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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Bram Stoker's 'The Gates of Life' is a captivating exploration of gothic fiction with a supernatural twist. The novel follows the story of a young protagonist who stumbles upon a hidden gateway to the afterlife, leading to a series of chilling encounters with ghosts and otherworldly creatures. Stoker's intricate prose and attention to detail create a haunting atmosphere that keeps readers on the edge of their seats, reminiscent of his iconic work 'Dracula'. The book delves into themes of mortality, the unknown, and the boundaries between life and death, making it a compelling read for fans of gothic literature. Stoker's mastery of suspense and his ability to craft unforgettable characters truly shine in this eerie tale. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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THE GATES OF LIFE
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Table of Contents
Introduction
At the threshold between innocence and responsibility, a single choice can fling open the doors that shape a life. Bram Stoker’s The Gates of Life turns that image of passage into a governing rhythm, following how decisions made in youth echo through years of consequence. The book invites readers to consider how love, loyalty, courage, and error converge at moments that feel ordinary until they suddenly are not. It is a study of turning points and the moral clarity—or confusion—that accompanies them, staging a measured drama in which character is revealed through action and steadfastness is tested by time.
Bram Stoker, the Irish novelist best known for Dracula, wrote widely across genres during the late Victorian and early Edwardian eras. The Gates of Life belongs to that later period, when Stoker was probing new narrative territories and social questions that extended beyond the supernatural. In some editions, this novel has appeared under the title The Man, a signal of its focus on formation, identity, and adulthood. Composed in the first decade of the twentieth century, it reflects the transitional energy of its moment: an age poised between strict convention and a modern sensibility that asked what a life might become.
Part of the book’s classic status lies in how it broadens our understanding of Stoker’s artistry. Readers often meet him through Gothic terrors, but here he refines a different register—romance, moral inquiry, and suspense without the trappings of the uncanny. The narrative is disciplined and attentive to cause and effect, yet it retains the atmospheric suggestiveness that marks Stoker’s best work. He builds tension from human stakes rather than monstrous threats, demonstrating that the same care for pacing, setting, and ethical pressure that animates his horror can also illuminate the quiet urgencies of ordinary lives.
The central premise is spare and compelling: a young life stands at the verge of maturity, and the bonds formed in early years—attachments of affection, duty, and promise—are confronted by circumstance. Fortune, chance, and choice intersect, pushing the protagonist to measure desire against responsibility. Stoker structures the story so that each decision opens onto another corridor of consequence, deepening the sense of passage implied by the title. Without relying on surprise for its own sake, the novel invites readers to witness how character is forged when events reorder the familiar, and how steadfast intentions are refined under pressure.
Enduring themes give The Gates of Life its lasting grip. Stoker explores the tension between fate and self-determination, suggesting that destiny is not a chain but a field in which will can still move. He examines the social scripts that guide men and women at the time, and how those scripts are either accepted or rewritten by experience. Loyalty emerges as both solace and test. Courage is not spectacle but constancy. And love, far from mere sentiment, becomes an ethic—demanding patience, honesty, and the humility to face the costs contained within our most cherished hopes.
Stoker’s craft supports these themes with images of thresholds, journeys, and reversals. Doors, paths, and crossings recur as quiet emblems of transformation, while shifts in weather and light underscore the moral atmosphere of crucial scenes. Dialogue carries the weight of social expectation, and Stoker’s descriptive economy keeps the focus on action and consequence. The result is a steady, accumulating momentum: chapters turn like hinges, each swing revealing a new alignment of possibilities. The prose is clear, the structure purposeful, and the effect cumulative, earning emotional power through measured progression rather than rhetorical excess.
Within Stoker’s body of work, The Gates of Life complements the celebrated Gothic while revealing a writer engaged with the ethical debates of his day. It speaks to anxieties about modernity and tradition, but also to the changing expectations placed on women and men in domestic and public life. Without abandoning narrative pleasure, it treats formation—how a person becomes who they are—as a serious subject. In doing so, it broadens the map of Stoker’s concerns, showing that the author who could summon dread also understood tenderness, duty, sacrifice, and the slow discipline of hope.
Its literary impact rests on this breadth and on the novel’s insistence that suspense can arise from moral stakes as surely as from supernatural peril. The Gates of Life participates in a tradition of romantic and social fiction that later writers would continue, blending inward transformation with outward trial. By demonstrating that character-driven drama can sustain the same intensity as Gothic spectacle, it helped normalize cross-pollination between popular romance, melodrama, and psychological narrative—an inheritance visible in much twentieth-century storytelling that values both momentum and ethical depth.
The novel’s classic appeal also comes from the clarity with which it frames consequence. Chance events occur, but they do not feel arbitrary; they pose questions. What do we owe to vows once made? How far should ambition stretch before it breaks trust? Stoker arranges his plot so that coincidence operates like a moral grammar, forcing choices into legibility. Readers sense justice not as a blunt instrument but as a patient current, one that tests characters without predetermining them. This balance between contingency and conscience creates a satisfying, durable architecture for reflection and rereading.
Entering the book, new readers benefit from attending to small signals: an overheard promise, a gesture of restraint, the weight of silence between friends. Stoker is often at his best when the story looks unassuming; the quiet scene is merely the threshold of the next. He respects the sentiment of his period while anchoring it in action, so that emotion is earned and revealed rather than declared. Patience is rewarded with cumulative resonance. The pleasures here are classical: a clean line of narrative, recognizable virtues under strain, and the gratifying sense that choices matter.
Historically, the novel’s world stands at a hinge: the late nineteenth century giving way to the early twentieth, with its shifting technologies, social mobility, and debates about autonomy. The Gates of Life absorbs that context without turning didactic, reflecting how private decisions are entangled with public norms. It observes the lingering authority of tradition even as it acknowledges emerging possibilities. The result is a humane portrait of a society—and of individuals—learning to navigate between legacy and change, a process that deepens the book’s imaginative sympathy and gives its conflicts a recognizable human scale.
