Chapter XII…

Chapter XII

Curious to learn what had passed between Beatrice and Frank, and deeply interested in all that could oust Frank out of the squire’s goodwill, or aught that could injure his own prospects by tending to unite son and father, Randal was not slow in reaching his young kinsman’s lodgings. It might be supposed that having, in all probability, just secured so great a fortune as would accompany Violante’s hand, Randal might be indifferent to the success of his scheme on the Hazeldean exchequer. Such a supposition would grievously wrong this profound young man. For, in the first place, Violante was not yet won, nor her father yet restored to the estates which would defray her dower; and, in the next place, Randal, like Iago, loved villany for the genius it called forth in him. The sole luxury the abstemious aspirer allowed to himself was that which is found in intellectual restlessness. Untempted by wine, dead to love, unamused by pleasure, indifferent to the arts, despising literature save as means to some end of power, Randal Leslie was the incarnation of thought hatched out of the corruption of will. At twilight we see thin airy spectral insects, all wing and nippers, hovering, as if they could never pause, over some sullen mephitic pool. Just so, methinks, hover over Acheron such gnat-like, noiseless soarers into gloomy air out of Stygian deeps, as are the thoughts of spirits like Randal Leslie’s. Wings have they, but only the better to pounce down,--draw their nutriment from unguarded material cuticles; and just when, maddened, you strike, and exulting exclaim, “Caught, by Jove!” wh-irr flies the diaphanous, ghostly larva, and your blow falls on your own twice-offended cheek.

The young men who were acquainted with Randal said he had not a vice! The fact being that his whole composition was one epic vice, so elaborately constructed that it had not an episode which a critic could call irrelevant. Grand young man!

“But, my dear fellow,” said Randal, as soon as he had learned from Frank all that had passed on board the vessel between him and Beatrice, “I cannot believe this. ‘Never loved you’? What was her object, then, in deceiving not only you, but myself? I suspect her declaration was but some heroical refinement of generosity. After her brother’s dejection and probable ruin, she might feel that she was no match for you. Then, too, the squire’s displeasure! I see it all; just like her,--noble, unhappy woman!”

Frank shook his head. “There are moments,” said he, with a wisdom that comes out of those instincts which awake from the depths of youth’s first great sorrow,--“moments when a woman cannot feign, and there are tones in the voice of a woman which men cannot misinterpret. She does not love me,--she never did love me; I can see that her heart has been elsewhere. No matter,--all is over. I don’t deny that I am suffering an intense grief; it gnaws like a kind of sullen hunger; and I feel so broken, too, as if I had grown old, and there was nothing left worth living for. I don’t deny all that.”

“My poor, dear friend, if you would but believe--”

“I don’t want to believe anything, except that I have been a great fool. I don’t think I can ever commit such follies again. But I’m a man. I shall get the better of this; I should despise myself if I could not. And now let us talk of my dear father. Has he left town?”

“Left last night by the mail. You can write and tell him you have given up the marchesa, and all will be well again between you.”

“Give her up! Fie, Randal! Do you think I should tell such a lie? She gave me up; I can claim no merit out of that.”

“Oh, yes! I can make the squire see all to your advantage. Oh, if it were only the marchesa! but, alas! that cursed postobit! How could Levy betray you? Never trust to usurers again; they cannot resist the temptation of a speedy profit.

“They first buy the son, and then sell him to the father. And the squire has such strange notions on matters of this kind.”

“He is right to have them. There, just read this letter from my mother. It came to me this morning. I could hang myself if I were a dog; but I’m a man, and so I must bear it.”

Randal took Mrs. Hazeldean’s letter from Frank’s trembling hand. The poor mother had learned, though but imperfectly, Frank’s misdeeds from some hurried lines which the squire had despatched to her; and she wrote as good, indulgent, but sensible, right-minded mothers alone can write. More lenient to an imprudent love than the squire, she touched with discreet tenderness on Frank’s rash engagements with a foreigner, but severely on his own open defiance of his father’s wishes. Her anger was, however, reserved for that unholy post-obit. Here the hearty genial wife’s love overcame the mother’s affection. To count, in cold blood, on that husband’s death, and to wound his heart so keenly, just where its jealous, fatherly fondness made it most susceptible!

“O Frank, Frank!” wrote Mrs. Hazeldean, “were it not for this, were it only for your unfortunate attachment to the Italian lady, only for your debts, only for the errors of hasty, extravagant youth, I should be with you now, my arms round your neck, kissing you, chiding you back to your father’s heart. But--but the thought that between you and his heart has been the sordid calculation of his death,--that is a wall between us. I cannot come near you. I should not like to look on your face, and think how my William’s tears fell over it, when I placed you, new born, in his arms, and bade him welcome his heir. What! you a mere boy still, your father yet in the prime of life, and the heir cannot wait till nature leaves him fatherless. Frank; Frank this is so unlike you. Can London have ruined already a disposition so honest and affectionate?--No; I cannot believe it. There must be some mistake. Clear it up, I implore you; or, though as a mother I pity you, as a wife I cannot forgive.”

Even Randal was affected by the letter; for, as we know, even Randal felt in his own person the strength of family ties. The poor squire’s choler and bluffness had disguised the parental heart from an eye that, however acute, had not been willing to search for it; and Randal, ever affected through his intellect, had despised the very weakness on which he had preyed. But the mother’s letter, so just and sensible (allowing that the squire’s opinions had naturally influenced the wife to take what men of the world would call a very exaggerated view of the every-day occurrence of loans raised by a son, payable only at a father’s death),--this letter, I say, if exaggerated according to fashionable notions, so sensible if judged by natural affections, touched the dull heart of the schemer, because approved by the quick tact of his intelligence.

“Frank,” said he, with a sincerity that afterwards amazed himself, “go down at once to Hazeldean; see your mother, and explain to her how this transaction really happened. The woman you loved, and wooed as wife, in danger of an arrest, your distraction of mind, Levy’s counsels, your hope to pay off the debt, so incurred to the usurer, from the fortune you would shortly receive with the marchesa. Speak to your mother,--she is a woman; women have a common interest in forgiving all faults that arise from the source of their power over us men,--I mean love. Go!”

“No, I cannot go; you see she would not like to look on my face. And I cannot repeat what you say so glibly. Besides, somehow or other, as I am so dependent upon my father,--and he has said as much,--I feel as if it would be mean in me to make any excuses. I did the thing, and must suffer for it. But I’m a in--an--no--I ‘m not a man here.” Frank burst into tears.

At the sight of those tears, Randal gradually recovered from his strange aberration into vulgar and low humanity. His habitual contempt for his kinsman returned; and with contempt came the natural indifference to the sufferings of the thing to be put to use. It is contempt for the worm that makes the angler fix it on the hook, and observe with complacency that the vivacity of its wriggles will attract the bite. If the worm could but make the angler respect, or even fear it, the barb would find some other bait. Few anglers would impale an estimable silkworm, and still fewer the anglers who would finger into service a formidable hornet.

“Pooh, my--dear Frank,” said Randal; “I have given you my advice; you reject it. Well, what then will you do?”

“I shall ask for leave of absence, and run away some where,” said Frank, drying his tears. “I can’t face London; I can’t mix with others. I want to be by myself, and wrestle with all that I feel here--in my heart. Then I shall write to my mother, say the plain truth, and leave her to judge as kindly of me as she can.”

“You are quite right. Yes, leave town! Why not go abroad? You have never been abroad. New scenes will distract your mind. Run over to Paris.”

“Not to Paris--I don’t want gayeties; but I did intend to go abroad somewhere,--any dull dismal hole of a place. Good-by! Don’t think of me any more for the present.”

“But let me know where you go; and meanwhile I will see the squire.”

“Say as little of me as you can to him. I know you mean most kindly, but oh, how I wish there never had been any third person between me and my father! There: you may well snatch away your hand. What an ungrateful wretch to you I am. I do believe I am the wickedest fellow. What! you shake hands with me still! My dear Randal, you have the best heart--God bless you!” Frank turned away, and disappeared within his dressing-room.

“They must be reconciled now, sooner or later,--squire and son,” said Randal to himself, as he left the lodgings. “I don’t see how I can prevent that,--the marchesa being withdrawn,--unless Frank does it for me. But it is well he should be abroad,--something maybe made out of that; meanwhile I may yet do all that I could reasonably hope to do,--even if Frank had married Beatrice,--since he was not to be disinherited. Get the squire to advance the money for the Thornhill purchase, complete the affair; this marriage with Violante will help; Levy must know that; secure the borough;--well thought of. I will go to Avenel’s. By-the-by, by-the-by, the squire might as well keep me still in the entail after Frank, supposing Frank die childless. This love affair may keep him long from marrying. His hand was very hot,--a hectic colour; those strong-looking fellows often go off in rapid decline, especially if anything preys on their minds,--their minds are so very small.

“Ah, the Hazeldean parson,--and with Avenel! That young man, too, who is he? I have seen him before some where.--My dear Mr. Dale, this is a pleasant surprise. I thought you had returned to Hazeldean with our friend the squire?”

MR. DALE.--“The squire! Has he left town, and without telling me?”

RANDAL (taking aside the parson).--“He was anxious to get back to Mrs. Hazeldean, who was naturally very uneasy about her son and this foolish marriage; but I am happy to tell you that that marriage is effectually and permanently broken off.”

MR. DALE.--“How, how? My poor friend told me he had wholly failed to make any impression on Frank,--forbade me to mention the subject. I was just going to see Frank myself. I always had some influence with him. But, Mr. Leslie, explain this very sudden and happy event. The marriage broken off!”

RANDAL.--“It is a long story, and I dare not tell you my humble share in it. Nay, I must keep that secret. Frank might not forgive me. Suffice it that you have my word that the fair Italian has left England, and decidedly refused Frank’s addresses. But stay, take my advice, don’t go to him; you see it was not only the marriage that has offended the squire, but some pecuniary transactions,--an unfortunate post-obit bond on the Casino property. Frank ought to be left to his own repentant reflections. They will be most salutary; you know his temper,--he don’t bear reproof; and yet it is better, on the other hand, not to let him treat too lightly what has passed. Let us leave him to himself for a few days He is in an excellent frame of mind.”

MR. DALE (shaking Randal’s hand warmly).--“You speak admirably--a post-obit!--so often as he has heard his father’s opinion on such transactions. No, I will not see him; I should be too angry--”

RANDAL (leading the parson back, resumes, after an exchange of salutations with Avenel, who, meanwhile, had been conferring with his nephew).--“You should not be so long away from your rectory, Mr. Dale. What will your parish do without you?”

MR. DALE.--“The old fable of the wheel and the fly. I am afraid the wheel rolls on the same. But if I am absent from my parish, I am still in the company of one who does me honour as an old parishioner. You remember Leonard Fairfield, your antagonist in the Battle of the Stocks?”

MR. AVENEL.--“My nephew, I am proud to say, sir.” Randal bowed with marked civility, Leonard with a reserve no less marked.

MR. AVENEL (ascribing his nephew’s reserve to shyness).--“You should be friends, you two youngsters. Who knows but you may run together in the same harness? Ah, that reminds me, Leslie, I have a word or two to say to you. Your servant, Mr. Dale. Shall be happy to present you to Mrs. Avenel. My card,--Eaton Square, Number --. You will call on me to-morrow, Leonard. And mind, I shall be very angry if you persist in your refusal. Such an opening!” Avenel took Randal’s arm, while the parson and Leonard walked on.

“Any fresh hints as to Lansmere?” asked Randal.

“Yes; I have now decided on the plan of contest. You must fight two and two,--you and Egerton against me and (if I can get him to stand, as I hope) my nephew, Leonard.”

“What!” said Randal, alarmed; “then, after all, I can hope for no support from you?”

“I don’t say that; but I have reason to think Lord L’Estrange will bestir himself actively in favour of Egerton. If so, it will be a very sharp contest; and I must manage the whole election on our side, and unite all our shaky votes, which I can best do by standing myself in the first instance, reserving it to after consideration whether I shall throw up at the last; for I don’t particularly want to come in, as I did a little time ago, before I had found out my nephew. Wonderful young man! with such a head,--will do me credit in the rotten old House; and I think I had best leave London, go to Screwstown, and look to my business. No, if Leonard stand, I roust first see to get him in; and next, to keep Egerton out. It will probably, therefore, end in the return of one and one or either side, as we thought of before,--Leonard on our side; and Egerton sha’n’t be the man on the other. You understand?”

“I do, my dear Avenel. Of course, as I before said, I can’t dictate to your party whom they should prefer,--Egerton or myself. And it will be obvious to the public that your party would rather defeat so eminent an adversary as Mr. Egerton than a tyro in politics like me. Of course I cannot scheme for such a result; it would be misconstrued, and damage my character. But I rely equally on your friendly promise.”

“Promise! No, I don’t promise. I must first see how the cat jumps; and I don’t know yet how our friends may like you, nor how they can be managed. All I can say is, that Audley Egerton sha’n’t be M.P. for Lansmere. Meanwhile, you will take care not to commit yourself in speaking so that our party can’t vote for you consistently; they must count on having you--when you get into the House.”

“I am not a violent party-man at present,” answered Randal, prudently. “And if public opinion prove on your side, it is the duty of a statesman to go with the times.”

“Very sensibly said; and I have a private bill or two, and some other little jobs, I want to get through the House, which we can discuss later, should it come to a frank understanding between us. We must arrange how to meet privately at Lansmere, if necessary. I’ll see to that. I shall go down this week. I think of taking a hint from the free and glorious land of America, and establishing secret caucuses. Nothing like ‘em.”

“Caucuses?”

“Small sub-committees that spy on their men night and day, and don’t suffer them to be intimidated to vote the other way.”

“You have an extraordinary head for public affairs, Avenel. You should come into parliament yourself; your nephew is so very young.”

“So are you.”

“Yes; but I know the world. Does he?”

“The world knows him, though not by name, and he has been the making of me.”

“How? You surprise me.”

Avenel first explained about the patent which Leonard had secured to him; and next confided, upon honour, Leonard’s identity with the anonymous author whom the parson had supposed to be Professor Moss.

Randal Leslie felt a jealous pang. What! then--had this village boy, this associate of John Burley (literary vagabond, whom he supposed had long since gone to the dogs, and been buried at the expense of the parish)--had this boy so triumphed over birth, rearing, circumstance, that, if Randal and Leonard had met together in any public place, and Leonard’s identity with the rising author had been revealed, every eye would have turned from Randal to gaze on Leonard? The common consent of mankind would have acknowledged the supreme royalty of genius when it once leaves its solitude, and strides into the world. What! was this rude villager the child of Fame, who, without an effort, and unconsciously, had inspired in the wearied heart of Beatrice di Negra a love that Randal knew, by an instinct, no arts, no craft, could ever create for him in the heart of woman? And now, did this same youth stand on the same level in the ascent to power as he, the well-born Randal Leslie, the accomplished protege of the superb Audley Egerton? Were they to be rivals in the same arena of practical busy life? Randal gnawed his quivering lip.

All the while, however, the young man whom he so envied was a prey to sorrows deeper far than could ever find room or footing in the narrow and stony heart of the unloving schemer.

As Leonard walked through the crowded streets with the friend and monitor of his childhood, confiding the simple tale of his earlier trials,--when, amidst the wreck of fortune and in despair of fame, the Child-angel smiled by his side, like Hope,--all renown seemed to him so barren, all the future so dark! His voice trembled, and his countenance became so sad, that his benignant listener, divining that around the image of Helen there clung some passionate grief that overshadowed all worldly success, drew Leonard gently and gently on, till the young man, long yearning for some confidant, told him all,--how, faithful through long years to one pure and ardent memory, Helen had been seen once more, the child ripened to woman, and the memory revealing itself as love.

The parson listened with a mild and thoughtful brow, which expanded into a more cheerful expression as Leonard closed his story.

“I see no reason to despond,” said Mr. Dale. “You fear that Miss Digby does not return your attachment; you dwell upon her reserve, her distant, though kindly manner. Cheer up! All young ladies are under the influence of what phrenologists call the organ of Secretiveness, when they are in the society of the object of their preference. Just as you describe Miss Digby’s manner to you, was my Carry’s manner to myself.”

The parson here indulged in a very appropriate digression upon female modesty, which he wound up by asserting that that estimable virtue became more and more influenced by the secretive organ, in proportion as the favoured suitor approached near and nearer to a definite proposal. It was the duty of a gallant and honourable lover to make that proposal in distinct and orthodox form, before it could be expected that a young lady should commit herself and the dignity of her sex by the slightest hint as to her own inclinations.

“Next,” continued the parson, “you choose to torment yourself by contrasting your own origin and fortunes with the altered circumstances of Miss Digby,--the ward of Lord L’Estrange, the guest of Lady Lansmere. You say that if Lord L’Estrange could have countenanced such a union, he would have adopted a different tone with you,--sounded your heart, encouraged your hopes, and so forth. I view things differently. I have reason to do so; and from all you have told me of this nobleman’s interest in your fate, I venture to make you this promise, that if Miss Digby would accept your hand, Lord L’Estrange shall ratify her choice.”

“My dear Mr. Dale,” cried Leonard, transported, “you make me that promise?”

“I do,--from what you have said, and from what I myself know of Lord L’Estrange. Go, then, at once to Knightsbridge, see Miss Digby, show her your heart, explain to her, if you will, your prospects, ask her permission to apply to Lord L’Estrange (since he has constituted himself her guardian); and if Lord L’Estrange hesitate,--which, if your happiness be set on this union, I think he will not,--let me know, and leave the rest to me.”

Leonard yielded himself to the parson’s persuasive eloquence. Indeed, when he recalled to mind those passages in the manuscripts of the ill-fated Nora, which referred to the love that Harley had once borne to her,--for he felt convinced that Harley and the boy suitor of Nora’s narrative were one and the same; and when all the interest that Harley had taken in his own fortunes was explained by his relationship to her (even when Lord L’Estrange had supposed it less close than he would now discover it to be), the young man, reasoning by his own heart, could not but suppose that the noble Harley would rejoice to confer happiness upon the son of her, so beloved by his boyhood.

“And to thee, perhaps, O my mother!” thought Leonard, with swimming eyes--“to thee, perhaps, even in thy grave, I shall owe the partner of my life, as to the mystic breath of thy genius I owe the first pure aspirations of my soul.”

It will be seen that Leonard had not confided to the parson his discovery of Nora’s manuscripts, nor even his knowledge of his real birth; for the proud son naturally shrank from any confidence that implicated Nora’s fair name, until at least Harley, who, it was clear from those papers, must have intimately known his father, should perhaps decide the question which the papers themselves left so terribly vague,--namely, whether he were the offspring of a legal marriage, or Nora had been the victim of some unholy fraud.

While the parson still talked, and while Leonard still mused and listened, their steps almost mechanically took the direction towards Knightsbridge, and paused at the gates of Lord Lansmere’s house.

“Go in, my young friend; I will wait without to know the issue,” said the parson, cheeringly. “Go, and with gratitude to Heaven, learn how to bear the most precious joy that can befall mortal man; or how to submit to youth’s sharpest sorrow, with the humble belief that even sorrow is but some mercy concealed.”

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Chapter XIII

Leonard was shown into the drawing-room, and it so chanced that Helen was there alone. The girl’s soft face was sadly changed, even since Leonard had seen it last; for the grief of natures mild and undemonstrative as hers, gnaws with quick ravages; but at Leonard’s unexpected entrance, the colour rushed so vividly to the pale cheeks that its hectic might be taken for the lustre of bloom and health. She rose hurriedly, and in great confusion faltered out, “that she believed Lady Lansmere was in her room,--she would go for her,” and moved towards the door, without seeming to notice the hand tremulously held forth to her; when Leonard exclaimed in uncontrollable emotions which pierced to her very heart, in the keen accent of reproach,--

“Oh, Miss Digby--oh, Helen--is it thus that you greet me,--rather thus that you shun me? Could I have foreseen this when we two orphans stood by the mournful bridge,--so friendless, so desolate, and so clinging each to each? Happy time!” He seized her hand suddenly as he spoke the last words, and bowed his face over it.

“I must not hear you. Do not talk so, Leonard, you break my heart. Let me go, let me go!”

“Is it that I am grown hateful to you; is it merely that you see my love and would discourage it? Helen, speak to me,--speak!”

He drew her with tender force towards him; and, holding her firmly by both hands, sought to gaze upon the face that she turned from him,--turned in such despair.

“You do not know,” she said at last, struggling for composure,--“you do not know the new claims on me, my altered position, how I am bound, or you would be the last to speak thus to me, the first to give me courage, and bid me--bid me--”

“Bid you what?”

“Feel nothing here but duty!” cried Helen, drawing from his clasp both her hands, and placing them firmly on her breast.

“Miss Digby,” said Leonard, after a short pause of bitter reflection, in which he wronged, while he thought to divine, her meaning, “you speak of new claims on you, your altered position--I comprehend. You may retain some tender remembrance of the past; but your duty now is to rebuke my presumption. It is as I thought and feared. This vain reputation which I have made is but a hollow sound,--it gives me no rank, assures me no fortune. I have no right to look for the Helen of old in the Helen of to-day. Be it so--forget what I have said, and forgive me.”

This reproach stung to the quick the heart to which it appealed. A flash brightened the meek, tearful eyes, almost like the flash of resentment; her lips writhed in torture, and she felt as if all other pain were light compared with the anguish that Leonard could impute to her motives which to her simple nature seemed so unworthy of her, and so galling to himself.

A word rushed as by inspiration to her lip, and that word calmed and soothed her.

“Brother!” she said touchingly, “brother!”

