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Title: The Disowned, Complete

Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Release Date: March 16, 2009 [EBook #7639]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE DISOWNED

by Edward Bulwer Lytton




CHAPTER I.

     I'll tell you a story if you please to attend. G. KNIGHT:
     Limbo.

It was the evening of a soft, warm day in the May of 17--. The sun had
already set, and the twilight was gathering slowly over the large, still
masses of wood which lay on either side of one of those green lanes
so peculiar to England. Here and there, the outline of the trees
irregularly shrunk back from the road, leaving broad patches of waste
land covered with fern and the yellow blossoms of the dwarf furze, and
at more distant intervals thick clusters of rushes, from which came the
small hum of gnats,--those "evening revellers" alternately rising and
sinking in the customary manner of their unknown sports,--till, as
the shadows grew darker and darker, their thin and airy shapes were no
longer distinguishable, and no solitary token of life or motion broke
the voiceless monotony of the surrounding woods.

The first sound which invaded the silence came from the light, quick
footsteps of a person whose youth betrayed itself in its elastic and
unmeasured tread, and in the gay, free carol which broke out by fits and
starts upon the gentle stillness of the evening.

There was something rather indicative of poetical taste than musical
science in the selection of this vesper hymn, which always commenced
with,--

  "'T is merry, 't is merry, in good green wood,"

and never proceeded a syllable further than the end of the second
line,--

  "when birds are about and singing;"

from the last word of which, after a brief pause, it invariably started
forth into joyous "iteration."

Presently a heavier, yet still more rapid, step than that of the
youth was heard behind; and, as it overtook the latter, a loud, clear,
good-humoured voice gave the salutation of the evening. The tone in
which this courtesy was returned was frank, distinct, and peculiarly
harmonious.

"Good evening, my friend. How far is it to W----? I hope I am not out of
the direct road?"

"To W----, sir?" said the man, touching his hat, as he perceived,
in spite of the dusk, something in the air and voice of his new
acquaintance which called for a greater degree of respect than he was
at first disposed to accord to a pedestrian traveller,--"to W----, sir?
why, you will not surely go there to-night? it is more than eight miles
distant, and the roads none of the best."

"Now, a curse on all rogues!" quoth the youth, with a serious sort of
vivacity. "Why, the miller at the foot of the hill assured me I should
be at my journey's end in less than an hour."

"He may have said right, sir," returned the man, "yet you will not reach
W---- in twice that time."

"How do you mean?" said the younger stranger.

"Why, that you may for once force a miller to speak truth in spite of
himself, and make a public-house, about three miles hence, the end of
your day's journey."

"Thank you for the hint," said the youth. "Does the house you speak of
lie on the road-side?"

"No, sir: the lane branches off about two miles hence, and you must then
turn to the right; but till then our way is the same, and if you would
not prefer your own company to mine we can trudge on together."

"With all my heart," rejoined the younger stranger; "and not the less
willingly from the brisk pace you walk. I thought I had few equals
in pedestrianism; but it should not be for a small wager that I would
undertake to keep up with you."

"Perhaps, sir," said the man, laughing, "I'll have had in the course
of my life a better usage and a longer experience of my heels than you
have."

Somewhat startled by a speech of so equivocal a meaning, the youth,
for the first time, turned round to examine, as well as the increasing
darkness would permit, the size and appearance of his companion. He was
not perhaps too well satisfied with his survey. His fellow pedestrian
was about six feet high, and of a corresponding girth of limb and frame,
which would have made him fearful odds in any encounter where bodily
strength was the best means of conquest. Notwithstanding the mildness
of the weather, he was closely buttoned in a rough great-coat, which was
well calculated to give all due effect to the athletic proportions of
the wearer.

There was a pause of some moments.

"This is but a wild, savage sort of scene for England, sir, in this
day of new-fashioned ploughs and farming improvements," said the tall
stranger, looking round at the ragged wastes and grim woods, which lay
steeped in the shade beside and before them.

"True," answered the youth; "and in a few years agricultural innovation
will scarcely leave, even in these wastes, a single furze-blossom for
the bee or a tuft of green-sward for the grasshopper; but, however
unpleasant the change may be for us foot-travellers, we must not repine
at what they tell us is so sure a witness of the prosperity of the
country."

"They tell us! who tell us?" exclaimed the stranger, with great
vivacity. "Is it the puny and spiritless artisan, or the debased and
crippled slave of the counter and the till, or the sallow speculator
on morals, who would mete us out our liberty, our happiness, our very
feelings by the yard and inch and fraction? No, no, let them follow
what the books and precepts of their own wisdom teach them; let them
cultivate more highly the lands they have already parcelled out by dikes
and fences, and leave, though at scanty intervals, some green patches of
unpolluted land for the poor man's beast and the free man's foot."

"You are an enthusiast on this subject," said the younger traveller, not
a little surprised at the tone and words of the last speech; "and if I
were not just about to commence the world with a firm persuasion that
enthusiasm on any matter is a great obstacle to success, I could be as
warm though not so eloquent as yourself."

"Ah, sir," said the stranger, sinking into a more natural and careless
tone, "I have a better right than I imagine you can claim to repine or
even to inveigh against the boundaries which are, day by day and hour
by hour, encroaching upon what I have learned to look upon as my own
territory. You were, just before I joined you, singing an old song; I
honour you for your taste: and no offence, sir, but a sort of fellowship
in feeling made me take the liberty to accost you. I am no very great
scholar in other things; but I owe my present circumstances of life
solely to my fondness for those old songs and quaint madrigals. And
I believe no person can better apply to himself Will Shakspeare's
invitation,--

  'Under the greenwood tree
   Who loves to lie with me,
   And tune his merry note
   Unto the sweet bird's throat,
   Come hither, come hither, come hither,
   Here shall he see
   No enemy
   But winter and rough weather.'"

Relieved from his former fear, but with increased curiosity at this
quotation, which was half said, half sung, in a tone which seemed to
evince a hearty relish for the sense of the words, the youth replied,--

"Truly, I did not expect to meet among the travellers of this wild
country with so well-stored a memory. And, indeed, I should have
imagined that the only persons to whom your verses could exactly have
applied were those honourable vagrants from the Nile whom in vulgar
language we term gypsies."

"Precisely so, sir," answered the tall stranger, indifferently;
"precisely so. It is to that ancient body that I belong."

"The devil you do!" quoth the youth, in unsophisticated surprise; "the
progress of education is indeed astonishing!"

"Why," answered the stranger, laughing, "to tell you the truth, sir,
I am a gypsy by inclination, not birth. The illustrious Bamfylde Moore
Carew is not the only example of one of gentle blood and honourable
education whom the fleshpots of Egypt have seduced."

"I congratulate myself," quoth the youth, in a tone that might have
been in jest, "upon becoming acquainted with a character at once so
respectable and so novel; and, to return your quotation in the way of
a compliment, I cry out with the most fashionable author of Elizabeth's
days,--

  'O for a bowl of fat Canary,
   Rich Palermo, sparkling Sherry,'

in order to drink to our better acquaintance."

"Thank you, sir,--thank you," cried the strange gypsy, seemingly
delighted with the spirit with which his young acquaintance appeared to
enter into his character, and his quotation from a class of authors at
that time much less known and appreciated than at present; "and if you
have seen already enough of the world to take up with ale when neither
Canary, Palermo, nor Sherry are forthcoming, I will promise, at least,
to pledge you in large draughts of that homely beverage. What say you
to passing a night with us? our tents are yet more at hand than the
public-house of which I spoke to you." The young man hesitated a moment,
then replied,--

"I will answer you frankly, my friend, even though I may find cause to
repent my confidence. I have a few guineas about me, which, though not
a large sum, are my all. Now, however ancient and honourable your
fraternity may be, they labour under a sad confusion, I fear, in their
ideas of meum and tuum."

"Faith, sir, I believe you are right; and were you some years older, I
think you would not have favoured me with the same disclosure you have
done now; but you may be quite easy on that score. If you were made of
gold, the rascals would not filch off the corner of your garment as long
as you were under my protection. Does this assurance satisfy you?"

"Perfectly," said the youth; "and now how far are we from your
encampment? I assure you I am all eagerness to be among a set of which I
have witnessed such a specimen."

"Nay, nay," returned the gypsy, "you must not judge of all my brethren
by me: I confess that they are but a rough tribe. However, I love them
dearly; and am only the more inclined to think them honest to each
other, because they are rogues to all the rest of the world."

By this time our travellers had advanced nearly two miles since they had
commenced companionship; and at a turn in the lane, about three hundred
yards farther on, they caught a glimpse of a distant fire burning
brightly through the dim trees. They quickened their pace, and striking
a little out of their path into a common, soon approached two tents,
the Arab homes of the vagrant and singular people with whom the gypsy
claimed brotherhood and alliance.




CHAPTER II.

   Here we securely live and eat
   The cream of meat;
  And keep eternal fires
   By which we sit and do divine.
        HERRICK: Ode to Sir Clipseby Crew.

Around a fire which blazed and crackled beneath the large seething-pot,
that seemed an emblem of the mystery and a promise of the good cheer
which are the supposed characteristics of the gypsy race, were grouped
seven or eight persons, upon whose swarthy and strong countenances the
irregular and fitful flame cast a picturesque and not unbecoming glow.
All of these, with the exception of an old crone who was tending the
pot, and a little boy who was feeding the fire with sundry fragments of
stolen wood, started to their feet upon the entrance of the stranger.

"What ho! my bob cuffins," cried the gypsy guide, "I have brought you a
gentry cove, to whom you will show all proper respect: and hark ye, my
maunders, if ye dare beg, borrow, or steal a single croker,--ay, but a
bawbee of him, I'll--but ye know me." The gypsy stopped abruptly, and
turned an eye, in which menace vainly struggled with good-humour, upon
each of his brethren, as they submissively bowed to him and his protege,
and poured forth a profusion of promises, to which their admonitor did
not even condescend to listen. He threw off his great-coat, doubled
it down by the best place near the fire, and made the youth forthwith
possess himself of the seat it afforded. He then lifted the cover of the
mysterious caldron. "Well, Mort," cried he to the old woman, as he bent
wistfully down, "what have we here?"

"Two ducks, three chickens, and a rabbit, with some potatoes," growled
the old hag, who claimed the usual privilege of her culinary office, to
be as ill-tempered as she pleased.

"Good!" said the gypsy; "and now, Mim, my cull, go to the other tent,
and ask its inhabitants, in my name, to come here and sup; bid them
bring their caldron to eke out ours: I'll find the lush."

With these words (which Mim, a short, swarthy member of the gang, with a
countenance too astute to be pleasing, instantly started forth to obey)
the gypsy stretched himself at full length by the youth's side, and
began reminding him, with some jocularity and at some length, of his
promise to drink to their better acquaintance.

Something there was in the scene, the fire, the caldron, the intent
figure and withered countenance of the old woman, the grouping of the
other forms, the rude but not unpicturesque tent, the dark still woods
on either side, with the deep and cloudless skies above, as the stars
broke forth one by one upon the silent air, which (to use the orthodox
phrase of the novelist) would not have been wholly unworthy the bold
pencil of Salvator himself.

The youth eyed, with that involuntary respect which personal advantages
always command, the large yet symmetrical proportions of his wild
companion; nor was the face which belonged to that frame much less
deserving of attention. Though not handsome, it was both shrewd and
prepossessing in its expression; the forehead was prominent, the brows
overhung the eyes, which were large, dark, and, unlike those of the
tribe in general, rather calm than brilliant; the complexion, though
sun-burnt, was not swarthy, and the face was carefully and cleanly
shaved, so as to give all due advantage of contrast to the brown
luxuriant locks which fell rather in flakes than curls, on either side
of the healthful and manly cheeks. In age, he was about thirty-five,
and, though his air and mien were assuredly not lofty nor aristocratic,
yet they were strikingly above the bearing of his vagabond companions:
those companions were in all respects of the ordinary race of gypsies;
the cunning and flashing eye, the raven locks, the dazzling teeth, the
bronzed colour, and the low, slight, active form, were as strongly their
distinguishing characteristics as the tokens of all their tribe.

But to these, the appearance of the youth presented a striking and
beautiful contrast.

He had only just passed the stage of boyhood, perhaps he might have
seen eighteen summers, probably not so many. He had, in imitation of his
companion, and perhaps from mistaken courtesy to his new society, doffed
his hat; and the attitude which he had chosen fully developed the noble
and intellectual turn of his head and throat. His hair, as yet preserved
from the disfiguring fashions of the day, was of a deep auburn, which
was rapidly becoming of a more chestnut hue, and curled in short close
curls from the nape of the neck to the commencement of a forehead
singularly white and high. His brows finely and lightly pencilled, and
his long lashes of the darkest dye, gave a deeper and perhaps softer
shade than they otherwise would have worn to eyes quick and observant
in their expression and of a light hazel in their colour. His cheek
was very fair, and the red light of the fire cast an artificial tint of
increased glow upon a complexion that had naturally rather bloom than
colour; while a dark riding frock set off in their full beauty the fine
outline of his chest and the slender symmetry of his frame.

But it was neither his features nor his form, eminently handsome as they
were, which gave the principal charm to the young stranger's appearance:
it was the strikingly bold, buoyant, frank, and almost joyous expression
which presided over all. There seemed to dwell the first glow and life
of youth, undimmed by a single fear and unbaffled in a single hope.
There were the elastic spring, the inexhaustible wealth of energies
which defied in their exulting pride the heaviness of sorrow and the
harassments of time. It was a face that, while it filled you with some
melancholy foreboding of the changes and chances which must, in the
inevitable course of fate, cloud the openness of the unwrinkled brow,
and soberize the fire of the daring and restless eye, instilled also
within you some assurance of triumph, and some omen of success,--a vague
but powerful sympathy with the adventurous and cheerful spirit which
appeared literally to speak in its expression. It was a face you might
imagine in one born under a prosperous star; and you felt, as you gazed,
a confidence in that bright countenance, which, like the shield of
the British Prince, [Prince Arthur.--See "The Faerie Queene."] seemed
possessed with a spell to charm into impotence the evil spirits who
menaced its possessor.

"Well, sir," said his friend, the gypsy, who had in his turn been
surveying with admiration the sinewy and agile frame of his young guest,
"well, sir, how fares your appetite? Old Dame Bingo will be mortally
offended if you do not do ample justice to her good cheer."

"If so," answered our traveller, who, young as he was, had learnt
already the grand secret of making in every situation a female friend,
"if so, I shall be likely to offend her still more."

"And how, my pretty master?" said the old crone with an iron smile.

"Why, I shall be bold enough to reconcile matters with a kiss, Mrs.
Bingo," answered the youth.

"Ha! Ha!" shouted the tall gypsy; "it is many a long day since my old
Mort slapped a gallant's face for such an affront. But here come our
messmates. Good evening, my mumpers; make your bows to this gentleman
who has come to bowse with us to-night. 'Gad, we'll show him that old
ale's none the worse for keeping company with the moon's darlings. Come,
sit down, sit down. Where's the cloth, ye ill-mannered loons, and the
knives and platters? Have we no holiday customs for strangers, think
ye? Mim, my cove, off to my caravan; bring out the knives, and all other
rattletraps; and harkye, my cuffin, this small key opens the inner hole,
where you will find two barrels; bring one of them. I'll warrant it of
the best, for the brewer himself drank some of the same sort but two
hours before I nimm'd them. Come, stump, my cull, make yourself wings.
Ho, Dame Bingo, is not that pot of thine seething yet? Ah, my young
gentleman, you commence betimes; so much the better; if love's a
summer's day, we all know how early a summer morning begins," added
the jovial Egyptian in a lower voice (feeling perhaps that he was only
understood by himself), as he gazed complacently on the youth, who, with
that happy facility of making himself everywhere at home so uncommon
to his countrymen, was already paying compliments suited to their
understanding to two fair daughters of the tribe who had entered with
the new-comers. Yet had he too much craft or delicacy, call it which you
will, to continue his addresses to that limit where ridicule or jealousy
from the male part of the assemblage might commence; on the contrary, he
soon turned to the men, and addressed them with a familiarity so frank
and so suited to their taste that he grew no less rapidly in their
favour than he had already done in that of the women, and when the
contents of the two caldrons were at length set upon the coarse but
clean cloth which in honour of his arrival covered the sod, it was in
the midst of a loud and universal peal of laughter which some broad
witticism of the young stranger had produced that the party sat down to
their repast.

Bright were the eyes and sleek the tresses of the damsel who placed
herself by the side of the stranger, and many were the alluring glances
and insinuated compliments which replied to his open admiration
and profuse flattery; but still there was nothing exclusive in his
attentions; perhaps an ignorance of the customs of his entertainers, and
a consequent discreet fear of offending them, restrained him; or perhaps
he found ample food for occupation in the plentiful dainties which his
host heaped before him.

"Now tell me," said the gypsy chief (for chief he appeared to be), "if
we lead not a merrier life than you dreamt of? or would you have us
change our coarse fare and our simple tents, our vigorous limbs and
free hearts, for the meagre board, the monotonous chamber, the diseased
frame, and the toiling, careful, and withered spirit of some miserable
mechanic?"

"Change!" cried the youth, with an earnestness which, if affected, was
an exquisite counterfeit, "by Heaven, I would change with you myself."

"Bravo, my fine cove!" cried the host, and all the gang echoed their
sympathy with his applause.

The youth continued: "Meat, and that plentiful; ale, and that strong;
women, and those pretty ones: what can man desire more?"

"Ay," cried the host, "and all for nothing,--no, not even a tax; who
else in this kingdom can say that? Come, Mim, push round the ale."

And the ale was pushed round, and if coarse the merriment, loud at least
was the laugh that rang ever and anon from the old tent; and though, at
moments, something in the guest's eye and lip might have seemed, to
a very shrewd observer, a little wandering and absent, yet, upon the
whole, he was almost as much at ease as the rest, and if he was not
quite as talkative he was to the full as noisy.

By degrees, as the hour grew later and the barrel less heavy, the
conversation changed into one universal clatter. Some told their feats
in beggary; others, their achievements in theft; not a viand they had
fed on but had its appropriate legend; even the old rabbit, which had
been as tough as old rabbit can well be, had not been honestly taken
from his burrow; no less a person than Mim himself had purloined it from
a widow's footman who was carrying it to an old maid from her nephew the
Squire.

"Silence," cried the host, who loved talking as well as the rest, and
who for the last ten minutes had been vainly endeavouring to obtain
attention. "Silence! my maunders, it's late, and we shall have the queer
cuffins [magistrates] upon us if we keep it up much longer. What, ho,
Mim, are you still gabbling at the foot of the table when your betters
are talking? As sure as my name's King Cole, I'll choke you with your
own rabbit skin, if you don't hush your prating cheat,--nay, never look
so abashed: if you will make a noise, come forward, and sing us a gypsy
song. You see, my young sir," turning to his guest, "that we are not
without our pretensions to the fine arts."

At this order, Mim started forth, and taking his station at the right
hand of the soi-disant King Cole, began the following song, the chorus
of which was chanted in full diapason by the whole group, with the
additional force of emphasis that knives, feet, and fists could
bestow:--

  THE GYPSY'S SONG.

  The king to his hall, and the steed to his stall,
   And the cit to his bilking board;
  But we are not bound to an acre of ground,
   For our home is the houseless sward.
  We sow not, nor toil; yet we glean from the soil
   As much as its reapers do;
  And wherever we rove, we feed on the cove
   Who gibes at the mumping crew.
      CHORUS.--So the king to his hall, etc.

  We care not a straw for the limbs of the law,
   Nor a fig for the cuffin queer;
  While Hodge and his neighbour shall lavish and labour,
   Our tent is as sure of its cheer.
      CHORUS.--So the king to his hall, etc.

  The worst have an awe of the harman's [constable] claw,
   And the best will avoid the trap; [bailiff]
  But our wealth is as free of the bailiff's see
   As our necks of the twisting crap. [gallows]
      CHORUS.--So the king to his hall, etc.

  They say it is sweet to win the meat
   For the which one has sorely wrought;
  But I never could find that we lacked the mind
   For the food that has cost us nought!
      CHRUS.--So the king to his hall, etc.

  And when we have ceased from our fearless feast
   Why, our jigger [door] will need no bars;
  Our sentry shall be on the owlet's tree,
   And our lamps the glorious stars.

           CHORUS.
  So the king to his hall, and the steed to his stall,
   And the cit to his bilking board;
  But we are not bound to an acre of ground,
   For our home is the houseless sward.

Rude as was this lawless stave, the spirit with which it was sung atoned
to the young stranger for its obscurity and quaintness; as for his host,
that curious personage took a lusty and prominent part in the chorus;
nor did the old woods refuse their share of the burden, but sent back a
merry echo to the chief's deep voice and the harsher notes of his jovial
brethren.

When the glee had ceased, King Cole rose, the whole band followed
his example, the cloth was cleared in a trice, the barrel--oh! what a
falling off was there!--was rolled into a corner of the tent, and the
crew to whom the awning belonged began to settle themselves to rest;
while those who owned the other encampment marched forth, with King Cole
at their head. Leaning with no light weight upon his guest's arm, the
lover of ancient minstrelsy poured into the youth's ear a strain of
eulogy, rather eloquent than coherent, upon the scene they had just
witnessed.

"What," cried his majesty in an enthusiastic tone, "what can be so truly
regal as our state? Can any man control us? Are we not above all laws?
Are we not the most despotic of kings? Nay, more than the kings of
earth, are we not the kings of Fairyland itself? Do we not realize the
golden dreams of the old rhymers, luxurious dogs that they were? Who
would not cry out,--

    'Blest silent groves! Oh, may ye be
     Forever Mirth's best nursery!
      May pure Contents
      Forever pitch their tents
  Upon these downs, these meads, these rocks, these mountains.'"

Uttering this notable extract from the thrice-honoured Sir Henry Wotton,
King Cole turned abruptly from the common, entered the wood which
skirted it, and, only attended by his guest and his minister Mim, came
suddenly, by an unexpected and picturesque opening in the trees, upon
one of those itinerant vehicles termed caravans, he ascended the few
steps which led to the entrance, opened the door, and was instantly in
the arms of a pretty and young woman. On seeing our hero (for such we
fear the youth is likely to become), she drew back with a blush not
often found upon regal cheeks.

"Pooh," said King Cole, half tauntingly, half fondly, "pooh, Lucy,
blushes are garden flowers, and ought never to be found wild in the
woods:" then changing his tone, he said, "come, put some fresh straw
in the corner, this stranger honours our palace to-night; Mim, unload
thyself of our royal treasures; watch without and vanish from within!"

Depositing on his majesty's floor the appurtenances of the regal
supper-table, Mim made his respectful adieus and disappeared; meanwhile
the queen scattered some fresh straw over a mattress in the narrow
chamber, and, laying over all a sheet of singularly snowy hue, made
her guest some apology for the badness of his lodging; this King Cole
interrupted by a most elaborately noisy yawn and a declaration of
extreme sleepiness. "Now, Lucy, let us leave the gentleman to what he
will like better than soft words even from a queen. Good night, sir, we
shall be stirring at daybreak;" and with this farewell King Cole took
the lady's arm, and retired with her into an inner compartment of the
caravan.

Left to himself, our hero looked round with surprise at the exceeding
neatness which reigned over the whole apartment. But what chiefly
engrossed the attention of one to whose early habits books had always
been treasures were several volumes, ranged in comely shelves, fenced
with wirework, on either side of the fireplace. "Courage," thought
he, as he stretched himself on his humble couch, "my adventures have
commenced well: a gypsy tent, to be sure, is nothing very new; but a
gypsy who quotes poetry, and enjoys a modest wife, speaks better than
books do for the improvement of the world!"




CHAPTER III.

  Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
  Than that of painted pomp?--As You Like It.

The sun broke cheerfully through the small lattice of the caravan, as
the youth opened his eyes and saw the good-humoured countenance of his
gypsy host bending over him complacently.

"You slept so soundly, sir, that I did not like to disturb you; but my
good wife only waits your rising to have all ready for breakfast."

"It were a thousand pities," cried the guest, leaping from his bed,
"that so pretty a face should look cross on my account, so I will not
keep her waiting an instant."

The gypsy smiled, as he answered, "I require no professional help from
the devil, sir, to foretell your fortune."

"No!--and what is it?"

"Honour, reputation, success: all that are ever won by a soft tongue, if
it be backed by a bold heart."

Bright and keen was the flash which shot over the countenance of the one
for whom this prediction was made, as he listened to it with a fondness
for which his reason rebuked him.

He turned aside with a sigh, which did not escape the gypsy, and bathed
his face in the water which the provident hand of the good woman had set
out for his lavations.

"Well," said his host, when the youth had finished his brief toilet,
"suppose we breathe the fresh air, while Lucy smooths your bed and
prepares the breakfast?"

"With all my heart," replied the youth, and they descended the steps
which led into the wood. It was a beautiful, fresh morning; the air was
like a draught from a Spirit's fountain, and filled the heart with new
youth and the blood with a rapturous delight; the leaves--the green,
green leaves of spring--were quivering on the trees, among which the
happy birds fluttered and breathed the gladness of their souls in song.
While the dewdrops that--

       "strewed
  A baptism o'er the flowers"--

gave back in their million mirrors the reflected smiles of the cloudless
and rejoicing sun.

"Nature," said the gypsy, "has bestowed on her children a gorgeous
present in such a morning."

"True," said the youth; "and you, of us two, perhaps only deserve it; as
for me, when I think of the long road of dust, heat, and toil, that lies
before me, I could almost wish to stop here and ask an admission into
the gypsy's tents."

"You could not do a wiser thing!" said the gypsy, gravely.

"But fate leaves me no choice," continued the youth, as seriously as
if he were in earnest; "and I must quit you immediately after I have a
second time tasted of your hospitable fare."

"If it must be so," answered the gypsy, "I will see you, at least, a
mile or two on your road." The youth thanked him for a promise which his
curiosity made acceptable, and they turned once more to the caravan.

The meal, however obtained, met with as much honour as it could possibly
have received from the farmer from whom its materials were borrowed.

It was not without complacency that the worthy pair beheld the notice
their guest lavished upon a fair, curly-headed boy of about three years
old, the sole child and idol of the gypsy potentates. But they did not
perceive, when the youth rose to depart, that he slipped into the folds
of the child's dress a ring of some value, the only one he possessed.

"And now," said he, after having thanked his entertainers for their
hospitality, "I must say good-by to your flock, and set out upon my
day's journey."

Lucy, despite her bashfulness, shook hands with her handsome guest;
and the latter, accompanied by the gypsy chief, strolled down to the
encampments.

Open and free was his parting farewell to the inmates of the two tents,
and liberal was the hand which showered upon all--especially on the
damsel who had been his Thais of the evening feast--the silver coins
which made no inconsiderable portion of his present property.

It was amidst the oracular wishes and favourable predictions of the
whole crew that he recommenced his journey with the gypsy chief.

When the tents were fairly out of sight, and not till then, King Cole
broke the silence which had as yet subsisted between them.

"I suppose, my young gentleman, that you expect to meet some of your
friends or relations at W----? I know not what they will say when they
hear where you have spent the night."

"Indeed!" said the youth; "whoever hears my adventures, relation or not,
will be delighted with my description; but in sober earnest, I expect to
find no one at W---- more my friend than a surly innkeeper, unless it be
his dog."

"Why, they surely do not suffer a stripling of your youth and evident
quality to wander alone!" cried King Cole, in undisguised surprise.

The young traveller made no prompt answer, but bent down as if to pluck
a wild-flower which grew by the road-side: after a pause, he said,--

"Nay, Master Cole, you must not set me the example of playing the
inquisitor, or you cannot guess how troublesome I shall be. To tell you
the truth, I am dying with curiosity to know something more about you
than you may be disposed to tell me: you have already confessed that,
however boon companions your gypsies may be, it is not among gypsies
that you were born and bred."

King Cole laughed: perhaps he was not ill pleased by the curiosity of
his guest, nor by the opportunity it afforded him of being his own hero.

"My story, sir," said he, "would be soon told, if you thought it worth
the hearing, nor does it contain anything which should prevent my
telling it."

"If so," quoth the youth, "I shall conceive your satisfying my request a
still greater favour than those you have already bestowed upon me."

The gypsy relaxed his pace into an indolent saunter, as he commenced:--

"The first scene that I remember was similar to that which you witnessed
last night. The savage tent, and the green moor; the fagot blaze; the
eternal pot, with its hissing note of preparation; the old dame who
tended it, and the ragged urchins who learned from its contents the
first reward of theft and the earliest temptation to it,--all these
are blended into agreeable confusion as the primal impressions of my
childhood. The woman who nurtured me as my mother was rather capricious
than kind, and my infancy passed away, like that of more favoured scions
of fortune, in alternate chastisement and caresses. In good truth,
Kinching Meg had the shrillest voice and the heaviest hand of the whole
crew; and I cannot complain of injustice, since she treated me no worse
than the rest. Notwithstanding the irregularity of my education, I grew
up strong and healthy, and my reputed mother had taught me so much fear
for herself that she left me none for anything else; accordingly, I
became bold, reckless, and adventurous, and at the age of thirteen
was as thorough a reprobate as the tribe could desire. At that time
a singular change befell me: we (that is, my mother and myself) were
begging not many miles hence at the door of a rich man's house in which
the mistress lay on her death-bed. That mistress was my real mother,
from whom Meg had stolen me in the first year of existence. Whether it
was through the fear of conscience or the hope of reward, no sooner had
Meg learnt the dangerous state of my poor mother, the constant grief,
which they said had been the sole though slow cause of her disease, and
the large sums which had been repeatedly offered for my recovery; no
sooner, I say, did Meg ascertain all these particulars than she fought
her way up to the sick-chamber, fell on her knees before the bed, owned
her crime, and produced myself. Various little proofs of time, place,
circumstance; the clothing I had worn when stolen, and which was still
preserved, joined to the striking likeness I bore to both my parents,
especially to my father, silenced all doubt and incredulity: I was
welcomed home with a joy which it is in vain to describe. My return
seemed to recall my mother from the grave; she lingered on for many
months longer than her physicians thought it possible, and when she died
her last words commended me to my father's protection."

"My surviving parent needed no such request. He lavished upon me all
that superfluity of fondness and food of which those good people who are
resolved to spoil their children are so prodigal. He could not bear the
idea of sending me to school; accordingly he took a tutor for me,--a
simple-hearted, gentle, kind man, who possessed a vast store of
learning rather curious than useful. He was a tolerable, and at least an
enthusiastic antiquarian, a more than tolerable poetaster; and he had a
prodigious budget full of old ballads and songs, which he loved
better to teach and I to learn, than all the 'Latin, Greek, geography,
astronomy, and the use of the globes,' which my poor father had so
sedulously bargained for."

"Accordingly, I became exceedingly well-informed in all the 'precious
conceits' and 'golden garlands' of our British ancients, and continued
exceedingly ignorant of everything else, save and except a few of
the most fashionable novels of the day, and the contents of six lying
volumes of voyages and travels, which flattered both my appetite for the
wonderful and my love of the adventurous. My studies, such as they were,
were not by any means suited to curb or direct the vagrant tastes my
childhood had acquired: on the contrary, the old poets, with their
luxurious description of the 'green wood' and the forest life; the
fashionable novelists, with their spirited accounts of the wanderings
of some fortunate rogue, and the ingenious travellers, with their wild
fables, so dear to the imagination of every boy, only fomented within
me a strong though secret regret at my change of life, and a restless
disgust to the tame home and bounded roamings to which I was condemned.
When I was about seventeen, my father sold his property (which he had
become possessed of in right of my mother), and transferred the purchase
money to the security of the Funds. Shortly afterwards he died; the bulk
of his fortune became mine; the remainder was settled upon a sister,
many years older than myself, whom, in consequence of her marriage and
residence in a remote part of Wales, I had never yet seen."

"Now, then, I was perfectly free and unfettered; my guardian lived in
Scotland, and left me entirely to the guidance of my tutor, who was both
too simple and too indolent to resist my inclinations. I went to London,
became acquainted with a set of most royal scamps, frequented the
theatres and the taverns, the various resorts which constitute the
gayeties of a blood just above the middle class, and was one of the
noisiest and wildest 'blades' that ever heard the 'chimes by midnight'
and the magistrate's lecture for matins. I was a sort of leader among
the jolly dogs I consorted with."

"My earlier education gave a raciness and nature to my delineations of
'life' which delighted them. But somehow or other I grew wearied of this
sort of existence. About a year after I was of age my fortune was more
than three parts spent; I fell ill with drinking and grew dull with
remorse: need I add that my comrades left me to myself? A fit of
the spleen, especially if accompanied with duns, makes one wofully
misanthropic; so, when I recovered from my illness, I set out on a tour
through Great Britain and France,--alone, and principally on foot. Oh,
the rapture of shaking off the half friends and cold formalities of
society and finding oneself all unfettered, with no companion but
Nature, no guide but youth, and no flatterer but hope!"

"Well, my young friend, I travelled for two years, and saw even in that
short time enough of this busy world to weary and disgust me with
its ordinary customs. I was not made to be polite, still less to be
ambitious. I sighed after the coarse comrades and the free tents of my
first associates; and a thousand remembrances of the gypsy wanderings,
steeped in all the green and exhilarating colours of childhood,
perpetually haunted my mind. On my return from my wanderings I found a
letter from my sister, who, having become a widow, had left Wales, and
had now fixed her residence in a well visited watering-place in the west
of England. I had never yet seen her, and her letter was a fine-ladylike
sort of epistle, with a great deal of romance and a very little sense,
written in an extremely pretty hand, and ending with a quotation from
Pope (I never could endure Pope, nor indeed any of the poets of the days
of Anne and her successors). It was a beautiful season of the year: I
had been inured to pedestrian excursions; so I set off on foot to see
my nearest surviving relative. On the way, I fell in (though on a very
different spot) with the very encampment you saw last night. By heavens,
that was a merry meeting to me! I joined, and journeyed with them for
several days: never do I remember a happier time. Then, after many years
of bondage and stiffness, and accordance with the world, I found myself
at ease, like a released bird; with what zest did I join in the rude
jokes and the knavish tricks, the stolen feasts and the roofless nights
of those careless vagabonds!"

"I left my fellow-travellers at the entrance of the town where my sister
lived. Now came the contrast. Somewhat hot, rather coarsely clad, and
covered with the dust of a long summer's day, I was ushered into a
little drawing-room, eighteen feet by twelve, as I was afterwards
somewhat pompously informed. A flaunting carpet, green, red, and yellow,
covered the floor. A full-length picture of a thin woman, looking most
agreeably ill-tempered, stared down at me from the chimney-piece;
three stuffed birds--how emblematic of domestic life!--stood stiff
and imprisoned, even after death, in a glass cage. A fire-screen and a
bright fireplace; chairs covered with holland, to preserve them from
the atmosphere; and long mirrors, wrapped as to the frame-work in
yellow muslin, to keep off the flies,--finish the panorama of this
watering-place mansion. The door opened, silks rustled, a voice shrieked
'My Brother!' and a figure, a thin figure, the original of the picture
over the chimney-piece, rushed in."

"I can well fancy her joy," said the youth.

"You can do no such thing, begging your pardon, sir," resumed King Cole.
"She had no joy at all: she was exceedingly surprised and disappointed.
In spite of my early adventures, I had nothing picturesque or romantic
about me at all. I was very thirsty, and I called for beer; I was very
tired, and I lay down on the sofa; I wore thick shoes and small buckles;
and my clothes were made God knows where, and were certainly put on God
knows how. My sister was miserably ashamed of me: she had not even the
manners to disguise it. In a higher rank of life than that which she
held she would have suffered far less mortification; for I fancy great
people pay but little real attention to externals. Even if a man of rank
is vulgar, it makes no difference in the orbit in which he moves: but
your 'genteel gentlewomen' are so terribly dependent upon what Mrs.
Tomkins will say; so very uneasy about their relations and the opinion
they are held in; and, above all, so made up of appearances and clothes;
so undone if they do not eat, drink, and talk a la mode,--that I can
fancy no shame like that of my poor sister at having found, and being
found with, a vulgar brother."

"I saw how unwelcome I was and I did not punish myself by a long visit.
I left her house and returned towards London. On my road, I again met
with my gypsy friends: the warmth of their welcome enchanted me; you
may guess the rest. I stayed with them so long that I could not bear
to leave them; I re-entered their crew: I am one among them. Not that
I have become altogether and solely of the tribe: I still leave
them whenever the whim seizes me, and repair to the great cities and
thoroughfares of man. There I am soon driven back again to my favourite
and fresh fields, as a reed upon a wild stream is dashed back upon the
green rushes from which it has been torn. You perceive that I have many
comforts and distinctions above the rest; for, alas, sir, there is no
society, however free and democratic, where wealth will not create
an aristocracy; the remnant of my fortune provides me with my
unostentatious equipage and the few luxuries it contains; it repays
secretly to the poor what my fellow-vagrants occasionally filch from
them; it allows me to curb among the crew all the grosser and heavier
offences against the law to which want might otherwise compel them;
and it serves to keep up that sway and ascendency which my superior
education and fluent spirits enabled me at first to attain. Though not
legally their king, I assume that title over the few encampments with
which I am accustomed to travel; and you perceive that I have given my
simple name both to the jocular and kingly dignity of which the old song
will often remind you. My story is done."

"Not quite," said his companion: "your wife? How came you by that
blessing?"

"Ah! thereby hangs a pretty and a love-sick tale, which would not
stand ill in an ancient ballad; but I will content myself with briefly
sketching it. Lucy is the daughter of a gentleman farmer: about four
years ago I fell in love with her. I wooed her clandestinely, and at
last I owned I was a gypsy: I did not add my birth nor fortune; no, I
was full of the romance of the Nut-brown Maid's lover, and attempted
a trial of woman's affection, which even in these days was not
disappointed. Still her father would not consent to our marriage, till
very luckily things went bad with him; corn, crops, cattle,--the deuce
was in them all; an execution was in his house, and a writ out against
his person. I settled these matters for him, and in return received a
father-in-law's blessing, and we are now the best friends in the world.
Poor Lucy is perfectly reconciled to her caravan and her wandering
husband, and has never, I believe, once repented the day on which she
became the gypsy's wife!"

"I thank you heartily for your history," said the youth, who had
listened very attentively to this detail; "and though my happiness and
pursuits are centred in that world which you despise, yet I confess that
I feel a sensation very like envy at your singular choice; and I would
not dare to ask of my heart whether that choice is not happier, as it is
certainly more philosophical, than mine."

They had now reached a part of the road where the country assumed a
totally different character; the woods and moors were no longer visible,
but a broad and somewhat bleak extent of country lay before them. Here
and there only a few solitary trees broke the uniformity of the wide
fields and scanty hedgerows, and at distant intervals the thin spires
of the scattered churches rose, like the prayers of which they were the
symbols, to mingle themselves with heaven.

The gypsy paused: "I will accompany you," said he, "no farther; your way
lies straight onwards, and you will reach W---- before noon; farewell,
and may God watch over you!"

"Farewell!" said the youth, warmly pressing the hand which was extended
to him. "If we ever meet again, it will probably solve a curious riddle;
namely, whether you are not disgusted with the caravan and I with the
world!"

"The latter is more likely than the former," said the gypsy, for one
stands a much greater chance of being disgusted with others than with
one's self; so changing a little the old lines, I will wish you adieu
after my own fashion, namely, in verse,--

  'Go, set thy heart on winged wealth,
   Or unto honour's towers aspire;
   But give me freedom and my health,
   And there's the sum of my desire!'"




CHAPTER IV.

  The letter, madam; have you none for me?--The Rendezvous.
  Provide surgeons.--Lover's Progress.

Our solitary traveller pursued his way with the light step and gay
spirits of youth and health.

"Turn gypsy, indeed!" he said, talking to himself; "there is something
better in store for me than that. Ay, I have all the world before me
where to choose--not my place of rest. No, many a long year will pass
away ere any place of rest will be my choice! I wonder whether I shall
find the letter at W----; the letter, the last letter I shall ever have
from home but it is no home to me now; and I--I, insulted, reviled,
trampled upon, without even a name--well, well, I will earn a still
fairer one than that of my forefathers. They shall be proud to own
me yet." And with these words the speaker broke off abruptly, with a
swelling chest and a flashing eye; and as, an unknown and friendless
adventurer, he gazed on the expanded and silent country around him, he
felt like Castruccio Castrucani that he could stretch his hands to the
east and to the west and exclaim, "Oh, that my power kept pace with my
spirit, then should it grasp the corners of the earth!"

The road wound at last from the champaign country, through which it had
for some miles extended itself, into a narrow lane, girded on either
side by a dead fence. As the youth entered this lane, he was somewhat
startled by the abrupt appearance of a horseman, whose steed leaped the
hedge so close to our hero as almost to endanger his safety. The rider,
a gentleman of about five-and-twenty, pulled up, and in a tone of
great courtesy apologized for his inadvertency; the apology was readily
admitted, and the horseman rode onwards in the direction of W----.

Trifling as this incident was, the air and mien of the stranger were
sufficient to arrest irresistibly the thoughts of the young traveller;
and before they had flowed into a fresh channel he found himself in the
town and at the door of the inn to which his expedition was bound. He
entered the bar; a buxom landlady and a still more buxom daughter were
presiding over the spirits of the place.

"You have some boxes and a letter for me, I believe," said the young
gentleman to the comely hostess.

"To you, sir!--the name, if you please?"

"To--to--to C---- L----," said the youth; "the initials C. L., to be
left till called for."

"Yes, sir, we have some luggage; came last night by the van; and a
letter besides, sir, to C. L. also."

The daughter lifted her large dark eyes at the handsome stranger,
and felt a wonderful curiosity to know what the letter to C. L. could
possibly be about; meanwhile mine hostess, raising her hand to a shelf
on which stood an Indian slop-basin, the great ornament of the bar at
the Golden Fleece, brought from its cavity a well-folded and well-sealed
epistle.

"That is it," cried the youth; "show me a private room instantly."

"What can he want a private room for?" thought the landlady's daughter.

"Show the gentleman to the Griffin, No. 4, John Merrylack," said the
landlady herself.

With an impatient step the owner of the letter followed a slipshod and
marvellously unwashed waiter into No. 4,--a small square asylum for town
travellers, country yeomen, and "single gentlemen;" presenting, on the
one side, an admirable engraving of the Marquis of Granby, and on the
other an equally delightful view of the stable-yard.

Mr. C. L. flung himself on a chair (there were only four chairs in No.
4), watched the waiter out of the room, seized his letter, broke open
the seal, and read--yea, reader, you shall read it too--as follows:--

"Enclosed is the sum to which you are entitled; remember, that it is all
which you can ever claim at my hands; remember also that you have made
the choice which now nothing can persuade me to alter. Be the name you
have so long iniquitously borne henceforth and always forgotten; upon
that condition you may yet hope from my generosity the future assistance
which you must want, but which you could not ask from my affection.
Equally by my heart and my reason you are forever DISOWNED."

The letter fell from the reader's hands. He took up the inclosure: it
was an order payable in London for 1,000 pounds; to him it seemed like
the rental of the Indies.

"Be it so!" he said aloud, and slowly; "be it so! With this will I carve
my way: many a name in history was built upon a worse foundation!"

With these words he carefully put up the money, re-read the brief note
which enclosed it, tore the latter into pieces, and then, going towards
the aforesaid view of the stable-yard, threw open the window and
leaned out, apparently in earnest admiration of two pigs which marched
gruntingly towards him, one goat regaling himself upon a cabbage, and a
broken-winded, emaciated horse, which having just been what the hostler
called "rubbed down," was just going to be what the hostler called
"fed."

While engaged in this interesting survey, the clatter of hoofs was
suddenly heard upon the rough pavement, a bell rang, a dog barked, the
pigs grunted, the hostler ran out, and the stranger, whom our hero had
before met on the road, trotted into the yard.

It was evident from the obsequiousness of the attendants that the
horseman was a personage of no mean importance; and indeed there was
something singularly distinguished and highbred in his air and carriage.

"Who can that be?" said the youth, as the horseman, having dismounted,
turned towards the door of the inn: the question was readily answered,
"There goes pride and poverty!" said the hostler, "Here comes Squire
Mordaunt!" said the landlady.

At the farther end of the stable-yard, through a narrow gate, the youth
caught a glimpse of the green sward and the springing flowers of a small
garden. Wearied with the sameness of No. 4 rather than with his journey,
he sauntered towards the said gate, and, seating himself in a small
arbour within the garden, surrendered himself to reflection.

The result of this self-conference was a determination to leave the
Golden Fleece by the earliest conveyance which went to that great object
and emporium of all his plans and thoughts, London. As, full of
this resolution and buried in the dream which it conjured up, he
was returning with downcast eyes and unheeding steps through the
stable-yard, to the delights of No. 4, he was suddenly accosted by a
loud and alarmed voice,--

"For God's sake, sir, look out, or--"

The sentence was broken off, the intended warning came too late, our
hero staggered back a few steps, and fell, stunned and motionless,
against the stable door. Unconsciously he had passed just behind the
heels of the stranger's horse, which being by no means in good humour
with the clumsy manoeuvres of his shampooer, the hostler, had taken
advantage of the opportunity presented to him of working off his
irritability, and had consequently inflicted a severe kick upon the
right shoulder of Mr. C. L.

The stranger, honoured by the landlady with the name and title of
Squire Mordaunt, was in the yard at the moment. He hastened towards the
sufferer, who as yet was scarcely sensible, and led him into the house.
The surgeon of the village was sent for and appeared. This disciple of
Galen, commonly known by the name of Jeremiah Bossolton, was a gentleman
considerably more inclined to breadth than length. He was exactly five
feet one inch in height, but thick and solid as a milestone; a wig of
modern cut, carefully curled and powdered, gave somewhat of a modish
and therefore unseemly grace to a solemn eye; a mouth drawn down at
the corners; a nose that had something in it exceedingly consequential;
eyebrows sage and shaggy; ears large and fiery; and a chin that would
have done honour to a mandarin. Now Mr. Jeremiah Bossolton had a certain
peculiarity of speech to which I shall find it difficult to do
justice. Nature had impressed upon his mind a prodigious love of the
grandiloquent; Mr. Bossolton, therefore, disdained the exact language of
the vulgar, and built unto himself a lofty fabric of words in which his
sense managed very frequently to lose itself. Moreover, upon beginning
a sentence of peculiar dignity, Mr. Bossolton was, it must be
confessed, sometimes at a loss to conclude it in a period worthy of the
commencement; and this caprice of nature which had endowed him with
more words than thoughts (necessity is, indeed, the mother of invention)
drove him into a very ingenious method of remedying the deficiency; this
was simply the plan of repeating the sense by inverting the sentence.

"How long a period of time," said Mr. Bossolton, "has elapsed since
this deeply-to-be-regretted and seriously-to-be-investigated accident
occurred?"

"Not many minutes," said Mordaunt; "make no further delay, I beseech
you, but examine the arm; it is not broken, I trust?"

"In this world, Mr. Mordaunt," said the practitioner, bowing very low,
for the person he addressed was of the most ancient lineage in the
county, "in this world, Mr. Mordaunt, even at the earliest period of
civilization, delay in matters of judgment has ever been considered of
such vital importance, and--and such important vitality, that we find
it inculcated in the proverbs of the Greeks and the sayings of the
Chaldeans as a principle of the most expedient utility, and--and--the
most useful expediency!"

"Mr. Bossolton," said Mordaunt, in a tone of remarkable and even
artificial softness and civility, "have the kindness immediately to
examine this gentleman's bruises."

Mr. Bossolton looked up to the calm but haughty face of the speaker,
and without a moment's hesitation proceeded to handle the arm, which was
already stripped for his survey.

"It frequently occurs," said Mr. Bossolton, "in the course of my
profession, that the forcible, sudden, and vehement application of any
hard substance, like the hoof of a quadruped, to the soft, tender,
and carniferous parts of the human frame, such as the arm, occasions a
pain--a pang, I should rather say--of the intensest acuteness, and--and
of the acutest intensity."

"Pray, Mr. Bossolton, is the bone broken?" asked Mordaunt.

By this time the patient, who had been hitherto in that languor which
extreme pain always produces at first, especially on young frames, was
sufficiently recovered to mark and reply to the kind solicitude of
the last speaker: "I thank you, sir," said he with a smile, "for your
anxiety, but I feel that the bone is not broken; the muscles are a
little hurt, that is all."

"Young gentleman," said Mr. Bossolton, "you must permit me to say that
they who have all their lives been employed in the pursuit, and the
investigation, and the analysis of certain studies are in general better
acquainted with those studies than they who have neither given them any
importance of consideration--nor--nor any consideration of importance.
Establishing this as my hypothesis, I shall now proceed to--"

"Apply immediate remedies, if you please, Mr. Bossolton," interrupted
Mr. Mordaunt, in that sweet and honeyed tone which somehow or other
always silenced even the garrulous practitioner.

Driven into taciturnity, Mr. Bossolton again inspected the arm, and
proceeded to urge the application of liniments and bandages, which he
promised to prepare with the most solicitudinous despatch and the most
despatchful solicitude.




CHAPTER V.

  Your name, Sir!
     Ha! my name, you say--my name?
  'T is well--my name--is--nay, I must consider.--Pedrillo.

This accident occasioned a delay of some days in the plans of the young
gentleman, for whom we trust very soon, both for our own convenience and
that of our reader, to find a fitting appellation.

Mr. Mordaunt, after seeing every attention paid to him both surgical
and hospitable, took his departure with a promise to call the next day;
leaving behind him a strong impression of curiosity and interest to
serve our hero as some mental occupation until his return. The bonny
landlady came up in a new cap, with blue ribbons, in the course of the
evening, to pay a visit of inquiry to the handsome patient, who was
removed from the Griffin, No. 4, to the Dragon, No. 8,--a room whose
merits were exactly in proportion to its number, namely, twice as great
as those of No. 4.

"Well, sir," said Mrs. Taptape, with a courtesy, "I trust you find
yourself better."

"At this moment I do," said the gallant youth, with a significant air.

"Hem," quoth the landlady.

A pause ensued. In spite of the compliment, a certain suspicion suddenly
darted across the mind of the hostess. Strong as are the prepossessions
of the sex, those of the profession are much stronger.

"Honest folk," thought the landlady, "don't travel with their initials
only; the last 'Whitehall Evening' was full of shocking accounts of
swindlers and cheats; and I gave nine pounds odd shillings for the
silver teapot John has brought him up,--as if the delft one was not good
enough for a foot traveller!"

Pursuing these ideas, Mrs. Taptape, looking bashfully down, said,--

"By the by, sir; Mr. Bossolton asked me what name he should put down in
his book for the medicines; what would you please me to say, sir?"

"Mr. who?" said the youth, elevating his eyebrows.

"Mr. Bossolton, sir, the apothecary."

"Oh! Bossolton! very odd name that,--not near so pretty as--dear me,
what a beautiful cap that is of yours!" said the young gentleman.

"Lord, sir, do you think so? The ribbon is pretty enough; but--but, as
I was saying, what name shall I tell Mr. Bossolton to put in his book?"
"This," thought Mrs. Taptape, "is coming to the point."

"Well!" said the youth, slowly, and as if in a profound reverie, "well,
Bossolton is certainly the most singular name I ever heard; he does
right to put it in a book: it is quite a curiosity! is he clever?"

"Very, sir," said the landlady, somewhat sharply; "but it is your name,
not his, that he wishes to put into his book."

"Mine?" said the youth, who appeared to have been seeking to gain time
in order to answer a query which most men find requires very little
deliberation, "mine, you say; my name is Linden--Clarence Linden--you
understand?"

"What a pretty name!" thought the landlady's daughter, who was listening
at the keyhole; "but how could he admire that odious cap of Ma's!"

"And, now, landlady, I wish you would send up my boxes; and get me a
newspaper, if you please."

"Yes, sir," said the landlady, and she rose to retire.

"I do not think," said the youth to himself, "that I could have hit on a
prettier name, and so novel a one too!--Clarence Linden,--why, if I were
that pretty girl at the bar I could fall in love with the very words.
Shakspeare was quite wrong when he said,--

  'A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.'"

"A rose by any name would not smell as sweet; if a rose's name was
Jeremiah Bossolton, for instance, it would not, to my nerves at least,
smell of anything but an apothecary's shop!"

When Mordaunt called the next morning, he found Clarence much better,
and carelessly turning over various books, part of the contents of the
luggage superscribed C. L. A book of whatever description was among the
few companions for whom Mordaunt had neither fastidiousness nor reserve;
and the sympathy of taste between him and the sufferer gave rise to
a conversation less cold and commonplace than it might otherwise have
been. And when Mordaunt, after a stay of some length, rose to depart,
he pressed Linden to return his visit before he left that part of the
country; his place, he added, was only about five miles distant from
W----. Linden, greatly interested in his visitor, was not slow in
accepting the invitation, and, perhaps for the first time in his life,
Mordaunt was shaking hands with a stranger he had only known two days.




CHAPTER VI.

  While yet a child, and long before his time,
  He had perceived the presence and the power
  Of greatness.
 .....
  But eagerly he read, and read again.
 .....
     Yet still uppermost
  Nature was at his heart, as if he felt,
  Though yet he knew not how, a wasting power
  In all things that from her sweet influence
  Might seek to wean him. Therefore with her hues,
  Her forms, and with the spirit of her forms,
  He clothed the nakedness of austere truth.
                      WORDSWORTH.

