Colonel Quaritch, V.C.: Chapter 15

Chapter 15

THE HAPPY DAYS

This is a troublesome world enough, but thanks to that mitigating fate
which now and again interferes to our advantage, there do come to most
of us times and periods of existence which, if they do not quite
fulfil all the conditions of ideal happiness, yet go near enough to
that end to permit in after days of our imagining that they did so. I
say to most of us, but in doing so I allude chiefly to those classes
commonly known as the "upper," by which is understood those who have
enough bread to put into their mouths and clothes to warm them; those,
too, who are not the present subjects of remorseless and hideous
ailments, who are not daily agonised by the sight of their famished
offspring; who are not doomed to beat out their lives against the
madhouse bars, or to see their hearts' beloved and their most
cherished hope wither towards that cold space from whence no message
comes. For such unfortunates, and for their million-numbered kin upon
the globe--the victims of war, famine, slave trade, oppression, usury,
over-population, and the curse of competition, the rays of light must
be few indeed; few and far between, only just enough to save them from
utter hopelessness. And even to the favoured ones, the well warmed and
well fed, who are to a great extent lifted by fortune or by their
native strength and wit above the degradations of the world, this
light of happiness is but as the gleam of stars, uncertain, fitful,
and continually lost in clouds. Only the utterly selfish or the
utterly ignorant can be happy with the happiness of savages or
children, however prosperous their own affairs, for to the rest, to
those who think and have hearts to feel, and imagination to realise,
and a redeeming human sympathy to be touched, the mere weight of the
world's misery pressing round them like an atmosphere, the mere echoes
of the groans of the dying and the cries of the children are
sufficient, and more than sufficient, to dull, aye, to destroy the
promise of their joys. But, even to this finer sort there do come rare
periods of almost complete happiness--little summers in the
tempestuous climate of our years, green-fringed wells of water in our
desert, pure northern lights breaking in upon our gloom. And strange
as it may seem, these breadths of happy days, when the old questions
cease to torment, and a man can trust in Providence and without one
qualifying thought bless the day that he was born, are very frequently
connected with the passion which is known as love; that mysterious
symbol of our double nature, that strange tree of life which, with its
roots sucking their strength from the dust-heap of humanity, yet
springs aloft above our level and bears its blooms in the face of
heaven.

Why it is and what it means we shall perhaps never know for certain.
But it does suggest itself, that as the greatest terror of our being
lies in the utter loneliness, the unspeakable identity, and unchanging
self-completeness of every living creature, so the greatest hope and
the intensest natural yearning of our hearts go out towards that
passion which in its fire heats has the strength, if only for a little
while, to melt down the barriers of our individuality and give to the
soul something of the power for which it yearns of losing its sense of
solitude in converse with its kind. For alone we are from infancy to
death!--we, for the most part, grow not more near together but rather
wider apart with the widening years. Where go the sympathies between
the parent and the child, and where is the close old love of brother
for his brother?

The invisible fates are continually wrapping us round and round with
the winding sheets of our solitude, and none may know all our heart
save He who made it. We are set upon the world as the stars are set
upon the sky, and though in following our fated orbits we pass and
repass, and each shine out on each, yet are we the same lonely lights,
rolling obedient to laws we cannot understand, through spaces of which
none may mark the measure.

Only, as says the poet in words of truth and beauty:

 "Only but this is rare--
  When a beloved hand is laid in ours,
  When jaded with the rush and glare
  Of the interminable hours,
  Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear;
  When our world-deafened ear
  Is by the tones of a loved voice caressed
  A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast
  And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again--
  And what we mean we say and what we would we know.
        *       *       *       *       *
  And then he thinks he knows
  The hills where his life rose
  And the sea whereunto it goes."

Some such Indian summer of delight and forgetfulness of trouble, and
the tragic condition of our days, was now opening to Harold Quaritch
and Ida de la Molle. Every day, or almost every day, they met and went
upon their painting expeditions and argued the point of the validity
or otherwise of the impressionist doctrines of art. Not that of all
this painting came anything very wonderful, although in the evening
the Colonel would take out his canvases and contemplate their rigid
proportions with singular pride and satisfaction. It was a little
weakness of his to think that he could paint, and one of which he was
somewhat tenacious. Like many another man he could do a number of
things exceedingly well and one thing very badly, and yet had more
faith in that bad thing than in all the good.