The word had a contrary effect on Leonard. Sweet as it was, tender as the voice that spoke it, it imposed a boundary to affection, it came as a knell to hope. He recoiled, shook his head mournfully: “Too late to accept that tie,--too late even for friendship. Henceforth--for long years to come--henceforth, till this heart has ceased to beat at your name to thrill at your presence, we two--are strangers.”

“Strangers! Well--yes, it is right--it must be so; we must not meet. Oh, Leonard Fairfield, who was it that in those days that you recall to me, who was it that found you destitute and obscure; who, not degrading you by charity, placed you in your right career; opened to you, amidst the labyrinth in which you were well-nigh lost, the broad road to knowledge, independence, fame? Answer me,--answer! Was it not the same who reared, sheltered your sister orphan? If I could forget what I have owed to him, should I not remember what he has done for you? Can I hear of your distinction, and not remember it? Can I think how proud she may be who will one day lean on your arm, and bear the name you have already raised beyond all the titles of an hour,--can I think of this, and not remember our common friend, benefactor, guardian? Would you forgive me, if I failed to do so?”

“But,” faltered Leonard, fear mingling with the conjectures these words called forth--“but is it that Lord L’Estrange would not consent to our union? Or of what do you speak? You bewilder me.”

Helen felt for some moments as if it were impossible to reply; and the words at length were dragged forth as if from the depth of her very soul.

“He came to me, our noble friend. I never dreamed of it. He did not tell me that he loved me. He told me that he was unhappy, alone; that in me, and only in me, he could find a comforter, a soother--He, he! And I had just arrived in England, was under his mother’s roof, had not then once more seen you; and--and--what could I answer? Strengthen me, strengthen me, you whom I look up to and revere. Yes, yes, you are right. We must see each other no more. I am betrothed to another,--to him! Strengthen me!”

All the inherent nobleness of the poet’s nature rose at once at this appeal.

“Oh, Helen--sister--Miss Digby, forgive me. You need no strength from me; I borrow it from you. I comprehend you, I respect. Banish all thought of me. Repay our common benefactor. Be what he asks of you,--his comforter, his soother; be more,--his pride and his joy. Happiness will come to you, as it comes to those who confer happiness and forget self. God comfort you in the passing struggle; God bless you, in the long years to come. Sister, I accept the holy name now, and will claim it hereafter, when I too can think more of others than myself.”

Helen had covered her face with her hands, sobbing; but with that soft, womanly constraint which presses woe back into the heart. A strange sense of utter solitude suddenly pervaded her whole being, and by that sense of solitude she knew that he was gone.

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Chapter XIV

In another room in that same house sat, solitary as Helen, a stern, gloomy, brooding man, in whom they who had best known him from his childhood could scarcely have recognized a trace of the humane, benignant, trustful, but wayward and varying Harley, Lord L’Estrange.

He had read that fragment of a memoir, in which, out of all the chasms of his barren and melancholy past, there rose two malignant truths that seemed literally to glare upon him with mocking and demon eyes. The woman whose remembrance had darkened all the sunshine of his life had loved another; the friend in whom he had confided his whole affectionate loyal soul had been his perfidious rival. He had read from the first word to the last, as if under a spell that held him breathless; and when he closed the manuscript, it was without a groan or sigh; but over his pale lips there passed that withering smile, which is as sure an index of a heart overcharged with dire and fearful passions, as the arrowy flash of the lightning is of the tempests that are gathered within the cloud.

He then thrust the papers into his bosom, and, keeping his hand over them, firmly clenched, he left the room, and walked slowly on towards his father’s house. With every step by the way, his nature, in the war of its elements, seemed to change and harden into forms of granite. Love, humanity, trust, vanished away. Hate, revenge, misanthropy, suspicion, and scorn of all that could wear the eyes of affection, or speak with the voice of honour, came fast through the gloom of his thoughts, settling down in the wilderness, grim and menacing as the harpies of ancient song--

“Uncaeque manus, et pallida semper Ora.”

“Hands armed with fangs, and lips forever pale.”

Thus the gloomy man had crossed the threshold of his father’s house, and silently entered the apartments still set apart for him. He had arrived about an hour before Leonard; and as he stood by the hearth, with his arms folded on his breast, and his eyes fixed lead-like on the ground, his mother came in to welcome and embrace him. He checked her eager inquiries after Violante, he recoiled from the touch of her hand.

“Hold, madam,” said he, startling her ear with the cold austerity of his tone. “I cannot heed your questions,--I am filled with the question I must put to yourself. You opposed my boyish love for Leonora Avenel. I do not blame you,--all mothers of equal rank would have done the same. Yet, had you not frustrated all frank intercourse with her, I might have taken refusal from her own lips,--survived that grief, and now been a happy man. Years since then have rolled away,--rolled over her quiet slumbers, and my restless waking life. All this time were you aware that Audley Egerton had been the lover of Leonora Avenel?”

“Harley, Harley! do not speak to me in that cruel voice, do not look at me with those hard eyes!”

“You knew it, then,--you, my mother!” continued Harley, unmoved by her rebuke; “and why did you never say, ‘Son, you are wasting the bloom and uses of your life in sorrowful fidelity to a lie! You are lavishing trust and friendship on a perfidious hypocrite.’”

“How could I speak to you thus; how could I dare to do so, seeing you still so cherished the memory of that unhappy girl, still believed that she had returned your affection? Had I said to you what I knew (but not till after her death), as to her relations with Audley Egerton--”

“Well? You falter; go on; had you done so?”

“Would you have felt no desire for revenge? Might there not have been strife between you, danger, bloodshed? Harley, Harley! Is not such silence pardonable in a mother? And why deprive you too of the only friend you seemed to prize; who alone had some influence over you; who concurred with me in the prayer and hope, that some day you would find a living partner worthy to replace this lost delusion, arouse your faculties,--be the ornament your youth promised to your country? For you wrong Audley,--indeed you do!”

“Wrong him! Ah, let me not do that. Proceed.”

“I do not excuse him his rivalship, nor his first concealment of it. But believe me, since then, his genuine remorse, his anxious tenderness for your welfare, his dread of losing your friendship--”

“Stop! It was doubtless Audley Egerton who induced you yourself to conceal what you call his ‘relations’ with her whom I can now so calmly name,--Leonora Avenel?”

“It was so, in truth; and from motives that--”

“Enough! let me hear no more.”

“But you will not think too sternly of what is past? You are about to form new ties. You cannot be wild and wicked enough to meditate what your brow seems to threaten. You cannot dream of revenge,--risk Audley’s life or your own?”

“Tut, tut, tut! What cause here for duels? Single combats are out of date; civilized men do not slay each other with sword and pistol. Tut! revenge! Does it look like revenge, that one object which brings me hither is to request my father’s permission to charge myself with the care of Audley Egerton’s election? What he values most in the world is his political position; and here his political existence is at stake. You know that I have had through life the character of a weak, easy, somewhat over-generous man. Such men are not revengeful. Hold! You lay your hand on my arm,--I know the magic of that light touch, Mother; but its power over me is gone. Countess of Lansmere, hear me! Ever from infancy (save in that frantic passion for which I now despise myself), I have obeyed you, I trust, as a duteous son. Now, our relative positions are somewhat altered. I have the right to exact--I will not say to command--the right which wrong and injury bestow upon all men. Madam, the injured man has prerogatives that rival those of kings. I now call upon you to question me no more; not again to breathe the name of Leonora Avenel, unless I invite the subject; and not to inform Audley Egerton by a hint, by a breath, that I have discovered--what shall I call it?--his ‘pardonable deceit.’ Promise me this, by your affection as mother, and on your faith as gentlewoman; or I declare solemnly, that never in life will you look upon my face again.”

Haughty and imperious though the countess was, her spirit quailed before Harley’s brow and voice.

“Is this my son,--this my gentle Harley?” she said falteringly. “Oh, put your arms round my neck; let me feel that I have not lost my child!”

Harley looked softened, but he did not obey the pathetic prayer; nevertheless, he held out his hand, and turning away his face, said, in a milder voice, “Have I your promise?”

“You have, you have; but on condition that there pass no words between you and Audley that can end but in the strife which--”

“Strife!” interrupted Harley. “I repeat that the idea of challenge and duel between me and my friend from our school days, and on a quarrel that we could explain to no seconds, would be a burlesque upon all that is grave in the realities of life and feeling. I accept your promise and seal it thus--”

He pressed his lips to his mother’s forehead, and passively received her embrace.

“Hush,” he said, withdrawing from her arms, “I hear my father’s voice.”

Lord Lansmere threw open the door widely, and with a certain consciousness that a door by which an Earl of Lansmere entered ought to be thrown open widely. It could not have been opened with more majesty if a huissier or officer of the Household had stood on either side. The countess passed by her lord with a light step, and escaped.

“I was occupied with my architect in designs for the new infirmary, of which I shall make a present to our county. I have only just heard that you were here, Harley. What is all this about our fair Italian guest? Is she not coming back to us? Your mother refers me to you for explanations.”

“You shall have them later, my dear father; at present I can think only of public affairs.”

“Public affairs! they are indeed alarming. I am rejoiced to hear you express yourself so worthily. An awful crisis, Harley! And, gracious Heaven! I have heard that a low man, who was born in Lansmere, but made a fortune in America, is about to contest the borough. They tell me he is one of the Avenels,--a born Blue; is it possible?”

“I have come here on that business. As a peer you cannot, of course, interfere; but I propose, with your leave, to go down myself to Lansmere, and undertake the superintendence of, the election. It would be better, perhaps, if you were not present; it would give us more liberty of action.”

“My dear Harley, shake hands; anything you please. You know how I have wished to see you come forward, and take that part in life which becomes your birth.”

“Ah, you think I have sadly wasted my existence hitherto.”

“To be frank with you, yes, Harley,” said the earl, with a pride that was noble in its nature, and not without dignity in its expression. “The more we take from our country, the more we owe to her. From the moment you came into the world as the inheritor of lands and honours, you were charged with a trust for the benefit of others, that it degrades one of our order of gentleman not to discharge.”

Harley listened with a sombre brow, and made no direct reply.

“Indeed,” resumed the earl, “I would rather you were about to canvass for yourself than for your friend Egerton. But I grant he is an example that it is never too late to follow. Why, who that had seen you both as youths, notwithstanding Audley had the advantage of being some years your senior--who could have thought that he was the one to become distinguished and eminent, and you to degenerate into the luxurious idler, averse to all trouble and careless of all fame? You, with such advantages, not only of higher fortunes, but, as every one said, of superior talents; you, who had then so much ambition, so keen a desire for glory, sleeping with Plutarch’s Lives under your pillow, and only, my wild son, only too much energy. But you are a young man still; it is not too late to redeem the years you have thrown away.”

“The years are nothing,--mere dates in an almanac; but the feelings, what can give me back those?--the hope, the enthusiasm, the--No matter! feelings do not, help men to rise in the world. Egerton’s feelings are not too lively. What I might have been, leave it to me to remember; let us talk of the example you set before me,--of Audley Egerton.”

“We must get him in,” said the earl, sinking his voice into a whisper. “It is of more importance to him than I even thought for. But you know his secrets. Why did you not confide to me frankly the state of his affairs?”

“His affairs? Do you mean that they are seriously embarrassed? This interests me much. Pray speak; what do you know?”

“He has discharged the greater part of his establishment. That in itself is natural on quitting office; but still it set people talking; and it has got wind that his estates are not only mortgaged for more than they are worth, but that he has been living upon the discount of bills; in short, he has been too intimate with a man whom we all know by sight,--a man who drives the finest horses in London, and they tell me (but that I cannot believe) lives in the familiar society of the young puppies he snares to perdition. What’s the man’s name? Levy, is it not?--yes, Levy.”

“I have seen Levy with him,” said Harley; and a sinister joy lighted up his falcon eyes. “Levy--Levy--it is well.”

“I hear but the gossip of the clubs,” resumed the earl; “but they do say that Levy makes little disguise of his power over our very distinguished friend, and rather parades it as a merit with our party (and, indeed, with all men--for Egerton has personal friends in every party) that he keeps sundry bills locked up in his desk until Egerton is once more safe in parliament. Nevertheless if, after all, our friend were to lose his election, and Levy were then to seize on his effects, and proclaim his ruin, it would seriously damage, perhaps altogether destroy, Audley’s political career.”

“So I conclude,” said Harley. “A Charles Fox might be a gamester, and a William Pitt be a pauper. But Audley Egerton is not of their giant stature; he stands so high because he stands upon heaps of respectable gold. Audley Egerton, needy and impoverished, out of parliament, and, as the vulgar slang has it, out at elbows, skulking from duns, perhaps in the Bench--”

“No, no; our party would never allow that; we would subscribe--”

“Worse than all, living as the pensioner of the party he aspired to lead! You say truly, his political prospects would be blasted. A man whose reputation lay in his outward respectability! Why, people would say that Audley Egerton has been--a solemn lie; eh, my father?”

“How can you talk with such coolness of your friend? You need say nothing to interest me in his election--if you mean that. Once in parliament, he must soon again be in office,--and learn to live on his salary. You must get him to submit to me the schedule of his liabilities. I have a head for business, as you know. I will arrange his affairs for him. And I will yet bet five to one, though I hate wagers, that he will be prime minister in three years. He is not brilliant, it is true; but just at this crisis we want a safe, moderate, judicious, conciliatory man; and Audley has so much tact, such experience of the House, such knowledge of the world, and,” added the earl, emphatically summing up his eulogies, “he is so thorough a gentleman!”

“A thorough gentleman, as you say,--the soul of honour! But, my dear father, it is your hour for riding; let me not detain you. It is settled, then; you do not come yourself to Lansmere. You put the house at my disposal, and allow me to invite Egerton, of course, and what other guests I may please; in short, you leave all to me?”

“Certainly; and if you cannot get in your friend, who can? That borough, it is an awkward, ungrateful place, and has been the plague of my life. So much as I have spent there, too,--so much as I have done to its trade!” And the earl, with an indignant sigh, left the room.

Harley seated himself deliberately at his writing-table, leaning his face on his hand, and looking abstractedly into space from under knit and lowering brows.

Harley L’Estrange was, as we have seen, a man singularly tenacious of affections and impressions. He was a man, too, whose nature was eminently bold, loyal, and candid; even the apparent whim and levity which misled the world, both as to his dispositions and his powers, might be half ascribed to that open temper which, in its over-contempt for all that seemed to savour of hypocrisy, sported with forms and ceremonials, and extracted humour, sometimes extravagant, sometimes profound, from “the solemn plausibilities of the world.” The shock he had now received smote the very foundations of his mind, and, overthrowing all the airier structures which fancy and wit had built upon its surface, left it clear as a new world for the operations of the darker and more fearful passions. When a man of a heart so loving and a nature so irregularly powerful as Harley’s suddenly and abruptly discovers deceit where he had most confided, it is not (as with the calmer pupils of that harsh teacher, Experience) the mere withdrawal of esteem and affection from the one offender; it is, that trust in everything seems gone; it is, that the injured spirit looks back to the Past, and condemns all its kindlier virtues as follies that conduced to its own woe; and looks on to the Future as to a journey beset with smiling traitors, whom it must meet with an equal simulation, or crush with a superior force. The guilt of treason to men like these is incalculable,--it robs the world of all the benefits they would otherwise have lavished as they passed; it is responsible for all the ill that springs from the corruption of natures whose very luxuriance, when the atmosphere is once tainted, does but diffuse disease,--even as the malaria settles not over thin and barren soils, not over wastes that have been from all time desolate, but over the places in which southern suns had once ripened delightful gardens, or the sites of cities, in which the pomp of palaces has passed away.

It was not enough that the friend of his youth, the confidant of his love, had betrayed his trust,--been the secret and successful rival; not enough that the woman his boyhood had madly idolized, and all the while he had sought her traces with pining, remorseful heart-believing she but eluded his suit from the emulation of a kindred generosity, desiring rather to sacrifice her own love than to cost to his the sacrifice of all which youth rashly scorns and the world so highly estimates,--not enough that all this while her refuge had been the bosom of another. This was not enough of injury. His whole life had been wasted on a delusion; his faculties and aims, the wholesome ambition of lofty minds, had been arrested at the very onset of fair existence; his heart corroded by a regret for which there was no cause; his conscience charged with the terror that his wild chase had urged a too tender victim to the grave, over which he had mourned. What years that might otherwise have been to himself so serene, to the world so useful, had been consumed in objectless, barren, melancholy dreams! And all this while to whom had his complaints been uttered?--to the man who knew that his remorse was an idle spectre and his faithful sorrow a mocking self-deceit. Every thought that could gall man’s natural pride, every remembrance that could sting into revenge a heart that had loved too deeply not to be accessible to hate, conspired to goad those maddening Furies who come into every temple which is once desecrated by the presence of the evil passions. In that sullen silence of the soul, vengeance took the form of justice. Changed though his feelings towards Leonora Avenel were, the story of her grief and her wrongs embittered still more his wrath against his rival. The fragments of her memoir left naturally on Harley’s mind the conviction that she had been the victim of an infamous fraud, the dupe of a false marriage. His idol had not only been stolen from the altar,--it had been sullied by the sacrifice; broken with remorseless hand, and thrust into dishonoured clay; mutilated, defamed; its very memory a thing of contempt to him who had ravished it from worship. The living Harley and the dead Nora--both called aloud to their joint despoiler, “Restore what thou hast taken from us, or pay the forfeit!”

Thus, then, during the interview between Helen and Leonard, thus Harley L’Estrange sat alone! and as a rude irregular lump of steel, when wheeled round into rapid motion, assumes the form of the circle it describes, so his iron purpose, hurried on by his relentless passion, filled the space into which he gazed with optical delusions, scheme after scheme revolving and consummating the circles that clasped a foe.

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Chapter XV

The entrance of a servant, announcing a name which Harley, in the absorption of his gloomy revery, did not hear, was followed by that of a person on whom he lifted his eyes in the cold and haughty surprise with which a man much occupied greets and rebukes the intrusion of an unwelcome stranger.

“It is so long since your Lordship has seen me,” said the visitor, with mild dignity, “that I cannot wonder you do not recognize my person, and have forgotten my name.”

“Sir,” answered Harley, with an impatient rudeness, ill in harmony with the urbanity for which he was usually distinguished,--“sir, your person is strange to me, and your name I did not hear; but, at all events, I am not now at leisure to attend to you. Excuse my plainness.”

“Yet pardon me if I still linger. My name is Dale. I was formerly curate at Lansmere; and I would speak to your Lordship in the name and the memory of one once dear to you,--Leonora Avenel.”

HARLEY (after a short pause).--“Sir, I cannot conjecture your business. But be seated. I remember you now, though years have altered both, and I have since heard much in your favour from Leonard Fairfield. Still let me pray, that you will be brief.”

MR. DALE.--“May I assume at once that you have divined the parentage of the young man you call Fairfield? When I listened to his grateful praises of your beneficence, and marked with melancholy pleasure the reverence in which he holds you, my heart swelled within me. I acknowledged the mysterious force of nature.”

HARLEY.--“Force of nature! You talk in riddles.”

MR. DALE (indignantly).--“Oh, my Lord, how can you so disguise your better self? Surely in Leonard Fairfield you have long since recognized the son of Nora Avenel?”

Harley passed his hand over his face. “Ah,” thought he, “she lived to bear a son then,--a son to Egerton! Leonard is that son. I should have known it by the likeness, by the fond foolish impulse that moved me to him. This is why he confided to me these fearful memoirs. He seeks his father,--he shall find him.”

MR. DALE (mistaking the cause of Harley’s silence).--“I honour your compunction, my Lord. Oh, let your heart and your conscience continue to speak to your worldly pride.”

HARLEY.--“My compunction, heart, conscience! Mr. Dale, you insult me!”

MR. DALE (sternly).--“Not so; I am fulfilling my mission, which bids me rebuke the sinner. Leonora Avenel speaks in me, and commands the guilty father to acknowledge the innocent child!”

Harley half rose, and his eyes literally flashed fire; but he calmed his anger into irony. “Ha!” said he, with a sarcastic smile, “so you suppose that I was the perfidious seducer of Nora Avenel,--that I am the callous father of the child who came into the world without a name. Very well, sir, taking these assumptions for granted, what is it you demand from me on behalf of this young man?”

“I ask from you his happiness,” replied Mr. Dale, imploringly; and yielding to the compassion with which Leonard inspired him, and persuaded that Lord L’Estrange felt a father’s love for the boy whom he had saved from the whirlpool of London, and guided to safety and honourable independence, he here, with simple eloquence, narrated all Leonard’s feelings for Helen,--his silent fidelity to her image, though a child’s, his love when he again beheld her as a woman, the modest fears which the parson himself had combated, the recommendation that Mr. Dale had forced upon him, to confess his affection to Helen, and plead his cause. “Anxious, as you may believe, for his success,” continued the parson, “I waited without your gates till he came from Miss Digby’s presence. And oh, my Lord, had you but seen his face!--such emotion and such despair! I could not learn from him what had passed. He escaped from me and rushed away. All that I could gather was from a few broken words, and from those words I formed the conjecture (it may be erroneous) that the obstacle to his happiness was not in Helen’s heart, my Lord, but seemed to me as if it were in yourself. Therefore, when he had vanished from my sight, I took courage, and came at, once to you. If he be your son, and Helen Digby be your ward,--she herself an orphan, dependent on your bounty,--why should they be severed? Equals in years, united by early circumstance, congenial, it seems, in simple habits and refined tastes,--what should hinder their union, unless it be the want of fortune? And all men know your wealth, none ever questioned your generosity. My Lord, my Lord, your look freezes me. If I have offended, do not visit my offence on him,--on Leonard!”

