The Results.--Perverted Ambition.--Selfish Passion.--The Intellect
Distorted by the Crookedness of the Heart.
Vivian’s schemes thus prospered. He had an income that permitted him the
outward appearances of a gentleman,--an independence modest, indeed, but
independence still. We were all gone from London. One letter to me with
the postmark of the town near which Colonel Vivian lived, sufficed to
confirm my belief in his parentage and in his return to his friends.
He then presented himself to Trevanion as the young man whose pen I had
employed in the member’s service; and knowing that I had never mentioned
his name to Trevanion,--for without Vivian’s permission I should not,
considering his apparent trust in me, have deemed myself authorized to
do so,--he took that of Gower, which he selected, haphazard, from an old
Court Guide as having the advantage--in common with most names borne by
the higher nobility of England--of not being confined, as the ancient
names of untitled gentlemen usually are, to the members of a single
family. And when, with his wonted adaptability and suppleness, he had
contrived to lay aside or smooth over whatever in his manners would be
calculated to displease Trevanion, and had succeeded in exciting the
interest which that generous statesman always conceived for ability,
he owned candidly one day, in the presence of Lady Ellinor,--for, his
experience had taught him the comparative ease with which the sympathy
of woman is enlisted in anything that appeals to the imagination,
or seems out of the ordinary beat of life,--that he had reasons for
concealing his connections for the present; that he had cause to believe
I suspected what they were, and, from mistaken regard for his welfare,
might acquaint his relations with his whereabout. He therefore begged
Trevanion, if the latter had occasion to write to me, not to mention
him. This promise Trevanion gave, though reluctantly,--for the
confidence volunteered to him seemed to exact the promise; but as he
detested mystery of all kinds, the avowal might have been fatal to any
further acquaintance, and under auspices so doubtful, there would have
been no chance of his obtaining that intimacy in Trevanion’s house which
he desired to establish, but for an accident which at once opened that
house to him almost as a home.
Vivian had always treasured a lock of his mother’s hair, cut off on her
death-bed; and when he was at his French tutor’s, his first pocket-money
had been devoted to the purchase of a locket, on which he had caused to
be inscribed his own name and his mother’s. Through all his wanderings
he had worn this relic; and in the direst pangs of want, no hunger had
been keen enough to induce him to part with it. Now, one morning, the
ribbon that suspended the locket gave way, and his eye resting on the
names inscribed on the gold, he thought, in his own vague sense of
right, imperfect as it was, that his compact with his father obliged
him to have the names erased. He took it to a jeweller in Piccadilly for
that purpose, and gave the requisite order, not taking notice of a lady
in the farther part of the shop. The locket was still on the counter
after Vivian had left, when the lady, coming forward, observed it, and
saw the names on the surface. She had been struck by the peculiar tone
of the voice, which she had heard before; and that very day Mr. Gower
received a note from Lady Ellinor Trevanion, requesting to see him. Much
wondering, he went. Presenting him with the locket, she said smiling,
“There is only one gentleman in the world who calls himself De Caxton,
unless it be his son. Ah! I see now why you wished to conceal yourself
from my friend Pisistratus. But how is this? Can you have any difference
with your father? Confide in me, or it is my duty to write to him.”
Even Vivian’s powers of dissimulation abandoned him, thus taken by
surprise. He saw no alternative but to trust Lady Ellinor with his
secret, and implore her to respect it. And then he spoke bitterly of his
father’s dislike to him, and his own resolution to prove the injustice
of that dislike by the position he would himself establish in the world.
At present his father believed him dead, and perhaps was not ill-pleased
to think so. He would not dispel that belief till he could redeem any
boyish errors, and force his family to be proud to acknowledge him.
Though Lady Ellinor was slow to believe that Roland could dislike his
son, she could yet readily believe that he was harsh and choleric, with
a soldier’s high notions of discipline; the young man’s story moved her,
his determination pleased her own high spirit. Always with a touch of
romance in her, and always sympathizing with each desire of ambition,
she entered into Vivian’s aspirations with an alacrity that surprised
himself. She was charmed with the idea of ministering to the son’s
fortunes, and ultimately reconciling him to the father,--through her
own agency; it would atone for any fault of which Roland could accuse
herself in the old time.
She undertook to impart the secret to Trevanion, for she would have no
secrets from him, and to secure his acquiescence in its concealment from
all others.
