Even the poll-clerks were touched; and when Dick, leaving his place, was

seen by the crowd assisting Lord L’Estrange to place poor John again

in the carriage, that picture of family love in the midst of political

difference--of the prosperous, wealthy, energetic son, who, as a boy,

had played at marbles in the very kennel, and who had risen in life

by his own exertions, and was now virtually M. P. for his native town,

tending on the broken-down, aged father, whom even the interests of

a son he was so proud of could not win from the colours which he

associated with truth and rectitude--had such an effect upon the rudest

of the mob there present, that you might have heard a pin fall,--till

the carriage drove away back to John’s humble home; and then there rose

such a tempest of huzzas! John Avenel’s vote for Egerton gave another

turn to the vicissitudes of that memorable election. As yet Avenel had

been ahead of Audley; but a plumper in favour of Egerton, from Avenel’s

own father, set an example and gave an excuse to many a Blue who had not

yet voted, and could not prevail on himself to split his vote between

Dick and Audley; and, therefore, several leading tradesmen, who, seeing

that Egerton was safe, had previously resolved not to vote at all, came

up in the last hour, plumped for Egerton, and carried him to the head

of the poll; so that poor John, whose vote, involving that of Mark

Fairfield, had secured the first opening in public life to the young

ambition of the unknown son-in-law, still contributed to connect with

success and triumph, but also with sorrow, and, it may be, with death,

the names of the high-born Egerton and the humble Avenel.

The great town-clock strikes the hour of four; the returning officer

declares the poll closed; the formal announcement of the result will

be made later. But all the town knows that Audley Egerton and Richard

Avenel are the members for Lausmere. And flags stream, and drums beat,

and men shake each other by the hand heartily; and there is talk of the

chairing to-morrow; and the public-houses are crowded; and there is an

indistinct hubbub in street and alley, with sudden bursts of uproarious

shouting; and the clouds to the west look red and lurid round the sun,

which has gone down behind the church tower,--behind the yew-trees that

overshadow the quiet grave of Nora Avenel.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

Amidst the darkening shadows of twilight, Randal Leslie walked through

Lansmere Park towards the house. He had slunk away before the poll was

closed,--crept through bylanes, and plunged into the leafless copses

of the earl’s stately pasture-grounds. Amidst the bewilderment of

his thoughts--at a loss to conjecture how this strange mischance had

befallen him, inclined to ascribe it to Leonard’s influence over Avenel,

but suspecting Harley, and half doubtful of Baron Levy--he sought to

ascertain what fault of judgment he himself had committed, what wile he

had forgotten, what thread in his web he had left ragged and incomplete.

He could discover none. His ability seemed to him unimpeachable,--totus,

teres, atque rotundas. And then there came across his breast a sharp

pang,--sharper than that of baffled ambition,--the feeling that he had

been deceived and bubbled and betrayed. For so vital a necessity to all

living men is TRUTH, that the vilest traitor feels amazed and wronged,

feels the pillars of the world shaken, when treason recoils on himself.

“That Richard Avenel, whom I trusted, could so deceive me!” murmured

Randal, and his lip quivered.

He was still in the midst of the Park, when a man with a yellow cockade

in his hat, and running fast from the direction of the town, overtook

him with a letter, on delivering which the messenger, waiting for no

answer, hastened back the way he had come. Randal recognized Avenel’s

hand on the address, broke the seal, and read as follows:

(Private and Confidential.)

DEAR LESLIE,--Don’t be down-hearted,--you will know to-night or

to-morrow why I have had cause to alter my opinion as to the Right

Honourable; and you will see that I could not, as a Family Man, act

otherwise than I have done. Though I have not broken my word to

you,--for you remember that all the help I promised was dependent on

my own resignation, and would go for nothing if Leonard resigned

instead,--yet I feel you must think yourself rather bamboozled. But

I have been obliged to sacrifice you, from a sense of Family Duty,

as you will soon acknowledge. My own nephew is sacrificed also; and

I have sacrificed my own concerns, which require the whole man of me

for the next year or two at Screwstown. So we are all in the same

boat, though you may think you are set adrift by yourself. But I

don’t mean to stay in parliament. I shall take the Chiltern

Hundreds, pretty considerable soon. And if you keep well with the

Blues, I’ll do my best with the Yellows to let you walk over the

course in my stead. For I don’t think Leonard will want to stand

again. And so a word to the wise,--and you may yet be member for

Lansmere.

R. A.

In this letter, Randal, despite all his acuteness, could not detect the

honest compunction of the writer. He could at first only look at the

worst side of human nature, and fancy that it was a paltry attempt

to stifle his just anger and ensure his discretion; but, on second

thoughts, it struck him that Dick might very naturally be glad to be

released to his mill, and get a quid pro quo out of Randal, under the

comprehensive title, “repayment of expenses.” Perhaps Dick was not

sorry to wait until Randal’s marriage gave him the means to make the

repayment. Nay, perhaps Randal had been thrown over for the present,

in order to wring from him better terms in a single election. Thus

reasoning, he took comfort from his belief in the mercenary motives of

another. True; it might be but a short disappointment. Before the next

parliament was a month old, he might yet take his seat in it as member

for Lansmere. But all would depend on his marriage with the heiress; he

must hasten that.

Meanwhile, it was necessary to knit and gather up all his thought,

courage, and presence of mind. How he shrunk from return to Lansmere

House,--from facing Egerton, Harley, all. But there was no choice. He

would have to make it up with the Blues,--to defend the course he had

adopted in the Committee-room. There, no doubt, was Squire Hazeldean

awaiting him with the purchase-money for the lands of Rood; there

was the Duke di Serrano, restored to wealth and honour; there was his

promised bride, the great heiress, on whom depended all that could

raise the needy gentleman into wealth and position. Gradually, with the

elastic temper that is essential to a systematic schemer, Randal Leslie

plucked himself from the pain of brooding over a plot that was defeated,

to prepare himself for consummating those that yet seemed so near

success. After all, should he fail in regaining Egerton’s favour,

Egerton was of use no more. He might rear his head, and face out what

some might call “ingratitude,” provided he could but satisfy the Blue

Committee. Dull dogs, how could he fail to do that! He could easily

talk over the Machiavellian sage. He should have small difficulty in

explaining all to the content of Audley’s distant brother, the squire.

Harley alone--but Levy had so positively assured him that Harley was not

sincerely anxious for Egerton; and as to the more important explanation

relative to Peschiera, surely what had satisfied Violante’s father ought

to satisfy a man who had no peculiar right to demand explanations at

all; and if these explanations did not satisfy, the onus to disprove

them must rest with Harley; and who or what could contradict Randal’s

plausible assertions,--assertions in support of which he himself could

summon a witness in Baron Levy? Thus nerving himself to all that could

task his powers, Randal Leslie crossed the threshold of Lansmere House,

and in the hall he found the baron awaiting him.

“I can’t account,” said Levy, “for what has gone so cross in this

confounded election. It is L’Estrange that puzzles me; but I know that

he hates Egerton. I know that he will prove that hate by one mode of

revenge, if he has lost it in another. But it is well, Randal, that

you are secure of Hazeldean’s money and the rich heiress’s hand;

otherwise--”

“Otherwise, what?”

“I should wash my hands of you, mon cher; for, in spite of all your

cleverness, and all I have tried to do for you, somehow or other I

begin to suspect that your talents will never secure your fortune. A

carpenter’s son beats you in public speaking, and a vulgar mill-owner

tricks you in private negotiation. Decidedly, as yet, Randal Leslie, you

are--a failure. And, as you so admirably said, ‘a man from whom we have

nothing to hope or fear we must blot out of the map of the future.’”

Randal’s answer was cut short by the appearance of the groom of the

chambers.

“My Lord is in the saloon, and requests you and Mr. Leslie will do him

the honour to join him there.” The two gentlemen followed the servant up

the broad stairs.

The saloon formed the centre room of the suite of apartments. From its

size, it was rarely used save on state occasions. It had the chilly and

formal aspect of rooms reserved for ceremony.

Riccabocca, Violante, Helen, Mr. Dale, Squire Hazeldean, and Lord

L’Estrange were grouped together by the cold Florentine marble table,

not littered with books and female work, and the endearing signs of

habitation, that give a living smile to the face of home; nothing

thereon save a great silver candelabrum, that scarcely lighted the

spacious room, and brought out the portraits on the walls as a part of

the assembly, looking, as portraits do look, with searching, curious

eyes upon every eye that turns to them.

But as soon as Randal entered, the squire detached himself from the

group, and, coming to the defeated candidate, shook hands with him

heartily.

“Cheer up, my boy; ‘t is no shame to be beaten. Lord L’Estrange says you

did your best to win, and man can do no more. And I’m glad, Leslie, that

we don’t meet for our little business till the election is over; for,

after annoyance, something pleasant is twice as acceptable. I’ve the

money in my pocket. Hush! and I say, my dear, dear boy, I cannot find

out where Frank is, but it is really all off with that foreign woman,

eh?”

“Yes, indeed, sir, I hope so. I’ll talk to you about it when we can be

alone. We may slip away presently, I trust.”

“I’ll tell you a secret scheme of mine and Harry’s,” said the squire, in

a still low whisper. “We, must drive that marchioness, or whatever

she is, out of the boy’s head, and put a pretty English girl into it

instead. That will settle him in life too. And I must try and swallow

that bitter pill of the post-obit. Harry makes worse of it than I do,

and is so hard on the poor fellow that I’ve been obliged to take his

part. I’ve no idea of being under petticoat government, it is not the

way with the Hazeldeans. Well, but to come back to the point: Whom do

you think I mean by the pretty girl?”

“Miss Sticktorights?”

“Zounds, no!--your own little sister, Randal. Sweet pretty face! Harry

liked her from the first, and then you’ll be Frank’s brother, and your

sound head and good heart will keep him right. And as you are going to

be married too (you must tell me all about that later), why, we shall

have two marriages, perhaps, in the family on the same day.”

Randal’s hand grasped the squire’s, and with an emotion of human

gratitude,--for we know that, hard to all else, he had natural feelings

for his fallen family; and his neglected sister was the one being on

earth whom he might almost be said to love. With all his intellectual

disdain for honest simple Frank, he knew no one in the world with whom

his young sister could be more secure and happy. Transferred to the

roof, and improved by the active kindness, of Mrs. Hazeldean, blest

in the manly affection of one not too refined to censure her own

deficiencies of education, what more could he ask for his sister, as he

pictured her to himself, with her hair hanging over her ears, and her

mind running into seed over some trashy novel. But before he could

reply, Violante’s father came to add his own philosophical consolations

to the squire’s downright comfortings.

“Who could ever count on popular caprice? The wise of all ages had

despised it. In that respect, Horace and Machiavelli were of the same

mind,” etc. “But,” said the duke, with emphatic kindness “perhaps your

very misfortune here may serve you elsewhere. The female heart is prone

to pity, and ever eager to comfort. Besides, if I am recalled to Italy,

you will have leisure to come with us, and see the land where, of all

others, ambition can be most readily forgotten, even” added the Italian

with a sigh--“even by her own sons!”

Thus addressed by both Hazeldean and the duke, Randal recovered his

spirits. It was clear that Lord L’Estrange had not conveyed to them

any unfavourable impression of his conduct in the Committee-room. While

Randal had been thus engaged, Levy had made his way to Harley, who

retreated with the baron into the bay of the great window.

“Well, my Lord, do you comprehend this conduct on the part of Richard

Avenel? He secure Egerton’s return!--he!”

“What so natural, Baron Levy,--his own brother-in-law?” The baron

started, and turned very pale.

“But how did he know that? I never told him. I meant indeed--”

“Meant, perhaps, to shame Egerton’s pride at the last by publicly

declaring his marriage with a shopkeeper’s daughter. A very good revenge

still left to you; but revenge for what? A word with you, now, Baron,

that our acquaintance is about to close forever. You know why I have

cause for resentment against Egerton. I do but suspect yours; will you

make it clear to me?”

“My Lord, my Lord,” faltered Baron Levy, “I, too, wooed Nora Avenel as

my wife; I, too, had a happier rival in the haughty worldling who did

not appreciate his own felicity; I too--in a word, some women inspire an

affection that mingles with the entire being of a man, and is fused with

all the currents of his life-blood. Nora Avenel was one of those women.”

