It was beautiful, it was almost excessive; for it had something of the morbid nature of an affection between two people too closely allied for the proper amount of reflection to take place between them; what her mother felt passed almost instantly through Stella’s mind; there was no need for the brain to ponder and criticize what the soul knew. Your grandmother would no doubt have liked some brisker resistance, some intellectual opposition, calling out a different sort of care; she may well have felt that the tie was too close to be wholesome, and might hinder Stella from entertaining those natural feelings upon which she set so high a value. Even a short parting was unduly painful; Stella was white as a ghost for days before she went abroad, and broke once into a passion of tears. “What can it matter where we are”, she said, “so long as we are all together?”
Her feeling during the last years became ever more anxious, as she detected signs of failing health in her mother, and could not contrive in any way to give her the rest which of all things she needed. Her silence with her stepfather almost gave way now and then to sharp and open remonstrance; for he never seemed to see, what was so plain to her eye, the innumerable things that his wife did, or how terribly she was worn. Then, in the spring of 1895 Stella was driven abroad, and half-way through the journey she became convinced by sign of handwriting or phrase, that her mother lay ill at home. She appealed to Vanessa, who could only send an answer dictated by her mother. Slight illness had indeed attacked her, but with the strange and ghastly fantasy of one who plays a part to the end, she would insist that the truth should not yet be told. Stella came home with a consciousness like that of some tormented dumb animal, that she had been deceived; and found her mother in bed, with the chill which was to end ten days later, in her death.
The shock to Stella was complete; she began, by sheer pure beauty of character, to do all that she could for everyone; but almost automatically. The future held nothing for her; the present was, I suppose, with a stepfather whom she barely knew, and four children who needed care and could as yet help her little, constantly painful. She was only just twenty-six, and in a moment she had to relinquish not only the chief source of all her life, but also the peculiar ways in which she best enjoyed her gifts. Indeed whoever she had been the position must have been painfully hard, but with her great distrust of her own powers, and her dread of books in particular, her task was terribly painful and almost bewildering. But still, had it not been for this desolation, laying her whole nature bare, and bidding it put forth its powers in entire loneliness, could she ever have shown herself as noble and as true as she was? All that she became in the future was firmly grounded, her own achievement; no one ever again was to serve her for prop; never again, perhaps, did she care for anyone as she had cared for her mother. That, whatever gain is to be set beside it, was the permanent loss.
Directly your grandmother was dead, Stella inherited all the duties that she had discharged; and like some creaking old waggon, pitifully rusted, and yet filled with stirring young creatures, our family once more toiled painfully along the way.
fn1 The exposure of Carlyle’s marital behaviour in his Reminiscences and in J. A. Fronde’s biography, shortly before Leslie began “The Mausoleum Book”, was a major scandal. Carlyle became notorious for having been “ill to live with”; cf. here.
fn2 See here.
Chapter Three
YOUR GRANDMOTHER’S POSITION in the family was such that her death not only removed the central figure from our eyes, but brought about such a shifting of relationships that life for a long time seemed incredibly strange. Your grandfather in his natural but surely unwise desire to do for us all that your grandmother had done, began to teach us our lessons; and gave up half his morning to us; a sacrifice indeed but that did not make his mood the easier. Then George, on the full tide of emotion, insisted upon a closer and more mature friendship with us; Gerald even became for the time serious and sentimental; and round this centre of profound emotion circled a number of friends, suddenly become conscious of a desire to take part in our lives, and of their right to have the depth of their own feelings recognized. Stella herself, almost stunned though she was at the moment, was never driven from her calm attitude of infinite consideration for others, of silence with respect to her own feelings; but this very calmness seemed to suffer, indifferently, a number of trials, and in particular to admit of quite unqualified self-surrender to your grandfather’s needs. Any comfort, whatever its nature, that came to hand, she offered him to stay his anguish; all her day was at his service, she exerted herself as I have said, to find people to visit him, to help her in some of her innumerable minute plans for his welfare. It is easy to see now that where she failed for the time was in proper discrimination. Her own disbelief in herself, and her long season of dependence made her incapable of trusting her own clear instincts in the matter. Her stepfather was the charge bequeathed her by her mother. She gave indiscriminately, conscious that she had not the best of all to give; and your grandfather who would doubtless have understood a clear statement of the position, took all that she offered him failing this as his right. But one of the consequences was that for some time life seemed to us in a chronic state of confusion. We were quite naturally unhappy; feeling a definite need, unbearably keen at moments, which was never to be satisfied. But that was recognizable pain, and the sharp pang grew to be almost welcome in the midst of the sultry and opaque life which was not felt, had nothing real in it, and yet swam about us, and choked us and blinded us. All these tears and groans, reproaches and protestations of affection, high talk of duty and work and living for others, were doubtless what we should feel if we felt properly, and yet we had but a dull sense of gloom which could not honestly be referred to the dead; unfortunately it did not quicken our feeling for the living; but hideous as it was, obscured both living and dead; and for long did unpardonable mischief by substituting for the shape of a true and most vivid mother, nothing better than an unlovable phantom.
That summer, after some hot months in London, we spent in Freshwater; and the heat there in the low bay, brimming as it seemed with soft vapours, and luxuriant with lush plants, mixes, like smoke, with other memories of hot rooms and silence, and an atmosphere all choked with too luxuriant feelings, so that one had at times a physical need of ruthless barbarism and fresh air.
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