"My Novel" — Complete

Leonard gazed curiously at the angler, as the last thus mournfully concluded. The ornate turn of his periods did not suit with his costume. He looked wofully threadbare and shabby,—a genteel sort of shabbiness too,—shabbiness in black. There was humour in the corners of his lip; and his hands, though they did not seem very clean—indeed his occupation was not friendly to such niceties—were those of a man who had not known manual labour. His face was pale and puffed, but the tip of the nose was red. He did not seem as if the watery element was as familiar to himself as to his Delilah, the perch.

“Such is Life!” recommenced the angler, in a moralizing tone, as he slid his rod into its canvas case. “If a man knew what it was to fish all one’s life in a stream that has only one perch, to catch that one perch nine times in all, and nine times to see it fall back into the water, plump,—if a man knew what it was, why, then “—here the angler looked over his shoulder full at Leonard—“why then, young sir, he would know what human life is to vain ambition. Good-evening.”

Away he went treading over the daisies and kingcups. Helen’s eyes followed him wistfully.

“What a strange person!” said Leonard, laughing.

“I think he is a very wise one,” murmured Helen; and she came close up to Leonard, and took his hand in both hers, as if she felt already that he was in need of the Comforter,—the line broken, and the perch lost!

CHAPTER IX

At noon the next day, London stole upon them through a gloomy, thick, oppressive atmosphere; for where is it that we can say London bursts on the sight? It stole on them through one of its fairest and most gracious avenues of approach,—by the stately gardens of Kensington, along the side of Hyde Park, and so on towards Cumberland Gate.

Leonard was not the least struck. And yet with a very little money, and a very little taste, it would be easy to render this entrance to London as grand and as imposing as that to Paris from the Champs Elysees. As they came near the Edgware Road, Helen took her new brother by the hand and guided him; for she knew all that neighbourhood, and she was acquainted with a lodging near that occupied by her father (to that lodging itself she could not have gone for the world), where they might be housed cheaply.

But just then the sky, so dull and overcast since morning, seemed one mass of black cloud. There suddenly came on a violent storm of rain. The boy and girl took refuge in a covered mews, in a street running out of the Edgware Road. This shelter soon became crowded; the two young pilgrims crept close to the wall, apart from the rest, Leonard’s arm round Helen’s waist, sheltering her from the rain that the strong wind contending with it beat in through the passage. Presently a young gentleman of better mien and dress than the other refugees entered, not hastily, but rather with a slow and proud step, as if, though he deigned to take shelter, he scorned to run to it. He glanced somewhat haughtily at the assembled group, passed on through the midst of it, came near Leonard, took off his hat, and shook the rain from its brim. His head thus uncovered, left all his features exposed; and the village youth recognized, at the first glance, his old victorious assailant on the green at Hazeldean.

CHAPTER IX

Yet Randal Leslie was altered. His dark cheek was as thin as in boyhood, and even yet more wasted by intense study and night vigils; but the expression of his face was at once more refined and manly, and there was a steady concentrated light in his eye, like that of one who has been in the habit of bringing all his thoughts to one point. He looked older than he was. He was dressed simply in black, a colour which became him; and altogether his aspect and figure were, not showy indeed, but distinguished. He looked to the common eye a gentleman; and to the more observant a scholar.

Helter-skelter! pell-mell! the group in the passage now pressed each on each, now scattered on all sides, making way, rushing down the mews, against the walls, as a fiery horse darted under shelter. The rider, a young man with a very handsome face, and dressed with that peculiar care which we commonly call dandyism, cried out, good-humouredly, “Don’t be afraid; the horse sha’n’t hurt any of you. A thousand pardons—so ho! so ho!” He patted the horse, and it stood as still as a statue, filling up the centre of the passage. The groups resettled; Randal approached the rider.

“Frank Hazeldean!”

“Ah, is it indeed Randal Leslie?”

Frank was off his horse in a moment, and the bridle was consigned to the care of a slim ‘prentice-boy holding a bundle.

“My dear fellow, how glad I am to see you. How lucky it was that I should turn in here. Not like me either, for I don’t much care for a ducking. Staying in town, Randal?”

