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THE DISOWNED
by Edward Bulwer Lytton
CHAPTER I.
I'll tell you a story if you please to attend.
G. KNIGHT: Limbo.
It was the evening of a soft, warm day in the May of 17--. The sun
had already set, and the twilight was gathering slowly over the large,
still masses of wood which lay on either side of one of those green
lanes so peculiar to England. Here and there, the outline of the
trees irregularly shrunk back from the road, leaving broad patches of
waste land covered with fern and the yellow blossoms of the dwarf
furze, and at more distant intervals thick clusters of rushes, from
which came the small hum of gnats,--those "evening revellers"
alternately rising and sinking in the customary manner of their
unknown sports,--till, as the shadows grew darker and darker, their
thin and airy shapes were no longer distinguishable, and no solitary
token of life or motion broke the voiceless monotony of the
surrounding woods.
The first sound which invaded the silence came from the light, quick
footsteps of a person whose youth betrayed itself in its elastic and
unmeasured tread, and in the gay, free carol which broke out by fits
and starts upon the gentle stillness of the evening.
There was something rather indicative of poetical taste than musical
science in the selection of this vesper hymn, which always commenced
with,--
"'T is merry, 't is merry, in good green wood,"
and never proceeded a syllable further than the end of the second
line,--
"when birds are about and singing;"
from the last word of which, after a brief pause, it invariably
started forth into joyous "iteration."
Presently a heavier, yet still more rapid, step than that of the youth
was heard behind; and, as it overtook the latter, a loud, clear, good-
humoured voice gave the salutation of the evening. The tone in which
this courtesy was returned was frank, distinct, and peculiarly
harmonious.
"Good evening, my friend. How far is it to W----? I hope I am not
out of the direct road?"
"To W----, sir?" said the man, touching his hat, as he perceived, in
spite of the dusk, something in the air and voice of his new
acquaintance which called for a greater degree of respect than he was
at first disposed to accord to a pedestrian traveller,--"to W----,
sir? why, you will not surely go there to-night? it is more than
eight miles distant, and the roads none of the best"
"Now, a curse on all rogues!" quoth the youth, with a serious sort of
vivacity. "Why, the miller at the foot of the hill assured me I
should be at my journey's end in less than an hour."
"He may have said right, sir," returned the man, "yet you will not
reach W---- in twice that time."
"How do you mean?" said the younger stranger.
"Why, that you may for once force a miller to speak truth in spite of
himself, and make a public-house, about three miles hence, the end of
your day's journey."
"Thank you for the hint," said the youth. "Does the house you speak
of lie on the road-side?"
"No, sir: the lane branches off about two miles hence, and you must
then turn to the right; but till then our way is the same, and if you
would not prefer your own company to mine we can trudge on together."
"With all my heart," rejoined the younger stranger; "and not the less
willingly from the brisk pace you walk. I thought I had few equals in
pedestrianism; but it should not be for a small wager that I would
undertake to keep up with you."
"Perhaps, sir," said the man, laughing, "I'll have had in the course of
my life a better usage and a longer experience of my heels than you
have."
Somewhat startled by a speech of so equivocal a meaning, the youth,
for the first time, turned round to examine, as well as the increasing
darkness would permit, the size and appearance of his companion. He
was not perhaps too well satisfied with his survey. His fellow
pedestrian was about six feet high, and of a corresponding girth of
limb and frame, which would have made him fearful odds in any
encounter where bodily strength was the best means of conquest.
Notwithstanding the mildness of the weather, he was closely buttoned
in a rough great-coat, which was well calculated to give all due
effect to the athletic proportions of the wearer.
There was a pause of some moments.
"This is but a wild, savage sort of scene for England, sir, in this
day of new-fashioned ploughs and farming improvements," said the tall
stranger, looking round at the ragged wastes and grim woods, which lay
steeped in the shade beside and before them.
"True," answered the youth; "and in a few years agricultural
innovation will scarcely leave, even in these wastes, a single furze-
blossom for the bee or a tuft of green-sward for the grasshopper; but,
however unpleasant the change may be for us foot-travellers, we must
not repine at what they tell us is so sure a witness of the prosperity
of the country."
"They tell us! who tell us?" exclaimed the stranger, with great
vivacity. "Is it the puny and spiritless artisan, or the debased and
crippled slave of the counter and the till, or the sallow speculator
on morals, who would mete us out our liberty, our happiness, our very
feelings by the yard and inch and fraction? No, no, let them follow
what the books and precepts of their own wisdom teach them; let them
cultivate more highly the lands they have already parcelled out by
dikes and fences, and leave, though at scanty intervals, some green
patches of unpolluted land for the poor man's beast and the free man's
foot."
"You are an enthusiast on this subject," said the younger traveller,
not a little surprised at the tone and words of the last speech; "and
if I were not just about to commence the world with a firm persuasion
that enthusiasm on any matter is a great obstacle to success, I could
be as warm though not so eloquent as yourself."
"Ah, sir," said the stranger, sinking into a more natural and careless
tone, "I have a better right than I imagine you can claim to repine or
even to inveigh against the boundaries which are, day by day and hour
by hour, encroaching upon what I have learned to look upon as my own
territory. You were, just before I joined you, singing an old song; I
honour you for your taste: and no offence, sir, but a sort of
fellowship in feeling made me take the liberty to accost you. I am no
very great scholar in other things; but I owe my present circumstances
of life solely to my fondness for those old songs and quaint
madrigals. And I believe no person can better apply to himself Will
Shakspeare's invitation,--
'Under the greenwood tree
Who loves to lie with me,
And tune his merry note
Unto the sweet bird's throat,
Come hither, come hither, come hither,
Here shall he see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather.'"
Relieved from his former fear, but with increased curiosity at this
quotation, which was half said, half sung, in a tone which seemed to
evince a hearty relish for the sense of the words, the youth replied,--
"Truly, I did not expect to meet among the travellers of this wild
country with so well-stored a memory. And, indeed, I should have
imagined that the only persons to whom your verses could exactly have
applied were those honourable vagrants from the Nile whom in vulgar
language we term gypsies."
"Precisely so, sir," answered the tall stranger, indifferently;
"precisely so. It is to that ancient body that I belong."
"The devil you do!" quoth the youth, in unsophisticated surprise; "the
progress of education is indeed astonishing!"
"Why," answered the stranger, laughing, "to tell you the truth, sir, I
am a gypsy by inclination, not birth. The illustrious Bamfylde Moore
Carew is not the only example of one of gentle blood and honourable
education whom the fleshpots of Egypt have seduced."
"I congratulate myself," quoth the youth, in a tone that might have
been in jest, "upon becoming acquainted with a character at once so
respectable and so novel; and, to return your quotation in the way of
a compliment, I cry out with the most fashionable author of
Elizabeth's days,--
'O for a bowl of fat Canary,
Rich Palermo, sparkling Sherry,'
in order to drink to our better acquaintance."
"Thank you, sir,--thank you," cried the strange gypsy, seemingly
delighted with the spirit with which his young acquaintance appeared
to enter into his character, and his quotation from a class of authors
at that time much less known and appreciated than at present; "and if
you have seen already enough of the world to take up with ale when
neither Canary, Palermo, nor Sherry are forthcoming, I will promise,
at least, to pledge you in large draughts of that homely beverage.
What say you to passing a night with us? our tents are yet more at
hand than the public-house of which I spoke to you." The young man
hesitated a moment, then replied,--
"I will answer you frankly, my friend, even though I may find cause to
repent my confidence. I have a few guineas about me, which, though
not a large sum, are my all. Now, however ancient and honourable your
fraternity may be, they labour under a sad confusion, I fear, in their
ideas of meum and tuum."
"Faith, sir, I believe you are right; and were you some years older, I
think you would not have favoured me with the same disclosure you have
done now; but you may be quite easy on that score. If you were made
of gold, the rascals would not filch off the corner of your garment as
long as you were under my protection. Does this assurance satisfy
you?"
"Perfectly," said the youth; "and now how far are we from your
encampment? I assure you I am all eagerness to be among a set of
which I have witnessed such a specimen."
"Nay, nay," returned the gypsy, "you must not judge of all my brethren
by me: I confess that they are but a rough tribe. However, I love
them dearly; and am only the more inclined to think them honest to
each other, because they are rogues to all the rest of the world."
By this time our travellers had advanced nearly two miles since they
had commenced companionship; and at a turn in the lane, about three
hundred yards farther on, they caught a glimpse of a distant fire
burning brightly through the dim trees. They quickened their pace,
and striking a little out of their path into a common, soon approached
two tents, the Arab homes of the vagrant and singular people with whom
the gypsy claimed brotherhood and alliance.
CHAPTER II.
Here we securely live and eat
The cream of meat;
And keep eternal fires
By which we sit and do divine.
HERRICK: Ode to Sir Clipseby Crew.
Around a fire which blazed and crackled beneath the large seething-
pot, that seemed an emblem of the mystery and a promise of the good
cheer which are the supposed characteristics of the gypsy race, were
grouped seven or eight persons, upon whose swarthy and strong
countenances the irregular and fitful flame cast a picturesque and not
unbecoming glow. All of these, with the exception of an old crone who
was tending the pot, and a little boy who was feeding the fire with
sundry fragments of stolen wood, started to their feet upon the
entrance of the stranger.
"What ho! my bob cuffins," cried the gypsy guide, "I have brought you
a gentry cove, to whom you will show all proper respect: and hark ye,
my maunders, if ye dare beg, borrow, or steal a single croker,--ay,
but a bawbee of him, I'll--but ye know me." The gypsy stopped
abruptly, and turned an eye, in which menace vainly struggled with
good-humour, upon each of his brethren, as they submissively bowed to
him and his protege, and poured forth a profusion of promises, to
which their admonitor did not even condescend to listen. He threw off
his great-coat, doubled it down by the best place near the fire, and
made the youth forthwith possess himself of the seat it afforded. He
then lifted the cover of the mysterious caldron. "Well, Mort," cried
he to the old woman, as he bent wistfully down, "what have we here?"
"Two ducks, three chickens, and a rabbit, with some potatoes," growled
the old hag, who claimed the usual privilege of her culinary office,
to be as ill-tempered as she pleased.
"Good!" said the gypsy; "and now, Mim, my cull, go to the other tent,
and ask its inhabitants, in my name, to come here and sup; bid them
bring their caldron to eke out ours: I'll find the lush."
With these words (which Mim, a short, swarthy member of the gang, with
a countenance too astute to be pleasing, instantly started forth to
obey) the gypsy stretched himself at full length by the youth's side,
and began reminding him, with some jocularity and at some length, of
his promise to drink to their better acquaintance.
Something there was in the scene, the fire, the caldron, the intent
figure and withered countenance of the old woman, the grouping of the
other forms, the rude but not unpicturesque tent, the dark still woods
on either side, with the deep and cloudless skies above, as the stars
broke forth one by one upon the silent air, which (to use the orthodox
phrase of the novelist) would not have been wholly unworthy the bold
pencil of Salvator himself.
The youth eyed, with that involuntary respect which personal
advantages always command, the large yet symmetrical proportions of
his wild companion; nor was the face which belonged to that frame much
less deserving of attention. Though not handsome, it was both shrewd
and prepossessing in its expression; the forehead was prominent, the
brows overhung the eyes, which were large, dark, and, unlike those of
the tribe in general, rather calm than brilliant; the complexion,
though sun-burnt, was not swarthy, and the face was carefully and
cleanly shaved, so as to give all due advantage of contrast to the
brown luxuriant locks which fell rather in flakes than curls, on
either side of the healthful and manly cheeks. In age, he was about
thirty-five, and, though his air and mien were assuredly not lofty nor
aristocratic, yet they were strikingly above the bearing of his
vagabond companions: those companions were in all respects of the
ordinary race of gypsies; the cunning and flashing eye, the raven
locks, the dazzling teeth, the bronzed colour, and the low, slight,
active form, were as strongly their distinguishing characteristics as
the tokens of all their tribe.
But to these, the appearance of the youth presented a striking and
beautiful contrast.
He had only just passed the stage of boyhood, perhaps he might have
seen eighteen summers, probably not so many. He had, in imitation of
his companion, and perhaps from mistaken courtesy to his new society,
doffed his hat; and the attitude which he had chosen fully developed
the noble and intellectual turn of his head and throat. His hair, as
yet preserved from the disfiguring fashions of the day, was of a deep
auburn, which was rapidly becoming of a more chestnut hue, and curled
in short close curls from the nape of the neck to the commencement of
a forehead singularly white and high. His brows finely and lightly
pencilled, and his long lashes of the darkest dye, gave a deeper and
perhaps softer shade than they otherwise would have worn to eyes quick
and observant in their expression and of a light hazel in their
colour. His cheek was very fair, and the red light of the fire cast
an artificial tint of increased glow upon a complexion that had
naturally rather bloom than colour; while a dark riding frock set off
in their full beauty the fine outline of his chest and the slender
symmetry of his frame.
But it was neither his features nor his form, eminently handsome as
they were, which gave the principal charm to the young stranger's
appearance: it was the strikingly bold, buoyant, frank, and almost
joyous expression which presided over all. There seemed to dwell the
first glow and life of youth, undimmed by a single fear and unbaffled
in a single hope. There were the elastic spring, the inexhaustible
wealth of energies which defied in their exulting pride the heaviness
of sorrow and the harassments of time. It was a face that, while it
filled you with some melancholy foreboding of the changes and chances
which must, in the inevitable course of fate, cloud the openness of
the unwrinkled brow, and soberize the fire of the daring and restless
eye, instilled also within you some assurance of triumph, and some
omen of success,--a vague but powerful sympathy with the adventurous
and cheerful spirit which appeared literally to speak in its
expression. It was a face you might imagine in one born under a
prosperous star; and you felt, as you gazed, a confidence in that
bright countenance, which, like the shield of the British Prince,
[Prince Arthur.--See "The Faerie Queene."] seemed possessed with a
spell to charm into impotence the evil spirits who menaced its
possessor.
"Well, sir," said his friend, the gypsy, who had in his turn been
surveying with admiration the sinewy and agile frame of his young
guest, "well, sir, how fares your appetite? Old Dame Bingo will be
mortally offended if you do not do ample justice to her good cheer."
"If so," answered our traveller, who, young as he was, had learnt
already the grand secret of making in every situation a female friend,
"if so, I shall be likely to offend her still more."
"And how, my pretty master?" said the old crone with an iron smile.
"Why, I shall be bold enough to reconcile matters with a kiss, Mrs.
Bingo," answered the youth.
"Ha! Ha!" shouted the tall gypsy; "it is many a long day since my old
Mort slapped a gallant's face for such an affront. But here come our
messmates. Good evening, my mumpers; make your bows to this gentleman
who has come to bowse with us to-night. 'Gad, we'll show him that old
ale's none the worse for keeping company with the moon's darlings.
Come, sit down, sit down. Where's the cloth, ye ill-mannered loons,
and the knives and platters? Have we no holiday customs for
strangers, think ye? Mim, my cove, off to my caravan; bring out the
knives, and all other rattletraps; and harkye, my cuffin, this small
key opens the inner hole, where you will find two barrels; bring one
of them. I'll warrant it of the best, for the brewer himself drank
some of the same sort but two hours before I nimm'd them. Come,
stump, my cull, make yourself wings. Ho, Dame Bingo, is not that pot
of thine seething yet? Ah, my young gentleman, you commence betimes;
so much the better; if love's a summer's day, we all know how early a
summer morning begins," added the jovial Egyptian in a lower voice
(feeling perhaps that he was only understood by himself), as he gazed
complacently on the youth, who, with that happy facility of making
himself everywhere at home so uncommon to his countrymen, was already
paying compliments suited to their understanding to two fair daughters
of the tribe who had entered with the new-comers. Yet had he too much
craft or delicacy, call it which you will, to continue his addresses
to that limit where ridicule or jealousy from the male part of the
assemblage might commence; on the contrary, he soon turned to the men,
and addressed them with a familiarity so frank and so suited to their
taste that he grew no less rapidly in their favour than he had already
done in that of the women, and when the contents of the two caldrons
were at length set upon the coarse but clean cloth which in honour of
his arrival covered the sod, it was in the midst of a loud and
universal peal of laughter which some broad witticism of the young
stranger had produced that the party sat down to their repast.
Bright were the eyes and sleek the tresses of the damsel who placed
herself by the side of the stranger, and many were the alluring
glances and insinuated compliments which replied to his open
admiration and profuse flattery; but still there was nothing exclusive
in his attentions; perhaps an ignorance of the customs of his
entertainers, and a consequent discreet fear of offending them,
restrained him; or perhaps he found ample food for occupation in the
plentiful dainties which his host heaped before him.
"Now tell me," said the gypsy chief (for chief he appeared to be), "if
we lead not a merrier life than you dreamt of? or would you have us
change our coarse fare and our simple tents, our vigorous limbs and
free hearts, for the meagre board, the monotonous chamber, the
diseased frame, and the toiling, careful, and withered spirit of some
miserable mechanic?"
"Change!" cried the youth, with an earnestness which, if affected, was
an exquisite counterfeit, "by Heaven, I would change with you myself."
"Bravo, my fine cove!" cried the host, and all the gang echoed their
sympathy with his applause.
The youth continued: "Meat, and that plentiful; ale, and that strong;
women, and those pretty ones: what can man desire more?"
"Ay," cried the host, "and all for nothing,--no, not even a tax; who
else in this kingdom can say that? Come, Mim, push round the ale."
And the ale was pushed round, and if coarse the merriment, loud at
least was the laugh that rang ever and anon from the old tent; and
though, at moments, something in the guest's eye and lip might have
seemed, to a very shrewd observer, a little wandering and absent, yet,
upon the whole, he was almost as much at ease as the rest, and if he
was not quite as talkative he was to the full as noisy.
By degrees, as the hour grew later and the barrel less heavy, the
conversation changed into one universal clatter. Some told their
feats in beggary; others, their achievements in theft; not a viand
they had fed on but had its appropriate legend; even the old rabbit,
which had been as tough as old rabbit can well be, had not been
honestly taken from his burrow; no less a person than Mim himself had
purloined it from a widow's footman who was carrying it to an old maid
from her nephew the Squire.
"Silence," cried the host, who loved talking as well as the rest, and
who for the last ten minutes had been vainly endeavouring to obtain
attention. "Silence! my maunders, it's late, and we shall have the
queer cuffins [magistrates] upon us if we keep it up much longer.
What, ho, Mim, are you still gabbling at the foot of the table when
your betters are talking? As sure as my name's King Cole, I'll choke
you with your own rabbit skin, if you don't hush your prating cheat,--
nay, never look so abashed: if you will make a noise, come forward,
and sing us a gypsy song. You see, my young sir," turning to his
guest, "that we are not without our pretensions to the fine arts."
At this order, Mim started forth, and taking his station at the right
hand of the soi-disant King Cole, began the following song, the chorus
of which was chanted in full diapason by the whole group, with the
additional force of emphasis that knives, feet, and fists could
bestow:--
THE GYPSY'S SONG.
The king to his hall, and the steed to his stall,
And the cit to his bilking board;
But we are not bound to an acre of ground,
For our home is the houseless sward.
We sow not, nor toil; yet we glean from the soil
As much as its reapers do;
And wherever we rove, we feed on the cove
Who gibes at the mumping crew.
CHORUS.--So the king to his hall, etc.
We care not a straw for the limbs of the law,
Nor a fig for the cuffin queer;
While Hodge and his neighbour shall lavish and labour,
Our tent is as sure of its cheer.
CHORUS.--So the king to his hall, etc.
The worst have an awe of the harman's [constable] claw,
And the best will avoid the trap; [bailiff]
But our wealth is as free of the bailiff's see
As our necks of the twisting crap. [gallows]
CHORUS.--So the king to his hall, etc.
They say it is sweet to win the meat
For the which one has sorely wrought;
But I never could find that we lacked the mind
For the food that has cost us nought!
CHRUS.--So the king to his hall, etc.
And when we have ceased from our fearless feast
Why, our jigger [door] will need no bars;
Our sentry shall be on the owlet's tree,
And our lamps the glorious stars.
CHORUS.
So the king to his hall, and the steed to his stall,
And the cit to his bilking board;
But we are not bound to an acre of ground,
For our home is the houseless sward.
Rude as was this lawless stave, the spirit with which it was sung
atoned to the young stranger for its obscurity and quaintness; as for
his host, that curious personage took a lusty and prominent part in
the chorus; nor did the old woods refuse their share of the burden,
but sent back a merry echo to the chief's deep voice and the harsher
notes of his jovial brethren.
When the glee had ceased, King Cole rose, the whole band followed his
example, the cloth was cleared in a trice, the barrel--oh! what a
falling off was there!--was rolled into a corner of the tent, and the
crew to whom the awning belonged began to settle themselves to rest;
while those who owned the other encampment marched forth, with King
Cole at their head. Leaning with no light weight upon his guest's
arm, the lover of ancient minstrelsy poured into the youth's ear a
strain of eulogy, rather eloquent than coherent, upon the scene they
had just witnessed.
"What," cried his majesty in an enthusiastic tone, "what can be so
truly regal as our state? Can any man control us? Are we not above
all laws? Are we not the most despotic of kings? Nay, more than the
kings of earth, are we not the kings of Fairyland itself? Do we not
realize the golden dreams of the old rhymers, luxurious dogs that they
were? Who would not cry out,--
'Blest silent groves! Oh, may ye be
Forever Mirth's best nursery!
May pure Contents
Forever pitch their tents
Upon these downs, these meads, these rocks, these mountains.'"
Uttering this notable extract from the thrice-honoured Sir Henry
Wotton, King Cole turned abruptly from the common, entered the wood
which skirted it, and, only attended by his guest and his minister
Mim, came suddenly, by an unexpected and picturesque opening in the
trees, upon one of those itinerant vehicles termed caravans, he
ascended the few steps which led to the entrance, opened the door, and
was instantly in the arms of a pretty and young woman. On seeing our
hero (for such we fear the youth is likely to become), she drew back
with a blush not often found upon regal cheeks.
"Pooh," said King Cole, half tauntingly, half fondly, "pooh, Lucy,
blushes are garden flowers, and ought never to be found wild in the
woods:" then changing his tone, he said, "come, put some fresh straw
in the corner, this stranger honours our palace to-night; Mim, unload
thyself of our royal treasures; watch without and vanish from within!"
Depositing on his majesty's floor the appurtenances of the regal
supper-table, Mim made his respectful adieus and disappeared;
meanwhile the queen scattered some fresh straw over a mattress in the
narrow chamber, and, laying over all a sheet of singularly snowy hue,
made her guest some apology for the badness of his lodging; this King
Cole interrupted by a most elaborately noisy yawn and a declaration of
extreme sleepiness. "Now, Lucy, let us leave the gentleman to what he
will like better than soft words even from a queen. Good night, sir,
we shall be stirring at daybreak;" and with this farewell King Cole
took the lady's arm, and retired with her into an inner compartment of
the caravan.
Left to himself, our hero looked round with surprise at the exceeding
neatness which reigned over the whole apartment. But what chiefly
engrossed the attention of one to whose early habits books had always
been treasures were several volumes, ranged in comely shelves, fenced
with wirework, on either side of the fireplace. "Courage," thought
he, as he stretched himself on his humble couch, "my adventures have
commenced well: a gypsy tent, to be sure, is nothing very new; but a
gypsy who quotes poetry, and enjoys a modest wife, speaks better than
books do for the improvement of the world!"
CHAPTER III.
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp?--As You Like It.
The sun broke cheerfully through the small lattice of the caravan, as
the youth opened his eyes and saw the good-humoured countenance of his
gypsy host bending over him complacently.
"You slept so soundly, sir, that I did not like to disturb you; but my
good wife only waits your rising to have all ready for breakfast."
"It were a thousand pities," cried the guest, leaping from his bed,
"that so pretty a face should look cross on my account, so I will not
keep her waiting an instant."
The gypsy smiled, as he answered, "I require no professional help from
the devil, sir, to foretell your fortune."
"No!--and what is it?"
"Honour, reputation, success: all that are ever won by a soft tongue,
if it be backed by a bold heart."
Bright and keen was the flash which shot over the countenance of the
one for whom this prediction was made, as he listened to it with a
fondness for which his reason rebuked him.
He turned aside with a sigh, which did not escape the gypsy, and
bathed his face in the water which the provident hand of the good
woman had set out for his lavations.
"Well," said his host, when the youth had finished his brief toilet,
"suppose we breathe the fresh air, while Lucy smooths your bed and
prepares the breakfast?"
"With all my heart," replied the youth, and they descended the steps
which led into the wood. It was a beautiful, fresh morning; the air
was like a draught from a Spirit's fountain, and filled the heart with
new youth and the blood with a rapturous delight; the leaves--the
green, green leaves of spring--were quivering on the trees, among
which the happy birds fluttered and breathed the gladness of their
souls in song. While the dewdrops that--
"strewed
A baptism o'er the flowers"--
gave back in their million mirrors the reflected smiles of the
cloudless and rejoicing sun.
"Nature," said the gypsy, "has bestowed on her children a gorgeous
present in such a morning."
"True," said the youth; "and you, of us two, perhaps only deserve it;
as for me, when I think of the long road of dust, heat, and toil, that
lies before me, I could almost wish to stop here and ask an admission
into the gypsy's tents."
"You could not do a wiser thing!" said the gypsy, gravely.
"But fate leaves me no choice," continued the youth, as seriously as
if he were in earnest; "and I must quit you immediately after I have a
second time tasted of your hospitable fare."
"If it must be so," answered the gypsy, "I will see you, at least, a
mile or two on your road." The youth thanked him for a promise which
his curiosity made acceptable, and they turned once more to the
caravan.
The meal, however obtained, met with as much honour as it could
possibly have received from the farmer from whom its materials were
borrowed.
It was not without complacency that the worthy pair beheld the notice
their guest lavished upon a fair, curly-headed boy of about three
years old, the sole child and idol of the gypsy potentates. But they
did not perceive, when the youth rose to depart, that he slipped into
the folds of the child's dress a ring of some value, the only one he
possessed.
"And now," said he, after having thanked his entertainers for their
hospitality, "I must say good-by to your flock, and set out upon my
day's journey."
Lucy, despite her bashfulness, shook hands with her handsome guest;
and the latter, accompanied by the gypsy chief, strolled down to the
encampments.
Open and free was his parting farewell to the inmates of the two
tents, and liberal was the hand which showered upon all--especially on
the damsel who had been his Thais of the evening feast--the silver
coins which made no inconsiderable portion of his present property.
It was amidst the oracular wishes and favourable predictions of the
whole crew that he recommenced his journey with the gypsy chief.
When the tents were fairly out of sight, and not till then, King Cole
broke the silence which had as yet subsisted between them.
"I suppose, my young gentleman, that you expect to meet some of your
friends or relations at W----? I know not what they will say when
they hear where you have spent the night."
"Indeed!" said the youth; "whoever hears my adventures, relation or
not, will be delighted with my description; but in sober earnest, I
expect to find no one at W---- more my friend than a surly innkeeper,
unless it be his dog."
"Why, they surely do not suffer a stripling of your youth and evident
quality to wander alone!" cried King Cole, in undisguised surprise.
The young traveller made no prompt answer, but bent down as if to
pluck a wild-flower which grew by the road-side: after a pause, he
said,--
"Nay, Master Cole, you must not set me the example of playing the
inquisitor, or you cannot guess how troublesome I shall be. To tell
you the truth, I am dying with curiosity to know something more about
you than you may be disposed to tell me: you have already confessed
that, however boon companions your gypsies may be, it is not among
gypsies that you were born and bred."
King Cole laughed: perhaps he was not ill pleased by the curiosity of
his guest, nor by the opportunity it afforded him of being his own
hero.
"My story, sir," said he, "would be soon told, if you thought it worth
the hearing, nor does it contain anything which should prevent my
telling it."
"If so," quoth the youth, "I shall conceive your satisfying my request
a still greater favour than those you have already bestowed upon me."
The gypsy relaxed his pace into an indolent saunter, as he commenced:--
"The first scene that I remember was similar to that which you
witnessed last night. The savage tent, and the green moor; the fagot
blaze; the eternal pot, with its hissing note of preparation; the old
dame who tended it, and the ragged urchins who learned from its
contents the first reward of theft and the earliest temptation to it,
--all these are blended into agreeable confusion as the primal
impressions of my childhood. The woman who nurtured me as my mother
was rather capricious than kind, and my infancy passed away, like that
of more favoured scions of fortune, in alternate chastisement and
caresses. In good truth, Kinching Meg had the shrillest voice and the
heaviest hand of the whole crew; and I cannot complain of injustice,
since she treated me no worse than the rest. Notwithstanding the
irregularity of my education, I grew up strong and healthy, and my
reputed mother had taught me so much fear for herself that she left me
none for anything else; accordingly, I became bold, reckless, and
adventurous, and at the age of thirteen was as thorough a reprobate as
the tribe could desire. At that time a singular change befell me: we
(that is, my mother and myself) were begging not many miles hence at
the door of a rich man's house in which the mistress lay on her death-
bed. That mistress was my real mother, from whom Meg had stolen me in
the first year of existence. Whether it was through the fear of
conscience or the hope of reward, no sooner had Meg learnt the
dangerous state of my poor mother, the constant grief, which they said
had been the sole though slow cause of her disease, and the large sums
which had been repeatedly offered for my recovery; no sooner, I say,
did Meg ascertain all these particulars than she fought her way up to
the sick-chamber, fell on her knees before the bed, owned her crime,
and produced myself. Various little proofs of time, place,
circumstance; the clothing I had worn when stolen, and which was still
preserved, joined to the striking likeness I bore to both my parents,
especially to my father, silenced all doubt and incredulity: I was
welcomed home with a joy which it is in vain to describe. My return
seemed to recall my mother from the grave; she lingered on for many
months longer than her physicians thought it possible, and when she
died her last words commended me to my father's protection."
"My surviving parent needed no such request. He lavished upon me all
that superfluity of fondness and food of which those good people who
are resolved to spoil their children are so prodigal. He could not
bear the idea of sending me to school; accordingly he took a tutor for
me,--a simple-hearted, gentle, kind man, who possessed a vast store of
learning rather curious than useful. He was a tolerable, and at least
an enthusiastic antiquarian, a more than tolerable poetaster; and he
had a prodigious budget full of old ballads and songs, which he loved
better to teach and I to learn, than all the 'Latin, Greek, geography,
astronomy, and the use of the globes,' which my poor father had so
sedulously bargained for."
"Accordingly, I became exceedingly well-informed in all the 'precious
conceits' and 'golden garlands' of our British ancients, and continued
exceedingly ignorant of everything else, save and except a few of the
most fashionable novels of the day, and the contents of six lying
volumes of voyages and travels, which flattered both my appetite for
the wonderful and my love of the adventurous. My studies, such as
they were, were not by any means suited to curb or direct the vagrant
tastes my childhood had acquired: on the contrary, the old poets, with
their luxurious description of the 'green wood' and the forest life;
the fashionable novelists, with their spirited accounts of the
wanderings of some fortunate rogue, and the ingenious travellers, with
their wild fables, so dear to the imagination of every boy, only
fomented within me a strong though secret regret at my change of life,
and a restless disgust to the tame home and bounded roamings to which
I was condemned. When I was about seventeen, my father sold his
property (which he had become possessed of in right of my mother), and
transferred the purchase money to the security of the Funds. Shortly
afterwards he died; the bulk of his fortune became mine; the remainder
was settled upon a sister, many years older than myself, whom, in
consequence of her marriage and residence in a remote part of Wales, I
had never yet seen."
"Now, then, I was perfectly free and unfettered; my guardian lived in
Scotland, and left me entirely to the guidance of my tutor, who was
both too simple and too indolent to resist my inclinations. I went to
London, became acquainted with a set of most royal scamps, frequented
the theatres and the taverns, the various resorts which constitute the
gayeties of a blood just above the middle class, and was one of the
noisiest and wildest 'blades' that ever heard the 'chimes by midnight'
and the magistrate's lecture for matins. I was a sort of leader among
the jolly dogs I consorted with."
"My earlier education gave a raciness and nature to my delineations of
'life' which delighted them. But somehow or other I grew wearied of
this sort of existence. About a year after I was of age my fortune
was more than three parts spent; I fell ill with drinking and grew
dull with remorse: need I add that my comrades left me to myself? A
fit of the spleen, especially if accompanied with duns, makes one
wofully misanthropic; so, when I recovered from my illness, I set out
on a tour through Great Britain and France,--alone, and principally on
foot. Oh, the rapture of shaking off the half friends and cold
formalities of society and finding oneself all unfettered, with no
companion but Nature, no guide but youth, and no flatterer but hope!"
"Well, my young friend, I travelled for two years, and saw even in
that short time enough of this busy world to weary and disgust me with
its ordinary customs. I was not made to be polite, still less to be
ambitious. I sighed after the coarse comrades and the free tents of
my first associates; and a thousand remembrances of the gypsy
wanderings, steeped in all the green and exhilarating colours of
childhood, perpetually haunted my mind. On my return from my
wanderings I found a letter from my sister, who, having become a
widow, had left Wales, and had now fixed her residence in a well
visited watering-place in the west of England. I had never yet seen
her, and her letter was a fine-ladylike sort of epistle, with a great
deal of romance and a very little sense, written in an extremely
pretty hand, and ending with a quotation from Pope (I never could
endure Pope, nor indeed any of the poets of the days of Anne and her
successors). It was a beautiful season of the year: I had been inured
to pedestrian excursions; so I set off on foot to see my nearest
surviving relative. On the way, I fell in (though on a very different
spot) with the very encampment you saw last night. By heavens, that
was a merry meeting to me! I joined, and journeyed with them for
several days: never do I remember a happier time. Then, after many
years of bondage and stiffness, and accordance with the world, I found
myself at ease, like a released bird; with what zest did I join in the
rude jokes and the knavish tricks, the stolen feasts and the roofless
nights of those careless vagabonds!"
"I left my fellow-travellers at the entrance of the town where my
sister lived. Now came the contrast. Somewhat hot, rather coarsely
clad, and covered with the dust of a long summer's day, I was ushered
into a little drawing-room, eighteen feet by twelve, as I was
afterwards somewhat pompously informed. A flaunting carpet, green,
red, and yellow, covered the floor. A full-length picture of a thin
woman, looking most agreeably ill-tempered, stared down at me from the
chimney-piece; three stuffed birds--how emblematic of domestic life!--
stood stiff and imprisoned, even after death, in a glass cage. A
fire-screen and a bright fireplace; chairs covered with holland, to
preserve them from the atmosphere; and long mirrors, wrapped as to the
frame-work in yellow muslin, to keep off the flies,--finish the
panorama of this watering-place mansion. The door opened, silks
rustled, a voice shrieked 'My Brother!' and a figure, a thin figure,
the original of the picture over the chimney-piece, rushed in."
"I can well fancy her joy," said the youth.
"You can do no such thing, begging your pardon, sir," resumed King
Cole. "She had no joy at all: she was exceedingly surprised and
disappointed. In spite of my early adventures, I had nothing
picturesque or romantic about me at all. I was very thirsty, and I
called for beer; I was very tired, and I lay down on the sofa; I wore
thick shoes and small buckles; and my clothes were made God knows
where, and were certainly put on God knows how. My sister was
miserably ashamed of me: she had not even the manners to disguise it.
In a higher rank of life than that which she held she would have
suffered far less mortification; for I fancy great people pay but
little real attention to externals. Even if a man of rank is vulgar,
it makes no difference in the orbit in which he moves: but your
'genteel gentlewomen' are so terribly dependent upon what Mrs. Tomkins
will say; so very uneasy about their relations and the opinion they
are held in; and, above all, so made up of appearances and clothes; so
undone if they do not eat, drink, and talk a la mode,--that I can
fancy no shame like that of my poor sister at having found, and being
found with, a vulgar brother."
"I saw how unwelcome I was and I did not punish myself by a long
visit. I left her house and returned towards London. On my road, I
again met with my gypsy friends: the warmth of their welcome enchanted
me; you may guess the rest. I stayed with them so long that I could
not bear to leave them; I re-entered their crew: I am one among them.
Not that I have become altogether and solely of the tribe: I still
leave them whenever the whim seizes me, and repair to the great cities
and thoroughfares of man. There I am soon driven back again to my
favourite and fresh fields, as a reed upon a wild stream is dashed
back upon the green rushes from which it has been torn. You perceive
that I have many comforts and distinctions above the rest; for, alas,
sir, there is no society, however free and democratic, where wealth
will not create an aristocracy; the remnant of my fortune provides me
with my unostentatious equipage and the few luxuries it contains; it
repays secretly to the poor what my fellow-vagrants occasionally filch
from them; it allows me to curb among the crew all the grosser and
heavier offences against the law to which want might otherwise compel
them; and it serves to keep up that sway and ascendency which my
superior education and fluent spirits enabled me at first to attain.
Though not legally their king, I assume that title over the few
encampments with which I am accustomed to travel; and you perceive
that I have given my simple name both to the jocular and kingly
dignity of which the old song will often remind you. My story is
done."
"Not quite," said his companion: "your wife? How came you by that
blessing?"
"Ah! thereby hangs a pretty and a love-sick tale, which would not
stand ill in an ancient ballad; but I will content myself with briefly
sketching it. Lucy is the daughter of a gentleman farmer: about four
years ago I fell in love with her. I wooed her clandestinely, and at
last I owned I was a gypsy: I did not add my birth nor fortune; no, I
was full of the romance of the Nut-brown Maid's lover, and attempted a
trial of woman's affection, which even in these days was not
disappointed. Still her father would not consent to our marriage,
till very luckily things went bad with him; corn, crops, cattle,--the
deuce was in them all; an execution was in his house, and a writ out
against his person. I settled these matters for him, and in return
received a father-in-law's blessing, and we are now the best friends
in the world. Poor Lucy is perfectly reconciled to her caravan and
her wandering husband, and has never, I believe, once repented the day
on which she became the gypsy's wife!"
"I thank you heartily for your history," said the youth, who had
listened very attentively to this detail; "and though my happiness and
pursuits are centred in that world which you despise, yet I confess
that I feel a sensation very like envy at your singular choice; and I
would not dare to ask of my heart whether that choice is not happier,
as it is certainly more philosophical, than mine."
They had now reached a part of the road where the country assumed a
totally different character; the woods and moors were no longer
visible, but a broad and somewhat bleak extent of country lay before
them. Here and there only a few solitary trees broke the uniformity
of the wide fields and scanty hedgerows, and at distant intervals the
thin spires of the scattered churches rose, like the prayers of which
they were the symbols, to mingle themselves with heaven.
The gypsy paused: "I will accompany you," said he, "no farther; your
way lies straight onwards, and you will reach W---- before noon;
farewell, and may God watch over you!"
"Farewell!" said the youth, warmly pressing the hand which was
extended to him. "If we ever meet again, it will probably solve a
curious riddle; namely, whether you are not disgusted with the caravan
and I with the world!"
"The latter is more likely than the former," said the gypsy, for one
stands a much greater chance of being disgusted with others than with
one's self; so changing a little the old lines, I will wish you adieu
after my own fashion, namely, in verse,--
'Go, set thy heart on winged wealth,
Or unto honour's towers aspire;
But give me freedom and my health,
And there's the sum of my desire!'"
CHAPTER IV.
The letter, madam; have you none for me?--The Rendezvous.
Provide surgeons.--Lover's Progress.
Our solitary traveller pursued his way with the light step and gay
spirits of youth and health.
"Turn gypsy, indeed!" he said, talking to himself; "there is something
better in store for me than that. Ay, I have all the world before me
where to choose--not my place of rest. No, many a long year will pass
away ere any place of rest will be my choice! I wonder whether I
shall find the letter at W----; the letter, the last letter I shall
ever have from home but it is no home to me now; and I--I, insulted,
reviled, trampled upon, without even a name--well, well, I will earn a
still fairer one than that of my forefathers. They shall be proud to
own me yet." And with these words the speaker broke off abruptly,
with a swelling chest and a flashing eye; and as, an unknown and
friendless adventurer, he gazed on the expanded and silent country
around him, he felt like Castruccio Castrucani that he could stretch
his hands to the east and to the west and exclaim, "Oh, that my power
kept pace with my spirit, then should it grasp the corners of the
earth!"
The road wound at last from the champaign country, through which it
had for some miles extended itself, into a narrow lane, girded on
either side by a dead fence. As the youth entered this lane, he was
somewhat startled by the abrupt appearance of a horseman, whose steed
leaped the hedge so close to our hero as almost to endanger his
safety. The rider, a gentleman of about five-and-twenty, pulled up,
and in a tone of great courtesy apologized for his inadvertency; the
apology was readily admitted, and the horseman rode onwards in the
direction of W----.
Trifling as this incident was, the air and mien of the stranger were
sufficient to arrest irresistibly the thoughts of the young traveller;
and before they had flowed into a fresh channel he found himself in
the town and at the door of the inn to which his expedition was bound.
He entered the bar; a buxom landlady and a still more buxom daughter
were presiding over the spirits of the place.
"You have some boxes and a letter for me, I believe," said the young
gentleman to the comely hostess.
"To you, sir!--the name, if you please?"
"To--to--to C---- L----," said the youth; "the initials C. L., to be
left till called for."
"Yes, sir, we have some luggage; came last night by the van; and a
letter besides, sir, to C. L. also."
The daughter lifted her large dark eyes at the handsome stranger, and
felt a wonderful curiosity to know what the letter to C. L. could
possibly be about; meanwhile mine hostess, raising her hand to a shelf
on which stood an Indian slop-basin, the great ornament of the bar at
the Golden Fleece, brought from its cavity a well-folded and well-
sealed epistle.
"That is it," cried the youth; "show me a private room instantly."
"What can he want a private room for?" thought the landlady's
daughter.
"Show the gentleman to the Griffin, No. 4, John Merrylack," said the
landlady herself.
With an impatient step the owner of the letter followed a slipshod and
marvellously unwashed waiter into No. 4,--a small square asylum for
town travellers, country yeomen, and "single gentlemen;" presenting,
on the one side, an admirable engraving of the Marquis of Granby, and
on the other an equally delightful view of the stable-yard.
Mr. C. L. flung himself on a chair (there were only four chairs in No.
4), watched the waiter out of the room, seized his letter, broke open
the seal, and read--yea, reader, you shall read it too--as follows:--
"Enclosed is the sum to which you are entitled; remember, that it is
all which you can ever claim at my hands; remember also that you have
made the choice which now nothing can persuade me to alter. Be the
name you have so long iniquitously borne henceforth and always
forgotten; upon that condition you may yet hope from my generosity the
future assistance which you must want, but which you could not ask
from my affection. Equally by my heart and my reason you are forever
DISOWNED."
The letter fell from the reader's hands. He took up the inclosure: it
was an order payable in London for 1,000 pounds; to him it seemed like
the rental of the Indies.
"Be it so!" he said aloud, and slowly; "be it so! With this will I
carve my way: many a name in history was built upon a worse
foundation!"
With these words he carefully put up the money, re-read the brief note
which enclosed it, tore the latter into pieces, and then, going
towards the aforesaid view of the stable-yard, threw open the window
and leaned out, apparently in earnest admiration of two pigs which
marched gruntingly towards him, one goat regaling himself upon a
cabbage, and a broken-winded, emaciated horse, which having just been
what the hostler called "rubbed down," was just going to be what the
hostler called "fed."
While engaged in this interesting survey, the clatter of hoofs was
suddenly heard upon the rough pavement, a bell rang, a dog barked, the
pigs grunted, the hostler ran out, and the stranger, whom our hero had
before met on the road, trotted into the yard.
It was evident from the obsequiousness of the attendants that the
horseman was a personage of no mean importance; and indeed there was
something singularly distinguished and highbred in his air and
carriage.
"Who can that be?" said the youth, as the horseman, having dismounted,
turned towards the door of the inn: the question was readily answered,
"There goes pride and poverty!" said the hostler, "Here comes Squire
Mordaunt!" said the landlady.
At the farther end of the stable-yard, through a narrow gate, the
youth caught a glimpse of the green sward and the springing flowers of
a small garden. Wearied with the sameness of No. 4 rather than with
his journey, he sauntered towards the said gate, and, seating himself
in a small arbour within the garden, surrendered himself to
reflection.
The result of this self-conference was a determination to leave the
Golden Fleece by the earliest conveyance which went to that great
object and emporium of all his plans and thoughts, London. As, full
of this resolution and buried in the dream which it conjured up, he
was returning with downcast eyes and unheeding steps through the
stable-yard, to the delights of No. 4, he was suddenly accosted by a
loud and alarmed voice,--
"For God's sake, sir, look out, or--"
The sentence was broken off, the intended warning came too late, our
hero staggered back a few steps, and fell, stunned and motionless,
against the stable door. Unconsciously he had passed just behind the
heels of the stranger's horse, which being by no means in good humour
with the clumsy manoeuvres of his shampooer, the hostler, had taken
advantage of the opportunity presented to him of working off his
irritability, and had consequently inflicted a severe kick upon the
right shoulder of Mr. C. L.
The stranger, honoured by the landlady with the name and title of
Squire Mordaunt, was in the yard at the moment. He hastened towards
the sufferer, who as yet was scarcely sensible, and led him into the
house. The surgeon of the village was sent for and appeared. This
disciple of Galen, commonly known by the name of Jeremiah Bossolton,
was a gentleman considerably more inclined to breadth than length. He
was exactly five feet one inch in height, but thick and solid as a
milestone; a wig of modern cut, carefully curled and powdered, gave
somewhat of a modish and therefore unseemly grace to a solemn eye; a
mouth drawn down at the corners; a nose that had something in it
exceedingly consequential; eyebrows sage and shaggy; ears large and
fiery; and a chin that would have done honour to a mandarin. Now Mr.
Jeremiah Bossolton had a certain peculiarity of speech to which I
shall find it difficult to do justice. Nature had impressed upon his
mind a prodigious love of the grandiloquent; Mr. Bossolton, therefore,
disdained the exact language of the vulgar, and built unto himself a
lofty fabric of words in which his sense managed very frequently to
lose itself. Moreover, upon beginning a sentence of peculiar dignity,
Mr. Bossolton was, it must be confessed, sometimes at a loss to
conclude it in a period worthy of the commencement; and this caprice
of nature which had endowed him with more words than thoughts
(necessity is, indeed, the mother of invention) drove him into a very
ingenious method of remedying the deficiency; this was simply the plan
of repeating the sense by inverting the sentence.
