Lord L'Estrange threw himself on a sofa, and leaned his cheek on his hand
thoughtfully. Audley Egerton sat near him, with his arms folded, and
gazed on his friend's face with a soft expression of aspect, which was
very unusual to the firm outline of his handsome features. The two men
were as dissimilar in person as the reader will have divined that they
were in character. All about Egerton was so rigid, all about L'Estrange
so easy. In every posture of Harley's there was the unconscious grace of
a child. The very fashion of his garments showed his abhorrence of
restraint. His clothes were wide and loose; his neckcloth, tied
carelessly, left his throat half bare. You could see that he had lived
much in warm and southern lands, and contracted a contempt for
conventionalities; there was as little in his dress as in his talk of the
formal precision of the North. He was three or four years younger than
Audley, but he looked at least twelve years younger. In fact, he was one
of those men to whom old age seems impossible; voice, look, figure, had
all the charm of youth: and perhaps it was from this gracious
youthfulness--at all events, it was characteristic of the kind of love he
inspired--that neither his parents, nor the few friends admitted into his
intimacy, ever called him, in their habitual intercourse, by the name of
his title. He was not L'Estrange with them, he was Harley; and by that
familiar baptismal I will usually designate him. He was not one of those
men whom author or reader wish to view at a distance, and remember as "my
Lord"--it was so rarely that he remembered it himself. For the rest, it
had been said of him by a shrewd wit, "He is so natural that every one
calls him affected." Harley L'Estrange was not so critically handsome as
Audley Egerton; to a commonplace observer, he was only rather good-
looking than otherwise. But women said that he had "a beautiful
countenance," and they were not wrong. He wore his hair, which was of a
fair chestnut, long, and in loose curls; and instead of the Englishman's
whiskers, indulged in the foreigner's mustache. His complexion was
delicate, though not effeminate: it was rather the delicacy of a student
than of a woman. But in his clear gray eye there was a wonderful vigour
of life. A skilful physiologist, looking only into that eye, would have
recognized rare stamina of constitution,--a nature so rich that, while
easily disturbed, it would require all the effects of time, or all the
fell combinations of passion and grief, to exhaust it. Even now, though
so thoughtful, and even so sad, the rays of that eye were as concentrated
and steadfast as the light of the diamond.
"You were only, then, in jest," said Audley, after a long silence, "when
you spoke of this mission to Florence. You have still no idea of
entering into public life?"
"None."
"I had hoped better things when I got your promise to pass one season in
London; but, indeed, you have kept your promise to the ear to break it to
the spirit. I could not presuppose that you would shun all society, and
be as much of a hermit here as under the vines of Como."
"I have sat in the Strangers' Gallery, and heard your great speakers; I
have been in the pit of the opera, and seen your fine ladies; I have
walked your streets; I have lounged in your parks, and I say that I can't
fall in love with a faded dowager, because she fills up her wrinkles with
rouge."
"Of what dowager do you speak?" asked the matter-of-fact Audley.
"She has a great many titles. Some people call her Fashion, you busy
men, Politics: it is all one,--tricked out and artificial. I mean London
Life. No, I can't fall in love with her, fawning old harridan!"
"I wish you could fall in love with something." "I wish I could, with
all my heart."
"But you are so /blaze/."
"On the contrary, I am so fresh. Look out of the window--what do you
see?"
"Nothing!"
"Nothing?"
"Nothing but houses and dusty lilacs, my coachman dozing on his box, and
two women in pattens crossing the kennel."
"I see not those where I lie on the sofa. I see but the stars. And I
feel for them as I did when I was a schoolboy at Eton. It is you who are
/blaze/, not I. Enough of this. You do not forget my commission with
respect to the exile who has married into your brother's family?"
"No; but here you set me a task more difficult than that of saddling your
cornet on the War Office."
"I know it is difficult, for the counter influence is vigilant and
strong; but, on the other hand, the enemy is so damnable a traitor that
one must have the Fates and the household gods on one's side."
"Nevertheless," said the practical Audley, bending over a book on the
table; "I think that the best plan would be to attempt a compromise with
the traitor."
"To judge of others by myself," answered Harley, with spirit, "it were
less bitter to put up with wrong than to palter with it for compensation.
And such wrong! Compromise with the open foe--that maybe done with
honour; but with the perjured friend--that were to forgive the perjury!"
"You are too vindictive," said Egerton; "there may be excuses for the
friend, which palliate even--"
"Hush! Audley, hush! or I shall think the world has indeed corrupted
you. Excuse for the friend who deceives, who betrays! No, such is the
true outlaw of Humanity; and the Furies surround him even while he sleeps
in the temple."
The man of the world lifted his eyes slowly on the animated face of one
still natural enough for the passions. He then once more returned to his
book, and said, after a pause, "It is time you should marry, Harley."
"No," answered L'Estrange, with a smile at this sudden turn in the
conversation, "not time yet; for my chief objection to that change in
life is, that the women nowadays are too old for me, or I am too young
for them. A few, indeed, are so infantine that one is ashamed to be
their toy; but most are so knowing that one is afraid to be their dupe.
The first, if they condescend to love you, love you as the biggest doll
they have yet dandled, and for a doll's good qualities,--your pretty blue
eyes and your exquisite millinery. The last, if they prudently accept
you, do so on algebraical principles; you are but the X or the Y that
represents a certain aggregate of goods matrimonial,--pedigree, title,
rent-roll, diamonds, pin-money, opera-box. They cast you up with the
help of mamma, and you wake some morning to find that plus wife minus
affection equals--the Devil!"
