The Disowned Part 37

I am waiting here for some days in expectation of Lord Aspeden's arrival. Sick as I was of England and all that has lately occurred to me there, I was glad to have an opportunity of leaving it sooner than my chief could do; and I amuse myself very indifferently in this dull town, with reading all the morning, plays all the evening, and dreams of my happier friends all the night.

And so you are sorry that I did not destroy Lord Borodaile. My dear duke, you would have been much more sorry if I had! What could you then have done for a living Pasquin for your stray lampoons and vagrant sarcasms? Had an unfortunate bullet carried away--

"That peer of England, pillar of the state,"

as you term him, pray on whom could 'Duke Humphrey unfold his griefs'?--Ah, Duke, better as it is, believe me; and, whenever you are at a loss for a subject for wit, you will find cause to bless my forbearance, and congratulate yourself upon the existence of its object.

Dare I hope that, amidst all the gayeties which court you, you will find time to write to me? If so, you shall have in return the earliest intelligence of every new soprano, and the most elaborate criticisms on every budding figurante of our court.

Have you met Trollolop lately, and in what new pursuit are his intellectual energies engaged? There, you see, I have fairly entrapped your Grace into a question which common courtesy will oblige you to answer.

Adieu, ever, my dear Duke. Most truly yours, etc.

LETTER FROM THE DUKE OF HAVERFIELD TO CLARENCE LINDEN, ESQ.

A thousand thanks, mon cher, for your letter, though it was certainly less amusing and animated than I could have wished it for your sake, as well as my own; yet it could not have been more welcomely received, had it been as witty as your conversation itself. I heard that you had accepted the place of secretary to Lord Aspeden, and that you had pa.s.sed through London on your way to the Continent, looking (the amiable Callythorpe, 'who never flatters,' is my authority) more like a ghost than yourself. So you may be sure, my dear Linden, that I was very anxious to be convinced under your own hand of your carnal existence.

Take care of yourself, my good fellow, and don't imagine, as I am apt to do, that youth is like my hunter, Fearnought, and will carry you over everything. In return for your philosophical maxim, I will give you another. "In age we should remember that we have been young, and in youth that we are to be old." Ehem!--am I not profound as a moralist? I think a few such sentences would become my long face well; and, to say truth, I am tired of being witty; every one thinks he can be that: so I will borrow Trollolop's philosophy,--take snuff, wear a wig out of curl, and grow wise instead of merry.

A propos of Trollolop; let me not forget that you honour him with your inquiries. I saw him three days since, and he asked me if I had been impressed lately with the idea vulgarly called Clarence Linden; and he then proceeded to inform me that he had heard the atoms which composed your frame were about to be resolved into a new form. While I was knitting my brows very wisely at this intelligence, he pa.s.sed on to apprise me that I had neither length, breadth, nor extension, nor anything but mind. Flattered by so delicate a compliment to my understanding, I yielded my a.s.sent: and he then s.h.i.+fted his ground, and told me that there was no such thing as mind; that we were but modifications of matter; and that, in a word, I was all body. I took advantage of this doctrine, and forthwith removed my modification of matter from his.

Findlater has just lost his younger brother in a duel. You have no idea how shocking it was. Sir Christopher one day heard his brother, who had just entered the ---- Dragoons, ridiculed for his want of spirit, by Major Elton, who professed to be the youth's best friend. The honest heart of our worthy baronet was shocked beyond measure at this perfidy, and the next time his brother mentioned Elton's name with praise, out came the story. You may guess the rest: young Findlater called out Elton, who shot him through the lungs! "I did it for the best," cried Sir Christopher.

La pauvre pet.i.te Meronville! What an Ariadne! Just as I was thinking to play the Bacchus to your Theseus, up steps an old gentleman from Yorks.h.i.+re, who hears it is fas.h.i.+onable to marry bonas robas, proposes honourable matrimony, and deprives me and the world of La Meronville!

The wedding took place on Monday last, and the happy pair set out to their seat in the North. Verily, we shall have quite a new race in the next generation; I expect all the babes will skip into the world with a pas de zephyr, singing in sweet trebles,--

"Little dancing loves we are!

