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HIGHER LAW:
A ROMANCE.
PART THE FIRST
CHAPTER 1.
‘THIS part of mine is just one of the most difficult in the world to act. There is absolutely no character in it.’
So spake Edmund Noel to Sophia Bevan, after a rehearsal for some private
theatricals at Linnwood Manor House,
‘I should not have thought it unsuited to you on that account,’ returned the young lady, with vivacity.
‘Meaning that–––?’ he inquired.
‘That you have never yet betrayed any such startling decision of character as would ensure your failing in a characterless rôle.’
‘And, therefore, that having no character of my own, I ought to be the better able to supply one at need? Methinks that in default of your usual logic, the void would be not ungracefully occupied by a little extra good-nature. It is a pity when both are conspicuous by their absence.’
‘Brute that I am!’ she exclaimed, her fine eyes filling with tears. ‘Yet you know that I can’t resist my joke, and so you need not be so thin-skinned. I would not let any one say behind your back what I say to your face. You know that well enough.’
‘I grant that if I were an eel, and must be skinned, I would rather have it done by you than by another,’ he returned. You feel the imputation of a want of a marked character
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so keenly?’ she asked. ‘I don’t see why you should, when most people who have it are odious.’
‘But not all,’ said Noel, more tenderly. ‘I know of one personage who is by no means odious, and yet has character enough for two.’
‘Ah, but then I am two,’ she answered. ‘I am an old woman as well as a young one; a clever woman as well as a stupid one; an ugly woman as well as a handsome one. The fairies who changed me did their work badly, and left two odd halves instead of one whole baby in my place.’
‘Poor dear Sophy,’ he said, softly. ‘Yet why will you not let your friends forget your misfortune, as I am sure they would, if you did not seem to take a delight in reminding them of it?’
‘I suppose I am very foolish,’ she said; ‘but when a woman calls herself ugly it at least prevents others calling her so.’
‘On the defensive now!’ exclaimed Noel. ‘Will you never comprehend that your friends do not need disarming? Regularity of feature does not comprise all the beauty in the world; and if you possess all the other kinds, surely you need not grieve so over the loss of that one. Your friends love you none the less.’
‘They are not in love with me, though. You are not a woman,’ she cried, ‘or you would know that beauty is a woman’s most precious possession, and that she would give everything else for it. I would give all my brains to have my nice features back again. It is the only thing men really care for. I am a “spoilt beauty” in the wrong sense.’
She spoke energetically, and with a considerable spice of bitterness mingled with her regret. For Sophia Bevan had been a strikingly handsome girl, but had sacrificed much of her beauty of face in a moment of impulsive benevolence. Seeing smoke and flame issuing from a labourer’s cottage on her father’s estate, at a time when she knew the tenants to be absent at work, she was seized with the idea that they had left their child at home. In an agony of apprehension she forced her way into the burning house. Not at once finding the object of her search, she remained battling with the fire until she fell exhausted and insensible; and was only saved from destruction by the arrival of the neighbours. Sophia was almost as much chagrined at finding that the exercise of her benevolence was superfluous, as at the damage to her beauty entailed by it.
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There was no child in the cottage, its mother having, contrary to her custom, taken it with her when she carried her husband’s dinner to him in the fields. And Sophia’s keen sense of the ludicrous contributed to aggravate the reminiscence. Her face was irretrievably injured. Her fine figure and bright eyes, her dark hair and sparkling ready wit, her rich voice and redundant energy, her largeness of heart and sympathy – these, however, all remained; and after the first years of disappointment she seemed to throw all her energies into her friendships, and to abandon the notion of love as a perquisite to which, through the loss of her beauty, she was no longer entitled. She did not, however, pretend to conceal her dissatisfaction with her changed prospects. The indomitable vivacity of her disposition put all concealment out of her power. In her eyes self-suppression was the most insignificant of virtues. Rather was it a vice, an hypocrisy. Reaction, depression, collapse, or fatigue, even after her most furious fits of fun, seemed utterly unknown to her. She was a sea always at high-tide; a river always brimming over; a wind ever boisterous. Freely allowing that she envied all beauty and its power of attraction, never was she in society without the beauties all envying her. Insipid youths might go to them, but men always flocked around her; and it was always in her circle that the laugh was loudest, the wit keenest, and the wisdom shrewdest.
