The Rubicon

Reggie sprang up and welcomed her with great eagerness and affection.

"Dear mother," he cried, "I am so glad you have come. Oh! how wet you are."

He led her to the fire, and poured out a cup of tea with almost feminine tenderness.

"I hope you and Gerty weren't anxious," she said.

"Oh, no," said Reggie, frankly, "not a bit. I knew it would be all right. But I'll run to tell father. He was going out with two men to look for you."

"Reggie wanted to go instead of him," said Gertrude, feeling that her lover's conduct was capable of some slight justification.

"Dear Reggie is never anxious," said Mrs. Davenport, warming her hands. "It is a great comfort for him."

Gertrude was rather relieved. There was no need for her, apparently, to turn advocate.

CHAPTER II

Theology, in theory, at any rate, teaches us that human beings are living things with souls; experience, on the other hand, which deals with facts capable of proof, insists that, whatever theological truth this statement may embody, for practical purposes, human beings are born without souls. The soul awakes, or, as experience says, is born at varying times. Some men and women reach maturity of body and mind without it, some, we cannot help thinking, reach death without it; some, on the other hand, are but children when that perplexing gift is handed over to their bewildered keeping. But the soulless human animal often has at its disposal and use a quantity of instincts which partake of the soul-like nature; the soul, at any rate, when it is born, takes them over entire. There is no need to adapt them, or to purify them, for they are already clean and pure; it hardly ever vitalises them, for they are already very living; it merely shows them their kinship to itself, and they are forthwith embodied in it.

This birth of the soul, like all births, is the consummation of bitter pangs; it is brought forth in sorrow, through some rending asunder of the inmost fibre, not by any elegant musing on devotional books, nor in a flash of blinding ecstasy, but in silence, save, perhaps, for the bitter cry, in darkness, in solitary desolation, for the sufferer does not know what is happening until the end of his pain has come; the blind pangs get fiercer and fiercer, and are still unexplained till the light breaks.

It would, perhaps, be an insult to the reader to state baldly the bearing of these remarks, for it will be already, we hope, obvious to him that, in this sense, Reggie, in spite of his frank charm, his susceptibility, his pretty face, his capacity for receiving and inspiring affection, was, at heart, soulless. His strong, hearty liking for his betrothed was of that genial, animal kind, which, however wholesome and satisfactory, has no more to do with the soul than his power of aiming straight at woodcock. Happily, or unhappily, for him, the abstruse side of life was scarcely less remote from Gertrude than it was from himself. She had at present no wish and no power to give anything but the same genial, hearty liking that she received, a thorough, wholesome affection in which the nature of both, as far as they were aware of their nature, shared to the full. Neither Reggie nor Gertrude had ever fallen in love with an idea, which is, perhaps, the most exacting lover that man or woman ever has, but which, being wholly abstract, is of an entirely different nature from the love of two young people who admire and like each other enormously, mind and body. This abstruser side of life was a complete puzzle to Reggie. To take a very small but wholly appropriate illustration; he could sympathise with his mother, who might, perhaps, be wandering on the High Croft in a snow-storm, with a good deal of feeling, but the instinct that made his father put on his damp shooting clothes, and prepare to go out, not for any assistance he could give, but for the eminently unpractical reason that his wife was in the snow and he was having tea, seemed inexplicable to his son. If he could have done a jot or a tittle of good by standing in the water butt for five minutes, there is not the shadow of doubt that he would have done so, shiveringly but contentedly and without question; but it would have seemed absurd to him to put his nose outside the hall door, if nothing was to come of it.

With a less sweet disposition, he would have been a profound egoist; but in his manliness was salt enough, as the phrase is, to keep him sweet. The egoist rates himself higher than he rates the rest of the world; he thinks more of himself, consciously or unconsciously, as he thinks less of others, whereas Reggie, though he was incapable of those intricacies of feeling, which, for all practical purposes, are different, not merely in complexity but in kind, from the simpler forms, and which make the spectacle of the human race so vastly interesting, and produce, it may be, love of the complex order, never contemplated himself at all, and, however little he knew of others, at any rate he knew nothing of himself. His mind resembled, it is true, a being of two dimensions, which is unable to contemplate the existence of a third, but in its two dimensions it moved very smoothly, and had a very charming smile for its own plane horizon.

Gertrude stopped with the Davenports nearly a fortnight – a fortnight of pleasant, quiet days, which are paradise to a mind content, and she was supremely content. Reggie was all that a lover, whom she would choose, should be; he was uniformly cheerful, affectionate, charming, full of the thought of her; and, ah! how much that means! Reggie was one of those who show their best side when they are in love; whereas many men, who are otherwise reasonable beings, behave like spoiled children when they are in that predicament; they become observant, jealous, exacting, when they should be serene, indulgent, large-hearted.

But once, just at the end of that fortnight, there arose out of the sea a little cloud like a man's hand, which broke the blue horizon, though Reggie was unconscious of it. A little hint of it had occurred once before, on that evening when Mrs. Davenport lost her way over the High Croft, but on that occasion it had soon passed away.