“Yes; at your uncle’s, Mr. Egerton. I have left Oxford.”

“For good?”

“For good.”

“But you have not taken your degree, I think? We Etonians all considered you booked for a double-first. Oh, we have been so proud of your fame,—you carried off all the prizes.”

“Not all; but some, certainly. Mr. Egerton offered me my choice,—to stay for my degree, or to enter at once into the Foreign Office. I preferred the end to the means. For, after all, what good are academical honours but as the entrance to life? To enter now is to save a step in a long way, Frank.”

“Ah, you were always ambitious, and you will make a great figure, I am sure.”

“Perhaps so—if I work for it. Knowledge is power.” Leonard started.

“And you!” resumed Randal, looking with some curious attention at his old schoolfellow. “You never came to Oxford. I did hear you were going into the army.”

“I am in the Guards,” said Frank, trying hard not to look too conceited as he made that acknowledgment. “The governor pished a little, and would rather I had come to live with him in the old Hall, and take to farming. Time enough for that, eh? By Jove, Randal, how pleasant a thing is life in London! Do you go to Almack’s to-night?”

“No; Wednesday is a holiday in the House. There is a great parliamentary dinner at Mr. Egerton’s. He is in the Cabinet now, you know; but you don’t see much of your uncle, I think.”

“Our sets are different,” said the young gentleman, in a tone of voice worthy of Brummel. “All those parliamentary fellows are devilish dull. The rain’s over. I don’t know whether the governor would like me to call at Grosvenor Square; but pray come and see me. Here’s my card to remind you; you must dine at our mess. Such capital fellows! What day will you fix?”

“I will call and let you know. Don’t you find it rather expensive in the Guards? I remember that you thought the governor, as you call him, used to chafe a little when you wrote for more pocket-money; and the only time I ever saw you with tears in your eyes was when Mr. Hazeldean, in sending you L5, reminded you that his estates were not entailed,—were at his own disposal, and they should never go to an extravagant spendthrift. It was not a pleasant threat that, Frank.”

“Oh!” cried the young man, colouring deeply. “It was not the threat that pained me; it was that my father could think so meanly of me as to fancy that—Well, well, but those were schoolboy days. And my father was always more generous than I deserved. We must see a great deal of each other, Randal. How good-natured you were at Eton, making my longs and shorts for me; I shall never forget it. Do call soon.”

Frank swung himself into his saddle, and rewarded the slim youth with half-a-crown,—a largess four times more ample than his father would have deemed sufficient. A jerk of the reins and a touch of the heel, off bounded the fiery horse and the gay young rider. Randal mused, and as the rain had now ceased, the passengers under shelter dispersed and went their way. Only Randal, Leonard, and Helen remained behind. Then, as Randal, still musing, lifted his eyes, they fell full upon Leonard’s face. He started, passed his hand quickly over his brow, looked again, hard and piercingly; and the change in his pale cheek to a shade still paler, a quick compression and nervous gnawing of his lip, showed that he too recognized an old foe. Then his glance ran over Leonard’s dress, which was somewhat dust-stained, but far above the class amongst which the peasant was born. Randal raised his brows in surprise, and with a smile slightly supercilious—the smile stung Leonard—and with a slow step, Randal left the passage, and took his way towards Grosvenor Square. The Entrance of Ambition was clear to him.

Then the little girl once more took Leonard by the hand, and led him through rows of humble, obscure, dreary streets. It seemed almost like an allegory personified, as the sad, silent child led on the penniless and low-born adventurer of genius by the squalid shops and through the winding lanes, which grew meaner and meaner, till both their forms vanished from the view.

CHAPTER X

“But do come; change your dress, return and dine with me; you will have just time, Harley. You will meet the most eminent men of our party; surely they are worth your study, philosopher that you affect to be.”

Thus said Audley Egerton to Lord L’Estrange, with whom he had been riding (after the toils of his office). The two gentlemen were in Audley’s library,—Mr. Egerton, as usual, buttoned up, seated in his chair, in the erect posture of a man who scorns “inglorious ease;” Harley, as usual, thrown at length on the sofa., his long hair in careless curls, his neckcloth loose, his habiliments flowing simplex mundit is, indeed, his grace all his own; seemingly negligent, never slovenly; at ease everywhere and with every one, even with Mr. Audley Egerton, who chilled or awed the ease out of most people.