“And so,” said Harley, still controlling his rage, “so this boy--whom, as you say, I saved from that pitiless world which has engulfed many a nobler genius--so, in return for all, he has sought to rob me of the last affection, poor and lukewarm though it was, that remained to me in life? He presume to lift his eyes to my affianced bride! He! And for aught I know, steal from me her living heart, and leave to me her icy hand!”

“Oh, my Lord, your affianced bride! I never dreamed of this. I implore your pardon. The very thought is so terrible, so unnatural! the son to woo the father’s! Oh, what sin have I fallen into! The sin was mine,--I urged and persuaded him to it. He was ignorant as myself. Forgive him, forgive him!”

“Mr. Dale,” said Harley, rising, and extending his hand, which the poor parson felt himself--unworthy to take,--“Mr. Dale, you are a good man,--if, indeed, this universe of liars contains some man who does not cheat our judgment when we deem him honest. Allow me only to ask why you consider Leonard Fairfield to be my son.”

“Was not your youthful admiration for poor Nora evident to me? Remember I was a frequent guest at Lansmere Park; and it was so natural that you, with all your brilliant gifts, should captivate her refined fancy, her affectionate heart.”

“Natural--you think so,--go on.”

“Your mother, as became her, separated you. It was not unknown to me that you still cherished a passion which your rank forbade to be lawful. Poor girl! she left the roof of her protectress, Lady Jane. Nothing was known of her till she came to her father’s house to give birth to a child, and die. And the same day that dawned on her corpse, you hurried from the place. Ah, no doubt your conscience smote you; you have never returned to Lansmere since.”

Harley’s breast heaved, he waved his hand; the parson resumed,

“Whom could I suspect but you? I made inquiries: they confirmed my suspicions.”

“Perhaps you inquired of my friend, Mr. Egerton? He was with me when--when--as you say, I hurried from the place.”

“I did, my Lord.”

“And he?”

“Denied your guilt; but still, a man of honour so nice, of heart so feeling, could not feign readily. His denial did not deceive me.”

“Honest man!” said Harley; and his hand griped at the breast over which still rustled, as if with a ghostly sigh, the records of the dead. “He knew she had left a son, too?”

“He did, my Lord; of course, I told him that.”

“The son whom I found starving in the streets of London! Mr. Dale, as you see, your words move me very much. I cannot deny that he who wronged, it may be with no common treachery, that young mother--for Nora Avenel was not one to be lightly seduced into error--”

“Indeed, no!”

“And who then thought no more of the offspring of her anguish and his own crime--I cannot deny that that man deserves some chastisement,--should render some atonement. Am I not right here? Answer with the plain speech which becomes your sacred calling.”

“I cannot say otherwise, my Lord,” replied the parson, pitying what appeared to him such remorse. “But if he repent--”

“Enough,” interrupted Harley. “I now invite you to visit me at Lansmere; give me your address, and I will apprise you of the day on which I will request your presence. Leonard Fairfield shall find a father--I was about to say, worthy of himself. For the rest--stay; reseat yourself. For the rest”--and again the sinister smile broke from Harley’s eye and lip--“I will not yet say whether I can, or ought to, resign to a younger and fairer suitor the lady who has accepted my own hand. I have no reason yet to believe that she prefers him. But what think you, meanwhile, of this proposal? Mr. Avenel wishes his nephew to contest the borough of Lansmere, has urged me to obtain the young man’s consent. True, that he may thus endanger the seat of Mr. Audley Egerton. What then? Mr. Audley Egerton is a great man, and may find another seat; that should not stand in the way. Let Leonard obey his uncle. If he win the election, why, he ‘ll be a more equal match, in the world’s eye, for Miss Digby, that is, should she prefer him to myself; and if she do not, still, in public life, there is a cure for all private sorrow. That is a maxim of Mr. Audley Egerton’s; and he, you know, is a man not only of the nicest honour, but the deepest worldly wisdom. Do you like my proposition?”

“It seems to me most considerate, most generous.”

“Then you shall take to Leonard the lines I am about to write.”

LORD L’ESTRANGE TO LEONARD FAIRFIELD.

I have read the memoir you intrusted to me. I will follow up all the clews that it gives me. Meanwhile I request you to suspend all questions; forbear all reference to a subject which, as you may well conjecture, is fraught with painful recollections to myself. At this moment, too, I am compelled to concentre my thoughts upon affairs of a public nature, and yet which may sensibly affect yourself. There are reasons why I urge you to comply with your uncle’s wish, and stand for the borough of Lansmere at the approaching election. If the exquisite gratitude of your nature so overrates what I may have done for you that you think you owe me some obligations, you will richly repay them on the day in which I bear you hailed as member for Lansmere. Relying on that generous principle of self-sacrifice, which actuates all your conduct, I shall count upon your surrendering your preference to private life, and entering the arena of that noble ambition which has conferred such dignity on the name of my friend Audley Egerton. He, it is true, will be your opponent; but he is too generous not to pardon my zeal for the interests of a youth whose career I am vain enough to think that I have aided. And as Mr. Randal Leslie stands in coalition with Egerton, and Mr. Avenel believes that two candidates of the same party cannot both succeed, the result may be to the satisfaction of all the feelings which I entertain for Audley Egerton, and for you, who, I have reason to think, will emulate his titles to my esteem.

Yours, L’ESTRANGE.

“There, Mr. Dale,” said Harley, sealing his letter, and giving it into the parson’s hands,--“there, you shall deliver this note to your friend. But no; upon second thoughts, since he does not yet know of your visit to me, it is best that he should be still in ignorance of it. For should Miss Digby resolve to abide by her present engagements, it were surely kind to save Leonard the pain of learning that you had communicated to me that rivalry he himself had concealed. Let all that has passed between us be kept in strict confidence.”

“I will obey you, my Lord,” answered the parson, meekly, startled to find that he who had come to arrogate authority was now submitting to commands; and all at fault what judgment he could venture to pass upon the man whom he had regarded as a criminal, who had not even denied the crime imputed to him, yet who now impressed the accusing priest with something of that respect which Mr. Dale had never before conceded but to Virtue. Could he have then but looked into the dark and stormy heart, which he twice misread!

“It is well,--very well,” muttered Harley, when the door had closed upon the parson. “The viper and the viper’s brood! So it was this man’s son that I led from the dire Slough of Despond; and the son unconsciously imitates the father’s gratitude and honour--Ha, ha!” Suddenly the bitter laugh was arrested; a flash of almost celestial joy darted through the warring elements of storm and darkness. If Helen returned Leonard’s affection, Harley L’Estrange was free! And through that flash the face of Violante shone upon him as an angel’s. But the heavenly light and the angel face vanished abruptly, swallowed up in the black abyss of the rent and tortured soul.

“Fool!” said the unhappy man, aloud, in his anguish--“fool! what then? Were I free, would it be to trust my fate again to falsehood? If, in all the bloom and glory of my youth, I failed to win the heart of a village girl; if, once more deluding myself, it is in vain that I have tended, reared, cherished, some germ of woman’s human affection in the orphan I saved from penury,--how look for love in the brilliant princess, whom all the sleek Lotharios of our gaudy world will surround with their homage when once she alights on their sphere! If perfidy be my fate--what hell of hells, in the thought!--that a wife might lay her head in my bosom, and--oh, horror! horror! No! I would not accept her hand were it offered, nor believe in her love were it pledged to me. Stern soul of mine, wise at last, love never more,--never more believe in truth!”

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Chapter XVI

As Harley quitted the room, Helen’s pale sweet face looked forth from a door in the same corridor. She advanced towards him timidly.

“May I speak with you?” she said, in almost inaudible accents; “I have been listening for your footstep.”

Harley looked at her steadfastly. Then, without a word, he followed her into the room she had left, and closed the door.

“I, too,” said he, “meant to seek an interview with yourself--but later. You would speak to me, Helen,--say on. Ah, child, what mean you? Why this?”--for Helen was kneeling at his feet.

“Let me kneel,” she said, resisting the hand that sought to raise her. “Let me kneel till I have explained all, and perhaps won your pardon. You said something the other evening. It has weighed on my heart and my conscience ever since. You said ‘that I should have no secret from you; for that, in our relation to each other, would be deceit.’ I have had a secret; but oh, believe me! it was long ere it was clearly visible to myself. You honoured me with a suit so far beyond my birth, my merits. You said that I might console and comfort you. At those words, what answer could I give,--I, who owe you so much more than a daughter’s duty? And I thought that my affections were free,--that they would obey that duty. But--but--but--” continued Helen, bowing her head still lowlier, and in a voice far fainter--“I deceived myself. I again saw him who had been all in the world to me, when the world was so terrible, and then--and then--I trembled. I was terrified at my own memories, my own thoughts. Still I struggled to banish the past, resolutely, firmly. Oh, you believe me, do you not? And I hoped to conquer. Yet ever since those words of yours, I felt that I ought to tell you even of the struggle. This is the first time we have met since you spoke them. And now--now--I have seen him again, and--and--though not by a word could she you had deigned to woo as your bride encourage hope in another; though there--there where you now stand--he bade me farewell, and we parted as if forever,--yet--yet O Lord L’Estrange! in return for your rank, wealth, your still nobler gifts of nature, what should I bring?--Something more than gratitude, esteem; reverence,--at least an undivided heart, filled with your image, and yours alone. And this I cannot give. Pardon me,--not for what I say now, but for not saying it before. Pardon me, O my benefactor, pardon me!”

“Rise, Helen,” said Harley, with relaxing brow, though still unwilling to yield to one softer and holier emotion. “Rise!” And he lifted her up, and drew her towards the light. “Let me look at your face. There seems no guile here. These tears are surely honest. If I cannot be loved, it is my fate, and not your crime. Now, listen to me. If you grant me nothing else, will you give me the obedience which the ward owes to the guardian, the child to the parent?”

“Yes, oh, yes!” murmured Helen.

“Then while I release you from all troth to me, I claim the right to refuse, if I so please it, my assent to the suit of--of the person you prefer. I acquit you of deceit, but I reserve to myself the judgment I shall pass on him. Until I myself sanction that suit, will you promise not to recall in any way the rejection which, if I understand you rightly, you have given to it?”

“I promise.”

“And if I say to you, ‘Helen, this man is not worthy of you ’”

“No, no! do not say that,--I could not believe you.” Harley frowned, but resumed calmly, “If, then, I say, ‘Ask me not wherefore, but I forbid you to be the wife of Leonard Fairfield, I what would be your answer?’”

“Ah, my Lord, if you can but comfort him, do with me as you will! but do not command me to break his heart.”

“Oh, silly child,” cried Harley, laughing scornfully, “hearts are not found in the race from which that man sprang. But I take your promise, with its credulous condition. Helen, I pity you. I have been as weak as you, bearded man though I be. Some day or other, you and I may live to laugh at the follies at which you weep now. I can give you no other comfort, for I know of none.”

He moved to the door, and paused at the threshold: “I shall not see you again for some days, Helen. Perhaps I may request my mother to join me at Lansmere; if so, I shall pray you to accompany her. For the present, let all believe that our position is unchanged. The time will soon come when I may--”

Helen looked up wistfully through her tears.

“I may release you from all duties to me,” continued Harley, with grave and severe coldness; “or I may claim your promise in spite of the condition; for your lover’s heart will not be broken. Adieu!”

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Chapter XVII

As Harley entered London, he came suddenly upon Randal Leslie, who was hurrying from Eaton Square, having not only accompanied Mr. Avenel in his walk, but gone home with him, and spent half the day in that gentleman’s society. He was now on his way to the House of Commons, at which some disclosure as to the day for the dissolution of parliament was expected.

“Lord L’Estrange,” said Randal, “I must stop you. I have been to Norwood, and seen our noble friend. He has confided to me, of course, all that passed. How can I express my gratitude to you! By what rare talent, with what signal courage, you have saved the happiness--perhaps even the honour--of my plighted bride!”

“Your bride! The duke, then, still holds to the promise you were fortunate enough to obtain from Dr. Riccabocca?”

“He confirms that promise more solemnly than ever. You may well be surprised at his magnanimity.”

“No; he is a philosopher,--nothing in him can surprise me. But he seemed to think, when I saw him, that there were circumstances you might find it hard to explain.”

“Hard! Nothing so easy. Allow me to tender to you the same explanations which satisfied one whom philosophy itself has made as open to truth as he is clear-sighted to imposture.”

“Another time, Mr. Leslie. If your bride’s father be satisfied, what right have I to doubt? By the way, you stand for Lansmere. Do me the favour to fix your quarters at the Park during the election. You will, of course, accompany Mr. Egerton.”

“You are most kind,” answered Randal, greatly surprised.

“You accept? That is well. We shall then have ample opportunity for those explanations which you honour me by offering; and, to make your visit still more agreeable, I may perhaps induce our friends at Norwood to meet you. Good-day.” Harley walked on, leaving Randal motionless in amaze, but tormented with suspicion. What could such courtesies in Lord L’Estrange portend? Surely no good.

“I am about to hold the balance of justice,” said Harley to himself. “I will cast the light-weight of that knave into the scale. Violante never can be mine; but I did not save her from a Peschiera to leave her to a Randal Leslie. Ha, ha! Audley Egerton has some human feeling,--tenderness for that youth whom he has selected from the world, in which he left Nora’s child to the jaws of Famine. Through that side I can reach at his heart, and prove him a fool like myself, where he esteemed and confided! Good.”

Thus soliloquizing, Lord L’Estrange gained the corner of Bruton Street, when he was again somewhat abruptly accosted.

“My dear Lord L’Estrange, let me shake you by the hand; for Heaven knows when I may see you again, and you have suffered me to assist in one good action.”

“Frank Hazeldean, I am pleased indeed to meet you. Why do you indulge in that melancholy doubt as to the time when I may see you again?”

“I have just got leave of absence. I am not well, and I am rather hipped, so I shall go abroad for a few weeks.”

In spite of himself, the sombre, brooding man felt interest and sympathy in the dejection that was evident in Frank’s voice and countenance. “Another dupe to affection,” thought he, as if in apology to himself,--“of course, a dupe; he is honest and artless--at present.” He pressed kindly on the arm which he had involuntarily twined within his own. “I conceive how you now grieve, my young friend,” said he; “but you will congratulate yourself hereafter on what this day seems to you an affliction.”

“My dear Lord--”

“I am much older than you, but not old enough for such formal ceremony. Pray call me L’Estrange.”

“Thank you; and I should indeed like to speak to you as a friend. There is a thought on my mind which haunts me. I dare say it is foolish enough, but I am sure you will not laugh at me. You heard what Madame di Negra said to me last night. I have been trifled with and misled, but I cannot forget so soon how dear to me that woman was. I am not going to bore you with such nonsense; but from what I can understand, her brother is likely to lose all his fortune; and, even if not, he is a sad scoundrel. I cannot bear the thought that she should be so dependent on him, that she may come to want. After all, there must be good in her,--good in her to refuse my hand if she did not love me. A mercenary woman so circumstanced would not have done that.”

“You are quite right. But do not torment yourself with such generous fears. Madame di Negra shall not come to want, shall not be dependent on her infamous brother. The first act of the Duke of Serrano, on regaining his estates, will be a suitable provision for his kinswoman. I will answer for this.”

“You take a load off my mind. I did mean to ask you to intercede with Riccabocca,--that is, the duke (it is so hard to think he can be a duke!)--I, alas! have nothing in my power to bestow upon Madame di Negra. I may, indeed, sell my commission; but then I have a debt which I long to pay off, and the sale of the commission would not suffice even for that; and perhaps my father might be still more angry if I do sell it. Well, good-by. I shall now go away happy,--that is, comparatively. One must bear things like--a man!”

“I should like, however, to see you again before you go abroad. I will call on you. Meanwhile, can you tell me the number of one Baron Levy? He lives in this street, I know.”

“Levy! Oh, have no dealings with him, I advise, I entreat you! He is the most plausible, dangerous rascal; and, for Heaven’s sake! pray be warned by me, and let nothing entangle you into--a POST-OBIT!”

“Be re-assured, I am more accustomed to lend money than borrow it; and as to a post-obit, I have a foolish prejudice against such transactions.”

“Don’t call it foolish, L’Estrange; I honour you for it. How I wish I had known you earlier--so few men of the world are like you. Even Randal Leslie, who is so faultless in most things, and never gets into a scrape himself, called my own scruples foolish. However--”

“Stay--Randal Leslie! What! He advised you to borrow on a post-obit, and probably shared the loan with you?”

“Oh, no; not a shilling.”

“Tell me all about it, Frank. Perhaps, as I see that Levy is mixed up in the affair, your information may be useful to myself, and put me on my guard in dealing with that popular gentleman.”

Frank, who somehow or other felt himself quite at home with Harley, and who, with all his respect for Randal Leslie’s talents, had a vague notion that Lord L’Estrange was quite as clever, and, from his years and experience, likely to be a safer and more judicious counsellor, was noways loath to impart the confidence thus pressed for.

He told Harley of his debts, his first dealings with Levy, the unhappy post-obit into which he had been hurried by the distress of Madame di Negra; his father’s anger, his mother’s letter, his own feelings of mingled shame and pride, which made him fear that repentance would but seem self-interest, his desire to sell his commission, and let its sale redeem in part the post-obit; in short, he made what is called a clean breast of it. Randal Leslie was necessarily mixed up with this recital; and the subtle cross-questionings of Harley extracted far more as to that young diplomatist’s agency in all these melancholy concerns than the ingenuous narrator himself was aware of.

“So then,” said Harley, “Mr. Leslie assured you of Madame di Negra’s affection, when you yourself doubted of it?”

“Yes; she took him in, even more than she did me.”

“Simple Mr. Leslie! And the same kind friend?--who is related to you, did you say?”

“His grandmother was a Hazeldean.”

“Humph. The same kind relation led you to believe that you could pay off this bond with the marchesa’s portion, and that he could obtain the consent of your parents to your marriage with that lady?”

“I ought to have known better; my father’s prejudices against foreigners and Papists are so strong.”

“And now Mr. Leslie concurs with you, that it is best for you to go abroad, and trust to his intercession with your father. He has evidently, then, gained a great influence over Mr. Hazeldean.”

“My father naturally compares me with him,--he so clever, so promising, so regular in his habits, and I such a reckless scapegrace.”

“And the bulk of your father’s property is unentailed; Mr. Hazeldean might disinherit you?”

“I deserve it. I hope he will.”

“You have no brothers nor sisters,--no relation, perhaps, after your parents, nearer to you than your excellent friend Mr. Randal Leslie?”

“No; that is the reason he is so kind to me, otherwise I am the last person to suit him. You have no idea how well-informed and clever he is,” added Frank, in a tone between admiration and awe.

“My dear Hazeldean, you will take my advice, will you not?”

“Certainly. You are too good.”

“Let all your family, Mr. Leslie included, suppose you to be gone abroad; but stay quietly in England, and within a day’s journey of Lansmere Park. I am obliged to go thither for the approaching election. I may ask you to come over. I think I see a way to serve you; and if so, you will soon hear from me. Now, Baron Levy’s number?”

“That is the house with the cabriolet at the door. How such a fellow can have such a horse!--‘t is out of all keeping!”

“Not at all; horses are high-spirited, generous, unsuspicious animals. They never know if it is a rogue who drives them. I have your promise, then, and you will send me your address?”

“I will. Strange that I feel more confidence in you than I do even in Randal. Do take care of Levy.”

Lord L’Estrange and Frank here shook hands, and Frank, with an anxious groan, saw L’Estrange disappear within the portals of the sleek destroyer.

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Chapter XVII

Lord L’Estrange followed the spruce servant into Baron Levy’s luxurious study.

The baron looked greatly amazed at his unexpected visitor; but he got up, handed a chair to my Lord with a low bow. “This is an honour,” said he.

“You have a charming abode here,” said Lord L’Estrange, looking round. “Very fine bronzes,--excellent taste. Your reception-rooms above are, doubtless, a model to all decorators?”

“Would your Lordship condescend to see them?” said Levy, wondering, but flattered.

“With the greatest pleasure.”

“Lights!” cried Levy, to the servant who answered his bell. “Lights in the drawing-rooms,--it is growing dark.” Lord L’Estrange followed the usurer upstairs; admired everything,--pictures, draperies, Sevres china, to the very shape of the downy fauteuils, to the very pattern of the Tournay carpets. Reclining then on one of the voluptuous sofas, Lord L’Estrange said smilingly, “You are a wise man: there is no advantage in being rich, unless one enjoys one’s riches.”

“My own maxim, Lord L’Estrange.”

“And it is something, too, to have a taste for good society. Small pride would you have, my dear baron, in these rooms, luxurious though they are, if filled with guests of vulgar exterior and plebeian manners. It is only in the world in which we move that we find persons who harmonize, as it were, with the porcelain of Sevres, and these sofas that might have come from Versailles.”

“I own,” said Levy, “that I have what some may call a weakness in a parvenu like myself. I have a love for the beau monde. It is indeed a pleasure to me when I receive men like your Lordship.”

“But why call yourself a parvenu? Though you are contented to honour the name of Levy, we, in society, all know that you are the son of a long-descended English peer. Child of love, it is true; but the Graces smile on those over whose birth Venus presided. Pardon my old-fashioned mythological similes,--they go so well with these rooms--Louis Quinze.”

