Mad, natural graces, that extinguish art.
KING HENRY THE SIXTH.
Words uttered from the heart, find their way to the heart.
Character is power.--CECIL’S REMAINS.
Ernest still felt as in a state of previous existence while passing
along the corridor, and entering the drawing-room at Clare Abbey,
in which so many happy hours had, in former days, been passed. All
was precisely as he had left it: the same pictures hung against the
walls; the same china ornamented the marble slabs; though it all
looked bright and fresh, it was the same patterned chintz, with
its well-remembered bunches, that covered the furniture; and the
furniture itself stood in precisely the same forms in which it had
been left by Mrs. De Grey. Most people have a fancy of their own
as to the arrangement of their rooms; and even if they come to the
perfection of comfort, make some little change to mark their own
individuality; but Lady Vere had no thoughts; and if she had found
her drawing-room arranged after the approved fashion of houses “to
let,” with a round table in the middle, and a sofa against the wall,
it is probable she would have been perfectly satisfied with it. To
complete the illusion, in the same place, on the same sofa to which
ill-health had for many years confined his mother, Lady Vere was
indolently reclining. One object only spoke not of the past; and
as his eyes, dreamily wandering around, rested on that one, it was
sufficient, as once before it had been, to drive him from dreams of
the past to still more dream-like thoughts of the future. That one
object was Camilla St. Maur, who was seated at the piano-forte, at
the farther end of the room.
Lady Vere half rose as Ernest approached her, bowed her beautiful
eyelids rather than her head, and, without speaking, occupied herself
for the next few moments in placing her feet on a footstool, and
arranging a cushion for her back. Camilla came hastily forward, and
with the unconscious grace and fearless self-possession which is
often the effect of a retired education, held out her hand to him,
saying, with a bright smile and a bright blush,
“_We_ are not strangers, Mr. De Grey.”
It has been said, that her beauty was very perfect and regular; but
the impression left by her beauty was not that of a perfect and
regular kind; it was rather that which is expressed by such words
as “interesting,” and “fascinating.” Its peculiar charm seemed to
consist in its rapid changes and strong contrasts; all blending
into one harmonious whole, but keeping the attention constantly
alive, forcing you to watch her countenance, that you might trace
what inward feeling it was which in one instant banished her colour
and banished her smiles; or, on the contrary, lit up its melancholy
beauty into the sparkling loveliness of a child. She was prettily
dressed this day in a light muslin gown, ornamented with sea-green
ribbons; her long curls loosely turned up, and falling from the back
of her head. Ernest, an admirer by instinct of all that was beautiful
in art or in nature, thought he never yet had seen in all the world
of beauty an object so exquisitely lovely as the young creature
before him.
She sat down, slightly moved a chair towards him, and went on.
“I told mamma of our meeting the other night, and how nearly you made
our acquaintance under very unpleasant circumstances.”
“Yes, Camilla told me she had almost had a fall,” said Lady Vere,
settling herself comfortably in a slanting posture; “it would have
been very disagreeable. I am glad you were there.”
“Not that you were of any use, Mr. De Grey,” Camilla said, shaking
her head. “I can’t allow you to think you were.”
“I assure you, I did not think so,” Ernest replied, smiling; and he
scarcely wondered at finding himself at once on a footing of perfect
intimacy with those who, as strangers, had occupied so much of his
thoughts, so careless and unconscious was the ease of the young girl.
“What a hot day it is,” remarked Lady Vere.
“The sun is hot, but there is a cold wind.”
“Did you walk all the way from Cranleigh? You must be very tired.”
Ernest smiled.
Camilla said, “You are a great walker, I am sure, Mr. De Grey.”
“Why do you think so?” he asked, smiling; “not because I have walked
from Cranleigh?”
“O no! I think nothing of that myself; but I am sure you are given to
long solitary rambles. You could not stay quietly at home on Saturday
to arrange your things, as you ought to have done, but you must set
off and walk for I don’t know how many hours on your first evening.”
