The Daughters of Danaus Part 18

"And my difficulty," said Hadria. "In the world that I was born into (for my sins), when one tries to do something that other people don't do, it is like trying to get up early in a house where the breakfast-hour is late. Nothing fits in with one's eccentric custom; everything conspires to discourage it."

"I wish I could give you a helping hand," said the Professor wistfully; "but one is so powerless. Each of us has to fight the real battle of life alone. n.o.body can see with our eyes, or feel with our nerves. The crux of the difficulty each bears for himself. But friendship can help us to believe the struggle worth while; it can sustain our courage and it can offer sympathy in victory,--but still more faithfully in defeat."

CHAPTER XII.

Hadria had determined upon making a strong and patient effort to pursue her work during the winter, while doing her best, at the same time, to please her mother, and to make up to her, as well as she could, for Algitha's departure. She would not be dismayed by difficulties: as the Professor said, only cowards and weaklings escaped these. She treated herself austerely, and found her power of concentration increasing, and her hold on herself greater. But, as usual, her greatest effort had to be given, not to the work itself, but to win opportunity to pursue it.

Mrs. Fullerton opposed her daughter's endeavours as firmly as ever. It was not good for a girl to be selfishly pre-occupied. She ought to think of others.

If Hadria yielded the point on any particular occasion, her mood and her work were destroyed: if she resisted, they were equally destroyed, through the nervous disturbance and the intense depression which followed the winning of a liberty too dearly bought. The incessant rising and quelling of her impulse and her courage--like the ebb and flow of tides--represented a vast amount of force not merely wasted, but expended in producing a dangerous wear and tear upon the system. The process told upon her health, and was the beginning of the weakening and unbalancing of the splendid const.i.tution which Hadria, in common with every member of the family, enjoyed as a birthright. The injury was insidious but serious. Hadria, unable to command any certain part of the day, began to sit up at night. This led to a direct clash of wills. Mr.

Fullerton said that the girl was doing her best to ruin her health for life; Mrs. Fullerton wished to know why Hadria, who had all the day at her disposal, could not spend the night rationally.

"But I haven't all the day, or any part of it, for certain," said Hadria.

"If you grudge the little services you do for me, pray abandon them,"

said the mother, genuinely hurt.

Hadria entered her room, one evening, tired out and profoundly depressed. A table, covered with books, stood beside the fire. She gave the top-heavy pile an impatient thrust and the ma.s.s fell, with a great crash, to the floor. A heap of ma.n.u.script--her musical achievement for the past year--was involved in the fall. She contemplated the wreck gravely.

"Yes, it is I who am weak, not circ.u.mstance that is strong. If I could keep my mind unmoved by the irritations; if I could quarrel with mother, and displease father, and offend all the world without a qualm, or without losing the delicate balance of thought and mood necessary for composition, then I should, to some extent, triumph over my circ.u.mstances; I should not lose so much time in this wretched unstringing. Only were I so immovably const.i.tuted, is it probable that I should be able to compose at all?"

She drew the score towards her. "People are surprised that women have never done anything noteworthy in music. People are so intelligent!" She turned over the pages critically. If only this instinct were not so overwhelmingly strong! Hadria wondered how many other women, from the beginning of history, had cursed the impulse to create! Fortunately, it was sometimes extinguished altogether, as to-night, for instance, when every impression, every desire was swept clean out of her, and her mind presented a creditable blank, such as really ought to satisfy the most exacting social mentor. In such a state, a woman might be induced to accept anything!