“Since you have touched on my birth,” said Levy, his colour rather heightening, not with shame, but with pride, “I don’t deny that it has had some effect on my habits and tastes in life. In fact--”

“In fact, own that you would be a miserable man, in spite of all your wealth, if the young dandies, who throng to your banquets, were to cut you dead in the streets; if, when your high-stepping horse stopped at your club, the porter shut the door in your face; if, when you lounged into the opera-pit, handsome dog that you are, each spendthrift rake in ‘Fop’s Alley,’ who now waits but the scratch of your pen to endorse billets doux with the charm that can chain to himself for a month some nymph of the Ballet, spinning round in a whirlwind of tulle, would shrink from the touch of your condescending forefinger with more dread of its contact than a bailiff’s tap in the thick of Pall Mall could inspire; if, reduced to the company of city clerks, parasite led-captains--”

“Oh, don’t go on, my dear Lord,” cried Levy, laughing affectedly. “Impossible though the picture be, it is really appalling. Cut me off from May Fair and St. James’s, and I should go into my strong closet and hang myself.”

“And yet, my dear baron, all this may happen if I have the whim just to try; all this will happen, unless, ere I leave your house, you concede the conditions I come here to impose.”

“My Lord!” exclaimed Levy, starting up, and pulling down his waistcoat with nervous passionate fingers, “if you were not under my own roof, I would--”

“Truce with mock heroics. Sit down, sir, sit down. I will briefly state my threat, more briefly my conditions. You will be scarcely more prolix in your reply. Your fortune I cannot touch, your enjoyment of it I can destroy. Refuse my conditions, make me your enemy,--and war to the knife! I will interrogate all the young dupes you have ruined. I will learn the history of all the transactions by which you have gained the wealth that it pleases you to spend in courting the society and sharing the vices of men who--go with these rooms, Louis Quinze. Not a roguery of yours shall escape me, down even to your last notable connivance with an Italian reprobate for the criminal abduction of an heiress. All these particulars I will proclaim in the clubs to which you have gained admittance, in every club in London which you yet hope to creep into; all these I will impart to some such authority in the Press as Mr. Henry Norreys; all these I will, upon the voucher of my own name, have so published in some journals of repute, that you must either tacitly submit to the revelations that blast you, or bring before a court of law actions that will convert accusations into evidence. It is but by sufferance that you are now in society; you are excluded when one man like me comes forth to denounce you. You try in vain to sneer at my menace--your white lips show your terror. I have rarely in life drawn any advantage from my rank and position; but I am thankful that they give me the power to make my voice respected and my exposure triumphant. Now, Baron Levy, will you go into your strong closet and hang yourself, or will you grant me my very moderate conditions? You are silent. I will relieve you, and state those conditions. Until the general election, about to take place, is concluded, you will obey me to the letter in all that I enjoin,--no demur and no scruple. And the first proof of obedience I demand is, your candid disclosure of all Mr. Audley Egerton’s pecuniary affairs.”

“Has my client, Mr. Egerton, authorized you to request of me that disclosure?”

“On the contrary, all that passes between us you will conceal from your client.”

“You would save him from ruin? Your trusty friend, Mr. Egerton!” said the baron, with a livid sneer.

“Wrong again, Baron Levy. If I would save him from ruin, you are scarcely the man I should ask to assist me.”

“Ah, I guess. You have learned how he--”

“Guess nothing, but obey in all things. Let us descend to your business room.”

Levy said not a word until he had reconducted his visitor into his den of destruction, all gleaming with spoliaria in rosewood. Then he said this: “If, Lord L’Estrange, you seek but revenge on Audley Egerton, you need not have uttered those threats. I too--hate the man.”

Harley looked at him wistfully, and the nobleman felt a pang that he had debased himself into a single feeling which the usurer could share. Nevertheless, the interview appeared to close with satisfactory arrangements, and to produce amicable understanding. For as the baron ceremoniously followed Lord L’Estrange through the hall, his noble visitor said, with marked affability,

“Then I shall see you at Lansmere with Mr. Egerton, to assist in conducting his election. It is a sacrifice of your time worthy of your friendship; not a step farther, I beg. Baron, I have the honour to wish you good-evening.”

As the street door opened on Lord L’Estrange he again found himself face to face with Randal Leslie, whose hand was already lifted to the knocker.

“Ha, Mr. Leslie!--you too a client of Baron Levy’s,--a very useful, accommodating man.”

Randal stared and stammered. “I come in haste from the House of Commons on Mr. Egerton’s business. Don’t you hear the newspaper vendors crying out ‘Great News, Dissolution of Parliament’?”

“We are prepared. Levy himself consents to give us the aid of his talents. Kindly, obliging, clever person!” Randal hurried into Levy’s study, to which the usurer had shrunk back, and was now wiping his brow with his scented handkerchief, looking heated and haggard, and very indifferent to Randal Leslie.

“How is this?” cried Randal. “I come to tell you first of Peschiera’s utter failure, the ridiculous coxcomb, and I meet at your door the last man I thought to find there,--the man who foiled us all, Lord L’Estrange. What brought him to you? Ah, perhaps his interest in Egerton’s election?”

“Yes,” said Levy, sulkily. “I know all about Peschiera. I cannot talk to you now; I must make arrangements for going to Lansmere.”

“But don’t forget my purchase from Thornhill. I shall have the money shortly from a surer source than Peschiera.”

“The squire?”

“Or a rich father-in-law.”

In the mean while, as Lord L’Estrange entered Bond Street, his ears were stunned by vociferous cries from the Stentors employed by “Standard,” “Sun,” and “Globe,”

--“Great News! Dissolution of Parliament--Great News!” The gas-lamps were lighted; a brown fog was gathering over the streets, blending itself with the falling shades of night. The forms of men loomed large through the mist. The lights from the shops looked red and lurid. Loungers usually careless as to politics were talking eagerly and anxiously of King, Lords, Commons, “Constitution at stake,” “Triumph of liberal opinions,”--according to their several biases. Hearing, and scorning--unsocial, isolated--walked on Harley L’Estrange. With his direr passions had been roused up all the native powers that made them doubly dangerous. He became proudly conscious of his own great faculties, but exulted in them only so far as they could minister to the purpose which had invoked them.

“I have constituted myself a Fate,” he said inly; “let the gods be but neutral, while I weave the meshes. Then, as Fate itself when it has fulfilled its mission, let me pass away into shadow, with the still and lonely stride that none may follow,--

“‘Oh, for a lodge in some vast wilderness.’

“How weary I am of this world of men!” And again the cry “Great News--National Crisis--Dissolution of Parliament--Great News!” rang through the jostling throng. Three men, arm-in-arm, brushed by Harley, and were stopped at the crossing by a file of carriages. The man in the centre was Audley Egerton. His companions were an ex-minister like himself, and one of those great proprietors who are proud of being above office, and vain of the power to make and unmake Governments.

“You are the only man to lead us, Egerton,” said this last personage. “Do but secure your seat, and as soon as this popular fever has passed away, you must be something more than the leader of Opposition,--you must be the first man in England.”

“Not a doubt of that,” chimed in the fellow ex-minister, a worthy man, perfect red-tapist, but inaudible in the reporters’ gallery. “And your election is quite safe, eh? All depends on that. You must not be thrown out at such a time, even for a month or two. I hear that you will have a contest--some townsmen of the borough, I think. But the Lansmere interest must be all-powerful; and I suppose L’Estrange will come out and canvass for you. You are not the man to have lukewarm friends!”

“Don’t be alarmed about my election. I am as sure of that as of L’Estrange’s friendship.”

Harley heard, with a grim smile, and passing his hand within his vest, laid it upon Nora’s memoir.

“What could we do in parliament without you?” said the great proprietor, almost piteously.

“Rather what could I do without parliament? Public life is the only existence I own. Parliament is all in all to me. But we may cross now.”

Harley’s eye glittered cold as it followed the tall form of the statesman, towering high above all other passers-by. “Ay,” he muttered, “ay, rest as sure of my friendship as I was of thine! And be Lansmere our field of Philippi! There where thy first step was made in the only life that thou own’st as existence, shall the ladder itself rot from under thy footing. There, where thy softer victim slunk to death from the deceit of thy love, shall deceit like thine own dig a grave for thy frigid ambition. I borrow thy quiver of fraud; its still arrows shall strike thee; and thou too shalt say, when the barb pierces home, ‘This comes from the hand of a friend.’ Ay, at Lansmere, at Lansmere, shall the end crown the whole! Go, and dot on the canvas the lines for a lengthened perspective, where my eyes note already the vanishing point of the picture.”

Then through the dull fog and under the pale gas-lights Harley L’Estrange pursued his noiseless way, soon distinguished no more amongst the various, motley, quick-succeeding groups, with their infinite sub-divisions of thought, care, and passion; while, loud over all their low murmurs, or silent hearts, were heard the tramp of horses and din of wheels, and the vociferous discordant cry that had ceased to attract and interest in the ears it vexed, “Great News, Great News--Dissolution of Parliament--Great News!”

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Chapter XIX

The scene is at Lansmere Park,--a spacious pile, commenced in the reign of Charles II.; enlarged and altered in the reign of Anne. Brilliant interval in the History of our National Manners, when even the courtier dreaded to be dull, and Sir Fopling raised himself on tiptoe to catch the ear of a wit; when the names of Devonshire and Dorset, Halifax and Carteret, Oxford and Bolingbroke, unite themselves, brotherlike, with those of Hobbes and of Dryden, of Prior and Bentley, of Arbuthnot, Gay, Pope, and Swift; and still, wherever we turn, to recognize some ideal of great Lord or fine Gentleman, the Immortals of Literature stand by his side.

The walls of the rooms at Lansmere were covered with the portraits of those who illustrate that time which Europe calls the Age of Louis XIV. A L’Estrange, who had lived through the reigns of four English princes (and with no mean importance through all) had collected those likenesses of noble contemporaries. As you passed through the chambers--opening one on the other in that pomp of parade introduced with Charles II. from the palaces of France, and retaining its mode till Versailles and the Trianon passed, themselves, out of date--you felt you were in excellent company. What saloons of our day, demeaned to tailed coats and white waistcoats, have that charm of high breeding which speaks out from the canvas of Kneller and Jervis, Vivien and Rigaud? And withal, notwithstanding lace and brocade--the fripperies of artificial costume--still those who give interest or charm to that day look from their portraits like men,--raking or debonair, if you will, never mincing nor feminine. Can we say as much of the portraits of Lawrence? Gaze there on fair Marlborough; what delicate perfection of features, yet how easy in boldness, how serene in the conviction of power! So fair and so tranquil he might have looked through the cannon reek at Ramillies and Blenheim, suggesting to Addison the image of an angel of war. Ah, there, Sir Charles Sedley, the Lovelace of wits! Note that strong jaw and marked brow; do you not recognize the courtier who scorned to ask one favour of the king with whom he lived as an equal, and who stretched forth the right hand of man to hurl from a throne the king who had made his daughter--a countess?

[Sedley was so tenacious of his independence that when his affairs were most embarrassed, he refused all pecuniary aid from Charles II. His bitter sarcasm, in vindication of the part he took in the deposition of James II., who had corrupted his daughter, and made her Countess of Dorchester, is well known. “As the king has made my daughter a countess, the least I can do, in common gratitude, is to assist in making his Majesty’s daughter--a queen!”]

Perhaps, from his childhood thus surrounded by the haunting faces--that spoke of their age as they looked from the walls--that age and those portraits were not without influence on the character of Harley L’Estrange. The whim and the daring, the passion for letters and reverence for genius, the mixture of levity and strength, the polished sauntering indolence, or the elastic readiness of energies once called into action,--all might have found their prototypes in the lives which those portraits rekindled. The deeper sentiment, the more earnest nature, which in Harley L’Estrange were commingled with the attributes common to a former age,--these, indeed, were of his own. Our age so little comprehended, while it colours us from its atmosphere! so full of mysterious and profound emotions, which our ancestors never knew!--will those emotions be understood by our descendants?

In this stately house were now assembled, as Harley’s guests, many of the more important personages whom the slow length of this story has made familiar to the reader. The two candidates for the borough in the True Blue interest,--Audley Egerton and Randal Leslie; and Levy,--chief among the barons to whom modern society grants a seignorie of pillage, which, had a baron of old ever ventured to arrogate, burgess and citizen, socman and bocman, villein and churl, would have burned him alive in his castle; the Duke di Serrano, still fondly clinging to his title of Doctor and pet name of Riccabocca; Jemima, not yet with the airs of a duchess, but robed in very thick silks, as the chrysalis state of a duchess; Violante, too, was there, sadly against her will, and shrinking as much as possible into the retirement of her own chamber. The Countess of Lansmere had deserted her lord, in order to receive the guests of her son; my lord himself, ever bent on being of use in some part of his country, and striving hard to distract his interest from his plague of a borough, had gone down into Cornwall to inquire into the social condition of certain troglodytes who worked in some mines which the earl had lately had the misfortune to wring from the Court of Chancery, after a lawsuit commenced by his grandfather; and a Blue Book, issued in the past session by order of parliament, had especially quoted the troglodytes thus devolved on the earl as bipeds who were in considerable ignorance of the sun, and had never been known to wash their feet since the day when they came into the world,--their world underground, chipped off from the Bottomless Pit!

With the countess came Helen Digby, of course; and Lady Lansmere, who had hitherto been so civilly cold to the wife elect of her son, had, ever since her interview with Harley at Knightsbridge, clung to Helen with almost a caressing fondness. The stern countess was tamed by fear; she felt that her own influence over Harley was gone; she trusted to the influence of Helen--in case of what?--ay, what? It was because the danger was not clear to her that her bold spirit trembled: superstitions, like suspicions, are “as bats among birds, and fly by twilight.” Harley had ridiculed the idea of challenge and strife between Audley and himself; but still Lady Lansmere dreaded the fiery emotions of the last, and the high spirit and austere self-respect which were proverbial to the first. Involuntarily she strengthened her intimacy with Helen. In case her alarm should appear justified, what mediator could be so persuasive in appeasing the angrier passions, as one whom courtship and betrothal sanctified to the gentlest?

On arriving at Lansmere, the countess, however, felt somewhat relieved. Harley had received her, if with a manner less cordial and tender than had hitherto distinguished it, still with easy kindness and calm self-possession. His bearing towards Audley Egerton still more reassured her: it was not marked by an exaggeration of familiarity or friendship, which would at once have excited her apprehensions of some sinister design,--nor; on the other hand, did it betray, by covert sarcasms, an ill-suppressed resentment. It was exactly what, under the circumstances, would have been natural to a man who had received an injury from an intimate friend, which, in generosity or discretion, he resolved to overlook, but which those aware of it could just perceive had cooled or alienated the former affection. Indefatigably occupying himself with all the details of the election, Harley had fair pretext for absenting himself from Audley, who, really looking very ill, and almost worn out, pleaded indisposition as an excuse for dispensing with the fatigues of a personal canvass, and, passing much of his time in his own apartments, left all the preparations for contest to his more active friends. It was not till he had actually arrived at Lansmere that Audley became acquainted with the name of his principal opponent. Richard Avenel! the brother of Nora! rising up from obscurity, thus to stand front to front against him in a contest on which all his fates were cast. Egerton quailed as before an appointed avenger. He would fain have retired from the field; he spoke to Harley.

“How can you support all the painful remembrances which the very name of my antagonist must conjure up?”

“Did you not tell me,” answered Harley, “to strive against such remembrances,--to look on them as sickly dreams? I am prepared to brave them. Can you be more sensitive than I?”

Egerton durst not say more. He avoided all further reference to the subject. The strife raged around him, and he shut himself out from it,--shut himself up in solitude with his own heart. Strife enough there! Once, late at night, he stole forth and repaired to Nora’s grave. He stood there, amidst the rank grass and under the frosty starlight, long, and in profound silence. His whole past life seemed to rise before him; and, when he regained his lonely room, and strove to survey the future, still he could behold only that past and that grave.

In thus declining all active care for an election, to his prospects so important, Audley Egerton was considered to have excuse, not only in the state of his health, but in his sense of dignity. A statesman so eminent, of opinions so well known, of public services so incontestable, might well be spared the personal trouble that falls upon obscurer candidates. And besides, according to current report, and the judgment of the Blue Committee, the return of Mr. Egerton was secure. But though Audley himself was thus indulgently treated, Harley and the Blue Committee took care to inflict double work upon Randal. That active young spirit found ample materials for all its restless energies. Randal Leslie was kept on his legs from sunrise to starlight. There does not exist in the Three Kingdoms a constituency more fatiguing to a candidate than that borough of Lansmere. As soon as you leave the High Street, wherein, according to immemorial usage, the Blue canvasser is first led, in order to put him into spirits for the toils that await him (delectable, propitious, constitutional High Street, in which at least two-thirds of the electors, opulent tradesmen employed at the Park, always vote for “my lord’s man,” and hospitably prepare wine and cakes in their tidy back-parlours!)--as soon as you quit this stronghold of the party, labyrinths of lanes and defiles stretch away into the farthest horizon; level ground is found nowhere; it is all up hill and down hill,--now rough, craggy pavements that blister the feet, and at the very first tread upon which all latent corns shook prophetically; now deep, muddy ruts, into which you sink ankle-deep, oozing slush creeping into the pores, and moistening the way for catarrh, rheum, cough, sore throat, bronchitis, and phthisis; black sewers and drains Acherontian, running before the thresholds, and so filling the homes behind with effluvia, that, while one hand clasps the grimy paw of the voter, the other instinctively guards from typhus and cholera your abhorrent nose. Not in those days had mankind ever heard of a sanitary reform! and, to judge of the slow progress which that reform seems to make, sewer and drain would have been much the same if they had. Scot-and-lot voters were the independent electors of Lansmere, with the additional franchise of Freemen. Universal suffrage could scarcely more efficiently swamp the franchises of men who care a straw what becomes of Great Britain! With all Randal Leslie’s profound diplomacy, all his art in talking over, deceiving, and (to borrow Dick Avenel’s vernacular phrase) “humbugging” educated men, his eloquence fell flat upon minds invulnerable to appeals, whether to State or to Church, to Reform or to Freedom. To catch a Scot-and-lot voter by such frivolous arguments--Randal Leslie might as well have tried to bring down a rhinoceros by a pop-gun charged with split peas! The young man who so firmly believed that “knowledge was power” was greatly disgusted. It was here the ignorance that foiled him. When he got hold of a man with some knowledge, Randal was pretty sure to trick him out of a vote.

Nevertheless, Randal Leslie walked and talked on, with most creditable perseverance. The Blue Committee allowed that he was an excellent canvasser. They conceived a liking for him, mingled with pity. For, though sure of Egerton’s return, they regarded Randal’s as out of the question. He was merely there to keep split votes from going to the opposite side; to serve his patron, the ex-minister; shake the paws, and smell the smells which the ex-minister was too great a man to shake and to smell. But, in point of fact, none of that Blue Committee knew anything of the prospects of the election. Harley received all the reports of each canvass-day. Harley kept the canvass-book locked up from all eyes but his own, or it might be Baron Levy’s, as Audley Egerton’s confidential, if not strictly professional adviser, Baron Levy, the millionaire, had long since retired from all acknowledged professions. Randal, however--close, observant, shrewd--perceived that he himself was much stronger than the Blue Committee believed; and, to his infinite surprise, he owed that strength to Lord L’Estrange’s exertions on his behalf. For though Harley, after the first day, on which he ostentatiously showed himself in the High Street, did not openly canvass with Randal, yet when the reports were brought in to him, and he saw the names of the voters who gave one vote to Audley, and withheld the other from Randal, he would say to Randal, dead beat as that young gentleman was, “Slip out with me, the moment dinner is over, and before you go the round of the public-houses; there are some voters we must get for you to-night.” And sure enough a few kindly words from the popular heir of the Lansmere baronies usually gained over the electors, from whom, though Randal had proved that all England depended on their votes in his favour, Randal would never have extracted more than a “Wu’ll, I shall waute gin the Dauy coomes!” Nor was this all that Harley did for the younger candidate. If it was quite clear that only one vote could be won for the Blues, and the other was pledged to the Yellows, Harley would say, “Then put it down to Mr. Leslie,”--a request the more readily conceded, since Audley Egerton was considered so safe by the Blues, and alone worth a fear by the Yellows.

Thus Randal, who kept a snug little canvass-book of his own, became more and more convinced that he had a better chance than Egerton, even without the furtive aid he expected from Avenel; and he could only account for Harley’s peculiar exertions in his favour by supposing that Harley, unpractised in elections, and deceived by the Blue Committee, believed Egerton to be perfectly safe, and sought, for the honour of the family interest, to secure both the seats.

Randal’s public cares thus deprived him of all opportunity of pressing his courtship on Violante; and, indeed, if ever he did find a moment in which he could steal to her reluctant side, Harley was sure to seize that very moment to send him off to canvass an hesitating freeman, or harangue in some public-house.

Leslie was too acute not to detect some motive hostile to his wooing, however plausibly veiled in the guise of zeal for his election, in this officiousness of Harley’s. But Lord L’Estrange’s manner to Violante was so little like that of a jealous lover, and he was so well aware of her engagement to Randal, that the latter abandoned the suspicion he had before conceived, that Harley was his rival. And he was soon led to believe that Lord L’Estrange had another, more disinterested, and less formidable motive for thus stinting his opportunities to woo the heiress.

“Mr. Leslie,” said Lord L’Estrange, one day, “the duke has confided to me his regret at his daughter’s reluctance to ratify his own promise; and knowing the warm interest I take in her welfare, for his sake and her own; believing, also, that some services to herself, as well as to the father she so loves, give me a certain influence over her inexperienced judgment, he has even requested me to speak a word to her in your behalf!”

“Ah, if you would!” said Randal, surprised.