Algernon Mordaunt was the last son of an old and honourable race, which
had centuries back numbered princes in its line. His parents had had
many children, but all (save Algernon, the youngest) died in their
infancy. His mother perished in giving him birth. Constitutional
infirmity and the care of mercenary nurses contributed to render
Algernon a weakly and delicate child: hence came a taste for loneliness
and a passion for study; and from these sprung, on the one hand, the
fastidiousness and reserve which render us apparently unamiable, and, on
the other, the loftiness of spirit and the kindness of heart which are
the best and earliest gifts of literature, and more than counterbalance
our deficiencies in the "minor morals" due to society by their tendency
to increase our attention to the greater ones belonging to mankind. Mr.
Mordaunt was a man of luxurious habits and gambling propensities: wedded
to London, he left the house of his ancestors to moulder into desertion
and decay; but to this home Algernon was constantly consigned during
his vacations from school; and its solitude and cheerlessness gave to
a disposition naturally melancholy and thoughtful those colours which
subsequent events were calculated to deepen, not efface.

Truth obliges us to state, despite our partiality to Mordaunt, that,
when he left his school after a residence of six years, it was with the
bitter distinction of having been the most unpopular boy in it. Why,
nobody could exactly explain, for his severest enemies could not accuse
him of ill-nature, cowardice, or avarice, and these make the three
capital offences of a school-boy; but Algernon Mordaunt had already
acquired the knowledge of himself, and could explain the cause, though
with a bitter and swelling heart. His ill health, his long residence at
home, his unfriended and almost orphan situation, his early habits of
solitude and reserve, all these, so calculated to make the spirit shrink
within itself, made him, on his entrance at school, if not unsocial,
appear so: this was the primary reason of his unpopularity; the second
was that he perceived, for he was sensitive (and consequently acute) to
the extreme, the misfortune of his manner, and in his wish to rectify
it, it became doubly unprepossessing; to reserve, it now added
embarrassment, to coldness, gloom; and the pain he felt in addressing or
being addressed by another was naturally and necessarily reciprocal, for
the effects of sympathy are nowhere so wonderful, yet so invisible, as
in the manners.

By degrees he shunned the intercourse which had for him nothing but
distress, and his volatile acquaintances were perhaps the first to set
him the example. Often in his solitary walks he stopped afar off to gaze
upon the sports which none ever solicited him to share; and as the shout
of laughter and of happy hearts came, peal after peal, upon his ear, he
turned enviously, yet not malignantly away, with tears, which not all
his pride could curb, and muttered to himself, "And these, these hate
me!"

There are two feelings common to all high or affectionate natures,--that
of extreme susceptibility to opinion and that of extreme bitterness at
its injustice. These feelings were Mordaunt's: but the keen edge which
one blow injures, the repetition blunts; and by little and little,
Algernon became not only accustomed, but, as he persuaded himself,
indifferent, to his want of popularity; his step grew more lofty, and
his address more collected, and that which was once diffidence gradually
hardened into pride.

His residence at the University was neither without honour nor profit.
A college life was then, as now, either the most retired or the most
social of all others; we need scarcely say which it was to Mordaunt, but
his was the age when solitude is desirable, and when the closet forms
the mind better than the world. Driven upon itself, his intellect became
inquiring and its resources profound; admitted to their inmost recesses,
he revelled among the treasures of ancient lore, and in his dreams of
the Nymph and Naiad, or his researches after truth in the deep wells of
the Stagyrite or the golden fountains of Plato, he forgot the loneliness
of his lot and exhausted the hoarded enthusiasm of his soul.

But his mind, rather thoughtful than imaginative, found no idol like
"Divine Philosophy." It delighted to plunge itself into the mazes of
metaphysical investigation; to trace the springs of the intellect; to
connect the arcana of the universe; to descend into the darkest caverns,
or to wind through the minutest mysteries of Nature, and rise, step
by step, to that arduous elevation on which Thought stands dizzy and
confused, looking beneath upon a clouded earth, and above upon an
unfathomable heaven.

Rarely wandering from his chamber, known personally to few and
intimately by none, Algernon yet left behind him at the University
the most remarkable reputation of his day. He had obtained some of the
highest of academical honours, and by that proverbial process of vulgar
minds which ever frames the magnificent from the unknown, the seclusion
in which he lived and the recondite nature of his favourite pursuits
attached to his name a still greater celebrity and interest than all the
orthodox and regular dignities he had acquired. There are few men who
do not console themselves for not being generally loved, if they can
reasonably hope that they are generally esteemed. Mordaunt had now grown
reconciled to himself and to his kind. He had opened to his interest a
world in his own breast, and it consoled him for his mortification in
the world without. But, better than this, his habits as well as studies
had strengthened the principles and confirmed the nobility of his mind.
He was not, it is true, more kind, more benevolent, more upright than
before; but those virtues now emanated from principle, not emotion:
and principle to the mind is what a free constitution is to a people;
without that principle or that free constitution, the one may be for
the moment as good, the other as happy; but we cannot tell how long the
goodness and the happiness will continue.

On leaving the University, his father sent for him to London. He stayed
there a short time, and mingled partially in its festivities; but the
pleasures of English dissipation have for a century been the same,
heartless without gayety, and dull without refinement. Nor could
Mordaunt, the most fastidious, yet warm-hearted of human beings,
reconcile either his tastes or his affections to the cold insipidities
of patrician society. His father's habits and evident distresses
deepened his disgust to his situation; for the habits were incurable and
the distresses increasing; and nothing but a circumstance which Mordaunt
did not then understand prevented the final sale of an estate already
little better than a pompons incumbrance.

It was therefore with the half painful, half pleasurable sensation with
which we avoid contemplating a ruin we cannot prevent that Mordaunt
set out upon that Continental tour deemed then so necessary a part of
education. His father, on taking leave of him, seemed deeply affected.
"Go, my son," said he, "may God bless you, and not punish me too
severely. I have wronged you deeply, and I cannot bear to look upon your
face."

To these words Algernon attached a general, but they cloaked a peculiar,
meaning: in three years, he returned to England; his father had been
dead some months, and the signification of his parting address was
already deciphered,--but of this hereafter.

In his travels Mordaunt encountered an Englishman whose name I will not
yet mention: a person of great reputed wealth; a merchant, yet a man
of pleasure; a voluptuary in life, yet a saint in reputation; or, to
abstain from the antithetical analysis of a character which will not
be corporeally presented to the reader till our tale is considerably
advanced, one who drew from nature a singular combination of shrewd
but false conclusions, and a peculiar philosophy, destined hereafter to
contrast the colours and prove the practical utility of that which was
espoused by Mordaunt.

There can be no education in which the lessons of the world do not form
a share. Experience, in expanding Algernon's powers, had ripened his
virtues. Nor had the years which had converted knowledge into wisdom
failed in imparting polish to refinement. His person had acquired a
greater grace, and his manners an easier dignity than before. His noble
and generous mind had worked its impress upon his features and his mien;
and those who could overcome the first coldness and shrinking hauteur of
his address found it required no minute examination to discover the real
expression of the eloquent eye and the kindling lip.

He had not been long returned before he found two enemies to his
tranquillity,--the one was love, the other appeared in the more
formidable guise of a claimant to his estate. Before Algernon was aware
of the nature of the latter he went to consult with his lawyer.

"If the claim be just, I shall not, of course, proceed to law," said
Mordaunt.

"But without the estate, sir, you have nothing!"

"True," said Algernon, calmly.

But the claim was not just, and to law he went.

In this lawsuit, however, he had one assistant in an old relation, who
had seen, indeed, but very little of him, but who compassionated his
circumstances, and above all hated his opponent. This relation was rich
and childless; and there were not wanting those who predicted that his
money would ultimately discharge the mortgages and repair the house of
the young representative of the Mordaunt honours. But the old kinsman
was obstinate, self-willed, and under the absolute dominion of patrician
pride; and it was by no means improbable that the independence of
Mordaunt's character would soon create a disunion between them, by
clashing against the peculiarities of his relation's temper.

It was a clear and sunny morning when Linden, tolerably recovered of his
hurt, set out upon a sober and aged pony, which after some natural pangs
of shame he had hired of his landlord, to Mordaunt Court.

Mordaunt's house was situated in the midst of a wild and extensive park,
surrounded with woods, and interspersed with trees of the stateliest
growth, now scattered into irregular groups, now marshalled into
sweeping avenues; while, ever and anon, Linden caught glimpses of
a rapid and brawling rivulet, which in many a slight but sounding
waterfall gave a music strange and spirit-like to the thick copses and
forest glades through which it went exulting on its way. The deer lay
half concealed by the fern among which they couched, turning their
stately crests towards the stranger, but not stirring from their rest;
while from the summit of beeches which would have shamed the pavilion
of Tityrus the rooks--those monks of the feathered people--were loud in
their confused but not displeasing confabulations.

As Linden approached the house, he was struck with the melancholy air
of desolation which spread over and around it: fragments of stone,
above which clomb the rank weed, insolently proclaiming the triumph of
Nature's meanest offspring over the wrecks of art; a moat dried up; a
railing once of massive gilding, intended to fence a lofty terrace on
the right from the incursions of the deer, but which, shattered and
decayed, now seemed to ask with the satirist,--

  "To what end did our lavish ancestors
   Erect of old these stately piles of ours?"

--a chapel on the left, perfectly in ruins,--all appeared strikingly
to denote that time had outstripped fortune, and that the years, which
alike hallow and destroy, had broken the consequence, in deepening the
antiquity, of the House of Mordaunt.

The building itself agreed but too well with the tokens of decay around
it; most of the windows were shut up, and the shutters of dark oak,
richly gilt, contrasted forcibly with the shattered panes and mouldered
framing of the glass. It was a house of irregular architecture.
Originally built in the fifteenth century, it had received its last
improvement, with the most lavish expense, during the reign of Anne; and
it united the Gallic magnificence of the latter period with the strength
and grandeur of the former; it was in a great part overgrown with ivy,
and, where that insidious ornament had not reached, the signs of decay,
and even ruin, were fully visible. The sun itself, bright and cheering
as it shone over Nature, making the green sod glow like emeralds, and
the rivulet flash in its beam, like one of those streams of real light,
imagined by Swedenborg in his visions of heaven, and clothing tree and
fell, brake and hillock, with the lavish hues of infant summer,--the sun
itself only made more desolate, because more conspicuous, the venerable
fabric, which the youthful traveller frequently paused more accurately
to survey, and its laughing and sportive beams playing over chink and
crevice, seemed almost as insolent and untimeous as the mirth of the
young mocking the silent grief of some gray-headed and solitary mourner.

Clarence had now reached the porch, and the sound of the shrill bell he
touched rang with a strange note through the general stillness of the
place. A single servant appeared, and ushered Clarence through a screen
hall, hung round with relics of armour, and ornamented on the side
opposite the music gallery with a solitary picture of gigantic size, and
exhibiting the full length of the gaunt person and sable steed of that
Sir Piers de Mordaunt who had so signalized himself in the field in
which Henry of Richmond changed his coronet for a crown. Through this
hall Clarence was led to a small chamber clothed with uncouth and
tattered arras, in which, seemingly immersed in papers, he found the
owner of the domain.

"Your studies," said Linden, after the salutations of the day, "seem to
harmonize with the venerable antiquity of your home;" and he pointed to
the crabbed characters and faded ink of the papers on the table.

"So they ought," answered Mordaunt, with a faint smile; "for they are
called from their quiet archives in order to support my struggle for
that home. But I fear the struggle is in vain, and that the quibbles of
law will transfer into other hands a possession I am foolish enough to
value the more from my inability to maintain it."

Something of this Clarence had before learned from the communicative
gossip of his landlady; and less desirous to satisfy his curiosity than
to lead the conversation from a topic which he felt must be so unwelcome
to Mordaunt, he expressed a wish to see the state apartments of the
house. With something of shame at the neglect they had necessarily
experienced, and something of pride at the splendour which no neglect
could efface, Mordaunt yielded to the request, and led the way up a
staircase of black oak, the walls and ceiling of which were covered with
frescoes of Italian art, to a suite of apartments in which time and dust
seemed the only tenants. Lingeringly did Clarence gaze upon the rich
velvet, the costly mirrors, the motley paintings of a hundred ancestors,
and the antique cabinets, containing, among the most hoarded relics of
the Mordaunt race, curiosities which the hereditary enthusiasm of a line
of cavaliers had treasured as the most sacred of heirlooms, and which,
even to the philosophical mind of Mordaunt, possessed a value he did not
seek too minutely to analyze. Here was the goblet from which the first
prince of Tudor had drunk after the field of Bosworth. Here the ring
with which the chivalrous Francis the First had rewarded a signal feat
of that famous Robert de Mordaunt, who, as a poor but adventurous
cadet of the house, had brought to the "first gentleman of France"
the assistance of his sword. Here was the glove which Sir Walter had
received from the royal hand of Elizabeth, and worn in the lists upon
a crest which the lance of no antagonist in that knightly court could
abase. And here, more sacred than all, because connected with the memory
of misfortune, was a small box of silver which the last king of a fated
line had placed in the hands of the gray-headed descendant of that Sir
Walter after the battle of the Boyne, saying, "Keep this, Sir Everard
Mordaunt, for the sake of one who has purchased the luxury of gratitude
at the price of a throne!"

As Clarence glanced from these relics to the figure of Mordaunt, who
stood at a little distance leaning against the window, with arms folded
on his breast and with eyes abstractedly wandering over the noble woods
and extended park, which spread below, he could not but feel that if
birth had indeed the power of setting its seal upon the form, it was
never more conspicuous than in the broad front and lofty air of the last
descendant of the race by whose memorials he was surrounded. Touched by
the fallen fortunes of Mordaunt, and interested by the uncertainty which
the chances of law threw over his future fate, Clarence could not resist
exclaiming, with some warmth and abruptness,--

"And by what subterfuge or cavil does the present claimant of these
estates hope to dislodge their rightful possessor?"

"Why," answered Mordaunt, "it is a long story in detail, but briefly
told in epitome. My father was a man whose habits greatly exceeded
his fortune, and a few months after his death, Mr. Vavasour, a distant
relation, produced a paper, by which it appeared that my father had,
for a certain sum of ready money, disposed of his estates to this Mr.
Vavasour, upon condition that they should not be claimed nor the treaty
divulged till after his death; the reason for this proviso seems to
have been the shame my father felt for his exchange, and his fear of the
censures of that world to which he was always devoted."

"But how unjust to you!" said Clarence.

"Not so much so as it seems," said Mordaunt, deprecatingly; "for I was
then but a sickly boy, and according to the physicians, and I sincerely
believe according also to my poor father's belief, almost certain of a
premature death. In that case Vavasour would have been the nearest heir;
and this expectancy, by the by, joined to the mortgages on the property,
made the sum given ridiculously disproportioned to the value of the
estate. I must confess that the news came upon me like a thunderbolt.
I should have yielded up possession immediately, but was informed by my
lawyers that my father had no legal right to dispose of the property;
the discussion of that right forms the ground of the present lawsuit.
But," continued Mordaunt, proudly, yet mournfully, "I am prepared for
the worst; if, indeed, I should call that the worst which can affect
neither intellect nor health nor character nor conscience."

Clarence was silent, and Mordaunt after a brief pause once more resumed
his guidance. Their tour ended in a large library filled with books, and
this Mordaunt informed his guest was his chosen sitting-room.

An old carved table was covered with works which for the most part
possessed for the young mind of Clarence, more accustomed to imagine
than reflect, but a very feeble attraction; on looking over them, he,
however, found, half hid by a huge folio of Hobbes, and another of
Locke, a volume of Milton's poems; this paved the way to a conversation
in which both had an equal interest, for both were enthusiastic in the
character and genius of that wonderful man, for whom "the divine and
solemn countenance of Freedom" was dearer than the light of day, and
whose solitary spell, accomplishing what the whole family of earth
once vainly began upon the plain of Shinar, has built of materials more
imperishable than "slime and brick" "a city and a tower whose summit has
reached to heaven."

It was with mutual satisfaction that Mordaunt and his guest continued
their commune till the hour of dinner was announced to them by a bell,
which, formerly intended as an alarum, now served the peaceful purpose
of a more agreeable summons.

The same servant who had admitted Clarence ushered them through the
great hall into the dining-room, and was their solitary attendant during
their repast.

The temper of Mordaunt was essentially grave and earnest, and his
conversation almost invariably took the tone of his mind; this made
their conference turn upon less minute and commonplace topics than one
between such new acquaintances, especially of different ages, usually
does.

"You will positively go to London to-morrow, then?" said Mordaunt, as
the servant, removing the appurtenances of dinner, left them alone.

"Positively," answered Clarence. "I go there to carve my own fortunes,
and, to say truth, I am impatient to begin." Mordaunt looked earnestly
at the frank face of the speaker, and wondered that one so young, so
well-educated, and, from his air and manner, evidently of gentle blood,
should appear so utterly thrown upon his own resources.

"I wish you success," said he, after a pause; "and it is a noble part
of the organization of this world that, by increasing those riches which
are beyond fortune, we do in general take the surest method of obtaining
those which are in its reach."

Clarence looked inquiringly at Mordaunt, who, perceiving it, continued,
"I see that I should explain myself further. I will do so by using the
thoughts of a mind not the least beautiful and accomplished which this
country has produced. 'Of all which belongs to us,' said Bolingbroke,
'the least valuable parts can alone fall under the will of others.
Whatever is best is safest; lies out of the reach of human power; can
neither be given nor taken away. Such is this great and beautiful work
of Nature, the world. Such is the mind of man, which contemplates
and admires the world whereof it makes the noblest part. These are
inseparably ours, and as long as we remain in one we shall enjoy the
other.'"

"Beautiful, indeed!" exclaimed Clarence, with the enthusiasm of a young
and pure heart, to which every loftier sentiment is always beautiful.

"And true as beautiful!" said Mordaunt. "Nor is this all, for the mind
can even dispense with that world 'of which it forms a part' if we can
create within it a world still more inaccessible to chance. But (and I
now return to and explain my former observation) the means by which we
can effect this peculiar world can be rendered equally subservient to
our advancement and prosperity in that which we share in common with
our race; for the riches which by the aid of wisdom we heap up in the
storehouses of the mind are, though not the only, the most customary
coin by which external prosperity is bought. So that the philosophy
which can alone give independence to ourselves becomes; under the name
of honesty, the best policy in commerce with our kind."

In conversation of this nature, which the sincerity and lofty enthusiasm
of Mordaunt rendered interesting to Clarence, despite the distaste
to the serious so ordinary to youth, the hours passed on, till the
increasing evening warned Linden to depart.

"Adieu!" said he to Mordaunt. "I know not when we shall meet again,
but if we ever do, I will make it my boast, whether in prosperity or
misfortune, not to have forgotten the pleasure I have this day enjoyed!"

Returning his guest's farewell with a warmth unusual to his manner,
Mordaunt followed him to the door and saw him depart.

Fate ordained that they should pursue in very different paths their
several destinies; nor did it afford them an opportunity of meeting
again, till years and events had severely tried the virtue of one and
materially altered the prospects of the other.

The next morning Clarence Linden was on his road to London.




CHAPTER VII.

     "Upon my word," cries Jones, "thou art a very odd fellow,
     and I like thy humour extremely."--FIELDING.

The rumbling and jolting vehicle which conveyed Clarence to the
metropolis stopped at the door of a tavern in Holborn. Linden was
ushered into a close coffee-room and presented with a bill of fare.
While he was deliberating between the respective merits of mutton chops
and beefsteaks, a man with a brown coat, brown breeches, and a brown
wig, walked into the room; he cast a curious glance at Clarence and then
turned to the waiter.

"A pair of slippers!"

"Yes, sir," and the waiter disappeared.

"I suppose," said the brown gentleman to Clarence, "I suppose, sir, you
are the gentleman just come to town?"

"You are right, sir," said Clarence.

"Very well, very well indeed," resumed the stranger, musingly. "I took
the liberty of looking at your boxes in the passage; I knew a lady, sir,
a relation of yours, I think."

"Sir!" exclaimed Linden, colouring violently.

"At least I suppose, for her name was just the same as yours, only, at
least, one letter difference between them: yours is Linden I see, sir;
hers was Minden. Am I right in my conjecture that you are related to
her?"

"Sir," answered Clarence, gravely, "notwithstanding the similarity of
our names, we are not related."

"Very extraordinary," replied the stranger.

"Very," repeated Linden.

"I had the honour, sir," said the brown gentleman, "to make Mrs. Minden
many presents of value, and I should have been very happy to have
obliged you in the same manner, had you been in any way connected with
that worthy gentlewoman."

"You are very kind," said Linden, "you are very kind; and since such
were your intentions, I believe I must have been connected with
Mrs. Minden. At all events, as you justly observe, there is only the
difference of a letter between our names, a discrepancy too slight, I am
sure, to alter your benevolent intentions."

Here the waiter returned with the slippers.

The stranger slowly unbuttoned his gaiters. "Sir," said he to Linden,
"we will renew our conversation presently."

No sooner had the generous friend of Mrs. Minden deposited his feet in
their easy tenements than he quitted the room. "Pray," said Linden
to the waiter, when he had ordered his simple repast, "who is that
gentleman in brown?"

"Mr. Brown," replied the waiter.

"And who or what is Mr. Brown?" asked our hero.

Before the waiter could reply, Mr. Brown returned, with a large bandbox,
carefully enveloped in a blue handkerchief. "You come from ----, sir?"
said Mr. Brown, quietly seating himself at the same table as Linden.

"No, sir, I do not."

"From ----, then?"

"No, sir,--from W----."

"W----?--ay--well. I knew a lady with a name very like W---- (the late
Lady Waddilove) extremely well. I made her some valuable presents: her
ladyship was very sensible of it."

"I don't doubt it, sir," replied Clarence; "such instances of general
beneficence rarely occur!"

"I have some magnificent relics of her ladyship in this box," returned
Mr. Brown.

"Really! then she was no less generous than yourself, I presume?"

"Yes, her ladyship was remarkably generous. About a week before she died
(the late Lady Waddilove was quite sensible of her danger), she called
me to her,--'Brown,' said she, 'you are a good creature; I have had my
most valuable things from you. I am not ungrateful: I will leave you--my
maid! She is as clever as you are and as good.' I took the hint, sir,
and married. It was an excellent bargain. My wife is a charming woman;
she entirely fitted up Mrs. Minden's wardrobe and I furnished the house.
Mrs. Minden was greatly indebted to us."

"Heaven help me!" thought Clarence, "the man is certainly mad."

The waiter entered with the dinner; and Mr. Brown, who seemed to have a
delicate aversion to any conversation in the presence of the Ganymede
of the Holborn tavern, immediately ceased his communications; meanwhile,
Clarence took the opportunity to survey him more minutely than he had
hitherto done.

His new acquaintance was in age about forty-eight; in stature, rather
under the middle height; and thin, dried, withered, yet muscular withal,
like a man who, in stinting his stomach for the sake of economy, does
not the less enjoy the power of undergoing any fatigue or exertion that
an object of adequate importance may demand. We have said already that
he was attired, like twilight, "in a suit of sober brown;" and there
was a formality, a precision, and a cat-like sort of cleanliness in
his garb, which savoured strongly of the respectable coxcombry of the
counting-house. His face was lean, it is true, but not emaciated; and
his complexion, sallow and adust, harmonized well with the colours of
his clothing. An eye of the darkest hazel, sharp, shrewd, and flashing
at times, especially at the mention of the euphonious name of Lady
Waddilove,--a name frequently upon the lips of the inheritor of her
abigail,--with a fire that might be called brilliant, was of that
modest species which can seldom encounter the straightforward glance
of another; on the contrary, it seemed restlessly uneasy in any settled
place, and wandered from ceiling to floor, and corner to corner, with
an inquisitive though apparently careless glance, as if seeking for
something to admire or haply to appropriate; it also seemed to be the
especial care of Mr. Brown to veil, as far as he was able, the vivacity
of his looks beneath an expression of open and unheeding good-nature, an
expression strangely enough contrasting with the closeness and sagacity
which Nature had indelibly stamped upon features pointed, aquiline, and
impressed with a strong mixture of the Judaical physiognomy. The manner
and bearing of this gentleman partook of the same undecided character
as his countenance: they seemed to be struggling between civility and
importance; a real eagerness to make the acquaintance of the person
he addressed, and an assumed recklessness of the advantages which that
acquaintance could bestow;--it was like the behaviour of a man who is
desirous of having the best possible motives imputed to him, but is
fearful lest that desire should not be utterly fulfilled. At the first
glance you would have pledged yourself for his respectability; at the
second, you would have half suspected him to be a rogue; and, after you
had been half an hour in his company, you would confess yourself in the
obscurest doubt which was the better guess, the first or the last.

"Waiter!" said Mr. Brown, looking enviously at the viands upon which
Linden, having satisfied his curiosity, was now with all the appetite of
youth regaling himself. "Waiter!"

"Yes, sir!"

"Bring me a sandwich--and--and, waiter, see that I have plenty
of--plenty of--"

"What, sir?"

"Plenty of mustard, waiter."

"Mustard" (and here Mr. Brown addressed himself to Clarence) "is a very
wonderful assistance to the digestion. By the by, sir, if you want any
curiously fine mustard, I can procure you some pots quite capital,--a
great favour, though,--they were smuggled from France, especially for
the use of the late Lady Waddilove."

"Thank you," said Linden, dryly; "I shall be very happy to accept
anything you may wish to offer me."

Mr. Brown took a pocket-book from his pouch. "Six pots of mustard,
sir,--shall I say six?"

"As many as you please," replied Clarence; and Mr. Brown wrote down "Six
pots of French mustard."

"You are a very young gentleman, sir," said Mr. Brown, "probably
intended for some profession: I don't mean to be impertinent, but if I
can be of any assistance--"

"You can, sir," replied Linden, "and immediately--have the kindness to
ring the bell."

Mr. Brown, with a grave smile, did as he was desired; the waiter
re-entered, and, receiving a whispered order from Clarence, again
disappeared.

"What profession did you say, sir?" renewed Mr. Brown, artfully.

"None!" replied Linden.

"Oh, very well,--very well indeed. Then as an idle, independent
gentleman, you will of course be a bit of a beau; want some shirts,
possibly; fine cravats, too; gentlemen wear a particular pattern now;
gloves, gold, or shall I say gilt chain, watch and seals, a ring or two,
and a snuff-box?"

"Sir, you are vastly obliging," said Clarence, in undisguised surprise.

"Not at all, I would do anything for a relation of Mrs. Minden."

The waiter re-entered; "Sir," said he to Linden, "your room is quite
ready."

"I am glad to hear it," said Clarence, rising. "Mr. Brown, I have the
honour of wishing you a good evening."

"Stay, sir--stay; you have not looked into these things belonging to the
late Lady Waddilove."

"Another time," said Clarence, hastily.

"To-morrow, at ten o'clock," muttered Mr. Brown.

"I am exceedingly glad I have got rid of that fellow," said Linden to
himself, as he stretched his limbs in his easy-chair, and drank off
the last glass of his pint of port. "If I have not already seen, I have
already guessed, enough of the world, to know that you are to look to
your pockets when a man offers you a present; they who 'give,' also
'take away.' So here I am in London, with an order for 1000 pounds in my
purse, the wisdom of Dr. Latinas in my head, and the health of eighteen
in my veins; will it not be my own fault if I do not both enjoy and make
myself--"

And then, yielding to meditations of future success, partaking strongly
of the inexperienced and sanguine temperament of the soliloquist,
Clarence passed the hours till his pillow summoned him to dreams no less
ardent and perhaps no less unreal.




CHAPTER VIII.

     "Oh, how I long to be employed!"--Every Man in his Humour.

Clarence was sitting the next morning over the very unsatisfactory
breakfast which tea made out of broomsticks, and cream out of chalk
(adulteration thrived even in 17--) afforded, when the waiter threw open
the door and announced Mr. Brown.

"Just in time, sir, you perceive," said Mr. Brown; "I am punctuality
itself: exactly a quarter of a minute to ten. I have brought you the
pots of French mustard, and I have some very valuable articles which you
must want, besides."

"Thank you, sir," said Linden, not well knowing what to say; and Mr.
Brown, untying a silk handkerchief, produced three shirts, two pots
of pomatum, a tobacco canister with a German pipe, four pair of silk
stockings, two gold seals, three rings, and a stuffed parrot!

"Beautiful articles these, sir," said Mr. Brown, with a snuffle "of
inward sweetness long drawn out," and expressive of great admiration of
his offered treasures; "beautiful articles, sir, ar'n't they?"

"Very, the parrot in particular," said Clarence.

"Yes, sir," returned Mr. Brown, "the parrot is indeed quite a jewel; it
belonged to the late Lady Waddilove; I offer it to you with considerable
regret, for--"

"Oh!" interrupted Clarence, "pray do not rob yourself of such a jewel;
it really is of no use to me."

"I know that, sir,--I know that," replied Mr. Brown; "but it will be of
use to your friends; it will be inestimable to any old aunt, sir, any
maiden lady living at Hackney, any curious elderly gentleman fond of a
knack-knack. I knew you would know some one to send it to as a present,
even though you should not want it yourself."

"Bless me!" thought Linden, "was there ever such generosity? Not content
with providing for my wants, he extends his liberality even to any
possible relations I may possess!"

Mr. Brown now re-tied "the beautiful articles" in his handkerchief.
"Shall I leave them, sir?" said he.

"Why, really," said Clarence, "I thought yesterday that you were in
jest; but you must be aware that I cannot accept presents from any
gentleman so much,--so much a stranger to me as you are."

"No, sir, I am aware of that," replied Mr. Brown; "and in order to
remove the unpleasantness of such a feeling, sir, on your part,--merely
in order to do that, I assure you with no other view, sir, in the
world,--I have just noted down the articles on this piece of paper; but
as you will perceive, at a price so low as still to make them actually
presents in everything but the name. Oh, sir, I perfectly understand
your delicacy, and would not for the world violate it."

So saying, Mr. Brown put a paper into Linden's hands, the substance
of which a very little more experience of the world would have enabled
Clarence to foresee; it ran thus:--

  CLARENCE LINDEN, ESQ., DR.
                     TO Mr. MORRIS BROWN.
                                l. s. d.
  To Six Pots of French Mustard.........  1 4 0
  To Three Superfine Holland Shirts, with Cambric Bosoms,
   Complete................ 4 1 0
  To Two Pots of Superior French Pomatum......  0 10 0
  To a Tobacco Canister of enamelled Tin, with a finely
   Executed Head of the Pretender; slight flaw in the same. 0 12 6
  To a German Pipe, second hand, as good as new, belonging
   to the late Lady Waddilove.......... 1 18 0
  To Four Pair of Black Silk Hose, ditto, belonging to her
   Ladyship's Husband............. 2 8 0
  To Two Superfine Embossed Gold Watch Seals, with a
   Classical Motto and Device to each, namely, Mouse Trap,
   and "Prenez Garde," to one, and "Who the devil can this
   be from?" [One would not have thought these ingenious
   devices had been of so ancient a date as the year 17--.]
   to the other............... 1 1 0
  To a remarkably fine Antique Ring, having the head of a
   Monkey................. 0 16 6
  A ditto, with blue stones........... 0 12 6
  A ditto, with green ditto........... 0 12 6
  A Stuffed Green Parrot, a remarkable favourite of the late
   Lady W................. 2 2 0
                               --------
   Sum Total...............  15 18 0
   Deduction for Ready Money..........  0 13 6
                               --------
                               15 4 6
   Mr. Brown's Profits for Brokerage........ 1 10 0
                               --------
   Sum Total............... 16 14 6

  Received of Clarence Linden, Esq., this  day of  17--.

It would have been no unamusing study to watch the expression of
Clarence's face as it lengthened over each article until he had reached
the final conclusion. He then carefully folded up the paper, restored it
to Mr. Brown, with a low bow, and said, "Excuse me, sir, I will not take
advantage of your generosity; keep your parrot and other treasures for
some more worthy person. I cannot accept of what you are pleased to term
your very valuable presents!"

"Oh, very well, very well," said Mr. Brown, pocketing the paper, and
seeming perfectly unconcerned at the termination of his proposals;
"perhaps I can serve you in some other way?"

"In none, I thank you," replied Linden.

"Just consider, sir!--you will want lodgings; I can find them for you
cheaper than you can yourself; or perhaps you would prefer going into a
nice, quiet, genteel family where you can have both board and lodging,
and be treated in every way as the pet child of the master?"

A thought crossed Linden's mind. He was going to stay in town some time;
he was ignorant of its ways; he had neither friends nor relations, at
least none whom he could visit and consult; moreover, hotels, he
knew, were expensive; lodgings, though cheaper, might, if tolerably
comfortable, greatly exceed the sum prudence would allow him to expend
would not this plan proposed by Mr. Brown, of going into a "nice quiet
genteel family," he the most advisable one he could adopt? The generous
benefactor of the late and ever-to-be-remembered Lady Waddilove
perceived his advantage, and making the most of Clarence's hesitation,
continued,--

"I know of a charming little abode, sir, situated in the suburbs
of London, quite rus in urbe, as the scholars say; you can have a
delightful little back parlour, looking out upon the garden, and all to
yourself, I dare say."

"And pray, Mr. Brown," interrupted Linden, "what price do you think
would be demanded for such enviable accommodation? If you offer me them
as 'a present,' I shall have nothing to say to them."

"Oh, sir," answered Mr. Brown, "the price will be a trifle,--a mere
trifle; but I will inquire, and let you know the exact sum in the course
of the day: all they want is a respectable gentlemanlike lodger; and I
am sure so near a relation of Mrs. Minden will upon my recommendation
be received with avidity. Then you won't have any of these valuable
articles, sir? You'll repent it, sir; take my word for it--hem!

"Since," replied Clarence, dryly, "your word appears of so much more
value than your articles, pardon me, if I prefer taking the former
instead of the latter."

Mr. Brown forced a smile,--"Well, sir, very well, very well indeed. You
will not go out before two o'clock? and at that time I shall call upon
you respecting the commission you have favoured me with."

"I will await you," said Clarence; and he bowed Mr. Brown out of the
room.

"Now, really," said Linden to himself, as he paced the narrow limits of
his apartment, "I do not see what better plan I can pursue; but let me
well consider what is my ultimate object. A high step in the world's
ladder! how is this to be obtained? First, by the regular method
of professions; but what profession should I adopt? The Church is
incompatible with my object, the army and navy with my means. Next come
the irregular methods of adventure and enterprise, such as marriage with
a fortune,"--here he paused and looked at the glass,--"the speculation
of a political pamphlet, or an ode to the minister; attendance on some
dying miser of my own name, without a relation in the world; or, in
short, any other mode of making money that may decently offer itself.
Now, situated as I am, without a friend in this great city, I might as
well purchase my experience at as cheap a rate and in as brief a time
as possible, nor do I see any plan of doing so more promising than that
proposed by Mr. Brown."

These and such like reflections, joined to the inspiriting pages of the
"Newgate Calendar" and "The Covent Garden Magazine," two works which
Clarence dragged from their concealment under a black tea-tray, afforded
him ample occupation till the hour of two, punctual to which time Mr.
Morris Brown returned.

"Well, sir," said Clarence, "what is your report?"

The friend of the late Lady W. wiped his brow and gave three long sighs
before he replied: "A long walk, sir--a very long walk I have had; but I
have succeeded. No thanks, sir,--no thanks,--the lady, a most charming,
delightful, amiable woman, will receive you with pleasure; you will have
the use of a back parlour (as I said) all the morning, and a beautiful
little bedroom entirely to yourself; think of that, sir. You will
have an egg for breakfast, and you will dine with the family at three
o'clock: quite fashionable hours you see, sir."

"And the terms?" said Linden, impatiently.

"Why, sir," replied Mr. Brown, "the lady was too genteel to talk to
me about them; you had better walk with me to her house and see if you
cannot yourself agree with her."

"I will," said Clarence. "Will you wait here till I have dressed?"

Mr. Brown bowed his assent.

"I might as well," thought Clarence, as he ascended to his bedroom,
"inquire into the character of this gentleman to whose good offices I
am so rashly intrusting myself." He rang his bell; the chambermaid
appeared, and was dismissed for the waiter. The character was soon
asked, and soon given. For our reader's sake we will somewhat enlarge
upon it.

Mr. Morris Brown originally came into the world with the simple
appellation of Moses, a name which his father--honest man--had, as
the Minories can still testify, honourably borne before him. Scarcely,
however, had the little Moses attained the age of five, when his father,
for causes best known to himself, became a Christian. Somehow or other
there is a most potent connection between the purse and the conscience,
and accordingly the blessings of Heaven descended in golden showers upon
the proselyte. "I shall die worth a plum," said Moses the elder (who had
taken unto himself the Christian cognomen of Brown); "I shall die worth
a plum," repeated he, as he went one fine morning to speculate at the
Exchange. A change of news, sharp and unexpected as a change of wind,
lowered the stocks and blighted the plum. Mr. Brown was in the "Gazette"
that week, and his wife in weeds for him the next. He left behind him,
besides the said wife, several debts and his son Moses. Beggared by the
former, our widow took a small shop in Wardour Street to support
the latter. Patient, but enterprising--cautious of risking pounds,
indefatigable in raising pence--the little Moses inherited the
propensities of his Hebrew ancestors; and though not so capable as
his immediate progenitor of making a fortune, he was at least far less
likely to lose one. In spite, however, of all the industry both of
mother and son, the gains of the shop were but scanty; to increase
them capital was required, and all Mr. Moses Brown's capital lay in his
brain. "It is a bad foundation," said the mother, with a sigh. "Not at
all!" said the son, and leaving the shop, he turned broker. Now a broker
is a man who makes an income out of other people's funds,--a gleaner of
stray extravagances; and by doing the public the honour of living upon
them may fairly be termed a little sort of state minister in his way.
What with haunting sales, hawking china, selling the curiosities of one
old lady and purchasing the same for another, Mr. Brown managed to enjoy
a very comfortable existence. Great pains and small gains will at last
invert their antithesis, and make little trouble and great profit; so
that by the time Mr. Brown had attained his fortieth year, the petty
shop had become a large warehouse; and, if the worthy Moses, now
christianized into Morris, was not so sanguine as his father in the
gathering of plums, he had been at least as fortunate in the collecting
of windfalls. To say truth, the abigail of the defunct Lady Waddilove
had been no unprofitable helpmate to our broker. As ingenious as
benevolent, she was the owner of certain rooms of great resort in the
neighbourhood of St. James's,--rooms where caps and appointments were
made better than anywhere else, and where credit was given and character
lost upon terms equally advantageous to the accommodating Mrs. Brown.

Meanwhile her husband, continuing through liking what he had begun
through necessity, slackened not his industry in augmenting his fortune;
on the contrary, small profits were but a keener incentive to large
ones,--as the glutton only sharpened by luncheon his appetite for
dinner. Still was Mr. Brown the very Alcibiades of brokers, the
universal genius, suiting every man to his humour. Business of whatever
description, from the purchase of a borough to that of a brooch, was
alike the object of Mr. Brown's most zealous pursuit: taverns, where
country cousins put up; rustic habitations, where ancient maidens
resided; auction or barter; city or hamlet,--all were the same to that
enterprising spirit, which made out of every acquaintance--a commission!
Sagacious and acute, Mr. Brown perceived the value of eccentricity in
covering design, and found by experience that whatever can be laughed at
as odd will be gravely considered as harmless. Several of the broker's
peculiarities were, therefore, more artificial than natural; and
many were the sly bargains which he smuggled into effect under the
comfortable cloak of singularity. No wonder, then, that the crafty
Morris grew gradually in repute as a person of infinite utility and
excellent qualifications; or that the penetrating friends of his
deceased sire bowed to the thriving itinerant, with a respect which they
denied to many in loftier professions and more general esteem.




CHAPTER IX.

     Trust me you have an exceeding fine lodging here,--very neat
     and private.--BEN JONSON.

It was a tolerably long walk to the abode of which the worthy broker
spoke in such high terms of commendation. At length, at the suburbs
towards Paddington, Mr. Brown stopped at a very small house; it stood
rather retired from its surrounding neighbours, which were of a loftier
and more pretending aspect than itself, and, in its awkward shape
and pitiful bashfulness, looked exceedingly like a school-boy finding
himself for the first time in a grown up party, and shrinking with all
possible expedition into the obscurest corner he can discover. Passing
through a sort of garden, in which a spot of grass lay in the embraces
of a stripe of gravel, Mr. Brown knocked upon a very bright knocker at a
very new door. The latter was opened, and a foot-boy appeared.

"Is Mrs. Copperas within?" asked the broker.

"Yees, sir," said the boy.

"Show this gentleman and myself up stairs," resumed Brown.

"Yees," reiterated the lackey.

Up a singularly narrow staircase, into a singularly diminutive
drawing-room, Clarence and his guide were ushered. There, seated on a
little chair by a little work-table, with one foot on a little stool and
one hand on a little book, was a little--very little lady.

"This is the young gentleman," said Mr. Brown; and Clarence bowed low,
in token of the introduction.

The lady returned the salutation with an affected bend, and said, in
a mincing and grotesquely subdued tone, "You are desirous, sir, of
entering into the bosom of my family. We possess accommodations of a
most elegant description; accustomed to the genteelest circles, enjoying
the pure breezes of the Highgate hills, and presenting to any guest we
may receive the attractions of a home rather than of a lodging, you will
find our retreat no less eligible than unique. You are, I presume, sir,
in some profession, some city avocation--or--or trade?"

"I have the misfortune," said he, smiling, "to belong to no profession."

The lady looked hard at the speaker, and then at the broker. With
certain people to belong to no profession is to be of no respectability.

"The most unexceptionable references will be given-and required,"
resumed Mrs. Copperas.

"Certainly," said Mr. Brown, "certainly, the gentleman is a relation of
Mrs. Minden, a very old customer of mine."

"In that case," said Mrs. Copperas, "the affair is settled;" and,
rising, she rang the bell, and ordered the foot-boy, whom she addressed
by the grandiloquent name of "De Warens" to show the gentleman the
apartments. While Clarence was occupied in surveying the luxuries of
a box at the top of the house, called a bed-chamber, which seemed just
large and just hot enough for a chrysalis, and a corresponding box
below, termed the back parlour, which would certainly not have been
large enough for the said chrysalis when turned into a butterfly,
Mr. Morris Brown, after duly, expatiating on the merits of Clarence,
proceeded to speak of the terms; these were soon settled, for Clarence
was yielding and the lady not above three times as extortionate as she
ought to have been.

Before Linden left the house, the bargain was concluded. That night
his trunks were removed to his new abode, and having with incredible
difficulty been squeezed into the bedroom, Clarence surveyed them
with the same astonishment with which the virtuoso beheld the flies in
amber,--

  "Not that the things were either rich or rare,
   He wondered how the devil they got there!"




CHAPTER X.

  Such scenes had tempered with a pensive grace
  The maiden lustre of that faultless face;
  Had hung a sad and dreamlike spell upon
  The gliding music of her silver tone,
  And shaded the soft soul which loved to lie
  In the deep pathos of that volumed eye.--O'Neill; or, The Rebel.

The love thus kindled between them was of no common or calculating
nature: it was vigorous and delicious, and at times so suddenly intense
as to appear to their young hearts for a moment or so with almost an
awful character.--Inesilla.

The reader will figure to himself a small chamber, in a remote wing of
a large and noble mansion. The walls were covered with sketches whose
extreme delicacy of outline and colouring betrayed the sex of the
artist; a few shelves filled with books supported vases of flowers. A
harp stood neglected at the farther end of the room, and just above
hung the slender prison of one of those golden wanderers from the Canary
Isles which hear to our colder land some of the gentlest music of their
skies and zephyrs. The window, reaching to the ground, was open,
and looked, through the clusters of jessamine and honeysuckle which
surrounded the low veranda, beyond upon thick and frequent copses of
blossoming shrubs, redolent of spring and sparkling in the sunny tears
of a May shower which had only just wept itself away. Embosomed in these
little groves lay plots of flowers, girdled with turf as green as ever
wooed the nightly dances of the fairies; and afar off, through one
artful opening, the eye caught the glittering wanderings of water, on
whose light and smiles the universal happiness of the young year seemed
reflected.

But in that chamber, heedless of all around, and cold to the joy with
which everything else, equally youthful, beautiful, and innocent, seemed
breathing and inspired, sat a very young and lovely female. Her cheek
leaned upon her hand, and large tears flowed fast and burningly over the
small and delicate fingers. The comb that had confined her tresses lay
at her feet, and the high dress which concealed her swelling breast had
been loosened, to give vent to the suffocating and indignant throbbings
which had rebelled against its cincture; all appeared to announce that
bitterness of grief when the mind, as it were, wreaks its scorn upon
the body in its contempt for external seemings, and to proclaim that the
present more subdued and softened sorrow had only succeeded to a burst
far less quiet and uncontrolled. Woe to those who eat the bread of
dependence their tears are wrung from the inmost sources of the heart.

Isabel St. Leger was the only child of a captain in the army who died
in her infancy; her mother had survived him but a few months; and to the
reluctant care and cold affections of a distant and wealthy relation
of the same name the warm-hearted and penniless orphan was consigned.
Major-General Cornelius St. Leger, whose riches had been purchased in
India at the price of his constitution, was of a temper as hot as his
curries, and he wreaked it the more unsparingly on his ward, because the
superior ill-temper of his maiden sister had prevented his giving
vent to it upon her. That sister, Miss Diana St. Leger, was a meagre
gentlewoman of about six feet high, with a loud voice and commanding
aspect. Long in awe of her brother, she rejoiced at heart to find some
one whom she had such right and reason to make in awe of herself; and
from the age of four to that of seventeen Isabel suffered every insult
and every degradation which could be inflicted upon her by the tyranny
of her two protectors. Her spirit, however, was far from being broken
by the rude shocks it received; on the contrary, her mind, gentleness
itself to the kind, rose indignantly against the unjust. It was true
that the sense of wrong did not break forth audibly; for, though
susceptible, Isabel was meek, and her pride was concealed by the outward
softness and feminacy of her temper: but she stole away from those who
had wounded her heart or trampled upon its feelings, and nourished with
secret but passionate tears the memory of the harshness or injustice she
had endured. Yet she was not vindictive: her resentment was a noble
not a debasing feeling; once, when she was yet a child, Miss Diana was
attacked with a fever of the most malignant and infectious kind; her
brother loved himself far too well to risk his safety by attending her;
the servants were too happy to wreak their hatred under the pretence
of obeying their fears; they consequently followed the example of their
master; and Miss Diana St. Leger might have gone down to her ancestors
"unwept, unhonoured, and unsung," if Isabel had not volunteered and
enforced her attendance. Hour after hour her fairy form flitted around
the sick-chamber; or sat mute and breathless by the feverish bed; she
had neither fear for contagion nor bitterness for past oppression;
everything vanished beneath the one hope of serving, the one
gratification of feeling herself, in the wide waste of creation, not
utterly without use, as she had been hitherto without friends.

Miss St. Leger recovered. "For your recovery, in the first place," said
the doctor, "you will thank Heaven; in the second, you will thank your
young relation;" and for several days the convalescent did overwhelm the
happy Isabel with her praises and caresses. But this change did not last
long: the chaste Diana had been too spoiled by the prosperity of many
years for the sickness of a single month to effect much good in her
disposition. Her old habits were soon resumed; and though it is probable
that her heart was in reality softened towards the poor Isabel, that
softening by no means extended to her temper. In truth, the brother and
sister were not without affection for one so beautiful and good, but
they had been torturing slaves all their lives, and their affection was,
and could be, but that of a taskmaster or a planter.

But Isabel was the only relation who ever appeared within their walls;
and among the guests with whom the luxurious mansion was crowded, she
passed no less for the heiress than the dependant; to her, therefore,
was offered the homage of many lips and hearts, and if her pride was
perpetually galled and her feelings insulted in private, her vanity (had
that equalled her pride and her feelings in its susceptibility) would
in no slight measure have recompensed her in public. Unhappily, however,
her vanity was the least prominent quality she possessed; and the
compliments of mercenary adulation were not more rejected by her heart
than despised by her understanding.

Yet did she bear within her a deep fund of buried tenderness, and a
mine of girlish and enthusiastic romance,--dangerous gifts to one so
situated, which, while they gave to her secret moments of solitude a
powerful but vague attraction, probably only prepared for her future
years the snare which might betray them into error or the delusion which
would colour them with regret.

Among those whom the ostentatious hospitality of General St. Leger
attracted to his house was one of very different character and
pretensions to the rest. Formed to be unpopular with the generality of
men, the very qualities that made him so were those which principally
fascinate the higher description of women of ancient birth, which
rendered still more displeasing the pride and coldness of his mien; of
talents peculiarly framed to attract interest as well as esteem; of
a deep and somewhat morbid melancholy, which, while it turned from
ordinary ties, inclined yearningly towards passionate affections; of
a temper where romance was only concealed from the many to become more
seductive to the few; unsocial, but benevolent; disliked, but respected;
of the austerest demeanour, but of passions the most fervid, though
the most carefully concealed,--this man united within himself all that
repels the common mass of his species, and all that irresistibly wins
and fascinates the rare and romantic few. To these qualities were added
a carriage and bearing of that high and commanding order which men
mistake for arrogance and pretension, and women overrate in proportion
to its contrast to their own. Something of mystery there was in the
commencement of the deep and eventful love which took place between this
person and Isabel, which I have never been able to learn whatever it
was, it seemed to expedite and heighten the ordinary progress of love;
and when in the dim twilight, beneath the first melancholy smile of
the earliest star, their hearts opened audibly to each other, that
confession had been made silently long since and registered in the
inmost recesses of the soul.

But their passion, which began in prosperity, was soon darkened. Whether
he took offence at the haughtiness of Isabel's lover, or whether
he desired to retain about him an object which he could torment and
tyrannize over, no sooner did the General discover the attachment of his
young relation than he peremptorily forbade its indulgence, and assumed
so insolent and overbearing an air towards the lover that the latter
felt he could no longer repeat his visits to or even continue his
acquaintance with the nabob.

To add to these adverse circumstances, a relation of the lover, from
whom his expectations had been large, was so enraged, not only at the
insult his cousin had received, but at the very idea of his forming an
alliance with one in so dependent a situation and connected with
such new blood as Isabel St. Leger, that, with that arrogance which
relations, however distant, think themselves authorized to assume, he
enjoined his cousin, upon pain of forfeiture of favour and fortune, to
renounce all idea of so disparaging an alliance. The one thus addressed
was not of a temper patiently to submit to such threats: he answered
them with disdain; and the breach, so dangerous to his pecuniary
interest, was already begun.

So far had the history of our lover proceeded at the time in which we
have introduced Isabel to the reader, and described to him the chamber
to which, in all her troubles and humiliations, she was accustomed to
fly, as to a sad but still unviolated sanctuary of retreat.

The quiet of this asylum was first broken by a slight rustling among
the leaves; but Isabel's back was turned towards the window, and in
the engrossment of her feelings she heard it not. The thick copse that
darkened the left side of the veranda was pierced, and a man passed
within the covered space, and stood still and silent before the window,
intently gazing upon the figure, which (though the face was turned
from him) betrayed in its proportions that beauty which in his eyes had
neither an equal nor a fault.

The figure of the stranger, though not very tall, was above the ordinary
height, and gracefully rather than robustly formed. He was dressed in
the darkest colours and the simplest fashion, which rendered yet more
striking the nobleness of his mien, as well as the clear and almost
delicate paleness of his complexion; his features were finely and
accurately formed; and had not ill health, long travel, or severe
thought deepened too much the lines of the countenance, and sharpened
its contour, the classic perfection of those features would have
rendered him undeniably and even eminently handsome. As it was, the
paleness and the somewhat worn character of his face, joined to an
expression at first glance rather haughty and repellent, made him lose
in physical what he certainly gained in intellectual beauty. His eyes
were large, deep, and melancholy, and had the hat which now hung over
his brow been removed, it would have displayed a forehead of remarkable
boldness and power.

Altogether, the face was cast in a rare and intellectual mould, and,
if wanting in those more luxuriant attractions common to the age of the
stranger, who could scarcely have attained his twenty-sixth year, it
betokened, at least, that predominance of mind over body which in some
eyes is the most requisite characteristic of masculine beauty.

With a soft and noiseless step, the stranger moved from his station
without the window, and, entering the room, stole towards the spot on
which Isabel was sitting. He leaned over her chair, and his eye rested
upon his own picture, and a letter in his own writing, over which the
tears of the young orphan flowed fast.

A moment more of agitated happiness for one, of unconscious and
continued sadness for the other,--

  "'T is past, her lover's at her feet."

And what indeed "was to them the world beside, with all its changes
of time and tide"? Joy, hope, all blissful and bright sensations, lay
mingled, like meeting waters, in one sunny stream of heartfelt and
unfathomable enjoyment; but this passed away, and the remembrance of
bitterness and evil succeeded.

"Oh, Algernon!" said Isabel, in a low voice, "is this your promise?"

"Believe me," said Mordaunt, for it was indeed he, "I have struggled
long with my feelings, but in vain; and for both our sakes, I rejoice at
the conquest they obtained. I listened only to a deceitful delusion when
I imagined I was obeying the dictates of reason. Ah, dearest, why should
we part for the sake of dubious and distant evils, when the misery of
absence is the most certain, the most unceasing evil we can endure?"

"For your sake, and therefore for mine!" interrupted Isabel, struggling
with her tears. "I am a beggar and an outcast. You must not link your
fate with mine. I could bear, Heaven knows how willingly, poverty and
all its evils for you and with you; but I cannot bring them upon you."

"Nor will you," said Mordaunt, passionately, as he covered the hand he
held with his burning kisses. "Have I not enough for both of us? It is
my love, not poverty, that I beseech you to share."

