My Novel Part 173

HARLEY (seriously).--"My levity is but lip-deep, my dear Mr. Dale. But sometimes the froth on the wave shows the change in the tide."

The parson looked at him earnestly, and then seized him by both hands with holy gladness and affection.

"Return to the Park now," said Harley, smiling; "and tell Violante, if it be not too late to see her, that she was even more eloquent than you."

Lord L'Estrange bounded forward.

Mr. Dale walked back through the park to Lansmere House. On the terrace he found Randal, who was still pacing to and fro, sometimes in the starlight, sometimes in the shadow.

Leslie looked up, and seeing Mr. Dale, the close astuteness of his aspect returned; and stepping out of the starlight deep into the shadow, he said,

"I was sorry to learn that Mr. Fairfield had been so hurt by Lord L'Estrange's severe allusions. Pity that political differences should interfere with private friends.h.i.+ps; but I hear that you have been to Mr. Fairfield,--and, doubtless, as the peacemaker. Perhaps you met Lord L'Estrange by the way? He promised me that he would apologize and retract."

"Good young man!" said the unsuspecting parson, "he has done so."

"And Mr. Leonard Fairfield will, therefore, I presume, continue the contest?"

"Contest--ah, this election! I suppose so, of course. But I grieve that he should stand against you, who seem to be disposed towards him so kindly."

"Oh," said Randal, with a benevolent smile, "we have fought before, you know, and I beat him then. I may do so again!"

And he walked into the house, arm-in-arm with the parson. Mr. Dale sought Violante; Leslie retired to his own room, and felt his election was secured.

Lord L'Estrange had gained the thick of the streets--pa.s.sing groups of roaring enthusiasts--Blue and Yellow--now met with a cheer, now followed by a groan. Just by a public-house that formed the angle of a lane with the High Street, and which was all ablaze with light and all alive with clamour, he beheld the graceful baron leaning against the threshold, smoking his cigar, too refined to a.s.sociate its divine vapour with the wreaths of s.h.a.g within, and chatting agreeably with a knot of females, who were either attracted by the general excitement, or waiting to see husband, brother, father, or son, who were now joining in the chorus of "Blue forever!" that rang from tap-room to attic of the illumined hostelry. Levy, seeing Lord L'Estrange, withdrew his cigar from his lips, and hastened to join him. "All the Hundred and Fifty are in there," said the baron, with a backward significant jerk of his thumb towards the inn. "I have seen them all privately, in tens at a time; and I have been telling the ladies without that it will be best for the interest of their families to go home, and let us lock up the Hundred and Fifty safe from the Yellows, till we bring them to the poll. But I am afraid," continued Levy, "that the rascals are not to be relied upon unless I actually pay them beforehand; and that would be disreputable, immoral,--and, what is more, it would upset the election. Besides, if they are paid beforehand, query, is it quite sure how they will vote afterwards?"

"Mr. Avenel, I dare say, can manage them," said Harley. "Pray do nothing immoral, and nothing that will upset the election. I think you might as well go home."

"Home! No, pardon me, my Lord; there must be some head to direct the Committee, and keep our captains at their posts upon the doubtful electors. A great deal of mischief may be done between this and the morrow; and I would sit up all night--ay, six nights a week for the next three months--to prevent any awkward mistake by which Audley Egerton can be returned."

"His return would really grieve you so much?" said Harley.

"You may judge of that by the zeal with which I enter into all your designs."

Here there was a sudden and wondrously loud shout from another inn,--a Yellow inn, far down the lane, not so luminous as the Blue hostelry; on the contrary, looking rather dark and sinister, more like a place for conspirators or felons than honest, independent electors,--"Avenel forever! Avenel and the Yellows!"

"Excuse me, my Lord, I must go back and watch over my black sheep, if I would have them blue!" said Levy; and he retreated towards the threshold. But at that shout of "Avenel forever!" as if at a signal, various electors of the redoubted Hundred and Fifty rushed from the Blue hostelry, sweeping past Levy, and hurrying down the lane to the dark little Yellow inn, followed by the female stragglers, as small birds follow an owl. It was not, however, very easy to get into that Yellow inn; Yellow Reformers, eminent for their zeal on behalf of purity of election, were stationed outside the door, and only strained in one candidate for admittance at a time. "After all," thought the baron, as he pa.s.sed into the princ.i.p.al room of the Blue tavern, and proposed the national song of "Rule Britannia,"--"after all, Avenel hates Egerton as much as I do, and both sides work to the same end." And thrumming on the table, he joined with a fine la.s.s in the famous line,

"For Britons never will be slaves!"

In the interim, Harley had disappeared within the Lansmere Arms, which was the headquarters of the Blue Committee. Not, however, mounting to the room in which a few of the more indefatigable were continuing their labours, receiving reports from scouts, giving orders, laying wagers, and very muzzy with British principles and spirits, Harley called aside the landlord, and inquired if the stranger, for whom rooms had been prepared, was yet arrived. An affirmative answer was given, and Harley followed the host up a private stair, to a part of the house remote from the rooms devoted to the purposes of the election. He remained with this stranger about half an hour, and then walked into the Committee-room, got rid of the more excited, conferred with the more sober, issued a few brief directions to such of the leaders as he felt he could most rely upon, and returned home as rapidly as he had quitted it.