"How long a period of time," said Mr. Bossolton, "has elapsed since
this deeply-to-be-regretted and seriously-to-be-investigated accident
occurred?"
"Not many minutes," said Mordaunt; "make no further delay, I beseech
you, but examine the arm; it is not broken, I trust?"
"In this world, Mr. Mordaunt," said the practitioner, bowing very low,
for the person he addressed was of the most ancient lineage in the
county, "in this world, Mr. Mordaunt, even at the earliest period of
civilization, delay in matters of judgment has ever been considered of
such vital importance, and--and such important vitality, that we find
it inculcated in the proverbs of the Greeks and the sayings of the
Chaldeans as a principle of the most expedient utility, and--and--the
most useful expediency!"
"Mr. Bossolton," said Mordaunt, in a tone of remarkable and even
artificial softness and civility, "have the kindness immediately to
examine this gentleman's bruises."
Mr. Bossolton looked up to the calm but haughty face of the speaker,
and without a moment's hesitation proceeded to handle the arm, which
was already stripped for his survey.
"It frequently occurs," said Mr. Bossolton, "in the course of my
profession, that the forcible, sudden, and vehement application of any
hard substance, like the hoof of a quadruped, to the soft, tender, and
carniferous parts of the human frame, such as the arm, occasions a
pain--a pang, I should rather say--of the intensest acuteness, and--
and of the acutest intensity."
"Pray, Mr. Bossolton, is the bone broken?" asked Mordaunt.
By this time the patient, who had been hitherto in that languor which
extreme pain always produces at first, especially on young frames, was
sufficiently recovered to mark and reply to the kind solicitude of the
last speaker: "I thank you, sir," said he with a smile, "for your
anxiety, but I feel that the bone is not broken; the muscles are a
little hurt, that is all."
"Young gentleman," said Mr. Bossolton, "you must permit me to say that
they who have all their lives been employed in the pursuit, and the
investigation, and the analysis of certain studies are in general
better acquainted with those studies than they who have neither given
them any importance of consideration--nor--nor any consideration of
importance. Establishing this as my hypothesis, I shall now proceed
to--"
"Apply immediate remedies, if you please, Mr. Bossolton," interrupted
Mr. Mordaunt, in that sweet and honeyed tone which somehow or other
always silenced even the garrulous practitioner.
Driven into taciturnity, Mr. Bossolton again inspected the arm, and
proceeded to urge the application of liniments and bandages, which he
promised to prepare with the most solicitudinous despatch and the most
despatchful solicitude.
CHAPTER V.
Your name, Sir!
Ha! my name, you say--my name?
'T is well--my name--is--nay, I must consider.--Pedrillo.
This accident occasioned a delay of some days in the plans of the
young gentleman, for whom we trust very soon, both for our own
convenience and that of our reader, to find a fitting appellation.
Mr. Mordaunt, after seeing every attention paid to him both surgical
and hospitable, took his departure with a promise to call the next
day; leaving behind him a strong impression of curiosity and interest
to serve our hero as some mental occupation until his return. The
bonny landlady came up in a new cap, with blue ribbons, in the course
of the evening, to pay a visit of inquiry to the handsome patient, who
was removed from the Griffin, No. 4, to the Dragon, No. 8,--a room
whose merits were exactly in proportion to its number, namely, twice
as great as those of No. 4.
"Well, sir," said Mrs. Taptape, with a courtesy, "I trust you find
yourself better."
"At this moment I do," said the gallant youth, with a significant air.
"Hem," quoth the landlady.
A pause ensued. In spite of the compliment, a certain suspicion
suddenly darted across the mind of the hostess. Strong as are the
prepossessions of the sex, those of the profession are much stronger.
"Honest folk," thought the landlady, "don't travel with their initials
only; the last 'Whitehall Evening' was full of shocking accounts of
swindlers and cheats; and I gave nine pounds odd shillings for the
silver teapot John has brought him up,--as if the delft one was not
good enough for a foot traveller!"
Pursuing these ideas, Mrs. Taptape, looking bashfully down, said,--
"By the by, sir; Mr. Bossolton asked me what name he should put down
in his book for the medicines; what would you please me to say, sir?"
"Mr. who?" said the youth, elevating his eyebrows.
"Mr. Bossolton, sir, the apothecary."
"Oh! Bossolton! very odd name that,--not near so pretty as--dear me,
what a beautiful cap that is of yours!" said the young gentleman.
"Lord, sir, do you think so? The ribbon is pretty enough; but--but,
as I was saying, what name shall I tell Mr. Bossolton to put in his
book?" "This," thought Mrs. Taptape, "is coming to the point."
"Well!" said the youth, slowly, and as if in a profound reverie,
"well, Bossolton is certainly the most singular name I ever heard; he
does right to put it in a book: it is quite a curiosity! is he
clever?"
"Very, sir," said the landlady, somewhat sharply; "but it is your
name, not his, that he wishes to put into his book."
"Mine?" said the youth, who appeared to have been seeking to gain time
in order to answer a query which most men find requires very little
deliberation, "mine, you say; my name is Linden--Clarence Linden--you
understand?"
"What a pretty name!" thought the landlady's daughter, who was
listening at the keyhole; "but how could he admire that odious cap of
Ma's!"
"And, now, landlady, I wish you would send up my boxes; and get me a
newspaper, if you please."
"Yes, sir," said the landlady, and she rose to retire.
"I do not think," said the youth to himself, "that I could have hit on
a prettier name, and so novel a one too!--Clarence Linden,--why, if I
were that pretty girl at the bar I could fall in love with the very
words. Shakspeare was quite wrong when he said,--
'A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.'"
"A rose by any name would not smell as sweet; if a rose's name was
Jeremiah Bossolton, for instance, it would not, to my nerves at least,
smell of anything but an apothecary's shop!"
When Mordaunt called the next morning, he found Clarence much better,
and carelessly turning over various books, part of the contents of the
luggage superscribed C. L. A book of whatever description was among
the few companions for whom Mordaunt had neither fastidiousness nor
reserve; and the sympathy of taste between him and the sufferer gave
rise to a conversation less cold and commonplace than it might
otherwise have been. And when Mordaunt, after a stay of some length,
rose to depart, he pressed Linden to return his visit before he left
that part of the country; his place, he added, was only about five
miles distant from W----. Linden, greatly interested in his visitor,
was not slow in accepting the invitation, and, perhaps for the first
time in his life, Mordaunt was shaking hands with a stranger he had
only known two days.
CHAPTER VI.
While yet a child, and long before his time,
He had perceived the presence and the power
Of greatness.
. . . . .
But eagerly he read, and read again.
. . . . .
Yet still uppermost
Nature was at his heart, as if he felt,
Though yet he knew not how, a wasting power
In all things that from her sweet influence
Might seek to wean him. Therefore with her hues,
Her forms, and with the spirit of her forms,
He clothed the nakedness of austere truth.
WORDSWORTH.
Algernon Mordaunt was the last son of an old and honourable race,
which had centuries back numbered princes in its line. His parents
had had many children, but all (save Algernon, the youngest) died in
their infancy. His mother perished in giving him birth.
Constitutional infirmity and the care of mercenary nurses contributed
to render Algernon a weakly and delicate child: hence came a taste for
loneliness and a passion for study; and from these sprung, on the one
hand, the fastidiousness and reserve which render us apparently
unamiable, and, on the other, the loftiness of spirit and the kindness
of heart which are the best and earliest gifts of literature, and more
than counterbalance our deficiencies in the "minor morals" due to
society by their tendency to increase our attention to the greater
ones belonging to mankind. Mr. Mordaunt was a man of luxurious habits
and gambling propensities: wedded to London, he left the house of his
ancestors to moulder into desertion and decay; but to this home
Algernon was constantly consigned during his vacations from school;
and its solitude and cheerlessness gave to a disposition naturally
melancholy and thoughtful those colours which subsequent events were
calculated to deepen, not efface.
Truth obliges us to state, despite our partiality to Mordaunt, that,
when he left his school after a residence of six years, it was with
the bitter distinction of having been the most unpopular boy in it.
Why, nobody could exactly explain, for his severest enemies could not
accuse him of ill-nature, cowardice, or avarice, and these make the
three capital offences of a school-boy; but Algernon Mordaunt had
already acquired the knowledge of himself, and could explain the
cause, though with a bitter and swelling heart. His ill health, his
long residence at home, his unfriended and almost orphan situation,
his early habits of solitude and reserve, all these, so calculated to
make the spirit shrink within itself, made him, on his entrance at
school, if not unsocial, appear so: this was the primary reason of his
unpopularity; the second was that he perceived, for he was sensitive
(and consequently acute) to the extreme, the misfortune of his manner,
and in his wish to rectify it, it became doubly unprepossessing; to
reserve, it now added embarrassment, to coldness, gloom; and the pain
he felt in addressing or being addressed by another was naturally and
necessarily reciprocal, for the effects of sympathy are nowhere so
wonderful, yet so invisible, as in the manners.
By degrees he shunned the intercourse which had for him nothing but
distress, and his volatile acquaintances were perhaps the first to set
him the example. Often in his solitary walks he stopped afar off to
gaze upon the sports which none ever solicited him to share; and as
the shout of laughter and of happy hearts came, peal after peal, upon
his ear, he turned enviously, yet not malignantly away, with tears,
which not all his pride could curb, and muttered to himself, "And
these, these hate me!"
There are two feelings common to all high or affectionate natures,--
that of extreme susceptibility to opinion and that of extreme
bitterness at its injustice. These feelings were Mordaunt's: but the
keen edge which one blow injures, the repetition blunts; and by little
and little, Algernon became not only accustomed, but, as he persuaded
himself, indifferent, to his want of popularity; his step grew more
lofty, and his address more collected, and that which was once
diffidence gradually hardened into pride.
His residence at the University was neither without honour nor profit.
A college life was then, as now, either the most retired or the most
social of all others; we need scarcely say which it was to Mordaunt,
but his was the age when solitude is desirable, and when the closet
forms the mind better than the world. Driven upon itself, his
intellect became inquiring and its resources profound; admitted to
their inmost recesses, he revelled among the treasures of ancient
lore, and in his dreams of the Nymph and Naiad, or his researches
after truth in the deep wells of the Stagyrite or the golden fountains
of Plato, he forgot the loneliness of his lot and exhausted the
hoarded enthusiasm of his soul.
But his mind, rather thoughtful than imaginative, found no idol like
"Divine Philosophy." It delighted to plunge itself into the mazes of
metaphysical investigation; to trace the springs of the intellect; to
connect the arcana of the universe; to descend into the darkest
caverns, or to wind through the minutest mysteries of Nature, and
rise, step by step, to that arduous elevation on which Thought stands
dizzy and confused, looking beneath upon a clouded earth, and above
upon an unfathomable heaven.
Rarely wandering from his chamber, known personally to few and
intimately by none, Algernon yet left behind him at the University the
most remarkable reputation of his day. He had obtained some of the
highest of academical honours, and by that proverbial process of
vulgar minds which ever frames the magnificent from the unknown, the
seclusion in which he lived and the recondite nature of his favourite
pursuits attached to his name a still greater celebrity and interest
than all the orthodox and regular dignities he had acquired. There
are few men who do not console themselves for not being generally
loved, if they can reasonably hope that they are generally esteemed.
Mordaunt had now grown reconciled to himself and to his kind. He had
opened to his interest a world in his own breast, and it consoled him
for his mortification in the world without. But, better than this,
his habits as well as studies had strengthened the principles and
confirmed the nobility of his mind. He was not, it is true, more
kind, more benevolent, more upright than before; but those virtues now
emanated from principle, not emotion: and principle to the mind is
what a free constitution is to a people; without that principle or
that free constitution, the one may be for the moment as good, the
other as happy; but we cannot tell how long the goodness and the
happiness will continue.
On leaving the University, his father sent for him to London. He
stayed there a short time, and mingled partially in its festivities;
but the pleasures of English dissipation have for a century been the
same, heartless without gayety, and dull without refinement. Nor
could Mordaunt, the most fastidious, yet warm-hearted of human beings,
reconcile either his tastes or his affections to the cold insipidities
of patrician society. His father's habits and evident distresses
deepened his disgust to his situation; for the habits were incurable
and the distresses increasing; and nothing but a circumstance which
Mordaunt did not then understand prevented the final sale of an estate
already little better than a pompons incumbrance.
It was therefore with the half painful, half pleasurable sensation
with which we avoid contemplating a ruin we cannot prevent that
Mordaunt set out upon that Continental tour deemed then so necessary a
part of education. His father, on taking leave of him, seemed deeply
affected. "Go, my son," said he, "may God bless you, and not punish
me too severely. I have wronged you deeply, and I cannot bear to look
upon your face."
To these words Algernon attached a general, but they cloaked a
peculiar, meaning: in three years, he returned to England; his father
had been dead some months, and the signification of his parting
address was already deciphered,--but of this hereafter.
In his travels Mordaunt encountered an Englishman whose name I will
not yet mention: a person of great reputed wealth; a merchant, yet a
man of pleasure; a voluptuary in life, yet a saint in reputation; or,
to abstain from the antithetical analysis of a character which will
not be corporeally presented to the reader till our tale is
considerably advanced, one who drew from nature a singular combination
of shrewd but false conclusions, and a peculiar philosophy, destined
hereafter to contrast the colours and prove the practical utility of
that which was espoused by Mordaunt.
There can be no education in which the lessons of the world do not
form a share. Experience, in expanding Algernon's powers, had ripened
his virtues. Nor had the years which had converted knowledge into
wisdom failed in imparting polish to refinement. His person had
acquired a greater grace, and his manners an easier dignity than
before. His noble and generous mind had worked its impress upon his
features and his mien; and those who could overcome the first coldness
and shrinking hauteur of his address found it required no minute
examination to discover the real expression of the eloquent eye and
the kindling lip.
He had not been long returned before he found two enemies to his
tranquillity,--the one was love, the other appeared in the more
formidable guise of a claimant to his estate. Before Algernon was
aware of the nature of the latter he went to consult with his lawyer.
"If the claim be just, I shall not, of course, proceed to law," said
Mordaunt.
"But without the estate, sir, you have nothing!"
"True," said Algernon, calmly.
But the claim was not just, and to law he went.
In this lawsuit, however, he had one assistant in an old relation, who
had seen, indeed, but very little of him, but who compassionated his
circumstances, and above all hated his opponent. This relation was
rich and childless; and there were not wanting those who predicted
that his money would ultimately discharge the mortgages and repair the
house of the young representative of the Mordaunt honours. But the
old kinsman was obstinate, self-willed, and under the absolute
dominion of patrician pride; and it was by no means improbable that
the independence of Mordaunt's character would soon create a disunion
between them, by clashing against the peculiarities of his relation's
temper.
It was a clear and sunny morning when Linden, tolerably recovered of
his hurt, set out upon a sober and aged pony, which after some natural
pangs of shame he had hired of his landlord, to Mordaunt Court.
Mordaunt's house was situated in the midst of a wild and extensive
park, surrounded with woods, and interspersed with trees of the
stateliest growth, now scattered into irregular groups, now marshalled
into sweeping avenues; while, ever and anon, Linden caught glimpses of
a rapid and brawling rivulet, which in many a slight but sounding
waterfall gave a music strange and spirit-like to the thick copses and
forest glades through which it went exulting on its way. The deer lay
half concealed by the fern among which they couched, turning their
stately crests towards the stranger, but not stirring from their rest;
while from the summit of beeches which would have shamed the pavilion
of Tityrus the rooks--those monks of the feathered people--were loud
in their confused but not displeasing confabulations.
As Linden approached the house, he was struck with the melancholy air
of desolation which spread over and around it: fragments of stone,
above which clomb the rank weed, insolently proclaiming the triumph of
Nature's meanest offspring over the wrecks of art; a moat dried up; a
railing once of massive gilding, intended to fence a lofty terrace on
the right from the incursions of the deer, but which, shattered and
decayed, now seemed to ask with the satirist,--
"To what end did our lavish ancestors
Erect of old these stately piles of ours?"
--a chapel on the left, perfectly in ruins,--all appeared strikingly
to denote that time had outstripped fortune, and that the years, which
alike hallow and destroy, had broken the consequence, in deepening the
antiquity, of the House of Mordaunt.
The building itself agreed but too well with the tokens of decay
around it; most of the windows were shut up, and the shutters of dark
oak, richly gilt, contrasted forcibly with the shattered panes and
mouldered framing of the glass. It was a house of irregular
architecture. Originally built in the fifteenth century, it had
received its last improvement, with the most lavish expense, during
the reign of Anne; and it united the Gallic magnificence of the latter
period with the strength and grandeur of the former; it was in a great
part overgrown with ivy, and, where that insidious ornament had not
reached, the signs of decay, and even ruin, were fully visible. The
sun itself, bright and cheering as it shone over Nature, making the
green sod glow like emeralds, and the rivulet flash in its beam, like
one of those streams of real light, imagined by Swedenborg in his
visions of heaven, and clothing tree and fell, brake and hillock, with
the lavish hues of infant summer,--the sun itself only made more
desolate, because more conspicuous, the venerable fabric, which the
youthful traveller frequently paused more accurately to survey, and
its laughing and sportive beams playing over chink and crevice, seemed
almost as insolent and untimeous as the mirth of the young mocking the
silent grief of some gray-headed and solitary mourner.
Clarence had now reached the porch, and the sound of the shrill bell
he touched rang with a strange note through the general stillness of
the place. A single servant appeared, and ushered Clarence through a
screen hall, hung round with relics of armour, and ornamented on the
side opposite the music gallery with a solitary picture of gigantic
size, and exhibiting the full length of the gaunt person and sable
steed of that Sir Piers de Mordaunt who had so signalized himself in
the field in which Henry of Richmond changed his coronet for a crown.
Through this hall Clarence was led to a small chamber clothed with
uncouth and tattered arras, in which, seemingly immersed in papers, he
found the owner of the domain.
"Your studies," said Linden, after the salutations of the day, "seem
to harmonize with the venerable antiquity of your home;" and he
pointed to the crabbed characters and faded ink of the papers on the
table.
"So they ought," answered Mordaunt, with a faint smile; "for they are
called from their quiet archives in order to support my struggle for
that home. But I fear the struggle is in vain, and that the quibbles
of law will transfer into other hands a possession I am foolish enough
to value the more from my inability to maintain it"
Something of this Clarence had before learned from the communicative
gossip of his landlady; and less desirous to satisfy his curiosity
than to lead the conversation from a topic which he felt must be so
unwelcome to Mordaunt, he expressed a wish to see the state apartments
of the house. With something of shame at the neglect they had
necessarily experienced, and something of pride at the splendour which
no neglect could efface, Mordaunt yielded to the request, and led the
way up a staircase of black oak, the walls and ceiling of which were
covered with frescoes of Italian art, to a suite of apartments in
which time and dust seemed the only tenants. Lingeringly did Clarence
gaze upon the rich velvet, the costly mirrors, the motley paintings of
a hundred ancestors, and the antique cabinets, containing, among the
most hoarded relics of the Mordaunt race, curiosities which the
hereditary enthusiasm of a line of cavaliers had treasured as the most
sacred of heirlooms, and which, even to the philosophical mind of
Mordaunt, possessed a value he did not seek too minutely to analyze.
Here was the goblet from which the first prince of Tudor had drunk
after the field of Bosworth. Here the ring with which the chivalrous
Francis the First had rewarded a signal feat of that famous Robert de
Mordaunt, who, as a poor but adventurous cadet of the house, had
brought to the "first gentleman of France" the assistance of his
sword. Here was the glove which Sir Walter had received from the
royal hand of Elizabeth, and worn in the lists upon a crest which the
lance of no antagonist in that knightly court could abase. And here,
more sacred than all, because connected with the memory of misfortune,
was a small box of silver which the last king of a fated line had
placed in the hands of the gray-headed descendant of that Sir Walter
after the battle of the Boyne, saying, "Keep this, Sir Everard
Mordaunt, for the sake of one who has purchased the luxury of
gratitude at the price of a throne!"
As Clarence glanced from these relics to the figure of Mordaunt, who
stood at a little distance leaning against the window, with arms
folded on his breast and with eyes abstractedly wandering over the
noble woods and extended park, which spread below, he could not but
feel that if birth had indeed the power of setting its seal upon the
form, it was never more conspicuous than in the broad front and lofty
air of the last descendant of the race by whose memorials he was
surrounded. Touched by the fallen fortunes of Mordaunt, and
interested by the uncertainty which the chances of law threw over his
future fate, Clarence could not resist exclaiming, with some warmth
and abruptness,--
"And by what subterfuge or cavil does the present claimant of these
estates hope to dislodge their rightful possessor?"
"Why," answered Mordaunt, "it is a long story in detail, but briefly
told in epitome. My father was a man whose habits greatly exceeded
his fortune, and a few months after his death, Mr. Vavasour, a distant
relation, produced a paper, by which it appeared that my father had,
for a certain sum of ready money, disposed of his estates to this Mr.
Vavasour, upon condition that they should not be claimed nor the
treaty divulged till after his death; the reason for this proviso
seems to have been the shame my father felt for his exchange, and his
fear of the censures of that world to which he was always devoted."
"But how unjust to you!" said Clarence.
"Not so much so as it seems," said Mordaunt, deprecatingly; "for I was
then but a sickly boy, and according to the physicians, and I
sincerely believe according also to my poor father's belief, almost
certain of a premature death. In that case Vavasour would have been
the nearest heir; and this expectancy, by the by, joined to the
mortgages on the property, made the sum given ridiculously
disproportioned to the value of the estate. I must confess that the
news came upon me like a thunderbolt. I should have yielded up
possession immediately, but was informed by my lawyers that my father
had no legal right to dispose of the property; the discussion of that
right forms the ground of the present lawsuit. But," continued
Mordaunt, proudly, yet mournfully, "I am prepared for the worst; if,
indeed, I should call that the worst which can affect neither
intellect nor health nor character nor conscience."
Clarence was silent, and Mordaunt after a brief pause once more
resumed his guidance. Their tour ended in a large library filled with
books, and this Mordaunt informed his guest was his chosen sitting-
room.
An old carved table was covered with works which for the most part
possessed for the young mind of Clarence, more accustomed to imagine
than reflect, but a very feeble attraction; on looking over them, he,
however, found, half hid by a huge folio of Hobbes, and another of
Locke, a volume of Milton's poems; this paved the way to a
conversation in which both had an equal interest, for both were
enthusiastic in the character and genius of that wonderful man, for
whom "the divine and solemn countenance of Freedom" was dearer than
the light of day, and whose solitary spell, accomplishing what the
whole family of earth once vainly began upon the plain of Shinar, has
built of materials more imperishable than "slime and brick" "a city
and a tower whose summit has reached to heaven."
It was with mutual satisfaction that Mordaunt and his guest continued
their commune till the hour of dinner was announced to them by a bell,
which, formerly intended as an alarum, now served the peaceful purpose
of a more agreeable summons.
The same servant who had admitted Clarence ushered them through the
great hall into the dining-room, and was their solitary attendant
during their repast.
The temper of Mordaunt was essentially grave and earnest, and his
conversation almost invariably took the tone of his mind; this made
their conference turn upon less minute and commonplace topics than one
between such new acquaintances, especially of different ages, usually
does.
"You will positively go to London to-morrow, then?" said Mordaunt, as
the servant, removing the appurtenances of dinner, left them alone.
"Positively," answered Clarence. "I go there to carve my own
fortunes, and, to say truth, I am impatient to begin." Mordaunt
looked earnestly at the frank face of the speaker, and wondered that
one so young, so well-educated, and, from his air and manner,
evidently of gentle blood, should appear so utterly thrown upon his
own resources.
"I wish you success," said he, after a pause; "and it is a noble part
of the organization of this world that, by increasing those riches
which are beyond fortune, we do in general take the surest method of
obtaining those which are in its reach."
Clarence looked inquiringly at Mordaunt, who, perceiving it,
continued, "I see that I should explain myself further. I will do so
by using the thoughts of a mind not the least beautiful and
accomplished which this country has produced. 'Of all which belongs
to us,' said Bolingbroke, 'the least valuable parts can alone fall
under the will of others. Whatever is best is safest; lies out of the
reach of human power; can neither be given nor taken away. Such is
this great and beautiful work of Nature, the world. Such is the mind
of man, which contemplates and admires the world whereof it makes the
noblest part. These are inseparably ours, and as long as we remain in
one we shall enjoy the other.'"
"Beautiful, indeed!" exclaimed Clarence, with the enthusiasm of a
young and pure heart, to which every loftier sentiment is always
beautiful.
"And true as beautiful!" said Mordaunt. "Nor is this all, for the
mind can even dispense with that world 'of which it forms a part' if
we can create within it a world still more inaccessible to chance.
But (and I now return to and explain my former observation) the means
by which we can effect this peculiar world can be rendered equally
subservient to our advancement and prosperity in that which we share
in common with our race; for the riches which by the aid of wisdom we
heap up in the storehouses of the mind are, though not the only, the
most customary coin by which external prosperity is bought. So that
the philosophy which can alone give independence to ourselves becomes;
under the name of honesty, the best policy in commerce with our kind."
In conversation of this nature, which the sincerity and lofty
enthusiasm of Mordaunt rendered interesting to Clarence, despite the
distaste to the serious so ordinary to youth, the hours passed on,
till the increasing evening warned Linden to depart.
"Adieu!" said he to Mordaunt. "I know not when we shall meet again,
but if we ever do, I will make it my boast, whether in prosperity or
misfortune, not to have forgotten the pleasure I have this day
enjoyed!"
Returning his guest's farewell with a warmth unusual to his manner,
Mordaunt followed him to the door and saw him depart.
Fate ordained that they should pursue in very different paths their
several destinies; nor did it afford them an opportunity of meeting
again, till years and events had severely tried the virtue of one and
materially altered the prospects of the other.
The next morning Clarence Linden was on his road to London.
CHAPTER VII.
"Upon my word," cries Jones, "thou art a very odd fellow, and I like
thy humour extremely."--FIELDING.
The rumbling and jolting vehicle which conveyed Clarence to the
metropolis stopped at the door of a tavern in Holborn. Linden was
ushered into a close coffee-room and presented with a bill of fare.
While he was deliberating between the respective merits of mutton
chops and beefsteaks, a man with a brown coat, brown breeches, and a
brown wig, walked into the room; he cast a curious glance at Clarence
and then turned to the waiter.
"A pair of slippers!"
"Yes, sir," and the waiter disappeared.
"I suppose," said the brown gentleman to Clarence, "I suppose, sir,
you are the gentleman just come to town?"
"You are right, sir," said Clarence.
"Very well, very well indeed," resumed the stranger, musingly. "I
took the liberty of looking at your boxes in the passage; I knew a
lady, sir, a relation of yours, I think."
"Sir!" exclaimed Linden, colouring violently.
"At least I suppose, for her name was just the same as yours, only, at
least, one letter difference between them: yours is Linden I see, sir;
hers was Minden. Am I right in my conjecture that you are related to
her?"
"Sir," answered Clarence, gravely, "notwithstanding the similarity of
our names, we are not related."
"Very extraordinary," replied the stranger.
"Very," repeated Linden.
"I had the honour, sir," said the brown gentleman, "to make Mrs.
Minden many presents of value, and I should have been very happy to
have obliged you in the same manner, had you been in any way connected
with that worthy gentlewoman."
"You are very kind," said Linden, "you are very kind; and since such
were your intentions, I believe I must have been connected with Mrs.
Minden. At all events, as you justly observe, there is only the
difference of a letter between our names, a discrepancy too slight, I
am sure, to alter your benevolent intentions."
Here the waiter returned with the slippers.
The stranger slowly unbuttoned his gaiters. "Sir," said he to Linden,
"we will renew our conversation presently."
No sooner had the generous friend of Mrs. Minden deposited his feet in
their easy tenements than he quitted the room. "Pray," said Linden to
the waiter, when he had ordered his simple repast, "who is that
gentleman in brown?"
"Mr. Brown," replied the waiter.
"And who or what is Mr. Brown?" asked our hero.
Before the waiter could reply, Mr. Brown returned, with a large
bandbox, carefully enveloped in a blue handkerchief. "You come from
----, sir?" said Mr. Brown, quietly seating himself at the same table
as Linden.
"No, sir, I do not."
"From ----, then?"
"No, sir,--from W----."
"W----?--ay--well. I knew a lady with a name very like W---- (the
late Lady Waddilove) extremely well. I made her some valuable
presents: her ladyship was very sensible of it."
"I don't doubt it, sir," replied Clarence; "such instances of general
beneficence rarely occur!"
"I have some magnificent relics of her ladyship in this box," returned
Mr. Brown.
"Really! then she was no less generous than yourself, I presume?"
"Yes, her ladyship was remarkably generous. About a week before she
died (the late Lady Waddilove was quite sensible of her danger), she
called me to her,--'Brown,' said she, 'you are a good creature; I have
had my most valuable things from you. I am not ungrateful: I will
leave you--my maid! She is as clever as you are and as good.' I took
the hint, sir, and married. It was an excellent bargain. My wife is
a charming woman; she entirely fitted up Mrs. Minden's wardrobe and I
furnished the house. Mrs. Minden was greatly indebted to us."
"Heaven help me!" thought Clarence, "the man is certainly mad."
The waiter entered with the dinner; and Mr. Brown, who seemed to have
a delicate aversion to any conversation in the presence of the
Ganymede of the Holborn tavern, immediately ceased his communications;
meanwhile, Clarence took the opportunity to survey him more minutely
than he had hitherto done.
His new acquaintance was in age about forty-eight; in stature, rather
under the middle height; and thin, dried, withered, yet muscular
withal, like a man who, in stinting his stomach for the sake of
economy, does not the less enjoy the power of undergoing any fatigue
or exertion that an object of adequate importance may demand. We have
said already that he was attired, like twilight, "in a suit of sober
brown;" and there was a formality, a precision, and a cat-like sort of
cleanliness in his garb, which savoured strongly of the respectable
coxcombry of the counting-house. His face was lean, it is true, but
not emaciated; and his complexion, sallow and adust, harmonized well
with the colours of his clothing. An eye of the darkest hazel, sharp,
shrewd, and flashing at times, especially at the mention of the
euphonious name of Lady Waddilove,--a name frequently upon the lips of
the inheritor of her abigail,--with a fire that might be called
brilliant, was of that modest species which can seldom encounter the
straightforward glance of another; on the contrary, it seemed
restlessly uneasy in any settled place, and wandered from ceiling to
floor, and corner to corner, with an inquisitive though apparently
careless glance, as if seeking for something to admire or haply to
appropriate; it also seemed to be the especial care of Mr. Brown to
veil, as far as he was able, the vivacity of his looks beneath an
expression of open and unheeding good-nature, an expression strangely
enough contrasting with the closeness and sagacity which Nature had
indelibly stamped upon features pointed, aquiline, and impressed with
a strong mixture of the Judaical physiognomy. The manner and bearing
of this gentleman partook of the same undecided character as his
countenance: they seemed to be struggling between civility and
importance; a real eagerness to make the acquaintance of the person he
addressed, and an assumed recklessness of the advantages which that
acquaintance could bestow;--it was like the behaviour of a man who is
desirous of having the best possible motives imputed to him, but is
fearful lest that desire should not be utterly fulfilled. At the
first glance you would have pledged yourself for his respectability;
at the second, you would have half suspected him to be a rogue; and,
after you had been half an hour in his company, you would confess
yourself in the obscurest doubt which was the better guess, the first
or the last.
"Waiter!" said Mr. Brown, looking enviously at the viands upon which
Linden, having satisfied his curiosity, was now with all the appetite
of youth regaling himself. "Waiter!"
"Yes, sir!"
"Bring me a sandwich--and--and, waiter, see that I have plenty of--
plenty of--"
"What, sir?"
"Plenty of mustard, waiter."
"Mustard" (and here Mr. Brown addressed himself to Clarence) "is a
very wonderful assistance to the digestion. By the by, sir, if you
want any curiously fine mustard, I can procure you some pots quite
capital,--a great favour, though,--they were smuggled from France,
especially for the use of the late Lady Waddilove."
"Thank you," said Linden, dryly; "I shall be very happy to accept
anything you may wish to offer me."
Mr. Brown took a pocket-book from his pouch. "Six pots of mustard,
sir,--shall I say six?"
"As many as you please," replied Clarence; and Mr. Brown wrote down
"Six pots of French mustard."
"You are a very young gentleman, sir," said Mr. Brown, "probably
intended for some profession: I don't mean to be impertinent, but if I
can be of any assistance--"
"You can, sir," replied Linden, "and immediately--have the kindness to
ring the bell."
Mr. Brown, with a grave smile, did as he was desired; the waiter re-
entered, and, receiving a whispered order from Clarence, again
disappeared.
"What profession did you say, sir?" renewed Mr. Brown, artfully.
"None!" replied Linden.
"Oh, very well,--very well indeed. Then as an idle, independent
gentleman, you will of course be a bit of a beau; want some shirts,
possibly; fine cravats, too; gentlemen wear a particular pattern now;
gloves, gold, or shall I say gilt chain, watch and seals, a ring or
two, and a snuff-box?"
"Sir, you are vastly obliging," said Clarence, in undisguised
surprise.
"Not at all, I would do anything for a relation of Mrs. Minden."
The waiter re-entered; "Sir," said he to Linden, "your room is quite
ready."
"I am glad to hear it," said Clarence, rising. "Mr. Brown, I have the
honour of wishing you a good evening."
"Stay, sir--stay; you have not looked into these things belonging to
the late Lady Waddilove."
"Another time," said Clarence, hastily.
"To-morrow, at ten o'clock," muttered Mr. Brown.
"I am exceedingly glad I have got rid of that fellow," said Linden to
himself, as he stretched his limbs in his easy-chair, and drank off
the last glass of his pint of port. "If I have not already seen, I
have already guessed, enough of the world, to know that you are to
look to your pockets when a man offers you a present; they who 'give,'
also 'take away.' So here I am in London, with an order for 1000
pounds in my purse, the wisdom of Dr. Latinas in my head, and the
health of eighteen in my veins; will it not be my own fault if I do
not both enjoy and make myself--"
And then, yielding to meditations of future success, partaking
strongly of the inexperienced and sanguine temperament of the
soliloquist, Clarence passed the hours till his pillow summoned him to
dreams no less ardent and perhaps no less unreal.
CHAPTER VIII.
"Oh, how I long to be employed!"--Every Man in his Humour.
Clarence was sitting the next morning over the very unsatisfactory
breakfast which tea made out of broomsticks, and cream out of chalk
(adulteration thrived even in 17--) afforded, when the waiter threw
open the door and announced Mr. Brown.
"Just in time, sir, you perceive," said Mr. Brown; "I am punctuality
itself: exactly a quarter of a minute to ten. I have brought you the
pots of French mustard, and I have some very valuable articles which
you must want, besides."
"Thank you, sir," said Linden, not well knowing what to say; and Mr.
Brown, untying a silk handkerchief, produced three shirts, two pots of
pomatum, a tobacco canister with a German pipe, four pair of silk
stockings, two gold seals, three rings, and a stuffed parrot!
"Beautiful articles these, sir," said Mr. Brown, with a snuffle "of
inward sweetness long drawn out," and expressive of great admiration
of his offered treasures; "beautiful articles, sir, ar'n't they?"
"Very, the parrot in particular," said Clarence.
"Yes, sir," returned Mr. Brown, "the parrot is indeed quite a jewel;
it belonged to the late Lady Waddilove; I offer it to you with
considerable regret, for--"
"Oh!" interrupted Clarence, "pray do not rob yourself of such a jewel;
it really is of no use to me."
"I know that, sir,--I know that," replied Mr. Brown; "but it will be
of use to your friends; it will be inestimable to any old aunt, sir,
any maiden lady living at Hackney, any curious elderly gentleman fond
of a knack-knack. I knew you would know some one to send it to as a
present, even though you should not want it yourself."
"Bless me!" thought Linden, "was there ever such generosity? Not
content with providing for my wants, he extends his liberality even to
any possible relations I may possess!"
Mr. Brown now re-tied "the beautiful articles" in his handkerchief.
"Shall I leave them, sir?" said he.
"Why, really," said Clarence, "I thought yesterday that you were in
jest; but you must be aware that I cannot accept presents from any
gentleman so much,--so much a stranger to me as you are."
"No, sir, I am aware of that," replied Mr. Brown; "and in order to
remove the unpleasantness of such a feeling, sir, on your part,--
merely in order to do that, I assure you with no other view, sir, in
the world,--I have just noted down the articles on this piece of
paper; but as you will perceive, at a price so low as still to make
them actually presents in everything but the name. Oh, sir, I
perfectly understand your delicacy, and would not for the world
violate it."
So saying, Mr. Brown put a paper into Linden's hands, the substance of
which a very little more experience of the world would have enabled
Clarence to foresee; it ran thus:--
CLARENCE LINDEN, ESQ., DR.
TO Mr. MORRIS BROWN.
l. s. d.
To Six Pots of French Mustard . . . . . . . . . 1 4 0
To Three Superfine Holland Shirts, with Cambric Bosoms,
Complete . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 1 0
To Two Pots of Superior French Pomatum . . . . . . 0 10 0
To a Tobacco Canister of enamelled Tin, with a finely
Executed Head of the Pretender; slight flaw in the same. 0 12 6
To a German Pipe, second hand, as good as new, belonging
to the late Lady Waddilove . . . . . . . . . . 1 18 0
To Four Pair of Black Silk Hose, ditto, belonging to her
Ladyship's Husband . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 8 0
To Two Superfine Embossed Gold Watch Seals, with a
Classical Motto and Device to each, namely, Mouse Trap,
and "Prenez Garde," to one, and "Who the devil can this
be from?" [One would not have thought these ingenious
devices had been of so ancient a date as the year 17--.]
to the other . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 0
To a remarkably fine Antique Ring, having the head of a
Monkey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 16 6
A ditto, with blue stones . . . . . . . . . . . 0 12 6
A ditto, with green ditto . . . . . . . . . . . 0 12 6
A Stuffed Green Parrot, a remarkable favourite of the late
Lady W. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2 0
--------
Sum Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 18 0
Deduction for Ready Money . . . . . . . . . . 0 13 6
--------
15 4 6
Mr. Brown's Profits for Brokerage . . . . . . . . 1 10 0
--------
Sum Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 14 6
Received of Clarence Linden, Esq., this day of 17--.
It would have been no unamusing study to watch the expression of
Clarence's face as it lengthened over each article until he had
reached the final conclusion. He then carefully folded up the paper,
restored it to Mr. Brown, with a low bow, and said, "Excuse me, sir, I
will not take advantage of your generosity; keep your parrot and other
treasures for some more worthy person. I cannot accept of what you
are pleased to term your very valuable presents!"
"Oh, very well, very well," said Mr. Brown, pocketing the paper, and
seeming perfectly unconcerned at the termination of his proposals;
"perhaps I can serve you in some other way?"
"In none, I thank you," replied Linden.
"Just consider, sir!--you will want lodgings; I can find them for you
cheaper than you can yourself; or perhaps you would prefer going into
a nice, quiet, genteel family where you can have both board and
lodging, and be treated in every way as the pet child of the master?"
A thought crossed Linden's mind. He was going to stay in town some
time; he was ignorant of its ways; he had neither friends nor
relations, at least none whom he could visit and consult; moreover,
hotels, he knew, were expensive; lodgings, though cheaper, might, if
tolerably comfortable, greatly exceed the sum prudence would allow him
to expend would not this plan proposed by Mr. Brown, of going into a
"nice quiet genteel family," he the most advisable one he could adopt?
The generous benefactor of the late and ever-to-be-remembered Lady
Waddilove perceived his advantage, and making the most of Clarence's
hesitation, continued,--
"I know of a charming little abode, sir, situated in the suburbs of
London, quite rus in urbe, as the scholars say; you can have a
delightful little back parlour, looking out upon the garden, and all
to yourself, I dare say."
"And pray, Mr. Brown," interrupted Linden, "what price do you think
would be demanded for such enviable accommodation? If you offer me
them as 'a present,' I shall have nothing to say to them."
"Oh, sir," answered Mr. Brown, "the price will be a trifle,--a mere
trifle; but I will inquire, and let you know the exact sum in the
course of the day: all they want is a respectable gentlemanlike
lodger; and I am sure so near a relation of Mrs. Minden will upon my
recommendation be received with avidity. Then you won't have any of
these valuable articles, sir? You'll repent it, sir; take my word for
it--hem!
"Since," replied Clarence, dryly, "your word appears of so much more
value than your articles, pardon me, if I prefer taking the former
instead of the latter."
Mr. Brown forced a smile,--"Well, sir, very well, very well indeed.
You will not go out before two o'clock? and at that time I shall call
upon you respecting the commission you have favoured me with."
"I will await you," said Clarence; and he bowed Mr. Brown out of the
room.
"Now, really," said Linden to himself, as he paced the narrow limits
of his apartment, "I do not see what better plan I can pursue; but let
me well consider what is my ultimate object. A high step in the
world's ladder! how is this to be obtained? First, by the regular
method of professions; but what profession should I adopt? The Church
is incompatible with my object, the army and navy with my means. Next
come the irregular methods of adventure and enterprise, such as
marriage with a fortune,"--here he paused and looked at the glass,--
"the speculation of a political pamphlet, or an ode to the minister;
attendance on some dying miser of my own name, without a relation in
the world; or, in short, any other mode of making money that may
decently offer itself. Now, situated as I am, without a friend in
this great city, I might as well purchase my experience at as cheap a
rate and in as brief a time as possible, nor do I see any plan of
doing so more promising than that proposed by Mr. Brown."
These and such like reflections, joined to the inspiriting pages of
the "Newgate Calendar" and "The Covent Garden Magazine," two works
which Clarence dragged from their concealment under a black tea-tray,
afforded him ample occupation till the hour of two, punctual to which
time Mr. Morris Brown returned.
"Well, sir," said Clarence, "what is your report?"
The friend of the late Lady W. wiped his brow and gave three long
sighs before he replied: "A long walk, sir--a very long walk I have
had; but I have succeeded. No thanks, sir,--no thanks,--the lady, a
most charming, delightful, amiable woman, will receive you with
pleasure; you will have the use of a back parlour (as I said) all the
morning, and a beautiful little bedroom entirely to yourself; think of
that, sir. You will have an egg for breakfast, and you will dine with
the family at three o'clock: quite fashionable hours you see, sir."
"And the terms?" said Linden, impatiently.
"Why, sir," replied Mr. Brown, "the lady was too genteel to talk to me
about them; you had better walk with me to her house and see if you
cannot yourself agree with her."
"I will," said Clarence. "Will you wait here till I have dressed?"
Mr. Brown bowed his assent.
"I might as well," thought Clarence, as he ascended to his bedroom,
"inquire into the character of this gentleman to whose good offices I
am so rashly intrusting myself." He rang his bell; the chambermaid
appeared, and was dismissed for the waiter. The character was soon
asked, and soon given. For our reader's sake we will somewhat enlarge
upon it.
Mr. Morris Brown originally came into the world with the simple
appellation of Moses, a name which his father--honest man--had, as the
Minories can still testify, honourably borne before him. Scarcely,
however, had the little Moses attained the age of five, when his
father, for causes best known to himself, became a Christian. Somehow
or other there is a most potent connection between the purse and the
conscience, and accordingly the blessings of Heaven descended in
golden showers upon the proselyte. "I shall die worth a plum," said
Moses the elder (who had taken unto himself the Christian cognomen of
Brown); "I shall die worth a plum," repeated he, as he went one fine
morning to speculate at the Exchange. A change of news, sharp and
unexpected as a change of wind, lowered the stocks and blighted the
plum. Mr. Brown was in the "Gazette" that week, and his wife in weeds
for him the next. He left behind him, besides the said wife, several
debts and his son Moses. Beggared by the former, our widow took a
small shop in Wardour Street to support the latter. Patient, but
enterprising--cautious of risking pounds, indefatigable in raising
pence--the little Moses inherited the propensities of his Hebrew
ancestors; and though not so capable as his immediate progenitor of
making a fortune, he was at least far less likely to lose one. In
spite, however, of all the industry both of mother and son, the gains
of the shop were but scanty; to increase them capital was required,
and all Mr. Moses Brown's capital lay in his brain. "It is a bad
foundation," said the mother, with a sigh. "Not at all!" said the
son, and leaving the shop, he turned broker. Now a broker is a man
who makes an income out of other people's funds,--a gleaner of stray
extravagances; and by doing the public the honour of living upon them
may fairly be termed a little sort of state minister in his way. What
with haunting sales, hawking china, selling the curiosities of one old
lady and purchasing the same for another, Mr. Brown managed to enjoy a
very comfortable existence. Great pains and small gains will at last
invert their antithesis, and make little trouble and great profit; so
that by the time Mr. Brown had attained his fortieth year, the petty
shop had become a large warehouse; and, if the worthy Moses, now
christianized into Morris, was not so sanguine as his father in the
gathering of plums, he had been at least as fortunate in the
collecting of windfalls. To say truth, the abigail of the defunct
Lady Waddilove had been no unprofitable helpmate to our broker. As
ingenious as benevolent, she was the owner of certain rooms of great
resort in the neighbourhood of St. James's,--rooms where caps and
appointments were made better than anywhere else, and where credit was
given and character lost upon terms equally advantageous to the
accommodating Mrs. Brown.
Meanwhile her husband, continuing through liking what he had begun
through necessity, slackened not his industry in augmenting his
fortune; on the contrary, small profits were but a keener incentive to
large ones,--as the glutton only sharpened by luncheon his appetite
for dinner. Still was Mr. Brown the very Alcibiades of brokers, the
universal genius, suiting every man to his humour. Business of
whatever description, from the purchase of a borough to that of a
brooch, was alike the object of Mr. Brown's most zealous pursuit:
taverns, where country cousins put up; rustic habitations, where
ancient maidens resided; auction or barter; city or hamlet,--all were
the same to that enterprising spirit, which made out of every
acquaintance--a commission! Sagacious and acute, Mr. Brown perceived
the value of eccentricity in covering design, and found by experience
that whatever can be laughed at as odd will be gravely considered as
harmless. Several of the broker's peculiarities were, therefore, more
artificial than natural; and many were the sly bargains which he
smuggled into effect under the comfortable cloak of singularity. No
wonder, then, that the crafty Morris grew gradually in repute as a
person of infinite utility and excellent qualifications; or that the
penetrating friends of his deceased sire bowed to the thriving
itinerant, with a respect which they denied to many in loftier
professions and more general esteem.
