Before a table, in the apartments appropriated to him in his father's
house at Knightsbridge, sat Lord L'Estrange, sorting or destroying
letters and papers,--an ordinary symptom of change of residence. There
are certain trifles by which a shrewd observer may judge of a man's
disposition. Thus, ranged on the table, with some elegance, but with
soldier-like precision, were sundry little relics of former days,
hallowed by some sentiment of memory, or perhaps endeared solely by
custom; which, whether he was in Egypt, Italy, or England, always made
part of the furniture of Harley's room. Even the small, old-fashioned,
and somewhat inconvenient inkstand into which he dipped the pen as he
labelled the letters he put aside, belonged to the writing-desk which had
been his pride as a schoolboy. Even the books that lay scattered round
were not new works, not those to which we turn to satisfy the curiosity
of an hour, or to distract our graver thoughts; they were chiefly either
Latin or Italian poets, with many a, pencil-mark on the margin; or books
which, making severe demand on thought, require slow and frequent
perusal, and become companions. Somehow or other, in remarking that even
in dumb, inanimate things the man was averse to change, and had the habit
of attaching himself to whatever was connected with old associations, you
might guess that he clung with pertinacity to affections more important,
and you could better comprehend the freshness of his friendship for one
so dissimilar in pursuits and character as Audley Egerton. An affection
once admitted into the heart of Harley L'Estrange seemed never to be
questioned or reasoned with; it became tacitly fixed, as it were, into
his own nature, and little less than a revolution of his whole system
could dislodge or disturb it.
Lord L'Estrange's hand rested now upon a letter in a stiff, legible
Italian character, and instead of disposing of it at once as he had done
with the rest, he spread it before him, and re-read the contents. It was
a letter from Riccabocca, received a few weeks since, and ran thus:--
LETTER FROM SIGNOR RICCABOCCA TO LORD L'ESTRANGE.
I thank you, my noble friend, for judging of me with faith in my honour,
and respect for my reverses.
No, and thrice no, to all concessions, all overtures, all treaty with
Giulio Franzini. I write the name, and my emotions choke me. I must
pause, and cool back into disdain. It is over. Pass from that subject.
But you have alarmed me. This sister! I have not seen her since her
childhood; but she was brought up under his influence,
--she can but work as his agent. She wish to learn my residence! It
can be but for some hostile and malignant purpose. I may trust in you,
--I know that. You say I may trust equally in the discretion of your
friend. Pardon me,--my confidence is not so elastic. A word may give
the clew to my retreat. But, if discovered, what harm can ensue? An
English roof protects me from Austrian despotism: true; but not the
brazen tower of Danae could protect me from Italian craft. And, were
there nothing worse, it would be intolerable to me to live under the eyes
of a relentless spy. Truly saith our proverb, 'He sleeps ill for whom
the enemy wakes.' Look you, my friend, I have done with my old life,
--I wish to cast it from me as a snake its skin. I have denied myself
all that exiles deem consolation. No pity for misfortune, no messages
from sympathizing friendship, no news from a lost and bereaved country
follow me to my hearth under the skies of the stranger. From all these
I have voluntarily cut thyself off. I am as dead to the life I once
lived as if the Styx rolled between it and me. With that sternness which
is admissible only to the afflicted, I have denied myself even the
consolation of your visits. I have told you fairly and simply that your
presence would unsettle all my enforced and infirm philosophy, and remind
me only of the past, which I seek to blot from remembrance. You have
complied on the one condition, that whenever I really want your aid I
will ask it; and, meanwhile, you have generously sought to obtain me
justice from the cabinets of ministers and in the courts of kings. I did
not refuse your heart this luxury; for I have a child--Ah! I have taught
that child already to revere your name, and in her prayers it is not
forgotten. But now that you are convinced that even your zeal is
unavailing, I ask you to discontinue attempts which may but bring the
spy upon my track, and involve me in new misfortunes. Believe me,
O brilliant Englishman, that I am satisfied and contented with my lot.
I am sure it would not be for my happiness to change it, 'Chi non ha
provato il male non conosce il bone.'
["One does not know when one is well off till one has known
misfortune."]
