To-morrow? Part 25

"We can't hold over anything in this life, opportunities, our own powers, health, youth, they are all things you can't store for the future. All we can do is to use them when they are put into our hands.

Still less can we reserve and warehouse our own feelings and emotions, and least of all, those of others. You might compare pa.s.sion to a gas.

If you allow gas its expansion it diffuses itself and is lost. If you subject it to confinement with close pressure, it becomes a liquid and loses its original form. It is the same with pa.s.sion. It is impossible to maintain it as such. Either it evaporates in gratification or it undergoes some metamorphosis in suppression."

I said nothing. There was a sort of coldness and weight in his words and tone that increased my own apprehensions.

"You can keep nothing up to the pitch of a crisis. We all know that.

Even a kettle of water, when it is once boiling, you cannot keep it so.

It must boil over into the flames or simmer down or dry up. And if you reject a woman at the crisis of her pa.s.sion, there is an enormous probability that, in waiting, her virtue or her inclination or her health will break down. Either her feelings may transport her into some folly or they may cool. If her will is too strong to allow the folly, and her nature too ardent to permit the cooling, then her const.i.tution must give way. This last is what, judging from all I see, I should think--since you ask my opinion, old fellow, you know--has happened in Lucia's case."

I looked at him with a faint feeling of surprise. His manner, voice, and words conveyed such an idea of certainty and perfect decision in his own mind.

"Yes," I answered; "I suppose that is it. Well, that is what she told me, virtually, herself."

"You cannot wonder at it!"

I coloured hotly as I answered,--

"I know it seems as if I had been a confounded prig in refusing her last year--people may say so; but if I had given in and kept her with me in Paris, then everybody would have been slanging me for that!"

d.i.c.k laughed.

"No, Victor; I am not slanging you for one or the other course. You acted up to your own principle--every fellow must do that; but I am not sure your principle is the best--that perpetual denial to impulse, that refusal to take what you can get in the moment, because of what you may be called upon to pay hereafter. At any rate, it may not be the luckiest nor the happiest. But still, in the case of a man who has many equally strong wishes, it is difficult to say what he should do. In your case the upshot of either resolution would have been the same--as things are, you will get your book out and be discontented; in the other case, you would have married Lucia and been discontented!"

"You may be as cynical as you please," I muttered, with my hands pressed over my eyes. "I am not responsible for the complex nature of the human brain, nor can I simplify it. I know what I am going to do now. Having secured the work, I am going to gain Lucia too, if it is in the power of any man--whether, as you put it, her virtue, or her health, or her inclination, or the whole lot together, have broken down!"

"And if you don't get her, you will get over it: we all do, Vic," he said, with a smile.

"Very possibly," I a.s.sented.

It was not worth while to discuss a contingency I had determined to prevent.

"A man's profession is his best friend," d.i.c.k went on, stretching himself out on the couch. "That he can command; and for the rest--purchasable pleasures--those he can command. These affaires-de-coeur, which you can't command, are always more bother than they are worth."

There was silence, then he added,--

"One good one, though, fairly early in life, is useful, like vaccination. You are not so likely to fall in love again after it; just as, after vaccination, you are not so likely to have smallpox. For myself, I should prefer smallpox to being in love."

I merely laughed, without replying. In my present state I was not sure that he was far wrong.

"I say," d.i.c.k remarked, after a pause; "you are looking most awfully seedy. Hadn't you better turn in and try and get some sleep? One always thinks one can't, but one generally does."

"Yes; I think I had better," I said, getting up. I turned one lamp out and the other down.

"It's odd--I wonder what the ultimate, future event will be"--

"'Quid sit futurum eras, fuge quaerere,'" answered d.i.c.k, with a laugh, as he turned and settled himself on the couch.

"There are a couple of rugs," I said, depositing them on his feet.

"Draw them up if you're cold."

"All right. Thanks! Good-night!"

"Good night!"

I slipped off my clothes and got into bed, feeling almost uncertain on my feet. My head seemed literally whirling and swimming in pain. When I awoke the following morning and looked round it was past ten. d.i.c.k had gone. I looked at the couch, it was empty, and a note was stuck by his pin into the sofa pillow. I sat up in bed, and by leaning forward and extending my arm I got hold of the pillow, and thence the paper and read it.

"8 A.M.--You are still asleep and I don't like to wake you, but I want to be back at my place by nine, so I am departing like the guest of an Arab. If you have nothing better to do this evening, come and dine with me. Army and Navy. Seven."

"Very good," I thought; I put the note and the pin on the table beside me, and got up. The headache was gone, and the head felt none the worse for it. The sun was streaming in through the blinds now. The gloom, the apprehensions, the pain of the previous night, had all cleared from the field together. I dressed and shaved with a steady hand, thinking, in a sane, easy way, very different from the inflamed, convulsive working of the brain last night. The work was set afloat in Paris--I should soon find readers on the asphalt--that quarter of my sky was clear. As for the sudden darkening squall that had sprung up in the other quarter, formerly so serene, the quarter over which reigned Lucia's star--it was only a squall, it would pa.s.s. She must be capable of being roused again to those feelings she had once known. And if I had nothing else, I had, at least, in my favour the sheer force and intensity of my own pa.s.sion--which is, after all, the weapon under which a woman quickest sinks. I felt that I cared more keenly for Lucia than most men of eight-and-twenty in the nineteenth century care for the women they marry. I was conscious of it instinctively; even if the memory of these last ten barren, empty years that I had lived did not convince me that a pa.s.sion for any one object would be greater in myself than in men whose multiplicity of previous loves must lessen the value of each succeeding one. My work, which had been Lucia's successful rival, had protected her from lesser ones.

