Chapter XXXV. The Tidal Wave

The Shuttle

by Francis Hodgson Burnett

There was only one man to speak to, and it being the nature of
the beast--so he harshly put it to himself--to be absolutely impelled
to speech at such times, Mount Dunstan laid bare his breast to him,
tearing aside all the coverings pride would have folded about him.
The man was, of course, Penzance, and the laying bare was done the
evening after the story of Red Godwyn had been told in the laurel
walk.

They had driven home together in a profound silence, the elder
man as deep in thought as the younger one. Penzance was thinking
that there was a calmness in having reached sixty and in knowing that
the pain and hunger of earlier years would not tear one again. And
yet, he himself was not untorn by that which shook the man for whom
his affection had grown year by year. It was evidently very
bad--very bad, indeed. He wondered if he would speak of it, and
wished he would, not because he himself had much to say in answer,
but because he knew that speech would be better than hard silence.

"Stay with me to-night," Mount Dunstan said, as they drove
through the avenue to the house. "I want you to dine with me and sit
and talk late. I am not sleeping well."

They often dined together, and the vicar not infrequently slept
at the Mount for mere companionship's sake. Sometimes they read,
sometimes went over accounts, planned economies, and balanced
expenditures. A chamber still called the Chaplain's room was always
kept in readiness. It had been used in long past days, when a
household chaplain had sat below the salt and left his patron's
table before the sweets were served. They dined together this night
almost as silently as they had driven homeward, and after the meal
they went and sat alone in the library.

The huge room was never more than dimly lighted, and the far-off
corners seemed more darkling than usual in the insufficient
illumination of the far from brilliant lamps. Mount Dunstan, after
standing upon the hearth for a few minutes smoking a pipe, which
would have compared ill with old Doby's Sunday splendour, left his
coffee cup upon the mantel and began to tramp up and down--out of the
dim light into the shadows, back out of the shadows into the poor
light.

"You know," he said, "what I think about most things-- you know
what I feel."

"I think I do."

"You know what I feel about Englishmen who brand themselves as
half men and marked merchandise by selling themselves and their
houses and their blood to foreign women who can buy them. You know
how savage I have been at the mere thought of it. And how I have
sworn----"

"Yes, I know what you have sworn," said Mr. Penzance.

It struck him that Mount Dunstan shook and tossed his head
rather like a bull about to charge an enemy.

"You know how I have felt myself perfectly within my rights when
I blackguarded such men and sneered at such women--taking it for
granted that each was merchandise of his or her kind and beneath
contempt. I am not a foul-mouthed man, but I have used gross words
and rough ones to describe them."

"I have heard you."

Mount Dunstan threw back his head with a big, harsh laugh. He
came out of the shadow and stood still.

"Well," he said, "I am in love--as much in love as any lunatic
ever was--with the daughter of Reuben S. Vanderpoel. There you
are--and there I am!"

"It has seemed to me," Penzance answered, "that it was almost
inevitable."

"My condition is such that it seems to me that it would be
inevitable in the case of any man. When I see another man look at
her my blood races through my veins with an awful fear and a wicked
heat. That will show you the point I have reached." He walked over
to the mantelpiece and laid his pipe down with a hand Penzance saw
was unsteady. "In turning over the pages of the volume of Life," he
said, "I have come upon the Book of Revelations."

"That is true," Penzance said.

"Until one has come upon it one is an inchoate fool," Mount
Dunstan went on. "And afterwards one is--for a time at least--a sort
of madman raving to one's self, either in or out of a
straitjacket--as the case may be. I am wearing the jacket --worse
luck! Do you know anything of the state of a man who cannot utter
the most ordinary words to a woman without being conscious that he is
making mad love to her? This afternoon I found myself telling Miss
Vanderpoel the story of Red Godwyn and Alys of the Sea-Blue Eyes. I
did not make a single statement having any connection with myself,
but throughout I was calling on her to think of herself and of me as
of those two. I saw her in my own arms, with the tears of Alys on
her lashes. I was making mad love, though she was unconscious of my
doing it."

"How do you know she was unconscious?" remarked Mr. Penzance.
"You are a very strong man."

Mount Dunstan's short laugh was even a little awful, because it
meant so much. He let his forehead drop a moment on to his arms as
they rested on the mantelpiece.