“You must give me the power to do so. You were obliging enough to volunteer to me the same explanations which you gave to the duke, his satisfaction with which induced him to renew or confirm the promise of his daughter’s hand. Should those explanations content me, as they did him, I hold the duke bound to fulfil his engagement, and I am convinced that his daughter would, in that case, not be inflexible to your suit. But, till such explanations be given, my friendship for the father, and my interest in the child, do not allow me to assist a cause which, however, at present suffers little by delay.”

“Pray, listen at once to those explanations.”

“Nay, Mr. Leslie, I can now only think of the election. As soon as that is over, rely on it you shall have the amplest opportunity to dispel any doubts which your intimacy with Count di Peschiera and Madame di Negra may have suggested.--a propos of the election, here is a list of voters you must see at once in Fish Lane. Don’t lose a moment.”

In the mean while, Richard Avenel and Leonard had taken up their quarters in the hotel appropriated to the candidates for the Yellows; and the canvass on that side was prosecuted with all the vigour which might be expected from operations conducted by Richard Avenel, and backed by the popular feeling.

The rival parties met from time to time in the streets and lanes, in all the pomp of war,--banners streaming, fifes resounding (for bands and colours were essential proofs of public spirit, and indispensable items in a candidate’s bills, in those good old days). When they thus encountered, very distant bows were exchanged between the respective chiefs; but Randal, contriving ever to pass close to Avenel, had ever the satisfaction of perceiving that gentleman’s countenance contracted into a knowing wink, as much as to say, “All right, in spite of this tarnation humbug.”

But now that both parties were fairly in the field, to the private arts of canvassing were added the public arts of oratory. The candidates had to speak, at the close of each day’s canvass, out from wooden boxes, suspended from the windows of their respective hotels, and which looked like dens for the exhibition of wild beasts. They had to speak at meetings of Committees, meetings of electors, go the nightly round of enthusiastic public-houses, and appeal to the sense of an enlightened people through wreaths of smoke and odours of beer.

The alleged indisposition of Audley Egerton had spared him the excitement of oratory, as well as the fatigue of canvassing. The practised debater had limited the display of his talents to a concise, but clear and masterly exposition of his own views on the leading public questions of the day, and the state of parties, which, on the day after his arrival at Lansmere, was delivered at a meeting of his general Committee, in the great room of their hotel, and which was then printed and circulated amongst the voters.

Randal, though he expressed himself with more fluency and self-possession than are usually found in the first attempts of a public speaker, was not effective in addressing an unlettered crowd; for a crowd of this kind is all heart--and we know that Randal Leslie’s heart was as small as heart could be. If he attempted to speak at his own intellectual level, he was so subtle and refining as to be incomprehensible; if he fell into the fatal error--not uncommon to inexperienced orators--of trying to lower himself to the intellectual level of his audience, he was only elaborately stupid. No man can speak too well for a crowd,--as no man can write too well for the stage; but in neither case should he be rhetorical, or case in periods the dry bones of reasoning. It is to the emotions or to the humours that the speaker of a crowd must address himself; his eye must brighten with generous sentiment, or his lip must expand in the play of animated fancy or genial wit. Randal’s voice, too, though pliant and persuasive in private conversation, was thin and poor when strained to catch the ear of a numerous assembly. The falsehood of his nature seemed to come out when he raised the tones which had been drilled into deceit. Men like Randal Leslie may become sharp debaters, admirable special pleaders; they can no more become orators than they can become poets. Educated audiences are essential to them, and the smaller the audience (that is, the more the brain supersedes the action of the heart) the better they can speak.

Dick Avenel was generally very short and very pithy in his addresses. He had two or three favourite topics, which always told. He was a fellow-townsman,--a man who had made his own way in life; he wanted to free his native place from aristocratic usurpation; it was the battle of the electors, not his private cause, etc. He said little against Randal,--“Pity a clever young man should pin his future to two yards of worn-out red tape;” “He had better lay hold of the strong rope, which the People, in compassion to his youth, were willing yet to throw out to save him from sinking,” etc. But as for Audley Egerton, “the gentleman who would not show, who was afraid to meet the electors, who could only find his voice in a hole-and-corner meeting, accustomed all his venal life to dark and nefarious jobs”--Dick, upon that subject, delivered philippics truly Demosthenian. Leonard, on the contrary, never attacked Harley’s friend, Mr. Egerton; but he was merciless against the youth who had filched reputation from John Burley, and whom he knew that Harley despised as heartily as himself. And Randal did not dare to retaliate (though boiling over with indignant rage), for fear of offending Leonard’s uncle. Leonard was unquestionably the popular speaker of the three. Though his temperament was a writer’s, not an orator’s; though he abhorred what he considered the theatrical exhibition of self, which makes what is called “delivery” more effective than ideas; though he had little interest at any time in party politics; though at this time his heart was far away from the Blues and Yellows of Lansmere, sad and forlorn,--yet, forced into action, the eloquence that was natural to his conversation poured itself forth. He had warm blood in his veins; and his dislike to Randal gave poignancy to his wit, and barbed his arguments with impassioned invective. In fact, Leonard could conceive no other motive for Lord L’Estrange’s request to take part in the election than that nobleman’s desire to defeat the man whom they both regarded as an impostor; and this notion was confirmed by some inadvertent expressions which Avenel let fall, and which made Leonard suspect that, if he were not in the field, Avenel would have exerted all his interest to return Randal instead of Egerton. With Dick’s dislike to that statesman Leonard found it impossible to reason; nor, on the other hand, could all Dick’s scoldings or coaxings induce Leonard to divert his siege on Randal to an assault upon the man who, Harley had often said, was dear to him as a brother.

In the mean while, Dick kept the canvass-book of the Yellows as closely as Harley kept that of the Blues; and in despite of many pouting fits and gusts of displeasure, took precisely the same pains for Leonard as Harley took for Randal. There remained, however, apparently unshaken by the efforts on either side, a compact body of about a Hundred and Fifty voters, chiefly freemen. Would they vote Yellow? Would they vote Blue? No one could venture to decide; but they declared that they would all vote the same way. Dick kept his secret “caucuses,” as he called them, constantly nibbling at this phalanx. A hundred and fifty voters!--they had the election in their hands! Never were hands so cordially shaken, so caressingly clung to, so fondly lingered upon! But the votes still stuck as firm to the hands as if a part of the skin, or of the dirt,--which was much the same thing!

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Chapter XX

Whenever Audley joined the other guests of an evening--while Harley was perhaps closeted with Levy and committeemen, and Randal was going the round of the public-houses--the one with whom he chiefly conversed was Violante. He had been struck at first, despite his gloom, less perhaps by her extraordinary beauty than by something in the expression of her countenance which, despite differences in feature and complexion, reminded him of Nora; and when, by his praises of Harley, he drew her attention, and won into her liking, he discovered, perhaps, that the likeness which had thus impressed him came from some similarities in character between the living and the lost one,--the same charming combination of lofty thought and childlike innocence, the same enthusiasm, the same rich exuberance of imagination and feeling. Two souls that resemble each other will give their likeness to the looks from which they beam. On the other hand, the person with whom Harley most familiarly associated, in his rare intervals of leisure, was Helen Digby. One day, Audley Egerton, standing mournfully by the window of the sitting-room appropriated to his private use, saw the two, whom he believed still betrothed, take their way across the park, side by side. “Pray Heaven, that she may atone to him for all!” murmured Audley. “But ah, that it had been Violante! Then I might have felt assured that the Future would efface the Past,--and found the courage to tell him all. And when last night I spoke of what Harley ought to be to England, how like were Violante’s eyes and smile to Nora’s, when Nora listened in delighted sympathy to the hopes of my own young ambition.” With a sigh he turned away, and resolutely sat down to read and reply to the voluminous correspondence which covered the table of the busy public man. For Audley’s return to parliament being considered by his political party as secure, to him were transmitted all the hopes and fears of the large and influential section of it whose members looked up to him as their future chief, and who in that general election (unprecedented for the number of eminent men it was fated to expel from parliament, and the number of new politicians it was fated to send into it) drew their only hopes of regaining their lost power from Audley’s sanguine confidence in the reaction of that Public Opinion which he had hitherto so profoundly comprehended; and it was too clearly seen, that the seasonable adoption of his counsels would have saved the existence and popularity of the late Administration, whose most distinguished members could now scarcely show themselves on the hustings.

Meanwhile Lord L’Estrange led his young companion towards a green hill in the centre of the park, on which stood a circular temple; that commanded a view of the country round for miles. They had walked in silence till they gained the summit of the sloped and gradual ascent; and then, as they stood still, side by side, Harley thus spoke,

“Helen, you know that Leonard is in the town, though I cannot receive him at the Park, since he is standing in opposition to my guests, Egerton and Leslie.”

HELEN.--“But that seems to me so strange. How--how could Leonard do anything that seems hostile to you?”

HARLEY.--“Would his hostility to me lower him in your opinion? If he know that I am his rival, does not rivalry include hate?”

HELEN.--“Oh, Lord L’Estrange, how can you speak thus; how so wrong yourself? Hate--hate to you! and from Leonard Fairfield!”

HARLEY.--“You evade my question. Would his hate or hostility to me affect your sentiments towards him?”

HELEN (looking down).--“I could not force myself to believe in it.”

HARLEY.--“Why?”

HELEN.--“Because it would be so unworthy of him.”

HARLEY.--“Poor child! You have the delusion of your years. You deck a cloud in the hues of the rainbow, and will not believe that its glory is borrowed from the sun of your own fancy. But here, at least, you are not deceived. Leonard obeys but my wishes, and, I believe, against his own will. He has none of man’s noblest attribute, Ambition.”

HELEN.--“No ambition!”

HARLEY.--“It is vanity that stirs the poet to toil,--if toil the wayward chase of his own chimeras can be called. Ambition is a more masculine passion.”

Helen shook her head gently, but made no answer.

HARLEY.--“If I utter a word that profanes one of your delusions, you shake your head and are incredulous. Pause: listen one moment to my counsels,--perhaps the last I may ever obtrude upon you. Lift your eyes; look around. Far as your eye can reach, nay, far beyond the line which the horizon forms in the landscape, stretch the lands of my inheritance. Yonder you see the home in which my forefathers for many generations lived with honour, and died lamented. All these, in the course of nature, might one day have been your own, had you not rejected my proposals. I offered you, it is true, not what is commonly called Love; I offered you sincere esteem, and affections the more durable for their calm. You have not been reared by the world in the low idolatry of rank and wealth; but even romance cannot despise the power of serving others, which rank and wealth bestow. For myself, hitherto indolence, and lately disdain, rob fortune of these nobler attributes. But she who will share my fortune may dispense it so as to atone for my sins of omission. On the other side, grant that there is no bar to your preference for Leonard Fairfield, what does your choice present to you? Those of his kindred with whom you will associate are unrefined and mean. His sole income is derived from precarious labours; the most vulgar of all anxieties--the fear of bread itself for the morrow--must mingle with all your romance, and soon steal from love all its poetry. You think his affection will console you for every sacrifice. Folly! the love of poets is for a mist, a moonbeam, a denizen of air, a phantom that they call an Ideal. They suppose for a moment that they have found that Ideal in Chloe or Phyllis, Helen or a milkmaid. Bah! the first time you come to the poet with the baker’s bill, where flies the Ideal? I knew one more brilliant than Leonard, more exquisitely gifted by nature; that one was a woman; she saw a man hard and cold as that stone at your feet,--a false, hollow, sordid worldling; she made him her idol, beheld in him all that history would not recognize in a Caesar, that mythology would scarcely grant to an Apollo: to him she was the plaything of an hour; she died, and before the year was out he had married for money! I knew another instance,--I speak of myself. I loved before I was your age. Had an angel warned me then, I would have been incredulous as you. How that ended, no matter: but had it not been for that dream of maudlin delirium, I had lived and acted as others of my kind and my sphere,--married from reason and judgment, been now a useful and happy man. Pause, then. Will you still reject me for Leonard Fairfield? For the last time you have the option,--me and all the substance of waking life, Leonard Fairfield and the shadows of a fleeting dream. Speak! You hesitate. Nay, take time to decide.”

HELEN.--“Ah, Lord L’Estrange, you who have felt what it is to love, how can you doubt my answer; how think that I could be so base, so ungrateful as take from yourself what you call the substance of waking life, while my heart was far away, faithful to what you call a dream?”

HARLEY.--“But can you not dispel the dream?”

HELEN (her whole face one flush).--“It was wrong to call it dream! It is the reality of life to me. All things else are as dreams.”

HARLEY (taking her hand and kissing it with respect).--“Helen, you have a noble heart, and I have tempted you in vain. I regret your choice, though I will no more oppose it. I regret it, though I shall never witness your disappointment. As the wife of that man, I shall see and know you no more.”

HELEN.--“Oh, no! do not say that. Why? Wherefore?”

HARLEY (his brows meeting).--“He is the child of fraud and of shame. His father is my foe, and my hate descends to the son. He, too, the son, filches from me--But complaints are idle. When the next few days are over, think of me but as one who abandons all right over your actions, and is a stranger to your future fate. Pooh! dry your tears: so long as you love Leonard or esteem me, rejoice that our paths do not cross.”

He walked on impatiently; but Helen, alarmed and wondering, followed close, took his arm timidly, and sought to soothe him. She felt that he wronged Leonard,--that he knew not how Leonard had yielded all hope when he learned to whom she was affianced. For Leonard’s sake she conquered her bashfulness, and sought to explain. But at her first hesitating, faltered words, Harley, who with great effort suppressed the emotions which swelled within him, abruptly left her side, and plunged into the recesses of thick, farspreading groves, that soon wrapped him from her eye.

While this conversation occurred between Lord L’Estrange and his ward, the soi-disant Riccabocca and Violante were walking slowly through the gardens. The philosopher, unchanged by his brightening prospects,--so far as the outer man was concerned,--still characterized by the red umbrella and the accustomed pipe,--took the way mechanically towards the sunniest quarter of the grounds, now and then glancing tenderly at Violante’s downcast, melancholy face, but not speaking; only, at each glance, there came a brisker cloud from the pipe, as if obedient to a fuller heave of the heart.

At length, in a spot which lay open towards the south, and seemed to collect all the gentlest beams of the November sun, screened from the piercing east by dense evergreens, and flanked from the bleak north by lofty walls, Riccabocca paused and seated himself. Flowers still bloomed on the sward in front, over which still fluttered the wings of those later and more brilliant butterflies that, unseen in the genial days of our English summer, come with autumnal skies, and sport round the mournful steps of the coming winter,--types of those thoughts which visit and delight the contemplation of age, while the current yet glides free from the iron ice, and the leaves yet linger on the boughs; thoughts that associate the memories of the departed summer with messages from suns that shall succeed the winter, and expand colours the most steeped in light and glory, just as the skies through which they gleam are darkening, and the flowers on which they hover fade from the surface of the earth, dropping still seeds, that sink deep out of sight below.

“Daughter,” said Riccabocca, drawing Violante to his side with caressing arm,--“Daughter! Mark how they who turn towards the south can still find the sunny side of the land scape! In all the seasons of life, how much of chill or of warmth depends on our choice of the aspect! Sit down: let us reason.”

Violante sat down passively, clasping her father’s hand in both her own. Reason! harsh word to the ears of Feeling! “You shrink,” resumed Riccabocca, “from even the courtship, even the presence of the suitor in whom my honour binds me to recognize your future bridegroom.”

Violante drew away her hands, and placed them before her eyes shudderingly.

“But” continued Riccabocca, rather peevishly, “this is not listening to reason. I may object to Mr. Leslie, because he has not an adequate rank or fortune to pretend to a daughter of my house; that would be what every one would allow to be reasonable in a father; except, indeed,” added the poor sage, trying hard to be sprightly, and catching hold of a proverb to help him--“except, indeed, those wise enough to recollect that admonitory saying, ‘Casa il figlio quando vuoi, e la figlia quando puoi,’--[Marry your son when you will, your daughter when you can]. Seriously, if I overlook those objections to Mr. Leslie, it is not natural for a young girl to enforce them. What is reason in you is quite another thing from reason in me. Mr. Leslie is young, not ill-looking, has the air of a gentleman, is passionately enamoured of you, and has proved his affection by risking his life against that villanous Peschiera,--that is, he would have risked it had Peschiera not been shipped out of the way. If, then, you will listen to reason, pray what can reason say against Mr. Leslie?”

“Father, I detest him!”

“Cospetto!” persisted Riccabocca, testily, “you have no reason to detest him. If you had any reason, child, I am sure that I should be the last person to dispute it. How can you know your own mind in such a matter? It is not as if you had seen anyone else you could prefer. Not another man of your own years do you even know,--except, indeed, Leonard Fairfield, whom, though I grant he is handsomer, and with more imagination and genius than Mr. Leslie, you still must remember as the boy who worked in my garden. Ah, to be sure, there is Frank Hazeldean; fine lad, but his affections are pre-engaged. In short,” continued the sage, dogmatically, “there is no one else you can, by any possible caprice, prefer to Mr. Leslie; and for a girl who has no one else in her head to talk of detesting a well-looking, well-dressed, clever young man, is--a nonsense--‘Chi lascia il poco per haver l’assai ne l’uno, ne l’altro avera mai’--which may be thus paraphrased,--The young lady who refuses a mortal in the hope of obtaining an angel, loses the one, and will never fall in with the other. So now, having thus shown that the darker side of the question is contrary to reason, let us look to the brighter. In the first place--”

“Oh, Father, Father!” cried Violante, passionately, “you to whom I once came for comfort in every childish sorrow do not talk to me with this cutting levity. See, I lay my head upon your breast, I put my arms around you; and now, can you reason me into misery?”

“Child, child, do not be so wayward. Strive, at least, against a prejudice that you cannot defend. My Violante, my darling, this is no trifle. Here I must cease to be the fond, foolish father, whom you can do what you will with. Here I am Alphonso, Duke di Serrano; for here my honour as noble and my word as man are involved. I, then, but a helpless exile, no hope of fairer prospects before me, trembling like a coward at the wiles of my unscrupulous kinsman, grasping at all chances to save you from his snares,--self offered your hand to Randal Leslie,--offered, promised, pledged it; and now that my fortunes seem assured, my rank in all likelihood restored, my foe crushed, my fears at rest, now, does it become me to retract what I myself have urged? It is not the noble, it is the parvenu, who has only to grow rich, in order to forget those whom in poverty he hailed as his friends. Is it for me to make the poor excuse, never heard on the lips of an Italian prince, ‘that I cannot command the obedience of my child;’ subject myself to the galling answer, ‘Duke of Serrano, you could once command that obedience, when, in exile, penury, and terror you offered me a bride without a dower’? Child, Violante, daughter of ancestors on whose honour never slander set a stain, I call on you to redeem your father’s plighted word.”

“Father, must it be so? Is not even the convent open to me? Nay, look not so coldly on me. If you could but read my heart! And oh! I feel so assured of your own repentance hereafter,--so assured that this man is not what you believe him. I so suspect that he has been playing throughout some secret and perfidious part.”

“Ha!” interrupted Riccabocca, “Harley has perhaps infected you with that notion.”

“No, no! But is not Harley, is not Lord L’Estrange one whose opinion you have cause to esteem? And if he distrusts Mr. Leslie--”

“Let him make good his distrust by such proof as will absolve my word, and I shall share your own joy. I have told him this. I have invited him to make good his suspicions, he puts me off. He cannot do so,” added Riccabocca, in a dejected tone; “Randal has already so well explained all that Harley deemed equivocal. Violante, my name and my honour rest in your hands. Cast them away if you will; I cannot constrain you, and I cannot stoop to implore. Noblesse oblige! With your birth you took its duties. Let them decide between your vain caprice and your father’s solemn remonstrance.”

Assuming a sternness that he was far from feeling, and putting aside his daughter’s arms, the exile walked away. Violante paused a moment, shivered, looked round as if taking a last farewell of joy and peace and hope on earth, and then approaching her father with a firm step, she said, “I never rebelled, Father; I did but entreat. What you say is my law now, as it has ever been; and come what may, never shall you hear complaint or murmur from me. Poor Father, you will suffer more than I shall. Kiss me!”

About an hour afterwards, as the short day closed in, Harley, returning from his solitary wanderings, after he had parted from Helen, encountered on the terrace, before the house, Lady Lansmere and Audley Egerton arm in arm.

Harley had drawn his hat over his brows, and his eyes were fixed on the ground, so that he did not see the group upon which he came unawares, until Audley’s voice startled him from his revery.

“My dear Harley,” said the ex-minister, with a faint smile, “you must not pass us by, now that you have a moment of leisure from the cares of the election. And, Harley, though we are under the same roof, I see you so little.” Lord L’Estrange darted a quick glance towards his mother,--a glance that seemed to say, “You leaning on Audley’s arm! Have you kept your promise?” And the eye that met his own reassured him.

“It is true,” said Harley; “but you, who know that, once engaged in public affairs, one has no heart left for the ties of private life, will excuse me. And this election is so important!”

“And you, Mr. Egerton,” said Lady Lansmere, “whom the election most concerns, seem privileged to be the only one who appears indifferent to success.”

“Ay; but you are not indifferent?” said Lord L’Estrange, abruptly.

“No. How can I be so, when my whole future career may depend on it?”

Harley drew Egerton aside. “There is one voter you ought at least to call upon and thank. He cannot be made to comprehend that, for the sake of any relation, even for the sake of his own son, he is to vote against the Blues,--against you; I mean, of course, Nora’s father, John Avenel. His vote and his son-in-law’s gained your majority at your first election.”

EGERTON.--“Call on John Avenel! Have you called?”

