A Mere Accident by George Moore

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A MERE ACCIDENT.

BY

GEORGE MOORE

AUTHOR OF "A MUMMER'S WIFE," "A MODERN LOVER,"
"A DRAMA IN MUSLIN," "SPRING DAYS," ETC.

Fifth Edition

TO

My Friends at Buckingham.

Nearly twenty years have gone since first we met, dear friends; time has
but strengthened our early affections, so for love token, for sign of
the years, I bring you this book--these views of your beautiful house
and hills where I have spent so many happy days, these last perhaps the
happiest of all.

G. M.

CHAPTER I.

Three hundred yards of smooth, broad, white road leading from Henfield,
a small town in Sussex. The grasses are lush, and the hedges are tall
and luxuriant. Restless boys scramble to and fro, quiet nursemaids
loiter, and a vagrant has sat down to rest though the bank is dripping
with autumn rain. How fair a prospect of southern England! Land of
exquisite homeliness and order; land of town that is country, of country
that is town; land of a hundred classes all deftly interwoven and all
waxing to one class--England. Land encrowned with the gifts of peaceful
days--days that live in thy face and the faces of thy children.

See it. The outlying villas with their porches and laurels, the red
tiled farm houses, and the brown barns, clustering beneath the wings of
beautiful trees--elm trees; see the flat plots of ground of the market
gardens, with figures bending over baskets of roots; see the factory
chimney; there are trees and gables everywhere; see the end of the
terrace, the gleam of glass, the flower vase, the flitting white of the
tennis players; see the long fields with the long team ploughing, see
the parish church, see the embowering woods, see the squire's house, see
everything and love it, for everything here is England.

* * * * *

Three hundred yards of smooth, broad, white road, leading from Henfield,
a small town in Sussex. It disappears in the woods which lean across the
fields towards the downs. The great bluff heights can be seen, and at
the point where the roads cross, where the tall trunks are listed with
golden light, stands a large wooden gate and a small box-like lodge. A
lonely place in a densely-populated county. The gatekeeper is blind, and
his flute sounds doleful and strange, and the leaves are falling.

The private road is short and stony. Apparently space was found for it
with difficulty, and it got wedged between an enormous holly hedge and a
stiff wooden paling. But overhead the great branches fight upwards
through a tortuous growth to the sky, and, as you advance, Thornby Place
continues to puzzle you with its medley of curious and contradictory
aspects. For as the second gate, which is in iron, is approached, your
thoughts of rural things are rudely scattered by sight of what seems a
London mews. Reason with yourself. This very urban feature is occasioned
by the high brick wall which runs parallel with the stables, and this,
as you pass round to the front of the house, is hidden in the clothing
foliage of a line of evergreen oaks; continuing along the lawn, the
trees bend about the house--a wash of Naples-yellow, a few sharp Italian
lines and angles. To complete the sketch, indicate the wings of the
blown rooks on the sullen sky.

But our purpose lies deeper than that which inspires a water-colour
sketch. We must learn when and why that house was built; we must see how
the facts reconcile its somewhat tawdry, its somewhat suburban aspect,
with the richer and more romantic aspects of the park. The park is even
now, though it be the middle of autumn, full of blowing green, and the
brown circling woods, full of England and English home life. That single
tree in the foreground is a lime; what a splendour of leafage it will be
in the summer! Those four on the right are chestnuts, and those far
away, lying between us and the imperial downs, are elms; through that
vista you can see the grand line, the abrupt hollows, and the bit of
chalk road cut zig-zag out of the steep side. Then why the anomaly of
Italian urns and pilasters; why not red Elizabethan gables and diamond
casements?

Why not? Because at the beginning of the century, when Brighton was
being built, fragments of architectural gossip were flying about Sussex,
and one of these had found its way to, and had rested in, the heart of
the grandfather of the present owner: in a simple and bucolic way he had
been seized by a desire for taste and style, and the present building
was the result. Therefore it will be well to examine in detail the house
which young John Norton of '86 was so fond of declaring he could never
see without becoming instantly conscious of a sense of dislike, a hatred
that he was fond of describing as a sort of constitutional complaint
which he was never quite free from, and which any view of the Rockery,
or the pilasters of the French bow-window, or indeed of anything
pertaining to Thornby Place, called at once into an active existence.

