CHAPTER VII.
THE POWER OF LOVE OVER THE RESOLUTION OF THE STUDENT.--ARAM
BECOMES A FREQUENT GUEST AT THE MANOR-HOUSE.--A WALK.--
CONVERSATION WITH DAME DARKMANS.--HER HISTORY.--POVERTY AND
ITS EFFECTS.
MAD. "Then, as Time won thee frequent to our hearth,
Didst thou not breathe, like dreams, into my soul
Nature's more gentle secrets, the sweet lore
Of the green herb and the bee-worshipp'd flower?
And when deep Night did o'er the nether Earth
Diffuse meek quiet, and the Heart of Heaven
With love grew breathless--didst thou not unrol
The volume of the weird chaldean stars,
And of the winds, the clouds, the invisible air,
Make eloquent discourse, until, methought,
No human lip, but some diviner spirit
Alone, could preach such truths of things divine?
And so--and so--"
ARAM. "From Heaven we turned to Earth,
And Wisdom fathered Passion."
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
ARAM. "Wise men have praised the Peasant's thoughtless lot,
And learned Pride hath envied humble Toil;
If they were right, why let us burn our books,
And sit us down, and play the fool with Time,
Mocking the prophet Wisdom's high decrees,
And walling this trite Present with dark clouds,
'Till Night becomes our Nature; and the ray
Ev'n of the stars, but meteors that withdraw
The wandering spirit from the sluggish rest
Which makes its proper bliss. I will accost
This denizen of toil."
--From Eugene Aram, a MS. Tragedy.
"A wicked hag, and envy's self excelling
In mischiefe, for herself she only vext,
But this same, both herself and others eke perplext."
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"Who then can strive with strong necessity,
That holds the world in his still changing state,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Then do no further go, no further stray,
But here lie down, and to thy rest betake."
--Spenser.
Few men perhaps could boast of so masculine and firm a mind, as, despite
his eccentricities, Aram assuredly possessed. His habits of solitude had
strengthened its natural hardihood; for, accustomed to make all the
sources of happiness flow solely from himself, his thoughts the only
companion--his genius the only vivifier--of his retreat; the tone and
faculty of his spirit could not but assume that austere and vigorous
energy which the habit of self-dependence almost invariably produces; and
yet, the reader, if he be young, will scarcely feel surprise that the
resolution of the Student, to battle against incipient love, from
whatever reasons it might be formed, gradually and reluctantly melted
away. It may be noted, that the enthusiasts of learning and reverie have,
at one time or another in their lives, been, of all the tribes of men,
the most keenly susceptible to love; their solitude feeds their passion;
and deprived, as they usually are, of the more hurried and vehement
occupations of life, when love is once admitted to their hearts, there is
no counter-check to its emotions, and no escape from its excitation.
Aram, too, had just arrived at that age when a man usually feels a sort
of revulsion in the current of his desires. At that age, those who have
hitherto pursued love, begin to grow alive to ambition; those who have
been slaves to the pleasures of life, awaken from the dream, and direct
their desire to its interests. And in the same proportion, they who till
then have wasted the prodigal fervours of youth upon a sterile soil; who
have served Ambition, or, like Aram, devoted their hearts to Wisdom;
relax from their ardour, look back on the departed years with regret, and
commence, in their manhood, the fiery pleasures and delirious follies
which are only pardonable in youth. In short, as in every human pursuit
there is a certain vanity, and as every acquisition contains within
itself the seed of disappointment, so there is a period of life when we
pause from the pursuit, and are discontented with the acquisition. We
then look around us for something new--again follow--and are again
deceived. Few men throughout life are the servants to one desire. When we
gain the middle of the bridge of our mortality, different objects from
those which attracted us upward almost invariably lure us to the descent.
Happy they who exhaust in the former part of the journey all the foibles
of existence! But how different is the crude and evanescent love of that
age when thought has not given intensity and power to the passions, from
the love which is felt, for the first time, in maturer but still youthful
years! As the flame burns the brighter in proportion to the resistance
which it conquers, this later love is the more glowing in proportion to
the length of time in which it has overcome temptation: all the solid
and, concentred faculties ripened to their full height, are no longer
capable of the infinite distractions, the numberless caprices of youth;
the rays of the heart, not rendered weak by diversion, collect into one
burning focus;
[Love is of the nature of a burning glass, which kept
still in one place, fireth; changed often it doth nothing!"
