Book: My Novel, Volume 11.

E >> Edward Bulwer Lytton >> My Novel, Volume 11.




He vanished amidst the trees, and was gone,--noiselessly, mysteriously,
as he had come.




CHAPTER IX.

The last words of Peschiera were still ringing in Violante's ears when
Harley appeared in sight, and the sound of his voice dispelled the vague
and dreamy stupor which had crept over her senses. At that voice there
returned the consciousness of a mighty loss, the sting of an intolerable
anguish. To meet Harley there, and thus, seemed impossible. She turned
abruptly away, and hurried towards the horse. Harley called to her by
name, but she would not answer, and only quickened her steps. He paused
a moment in surprise, and then hastened after her.

"Under what strange taboo am I placed?" said he, gayly, as he laid his
hand on her shrinking arm. "I inquire for Helen,--she is ill, and cannot
see me. I come to sun myself in your presence, and you fly me as if gods
and men had set their mark on my brow. Child! child! what is this? You
are weeping?"

"Do not stay me now,--do not speak to me," answerred Violante, through
her stifling sobs, as she broke from his hand and made towards the house.

"Have you a grief, and under the shelter of my father's roof,--a grief
that you will not tell to me? Cruel!" cried Harley, with inexpressible
tenderness of reproach in his soft tones.

Violante could not trust herself to reply. Ashamed of her self-betrayal,
softened yet more by his pleading voice, she could have prayed to the
earth to swallow her. At length, checking her tears by an heroic effort,
she said, almost calmly, "Noble friend, forgive me. I have no grief,
believe me, which--which I can tell to you. I was but thinking of my
poor father when you came up; alarming myself about him, it may be, with
vain, superstitious fears; and so--even a slight surprise--your abrupt
appearance has sufficed to make me thus weak and foolish; but I wish to
see my father!--to go home--home!"

"Your father is well, believe me, and pleased that you are here. No
danger threatens him; and you, here, are safe." "I safe--and from what?"

Harley mused irresolute. He inclined to confide to her the danger which
her father had concealed; but had he the right to do so against her
father's will?

"Give me," he said, "time to reflect, and to obtain permission to intrust
you with a secret which, in my judgment, you should know. Meanwhile,
this much I may say, that rather than you should incur the danger that I
believe he exaggerates, your father would have given you a protector--
even in Randal Leslie."

Violante started.

"But," resumed Harley, with a calm, in which a certain deep mournfulness
was apparent, unconsciously to himself, "but I trust you are reserved for
a fairer fate, and a nobler spouse. I have vowed to live henceforth in
the common workday world. But for you, bright child, for you, I am a
dreamer still!"

Violante turned her eyes for one instant towards the melancholy speaker.
The look thrilled to his heart. He bowed his face involuntarily. When
he looked up, she had left his side. He did not this time attempt to
follow her, but moved away and plunged amidst the leafless trees.

An hour afterwards he re-entered the house, and again sought to see
Helen. She had now recovered sufficiently to give him the interview he
requested.

He approached her with a grave and serious gentleness. "My dear Helen,"
said he, "you have consented to be my wife, my life's mild companion; let
it be soon--soon--for I need you. I need all the strength of that holy
tie. Helen, let me press you to fix the time."

"I owe you too much," answered Helen, looking down, "to have any will but
yours. But your mother," she added, perhaps clinging to the idea of some
reprieve,--"your mother has not yet--"

"My mother--true. I will speak first to her. You shall receive from my
family all honour due to your gentle virtues. Helen, by the way, have
you mentioned to Violante the bond between us?"

"No; that is, I fear I may have unguardedly betrayed it, against Lady
Lansmere's commands too--but--but--"

"So, Lady Lansmere forbade you to name it to Violante? This should not
be. I will answer for her permission to revoke that interdict. It is
due to Violante and to you. Tell your young friend all. Ah, Helen, if I
am at times cold or wayward, bear with me--bear with me; for you love me,
do you not?"




CHAPTER X.

That same evening Randal heard from Levy (at whose house he stayed late)
of that self-introduction to Violante which (thanks to his skeleton key)
Peschiera had contrived to effect; and the count seemed more than
sanguine,--he seemed assured as to the full and speedy success of his
matrimonial enterprise. "Therefore," said Levy, "I trust I may very soon
congratulate you on the acquisition of your family estates."

"Strange!" answered Randal, "strange that my fortunes seem so bound up
with the fate of a foreigner like Beatrice di Negra and her connection
with Frank Hazeldean." He looked up at the clock as he spoke, and added,

"Frank by this time has told his father of his engagement."