Thornby Place is but two stories high, and its spruce walls of Portland
stone and ashlar work rise sheer out of the green sward; in front, Doric
columns support a heavy entablature, and there are urns at the corners
of the building. The six windows on the ground floor are topped with
round arches, and coming up the drive the house seems a perfect square.
But this regularity of structure has on the east side been somewhat
interfered with by a projection of some thirty or forty feet--a billiard
room, in fine, which during John's minority Mrs Norton had thought
proper to add. But she had lived to rue her experiment, for to this
young man, with his fretful craving for beauty and exactness of
proportion, it is an ever present source of complaint; and he had once
in a half humorous, half serious way, gone so far as to avail himself of
the "eyesore," as he called it, to excuse his constant absence from
home, and as a pretence for shutting himself up in his dear college,
with his cherished Latin authors. It was partly for the sake of avenging
himself on his mother, whose decisive practicality jarred the delicate
music of a nature extravagantly ideal, that he so severely criticised
all that she held sacred; and his strictures fell heaviest on the bow
window, looking somewhat like a temple with its small pilasters
supporting the rich cornice from which the dwarf vaulting springs. The
loggia, he admitted, although painfully out of keeping with the
surrounding country, was not wholly wanting in design, and he admired
its columns of a Doric order, and likewise the cornice that like a crown
encompasses the house. The entrance is under the loggia; there are round
arched windows on either side, a square window under the roof, and the
hall door is in solid oak studded with ornamental nails.

On entering you find yourself in a common white-painted passage, and on
either side of the drawing-room and dining-room are four allegorical
female heads: Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. Further on is the
hall, with its short polished oak stairway sloping gently to a balcony;
and there are white painted pillars that support the low roof, and these
pillars make a kind of entrance to the passage which traverses the
house from end to end. England--England clear and spotless! Nowhere do
you find a trace of dust or disorder. The arrangement of things is
somewhat mechanical. The curtains and wall-paper in the bedrooms are
suggestive of trades people and housemaids; no hastily laid aside book
or shawl breaks the excessive orderliness. Every piece of furniture is
in its appointed place, and nothing testifies to the voluntariness of
the occupant, or the impulse prompted by the need of the moment. On the
presses at the ends of the passages, where is stored the house linen,
cards are hung bearing this inscription: "When washing the woodwork the
servants are requested to use no soda without first obtaining permission
from Mrs Norton." This detail was especially distasteful to John; he
often thought of it when away, and it was one of the many irritating
impressions which went to make up the sum of his dislike of Thornby
Place.

Mrs Norton is now crying her last orders to the servants; and although
dressed elaborately as if to receive visitors, she has not yet laid
aside her basket of keys. She is in her forty-fifth year. Her figure is
square and strong, and not devoid of matronly charm. It approves a
healthy mode of life, and her quick movements are indicative of her
sharp determined mind. Her face is somewhat small for her shoulders, the
temples are narrow and high, the nose is long and thin, the cheek bones
are prominent, the chin is small, but unsuggestive of weakness, the lips
are pinched, the complexion is flushed, and the eyes set close above the
long thin nose are an icy grey. Mrs Norton is a handsome woman. Her
fashionably-cut silk fits her perfectly; the skirt is draped with grace
and precision, and the glossy shawl with the long soft fringe is elegant
and delightfully mundane. She raises her double gold eyeglasses, and,
contracting her forehead, stares pryingly about her; and so fashionable
is she, and her modernity is so picturesque, that for a moment you think
of the entrance of a duchess in the first act of a piece by Augier
played on the stage of the Francais.

Still holding her gold-rimmed glasses to her eyes, she descended the
broad stairs to the hall, and from thence she went into the library.
There are two small bookcases filled with sombre volumes, and the busts
of Moliere and Shakespeare attempt to justify the appellation. But there
is in the character, I was almost going to say in the atmosphere of the
room, that same undefinable, easily recognizable something which
proclaims the presence of non-readers. The traces of three or four days,
at the most a week, which John occasionally spent at Thornby Place, were
necessarily ephemeral, and the weakness of Mrs Norton's sight rendered
continuous reading impossible. Sometimes Kitty Hare brought a novel from
the circulating library to read aloud, and sometimes John forgot one of
his books, and a volume of Browning still lay on the table. The room was
filled with shadow and mournfulness, and in a dusty grate the fire
smouldered.