And here I must a little digress from the chronological course of my
explanatory narrative to inform the reader that when Lady Ellinor had
her interview with Roland, she had been repelled by the sternness of his
manner from divulging Vivian’s secret. But on her first attempt to sound
or conciliate him, she had begun with some eulogies on Trevanion’s new
friend and assistant, Mr. Gower, and had awakened Roland’s suspicions of
that person’s identity with his son,--suspicions which had given him a
terrible interest in our joint deliverance of Miss Trevanion. But so
heroically had the poor soldier sought to resist his own fears, that
on the way he shrank to put to me the questions that might paralyze the
energies which, whatever the answer, were then so much needed. “For,”
said he to my father, “I felt the blood surging to my temples; and if I
had said to Pisistratus, ‘Describe this man,’ and by his description I
had recognized my son, and dreaded lest I might be too late to arrest
him from so treacherous a crime, my brain would have given way,--and so
I did not dare!”
I return to the thread of my story. From the time that Vivian confided
in Lady Ellinor, the way was cleared to his most ambitious hopes; and
though his acquisitions were not sufficiently scholastic and various to
permit Trevanion to select him as a secretary, yet, short of sleeping at
the house, he was little less intimate there than I had been.
Among Vivian’s schemes of advancement, that of winning the hand and
heart of the great heiress had not been one of the least sanguine. This
hope was annulled when, not long after his intimacy at her father’s
house, she became engaged to young Lord Castleton. But he could not see
Miss Trevanion with impunity (alas! who, with a heart yet free, could be
insensible to attractions so winning?). He permitted the love--such love
as his wild, half-educated, half-savage nature acknowledged--to creep
into his soul, to master it; but he felt no hope, cherished no scheme
while the young lord lived. With the death of her betrothed, Fanny
was free; then he began to hope,--not yet to scheme. Accidentally he
encountered Peacock. Partly from the levity that accompanied a false
good-nature that was constitutional with him, partly from a vague idea
that the man might be useful, Vivian established his quondam associate
in the service of Trevanion. Peacock soon gained the secret of Vivian’s
love for Fanny, and dazzled by the advantages that a marriage with Miss
Trevanion would confer on his patron, and might reflect on himself, and
delighted at an occasion to exercise his dramatic accomplishments on the
stage of real life, he soon practised the lesson that the theatres had
taught him; namely, to make a sub-intrigue between maid and valet serve
the schemes and insure the success of the lover. If Vivian had some
opportunities to imply his admiration, Miss Trevanion gave him none
to plead his cause. But the softness of her nature, and that
graceful kindness which surrounded her like an atmosphere, emanating
unconsciously from a girl’s harmless desire to please, tended to deceive
him. His own personal gifts were so rare, and in his wandering life the
effect they had produced had so increased his reliance on them, that he
thought he wanted but the fair opportunity to woo in order to win. In
this state of mental intoxication, Trevanion, having provided for his
Scotch secretary, took him to Lord N--s. His hostess was one of those
middle-aged ladies of fashion who like to patronize and bring forward
young men, accepting gratitude for condescension as a homage to beauty.
She was struck by Vivian’s exterior, and that “picturesque” in look and
in manner which belonged to him. Naturally garrulous and indiscreet, she
was unreserved to a pupil whom she conceived the whim to make “au fait
to society.” Thus she talked to him, among other topics in fashion, of
Miss Trevanion, and expressed her belief that the present Lord Castleton
had always admired her; but it was only on his accession to the
marquisate that he had made up his mind to marry, or, from his knowledge
of Lady Ellinor’s ambition, thought that the Marquis of Castleton
might achieve the prize which would have been refused to Sir Sedley
Beaudesert. Then, to corroborate the predictions she hazarded, she
repeated, perhaps with exaggeration, some passages from Lord Castleton’s
replies to her own suggestions on the subject. Vivian’s alarm became
fatally excited; unregulated passions easily obscured a reason so long
perverted, and a conscience so habitually dulled. There is an instinct
in all intense affection (whether it be corrupt or pure) that usually
makes its jealousy prophetic. Thus, from the first, out of all the
brilliant idlers round Fanny Trevanion, my jealousy had pre-eminently
fastened on Sir Sedley Beaudesert, though, to all seeming, without
a cause. From the same instinct Vivian had conceived the same vague
jealousy,--a jealousy, in his instance, coupled with a deep dislike
to his supposed rival, who had wounded his self-love. For the marquis,
though to be haughty or ill-bred was impossible to the blandness of his
nature, had never shown to Vivian the genial courtesies he had lavished
upon me, and kept politely aloof from his acquaintance; while Vivian’s
personal vanity had been wounded by that drawing-room effect which the
proverbial winner of all hearts produced without an effort,--an effect
that threw into the shade the youth and the beauty (more striking, but
infinitely less prepossessing) of the adventurous rival. Thus animosity
to Lord Castleton conspired with Vivian’s passion for Fanny to rouse all
that was worst by nature and by rearing in this audacious and turbulent
spirit.