Who the deuce is our papa?"

I think you will be surprised to hear that Lord Borodaile is beginning to thaw; I saw him smile the other day! Certainly, we are not so near the North Pole as we were! He is going, and so am I, in the course of the autumn, to your old friends the Westboroughs. Report says that he is un peu epris de la belle Flore; but, then, Report is such a liar! For my own part I always contradict her.

I eagerly embrace your offer of correspondence, and a.s.sure you that there are few people by whose friends.h.i.+p I conceive myself so much honoured as by yours. You will believe this; for you know that, like Callythorpe, I never flatter. Farewell for the present.

Sincerely yours, HAVERFIELD.

CHAPTER LVI.

Q. Eliz.--Shall I be tempted of the devil thus?

K. Rich.--Ay, if the devil tempt thee to do good.

Q. Eliz.--Shall I forget myself to be myself?--SHAKSPEARE.

It wanted one hour to midnight, as Crauford walked slowly to the lonely and humble street where he had appointed his meeting with Glendower. It was a stormy and fearful night. The day had been uncommonly sultry, and, as it died away, thick ma.s.ses of cloud came labouring along the air, which lay heavy and breathless, as if under a spell,--as if in those dense and haggard vapours the rider of the storm sat, like an incubus, upon the atmosphere beneath, and paralyzed the motion and wholesomeness of the sleeping winds. And about the hour of twilight, or rather when twilight should have been, instead of its quiet star, from one obscure corner of the heavens flashed a solitary gleam of lightning, lingered a moment,--

"And ere a man had power to say, Behold!

The jaws of darkness did devour it up."

But then, as if awakened from a torpor by a signal universally acknowledged, from the courts and quarters of heaven, came, blaze after blaze, and peal upon peal, the light and voices of the Elements when they walk abroad. The rain fell not: all was dry and arid; the mood of Nature seemed not gentle enough for tears; and the lightning, livid and forked, flashed from the sullen clouds with a deadly fierceness, made trebly perilous by the panting drought and stagnation of the air. The streets were empty and silent, as if the huge city had been doomed and delivered to the wrath of the tempest; and ever and anon the lightnings paused upon the housetops, shook and quivered as if meditating their stroke, and then, baffled as it were, by some superior and guardian agency, vanished into their gloomy tents, and made their next descent from some opposite corner of the skies.

It was a remarkable instance of the force with which a cherished object occupies the thoughts, and of the all-sufficiency of the human mind to itself, the slowness and unconsciousness of danger with which Crauford, a man luxurious as well as naturally timid, moved amidst the angry fires of heaven and brooded, undisturbed and sullenly serene, over the project at his heart.

"A rare night for our meeting," thought he; "I suppose he will not fail me. Now let me con over my task. I must not tell him all yet. Such babes must be led into error before they can walk: just a little inkling will suffice, a glimpse into the arcana of my scheme. Well, it is indeed fortunate that I met him, for verily I am surrounded with danger, and a very little delay in the a.s.sistance I am forced to seek might exalt me to a higher elevation than the peerage."

Such was the meditation of this man, as with a slow, shufling walk, characteristic of his mind, he proceeded to the appointed spot.

A cessation of unusual length in the series of the lightnings, and the consequent darkness, against which the dull and scanty lamps vainly struggled, prevented Crauford and another figure approaching from the opposite quarter seeing each other till they almost touched. Crauford stopped abruptly.

"Is it you?" said he.

"It is a man who has outlived fortune!" answered Glendower, in the exaggerated and metaphorical language which the thoughts of men who imagine warmly, and are excited powerfully, so often a.s.sume.

"Then," rejoined Crauford, "you are the more suited for my purpose.

A little urging of necessity behind is a marvellous whetter of the appet.i.te to danger before, he! he!" And as he said this, his low chuckling laugh jarringly enough contrasted with the character of the night and his companion.

Glendower replied not: a pause ensued; and the lightning which, spreading on a sudden from east to west, hung over the city a burning and ghastly canopy, showed the face of each to the other, working and almost haggard as it was with the conception of dark thoughts, and rendered wan and unearthly by the spectral light in which it was beheld.

