The wisdom of folly

In a remote and very beautiful corner of North Wales, somewhere in the last quarter of the last century, two girls and a young man sat by the seashore enjoying the combined delights of extreme youth and an exquisite summer's day.

The girls were both beautiful--the younger one exceptionally so. They were singularly alike, with the same golden-brown hair, dark eyes, and delicate complexions; but while the elder was staid and serious beyond her years, surrounded by an intangible atmosphere of sadness and reserve, the younger was the embodiment of sunshine and gaiety, and seemed to be an impersonation of all those qualities which are associated with the dawn of day and the Rush of spring. Any one could see at a glance that they were sisters; but--as it has frequently been the case with a pair of sisters, from the days of Leah and Rachel downwards--the younger was an edition de luxe of the elder, and had been petted and spoiled accordingly.

Adah, the elder one--whom Nature had called to play the role of Leah, providing her with the tenderly pathetic eyes and the knack of taking a back seat belonging to the part--was barely twenty years of age, but already a woman: while Zillah, the younger sister--the counterpart of Rachel, with all the orthodox adjuncts of beauty and favour--was fully eighteen, but still no more than a lovely and irresponsible child. Their mother had died some fifteen years before this story opens; and upon the five-year-old Adah had devolved the duty of supplying, as far as possible, her place towards the pretty and wayward baby of three. Hence arose Adah's womanly dignity and maternal responsibility at an age when most girls are only children themselves; and hence arose also that devoted adoration of her younger sister which was the ruling passion of her life.

There are few more delightful human relationships than the bond between a pair of sisters. Being of the same sex, the same family, the same generation--brought up with identical surroundings, associations, and education--they are as much alike as it is possible for two human beings to be: yet, on the other hand, this similarity is, as a rule, varied and thrown into relief by far-reaching and fundamental differences of taste and character.

This dear and delightful bond was specially strong between Adah and Zillah Treherne. Their mother died when they were very young; their father was far too morose and melancholy a man ever to stand on the same plane as that in which his children lived and moved; and they had no intimate friends of their own age--partly because devoted sisters do not generally make intimate friends outside their own family circle, and partly because in this particular case the girls never met any other girls whereof to make friends. Hence they were thrown much upon each other for companionship and sympathy: and each one fully and amply responded to the other's needs.

Their father, who was a Cornishman by birth, had been for many years the Vicar of a remote country parish on the Welsh coast. There he met and wooed and wedded his lovely wife; and there he laid her, after six short years of married happiness, to await, at the foot of the everlasting hills, the dawn of the Resurrection Morning.

The girls had never gone ten miles away from Llanferdovey in all their short lives: had never thought of asking to go: but they had dreamed their dreams--as all girls will--of the wonderful world lying east of the rampart of mountains which guarded their wave-washed home: and had experienced youthful and uttered longings to break through that (to them) impenetrable barrier, and to taste the pleasures and shares of joys of the gay life on the other side.

If friends were scarce in that remote seaside village, so also were lovers. In spite of their undeniable good looks, the younger of the sisters, when this story opens, had known but one suitor, and the elder none at all. Yet--and herein lay the tragedy, by no means, alas! an uncommon one--marriage was the only possible vocation for these two girls. They were not sufficiently well educated nor sufficiently enterprising to earn their own living by scholastic or commercial methods; and their father had nothing to leave behind him when he was gone. They had no kind friends--no rich relations. Their mother had been the only child of an impecunious farmer; and their father belonged to an old and impoverished family, and was now the last of his race. Therefore marriage and starvation appeared to be the only alternatives before them in the future, when their father was no longer with them; and the former and more agreeable of these alternatives was rendered practically impossible by the absence of any eligible bachelors.

True, the only bachelor in the neighbourhood was, after his fashion, in love with Zillah; but his eligibility was a matter of doubt in the case of a refined and sensitive girl. Owen Griffith was in no sense of the word a gentleman. He was neither well born nor well bred. And, further, bad as were his manners, his morals were infinitely worse. His father had been a cattle dealer and owned a small estate; but Owen himself did nothing at all, having unfortunately inherited just sufficient money from that defunct parent to keep him permanently in mischief and out of work: for the Satanic undertaking to supply idle hands with ample occupation had in his case been abundantly carried out. Owen Griffith was a low, coarse, ill-conditioned fellow, and a most unsuitable companion for two innocent girls. Yet until this year he had seemed to be the only possible husband for the lovely and penniless Zillah.