The years that had passed since her accident, and she was now seven-and-twenty, she had devoted to study with an eagerness and persistency which had their source, not only in her thoroughness of character, but also in her determination to win for herself a new position in society to replace that to which her beauty no longer entitled her. Her father, Sir Francis, who had died several years before the time to which we are referring, was a baronet, of considerable repute in the world of literature and politics. Her mother had died in the childhood of this their only child; and Sophia was now, as was her custom, spending the autumn with her stepmother in a charming country house which belonged to herself, among the wild beauties of the north coast of Devonshire.
Sophia and Lady Bevan were on the best possible terms together. They were
entirely independent of each other, and as her ladyship had succeeded to her
late husband’s house in
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and placid disposition of the elder lady enabled her to live in complete accord with her vivacious stepdaughter, to whose movements and wishes it was a pleasure to her to adapt herself, and whom she therefore suffered to rule her house, a task which Sophia certainly managed to perform with complete satisfaction to both parties. There was, accordingly, always an infusion of what she considered the fossil, that is, the eminently respectable, element in their society, for the delectation of her staid relative; while for herself she took care to provide a following of lively and clever companions, who looked up to her as their guiding star.
Bright compound that she was of talent and energy, the statesmen, authors, artists, and savants who had at first been brought into her society through the influence of her father, now sought her for her own sake; or, as she said, for their own. ‘You come to me as to an intellectual tavern, and after getting the mental refreshment that you want, go away and think no more of me.’
All who did or could do anything, found in her a ready appreciation and a warm sympathy in their labours. To stupidity and incapacity only was she indifferent. ‘Not that she herself could do anything,’ she used to say; she had no faculty but her voice. Talk she could, and sing, – yes, that was doing something, for it amused others, and it was her creed that everybody in society is bound to contribute something to the general stock.’
Her singing was of that rare order which is best described as dramatic. Rejecting anything weak or trashy, she threw such individuality and clearness of expression into every note, as to make the words mean far more when sung than said. Her rendering of English ballads in particular was really glorious, though she herself preferred her French songs, and declared that she was more French than English, having lived many of her early years in Paris. For the generality of people, her vivacity delightfully transcended the ordinary English type of manner, though the sedater proprieties who sought Lady Bevan’s society, were sometimes a little doubtful whether even Sophia’s cleverness, heartiness, and thorough purity of feeling, were quite sufficient to justify them in condoning the strong individuality of her manner. One less gifted would probably have fared worse at their hands.
Some of their friends professed to be puzzled by the relations between Sophia and Edmund, and shook their heads at the suggestion
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of a friendship between persons of opposite sexes who declined to consider matrimony as the be-all and end-all of such friendship. However, it was simple enough to themselves. He was a year the younger of the two. She had no brother; he had no sister. Thrown much together in early youth, they filled the void by the adoption of each other into those relations: and they remained boy and girl to each other, long after they were man and woman for the world.
In the four or five years which had elapsed since Noel graduated, and of which a considerable portion had been spent abroad, there was no apparent change in their relations; no talk of marriage, or of love, and no diminution of friendship. Sophia was fond of him in spite of his being one of those who ‘did nothing:’ and he was at ease with her as a man may be with one who expects and wants nothing of him but brotherly affection. She had many friendships with men, over whom she exercised an influence which it was evidently a delight to her to increase and to use. Frenchwoman like, she was a bit of an intrigante at heart; but her benevolence and high sense of duty led her invariably to use her influence for good: and many an inward triumph she felt over her fairer friends who confessed their inferiority by coming to her for advice as to their treatment of their tardy or recusant lovers. She sometimes complained to Edmund Noel that she had less influence over him than over many who were far more indifferent to her. He knew that the accusation was true; but he shrunk from letting her perceive its cause. He almost idolised beauty, but hers had never been the kind of beauty that had the deepest charm for him. Even before she had lost that attraction, he had been unable to conceal from himself that his intense appreciation of the gentler feminine qualities, caused him to recoil somewhat from her uncontrolled impulsiveness. For themselves, their relations had soon found their proper level; they felt that the temperature necessary for a closer intimacy was impossible between them; and he felt that however warmly he might value her as a friend, and admire her talent, he could never reconcile himself to the contrast of demeanour which grew out of their opposite temperaments.