"No! Algernon, you cannot deceive me; your own estate will be torn from
you by the law: if you marry me, your cousin will not assist you; I, you
know too well, can command nothing; and I shall see you, for whom in
my fond and bright dreams I have presaged everything great and exalted,
buried in an obscurity from which your talents can never rise, and
suffering the pangs of poverty and dependence and humiliation like
my own; and--and--I--should be the wretch who caused you all. Never,
Algernon, never!--I love you too--too well!"

But the effort which wrung forth the determination of the tone in which
these words were uttered was too violent to endure; and, as the full
desolation of her despair crowded fast and dark upon the orphan's mind,
she sank back upon her chair in very sickness of soul, nor heeded, in
her unconscious misery, that her hand was yet clasped by her lover and
that her head drooped upon his bosom.

"Isabel," he said, in a low, sweet tone, which to her ear seemed the
concentration of all earthly music,--"Isabel, look up,--my own, my
beloved,--look up and hear me. Perhaps you say truly when you tell me
that the possessions of my house shall melt away from me, and that my
relation will not offer to me the precarious bounty which, even if he
did offer, I would reject; but, dearest, are there not a thousand
paths open to me,--the law, the state, the army?--you are silent,
Isabel,--speak!"

Isabel did not reply, but the soft eyes which rested upon his told, in
their despondency, how little her reason was satisfied by the arguments
he urged.

"Besides," he continued, "we know not yet whether the law may not decide
in my favour: at all events years may pass before the judgment is given;
those years make the prime and verdure of our lives; let us not waste
them in mourning over blighted hopes and severed hearts; let us snatch
what happiness is yet in our power, nor anticipate, while the heavens
are still bright above us, the burden of the thunder or the cloud."

Isabel was one of the least selfish and most devoted of human beings,
yet she must be forgiven if at that moment her resolution faltered, and
the overpowering thought of being in reality his forever flashed upon
her mind. It passed from her the moment it was formed; and, rising from
a situation in which the touch of that dear hand and the breath of
those wooing lips endangered the virtue and weakened the strength of her
resolves, she withdrew herself from his grasp, and while she averted her
eyes, which dared not encounter his, she said in a low but firm voice,--

"It is in vain, Algernon; it is in vain. I can be to you nothing but a
blight or burden, nothing but a source of privation and anguish. Think
you that I will be this?--no, I will not darken your fair hopes and
impede your reasonable ambition. Go (and here her voice faltered for a
moment, but soon recovered its tone), go, Algernon, dear Algernon; and
if my foolish heart will not ask you to think of me no more, I can at
least implore you to think of me only as one who would die rather than
cost you a moment of that poverty and debasement, the bitterness of
which she has felt herself, and who for that very reason tears herself
away from you forever."

"Stay, Isabel, stay!" cried Mordaunt, as he caught hold of her robe,
"give me but one word more, and you shall leave me. Say that if I can
create for myself a new source of independence; if I can carve out a
road where the ambition you erroneously impute to me can be gratified,
as well as the more moderate wishes our station has made natural to us
to form,--say, that if I do this, I may permit myself to hope,--say,
that when I have done it, I may claim you as my own!"

Isabel paused, and turned once more her face towards his own. Her lips
moved, and though the words died within her heart, yet Mordaunt read
well their import in the blushing cheek and the heaving bosom, and the
lips which one ray of hope and comfort was sufficient to kindle into
smiles. He gazed, and all obstacles, all difficulties, disappeared; the
gulf of time seemed passed, and he felt as if already he had earned and
won his reward.

He approached her yet nearer; one kiss on those lips, one pressure
of that thrilling hand, one long, last embrace of that shrinking and
trembling form,--and then, as the door closed upon his view, he felt
that the sunshine of Nature had passed away, and that in the midst of
the laughing and peopled earth he stood in darkness and alone.




CHAPTER XI.

 He who would know mankind must be at home with all men.
                     STEPHEN MONTAGUE.

We left Clarence safely deposited in his little lodgings. Whether
from the heat of his apartment or the restlessness a migration of beds
produces in certain constitutions, his slumbers on the first night of
his arrival were disturbed and brief. He rose early and descended to the
parlour; Mr. de Warens, the nobly appellatived foot-boy, was laying
the breakfast-cloth. From three painted shelves which constituted the
library of "Copperas Bower," as its owners gracefully called their
habitation, Clarence took down a book very prettily bound; it was "Poems
by a Nobleman." No sooner had he read two pages than he did exactly what
the reader would have done, and restored the volume respectfully to its
place. He then drew his chair towards the window, and wistfully eyed
sundry ancient nursery maids, who were leading their infant charges to
the "fresh fields and pastures new" of what is now the Regent's Park.

In about an hour Mrs. Copperas descended, and mutual compliments were
exchanged; to her succeeded Mr. Copperas, who was well scolded for his
laziness: and to them, Master Adolphus Copperas, who was also chidingly
termed a naughty darling for the same offence. Now then Mrs. Copperas
prepared the tea, which she did in the approved method adopted by all
ladies to whom economy is dearer than renown, namely, the least possible
quantity of the soi-disant Chinese plant was first sprinkled by the
least possible quantity of hot water; after this mixture had become as
black and as bitter as it could possibly be without any adjunct from the
apothecary's skill, it was suddenly drenched with a copious diffusion,
and as suddenly poured forth--weak, washy, and abominable,--into four
cups, severally appertaining unto the four partakers of the matutinal
nectar.

Then the conversation began to flow. Mrs. Copperas was a fine lady, and
a sentimentalist,--very observant of the little niceties of phrase and
manner. Mr. Copperas was a stock-jobber and a wit,--loved a good hit
in each capacity; was very round, very short, and very much like a John
Dory; and saw in the features and mind of the little Copperas the exact
representative of himself.

"Adolphus, my love," said Mrs. Copperas, "mind what I told you, and sit
upright. Mr. Linden, will you allow me to cut you a leetle piece of this
roll?"

"Thank you," said Clarence, "I will trouble you rather for the whole of
it."

Conceive Mrs. Copperas's dismay! From that moment she saw herself eaten
out of house and home; besides, as she afterwards observed to her friend
Miss Barbara York, the "vulgarity of such an amazing appetite!"

"Any commands in the city, Mr. Linden?" asked the husband; "a coach will
pass by our door in a few minutes,--must be on 'Change in half an hour.
Come, my love, another cup of tea; make haste; I have scarcely a
moment to take my fare for the inside, before coachee takes his for the
outside. Ha! ha! ha! Mr. Linden."

"Lord, Mr. Copperas," said his helpmate, "how can you be so silly?
setting such an example to your son, too; never mind him, Adolphus, my
love; fie, child! a'n't you ashamed of yourself? never put the spoon
in your cup till you have done tea: I must really send you to school to
learn manners. We have a very pretty little collection of books
here, Mr. Linden, if you would like to read an hour or two after
breakfast,--child, take your hands out of your pockets,--all the best
English classics I believe,--'Telemachus,' and Young's 'Night Thoughts,'
and 'Joseph Andrews,' and the 'Spectator,' and Pope's Iliad, and
Creech's Lucretius; but you will look over them yourself! This is
Liberty Hall, as well as Copperas Bower, Mr. Linden!"

"Well, my love," said the stock-jobber, "I believe I must be off. Here
Tom," Tom (Mr. de Warens had just entered the room with some more hot
water, to weaken still further "the poor remains of what was once"--the
tea!), "Tom, just run out and stop the coach; it will be by in five
minutes."

"Have not I prayed and besought you, many and many a time, Mr.
Copperas," said the lady, rebukingly, "not to call De Warens by his
Christian name? Don't you know that all people in genteel life, who only
keep one servant, invariably call him by his surname, as if he were the
butler, you know?"

"Now, that is too good, my love," said Copperas. "I will call poor Tom
by any surname you please, but I really can't pass him off for a butler!
Ha--ha--ha--you must excuse me there, my love!"

"And pray, why not, Mr. Copperas? I have known many a butler bungle
more at a cork than he does; and pray tell me who did you ever see wait
better at dinner?"

"He wait at dinner, my love! it is not he who waits."

"Who then, Mr. Copperas?"

"Why we, my love; it's we who wait for dinner; but that's the cook's
fault, not his."

"Pshaw! Mr. Copperas; Adolphus, my love, sit upright, darling."

Here De Warens cried from the bottom of the stairs,--"Measter, the coach
be coming up."

"There won't be room for it to turn then," said the facetious Mr.
Copperas, looking round the apartment as if he took the words literally.

"What coach is it, boy?"

Now that was not the age in which coaches scoured the city every half
hour, and Mr. Copperas knew the name of the coach as well as he knew his
own.

"It be the Swallow coach, sir."

"Oh, very well: then since I have swallowed in the roll, I will now roll
in the Swallow--ha--ha--ha! Good-by, Mr. Linden."

No sooner had the witty stock-jobber left the room than Mrs. Copperas
seemed to expand into a new existence. "My husband, sir," said she,
apologetically, "is so odd, but he's an excellent sterling character;
and that, you know, Mr. Linden, tells more in the bosom of a family than
all the shining qualities which captivate the imagination. I am sure,
Mr. Linden, that the moralist is right in admonishing us to prefer the
gold to the tinsel. I have now been married some years, and every year
seems happier than the last; but then, Mr. Linden, it is such a pleasure
to contemplate the growing graces of the sweet pledge of our mutual
love.--Adolphus, my dear, keep your feet still, and take your hands out
of your pockets!"

A short pause ensued.

"We see a great deal of company," said Mrs. Copperas, pompously, "and of
the very best description. Sometimes we are favoured by the society
of the great Mr. Talbot, a gentleman of immense fortune and quite the
courtier: he is, it is true, a little eccentric in his dress: but then
he was a celebrated beau in his young days. He is our next neighbour;
you can see his house out of the window, just across the garden--there!
We have also, sometimes, our humble board graced by a very elegant
friend of mine, Miss Barbara York, a lady of very high connections, her
first cousin was a lord mayor.--Adolphus, my dear, what are you about?
Well, Mr. Linden, you will find your retreat quite undisturbed; I
must go about the household affairs; not that I do anything more
than superintend, you know, sir; but I think no lady should be above
consulting her husband's interests; that's what I call true old English
conjugal affection. Come, Adolphus, my dear."

And Clarence was now alone. "I fear," thought he, "that I shall get on
very indifferently with these people. But it will not do for me to be
misanthropical, and (as Dr. Latinas was wont to say) the great merit of
philosophy, when we cannot command circumstances, is to reconcile us to
them."




CHAPTER XII.

 A retired beau is one of the most instructive spectacles in the world.
           STEPHEN MONTAGUE.

It was quite true that Mrs. Copperas saw a great deal of company, for
at a certain charge, upon certain days, any individual might have the
honour of sharing her family repast; and many, of various callings,
though chiefly in commercial life, met at her miscellaneous board.
Clarence must, indeed, have been difficult to please, or obtuse
of observation, if, in the variety of her guests, he had not found
something either to interest or amuse him. Heavens! what a motley
group were accustomed, twice in the week, to assemble there! the little
dining-parlour seemed a human oven; and it must be owned that Clarence
was no slight magnet of attraction to the female part of the guests.
Mrs. Copperas's bosom friend in especial, the accomplished Miss Barbara
York, darted the most tender glances on the handsome young stranger;
but whether or not a nose remarkably prominent and long prevented the
glances from taking full effect, it is certain that Clarence seldom
repaid them with that affectionate ardour which Miss Barbara York had
ventured to anticipate. The only persons indeed for whom he felt any
sympathetic attraction were of the same sex as himself. The one was
Mr. Talbot, the old gentleman whom Mrs. Copperas had described as the
perfect courtier; the other, a young artist of the name of Warner.
Talbot, to Clarence's great astonishment (for Mrs. Copperas's eulogy had
prepared him for something eminently displeasing) was a man of birth,
fortune, and manners peculiarly graceful and attractive. It is true,
however, that, despite of his vicinity, and Mrs. Copperas's urgent
solicitations, he very seldom honoured her with his company, and he
always cautiously sent over his servant in the morning to inquire the
names and number of her expected guests; nor was he ever known to
share the plenteous board of the stock-jobber's lady whenever any
other partaker of its dainties save Clarence and the young artist were
present. The latter, the old gentleman really liked; and as for one
truly well born and well bred there is no vulgarity except in the mind,
the slender means, obscure birth, and struggling profession of Warner
were circumstances which, as they increased the merit of a gentle manner
and a fine mind, spoke rather in his favour than the reverse. Mr. Talbot
was greatly struck by Clarence Linden's conversation and appearance;
and indeed there was in Talbot's tastes so strong a bias to aristocratic
externals that Clarence's air alone would have been sufficient to win
the good graces of a man who had, perhaps, more than most courtiers of
his time, cultivated the arts of manner and the secrets of address.

"You will call upon me soon?" said he to Clarence, when, after dining
one day with the Copperases and their inmate, he rose to return home.
And Clarence, delighted with the urbanity and liveliness of his new
acquaintance, readily promised that he would.

Accordingly the next day Clarence called upon Mr. Talbot. The house, as
Mrs. Copperas had before said, adjoined her own, and was only separated
from it by a garden. It was a dull mansion of brick, which had disdained
the frippery of paint and whitewashing, and had indeed been built
many years previously to the erection of the modern habitations which
surrounded it. It was, therefore, as a consequence of this priority
of birth, more sombre than the rest, and had a peculiarly forlorn and
solitary look. As Clarence approached the door, he was struck with the
size of the house; it was of very considerable extent, and in the more
favourable situations of London, would have passed for a very desirable
and spacious tenement. An old man, whose accurate precision of dress
bespoke the tastes of the master, opened the door, and after ushering
Clarence through two long, and, to his surprise, almost splendidly
furnished rooms, led him into a third, where, seated at a small
writing-table, he found Mr. Talbot. That person, one whom Clarence then
little thought would hereafter exercise no small influence over his
fate, was of a figure and countenance well worthy the notice of a
description.

His own hair, quite white, was carefully and artificially curled, and
gave a Grecian cast to features whose original delicacy, and exact
though small proportions, not even age could destroy. His eyes were
large, black, and sparkled with almost youthful vivacity; and his mouth,
which was the best feature he possessed, developed teeth white and
even as rows of ivory. Though small and somewhat too slender in the
proportions of his figure, nothing could exceed the ease and the grace
of his motions and air; and his dress, though singularly rich in
its materials, eccentric in its fashion, and from its evident study,
unseemly to his years, served nevertheless to render rather venerable
than ridiculous a mien which could almost have carried off any
absurdity, and which the fashion of the garb peculiarly became. The tout
ensemble was certainly that of a man who was still vain of his exterior,
and conscious of its effect; and it was as certainly impossible to
converse with Mr. Talbot for five minutes without merging every less
respectful impression in the magical fascination of his manner.

"I thank you, Mr. Linden," said Talbot, rising, "for your accepting so
readily an old man's invitation. If I have felt pleasure in discovering
that we were to be neighbours, you may judge what that pleasure is
to-day at finding you my visitor."

Clarence, who, to do him justice, was always ready at returning a fine
speech, replied in a similar strain, and the conversation flowed on
agreeably enough. There was more than a moderate collection of books
in the room, and this circumstance led Clarence to allude to literary
subjects; these Mr. Talbot took up with avidity, and touched with a
light but graceful criticism upon many of the then modern and some of
the older writers. He seemed delighted to find himself understood and
appreciated by Clarence, and every moment of Linden's visit served
to ripen their acquaintance into intimacy. At length they talked upon
Copperas Bower and its inmates.

"You will find your host and hostess," said the gentleman, "certainly of
a different order from the persons with whom it is easy to see you
have associated; but, at your happy age, a year or two may be very well
thrown away upon observing the manners and customs of those whom, in
later life, you may often be called upon to conciliate or perhaps to
control. That man will never be a perfect gentleman who lives only with
gentlemen. To be a man of the world, we must view that world in every
grade and in every perspective. In short, the most practical art of
wisdom is that which extracts from things the very quality they least
appear to possess; and the actor in the world, like the actor on the
stage, should find 'a basket-hilted sword very convenient to carry milk
in.' [See the witty inventory of a player's goods in the "Tatler."] As
for me, I have survived my relations and friends. I cannot keep late
hours, nor adhere to the unhealthy customs of good society; nor do
I think that, to a man of my age and habits, any remuneration would
adequately repay the sacrifice of health or comfort. I am, therefore,
well content to sink into a hermitage in an obscure corner of this great
town, and only occasionally to revive my 'past remembrances of higher
state,' by admitting a few old acquaintances to drink my bachelor's tea
and talk over the news of the day. Hence, you see, Mr. Linden, I pick
up two or three novel anecdotes of state and scandal, and maintain my
importance at Copperas Bower by retailing them second-hand. Now that
you are one of the inmates of that abode, I shall be more frequently its
guest. By the by, I will let you into a secret: know that I am somewhat
a lover of the marvellous, and like to indulge a little embellishing
exaggeration in any place where there is no chance of finding me
out. Mind, therefore, my dear Mr. Linden, that you take no ungenerous
advantage of this confession; but suffer me, now and then, to tell my
stories my own way, even when you think truth would require me to tell
them in another."

"Certainly," said Clarence, laughing; "let us make an agreement: you
shall tell your stories as you please, if you will grant me the same
liberty in paying my compliments; and if I laugh aloud at the stories,
you shall promise me not to laugh aloud at the compliments."

"It is a bond," said Talbot; "and a very fit exchange of service it is.
It will be a problem in human nature to see who has the best of it: you
shall pay your court by flattering the people present, and I mine by
abusing those absent. Now, in spite of your youth and curling locks, I
will wager that I succeed the best; for in vanity there is so great a
mixture of envy that no compliment is like a judicious abuse: to enchant
your acquaintance, ridicule his friends."

"Ah, sir," said Clarence, "this opinion of yours is, I trust, a little
in the French school, where brilliancy is more studied than truth, and
where an ill opinion of our species always has the merit of passing for
profound."

Talbot smiled, and shook his head. "My dear young friend," said he, "it
is quite right that you, who are coming into the world, should think
well of it; and it is also quite right that I, who am going out of it,
should console myself by trying to despise it. However, let me tell you,
my young friend, that he whose opinion of mankind is not too elevated
will always be the most benevolent, because the most indulgent, to
those errors incidental to human imperfection to place our nature in
too flattering a view is only to court disappointment, and end in
misanthropy. The man who sets out with expecting to find all his
fellow-creatures heroes of virtue will conclude by condemning them as
monsters of vice; and, on the contrary, the least exacting judge of
actions will be the most lenient. If God, in His own perfection, did not
see so many frailties in us, think you He would be so gracious to our
virtues?"

"And yet," said Clarence, "we remark every day examples of the highest
excellence."

"Yes," replied Talbot, "of the highest but not of the most constant
excellence. He knows very little of the human heart who imagines we
cannot do a good action; but, alas! he knows still less of it who
supposes we can be always doing good actions. In exactly the same ratio
we see every day the greatest crimes are committed; but we find no
wretch so depraved as to be always committing crimes. Man cannot be
perfect even in guilt."

In this manner Talbot and his young visitor conversed, till Clarence,
after a stay of unwarrantable length, rose to depart.

"Well," said Talbot, "if we now rightly understand each other, we shall
be the best friends in the world. As we shall expect great things from
each other sometimes, we will have no scruple in exacting a heroic
sacrifice every now and then; for instance, I will ask you to punish
yourself by an occasional tete-a-tete with an ancient gentleman; and, as
we can also by the same reasoning pardon great faults in each other, if
they are not often committed, so I will forgive you, with all my heart,
whenever you refuse my invitations, if you do not refuse them often. And
now farewell till we meet again."

It seemed singular and almost unnatural to Linden that a man like
Talbot, of birth, fortune, and great fastidiousness of taste and temper,
should have formed any sort of acquaintance, however slight and distant,
with the facetious stock-jobber and his wife; but the fact is easily
explained by a reference to the vanity which we shall see hereafter
made the ruling passion of Talbot's nature. This vanity, which
branching forth into a thousand eccentricities, displayed itself in the
singularity of his dress, the studied yet graceful warmth of his
manner, his attention to the minutiae of life, his desire, craving and
insatiate, to receive from every one, however insignificant, his obolus
of admiration,--this vanity, once flattered by the obsequious homage it
obtained from the wonder and reverence of the Copperases, reconciled his
taste to the disgust it so frequently and necessarily conceived; and,
having in great measure resigned his former acquaintance and wholly
outlived his friends, he was contented to purchase the applause
which had become to him a necessary of life at the humble market more
immediately at his command.

There is no dilemma in which Vanity cannot find an expedient to develop
its form, no stream of circumstances in which its buoyant and light
nature will not rise to float upon the surface. And its ingenuity is as
fertile as that of the player who (his wardrobe allowing him no other
method of playing the fop) could still exhibit the prevalent passion for
distinction by wearing stockings of different colours.




CHAPTER XIII.

               Who dares
  Interpret then my life for me as 't were
  One of the undistinguishable many?
               COLERIDGE: Wallenstein.

The first time Clarence had observed the young artist, he had taken a
deep interest in his appearance. Pale, thin, undersized, and slightly
deformed, the sanctifying mind still shed over the humble frame a spell
more powerful than beauty. Absent in manner, melancholy in air, and
never conversing except upon subjects on which his imagination was
excited, there was yet a gentleness about him which could not fail to
conciliate and prepossess; nor did Clarence omit any opportunity
to soften his reserve, and wind himself into his more intimate
acquaintance. Warner, the only support of an aged and infirm grandmother
(who had survived her immediate children), was distantly related to Mrs.
Copperas; and that lady extended to him, with ostentatious benevolence,
her favour and support. It is true that she did not impoverish the
young Adolphus to enrich her kinsman, but she allowed him a seat at her
hospitable board, whenever it was not otherwise filled; and all that she
demanded in return was a picture of herself, another of Mr. Copperas,
a third of Master Adolphus, a fourth of the black cat, and from time to
time sundry other lesser productions of his genius, of which, through
the agency of Mr. Brown, she secretly disposed at a price that
sufficiently remunerated her for whatever havoc the slender appetite of
the young painter was able to effect.

By this arrangement, Clarence had many opportunities of gaining that
intimacy with Warner which had become to him an object; and though the
painter, constitutionally diffident and shy, was at first averse to, and
even awed by, the ease, boldness, fluent speech, and confident address
of a man much younger than himself, yet at last he could not resist the
being decoyed into familiarity; and the youthful pair gradually advanced
from companionship into friendship. There was a striking contrast
between the two: Clarence was bold and frank, Warner close and timid.
Both had superior abilities; but the abilities of Clarence were for
action, those of Warner for art: both were ambitious; but the ambition
of Clarence was that of circumstances rather than character. Compelled
to carve his own fortunes without sympathy or aid, he braced his mind to
the effort, though naturally too gay for the austerity, and too genial
for the selfishness of ambition. But the very essence of Warner's nature
was the feverish desire of fame: it poured through his veins like lava;
it preyed as a worm upon his cheek; it corroded his natural sleep;
it blackened the colour of his thoughts; it shut out, as with an
impenetrable wall, the wholesome energies and enjoyments and objects of
living men; and, taking from him all the vividness of the present, all
the tenderness of the past, constrained his heart to dwell forever and
forever amidst the dim and shadowy chimeras of a future he was fated
never to enjoy.

But these differences of character, so far from disturbing, rather
cemented their friendship; and while Warner (notwithstanding his
advantage of age) paid involuntary deference to the stronger character
of Clarence, he, in his turn, derived that species of pleasure by which
he was most gratified, from the affectionate and unenvious interest
Clarence took in his speculations of future distinction, and the
unwearying admiration with which he would sit by his side, and watch the
colours start from the canvas, beneath the real though uncultured genius
of the youthful painter.

Hitherto, Warner had bounded his attempts to some of the lesser efforts
of the art; he had now yielded to the urgent enthusiasm of his nature,
and conceived the plan of an historical picture. Oh! what sleepless
nights, what struggles of the teeming fancy with the dense brain, what
labours of the untiring thought wearing and intense as disease itself,
did it cost the ambitious artist to work out in the stillness of his
soul, and from its confused and conflicting images, the design of this
long meditated and idolized performance! But when it was designed;
when shape upon shape grew and swelled, and glowed from the darkness of
previous thought upon the painter's mind; when, shutting his eyes in the
very credulity of delight, the whole work arose before him, glossy with
its fresh hues, bright, completed, faultless, arrayed as it were, and
decked out for immortality,--oh! then what a full and gushing moment of
rapture broke like a released stream upon his soul! What a recompense
for wasted years, health, and hope! What a coronal to the visions and
transports of Genius: brief, it is true, but how steeped in the very
halo of a light that might well be deemed the glory of heaven!

But the vision fades, the gorgeous shapes sweep on into darkness, and,
waking from his revery, the artist sees before him only the dull walls
of his narrow chamber; the canvas stretched a blank upon its frame; the
works, maimed, crude, unfinished, of an inexperienced hand, lying idly
around; and feels himself--himself, but one moment before the creator of
a world of wonders, the master spirit of shapes glorious and majestical
beyond the shapes of men-dashed down from his momentary height, and
despoiled both of his sorcery and his throne.

It was just in such a moment that Warner, starting up, saw Linden (who
had silently entered his room) standing motionless before him.

"Oh, Linden!" said the artist, "I have had so superb a dream,--a dream
which, though I have before snatched some such vision by fits and
glimpses, I never beheld so realized, so perfect as now; and--but you
shall see, you shall judge for yourself; I will sketch out the design
for you;" and, with a piece of chalk and a rapid hand, Warner conveyed
to Linden the outline of his conception. His young friend was eager in
his praise and his predictions of renown, and Warner listened to him
with a fondness which spread over his pale cheek a richer flush than
lover ever caught from the whispers of his beloved.

"Yes," said he, as he rose, and his sunken and small eye flashed out
with a feverish brightness, "yes, if my hand does not fail my thought,
it shall rival even--" Here the young painter stopped short, abashed at
that indiscretion of enthusiasm about to utter to another the hoarded
vanities hitherto locked in his heart of hearts as a sealed secret,
almost from himself.

"But come," said Clarence, affectionately, "your hand is feverish and
dry, and of late you have seemed more languid than you were wont,--come,
Warner, you want exercise: it is a beautiful evening, and you shall
explain your picture still further to me as we walk."

Accustomed to yield to Clarence, Warner mechanically and abstractedly
obeyed; they walked out into the open streets.

"Look around us," said Warner, pausing, "look among this toiling and
busy and sordid mass of beings who claim with us the fellowship of clay.
The poor labour; the rich feast: the only distinction between them is
that of the insect and the brute; like them they fulfil the same end and
share the same oblivion; they die, a new race springs up, and the very
grass upon their graves fades not so soon as their memory. Who that is
conscious of a higher nature would not pine and fret himself away to be
confounded with these? Who would not burn and sicken and parch with
a delirious longing to divorce himself from so vile a herd? What have
their petty pleasures and their mean aims to atone for the abasement of
grinding down our spirits to their level? Is not the distinction from
their blended and common name a sufficient recompense for all that
ambition suffers or foregoes? Oh, for one brief hour (I ask no more) of
living honour, one feeling of conscious, unfearing certainty that Fame
has conquered Death! and then for this humble and impotent clay, this
drag on the spirit which it does not assist but fetter, this wretched
machine of pains and aches, and feverish throbbings, and vexed
inquietudes, why, let the worms consume it, and the grave hide--for Fame
there is no grave."

At that moment one of those unfortunate women who earn their polluted
sustenance by becoming the hypocrites of passions abruptly accosted
them.

"Miserable wretch!" said Warner, loathingly, as he pushed her aside; but
Clarence, with a kindlier feeling, noticed that her haggard cheek was
wet with tears, and that her frame, weak and trembling, could scarcely
support itself; he, therefore, with that promptitude of charity which
gives ere it discriminates put some pecuniary assistance in her hand and
joined his comrade.

"You would not have spoken so tauntingly to the poor girl had you
remarked her distress," said Clarence.

"And why," said Warner, mournfully, "why be so cruel as to prolong,
even for a few hours, an existence which mercy would only seek to bring
nearer to the tomb? That unfortunate is but one of the herd, one of the
victims to pleasures which debase by their progress and ruin by their
end. Yet perhaps she is not worse than the usual followers of love,--of
love, that passion the most worshipped, yet the least divine,--selfish
and exacting,--drawing its aliment from destruction, and its very nature
from tears."

"Nay," said Clarence, "you confound the two loves, the Eros and the
Anteros; gods whom my good tutor was wont so sedulously to distinguish:
you surely do not inveigh thus against all love?"

"I cry you mercy," said Warner, with something of sarcasm in his
pensiveness of tone. "We must not dispute; so I will hold my peace: but
make love all you will; what are the false smiles of a lip which a few
years can blight as an autumn leaf? what the homage of a heart as feeble
and mortal as your own? Why, I, with a few strokes of a little hair
and an idle mixture of worthless colours, will create a beauty in whose
mouth there shall be no hollowness, in whose lip there shall be no
fading; there, in your admiration, you shall have no need of flattery
and no fear of falsehood; you shall not be stung with jealousy nor
maddened with treachery; nor watch with a breaking heart over the waning
bloom, and departing health, till the grave open, and your perishable
paradise is not. No: the mimic work is mightier than the original, for
it outlasts it; your love cannot wither it, or your desertion destroy;
your very death, as the being who called it into life, only stamps it
with a holier value."

"And so then," said Clarence, "you would seriously relinquish, for the
mute copy of the mere features, those affections which no painting can
express?"

"Ay," said the painter, with an energy unusual to his quiet manner, and
slightly wandering in his answer from Clarence's remark, "ay, one serves
not two mistresses: mine is the glory of my art. Oh! what are the
cold shapes of this tame earth, where the footsteps of the gods have
vanished, and left no trace, the blemished forms, the debased brows, and
the jarring features, to the glorious and gorgeous images which I can
conjure up at my will? Away with human beauties, to him whose nights
are haunted with the forms of angels and wanderers from the stars, the
spirits of all things lovely and exalted in the universe: the universe
as it was; when to fountain, and stream, and hill, and to every tree
which the summer clothed, was allotted the vigil of a Nymph! when
through glade, and by waterfall, at glossy noontide, or under the silver
stars, the forms of Godhead and Spirit were seen to walk; when the
sculptor modelled his mighty work from the beauty and strength of
Heaven, and the poet lay in the shade to dream of the Naiad and the
Faun, and the Olympian dwellers whom he walked in rapture to behold;
and the painter, not as now, shaping from shadow and in solitude the dim
glories of his heart, caught at once his inspiration from the glow of
earth and its living wanderers, and, lo, the canvas breathed! Oh! what
are the dull realities and the abortive offspring of this altered and
humbled world--the world of meaner and dwarfish men--to him whose realms
are peopled with visions like these?"

And the artist, whose ardour, long excited and pent within, had at last
thus audibly, and to Clarence's astonishment, burst forth, paused, as
if to recall himself from his wandering enthusiasm. Such moments of
excitement were indeed rare with him, except when utterly alone, and
even then, were almost invariably followed by that depression of spirit
by which all over-wrought susceptibility is succeeded. A change came
over his face, like that of a cloud when the sunbeam which gilded leaves
it; and, with a slight sigh and a subdued tone, he resumed,--

"So, my friend, you see what our art can do even for the humblest
professor, when I, a poor, friendless, patronless artist, can thus
indulge myself by forgetting the present. But I have not yet explained
to you the attitude of my principal figure;" and Warner proceeded once
more to detail the particulars of his intended picture. It must be
confessed that he had chosen a fine though an arduous subject: it was
the Trial of Charles the First; and as the painter, with the enthusiasm
of his profession and the eloquence peculiar to himself, dwelt upon
the various expressions of the various forms which that extraordinary
judgment-court afforded, no wonder that Clarence forgot, with the artist
himself, the disadvantages Warner had to encounter in the inexperience
of an unregulated taste and an imperfect professional education.




CHAPTER XIV.

  All manners take a tincture from our own,
  Or come discoloured through our passions shown.--POPE.

What! give up liberty, property, and, as the Gazeteer says, lie down to
be saddled with wooden shoes?--Vicar of Wakefield.

There was something in the melancholy and reflective character of Warner
resembling that of Mordaunt; had they lived in these days perhaps both
the artist and the philosopher had been poets. But (with regard to the
latter) at that time poetry was not the customary vent for deep thought
or passionate feeling. Gray, it is true, though unjustly condemned as
artificial and meretricious in his style, had infused into the scanty
works which he has bequeathed to immortality a pathos and a richness
foreign to the literature of the age; and, subsequently, Goldsmith,
in the affecting yet somewhat enervate simplicity of his verse, had
obtained for Poetry a brief respite from a school at once declamatory
and powerless, and led her forth for a "Sunshine Holiday" into the
village green and under the hawthorn shade. But, though the softer and
meeker feelings had struggled into a partial and occasional vent, those
which partook more of passion and of thought, the deep, the wild, the
fervid, were still without "the music of a voice." For the after century
it was reserved to restore what we may be permitted to call the spirit
of our national literature; to forsake the clinquant of the French
mimickers of classic gold; to exchange a thrice-adulterated Hippocrene
for the pure well of Shakspeare and of Nature; to clothe philosophy
in the gorgeous and solemn majesty of appropriate music; and to invest
passion with a language as burning as its thought and rapid as
its impulse. At that time reflection found its natural channel in
metaphysical inquiry or political speculation; both valuable, perhaps,
but neither profound. It was a bold, and a free, and an inquisitive age,
but not one in which thought ran over its set and stationary banks, and
watered even the common flowers of verse: not one in which Lucretius
could have embodied the dreams of Epicurus; Shakspeare lavished the
mines of a superhuman wisdom upon his fairy palaces and enchanted isles;
or the Beautifier [Wordsworth] of this common earth have called forth

  "The motion of the spirit that impels
   All thinking things, all objects of all thought;"

or Disappointment and Satiety have hallowed their human griefs by a
pathos wrought from whatever is magnificent and grand and lovely in
the unknown universe; or the speculations of a great but visionary mind
[Shelley] have raised, upon subtlety and doubt, a vast and irregular
pile of verse, full of dim-lighted cells, and winding galleries, in
which what treasures lie concealed! That was an age in which poetry
took one path and contemplation another; those who were addicted to the
latter pursued it in its orthodox roads; and many, whom Nature, perhaps
intended for poets, the wizard Custom converted into speculators or
critics.

It was this which gave to Algernon's studies their peculiar hue; while,
on the other hand, the taste for the fine arts which then universally
prevailed, directed to the creations of painting, rather than those of
poetry, more really congenial to his powers, the intense imagination and
passion for glory which marked and pervaded the character of the artist.

But as we have seen that that passion for glory made the great
characteristic difference between Clarence and Warner, so also did
that passion terminate any resemblance which Warner bore to Algernon
Mordaunt. With the former a rank and unwholesome plant, it grew up to
the exclusion of all else; with the latter, subdued and regulated, it
sheltered, not withered, the virtues by which it was surrounded. With
Warner, ambition was a passionate desire to separate himself by fame
from the herd of other men; with Mordaunt, to bind himself by charity
yet closer to his kind: with the one, it produced a disgust to his
species; with the other, a pity and a love: with the one, power was the
badge of distinction; with the other, the means to bless! But our story
lingers.

It was now the custom of Warner to spend the whole day at his work, and
wander out with Clarence, when the evening darkened, to snatch a brief
respite of exercise and air. Often, along the lighted and populous
streets, would the two young and unfriended competitors for this world's
high places roam with the various crowd, moralizing as they went or
holding dim conjecture upon their destinies to be. And often would they
linger beneath the portico of some house where, "haunted with great
resort," Pleasure and Pomp held their nightly revels, to listen to the
music that, through the open windows, stole over the rare exotics with
which wealth mimics the southern scents, and floated, mellowing by
distance, along the unworthy streets; and while they stood together,
silent and each feeding upon separate thoughts, the artist's pale
lip would curl with scorn, as he heard the laugh and the sounds of a
frivolous and hollow mirth ring from the crowd within, and startle the
air from the silver spell which music had laid upon it. "These," would
he say to Clarence, "these are the dupes of the same fever as ourselves:
like us, they strive and toil and vex their little lives for a
distinction from their race. Ambition comes to them, as to all: but they
throw for a different prize than we do; theirs is the honour of a day,
ours is immortality; yet they take the same labour and are consumed by
the same care. And, fools that they are, with their gilded names and
their gaudy trappings, they would shrink in disdain from that comparison
with us which we, with a juster fastidiousness, blush at this moment to
acknowledge."

From these scenes they would rove on, and, both delighting in contrast,
enter some squalid and obscure quarter of the city. There, one night,
quiet observers of their kind, they paused beside a group congregated
together by some common cause of obscene merriment or unholy
fellowship--a group on which low vice had set her sordid and hideous
stamp--to gaze and draw strange humours or a motley moral from that
depth and ferment of human nature into whose sink the thousand streams
of civilization had poured their dregs and offal.

"You survey these," said the painter, marking each with the curious eye
of his profession: "they are a base horde, it is true; but they have
their thirst of fame, their aspirations even in the abyss of crime or
the loathsomeness of famished want. Down in yon cellar, where a farthing
rushlight glimmers upon haggard cheeks, distorted with the idiotcy
of drink; there, in that foul attic, from whose casement you see the
beggar's rags hang to dry, or rather to crumble in the reeking and
filthy air; farther on, within those walls which, black and heavy as the
hearts they hide, close our miserable prospect,--there, even there, in
the mildewed dungeon, in the felon's cell, on the very scaffold's self,
Ambition hugs her own hope or scowls upon her own despair. Yes! the
inmates of those walls had their perilous game of honour, their 'hazard
of the die,' in which vice was triumph and infamy success. We do but
share their passion, though we direct it to a better object."

Pausing for a moment, as his thoughts flowed into a somewhat different
channel of his character, Warner continued, "We have now caught a
glimpse of the two great divisions of mankind; they who riot in palaces,
and they who make mirth hideous in rags and hovels: own that it is but
a poor survey in either. Can we be contemptible with these or loathsome
with those? Or rather have we not a nobler spark within us, which
we have but to fan into a flame that shall burn forever, when these
miserable meteors sink into the corruption from which they rise?"

"But," observed Clarence, "these are the two extremes; the pinnacle of
civilization, too worn and bare for any more noble and vigorous fruit,
and the base upon which the cloud descends in rain and storm. Look to
the central portion of society; there the soil is more genial, and its
produce more rich."

"Is it so, in truth?" answered Warner; "pardon me, I believe not: the
middling classes are as human as the rest. There is the region, the
heart, of Avarice,--systematized, spreading, rotting, the very fungus
and leprosy of social states; suspicion, craft, hypocrisy, servility to
the great, oppression to the low, the waxlike mimicry of courtly vices,
the hardness of flint to humble woes; thought, feeling, the faculties
and impulses of man, all ulcered into one great canker, Gain,--these
make the general character of the middling class, the unleavened mass of
that mediocrity which it has been the wisdom of the shallow to applaud.
Pah! we too are of this class, this potter's earth, this paltry mixture
of mud and stone; but we, my friend, we will knead gold into our clay."

"But look," said Clarence, pointing to the group before them, "look, yon
wretched mother, whose voice an instant ago uttered the coarsest accents
of maudlin and intoxicated prostitution, is now fostering her infant,
with a fondness stamped upon her worn cheek and hollow eye, which might
shame the nice maternity of nobles; and there, too, yon wretch whom, in
the reckless effrontery of hardened abandonment, we ourselves heard a
few minutes since boast of his dexterity in theft, and openly exhibit
its token,--look, he is now, with a Samaritan's own charity, giving the
very goods for which his miserable life was risked to that attenuated
and starving stripling! No, Warner, no! even this mass is not
unleavened. The vilest infamy is not too deep for the Seraph Virtue to
descend and illumine its abyss!"

"Out on the weak fools!" said the artist, bitterly: "it would be
something, if they could be consistent even in crime!" and, placing his
arm in Linden's, he drew him away.

As the picture grew beneath the painter's hand, Clarence was much struck
with the outline and expression of countenance given to the regicide
Bradshaw.

"They are but an imperfect copy of the living original from whom I have
borrowed them," said Warner, in answer to Clarence's remark upon the
sternness of the features. "But that original--a relation of mine, is
coming here to-day: you shall see him."

While Warner was yet speaking, the person in question entered. His
were, indeed, the form and face worthy to be seized by the painter.
The peculiarity of his character made him affect a plainness of dress
unusual to the day, and approaching to the simplicity, but not the
neatness, of Quakerism. His hair--then, with all the better ranks, a
principal object of cultivation--was wild, dishevelled, and, in wiry
flakes of the sablest hue, rose abruptly from a forehead on which either
thought or passion had written its annals with an iron pen; the lower
part of the brow, which overhung the eye, was singularly sharp and
prominent; while the lines, or rather furrows, traced under the eyes and
nostrils, spoke somewhat of exhaustion and internal fatigue. But this
expression was contrasted and contradicted by the firmly compressed lip;
the lighted, steady, stern eye; the resolute and even stubborn front,
joined to proportions strikingly athletic and a stature of uncommon
height.

"Well, Wolfe," said the young painter to the person we have described,
"it is indeed a kindness to give me a second sitting."

"Tusk, boy!" answered Wolfe, "all men have their vain points, and I own
that I am not ill pleased that these rugged features should be assigned,
even in fancy, to one of the noblest of those men who judged the
mightiest cause in which a country was ever plaintiff, a tyrant
criminal, and a world witness!" While Wolfe was yet speaking his
countenance, so naturally harsh, took a yet sterner aspect, and the
artist, by a happy touch, succeeded in transferring it to the canvas.

"But, after all," continued Wolfe, "it shames me to lend aid to an art
frivolous in itself, and almost culpable in times when Freedom wants the
head to design, and perhaps the hand to execute, far other and nobler
works than the blazoning of her past deeds upon perishable canvas."

A momentary anger at the slight put upon his art crossed the pale brow
of the artist; but he remembered the character of the man and continued
his work in silence. "You consider then, sir, that these are times in
which liberty is attacked?" said Clarence.

"Attacked!" repeated Wolfe,--"attacked!" and then suddenly sinking his
voice into a sort of sneer, "why, since the event which this painting
is designed to commemorate, I know not if we have ever had one solitary
gleam of liberty break along the great chaos of jarring prejudice and
barbarous law which we term forsooth a glorious constitution. Liberty
attacked! no, boy; but it is a time when liberty may be gained."

Perfectly unacquainted with the excited politics of the day, or the
growing and mighty spirit which then stirred through the minds of men,
Clarence remained silent; but his evident attention flattered the fierce
republican, and he proceeded.

"Ay," he said slowly, and as if drinking in a deep and stern joy from
his conviction in the truth of the words he uttered,--"ay, I have
wandered over the face of the earth, and I have warmed my soul at the
fires which lay hidden under its quiet surface; I have been in the city
and the desert,--the herded and banded crimes of the Old World, and the
scattered but bold hearts which are found among the savannahs of the
New; and in either I have beheld that seed sown which, from a mustard
grain, too scanty for a bird's beak, shall grow up to be a shelter and
a home for the whole family of man. I have looked upon the thrones of
kings, and lo, the anointed ones were in purple and festive pomp; and
I looked beneath the thrones, and I saw Want and Hunger, and despairing
Wrath gnawing the foundations away. I have stood in the streets of that
great city where Mirth seems to hold an eternal jubilee, and beheld the
noble riot while the peasant starved; and the priest built altars to
Mammon, piled from the earnings of groaning Labour and cemented with
blood and tears. But I looked farther, and saw, in the rear, chains
sharpened into swords, misery ripening into justice, and famine
darkening into revenge; and I laughed as I beheld, for I knew that the
day of the oppressed was at hand."

Somewhat awed by the prophetic tone, though revolted by what seemed to
him the novelty and the fierceness of the sentiments of the republican,
Clarence, after a brief pause, said,--

"And what of our own country?"

Wolfe's brow darkened. "The oppression here," said he, "has not been
so weighty, therefore the reaction will be less strong; the parties
are more blended, therefore their separation will be more arduous; the
extortion is less strained, therefore the endurance will be more meek;
but, soon or late, the struggle must come: bloody will it be, if the
strife be even; gentle and lasting, if the people predominate."

"And if the rulers be the strongest?" said Clarence.

"The struggle will be renewed," replied Wolfe, doggedly.

"You still attend those oratorical meetings, cousin, I think?" said
Warner.

"I do," said Wolfe; "and if you are not so utterly absorbed in your vain
and idle art as to be indifferent to all things nobler, you will learn
yourself to take interest in what concerns--I will not say your
country, but mankind. For you, young man" (and the republican turned to
Clarence), "I would fain hope that life has not already been diverted
from the greatest of human objects; if so, come to-morrow night to our
assembly, and learn from worthier lips than mine the precepts and the
hopes for which good men live or die."

"I will come at all events to listen, if not to learn," said Clarence,
eagerly, for his curiosity was excited. And the republican, having now
fulfilled the end of his visit, rose and departed.




CHAPTER XV.

  Bound to suffer persecution
  And martyrdom with resolution,
  T'oppose himself against the hate
  And vengeance of the incensed state.--Hudibras.

Born of respectable though not wealthy parents, John Wolfe was one
of those fiery and daring spirits which, previous to some mighty
revolution, Fate seems to scatter over various parts of the earth, even
those removed from the predestined explosion,--heralds of the events in
which they are fitted though not fated to be actors. The period at which
he is presented to the reader was one considerably prior to that French
Revolution so much debated and so little understood. But some such
event, though not foreseen by the common, had been already foreboded
by the more enlightened, eye; and Wolfe, from a protracted residence
in France among the most discontented of its freer spirits, had brought
hope to that burning enthusiasm which had long made the pervading
passion of his existence.

Bold to ferocity, generous in devotion to folly in self-sacrifice,
unflinching in his tenets to a degree which rendered their ardour
ineffectual to all times, because utterly inapplicable to the present,
Wolfe was one of those zealots whose very virtues have the semblance
of vice, and whose very capacities for danger become harmless from the
rashness of their excess.

It was not among the philosophers and reasoners of France that Wolfe had
drawn strength to his opinions: whatever such companions might have
done to his tenets, they would at least have moderated his actions. The
philosopher may aid or expedite a change; but never does the philosopher
in any age or of any sect countenance a crime. But of philosophers Wolfe
knew little, and probably despised them for their temperance: it was
among fanatics--ignorant, but imaginative--that he had strengthened the
love without comprehending the nature of republicanism. Like Lucian's
painter, whose flattery portrayed the one-eyed prince in profile, he
viewed only that side of the question in which there was no defect, and
gave beauty to the whole by concealing the half. Thus, though on
his return to England herding with the common class of his reforming
brethren, Wolfe possessed many peculiarities and distinctions of
character which, in rendering him strikingly adapted to the purpose of
the novelist, must serve as a caution to the reader not to judge of the
class by the individual.

With a class of Republicans in England there was a strong tendency to
support their cause by reasoning. With Wolfe, whose mind was little
wedded to logic, all was the offspring of turbulent feelings, which, in
rejecting argument, substituted declamation for syllogism. This effected
a powerful and irreconcilable distinction between Wolfe and the better
part of his comrades; for the habits of cool reasoning, whether true or
false, are little likely to bias the mind towards those crimes to which
Wolfe's unregulated emotions might possibly urge him, and give to the
characters to which they are a sort of common denominator something of
method and much of similarity. But the feelings--those orators which
allow no calculation and baffle the tameness of comparison--rendered
Wolfe alone, unique, eccentric in opinion or action, whether of vice or
virtue.

Private ties frequently moderate the ardour of our public enthusiasm.
Wolfe had none. His nearest relation was Warner, and it may readily
be supposed that with the pensive and contemplative artist he had very
little in common. He had never married, nor had ever seemed to wander
from his stern and sterile path, in the most transient pursuit of the
pleasures of sense. Inflexibly honest, rigidly austere,--in his moral
character his bitterest enemies could detect no flaw,--poor, even to
indigence, he had invariably refused all overtures of the government;
thrice imprisoned and heavily fined for his doctrines, no fear of a
future, no remembrance of the past punishment could ever silence his
bitter eloquence or moderate the passion of his distempered zeal;
kindly, though rude, his scanty means were ever shared by the less
honest and disinterested followers of his faith; and he had been known
for days to deprive himself of food, and for nights of shelter, for the
purpose of yielding food and shelter to another.

Such was the man doomed to forsake, through a long and wasted life,
every substantial blessing, in pursuit of a shadowy good; with the
warmest benevolence in his heart, to relinquish private affections, and
to brood even to madness over public offences; to sacrifice everything
in a generous though erring devotion for that freedom whose cause,
instead of promoting, he was calculated to retard; and, while he
believed himself the martyr of a high and uncompromising virtue, to
close his career with the greatest of human crimes.




CHAPTER XVI.

     Faith, methinks his humour is good, and his purse will buy
     good company.--The Parson's Wedding.

When Clarence returned home, after the conversation recorded in our last
chapter, he found a note from Talbot, inviting him to meet some friends
of the latter at supper that evening. It was the first time Clarence had
been asked, and he looked forward with some curiosity and impatience to
the hour appointed in the note.

It is impossible to convey any idea of the jealous rancour felt by Mr.
and Mrs. Copperas on hearing of this distinction,--a distinction which
"the perfect courtier" had never once bestowed upon themselves.

Mrs. Copperas tossed her head, too indignant for words; and the
stock-jobber, in the bitterness of his soul, affirmed, with a meaning
air, "that he dared say, after all, that the old gentleman was not so
rich as he gave out."

On entering Talbot's drawing-room, Clarence found about seven or eight
people assembled; their names, in proclaiming the nature of the party,
indicated that the aim of the host was to combine aristocracy and
talent. The literary acquirements and worldly tact of Talbot, joined
to the adventitious circumstances of birth and fortune, enabled him to
effect this object, so desirable in polished society, far better than
we generally find it effected now. The conversation of these guests was
light and various. The last bon mot of Chesterfield, the last sarcasm
of Horace Walpole, Goldsmith's "Traveller," Shenstone's "Pastorals," and
the attempt of Mrs. Montagu to bring Shakspeare into fashion,--in all
these subjects the graceful wit and exquisite taste of Talbot shone
pre-eminent; and he had almost succeeded in convincing a profound critic
that Gray was a poet more likely to live than Mason, when the servant
announced supper.

That was the age of suppers! Happy age! Meal of ease and mirth; when
Wine and Night lit the lamp of Wit! Oh, what precious things were said
and looked at those banquets of the soul! There epicurism was in the
lip as well as the palate, and one had humour for a hors d'oeuvre and
repartee for an entremet. At dinner there is something too pompous, too
formal, for the true ease of Table Talk. One's intellectual appetite,
like the physical, is coarse but dull. At dinner one is fit only for
eating; after dinner only for politics. But supper was a glorious relic
of the ancients. The bustle of the day had thoroughly wound up the
spirit, and every stroke upon the dial-plate of wit was true to the
genius of the hour. The wallet of diurnal anecdote was full, and craved
unloading. The great meal--that vulgar first love of the appetite--was
over, and one now only flattered it into coquetting with another.
The mind, disengaged and free, was no longer absorbed in a cutlet or
burdened with a joint. The gourmand carried the nicety of his physical
perception to his moral, and applauded a bon mot instead of a bonne
bouche.

Then, too, one had no necessity to keep a reserve of thought for the
after evening; supper was the final consummation, the glorious funeral
pyre of day. One could be merry till bedtime without an interregnum.
Nay, if in the ardour of convivialism one did,--I merely hint at the
possibility of such an event,--if one did exceed the narrow limits of
strict ebriety, and open the heart with a ruby key, one had nothing to
dread from the cold, or, what is worse, the warm looks of ladies in the
drawing-room; no fear that an imprudent word, in the amatory fondness
of the fermented blood, might expose one to matrimony and settlements.
There was no tame, trite medium of propriety and suppressed confidence,
no bridge from board to bed, over which a false step (and your wine-cup
is a marvellous corrupter of ambulatory rectitude) might precipitate
into an irrecoverable abyss of perilous communication or unwholesome
truth. One's pillow became at once the legitimate and natural bourne
to "the overheated brain;" and the generous rashness of the coenatorial
reveller was not damped by untimeous caution or ignoble calculation.

But "we have changed all that now." Sobriety has become the successor
of suppers; the great ocean of moral encroachment has not left us one
little island of refuge. Miserable supper-lovers that we are, like the
native Indians of America, a scattered and daily disappearing race, we
wander among strange customs, and behold the innovating and invading
Dinner spread gradually over the very space of time in which the majesty
of Supper once reigned undisputed and supreme!

       O, ye heavens, be kind,
  And feel, thou earth, for this afflicted race.--WORDSWORTH.

As he was sitting down to the table, Clarence's notice was arrested by
a somewhat suspicious and unpleasing occurrence. The supper room was
on the ground floor, and, owing to the heat of the weather, one of the
windows, facing the small garden, was left open. Through this window
Clarence distinctly saw the face of a man look into the room for
one instant, with a prying and curious gaze, and then as instantly
disappear. As no one else seemed to remark this incident, and the
general attention was somewhat noisily engrossed by the subject
of conversation, Clarence thought it not worth while to mention a
circumstance for which the impertinence of any neighbouring servant or
drunken passer-by might easily account. An apprehension, however, of a
more unpleasant nature shot across him, as his eye fell upon the costly
plate which Talbot rather ostentatiously displayed, and then glanced to
the single and aged servant, who was, besides his master, the only male
inmate of the house. Nor could he help saying to Talbot, in the course
of the evening, that he wondered he was not afraid of hoarding so many
articles of value in a house at once so lonely and ill guarded.

