Tancred Part 15

'I have just returned from Paris; the first time I have been out; and, had it not been for you,' she added, 'I should not have been here to-night. I think they would have put me in prison.'

'Lady Bardolf ought to be very much obliged to me, and so ought the world.'

'I am,' said Lady Bertie and Bellair.

'That is worth everything else,' said Tancred.

'What a pretty carriage you have! I do not think I shall ever get into mine again. I am almost glad they have destroyed my chariot. I am sure I shall never be able to drive in anything else now except a brougham.'

'Why did you not keep mine?'

'You are magnificent; too gorgeous and oriental for these cold climes.

You shower your presents as if you were in the East, which Lord Valentine tells me you are about to visit. When do you leave us?'

'I think of going immediately.'

'Indeed!' said Lady Bertie and Bellair, and her countenance changed.

There was a pause, and then she continued playfully, yet as it were half in sadness, 'I almost wish you had not come to my rescue this morning.'

'And why?' 'Because I do not like to make agreeable acquaintances only to lose them.'

'I think that I am most to be pitied,' said Tancred.

'You are wearied of the world very soon. Before you can know us, you leave us.'

'I am not wearied of the world, for indeed, as you say, I know nothing of it. I am here by accident, as you were in the stoppage to-day. It will disperse, and then I shall get on.'

'Lord Valentine tells me that you are going to realise my dream of dreams, that you are going to Jerusalem.'

'Ah!' said Tancred, kindling, 'you too have felt that want?'

'But I never can pardon myself for not having satisfied it,' said Lady Bertie and Bellair in a mournful tone, and looking in his face with her beautiful dark eyes. 'It is the mistake of my life, and now can never be remedied. But I have no energy. I ought, as a girl, when they opposed my purpose, to have taken up my palmer's staff, and never have rested content till I had gathered my sh.e.l.l on the strand of Joppa.'

'It is the right feeling' said Tancred. 'I am persuaded we ought all to go.'

'But we remain here,' said the lady, in a tone of suppressed and elegant anguish; 'here, where we all complain of our hopeless lives; with not a thought beyond the pa.s.sing hour, yet all bewailing its wearisome and insipid moments.'

'Our lot is cast in a material age,' said Tancred.

'The spiritual can alone satisfy me,' said Lady Bertie and Bellair.

'Because you have a soul,' continued Tancred, with animation, 'still of a celestial hue. They are rare in the nineteenth century. n.o.body now thinks about heaven. They never dream of angels. All their existence is concentrated in steamboats and railways.'

'You are right,' said the lady, earnestly; 'and you fly from it.'

'I go for other purposes; I would say even higher ones,' said Tancred.

'I can understand you; your feelings are my own. Jerusalem has been the dream of my life. I have always been endeavouring to reach it, but somehow or other I never got further than Paris.'

'And yet it is very easy now to get to Jerusalem,' said Tancred; 'the great difficulty, as a very remarkable man said to me this morning, is to know what to do when you are there.'

'Who said that to you?' inquired Lady Bertie and Bellair, bending her head.

'It was the person I was going to call upon when I met you; Monsieur de Sidonia.'

'Monsieur de Sidonia!' said the lady, with animation. 'Ah! you know him?'

'Not as much as I could wish. I saw him to-day for the first time. My cousin, Lord Eskdale, gave me a letter of introduction to him, for his advice and a.s.sistance about my journey. Sidonia has been a great traveller.'

'There is no person I wish to know so much as M. de Sidonia,' said Lady Bertie and Bellair. 'He is a great friend of Lord Eskdale, I think?

I must get Lord Eskdale,' she added, musingly, 'to give me a little dinner, and ask M. de Sidonia to meet me.'

'He never goes anywhere; at least I have heard so,' said Tancred.

'He once used to do, and to give us great fetes. I remember hearing of them before I was out. We must make him resume them. He is immensely rich.'

'I dare say he may be,' said Tancred. 'I wonder how a man with his intellect and ideas can think of the acc.u.mulation of wealth.'

''Tis his destiny,' said Lady Bertie and Bellair. 'He can no more disembarra.s.s himself of his hereditary millions than a dynasty of the cares of empire. I wonder if he will get the Great Northern. They talked of nothing else at Paris.'

'Of what?' said Tancred.

'Oh! let us talk of Jerusalem!' said Lady Bertie and Bellair. 'Ah, here is Augustus! Let me make you and my husband acquainted.'