You ask me how I live,--I answer, /alla giornata/,--[To the day]--not for
the morrow, as I did once. I have accustomed myself to the calm
existence of a village. I take interest in its details. There is my
wife, good creature, sitting opposite to me, never asking what I write,
or to whom, but ready to throw aside her work and talk the moment the pen
is out of my hand. Talk--and what about? Heaven knows! But I would
rather hear that talk, though on the affairs of a hamlet, than babble
again with recreant nobles and blundering professors about commonwealths
and constitutions. When I want to see how little those last influence
the happiness of wise men, have I not Machiavelli and Thucydides? Then,
by and by, the parson will drop in, and we argue. He never knows when he
is beaten, so the argument is everlasting. On fine days I ramble out by
a winding rill with my Violante, or stroll to my friend the squire's, and
see how healthful a thing is true pleasure; and on wet days I shut myself
up, and mope, perhaps till, hark! a gentle tap at the door, and in comes
Violante, with her dark eyes, that shine out through reproachful tears,--
reproachful that I should mourn alone, while she is under my roof; so she
puts her arms round me, and in five minutes all is sunshine within. What
care we for your English gray clouds without?
Leave me, my dear Lord,--leave me to this quiet happy passage towards old
age, serener than the youth that I wasted so wildly; and guard well the
secret on which my happiness depends.
Now to yourself, before I close. Of that same yourself you speak too
little, as of me too much. But I so well comprehend the profound
melancholy that lies underneath the wild and fanciful humour with which
you but suggest, as in sport, what you feel so in earnest. The laborious
solitude of cities weighs on you. You are flying back to the /dolce far
niente/,--to friends few, but intimate; to life monotonous, but
unrestrained; and even there the sense of loneliness will again seize
upon you; and you do not seek, as I do, the annihilation of memory,--your
dead passions are turned to ghosts that haunt you, and unfit you for the
living world. I see it all,--I see it still, in your hurried fantastic
lines, as I saw it when we two sat amidst the pines and beheld the blue
lake stretched below, I troubled by the shadow of the Future, you
disturbed by that of the Past.
Well, but you say, half seriously, half in jest, "I will escape from this
prison-house of memory; I will form new ties, like other men, and before
it be too late; I will marry. Ay, but I must love,--there is the
difficulty." Difficulty,--yes, and Heaven be thanked for it! Recall all
the unhappy marriages that have come to your knowledge: pray, have not
eighteen out of twenty been marriages for Love? It always has been so,
and it always will; because, whenever we love deeply, we exact so much
and forgive so little. Be content to find some one with whom your hearth
and your honour are safe. You will grow to love what never wounds your
heart, you will soon grow out of love with what must always disappoint
your imagination. /Cospetto/! I wish my Jemima had a younger sister for
you. Yet it was with a deep groan that I settled myself to a--Jemima.
Now, I have written you a long letter, to prove how little I need of your
compassion or your zeal. Once more let there be long silence between us.
It is not easy for me to correspond with a man of your rank, and not
incur the curious gossip of my still little pool of a world which the
splash of a pebble can break into circles. I must take this over to a
post-town some ten miles off, and drop it into the box by stealth.
Adieu, dear and noble friend, gentlest heart and subtlest fancy that I
have met in my walk through life. Adieu. Write me word when you have
abandoned a day-dream and found a Jemima.
ALPHONSO.
P. S.--For Heaven's sake, caution and recaution your friend the minister
not to drop a word to this woman that may betray my hiding-place.
"Is he really happy?" murmured Harley, as he closed the letter; and he
sank for a few moments into a revery.
"This life in a village, this wife in a lady who puts down her work to
talk about villagers--what a contrast to Audley's full existence! And I
cannot envy nor comprehend either! yet my own existence--what is it?"
He rose, and moved towards the window, from which a rustic stair
descended to a green lawn, studded with larger trees than are often found
in the grounds of a suburban residence. There were calm and coolness in
the sight, and one could scarcely have supposed that London lay so near.
The door opened softly, and a lady past middle age entered, and
approaching Harley, as he still stood musing by the window, laid her hand
on his shoulder. What character there is in a hand! Hers was a hand
that Titian would have painted with elaborate care! Thin, white, and
delicate, with the blue veins raised from the surface. Yet there was
something more than mere patrician elegance in the form and texture. A
true physiologist would have said at once, "There are intellect and pride
in that hand, which seems to fix a hold where it rests; and lying so
lightly, yet will not be as lightly shaken off."
"Harley," said the lady--and Harley turned--"you do not deceive me by
that smile," she continued sadly; "you were not smiling when I entered."
"It is rarely that we smile to ourselves, my dear mother; and I have done
nothing lately so foolish as to cause me to smile at myself."
"My son," said Lady Lansmere, somewhat abruptly, but with great
earnestness, "you come from a line of illustrious ancestors; and methinks
they ask from their tombs why the last of their race has no aim and no
object, no interest, no home, in the land which they served, and which
rewarded them with its honours."
"Mother," said the soldier, simply, "when the land was in danger I served
it as my forefathers served,--and my answer would be the scars on my
breast."