Harley was startled. This burst of emotion from a man so corrupt and

cynical arrested even the scorn he felt for the usurer. Levy soon

recovered himself. “But our revenge is not baffled yet. Egerton, if not

already in my power, is still in yours. His election may save him from

arrest, but the law has other modes of public exposure and effectual

ruin.”

“For the knave, yes,--as I intimated to you in your own house,--you who

boast of your love to Nora Avenel, and know in your heart that you were

her destroyer; you who witnessed her marriage, and yet dared to tell her

that she was dishonoured!”

“My Lord--I--how could you know--I mean, how think that--that--”

faltered Levy, aghast.

“Nora Avenel has spoken from her grave,” replied Harley, solemnly.

“Learn that, wherever man commits a crime, Heaven finds a witness!”

“It is on me, then,” said Levy, wrestling against a superstitious thrill

at his heart--“on me that you now concentre your vengeance; and I must

meet it as I may. But I have fulfilled my part of our compact. I have

obeyed you implicitly--and--”

“I will fulfil my part of our bond, and leave you undisturbed in your

wealth.”

“I knew I might trust to your Lordship’s honour,” exclaimed the usurer,

in servile glee.

“And this vile creature nursed the same passions as myself; and but

yesterday we were partners in the same purpose, and influenced by the

same thought!” muttered Harley to himself. “Yes,” he said aloud, “I

dare not, Baron Levy, constitute myself your judge. Pursue your own

path,--all roads meet at last before the common tribunal. But you are

not yet released from our compact; you must do some good in spite of

yourself. Look yonder, where Randal Leslie stands, smiling secure,

between the two dangers he has raised up for himself. And as Randal

Leslie himself has invited me to be his judge, and you are aware that

he cited yourself this very day as his witness, here I must expose the

guilty; for here the innocent still live, and need defence.”

Harley turned away, and took his place by the table. “I have wished,”

said he, raising his voice, “to connect with the triumph of my earliest

and dearest friend the happiness of others in whose welfare I feel an

interest. To you, Alphonso, Duke of Serrano, I now give this despatch,

received last evening by a special messenger from the Prince Von ------,

announcing your restoration to your lands and honours.”

The squire stared with open mouth. “Rickeybockey a duke? Why, Jemima’s a

duchess! Bless me, she is actually crying!” And his good heart prompted

him to run to his cousin and cheer her up a bit.

Violante glanced at Harley, and flung herself on her father’s breast.

Randal involuntarily rose, and moved to the duke’s chair.

“And you, Mr. Randal Leslie,” continued Harley, “though you have lost

your election, see before you at this moment such prospects of wealth

and happiness, that I shall only have to offer you congratulations to

which those that greet Mr. Audley Egerton may well appear lukewarm and

insipid, provided you prove that you have not forfeited the right to

claim that promise which the Duke di Serrano has accorded to the

suitor of his daughter’s hand. Some doubts resting on my mind, you have

volunteered to dispel them. I have the duke’s permission to address to

you a few questions, and I now avail myself of your offer to reply to

them.”

“Now,--and here, my Lord?” said Randal, glancing round the room, as if

deprecating the presence of so many witnesses. “Now,--and here. Nor are

those present so strange to your explanations as your question would

imply. Mr. Hazeldean, it so happens that much of what I shall say to Mr.

Leslie concerns your son.”

Randal’s countenance fell. An uneasy tremor now seized him.

“My son! Frank? Oh, then, of course, Randal will speak out. Speak, my

boy!”

Randal remained silent. The duke looked at his working face, and drew

away his chair.

“Young man, can you hesitate?” said he. “A doubt is expressed which

involves your honour.”

“‘s death!” cried the squire, also gazing on Randal’s cowering eye and

quivering lip, “what are you afraid of?”

“Afraid!” said Randal, forced into speech, and with a hollow

laugh--“afraid?--I? What of? I was only wondering what Lord L’Estrange

could mean.”

“I will dispel that wonder at once. Mr. Hazeldean, your son displeased

you first by his proposals of marriage to the Marchesa di Negra against

your consent; secondly, by a post-obit bond granted to Baron Levy. Did

you understand from Mr. Randal Leslie that he had opposed or favoured

the said marriage,--that he had countenanced or blamed the said

post-obit?”

“Why, of course,” cried the squire, “that he had opposed both the one

and the other.”

“Is it so, Mr. Leslie?”

“My Lord--I--I--my affection for Frank, and my esteem for his respected

father--I--I--” (He nerved himself, and went on with firm voice)--“Of

course, I did all I could to dissuade Frank from the marriage; and as to

the post-obit, I know nothing about it.”

“So much at present for this matter. I pass on to the graver one,

that affects your engagement with the Duke di Serrano’s daughter. I

understand from you, Duke, that to save your daughter from the snares

of Count di Peschiera, and in the belief that Mr. Leslie shared in

your dread of the count’s designs, you, while in exile and in poverty,

promised to that gentleman your daughter’s hand? When the probabilities

of restoration to your principalities seemed well-nigh certain, you

confirmed that promise on learning from Mr. Leslie that he had, however

ineffectively, struggled to preserve your heiress from a perfidious

snare. Is it not so?”

“Certainly. Had I succeeded to a throne, I could not recall the promise

that I had given in penury and banishment; I could not refuse to him who

would have sacrificed worldly ambition in wedding a penniless bride, the

reward of his own generosity. My daughter subscribes to my views.”

Violante trembled, and her hands were locked together; but her gaze was

fixed on Harley.

Mr. Dale wiped his eyes, and thought of the poor refugee feeding on

minnows, and preserving himself from debt amongst the shades of the

Casino.

“Your answer becomes you, Duke,” resumed Harley. “But should it be

proved that Mr. Leslie, instead of wooing the princess for herself,

actually calculated on the receipt of money for transferring her to

Count Peschiera; instead of saving her from the dangers you dreaded,

actually suggested the snare from which she was delivered,--would you

still deem your honour engaged to--”

“Such a villain? No, surely not!” exclaimed the duke. “But this is a

groundless hypothesis! Speak, Randal.”

“Lord L’Estrange cannot insult me by deeming it otherwise than a

groundless hypothesis!” said Randal, striving to rear his head.

“I understand then, Mr. Leslie, that you scornfully reject such a

supposition?”

“Scornfully--yes. And,” continued Randal, advancing a step, “since the

supposition has been made, I demand from Lord L’Estrange, as his equal

(for all gentlemen are equals where honour is to be defended at the cost

of life), either instant retractation--or instant proof.”

“That’s the first word you have spoken like a man,” cried the squire. “I

have stood my ground myself for a less cause. I have had a ball through

my right shoulder.”

“Your demand is just,” said Harley, unmoved. “I cannot give the

retractation,--I will produce the proof.”

He rose and rang the bell; the servant entered, received his whispered

order, and retired. There was a pause painful to all. Randal, however,

ran over in his fearful mind what evidence could be brought against

him--and foresaw none. The folding doors of the saloon were thrown open

and the servant announced--

THE COUNT DI PESCHIERA.

A bombshell, descending through the roof could not have produced a more

startling sensation. Erect, bold, with all the imposing effect of his

form and bearing, the count strode into the centre of the ring; and

after a slight bend of haughty courtesy, which comprehended all present,

reared up his lofty head, and looked round, with calm in his eye and a

curve on his lip,--the self-assured, magnificent, high-bred Daredevil.

“Duke di Serrano,” said the count, in English, turning towards his

astounded kinsman, and in a voice that, slow, clear, and firm, seemed to

fill the room, “I returned to England on the receipt of a letter from my

Lord L’Estrange, and with a view, it is true, of claiming at his hands

the satisfaction which men of our birth accord to each other, where

affront, from what cause soever, has been given or received. Nay, fair

kinswoman,”--and the count, with a slight but grave smile, bowed to

Violante, who had uttered a faint cry,--“that intention is abandoned. If

I have adopted too lightly the old courtly maxim, that ‘all stratagems

are fair in love,’ I am bound also to yield to my Lord L’Estrange’s

arguments, that the counter-stratagems must be fair also. And, after

all, it becomes me better to laugh at my own sorry figure in defeat,

than to confess myself gravely mortified by an ingenuity more successful

than my own.” The count paused, and his eye lightened with sinister

fire, which ill suited the raillery of his tone and the polished ease of

his bearing. “Ma foi!” he continued, “it is permitted me to speak thus,

since at least I have given proofs of my indifference to danger, and my

good fortune when exposed to it. Within the last six years I have

had the honour to fight nine duels, and the regret to wound five, and

dismiss from the world four, as gallant and worthy gentlemen as ever the

sun shone upon.”

“Monster!” faltered the parson.

The squire stared aghast, and mechanically rubbed the shoulder which had

been lacerated by Captain Dashinore’s bullet. Randal’s pale face grew

yet more pale, and the eye he had fixed upon the count’s hardy visage

quailed and fell.

“But,” resumed the count, with a graceful wave of the hand, “I have to

thank my Lord L’Estrange for reminding me that a man whose courage is

above suspicion is privileged not only to apologize if he has injured

another, but to accompany apology with atonement. Duke of Serrano, it is

for that purpose that I am here. My Lord, you have signified your wish

to ask me some questions of serious import as regards the duke and his

daughter; I will answer them without reserve.”

“Monsieur le Comte,” said Harley, “availing myself of your courtesy,

I presume to inquire who informed you that this young lady was a guest

under my father’s roof?”

“My informant stands yonder,--Mr. Randal Leslie; and I call upon Baron

Levy to confirm my statement.”

“It is true,” said the baron, slowly, and as if overmastered by the tone

and mien of an imperious chieftain.

There came a low sound like a hiss from Randal’s livid lips.

“And was Mr. Leslie acquainted with your project for securing the person

and hand of your young kinswoman?”

“Certainly,--and Baron Levy knows it.” The baron bowed assent. “Permit

me to add--for it is due to a lady nearly related to myself--that it

was, as I have since learned, certain erroneous representations made to

her by Mr. Leslie which alone induced that lady, after my own arguments

had failed, to lend her aid to a project which otherwise she would

have condemned as strongly as, Duke di Serrano, I now with unfeigned

sincerity do myself condemn it.”

There was about the count, as he thus spoke, so much of that personal

dignity which, whether natural or artificial, imposes for the moment

upon human judgment,--a dignity so supported by the singular advantages

of his superb stature, his handsome countenance, his patrician

air,--that the duke, moved by his good heart, extended his hand to the

perfidious kinsman, and forgot all the Machiavellian wisdom which should

have told him how little a man of the count’s hardened profligacy

was likely to be influenced by any purer motives, whether to frank

confession or to manly repentance. The count took the hand thus extended

to him, and bowed his face, perhaps to conceal the smile which would

have betrayed his secret soul. Randal still remained mute, and pale

as death. His tongue clove to his mouth. He felt that all present were

shrinking from his side. At last, with a violent effort, he faltered

out, in broken sentences,

“A charge so sudden may well--may well confound me. But--but--who can

credit it? Both the law and commonsense pre-suppose some motive for a

criminal action; what could be my motive here? I--myself the suitor for

the hand of the duke’s daughter--I betray her! Absurd--absurd! Duke,

Duke, I put it to your own knowledge of mankind whoever goes thus

against his own interest--and--and his own heart?”

This appeal, however feebly made, was not without effect on the

philosopher. “That is true,” said the duke, dropping his kinsman’s hand;

“I see no motive.”

“Perhaps,” said Harley, “Baron Levy may here enlighten us. Do you know

of any motive of self-interest that could have actuated Mr. Leslie in

assisting the count’s schemes?”

Levy hesitated. The count took up the word. “Pardieu!” said he, in his

clear tone of determination and will--“pardieu! I can have no doubt

thrown on my assertion, least of all by those who know of its truth; and

I call upon you, Baron Levy, to state whether, in case of my marriage

with the duke’s daughter, I had not agreed to present my sister with

a sum, to which she alleged some ancient claim, and which would have

passed through your hands?”

“Certainly, that is true,” said the baron.

“And would Mr. Leslie have benefited by any portion of that sum?”

Levy paused again.

“Speak, sir,” said the count, frowning.

“The fact is,” said the baron, “that Mr. Leslie was anxious to complete

a purchase of certain estates that had once belonged to his family, and

that the count’s marriage with the signora, and his sister’s marriage

with Mr. Hazeldean, would have enabled me to accommodate Mr. Leslie with

a loan to effect that purchase.”