--Letters by Sir John Suckling.]
the same earnestness and unity of purpose which render what we
undertake in manhood so far more successful than what we would effect in
youth, are equally visible and equally triumphant, whether directed to
interest or to love. But then, as in Aram, the feelings must be fresh as
well as matured; they must not have been frittered away by previous
indulgence; the love must be the first produce of the soil, not the
languid after-growth.
The reader will remark, that the first time in which our narrative has
brought Madeline and Aram together, was not the first time they had met;
Aram had long noted with admiration a beauty which he had never seen
paralleled, and certain vague and unsettled feelings had preluded the
deeper emotion that her image now excited within him. But the main cause
of his present and growing attachment, had been in the evident sentiment
of kindness which he could not but feel Madeline bore towards him. So
retiring a nature as his, might never have harboured love, if the love
bore the character of presumption; but that one so beautiful beyond his
dreams as Madeline Lester, should deign to exercise towards him a
tenderness, that might suffer him to hope, was a thought, that when he
caught her eye unconsciously fixed upon him, and noted that her voice
grew softer and more tremulous when she addressed him, forced itself upon
his heart, and woke there a strange and irresistible emotion, which
solitude and the brooding reflection that solitude produces--a reflection
so much more intense in proportion to the paucity of living images it
dwells upon--soon ripened into love. Perhaps even, he would not have
resisted the impulse as he now did, had not at this time certain thoughts
connected with past events, been more forcibly than of late years
obtruded upon him, and thus in some measure divided his heart. By
degrees, however, those thoughts receded from their vividness, into the
habitual deep, but not oblivious, shade beneath which his commanding mind
had formerly driven them to repose; and as they thus receded, Madeline's
image grew more undisturbedly present, and his resolution to avoid its
power more fluctuating and feeble. Fate seemed bent upon bringing
together these two persons, already so attracted towards each other.
After the conversation recorded in our last chapter, between Walter and
the Student, the former, touched and softened as we have seen, in spite
of himself, had cheerfully forborne (what before he had done reluctantly)
the expressions of dislike which he had once lavished so profusely upon
Aram; and Lester, who, forward as he had seemed, had nevertheless been
hitherto a little checked in his advances to his neighbour by the
hostility of his son, now felt no scruple to deter him from urging them
with a pertinacity that almost forbade refusal. It was Aram's constant
habit, in all seasons, to wander abroad at certain times of the day,
especially towards the evening; and if Lester failed to win entrance to
his house, he was thus enabled to meet the Student in his frequent
rambles, and with a seeming freedom from design. Actuated by his great
benevolence of character, Lester earnestly desired to win his solitary
and unfriended neighbour from a mood and habit which he naturally
imagined must engender a growing melancholy of mind; and since Walter had
detailed to him the particulars of his meeting with Aram, this desire had
been considerably increased. There is not perhaps a stronger feeling in
the world than pity, when united with admiration. When one man is
resolved to know another, it is almost impossible to prevent him: we see
daily the most remarkable instances of perseverance on one side
conquering distaste on the other. By degrees, then, Aram relaxed from his
insociability; he seemed to surrender himself to a kindness, the
sincerity of which he was compelled to acknowledge; if he for a long time
refused to accept the hospitality of his neighbour, he did not reject his
society when they met, and this intercourse by little and little
progressed, until ultimately the recluse yielded to solicitation, and
became the guest as well as companion. This, at first accident, grew,
though not without many interruptions, into habit; and at length few
evenings were passed by the inmates of the Manor-house without the
society of the Student. As his reserve wore off, his conversation mingled
with its attractions a tender and affectionate tone. He seemed grateful
for the pains which had been taken to allure him to a scene in which, at
last, he acknowledged he found a happiness that he never experienced
before: and those who had hitherto admired him for his genius, admired
him now yet more for his susceptibility to the affections.
There was not in Aram any thing that savoured of the harshness of
pedantry, or the petty vanities of dogmatism: his voice was soft and low,
and his manner always remarkable for its singular gentleness, and a
certain dignified humility. His language did indeed, at times, assume a
tone of calm and patriarchal command; but it was only the command arising
from an intimate persuasion of the truth of what he uttered. Moralizing
upon our nature, or mourning over the delusions of the world, a grave and
solemn strain breathed throughout his lofty words and the profound
melancholy of his wisdom; but it touched, not offended--elevated, not
humbled--the lesser intellect of his listeners; and even this air of
unconscious superiority vanished when he was invited to teach or explain.