HARLEY (calmly).--“Yes. Poor old man, his mind has been affected ever since Nora’s death. But your name as the candidate for the borough at that time,--the successful candidate for whose triumph the joy-bells chimed with her funeral knell,--your name brings up her memory; and he talks in a breath of her and of you. Come, let us walk together to his house; it is close by the Park Lodge.”

The drops stood on Audley’s brow! He fixed his dark handsome eyes, in mournful amaze, upon Harley’s tranquil face.

“Harley, at last, then, you have forgotten the Past.”

“No; but the Present is more imperious. All my efforts are needed to requite your friendship. You stand against her brother,--yet her father votes for you. And her mother says to her son, ‘Let the old man alone. Conscience is all that is well alive in him; and he thinks if he were to vote against the Blues, he would sin against honour.’ ‘An electioneering prejudice,’ some sceptics would say. But you must be touched by this trait of human nature,--in her father, too,--you, Audley Egerton, who are the soul of honour. What ails you?”

EGERTON.--“Nothing; a spasm at the heart; my old complaint. Well, I will call on the poor man later, but not now,--not with you. Nay, nay, I will not,--I cannot. Harley, just as you joined us, I was talking to your mother.”

HARLEY.--“Ay, and what of?”

EGERTON.--“Yourself. I saw you from my windows walking with your betrothed. Afterwards I observed her coming home alone; and by the glimpse I caught of her gentle countenance, it seemed sad. Harley, do you deceive us?”

HARLEY.--“Deceive! I! How?”

EGERTON.--“DO you really feel that your intended marriage will bestow on you the happiness, which is my prayer, as it must be your mother’s?”

HARLEY.--“Happiness, I hoped so. But perhaps--”

EGERTON.--“Perhaps what?”

HARLEY.--“Perhaps the marriage may not take place. Perhaps I have a rival; not an open one,--a secret, stealthy wooer, in one, too, whom I have loved, served, trusted. Question me not now. Such instances of treachery make one learn more how to prize a friendship honest, devoted, faithful as your own, Audley Egerton. But here comes your protege, released awhile from his canvass, and your confidential adviser, Baron Levy. He accompanied Randal through the town to-day. So anxious is he to see that that young man does not play false, and regard his own interest before yours! Would that surprise you?”

EGERTON.--“You are too severe upon Randal Leslie. He is ambitious, worldly, has no surplus of affection at the command of his heart--”

HARLEY.--“Is it Randal Leslie you describe?”

EGERTON (with a languid smile).--“Yes, you see I do not flatter. But he is born and reared a gentleman; as such he would scarcely do anything mean. And, after all, it is with me that he must rise or fall. His very intellect must tell him that. But again I ask, do not strive to prepossess me against him. I am a man who could have loved a son. I have none. Randal, such as he is, is a sort of son. He carries on my projects and my interest in the world of men beyond the goal of the tomb.”

Audley turned kindly to Randal.

“Well, Leslie, what report of the canvass?”

“Levy has the book, sir. I think we have gained ten fresh votes for you, and perhaps seven for me.”

“Let me rid you of your book, Baron Levy,” said Harley. Just at this time Riccabocca and Violante approached the house, both silent. The Italian caught sight of Randal, and made him a sign to join them. The young lover glanced fearfully towards Harley, and then with alacrity bounded forward, and was soon at Violante’s side. But scarce had Harley, surprised by Leslie’s sudden disappearance, remarked the cause, than with equal abruptness he abandoned the whispered conference he had commenced with Levy, and hastening to Randal, laid hand on the young man’s shoulder, exclaiming, “Ten thousand pardons to all three! But I cannot allow this waste of time, Mr. Leslie. You have yet an hour before it grows dark. There are three out-voters six miles off, influential farmers, whom you must canvass in person with my father’s steward. Hasten to the stables; choose your own horse. To saddle, to saddle! Baron Levy, go and order my Lord’s steward, Mr. Smart, to join Mr. Leslie at the stables; then come back to me,--quick. What! loitering still, Mr. Leslie! You will make me throw up your whole cause in disgust at your indolence and apathy.”

Alarmed at this threat, Randal lifted his accusing eyes to heaven and withdrew.

Meanwhile Audley had drawn close to Lady Lansmere, who was leaning, in thought, over the balustrade of the terrace. “Do you note,” said Audley, whispering, “how Harley sprang forward when the fair Italian came in sight? Trust me, I was right. I know little of the young lady, but I have conversed with her. I have gazed on the changes in her face. If Harley ever love again, and if ever love influence and exalt his mind, wish with me that his choice may yet fall where I believe that his heart inclines it.”

LADY LANSMERE.--“Ah, that it were so! Helen, I own, is charming; but--but--Violante is equal in birth! Are you not aware that she is engaged to your young friend Mr. Leslie?”

AUDLEY.--“Randal told me so; but I cannot believe it. In fact, I have taken occasion to sound that fair creature’s inclinations, and if I know aught of women, her heart is not with Randal. I cannot believe her to be one whose affections are so weak as to be easily constrained; nor can I suppose that her father could desire to enforce a marriage that is almost a misalliance. Randal must deceive himself; and from something Harley just let fall, in our painful but brief conversation, I suspect that his engagement with Miss Digby is broken off. He promises to tell me more later. Yes,” continued Audley, mournfully, “observe Violante’s countenance, with its ever-varying play; listen to her voice, to which feeling seems to give the expressive music, and tell me whether you are not sometimes reminded of--of--In one word, there is one who, even without rank or fortune, would be worthy to replace the image of Leonora, and be to Harley--what Leonora could not; for sure I am that Violante loves him.”

Harley, meanwhile, had lingered with Riccabocca and Violante, speaking but on indifferent subjects, obtaining short answers from the first, and none from the last, when the sage drew him a little aside, and whispered, “She has consented to sacrifice herself to my sense of honour. But, O Harley! if she be unhappy, it will break my heart. Either you must give me sufficient proof of Randal’s unworthiness, to absolve me from my promise, or I must again entreat, you to try and conciliate the poor child in his favour. All you say has weight with her; she respects you as--a second father.”

Harley did not seem peculiarly flattered by that last assurance; but he was relieved from an immediate answer by the appearance of a man who came from the direction of the stables, and whose dress, covered with dust, and travel-stained, seemed like that of a foreign courier. No sooner did Harley catch sight of this person, than he sprang forward, and accosted him briefly and rapidly.

“You have been quick; I did not expect you so soon. You discovered the trace? You gave my letter--”

“And have brought back the answer, my Lord,” replied the man, taking the letter from a leathern pouch at his side. Harley hastily broke open the seal, and glanced over the contents, which were comprised in a few lines.

“Good. Say not whence you came. Do not wait here; return at once to London.”

Harley’s face seemed so unusually cheerful as he rejoined the Italians, that the duke exclaimed,--

“A despatch from Vienna? My recall!”

“From Vienna, my dear friend! Not possible yet. I cannot calculate on hearing from the prince till a day or two before the close of this election. But you wish me to speak to Violante. Join my mother yonder. What can she be saying to Mr. Egerton? I will address a few words apart to your fair daughter, that may at least prove the interest in her fate taken by--her second father.”

“Kindest of friends!” said the unsuspecting pupil of Machiavelli, and he walked towards the terrace. Violante was about to follow. Harley detained her.

“Do not go till you have thanked me; for you are not the noble Violante for whom I take you, unless you acknowledge gratitude to any one who delivers you from the presence of an admirer in Mr. Randal Leslie.”

VIOLANTE.--“Ought I to hear this of one whom--whom--”

HARLEY.--“One whom your father obstinately persists in obtruding on your repugnance? Yet, O dear child, you who, when almost an infant, ere yet you knew what snares and pitfalls, for all who trust to another, lie under the sward at our feet, even when decked the fairest with the flowers of spring; you who put your small hands around my neck, and murmured in your musical voice, ‘Save us,--save my father,’--you at least I will not forsake, in a peril worse than that which menaced you then,--a peril which affrights you more than that which threatened you in the snares of Peschiera. Randal Leslie may thrive in his meaner objects of ambition; those I fling to him in scorn: but you! the presuming varlet!” Harley paused a moment, half stifled with indignation. He then resumed, calmly, “Trust to me, and fear not. I will rescue this hand from the profanation of Randal Leslie’s touch; and then farewell, for life, to every soft emotion. Before me expands the welcome solitude. The innocent saved, the honest righted, the perfidious stricken by a just retribution,--and then--what then? Why, at least I shall have studied Machiavelli with more effect than your wise father; and I shall lay him aside, needing no philosophy to teach me never again to be deceived.” His brow darkened; he turned abruptly away, leaving Violante lost in amaze, fear, and a delight, vague, yet more vividly felt than all.

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Chapter XXI

That night, after the labours of the day, Randal had gained the sanctuary of his own room, and seated himself at his table, to prepare the heads of the critical speech he would have now very soon to deliver on the day of nomination,--critical speech when, in the presence of foes and friends, reporters from London, and amidst all the jarring interests that he sought to weave into the sole self-interest of Randal Leslie, he would be called upon to make the formal exposition of his political opinions. Randal Leslie, indeed, was not one of those speakers whom either modesty, fastidiousness, or conscientious desire of truth predisposes towards the labour of written composition. He had too much cleverness to be in want of fluent period or ready commonplace,--the ordinary materials of oratorical impromptu; too little taste for the Beautiful to study what graces of diction will best adorn a noble sentiment; too obtuse a conscience to care if the popular argument were purified from the dross which the careless flow of a speech wholly extemporaneous rarely fails to leave around it. But this was no ordinary occasion. Elaborate study here was requisite, not for the orator, but the hypocrite. Hard task, to please the Blues, and not offend the Yellows; appear to side with Audley Egerton, yet insinuate sympathy with Dick Avenel; confront, with polite smile, the younger opponent whose words had lodged arrows in his vanity, which rankled the more gallingly because they had raised the skin of his conscience.

He had dipped his pen into the ink and smoothed the paper before him, when a knock was heard at the door.

“Come in,” said he, impatiently. Levy entered saunteringly.

“I am come to talk over matters with you, mon cher,” said the baron, throwing himself on the sofa. “And, first, I wish you joy of your prospects of success.”

Randal postponed his meditated composition with a quick sigh, drew his chair towards the sofa, and lowered his voice into a whisper. “You think with me, that the chance of my success--is good?”

“Chance! Why, it is a rubber of whist, in which your partner gives you all the winnings, and in which the adversary is almost sure to revoke. Either Avenel or his nephew, it is true, must come in; but not both. Two parvenus aspiring to make a family seat of an earl’s borough! Bah! too absurd!”

“I hear from Riccabocca (or rather the Duke di Serrano) that this same young Fairfield is greatly indebted to the kindness of Lord L’Estrange. Very odd that he should stand against the Lansmere interest.”

“Ambition, mon cher. You yourself are under some obligations to Mr. Egerton. Yet, in reality, he has more to apprehend from you than from Mr. Fairfield.”

“I disown obligations to Mr. Egerton. And if the electors prefer me to him (whom, by-the-by, they once burned in effigy), it is no fault of mine: the fault, if any, will rest with his own dearest friend, L’Estrange. I do not understand how a man of such clear sense as L’Estrange undoubtedly possesses, should be risking Egerton’s election in his zeal for mine. Nor do his formal courtesies to myself deceive me. He has even implied that he suspects me of connivance with Peschiera’s schemes on Violante. But those suspicions he cannot support. For of course, Levy, you would not betray me--”

“I! What possible interest could I serve in that?”

“None that I can discover, certainly,” said Randal, relaxing into a smile. “And when I get into parliament, aided by the social position which my marriage will give me, I shall have so many ways to serve you. No, it is certainly your interest not to betray me; and I shall count on you as a witness, if a witness can be required.”

“Count on me, certainly, my dear fellow,” said the baron. “And I suppose there will be no witness the other way. Done for eternally is my poor dear friend Peschiera, whose cigars, by-the-by, were matchless;--I wonder if there will be any for sale. And if he were not so done for, it is not you, it is L’Estrange, that he would be tempted to do for!”

“We may blot Peschiera out of the map of the future,” rejoined Randal. “Men from whom henceforth we have nothing to hope or to fear are to us as the races before the deluge.”

“Fine remark,” quoth the baron, admiringly. “Peschiera, though not without brains, was a complete failure. And when the failure of one I have tried to serve is complete, the rule I have adopted through life is to give him up altogether.”

“Of course,” said Randal.

“Of course,” echoed the baron. “On the other hand, you know that I like pushing forward young men of mark and promise. You really are amazingly clever; but how comes it you don’t speak better? Do you know, I doubt whether you will do in the House of Commons all that I expected from your address and readiness in private life.”

“Because I cannot talk trash vulgar enough for a mob? Pooh! I shall succeed wherever knowledge is really power. Besides, you must allow for my infernal position. You know, after all, that Avenel, if he can only return himself or his nephew, still holds in his hands the choice of the candidate upon our side. I cannot attack him; I cannot attack his insolent nephew--”

“Insolent!--not that, but bitterly eloquent. He hits you hard. You are no match for him, Randal, before a popular audience; though, en petit comite, the devil himself were hardly a match for you. But now to a somewhat more serious point. Your election you will win, your bride is promised to you; but the old Leslie lands, in the present possession of Squire Thornhill, you have not gained,--and your chance of gaining them is in great jeopardy. I did not like to tell you this morning,--it would have spoiled your temper for canvassing; but I have received a letter from Thornhill himself. He has had an offer for the property, which is only L1000 short of what he asks. A city alderman, called Jobson, is the bidder; a man, it seems, of large means and few words. The alderman has fixed the date on which he must have a definite answer; and that date falls on the --th, two days after that fixed for the poll at Lansmere. The brute declares he will close with another investment, if Thornhill does not then come in to his terms. Now, as Thornhill will accept these terms unless I can positively promise him better, and as those funds on which you calculated (had the marriage of Peschiera with Violante, and Frank Hazeldean with Madame di Negra, taken place) fail you, I see no hope for your being in time with the money,--and the old lands of the Leslies must yield their rents to a Jobson.”

“I care for nothing on earth like those old lands of my forefathers,” said Randal, with unusual vehemence; “I reverence so little amongst the living, and I do reverence the dead. And my marriage will take place so soon; and the dower would so amply cover the paltry advance required.”

“Yes; but the mere prospect of a marriage to the daughter of a man whose lands are still sequestered would be no security to a money-lender.”

“Surely,” said Randal, “you, who once offered to assist me when my fortunes were more precarious, might now accommodate me with this loan, as a friend, and keep the title-deeds of the estate as--”

“As a money-lender,” added the baron, laughing pleasantly. “No, mon cher, I will still lend you half the sum required in advance, but the other half is more than I can afford as friend, or hazard as money-lender; and it would damage my character,--be out of all rule,--if, the estates falling by your default of payment into my own hands, I should appear to be the real purchaser of the property of my own distressed client. But, now I think of it, did not Squire Hazeldean promise you his assistance in this matter?”

“He did so,” answered Randal, “as soon as the marriage between Frank and Madame di Negra was off his mind. I meant to cross over to Hazeldean immediately after the election. How can I leave the place till then?”

“If you do, your election is lost. But why not write to the squire?”

“It is against my maxim to write where I can speak. However, there is no option; I will write at once. Meanwhile, communicate with Thornhill; keep up his hopes; and be sure, at least, that he does not close with this greedy alderman before the day fixed for decision.”

“I have done all that already, and my letter is gone. Now, do your part: and if you write as cleverly as you talk, you would coax the money out from a stonier heart than poor Mr. Hazeldean’s. I leave you now; good-night.”

Levy took up his candlestick, nodded, yawned, and went. Randal still suspended the completion of his speech, and indited the following epistle:--

MY DEAR MR. HAZELDEAN,--I wrote to you a few hasty lines on leaving town, to inform you that the match you so dreaded was broken off, and proposing to defer particulars till I could visit your kind and hospitable roof, which I trusted to do for a few hours during my stay at Lansmere, since it is not a day’s journey hence to Hazeldean. But I did not calculate on finding so sharp a contest. In no election throughout the kingdom do I believe that a more notable triumph, or a more stunning defeat, for the great landed interest can occur. For in this town--so dependent on agriculture-- we are opposed by a low and sordid manufacturer, of the most revolutionary notions, who has, moreover, the audacity to force his own nephew--that very boy whom I chastised for impertinence on your village green, son of a common carpenter--actually the audacity, I say, to attempt to force this peasant of a nephew, as well as himself, into the representation of Lansmere, against the earl’s interest, against your distinguished brother,--of myself I say nothing. You should hear the language in which these two men indulge against all your family! If we are beaten by such persons in a borough supposed to be so loyal as Lansmere, every one with a stake in the country may tremble at such a prognostic of the ruin that must await not only our old English Constitution, but the existence of property itself. I need not say that on such an occasion I cannot spare myself. Mr. Egerton is ill too. All the fatigue of the canvass devolves on me. I feel, my dear and revered friend, that I am a genuine Hazeldean, fighting your battle; and that thought carries me through all. I cannot, therefore, come to you till the election is over; and meanwhile you, and my dear Mrs. Hazeldean, must be anxious to know more about the affair that so preyed on both your hearts than I have yet informed you, or can well trust to a letter. Be assured, however, that the worst is over; the lady has gone abroad. I earnestly entreated Frank (who showed me Mrs. Hazeldean’s most pathetic letter to him) to hasten at once to the Hall and relieve your minds. Unfortunately he would not be ruled by me, but talked of going abroad too--not, I trust (nay, I feel assured), in pursuit of Madame di Negra; but still--In short, I should be so glad to see you, and talk over the whole. Could you not come hither--I pray do. And now, at the risk of your thinking that in this I am only consulting my own interest (but no--your noble English heart will never so misiudge me!), I will add with homely frankness, that if you could accommodate me immediately with the loan you not long since so generously offered, you would save those lands once in my family from passing away from us forever. A city alderman--one Jobson--is meanly taking advantage of Thornhill’s necessities, and driving a hard bargain for those lands. He has fixed the --th inst. for Thornhill’s answer, and Levy (who is here assisting Mr. Egerton’s election) informs me that Thornhill will accept his offer, unless I am provided with L10,000 beforehand; the other L10,000, to complete the advance required, Levy will lend me. Do not be surprised at the usurer’s liberality; he knows that I am about shortly to marry a very great heiress (you will be pleased when you learn whom, and will then be able to account for my indifference to Miss Sticktorights), and her dower will amply serve to repay his loan and your own, if I may trust to your generous affection for the grandson of a Hazeldean! I have the less scruple in this appeal to you, for I know bow it would grieve you that a Jobson, who perhaps never knew a grandmother, should foist your own kinsman from the lands of his fathers. Of one thing I am convinced,--we squires and sons of squires must make common cause against those great moneyed capitalists, or they will buy us all out in a few generations. The old race of country gentlemen is already much diminished by the grasping cupidity of such leviathans; and if the race be once extinct, what will become of the boast and strength of England?

Yours, my dear Mr. Hazeldean, with most affectionate and grateful respect,

RANDAL LESLIE.

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Chapter XXII

Nothing to Leonard could as yet be more distasteful or oppressive than his share in this memorable election. In the first place, it chafed the secret sores of his heart to be compelled to resume the name of Fairfeld, which was a tacit disavowal of his birth. It had been such delight to him that the same letters which formed the name of Nora should weave also that name of Oran, to which he had given distinction, which he had associated with all his nobler toils, and all his hopes of enduring fame,--a mystic link between his own career and his mother’s obscurer genius. It seemed to him as if it were rendering to her the honours accorded to himself,--subtle and delicate fancy of the affections, of which only poets would be capable, but which others than poets may perhaps comprehend! That earlier name of Fairfield was connected in his memory with all the ruder employments, the meaner trials of his boyhood; the name of Oran, with poetry and fame. It was his title in the ideal world, amongst all fair shapes and spirits. In receiving the old appellation, the practical world, with its bitterness and strife, returned to him as at the utterance of a spell. But in coming to Lansmere he had no choice. To say nothing of Dick, and Dick’s parents with whom his secret would not be safe, Randal Leslie knew that he had gone by the name of Fairfield,--knew his supposed parentage, and would be sure to proclaim them. How account for the latter name without setting curiosity to decipher the anagram it involved, and perhaps guiding suspicion to his birth from Nora, to the injury of her memory, yet preserved from stain?

His feelings as connected with Nora--sharpened and deepened as they all had been by his discovery of her painful narrative-were embittered still more by coming in contact with her parents. Old John was in the same helpless state of mind and body as before,--neither worse nor better; but waking up at intervals with vivid gleams of interest in the election at the wave of a blue banner, at the cry of “Blue forever!” It was the old broken-clown charger, who, dozing in the meadows, starts at the roll of the drum. No persuasions Dick could employ would induce his father to promise to vote even one Yellow. You might as well have expected the old Roman, with his monomaniac cry against Carthage, to have voted for choosing Carthaginians for consuls. But poor John, nevertheless, was not only very civil, but very humble to Dick,--“very happy to oblige the gentleman.”

“Your own son!” bawled Dick; “and here is your own grandson.”

“Very happy to serve you both; but you see you are the wrong colour.”

Then as he gazed at Leonard, the old man approached him with trembling knees, stroked his hair, looked into his face, piteously. “Be thee my grandson?” he faltered. “Wife, wife, Nora had no son, had she? My memory begins to fail me, sir; pray excuse it; but you have a look about the eyes that--” Old John began to weep, and his wife led him away.