"Nonsense," said Audley, with his quiet, grave laugh. "I grant that it
is often the misfortune of a man in your station to be married rather for
what he has than for what he is; but you are tolerably penetrating, and
not likely to be deceived in the character of the woman you court."
"Of the woman I court?--No! But of the woman I marry, very likely
indeed! Woman is a changeable thing, as our Virgil informed us at
school; but her change par excellence is from the fairy you woo to the
brownie you wed. It is not that she has been a hypocrite,--it is that
she is a transmigration. You marry a girl for her accomplishments. She
paints charmingly, or plays like Saint Cecilia. Clap a ring on her
finger, and she never draws again,--except perhaps your caricature on the
back of a letter,--and never opens a piano after the honeymoon. You
marry her for her sweet temper; and next year, her nerves are so
shattered that you can't contradict her but you are whirled into a storm
of hysterics. You marry her because she declares she hates balls and
likes quiet; and ten to one but what she becomes a patroness at Almack's,
or a lady-in-waiting."
"Yet most men marry, and most men survive the operation."
"If it were only necessary to live, that would be a consolatory and
encouraging reflection. But to live with peace, to live with dignity,
to live with freedom, to live in harmony with your thoughts, your habits,
your aspirations--and this in the perpetual companionship of a person to
whom you have given the power to wound your peace, to assail your
dignity, to cripple your freedom, to jar on each thought and each habit,
and bring you down to the meanest details of earth, when you invite her,
poor soul, to soar to the spheres--that makes the To Be or Not To Be,
which is the question."
"If I were you, Harley, I would do as I have heard the author of
'Sandford and Merton' did,--choose out a child and educate her yourself,
after your own heart."
"You have hit it," answered Harley, seriously. "That has long been my
idea,--a very vague one, I confess. But I fear I shall be an old man
before I find even the child."
"Ah!" he continued, yet more earnestly, while the whole character of his
varying countenance changed again,--"ah, if indeed I could discover what
I seek,--one who, with the heart of a child, has the mind of a woman; one
who beholds in nature the variety, the charm, the never feverish, ever
healthful excitement that others vainly seek in the bastard
sentimentalities of a life false with artificial forms; one who can
comprehend, as by intuition, the rich poetry with which creation is
clothed,--poetry so clear to the child when enraptured with the flower,
or when wondering at the star! If on me such exquisite companionship
were bestowed--why, then--" He paused, sighed deeply, and, covering his
face with his hand, resumed, in faltering accents,--
"But once--but once only, did such vision of the Beautiful made Human
rise before me,--rise amidst 'golden exhalations of the dawn.' It
beggared my life in vanishing. You know only--you only--how--how--"
He bowed his head, and the tears forced themselves through his clenched
fingers.
"So long ago!" said Audley, sharing his friend's emotion. "Years so long
and so weary, yet still thus tenacious of a mere boyish memory!"
"Away with it, then!" cried Harley, springing to his feet, and with a
laugh of strange merriment. "Your carriage still waits: set me home
before you go to the House."
Then laying his hand lightly on his friend's shoulder, he said, "Is it
for you, Audley Egerton, to speak sneeringly of boyish memories? What
else is it that binds us together? What else warms my heart when I meet
you? What else draws your thoughts from blue-books and beer-bills to
waste them on a vagrant like me? Shake hands. Oh, friend of my boyhood!
recollect the oars that we plied and the bats that we wielded in the old
time, or the murmured talk on the moss-grown bank, as we sat together,
building in the summer air castles mightier than Windsor. Ah, they are
strong ties, those boyish memories believe me! I remember, as if it were
yesterday, my translation of that lovely passage in Persius, beginning--
let me see--ah!
"'Quum primum pavido custos mihi purpura cernet,'--
that passage on friendship which gushes out so livingly from the stern
heart of the satirist. And when old--complimented me on my verses, my
eye sought yours. Verily, I now say as then,--
"'Nescio quod, certe est quod me tibi temperet astrum.'"
["What was the star I know not, but certainly some star
it was that attuned me unto thee."]
Audley turned away his head as he returned the grasp of his friend's
hand; and while Harley, with his light elastic footstep, descended the
stairs, Egerton lingered behind, and there was no trace of the worldly
man upon his countenance when he took his place in the carriage by his
companion's side.
Two hours afterwards, weary cries of "Question, question!" "Divide,
divide!" sank into reluctant silence as Audley Egerton rose to conclude
the debate,--the man of men to speak late at night, and to impatient
benches: a man who would be heard; whom a Bedlam broke loose would not
have roared down; with a voice clear and sound as a bell, and a form as
firmly set on the ground as a church-tower. And while, on the dullest of
dull questions, Audley Egerton thus, not too lively himself, enforced
attention, where was Harley L'Estrange? Standing alone by the river at
Richmond, and murmuring low fantastic thoughts as he gazed on the moonlit
tide.
When Audley left him at home he had joined his parents, made them gay
with his careless gayety, seen the old-fashioned folks retire to rest,
and then--while they, perhaps, deemed him once more the hero of ball-
rooms and the cynosure of clubs--he drove slowly through the soft summer
night, amidst the perfumes of many a garden and many a gleaming chestnut
grove, with no other aim before him than to reach the loveliest margin of
England's loveliest river, at the hour when the moon was fullest and the
song of the nightingale most sweet. And so eccentric a humourist was
this man, that I believe, as he there loitered,--no one near to cry "How
affected!" or "How romantic!"--he enjoyed himself more than if he had
been exchanging the politest "how-d'ye-dos" in the hottest of London
drawing-rooms, or betting his hundreds on the odd trick, with Lord de
R------ for his partner.