"And you feel sure that the squire cannot be coaxed into consent?"

"No; but I feel sure that the squire will be so choleric at the first
intelligence, that Frank will not have the self-control necessary for
coaxing; and, perhaps, before the squire can relent upon this point, he
may, by some accident, learn his grievances on another, which would
exasperate him still more."

"Ay, I understand,--the post-obit?" Randal nodded.

"And what then?" asked Levy.

"The next of kin to the lands of Hazeldean may have his day."

The baron smiled.

"You have good prospects in that direction, Leslie; look now to another.
I spoke to you of the borough of Lansmere. Your patron, Audley Egerton,
intends to stand for it."

Randal's heart had of late been so set upon other and more avaricious
schemes, that a seat in parliament had sunk into a secondary object;
nevertheless his ambitious and all-grasping nature felt a bitter pang,
when he heard that Egerton thus interposed between himself and any chance
of advancement.

"So," he muttered sullenly,--"so this man, who pretends to be my
benefactor, squanders away the wealth of my forefathers, throws me
penniless on the world; and, while still encouraging me to exertion and
public life, robs me himself of--"

"No!" interrupted Levy, "not robs you; we may prevent that. The Lansmere
interest is not so strong in the borough as Dick Avenel's."

"But I cannot stand against Egerton."

"Assuredly not,--you may stand with him."

"How?"

"Dick Avenel will never suffer Egerton to come in; and though he cannot,
perhaps, carry two of his own politics, he can split his votes upon you."

Randal's eyes flashed. He saw at a glance that if Avenel did not
overrate the relative strength of parties, his seat could be secured.

"But," he said, "Egerton has not spoken to me on such a subject; nor can
you expect that he would propose to me to stand with him, if he foresaw
the chance of being ousted by the very candidate he himself introduced."

"Neither he nor his party will anticipate that possibility. If he ask
you, agree to stand,--leave the rest to me."

"You must hate Egerton bitterly," said Randal; "for I am not vain enough
to think that you thus scheme but from pure love to me."

"The motives of men are intricate and complicated," answered Levy, with
unusual seriousness. "It suffices to the wise to profit by the actions,
and leave the motives in shade."

There was silence for some minutes. Then the two drew closer towards
each other, and began to discuss details in their joint designs.

Randal walked home slowly. It was a cold moonlit night. Young idlers of
his own years and rank passed him by on their way from the haunts of
social pleasure. They were yet in the first fair holiday of life.
Life's holiday had gone from him forever. Graver men, in the various
callings of masculine labour--professions, trade, the State--passed him
also. Their steps might be sober, and their faces careworn; but no step
had the furtive stealth of his, no face the same contracted, sinister,
suspicious gloom. Only once, in a lonely thoroughfare, and on the
opposite side of the way, fell a footfall, and glanced an eye, that
seemed to betray a soul in sympathy with Randal Leslie's.

And Randal, who had heeded none of the other passengers by the way, as if
instinctively, took note of this one. His nerves crisped at the noise-
less slide of that form, as it stalked on from lamp to lamp, keeping pace
with his own. He felt a sort of awe, as if he had beheld the wraith of
himself; and even as he glanced suspiciously at the stranger, the
stranger glanced at him. He was inexpressibly relieved when the figure
turned down another street and vanished.

That man was a felon, as yet undetected. Between him and his kind there
stood but a thought,--a veil air-spun, but impassable, as the veil of the
Image at Sais.

And thus moved and thus looked Randal Leslie, a thing of dark and secret
mischief, within the pale of the law, but equally removed from man by the
vague consciousness that at his heart lay that which the eyes of man
would abhor and loathe. Solitary amidst the vast city, and on through
the machinery of Civilization, went the still spirit of Intellectual
Evil.




CHAPTER XI.

Early the next morning Randal received two notes, one from Frank, written
in great agitation, begging Randal to see and propitiate his father, whom
he feared he had grievously offended; and then running off, rather
incoherently, into protestations that his honour as well as his
affections were engaged irrevocably to Beatrice, and that her, at least,
he could never abandon.

And the second note was from the squire himself--short, and far less
cordial than usual--requesting Mr. Leslie to call on him.

Randal dressed in haste, and went first to Limmer's hotel. He found the
parson with Mr. Hazeldean, and endeavouring in vain to soothe him. The
squire had not slept all night, and his appearance was almost haggard.

"Oho! Mr. young Leslie," said he, throwing himself back in his chair as
Randal entered, "I thought you were a friend,--I thought you were Frank's
adviser. Explain, sir! explain!"