Percy, it must be owned, was not so jovially contented with the spectacle, as the days went on, as the actors themselves. He was a deductive young gentleman, and, to his mind, this affair resembled too strongly Reggie's previous flutterings in the feminine dovecotes to strike him as something altogether different from a flirtation on a large scale. A flirtation, after all, is only a superficial exhibition of love, an attraction on one side, a liability to be attracted on the other; and the question occurred to him, whether it is possible to keep a flirtation up permanently, and what was left if it broke down? A strong, deep love, like the Nile in flood, leaves, like a sediment behind, which in so many cases renders marriages, from which the tumultuous stream has passed, happy and stable, an alluvial deposit, which makes the earth rich and fruitful in the sober green of friendship; but when the slender, light-hearted streamlet is dried up, the effect of its passage is only too often seen in the uncovering of ugly roots and stones, and a removal, not a deposit of sediment. Of course he knew more about those previous affairs, which, to do Reggie justice, were superficial and innocent enough, than did that gentleman's mother. A young man, whatever his relations with his mother may be, will choose some other confidant in such cases. They argued, in fact, nothing more than a very great susceptibility on Reggie's part to the influence of charming young women, and the sage Percy asked himself whether the constant propinquity of one specimen of this attractive product would necessarily secure him from the influence of the others. That unlucky resemblance between his previous skirmishes and this engagement seemed to him too close to be altogether satisfactory. A flirtation on a large scale, he argued, is not very different from a flirtation on a small scale.

Mrs. Davenport had immense confidence in Percy. He was three years older than Reggie, and was possessed of a certain soundness, of which that young gentleman stood in need. He had been of great use to him in the thousand and one unconscious ways in which one young man can help another slightly younger than himself. He had a practical mastery of details that led him to reliable conclusions on their sum, which is a gift as useful as intuitive judgment, though less striking in its process, as it partakes of the nature of industry rather than brilliance. But Reggie's mother did him justice, and found herself consulting him as she would have consulted an older man, with considerable respect for his opinion.

"We are all so delighted about Reggie's engagement," she said to him one evening after dinner. "His father thought, and so did I, that a long engagement was better. You see they are both very young, and they ought to know each other well. No one should marry on an enthusiastic first impression, least of all Reggie, because he has so many of them."

"Certainly there are no signs of wavering yet," said he. "They are as fond of each other as – as two children."

"Why do you say that?" she asked.

"They are so healthfully fond of each other," he said. "They were trying to read two of Browning's lyrics this morning, about one way of love and another way of love, and they gave it up in about three minutes and read Pickwick instead."

"Poor Reggie, I'm afraid he'll find that his way of love is neither one nor the other, but I think it's a good way for all that."

"There's no nonsense about it, anyhow," said Percy, without meaning to make reflections on the lyrics in question.

"It isn't tumultuous exactly," said Reggie's mother, "but it's very thorough. Still waters do run deep, you know, in spite of the proverb."

"But the stillness is not a proof of their depth."

"No; but when a stream is in the rapids, so to speak, it is. The rapids, I mean, which come just after the waterfall, the plunge into love."

"Oh, but Reggie's always falling in love."

"So I gathered; though, of course, the boy wouldn't tell me about that. But I don't think that's against his present engagement."

Percy was silent, and Mrs. Davenport adjusted her bracelet before she added, —

"I believe it's a healthy thing for a young man to be in a chronic state of devotion. The vague adoration is all sucked into the particular adoration when that comes."

"But is falling in love with a series of particular girls to be called a vague adoration?"

"Yes, certainly, just as a circle is an infinite number of straight lines. He falls in love with womanliness in many forms."

"I see. No doubt you are right. Certainly he is standing his long engagement very well."

"Poor boy! he wants to shorten it very much, which is just the very reason why I want it to be long."

"Miss Carston is satisfied, I gather?"

"It looks like it," said Mrs. Davenport, smiling, and indicating with her eye a shady corner of the room where the two lovers were sitting.

"Old Lady Hayes was staying with us for a week in London last summer," she continued, after a pause. "She was defeated in a great battle, apparently, with your sister, and came here to bind up her wounds by bullying us all. I have an immense admiration for anyone who can rout her."

Percy laughed.

"I heard something about it. Eva behaved abominably, I expect."

"I met her several times in London," said Mrs. Davenport. "She has a wonderful way of appearing to notice no one, and obliging every one to notice her."

"I never saw anyone so changed in a short time as Eva," said Percy. "She has suddenly found men and women extraordinarily interesting. A year ago, she was exactly the reverse. She disliked most women, and never remembered any man."

"That was the impression she gave me in the summer."

"Ah! but that manner is only a survival. She is often silent; at other times she talks a great deal. In the old days she seldom talked at all."

"Poor Hayes is terribly afraid of her."

"I think most people are afraid of her. She can be very cruel."

"A woman with such beauty as that has an unfair advantage. Her shots must always tell."

"She is one of those people who always make an impression," said Percy; "because she doesn't care at all what impression she makes."

"That is the sort of impression that produces the deadliest results," said Mrs. Davenport. "If a man sees that he is being made a fool of, he can be on his guard, but the effect of the other is that he is dazzled, piqued, maddened. The women who don't care are always those for whom men care most passionately."

"I wonder if Eva will ever fall in love," said Percy half to himself.

"It will be a fine sight if she does; she will teach all these bloodless people how to do it. I think she has more force than anyone I know. Does she ever talk to you about her marriage?"