"LORD L'ESTRANGE, noble friend!"
"You!--and here--Violante? Is it I whom you seek? For what? Good
heavens! what has happened? Why are you so pale; why tremble?"
"Have you forgiven Helen?" asked Violante, beginning with evasive
question, and her cheek was pale no more. "Helen, the poor child!
I have nothing in her to forgive, much to thank her for. She has been
frank and honest."
"And Leonard--whom I remember in my childhood--you have forgiven him?"
"Fair mediator," said Harley, smiling, though coldly, "happy is the man
who deceives another; all plead for him. And if the man deceived cannot
forgive, no one will sympathize or excuse."
"But Leonard did not deceive you?"
"Yes, from the first. It is a long tale, and not to be told to you; but
I cannot forgive him."
"Adieu! my Lord. Helen must, then, still be very dear to you!" Violante
turned away. Her emotion was so artless, her very anger so charming,
that the love, against which, in the prevalence of his later and darker
passions, he had so sternly struggled, rushed back upon Harley's breast;
but it came only in storm.
"Stay, but talk not of Helen!" he exclaimed. "Ah, if Leonard's sole
offence had been what you appear to deem it, do you think I could feel
resentment? No; I should have gratefully hailed the hand that severed a
rash and ungenial tie. I would have given my ward to her lover with such
a dower as it suits my wealth to bestow. But his offence dates from his
very birth. To bless and to enrich the son of a man who--Violante,
listen to me. We may soon part, and forever. Others may misconstrue my
actions; you, at least, shall know from what just principle they spring.
There was a man whom I singled out of the world as more than a brother.
In the romance of my boyhood I saw one who dazzled my fancy, captivated
my heart. It was a dream of Beauty breathed into waking life. I loved,
--I believed myself beloved. I confided all my heart to this friend,--
this more than brother; he undertook to befriend and to aid my suit. On
that very pretext he first saw this ill-fated girl, saw, betrayed,
destroyed her; left me ignorant that her love, which I had thought mine,
had been lavished so wildly on another; left me to believe that my own
suit she had fled, but in generous self-sacrifice,--for she was poor and
humbly born; that--oh, vain idiot that I was!--the self-sacrifice had
been too strong for a young human heart, which had broken in the
struggle; left me to corrode my spring of life in remorse; clasped my
hand in mocking comfort, smiled at my tears of agony--not one tear
himself for his own poor victim! And suddenly, not long since, I learned
all this. And in the father of Leonard Fairfield, you behold the man who
has poisoned all the well-spring of joy to me. You weep! Oh, Violante!
the Past he has blighted and embittered,--that I could forgive; but the
Future is blasted too. For just ere this treason was revealed to me, I
had begun to awake from the torpor of my dreary penance, to look with
fortitude towards the duties I had slighted, to own that the pilgrimage
before me was not barren. And then, oh then, I felt that all love was
not buried in a grave. I felt that you, had fate so granted, might have
been all to my manhood which youth only saw through the delusion of its
golden mists. True, I was then bound to Helen; true, that honour to her
might forbid me all hope. But still, even to know that my heart was not
all ashes, that I could love again, that that glorious power and
privilege of our being was still mine, seemed to me so heavenly sweet.
But then this revelation of falsehood burst on me, and all truth seemed
blotted from the universe. I am freed from Helen; ah, freed, forsooth,--
because not even rank and wealth, and benefits and confiding tenderness,
could bind to me one human heart! Free from her; but between me and your
fresh nature stands Suspicion as an Upas tree. Not a hope that would
pass through the tainted air and fly to you, but falls dead under the
dismal boughs. I love!
"Ha, ha! I--I, whom the past has taught the impossibility to be loved
again. No: if those soft lips murmured 'Yes' to the burning prayer that,
had I been free but two short weeks ago, would have rushed from the frank
deeps of my heart, I should but imagine that you deceived yourself,--a
girl's first fleeting delusive fancy,--nothing more! Were you my bride,
Violante, I should but debase your bright nature by my own curse of
distrust. At each word of tenderness, my heart would say, 'How long will
this last; when will the deception come?' Your beauty, your gifts, would
bring me but jealous terror, eternally I should fly from the Present to
the Future, and say. 'These hairs will be gray, while flattering youth
will surround her in the zenith of her charms.' Why then do I hate and
curse my foe? Why do I resolve upon revenge? I comprehend it now. I
knew that there was something more imperious than the ghost of the Past
that urged me on. Gazing on you, I feel that it was the dim sense of a
mighty and priceless loss; it is not the dead Nora,--it is the living
Violante. Look not at me with those reproachful eyes: they cannot
reverse my purpose; they cannot banish suspicion from my sickened soul;
they cannot create a sunshine in the midst of this ghastly twilight. Go,
go; leave me to the sole joy that bequeaths no disappointment, the sole
feeling that unites me to social man; leave me to my revenge."