CHAPTER IX.
Trust me you have an exceeding fine lodging here,--very neat and
private.--BEN JONSON.
It was a tolerably long walk to the abode of which the worthy broker
spoke in such high terms of commendation. At length, at the suburbs
towards Paddington, Mr. Brown stopped at a very small house; it stood
rather retired from its surrounding neighbours, which were of a
loftier and more pretending aspect than itself, and, in its awkward
shape and pitiful bashfulness, looked exceedingly like a school-boy
finding himself for the first time in a grown up party, and shrinking
with all possible expedition into the obscurest corner he can
discover. Passing through a sort of garden, in which a spot of grass
lay in the embraces of a stripe of gravel, Mr. Brown knocked upon a
very bright knocker at a very new door. The latter was opened, and a
foot-boy appeared.
"Is Mrs. Copperas within?" asked the broker.
"Yees, sir," said the boy.
"Show this gentleman and myself up stairs," resumed Brown.
"Yees," reiterated the lackey.
Up a singularly narrow staircase, into a singularly diminutive
drawing-room, Clarence and his guide were ushered. There, seated on a
little chair by a little work-table, with one foot on a little stool
and one hand on a little book, was a little--very little lady.
"This is the young gentleman," said Mr. Brown; and Clarence bowed low,
in token of the introduction.
The lady returned the salutation with an affected bend, and said, in a
mincing and grotesquely subdued tone, "You are desirous, sir, of
entering into the bosom of my family. We possess accommodations of a
most elegant description; accustomed to the genteelest circles,
enjoying the pure breezes of the Highgate hills, and presenting to any
guest we may receive the attractions of a home rather than of a
lodging, you will find our retreat no less eligible than unique. You
are, I presume, sir, in some profession, some city avocation--or--or
trade?"
"I have the misfortune," said he, smiling, "to belong to no
profession."
The lady looked hard at the speaker, and then at the broker. With
certain people to belong to no profession is to be of no
respectability.
"The most unexceptionable references will be given-and required,"
resumed Mrs. Copperas.
"Certainly," said Mr. Brown, "certainly, the gentleman is a relation
of Mrs. Minden, a very old customer of mine."
"In that case," said Mrs. Copperas, "the affair is settled;" and,
rising, she rang the bell, and ordered the foot-boy, whom she
addressed by the grandiloquent name of "De Warens" to show the
gentleman the apartments. While Clarence was occupied in surveying
the luxuries of a box at the top of the house, called a bed-chamber,
which seemed just large and just hot enough for a chrysalis, and a
corresponding box below, termed the back parlour, which would
certainly not have been large enough for the said chrysalis when
turned into a butterfly, Mr. Morris Brown, after duly, expatiating on
the merits of Clarence, proceeded to speak of the terms; these were
soon settled, for Clarence was yielding and the lady not above three
times as extortionate as she ought to have been.
Before Linden left the house, the bargain was concluded. That night
his trunks were removed to his new abode, and having with incredible
difficulty been squeezed into the bedroom, Clarence surveyed them with
the same astonishment with which the virtuoso beheld the flies in
amber,--
"Not that the things were either rich or rare,
He wondered how the devil they got there!"
CHAPTER X.
Such scenes had tempered with a pensive grace
The maiden lustre of that faultless face;
Had hung a sad and dreamlike spell upon
The gliding music of her silver tone,
And shaded the soft soul which loved to lie
In the deep pathos of that volumed eye.--O'Neill; or, The Rebel.
The love thus kindled between them was of no common or calculating
nature: it was vigorous and delicious, and at times so suddenly
intense as to appear to their young hearts for a moment or so with
almost an awful character.--Inesilla.
The reader will figure to himself a small chamber, in a remote wing of
a large and noble mansion. The walls were covered with sketches whose
extreme delicacy of outline and colouring betrayed the sex of the
artist; a few shelves filled with books supported vases of flowers. A
harp stood neglected at the farther end of the room, and just above
hung the slender prison of one of those golden wanderers from the
Canary Isles which hear to our colder land some of the gentlest music
of their skies and zephyrs. The window, reaching to the ground, was
open, and looked, through the clusters of jessamine and honeysuckle
which surrounded the low veranda, beyond upon thick and frequent
copses of blossoming shrubs, redolent of spring and sparkling in the
sunny tears of a May shower which had only just wept itself away.
Embosomed in these little groves lay plots of flowers, girdled with
turf as green as ever wooed the nightly dances of the fairies; and
afar off, through one artful opening, the eye caught the glittering
wanderings of water, on whose light and smiles the universal happiness
of the young year seemed reflected.
But in that chamber, heedless of all around, and cold to the joy with
which everything else, equally youthful, beautiful, and innocent,
seemed breathing and inspired, sat a very young and lovely female.
Her cheek leaned upon her hand, and large tears flowed fast and
burningly over the small and delicate fingers. The comb that had
confined her tresses lay at her feet, and the high dress which
concealed her swelling breast had been loosened, to give vent to the
suffocating and indignant throbbings which had rebelled against its
cincture; all appeared to announce that bitterness of grief when the
mind, as it were, wreaks its scorn upon the body in its contempt for
external seemings, and to proclaim that the present more subdued and
softened sorrow had only succeeded to a burst far less quiet and
uncontrolled. Woe to those who eat the bread of dependence their
tears are wrung from the inmost sources of the heart.
Isabel St. Leger was the only child of a captain in the army who died
in her infancy; her mother had survived him but a few months; and to
the reluctant care and cold affections of a distant and wealthy
relation of the same name the warm-hearted and penniless orphan was
consigned. Major-General Cornelius St. Leger, whose riches had been
purchased in India at the price of his constitution, was of a temper
as hot as his curries, and he wreaked it the more unsparingly on his
ward, because the superior ill-temper of his maiden sister had
prevented his giving vent to it upon her. That sister, Miss Diana St.
Leger, was a meagre gentlewoman of about six feet high, with a loud
voice and commanding aspect. Long in awe of her brother, she rejoiced
at heart to find some one whom she had such right and reason to make
in awe of herself; and from the age of four to that of seventeen
Isabel suffered every insult and every degradation which could be
inflicted upon her by the tyranny of her two protectors. Her spirit,
however, was far from being broken by the rude shocks it received; on
the contrary, her mind, gentleness itself to the kind, rose
indignantly against the unjust. It was true that the sense of wrong
did not break forth audibly; for, though susceptible, Isabel was meek,
and her pride was concealed by the outward softness and feminacy of
her temper: but she stole away from those who had wounded her heart or
trampled upon its feelings, and nourished with secret but passionate
tears the memory of the harshness or injustice she had endured. Yet
she was not vindictive: her resentment was a noble not a debasing
feeling; once, when she was yet a child, Miss Diana was attacked with
a fever of the most malignant and infectious kind; her brother loved
himself far too well to risk his safety by attending her; the servants
were too happy to wreak their hatred under the pretence of obeying
their fears; they consequently followed the example of their master;
and Miss Diana St. Leger might have gone down to her ancestors
"unwept, unhonoured, and unsung," if Isabel had not volunteered and
enforced her attendance. Hour after hour her fairy form flitted
around the sick-chamber; or sat mute and breathless by the feverish
bed; she had neither fear for contagion nor bitterness for past
oppression; everything vanished beneath the one hope of serving, the
one gratification of feeling herself, in the wide waste of creation,
not utterly without use, as she had been hitherto without friends.
Miss St. Leger recovered. "For your recovery, in the first place,"
said the doctor, "you will thank Heaven; in the second, you will thank
your young relation;" and for several days the convalescent did
overwhelm the happy Isabel with her praises and caresses. But this
change did not last long: the chaste Diana had been too spoiled by the
prosperity of many years for the sickness of a single month to effect
much good in her disposition. Her old habits were soon resumed; and
though it is probable that her heart was in reality softened towards
the poor Isabel, that softening by no means extended to her temper.
In truth, the brother and sister were not without affection for one so
beautiful and good, but they had been torturing slaves all their
lives, and their affection was, and could be, but that of a taskmaster
or a planter.
But Isabel was the only relation who ever appeared within their walls;
and among the guests with whom the luxurious mansion was crowded, she
passed no less for the heiress than the dependant; to her, therefore,
was offered the homage of many lips and hearts, and if her pride was
perpetually galled and her feelings insulted in private, her vanity
(had that equalled her pride and her feelings in its susceptibility)
would in no slight measure have recompensed her in public. Unhappily,
however, her vanity was the least prominent quality she possessed; and
the compliments of mercenary adulation were not more rejected by her
heart than despised by her understanding.
Yet did she bear within her a deep fund of buried tenderness, and a
mine of girlish and enthusiastic romance,--dangerous gifts to one so
situated, which, while they gave to her secret moments of solitude a
powerful but vague attraction, probably only prepared for her future
years the snare which might betray them into error or the delusion
which would colour them with regret.
Among those whom the ostentatious hospitality of General St. Leger
attracted to his house was one of very different character and
pretensions to the rest. Formed to be unpopular with the generality
of men, the very qualities that made him so were those which
principally fascinate the higher description of women of ancient
birth, which rendered still more displeasing the pride and coldness of
his mien; of talents peculiarly framed to attract interest as well as
esteem; of a deep and somewhat morbid melancholy, which, while it
turned from ordinary ties, inclined yearningly towards passionate
affections; of a temper where romance was only concealed from the many
to become more seductive to the few; unsocial, but benevolent;
disliked, but respected; of the austerest demeanour, but of passions
the most fervid, though the most carefully concealed,--this man united
within himself all that repels the common mass of his species, and all
that irresistibly wins and fascinates the rare and romantic few. To
these qualities were added a carriage and bearing of that high and
commanding order which men mistake for arrogance and pretension, and
women overrate in proportion to its contrast to their own. Something
of mystery there was in the commencement of the deep and eventful love
which took place between this person and Isabel, which I have never
been able to learn whatever it was, it seemed to expedite and heighten
the ordinary progress of love; and when in the dim twilight, beneath
the first melancholy smile of the earliest star, their hearts opened
audibly to each other, that confession had been made silently long
since and registered in the inmost recesses of the soul.
But their passion, which began in prosperity, was soon darkened.
Whether he took offence at the haughtiness of Isabel's lover, or
whether he desired to retain about him an object which he could
torment and tyrannize over, no sooner did the General discover the
attachment of his young relation than he peremptorily forbade its
indulgence, and assumed so insolent and overbearing an air towards the
lover that the latter felt he could no longer repeat his visits to or
even continue his acquaintance with the nabob.
To add to these adverse circumstances, a relation of the lover, from
whom his expectations had been large, was so enraged, not only at the
insult his cousin had received, but at the very idea of his forming an
alliance with one in so dependent a situation and connected with such
new blood as Isabel St. Leger, that, with that arrogance which
relations, however distant, think themselves authorized to assume, he
enjoined his cousin, upon pain of forfeiture of favour and fortune, to
renounce all idea of so disparaging an alliance. The one thus
addressed was not of a temper patiently to submit to such threats: he
answered them with disdain; and the breach, so dangerous to his
pecuniary interest, was already begun.
So far had the history of our lover proceeded at the time in which we
have introduced Isabel to the reader, and described to him the chamber
to which, in all her troubles and humiliations, she was accustomed to
fly, as to a sad but still unviolated sanctuary of retreat.
The quiet of this asylum was first broken by a slight rustling among
the leaves; but Isabel's back was turned towards the window, and in
the engrossment of her feelings she heard it not. The thick copse
that darkened the left side of the veranda was pierced, and a man
passed within the covered space, and stood still and silent before the
window, intently gazing upon the figure, which (though the face was
turned from him) betrayed in its proportions that beauty which in his
eyes had neither an equal nor a fault.
The figure of the stranger, though not very tall, was above the
ordinary height, and gracefully rather than robustly formed. He was
dressed in the darkest colours and the simplest fashion, which
rendered yet more striking the nobleness of his mien, as well as the
clear and almost delicate paleness of his complexion; his features
were finely and accurately formed; and had not ill health, long
travel, or severe thought deepened too much the lines of the
countenance, and sharpened its contour, the classic perfection of
those features would have rendered him undeniably and even eminently
handsome. As it was, the paleness and the somewhat worn character of
his face, joined to an expression at first glance rather haughty and
repellent, made him lose in physical what he certainly gained in
intellectual beauty. His eyes were large, deep, and melancholy, and
had the hat which now hung over his brow been removed, it would have
displayed a forehead of remarkable boldness and power.
Altogether, the face was cast in a rare and intellectual mould, and,
if wanting in those more luxuriant attractions common to the age of
the stranger, who could scarcely have attained his twenty-sixth year,
it betokened, at least, that predominance of mind over body which in
some eyes is the most requisite characteristic of masculine beauty.
With a soft and noiseless step, the stranger moved from his station
without the window, and, entering the room, stole towards the spot on
which Isabel was sitting. He leaned over her chair, and his eye
rested upon his own picture, and a letter in his own writing, over
which the tears of the young orphan flowed fast.
A moment more of agitated happiness for one, of unconscious and
continued sadness for the other,--
"'T is past, her lover's at her feet."
And what indeed "was to them the world beside, with all its changes of
time and tide"? Joy, hope, all blissful and bright sensations, lay
mingled, like meeting waters, in one sunny stream of heartfelt and
unfathomable enjoyment; but this passed away, and the remembrance of
bitterness and evil succeeded.
"Oh, Algernon!" said Isabel, in a low voice, "is this your promise?"
"Believe me," said Mordaunt, for it was indeed he, "I have struggled
long with my feelings, but in vain; and for both our sakes, I rejoice
at the conquest they obtained. I listened only to a deceitful
delusion when I imagined I was obeying the dictates of reason. Ah,
dearest, why should we part for the sake of dubious and distant evils,
when the misery of absence is the most certain, the most unceasing
evil we can endure?"
"For your sake, and therefore for mine!" interrupted Isabel,
struggling with her tears. "I am a beggar and an outcast. You must
not link your fate with mine. I could bear, Heaven knows how
willingly, poverty and all its evils for you and with you; but I
cannot bring them upon you."
"Nor will you," said Mordaunt, passionately, as he covered the hand he
held with his burning kisses. "Have I not enough for both of us? It
is my love, not poverty, that I beseech you to share."
"No! Algernon, you cannot deceive me; your own estate will be torn
from you by the law: if you marry me, your cousin will not assist you;
I, you know too well, can command nothing; and I shall see you, for
whom in my fond and bright dreams I have presaged everything great and
exalted, buried in an obscurity from which your talents can never
rise, and suffering the pangs of poverty and dependence and
humiliation like my own; and--and--I--should be the wretch who caused
you all. Never, Algernon, never!--I love you too--too well!"
But the effort which wrung forth the determination of the tone in
which these words were uttered was too violent to endure; and, as the
full desolation of her despair crowded fast and dark upon the orphan's
mind, she sank back upon her chair in very sickness of soul, nor
heeded, in her unconsious misery, that her hand was yet clasped by her
lover and that her head drooped upon his bosom.
"Isabel," he said, in a low, sweet tone, which to her ear seemed the
concentration of all earthly music,--"Isabel, look up,--my own, my
beloved,--look up and hear me. Perhaps you say truly when you tell me
that the possessions of my house shall melt away from me, and that my
relation will not offer to me the precarious bounty which, even if he
did offer, I would reject; but, dearest, are there not a thousand
paths open to me,--the law, the state, the army?--you are silent,
Isabel,--speak!"
Isabel did not reply, but the soft eyes which rested upon his told, in
their despondency, how little her reason was satisfied by the
arguments he urged.
"Besides," he continued, "we know not yet whether the law may not
decide in my favour: at all events years may pass before the judgment
is given; those years make the prime and verdure of our lives; let us
not waste them in mourning over blighted hopes and severed hearts; let
us snatch what happiness is yet in our power, nor anticipate, while
the heavens are still bright above us, the burden of the thunder or
the cloud."
Isabel was one of the least selfish and most devoted of human beings,
yet she must be forgiven if at that moment her resolution faltered,
and the overpowering thought of being in reality his forever flashed
upon her mind. It passed from her the moment it was formed; and,
rising from a situation in which the touch of that dear hand and the
breath of those wooing lips endangered the virtue and weakened the
strength of her resolves, she withdrew herself from his grasp, and
while she averted her eyes, which dared not encounter his, she said in
a low but firm voice,--
"It is in vain, Algernon; it is in vain. I can be to you nothing but
a blight or burden, nothing but a source of privation and anguish.
Think you that I will be this?--no, I will not darken your fair hopes
and impede your reasonable ambition. Go (and here her voice faltered
for a moment, but soon recovered its tone), go, Algernon, dear
Algernon; and if my foolish heart will not ask you to think of me no
more, I can at least implore you to think of me only as one who would
die rather than cost you a moment of that poverty and debasement, the
bitterness of which she has felt herself, and who for that very reason
tears herself away from you forever."
"Stay, Isabel, stay!" cried Mordaunt, as he caught hold of her robe,
"give me but one word more, and you shall leave me. Say that if I can
create for myself a new source of independence; if I can carve out a
road where the ambition you erroneously impute to me can be gratified,
as well as the more moderate wishes our station has made natural to us
to form,--say, that if I do this, I may permit myself to hope,--say,
that when I have done it, I may claim you as my own!"
Isabel paused, and turned once more her face towards his own. Her
lips moved, and though the words died within her heart, yet Mordaunt
read well their import in the blushing cheek and the heaving bosom,
and the lips which one ray of hope and comfort was sufficient to
kindle into smiles. He gazed, and all obstacles, all difficulties,
disappeared; the gulf of time seemed passed, and he felt as if already
he had earned and won his reward.
He approached her yet nearer; one kiss on those lips, one pressure of
that thrilling hand, one long, last embrace of that shrinking and
trembling form,--and then, as the door closed upon his view, he felt
that the sunshine of Nature had passed away, and that in the midst of
the laughing and peopled earth he stood in darkness and alone.
CHAPTER XI.
He who would know mankind must be at home with all men.
STEPHEN MONTAGUE.
We left Clarence safely deposited in his little lodgings. Whether
from the heat of his apartment or the restlessness a migration of beds
produces in certain constitutions, his slumbers on the first night of
his arrival were disturbed and brief. He rose early and descended to
the parlour; Mr. de Warens, the nobly appellatived foot-boy, was
laying the breakfast-cloth. From three painted shelves which
constituted the library of "Copperas Bower," as its owners gracefully
called their habitation, Clarence took down a book very prettily
bound; it was "Poems by a Nobleman." No sooner had he read two pages
than he did exactly what the reader would have done, and restored the
volume respectfully to its place. He then drew his chair towards the
window, and wistfully eyed sundry ancient nursery maids, who were
leading their infant charges to the "fresh fields and pastures new" of
what is now the Regent's Park.
In about an hour Mrs. Copperas descended, and mutual compliments were
exchanged; to her succeeded Mr. Copperas, who was well scolded for his
laziness: and to them, Master Adolphus Copperas, who was also
chidingly termed a naughty darling for the same offence. Now then
Mrs. Copperas prepared the tea, which she did in the approved method
adopted by all ladies to whom economy is dearer than renown, namely,
the least possible quantity of the soi-disant Chinese plant was first
sprinkled by the least possible quantity of hot water; after this
mixture had become as black and as bitter as it could possibly be
without any adjunct from the apothecary's skill, it was suddenly
drenched with a copious diffusion, and as suddenly poured forth--weak,
washy, and abominable,--into four cups, severally appertaining unto
the four partakers of the matutinal nectar.
Then the conversation began to flow. Mrs. Copperas was a fine lady,
and a sentimentalist,--very observant of the little niceties of phrase
and manner. Mr. Copperas was a stock-jobber and a wit,--loved a good
hit in each capacity; was very round, very short, and very much like a
John Dory; and saw in the features and mind of the little Copperas the
exact representative of himself.
"Adolphus, my love," said Mrs. Copperas, "mind what I told you, and
sit upright. Mr. Linden, will you allow me to cut you a leetle piece
of this roll?"
"Thank you," said Clarence, "I will trouble you rather for the whole
of it."
Conceive Mrs. Copperas's dismay! From that moment she saw herself
eaten out of house and home; besides, as she afterwards observed to
her friend Miss Barbara York, the "vulgarity of such an amazing
appetite!"
"Any commands in the city, Mr. Linden?" asked the husband; "a coach
will pass by our door in a few minutes,--must be on 'Change in half an
hour. Come, my love, another cup of tea; make haste; I have scarcely
a moment to take my fare for the inside, before coachee takes his for
the outside. Ha! ha! ha! Mr. Linden."
"Lord, Mr. Copperas," said his helpmate, "how can you be so silly?
setting such an example to your son, too; never mind him, Adolphus, my
love; fie, child! a'n't you ashamed of yourself? never put the spoon
in your cup till you have done tea: I must really send you to school
to learn manners. We have a very pretty little collection of books
here, Mr. Linden, if you would like to read an hour or two after
breakfast,--child, take your hands out of your pockets,--all the best
English classics I believe,--'Telemachus,' and Young's 'Night
Thoughts,' and 'Joseph Andrews,' and the 'Spectator,' and Pope's
Iliad, and Creech's Lucretius; but you will look over them yourself!
This is Liberty Hall, as well as Copperas Bower, Mr. Linden!"
"Well, my love," said the stock-jobber, "I believe I must be off.
Here Tom, Tom (Mr. de Warens had just entered the room with some more
hot water, to weaken still further "the poor remains of what was once
"--the tea!), Tom, just run out and stop the coach; it will be by in
five minutes."
"Have not I prayed and besought you, many and many a time, Mr.
Copperas," said the lady, rebukingly, "not to call De Warens by his
Christian name? Don't you know that all people in genteel life, who
only keep one servant, invariably call him by his surname, as if he
were the butler, you know?"
"Now, that is too good, my love," said Copperas. "I will call poor
Tom by any surname you please, but I really can't pass him off for a
butler! Ha--ha--ha--you must excuse me there, my love!"
"And pray, why not, Mr. Copperas? I have known many a butler bungle
more at a cork than he does; and pray tell me who did you ever see
wait better at dinner?"
"He wait at dinner, my love! it is not he who waits."
"Who then, Mr. Copperas?"
"Why we, my love; it's we who wait for dinner; but that's the cook's
fault, not his."
"Pshaw! Mr. Copperas; Adolphus, my love, sit upright, darling."
Here De Warens cried from the bottom of the stairs,--"Measter, the
coach be coming up."
"There won't be room for it to turn then," said the facetious Mr.
Copperas, looking round the apartment as if he took the words
literally.
"What coach is it, boy?"
Now that was not the age in which coaches scoured the city every half
hour, and Mr. Copperas knew the name of the coach as well as he knew
his own.
"It be the Swallow coach, sir."
"Oh, very well: then since I have swallowed in the roll, I will now
roll in the Swallow--ha--ha--ha! Good-by, Mr. Linden."
No sooner had the witty stock-jobber left the room than Mrs. Copperas
seemed to expand into a new existence. "My husband, sir," said she,
apologetically, "is so odd, but he's an excellent sterling character;
and that, you know, Mr. Linden, tells more in the bosom of a family
than all the shining qualities which captivate the imagination. I am
sure, Mr. Linden, that the moralist is right in admonishing us to
prefer the gold to the tinsel. I have now been married some years,
and every year seems happier than the last; but then, Mr. Linden, it
is such a pleasure to contemplate the growing graces of the sweet
pledge of our mutual love.--Adolphus, my dear, keep your feet still,
and take your hands out of your pockets!"
A short pause ensued.
"We see a great deal of company," said Mrs. Copperas, pompously, "and
of the very best description. Sometimes we are favoured by the
society of the great Mr. Talbot, a gentleman of immense fortune and
quite the courtier: he is, it is true, a little eccentric in his
dress: but then he was a celebrated beau in his young days. He is our
next neighbour; you can see his house out of the window, just across
the garden--there! We have also, sometimes, our humble board graced
by a very elegant friend of mine, Miss Barbara York, a lady of very
high connections, her first cousin was a lord mayor.--Adolphus, my
dear, what are you about? Well, Mr. Linden, you will find your
retreat quite undisturbed; I must go about the household affairs; not
that I do anything more than superintend, you know, sir; but I think
no lady should be above consulting her husband's interests; that's
what I call true old English conjugal affection. Come, Adolphus, my
dear."
And Clarence was now alone. "I fear," thought he, "that I shall get
on very indifferently with these people. But it will not do for me to
be misanthropical, and (as Dr. Latinas was wont to say) the great
merit of philosophy, when we cannot command circumstances, is to
reconcile us to them."
CHAPTER XII.
A retired beau is one of the most instructive spectacles in the world.
STEPHEN MONTAGUE.
It was quite true that Mrs. Copperas saw a great deal of company, for
at a certain charge, upon certain days, any individual might have the
honour of sharing her family repast; and many, of various callings,
though chiefly in commercial life, met at her miscellaneous board.
Clarence must, indeed, have been difficult to please, or obtuse of
observation, if, in the variety of her guests, he had not found
something either to interest or amuse him. Heavens! what a motley
group were accustomed, twice in the week, to assemble there! the
little dining-parlour seemed a human oven; and it must be owned that
Clarence was no slight magnet of attraction to the female part of the
guests. Mrs. Copperas's bosom friend in especial, the accomplished
Miss Barbara York, darted the most tender glances on the handsome
young stranger; but whether or not a nose remarkably prominent and
long prevented the glances from taking full effect, it is certain that
Clarence seldom repaid them with that affectionate ardour which Miss
Barbara York had ventured to anticipate. The only persons indeed for
whom he felt any sympathetic attraction were of the same sex as
himself. The one was Mr. Talbot, the old gentleman whom Mrs. Copperas
had described as the perfect courtier; the other, a young artist of
the name of Warner. Talbot, to Clarence's great astonishment (for
Mrs. Copperas's eulogy had prepared him for something eminently
displeasing) was a man of birth, fortune, and manners peculiarly
graceful and attractive. It is true, however, that, despite of his
vicinity, and Mrs. Copperas's urgent solicitations, he very seldom
honoured her with his company, and he always cautiously sent over his
servant in the morning to inquire the names and number of her expected
guests; nor was he ever known to share the plenteous board of the
stock-jobber's lady whenever any other partaker of its dainties save
Clarence and the young artist were present. The latter, the old
gentleman really liked; and as for one truly well born and well bred
there is no vulgarity except in the mind, the slender means, obscure
birth, and struggling profession of Warner were circumstances which,
as they increased the merit of a gentle manner and a fine mind, spoke
rather in his favour than the reverse. Mr. Talbot was greatly struck
by Clarence Linden's conversation and appearance; and indeed there was
in Talbot's tastes so strong a bias to aristocratic externals that
Clarence's air alone would have been sufficient to win the good graces
of a man who had, perhaps, more than most courtiers of his time,
cultivated the arts of manner and the secrets of address.
"You will call upon me soon?" said he to Clarence, when, after dining
one day with the Copperases and their inmate, he rose to return home.
And Clarence, delighted with the urbanity and liveliness of his new
acquaintance, readily promised that he would.
Accordingly the next day Clarence called upon Mr. Talbot. The house,
as Mrs. Copperas had before said, adjoined her own, and was only
separated from it by a garden. It was a dull mansion of brick, which
had disdained the frippery of paint and whitewashing, and had indeed
been built many years previously to the erection of the modern
habitations which surrounded it. It was, therefore, as a consequence
of this priority of birth, more sombre than the rest, and had a
peculiarly forlorn and solitary look. As Clarence approached the
door, he was struck with the size of the house; it was of very
considerable extent, and in the more favourable situations of London,
would have passed for a very desirable and spacious tenement. An old
man, whose accurate precision of dress bespoke the tastes of the
master, opened the door, and after ushering Clarence through two long,
and, to his surprise, almost splendidly furnished rooms, led him into
a third, where, seated at a small writing-table, he found Mr. Talbot.
That person, one whom Clarence then little thought would hereafter
exercise no small influence over his fate, was of a figure and
countenance well worthy the notice of a description.
His own hair, quite white, was carefully and artificially curled, and
gave a Grecian cast to features whose original delicacy, and exact
though small proportions, not even age could destroy. His eyes were
large, black, and sparkled with almost youthful vivacity; and his
mouth, which was the best feature he possessed, developed teeth white
and even as rows of ivory. Though small and somewhat too slender in
the proportions of his figure, nothing could exceed the ease and the
grace of his motions and air; and his dress, though singularly rich in
its materials, eccentric in its fashion, and from its evident study,
unseemly to his years, served nevertheless to render rather venerable
than ridiculous a mien which could almost have carried off any
absurdity, and which the fashion of the garb peculiarly became. The
tout ensemble was certainly that of a man who was still vain of his
exterior, and conscious of its effect; and it was as certainly
impossible to converse with Mr. Talbot for five minutes without
merging every less respectful impression in the magical fascination of
his manner.
"I thank you, Mr. Linden," said Talbot, rising, "for your accepting so
readily an old man's invitation. If I have felt pleasure in
discovering that we were to be neighbours, you may judge what that
pleasure is to-day at finding you my visitor."
Clarence, who, to do him justice, was always ready at returning a fine
speech, replied in a similar strain, and the conversation flowed on
agreeably enough. There was more than a moderate collection of books
in the room, and this circumstance led Clarence to allude to literary
subjects; these Mr. Talbot took up with avidity, and touched with a
light but graceful criticism upon many of the then modern and some of
the older writers. He seemed delighted to find himself understood and
appreciated by Clarence, and every moment of Linden's visit served to
ripen their acquaintance into intimacy. At length they talked upon
Copperas Bower and its inmates.
"You will find your host and hostess," said the gentleman, "certainly
of a different order from the persons with whom it is easy to see you
have associated; but, at your happy age, a year or two may be very
well thrown away upon observing the manners and customs of those whom,
in later life, you may often be called upon to conciliate or perhaps
to control. That man will never be a perfect gentleman who lives only
with gentlemen. To be a man of the world, we must view that world in
every grade and in every perspective. In short, the most practical
art of wisdom is that which extracts from things the very quality they
least appear to possess; and the actor in the world, like the actor on
the stage, should find 'a basket-hilted sword very convenient to carry
milk in.' [See the witty inventory of a player's goods in the
"Tatler."] As for me, I have survived my relations and friends. I
cannot keep late hours, nor adhere to the unhealthy customs of good
society; nor do I think that, to a man of my age and habits, any
remuneration would adequately repay the sacrifice of health or
comfort. I am, therefore, well content to sink into a hermitage in an
obscure corner of this great town, and only occasionally to revive my
'past remembrances of higher state,' by admitting a few old
acquaintances to drink my bachelor's tea and talk over the news of the
day. Hence, you see, Mr. Linden, I pick up two or three novel
anecdotes of state and scandal, and maintain my importance at Copperas
Bower by retailing them second-hand. Now that you are one of the
inmates of that abode, I shall be more frequently its guest. By the
by, I will let you into a secret: know that I am somewhat a lover of
the marvellous, and like to indulge a little embellishing exaggeration
in any place where there is no chance of finding me out. Mind,
therefore, my dear Mr. Linden, that you take no ungenerous advantage
of this confession; but suffer me, now and then, to tell my stories my
own way, even when you think truth would require me to tell them in
another."
"Certainly," said Clarence, laughing; "let us make an agreement: you
shall tell your stories as you please, if you will grant me the same
liberty in paying my compliments; and if I laugh aloud at the stories,
you shall promise me not to laugh aloud at the compliments."
"It is a bond," said Talbot; "and a very fit exchange of service it
is. It will be a problem in human nature to see who has the best of
it: you shall pay your court by flattering the people present, and I
mine by abusing those absent. Now, in spite of your youth and curling
locks, I will wager that I succeed the best; for in vanity there is so
great a mixture of envy that no compliment is like a judicious abuse:
to enchant your acquaintance, ridicule his friends."
"Ah, sir," said Clarence, "this opinion of yours is, I trust, a little
in the French school, where brilliancy is more studied than truth, and
where an ill opinion of our species always has the merit of passing
for profound."
Talbot smiled, and shook his head. "My dear young friend," said he,
"it is quite right that you, who are coming into the world, should
think well of it; and it is also quite right that I, who am going out
of it, should console myself by trying to despise it. However, let me
tell you, my young friend, that he whose opinion of mankind is not too
elevated will always be the most benevolent, because the most
indulgent, to those errors incidental to human imperfection to place
our nature in too flattering a view is only to court disappointment,
and end in misanthropy. The man who sets out with expecting to find
all his fellow-creatures heroes of virtue will conclude by condemning
them as monsters of vice; and, on the contrary, the least exacting
judge of actions will be the most lenient. If God, in His own
perfection, did not see so many frailties in us, think you He would be
so gracious to our virtues?"
"And yet," said Clarence, "we remark every day examples of the highest
excellence."
"Yes," replied Talbot, "of the highest but not of the most constant
excellence. He knows very little of the human heart who imagines we
cannot do a good action; but, alas! he knows still less of it who
supposes we can be always doing good actions. In exactly the same
ratio we see every day the greatest crimes are committed; but we find
no wretch so depraved as to be always committing crimes. Man cannot
be perfect even in guilt."
In this manner Talbot and his young visitor conversed, till Clarence,
after a stay of unwarrantable length, rose to depart.
"Well," said Talbot, "if we now rightly understand each other, we
shall be the best friends in the world. As we shall expect great
things from each other sometimes, we will have no scruple in exacting
a heroic sacrifice every now and then; for instance, I will ask you to
punish yourself by an occasional tete-a-tete with an ancient
gentleman; and, as we can also by the same reasoning pardon great
faults in each other, if they are not often committed, so I will
forgive you, with all my heart, whenever you refuse my invitations, if
you do not refuse them often. And now farewell till we meet again."
It seemed singular and almost unnatural to Linden that a man like
Talbot, of birth, fortune, and great fastidiousness of taste and
temper, should have formed any sort of acquaintance, however slight
and distant, with the facetious stock-jobber and his wife; but the
fact is easily explained by a reference to the vanity which we shall
see hereafter made the ruling passion of Talbot's nature. This
vanity, which branching forth into a thousand eccentricities,
displayed itself in the singularity of his dress, the studied yet
graceful warmth of his manner, his attention to the minutiae of life,
his desire, craving and insatiate, to receive from every one, however
insignificant, his obolus of admiration,--this vanity, once flattered
by the obsequious homage it obtained from the wonder and reverence of
the Copperases, reconciled his taste to the disgust it so frequently
and necessarily conceived; and, having in great measure resigned his
former acquaintance and wholly outlived his friends, he was contented
to purchase the applause which had become to him a necessary of life
at the humble market more immediately at his command.
There is no dilemma in which Vanity cannot find an expedient to
develop its form, no stream of circumstances in which its buoyant and
light nature will not rise to float upon the surface. And its
ingenuity is as fertile as that of the player who (his wardrobe
allowing him no other method of playing the fop) could still exhibit
the prevalent passion for distinction by wearing stockings of
different colours.
CHAPTER XIII.
Who dares
Interpret then my life for me as 't were
One of the undistinguishable many?
COLERIDGE: Wallenstein.
The first time Clarence had observed the young artist, he had taken a
deep interest in his appearance. Pale, thin, undersized, and slightly
deformed, the sanctifying mind still shed over the humble frame a
spell more powerful than beauty. Absent in manner, melancholy in air,
and never conversing except upon subjects on which his imagination was
excited, there was yet a gentleness about him which could not fail to
conciliate and prepossess; nor did Clarence omit any opportunity to
soften his reserve, and wind himself into his more intimate
acquaintance. Warner, the only support of an aged and infirm
grandmother (who had survived her immediate children), was distantly
related to Mrs. Copperas; and that lady extended to him, with
ostentatious benevolence, her favour and support. It is true that she
did not impoverish the young Adolphus to enrich her kinsman, but she
allowed him a seat at her hospitable board, whenever it was not
otherwise filled; and all that she demanded in return was a picture of
herself, another of Mr. Copperas, a third of Master Adolphus, a fourth
of the black cat, and from time to time sundry other lesser
productions of his genius, of which, through the agency of Mr. Brown,
she secretly disposed at a price that sufficiently remunerated her for
whatever havoc the slender appetite of the young painter was able to
effect.
By this arrangement, Clarence had many opportunities of gaining that
intimacy with Warner which had become to him an object; and though the
painter, constitutionally diffident and shy, was at first averse to,
and even awed by, the ease, boldness, fluent speech, and confident
address of a man much younger than himself, yet at last he could not
resist the being decoyed into familiarity; and the youthful pair
gradually advanced from companionship into friendship. There was a
striking contrast between the two: Clarence was bold and frank, Warner
close and timid. Both had superior abilities; but the abilities of
Clarence were for action, those of Warner for art: both were
ambitious; but the ambition of Clarence was that of circumstances
rather than character. Compelled to carve his own fortunes without
sympathy or aid, he braced his mind to the effort, though naturally
too gay for the austerity, and too genial for the selfishness of
ambition. But the very essence of Warner's nature was the feverish
desire of fame: it poured through his veins like lava; it preyed as a
worm upon his cheek; it corroded his natural sleep; it blackened the
colour of his thoughts; it shut out, as with an impenetrable wall, the
wholesome energies and enjoyments and objects of living men; and,
taking from him all the vividness of the present, all the tenderness
of the past, constrained his heart to dwell forever and forever amidst
the dim and shadowy chimeras of a future he was fated never to enjoy.
But these differences of character, so far from disturbing, rather
cemented their friendship; and while Warner (notwithstanding his
advantage of age) paid involuntary deference to the stronger character
of Clarence, he, in his turn, derived that species of pleasure by
which he was most gratified, from the affectionate and unenvious
interest Clarence took in his speculations of future distinction, and
the unwearying admiration with which he would sit by his side, and
watch the colours start from the canvas, beneath the real though
uncultured genius of the youthful painter.
Hitherto, Warner had bounded his attempts to some of the lesser
efforts of the art; he had now yielded to the urgent enthusiasm of his
nature, and conceived the plan of an historical picture. Oh! what
sleepless nights, what struggles of the teeming fancy with the dense
brain, what labours of the untiring thought wearing and intense as
disease itself, did it cost the ambitious artist to work out in the
stillness of his soul, and from its confused and conflicting images,
the design of this long meditated and idolized performance! But when
it was designed; when shape upon shape grew and swelled, and glowed
from the darkness of previous thought upon the painter's mind; when,
shutting his eyes in the very credulity of delight, the whole work
arose before him, glossy with its fresh hues, bright, completed,
faultless, arrayed as it were, and decked out for immortality,--oh!
then what a full and gushing moment of rapture broke like a released
stream upon his soul! What a recompense for wasted years, health, and
hope! What a coronal to the visions and transports of Genius: brief,
it is true, but how steeped in the very halo of a light that might
well be deemed the glory of heaven!
But the vision fades, the gorgeous shapes sweep on into darkness, and,
waking from his revery, the artist sees before him only the dull walls
of his narrow chamber; the canvas stretched a blank upon its frame;
the works, maimed, crude, unfinished, of an inexperienced hand, lying
idly around; and feels himself--himself, but one moment before the
creator of a world of wonders, the master spirit of shapes glorious
and majestical beyond the shapes of men-dashed down from his momentary
height, and despoiled both of his sorcery and his throne.
It was just in such a moment that Warner, starting up, saw Linden (who
had silently entered his room) standing motionless before him.
"Oh, Linden!" said the artist, "I have had so superb a dream,--a dream
which, though I have before snatched some such vision by fits and
glimpses, I never beheld so realized, so perfect as now; and--but you
shall see, you shall judge for yourself; I will sketch out the design
for you;" and, with a piece of chalk and a rapid hand, Warner conveyed
to Linden the outline of his conception. His young friend was eager
in his praise and his predictions of renown, and Warner listened to
him with a fondness which spread over his pale cheek a richer flush
than lover ever caught from the whispers of his beloved.
"Yes," said he, as he rose, and his sunken and small eye flashed out
with a feverish brightness, "yes, if my hand does not fail my thought,
it shall rival even--" Here the young painter stopped short, abashed
at that indiscretion of enthusiasm about to utter to another the
hoarded vanities hitherto locked in his heart of hearts as a sealed
secret, almost from himself.
"But come," said Clarence, affectionately, "your hand is feverish and
dry, and of late you have seemed more languid than you were wont,--
come, Warner, you want exercise: it is a beautiful evening, and you
shall explain your picture still further to me as we walk."
Accustomed to yield to Clarence, Warner mechanically and abstractedly
obeyed; they walked out into the open streets.
"Look around us," said Warner, pausing, "look among this toiling and
busy and sordid mass of beings who claim with us the fellowship of
clay. The poor labour; the rich feast: the only distinction between
them is that of the insect and the brute; like them they fulfil the
same end and share the same oblivion; they die, a new race springs up,
and the very grass upon their graves fades not so soon as their
memory. Who that is conscious of a higher nature would not pine and
fret himself away to be confounded with these? Who would not burn and
sicken and parch with a delirious longing to divorce himself from so
vile a herd? What have their petty pleasures and their mean aims to
atone for the abasement of grinding down our spirits to their level?
Is not the distinction from their blended and common name a sufficient
recompense for all that ambition suffers or foregoes? Oh, for one
brief hour (I ask no more) of living honour, one feeling of conscious,
unfearing certainty that Fame has conquered Death! and then for this
humble and impotent clay, this drag on the spirit which it does not
assist but fetter, this wretched machine of pains and aches, and
feverish throbbings, and vexed inquietudes, why, let the worms consume
it, and the grave hide--for Fame there is no grave."
At that moment one of those unfortunate women who earn their polluted
sustenance by becoming the hypocrites of passions abruptly accosted
them.
"Miserable wretch!" said Warner, loathingly, as he pushed her aside;
but Clarence, with a kindlier feeling, noticed that her haggard cheek
was wet with tears, and that her frame, weak and trembling, could
scarcely support itself; he, therefore, with that promptitude of
charity which gives ere it discriminates put some pecuniary assistance
in her hand and joined his comrade.
"You would not have spoken so tauntingly to the poor girl had you
remarked her distress," said Clarence.
"And why," said Warner, mournfully, "why be so cruel as to prolong,
even for a few hours, an existence which mercy would only seek to
bring nearer to the tomb? That unfortunate is but one of the herd,
one of the victims to pleasures which debase by their progress and
ruin by their end. Yet perhaps she is not worse than the usual
followers of love,--of love, that passion the most worshipped, yet the
least divine,--selfish and exacting,--drawing its aliment from
destruction, and its very nature from tears."
"Nay," said Clarence, "you confound the two loves, the Eros and the
Anteros; gods whom my good tutor was wont so sedulously to
distinguish: you surely do not inveigh thus against all love?"
"I cry you mercy," said Warner, with something of sarcasm in his
pensiveness of tone. "We must not dispute; so I will hold my peace:
but make love all you will; what are the false smiles of a lip which a
few years can blight as an autumn leaf? what the homage of a heart as
feeble and mortal as your own? Why, I, with a few strokes of a little
hair and an idle mixture of worthless colours, will create a beauty in
whose mouth there shall be no hollowness, in whose lip there shall be
no fading; there, in your admiration, you shall have no need of
flattery and no fear of falsehood; you shall not be stung with
jealousy nor maddened with treachery; nor watch with a breaking heart
over the waning bloom, and departing health, till the grave open, and
your perishable paradise is not. No: the mimic work is mightier than
the original, for it outlasts it; your love cannot wither it, or your
desertion destroy; your very death, as the being who called it into
life, only stamps it with a holier value."
"And so then," said Clarence, "you would seriously relinquish, for the
mute copy of the mere features, those affections which no painting can
express?"
"Ay," said the painter, with an energy unusual to his quiet manner,
and slightly wandering in his answer from Clarence's remark, "ay, one
serves not two mistresses: mine is the glory of my art. Oh! what are
the cold shapes of this tame earth, where the footsteps of the gods
have vanished, and left no trace, the blemished forms, the debased
brows, and the jarring features, to the glorious and gorgeous images
which I can conjure up at my will? Away with human beauties, to him
whose nights are haunted with the forms of angels and wanderers from
the stars, the spirits of all things lovely and exalted in the
universe: the universe as it was; when to fountain, and stream, and
hill, and to every tree which the summer clothed, was allotted the
vigil of a Nymph! when through glade, and by waterfall, at glossy
noontide, or under the silver stars, the forms of Godhead and Spirit
were seen to walk; when the sculptor modelled his mighty work from the
beauty and strength of Heaven, and the poet lay in the shade to dream
of the Naiad and the Faun, and the Olympian dwellers whom he walked in
rapture to behold; and the painter, not as now, shaping from shadow
and in solitude the dim glories of his heart, caught at once his
inspiration from the glow of earth and its living wanderers, and, lo,
the canvas breathed! Oh! what are the dull realities and the abortive
offspring of this altered and humbled world--the world of meaner and
dwarfish men--to him whose realms are peopled with visions like
these?"
And the artist, whose ardour, long excited and pent within, had at
last thus audibly, and to Clarence's astonishment, burst forth,
paused, as if to recall himself from his wandering enthusiasm. Such
moments of excitement were indeed rare with him, except when utterly
alone, and even then, were almost invariably followed by that
depression of spirit by which all over-wrought susceptibility is
succeeded. A change came over his face, like that of a cloud when the
sunbeam which gilded leaves it; and, with a slight sigh and a subdued
tone, he resumed,--
"So, my friend, you see what our art can do even for the humblest
professor, when I, a poor, friendless, patronless artist, can thus
indulge myself by forgetting the present. But I have not yet
explained to you the attitude of my principal figure;" and Warner
proceeded once more to detail the particulars of his intended picture.
It must be confessed that he had chosen a fine though an arduous
subject: it was the Trial of Charles the First; and as the painter,
with the enthusiasm of his profession and the eloquence peculiar to
himself, dwelt upon the various expressions of the various forms which
that extraordinary judgment-court afforded, no wonder that Clarence
forgot, with the artist himself, the disadvantages Warner had to
encounter in the inexperience of an unregulated taste and an imperfect
professional education.
CHAPTER XIV.
All manners take a tincture from our own,
Or come discoloured through our passions shown.--POPE.
What! give up liberty, property, and, as the Gazeteer says, lie down
to be saddled with wooden shoes?--Vicar of Wakefield.