For contemporary readers, the novel’s themes feel immediate. We still live at thresholds—between youth and adulthood, certainty and risk, self and obligation—where choices write the story of who we become. Stoker’s focus on integrity, responsibility, and love as ethical labor speaks across time. The Gates of Life endures not because it promises easy outcomes, but because it honors the cost of worthy ones. By guiding us through passages where resolve is tested and compassion enlarged, it shows why the classics remain companions: they teach us how to stand at the door, choose, and step forward.
Synopsis
The Gates of Life, also known as The Man, is Bram Stoker’s non‑supernatural novel of character, sentiment, and social duty. Set primarily in the English countryside, it traces a young woman’s development from spirited childhood to tested adulthood. Stoker shapes the narrative around questions of inheritance, honor, and the expectations placed upon women who occupy positions traditionally reserved for men. The story proceeds at a measured pace, emphasizing moral choices, the weight of community opinion, and the contrasts between genuine integrity and polished charm. Without leaning on gothic motifs, it explores how personal feeling must negotiate with responsibility and public consequence.
The novel opens with a child whose given name, uncommon for a girl, signals her family’s hopes and the unconventional path before her. Raised amid fields, woodlands, and a long‑established estate, she is encouraged to cultivate independence, physical courage, and a straightforward sense of right and wrong. Early episodes emphasize mentorship, the rhythms of rural life, and the social web that binds landowners, tenants, and neighbors. A childhood companion emerges as an important figure, sharing lessons and adventures that forge deep mutual trust. The tone is affectionate yet observant, marking how small choices begin to harden into traits of character.
As the heroine approaches maturity, circumstances place her closer to the helm of the family property, where everyday decisions bear long shadows. Stoker details the practicalities of stewardship—rents, repairs, and charity—alongside the pressures of etiquette and reputation. The community reads meaning into each gesture, and the heroine learns that public kindness may imply private commitments. The narrative observes how confidence can verge into stubbornness, and how forthrightness invites admiration while also provoking criticism. Throughout, the estate setting functions as a proving ground, revealing the protagonist’s fitness to manage both the land and the loyalties that come with it.
The childhood friend, now a reserved and steadfast adult, reenters the story as a quiet counterpoint to social brilliance. His feelings are transparent to readers long before they are to the heroine, yet he hesitates, mindful of propriety and her growing responsibilities. Stoker underscores a mutual respect founded on shared memory and practical service, rather than flirtation. Conversations about work, duty, and simple pleasures carry more weight than grand declarations. This thread develops gradually, its progress marked by misunderstandings of tone and timing rather than outright conflict, suggesting how two honorable people can still fail to read each other clearly.
Into this equilibrium steps a newcomer who thrives in drawing rooms and public occasions. He is attentive, eloquent, and conspicuously admired, offering the heroine a vision of life adorned by acclaim. The contrast with the childhood friend sharpens: charm sits opposite constancy, spectacle opposite substance. Stoker is careful not to caricature, allowing the newcomer genuine appeal while hinting at gaps between performance and principle. Social scenes grow more intricate, with favors exchanged, calls returned, and small slights amplified by gossip. The heroine, publicly poised yet privately uncertain, weighs suitors as much by their effect on her community as by their effect on her heart.
A sequence of trials—some social, some practical—tests every principal. The estate faces challenges that require quick judgment and a willingness to accept blame. Stoker shows how crises reveal underlying values: who steps forward without prompting, who calculates advantage, and who shoulders unglamorous work. The heroine’s decisions place her reputation at risk even when her motives are sound. Acts of quiet bravery, kept from public view, contrast with widely reported gestures that cost little. These episodes do not resolve the triangle, but they make clearer what sort of companionship would support a lifetime of responsibilities as well as moments of celebration.
Misapprehensions accumulate. A well‑intended concealment appears duplicitous; a delayed explanation arrives too late; a token meant as reassurance proves wounding. Stoker lets distance—literal and figurative—enter the narrative. Absences lengthen, letters are interpreted through the lens of pride, and intermediaries complicate simple truths. The heroine’s confidence hardens into self‑reliance that can look like coldness. Meanwhile, her suitors reveal themselves not by grand statements but by how they endure waiting, disappointment, and public rumor. The novel’s middle movement thus becomes a study in how honorable impulses can diverge, and how ordinary restraint may resemble indifference.
A reckoning gathers as private motives intersect with public stakes. The heroine must decide what sort of future aligns with her sense of justice and with the claims others have upon her. Stoker engineers moments of heightened risk and moral choice, in which safety, status, and affection cannot all be preserved intact. Revelations clarify earlier misunderstandings without nullifying their cost. Each central figure is afforded an opportunity to act decisively, showing whether promises hold under strain. The narrative’s momentum moves toward a resolution rooted less in surprise than in the cumulative weight of character, habit, and long‑observed conduct.
The Gates of Life endures for its sober affirmation that love, to be durable, must be compatible with duty. Stoker’s interest lies not in sensational shocks but in the ethics of everyday leadership and partnership, and in the dignity of work unpraised. The novel offers a companion to his better‑known dark romances by examining courage without the supernatural, and loyalty without show. Its closing emphasis remains spoiler‑safe: maturity is measured by the willingness to put principle before appetite, and by the capacity to recognize steadiness when it is least theatrical. In that, the book’s questions remain resonant beyond its era.
Historical Context
Bram Stoker’s The Gates of Life—often published under the title The Man (1905)—is set largely in contemporary England at the turn of the twentieth century, a moment straddling late Victorian and early Edwardian society. The dominant institutions framing the narrative were the landed gentry and their estates, the Church of England, and the British legal system governing inheritance and marriage. Britain remained the center of a global empire, and imperial self-confidence mingled with anxieties after recent conflicts. Everyday life, especially outside major cities, moved to rhythms of parish life, county politics, and seasonal country pursuits that reinforced class hierarchy and codes of conduct.