“It was _my things_ which drove me out,” he said, laughing. “I could
hardly find a place even to put my hat upon. If you know the wretched
desolate look of a new, disarranged house, you will not wonder at my
escaping from it as fast as I could.”
“I don’t know anything about it; and I am sure I should like it if
I did. I am sure I should like a change, even to be uncomfortable.
We never once have moved since first we came to this _dull, stupid,
tedious_ place; and I don’t care how soon a change comes.” She spoke
the words with emphasis.
Ernest involuntarily coloured, and looked annoyed. Was it really
thus: the home over which his own heart was yearning--was it but dull
and stupid to those who were the envied possessors of it?
Camilla saw his look, reproached herself for her thoughtlessness;
and, moving her chair nearer to him, said, blushing deeply, and
bending forward, “Now, I should not have said that to _you_. I am
very sorry.”
“Pray, don’t be sorry! there is no need. Pray, don’t think that you
have annoyed me,” Ernest said, angry with himself, and feeling--but
it would be difficult to describe exactly what he did feel towards
her at that moment.
“What did you say, Camilla?” asked Lady Vere.
“Something, as usual, that I ought not to have said,” she replied.
Then jumping up, she rang the bell, saying, “I quite forgot to send
for Reginald. He told me to let him know if Mr. De Grey called.”
“Where is Reginald?”
“Reading in his room, mamma. I went and rattled at the door a little
while ago, but he would not notice me. He fastens his door to keep me
out,” she went on, turning to Ernest, “for five or six hours a day;
he says he can’t read if I am there. Isn’t it very hard?”
The thought that passed through Ernest’s mind would, if expressed,
have taken the form of a vapid compliment,--and he was no
complimenter; so he only laughed, and said nothing.
“You have no sister to worry you at your studies, have you, Mr. De
Grey?”
“No. If my studies don’t get on as well as they should, I have
nobody to blame but myself.”
“But they do get on very well, I suppose? Reginald says,--but here is
Reginald.”
“Mr. De Grey is here, my dear Reginald,” remarked Lady Vere. “Camilla
sent to tell you.”
Camilla got up, and drew a chair for her brother between herself
and Ernest. He thanked her with a smile, and sat down; but the ease
of the visit was gone. Camilla left her brother to speak; and he,
anxious as he was to make Ernest feel at home, and unrestrained, had
not the gift of easy conversation, which his sister possessed. Long
pauses ensued, and the intervals were filled up by wise observations
from Lady Vere, which seemed, in her son’s presence, to be more
utterly without point or meaning than before.
Ernest soon got up and took leave, and Reginald followed him. He took
down his hat in the corridor, and, opening a side glass-door, led him
into the garden. He then said--
“Another day, Mr. De Grey, I shall ask you to pay _me_ a visit, and
a longer one. But I know that your first visit to us must have been
painful, and if my presence annoys you, and you would rather go
through these well-known ways alone, only say so, and I shall not
misunderstand you.”
Ernest’s heart _was_ full of many thoughts and many sensations,
but they were not now thoughts of himself, or regretful mournings
over the past; they were rather strange sweet feelings of gratitude
and love for those who had shown such unbidden thoughtfulness and
consideration for him. It took a moment to overcome a perhaps
somewhat unmanly softness, which the combination of these new
feelings, with the feelings natural to the spot where he stood, was
tending to produce; and Reginald, fancying he was answered, turned
away.
“Pray, don’t think I wish to be alone!” Ernest said, recovering his
bewildered senses; “I was silent only because I could not thank
you for your kindness as I should wish to do. I will not deny,” he
continued, after a moment’s thought, “that it was painful to me to
come here to-day; I was very fond of this place, and I had not quite
made up my mind to see it in other hands; but if I say this honestly,
will you equally believe me when I say that it is painful no more.”
They walked on together. Reginald suddenly said,
“I have thought so much of you, Mr. De Grey, all my life long.”
“Have you?” Ernest said, with some surprise. “I have thought of
you,--but then that was but natural.”
