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CHAPTER XIV: FLORIMEL
That night Florimel had her thoughts as well as Malcolm. Already
life was not what it had been to her, and the feeling of a difference
is often what sets one a-thinking first. While her father lived,
and the sureness of his love overarched her consciousness with a
heaven of safety, the physical harmony of her nature had supplied
her with a more than sufficient sense of well being. Since his death,
too, there had been times when she even fancied an enlargement of
life in the sense of freedom and power which came with the knowledge
of being a great lady, possessed of the rare privilege of an ancient
title and an inheritance which seemed to her a yet greater wealth
than it was. But she had soon found that, as to freedom, she had
less of that than before--less of the feeling of it within her:
not much freedom of any sort is to be had without fighting for it,
and she had yet to discover that the only freedom worth the name
--that of heart, and soul, and mind--is not to be gained except
through the hardest of battles. She was very lonely, too. Lady
Bellair had never assumed with her any authority, and had always
been kind even to petting, but there was nothing about her to make
a home for the girl's heart. She felt in her no superiority, and
for a spiritual home that is essential. As she learned to know her
better, this sense of loneliness went on deepening, for she felt
more and more that her guardian was not one in whom she could place
genuine confidence, while yet her power over her was greater than
she knew. The innocent nature of the girl had begun to recoil from
what she saw in the woman of the world, and yet she had in herself
worldliness enough to render her fully susceptible of her influences.
Notwithstanding her fine health and natural spirits, Florimel had
begun to know what it is to wake suddenly of a morning between
three and four, and lie for a long weary time, sleepless. In youth
bodily fatigue ensures falling asleep, but as soon as the body is
tolerably rested, if there be unrest in the mind, that wakes it,
and consciousness returns in the shape of a dull misgiving like the
far echo of the approaching trump of the archangel. Indeed, those
hours are as a vestibule to the great hall of judgment, and to such
as, without rendering it absolute obedience, yet care to keep on
some sort of terms with their conscience, is a time of anything but
comfort. Nor does the court in those hours sitting, concern itself
only with heavy questions of right or wrong, but whoever loves
and cares himself for his appearance before the eyes of men, finds
himself accused of paltry follies, stupidities, and indiscretions,
and punished with paltry mortifications, chagrins, and anxieties.
From such arraignment no man is free but him who walks in the perfect
law of liberty--that is, the will of the Perfect--which alone
is peace.
On the morning after she had thus taken Malcolm again into her
service, Florimel had one of these experiences--a foretaste of
the Valley of the Shadow: she awoke in the hour when judgment sits
upon the hearts of men. Or is it not rather the hour for which a
legion of gracious spirits are on the watch--when, fresh raised
from the death of sleep, cleansed a little from the past and its
evils by the gift of God, the heart and brain are most capable of
their influences?--the hour when, besides, there is no refuge of
external things wherein the man may shelter himself from the truths
they would so gladly send conquering into the citadel of his nature,
--no world of the senses to rampart the soul from thought, when
the eye and the ear are as if they were not, and the soul lies naked
before the infinite of reality. This live hour of the morning is
the most real hour of the day, the hour of the motions of a prisoned
and persecuted life, of its effort to break through and breathe. A
good man then finds his refuge in the heart of the Purifying Fire;
the bad man curses the swarms of Beelzebub that settle upon every
sore spot in his conscious being.
But it was not the general sense of unfitness in the conditions
of her life, neither was it dissatisfaction with Lady Bellair, or
the want of the pressure of authority upon her unstable being; it
was not the sense of loneliness and unshelteredness in the sterile
waste of fashionable life, neither was it weariness with the same
and its shows, or all these things together, that could have waked
the youth of Florimel and kept it awake at this hour of the night
--for night that hour is, however near the morning.
Some few weeks agone, she had accompanied to the study of a certain
painter, a friend who was then sitting to him for her portrait. The
moment she entered, the appearance of the man and his surroundings
laid hold of her imagination. Although on the very verge of popularity,
he was young--not more than five and twenty. His face, far from
what is called handsome, had a certain almost grandeur in it, owed
mainly to the dominant forehead, and the regnant life in the eyes.
To this the rest of the countenance was submissive. The mouth was
sweet yet strong, seeming to derive its strength from the will
that towered above and overhung it, throned on the crags of those
eyebrows. The nose was rather short, not unpleasantly so, and had
mass enough. In figure he was scarcely above the usual height,
but well formed. To a first glance even, the careless yet graceful
freedom of his movements was remarkable, while his address was
manly, and altogether devoid of self recommendation. Confident
modesty and unobtrusive ease distinguished his demeanour. His
father, Arnold Lenorme, descended from an old Norman family, had
given him the Christian name of Raoul, which, although outlandish,
tolerably fitted the surname, notwithstanding the contiguous l's,
objectionable to the fastidious ear of their owner. The earlier
and more important part of his education, the beginnings, namely,
of everything he afterwards further followed, his mother herself
gave him, partly because she was both poor and capable, and
partly because she was more anxious than most mothers for his best
welfare. The poverty they had crept through, as those that strive
after better things always will, one way or another, with immeasurable
advantage, and before the time came when he must leave home, her
influence had armed him in adamant--a service which alas! few
mothers seem capable of rendering the knights whom they send out into
the battlefield of the world. Most of them give their children the
best they have; but how shall a foolish woman ever be a wise mother?
