While yet a child, and long before his time,
He had perceived the presence and the power
Of greatness.
. . . . .
But eagerly he read, and read again.
. . . . .
Yet still uppermost
Nature was at his heart, as if he felt,
Though yet he knew not how, a wasting power
In all things that from her sweet influence
Might seek to wean him. Therefore with her hues,
Her forms, and with the spirit of her forms,
He clothed the nakedness of austere truth.
WORDSWORTH.
Algernon Mordaunt was the last son of an old and honourable race,
which had centuries back numbered princes in its line. His parents
had had many children, but all (save Algernon, the youngest) died in
their infancy. His mother perished in giving him birth.
Constitutional infirmity and the care of mercenary nurses contributed
to render Algernon a weakly and delicate child: hence came a taste for
loneliness and a passion for study; and from these sprung, on the one
hand, the fastidiousness and reserve which render us apparently
unamiable, and, on the other, the loftiness of spirit and the kindness
of heart which are the best and earliest gifts of literature, and more
than counterbalance our deficiencies in the "minor morals" due to
society by their tendency to increase our attention to the greater
ones belonging to mankind. Mr. Mordaunt was a man of luxurious habits
and gambling propensities: wedded to London, he left the house of his
ancestors to moulder into desertion and decay; but to this home
Algernon was constantly consigned during his vacations from school;
and its solitude and cheerlessness gave to a disposition naturally
melancholy and thoughtful those colours which subsequent events were
calculated to deepen, not efface.
Truth obliges us to state, despite our partiality to Mordaunt, that,
when he left his school after a residence of six years, it was with
the bitter distinction of having been the most unpopular boy in it.
Why, nobody could exactly explain, for his severest enemies could not
accuse him of ill-nature, cowardice, or avarice, and these make the
three capital offences of a school-boy; but Algernon Mordaunt had
already acquired the knowledge of himself, and could explain the
cause, though with a bitter and swelling heart. His ill health, his
long residence at home, his unfriended and almost orphan situation,
his early habits of solitude and reserve, all these, so calculated to
make the spirit shrink within itself, made him, on his entrance at
school, if not unsocial, appear so: this was the primary reason of his
unpopularity; the second was that he perceived, for he was sensitive
(and consequently acute) to the extreme, the misfortune of his manner,
and in his wish to rectify it, it became doubly unprepossessing; to
reserve, it now added embarrassment, to coldness, gloom; and the pain
he felt in addressing or being addressed by another was naturally and
necessarily reciprocal, for the effects of sympathy are nowhere so
wonderful, yet so invisible, as in the manners.
By degrees he shunned the intercourse which had for him nothing but
distress, and his volatile acquaintances were perhaps the first to set
him the example. Often in his solitary walks he stopped afar off to
gaze upon the sports which none ever solicited him to share; and as
the shout of laughter and of happy hearts came, peal after peal, upon
his ear, he turned enviously, yet not malignantly away, with tears,
which not all his pride could curb, and muttered to himself, "And
these, these hate me!"
There are two feelings common to all high or affectionate natures,--
that of extreme susceptibility to opinion and that of extreme
bitterness at its injustice. These feelings were Mordaunt's: but the
keen edge which one blow injures, the repetition blunts; and by little
and little, Algernon became not only accustomed, but, as he persuaded
himself, indifferent, to his want of popularity; his step grew more
lofty, and his address more collected, and that which was once
diffidence gradually hardened into pride.
His residence at the University was neither without honour nor profit.
A college life was then, as now, either the most retired or the most
social of all others; we need scarcely say which it was to Mordaunt,
but his was the age when solitude is desirable, and when the closet
forms the mind better than the world. Driven upon itself, his
intellect became inquiring and its resources profound; admitted to
their inmost recesses, he revelled among the treasures of ancient
lore, and in his dreams of the Nymph and Naiad, or his researches
after truth in the deep wells of the Stagyrite or the golden fountains
of Plato, he forgot the loneliness of his lot and exhausted the
hoarded enthusiasm of his soul.