"It is an awful night," said Glendower.

"True," answered Crauford, "a very awful night; but we are all safe under the care of Providence. Jesus! what a flas.h.!.+ Think you it is a favourable opportunity for our conversation?"

"Why not?" said Glendower; "what have the thunders and wrath of Heaven to do with us?"

"H-e-m! h-e-m! G.o.d sees all things," rejoined Crauford, "and avenges Himself on the guilty by His storms!"

"Ay; but those are the storms of the heart! I tell you that even the innocent may have that within to which the loudest tempests without are peace! But guilt, you say; what have we to do with guilt?"

Crauford hesitated, and, avoiding any reply to this question, drew Glendower's arm within his own, and in a low half-whispered tone said,--

"Glendower, survey mankind; look with a pa.s.sionless and unprejudiced eye upon the scene which moves around us: what do you see anywhere but the same re-acted and eternal law of Nature,--all, all preying upon each other? Or if there be a solitary individual who refrains, he is as a man without a common badge, without a marriage garment, and the rest trample him under foot! Glendower, you are such a man! Now hearken, I will deceive you not; I honour you too much to beguile you, even to your own good. I own to you, fairly and at once, that in the scheme I shall unfold to you, there may be something repugnant, to the fact.i.tious and theoretical principles of education,--something hostile to the prejudices, though not to the reasonings, of the mind; but--"

"Hold!" said Glendower, abruptly, pausing and fixing his bold and searching eye upon the tempter; "hold! there will be no need of argument or refinement in this case: tell me at once your scheme, and at once I will accept or reject it!"

"Gently," said Crauford; "to all deeds of contract there is a preamble.

Listen to me yet further: when I have ceased, I will listen to you. It is in vain that you place man in cities; it is in vain that you fetter him with laws; it is in vain that you pour into his mind the light of an imperfect morality, of a glimmering wisdom, of an ineffectual religion: in all places he is the same,--the same savage and crafty being, who makes the pa.s.sions which rule himself the tools of his conquest over others! There is in all creation but one evident law,--self-preservation! Split it as you like into hairbreadths and atoms, it is still fundamentally and essentially unaltered. Glendower, that self-preservation is our bond now. Of myself I do not at present speak; I refer only to you: self-preservation commands you to place implicit confidence in me; it impels you to abjure indigence, by accepting the proposal I am about to make to you."

"You, as yet, speak enigmas," said Glendower; "but they are sufficiently clear to tell me their sense is not such as I have heard you utter."

"You are right. Truth is not always safe,--safe either to others, or to ourselves! But I dare open to you now my real heart: look in it; I dare to say that you will behold charity, benevolence, piety to G.o.d, love and friends.h.i.+p at this moment to yourself; but I own, also, that you will behold there a determination--which to me seems courage--not to be the only idle being in the world, where all are busy; or, worse still, to be the only one engaged in a perilous and uncertain game, and yet shunning to employ all the arts of which he is master. I will own to you that, long since, had I been foolishly inert, I should have been, at this moment, more penniless and dest.i.tute than yourself. I live happy, respected, wealthy! I enjoy in their widest range the blessings of life.

I dispense those blessings to others. Look round the world: whose name stands fairer than mine? whose hand relieves more of human distresses?

whose tongue preaches purer doctrines? None, Glendower, none. I offer to you means not dissimilar to those I have chosen, fortunes not unequal to those I possess. Nothing but the most unjustifiable fastidiousness will make you hesitate to accept my offer."

"You cannot expect that I have met you this night with a resolution to be unjustifiably fastidious," said Glendower, with a hollow and cold smile.

Crauford did not immediately answer, for he was considering whether it was yet the time for disclosing the important secret. While he was deliberating, the sullen clouds began to break from their suspense.

A double darkness gathered around, and a few large drops fell on the ground in token of a more general discharge about to follow from the floodgates of heaven. The two men moved onward, and took shelter under an old arch. Crauford first broke silence. "Hist!" said he, "hist! do you hear anything?"