Beside Still Waters - Arthur Christopher Benson (top 10 novels of all time .txt) 📗

home of its heart, dipping its feet in the crest of the wandering wave, till the land, whither it was bound, should rise like a soft shadow over the horizon; till the shadow became a shape, and at last the tall cliffs, with the green downs above, the glittering plain, the sombre forest, loomed out above one, just beyond where the waves whitened on the loud sea-beaches, and the sound of the breakers came harmoniously over the waste of waters, like the soft tolling of a muffled bell.


XVIII

His Father's Death--Illness--A New Home--The New Light

Up to this time it may be said that Hugh had never felt the pressure of sordid anxieties, or experienced any sorrows but the sorrows of pure emotion. But now all at once there fell on him a series of heavy afflictions. His father died after a very short illness; so little had a fatal result been expected, that Hugh only reached home after his death. It happened that the last sight he had had of his father had been one of peculiar brightness. He had been staying at home, and, on the morning of his return to Cambridge, had gone into the study for a parting talk. He had found his father in a mood, not common with him, but which was growing commoner as he grew older, of serene cheerfulness. He had talked to Hugh very eagerly about a little book of poems that Hugh had lately published. Hugh had hardly mentioned it to his father beforehand, but he had dedicated the book to him, though he imagined that his father must consider poetry a dilettante kind of occupation. He was amazed to find, when he discussed the book with his father, that he was met with so vivid and personal a sympathy, that he discerned that the writing of poetry must have been a preoccupation of his father's in early days, one of those delicate ambitions on which he had sharply turned the key. His mother and sister were away for the day, so that when it was time to go, and the carriage was announced, there was no one but his father in the house. He had, as his custom was, laid his hand on his son's head, and blessed him with a deep emotion, adding a few words of love and confidence that had filled Hugh's eyes with tears; and his father had then put his arm through his son's, walked to the door with him, and had stood there in the bright morning, with his grey hair stirred by the wind, waving his hand till the carriage had turned the corner of the shrubbery.

Hugh often suffered from a certain apprehensiveness of mind on leaving home; he had sometimes wondered, as he said farewell to the group, whether he would see them thus again. But that morning it had never occurred to him that there was any such possibility in store for him; so that now, when he returned to the darkened house, and presently saw that pale, still form, with a quiet smile on the face, as of one satisfied beyond his dearest wish, he plunged into a depth of ineffectual sorrow such as he had never known before. The one thought that sustained him was that he and his father had loved, understood, and trusted each other. It was a horror to Hugh to think what his feelings might have been in the old days, if his father had died when his own predominant emotion had been a respectful fear of him.

It seemed impossible to believe that all the activities of that long life were over; and as Hugh went through his father's papers, with incessant little heart-broken griefs at the arrangements and precisions that had stood for so much devoted faithfulness and loyal responsibility, it seemed to him as though the door must open, and the well-known figure, with the smile that Hugh knew so well, stand before him.

The first disaster that was revealed to him was the smallness of his father's fortune; his father, though often talking about business to his son, had a curious reticence about money affairs, and had never prepared him for the scantiness of the provision that he had accumulated. Hugh saw at once that the utmost care would have for the future to be exercised, and that their whole scale of life must be altered. The fact was that his father's professional income had been ample, and that he had had a strong dislike to saving money from ecclesiastical sources. The home must evidently be broken up at once, and a small house taken for his mother. But fortunately both his mother and sister were entirely undismayed by this; their tastes were simple enough; but Hugh saw that he would have himself to contribute to their assistance. With his own small fortune, his literary work, and a little academical work that he was doing, he had been able to live comfortably enough without taking thought; but now he saw that all this must be curtailed. He had an intense dislike of thinking about money; and he therefore determined that there should be no small economies on his part, but that he would simply, if necessary, alter his easy scale of living.

It was a terrible process disestablishing the old home; the sale of furniture and books, the displacing of the old pictures, seemed to tear and rend all sorts of delicate fibres; but at last the house was dismantled, and it became a bitter sort of joy to leave a place that had become like a sad skeleton of one that he had loved. The trees, the flowers, the church-tower over the elms--as they drove away on that last morning, these seemed to regard him with mournful and hollow eyes; the parting was indeed so intensely sad, that Hugh experienced a grim relief in completing it; and there fell on him a deep dreariness of spirit, which seemed at last to benumb him, until he felt that he could no longer care for anything.

