----The fearful time
Cuts off the ceremonious vows of love,
And ample interchange of sweet discourse,
Which so long sunder’d friends should dwell upon.
SHAKSPEARE.
Whilst the contest still continued, Oakley had not felt any despondency
at his daily diminishing hopes of success. The reputation of a martyr
was one peculiarly suited to his character. It was almost the only
distinction which, whilst it elevated him in his own opinion, at
the same time fed that distrust of others in which it pleased him
to indulge. Whilst he persuaded himself, in attempting to persuade
others, that he was the victim of an unprincipled conspiracy, it is to
be doubted whether at the moment he would have exchanged the liberty
of expressing his opinion of his opponents in unmeasured terms, for
that situation on the poll which would have burdened his tongue with a
weight of gratitude, and deprived him of the pleasure of considering
himself as a virtuous victim to the ignorance and corruption of the age.
But, as the excitement subsided, other feelings blended themselves
with the retrospect. He left the town in Lady Boreton’s carriage: her
ladyship had been active in her assistance to the very last, and would
now, if she had received any encouragement, have been equally ready
with her consolations, but Oakley’s taciturnity seemed invincible;
therefore Lady Boreton, whose busy mind was never unoccupied, entered
at once into eager conversation with her literary hanger-on, who sat
opposite, and was soon as far off as the gardens of the Hesperides,
discussing their recently-discovered locality. Sir John, who was
opposite Oakley, lest he should be expected to say any thing, kept
his eyes as intently fixed upon the passing hedges, as if he had been
counting the blackberries on them.
Oakley therefore was allowed, undisturbed, the indulgence of his
reflections at much greater length than they need be recorded. It is
sufficient to say, that every ground of consolation gradually faded
away upon further examination. He now felt disposed to doubt the
justice, or even the excellence of some of those philippics of which he
had not been a little proud, when they found a ready approval in the
acclamations of his party. Their effect however still remained to be
felt; they had alienated the only person whose friendship he had ever
valued, and separated him farther from her who had awakened in his
heart an interest, strong in proportion to the newness of the feeling
to him.
He was roused by hearing Lady Boreton say, after a check to their
progress, caused by meeting another carriage at a turnpike, “There
is Lady Latimer, of course all smiles; and can that possibly be Miss
Mordaunt moping in the corner? How that girl is altered since she first
came to my house! I can’t think what has come over her; I never saw any
thing so melancholy as she looked last time she came into town with
Lady Latimer.”
The carriages crossed; no one replied to Lady Boreton’s remark; she
therefore returned to her golden-fruited gardens, Sir John to his
blackberry-bushes, and Oakley resumed his reverie, which was now
somewhat less political than it had originally been. They thus arrived
at the first stage where they were to separate; Sir John and Lady
Boreton continuing their route homewards, and Oakley mounting his
horse and crossing to Goldsborough. The groom who had come to meet him
with the horse, brought with him from thence a packet which otherwise
affected his destination.
It was with some surprise that he read a letter from Mrs. Mordaunt
to him, in which she stated that she was already under such heavy
obligations to him, that she had the less hesitation in applying to him
now to extricate her from difficulties of a delicate and distressing
nature. Her health had latterly, she said, been breaking rapidly; she
had been anxious not to alarm Helen on the subject unnecessarily, till
warned by her physician that she had no time to lose. As her daughter’s
intimacy with Lady Latimer had originated in an accidental occurrence,
with which she had herself no concern, she was unwilling now to open a
communication with that lady, which might lead to inquiries, that, for
many reasons, she would rather avoid; and yet she could not bear that
her daughter should return to her unprepared to find her much changed
since last they parted. She therefore knew not to whom to confide the
task of imparting to Helen the painful necessity for her return, unless
it was to him from whom she had had no secret, and to whom she owed the
double debt of having, by his liberality, given comfort to her latter
days, and by his kindness, smoothed her daughter’s first entrance into
the world.
Oakley’s faculties had been so bewildered and exhausted by the
excitement under which he had been lately labouring, that he read this
letter over several times before he could form any consistent plan
for complying with the request it contained. It appeared as if Mrs.
Mordaunt had been ignorant of many late circumstances, which made
him a peculiarly inconvenient medium for communicating any thing
to Helen whilst under Lord Latimer’s roof. And such indeed was the
case. Helen could have related nothing to her mother on the subject
of the election, except those prejudiced versions of the contest
which were perpetually repeated in her hearing at Latimer, and which
she was extremely unwilling to believe; she had therefore adopted
the alternative of utter silence on that subject, and so completely
secluded was Mrs. Mordaunt’s mode of life, that she was very unlikely
to know any thing about it from any other source.