The book appeared as Stoker’s theatrical career reached a transition. For decades from the late 1870s, he managed the Lyceum Theatre in London for the celebrated actor Henry Irving, learning how popular narratives balanced moral sentiment with spectacle. By 1905 the Edwardian era had begun, Irving would die that same year, and Stoker—already famous for Dracula (1897)—was publishing fiction that engaged contemporary social debates without the overt supernatural. The reading public had broadened and shifted since the 1890s, and single-volume novels aimed at a middle-class market primed for romance, moral testing, and modern problems rendered in accessible, dramatic prose.
One of the most visible debates of the 1890s and early 1900s was the “New Woman.” Campaigners organized for women’s rights in education, employment, and politics; the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies consolidated in 1897, and the more militant Women’s Social and Political Union formed in 1903. Journals and popular fiction argued over female autonomy, marriage, and motherhood. Stoker’s novel, centered on a strong-willed heiress negotiating duty and desire, echoes these discussions: it tests how far a woman could direct her own life within elite society while preserving respectability, and it measures the costs of transgressing or upholding prevailing gender expectations.
Legal reforms underpin the novel’s world. The Married Women’s Property Acts (1870 and 1882) allowed wives to own property and earnings in their own right, weakening the older doctrine of coverture. The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 had already created civil divorce courts, and late nineteenth-century measures, including the Guardianship of Infants Act (1886), incrementally expanded women’s legal standing. In such a framework, an heiress’s choices—about marriage settlements, control of land, and guardianship—had concrete consequences. The narrative’s tensions over consent, contract, and reputation reflect the period’s slow redefinition of women’s legal personhood.
Land and lineage remain central. Primogeniture and traditional settlements still shaped the transmission of estates, though the Settled Land Acts (beginning 1882) increased flexibility for life tenants to sell or improve land. The agricultural depression from the late 1870s weakened rural incomes, and the introduction of death duties in 1894 put new fiscal pressure on great houses. Stewardship, rather than mere display, was increasingly touted as the ideal of the landed elite. The novel’s country-house milieu registers this climate, where estate management, philanthropy, and prudent marriages function as strategies to preserve status and local influence.
Courtship rituals and marriage conventions anchor social life in the story’s world. Chaperonage, formal introductions, and tightly policed propriety governed eligible young people in upper-class circles. Public debate over forbidden unions—most famously the long campaign culminating in the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act of 1907—revealed how marriage rules were both legal and moral battlegrounds. The press, clergy, and family elders enforced standards. Stoker writes within this matrix: honor, rumor, and timing matter, and the prospect of an imprudent match threatens not only feeling but property, alliances, and communal standing.
Edwardian Britain had recently emerged from the Second Boer War (1899–1902), a conflict that stirred patriotism and also exposed national weaknesses in health and organization. Public talk of “manliness”—courage, self-command, and duty—pervaded schools, churches, and the press. The title The Man resonated with these ideals, yet the narrative complicates them by weighing restraint, empathy, and moral courage alongside physical daring. In this context, tests of character are implicitly national as well as personal, echoing contemporary anxieties about fitness for imperial leadership and the responsibilities of rank.
Education reforms changed expectations for both sexes. Compulsory elementary schooling spread after 1870, and women’s higher education expanded through colleges founded from the 1860s. Women gained qualifications in medicine and the professions, albeit unevenly. In gentry households, educated daughters increasingly read widely and formed opinions on politics, philanthropy, and estate affairs. This climate informs Stoker’s portrayal of a heroine capable of judgment and leadership. While the novel remains rooted in conventional hierarchies, it reflects a world in which literate, socially aware women could plausibly steer negotiations over property, charity, and the choice of a spouse.
Technological change made its own pressure felt. Railways knit country districts to London and the provinces; the telegraph and an expanding postal service accelerated news and private correspondence; the telephone and motorcar were entering everyday life in cities and, more slowly, the countryside. These innovations altered courtship, scandal, and rescue plots alike by collapsing distances and timelines. Even when a story remains rural in setting, it assumes a Britain where mobility and communication can swiftly intensify a crisis—or retrieve it—thereby heightening the moral and emotional stakes of decisions taken in the drawing room or on the road.
The contrast between metropolis and countryside was a favorite late Victorian theme. London embodied scale, speed, and cosmopolitan temptation; the shires promised rootedness, duty, and memory. Rural estates depended on networks of tenant farmers, gamekeepers, and domestic servants, while towns nearby provided shops, newspapers, and railheads. Philanthropic projects—schools, reading rooms, relief for the poor—were markers of a conscientious landlord or lady. Stoker situates his fiction in this polarity, where the country house becomes both refuge and stage, its ceremonies mediating between tradition and the encroaching modern world.
Religious institutions underwrote these social codes. The Church of England, with its parish structures, rites, and charities, shaped weekly rhythms and the language of conscience. Nonconformist chapels, especially in market towns, provided alternate moral communities. Sermons, temperance societies, and mission work promoted self-discipline and social duty. Stoker, writing for an audience steeped in this culture, employs a moral vocabulary recognizable to parishioners and readers alike: forgiveness, duty, sacrifice, and covenant. Decisions in love and inheritance are framed as spiritual as well as legal obligations, tethering private feeling to communal ethics.
Stoker’s long service at the Lyceum Theatre cultivated a sense of timing, spectacle, and character that carries into his prose. Working with Henry Irving, he learned how melodrama balanced heightened feeling with clear moral stakes. The company’s extensive North American tours exposed him to transatlantic audiences and the logistics of mass entertainment. By the 1900s, such experience helped Stoker craft scenes that feel theatrically staged—public confrontations, rescues, confessions—while still speaking to contemporary concerns. The Gates of Life channels that stagecraft into a novel of manners and tests, rather than the overt horror of his earlier triumph.
Stoker’s Irish background also matters. Born in Dublin in 1847 and educated at Trinity College Dublin, he worked as a civil servant and drama critic for the Dublin Evening Mail before moving to London in 1878. Irish and English literary circles overlapped in this period, and Stoker’s social world included figures who moved between the two cultures. The public scandals surrounding Oscar Wilde in 1895, and the moralism that followed, sharpened sensitivities about sexual propriety in print. Stoker’s later fiction often adopts a guarded tone on intimate matters, aligning with a readership wary of transgression yet curious about modern freedom.