“Nay, my dear Audley, forgive me. But your eminent men are all men of one idea, and that not a diverting one, politics! politics! politics! The storm in the saucer.”

“But what is your life, Harley?—the saucer without the storm?”

“Do you know, that’s very well said, Audley? I did not think you had so much liveliness of repartee. Life! life! it is insipid, it is shallow,—no launching Argosies in the saucer. Audley, I have the oddest fancy—”

“That of course,” said Audley, dryly; “you never had any other. What is the new one?”

HARLEY (with great gravity).—“Do you believe in Mesmerism?”

AUDLEY.—“Certainly not.”

HARLEY.—“If it were in the power of an animal magnetizer to get me out of my own skin into somebody’s else! That’s my fancy! I am so tired of myself,—so tired! I have run through all my ideas,—know every one of them by heart. When some pretentious impostor of an idea perks itself up and says, ‘Look at me,—I ‘m a new acquaintance,’ I just give it a nod, and say ‘Not at all, you have only got a new coat on; you are the same old wretch that has bored me these last twenty years; get away.’ But if one could be in a new skin, if I could be for half-an-hour your tall porter, or one of your eminent matter-of-fact men, I should then really travel into a new world.’ Every man’s brain must be a world in itself, eh? If I could but make a parochial settlement even in yours, Audley,—run over all your thoughts and sensations. Upon my life, I ‘ll go and talk to that French mesmerizer about it.”

[If, at the date in which Lord L’Estrange held this conversation with Mr. Egerton, Alfred de Musset had written his comedies, we should suspect that his lordship had plagiarized from one of them the whimsical idea that he here vents upon Audley. In repeating it, the author at least cannot escape from the charge of obligation to a writer whose humour is sufficiently opulent to justify the loan.]

AUDLEY (who does not seem to like the notion of having his thoughts and sensations rummaged, even by his friend, and even in fancy)—“Pooh, pooh, pooh! Do talk like a man of sense.”

HARLEY.—“Man of sense! Where shall I find a model? I don’t know a man of sense!—never met such a creature. Don’t believe it ever existed. At one time I thought Socrates must have been a man of sense: a delusion; he would stand gazing into the air, and talking to his Genius from sunrise to sunset. Is that like a man of sense? Poor Audley! how puzzled he looks! Well, I’ll try and talk sense to oblige you. And first” (here Harley raised himself on his elbow),—“first, is it true, as I have heard vaguely, that you are paying court to the sister of that infamous Italian traitor?”

“Madame di Negra? No: I am not paying court to her,” answered Audley, with a cold smile. “But she is very handsome; she is very clever; she is useful to me,—I need not say how or why; that belongs to my metier as a politician. But I think, if you will take my advice, or get your friend to take it, I could obtain from her brother, through my influence with her, some liberal concessions to your exile. She is very anxious to know where he is.”

“You have not told her?”

“No; I promised you I would keep that secret.”

“Be sure you do; it is only for some mischief, some snare, that she could desire such information. Concessions! pooh! This is no question of concessions, but of rights.”

“I think you should leave your friend to judge of that.”

“Well, I will write to him. Meanwhile, beware of this woman. I have heard much of her abroad, and she has the character of her brother for duplicity and—”

“Beauty,” interrupted Audley, turning the conversation with practised adroitness. “I am told that the count is one of the handsomest men in Europe, much handsomer than his sister still, though nearly twice her age. Tut, tut, Harley; fear not for me. I am proof against all feminine attractions. This heart is dead.”

“Nay, nay; it is not for you to speak thus,—leave that to me. But even I will not say it. The heart never dies. And you; what have you lost?—a wife; true: an excellent, noble-hearted woman. But was it love that you felt for her? Enviable man, have you ever loved?”

“Perhaps not, Harley,” said Audley, with a sombre aspect and in dejected accents; “very few men ever have loved, at least as you mean by the word. But there are other passions than love that kill the heart, and reduce us to mechanism.”