Hadria brought out two letters from her pocket; one from the Professor, the other from Miss Du Prel. The latter had been writing frequently of late, pointing out the danger of Hadria's exaggerated ideas, and the probability of their ruining her happiness in life. Valeria had suffered herself from "ideas," and knew how fatal they were. Life _could_ not be exactly as one would have it, and it was absolutely necessary, in order to avoid misery for oneself and others, to consent to take things more or less as they were; to make up one's mind to bend a little, rather than have to break, in the end. Things were never quite so shocking as they seemed to one's youthful imagination. The world was made up of compromises. Good was mixed with evil everywhere. The domestic idea, as Hadria called it, might be, in its present phase, somewhat offensive, but it could be redeemed in its application, in the details and "extenuating circ.u.mstances." Valeria could not warn Hadria too earnestly against falling into the mistake that Valeria herself had made. She had repudiated the notion of anything short of an ideal union; a perfect comradeship, without the shadow of restraint or bondage in the relationship; and not having found it, she had refused the tie altogether. She could not bring herself to accept the lesser thing, having conceived the possibility of the greater. She now saw her error, and repented it. She was reaping the penalty in a lonely and unsatisfied life. For a long time her work had seemed to suffice, but she felt now that she had been trusting to a broken reed. She was terrified at her solitude. She could not face the thought of old age, without a single close tie, without a home, without a hold upon her race.

She ended by entreating Hadria not to refuse marriage merely because she could not find a man to agree with her in everything, or capable of entering into the spirit of the relationship that perhaps would unite the men and women of the future. It was a pity that Hadria had not been born a generation later, but since she had come into the world at this time of transition, she must try to avoid the tragedy that threatens all spirits who are pointing towards the new order, while the old is still working out its unexhausted impetus.

This reiterated advice had begun to trouble Hadria. It did not convince her, but Valeria's words were incessantly repeating themselves in her mind; working as a ferment among her thoughts.

The letters from Miss Du Prel and the Professor were to her, a source of great pleasure and of great pain. In her depressed moods, they would often rather increase her despondency, because the writers used to take for granted so many achievements that she had not been able to accomplish.

"They think I am living and progressing as they are; they do not know that the riot and stir of intellectual life has ceased. I am like a creature struggling in a quicksand."

On the Professor's letter, the comments were of a different character.

He had recommended her to read certain books, and reminded her that no possessor of good books could lack the privilege of spiritual sanctuary.

"Ah! yes, I know few pleasures so great as that of finding one's own idea, or hope, or longing, finely expressed, half-born thoughts alive and of stately stature; and then the exquisite touches of art upon quick nerves, the enlarging of the realms of imagination, knowledge, the heightening of perceptions, intuitions; finally the blessed power of escaping from oneself, with the paradoxical reward of greater self-realization! But, ah, Professor, to me there is a 'but' even here.

I am oppressed by a sense of the discrepancy between the world that books disclose to me, and the world that I myself inhabit. In books, the _impossibilities_ are all left out. They give you no sense of the sordid Inevitable that looms so large on the grey horizon. Another more personal quarrel that I have with books is on account of their attacking all my pet prejudices, and sneering at the type of woman that I have the misfortune to belong to. I am always exhorted to cure myself of being myself. Nothing less would suffice. Now this is wounding. All my particular feelings, my strongest beliefs, are condemned, directly or by inference. I could almost believe that there is a literary conspiracy to reform me. The "true women" of literature infallibly think and feel precisely as I do _not_ think and feel, while the sentiments that I detest--woe is me--are lauded to the skies. Truly, if we women don't know exactly what we ought to think and feel, it is not for want of telling. Yet you say, Professor, in this very letter, that the sense of having a peculiar experience is always an illusion, that every feeling of ours has been felt before, if not in our own day, then in the crowded past, with its throngs of forgotten lives and unrecorded experiences. I wish to heaven I could meet those who have had exactly mine!"

Hadria did not keep up an active correspondence with Miss Du Prel or with the Professor. She had no idea of adding to the burden of their busy lives, by wails for sympathy. It seemed to her feeble, and contemptible, to ask to be dragged up by their strength, instead of exerting her own. If that were insufficient, why then let her go down, as thousands had gone down before her. As a miser telling his gold, she would read and re-read those occasional letters, written amidst the stress of life at high pressure, and bearing evidence of that life of thought and work, in their tense, full-packed phrases. With what a throb of longing and envy Hadria used to feel the vibration through her own nerves! It was only when completely exhausted and hara.s.sed that the response was lacking. To-night everything seemed to be obliterated. Her hope, her interest were, for the moment, tired out. Her friends would be disappointed in her, but there was no help for it.

She picked up the score of her music, and stood, with a handful of the once precious offspring of her brain held out towards the flames. Then she drew it back, and half closed her eyes in self-scrutinizing thought.

"Come now," she said to herself, "are you sincere in your intention of giving up? Are you not doing this in a fit of spite against destiny? as if destiny cared two straws. Heavens! what a poor little piece of melodrama. And to think that you should have actually taken yourself in it by it. One acts so badly with only oneself for audience. You know perfectly well that you are _not_ going to give in, you are _not_ going to attempt to stifle that which is the centre of your life; you have not courage for such slow suicide. Don't add insincerity to the other faults that are laid to your account----" She mused over the little self-administered lecture. And probing down into her consciousness, she realized that she could not face the thought of surrender. She meant to fight on. The notion of giving in had been seized instinctively, for a moment of rest. Nothing should really make her cease the struggle, until the power itself had been destroyed. She was sure of it, in her heart, in spite of failures and miserably inadequate expressions of it.

Suddenly, as a shaft of light through parting clouds, came bursting forth, radiant, rejoicing, that sense of power, large, resistless, genial as morning sunshine. Yes, yes, let them say what they might, discourage, smile, or frown as they would, the faculty was given to her, and she would fight for opportunity to use it while she had breath.

CHAPTER XIII.

As if it had all been ingeniously planned, the minutest incidents and conditions of Hadria's life conspired towards the event that was to decide its drift for ever.

Often, in the dim afternoon, she would sit by the window and watch the rain sweeping across the country, longing then for Temperley's music, which used to make the wild scene so unspeakably beautiful. Now there was no music, no music anywhere, only this fierce and mournful rush of the wind, which seemed as if it were trying to utter some universal grief. At sunset, braving the cold, she would mount the creaking staircase, pa.s.s along the silent upper corridors, and on through the empty rooms to the garret in the tower. The solitude was a relief; the strangeness of the scene appealed to some wild instinct, and to the intense melancholy that lurks in the Celtic nature.

Even at night, she did not shrink from braving the glooms and silences of the deserted upper floor, nor the solitude of the garret, which appeared the deeper, from the many memories of happy evenings that it evoked. She wished Ernest would come home. It was so long since she had seen her favourite brother. She could not bear the thought of his drifting away from her. What talks they had had in this old garret!

These nights in the tower, among the winds, soothed the trouble of her spirit as nothing else had power to do. The mystery of life, the thrill of existence, touched her with a strange joy that ran perilously near to pain. What vast dim possibilities lurked out there, in the hollows of the hills! What inspiration thundered in the voice of the prophet wind!

Once, she had gone downstairs and out, alone, in a tearing storm, to wander across the bleak pastures, wrapt round by the wind as by a flame; at one with the desperate elemental thing.

The wanderer felt herself caught into the heart of some vast unknown power, of which the wind was but a thrall, until she became, for a moment, consciously part of that which was universal. Her personality grew dim; she stood, as it seemed, face to face with Nature, divided from the ultimate truth by only a thin veil, to temper the splendour and the terror. Then the tension of personal feeling was loosened. She saw how entirely vain and futile were the things of life that we grieve and struggle over.

It was not a side, an aspect of existence, but the whole of it that seemed to storm round her, in the darkness. No wonder, when the wind was let loose among the mountains, that the old Highland people thought that their dead were about them. All night long, after Hadria returned to her room in the keep, the wind kept up its cannonade against the walls, hooting in the chimneys with derisive voices, and flinging itself, in mad revolt, against the old-established hills and the stable earth, which changed its forms only in slow obedience to the persuadings of the elements, in the pa.s.sing of centuries. It cared nothing for the pa.s.sion of a single storm.

And then came reaction, doubt. After all, humanity was a puny production of the Ages. Men and women were like the struggling animalculae that her father had so often shewn the boys, in a drop of magnified ditch-water; yet not quite like those microscopic insects, for the stupendous processes of life had at last created a widening consciousness, a mind which could perceive the bewildering vastness of Nature and its own smallness, which could, in some measure, get outside its own particular ditch, and the strife and struggle of it, groping upwards for larger realities--

"Over us stars and under us graves."

To go down next morning to breakfast; to meet the usual homely events, was bewildering after such a night. Which was dream: this or that? So solid and convincing seemed, at times, the interests and objects of every day, that Hadria would veer round to a sudden conviction that these things, or what they symbolized, were indeed the solid facts of human life, and that all other impressions arose from the disorderly working of overcharged brain-cells. It was a little ailment of youth and would pa.s.s off. Had it been possible to describe to her father the impressions made upon her by the world and Nature, as they had presented themselves to her imagination from her childhood, he would have prescribed change of air and gymnastics. Perhaps that was the really rational view of the matter. But what if these hygienic measures cured her of the haunting consciousness of mystery and vastness; what if she became convinced of the essential importance of the Gordon pedigree, or of the amount of social consideration due to the family who had taken Clarenoc? Would that alter the bewildering truths of which she would have ceased to think?

No; it would only mean that the animalcule had returned to the occupations of its ditch, while the worlds and the peoples went spinning to their destiny.

"Do the duty that lies nearest thee," counselled everybody: people of all kinds, books of all kinds. "Cheap, well-sounding advice," thought Hadria, "sure of popularity! Continue to wriggle industriously, O animalcule, in that particular ditch wherein it has pleased heaven to place thee; seek not the flowing stream and the salt ocean; and if, some clear night, a star finds room to mirror itself in thy little stagnant world, shining through the fat weeds and slime that almost shut out the heavens, pray be careful not to pay too much heed to the high-born luminary. Look to your wriggling; that is your proper business. An animalcule that does not wriggle must be morbid or peculiar. All will tender, in different forms of varying elegance, the safe and simple admonition: 'Wriggle and be d.a.m.ned to you!'"

It was at this somewhat fevered moment, that Hubert Temperley appeared, once more, upon the scene. Hadria was with her mother, taking tea at Drumgarren, when Mrs. Gordon, catching the sounds of carriage wheels, announced that she was expecting Hubert and his sister for a visit. In another second, the travellers were in the drawing-room.

Hubert's self-possession was equal to the occasion. He introduced his sister to Mrs. Fullerton and Hadria. Miss Temperley was his junior by a year; a slight, neatly-built young woman, with a sort of tact that went on brilliantly up to a certain point, and then suddenly collapsed altogether. She had her brother's self-complacency, and an air of encouragement which Mrs. Gordon seemed to find most gratifying.

She dressed perfectly, in quiet Parisian fashion. Hadria saw that her brother had taken her into his confidence, or she concluded so from something in Miss Temperley's manner. The latter treated Hadria with a certain familiarity, as if she had known her for some time, and she had a way of seeming to take her apart, when addressing her, as if there were a sort of understanding between them. It was here that her instinct failed her; for she seemed unaware that this a.s.sumption of an intimacy that did not exist was liable to be resented, and that it might be unpleasant to be expected to catch special remarks sent over the heads of the others, although ostensibly for the common weal.

Hadria thought that she had never seen so strange a contrast as this young woman's behaviour, within and without the circle of her perceptions. It was the more remarkable, since her mind was bent upon the details and niceties of conduct, and the _nuances_ of existence.

"I shall come and see you as soon as I can," she promised, when Mrs.

Fullerton rose to leave.

Miss Temperley kept her word. She was charmed with the old house, praising authoritatively.

"This is an excellent piece of carving; far superior to the one in the dining-room. Ah, yes, that is charming; so well arranged. You ought to have a touch of blue there to make it perfect."

Hubert shewed good taste in keeping away from Dunaghee, except to pay his call on Mr. and Mrs. Fullerton.