The Professor (35 page)

When Hunsden is staying alone at the Wood (which seldom happens)
he generally finds his way two or three times a week to Daisy
Lane. He has a philanthropic motive for coming to smoke his
cigar in our porch on summer evenings; he says he does it to kill
the earwigs amongst the roses, with which insects, but for his
benevolent fumigations, he intimates we should certainly be
overrun. On wet days, too, we are almost sure to see him;
according to him, it gets on time to work me into lunacy by
treading on my mental corns, or to force from Mrs. Crimsworth
revelations of the dragon within her, by insulting the memory of
Hofer and Tell.

We also go frequently to Hunsden Wood, and both I and Frances
relish a visit there highly. If there are other guests, their
characters are an interesting study; their conversation is
exciting and strange; the absence of all local narrowness both in
the host and his chosen society gives a metropolitan, almost a
cosmopolitan freedom and largeness to the talk. Hunsden himself
is a polite man in his own house: he has, when he chooses to
employ it, an inexhaustible power of entertaining guests; his
very mansion too is interesting, the rooms look storied, the
passages legendary, the low-ceiled chambers, with their long rows
of diamond-paned lattices, have an old-world, haunted air: in
his travels he hall collected stores of articles of VERTU, which
are well and tastefully disposed in his panelled or tapestried
rooms: I have seen there one or two pictures, and one or two
pieces of statuary which many an aristocratic connoisseur might
have envied.

When I and Frances have dined and spent an evening with Hunsden,
he often walks home with us. His wood is large, and some of the
timber is old and of huge growth. There are winding ways in it
which, pursued through glade and brake, make the walk back to
Daisy Lane a somewhat long one. Many a time, when we have had
the benefit of a full moon, and when the night has been mild and
balmy, when, moreover, a certain nightingale has been singing,
and a certain stream, hid in alders, has lent the song a soft
accompaniment, the remote church-bell of the one hamlet in a
district of ten miles, has tolled midnight ere the lord of the
wood left us at our porch. Free-flowing was his talk at such
hours, and far more quiet and gentle than in the day-time and
before numbers. He would then forget politics and discussion,
and would dwell on the past times of his house, on his family
history, on himself and his own feelings—subjects each and all
invested with a peculiar zest, for they were each and all unique.
One glorious night in June, after I had been taunting him about
his ideal bride and asking him when she would come and graft her
foreign beauty on the old Hunsden oak, he answered suddenly—

"You call her ideal; but see, here is her shadow; and there
cannot be a shadow without a substance."

He had led us from the depth of the "winding way" into a glade
from whence the beeches withdrew, leaving it open to the sky; an
unclouded moon poured her light into this glade, and Hunsden held
out under her beam an ivory miniature.

Frances, with eagerness, examined it first; then she gave it to
me—still, however, pushing her little face close to mine, and
seeking in my eyes what I thought of the portrait. I thought it
represented a very handsome and very individual-looking female
face, with, as he had once said, "straight and harmonious
features." It was dark; the hair, raven-black, swept not only
from the brow, but from the temples—seemed thrust away
carelessly, as if such beauty dispensed with, nay, despised
arrangement. The Italian eye looked straight into you, and an
independent, determined eye it was; the mouth was as firm as
fine; the chin ditto. On the back of the miniature was gilded
"Lucia."

"That is a real head," was my conclusion.

Hunsden smiled.

"I think so," he replied. "All was real in Lucia."

"And she was somebody you would have liked to marry—but could
not?"

"I should certainly have liked to marry her, and that I HAVE not
done so is a proof that I COULD not."

He repossessed himself of the miniature, now again in Frances'
hand, and put it away.

"What do YOU think of it?" he asked of my wife, as he buttoned
his coat over it.

"I am sure Lucia once wore chains and broke them," was the
strange answer. "I do not mean matrimonial chains," she added,
correcting herself, as if she feared mis-interpretation, "but
social chains of some sort. The face is that of one who has made
an effort, and a successful and triumphant effort, to wrest some
vigorous and valued faculty from insupportable constraint; and
when Lucia's faculty got free, I am certain it spread wide
pinions and carried her higher than—" she hesitated.

"Than what?" demanded Hunsden.

"Than 'les convenances' permitted you to follow."

"I think you grow spiteful—impertinent."

