Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 131.djvu/477

Rh great hall of judgment, and to such as, without rendering it absolute obedience, yet care to keep on some sort of terms with their conscience, it is a time of anything but comfort. Nor does the court those hours sitting concern itself only with heavy questions of right and wrong, but whoever loves himself and cares for his appearance before the eyes of men finds himself accused of paltry follies, stupidities and indiscretions, and punished with paltry mortifications, chagrins and anxieties. From such arraignment no man is free but him who walks in the perfect law of liberty — that is, the will of the Perfect — which alone is peace.

On the morning after she had thus taken Malcolm into her service Florimel had one of these experiences — a foretaste of the valley of the shadow: she awoke in the hour when judgment sits upon the hearts of men. Or is it not rather the hour for which a legion of gracious spirits are on the watch — when, fresh raised from the death of sleep, cleansed a little from the past and its evils by the gift of God, the heart and brain are most capable of their influences? — the hour when, besides, there is no refuge of external things wherein man may shelter himself from the truths they would so gladly send conquering into the citadel of his nature, no world of the senses to rampart the soul from thought, when the eye and the ear are as if they were not, and the soul lies naked before the infinite of reality. This live hour of the morning is the most real hour of the day, the hour of the motions of a prisoned and persecuted life, of its effort to break through and breathe. A good man then finds his refuge in the heart of the purifying fire: the bad man curses the swarms of Beelzebub that settle upon every sore spot in his conscious being.

But it was not the general sense of unfitness in the conditions of her life — neither was it dissatisfaction with Lady Bellair for the want of the pressure of authority upon her unstable being; it was not the sense of loneliness and unshelteredness in the sterile waste of fashionable life, neither was it weariness with the same and its shows, or all these things together, that could have waked the youth of Florimel and kept it awake at this hour of the night, for night that hour is, however near the morning.

Some few weeks agone she had accompanied to the study of a certain painter a friend who was then sitting for her portrait. The moment she entered, the appearance of the man and his surroundings laid hold of her imagination. Although on the very verge of popularity, he was young — not more than five-and-twenty. His face, far from what is called handsome, had a certain almost grandeur in it, owed mainly to the dominant forehead and the regnant life in the eyes. To this the rest of the countenance was submissive. The mouth was sweet yet strong, seeming to derive its strength from the will that towered above and overhung it, throned on the crags of those eyebrows. The nose was rather short, not unpleasantly so, and had mass enough. In figure he was scarcely above the usual height, but well formed. To a first glance, even, the careless yet graceful freedom of his movements was remarkable, while his address was manly and altogether devoid of self-recommendation. Confident modesty and unobtrusive ease distinguished his demeanor.

His father, Arnold Lenorme, descended from an old Norman family, had given him the Christian name of Raoul, which, although outlandish, tolerably fitted the surname, notwithstanding the contiguous l's, so objectionable to the fastidious ear of their owner. The earlier and more important part of his education — the beginnings, namely, of everything he afterward further followed — his mother herself gave him, partly because she was both poor and capable, and partly because she was more anxious than most mothers for his best welfare. The poverty they had crept through, as those that strive after better things always will, one way or another, with immeasurable advantage, and before the time came when he must leave home her influence had armed him in adamant — a service which, alas! few mothers seem capable of rendering the knights whom they send out into the battle-field of the world. Most of them give their children the best they have, but how shall a foolish woman be a wise mother? The result in his case was that reverence for her as the type of womanhood, working along with a natural instinct for refinement, a keen feeling of the incompatibility with art of anything in itself low or unclean, and a healthful and successful activity of mind, had rendered him so far upright and honorable that he had never yet done that in one mood upon which in another he had looked back with loathing. As yet, he had withstood the temptations belonging to his youth and his profession — in a great measure also the temptations belonging to success: he had not yet been 