"Oh, my God!" he said. But the next instant his head lifted
itself. "It is the mystery of the world--this thing. A tidal wave
gathering itself mountain high and crashing down upon one's
helplessness might be as easily defied. It is supposed to disperse,
I believe. That has been said so often that there must be truth in
it. In twenty or thirty or forty years one is told one will have got
over it. But one must live through the years--one must live through
them--and the chief feature of one's madness is that one is convinced
that they will last forever."

"Go on," said Mr. Penzance, because he had paused and stood
biting his lip. "Say all that you feel inclined to say. It is the
best thing you can do. I have never gone through this myself, but I
have seen and known the amazingness of it for many years. I have
seen it come and go."

"Can you imagine," Mount Dunstan said, "that the most damnable
thought of all--when a man is passing through it-- is the possibility
of its going? Anything else rather than the knowledge that years
could change or death could end it! Eternity seems only to offer
space for it. One knows--but one does not believe. It does
something to one's brain."

"No scientist, howsoever profound, has ever discovered what,"
the vicar mused aloud.

"The Book of Revelations has shown to me how--how magnificent
life might be!" Mount Dunstan clenched and unclenched his hands, his
eyes flashing. "Magnificent--that is the word. To go to her on
equal ground to take her hands and speak one's passion as one
would--as her eyes answered. Oh, one would know! To bring her home
to this place--having made it as it once was--to live with her
here--to be with her as the sun rose and set and the seasons
changed--with the joy of life filling each of them. She is the joy
of Life--the very heart of it. You see where I am--you see!"

"Yes," Penzance answered. He saw, and bowed his head, and Mount
Dunstan knew he wished him to continue.

"Sometimes--of late--it has been too much for me and I have
given free rein to my fancy--knowing that there could never be more
than fancy. I was doing it this afternoon as I watched her move
about among the people. And Mary Lithcom began to talk about her."
He smiled a grim smile. "Perhaps it was an intervention of the gods
to drag me down from my impious heights. She was quite unconscious
that she was driving home facts like nails--the facts that every man
who wanted money wanted Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughter--and that the
young lady, not being dull, was not unaware of the obvious truth!
And that men with prizes to offer were ready to offer them in a
proper manner. Also that she was only a brilliant bird of passage,
who, in a few months, would be caught in the dazzling net of the
great world. And that even Lord Westholt and Dunholm Castle were not
quite what she might expect. Lady Mary was sincerely interested.
She drove it home in her ardour. She told me to look at her--to look
at her mouth and chin and eyelashes--and to make note of what she
stood for in a crowd of ordinary people. I could have laughed aloud
with rage and self-mockery."

Mr. Penzance was resting his forehead on his hand, his elbow on
his chair's arm.

"This is profound unhappiness," he said. "It is profound
unhappiness."

Mount Dunstan answered by a brusque gesture.

"But it will pass away," went on Penzance, "and not as you fear
it must," in answer to another gesture, fiercely impatient. "Not that
way. Some day--or night--you will stand heretogether, and you will
tell her all you have told me. I know it will be so."

"What!" Mount Dunstan cried out. But the words had been spoken
with such absolute conviction that he felt himself become pale.

It was with the same conviction that Penzance went on.

"I have spent my quiet life in thinking of the forces for which
we find no explanation--of the causes of which we only see the
effects. Long ago in looking at you in one of my pondering moments I
said to myself that you were of the Primeval Force which cannot lose
its way--which sweeps a clear pathway for itself as it moves--and
which cannot be held back. I said to you just now that because you
are a strong man you cannot be sure that a woman you are--even in
spite of yourself-- making mad love to, is unconscious that you are
doing it. You do not know what your strength lies in. I do not, the
woman does not, but we must all feel it, whether we comprehend it or
no. You said of this fine creature, some time since, that she was
Life, and you have just said again something of the same kind. It is
quite true. She is Life, and the joy of it. You are two strong
forces, and you are drawing together."

He rose from his chair, and going to Mount Dunstan put hishand
on his shoulder, his fine old face singularly rapt and glowing.

"She is drawing you and you are drawing her, and each is too
strong to release the other. I believe that to be true. Both bodies
and souls do it. They are not separate things. They move on their
way as the stars do--they move on their way."

