THE
CONTRAST,
BY THE AUTHOR OF “MATILDA,” “YES AND NO,”
&c. &c.
Take but degree away--untune that string,
And hark! what discord follows.
SHAKSPEARE.
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
LONDON:
HENRY COLBURN AND RICHARD BENTLEY,
NEW BURLINGTON STREET.
1832.
ADVERTISEMENT.
“What’s in a name?” is a question to which, perhaps, a bookseller
would be apt to reply--“More than meets the eye.” With some suspicion
of this kind, I have hesitated much what Title to prefix to the
following pages.
I might, it is true, have been satisfied with the safe expedient of
any two or three mellifluous, though unmeaning syllables, in the
shape of a proper name; but I was anxious, if possible, rather to
explain the character than to record the family appellation of my
hero--if hero that person must be called whose failings and whose
errors occupy most of these pages.
If I had been writing in French, “L’Homme Difficile” would most
nearly have defined the character I meant to pourtray; but there is
no synonymous phrase in English. “The Fastidious Man” did not quite
please me. I am myself fastidious as to the use of the term, “the
Man,” in a title explanatory of character. “Fastidiousness” is not
euphonious, still less “Fastidiosity,” which Johnson passes current.
Under these difficulties I have left my hero to speak for himself,
without introduction; and taking what would, perhaps, at first have
been the more gallant course, I have attempted to draw the attention
of the reader to the diversity of female character arising, in great
part, from difference of situation, under the form, and with the
title, of “The Contrast.”
One word more, kind Reader, in the shape of an humble petition for
that general indulgence which no one can feel more than myself how
much I require.
THE CONTRAST.
CHAPTER I.
Will Fortune never come with both hands full,
But write her fair words still in foulest letters?
She either gives a stomach and no food
(Such are the poor in health), or else a feast
And takes away the stomach: such are the rich
That have abundance and enjoy it not.
SHAKSPEARE.
----Your servant and your friend;
One that attends your ladyship’s commands.
IBID.
She was not old, nor young, nor at the years
Which certain people call a certain age,
Which yet the most uncertain age appears.
BYRON.
In that iron age when Frenchmen marched “en masse” from Madrid to
Moscow; when Continental travelling was effected by drawing not
_bills_, but _swords_; when _cannon_, not _credit_, gave to strangers
the comforts of home in foreign lands, then were the locomotive
propensities of the peaceable portion of our countrymen necessarily
confined within the narrow limits of our sea-girt island. Impatient
at being thus temporarily dammed up, the stream of society annually
flowed outwards from the metropolis down to the extremest low-water
mark of the different bathing-places.
It was during this period, that a large party had assembled, at the
conclusion of the London season, at the hospitable mansion of Sir
North Saunders. Sir North’s father had been a great contractor in
those days when contracts were worth something; and, having realized
an immense sum in the course of the American war, he, in gratitude,
christened his son and heir after that minister, to whose persevering
profusion he owed all to which he would be heir. When the almost
unanimous voice of an indignant nation had closed the disastrous
struggle, Sir Simon Saunders (as the contractor and first baronet was
called) was, after a time, completely puzzled how to act.
During the first rapid succession of short and inconsistent
administrations, he stuck by the Treasury, with a tenacity as to
place, and versatility as to persons, worthy of that renowned vicar,
whose peculiar talents in that line have become proverbial. Yet, as
upon the permanent ascendancy of the Pitt party of that day, he found
that retrenchment and reform were the watch-words at head-quarters,
he, in disgust, threw up the whole concern, laid out some of his
previously-acquired spoil in the purchase of Hornscliff Abbey, and
retired to that beautiful retreat, thinking that, at any rate, a
country gentleman contractor was not a greater contradiction in
terms, than a patriot minister.
He was not, however, long condemned to pretend to enjoy a state
of existence so uncongenial to all his tastes and habits; and his
son and heir, Sir North, not only succeeded in full to all the
acquirements of his father’s later years, but also inherited, in all
its original freshness, that turn of mind which had in youth raised
Sir Simon from nobody.
It was not therefore to be expected that he would long bury himself
in the solitudes of Hornscliff Abbey, more especially as, coming
of age soon after the breaking out of the revolutionary war, and
having a great deal of parliamentary interest, the same minister who
had disappointed the expectations of the father, now acting upon a
different system, granted upon many occasions the utmost demands of
the son.
From this time for nearly twenty years, Sir North continued in
heart and soul nothing more nor less than a thorough-paced trading
politician; most anxious, nevertheless, to veil that character under
the reputation of a _bon vivant_, _bel esprit_, and _connoisseur_. To
these pretensions, since the last audit-day had given him a glimpse
of his beautiful property at Hornscliff, he had added an eager desire
to be thought an enthusiast in the picturesque. He had, in imitation
of some of his acquaintance, a service of china painted with views of
the romantic environs of his place: the beauties which the plates and
dishes thus displayed, were, during the season, the constant theme of
his conversation, coupled with pressing invitations to his various
acquaintance, that as his boasted property was upon the coast, they
would make Hornscliff Abbey their sojourning place during the ensuing
summer.
This many of them seemed nothing loth to do, particularly as they
ascertained that the other _artiste_, whose labours, in their
opinion, no less profitably adorned the plates and dishes, was to
continue his successful attempts to eclipse the performance of the
painter.