But, strange to say, although he affected to believe so firmly in his
own style of art and hold Ida's in such cheap regard, it was a little
painting of the latter's that he valued most, and which was oftenest
put upon his easel for purposes of solitary admiration. It was one of
those very impressionist productions that faded away in the distance,
and full of soft grey tints, such as his soul loathed. There was a
tree with a blot of brown colour on it, and altogether (though as a
matter of fact a clever thing enough) from his point of view of art it
was utterly "anathema." This little picture in oils faintly shadowed
out himself sitting at his easel, working in the soft grey of the
autumn evening, and Ida had painted it and given it to him, and that
was why he admired it so much. For to speak the truth, our friend the
Colonel was going, going fast--sinking out of sight of his former self
into the depths of the love that possessed his soul.

He was a very simple and pure-minded man. Strange as it may appear,
since that first unhappy business of his youth, of which he had never
been heard to speak, no living woman had been anything to him.
Therefore, instead of becoming further vulgarised and hardened by
association with all the odds and ends of womankind that a man
travelling about the globe comes into contact with, generally not
greatly to his improvement, his faith had found time to grow up
stronger even than at first. Once more he looked upon woman as a young
man looks before he has had bitter experience of the world--as a being
to be venerated and almost worshipped, as something better, brighter,
purer than himself, hardly to be won, and when won to be worn like a
jewel prized at once for value and for beauty.

Now this is a dangerous state of mind for a man of three or four and
forty to fall into, because it is a soft state, and this is a world in
which the softest are apt to get the worst of it. At four and forty a
man, of course, should be hard enough to get the better of other
people, as indeed he generally is.

When Harold Quaritch, after that long interval, set his eyes again
upon Ida's face, he felt a curious change come over him. All the vague
ideas and more or less poetical aspirations which for five long years
had gathered themselves about that memory, took shape and form, and in
his heart he knew he loved her. Then as the days went on and he came
to know her better, he grew to love her more and more, till at last
his whole heart went out towards his late found treasure, and she
became more than life to him, more than aught else had been or could
be. Serene and happy were those days which they spent in painting and
talking as they wandered about the Honham Castle grounds. By degrees
Ida's slight but perceptible hardness of manner wore away, and she
stood out what she was, one of the sweetest and most natural women in
England, and with it all, a woman having brains and force of
character.

Soon Harold discovered that her life had been anything but an easy
one. The constant anxiety about money and her father's affairs had
worn her down and hardened her till, as she said, she began to feel as
though she had no heart left. Then too he heard all her trouble about
her dead and only brother James, how dearly she had loved him, and
what a sore trouble he had been with his extravagant ways and his
continual demands for money, which had to be met somehow or other. At
last came the crushing blow of his death, and with it the certainty of
the extinction of the male line of the de la Molles, and she said that
for a while she had believed her father would never hold up his head
again. But his vitality was equal to the shock, and after a time the
debts began to come in, which although he was not legally bound to do
so, her father would insist upon meeting to the last farthing for the
honour of the family and out of respect for his son's memory. This
increased their money troubles, which had gone on and on, always
getting worse as the agricultural depression deepened, till things had
reached their present position.

All this she told him bit by bit, only keeping back from him the last
development of the drama with the part that Edward Cossey had played
in it, and sad enough it made him to think of that ancient house of de
la Molle vanishing into the night of ruin.

Also she told him something of her own life, how companionless it had
been since her brother went into the army, for she had no real friends
about Honham, and not even an acquaintance of her own tastes, which,
without being gushingly so, were decidedly artistic and intellectual.
"I should have wished," she said, "to try to do something in the
world. I daresay I should have failed, for I know that very few women
meet with a success which is worth having. But still I should have
liked to try, for I am not afraid of work. But the current of my life
is against it; the only thing that is open to me is to strive and make
both ends meet upon an income which is always growing smaller, and to
save my father, poor dear, from as much worry as I can.