But this summer another possibility had appeared upon the matrimonial horizon in the form of the third member of the party sitting upon the beach at Llanferdovey: which member was an extremely ugly, yet at the same time somewhat attractive, young man of about one-and-twenty. He was obviously a gentleman: he was equally obviously an unconventional one: unconventional even at an age when the normal male is obsessed by a consuming desire to look and act and live in a manner absolutely identical with the acts and looks and lives of all the other normal males of his set and generation. This uncommon young man had repaired to that remote corner of Wales in order to have leisure and opportunity to prepare himself for his final examination at Oxford; and this he dutifully intended to do, as he was by no means an idle or a frivolous person. But the gods saw otherwise, as they have a knack of seeing, when weak mortals make plans irrespective of the claims of youth and nature.

Nicholas Ingoldby (that was the name of the unusual young man) attended, as in duty bound, the village church on a Sunday morning; for he was sufficiently unconventional not to defy all the conventions in which his mother had trained him. At the village church he saw the Vicar's younger daughter; and straightway found it necessary to call at the vicarage and entrust his spiritual welfare, during the time of his sojourn at Llanferdovey, into the hands of the shepherd of that particular fold. The Reverend Reuben Treherne was only too well pleased to undertake--if but temporarily--the guidance of a spirit as bright and cultured as that of Nicholas, and one, moreover, which was even yet in the sheltering shadow of that University where the Vicar of Llanferdovey had spent some of the happiest years of his life: therefore the road to Zillah's acquaintance was an easy one, and the door of the vicarage was speedily thrown open to so rare and cheerful a guest.

The Vicar liked him because he was an Oxford man and a gentleman: Zillah liked him because he amused and admired her: but to Adah he appeared as a winged and glorious, Perseus, sent specially to rescue her Andromeda from the clutches of the sea-monster.

For herself Adah Treherne saw no visions and dreamed no dreams: she raised no airy castles for her own habitation: all her thoughts and hopes and wishes were centred in her young sister; and it was for Zillah's sake, and for Zillah's sake alone, that she built castles in the air and painted rosy pictures of the future. Her life was so absorbed in that of her sister that she literally had no ambitions of her own. If Zillah's life were happy, she would be happy in seeing it; if Zillah's life were miserable, then her heart would surely break.

She was wise enough to realise what a hopeless future spread out before herself and her sister, should they not marry before their father died; and as Reuben Treherne had not himself married until late in life, Adah could not help seeing that the time still left to him must perforce be short.

And then what would happen to herself and Zillah?

They were too refined and too well born to be able to earn their own living as farm-servants: they were too ignorant and inexperienced to earn it in any other way. Then what would become of them if they were still single and unprovided for at the time of their father's death?

For herself she did not mind: she really had no self apart from Zillah. But it was agony to her to think of this beautiful and beloved sister exposed to the miseries of poverty and privation: and it was even a keener agony to imagine her adored and admired idol married to that ill-conditioned brute, Owen Griffith.

But when Nicholas appeared upon the scene, fresh hopes irradiated Adah's soul. She saw at a glance that he admired her sister: knew day by day that he was falling more and more deeply in love with Zillah: and her heart leapt within her at the thought that here at last was the solution of her life's problem, and the answer to her many prayers for Zillah's welfare.

She did not know--how could she?--that Ingoldby was a poor man, with no prospect of being able to maintain a wife for many years to come. That knowledge was to come later, when the shadows darkened around her, and the veiled form of Tragedy stepped heavily across her threshold. All she knew at present was that a fairy prince (albeit in an ill-favoured disguise) had scaled the rampart of mountains which guarded Llanferdovey, and had come to set her sister free.

"I cannot endure portents and omens and things of that sort," the young man was saying on that summer's afternoon to his listening companions, à propos of a conversation concerning the supernatural; "because I think they are prone to produce what they only intend to predict. To expect a misfortune to happen, is one of the surest ways of inducing it to happen. I know a man at Oxford who is wretched for a month if he happens to see the new moon through glass, and who vows that some misfortune always follows his vision. And I believe that it does: not because the glazed moon predicted the misfortune, but because the artificial dread produced by the sight of the new moon induces a state of mind which paves the way for the misfortune that it expects. Now what is the sense of adding to the unavoidable miseries of life a lot of extras and intermediates, brought about by magpies and new moons and Fridays, and things of that kind?"

