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GODFREY WARDOUR.
The property of which Thornwick once formed a part was then large
and important; but it had, by not very slow degrees, generation
following generation of unthrift, dwindled and shrunk and
shriveled, until at last it threatened to disappear from the
family altogether, like a spark upon burnt paper. Then came one
into possession who had some element of salvation in him;
Godfrey's father not only held the poor remnant together, but,
unable to add to it, improved it so greatly that at length, in
the midst of the large properties around, it resembled the
diamond that hearts a disk of inferior stones. Doubtless, could
he have used his wife's money, he would have spent it on land;
but it was under trustees for herself and her children, and
indeed would not have gone far in the purchase of English soil.
Considerably advanced in years before he thought of marrying, he
died while Godfrey, whom he intended bringing up to a profession,
was yet a child; and his widow, carrying out his intention, had
educated the boy with a view to the law. Godfrey, however, had
positively declined entering on the studies special to a career
he detested; nor was it difficult to reconcile his mother to the
enforced change of idea, when she found that his sole desire was
to settle down with her, and manage the two hundred acres his
father had left him. He took his place in the county, therefore,
as a yeoman-farmer--none the less a gentleman by descent,
character, and education. But while in genuine culture and
refinement the superior of all the landed proprietors in the
neighborhood, and knowing it, he was the superior of most of them
in this also, that he counted it no derogation from the dignity
he valued to put his hands upon occasion to any piece of work
required about the place.
His nature was too large, however, and its needs therefore too
many, to allow of his spending his energies on the property; and
he did not brood over such things as, so soon as they become
cares, become despicable. How much time is wasted in what is
called thought, but is merely care--an anxious idling over the
fancied probabilities of result! Of this fault, I say, Godfrey
was not guilty--more, however, I must confess, from healthful
drawings in other directions, than from philosophy or wisdom: he
was a reader--not in the sense of a man who derives
intensest pleasure from the absorption of intellectual pabulum--
one not necessarily so superior as some imagine to the
gourmet, or even the gourmand: in his reading Godfrey
nourished certain of the higher tendencies of his nature--
read with a constant reference to his own views of life, and the
confirmation, change, or enlargement of his theories of the same;
but neither did he read with the highest aim of all--the
enlargement of reverence, obedience, and faith; for he had never
turned his face full in the direction of infinite growth--the
primal end of a man's being, who is that he may return to the
Father, gathering his truth as he goes. Yet by the simple
instincts of a soul undebased by self-indulgence or low pursuits,
he was drawn ever toward things lofty and good; and life went
calmly on, bearing Godfrey Wardour toward middle age, unruffled
either by anxiety or ambition.
To the forecasting affection of a mother, the hour when she must
yield the first place both in her son's regards and in the house-
affairs could not but have often presented itself, in doubt and
pain--perhaps dread. Only as year after year passed and Godfrey
revealed no tendency toward marriage, her anxiety changed sides,
and she began to fear lest with Godfrey the ancient family should
come to an end. As yet, however, finding no response to covert
suggestion, she had not ventured to speak openly to him on the
subject. All the time, I must add, she had never thought of Letty
either as thwarting or furthering her desires, for in truth she
felt toward her as one on whom Godfrey could never condescend to
look, save with the kindness suitable for one immeasurably below
him. As to what might pass in Letty's mind, Mrs. Wardour had
neither curiosity nor care: else she might possibly have been
more considerate than to fall into the habit of talking to her in
such swelling words of maternal pride that, even if she had not
admired him of herself, Letty could hardly escape coming to
regard her cousin Godfrey as the very first of men.
It added force to the veneration of both mother and cousin--for
it was nothing less than veneration in either--that there was
about Godfrey an air of the inexplicable, or at least the
unknown, and therefore mysterious. This the elder woman, not
without many a pang at her exclusion from his confidence,
attributed, and correctly, to some passage in his life at the
university; to the younger it appeared only as greatness self-
veiled from the ordinary world: to such as she, could be
vouchsafed only an occasional peep into the gulf of his
knowledge, the grandeur of his intellect, and the
imperturbability of his courage.
The passage in Godfrey's life to which I have referred as vaguely
suspected by his mother, I need not present in more than merest
outline: it belongs to my history only as a component part of the
soil whence it springs, and as in some measure necessary to the
understanding of Godfrey's character. In the last year of his
college life he had formed an attachment, the precise nature of
which I do not know. What I do know is, that the bonds of it were
rudely broken, and of the story nothing remained but
disappointment and pain, doubt and distrust. Godfrey had most
likely cherished an overweening notion of the relative value of
the love he gave; but being his, I am certain it was genuine--by
that, I mean a love with no small element of the everlasting in
it. The woman who can cast such a love from her is not likely to
meet with such another. But with this one I have nothing to do.
It had been well if he had been left with only a wounded heart,
but in that heart lay wounded pride. He hid it carefully, and the
keener in consequence grew the sensitiveness, almost feminine,
which no stranger could have suspected beneath the manner he
wore. Under that bronzed countenance, with its firm-set mouth and
powerful jaw--below that clear blue eye, and that upright easy
carriage, lay a faithful heart haunted by a sense of wrong: he
who is not perfect in forgiveness must be haunted thus; he only
is free whose love for the human is so strong that he can pardon
the individual sin; he alone can pray the prayer, "Forgive us our
trespasses," out of a full heart. Forgiveness is the only cure of
wrong. And hand in hand with Sense-of-injury walks ever the weak
sister-demon Self-pity, so dear, so sweet to many--both of them
the children of Philautos, not of Agape. But there was no hate,
no revenge, in Godfrey, and, I repeat, his weakness he kept
concealed. It must have been in his eyes, but eyes are hard to
read. For the rest, his was a strong poetic nature--a nature
which half unconsciously turned ever toward the best, away from
the mean judgments of common men, and with positive loathing from
the ways of worldly women. Never was peace endangered between his
mother and him, except when she chanced to make use of some evil
maxim which she thought experience had taught her, and the look
her son cast upon her stung her to the heart, making her for a
moment feel as if she had sinned what the theologians call the
unpardonable sin. When he rose and walked from the room without a
word, she would feel as if abandoned to her wickedness, and be
miserable until she saw him again. Something like a spring-
cleaning would begin and go on in her for some time after, and
her eyes would every now and then steal toward her judge with a
glance of awe and fearful apology. But, however correct Godfrey
might be in his judgment of the worldly, that judgment was less
inspired by the harmonies of the universe than by the discords
that had jarred his being and the poisonous shocks he had
received in the encounter of the noble with the ignoble. There
was yet in him a profound need of redemption into the love of the
truth for the truth's sake. He had the fault of thinking too well
of himself--which who has not who thinks of himself at all, apart
from his relation to the holy force of life, within yet beyond
him? It was the almost unconscious, assuredly the undetected,
self-approbation of the ordinarily righteous man, the defect of
whose righteousness makes him regard himself as upright, but the
virtue of whose uprightness will at length disclose to his
astonished view how immeasurably short of rectitude he comes. At
the age of thirty, Godfrey Wardour had not yet become so
displeased with himself as to turn self-roused energy upon
betterment; and until then all growth must be of doubtful result.
The point on which the swift-revolving top of his thinking and
feeling turned was as yet his present conscious self, as a thing
that was and would be, not as a thing that had to become.
Naturally the pivot had worn a socket, and such socket is sure to
be a sore. His friends notwithstanding gave him credit for great
imperturbability; but in such willfully undemonstrative men the
evil burrows the more insidiously that it is masked by a
constrained exterior.
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