That task which so few do gracefully, that an accurate and shrewd thinker
has said: "It is always safe to learn, even from our enemies; seldom safe
to instruct even our friends," [Note: Lacon.] Aram performed with a
meekness and simplicity that charmed the vanity, even while it corrected
the ignorance, of the applicant; and so various and minute was the
information of this accomplished man, that there scarcely existed any
branch even of that knowledge usually called practical, to which he could
not impart from his stores something valuable and new. The agriculturist
was astonished at the success of his suggestions; and the mechanic was
indebted to him for the device which abridged his labour in improving its
result.
It happened that the study of botany was not, at that day, so favourite
and common a diversion with young ladies as it is now, and Ellinor,
captivated by the notion of a science that gave a life and a history to
the loveliest of earth's offspring, besought Aram to teach her its
principles.
As Madeline, though she did not second the request, could scarcely absent
herself from sharing the lesson, this pursuit brought the pair--already
lovers--closer and closer together. It associated them not only at home,
but in their rambles throughout that enchanting country; and there is a
mysterious influence in Nature, which renders us, in her loveliest
scenes, the most susceptible to love! Then, too, how often in their
occupation their hands and eyes met:--how often, by the shady wood or the
soft water-side, they found themselves alone. In all times, how dangerous
the connexion, when of different sexes, between the scholar and the
teacher! Under how many pretences, in that connexion, the heart finds the
opportunity to speak out.
Yet it was not with ease and complacency that Aram delivered himself to
the intoxication of his deepening attachment. Sometimes he was studiously
cold, or evidently wrestling with the powerful passion that mastered his
reason. It was not without many throes, and desperate resistance, that
love at length overwhelmed and subdued him; and these alternations of his
mood, if they sometimes offended Madeline and sometimes wounded, still
rather increased than lessened the spell which bound her to him. The
doubt and the fear--the caprice and the change, which agitate the
surface, swell also the tides, of passion. Woman, too, whose love is so
much the creature of her imagination, always asks something of mystery
and conjecture in the object of her affection. It is a luxury to her to
perplex herself with a thousand apprehensions; and the more restlessly
her lover occupies her mind, the more deeply he enthrals it.
Mingling with her pure and tender attachment to Aram, a high and
unswerving veneration, she saw in his fitfulness, and occasional
abstraction and contradiction of manner, a confirmation of the modest
sentiment that most weighed upon her fears; and imagined that at those
times he thought her, as she deemed herself, unworthy of his love. And
this was the only struggle which she conceived to pass between the
affection he evidently bore her, and the feelings which had as yet
restrained him from its open avowal.
One evening, Lester and the two sisters were walking with the Student
along the valley that led to the house of the latter, when they saw an
old woman engaged in collecting firewood among the bushes, and a little
girl holding out her apron to receive the sticks with which the crone's
skinny arms unsparingly filled it. The child trembled, and seemed half-
crying; while the old woman, in a harsh, grating croak, was muttering
forth mingled objurgation and complaint.
There was something in the appearance of the latter at once impressive
and displeasing; a dark, withered, furrowed skin was drawn like parchment
over harsh and aquiline features; the eyes, through the rheum of age,
glittered forth black and malignant; and even her stooping posture did
not conceal a height greatly above the common stature, though gaunt and
shrivelled with years and poverty. It was a form and face that might have
recalled at once the celebrated description of Otway, on a part of which
we have already unconsciously encroached, and the remaining part of which
we shall wholly borrow.
"--On her crooked shoulders had she wrapped The tattered remnants of an
old stript hanging, That served to keep her carcase from the cold, So
there was nothing of a piece about her. Her lower weeds were all o'er
coarsely patched With different coloured rags, black, red, white, yellow,
And seemed to speak variety of wretchedness."
"See," said Lester, "one of the eyesores of our village, (I might say)
the only discontented person."
"What! Dame Darkmans!" said Ellinor, quickly. "Ah! let us turn back. I
hate to encounter that old woman; there is something so evil and savage
in her manner of talk--and look, how she rates that poor girl, whom she
has dragged or decoyed to assist her!"
Aram looked curiously on the old hag. "Poverty," said he, "makes some
humble, but more malignant; is it not want that grafts the devil on this
poor woman's nature? Come, let us accost her--I like conferring with
distress."
"It is hard labour this?" said the Student gently.
The old woman looked up askant--the music of the voice that addressed her
sounded harsh on her ear.
"Ay, ay!" she answered. "You fine gentlefolks can know what the poor
suffer; ye talk and ye talk, but ye never assist."