The girls slightly shivered. To their Celtic blood and Cambrian upbringing these theories were rank blasphemy.

"I believe in all such things myself," the elder remarked.

"And they frighten me dreadfully," added the younger.

"Then what a mistake to indulge in so perverted a form of faith! It is your belief itself that frightens you--not the things that you believe in. No bogy ever killed a man: but the fear of bogies has killed its tens of thousands."

"Then don't you believe in the supernatural at all, Nicholas?" asked Adah.

With the delightful freemasonry of youth--unshadowed by even the ghost of a chaperon--the young people were already on the footing of Christian names.

"Certainly I do--with all my heart; and that is why I am not what you call superstitious. It is because I believe so much, that I believe so little. It is because I believe that the supernatural world is a real world, that I cannot believe all the unreal nonsense that you talk about it. Don't you see my point? It is because I believe that the angels and the spirits are as real and as living as we are, that I believe they are as sensible and as rational as we are. If you tell me that the laws of the spiritual world decree that dire suffering shall be the consequence of deliberate sin, I am with you; but if you say that they likewise rule that dire suffering shall be the result of an accidental peep at the new moon through your bedroom window, I can only say that I have too much respect for Almighty Wisdom to countenance such a theory for an instant."

"Do you believe in ghosts?" Zillah inquired in an awestruck voice.

"Certainly; but in wise and sensible ghosts, and not in the table-turning, floor-rapping, aimless species. It is just because I cherish such a profound belief in and such a deep respect for spiritual beings, that I cannot credit them with all the foolish and purposeless behaviour that is commonly attributed to them in so-called haunted houses. I think if people are permitted to come back to this world at all, they are permitted for some wise purpose, and not for the mere object of knocking at doors and throwing crockery about and causing all your servants to give notice. If Providence sees fit that your servants shall give notice, it isn't necessary to go to the expense and trouble of sending the denizens of the other world to frighten them into doing so; it will be quite sufficient to send somebody else's maid to stay in your house for a week-end."

"Then I suppose that though you believe in ghosts, you are not frightened of them?" said Adah.

"Precisely. I have lived all my life in an old, old place, imbued with the spirit of the past, so that now the by-gone times are as real to me as the present ones. I don't believe that the people who once lived in a place come back to that place centuries after, for the fun of knocking at doors and walking about empty rooms, like little boys who ring your front-door bell and then run away and hide. But I do believe that the people who live in a place create a spiritual atmosphere there, which clings to that place long after they themselves have passed to some higher plane of existence. That is why I would never, if I knew it, live in a house where very wicked people had lived: I think they would create an atmosphere of evil which would for ever after infect the moral air of that house."

"Then you would be frightened of their ghosts after all!" cried Zillah triumphantly.

"I shouldn't be frightened, as you would be, of their saying 'Bo' behind a door, or making faces at me in the dark. I should be afraid of their having infected the air I breathed with their vile moral poison, so that I should finally become as bad as they had been. Just as I should be afraid of staying in a house where people had smallpox; not for fear of the patient's relieving the tedium of illness by dragging bodies about or rattling chains, but for fear of catching the disease myself."

"Did you ever see a ghost at your lovely old house--the place you are always telling us about?" asked the younger of the girls.

"I never saw one: but I am haunted continually by the spirit of one, Mandolet, the Court Jester of that departed monarch, Edward the Fourth. I never beheld the wraith of that excellent Fool; he passed over some centuries ago to higher and wider spheres, and, I doubt not, is serving and praising his Maker in the company of the angels that excel in strength. But the moral atmosphere that he left behind him was so strong and so abiding that it has permeated the house where I live, which was built on that part of the royal Palace of Eldhurst where the Jester's apartments lay. At least tradition says that the Jester's apartments were situated near to the bakehouse, so that--like his distinguished prototype, the Knave of Hearts--he might help himself to the royal tarts when that way inclined."

"And did he help himself?" asked Zillah, who was still young enough to be absolutely literal.

