Lord L’Estrange threw himself on a sofa, and leaned his cheek on his hand thoughtfully. Audley Egerton sat near him, with his arms folded, and gazed on his friend’s face with a soft expression of aspect, which was very unusual to the firm outline of his handsome features. The two men were as dissimilar in person as the reader will have divined that they were in character. All about Egerton was so rigid, all about L’Estrange so easy. In every posture of Harley’s there was the unconscious grace of a child. The very fashion of his garments showed his abhorrence of restraint. His clothes were wide and loose; his neckcloth, tied carelessly, left his throat half bare. You could see that he had lived much in warm and southern lands, and contracted a contempt for conventionalities; there was as little in his dress as in his talk of the formal precision of the North. He was three or four years younger than Audley, but he looked at least twelve years younger. In fact, he was one of those men to whom old age seems impossible; voice, look, figure, had all the charm of youth: and perhaps it was from this gracious youthfulness—at all events, it was characteristic of the kind of love he inspired—that neither his parents, nor the few friends admitted into his intimacy, ever called him, in their habitual intercourse, by the name of his title. He was not L’Estrange with them, he was Harley; and by that familiar baptismal I will usually designate him. He was not one of those men whom author or reader wish to view at a distance, and remember as “my Lord”—it was so rarely that he remembered it himself. For the rest, it had been said of him by a shrewd wit, “He is so natural that every one calls him affected.” Harley L’Estrange was not so critically handsome as Audley Egerton; to a commonplace observer, he was only rather good-looking than otherwise. But women said that he had “a beautiful countenance,” and they were not wrong. He wore his hair, which was of a fair chestnut, long, and in loose curls; and instead of the Englishman’s whiskers, indulged in the foreigner’s mustache. His complexion was delicate, though not effeminate: it was rather the delicacy of a student than of a woman. But in his clear gray eye there was a wonderful vigour of life. A skilful physiologist, looking only into that eye, would have recognized rare stamina of constitution,—a nature so rich that, while easily disturbed, it would require all the effects of time, or all the fell combinations of passion and grief, to exhaust it. Even now, though so thoughtful, and even so sad, the rays of that eye were as concentrated and steadfast as the light of the diamond.
“You were only, then, in jest,” said Audley, after a long silence, “when you spoke of this mission to Florence. You have still no idea of entering into public life?”
“None.”
“I had hoped better things when I got your promise to pass one season in London; but, indeed, you have kept your promise to the ear to break it to the spirit. I could not presuppose that you would shun all society, and be as much of a hermit here as under the vines of Como.”
“I have sat in the Strangers’ Gallery, and heard your great speakers; I have been in the pit of the opera, and seen your fine ladies; I have walked your streets; I have lounged in your parks, and I say that I can’t fall in love with a faded dowager, because she fills up her wrinkles with rouge.”
“Of what dowager do you speak?” asked the matter-of-fact Audley.
“She has a great many titles. Some people call her Fashion, you busy men, Politics: it is all one,—tricked out and artificial. I mean London Life. No, I can’t fall in love with her, fawning old harridan!”
“I wish you could fall in love with something.”
“I wish I could, with all my heart.”
“But you are so blaze.”
“On the contrary, I am so fresh. Look out of the window—what do you see?”
“Nothing!”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing but houses and dusty lilacs, my coachman dozing on his box, and two women in pattens crossing the kennel.”
“I see not those where I lie on the sofa. I see but the stars. And I feel for them as I did when I was a schoolboy at Eton. It is you who are blaze, not I. Enough of this. You do not forget my commission with respect to the exile who has married into your brother’s family?”
“No; but here you set me a task more difficult than that of saddling your cornet on the War Office.”
“I know it is difficult, for the counter influence is vigilant and strong; but, on the other hand, the enemy is so damnable a traitor that one must have the Fates and the household gods on one’s side.”
“Nevertheless,” said the practical Audley, bending over a book on the table; “I think that the best plan would be to attempt a compromise with the traitor.”
“To judge of others by myself,” answered Harley, with spirit, “it were less bitter to put up with wrong than to palter with it for compensation. And such wrong! Compromise with the open foe—that maybe done with honour; but with the perjured friend—that were to forgive the perjury!”
“You are too vindictive,” said Egerton; “there may be excuses for the friend, which palliate even—”
“Hush! Audley, hush! or I shall think the world has indeed corrupted you. Excuse for the friend who deceives, who betrays! No, such is the true outlaw of Humanity; and the Furies surround him even while he sleeps in the temple.”
The man of the world lifted his eyes slowly on the animated face of one still natural enough for the passions. He then once more returned to his book, and said, after a pause, “It is time you should marry, Harley.”
“No,” answered L’Estrange, with a smile at this sudden turn in the conversation, “not time yet; for my chief objection to that change in life is, that the women nowadays are too old for me, or I am too young for them. A few, indeed, are so infantine that one is ashamed to be their toy; but most are so knowing that one is afraid to be their dupe. The first, if they condescend to love you, love you as the biggest doll they have yet dandled, and for a doll’s good qualities,—your pretty blue eyes and your exquisite millinery. The last, if they prudently accept you, do so on algebraical principles; you are but the X or the Y that represents a certain aggregate of goods matrimonial,—pedigree, title, rent-roll, diamonds, pin-money, opera-box. They cast you up with the help of mamma, and you wake some morning to find that plus wife minus affection equals—the Devil!”