The publishing economy conditioned what was written and how it was read. The dominance of circulating libraries waned in the 1890s, as the three-decker novel gave way to affordable single-volume editions. The Net Book Agreement (1900) stabilized retail prices and encouraged a wide middle-class readership. Reviews in newspapers and monthlies could make or mar a book; reading societies and lending libraries kept fiction in circulation far from London. Authors aiming for a broad audience balanced novelty with moral reassurance. Stoker’s novel fits this ecology: a contemporary subject, dramatic turns, and clear ethical horizons suited to family reading and discussion.
Victorian and Edwardian campaigns around public morality formed another backdrop. The Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885) raised the age of consent and criminalized certain sexual behaviors, prompting heightened scrutiny of courtship and reputation. Periodical literature amplified anxieties about seduction, betrayal, and the vulnerability of women in a rapidly changing society. Writers negotiated these sensitivities by emphasizing consent, guardianship, and the social consequences of passion. In The Gates of Life, decisions about love are tested against public honor and legal safeguards, reflecting an environment where romance is inevitably a matter of law, class, and conscience.
Country sports and codes of conduct expressed elite identity. Riding, hunting, and estate hospitality marked membership in county society and cultivated virtues of courage, self-control, and generosity. At the same time, animal welfare movements, organized since the early nineteenth century, and urban critiques of rural privilege challenged aspects of these traditions. Landscape itself—parks, coverts, hedgerows—was both aesthetic theater and economic resource. Stoker writes within that culture, where the countryside can appear as a school of character. The tension between inherited custom and ethical reform supplies an undercurrent to scenes of leisure and crisis alike.
Finally, the aftermath of war and the stir of reform gave the era a double face: nostalgic and forward-looking. Health campaigns after the Boer War, debates on education and efficiency, and women’s organized politics all pressed established families to adapt. The Gates of Life mirrors this transition. It celebrates constancy, prudence, and duty while acknowledging that women’s agency, legal change, and modern communications reshape how love, inheritance, and honor are decided. In doing so, the novel stands as both mirror and critique, registering the Edwardian negotiation between a fading Victorian order and the gates of a new social life.
Author Biography
Bram Stoker (1847–1912) was an Irish novelist, short-story writer, and theater professional whose work bridges the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods. Best known as the author of Dracula (1897), he helped define the contours of modern Gothic fiction, combining documentary realism with folklore, travel writing, and the era’s fascination with science and technology. His fiction explores tensions between tradition and modernity, urban sophistication and peripheral frontiers, and the interplay of superstition, belief, and rational inquiry. Beyond his most famous novel, Stoker produced a varied body of tales and essays that reflect the dynamism of fin‑de‑siècle culture and the international circuits of popular entertainment.
Educated at Trinity College Dublin in the late 1860s and early 1870s, Stoker engaged deeply with rhetoric, debate, and athletics while completing his degree. After graduation he entered the Irish civil service, working for several years in Dublin, and began contributing theater reviews to the Dublin Evening Mail. This dual track—government work and cultural journalism—shaped his disciplined habits and his eye for performance. His early reading drew on Irish storytelling traditions and on the Gothic and sensation literatures circulating in nineteenth‑century Dublin; critics often note the presence of authors such as J. Sheridan Le Fanu as important antecedents to Stoker’s mature work.
In the late 1870s Stoker relocated to London and assumed a central role in the city’s theatrical world as business manager of the Lyceum Theatre, associated with the celebrated actor Henry Irving. Over nearly three decades he oversaw finances, touring logistics, and publicity for large‑scale productions that traveled across Britain, Europe, and North America. Immersion in stagecraft and melodrama sharpened his sense of pacing, scene construction, and character, qualities that would carry into his fiction. The cosmopolitan milieu of the theater also exposed him to transnational networks of stories, places, and technologies that inform the seafaring episodes, communications media, and shifting geographies of his novels.
Dracula, published in 1897, crystallized Stoker’s method. He assembled the narrative from diaries, letters, ship’s logs, telegrams, and newspaper cuttings, creating a mosaic of voices that lends immediacy and plausibility to supernatural events. Research in libraries and attention to travelogues, medical and legal discourse, and folklore supplied details about landscapes, beliefs, and occult practices, while a visit to the North Sea town of Whitby helped fix some English settings. Contemporary reviewers generally praised the novel’s atmosphere and narrative ingenuity, although its reputation grew substantially in the twentieth century. Stoker also prepared a stage version to secure dramatic rights, reflecting his instinct for performance and adaptation.
Although now overshadowed by Dracula, Stoker’s broader oeuvre ranges widely across genres. Early publications include the fairy‑tale collection Under the Sunset (1881) and the novel The Snake’s Pass (1890). He experimented with romance and frontier adventure in The Shoulder of Shasta (1895) and Miss Betty (1898), maritime intrigue in The Mystery of the Sea (1902), Egyptological Gothic in The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), and late romances of peril in The Man (1905), The Lady of the Shroud (1909), and The Lair of the White Worm (1911). He also produced the influential biography Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906) and, posthumously, Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories (1914).
Across these works Stoker returned to themes that resonated with his era. He juxtaposed emerging technologies—typewriters, shorthand, phonographs, chemical analysis, and rapid communications—with superstition, ritual, and folk medicine, staging debates over authority and evidence. He mined travel literature and antiquarian scholarship to reanimate legends, from Central European vampirism to British and Mediterranean maritime lore, and he adapted the documentary techniques of journalism to fiction. His long theater career fostered an emphasis on spectacle, gesture, and timing, even on the page. Nonfiction about performance illuminates his respect for professionalism and discipline, and his novels often explore leadership, collaboration, and the ethics of collective action.