But his mind, rather thoughtful than imaginative, found no idol like
"Divine Philosophy." It delighted to plunge itself into the mazes of
metaphysical investigation; to trace the springs of the intellect; to
connect the arcana of the universe; to descend into the darkest
caverns, or to wind through the minutest mysteries of Nature, and
rise, step by step, to that arduous elevation on which Thought stands
dizzy and confused, looking beneath upon a clouded earth, and above
upon an unfathomable heaven.
Rarely wandering from his chamber, known personally to few and
intimately by none, Algernon yet left behind him at the University the
most remarkable reputation of his day. He had obtained some of the
highest of academical honours, and by that proverbial process of
vulgar minds which ever frames the magnificent from the unknown, the
seclusion in which he lived and the recondite nature of his favourite
pursuits attached to his name a still greater celebrity and interest
than all the orthodox and regular dignities he had acquired. There
are few men who do not console themselves for not being generally
loved, if they can reasonably hope that they are generally esteemed.
Mordaunt had now grown reconciled to himself and to his kind. He had
opened to his interest a world in his own breast, and it consoled him
for his mortification in the world without. But, better than this,
his habits as well as studies had strengthened the principles and
confirmed the nobility of his mind. He was not, it is true, more
kind, more benevolent, more upright than before; but those virtues now
emanated from principle, not emotion: and principle to the mind is
what a free constitution is to a people; without that principle or
that free constitution, the one may be for the moment as good, the
other as happy; but we cannot tell how long the goodness and the
happiness will continue.
On leaving the University, his father sent for him to London. He
stayed there a short time, and mingled partially in its festivities;
but the pleasures of English dissipation have for a century been the
same, heartless without gayety, and dull without refinement. Nor
could Mordaunt, the most fastidious, yet warm-hearted of human beings,
reconcile either his tastes or his affections to the cold insipidities
of patrician society. His father's habits and evident distresses
deepened his disgust to his situation; for the habits were incurable
and the distresses increasing; and nothing but a circumstance which
Mordaunt did not then understand prevented the final sale of an estate
already little better than a pompons incumbrance.
It was therefore with the half painful, half pleasurable sensation
with which we avoid contemplating a ruin we cannot prevent that
Mordaunt set out upon that Continental tour deemed then so necessary a
part of education. His father, on taking leave of him, seemed deeply
affected. "Go, my son," said he, "may God bless you, and not punish
me too severely. I have wronged you deeply, and I cannot bear to look
upon your face."
To these words Algernon attached a general, but they cloaked a
peculiar, meaning: in three years, he returned to England; his father
had been dead some months, and the signification of his parting
address was already deciphered,--but of this hereafter.
In his travels Mordaunt encountered an Englishman whose name I will
not yet mention: a person of great reputed wealth; a merchant, yet a
man of pleasure; a voluptuary in life, yet a saint in reputation; or,
to abstain from the antithetical analysis of a character which will
not be corporeally presented to the reader till our tale is
considerably advanced, one who drew from nature a singular combination
of shrewd but false conclusions, and a peculiar philosophy, destined
hereafter to contrast the colours and prove the practical utility of
that which was espoused by Mordaunt.
There can be no education in which the lessons of the world do not
form a share. Experience, in expanding Algernon's powers, had ripened
his virtues. Nor had the years which had converted knowledge into
wisdom failed in imparting polish to refinement. His person had
acquired a greater grace, and his manners an easier dignity than
before. His noble and generous mind had worked its impress upon his
features and his mien; and those who could overcome the first coldness
and shrinking hauteur of his address found it required no minute
examination to discover the real expression of the eloquent eye and
the kindling lip.
He had not been long returned before he found two enemies to his
tranquillity,--the one was love, the other appeared in the more
formidable guise of a claimant to his estate. Before Algernon was
aware of the nature of the latter he went to consult with his lawyer.
"If the claim be just, I shall not, of course, proceed to law," said
Mordaunt.
"But without the estate, sir, you have nothing!"
"True," said Algernon, calmly.
But the claim was not just, and to law he went.