"Metaphorically speaking, he did. That is to say, he enjoyed the sweets of court life with none of its responsibilities; he stole the tarts, and left the suet-pudding to be dealt with by the royal digestion. And therein he showed himself for the wise fool that he was; and set forth to succeeding generations a shining example of the wisdom of folly." Nicholas loved the sound of his own voice; and never so well as when it was discoursing what other people considered nonsense. "For when the King offered him higher rank, and the right to poke his fingers into the pies of State, and all such privileges as the ambitious wiseacre sells his soul for, the merry knave declined them all; and deliberately chose to spend the remainder of his days in domestic and undistinguished seclusion. Which merely proves to the world at large what an arrant fool he was; and to me in particular that the wisdom of folly is the only wisdom worth seeking after."

Zillah laughed gaily: Ingoldby's whimsicalities were a source of endless wonder and amusement to her in contrast to the serious strictness of her father's conversation. "And do you feel yourself as great a fool as Mandolet?" she asked.

"Alas! not yet; but I hope to be, ere my days are done. Give me time, sweet lady: remember that I am but just of age, and that a perfect fool is a ripe and mature product. But even now, compared with men of my own generation--with my cousin, Roland Ketteringham, for instance, who is younger than I am, and as wise and sensible a young man as you could meet with on a summer's day--I flatter myself that I am foolish indeed. I love scholarship for its own sake, and not for what it may lead to--I play games in order to pass the time, and not as the end and aim of existence--and I order my life to please my Maker and myself, and not according to the dicta of Society. Could folly have gone much further than that in the short space of two decades, I ask you?"

Zillah laughed again: and the dimple in her cheek was so bewitching that Nicholas was tempted to add to the list of follies that he had committed, the crowning one of having fallen head over ears in love with a girl whom he could not possibly afford to marry. But this once he thought before he spoke: and refrained.

Adah's face was still wistful. When Zillah laughed she smiled: and her smile was always more or less pathetic. "But you are not foolish enough to be superstitious, you say?"

"I said I was much too foolish to be superstitious. It is because I believe in ghosts that I am not afraid of them: and it is because I pin my faith to real omens that I have no regard for false ones. If you told me that you had met an angel with a flaming sword, who warned you that if you went along a certain road evil would come of it, I should believe you implicitly, and beg you to avoid that road at all costs: but if you told me that you dared not go down a particular street because you would have to pass under a ladder in order to do so, I should have no patience with you at all. I believe in horses and chariots of fire and in legions of angels all round about us: I should never be in the least surprised to catch sight of them any day: but I cannot believe in silly spirits who thump doors and rap tables and make themselves generally tiresome and ridiculous--or, if I do believe in them, I think they are very second-rate and inferior spirits, and ought not to be encouraged."

"Do you think that there are really such things as haunted houses?" asked Zillah.

"Certainly: I don't think there are really such things as houses that are not haunted. Every house is as full of unseen things as was Elisha's mountain: only our eyes--like the eyes of the prophet's servant--are not yet opened to see them. Every house that is inhabited by human beings is haunted by principalities and powers and the great conflicting armaments of good and evil. Don't you see what I mean?"

"I think I do, to a certain extent," replied Adah, while Zillah listened spell-bound, "and I wish I could believe it too. Your sort of superstition must be comforting instead of terrifying. But it is so dreadfully difficult to make oneself believe what one doesn't," she added with a sigh.

"According to my theory, nothing is supernatural because everything is supernatural," continued Nicholas, his ugly face almost transfigured into beauty by the intensity of his feelings and the passing exaltation of his mood. "There is nothing surprising to me in a miracle: it is only the rarity of miracles that surprises me. In the same way there would be nothing wonderful to me in seeing a spirit: the wonder is that our eyes are so blinded that we cannot see them. I have no fear of haunted houses: my only fear would be to enter a house which was not haunted by the denizens of the spiritual world, and where no guardian angel kept watch and ward. It is just because I believe in real ghosts so much, that I believe in imaginary ones so little. I have never seen phantom hearses or headless ladies or shadowy hounds, and I don't want to see them: but I trust if I keep my heart pure and my eye single, I may now and again be vouchsafed visions of angels, and may even perchance some day catch a far-off glimmer of the glory of the Holy Grail."

There was a pause for a few moments, while the two girls were filled with the admiration which women always feel when a man allows them a glimpse of his real self: and Nicholas was overpowered with the shame which a man invariably suffers after such a glimpse has been permitted. Then he rose awkwardly from his seat upon the beach, exclaiming, "I say, let's go in: it must be getting teatime!" And his two admirers meekly followed him to the vicarage.