There was something in the melancholy and reflective character of
Warner resembling that of Mordaunt; had they lived in these days
perhaps both the artist and the philosopher had been poets. But (with
regard to the latter) at that time poetry was not the customary vent
for deep thought or passionate feeling. Gray, it is true, though
unjustly condemned as artificial and meretricious in his style, had
infused into the scanty works which he has bequeathed to immortality a
pathos and a richness foreign to the literature of the age; and,
subsequently, Goldsmith, in the affecting yet somewhat enervate
simplicity of his verse, had obtained for Poetry a brief respite from
a school at once declamatory and powerless, and led her forth for a
"Sunshine Holiday" into the village green and under the hawthorn
shade. But, though the softer and meeker feelings had struggled into
a partial and occasional vent, those which partook more of passion and
of thought, the deep, the wild, the fervid, were still without "the
music of a voice." For the after century it was reserved to restore
what we may be permitted to call the spirit of our national
literature; to forsake the clinquant of the French mimickers of
classic gold; to exchange a thrice-adulterated Hippocrene for the pure
well of Shakspeare and of Nature; to clothe philosophy in the gorgeous
and solemn majesty of appropriate music; and to invest passion with a
language as burning as its thought and rapid as its impulse. At that
time reflection found its natural channel in metaphysical inquiry or
political speculation; both valuable, perhaps, but neither profound.
It was a bold, and a free, and an inquisitive age, but not one in
which thought ran over its set and stationary banks, and watered even
the common flowers of verse: not one in which Lucretius could have
embodied the dreams of Epicurus; Shakspeare lavished the mines of a
superhuman wisdom upon his fairy palaces and enchanted isles; or the
Beautifier [Wordsworth] of this common earth have called forth
"The motion of the spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought;"
or Disappointment and Satiety have hallowed their human griefs by a
pathos wrought from whatever is magnificent and grand and lovely in
the unknown universe; or the speculations of a great but visionary
mind [Shelley] have raised, upon subtlety and doubt, a vast and
irregular pile of verse, full of dim-lighted cells, and winding
galleries, in which what treasures lie concealed! That was an age in
which poetry took one path and contemplation another; those who were
addicted to the latter pursued it in its orthodox roads; and many,
whom Nature, perhaps intended for poets, the wizard Custom converted
into speculators or critics.
It was this which gave to Algernon's studies their peculiar hue;
while, on the other hand, the taste for the fine arts which then
universally prevailed, directed to the creations of painting, rather
than those of poetry, more really congenial to his powers, the intense
imagination and passion for glory which marked and pervaded the
character of the artist.
But as we have seen that that passion for glory made the great
characteristic difference between Clarence and Warner, so also did
that passion terminate any resemblance which Warner bore to Algernon
Mordaunt. With the former a rank and unwholesome plant, it grew up to
the exclusion of all else; with the latter, subdued and regulated, it
sheltered, not withered, the virtues by which it was surrounded. With
Warner, ambition was a passionate desire to separate himself by fame
from the herd of other men; with Mordaunt, to bind himself by charity
yet closer to his kind: with the one, it produced a disgust to his
species; with the other, a pity and a love: with the one, power was
the badge of distinction; with the other, the means to bless! But our
story lingers.
It was now the custom of Warner to spend the whole day at his work,
and wander out with Clarence, when the evening darkened, to snatch a
brief respite of exercise and air. Often, along the lighted and
populous streets, would the two young and unfriended competitors for
this world's high places roam with the various crowd, moralizing as
they went or holding dim conjecture upon their destinies to be. And
often would they linger beneath the portico of some house where,
"haunted with great resort," Pleasure and Pomp held their nightly
revels, to listen to the music that, through the open windows, stole
over the rare exotics with which wealth mimics the southern scents,
and floated, mellowing by distance, along the unworthy streets; and
while they stood together, silent and each feeding upon separate
thoughts, the artist's pale lip would curl with scorn, as he heard the
laugh and the sounds of a frivolous and hollow mirth ring from the
crowd within, and startle the air from the silver spell which music
had laid upon it. "These," would he say to Clarence, "these are the
dupes of the same fever as ourselves: like us, they strive and toil
and vex their little lives for a distinction from their race.
Ambition comes to them, as to all: but they throw for a different
prize than we do; theirs is the honour of a day, ours is immortality;
yet they take the same labour and are consumed by the same care. And,
fools that they are, with their gilded names and their gaudy
trappings, they would shrink in disdain from that comparison with us
which we, with a juster fastidiousness, blush at this moment to
acknowledge."
From these scenes they would rove on, and, both delighting in
contrast, enter some squalid and obscure quarter of the city. There,
one night, quiet observers of their kind, they paused beside a group
congregated together by some common cause of obscene merriment or
unholy fellowship--a group on which low vice had set her sordid and
hideous stamp--to gaze and draw strange humours or a motley moral from
that depth and ferment of human nature into whose sink the thousand
streams of civilization had poured their dregs and offal.
"You survey these," said the painter, marking each with the curious
eye of his profession: "they are a base horde, it is true; but they
have their thirst of fame, their aspirations even in the abyss of
crime or the loathsomeness of famished want. Down in yon cellar,
where a farthing rushlight glimmers upon haggard cheeks, distorted
with the idiotcy of drink; there, in that foul attic, from whose
casement you see the beggar's rags hang to dry, or rather to crumble
in the reeking and filthy air; farther on, within those walls which,
black and heavy as the hearts they hide, close our miserable
prospect,--there, even there, in the mildewed dungeon, in the felon's
cell, on the very scaffold's self, Ambition hugs her own hope or
scowls upon her own despair. Yes! the inmates of those walls had
their perilous game of honour, their 'hazard of the die,' in which
vice was triumph and infamy success. We do but share their passion,
though we direct it to a better object."
Pausing for a moment, as his thoughts flowed into a somewhat different
channel of his character, Warner continued, "We have now caught a
glimpse of the two great divisions of mankind; they who riot in
palaces, and they who make mirth hideous in rags and hovels: own that
it is but a poor survey in either. Can we be contemptible with these
or loathsome with those? Or rather have we not a nobler spark within
us, which we have but to fan into a flame that shall burn forever,
when these miserable meteors sink into the corruption from which they
rise?"
"But," observed Clarence, "these are the two extremes; the pinnacle of
civilization, too worn and bare for any more noble and vigorous fruit,
and the base upon which the cloud descends in rain and storm. Look to
the central portion of society; there the soil is more genial, and its
produce more rich."
"Is it so, in truth?" answered Warner; "pardon me, I believe not: the
middling classes are as human as the rest. There is the region, the
heart, of Avarice,--systematized, spreading, rotting, the very fungus
and leprosy of social states; suspicion, craft, hypocrisy, servility
to the great, oppression to the low, the waxlike mimicry of courtly
vices, the hardness of flint to humble woes; thought, feeling, the
faculties and impulses of man, all ulcered into one great canker,
Gain,--these make the general character of the middling class, the
unleavened mass of that mediocrity which it has been the wisdom of the
shallow to applaud. Pah! we too are of this class, this potter's
earth, this paltry mixture of mud and stone; but we, my friend, we
will knead gold into our clay."
"But look," said Clarence, pointing to the group before them, "look,
yon wretched mother, whose voice an instant ago uttered the coarsest
accents of maudlin and intoxicated prostitution, is now fostering her
infant, with a fondness stamped upon her worn cheek and hollow eye,
which might shame the nice maternity of nobles; and there, too, yon
wretch whom, in the reckless effrontery of hardened abandonment, we
ourselves heard a few minutes since boast of his dexterity in theft,
and openly exhibit its token,--look, he is now, with a Samaritan's own
charity, giving the very goods for which his miserable life was risked
to that attenuated and starving stripling! No, Warner, no! even this
mass is not unleavened. The vilest infamy is not too deep for the
Seraph Virtue to descend and illumine its abyss!"
"Out on the weak fools!" said the artist, bitterly: "it would be
something, if they could be consistent even in crime!" and, placing
his arm in Linden's, he drew him away.
As the picture grew beneath the painter's hand, Clarence was much
struck with the outline and expression of countenance given to the
regicide Bradshaw.
"They are but an imperfect copy of the living original from whom I
have borrowed them," said Warner, in answer to Clarence's remark upon
the sternness of the features. "But that original--a relation of
mine, is coming here to-day: you shall see him."
While Warner was yet speaking, the person in question entered. His
were, indeed, the form and face worthy to be seized by the painter.
The peculiarity of his character made him affect a plainness of dress
unusual to the day, and approaching to the simplicity, but not the
neatness, of Quakerism. His hair--then, with all the better ranks, a
principal object of cultivation--was wild, dishevelled, and, in wiry
flakes of the sablest hue, rose abruptly from a forehead on which
either thought or passion had written its annals with an iron pen; the
lower part of the brow, which overhung the eye, was singularly sharp
and prominent; while the lines, or rather furrows, traced under the
eyes and nostrils, spoke somewhat of exhaustion and internal fatigue.
But this expression was contrasted and contradicted by the firmly
compressed lip; the lighted, steady, stern eye; the resolute and even
stubborn front, joined to proportions strikingly athletic and a
stature of uncommon height.
"Well, Wolfe," said the young painter to the person we have described,
"it is indeed a kindness to give me a second sitting."
"Tusk, boy!" answered Wolfe, "all men have their vain points, and I
own that I am not ill pleased that these rugged features should be
assigned, even in fancy, to one of the noblest of those men who judged
the mightiest cause in which a country was ever plaintiff, a tyrant
criminal, and a world witness!" While Wolfe was yet speaking his
countenance, so naturally harsh, took a yet sterner aspect, and the
artist, by a happy touch, succeeded in transferring it to the canvas.
"But, after all," continued Wolfe, "it shames me to lend aid to an art
frivolous in itself, and almost culpable in times when Freedom wants
the head to design, and perhaps the hand to execute, far other and
nobler works than the blazoning of her past deeds upon perishable
canvas."
A momentary anger at the slight put upon his art crossed the pale brow
of the artist; but he remembered the character of the man and
continued his work in silence. "You consider then, sir, that these
are times in which liberty is attacked?" said Clarence.
"Attacked!" repeated Wolfe,--" attacked!" and then suddenly sinking
his voice into a sort of sneer, "why, since the event which this
painting is designed to commemorate, I know not if we have ever had
one solitary gleam of liberty break along the great chaos of jarring
prejudice and barbarous law which we term forsooth a glorious
constitution. Liberty attacked! no, boy; but it is a time when
liberty may be gained."
Perfectly unacquainted with the excited politics of the day, or the
growing and mighty spirit which then stirred through the minds of men,
Clarence remained silent; but his evident attention flattered the
fierce republican, and he proceeded.
"Ay," he said slowly, and as if drinking in a deep and stern joy from
his conviction in the truth of the words he uttered,--"ay, I have
wandered over the face of the earth, and I have warmed my soul at the
fires which lay hidden under its quiet surface; I have been in the
city and the desert,--the herded and banded crimes of the Old World,
and the scattered but bold hearts which are found among the savannahs
of the New; and in either I have beheld that seed sown which, from a
mustard grain, too scanty for a bird's beak, shall grow up to be a
shelter and a home for the whole family of man. I have looked upon
the thrones of kings, and lo, the anointed ones were in purple and
festive pomp; and I looked beneath the thrones, and I saw Want and
Hunger, and despairing Wrath gnawing the foundations away. I have
stood in the streets of that great city where Mirth seems to hold an
eternal jubilee, and beheld the noble riot while the peasant starved;
and the priest built altars to Mammon, piled from the earnings of
groaning Labour and cemented with blood and tears. But I looked
farther, and saw, in the rear, chains sharpened into swords, misery
ripening into justice, and famine darkening into revenge; and I
laughed as I beheld, for I knew that the day of the oppressed was at
hand."
Somewhat awed by the prophetic tone, though revolted by what seemed to
him the novelty and the fierceness of the sentiments of the
republican, Clarence, after a brief pause, said,--
"And what of our own country?"
Wolfe's brow darkened. "The oppression here," said he, "has not been
so weighty, therefore the reaction will be less strong; the parties
are more blended, therefore their separation will be more arduous; the
extortion is less strained, therefore the endurance will be more meek;
but, soon or late, the struggle must come: bloody will it be, if the
strife be even; gentle and lasting, if the people predominate."
"And if the rulers be the strongest?" said Clarence.
"The struggle will be renewed," replied Wolfe, doggedly.
"You still attend those oratorical meetings, cousin, I think?" said
Warner.
"I do," said Wolfe; "and if you are not so utterly absorbed in your
vain and idle art as to be indifferent to all things nobler, you will
learn yourself to take interest in what concerns--I will not say your
country, but mankind. For you, young man" (and the republican turned
to Clarence), "I would fain hope that life has not already been
diverted from the greatest of human objects; if so, come to-morrow
night to our assembly, and learn from worthier lips than mine the
precepts and the hopes for which good men live or die."
"I will come at all events to listen, if not to learn," said Clarence,
eagerly, for his curiosity was excited. And the republican, having
now fulfilled the end of his visit, rose and departed.
CHAPTER XV.
Bound to suffer persecution
And martyrdom with resolution,
T'oppose himself against the hate
And vengeance of the incensed state.--Hudibras.
Born of respectable though not wealthy parents, John Wolfe was one of
those fiery and daring spirits which, previous to some mighty
revolution, Fate seems to scatter over various parts of the earth,
even those removed from the predestined explosion,--heralds of the
events in which they are fitted though not fated to be actors. The
period at which he is presented to the reader was one considerably
prior to that French Revolution so much debated and so little
understood. But some such event, though not foreseen by the common,
had been already foreboded by the more enlightened, eye; and Wolfe,
from a protracted residence in France among the most discontented of
its freer spirits, had brought hope to that burning enthusiasm which
had long made the pervading passion of his existence.
Bold to ferocity, generous in devotion to folly in self-sacrifice,
unflinching in his tenets to a degree which rendered their ardour
ineffectual to all times, because utterly inapplicable to the present,
Wolfe was one of those zealots whose very virtues have the semblance
of vice, and whose very capacities for danger become harmless from the
rashness of their excess.
It was not among the philosophers and reasoners of France that Wolfe
had drawn strength to his opinions: whatever such companions might
have done to his tenets, they would at least have moderated his
actions. The philosopher may aid or expedite a change; but never does
the philosopher in any age or of any sect countenance a crime. But of
philosophers Wolfe knew little, and probably despised them for their
temperance: it was among fanatics--ignorant, but imaginative--that he
had strengthened the love without comprehending the nature of
republicanism. Like Lucian's painter, whose flattery portrayed the
one-eyed prince in profile, he viewed only that side of the question
in which there was no defect, and gave beauty to the whole by
concealing the half. Thus, though on his return to England herding
with the common class of his reforming brethren, Wolfe possessed many
peculiarities and distinctions of character which, in rendering him
strikingly adapted to the purpose of the novelist, must serve as a
caution to the reader not to judge of the class by the individual.
With a class of Republicans in England there was a strong tendency to
support their cause by reasoning. With Wolfe, whose mind was little
wedded to logic, all was the offspring of turbulent feelings, which,
in rejecting argument, substituted declamation for syllogism. This
effected a powerful and irreconcilable distinction between Wolfe and
the better part of his comrades; for the habits of cool reasoning,
whether true or false, are little likely to bias the mind towards
those crimes to which Wolfe's unregulated emotions might possibly urge
him, and give to the characters to which they are a sort of common
denominator something of method and much of similarity. But the
feelings--those orators which allow no calculation and baffle the
tameness of comparison--rendered Wolfe alone, unique, eccentric in
opinion or action, whether of vice or virtue.
Private ties frequently moderate the ardour of our public enthusiasm.
Wolfe had none. His nearest relation was Warner, and it may readily
be supposed that with the pensive and contemplative artist he had very
little in common. He had never married, nor had ever seemed to wander
from his stern and sterile path, in the most transient pursuit of the
pleasures of sense. Inflexibly honest, rigidly austere,--in his moral
character his bitterest enemies could detect no flaw,--poor, even to
indigence, he had invariably refused all overtures of the government;
thrice imprisoned and heavily fined for his doctrines, no fear of a
future, no remembrance of the past punishment could ever silence his
bitter eloquence or moderate the passion of his distempered zeal;
kindly, though rude, his scanty means were ever shared by the less
honest and disinterested followers of his faith; and he had been known
for days to deprive himself of food, and for nights of shelter, for
the purpose of yielding food and shelter to another.
Such was the man doomed to forsake, through a long and wasted life,
every substantial blessing, in pursuit of a shadowy good; with the
warmest benevolence in his heart, to relinquish private affections,
and to brood even to madness over public offences; to sacrifice
everything in a generous though erring devotion for that freedom whose
cause, instead of promoting, he was calculated to retard; and, while
he believed himself the martyr of a high and uncompromising virtue, to
close his career with the greatest of human crimes.
CHAPTER XVI.
Faith, methinks his humour is good, and his purse will buy good
company.--The Parson's Wedding.
When Clarence returned home, after the conversation recorded in our
last chapter, he found a note from Talbot, inviting him to meet some
friends of the latter at supper that evening. It was the first time
Clarence had been asked, and he looked forward with some curiosity and
impatience to the hour appointed in the note.
It is impossible to convey any idea of the jealous rancour felt by Mr.
and Mrs. Copperas on hearing of this distinction,--a distinction which
"the perfect courtier" had never once bestowed upon themselves.
Mrs. Copperas tossed her head, too indignant for words; and the stock-
jobber, in the bitterness of his soul, affirmed, with a meaning air,
"that he dared say, after all, that the old gentleman was not so rich
as he gave out."
On entering Talbot's drawing-room, Clarence found about seven or eight
people assembled; their names, in proclaiming the nature of the party,
indicated that the aim of the host was to combine aristocracy and
talent. The literary acquirements and worldly tact of Talbot, joined
to the adventitious circumstances of birth and fortune, enabled him to
effect this object, so desirable in polished society, far better than
we generally find it effected now. The conversation of these guests
was light and various. The last bon mot of Chesterfield, the last
sarcasm of Horace Walpole, Goldsmith's "Traveller," Shenstone's
"Pastorals," and the attempt of Mrs. Montagu to bring Shakspeare into
fashion,--in all these subjects the graceful wit and exquisite taste
of Talbot shone pre-eminent; and he had almost succeeded in convincing
a profound critic that Gray was a poet more likely to live than Mason,
when the servant announced supper.
That was the age of suppers! Happy age! Meal of ease and mirth; when
Wine and Night lit the lamp of Wit! Oh, what precious things were
said and looked at those banquets of the soul! There epicurism was in
the lip as well as the palate, and one had humour for a hors d'oeuvre
and repartee for an entremet. At dinner there is something too
pompous, too formal, for the true ease of Table Talk. One's
intellectual appetite, like the physical, is coarse but dull. At
dinner one is fit only for eating; after dinner only for politics.
But supper was a glorious relic of the ancients. The bustle of the
day had thoroughly wound up the spirit, and every stroke upon the
dial-plate of wit was true to the genius of the hour. The wallet of
diurnal anecdote was full, and craved unloading. The great meal--that
vulgar first love of the appetite--was over, and one now only
flattered it into coquetting with another. The mind, disengaged and
free, was no longer absorbed in a cutlet or burdened with a joint.
The gourmand carried the nicety of his physical perception to his
moral, and applauded a bon mot instead of a bonne bouche.
Then, too, one had no necessity to keep a reserve of thought for the
after evening; supper was the final consummation, the glorious funeral
pyre of day. One could be merry till bedtime without an interregnum.
Nay, if in the ardour of convivialism one did,--I merely hint at the
possibility of such an event,--if one did exceed the narrow limits of
strict ebriety, and open the heart with a ruby key, one had nothing to
dread from the cold, or, what is worse, the warm looks of ladies in
the drawing-room; no fear that an imprudent word, in the amatory
fondness of the fermented blood, might expose one to matrimony and
settlements. There was no tame, trite medium of propriety and
suppressed confidence, no bridge from board to bed, over which a false
step (and your wine-cup is a marvellous corrupter of ambulatory
rectitude) might precipitate into an irrecoverable abyss of perilous
communication or unwholesome truth. One's pillow became at once the
legitimate and natural bourne to "the overheated brain;" and the
generous rashness of the coenatorial reveller was not damped by
untimeous caution or ignoble calculation.
But "we have changed all that now." Sobriety has become the successor
of suppers; the great ocean of moral encroachment has not left us one
little island of refuge. Miserable supper-lovers that we are, like
the native Indians of America, a scattered and daily disappearing
race, we wander among strange customs, and behold the innovating and
invading Dinner spread gradually over the very space of time in which
the majesty of Supper once reigned undisputed and supreme!
O, ye heavens, be kind,
And feel, thou earth, for this afflicted race.--WORDSWORTH.
As he was sitting down to the table, Clarence's notice was arrested by
a somewhat suspicious and unpleasing occurrence. The supper room was
on the ground floor, and, owing to the heat of the weather, one of the
windows, facing the small garden, was left open. Through this window
Clarence distinctly saw the face of a man look into the room for one
instant, with a prying and curious gaze, and then as instantly
disappear. As no one else seemed to remark this incident, and the
general attention was somewhat noisily engrossed by the subject of
conversation, Clarence thought it not worth while to mention a
circumstance for which the impertinence of any neighbouring servant or
drunken passer-by might easily account. An apprehension, however, of
a more unpleasant nature shot across him, as his eye fell upon the
costly plate which Talbot rather ostentatiously displayed, and then
glanced to the single and aged servant, who was, besides his master,
the only male inmate of the house. Nor could he help saying to
Talbot, in the course of the evening, that he wondered he was not
afraid of hoarding so many articles of value in a house at once so
lonely and ill guarded.
"Ill guarded!" said Talbot, rather affronted, "why, I and my servant
always sleep here!"
To this Clarence thought it neither prudent nor well-bred to offer
further remark.
CHAPTER XVII.
Meetings or public calls he never missed,
To dictate often, always to assist.
. . . . .
To his experience and his native sense,
He joined a bold, imperious eloquence;
The grave, stern look of men informed and wise,
A full command of feature, heart and eyes,
An awe-compelling frown, and fear-inspiring size.--CRABBE.
The next evening Clarence, mindful of Wolfe's invitation, inquired
from Warner (who repaid the contempt of the republican for the
painter's calling by a similar feeling for the zealot's) the direction
of the oratorical meeting, and repaired there alone. It was the most
celebrated club (of that description) of the day, and well worth
attending, as a gratification to the curiosity, if not an improvement
to the mind.
On entering, he found himself in a long room, tolerably well lighted,
and still better filled. The sleepy countenances of the audience, the
whispered conversation carried on at scattered intervals, the listless
attitudes of some, the frequent yawns of others, the eagerness with
which attention was attracted to the opening door, when it admitted
some new object of interest, the desperate resolution with which some
of the more energetic turned themselves towards the orator, and then,
with a faint shake of the head, turned themselves again hopelessly
away,--were all signs that denoted that no very eloquent declaimer was
in possession of the "house." It was, indeed, a singularly dull,
monotonous voice which, arising from the upper end of the room,
dragged itself on towards the middle, and expired with a sighing sound
before it reached the end. The face of the speaker suited his vocal
powers; it was small, mean, and of a round stupidity, without anything
even in fault that could possibly command attention or even the
excitement of disapprobation: the very garments of the orator seemed
dull and heavy, and, like the Melancholy of Milton, had a "leaden
look." Now and then some words, more emphatic than others,--stones
breaking, as it were with a momentary splash, the stagnation of the
heavy stream,--produced from three very quiet, unhappy-looking persons
seated next to the speaker, his immediate friends, three single
isolated "hears!"
"The force of friendship could no further go."
At last, the orator having spoken through, suddenly stopped; the whole
meeting seemed as if a weight had been taken from it; there was a
general buzz of awakened energy, each stretched his limbs, and
resettled himself in his place,--
"And turning to his neighbour said,
'Rejoice!'"
A pause ensued, the chairman looked round, the eyes of the meeting
followed those of the president, with a universal and palpable
impatience, towards an obscure corner of the room: the pause deepened
for one moment, and then was broken; a voice cried "Wolfe!" and at
that signal the whole room shook with the name. The place which
Clarence had taken did not allow him to see the object of these cries,
till he rose from his situation, and, passing two rows of benches,
stood forth in the middle space of the room; then, from one to one
went round the general roar of applause; feet stamped, hands clapped,
umbrellas set their sharp points to the ground, and walking-sticks
thumped themselves out of shape in the universal clamour. Tall,
gaunt, and erect, the speaker possessed, even in the mere proportions
of his frame, that physical power which never fails, in a popular
assembly, to gain attention to mediocrity and to throw dignity over
faults. He looked very slowly round the room, remaining perfectly
still and motionless, till the clamour of applause had entirely
subsided, and every ear, Clarence's no less eagerly than the rest, was
strained, and thirsting to catch the first syllables of his voice.
It was then with a low, very deep, and somewhat hoarse tone, that he
began; and it was not till he had spoken for several minutes that the
iron expression of his face altered, that the drooping hand was
raised, and that the suppressed, yet powerful, voice began to expand
and vary in its volume. He had then entered upon a new department of
his subject. The question was connected with the English
constitution, and Wolfe was now preparing to put forth, in long and
blackened array, the alleged evils of an aristocratical form of
government. Then it was as if the bile and bitterness of years were
poured forth in a terrible and stormy wrath,--then his action became
vehement, and his eye flashed forth unutterable fire: his voice,
solemn, swelling, and increasing with each tone in its height and
depth, filled, as with something palpable and perceptible, the shaking
walls. The listeners,--a various and unconnected group, bound by no
tie of faith or of party, many attracted by curiosity, many by the
hope of ridicule, some abhorring the tenets expressed, and nearly all
disapproving their principles or doubting their wisdom,--the
listeners, certainly not a group previously formed or moulded into
enthusiasm, became rapt and earnest; their very breath forsook them.
Linden had never before that night heard a public speaker; but he was
of a thoughtful and rather calculating mind, and his early habits of
decision, and the premature cultivation of his intellect, rendered him
little susceptible, in general, to the impressions of the vulgar:
nevertheless, in spite of himself, he was hurried away by the stream,
and found that the force and rapidity of the speaker did not allow him
even time for the dissent and disapprobation which his republican
maxims and fiery denunciations perpetually excited in a mind
aristocratic both by creed and education. At length after a
peroration of impetuous and magnificent invective, the orator ceased.
In the midst of the applause that followed, Clarence left the
assembly; he could not endure the thought that any duller or more
commonplace speaker should fritter away the spell which yet bound and
engrossed his spirit.
CHAPTER XVIII.
At the bottom of the staircase was a small door, which gave way before
Nigel, as he precipitated himself upon the scene of action, a cocked
pistol in one hand, etc.--Fortunes of Nigel.
The night, though not utterly dark, was rendered capricious and dim by
alternate wind and rain; and Clarence was delayed in his return
homeward by seeking occasional shelter from the rapid and heavy
showers which hurried by. It was during one of the temporary
cessations of the rain that he reached Copperas Bower; and, while he
was searching in his pockets for the key which was to admit him, he
observed two men loitering about his neighbour's house. The light was
not sufficient to give him more than a scattered and imperfect view of
their motions. Somewhat alarmed, he stood for several moments at the
door, watching them as well as he was able; nor did he enter the house
till the loiterers had left their suspicious position, and, walking
onwards, were hid entirely from him by the distance and darkness.
"It really is a dangerous thing for Talbot," thought Clarence, as he
ascended to his apartment, "to keep so many valuables, and only one
servant, and that one as old as himself too. However, as I am by no
means sleepy, and my room is by no means cool, I may as well open my
window, and see if those idle fellows make their re-appearance."
Suiting the action to the thought, Clarence opened his little
casement, and leaned wistfully out.
He had no light in his room, for none was ever left for him. This
circumstance, however, of course enabled him the better to penetrate
the dimness and haze of the night; and, by the help of the fluttering
lamps, he was enabled to take a general though not minute survey of
the scene below.
I think I have before said that there was a garden between Talbot's
house and Copperas Bower; this was bounded by a wall, which confined
Talbot's peculiar territory of garden, and this wall, describing a
parallelogram, faced also the road. It contained two entrances,--one
the principal adytus, in the shape of a comely iron gate, the other a
wooden door, which, being a private pass, fronted the intermediate
garden before mentioned and was exactly opposite to Clarence's window.
Linden had been more than ten minutes at his post, and had just begun
to think his suspicions without foundation and his vigil in vain, when
he observed the same figures he had seen before advance slowly from
the distance and pause by the front gate of Talbot's mansion.
Alarmed and anxious, he redoubled his attention; he stretched himself,
as far as his safety would permit, out of the window; the lamps,
agitated by the wind, which swept by in occasional gusts, refused to
grant to his straining sight more than an inaccurate and unsatisfying
survey. Presently, a blast, more violent than ordinary, suspended as
it were the falling columns of rain and left Clarence in almost total
darkness; it rolled away, and the momentary calm which ensued enabled
him to see that one of the men was stooping by the gate, and the other
standing apparently on the watch at a little distance. Another gust
shook the lamps and again obscured his view; and when it had passed
onward in its rapid course, the men had left the gate, and were in the
garden beneath his window. They crept cautiously, but swiftly, along
the opposite wall, till they came to the small door we have before
mentioned; here they halted, and one of them appeared to occupy
himself in opening the door. Now, then, fear was changed into
certainty, and it seemed without doubt that the men, having found some
difficulty or danger in forcing the stronger or more public entrance,
had changed their quarter of attack. No more time was to be lost;
Clarence shouted aloud, but the high wind probably prevented the sound
reaching the ears of the burglars, or at least rendered it dubious and
confused. The next moment, and before Clarence could repeat his
alarm, they had opened the door, and were within the neighbouring
garden, beyond his view. Very young men, unless their experience has
outstripped their youth, seldom have much presence of mind; that
quality, which is the opposite to surprise, comes to us in those years
when nothing seems to us strange or unexpected. But a much older man
than Clarence might have well been at a loss to know what conduct to
adopt in the situation in which our hero was placed. The visits of
the watchman to that (then) obscure and ill-inhabited neighborhood
were more regulated by his indolence than his duty; and Clarence knew
that it would be in vain to listen for his cry or tarry for his
assistance. He himself was utterly unarmed, but the stock-jobber had
a pair of horse-pistols, and as this recollection flashed upon him,
the pause of deliberation ceased.
With a swift step he descended the first flight of stairs, and pausing
at the chamber door of the faithful couple, knocked upon its panels
with a loud and hasty summons. The second repetition of the noise
produced the sentence, uttered in a very trembling voice, of "Who's
there?"
"It is I, Clarence Linden," replied our hero; "lose no time in opening
the door."
This answer seemed to reassure the valorous stock-jobber. He slowly
undid the bolt, and turned the key.
"In Heaven's name, what do you want, Mr. Linden?" said he.
"Ay," cried a sharp voice from the more internal recesses of the
chamber, "what do you want, sir, disturbing us in the bosom of our
family and at the dead of night?"
With a rapid voice, Clarence repeated what he had seen, and requested
the broker to accompany him to Talbot's house, or at least to lend him
his pistols.
"He shall do no such thing," cried Mrs. Copperas. "Come here, Mr. C.,
and shut the door directly."
"Stop, my love," said the stock-jobber, "stop a moment."
"For God's sake," cried Clarence, "make no delay; the poor old man may
be murdered by this time."
"It's no business of mine," said the stock-jobber. "If Adolphus had
not broken the rattle I would not have minded the trouble of springing
it; but you are very much mistaken if you think I am going to leave my
warm bed in order to have my throat cut."
"Then give me your pistols," cried Clarence; "I will go alone."
"I shall commit no such folly," said the stock-jobber; "if you are
murdered, I may have to answer it to your friends and pay for your
burial. Besides, you owe us for your lodgings: go to your bed, young
man, as I shall to mine." And, so saying, Mr. Copperas proceeded to
close the door.
But enraged at the brutality of the man and excited by the urgency of
the case, Clarence did not allow him so peaceable a retreat. With a
strong and fierce grasp, he seized the astonished Copperas by the
throat, and shaking him violently, forced his own entrance into the
sacred nuptial chamber.
"By Heaven," cried Linden, in a savage and stern tone, for his blood
was up. "I will twist your coward's throat, and save the murderer his
labour, if you do not instantly give me up your pistols."
The stock-jobber was panic-stricken. "Take them," he cried, in the
extremest terror; "there they are on the chimney-piece close by."
"Are they primed and loaded?" said Linden, not relaxing his gripe.
"Yes, yes!" said the stock-jobber, "loose my throat, or you will choke
me!" and at that instant, Clarence felt himself clasped by the
invading hands of Mrs. Copperas.
"Call off your wife," said he, "or I will choke you!" and he tightened
his hold, "and tell her to give me the pistols."
The next moment Mrs. Copperas extended the debated weapons towards
Clarence. He seized them, flung the poor stock-jobber against the
bedpost, hurried down stairs, opened the back door, which led into the
garden, flew across the intervening space, arrived at the door, and
entering Talbot's garden, paused to consider what was the next step to
be taken.
A person equally brave as Clarence, but more cautious, would not have
left the house without alarming Mr. de Warens, even in spite of the
failure with his master; but Linden only thought of the pressure of
time and the necessity of expedition, and he would have been a very
unworthy hero of romance had he felt fear for two antagonists, with a
brace of pistols at his command and a high and good action in view.
After a brief but decisive halt, he proceeded rapidly round the house,
in order to ascertain at which part the ruffians had admitted
themselves, should they (as indeed there was little doubt) have
already effected their entrance.
He found the shutters of one of the principal rooms on the ground-
floor had been opened, and through the aperture he caught the glimpse
of a moving light, which was suddenly obscured. As he was about to
enter, the light again flashed out: he drew back just in time,
carefully screened himself behind the shutter, and, through one of the
chinks, observed what passed within. Opposite to the window was a
door which conducted to the hall and principal staircase; this door
was open, and in the hall at the foot of the stairs Clarence saw two
men; one carried a dark lantern, from which the light proceeded, and
some tools, of the nature of which Clarence was naturally ignorant:
this was a middle-sized muscular man, dressed in the rudest garb of an
ordinary labourer; the other was much taller and younger, and his
dress was of a rather less ignoble fashion.
"Hist! hist!" said the taller one, in a low tone, "did you not hear a
noise, Ben?"
"Not a pin fall; but stow your whids, man!"
This was all that Clarence heard in a connected form; but as the
wretches paused, in evident doubt how to proceed, he caught two or
three detached words, which his ingenuity readily formed into
sentences. "No, no! sleeps to the left--old man above--plate chest;
we must have the blunt too. Come, track up the dancers, and douse the
glim." And at the last words the light was extinguished, and
Clarence's quick and thirsting ear just caught their first steps on
the stairs; they died away, and all was hushed.
It had several times occurred to Clarence to rush from his hiding-
place, and fire at the ruffians, and perhaps that measure would have
been the wisest he could have taken; but Clarence had never discharged
a pistol in his life, and he felt, therefore, that his aim must be
uncertain enough to render a favourable position and a short distance
essential requisites. Both these were, at present, denied to him; and
although he saw no weapons about the persons of the villains, yet he
imagined they would not have ventured on so dangerous an expedition
without firearms; and if he failed, as would have been most probable,
in his two shots, he concluded that, though the alarm would be given,
his own fate would be inevitable.
If this was reasoning upon false premises, for housebreakers seldom or
never carry loaded firearms, and never stay for revenge, when their
safety demands escape, Clarence may be forgiven for not knowing the
customs of housebreakers, and for not making the very best of an
extremely novel and dangerous situation.
No sooner did he find himself in total darkness than he bitterly
reproached himself for his late backwardness, and, inwardly resolving
not again to miss any opportunity which presented itself, he entered
the window, groped along the room into the hall, and found his way
very slowly and after much circumlocution to the staircase.
He had just gained the summit, when a loud cry broke upon the
stillness: it came from a distance, and was instantly hushed; but he
caught at brief intervals, the sound of angry and threatening voices.
Clarence bent down anxiously, in the hope that some solitary ray would
escape through the crevice of the door within which the robbers were
engaged. But though the sounds came from the same floor as that on
which he now trod, they seemed far and remote, and not a gleam of
light broke the darkness.
He continued, however, to feel his way in the direction from which the
sounds proceeded, and soon found himself in a narrow gallery; the
voices seemed more loud and near, as he advanced; at last he
distinctly heard the words--
"Will you not confess where it is placed?"
"Indeed, indeed," replied an eager and earnest voice, which Clarence
recognized as Talbot's, "this is all the money I have in the house,--
the plate is above,--my servant has the key,--take it,--take all,--but
save his life and mine."
"None of your gammon," said another and rougher voice than that of the
first speaker: "we know you have more blunt than this,--a paltry sum
of fifty pounds, indeed!"
"Hold!" cried the other ruffian, "here is a picture set with diamonds,
that will do, Ben. Let go the old man."
Clarence was now just at hand, and probably from a sudden change in
the position of the dark lantern within, a light abruptly broke from
beneath the door and streamed along the passage.
"No, no, no!" cried the old man, in a loud yet tremulous voice,--"no,
not that, anything else, but I will defend that with my life."
"Ben, my lad," said the ruffian, "twist the old fool's neck we have no
more time to lose."
At that very moment the door was flung violently open, and Clarence
Linden stood within three paces of the reprobates and their prey. The
taller villain had a miniature in his hand, and the old man clung to
his legs with a convulsive but impotent clasp; the other fellow had
already his gripe upon Talbot's neck, and his right hand grasped a
long case-knife.
With a fierce and flashing eye, and a cheek deadly pale with internal
and resolute excitement, Clarence confronted the robbers.
"Thank Heaven," cried he, "I am not too late!" And advancing yet
another step towards the shorter ruffian, who struck mute with the
suddenness of the apparition, still retained his grasp of the old man,
he fired his pistol, with a steady and close aim; the ball penetrated
the wretch's brain, and without sound or sigh, he fell down dead, at
the very feet of his just destroyer. The remaining robber had already
meditated, and a second more sufficed to accomplish, his escape. He
sprang towards the door: the ball whizzed beside him, but touched him
not. With a safe and swift step, long inured to darkness, he fled
along the passage; and Linden, satisfied with the vengeance he had
taken upon his comrade, did not harass him with an unavailing pursuit.
Clarence turned to assist Talbot. The old man was stretched upon the
floor insensible, but his hand grasped the miniature which the
plunderer had dropped in his flight and terror, and his white and
ashen lip was pressed convulsively upon the recovered treasure.
Linden raised and placed him on his bed, and while employed in
attempting to revive him, the ancient domestic, alarmed by the report
of the pistol, came, poker in hand, to his assistance. By little and
little they recovered the object of their attention. His eyes rolled
wildly round the room, and he muttered,--"Off, off! ye shall not rob
me of my only relic of her,--where is it?--have you got it?--the
picture, the picture!"
"It is here, sir, it is here," said the old servant; "it is in your
own hand."
Talbot's eye fell upon it; he gazed at it for some moments, pressed it
to his lips, and then, sitting erect and looking wildly round, he
seemed to awaken to the sense of his late danger and his present
deliverance.
CHAPTER XIX.
Ah, fleeter far than fleetest storm or steed,
Or the death they bear,
The heart which tender thought clothes like a dove
With the wings of care!
In the battle, in the darkness, in the need,
Shall mine cling to thee!
Nor claim one smile for all the comfort, love,
It may bring to thee!--SHELLEY.
LETTER FROM ALGERNON MORDAUNT TO ISABEL ST. LEGER.
You told me not to write to you. You know how long, but not how
uselessly I have obeyed you. Did you think, Isabel, that my love was
of that worldly and common order which requires a perpetual aliment to
support it? Did you think that, if you forbade the stream to flow
visibly, its sources would be exhausted, and its channel dried up?
This may be the passion of others; it is not mine. Months have passed
since we parted, and since then you have not seen me; this letter is
the first token you have received from a remembrance which cannot die.
But do you think that I have not watched and tended upon you, and
gladdened my eyes with gazing on your beauty when you have not dreamed
that I was by? Ah, Isabel, your heart should have told you of it;
mine would, had you been so near me!
You receive no letters from me, it is true: think you that my hand and
heart are therefore idle? No. I write to you a thousand burning
lines: I pour out my soul to you; I tell you of all I suffer; my
thoughts, my actions, my very dreams, are all traced upon the paper.
I send them not to you, but I read them over and over, and when I come
to your name, I pause and shut my eyes, and then "Fancy has her
power," and lo! "you are by my side!"
Isabel, our love has not been a holiday and joyous sentiment; but I
feel a solemn and unalterable conviction that our union is ordained.
Others have many objects to distract and occupy the thoughts which are
once forbidden a single direction, but we have none. At least, to me
you are everything. Pleasure, splendour, ambition, all are merged
into one great and eternal thought, and that is you!
Others have told me, and I believed them, that I was hard and cold and
stern: so perhaps I was before I knew you, but now I am weaker and
softer than a child. There is a stone which is of all the hardest and
the chillest, but when once set on fire it is unquenchable. You smile
at my image, perhaps, and I should smile if I saw it in the writing of
another; for all that I have ridiculed in romance as exaggerated seems
now to me too cool and too commonplace for reality.
But this is not what I meant to write to you; you are ill, dearest and
noblest Isabel, you are ill! I am the cause, and you conceal it from
me; and you would rather pine away and die than suffer me to lose one
of those worldly advantages which are in my eyes but as dust in the
balance,--it is in vain to deny it. I heard from others of your
impaired health; I have witnessed it myself. Do you remember last
night, when you were in the room with your relations, and they made
you sing,--a song too which you used to sing to me, and when you came
to the second stanza your voice failed you, and you burst into tears,
and they, instead of soothing, reproached and chid you, and you
answered not, but wept on? Isabel, do you remember that a sound was
heard at the window and a groan? Even they were startled, but they
thought it was the wind, for the night was dark and stormy, and they
saw not that it was I: yes, my devoted, my generous love, it was I who
gazed upon you, and from whose heart that voice of anguish was wrung;
and I saw your cheek was pale and thin, and that the canker at the
core had preyed upon the blossom.
Think you, after this, that I could keep silence or obey your request?
No, dearest, no! Is not my happiness your object? I have the vanity
to believe so; and am I not the best judge how that happiness is to be
secured? I tell you, I say it calmly, coldly, dispassionately,--not
from the imagination, not even from the heart, but solely from the
reason,--that I can bear everything rather than the loss of you; and
that if the evil of my love scathe and destroy you, I shall consider
and curse myself as your murderer! Save me from this extreme of
misery, my--yes, my Isabel! I shall be at the copse where we have so
often met before, to-morrow, at noon. You will meet me; and if I
cannot convince you, I will not ask you to be persuaded. A. M.
And Isabel read this letter, and placed it at her heart, and felt less
miserable than she had done for months; for, though she wept, there
was sweetness in the tears which the assurance of his love and the
tenderness of his remonstrance had called forth. She met him: how
could she refuse? and the struggle was past. Though not "convinced"
she was "persuaded;" for her heart, which refused his reasonings,
melted at his reproaches and his grief. But she would not consent to
unite her fate with him at once, for the evils of that step to his
interests were immediate and near; she was only persuaded to permit
their correspondence and occasional meetings, in which, however
imprudent they might be for herself, the disadvantages to her lover
were distant and remote. It was of him only that she thought; for him
she trembled; for him she was the coward and the woman; for herself
she had no fears, and no forethought.
And Algernon was worthy of this devoted love, and returned it as it
was given. Man's love, in general, is a selfish and exacting
sentiment: it demands every sacrifice and refuses all. But the nature
of Mordaunt was essentially high and disinterested, and his honour,
like his love, was not that of the world: it was the ethereal and
spotless honour of a lofty and generous mind, the honour which custom
can neither give nor take away; and, however impatiently he bore the
deferring of a union, in which he deemed that he was the only
sufferer, he would not have uttered a sigh or urged a prayer for that
union, could it, in the minutest or remotest degree, have injured or
degraded her.
These are the hearts and natures which make life beautiful; these are
the shrines which sanctify love; these are the diviner spirits for
whom there is kindred and commune with everything exalted and holy in
heaven and earth. For them Nature unfolds her hoarded poetry and her
hidden spells; for their steps are the lonely mountains, and the still
woods have a murmur for their ears; for them there is strange music in
the wave, and in the whispers of the light leaves, and rapture in the
voices of the birds: their souls drink, and are saturated with the
mysteries of the Universal Spirit, which the philosophy of old times
believed to be God Himself. They look upon the sky with a gifted
vision, and its dove-like quiet descends and overshadows their hearts;
the Moon and the Night are to them wells of Castalian inspiration and
golden dreams; and it was one of them who, gazing upon the Evening
Star, felt in the inmost sanctuary of his soul its mysterious
harmonies with his most worshipped hope, his most passionate desire,
and dedicated it to--LOVE.
CHAPTER XX.
Maria. Here's the brave old man's love,
Bianca. That loves the young man.
The Woman's Prize; or, The Tamer Tamed.
"No, my dear Clarence, you have placed confidence in me, and it is now
my duty to return it; you have told me your history and origin, and I
will inform you of mine, but not yet. At present we will talk of you.
You have conferred upon me what our universal love of life makes us
regard as the greatest of human obligations; and though I can bear a
large burden of gratitude, yet I must throw off an atom or two in
using my little power in your behalf. Nor is this all: your history
has also given you another tie upon my heart, and, in granting you a
legitimate title to my good offices, removes any scruple you might
otherwise have had in accepting them."
"I have just received this letter from Lord ----, the minister for
foreign affairs: you will see that he has appointed you to the office
of attache at ----. You will also oblige me by looking over this
other letter at your earliest convenience; the trifling sum which it
contains will be repeated every quarter; it will do very well for an
attache: when you are an ambassador, why, we must equip you by a
mortgage on Scarsdale; and now, my dear Clarence, tell me all about
the Copperases."
I need not say who was the speaker of the above sentences: sentences
apparently of a very agreeable nature; nevertheless, Clarence seemed
to think otherwise, for the tears gushed into his eyes, and he was
unable for several moments to reply.
"Come, my young friend," said Talbot, kindly; "I have no near
relations among whom I can choose a son I like better than you, nor
you any at present from whom you might select a more desirable father:
consequently, you must let me look upon you as my own flesh and blood;
and, as I intend to be a very strict and peremptory father, I expect
the most silent and scrupulous obedience to my commands. My first
parental order to you is to put up those papers, and to say nothing
more about them; for I have a great deal to talk to you about upon
other subjects."
And by these and similar kind-hearted and delicate remonstrances, the
old man gained his point. From that moment Clarence looked upon him
with the grateful and venerating love of a son; and I question very
much, if Talbot had really been the father of our hero, whether he
would have liked so handsome a successor half so well.