After Henry Irving’s death in 1905 and the end of the Lyceum years, Stoker devoted increasing energy to writing and to memorializing the stage he knew so well. He continued to publish fiction into the early 1910s and died in London in 1912. His posthumous reputation expanded dramatically through adaptations: an unauthorized German film, Nosferatu (1922), prompted legal action by his estate, and subsequent stage and screen versions cemented Dracula as a global icon. Scholars continue to study his surviving notes and correspondence, which reveal painstaking research and structural planning. Today Stoker is recognized as a principal architect of modern vampire and Gothic literature.
THE GATES OF LIFE
Fore-Glimpse
‘I would rather be an angel than God!’
The voice of the speaker sounded clearly through the hawthorn tree. The young man and the young girl who sat together on the low tombstone looked at each other. They had heard the voices of the two children talking, but had not noticed what they said; it was the sentiment, not the sound, which roused their attention.
The girl put her finger to her lips to impress silence, and the man nodded; they sat as still as mice whilst the two children went on talking.
* * * * *
The scene would have gladdened a painter’s heart. An old churchyard. The church low and square-towered, with long mullioned windows, the yellow-grey stone roughened by age and tender-hued with lichens. Round it clustered many tombstones tilted in all directions. Behind the church a line of gnarled and twisted yews.
The churchyard was full of fine trees. On one side a magnificent cedar; on the other a great copper beech. Here and there among the tombs and headstones many beautiful blossoming trees rose from the long green grass. The laburnum glowed in the June afternoon sunlight; the lilac, the hawthorn and the clustering meadowsweet which fringed the edge of the lazy stream mingled their heavy sweetness in sleepy fragrance. The yellow-grey crumbling walls were green in places with wrinkled harts-tongues, and were topped with sweet-williams and spreading house-leek and stone-crop and wild-flowers whose delicious sweetness made for the drowsy repose of perfect summer.
But amid all that mass of glowing colour the two young figures seated on the grey old tomb stood out conspicuously. The man was in conventional hunting-dress: red coat, white stock, black hat, white breeches, and top-boots. The girl was one of the richest, most glowing, and yet withal daintiest figures the eye of man could linger on. She was in riding-habit of hunting scarlet cloth; her black hat was tipped forward by piled-up masses red-golden hair. Round her neck was a white lawn scarf in the fashion of a man’s hunting-stock, close fitting, and sinking into a gold-buttoned waistcoat of snowy twill. As she sat with the long skirt across her left arm her tiny black top-boots appeared underneath. Her gauntleted gloves were of white buckskin; her riding-whip was plaited of white leather, topped with ivory and banded with gold.
Even in her fourteenth year Miss Stephen Norman gave promise of striking beauty; beauty of a rarely composite character. In her the various elements of her race seemed to have cropped out. The firm-set jaw, with chin broader and more square than is usual in a woman, and the wide fine forehead and aquiline nose marked the high descent from Saxon through Norman. The glorious mass of red hair, of the true flame colour, showed the blood of another ancient ancestor of Northern race, and suited well with the voluptuous curves of the full, crimson lips. The purple-black eyes, the raven eyebrows and eyelashes, and the fine curve of the nostrils spoke of the Eastern blood of the far-back wife of the Crusader. Already she was tall for her age, with something of that lankiness which marks the early development of a really fine figure. Long-legged, long-necked, as straight as a lance, with head poised on the proud neck like a lily on its stem.
Stephen Norman certainly gave promise of a splendid womanhood. Pride, self-reliance and dominance were marked in every feature; in her bearing and in her lightest movement.
Her companion, Harold An Wolf, was some five years her senior, and by means of those five years and certain qualities had long stood in the position of her mentor. He was more than six feet two in height, deep-chested, broad-shouldered, lean-flanked, long-armed and big-handed. He had that appearance strength, with well-poised neck and forward set of the head, which marks the successful athlete.
The two sat quiet, listening. Through the quiet hum of afternoon came the voices of the two children. Outside the lich-gate[1], under the shade of the spreading cedar, the horses stamped occasionally as the flies troubled them. The grooms were mounted; one held the delicate-limbed white Arab, the other the great black horse.
‘I would rather be an angel than God!’
The little girl who made the remark was an ideal specimen of the village Sunday-school child. Blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked, thick-legged, with her straight brown hair tied into a hard bunch with a much-creased, cherry-coloured ribbon. A glance at the girl would have satisfied the most sceptical as to her goodness. Without being in any way smug she was radiant with self-satisfaction and well-doing. A child of the people; an early riser; a help to her mother; a good angel to her father; a little mother to her brothers and sisters; cleanly in mind and body; self-reliant, full of faith, cheerful.
The other little girl was prettier, but of a more stubborn type; more passionate, less organised, and infinitely more assertive. Black-haired, black-eyed, swarthy, large-mouthed, snub-nosed; the very type and essence of unrestrained, impulsive, emotional, sensual nature. A seeing eye would have noted inevitable danger for the early years of her womanhood. She seemed amazed by the self-abnegation implied by her companion’s statement; after a pause she replied:
‘I wouldn’t. I’d rather be up at the top of everything and give orders to the angels if I chose. I can’t think, Marjorie, why you’d rather take orders than give them.’
‘That’s just it, Susan. I don’t want to give orders; I’d rather obey them. It must be very terrible to have to think of things so much, that you want everything done your own way. And besides, I shouldn’t like to have to be just!’
‘Why not?’ the voice was truculent, though there was wistfulness in it also.
‘Oh Susan. Just fancy having to punish; for of course justice needs punishing as well as praising. Now an angel has such a nice time, helping people and comforting them, and bringing sunshine into dark places. Putting down fresh dew every morning; making the flowers grow, and bringing babies and taking care of them till their mothers find them. Of course God is very good and very sweet and very merciful, but oh, He must be very terrible.’
‘All the same I would rather be God and able to do things!’
Then the children moved off out of earshot. The two seated on the tombstone looked after them. The first to speak was the girl, who said:
‘That’s very sweet and good of Marjorie; but do you know, Harold, I like Susie’s idea better.’
‘Which idea was that, Stephen?’
‘Why, didn’t you notice what she said: “I’d like to be God and be able to do things”?’