Thus, their relation to each other consisted of a firm friendship, tempered by such little outbreaks of sarcastic analysis as that which has already appeared, and in which it must be confessed that Sophia was invariably the assailant.
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It was a curious instance of the combination of opposites, for his quietness of manner irritated her exuberant disposition as much as it attracted her. When in a good-humour with him she said that he ‘radiated repose.’ When otherwise, she was provoked at his calmness. But, the instant he answered her outburst by a sarcasm, she submitted, saying it gave him an unfair advantage over her that he should remain master of himself when she allowed her rage to master her. His customary reticence she interpreted into a rebuke of her volubility. She sometimes affected to think that it concealed passages in his life and feelings which he dared not exhibit. Making no secret of anything about herself, she could not comprehend his dislike of making his affairs or his history the property of his friends. She thought that she knew all about his means and his prospects, for she knew that he had inherited from his father, whose only child he was, a moderate estate in that neighbourhood, which had always been his home, and that he had considerable expectations from an uncle; but of his real principles and aims in life, she felt that their long intimacy had revealed nothing to her; and she did not even know if he had ever been in love! She thought he must have been, for he made no secret of his adoration of beauty; and he revealed so much of his foreign pursuits as showed that he was familiar with the studios of sculptors, and loved to try his own hand at the plastic art. Rumours had reached her, too, of his having been smitten more than once in his wanderings; and once, when Sophia had gained access to a room he had fitted up as a studio at home, she thought she perceived an identity of expression pervading several of his attempts, from which she drew her own conclusions. But he said nothing, only observing generally, when personal gossips were broached, that he thought it worse to say wrong than to do wrong, for the deed might affect the actors only, but the relation of it affected many and multiplied the mischief.
It was on his enouncing such a sentiment one evening that Sophia said with a scrutinising look:
‘I wonder how much of that you mean, you horrid sphinx. I believe that you mean it all. You delight in going about like an animated charnel-house, only just managing to keep silence enough to conceal the horrors you contain.’
‘Yes,’ he replied, laughing. ‘The Campo-Santo at
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is, I cannot compete with you pure, open-hearted creatures, and so I keep my revelations to myself.’
‘Oh, what a delicious bull,’ she exclaimed. ‘I believe you are like Canning’s Knifegrinder: “Story! God bless you, I have none to tell, sir;” and you keep that awful silence to conceal the yawning void within.’
‘Well, you must allow that it is very good-natured of me, for you women dearly love a mystery.’
‘Meaning yourself. Don’t be conceited. If I do love you dearly, it’s my folly and not your merit.’
‘All grace, as the Calvinists say. Well, so long as it brings me to heaven, one must not criticise the vehicle.’
‘Heaven won’t do for you. Everybody is transparent there.’
‘You know why, I suppose?’
‘Why?’
‘Because they all understand the language, and none fear to be read awrong: which is probably the reason why you women are called angels; your instinct is never at fault.’
‘Except when we are so silly as to care for you men.’
‘However,’ he added, ‘my motive, if I have any, for keeping myself to myself, is probably not quite what you pretend to imagine; but really in part because I am constitutionally shy or reserved, and in part because of my dominant love of liberty. Once let everybody know all about oneself, and one is no longer one’s own property. You know all about heaven and the way the angels go on, no doubt; but I can quote Bible for my view of things. Why should I let others into my secrets, supposing I have any, when we are enjoined not to let even our own right hand know what our left doeth? What can be more conclusive against confession?’
