‘I am like Jacob at the foot of the ladder whose top reaches into heaven, and Lady Grace is an angel standing on it, high, very high up. She beckons me to ascend, and I want her to come down to me. Till one yields there can be no rapprochement. Which is it to be?’
‘How can you ask? For her to descend is inconceivable. You must go up.’
He shook his head. ‘do not care for such altitudes. The air is too thin, the light too strong, and it is deadly cold. I like the warmth of earth and its somewhat crass atmosphere.’
‘You would drag her down!’
‘Am I sacrilegious? I think her very perfect, quite angelic, but insufficiently human.’
‘What do you mean by human—that which is gross? Lady Grace can never become that. Human she is in the best sense. She shows you what human nature may become, not what it usually is.’
‘Quite so—natura, about-to-become. I like the present; there is unrest in a future participle. Cousin Lucy, to every substance, humanity not excepted, there are three conditions possible: the solid, the fluid, and the gaseous. I am in the first, she is in the last. I am not even, and have no desire to be, in the transition stage. She must condense and descend, or I must evaporate, and that I won’t do.’
‘Go higher, always higher!’ said Lucy, eagerly.
‘The desire to do so is not in me. It is a strain to me to keep awing in this region of high culture. I am like Icarus. My waxen pinions are melting, and I shall go down suddenly.’
‘Surely you do not object to culture.’
‘Not at all. I like culture as it affects creature comforts. I would not go back a hundred years and be bereft of my bath, my daily paper, lucifer-matches, and having my hair brushed by machinery. Culture is excellent till it meddles with the inner man. When it begins to scrape, and reduce, and polish natural proclivities and robust individualities, why then, Lucy, I fancy it not.’
‘You would like a luxurious savagery.’
‘No, not that. Outer culture will relax and soften the inner brute. You begin by stifling nature and then mummifying it magnificently. Your highly crystallised culture resembles a Rupert’s drop. Do you know it? It is a frozen tear of glass, so hard that you cannot break it with a hammer, and yet so fragile that it will crumble into dust between your fingers if you snip the hair-like end. Refine as you will, there is always a vulnerable point in your civilisation, and when that is touched the whole collapses. I like your culture well enough; a little of it is a wondrous thing; a great deal is overpowering. I have known a whole family suffocated by the breaking of a jar of otto of roses. You are passing human nature through retorts and sublimating it to an essence. There will be a reaction. The reaction is begun. It was the same in old Rome. Their culture was carried to an extremity, and the barbarian burst over it and trampled it out. Now your high refinement of mind and manner and spirit has reached its limit, and the great mass of barbarous, vulgar life beneath is lifting itself up, to smite you down and destroy you.’
‘The northern barbarians came down on Rome because the old Roman civilisation was selfish. The northern races were full of heroic virtues, self-restraint, submission to authority, and religion. Are these qualities to be found in the coming barbarians?’
‘Oh dear, no,’ said Charles. ‘What we are coming to is the revolt against these very virtues which characterise your Christian aristocratic culture. What is coming is the emancipation of individualism, which has been distorted and suppressed by self-restraint, submission, and religion. You, brought up under the old system, are parts of a whole, and think and act and breathe and move as portions of the social machine. You are bound with responsibilities, hedged about with duties. You cannot do what you like, you have to consider everyone else. You have obligations to every child in the school and sick woman on her bed. You have to dress according to your station; attend church to set an example. Where is the I Myself in this? A poor bound lion in a net. The coming change is the bursting of the lion out of the net, and the rending of every mesh that entangled him; it is the rebellion of the individual against obligations of every sort, social, moral, political, religious. Self will be free and follow its own will wherever it leads—free to enjoy every luxury that civilisation can give, without scruple from within or check from without.’
Lucy shuddered.
Charles laughed. ‘This frightens you, and well it may, brought up as you are in the old world. I do not say that your old world is wrong, or that the new world which is beginning to live is right. They are counter principles. I tell you what is coming; I need no prophetic instinct to see that. The individual for the first time since the fall of old Rome and heathenism is asserting itself. Hitherto the body corporate has been supreme.’
‘That will be a terrible time. I dare not even think of it.’
‘Not as bad as you suppose. In mechanics, when two forces meet, running in different directions, they do not kill each other, but they produce a resultant, that is, a force which goes in quite a new direction. The old idea is not exhausted, and when the new idea clashes against it, neither is neutralised so as to cease to be, both are modified and altered into a resultant of some sort. What the resultant will be when the counter forces in modern life meet, I cannot conjecture, but we shall see a new social departure in a direction of which we know nothing.’
‘To return to Lady Grace.’
‘You are right; to return to her. You see, I do not want to break away from the new current, to plunge myself in the old, which is passing away.’
‘What prospect of happiness is there to either, with minds and principles so dissimilar, so conflicting?’
‘That,’ said he, and sighed, ‘that is what I continually ask myself, and am as often frightened at the answer.’
‘Oh, Cousin Charles! do not risk the ruin of her, of your life, by persevering.’
‘Remember, Lucy, she encouraged me. She made the advance, not I. I would not have dared to speak unprovoked by her.’
‘Cousin Charles! you must release her.’
‘What!—and ruin the family?’
Lucy put her hands over her eyes. ‘I must not interfere,’ she said; ‘my thoughts were only for her.’
‘This is how matters stand, Lucy,’ said Charles Cheek. ‘I love and venerate Lady Grace above every woman in the world, but she is not the woman I desire as my wife. I suppose I am deficient in ambition. It may be that she would insist on a higher life, a life of more restraint than that I now lead, and this I do not choose to adopt. I belong to the new era, and declare for liberty. I like comfort, I like enjoyment, and I detest obligation. If I marry Lady Grace I throw myself into moral, social, and mental bondage. No doubt it would do me good, make a high-principled, conscientious English gentleman of me; but I refuse the schooling, and the results are not to my taste. Lucy! I will give her up. I will go to my father and make the best terms I can for the family. It is I who shrink from the engagement, not she, and therefore we are bound to make some compensation.’
‘Will you see her first?’
‘No, I will write.’
Lucy drew a sigh of relief. ‘I am sure your decision is right,’ she said, ’cost what it may to the family.'