‘Yes,’ he said after a moment’s reflection. ‘That’s a fine idea in the abstract; but I doubt of its happiness in the long-run.’
‘Doubt of its happiness. Come now? what could there be better, after all. Isn’t it good enough to be God. What more do you want?’
The girl’s tone was quizzical, but her great black eyes blazed with some thought of sincerity which lay behind the fun. The young man shook his head with a smile of kindly tolerance as he answered:
‘It isn’t that—surely you must know it. I’m ambitious enough, goodness knows; but there are bounds to satisfy even me. But I’m not sure that the good little thing isn’t right. She seemed, somehow, to hit a bigger truth than she knew: “fancy having to be just.”’
‘I don’t see much difficulty in that. Anyone can be just!’
‘Pardon me,’ he answered, ‘there is perhaps nothing so difficult in the whole range of a man’s work.. There was distinct defiance in the girl’s eyes as she asked:
‘A man’s work. Why a man’s work. Isn’t it a woman’s work also?’
‘Well, I suppose it ought to be, theoretically; practically it isn’t.’
‘And why not, pray?. The mere suggestion of any disability of woman as such aroused immediate antagonism. Her companion suppressed a smile as he answered deliberately:
‘Because, my dear Stephen, the Almighty has ordained that justice is not a virtue women can practise. Mind, I do not say women are unjust. Far from it, where there are no interests of those dear to them they can be of a sincerity of justice that can make a man’s blood run cold. But justice in the abstract is not an ordinary virtue: it has to be considerate as well as stern, and above all interest of all kinds and of every one—. The girl interrupted hotly:
‘I don’t agree with you at all. You can’t give an instance where women are unjust. I don’t mean of course individual instances, but classes of cases where injustice is habitual.. The suppressed smile cropped out now unconsciously round the man’s lips in a way which was intensely aggravating to the girl.
‘I’ll give you a few,’ he said. ‘Did you ever know a mother just to a boy who beat her own boy at school?. The girl replied quietly:
‘Ill-treatment and bullying are subjects for punishment, not justice.’
‘Oh, I don’t mean that kind of beating. I mean getting the prizes their own boys contended for; getting above them in class; showing superior powers in running or cricket or swimming, or in any of the forms of effort in which boys vie with each other.. The girl reflected, then she spoke:
‘Well, you may be right. I don’t altogether admit it, but I accept it as not on my side. But this is only one case.’
‘A pretty common one. Do you think that Sheriff of Galway, who in default of a hangman hanged his son with his own hands, would have done so if he had been a woman?. The girl answered at once:
‘Frankly, no. I don’t suppose the mother was ever born who would do such a thing. But that is not a common case, is it. Have you any other?. The young man paused before he spoke:
‘There is another, but I don’t think I can go into it fairly with you.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, because after all you know, Stephen, you are only a girl and you can’t be expected to know.. The girl laughed:
‘Well, if it’s anything about women surely a girl, even of my tender age, must know something more of it, or be able to guess at, than any young man can. However, say what you think and I’ll tell you frankly if I agree—that is if a woman can be just, in such a matter.’
‘Shortly the point is this: Can a woman be just to another woman, or to a man for the matter of that, where either her own affection or a fault of the other is concerned?’
‘I don’t see any reason to the contrary. Surely pride alone should ensure justice in the former case, and the consciousness of superiority in the other.. The young man shook his head:
‘Pride and the consciousness of superiority. Are they not much the same thing. But whether or no, if either of them has to be relied on, I’m afraid the scales of Justice would want regulating, and her sword should be blunted in case its edge should be turned back on herself. I have an idea that although pride might be a guiding principle with you individually, it would be a failure with the average. However, as it would be in any case a rule subject to many exceptions I must let it go.’
Harold looked at his watch and rose. Stephen followed him; transferring her whip into the hand which held up the skirt, she took his arm with her right hand in the pretty way in which a young girl clings to her elders. Together they went out at the lich-gate. The groom drew over with the horses. Stephen patted hers and gave her a lump of sugar. Then putting her foot into Harold’s ready hand she sprang lightly into the saddle. Harold swung himself into his saddle with the dexterity of an accomplished rider.
As the two rode up the road, keeping on the shady side under the trees, Stephen said quietly, half to herself, as if the sentence had impressed itself on her mind:
‘To be God and able to do things!’
Harold rode on in silence. The chill of some vague fear was upon him.
CHAPTER I—Stephen
Stephen Norman of Normanstand had remained a bachelor until close on middle age, when the fact took hold of him that there was no immediate heir to his great estate. Whereupon, with his wonted decision, he set about looking for a wife.
He had been a close friend of his next neighbour, Squire[2] Rowly, ever since their college days. They had, of course, been often in each other’s houses, and Rowly’s young sister—almost a generation younger than himself, and the sole fruit of his father’s second marriage—had been like a little sister to him too. She had, in the twenty years which had elapsed, grown to be a sweet and beautiful young woman. In all the past years, with the constant opportunity which friendship gave of close companionship, the feeling never altered. Squire Norman would have been surprised had he been asked to describe Margaret Rowly and found himself compelled to present the picture of a woman, not a child.
Now, however, when his thoughts went womanward and wifeward, he awoke to the fact that Margaret came within the category of those he sought. His usual decision ran its course. Semi-brotherly feeling gave place to a stronger and perhaps more selfish feeling. Before he even knew it, he was head over ears in love with his pretty neighbour.
Norman was a fine man, stalwart and handsome; his forty years sat so lightly on him that his age never seemed to come into question in a woman’s mind. Margaret had always liked him and trusted him; he was the big brother who had no duty in the way of scolding to do. His presence had always been a gladness; and the sex of the girl, first unconsciously then consciously, answered to the man’s overtures, and her consent was soon obtained.