“What! what!” exclaimed the squire, hastily buttoning his breast-pocket

with one hand, while he seized Randal’s arm with the other--“my son’s

marriage! You lent yourself to that, too? Don’t look so like a lashed

hound! Speak out like a man, if man you be!”

“Lent himself to that, my good sir!” said the count. “Do you suppose

that the Marchesa di Negra could have condescended to an alliance with a

Mr. Hazeldean--”

“Condescended! a Hazeldean of Hazeldean!” exclaimed the squire, turning

fiercely, and half choked with indignation. “Unless,” continued the

count, imperturbably, “she had been compelled by circumstances to do

that said Mr. Hazeldean the honour to accept a pecuniary accommodation,

which she had no other mode to discharge? And here, sir, the family

of Hazeldean, I am bound to say, owe a great debt of gratitude to Mr.

Leslie; for it was he who most forcibly represented to her the necessity

for this misalliance; and it was he, I believe, who suggested to my

friend the baron the mode by which Mr. Hazeldean was best enabled to

afford the accommodation my sister deigned to accept.”

“Mode! the post-obit!” ejaculated the squire, relinquishing his hold of

Randal to lay his gripe upon Levy.

The baron shrugged his shoulders. “Any friend of Mr. Frank Hazeldean’s

would have recommended the same, as the most economical mode of raising

money.”

Parson Dale, who had at first been more shocked than any one present at

these gradual revelations of Randal’s treachery, now turning his eyes

towards the young man, was so seized with commiseration at the sight of

Randal’s face, that he laid his hand on Harley’s arm, and whispered him,

“Look, look at that countenance!--and one so young! Spare him, spare

him!”

“Mr. Leslie,” said Harley, in softened tones, “believe me that nothing

short of justice to the Duke di Serrano--justice even to my young friend

Mr. Hazeldean--has compelled me to this painful duty. Here let all

inquiry terminate.”

“And,” said the count, with exquisite blandness, “since I have been

informed by my Lord L’Estrange that Mr. Leslie has represented as a

serious act on his part that personal challenge to myself, which I

understood was but a pleasant and amicable arrangement in our baffled

scheme, let me assure Mr. Leslie that if he be not satisfied with the

regret that I now express for the leading share I have taken in these

disclosures, I am wholly at Mr. Leslie’s service.”

“Peace, homicide,” cried the parson, shuddering; and he glided to

the side of the detected sinner, from whom all else had recoiled in

loathing.

Craft against craft, talent against talent, treason against treason--in

all this Randal Leslie would have risen superior to Giulio di Peschiera.

But what now crushed him was not the superior intellect,--it was the

sheer brute power of audacity and nerve. Here stood the careless,

unblushing villain, making light of his guilt, carrying it away from

disgust itself, with resolute look and front erect. There stood the

abler, subtler, profounder criminal, cowering, abject, pitiful; the

power of mere intellectual knowledge shivered into pieces against the

brazen metal with which the accident of constitution often arms some

ignobler nature.

The contrast was striking, and implied that truth so universally felt,

yet so little acknowledged in actual life, that men with audacity

and force of character can subdue and paralyze those far superior to

themselves in ability and intelligence. It was these qualities which

made Peschiera Randal’s master; nay, the very physical attributes of

the count, his very voice and form, his bold front and unshrinking eye,

overpowered the acuter mind of the refining schemer, as in a popular

assembly some burly Cleon cows into timorous silence every dissentient

sage. But Randal turned in sullen impatience from the parson’s whisper,

that breathed comfort or urged repentance; and at length said, with

clearer tones than he had yet mustered,

“It is not a personal conflict with the Count di Peschiera that

can vindicate my honour; and I disdain to defend myself against the

accusations of a usurer, and of a mam who--”

“Monsieur!” said the count, drawing himself up.

“A man who,” persisted Randal, though he trembled visibly, “by his own

confession, was himself guilty of all the schemes in which he would

represent me as his accomplice, and who now, not clearing himself, would

yet convict another--”

“Cher petit monsieur!” said the count, with his grand air of disdain,

“when men like me make use of men like you, we reward them for a service

if rendered, or discard them if the service be not done; and if I

condescend to confess and apologize for any act I have committed,

surely Mr. Randal Leslie might do the same without disparagement to

his dignity. But I should never, sir, have taken the trouble to appear

against you, had you not, as I learn, pretended to the hand of the lady

whom I had hoped, with less presumption, to call my bride; and in this,

how can I tell that you have not tricked and betrayed me? Is there

anything in our past acquaintance that warrants me to believe that,

instead of serving me, you sought but to serve yourself? Be that as it

may, I had but one mode of repairing to the head of my house the wrongs

I have done him, and that was by saving his daughter from a derogatory

alliance with an impostor who had abetted my schemes for hire, and who

now would filch for himself their fruit.”

“Duke!” exclaimed Randal.

The duke turned his back. Randal extended his hands to the squire. “Mr.

Hazeldean--what? you, too, condemn me, and unheard?”

“Unheard!--zounds, no! If you have anything to say, speak truth, and

shame the devil.”

“I abet Frank’s marriage! I sanction the post-obit! Oh!” cried Randal,

clinging to a straw, “if Frank himself were but here!”

Harley’s compassion vanished before this sustained hypocrisy.

“You wish for the presence of Frank Hazeldean? It is just.” Harley

opened the door of the inner room, and Frank appeared at the entrance.

“My son! my son!” cried the squire, rushing forward, and clasping Frank

to his broad, fatherly breast.

This affecting incident gave a sudden change to the feelings of the

audience, and for a moment Randal himself was forgotten. The young

man seized that moment. Reprieved, as it were, from the glare of

contemptuous, accusing eyes, slowly he crept to the door, slowly and

noiselessly, as the viper, when it is wounded, drops its crest and

glides writhing through the grass. Levy followed him to the threshold,

and whispered in his ear,

“I could not help it,--you would have done the same by me. You see you

have failed in everything; and when a man fails completely, we both

agreed that we must give him up altogether.”

Randal said not a word, and the baron marked his shadow fall on the

broad stairs, stealing down, down, step after step, till it faded from

the stones.

“But he was of some use,” muttered Levy. “His treachery and his exposure

will gall the childless Egerton. Some little revenge still!”

The count touched the arm of the musing usurer,

“J’ai bien joue mon role, n’est ce pas?”--(I have well played my part,

have I not?)

“Your part! Ah, but, my dear count, I do not quite understand it.”

“Ma foi, you are passably dull. I had just been landed in France, when

a letter from L’Estrange reached me. It was couched as an invitation,

which I interpreted to--the duello. Such invitations I never refuse.

I replied: I came hither, took my lodgings at an inn. My Lord seeks me

last night.

“I begin in the tone you may suppose. Pardieu! he is clever, milord! He

shows me a letter from the Prince Von -----, Alphonse’s recall, my own

banishment. He places before me, but with admirable suavity, the option

of beggary and ruin, or an honourable claim on Alphonso’s gratitude. And

as for that petit monsieur, do you think I could quietly contemplate my

own tool’s enjoyment of all I had lost myself? Nay, more, if that young

Harpagon were Alphonso’s son-inlaw, could the duke have a whisperer at

his ear more fatal to my own interests? To be brief, I saw at a glance

my best course. I have adopted it. The difficulty was to extricate

myself as became a man de sang et de jeu. If I have done so,

congratulate me. Alphonso has taken my hand, and I now leave it to him

to attend to my fortunes, and clear up my repute.”

“If you are going to London,” said Levy, “my carriage, ere this, must be

at the door, and I shall be proud to offer you a seat, and converse with

you on your prospects. But, peste, mon cher, your fall has been from a

great height, and any other man would have broken his bones.”

“Strength is ever light,” said the count, smiling; “and it does not

fall; it leaps down and rebounds.”

Levy looked at the count, and blamed himself for having disparaged

Peschiera and overrated Randal.

While this conference went on, Harley was by Violante’s side.

“I have kept my promise to you,” said he, with a kind of tender

humility. “Are you still so severe on me?”

“Ah,” answered Violante, gazing on his noble brow, with all a woman’s

pride in her eloquent, admiring eyes, “I have heard from Mr. Dale that

you have achieved a conquest over yourself, which makes me ashamed to

think that I presumed to doubt how your heart would speak when a moment

of wrath (though of wrath so just) had passed away.”

“No, Violante, do not acquit me yet; witness my revenge (for I have not

foregone it), and then let my heart speak, and breathe its prayer that

the angel voice, which it now beats to hear, may still be its guardian

monitor.”

“What is this?” cried an amazed voice; and Harley, turning round, saw

that the duke was by his side; and, glancing with ludicrous surprise,

now to Harley, now to Violante, “Am I to understand that you--”

“Have freed you from one suitor for this dear hand, to become myself

your petitioner!”

“Corpo di Bacco!” cried the sage, almost embracing Harley, “this,

indeed, is joyful news. But I must not again make a rash pledge,--not

again force my child’s inclinations. And Violante; you see, is running

away.”

The duke stretched out his arm, and detained his child. He drew her

to his breast, and whispered in her ear. Violante blushed crimson, and

rested her head on his shoulder. Harley eagerly pressed forward.

“There,” said the duke, joining Harley’s hand with his daughter’s, “I

don’t think I shall hear much more of the convent; but anything of this

sort I never suspected. If there be a language in the world for which

there is no lexicon nor grammar, it is that which a woman thinks in, but

never speaks.”

“It is all that is left of the language spoken in paradise,” said

Harley.

“In the dialogue between Eve and the serpent,--yes,” quoth the

incorrigible sage. “But who comes here?--our friend Leonard.”

Leonard now entered the room; but Harley could scarcely greet him,

before he was interrupted by the count. “Milord,” said Peschiera,

beckoning him aside, “I have fulfilled my promise, and I will now leave

your roof. Baron Levy returns to London, and offers me a seat in his

carriage, which is already, I believe, at your door. The duke and his

daughter will readily forgive me if I do not ceremoniously bid

them farewell. In our altered positions, it does not become me too

intrusively to claim kindred; it became me only to remove, as I trust I

have done, a barrier against the claim. If you approve my conduct, you

will state your own opinion to the duke.” With a profound salutation the

count turned to depart; nor did Harley attempt to stay him, but attended

him down the stairs with polite formality.

“Remember only, my Lord, that I solicit nothing. I may allow myself to

accept,--voilia tout.” He bowed again, with the inimitable grace of the

old regime, and stepped into the baron’s travelling carriage.

Levy, who had lingered behind, paused to accost L’Estrange. “Your

Lordship will explain to Mr. Egerton how his adopted son deserved his

esteem, and repaid his kindness. For the rest, though you have bought up

the more pressing and immediate demands on Mr. Egerton, I fear that even

your fortune will not enable you to clear those liabilities which will

leave him, perhaps, a pauper!”

“Baron Levy,” said Harley, abruptly, “if I have forgiven Mr. Egerton,

cannot you too forgive? Me he has wronged; you have wronged him, and

more foully.”

“No, my Lord, I cannot forgive him. You he has never humiliated, you he

has never employed for his wants, and scorned as his companion. You have

never known what it is to start in life with one whose fortunes were

equal to your own, whose talents were not superior. Look you, Lord

L’Estrange, in spite of this difference between me and Egerton, that he

has squandered the wealth that he gained without effort, while I

have converted the follies of others into my own ample revenues, the

spendthrift in his penury has the respect and position which millions

cannot bestow upon me. You would say that I am an usurer, and he is a

statesman. But do you know what I should have been, had I not been born

the natural son of a peer? Can you guess what I should have been if

Nora Avenel had been my wife? The blot on my birth, and the blight on my

youth, and the knowledge that he who was rising every year into the rank

which entitled him to reject me as a guest at his table--he whom the

world called the model of a gentleman--was a coward and a liar to the

friend of his youth,--all this made me look on the world with contempt;

and, despising Audley Egerton, I yet hated him and envied. You, whom

he wronged, stretch your hand as before to the great statesman; from my

touch you would shrink as pollution. My Lord, you may forgive him whom

you love and pity; I cannot forgive him whom I scorn and envy. Pardon my

prolixity. I now quit your house.” The baron moved a step, then, turning

back, said with a withering sneer,--

“But you will tell Mr. Egerton how I helped to expose the son he

adopted! I thought of the childless man when your Lordship imagined I

was but in fear of your threats. Ha! ha! that will sting.”

The baron gnashed his teeth as, hastily entering the carriage, he drew

down the blinds. The post-boys cracked their whips, and the wheels

rolled away.