In this lawsuit, however, he had one assistant in an old relation, who
had seen, indeed, but very little of him, but who compassionated his
circumstances, and above all hated his opponent. This relation was
rich and childless; and there were not wanting those who predicted
that his money would ultimately discharge the mortgages and repair the
house of the young representative of the Mordaunt honours. But the
old kinsman was obstinate, self-willed, and under the absolute
dominion of patrician pride; and it was by no means improbable that
the independence of Mordaunt's character would soon create a disunion
between them, by clashing against the peculiarities of his relation's
temper.
It was a clear and sunny morning when Linden, tolerably recovered of
his hurt, set out upon a sober and aged pony, which after some natural
pangs of shame he had hired of his landlord, to Mordaunt Court.
Mordaunt's house was situated in the midst of a wild and extensive
park, surrounded with woods, and interspersed with trees of the
stateliest growth, now scattered into irregular groups, now marshalled
into sweeping avenues; while, ever and anon, Linden caught glimpses of
a rapid and brawling rivulet, which in many a slight but sounding
waterfall gave a music strange and spirit-like to the thick copses and
forest glades through which it went exulting on its way. The deer lay
half concealed by the fern among which they couched, turning their
stately crests towards the stranger, but not stirring from their rest;
while from the summit of beeches which would have shamed the pavilion
of Tityrus the rooks--those monks of the feathered people--were loud
in their confused but not displeasing confabulations.
As Linden approached the house, he was struck with the melancholy air
of desolation which spread over and around it: fragments of stone,
above which clomb the rank weed, insolently proclaiming the triumph of
Nature's meanest offspring over the wrecks of art; a moat dried up; a
railing once of massive gilding, intended to fence a lofty terrace on
the right from the incursions of the deer, but which, shattered and
decayed, now seemed to ask with the satirist,--
"To what end did our lavish ancestors
Erect of old these stately piles of ours?"
--a chapel on the left, perfectly in ruins,--all appeared strikingly
to denote that time had outstripped fortune, and that the years, which
alike hallow and destroy, had broken the consequence, in deepening the
antiquity, of the House of Mordaunt.
The building itself agreed but too well with the tokens of decay
around it; most of the windows were shut up, and the shutters of dark
oak, richly gilt, contrasted forcibly with the shattered panes and
mouldered framing of the glass. It was a house of irregular
architecture. Originally built in the fifteenth century, it had
received its last improvement, with the most lavish expense, during
the reign of Anne; and it united the Gallic magnificence of the latter
period with the strength and grandeur of the former; it was in a great
part overgrown with ivy, and, where that insidious ornament had not
reached, the signs of decay, and even ruin, were fully visible. The
sun itself, bright and cheering as it shone over Nature, making the
green sod glow like emeralds, and the rivulet flash in its beam, like
one of those streams of real light, imagined by Swedenborg in his
visions of heaven, and clothing tree and fell, brake and hillock, with
the lavish hues of infant summer,--the sun itself only made more
desolate, because more conspicuous, the venerable fabric, which the
youthful traveller frequently paused more accurately to survey, and
its laughing and sportive beams playing over chink and crevice, seemed
almost as insolent and untimeous as the mirth of the young mocking the
silent grief of some gray-headed and solitary mourner.
Clarence had now reached the porch, and the sound of the shrill bell
he touched rang with a strange note through the general stillness of
the place. A single servant appeared, and ushered Clarence through a
screen hall, hung round with relics of armour, and ornamented on the
side opposite the music gallery with a solitary picture of gigantic
size, and exhibiting the full length of the gaunt person and sable
steed of that Sir Piers de Mordaunt who had so signalized himself in
the field in which Henry of Richmond changed his coronet for a crown.
Through this hall Clarence was led to a small chamber clothed with
uncouth and tattered arras, in which, seemingly immersed in papers, he
found the owner of the domain.
"Your studies," said Linden, after the salutations of the day, "seem
to harmonize with the venerable antiquity of your home;" and he
pointed to the crabbed characters and faded ink of the papers on the
table.