"Ill guarded!" said Talbot, rather affronted, "why, I and my servant
always sleep here!"

To this Clarence thought it neither prudent nor well-bred to offer
further remark.




CHAPTER XVII.

  Meetings or public calls he never missed,
  To dictate often, always to assist.
 .....
  To his experience and his native sense,
  He joined a bold, imperious eloquence;
  The grave, stern look of men informed and wise,
  A full command of feature, heart and eyes,
  An awe-compelling frown, and fear-inspiring size.--CRABBE.

The next evening Clarence, mindful of Wolfe's invitation, inquired from
Warner (who repaid the contempt of the republican for the painter's
calling by a similar feeling for the zealot's) the direction of the
oratorical meeting, and repaired there alone. It was the most celebrated
club (of that description) of the day, and well worth attending, as a
gratification to the curiosity, if not an improvement to the mind.

On entering, he found himself in a long room, tolerably well lighted,
and still better filled. The sleepy countenances of the audience, the
whispered conversation carried on at scattered intervals, the listless
attitudes of some, the frequent yawns of others, the eagerness with
which attention was attracted to the opening door, when it admitted some
new object of interest, the desperate resolution with which some of the
more energetic turned themselves towards the orator, and then, with a
faint shake of the head, turned themselves again hopelessly away,--were
all signs that denoted that no very eloquent declaimer was in possession
of the "house." It was, indeed, a singularly dull, monotonous voice
which, arising from the upper end of the room, dragged itself on towards
the middle, and expired with a sighing sound before it reached the end.
The face of the speaker suited his vocal powers; it was small, mean, and
of a round stupidity, without anything even in fault that could possibly
command attention or even the excitement of disapprobation: the very
garments of the orator seemed dull and heavy, and, like the Melancholy
of Milton, had a "leaden look." Now and then some words, more emphatic
than others,--stones breaking, as it were with a momentary splash,
the stagnation of the heavy stream,--produced from three very quiet,
unhappy-looking persons seated next to the speaker, his immediate
friends, three single isolated "hears!"

  "The force of friendship could no further go."

At last, the orator having spoken through, suddenly stopped; the whole
meeting seemed as if a weight had been taken from it; there was a
general buzz of awakened energy, each stretched his limbs, and resettled
himself in his place,--

  "And turning to his neighbour said,
        'Rejoice!'"

A pause ensued, the chairman looked round, the eyes of the meeting
followed those of the president, with a universal and palpable
impatience, towards an obscure corner of the room: the pause deepened
for one moment, and then was broken; a voice cried "Wolfe!" and at that
signal the whole room shook with the name. The place which Clarence had
taken did not allow him to see the object of these cries, till he rose
from his situation, and, passing two rows of benches, stood forth in the
middle space of the room; then, from one to one went round the general
roar of applause; feet stamped, hands clapped, umbrellas set their sharp
points to the ground, and walking-sticks thumped themselves out of shape
in the universal clamour. Tall, gaunt, and erect, the speaker possessed,
even in the mere proportions of his frame, that physical power which
never fails, in a popular assembly, to gain attention to mediocrity
and to throw dignity over faults. He looked very slowly round the room,
remaining perfectly still and motionless, till the clamour of applause
had entirely subsided, and every ear, Clarence's no less eagerly than
the rest, was strained, and thirsting to catch the first syllables of
his voice.

It was then with a low, very deep, and somewhat hoarse tone, that he
began; and it was not till he had spoken for several minutes that the
iron expression of his face altered, that the drooping hand was raised,
and that the suppressed, yet powerful, voice began to expand and vary
in its volume. He had then entered upon a new department of his subject.
The question was connected with the English constitution, and Wolfe was
now preparing to put forth, in long and blackened array, the alleged
evils of an aristocratical form of government. Then it was as if the
bile and bitterness of years were poured forth in a terrible and stormy
wrath,--then his action became vehement, and his eye flashed forth
unutterable fire: his voice, solemn, swelling, and increasing with each
tone in its height and depth, filled, as with something palpable
and perceptible, the shaking walls. The listeners,--a various and
unconnected group, bound by no tie of faith or of party, many attracted
by curiosity, many by the hope of ridicule, some abhorring the tenets
expressed, and nearly all disapproving their principles or doubting
their wisdom,--the listeners, certainly not a group previously formed
or moulded into enthusiasm, became rapt and earnest; their very breath
forsook them.

Linden had never before that night heard a public speaker; but he was
of a thoughtful and rather calculating mind, and his early habits of
decision, and the premature cultivation of his intellect, rendered
him little susceptible, in general, to the impressions of the vulgar:
nevertheless, in spite of himself, he was hurried away by the stream,
and found that the force and rapidity of the speaker did not allow him
even time for the dissent and disapprobation which his republican maxims
and fiery denunciations perpetually excited in a mind aristocratic both
by creed and education. At length after a peroration of impetuous and
magnificent invective, the orator ceased.

In the midst of the applause that followed, Clarence left the assembly;
he could not endure the thought that any duller or more commonplace
speaker should fritter away the spell which yet bound and engrossed his
spirit.




CHAPTER XVIII.

     At the bottom of the staircase was a small door, which gave
     way before Nigel, as he precipitated himself upon the scene
     of action, a cocked pistol in one hand, etc.--Fortunes of
     Nigel.

The night, though not utterly dark, was rendered capricious and dim by
alternate wind and rain; and Clarence was delayed in his return homeward
by seeking occasional shelter from the rapid and heavy showers which
hurried by. It was during one of the temporary cessations of the rain
that he reached Copperas Bower; and, while he was searching in his
pockets for the key which was to admit him, he observed two men
loitering about his neighbour's house. The light was not sufficient
to give him more than a scattered and imperfect view of their motions.
Somewhat alarmed, he stood for several moments at the door, watching
them as well as he was able; nor did he enter the house till the
loiterers had left their suspicious position, and, walking onwards, were
hid entirely from him by the distance and darkness.

"It really is a dangerous thing for Talbot," thought Clarence, as he
ascended to his apartment, "to keep so many valuables, and only one
servant, and that one as old as himself too. However, as I am by no
means sleepy, and my room is by no means cool, I may as well open my
window, and see if those idle fellows make their re-appearance." Suiting
the action to the thought, Clarence opened his little casement, and
leaned wistfully out.

He had no light in his room, for none was ever left for him. This
circumstance, however, of course enabled him the better to penetrate the
dimness and haze of the night; and, by the help of the fluttering lamps,
he was enabled to take a general though not minute survey of the scene
below.

I think I have before said that there was a garden between Talbot's
house and Copperas Bower; this was bounded by a wall, which confined
Talbot's peculiar territory of garden, and this wall, describing a
parallelogram, faced also the road. It contained two entrances,--one the
principal adytus, in the shape of a comely iron gate, the other a wooden
door, which, being a private pass, fronted the intermediate garden
before mentioned and was exactly opposite to Clarence's window.

Linden had been more than ten minutes at his post, and had just begun to
think his suspicions without foundation and his vigil in vain, when he
observed the same figures he had seen before advance slowly from the
distance and pause by the front gate of Talbot's mansion.

Alarmed and anxious, he redoubled his attention; he stretched himself,
as far as his safety would permit, out of the window; the lamps,
agitated by the wind, which swept by in occasional gusts, refused to
grant to his straining sight more than an inaccurate and unsatisfying
survey. Presently, a blast, more violent than ordinary, suspended as
it were the falling columns of rain and left Clarence in almost total
darkness; it rolled away, and the momentary calm which ensued enabled
him to see that one of the men was stooping by the gate, and the other
standing apparently on the watch at a little distance. Another gust
shook the lamps and again obscured his view; and when it had passed
onward in its rapid course, the men had left the gate, and were in the
garden beneath his window. They crept cautiously, but swiftly, along
the opposite wall, till they came to the small door we have before
mentioned; here they halted, and one of them appeared to occupy himself
in opening the door. Now, then, fear was changed into certainty, and
it seemed without doubt that the men, having found some difficulty or
danger in forcing the stronger or more public entrance, had changed
their quarter of attack. No more time was to be lost; Clarence shouted
aloud, but the high wind probably prevented the sound reaching the ears
of the burglars, or at least rendered it dubious and confused. The next
moment, and before Clarence could repeat his alarm, they had opened the
door, and were within the neighbouring garden, beyond his view. Very
young men, unless their experience has outstripped their youth, seldom
have much presence of mind; that quality, which is the opposite to
surprise, comes to us in those years when nothing seems to us strange or
unexpected. But a much older man than Clarence might have well been at
a loss to know what conduct to adopt in the situation in which our
hero was placed. The visits of the watchman to that (then) obscure and
ill-inhabited neighborhood were more regulated by his indolence than his
duty; and Clarence knew that it would be in vain to listen for his cry
or tarry for his assistance. He himself was utterly unarmed, but the
stock-jobber had a pair of horse-pistols, and as this recollection
flashed upon him, the pause of deliberation ceased.

With a swift step he descended the first flight of stairs, and pausing
at the chamber door of the faithful couple, knocked upon its panels with
a loud and hasty summons. The second repetition of the noise produced
the sentence, uttered in a very trembling voice, of "Who's there?"

"It is I, Clarence Linden," replied our hero; "lose no time in opening
the door."

This answer seemed to reassure the valorous stock-jobber. He slowly
undid the bolt, and turned the key.

"In Heaven's name, what do you want, Mr. Linden?" said he.

"Ay," cried a sharp voice from the more internal recesses of the
chamber, "what do you want, sir, disturbing us in the bosom of our
family and at the dead of night?"

With a rapid voice, Clarence repeated what he had seen, and requested
the broker to accompany him to Talbot's house, or at least to lend him
his pistols.

"He shall do no such thing," cried Mrs. Copperas. "Come here, Mr. C.,
and shut the door directly."

"Stop, my love," said the stock-jobber, "stop a moment."

"For God's sake," cried Clarence, "make no delay; the poor old man may
be murdered by this time."

"It's no business of mine," said the stock-jobber. "If Adolphus had not
broken the rattle I would not have minded the trouble of springing it;
but you are very much mistaken if you think I am going to leave my warm
bed in order to have my throat cut."

"Then give me your pistols," cried Clarence; "I will go alone."

"I shall commit no such folly," said the stock-jobber; "if you are
murdered, I may have to answer it to your friends and pay for your
burial. Besides, you owe us for your lodgings: go to your bed, young
man, as I shall to mine." And, so saying, Mr. Copperas proceeded to
close the door.

But enraged at the brutality of the man and excited by the urgency of
the case, Clarence did not allow him so peaceable a retreat. With
a strong and fierce grasp, he seized the astonished Copperas by the
throat, and shaking him violently, forced his own entrance into the
sacred nuptial chamber.

"By Heaven," cried Linden, in a savage and stern tone, for his blood
was up. "I will twist your coward's throat, and save the murderer his
labour, if you do not instantly give me up your pistols."

The stock-jobber was panic-stricken. "Take them," he cried, in the
extremest terror; "there they are on the chimney-piece close by."

"Are they primed and loaded?" said Linden, not relaxing his gripe.

"Yes, yes!" said the stock-jobber, "loose my throat, or you will choke
me!" and at that instant, Clarence felt himself clasped by the invading
hands of Mrs. Copperas.

"Call off your wife," said he, "or I will choke you!" and he tightened
his hold, "and tell her to give me the pistols."

The next moment Mrs. Copperas extended the debated weapons towards
Clarence. He seized them, flung the poor stock-jobber against the
bedpost, hurried down stairs, opened the back door, which led into the
garden, flew across the intervening space, arrived at the door, and
entering Talbot's garden, paused to consider what was the next step to
be taken.

A person equally brave as Clarence, but more cautious, would not have
left the house without alarming Mr. de Warens, even in spite of the
failure with his master; but Linden only thought of the pressure of time
and the necessity of expedition, and he would have been a very unworthy
hero of romance had he felt fear for two antagonists, with a brace of
pistols at his command and a high and good action in view.

After a brief but decisive halt, he proceeded rapidly round the
house, in order to ascertain at which part the ruffians had admitted
themselves, should they (as indeed there was little doubt) have already
effected their entrance.

He found the shutters of one of the principal rooms on the ground-floor
had been opened, and through the aperture he caught the glimpse of a
moving light, which was suddenly obscured. As he was about to enter, the
light again flashed out: he drew back just in time, carefully screened
himself behind the shutter, and, through one of the chinks, observed
what passed within. Opposite to the window was a door which conducted to
the hall and principal staircase; this door was open, and in the hall at
the foot of the stairs Clarence saw two men; one carried a dark lantern,
from which the light proceeded, and some tools, of the nature of which
Clarence was naturally ignorant: this was a middle-sized muscular man,
dressed in the rudest garb of an ordinary labourer; the other was much
taller and younger, and his dress was of a rather less ignoble fashion.

"Hist! hist!" said the taller one, in a low tone, "did you not hear a
noise, Ben?"

"Not a pin fall; but stow your whids, man!"

This was all that Clarence heard in a connected form; but as the
wretches paused, in evident doubt how to proceed, he caught two or three
detached words, which his ingenuity readily formed into sentences. "No,
no! sleeps to the left--old man above--plate chest; we must have the
blunt too. Come, track up the dancers, and douse the glim." And at
the last words the light was extinguished, and Clarence's quick and
thirsting ear just caught their first steps on the stairs; they died
away, and all was hushed.

It had several times occurred to Clarence to rush from his hiding-place,
and fire at the ruffians, and perhaps that measure would have been the
wisest he could have taken; but Clarence had never discharged a pistol
in his life, and he felt, therefore, that his aim must be uncertain
enough to render a favourable position and a short distance essential
requisites. Both these were, at present, denied to him; and although he
saw no weapons about the persons of the villains, yet he imagined they
would not have ventured on so dangerous an expedition without firearms;
and if he failed, as would have been most probable, in his two shots, he
concluded that, though the alarm would be given, his own fate would be
inevitable.

If this was reasoning upon false premises, for housebreakers seldom
or never carry loaded firearms, and never stay for revenge, when their
safety demands escape, Clarence may be forgiven for not knowing the
customs of housebreakers, and for not making the very best of an
extremely novel and dangerous situation.

No sooner did he find himself in total darkness than he bitterly
reproached himself for his late backwardness, and, inwardly resolving
not again to miss any opportunity which presented itself, he entered
the window, groped along the room into the hall, and found his way very
slowly and after much circumlocution to the staircase.

He had just gained the summit, when a loud cry broke upon the stillness:
it came from a distance, and was instantly hushed; but he caught at
brief intervals, the sound of angry and threatening voices. Clarence
bent down anxiously, in the hope that some solitary ray would escape
through the crevice of the door within which the robbers were engaged.
But though the sounds came from the same floor as that on which he now
trod, they seemed far and remote, and not a gleam of light broke the
darkness.

He continued, however, to feel his way in the direction from which the
sounds proceeded, and soon found himself in a narrow gallery; the voices
seemed more loud and near, as he advanced; at last he distinctly heard
the words--

"Will you not confess where it is placed?"

"Indeed, indeed," replied an eager and earnest voice, which Clarence
recognized as Talbot's, "this is all the money I have in the house,--the
plate is above,--my servant has the key,--take it,--take all,--but save
his life and mine."

"None of your gammon," said another and rougher voice than that of the
first speaker: "we know you have more blunt than this,--a paltry sum of
fifty pounds, indeed!"

"Hold!" cried the other ruffian, "here is a picture set with diamonds,
that will do, Ben. Let go the old man."

Clarence was now just at hand, and probably from a sudden change in the
position of the dark lantern within, a light abruptly broke from beneath
the door and streamed along the passage.

"No, no, no!" cried the old man, in a loud yet tremulous voice,--"no,
not that, anything else, but I will defend that with my life."

"Ben, my lad," said the ruffian, "twist the old fool's neck we have no
more time to lose."

At that very moment the door was flung violently open, and Clarence
Linden stood within three paces of the reprobates and their prey. The
taller villain had a miniature in his hand, and the old man clung to his
legs with a convulsive but impotent clasp; the other fellow had
already his gripe upon Talbot's neck, and his right hand grasped a long
case-knife.

With a fierce and flashing eye, and a cheek deadly pale with internal
and resolute excitement, Clarence confronted the robbers.

"Thank Heaven," cried he, "I am not too late!" And advancing yet another
step towards the shorter ruffian, who struck mute with the suddenness
of the apparition, still retained his grasp of the old man, he fired his
pistol, with a steady and close aim; the ball penetrated the wretch's
brain, and without sound or sigh, he fell down dead, at the very feet
of his just destroyer. The remaining robber had already meditated, and
a second more sufficed to accomplish, his escape. He sprang towards the
door: the ball whizzed beside him, but touched him not. With a safe
and swift step, long inured to darkness, he fled along the passage; and
Linden, satisfied with the vengeance he had taken upon his comrade, did
not harass him with an unavailing pursuit.

Clarence turned to assist Talbot. The old man was stretched upon the
floor insensible, but his hand grasped the miniature which the plunderer
had dropped in his flight and terror, and his white and ashen lip was
pressed convulsively upon the recovered treasure.

Linden raised and placed him on his bed, and while employed in
attempting to revive him, the ancient domestic, alarmed by the report of
the pistol, came, poker in hand, to his assistance. By little and little
they recovered the object of their attention. His eyes rolled wildly
round the room, and he muttered,--"Off, off! ye shall not rob me of my
only relic of her,--where is it?--have you got it?--the picture, the
picture!"

"It is here, sir, it is here," said the old servant; "it is in your own
hand."

Talbot's eye fell upon it; he gazed at it for some moments, pressed it
to his lips, and then, sitting erect and looking wildly round, he seemed
to awaken to the sense of his late danger and his present deliverance.




CHAPTER XIX.

  Ah, fleeter far than fleetest storm or steed,
   Or the death they bear,
  The heart which tender thought clothes like a dove
   With the wings of care!
  In the battle, in the darkness, in the need,
   Shall mine cling to thee!
  Nor claim one smile for all the comfort, love,
   It may bring to thee!--SHELLEY.



LETTER FROM ALGERNON MORDAUNT TO ISABEL ST. LEGER.

You told me not to write to you. You know how long, but not how
uselessly I have obeyed you. Did you think, Isabel, that my love was
of that worldly and common order which requires a perpetual aliment
to support it? Did you think that, if you forbade the stream to flow
visibly, its sources would be exhausted, and its channel dried up? This
may be the passion of others; it is not mine. Months have passed since
we parted, and since then you have not seen me; this letter is the first
token you have received from a remembrance which cannot die. But do you
think that I have not watched and tended upon you, and gladdened my eyes
with gazing on your beauty when you have not dreamed that I was by? Ah,
Isabel, your heart should have told you of it; mine would, had you been
so near me!

You receive no letters from me, it is true: think you that my hand and
heart are therefore idle? No. I write to you a thousand burning lines:
I pour out my soul to you; I tell you of all I suffer; my thoughts, my
actions, my very dreams, are all traced upon the paper. I send them not
to you, but I read them over and over, and when I come to your name, I
pause and shut my eyes, and then "Fancy has her power," and lo! "you are
by my side!"

Isabel, our love has not been a holiday and joyous sentiment; but I feel
a solemn and unalterable conviction that our union is ordained.

Others have many objects to distract and occupy the thoughts which are
once forbidden a single direction, but we have none. At least, to me you
are everything. Pleasure, splendour, ambition, all are merged into one
great and eternal thought, and that is you!

Others have told me, and I believed them, that I was hard and cold
and stern: so perhaps I was before I knew you, but now I am weaker and
softer than a child. There is a stone which is of all the hardest and
the chillest, but when once set on fire it is unquenchable. You smile
at my image, perhaps, and I should smile if I saw it in the writing of
another; for all that I have ridiculed in romance as exaggerated seems
now to me too cool and too commonplace for reality.

But this is not what I meant to write to you; you are ill, dearest and
noblest Isabel, you are ill! I am the cause, and you conceal it from
me; and you would rather pine away and die than suffer me to lose one
of those worldly advantages which are in my eyes but as dust in the
balance,--it is in vain to deny it. I heard from others of your impaired
health; I have witnessed it myself. Do you remember last night, when you
were in the room with your relations, and they made you sing,--a song
too which you used to sing to me, and when you came to the second stanza
your voice failed you, and you burst into tears, and they, instead of
soothing, reproached and chid you, and you answered not, but wept on?
Isabel, do you remember that a sound was heard at the window and a
groan? Even they were startled, but they thought it was the wind, for
the night was dark and stormy, and they saw not that it was I: yes, my
devoted, my generous love, it was I who gazed upon you, and from whose
heart that voice of anguish was wrung; and I saw your cheek was pale and
thin, and that the canker at the core had preyed upon the blossom.

Think you, after this, that I could keep silence or obey your request?
No, dearest, no! Is not my happiness your object? I have the vanity
to believe so; and am I not the best judge how that happiness is to be
secured? I tell you, I say it calmly, coldly, dispassionately,--not
from the imagination, not even from the heart, but solely from the
reason,--that I can bear everything rather than the loss of you; and
that if the evil of my love scathe and destroy you, I shall consider
and curse myself as your murderer! Save me from this extreme of misery,
my--yes, my Isabel! I shall be at the copse where we have so often met
before, to-morrow, at noon. You will meet me; and if I cannot convince
you, I will not ask you to be persuaded. A. M.

And Isabel read this letter, and placed it at her heart, and felt less
miserable than she had done for months; for, though she wept, there
was sweetness in the tears which the assurance of his love and the
tenderness of his remonstrance had called forth. She met him: how could
she refuse? and the struggle was past. Though not "convinced" she was
"persuaded;" for her heart, which refused his reasonings, melted at his
reproaches and his grief. But she would not consent to unite her fate
with him at once, for the evils of that step to his interests
were immediate and near; she was only persuaded to permit their
correspondence and occasional meetings, in which, however imprudent they
might be for herself, the disadvantages to her lover were distant and
remote. It was of him only that she thought; for him she trembled; for
him she was the coward and the woman; for herself she had no fears, and
no forethought.

And Algernon was worthy of this devoted love, and returned it as it was
given. Man's love, in general, is a selfish and exacting sentiment: it
demands every sacrifice and refuses all. But the nature of Mordaunt was
essentially high and disinterested, and his honour, like his love, was
not that of the world: it was the ethereal and spotless honour of a
lofty and generous mind, the honour which custom can neither give nor
take away; and, however impatiently he bore the deferring of a union, in
which he deemed that he was the only sufferer, he would not have uttered
a sigh or urged a prayer for that union, could it, in the minutest or
remotest degree, have injured or degraded her.

These are the hearts and natures which make life beautiful; these are
the shrines which sanctify love; these are the diviner spirits for whom
there is kindred and commune with everything exalted and holy in heaven
and earth. For them Nature unfolds her hoarded poetry and her hidden
spells; for their steps are the lonely mountains, and the still woods
have a murmur for their ears; for them there is strange music in the
wave, and in the whispers of the light leaves, and rapture in the voices
of the birds: their souls drink, and are saturated with the mysteries of
the Universal Spirit, which the philosophy of old times believed to
be God Himself. They look upon the sky with a gifted vision, and its
dove-like quiet descends and overshadows their hearts; the Moon and the
Night are to them wells of Castalian inspiration and golden dreams; and
it was one of them who, gazing upon the Evening Star, felt in the inmost
sanctuary of his soul its mysterious harmonies with his most worshipped
hope, his most passionate desire, and dedicated it to--LOVE.




CHAPTER XX.

     Maria. Here's the brave old man's love, Bianca. That loves
     the young man.         The Woman's Prize; or, The Tamer
     Tamed.

"No, my dear Clarence, you have placed confidence in me, and it is now
my duty to return it; you have told me your history and origin, and I
will inform you of mine, but not yet. At present we will talk of you.
You have conferred upon me what our universal love of life makes us
regard as the greatest of human obligations; and though I can bear a
large burden of gratitude, yet I must throw off an atom or two in using
my little power in your behalf. Nor is this all: your history has also
given you another tie upon my heart, and, in granting you a legitimate
title to my good offices, removes any scruple you might otherwise have
had in accepting them."

"I have just received this letter from Lord ----, the minister for
foreign affairs: you will see that he has appointed you to the office
of attache at ----. You will also oblige me by looking over this other
letter at your earliest convenience; the trifling sum which it contains
will be repeated every quarter; it will do very well for an attache:
when you are an ambassador, why, we must equip you by a mortgage on
Scarsdale; and now, my dear Clarence, tell me all about the Copperases."

I need not say who was the speaker of the above sentences: sentences
apparently of a very agreeable nature; nevertheless, Clarence seemed to
think otherwise, for the tears gushed into his eyes, and he was unable
for several moments to reply.

"Come, my young friend," said Talbot, kindly; "I have no near relations
among whom I can choose a son I like better than you, nor you any
at present from whom you might select a more desirable father:
consequently, you must let me look upon you as my own flesh and blood;
and, as I intend to be a very strict and peremptory father, I expect the
most silent and scrupulous obedience to my commands. My first parental
order to you is to put up those papers, and to say nothing more about
them; for I have a great deal to talk to you about upon other subjects."

And by these and similar kind-hearted and delicate remonstrances, the
old man gained his point. From that moment Clarence looked upon him with
the grateful and venerating love of a son; and I question very much,
if Talbot had really been the father of our hero, whether he would have
liked so handsome a successor half so well.

The day after this arrangement, Clarence paid his debt to the Copperases
and removed to Talbot's house. With this event commenced a new era in
his existence: he was no longer an outcast and a wanderer; out of alien
ties he had wrought the link of a close and even paternal friendship;
life, brilliant in its prospects and elevated in its ascent, opened
flatteringly before him; and the fortune and courage which had so
well provided for the present were the best omens and auguries for the
future.

One evening, when the opening autumn had made its approaches felt, and
Linden and his new parent were seated alone by a blazing fire, and had
come to a full pause in their conversation, Talbot, shading his face
with the friendly pages of the "Whitehall Evening Paper," as if to
protect it from the heat, said,--

"I told you, the other day, that I would give you, at some early
opportunity, a brief sketch of my life. This confidence is due to you in
return for yours; and since you will soon leave me, and I am an old
man, whose life no prudent calculation can fix, I may as well choose the
present time to favour you with my confessions."

Clarence expressed and looked his interest, and the old man thus
commenced,--


THE HISTORY OF A VAIN MAN.

I was the favourite of my parents, for I was quick at my lessons, and my
father said I inherited my genius from him; and comely in my person, and
my mother said that my good looks came from her. So the honest pair saw
in their eldest son the union of their own attractions, and thought they
were making much of themselves when they lavished their caresses upon
me. They had another son, poor Arthur,--I think I see him now! He was a
shy, quiet, subdued boy, of a very plain personal appearance. My father
and mother were vain, showy, ambitious people of the world, and they
were as ashamed of my brother as they were proud of myself. However, he
afterwards entered the army and distinguished himself highly. He died in
battle, leaving an only daughter, who married, as you know, a nobleman
of high rank. Her subsequent fate it is now needless to relate.

Petted and pampered from my childhood, I grew up with a profound belief
in my own excellences, and a feverish and irritating desire to impress
every one who came in my way with the same idea. There is a sentence
in Sir William Temple, which I have often thought of with a painful
conviction of its truth: "A restlessness in men's minds to be something
they are not, and to have something they have not, is the root of all
immorality." [And of all good.--AUTHOR.] At school, I was confessedly
the cleverest boy in my remove; and, what I valued equally as much, I
was the best cricketer of the best eleven. Here, then, you will say
my vanity was satisfied,--no such thing! There was a boy who shared my
room, and was next me in the school; we were, therefore, always thrown
together. He was a great stupid, lubberly cub, equally ridiculed by the
masters and disliked by the boys. Will you believe that this individual
was the express and almost sole object of my envy? He was more than
my rival, he was my superior; and I hated him with all the unleavened
bitterness of my soul.

I have said he was my superior: it was in one thing. He could balance a
stick, nay, a cricket-bat, a poker, upon his chin, and I could not; you
laugh, and so can I now, but it was no subject of laughter to me
then. This circumstance, trifling as it may appear to you, poisoned my
enjoyment. The boy saw my envy, for I could not conceal it; and as all
fools are malicious, and most fools ostentatious, he took a particular
pride and pleasure in displaying his dexterity and showing off my
discontent. You can form no idea of the extent to which this petty
insolence vexed and disquieted me. Even in my sleep, the clumsy and
grinning features of this tormenting imp haunted me like a spectre:
my visions were nothing but chins and cricket-bats; walking-sticks,
sustaining themselves upon human excrescences, and pokers dancing a
hornpipe upon the tip of a nose. I assure you that I have spent hours in
secret seclusion, practising to rival my hated comrade, and my face--see
how one vanity quarrels with another--was little better than a mass of
bruises and discolorations.

I actually became so uncomfortable as to write home, and request to
leave the school. I was then about sixteen, and my indulgent father, in
granting my desire, told me that I was too old and too advanced in my
learning to go to any other academic establishment than the University.
The day before I left the school, I gave, as was usually the custom, a
breakfast to all my friends; the circumstance of my tormentor's sharing
my room obliged me to invite him among the rest. However, I was in
high spirits, and being a universal favourite with my schoolfellows, I
succeeded in what was always to me an object of social ambition, and set
the table in a roar; yet, when our festival was nearly expired, and I
began to allude more particularly to my approaching departure, my
vanity was far more gratified, for my feelings were far more touched, by
observing the regret and receiving the good wishes of all my companions.
I still recall that hour as one of the proudest and happiest of my
life; but it had its immediate reverse. My evil demon put it into my
tormentor's head to give me one last parting pang of jealousy. A large
umbrella happened accidentally to be in my room; Crompton--such was my
schoolfellow's name--saw and seized it. "Look here, Talbot," said he,
with his taunting and hideous sneer, "you can't do this;" and placing
the point of the umbrella upon his forehead, just above the eyebrow, he
performed various antics round the room.

At that moment I was standing by the fireplace, and conversing with
two boys upon whom, above all others, I wished to leave a favourable
impression. My foolish soreness on this one subject had been often
remarked; and, as I turned in abrupt and awkward discomposure from the
exhibition, I observed my two schoolfellows smile and exchange looks.
I am not naturally passionate, and even at that age I had in ordinary
cases great self-command; but this observation, and the cause which led
to it, threw me off my guard. Whenever we are utterly under the command
of one feeling, we cannot be said to have our reason: at that instant
I literally believe I was beside myself. What! in the very flush of
the last triumph that that scene would ever afford me; amidst the last
regrets of my early friends, to whom I fondly hoped to bequeath a long
and brilliant remembrance, to be thus bearded by a contemptible rival,
and triumphed over by a pitiful yet insulting superiority; to close my
condolences with laughter; to have the final solemnity of my career
thus terminating in mockery; and ridicule substituted as an ultimate
reminiscence in the place of an admiring regret; all this, too, to be
effected by one so long hated, one whom I was the only being forbidden
the comparative happiness of despising? I could not brook it; the
insult, the insulter, were too revolting. As the unhappy buffoon
approached me, thrusting his distorted face towards mine, I seized and
pushed him aside, with a brief curse and a violent hand. The sharp
point of the umbrella slipped; my action gave it impetus and weight; it
penetrated his eye, and--spare me, spare me the rest. [This instance
of vanity, and indeed the whole of Talbot's history, is literally from
facts.]

The old man bent down, and paused for a few moments before he resumed.

Crompton lost his eye, but my punishment was as severe as his. People
who are very vain are usually equally susceptible, and they who feel
one thing acutely will so feel another. For years, ay, for many years
afterwards, the recollection of my folly goaded me with the bitterest
and most unceasing remorse. Had I committed murder, my conscience could
scarce have afflicted me more severely. I did not regain my self-esteem
till I had somewhat repaired the injury I had done. Long after that
time Crompton was in prison, in great and overwhelming distress. I
impoverished myself to release him; I sustained him and his family till
fortune rendered my assistance no longer necessary; and no triumphs were
ever more sweet to me than the sacrifice I was forced to submit to, in
order to restore him to prosperity.

It is natural to hope that this accident had at least the effect of
curing me of my fault; but it requires philosophy in yourself, or your
advisers, to render remorse of future avail. How could I amend my
fault, when I was not even aware of it? Smarting under the effects,
I investigated not the cause, and I attributed to irascibility and
vindictiveness what had a deeper and more dangerous origin.

At college, in spite of all my advantages of birth, fortune, health, and
intellectual acquirements, I had many things besides the one enemy of
remorse to corrode my tranquillity of mind. I was sure to find some one
to excel me in something, and this was enough to embitter my peace. Our
living Goldsmith is my favourite poet, and I perhaps insensibly
venerate the genius the more because I find something congenial in the
infirmities of the man. I can fully credit the anecdotes recorded
of him. I, too, could once have been jealous of a puppet handling a
spontoon; I, too, could once have been miserable if two ladies at the
theatre were more the objects of attention than myself! You, Clarence,
will not despise me for this confession; those who knew me less would.
Fools! there is no man so great as not to have some littleness more
predominant than all his greatness. Our virtues are the dupes, and often
only the playthings, of our follies! smile, but it is mournfully, in
looking back to that day. Though rich, high-born, and good-looking, I
possessed not one of these three qualities in that eminence which could
alone satisfy my love of superiority and desire of effect. I knew this
somewhat humiliating truth, for, though vain, I was not conceited.
Vanity, indeed, is the very antidote to conceit; for while the former
makes us all nerve to the opinion of others, the latter is perfectly
satisfied with its opinion of itself.

I knew this truth, and as Pope, if he could not be the greatest of
poets, resolved to be the most correct, so I strove, since I could not
be the handsomest, the wealthiest, and the noblest of my contemporaries,
to excel them, at least, in the grace and consummateness of manner; and
in this after incredible pains, after diligent apprenticeship in the
world and intense study in the closet, I at last flattered myself that
I had succeeded. Of all success, while we are yet in the flush of youth
and its capacities of enjoyment, I can imagine none more intoxicating or
gratifying than the success of society, and I had certainly some years
of its triumph and eclat. I was courted, followed, flattered, and sought
by the most envied and fastidious circles in England and even in Paris;
for society, so indifferent to those who disdain it, overwhelms with
its gratitude--profuse though brief--those who devote themselves to its
amusement. The victim to sameness and ennui, it offers, like the pallid
and luxurious Roman, a reward for a new pleasure: and as long as our
industry or talent can afford the pleasure, the reward is ours. At
that time, then, I reaped the full harvest of my exertions: the
disappointment and vexation were of later date.

I now come to the great era of my life,--Love. Among my acquaintance was
Lady Mary Walden, a widow of high birth, and noble though not powerful
connections. She lived about twenty miles from London in a beautiful
retreat; and, though not rich, her jointure, rendered ample by economy,
enabled her to indulge her love of society. Her house was always as
full as its size would permit, and I was among the most welcome of its
visitors. She had an only daughter: even now, through the dim mists of
years, that beautiful and fairy form rises still and shining before me,
undimmed by sorrow, unfaded by time. Caroline Walden was the object
of general admiration, and her mother, who attributed the avidity with
which her invitations were accepted by all the wits and fine gentlemen
of the day to the charms of her own conversation, little suspected the
face and wit of her daughter to be the magnet of attraction. I had no
idea at that time of marriage, still less could I have entertained such
a notion, unless the step had greatly exalted my rank and prospects.

The poor and powerless Caroline Walden was therefore the last person
for whom I had what the jargon of mothers term "serious intentions."
However, I was struck with her exceeding loveliness and amused by the
vivacity of her manners; moreover, my vanity was excited by the hope
of distancing all my competitors for the smiles of the young beauty.
Accordingly I laid myself out to please, and neglected none of those
subtle and almost secret attentions which, of all flatteries, are the
most delicate and successful; and I succeeded. Caroline loved me with
all the earnestness and devotion which characterize the love of woman.
It never occurred to her that I was only trifling with those affections
which it seemed so ardently my intention to win. She knew that my
fortune was large enough to dispense with the necessity of fortune with
my wife, and in birth she would have equalled men of greater pretensions
to myself; added to this, long adulation had made her sensible though
not vain of her attractions, and she listened with a credulous ear to
the insinuated flatteries I was so well accustomed to instil.

Never shall I forget--no, though I double my present years--the shock,
the wildness of despair with which she first detected the selfishness
of my homage; with which she saw that I had only mocked her trusting
simplicity; and that while she had been lavishing the richest treasures
of her heart before the burning altars of Love, my idol had been Vanity
and my offerings deceit. She tore herself from the profanation of my
grasp; she shrouded herself from my presence. All interviews with me
were rejected; all my letters returned to me unopened; and though, in
the repentance of my heart, I entreated, I urged her to accept vows that
were no longer insincere, her pride became her punishment, as well as
my own. In a moment of bitter and desperate feeling; she accepted the
offers of another, and made the marriage bond a fatal and irrevocable
barrier to our reconciliation and union.

Oh, how I now cursed my infatuation! how passionately I recalled the
past! how coldly I turned from the hollow and false world, to whose
service I had sacrificed my happiness, to muse and madden over the
prospects I had destroyed and the loving and noble heart I had rejected!
Alas! after all, what is so ungrateful as that world for which we
renounce so much? Its votaries resemble the Gymnosophists of old, and
while they profess to make their chief end pleasure, we can only learn
that they expose themselves to every torture and every pain!

Lord Merton, the man whom Caroline now called husband, was among the
wealthiest and most dissipated of his order; and two years after our
separation I met once more with the victim of my unworthiness, blazing
in "the full front" of courtly splendour, the leader of its gayeties and
the cynosure of her followers. Intimate with the same society, we were
perpetually cast together, and Caroline was proud of displaying the
indifference towards me, which, if she felt not, she had at least learnt
artfully to assume. This indifference was her ruin. The depths of my
evil passion were again sounded and aroused, and I resolved yet to
humble the pride and conquer the coldness which galled to the very quick
the morbid acuteness of my self-love. I again attached myself to her
train; I bowed myself to the very dust before her. What to me were
her chilling reply and disdainful civilities?---only still stronger
excitements to persevere.

I spare you and myself the gradual progress of my schemes. A woman may
recover her first passion, it is true; but then she must replace it with
another. That other was denied to Caroline: she had not even children
to engross her thoughts and to occupy her affections; and the gay world,
which to many becomes an object, was to her only an escape.

Clarence, my triumph came! Lady Walden (who had never known our secret)
invited me to her house: Caroline was there. In the same spot where we
had so often stood before, and in which her earliest affections were
insensibly breathed away, in that same spot I drew from her colourless
and trembling lips the confession of her weakness, the restored and
pervading power of my remembrance.

But Caroline was a proud and virtuous woman: even while her heart
betrayed her, her mind resisted; and in the very avowal of her
unconquered attachment, she renounced and discarded me forever. I was
not an ungenerous though a vain man; but my generosity was wayward,
tainted, and imperfect. I could have borne the separation; I could have
severed myself from her; I could have flown to the uttermost parts of
the earth; I could have hoarded there my secret yet unextinguished
love, and never disturbed her quiet by a murmur: but then the fiat of
separation must have come from me! My vanity could not bear that her
lips should reject me, that my part was not to be the nobility of
sacrifice, but the submission of resignation. However, my better
feelings were aroused, and though I could not stifle I concealed my
selfish repinings. We parted: she returned to town; I buried myself in
the country; and, amidst the literary studies to which, though by fits
and starts, I was passionately devoted, I endeavoured to forget my
ominous and guilty love.

But I was then too closely bound to the world not to be perpetually
reminded of its events. My retreat was thronged with occasional
migrators from London; my books were mingled with the news and scandal
of the day. All spoke to me of Lady Merton; not as I loved to picture
her to myself, pale and sorrowful, and brooding over my image; but gay,
dissipated, the dispenser of smiles, the prototype of joy. I contrasted
this account of her with the melancholy and gloom of my own feelings,
and I resented her seeming happiness as an insult to myself.

In this angry and fretful mood I returned to London. My empire was
soon resumed; and now, Linden, comes the most sickening part of my
confessions. Vanity is a growing and insatiable disease: what seems to
its desires as wealth to-day, to-morrow it rejects as poverty. I was at
first contented to know that I was beloved; by degrees, slow, yet sure,
I desired that others should know it also. I longed to display my power
over the celebrated and courted Lady Merton; and to put the last crown
to my reputation and importance. The envy of others is the food of
our own self-love. Oh, you know not, you dream not, of the galling
mortifications to which a proud woman, whose love commands her pride,
is subjected! I imposed upon Caroline the most humiliating, the most
painful trials; I would allow her to see none but those I pleased; to
go to no place where I withheld my consent; and I hesitated not to exert
and testify my power over her affections, in proportion to the publicity
of the opportunity.

Yet, with all this littleness, would you believe that I loved Caroline
with the most ardent and engrossing passion? I have paused behind her,
in order to kiss the ground she trod on; I have stayed whole nights
beneath her window, to catch one glimpse of her passing form, even
though I had spent hours of the daytime in her society; and, though my
love burned and consumed me like a fire, I would not breathe a single
wish against her innocence, or take advantage of my power to accomplish
what I knew from her virtue and pride no atonement could possibly repay.
Such are the inconsistencies of the heart, and such, while they prevent
our perfection, redeem us from the utterness of vice! Never, even in
my wildest days, was I blind to the glory of virtue, yet never, till
my latest years, have I enjoyed the faculty to avail myself of my
perception. I resembled the mole, which by Boyle is supposed to possess
the idea of light, but to be unable to comprehend the objects on which
it shines.

Among the varieties of my prevailing sin, was a weakness common enough
to worldly men. While I ostentatiously played off the love I had excited
I could not bear to show the love I felt. In our country, and perhaps,
though in a less degree, in all other highly artificial states,
enthusiasm or even feeling of any kind is ridiculous; and I could not
endure the thought that my treasured and secret affections should be
dragged from their retreat to be cavilled and carped at by--

  "Every beardless, vain comparative."

This weakness brought on the catastrophe of my love; for, mark me,
Clarence, it is through our weaknesses that our vices are punished!
One night I went to a masquerade; and, while I was sitting in a remote
corner, three of my acquaintances, whom I recognized, though they knew
it not, approached and rallied me upon my romantic attachment to Lady
Merton. One of them was a woman of a malicious and sarcastic wit; the
other two were men whom I disliked, because their pretensions interfered
with mine; they were diners-out and anecdote-mongers. Stung to the
quick by their sarcasms and laughter, I replied in a train of mingled
arrogance and jest; at last I spoke slightingly of the person in
question; and these profane and false lips dared not only to disown the
faintest love to that being who was more to me than all on earth, but
even to speak of herself with ridicule and her affection with disdain.

In the midst of this, I turned and beheld, within hearing, a figure
which I knew upon the moment. O Heaven! the burning shame and agony of
that glance! It raised its mask--I saw that blanched cheek, and that
trembling lip! I knew that the iron had indeed entered into her soul.

Clarence, I never beheld her again alive. Within a week from that time
she was a corpse. She had borne much, suffered much, and murmured not;
but this shock pressed too hard, came too home, and from the hand of
him for whom she would have sacrificed all! I stood by her in death;
I beheld my work; and I turned away, a wanderer and a pilgrim upon the
face of the earth. Verily, I have had my reward.

The old man paused, in great emotion; and Clarence, who could offer
him no consolation, did not break the silence. In a few minutes Talbot
continued--

From that time the smile of woman was nothing to me: I seemed to grow
old in a single day. Life lost to me all its objects. A dreary and
desert blank stretched itself before me: the sounds of creation had only
in my ears one voice; the past, the future, one image. I left my country
for twenty years, and lived an idle and hopeless man in the various
courts of the Continent.

At the age of fifty I returned to England; the wounds of the past had
not disappeared, but they were scarred over; and I longed, like the rest
of my species, to have an object in view. At that age, if we have seen
much of mankind and possess the talents to profit by our knowledge, we
must be one of two sects,--a politician or a philosopher. My time was
not yet arrived for the latter, so I resolved to become the former; but
this was denied me, for my vanity had assumed a different shape. It is
true that I cared no longer for the reputation women can bestow; but I
was eager for the applause of men, and I did not like the long labour
necessary to attain it. I wished to make a short road to my object, and
I eagerly followed every turn but the right one, in the hopes of its
leading me sooner to my goal.

The great characteristic of a vain man in contradistinction to an
ambitious man, his eternal obstacle to a high and honourable fame, is
this: he requires for any expenditure of trouble too speedy a reward;
he cannot wait for years, and climb, step by step, to a lofty object;
whatever he attempts, he must seize at a single grasp. Added to this, he
is incapable of an exclusive attention to one end; the universality of
his cravings is not contented, unless it devours all; and thus he is
perpetually doomed to fritter away his energies by grasping at the
trifling baubles within his reach, and in gathering the worthless fruit
which a single sun can mature.

This, then, was my fault, and the cause of my failure. I could not give
myself up to finance, nor puzzle through the intricacies of commerce:
even the common parliamentary drudgeries of constant attendance and
late hours were insupportable to me; and so after two or three "splendid
orations," as my friends termed them, I was satisfied with the puffs of
the pamphleteers and closed my political career. I was now, then, the
wit and the conversationalist. With my fluency of speech and variety
of information, these were easy distinctions; and the popularity of a
dinner-table or the approbation of a literary coterie consoled me for
the more public and more durable applause I had resigned.

But even this gratification did not last long. I fell ill; and the
friends who gathered round the wit fled from the valetudinarian. This
disgusted me, and when I was sufficiently recovered I again returned to
the Continent. But I had a fit of misanthropy and solitude upon me, and
so it was not to courts and cities, the scenes of former gayeties,
that I repaired; on the contrary, I hired a house by one of the most
sequestered of the Swiss lakes, and, avoiding the living, I surrendered
myself without interruption or control to commune with the dead. I
surrounded myself with books and pored with a curious and searching eye
into those works which treat particularly upon "man." My passions were
over, my love of pleasure and society was dried up, and I had now
no longer the obstacles which forbid us to be wise; I unlearned
the precepts my manhood had acquired, and in my old age I commenced
philosopher; Religion lent me her aid, and by her holy lamp my studies
were conned and my hermitage illumined.

There are certain characters which in the world are evil, and in
seclusion are good: Rousseau, whom I knew well, is one of them. These
persons are of a morbid sensitiveness, which is perpetually galled by
collision with others. In short, they are under the dominion of VANITY;
and that vanity, never satisfied and always restless in the various
competitions of society, produces "envy, hatred, malice, and
all uncharitableness!" but, in solitude, the good and benevolent
dispositions with which our self-love no longer interferes have room to
expand and ripen without being cramped by opposing interests: this will
account for many seeming discrepancies in character. There are also
some men in whom old age supplies the place of solitude, and Rousseau's
antagonist and mental antipodes, Voltaire, is of this order. The pert,
the malignant, the arrogant, the lampooning author in his youth and
manhood, has become in his old age the mild, the benevolent, and the
venerable philosopher. Nothing is more absurd than to receive the
characters of great men so implicitly upon the word of a biographer;
and nothing can be less surprising than our eternal disputes upon
individuals: for no man throughout life is the same being, and each
season of our existence contradicts the characteristics of the last.

And now in my solitude and my old age, a new spirit entered within me:
the game in which I had engaged so vehemently was over for me; and I
joined to my experience as a player my coolness as a spectator; I no
longer struggled with my species, and I began insensibly to love them.
I established schools and founded charities; and, in secret but active
services to mankind, I employed my exertions and lavished my desires.

From this amendment I date the peace of mind and elasticity which I now
enjoy; and in my later years the happiness which I pursued in my youth
and maturity so hotly, yet so ineffectually, has flown unsolicited to my
breast.

About five years ago I came again to England, with the intention of
breathing my last in the country which gave me birth. I retired to
my family home; I endeavoured to divert myself in agricultural
improvements, and my rental was consumed in speculation. This did not
please me long: I sought society,--society in Yorkshire! You may
imagine the result: I was out of my element; the mere distance from
the metropolis, from all genial companionship, sickened me with a vague
feeling of desertion and solitude; for the first time in my life I
felt my age and my celibacy. Once more I returned to town, a complaint
attacked my lungs, the physicians recommended the air of this
neighbourhood, and I chose the residence I now inhabit. Without being
exactly in London, I can command its advantages, and obtain society as
a recreation without buying it by restraint. I am not fond of new faces
nor any longer covetous of show; my old servant therefore contented me:
for the future, I shall, however, to satisfy your fears, remove to
a safer habitation, and obtain a more numerous guard. It is, at all
events, a happiness to me that Fate, in casting me here and exposing me
to something of danger, has raised up in you a friend for my old age,
and selected from this great universe of strangers one being to convince
my heart that it has not outlived affection. My tale is done; may you
profit by its moral!

When Talbot said that our characters were undergoing a perpetual change
he should have made this reservation,--the one ruling passion remains
to the last; it may be modified, but it never departs; and it is these
modifications which do, for the most part, shape out the channels of our
change; or as Helvetius has beautifully expressed it, "we resemble those
vessels which the waves still carry towards the south, when the north
wind has ceased to blow;" but in our old age, this passion, having
little to feed on, becomes sometimes dormant and inert, and then our
good qualities rise, as it were from an incubus, and have their sway.

Yet these cases are not common, and Talbot was a remarkable instance,
for he was a remarkable man. His mind had not slept while the age
advanced, and thus it had swelled as it were from the bondage of
its earlier passions and prejudices. But little did he think, in the
blindness of self-delusion,--though it was so obvious to Clarence,
that he could have smiled if he had not rather inclined to weep at the
frailties of human nature,--little did he think that the vanity which
had cost him so much remained "a monarch still," undeposed alike by
his philosophy, his religion, or his remorse; and that, debarred
by circumstances from all wider and more dangerous fields, it still
lavished itself upon trifles unworthy of his powers and puerilities
dishonouring his age. Folly is a courtesan whom we ourselves seek,
whose favours we solicit at an enormous price, and who, like Lais,
finds philosophers at her door scarcely less frequently than the rest of
mankind!




CHAPTER XXI.

 Mrs. Trinket. What d'ye buy, what d'ye lack, gentlemen? Gloves, ribbons,
 and essences,--ribbons, gloves, and essences.
                          ETHEREGE.

"And so, my love," said Mr. Copperas, one morning at breakfast, to his
wife, his right leg being turned over his left, and his dexter hand
conveying to his mouth a huge morsel of buttered cake,--"and, so my
love, they say that the old fool is going to leave the jackanapes all
his fortune?"

"They do say so, Mr. C.; for my part I am quite out of patience with the
art of the young man; I dare say he is no better than he should be; he
always had a sharp look, and for aught I know there may be more in
that robbery than you or I dreamed of, Mr. Copperas. It was a pity,"
continued Mrs. Copperas, upbraiding her lord with true matrimonial
tenderness and justice, for the consequences of his having acted from
her advice,--"it was a pity, Mr. C., that you should have refused to
lend him the pistols to go to the old fellow's assistance, for then who
knows but--"

"I might have converted them into pocket pistols," interrupted Mr. C.,
"and not have overshot the mark, my dear--ha, ha, ha!"

"Lord, Mr. Copperas, you are always making a joke of everything."

"No, my dear, for once I am making a joke of nothing."

"Well, I declare it's shameful," cried Mrs. Copperas, still following
up her own indignant meditations, "and after taking such notice of
Adolphus, too, and all!"

"Notice, my dear! mere words," returned Mr. Copperas, "mere words, like
ventilators, which make a great deal of air, but never raise the wind;
but don't put yourself in a stew, my love, for the doctors say that
copperas in a stew is poison!"

At this moment Mr. de Warens, throwing open the door, announced Mr.
Brown; that gentleman entered, with a sedate but cheerful air. "Well,
Mrs. Copperas, your servant; any table-linen wanted? Mr. Copperas, how
do you do? I can give you a hint about the stocks. Master Copperas,
you are looking bravely; don't you think he wants some new pinbefores,
ma'am? But Mr. Clarence Linden, where is he? Not up yet, I dare say. Ah,
the present generation is a generation of sluggards, as his worthy aunt,
Mrs. Minden, used to say."

"I am sure," said Mrs. Copperas, with a disdainful toss of the head,
"I know nothing about the young man. He has left us; a very mysterious
piece of business indeed, Mr. Brown; and now I think of it, I can't help
saying that we were by no means pleased with your introduction: and, by
the by, the chairs you bought for us at the sale were a mere take-in, so
slight that Mr. Walruss broke two of them by only sitting down."

"Indeed, ma'am?" said Mr. Brown, with expostulating gravity; "but then
Mr. Walruss is so very corpulent. But the young gentleman, what of him?"
continued the broker, artfully turning from the point in dispute.

"Lord, Mr. Brown, don't ask me: it was the unluckiest step we ever made
to admit him into the bosom of our family; quite a viper, I assure you;
absolutely robbed poor Adolphus."

"Lord help us!" said Mr. Brown, with a look which "cast a browner
horror" o'er the room, "who would have thought it? and such a pretty
young man!"

"Well," said Mr. Copperas, who, occupied in finishing the buttered cake,
had hitherto kept silence, "I must be off. Tom--I mean de Warens--have
you stopped the coach?"

"Yees, sir."

"And what coach is it?"

"It be the Swallow, sir."

"Oh, very well. And now, Mr. Brown, having swallowed in the roll, I
will e'en roll in the Swallow--Ha, ha, ha!--At any rate," thought Mr.
Copperas, as he descended the stairs, "he has not heard that before."

"Ha, ha!" gravely chuckled Mr. Brown, "what a very facetious, lively
gentleman Mr. Copperas is. But touching this ungrateful young man, Mr.
Linden, ma'am?"