“Who can judge,” thought Harley, “through what modes retribution comes

home to the breast? That man is chastised in his wealth, ever gnawed by

desire for what his wealth cannot buy!” He roused himself, cleared his

brow, as from a thought that darkened and troubled; and, entering the

saloon, laid his hand upon Leonard’s shoulder, and looked, rejoicing,

into the poet’s mild, honest, lustrous eyes. “Leonard,” said he, gently,

“your hour is come at last.”

CHAPTER XXXIV.

Audely Egerton was alone in his apartment. A heavy sleep had come over

him, shortly after Harley and Randal had left the house in the early

morning; and that sleep continued till late in the day. All the while

the town of Lansmere had been distracted in his cause, all the while so

many tumultuous passions had run riot in the contest that was to close

or re-open for the statesman’s ambition the Janus gates of political

war, the object of so many fears and hopes, schemes and counter-schemes,

had slumbered quietly as an infant in the cradle. He woke but in time to

receive Harley’s despatch, announcing the success of his election; and

adding, “Before the night you shall embrace your son. Do not join us

below when I return. Keep calm,--we will come to you.”

In fact, though not aware of the dread nature of Audley’s complaint,

with its warning symptoms, Lord L’Estrange wished to spare to his friend

the scene of Randal’s exposure.

On the receipt of that letter Egerton rose. At the prospect of seeing

his son--Nora’s son--the very memory of his disease vanished. The poor,

weary, over-laboured heart indeed beat loud, and with many a jerk and

spasm. He heeded it not. The victory, that restored him to the sole life

for which he had hitherto cared to live, was clean forgotten. Nature

claimed her own,--claimed it in scorn of death, and in oblivion of

renown.

There sat the man, dressed with his habitual precision,--the black

coat, buttoned across the broad breast; his countenance, so mechanically

habituated to self-control, still revealing little of emotion, though

the sickly flush came and went on the bronzed cheek, and the eye watched

the hand of the clock, and the ear hungered for a foot-tread along the

corridor. At length the sound was heard,--steps, many steps. He sprung

to his feet, he stood on the hearth. Was the hearth to be solitary no

more? Harley entered first. Egerton’s eyes rested on him eagerly for

a moment, and strained onward across the threshold. Leonard came

next,--Leonard Fairfield, whom he had seen as his opponent! He began

to suspect, to conjecture, to see the mother’s tender eyes in the son’s

manly face. Involuntarily he opened his arms; but, Leonard remaining

still, let them fall with a deep sigh, and fancied himself deceived.

“Friend,” said Harley, “I give to you a son proved in adversity, and who

has fought his own way to fame. Leonard, in the man to whom I prayed you

to sacrifice your own ambition, of whom you have spoken with such

worthy praise, whose career of honour you have promoted, and whose life,

unsatisfied by those honours, you will soothe with your filial love,

behold the husband of Nora Avenel! Kneel to your father! O Audley,

embrace your son!”

“Here, here!” exclaimed Egerton, as Leonard bent his knee,--“here to my

heart! Look at me with those eyes!--kindly, forgivingly: they are your

mother’s!” His proud head sunk on his son’s shoulder.

“But this is not enough,” said Harley, leading Helen, and placing her by

Leonard’s side. “You must open your heart for more. Take into its folds

my sweet ward and daughter. What is a home without the smile of woman?

They have loved each other from children. Audley, yours be the hand to

join,--yours be the lips to bless.”

Leonard started anxiously. “Oh, sir!--oh, my father!--this generous

sacrifice may not be; for he--he who has saved me for this surpassing

joy--he too loves her!”

“Nay, Leonard,” said Harley, smiling, “I am not so neglectful of myself.

Another home woos you, Audley. He whom you long so vainly sought to

reconcile to life, exchanging mournful dreams for happy duties,--he,

too, presents you to his bride. Love her for my sake,--for your own. She

it is, not I, who presides over this hallowed reunion. But for her, I

should have been a blinded, vindictive, guilty, repentant man; and--”

Violante’s soft hand was on his lips. “Thus,” said the parson, with mild

solemnity, “man finds that the Saviour’s precepts, ‘Let not the sun go

down upon thy wrath,’ and ‘Love one another,’ are clews that conduct us

through the labyrinth of human life, when the schemes of fraud and hate

snap asunder, and leave us lost amidst the maze.”

Egerton reared his head, as if to answer; and all present were struck

and appalled by the sudden change that had come over his countenance.

There was a film upon the eye, a shadow on the aspect; the words

failed his lips; he sunk on the seat beside him. The left hand rested

droopingly upon the piles of public papers and official documents, and

the fingers played with them, as the bedridden dying sufferer plays with

the coverlid he will soon exchange for the winding-sheet. But his right

hand seemed to feel, as through the dark, for the recovered son; and

having touched what it sought, feebly drew Leonard near and nearer.

Alas! that blissful PRIVATE LIFE--that close centre round the core of

being in the individual man--so long missed and pined for, slipped from

him, as it were, the moment it reappeared; hurried away, as the circle

on the ocean, which is scarce seen ere it vanishes amidst infinity.

Suddenly both hands were still; the head fell back. Joy had burst

asunder the last ligaments, so fretted away in unrevealing sorrow. Afar,

their sound borne into that room, the joy-bells were pealing triumph;

mobs roaring out huzzas; the weak cry of John Avenel might be blent in

those shouts, as the drunken zealots reeled by his cottage door, and

startled the screaming ravens that wheeled round the hollow oak. The

boom which is sent from the waves on the surface of life, while the

deeps are so noiseless in their march, was wafted on the wintry air into

the chamber of the statesman it honoured, and over the grass sighing low

upon Nora’s grave. But there was one in the chamber, as in the grave,

for whom the boom on the wave had no sound, and the march of the deep

had no tide. Amidst promises of home, and union, and peace, and fame,

Death strode into the household ring, and, seating itself, calm and

still, looked life-like,--warm hearts throbbing round it; lofty hopes

fluttering upward; Love kneeling at its feet; Religion, with lifted

finger, standing by its side.

FINAL CHAPTER.

SCENE--The Hall in the Old Tower of CAPTAIN ROLAND DE CAXTON.

“But you have not done?” said Augustine Caxton.

PISISTRATUS.--“What remains to do?”

MR. CAXTON.--“What! why, the Final Chapter!--the last news you can give

us of those whom you have introduced to our liking or dislike.”

PISISTRATUS.--“Surely it is more dramatic to close the work with a

scene that completes the main design of the plot, and leave it to the

prophetic imagination of all whose flattering curiosity is still not

wholly satisfied, to trace the streams of each several existence, when

they branch off again from the lake in which their waters converge, and

by which the sibyl has confirmed and made clear the decree that ‘Conduct

is Fate.’”

MR. CAXTON.--“More dramatic, I grant; but you have not written a drama.

A novelist should be a comfortable, garrulous, communicative, gossiping

fortune-teller; not a grim, laconical, oracular sibyl. I like a novel

that adopts all the old-fashioned customs prescribed to its art by

the rules of the Masters,--more especially a novel which you style ‘My

Novel’ par emphasis.”

CAPTAIN ROLAND.--“A most vague and impracticable title ‘My Novel’! It

must really be changed before the work goes in due form to the public.”

MR. SQUILLS.--“Certainly the present title cannot be even pronounced by

many without inflicting a shock upon their nervous system. Do you think,

for instance, that my friend, Lady Priscilla Graves--who is a great

novel-reader indeed, but holds all female writers unfeminine deserters

to the standard of Man--could ever come out with, ‘Pray, sir, have you

had time to look at--MY Novel?’--She would rather die first. And yet

to be silent altogether on the latest acquisition to the circulating

libraries would bring on a functional derangement of her ladyship’s

organs of speech. Or how could pretty Miss Dulcet--all sentiment, it

is true, but all bashful timidity--appall Captain Smirke from proposing

with, ‘Did not you think the parson’s sermon a little too dry in--MY

Novel’? It will require a face of brass, or at least a long course

of citrate of iron, before a respectable lady or unassuming young

gentleman, with a proper dread of being taken for scribblers, could

electrify a social circle with ‘The reviewers don’t do justice to the

excellent things in--My Novel.’”

CAPTAIN ROLAND.--“Awful consequences, indeed, may arise from the

mistakes such a title gives rise to. Counsellor Digwell, for instance, a

lawyer of literary tastes, but whose career at the Bar was long delayed

by an unjust suspicion amongst the attorneys that he had written a

‘Philosophical Essay’--imagine such a man excusing himself for being

late at a dinner of bigwigs, with ‘I could not get away from--My Novel!’

It would be his professional ruin! I am not fond of lawyers in general,

but still I would not be a party to taking the bread out of the mouth

of those with a family; and Digwell has children,--the tenth an innocent

baby in arms.”

MR. CAXTON.--“As to Digwell in particular, and lawyers in general, they

are too accustomed to circumlocution to expose themselves to the danger

your kind heart apprehends; but I allow that a shy scholar like myself,

or a grave college tutor, might be a little put to the blush, if he were

to blurt forth inadvertently with, ‘Don’t waste your time over trash

like--MY Novel.’ And that thought presents to us another and more

pleasing view of this critical question. The title you condemn places

the work under universal protection. Lives there a man or a woman so

dead to self-love as to say, ‘What contemptible stuff is--MY Novel’?

Would he or she not rather be impelled by that strong impulse of an

honourable and virtuous heart, which moves us to stand as well as we can

with our friends, to say, ‘Allow that there is really a good thing now

and then in--My Novel.’ Moreover, as a novel aspires to embrace most of

the interests or the passions that agitate mankind,--to generalize, as

it were, the details of life that come home to us all,--so, in reality,

the title denotes that if it be such as the author may not unworthily

call his Novel, it must also be such as the reader, whoever he be, may

appropriate in part to himself, representing his own ideas, expressing

his own experience, reflecting, if not in full, at least in profile,

his own personal identity. Thus, when we glance at the looking-glass in

another man’s room, our likeness for the moment appropriates the mirror;

and according to the humour in which we are, or the state of our spirits

and health, we say to ourselves, ‘Bilious and yellow!--I might as well

take care of my diet!’ Or, ‘Well, I ‘ve half a mind to propose to dear

Jane; I’m not such an ill-looking dog as I thought for!’ Still, whatever

result from that glance at the mirror, we never doubt that ‘t is our

likeness we see; and each says to the phantom reflection, ‘Thou art

myself,’ though the mere article of furniture that gives the reflection

belongs to another. It is my likeness if it be his glass. And a

narrative that is true to the Varieties of Life is every Man’s Novel,

no matter from what shores, by what rivers, by what bays, in what pits,

were extracted the sands and the silex, the pearlash, the nitre, and

quicksilver which form its materials; no matter who the craftsman who

fashioned its form; no matter who the vendor that sold, or the customer

who bought: still, if I but recognize some trait of myself, ‘t is my

likeness that makes it ‘My Novel.’”

MR. SQUILLS (puzzled, and therefore admiring).--“Subtle, sir,--very

subtle. Fine organ of Comparison in Mr. Caxton’s head, and much called

into play this evening!”

MR. CAXTON (benignly).--“Finally, the author by this most admirable and

much signifying title dispenses with all necessity of preface. He need

insinuate no merits, he need extenuate no faults; for, by calling his

work thus curtly ‘MY Novel,’ he doth delicately imply that it is no use

wasting talk about faults or merits.”

PISISTRATUS (amazed).--“How is that, sir?”

MR. CAXTON.--“What so clear? You imply that, though a better novel may

be written by others, you do not expect to write a novel to which,

taken as a novel, you would more decisively and unblushingly prefix that

voucher of personal authorship and identity conveyed in the monosyllable

‘My.’ And if you have written your best, let it be ever so bad, what can

any man of candour and integrity require more from you? Perhaps you will

say that, if you had lived two thousand years ago, you might have called

it ‘The Novel,’ or the ‘Golden Novel,’ as Lucius called his story ‘The

Ass;’ and Apuleius, to distinguish his own more elaborate Ass from all

Asses preceding it, called his tale ‘The Golden Ass.’ But living in the

present day, such a designation--implying a merit in general, not

the partial and limited merit corresponding only with your individual

abilities--would be presumptuous and offensive. True, I here anticipate

the observation I see Squills is about to make--”

SQUILLS.--“I, Sir?”