“Have you thought of me as I have thought of you, _with envy_?”
Reginald asked with a slight smile.
“With envy!--of me!” Poor Ernest had never been in the habit of
contemplating his own destiny as one to be envied.
“You wonder that I should envy you,” said his companion; “but it has
always seemed to me that you were born to be great. Beginning life
with such a sacrifice, thrown entirely upon yourself, yours was a
destiny to create ambition, and to fulfil it.” The eyes of the young
man sparkled, and his colour rose as he spoke.
“And how do you think of me now?” asked Ernest, with some sadness in
his tone.
Reginald was silent.
“Not with envy now?”
“I confess,” Reginald said, after a short silence, “that when I first
heard, three years ago, of the life you had chosen, I heard it with
such wonder and regret, that I ceased to ask about you from old Mr.
Temple, ceased to think of you as I had done. I was disappointed in
you. I thought you had thrown your destiny away. But latterly, since
I heard of your returning here, although I have ceased to envy, I
have thought of you again.”
“You despise the life I have....” Ernest hesitated before he said the
word, but he did at last say it--“chosen.”
“No, not despise,” replied Reginald, gravely. “I respect, even
admire, those who devote themselves to it. But then, it is a life
open to all; it needs no peculiar talents, it leads to no greatness;
it is a good path, a holy life, but it is not a life for the ambition
of those who would rise high and do great and lofty deeds. I do not
think it was the life which _you_ should have chosen, Mr. De Grey.”
Ernest had said the same to himself a hundred times; his constant
feeling was (though prompted by motives less high than those which
animated his youthful companion), that he was “cabin’d, cribb’d,
confined;” but answers which we seek for in vain, to the questionings
of our own discontented spirits, come at our call when those
questionings fall from the lips of others. Arguments unthought of
before now rose in Ernest’s mind.
“I have often felt as you do,” he said, thoughtfully, “but I suppose
we are wrong in thinking so much of the greatness which is in
the sight of men. Your ambition would be to influence on a large
scale, to influence or lead your countrymen, to guide the destinies
of nations. But if we consider the point seriously, and remember
how nations are made up of separate individuals, the life of a
country clergyman, whose office is to lead to the highest virtue,
say but five or six hundred ignorant human beings, is, in fact, as
important,--as important in the fate even of nations,--as the more
enlarged but less certain influence of a statesman. Should not we who
are Christians think the greatest of all deeds, the highest as well
as the holiest, to preach the faith which we profess?”
“If you were speaking of the life of a missionary, I could understand
and agree with you,” Reginald replied. “To convert the multitudes
of the heathen, to be the first to plant the Cross on an idolatrous
shore--I have dreamed of such a life myself,” he added, with a smile
and a sparkling eye, “but it is, not too high, but too holy for me.”
Ernest looked up at his companion, and while he gazed with strange
feelings of admiration on his pure and lofty beauty, his heart was
stirred and saddened,--stirred with vague, aspiring, ambitious
dreams, and saddened as he thought of the vows and chains of filial
duty, which bound him to a life from which for the moment he recoiled
with something of contempt. But he never yet had expressed to a human
being, not even to his mother, the reluctance with which he had
entered upon that life, and the struggles through which its duties
were performed; and they were not expressed now. With a violent
effort, quelling the rising discontent, he said, with a grave smile:
“You must not make me discontented with my life; at any rate, for the
present, my duties lie in England, and _here_; and lowly as those
duties may be, even already I feel that they are higher than I can
perform.”
Reginald made no answer, but walked thoughtfully on. Stopping
at last, and turning suddenly round, he waved his hand over the
landscape which lay stretched, and smiling, in the luxuriance of
early autumn, before them, and said, musingly:
“How strange the destinies of this world are, Mr. De Grey! I remember
hearing, when first we came here, that it had broken your heart to
leave your home; and still I see that, however well and nobly you
have borne the loss of your inheritance, and the change of life to
which that loss has condemned you, your mind, and thoughts, and love
are centred upon it still; and yet it is taken from you, and given to
me--to whom it is _nothing_.”