When in the fulness of time it was known that an heir was expected, Squire Norman took for granted that the child would be a boy, and held the idea so tenaciously that his wife, who loved him deeply, gave up warning and remonstrance after she had once tried to caution him against too fond a hope. She saw how bitterly he would be disappointed in case it should prove to be a girl. He was, however, so fixed on the point that she determined to say no more. After all, it might be a boy; the chances were equal. The Squire would not listen to any one else at all; so as the time went on his idea was more firmly fixed than ever. His arrangements were made on the base that he would have a son. The name was of course decided. Stephen had been the name of all the Squires of Normanstand for ages—as far back as the records went; and Stephen the new heir of course would be.
Like all middle-aged men with young wives he was supremely anxious as the time drew near. In his anxiety for his wife his belief in the son became passive rather than active. Indeed, the idea of a son was so deeply fixed in his mind that it was not disturbed even by his anxiety for the young wife he idolised.
When instead of a son a daughter was born, the Doctor and the nurse, who knew his views on the subject, held back from the mother for a little the knowledge of the sex. Dame Norman was so weak that the Doctor feared lest anxiety as to how her husband would bear the disappointment, might militate against her. Therefore the Doctor sought the Squire in his study, and went resolutely at his task.
‘Well, Squire, I congratulate you on the birth of your child!. Norman was of course struck with the use of the word ‘child’; but the cause of his anxiety was manifested by his first question:
‘How is she, Doctor. Is she safe?. The child was after all of secondary importance. The Doctor breathed more freely; the question had lightened his task. There was, therefore, more assurance in his voice as he answered:
‘She is safely through the worst of her trouble, but I am greatly anxious yet. She is very weak. I fear anything that might upset her.’
The Squire’s voice came quick and strong:
‘There must be no upset. And now tell me about my son?. He spoke the last word half with pride, half bashfully.
‘Your son is a daughter!. There was silence for so long that the Doctor began to be anxious. Squire Norman sat quite still; his right hand resting on the writing-table before him became clenched so hard that the knuckles looked white and the veins red. After a long slow breath he spoke:
‘She, my daughter, is well?. The Doctor answered with cheerful alacrity:
‘Splendid!—I never saw a finer child in my life. She will be a comfort and an honour to you!. The Squire spoke again:
‘What does her mother think. I suppose she’s very proud of her?’
‘She does not know yet that it is a girl. I thought it better not to let her know till I had told you.’
‘Why?’
‘Because—because—Norman, old friend, you know why. Because you had set your heart on a son; and I know how it would grieve that sweet young wife and mother to feel your disappointment. I want your lips to be the first to tell her; so that on may assure her of your happiness in that a daughter has been born to you.’
The Squire put out his great hand and laid it on the other’s shoulder. There was almost a break in his voice as he said:
‘Thank you, my old friend, my true friend, for your thought. When may I see her?’
‘By right, not yet. But, as knowing your views, she may fret herself till she knows, I think you had better come at once.’
All Norman’s love and strength combined for his task. As he leant over and kissed his young wife there was real fervour in his voice as he said:
‘Where is my dear daughter that you may place her in my arms?. For an instant there came a chill to the mother’s heart that her hopes had been so far disappointed; but then came the reaction of her joy that her husband, her baby’s father, was pleased. There was a heavenly dawn of red on her pale face as she drew her husband’s head down and kissed him.
‘Oh, my dear,’ she said, ‘I am so happy that you are pleased!. The nurse took the mother’s hand gently and held it to the baby as she laid it in the father’s arms.
He held the mother’s hand as he kissed the baby’s brow.
The Doctor touched him gently on the arm and beckoned him away. He went with careful footsteps, looking behind as he went.
After dinner he talked with the Doctor on various matters; but presently he asked:
‘I suppose, Doctor, it is no sort of rule that the first child regulates the sex of a family?’
‘No, of course not. Otherwise how should we see boys and girls mixed in one family, as is nearly always the case. But, my friend,’ he went on, ‘you must not build hopes so far away. I have to tell you that your wife is far from strong. Even now she is not so well as I could wish, and there yet may be change.. The Squire leaped impetuously to his feet as he spoke quickly:
‘Then why are we waiting here. Can nothing be done. Let us have the best help, the best advice in the world.. The Doctor raised his hand.
‘Nothing can be done as yet. I have only fear.’
‘Then let us be ready in case your fears should be justified. Who are the best men in London to help in such a case?. The Doctor mentioned two names; and within a few minutes a mounted messenger was galloping to Norcester, the nearest telegraph centre. The messenger was to arrange for a special train if necessary. Shortly afterwards the Doctor went again to see his patient. After a long absence he came back, pale and agitated. Norman felt his heart sink when he saw him; a groan broke from him as the Doctor spoke:
‘She is much worse. I am in great fear that she may pass away before the morning!. The Squire’s strong voice was clouded, with a hoarse veil as he asked:
‘May I see her?’
‘Not yet; at present she is sleeping. She may wake strengthened; in which case you may see her. But if not—’
‘If not?’—the voice was not like his own.
‘Then I shall send for you at once!. The Doctor returned to his vigil. The Squire, left alone, sank on his knees, his face in his hands; his great shoulders shook with the intensity of his grief.
An hour or more passed before he heard hurried steps. He sprang to the door:
‘Well?’
‘You had better come now.’
‘Is she better?’
‘Alas! no. I fear her minutes are numbered. School yourself, my dear old friend. God will help you in this bitter hour. All you can do now is to make her last moments happy.’
‘I know. I know!’ he answered in a voice so calm that his companion wondered.
When they came into the room Margaret was dozing. When her eyes opened and she found her husband beside her bed there spread over her face a glad look; which, alas! soon changed to one of pain. She motioned to him to bend down. He knelt and put his head beside her on the pillow; his arms went tenderly round her as though by his iron devotion and strength he would shield her from all harm. Her voice came very low and in broken gasps; she was summoning all her strength that she might speak:
‘My dear, dear husband, I am so sad at leaving you. You have made me so happy, and I love you so. Forgive me, dear, for the pain I know you will suffer when I am gone. And oh, Stephen, I know you will cherish our little one—yours and mine—when I am gone. She will have no mother; you will have to be father and mother too.’