The day after this arrangement, Clarence paid his debt to the
Copperases and removed to Talbot's house. With this event commenced a
new era in his existence: he was no longer an outcast and a wanderer;
out of alien ties he had wrought the link of a close and even paternal
friendship; life, brilliant in its prospects and elevated in its
ascent, opened flatteringly before him; and the fortune and courage
which had so well provided for the present were the best omens and
auguries for the future.
One evening, when the opening autumn had made its approaches felt, and
Linden and his new parent were seated alone by a blazing fire, and had
come to a full pause in their conversation, Talbot, shading his face
with the friendly pages of the "Whitehall Evening Paper," as if to
protect it from the heat, said,--
"I told you, the other day, that I would give you, at some early
opportunity, a brief sketch of my life. This confidence is due to you
in return for yours; and since you will soon leave me, and I am an old
man, whose life no prudent calculation can fix, I may as well choose
the present time to favour you with my confessions."
Clarence expressed and looked his interest, and the old man thus
commenced,--
THE HISTORY OF A VAIN MAN.
I was the favourite of my parents, for I was quick at my lessons, and
my father said I inherited my genius from him; and comely in my
person, and my mother said that my good looks came from her. So the
honest pair saw in their eldest son the union of their own
attractions, and thought they were making much of themselves when they
lavished their caresses upon me. They had another son, poor Arthur,--
I think I see him now! He was a shy, quiet, subdued boy, of a very
plain personal appearance. My father and mother were vain, showy,
ambitious people of the world, and they were as ashamed of my brother
as they were proud of myself. However, he afterwards entered the army
and distinguished himself highly. He died in battle, leaving an only
daughter, who married, as you know, a nobleman of high rank. Her
subsequent fate it is now needless to relate.
Petted and pampered from my childhood, I grew up with a profound
belief in my own excellences, and a feverish and irritating desire to
impress every one who came in my way with the same idea. There is a
sentence in Sir William Temple, which I have often thought of with a
painful conviction of its truth: "A restlessness in men's minds to be
something they are not, and to have something they have not, is the
root of all immorality." [And of all good.--AUTHOR.] At school, I
was confessedly the cleverest boy in my remove; and, what I valued
equally as much, I was the best cricketer of the best eleven. Here,
then, you will say my vanity was satisfied,--no such thing! There was
a boy who shared my room, and was next me in the school; we were,
therefore, always thrown together. He was a great stupid, lubberly
cub, equally ridiculed by the masters and disliked by the boys. Will
you believe that this individual was the express and almost sole
object of my envy? He was more than my rival, he was my superior; and
I hated him with all the unleavened bitterness of my soul.
I have said he was my superior: it was in one thing. He could balance
a stick, nay, a cricket-bat, a poker, upon his chin, and I could not;
you laugh, and so can I now, but it was no subject of laughter to me
then. This circumstance, trifling as it may appear to you, poisoned
my enjoyment. The boy saw my envy, for I could not conceal it; and as
all fools are malicious, and most fools ostentatious, he took a
particular pride and pleasure in displaying his dexterity and showing
off my discontent. You can form no idea of the extent to which this
petty insolence vexed and disquieted me. Even in my sleep, the clumsy
and grinning features of this tormenting imp haunted me like a
spectre: my visions were nothing but chins and cricket-bats; walking-
sticks, sustaining themselves upon human excrescences, and pokers
dancing a hornpipe upon the tip of a nose. I assure you that I have
spent hours in secret seclusion, practising to rival my hated comrade,
and my face--see how one vanity quarrels with another--was little
better than a mass of bruises and discolorations.
I actually became so uncomfortable as to write home, and request to
leave the school. I was then about sixteen, and my indulgent father,
in granting my desire, told me that I was too old and too advanced in
my learning to go to any other academic establishment than the
University. The day before I left the school, I gave, as was usually
the custom, a breakfast to all my friends; the circumstance of my
tormentor's sharing my room obliged me to invite him among the rest.
However, I was in high spirits, and being a universal favourite with
my schoolfellows, I succeeded in what was always to me an object of
social ambition, and set the table in a roar; yet, when our festival
was nearly expired, and I began to allude more particularly to my
approaching departure, my vanity was far more gratified, for my
feelings were far more touched, by observing the regret and receiving
the good wishes of all my companions. I still recall that hour as one
of the proudest and happiest of my life; but it had its immediate
reverse. My evil demon put it into my tormentor's head to give me one
last parting pang of jealousy. A large umbrella happened accidentally
to be in my room; Crompton--such was my schoolfellow's name--saw and
seized it. "Look here, Talbot," said he, with his taunting and
hideous sneer, "you can't do this;" and placing the point of the
umbrella upon his forehead, just above the eyebrow, he performed
various antics round the room.
At that moment I was standing by the fireplace, and conversing with
two boys upon whom, above all others, I wished to leave a favourable
impression. My foolish soreness on this one subject had been often
remarked; and, as I turned in abrupt and awkward discomposure from the
exhibition, I observed my two schoolfellows smile and exchange looks.
I am not naturally passionate, and even at that age I had in ordinary
cases great self-command; but this observation, and the cause which
led to it, threw me off my guard. Whenever we are utterly under the
command of one feeling, we cannot be said to have our reason: at that
instant I literally believe I was beside myself. What! in the very
flush of the last triumph that that scene would ever afford me; amidst
the last regrets of my early friends, to whom I fondly hoped to
bequeath a long and brilliant remembrance, to be thus bearded by a
contemptible rival, and triumphed over by a pitiful yet insulting
superiority; to close my condolences with laughter; to have the final
solemnity of my career thus terminating in mockery; and ridicule
substituted as an ultimate reminiscence in the place of an admiring
regret; all this, too, to be effected by one so long hated, one whom I
was the only being forbidden the comparative happiness of despising?
I could not brook it; the insult, the insulter, were too revolting.
As the unhappy buffoon approached me, thrusting his distorted face
towards mine, I seized and pushed him aside, with a brief curse and a
violent hand. The sharp point of the umbrella slipped; my action gave
it impetus and weight; it penetrated his eye, and--spare me, spare me
the rest. [This instance of vanity, and indeed the whole of Talbot's
history, is literally from facts.]
The old man bent down, and paused for a few moments before he resumed.
Crompton lost his eye, but my punishment was as severe as his. People
who are very vain are usually equally susceptible, and they who feel
one thing acutely will so feel another. For years, ay, for many years
afterwards, the recollection of my folly goaded me with the bitterest
and most unceasing remorse. Had I committed murder, my conscience
could scarce have afflicted me more severely. I did not regain my
self-esteem till I had somewhat repaired the injury I had done. Long
after that time Crompton was in prison, in great and overwhelming
distress. I impoverished myself to release him; I sustained him and
his family till fortune rendered my assistance no longer necessary;
and no triumphs were ever more sweet to me than the sacrifice I was
forced to submit to, in order to restore him to prosperity.
It is natural to hope that this accident had at least the effect of
curing me of my fault; but it requires philosophy in yourself, or your
advisers, to render remorse of future avail. How could I amend my
fault, when I was not even aware of it? Smarting under the effects, I
investigated not the cause, and I attributed to irascibility and
vindictiveness what had a deeper and more dangerous origin.
At college, in spite of all my advantages of birth, fortune, health,
and intellectual acquirements, I had many things besides the one enemy
of remorse to corrode my tranquillity of mind. I was sure to find
some one to excel me in something, and this was enough to embitter my
peace. Our living Goldsmith is my favourite poet, and I perhaps
insensibly venerate the genius the more because I find something
congenial in the infirmities of the man. I can fully credit the
anecdotes recorded of him. I, too, could once have been jealous of a
puppet handling a spontoon; I, too, could once have been miserable if
two ladies at the theatre were more the objects of attention than
myself! You, Clarence, will not despise me for this confession; those
who knew me less would. Fools! there is no man so great as not to
have some littleness more predominant than all his greatness. Our
virtues are the dupes, and often only the playthings, of our follies!
smile, but it is mournfully, in looking back to that day. Though
rich, high-born, and good-looking, I possessed not one of these three
qualities in that eminence which could alone satisfy my love of
superiority and desire of effect. I knew this somewhat humiliating
truth, for, though vain, I was not conceited. Vanity, indeed, is the
very antidote to conceit; for while the former makes us all nerve to
the opinion of others, the latter is perfectly satisfied with its
opinion of itself.
I knew this truth, and as Pope, if he could not be the greatest of
poets, resolved to be the most correct, so I strove, since I could not
be the handsomest, the wealthiest, and the noblest of my
contemporaries, to excel them, at least, in the grace and
consummateness of manner; and in this after incredible pains, after
diligent apprenticeship in the world and intense study in the closet,
I at last flattered myself that I had succeeded. Of all success,
while we are yet in the flush of youth and its capacities of
enjoyment, I can imagine none more intoxicating or gratifying than the
success of society, and I had certainly some years of its triumph and
eclat. I was courted, followed, flattered, and sought by the most
envied and fastidious circles in England and even in Paris; for
society, so indifferent to those who disdain it, overwhelms with its
gratitude--profuse though brief--those who devote themselves to its
amusement. The victim to sameness and ennui, it offers, like the
pallid and luxurious Roman, a reward for a new pleasure: and as long
as our industry or talent can afford the pleasure, the reward is ours.
At that time, then, I reaped the full harvest of my exertions: the
disappointment and vexation were of later date.
I now come to the great era of my life,--Love. Among my acquaintance
was Lady Mary Walden, a widow of high birth, and noble though not
powerful connections. She lived about twenty miles from London in a
beautiful retreat; and, though not rich, her jointure, rendered ample
by economy, enabled her to indulge her love of society. Her house was
always as full as its size would permit, and I was among the most
welcome of its visitors. She had an only daughter: even now, through
the dim mists of years, that beautiful and fairy form rises still and
shining before me, undimmed by sorrow, unfaded by time. Caroline
Walden was the object of general admiration, and her mother, who
attributed the avidity with which her invitations were accepted by all
the wits and fine gentlemen of the day to the charms of her own
conversation, little suspected the face and wit of her daughter to be
the magnet of attraction. I had no idea at that time of marriage,
still less could I have entertained such a notion, unless the step had
greatly exalted my rank and prospects.
The poor and powerless Caroline Walden was therefore the last person
for whom I had what the jargon of mothers term "serious intentions."
However, I was struck with her exceeding loveliness and amused by the
vivacity of her manners; moreover, my vanity was excited by the hope
of distancing all my competitors for the smiles of the young beauty.
Accordingly I laid myself out to please, and neglected none of those
subtle and almost secret attentions which, of all flatteries, are the
most delicate and successful; and I succeeded. Caroline loved me with
all the earnestness and devotion which characterize the love of woman.
It never occurred to her that I was only trifling with those
affections which it seemed so ardently my intention to win. She knew
that my fortune was large enough to dispense with the necessity of
fortune with my wife, and in birth she would have equalled men of
greater pretensions to myself; added to this, long adulation had made
her sensible though not vain of her attractions, and she listened with
a credulous ear to the insinuated flatteries I was so well accustomed
to instil.
Never shall I forget--no, though I double my present years--the shock,
the wildness of despair with which she first detected the selfishness
of my homage; with which she saw that I had only mocked her trusting
simplicity; and that while she had been lavishing the richest
treasures of her heart before the burning altars of Love, my idol had
been Vanity and my offerings deceit. She tore herself from the
profanation of my grasp; she shrouded herself from my presence. All
interviews with me were rejected; all my letters returned to me
unopened; and though, in the repentance of my heart, I entreated, I
urged her to accept vows that were no longer insincere, her pride
became her punishment, as well as my own. In a moment of bitter and
desperate feeling; she accepted the offers of another, and made the
marriage bond a fatal and irrevocable barrier to our reconciliation
and union.
Oh, how I now cursed my infatuation! how passionately I recalled the
past! how coldly I turned from the hollow and false world, to whose
service I had sacrificed my happiness, to muse and madden over the
prospects I had destroyed and the loving and noble heart I had
rejected! Alas! after all, what is so ungrateful as that world for
which we renounce so much? Its votaries resemble the Gymnosophists of
old, and while they profess to make their chief end pleasure, we can
only learn that they expose themselves to every torture and every
pain!
Lord Merton, the man whom Caroline now called husband, was among the
wealthiest and most dissipated of his order; and two years after our
separation I met once more with the victim of my unworthiness, blazing
in "the full front" of courtly splendour, the leader of its gayeties
and the cynosure of her followers. Intimate with the same society, we
were perpetually cast together, and Caroline was proud of displaying
the indifference towards me, which, if she felt not, she had at least
learnt artfully to assume. This indifference was her ruin. The
depths of my evil passion were again sounded and aroused, and I
resolved yet to humble the pride and conquer the coldness which galled
to the very quick the morbid acuteness of my self-love. I again
attached myself to her train; I bowed myself to the very dust before
her. What to me were her chilling reply and disdainful civilities?---
only still stronger excitements to persevere.
I spare you and myself the gradual progress of my schemes. A woman
may recover her first passion, it is true; but then she must replace
it with another. That other was denied to Caroline: she had not even
children to engross her thoughts and to occupy her affections; and the
gay world, which to many becomes an object, was to her only an escape.
Clarence, my triumph came! Lady Walden (who had never known our
secret) invited me to her house: Caroline was there. In the same spot
where we had so often stood before, and in which her earliest
affections were insensibly breathed away, in that same spot I drew
from her colourless and trembling lips the confession of her weakness,
the restored and pervading power of my remembrance.
But Caroline was a proud and virtuous woman: even while her heart
betrayed her, her mind resisted; and in the very avowal of her
unconquered attachment, she renounced and discarded me forever. I was
not an ungenerous though a vain man; but my generosity was wayward,
tainted, and imperfect. I could have borne the separation; I could
have severed myself from her; I could have flown to the uttermost
parts of the earth; I could have hoarded there my secret yet
unextinguished love, and never disturbed her quiet by a murmur: but
then the fiat of separation must have come from me! My vanity could
not bear that her lips should reject me, that my part was not to be
the nobility of sacrifice, but the submission of resignation.
However, my better feelings were aroused, and though I could not
stifle I concealed my selfish repinings. We parted: she returned to
town; I buried myself in the country; and, amidst the literary studies
to which, though by fits and starts, I was passionately devoted, I
endeavoured to forget my ominous and guilty love.
But I was then too closely bound to the world not to be perpetually
reminded of its events. My retreat was thronged with occasional
migrators from London; my books were mingled with the news and scandal
of the day. All spoke to me of Lady Merton; not as I loved to picture
her to myself, pale and sorrowful, and brooding over my image; but
gay, dissipated, the dispenser of smiles, the prototype of joy. I
contrasted this account of her with the melancholy and gloom of my own
feelings, and I resented her seeming happiness as an insult to myself.
In this angry and fretful mood I returned to London. My empire was
soon resumed; and now, Linden, comes the most sickening part of my
confessions. Vanity is a growing and insatiable disease: what seems
to its desires as wealth to-day, to-morrow it rejects as poverty. I
was at first contented to know that I was beloved; by degrees, slow,
yet sure, I desired that others should know it also. I longed to
display my power over the celebrated and courted Lady Merton; and to
put the last crown to my reputation and importance. The envy of
others is the food of our own self-love. Oh, you know not, you dream
not, of the galling mortifications to which a proud woman, whose love
commands her pride, is subjected! I imposed upon Caroline the most
humiliating, the most painful trials; I would allow her to see none
but those I pleased; to go to no place where I withheld my consent;
and I hesitated not to exert and testify my power over her affections,
in proportion to the publicity of the opportunity.
Yet, with all this littleness, would you believe that I loved Caroline
with the most ardent and engrossing passion? I have paused behind
her, in order to kiss the ground she trod on; I have stayed whole
nights beneath her window, to catch one glimpse of her passing form,
even though I had spent hours of the daytime in her society; and,
though my love burned and consumed me like a fire, I would not breathe
a single wish against her innocence, or take advantage of my power to
accomplish what I knew from her virtue and pride no atonement could
possibly repay. Such are the inconsistencies of the heart, and such,
while they prevent our perfection, redeem us from the utterness of
vice! Never, even in my wildest days, was I blind to the glory of
virtue, yet never, till my latest years, have I enjoyed the faculty to
avail myself of my perception. I resembled the mole, which by Boyle
is supposed to possess the idea of light, but to be unable to
comprehend the objects on which it shines.
Among the varieties of my prevailing sin, was a weakness common enough
to worldly men. While I ostentatiously played off the love I had
excited I could not bear to show the love I felt. In our country, and
perhaps, though in a less degree, in all other highly artificial
states, enthusiasm or even feeling of any kind is ridiculous; and I
could not endure the thought that my treasured and secret affections
should be dragged from their retreat to be cavilled and carped at by--
"Every beardless, vain comparative."
This weakness brought on the catastrophe of my love; for, mark me,
Clarence, it is through our weaknesses that our vices are punished!
One night I went to a masquerade; and, while I was sitting in a remote
corner, three of my acquaintances, whom I recognized, though they knew
it not, approached and rallied me upon my romantic attachment to Lady
Merton. One of them was a woman of a malicious and sarcastic wit; the
other two were men whom I disliked, because their pretensions
interfered with mine; they were diners-out and anecdote-mongers.
Stung to the quick by their sarcasms and laughter, I replied in a
train of mingled arrogance and jest; at last I spoke slightingly of
the person in question; and these profane and false lips dared not
only to disown the faintest love to that being who was more to me than
all on earth, but even to speak of herself with ridicule and her
affection with disdain.
In the midst of this, I turned and beheld, within hearing, a figure
which I knew upon the moment. O Heaven! the burning shame and agony
of that glance! It raised its mask--I saw that blanched cheek, and
that trembling lip! I knew that the iron had indeed entered into her
soul.
Clarence, I never beheld her again alive. Within a week from that
time she was a corpse. She had borne much, suffered much, and
murmured not; but this shock pressed too hard, came too home, and from
the hand of him for whom she would have sacrificed all! I stood by
her in death; I beheld my work; and I turned away, a wanderer and a
pilgrim upon the face of the earth. Verily, I have had my reward.
The old man paused, in great emotion; and Clarence, who could offer
him no consolation, did not break the silence. In a few minutes
Talbot continued--
From that time the smile of woman was nothing to me: I seemed to grow
old in a single day. Life lost to me all its objects. A dreary and
desert blank stretched itself before me: the sounds of creation had
only in my ears one voice; the past, the future, one image. I left my
country for twenty years, and lived an idle and hopeless man in the
various courts of the Continent.
At the age of fifty I returned to England; the wounds of the past had
not disappeared, but they were scarred over; and I longed, like the
rest of my species, to have an object in view. At that age, if we
have seen much of mankind and possess the talents to profit by our
knowledge, we must be one of two sects,--a politician or a
philosopher. My time was not yet arrived for the latter, so I
resolved to become the former; but this was denied me, for my vanity
had assumed a different shape. It is true that I cared no longer for
the reputation women can bestow; but I was eager for the applause of
men, and I did not like the long labour necessary to attain it. I
wished to make a short road to my object, and I eagerly followed every
turn but the right one, in the hopes of its leading me sooner to my
goal.
The great characteristic of a vain man in contradistinction to an
ambitious man, his eternal obstacle to a high and honourable fame, is
this: he requires for any expenditure of trouble too speedy a reward;
he cannot wait for years, and climb, step by step, to a lofty object;
whatever he attempts, he must seize at a single grasp. Added to this,
he is incapable of an exclusive attention to one end; the universality
of his cravings is not contented, unless it devours all; and thus he
is perpetually doomed to fritter away his energies by grasping at the
trifling baubles within his reach, and in gathering the worthless
fruit which a single sun can mature.
This, then, was my fault, and the cause of my failure. I could not
give myself up to finance, nor puzzle through the intricacies of
commerce: even the common parliamentary drudgeries of constant
attendance and late hours were insupportable to me; and so after two
or three "splendid orations," as my friends termed them, I was
satisfied with the puffs of the pamphleteers and closed my political
career. I was now, then, the wit and the conversationalist. With my
fluency of speech and variety of information, these were easy
distinctions; and the popularity of a dinner-table or the approbation
of a literary coterie consoled me for the more public and more durable
applause I had resigned.
But even this gratification did not last long. I fell ill; and the
friends who gathered round the wit fled from the valetudinarian. This
disgusted me, and when I was sufficiently recovered I again returned
to the Continent. But I had a fit of misanthropy and solitude upon
me, and so it was not to courts and cities, the scenes of former
gayeties, that I repaired; on the contrary, I hired a house by one of
the most sequestered of the Swiss lakes, and, avoiding the living, I
surrendered myself without interruption or control to commune with the
dead. I surrounded myself with books and pored with a curious and
searching eye into those works which treat particularly upon "man."
My passions were over, my love of pleasure and society was dried up,
and I had now no longer the obstacles which forbid us to be wise; I
unlearned the precepts my manhood had acquired, and in my old age I
commenced philosopher; Religion lent me her aid, and by her holy lamp
my studies were conned and my hermitage illumined.
There are certain characters which in the world are evil, and in
seclusion are good: Rousseau, whom I knew well, is one of them. These
persons are of a morbid sensitiveness, which is perpetually galled by
collision with others. In short, they are under the dominion of
VANITY; and that vanity, never satisfied and always restless in the
various competitions of society, produces "envy, hatred, malice, and
all uncharitableness!" but, in solitude, the good and benevolent
dispositions with which our self-love no longer interferes have room
to expand and ripen without being cramped by opposing interests: this
will account for many seeming discrepancies in character. There are
also some men in whom old age supplies the place of solitude, and
Rousseau's antagonist and mental antipodes, Voltaire, is of this
order. The pert, the malignant, the arrogant, the lampooning author
in his youth and manhood, has become in his old age the mild, the
benevolent, and the venerable philosopher. Nothing is more absurd
than to receive the characters of great men so implicitly upon the
word of a biographer; and nothing can be less surprising than our
eternal disputes upon individuals: for no man throughout life is the
same being, and each season of our existence contradicts the
characteristics of the last.
And now in my solitude and my old age, a new spirit entered within me:
the game in which I had engaged so vehemently was over for me; and I
joined to my experience as a player my coolness as a spectator; I no
longer struggled with my species, and I began insensibly to love them.
I established schools and founded charities; and, in secret but active
services to mankind, I employed my exertions and lavished my desires.
From this amendment I date the peace of mind and elasticity which I
now enjoy; and in my later years the happiness which I pursued in my
youth and maturity so hotly, yet so ineffectually, has flown
unsolicited to my breast.
About five years ago I came again to England, with the intention of
breathing my last in the country which gave me birth. I retired to my
family home; I endeavoured to divert myself in agricultural
improvements, and my rental was consumed in speculation. This did not
please me long: I sought society,--society in Yorkshire! You may
imagine the result: I was out of my element; the mere distance from
the metropolis, from all genial companionship, sickened me with a
vague feeling of desertion and solitude; for the first time in my life
I felt my age and my celibacy. Once more I returned to town, a
complaint attacked my lungs, the physicians recommended the air of
this neighbourhood, and I chose the residence I now inhabit. Without
being exactly in London, I can command its advantages, and obtain
society as a recreation without buying it by restraint. I am not fond
of new faces nor any longer covetous of show; my old servant therefore
contented me: for the future, I shall, however, to satisfy your fears,
remove to a safer habitation, and obtain a more numerous guard. It
is, at all events, a happiness to me that Fate, in casting me here and
exposing me to something of danger, has raised up in you a friend for
my old age, and selected from this great universe of strangers one
being to convince my heart that it has not outlived affection. My
tale is done; may you profit by its moral!
When Talbot said that our characters were undergoing a perpetual
change he should have made this reservation,--the one ruling passion
remains to the last; it may be modified, but it never departs; and it
is these modifications which do, for the most part, shape out the
channels of our change; or as Helvetius has beautifully expressed it,
"we resemble those vessels which the waves still carry towards the
south, when the north wind has ceased to blow;" but in our old age,
this passion, having little to feed on, becomes sometimes dormant and
inert, and then our good qualities rise, as it were from an incubus,
and have their sway.
Yet these cases are not common, and Talbot was a remarkable instance,
for he was a remarkable man. His mind had not slept while the age
advanced, and thus it had swelled as it were from the bondage of its
earlier passions and prejudices. But little did he think, in the
blindness of self-delusion,--though it was so obvious to Clarence,
that he could have smiled if he had not rather inclined to weep at the
frailties of human nature,--little did he think that the vanity which
had cost him so much remained "a monarch still," undeposed alike by
his philosophy, his religion, or his remorse; and that, debarred by
circumstances from all wider and more dangerous fields, it still
lavished itself upon trifles unworthy of his powers and puerilities
dishonouring his age. Folly is a courtesan whom we ourselves seek,
whose favours we solicit at an enormous price, and who, like Lais,
finds philosophers at her door scarcely less frequently than the rest
of mankind!
CHAPTER XXI.
Mrs. Trinket. What d'ye buy, what d'ye lack, gentlemen? Gloves,
ribbons, and essences,--ribbons, gloves, and essences.
ETHEREGE.
"And so, my love," said Mr. Copperas, one morning at breakfast, to his
wife, his right leg being turned over his left, and his dexter hand
conveying to his mouth a huge morsel of buttered cake,--"and, so my
love, they say that the old fool is going to leave the jackanapes all
his fortune?"
"They do say so, Mr. C.; for my part I am quite out of patience with
the art of the young man; I dare say he is no better than he should
be; he always had a sharp look, and for aught I know there may be more
in that robbery than you or I dreamed of, Mr. Copperas. It was a
pity," continued Mrs. Copperas, upbraiding her lord with true
matrimonial tenderness and justice, for the consequences of his having
acted from her advice,--"it was a pity, Mr. C., that you should have
refused to lend him the pistols to go to the old fellow's assistance,
for then who knows but--"
"I might have converted them into pocket pistols," interrupted Mr. C.,
"and not have overshot the mark, my dear--ha, ha, ha!"
"Lord, Mr. Copperas, you are always making a joke of everything."
"No, my dear, for once I am making a joke of nothing."
"Well, I declare it's shameful," cried Mrs. Copperas, still following
up her own indignant meditations, "and after taking such notice of
Adolphus, too, and all!"
"Notice, my dear! mere words," returned Mr. Copperas, "mere words,
like ventilators, which make a great deal of air, but never raise the
wind; but don't put yourself in a stew, my love, for the doctors say
that copperas in a stew is poison!"
At this moment Mr. de Warens, throwing open the door, announced Mr.
Brown; that gentleman entered, with a sedate but cheerful air. "Well,
Mrs. Copperas, your servant; any table-linen wanted? Mr. Copperas,
how do you do? I can give you a hint about the stocks. Master
Copperas, you are looking bravely; don't you think he wants some new
pinbefores, ma'am? But Mr. Clarence Linden, where is he? Not up yet,
I dare say. Ah, the present generation is a generation of sluggards,
as his worthy aunt, Mrs. Minden, used to say."
"I am sure," said Mrs. Copperas, with a disdainful toss of the head,
"I know nothing about the young man. He has left us; a very
mysterious piece of business indeed, Mr. Brown; and now I think of it,
I can't help saying that we were by no means pleased with your
introduction: and, by the by, the chairs you bought for us at the sale
were a mere take-in, so slight that Mr. Walruss broke two of them by
only sitting down."
"Indeed, ma'am?" said Mr. Brown, with expostulating gravity; "but then
Mr. Walruss is so very corpulent. But the young gentleman, what of
him?" continued the broker, artfully turning from the point in
dispute.
"Lord, Mr. Brown, don't ask me: it was the unluckiest step we ever
made to admit him into the bosom of our family; quite a viper, I
assure you; absolutely robbed poor Adolphus."
"Lord help us!" said Mr. Brown, with a look which "cast a browner
horror" o'er the room, "who would have thought it? and such a pretty
young man!"
"Well," said Mr. Copperas, who, occupied in finishing the buttered
cake, had hitherto kept silence, "I must be off. Tom--I mean de
Warens--have you stopped the coach?"
"Yees, sir."
And what coach is it?"
"It be the Swallow, sir."
"Oh, very well. And now, Mr. Brown, having swallowed in the roll, I
will e'en roll in the Swallow--Ha, ha, ha!--At any rate," thought Mr.
Copperas, as he descended the stairs, "he has not heard that before."
"Ha, ha!" gravely chuckled Mr. Brown, "what a very facetious, lively
gentleman Mr. Copperas is. But touching this ungrateful young man,
Mr. Linden, ma'am?"
"Oh, don't tease me, Mr. Brown, I must see after my
domestics: ask Mr. Talbot, the old miser in the next house, the
havarr, as the French say."
"Well, now," said Mr. Brown, following the good lady down stairs, "how
distressing for me! and to say that he was Mrs. Minden's nephew, too!"
But Mr. Brown's curiosity was not so easily satisfied, and finding Mr.
de Warens leaning over the "front" gate, and "pursuing with wistful
eyes" the departing "Swallow," he stopped, and, accosting him, soon
possessed himself of the facts that "old Talbot had been robbed and
murdered, but that Mr. Linden had brought him to life again; and that
old Talbot had given him a hundred thousand pounds, and adopted him as
his son; and that how Mr. Linden was going to be sent to foreign
parts, as an ambassador, or governor, or great person; and that how
meester and meeses were quite 'cut up' about it."
All these particulars having been duly deposited in the mind of Mr.
Brown, they produced an immediate desire to call upon the young
gentleman, who, to say nothing of his being so very nearly related to
his old customer, Mrs. Minden, was always so very great a favourite
with him, Mr. Brown.
Accordingly, as Clarence was musing over his approaching departure,
which was now very shortly to take place, he was somewhat startled by
the apparition of Mr. Brown--"Charming day, sir,--charming day," said
the friend of Mrs. Minden,--"just called in to congratulate you. I
have a few articles, sir, to present you with,--quite rarities, I
assure you,--quite presents, I may say. I picked them up at a sale of
the late Lady Waddilove's most valuable effects. They are just the
things, sir, for a gentleman going on a foreign mission. A most
curious ivory chest, with an Indian padlock, to hold confidential
letters,--belonged formerly, sir, to the Great Mogul; and a beautiful
diamond snuff-box, sir, with a picture of Louis XIV. on it,
prodigiously fine, and will look so loyal too: and, sir, if you have
any old aunts in the country, to send a farewell present to, I have
some charming fine cambric, a superb Dresden tea set, and a lovely
little 'ape,' stuffed by the late Lady W. herself."
"My good sir," began Clarence.
"Oh, no thanks, sir,--none at all,--too happy to serve a relation of
Mrs. Minden,--always proud to keep up family connections. You will be
at home to-morrow, sir, at eleven; I will look in; your most humble
servant, Mr. Linden." And almost upsetting Talbot, who had just
entered, Mr. Brown bowed himself out.
CHAPTER XXII.
He talked with open heart and tongue,
Affectionate and true;
A pair of friends, though I was young
And Matthew seventy-two.--WORDSWORTH.
Meanwhile the young artist proceeded rapidly with his picture.
Devoured by his enthusiasm, and utterly engrossed by the sanguine
anticipation of a fame which appeared to him already won, he allowed
himself no momentary interval of relaxation; his food was eaten by
starts, and without stirring from his easel; his sleep was brief and
broken by feverish dreams; he no longer roved with Clarence, when the
evening threw her shade over his labours; all air and exercise he
utterly relinquished; shut up in his narrow chamber, he passed the
hours in a fervid and passionate self-commune, which, even in suspense
from his work, riveted his thoughts the closer to its object. All
companionship, all intrusion, he bore with irritability and
impatience. Even Clarence found himself excluded from the presence of
his friend; even his nearest relation, who doted on the very ground
which he hallowed with his footstep, was banished from the haunted
sanctuary of the painter; from the most placid of human beings, Warner
seemed to have grown the most morose.
Want of rest, abstinence from food, the impatience of the strained
spirit and jaded nerves, all contributed to waste the health while
they excited the genius of the artist. A crimson spot, never before
seen there, burned in the centre of his pale cheek; his eye glowed
with a brilliant but unnatural fire; his features grew sharp and
attenuated; his bones worked from his whitening and transparent skin;
and the soul and frame, turned from their proper and kindly union,
seemed contesting, with fierce struggles, which should obtain the
mastery and the triumph.
But neither his new prospects nor the coldness of his friend diverted
the warm heart of Clarence from meditating how he could most
effectually serve the artist before he departed from the country, It
was a peculiar object of desire to Warner that the most celebrated
painter of the day, who was on terms of intimacy with Talbot, and who
with the benevolence of real superiority was known to take a keen
interest in the success of more youthful and inexperienced genius,--it
was a peculiar object of desire to Warner, that Sir Joshua Reynolds
should see his picture before it was completed; and Clarence, aware of
this wish, easily obtained from Talbot a promise that it should be
effected. That was the least service of his zeal touched by the
earnestness of Linden's friendship, anxious to oblige in any way his
preserver, and well pleased himself to be the patron of merit, Talbot
readily engaged to obtain for Warner whatever the attention and favour
of high rank or literary distinction could bestow. "As for his
picture," said Talbot (when, the evening before Clarence's departure,
the latter was renewing the subject), "I shall myself become the
purchaser, and at a price which will enable our friend to afford
leisure and study for the completion of his next attempt; but even at
the risk of offending your friendship, and disappointing your
expectations, I will frankly tell you that I think Warner overrates,
perhaps not his talents, but his powers; not his ability for doing
something great hereafter, but his capacity of doing it at present.
In the pride of his heart, he has shown me many of his designs, and I
am somewhat of a judge: they want experience, cultivation, taste, and,
above all, a deeper study of the Italian masters. They all have the
defects of a feverish colouring, an ambitious desire of effect, a
wavering and imperfect outline, an ostentatious and unnatural strength
of light and shadow; they show, it is true, a genius of no ordinary
stamp, but one ill regulated, inexperienced, and utterly left to its
own suggestions for a model. However, I am glad he wishes for the
opinion of one necessarily the best judge: let him bring the picture
here by Thursday; on that day my friend has promised to visit me; and
now let us talk of you and your departure."
The intercourse of men of different ages is essentially unequal: it
must always partake more or less of advice on one side and deference
on the other; and although the easy and unpedantic turn of Talbot's
conversation made his remarks rather entertaining than obviously
admonitory, yet they were necessarily tinged by his experience, and
regulated by his interest in the fortunes of his young friend.
"My dearest Clarence," said he, affectionately, "we are about to bid
each other a long farewell. I will not damp your hopes and
anticipations by insisting on the little chance there is that you
should ever see me again. You are about to enter upon the great
world, and have within you the desire and power of success; let me
flatter myself that you can profit by my experience. Among the
'Colloquia' of Erasmus, there is a very entertaining dialogue between
Apicius and a man who, desirous of giving a feast to a very large and
miscellaneous party, comes to consult the epicure what will be the
best means to give satisfaction to all. Now you shall be this
Spudaeus (so I think he is called), and I will be Apicius; for the
world, after all, is nothing more than a great feast of different
strangers, with different tastes and of different ages, and we must
learn to adapt ourselves to their minds, and our temptations to their
passions, if we wish to fascinate or even to content them. Let me
then call your attention to the hints and maxims which I have in this
paper amused myself with drawing up for your instruction. Write to me
from time to time, and I will, in replying to your letters, give you
the best advice in my power. For the rest, my dear boy, I have only
to request that you will be frank, and I, in my turn, will promise
that when I cannot assist, I will never reprove. And now, Clarence,
as the hour is late and you leave us early tomorrow, I will no longer
detain you. God bless you and keep you. You are going to enjoy
life,--I to anticipate death; so that you can find in me little
congenial to yourself; but as the good Pope said to our Protestant
countryman, 'Whatever the difference between us, I know well that an
old man's blessing is never without its value.'"
As Clarence clasped his benefactor's hand, the tears gushed from his
eyes. Is there one being, stubborn as the rock to misfortune, whom
kindness does not affect? For my part, kindness seems to me to come
with a double grace and tenderness from the old; it seems in them the
hoarded and long purified benevolence of years; as if it had survived
and conquered the baseness and selfishness of the ordeal it had
passed; as if the winds, which had broken the form, had swept in vain
across the heart, and the frosts which had chilled the blood and
whitened the thin locks had possessed no power over the warm tide of
the affections. It is the triumph of nature over art; it is the voice
of the angel which is yet within us. Nor is this all: the tenderness
of age is twice blessed,--blessed in its trophies over the obduracy of
encrusting and withering years, blessed because it is tinged with the
sanctity of the grave; because it tells us that the heart will blossom
even upon the precincts of the tomb, and flatters us with the
inviolacy and immortality of love.
CHAPTER XXIII.
Cannot I create,
Cannot I form, cannot I fashion forth
Another world, another universe?--KEATS.
The next morning Clarence, in his way out of town, directed his
carriage (the last and not the least acceptable present from Talbot)
to stop at Warner's door. Although it was scarcely sunrise, the aged
grandmother of the artist was stirring, and opened the door to the
early visitor. Clarence passed her with a brief salutation, hurried
up the narrow stairs, and found himself in the artist's chamber. The
windows were closed, and the air of the room was confined and hot. A
few books, chiefly of history and poetry, stood in confused disorder
upon some shelves opposite the window. Upon a table beneath them lay
a flute, once the cherished recreation of the young painter, but now
long neglected and disused; and, placed exactly opposite to Warner, so
that his eyes might open upon his work, was the high-prized and
already more than half-finished picture.
Clarence bent over the bed; the cheek of the artist rested upon his
arm in an attitude unconsciously picturesque; the other arm was tossed
over the coverlet, and Clarence was shocked to see how emaciated it
had become. But ever and anon the lips of the sleeper moved
restlessly, and words, low and inarticulate, broke out. Sometimes he
started abruptly, and a bright but evanescent flush darted over his
faded and hollow cheek; and once the fingers of the thin hand which
lay upon the bed expanded and suddenly closed in a firm and almost
painful grasp; it was then that for the first time the words of the
artist became distinct.
"Ay, ay," he said, "I have thee, I have thee at last. Long, very long
thou hast burnt up my heart like fuel, and mocked me, and laughed at
my idle efforts; but now, now, I have thee. Fame, Honour,
Immortality, whatever thou art called, I have thee, and thou canst not
escape; but it is almost too late!" And, as if wrung by some sudden
pain, the sleeper turned heavily round, groaned audibly, and awoke.
"My friend," said Clarence, soothingly, and taking his hand, "I have
come to bid you farewell. I am just setting off for the Continent,
but I could not leave England without once more seeing you. I have
good news, too, for you." And Clarence proceeded to repeat Talbot's
wish that Warner should bring the picture to his house on the
following Thursday, that Sir Joshua might inspect it. He added also,
in terms the flattery of which his friendship could not resist
exaggerating, Talbot's desire to become the purchaser of the picture.
"Yes," said the artist, as his eye glanced delightedly over his
labour; "yes, I believe when it is once seen there will be many
candidates!"
"No doubt," answered Clarence; "and for that reason you cannot blame
Talbot for wishing to forestall all other competitors for the prize;"
and then, continuing the encouraging nature of the conversation,
Clarence enlarged upon the new hopes of his friend, besought him to
take time, to spare his health, and not to injure both himself and his
performance by over-anxiety and hurry. Clarence concluded by
retailing Talbot's assurance that in all cases and circumstances he
(Talbot) considered himself pledged to be Warner's supporter and
friend.
With something of impatience, mingled with pleasure, the painter
listened to all these details; nor was it to Linden's zeal nor to
Talbot's generosity, but rather to the excess of his own merit, that
he secretly attributed the brightening prospect offered him.
The indifference which Warner, though of a disposition naturally kind,
evinced at parting with a friend who had always taken so strong an
interest in his behalf, and whose tears at that moment contrasted
forcibly enough with the apathetic coldness of his own farewell, was a
remarkable instance how acute vividness on a single point will deaden
feeling on all others. Occupied solely and burningly with one intense
thought, which was to him love, friendship, health, peace, wealth,
Warner could not excite feelings, languid and exhausted with many and
fiery conflicts, to objects of minor interest, and perhaps he inwardly
rejoiced that his musings and his study would henceforth be sacred
even from friendship.
Deeply affected, for his nature was exceedingly unselfish, generous,
and susceptible, Clarence tore himself away, placed in the
grandmother's hand a considerable portion of the sum he had received
from Talbot, hurried into his carriage, and found himself on the high
road to fortune, pleasure, distinction, and the Continent.
But while Clarence, despite of every advantage before him, hastened to
a court of dissipation and pleasure, with feelings in which regretful
affection for those he had left darkened his worldly hopes and mingled
with the sanguine anticipations of youth, Warner, poor, low-born,
wasted with sickness, destitute of friends, shut out by his
temperament from the pleasures of his age, burned with hopes far less
alloyed than those of Clarence, and found in them, for the sacrifice
of all else, not only a recompense, but a triumph.
Thursday came. Warner had made one request to Talbot, which had with
difficulty been granted: it was that he himself might unseen be the
auditor of the great painter's criticisms, and that Sir Joshua should
be perfectly unaware of his presence. It had been granted with
difficulty, because Talbot wished to spare Warner the pain of hearing
remarks which he felt would be likely to fall far short of the
sanguine self-elation of the young artist; and it had been granted
because Talbot imagined that, even should this be the case, the pain
would be more than counterbalanced by the salutary effect it might
produce. Alas! vanity calculates but poorly upon the vanity of
others! What a virtue we should distil from frailty; what a world of
pain we should save our brethren, if we would suffer our own weakness
to be the measure of theirs!
Thursday came: the painting was placed by the artist's own hand in the
most favourable light; a curtain, hung behind it, served as a screen
for Warner, who, retiring to his hiding-place, surrendered his heart
to delicious forebodings of the critic's wonder and golden
anticipations of the future destiny of his darling work. Not a fear
dashed the full and smooth cup of his self-enjoyment. He had lain
awake the whole of the night in restless and joyous impatience for the
morrow. At daybreak he had started from his bed, he had unclosed his
shutters, he had hung over his picture with a fondness greater, if
possible, than he had ever known before! like a mother, he felt as if
his own partiality was but a part of a universal tribute; and, as his
aged relative, turning her dim eyes to the painting, and, in her
innocent idolatry, rather of the artist than his work, praised and
expatiated and foretold, his heart whispered, "If it wring this
worship from ignorance, what will be the homage of science?"
He who first laid down the now hackneyed maxim that diffidence is the
companion of genius knew very little of the workings of the human
heart. True, there may have been a few such instances, and it is
probable that in this maxim, as in most, the exception made the rule.
But what could ever reconcile genius to its sufferings, its
sacrifices, its fevered inquietudes, the intense labour which can
alone produce what the shallow world deems the giant offspring of a
momentary inspiration: what could ever reconcile it to these but the
haughty and unquenchable consciousness of internal power; the hope
which has the fulness of certainty that in proportion to the toil is
the reward; the sanguine and impetuous anticipation of glory, which
bursts the boundaries of time and space, and ranges immortality with a
prophet's rapture? Rob Genius of its confidence, of its lofty self-
esteem, and you clip the wings of the eagle: you domesticate, it is
true, the wanderer you could not hitherto comprehend, in the narrow
bounds of your household affections; you abase and tame it more to the
level of your ordinary judgments, but you take from it the power to
soar; the hardihood which was content to brave the thundercloud and
build its eyrie on the rock, for the proud triumph of rising above its
kind, and contemplating with a nearer eye the majesty of heaven.
But if something of presumption is a part of the very essence of
genius, in Warner it was doubly natural, for he was still in the heat
and flush of a design, the defects of which he had not yet had the
leisure to examine; and his talents, self-taught and self-modelled,
had never received either the excitement of emulation or the chill of
discouragement from the study of the masterpieces of his art.
The painter had not been long alone in his concealment before he heard
steps; his heart beat violently, the door opened, and he saw, through
a small hole which he had purposely made in the curtain, a man with a
benevolent and prepossessing countenance, whom he instantly recognized
as Sir Joshua Reynolds, enter the room, accompanied by Talbot. They
walked up to the picture, the painter examined it closely, and in
perfect silence. "Silence," thought Warner, "is the best homage of
admiration;" but he trembled with impatience to hear the admiration
confirmed by words,--those words came too soon.
"It is the work of a clever man, certainly," said Sir Joshua; "but"
(terrible monosyllable) "of one utterly unskilled in the grand
principles of his art--look here, and here, and here, for instance;"
and the critic, perfectly unconscious of the torture he inflicted,
proceeded to point out the errors of the work. Oh! the agony, the
withering agony of that moment to the ambitious artist! In vain he
endeavoured to bear up against the judgment,--in vain he endeavoured
to persuade himself that it was the voice of envy which in those cold,
measured, defining accents, fell like drops of poison upon his heart.
He felt at once, and as if by a magical inspiration, the truth of the
verdict; the scales of self-delusion fell from his eyes; by a hideous
mockery, a kind of terrible pantomime, his goddess seemed at a word, a
breath, transformed into a monster: life, which had been so lately
concentrated into a single hope, seemed now, at once and forever,
cramped, curdled, blistered into a single disappointment.
"But," said Talbot, who had in vain attempted to arrest the criticisms
of the painter (who, very deaf at all times, was, at that time in
particular, engrossed by the self-satisfaction always enjoyed by one
expatiating on his favourite topic),--"but," said Talbot, in a louder
voice, "you own there is great genius in the design?"
"Certainly, there is genius," replied Sir Joshua, in a tone of calm
and complacent good-nature; "but what is genius without culture? You
say the artist is young, very young; let him take time: I do not say
let him attempt a humbler walk; let him persevere in the lofty one he
has chosen, but let him first retrace every step he has taken; let him
devote days, months, years, to the most diligent study of the immortal
masters of the divine art, before he attempts (to exhibit, at least)
another historical picture. He has mistaken altogether the nature of
invention: a fine invention is nothing more than a fine deviation
from, or enlargement on, a fine model: imitation, if noble and
general, insures the best hope of originality. Above all, let your
young friend, if he can afford it, visit Italy."
"He shall afford it," said Talbot, kindly, "for he shall have whatever
advantages I can procure him; but you see the picture is only half-
completed: he could alter it!"
"He had better burn it!" replied the painter, with a gentle smile.
And Talbot, in benevolent despair, hurried his visitor out of the
room. He soon returned to seek and console the artist, but the artist
was gone; the despised, the fatal picture, the blessing and curse of
so many anxious and wasted hours, had vanished also with its creator.
CHAPTER XXIV.