She therefore had written in the full confidence that Mr. Oakley’s
intercourse with her daughter was still upon the same easy footing that
it had formerly been. Her own early experience of the workings of the
heart, and the deductions which, in the calm of her latter days, she
had drawn from that experience, leading her to believe that Helen’s
comparative omission of Oakley’s name in her most recent letters, arose
from other causes than either separation or indifference. Not that it
ought, therefore, to be supposed that Mrs. Mordaunt had formed any
interested scheme for her daughter’s advantageous settlement in life,
by a union with Oakley, but occasionally, in her solitude, indistinct
hopes of that nature would come across her. She had so studied Helen’s
character, she had so sifted its freedom from the seeds of those errors
which had been her own ruin, that when year after year she found it
only more “lovely in blossom, rich in fruit,” she justly considered
that one so perfect as a daughter, would be invaluable as a wife.
True, with bitter humiliation she felt that her own character might be
a bar to any connexion of that kind; and to think of her, separated and
estranged, was more than she could bear: but it had long been in her
daughter and for her daughter alone she had lived, and for her sake she
hoped soon to die.
It was in the prospects which the visit to Lady Latimer seemed to have
opened to Helen, that Mrs. Mordaunt found her consolation for the
present separation. Lady Latimer had first met Miss Mordaunt at the
house of an old governess of hers, who had retired to the same secluded
neighbourhood as her mother. She was a very respectable elderly
gentlewoman, with whom Lady Latimer kept up an occasional intercourse,
in gratitude for some early moral instruction which Lady Flamborough
had, as in duty bound, in the first instance, hired her to implant, and
afterwards had herself been at some pains to eradicate. This good old
lady had taken a great fancy to Miss Mordaunt, and had introduced her
to the notice of Lady Latimer, as the orphan-child of an officer in
the army, whose widow lived in that neighbourhood.
But to return to Oakley and the letter. It is to be feared that one
of the first reflections that it raised in his mind was, that the
death of a person in Mrs. Mordaunt’s unfortunate situation would be no
disadvantage to Helen; but he checked the idea, when he recollected the
shock her affectionate nature would sustain in the final separation
from a mother, from whom she had received nothing but kindness, and of
whom she knew nothing but good. Again he cursed this unlucky election,
which had laid an embargo upon personal communication at present.
How could he, especially after the language he had used about Lord
Latimer and his friends, attempt to cross his threshold uninvited and
unexpected?
He sat down determined to write the painful intelligence he had to
convey to Miss Mordaunt. But he could not satisfy himself with either
the style or substance of what he had committed to paper. Besides, what
right had he to address Miss Mordaunt at all? Many things, which an
additional word or look might explain or soften, at the moment looked
abrupt when staring nakedly and unalterably upon paper.
At one time he thought of returning home to Goldsborough and committing
to some delegated person the task that had been assigned to himself.
But who should be that person? became the next question. Mr. Gardner
from his character, would have been peculiarly fitted to undertake it,
but he could not think of asking such a favour of him, after parting
from him in a temper of suspicion, which did not render it easy to make
the next meeting one of unrestrained confidence.
He read the letter again, and it appeared that something must be
decided on speedily. Whilst he was still deliberating, the shades of
night thickened around him, and after having made a last ineffectual
attempt to finish what he had written by the uncertain fire-light in
the little room to which he had retired, he took the sudden resolution
of returning himself alone, and under cover of the darkness, (he
trusted unobserved,) to the county town where Helen had accompanied
Lady Latimer.
“There at least,” thought he, “whilst they are occupied with their
petty triumph, I can have an opportunity of a few minutes’ private
conversation with Miss Mordaunt without trespassing upon Lord Latimer’s
hospitality.”
This resolution was no sooner taken than executed, and he was without
further delay on horseback, and again, but more rapidly gliding past
those hedges of which Sir John had some hours before so accurately
examined the details, but which now appeared, by the uncertain
twilight of an autumnal evening, to stalk by in gloomy, gigantic
masses, as he galloped between them. He heeded not their threatening
shadows, nor the more substantial discomforts of the coming storm,
entirely occupied with arranging, as far as the confusion of his ideas
would admit, the manner in which he might best break the unwelcome
tidings with which he was charged, to one whom he was most unwilling to
pain.
The first thing that at all dissipated the deep abstraction in which
these thoughts involved him, was soon after entering the town, a sudden
and violent start of his horse at a blazing pile which flared across
the streets. This appeared to rise out of a cask, which the drunken
assemblage who surrounded it, having previously emptied, had now filled
with combustibles, and on the top of it was exposed a stuffed figure,
which, from its black wig and oratorical attitude, was evidently meant
for Oakley himself.
Enraged at the sight, he spurred his horse furiously through the mob,
who fled on all sides, scared at the sight, as the lurid glare fell
for a moment upon the haggard apparition of him whose image they had
just been reviling, but whose actual presence they had seen removed
from the town some hours before. In another second he was lost in the
thick cloud of smoke which rolled onward the way he went, and it ever
after remained an unexplained mystery, what it was the boys saw that
night near Tom Smith’s rag-yard. Even the old gossip (who, as the first
authority in ghost-stories was consulted on the subject) only shook his
head, and said, “It was na a canny task to burn a sinfu’ cratur afore
his day--there was na tilling wha might com in sim shape or other to
thankee for saving of his fuel.”
Meantime Oakley rode on, not much improved in temper by the late
incident, and having put up his horse, sought out Lady Latimer’s
lodging.