‘I will hold her in my very heart’s core, my darling, as I hold you!. He could hardly speak from emotion. She went on:
‘And oh, my dear, you will not grieve that she is not a son to carry on your name?. And then a sudden light came into her eyes; and there was exultation in her weak voice as she said:
‘She is to be our only one; let her be indeed our son. Call her the name we both love!. For answer he rose and laid his hand very, very tenderly on the babe as he said:
‘This dear one, my sweet wife, who will carry your soul in her breast, will be my son; the only son I shall ever have. All my life long I shall, please Almighty God, so love her—our little Stephen—as you and I love each other!’
She laid her hand on his so that it touched at once her husband and her child. Then she raised the other weak arm, and placed it round his neck, and their lips met. Her soul went out in this last kiss.
CHAPTER II—The Heart of a Child
For some weeks after his wife’s death Squire Norman[3] was overwhelmed with grief. He made a brave effort, however, to go through the routine of his life; and succeeded so far that he preserved an external appearance of bearing his loss with resignation. But within, all was desolation.
Little Stephen had winning ways which sent deep roots into her father’s heart. The little bundle of nerves which the father took into his arms must have realised with all its senses that, in all that it saw and heard and touched, there was nothing but love and help and protection. Gradually the trust was followed by expectation. If by some chance the father was late in coming to the nursery the child would grow impatient and cast persistent, longing glances at the door. When he came all was joy.
Time went quickly by, and Norman was only recalled to its passing by the growth of his child. Seedtime and harvest, the many comings of nature’s growth were such commonplaces to him, and had been for so many years, that they made on him no impressions of comparison. But his baby was one and one only. Any change in it was not only in itself a new experience, but brought into juxtaposition what is with what was. The changes that began to mark the divergence of sex were positive shocks to him, for they were unexpected. In the very dawn of babyhood dress had no special import; to his masculine eyes sex was lost in youth. But, little by little, came the tiny changes which convention has established. And with each change came to Squire Norman the growing realisation that his child was a woman. A tiny woman, it is true, and requiring more care and protection and devotion than a bigger one; but still a woman. The pretty little ways, the eager caresses, the graspings and holdings of the childish hands, the little roguish smiles and pantings and flirtings were all but repetitions in little of the dalliance of long ago. The father, after all, reads in the same book in which the lover found his knowledge.
At first there was through all his love for his child a certain resentment of her sex. His old hope of a son had been rooted too deeply to give way easily. But when the conviction came, and with it the habit of its acknowledgment, there came also a certain resignation, which is the halting-place for satisfaction. But he never, not then nor afterwards, quite lost the old belief that Stephen was indeed a son. Could there ever have been a doubt, the remembrance of his wife’s eyes and of her faint voice, of her hope and her faith, as she placed her baby in his arms would have refused it a resting-place. This belief tinged all his after-life and moulded his policy with regard to his girl’s upbringing. If she was to be indeed his son as well as his daughter, she must from the first be accustomed to boyish as well as to girlish ways. This, in that she was an only child, was not a difficult matter to accomplish. Had she had brothers and sisters, matters of her sex would soon have found their own level.
There was one person who objected strongly to any deviation from the conventional rule of a girl’s education. This was Miss Laetitia Rowly, who took after a time, in so far as such a place could be taken, that of the child’s mother. Laetitia Rowly was a young aunt of Squire Rowly of Norwood; the younger sister of his father and some sixteen years his own senior. When the old Squire’s second wife had died, Laetitia, then a conceded spinster of thirty-six, had taken possession of the young Margaret. When Margaret had married Squire Norman, Miss Rowly was well satisfied; for she had known Stephen Norman all her life. Though she could have wished a younger bridegroom for her darling, she knew it would be hard to get a better man or one of more suitable station in life. Also she knew that Margaret loved him, and the woman who had never found the happiness of mutual love in her own life found a pleasure in the romance of true love, even when the wooer was middle-aged. She had been travelling in the Far East when the belated news of Margaret’s death came to her. When she had arrived home she announced her intention of taking care of Margaret’s child, just as she had taken care of Margaret. For several reasons this could not be done in the same way. She was not old enough to go and live at Normanstand without exciting comment; and the Squire absolutely refused to allow that his daughter should live anywhere except in his own house. Educational supervision, exercised at such distance and so intermittently, could neither be complete nor exact.
Though Stephen was a sweet child she was a wilful one, and very early in life manifested a dominant nature. This was a secret pleasure to her father, who, never losing sight of his old idea that she was both son and daughter, took pleasure as well as pride out of each manifestation of her imperial will. The keen instinct of childhood, which reasons in feminine fashion, and is therefore doubly effective in a woman-child, early grasped the possibilities of her own will. She learned the measure of her nurse’s foot and then of her father’s; and so, knowing where lay the bounds of possibility of the achievement of her wishes, she at once avoided trouble and learned how to make the most of the space within the limit of her tether.
It is not those who ‘cry for the Moon’ who go furthest or get most in this limited world of ours. Stephen’s pretty ways and unfailing good temper were a perpetual joy to her father; and when he found that as a rule her desires were reasonable, his wish to yield to them became a habit.
Miss Rowly seldom saw any individual thing to disapprove of. She it was who selected the governesses and who interviewed them from time to time as to the child’s progress. Not often was there any complaint, for the little thing had such a pretty way of showing affection, and such a manifest sense of justified trust in all whom she encountered, that it would have been hard to name a specific fault.
But though all went in tears of affectionate regret, and with eminently satisfactory emoluments and references, there came an irregularly timed succession of governesses.
Stephen’s affection for her ‘Auntie’ was never affected by any of the changes. Others might come and go, but there no change came. The child’s little hand would steal into one of the old lady’s strong ones, or would clasp a finger and hold it tight. And then the woman who had never had a child of her own would feel, afresh each time, as though the child’s hand was gripping her heart.
With her father she was sweetest of all. And as he seemed to be pleased when she did anything like a little boy, the habit of being like one insensibly grew on her.