MR. CAXTON.--“You would say that, as Scarron called his work of fiction

‘The Comic Novel,’ so Pisistratus might have called his ‘The Serious

Novel,’ or ‘The Tragic Novel.’ But, Squills, that title would not have

been inviting nor appropriate, and would have been exposed to comparison

with Scarron, who being dead is inimitable. Wherefore--to put the

question on the irrefragable basis of mathematics--wherefore as A B ‘My

Novel’ is not equal to B C ‘The Golden Novel,’ nor to D E ‘The Serious

or Tragic Novel,’ it follows that A B ‘My Novel’ is equal to P C

‘Pisistratus Caxton,’ and P C ‘Pisistratus Caxton’ must therefore be

just equal, neither more nor less, to A B ‘My Novel,’--which was to be

demonstrated.” My father looked round triumphantly, and observing that

Squills was dumfounded, and the rest of his audience posed, he added

mildly,

“And so now, ‘non quieta movere,’ proceed with the Final Chapter, and

tell us first what became of that youthful Giles Overreach, who was

himself his own Marrall?”

“Ay,” said the captain, “what became of Randal Leslie? Did he repent and

reform?”

“Nay,” quoth my father, with a mournful shake of the head, “you can

regulate the warm tide of wild passion, you can light into virtue the

dark errors of ignorance; but where the force of the brain does but clog

the free action of the heart, where you have to deal, not with ignorance

misled, but intelligence corrupted, small hope of reform; for reform

here will need re-organization. I have somewhere read (perhaps in Hebrew

tradition) that of the two orders of fallen spirits,--the Angels of Love

and the Angels of Knowledge,--the first missed the stars they had lost,

and wandered back through the darkness, one by one, into heaven; but the

last, lighted on by their own lurid splendours, said, ‘Wherever we go,

there is heaven!’ And deeper and lower descending, lost their shape

and their nature, till, deformed and obscene, the bottomless pit closed

around them.”

MR. SQUILLS.--“I should not have thought, Mr. Caxton, that a book-man

like you would be thus severe upon Knowledge.”

MR. CAXTON (in wrath).--“Severe upon knowledge! Oh, Squills, Squills,

Squills! Knowledge perverted is knowledge no longer. Vinegar, which,

exposed to the sun, breeds small serpents, or at best slimy eels, not

comestible, once was wine. If I say to my grandchildren, ‘Don’t drink

that sour stuff, which the sun itself fills with reptiles,’ does that

prove me a foe to sound sherry? Squills, if you had but received a

scholastic education, you would know the wise maxim that saith, ‘All

things the worst are corruptions from things originally designed as the

best.’ Has not freedom bred anarchy, and religion fanaticism? And if I

blame Marat calling for blood, or Dominic racking a heretic, am I severe

on the religion that canonized Francis de Sales, or the freedom that

immortalized Thrasybulus?”

Mr. Squills, dreading a catalogue of all the saints in the calendar,

and an epitome of Ancient History, exclaimed eagerly, “Enough, sir; I am

convinced!”

MR. CAXTON.--“Moreover, I have thought it a natural stroke of art in

Pisistratus to keep Randal Leslie, in his progress towards the rot

of the intellect unwholesomely refined, free from all the salutary

influences that deter ambition from settling into egotism. Neither in

his slovenly home, nor from his classic tutor at his preparatory school,

does he seem to have learned any truths, religious or moral, that might

give sap to fresh shoots, when the first rank growth was cut down by the

knife; and I especially noted, as illustrative of Egerton, no less than

of Randal, that though the statesman’s occasional hints of advice to

his protege are worldly wise in their way, and suggestive of honour as

befitting the creed of a gentleman, they are not such as much influence

a shrewd reasoner like Randal, whom the example of the playground at

Eton had not served to correct of the arid self-seeking, which looked

to knowledge for no object but power. A man tempted by passions like

Audley, or seduced into fraud by a cold, subtle spirit like Leslie,

will find poor defence in the elegant precept, ‘Remember to act as

a gentleman.’ Such moral embroidery adds a beautiful scarf to one’s

armour; but it is not the armour itself! Ten o’clock, as I live! Push

on, Pisistratus! and finish the chapter.”

MRS. CAXTON (benevolently).--“Don’t hurry. Begin with that odious Randal

Leslie, to oblige your father; but there are others whom Blanche and I

care much more to hear about.”

Pisistratus, since there is no help for it, produces a supplementary

manuscript, which proves that, whatever his doubt as to the artistic

effect of a Final Chapter, he had foreseen that his audience would not

be contented without one.

Randal Leslie, late at noon the day after he quitted Lansmere Park,

arrived on foot at his father’s house. He had walked all the way, and

through the solitudes of the winter night; but he was not sensible of

fatigue till the dismal home closed round him, with its air of hopeless

ignoble poverty; and then he sunk upon the floor feeling himself a

ruin amidst the ruins. He made no disclosure of what had passed to his

relations. Miserable man, there was not one to whom he could confide,

or from whom he might hear the truths that connect repentance with

consolation! After some weeks passed in sullen and almost unbroken

silence, be left as abruptly as he had appeared, and returned to London.

The sudden death of a man like Egerton had even in those excited

times created intense, though brief sensation. The particulars of the

election, that had been given in detail in the provincial papers, were

copied into the London journals, among those details, Randal Leslie’s

conduct in the Committee-room, with many an indignant comment on

selfishness and ingratitude. The political world of all parties formed

one of those judgments on the great man’s poor dependant, which fix a

stain upon the character and place a barrier in the career of ambitious

youth. The important personages who had once noticed Randal for Audley’s

sake, and who, on their subsequent and not long-deferred restoration to

power, could have made his fortune, passed him in the streets without

a nod. He did not venture to remind Avenel of the promise to aid him in

another election for Lansmere, nor dream of filling up the vacancy which

Egerton’s death had created. He was too shrewd not to see that all hope

of that borough was over,--he would have been hooted in the streets and

pelted from the hustings. Forlorn in the vast metropolis as Leonard

had once been, in his turn he loitered on the bridge, and gazed on the

remorseless river. He had neither money nor connections,--nothing save

talents and knowledge to force his way back into the lofty world in

which all had smiled on him before; and talents and knowledge, that had

been exerted to injure a benefactor, made him but the more despised.

But even now, Fortune, that had bestowed on the pauper heir of Rood

advantages so numerous and so dazzling, out of which he had cheated

himself, gave him a chance, at least, of present independence, by which,

with patient toil, he might have won, if not to the highest places, at

least to a position in which he could have forced the world to listen

to his explanations; and perhaps receive his excuses. The L5,000

that Audley designed for him, and which, in a private memorandum, the

statesman had entreated Harley to see safely rescued from the fangs of

the law, were made over to Randal by Lord L’Estrange’s solicitor; but

this sum seemed to him so small after the loss of such gorgeous hopes,

and the up-hill path seemed so slow after such short cuts to power,

that Randal looked upon the unexpected bequest simply as an apology for

adopting no profession. Stung to the quick by the contrast between his

past and his present place in the English world, he hastened abroad.

There, whether in distraction from thought, or from the curiosity of a

restless intellect to explore the worth of things yet untried, Randal

Leslie, who had hitherto been so dead to the ordinary amusements of

youth, plunged into the society of damaged gamesters and third-rate

roues. In this companionship his very talents gradually degenerated, and

their exercise upon low intrigues and miserable projects but abased his

social character, till, sinking step after step as his funds decayed,

he finally vanished out of the sphere in which even profligates still

retain the habits, and cling to the caste of gentlemen. His father died;

the neglected property of Rood devolved on Randal, but out of its scanty

proceeds he had to pay the portions of his brother and sister, and

his mother’s jointure; the surplus left was scarcely visible in the

executor’s account. The hope of restoring the home and fortunes of his

forefathers had long ceased. What were the ruined hall and its bleak

wastes, without that hope which had once dignified the wreck and the

desert? He wrote from St. Petersburg, ordering the sale of the property.

No one great proprietor was a candidate for the unpromising investment;

it was sold in lots among small freeholders and retired traders. A

builder bought the hall for its material. Hall, lands, and name were

blotted out of the map and the history of the county.

The widow, Oliver, and Juliet removed to a provincial town in another

shire. Juliet married an ensign in a marching regiment; and died of

neglect after childbirth. Mrs. Leslie did not long survive her. Oliver

added to his little fortune by marriage with the daughter of a retail

tradesman, who had amassed a few thousand pounds. He set up a brewery,

and contrived to live without debt, though a large family and his own

constitutional inertness extracted from his business small profits and

no savings. Nothing of Randal had been heard of for years after the sale

of Rood, except that he had taken up his residence either in Australia

or the United States; it was not known which, but presumed to be the

latter. Still, Oliver had been brought up with so high a veneration of

his brother’s talents, that he cherished the sanguine belief that Randal

would some day appear, wealthy and potent, like the uncle in a

comedy; lift rip the sunken family, and rear into graceful ladies and

accomplished gentlemen the clumsy little boys and the vulgar little

girls who now crowded round Oliver’s dinner-table, with appetites

altogether disproportioned to the size of the joints.

One winter day, when from the said dinner-table wife and children had

retired, and Oliver sat sipping his half-pint of bad port, and looking

over unsatisfactory accounts, a thin terrier, lying on the threadbare

rug by the niggard fire, sprang up and barked fiercely. Oliver lifted

his dull blue eyes, and saw opposite to him, at the window, a human

face. The face was pressed close to the panes, and was obscured by the

haze which the breath of its lips drew forth from the frosty rime that

had gathered on the glass.

Oliver, alarmed and indignant, supposing this intrusive spectator of his

privacy to be some bold and lawless tramper, stepped out of the room,

opened the front door, and bade the stranger go about his business;

while the terrier still more inhospitably yelped and snapped at the

stranger’s heels. Then a hoarse voice said, “Don’t you know me, Oliver?

I am your brother Randal! Call away your dog and let me in.” Oliver

stared aghast; he could not believe his slow senses, he could not

recognize his brother in the gaunt grim apparition before him; but at

length he came forward, gazed into Randal’s face, and, grasping his hand

in amazed silence, led him into the little parlour. Not a trace of

the well-bred refinement which had once characterized Randal’s air and

person was visible. His dress bespoke the last stage of that terrible

decay which is significantly called the “shabby genteel.” His mien was

that of the skulking, timorous, famished vagabond. As he took off his

greasy tattered hat, he exhibited, though still young in years, the

signs of premature old age. His hair, once so fine and silken, was of

a harsh iron-gray, bald in ragged patches; his forehead and visage were

ploughed into furrows; intelligence was still in the aspect, but an

intelligence that instinctively set you on your guard,--sinister,

gloomy, menacing.

Randal stopped short all questioning. He seized the small modicum of

wine on the table, and drained it at a draught. “Poole,” said he, “have

you nothing that warms a man better than this?” Oliver, who felt as if

under the influence of a frightful dream, went to a cupboard and took

out a bottle of brandy three-parts full. Randal snatched at it eagerly,

and put his lips to the mouth of the bottle. “Ah,” said he, after a

short pause, “this comforts; now give me food.” Oliver hastened himself

to serve his brother; in fact, he felt ashamed that even the slipshod

maid-servant should see his visitor. When he returned with such

provisions as he could extract from the larder, Randal was seated by the

fire, spreading over the embers emaciated bony hands, like the talons of

a vulture.

He devoured the cold meat set before him with terrible voracity, and

nearly finished the spirits left in the bottle; but the last had no

effect in dispersing his gloom. Oliver stared at him in fear; the

terrier continued to utter a low suspicious growl.

“You would know my history?” at length said Randal, bluntly. “It is

short. I have tried for fortune and failed, I am without a penny and

without a hope. You seem poor,--

“I suppose you cannot much help me. Let me at least stay with you for a

time,--I know not where else to look for bread and for shelter.”

Oliver burst into tears, and cordially bade his brother welcome. Randal

remained some weeks at Oliver’s house, never stirring out of the doors,

and not seeming to notice, though he did not scruple to use, the new

habiliments, which Oliver procured ready-made, and placed, without

remark, in his room. But his presence soon became intolerable to the

mistress of the house, and oppressive even to its master. Randal, who

had once been so abstemious that he had even regarded the most

moderate use of wine as incompatible with clear judgment and vigilant

observation, had contracted the habit of drinking spirits at all hours

of the day; but though they sometimes intoxicated him into stupor, they

never unlocked his heart nor enlivened his sullen mood. If he observed

less acutely than of old, he could still conceal just as closely.