Dawn was gray in the skies when Harley sought his own chamber. To gain it, he pa.s.sed by the door of Violante's. His heart suffused with grateful ineffable tenderness, he paused and kissed the threshold. When he stood within his room (the same that he had occupied in his early youth), he felt as if the load of years were lifted from his bosom. The joyous, divine elasticity of spirit, that in the morning of life springs towards the Future as a bird soars into heaven, pervaded his whole sense of being. A Greek poet implies that the height of bliss is the sudden relief of pain: there is a n.o.bler bliss still,--the rapture of the conscience at the sudden release from a guilty thought. By the bedside at which he had knelt in boyhood, Harley paused to kneel once more. The luxury of prayer, interrupted since he had nourished schemes of which his pa.s.sions had blinded him to the sin, but which, nevertheless, he dared not confess to the All-Merciful, was restored to him. And yet, as he bowed his knee, the elation of spirits he had before felt forsook him. The sense of the danger his soul had escaped, the full knowledge of the guilt to which the fiend had tempted, came dread before his clearing vision; he shuddered in horror of himself. And he who but a few hours before had deemed it so impossible to pardon his fellow-man, now felt as if years of useful and beneficent deeds could alone purify his own repentant soul from the memory of one hateful pa.s.sion.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

But while Harley had thus occupied the hours of night with cares for the living, Audley Egerton had been in commune with the dead. He had taken from the pile of papers amidst which it had fallen, the record of Nora's silenced heart. With a sad wonder he saw how he had once been loved.

What had all which successful ambition had bestowed on the lonely statesman to compensate for the glorious empire he had lost,--such realms of lovely fancy; such worlds of exquisite emotion; that infinite which lies within the divine sphere that unites spiritual genius with human love? His own positive and earthly nature attained, for the first time, and as if for its own punishment, the comprehension of that loftier and more ethereal visitant from the heavens, who had once looked with a seraph's smile through the prison-bars of his iron life; that celestial refinement of affection, that exuberance of feeling which warms into such varieties of beautiful idea, under the breath of the earth-beautifier, Imagination,--all from which, when it was all his own, he had turned half weary and impatient, and termed the exaggerations of a visionary romance, now that the world had lost them evermore, he interpreted aright as truths. Truths they were, although illusions. Even as the philosopher tells us that the splendour of colours which deck the universe is not on the surface whereon we think to behold it, but in our own vision; yet, take the colours from the universe, and what philosophy can a.s.sure us that the universe has sustained no loss?

But when Audley came to that pa.s.sage in the fragment which, though but imperfectly, explained the true cause of Nora's flight; when he saw how Levy, for what purpose he was unable to conjecture, had suggested to his bride the doubts that had offended him,--a.s.serted the marriage to be a fraud, drawn from Audley's own brief resentful letters to Nora proof of the a.s.sertion, misled so naturally the young wife's scanty experience of actual life, and maddened one so sensitively pure into the conviction of dishonour,--his brow darkened, and his hand clenched. He rose and went at once to Levy's room. He found it deserted, inquired, learned that Levy was gone forth, and had left word he might not be at home for the night. Fortunate, perhaps, for Audley, fortunate for the baron, that they did not then meet. Revenge, in spite of his friend's admonition, might at that hour have been as potent an influence on Egerton as it had been on Harley, and not, as with the latter, to be turned aside.

Audley came back to his room and finished the tragic record. He traced the tremor of that beloved hand through the last tortures of doubt and despair; he saw where the hot tears had fallen; he saw where the hand had paused, the very sentence not concluded; mentally he accompanied his--fated bride in the dismal journey to her maiden home, and beheld her before him as he had last seen, more beautiful even in death than the face of living woman had ever since appeared to him; and as he bent over the last words, the blank that they left on the leaf, stretching pale beyond the quiver of the characters and the blister of the tears,--pale and blank as the void which departed love leaves behind it,--he felt his Heart suddenly stand still, its course arrested as the record closed. It beat again, but feebly,--so feebly! His breath became labour and pain, his sight grew dizzy; but the const.i.tutional firmness and fort.i.tude of the man clung to him in the stubborn mechanism of habit, his will yet fought against his disease, life rallied as the light flickers up in the waning taper.

The next morning, when Harley came into his friend's room, Egerton was asleep. But the sleep seemed much disturbed; the breathing was hard and difficult; the bed-clothes were partially thrown off, as if in the tossing of disturbed dreams; the sinewy strong arm, the broad athletic breast, were partly bare. Strange that so deadly a disease within should leave the frame such apparent power that, to the ordinary eye, the sleeping sufferer seemed a model of healthful vigour. One hand was thrust with uneasy straining over the pillows,--it had its hold on the fatal papers; a portion of the leaves was visible; and where the characters had been blurred by Nora's tears, were the traces, yet moist, of tears perhaps more bitter.

Harley felt deeply affected; and while he still stood by the bed, Egerton sighed heavily and woke. He stared round him, as if perplexed and confused, till his eyes resting on Harley, he smiled and said,

"So early! Ah, I remember, it is the day for our great boat-race. We shall have the current against us; but you and I together--when did we ever lose?"

Audley's mind was wandering; it had gone back to the old Eton days. But Harley thought that he spoke in metaphorical allusion to the present more important contest.

"True, my Audley,--you and I together--when did we ever lose? But will you rise? I wish you would be at the polling-place to shake hands with your voters as they come up. By four o'clock you will be released, and the election won."

"The election! How! what!" said Egerton, recovering himself. "I recollect now. Yes,--I accept this last kindness from you. I always said I would die in harness. Public life--I have no other. Ah, I dream again!

Oh, Harley my son, my son!"

"You shall see him after four o'clock. You will be proud of each other.

But make haste and dress. Shall I ring the bell for your servant?"

"Do," said Egerton, briefly, and sinking back. Harley quitted the room, and joined Randal and some of the more important members of the Blue Committee, who were already hurrying over their breakfast.

All were anxious and nervous except Harley, who dipped his dry toast into his coffee, according to his ordinary abstemious Italian habit, with serene composure. Randal in vain tried for an equal tranquillity.

But though sure of his election, there would necessarily follow a scene trying to the nerve of his hypocrisy. He would have to affect profound chagrin in the midst of vile joy; have to act the part of decorous high-minded sorrow, that by some untoward chance, some unaccountable cross-splitting, Randal Leslie's gain should be Audley Egerton's loss.

Besides, he was flurried in the expectation of seeing the squire, and of appropriating the money which was to secure the dearest object of his ambition. Breakfast was soon despatched. The Committee-men, bustling for their hats, and looking at their watches, gave the signal for departure; yet no Squire Hazeldean had made his appearance. Harley, stepping from the window upon the terrace, beckoned to Randal, who took his hat and followed.

"Mr. Leslie," said Harley, leaning against the bal.u.s.trade, and carelessly patting Nero's rough, honest head, "you remember that you were good enough to volunteer to me the explanation of certain circ.u.mstances in connection with the Count di Peschiera, which you gave to the Duke di Serrano; and I replied that my thoughts were at present engaged on the election, but as soon as that was over, I should be very willing to listen to any communications affecting yourself and my old friend the duke, with which you might be pleased to favour me."

This address took Randal by surprise, and did not tend to calm his nerves. However, he replied readily,

"Upon that, as upon any other matter that may influence the judgment you form of me, I shall be but too eager to remove a single doubt that, in your eyes, can rest upon my honour."

"You speak exceedingly well, Mr. Leslie; no man can express himself more handsomely; and I will claim your promise with the less scruple because the duke is powerfully affected by the reluctance of his daughter to ratify the engagement that binds his honour, in case your own is indisputably cleared. I may boast of some influence over the young lady, since I a.s.sisted to save her from the infamous plot of Peschiera; and the duke urges me to receive your explanation, in the belief that, if it satisfy me, as it has satisfied him, I may conciliate his child in favour of the addresses of a suitor who would have hazarded his very life against so redoubted a duellist as Peschiera."

"Lord L'Estrange," replied Randal, bowing, "I shall indeed owe you much if you can remove that reluctance on the part of my betrothed bride, which alone clouds my happiness, and which would at once put an end to my suit, did I not ascribe it to an imperfect knowledge of myself, which I shall devote my life to improve into confidence and affection."

"No man can speak more handsomely," reiterated Harley, as if with profound admiration; and indeed he did eye Randal as we eye some rare curiosity. "I am happy to inform you, too," continued L'Estrange, "that if your marriage with the Duke of Serrano's daughter take place--"

"If!" echoed Randal.

"I beg pardon for making an hypothesis of what you claim the right to esteem a certainty,--I correct my expression: when your marriage with that young lady takes place, you will at least escape the rock on which many young men of ardent affections have split at the onset of the grand voyage. You will form no imprudent connection. In a word, I received yesterday a despatch from Vienna, which contains the full pardon and formal restoration of Alphonso, Duke di Serrano. And I may add, that the Austrian government (sometimes misunderstood in this country) is bound by the laws it administers, and can in no way dictate to the duke, once restored, as to the choice of his son-in-law, or as to the heritage that may devolve on his child."

"And does the duke yet know of his recall?" exclaimed Randal, his cheeks flushed and his eyes sparkling.

"No. I reserve that good news, with other matters, till after the election is over. But Egerton keeps us waiting sadly. Ah, here comes his valet."

Audley's servant approached. "Mr. Egerton feels himself rather more poorly than usual, my Lord; he begs you will excuse his going with you into the town at present. He will come later if his presence is absolutely necessary."