“Do you wish her to be taken away at once?” asked Hugh, almost in an angry tone.
“Certainly not. That would be impossible. We have agreed to take her, and must bear with it. And I would not have her moved from this, if I thought that if she stayed awhile it might be arranged that she might return from us direct to her husband.”
“I shall try that, of course;—now.”
“But if he will not have her;—if he be so obstinate, so foolish, and so wicked, do not leave her here longer than you can help.” Then Hugh explained that Sir Marmaduke and Lady Rowley were to be in England in the spring, and that it would be very desirable that the poor woman should not be sent abroad to look for a home before that. “If it must be so, it must,” said Priscilla. “But eight months is a long time.”
Hugh went out to smoke his pipe on the church-wall in a moody, unhappy state of mind. He had hoped to have done so well in regard to Mrs. Trevelyan! Till he had met Colonel Osborne, he felt sure, almost sure, that she would have refused to see that pernicious troubler of the peace of families. In this he found that he had been disappointed; but he had not expected that Priscilla would have been so much opposed to the arrangement which he had made about the house, and then he had been buoyed up by the anticipation of some delight in meeting Nora Rowley. There was, at any rate, the excitement of seeing her to keep his spirits from flagging. He had seen her, and had had the opportunity of which he had so long been thinking. He had seen her, and had had every possible advantage on his side. What could any man desire better than the privilege of walking home with the girl he loved through country lanes of a summer evening? They had been an hour together—or might have been, had he chosen to prolong the interview. But the words which had been spoken between them had had not the slightest interest—unless it were that they had tended to make the interval between him and her wider than ever. He had asked her—he thought that he had asked—whether it would grieve her to abandon that delicate, dainty mode of life to which she had been accustomed; and she had replied, that she would never abandon it of her own accord. Of course she had intended him to take her at her word.
He blew forth quick clouds of heavy smoke, as he attempted to make himself believe that this was all for the best. What would such a one as he was do with a wife? Or, seeing as he did see, that marriage itself was quite out of the question, how could it be good either for him or her that they should be tied together by a long engagement? Such a future would not at all suit the purpose of his life. In his life absolute freedom would be needed;—freedom from unnecessary ties, freedom from unnecessary burdens. His income was most precarious, and he certainly would not make it less so by submission to any closer literary thraldom. And he believed himself to be a Bohemian—too much of a Bohemian to enjoy a domestic fireside with children and slippers. To be free to go where he liked, and when he liked; to think as he pleased; to be driven nowhere by conventional rules; to use his days, Sundays as well as Mondays, as he pleased to use them; to turn Republican, if his mind should take him that way—or Quaker, or Mormon, or Red Indian, if he wished it, and in so turning to do no damage to anyone but himself;—that was the life which he had planned for himself. His Aunt Stanbury had not read his character altogether wrongly, as he thought, when she had once declared that decency and godliness were both distasteful to him. Would it not be destruction to such a one as he was, to fall into an interminable engagement with any girl, let her be ever so sweet?
But yet, he felt as he sat there, filling pipe after pipe, smoking away till past midnight, that though he could not bear the idea of trammels, though he was totally unfit for matrimony, either present or in prospect—he felt that he had within his breast a double identity, and that that other division of himself would be utterly crushed if it were driven to divest itself of the idea of love. Whence was to come his poetry, the romance of his life, the springs of clear water in which his ignoble thoughts were to be dipped till they should become pure, if love was to be banished altogether from the list of delights that were possible to him? And then he began to speculate on love—that love of which poets wrote, and of which he found that some sparkle was necessary to give light to his life. Was it not the one particle of divine breath given to man, of which he had heard since he was a boy? And how was this love to be come at, and was it to be a thing of reality, or merely an idea? Was it a pleasure to be attained, or a mystery that charmed by the difficulties of the distance—a distance that never could be so passed that the thing should really be reached? Was love to be ever a delight, vague as is that feeling of unattainable beauty which far-off mountains give, when you know that you can never place yourself amidst their unseen valleys? And if love could be reached—the love of which the poets sing, and of which his own
