A Country Gentleman and His Family · Chapter 15 (2/2)

Cavendish looked at his companion with eyes that twinkled with a sort of tragic laughter. It was natural for the young one to feel himself in a grand and unique position, as a very young man seized by a grand passion is so apt to do; but the fine superiority and conviction that he was not as other men gave a grim amusement to the man who was so easygoing, whose life was all plain sailing in the other’s sight. “All the more reason,” he said, with a laugh, “being safe myself, that I should take an interest in you.” He laughed again, so that for the moment Warrender, with momentary rage, believed himself the object of his friend’s derision. But a glance at Cavendish dispelled this fear, and presently each retired into his corner, and they sat opposite to each other saying nothing, while the long levels of the green country flew past them, and the clang of the going swept every other sound away. They were alone in their compartment, each buried in his thoughts: the one in all the absorption of a sudden and overwhelming passion, not without a certain pride in it and in himself, although consciously thinking of nothing but of her, going over and over their last interviews, and forming visions to himself of the future; while the other, he who was so easygoing, the cheerful companion, unexpectedly found to be so sympathetic, but otherwise somewhat compassionately regarded as superficial and commonplace by the youth newly plunged into life⁠—the other went back into those recollections which were his, which had been confided to none, which he had thought laid to rest and half forgotten, but which had suddenly surged up again with so extraordinary a revival of pain. The presence of Warrender opposite to him, and the unconscious revelation he had made of the condition of his own mind and thoughts, had transported Dick back again for a moment into what seemed an age, a century past, the time when he had been as his friend was, in the ecstasy of a youthful passion. He remembered that; then with quick scorn and disdain turned from the thought, and plunged into the deep abysses of possibility which he now saw opening at his feet. He had said to himself that the past was altogether past, and that he could begin in his own country, far from the associations of his brief and unhappy meddling with fate, a new existence, one natural to him, among his own people, in the occupations he understood. He had not understood either himself or life in that strange, extravagant essay at living which he had made and ended, as he had thought, and of which nobody knew anything. How could he tell, he asked himself now, how much or how little was known? Was anything ever ended until death had put the finis to mortal history?

These young men sat opposite to each other, two excellent examples of the wellborn, well-bred young Englishman, admirably dressed, with that indifference to and ease in their well-fitting garments, that easy and careful simplicity, which only the Anglo-Saxon seems able to attain to in such apparel; Warrender, indeed, with something of that dreamy look about the eyes which betrays the abstraction of the mind in a realm of imagination, but nothing besides which could have suggested to any spectator the presence of either mystery in the past or danger in the future, beyond the dangers of flood or field. They were both above the reach of need, but both with that wholesome necessity for doing which is in English blood, and all the world before them⁠—public duty and private happiness, the inheritance of the class to which they belonged. Yet to one care had come in the guise of passion; and the other was setting out upon a second beginning, no one knew how heavily laden and handicapped in the struggle of life.