"Oh, don't tease me, Mr. Brown, I must see after my domestics: ask Mr.
Talbot, the old miser in the next house, the havarr, as the French say."

"Well, now," said Mr. Brown, following the good lady down stairs, "how
distressing for me! and to say that he was Mrs. Minden's nephew, too!"

But Mr. Brown's curiosity was not so easily satisfied, and finding Mr.
de Warens leaning over the "front" gate, and "pursuing with wistful
eyes" the departing "Swallow," he stopped, and, accosting him, soon
possessed himself of the facts that "old Talbot had been robbed and
murdered, but that Mr. Linden had brought him to life again; and that
old Talbot had given him a hundred thousand pounds, and adopted him as
his son; and that how Mr. Linden was going to be sent to foreign parts,
as an ambassador, or governor, or great person; and that how meester and
meeses were quite 'cut up' about it."

All these particulars having been duly deposited in the mind of
Mr. Brown, they produced an immediate desire to call upon the young
gentleman, who, to say nothing of his being so very nearly related to
his old customer, Mrs. Minden, was always so very great a favourite with
him, Mr. Brown.

Accordingly, as Clarence was musing over his approaching departure,
which was now very shortly to take place, he was somewhat startled by
the apparition of Mr. Brown--"Charming day, sir,--charming day," said
the friend of Mrs. Minden,--"just called in to congratulate you. I have
a few articles, sir, to present you with,--quite rarities, I assure
you,--quite presents, I may say. I picked them up at a sale of the late
Lady Waddilove's most valuable effects. They are just the things, sir,
for a gentleman going on a foreign mission. A most curious ivory
chest, with an Indian padlock, to hold confidential letters,--belonged
formerly, sir, to the Great Mogul; and a beautiful diamond snuff-box,
sir, with a picture of Louis XIV. on it, prodigiously fine, and will
look so loyal too: and, sir, if you have any old aunts in the country,
to send a farewell present to, I have some charming fine cambric, a
superb Dresden tea set, and a lovely little 'ape,' stuffed by the late
Lady W. herself."

"My good sir," began Clarence.

"Oh, no thanks, sir,--none at all,--too happy to serve a relation of
Mrs. Minden,--always proud to keep up family connections. You will be
at home to-morrow, sir, at eleven; I will look in; your most humble
servant, Mr. Linden." And almost upsetting Talbot, who had just entered,
Mr. Brown bowed himself out.




CHAPTER XXII.

  He talked with open heart and tongue,
   Affectionate and true;
  A pair of friends, though I was young
   And Matthew seventy-two.--WORDSWORTH.

Meanwhile the young artist proceeded rapidly with his picture. Devoured
by his enthusiasm, and utterly engrossed by the sanguine anticipation
of a fame which appeared to him already won, he allowed himself no
momentary interval of relaxation; his food was eaten by starts, and
without stirring from his easel; his sleep was brief and broken by
feverish dreams; he no longer roved with Clarence, when the evening
threw her shade over his labours; all air and exercise he utterly
relinquished; shut up in his narrow chamber, he passed the hours in a
fervid and passionate self-commune, which, even in suspense from his
work, riveted his thoughts the closer to its object. All companionship,
all intrusion, he bore with irritability and impatience. Even Clarence
found himself excluded from the presence of his friend; even his nearest
relation, who doted on the very ground which he hallowed with his
footstep, was banished from the haunted sanctuary of the painter; from
the most placid of human beings, Warner seemed to have grown the most
morose.

Want of rest, abstinence from food, the impatience of the strained
spirit and jaded nerves, all contributed to waste the health while they
excited the genius of the artist. A crimson spot, never before seen
there, burned in the centre of his pale cheek; his eye glowed with a
brilliant but unnatural fire; his features grew sharp and attenuated;
his bones worked from his whitening and transparent skin; and the soul
and frame, turned from their proper and kindly union, seemed contesting,
with fierce struggles, which should obtain the mastery and the triumph.

But neither his new prospects nor the coldness of his friend diverted
the warm heart of Clarence from meditating how he could most effectually
serve the artist before he departed from the country, It was a peculiar
object of desire to Warner that the most celebrated painter of the day,
who was on terms of intimacy with Talbot, and who with the benevolence
of real superiority was known to take a keen interest in the success
of more youthful and inexperienced genius,--it was a peculiar object of
desire to Warner, that Sir Joshua Reynolds should see his picture before
it was completed; and Clarence, aware of this wish, easily obtained from
Talbot a promise that it should be effected. That was the least service
of his zeal touched by the earnestness of Linden's friendship, anxious
to oblige in any way his preserver, and well pleased himself to be the
patron of merit, Talbot readily engaged to obtain for Warner whatever
the attention and favour of high rank or literary distinction could
bestow. "As for his picture," said Talbot (when, the evening before
Clarence's departure, the latter was renewing the subject), "I shall
myself become the purchaser, and at a price which will enable our friend
to afford leisure and study for the completion of his next attempt; but
even at the risk of offending your friendship, and disappointing your
expectations, I will frankly tell you that I think Warner overrates,
perhaps not his talents, but his powers; not his ability for doing
something great hereafter, but his capacity of doing it at present. In
the pride of his heart, he has shown me many of his designs, and I am
somewhat of a judge: they want experience, cultivation, taste, and,
above all, a deeper study of the Italian masters. They all have the
defects of a feverish colouring, an ambitious desire of effect, a
wavering and imperfect outline, an ostentatious and unnatural strength
of light and shadow; they show, it is true, a genius of no ordinary
stamp, but one ill regulated, inexperienced, and utterly left to its own
suggestions for a model. However, I am glad he wishes for the opinion
of one necessarily the best judge: let him bring the picture here by
Thursday; on that day my friend has promised to visit me; and now let us
talk of you and your departure."

The intercourse of men of different ages is essentially unequal: it must
always partake more or less of advice on one side and deference on
the other; and although the easy and unpedantic turn of Talbot's
conversation made his remarks rather entertaining than obviously
admonitory, yet they were necessarily tinged by his experience, and
regulated by his interest in the fortunes of his young friend.

"My dearest Clarence," said he, affectionately, "we are about to bid
each other a long farewell. I will not damp your hopes and anticipations
by insisting on the little chance there is that you should ever see me
again. You are about to enter upon the great world, and have within
you the desire and power of success; let me flatter myself that you can
profit by my experience. Among the 'Colloquia' of Erasmus, there is a
very entertaining dialogue between Apicius and a man who, desirous of
giving a feast to a very large and miscellaneous party, comes to consult
the epicure what will be the best means to give satisfaction to all.
Now you shall be this Spudaeus (so I think he is called), and I will be
Apicius; for the world, after all, is nothing more than a great feast of
different strangers, with different tastes and of different ages, and
we must learn to adapt ourselves to their minds, and our temptations to
their passions, if we wish to fascinate or even to content them. Let me
then call your attention to the hints and maxims which I have in this
paper amused myself with drawing up for your instruction. Write to me
from time to time, and I will, in replying to your letters, give you
the best advice in my power. For the rest, my dear boy, I have only to
request that you will be frank, and I, in my turn, will promise that
when I cannot assist, I will never reprove. And now, Clarence, as the
hour is late and you leave us early tomorrow, I will no longer detain
you. God bless you and keep you. You are going to enjoy life,--I
to anticipate death; so that you can find in me little congenial to
yourself; but as the good Pope said to our Protestant countryman,
'Whatever the difference between us, I know well that an old man's
blessing is never without its value.'"

As Clarence clasped his benefactor's hand, the tears gushed from his
eyes. Is there one being, stubborn as the rock to misfortune, whom
kindness does not affect? For my part, kindness seems to me to come with
a double grace and tenderness from the old; it seems in them the hoarded
and long purified benevolence of years; as if it had survived and
conquered the baseness and selfishness of the ordeal it had passed; as
if the winds, which had broken the form, had swept in vain across the
heart, and the frosts which had chilled the blood and whitened the thin
locks had possessed no power over the warm tide of the affections. It
is the triumph of nature over art; it is the voice of the angel which
is yet within us. Nor is this all: the tenderness of age is twice
blessed,--blessed in its trophies over the obduracy of encrusting and
withering years, blessed because it is tinged with the sanctity of the
grave; because it tells us that the heart will blossom even upon
the precincts of the tomb, and flatters us with the inviolacy and
immortality of love.




CHAPTER XXIII.

             Cannot I create,
  Cannot I form, cannot I fashion forth
  Another world, another universe?--KEATS.

The next morning Clarence, in his way out of town, directed his carriage
(the last and not the least acceptable present from Talbot) to stop at
Warner's door. Although it was scarcely sunrise, the aged grandmother
of the artist was stirring, and opened the door to the early visitor.
Clarence passed her with a brief salutation, hurried up the narrow
stairs, and found himself in the artist's chamber. The windows were
closed, and the air of the room was confined and hot. A few books,
chiefly of history and poetry, stood in confused disorder upon some
shelves opposite the window. Upon a table beneath them lay a flute, once
the cherished recreation of the young painter, but now long neglected
and disused; and, placed exactly opposite to Warner, so that his eyes
might open upon his work, was the high-prized and already more than
half-finished picture.

Clarence bent over the bed; the cheek of the artist rested upon his arm
in an attitude unconsciously picturesque; the other arm was tossed
over the coverlet, and Clarence was shocked to see how emaciated it had
become. But ever and anon the lips of the sleeper moved restlessly, and
words, low and inarticulate, broke out. Sometimes he started abruptly,
and a bright but evanescent flush darted over his faded and hollow
cheek; and once the fingers of the thin hand which lay upon the bed
expanded and suddenly closed in a firm and almost painful grasp; it was
then that for the first time the words of the artist became distinct.

"Ay, ay," he said, "I have thee, I have thee at last. Long, very long
thou hast burnt up my heart like fuel, and mocked me, and laughed at
my idle efforts; but now, now, I have thee. Fame, Honour, Immortality,
whatever thou art called, I have thee, and thou canst not escape; but it
is almost too late!" And, as if wrung by some sudden pain, the sleeper
turned heavily round, groaned audibly, and awoke.

"My friend," said Clarence, soothingly, and taking his hand, "I have
come to bid you farewell. I am just setting off for the Continent, but I
could not leave England without once more seeing you. I have good news,
too, for you." And Clarence proceeded to repeat Talbot's wish that
Warner should bring the picture to his house on the following Thursday,
that Sir Joshua might inspect it. He added also, in terms the flattery
of which his friendship could not resist exaggerating, Talbot's desire
to become the purchaser of the picture.

"Yes," said the artist, as his eye glanced delightedly over his labour;
"yes, I believe when it is once seen there will be many candidates!"

"No doubt," answered Clarence; "and for that reason you cannot blame
Talbot for wishing to forestall all other competitors for the prize;"
and then, continuing the encouraging nature of the conversation,
Clarence enlarged upon the new hopes of his friend, besought him to
take time, to spare his health, and not to injure both himself and his
performance by over-anxiety and hurry. Clarence concluded by retailing
Talbot's assurance that in all cases and circumstances he (Talbot)
considered himself pledged to be Warner's supporter and friend.

With something of impatience, mingled with pleasure, the painter
listened to all these details; nor was it to Linden's zeal nor to
Talbot's generosity, but rather to the excess of his own merit, that he
secretly attributed the brightening prospect offered him.

The indifference which Warner, though of a disposition naturally kind,
evinced at parting with a friend who had always taken so strong an
interest in his behalf, and whose tears at that moment contrasted
forcibly enough with the apathetic coldness of his own farewell, was a
remarkable instance how acute vividness on a single point will deaden
feeling on all others. Occupied solely and burningly with one intense
thought, which was to him love, friendship, health, peace, wealth,
Warner could not excite feelings, languid and exhausted with many and
fiery conflicts, to objects of minor interest, and perhaps he inwardly
rejoiced that his musings and his study would henceforth be sacred even
from friendship.

Deeply affected, for his nature was exceedingly unselfish, generous,
and susceptible, Clarence tore himself away, placed in the grandmother's
hand a considerable portion of the sum he had received from Talbot,
hurried into his carriage, and found himself on the high road to
fortune, pleasure, distinction, and the Continent.

But while Clarence, despite of every advantage before him, hastened to
a court of dissipation and pleasure, with feelings in which regretful
affection for those he had left darkened his worldly hopes and mingled
with the sanguine anticipations of youth, Warner, poor, low-born, wasted
with sickness, destitute of friends, shut out by his temperament from
the pleasures of his age, burned with hopes far less alloyed than those
of Clarence, and found in them, for the sacrifice of all else, not only
a recompense, but a triumph.

Thursday came. Warner had made one request to Talbot, which had with
difficulty been granted: it was that he himself might unseen be the
auditor of the great painter's criticisms, and that Sir Joshua should be
perfectly unaware of his presence. It had been granted with difficulty,
because Talbot wished to spare Warner the pain of hearing remarks which
he felt would be likely to fall far short of the sanguine self-elation
of the young artist; and it had been granted because Talbot imagined
that, even should this be the case, the pain would be more than
counterbalanced by the salutary effect it might produce. Alas! vanity
calculates but poorly upon the vanity of others! What a virtue we should
distil from frailty; what a world of pain we should save our brethren,
if we would suffer our own weakness to be the measure of theirs!

Thursday came: the painting was placed by the artist's own hand in the
most favourable light; a curtain, hung behind it, served as a screen
for Warner, who, retiring to his hiding-place, surrendered his heart to
delicious forebodings of the critic's wonder and golden anticipations of
the future destiny of his darling work. Not a fear dashed the full and
smooth cup of his self-enjoyment. He had lain awake the whole of the
night in restless and joyous impatience for the morrow. At daybreak he
had started from his bed, he had unclosed his shutters, he had hung over
his picture with a fondness greater, if possible, than he had ever known
before! like a mother, he felt as if his own partiality was but a part
of a universal tribute; and, as his aged relative, turning her dim eyes
to the painting, and, in her innocent idolatry, rather of the artist
than his work, praised and expatiated and foretold, his heart whispered,
"If it wring this worship from ignorance, what will be the homage of
science?"

He who first laid down the now hackneyed maxim that diffidence is the
companion of genius knew very little of the workings of the human heart.
True, there may have been a few such instances, and it is probable that
in this maxim, as in most, the exception made the rule. But what could
ever reconcile genius to its sufferings, its sacrifices, its fevered
inquietudes, the intense labour which can alone produce what the shallow
world deems the giant offspring of a momentary inspiration: what
could ever reconcile it to these but the haughty and unquenchable
consciousness of internal power; the hope which has the fulness of
certainty that in proportion to the toil is the reward; the sanguine and
impetuous anticipation of glory, which bursts the boundaries of time and
space, and ranges immortality with a prophet's rapture? Rob Genius of
its confidence, of its lofty self-esteem, and you clip the wings of the
eagle: you domesticate, it is true, the wanderer you could not hitherto
comprehend, in the narrow bounds of your household affections; you abase
and tame it more to the level of your ordinary judgments, but you take
from it the power to soar; the hardihood which was content to brave the
thundercloud and build its eyrie on the rock, for the proud triumph of
rising above its kind, and contemplating with a nearer eye the majesty
of heaven.

But if something of presumption is a part of the very essence of genius,
in Warner it was doubly natural, for he was still in the heat and flush
of a design, the defects of which he had not yet had the leisure to
examine; and his talents, self-taught and self-modelled, had
never received either the excitement of emulation or the chill of
discouragement from the study of the masterpieces of his art.

The painter had not been long alone in his concealment before he heard
steps; his heart beat violently, the door opened, and he saw, through
a small hole which he had purposely made in the curtain, a man with a
benevolent and prepossessing countenance, whom he instantly recognized
as Sir Joshua Reynolds, enter the room, accompanied by Talbot. They
walked up to the picture, the painter examined it closely, and in
perfect silence. "Silence," thought Warner, "is the best homage of
admiration;" but he trembled with impatience to hear the admiration
confirmed by words,--those words came too soon.

"It is the work of a clever man, certainly," said Sir Joshua; "but"
(terrible monosyllable) "of one utterly unskilled in the grand
principles of his art--look here, and here, and here, for instance;" and
the critic, perfectly unconscious of the torture he inflicted, proceeded
to point out the errors of the work. Oh! the agony, the withering agony
of that moment to the ambitious artist! In vain he endeavoured to bear
up against the judgment,--in vain he endeavoured to persuade himself
that it was the voice of envy which in those cold, measured, defining
accents, fell like drops of poison upon his heart. He felt at once, and
as if by a magical inspiration, the truth of the verdict; the scales
of self-delusion fell from his eyes; by a hideous mockery, a kind of
terrible pantomime, his goddess seemed at a word, a breath, transformed
into a monster: life, which had been so lately concentrated into
a single hope, seemed now, at once and forever, cramped, curdled,
blistered into a single disappointment.

"But," said Talbot, who had in vain attempted to arrest the criticisms
of the painter (who, very deaf at all times, was, at that time in
particular, engrossed by the self-satisfaction always enjoyed by one
expatiating on his favourite topic),--"but," said Talbot, in a louder
voice, "you own there is great genius in the design?"

"Certainly, there is genius," replied Sir Joshua, in a tone of calm and
complacent good-nature; "but what is genius without culture? You say
the artist is young, very young; let him take time: I do not say let
him attempt a humbler walk; let him persevere in the lofty one he has
chosen, but let him first retrace every step he has taken; let him
devote days, months, years, to the most diligent study of the immortal
masters of the divine art, before he attempts (to exhibit, at least)
another historical picture. He has mistaken altogether the nature of
invention: a fine invention is nothing more than a fine deviation
from, or enlargement on, a fine model: imitation, if noble and general,
insures the best hope of originality. Above all, let your young friend,
if he can afford it, visit Italy."

"He shall afford it," said Talbot, kindly, "for he shall have
whatever advantages I can procure him; but you see the picture is only
half-completed: he could alter it!"

"He had better burn it!" replied the painter, with a gentle smile.

And Talbot, in benevolent despair, hurried his visitor out of the room.
He soon returned to seek and console the artist, but the artist was
gone; the despised, the fatal picture, the blessing and curse of so many
anxious and wasted hours, had vanished also with its creator.




CHAPTER XXIV.

  What is this soul, then? Whence
  Came it?--It does not seem my own, and I
  Have no self-passion or identity!
  Some fearful end must be--
 ......
  There never lived a mortal man, who bent
  His appetite beyond his natural sphere,
  But starved and died.--KEATS: Endymion.

On entering his home, Warner pushed aside, for the first time in his
life with disrespect, his aged and kindly relation, who, as if in
mockery of the unfortunate artist stood prepared to welcome and
congratulate his return. Bearing his picture in his arms, he rushed
upstairs, hurried into his room, and locked the door. Hastily he tore
aside the cloth which had been drawn over the picture; hastily and
tremblingly he placed it upon the frame accustomed to support it, and
then, with a long, long, eager, searching, scrutinizing glance, he
surveyed the once beloved mistress of his worship. Presumption, vanity,
exaggerated self-esteem, are, in their punishment, supposed to excite
ludicrous not sympathetic emotion; but there is an excess of feeling,
produced by whatever cause it may be, into which, in spite of ourselves,
we are forced to enter. Even fear, the most contemptible of the
passions, becomes tragic the moment it becomes an agony.

"Well, well!" said Warner, at last, speaking very slowly, "it is
over,--it was a pleasant dream,--but it is over,--I ought to be thankful
for the lesson." Then suddenly changing his mood and tone, he repeated,
"Thankful! for what? that I am a wretch,--a wretch more utterly hopeless
and miserable and abandoned than a man who freights with all his wealth,
his children, his wife, the hoarded treasures and blessings of an
existence, one ship, one frail, worthless ship, and, standing himself
on the shore, sees it suddenly go down! Oh, was I not a fool,--a
right noble fool,--a vain fool,--an arrogant fool,--a very essence and
concentration of all things that make a fool, to believe such delicious
marvels of myself! What, man!" (here his eye saw in the opposite
glass his features, livid and haggard with disease, and the exhausting
feelings which preyed within him)--"what, man! would nothing serve
thee but to be a genius,--thee, whom Nature stamped with her curse!
Dwarf-like and distorted, mean in stature and in lineament, thou wert,
indeed, a glorious being to perpetuate grace and beauty, the majesties
and dreams of art! Fame for thee, indeed--ha-ha! Glory--ha-ha! a
place with Titian, Correggio, Raphael--ha--ha--ha! O, thrice modest,
thrice-reasonable fool! But this vile daub; this disfigurement of
canvas; this loathed and wretched monument of disgrace; this notable
candidate for--ha--ha--immortality! this I have, at least, in my power."
And seizing the picture, he dashed it to the ground, and trampled it
with his feet upon the dusty boards, till the moist colours presented
nothing but one confused and dingy stain.

This sight seemed to recall him for a moment. He paused, lifted up
the picture once more, and placed it on the table. "But," he
muttered, "might not this critic be envious? am I sure that he judged
rightly--fairly? The greatest masters have looked askant and jealous at
their pupils' works. And then, how slow, how cold, how damned cold, how
indifferently he spoke; why, the very art should have warmed him more.
Could he have--No, no, no: it was true, it was! I felt the conviction
thrill through me like a searing iron. Burn it--did he say--ay--burn it:
it shall be done this instant."

And, hastening to the door, he undid the bolt. He staggered back as he
beheld his old and nearest surviving relative, the mother of his father,
seated upon the ground beside the door, terrified by the exclamations
she did not dare to interrupt. She rose slowly, and with difficulty as
she saw him; and, throwing around him the withered arms which had nursed
his infancy, exclaimed, "My child!--my poor--poor child! what has come
to you of late? you, who were so gentle, so mild, so quiet,--you are no
longer the same,--and oh, my son, how ill you look: your father looked
so just before he died!"

"Ill!" said he, with a sort of fearful gayety, "ill--no: I never was so
well; I have been in a dream till now; but I have woke at last. Why,
it is true that I have been silent and shy, but I will be so no more.
I will laugh, and talk, and walk, and make love, and drink wine, and be
all that other men are. Oh, we will be so merry! But stay here, while I
fetch a light."

"A light, my child, for what?"

"For a funeral!" shouted Warner, and, rushing past her, he descended the
stairs, and returned almost in an instant with a light.

Alarmed and terrified, the poor old woman had remained motionless and
weeping violently. Her tears Warner did not seem to notice; he pushed
her gently into the room, and began deliberately, and without uttering a
syllable, to cut the picture into shreds.

"What are you about, my child?" cried the old woman "you are mad; it is
your beautiful picture that you are destroying!"

Warner did not reply, but going to the hearth, piled together, with nice
and scrupulous care, several pieces of paper, and stick, and matches,
into a sort of pyre; then, placing the shreds of the picture upon it, he
applied the light, and the whole was instantly in a blaze.

"Look, look!" cried he, in an hysterical tone, "how it burns and
crackles and blazes! What master ever equalled it now?--no fault now
in those colours,--no false tints in that light and shade! See how that
flame darts up and soars!--that flame is my spirit! Look--is it not
restless?--does it not aspire bravely?--why, all its brother flames
are grovellers to it!--and now,--why don't you look!--it
falters--fades--droops--and--ha--ha--ha! poor idler, the fuel is
consumed--and--it is darkness."

As Warner uttered these words his eyes reeled; the room swam before him;
the excitement of his feeble frame had reached its highest pitch; the
disease of many weeks had attained its crisis; and, tottering back a
few paces, he fell upon the floor, the victim of a delirious and raging
fever.

But it was not thus that the young artist was to die. He was reserved
for a death that, like his real nature, had in it more of gentleness and
poetry. He recovered by slow degrees, and his mind, almost in spite of
himself, returned to that profession from which it was impossible to
divert the thoughts and musings of many years. Not that he resumed the
pencil and the easel: on the contrary, he could not endure them in his
sight; they appeared, to a mind festered and sore, like a memorial and
monument of shame. But he nursed within him a strong and ardent desire
to become a pilgrim to that beautiful land of which he had so often
dreamed, and which the innocent destroyer of his peace had pointed out
as the theatre of inspiration and the nursery of future fame.

The physicians who, at Talbot's instigation, attended him, looked at his
hectic cheek and consumptive frame, and readily flattered his desire;
and Talbot, no less interested in Warner's behalf on his own account
than bound by his promise to Clarence, generously extended to the
artist that bounty which is the most precious prerogative of the rich.
Notwithstanding her extreme age, his grandmother insisted upon attending
him: there is in the heart of woman so deep a well of love that no
age can freeze it. They made the voyage: they reached the shore of the
myrtle and the vine, and entered the Imperial City. The air of Rome
seemed at first to operate favourably upon the health of the English
artist. His strength appeared to increase, his spirit to expand; and
though he had relapsed into more than his original silence and reserve,
he resumed, with apparent energy, the labours of the easel: so that
they who looked no deeper than the surface might have imagined the scar
healed, and the real foundation of future excellence begun.

But while Warner most humbled himself before the gods of the pictured
world; while the true principles of the mighty art opened in their
fullest glory on his soul; precisely at this very moment shame and
despondency were most bitter at his heart: and while the enthusiasm of
the painter kindled, the ambition of the man despaired. But still he
went on, transfusing into his canvas the grandeur and simplicity of the
Italian school; still, though he felt palpably within him the creeping
advance of the deadliest and surest enemy to fame, he pursued, with
an unwearied ardour, the mechanical completion of his task; still, the
morning found him bending before the easel, and the night brought to his
solitary couch meditation rather than sleep. The fire, the irritability
which he had evinced before his illness had vanished, and the original
sweetness of his temper had returned; he uttered no complaint, he dwelt
upon no anticipation of success; hope and regret seemed equally dead
within him; and it was only when he caught the fond, glad eyes of his
aged attendant that his own filled with tears, or that the serenity of
his brow darkened into sadness.

This went on for some months; till one evening they found the painter
by his window, seated opposite to an unfinished picture. The pencil
was still in his hand; the quiet of settled thought was still upon
his countenance; the soft breeze of a southern twilight waved the hair
livingly from his forehead; the earliest star of a southern sky lent
to his cheek something of that subdued lustre which, when touched by
enthusiasm, it had been accustomed to wear; but these were only the
mockeries of life: life itself was no more! He had died, reconciled,
perhaps, to the loss of fame, in discovering that Art is to be loved for
itself, and not for the rewards it may bestow upon the artist.

There are two tombs close to each other in the strangers' burial-place
at Rome: they cover those for whom life, unequally long, terminated in
the same month. The one is of a woman, bowed with the burden of many
years: the other darkens over the dust of the young artist.




CHAPTER XXV.

      Think upon my grief,
  And on the justice of my flying hence,
  To keep me from a most unholy match.--SHAKSPEARE.

"But are you quite sure," said General St. Leger, "are you quite sure
that this girl still permits Mordaunt's addresses?"

"Sure!" cried Miss Diana St. Leger, "sure, General! I saw it with my own
eyes. They were standing together in the copse, when I, who had long had
my suspicions, crept up, and saw them; and Mr. Mordaunt held her hand,
and kissed it every moment. Shocking and indecorous!"

"I hate that man! as proud as Lucifer," growled the General. "Shall we
lock her up, or starve her?"

"No, General, something better than that."

"What, my love? flog her?"

"She's too old for that, brother; we'll marry her."

"Marry her!"

"Yes, to Mr. Glumford; you know that he has asked her several times."

"But she cannot bear him."

"We'll make her bear him, General St. Leger."

"But if she marries, I shall have nobody to nurse me when I have the
gout."

"Yes, brother: I know of a nice little girl, Martha Richardson, your
second cousin's youngest daughter; you know he has fourteen children,
and you may have them all, one after another, if you like."

"Very true, Diana; let the jade marry Mr. Glumford."

"She shall," said the sister; "and I'll go about it this very moment:
meantime I'll take care that she does not see her lover any more."

About three weeks after this conversation, Mordaunt, who had in vain
endeavoured to see Isabel, who had not even heard from her, whose
letters had been returned to him unopened, and who, consequently, was in
despair, received the following note:--

This is the first time I have been able to write to you, at least to get
my letter conveyed: it is a strange messenger that I have employed, but
I happened formerly to make his acquaintance; and accidentally
seeing him to-day, the extremity of the case induced me to give him a
commission which I could trust to no one else. Algernon, are not the
above sentences written with admirable calmness? are they not very
explanatory, very consistent, very cool? and yet do you know that I
firmly believe I am going mad? My brain turns round and round, and my
hand burns so that I almost think that, like our old nurse's stories of
the fiend, it will scorch the paper as I write. And I see strange faces
in my sleep and in my waking, all mocking at me, and they torture and
aunt met and when I look at those faces I see no human relenting, no!
though I weep and throw myself on my knees and implore them to save me.
Algernon, my only hope is in you. You know that I have always hitherto
refused to ruin you, and even now, though I implore you to deliver me, I
will not be so selfish as--as--I know not what I write, but if I cannot
be your wife--I will not be his! No! if they drag me to church, it shall
be to my grave, not my bridal.                     ISABEL ST. LEGER.

When Mordaunt had read this letter, which, in spite of its incoherence,
his fears readily explained, he rose hastily; his eyes rested upon a
sober-looking man, clad in brown. The proud love no spectators to their
emotions.

"Who are you, sir?" said Algernon, quickly.

"Morris Brown," replied the stranger, coolly and civilly. "Brought that
letter to you, sir; shall be very happy to serve you with anything
else; just fitted out a young gentleman as ambassador, a nephew to Mrs.
Minden,--very old friend of mine. Beautiful slabs you have here, sir,
but they want a few knick-knacks; shall be most happy to supply you; got
a lovely little ape, sir, stuffed by the late Lady Waddilove; it would
look charming with this old-fashioned carving; give the room quite the
air of a museum."

"And so," said Mordaunt, for whose ear the eloquence of Mr. Brown
contained only one sentence, "and so you brought this note, and will
take back my answer?"

"Yes, sir; anything to keep up family connections; I knew a Lady Morden
very well,--very well indeed, sir,--a relation of yours, I presume, by
the similarity of the name; made her very valuable presents; shall be
most happy to do the same to you, when you are married, sir. You will
refurnish the house, I suppose? Let me see; fine proportions to this
room, sir; about thirty-six feet by twenty-eight; I'll do the thing
twenty per cent cheaper than the trade; and touching the lovely
little--"

"Here," interrupted Mordaunt, "you will take back this note, and be
sure that Miss Isabel St. Leger has it as soon as possible; oblige me by
accepting this trifle,--a trifle indeed compared with my gratitude, if
this note reaches its destination safely."

"I am sure," said Mr. Brown, looking with surprise at the gift, which
he held with no unwilling hand, "I am sure, sir, that you are very
generous, and strongly remind me of your relation, Lady Morden; and
if you would like the lovely little ape as a present--I mean really a
present--you shall have it, Mr. Mordaunt."

But Mr. Mordaunt had left the room, and the sober Morris, looking round,
and cooling in his generosity, said to himself, "It is well he did not
hear me, however; but I hope he will marry the nice young lady, for I
love doing a kindness. This house must be refurnished; no lady will like
these old-fashioned chairs."




CHAPTER XXVI.

  Squire and fool are the same thing here--FARQUHAR.

        In such a night
  Did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew,
  And, with an unthrift love, did run from Venice.---SHAKSPEARE.

The persecutions which Isabel had undergone had indeed preyed upon her
reason as well as her health; and, in her brief intervals of respite
from the rage of the uncle, the insults of the aunt, and, worse than
all, the addresses of the intended bridegroom, her mind, shocked and
unhinged, reverted with such intensity to the sufferings she endured as
to give her musings the character of insanity. It was in one of these
moments that she had written to Mordaunt; and had the contest continued
much longer the reason of the unfortunate and persecuted girl would have
totally deserted her.

She was a person of acute, and even poignant, sensibilities, and these
the imperfect nature of her education had but little served to guide
or to correct; but as her habits were pure and good, the impulses which
spring from habit were also sinless and exalted, and, if they erred,
"they leaned on virtue's side," and partook rather of a romantic
and excessive generosity than of the weakness of womanhood or the
selfishness of passion. All the misery and debasement of her equivocal
and dependent situation had not been able to drive her into compliance
with Mordaunt's passionate and urgent prayers; and her heart was proof
even to the eloquence of love, when that eloquence pointed towards the
worldly injury and depreciation of her lover: but this new persecution
was utterly unforeseen in its nature and intolerable from its cause. To
marry another; to be torn forever from one in whom her whole heart was
wrapped; to be forced not only to forego his love, but to feel that the
very thought of him was a crime,--all this, backed by the vehement and
galling insults of her relations, and the sullen and unmoved meanness of
her intended bridegroom, who answered her candour and confession with a
stubborn indifference and renewed overtures, made a load of evil which
could neither be borne with resignation nor contemplated with patience.

She was sitting, after she had sent her letter, with her two relations,
for they seldom trusted her out of their sight, when Mr. Glumford was
announced. Now, Mr. George Glumford was a country gentleman of what
might be termed a third-rate family in the county: he possessed about
twelve hundred a year, to say nothing of the odd pounds, shillings, and
pence, which, however, did not meet with such contempt in his memory or
estimation; was of a race which could date as far back as Charles the
Second; had been educated at a country school with sixty others, chiefly
inferior to himself in rank; and had received the last finish at a
very small hall at Oxford. In addition to these advantages, he had been
indebted to nature for a person five feet eight inches high, and stout
in proportion; for hair very short, very straight, and of a red hue,
which even through powder cast out a yellow glow; for an obstinate
dogged sort of nose, beginning in snub, and ending in bottle; for cold,
small, gray eyes, a very small mouth, pinched up and avaricious; and
very large, very freckled, yet rather white hands, the nails of which
were punctiliously cut into a point every other day, with a pair of
scissors which Mr. Glumford often boasted had been in his possession
since his eighth year; namely, for about thirty-two legitimate
revolutions of the sun.

He was one of those persons who are equally close and adventurous; who
love the eclat of a little speculation, but take exceeding good care
that it should be, in their own graceful phrase, "on the safe side of
the hedge." In pursuance of this characteristic of mind, he had
resolved to fall in love with Miss Isabel St. Leger; for she being very
dependent, he could boast to her of his disinterestedness, and hope that
she would be economical through a principle of gratitude; and being
the nearest relation to the opulent General St. Leger and his unmarried
sister there seemed to be every rational probability of her inheriting
the bulk of their fortunes. Upon these hints of prudence spake Mr.
George Glumford.

Now, when Isabel, partly in her ingenuous frankness, partly from the
passionate promptings of her despair, revealed to him her attachment to
another, and her resolution never, with her own consent, to become his,
it seemed to the slow but not uncalculating mind of Mr. Glumford not by
any means desirable that he should forego his present intentions, but
by all means desirable that he should make this reluctance of Isabel
an excuse for sounding the intentions and increasing the posthumous
liberality of the East Indian and his sister.

"The girl is of my nearest blood," said the Major-General, "and if I
don't leave my fortune to her, who the devil should I leave it to, sir?"
and so saying, the speaker, who was in a fell paroxysm of the gout,
looked so fiercely at the hinting wooer that Mr. George Glumford, who
was no Achilles, was somewhat frightened, and thought it expedient to
hint no more.

"My brother," said Miss Diana, "is so odd; but he is the most generous
of men: besides, the girl has claims upon him." Upon these speeches Mr.
Glumford thought himself secure; and inly resolving to punish the
fool for her sulkiness and bad taste as soon as he lawfully could, he
continued his daily visits and told his sporting acquaintance that his
time was coming.

Revenons a nos moutons. Forgive this preliminary detail, and let us
return to Mr. Glumford himself, whom we left at the door, pulling and
fumbling at the glove which covered his right hand, in order to present
the naked palm to Miss Diana St. Leger. After this act was performed,
he approached Isabel, and drawing his chair near to her, proceeded
to converse with her as the Ogre did with Puss in Boots; namely, "as
civilly as an Ogre could do."

This penance had not proceeded far, before the door was again opened,
and Mr. Morris Brown presented himself to the conclave.

"Your servant, General; your servant, Madam. I took the liberty of
coming back again, Madam, because I forgot to show you some very fine
silks, the most extraordinary bargain in the world,--quite presents;
and I have a Sevres bowl here, a superb article, from the cabinet of the
late Lady Waddilove."

Now Mr. Brown was a very old acquaintance of Miss Diana St. Leger, for
there is a certain class of old maids with whom our fair readers are no
doubt acquainted, who join to a great love of expense a great love of
bargains, and who never purchase at the regular place if they can find
any irregular vendor. They are great friends of Jews and itinerants,
hand-in-glove with smugglers, Ladies Bountiful to pedlers, are diligent
readers of puffs and advertisements, and eternal haunters of sales and
auctions. Of this class was Miss Diana a most prominent individual:
judge, then, how acceptable to her was the acquaintance of Mr. Brown.
That indefatigable merchant of miscellanies had, indeed, at a time
when brokers were perhaps rather more rare and respectable than now, a
numerous country acquaintance, and thrice a year he performed a sort
of circuit to all his customers and connections; hence his visit to St.
Leger House, and hence Isabel's opportunity of conveying her epistle.

"Pray," said Mr. Glumford, who had heard much of Mr. Brown's "presents"
from Miss Diana,--"pray don't you furnish rooms, and things of that
sort?"

"Certainly, sir, certainly, in the best manner possible."

"Oh, very well; I shall want some rooms furnished soon,--a bedroom and
a dressing-room, and things of that sort, you know. And so--perhaps
you may have something in your box that will suit me, gloves or
handkerchiefs or shirts or things of that sort."

"Yes, sir, everything, I sell everything," said Mr. Brown, opening his
box. "I beg pardon, Miss Isabel, I have dropped my handkerchief by your
chair; allow me to stoop," and Mr. Brown, stooping under the table,
managed to effect his purpose; unseen by the rest, a note was slipped
into Isabel's hand, and under pretence of stooping too, she managed to
secure the treasure. Love need well be honest if, even when it is most
true, it leads us into so much that is false!

Mr. Brown's box was now unfolded before the eyes of the crafty Mr.
Glumford, who, having selected three pair of gloves, offered the exact
half of the sum demanded.

Mr. Brown lifted up his hands and eyes.

"You see," said the imperturbable Glumford, "that if you let me have
them for that, and they last me well, and don't come unsewn, and stand
cleaning, you'll have my custom in furnishing the house, and rooms,
and--things of that sort."

Struck with the grandeur of this opening, Mr. Brown yielded, and the
gloves were bought.

"The fool!" thought the noble George, laughing in his sleeve, "as if
I should ever furnish the house from his box!" Strange that some men
should be proud of being mean! The moment Isabel escaped to dress for
dinner, she opened her lover's note. It was as follows.--

Be in the room, your retreat, at nine this evening. Let the window be
left unclosed. Precisely at that hour I will be with you. I shall have
everything in readiness for your flight. Be sure, dearest Isabel, that
nothing prevents your meeting me there, even if all your house follow
or attend you. I will bear you from all. Oh, Isabel! in spite of the
mystery and wretchedness of your letter, I feel too happy, too blest at
the thought that our fates will be at length united, and that the union
is at hand. Remember nine.                          A. M.

Love is a feeling which has so little to do with the world, a passion
so little regulated by the known laws of our more steady and settled
emotions, that the thoughts which it produces are always more or
less connected with exaggeration and romance. To the secret spirit of
enterprise which, however chilled by his pursuits and habits, still
burned within Mordaunt's breast, there was a wild pleasure in the
thought of bearing off his mistress and his bride from the very home and
hold of her false friends and real foes; while in the contradictions
of the same passion, Isabel, so far from exulting at her approaching
escape, trembled at her danger and blushed for her temerity; and the
fear and the modesty of woman almost triumphed over her brief energy and
fluctuating resolve.




CHAPTER XXVII.

  We haste,-the chosen and the lovely bringing;
   Love still goes with her from her place of birth;
  Deep, silent joy, within her soul is springing,
   Though in her glance the light no more is mirth.--Mrs. HEMANS.

"Damn it!" said the General.

"The vile creature!" cried Miss Diana.

"I don't understand things of that sort," ejaculated the bewildered Mr.
Glumford.

"She has certainly gone," said the valiant General.

"Certainly!" grunted Miss Diana.

"Gone!" echoed the bridegroom not to be.

And she was gone! Never did more loving and tender heart forsake all,
and cling to a more loyal and generous nature. The skies were darkened
with clouds,--

  "And the dim stars rushed through them rare and fast;"

and the winds wailed with a loud and ominous voice; and the moon came
forth, with a faint and sickly smile, from her chamber in the mist, and
then shrank back, and was seen no more; but neither omen nor fear was
upon Mordaunt's breast, as it swelled beneath the dark locks of Isabel,
which were pressed against it.

As Faith clings the more to the cross of life, while the wastes deepen
around her steps, and the adders creep forth upon her path, so love
clasps that which is its hope and comfort the closer, for the desert
which encompasses and the dangers which harass its way.

They had fled to London, and Isabel had been placed with a very distant
and very poor, though very high-born, relative of Algernon, till the
necessary preliminaries could be passed and the final bond knit. Yet
still the generous Isabel would have refused, despite the injury to
her own fame, to have ratified a union which filled her with gloomy
presentiments for Mordaunt's fate; and still Mordaunt by little and
little broke down her tender scruples and self-immolating resolves, and
ceased not his eloquence and his suit till the day of his nuptials was
set and come.

The morning was bright and clear; the autumn was drawing towards its
close, and seemed willing to leave its last remembrance tinged with the
warmth and softness of its parent summer, rather than with the stern
gloom and severity of its chilling successor.

And they stood beside the altar, and their vows were exchanged. A
slight tremor came over Algernon's frame, a slight shade darkened
his countenance; for even in that bridal hour an icy and thrilling
foreboding curdled to his heart; it passed,--the ceremony was over,
and Mordaunt bore his blushing and weeping bride from the church. His
carriage was in attendance; for, not knowing how long the home of
his ancestors might be his, he was impatient to return to it. The old
Countess d'Arcy, Mordaunt's relation, with whom Isabel had been staying,
called them back to bless them; for, even through the coldness of old
age, she was touched by the singularity of their love and affected by
their nobleness of heart. She laid her wan and shrivelled hand upon
each, as she bade them farewell, and each shrank back involuntarily, for
the cold and light touch seemed like the fingers of the dead.

Fearful, indeed, is the vicinity of death and life,--the bridal chamber
and the charnel. That night the old woman died. It appeared as if Fate
had set its seal upon the union it had so long forbidden, and had woven
a dark thread even in the marriage-bond. At least, it tore from two
hearts, over which the cloud and the blast lay couched in a "grim
repose," the last shelter, which, however frail and distant, seemed left
to them upon the inhospitable earth.




CHAPTER XXVIII.

  Live while ye may, yet happy pair; enjoy
  Short pleasures, for long woes are to succeed.--MILTON.

The autumn and the winter passed away; Mordaunt's relation continued
implacable. Algernon grieved for this, independent of worldly
circumstances; for, though he had seldom seen that relation, yet he
loved him for former kindness--rather promised, to be sure, than
yet shown--with the natural warmth of an affection which has but few
objects. However, the old gentleman (a very short, very fat person; very
short and very fat people, when they are surly, are the devil and all;
for the humours of their mind, like those of their body, have something
corrupt and unpurgeable in them) wrote him one bluff, contemptuous
letter, in a witty strain,--for he was a bit of a humourist,--disowned
his connection, and very shortly afterwards died, and left all his
fortune to the very Mr. Vavasour who was at law with Mordaunt, and for
whom he had always openly expressed the strongest personal dislike:
spite to one relation is a marvellous tie to another. Meanwhile the
lawsuit went on less slowly than lawsuits usually do, and the final
decision was very speedily to be given.

We said the autumn and the winter were gone; and it was in one of those
latter days in March, when, like a hoyden girl subsiding into dawning
womanhood, the rude weather mellows into a softer and tenderer month,
that, by the side of a stream, overshadowed by many a brake and tree,
sat two persons.

"I know not, dearest Algernon," said one, who was a female, "if this is
not almost the sweetest month in the year, because it is the month of
Hope."

"Ay, Isabel; and they did it wrong who called it harsh, and dedicated it
to Mars. I exult even in the fresh winds which hardier frames than mine
shrink from, and I love feeling their wild breath fan my cheek as I ride
against it. I remember," continued Algernon, musingly, "that on this
very day three years ago, I was travelling through Germany, alone and on
horseback, and I paused, not far from Ens, on the banks of the Danube;
the waters of the river were disturbed and fierce, and the winds came
loud and angry against my face, dashing the spray of the waves upon me,
and filling my spirit with a buoyant and glad delight; and at that time
I had been indulging old dreams of poetry, and had laid my philosophy
aside; and, in the inspiration of the moment, I lifted up my hand
towards the quarter whence the winds came, and questioned them audibly
of their birthplace and their bourne; and, as the enthusiasm increased,
I compared them to our human life, which a moment is, and then is not;
and, proceeding from folly to folly, I asked them, as if they were the
interpreters of heaven, for a type and sign of my future lot."

"And what said they?" inquired Isabel, smiling, yet smiling timidly.

"They answered not," replied Mordaunt; "but a voice within me seemed
to say, 'Look above!' and I raised my eyes,--but I did not see thee,
love,--so the Book of Fate lied."

"Nay, Algernon, what did you see?" asked Isabel, more earnestly than the
question deserved.

"I saw a thin cloud, alone amidst many dense and dark ones scattered
around; and as I gazed it seemed to take the likeness of a funeral
procession--coffin, bearers, priests, all--as clear in the cloud as I
have seen them on the earth: and I shuddered as I saw; but the winds
blew the vapour onwards, and it mingled with the broader masses of
cloud; and then, Isabel, the sun shone forth for a moment, and I
mistook, love, when I said you were not there, for that sun was you; but
suddenly the winds ceased, and the rain came on fast and heavy: so my
romance cooled, and my fever slacked; I thought on the inn at Ens,
and the blessings of a wood fire, which is lighted in a moment, and I
spurred on my horse accordingly."

"It is very strange," said Isabel.

"What, love?" whispered Algernon, kissing her cheek.

"Nothing, dearest, nothing."

At that instant, the deer, which lay waving their lordly antlers to and
fro beneath the avenue which sloped upward from the stream to the house,
rose hurriedly and in confusion, and stood gazing, with watchful eyes,
upon a man advancing towards the pair.

It was one of the servants with a letter. Isabel saw a faint change
(which none else could have seen) in Mordaunt's countenance, as he
recognized the writing and broke the seal. When he had read the letter,
his eyes fell upon the ground, and then, with a slight start, he lifted
them up, and gazed long and eagerly around. Wistfully did he drink,
as it were, into his heart the beautiful and expanded scene which lay
stretched on either side; the noble avenue which his forefathers had
planted as a shelter to their sons, and which now in its majestic growth
and its waving boughs seemed to say, "Lo! ye are repaid!" and the never
silent and silver stream, by which his boyhood had sat for hours, lulled
by its music, and inhaling the fragrance of the reed and wild flower
that decoyed the bee to its glossy banks; and the deer, to whose
melancholy belling be had listened so often in the gray twilight with
a rapt and dreaming ear; and the green fern waving on the gentle hill,
from whose shade his young feet had startled the hare and the infant
fawn; and far and faintly gleaming through the thick trees, which
clasped it as with a girdle, the old Hall, so associated with vague
hopes and musing dreams, and the dim legends of gone time, and the lofty
prejudices of ancestral pride,--all seemed to sink within him, as he
gazed, like the last looks of departing friends; and when Isabel, who
had not dared to break a silence which partook so strongly of gloom,
at length laid her hand upon his arm, and lifted her dark, deep, tender
eyes to his, he said, as he drew her towards him, and a faint and sickly
smile played upon his lips,--

"It is past, Isabel: henceforth we have no wealth but in each other. The
cause has been decided--and--and--we are beggars!"




CHAPTER XXIX.

     We expose our life to a quotidian ague of frigid
     impertinences, which would make a wise man tremble to think
     of.--COWLEY.

We must suppose a lapse of four years from the date of those events
which concluded the last chapter; and, to recompence the reader, who I
know has a little penchant for "High Life," even in the last century,
for having hitherto shown him human beings in a state of society
not wholly artificial, I beg him to picture to himself a large room,
brilliantly illuminated, and crowded "with the magnates of the land."
Here, some in saltatory motion, some in sedentary rest, are dispersed
various groups of young ladies and attendant swains, talking upon the
subject of Lord Rochester's celebrated poem,--namely, "Nothing!"--and
lounging around the doors, meditating probably upon the same subject,
stand those unhappy victims of dancing daughters, denominated "Papas."

The music has ceased; the dancers have broken up; and there is a general
but gentle sweep towards the refreshment-room. In the crowd--having
just entered--there glided a young man of an air more distinguished and
somewhat more joyous than the rest.

"How do you do, Mr. Linden?" said a tall and (though somewhat passe)
very handsome woman, blazing with diamonds; "are you just come?"

And, here, by the way, I cannot resist pausing to observe that a friend
of mine, meditating a novel, submitted a part of the manuscript to
a friendly publisher. "Sir," said the bookseller, "your book is very
clever, but it wants dialogue."

"Dialogue!" cried my friend: "you mistake; it is all dialogue."

"Ay, sir, but not what we call dialogue; we want a little conversation
in fashionable life,--a little elegant chit-chat or so: and, as you must
have seen so much of the beau monde, you could do it to the life: we
must have something light and witty and entertaining."

"Light, witty, and entertaining!" said our poor friend; "and how the
deuce, then, is it to be like conversation in 'fashionable life'? When
the very best conversation one can get is so insufferably dull, how do
you think people will be amused by reading a copy of the very worst?"

"They are amused, sir," said the publisher; "and works of this kind
sell!"

"I am convinced," said my friend; for he was a man of a placid temper:
he took the hint, and his book did sell!

Now this anecdote rushed into my mind after the penning of the little
address of the lady in diamonds,--"How do you do, Mr. Linden? Are
you just come?"--and it received an additional weight from my utter
inability to put into the mouth of Mr. Linden--notwithstanding my desire
of representing him in the most brilliant colours--any more happy and
eloquent answer than, "Only this instant!"

However, as this is in the true spirit of elegant dialogue, I trust my
readers find it as light, witty, and entertaining as, according to the
said publisher, the said dialogue is always found by the public.

While Clarence was engaged in talking with this lady, a very pretty,
lively, animated girl, with laughing blue eyes, which, joined to the
dazzling fairness of her complexion, gave a Hebe-like youth to her
features and expression, was led up to the said lady by a tall young
man, and consigned, with the ceremonious bow of the vieille tour, to her
protection.

"Ah, Mr. Linden," cried the young lady, "I am very glad to see
you,--such a beautiful ball!--Everybody here that I most like. Have you
had any refreshments, Mamma? But I need not ask, for I am sure you have
not; do come, Mr. Linden will be our cavalier."

"Well, Flora, as you please," said the elderly lady, with a proud
and fond look at her beautiful daughter; and they proceeded to the
refreshment-room.

No sooner were they seated at one of the tables, than they were accosted
by Lord St. George, a nobleman whom Clarence, before he left England,
had met more than once at Mr. Talbot's.

"London," said his lordship to her of the diamonds, "has not seemed like
the same place since Lady Westborough arrived; your presence brings
out all the other luminaries: and therefore a young acquaintance of
mine--God bless me, there he is, seated by Lady Flora--very justly
called you the 'evening star.'"

"Was that Mr. Linden's pretty saying?" said Lady Westborough, smiling.

"It was," answered Lord St. George; "and, by the by, he is a very
sensible, pleasant person, and greatly improved since he left England
last."

"What!" said Lady Westborough, in a low tone (for Clarence, though in
earnest conversation with Lady Flora, was within hearing), and making
room for Lord St. George beside her, "what! did you know him before he
went to ----? You can probably tell me, then, who--that is to say--what
family he is exactly of--the Lindens of Devonshire, or--or--"

"Why, really," said Lord St. George, a little confused, for no man likes
to be acquainted with persons whose pedigree he cannot explain, "I don't
know what may be his family: I met him at Talbot's four or five years
ago; he was then a mere boy, but he struck me as being very clever, and
Talbot since told me that he was a nephew of his own."

"Talbot," said Lady Westborough, musingly, "what Talbot?"

"Oh! the Talbot--the ci-devant jeune homme!"

"What, that charming, clever, animated old gentleman, who used to dress
so oddly, and had been so celebrated a beau garcon in his day?"

"Exactly so," said Lord St. George, taking snuff, and delighted to find
he had set his young acquaintance on so honourable a footing.

"I did not know he was still alive," said Lady Westborough, and
then, turning her eyes towards Clarence and her daughter, she added
carelessly, "Mr. Talbot is very rich, is he not?"

"Rich as Croesus," replied Lord St. George, with a sigh.

"And Mr. Linden is his heir, I suppose?"

"In all probability," answered Lord St. George; "though I believe I can
boast a distant relationship to Talbot. However, I could not make him
fully understand it the other day, though I took particular pains to
explain it."

While this conversation was going on between the Marchioness of
Westborough and Lord St. George, a dialogue equally interesting to the
parties concerned, and I hope, equally light, witty, and entertaining to
readers in general, was sustained between Clarence and Lady Flora.

"How long shall you stay in England?" asked the latter, looking down.

"I have not yet been able to decide," replied Clarence, "for it rests
with the ministers, not me. Directly Lord Aspeden obtains another
appointment, I am promised the office of Secretary of Legation; but till
then, I am--

  "'A captive in Augusta's towers
   To beauty and her train.'"

"Oh!" cried Lady Flora, laughing, "you mean Mrs. Desborough and her
train: see where they sweep! Pray go and render her homage."

"It is rendered," said Linden, in a low voice, "without so long a
pilgrimage, but perhaps despised."