"Say not so, Dame," said Lester; "did I not send you but yesterday bread
and money? and when do you ever look up at the Hall without obtaining
relief?"
"But the bread was as dry as a stick," growled the hag: "and the money,
what was it? will it last a week? Oh, yes! Ye think as much of your doits
and mites, as if ye stripped yourselves of a comfort to give it to us.
Did ye have a dish less--a 'tato less, the day ye sent me--your charity I
'spose ye calls it? Och! fie! But the Bible's the poor cretur's comfort."
"I am glad to hear you say that, Dame," said the good-natured Lester;
"and I forgive every thing else you have said, on account of that one
sentence."
The old woman dropped the sticks she had just gathered, and glowered at
the speaker's benevolent countenance with a malicious meaning in her dark
eyes.
"An' ye do? Well, I'm glad I please ye there. Och! yes! the Bible's a
mighty comfort; for it says as much that the rich man shall not inter the
kingdom of Heaven! There's a truth for you, that makes the poor folk's
heart chirp like a cricket--ho! ho! I sits by the imbers of a night, and
I thinks and thinks as how I shall see you all burning; and ye'll ask me
for a drop o' water, and I shall laugh thin from my pleasant seat with
the angels. Och--it's a book for the poor that!"
The sisters shuddered. "And you think then that with envy, malice, and
all uncharitableness at your heart, you are certain of Heaven? For shame!
Pluck the mote from your own eye!"
"What sinnifies praching? Did not the Blessed Saviour come for the poor?
Them as has rags and dry bread here will be ixalted in the nixt world;
an' if we poor folk have malice as ye calls it, whose fault's that? What
do ye tache us? Eh?--answer me that. Ye keeps all the larning an' all the
other fine things to yoursel', and then ye scould, and thritten, and hang
us, 'cause we are not as wise as you. Och! there is no jistice in the
Lamb, if Heaven is not made for us; and the iverlasting Hell, with its
brimstone and fire, and its gnawing an' gnashing of teeth, an' its
theirst, an' its torture, and its worm that niver dies, for the like o'
you."
"Come! come away," said Ellinor, pulling her father's arm.
"And if," said Aram, pausing, "if I were to say to you,--name your want
and it shall be fulfilled, would you have no charity for me also?"
"Umph," returned the hag, "ye are the great scolard; and they say ye
knows what no one else do. Till me now," and she approached, and
familiarly, laid her bony finger on the student's arm; "till me,--have ye
iver, among other fine things, known poverty?"
"I have, woman!" said Aram, sternly.
"Och ye have thin! And did ye not sit and gloat, and eat up your oun
heart, an' curse the sun that looked so gay, an' the winged things that
played so blithe-like, an' scowl at the rich folk that niver wasted a
thought on ye? till me now, your honour, till me!"
And the crone curtesied with a mock air of beseeching humility.
"I never forgot, even in want, the love due to my fellow-sufferers; for,
woman, we all suffer,--the rich and the poor: there are worse pangs than
those of want!"
"Ye think there be, do ye? that's a comfort, umph! Well, I'll till ye
now, I feel a rispict for you, that I don't for the rest on 'em; for your
face does not insult me with being cheary like their's yonder; an' I have
noted ye walk in the dusk with your eyes down and your arms crossed; an'
I have said,--that man I do not hate, somehow, for he has something dark
at his heart like me!"
"The lot of earth is woe," answered Aram calmly, yet shrinking back from
the crone's touch; "judge we charitably, and act we kindly to each other.
There--this money is not much, but it will light your hearth and heap
your table without toil, for some days at least!"
"Thank your honour: an' what think you I'll do with the money?"
"What?"
"Drink, drink, drink!" cried the hag fiercely; "there's nothing like
drink for the poor, for thin we fancy oursels what we wish, and," sinking
her voice into a whisper, "I thinks thin that I have my foot on the
billies of the rich folks, and my hands twisted about their intrails, and
I hear them shriek, and--thin I'm happy!"
"Go home!" said Aram, turning away, "and open the Book of life with other
thoughts."
The little party proceeded, and, looking back, Lester saw the old woman
gaze after them, till a turn in the winding valley hid her from his
sight.
"That is a strange person, Aram; scarcely a favourable specimen of the
happy English peasant;" said Lester, smiling.
"Yet they say," added Madeline, "that she was not always the same
perverse and hateful creature she is now."
"Ay," said Aram, "and what then is her history?"