"Revenge! Oh, cruel!" exclaimed Violante, laying her hand on his arm.
"And in revenge, it is your own life that you will risk!"
"My life, simple child! This is no contest of life against life. Could
I bare to all the world my wrongs for their ribald laughter, I should
only give to my foe the triumph to pity my frenzy, to shun the contest;
or grant it, if I could find a second--and then fire in the air. And all
the world would say, 'Generous Egerton! soul of honour!'"
"Egerton, Mr. Egerton! He cannot be this foe? It is not on him you can
design revenge,--you who spend all your hours in serving his cause, you
to whom he trusts so fondly, you who leaned yesterday on his shoulder,
and smiled so cheeringly in his face?"
"Did I? Hypocrisy against hypocrisy, snare against snare: that is my
revenge."
"Harley, Harley! Cease, cease!"
The storm of passion rushed on unheeding.
"I seem to promote his ambition but to crush it into the mire. I have
delivered him from the gentler gripe of an usurer, so that he shall hold
at my option alms or a prison--"
"Friend, friend! Hush, hush!"
"I have made the youth he has reared and fostered into treachery like his
own (your father's precious choice, Randal Leslie) mine instrument in the
galling lesson how ingratitude can sting. His very son shall avenge the
mother, and be led to his father's breast as victor, with Randal Leslie,
in the contest that deprives sire and benefactor of all that makes life
dear to ambitious egotism. And if, in the breast of Audley Egerton,
there can yet lurk one memory of what I was to him and to truth, not his
least punishment will be the sense that his own perfidy has so changed
the man whose very scorn of falsehood has taught him to find in fraud
itself the power of retribution."
"If this be not a terrible dream," murmured Violante, recoiling, "it is
not your foe alone that you will deprive of all that makes life dear.
Act thus--and what, in the future, is left to me?"
"To you? Oh, never fear. I may give Randal Leslie a triumph over his
patron, but in the same hour I will unmask his villany, and sweep him
forever from your path. What in the future is left to you?---your
birthright and your native land; hope, joy, love, felicity. Could it be
possible that in the soft but sunny fancy which plays round the heart of
maiden youth, but still sends no warmth into its deeps,--could it be
possible that you had Honoured me with a gentler thought, it will pass
away, and you will be the pride and delight of one of your own years, to
whom the vista of Time is haunted by no chilling spectres, one who can
look upon that lovely face, and not turn away to mutter, 'Too fair, too
fair for me!'"
"Oh, agony!" exclaimed Violante, with sudden passion. "In my turn hear
me. If, as you promise, I am released from the dreadful thought that he,
at whose touch I shudder, can claim this hand, my choice is irrevocably
made. The altars which await me will not be those of a human love.
But oh, I implore you--by all the memories of your own life, hitherto,
if sorrowful, unsullied, by the generous interest you yet profess for me,
whom you will have twice saved from a danger to which death were mercy--
leave, oh, leave to me the right to regard your image as I have done from
the first dawn of childhood. Leave me the right to honour and revere it.
Let not an act accompanied with a meanness--oh that I should say the
word!--a meanness and a cruelty that give the lie to your whole life--
make even a grateful remembrance of you an unworthy sin. When I kneel
within the walls that divide me from the world, oh, let me think that I
can pray for you as the noblest being that the world contains! Hear me!
hear me!"