Between this room and the drawing-room, in a recess formed by the bow
window, Mrs Norton kept her birds, and still peering through her
gold-rimmed glasses, she examined their seed-troughs and water-glasses,
and, having satisfied herself as to their state, she entered the
drawing-room. There is little in this room; no pictures relieve the
widths of grey colourless wall paper, and the sombre oak floor is spaced
with a few pieces of furniture--heavy furniture enshrouded in grey linen
cloths. Three French cabinets, gaudy with vile veneer and bright brass,
are nailed against the walls, and the empty room is reflected dismally
in the great gold mirror which faces the vivid green of the sward and
the duller green of the encircling elms of the park.

Mrs Norton let her eyes wander, and sighing she went into the
dining-room. The dining-room is always the most human of rooms, and the
dining-room in Thornby Place, although allied to the other rooms in an
absence of fancy in its arrangement, shows prettily in contrast to them
with its white cloth cheerful with flowers and ferns. The floor is
covered with a tightly stretched red cloth, the chairs are set in
symmetrical rows; with the exception of a black clock there is no
ornament on the chimney-piece, and a red cloth screen conceals the door
used by the servants.

Mrs Norton walked with her quiet decisive step to the window, and
holding the gold-rimmed glasses to her eyes, she looked into the
landscape as if she were expecting someone to appear. The day was grimy
with clouds; mist had risen, and it hung out of the branches of the elms
like a veil of white gauze. Withdrawing her eye from the vague prospect
before her, Mrs Norton played listlessly with the tassel of one of the
blinds. "Surely," she thought, "he cannot have been foolish enough to
have walked over the downs such a day as this;" then, raising her
glasses again she looked out at the smallest angle with the wall of the
house, so that she should get sight of a vista through which any one
coming from Shoreham would have to pass. Presently a silhouette
appeared on the sullen sky. Mrs Norton moved precipitately from the
window, and she rang the bell sharply.

"John," she said, "Mr Hare has been going in for one of his long walks.
I see him now coming across the park. I am sure he has walked over the
downs; if so he must be wet through. Have a fire lighted in Mr Norton's
room, put up a pair of slippers for him: here is the key of Mr Norton's
wardrobe; let Mr Hare have what he wants."

And having detached one from the many bunches which filled her basket,
she went herself to open the door to her visitor. He was however still
some distance away, and standing in the shelter of the loggia she waited
for him, watched the vague silhouette resolving itself into colour and
line. But it was not until he climbed the iron fence which separated
the park from the garden grounds that the figure grew into its
individuality. Then you saw a man of about forty, about the medium
height and inclined to stoutness. His face was round and florid, and it
was set with sandy whiskers. His white necktie proclaimed him a parson,
and the grey mud with which his boots were bespattered told of his long
walk. As is generally the case with those of his profession, he spoke
fluently, his voice was melodious, and his rapid answers and his bright
eyes saved him from appearing commonplace. In addressing Mrs Norton he
used her Christian name.

"You are quite right, Lizzie, you are quite right; I shouldn't have done
it: had I known what a state the roads were in, I wouldn't have
attempted it."

"What is the use of talking like that, as if you didn't know what these
roads were like! For twenty years you have been making use of them, and
if you don't know what they are like in winter by this time, all I can
say is that you never will."

"I never saw them in the state they are now; such a slush of chalk and
clay was never seen."

"What can you expect after a month of heavy rain? You are wringing wet."

"Yes, I was caught in a heavy shower as I was crossing over by
Fresh-Combe-bottom. I am certainly not in a fit state to come into your
dining-room."

"I should think not indeed! I really believe if I were to allow it,
you would sit the whole afternoon in your wet clothes. You'll find
everything ready for you in John's room. I'll give you ten minutes. I'll
tell them to bring up lunch in ten minutes. Stay, will you have a glass
of wine before going upstairs?"

"I am afraid of spoiling your carpet."

"Yes, indeed! not one step further! I'll fetch it for you."