Mrs. Oliver Leslie, at first rather awed and taciturn, grew cold and

repelling, then pert and sarcastic, at last undisguisedly and vulgarly

rude. Randal made no retort; but his sneer was so galling that the wife

flew at once to her husband, and declared that either she or his brother

must leave the house. Oliver tried to pacify and compromise, with

partial success; and a few days afterwards, he came to Randal and said

timidly, “You see, my wife brought me nearly all I possess, and you

don’t condescend to make friends with her. Your residence here must be

as painful to you as to me. But I wish to see you provided for; and I

could offer you something, only it seems, at first glance, so beneath--”

“Beneath what?” interrupted Randal, witheringly. “What I was--or what I

am? Speak out!”

“To be sure you are a scholar; and I have heard you say fine things

about knowledge and so forth; and you’ll have plenty of books at your

disposal, no doubt; and you are still young, and may rise--and--”

“Hell and torments! Be quick,--say the worst or the best!” cried Randal,

fiercely.

“Well, then,” said poor Oliver, still trying to soften the intended

proposal, “you must know that our poor sister’s husband was nephew

to Dr. Felpem, who keeps a very respectable school. He is not learned

himself, and attends chiefly to arithmetic and book-keeping, and such

matters; but he wants an usher to teach the classics, for some of the

boys go to college. And I have written to him, just to sound--I did not

mention your name till I knew if you would like it; but he will take my

recommendation. Board, lodging, L50 a year; in short, the place is yours

if you like it.” Randal shivered from head to foot, and was long

before he answered. “Well, be it so; I have come to that. Ha, ha! yes,

knowledge is power!” He paused a few moments. “So, the old Hall is razed

to the ground, and you are a tradesman in a small country town, and my

sister is dead, and I henceforth am--John Smith! You say that you did

not mention my name to the schoolmaster,--still keep it concealed;

forget that I once was a Leslie. Our tie of brotherhood ceases when I

go from your hearth. Write, then, to your head-master, who attends

to arithmetic, and secure the rank of his usher in Latin and Greek

for--John Smith!”

Not many days afterwards, the protege of Audley Egerton entered on his

duties as usher in one of those large, cheap schools, which comprise a

sprinkling of the sons of gentry and clergymen designed for the learned

professions, with a far larger proportion of the sons of traders,

intended, some for the counting-house, some for the shop and the till.

There, to this day, under the name of John Smith, lives Randal Leslie.

It is probably not pride alone that induces him to persist in that

change of name, and makes him regard as perpetual the abandonment of

the one that he took from his forefathers, and with which he had once

identified his vaulting ambition; for shortly after he had quitted

his brother’s house, Oliver read in the weekly newspaper, to which he

bounded his lore of the times in which he lived, an extract from

an American journal, wherein certain mention was made of an English

adventurer who, amongst other aliases, had assumed the name of

Leslie,--that extract caused Oliver to start, turn pale, look round,

and thrust the paper into the fire. From that time he never attempted to

violate the condition Randal had imposed on him, never sought to renew

their intercourse, nor to claim a brother. Doubtless, if the adventurer

thus signalized was the man Oliver suspected, whatever might be imputed

to Randal’s charge that could have paled a brother’s cheek, it was none

of the more violent crimes to which law is inexorable, but rather (in

that progress made by ingratitude and duplicity, with Need and Necessity

urging them on) some act of dishonesty which may just escape from the

law, to sink, without redemption, the name. However this be, there is

nothing in Randal’s present course of life which forbodes any deeper

fall. He has known what it is to want bread, and his former restlessness

subsides into cynic apathy.

He lodges in the town near the school, and thus the debasing habit of

unsocial besotment is not brought under the eyes of his superior. The

drain is his sole luxury; if it be suspected, it is thought to be his

sole vice. He goes through the ordinary routine of tuition with average

credit; his spirit of intrigue occasionally shows itself in attempts

to conciliate the favour of the boys whose fathers are wealthy, who are

born to higher rank than the rest; and he lays complicated schemes to

be asked home for the holidays. But when the schemes succeed, and the

invitation comes, he recoils and shrinks back,--he does not dare to show

himself on the borders of the brighter world he once hoped to sway; he

fears that he may be discovered to be--a Leslie! On such days, when his

taskwork is over, he shuts himself up in his room, locks the door, and

drugs himself into insensibility.

Once he found a well-worn volume running the round of delighted

schoolboys, took it up, and recognized Leonard’s earliest popular work,

which had, many years before, seduced himself into pleasant thoughts and

gentle emotions. He carried the book to his own lodgings, read it again;

and when he returned it to its young owner, some of the leaves were

stained with tears. Alas! perhaps but the maudlin tears of broken

nerves, not of the awakened soul,--for the leaves smelt strongly of

whiskey. Yet, after that re-perusal, Randal Leslie turned suddenly to

deeper studies than his habitual drudgeries required. He revived and

increased his early scholarship; he chalked the outline of a work of

great erudition, in which the subtlety of his intellect found field

in learned and acute criticism. But he has never proceeded far in this

work. After each irregular and spasmodic effort, the pen drops from his

hand, and he mutters, “But to what end?

“I can never now raise a name. Why give reputation to--John Smith?”

Thus he drags on his life; and perhaps, when he dies, the fragments of

his learned work may be discovered in the desk of the usher, and serve

as hints to some crafty student, who may filch ideas and repute from the

dead Leslie, as Leslie had filched them from the living Burley.

While what may be called poetical justice has thus evolved itself from

the schemes in which Randal Leslie had wasted rare intellect in baffling

his own fortunes, no outward signs of adversity evince the punishment

of Providence on the head of the more powerful offender, Baron Levy. No

fall in the Funds has shaken the sumptuous fabric, built from the ruined

houses of other men. Baron Levy is still Baron Levy the millionaire; but

I doubt if at heart he be not more acutely miserable than Randal Leslie

the usher. For Levy is a man who has admitted the fiercer passions into

his philosophy of life; he has not the pale blood and torpid heart which

allow the scotched adder to dose away its sense of pain. Just as old age

began to creep upon the fashionable usurer, he fell in love with a young

opera-dancer, whose light heels had turned the lighter heads of half the

eligans of Paris and London. The craft of the dancer was proof against

all lesser bribes than that of marriage; and Levy married her. From

that moment his house, Louis Quinze, was more crowded than ever by the

high-born dandies whose society he had long so eagerly courted. That

society became his curse. The baroness was an accomplished coquette; and

Levy (with whom, as we have seen, jealousy was the predominant passion)

was stretched on an eternal rack. His low estimate of human nature, his

disbelief in the possibility of virtue, added strength to the agony

of his suspicions, and provoked the very dangers he dreaded. His

self-torturing task was that of the spy upon his own hearth. His

banquets were haunted by a spectre; the attributes of his wealth were as

the goad and the scourge of Nemesis. His gay cynic smile changed into

a sullen scowl, his hair blanched into white, his eyes were hollow with

one consuming care. Suddenly he left his costly house,--left London;

abjured all the society which it had been the joy of his wealth

to purchase; buried himself and his wife in a remote corner of the

provinces; and there he still lives. He seeks in vain to occupy his days

with rural pursuits,--he to whom the excitements of a metropolis, with

all its corruption and its vices, were the sole sources of the torpid

stream that he called “pleasure.” There, too, the fiend of jealousy

still pursues him: he prowls round his demesnes with the haggard eye

and furtive step of a thief; he guards his wife as a prisoner, for she

threatens every day to escape. The life of the man who had opened the

prison to so many is the life of a jailer. His wife abhors him, and does

not conceal it; and still slavishly he dotes on her. Accustomed to the

freest liberty, demanding applause and admiration as her rights; wholly

uneducated, vulgar in mind, coarse in language, violent in temper, the

beautiful Fury he had brought to his home makes that home a hell. Thus,

what might seem to the superficial most enviable, is to their possessor

most hateful. He dares not ask a soul to see how he spends his gold;

he has shrunk into a mean and niggardly expenditure, and complains

of reverse and poverty, in order to excuse himself to his wife for

debarring her the enjoyments which she anticipated from the Money Bags

she had married. A vague consciousness of retribution has awakened

remorse, to add to his other stings. And the remorse coming from

superstition, not religion (sent from below, not descending from above),

brings with it none of the consolations of a genuine repentance. He

never seeks to atone, never dreams of some redeeming good action. His

riches flow around him, spreading wider and wider--out of his own reach.

The Count di Peschiera was not deceived in the calculations which

had induced him to affect repentance, and establish a claim upon his

kinsman. He received from the generosity of the Duke di Serrano an

annuity not disproportioned to his rank, and no order from his court

forbade his return to Vienna. But, in the very summer that followed his

visit to Lansmere, his career came to an abrupt close. At Baden-Baden

he paid court to a wealthy and accomplished Polish widow; and his fine

person and terrible repute awed away all rivals, save a young Frenchman,

as daring as himself, and much more in love. A challenge was given and

accepted. Peschiera appeared on the fatal ground, with his customary

sang-froid, humming an opera air, and looking so diabolically gay that

his opponent’s nerves were affected in spite of his courage; and the

Frenchman’s trigger going off before he had even taken aim, to his own

ineffable astonishment, he shot the count through the heart, dead.

Beatrice di Negra lived for some years after her brother’s death in

strict seclusion, lodging within a convent, though she did not take

the veil, as she at first proposed. In fact, the more she saw of the

sisterhood, the more she found that human regrets and human passions

(save in some rarely gifted natures) find their way through the barred

gates and over the lofty walls. Finally, she took up her abode in Rome,

where she is esteemed for a life not only marked by strict propriety,

but active benevolence. She cannot be prevailed on to accept from the

duke more than a fourth of the annuity that had been bestowed on her

brother; but she has few wants, save those of charity; and when charity

is really active, it can do so much with so little gold! She is not

known in the gayer circles of the city; but she gathers round her a

small society composed chiefly of artists and scholars, and is never so

happy as when she can aid some child of genius,--more especially if his

country be England.

The squire and his wife still flourish at Hazeldean, where Captain

Barnabas Higginbotham has taken up his permanent abode. The captain is a

confirmed hypochondriac; but he brightens up now and then when he hears

of any illness in the family of Mr. Sharpe Currie, and, at such times,

is heard to murmur, “If those seven sickly children should go off, I

might still have very great--EXPECTATIONS,”--for the which he has been

roundly scolded by the squire, and gravely preached at by the parson.

Upon both, however, he takes his revenge in a fair and gentlemanlike

way, three times a week, at the whist-table, the parson no longer having

the captain as his constant partner, since a fifth now generally cuts

in at the table,--in the person of that old enemy and neighbour, Mr.

Sticktorights. The parson, thus fighting his own battles unallied to the

captain, observes with melancholy surprise that there is a long run of

luck against him, and that he does not win so much as he used to

do. Fortunately that is the sole trouble--except Mrs. Dale’s “little

tempers,” to which he is accustomed--that ever disturbs the serene tenor

of the parson’s life. We must now explain how Mr. Sticktorights came

to cut in at the Hazeldean whist-table. Frank has settled at the Casino

with a wife who suits him exactly, and that wife was Miss Sticktorights.

It was two years before Frank recovered the disappointment with which

the loss of Beatrice saddened his spirits, but sobered his habits and

awoke his reflection. An affection, however misplaced and ill-requited,

if honestly conceived and deeply felt, rarely fails to advance the

self-education of man. Frank became steady and serious; and, on a visit

to Hazeldean, met at a county ball Miss Sticktorights, and the two young

persons were instantly attracted towards each other, perhaps by the

very feud that had so long existed between their houses. The marriage

settlements were nearly abandoned, at the last moment, by a discussion

between the parents as to the Right of Way; but the dispute was happily

appeased by Mr. Dale’s suggestion that as both properties would

be united in the children of the proposed marriage, all cause for

litigation would naturally cease, since no man would go to law with

himself. Mr. Sticktorights and Mr. Hazeldean, however, agreed in the

precaution of inserting a clause in the settlements (though all the

lawyers declared that it could not be of any legal avail), by which

it was declared, that if, in default of heritable issue by the said

marriage, the Sticktorights’ estate devolved on some distant scion of

the Sticktorights family, the right of way from the wood across the

waste land would still remain in the same state of delectable dispute

in which it then stood. There seems, however, little chance of a lawsuit

thus providently bequeathed to the misery of distant generations, since

two sons and two daughters are already playing at hide-and-seek on

the terrace where Jackeymo once watered the orange-trees, and in the

belvidere where Riccabocca had studied his Machiavelli.