As he spoke, Mount Dunstan's eyes looked into his fixedly. Then
they turned aside and looked down upon the mantel against which he
was leaning. He aimlessly picked up his pipe and laid it down again.
He was paler than before, but he said no single word.

"You think your reasons for holding aloof from her are the
reasons of a man." Mr. Penzance's voice sounded to him remote.
"They are the reasons of a man's pride--but that is not the strongest
thing in the world. It only imagines it is. You think that you
cannot go to her as a luckier man could. You think nothing shall
force you to speak. Ask yourself why. It is because you believe
that to show your heart would be to place yourself in the humiliating
position of a man who might seem to her and to the world to be a base
fellow."

"An impudent, pushing, base fellow," thrust in Mount Dunstan
fiercely. "One of a vulgar lot. A thing fancying even its beggary
worth buying. What has a man--whose very name is hung with tattered
ugliness--to offer?"

Penzance's hand was still on his shoulder and his look at him
was long.

"His very pride," he said at last, "his very obstinacy and
haughty, stubborn determination. Those broken because the other
feeling is the stronger and overcomes him utterly."

A flush leaped to Mount Dunstan's forehead. He set both elbows
on the mantel and let his forehead fall on his clenched fists. And
the savage Briton rose in him.

"No!" he said passionately. "By God, no!"

"You say that," said the older man, "because you have not yet
reached the end of your tether. Unhappy as you are, you are not
unhappy enough. Of the two, you love yourself the more--your pride
and your stubbornness."

"Yes," between his teeth. "I suppose I retain yet a sort of
respect--and affection--for my pride. May God leave it to me!"

Penzance felt himself curiously exalted; he knew himself
unreasoningly passing through an oddly unpractical, uplifted moment,
in whose impelling he singularly believed.

"You are drawing her and she is drawing you," he said. "Perhaps
you drew each other across seas. You will stand here together and
you will tell her of this--on this very spot."

Mount Dunstan changed his position and laughed roughly, as if to
rouse himself. He threw out his arm in a big, uneasy gesture, taking
in the room.

"Oh, come," he said. "You talk like a seer. Look about you.
Look! I am to bring her here!"

"If it is the primeval thing she will not care. Why should
she?"

"She! Bring a life like hers to this! Or perhaps you mean that
her own wealth might make her surroundings becoming-- that a man
would endure that?"

"If it is the primeval thing, you would not care. You would
have forgotten that you two had ever lived an hour apart."

He spoke with a deep, moved gravity--almost as if he were
speaking of the first Titan building of the earth. Mount Dunstan
staring at his delicate, insistent, elderly face, tried to laugh
again--and failed because the effort seemed actually irreverent. It
was a singular hypnotic moment, indeed. He himself was hypnotised.
A flashlight of new vision blazed before him and left him dumb. He
took up his pipe hurriedly, and with still unsteady fingers began to
refill it. When it was filled he lighted it, and then without a word
of answer left the hearth and began to tramp up and down the room
again--out of the dim light into the shadows, back out of the shadows
and into the dim light again, his brow working and his teeth holding
hard his amber mouthpiece.

The morning awakening of a normal healthy human creature should
be a joyous thing. After the soul's long hours of release from the
burden of the body, its long hours spent-- one can only say in awe at
the mystery of it, "away, away"-- in flight, perhaps, on broad,
tireless wings, beating softly in fair, far skies, breathing pure
life, to be brought back to renew the strength of each dawning day;
after these hours of quiescence of limb and nerve and brain, the
morning life returning should unseal for the body clear eyes of peace
at least. In time to come this will be so, when the soul's wings are
stronger, the body more attuned to infinite law and the race a
greater power--but as yet it often seems as though the winged thing
came back a lagging and reluctant rebel against its fate and the
chain which draws it back a prisoner to its toil.

