Chương Chương 4 · Chapter IV

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“_Gorgibus._— * * * Je te dis que le mariage est une chose sainte

et sacrée: et que c’est faire en honnêtes gens, que de débuter par là.

“_Madelon._—Mon Dieu! que si tout le monde vous ressemblait, un

roman serait bientôt fini! La belle chose que ce serait, si d’abord

Cyrus épousait Mandane, et qu’Aronce de plain-pied fût marié à Clélie!

* * * Laissez-nous faire à loisir le tissu de notre roman, et n’en

pressez pas tant la conclusion.”

MOLIÈRE. _Les Précieuses Ridicules._

It would be a little hard to blame the rector of Pennicote that in the

course of looking at things from every point of view, he looked at

Gwendolen as a girl likely to make a brilliant marriage. Why should he

be expected to differ from his contemporaries in this matter, and wish

his niece a worse end of her charming maidenhood than they would

approve as the best possible? It is rather to be set down to his credit

that his feelings on the subject were entirely good-natured. And in

considering the relation of means to ends, it would have been mere

folly to have been guided by the exceptional and idyllic—to have

recommended that Gwendolen should wear a gown as shabby as Griselda’s

in order that a marquis might fall in love with her, or to have

insisted that since a fair maiden was to be sought, she should keep

herself out of the way. Mr. Gascoigne’s calculations were of the kind

called rational, and he did not even think of getting a too frisky

horse in order that Gwendolen might be threatened with an accident and

be rescued by a man of property. He wished his niece well, and he meant

her to be seen to advantage in the best society of the neighborhood.

Her uncle’s intention fell in perfectly with Gwendolen’s own wishes.

But let no one suppose that she also contemplated a brilliant marriage

as the direct end of her witching the world with her grace on

horseback, or with any other accomplishment. That she was to be married

some time or other she would have felt obliged to admit; and that her

marriage would not be of a middling kind, such as most girls were

contented with, she felt quietly, unargumentatively sure. But her

thoughts never dwelt on marriage as the fulfillment of her ambition;

the dramas in which she imagined herself a heroine were not wrought up

to that close. To be very much sued or hopelessly sighed for as a bride

was indeed an indispensable and agreeable guarantee of womanly power;

but to become a wife and wear all the domestic fetters of that

condition, was on the whole a vexatious necessity. Her observation of

matrimony had inclined her to think it rather a dreary state in which a

woman could not do what she liked, had more children than were

desirable, was consequently dull, and became irrevocably immersed in

humdrum. Of course marriage was social promotion; she could not look

forward to a single life; but promotions have sometimes to be taken

with bitter herbs—a peerage will not quite do instead of leadership to

the man who meant to lead; and this delicate-limbed sylph of twenty

meant to lead. For such passions dwell in feminine breasts also. In

Gwendolen’s, however, they dwelt among strictly feminine furniture, and

had no disturbing reference to the advancement of learning or the

balance of the constitution; her knowledge being such as with no sort

of standing-room or length of lever could have been expected to move

the world. She meant to do what was pleasant to herself in a striking

manner; or rather, whatever she could do so as to strike others with

admiration and get in that reflected way a more ardent sense of living,

seemed pleasant to her fancy.

“Gwendolen will not rest without having the world at her feet,” said

Miss Merry, the meek governess: hyperbolical words which have long come

to carry the most moderate meanings; for who has not heard of private

persons having the world at their feet in the shape of some half-dozen

items of flattering regard generally known in a genteel suburb? And

words could hardly be too wide or vague to indicate the prospect that

made a hazy largeness about poor Gwendolen on the heights of her young

self-exultation. Other people allowed themselves to be made slaves of,

and to have their lives blown hither and thither like empty ships in

which no will was present. It was not to be so with her; she would no

longer be sacrificed to creatures worth less than herself, but would

make the very best of the chances that life offered her, and conquer

circumstances by her exceptional cleverness. Certainly, to be settled

at Offendene, with the notice of Lady Brackenshaw, the archery club,

and invitations to dine with the Arrowpoints, as the highest lights in

her scenery, was not a position that seemed to offer remarkable

chances; but Gwendolen’s confidence lay chiefly in herself. She felt

well equipped for the mastery of life. With regard to much in her lot

hitherto, she held herself rather hardly dealt with, but as to her

“education,” she would have admitted that it had left her under no

disadvantages. In the school-room her quick mind had taken readily that

strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves

ignorance from any painful sense of limpness; and what remained of all

things knowable, she was conscious of being sufficiently acquainted

with through novels, plays and poems. About her French and music, the

two justifying accomplishments of a young lady, she felt no ground for

uneasiness; and when to all these qualifications, negative and

positive, we add the spontaneous sense of capability some happy persons

are born with, so that any subject they turn their attention to

impresses them with their own power of forming a correct judgment on

it, who can wonder if Gwendolen felt ready to manage her own destiny?