"Is it only in danger that a country is served, only in war that duty is
fulfilled? Do you think that your father, in his plain, manly life of
country gentleman, does not fulfil, though perhaps too obscurely, the
objects for which aristocracy is created, and wealth is bestowed?"
"Doubtless he does, ma'am,--and better than his vagrant son ever can."
"Yet his vagrant son has received such gifts from nature, his youth was
so rich in promise, his boyhood so glowed at the dream of glory!"
"Ay," said Harley, very softly, "it is possible,--and all to be buried in
a single grave!"
The countess started, and withdrew her hand from Harley's shoulder.
Lady Lansmere's countenance was not one that much varied in expression.
She had in this, as in her cast of feature, little resemblance to her
son.
Her features were slightly aquiline,--the eyebrows of that arch which
gives a certain majesty to the aspect; the lines round the mouth were
habitually rigid and compressed. Her face was that of one who had gone
through great emotion and subdued it. There was something formal, and
even ascetic, in the character of her beauty, which was still
considerable, in her air and in her dress. She might have suggested to
you the idea of some Gothic baroness of old, half chatelaine, half-
abbess; you would see at a glance that she did not live in the light
world around her, and disdained its fashion and its mode of thought; yet
with all this rigidity it was still the face of the woman who has known
human ties and human affections. And now, as she gazed long on Harley's
quiet, saddened brow, it was the face of a mother.
"A single grave," she said, after a long pause. "And you were then but a
boy, Harley! Can such a memory influence you even to this day? It is
scarcely possible: it does not seem to me within the realities of man's
life,--though it might be of woman's."
"I believe," said Harley, half soliloquizing, "that I have a great deal
of the woman in me. Perhaps men who live much alone, and care not for
men's objects, do grow tenacious of impressions, as your sex does. But
oh," he cried, aloud, and with a sudden change of countenance, "oh, the
hardest and the coldest man would have felt as I do, had he known HER,
had he loved HER. She was like no other woman I have ever met. Bright
and glorious creature of another sphere! She descended on this earth and
darkened it when she passed away. It is no use striving. Mother, I have
as much courage as our steel-clad fathers ever had. I have dared in
battle and in deserts, against man and the wild beast, against the storm
and the ocean, against the rude powers of Nature,--dangers as dread as
ever pilgrim or Crusader rejoiced to brave. But courage against that one
memory! no, I have none!"
"Harley, Harley, you break my heart!" cried the countess, clasping her
hands.
"It is astonishing," continued her son, so rapt in his own thoughts that
he did not, perhaps, hear her outcry. "Yea, verily, it is astonishing,
that considering the thousands of women I have seen and spoken with, I
never see a face like hers,--never hear a voice so sweet. And all this
universe of life cannot afford me one look and one tone that can restore
me to man's privilege,--love. Well, well, well, life has other things
yet; Poetry and Art live still; still smiles the heaven and still wave
the trees. Leave me to happiness in my own way."
The countess was about to reply, when the door was thrown hastily open,
and Lord Lansmere walked in.
The earl was some years older than the countess, but his placid face
showed less wear and tear,--a benevolent, kindly face, without any
evidence of commanding intellect, but with no lack of sense in its
pleasant lines; his form not tall, but upright and with an air of
consequence,--a little pompous, but good-humouredly so,--the pomposity of
the Grand Seigneur who has lived much in provinces, whose will has been
rarely disputed, and whose importance has been so felt and acknowledged
as to react insensibly on himself;--an excellent man; but when you
glanced towards the high brow and dark eye of the countess, you marvelled
a little how the two had come together, and, according to common report,
lived so happily in the union.
"Ho, ho! my dear Harley," cried Lord Lansmere, rubbing his hands with an
appearance of much satisfaction, "I have just been paying a visit to the
duchess."
"What duchess, my dear father?"
"Why, your mother's first cousin, to be sure,--the Duchess of
Knaresborough, whom, to oblige me, you condescended to call upon; and
delighted I am to hear that you admire Lady Mary--"
She is very high bred, and rather--high-nosed," answered Harley. Then,
observing that his mother looked pained, and his father disconcerted, he
added seriously, "But handsome certainly."
"Well, Harley," said the earl, recovering himself, "the duchess, taking
advantage of our connection to speak freely, has intimated to me that
Lady Mary has been no less struck with yourself; and to come to the
point, since you allow that it is time you should think of marrying, I do
not know a more desirable alliance. What do you say, Katherine?"
"The duke is of a family that ranks in history before the Wars of the
Roses," said Lady Lansmere, with an air of deference to her husband; "and
there has never been one scandal in its annals, nor one blot on its
scutcheon. But I am sure my dear Lord must think that the duchess should
not have made the first overture,--even to a friend and a kinsman?"