“Is it really so?--Is it nothing to you?” Ernest said, sadly and
wonderingly. Reginald was right; every flower of the field, every
blade of grass that was trampled under his feet was dear to him. In
some minds, the sense of local attachment is a passion strong as the
attachments of human love; and his was one of these.
“I see and own its beauty,” Reginald replied; “I like it as my home;
and if I were allowed to choose my home from all the world, I might
probably choose this one; but still, it is nothing to me. My hopes
are not here. The duties which may one day be mine,--important ones,
I own, and which you, I feel, would so well have performed,--are
trifling and irksome to me. I long to be free and unshackled, to
follow where my destiny would lead me,--free as you were, Mr. De
Grey.”
“It _is_ strange,” said Ernest, thoughtfully. After a moment,
however, he continued, “But as we are bound to believe that the
circumstances in which we are placed are, if we use them rightly,
the best discipline for our minds, I think I can see, without much
thought, the use which we should make of ours. You must learn to
stoop, and I must learn to rise. Yours is the easiest task. A very
short experience will teach you, that events and duties are not great
and small in themselves, but in the motives that prompt, and the
consequences that follow them. My task is harder--” he paused, and
sighed; then added with a smile, though rather a melancholy one, “I
believe I have been using my office and preaching to you; but I feel
much more the need of your preaching to me.”
They parted shortly after, and each went thoughtfully on his way.
A character like Reginald’s had never crossed Ernest’s path before.
Had he met with such an one in earlier days, it is probable that
he would have been less tied and bound with the chains of human
feelings, and human infirmities than he now was; for his nature was
impressible, needing but a spark to kindle its fire and animate it
into exertion; but such characters as Reginald’s are rare,--and more
rare, I think, in men, at least at the present day, than in women.
The cold outside,--the ambition burning and consuming within,--the
indifference to all which the world calls good, and the eyes set
on dreams in which the world perceives no beauty!--such are not,
I think, met with more than once or twice in life; or if they
are, it is under circumstances which, from position, command less
attention; or from want of outward attractions, have less power to
win admiration and love. If there were many like Reginald, with pure
hearts and lofty dreams, with the prominence of position to win all
eyes, and the seraphic beauty to fix them, I do not know what this
world might not be.
There is no subject of meditation so strange or, it might be
said, so awful, as the consideration how one human being seems
to be given into the power of another to be moulded at his will.
Words at random spoken--good words and evil words--serious yet
unintentional expressions of good feeling, and light sportive words
of unintentional carelessness or irreverence--have had power to form
a character, to direct a destiny for ever. We cannot open our mouths
and be absolutely certain that our words will not sink deep into
the heart of some man, woman, or child, who may be an unobserved or
neglected bystander;--a single sentence has before now haunted a mind
for ever. Such considerations give an awful responsibility to the
power of speech; and yet how few think of this! even of the best, how
few sufficiently consider it! Happy those who use their tongues as
responsible instruments; and happy, too, those who from the truth and
purity of the inward fountain do a good work, and know it not. There
are many, I hope and believe, of the latter sort. Neither Ernest nor
Reginald were in the habit of considering their words in so solemn
a light. In their conversation this day, each had but expressed his
feelings as they rose in his mind, and yet the words which each had
said, were carried away as new principles by the hearts of each.
Ernest was animated, strengthened, and filled full of thoughts of a
higher zeal; for a few hours the hopes of earth, earthly passions,
earthly ties, seemed “like dust and dross to his eye,” and he turned
to his lowly duties with an ardent spirit, with fresh and vigorous
resolution, and with glowing pictures of successful labour in his
high calling. If this strength, and these higher hopes quickly faded,
it was not the influence that faded,--_that_ remained on his mind;
it was the stronger influence of human feeling and human weakness
which superseded without effacing them. On Reginald the effect of his
companion’s words was less felt, and less immediate; but an effect
they had.