For ours was not like earthly love.
And must this parting be our very last?
No! I shall love thee still when death itself is past.
......
Hush’d were his Gertrude’s lips! but still their bland
And beautiful expression seem’d to melt
With love that could not die! and still his hand
She presses to the heart, no more that felt.
Ah, heart! where once each fond affection dwelt.
CAMPBELL.
“I wonder,” said Mr. Brown to himself, as he spurred his shaggy pony
to a speed very unusual to the steady habits of either party, “I wonder
where I shall find him. I would not for the late Lady Waddilove’s best
diamond cross have any body forestall me in the news. To think of my
young master dying so soon after my last visit, or rather my last visit
but one; and to think of the old gentleman taking on so, and raving
about his injustice to the rightful possessor, and saying that he
is justly punished, and asking me so eagerly if I could discover the
retreat of the late squire, and believing me so implicitly when I
undertook to do it, and giving me this letter!” And here Mr. Brown
wistfully examined an epistle sealed with black wax, peeping into the
corners, which irritated rather than satisfied his curiosity. “I wonder
what the old gentleman says in it; I suppose he will, of course, give up
the estate and house. Let me see; that long picture gallery, just built,
will, at all events, want furnishing. That would be a famous opportunity
to get rid of the Indian jars, and the sofas, and the great Turkey
carpet. How lucky that I should just have come in time to get the
letter. But let me consider how I shall find out?--an advertisement
in the paper? Ah! that’s the plan. ‘Algernon Mordaunt, Esq.: something
greatly to his advantage; apply to Mr. Brown, etc.’ Ah! that will do
well, very well. The Turkey carpet won’t be quite long enough. I wish
I had discovered Mr. Mordaunt’s address before, and lent him some money
during the young gentleman’s life: it would have seemed more generous.
However, I can offer it now, before I show the letter. Bless me, it’s
getting dark. Come, Dobbin, ye-up!” Such were the meditations of the
faithful friend of the late Lady Waddilove, as he hastened to London,
charged with the task of discovering Mordaunt and with the delivery of
the following epistle:--
You are now, sir, the heir to that property which, some years ago,
passed from your hands into mine. My son, for whom alone wealth or I may
say life was valuable to me, is no more. I only, an old, childless man,
stand between you and the estates of Mordaunt. Do not wait for my death
to enjoy them. I cannot live here, where everything reminds me of my
great and irreparable loss. I shall remove next month into another home.
Consider this, then, as once more yours. The house, I believe, you will
not find disimproved by my alterations: the mortgages on the estate have
been paid off; the former rental you will perhaps allow my steward to
account to you for, and after my death the present one will be yours. I
am informed that you are a proud man, and not likely to receive favours.
Be it so, sir! it is no favour you will receive, but justice; there are
circumstances connected with my treaty with your father which have of
late vexed my conscience; and conscience, sir, must be satisfied at any
loss. But we shall meet, perhaps, and talk over the past; at present I
will not enlarge on it. If you have suffered by me, I am sufficiently
punished, and my only hope is to repair your losses.
I am, etc., H. VAVASOUR MORDAUNT.
Such was the letter, so important to Mordaunt, with which our worthy
friend was charged. Bowed to the dust as Vavasour was by the loss of his
son, and open to conscience as affliction had made him, he had lived
too long for effect, not to be susceptible to its influence, even to the
last. Amidst all his grief, and it was intense, there were some whispers
of self-exaltation at the thought of the eclat which his generosity and
abdication would excite; and, with true worldly morality, the hoped-for
plaudits of others gave a triumph rather than humiliation to his
reconcilement with himself.
To say truth, there were indeed circumstances connected with his treaty
with Mordaunt’s father calculated to vex his conscience. He knew that he
had not only taken great advantage of Mr. Mordaunt’s distress, but
that at his instigation a paper which could forever have prevented
Mr. Mordaunt’s sale of the property, had been destroyed. These
circumstances, during the life of his son, he had endeavoured to forget
or to palliate. But grief is rarely deaf to remorse; and at the death of
that idolized son the voice at his heart grew imperious, and he lost the
power in losing the motive of reasoning it away.
Mr. Brown’s advertisement was unanswered; and, with the zeal and
patience of the Christian proselyte’s tribe and calling, the good man
commenced, in person, a most elaborate and painstaking research. For
a long time, his endeavours were so ineffectual that Mr. Brown, in
despair, disposed of the two Indian jars for half their value, and
heaved a despondent sigh, whenever he saw the great Turkey carpet rolled
up in his warehouse with as much obstinacy as if it never meant to
unroll itself again.
At last, however, by dint of indefatigable and minute investigation, he
ascertained that the object of his search had resided in London, under a
feigned name; from lodging to lodging, and corner to corner, he tracked
him, till at length he made himself master of Mordaunt’s present
retreat. A joyful look did Mr. Brown cast at the great Turkey carpet,
as he passed by it, on his way to his street door, on the morning of his
intended visit to Mordaunt. “It is a fine thing to have a good heart,”
said he, in the true style of Sir Christopher Findlater, and he again
eyed the Turkey carpet. “I really feel quite happy at the thought of the
pleasure I shall give.”