"So they ought," answered Mordaunt, with a faint smile; "for they are
called from their quiet archives in order to support my struggle for
that home. But I fear the struggle is in vain, and that the quibbles
of law will transfer into other hands a possession I am foolish enough
to value the more from my inability to maintain it"
Something of this Clarence had before learned from the communicative
gossip of his landlady; and less desirous to satisfy his curiosity
than to lead the conversation from a topic which he felt must be so
unwelcome to Mordaunt, he expressed a wish to see the state apartments
of the house. With something of shame at the neglect they had
necessarily experienced, and something of pride at the splendour which
no neglect could efface, Mordaunt yielded to the request, and led the
way up a staircase of black oak, the walls and ceiling of which were
covered with frescoes of Italian art, to a suite of apartments in
which time and dust seemed the only tenants. Lingeringly did Clarence
gaze upon the rich velvet, the costly mirrors, the motley paintings of
a hundred ancestors, and the antique cabinets, containing, among the
most hoarded relics of the Mordaunt race, curiosities which the
hereditary enthusiasm of a line of cavaliers had treasured as the most
sacred of heirlooms, and which, even to the philosophical mind of
Mordaunt, possessed a value he did not seek too minutely to analyze.
Here was the goblet from which the first prince of Tudor had drunk
after the field of Bosworth. Here the ring with which the chivalrous
Francis the First had rewarded a signal feat of that famous Robert de
Mordaunt, who, as a poor but adventurous cadet of the house, had
brought to the "first gentleman of France" the assistance of his
sword. Here was the glove which Sir Walter had received from the
royal hand of Elizabeth, and worn in the lists upon a crest which the
lance of no antagonist in that knightly court could abase. And here,
more sacred than all, because connected with the memory of misfortune,
was a small box of silver which the last king of a fated line had
placed in the hands of the gray-headed descendant of that Sir Walter
after the battle of the Boyne, saying, "Keep this, Sir Everard
Mordaunt, for the sake of one who has purchased the luxury of
gratitude at the price of a throne!"
As Clarence glanced from these relics to the figure of Mordaunt, who
stood at a little distance leaning against the window, with arms
folded on his breast and with eyes abstractedly wandering over the
noble woods and extended park, which spread below, he could not but
feel that if birth had indeed the power of setting its seal upon the
form, it was never more conspicuous than in the broad front and lofty
air of the last descendant of the race by whose memorials he was
surrounded. Touched by the fallen fortunes of Mordaunt, and
interested by the uncertainty which the chances of law threw over his
future fate, Clarence could not resist exclaiming, with some warmth
and abruptness,--
"And by what subterfuge or cavil does the present claimant of these
estates hope to dislodge their rightful possessor?"
"Why," answered Mordaunt, "it is a long story in detail, but briefly
told in epitome. My father was a man whose habits greatly exceeded
his fortune, and a few months after his death, Mr. Vavasour, a distant
relation, produced a paper, by which it appeared that my father had,
for a certain sum of ready money, disposed of his estates to this Mr.
Vavasour, upon condition that they should not be claimed nor the
treaty divulged till after his death; the reason for this proviso
seems to have been the shame my father felt for his exchange, and his
fear of the censures of that world to which he was always devoted."
"But how unjust to you!" said Clarence.
"Not so much so as it seems," said Mordaunt, deprecatingly; "for I was
then but a sickly boy, and according to the physicians, and I
sincerely believe according also to my poor father's belief, almost
certain of a premature death. In that case Vavasour would have been
the nearest heir; and this expectancy, by the by, joined to the
mortgages on the property, made the sum given ridiculously
disproportioned to the value of the estate. I must confess that the
news came upon me like a thunderbolt. I should have yielded up
possession immediately, but was informed by my lawyers that my father
had no legal right to dispose of the property; the discussion of that
right forms the ground of the present lawsuit. But," continued
Mordaunt, proudly, yet mournfully, "I am prepared for the worst; if,
indeed, I should call that the worst which can affect neither
intellect nor health nor character nor conscience."