It had seemed so often to Mount Dunstan--oftener than not.
Youth should not know such awakening, he was well aware; but he had
known it sometimes even when he had been a child, and since his
return from his ill-starred struggle in America, the dull and
reluctant facing of the day had become a habit. Yet on the morning
after his talk with his friend-- the curious, uplifted, unpractical
talk which had seemed to hypnotise him--he knew when he opened his
eyes to the light that he had awakened as a man should awake--with an
unreasoning sense of pleasure in the life and health of his own body,
as he stretched mighty limbs, strong after the night's rest, and
feeling that there was work to be done. It was all unreasoning--
there was no more to be done than on those other days which he had
wakened to with bitterness, because they seemed useless and empty of
any worth--but this morning the mere light of the sun was of use, the
rustle of the small breeze in the leaves, the soft floating past of
the white clouds, the mere fact that the great blind-faced, stately
house was his own, that he could tramp far over lands which were his
heritage, unfed though they might be, and that the very rustics who
would pass him in the lanes were, so to speak, his own people: that
he had name, life, even the common thing of hunger for his morning
food--it was all of use.

An alluring picture--of a certain deep, clear bathing pool in
the park rose before him. It had not called to him for many a day,
and now he saw its dark blueness gleam between flags and green rushes
in its encircling thickness of shrubs and trees.

He sprang from his bed, and in a few minutes was striding across
the grass of the park, his towels over his arm, his head thrown back
as he drank in the freshness of the morning- scented air. It was
scented with dew and grass and the breath of waking trees and growing
things; early twitters and thrills were to be heard here and there,
insisting on morning joyfulness; rabbits frisked about among the
fine-grassed hummocks of their warren and, as he passed, scuttled
back into their holes, with a whisking of short white tails, at which
he laughed with friendly amusement. Cropping stags lifted their
antlered heads, and fawns with dappled sides and immense lustrous
eyes gazed at him without actual fear, even while they sidled closer
to their mothers. A skylark springing suddenly from the grass a few
yards from his feet made him stop short once and stand looking upward
and listening. Who could pass by a skylark at five o'clock on a
summer's morning--the little, heavenly light-heart circling and
wheeling, showering down diamonds, showering down pearls, from its
tiny pulsating, trilling throat?

"Do you know why they sing like that? It is because all but the
joy of things has been kept hidden from them. They knew nothing but
life and flight and mating, and the gold of the sun. So they sing."
That she had once said.

He listened until the jewelled rain seemed to have fallen into
his soul. Then he went on his way smiling as he knew he had never
smiled in his life before. He knew it because he realised that he
had never before felt the same vigorous, light normality of spirit,
the same sense of being as other men. It was as though something had
swept a great clear space about him, and having room for air he
breathed deep and was glad of the commonest gifts of being.

The bathing pool had been the greatest pleasure of his
uncared-for boyhood. No one knew which long passed away Mount
Dunstan had made it. The oldest villager had told him that it had
"allus ben there," even in his father's time. Since he himself had
known it he had seen that it was kept at its best.

Its dark blue depths reflected in their pellucid clearness the
water plants growing at its edge and the enclosing shrubs and trees.
The turf bordering it was velvet-thick and green, and a few
flag-steps led down to the water. Birds came there to drink and
bathe and preen and dress their feathers. He knew there were often
nests in the bushes--sometimes the nests of nightingales who filled
the soft darkness or moonlight of early June with the wonderfulness
of nesting song. Sometimes a straying fawn poked in a tender nose,
and after drinking delicately stole away, as if it knew itself a
trespasser.

To undress and plunge headlong into the dark sapphire water was
a rapturous thing. He swam swiftly and slowly by turns, he floated,
looking upward at heaven's blue, listening to birds' song and
inhaling all the fragrance of the early day. Strength grew in him
and life pulsed as the water lapped his limbs. He found himself
thinking with pleasure of a long walk he intended to take to see a
farmer he must talk to about his hop gardens; he found himself
thinking with pleasure of other things as simple and common to
everyday life--such things as he ordinarily faced merely because he
must, since he could not afford an experienced bailiff. He was his
own bailiff, his own steward, merely, he had often thought, an
unsuccessful farmer of half- starved lands. But this morning neither
he nor they seemed so starved, and--for no reason--there was a future
of some sort.

He emerged from his pool glowing, the turf feeling like velvet
beneath his feet, a fine light in his eyes.

"Yes," he said, throwing out his arms in a lordly stretch of
physical well-being, "it might be a magnificent thing--mere strong
living. This is magnificent."