What is this soul, then? Whence
Came it?--It does not seem my own, and I
Have no self-passion or identity!
Some fearful end must be--
. . . . . .
There never lived a mortal man, who bent
His appetite beyond his natural sphere,
But starved and died.--KEATS: Endymion.
On entering his home, Warner pushed aside, for the first time in his
life with disrespect, his aged and kindly relation, who, as if in
mockery of the unfortunate artist stood prepared to welcome and
congratulate his return. Bearing his picture in his arms, he rushed
upstairs, hurried into his room, and locked the door. Hastily he tore
aside the cloth which had been drawn over the picture; hastily and
tremblingly he placed it upon the frame accustomed to support it, and
then, with a long, long, eager, searching, scrutinizing glance, he
surveyed the once beloved mistress of his worship. Presumption,
vanity, exaggerated self-esteem, are, in their punishment, supposed to
excite ludicrous not sympathetic emotion; but there is an excess of
feeling, produced by whatever cause it may be, into which, in spite of
ourselves, we are forced to enter. Even fear, the most contemptible
of the passions, becomes tragic the moment it becomes an agony.
"Well, well!" said Warner, at last, speaking very slowly, "it is
over,--it was a pleasant dream,--but it is over,--I ought to be
thankful for the lesson." Then suddenly changing his mood and tone,
he repeated, "Thankful! for what? that I am a wretch,--a wretch more
utterly hopeless and miserable and abandoned than a man who freights
with all his wealth, his children, his wife, the hoarded treasures and
blessings of an existence, one ship, one frail, worthless ship, and,
standing himself on the shore, sees it suddenly go down! Oh, was I
not a fool,--a right noble fool,--a vain fool,--an arrogant fool,--a
very essence and concentration of all things that make a fool, to
believe such delicious marvels of myself! What, man!" (here his eye
saw in the opposite glass his features, livid and haggard with
disease, and the exhausting feelings which preyed within him)--"what,
man! would nothing serve thee but to be a genius,--thee, whom Nature
stamped with her curse! Dwarf-like and distorted, mean in stature and
in lineament, thou wert, indeed, a glorious being to perpetuate grace
and beauty, the majesties and dreams of art! Fame for thee, indeed--
ha-ha! Glory--ha-ha! a place with Titian, Correggio, Raphael--ha--ha
--ha! O, thrice modest, thrice-reasonable fool! But this vile daub;
this disfigurement of canvas; this loathed and wretched monument of
disgrace; this notable candidate for--ha--ha--immortality! this I
have, at least, in my power." And seizing the picture, he dashed it
to the ground, and trampled it with his feet upon the dusty boards,
till the moist colours presented nothing but one confused and dingy
stain.
This sight seemed to recall him for a moment. He paused, lifted up
the picture once more, and placed it on the table. "But," he
muttered, "might not this critic be envious? am I sure that he judged
rightly--fairly? The greatest masters have looked askant and jealous
at their pupils' works. And then, how slow, how cold, how damned
cold, how indifferently he spoke; why, the very art should have warmed
him more. Could he have--No, no, no: it was true, it was! I felt the
conviction thrill through me like a searing iron. Burn it--did he
say--ay--burn it: it shall be done this instant."
And, hastening to the door, he undid the bolt. He staggered back as
he beheld his old and nearest surviving relative, the mother of his
father, seated upon the ground beside the door, terrified by the
exclamations she did not dare to interrupt. She rose slowly, and with
difficulty as she saw him; and, throwing around him the withered arms
which had nursed his infancy, exclaimed, "My child!--my poor--poor
child! what has come to you of late? you, who were so gentle, so mild,
so quiet,--you are no longer the same,--and oh, my son, how ill you
look: your father looked so just before he died!"
"Ill!" said he, with a sort of fearful gayety, "ill--no: I never was
so well; I have been in a dream till now; but I have woke at last.
Why, it is true that I have been silent and shy, but I will be so no
more. I will laugh, and talk, and walk, and make love, and drink
wine, and be all that other men are. Oh, we will be so merry! But
stay here, while I fetch a light."
"A light, my child, for what?"
"For a funeral!" shouted Warner, and, rushing past her, he descended
the stairs, and returned almost in an instant with a light.
Alarmed and terrified, the poor old woman had remained motionless and
weeping violently. Her tears Warner did not seem to notice; he pushed
her gently into the room, and began deliberately, and without uttering
a syllable, to cut the picture into shreds.
"What are you about, my child?" cried the old woman "you are mad; it
is your beautiful picture that you are destroying!"
Warner did not reply, but going to the hearth, piled together, with
nice and scrupulous care, several pieces of paper, and stick, and
matches, into a sort of pyre; then, placing the shreds of the picture
upon it, he applied the light, and the whole was instantly in a blaze.
"Look, look!" cried he, in an hysterical tone, "how it burns and
crackles and blazes! What master ever equalled it now?--no fault now
in those colours,--no false tints in that light and shade! See how
that flame darts up and soars!--that flame is my spirit! Look--is it
not restless?--does it not aspire bravely?--why, all its brother
flames are grovellers to it!--and now,--why don't you look!--it
falters--fades--droops--and--ha--ha--ha! poor idler, the fuel is
consumed--and--it is darkness."
As Warner uttered these words his eyes reeled; the room swam before
him; the excitement of his feeble frame had reached its highest pitch;
the disease of many weeks had attained its crisis; and, tottering back
a few paces, he fell upon the floor, the victim of a delirious and
raging fever.
But it was not thus that the young artist was to die. He was reserved
for a death that, like his real nature, had in it more of gentleness
and poetry. He recovered by slow degrees, and his mind, almost in
spite of himself, returned to that profession from which it was
impossible to divert the thoughts and musings of many years. Not that
he resumed the pencil and the easel: on the contrary, he could not
endure them in his sight; they appeared, to a mind festered and sore,
like a memorial and monument of shame. But he nursed within him a
strong and ardent desire to become a pilgrim to that beautiful land of
which he had so often dreamed, and which the innocent destroyer of his
peace had pointed out as the theatre of inspiration and the nursery of
future fame.
The physicians who, at Talbot's instigation, attended him, looked at
his hectic cheek and consumptive frame, and readily flattered his
desire; and Talbot, no less interested in Warner's behalf on his own
account than bound by his promise to Clarence, generously extended to
the artist that bounty which is the most precious prerogative of the
rich. Notwithstanding her extreme age, his grandmother insisted upon
attending him: there is in the heart of woman so deep a well of love
that no age can freeze it. They made the voyage: they reached the
shore of the myrtle and the vine, and entered the Imperial City. The
air of Rome seemed at first to operate favourably upon the health of
the English artist. His strength appeared to increase, his spirit to
expand; and though he had relapsed into more than his original silence
and reserve, he resumed, with apparent energy, the labours of the
easel: so that they who looked no deeper than the surface might have
imagined the scar healed, and the real foundation of future excellence
begun.
But while Warner most humbled himself before the gods of the pictured
world; while the true principles of the mighty art opened in their
fullest glory on his soul; precisely at this very moment shame and
despondency were most bitter at his heart: and while the enthusiasm of
the painter kindled, the ambition of the man despaired. But still he
went on, transfusing into his canvas the grandeur and simplicity of
the Italian school; still, though he felt palpably within him the
creeping advance of the deadliest and surest enemy to fame, he
pursued, with an unwearied ardour, the mechanical completion of his
task; still, the morning found him bending before the easel, and the
night brought to his solitary couch meditation rather than sleep. The
fire, the irritability which he had evinced before his illness had
vanished, and the original sweetness of his temper had returned; he
uttered no complaint, he dwelt upon no anticipation of success; hope
and regret seemed equally dead within him; and it was only when he
caught the fond, glad eyes of his aged attendant that his own filled
with tears, or that the serenity of his brow darkened into sadness.
This went on for some months; till one evening they found the painter
by his window, seated opposite to an unfinished picture. The pencil
was still in his hand; the quiet of settled thought was still upon his
countenance; the soft breeze of a southern twilight waved the hair
livingly from his forehead; the earliest star of a southern sky lent
to his cheek something of that subdued lustre which, when touched by
enthusiasm, it had been accustomed to wear; but these were only the
mockeries of life: life itself was no more! He had died, reconciled,
perhaps, to the loss of fame, in discovering that Art is to be loved
for itself, and not for the rewards it may bestow upon the artist.
There are two tombs close to each other in the strangers' burial-place
at Rome: they cover those for whom life, unequally long, terminated in
the same month. The one is of a woman, bowed with the burden of many
years: the other darkens over the dust of the young artist.
CHAPTER XXV.
Think upon my grief,
And on the justice of my flying hence,
To keep me from a most unholy match.--SHAKSPEARE.
"But are you quite sure," said General St. Leger, "are you quite sure
that this girl still permits Mordaunt's addresses?"
"Sure!" cried Miss Diana St. Leger, "sure, General! I saw it with my
own eyes. They were standing together in the copse, when I, who had
long had my suspicions, crept up, and saw them; and Mr. Mordaunt held
her hand, and kissed it every moment. Shocking and indecorous!"
"I hate that man! as proud as Lucifer," growled the General. "Shall
we lock her up, or starve her?"
"No, General, something better than that."
"What, my love? flog her?"
"She's too old for that, brother; we'll marry her."
"Marry her!"
"Yes, to Mr. Glumford; you know that he has asked her several times."
"But she cannot bear him."
"We'll make her bear him, General St. Leger."
"But if she marries, I shall have nobody to nurse me when I have the
gout."
"Yes, brother: I know of a nice little girl, Martha Richardson, your
second cousin's youngest daughter; you know he has fourteen children,
and you may have them all, one after another, if you like."
"Very true, Diana; let the jade marry Mr. Glumford."
"She shall," said the sister; "and I'll go about it this very moment:
meantime I'll take care that she does not see her lover any more."
About three weeks after this conversation, Mordaunt, who had in vain
endeavoured to see Isabel, who had not even heard from her, whose
letters had been returned to him unopened, and who, consequently, was
in despair, received the following note:--
This is the first time I have been able to write to you, at least to
get my letter conveyed: it is a strange messenger that I have
employed, but I happened formerly to make his acquaintance; and
accidentally seeing him to-day, the extremity of the case induced me
to give him a commission which I could trust to no one else.
Algernon, are not the above sentences written with admirable calmness?
are they not very explanatory, very consistent, very cool? and yet do
you know that I firmly believe I am going mad? My brain turns round
and round, and my hand burns so that I almost think that, like our old
nurse's stories of the fiend, it will scorch the paper as I write.
And I see strange faces in my sleep and in my waking, all mocking at
me, and they torture and aunt met and when I look at those faces I see
no human relenting, no! though I weep and throw myself on my knees and
implore them to save me. Algernon, my only hope is in you. You know
that I have always hitherto refused to ruin you, and even now, though
I implore you to deliver me, I will not be so selfish as--as--I know
not what I write, but if I cannot be your wife--I will not be his!
No! if they drag me to church, it shall be to my grave, not my bridal.
ISABEL ST. LEGER.
When Mordaunt had read this letter, which, in spite of its
incoherence, his fears readily explained, he rose hastily; his eyes
rested upon a sober-looking man, clad in brown. The proud love no
spectators to their emotions.
"Who are you, sir?" said Algernon, quickly.
"Morris Brown," replied the stranger, coolly and civilly. "Brought
that letter to you, sir; shall be very happy to serve you with
anything else; just fitted out a young gentleman as ambassador, a
nephew to Mrs. Minden,--very old friend of mine. Beautiful slabs you
have here, sir, but they want a few knick-knacks; shall be most happy
to supply you; got a lovely little ape, sir, stuffed by the late Lady
Waddilove; it would look charming with this old-fashioned carving;
give the room quite the air of a museum."
"And so," said Mordaunt, for whose ear the eloquence of Mr. Brown
contained only one sentence, "and so you brought this note, and will
take back my answer?"
"Yes, sir; anything to keep up family connections; I knew a Lady
Morden very well,--very well indeed, sir,--a relation of yours, I
presume, by the similarity of the name; made her very valuable
presents; shall be most happy to do the same to you, when you are
married, sir. You will refurnish the house, I suppose? Let me see;
fine proportions to this room, sir; about thirty-six feet by twenty-
eight; I'll do the thing twenty per cent cheaper than the trade; and
touching the lovely little--"
"Here," interrupted Mordaunt, "you will take back this note, and be
sure that Miss Isabel St. Leger has it as soon as possible; oblige me
by accepting this trifle,--a trifle indeed compared with my gratitude,
if this note reaches its destination safely."
"I am sure," said Mr. Brown, looking with surprise at the gift, which
he held with no unwilling hand, "I am sure, sir, that you are very
generous, and strongly remind me of your relation, Lady Morden; and if
you would like the lovely little ape as a present--I mean really a
present--you shall have it, Mr. Mordaunt."
But Mr. Mordaunt had left the room, and the sober Morris, looking
round, and cooling in his generosity, said to himself, "It is well he
did not hear me, however; but I hope he will marry the nice young
lady, for I love doing a kindness. This house must be refurnished; no
lady will like these old-fashioned chairs."
CHAPTER XXVI.
Squire and fool are the same thing here--FARQUHAR.
In such a night
Did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew,
And, with an unthrift love, did run from Venice.---SHAKSPEARE.
The persecutions which Isabel had undergone had indeed preyed upon her
reason as well as her health; and, in her brief intervals of respite
from the rage of the uncle, the insults of the aunt, and, worse than
all, the addresses of the intended bridegroom, her mind, shocked and
unhinged, reverted with such intensity to the sufferings she endured
as to give her musings the character of insanity. It was in one of
these moments that she had written to Mordaunt; and had the contest
continued much longer the reason of the unfortunate and persecuted
girl would have totally deserted her.
She was a person of acute, and even poignant, sensibilities, and these
the imperfect nature of her education had but little served to guide
or to correct; but as her habits were pure and good, the impulses
which spring from habit were also sinless and exalted, and, if they
erred, "they leaned on virtue's side," and partook rather of a
romantic and excessive generosity than of the weakness of womanhood or
the selfishness of passion. All the misery and debasement of her
equivocal and dependent situation had not been able to drive her into
compliance with Mordaunt's passionate and urgent prayers; and her
heart was proof even to the eloquence of love, when that eloquence
pointed towards the worldly injury and depreciation of her lover: but
this new persecution was utterly unforeseen in its nature and
intolerable from its cause. To marry another; to be torn forever from
one in whom her whole heart was wrapped; to be forced not only to
forego his love, but to feel that the very thought of him was a
crime,--all this, backed by the vehement and galling insults of her
relations, and the sullen and unmoved meanness of her intended
bridegroom, who answered her candour and confession with a stubborn
indifference and renewed overtures, made a load of evil which could
neither be borne with resignation nor contemplated with patience.
She was sitting, after she had sent her letter, with her two
relations, for they seldom trusted her out of their sight, when Mr.
Glumford was announced. Now, Mr. George Glumford was a country
gentleman of what might be termed a third-rate family in the county:
he possessed about twelve hundred a year, to say nothing of the odd
pounds, shillings, and pence, which, however, did not meet with such
contempt in his memory or estimation; was of a race which could date
as far back as Charles the Second; had been educated at a country
school with sixty others, chiefly inferior to himself in rank; and had
received the last finish at a very small hall at Oxford. In addition
to these advantages, he had been indebted to nature for a person five
feet eight inches high, and stout in proportion; for hair very short,
very straight, and of a red hue, which even through powder cast out a
yellow glow; for an obstinate dogged sort of nose, beginning in snub,
and ending in bottle; for cold, small, gray eyes, a very small mouth,
pinched up and avaricious; and very large, very freckled, yet rather
white hands, the nails of which were punctiliously cut into a point
every other day, with a pair of scissors which Mr. Glumford often
boasted had been in his possession since his eighth year; namely, for
about thirty-two legitimate revolutions of the sun.
He was one of those persons who are equally close and adventurous; who
love the eclat of a little speculation, but take exceeding good care
that it should be, in their own graceful phrase, "on the safe side of
the hedge." In pursuance of this characteristic of mind, he had
resolved to fall in love with Miss Isabel St. Leger; for she being
very dependent, he could boast to her of his disinterestedness, and
hope that she would be economical through a principle of gratitude;
and being the nearest relation to the opulent General St. Leger and
his unmarried sister there seemed to be every rational probability of
her inheriting the bulk of their fortunes. Upon these hints of
prudence spake Mr. George Glumford.
Now, when Isabel, partly in her ingenuous frankness, partly from the
passionate promptings of her despair, revealed to him her attachment
to another, and her resolution never, with her own consent, to become
his, it seemed to the slow but not uncalculating mind of Mr. Glumford
not by any means desirable that he should forego his present
intentions, but by all means desirable that he should make this
reluctance of Isabel an excuse for sounding the intentions and
increasing the posthumous liberality of the East Indian and his
sister.
"The girl is of my nearest blood," said the Major-General, "and if I
don't leave my fortune to her, who the devil should I leave it to,
sir?" and so saying, the speaker, who was in a fell paroxysm of the
gout, looked so fiercely at the hinting wooer that Mr. George
Glumford, who was no Achilles, was somewhat frightened, and thought it
expedient to hint no more.
"My brother," said Miss Diana, "is so odd; but he is the most generous
of men: besides, the girl has claims upon him." Upon these speeches
Mr. Glumford thought himself secure; and inly resolving to punish the
fool for her sulkiness and bad taste as soon as he lawfully could, he
continued his daily visits and told his sporting acquaintance that his
time was coming.
Revenons a nos moutons. Forgive this preliminary detail, and let us
return to Mr. Glumford himself, whom we left at the door, pulling and
fumbling at the glove which covered his right hand, in order to
present the naked palm to Miss Diana St. Leger. After this act was
performed, he approached Isabel, and drawing his chair near to her,
proceeded to converse with her as the Ogre did with Puss in Boots;
namely, "as civilly as an Ogre could do."
This penance had not proceeded far, before the door was again opened,
and Mr. Morris Brown presented himself to the conclave.
"Your servant, General; your servant, Madam. I took the liberty of
coming back again, Madam, because I forgot to show you some very fine
silks, the most extraordinary bargain in the world,--quite presents;
and I have a Sevres bowl here, a superb article, from the cabinet of
the late Lady Waddilove."
Now Mr. Brown was a very old acquaintance of Miss Diana St. Leger, for
there is a certain class of old maids with whom our fair readers are
no doubt acquainted, who join to a great love of expense a great love
of bargains, and who never purchase at the regular place if they can
find any irregular vendor. They are great friends of Jews and
itinerants, hand-in-glove with smugglers, Ladies Bountiful to pedlers,
are diligent readers of puffs and advertisements, and eternal haunters
of sales and auctions. Of this class was Miss Diana a most prominent
individual: judge, then, how acceptable to her was the acquaintance of
Mr. Brown. That indefatigable merchant of miscellanies had, indeed,
at a time when brokers were perhaps rather more rare and respectable
than now, a numerous country acquaintance, and thrice a year he
performed a sort of circuit to all his customers and connections;
hence his visit to St. Leger House, and hence Isabel's opportunity of
conveying her epistle.
"Pray," said Mr. Glumford, who had heard much of Mr. Brown's
"presents" from Miss Diana,--"pray don't you furnish rooms, and things
of that sort?"
"Certainly, sir, certainly, in the best manner possible."
"Oh, very well; I shall want some rooms furnished soon,--a bedroom and
a dressing-room, and things of that sort, you know. And so--perhaps
you may have something in your box that will suit me, gloves or
handkerchiefs or shirts or things of that sort."
"Yes, sir, everything, I sell everything," said Mr. Brown, opening his
box. "I beg pardon, Miss Isabel, I have dropped my handkerchief by
your chair; allow me to stoop," and Mr. Brown, stooping under the
table, managed to effect his purpose; unseen by the rest, a note was
slipped into Isabel's hand, and under pretence of stooping too, she
managed to secure the treasure. Love need well be honest if, even
when it is most true, it leads us into so much that is false!
Mr. Brown's box was now unfolded before the eyes of the crafty Mr.
Glumford, who, having selected three pair of gloves, offered the exact
half of the sum demanded.
Mr. Brown lifted up his hands and eyes.
"You see," said the imperturbable Glumford, "that if you let me have
them for that, and they last me well, and don't come unsewn, and stand
cleaning, you'll have my custom in furnishing the house, and rooms,
and--things of that sort."
Struck with the grandeur of this opening, Mr. Brown yielded, and the
gloves were bought.
"The fool!" thought the noble George, laughing in his sleeve, "as if I
should ever furnish the house from his box!" Strange that some men
should be proud of being mean! The moment Isabel escaped to dress for
dinner, she opened her lover's note. It was as follows.--
Be in the room, your retreat, at nine this evening. Let the window be
left unclosed. Precisely at that hour I will be with you. I shall
have everything in readiness for your flight. Be sure, dearest
Isabel, that nothing prevents your meeting me there, even if all your
house follow or attend you. I will bear you from all. Oh, Isabel! in
spite of the mystery and wretchedness of your letter, I feel too
happy, too blest at the thought that our fates will be at length
united, and that the union is at hand. Remember nine.
A. M.
Love is a feeling which has so little to do with the world, a passion
so little regulated by the known laws of our more steady and settled
emotions, that the thoughts which it produces are always more or less
connected with exaggeration and romance. To the secret spirit of
enterprise which, however chilled by his pursuits and habits, still
burned within Mordaunt's breast, there was a wild pleasure in the
thought of bearing off his mistress and his bride from the very home
and hold of her false friends and real foes; while in the
contradictions of the same passion, Isabel, so far from exulting at
her approaching escape, trembled at her danger and blushed for her
temerity; and the fear and the modesty of woman almost triumphed over
her brief energy and fluctuating resolve.
CHAPTER XXVII.
We haste,-the chosen and the lovely bringing;
Love still goes with her from her place of birth;
Deep, silent joy, within her soul is springing,
Though in her glance the light no more is mirth.--Mrs. HEMANS.
"Damn it!" said the General.
"The vile creature!" cried Miss Diana.
"I don't understand things of that sort," ejaculated the bewildered
Mr. Glumford.
"She has certainly gone," said the valiant General.
"Certainly!" grunted Miss Diana.
"Gone!" echoed the bridegroom not to be.
And she was gone! Never did more loving and tender heart forsake all,
and cling to a more loyal and generous nature. The skies were
darkened with clouds,--
"And the dim stars rushed through them rare and fast;"
and the winds wailed with a loud and ominous voice; and the moon came
forth, with a faint and sickly smile, from her chamber in the mist,
and then shrank back, and was seen no more; but neither omen nor fear
was upon Mordaunt's breast, as it swelled beneath the dark locks of
Isabel, which were pressed against it.
As Faith clings the more to the cross of life, while the wastes deepen
around her steps, and the adders creep forth upon her path, so love
clasps that which is its hope and comfort the closer, for the desert
which encompasses and the dangers which harass its way.
They had fled to London, and Isabel had been placed with a very
distant and very poor, though very high-born, relative of Algernon,
till the necessary preliminaries could be passed and the final bond
knit. Yet still the generous Isabel would have refused, despite the
injury to her own fame, to have ratified a union which filled her with
gloomy presentiments for Mordaunt's fate; and still Mordaunt by little
and little broke down her tender scruples and self-immolating
resolves, and ceased not his eloquence and his suit till the day of
his nuptials was set and come.
The morning was bright and clear; the autumn was drawing towards its
close, and seemed willing to leave its last remembrance tinged with
the warmth and softness of its parent summer, rather than with the
stern gloom and severity of its chilling successor.
And they stood beside the altar, and their vows were exchanged. A
slight tremor came over Algernon's frame, a slight shade darkened his
countenance; for even in that bridal hour an icy and thrilling
foreboding curdled to his heart; it passed,--the ceremony was over,
and Mordaunt bore his blushing and weeping bride from the church. His
carriage was in attendance; for, not knowing how long the home of his
ancestors might be his, he was impatient to return to it. The old
Countess d'Arcy, Mordaunt's relation, with whom Isabel had been
staying, called them back to bless them; for, even through the
coldness of old age, she was touched by the singularity of their love
and affected by their nobleness of heart. She laid her wan and
shrivelled hand upon each, as she bade them farewell, and each shrank
back involuntarily, for the cold and light touch seemed like the
fingers of the dead.
Fearful, indeed, is the vicinity of death and life,--the bridal
chamber and the charnel. That night the old woman died. It appeared
as if Fate had set its seal upon the union it had so long forbidden,
and had woven a dark thread even in the marriage-bond. At least, it
tore from two hearts, over which the cloud and the blast lay couched
in a "grim repose," the last shelter, which, however frail and
distant, seemed left to them upon the inhospitable earth.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
Live while ye may, yet happy pair; enjoy
Short pleasures, for long woes are to succeed.--MILTON.
The autumn and the winter passed away; Mordaunt's relation continued
implacable. Algernon grieved for this, independent of worldly
circumstances; for, though he had seldom seen that relation, yet he
loved him for former kindness--rather promised, to be sure, than yet
shown--with the natural warmth of an affection which has but few
objects. However, the old gentleman (a very short, very fat person;
very short and very fat people, when they are surly, are the devil and
all; for the humours of their mind, like those of their body, have
something corrupt and unpurgeable in them) wrote him one bluff,
contemptuous letter, in a witty strain,--for he was a bit of a
humourist,--disowned his connection, and very shortly afterwards died,
and left all his fortune to the very Mr. Vavasour who was at law with
Mordaunt, and for whom he had always openly expressed the strongest
personal dislike: spite to one relation is a marvellous tie to
another. Meanwhile the lawsuit went on less slowly than lawsuits
usually do, and the final decision was very speedily to be given.
We said the autumn and the winter were gone; and it was in one of
those latter days in March, when, like a hoyden girl subsiding into
dawning womanhood, the rude weather mellows into a softer and tenderer
month, that, by the side of a stream, overshadowed by many a brake and
tree, sat two persons.
"I know not, dearest Algernon," said one, who was a female, "if this
is not almost the sweetest month in the year, because it is the month
of Hope."
"Ay, Isabel; and they did it wrong who called it harsh, and dedicated
it to Mars. I exult even in the fresh winds which hardier frames than
mine shrink from, and I love feeling their wild breath fan my cheek as
I ride against it. I remember," continued Algernon, musingly, "that
on this very day three years ago, I was travelling through Germany,
alone and on horseback, and I paused, not far from Ens, on the banks
of the Danube; the waters of the river were disturbed and fierce, and
the winds came loud and angry against my face, dashing the spray of
the waves upon me, and filling my spirit with a buoyant and glad
delight; and at that time I had been indulging old dreams of poetry,
and had laid my philosophy aside; and, in the inspiration of the
moment, I lifted up my hand towards the quarter whence the winds came,
and questioned them audibly of their birthplace and their bourne; and,
as the enthusiasm increased, I compared them to our human life, which
a moment is, and then is not; and, proceeding from folly to folly, I
asked them, as if they were the interpreters of heaven, for a type and
sign of my future lot."
"And what said they?" inquired Isabel, smiling, yet smiling timidly.
"They answered not," replied Mordaunt; "but a voice within me seemed
to say, 'Look above!' and I raised my eyes,--but I did not see thee,
love,--so the Book of Fate lied."
"Nay, Algernon, what did you see?" asked Isabel, more earnestly than
the question deserved.
"I saw a thin cloud, alone amidst many dense and dark ones scattered
around; and as I gazed it seemed to take the likeness of a funeral
procession--coffin, bearers, priests, all--as clear in the cloud as I
have seen them on the earth: and I shuddered as I saw; but the winds
blew the vapour onwards, and it mingled with the broader masses of
cloud; and then, Isabel, the sun shone forth for a moment, and I
mistook, love, when I said you were not there, for that sun was you;
but suddenly the winds ceased, and the rain came on fast and heavy: so
my romance cooled, and my fever slacked; I thought on the inn at Ens,
and the blessings of a wood fire, which is lighted in a moment, and I
spurred on my horse accordingly."
"It is very strange," said Isabel.
"What, love?" whispered Algernon, kissing her cheek.
"Nothing, dearest, nothing."
At that instant, the deer, which lay waving their lordly antlers to
and fro beneath the avenue which sloped upward from the stream to the
house, rose hurriedly and in confusion, and stood gazing, with
watchful eyes, upon a man advancing towards the pair.
It was one of the servants with a letter. Isabel saw a faint change
(which none else could have seen) in Mordaunt's countenance, as he
recognized the writing and broke the seal. When he had read the
letter, his eyes fell upon the ground, and then, with a slight start,
he lifted them up, and gazed long and eagerly around. Wistfully did
he drink, as it were, into his heart the beautiful and expanded scene
which lay stretched on either side; the noble avenue which his
forefathers had planted as a shelter to their sons, and which now in
its majestic growth and its waving boughs seemed to say, "Lo! ye are
repaid!" and the never silent and silver stream, by which his boyhood
had sat for hours, lulled by its music, and inhaling the fragrance of
the reed and wild flower that decoyed the bee to its glossy banks; and
the deer, to whose melancholy belling be had listened so often in the
gray twilight with a rapt and dreaming ear; and the green fern waving
on the gentle hill, from whose shade his young feet had startled the
hare and the infant fawn; and far and faintly gleaming through the
thick trees, which clasped it as with a girdle, the old Hall, so
associated with vague hopes and musing dreams, and the dim legends of
gone time, and the lofty prejudices of ancestral pride,--all seemed to
sink within him, as he gazed, like the last looks of departing
friends; and when Isabel, who had not dared to break a silence which
partook so strongly of gloom, at length laid her hand upon his arm,
and lifted her dark, deep, tender eyes to his, he said, as he drew her
towards him, and a faint and sickly smile played upon his lips,--
"It is past, Isabel: henceforth we have no wealth but in each other.
The cause has been decided--and--and--we are beggars!"
CHAPTER XXIX.
We expose our life to a quotidian ague of frigid impertinences, which
would make a wise man tremble to think of.--COWLEY.
We must suppose a lapse of four years from the date of those events
which concluded the last chapter; and, to recompence the reader, who I
know has a little penchant for "High Life," even in the last century,
for having hitherto shown him human beings in a state of society not
wholly artificial, I beg him to picture to himself a large room,
brilliantly illuminated, and crowded "with the magnates of the land."
Here, some in saltatory motion, some in sedentary rest, are dispersed
various groups of young ladies and attendant swains, talking upon the
subject of Lord Rochester's celebrated poem,--namely, "Nothing!"--and
lounging around the doors, meditating probably upon the same subject,
stand those unhappy victims of dancing daughters, denominated "Papas."
The music has ceased; the dancers have broken up; and there is a
general but gentle sweep towards the refreshment-room. In the crowd--
having just entered--there glided a young man of an air more
distinguished and somewhat more joyous than the rest.
"How do you do, Mr. Linden?" said a tall and (though somewhat passe)
very handsome woman, blazing with diamonds; "are you just come?"
And, here, by the way, I cannot resist pausing to observe that a
friend of mine, meditating a novel, submitted a part of the manuscript
to a friendly publisher. "Sir," said the bookseller, "your book is
very clever, but it wants dialogue."
"Dialogue!" cried my friend: "you mistake; it is all dialogue."
"Ay, sir, but not what we call dialogue; we want a little conversation
in fashionable life,--a little elegant chit-chat or so: and, as you
must have seen so much of the beau monde, you could do it to the life:
we must have something light and witty and entertaining."
"Light, witty, and entertaining!" said our poor friend; "and how the
deuce, then, is it to be like conversation in 'fashionable life'?
When the very best conversation one can get is so insufferably dull,
how do you think people will be amused by reading a copy of the very
worst?"
"They are amused, sir," said the publisher; "and works of this kind
sell!"
"I am convinced," said my friend; for he was a man of a placid temper:
he took the hint, and his book did sell!
Now this anecdote rushed into my mind after the penning of the little
address of the lady in diamonds,--"How do you do, Mr. Linden? Are you
just come?"--and it received an additional weight from my utter
inability to put into the mouth of Mr. Linden--notwithstanding my
desire of representing him in the most brilliant colours--any more
happy and eloquent answer than, "Only this instant!"
However, as this is in the true spirit of elegant dialogue, I trust my
readers find it as light, witty, and entertaining as, according to the
said publisher, the said dialogue is always found by the public.
While Clarence was engaged in talking with this lady, a very pretty,
lively, animated girl, with laughing blue eyes, which, joined to the
dazzling fairness of her complexion, gave a Hebe-like youth to her
features and expression, was led up to the said lady by a tall young
man, and consigned, with the ceremonious bow of the vieille tour, to
her protection.
"Ah, Mr. Linden," cried the young lady, "I am very glad to see you,--
such a beautiful ball!--Everybody here that I most like. Have you had
any refreshments, Mamma? But I need not ask, for I am sure you have
not; do come, Mr. Linden will be our cavalier."
"Well, Flora, as you please," said the elderly lady, with a proud and
fond look at her beautiful daughter; and they proceeded to the
refreshment-room.
No sooner were they seated at one of the tables, than they were
accosted by Lord St. George, a nobleman whom Clarence, before he left
England, had met more than once at Mr. Talbot's.
"London," said his lordship to her of the diamonds, "has not seemed
like the same place since Lady Westborough arrived; your presence
brings out all the other luminaries: and therefore a young
acquaintance of mine--God bless me, there he is, seated by Lady Flora--
very justly called you the 'evening star.'"
"Was that Mr. Linden's pretty saying?" said Lady Westborough, smiling.
"It was," answered Lord St. George; "and, by the by, he is a very
sensible, pleasant person, and greatly improved since he left England
last."
"What!" said Lady Westborough, in a low tone (for Clarence, though in
earnest conversation with Lady Flora, was within hearing), and making
room for Lord St. George beside her, "what! did you know him before he
went to ----? You can probably tell me, then, who--that is to say--
what family he is exactly of--the Lindens of Devonshire, or--or--"
"Why, really," said Lord St. George, a little confused, for no man
likes to be acquainted with persons whose pedigree he cannot explain,
"I don't know what may be his family: I met him at Talbot's four or
five years ago; he was then a mere boy, but he struck me as being very
clever, and Talbot since told me that he was a nephew of his own."
"Talbot," said Lady Westborough, musingly, "what Talbot?"
"Oh! the Talbot--the ci-devant jeune homme!"
"What, that charming, clever, animated old gentleman, who used to
dress so oddly, and had been so celebrated a beau garcon in his day?"
"Exactly so," said Lord St. George, taking snuff, and delighted to
find he had set his young acquaintance on so honourable a footing.
"I did not know he was still alive," said Lady Westborough, and then,
turning her eyes towards Clarence and her daughter, she added
carelessly, "Mr. Talbot is very rich, is he not?"
"Rich as Croesus," replied Lord St. George, with a sigh.
"And Mr. Linden is his heir, I suppose?"
"In all probability," answered Lord St. George; "though I believe I
can boast a distant relationship to Talbot. However, I could not make
him fully understand it the other day, though I took particular pains
to explain it."
While this conversation was going on between the Marchioness of
Westborough and Lord St. George, a dialogue equally interesting to the
parties concerned, and I hope, equally light, witty, and entertaining
to readers in general, was sustained between Clarence and Lady Flora.
"How long shall you stay in England?" asked the latter, looking down.
"I have not yet been able to decide," replied Clarence, "for it rests
with the ministers, not me. Directly Lord Aspeden obtains another
appointment, I am promised the office of Secretary of Legation; but
till then, I am--
"'A captive in Augusta's towers
To beauty and her train.'"
"Oh!" cried Lady Flora, laughing, "you mean Mrs. Desborough and her
train: see where they sweep! Pray go and render her homage."
"It is rendered," said Linden, in a low voice, "without so long a
pilgrimage, but perhaps despised."
Lady Flora's laugh was hushed; the deepest blushes suffused her
cheeks, and the whole character of that face, before so playful and
joyous, seemed changed, as by a spell, into a grave, subdued, and even
timid look.
Linden resumed, and his voice scarcely rose above a whisper. A
whisper! O delicate and fairy sound! music that speaketh to the
heart, as if loth to break the spell that binds it while it listens!
Sigh breathed into words, and freighting love in tones languid, like
homeward bees, by the very sweets with which they are charged! "Do
you remember," said he, "that evening at ---- when we last parted? and
the boldness which at that time you were gentle enough to forgive?"
Lady Flora replied not.
"And do you remember," continued Clarence, "that I told you that it
was not as an unknown and obscure adventurer that I would claim the
hand of her whose heart as an adventurer I had won?"
Lady Flora raised her eyes for one moment, and encountering the ardent
gaze of Clarence, as instantly dropped them.
"The time is not yet come," said Linden, "for the fulfilment of this
promise; but may I--dare I hope, that when it does, I shall not be--"
"Flora, my love," said Lady Westborough, "let me introduce to you Lord
Borodaile."
Lady Flora turned: the spell was broken; and the lovers were instantly
transformed into ordinary mortals. But, as Flora, after returning
Lord Borodaile's address, glanced her eye towards Clarence, she was
struck with the sudden and singular change of his countenance; the
flush of youth and passion was fled, his complexion was deadly pale,
and his eyes were fixed with a searching and unaccountable meaning
upon the face of the young nobleman, who was alternately addressing,
with a quiet and somewhat haughty fluency, the beautiful mother, and
the more lovely though less commanding daughter. Directly Linden
perceived that he was observed, he rose, turned away, and was soon
lost among the crowd.
Lord Borodaile, the son and heir of the powerful Earl of Ulswater, was
about the age of thirty, small, slight, and rather handsome than
otherwise, though his complexion was dark and sallow; and a very
aquiline nose gave a stern and somewhat severe air to his countenance.
He had been for several years abroad, in various parts of the
Continent, and (no other field for an adventurous and fierce spirit
presenting itself) had served with the gallant Earl of Effingham, in
the war between the Turks and Russians, as a volunteer in the armies
of the latter. In this service he had been highly distinguished for
courage and conduct; and, on his return to England about a twelvemonth
since, had obtained the command of a cavalry regiment. Passionately
fond of his profession, he entered into its minutest duties with a
zeal not exceeded by the youngest and poorest subaltern in the army.
His manners were very cold, haughty, collected, and self-possessed,
and his conversation that of a man who has cultivated his intellect
rather in the world than the closet. I mean, that, perfectly ignorant
of things, he was driven to converse solely upon persons, and, having
imbibed no other philosophy than that which worldly deceits and
disappointments bestow, his remarks, though shrewd, were bitterly
sarcastic, and partook of all the ill-nature for which a very scanty
knowledge of the world gives a sour and malevolent mind so ready an
excuse.
"How very disagreeable Lord Borodaile is!" said Lady Flora, when the
object of the remark turned away and rejoined some idlers of his
corps.
"Disagreeable!" said Lady Westborough. "I think him charming: he is
so sensible. How true his remarks on the world are!"
Thus is it always; the young judge harshly of those who undeceive or
revolt their enthusiasm; and the more advanced in years, who have not
learned by a diviner wisdom to look upon the human follies and errors
by which they have suffered with a pitying and lenient eye, consider
every maxim of severity on those frailties as the proof of a superior
knowledge, and praise that as a profundity of thought which in reality
is but an infirmity of temper.
Clarence is now engaged in a minuet de la tour with the beautiful
Countess of ----, the best dancer of the day in England. Lady Flora
is flirting with half a dozen beaux, the more violently in proportion
as she observes the animation with which Clarence converses, and the
grace with which his partner moves; and, having thus left our two
principal personages occupied and engaged, let us turn for a moment to
a room which we have not entered.
This is a forlorn, deserted chamber, destined to cards, which are
never played in this temple of Terpsichore. At the far end of this
room, opposite to the fireplace, are seated four men, engaged in
earnest conversation.
The tallest of these was Lord Quintown, a nobleman remarkable at that
day for his personal advantages, his good fortune with the beau sexe,
his attempts at parliamentary eloquence, in which he was lamentably
unsuccessful, and his adherence to Lord North. Next to him sat Mr.
St. George, the younger brother of Lord St. George, a gentleman to
whom power and place seemed married without hope of divorce; for,
whatever had been the changes of ministry for the last twelve years,
he, secure in a lucrative though subordinate situation, had "smiled at
the whirlwind and defied the storm," and, while all things shifted and
vanished round him, like clouds and vapours, had remained fixed and
stationary as a star. "Solid St. George," was his appellative by his
friends, and his enemies did not grudge him the title. The third was
the minister for ----; and the fourth was Clarence's friend, Lord
Aspeden. Now this nobleman, blessed with a benevolent, smooth, calm
countenance, valued himself especially upon his diplomatic elegance in
turning a compliment.
Having a great taste for literature as well as diplomacy, this
respected and respectable peer also possessed a curious felicity for
applying quotation; and nothing rejoiced him so much as when, in the
same phrase, he was enabled to set the two jewels of his courtliness
of flattery and his profundity of erudition. Unhappily enough, his
compliments were seldom as well taken as they were meant; and, whether
from the ingratitude of the persons complimented or the ill fortune of
the noble adulator, seemed sometimes to produce indignation in place
of delight. It has been said that his civilities had cost Lord
Aspeden four duels and one beating; but these reports were probably
the malicious invention of those who had never tasted the delicacies
of his flattery.
Now these four persons being all members of the Privy Council, and
being thus engaged in close and earnest conference were, you will
suppose, employed in discussing their gravities and secrets of state:
no such thing; that whisper from Lord Quintown, the handsome nobleman,
to Mr. St. George, is no hoarded and valuable information which would
rejoice the heart of the editor of an Opposition paper, no direful
murmur, "perplexing monarchs with the dread of change;" it is only a
recent piece of scandal, touching the virtue of a lady of the court,
which (albeit the sage listener seems to pay so devout an attention to
the news) is far more interesting to the gallant and handsome
informant than to his brother statesman; and that emphatic and
vehement tone with which Lord Aspeden is assuring the minister for
---- of some fact, is merely an angry denunciation of the chicanery
practised at the last Newmarket.
"By the by, Aspeden," said Lord Quintown, "who is that good-looking
fellow always flirting with Lady Flora Ardenne,--an attache of yours,
is he not?"
"Oh! Linden, I suppose you mean. A very sensible, clever young
fellow, who has a great genius for business and plays the flute
admirably. I must have him for my secretary, my dear lord, mind
that."
"With such a recommendation, Lord Aspeden," said the minister, with a
bow, "the state would be a great loser did it not elect your attache,
who plays so admirably on the flute, to the office of your secretary.
Let us join the dancers."
"I shall go and talk with Count B----," quoth Mr. St. George.
"And I shall make my court to his beautiful wife," said the minister,
sauntering into the ballroom, to which his fine person and graceful
manners were much better adapted than was his genius to the cabinet or
his eloquence to the senate.
The morning had long dawned, and Clarence, for whose mind pleasure was
more fatiguing than business, lingered near the door, to catch one
last look of Lady Flora before he retired. He saw her leaning on the
arm of Lord Borodaile, and hastening to join the dancers with her
usual light step and laughing air; for Clarence's short conference
with her had, in spite of his subsequent flirtations, rendered her
happier than she had ever felt before. Again a change passed over
Clarence's countenance,--a change which I find it difficult to express
without borrowing from those celebrated German dramatists who could
portray in such exact colours "a look of mingled joy, sorrow, hope,
passion, rapture, and despair;" for the look was not that of jealousy
alone, although it certainly partook of its nature, but a little also
of interest, and a little of sorrow; and when he turned away, and
slowly descended the stairs, his eyes were full of tears, and his
thoughts far--far away;--whither?
CHAPTER XXX.
Quae fert adolescentia
Ea ne me celet consuefeci filium.--TERENCE.
["The things which youth proposes I accustomed
my son that he should never conceal from me."]
The next morning Clarence was lounging over his breakfast, and
glancing listlessly now at the pages of the newspapers, now at the
various engagements for the week, which lay confusedly upon his table,
when he received a note from Talbot, requesting to see him as soon as
possible.
"Had it not been for that man," said Clarence to himself, "what should
I have been now? But, at least, I have not disgraced his friendship.
I have already ascended the roughest because the lowest steps on the
hill where Fortune builds her temple. I have already won for the name
I have chosen some 'golden opinions' to gild its obscurity. One year
more may confirm my destiny and ripen hope into success: then--then, I
may perhaps throw off a disguise that, while it befriended, has not
degraded me, and avow myself to her! Yet how much better to dignify
the name I have assumed than to owe respect only to that which I have
not been deemed worthy to inherit! Well, well, these are bitter
thoughts; let me turn to others. How beautiful Flora looked last
night! and, he--he--but enough of this: I must dress, and then to
Talbot."
Muttering these wayward fancies, Clarence rose, completed his toilet,
sent for his horses, and repaired to a village about seven miles from
London, where Talbot, having yielded to Clarence's fears and
solicitations, and left his former insecure tenement, now resided
under the guard and care of an especial and private watchman.
It was a pretty, quiet villa, surrounded by a plantation and pleasure-
ground of some extent for a suburban residence, in which the old
philosopher (for though in some respects still frail and prejudiced,
Talbot deserved that name) held his home. The ancient servant, on
whom four years had passed lightly and favouringly, opened the door to
Clarence, with his usual smile of greeting and familiar yet respectful
salutation, and ushered our hero into a room, furnished with the usual
fastidious and rather feminine luxury which characterized Talbot's
tastes. Sitting with his back turned to the light, in a large easy-
chair, Clarence found the wreck of the once gallant, gay Lothario.
There was not much alteration in his countenance since we last saw
him; the lines, it is true, were a little more decided, and the cheeks
a little more sunken; but the dark eye beamed with all its wonted
vivacity, and the delicate contour of the mouth preserved all its
physiognomical characteristics of the inward man. He rose with
somewhat more difficulty than he was formerly wont to do, and his
limbs had lost much of their symmetrical proportions; yet the kind
clasp of his hand was as firm and warm as when it had pressed that of
the boyish attache four years since; and the voice which expressed his
salutation yet breathed its unconquered suavity and distinctness of
modulation. After the customary greetings and inquiries were given
and returned, the young man drew his chair near to Talbot's, and
said,--
"You sent for me, dear sir; have you anything more important than
usual to impart to me?--or--and I hope this is the case--have you at
last thought of any commission, however trifling, in the execution of
which I can be of use?"
"Yes, Clarence, I wish your judgment to select me some strawberries,--
you know that I am a great epicure in fruit,--and get me the new work
Dr. Johnson has just published. There, are you contented? And now,
tell me all about your horse; does he step well? Has he the true
English head and shoulder? Are his legs fine, yet strong? Is he full
of spirit and devoid of vice?"