‘And, so, in private life you are incapable of friendship, for there can be no real friendship without mutual confidence; and in public life you can win no reputation for yourself.’
‘In private life,’ returned Noel, ‘the amount of confidence is determined by the nature of the relationship, whether it of friendship or of love. My idea of friendship is to accept whatever of confidence may be freely reposed in me, without seeking to pry farther. That is, I accept my friend as he wishes to appear to me, and ignore his other sides. In love I allow no limitations. There, sympathy must be complete, and without reserve. As for winning a reputation among the public by putting my name to any book I may write, or otherwise, I owe
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the public no such satisfaction. If they like my book, they are indebted to me for the pleasure or information they may get from it, far more than I to them for their applause or their guineas. Besides, not only should I be no longer my own property, and free from troublesome inquisition, but I should be detracting from the value of my work. Not only do Truth and Beauty need no name of priest or prophet to back them; but with a name the one is apt to become only so and so’s opinion, and the other so and so’s ideal.’
‘Ah! I see you really are meditating a book,’ said Sophia, ‘but I suspect that there is still another reason at the bottom. You have not the courage to risk a failure. Your motto is, “Better not try at all than try and fail.” While I infinitely prefer, “Better to fail than not to try.” ’
‘Then why don’t you write something? If your book only be as clever and amusing as your letters and conversation, and half as good as your singing, it is sure to be a success.’
‘Ah, everybody tells me so; but I haven’t a bit of creative faculty in me! I don’t know what an incident is. Nothing real ever happened to me, but once, and then I lost my head, and my face too, and knew nothing about it. I could write only what everybody skips, the reflections. Now if you would write the story, I think I could manage the padding. The fact is, I believe that no single woman can write a book about life and manners without running the risk of making herself ridiculous by some absurd blunders which would come through the want of the experience that marriage would give her. If you would live a life and get into scrapes, and correspond with me about getting out of them, I am sure our letters would make a capital book.’
‘Very good; I will get into a scrape at once.’
‘On paper; and I will get you out, on paper.’
‘You promise?’ he asked, seriously.
‘But you mustn’t behave ill to anybody.’
‘Not even on paper?’
‘No; I can’t have you behave ill anywhere.’
‘I am to get unto a scrape without behaving ill? Very good. I don’t see at present how it is to be done, but I will watch my opportunity. I am to avoid the evil, but court the appearance of it.’
Thus would Sophia Bevan and Edmund Noel have sat and talked together the whole evening, and no one would have
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thought it strange; but at this moment Sophia was called upon for a song. She complied, and until the whole party was ready to retire for the night, she sat at the piano pouring out song after song as from an inexhaustible store – French, English, Italian, German, Spanish; accompanying herself perfectly without book or note, and conversing with indescribable vivacity between each with all her visitors in turn, or at once; the centre and life of the whole party. And often after the most touching of her songs, when her audience was voiceless with the silence of threatening tears, she would jump up and utter some joke, and burst into heartiest laughter, as if quite forgetting that others could not keep up with her rapid changes of mood, or avoid being shocked by her incongruities of manner.
On taking leave of Noel for the night, she said,
‘That’s my idea of duty.’
‘I am sorry you have found it so,’ he answered; ‘to everyone else it has been a great pleasure.’
‘You have me there, I grant,’ she replied; ‘but I do enjoy a good chat with you, and was sorry to give it up. You are such a fitful personage; one never seems to be sure of your being really here. I shall not be the least surprised to find to-morrow that you have set off before breakfast for the Mountains of the Moon, or some other bourne whence postage stamps never return. You are a little moony, you know.’
‘Never mind, so long as I am illumined by your sunshine, I ought, however, to be not little, but full, moony, if it be true, as you say, that we are such complete opposites.’
‘I think I like the other best, for then you are nearest to me.’
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