"Gently, my dear Mr. Hazeldean," said the parson. "You do but surprise
and alarm Mr. Leslie. Tell him more distinctly what he has to explain."

SQUIRE.--"Did you or did you not tell me or Mrs. Hazeldean that Frank was
in love with Violante Rickeybockey?"

RANDAL (as in amaze).--"I! Never, sir! I feared, on the contrary, that
he was somewhat enamoured of a very different person. I hinted at that
possibility. I could not do more, for I did not know how far Frank's
affections were seriously engaged. And indeed, sir, Mrs. Hazeldean,
though not encouraging the idea that your son could marry a foreigner and
a Roman Catholic, did not appear to consider such objections insuperable,
if Frank's happiness were really at stake."

Here the poor squire gave way to a burst of passion, that involved in one
tempest Frank, Randal, Harry herself, and the whole race of foreigners,
Roman Catholics, and women. While the squire was still incapable of
hearing reason, the parson, taking aside Randal, convinced himself that
the whole affair, so far as Randal was concerned, had its origin in a
very natural mistake; and that while that young gentleman had been
hinting at Beatrice, Mrs. Hazeldean had been thinking of Violante.
With considerable difficulty he succeeded in conveying this explanation
to the squire, and somewhat appeasing his wrath against Randal. And the
Dissimulator, seizing his occasion, then expressed so much grief and
astonishment at learning that matters had gone as far as the parson
informed him,--that Frank had actually proposed to Beatrice, been
accepted, and engaged himself, before even communicating with his father;
he declared so earnestly, that he could never conjecture such evil, that
he had had Frank's positive promise to take no step without the sanction
of his parents; he professed such sympathy with the squire's wounded
feelings, and such regret at Frank's involvement, that Mr. Hazeldean at
last yielded up his honest heart to his consoler, and griping Randal's
hand, said, "Well, well, I wronged you; beg your pardon. What now is to
be done?"

"Why, you cannot consent to this marriage,--impossible!" replied Randal;
"and we must hope, therefore, to influence Frank by his sense of duty."

"That's it," said the squire; "for I'll not give way. Pretty pass things
have come to, indeed! A widow, too, I hear. Artful jade! thought, no
doubt, to catch a Hazeldean of Hazeldean. My estates go to an outlandish
Papistical set of mongrel brats! No, no, never!"

"But," said the parson, mildly, "perhaps we may be unjustly prejudiced
against this lady. We should have consented to Violante; why not to her?
She is of good family?"

"Certainly," said Randal.

"And good character?"

Randal shook his head, and sighed. The squire caught him roughly by the
arm--"Answer the parson!" cried he, vehemently.

"Indeed, sir, I cannot speak disrespectfully of the character of a
woman,--who may, too, become Frank's wife; and the world is ill-natured
and not to be believed. But you can judge for yourself, my dear Mr.
Hazeldean. Ask your brother whether Madame di Negra is one whom he would
advise his nephew to marry."

"My brother!" exclaimed the squire, furiously. "Consult my distant
brother on the affairs of my own son?"

"He is a man of the world," put in Randal.

"And of feeling and honour," said the parson; "and, perhaps, through him,
we may be enabled to enlighten Frank, and save him from what appears to
be the snare of an artful woman."

"Meanwhile," said Randal, "I will seek Frank, and do my best with him.
Let me go now,--I will return in an hour or so."

"I will accompany you," said the parson.

"Nay, pardon me, but I think we two young men can talk more openly
without a third person, even so wise and kind as you."

"Let Randal go," growled the squire. And Randal went. He spent some
time with Frank, and the reader will easily divine how that time was
employed. As he left Frank's lodgings, he found himself suddenly seized
by the squire himself.

"I was too impatient to stay at home and listen to the parson's prosing,"
said Mr. Hazeldean, nervously. "I have shaken Dale off. Tell me what
has passed. Oh, don't fear,--I'm a man, and can bear the worst."

Randal drew the squire's arm within his, and led him into the adjacent
park.

"My dear sir," said he, sorrowfully, "this is very confidential what I am
about to say. I must repeat it to you, because, without such confidence,
I see not how to advise you on the proper course to take. But if I
betray Frank, it is for his good, and to his own father;--only do not
tell him. He would never forgive me; it would forever destroy my
influence over him."

"Go on, go on," gasped the squire; "speak out. I'll never tell the
ungrateful boy that I learned his secrets from another."

"Then," said Randal, "the secret of his entanglement with Madame di Negra
is simply this: he found her in debt--nay, on the point of being
arrested--"

"Debt! arrested! Jezebel!"

"And in paying the debt himself, and saving her from arrest, he conferred
on her the obligation which no woman of honour could accept save from an
affianced husband. Poor Frank!--if sadly taken in, still we must pity
and forgive him!"

Suddenly, to Randal's great surprise, the squire's whole face brightened
up.

"I see, I see!" he exclaimed, slapping his thigh. "I have it, I have it!
'T is an affair of money! I can buy her off. If she took money from
him--the mercenary, painted baggage I--why, then, she'll take it from me.
I don't care what if costs--half my fortune--all! I'd be content never
to see Hazeldean Hall again, if I could save my son, my own son, from
disgrace and misery; for miserable he will be, when he knows he has
broken my heart and his mother's. And for a creature like that! My boy,
a thousand hearty thanks to you. Where does the wench live? I'll go to
her at once." And as he spoke, the squire actually pulled out his
pocketbook, and began turning over and counting the bank-notes in it.

Randal at first tried to combat this bold resolution on the part of the
squire; but Mr. Hazeldean had seized on it with all the obstinacy of his
straightforward English mind. He cut Randal's persuasive eloquence off
in the midst.

"Don't waste your breath! I've settled it; and if you don't tell me
where she lives, 't is easily found out, I suppose."

Randal mused a moment. "After all," thought he, "why not? He will be
sure so to speak as to enlist her pride against himself, and to irritate
Frank to the utmost. Let him go."

Accordingly he gave the information required; and, insisting with great
earnestness on the squire's promise not to mention to Madame di Negra his
knowledge of Frank's pecuniary aid (for that would betray Randal as the
informant); and satisfying himself as he best might with the squire's
prompt assurance, "that he knew how to settle matters, without saying why
or wherefore, as long as he opened his purse wide enough," he accompanied
Mr. Hazeldean back into the streets, and there left him,--fixing an hour
in the evening for an interview at Limmer's, and hinting that it would be
best to have that interview without the presence of the parson.

"Excellent good man," said Randal, "but not with sufficient knowledge of
the world for affairs of this kind, which you understand so well."

"I should think so," quoth the squire, who had quite recovered his good-
humour. "And the parson is as soft as buttermilk. We must be firm
here,--firm, sir." And the squire struck the end of his stick on the
pavement, nodded to Randal, and went on to May Fair as sturdily and as
confidently as if to purchase a prize cow at a cattle-show.




CHAPTER XII.

"Bring the light nearer," said John Burley,--"nearer still."

Leonard obeyed, and placed the candle on a little table by the sick man's
bedside.

Burley's mind was partially wandering; but there was method in his
madness. Horace Walpole said that "his stomach would survive all the
rest of him." That which in Burley survived the last was his quaint,
wild genius. He looked wistfully at the still flame of the candle: "It
lives ever in the air!" said he.

"What lives ever?"

Burley's voice swelled, "Light!" He turned from Leonard, and again
contemplated the little flame. "In the fixed star, in the Will-o'-the-
wisp, in the great sun that illumines half a world, or the farthing
rushlight by which the ragged student strains his eyes,--still the same
flower of the elements! Light in the universe, thought in the soul--Ay,
ay, go on with the simile. My head swims. Extinguish the light! You
cannot; fool, it vanishes from your eye, but it is still in the space.
Worlds must perish, suns shrivel up, matter and spirit both fall into
nothingness, before the combinations whose union makes that little flame
which the breath of a babe can restore to darkness, shall lose the power
to form themselves into light once more. Lose the power!---no, the
necessity: it is the one Must in creation. Ay, ay, very dark riddles
grow clear now,--now when I could not cast up an addition sum in the
baker's bill! What wise man denied that two and two made four? Do they
not make four? I can't answer him. But I could answer a question that
some wise men have contrived to make much knottier." He smiled softly,
and turned his face for some minutes to the wall.

This was the second night on which Leonard had watched by his bedside,
and Burley's state had grown rapidly worse. He could not last many days,
perhaps many hours. But he had evinced an emotion beyond mere delight at
seeing Leonard again. He had since then been calmer, more himself. "I
feared I might have ruined you by my bad example," he said, with a touch
of humour that became pathos as he added, "That idea preyed on me."

"No, no; you did me great good."

"Say that,--say it often," said Burley, earnestly; "it makes my heart
feel so light."

He had listened to Leonard's story with deep interest, and was fond of
talking to him of little Helen. He detected the secret at the young
man's heart, and cheered the hopes that lay there, amidst fears and
sorrows. Burley never talked seriously of his repentance; it was not in
his nature to talk seriously of the things which he felt solemnly. But
his high animal spirits were quenched with the animal power that fed
them. Now, we go out of our sensual existence only when we are no longer
enthralled by the Present, in which the senses have their realm. The
sensual being vanishes when Ave are in the Past or the Future. The
Present was gone from Burley; he could no more be its slave and its king.

It was most touching to see how the inner character of this man unfolded
itself, as the leaves of the outer character fell off and withered,--a
character no one would have guessed in him, an inherent refinement that
was almost womanly; and he had all a woman's abnegation of self. He took
the cares lavished on him so meekly. As the features of the old man
return in the stillness of death to the aspect of youth,--the lines
effaced, the wrinkles gone,--so, in seeing Burley now, you saw what he
had been in his spring of promise. But he himself saw only what he had
failed to be,--powers squandered, life wasted. "I once beheld," he said,
"a ship in a storm. It was a cloudy, fitful day, and I could see the
ship with all its masts fighting bard for life and for death. Then came
night, dark as pitch, and I could only guess that the ship fought on.
Towards the dawn the stars grew visible, and once more I saw the ship: it
was a wreck,--it went down just as the stars shone forth."

When he had made that allusion to himself, he sat very still for some
time, then he spread out his wasted hands, and gazed on them, and on his
shrunken limbs. "Good," said he, laughing low; "these hands were too
large and rude for handling the delicate webs of my own mechanism, and
these strong limbs ran away with me. If I had been a sickly, puny
fellow, perhaps my mind would have had fair play. There was too much of
brute body here! Look at this hand now! You can see the light through
it! Good, good!"

Now, that evening, until he had retired to bed, Burley had been unusually
cheerful, and had talked with much of his old eloquence, if with little
of his old humour. Amongst other matters, he had spoken with
considerable interest of some poems and other papers in manuscript which
had been left in the house by a former lodger, and which, the reader may
remember, Mrs. Goodyer had urged him in vain to read, in his last visit
to her cottage. But then he had her husband Jacob to chat with, and the
spirit bottle to finish, and the wild craving for excitement plucked his
thoughts back to his London revels. Now poor Jacob was dead, and it was
not brandy that the sick man drank from the widow's cruse; and London lay
afar amidst its fogs, like a world resolved back into nebula. So, to
please his hostess and distract his own solitary thoughts, he had
condescended (just before Leonard found him out) to peruse the memorials
of a life obscure to the world, and new to his own experience of coarse
joys and woes. "I have been making a romance, to amuse myself, from
their contents," said he. "They maybe of use to you, brother author.
I have told Mrs. Goodyer to place them in your room. Amongst those
papers is a sort of journal,--a woman's journal; it moved me greatly. A
man gets into another world, strange to him as the orb of Sirius, if he
can transport himself into the centre of a woman's heart, and see the
life there, so wholly unlike our own. Things of moment to us, to it so
trivial; things trifling to us, to it so vast. There was this journal,
in its dates reminding me of stormy events in my own existence, and grand
doings in the world's. And those dates there, chronicling but the
mysterious, unrevealed record of some obscure, loving heart! And in that
chronicle, O Sir Poet, there was as much genius, vigour of thought,
vitality of being, poured and wasted, as ever kind friend will say was
lavished on the rude outer world by big John Burley! Genius, genius!
are we all alike, then, save when we leash ourselves to some matter-of-
fact material, and float over the roaring seas on a wooden plank or a
herring tub?" And after he had uttered that cry of a secret anguish,
John Burley had begun to show symptoms of growing fever and disturbed
brain; and when they had got him into bed, he lay there muttering to
himself, until, towards midnight, he had asked Leonard to bring the light
nearer to him.

So now he again was quiet, with his face turned towards the wall; and
Leonard stood by the bedside sorrowfully, and Mrs. Goodyer, who did not
heed Burley's talk, and thought only of his physical state, was dipping
cloths into iced water to apply to his forehead. But as she approached
with these, and addressed him soothingly, Burley raised himself on his
arm, and waved aside the bandages. "I do not need them," said he, in a
collected voice. "I am better now. I and that pleasant light understand
one another, and I believe all it tells me. Pooh, pooh, I do not rave."
He looked so smilingly and so kindly into her face, that the poor woman,
who loved him as her own son, fairly burst into tears. He drew her
towards him, and kissed her forehead.

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