While Egerton spoke, Harley turned aside, and his breast heaved. There was a short silence; Audley was the first to break it.

“Speaking of my lost wife, I am sorry that you do not approve what I have done for her young kinsman, Randal Leslie.”

HARLEY (recovering himself with an effort).—“Is it true kindness to bid him exchange manly independence for the protection of an official patron?”

AUDLEV.—“I did not bid him. I gave him his choice. At his age, I should have chosen as he has done.”

HARLEY.—“I trust not; I think better of you. But answer me one question frankly, and then I will ask another. Do you mean to make this young man your heir?”

AUDLEY (with a slight embarrassment).—“Heir, pooh! I am young still. I may live as long as he—time enough to think of that.”

HARLEY.—“Then now to my second question. Have you told this youth plainly that he may look to you for influence, but not for wealth?”

AUDLEY (firmly).—“I think I have; but I shall repeat it more emphatically.”

HARLEY.—“Then I am satisfied as to your conduct, but not as to his. For he has too acute an intellect not to know what it is to forfeit independence; and, depend on it, he has made his calculations, and would throw you into the bargain in any balance that he could strike in his favour. You go by your experience in judging men; I by my instincts. Nature warns us as it does the inferior animals,—only we are too conceited, we bipeds, to heed her. My instincts of soldier and gentleman recoil from that old young man. He has the soul of the Jesuit. I see it in his eye, I hear it in the tread of his foot; volto sciolto he has not; i pensieri stretti he has. Hist! I hear now his step in the hall. I should know it from a thousand. That’s his very touch on the handle of the door.”

Randal Leslie entered. Harley—who, despite his disregard for forms, and his dislike to Randal, was too high-bred not to be polite to his junior in age or inferior in rank-rose and bowed. But his bright piercing eyes did not soften as they caught and bore down the deeper and more latent fire in Randal’s. Harley did not resume his seat, but moved to the mantelpiece, and leaned against it.

RANDAL.—“I have fulfilled your commissions, Mr. Egerton. I went first to Maida Hill, and saw Mr. Burley. I gave him the check, but he said it was too much, and he should return half to the banker; he will write the article as you suggested. I then—”

AUDLEY.—“Enough, Randal! we will not fatigue Lord L’Estrange with these little details of a life that displeases him,—the life political.”

HARLEY.—“But these details do not displease me; they reconcile me to my own life. Go on, pray, Mr. Leslie.”

Randal had too much tact to need the cautioning glance of Mr. Egerton. He did not continue, but said with a soft voice, “Do you think, Lord L’Estrange, that the contemplation of the mode of life pursued by others can reconcile a man to his own, if he had before thought it needed a reconciler?” Harley looked pleased, for the question was ironical; and if there was a thing in the world be abhorred, it was flattery.

“Recollect your Lucretius, Mr. Leslie, the Suave mare, etc., ‘pleasant from the cliff to see the mariners tossed on the ocean.’ Faith, I think that sight reconciles one to the cliff, though, before, one might have been teased by the splash from the spray, and deafened by the scream of the sea-gulls. But I leave you, Audley. Strange that I have heard no more of my soldier! Remember I have your promise when I come to claim it. Good-by, Mr. Leslie, I hope that Burley’s article will be worth the check.”

Lord L’Estrange mounted his horse, which was still at the door, and rode through the Park. But he was no longer now unknown by sight. Bows and nods saluted him on every side.

“Alas, I am found out, then,” said he to himself. “That terrible Duchess of Knaresborough, too—I must fly my country.” He pushed his horse into a canter, and was soon out of the Park. As he dismounted at his father’s sequestered house, you would have hardly supposed him the same whimsical, fantastic, but deep and subtle humourist that delighted in perplexing the material Audley, for his expressive face was unutterably serious. But the moment he came into the presence of his parents, the countenance was again lighted and cheerful. It brightened the whole room like sunshine.

CHAPTER XI

“Mr. Leslie,” said Egerton, when Harley had left the library, “you did not act with your usual discretion in touching upon matters connected with politics in the presence of a third party.”

“I feel that already, sir; my excuse is, that I held Lord L’Estrange to be your most intimate friend.”