His confidant Peacock suggested, from his stage experience, the
outlines of a plot, to which Vivian’s astuter intellect instantly gave
tangibility and coloring. Peacock had already found Miss Trevanion’s
waiting-woman ripe for any measure that might secure himself as her
husband and a provision for life as a reward. Two or three letters
between them settled the preliminary engagements. A friend of the
ex-comedian’s had lately taken an inn on the north road, and might be
relied upon. At that inn it was settled that Vivian should meet Miss
Trevanion, whom Peacock, by the aid of the abigail, engaged to lure
there. The sole difficulty that then remained would, to most men, have
seemed the greatest; namely, the consent of Miss Trevanion to a Scotch
marriage. But Vivian hoped all things from his own eloquence, art, and
passion; and by an inconsistency, however strange, still not unnatural
in the twists of so crooked an intellect, he thought that by insisting
on the intention of her parents to sacrifice her youth to the very man
of whose attractions he was most jealous,--by the picture of disparity
of years, by the caricature of his rival’s foibles and frivolities,
by the commonplaces of “beauty bartered for ambition,” etc.,--he might
enlist her fears of the alternative on the side of the choice urged upon
her. The plan proceeded, the time came: Peacock pretended the excuse of
a sick relation to leave Trevanion; and Vivian a day before, on pretence
of visiting the picturesque scenes in the neighborhood, obtained leave
of absence. Thus the plot went on to its catastrophe.
“And I need not ask,” said I, trying in vain to conceal my indignation,
“how Miss Trevanion received your monstrous proposition!”
Vivian’s pale cheek grew paler, but he made no reply.
“And if we had not arrived, what would you have done? Oh, dare you look
into the gulf of infamy you have escaped!”
“I cannot and I will not bear this!” exclaimed Vivian, starting up. “I
have laid my heart bare before you, and it is ungenerous and unmanly
thus to press upon its wounds. You can moralize, you can speak coldly;
but--I--I loved!”
“And do you think,” I burst forth, “do you think that I did not love
too,--love longer than you have done; better than you have done; gone
through sharper struggles, darker days, more sleepless nights than you;
and yet--”
Vivian caught hold of me.
“Hush!” he cried; “is this indeed true? I thought you might have had
some faint and fleeting fancy for Miss Trevanion, but that you curbed
and conquered it at once. Oh, no! It was impossible to have loved
really, and to have surrendered all chance as you did,--have left the
house, have fled from her presence! No, no; that was not love!”
“It was love! And I pray Heaven to grant that, one day, you may know how
little your affection sprang from those feelings which make true love
sublime as honor, and meek as is religion! Oh, cousin, cousin, with
those rare gifts, what you might have been; what, if you will pass
through repentance and cling to atonement, what, I dare hope, you may
yet be! Talk not now of your love; I talk not of mine! Love is a thing
gone from the lives of both. Go back to earlier thoughts, to heavier
wrongs,--your father, that noble heart which you have so wantonly
lacerated, which you have so little comprehended!”
Then, with all the warmth of emotion, I hurried on,--showed him the true
nature of honor and of Roland (for the names were one!); showed him the
watch, the hope, the manly anguish I had witnessed, and wept--I, not his
son--to see; showed him the poverty and privation to which the father,
even at the last, had condemned himself, so that the son might have no
excuse for the sins that Want whispers to the weak. This and much
more, and I suppose with the pathos that belongs to all earnestness,
I enforced, sentence after sentence, yielding to no interruption,
overmastering all dissent, driving in the truth, nail after nail, as it
were, into the obdurate heart that I constrained and grappled to. And at
last the dark, bitter, cynical nature gave way, and the young man fell
sobbing at my feet and cried aloud, “Spare me, spare me! I see it all
now, wretch that I have been!”