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