When the parson had drunk the wine, and was following the butler
upstairs, Mrs Norton returned to the dining-room with the empty glass in
her hand. She placed it on the chimney piece; she stirred the fire, and
her thoughts flowed pleasantly as she dwelt on the kindness of her old
friend. "He only got my note this morning," she mused. "I wonder if he
will be able to persuade John to return home." Mrs Norton, in her own
hard, cold way, loved her son, but in truth she thought more of the
power of which he was the representative than of the man himself: the
power to take to himself a wife--a wife who would give an heir to
Thornby Place. This was to be the achievement of Mrs Norton's life, and
the difficulties that intervened were too absorbing for her to think
much whether her son would find happiness in marriage; nor was it
natural to her to set much store on the refining charm and the uniting
influences of mental sympathies. Had she not passed the age when the
sentimental emotions are liveliest? And the fibre was wanting in her to
take into much account the whispering or the silence of passion.

Mrs Norton saw in marriage nothing but the child, and in the child
nothing but an heir--that is to say, a male who would continue the name
and traditions of Thornby Place. This would seem to indicate a material
nature, but such a misapprehension arises from the common habit of
confusing pure thought--thought which proceeds direct from the brain
and lives uncoloured by the material wants of life--with instincts whose
complexity often causes them to appear as mental potentialities, whereas
they are but instincts, inherited promptings, and aversions more or less
modified by physical constitution and the material forces of the life in
which the constitution has grown up; and yet, though pure thought, that
is to say the power of detaching oneself from the webs of life and
viewing men and things from a height, is the rarest of gifts, many are
possessed of sufficient intellectuality to enjoy with the brain apart
from the senses. Mrs Norton was such an one. After five o'clock tea she
would ask Kitty to read to her, and drawing her shawl about her
shoulders, would readily abandon the intellectual side of her nature to
the seductive charm of the romantic story of James of Scotland; and
while to the girl the heroism and chivalry were a little clouded by the
quaint turns of Rossetti's verse, to the woman these were added
delights, which her quiet penetrating understanding followed and took
instant note of.

"Were mother and son ever so different?" was the common remark. The
artistic was the side of Mrs Norton's character that was unaffectedly
kept out of sight, just as young John Norton was careful to hide from
public knowledge his strict business habits, and to expose, perhaps a
little ostentatiously, the spiritual impulses in which he was so deeply
concerned: the subtle refinement of sacred places, from the mystery of
the great window with its mitres and croziers to the sunlit path between
the tombs where the children play, the curious and yet natural charm
that attendance in the sacristy had for him, the arrangement of the
large oak presses, wherein are stored the fine altar linen and the
chalices, the distributing of the wine and water that were not for
bodily need, and the wearing of the flowing surplices, the murmuring of
the Latin responses that helped so wonderfully to enforce the impression
of beautiful and refined life which was his, and which he lived beyond
the gross influences of the wholly temporal life which he knew was
raging almost but not quite out of hearing. But, however marked may be
the accidental variations of character, hereditary instincts are
irresistible, and in obedience to them John neglected nothing that
concerned his pecuniary instincts. He was in daily communication with
his agent, and the financial position of every farmer, and the state of
every farm on his property, were not only known to him but were
constantly borne in mind, and influenced him in that progressive
ordering of things which marked the administration of his property. He
was furnished quarterly with an account of all monies paid, to which
were joined descriptive notes of each farm, showing what alterations the
past three months had brought, and setting forth the agricultural
intentions and abilities of the occupier.

John Norton waited the arrival of these accounts with a keen interest:
they were a relish to his life; and without experiencing any revulsion
of feeling, he would lay down a portfolio filled with photographs of
drawings by Leonardo da Vinci--studies of drapery, studies of hands and
feet, realistic studies of thin-lipped women and ecstatic angels with
the light upon their high foreheads--and cheerfully, and even with a
sense of satisfaction, he would untie the bald, prosaic roll of paper,
and seating himself at his window overlooking the long terrace, he would
add up the figures submitted to him, detecting the smallest arithmetical
error, making note of the least delay in payment of any money due, and
questioning the slightest overpayment for work done. The morning hours
fled as he pursued his congenial task; and from time to time he would
let his thoughts wander from the teasing computation of the money that
would be required to make the repairs that a certain farmer had
demanded, to the unworldly quiet of the sacristy; he would think, and
his thoughts contained an evanescent sense of the paradox, of the altar
linen he would have to fold and put away, and of the altar breads he
would presently have to write to London for; and meanwhile his eyes
would follow in delight the black figures of the Jesuits, who, with
cassocks blowing and berrettas set firmly on their heads, walked up and
down the long gravel walks reading their breviaries.