"He is all this, sir, thanks to you for him."
"Ah!" cried Talbot,--
"'Old as I am, for riding feats unfit,
The shape of horses I remember yet'"
"And now let us hear how you like Ranelagh; and above all how you liked
the ball last night."
And the vivacious old man listened with the profoundest appearance of
interest to all the particulars of Clarence's animated detail. His
vanity, which made him wish to be loved, had long since taught him the
surest method of becoming so; and with him, every visitor, old, young,
the man of books, or the disciple of the world, was sure to find the
readiest and even eagerest sympathy in every amusement or occupation.
But for Clarence, this interest lay deeper than in the surface of
courtly breeding. Gratitude had first bound to him his adopted son,
then a tie yet unexplained, and lastly, but not least, the pride of
protection. He was vain of the personal and mental attractions of his
protege, and eager for the success of one whose honours would reflect
credit on himself.
But there was one part of Clarence's account of the last night to
which the philosopher paid a still deeper attention, and on which he
was more minute in his advice; what this was, I cannot, as yet, reveal
to the reader.
The conversation then turned on light and general matters,--the
scandal, the literature, the politics, the on dits of the day; and
lastly upon women; thence Talbot dropped into his office of Mentor.
"A celebrated cardinal said, very wisely, that few ever did anything
among men until women were no longer an object to them. That is the
reason, by the by, why I never succeeded with the former, and why
people seldom acquire any reputation, except for a hat, or a horse,
till they marry. Look round at the various occupations of life. How
few bachelors are eminent in any of them! So you see, Clarence, you
will have my leave to marry Lady Flora as soon as you please."
Clarence coloured, and rose to depart. Talbot followed him to the
door, and then said, in a careless way, "By the by, I had almost
forgotten to tell you that, as you have now many new expenses, you
will find the yearly sum you have hitherto received doubled. To give
you this information is the chief reason why I sent for you this
morning. God bless you, my dear boy."
And Talbot shut the door, despite his politeness, in the face and
thanks of his adopted son.
CHAPTER XXXI.
There is a great difference between seeking to raise a laugh from
everything, and seeking in everything what justly may be laughed at.
LORD SHAFTESBURY.
Behold our hero, now in the zenith of distinguished dissipations!
Courteous, attentive, and animated, the women did not esteem him the
less for admiring them rather than himself; while, by the gravity of
his demeanour to men,--the eloquent, yet unpretending flow of his
conversation, whenever topics of intellectual interest were discussed,
the plain and solid sense which he threw into his remarks, and the
avidity with which he courted the society of all distinguished for
literary or political eminence,--he was silently but surely
establishing himself in esteem as well as popularity, and laying the
certain foundation of future honour and success.
Thus, although he had only been four months returned to England, he
was already known and courted in every circle, and universally spoken
of as among "the most rising young gentlemen" whom fortune and the
administration had marked for their own. His history, during the four
years in which we have lost sight of him, is briefly told.
He soon won his way into the good graces of Lord Aspeden; became his
private secretary and occasionally his confidant. Universally admired
for his attraction of form and manner, and, though aiming at
reputation, not averse to pleasure, he had that position which fashion
confers at the court of ----, when Lady Westborough and her beautiful
daughter, then only seventeen, came to ----, in the progress of a
Continental tour, about a year before his return to England. Clarence
and Lady Flora were naturally brought much together in the restricted
circle of a small court, and intimacy soon ripened into attachment.
Lord Aspeden being recalled, Clarence accompanied him to England; and
the ex-minister, really liking much one who was so useful to him, had
faithfully promised to procure him the office and honour of secretary
whenever his lordship should be reappointed minister.
Three intimate acquaintances had Clarence Linden. The one was the
Honourable Henry Trollolop, the second Mr. Callythorpe, and the third
Sir Christopher Findlater. We will sketch them to you in an instant.
Mr. Trollolop was a short, stout gentleman, with a very thoughtful
countenance,-that is to say, he wore spectacles and took snuff.
Mr. Trollolop--we delight in pronouncing that soft liquid name--was
eminently distinguished by a love of metaphysics,--metaphysics were in
a great measure the order of the day; but Fate had endowed Mr.
Trollolop with a singular and felicitous confusion of idea. Reid,
Berkeley, Cudworth, Hobbes, all lay jumbled together in most edifying
chaos at the bottom of Mr. Trollolop's capacious mind; and whenever he
opened his mouth, the imprisoned enemies came rushing and scrambling
out, overturning and contradicting each other in a manner quite
astounding to the ignorant spectator. Mr. Callythorpe was meagre,
thin, sharp, and yellow. Whether from having a great propensity for
nailing stray acquaintances, or being particularly heavy company, or
from any other cause better known to the wits of the period than to
us, he was occasionally termed by his friends the "yellow hammer."
The peculiar characteristics of this gentleman were his sincerity and
friendship. These qualities led him into saying things the most
disagreeable, with the civilest and coolest manner in the world,--
always prefacing them with, "You know, my dear so-and-so, I am your
true friend." If this proof of amity was now and then productive of
altercation, Mr. Callythorpe, who was ha great patriot, had another and
a nobler plea,--"Sir," he would say, putting his hand to his heart,--
"sir, I'm an Englishman: I know not what it is to feign." Of a very
different stamp was Sir Christopher Findlater. Little cared he for
the subtleties of the human mind, and not much more for the
disagreeable duties of "an Englishman." Honest and jovial, red in the
cheeks, empty in the head, born to twelve thousand a year, educated in
the country, and heir to an earldom, Sir Christopher Findlater piqued
himself, notwithstanding his worldly advantages, usually so
destructive to the kindlier affections, on having the best heart in
the world, and this good heart, having a very bad head to regulate and
support it, was the perpetual cause of error to the owner and evil to
the public.
One evening, when Clarence was alone in his rooms, Mr. Trollolop
entered.
"My dear Linden," said the visitor, "how are you?"
"I am, as I hope you are, very well," answered Clarence.
"The human mind," said Trollolop, taking off his greatcoat,--
"Sir Christopher Findlater and Mr. Callythorpe, sir," said the valet.
"Pshaw! What has Sir Christopher Findlater to do with the human mind?"
muttered Mr. Trollolop.
Sir Christopher entered with a swagger and a laugh. "Well, old
fellow, how do you do? Deuced cold this evening."
"Though it is an evening in May," observed Clarence; "but then, this
cursed climate."
"Climate!" interrupted Mr. Callythorpe, "it is the best climate in the
world: I am an Englishman, and I never abuse my country."
"'England, with all thy faults, I love thee still!'"
"As to climate," said Trollolop, "there is no climate, neither here
nor elsewhere: the climate is in your mind, the chair is in your mind,
and the table too, though I dare say you are stupid enough to think
the two latter are in the room; the human mind, my dear Findlater--"
"Don't mind me, Trollolop," cried the baronet, "I can't bear your
clever heads: give me a good heart; that's worth all the heads in the
world; d--n me if it is not! Eh, Linden?"
"Your good heart," cried Trollolop, in a passion (for all your self-
called philosophers are a little choleric), "your good heart is all
cant and nonsense: there is no heart at all; we are all mind."
"I be hanged if I'm all mind," said the baronet.
"At least," quoth Linden, gravely, "no one ever accused you of it
before."
"We are all mind," pursued the reasoner; "we are all mind, un moulin a
raisonnement. Our ideas are derived from two sources, sensation or
memory. That neither our thoughts nor passions, nor our ideas formed
by the imagination, exist without the mind, everybody will allow;
[Berkeley, Sect. iii., "Principles of Human Knowledge."] therefore,
you see, the human mind is--in short, there is nothing in the world
but the human mind!"
"Nothing could be better demonstrated," said Clarence.
"I don't believe it," quoth the baronet.
"But you do believe it, and you must believe it," cried Trollolop;
"for 'the Supreme Being has implanted within us the principle of
credulity,' and therefore you do believe it!"
"But I don't," cried Sir Christopher.
"You are mistaken," replied the metaphysician, calmly; "because I must
speak truth."
"Why must you, pray?" said the baronet.
"Because," answered Trollolop, taking snuff, "there is a principle of
veracity implanted in our nature."
"I wish I were a metaphysician," said Clarence, with a sigh.
"I am glad to hear you say so; for you know, my dear Linden," said
Callythorpe, "that I am your true friend, and I must therefore tell
you that you are shamefully ignorant. You are not offended?"
"Not at all!" said Clarence, trying to smile.
"And you, my dear Findlater" (turning to the baronet), "you know that
I wish you well; you know that I never flatter; I'm your real friend,
so you must not be angry; but you really are not considered a
Solomon."
"Mr. Callythorpe!" exclaimed the baronet in a rage (the best-hearted
people can't always bear truth), "what do you mean?"
"You must not be angry, my good sir; you must not, really. I can't
help telling you of your faults; for I am a true Briton, sir, a true
Briton, and leave lying to slaves and Frenchmen."
"You are in an error," said Trollolop; "Frenchmen don't lie, at least
not naturally, for in the human mind, as I before said, the Divine
Author has implanted a principle of veracity which--"
"My dear sir," interrupted Callythorpe, very affectionately, "you
remind me of what people say of you."
"Memory may be reduced to sensation, since it is only a weaker
sensation," quoth Trollolop; "but proceed."
"You know, Trollolop," said Callythorpe, in a singularly endearing
intonation of voice, "you know that I never flatter; flattery is
unbecoming a true friend,--nay, more, it is unbecoming a native of our
happy isles, and people do say of you that you know nothing
whatsoever, no, not an iota, of all that nonsensical, worthless
philosophy of which you are always talking. Lord St. George said the
other day 'that you were very conceited.'--'No, not conceited,'
replied Dr. ----, 'only ignorant;' so if I were you, Trollolop, I
would cut metaphysics; you're not offended?"
"By no means," cried Trollolop, foaming at the mouth.
"For my part," said the good-hearted Sir Christopher, whose wrath had
now subsided, rubbing his hands,--"for my part, I see no good in any
of those things: I never read--never--and I don't see how I'm a bit
the worse for it. A good man, Linden, in my opinion, only wants to do
his duty, and that is very easily done."
"A good man; and what is good?" cried the metaphysician, triumphantly.
"Is it implanted within us? Hobbes, according to Reid, who is our
last, and consequently best, philosopher, endeavours to demonstrate
that there is no difference between right and wrong."
"I have no idea of what you mean," cried Sir Christopher.
"Idea!" exclaimed the pious philosopher. "Sir, give me leave to tell
you that no solid proof has ever been advanced of the existence of
ideas: they are a mere fiction and hypothesis. Nay, sir, 'hence
arises that scepticism which disgraces our philosophy of the mind.'
Ideas!--Findlater, you are a sceptic and an idealist."
"I?" cried the affrighted baronet; "upon my honour I am no such thing.
Everybody knows that I am a Christian, and--"
"Ah!" interrupted Callythorpe, with a solemn look, "everybody knows
that you are not one of those horrid persons,--those atrocious deists
and atheists and sceptics, from whom the Church and freedom of old
England have suffered such danger. I am a true Briton of the good old
school; and I confess, Mr. Trollolop, that I do not like to hear any
opinions but the right ones."
"Right ones being only those which Mr. Callythorpe professes," said
Clarence.
"Exactly so!" rejoined Mr. Callythorpe.
"The human mind," commenced Mr. Trollolop, stirring the fire; when
Clarence, who began to be somewhat tired of this conversation, rose.
"You will excuse me," said he, "but I am particularly engaged, and it
is time to dress. Harrison will get you tea or whatever else you are
inclined for."
"The human mind," renewed Trollolop, not heeding the interruption; and
Clarence forthwith left the room.
CHAPTER XXXII.
You blame Marcius for being proud.--Coriolanus.
Here is another fellow, a marvellous pretty hand at fashioning a
compliment.-The Tanner of Tyburn.
There was a brilliant ball at Lady T----'s, a personage who, every one
knows, did in the year 17-- give the best balls, and have the best-
dressed people at them, in London. It was about half-past twelve,
when Clarence, released from his three friends, arrived at the
countess's. When he entered, the first thing which struck him was
Lord Borodaile in close conversation with Lady Flora.
Clarence paused for a few moments, and then, sauntering towards them,
caught Flora's eye,--coloured, and advanced. Now, if there was a
haughty man in Europe, it was Lord Borodaile. He was not proud of his
birth, nor fortune, but he was proud of himself; and, next to that
pride, he was proud of being a gentleman. He had an exceeding horror
of all common people; a Claverhouse sort of supreme contempt to
"puddle blood;" his lip seemed to wear scorn as a garment; a lofty and
stern self-admiration, rather than self-love, sat upon his forehead as
on a throne. He had, as it were, an awe of himself; his thoughts were
so many mirrors of Viscount Borodaile dressed en dieu. His mind was a
little Versailles, in which self sat like Louis XIV., and saw nothing
but pictures of its self, sometimes as Jupiter and sometimes as Apollo.
What marvel then, that Lord Borodaile was a very unpleasant companion?
for every human being he had "something of contempt." His eye was
always eloquent in disdaining; to the plebeian it said, "You are not a
gentleman;" to the prince, "You are not Lord Borodaile."
Yet, with all this, he had his good points. He was brave as a lion;
strictly honourable; and though very ignorant, and very self-
sufficient, had that sort of dogged good sense which one very often
finds in men of stern hearts, who, if they have many prejudices, have
little feeling, to overcome.
Very stiffly and very haughtily did Lord Borodaile draw up, when
Clarence approached and addressed Lady Flora; much more stiffly and
much more haughtily did he return, though with old-fashioned precision
of courtesy, Clarence's bow, when Lady Westborough introduced them to
each other. Not that this hauteur was intended as a particular
affront: it was only the agreeability of his lordship's general
manner.
"Are you engaged?" said Clarence to Flora.
"I am, at present, to Lord Borodaile."
"After him, may I hope?"
Lady Flora nodded assent, and disappeared with Lord Borodaile.
His Royal Highness the Duke of ---- came up to Lady Westborough; and
Clarence, with a smiling countenance and an absent heart, plunged into
the crowd. There he met Lord Aspeden, in conversation with the Earl
of Holdenworth, one of the administration.
"Ah, Linden," said the diplomatist, "let me introduce you to Lord
Holdenworth,--a clever young man, my dear lord, and plays the flute
beautifully." With this eulogium, Lord Aspeden glided away; and Lord
Holdenworth, after some conversation with Linden, honoured him by an
invitation to dinner the next day.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
'T is true his nature may with faults abound;
But who will cavil when the heart is sound?--STEPHEN MONTAGUE.
Dum vitant stulti vitia, in contraria currant.-HORACE.
["The foolish while avoiding vice run into the opposite
extremes."]
The next day Sir Christopher Findlater called on Clarence. "Let us
lounge in the park," said he.
"With pleasure," replied Clarence; and into the park they lounged.
By the way they met a crowd, who were hurrying a man to prison. The
good-hearted Sir Christopher stopped: "Who is that poor fellow?" said
he.
"It is the celebrated" (in England all criminals are celebrated.
Thurtell was a hero, Thistlewood a patriot, and Fauntleroy was
discovered to be exactly like Buonaparte!) "it is the celebrated
robber, John Jefferies, who broke into Mrs. Wilson's house, and cut
the throats of herself and her husband, wounded the maid-servant, and
split the child's skull with the poker." Clarence pressed forward: "I
have seen that man before," thought he. He looked again, and
recognized the face of the robber who had escaped from Talbot's house
on the eventful night which had made Clarence's fortune. It was a
strongly-marked and rather handsome countenance, which would not be
easily forgotten; and a single circumstance of excitement will stamp
features on the memory as deeply as the commonplace intercourse of
years.
"John Jefferies!" exclaimed the baronet; "let us come away."
"Linden," continued Sir Christopher, "that fellow was my servant once.
He robbed me to some considerable extent. I caught him. He appealed
to my heart; and you know, my dear fellow, that was irresistible, so I
let him off. Who could have thought he would have turned out so?"
And the baronet proceeded to eulogize his own good-nature, by which it
is just necessary to remark that one miscreant had been saved for a
few years from transportation, in order to rob and murder ad libitum,
and, having fulfilled the office of a common pest, to suffer on the
gallows at last. What a fine thing it is to have a good heart! Both
our gentlemen now sank into a revery, from which they were awakened,
at the entrance of the park, by a young man in rags who, with a
piteous tone, supplicated charity. Clarence, who, to his honour be it
spoken, spent an allotted and considerable part of his income in
judicious and laborious benevolence, had read a little of political
morals, then beginning to be understood, and walked on. The good-
hearted baronet put his hand in his pocket, and gave the beggar half a
guinea, by which a young, strong man, who had only just commenced the
trade, was confirmed in his imposition for the rest of his life; and,
instead of the useful support, became the pernicious incumbrance of
society.
Sir Christopher had now recovered his spirits. "What's like a good
action?" said he to Clarence, with a swelling breast.
The park was crowded to excess; our loungers were joined by Lord St.
George. His lordship was a stanch Tory. He could not endure Wilkes,
liberty, or general education. He launched out against the
enlightenment of domestics. [The ancestors of our present footmen, if
we may believe Sir William Temple, seem to have been to the full as
intellectual as their descendants. "I have had," observes the
philosophic statesman, "several servants far gone in divinity, others
in poetry; have known, in the families of some friends; a keeper deep
in the Rosicrucian mysteries and a laundress firm in those of
Epicurus."]
"What has made you so bitter?" said Sir Christopher.
"My valet," cried Lord St. George,--"he has invented a new toasting-
fork, is going to take out a patent, make his fortune, and leave me;
that's what I call ingratitude, Sir Christopher; for I ordered his
wages to be raised five pounds but last year."
"It was very ungrateful," said the ironical Clarence.
"Very!" reiterated the good-hearted Sir Christopher.
"You cannot recommend me a valet, Findlater," renewed his lordship, "a
good, honest, sensible fellow, who can neither read nor write?"
"N-o-o,--that is to say, yes! I can; my old servant Collard is out of
place, and is as ignorant as--as--"
"I--or you are?" said Lord St. George, with a laugh.
"Precisely," replied the baronet.
"Well, then, I take your recommendation: send him to me to-morrow at
twelve."
"I will," said Sir Christopher.
"My dear Findlater," cried Clarence, when Lord St. George was gone,
"did you not tell me, some time ago, that Collard was a great rascal,
and very intimate with Jefferies? and now you recommend him to Lord
St. George!"
"Hush, hush, hush!" said the baronet; "he was a great rogue to be
sure: but, poor fellow, he came to me yesterday with tears in his
eyes, and said he should starve if I would not give him a character;
so what could I do?"
"At least, tell Lord St. George the truth," observed Clarence.
"But then Lord St. George would not take him!" rejoined the good-
hearted Sir Christopher, with forcible naivete. "No, no, Linden, we
must not be so hard-hearted; we must forgive and forget;" and so
saying, the baronet threw out his chest, with the conscious exultation
of a man who has uttered a noble sentiment. The moral of this little
history is that Lord St. George, having been pillaged "through thick
and thin," as the proverb has it, for two years, at last missed a gold
watch, and Monsieur Collard finished his career as his exemplary
tutor, Mr. John Jefferies, had done before him. Ah! what a fine thing
it is to have a good heart!
But to return. Just as our wanderers had arrived at the farther end
of the park, Lady Westborough and her daughter passed them. Clarence,
excusing himself to his friend, hastened towards them, and was soon
occupied in saying the prettiest things in the world to the prettiest
person, at least in his eyes; while Sir Christopher, having done as
much mischief as a good heart well can do in a walk of an hour,
returned home to write a long letter to his mother, against "learning
and all such nonsense, which only served to blunt the affections and
harden the heart."
"Admirable young man!" cried the mother, with tears in her eyes. "A
good heart is better than all the heads in the world."
Amen!
CHAPTER XXXIV.
"Make way, Sir Geoffrey Peveril, or you will compel me to do that I
may be sorry for!"
"You shall make no way here but at your peril," said Sir Geoffrey;"
this is my ground."--Peveril of the Peak.
One night on returning home from a party at Lady Westborough's in
Hanover Square, Clarence observed a man before him walking with an
uneven and agitated step. His right hand was clenched, and he
frequently raised it as with a sudden impulse, and struck fiercely as
if at some imagined enemy.
The stranger slackened his pace. Clarence passed him, and, turning
round to satisfy the idle curiosity which the man's eccentric gestures
had provoked, his eye met a dark, lowering, iron countenance, which,
despite the lapse of four years, he recognized on the moment: it was
Wolfe, the republican.
Clarence moved, involuntarily, with a quicker step; but in a few
minutes, Wolfe, who was vehemently talking to himself, once more
passed him; the direction he took was also Clarence's way homeward,
and he therefore followed the republican, though at some slight
distance, and on the opposite side of the way. A gentleman on foot,
apparently returning from a party, met Wolfe, and, with an air half
haughty, half unconscious, took the wall; though, according to old-
fashioned rules of street courtesy, he was on the wrong side for
asserting the claim. The stern republican started, drew himself up to
his full height, and sturdily and doggedly placed himself directly in
the way of the unjust claimant. Clarence was now nearly opposite to
the two, and saw all that was going on.
With a motion a little rude and very contemptuous, the passenger
attempted to put Wolfe aside, and win his path. Little did he know of
the unyielding nature he had to do with; the next instant the
republican, with a strong hand, forced him from the pavement into the
very kennel, and silently and coldly continued his way.
The wrath of the discomfited passenger was vehemently kindled.
"Insolent dog!" cried he, in a loud and arrogant tone, "your baseness
is your protection." Wolfe turned rapidly, and made but two strides
before he was once more by the side of his defeated opponent.
"What did you say?" he asked, in his low, deep, hoarse voice.
Clarence stopped. "There will be mischief done here," thought he, as
he called to mind the stern temper of the republican.
"Merely," said the other, struggling with his rage, "that it is not
for men of my rank to avenge the insults offered us by those of
yours!"
"Your rank!" said Wolfe, bitterly retorting the contempt of the
stranger, in a tone of the loftiest disdain; "your rank! poor
changeling! And what are you, that you should lord it over me? Are
your limbs stronger? your muscles firmer? your proportions juster?
your mind acuter? your conscience clearer? Fool! fool! go home and
measure yourself with lackeys!"
The republican ceased, and pushing the stranger aside, turned slowly
away. But this last insult enraged the passenger beyond all prudence.
Before Wolfe had proceeded two paces, he muttered a desperate but
brief oath, and struck the reformer with a strength so much beyond
what his figure (which was small and slight) appeared to possess, that
the powerful and gaunt frame of Wolfe recoiled backward several steps,
and, had it not been for the iron railing of the neighbouring area,
would have fallen to the ground.
Clarence pressed forward: the face of the rash aggressor was turned
towards him; the features were Lord Borodaile's. He had scarcely time
to make this discovery, before Wolfe had recovered himself. With a
wild and savage cry, rather than exclamation, he threw himself upon
his antagonist, twined his sinewy arms round the frame of the
struggling but powerless nobleman, raised him in the air with the easy
strength of a man lifting a child, held him aloft for one moment with
a bitter and scornful laugh of wrathful derision, and then dashed him
to the ground, and planting his foot upon Borodaile's breast said,--
"So shall it be with all of you: there shall be but one instant
between your last offence and your first but final debasement. Lie
there! it is your proper place! By the only law which you yourself
acknowledge, the law which gives the right divine to the strongest; if
you stir limb or muscle, I will crush the breath from your body."
But Clarence was now by the side of Wolfe, a new and more powerful
opponent.
"Look you," said he: "you have received an insult, and you have done
justice yourself. I condemn the offence, and quarrel not with you for
the punishment; but that punishment is now past: remove your foot, or--"
"What?" shouted Wolfe, fiercely, his lurid and vindictive eye flashing
with the released fire of long-pent and cherished passions.
"Or," answered Clarence, calmly, "I will hinder you from committing
murder."
At that instant the watchman's voice was heard, and the night's
guardian himself was seen hastening from the far end of the street
towards the place of contest. Whether this circumstance, or Clarence's
answer, somewhat changed the current of the republican's thoughts, or
whether his anger, suddenly raised, was now as suddenly subsiding, it
is not easy to decide; but he slowly and deliberately moved his foot
from the breast of his baffled foe, and bending down seemed
endeavouring to ascertain the mischief he had done. Lord Borodaile
was perfectly insensible.
"You have killed him!" cried Clarence in a voice of horror, "but you
shall not escape;" and he placed a desperate and nervous hand on the
republican.
"Stand off," said Wolfe, "my blood is up! I would not do more
violence to-night than I have done. Stand off! the man moves; see!"
And Lord Borodaile, uttering a long sigh, and attempting to rise,
Clarence released his hold of the republican, and bent down to assist
the fallen nobleman. Meanwhile, Wolfe, muttering to himself, turned
from the spot, and strode haughtily away.
The watchman now came up, and, with his aid, Clarence raised Lord
Borodaile. Bruised, stunned, half insensible as he was, that
personage lost none of his characteristic stateliness; he shook off
the watchman's arm, as if there was contamination in the touch; and
his countenance, still menacing and defying in its expression, turned
abruptly towards Clarence, as if he yet expected to meet and struggle
with a foe.
"How are you, my lord?" said Linden; "not severely hurt, I trust?"
"Well, quite well," cried Borodaile. "Mr. Linden, I think?--I thank
you cordially for your assistance; but the dog, the rascal, where is
he?"
"Gone," said Clarence.
"Gone! Where--where?" cried Borodaile; "that living man should insult
me, and yet escape!"
"Which way did the fellow go?" said the watchman, anticipative of
half-a-crown. "I will run after him in a trice, your honour: I
warrant I nab him."
"No--no--" said Borodaile, haughtily, "I leave my quarrels to no man;
if I could not master him myself, no one else shall do it for me. Mr.
Linden, excuse me, but I am perfectly recovered, and can walk very
well without your polite assistance. Mr. Watchman, I am obliged to
you: there is a guinea to reward your trouble."
With these words, intended as a farewell, the proud patrician,
smothering his pain, bowed with extreme courtesy to Clarence, again
thanked him, and walked on unaided and alone.
"He is a game blood," said the watchman, pocketing the guinea.
"He is worthy his name," thought Clarence; "though he was in the
wrong, my heart yearns to him."
CHAPTER XXXV.
Things wear a vizard which I think to like not.--Tanner of Tyburn.
Clarence, from that night, appeared to have formed a sudden attachment
to Lord Borodaile. He took every opportunity of cultivating his
intimacy, and invariably treated him with a degree of consideration
which his knowledge of the world told him was well calculated to gain
the good will of his haughty and arrogant acquaintance; but all this
was in effectual in conquering Borodaile's coldness and reserve. To
have been once seen in a humiliating and degrading situation is quite
sufficient to make a proud man hate the spectator, and, with the
confusion of all prejudiced minds, to transfer the sore remembrance of
the event to the association of the witness. Lord Borodaile, though
always ceremoniously civil, was immovably distant; and avoided as well
as he was able Clarence's insinuating approaches and address. To add
to his indisposition to increase his acquaintance with Linden, a
friend of his, a captain in the Guards, once asked him who that Mr.
Linden was? and, on his lordship's replying that he did not know, Mr.
Percy Bobus, the son of a wine-merchant, though the nephew of a duke,
rejoined, "Nobody does know."
"Insolent intruder!" thought Lord Borodaile: "a man whom nobody knows
to make such advances to me!"
A still greater cause of dislike to Clarence arose from jealousy.
Ever since the first night of his acquaintance with Lady Flora, Lord
Borodaile had paid her unceasing attention. In good earnest, he was
greatly struck by her beauty, and had for the last year meditated the
necessity of presenting the world with a Lady Borodaile. Now, though
his lordship did look upon himself in as favourable a light as a man
well can do, yet he could not but own that Clarence was very handsome,
had a devilish gentlemanlike air, talked with a better grace than the
generality of young men, and danced to perfection. "I detest that
fellow!" said Lord Borodaile, involuntarily and aloud, as these
unwilling truths forced themselves upon his mind.
"Whom do you detest?" asked Mr. Percy Bobus, who was lying on the sofa
in Lord Borodaile's drawing-room, and admiring a pair of red-heeled
shoes which decorated his feet.
"That puppy Linden!" said Lord Borodaile, adjusting his cravat.
"He is a deuced puppy, certainly!" rejoined Mr. Percy Bobus, turning
round in order to contemplate more exactly the shape of his right
shoe. "I can't bear conceit, Borodaile."
"Nor I: I abhor it; it is so d--d disgusting!" replied Lord Borodaile,
leaning his chin upon his two hands, and looking full into the glass.
"Do you use MacNeile's divine pomatum?"
"No, it's too hard; I get mine from Paris: shall I send you some?"
"Do," said Lord Borodaile.
"Mr. Linden, my lord," said the servant, throwing open the door; and
Clarence entered.
"I am very fortunate," said he, with that smile which so few ever
resisted, "to find you at home, Lord Borodaile; but as the day was wet,
I thought I should have some chance of that pleasure; I therefore
wrapped myself up in my roquelaure, and here I am."
Now, nothing could be more diplomatic than the compliment of choosing
a wet day for a visit, and exposing one's self to "the pitiless
shower," for the greater probability of finding the person visited at
home. Not so thought Lord Borodaile; he drew himself up, bowed very
solemnly, and said, with cold gravity,--
"You are very obliging, Mr. Linden."
Clarence coloured, and bit his lip as he seated himself. Mr. Percy
Bobus, with true insular breeding, took up the newspaper.
"I think I saw you at Lady C.'s last night," said Clarence; "did you
stay there long?"
"No, indeed," answered Borodaile; "I hate her parties."
"One does meet such odd people there," observed Mr. Percy Bobus;
"creatures one never sees anywhere else:"
"I hear," said Clarence, who never abused any one, even the givers of
stupid parties, if he could help it, and therefore thought it best to
change the conversation,--"I hear, Lord Borodaile, that some hunters
of yours are to be sold. I purpose being a bidder for Thunderbolt."
"I have a horse to sell you, Mr. Linden," cried Mr. Percy Bobus,
springing from the sofa into civility; "a superb creature."
"Thank you," said Clarence, laughing; "but I can only afford to buy
one, and I have taken a great fancy to Thunderbolt."
Lord Borodaile, whose manners were very antiquated in their
affability, bowed. Mr. Bobus sank back into his sofa, and resumed the
paper.
A pause ensued. Clarence was chilled in spite of himself. Lord
Borodaile played with a paper-cutter.
"Have you been to Lady Westborough's lately?" said Clarence, breaking
silence.
"I was there last night," replied Lord Borodaile.
"Indeed!" cried Clarence. "I wonder I did not see you there, for I
dined with them."
Lord Borodaile's hair curled of itself. "He dined there, and I only
asked in the evening!" thought he; but his sarcastic temper suggested
a very different reply.
"Ah," said he, elevating his eyebrows, "Lady Westborough told me she
had had some people to dinner whom she had been obliged to ask.
Bobus, is that the 'Public Advertiser'? See whether that d--d fellow
Junius has been writing any more of his venomous letters."
Clarence was not a man apt to take offence, but he felt his bile rise.
"It will not do to show it," thought he; so he made some further
remark in a jesting vein; and, after a very ill-sustained conversation
of some minutes longer, rose, apparently in the best humour possible,
and departed, with a solemn intention never again to enter the house.
Thence he went to Lady Westborough's.
The marchioness was in her boudoir: Clarence was as usual admitted;
for Lady Westborough loved amusement above all things in the world,
and Clarence had the art of affording it better than any young man of
her acquaintance. On entering, he saw Lady Flora hastily retreating
through an opposite door. She turned her face towards him for one
moment: that moment was sufficient to freeze his blood: the large
tears were rolling down her cheeks, which were as white as death, and
the expression of those features, usually so laughing and joyous, was
that of utter and ineffable despair.
Lady Westborough was as lively, as bland, and as agreeable as ever:
but Clarence thought he detected something restrained and embarrassed
lurking beneath all the graces of her exterior manner; and the single
glance he had caught of the pale and altered face of Lady Flora was
not calculated to reassure his mind or animate his spirits. His visit
was short; when he left the room, he lingered for a few moments in the
ante-chamber in the hope of again seeing Lady Flora. While thus
loitering, his ear caught the sound of Lady Westborough's voice: "When
Mr. Linden calls again, you have my orders never to admit him into
this room; he will be shown into the drawing-room."
With a hasty step and a burning cheek Clarence quitted the house, and
hurried, first to his solitary apartments, and thence, impatient of
loneliness, to the peaceful retreat of his benefactor.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
A maiden's thoughts do check my trembling hand.--DRAYTON.
There is something very delightful in turning from the unquietness and
agitation, the fever, the ambition, the harsh and worldly realities of
man's character to the gentle and deep recesses of woman's more secret
heart. Within her musings is a realm of haunted and fairy thought, to
which the things of this turbid and troubled life have no entrance.
What to her are the changes of state, the rivalries and contentions
which form the staple of our existence? For her there is an intense
and fond philosophy, before whose eye substances flit and fade like
shadows, and shadows grow glowingly into truth. Her soul's creations
are not as the moving and mortal images seen in the common day: they
are things, like spirits steeped in the dim moonlight, heard when all
else are still, and busy when earth's labourers are at rest! They are
"Such stuff
As dreams are made of, and their little life
Is rounded by a sleep."
Hers is the real and uncentred poetry of being, which pervades and
surrounds her as with an air, which peoples her visions and animates
her love, which shrinks from earth into itself, and finds marvel and
meditation in all that it beholds within, and which spreads even over
the heaven in whose faith she so ardently believes the mystery and the
tenderness of romance.
LETTER I.
FROM LADY FLORA ARDENNE TO MISS ELEANOR TREVANION.
You say that I have not written to you so punctually of late as I used
to do before I came to London, and you impute my negligence to the
gayeties and pleasures by which I am surrounded. Eh bien! my dear
Eleanor, could you have thought of a better excuse for me? You know
how fond we--ay, dearest, you as well as I--used to be of dancing, and
how earnestly we were wont to anticipate those children's balls at my
uncle's, which were the only ones we were ever permitted to attend. I
found a stick the other day, on which I had cut seven notches,
significant of seven days more to the next ball; we reckoned time by
balls then, and danced chronologically. Well, my dear Eleanor, here I
am now, brought out, tolerably well-behaved, only not dignified
enough, according to Mamma,--as fond of laughing, talking, and dancing
as ever; and yet, do you know, a ball, though still very delightful,
is far from being the most important event in creation; its
anticipation does not keep me awake of a night: and what is more to
the purpose, its recollection does not make me lock up my writing-
desk, burn my portefeuille, and forget you, all of which you seem to
imagine it has been able to effect.
No, dearest Eleanor, you are mistaken; for, were she twice as giddy
and ten times as volatile as she is, your own Flora could never, never
forget you, nor the happy hours we have spent together, nor the pretty
goldfinches we had in common, nor the little Scotch duets we used to
sing together, nor our longings to change them into Italian, nor our
disappointment when we did so, nor our laughter at Signor Shrikalini,
nor our tears when poor darling Bijou died. And do you remember,
dearest, the charming green lawn where we used to play together, and
plan tricks for your governess? She was very, very cross, though, I
think, we were a little to blame too. However, I was much the worst!
And pray, Eleanor, don't you remember how we used to like being called
pretty, and told of the conquests we should make? Do you like all
that now? For my part, I am tired of it, at least from the generality
of one's flatterers.
Ah! Eleanor, or "heigho!" as the young ladies in novels write, do you
remember how jealous I was of you at ----, and how spiteful I was, and
how you were an angel, and bore with me, and kissed me, and told me
that--that I had nothing to fear? Well, Clar--I mean Mr. Linden, is
now in town and so popular, and so admired! I wish we were at ----
again, for there we saw him every day, and now we don't meet more than
three times a week; and though I like hearing him praised above all
things, yet I feel very uncomfortable when that praise comes from
very, very pretty women. I wish we were at ---- again! Mamma, who is
looking more beautiful than ever, is, very kind! she says nothing to
be sure, but she must see how--that is to say--she must know that--
that I--I mean that Clarence is very attentive to me, and that I blush
and look exceedingly silly whenever he is; and therefore I suppose
that whenever Clarence thinks fit to ask me, I shall not be under the
necessity of getting up at six o'clock, and travelling to Gretna
Green, through that odious North Road, up the Highgate Hill, and over
Finchley Common.
"But when will he ask you?" My dearest Eleanor, that is more than I
can say. To tell you the truth, there is something about Linden which
I cannot thoroughly understand. They say he is nephew and heir to the
Mr. Talbot whom you may have heard Papa talk of; but if so, why the
hints, the insinuations, of not being what he seems, which Clarence
perpetually throws out, and which only excite my interest without
gratifying my curiosity? 'It is not,' he has said, more than once,
'as an obscure adventurer that I will claim your love;' and if I
venture, which is very seldom (for I am a little afraid of him), to
question his meaning, he either sinks into utter silence, for which,
if I had loved according to book, and not so naturally, I should be
very angry with him, or twists his words into another signification,
such as that he would not claim me till he had become something higher
and nobler than he is now. Alas, my dear Eleanor, it takes a long
time to make an ambassador out of an attache.
See now if you reproached me justly with scanty correspondences. If I
write a line more, I must begin a new sheet, and that will be beyond
the power of a frank,--a thing which would, I know, break the heart of
your dear, good, generous, but a little too prudent aunt, and
irrevocably ruin me in her esteem. So God bless you, dearest Eleanor,
and believe me most affectionately yours, FLORA ARDENNE.
LETTER II.
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.
Pray, dearest Eleanor, does that good aunt of yours--now don't frown,
I am not going to speak disrespectfully of her--ever take a liking to
young gentlemen whom you detest, and insist upon the fallacy of your
opinion and the unerring rectitude of hers? If so, you can pity and
comprehend my grief. Mamma has formed quite an attachment to a very
disagreeable person! He is Lord Borodaile, the eldest, and I believe,
the only son of Lord Ulswater. Perhaps you may have met him abroad,
for he has been a great traveller: his family is among the most
ancient in England, and his father's estate covers half a county. All
this Mamma tells me, with the most earnest air in the world, whenever
I declaim upon his impertinence or disagreeability (is there such a
word? there ought to be). "Well," said I to-day, "what's that to me?"
"It may be a great deal to you," replied Mamma, significantly, and the
blood rushed from my face to my heart. She could not, Eleanor, she
could not mean, after all her kindness to Clarence, and in spite of
all her penetration into my heart,--oh, no, no,--she could not. How
terribly suspicious this love makes one!
But if I disliked Lord Borodaile at first, I have hated him of late;
for, somehow or other, he is always in the way. If I see Clarence
hastening through the crowd to ask me to dance, at that very instant
up steps Lord Borodaile with his cold, changeless face, and his
haughty old-fashioned bow, and his abominable dark complexion; and
Mamma smiles; and he hopes he finds me disengaged; and I am hurried
off; and poor Clarence looks so disappointed and so wretched! You
have no idea how ill-tempered this makes me. I could not help asking
Lord Borodaile yesterday if he was never going abroad again, and the
hateful creature played with his cravat, and answered "Never!" I was
in hopes that my sullenness would drive his lordship away: tout au
contraire; "Nothing," said he to me the other day, when he was in full
pout, "nothing is so plebeian as good-humour!"
I wish, then, Eleanor, that he could see your governess: she must be
majesty itself in his eyes!
Ah, dearest, how we belie ourselves! At this moment, when you might
think, from the idle, rattling, silly flow of my letter, that my heart
was as light and free as it was when we used to play on the green
lawn, and under the sunny trees, in the merry days of our childhood,
the tears are running down my cheeks; see where they have fallen on
the page, and my head throbs as if my thoughts were too full and heavy
for it to contain. It is past one! I am alone, and in my own room.
Mamma is gone to a rout at H---- House, but I knew I should not meet
Clarence there, and so said I was ill, and remained at home. I have
done so often of late, whenever I have learned from him that he was
not going to the same place as Mamma. Indeed, I love much better to
sit alone and think over his words and looks; and I have drawn, after
repeated attempts, a profile likeness of him; and oh, Eleanor, I
cannot tell you how dear it is to me; and yet there is not a line, not
a look of his countenance which I have not learned by heart, without
such useless aids to my memory. But I am ashamed of telling you all
this, and my eyes ache so, that I can write no more.
Ever, as ever, dearest Eleanor, your affectionate friend. F. A.
LETTER III.
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.
Eleanor, I am undone! My mother--my mother has been so cruel; but she
cannot, she cannot intend it, or she knows very little of my heart.
With some ties may be as easily broken as formed; with others they are
twined around life itself.
Clarence dined with us yesterday, and was unusually animated and
agreeable. He was engaged on business with Lord Aspeden afterwards,
and left us early. We had a few people in the evening, Lord Borodaile
among the rest; and my mother spoke of Clarence, and his relationship
to and expectations from Mr. Talbot. Lord Borodaile sneered; "You are
mistaken," said he, sarcastically; "Mr. Linden may feel it convenient
to give out that he is related to so old a family as the Talbots; and
since Heaven only knows who or what he is, he may as well claim
alliance with one person as another; but he is certainly not the
nephew of Mr. Talbot of Scarsdale Park, for that gentleman had no
sisters and but one brother, who left an only daughter; that daughter
had also but one child, certainly no relation to Mr. Linden. I can
vouch for the truth of this statement; for the Talbots are related to,
or at least nearly connected with, myself; and I thank Heaven that I
have a pedigree, even in its collateral branches, worth learning by
heart." And then Lord Borodaile--I little thought, when I railed
against him, what serious cause I should have to hate him--turned to
me and harassed me with his tedious attentions the whole of the
evening.
This morning Mamma sent for me into her boudoir. "I have observed,"
said she, with the greatest indifference, "that Mr. Linden has, of
late, been much too particular in his manner towards you: your foolish
and undue familiarity with every one has perhaps given him
encouragement. After the gross imposition which Lord Borodaile
exposed to us last night, I cannot but consider the young man as a
mere adventurer, and must not only insist on your putting a total
termination to civilities which we must henceforth consider
presumption, but I myself shall consider it incumbent upon me greatly
to limit the advances he has thought proper to make towards my
acquaintance."
You may guess how thunderstruck I was by this speech. I could not
answer; my tongue literally clove to my mouth, and I was only relieved
by a sudden and violent burst of tears. Mamma looked exceedingly
displeased, and was just going to speak, when the servant threw open
the door and announced Mr. Linden. I rose hastily, and had only just
time to escape, as he entered; but when I heard that dear, dear voice,
I could not resist turning for one moment. He saw me; and was struck
mute, for the agony of my soul was stamped visibly on my countenance.
That moment was over: with a violent effort I tore myself away.
Eleanor, I can now write no more. God bless you! and me too; for I am
very, very unhappy. F. A.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
What a charming character is a kind old man.--STEPHEN MONTAGUE.
"Cheer up, my dear boy," said Talbot, kindly, "we must never despair.
What though Lady Westborough has forbidden you the boudoir, a boudoir
is a very different thing from a daughter, and you have no right to
suppose that the veto extends to both. But now that we are on this
subject, do let me reason with you seriously. Have you not already
tasted all the pleasures, and been sufficiently annoyed by some of the
pains, of acting the 'Incognito'? Be ruled by me: resume your proper
name; it is at least one which the proudest might acknowledge; and its
discovery will remove the greatest obstacle to the success which you
so ardently desire."
Clarence, who was labouring under strong excitement, paused for some
moments, as if to collect himself, before he replied: "I have been
thrust from my father's home; I have been made the victim of another's
crime; I have been denied the rights and name of son; perhaps (and I
say this bitterly) justly denied them, despite of my own innocence.
What would you have me do? Resume a name never conceded to me,--
perhaps not righteously mine,--thrust myself upon the unwilling and
shrinking hands which disowned and rejected me; blazon my virtues by
pretensions which I myself have promised to forego, and foist myself
on the notice of strangers by the very claims which my nearest
relations dispute? Never! never! never! With the simple name I have
assumed; the friend I myself have won,--you, my generous benefactor,
my real father, who never forsook nor insulted me for my misfortunes,--
with these I have gained some steps in the ladder; with these, and
those gifts of nature, a stout heart and a willing hand, of which none
can rob me, I will either ascend the rest, even to the summit, or fall
to the dust, unknown, but not contemned; unlamented, but not
despised."
"Well, well," said Talbot, brushing away a tear which he could not
deny to the feeling, even while he disputed the judgment, of the young
adventurer,--"well, this is all very fine and very foolish; but you
shall never want friend or father while I live, or when I have ceased
to live; but come,--sit down, share my dinner, which is not very good,
and my dessert, which is: help me to entertain two or three guests who
are coming to me in the evening, to talk on literature, sup, and
sleep; and to-morrow you shall return home, and see Lady Flora in the
drawing-room if you cannot in the boudoir."
And Clarence was easily persuaded to accept the invitation. Talbot
was not one of those men who are forced to exert themselves to be
entertaining. He had the pleasant and easy way of imparting his great
general and curious information, that a man, partly humourist, partly
philosopher, who values himself on being a man of letters, and is in
spite of himself a man of the world, always ought to possess.
Clarence was soon beguiled from the remembrance of his mortifications,
and, by little and little, entirely yielded to the airy and happy flow
of Talbot's conversation.
In the evening, three or four men of literary eminence (as many as
Talbot's small Tusculum would accommodate with beds) arrived, and in a
conversation, free alike from the jargon of pedants and the
insipidities of fashion, the night fled away swiftly and happily, even
to the lover.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
We are here (in the country) among the vast and noble scenes of
Nature; we are there (in the town) among the pitiful shifts of policy.
We walk here in the light and open ways of the divine bounty,--we
grope therein the dark and confused labyrinths of human malice; our
senses are here feasted with all the clear and genuine taste of their
objects, which are all sophisticated there, and for the most part
overwhelmed with their contraries: here pleasure, methinks, looks like
a beautiful, constant, and modest wife; it is there an impudent,
fickle, and painted harlot.--COWLEY.
Draw up the curtain! The scene is the Opera.
The pit is crowded; the connoisseurs in the front row are in a very
ill humour. It must be confessed that extreme heat is a little trying
to the temper of a critic.
The Opera then was not what it is now, nor even what it had been in a
former time. It is somewhat amusing to find Goldsmith questioning, in
one of his essays, whether the Opera could ever become popular in
England. But on the night--on which the reader is summoned to that
"theatre of sweet sounds" a celebrated singer from the Continent made
his first appearance in London, and all the world thronged to "that
odious Opera-house" to hear, or to say they had heard, the famous
Sopraniello.