“What a beautiful place it must be!” said Lady Madelina Manfred to
her neighbour, young Lord Castleton, as she pensively dropped her
beautiful eyes on her plate, and continued in a sentimental tone,
“I hope that you are as passionately fond of the sea as I am. How
sublime its eternal sameness! How grand its boundless limits! Oh, I
could look on it for ever!” she added, as she completely covered the
German ocean with half a spoonful of bread sauce. “Shall we adjourn
there at the end of the season?” continued the lady, with a peculiar
emphasis on that comprehensive monosyllable _we_.
It was, indeed, to establish such an identity of interest between
her and young Lord Castleton, as would give her a common property in
the use of the first person plural, that she had been labouring all
through the season. Lady Madelina Manfred was born a fool, but had
through life cultivated that species of cunning which fools so often
display in the pursuit of an object, if they have one. The object
which she had been--I will not say for how many years, successfully
pursuing, was admiration. To be sure, nature had assisted her with a
pair of eyes which looked as if they could not but mean something,
and a voice, whose seductive tones could give a charm even to folly.
Her husband was one of those good, easy men, who seem as if only born
to give their wives a name, inasmuch as their own is never by any
chance heard after they have once accomplished that purpose. Seasons
had rolled on; and if Lady Madelina Manfred’s eye had lost some of
its brilliancy, her complexion some of its bloom, and her form some
of its freshness, there were still many who were wilfully blind to
such changes. As Lord Castleton will, in the course of these pages,
have much to say for himself, it is unnecessary to say any more for
him at present, than that he was but just nineteen; and whatever
opinion might then be entertained of the _liaison_ lately formed
between him and Lady Madelina, it was no scandal, when gossips said
that there _was a time_ when she had held him in her arms.
To the attractions of the invitation to Hornscliff Abbey, often urged
by Sir North, and so sweetly echoed by Lady Madelina, Lord Castleton
was not then in a frame of mind to be insensible, particularly as, in
addition to all other reasons for accepting it, his guardians were
very anxious that he should _not_; and he therefore longed to show
he was his own master, by putting himself completely at the disposal
of Sir North and Lady Madelina, who had both the most deliberate
designs, the one personal, the other political, upon his future
independence.
To Hornscliff Abbey, therefore, he transported himself, as soon as
he found that the waiters at the clubs monopolized the newspapers,
and sauntering hackney-coachmen elbowed him as they lounged along the
foot-pavement.
Lord Castleton was not by nature at all that sort of being which the
acquired habits of the last few months had made him appear, to all
who had never known him before. The parting jolt of his carriage
moving off the London pavement, seemed to shake from his nature much
of that affectation with which the season had encrusted it; and the
first breath of pure country air, as he cleared the last Cockney
villa, seemed to revive in their springy freshness, many of those
early feelings and tastes, which, however faded for a time, can at
nineteen hardly be irrecoverably seared and withered.
As he approached his destination, his spirit seemed to expand with
the bolder features of the mountain-scenery by which he found himself
surrounded. Though within the immediate limits of Sir North’s domain,
the effect was almost ludicrous of the attempts which had evidently
been hastily and recently made to cripple and confine the bold and
gigantic shapes which nature here displayed, in the scanty and
servile livery of a dress place. The contrasts thus produced were
quite comical. Rugged rocks were encircled by invisible railings;
cast-iron bridges swung across the wildest glens; Chinese pagodas
rose out of mountain heather; gilt wire aviaries were dotted about
in solitudes, where eagles might have stooped, or black game brooded;
and Thames wherries were moored by silken cords along the banks of
the shallow, but rapid torrent, which rushed over a rocky bed down to
the sea.
At the Abbey itself, these contradictions were more various and more
numerous, though perhaps not more striking. It requires nothing else
but an unlimited command of money to transport, in an incredibly
short space of time, all the contents of a London upholsterer’s
shop to the remotest and most uncivilized corner of the kingdom;
and due activity had been shown in attending to Sir North’s order,
that Hornscliff Abbey should, without delay, be furnished from
cellar to attic. The building itself, situated in one of those
snugly-sheltered, but romantic glens, where in former times the
monks had generally the good taste to fix, remained one of the best
preserved and most perfect specimens of the abbey-gothic style of
architecture: it was not to be expected that any furniture, thus
hastily huddled together, should be in perfect keeping with the walls
by which it was surrounded; less care was therefore taken that one
part should tally with the rest, and articles of every description
were crammed into all the rooms, with the same ill-assorted
propinquity in which they stood in the warehouses, whence they had
been removed wholesale.
But neither French paper on cedar panels, nor fragile wherries on
mountain torrents, seemed so much misplaced, as did some of the
company whom Sir North had collected to witness his installation as
a country gentleman. Many men, whose utmost previous pedestrian feat
had been daily gliding from their offices along the smooth flags of
Parliament-street to make a House, and ladies, who thought it an
exertion to step from their carriage across a broad _trottoir_ on
a morning visit, were now expected to thread tangled brakes, and to
climb over rugged rocks, in search of the picturesque.
Sir North was determined, however, to play what is called the whole
game; and the very day after the arrival of Lord Castleton, had been
fixed on for a distant excursion, to a romantic bay on the coast; the
beauties of which had been much vaunted by the Rev. Mr. Turner, the
picturesque-loving Rector of the adjoining parish; who, upon these
occasions, acted as guide, and wasted a great deal of intelligence,
taste, and enthusiasm, upon parties generally both indifferent
and ignorant; and took a considerable deal of useless trouble in
endeavouring to cultivate a mutual spirit of good-will between the
wild scenes he loved, and their present super-refined visitors, by
smoothing rugged inhospitalities on one side, and endeavouring to
cultivate a feeling of admiration on the other.