“Nonsense,” said Audley, with his quiet, grave laugh. “I grant that it is often the misfortune of a man in your station to be married rather for what he has than for what he is; but you are tolerably penetrating, and not likely to be deceived in the character of the woman you court.”
“Of the woman I court?—No! But of the woman I marry, very likely indeed! Woman is a changeable thing, as our Virgil informed us at school; but her change par excellence is from the fairy you woo to the brownie you wed. It is not that she has been a hypocrite,—it is that she is a transmigration. You marry a girl for her accomplishments. She paints charmingly, or plays like Saint Cecilia. Clap a ring on her finger, and she never draws again,—except perhaps your caricature on the back of a letter,—and never opens a piano after the honeymoon. You marry her for her sweet temper; and next year, her nerves are so shattered that you can’t contradict her but you are whirled into a storm of hysterics. You marry her because she declares she hates balls and likes quiet; and ten to one but what she becomes a patroness at Almack’s, or a lady-in-waiting.”
“Yet most men marry, and most men survive the operation.”
“If it were only necessary to live, that would be a consolatory and encouraging reflection. But to live with peace, to live with dignity, to live with freedom, to live in harmony with your thoughts, your habits, your aspirations—and this in the perpetual companionship of a person to whom you have given the power to wound your peace, to assail your dignity, to cripple your freedom, to jar on each thought and each habit, and bring you down to the meanest details of earth, when you invite her, poor soul, to soar to the spheres—that makes the To Be or Not To Be, which is the question.”
“If I were you, Harley, I would do as I have heard the author of ‘Sandford and Merton’ did,—choose out a child and educate her yourself, after your own heart.”
“You have hit it,” answered Harley, seriously. “That has long been my idea,—a very vague one, I confess. But I fear I shall be an old man before I find even the child.”
“Ah!” he continued, yet more earnestly, while the whole character of his varying countenance changed again,—“ah, if indeed I could discover what I seek,—one who, with the heart of a child, has the mind of a woman; one who beholds in nature the variety, the charm, the never feverish, ever healthful excitement that others vainly seek in the bastard sentimentalities of a life false with artificial forms; one who can comprehend, as by intuition, the rich poetry with which creation is clothed,—poetry so clear to the child when enraptured with the flower, or when wondering at the star! If on me such exquisite companionship were bestowed—why, then—” He paused, sighed deeply, and, covering his face with his hand, resumed, in faltering accents,—
“But once—but once only, did such vision of the Beautiful made Human rise before me,—rise amidst ‘golden exhalations of the dawn.’ It beggared my life in vanishing. You know only—you only—how—how—”
He bowed his head, and the tears forced themselves through his clenched fingers.
“So long ago!” said Audley, sharing his friend’s emotion. “Years so long and so weary, yet still thus tenacious of a mere boyish memory!”
“Away with it, then!” cried Harley, springing to his feet, and with a laugh of strange merriment. “Your carriage still waits: set me home before you go to the House.”
Then laying his hand lightly on his friend’s shoulder, he said, “Is it for you, Audley Egerton, to speak sneeringly of boyish memories? What else is it that binds us together? What else warms my heart when I meet you? What else draws your thoughts from blue-books and beer-bills to waste them on a vagrant like me? Shake hands. Oh, friend of my boyhood! recollect the oars that we plied and the bats that we wielded in the old time, or the murmured talk on the moss-grown bank, as we sat together, building in the summer air castles mightier than Windsor. Ah, they are strong ties, those boyish memories believe me! I remember, as if it were yesterday, my translation of that lovely passage in Persius, beginning—let me see—ah!
“‘Quum primum pavido custos mihi purpura cernet,’—
that passage on friendship which gushes out so livingly from the stern heart of the satirist. And when old—complimented me on my verses, my eye sought yours. Verily, I now say as then,—
“‘Nescio quod, certe est quod me tibi temperet astrum.’”
[“What was the star I know not, but certainly some star
it was that attuned me unto thee.”]
Audley turned away his head as he returned the grasp of his friend’s hand; and while Harley, with his light elastic footstep, descended the stairs, Egerton lingered behind, and there was no trace of the worldly man upon his countenance when he took his place in the carriage by his companion’s side.
Two hours afterwards, weary cries of “Question, question!” “Divide, divide!” sank into reluctant silence as Audley Egerton rose to conclude the debate,—the man of men to speak late at night, and to impatient benches: a man who would be heard; whom a Bedlam broke loose would not have roared down; with a voice clear and sound as a bell, and a form as firmly set on the ground as a church-tower. And while, on the dullest of dull questions, Audley Egerton thus, not too lively himself, enforced attention, where was Harley L’Estrange? Standing alone by the river at Richmond, and murmuring low fantastic thoughts as he gazed on the moonlit tide.
When Audley left him at home he had joined his parents, made them gay with his careless gayety, seen the old-fashioned folks retire to rest, and then—while they, perhaps, deemed him once more the hero of ball-rooms and the cynosure of clubs—he drove slowly through the soft summer night, amidst the perfumes of many a garden and many a gleaming chestnut grove, with no other aim before him than to reach the loveliest margin of England’s loveliest river, at the hour when the moon was fullest and the song of the nightingale most sweet. And so eccentric a humourist was this man, that I believe, as he there loitered,—no one near to cry “How affected!” or “How romantic!”—he enjoyed himself more than if he had been exchanging the politest “how-d’ye-dos” in the hottest of London drawing-rooms, or betting his hundreds on the odd trick, with Lord de R——— for his partner.
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