"Why," replied Madeline, slightly blushing to find herself made the
narrator of a story, "some forty years ago this woman, so gaunt and
hideous now, was the beauty of the village. She married an Irish soldier
whose regiment passed through Grassdale, and was heard of no more till
about ten years back, when she returned to her native place, the
discontented, envious, altered being you now see her."
"She is not reserved in regard to her past life, said Lester. "She is too
happy to seize the attention of any one to whom she can pour forth her
dark and angry confidence. She saw her husband, who was afterwards
dismissed the service, a strong, powerful man, a giant of his tribe, pine
and waste, inch by inch, from mere physical want, and at last literally
die from hunger. It happened that they had settled in the country in
which her husband was born, and in that county, those frequent famines
which are the scourge of Ireland were for two years especially severe.
You may note, that the old woman has a strong vein of coarse eloquence at
her command, perhaps acquired in (for it partakes of the natural
character of) the country in which she lived so long; and it would
literally thrill you with horror to hear her descriptions of the misery
and destitution that she witnessed, and amidst which her husband breathed
his last. Out of four children, not one survives. One, an infant, died
within a week of the father; two sons were executed, one at the age of
sixteen, one a year older, for robbery committed under aggravated
circumstances; and the fourth, a daughter, died in the hospitals of
London. The old woman became a wanderer and a vagrant, and was at length
passed to her native parish, where she has since dwelt. These are the
misfortunes which have turned her blood to gall; and these are the causes
which fill her with so bitter a hatred against those whom wealth has
preserved from sharing or witnessing a fate similar to hers."
"Oh!" said Aram, in a low, but deep tone, "when--when will these hideous
disparities be banished from the world? How many noble natures--how many
glorious hopes--how much of the seraph's intellect, have been crushed
into the mire, or blasted into guilt, by the mere force of physical want?
What are the temptations of the rich to those of the poor? Yet see how
lenient we are to the crimes of the one,--how relentless to those of the
other! It is a bad world; it makes a man's heart sick to look around him.
The consciousness of how little individual genius can do to relieve the
mass, grinds out, as with a stone, all that is generous in ambition; and
to aspire from the level of life is but to be more graspingly selfish."
"Can legislators, or the moralists that instruct legislators, do so
little, then, towards universal good?" said Lester, doubtingly.
"Why? what can they do but forward civilization? And what is
civilization, but an increase of human disparities? The more the luxury
of the few, the more startling the wants, and the more galling the sense,
of poverty. Even the dreams of the philanthropist only tend towards
equality; and where is equality to be found, but in the state of the
savage? No; I thought otherwise once; but I now regard the vast lazar-
house around us without hope of relief:--Death is the sole Physician!"
"Ah, no!" said the high-souled Madeline, eagerly; "do not take away from
us the best feeling and the highest desire we can cherish. How poor, even
in this beautiful world, with the warm sun and fresh air about us, that
alone are sufficient to make us glad, would be life, if we could not make
the happiness of others!"
Aram looked at the beautiful speaker with a soft and half-mournful smile.
There is one very peculiar pleasure that we feel as we grow older,--it
is to see embodied in another and a more lovely shape the thoughts and
sentiments we once nursed ourselves; it is as if we viewed before us the
incarnation of our own youth; and it is no wonder that we are warmed
towards the object, that thus seems the living apparition of all that was
brightest in ourselves! It was with this sentiment that Aram now gazed on
Madeline. She felt the gaze, and her heart beat delightedly, but she sunk
at once into a silence, which she did not break during the rest of their
walk.
"I do not say," said Aram, after a pause, "that we are not able to make
the happiness of those immediately around us. I speak only of what we can
effect for the mass. And it is a deadening thought to mental ambition,
that the circle of happiness we can create is formed more by our moral
than our mental qualities. A warm heart, though accompanied but by a
mediocre understanding, is even more likely to promote the happiness of
those around, than are the absorbed and abstract, though kindly powers of
a more elevated genius; but (observing Lester about to interrupt him),
let us turn from this topic,--let us turn from man's weakness to the
glories of the mother-nature, from which he sprung."
And kindling, as he ever did, the moment he approached a subject so dear
to his studies, Aram now spoke of the stars, which began to sparkle
forth,--of the vast, illimitable career which recent science had opened
to the imagination,--and of the old, bewildering, yet eloquent theories,
which from age to age had at once misled and elevated the conjecture of
past sages. All this was a theme which his listeners loved to listen to,
and Madeline not the least. Youth, beauty, pomp, what are these, in point
of attraction, to a woman's heart, when compared to eloquence?--the magic
of the tongue is the most dangerous of all spells!