Lady Flora's laugh was hushed; the deepest blushes suffused her cheeks,
and the whole character of that face, before so playful and joyous,
seemed changed, as by a spell, into a grave, subdued, and even timid
look.

Linden resumed, and his voice scarcely rose above a whisper. A whisper!
O delicate and fairy sound! music that speaketh to the heart, as if loth
to break the spell that binds it while it listens! Sigh breathed into
words, and freighting love in tones languid, like homeward bees, by the
very sweets with which they are charged! "Do you remember," said he,
"that evening at ---- when we last parted? and the boldness which at
that time you were gentle enough to forgive?"

Lady Flora replied not.

"And do you remember," continued Clarence, "that I told you that it was
not as an unknown and obscure adventurer that I would claim the hand of
her whose heart as an adventurer I had won?"

Lady Flora raised her eyes for one moment, and encountering the ardent
gaze of Clarence, as instantly dropped them.

"The time is not yet come," said Linden, "for the fulfilment of this
promise; but may I--dare I hope, that when it does, I shall not be--"

"Flora, my love," said Lady Westborough, "let me introduce to you Lord
Borodaile."

Lady Flora turned: the spell was broken; and the lovers were instantly
transformed into ordinary mortals. But, as Flora, after returning Lord
Borodaile's address, glanced her eye towards Clarence, she was struck
with the sudden and singular change of his countenance; the flush of
youth and passion was fled, his complexion was deadly pale, and his eyes
were fixed with a searching and unaccountable meaning upon the face of
the young nobleman, who was alternately addressing, with a quiet and
somewhat haughty fluency, the beautiful mother, and the more lovely
though less commanding daughter. Directly Linden perceived that he was
observed, he rose, turned away, and was soon lost among the crowd.

Lord Borodaile, the son and heir of the powerful Earl of Ulswater,
was about the age of thirty, small, slight, and rather handsome than
otherwise, though his complexion was dark and sallow; and a very
aquiline nose gave a stern and somewhat severe air to his countenance.
He had been for several years abroad, in various parts of the Continent,
and (no other field for an adventurous and fierce spirit presenting
itself) had served with the gallant Earl of Effingham, in the war
between the Turks and Russians, as a volunteer in the armies of the
latter. In this service he had been highly distinguished for courage and
conduct; and, on his return to England about a twelvemonth since, had
obtained the command of a cavalry regiment. Passionately fond of his
profession, he entered into its minutest duties with a zeal not exceeded
by the youngest and poorest subaltern in the army.

His manners were very cold, haughty, collected, and self-possessed, and
his conversation that of a man who has cultivated his intellect rather
in the world than the closet. I mean, that, perfectly ignorant of
things, he was driven to converse solely upon persons, and, having
imbibed no other philosophy than that which worldly deceits and
disappointments bestow, his remarks, though shrewd, were bitterly
sarcastic, and partook of all the ill-nature for which a very scanty
knowledge of the world gives a sour and malevolent mind so ready an
excuse.

"How very disagreeable Lord Borodaile is!" said Lady Flora, when the
object of the remark turned away and rejoined some idlers of his corps.

"Disagreeable!" said Lady Westborough. "I think him charming: he is so
sensible. How true his remarks on the world are!"

Thus is it always; the young judge harshly of those who undeceive or
revolt their enthusiasm; and the more advanced in years, who have not
learned by a diviner wisdom to look upon the human follies and errors by
which they have suffered with a pitying and lenient eye, consider
every maxim of severity on those frailties as the proof of a superior
knowledge, and praise that as a profundity of thought which in reality
is but an infirmity of temper.

Clarence is now engaged in a minuet de la tour with the beautiful
Countess of ----, the best dancer of the day in England. Lady Flora is
flirting with half a dozen beaux, the more violently in proportion as
she observes the animation with which Clarence converses, and the grace
with which his partner moves; and, having thus left our two principal
personages occupied and engaged, let us turn for a moment to a room
which we have not entered.

This is a forlorn, deserted chamber, destined to cards, which are never
played in this temple of Terpsichore. At the far end of this room,
opposite to the fireplace, are seated four men, engaged in earnest
conversation.

The tallest of these was Lord Quintown, a nobleman remarkable at that
day for his personal advantages, his good fortune with the beau sexe,
his attempts at parliamentary eloquence, in which he was lamentably
unsuccessful, and his adherence to Lord North. Next to him sat Mr. St.
George, the younger brother of Lord St. George, a gentleman to whom
power and place seemed married without hope of divorce; for, whatever
had been the changes of ministry for the last twelve years, he,
secure in a lucrative though subordinate situation, had "smiled at
the whirlwind and defied the storm," and, while all things shifted and
vanished round him, like clouds and vapours, had remained fixed and
stationary as a star. "Solid St. George," was his appellative by his
friends, and his enemies did not grudge him the title. The third was the
minister for ----; and the fourth was Clarence's friend, Lord Aspeden.
Now this nobleman, blessed with a benevolent, smooth, calm countenance,
valued himself especially upon his diplomatic elegance in turning a
compliment.

Having a great taste for literature as well as diplomacy, this respected
and respectable peer also possessed a curious felicity for applying
quotation; and nothing rejoiced him so much as when, in the same phrase,
he was enabled to set the two jewels of his courtliness of flattery
and his profundity of erudition. Unhappily enough, his compliments
were seldom as well taken as they were meant; and, whether from the
ingratitude of the persons complimented or the ill fortune of the noble
adulator, seemed sometimes to produce indignation in place of delight.
It has been said that his civilities had cost Lord Aspeden four duels
and one beating; but these reports were probably the malicious invention
of those who had never tasted the delicacies of his flattery.

Now these four persons being all members of the Privy Council, and being
thus engaged in close and earnest conference were, you will suppose,
employed in discussing their gravities and secrets of state: no such
thing; that whisper from Lord Quintown, the handsome nobleman, to Mr.
St. George, is no hoarded and valuable information which would rejoice
the heart of the editor of an Opposition paper, no direful murmur,
"perplexing monarchs with the dread of change;" it is only a recent
piece of scandal, touching the virtue of a lady of the court, which
(albeit the sage listener seems to pay so devout an attention to the
news) is far more interesting to the gallant and handsome informant than
to his brother statesman; and that emphatic and vehement tone with which
Lord Aspeden is assuring the minister for ---- of some fact, is merely
an angry denunciation of the chicanery practised at the last Newmarket.

"By the by, Aspeden," said Lord Quintown, "who is that good-looking
fellow always flirting with Lady Flora Ardenne,--an attache of yours, is
he not?"

"Oh! Linden, I suppose you mean. A very sensible, clever young fellow,
who has a great genius for business and plays the flute admirably. I
must have him for my secretary, my dear lord, mind that."

"With such a recommendation, Lord Aspeden," said the minister, with a
bow, "the state would be a great loser did it not elect your attache,
who plays so admirably on the flute, to the office of your secretary.
Let us join the dancers."

"I shall go and talk with Count B----," quoth Mr. St. George.

"And I shall make my court to his beautiful wife," said the minister,
sauntering into the ballroom, to which his fine person and graceful
manners were much better adapted than was his genius to the cabinet or
his eloquence to the senate.

The morning had long dawned, and Clarence, for whose mind pleasure was
more fatiguing than business, lingered near the door, to catch one last
look of Lady Flora before he retired. He saw her leaning on the arm of
Lord Borodaile, and hastening to join the dancers with her usual light
step and laughing air; for Clarence's short conference with her had, in
spite of his subsequent flirtations, rendered her happier than she had
ever felt before. Again a change passed over Clarence's countenance,--a
change which I find it difficult to express without borrowing from those
celebrated German dramatists who could portray in such exact colours "a
look of mingled joy, sorrow, hope, passion, rapture, and despair;" for
the look was not that of jealousy alone, although it certainly partook
of its nature, but a little also of interest, and a little of sorrow;
and when he turned away, and slowly descended the stairs, his eyes were
full of tears, and his thoughts far--far away;--whither?




CHAPTER XXX.

  Quae fert adolescentia
  Ea ne me celet consuefeci filium.--TERENCE.

  ["The things which youth proposes I accustomed
  my son that he should never conceal from me."]

The next morning Clarence was lounging over his breakfast, and glancing
listlessly now at the pages of the newspapers, now at the various
engagements for the week, which lay confusedly upon his table, when he
received a note from Talbot, requesting to see him as soon as possible.

"Had it not been for that man," said Clarence to himself, "what should
I have been now? But, at least, I have not disgraced his friendship. I
have already ascended the roughest because the lowest steps on the hill
where Fortune builds her temple. I have already won for the name I have
chosen some 'golden opinions' to gild its obscurity. One year more
may confirm my destiny and ripen hope into success: then--then, I may
perhaps throw off a disguise that, while it befriended, has not degraded
me, and avow myself to her! Yet how much better to dignify the name
I have assumed than to owe respect only to that which I have not been
deemed worthy to inherit! Well, well, these are bitter thoughts; let me
turn to others. How beautiful Flora looked last night! and, he--he--but
enough of this: I must dress, and then to Talbot."

Muttering these wayward fancies, Clarence rose, completed his toilet,
sent for his horses, and repaired to a village about seven miles
from London, where Talbot, having yielded to Clarence's fears and
solicitations, and left his former insecure tenement, now resided under
the guard and care of an especial and private watchman.

It was a pretty, quiet villa, surrounded by a plantation and
pleasure-ground of some extent for a suburban residence, in which the
old philosopher (for though in some respects still frail and prejudiced,
Talbot deserved that name) held his home. The ancient servant, on
whom four years had passed lightly and favouringly, opened the door to
Clarence, with his usual smile of greeting and familiar yet respectful
salutation, and ushered our hero into a room, furnished with the usual
fastidious and rather feminine luxury which characterized Talbot's
tastes. Sitting with his back turned to the light, in a large
easy-chair, Clarence found the wreck of the once gallant, gay Lothario.

There was not much alteration in his countenance since we last saw him;
the lines, it is true, were a little more decided, and the cheeks
a little more sunken; but the dark eye beamed with all its wonted
vivacity, and the delicate contour of the mouth preserved all its
physiognomical characteristics of the inward man. He rose with somewhat
more difficulty than he was formerly wont to do, and his limbs had lost
much of their symmetrical proportions; yet the kind clasp of his hand
was as firm and warm as when it had pressed that of the boyish attache
four years since; and the voice which expressed his salutation yet
breathed its unconquered suavity and distinctness of modulation. After
the customary greetings and inquiries were given and returned, the young
man drew his chair near to Talbot's, and said,--

"You sent for me, dear sir; have you anything more important than usual
to impart to me?--or--and I hope this is the case--have you at last
thought of any commission, however trifling, in the execution of which I
can be of use?"

"Yes, Clarence, I wish your judgment to select me some
strawberries,--you know that I am a great epicure in fruit,--and get me
the new work Dr. Johnson has just published. There, are you contented?
And now, tell me all about your horse; does he step well? Has he the
true English head and shoulder? Are his legs fine, yet strong? Is he
full of spirit and devoid of vice?"

"He is all this, sir, thanks to you for him."

"Ah!" cried Talbot,--

  "'Old as I am, for riding feats unfit,
   The shape of horses I remember yet'"

"And now let us hear how you like Ranelagh; and above all how you liked
the ball last night."

And the vivacious old man listened with the profoundest appearance
of interest to all the particulars of Clarence's animated detail. His
vanity, which made him wish to be loved, had long since taught him the
surest method of becoming so; and with him, every visitor, old, young,
the man of books, or the disciple of the world, was sure to find the
readiest and even eagerest sympathy in every amusement or occupation.
But for Clarence, this interest lay deeper than in the surface of
courtly breeding. Gratitude had first bound to him his adopted son,
then a tie yet unexplained, and lastly, but not least, the pride of
protection. He was vain of the personal and mental attractions of his
protege, and eager for the success of one whose honours would reflect
credit on himself.

But there was one part of Clarence's account of the last night to which
the philosopher paid a still deeper attention, and on which he was more
minute in his advice; what this was, I cannot, as yet, reveal to the
reader.

The conversation then turned on light and general matters,--the scandal,
the literature, the politics, the on dits of the day; and lastly upon
women; thence Talbot dropped into his office of Mentor.

"A celebrated cardinal said, very wisely, that few ever did anything
among men until women were no longer an object to them. That is the
reason, by the by, why I never succeeded with the former, and why people
seldom acquire any reputation, except for a hat, or a horse, till they
marry. Look round at the various occupations of life. How few bachelors
are eminent in any of them! So you see, Clarence, you will have my leave
to marry Lady Flora as soon as you please."

Clarence coloured, and rose to depart. Talbot followed him to the door,
and then said, in a careless way, "By the by, I had almost forgotten
to tell you that, as you have now many new expenses, you will find
the yearly sum you have hitherto received doubled. To give you this
information is the chief reason why I sent for you this morning. God
bless you, my dear boy."

And Talbot shut the door, despite his politeness, in the face and thanks
of his adopted son.




CHAPTER XXXI.

     There is a great difference between seeking to raise a laugh from
     everything, and seeking in everything what justly may be laughed
     at.                       LORD SHAFTESBURY.

Behold our hero, now in the zenith of distinguished dissipations!
Courteous, attentive, and animated, the women did not esteem him the
less for admiring them rather than himself; while, by the gravity of
his demeanour to men,--the eloquent, yet unpretending flow of his
conversation, whenever topics of intellectual interest were discussed,
the plain and solid sense which he threw into his remarks, and the
avidity with which he courted the society of all distinguished for
literary or political eminence,--he was silently but surely establishing
himself in esteem as well as popularity, and laying the certain
foundation of future honour and success.

Thus, although he had only been four months returned to England, he was
already known and courted in every circle, and universally spoken of
as among "the most rising young gentlemen" whom fortune and the
administration had marked for their own. His history, during the four
years in which we have lost sight of him, is briefly told.

He soon won his way into the good graces of Lord Aspeden; became his
private secretary and occasionally his confidant. Universally admired
for his attraction of form and manner, and, though aiming at reputation,
not averse to pleasure, he had that position which fashion confers at
the court of ----, when Lady Westborough and her beautiful daughter,
then only seventeen, came to ----, in the progress of a Continental
tour, about a year before his return to England. Clarence and Lady Flora
were naturally brought much together in the restricted circle of a small
court, and intimacy soon ripened into attachment.

Lord Aspeden being recalled, Clarence accompanied him to England; and
the ex-minister, really liking much one who was so useful to him, had
faithfully promised to procure him the office and honour of secretary
whenever his lordship should be reappointed minister.

Three intimate acquaintances had Clarence Linden. The one was the
Honourable Henry Trollolop, the second Mr. Callythorpe, and the third
Sir Christopher Findlater. We will sketch them to you in an instant.
Mr. Trollolop was a short, stout gentleman, with a very thoughtful
countenance,-that is to say, he wore spectacles and took snuff.

Mr. Trollolop--we delight in pronouncing that soft liquid name--was
eminently distinguished by a love of metaphysics,--metaphysics were in
a great measure the order of the day; but Fate had endowed Mr. Trollolop
with a singular and felicitous confusion of idea. Reid, Berkeley,
Cudworth, Hobbes, all lay jumbled together in most edifying chaos at
the bottom of Mr. Trollolop's capacious mind; and whenever he opened
his mouth, the imprisoned enemies came rushing and scrambling out,
overturning and contradicting each other in a manner quite astounding
to the ignorant spectator. Mr. Callythorpe was meagre, thin, sharp,
and yellow. Whether from having a great propensity for nailing stray
acquaintances, or being particularly heavy company, or from any
other cause better known to the wits of the period than to us, he was
occasionally termed by his friends the "yellow hammer." The peculiar
characteristics of this gentleman were his sincerity and friendship.
These qualities led him into saying things the most disagreeable, with
the civilest and coolest manner in the world,--always prefacing them
with, "You know, my dear so-and-so, I am your true friend." If
this proof of amity was now and then productive of altercation,
Mr. Callythorpe, who was ha great patriot, had another and a nobler
plea,--"Sir," he would say, putting his hand to his heart,--"sir, I'm an
Englishman: I know not what it is to feign." Of a very different stamp
was Sir Christopher Findlater. Little cared he for the subtleties of
the human mind, and not much more for the disagreeable duties of "an
Englishman." Honest and jovial, red in the cheeks, empty in the head,
born to twelve thousand a year, educated in the country, and heir to an
earldom, Sir Christopher Findlater piqued himself, notwithstanding his
worldly advantages, usually so destructive to the kindlier affections,
on having the best heart in the world, and this good heart, having a
very bad head to regulate and support it, was the perpetual cause of
error to the owner and evil to the public.

One evening, when Clarence was alone in his rooms, Mr. Trollolop
entered.

"My dear Linden," said the visitor, "how are you?"

"I am, as I hope you are, very well," answered Clarence.

"The human mind," said Trollolop, taking off his greatcoat,--

"Sir Christopher Findlater and Mr. Callythorpe, sir," said the valet.

"Pshaw! What has Sir Christopher Findlater to do with the human mind?"
muttered Mr. Trollolop.

Sir Christopher entered with a swagger and a laugh. "Well, old fellow,
how do you do? Deuced cold this evening."

"Though it is an evening in May," observed Clarence; "but then, this
cursed climate."

"Climate!" interrupted Mr. Callythorpe, "it is the best climate in the
world: I am an Englishman, and I never abuse my country."

  "'England, with all thy faults, I love thee still!'"

"As to climate," said Trollolop, "there is no climate, neither here nor
elsewhere: the climate is in your mind, the chair is in your mind, and
the table too, though I dare say you are stupid enough to think the two
latter are in the room; the human mind, my dear Findlater--"

"Don't mind me, Trollolop," cried the baronet, "I can't bear your clever
heads: give me a good heart; that's worth all the heads in the world;
d--n me if it is not! Eh, Linden?"

"Your good heart," cried Trollolop, in a passion (for all your
self-called philosophers are a little choleric), "your good heart is all
cant and nonsense: there is no heart at all; we are all mind."

"I be hanged if I'm all mind," said the baronet.

"At least," quoth Linden, gravely, "no one ever accused you of it
before."

"We are all mind," pursued the reasoner; "we are all mind, un moulin
a raisonnement. Our ideas are derived from two sources, sensation or
memory. That neither our thoughts nor passions, nor our ideas formed
by the imagination, exist without the mind, everybody will allow;
[Berkeley, Sect. iii., "Principles of Human Knowledge."] therefore, you
see, the human mind is--in short, there is nothing in the world but the
human mind!"

"Nothing could be better demonstrated," said Clarence.

"I don't believe it," quoth the baronet.

"But you do believe it, and you must believe it," cried Trollolop; "for
'the Supreme Being has implanted within us the principle of credulity,'
and therefore you do believe it!"

"But I don't," cried Sir Christopher.

"You are mistaken," replied the metaphysician, calmly; "because I must
speak truth."

"Why must you, pray?" said the baronet.

"Because," answered Trollolop, taking snuff, "there is a principle of
veracity implanted in our nature."

"I wish I were a metaphysician," said Clarence, with a sigh.

"I am glad to hear you say so; for you know, my dear Linden," said
Callythorpe, "that I am your true friend, and I must therefore tell you
that you are shamefully ignorant. You are not offended?"

"Not at all!" said Clarence, trying to smile.

"And you, my dear Findlater" (turning to the baronet), "you know that I
wish you well; you know that I never flatter; I'm your real friend, so
you must not be angry; but you really are not considered a Solomon."

"Mr. Callythorpe!" exclaimed the baronet in a rage (the best-hearted
people can't always bear truth), "what do you mean?"

"You must not be angry, my good sir; you must not, really. I can't help
telling you of your faults; for I am a true Briton, sir, a true Briton,
and leave lying to slaves and Frenchmen."

"You are in an error," said Trollolop; "Frenchmen don't lie, at least
not naturally, for in the human mind, as I before said, the Divine
Author has implanted a principle of veracity which--"

"My dear sir," interrupted Callythorpe, very affectionately, "you remind
me of what people say of you."

"Memory may be reduced to sensation, since it is only a weaker
sensation," quoth Trollolop; "but proceed."

"You know, Trollolop," said Callythorpe, in a singularly endearing
intonation of voice, "you know that I never flatter; flattery is
unbecoming a true friend,--nay, more, it is unbecoming a native of our
happy isles, and people do say of you that you know nothing whatsoever,
no, not an iota, of all that nonsensical, worthless philosophy of which
you are always talking. Lord St. George said the other day 'that you
were very conceited.'--'No, not conceited,' replied Dr. ----, 'only
ignorant;' so if I were you, Trollolop, I would cut metaphysics; you're
not offended?"

"By no means," cried Trollolop, foaming at the mouth.

"For my part," said the good-hearted Sir Christopher, whose wrath had
now subsided, rubbing his hands,--"for my part, I see no good in any
of those things: I never read--never--and I don't see how I'm a bit the
worse for it. A good man, Linden, in my opinion, only wants to do his
duty, and that is very easily done."

"A good man; and what is good?" cried the metaphysician, triumphantly.
"Is it implanted within us? Hobbes, according to Reid, who is our last,
and consequently best, philosopher, endeavours to demonstrate that there
is no difference between right and wrong."

"I have no idea of what you mean," cried Sir Christopher.

"Idea!" exclaimed the pious philosopher. "Sir, give me leave to tell you
that no solid proof has ever been advanced of the existence of ideas:
they are a mere fiction and hypothesis. Nay, sir, 'hence arises
that scepticism which disgraces our philosophy of the mind.'
Ideas!--Findlater, you are a sceptic and an idealist."

"I?" cried the affrighted baronet; "upon my honour I am no such thing.
Everybody knows that I am a Christian, and--"

"Ah!" interrupted Callythorpe, with a solemn look, "everybody knows that
you are not one of those horrid persons,--those atrocious deists and
atheists and sceptics, from whom the Church and freedom of old England
have suffered such danger. I am a true Briton of the good old school;
and I confess, Mr. Trollolop, that I do not like to hear any opinions
but the right ones."

"Right ones being only those which Mr. Callythorpe professes," said
Clarence.

"Exactly so!" rejoined Mr. Callythorpe.

"The human mind," commenced Mr. Trollolop, stirring the fire; when
Clarence, who began to be somewhat tired of this conversation, rose.
"You will excuse me," said he, "but I am particularly engaged, and it
is time to dress. Harrison will get you tea or whatever else you are
inclined for."

"The human mind," renewed Trollolop, not heeding the interruption; and
Clarence forthwith left the room.




CHAPTER XXXII.

     You blame Marcius for being proud.--Coriolanus. Here is
     another fellow, a marvellous pretty hand at fashioning a
     compliment.-The Tanner of Tyburn.

There was a brilliant ball at Lady T----'s, a personage who, every
one knows, did in the year 17-- give the best balls, and have the
best-dressed people at them, in London. It was about half-past
twelve, when Clarence, released from his three friends, arrived at the
countess's. When he entered, the first thing which struck him was Lord
Borodaile in close conversation with Lady Flora.

Clarence paused for a few moments, and then, sauntering towards them,
caught Flora's eye,--coloured, and advanced. Now, if there was a haughty
man in Europe, it was Lord Borodaile. He was not proud of his birth, nor
fortune, but he was proud of himself; and, next to that pride, he was
proud of being a gentleman. He had an exceeding horror of all common
people; a Claverhouse sort of supreme contempt to "puddle blood;"
his lip seemed to wear scorn as a garment; a lofty and stern
self-admiration, rather than self-love, sat upon his forehead as on a
throne. He had, as it were, an awe of himself; his thoughts were so many
mirrors of Viscount Borodaile dressed en dieu. His mind was a little
Versailles, in which self sat like Louis XIV., and saw nothing but
pictures of its self, sometimes as Jupiter and sometimes as Apollo. What
marvel then, that Lord Borodaile was a very unpleasant companion? for
every human being he had "something of contempt." His eye was always
eloquent in disdaining; to the plebeian it said, "You are not a
gentleman;" to the prince, "You are not Lord Borodaile."

Yet, with all this, he had his good points. He was brave as a lion;
strictly honourable; and though very ignorant, and very self-sufficient,
had that sort of dogged good sense which one very often finds in men of
stern hearts, who, if they have many prejudices, have little feeling, to
overcome.

Very stiffly and very haughtily did Lord Borodaile draw up, when
Clarence approached and addressed Lady Flora; much more stiffly and much
more haughtily did he return, though with old-fashioned precision of
courtesy, Clarence's bow, when Lady Westborough introduced them to each
other. Not that this hauteur was intended as a particular affront: it
was only the agreeability of his lordship's general manner.

"Are you engaged?" said Clarence to Flora.

"I am, at present, to Lord Borodaile."

"After him, may I hope?"

Lady Flora nodded assent, and disappeared with Lord Borodaile.

His Royal Highness the Duke of ---- came up to Lady Westborough; and
Clarence, with a smiling countenance and an absent heart, plunged into
the crowd. There he met Lord Aspeden, in conversation with the Earl of
Holdenworth, one of the administration.

"Ah, Linden," said the diplomatist, "let me introduce you to Lord
Holdenworth,--a clever young man, my dear lord, and plays the flute
beautifully." With this eulogium, Lord Aspeden glided away; and Lord
Holdenworth, after some conversation with Linden, honoured him by an
invitation to dinner the next day.




CHAPTER XXXIII.

  'T is true his nature may with faults abound;
  But who will cavil when the heart is sound?--STEPHEN MONTAGUE.

  Dum vitant stulti vitia, in contraria currant.-HORACE.
  ["The foolish while avoiding vice run into the opposite
  extremes."]

The next day Sir Christopher Findlater called on Clarence. "Let us
lounge in the park," said he.

"With pleasure," replied Clarence; and into the park they lounged.

By the way they met a crowd, who were hurrying a man to prison. The
good-hearted Sir Christopher stopped: "Who is that poor fellow?" said
he.

"It is the celebrated" (in England all criminals are celebrated.
Thurtell was a hero, Thistlewood a patriot, and Fauntleroy was
discovered to be exactly like Buonaparte!) "it is the celebrated robber,
John Jefferies, who broke into Mrs. Wilson's house, and cut the throats
of herself and her husband, wounded the maid-servant, and split the
child's skull with the poker." Clarence pressed forward: "I have seen
that man before," thought he. He looked again, and recognized the face
of the robber who had escaped from Talbot's house on the eventful night
which had made Clarence's fortune. It was a strongly-marked and rather
handsome countenance, which would not be easily forgotten; and a single
circumstance of excitement will stamp features on the memory as deeply
as the commonplace intercourse of years.

"John Jefferies!" exclaimed the baronet; "let us come away."

"Linden," continued Sir Christopher, "that fellow was my servant once.
He robbed me to some considerable extent. I caught him. He appealed to
my heart; and you know, my dear fellow, that was irresistible, so I let
him off. Who could have thought he would have turned out so?" And the
baronet proceeded to eulogize his own good-nature, by which it is just
necessary to remark that one miscreant had been saved for a few years
from transportation, in order to rob and murder ad libitum, and, having
fulfilled the office of a common pest, to suffer on the gallows at last.
What a fine thing it is to have a good heart! Both our gentlemen now
sank into a revery, from which they were awakened, at the entrance of
the park, by a young man in rags who, with a piteous tone, supplicated
charity. Clarence, who, to his honour be it spoken, spent an allotted
and considerable part of his income in judicious and laborious
benevolence, had read a little of political morals, then beginning to be
understood, and walked on. The good-hearted baronet put his hand in his
pocket, and gave the beggar half a guinea, by which a young, strong man,
who had only just commenced the trade, was confirmed in his imposition
for the rest of his life; and, instead of the useful support, became the
pernicious incumbrance of society.

Sir Christopher had now recovered his spirits. "What's like a good
action?" said he to Clarence, with a swelling breast.

The park was crowded to excess; our loungers were joined by Lord St.
George. His lordship was a stanch Tory. He could not endure Wilkes,
liberty, or general education. He launched out against the enlightenment
of domestics. [The ancestors of our present footmen, if we may believe
Sir William Temple, seem to have been to the full as intellectual as
their descendants. "I have had," observes the philosophic statesman,
"several servants far gone in divinity, others in poetry; have known, in
the families of some friends; a keeper deep in the Rosicrucian mysteries
and a laundress firm in those of Epicurus."]

"What has made you so bitter?" said Sir Christopher.

"My valet," cried Lord St. George,--"he has invented a new
toasting-fork, is going to take out a patent, make his fortune, and
leave me; that's what I call ingratitude, Sir Christopher; for I ordered
his wages to be raised five pounds but last year."

"It was very ungrateful," said the ironical Clarence.

"Very!" reiterated the good-hearted Sir Christopher.

"You cannot recommend me a valet, Findlater," renewed his lordship, "a
good, honest, sensible fellow, who can neither read nor write?"

"N-o-o,--that is to say, yes! I can; my old servant Collard is out of
place, and is as ignorant as--as--"

"I--or you are?" said Lord St. George, with a laugh.

"Precisely," replied the baronet.

"Well, then, I take your recommendation: send him to me to-morrow at
twelve."

"I will," said Sir Christopher.

"My dear Findlater," cried Clarence, when Lord St. George was gone, "did
you not tell me, some time ago, that Collard was a great rascal, and
very intimate with Jefferies? and now you recommend him to Lord St.
George!"

"Hush, hush, hush!" said the baronet; "he was a great rogue to be sure:
but, poor fellow, he came to me yesterday with tears in his eyes, and
said he should starve if I would not give him a character; so what could
I do?"

"At least, tell Lord St. George the truth," observed Clarence.

"But then Lord St. George would not take him!" rejoined the good-hearted
Sir Christopher, with forcible naivete. "No, no, Linden, we must not be
so hard-hearted; we must forgive and forget;" and so saying, the baronet
threw out his chest, with the conscious exultation of a man who has
uttered a noble sentiment. The moral of this little history is that
Lord St. George, having been pillaged "through thick and thin," as the
proverb has it, for two years, at last missed a gold watch, and Monsieur
Collard finished his career as his exemplary tutor, Mr. John Jefferies,
had done before him. Ah! what a fine thing it is to have a good heart!

But to return. Just as our wanderers had arrived at the farther end
of the park, Lady Westborough and her daughter passed them. Clarence,
excusing himself to his friend, hastened towards them, and was soon
occupied in saying the prettiest things in the world to the prettiest
person, at least in his eyes; while Sir Christopher, having done as much
mischief as a good heart well can do in a walk of an hour, returned home
to write a long letter to his mother, against "learning and all such
nonsense, which only served to blunt the affections and harden the
heart."

"Admirable young man!" cried the mother, with tears in her eyes. "A good
heart is better than all the heads in the world."

Amen!




CHAPTER XXXIV.

     "Make way, Sir Geoffrey Peveril, or you will compel me to do
     that I may be sorry for!"

     "You shall make no way here but at your peril," said Sir
     Geoffrey; "this is my ground."--Peveril of the Peak.

One night on returning home from a party at Lady Westborough's in
Hanover Square, Clarence observed a man before him walking with an
uneven and agitated step. His right hand was clenched, and he frequently
raised it as with a sudden impulse, and struck fiercely as if at some
imagined enemy.

The stranger slackened his pace. Clarence passed him, and, turning round
to satisfy the idle curiosity which the man's eccentric gestures had
provoked, his eye met a dark, lowering, iron countenance, which, despite
the lapse of four years, he recognized on the moment: it was Wolfe, the
republican.

Clarence moved, involuntarily, with a quicker step; but in a few
minutes, Wolfe, who was vehemently talking to himself, once more passed
him; the direction he took was also Clarence's way homeward, and he
therefore followed the republican, though at some slight distance,
and on the opposite side of the way. A gentleman on foot, apparently
returning from a party, met Wolfe, and, with an air half haughty, half
unconscious, took the wall; though, according to old-fashioned rules of
street courtesy, he was on the wrong side for asserting the claim.
The stern republican started, drew himself up to his full height, and
sturdily and doggedly placed himself directly in the way of the unjust
claimant. Clarence was now nearly opposite to the two, and saw all that
was going on.

With a motion a little rude and very contemptuous, the passenger
attempted to put Wolfe aside, and win his path. Little did he know
of the unyielding nature he had to do with; the next instant the
republican, with a strong hand, forced him from the pavement into the
very kennel, and silently and coldly continued his way.

The wrath of the discomfited passenger was vehemently kindled.

"Insolent dog!" cried he, in a loud and arrogant tone, "your baseness is
your protection." Wolfe turned rapidly, and made but two strides before
he was once more by the side of his defeated opponent.

"What did you say?" he asked, in his low, deep, hoarse voice.

Clarence stopped. "There will be mischief done here," thought he, as he
called to mind the stern temper of the republican.

"Merely," said the other, struggling with his rage, "that it is not for
men of my rank to avenge the insults offered us by those of yours!"

"Your rank!" said Wolfe, bitterly retorting the contempt of the
stranger, in a tone of the loftiest disdain; "your rank! poor
changeling! And what are you, that you should lord it over me? Are your
limbs stronger? your muscles firmer? your proportions juster? your
mind acuter? your conscience clearer? Fool! fool! go home and measure
yourself with lackeys!"

The republican ceased, and pushing the stranger aside, turned slowly
away. But this last insult enraged the passenger beyond all prudence.
Before Wolfe had proceeded two paces, he muttered a desperate but brief
oath, and struck the reformer with a strength so much beyond what
his figure (which was small and slight) appeared to possess, that the
powerful and gaunt frame of Wolfe recoiled backward several steps, and,
had it not been for the iron railing of the neighbouring area, would
have fallen to the ground.

Clarence pressed forward: the face of the rash aggressor was turned
towards him; the features were Lord Borodaile's. He had scarcely time to
make this discovery, before Wolfe had recovered himself. With a wild
and savage cry, rather than exclamation, he threw himself upon his
antagonist, twined his sinewy arms round the frame of the struggling but
powerless nobleman, raised him in the air with the easy strength of a
man lifting a child, held him aloft for one moment with a bitter and
scornful laugh of wrathful derision, and then dashed him to the ground,
and planting his foot upon Borodaile's breast said,--

"So shall it be with all of you: there shall be but one instant between
your last offence and your first but final debasement. Lie there! it is
your proper place! By the only law which you yourself acknowledge, the
law which gives the right divine to the strongest; if you stir limb or
muscle, I will crush the breath from your body."

But Clarence was now by the side of Wolfe, a new and more powerful
opponent.

"Look you," said he: "you have received an insult, and you have done
justice yourself. I condemn the offence, and quarrel not with you for
the punishment; but that punishment is now past: remove your foot, or--"

"What?" shouted Wolfe, fiercely, his lurid and vindictive eye flashing
with the released fire of long-pent and cherished passions.

"Or," answered Clarence, calmly, "I will hinder you from committing
murder."

At that instant the watchman's voice was heard, and the night's guardian
himself was seen hastening from the far end of the street towards the
place of contest. Whether this circumstance, or Clarence's answer,
somewhat changed the current of the republican's thoughts, or whether
his anger, suddenly raised, was now as suddenly subsiding, it is not
easy to decide; but he slowly and deliberately moved his foot from
the breast of his baffled foe, and bending down seemed endeavouring
to ascertain the mischief he had done. Lord Borodaile was perfectly
insensible.

"You have killed him!" cried Clarence in a voice of horror, "but you
shall not escape;" and he placed a desperate and nervous hand on the
republican.

"Stand off," said Wolfe, "my blood is up! I would not do more violence
to-night than I have done. Stand off! the man moves; see!"

And Lord Borodaile, uttering a long sigh, and attempting to rise,
Clarence released his hold of the republican, and bent down to assist
the fallen nobleman. Meanwhile, Wolfe, muttering to himself, turned from
the spot, and strode haughtily away.

The watchman now came up, and, with his aid, Clarence raised Lord
Borodaile. Bruised, stunned, half insensible as he was, that personage
lost none of his characteristic stateliness; he shook off the watchman's
arm, as if there was contamination in the touch; and his countenance,
still menacing and defying in its expression, turned abruptly towards
Clarence, as if he yet expected to meet and struggle with a foe.

"How are you, my lord?" said Linden; "not severely hurt, I trust?"

"Well, quite well," cried Borodaile. "Mr. Linden, I think?--I thank you
cordially for your assistance; but the dog, the rascal, where is he?"

"Gone," said Clarence.

"Gone! Where--where?" cried Borodaile; "that living man should insult
me, and yet escape!"

"Which way did the fellow go?" said the watchman, anticipative of
half-a-crown. "I will run after him in a trice, your honour: I warrant I
nab him."

"No--no--" said Borodaile, haughtily, "I leave my quarrels to no man;
if I could not master him myself, no one else shall do it for me. Mr.
Linden, excuse me, but I am perfectly recovered, and can walk very well
without your polite assistance. Mr. Watchman, I am obliged to you: there
is a guinea to reward your trouble."

With these words, intended as a farewell, the proud patrician,
smothering his pain, bowed with extreme courtesy to Clarence, again
thanked him, and walked on unaided and alone.

"He is a game blood," said the watchman, pocketing the guinea.

"He is worthy his name," thought Clarence; "though he was in the wrong,
my heart yearns to him."




CHAPTER XXXV.

     Things wear a vizard which I think to like not.--Tanner of
     Tyburn.

Clarence, from that night, appeared to have formed a sudden attachment
to Lord Borodaile. He took every opportunity of cultivating his
intimacy, and invariably treated him with a degree of consideration
which his knowledge of the world told him was well calculated to gain
the good will of his haughty and arrogant acquaintance; but all this
was in effectual in conquering Borodaile's coldness and reserve. To
have been once seen in a humiliating and degrading situation is quite
sufficient to make a proud man hate the spectator, and, with the
confusion of all prejudiced minds, to transfer the sore remembrance
of the event to the association of the witness. Lord Borodaile, though
always ceremoniously civil, was immovably distant; and avoided as well
as he was able Clarence's insinuating approaches and address. To add to
his indisposition to increase his acquaintance with Linden, a friend of
his, a captain in the Guards, once asked him who that Mr. Linden was?
and, on his lordship's replying that he did not know, Mr. Percy Bobus,
the son of a wine-merchant, though the nephew of a duke, rejoined,
"Nobody does know."

"Insolent intruder!" thought Lord Borodaile: "a man whom nobody knows to
make such advances to me!"

A still greater cause of dislike to Clarence arose from jealousy.
Ever since the first night of his acquaintance with Lady Flora, Lord
Borodaile had paid her unceasing attention. In good earnest, he was
greatly struck by her beauty, and had for the last year meditated the
necessity of presenting the world with a Lady Borodaile. Now, though his
lordship did look upon himself in as favourable a light as a man well
can do, yet he could not but own that Clarence was very handsome, had
a devilish gentlemanlike air, talked with a better grace than the
generality of young men, and danced to perfection. "I detest that
fellow!" said Lord Borodaile, involuntarily and aloud, as these
unwilling truths forced themselves upon his mind.

"Whom do you detest?" asked Mr. Percy Bobus, who was lying on the sofa
in Lord Borodaile's drawing-room, and admiring a pair of red-heeled
shoes which decorated his feet.

"That puppy Linden!" said Lord Borodaile, adjusting his cravat.

"He is a deuced puppy, certainly!" rejoined Mr. Percy Bobus, turning
round in order to contemplate more exactly the shape of his right shoe.
"I can't bear conceit, Borodaile."

"Nor I: I abhor it; it is so d--d disgusting!" replied Lord Borodaile,
leaning his chin upon his two hands, and looking full into the glass.
"Do you use MacNeile's divine pomatum?"

"No, it's too hard; I get mine from Paris: shall I send you some?"

"Do," said Lord Borodaile.

"Mr. Linden, my lord," said the servant, throwing open the door; and
Clarence entered.

"I am very fortunate," said he, with that smile which so few ever
resisted, "to find you at home, Lord Borodaile; but as the day was
wet, I thought I should have some chance of that pleasure; I therefore
wrapped myself up in my roquelaure, and here I am."

Now, nothing could be more diplomatic than the compliment of choosing a
wet day for a visit, and exposing one's self to "the pitiless shower,"
for the greater probability of finding the person visited at home. Not
so thought Lord Borodaile; he drew himself up, bowed very solemnly, and
said, with cold gravity,--

"You are very obliging, Mr. Linden."

Clarence coloured, and bit his lip as he seated himself. Mr. Percy
Bobus, with true insular breeding, took up the newspaper.

"I think I saw you at Lady C.'s last night," said Clarence; "did you
stay there long?"

"No, indeed," answered Borodaile; "I hate her parties."

"One does meet such odd people there," observed Mr. Percy Bobus;
"creatures one never sees anywhere else:"

"I hear," said Clarence, who never abused any one, even the givers of
stupid parties, if he could help it, and therefore thought it best to
change the conversation,--"I hear, Lord Borodaile, that some hunters of
yours are to be sold. I purpose being a bidder for Thunderbolt."

"I have a horse to sell you, Mr. Linden," cried Mr. Percy Bobus,
springing from the sofa into civility; "a superb creature."

"Thank you," said Clarence, laughing; "but I can only afford to buy one,
and I have taken a great fancy to Thunderbolt."

Lord Borodaile, whose manners were very antiquated in their affability,
bowed. Mr. Bobus sank back into his sofa, and resumed the paper.

A pause ensued. Clarence was chilled in spite of himself. Lord Borodaile
played with a paper-cutter.

"Have you been to Lady Westborough's lately?" said Clarence, breaking
silence.

"I was there last night," replied Lord Borodaile.

"Indeed!" cried Clarence. "I wonder I did not see you there, for I dined
with them."

Lord Borodaile's hair curled of itself. "He dined there, and I only
asked in the evening!" thought he; but his sarcastic temper suggested a
very different reply.

"Ah," said he, elevating his eyebrows, "Lady Westborough told me she had
had some people to dinner whom she had been obliged to ask. Bobus, is
that the 'Public Advertiser'? See whether that d--d fellow Junius has
been writing any more of his venomous letters."

Clarence was not a man apt to take offence, but he felt his bile rise.
"It will not do to show it," thought he; so he made some further remark
in a jesting vein; and, after a very ill-sustained conversation of
some minutes longer, rose, apparently in the best humour possible, and
departed, with a solemn intention never again to enter the house. Thence
he went to Lady Westborough's.

The marchioness was in her boudoir: Clarence was as usual admitted;
for Lady Westborough loved amusement above all things in the world, and
Clarence had the art of affording it better than any young man of her
acquaintance. On entering, he saw Lady Flora hastily retreating through
an opposite door. She turned her face towards him for one moment: that
moment was sufficient to freeze his blood: the large tears were rolling
down her cheeks, which were as white as death, and the expression of
those features, usually so laughing and joyous, was that of utter and
ineffable despair.

Lady Westborough was as lively, as bland, and as agreeable as ever:
but Clarence thought he detected something restrained and embarrassed
lurking beneath all the graces of her exterior manner; and the single
glance he had caught of the pale and altered face of Lady Flora was not
calculated to reassure his mind or animate his spirits. His visit was
short; when he left the room, he lingered for a few moments in the
ante-chamber in the hope of again seeing Lady Flora. While thus
loitering, his ear caught the sound of Lady Westborough's voice: "When
Mr. Linden calls again, you have my orders never to admit him into this
room; he will be shown into the drawing-room."

With a hasty step and a burning cheek Clarence quitted the house, and
hurried, first to his solitary apartments, and thence, impatient of
loneliness, to the peaceful retreat of his benefactor.




CHAPTER XXXVI.

  A maiden's thoughts do check my trembling hand.--DRAYTON.

There is something very delightful in turning from the unquietness and
agitation, the fever, the ambition, the harsh and worldly realities of
man's character to the gentle and deep recesses of woman's more secret
heart. Within her musings is a realm of haunted and fairy thought, to
which the things of this turbid and troubled life have no entrance. What
to her are the changes of state, the rivalries and contentions which
form the staple of our existence? For her there is an intense and fond
philosophy, before whose eye substances flit and fade like shadows, and
shadows grow glowingly into truth. Her soul's creations are not as the
moving and mortal images seen in the common day: they are things, like
spirits steeped in the dim moonlight, heard when all else are still, and
busy when earth's labourers are at rest! They are

          "Such stuff
  As dreams are made of, and their little life
  Is rounded by a sleep."

Hers is the real and uncentred poetry of being, which pervades and
surrounds her as with an air, which peoples her visions and animates
her love, which shrinks from earth into itself, and finds marvel and
meditation in all that it beholds within, and which spreads even over
the heaven in whose faith she so ardently believes the mystery and the
tenderness of romance.



LETTER I.

FROM LADY FLORA ARDENNE TO MISS ELEANOR TREVANION.

You say that I have not written to you so punctually of late as I used
to do before I came to London, and you impute my negligence to the
gayeties and pleasures by which I am surrounded. Eh bien! my dear
Eleanor, could you have thought of a better excuse for me? You know how
fond we--ay, dearest, you as well as I--used to be of dancing, and
how earnestly we were wont to anticipate those children's balls at my
uncle's, which were the only ones we were ever permitted to attend.
I found a stick the other day, on which I had cut seven notches,
significant of seven days more to the next ball; we reckoned time by
balls then, and danced chronologically. Well, my dear Eleanor, here I
am now, brought out, tolerably well-behaved, only not dignified enough,
according to Mamma,--as fond of laughing, talking, and dancing as ever;
and yet, do you know, a ball, though still very delightful, is far from
being the most important event in creation; its anticipation does
not keep me awake of a night: and what is more to the purpose,
its recollection does not make me lock up my writing-desk, burn my
portefeuille, and forget you, all of which you seem to imagine it has
been able to effect.

No, dearest Eleanor, you are mistaken; for, were she twice as giddy
and ten times as volatile as she is, your own Flora could never, never
forget you, nor the happy hours we have spent together, nor the pretty
goldfinches we had in common, nor the little Scotch duets we used to
sing together, nor our longings to change them into Italian, nor our
disappointment when we did so, nor our laughter at Signor Shrikalini,
nor our tears when poor darling Bijou died. And do you remember,
dearest, the charming green lawn where we used to play together, and
plan tricks for your governess? She was very, very cross, though, I
think, we were a little to blame too. However, I was much the worst!
And pray, Eleanor, don't you remember how we used to like being called
pretty, and told of the conquests we should make? Do you like all that
now? For my part, I am tired of it, at least from the generality of
one's flatterers.

Ah! Eleanor, or "heigho!" as the young ladies in novels write, do you
remember how jealous I was of you at ----, and how spiteful I was, and
how you were an angel, and bore with me, and kissed me, and told me
that--that I had nothing to fear? Well, Clar--I mean Mr. Linden, is now
in town and so popular, and so admired! I wish we were at ---- again,
for there we saw him every day, and now we don't meet more than three
times a week; and though I like hearing him praised above all things,
yet I feel very uncomfortable when that praise comes from very, very
pretty women. I wish we were at ---- again! Mamma, who is looking more
beautiful than ever, is, very kind! she says nothing to be sure, but she
must see how--that is to say--she must know that--that I--I mean that
Clarence is very attentive to me, and that I blush and look exceedingly
silly whenever he is; and therefore I suppose that whenever Clarence
thinks fit to ask me, I shall not be under the necessity of getting
up at six o'clock, and travelling to Gretna Green, through that odious
North Road, up the Highgate Hill, and over Finchley Common.

"But when will he ask you?" My dearest Eleanor, that is more than I
can say. To tell you the truth, there is something about Linden which I
cannot thoroughly understand. They say he is nephew and heir to the Mr.
Talbot whom you may have heard Papa talk of; but if so, why the hints,
the insinuations, of not being what he seems, which Clarence perpetually
throws out, and which only excite my interest without gratifying my
curiosity? 'It is not,' he has said, more than once, 'as an obscure
adventurer that I will claim your love;' and if I venture, which is very
seldom (for I am a little afraid of him), to question his meaning, he
either sinks into utter silence, for which, if I had loved according to
book, and not so naturally, I should be very angry with him, or twists
his words into another signification, such as that he would not claim me
till he had become something higher and nobler than he is now. Alas,
my dear Eleanor, it takes a long time to make an ambassador out of an
attache.

See now if you reproached me justly with scanty correspondences. If I
write a line more, I must begin a new sheet, and that will be beyond the
power of a frank,--a thing which would, I know, break the heart of your
dear, good, generous, but a little too prudent aunt, and irrevocably
ruin me in her esteem. So God bless you, dearest Eleanor, and believe me
most affectionately yours,      FLORA ARDENNE.



LETTER II. FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.

Pray, dearest Eleanor, does that good aunt of yours--now don't frown,
I am not going to speak disrespectfully of her--ever take a liking to
young gentlemen whom you detest, and insist upon the fallacy of your
opinion and the unerring rectitude of hers? If so, you can pity and
comprehend my grief. Mamma has formed quite an attachment to a very
disagreeable person! He is Lord Borodaile, the eldest, and I believe,
the only son of Lord Ulswater. Perhaps you may have met him abroad, for
he has been a great traveller: his family is among the most ancient in
England, and his father's estate covers half a county. All this Mamma
tells me, with the most earnest air in the world, whenever I declaim
upon his impertinence or disagreeability (is there such a word? there
ought to be). "Well," said I to-day, "what's that to me?" "It may be a
great deal to you," replied Mamma, significantly, and the blood rushed
from my face to my heart. She could not, Eleanor, she could not mean,
after all her kindness to Clarence, and in spite of all her penetration
into my heart,--oh, no, no,--she could not. How terribly suspicious this
love makes one!

But if I disliked Lord Borodaile at first, I have hated him of late;
for, somehow or other, he is always in the way. If I see Clarence
hastening through the crowd to ask me to dance, at that very instant
up steps Lord Borodaile with his cold, changeless face, and his haughty
old-fashioned bow, and his abominable dark complexion; and Mamma smiles;
and he hopes he finds me disengaged; and I am hurried off; and poor
Clarence looks so disappointed and so wretched! You have no idea how
ill-tempered this makes me. I could not help asking Lord Borodaile
yesterday if he was never going abroad again, and the hateful creature
played with his cravat, and answered "Never!" I was in hopes that my
sullenness would drive his lordship away: tout au contraire; "Nothing,"
said he to me the other day, when he was in full pout, "nothing is so
plebeian as good-humour!"

I wish, then, Eleanor, that he could see your governess: she must be
majesty itself in his eyes!

Ah, dearest, how we belie ourselves! At this moment, when you might
think, from the idle, rattling, silly flow of my letter, that my heart
was as light and free as it was when we used to play on the green lawn,
and under the sunny trees, in the merry days of our childhood, the tears
are running down my cheeks; see where they have fallen on the page,
and my head throbs as if my thoughts were too full and heavy for it to
contain. It is past one! I am alone, and in my own room. Mamma is gone
to a rout at H---- House, but I knew I should not meet Clarence there,
and so said I was ill, and remained at home. I have done so often of
late, whenever I have learned from him that he was not going to the same
place as Mamma. Indeed, I love much better to sit alone and think
over his words and looks; and I have drawn, after repeated attempts, a
profile likeness of him; and oh, Eleanor, I cannot tell you how dear
it is to me; and yet there is not a line, not a look of his countenance
which I have not learned by heart, without such useless aids to my
memory. But I am ashamed of telling you all this, and my eyes ache so,
that I can write no more.

Ever, as ever, dearest Eleanor, your affectionate friend.

F. A.



LETTER III. FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.

Eleanor, I am undone! My mother--my mother has been so cruel; but she
cannot, she cannot intend it, or she knows very little of my heart. With
some ties may be as easily broken as formed; with others they are twined
around life itself.

Clarence dined with us yesterday, and was unusually animated and
agreeable. He was engaged on business with Lord Aspeden afterwards, and
left us early. We had a few people in the evening, Lord Borodaile among
the rest; and my mother spoke of Clarence, and his relationship to
and expectations from Mr. Talbot. Lord Borodaile sneered; "You are
mistaken," said he, sarcastically; "Mr. Linden may feel it convenient to
give out that he is related to so old a family as the Talbots; and since
Heaven only knows who or what he is, he may as well claim alliance with
one person as another; but he is certainly not the nephew of Mr.
Talbot of Scarsdale Park, for that gentleman had no sisters and but
one brother, who left an only daughter; that daughter had also but one
child, certainly no relation to Mr. Linden. I can vouch for the truth
of this statement; for the Talbots are related to, or at least nearly
connected with, myself; and I thank Heaven that I have a pedigree, even
in its collateral branches, worth learning by heart." And then Lord
Borodaile--I little thought, when I railed against him, what serious
cause I should have to hate him--turned to me and harassed me with his
tedious attentions the whole of the evening.

This morning Mamma sent for me into her boudoir. "I have observed," said
she, with the greatest indifference, "that Mr. Linden has, of late, been
much too particular in his manner towards you: your foolish and undue
familiarity with every one has perhaps given him encouragement. After
the gross imposition which Lord Borodaile exposed to us last night, I
cannot but consider the young man as a mere adventurer, and must not
only insist on your putting a total termination to civilities which we
must henceforth consider presumption, but I myself shall consider it
incumbent upon me greatly to limit the advances he has thought proper to
make towards my acquaintance."

You may guess how thunderstruck I was by this speech. I could not
answer; my tongue literally clove to my mouth, and I was only relieved
by a sudden and violent burst of tears. Mamma looked exceedingly
displeased, and was just going to speak, when the servant threw open the
door and announced Mr. Linden. I rose hastily, and had only just time to
escape, as he entered; but when I heard that dear, dear voice, I could
not resist turning for one moment. He saw me; and was struck mute, for
the agony of my soul was stamped visibly on my countenance. That moment
was over: with a violent effort I tore myself away.

