Grace Tolmar: a novel

Chapter I

Some years ago professional business required me to travel, in the winter time, into that part of Carnarvonshire which is reached by a road skirting the shoulder of Snowdon, and which passes through some of the wildest portions of North Wales. The country hereabouts is bare and desolate, even in summer ; in winter time, when the treeless mountains are covered with snow, which the wind, rushing through the narrow valleys, has sjyept from the exposed hill-sides and piled into drifts at every sheltered corner, the road becomes as dreary a one as the traveller is likely to encounter. I was within but a few miles of my destination, and the early winter night had already come on, closing down over the landscape like the heavy eyehds of a wearied man ; what light was left coming or seeming to come more from the whitened face of the land than from the heavens above, when it was my misfortune to find such a snow-drift as I have described blocking up the road, at a place where it runs between two steep banks.

The snow was some yards in depth, and to pass it with our carriage seemed hardly possible, although we had already laboured through several like but lesser impediments. The horse, unfit for so long a journey as we had made, was now labouring along with faihng limbs, stumbling at every step, his hoofs balled with snow. The long hill from the last station had obhged him to proceed at a slow pace, and the cutting winds assailed his miserable flanks and chilled the perspiration running in streams down his bare ribs. His breathing laboured convulsively, and its hollow sound told me of his distress. The driver's hand raised the whip to urge him to pass this last obstacle. I stopped him ; it was time. The horse stood still, drooped his head, raised it, staggered, and stumbling forward, reeled to one side, and finally slowly sank to his knees and fell softly over into the deep snow.

We jumped out, but the animal had died even in falling, and his body lay hampered in the harness, and the bony articulation seemed to stiffen and grow stark at once in the cold air. I was forced very unwillingly to retrace my steps to a little wayside inn which we had just passed. Though at such inns in Wales they expect and prepare for no guests but in summer, I found some activity in the house. There was already a person who, I was told, had passed some weeks in the inn. I was acquainted with the landlord, who lost no time in informing me of the character of his guest. He had come, he told me, without warning ; had,- apparently, no occupation in the neighbourhood, and had evidently become the subject of no little curiosity to his host and the neighbours. Occupied with my detention, and paying but little heed to these details, I turned from the blazing fire of the kitchen — the inn's only sitting-room — and I saw, standing in the doorway, a man's form which immediately fixed my whole attention.

A tall, commanding figure ; a face young still, but grave, gaunt, of an ashy paleness and emaciated beyond belief, with the gauntness, pallor, and emaciation of sixty. In the eyes, in their brightness — for they glanced back the gleam of the fire like eyes in madness — and in their bold look, and also in the firm set of the mouth, were what chiefly remained of youth. This person's look was fixed upon me, and I returned it as fixedly, for there was in it the attraction of some by-gone memory which I could not as yet define. So we stood till he spoke my name. Then it came back upon me that he was one from whom I had parted some eight years before ; he and I fellow-students at the University of Heidelberg, he then in the pride and vigour of youth, a man very difficult to reconcile with the wan and faded being before me.

He was, or rather he had been, a man of a singular character and singular endowments. His face was impressive ; it would have been, perhaps it was, strikingly handsome, but for a certain restlessness and intensity of expression, for the eyes were large and shapely, and the features purely and finely moulded ; and the complexion, though dark and sallow for an Englishman, was very clear. "I knew your voice, Greville," he said, " before I saw your face ; you would not know either in me again, I think." His voice came to me low and hollow, like the ghost of a voice, as he was like the ghost of himself, for his manner, which formerly had been animated and joyous, was dead and cold. Court ing as he did, no sympathy, I had a delicacy in offering it or even in inquiring into the cause of his altered condition ; but, in time, as we spoke together, some faint shadowy return of his departed cordiality invaded his voice and his manner.

Then I asked if he was ill. He answered me, speaking very slowly and preserving the same even and measured intonation of his previous speech, not even changing his look into the fire, " Yes, I believe I am dying." I asked no more. After a little time we began to talk more cheerfully than we had before, upon other topics. We conversed till far into the night, and as we were parting, I said, — "I heard by accident to-night that you have been here some weeks. You are ill, and I fear there is something that troubles you. Can I not in any way be of use to you ? " His hand had, I thought, a touch of cordiality as he answered me by a sudden gesture of refusal. He placed his hand on my arm. He said not a word ; yet there was no discourtesy in the action, but it betokened such a pride and consciousness of power to bear unaided what was before him, as took me not a little by surprise, though I knew well how firm and un flinching was his nature.

We parted, and intending to start early in the morning for my destination in the immediate neighbourhood, I had little expectation of seeing him again. Left alone, I recalled my memories of Robert Pole. At the University he was my chief friend. I recalled the force and power of his will, but I remembered also his extraordinary, almost extravagant susceptibility to every passing impression, and I found it not a little difficult to picture to myself the train of circumstances which had moulded into indifferentism and reserve, a nature so open and so enthusiastic. I had lived in very close intimacy with Robert Pole at Heidelberg, but even had I not done so, I should still have had a perfect recollection of him, for he had made no small impression on the ordinarily quiet mind of that university.

His were talents of that brilliant and universal order which pecuharly captivate young minds. Young men seldom appreciate the slow, plodding abilities which abjure every occupation foreign to the task before them ; yet it is these men who succeed in life ; not those who, like my friend, wear out the tough fibre of their nature by the variety and violence of their emotions. He plunged into all the studies, and into all the occupations and amusements of the university with equal ardour. His geniality, his animation, a certain charm of manner, backed by the occasional display of so firm a character as forced respect from those disposed to withhold it, won him the sympathy as well as the admiration of every one. There were, I should imagine, not many of his contemporaries at the University who had not planned out some brilliant and elevated career for Robert Pole.

Now, this realization of such forecasts was before me ; and yet he differed from almost every one of us in entirely lacking any kind or form of ambition. It was, doubtless, an imperfection in his nature, and as I even then thought, a great misfortune for him ; for I have ever held it to be a misfortune to a man if, having any sort of mental force, he have not likewise a commensu rate ambition. A man of genius, wanting this quality, content to stoop to the lower tenour of minds inferior to him, must be among the most miserable beings upon earth. The mind, not employed in projects to occupy it, must needs fret the body it inhabits to destruction. For this reason I had anticipated no happy destiny for Robert Pole. Possessing a grasp of mind and a power wiiich we, his companions, allowed without the smallest cavil, we observed with no little astonishment, that he disdained, and from no motives of indolence, the distinctions which lay within his easy reach.

He often expressed his determination to adopt no serious career in after life, and I can distinctly recollect the emphasis of conviction with which he spoke to me one day when I had been suggest ing to him that by so doing he would be wasting both his energy and his talents. "How could I employ either ? " he retorted upon me. "I want no one tangible thing that I have not already. I do not want money, and I do not care for fame. Let me labour ever so hard, and I should only be presenting the absurd spectacle of a man working to obtain that to which he is absolutely indifferent." " At any rate," I said, " there is occupation, and therefore, I suppose, pleasure, in the pursuit of any career ; that of politics, for instance." " I do not really know," said Robert Pole, " which I should most hate, the pursuit or the attainment of success in politics, and yet I con fess that at one time the idea of such success had a certain charm for me.

To endure for a season that one may at last be able to impose one's own will on multitudes ; to desire to possess strength, with the power to use it, is, no doubt, the most noble form of ambition, — if ambition, in any form, be noble, which I doubt ; but such a desire is certainly immoral in itself," he said, with a laugh : " and besides, I do not think such a result would practically follow from the greatest possible success in a political career. For what, after all, is political success ? A man patiently works his way upwards ; he arrives at the very pinnacle of his ambition ; he finds himself, at last, in the position where he had hoped to put in action the darling ideas of his heart. But those very ideas are themselves the currency of politics. He will find that on his road to any sort of eminence he will have had to modify them.

He will have had to change the very mintage of his brain for the more current coin which shall bring him place and power. If that man is still in earnest, his position is surely pitiable." " It is all very well to depreciate ambition," I said ; " it is a noble quality, and but for it we should still be savages." " No doubt," he answered, "it is good policy in the world to elevate ambition into a virtue, as the quality from which most of the benefits accrue to society ; but it is one of very sordid origin. What can be less noble ? To rise in any career, we must selfishly thrust aside others who are struggling into the places we wish to occupy. If a great crisis in our country's fortunes required us to push on to prominence, then would ambition indeed be noble. As it is, it has no charm for me."

" I have no great sympathy with it," I said, " but surely a great name in literature or in art would be desirable." " Certainly," he said, "to influence a nation's feelings, to touch the heart and mind of a whole people, this, indeed, would be a thing to toil for ; but who could measure himself for such a task and his soul not sink within him ? The true delight of an artist's or author's life is in the creating and fashioning of his work, not to any degree in the fame which may follow. For only imagine the load he will have to carry about with him, in the hatred of his rivals, the envy of those who lack his power, in the bitterness of unde served censure, and the greater bitterness of praise not his due. For it would almost seem that no censure of an artist or an author can be without malice, and no praise without adulation."

These views are characteristic of Robert Pole. Enthusiastic as he was, in a fashion, his judg ment was too clear to let him be blinded in the pursuit of aspirations which common men would call noble, but of which he clearly saw the vanity. There was another defect in him, which almost followed from the even balance of his mental faculties and of his feelings. He was irresolute : not in thought or in speech, but in action. He was aware of it ; his habit of irreso lution — springing not by any means from a weak will — was frequently in his thoughts, and he even exaggerated it into a common subject of jest. It is, surely, a fatal quality; and there are men of the highest mental power, subtle in their conceptions, lofty in their aspirations, strong in their mental grasp, and wide in their sympathies, who yet, being cursed with this failing, struggle in vain with the events which bear coarser natures to success and to contentment.

Another somewhat singular trait in his cha racter I recall, because it has an important bear ing upon thehistory of the events which I am about to relate. It was the opinions he held about women. They were markedly at variance with those professed by the young men among whom he was living. None are so given to calumniate the character of women as very young men. The mystery which every woman is to herself and to others, they earn a cheap self complacence by ignoring, and with the simplicity of inexperience, they trace every action and event in a woman's existence to plain and generally ignoble motives. Robert Pole, who had spent most of his early life in the easy society of the Continent, had pro bably seen more of women, good, bad, and in different, than any of us, and, as a rule, he abstained from the common talk on the subject.

If he did join in it, it was to laugh down the scoffing and depreciatory tone commonly adopted, and sometimes to set up an ideal type of woman of his own — a type as extravagant, perhaps, in one direction as the opposite one was in another. He silenced, if he did not convince, these worthy young Germans, who, though they blushed and stammered under the eyes of their tutors' daughters, would pretend to the cynicism of a Voltaire or the antecedents of a Richelieu. On the day which followed my conversation with Robert Pole I departed early, and, as I had foreseen, did not see my friend. Arrived at the house which was the destination of my journey, at a distance of some miles, I began to regret that I had not used more insistance in forcing my services on one who could not but require some sympathy, and, perhaps, some assistance.

I therefore returned to the inn on the day following. I questioned the landlord. He informed me that Mr. Pole passed days and nights in his own room, without books or occupation of any sort. I entered, and found him sitting still near the window, looking out upon the bare side of the great moun tain ridge. A thaw had set in, and the snow was only visible in patches on the broad expanse of mountain side. The grey and barren rock showed naked and unseemly beneath it. I looked upon his face, and it was a drearier reflection of the dreari ness he was looking out upon. He thanked me for coming to see him, though he could hardly bring an expression of thanks into his face. I sat with him, and we talked ; he, gently and courteously enough, for the hardness, though not the cold ness, of his voice was departing a little ; but I soon saw that he was beyond comfort, and I respected the sorrow or the anxiety which I knew was weighing upon him.

He had, I was aware, travelled much on the Continent since leaving Heidelberg, and, once or twice that he alluded to this fact, he paused when apparently on the point of speaking on the subject. Once he again made such a pause, longer than usual, and then looked at me very intently for some moments. " I should like," he said, " to tell you all my history. I should like to put before another person the whole circumstances that have brought me down to what I am. It would please me still to think, as I have till now thought, that I was as much beyond the requirement, as I believed I was beyond the reach, of any human sympathy. It is, perhaps, a foolish kind of vanity to desire that. Few men, I think, can be so isolated ; and if they can be in their strength, they cannot in their weakness." With this sort of half apology, he began to talk of the occurrences of his past life ; dwelling on an episode here and there ; sketching this and that scene, character, and incident, with so vivid a recollection, that I, partly from knowledge of and love for the teller, and partly from the skill which he unconsciously used in recounting these occurrences, grew first interested, and then deeply engrossed and moved by his story ; nor were these reminiscences, I thought, altogether painful to himself.

It is said to intensify present misery that a man should remember past happiness ; on the other hand, it is often almost a source of ease to recall former troubles when they are past, even though he who recalls them shall not have outlived their bitterness. We spoke all through the night, he narrating rapidly and eagerly, and as if seeking, at times, to justify his conduct, and, at others, to justify the misery which had overtaken him, and I now and then asking a question ; for the thread of his story was at times broken by the very fulness of his memory, which overlooked details of which I was ignorant. At times he was interrupted by the vehemence of his expression of feelings which he essayed, but was not able at all times, to control. He stopped, and then I saw the extent of his bodily weakness more fully : he was prostrated by the effort he had made.

After this we met again and again, I coming to him as often as my avocations in the neighbourhood would permit. Soon afterwards, urgent business recalled me to London. I pressed him to come with me, disliking the idea of leaving him alone with his brooding misery, in this com fortless solitude. He told me that it was useless for him to think of it ; that his bodily infirmity was greater than it appeared to me ; that my society, my sympathy, and our talk revived what strength he had ; but that long hours of reactive prostration followed our conversations. " Times when I am so nearly dead," he said, with something of his wonted emphasis, " that I cease even to think, and, therefore, to suffer." So we parted, he staying by choice to die among strange people and amidst strange hills. Before I went, I pressed him to write down for me, more fully and more consecutively, what he had already in part related.

I imagined that, in doing this, he would derive some solace, or, at least, some distraction, of the sort that our con versations had already afforded him. He consented — "If," he added, significantly, "I shall have time." What I now place before the reader is the written narration in my friend Pole's hand, and which reached me in London some months after wards.

Chapter II

You have taken, Greville, so kind and, as I like to believe, so fair a view of the circumstances of which, so far as I could do so in conversation, I gave you an outline, that I very gladly comply with your wish to write down for you more fully the history of those events which have brought me to my present condition. You will under stand my motives for silence upon some points in my conversation with you ; and you will, I hope, appreciate and allow for my discursiveness in some others upon which I shall have to dilate. I have omitted nothing of importance, and I ask you to read through to the very end before you pass your judgment. I have undertaken this task at your request, yet it will not have been without its use to me. It will serve as a justification to myself, as well as to you. I cannot regard the matters I have related dispassionately, but I shall earnestly endeavour to represent them with abso lute fairness.

Such as they were, I may not be stating them ; but such as I saw them, such as they were to me, I shall have written them down. After leaving Heidelberg, which was not until a year after your departure, and after spending several years in the society of some of the Euro pean capitals, I finally found my way to Rome, there to meet my family, who were spending the winter season in that city. My father's second marriage, and his death in my extreme youth, have almost deprived me of a home, in the true sense of the word. With my step-mother and with my half-sisters I have always been on the most friendly terms ; but my long absences have quite prevented the growth of any real home sympathies between us. There has never been the shadow of a difference betwixt us, but we are little more than friends, with separate interests and with different tastes.

Of my family, indeed, I shall have little further to say, for they have but a small part in the occurrences which I am going to narrate. I need not say anything of the six months which we spent in Rome, amid the gaieties of the Roman winter and spring^-you have yourself passed some time in Rome, and know the charm of its mixed foreign and English society, of its delicious climate, of the endless delights in the various associations of the city itself. In the spring, my mother and sisters returned to England ; but I did not accompany them, for I could not tear myself away from Italy, and I proposed to spend some portion of the heats of summer in one of those pleasant mountain villages near the capital, to which the Romans themselves resort, when the heats of the plain country and the accompanying fevers make the city unen durable.

A friend, an intimate acquaintance, towards whom a superficial similarity of tastes and an identity of requirements had drawn me during the Roman season, a young Prussian, one of those many friends whom one meets with but small pleasure and parts from with no regret, agreed to rent with me a small villa in the neighbourhood of Albano. It is a place, I think, that you never visited : a little village about twelve miles from Rome, secluded among lofty mountains, whose shadows moderate the fierce glare of the noonday sun, and make one long cool twilight of the after noon : a peaceful retreat, surrounded by woods, through whose oaken glades and mossy lawns were cool and silent walks that a poet or a dreamer might love. Count Rehden and myself were neither, and we, therefore, liked the place none the less that the little town itself and the several white-walled villas round about it were tenanted by some of the friends whom we had known in the course of the previous winter in the capital.