“Don’t come again,” she said to Leonard, harshly, when she returned. “He’ll not sleep all night now.” And then, observing that the tears stood in Leonard’s eyes, she added, in softened tones, “I am glad to see you well and thriving, and to hear that you have been of great service to my son Richard, who is a credit and an honour to the family, though poor John cannot vote for him or for you against his conscience; and he should not be asked,” she added, firing up; “and it is a sin to ask it, and he so old, and no one to defend him but me. But defend him I will while I have life!”

The poet recognized woman’s brave, loving, wife-like heart here, and would have embraced the stern grandmother, if she had not drawn back from him; and, as she turned towards the room to which she had led her husband, she said over her shoulder,--

“I’m not so unkind as I seem, boy; but it is better for you, and for all, that you should not come to this house again,--better that you had not come into the town.”

“Fie, Mother!” said Dick, seeing that Leonard, bending his head, silently walked from the room. “You should be prouder of your grandson than you are of me.”

“Prouder of him who may shame us all yet?”

“What do you mean?”

But Mrs. Avenel shook her head and vanished.

“Never mind her, poor old soul,” said Dick, as he joined Leonard at the threshold; “she always had her tempers. And since there is no vote to be got in this house, and one can’t set a caucus on one’s own father,--at least in this extraordinary rotten and prejudiced old country, which is quite in its dotage,--we’ll not come here to be snubbed any more. Bless their old hearts, nevertheless!”

Leonard’s acute sensibility in all that concerned his birth, deeply wounded by Mrs. Avenel’s allusions, which he comprehended better than his uncle did, was also kept on the edge by the suspense to which he was condemned by Harley’s continued silence as to the papers confided to that nobleman. It seemed to Leonard almost unaccountable that Harley should have read those papers, be in the same town with himself, and yet volunteer no communication. At length he wrote a few lines to Lord L’Estrange, bringing the matter that concerned him so deeply before Harley’s recollection, and suggesting his own earnest interest in any information that could supply the gaps and omissions of the desultory fragments. Harley, in replying to this note, said, with apparent reason, “that it would require a long personal interview to discuss the subject referred to, and that such an interview, in the thick of the contest between himself and a candidate opposed to the Lansmere party, would be sure to get wind, be ascribed to political intrigues, be impossible otherwise to explain, and embarrass all the interests confided to their respective charge. That for the rest, he had not been unmindful of Leonard’s anxiety, which must now mainly be to see justice done to the dead parent, and learn the name, station, and character of the parent yet surviving. And in this Harley trusted to assist him as soon as the close of the poll would present a suitable occasion.” The letter was unlike Harley’s former cordial tone: it was hard and dry. Leonard respected L’Estrange too much to own to himself that it was unfeeling. With all his rich generosity of nature, he sought excuses for what he declined to blame. Perhaps something in Helen’s manner or words had led Harley to suspect that she still cherished too tender an interest in the companion of her childhood; perhaps under this coldness of expression there lurked the burning anguish of jealousy. And, oh, Leonard so well understood, and could so nobly compassionate even in his prosperous rival, that torture of the most agonizing of human passions, in which all our reasonings follow the distorted writhings of our pain.

And Leonard himself, amidst his other causes of disquiet, was at once so gnawed and so humbled by his own jealousy. Helen, he knew, was still under the same roof as Harley. They, the betrothed, could see each other daily, hourly. He would soon hear of their marriage. She would be borne afar from the very sphere of his existence,--carried into a loftier region, accessible only to his dreams. And yet to be jealous of one to whom both Helen and himself were under such obligations debased him in his own esteem,--jealousy here was so like ingratitude. But for Harley, what could have become of Helen, left to his boyish charge,--he who had himself been compelled, in despair, to think of sending her from his side, to be reared into smileless youth in his mother’s humble cottage, while he faced famine alone, gazing on the terrible river, from the bridge by which he had once begged for very alms,--begged of that Audley Egerton to whom he was now opposed as an equal; or flying from the fiend that glared at him under the lids of the haunting Chatterton? No, jealousy here was more than agony,--it was degradation, it was crime! But, all! if Helen were happy in these splendid nuptials! Was he sure even of that consolation? Bitter was the thought either way,--that she should wholly forget him, in happiness from which he stood excluded as a thing of sin; or sinfully herself remember, and be wretched!

With that healthful strength of will which is more often proportioned to the susceptibility of feeling than the world suppose, the young man at last wrenched himself for awhile from the iron that had entered into his soul, and forced his thoughts to seek relief in the very objects from which they otherwise would have the most loathingly recoiled. He aroused his imagination to befriend his reason; he strove to divine some motive not explained by Harley, not to be referred to the mere defeat, by counter-scheme, of the scheming Randal, nor even to be solved by any service to Audley Egerton, which Harley might evolve from the complicated meshes of the election,--some motive that could more interest his own heart in the contest, and connect itself with Harley’s promised aid in clearing up the mystery of his parentage. Nora’s memoir had clearly hinted that his father was of rank and station far beyond her own. She had thrown the glow of her glorious fancies over the ambition and the destined career of the lover in whom she had merged her ambition as poetess, and her career as woman. Possibly the father might be more disposed to own and to welcome the son, if the son could achieve an opening, and give promise of worth, in that grand world of public life in which alone reputation takes precedence of rank. Possibly, too, if the son thus succeeded, and became one whom a proud father could with pride acknowledge, possibly he might not only secure a father’s welcome, but vindicate a mother’s name. This marriage, which Nora darkly hinted she had been led to believe was fraudulent, might, after all, have been legal,--the ceremony concealed, even till now, by worldly shame at disparity of rank. But if the son could make good his own footing--there where rank itself owned its chiefs in talent--that shame might vanish. These suppositions were not improbable; nor were they uncongenial to Leonard’s experience of Harley’s delicate benignity of purpose. Here, too, the image of Helen allied itself with those of his parents, to support his courage and influence his new ambition. True, that she was lost to him forever. No worldly success, no political honours, could now restore her to his side. But she might hear him named with respect in those circles in which alone she would hereafter move, and in which parliamentary reputation ranks higher than literary fame. And perhaps in future years, when love, retaining its tenderness, was purified from its passion, they might thus meet as friends. He might without a pang take her children on his knees, and say, perhaps in their old age, when he had climbed to a social equality even with her high-born lord, “It was the hope to regain the privilege bestowed on our childhood, that strengthened me to seek distinction when you and happiness forsook my youth.” Thus regarded, the election, which had before seemed to him so poor and vulgar an exhibition of vehement passions for petty objects, with its trumpery of banners and its discord of trumpets, suddenly grew into vivid interest, and assumed dignity and importance. It is ever thus with all mortal strife. In proportion as it possesses, or is void of, the diviner something that quickens the pulse of the heart, and elevates the wing of the imagination, it presents a mockery to the philosopher, or an inspiration to the bard. Feel that something, and no contest is mean! Feel it not, and, like Byron, you may class with the slaughter of Cannae that field which, at Waterloo, restored the landmarks of nations; or may jeer with Juvenal at the dust of Hannibal, because he sought to deliver Carthage from ruin, and free a world from Rome.

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Chapter XXIII

Once then, grappling manfully with the task he had undertaken, and constraining himself to look on what Riccabocca would have called “the southern side of things,” whatever there was really great in principle or honourable to human nature, deep below the sordid details and pitiful interests apparent on the face of the agitated current, came clear to his vision. The ardour of those around him began to be contagious: the generous devotion to some cause apart from self, which pervades an election, and to which the poorest voter will often render sacrifices that may be called sublime; the warm personal affection which community of zeal creates for the defender of beloved opinions,--all concurred to dispel that indifference to party politics, and counteract that disgust of their baser leaven, which the young poet had first conceived. He even began to look with complacency, for itself, on a career of toil and honours strange to his habitual labours and intellectual ambition. He threw the poetry of idea within him (as poets ever do) into the prose of action to which he was hurried forward. He no longer opposed Dick Avenel when that gentleman represented how detrimental it would be to his business at Screwstown if he devoted to his country the time and the acumen required by his mill and its steamengine; and how desirable it would be, on all accounts, that Leonard Fairfield should become the parliamentary representative of the Avenels. “If, therefore,” said Dick, “two of us cannot come in, and one must retire, leave it to me to arrange with the Committee that you shall be the one to persist. Oh, never fear but what all scruples of honour shall be satisfied. I would not for the sake of the Avenels have a word said against their representative.”

“But,” answered Leonard, “if I grant this, I fear that you have some intention of suffering the votes that your resignation would release to favour Leslie at the expense of Egerton.”

“What the deuce is Egerton to you?”

“Nothing, except through my gratitude to his friend Lord L’Estrange.”

“Pooh! I will tell you a secret. Levy informs me privately that L’Estrange will be well satisfied if the choice of Lansmere fall upon Leslie instead of Egerton; and I think I convinced my Lord--for I saw him in London--that Egerton would have no chance, though Leslie might.”

“I must think that Lord L’Estrange would resist to the utmost any attempt to prefer Leslie--whom he despises--to Egerton, whom he honours. And, so thinking, I too would resist it, as you may judge by the speeches which have so provoked your displeasure.”

“Let us cut short a yarn of talk which, when it comes to likings and dislikings, might last to almighty crack: I’ll ask you to do nothing that Lord L’Estrange does not sanction. Will that satisfy you?”

“Certainly, provided I am assured of the sanction.”

And now, the important day preceding the poll, the day in which the candidates were to be formally nominated, and meet each other in all the ceremony of declared rivalship, dawned at last. The town-hall was the place selected for the occasion; and before sunrise, all the streets were resonant with music, and gay with banners.

Audley Egerton felt that he could not--without incurring some just sarcasm on his dread to face the constituency he had formerly represented, and by the malcontents of which he had been burned in effigy--absent himself from the townhall, as he had done from balcony and hostel. Painful as it was to confront Nora’s brother, and wrestle in public against all the secret memories that knit the strife of the present contest with the anguish that recalled the first,--still the thing must be done; and it was the English habit of his life to face with courage whatever he had to do.

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Chapter XXIV

The chiefs of the Blue party went in state from Lansmere Park; the two candidates in open carriages, each attended with his proposer and seconder. Other carriages were devoted to Harley and Levy, and the principal members of the Committee. Riccabocca was seized with a fit of melancholy or cynicism, and declined to join the procession. But just before they started, as all were assembling without the front door, the postman arrived with his welcome bag. There were letters for Harley, some for Levy, many for Egerton, one for Randal Leslie.

Levy, soon hurrying over his own correspondence, looked, in the familiar freedom wherewith he usually treated his particular friends, over Randal’s shoulder.

“From the squire?” said he. “Ah, he has written at last! What made him delay so long? Hope he relieves your mind?”

“Yes,” cried Randal, giving way to a joy that rarely lighted up his close and secret countenance,--“yes, he does not write from Hazeldean,--not there when my letter arrived, in London, could not rest at the Hall,--the place reminded him too much of Frank;--went again to town, on the receipt of my first letter concerning the rupture of the marriage, to see after his son, and take up some money to pay off his post-obit. Read what he says:--

“‘So, while I was about a mortgage--never did I guess that I should be the man to encumber the Hazeldean estate--I thought I might as well add L20,000 as L10,000 to the total. Why should you be indebted at all to that Baron Levy? Don’t have dealings with money- lenders. Your grandmother was a Hazeldean; and from a Hazeldean you shall have the whole sum required in advance for those Rood lands,-- good light soil some of them. As to repayment, we’ll talk of that later. If Frank and I come together again, as we did of old, why, my estates will be his some day, and he’ll not grudge the mortgage, so fond as he always was of you; and if we don’t come together, what do I care for hundreds or thousands, either more or less? So I shall be down at Lansmere the day after to-morrow, just in the thick of your polling. Beat the manufacturer, my boy, and stick up for the land. Tell Levy to have all ready. I shall bring the money down in good bank-notes, and a brace of pistols in my coat pocket to take care of them in ease robbers get scent of the notes and attack me on the road, as they did my grandfather sixty years ago, come next Michaelmas. A Lansmere election puts one in mind of pistols. I once fought a duel with an officer in his Majesty’s service, R.N., and had a ball lodged in my right shoulder, on account of an election at Lansmere; but I have forgiven Audley his share in that transaction. Remember me to him kindly. Don’t get into a duel yourself; but I suppose manufacturers don’t fight,--not that I blame them for that--far from it.’”

The letter then ran on to express surprise, and hazard conjecture, as to the wealthy marriage which Randal had announced as a pleasing surprise to the squire.

“Well,” said Levy, returning the letter, “you must have written as cleverly as you talk, or the squire is a booby indeed.”

Randal smiled, pocketed his letter, and responding to the impatient call of his proposer, sprang lightly into the carriage.

Harley, too, seemed pleased with the letters delivered to himself, and now joined Levy, as the candidates drove slowly off.

“Has not Mr. Leslie received from the squire an answer to that letter of which you informed me?”

“Yes, my Lord, the squire will be here to-morrow.”

“To-morrow? Thank you for apprising me; his rooms shall be prepared.”

“I suppose he will only stay to see Leslie and myself, and pay the money.”

“Aha! Pay the money. Is it so, then?”

“Twice the sum, and, it seems, as a gift, which Leslie only asked as a loan. Really, my Lord, Mr. Leslie is a very clever man; and though I am at your commands, I should not like to injure him. With such matrimonial prospects, he could be a very powerful enemy; and if he succeed in parliament, still more so.”

“Baron, these gentlemen are waiting for you. I will follow by myself.”

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Chapter XXV

In the centre of the raised platform in the town-hall sat the mayor. On either hand of that dignitary now appeared the candidates of the respective parties,--to his right, Audley Egerton and Leslie; to his left, Dick Avenel and Leonard.

The place was as full as it could hold. Rows of grimy faces peeped in, even from the upper windows outside the building. The contest was one that created intense interest, not only from public principles, but local passions. Dick Avenel, the son of a small tradesman, standing against the Right Honourable Audley Egerton, the choice of the powerful Lansmere aristocratic party,--standing, too, with his nephew by his side; taking, as he himself was wont to say, “the tarnation Blue Bull by both its oligarchical horns!”--there was a pluck and gallantry in the very impudence of the attempt to convert the important borough--for one member of which a great earl had hitherto striven, “with labour dire and weary woe” into two family seats for the House of Avenel and the triumph of the Capelocracy.

This alone would have excited all the spare passions of a country borough; but, besides this, there was the curiosity that attached to the long-deferred public appearance of a candidate so renowned as the ex-minister,--a man whose career had commenced with his success at Lansmere, and who now, amidst the popular tempest that scattered his colleagues, sought to refit his vessel in the same harbour from which it had first put forth. New generations had grown up since the name of Audley Egerton had first fluttered the dovecotes in that Corioli. The questions that had then seemed so important were, for the most part, settled and at rest. But those present who remembered Egerton in the former day, were struck to see how the same characteristics of bearing and aspect which had distinguished his early youth revived their interest in the mature and celebrated man. As he stood up for a few moments, before he took his seat beside the mayor, glancing over the assembly, with its uproar of cheers and hisses, there was the same stately erectness of form and steadfastness of look, the same indefinable and mysterious dignity of externals, that imposed respect, confirmed esteem, or stilled dislike. The hisses involuntarily ceased.

The preliminary proceedings over, the proposers and seconders commenced their office.

Audley was proposed, of course, by the crack man of the party,--a gentleman who lived on his means in a white house in the High Street, had received a University education, and was a cadet of a “County Family.” This gentleman spoke much about the Constitution, something about Greece and Rome; compared Egerton with William Pitt, also with Aristides; and sat down, after an oration esteemed classical by the few, and pronounced prosy by the many. Audley’s seconder, a burly and important maltster, struck a bolder key. He dwelt largely upon the necessity of being represented by gentlemen of wealth and rank, and not by “upstarts and adventurers.” (Cheers and groans.) “Looking at the candidates on the other side, it was an insult to the respectability of Lansmere to suppose its constituents could elect a man who had no pretensions whatever to their notice, except that he had once been a little boy in the town, in which his father kept a shop,--and a very noisy, turbulent, dirty little boy he was!” Dick smoothed his spotless shirt-front, and looked daggers, while the Blues laughed heartily, and the Yellows cried “Shame!” “As for the other candidate on the same side, he [the maltster] had nothing to say against him.--He was, no doubt, seduced into presumption by his uncle and his own inexperience. It was said that that candidate, Mr. Fairfield, was an author and a poet; if so, he was unknown to fame, for no bookseller in the town had ever even heard of Mr. Fairfield’s works. Then it was replied Mr. Fairfield had written under another name. What would that prove? Either that he was ashamed of his name, or that the works did him no credit. For his part, he [the maltster] was an Englishman; he did not like anonymous scribblers; there was something not right in whatever was concealed. A man should never be afraid to put his name to what he wrote. But grant that Mr. Fairfield was a great author and a great poet, what the borough of Lansinere wanted was, not a member who would pass his time in writing sonnets to Peggy or Moggy, but a practical man of business,--a statesman,--such a man as Mr. Audley Egerton, a gentleman of ancient birth, high standing, and princely fortune. The member for such a place as Lansmere should have a proper degree of wealth.” (“Hear, hear!” from the Hundred and Fifty Hesitators, who all stood in a row at the bottom of the hall; and “Gammon!” “Stuff!” from some revolutionary but incorruptible Yellows.) Still the allusion to Egerton’s private fortune had considerable effect with the bulk of the audience, and the maltster was much cheered on concluding. Mr. Avenel’s proposer and seconder--the one a large grocer, the other the proprietor of a new shop for ticketed prints, shawls, blankets, and counterpanes,--a man, who, as he boasted, dealt with the People for ready money, and no mistake, at least none that he ever rectified--next followed. Both said much the same thing. Mr. Avenel had made his fortune by honest industry, was a fellow-townsman, must know the interests of the town better than strangers, upright public principles, never fawn on governments, would see that the people had their rights, and cut down army, navy, and all other jobs of a corrupt aristocracy, etc. Randal Leslie’s proposer, a captain on half-pay, undertook a long defence of army and navy, from the unpatriotic aspersions of the preceding speakers, which defence diverted him from the due praise of Randal, until cries of “Cut it short,” recalled him to that subject; and then the topics he selected for eulogium were “amiability of character, so conspicuous in the urbane manners of his young friend;” “coincidence in the opinions of that illustrious statesman with whom he was conjoined;” “early tuition in the best principles; only fault, youth,--and that was a fault which would diminish every day.” Randal’s seconder was a bluff yeoman, an outvoter of weight with the agricultural electors. He was too straightforward by half,--adverted to Audley Egerton’s early desertion of questions espoused by landed interest, hoped he had had enough of the large towns; and he (the yeoman) was ready to forgive and forget, but trusted that there would be no chance of burning their member again in effigy. As to the young gentleman, whose nomination he had the pleasure to second, did not know much about him; but the Leslies were an old family in the neighbouring county, and Mr. Leslie said he was nearly related to Squire Hazeldean,--as good a man as ever stood upon shoe leather. He (the yeoman) liked a good breed in sheep and bullocks; and a good breed in men he supposed was the same thing. He (the yeoman) was not for abuses,--he was for King and Constitution. He should have no objection, for instance, to have tithes lowered, and the malt-tax repealed,--not the least objection. Mr. Leslie seemed to him a likely young chap, and uncommon well-spoken; and, on the whole, for aught he (the yeoman) could see, would do quite as well in parliament as nine-tenths of the gentlemen sent there. The yeoman sat down, little cheered by the Blues, much by the Yellows, and with a dim consciousness that somehow or other he had rather damaged than not the cause of the party he had been chosen to advocate. Leonard was not particularly fortunate in his proposer, a youngish gentleman, who, having tried various callings, with signal unsuccess, had come into a small independence, and set up for a literary character. This gentleman undertook the defence of poets, as the half-pay captain had undertaken that of the army and navy; and after a dozen sentences spoken through the nose, about the “moonlight of existence,” and “the oasis in the desert,” suddenly broke down, to the satisfaction of his impatient listeners. This failure was, however, redeemed by Leonard’s seconder, a master tailor, a practised speaker and an earnest, thinking man, sincerely liking and warmly admiring Leonard Fairfield. His opinions were delivered with brief simplicity, and accompanied by expressions of trust in Leonard’s talents and honesty, that were effective, because expressed with feeling.

These preparatory orations over, a dead silence succeeded, and Audley Egerton arose.

At the first few sentences, all felt they were in the presence of one accustomed to command attention, and to give to opinions the weight of recognized authority. The slowness of the measured accents, the composure of the manly aspect, the decorum of the simple gestures,--all bespoke and all became the minister of a great empire, who had less agitated assemblies by impassioned eloquence, than compelled their silent respect to the views of sagacity and experience. But what might have been formal and didactic in another was relieved in Egerton by that air, tone, bearing of gentleman, which have a charm for the most plebeian audience. He had eminently these attributes in private life; but they became far more conspicuous whenever he had to appear in public. The “senatorius decor” seemed a phrase coined for him.