"Lucia has trodden the stage," continued Frances. "You never
seriously thought of marrying her; you admired her originality,
her fearlessness, her energy of body and mind; you delighted in
her talent, whatever that was, whether song, dance, or dramatic
representation; you worshipped her beauty, which was of the sort
after your own heart: but I am sure she filled a sphere from
whence you would never have thought of taking a wife."

"Ingenious," remarked Hunsden; "whether true or not is another
question. Meantime, don't you feel your little lamp of a spirit
wax very pale, beside such a girandole as Lucia's?"

"Yes."

"Candid, at least; and the Professor will soon be dissatisfied
with the dim light you give?"

"Will you, monsieur?"

"My sight was always too weak to endure a blaze, Frances," and we
had now reached the wicket.

I said, a few pages back, that this is a sweet summer evening; it
is—there has been a series of lovely days, and this is the
loveliest; the hay is just carried from my fields, its perfume
still lingers in the air. Frances proposed to me, an hour or two
since, to take tea out on the lawn; I see the round table, loaded
with china, placed under a certain beech; Hunsden is expected
—nay, I hear he is come—there is his voice, laying down the law
on some point with authority; that of Frances replies; she
opposes him of course. They are disputing about Victor, of whom
Hunsden affirms that his mother is making a milksop. Mrs.
Crimsworth retaliates:—

"Better a thousand times he should be a milksop than what he,
Hunsden, calls 'a fine lad;' and moreover she says that if
Hunsden were to become a fixture in the neighbourhood, and were
not a mere comet, coming and going, no one knows how, when,
where, or why, she should be quite uneasy till she had got Victor
away to a school at least a hundred miles off; for that with his
mutinous maxims and unpractical dogmas, he would ruin a score of
children."

I have a word to say of Victor ere I shut this manuscript in my
desk—but it must be a brief one, for I hear the tinkle of silver
on porcelain.

Victor is as little of a pretty child as I am of a handsome man,
or his mother of a fine woman; he is pale and spare, with large
eyes, as dark as those of Frances, and as deeply set as mine.
His shape is symmetrical enough, but slight; his health is good.
I never saw a child smile less than he does, nor one who knits
such a formidable brow when sitting over a book that interests
him, or while listening to tales of adventure, peril, or wonder,
narrated by his mother, Hunsden, or myself. But though still, he
is not unhappy—though serious, not morose; he has a
susceptibility to pleasurable sensations almost too keen, for it
amounts to enthusiasm. He learned to read in the old-fashioned
way out of a spelling-book at his mother's knee, and as he got on
without driving by that method, she thought it unnecessary to buy
him ivory letters, or to try any of the other inducements to
learning now deemed indispensable. When he could read, he became
a glutton of books, and is so still. His toys have been few, and
he has never wanted more. For those he possesses, he seems to
have contracted a partiality amounting to affection; this
feeling, directed towards one or two living animals of the house,
strengthens almost to a passion.

Mr. Hunsden gave him a mastiff cub, which he called Yorke, after
the donor; it grew to a superb dog, whose fierceness, however,
was much modified by the companionship and caresses of its young
master. He would go nowhere, do nothing without Yorke; Yorke
lay at his feet while he learned his lessons, played with him in
the garden, walked with him in the lane and wood, sat near his
chair at meals, was fed always by his own hand, was the first
thing he sought in the morning, the last he left at night. Yorke
accompanied Mr. Hunsden one day to X—, and was bitten in the
street by a dog in a rabid state. As soon as Hunsden had brought
him home, and had informed me of the circumstance, I went into
the yard and shot him where he lay licking his wound: he was
dead in an instant; he had not seen me level the gun; I stood
behind him. I had scarcely been ten minutes in the house, when
my ear was struck with sounds of anguish: I repaired to the yard
once more, for they proceeded thence. Victor was kneeling beside
his dead mastiff, bent over it, embracing its bull-like neck, and
lost in a passion of the wildest woe: he saw me.

"Oh, papa, I'll never forgive you! I'll never forgive you!" was
his exclamation. "You shot Yorke—I saw it from the window. I
never believed you could be so cruel—I can love you no more!"

I had much ado to explain to him, with a steady voice, the stern
necessity of the deed; he still, with that inconsolable and
bitter accent which I cannot render, but which pierced my heart,
repeated—

"He might have been cured—you should have tried—you should have
burnt the wound with a hot iron, or covered it with caustic. You
gave no time; and now it is too late—he is dead!"

He sank fairly down on the senseless carcase; I waited patiently
a long while, till his grief had somewhat exhausted him; and then
I lifted him in my arms and carried him to his mother, sure that
she would comfort him best. She had witnessed the whole scene
from a window; she would not come out for fear of increasing my
difficulties by her emotion, but she was ready now to receive
him. She took him to her kind heart, and on to her gentle lap;
consoled him but with her lips, her eyes, her soft embrace, for
some time; and then, when his sobs diminished, told him that
Yorke had felt no pain in dying, and that if he had been left to
expire naturally, his end would have been most horrible; above
all, she told him that I was not cruel (for that idea seemed to
give exquisite pain to poor Victor), that it was my affection for
Yorke and him which had made me act so, and that I was now almost
heart-broken to see him weep thus bitterly.

Victor would have been no true son of his father, had these
considerations, these reasons, breathed in so low, so sweet a
tone—married to caresses so benign, so tender—to looks so
inspired with pitying sympathy—produced no effect on him. They
did produce an effect: he grew calmer, rested his face on her
shoulder, and lay still in her arms. Looking up, shortly, he
asked his mother to tell him over again what she had said about
Yorke having suffered no pain, and my not being cruel; the balmy
words being repeated, he again pillowed his cheek on her breast,
and was again tranquil.

Some hours after, he came to me in my library, asked if I forgave
him, and desired to be reconciled. I drew the lad to my side,
and there I kept him a good while, and had much talk with him,
in the course of which he disclosed many points of feeling and
thought I appoved of in my son. I found, it is true, few
elements of the "good fellow" or the "fine fellow" in him; scant
sparkles of the spirit which loves to flash over the wine cup, or
which kindles the passions to a destroying fire; but I saw in the
soil of his heart healthy and swelling germs of compassion,
affection, fidelity. I discovered in the garden of his intellect
a rich growth of wholesome principles—reason, justice, moral
courage, promised, if not blighted, a fertile bearing. So I
bestowed on his large forehead, and on his cheek—still pale with
tears—a proud and contented kiss, and sent him away comforted.
Yet I saw him the next day laid on the mound under which Yorke
had been buried, his face covered with his hands; he was
melancholy for some weeks, and more than a year elapsed before he
would listen to any proposal of having another dog.

Victor learns fast. He must soon go to Eton, where, I suspect,
his first year or two will be utter wretchedness: to leave me,
his mother, and his home, will give his heart an agonized wrench;
then, the fagging will not suit him—but emulation, thirst after
knowledge, the glory of success, will stir and reward him in
time. Meantime, I feel in myself a strong repugnance to fix the
hour which will uproot my sole olive branch, and transplant it
far from me; and, when I speak to Frances on the subject, I am
heard with a kind of patient pain, as though I alluded to some
fearful operation, at which her nature shudders, but from which
her fortitude will not permit her to recoil. The step must,
however, be taken, and it shall be; for, though Frances will not
make a milksop of her son, she will accustom him to a style of
treatment, a forbearance, a congenial tenderness, he will meet
with from none else. She sees, as I also see, a something in
Victor's temper—a kind of electrical ardour and power—which
emits, now and then, ominous sparks; Hunsden calls it his spirit,
and says it should not be curbed. I call it the leaven of the
offending Adam, and consider that it should be, if not WHIPPED
out of him, at least soundly disciplined; and that he will be
cheap of any amount of either bodily or mental suffering which
will ground him radically in the art of self-control. Frances
gives this something in her son's marked character no name; but
when it appears in the grinding of his teeth, in the glittering
of his eye, in the fierce revolt of feeling against
disappointment, mischance, sudden sorrow, or supposed injustice,
she folds him to her breast, or takes him to walk with her alone
in the wood; then she reasons with him like any philosopher, and
to reason Victor is ever accessible; then she looks at him with
eyes of love, and by love Victor can be infallibly subjugated;
but will reason or love be the weapons with which in future the
world will meet his violence? Oh, no! for that flash in his
black eye—for that cloud on his bony brow—for that compression
of his statuesque lips, the lad will some day get blows instead
of blandishments—kicks instead of kisses; then for the fit of
mute fury which will sicken his body and madden his soul; then
for the ordeal of merited and salutary suffering, out of which he
will come (I trust) a wiser and a better man.