"Why, we are old-fashioned people," said the earl, rather embarrassed,
"and the duchess is a woman of the world."
"Let us hope," said the countess, mildly, "that her daughter is not."
"I would not marry Lady Mary, if all the rest of the female sex were
turned into apes," said Lord L'Estrange, with deliberate fervour.
"Good heavens!" cried the earl, "what extraordinary language is this?
And pray why, sir?"
HARLEY.--"I can't say; there is no why in these cases. But, my dear
father, you are not keeping faith with me."
LORD LANSMERE.--"HOW?"
HARLEY.--"You and my Lady, here, entreat me to marry; I promise to do my
best to obey you, but on one condition, that I choose for myself, and
take my time about it. Agreed on both sides. Whereon, off goes your
Lordship--actually before noon, at an hour when no lady, without a
shudder, could think of cold blonde and damp orange flowers--off goes
your Lordship, I say, and commits poor Lady Mary and your unworthy son to
a mutual admiration,--which neither of us ever felt. Pardon me, my
father, but this is grave. Again let me claim your promise,--full choice
for myself, and no reference to the Wars of the Roses. What War of the
Roses like that between Modesty and Love upon the cheek of the virgin!"
LADY LANSMERE.--"Full choice for yourself, Harley: so be it. But we,
too, named a condition,--did we not, Lansmere?"
THE EARL (puzzled).--"Eh, did we? Certainly we did."
HARLEY.--"What was it?"
LADY LANSMERE.--"The son of Lord Lansmere can only marry the daughter of
a gentleman."
THE EARL.---"Of course, of course."
The blood rushed over Harley's fair face, and then as suddenly left it
pale.
He walked away to the window; his mother followed him, and again laid her
hand on his shoulder.
"You were cruel," said he, gently, and in a whisper, as he winced under
the touch of the hand. Then turning to the earl, who was gazing at him
in blank surprise,--it never occurred to Lord Lansmere that there could
be a doubt of his son's marrying beneath the rank modestly stated by the
countess,--Harley stretched forth his hand, and said, in his soft winning
tone, "You have ever been most gracious to me, and most forbearing; it is
but just that I should sacrifice the habits of an egotist, to gratify a
wish which you so warmly entertain. I agree with you, too, that our race
should not close in me,--Noblesse oblige. But you know I was ever
romantic; and I must love where I marry; or, if not love, I must feel
that my wife is worthy of all the love I could once have bestowed. Now,
as to the vague word 'gentleman' that my mother employs--word that means
so differently on different lips--I confess that I have a prejudice
against young ladies brought up in the 'excellent foppery of the world,'
as the daughters of gentlemen of our rank mostly are. I crave,
therefore, the most liberal interpretation of this word 'gentleman.'
And so long as there be nothing mean or sordid in the birth, habits, and
education of the father of this bride to be, I trust you will both agree
to demand nothing more,--neither titles nor pedigree."
"Titles, no, assuredly," said Lady Lansmere; "they do not make
gentlemen."
"Certainly not," said the earl; "many of our best families are untitled."
"Titles--no," repeated Lady Lansmere; "but ancestors yes."
"Ah, my mother," said Harley, with his most sad and quiet smile, "it is
fated that we shall never agree. The first of our race is ever the one
we are most proud of; and pray, what ancestors had he? Beauty, virtue,
modesty, intellect,--if these are not nobility enough for a man, he is a
slave to the dead."
With these words Harley took up his hat and made towards the door.
"You said yourself, 'Noblesse oblige,'" said the countess, following him
to the threshold; "we have nothing more to add."
Harley slightly shrugged his shoulders, kissed his mother's hand;
whistled to Nero, who started up from a doze by the window, and went his
way.
"Does he really go abroad next week?" said the earl. "So he says."
"I am afraid there is no chance for Lady Mary," resumed Lord Lansmere,
with a slight but melancholy smile.
"She has not intellect enough to charm him. She is not worthy of
Harley," said the proud mother.
"Between you and me," rejoined the earl, rather timidly, "I don't see
what good his intellect does him. He could not be more unsettled and
useless if he were the merest dunce in the three kingdoms. And so
ambitious as he was when a boy! Katherine, I sometimes fancy that you
know what changed him."
"I!" Nay, my dear Lord, it is a common change enough with the young,
when of such fortunes, who find, when they enter life, that there is
really little left for them to strive for. Had Harley been a poor man's
son, it might have been different."
"I was born to the same fortunes as Harley," said the earl, shrewdly,
"and yet I flatter myself I am of some use to old England."
The countess seized upon the occasion, complimented her Lord, and turned
the subject.