Eleanor, I can now write no more. God bless you! and me too; for I am
very, very unhappy. F. A.




CHAPTER XXXVII.

    What a charming character is a kind old man.--STEPHEN MONTAGUE.

"Cheer up, my dear boy," said Talbot, kindly, "we must never despair.
What though Lady Westborough has forbidden you the boudoir, a boudoir is
a very different thing from a daughter, and you have no right to suppose
that the veto extends to both. But now that we are on this subject, do
let me reason with you seriously. Have you not already tasted all the
pleasures, and been sufficiently annoyed by some of the pains, of acting
the 'Incognito'? Be ruled by me: resume your proper name; it is at least
one which the proudest might acknowledge; and its discovery will remove
the greatest obstacle to the success which you so ardently desire."

Clarence, who was labouring under strong excitement, paused for some
moments, as if to collect himself, before he replied: "I have been
thrust from my father's home; I have been made the victim of another's
crime; I have been denied the rights and name of son; perhaps (and I
say this bitterly) justly denied them, despite of my own innocence. What
would you have me do? Resume a name never conceded to me,--perhaps not
righteously mine,--thrust myself upon the unwilling and shrinking hands
which disowned and rejected me; blazon my virtues by pretensions which
I myself have promised to forego, and foist myself on the notice of
strangers by the very claims which my nearest relations dispute? Never!
never! never! With the simple name I have assumed; the friend I myself
have won,--you, my generous benefactor, my real father, who never
forsook nor insulted me for my misfortunes,--with these I have gained
some steps in the ladder; with these, and those gifts of nature, a stout
heart and a willing hand, of which none can rob me, I will either ascend
the rest, even to the summit, or fall to the dust, unknown, but not
contemned; unlamented, but not despised."

"Well, well," said Talbot, brushing away a tear which he could not
deny to the feeling, even while he disputed the judgment, of the young
adventurer,--"well, this is all very fine and very foolish; but you
shall never want friend or father while I live, or when I have ceased to
live; but come,--sit down, share my dinner, which is not very good, and
my dessert, which is: help me to entertain two or three guests who are
coming to me in the evening, to talk on literature, sup, and sleep; and
to-morrow you shall return home, and see Lady Flora in the drawing-room
if you cannot in the boudoir."

And Clarence was easily persuaded to accept the invitation. Talbot
was not one of those men who are forced to exert themselves to be
entertaining. He had the pleasant and easy way of imparting his great
general and curious information, that a man, partly humourist, partly
philosopher, who values himself on being a man of letters, and is in
spite of himself a man of the world, always ought to possess. Clarence
was soon beguiled from the remembrance of his mortifications, and,
by little and little, entirely yielded to the airy and happy flow of
Talbot's conversation.

In the evening, three or four men of literary eminence (as many as
Talbot's small Tusculum would accommodate with beds) arrived, and in a
conversation, free alike from the jargon of pedants and the insipidities
of fashion, the night fled away swiftly and happily, even to the lover.




CHAPTER XXXVIII.

     We are here (in the country) among the vast and noble scenes
     of Nature; we are there (in the town) among the pitiful
     shifts of policy. We walk here in the light and open ways of
     the divine bounty,--we grope therein the dark and confused
     labyrinths of human malice; our senses are here feasted with
     all the clear and genuine taste of their objects, which are
     all sophisticated there, and for the most part overwhelmed
     with their contraries: here pleasure, methinks, looks like a
     beautiful, constant, and modest wife; it is there an
     impudent, fickle, and painted harlot.--COWLEY.

Draw up the curtain! The scene is the Opera.

The pit is crowded; the connoisseurs in the front row are in a very ill
humour. It must be confessed that extreme heat is a little trying to the
temper of a critic.

The Opera then was not what it is now, nor even what it had been in a
former time. It is somewhat amusing to find Goldsmith questioning,
in one of his essays, whether the Opera could ever become popular in
England. But on the night--on which the reader is summoned to that
"theatre of sweet sounds" a celebrated singer from the Continent made
his first appearance in London, and all the world thronged to "that
odious Opera-house" to hear, or to say they had heard, the famous
Sopraniello.

With a nervous step, Clarence proceeded to Lady Westborough's box; and
it was many minutes that he lingered by the door before he summoned
courage to obtain admission.

He entered; the box was crowded; but Lady Flora was not there. Lord
Borodaile was sitting next to Lady Westborough. As Clarence entered,
Lord Borodaile raised his eyebrows, and Lady Westborough her glass.
However disposed a great person may be to drop a lesser one, no one of
real birth or breeding ever cuts another. Lady Westborough, therefore,
though much colder, was no less civil than usual; and Lord Borodaile
bowed lower than ever to Mr. Linden, as he punctiliously called him.
But Clarence's quick eye discovered instantly that he was no welcome
intruder, and that his day with the beautiful marchioness was over. His
visit, consequently, was short and embarrassed. When he left the box,
he heard Lord Borodaile's short, slow, sneering laugh, followed by Lady
Westborough's "hush" of reproof.

His blood boiled. He hurried along the passage, with his eyes fixed upon
the ground and his hand clenched.

"What ho! Linden, my good fellow; why, you look as if all the ferocity
of the great Figg were in your veins," cried a good-humoured voice.
Clarence started, and saw the young and high-spirited Duke of
Haverfield.

"Are you going behind the scenes?" said his grace. "I have just come
thence; and you had much better drop into La Meronville's box with me.
You sup with her to-night, do you not?

"No, indeed!" replied Clarence; "I scarcely know her, except by sight."

"Well, and what think you of her?"

"That she is the prettiest Frenchwoman I ever saw."

"Commend me to secret sympathies!" cried the duke. "She has asked
me three times who you were, and told me three times you were the
handsomest man in London and had quite a foreign air; the latter
recommendation being of course far greater than the former. So,
after this, you cannot refuse to accompany me to her box and make her
acquaintance."

"Nay," answered Clarence, "I shall be too happy to profit by the taste
of so discerning a person; but it is cruel in you, Duke, not to feign
a little jealousy,--a little reluctance to introduce so formidable a
rival."

"Oh, as to me," said the duke, "I only like her for her mental, not
her personal, attractions. She is very agreeable, and a little witty;
sufficient attractions for one in her situation."

"But do tell me a little of her history," said Clarence, "for, in spite
of her renown, I only know her as La belle Meronville. Is she not living
en ami with some one of our acquaintance?"

"To be sure," replied the duke, "with Lord Borodaile. She is
prodigiously extravagant; and Borodaile affects to be prodigiously fond:
but as there is only a certain fund of affection in the human heart, and
all Lord Borodaile's is centred in Lord Borodaile, that cannot really be
the case."

"Is he jealous of her?" said Clarence.

"Not in the least! nor indeed, does she give him any cause. She is very
gay, very talkative, gives excellent suppers, and always has her box at
the Opera crowded with admirers; but that is all. She encourages many,
and favours but one. Happy Borodaile! My lot is less fortunate! You
know, I suppose, that Julia has deserted me?"

"You astonish me,--and for what?"

"Oh, she told me, with a vehement burst of tears, that she was convinced
I did not love her, and that a hundred pounds a month was not sufficient
to maintain a milliner's apprentice. I answered the first assertion by
an assurance that I adored her: but I preserved a total silence with
regard to the latter; and so I found Trevanion tete-a-tete with her the
next day."

"What did you?" said Clarence.

"Sent my valet to Trevanion with an old coat of mine, my compliments,
and my hopes that, as Mr. Trevanion was so fond of my cast-off
conveniences, he would honour me by accepting the accompanying trifle."

"He challenged you, without doubt?"

"Challenged me! No: he tells all his friends that I am the wittiest man
in Europe."

"A fool can speak the truth, you see," said Clarence, laughing.

"Thank you, Linden; you shall have my good word with La Meronville for
that: mais allons."

Mademoiselle de la Meronville, as she pointedly entitled herself, was
one of those charming adventuresses, who, making the most of a
good education and a prepossessing person, a delicate turn for
letter-writing, and a lively vein of conversation, came to England for
a year or two, as Spaniards were wont to go to Mexico, and who return
to their native country with a profound contempt for the barbarians whom
they have so egregiously despoiled. Mademoiselle de la Meronville was
small, beautifully formed, had the prettiest hands and feet in the
world, and laughed musically. By the by, how difficult it is to laugh,
or even to smile, at once naturally and gracefully! It is one of
Steele's finest touches of character, where he says of Will Honeycombe,
"He can smile when one speaks to him, and laughs easily."

In a word, the pretty Frenchwoman was precisely formed to turn the head
of a man like Lord Borodaile, who loved to be courted and who required
to be amused. Mademoiselle de la Meronville received Clarence with a
great deal of grace, and a little reserve, the first chiefly natural,
the last wholly artificial.

"Well," said the duke (in French), "you have not told me who are to be
of your party this evening,--Borodaile, I suppose, of course?"

"No, he cannot come to-night."

"Ah, quel malheur! then the hock will not be iced enough: Borodaile's
looks are the best wine-coolers in the world."

"Fie!" cried La Meronville, glancing towards Clarence, "I cannot endure
your malevolence; wit makes you very bitter."

"And that is exactly the reason why La belle Meronville loves me so:
nothing is so sweet to one person as bitterness upon another; it is
human nature and French nature (which is a very different thing) into
the bargain."

"Bah! my Lord Duke, you judge of others by yourself."

"To be sure I do," cried the duke; "and that is the best way of forming
a right judgment. Ah! what a foot, that little figurante has; you don't
admire her, Linden?"

"No, Duke; my admiration is like the bird in the cage,--chained here,
and cannot fly away!" answered Clarence, with a smile at the frippery of
his compliment.

"Ah, Monsieur," cried the pretty Frenchwoman, leaning back, "you have
been at Paris, I see: one does not learn those graces of language in
England. I have been five months in your country; brought over the
prettiest dresses imaginable, and have only received three compliments,
and (pity me!) two out of the three were upon my pronunciation of 'How
do you do?'"

"Well," said Clarence, "I should have imagined that in England, above
all other countries, your vanity would have been gratified, for you know
we pique ourselves on our sincerity, and say all we think."

"Yes? then you always think very unpleasantly. What an alternative!
which is the best, to speak ill or to think ill of one?"

"Pour l'amour de Dieu," cried the duke, "don't ask such puzzling
questions; you are always getting into those moral subtleties, which
I suppose you learn from Borodaile. He is a wonderful metaphysician, I
hear; I can answer for his chemical powers: the moment he enters a room
the very walls grow damp; as for me, I dissolve; I should flow into
a fountain, like Arethusa, if happily his lordship did not freeze one
again into substance as fast as he dampens one into thaw."

"Fi donc!" cried La Meronville. "I should be very angry had you not
taught me to be very indifferent--"

"To him!" said the duke, dryly. "I'm glad to hear it. He is not worth
une grande passion, believe me; but tell me, ma belle, who else sups
with you?"

"D'abord, Monsieur Linden, I trust," answered La Meronville, with a look
of invitation, to which Clarence bowed and smiled his assent, "Milord
D----, and Monsieur Trevanion, Mademoiselle Caumartin, and Le Prince
Pietro del Ordino."

"Nothing can be better arranged," said the duke. "But see, they are just
going to drop the curtain. Let me call your carriage."

"You are too good, milord," replied La Meronville, with a bow which
said, "of course;" and the duke, who would not have stirred three paces
for the first princess of the blood, hurried out of the box (despite
of Clarence's offer to undertake the commission) to inquire after the
carriage of the most notorious adventuress of the day.

Clarence was alone in the box with the beautiful Frenchwoman. To
say truth, Linden was far too much in love with Lady Flora, and too
occupied, as to his other thoughts, with the projects of ambition, to
be easily led into any disreputable or criminal liaison; he therefore
conversed with his usual ease, though with rather more than his usual
gallantry, without feeling the least touched by the charms of La
Meronville or the least desirous of supplanting Lord Borodaile in her
favour.

The duke reappeared, and announced the carriage. As, with La Meronville
leaning on his arm, Clarence hurried out, he accidentally looked up,
and saw on the head of the stairs Lady Westborough with her party (Lord
Borodaile among the rest) in waiting for her carriage. For almost the
first time in his life, Clarence felt ashamed of himself; his cheek
burned like fire, and he involuntarily let go the fair hand which was
leaning upon his arm. However, the weaker our course the better face we
should put upon it, and Clarence, recovering his presence of mind, and
vainly hoping he had not been perceived, buried his face as well as he
was able in the fur collar of his cloak, and hurried on.

"You saw Lord Borodaile?" said the duke to La Meronville, as he handed
her into her carriage.

"Yes, I accidentally looked back after we had passed him, and then I saw
him."

"Looked back!" said the duke; "I wonder he did not turn you into a
pillar of salt."

"Fi donc!" cried La belle Meronville, tapping his grace playfully on the
arm, in order to do which she was forced to lean a little harder upon
Clarence's, which she had not yet relinquished--"Fi donc! Francois, chez
moi!"

"My carriage is just behind," said the duke. "You will go with me to La
Meronville's, of course?"

"Really, my dear duke," said Clarence, "I wish I could excuse myself
from this party. I have another engagement."

"Excuse yourself? and leave me to the mercy of Mademoiselle Caumartin,
who has the face of an ostrich, and talks me out of breath! Never, my
dear Linden, never! Besides, I want you to see how well I shall behave
to Trevanion. Here is the carriage. Entrez, mon cher."

And Clarence, weakly and foolishly (but he was very young and very
unhappy, and so, longing for an escape from his own thoughts) entered
the carriage, and drove to the supper party, in order to prevent the
Duke of Haverfield being talked out of breath by Mademoiselle Caumartin,
who had the face of an ostrich.




CHAPTER XXXIX.

  Yet truth is keenly sought for, and the wind
  Charged with rich words, poured out in thought's defence;
  Whether the Church inspire that eloquence,
  Or a Platonic piety, confined
  To the sole temple of the inward mind;
  And one there is who builds immortal lays,
  Though doomed to tread in solitary ways;
  Darkness before, and danger's voice behind!
  Yet not alone--
                     WORDSWORTH.

London, thou Niobe, who sittest in stone, amidst thy stricken and fated
children; nurse of the desolate, that hidest in thy bosom the shame, the
sorrows, the sins of many sons; in whose arms the fallen and the outcast
shroud their distresses, and shelter from the proud man's contumely;
Epitome and Focus of the disparities and maddening contrasts of this
wrong world, that assemblest together in one great heap the woes, the
joys, the elevations, the debasements of the various tribes of man;
mightiest of levellers, confounding in thy whirlpool all ranks, all
minds, the graven labours of knowledge, the straws of the maniac, purple
and rags, the regalities and the loathsomeness of earth,--palace and
lazar-house combined! Grave of the living, where, mingled and massed
together, we couch, but rest not,--"for in that sleep of life what
dreams do come,"--each vexed with a separate vision,--"shadows" which
"grieve the heart," unreal in their substance, but faithful in their
warnings, flitting from the eye, but graving unfleeting memories on
the mind, which reproduce new dreams over and over, until the phantasm
ceases, and the pall of a heavier torpor falls upon the brain, and all
is still and dark and hushed! "From the stir of thy great Babel,"
and the fixed tinsel glare in which sits pleasure like a star, "which
shines, but warms not with its powerless rays," we turn to thy deeper
and more secret haunts. Thy wilderness is all before us--where to choose
our place of rest; and, to our eyes, thy hidden recesses are revealed.

The clock of St. Paul's had tolled the second hour of morning. Within
a small and humble apartment in the very heart of the city, there sat
a writer, whose lucubrations, then obscure and unknown, were destined,
years afterwards, to excite the vague admiration of the crowd and the
deeper homage of the wise. They were of that nature which is slow in
winning its way to popular esteem; the result of the hived and hoarded
knowledge of years; the produce of deep thought and sublime aspirations,
influencing, in its bearings, the interests of the many, yet only
capable of analysis by the judgment of the few. But the stream broke
forth at last from the cavern to the daylight, although the source was
never traced; or, to change the image,--albeit none know the hand which
executed and the head which designed, the monument of a mighty intellect
has been at length dug up, as it were, from the envious earth, the
brighter for its past obscurity, and the more certain of immortality
from the temporary neglect it has sustained.

The room was, as we before said, very small, and meanly furnished; yet
were there a few articles of costliness and luxury scattered about,
which told that the tastes of its owner had not been quite humbled to
the level of his fortunes. One side of the narrow chamber was covered
with shelves, which supported books in various languages, and though
chiefly on scientific subjects, not utterly confined to them. Among the
doctrines of the philosopher, and the golden rules of the moralist,
were also seen the pleasant dreams of poets, the legends of Spenser,
the refining moralities of Pope, the lofty errors of Lucretius, and the
sublime relics of our "dead kings of melody." [Shakspeare and Milton]
And over the hearth was a picture, taken in more prosperous days, of
one who had been and was yet to the tenant of that abode, better than
fretted roofs and glittering banquets, the objects of ambition, or
even the immortality of fame. It was the face of one very young and
beautiful, and the deep, tender eyes looked down, as with a watchful
fondness, upon the lucubrator and his labours. While beneath the window,
which was left unclosed, for it was scarcely June, were simple yet not
inelegant vases, filled with flowers,--

  "Those lovely leaves, where we
   May read how soon things have
   Their end, though ne'er so brave." [Herrick]

The writer was alone, and had just paused from his employment; he was
leaning his face upon one hand, in a thoughtful and earnest mood, and
the air which came chill, but gentle, from the window, slightly stirred
the locks from the broad and marked brow, over which they fell in thin
but graceful waves. Partly owing perhaps to the waning light of the
single lamp and the lateness of the hour, his cheek seemed very pale,
and the complete though contemplative rest of the features partook
greatly of the quiet of habitual sadness, and a little of the languor
of shaken health; yet the expression, despite the proud cast of the
brow and profile, was rather benevolent than stern or dark in its
pensiveness, and the lines spoke more of the wear and harrow of deep
thought than the inroads of ill-regulated passion.

There was a slight tap at the door; the latch was raised, and the
original of the picture I have described entered the apartment.

Time had not been idle with her since that portrait had been taken: the
round elastic figure had lost much of its youth and freshness; the step,
though light, was languid, and in the centre of the fair, smooth cheek,
which was a little sunken, burned one deep bright spot,--fatal sign to
those who have watched the progress of the most deadly and deceitful of
our national maladies; yet still the form and countenance were eminently
interesting and lovely; and though the bloom was gone forever, the
beauty, which not even death could wholly have despoiled, remained to
triumph over debility, misfortune, and disease.

She approached the student, and laid her hand upon his shoulder.

"Dearest!" said he, tenderly yet reproachfully, "yet up, and the hour so
late and yourself so weak? Fie, I must learn to scold you."

"And how," answered the intruder, "how could I sleep or rest while you
are consuming your very life in those thankless labours?"

"By which," interrupted the writer, with a faint smile, "we glean our
scanty subsistence."

"Yes," said the wife (for she held that relation to the student), and
the tears stood in her eyes, "I know well that every morsel of bread,
every drop of water, is wrung from your very heart's blood, and I--I am
the cause of all; but surely you exert yourself too much, more than can
be requisite? These night damps, this sickly and chilling air, heavy
with the rank vapours of the coming morning, are not suited to thoughts
and toils which are alone sufficient to sear your mind and exhaust your
strength. Come, my own love, to bed; and yet first come and look upon
our child, how sound she sleeps! I have leaned over her for the last
hour, and tried to fancy it was you whom I watched, for she has learned
already your smile and has it even when she sleeps."

"She has cause to smile," said the husband, bitterly.

"She has, for she is yours! and even in poetry and humble hopes, that is
an inheritance which may well teach her pride and joy. Come, love, the
air is keen, and the damp rises to your forehead,--yet stay, till I have
kissed it away."

"Mine own love," said the student, as he rose and wound his arm round
the slender waist of his wife, "wrap your shawl closer over your bosom,
and let us look for one instant upon the night. I cannot sleep till I
have slaked the fever of my blood: the air has nothing of coldness in
its breath for me."

And they walked to the window and looked forth. All was hushed and still
in the narrow street; the cold gray clouds were hurrying fast along the
sky; and the stars, weak and waning in their light, gleamed forth at
rare intervals upon the mute city, like expiring watch-lamps of the
dead.

They leaned out and spoke not; but when they looked above upon the
melancholy heavens, they drew nearer to each other, as if it were their
natural instinct to do so whenever the world without seemed discouraging
and sad.

At length the student broke the silence; but his thoughts, which were
wandering and disjointed, were breathed less to her than vaguely and
unconsciously to himself. "Morn breaks,--another and another!--day upon
day!--while we drag on our load like the blind beast which knows not
when the burden shall be cast off and the hour of rest be come."

The woman pressed her hand to her bosom, but made no rejoinder--she knew
his mood--and the student continued,--"And so life frets itself away!
Four years have passed over our seclusion--four years! a great segment
in the little circle of our mortality; and of those years what day has
pleasure won from labour, or what night has sleep snatched wholly
from the lamp? Weaker than the miser, the insatiable and restless
mind traverses from east to west; and from the nooks, and corners, and
crevices of earth collects, fragment by fragment, grain by grain, atom
by atom, the riches which it gathers to its coffers--for what?--to
starve amidst the plenty! The fantasies of the imagination bring a ready
and substantial return: not so the treasures of thought. Better that I
had renounced the soul's labour for that of its hardier frame--better
that I had 'sweated in the eye of Phoebus,' than 'eat my heart with
crosses and with cares,'--seeking truth and wanting bread--adding to the
indigence of poverty its humiliation; wroth with the arrogance of men,
who weigh in the shallow scales of their meagre knowledge the product of
lavish thought, and of the hard hours for which health, and sleep, and
spirit have been exchanged;--sharing the lot of those who would
enchant the old serpent of evil, which refuses the voice of the
charmer!--struggling against the prejudice and bigoted delusion of the
bandaged and fettered herd to whom, in our fond hopes and aspirations,
we trusted to give light and freedom; seeing the slavish judgments we
would have redeemed from error clashing their chains at us in ire;--made
criminal by our very benevolence;--the martyrs whose zeal is rewarded
with persecution, whose prophecies are crowned with contempt!--Better,
oh, better that I had not listened to the vanity of a heated
brain--better that I had made my home with the lark and the wild bee,
among the fields and the quiet hills, where life, if obscurer, is
less debased, and hope, if less eagerly indulged, is less bitterly
disappointed. The frame, it is true, might have been bowed to a harsher
labour, but the heart would at least have had its rest from anxiety, and
the mind its relaxation from thought."

The wife's tears fell upon the hand she clasped. The student turned, and
his heart smote him for the selfishness of his complaint. He drew her
closer and closer to his bosom; and gazing fondly upon those eyes which
years of indigence and care might have robbed of their young lustre, but
not of their undying tenderness, he kissed away her tears, and addressed
her in a voice which never failed to charm her grief into forgetfulness.

"Dearest and kindest," he said, "was I not to blame for accusing those
privations or regrets which have only made us love each other the more?
Trust me, mine own treasure, that it is only in the peevishness of an
inconstant and fretful humour that I have murmured against my fortune.
For, in the midst of all, I look upon you, my angel, my comforter,
my young dream of love, which God, in His mercy, breathed into waking
life--I look upon you, and am blessed and grateful. Nor in my juster
moments do I accuse even the nature of these studies, though they
bring us so scanty a reward. Have I not hours of secret and overflowing
delight, the triumphs of gratified research--flashes of sudden light,
which reward the darkness of thought, and light up my solitude as a
revel?--These feelings of rapture, which nought but Science can afford,
amply repay her disciples for worse evils and severer handships than
it has been my destiny to endure. Look along the sky, how the vapours
struggle with the still yet feeble stars: even so have the mists of
error been pierced, though not scattered, by the dim but holy lights of
past wisdom, and now the morning is at hand, and in that hope we journey
on, doubtful, but not utterly in darkness. Nor is this all my hope;
there is a loftier and more steady comfort than that which mere
philosophy can bestow. If the certainty of future fame bore Milton
rejoicing through his blindness, or cheered Galileo in his dungeon,
what stronger and holier support shall not be given to him who has loved
mankind as his brothers, and devoted his labours to their cause?--who
has not sought, but relinquished, his own renown?---who has braved the
present censures of men for their future benefit, and trampled upon
glory in the energy of benevolence? Will there not be for him something
more powerful than fame to comfort his sufferings and to sustain his
hopes? If the wish of mere posthumous honour be a feeling rather vain
than exalted, the love of our race affords us a more rational and noble
desire of remembrance. Come what will, that love, if it animates our
toils and directs our studies, shall when we are dust make our relics
of value, our efforts of avail, and consecrate the desire of fame,
which were else a passion selfish and impure, by connecting it with the
welfare of ages and the eternal interests of the world and its Creator!
Come, we will to bed."




CHAPTER XL.

     A man may be formed by nature for an admirable citizen, and
     yet, from the purest motives, be a dangerous one to the
     State in which the accident of birth has placed him.--
     STEPHEN MONTAGUE.

The night again closed., and the student once more resumed his labours.
The spirit of his hope and comforter of his toils sat by him, ever and
anon lifting her fond eyes from her work to gaze upon his countenance,
to sigh, and to return sadly and quietly to her employment.

A heavy step ascended the stairs, the door opened, and the tall figure
of Wolfe, the republican, presented itself. The female rose, pushed a
chair towards him with a smile and grace suited to better fortunes, and,
retiring from the table, reseated herself silent and apart.

"It is a fine night," said the student, when the mutual greetings were
over. "Whence come you?"

"From contemplating human misery and worse than human degradation,"
replied Wolfe, slowly seating himself.

"Those words specify no place: they apply universally," said the
student, with a sigh.

"Ay, Glendower, for misgovernment is universal," rejoined Wolfe.

Glendower made no answer.

"Oh!" said Wolfe, in the low, suppressed tone of intense passion which
was customary to him, "it maddens me to look upon the willingness with
which men hug their trappings of slavery,--bears, proud of the rags
which deck and the monkeys which ride them. But it frets me yet more
when some lordling sweeps along, lifting his dull eyes above the fools
whose only crime and debasement are--what?--their subjection to him!
Such a one I encountered a few nights since; and he will remember the
meeting longer than I shall. I taught that 'god to tremble.'"

The female rose, glanced towards her husband, and silently withdrew.

Wolfe paused for a few moments, looked curiously and pryingly round,
and then rising went forth into the passage to see that no loiterer or
listener was near; returned, and drawing his chair close to Glendower,
fixed his dark eye upon him, and said,--

"You are poor, and your spirit rises against your lot, you are just, and
your heart swells against the general oppression you behold: can you not
dare to remedy your ills and those of mankind?"

"I can dare," said Glendower, calmly, though haughtily, "all things but
crime."

"And which is crime?--the rising against, or the submission to, evil
government? Which is crime, I ask you?"

"That which is the most imprudent," answered Glendower.

"We may sport in ordinary cases with our own safeties, but only in rare
cases with the safety of others."

Wolfe rose, and paced the narrow room impatiently to and fro. He paused
by the window and threw it open. "Come here," he cried,--"come and look
out."

Glendower did so; all was still and quiet.

"Why did you call me?" said he; "I see nothing."

"Nothing!" exclaimed Wolfe; "look again; look on yon sordid and squalid
huts; look at yon court, that from this wretched street leads to abodes
to which these are as palaces; look at yon victims of vice and famine,
plying beneath the midnight skies their filthy and infectious trade.
Wherever you turn your eyes, what see you? Misery, loathsomeness, sin!
Are you a man, and call you these nothing? And now lean forth still
more; see afar off, by yonder lamp, the mansion of ill-gotten and
griping wealth. He who owns those buildings, what did he that he should
riot while we starve? He wrung from the negro's tears and bloody sweat
the luxuries of a pampered and vitiated taste; he pandered to the
excesses of the rich; he heaped their tables with the product of a
nation's groans. Lo!--his reward! He is rich, prosperous, honoured! He
sits in the legislative assembly; he declaims against immorality;
he contends for the safety of property and the equilibrium of ranks.
Transport yourself from this spot for an instant; imagine that you
survey the gorgeous homes of aristocracy and power, the palaces of the
west. What see you there?--the few sucking, draining, exhausting the
blood, the treasure, the very existence of the many. Are we, who are of
the many, wise to suffer it?"

"Are we of the many?" said Glendower.

"We could be," said Wolfe, hastily.

"I doubt it;" replied Glendower.

"Listen," said the republican, laying his hand upon Glendower's
shoulder, "listen to me. There are in this country men whose spirits not
years of delayed hope, wearisome persecution, and, bitterer than all,
misrepresentation from some and contempt from others, have yet quelled
and tamed. We watch our opportunity; the growing distress of the
country, the increasing severity and misrule of the administration, will
soon afford it us. Your talents, your benevolence, render you worthy to
join us. Do so, and--"

"Hush!" interrupted the student; "you know not what you say: you weigh
not the folly, the madness of your design! I am a man more fallen, more
sunken, more disappointed than you. I, too, have had at my heart the
burning and lonely hope which, through years of misfortune and want, has
comforted me with the thought of serving and enlightening mankind,--I,
too, have devoted to the fulfilment of that hope, days and nights, in
which the brain grew dizzy and the heart heavy and clogged with the
intensity of my pursuits. Were the dungeon and the scaffold my reward
Heaven knows that I would not flinch eye or hand or abate a jot of heart
and hope in the thankless prosecution of my toils. Know me, then, as
one of fortunes more desperate than your own; of an ambition more
unquenchable; of a philanthropy no less ardent; and, I will add, of a
courage no less firm: and behold the utter hopelessness of your projects
with others, when to me they only appear the visions of an enthusiast."

Wolfe sank down in the chair.

"Is it even so?" said he, slowly and musingly. "Are my hopes but
delusions? Has my life been but one idle, though convulsive dream? Is
the goddess of our religion banished from this great and populous earth
to the seared and barren hearts of a few solitary worshippers, whom all
else despise as madmen or persecute as idolaters? And if so, shall we
adore her the less?---No! though we perish in her cause, it is around
her altar that our corpses shall be found!"

"My friend," said Glendower, kindly, for he was touched by the sincerity
though opposed to the opinions of the republican, "the night is yet
early: we will sit down to discuss our several doctrines calmly and in
the spirit of truth and investigation."

"Away!" cried Wolfe, rising and slouching his hat over his bent
and lowering brows; "away! I will not listen to you: I dread your
reasonings; I would not have a particle of my faith shaken. If I err,
I have erred from my birth,--erred with Brutus and Tell, Hampden and
Milton, and all whom the thousand tribes and parties of earth consecrate
with their common gratitude and eternal reverence. In that error I will
die! If our party can struggle not with hosts, there may yet arise some
minister with the ambition of Caesar, if not his genius,--of whom a
single dagger can rid the earth!"

"And if not?" said Glendower.

"I have the same dagger for myself!" replied Wolfe, as he closed the
door.




CHAPTER XLI.

     Bolingbroke has said that "Man is his own sharper and his
     own bubble;" and certainly he who is acutest in duping
     others is ever the most ingenious in outwitting himself. The
     criminal is always a sophist; and finds in his own reason a
     special pleader to twist laws human and divine into a
     sanction of his crime. The rogue is so much in the habit of
     cheating, that he packs the cards even when playing at
     Patience with himself.--STEPHEN MONTAGUE.

The only two acquaintances in this populous city whom Glendower
possessed who were aware that in a former time he had known a better
fortune were Wolfe and a person of far higher worldly estimation, of the
name of Crauford. With the former the student had become acquainted by
the favour of chance, which had for a short time made them lodgers in
the same house. Of the particulars of Glendower's earliest history Wolfe
was utterly ignorant; but the addresses upon some old letters, which
he had accidentally seen, had informed him that Glendower had formerly
borne another name; and it was easy to glean from the student's
conversation that something of greater distinction and prosperity than
he now enjoyed was coupled with the appellation he had renounced.
Proud, melancholy, austere,--brooding upon thoughts whose very loftiness
received somewhat of additional grandeur from the gloom which encircled
it,--Glendower found, in the ruined hopes and the solitary lot of the
republican, that congeniality which neither Wolfe's habits nor the
excess of his political fervour might have afforded to a nature which
philosophy had rendered moderate and early circumstances refined.
Crauford was far better acquainted than Wolfe with the reverses
Glendower had undergone. Many years ago he had known and indeed
travelled with him upon the Continent; since then they had not met till
about six months prior to the time in which Glendower is presented to
the reader. It was in an obscure street of the city that Crauford had
then encountered Glendower, whose haunts were so little frequented by
the higher orders of society that Crauford was the first, and the only
one of his former acquaintance with whom for years he had been brought
into contact. That person recognized him at once, accosted him, followed
him home, and three days afterwards surprised him with a visit. Of
manners which, in their dissimulation, extended far beyond the ordinary
ease and breeding of the world, Crauford readily appeared not to notice
the altered circumstances of his old acquaintance; and, by a tone
of conversation artfully respectful, he endeavoured to remove from
Glendower's mind that soreness which his knowledge of human nature told
him his visit was calculated to create.

There is a certain species of pride which contradicts the ordinary
symptoms of the feeling, and appears most elevated when it would be
reasonable to expect it should be most depressed. Of this sort was
Glendower's. When he received the guest who had known him in his former
prosperity, some natural sentiment of emotion called, it is true, to his
pale cheek a momentary flush, as he looked round his humble apartment,
and the evident signs of poverty it contained; but his address was calm
and self-possessed, and whatever mortification he might have felt, no
intonation of his voice, no tell-tale embarrassment of manner, revealed
it. Encouraged by this air, even while he was secretly vexed by it,
and perfectly unable to do justice to the dignity of mind which gave
something of majesty rather than humiliation to misfortune, Crauford
resolved to repeat his visit, and by intervals, gradually lessening,
renewed it, till acquaintance seemed, though little tinctured, at least
on Glendower's side, by friendship, to assume the semblance of intimacy.
It was true, however, that he had something to struggle against in
Glendower's manner, which certainly grew colder in proportion to the
repetition of the visits; and at length Glendower said, with an ease and
quiet which abashed for a moment an effrontery of mind and manner which
was almost parallel, "Believe me, Mr. Crauford, I feel fully sensible of
your attentions; but as circumstances at present are such as to render
an intercourse between us little congenial to the habits and sentiments
of either, you will probably understand and forgive my motives in
wishing no longer to receive civilities which, however I may feel them,
I am unable to return."

Crauford coloured and hesitated before he replied. "Forgive me then,"
said he, "for my fault. I did venture to hope that no circumstances
would break off an acquaintance to me so valuable. Forgive me if I
did imagine that an intercourse between mind and mind could be equally
carried on, whether the mere body were lodged in a palace or a hovel;"
and then suddenly changing his tone into that of affectionate warmth,
Crauford continued, "My dear Glendower, my dear friend, I would say, if
I durst, is not your pride rather to blame here? Believe me, in my turn,
I fully comprehend and bow to it; but it wounds me beyond expression.
Were you in your proper station, a station much higher than my own,
I would come to you at once, and proffer my friendship: as it is, I
cannot; but your pride wrongs me, Glendower,--indeed it does."

And Crauford turned away, apparently in the bitterness of wounded
feeling.

Glendower was touched: and his nature, as kind as it was proud,
immediately smote him for conduct certainly ungracious and perhaps
ungrateful. He held out his hand to Crauford; with the most respectful
warmth that personage seized and pressed it: and from that time
Crauford's visits appeared to receive a license which, if not perfectly
welcome, was at least never again questioned.

"I shall have this man now," muttered Crauford, between his ground
teeth, as he left the house, and took his way to his counting-house.
There, cool, bland, fawning, and weaving in his close and dark mind
various speculations of guilt and craft, he sat among his bills and
gold, like the very gnome and personification of that Mammon of gain to
which he was the most supple though concealed adherent.

Richard Crauford was of a new but not unimportant family. His father had
entered into commerce, and left a flourishing firm and a name of great
respectability in his profession to his son. That son was a man whom
many and opposite qualities rendered a character of very singular and
uncommon stamp. Fond of the laborious acquisition of money, he was
equally attached to the ostentatious pageantries of expense. Profoundly
skilled in the calculating business of his profession, he was devoted
equally to the luxuries of pleasure; but the pleasure was suited well
to the mind which pursued it. The divine intoxication of that love where
the delicacies and purities of affection consecrate the humanity of
passion was to him a thing of which not even his youngest imagination
had ever dreamed. The social concomitants of the wine-cup (which have
for the lenient an excuse, for the austere a temptation), the generous
expanding of the heart, the increased yearning to kindly affection, the
lavish spirit throwing off its exuberance in the thousand lights and
emanations of wit,--these, which have rendered the molten grape, despite
of its excesses, not unworthy of the praises of immortal hymns,
and taken harshness from the judgment of those averse to its
enjoyment,--these never presented an inducement to the stony temperament
and dormant heart of Richard Crauford.

He looked upon the essences of things internal as the common eye upon
outward nature, and loved the many shapes of evil as the latter does the
varieties of earth, not for their graces, but their utility. His
loves, coarse and low, fed their rank fires from an unmingled and gross
depravity. His devotion to wine was either solitary and unseen--for he
loved safety better than mirth--or in company with those whose station
flattered his vanity, not whose fellowship ripened his crude and nipped
affections. Even the recklessness of vice in him had the character of
prudence; and in the most rapid and turbulent stream of his excesses,
one might detect the rocky and unmoved heart of the calculator at the
bottom.

Cool, sagacious, profound in dissimulation, and not only observant of,
but deducing sage consequences from, those human inconsistencies and
frailties by which it was his aim to profit, he cloaked his deeper vices
with a masterly hypocrisy; and for those too dear to forego and too
difficult to conceal he obtained pardon by the intercession of virtues
it cost him nothing to assume. Regular in his attendance at worship;
professing rigidness of faith beyond the tenets of the orthodox church;
subscribing to the public charities, where the common eye knoweth what
the private hand giveth; methodically constant to the forms of business;
primitively scrupulous in the proprieties of speech; hospitable, at
least to his superiors, and, being naturally smooth, both of temper and
address, popular with his inferiors,--it was no marvel that one part
of the world forgave to a man rich and young the irregularities of
dissipation, that another forgot real immorality in favour of affected
religion, or that the remainder allowed the most unexceptionable
excellence of words to atone for the unobtrusive errors of a conduct
which did not prejudice them.

"It is true," said his friends, "that he loves women too much: but he is
young; he will marry and amend."

Mr. Crauford did marry; and, strange as it may seem, for love,--at least
for that brute-like love, of which alone he was capable. After a few
years of ill-usage on his side, and endurance on his wife's, they
parted. Tired of her person, and profiting by her gentleness of temper,
he sent her to an obscure corner of the country, to starve upon the
miserable pittance which was all he allowed her from his superfluities.
Even then--such is the effect of the showy proprieties of form and
word--Mr. Crauford sank not in the estimation of the world.

"It was easy to see," said the spectators of his domestic drama, "that
a man in temper so mild, in his business so honourable, so civil of
speech, so attentive to the stocks and the sermon, could not have
been the party to blame. One never knew the rights of matrimonial
disagreements, nor could sufficiently estimate the provoking disparities
of temper. Certainly Mrs. Crauford never did look in good humour, and
had not the open countenance of her husband; and certainly the very
excesses of Mr. Crauford betokened a generous warmth of heart, which the
sullenness of his conjugal partner might easily chill and revolt."

And thus, unquestioned and unblamed, Mr. Crauford walked onward in
his beaten way; and, secretly laughing at the toleration of the crowd,
continued at his luxurious villa the orgies of a passionless yet brutal
sensuality.

So far might the character of Richard Crauford find parallels in
hypocrisy and its success. Dive we now deeper into his soul. Possessed
of talents which, though of a secondary rank, were in that rank
consummate, Mr. Crauford could not be a villain by intuition or the
irregular bias of his nature: he was a villain upon a grander scale; he
was a villain upon system. Having little learning and less knowledge,
out of his profession his reflection expended itself upon apparently
obvious deductions from the great and mysterious book of life. He saw
vice prosperous in externals, and from this sight his conclusion was
drawn. "Vice," said he, "is not an obstacle to success; and if so, it
is at least a pleasanter road to it than your narrow and thorny ways of
virtue." But there are certain vices which require the mask of virtue,
and Crauford thought it easier to wear the mask than to school his soul
to the reality. So to the villain he added the hypocrite. He found the
success equalled his hopes, for he had both craft and genius; nor was he
naturally without the minor amiabilities, which to the ignorance of the
herd seem more valuable than coin of a more important amount. Blinded
as we are by prejudice, we not only mistake but prefer decencies to
moralities; and, like the inhabitants of Cos, when offered the choice of
two statues of the same goddess, we choose, not that which is the most
beautiful, but that which is the most dressed.

Accustomed easily to dupe mankind, Crauford soon grew to despise them;
and from justifying roguery by his own interest, he now justified it by
the folly of others; and as no wretch is so unredeemed as to be without
excuse to himself, Crauford actually persuaded his reason that he was
vicious upon principle, and a rascal on a system of morality. But why
the desire of this man, so consummately worldly and heartless, for an
intimacy with the impoverished and powerless student? This question is
easily answered. In the first place, during Crauford's acquaintance with
Glendower abroad, the latter had often, though innocently, galled the
vanity and self-pride of the parvenu affecting the aristocrat, and in
poverty the parvenu was anxious to retaliate. But this desire would
probably have passed away after he had satisfied his curiosity, or
gloated his spite, by one or two insights into Glendower's home,--for
Crauford, though at times a malicious, was not a vindictive, man,--had
it not been for a much more powerful object which afterwards occurred to
him. In an extensive scheme of fraud, which for many years this man had
carried on and which for secrecy and boldness was almost unequalled, it
had of late become necessary to his safety to have a partner, or rather
tool. A man of education, talent, and courage was indispensable, and
Crauford had resolved that Glendower should be that man. With the
supreme confidence in his own powers which long success had given him;
with a sovereign contempt for, or rather disbelief in, human integrity;
and with a thorough conviction that the bribe to him was the bribe with
all, and that none would on any account be poor if they had the offer
to be rich,--Crauford did not bestow a moment's consideration upon
the difficulty of his task, or conceive that in the nature and mind of
Glendower there could exist any obstacle to his design.

Men addicted to calculation are accustomed to suppose those employed in
the same mental pursuit arrive, or ought to arrive, at the same final
conclusion. Now, looking upon Glendower as a philosopher, Crauford
looked upon him as a man who, however he might conceal his real
opinions, secretly laughed, like Crauford's self, not only at the
established customs, but at the established moralities of the world.
Ill-acquainted with books, the worthy Richard was, like all men
similarly situated, somewhat infected by the very prejudices he affected
to despise; and he shared the vulgar disposition to doubt the hearts
of those who cultivate the head. Glendower himself had confirmed this
opinion by lauding, though he did not entirely subscribe to, those
moralists who have made an enlightened self-interest the proper measure
of all human conduct; and Crauford, utterly unable to comprehend this
system in its grand, naturally interpreted it in a partial, sense.
Espousing self-interest as his own code, he deemed that in reality
Glendower's principles did not differ greatly from his; and, as there
is no pleasure to a hypocrite like that of finding a fit opportunity to
unburden some of his real sentiments, Crauford was occasionally wont
to hold some conference and argument with the student, in which his
opinions were not utterly cloaked in their usual disguise; but cautious
even in his candour, he always forbore stating such opinions as his own:
he merely mentioned them as those which a man beholding the villanies
and follies of his kind, might be tempted to form; and thus Glendower,
though not greatly esteeming his acquaintance, looked upon him as one
ignorant in his opinions, but not likely to err in his conduct.

These conversations did, however, it is true, increase Crauford's
estimate of Glendower's integrity, but they by no means diminished his
confidence of subduing it. Honour, a deep and pure sense of the divinity
of good, the steady desire of rectitude, and the supporting aid of a
sincere religion,--these he did not deny to his intended tool: he rather
rejoiced that he possessed them. With the profound arrogance, the sense
of immeasurable superiority, which men of no principle invariably feel
for those who have it, Crauford said to himself, "Those very virtues
will be my best dupes; they cannot resist the temptations I shall offer;
but they can resist any offer to betray me afterwards; for no man can
resist hunger: but your fine feelings, your nice honour, your precise
religion,--he! he! he!--these can teach a man very well to resist
a common inducement; they cannot make him submit to be his own
executioner; but they can prevent his turning king's evidence and being
executioner to another. No, no: it is not to your common rogues that I
may dare trust my secret,--my secret, which is my life! It is precisely
of such a fine, Athenian, moral rogue as I shall make my proud friend
that I am in want. But he has some silly scruples; we must beat them
away: we must not be too rash; and above all, we must leave the best
argument to poverty. Want is your finest orator; a starving wife,
a famished brat,--he! he!--these are your true tempters,--your true
fathers of crime, and fillers of jails and gibbets. Let me see: he
has no money, I know, but what he gets from that bookseller. What
bookseller, by the by? Ah, rare thought! I'll find out, and cut off that
supply. My lady wife's cheek will look somewhat thinner next month, I
fancy--he! he! But 't is a pity, for she is a glorious creature! Who
knows but I may serve two purposes? However, one at present! business
first, and pleasure afterwards; and, faith, the business is damnably
like that of life and death."

Muttering such thoughts as these, Crauford took his way one evening to
Glendower's house.




CHAPTER XLII.

     Iago.--Virtue; a fig!--'t is in ourselves that we are thus
     and thus.--Othello.

"So, so, my little one, don't let me disturb you. Madam, dare I venture
to hope your acceptance of this fruit? I chose it myself, and I am
somewhat of a judge. Oh! Glendower, here is the pamphlet you wished to
see."

With this salutation, Crauford drew his chair to the table by which
Glendower sat, and entered into conversation with his purposed victim. A
comely and a pleasing countenance had Richard Crauford! the lonely light
of the room fell upon a face which, though forty years of guile had
gone over it, was as fair and unwrinkled as a boy's. Small, well-cut
features; a blooming complexion; eyes of the lightest blue; a forehead
high, though narrow; and a mouth from which the smile was never
absent,--these, joined to a manner at once soft and confident, and an
elegant though unaffected study of dress, gave to Crauford a personal
appearance well suited to aid the effect of his hypocritical and
dissembling mind.

"Well, my friend," said he, "always at your books, eh? Ah! it is a happy
taste; would that I had cultivated it more; but we who are condemned to
business have little leisure to follow our own inclinations. It is only
on Sundays that I have time to read; and then (to say truth) I am an
old-fashioned man, whom the gayer part of the world laughs at, and then
I am too occupied with the Book of Books to think of any less important
study."

Not deeming that a peculiar reply was required to this pious speech,
Glendower did not take that advantage of Crauford's pause which it was
evidently intended that he should. With a glance towards the student's
wife, our mercantile friend continued: "I did once--once in my young
dreams--intend that whenever I married I would relinquish a profession
for which, after all, I am but little calculated. I pictured to myself a
country retreat, well stored with books; and having concentrated in one
home all the attractions which would have tempted my thoughts abroad, I
had designed to surrender myself solely to those studies which, I lament
to say, were but ill attended to in my earlier education. But--but"
(here Mr. Crauford sighed deeply, and averted his face) "fate willed it
otherwise!"

Whatever reply of sympathetic admiration or condolence Glendower might
have made was interrupted by one of those sudden and overpowering
attacks of faintness which had of late seized the delicate and declining
health of his wife. He rose, and leaned over her with a fondness and
alarm which curled the lip of his visitor.

"Thus it is," said Crauford to himself, "with weak minds, under the
influence of habit. The love of lust becomes the love of custom, and the
last is as strong as the first."

When--she had recovered, she rose, and (with her child) retired to
rest, the only restorative she ever found effectual for her complaint.
Glendower went with her, and, after having seen her eyes, which swam
with tears of gratitude at his love, close in the seeming slumber
she affected in order to release him from his watch, he returned to
Crauford. He found that gentleman leaning against the chimney-piece with
folded arms, and apparently immersed in thought. A very good opportunity
had Glendower's absence afforded to a man whose boast it was never
to lose one. Looking over the papers on the table, he had seen and
possessed himself of the address of the bookseller the student dealt
with. "So much for business, now for philanthropy," said Mr. Crauford,
in his favorite antithetical phrase, throwing himself in his attitude
against the chimney-piece.

As Glendower entered, Crauford started from his revery, and with a
melancholy air and pensive voice said,--

"Alas, my friend, when I look upon this humble apartment, the weak
health of your unequalled wife, your obscurity, your misfortunes; when I
look upon these, and contrast them with your mind, your talents, and all
that you were born and fitted for, I cannot but feel tempted to believe
with those who imagine the pursuit of virtue a chimera, and who justify
their own worldly policy by the example of all their kind."

"Virtue," said Glendower, "would indeed be a chimera, did it require
support from those whom you have cited."

"True,--most true," answered Crauford, somewhat disconcerted in reality,
though not in appearance; "and yet, strange as it may seem, I have known
some of those persons very good, admirably good men. They were extremely
moral and religious: they only played the great game for worldly
advantage upon the same terms as the other players; nay, they never made
a move in it without most fervently and sincerely praying for divine
assistance."

"I readily believe you," said Glendower, who always, if possible,
avoided a controversy: "the easiest person to deceive is one's own
self."

"Admirably said," answered Crauford, who thought it nevertheless one of
the most foolish observations he had ever heard, "admirably said! and
yet my heart does grieve bitterly for the trials and distresses it
surveys. One must make excuses for poor human frailty; and one is often
placed in such circumstances as to render it scarcely possible without
the grace of God" (here Crauford lifted up his eyes) "not to be urged,
as it were, into the reasonings and actions of the world."

Not exactly comprehending this observation, and not very closely
attending to it, Glendower merely bowed, as in assent, and Crauford
continued,--

"I remember a remarkable instance of this truth. One of my partner's
clerks had, through misfortune or imprudence, fallen into the greatest
distress. His wife, his children (he had a numerous family), were on
the literal and absolute verge of starvation. Another clerk, taking
advantage of these circumstances, communicated to the distressed man
a plan for defrauding his employer. The poor fellow yielded to the
temptation, and was at last discovered. I spoke to him myself, for I
was interested in his fate, and had always esteemed him. 'What,' said
I, 'was your motive for this fraud?' 'My duty!' answered the man,
fervently; 'my duty! Was I to suffer my wife, my children, to starve
before my face, when I could save them at a little personal risk? No:
my duty forbade it!' and in truth, Glendower, there was something very
plausible in this manner of putting the question."

"You might, in answering it," said Glendower, "have put the point in a
manner equally plausible and more true: was he to commit a great crime
against the millions connected by social order, for the sake of serving
a single family, and that his own?"

"Quite right," answered Crauford: "that was just the point of view
in which I did put it; but the man, who was something of a reasoner,
replied, 'Public law is instituted for public happiness. Now if mine and
my children's happiness is infinitely and immeasurably more served by
this comparatively petty fraud than my employer's is advanced by my
abstaining from, or injured by my committing it, why, the origin of
law itself allows me to do it.' What say you to that, Glendower? It is
something in your Utilitarian, or, as you term it, Epicurean [See the
article on Mr. Moore's "Epicurean" in the "Westminster Review." Though
the strictures on that work are harsh and unjust, yet the part relating
to the real philosophy of Epicurus is one of the most masterly things in
criticism.] principle; is it not?" and Crauford, shading his eyes, as
if from the light, watched narrowly Glendower's countenance, while he
concealed his own.

"Poor fool!" said Glendower; "the man was ignorant of the first lesson
in his moral primer. Did he not know that no rule is to be applied to
a peculiar instance, but extended to its most general bearings? Is it
necessary even to observe that the particular consequence of fraud
in this man might, it is true, be but the ridding his employer of
superfluities, scarcely missed, for the relief of most urgent want in
two or three individuals; but the general consequences of fraud and
treachery would be the disorganization of all society? Do not think,
therefore, that this man was a disciple of my, or of any, system of
morality."

"It is very just, very," said Mr. Crauford, with a benevolent sigh; "but
you will own that want seldom allows great nicety in moral distinctions,
and that when those whom you love most in the world are starving, you
may be pitied, if not forgiven, for losing sight of the after laws of
Nature and recurring to her first ordinance, self-preservation."

"We should be harsh, indeed," answered Glendower, "if we did not pity;
or, even while the law condemned, if the individual did not forgive."

"So I said, so I said," cried Crauford; "and in interceding for the
poor fellow, whose pardon I am happy to say I procured, I could not help
declaring that, if I were placed in the same circumstances, I am not
sure that my crime would not have been the same."

"No man could feel sure!" said Glendower, dejectedly. Delighted and
surprised with this confession, Crauford continued: "I believe,--I
fear not; thank God, our virtue can never be so tried: but even you,
Glendower, even you, philosopher, moralist as you are,--just, good,
wise, religious,--even you might be tempted, if you saw your angel wife
dying for want of the aid, the very sustenance, necessary to existence,
and your innocent and beautiful daughter stretch her little hands to you
and cry in the accents of famine for bread."

The student made no reply for a few moments, but averted his
countenance, and then in a slow tone said, "Let us drop this subject:
none know their strength till they are tried; self-confidence should
accompany virtue, but not precede it."

A momentary flash broke from the usually calm, cold eye of Richard
Crauford. "He is mine," thought he: "the very name of want abases his
pride: what will the reality do? O human nature, how I know and mock
thee!"

"You are right," said Crauford, aloud; "let us talk of the pamphlet."

And after a short conversation upon indifferent subjects, the visitor
departed. Early the next morning was Mr. Crauford seen on foot, taking
his way to the bookseller whose address he had learnt. The bookseller
was known as a man of a strongly evangelical bias. "We must insinuate a
lie or two," said Crauford, inly, "about Glendower's principles. He! he!
it will be a fine stroke of genius to make the upright tradesman suffer
Glendower to starve out of a principle of religion. But who would have
thought my prey had been so easily snared? why, if I had proposed the
matter last night, I verily think he would have agreed to it."