There were many subjects in the world—perhaps the majority—in which

she felt no interest, because they were stupid; for subjects are apt to

appear stupid to the young as light seems dull to the old; but she

would not have felt at all helpless in relation to them if they had

turned up in conversation. It must be remembered that no one had

disputed her power or her general superiority. As on the arrival at

Offendene, so always, the first thought of those about her had been,

what will Gwendolen think?—if the footman trod heavily in creaking

boots, or if the laundress’s work was unsatisfactory, the maid said,

“This will never do for Miss Harleth”; if the wood smoked in the

bedroom fire-place, Mrs. Davilow, whose own weak eyes suffered much from

this inconvenience, spoke apologetically of it to Gwendolen. If, when

they were under the stress of traveling, she did not appear at the

breakfast table till every one else had finished, the only question

was, how Gwendolen’s coffee and toast should still be of the hottest

and crispest; and when she appeared with her freshly-brushed

light-brown hair streaming backward and awaiting her mamma’s hand to

coil it up, her large brown eyes glancing bright as a wave-washed onyx

from under their long lashes, it was always she herself who had to be

tolerant—to beg that Alice who sat waiting on her would not stick up

her shoulders in that frightful manner, and that Isabel, instead of

pushing up to her and asking questions, would go away to Miss Merry.

Always she was the princess in exile, who in time of famine was to have

her breakfast-roll made of the finest-bolted flour from the seven thin

ears of wheat, and in a general decampment was to have her silver fork

kept out of the baggage. How was this to be accounted for? The answer

may seem to lie quite on the surface:—in her beauty, a certain

unusualness about her, a decision of will which made itself felt in her

graceful movements and clear unhesitating tones, so that if she came

into the room on a rainy day when everybody else was flaccid and the

use of things in general was not apparent to them, there seemed to be a

sudden, sufficient reason for keeping up the forms of life; and even

the waiters at hotels showed the more alacrity in doing away with

crumbs and creases and dregs with struggling flies in them. This potent

charm, added to the fact that she was the eldest daughter, toward whom

her mamma had always been in an apologetic state of mind for the evils

brought on her by a step-father, may seem so full a reason for

Gwendolen’s domestic empire, that to look for any other would be to ask

the reason of daylight when the sun is shining. But beware of arriving

at conclusions without comparison. I remember having seen the same

assiduous, apologetic attention awarded to persons who were not at all

beautiful or unusual, whose firmness showed itself in no very graceful

or euphonious way, and who were not eldest daughters with a tender,

timid mother, compunctious at having subjected them to inconveniences.

Some of them were a very common sort of men. And the only point of

resemblance among them all was a strong determination to have what was

pleasant, with a total fearlessness in making themselves disagreeable

or dangerous when they did not get it. Who is so much cajoled and

served with trembling by the weak females of a household as the

unscrupulous male—capable, if he has not free way at home, of going

and doing worse elsewhere? Hence I am forced to doubt whether even

without her potent charm and peculiar filial position Gwendolen might

not still have played the queen in exile, if only she had kept her

inborn energy of egoistic desire, and her power of inspiring fear as to

what she might say or do. However, she had the charm, and those who

feared her were also fond of her; the fear and the fondness being

perhaps both heightened by what may be called the iridescence of her

character—the play of various, nay, contrary tendencies. For Macbeth’s

rhetoric about the impossibility of being many opposite things in the

same moment, referred to the clumsy necessities of action and not to

the subtler possibilities of feeling. We cannot speak a loyal word and

be meanly silent; we cannot kill and not kill in the same moment; but a

moment is wide enough for the loyal and mean desire, for the outlash of

a murderous thought and the sharp backward stroke of repentance.