Nothing, except the possession of this woman, had ever been a synonym of pleasure with me, and therefore its expectation had a stronger hold over me than it could have had over a man who was accustomed to acknowledge and recognise pleasure under a hundred names. I felt the impetus of this undiffused, undissipated pa.s.sion, in its undivided strength, stir and vitalise all my energies, and its power over my own frame made me involuntarily, instinctively confident of the power it would have over hers.

"We will see how long it is before you capitulate, oh my fortified and arrogant city!" I thought, as I finished dressing and went downstairs.

My father was reading the paper, apparently waiting breakfast for me.

We were on the very best of terms now.

He felt convinced of my capability to work, and a.s.sured of my success.

With that surprising tendency of the human mind to delegate its own powers to another, he accepted completely the verdict of the Parisian publisher upon qualities he had had under his own observation for an odd twenty years. Now, forsooth, because another man had told him so, he took it for granted that I had some talent. And all the time we had lived together he had hesitated to form that opinion from first-hand knowledge. Extraordinary trait in human nature, this liking to be thought for, instead of thinking for yourself! This waiting to take up, second-hand, ready-made, the views of another man, even when the fresh materials are at your hand, and you may examine them and form your own.

It is a universal tendency, of course, and displays itself everywhere; in religion, in morality, in fas.h.i.+ons, in vices, in simple conversation--everywhere.

The glorious and free gift of Nature to every man, the capacity for perception and judgment, he shamefacedly, as if it were a disgrace, tries to s.h.i.+ft off upon another. It always amuses me immensely when brought before me, and it did now in my father's case. He a.s.sumed, as innumerable people do, that success or failure proves or disproves merit, which is such a curious opinion, as remarkable as if a person believed the absence or presence of the hall-mark proved or disproved the ident.i.ty of gold. On no point did he and I differ more widely than on this.

It has always seemed to me that the formation of a judgment and opinion is an involuntary function of the mind, not a matter of effort, as others seem to regard it. Your judgment may be wrong, so may your opinion; your perception may be misled. I understand that. But can you exist without judgment, without opinion, without perception, till another man hand you his? This is hard to realise.

My father in all these years had not said my son is a fool and will not succeed, nor had he said my son is clever and will succeed, but what he had said was this, he may be a fool or he may be clever, we will see what the publishers say. And this att.i.tude of mind, which repeated itself in different forms in half the men one meets, is fascinatingly incomprehensible to me. If I have the opportunity of seeing a man or testing a ring, what do I care, what does it matter to me, whether he is successful or unsuccessful, whether the ring is hall-marked or not!

I have my own eyes, ears, and intelligence at command. What more do I want? Give me the man or the metal: in a very short time I have decided their worth to my own satisfaction. I may be wrong in my estimate, of course, but that is another matter.

If my brain is in a healthy state, I can do more avoid its forming an exact, personal opinion of the man, and a computation of his powers, than I can avoid my eye spontaneously taking his shape and muscles into its vision. In their natural, unimpaired state, neither organ should need artificial aid. But my father was looking at me now through the mental spectacles of my success, which made to him hugely big that merit which, before, he could not see at all. Thanks to those spectacles, an easy indulgence was granted me. Little that I could do now was wrong. Another man had thought fit to pay me for my powers.

That elevated me in his estimation as the powers themselves never had done. He had no longer any wish apparently to oppose me. Since my brains were now authenticated by the seal of a publisher, he was sufficiently satisfied that they might be trusted to decide my own life and conduct. However, besides all this, he was strictly a man of his word, and having promised that, with my success, all opposition to my marriage would cease, he kept his conditions, as I had kept mine.

"I am very sorry to be so late," I said, as we drew our chairs to the table. "I am afraid you have waited for me."

"My dear boy, a few minutes are of no consequence!"

"I had rather a stiff headache last night, and only got to sleep when it was nearly time to get up. I hope I didn't wake you coming home last night? That idiot Walters must needs turn out the gas and go to sleep in the hall. Of course I kicked him over. Did it disturb you?"

"I should think it was calculated to disturb Walters more than me!" he returned. "No; I didn't hear you. Were you late? Will you have sole or bacon?"

"Sole, please," I said. "Yes; d.i.c.k and I walked back from Lucia's place."

"How did you find her?" he asked, stirring his tea I had just handed him, and looking at me. "Don't you think she has deteriorated in looks very much?"

"Enormously," I replied, without hesitation.

There is nothing like conceding at once to your opponent any point that you admit yourself. It saves discussion being wasted upon that which you are really agreed about, and gives more weight to all you refuse to relinquish to him afterwards.

My father looked a little surprised, and did not answer immediately, and I continued,--

"She was always, as far as I remember, a girl who could look exceedingly pretty and positively plain, and all the intermediate gradations, within twenty-four hours, but really," I added, meeting his eyes across the breakfast table, and the full blaze of the sunlight falling into my own, "to me, in any one of them, she is equally"--