Audley commenced with notice of his adversaries in that language of high courtesy which is so becoming to superior station, and which augurs better for victory than the most pointed diatribes of hostile declamation. Inclining his head towards Avenel, he expressed regret that he should be opposed by a gentleman whose birth naturally endeared him to the town, of which he was a distinguished native, and whose honourable ambition was in itself a proof of the admirable nature of that Constitution, which admitted the lowliest to rise to its distinctions, while it compelled the loftiest to labour and compete for those honours which were the most coveted, because they were derived from the trust of their countrymen, and dignified by the duties which the sense of responsibility entailed. He paid a passing but generous compliment to the reputed abilities of Leonard Fairfield; and alluding with appropriate grace to the interest he had ever taken in the success of youth striving for place in the van of the new generation that marched on to replace the old, he implied that he did not consider Leonard as opposed to himself, but rather as an emulous competitor for a worthy prize with his “own young and valued friend, Mr. Randal Leslie.” “They are happy at their years!” said the statesman, with a certain pathos. “In the future they see nothing to fear, in the past they have nothing to defend. It is not so with me.” And then, passing on to the vague insinuations or bolder charges against himself and his policy proffered by the preceding speakers, Audley gathered himself up, and paused; for his eye here rested on the Reporters seated round the table just below him; and he recognized faces not unfamiliar to his recollection when metropolitan assemblies had hung on the words which fell from lips then privileged to advise a king. And involuntarily it occurred to the ex-minister to escape altogether from this contracted audience,--this election, with all its associations of pain,--and address himself wholly to that vast and invisible Public, to which those Reporters would transmit his ideas. At this thought his whole manner gradually changed. His eye became fixed on the farthest verge of the crowd; his tones grew more solemn in their deep and sonorous swell. He began to review and to vindicate his whole political life. He spoke of the measures he had aided to pass, of his part in the laws which now ruled the land. He touched lightly, but with pride, on the services he had rendered to the opinions he had represented. He alluded to his neglect of his own private fortunes; but in what detail, however minute, in the public business committed to his charge, could even an enemy accuse him of neglect? The allusion was no doubt intended to prepare the public for the news that the wealth of Audley Egerton was gone. Finally, he came to the questions that then agitated the day; and made a general but masterly exposition of the policy which, under the changes he foresaw, he should recommend his party to adopt.

Spoken to the motley assembly in that town-hall, Audley’s speech extended to a circle of interest too wide for their sympathy. But that assembly he heeded not,--he forgot it. The reporters understood him, as their flying pens followed words which they presumed neither to correct nor to abridge. Audley’s speech was addressed to the nation,--the speech of a man in whom the nation yet recognized a chief, desiring to clear all misrepresentation from his past career; calculating, if life were spared to him, on destinies higher than he had yet fulfilled; issuing a manifesto of principles to be carried later into power, and planting a banner round which the divided sections of a broken host might yet rally for battle and for conquest. Or perhaps, in the deeps of his heart (not even comprehended by reporters, nor to be divined by the public), the uncertainty of life was more felt than the hope of ambition; and the statesman desired to leave behind him one full vindication of that public integrity and honour, on which, at least, his conscience acknowledged not a stain.

“For more than twenty years,” said Audley, in conclusion, “I have known no day in which I have not lived for my country. I may at times have opposed the wish of the People,--I may oppose it now; but, so far as I can form a judgment, only because I prefer their welfare to their wish. And if--as I believe--there have been occasions on which, as one amongst men more renowned, I have amended the laws of England, confirmed her safety, extended her commerce, upheld her honour, I leave the rest to the censure of my enemies, and [his voice trembled] to the charity of my friends.”

Before the cheers that greeted the close of this speech were over, Richard Avenel arose. What is called “the more respectable part” of an audience--namely, the better educated and better clad, even on the Yellow side of the question--winced a little for the credit of their native borough, when they contemplated the candidate pitted against the Great Commoner, whose lofty presence still filled the eye, and whose majestic tones yet sounded in the ear. But the vast majority on both sides, Blue and Yellow, hailed the rise of Dick Avenel as a relief to what, while it had awed their attention, had rather strained their faculties. The Yellows cheered and the Blues groaned; there was a tumultuous din of voices, and a reel to and fro of the whole excited mass of unwashed faces and brawny shoulders. But Dick had as much pluck as Audley himself; and by degrees, his pluck and his handsome features, and the curiosity to hear what he had to say, obtained him a hearing; and that hearing Dick having once got, he contrived to keep. His self-confidence was backed by a grudge against Egerton, that attained to the elevation of malignity. He had armed himself for this occasion with an arsenal of quotations from Audley’s speeches, taken out of Hansard’s Debates; and, garbling these texts in the unfairest and most ingenious manner, he contrived to split consistency into such fragments of inconsistency--to cut so many harmless sentences into such unpopular, arbitrary, tyrannical segments of doctrine--that he made a very pretty case against the enlightened and incorruptible Egerton, as shuffler and trimmer, defender of jobs, and eulogist of Manchester massacres, etc. And all told the more because it seemed courted and provoked by the ex-minister’s elaborate vindication of himself. Having thus, as he declared, “triumphantly convicted the Right Honourable Gentleman out of his own mouth,” Dick considered himself at liberty to diverge into what he termed “the just indignation of a freeborn Briton;” in other words, into every variety of abuse which bad taste could supply to acrimonious feeling. But he did it so roundly and dauntlessly, in such true hustings style, that for the moment, at least, he carried the bulk of the crowd along with him sufficiently to bear down all the resentful murmurs of the Blue Committee men, and the abashed shakes of the head with which the more aristocratic and well-bred among the Yellows signified to each other that they were heartily ashamed of their candidate. Dick concluded with an emphatic declaration that the Right Honourable Gentleman’s day was gone by; that the people had been pillaged and plundered enough by pompous red-tapists, who only thought of their salaries, and never went to their offices except to waste the pen, ink, and paper which they did not pay for; that the Right Honourable Gentleman had boasted he had served his country for twenty years. Served his country!--he should have said served her out! (Much laughter.) Pretty mess his country was in now. In short, for twenty years the Right Honourable Gentleman had put his hands into his country’s pockets. “And I ask you,” bawled Dick, “whether any of you are a bit the better for all that he has taken out of them!” The Hundred and Fifty Hesitators shook their heads. “Noa, that we ben’t!” cried the Hundred and Fifty, dolorously. “You hear THE PEOPLE!” said Dick, turning majestically to Egerton, who, with his arms folded on his breast, and his upper lip slightly curved, sat like “Atlas unremoved,”--“you hear THE PEOPLE! They condemn you and the whole set of you. I repeat here what I once vowed on a less public occasion, ‘As sure as my name is Richard Avenel, you shall smart for’--Dick hesitated--‘smart for your contempt of the just rights, honest claims, and enlightened aspirations of your indignant countrymen. The schoolmaster is abroad, and the British Lion is aroused!’”

Dick sat down. The curve of contempt had passed from Egerton’s lip; at the name of Avenel, thus harshly spoken, he had suddenly shaded his face with his hand.

But Randal Leslie next arose, and Audley slowly raised his eyes, and looked towards his protege with an expression of kindly interest. What better debut could there be for a young man warmly attached to an eminent patron who had been coarsely assailed,--for a political aspirant vindicating the principles which that patron represented? The Blues, palpitating with indignant excitement, all prepared to cheer every sentence that could embody their sense of outrage, even the meanest amongst the Yellows, now that Dick had concluded, dimly aware that their orator had laid himself terribly open, and richly deserved (more especially from the friend of Audley Egerton) whatever punishing retort could vibrate from the heart of a man to the tongue of an orator. A better opportunity for an honest young debutant could not exist; a more disagreeable, annoying, perplexing, unmanageable opportunity for Randal Leslie, the malice of the Fates could not have contrived. How could he attack Dick Avenel,--he who counted upon Dick Avenel to win his election? How could he exasperate the Yellows, when Dick’s solemn injunction had been, “Say nothing to make the Yellows not vote for you”? How could he identify himself with Egerton’s policy, when it was his own policy to make his opponents believe him an unprejudiced, sensible youth, who would come all right and all Yellow one of these days? Demosthenes himself would have had a sore throat worse than when he swallowed the golden cup of Harpalus, had Demosthenes been placed in so cursed a fix. Therefore Randal Leslie may well be excused if he stammered and boggled, if he was appalled by a cheer when he said a word in vindication of Egerton, and looked cringing and pitiful when he sneaked out a counter civility to Dick. The Blues were sadly disappointed, damped; the Yellows smirked and took heart. Audley Egerton’s brows darkened. Harley, who was on the platform, half seen behind the front row, a quiet listener, bent over and whispered dryly to Audley, “You should have given a lesson beforehand to your clever young friend. His affection for you overpowers him!”

Audley made no rejoinder, but tore a leaf out of his pocketbook, and wrote, in pencil, these words, “Say that you may well feel embarrassed how to reply to Mr. Avenel, because I had especially requested you not to be provoked to one angry expression against a gentleman whose father and brother-in-law gave the majority of two by which I gained my first seat in parliament; then plunge at once into general politics.” He placed this paper in Randal’s hand, just as that unhappy young man was on the point of a thorough breakdown. Randal paused, took breath, read the words attentively, and amidst a general titter; his presence of mind returned to him; he saw a way out of the scrape, collected himself, suddenly raised his head, and in tones unexpectedly firm and fluent, enlarged on the text afforded to him,--enlarged so well that he took the audience by surprise, pleased the Blues by an evidence of Audley’s generosity, and touched the Yellows by so affectionate a deference to the family of their two candidates. Then the speaker was enabled to come at once to the topics on which he had elaborately prepared himself, and delivered a set harangue, very artfully put together,--temporizing it is true, and trimming, but full of what would have been called admirable tact and discretion in an old stager who did not want to commit himself to anybody or to anything. On the whole, the display became creditable, at least as an evidence of thoughtful reserve, rare in a man so young; too refining and scholastic for oratory, but a very good essay,--upon both sides of the question. Randal wiped his pale forehead and sat down, cheered, especially by the lawyers present, and self-contented. It was now Leonard’s turn to speak. Keenly nervous, as men of the literary temperament are, constitutionally shy, his voice trembled as he began. But he trusted, unconsciously, less to his intellect than his warm heart and noble temper; and the warm heart prompted his words, and the noble temper gradually dignified his manner. He took advantage of the sentences which Audley had put into Randal’s mouth, in order to efface the impression made by his uncle’s rude assault. “Would that the Right Honourable Gentleman had himself made that generous and affecting allusion to the services which he had deigned to remember, for, in that case, he [Leonard] was confident that Mr. Avenel would have lost all the bitterness which political contest was apt to engender in proportion to the earnestness with which political opinions were entertained. Happy it was when some such milder sentiment as that which Mr. Egerton had instructed Mr. Leslie to convey, preceded the sharp encounter, and reminded antagonists, as Mr. Leslie had so emphatically done, that every shield had two sides, and that it was possible to maintain the one side to be golden, without denying the truth of the champion who asserted the other side to be silver.” Then, without appearing to throw over his uncle, the young speaker contrived to insinuate an apology on his uncle’s behalf, with such exquisite grace and good feeling, that he was loudly cheered by both parties; and even Dick did not venture to utter the dissent which struggled to his lips.

But if Leonard dealt thus respectfully with Egerton, he had no such inducement to spare Randal Leslie. With the intuitive penetration of minds accustomed to analyze character and investigate human nature, he detected the varnished insincerity of Randal’s artful address. His colour rose, his voice swelled, his fancy began to play, and his wit to sparkle, when he came to take to pieces his younger antagonist’s rhetorical mosaic. He exposed the falsehood of its affected moderation; he tore into shreds the veil of words, with their motley woof of yellow and blue, and showed that not a single conviction could be discovered behind it. “Mr. Leslie’s speech,” said he, “puts me in mind of a ferry-boat; it seems made for no purpose but to go from one side to the other.” The simile hit the truth so exactly that it was received with a roar of laughter: even Egerton smiled. “For myself,” concluded Leonard, as he summed up his unsparing analysis, “I am new to party warfare; yet if I were not opposing Mr. Leslie as a candidate for your suffrages, if I were but an elector,--belonging, as I do, to the people by my condition and my labours,--I should feel that he is one of those politicians in whom the welfare, the honour, the moral elevation of the people, find no fitting representative.”

Leonard sat down amidst great applause, and after a speech that raised the Yellows in their own estimation, and materially damaged Randal Leslie in the eyes of the Blues. Randal felt this, with a writhing of the heart, though a sneer on the lips. He glanced furtively towards Dick Avenel, on whom, after all, his election, in spite of the Blues, might depend. Dick answered the furtive glance by an encouraging wink. Randal turned to Egerton, and whispered to him, “How I wish I had had more practice in speaking, so that I could have done you more justice!”

“Thank you, Leslie; Mr. Fairfield has supplied any omission of yours, so far as I am concerned. And you should excuse him for his attack on yourself, because it may serve to convince you where your fault as a speaker lies.”

“Where?” asked Leslie, with jealous sullenness.

“In not believing a single word that you say,” answered Egerton, very dryly; and then turning away, he said aloud to his proposer, and with a slight sigh, “Mr. Avenel maybe proud of his nephew! I wish that young man were on our side; I could train him into a great debater.”

And now the proceedings were about to terminate with a show of hands, when a tall, brawny elector in the middle of the hall suddenly arose, and said he had some questions to put. A thrill ran through the assembly, for this elector was the demagogue of the Yellows,--a fellow whom it was impossible to put down, a capital speaker, with lungs of brass. “I shall be very short,” said the demagogue. And therewith, under the shape of questions to the two Blue candidates, he commenced a most furious onslaught on the Earl of Lansmere, and the earl’s son, Lord L’Estrange, accusing the last of the grossest intimidation and corruption, and citing instances thereof as exhibited towards various electors in Fish Lane and the Back Slums, who had been turned from Yellow promises by the base arts of Blue aristocracy, represented in the person of the noble lord, whom he now dared to reply. The orator paused, and Harley suddenly passed into the front of the platform, in token that he accepted the ungracious invitation. Great as had been the curiosity to hear Audley Egerton, yet greater, if possible, was the curiosity to hear Lord L’Estrange. Absent from the place for so many years, heir to such immense possessions, with a vague reputation for talents that he had never proved,--strange, indeed, if Blue and Yellow had not strained their ears and hushed their breaths to listen.

It is said that the poet is born, and the orator made,--a saying only partially true. Some men have been made poets, and some men have been born orators. Most probably Harley L’Estrange had hitherto never spoken in public; and he had not now spoken five minutes before all the passions and humours of the assembly were as much under his command as the keys of the instrument are under the hands of the musician. He had taken from nature a voice capable of infinite variety of modulation, a countenance of the most flexible play of expression; and he was keenly alive (as profound humourists are) equally to the ludicrous and the graver side of everything presented to his vigorous understanding. Leonard had the eloquence of a poet, Audley Egerton that of a parliamentary debater; but Harley had the rarer gift of eloquence in itself, apart from the matter it conveys or adorns,--that gift which Demosthenes meant by his triple requisite of an orator, which has been improperly translated “action,” but means in reality “the acting,” “the stage-play.” Both Leonard and Audley spoke well, from the good sense which their speeches contained; but Harley could have talked nonsense, and made it more effective than sense,--even as a Kemble or Macready could produce effects from the trash talked by “The Stranger,” which your merely accomplished performer would fail to extract from the beauties of Hamlet. The art of oratory, indeed, is allied more closely to that of the drama than to any other; and throughout Harley’s whole nature there ran, as the reader may have noted (though quite unconsciously to Harley himself), a tendency towards that concentration of thought, action, and circumstance on a single purpose, which makes the world form itself into a stage, and gathers various and scattered agencies into the symmetry and compactness of a drama. This tendency, though it often produces effects that appear artificially theatrical, is not uncommon with persons the most genuine and single-minded. It is, indeed, the natural inclination of quick energies springing from warm emotions. Hence the very history of nations in their fresh, vigorous, half-civilized youth always shapes itself into dramatic forms; while, as the exercise of sober reason expands with civilization, to the injury of the livelier faculties and more intuitive impulses, people look to the dramatic form of expression, whether in thought or in action, as if it were the antidote to truth, instead of being its abstract and essence.

But to return from this long and somewhat metaphysical digression: whatever might be the cause why Harley L’Estrange spoke so wonderfully well, there could be no doubt that wonderfully well he did speak. He turned the demagogue and his attack into the most felicitous ridicule, and yet with the most genial good-humour; described that virtuous gentleman’s adventures in search of corruption through the pure regions of Fish Lane and the Back Slums; and then summed up the evidences on which the demagogue had founded his charge, with a humour so caustic and original that the audience were convulsed with laughter. From laughter Harley hurried his audience almost to the pathos of tears,--for he spoke of the insinuations against his father so that every son and every father in the assembly felt moved as at the voice of Nature.

A turn in a sentence, and a new emotion seized the assembly. Harley was identifying himself with the Lansmere electors. He spoke of his pride in being a Lansmere man, and all the Lansmere electors suddenly felt proud of him. He talked with familiar kindness of old friends remembered in his schoolboy holidays, rejoicing to find so many alive and prospering. He had a felicitous word to each.

“Dear old Lansmere!” said he, and the simple exclamation won him the hearts of all. In fine, when he paused, as if to retire, it was amidst a storm of acclamation. Audley grasped his hand, and whispered, “I am the only one here not surprised, Harley. Now you have discovered your powers, never again let them slumber. What a life may be yours if you no longer waste it!” Harley extricated his hand, and his eye glittered. He made a sign that he had more to say, and the applause was hushed. “My Right Honourable friend chides me for the years that I have wasted. True; my years have been wasted,--no matter how nor wherefore! But his! how have they been spent? In such devotion to the public that those who know him not as I do, have said that he had not one feeling left to spare to the obscurer duties and more limited affections, by which men of ordinary talents and humble minds rivet the links of that social order which it is the august destiny of statesmen--like him who now sits beside me--to cherish and defend. But, for my part, I think that there is no being so dangerous as the solemn hypocrite, who, because he drills his cold nature into serving mechanically some conventional abstraction,--whether he calls it ‘the Constitution’ or ‘the Public,’--holds himself dispensed from whatever, in the warm blood of private life, wins attachment to goodness, and confidence to truth. Let others, then, praise my Right Honourable friend as the incorruptible politician. Pardon me if I draw his likeness as the loyal sincere man, who might say with the honest priest ‘that he could not tell a lie to gain heaven by it!’--and with so fine a sense of honour, that he would hold it a lie merely to conceal the truth.” Harley then drew a brilliant picture of the type of chivalrous honesty,--of the ideal which the English attach to the phrase of “a perfect gentleman,” applying each sentence to his Right Honourable friend with an emphasis that seemed to burst from his heart. To all of the audience, save two, it was an eulogium which the fervent sincerity of the eulogist alone saved from hyperbole. But Levy rubbed his hands, and chuckled inly; and Egerton hung his head, and moved restlessly on his seat. Every word that Harley uttered lodged an arrow in Audley’s breast. Amidst the cheers that followed this admirable sketch of the “loyal man,” Harley recognized Leonard’s enthusiastic voice. He turned sharply towards the young man: “Mr. Fairfield cheers this description of integrity, and its application; let him imitate the model set before him, and he may live to hear praise as genuine as mine from some friend who has tested his worth as I have tested Mr. Egerton’s. Mr. Fairfield is a poet: his claim to that title was disputed by one of the speakers who preceded me!--unjustly disputed! Mr. Fairfield is every inch a poet. But, it has been asked, ‘Are poets fit for the business of senates? Will they not be writing sonnets to Peggy and Moggy, when you want them to concentrate their divine imagination on the details of a beer bill?’ Do not let Mr. Fairfield’s friends be alarmed. At the risk of injury to the two candidates whose cause I espouse, truth compels me to say, that poets, when they stoop to action, are not less prosaic than the dullest amongst us; they are swayed by the same selfish interests, they are moved by the same petty passions. It is a mistake to suppose that any detail in common life, whether in public or private, can be too mean to seduce the exquisite pliances of their fancy. Nay, in public life, we may trust them better than other men; for vanity is a kind of second conscience, and, as a poet has himself said,--

“‘Who fears not to do ill, yet fears the name, And free from conscience, is a slave to shame.’

In private life alone we do well to be on our guard against these children of fancy, for they so devote to the Muse all their treasury of sentiment, that we can no more expect them to waste a thought on the plain duties of men, than we can expect the spendthrift, who dazzles the town, ‘to fritter away his money in paying his debts.’ But all the world are agreed to be indulgent to the infirmities of those who are their own deceivers and their own chastisers. Poets have more enthusiasm, more affection, more heart than others; but only for fictions of their own creating. It is in vain for us to attach them to ourselves by vulgar merit, by commonplace obligations, strive and sacrifice as we may. They are ungrateful to us, only because gratitude is so very unpoetical a subject. We lose them the moment we attempt to bind. Their love--

“‘Light as air, at sight of human ties, Spreads its light wings, and in a moment flies.’

“They follow their own caprices, adore their own delusions, and, deeming the forms of humanity too material for their fantastic affections, conjure up a ghost, and are chilled to death by its embrace!”

Then, suddenly aware that he was passing beyond the comprehension of his audience, and touching upon the bounds of his bitter secret (for here he was thinking, not of Leonard, but of Nora), Harley gave a new and more homely direction to his terrible irony,--turned into telling ridicule the most elevated sentiments Leonard’s speech had conveyed, hastened on to a rapid view of political questions in general, defended Leslie with the same apparent earnestness and latent satire with which he had eulogized Audley, and concluded a speech which, for popular effect, had never been equalled in that hall, amidst a diapason of cheers that threatened to bring down the rafters.

In a few minutes more the proceedings were closed, a show of hands taken. The show was declared by the Mayor, who was a thorough Blue, in favour of the Right Hon. Audley Egerton and Randal Leslie, Esquire.

Cries of “No,” “Shame,” “Partial,” etc., a poll demanded on behalf of the other two candidates, and the crowd began to pour out of the hall.

Harley was the first who vanished, retreating by the private entrance. Egerton followed; Randal lingering, Avenel came up and shook hands with him openly, but whispered privately, “Meet me to-night in Lansmere Park, in the oak copse, about three hundred yards from the turnstile, at the town end of the park. We must see how to make all right. What a confounded humbug this has been!”

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