“A public man, Mr. Leslie, would ill serve his country if he were not especially reserved towards his private friends—when they do not belong to his party.”

“But pardon me my ignorance. Lord Lansmere is so well known to be one of your supporters, that I fancied his son must share his sentiments, and be in your confidence.”

Egerton’s brows slightly contracted, and gave a stern expression to a countenance always firm and decided. He however answered in a mild tone,

“At the entrance into political life, Mr. Leslie, there is nothing in which a young man of your talents should be more on his guard than thinking for himself; he will nearly always think wrong. And I believe that is one reason why young men of talent disappoint their friends, and remain so long out of office.”

A haughty flush passed over Randal’s brow, and faded away quickly; he bowed in silence.

Egerton resumed, as if in explanation, and even in kindly apology,

“Look at Lord L’Estrange himself. What young man could come into life with brighter auspices? Rank, wealth, high animal spirits (a great advantage those same spirits, Mr. Leslie), courage, self-possession, scholarship as brilliant perhaps as your own; and now see how his life is wasted! Why? He always thought fit to think for himself. He could never be broken into harness, and never will be. The state coach, Mr. Leslie, requires that all the horses should pull together.”

“With submission, sir,” answered Randal, “I should think that there were other reasons why Lord L’Estrange, whatever be his talents—and of these you must be indeed an adequate judge—would never do anything in public life.”

“Ay, and what?” said Egerton, quickly.

“First,” said Randal, shrewdly, “private life has done too much for him. What could public life give to one who needs nothing? Born at the top of the social ladder, why should he put himself voluntarily at the last step, for the sake of climbing up again? And secondly, Lord L’Estrange seems to me a man in whose organization sentiment usurps too large a share for practical existence.”

“You have a keen eye,” said Audley, with some admiration,—“keen for one so young. Poor Harley!”

Mr. Egerton’s last words were said to himself. He resumed quickly,

“There is something on my mind, my young friend. Let us be frank with each other. I placed before you fairly the advantages and disadvantages of the choice I gave you. To take your degree with such honours as no doubt you would have won, to obtain your fellowship, to go to the Bar, with those credentials in favour of your talents,—this was one career. To come at once into public life, to profit by my experience, avail yourself of my interest, to take the chances of rise or fall with a party,—this was another. You chose the last. But in so doing, there was a consideration which might weigh with you, and on which, in stating your reasons for your option, you were silent.”

“What is that, sir?”

“You might have counted on my fortune, should the chances of party fail you: speak, and without shame if so; it would be natural in a young man, who comes from the elder branch of the House whose heiress was my wife.”

“You wound me, Mr. Egerton,” said Randal, turning away.

Mr. Egerton’s cold glance followed Randal’s movements; the face was hid from the glance, and the statesman’s eye rested on the figure, which is often as self-betraying as the countenance itself. Randal baffled Mr. Egerton’s penetration,—the young man’s emotion might be honest pride and pained and generous feeling, or it might be something else. Egerton continued slowly,

“Once for all, then, distinctly and emphatically, I say, never count upon that; count upon all else that I can do for you, and forgive me when I advise harshly or censure coldly; ascribe this to my interest in your career. Moreover, before decision becomes irrevocable, I wish you to know practically all that is disagreeable or even humiliating in the first subordinate steps of him who, without wealth or station, would rise in public life. I will not consider your choice settled till the end of a year at least,—your name will be kept on the college books till then; if on experience you should prefer to return to Oxford, and pursue the slower but surer path to independence and distinction, you can. And now give me your hand, Mr. Leslie, in sign that you forgive my bluntness: it is time to dress.”

Randal, with his face still averted, extended his hand. Mr. Egerton held it a moment, then dropping it, left the room. Randal turned as the door closed; and there was in his dark face a power of sinister passion, that justified all Harley’s warnings. His lips moved, but not audibly; then as if struck by a sudden thought, he followed Egerton into the hall.

“Sir,” said he, “I forgot to say, that on returning from Maida Hill, I took shelter from the rain under a covered passage, and there I met unexpectedly with your nephew, Frank Hazeldean.”