After a walk through as many obscure and filthy wynds and lanes and
alleys and courts as ever were threaded by some humble fugitive from
justice, the patient Morris came to a sort of court, situated among the
miserable hovels in the vicinity of the Tower. He paused wonderingly at
a dwelling in which every window was broken, and where the tiles, torn
from the roof, lay scattered in forlorn confusion beside the door; where
the dingy bricks looked crumbling away, from very age and rottenness,
and the fabric, which was of great antiquity, seemed so rocking and
infirm that the eye looked upon its distorted and overhanging position
with a sensation of pain and dread; where the very rats had deserted
their loathsome cells from the insecurity of their tenure, and the
ragged mothers of the abject neighbourhood forbade their brawling
children to wander under the threatening walls, lest they should keep
the promise of their mouldering aspect, and, falling, bare to the
obstructed and sickly day the secrets of their prison-house. Girt with
the foul and reeking lairs of that extreme destitution which necessity
urges irresistibly into guilt, and excluded, by filthy alleys and an
eternal atmosphere of smoke and rank vapour, from the blessed sun and
the pure air of heaven, the miserable mansion seemed set apart for every
disease to couch within,--too perilous even for the hunted criminal;
too dreary even for the beggar to prefer it to the bare hedge, or the
inhospitable porch, beneath whose mockery of shelter the frost of winter
had so often numbed him into sleep.
Thrice did the heavy and silver-headed cane of Mr. Brown resound upon
the door, over which was a curious carving of a lion dormant, and a
date, of which only the two numbers 15 were discernable. Roused by a
note so unusual, and an apparition so unwontedly smug as the worthy
Morris, a whole legion of dingy and smoke-dried brats, came trooping
from the surrounding huts, and with many an elvish cry, and strange
oath, and cabalistic word, which thrilled the respectable marrow of Mr.
Brown, they collected in a gaping, and, to his alarmed eye, a menacing
group, as near to the house as their fears and parents would permit
them.
“It is very dangerous,” thought Mr. Brown, looking shiveringly up at the
hanging and tottering roof, “and very appalling,” as he turned to the
ragged crowd of infant reprobates which began with every moment to
increase. At last he summoned courage, and inquired, in a tone half
soothing and half dignified, if they could inform him how to obtain
admittance or how to arouse the inhabitants.
An old crone, leaning out of an opposite window, with matted hair
hanging over a begrimed and shrivelled countenance, made answer. “No
one,” she said, in her peculiar dialect, which the worthy man scarcely
comprehended, “lived there or had done so for years:” but Brown knew
better; and while he was asserting the fact, a girl put her head out of
another hovel, and said that she had sometimes seen, at the dusk of the
evening, a man leave the house, but whether any one else lived in it
she could not tell. Again Mr. Brown sounded an alarm, but no answer came
forth, and in great fear and trembling he applied violent hands to
the door: it required but little force; it gave way; he entered; and,
jealous of the entrance of the mob without, reclosed and barred, as well
as he was able, the shattered door. The house was unnaturally large
for the neighbourhood, and Brown was in doubt whether first to ascend a
broken and perilous staircase or search the rooms below: he decided on
the latter; he found no one, and with a misgiving heart, which nothing
but the recollection of the great Turkey carpet could have inspired, he
ascended the quaking steps. All was silent. But a door was unclosed. He
entered, and saw the object of his search before him.
Over a pallet bent a form, on which, though youth seemed withered and
even pride broken, the unconquerable soul left somewhat of grace and of
glory, that sustained the beholder’s remembrance of better days; a child
in its first infancy knelt on the nearer side of the bed with clasped
hands, and vacant eyes that turned towards the intruder with a listless
and lacklustre gaze. But Glendower, or rather Mordaunt, as he bent over
the pallet, spoke not, moved not: his eyes were riveted on one object;
his heart seemed turned into stone and his veins curdled into ice. Awed
and chilled by the breathing desolation of the spot, Brown approached,
and spoke he scarcely knew what. “You are,” he concluded his address,
“the master of Mordaunt Court;” and he placed the letter in the hands of
the person he thus greeted.
“Awake, hear me!” cried Algernon to Isabel, as she lay extended on the
couch; and the messenger of glad tidings, for the first time seeing her
countenance, shuddered, and knew that he was in the chamber of death.
“Awake, my own, own love! Happy days are in store for us yet: our misery
is past; you will live, live to bless me in riches, as you have done in
want.”
Isabel raised her eyes to his, and a smile, sweet, comforting, and
full of love, passed the lips which were about to close forever. “Thank
Heaven,” she murmured, “for your dear sake. It is pleasant to die now,
and thus;” and she placed the hand that was clasped in her relaxing and
wan fingers within the bosom which had been for anguished and hopeless
years his asylum and refuge, and which now when fortune changed, as if
it had only breathed in comfort to his afflictions, was for the first
time and forever to be cold,--cold even to him!
“You will live, you will live,” cried Mordaunt, in wild and incredulous
despair, “in mercy live! You, who have been my angel of hope, do not,--O
God, O God! do not desert me now!”
But that faithful and loving heart was already deaf to his voice,
and the film grew darkening and rapidly over the eye which still with
undying fondness sought him out through the shade and agony of death.
Sense and consciousness were gone, and dim and confused images whirled
round her soul, struggling a little moment before they sank into the
depth and silence where the past lies buried. But still mindful of him,
and grasping, as it were, at his remembrance, she clasped, closer and
closer, the icy hand which she held, to her breast. “Your hand is cold,
dearest, it is cold,” said she, faintly, “but I will warm it here!” And
so her spirit passed away, and Mordaunt felt afterwards, in a lone and
surviving pilgrimage, that her last thought had been kindness to him,
and that her last act had spoken forgetfulness even of death in the
tenderness of love!