Jackeymo, though his master has assessed the long arrears of his wages

at a sum which would enable him to have orange-groves and servants

of his own, still clings to his former duties, and practises his

constitutional parsimony. His only apparent deviation into profusion

consists in the erection of a chapel to his sainted namesake, to whom

he burns many a votive taper,--the tapers are especially tall, and their

sconces are wreathed with garlands, whenever a letter with the foreign

postmark brings good news of the absent Violante and her English lord.

Riccabocca was long before he reconciled himself to the pomp of his

principalities and his title of Duke. Jemima accommodated herself much

more readily to greatness; but she retained all her native Hazeldean

simplicity at heart, and is adored by the villagers around her,

especially by the young of both sexes, whom she is always ready to marry

and to portion,--convinced, long ere this, of the redeemable qualities

of the male sex by her reverence for the duke, who continues to satirize

women and wedlock, and deem himself--thanks to his profound experience

of the one, and his philosophical endurance of the other--the only happy

husband in the world. Longer still was it before the sage, who had been

so wisely anxious to rid himself of the charge of a daughter, could

wean his thoughts from the remembrance of her tender voice and loving

eyes,--not, indeed, till he seriously betook himself to the task of

educating the son with whom, according to his scientific prognostics,

Jemima presented him shortly after his return to his native land.

The sage began betimes with his Italian proverbs, full of hardhearted

worldly wisdom, and the boy was scarce out of the hornbook before he was

introduced to Machiavelli. But somehow or other the simple goodness

of the philosopher’s actual life, with his high-wrought patrician

sentiments of integrity and honour, so counteract the theoretical

lessons, that the Heir of Serrano is little likely to be made more wise

by the proverbs, or more wicked by the Machiavelli, than those studies

have practically made the progenitor, whose opinions his countrymen

still shame with the title of “Alphonso the Good.”

The duke long cherished a strong curiosity to know what had become of

Randal. He never traced the adventurer to his closing scene. But once

(years before Randal had crept into his present shelter) in a visit

of inspection to the hospital at Genoa, the duke, with his peculiar

shrewdness of observation in all matters except those which concerned

himself, was remarking to the officer in attendance, “that for one dull,

honest man whom fortune drove to the hospital or the jail, he had found,

on investigation of their antecedents, three sharp-witted knaves who had

thereto reduced themselves”--when his eye fell upon a man asleep in

one of the sick wards; and recognizing the face, not then so changed as

Oliver had seen it, he walked straight up, and gazed upon Randal Leslie.

“An Englishman,” said the official. “He was brought hither insensible,

from a severe wound on the head, inflicted, as we discovered, by a

well-known chevalier d’industrie, who declared that the Englishman had

outwitted and cheated him. That was not very likely, for a few crowns

were all we could find on the Englishman’s person, and he had been

obliged to leave his lodgings for debt. He is recovering, but there is

fever still.”

The duke gazed silently on the sleeper, who was tossing restlessly on

his pallet, and muttering to himself; then he placed his purse in the

official’s hand. “Give this to the Englishman,” said he; “but conceal

my name. It is true, it is true, the proverb is very true,” resumed the

duke, descending the stairs, “Piu pelli di volpi the di asini vanno in

Pellieciaria.” (More hides of foxes than of asses find their way to the

tanner’s).

Dr. Morgan continues to prescribe globules for grief, and to administer

infinitesimally to a mind diseased. Practising what he prescribes,

he swallows a globule of caustic whenever the sight of a distressed

fellow-creature moves him to compassion,--a constitutional tendency

which, he is at last convinced, admits of no radical cure. For the rest,

his range of patients has notably expanded; and under his sage care

his patients unquestionably live as long--as Providence pleases. No

allopathist can say more.

The death of poor John Burley found due place in the obituary of

“literary men.” Admirers, unknown before, came forward and subscribed

for a handsome monument to his memory in Kensall Green. They would have

subscribed for the relief of his widow and children, if he had left

any. Writers in magazines thrived for some months on collections of his

humorous sayings, anecdotes of his eccentricities, and specimens of

the eloquence that had lightened through the tobacco-reek of tavern

and club-room. Leonard ultimately made a selection from his scattered

writings which found place in standard libraries, though their subjects

were either of too fugitive an interest, or treated in too capricious

a manner, to do more than indicate the value of the ore, had it been

purified from its dross and subjected to the art of the mint. These

specimens could not maintain their circulation as the coined money of

Thought, but they were hoarded by collectors as rare curiosities. Alas,

poor Burley!

The Pompleys sustained a pecuniary loss by the crash of a railway

company, in which the colonel had been induced to take several shares

by one of his wife’s most boasted “connections,” whose estate the said

railway proposed to traverse, on paying L400 an acre, in that golden age

when railway companies respected the rights of property. The colonel was

no longer able, in his own country, to make both ends meet at Christmas.

He is now straining hard to achieve that feat in Boulogne, and has in

the process grown so red in the face, that those who meet him in his

morning walk on the pier, bargaining for fish, shake their heads and

say, “Old Pompley will go off in a fit of apoplexy; a great loss to

society; genteel people the Pompleys! and very highly ‘connected.’”

The vacancy created in the borough of Lansmere by Audley Egerton’s

death was filled up by our old acquaintance, Haveril Dashmore, who had

unsuccessfully contested that seat on Egerton’s first election. The

naval officer was now an admiral, and perfectly reconciled to the

Constitution, with all its alloy of aristocracy.

Dick Avenel did not retire from parliament so soon as he had

anticipated. He was not able to persuade Leonard, whose brief fever of

political ambition was now quenched in the calm fountain of the Muse,

to supply his place in the senate, and he felt that the House of Avenel

needed one representative. He contrived, however, to devote, for the

first year or two, much more of his time to his interests at Screwstown

than to the affairs of his country, and succeeded in baffling the

over-competition to which he had been subjected by taking the competitor

into partnership. Having thus secured a monopoly at Screwstown, Dick, of

course, returned with great ardour to his former enlightened opinions in

favour of free trade. He remained some years in parliament; and though

far too shrewd to venture out of his depth as an orator, distinguished

himself so much by his exposure of “humbug” on an important Committee,

that he acquired a very high reputation as a man of business, and

gradually became so in request amongst all the members who moved for

“Select Committees,” that he rose into consequence; and Mrs. Avenel,

courted for his sake, more than her own, obtained the wish of her

heart, and was received as an acknowledged habituee into the circles

of fashion. Amidst these circles, however, Dick found that his home

entirely vanished; and when he came home from the House of Commons,

tired to death, at two in the morning, disgusted at always hearing that

Mrs. Avenel was not yet returned from some fine lady’s ball, he formed a

sudden resolution of cutting Parliament, Fashion, and London altogether;

withdrew his capital, now very large, from his business; bought the

remaining estates of Squire Thornhill; and his chief object of ambition

is in endeavouring to coax or bully out of their holdings all the small

freeholders round, who had subdivided amongst them, into poles and

furlongs, the fated inheritance of Randal Leslie. An excellent justice

of the peace, though more severe than your old family proprietors

generally are; a spirited landlord, as to encouraging and making, at

a proper percentage, all permanent improvements on the soil, but

formidable to meet if the rent be not paid to the day, or the least

breach of covenant be heedlessly incurred on a farm that he could let

for more money; employing a great many hands in productive labour, but

exacting rigorously from all the utmost degree of work at the smallest

rate of wages which competition and the poor-rate permit; the young

and robust in his neighbourhood never stinted in work, and the aged

and infirm, as lumber worn out, stowed away in the workhouse,--Richard

Avenel holds himself an example to the old race of landlords; and, taken

altogether, he is no very bad specimen of the rural civilizers whom the

application of spirit and capital raise up in the new.

From the wrecks of Egerton’s fortune, Harley, with the aid of his

father’s experience in business, could not succeed in saving, for the

statesman’s sole child and heir, more than a few thousand pounds; and

but for the bonds and bills which, when meditating revenge, he had

bought from Levy, and afterwards thrown into the fire--paying dear

for that detestable whistle--even this surplus would not have been

forthcoming.

Harley privately paid out of his own fortune the L5,000 Egerton had

bequeathed to Leslie; perhaps not sorry, now that the stern duty of

exposing the false wiles of the schemer was fulfilled, to afford some

compensation even to the victim who had so richly deserved his fate;

and pleased, though mournfully, to comply with the solemn request of the

friend whose offence was forgotten in the remorseful memory of his own

projects of revenge.

Leonard’s birth and identity were easily proved, and no one appeared to

dispute them. The balance due to him as his father’s heir, together with

the sum Avenel ultimately paid to him for the patent of his invention,

and the dowry which Harley insisted upon bestowing on Helen, amounted to

that happy competence which escapes alike the anxieties of poverty, and

(what to one of contemplative tastes and retired habits are often more

irksome to bear) the show and responsibilities of wealth. His father’s

death made a deep impression upon Leonard’s mind; but the discovery that

he owed his birth to a statesman of so great a repute, and occupying a

position in society so conspicuous, contributed not to confirm, but to

still, the ambition which had for a short time diverted him from his

more serene aspirations. He had no longer to win a rank which might

equal Helen’s. He had no longer a parent, whose affections might be best

won through pride. The memories of his earlier peasant life, and his

love for retirement,--in which habit confirmed the constitutional

tendency,--made him shrink from what a more worldly nature would have

considered the enviable advantages of a name that secured the entrance

into the loftiest sphere of our social world. He wanted not that name to

assist his own path to a rank far more durable than that which kings can

confer. And still he retained in the works he had published, and still

he proposed to bestow on the works more ambitious that he had, in

leisure and competence, the facilities to design with care, and complete

with patience, the name he had himself invented, and linked with the

memory of the low-born mother. Therefore, though there was some

wonder, in drawing-rooms and clubs, at the news of Egerton’s first

unacknowledged marriage, and some curiosity expressed as to what the son

of that marriage might do,--and great men were prepared to welcome, and

fine ladies to invite and bring out, the heir to the statesman’s grave

repute,--yet wonder and curiosity soon died away; the repute soon passed

out of date, and its heir was soon forgotten. Politicians who fall short

of the highest renown are like actors; no applause is so vivid while

they are on the stage, no oblivion so complete when the curtain falls on

the last farewell.

Leonard saw a fair tomb rise above Nora’s grave, and on the tomb was

engraved the word of WIFE, which vindicated her beloved memory. He

felt the warm embrace of Nora’s mother, no longer ashamed to own her

grandchild; and even old John was made sensible that a secret weight

of sorrow was taken from his wife’s stern silent heart. Leaning

on Leonard’s arm, the old man gazed wistfully on Nora’s tomb, and

muttering, “Egerton! Egerton! ‘Leonora, the first wife of the Right

Honourable Audley Egerton!’ Ha! I voted for him. She married the right

colour. Is that the date? Is it so long since she died? Well, well! I

miss her sadly. But wife says we shall both now see her soon; and wife

once thought we should never see her again,--never; but I always knew

better. Thank you, sir. I’m a poor creature, but these tears don’t pain

me,--quite otherwise. I don’t know why, but I’m very happy. Where’s my

old woman? She does not mind how much I talk about Nora now. Oh,

there she is! Thank you, sir, humbly; but I’d rather lean on my old

woman,--I’m more used to it; and--wife, when shall we go to Nora?”

Leonard had brought Mrs. Fairfield to see her parents, and Mrs. Avenel

welcomed her with unlooked-for kindness. The name inscribed upon Nora’s

tomb softened the mother’s heart to her surviving daughter. As poor John

had said, “She could now talk about Nora;” and in that talk, she and the

child she had so long neglected discovered how much they had in common.

So when, shortly after his marriage with Helen, Leonard went abroad,

Jane Fairfield remained with the old couple. After their death, which

was within a day of each other, she refused, perhaps from pride, to take

up her residence with Leonard; but she settled near the home which he

subsequently found in England. Leonard remained abroad for some years.

A quiet observer of the various manners and intellectual development of

living races, a rapt and musing student of the monuments that revive

the dead, his experience of mankind grew large in silence, and his

perceptions of the Sublime and Beautiful brightened into tranquil art

under their native skies.