The result in his case was, that reverence for her as the type of
womanhood, working along with a natural instinct for refinement, a
keen feeling of the incompatibility with art of anything in itself
low or unclean, and a healthful and successful activity of mind,
had rendered him so far upright and honourable that he had never
yet done that in one mood which in another he had looked back upon
with loathing. As yet he had withstood the temptations belonging
to his youth and his profession--in great measure also the
temptations belonging to success; he had not yet been tried with
disappointment, or sorrow, or failure.
As to the environment in which Florimel found him, it was to her
a region of confused and broken colour and form--a kind of chaos
out of which beauty was ever ready to start. Pictures stood on
easels, leaned against chair backs, glowed from the wall--each
contributing to the atmosphere of solved rainbow that seemed to
fill the space. Lenorme was seated--not at his easel, but at a
grand piano, which stood away, half hidden in a corner, as if it
knew itself there on sufferance, with pictures all about the legs
of it. For they had walked straight in without giving his servant
time to announce them. A bar of a song, in a fine tenor voice,
broke as they opened the door; and the painter came to meet them
from the farther end of the study. He shook hands with Florimel's
friend, and turned with a bow to her. At the first glance the eyes
of both fell. Raised the same instant, they encountered each other
point blank, and then the eloquent blood had its turn at betrayal.
What the moment meant, Florimel did not understand; but it seemed
as if Raoul and she had met somewhere long ago, were presumed not
to know it, but could not help remembering it, and agreeing to
recognise it as a fact. A strange pleasure filled her heart. While
Mrs Barnardiston sat she flitted about the room like a butterfly,
looking at one thing after another, and asking now the most ignorant,
now the most penetrative question, disturbing not a little the
work, but sweetening the temper of the painter, as he went on with
his study of the mask and helmet into which the Gorgon stare of
the Unideal had petrified the face and head of his sitter. He found
the situation trying nevertheless. It was as if Cupid had been set
by Jupiter to take a portrait of Io in her stall, while evermore he
heard his Psyche fluttering about among the peacocks in the yard.
For the girl had bewitched him at first sight. He thought it was
only as an artist, though to be sure a certain throb, almost of
pain, in the region of the heart, when first his eyes fell before
hers, might have warned, and perhaps did in vain warn him otherwise.
Sooner than usual he professed himself content with the sitting,
and then proceeded to show the ladies some of his sketches and
pictures. Florimel asked to see one standing as in disgrace with
its front to the wall. He put it, half reluctantly, on an easel,
and said it was meant for the unveiling of Isis, as presented in
a maehrchen of Novalis, introduced in Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, in
which the goddess of Nature reveals to the eager and anxious gaze
of the beholder the person of his Rosenbluethchen, whom he had left
behind him when he set out to visit the temple of the divinity.
But on the great pedestal where should have sat the goddess there
was no gracious form visible. That part of the picture was a
blank. The youth stood below, gazing enraptured with parted lips
and outstretched arms, as if he had already begun' to suspect what
had begun to dawn through the slowly thinning veil--but to the
eye of the beholder he gazed as yet only on vacancy, and the picture
had not reached an attempt at self explanation. Florimel asked why
he had left it so long unfinished, for the dust was thick on the
back of the canvas.
"Because I have never seen the face or figure," the painter answered,
"either in eye of mind or of body, that claimed the position."
As he spoke, his eyes seemed to Florimel to lighten strangely, and
as if by common consent they turned away, and looked at something
else. Presently Mrs Barnardiston, who cared more for sound than
form or colour, because she could herself sing a little, began to
glance over some music on the piano, curious to find what the young
man had been singing, whereupon Lenorme said to Florimel hurriedly,
and almost in a whisper, with a sort of hesitating assurance,
"If you would give me a sitting or two--I know I am presumptuous,
but if you would--I--I should send the picture to the Academy
in a week."
"I will," replied Florimel, flushing like a wild poppy, and as she
said it, she looked up in his face and smiled.
"It would have been selfish," she said to herself as they drove
away, "to refuse him."
This first interview, and all the interviews that had followed, now
passed through her mind as she lay awake in the darkness preceding
the dawn, and she reviewed them not without self reproach. But
for some of my readers it will be hard to believe that one of the
feelings that now tormented the girl was a sense of lowered dignity
because of the relation in which she stood to the painter--seeing
there was little or no ground for moral compunction, and the feeling
had its root merely in the fact that he was a painter fellow, and
she a marchioness. Her rank had already grown to seem to her so
identified with herself that she was hardly any longer capable of
the analysis that should show it distinct from her being. As to any
duty arising from her position, she had never heard the word used
except as representing something owing to, not owed by rank. Social
standing in the eyes of the super excellent few of fashion was the
Satan of unrighteousness worshipped around her. And the precepts
of this worship fell upon soil prepared for it. For with all the
simplicity of her nature, there was in it an inborn sense of rank,
of elevation in the order of the universe above most others of the
children of men--of greater intrinsic worth therefore in herself.