And living thus, half in the persuasive charm of ceremonial, half in
the hard procession of account books, the last three years of John's
life had passed. On coming of age he had spent a few weeks at Thornby
Place, but the place, and especially the country, had appeared to
him so grossly protestant--so entirely occupied with the material
well-to-doness of life--that he declared he longed to breathe again the
breath of his beloved sacristy, that he must away from that close and
oppressive atmosphere of the flesh. Since then, with the exception of a
few visits of a few days he had lived at Stanton College, writing to his
mother not of the business which concerned his property, but of mental
problems and artistic impulses. On business matters he never consulted
her; but he thought it fortunate that she should choose to spend her
jointure on Thornby Place, and so save him a great deal of expense in
keeping up the house, which, although he disliked it with a dislike that
had grown inveterate, he was still unwilling to allow to fall to ruins.

Mrs Norton, as has been said, was capable of understanding much in the
abstract; so long as things, and ideas of things, did not come within
the circle of her practical life, they were judged from a liberal
standpoint, but so soon as they touched any personal consideration,
they were judged by a moral code that in no way corresponded to her
intellectual comprehension of the matter she so unhesitatingly
condemned. But by this it must by no means be understood that Mrs Norton
wore her conscience easily--that it was a garment that could be
shortened or lengthened to suit all weathers. Our diagnosis of Mrs
Norton's character involves no accusation of laxity of principle. Mrs
Norton was a woman with an intelligence, who had inherited in all its
primary force a code of morals that had grown up in the narrower minds
of less gifted generations. In talking to her you were conscious of two
active and opposing principles: reason and hereditary morality. I use
"opposing" as being descriptive of the state of soul that would
generally follow from such mental contradiction, but in Mrs Norton no
shocking conflict of thought was possible, her mind being always
strictly subservient to her instinctive standard of right and wrong.

And John had inherited the moral temperament of his mother's family, and
with it his mother's intelligence, nor had the equipoise been disturbed
in the transmitting; his father's delicate constitution in inflicting
germs of disease had merely determined the variation represented by the
marked artistic impulses which John presented to the normal type of
either his father's or his mother's family. It would therefore seem that
any too sudden corrective of defect will result in anomaly, and, in
the case under notice, direct mingling of perfect health with spinal
weakness had germinated into a marked yearning for the heroic ages, for
the supernatural as contrasted with the meanness of the routine of
existence. And now before closing this psychical investigation, and
picking up the thread of the story, which will of course be no more than
an experimental demonstration of the working of the brain into which we
are looking, we must take note of two curious mental traits both living
side by side, and both apparently negative of the other's existence: an
intense and ever pulsatory horror of death, a sullen contempt and often
a ferocious hatred of life. The stress of mind engendered by the
alternating of these themes of suffering would have rendered life an
unbearable burden to John, had he not found anchorage in an invincible
belief in God, a belief which set in stormily for the pomp and opulence
of Catholic ceremonial, for the solemn Gothic arch and the jewelled joy
of painted panes, for the grace and the elegance and the order of
hieratic life.

In a being whose soul is but the shadow of yours, a second soul looking
towards the same end as your soul, or in a being whose soul differs
radically, and is concerned with other satisfactions and other ideals,
you will most probably find some part of the happiness of your dreams,
but in intercourse with one who is grossly like you, but who is
absolutely different when the upper ways of character are taken into
account, there will be--no matter how inexorable are the ties that
bind--much fret and irritation and noisy clashing. It was so with John
Norton and his mother; even in the exercise of faculties that had been
directly transmitted from one to the other there had been angry
collision. For example:--their talents for business were identical; but
while she thought the admirable conduct of her affairs was a thing to be
proud of, he would affect an air of negligence, and would willingly
have it believed that he lived independent of such gross necessities.
Then his malady--for intense depression of the spirits was a malady with
him--offered an ever-recurring cause of misunderstanding. How irritating
it was when he lay shut up in his room, his soul looking down with
murderous eyes on the poor worm that writhed out its life in view of the
pitiless stars, and longing with a fierce wild longing to shake off the
burning garment of consciousness, and plunge into the black happiness of
the grave, to hear Mrs Norton on the threshold uttering from time to
time admonitory remarks.

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