CHAPTER XXVI.
LEOPOLD'S STORY.
While yet a mere boy, scarcely more than sixteen, Leopold had made
acquaintance with the family of a certain manufacturer, who, having
retired from business with a rapidly-gained fortune, had some years
before purchased an estate a few miles from Goldswyre, his uncle's
place. Their settling in the neighbourhood was not welcome to the
old-fashioned, long-rooted family of the Lingards; but although they
had not called upon them, they could not help meeting them
occasionally. Leopold's association with them commenced just after
he had left Eton, between which time and his going up to Cambridge
he spent a year in reading with his cousins' tutor. It was at a ball
he first saw Emmeline, the eldest of the family. She had but lately
returned from a school at which from the first she had had for her
bedfellow a black ewe. It was not a place where any blackness under
that of pitch was likely to attract notice, being one of those very
ordinary and very common schools where everything is done that is
done, first for manners, then for accomplishments, and lastly for
information, leaving all the higher faculties and endowments of the
human being as entirely unconsidered as if they had no existence.
Taste, feeling, judgment, imagination, conscience, are in such
places left to look after themselves, and the considerations
presented to them, and duties required of them as religious, are
only fitted to lower still farther such moral standard as they may
possess. Schools of this kind send out, as their quota of the supply
of mothers for the ages to come, young women who will consult a book
of etiquette as to what is ladylike; who always think what is the
mode, never what is beautiful; who read romances in which the
wickedness is equalled only by the shallowness; who write questions
to weekly papers concerning points of behaviour, and place their
whole, or chief delight in making themselves attractive to men. Some
such girls look lady-like and interesting, and many of them are
skilled in the arts that meet their fullest development in a nature
whose sense of existence is rounded by its own reflection in the
mirror of self-consciousness falsified by vanity. Once understood,
they are for a sadness or a loathing, after the nature that
understands them; till then, they are to the beholder such as they
desire to appear, while under the fair outside lies a nature whose
vulgarity, if the most thorough of changes do not in the meantime
supervene, will manifest itself hideously on the approach of middle
age, that is, by the time when habituation shall have destroyed the
restraints of diffidence. Receiving ever fresh and best assurance of
their own consequence in the attention and admiration of men, such
girls are seldom capable of any real attachment, and the marvel is
that so few of them comparatively disgrace themselves after
marriage.
Whether it was the swarthy side of his nature, early ripened under
the hot Indian sun, that found itself irresistibly drawn to the
widening of its humanity in the flaxen fairness of Emmeline, or the
Saxon element in him seeking back to its family--it might indeed
have been both, our nature admitting of such marvellous complexity
in its unity,--he fell in love with her, if not in the noblest yet
in a very genuine, though at the same time very passionate way; and
as she had, to use a Scots proverb, a crop for all corn, his
attentions were acceptable to her. Had she been true-hearted enough
to know anything of that love whose name was for ever suffering
profanation upon her lips, she would, being at least a year and a
half older than he, have been too much of a woman to encourage his
approaches--would have felt he was a boy and must not be allowed to
fancy himself a man. But to be just, he did look to English eyes
older than he was. And then he was very handsome, distinguished-looking,
of a good family, which could in no sense be said of her,--and with
high connections--at the same time a natural contrast to herself,
and personally attractive to her. The first moment she saw his great
black eyes blaze, she accepted the homage, laid it on the altar of
her self-worship, and ever after sought to see them lighted up afresh
in worship of her only divinity. To be feelingly aware of her power
over him, to play upon him as on an instrument, to make his cheek
pale or glow, his eyes flash or fill, as she pleased, was a game
almost too delightful.
One of the most potent means for producing the humano-atmospheric
play in which her soul thus rejoiced, and one whose operation was to
none better known than to Emmeline, was jealousy, and for its
generation she had all possible facilities--for there could not be a
woman in regard of whom jealousy was more justifiable on any ground
except that of being worth it. So far as it will reach, however, it
must be remembered, in mitigation of judgment, that she had no gauge
in herself equal to the representation of a tithe of the misery
whose signs served to lift her to the very Paradise of falsehood:
she knew not what she did, and possibly knowledge might have found
in her some pity and abstinence. But when a woman, in her own nature
cold, takes delight in rousing passion, she will, selfishly
confident in her own safety, go to strange lengths in kindling and
fanning the flame which is the death of the other.
It is far from my intention to follow the disagreeable topic across
the pathless swamp through which an elaboration of its phases would
necessarily drag me. Of morbid anatomy, save for the setting forth
of cure, I am not fond, and here there is nothing to be said of
cure. What concerns me as a narrator is, that Emmeline consoled and
irritated and re-consoled Leopold, until she had him her very slave,
and the more her slave that by that time he knew something of her
character. The knowledge took from him what little repose she had
left him; he did no more good at school, and went to Cambridge with
the conviction that the woman to whom he had given his soul, would
be doing things in his absence the sight of which would drive him
mad. Yet somehow he continued to live, reassured now and then by the
loving letters she wrote to him, and relieving his own heart while
he fostered her falsehood by the passionate replies he made to them.
From a sad accident of his childhood, he had become acquainted with
something of the influences of a certain baneful drug, to the use of
which one of his attendants was addicted, and now at college, partly
from curiosity, partly from a desire to undergo its effects, but
chiefly in order to escape from ever-gnawing and passionate thought,
he began to make EXPERIMENTS in its use. Experiment called for
repetition--in order to verification, said the fiend,--and
repetition led first to a longing after its effects, and next to a
mad appetite for the thing itself; so that, by the time of which my
narrative treats, he was on the verge of absolute slavery to its
use, and in imminent peril of having to pass the rest of his life in
alternations of ecstasy and agony, divided by dull spaces of misery,
the ecstasies growing rarer and rarer, and the agonies more and more
frequent, intense, and lasting; until at length the dethroned Apollo
found himself chained to a pillar of his own ruined temple, which
the sirocco was fast filling with desert sand.