"Violante!" murmured Harley, his whole frame heaving with emotion, "bear
with me. Do not ask of me the sacrifice of what seems to me the cause of
manhood itself,--to sit down, meek and patient, under a wrong that
debases me, with the consciousness that all my life I have been the
miserable dupe to affections I deemed so honest, to regrets that I
believed so holy. Ah, I should feel more mean in my pardon than you can
think me in revenge! Were it an acknowledged enemy, I could open my arms
to him at your bidding; but the perfidious friend!--ask it not. My cheek
burns at the, thought, as at the stain of a blow. Give me but to-morrow
--one day--I demand no more--wholly to myself and to the past, and mould
me for the future as you will. Pardon, pardon the ungenerous thoughts
that extended distrust to you. I retract them; they are gone,--dispelled
before those touching words, those ingenuous eyes. At your feet,
Violante, I repent and I implore! Your father himself shall banish your
sordid suitor. Before this hour to-morrow you will be free. Oh, then,
then! will you not give me this hand to guide me again into the paradise
of my youth? Violante, it is in vain to wrestle with myself, to doubt,
to reason, to be wisely fearful! I love, I love you! I trust again in
virtue and faith. I place my fate in your keeping." If at times
Violante may appear to have ventured beyond the limit of strict maiden
bashfulness, much may be ascribed to her habitual candour, her solitary
rearing, and remoteness from the world, the very innocence of her soul,
and the warmth of heart which Italy gives its daughters. But now that
sublimity of thought and purpose which pervaded her nature, and required
only circumstances to develop, made her superior to all the promptings of
love itself. Dreams realized which she had scarcely dared to own; Harley
free, Harley at her feet; all the woman struggling at her heart, mantling
in her blushes, still stronger than love, stronger than the joy of being
loved again, was the heroic will,--will to save him, who in all else
ruled her existence, from the eternal degradation to which passion had
blinded his own confused and warring spirit.
Leaving one hand in his impassioned clasp, as he still knelt before her,
she raised on high the other. "Ah," she said, scarce audibly,--"ah, if
heaven vouchsafe me the proud and blissful privilege to be allied to your
fate, to minister to your happiness, never should I know one fear of your
distrust. No time, no change, no sorrow--not even the loss of your
affection--could make me forfeit the right to remember that you had once
confided to me a heart so noble. But"--here her voice rose in its tone,
and the glow fled from her cheek--"but, O Thou the Ever Present, hear and
receive the solemn vow. If to me he refuse to sacrifice the sin that
would debase him, that sin be the barrier between us evermore; and may my
life, devoted to Thy service, atone for the hour in which he belied the
nature he received from Thee! Harley, release me! I have spoken: firm
as yourself, I leave the choice to you."
"You judge me harshly," said Harley, rising, with sullen anger; "but at
least I have not the meanness to sell what I hold as justice, though the
bribe may include my last hope of happiness."
"Meanness! Oh, unhappy, beloved Harley!" exclaimed Violante, with such a
gush of exquisite reproachful tenderness, that it thrilled him as the
voice of the parting guardian angel. "Meanness! But it is that from
which I implore you to save yourself. You cannot judge, you cannot see.
You are dark, dark. Lost Christian that you are, what worse than heathen
darkness to feign the friendship the better to betray; to punish
falsehood by becoming yourself so false; to accept the confidence even
of your bitterest foe, and then to sink below his own level in deceit?
And oh, worse than all--to threaten that a son--son of the woman you
professed to love--should swell your vengeance against a father! No!
it was not you that said this,--it was the Fiend!"
"Enough!" exclaimed Harley, startled, conscience-stricken, and rushing
into resentment, in order to escape the sense of shame. "Enough! you
insult the man you professed to honour."
"I honoured the prototype of gentleness and valour. I honoured one who
seemed to me to clothe with life every grand and generous image that is
born from the souls of poets. Destroy that ideal, and you destroy the
Harley whom I honoured. He is dead to me forever. I will mourn for him
as his widow, faithful to his memory, weeping over the thought of what he
was." Sobs choked her voice; but as Harley, once more melted, sprang
forward to regain her side, she escaped with a yet quicker movement,
gained the door, and darting down the corridor, vanished from his sight.
Harley stood still one moment, thoroughly irresolute, nay, almost
subdued. Then sternness, though less rigid than before, gradually came
to his brow. The demon had still its hold in the stubborn and marvellous
pertinacity with which the man clung to all that once struck root at his
heart. With a sudden impulse that still withheld decision, yet spoke of
sore-shaken purpose, he strode to his desk, drew from it Nora's
manuscript, and passed from his room.
Harley had meant never to have revealed to Audley the secret he had
gained until the moment when revenge was consuminated. He had
contemplated no vain reproach. His wrath would have spoken forth in
deeds, and then a word would have sufficed as the key to all. Willing,
perhaps, to hail some extenuation of perfidy, though the possibility of
such extenuation he had never before admitted, he determined on the
interview which he had hitherto so obstinately shunned, and went straight
to the room in which Audley Egerton still sat, solitary and fearful.