Tancred almost expected to see the moustached companion of the morning, but it was not so. Lord Bertie and Bellair was a tall, thin, distinguished, withered-looking young man, who thanked Tancred for his courtesy of the morning with a sort of gracious negligence, and, after some easy talk, asked Tancred to dine with them on the morrow. He was engaged, but he promised to call on Lady Bertie and Bellair immediately, and see some drawings of the Holy Land.

CHAPTER XIX.

_Lord Henry Sympathises_

Pa.s.sING through a marble antechamber, Tancred was ushered into an apartment half saloon and half-library; the choicely-bound volumes, which were not too numerous, were ranged on shelves inlaid in the walls, so that they ornamented, without diminis.h.i.+ng, the apartment. These walls were painted in encaustic, corresponding with the coved ceiling, which was richly adorned in the same fas.h.i.+on. A curtain of violet velvet, covering if necessary the large window, which looked upon a balcony full of flowers, and the umbrageous Park; an Axminster carpet, manufactured to harmonise both in colour and design with the rest of the chamber; a profusion of luxurious seats; a large table of ivory marquetry, bearing a carved silver bell which once belonged to a pope; a Naiad, whose golden urn served as an inkstand; some daggers that acted as paper cutters, and some French books just arrived; a group of beautiful vases recently released from an Egyptian tomb and ranged on a tripod of malachite: the portrait of a statesman, and the bust of an emperor, and a sparkling fire, were all circ.u.mstances which made the room both interesting and comfortable in which Sidonia welcomed Tancred and introduced him to a guest who had preceded him, Lord Henry Sydney.

It was a name that touched Tancred, as it has all the youth of England, significant of a career that would rescue public life from that strange union of lax principles and contracted sympathies which now form the special and degrading features of British politics. It was borne by one whose boyhood we have painted amid the fields and schools of Eton, and the springtime of whose earliest youth we traced by the sedgy waters of the Cam. We left him on the threshold of public life; and, in four years, Lord Henry had created that reputation which now made him a source of hope and solace to millions of his countrymen. But they were four years of labour which outweighed the usual exertions of public men in double that s.p.a.ce. His regular attendance in the House of Commons alone had given him as much Parliamentary experience as fell to the lot of many of those who had been first returned in 1837, and had been, therefore, twice as long in the House. He was not only a vigilant member of public and private committees, but had succeeded in appointing and conducting several on topics which he esteemed of high importance. Add to this, that he took an habitual part in debate, and was a frequent and effective public writer; and we are furnished with an additional testimony, if that indeed were wanting, that there is no incentive to exertion like the pa.s.sion for a n.o.ble renown. Nor should it be forgotten, that, in all he accomplished, he had but one final purpose, and that the highest. The debate, the committee, the article in the Journal or the Review, the public meeting, the private research, these were all means to advance that which he had proposed as the object of his public life, namely, to elevate the condition of the people.

Although there was no public man whose powers had more rapidly ripened, still it was interesting to observe that their maturity had been faithful to the healthy sympathies of his earlier years. The boy, whom we have traced intent upon the revival of the pastimes of the people, had expanded into the statesman, who, in a profound and comprehensive investigation of the elements of public wealth, had shown that a jaded population is not a source of national prosperity. What had been a picturesque emotion had now become a statistical argument. The material system that proposes the supply of constant toil to a people as the perfection of polity, had received a staggering blow from the exertions of a young patrician, who announced his belief that labour had its rights as well as its duties. What was excellent about Lord Henry was, that he was not a mere philanthropist, satisfied to rouse public attention to a great social evil, or instantly to suggest for it some crude remedy.

A scholar and a man of the world, learned in history and not inexperienced in human nature, he was sensible that we must look to the const.i.tuent principles of society for the causes and the cures of great national disorders. He therefore went deeply into the question, nor shrank from investigating how far those disorders were produced by the operation or the desuetude of ancient inst.i.tutions, and how far it might be necessary to call new influences into political existence for their remedy. Richly informed, still studious, fond of labour and indefatigable, of a gentle disposition though of an ardent mind, calm yet energetic, very open to conviction, but possessing an inflexibility amounting even to obstinacy when his course was once taken, a ready and improving speaker, an apt and attractive writer, affable and sincere, and with the undesigning faculty of making friends, Lord Henry seemed to possess all the qualities of a popular leader, if we add to them the golden ones: high lineage, an engaging appearance, youth, and a temperament in which the reason had not been developed to the prejudice of the heart.

'And when do you start for the Holy Land?' said Lord Henry to Tancred, in a tone and with a countenance which proved his sympathy.

'I have clutched my staff, but the caravan lingers.'

'I envy you!'

'Why do you not go?'