Amusing himself with these thoughts, Crauford arrived at the
bookseller's. There he found Fate had saved him from one crime at least.
The whole house was in confusion: the bookseller had that morning died
of an apoplectic fit.

"Good God! how shocking!" said Crauford to the foreman; "but he was a
most worthy man, and Providence could no longer spare him. The ways of
Heaven are inscrutable! Oblige me with three copies of that precious
tract termed the 'Divine Call.' I should like to be allowed permission
to attend the funeral of so excellent a man. Good morning, sir. Alas!
alas!" and, shaking his head piteously, Mr. Crauford left the shop.

"Hurra!" said he, almost audibly, when he was once more in the street,
"hurra! my victim is made; my game is won: death or the devil fights for
me. But, hold: there are other booksellers in this monstrous city!--ay,
but not above two or three in our philosopher's way. I must forestall
him there,--so, so,--that is soon settled. Now, then, I must leave him a
little while, undisturbed, to his fate. Perhaps my next visit may be to
him in jail: your debtor's side of the Fleet is almost as good a pleader
as an empty stomach,--he! he! He!--but the stroke must be made soon,
for time presses, and this d--d business spreads so fast that if I don't
have a speedy help, it will be too much for my hands, griping as they
are. However, if it holds on a year longer, I will change my seat in the
Lower House for one in the Upper; twenty thousand pounds to the minister
may make a merchant a very pretty peer. O brave Richard Crauford, wise
Richard Crauford, fortunate Richard Crauford, noble Richard Crauford!
Why, if thou art ever hanged, it will be by a jury of peers. 'Gad, the
rope would then have a dignity in it, instead of disgrace. But stay,
here comes the Dean of ----; not orthodox, it is said,--rigid Calvinist!
out with the 'Divine Call'!"

When Mr. Richard Crauford repaired next to Glendower, what was his
astonishment and dismay at hearing he had left his home, none knew
whither nor could give the inquirer the slightest clew.

"How long has he left?" said Crauford to the landlady.

"Five days, sir."

"And will he not return to settle any little debts he may have
incurred?" said Crauford.

"Oh, no, sir: he paid them all before he went. Poor gentleman,--for
though he was poor, he was the finest and most thorough gentleman I ever
saw!--my heart bled for him. They parted with all their valuables to
discharge their debts: the books and instruments and busts,--all went;
and what I saw, though he spoke so indifferently about it, hurt him the
most,--he sold even the lady's picture. 'Mrs. Croftson,' said he, 'Mr.
----, the painter, will send for that picture the day after I leave
you. See that he has it, and that the greatest care is taken of it in
delivery.'"

"And you cannot even guess where he has gone to?"

"No, sir; a single porter was sufficient to convey his remaining goods,
and he took him from some distant part of the town."

"Ten thousand devils!" muttered Crauford, as he turned away; "I should
have foreseen this! He is lost now. Of course he will again change
his name; and in the d--d holes and corners of this gigantic puzzle of
houses, how shall I ever find him out? and time presses too! Well, well,
well! there is a fine prize for being cleverer, or, as fools would say,
more rascally than others; but there is a world of trouble in winning
it. But come; I will go home, lock myself up, and get drunk! I am as
melancholy as a cat in love, and about as stupid; and, faith, one
must get spirits in order to hit on a new invention. But if there be
consistency in fortune, or success in perseverance, or wit in Richard
Crauford, that man shall yet be my victim--and preserver!"




CHAPTER XLIII.

  Revenge is now the cud
  That I do chew.--I'll challenge him.
              BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

We return to "the world of fashion," as the admirers of the polite novel
of would say. The noon-day sun broke hot and sultry through half-closed
curtains of roseate silk, playing in broken beams upon rare and fragrant
exotics, which cast the perfumes of southern summers over a chamber,
moderate, indeed, as to its dimensions, but decorated with a splendour
rather gaudy than graceful, and indicating much more a passion for
luxury than a refinement of taste.

At a small writing-table sat the beautiful La Meronville. She had just
finished a note, written (how Jean Jacques would have been enchanted)
upon paper couleur de rose, with a mother-of-pearl pen, formed as one of
Cupid's darts, dipped into an ink-stand of the same material, which was
shaped as a quiver, and placed at the back of a little Love, exquisitely
wrought. She was folding this billet when a page, fantastically dressed,
entered, and, announcing Lord Borodaile, was immediately followed by
that nobleman. Eagerly and almost blushingly did La Meronville thrust
the note into her bosom, and hasten to greet and to embrace her adorer.
Lord Borodaile flung himself on one of the sofas with a listless and
discontented air. The experienced Frenchwoman saw that there was a cloud
on his brow.

"My dear friend," said she, in her own tongue, "you seem vexed: has
anything annoyed you?"

"No, Cecile, no. By the by, who supped with you last night?"

"Oh! the Duke of Haverfield, your friend."

"My friend!" interrupted Borodaile, haughtily: "he's no friend of mine;
a vulgar, talkative fellow; my friend, indeed!"

"Well, I beg your pardon: then there was Mademoiselle Caumartin, and the
Prince Pietro del Orbino, and Mr. Trevanion, and Mr. Lin--Lin--Linten,
or Linden."

"And pray, will you allow me to ask how you became acquainted with Mr.
Lin--Lin--Linten, or Linden?"

"Assuredly; through the Duke of Haverfield."

"Humph! Cecile, my love, that young man is not fit to be the
acquaintance of my friend: allow me to strike him from your list."

"Certainly, certainly!" said La Meronville, hastily; and stooping as
if to pick up a fallen glove, though, in reality, to hide her face from
Lord Borodaile's searching eye, the letter she had written fell from her
bosom. Lord Borodaile's glance detected the superscription, and before
La Meronville could regain the note he had possessed himself of it.

"A Monsieur, Monsieur Linden!" said he, coldly, reading the address;
"and, pray, how long have you corresponded with that gentleman?"

Now La Meronville's situation at that moment was by no means agreeable.
She saw at one glance that no falsehood or artifice could avail her; for
Lord Borodaile might deem himself fully justified in reading the note,
which would contradict any glossing statement she might make. She
saw this. She was a woman of independence; cared not a straw for Lord
Borodaile at present, though she had had a caprice for him; knew that
she might choose her bon ami out of all London, and replied,--

"That is the first letter I ever wrote to him; but I own that it will
not be the last."

Lord Borodaile turned pale.

"And will you suffer me to read it?" said he; for even in these cases he
was punctiliously honourable.

La Meronville hesitated. She did not know him. "If I do not consent,"
thought she, "he will do it without the consent: better submit with a
good grace.--Certainly!" she answered, with an air of indifference.

Borodaile opened and read the note; it was as follows:--

You have inspired me with a feeling for you which astonishes myself.
Ah, why should that love be the strongest which is the swiftest in its
growth? I used to love Lord Borodaile: I now only esteem him; the love
has flown to you. If I judge rightly from your words and your eyes, this
avowal will not be unwelcome to you. Come and assure me, in person, of a
persuasion so dear to my heart. C. L. M.

"A very pretty effusion!" said Lord Borodaile, sarcastically, and only
showing his inward rage by the increasing paleness of his complexion and
a slight compression of his lip. "I thank you for your confidence in me.
All I ask is that you will not send this note till to-morrow. Allow me
to take my leave of you first, and to find in Mr. Linden a successor
rather than a rival."

"Your request, my friend," said La Meronville, adjusting her hair, "is
but reasonable. I see that you understand these arrangements; and, for
my part, I think that the end of love should always be the beginning of
friendship: let it be so with us!"

"You do me too much honour," said Borodaile, bowing profoundly.
"Meanwhile I depend upon your promise, and bid you, as a lover, farewell
forever."

With his usual slow step Lord Borodaile descended the stairs, and
walked towards the central quartier of town. His meditations were of no
soothing nature. "To be seen by that man in a ridiculous and degrading
situation; to be pestered with his d--d civility; to be rivalled by him
with Lady Flora; to be duped and outdone by him with my mistress!
Ay, all this have I been; but vengeance shall come yet. As for La
Meronville, the loss is a gain; and, thank Heaven, I did not betray
myself by venting my passion and making a scene. But it was I. who ought
to have discarded her, not the reverse; and--death and confusion--for
that upstart, above all men! And she talked in her letter about his eyes
and words. Insolent coxcomb, to dare to have eyes and words for one
who belonged to me. Well, well, he shall smart for this. But let me
consider: I must not play the jealous fool, must not fight for a ----,
must not show the world that a man, nobody knows who, could really
outwit and outdo me,--me,--Francis Borodaile! No, no: I must throw the
insult upon him, must myself be the aggressor and the challenged; then,
too, I shall have the choice of weapons,--pistols of course. Where shall
I hit him, by the by? I wish I shot as well as I used to do at Naples. I
was in full practice then. Cursed place, where there was nothing else to
do but to practise!"

Immersed in these or somewhat similar reflections did Lord Borodaile
enter Pall Mall.

"Ah, Borodaile!" said Lord St. George, suddenly emerging from a shop.
"This is really fortunate: you are going my way exactly; allow me to
join you."

Now Lord Borodaile, to say nothing of his happening at that time to be
in a mood more than usually unsocial, could never at any time bear the
thought of being made an instrument of convenience, pleasure, or good
fortune to another. He therefore, with a little resentment at Lord St.
George's familiarity, coldly replied, "I am sorry that I cannot avail
myself of your offer. I am sure my way is not the same as yours."

"Then," replied Lord St. George, who was a good-natured, indolent man,
who imagined everybody was as averse to walking alone as he was, "then I
will make mine the same as yours."

Borodaile coloured: though always uncivil, he did not like to be
excelled in good manners; and therefore replied, that nothing but
extreme business at White's could have induced him to prefer his own way
to that of Lord St. George.

The good-natured peer took Lord Borodaile's arm. It was a natural
incident, but it vexed the punctilious viscount that any man should
take, not offer, the support.

"So, they say," observed Lord St. George, "that young Linden is to marry
Lady Flora Ardenne."

"Les on-dits font la gazette des fous," rejoined Borodaile with a
sneer. "I believe that Lady Flora is little likely to contract such a
misalliance."

"Misalliance!" replied Lord St. George. "I thought Linden was of a very
old family; which you know the Westboroughs are not, and he has great
expectations--"

"Which are never to be realized," interrupted Borodaile, laughing
scornfully.

"Ah, indeed!" said Lord St. George, seriously. "Well, at all events he
is a very agreeable, unaffected young man: and, by the by, Borodaile,
you will meet him chez moi to-day; you know you dine with me?"

"Meet Mr. Linden! I shall be proud to have that honour," said Borodaile,
with sparkling eyes; "will Lady Westborough be also of the party?"

"No, poor Lady St. George is very ill, and I have taken the opportunity
to ask only men."

"You have done wisely, my lord," said Borodaile, secum multa revolvens;
"and I assure you I wanted no hint to remind me of your invitation."

Here the Duke of Haverfield joined them. The duke never bowed to any
one of the male sex; he therefore nodded to Borodaile, who, with a very
supercilious formality, took off his hat in returning the salutation.
The viscount had at least this merit in his pride,--that if it was
reserved to the humble, it was contemptuous to the high: his inferiors
he wished to remain where they were; his equals he longed to lower.

"So I dine with you, Lord St. George, to-day," said the duke; "whom
shall I meet?"

"Lord Borodaile, for one," answered St. George; "my brother, Aspeden,
Findlater, Orbino, and Linden."

"Linden!" cried the duke; "I'm very glad to hear it, c'est un homme fait
expres pour moi. He is very clever, and not above playing the fool; has
humour without setting up for a wit, and is a good fellow without being
a bad man. I like him excessively."

"Lord St. George;" said Borodaile, who seemed that day to be the very
martyr of the unconscious Clarence, "I wish you good morning. I have
only just remembered an engagement which I must keep before I go to
White's."

And with a bow to the duke, and a remonstrance from Lord St. George,
Borodaile effected his escape. His complexion was, insensibly to
himself, more raised than usual, his step more stately; his mind, for
the first time for years, was fully excited and engrossed. Ah, what a
delightful thing it is for an idle man, who has been dying of ennui, to
find an enemy!




CHAPTER XLIV.

  You must challenge him
  There's no avoiding; one or both must drop.
                 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

"Ha! ha! ha! bravo, Linden!" cried Lord St. George, from the head of his
splendid board, in approbation of some witticism of Clarence's; and ha!
ha! ha! or he! he! he! according to the cachinnatory intonations of the
guests rang around.

"Your lordship seems unwell," said Lord Aspeden to Borodaile; "allow me
to take wine with you."

Lord Borodaile bowed his assent.

"Pray," said Mr. St. George to Clarence, "have you seen my friend Talbot
lately?"

"This very morning," replied Linden: "indeed, I generally visit him
three or four times a week; he often asks after you."

"Indeed!" said Mr. St. George, rather flattered; "he does me much
honour; but he is a distant connection of mine, and I suppose I must
attribute his recollection of me to that cause. He is a near relation of
yours, too, I think: is he not?"

"I am related to him," answered Clarence, colouring.

Lord Borodaile leaned forward, and his lip curled. Though, in some
respects, a very unamiable man, he had, as we have said, his good
points. He hated a lie as much as Achilles did; and he believed in his
heart of hearts that Clarence had just uttered one.

"Why," observed Lord Aspeden, "why, Lord Borodaile, the Talbots of
Scarsdale are branches of your genealogical tree; therefore your
lordship must be related to Linden; 'you are two cherries on one
stalk'!"

"We are by no means related," said Lord Borodaile, with a distinct and
clear voice, intended expressly for Clarence; "that is an honour which I
must beg leave most positively to disclaim."

There was a dead silence; the eyes of all who heard a remark so
intentionally rude were turned immediately towards Clarence. His cheek
burned like fire; he hesitated a moment, and then said, in the same key,
though with a little trembling in his intonation,--

"Lord Borodaile cannot be more anxious to disclaim it than I am."

"And yet," returned the viscount, stung to the soul, "they who advance
false pretensions ought at least to support them!"

"I do not understand you, my lord," said Clarence.

"Possibly not," answered Borodaile, carelessly: "there is a maxim which
says that people not accustomed to speak truth cannot comprehend it in
others."

Unlike the generality of modern heroes, who are always in a passion,--
off-hand, dashing fellows, in whom irascibility is a virtue,--Clarence
was peculiarly sweet-tempered by nature, and had, by habit, acquired a
command over all his passions to a degree very uncommon in so young a
man. He made no reply to the inexcusable affront he had received. His
lip quivered a little, and the flush of his countenance was succeeded
by an extreme paleness; this was all: he did not even leave the room
immediately, but waited till the silence was broken by some well-bred
member of the party; and then, pleading an early engagement as an excuse
for his retiring so soon, he rose and departed.

There was throughout the room a universal feeling of sympathy with the
affront and indignation against the offender; for, to say nothing of
Clarence's popularity and the extreme dislike in which Lord Borodaile
was held, there could be no doubt as to the wantonness of the outrage or
the moderation of the aggrieved party. Lord Borodaile already felt
the punishment of his offence: his very pride, while it rendered him
indifferent to the spirit, had hitherto kept him scrupulous as to the
formalities of social politeness; and he could not but see the grossness
with which he had suffered himself to violate them and the light in
which his conduct was regarded. However, this internal discomfort only
rendered him the more embittered against Clarence and the more
confirmed in his revenge. Resuming, by a strong effort, all the external
indifference habitual to his manner, he attempted to enter into a
conversation with those of the party who were next to him but his
remarks produced answers brief and cold; even Lord Aspeden forgot his
diplomacy and his smile; Lord St. George replied to his observations by
a monosyllable; and the Duke of Haverfield, for the first time in his
life, asserted the prerogative which his rank gave him of setting the
example,--his grace did not reply to Lord Borodaile at all. In truth,
every one present was seriously displeased. All civilized societies
have a paramount interest in repressing the rude. Nevertheless, Lord
Borodaile bore the brunt of his unpopularity with a steadiness and
unembarrassed composure worthy of a better cause; and finding, at last,
a companion disposed to be loquacious in the person of Sir Christopher
Findlater (whose good heart, though its first impulse resented more
violently than that of any heart present the discourtesy of the
viscount, yet soon warmed to the desagremens of his situation, and
hastened to adopt its favourite maxim of forgive and forget), Lord
Borodaile sat the meeting out; and if he did not leave the latest, he
was at least not the first to follow Clarence: "L'orgueil ou donne le
courage, ou il y supplee." ["Pride either gives courage or supplies the
place of it."]

Meanwhile Linden had returned to his solitary home. He hastened to
his room, locked the door, flung himself on his sofa, and burst into a
violent and almost feminine paroxysm of tears. This fit lasted for
more than an hour; and when Clarence at length stilled the indignant
swellings of his heart, and rose from his supine position, he started,
as his eye fell upon the opposite mirror, so haggard and exhausted
seemed the forced and fearful calmness of his countenance. With a
hurried step; with arms now folded on his bosom, now wildly tossed from
him; and the hand so firmly clenched that the very bones seemed working
through the skin; with a brow now fierce, now only dejected; and a
complexion which one while burnt as with the crimson flush of a fever,
and at another was wan and colourless, like his whose cheek a spectre
has blanched,--Clarence paced his apartment, the victim not only of
shame,--the bitterest of tortures to a young and high mind,--but of
other contending feelings, which alternately exasperated and palsied his
wrath, and gave to his resolves at one moment an almost savage ferocity
and at the next an almost cowardly vacillation.

The clock had just struck the hour of twelve when a knock at the door
announced a visitor. Steps were heard on the stairs and presently a
tap at Clarence's room-door. He unlocked it and the Duke of Haverfield
entered. "I am charmed to find you at home," cried the duke, with his
usual half kind, half careless address. "I was determined to call upon
you, and be the first to offer my services in this unpleasant affair."

Clarence pressed the duke's hand, but made no answer.

"Nothing could be so unhandsome as Lord Borodaile's conduct," continued
the duke. "I hope you both fence and shoot well. I shall never forgive
you, if you do not put an end to that piece of rigidity."

Clarence continued to walk about the room in great agitation; the duke
looked at him with some surprise. At last Linden paused by the window,
and said, half unconsciously, "It must be so: I cannot avoid fighting!"

"Avoid fighting!" cried his grace, in undisguised astonishment. "No,
indeed: but that is the least part of the matter; you must kill as well
as fight him."

"Kill him!" cried Clarence, wildly, "whom?" and then sinking into a
chair, he covered his face with his hands for a few moments, and seemed
to struggle with his emotions.

"Well," thought the duke, "I never was more mistaken in my life. I could
have bet my black horse against Trevanion's Julia, which is certainly
the most worthless thing I know, that Linden had been a brave fellow:
but these English heroes almost go into fits at a duel; one manages such
things, as Sterne says, better in France."

Clarence now rose, calm and collected. He sat down; wrote a brief note
to Borodaile, demanding the fullest apology, or the earliest meeting;
put it into the duke's hands, and said with a faint smile, "My dear
duke, dare I ask you to be a second to a man who has been so grievously
affronted and whose genealogy has been so disputed?"

"My dear Linden," said the duke, warmly, "I have always been grateful
to my station in life for this advantage,--the freedom with which it has
enabled me to select my own acquaintance and to follow my own pursuits.
I am now more grateful to it than ever, because it has given me a better
opportunity than I should otherwise have had of serving one whom I have
always esteemed. In entering into your quarrel I shall at least show
the world that there are some men not inferior in pretensions to Lord
Borodaile who despise arrogance and resent overbearance even to others.
Your cause I consider the common cause of society; but I shall take it
up, if you will allow me, with the distinguishing zeal of a friend."

Clarence, who was much affected by the kindness of this speech, replied
in a similar vein; and the duke, having read and approved the letter,
rose. "There is, in my opinion," said he, "no time to be lost. I will
go to Borodaile this very evening: adieu, mon cher! you shall kill the
Argus, and then carry off the Io. I feel in a double passion with that
ambulating poker, who is only malleable when he is red-hot, when I
think how honourably scrupulous you were with La Meronville last night,
notwithstanding all her advances; but I go to bury Caesar, not to scold
him. Au revoir."




CHAPTER XLV.

     Conon.--You're well met, Crates. Crates.--If we part so,
     Conon.-Queen of Corinth.

It was as might be expected from the character of the aggressor. Lord
Borodaile refused all apology, and agreed with avidity to a speedy
rendezvous. He chose pistols (choice, then, was not merely nominal), and
selected Mr. Percy Bobus for his second, a gentleman who was much
fonder of acting in that capacity than in the more honourable one of
a principal. The author of "Lacon" says "that if all seconds were as
averse to duels as their principals, there would be very little blood
spilt in that way;" and it was certainly astonishing to compare the
zeal with which Mr. Bobus busied himself about this "affair" with
that testified by him on another occasion when he himself was more
immediately concerned.

The morning came. Mr. Bobus breakfasted with his friend. "Damn it,
Borodaile," said he, as the latter was receiving the ultimate polish of
the hairdresser, "I never saw you look better in my life. It will be a
great pity if that fellow shoots you."

"Shoots me!" said Lord Borodaile, very quietly,--"me! no! that is quite
out of the question; but joking apart, Bobus, I will not kill the young
man. Where shall I hit him?"

"In the cap of the knee," said Mr. Percy, breaking an egg.

"Nay, that will lame him for life," said Lord Borodaile, putting on his
cravat with peculiar exactitude.

"Serve him right," said Mr. Bobus. "Hang him, I never got up so early
in my life: it is quite impossible to eat at this hour. Oh!--a propos,
Borodaile, have you left any little memoranda for me to execute?"

"Memoranda!--for what?" said Borodaile, who had now just finished his
toilet.

"Oh!" rejoined Mr. Percy Bobus, "in case of accident, you know: the man
may shoot well, though I never saw him in the gallery."

"Pray," said Lord Borodaile, in a great though suppressed passion,
"pray, Mr. Bobus, how often have I to tell you that it is not by Mr.
Linden that my days are to terminate: you are sure that Carabine saw to
that trigger?"

"Certain," said Mr. Percy, with his mouth full, "certain. Bless me,
here's the carriage, and breakfast not half done yet."

"Come, come," cried Borodaile, impatiently, "we must breakfast
afterwards. Here, Roberts, see that we have fresh chocolate and some
more cutlets when we return."

"I would rather have them now," said Mr. Bobus, foreseeing the
possibility of the return being single: "Ibis! redibis?" etc.

"Come, we have not a moment to lose," exclaimed Borodaile, hastening
down the stairs; and Mr. Percy Bobus followed, with a strange mixture of
various regrets, partly for the breakfast that was lost and partly for
the friend that might be.

When they arrived at the ground, Clarence and the duke were already
there: the latter, who was a dead shot, had fully persuaded himself that
Clarence was equally adroit, and had, in his providence for Borodaile,
brought a surgeon. This was a circumstance of which the viscount, in
the plenitude of his confidence for himself and indifference for his
opponent, had never once dreamed.

The ground was measured; the parties were about to take the ground. All
Linden's former agitation had vanished; his mien was firm, grave, and
determined: but he showed none of the careless and fierce hardihood
which characterized his adversary; on the contrary, a close observer
might have remarked something sad and dejected amidst all the
tranquillity and steadiness of his brow and air.

"For Heaven's sake," whispered the duke, as he withdrew from the spot,
"square your body a little more to your left and remember your exact
level. Borodaile is much shorter than you."

There was a brief, dread pause: the signal was given; Borodaile fired;
his ball pierced Clarence's side; the wounded man staggered one step,
but fell not. He raised his pistol; the duke bent eagerly forward; an
expression of disappointment and surprise passed his lips; Clarence had
fired in the air. The next moment Linden felt a deadly sickness come
over him; he fell into the arms of the surgeon. Borodaile, touched by
a forbearance which he had so little right to expect, hastened to the
spot. He leaned over his adversary in greater remorse and pity than he
would have readily confessed to himself. Clarence unclosed his eyes;
they dwelt for one moment upon the subdued and earnest countenance of
Borodaile.

"Thank God," he said faintly, "that you were not the victim," and with
those words he fell back insensible. They carried him to his lodgings.
His wound was accurately examined. Though not mortal, it was of a
dangerous nature; and the surgeons ended a very painful operation by
promising a very lingering recovery.

What a charming satisfaction for being insulted!




CHAPTER XLVI.

     Je me contente de ce qui peut s'ecrire, et je reve tout ce
     qui peut se rever.--DE SEVIGNE.

["I content myself with writing what I am able, and I dream all I
possibly can dream."]

About a week after his wound, and the second morning of his return to
sense and consciousness, when Clarence opened his eyes, they fell upon
a female form seated watchfully and anxiously by his bedside. He raised
himself in mute surprise, and the figure, startled by the motion, rose,
drew the curtain, and vanished. With great difficulty he rang his bell.
His valet, Harrison, on whose mind, though it was of no very exalted
order, the kindness and suavity of his master had made a great
impression, instantly appeared.

"Who was that lady?" asked Linden. "How came she here?"

Harrison smiled: "Oh, sir, pray please to lie down, and make yourself
easy: the lady knows you very well and would come here; she insists upon
staying in the house, so we made up a bed in the drawing-room and she
has watched by you night and day. She speaks very little English to
be sure, but your honour knows, begging your pardon, how well I speak
French."

"French?" said Clarence, faintly,--"French? In Heaven's name, who is
she?"

"A Madame--Madame--La Melonveal, or some such name, sir," said the
valet.

Clarence fell back. At that moment his hand was pressed. He turned, and
saw Talbot by his side. The kind old man had not suffered La Meronville
to be Linden's only nurse: notwithstanding his age and peculiarity of
habits, he had fixed his abode all the day in Clarence's house, and at
night, instead of returning to his own home, had taken up his lodgings
at the nearest hotel.

With a jealous and anxious eye to the real interest and respectability
of his adopted son, Talbot had exerted all his address, and even all his
power, to induce La Meronville, who had made her settlement previous to
Talbot's, to quit the house, but in vain. With that obstinacy which a
Frenchwoman when she is sentimental mistakes for nobility of heart, the
ci-devant amante of Lord Borodaile insisted upon watching and tending
one of whose sufferings she said and believed she was the unhappy though
innocent cause: and whenever more urgent means of removal were hinted at
La Meronville flew to the chamber of her beloved, apostrophized him in
a strain worthy of one of D'Arlincourt's heroines, and in short was so
unreasonably outrageous that the doctors, trembling for the safety of
their patient, obtained from Talbot a forced and reluctant acquiescence
in the settlement she had obtained.

Ah! what a terrible creature a Frenchwoman is, when, instead of
coquetting with a caprice, she insists upon conceiving a grande passion.
Little, however, did Clarence, despite his vexation when he learned
of the bienveillance of La Meronville, foresee the whole extent of the
consequences it would entail upon him: still less did Talbot, who in his
seclusion knew not the celebrity of the handsome adventuress, calculate
upon the notoriety of her motions or the ill effect her ostentatious
attachment would have upon Clarence's prosperity as a lover to Lady
Flora. In order to explain these consequences the more fully, let us,
for the present, leave our hero to the care of the surgeon, his friends,
and his would-be mistress; and while he is more rapidly recovering than
the doctors either hoped or presaged, let us renew our acquaintance with
a certain fair correspondent.



LETTER FROM THE LADY FLORA ARDENNE TO MISS ELEANOR TREVANION.

My Dearest Eleanor,--I have been very ill, or you would sooner have
received an answer to your kind,-too kind and consoling letter. Indeed
I have only just left my bed: they say that I have been delirious, and I
believe it; for you cannot conceive what terrible dreams I have had. But
these are all over now, and everyone is so kind to me,--my poor mother
above all! It is a pleasant thing to be ill when we have those who love
us to watch our recovery.

I have only been in bed a few days; yet it seems to me as if a long
portion of my existence were past,--as if I had stepped into a new era.
You remember that my last letter attempted to express my feelings at
Mamma's speech about Clarence, and at my seeing him so suddenly. Now,
dearest, I cannot but look on that day, on these sensations, as on a
distant dream. Every one is so kind to me, Mamma caresses and soothes me
so fondly, that I fancy I must have been under some illusion. I am sure
they could not seriously have meant to forbid his addresses. No, no: I
feel that all will yet be well,--so well, that even you, who are of so
contented a temper, will own that if you were not Eleanor you would be
Flora.

I wonder whether Clarence knows that I have been ill? I wish you knew
him. Well, dearest, this letter--a very unhandsome return, I own, for
yours--must content you at present, for they will not let me write more;
though, so far as I am concerned, I am never so weak, in frame I mean,
but what I could scribble to you about him.

Addio, carissima. F. A.

I have prevailed on Mamma, who wished to sit by me and amuse me, to go
to the Opera to-night, the only amusement of which she is particularly
fond. Heaven forgive me for my insincerity, but he always comes into our
box, and I long to hear some news of him.



LETTER II. FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.

Eleanor, dearest Eleanor, I am again very ill, but not as I was before,
ill from a foolish vexation of mind: no, I am now calm and even happy.
It was from an increase of cold only that I have suffered a relapse. You
may believe this, I assure you, in spite of your well meant but bitter
jests upon my infatuation, as you very rightly call it, for Mr. Linden.
You ask me what news from the Opera? Silly girl that I was, to lie awake
hour after hour, and refuse even to take my draught, lest I should be
surprised into sleep, till Mamma returned. I sent Jermyn down directly
I heard her knock at the door (oh, how anxiously I had listened for
it!) to say that I was still awake and longed to see her. So, of course,
Mamma came up, and felt my pulse, and said it was very feverish, and
wondered the draught had not composed me; with a great deal more to the
same purpose, which I bore as patiently as I could, till it was my turn
to talk; and then I admired her dress and her coiffure, and asked if it
was a full house, and whether the prima donna was in voice, etc.: till,
at last, I won my way to the inquiry of who were her visitors. "Lord
Borodaile," said she, "and the Duke of ----, and Mr. St. George,
and Captain Leslie, and Mr. De Retz, and many others." I felt so
disappointed, Eleanor, but did not dare ask whether he was not of the
list; till, at last, my mother observing me narrowly, said, "And by the
by, Mr. Linden looked in for a few minutes. I am glad, my dearest Flora,
that I spoke to you so decidedly about him the other day." "Why, Mamma?"
said I, hiding my face under the clothes. "Because," said she, in rather
a raised voice, "he is quite unworthy of you! but it is late now, and
you should go to sleep; to-morrow I will tell you more." I would have
given worlds to press the question then, but could not venture. Mamma
kissed and left me. I tried to twist her words into a hundred meanings,
but in each I only thought that they were dictated by some worldly
information,--some new doubts as to his birth or fortune; and, though
that supposition distressed me greatly, yet it could not alter my love
or deprive me of hope; and so I cried and guessed, and guessed and
cried, till at last I cried myself to sleep.

When I awoke, Mamma was already up, and sitting beside me: she talked
to me for more than an hour upon ordinary subjects, till at last,
perceiving how absent or rather impatient I appeared, she dismissed
Jermyn, and spoke to me thus:--

"You know, Flora, that I have always loved you, more perhaps than I
ought to have done, more certainly than I have loved your brothers
and sisters; but you were my eldest child, my first-born, and all the
earliest associations of a mother are blent and entwined with you. You
may be sure therefore that I have ever had only your happiness in view,
and that it is only with a regard to that end that I now speak to you."

I was a little frightened, Eleanor, by this opening, but I was much more
touched, so I took Mamma's hand and kissed and wept silently over it;
she continued: "I observed Mr. Linden's attention to you, at ----; I
knew nothing more of his rank and birth then than I do at present:
but his situation in the embassy and his personal appearance naturally
induced me to suppose him a gentleman of family, and, therefore, if
not a great at least not an inferior match for you, so far as worldly
distinctions are concerned. Added to this, he was uncommonly handsome,
and had that general reputation for talent which is often better than
actual wealth or hereditary titles. I therefore did not check, though I
would not encourage any attachment you might form for him; and nothing
being declared or decisive on either side when we left--, I imagined
that if your flirtation with him did even amount to a momentary and
girlish phantasy, absence and change of scene would easily and rapidly
efface the impression. I believe that in a great measure it was effaced
when Lord Aspeden returned to England, and with him Mr. Linden. You
again met the latter in society almost as constantly as before; a
caprice nearly conquered was once more renewed; and in my anxiety that
you should marry, not for aggrandizement, but happiness, I own to my
sorrow that I rather favoured than forbade his addresses. The young
man--remember, Flora--appeared in society as the nephew and heir of a
gentleman of ancient family and considerable property; he was rising
in diplomacy, popular in the world, and, so far as we could see, of
irreproachable character; this must plead my excuse for tolerating
his visits, without instituting further inquiries respecting him, and
allowing your attachment to proceed without ascertaining how far it had
yet extended. I was awakened to a sense of my indiscretion by an inquiry
which Mr. Linden's popularity rendered general; namely, if Mr. Talbot
was his uncle, who was his father? who his more immediate relations? and
at that time Lord Borodaile informed us of the falsehood he had either
asserted or allowed to be spread in claiming Mr. Talbot as his relation.
This you will observe entirely altered the situation of Mr. Linden
with respect to you. Not only his rank in life became uncertain, but
suspicious. Nor was this all: his very personal respectability was no
longer unimpeachable. Was this dubious and intrusive person, without a
name and with a sullied honour, to be your suitor? No, Flora; and it
was from this indignant conviction that I spoke to you some days since.
Forgive me, my child, if I was less cautious, less confidential than
I am now. I did not imagine the wound was so deep, and thought that I
should best cure you by seeming unconscious of your danger. The case is
now changed; your illness has convinced me of my fault, and the extent
of your unhappy attachment: but will my own dear child pardon me if I
still continue, if I even confirm, my disapproval of her choice? Last
night at the Opera Mr. Linden entered my box. I own that I was cooler to
him than usual. He soon left us, and after the Opera I saw him with
the Duke of Haverfield, one of the most incorrigible roues of the
day, leading out a woman of notoriously bad character and of the most
ostentatious profligacy. He might have had some propriety, some decency,
some concealment at least, but he passed just before me,--before the
mother of the woman to whom his vows of honourable attachment were due
and who at that very instant was suffering from her infatuation for him.
Now, Flora, for this man, an obscure and possibly a plebeian adventurer,
whose only claim to notice has been founded on falsehood, whose only
merit, a love of you, has been, if not utterly destroyed, at least
polluted and debased,--for this man, poor alike in fortune, character,
and honour, can you any longer profess affection or esteem?"

"Never, never, never!" cried I, springing from the bed, and throwing
myself upon my mother's neck. "Never: I am your own Flora once more.
I will never suffer any one again to make me forget you," and then I
sobbed so violently that Mamma was frightened, and bade me lie down and
left me to sleep. Several hours have passed since then, and I could not
sleep nor think, and I would not cry, for he is no longer worthy of my
tears; so I have written to you.

Oh, how I despise and hate myself for having so utterly, in my vanity
and folly, forgotten my mother, that dear, kind, constant friend, who
never cost me a single tear, but for my own ingratitude! Think, Eleanor,
what an affront to me,--to me, who, he so often said, had made all other
women worthless in his eyes. Do I hate him? No, I cannot hate. Do I
despise? No, I will not despise, but I will forget him, and keep my
contempt and hatred for myself.

God bless you! I am worn out. Write soon, or rather come, if possible,
to your affectionate but unworthy friend, F. A.

Good Heavens! Eleanor, he is wounded. He has fought with Lord
Borodaile. I have just heard it; Jermyn told me. Can it, can it be true?
What,--what have I said against him? Hate? forget? No, no: I never loved
him till now.



LETTER III. FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.

(After an interval of several weeks.)

Time has flown, my Eleanor, since you left me, after your short but kind
visit, with a heavy but healing wing. I do not think I shall ever again
be the giddy girl I have been; but my head will change, not my heart;
that was never giddy, and that shall still be as much yours as ever.
You are wrong in thinking I have not forgotten, at least renounced all
affection for Mr. Linden. I have, though with a long and bitter effort.
The woman for whom he fought went, you know, to his house, immediately
on hearing of his wound. She has continued with him ever since. He had
the audacity to write to me once; my mother brought me the note, and
said nothing. She read my heart aright. I returned it unopened. He has
even called since his convalescence. Mamma was not at home to him. I
hear that he looks pale and altered. I hope not,--at least I cannot
resist praying for his recovery. I stay within entirely; the season
is over now, and there are no parties: but I tremble at the thought of
meeting him even in the Park or the Gardens. Papa talks of going into
the country next week. I cannot tell you how eagerly I look forward to
it: and you will then come and see me; will you not, dearest Eleanor?

Ah! what happy days we will have yet: we will read Italian together, as
we used to do; you shall teach me your songs, and I will instruct you
in mine; we will keep birds as we did, let me see, eight years ago. You
will never talk to me of my folly: let that be as if it had never been;
but I will wonder with you about your future choice, and grow happy in
anticipating your happiness. Oh, how selfish I was some weeks ago! then
I could only overwhelm you with my egotisms: now, Eleanor, it is your
turn; and you shall see how patiently I will listen to yours. Never fear
that you can be too prolix: the diffuser you are, the easier I shall
forgive myself.

Are you fond of poetry, Eleanor? I used to say so, but I never felt that
I was till lately. I will show you my favourite passages in my favourite
poets when you come to see me. You shall see if yours correspond with
mine. I am so impatient to leave this horrid town, where everything
seems dull, yet feverish,--insipid, yet false. Shall we not be happy
when we meet? If your dear aunt will come with you, she shall see how I
(that is my mind) am improved.

Farewell.     Ever your most affectionate,
                             F. A.




CHAPTER XLVII.

     Brave Talbot, we will follow thee.--Henry the Sixth.

"My letter insultingly returned--myself refused admittance; not a
single inquiry made during my illness; indifference joined to positive
contempt. By Heaven, it is insupportable!"

"My dear Clarence," said Talbot to his young friend, who, fretful from
pain and writhing beneath his mortification, walked to and fro his
chamber with an impatient stride; "my dear Clarence, do sit down, and
not irritate your wound by such violent exercise. I am as much enraged
as yourself at the treatment you have received, and no less at a loss to
account for it. Your duel, however unfortunate the event, must have
done you credit, and obtained you a reputation both for generosity
and spirit; so that it cannot be to that occurrence that you are to
attribute the change. Let us rather suppose that Lady Flora's attachment
to you has become evident to her father and mother; that they naturally
think it would be very undesirable to marry their daughter to a man
whose family nobody knows, and whose respectability he is forced
into fighting in order to support. Suffer me then to call upon Lady
Westborough, whom I knew many years ago, and explain your origin, as
well as your relationship to me."

Linden paused irresolutely.

"Were I sure that Lady Flora was not utterly influenced by her mother's
worldly views, I would gladly consent to your proposal, but--"

"Forgive me, Clarence," cried Talbot; "but you really argue much more
like a very young man than I ever heard you do before,--even four years
ago. To be sure Lady Flora is influenced by her mother's views.
Would you have her otherwise? Would you have her, in defiance of all
propriety, modesty, obedience to her parents, and right feeling for
herself, encourage an attachment to a person not only unknown, but who
does not even condescend to throw off the incognito to the woman he
addresses? Come, Clarence, give me your instructions, and let me act as
your ambassador to-morrow."

Clarence was silent.

"I may consider it settled then," replied Talbot: "meanwhile you shall
come home and stay with me; the pure air of the country, even so
near town, will do you more good than all the doctors in London; and,
besides, you will thus be enabled to escape from that persecuting
Frenchwoman."

"In what manner?" said Clarence.

"Why, when you are in my house, she cannot well take up her abode with
you; and you shall, while I am forwarding your suit with Lady Flora,
write a very flattering, very grateful letter of excuses to Madame la
Meronville. But leave me alone to draw it up for you: meanwhile, let
Harrison pack up your clothes and medicines; and we will effect our
escape while Madame la Meronville yet sleeps."

Clarence rang the bell; the orders were given, executed, and in less
than an hour he and his friends were on their road to Talbot's villa.

As they drove slowly through the grounds to the house, Clarence was
sensibly struck with the quiet and stillness which breathed around. On
either side of the road the honeysuckle and rose cast their sweet scents
to the summer wind, which, though it was scarcely noon, stirred freshly
among the trees, and waved as if it breathed a second youth over the wan
cheek of the convalescent. The old servant's ear had caught the sound of
wheels, and he came to the door, with an expression of quiet delight on
his dry countenance, to welcome in his master. They had lived together
for so many years that they were grown like one another. Indeed, the
veteran valet prided himself on his happy adoption of his master's dress
and manner. A proud man, we ween, was that domestic, whenever he had
time and listeners for the indulgence of his honest loquacity; many an
ancient tale of his master's former glories was then poured from his
unburdening remembrance. With what a glow, with what a racy enjoyment,
did he expand upon the triumphs of the past; how eloquently did he
particularize the exact grace with which young Mr. Talbot was wont to
enter the room, in which he instantly became the cynosure of ladies'
eyes; how faithfully did he minute the courtly dress, the exquisite
choice of colour, the costly splendour of material, which were the envy
of gentles, and the despairing wonder of their valets; and then the zest
with which the good old man would cry, "I dressed the boy!" Even still,
this modern Scipio (Le Sage's Scipio, not Rome's) would not believe that
his master's sun was utterly set: he was only in a temporary retirement,
and would, one day or other, reappear and reastonish the London world.
"I would give my right arm," Jasper was wont to say, "to see Master at
court. How fond the King would be of him! Ah! well, well; I wish he
was not so melancholy-like with his books, but would go out like other
people!"

Poor Jasper! Time is, in general, a harsh wizard in his transformations;
but the change which thou didst lament so bitterly was happier for thy
master than all his former "palmy state" of admiration and homage. "Nous
avons recherche le plaisir," says Rousseau, in one of his own inimitable
antitheses, "et le bonheur a fui loin de nous." ["We have pursued
pleasure, and happiness has fled far from our reach."] But in the
pursuit of Pleasure we sometimes chance on Wisdom, and Wisdom leads us
to the right track, which, if it take us not so far as Happiness, is
sure at least of the shelter of Content.

Talbot leaned kindly upon Jasper's arm as he descended from the
carriage, and inquired into his servant's rheumatism with the anxiety
of a friend. The old housekeeper, waiting in the hall, next received his
attention; and in entering the drawing-room, with that consideration,
even to animals, which his worldly benevolence had taught him, he paused
to notice and caress a large gray cat which rubbed herself against his
legs. Doubtless there is some pleasure in making even a gray cat happy!

Clarence having patiently undergone all the shrugs, and sighs, and
exclamations of compassion at his reduced and wan appearance, which are
the especial prerogatives of ancient domestics, followed the old man
into the room. Papers and books, though carefully dusted, were left
scrupulously in the places in which Talbot had last deposited them
(incomparable good fortune! what would we not give for such chamber
handmaidens!); fresh flowers were in all the stands and vases; the large
library chair was jealously set in its accustomed place, and all
wore, to Talbot's eyes, that cheerful yet sober look of welcome and
familiarity which makes a friend of our house. The old man was in high
spirits.

"I know not how it is," said he, "but I feel younger than ever! You
have often expressed a wish to see my family seat at Scarsdale: it
is certainly a great distance hence; but as you will be my travelling
companion, I think I will try and crawl there before the summer is over;
or, what say you, Clarence, shall I lend it to you and Lady Flora for
the honeymoon? You blush! A diplomatist blush! Ah, how the world has
changed since my time! But come, Clarence, suppose you write to La
Meronville?"

"Not to-day, sir, if you please," said Linden: "I feel so very weak."

"As you please, Clarence; but some years hence you will learn the value
of the present. Youth is always a procrastinator, and, consequently,
always a penitent." And thus Talbot ran on into a strain of
conversation, half serious, half gay, which lasted till Clarence went
upstairs to lie down and muse on Lady Flora Ardenne.




CHAPTER XLVIII.

     La vie eat un sommeil. Les vieillards sont ceux donc le
     sommeil a ete plus long: ils ne commencent a se reveiller
     que quand il faut mourir. --LA BRUYERE.

     ["Life is a sleep. The aged are those whose sleep has been
     the longest they begin to awaken themselves just as they are
     obliged to die."]

"You wonder why I have never turned author, with my constant love
of literature and my former desire of fame," said Talbot, as he and
Clarence sat alone after dinner, discussing many things: "the fact is,
that I have often intended it, and as often been frightened from
my design. Those terrible feuds; those vehement disputes; those
recriminations of abuse, so inseparable from literary life,--appear to
me too dreadful for a man not utterly hardened or malevolent voluntarily
to encounter. Good Heavens! what acerbity sours the blood of an author!
The manifestoes of opposing generals, advancing to pillage, to burn, to
destroy, contain not a tithe of the ferocity which animates the pages
of literary controversialists! No term of reproach is too severe, no
vituperation too excessive! the blackest passions, the bitterest, the
meanest malice, pour caustic and poison upon every page! It seems as if
the greatest talents, the most elaborate knowledge, only sprang from
the weakest and worst-regulated mind, as exotics from dung. The private
records, the public works of men of letters, teem with an immitigable
fury! Their histories might all be reduced into these sentences: they
were born; they quarrelled; they died!"

"But," said Clarence, "it would matter little to the world if
these quarrels were confined merely to poets and men of imaginative
literature, in whom irritability is perhaps almost necessarily allied to
the keen and quick susceptibilities which constitute their genius. These
are more to be lamented and wondered at among philosophers, theologians,
and men of science; the coolness, the patience, the benevolence, which
ought to characterize their works, should at least moderate their
jealousy and soften their disputes."

"Ah!" said Talbot, "but the vanity of discovery is no less acute than
that of creation: the self-love of a philosopher is no less self-love
than that of a poet. Besides, those sects the most sure of their
opinions, whether in religion or science, are always the most bigoted
and persecuting. Moreover, nearly all men deceive themselves in
disputes, and imagine that they are intolerant, not through private
jealousy, but public benevolence: they never declaim against the
injustice done to themselves; no, it is the terrible injury done
to society which grieves and inflames them. It is not the bitter
expressions against their dogmas which give them pain; by no means:
it is the atrocious doctrines (so prejudicial to the country, if in
polities; so pernicious to the world, if in philosophy), which their
duty, not their vanity, induces them to denounce and anathematize."

"There seems," said Clarence, "to be a sort of reaction in sophistry and
hypocrisy: there has, perhaps, never been a deceiver who was not, by his
own passions, himself the deceived."

"Very true," said Talbot; "and it is a pity that historians have not
kept that fact in view: we should then have had a better notion of the
Cromwells and Mohammeds of the past than we have now, nor judged those
as utter impostors who were probably half dupes. But to return to
myself. I think you will already be able to answer your own question,
why I did not turn author, now that we have given a momentary
consideration to the penalties consequent on such a profession. But in
truth, as I near the close of my life, I often regret that I had not
more courage, for there is in us all a certain restlessness in the
persuasion, whether true or false, of superior knowledge or intellect,
and this urges us on to the proof; or, if we resist its impulse; renders
us discontented with our idleness and disappointed with the past. I have
everything now in my possession which it has been the desire of my later
years to enjoy: health, retirement, successful study, and the affection
of one in whose breast, when I am gone, my memory will not utterly
pass away. With these advantages, added to the gifts of fortune, and an
habitual elasticity of spirit, I confess that my happiness is not free
from a biting and frequent regret: I would fain have been a better
citizen; I would fain have died in the consciousness not only that I had
improved my mind to the utmost, but that I had turned that improvement
to the benefit of my fellow-creatures. As it is, in living wholly
for myself, I feel that my philosophy has wanted generosity; and my
indifference to glory has proceeded from a weakness, not, as I once
persuaded myself, from a virtue but the fruitlessness of my existence
has been the consequence of the arduous frivolities and the petty
objects in which my early years were consumed; and my mind, in losing
the enjoyments which it formerly possessed, had no longer the vigour to
create for itself a new soil, from which labour it could only hope
for more valuable fruits. It is no contradiction to see those who
most eagerly courted society in their youth shrink from it the most
sensitively in their age; for they who possess certain advantages,
and are morbidly vain of them, will naturally be disposed to seek that
sphere for which those advantages are best calculated: and when youth
and its concomitants depart, the vanity so long fed still remains, and
perpetually mortifies them by recalling not so much the qualities
they have lost, as the esteem which those qualities conferred; and by
contrasting not so much their own present alteration, as the change
they experience in the respect and consideration of others. What wonder,
then, that they eagerly fly from the world, which has only mortification
for their self-love, or that we find, in biography, how often the most
assiduous votaries of pleasure have become the most rigid of recluses?
For my part, I think that that love of solitude which the ancients so
eminently possessed, and which, to this day, is considered by some as
the sign of a great mind, nearly always arises from a tenderness of
vanity, easily wounded in the commerce of the rough world; and that
it is under the shadow of Disappointment that we must look for the
hermitage. Diderot did well, even at the risk of offending Rousseau,
to write against solitude. The more a moralist binds man to man, and
forbids us to divorce our interests from our kind, the more effectually
is the end of morality obtained. They only are justifiable in seclusion
who, like the Greek philosophers, make that very seclusion the means of
serving and enlightening their race; who from their retreats send forth
their oracles of wisdom, and render the desert which surrounds them
eloquent with the voice of truth. But remember, Clarence (and let my
life, useless in itself, have at least this moral), that for him who
in no wise cultivates his talent for the benefit of others; who is
contented with being a good hermit at the expense of being a bad
citizen; who looks from his retreat upon a life wasted in the difficiles
nugae of the most frivolous part of the world, nor redeems in the closet
the time he has misspent in the saloon,--remember that for him seclusion
loses its dignity, philosophy its comfort, benevolence its hope, and
even religion its balm. Knowledge unemployed may preserve us from vice;
but knowledge beneficently employed is virtue. Perfect happiness, in our
present state, is impossible; for Hobbes says justly that our nature is
inseparable from desires, and that the very word desire (the craving
for something not possessed) implies that our present felicity is not
complete. But there is one way of attaining what we may term, if not
utter, at least mortal, happiness; it is this,--a sincere and unrelaxing
activity for the happiness of others. In that one maxim is concentrated
whatever is noble in morality, sublime in religion, or unanswerable in
truth. In that pursuit we have all scope for whatever is excellent in
our hearts, and none for the petty passions which our nature is heir
to. Thus engaged, whatever be our errors, there will be nobility, not
weakness, in our remorse; whatever our failure, virtue, not selfishness,
in our regret; and, in success, vanity itself will become holy and
triumph eternal. As astrologers were wont to receive upon metals 'the
benign aspect of the stars, so as to detain and fix, as it were, the
felicity of that hour which would otherwise be volatile and fugitive,'
[Bacon] even so will that success leave imprinted upon our memory a
blessing which cannot pass away; preserve forever upon our names, as on
a signet, the hallowed influence of the hour in which our great end was
effected, and treasure up 'the relics of heaven' in the sanctuary of a
human fane."

As the old man ceased, there was a faint and hectic flush over his face,
an enthusiasm on his features, which age made almost holy, and which
Clarence had never observed there before. In truth, his young listener
was deeply affected, and the advice of his adopted parent was afterwards
impressed with a more awful solemnity upon his remembrance. Already he
had acquired much worldly lore from Talbot's precepts and conversation.
He had obtained even something better than worldly lore,--a kindly and
indulgent disposition to his fellow-creatures; for he had seen that
foibles were not inconsistent with generous and great qualities, and
that we judge wrongly of human nature when we ridicule its littleness.
The very circumstances which make the shallow misanthropical incline the
wise to be benevolent. Fools discover that frailty is not incompatible
with great men; they wonder and despise: but the discerning find that
greatness is not incompatible with frailty; and they admire and indulge.

But a still greater benefit than this of toleration did Clarence derive
from the commune of that night. He became strengthened in his honourable
ambition and nerved to unrelaxing exertion. The recollection of Talbot's
last words, on that night, occurred to him often and often, when sick at
heart and languid with baffled hope, it roused him from that gloom and
despondency which are always unfavourable to virtue, and incited him
once more to that labour in the vineyard which, whether our hour be late
or early, will if earnest obtain a blessing and reward.

The hour was now waxing late; and Talbot, mindful of his companion's
health, rose to retire. As he pressed Clarence's hand and bade him
farewell for the night, Linden thought there was something more than
usually impressive in his manner and affectionate in his words. Perhaps
this was the natural result of their conversation.

The next morning, Clarence was awakened by a noise. He listened, and
heard distinctly an alarmed cry proceeding from the room in which Talbot
slept, and which was opposite to his own. He rose hastily and hurried
to the chamber. The door was open; the old servant was bending over the
bed: Clarence approached, and saw that he supported his master in his
arms.

"Good God!" he cried, "what is the matter?" The faithful old man lifted
up his face to Clarence, and the big tears rolled fast from eyes in
which the sources of such emotion were well-nigh dried up.

"He loved you well, sir!" he said, and could say no more. He dropped
the body gently, and throwing himself on the floor sobbed aloud. With
a foreboding and chilled heart, Clarence bent forward; the face of his
benefactor lay directly before him, and the hand of death was upon
it. The soul had passed to its account hours since, in the hush of
night,--passed, apparently, without a struggle or a pang, like the wind,
which animates the harp one moment, and the next is gone.

Linden seized his hand; it was heavy and cold: his eye rested upon the
miniature of the unfortunate Lady Merton, which, since the night of the
attempted robbery, Talbot had worn constantly round his neck. Strange
and powerful was the contrast of the pictured face--in whic