During the period of the summer sojourn of the Italians in these upland retreats, of which there are several, a little society springs up spontaneously among each small community, which, if less gay, is more intimate and agreeable than that of the Roman season. We frequently made parties of pleasure to different parts of the surrounding country. One such occasion is, for reasons which you shall presently know,' peculiarly impressed on my memory. A number of us, ladies and gentle men, were to meet on the banks of a small mountain lake, in our close neighbourhood, to reach which it was necessary first to ascend the steep side of a mountain, and then to descend it by a circuitous path, leading through a tangled thicket, to the valley beneath, deep down in the basin of which lies the tiny lake, circled with a belt of glistening white sand, like a blue gem set in a silver rim.

Here we passed a very pleasant day. The Romans, accounted of an almost Castilian dignity and staidness of demeanour, are only so before chance strangers. To-day the whole party — composed chiefly of Romans, but in which, as is not unusual in the neighbourhood of this gathering-place of all nations, representatives of almost every European nationality were present — was exceedingly joyous. Nevertheless, I can remember nothing of any importance to record till towards evening. It was nightfall, but the darkness (for there was no moon) of the pleasant summer night was no bar to our staying on by the lakeside, and we accordingly did stay. The mountains rose up darkly into the night-air ; and the woods, trembling all day in the sun with green and golden light, now hung like heavy black palls on the hill-sides.

The lake, only, retained some little remains of its brightness ; but it had lost all its blue colour, and, absorbing what remained of light in the heavens, it took the appearance of a little sea of some molten metal. The night falls so abruptly, in southern lands, that these sudden changes in the face of nature have a very strange impressiveness about them. The party was silent for a moment, and in that interval we heard, for the first time, the little waves run in and rest for a space upon the sandy shore, without breaking on it, and the warm summer air breathing among the leaves without stirring them. Not real sounds these, but the veritable voices of silence. There stood a solitary white house on the further border of the lake. It was hid from sight now by the night, but in the day I had noticed it as being apparently the only one in the valley.

Some of the party now proposed to signal to the occupant of this house (who was known to them) by means of a fire lighted on our side of the lake. This suggestion was well received, and very soon a good pile of dry leaves and branches from the wood was collected and fired. The flames leapt up and, growing in height and brightness, soon shone out far over the waters of the lake : we stood still to watch its effect on the dwellers opposite. Presently we saw lights moving about near the house ; then they assembled at one point ; then suddenly grew steady, and we guessed that a boat was being launched ; the lights still glowed steadily, like stars. Soon the torches glared right in upon us, and in a moment the boat — running swiftly in from the last stroke of the oars — glided up to the shore at our feet.

In it were two boatmen and a lady. A slight figure stood up in the boat, in another instant she had stepped ashore ; and so lightly and quickly had she alighted from the high side of the boat, that no one of us had time to give that conventionally offered aid, which, indeed, she seemed very far from requiring. The night was dark and our fire bright, so that as she stood in the boat and, a moment after, among our party ashore, I could see nothing of this lady but a tall, slight and gracefully moving figure. Then she advanced into the red circle of firelight, and then I first saw her face. This lady was Madame Tolmar. You know now, Greville, what part in, and what influence on my life this lady has had ; and I wish to express to you, very distinctly and in as sober language as I can command, the sort of impres sion which this first glimpse of her gave me.

She came towards the glow of the fire, and then I saw her face. It was somewhat pale, and I thought it was owing to the effect of the fire light that it had a peculiar tender, transparent, amber-like tone, such as is possessed by some good portraits, but I found afterwards that this was natural. It was the face of a woman of nearly thirty ; the hair, a chestnut brown, rather light than dark ; growing low on the forehead, it arched upwards, in an insensible curve, towards either temple. The eyebrows were marked, delicate, and in a very regular arch over marvel lously clear, dark grey, well-opened eyes ; the nose straight and the mouth not small, but, though with full lips, exceedingly fine and delicate in the modelling. But features, taken separately, give no idea of a face. They did not strike me then, when perhaps I was, more than afterwards, able to criticize them singly, nearly so much as their peculiar expression.