THE FLIGHT IN WILD WEATHER

The morning of Lucy Darleton’s letter of reply to her friend Clara was fair before sunrise, with luminous colours that are an omen to the husbandman.  Clara had no weather-eye for the rich Eastern crimson, nor a quiet space within her for the beauty.  She looked on it as her gate of promise, and it set her throbbing with a revived belief in radiant things which she had once dreamed of to surround her life, but her accelerated pulses narrowed her thoughts upon the machinery of her project.  She herself was metal, pointing all to her one aim when in motion.  Nothing came amiss to it, everything was fuel; fibs, evasions, the serene battalions of white lies parallel on the march with dainty rogue falsehoods.  She had delivered herself of many yesterday in her engagements for to-day.  Pressure was put on her to engage herself, and she did so liberally, throwing the burden of deceitfulness on the extraordinary pressure.  “I want the early part of the morning; the rest of the day I shall be at liberty.”  She said it to Willoughby, Miss Dale, Colonel De Craye, and only the third time was she aware of the delicious double meaning.  Hence she associated it with the colonel.

Your loudest outcry against the wretch who breaks your rules is in asking how a tolerably conscientious person could have done this and the other besides the main offence, which you vow you could overlook but for the minor objections pertaining to conscience, the incomprehensible and abominable lies, for example, or the brazen coolness of the lying.  Yet you know that we live in an undisciplined world, where in our seasons of activity we are servants of our design, and that this comes of our passions, and those of our position.  Our design shapes us for the work in hand, the passions man the ship, the position is their apology:  and now should conscience be a passenger on board, a merely seeming swiftness of our vessel will keep him dumb as the unwilling guest of a pirate captain scudding from the cruiser half in cloven brine through rocks and shoals to save his black flag.  Beware the false position.

That is easy to say:  sometimes the tangle descends on us like a net of blight on a rose-bush.  There is then an instant choice for us between courage to cut loose, and desperation if we do not.  But not many men are trained to courage; young women are trained to cowardice.  For them to front an evil with plain speech is to be guilty of effrontery and forfeit the waxen polish of purity, and therewith their commanding place in the market.  They are trained to please man’s taste, for which purpose they soon learn to live out of themselves, and look on themselves as he looks, almost as little disturbed as he by the undiscovered.  Without courage, conscience is a sorry guest; and if all goes well with the pirate captain, conscience will be made to walk the plank for being of no service to either party.