Clarence was silent, and Mordaunt after a brief pause once more
resumed his guidance. Their tour ended in a large library filled with
books, and this Mordaunt informed his guest was his chosen sitting-
room.
An old carved table was covered with works which for the most part
possessed for the young mind of Clarence, more accustomed to imagine
than reflect, but a very feeble attraction; on looking over them, he,
however, found, half hid by a huge folio of Hobbes, and another of
Locke, a volume of Milton's poems; this paved the way to a
conversation in which both had an equal interest, for both were
enthusiastic in the character and genius of that wonderful man, for
whom "the divine and solemn countenance of Freedom" was dearer than
the light of day, and whose solitary spell, accomplishing what the
whole family of earth once vainly began upon the plain of Shinar, has
built of materials more imperishable than "slime and brick" "a city
and a tower whose summit has reached to heaven."
It was with mutual satisfaction that Mordaunt and his guest continued
their commune till the hour of dinner was announced to them by a bell,
which, formerly intended as an alarum, now served the peaceful purpose
of a more agreeable summons.
The same servant who had admitted Clarence ushered them through the
great hall into the dining-room, and was their solitary attendant
during their repast.
The temper of Mordaunt was essentially grave and earnest, and his
conversation almost invariably took the tone of his mind; this made
their conference turn upon less minute and commonplace topics than one
between such new acquaintances, especially of different ages, usually
does.
"You will positively go to London to-morrow, then?" said Mordaunt, as
the servant, removing the appurtenances of dinner, left them alone.
"Positively," answered Clarence. "I go there to carve my own
fortunes, and, to say truth, I am impatient to begin." Mordaunt
looked earnestly at the frank face of the speaker, and wondered that
one so young, so well-educated, and, from his air and manner,
evidently of gentle blood, should appear so utterly thrown upon his
own resources.
"I wish you success," said he, after a pause; "and it is a noble part
of the organization of this world that, by increasing those riches
which are beyond fortune, we do in general take the surest method of
obtaining those which are in its reach."
Clarence looked inquiringly at Mordaunt, who, perceiving it,
continued, "I see that I should explain myself further. I will do so
by using the thoughts of a mind not the least beautiful and
accomplished which this country has produced. 'Of all which belongs
to us,' said Bolingbroke, 'the least valuable parts can alone fall
under the will of others. Whatever is best is safest; lies out of the
reach of human power; can neither be given nor taken away. Such is
this great and beautiful work of Nature, the world. Such is the mind
of man, which contemplates and admires the world whereof it makes the
noblest part. These are inseparably ours, and as long as we remain in
one we shall enjoy the other.'"
"Beautiful, indeed!" exclaimed Clarence, with the enthusiasm of a
young and pure heart, to which every loftier sentiment is always
beautiful.
"And true as beautiful!" said Mordaunt. "Nor is this all, for the
mind can even dispense with that world 'of which it forms a part' if
we can create within it a world still more inaccessible to chance.
But (and I now return to and explain my former observation) the means
by which we can effect this peculiar world can be rendered equally
subservient to our advancement and prosperity in that which we share
in common with our race; for the riches which by the aid of wisdom we
heap up in the storehouses of the mind are, though not the only, the
most customary coin by which external prosperity is bought. So that
the philosophy which can alone give independence to ourselves becomes;
under the name of honesty, the best policy in commerce with our kind."
In conversation of this nature, which the sincerity and lofty
enthusiasm of Mordaunt rendered interesting to Clarence, despite the
distaste to the serious so ordinary to youth, the hours passed on,
till the increasing evening warned Linden to depart.
"Adieu!" said he to Mordaunt. "I know not when we shall meet again,
but if we ever do, I will make it my boast, whether in prosperity or
misfortune, not to have forgotten the pleasure I have this day
enjoyed!"
Returning his guest's farewell with a warmth unusual to his manner,
Mordaunt followed him to the door and saw him depart.
Fate ordained that they should pursue in very different paths their
several destinies; nor did it afford them an opportunity of meeting
again, till years and events had severely tried the virtue of one and
materially altered the prospects of the other.
The next morning Clarence Linden was on his road to London.