On his return to England he purchased a small house amidst the most

beautiful scenes of Devonshire, and there patiently commenced a work

in which he designed to bequeath to his country his noblest thoughts

in their fairest forms. Some men best develop their ideas by constant

exercise; their thoughts spring from their brain ready-armed, and seek,

like the fabled goddess, to take constant part in the wars of men. And

such are, perhaps, on the whole, the most vigorous and lofty writers;

but Leonard did not belong to this class. Sweetness and serenity were

the main characteristics of his genius; and these were deepened by his

profound sense of his domestic happiness. To wander alone with Helen

by the banks of the murmurous river; to gaze with her on the deep still

sea; to feel that his thoughts, even when most silent, were comprehended

by the intuition of love, and reflected on that translucent sympathy so

yearned for and so rarely found by poets,--these were the Sabbaths of

his soul, necessary to fit him for its labours: for the Writer has this

advantage over other men, that his repose is not indolence. His duties,

rightly fulfilled, are discharged to earth and men in other capacities

than those of action. If he is not seen among those who act, he is

all the while maturing some noiseless influence, which will guide or

illumine, civilize or elevate, the restless men whose noblest actions

are but the obedient agencies of the thoughts of writers. Call not,

then, the Poet whom we place amidst the Varieties of Life, the sybarite

of literary ease, if, returning on Summer eves, Helen’s light footstep

by his musing side, he greets his sequestered home, with its trellised

flowers smiling out from amidst the lonely cliffs in which it is

embedded; while lovers still, though wedded long, they turn to each

other, with such deep joy in their speaking eyes, grateful that the

world, with its various distractions and noisy conflicts, lies so far

from their actual existence,--only united to them by the happy link that

the writer weaves invisibly with the hearts that he moves and the souls

that he inspires. No! Character and circumstance alike unfitted Leonard

for the strife of the thronged literary democracy; they led towards the

development of the gentler and purer portions of his nature,--to the

gradual suppression of the more combative and turbulent. The influence

of the happy light under which his genius so silently and calmly grew,

was seen in the exquisite harmony of its colours, rather than the

gorgeous diversities of their glow. His contemplation, intent upon

objects of peaceful beauty, and undisturbed by rude anxieties and

vehement passions, suggested only kindred reproductions to the creative

faculty by which it was vivified; so that the whole man was not only

a poet, but, as it were, a poem,--a living idyl, calling into pastoral

music every reed that sighed and trembled along the stream of life. And

Helen was so suited to a nature of this kind, she so guarded the ideal

existence in which it breathes! All the little cares and troubles of

the common practical life she appropriated so quietly to herself,--the

stronger of the two, as should be a poet’s wife, in the necessary

household virtues of prudence and forethought. Thus if the man’s genius

made the home a temple, the woman’s wisdom gave to the temple the

security of the fortress. They have only one child,--a girl; they call

her Nora. She has the father’s soul-lit eyes, and the mother’s warm

human smile. She assists Helen in the morning’s noiseless domestic

duties; she sits in the evening at Leonard’s feet, while he reads or

writes. In each light grief of childhood she steals to the mother’s

knee; but in each young impulse of delight, or each brighter flash of

progressive reason, she springs to the father’s breast. Sweet Helen,

thou hast taught her this, taking to thyself the shadows even of thine

infant’s life, and leaving to thy partner’s eyes only its rosy light!

But not here shall this picture of Helen close. Even the Ideal can only

complete its purpose by connection with the Real; even in solitude the

writer must depend upon mankind.

Leonard at last has completed the work, which has been the joy and the

labour of so many years,--the work which he regards as the flower of all

his spiritual being, and to which he has committed all the hopes that

unite the creature of today with the generations of the future. The work

has gone through the press, each line lingered over with the elaborate

patience of the artist, loath to part with the thought he has sculptured

into form, while an improving touch can be imparted by the chisel. He

has accepted an invitation from Norreys. In the restless excitement

(strange to him since his first happy maiden effort) he has gone to

London. Unrecognized in the huge metropolis, he has watched to see if

the world acknowledge the new tie he has woven between its busy life and

his secluded toil. And the work came out in an unpropitious hour; other

things were occupying the public; the world was not at leisure to heed

him, and the book did not penetrate into the great circle of readers.

But a savage critic has seized on it, and mangled, distorted, deformed

it, confounding together defect and beauty in one mocking ridicule; and

the beauties have not yet found an exponent, nor the defects a defender;

and the publisher shakes his head, points to groaning shelves, and

delicately hints that the work which was to be the epitome of the sacred

life within life does not hit the taste of the day. Leonard thinks over

the years that his still labour has cost him, and knows that he has

exhausted the richest mines of his intellect, and that long years will

elapse before he can recruit that capital of ideas which is necessary to

sink new shafts and bring to light fresh ore; and the deep despondency

of intellect, frustrated in its highest aims, has seized him, and all

he has before done is involved in failure by the defeat of the crowning

effort. Failure, and irrecoverable, seems his whole ambition as writer;

his whole existence in the fair Ideal seems to have been a profitless

dream, and the face of the Ideal itself is obscured. And even Norreys

frankly, though kindly, intimates that the life of a metropolis is

essential to the healthful intuition of a writer in the intellectual

wants of his age, since every great writer supplies a want in his own

generation, for some feeling to be announced, some truth to be revealed.

And as this maxim is generally sound, as most great writers have lived

in cities, Leonard dares not dwell on the exception; it is only success

that justifies the attempt to be an exception to the common rule; and

with the blunt manhood of his nature, which is not a poet’s, Norreys

sums up with, “What then? One experiment has failed; fit your life to

your genius, and try again.” Try again! Easy counsel enough to the man

of ready resource and quick combative mind; but to Leonard, how hard

and how harsh! “Fit his life to his genius!”--renounce contemplation and

Nature for the jostle of Oxford Street! Would that life not scare away

the genius forever? Perplexed and despondent, though still struggling

for fortitude, he returns to his home; and there at his hearth awaits

the Soother, and there is the voice that repeats the passages most

beloved, and prophesies so confidently of future fame; and gradually all

around smiles from the smile of Helen. And the profound conviction that

Heaven places human happiness beyond the reach of the world’s contempt

or praise, circulates through his system and restores its serene calm.

And he feels that the duty of the intellect is to accomplish and perfect

itself,--to harmonize its sounds into music that may be heard in heaven,

though it wake not an echo on the earth. If this be done, as with some

men, best amidst the din and the discord, be it so; if, as with him,

best in silence, be it so too. And the next day he reclines with Helen

by the seashore, gazing calmly as before on the measureless sunlit

ocean; and Helen, looking into his face, sees that it is sunlit as the

deep. His hand steals within her own, in the gratitude that endears

beyond the power of passion, and he murmurs gently, “Blessed be the

woman who consoles.”

The work found its way at length into fame, and the fame sent its voices

loud to the poet’s home. But the applause of the world had not a sound

so sweet to his ear, as, when, in doubt, humiliation, and sadness, the

lips of his Helen had whispered “Hope! and believe!”

Side by side with this picture of Woman the Consoler, let me place the

companion sketch. Harley L’Estrange, shortly after his marriage with

Violante, had been induced, whether at his bride’s persuasions, or to

dissipate the shadow with which Egerton’s death still clouded his wedded

felicity, to accept a temporary mission, half military, half civil, to

one of our colonies. On this mission he had evinced so much ability

and achieved so signal a success, that on his return to England he was

raised to the peerage, while his father yet lived to rejoice that the

son who would succeed to his honours had achieved the nobler dignity

of honours not inherited, but won. High expectations were formed of

Harley’s parliamentary success; but he saw that such success, to be

durable, must found itself on the knowledge of wearisome details, and

the study of that practical business which jarred on his tastes, though

it suited his talents. Harley had been indolent for so many years,--and

there is so much to make indolence captivating to a man whose rank is

secured, who has nothing to ask from fortune, and who finds at his home

no cares from which he seeks a distraction; so he laughed at ambition in

the whim of his delightful humours, and the expectations formed from

his diplomatic triumph died away. But then came one of those political

crises, in which men ordinarily indifferent to politics rouse themselves

to the recollection that the experiment of legislation is not made upon

dead matter, but on the living form of a noble country; and in both

Houses of Parliament the strength of party is put forth.

It is a lovely day in spring, and Harley is seated by the window of

his old room at Knightsbridge,--now glancing to the lively green of

the budding trees; now idling with Nero, who, though in canine old age,

enjoys the sun like his master; now repeating to himself, as he turns

over the leaves of his favourite Horace, some of those lines that make

the shortness of life the excuse for seizing its pleasures and

eluding its fatigues, which formed the staple morality of the polished

epicurean; and Violante (into what glorious beauty her maiden bloom

has matured!) comes softly into the room, seats herself on a low stool

beside him, leaning her face on her hands, and looking up at him

through her dark, clear, spiritual eyes; and as she continues to speak,

gradually a change comes over Harley’s aspect, gradually the brow grows

thoughtful, and the lips lose their playful smile. There is no hateful

assumption of the would-be “superior woman,” no formal remonstrance, no

lecture, no homily which grates upon masculine pride; but the high theme

and the eloquent words elevate unconsciously of themselves, and the

Horace is laid aside,--a Parliamentary Blue Book has been, by some

marvel or other, conjured there in its stead; and Violante now moves

away as softly as she entered. Harley’s hand detains her.

“Not so. Share the task, or I quit it. Here is an extract I condemn you

to copy. Do you think I would go through this labour if you were not to

halve the success?--halve the labour as well!”

And Violante, overjoyed, kisses away the implied rebuke, and sits down

to work, so demure and so proud, by his side. I do not know if Harley

made much way in the Blue Book that morning; but a little time after he

spoke in the Lords, and surpassed all that the most sanguine had hoped

from his talents. The sweetness of fame and the consciousness of utility

once fully tasted, Harley’s consummation of his proper destinies

was secure. A year later, and his voice was one of the influences of

England. His boyish love of glory revived,--no longer vague and dreamy,

but ennobled into patriotism, and strengthened into purpose. One night,

after a signal triumph, he returned home, with his father, who had

witnessed it, and Violante--who all lovely, all brilliant, though she

was, never went forth in her lord’s absence, to lower among fops and

flatterers the dignity of the name she so aspired to raise--sprang to

meet him. Harley’s eldest son--a boy yet in the nursery--had been kept

up later than usual; perhaps Violante had anticipated her husband’s

triumph, and wished the son to share it. The old earl beckoned the

child to him, and laying his hand on the infant’s curly locks, said with

unusual seriousness,

“My boy, you may see troubled times in England before these hairs are

as gray as mine; and your stake in England’s honour and peace will be

great. Heed this hint from an old man who had no talents to make a

noise in the world, but who yet has been of some use in his generation.

Neither sounding titles, nor wide lands, nor fine abilities, will give

you real joy, unless you hold yourself responsible for all to your God

and to your country; and when you are tempted to believe that the gifts

you may inherit from both entail no duties, or that duties are at war

with true pleasure, remember how I placed you in your father’s arms,

and said, ‘Let him be as proud of you some day as I at this hour am of

him.’”

The boy clung to his father’s breast, and said manfully, “I will try!”

Harley bent his fair smooth brow over the young earnest face, and said

softly, “Your mother speaks in you!”

Then the old countess, who had remained silent and listening on her

elbow-chair, rose and kissed the earl’s hand reverently. Perhaps in that

kiss there was the repentant consciousness how far the active goodness

she had often secretly undervalued had exceeded, in its fruits, her own

cold unproductive powers of will and mind. Then passing on to Harley,

her brow grew elate, and the pride returned to her eye.

“At last,” she said, laying on his shoulder that light firm hand, from

which he no longer shrunk,--“at last, O my noble son, you have fulfilled

all the promise of your youth!”

“If so,” answered Harley, “it is because I have found what I then sought

in vain.” He drew his arm around Violante, and added, with half tender,

half solemn smile, “Blessed is the woman who exalts!”

So, symbolled forth in these twin and fair flowers which Eve saved for

Earth out of Paradise, each with the virtue to heal or to strengthen,

stored under the leaves that give sweets to the air; here, soothing the

heart when the world brings the trouble; here, recruiting the soul which

our sloth or our senses enervate, leave we Woman, at least in the place

Heaven assigns to her amidst the multiform “Varieties of Life.”

Farewell to thee, gentle Reader; and go forth to the world, O MY NOVEL!

THE END.

End of Project Gutenberg’s My Novel, Complete, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton