CHAPTER IV.

"_Gorgibus._-- * * * Je te dis que le mariage est une chose sainte
et sacree: et que c'est faire en honnetes gens, que de debuter par la.

"_Madelon._--Mon Dieu! que si tout le monde vous ressemblait, un
roman serait bientot fini! La belle chose que ce serait, si d'abord
Cyrus epousait Mandane, et qu'Aronce de plain-pied fut marie a Clelie!
* * * Laissez-nous faire a loisir le tissu de notre roman, et n'en
pressez pas tant la conclusion."
MOLIERE. _Les Precieuses Ridicules._


It would be a little hard to blame the rector of Pennicote that in the
course of looking at things from every point of view, he looked at
Gwendolen as a girl likely to make a brilliant marriage. Why should he be
expected to differ from his contemporaries in this matter, and wish his
niece a worse end of her charming maidenhood than they would approve as
the best possible? It is rather to be set down to his credit that his
feelings on the subject were entirely good-natured. And in considering the
relation of means to ends, it would have been mere folly to have been
guided by the exceptional and idylic--to have recommended that Gwendolen
should wear a gown as shabby as Griselda's in order that a marquis might
fall in love with her, or to have insisted that since a fair maiden was to
be sought, she should keep herself out of the way. Mr. Gascoigne's
calculations were of the kind called rational, and he did not even think
of getting a too frisky horse in order that Gwendolen might be threatened
with an accident and be rescued by a man of property. He wished his niece
well, and he meant her to be seen to advantage in the best society of the
neighborhood.

Her uncle's intention fell in perfectly with Gwendolen's own wishes. But
let no one suppose that she also contemplated a brilliant marriage as the
direct end of her witching the world with her grace on horseback, or with
any other accomplishment. That she was to be married some time or other
she would have felt obliged to admit; and that her marriage would not be
of a middling kind, such as most girls were contented with, she felt
quietly, unargumentatively sure. But her thoughts never dwelt on marriage
as the fulfillment of her ambition; the dramas in which she imagined
herself a heroine were not wrought up to that close. To be very much sued
or hopelessly sighed for as a bride was indeed an indispensable and
agreeable guarantee of womanly power; but to become a wife and wear all
the domestic fetters of that condition, was on the whole a vexatious
necessity. Her observation of matrimony had inclined her to think it
rather a dreary state in which a woman could not do what she liked, had
more children than were desirable, was consequently dull, and became
irrevocably immersed in humdrum. Of course marriage was social promotion;
she could not look forward to a single life; but promotions have sometimes
to be taken with bitter herbs--a peerage will not quite do instead of
leadership to the man who meant to lead; and this delicate-limbed sylph of
twenty meant to lead. For such passions dwell in feminine breasts also. In
Gwendolen's, however, they dwelt among strictly feminine furniture, and
had no disturbing reference to the advancement of learning or the balance
of the constitution; her knowledge being such as with no sort of standing-
room or length of lever could have been expected to move the world. She
meant to do what was pleasant to herself in a striking manner; or rather,
whatever she could do so as to strike others with admiration and get in
that reflected way a more ardent sense of living, seemed pleasant to her
fancy.

"Gwendolen will not rest without having the world at her feet," said Miss
Merry, the meek governess: hyperbolical words which have long come to
carry the most moderate meanings; for who has not heard of private persons
having the world at their feet in the shape of some half-dozen items of
flattering regard generally known in a genteel suburb? And words could
hardly be too wide or vague to indicate the prospect that made a hazy
largeness about poor Gwendolen on the heights of her young self-
exultation. Other people allowed themselves to be made slaves of, and to
have their lives blown hither and thither like empty ships in which no
will was present. It was not to be so with her; she would no longer be
sacrificed to creatures worth less than herself, but would make the very
best of the chances that life offered her, and conquer circumstances by
her exceptional cleverness. Certainly, to be settled at Offendene, with
the notice of Lady Brackenshaw, the archery club, and invitations to dine
with the Arrowpoints, as the highest lights in her scenery, was not a
position that seemed to offer remarkable chances; but Gwendolen's
confidence lay chiefly in herself. She felt well equipped for the mastery
of life. With regard to much in her lot hitherto, she held herself rather
hardly dealt with, but as to her "education," she would have admitted that
it had left her under no disadvantages. In the school-room her quick mind
had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected
facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness; and what
remained of all things knowable, she was conscious of being sufficiently
acquainted with through novels, plays and poems. About her French and
music, the two justifying accomplishments of a young lady, she felt no
ground for uneasiness; and when to all these qualifications, negative and
positive, we add the spontaneous sense of capability some happy persons
are born with, so that any subject they turn their attention to impresses
them with their own power of forming a correct judgment on it, who can
wonder if Gwendolen felt ready to manage her own destiny?

There were many subjects in the world--perhaps the majority--in which she
felt no interest, because they were stupid; for subjects are apt to appear
stupid to the young as light seems dull to the old; but she would not have
felt at all helpless in relation to them if they had turned up in
conversation. It must be remembered that no one had disputed her power or
her general superiority. As on the arrival at Offendene, so always, the
first thought of those about her had been, what will Gwendolen think?--if
the footman trod heavily in creaking boots, or if the laundress's work was
unsatisfactory, the maid said, "This will never do for Miss Harleth"; if
the wood smoked in the bedroom fireplace, Mrs. Davilow, whose own weak
eyes suffered much from this inconvenience, spoke apologetically of it to
Gwendolen. If, when they were under the stress of traveling, she did not
appear at the breakfast table till every one else had finished, the only
question was, how Gwendolen's coffee and toast should still be of the
hottest and crispest; and when she appeared with her freshly-brushed
light-brown hair streaming backward and awaiting her mamma's hand to coil
it up, her large brown eyes glancing bright as a wave-washed onyx from
under their long lashes, it was always she herself who had to be tolerant
--to beg that Alice who sat waiting on her would not stick up her
shoulders in that frightful manner, and that Isabel, instead of pushing up
to her and asking questions, would go away to Miss Merry.

Always she was the princess in exile, who in time of famine was to have
her breakfast-roll made of the finest-bolted flour from the seven thin
ears of wheat, and in a general decampment was to have her silver folk
kept out of the baggage. How was this to be accounted for? The answer may
seem to lie quite on the surface:--in her beauty, a certain unusualness
about her, a decision of will which made itself felt in her graceful
movements and clear unhesitating tones, so that if she came into the room
on a rainy day when everybody else was flaccid and the use of things in
general was not apparent to them, there seemed to be a sudden, sufficient
reason for keeping up the forms of life; and even the waiters at hotels
showed the more alacrity in doing away with crumbs and creases and dregs
with struggling flies in them. This potent charm, added to the fact that
she was the eldest daughter, toward whom her mamma had always been in an
apologetic state of mind for the evils brought on her by a step-father,
may seem so full a reason for Gwendolen's domestic empire, that to look
for any other would be to ask the reason of daylight when the sun is
shining. But beware of arriving at conclusions without comparison. I
remember having seen the same assiduous, apologetic attention awarded to
persons who were not at all beautiful or unusual, whose firmness showed
itself in no very graceful or euphonious way, and who were not eldest
daughters with a tender, timid mother, compunctious at having subjected
them to inconveniences. Some of them were a very common sort of men. And
the only point of resemblance among them all was a strong determination to
have what was pleasant, with a total fearlessness in making themselves
disagreeable or dangerous when they did not get it. Who is so much cajoled
and served with trembling by the weak females of a household as the
unscrupulous male--capable, if he has not free way at home, of going and
doing worse elsewhere? Hence I am forced to doubt whether even without her
potent charm and peculiar filial position Gwendolen might not still have
played the queen in exile, if only she had kept her inborn energy of
egoistic desire, and her power of inspiring fear as to what she might say
or do. However, she had the charm, and those who feared her were also fond
of her; the fear and the fondness being perhaps both heightened by what
may be called the iridescence of her character--the play of various, nay,
contrary tendencies. For Macbeth's rhetoric about the impossibility of
being many opposite things in the same moment, referred to the clumsy
necessities of action and not to the subtler possibilities of feeling. We
cannot speak a loyal word and be meanly silent; we cannot kill and not
kill in the same moment; but a moment is wide enough for the loyal and
mean desire, for the outlash of a murderous thought and the sharp backward stroke of repentance.