How could it be otherwise with the offspring of generations of pride
and falsely conscious superiority? Hence, as things were going now
with the mere human part of her, some commotion, if not earthquake
indeed, was imminent. Nay the commotion had already begun, as
manifest in her sleeplessness and the thoughts that occupied it.
Rightly to understand the sense of shame and degradation she had
not unfrequently felt of late, we must remember that in the circle
in which she moved she heard professions, arts, and trades alluded
to with the same unuttered, but the more strongly implied contempt
--a contempt indeed regarded as so much a matter of course, so
thoroughly understood, so reasonable in its nature, so absolute in
its degree, that to utter it would have been bad taste from very
superfluity. Yet she never entered the painter's study but with
trembling heart, uncertain foot, and fluttering breath, as of one
stepping within the gates of an enchanted paradise, whose joy is
too much for the material weight of humanity to ballast even to the
steadying of the bodily step, and the outward calm of the bodily
carriage. How far things had gone between them we shall be able to
judge by and by; it will be enough at present to add that it was
this relation and the inward strife arising from it that had not
only prematurely, but over rapidly ripened the girl into the woman.
This my disclosure of her condition, however, has not yet uncovered
the sorest spot upon which the flies of Beelzebub settled in the
darkness of this torture hour of the human clock. Although still
the same lively, self operative nature she had been in other
circumstances, she was so far from being insensible or indifferent
to the opinions of others, that she had not even strength enough to
keep a foreign will off the beam of her choice: the will of another,
in no way directly brought to bear on hers, would yet weigh to
her encouragement where her wish was doubtful, or to her restraint
where impulse was strong; it would even move her towards a line
of conduct whose anticipated results were distasteful to her. Ever
and anon her pride would rise armed against the consciousness of
slavery, .but its armour was too weak either for defence or for
deliverance. She knew that the heart of Lady Bellair, what of heart
she had, was set upon her marriage with her nephew, Lord Liftore.
Now she recoiled from the idea of marriage, and dismissed it into
a future of indefinite removal; she had no special desire to please
Lady Bellair from the point of gratitude, for she was perfectly aware
that her relation to herself was far from being without advantage
to that lady's position as well as means: a whisper or two that
had reached her had been enough to enlighten her in that direction;
neither could she persuade herself that Lord Liftore was at all
the sort of man she could become proud of as a husband; and yet she
felt destined to be his wife. On the other hand she had no dislike
to him: he was handsome, well informed, capable--a gentleman,
she thought, of good regard in the circles in which they moved, and
one who would not in any manner disgrace her, although to be sure
he was her inferior in rank, and she would rather have married
a duke. At the same time, to confess all the truth, she was by no
means indifferent to the advantages of having for a husband a man
with money enough to restore the somewhat tarnished prestige of her
own family to its pristine brilliancy. She had never said a word
to encourage the scheming of Lady Bellair; neither, on the other
hand, had she ever said a word to discourage her hopes, or give her
ground for doubting the acceptableness of her cherished project.
Hence Lady Bellair had naturally come to regard the two as almost
affianced. But Florimel's aversion to the idea of marriage, and her
horror at the thought of the slightest whisper of what was between
her and Lenorme, increased together.
There were times too when she asked herself in anxious discomfort
whether she was not possibly a transgressor against a deeper and
simpler law than that of station--whether she was altogether
maidenly in the encouragement she had given and was giving to the
painter. It must not be imagined that she had once visited him
without a companion, though that companion was indeed sometimes
only her maid--her real object being covered by the true pretext
of sitting for her portrait, which Lady Bellair pleased herself
with imagining would one day be presented to Lord Liftore. But she
could not, upon such occasions of morning judgment as this, fail
to doubt sorely whether the visits she paid him, and the liberties
which upon fortunate occasions she allowed him, were such as could
be justified on any ground other than that she was prepared to give
him all. All, however, she was by no means prepared to give him:
that involved consequences far too terrible to be contemplated even
as possibilities.
With such causes for disquiet in her young heart and brain, it is
not then wonderful that she should sometimes be unable to slip across
this troubled region of the night in the boat of her dreams, but
should suffer shipwreck on the waking coast, and have to encounter
the staring and questioning eyes of more than one importunate truth.
Nor is it any wonder either that, to such an inexperienced and so
troubled a heart, the assurance of one absolutely devoted friend
should come with healing and hope--even if that friend should be
but a groom, altogether incapable of understanding her position,
or perceiving the phantoms that crowded about her, threatening to
embody themselves in her ruin. A clumsy, ridiculous fellow, she
said to herself, from whose person she could never dissociate the
smell of fish, who talked a horrible jargon called Scotch, and
who could not be prevented from uttering unpalatable truths at
uncomfortable moments; yet whose thoughts were as chivalrous as
his person was powerful, and whose countenance was pleasing if only
for the triumph of honesty therein: she actually felt stronger and
safer to know he was near, and at her beck and call.
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