He returned at last to Cambridge; and now illness fell upon him for the second time in his life. Not a definite illness, but a lingering _malaise_, which seemed to bereave him of all spring and energy. He was told that he must not work, must spend his time in the open air, must be careful in matters of food and sleep. He lived indeed for some months the life of an invalid. The restrictions fretted him intolerably; but he found that every carelessness brought its swift revenge. He had previously felt little or no sympathy with invalids; he had disliked the signs of illness in others, the languor, the sunken eye, the fretfulness of fever, and now he had to bear them himself. He had always felt, half unconsciously, that illness was a fanciful thing, and might be avoided by a kind of cheerful effort. But now he had to go through the experience of feebleness and peevish inactivity. He used sometimes, out of pure irritability, to resume his work; but he had no grip or vigour; his conceptions were languid, his technical resources were dulled; and then came strange and unmanning dizzinesses, the horrible feeling, in the middle of a cheerful company, that one is hardly accountable for one's actions, when the only escape seems to be to hold on with all one's might to the slenderest thread of conventional thought. The difficulty was to know how to fill the time. There was no relish in company, and yet a hatred of solitude; he used to moon about, sit in the garden, take irresolute walks; he read novels, and found them unutterably dreary. Music was the only thing that lifted him out of his causeless depression, and gave back a little zest to life; but the fear that was almost intolerable was the possibility that he would never emerge out of this wretchedness. Day after day passed, and no change was apparent; till just when he was on the verge of despair, when the darkest visions began to haunt his mind, the cloud began to lift. He found that he could work a little, though the smallest excess was still punished by days of feebleness. But, holding to this thread of hope, Hugh climbed slowly out of the darkness; and it was a day to him of deep and abiding gratitude when, after a long Swiss holiday, in which his bodily activity had come back to him with an intensity of pleasure, Hugh realised that he was again in his ordinary health.

But he had at this time a bitter disappointment. Just before his father's death he had finished preparing a little work for publication, a set of essays on a variety of subjects, to which he had devoted much care and thought. To his deep vexation it met with a very contemptuous reception. Its errors were mercilessly criticised, and it was proclaimed to be the work of a sickly, sentimental dilettante. Hugh found it hard to believe in the verdict; but his conviction was established by the opinion of one of his old friends who, as kindly as possible, pointed out that the book was both thin and egotistical. Hugh felt as if he could never write again, and as if the chief occupation of his life would be gone; but with renewed health his confidence returned, and in a few weeks he was able to look the situation in the face. The reception of the book had brought home to him the direction in which he was drifting. He saw that a certain toughness and hardness of fibre had been wanting. He saw that he had tried to fill a book up out of his own mind, in a leisurely and trifling mood. He had not attempted to grasp his subjects, but had allowed himself to put down loose and half-hearted impressions, instead of trying to see into the essence of the things he was describing.

But, his illness over, he was astonished to find how little both money anxieties and the shattering of literary hopes distressed him. For the first, it was clear that his mother and sister could live with an adequate degree of comfort and dignity. And as for his literary hopes, he realised that the failure had been a real revelation of his own weakness; but he realised too that other people would forget about the book still faster than he himself, and that no previous failures would damn a further work, if only it possessed the true qualities of art; and indeed from this time he dated a real increase of artistic faculty, a sense of constraining vocation, a joy in literary labour, which soon, like a sunrise, brightened all his horizon; and it was pleasant too, though Hugh did not overvalue it, to find his work beginning to bring him a definite, though slight reputation, and a position among imaginative critics.

Moreover his new home began to have a very potent charm for him. His mother had settled in a small ancient house in the depths of the country. They had very few neighbours. The little building itself was full of charm, the charm of mellow beauty and old human ownership; it was embosomed among trees, and had a small walled garden, rich in flowers and shade. He had been there but a few weeks, when he realised that the old feeling of a vague friendliness and intimate concern with nature had come back. It was as though the