With a nervous step, Clarence proceeded to Lady Westborough's box; and
it was many minutes that he lingered by the door before he summoned
courage to obtain admission.
He entered; the box was crowded; but Lady Flora was not there. Lord
Borodaile was sitting next to Lady Westborough. As Clarence entered,
Lord Borodaile raised his eyebrows, and Lady Westborough her glass.
However disposed a great person may be to drop a lesser one, no one of
real birth or breeding ever cuts another. Lady Westborough,
therefore, though much colder, was no less civil than usual; and Lord
Borodaile bowed lower than ever to Mr. Linden, as he punctiliously
called him. But Clarence's quick eye discovered instantly that he was
no welcome intruder, and that his day with the beautiful marchioness
was over. His visit, consequently, was short and embarrassed. When
he left the box, he heard Lord Borodaile's short, slow, sneering
laugh, followed by Lady Westborough's "hush" of reproof.
His blood boiled. He hurried along the passage, with his eyes fixed
upon the ground and his hand clenched.
"What ho! Linden, my good fellow; why, you look as if all the ferocity
of the great Figg were in your veins," cried a good-humoured voice.
Clarence started, and saw the young and high-spirited Duke of
Haverfield.
"Are you going behind the scenes?" said his grace. "I have just come
thence; and you had much better drop into La Meronville's box with me.
You sup with her to-night, do you not?
"No, indeed!" replied Clarence; "I scarcely know her, except by
sight."
"Well, and what think you of her?"
"That she is the prettiest Frenchwoman I ever saw."
"Commend me to secret sympathies!" cried the duke. "She has asked me
three times who you were, and told me three times you were the
handsomest man in London and had quite a foreign air; the latter
recommendation being of course far greater than the former. So, after
this, you cannot refuse to accompany me to her box and make her
acquaintance."
"Nay," answered Clarence, "I shall be too happy to profit by the taste
of so discerning a person; but it is cruel in you, Duke, not to feign
a little jealousy,--a little reluctance to introduce so formidable a
rival."
"Oh, as to me," said the duke, "I only like her for her mental, not
her personal, attractions. She is very agreeable, and a little witty;
sufficient attractions for one in her situation."
"But do tell me a little of her history," said Clarence, "for, in
spite of her renown, I only know her as La belle Meronville. Is she
not living en ami with some one of our acquaintance?"
"To be sure," replied the duke, "with Lord Borodaile. She is
prodigiously extravagant; and Borodaile affects to be prodigiously
fond: but as there is only a certain fund of affection in the human
heart, and all Lord Borodaile's is centred in Lord Borodaile, that
cannot really be the case."
"Is he jealous of her?" said Clarence.
"Not in the least! nor indeed, does she give him any cause. She is
very gay, very talkative, gives excellent suppers, and always has her
box at the Opera crowded with admirers; but that is all. She
encourages many, and favours but one. Happy Borodaile! My lot is
less fortunate! You know, I suppose, that Julia has deserted me?"
"You astonish me,--and for what?"
"Oh, she told me, with a vehement burst of tears, that she was
convinced I did not love her, and that a hundred pounds a month was
not sufficient to maintain a milliner's apprentice. I answered the
first assertion by an assurance that I adored her: but I preserved a
total silence with regard to the latter; and so I found Trevanion
tete-a-tete with her the next day."
"What did you?" said Clarence.
"Sent my valet to Trevanion with an old coat of mine, my compliments,
and my hopes that, as Mr. Trevanion was so fond of my cast-off
conveniences, he would honour me by accepting the accompanying
trifle."
"He challenged you, without doubt?"
"Challenged me! No: he tells all his friends that I am the wittiest
man in Europe."
"A fool can speak the truth, you see," said Clarence, laughing.
"Thank you, Linden; you shall have my good word with La Meronville for
that: mais allons."
Mademoiselle de la Meronville, as she pointedly entitled herself, was
one of those charming adventuresses, who, making the most of a good
education and a prepossessing person, a delicate turn for letter-
writing, and a lively vein of conversation, came to England for a year
or two, as Spaniards were wont to go to Mexico, and who return to
their native country with a profound contempt for the barbarians whom
they have so egregiously despoiled. Mademoiselle de la Meronville was
small, beautifully formed, had the prettiest hands and feet in the
world, and laughed musically. By the by, how difficult it is to
laugh, or even to smile, at once naturally and gracefully! It is one
of Steele's finest touches of character, where he says of Will
Honeycombe, "He can smile when one speaks to him, and laughs easily."
In a word, the pretty Frenchwoman was precisely formed to turn the
head of a man like Lord Borodaile, who loved to be courted and who
required to be amused. Mademoiselle de la Meronville received
Clarence with a great deal of grace, and a little reserve, the first
chiefly natural, the last wholly artificial.
"Well," said the duke (in French), "you have not told me who are to be
of your party this evening,--Borodaile, I suppose, of course?"
"No, he cannot come to-night."
"Ah, quel malheur! then the hock will not be iced enough: Borodaile's
looks are the best wine-coolers in the world."
"Fie!" cried La Meronville, glancing towards Clarence, "I cannot
endure your malevolence; wit makes you very bitter."
"And that is exactly the reason why La belle Meronville loves me so:
nothing is so sweet to one person as bitterness upon another; it is
human nature and French nature (which is a very different thing) into
the bargain."
"Bah! my Lord Duke, you judge of others by yourself."
"To be sure I do," cried the duke; "and that is the best way of
forming a right judgment. Ah! what a foot, that little figurante has;
you don't admire her, Linden?"
"No, Duke; my admiration is like the bird in the cage,--chained here,
and cannot fly away!" answered Clarence, with a smile at the frippery
of his compliment.
"Ah, Monsieur," cried the pretty Frenchwoman, leaning back, "you have
been at Paris, I see: one does not learn those graces of language in
England. I have been five months in your country; brought over the
prettiest dresses imaginable, and have only received three
compliments, and (pity me!) two out of the three were upon my
pronunciation of 'How do you do?'"
"Well," said Clarence, "I should have imagined that in England, above
all other countries, your vanity would have been gratified, for you
know we pique ourselves on our sincerity, and say all we think."
"Yes? then you always think very unpleasantly. What an alternative!
which is the best, to speak ill or to think ill of one?"
"Pour l'amour de Dieu," cried the duke, "don't ask such puzzling
questions; "you are always getting into those moral subtleties, which
I suppose you learn from Borodaile. He is a wonderful metaphysician,
I hear; I can answer for his chemical powers: the moment he enters a
room the very walls grow damp; as for me, I dissolve; I should flow
into a fountain, like Arethusa, if happily his lordship did not freeze
one again into substance as fast as he dampens one into thaw."
"Fi donc!" cried La Meronville. "I should be very angry had you not
taught me to be very indifferent-"
"To him!" said the duke, dryly. "I'm glad to hear it. He is not
worth une grande passion, believe me; but tell me, ma belle, who else
sups with you?"
"D'abord, Monsieur Linden, I trust," answered La Meronville, with a
look of invitation, to which Clarence bowed and smiled his assent,
"Milord D----, and Monsieur Trevanion, Mademoiselle Caumartin, and Le
Prince Pietro del Ordino."
"Nothing can be better arranged," said the duke. "But see, they are
just going to drop the curtain. Let me call your carriage."
"You are too good, milord," replied La Meronville, with a bow which
said, "of course;" and the duke, who would not have stirred three
paces for the first princess of the blood, hurried out of the box
(despite of Clarence's offer to undertake the commission) to inquire
after the carriage of the most notorious adventuress of the day.
Clarence was alone in the box with the beautiful Frenchwoman. To say
truth, Linden was far too much in love with Lady Flora, and too
occupied, as to his other thoughts, with the projects of ambition, to
be easily led into any disreputable or criminal liaison; he therefore
conversed with his usual ease, though with rather more than his usual
gallantry, without feeling the least touched by the charms of La
Meronville or the least desirous of supplanting Lord Borodaile in her
favour.
The duke reappeared, and announced the carriage. As, with La
Meronville leaning on his arm, Clarence hurried out, he accidentally
looked up, and saw on the head of the stairs Lady Westborough with her
party (Lord Borodaile among the rest) in waiting for her carriage.
For almost the first time in his life, Clarence felt ashamed of
himself; his cheek burned like fire, and he involuntarily let go the
fair hand which was leaning upon his arm. However, the weaker our
course the better face we should put upon it, and Clarence, recovering
his presence of mind, and vainly hoping he had not been perceived,
buried his face as well as he was able in the fur collar of his cloak,
and hurried on.
"You saw Lord Borodaile?" said the duke to La Meronville, as he handed
her into her carriage.
"Yes, I accidentally looked back after we had passed him, and then I
saw him."
"Looked back!" said the duke; "I wonder he did not turn you into a
pillar of salt."
"Fi donc!" cried La belle Meronville, tapping his grace playfully on
the arm, in order to do which she was forced to lean a little harder
upon Clarence's, which she had not yet relinquished--" Fi donc!
Francois, chez moi!"
"My carriage is just behind," said the duke. "You will go with me to
La Meronville's, of course?"
"Really, my dear duke," said Clarence, "I wish I could excuse myself
from this party. I have another engagement."
"Excuse yourself? and leave me to the mercy of Mademoiselle Caumartin,
who has the face of an ostrich, and talks me out of breath! Never, my
dear Linden, never! Besides, I want you to see how well I shall
behave to Trevanion. Here is the carriage. Entrez, mon cher."
And Clarence, weakly and foolishly (but he was very young and very
unhappy, and so, longing for an escape from his own thoughts) entered
the carriage, and drove to the supper party, in order to prevent the
Duke of Haverfield being talked out of breath by Mademoiselle
Caumartin, who had the face of an ostrich.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
Yet truth is keenly sought for, and the wind
Charged with rich words, poured out in thought's defence;
Whether the Church inspire that eloquence,
Or a Platonic piety, confined
To the sole temple of the inward mind;
And one there is who builds immortal lays,
Though doomed to tread in solitary ways;
Darkness before, and danger's voice behind!
Yet not alone-- WORDSWORTH.
London, thou Niobe, who sittest in stone, amidst thy stricken and
fated children; nurse of the desolate, that hidest in thy bosom the
shame, the sorrows, the sins of many sons; in whose arms the fallen
and the outcast shroud their distresses, and shelter from the proud
man's contumely; Epitome and Focus of the disparities and maddening
contrasts of this wrong world, that assemblest together in one great
heap the woes, the joys, the elevations, the debasements of the
various tribes of man; mightiest of levellers, confounding in thy
whirlpool all ranks, all minds, the graven labours of knowledge, the
straws of the maniac, purple and rags, the regalities and the
loathsomeness of earth,--palace and lazar-house combined! Grave of
the living, where, mingled and massed together, we couch, but rest
not,--"for in that sleep of life what dreams do come,"--each vexed
with a separate vision,--"shadows" which "grieve the heart," unreal in
their substance, but faithful in their warnings, flitting from the
eye, but graving unfleeting memories on the mind, which reproduce new
dreams over and over, until the phantasm ceases, and the pall of a
heavier torpor falls upon the brain, and all is still and dark and
hushed! "From the stir of thy great Babel," and the fixed tinsel
glare in which sits pleasure like a star, "which shines, but warms not
with its powerless rays," we turn to thy deeper and more secret
haunts. Thy wilderness is all before us--where to choose our place of
rest; and, to our eyes, thy hidden recesses are revealed.
The clock of St. Paul's had tolled the second hour of morning. Within
a small and humble apartment in the very heart of the city, there sat
a writer, whose lucubrations, then obscure and unknown, were destined,
years afterwards, to excite the vague admiration of the crowd and the
deeper homage of the wise. They were of that nature which is slow in
winning its way to popular esteem; the result of the hived and hoarded
knowledge of years; the produce of deep thought and sublime
aspirations, influencing, in its bearings, the interests of the many,
yet only capable of analysis by the judgment of the few. But the
stream broke forth at last from the cavern to the daylight, although
the source was never traced; or, to change the image,--albeit none
know the hand which executed and the head which designed, the monument
of a mighty intellect has been at length dug up, as it were, from the
envious earth, the brighter for its past obscurity, and the more
certain of immortality from the temporary neglect it has sustained.
The room was, as we before said, very small, and meanly furnished; yet
were there a few articles of costliness and luxury scattered about,
which told that the tastes of its owner had not been quite humbled to
the level of his fortunes. One side of the narrow chamber was covered
with shelves, which supported books in various languages, and though
chiefly on scientific subjects, not utterly confined to them. Among
the doctrines of the philosopher, and the golden rules of the
moralist, were also seen the pleasant dreams of poets, the legends of
Spenser, the refining moralities of Pope, the lofty errors of
Lucretius, and the sublime relics of our "dead kings of melody."
[Shakspeare and Milton] And over the hearth was a picture, taken in
more prosperous days, of one who had been and was yet to the tenant of
that abode, better than fretted roofs and glittering banquets, the
objects of ambition, or even the immortality of fame. It was the face
of one very young and beautiful, and the deep, tender eyes looked
down, as with a watchful fondness, upon the lucubrator and his
labours. While beneath the window, which was left unclosed, for it
was scarcely June, were simple yet not inelegant vases, filled with
flowers,--
"Those lovely leaves, where we
May read how soon things have
Their end, though ne'er so brave." [Herrick]
The writer was alone, and had just paused from his employment; he was
leaning his face upon one hand, in a thoughtful and earnest mood, and
the air which came chill, but gentle, from the window, slightly
stirred the locks from the broad and marked brow, over which they fell
in thin but graceful waves. Partly owing perhaps to the waning light
of the single lamp and the lateness of the hour, his cheek seemed very
pale, and the complete though contemplative rest of the features
partook greatly of the quiet of habitual sadness, and a little of the
languor of shaken health; yet the expression, despite the proud cast
of the brow and profile, was rather benevolent than stern or dark in
its pensiveness, and the lines spoke more of the wear and harrow of
deep thought than the inroads of ill-regulated passion.
There was a slight tap at the door; the latch was raised, and the
original of the picture I have described entered the apartment.
Time had not been idle with her since that portrait had been taken:
the round elastic figure had lost much of its youth and freshness; the
step, though light, was languid, and in the centre of the fair, smooth
cheek, which was a little sunken, burned one deep bright spot,--fatal
sign to those who have watched the progress of the most deadly and
deceitful of our national maladies; yet still the form and countenance
were eminently interesting and lovely; and though the bloom was gone
forever, the beauty, which not even death could wholly have despoiled,
remained to triumph over debility, misfortune, and disease.
She approached the student, and laid her hand upon his shoulder.
"Dearest!" said he, tenderly yet reproachfully, "yet up, and the hour
so late and yourself so weak? Fie, I must learn to scold you."
"And how," answered the intruder, "how could I sleep or rest while you
are consuming your very life in those thankless labours?"
"By which," interrupted the writer, with a faint smile, "we glean our
scanty subsistence."
"Yes," said the wife (for she held that relation to the student), and
the tears stood in her eyes, "I know well that every morsel of bread,
every drop of water, is wrung from your very heart's blood, and I--I
am the cause of all; but surely you exert yourself too much, more than
can be requisite? These night damps, this sickly and chilling air,
heavy with the rank vapours of the coming morning, are not suited to
thoughts and toils which are alone sufficient to sear your mind and
exhaust your strength. Come, my own love, to bed; and yet first come
and look upon our child, how sound she sleeps! I have leaned over her
for the last hour, and tried to fancy it was you whom I watched, for
she has learned already your smile and has it even when she sleeps."
"She has cause to smile," said the husband, bitterly.
"She has, for she is yours! and even in poetry and humble hopes, that
is an inheritance which may well teach her pride and joy. Come, love,
the air is keen, and the damp rises to your forehead,--yet stay, till
I have kissed it away."
"Mine own love," said the student, as he rose and wound his arm round
the slender waist of his wife, "wrap your shawl closer over your
bosom, and let us look for one instant upon the night. I cannot sleep
till I have slaked the fever of my blood: the air has nothing of
coldness in its breath for me."
And they walked to the window and looked forth. All was hushed and
still in the narrow street; the cold gray clouds were hurrying fast
along the sky; and the stars, weak and waning in their light, gleamed
forth at rare intervals upon the mute city, like expiring watch-lamps
of the dead.
They leaned out and spoke not; but when they looked above upon the
melancholy heavens, they drew nearer to each other, as if it were
their natural instinct to do so whenever the world without seemed
discouraging and sad.
At length the student broke the silence; but his thoughts, which were
wandering and disjointed, were breathed less to her than vaguely and
unconsciously to himself. "Morn breaks,--another and another!--day
upon day!--while we drag on our load like the blind beast which knows
not when the burden shall be cast off and the hour of rest be come."
The woman pressed her hand to her bosom, but made no rejoinder--she
knew his mood--and the student continued,--"And so life frets itself
away! Four years have passed over our seclusion--four years! a great
segment in the little circle of our mortality; and of those years what
day has pleasure won from labour, or what night has sleep snatched
wholly from the lamp? Weaker than the miser, the insatiable and
restless mind traverses from east to west; and from the nooks, and
corners, and crevices of earth collects, fragment by fragment, grain
by grain, atom by atom, the riches which it gathers to its coffers--
for what?--to starve amidst the plenty! The fantasies of the
imagination bring a ready and substantial return: not so the treasures
of thought. Better that I had renounced the soul's labour for that of
its hardier frame--better that I had 'sweated in the eye of Phoebus,'
than 'eat my heart with crosses and with cares,'--seeking truth and
wanting bread--adding to the indigence of poverty its humiliation;
wroth with the arrogance of men, who weigh in the shallow scales of
their meagre knowledge the product of lavish thought, and of the hard
hours for which health, and sleep, and spirit have been exchanged;--
sharing the lot of those who would enchant the old serpent of evil,
which refuses the voice of the charmer!--struggling against the
prejudice and bigoted delusion of the bandaged and fettered herd to
whom, in our fond hopes and aspirations, we trusted to give light and
freedom; seeing the slavish judgments we would have redeemed from
error clashing their chains at us in ire;--made criminal by our very
benevolence;--the martyrs whose zeal is rewarded with persecution,
whose prophecies are crowned with contempt!--Better, oh, better that I
had not listened to the vanity of a heated brain--better that I had
made my home with the lark and the wild bee, among the fields and the
quiet hills, where life, if obscurer, is less debased, and hope, if
less eagerly indulged, is less bitterly disappointed. The frame, it
is true, might have been bowed to a harsher labour, but the heart
would at least have had its rest from anxiety, and the mind its
relaxation from thought."
The wife's tears fell upon the hand she clasped. The student turned,
and his heart smote him for the selfishness of his complaint. He drew
her closer and closer to his bosom; and gazing fondly upon those eyes
which years of indigence and care might have robbed of their young
lustre, but not of their undying tenderness, he kissed away her tears,
and addressed her in a voice which never failed to charm her grief
into forgetfulness.
"Dearest and kindest," he said, "was I not to blame for accusing those
privations or regrets which have only made us love each other the
more? Trust me, mine own treasure, that it is only in the peevishness
of an inconstant and fretful humour that I have murmured against my
fortune. For, in the midst of all, I look upon you, my angel, my
comforter, my young dream of love, which God, in His mercy, breathed
into waking life--I look upon you, and am blessed and grateful. Nor
in my juster moments do I accuse even the nature of these studies,
though they bring us so scanty a reward. Have I not hours of secret
and overflowing delight, the triumphs of gratified research--flashes
of sudden light, which reward the darkness of thought, and light up my
solitude as a revel?--These feelings of rapture, which nought but
Science can afford, amply repay her disciples for worse evils and
severer handships than it has been my destiny to endure. Look along
the sky, how the vapours struggle with the still yet feeble stars:
even so have the mists of error been pierced, though not scattered, by
the dim but holy lights of past wisdom, and now the morning is at
hand, and in that hope we journey on, doubtful, but not utterly in
darkness. Nor is this all my hope; there is a loftier and more steady
comfort than that which mere philosophy can bestow. If the certainty
of future fame bore Milton rejoicing through his blindness, or cheered
Galileo in his dungeon, what stronger and holier support shall not be
given to him who has loved mankind as his brothers, and devoted his
labours to their cause?--who has not sought, but relinquished, his own
renown?---who has braved the present censures of men for their future
benefit, and trampled upon glory in the energy of benevolence? Will
there not be for him something more powerful than fame to comfort his
sufferings and to sustain his hopes? If the wish of mere posthumous
honour be a feeling rather vain than exalted, the love of our race
affords us a more rational and noble desire of remembrance. Come what
will, that love, if it animates our toils and directs our studies,
shall when we are dust make our relics of value, our efforts of avail,
and consecrate the desire of fame, which were else a passion selfish
and impure, by connecting it with the welfare of ages and the eternal
interests of the world and its Creator! Come, we will to bed."
CHAPTER XL.
A man may be formed by nature for an admirable citizen, and yet, from
the purest motives, be a dangerous one to the State in which the
accident of birth has placed him.--STEPHEN MONTAGUE.
The night again closed., and the student once more resumed his
labours. The spirit of his hope and comforter of his toils sat by
him, ever and anon lifting her fond eyes from her work to gaze upon
his countenance, to sigh, and to return sadly and quietly to her
employment.
A heavy step ascended the stairs, the door opened, and the tall figure
of Wolfe, the republican, presented itself. The female rose, pushed a
chair towards him with a smile and grace suited to better fortunes,
and, retiring from the table, reseated herself silent and apart.
"It is a fine night," said the student, when the mutual greetings were
over. "Whence come you?"
"From contemplating human misery and worse than human degradation,"
replied Wolfe, slowly seating himself.
"Those words specify no place: they apply universally," said the
student, with a sigh.
"Ay, Glendower, for misgovernment is universal," rejoined Wolfe.
Glendower made no answer.
"Oh!" said Wolfe, in the low, suppressed tone of intense passion which
was customary to him, "it maddens me to look upon the willingness with
which men hug their trappings of slavery,--bears, proud of the rags
which deck and the monkeys which ride them. But it frets me yet more
when some lordling sweeps along, lifting his dull eyes above the fools
whose only crime and debasement are--what?--their subjection to him!
Such a one I encountered a few nights since; and he will remember the
meeting longer than I shall. I taught that 'god to tremble.'"
The female rose, glanced towards her husband, and silently withdrew.
Wolfe paused for a few moments, looked curiously and pryingly round,
and then rising went forth into the passage to see that no loiterer or
listener was near; returned, and drawing his chair close to Glendower,
fixed his dark eye upon him, and said,--
"You are poor, and your spirit rises against your lot, you are just,
and your heart swells against the general oppression you behold: can
you not dare to remedy your ills and those of mankind?"
"I can dare," said Glendower, calmly, though haughtily, all things but
crime."
"And which is crime?--the rising against, or the submission to, evil
government? Which is crime, I ask you?"
"That which is the most imprudent," answered Glendower.
"We may sport in ordinary cases with our own safeties, but only in
rare cases with the safety of others."
Wolfe rose, and paced the narrow room impatiently to and fro. He
paused by the window and threw it open. "Come here," he cried,--"come
and look out."
Glendower did so; all was still and quiet.
"Why did you call me?" said he; "I see nothing."
"Nothing!" exclaimed Wolfe; "look again; look on yon sordid and
squalid huts; look at yon court, that from this wretched street leads
to abodes to which these are as palaces; look at yon victims of vice
and famine, plying beneath the midnight skies their filthy and
infectious trade. Wherever you turn your eyes, what see you? Misery,
loathsomeness, sin! Are you a man, and call you these nothing? And
now lean forth still more; see afar off, by yonder lamp, the mansion
of ill-gotten and griping wealth. He who owns those buildings, what
did he that he should riot while we starve? He wrung from the negro's
tears and bloody sweat the luxuries of a pampered and vitiated taste;
he pandered to the excesses of the rich; he heaped their tables with
the product of a nation's groans. Lo!--his reward! He is rich,
prosperous, honoured! He sits in the legislative assembly; he
declaims against immorality; he contends for the safety of property
and the equilibrium of ranks. Transport yourself from this spot for
an instant; imagine that you survey the gorgeous homes of aristocracy
and power, the palaces of the west. What see you there?--the few
sucking, draining, exhausting the blood, the treasure, the very
existence of the many. Are we, who are of the many, wise to suffer
it?"
"Are we of the many?" said Glendower.
"We could be," said Wolfe, hastily.
"I doubt it;" replied Glendower.
"Listen," said the republican, laying his hand upon Glendower's
shoulder, "listen to me. There are in this country men whose spirits
not years of delayed hope, wearisome persecution, and, bitterer than
all, misrepresentation from some and contempt from others, have yet
quelled and tamed. We watch our opportunity; the growing distress of
the country, the increasing severity and misrule of the
administration, will soon afford it us. Your talents, your
benevolence, render you worthy to join us. Do so, and--"
"Hush!" interrupted the student; "you know not what you say: you weigh
not the folly, the madness of your design! I am a man more fallen,
more sunken, more disappointed than you. I, too, have had at my heart
the burning and lonely hope which, through years of misfortune and
want, has comforted me with the thought of serving and enlightening
mankind,--I, too, have devoted to the fulfilment of that hope, days
and nights, in which the brain grew dizzy and the heart heavy and
clogged with the intensity of my pursuits. Were the dungeon and the
scaffold my reward Heaven knows that I would not flinch eye or hand or
abate a jot of heart and hope in the thankless prosecution of my
toils. Know me, then, as one of fortunes more desperate than your
own; of an ambition more unquenchable; of a philanthropy no less
ardent; and, I will add, of a courage no less firm: and behold the
utter hopelessness of your projects with others, when to me they only
appear the visions of an enthusiast."
Wolfe sank down in the chair.
"Is it even so?" said he, slowly and musingly. "Are my hopes but
delusions? Has my life been but one idle, though convulsive dream?
Is the goddess of our religion banished from this great and populous
earth to the seared and barren hearts of a few solitary worshippers,
whom all else despise as madmen or persecute as idolaters? And if so,
shall we adore her the less?---No! though we perish in her cause, it
is around her altar that our corpses shall be found!"
"My friend," said Glendower, kindly, for he was touched by the
sincerity though opposed to the opinions of the republican, "the night
is yet early: we will sit down to discuss our several doctrines calmly
and in the spirit of truth and investigation."
"Away!" cried Wolfe, rising and slouching his hat over his bent and
lowering brows; "away! I will not listen to you: I dread your
reasonings; I would not have a particle of my faith shaken. If I err,
I have erred from my birth,--erred with Brutus and Tell, Hampden and
Milton, and all whom the thousand tribes and parties of earth
consecrate with their common gratitude and eternal reverence. In that
error I will die! If our party can struggle not with hosts, there may
yet arise some minister with the ambition of Caesar, if not his
genius,--of whom a single dagger can rid the earth!"
"And if not?" said Glendower.
"I have the same dagger for myself!" replied Wolfe, as he closed the
door.
CHAPTER XLI.
Bolingbroke has said that "Man is his own sharper and his own bubble;"
and certainly he who is acutest in duping others is ever the most
ingenious in outwitting himself. The criminal is always a sophist;
and finds in his own reason a special pleader to twist laws human and
divine into a sanction of his crime. The rogue is so much in the
habit of cheating, that he packs the cards even when playing at
Patience with himself.--STEPHEN MONTAGUE.
The only two acquaintances in this populous city whom Glendower
possessed who were aware that in a former time he had known a better
fortune were Wolfe and a person of far higher worldly estimation, of
the name of Crauford. With the former the student had become
acquainted by the favour of chance, which had for a short time made
them lodgers in the same house. Of the particulars of Glendower's
earliest history Wolfe was utterly ignorant; but the addresses upon
some old letters, which he had accidentally seen, had informed him
that Glendower had formerly borne another name; and it was easy to
glean from the student's conversation that something of greater
distinction and prosperity than he now enjoyed was coupled with the
appellation he had renounced. Proud, melancholy, austere,--brooding
upon thoughts whose very loftiness received somewhat of additional
grandeur from the gloom which encircled it,--Glendower found, in the
ruined hopes and the solitary lot of the republican, that congeniality
which neither Wolfe's habits nor the excess of his political fervour
might have afforded to a nature which philosophy had rendered moderate
and early circumstances refined. Crauford was far better acquainted
than Wolfe with the reverses Glendower had undergone. Many years ago
he had known and indeed travelled with him upon the Continent; since
then they had not met till about six months prior to the time in which
Glendower is presented to the reader. It was in an obscure street of
the city that Crauford had then encountered Glendower, whose haunts
were so little frequented by the higher orders of society that
Crauford was the first, and the only one of his former acquaintance
with whom for years he had been brought into contact. That person
recognized him at once, accosted him, followed him home, and three
days afterwards surprised him with a visit. Of manners which, in
their dissimulation, extended far beyond the ordinary ease and
breeding of the world, Crauford readily appeared not to notice the
altered circumstances of his old acquaintance; and, by a tone of
conversation artfully respectful, he endeavoured to remove from
Glendower's mind that soreness which his knowledge of human nature
told him his visit was calculated to create.
There is a certain species of pride which contradicts the ordinary
symptoms of the feeling, and appears most elevated when it would be
reasonable to expect it should be most depressed. Of this sort was
Glendower's. When he received the guest who had known him in his
former prosperity, some natural sentiment of emotion called, it is
true, to his pale cheek a momentary flush, as he looked round his
humble apartment, and the evident signs of poverty it contained; but
his address was calm and self-possessed, and whatever mortification he
might have felt, no intonation of his voice, no tell-tale
embarrassment of manner, revealed it. Encouraged by this air, even
while he was secretly vexed by it, and perfectly unable to do justice
to the dignity of mind which gave something of majesty rather than
humiliation to misfortune, Crauford resolved to repeat his visit, and
by intervals, gradually lessening, renewed it, till acquaintance
seemed, though little tinctured, at least on Glendower's side, by
friendship, to assume the semblance of intimacy. It was true,
however, that he had something to struggle against in Glendower's
manner, which certainly grew colder in proportion to the repetition of
the visits; and at length Glendower said, with an ease and quiet which
abashed for a moment an effrontery of mind and manner which was almost
parallel, "Believe me, Mr. Crauford, I feel fully sensible of your
attentions; but as circumstances at present are such as to render an
intercourse between us little congenial to the habits and sentiments
of either, you will probably understand and forgive my motives in
wishing no longer to receive civilities which, however I may feel
them, I am unable to return."
Crauford coloured and hesitated before he replied. "Forgive me then,"
said he, "for my fault. I did venture to hope that no circumstances
would break off an acquaintance to me so valuable. Forgive me if I
did imagine that an intercourse between mind and mind could be equally
carried on, whether the mere body were lodged in a palace or a hovel;"
and then suddenly changing his tone into that of affectionate warmth,
Crauford continued, "My dear Glendower, my dear friend, I would say,
if I durst, is not your pride rather to blame here? Believe me, in my
turn, I fully comprehend and bow to it; but it wounds me beyond
expression. Were you in your proper station, a station much higher
than my own, I would come to you at once, and proffer my friendship:
as it is, I cannot; but your pride wrongs me, Glendower,--indeed it
does."
And Crauford turned away, apparently in the bitterness of wounded
feeling.
Glendower was touched: and his nature, as kind as it was proud,
immediately smote him for conduct certainly ungracious and perhaps
ungrateful. He held out his hand to Crauford; with the most
respectful warmth that personage seized and pressed it: and from that
time Crauford's visits appeared to receive a license which, if not
perfectly welcome, was at least never again questioned.
"I shall have this man now," muttered Crauford, between his ground
teeth, as he left the house, and took his way to his counting-house.
There, cool, bland, fawning, and weaving in his close and dark mind
various speculations of guilt and craft, he sat among his bills and
gold, like the very gnome and personification of that Mammon of gain
to which he was the most supple though concealed adherent.
Richard Crauford was of a new but not unimportant family. His father
had entered into commerce, and left a flourishing firm and a name of
great respectability in his profession to his son. That son was a man
whom many and opposite qualities rendered a character of very singular
and uncommon stamp. Fond of the laborious acquisition of money, he
was equally attached to the ostentatious pageantries of expense.
Profoundly skilled in the calculating business of his profession, he
was devoted equally to the luxuries of pleasure; but the pleasure was
suited well to the mind which pursued it. The divine intoxication of
that love where the delicacies and purities of affection consecrate
the humanity of passion was to him a thing of which not even his
youngest imagination had ever dreamed. The social concomitants of the
wine-cup (which have for the lenient an excuse, for the austere a
temptation), the generous expanding of the heart, the increased
yearning to kindly affection, the lavish spirit throwing off its
exuberance in the thousand lights and emanations of wit,--these, which
have rendered the molten grape, despite of its excesses, not unworthy
of the praises of immortal hymns, and taken harshness from the
judgment of those averse to its enjoyment,--these never presented an
inducement to the stony temperament and dormant heart of Richard
Crauford.
He looked upon the essences of things internal as the common eye upon
outward nature, and loved the many shapes of evil as the latter does
the varieties of earth, not for their graces, but their utility. His
loves, coarse and low, fed their rank fires from an unmingled and
gross depravity. His devotion to wine was either solitary and unseen--
for he loved safety better than mirth--or in company with those whose
station flattered his vanity, not whose fellowship ripened his crude
and nipped affections. Even the recklessness of vice in him had the
character of prudence; and in the most rapid and turbulent stream of
his excesses, one might detect the rocky and unmoved heart of the
calculator at the bottom.
Cool, sagacious, profound in dissimulation, and not only observant of,
but deducing sage consequences from, those human inconsistencies and
frailties by which it was his aim to profit, he cloaked his deeper
vices with a masterly hypocrisy; and for those too dear to forego and
too difficult to conceal he obtained pardon by the intercession of
virtues it cost him nothing to assume. Regular in his attendance at
worship; professing rigidness of faith beyond the tenets of the
orthodox church; subscribing to the public charities, where the common
eye knoweth what the private hand giveth; methodically constant to the
forms of business; primitively scrupulous in the proprieties of
speech; hospitable, at least to his superiors, and, being naturally
smooth, both of temper and address, popular with his inferiors,--it
was no marvel that one part of the world forgave to a man rich and
young the irregularities of dissipation, that another forgot real
immorality in favour of affected religion, or that the remainder
allowed the most unexceptionable excellence of words to atone for the
unobtrusive errors of a conduct which did not prejudice them.
"It is true," said his friends, "that he loves women too much: but he
is young; he will marry and amend."
Mr. Crauford did marry; and, strange as it may seem, for love,--at
least for that brute-like love, of which alone he was capable. After
a few years of ill-usage on his side, and endurance on his wife's,
they parted. Tired of her person, and profiting by her gentleness of
temper, he sent her to an obscure corner of the country, to starve
upon the miserable pittance which was all he allowed her from his
superfluities. Even then--such is the effect of the showy proprieties
of form and word--Mr. Crauford sank not in the estimation of the
world.
"It was easy to see," said the spectators of his domestic drama, "that
a man in temper so mild, in his business so honourable, so civil of
speech, so attentive to the stocks and the sermon, could not have been
the party to blame. One never knew the rights of matrimonial
disagreements, nor could sufficiently estimate the provoking
disparities of temper. Certainly Mrs. Crauford never did look in good
humour, and had not the open countenance of her husband; and certainly
the very excesses of Mr. Crauford betokened a generous warmth of
heart, which the sullenness of his conjugal partner might easily chill
and revolt."
And thus, unquestioned and unblamed, Mr. Crauford walked onward in his
beaten way; and, secretly laughing at the toleration of the crowd,
continued at his luxurious villa the orgies of a passionless yet
brutal sensuality.
So far might the character of Richard Crauford find parallels in
hypocrisy and its success. Dive we now deeper into his soul.
Possessed of talents which, though of a secondary rank, were in that
rank consummate, Mr. Crauford could not be a villain by intuition or
the irregular bias of his nature: he was a villain upon a grander
scale; he was a villain upon system. Having little learning and less
knowledge, out of his profession his reflection expended itself upon
apparently obvious deductions from the great and mysterious book of
life. He saw vice prosperous in externals, and from this sight his
conclusion was drawn. "Vice," said he, "is not an obstacle to
success; and if so, it is at least a pleasanter road to it than your
narrow and thorny ways of virtue." But there are certain vices which
require the mask of virtue, and Crauford thought it easier to wear the
mask than to school his soul to the reality. So to the villain he
added the hypocrite. He found the success equalled his hopes, for he
had both craft and genius; nor was he naturally without the minor
amiabilities, which to the ignorance of the herd seem more valuable
than coin of a more important amount. Blinded as we are by prejudice,
we not only mistake but prefer decencies to moralities; and, like the
inhabitants of Cos, when offered the choice of two statues of the same
goddess, we choose, not that which is the most beautiful, but that
which is the most dressed.
Accustomed easily to dupe mankind, Crauford soon grew to despise them;
and from justifying roguery by his own interest, he now justified it
by the folly of others; and as no wretch is so unredeemed as to be
without excuse to himself, Crauford actually persuaded his reason that
he was vicious upon principle, and a rascal on a system of morality.
But why the desire of this man, so consummately worldly and heartless,
for an intimacy with the impoverished and powerless student? This
question is easily answered. In the first place, during Crauford's
acquaintance with Glendower abroad, the latter had often, though
innocently, galled the vanity and self-pride of the parvenu affecting
the aristocrat, and in poverty the parvenu was anxious to retaliate.
But this desire would probably have passed away after he had satisfied
his curiosity, or gloated his spite, by one or two insights into
Glendower's home,--for Crauford, though at times a malicious, was not
a vindictive, man,--had it not been for a much more powerful object
which afterwards occurred to him. In an extensive scheme of fraud,
which for many years this man had carried on and which for secrecy and
boldness was almost unequalled, it had of late become necessary to his
safety to have a partner, or rather tool. A man of education, talent,
and courage was indispensable, and Crauford had resolved that
Glendower should be that man. With the supreme confidence in his own
powers which long success had given him; with a sovereign contempt
for, or rather disbelief in, human integrity; and with a thorough
conviction that the bribe to him was the bribe with all, and that none
would on any account be poor if they had the offer to be rich,--
Crauford did not bestow a moment's consideration upon the difficulty
of his task, or conceive that in the nature and mind of Glendower
there could exist any obstacle to his design.
Men addicted to calculation are accustomed to suppose those employed
in the same mental pursuit arrive, or ought to arrive, at the same
final conclusion. Now, looking upon Glendower as a philosopher,
Crauford looked upon him as a man who, however he might conceal his
real opinions, secretly laughed, like Crauford's self, not only at the
established customs, but at the established moralities of the world.
Ill-acquainted with books, the worthy Richard was, like all men
similarly situated, somewhat infected by the very prejudices he
affected to despise; and he shared the vulgar disposition to doubt the
hearts of those who cultivate the head. Glendower himself had
confirmed this opinion by lauding, though he did not entirely
subscribe to, those moralists who have made an enlightened self-
interest the proper measure of all human conduct; and Crauford,
utterly unable to comprehend this system in its grand, naturally
interpreted it in a partial, sense. Espousing self-interest as his
own code, he deemed that in reality Glendower's principles did not
differ greatly from his; and, as there is no pleasure to a hypocrite
like that of finding a fit opportunity to unburden some of his real
sentiments, Crauford was occasionally wont to hold some conference and
argument with the student, in which his opinions were not utterly
cloaked in their usual disguise; but cautious even in his candour, he
always forbore stating such opinions as his own: he merely mentioned
them as those which a man beholding the villanies and follies of his
kind, might be tempted to form; and thus Glendower, though not greatly
esteeming his acquaintance, looked upon him as one ignorant in his
opinions, but not likely to err in his conduct.
These conversations did, however, it is true, increase Crauford's
estimate of Glendower's integrity, but they by no means diminished his
confidence of subduing it. Honour, a deep and pure sense of the
divinity of good, the steady desire of rectitude, and the supporting
aid of a sincere religion,--these he did not deny to his intended
tool: he rather rejoiced that he possessed them. With the profound
arrogance, the sense of immeasurable superiority, which men of no
principle invariably feel for those who have it, Crauford said to
himself, "Those very virtues will be my best dupes; they cannot resist
the temptations I shall offer; but they can resist any offer to betray
me afterwards; for no man can resist hunger: but your fine feelings,
your nice honour, your precise religion,--he! he! he!--these can teach
a man very well to resist a common inducement; they cannot make him
submit to be his own executioner; but they can prevent his turning
king's evidence and being executioner to another. No, no: it is not
to your common rogues that I may dare trust my secret,--my secret,
which is my life! It is precisely of such a fine, Athenian, moral
rogue as I shall make my proud friend that I am in want. But he has
some silly scruples; we must beat them away: we must not be too rash;
and above all, we must leave the best argument to poverty. Want is
your finest orator; a starving wife, a famished brat,--he! he!--these
are your true tempters,--your true fathers of crime, and fillers of
jails and gibbets. Let me see: he has no money, I know, but what he
gets from that bookseller. What bookseller, by the by? Ah, rare
thought! I'll find out, and cut off that supply. My lady wife's
cheek will look somewhat thinner next month, I fancy--he! he! But 't
is a pity, for she is a glorious creature! Who knows but I may serve
two purposes? However, one at present! business first, and pleasure
afterwards; and, faith, the business is damnably like that of life and
death."
Muttering such thoughts as these, Crauford took his way one evening to
Glendower's house.
CHAPTER XLII.
Iago.--Virtue; a fig!--'t is in ourselves that we are thus and thus.--
Othello.
"So, so, my little one, don't let me disturb you. Madam, dare I
venture to hope your acceptance of this fruit? I chose it myself, and
I am somewhat of a judge. Oh! Glendower, here is the pamphlet you
wished to see."
With this salutation, Crauford drew his chair to the table by which
Glendower sat, and entered into conversation with his purposed victim.
A comely and a pleasing countenance had Richard Crauford! the lonely
light of the room fell upon a face which, though forty years of guile
had gone over it, was as fair and unwrinkled as a boy's. Small, well-
cut features; a blooming complexion; eyes of the lightest blue; a
forehead high, though narrow; and a mouth from which the smile was
never absent,--these, joined to a manner at once soft and confident,
and an elegant though unaffected study of dress, gave to Crauford a
personal appearance well suited to aid the effect of his hypocritical
and dissembling mind.
"Well, my friend," said he, "always at your books, eh? Ah! it is a
happy taste; would that I had cultivated it more; but we who are
condemned to business have little leisure to follow our own
inclinations. It is only on Sundays that I have time to read; and
then (to say truth) I am an old-fashioned man, whom the gayer part of
the world laughs at, and then I am too occupied with the Book of Books
to think of any less important study."
Not deeming that a peculiar reply was required to this pious speech,
Glendower did not take that advantage of Crauford's pause which it was
evidently intended that he should. With a glance towards the
student's wife, our mercantile friend continued: "I did once--once in
my young dreams--intend that whenever I married I would relinquish a
profession for which, after all, I am but little calculated. I
pictured to myself a country retreat, well stored with books; and
having concentrated in one home all the attractions which would have
tempted my thoughts abroad, I had designed to surrender myself solely
to those studies which, I lament to say, were but ill attended to in
my earlier education. But--but" (here Mr. Crauford sighed deeply, and
averted his face) "fate willed it otherwise!"
Whatever reply of sympathetic admiration or condolence Glendower might
have made was interrupted by one of those sudden and overpowering
attacks of faintness which had of late seized the delicate and
declining health of his wife. He rose, and leaned over her with a
fondness and alarm which curled the lip of his visitor.
"Thus it is," said Crauford to himself, "with weak minds, under the
influence of habit. The love of lust becomes the love of custom, and
the last is as strong as the first."
When--she had recovered, she rose, and (with her child) retired to
rest, the only restorative she ever found effectual for her complaint.
Glendower went with her, and, after having seen her eyes, which swam
with tears of gratitude at his love, close in the seeming slumber she
affected in order to release him from his watch, he returned to
Crauford. He found that gentleman leaning against the chimney-piece
with folded arms, and apparently immersed in thought. A very good
opportunity had Glendower's absence afforded to a man whose boast it
was never to lose one. Looking over the papers on the table, he had
seen and possessed himself of the address of the bookseller the
student dealt with. "So much for business, now for philanthropy,"
said Mr. Crauford, in his favorite antithetical phrase, throwing
himself in his attitude against the chimney-piece.
As Glendower entered, Crauford started from his revery, and with a
melancholy air and pensive voice said,--
"Alas, my friend, when I look upon this humble apartment, the weak
health of your unequalled wife, your obscurity, your misfortunes; when
I look upon these, and contrast them with your mind, your talents, and
all that you were born and fitted for, I cannot but feel tempted to
believe with those who imagine the pursuit of virtue a chimera, and
who justify their own worldly policy by the example of all their
kind."
"Virtue," said Glendower, "would indeed be a chimera, did it require
support from those whom you have cited."
"True,--most true," answered Crauford, somewhat disconcerted in
reality, though not in appearance; "and yet, strange as it may seem, I
have known some of those persons very good, admirably good men. They
were extremely moral and religious: they only played the great game
for worldly advantage upon the same terms as the other players; nay,
they never made a move in it without most fervently and sincerely
praying for divine assistance."
"I readily believe you," said Glendower, who always, if possible,
avoided a controversy: "the easiest person to deceive is one's own
self."
"Admirably said," answered Crauford, who thought it nevertheless one
of the most foolish observations he had ever heard, "admirably said!
and yet my heart does grieve bitterly for the trials and distresses it
surveys. One must make excuses for poor human frailty; and one is
often placed in such circumstances as to render it scarcely possible
without the grace of God" (here Crauford lifted up his eyes) "not to
be urged, as it were, into the reasonings and actions of the world."
Not exactly comprehending this observation, and not very closely
attending to it, Glendower merely bowed, as in assent, and Crauford
continued,--
"I remember a remarkable instance of this truth. One of my partner's
clerks had, through misfortune or imprudence, fallen into the greatest
distress. His wife, his children (he had a numerous family), were on
the literal and absolute verge of starvation. Another clerk, taking
advantage of these circumstances, communicated to the distressed man a
plan for defrauding his employer. The poor fellow yielded to the
temptation, and was at last discovered. I spoke to him myself, for I
was interested in his fate, and had always esteemed him. 'What,' said
I, 'was your motive for this fraud?' 'My duty!' answered the man,
fervently; 'my duty! Was I to suffer my wife, my children, to starve
before my face, when I could save them at a little personal risk? No:
my duty forbade it!' and in truth, Glendower, there was something v |