"Don't think that I am complaining," she went on hurriedly, "or that I
want to rush into pleasure-seeking, because I do not--a little of that
goes a long way with me. Besides, I know that I have many things to be
thankful for. Few women have such a kind father as mine, though we do
quarrel at times. Of course we cannot have everything our own way in
this world, and I daresay that I do not make the best of things.
Still, at times it does seem a little hard that I should be forced to
lead such a narrow life, just when I feel that I could work in a wide
one."

Harold looked up at her face and saw that a tear was gathering in her
dark eyes and in his heart he registered a vow that if by any means it
ever lay within his power to improve her lot he would give everything
he had to do it. But all he said was:

"Don't be downhearted, Miss de la Molle. Things change in a wonderful
way, and often they mend when they look worst. You know," he went on a
little nervously, "I am an old-fashioned sort of individual, and I
believe in Providence and all that sort of thing, you see, and that
matters generally come pretty well straight in the long run if people
deserve it."

Ida shook her head a little doubtfully and sighed.

"Perhaps," she said, "but I suppose that we do not deserve it. Anyhow,
our good fortune is a long while coming," and the conversation
dropped.

Still her friend's strong belief in the efficacy of Providence, and
generally his masculine sturdiness, did cheer her up considerably.
Even the strongest women, if they have any element that can be called
feminine left in them, want somebody of the other sex to lean on, and
she was no exception to the rule. Besides, if Ida's society had charms
for Colonel Quaritch, his society had almost if not quite as much
charm for her. It may be remembered that on the night when they first
met she had spoken to herself of him as the kind of man whom she would
like to marry. The thought was a passing one, and it may be safely
said that she had not since entertained any serious idea of marriage
in connection with Colonel Quaritch. The only person whom there seemed
to be the slightest probability of her marrying was Edward Cossey, and
the mere thought of this was enough to make the whole idea of
matrimony repugnant to her.

But this notwithstanding, day by day she found Harold Quaritch's
society more congenial. Herself by nature, and also to a certain
degree by education, a cultured woman, she rejoiced to find in him an
entirely kindred spirit. For beneath his somewhat rugged and
unpromising exterior, Harold Quaritch hid a vein of considerable
richness. Few of those who associated with him would have believed
that the man had a side to his nature which was almost poetic, or that
he was a ripe and finished scholar, and, what is more, not devoid of a
certain dry humour. Then he had travelled far and seen much of men and
manners, gathering up all sorts of quaint odds and ends of
information. But perhaps rather than these accomplishments it was the
man's transparent honesty and simple-mindedness, his love for what is
true and noble, and his contempt of what is mean and base, which,
unwittingly peeping out through his conversation, attracted her more
than all the rest. Ida was no more a young girl, to be caught by a
handsome face or dazzled by a superficial show of mind. She was a
thoughtful, ripened woman, quick to perceive, and with the rare talent
of judgment wherewith to weigh the proceeds of her perception. In
plain, middle-aged Colonel Quaritch she found a very perfect
gentleman, and valued him accordingly.

And so day grew into day through that lovely autumn-tide. Edward
Cossey was away in London, Quest had ceased from troubling, and
journeying together through the sweet shadows of companionship, by
slow but sure degrees they drew near to the sunlit plain of love. For
it is not common, indeed, it is so uncommon as to be almost
impossible, that a man and woman between whom there stands no natural
impediment can halt for very long in those shadowed ways. There is
throughout all nature an impulse that pushes ever onwards towards
completion, and from completion to fruition. Liking leads to sympathy,
sympathy points the path to love, and then love demands its own. This
is the order of affairs, and down its well-trodden road these two were
quickly travelling.

George the wily saw it, and winked his eye with solemn meaning. The
Squire also saw something of it, not being wanting in knowledge of the
world, and after much cogitation and many solitary walks elected to
leave matters alone for the present. He liked Colonel Quaritch, and
thought that it would be a good thing for Ida to get married, though
the idea of parting from her troubled his heart sorely. Whether or no
it would be desirable from his point of view that she should marry the
Colonel was a matter on which he had not as yet fully made up his
mind. Sometimes he thought it would, and sometimes he thought the
reverse. Then at times vague ideas suggested by Edward Cossey's
behaviour about the loan would come to puzzle him. But at present he
was so much in the dark that he could come to no absolute decision, so
with unaccustomed wisdom for so headstrong and precipitate a man, he
determined to refrain from interference, and for a while at any rate
allow events to take their natural course.

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