"My Novel" — Complete

“Why, we are old-fashioned people,” said the earl, rather embarrassed, “and the duchess is a woman of the world.”

“Let us hope,” said the countess, mildly, “that her daughter is not.”

“I would not marry Lady Mary, if all the rest of the female sex were turned into apes,” said Lord L’Estrange, with deliberate fervour.

“Good heavens!” cried the earl, “what extraordinary language is this? And pray why, sir?”

HARLEY.—“I can’t say; there is no why in these cases. But, my dear father, you are not keeping faith with me.”

LORD LANSMERE.—“HOW?”

HARLEY.—“You and my Lady, here, entreat me to marry; I promise to do my best to obey you, but on one condition, that I choose for myself, and take my time about it. Agreed on both sides. Whereon, off goes your Lordship—actually before noon, at an hour when no lady, without a shudder, could think of cold blonde and damp orange flowers—off goes your Lordship, I say, and commits poor Lady Mary and your unworthy son to a mutual admiration,—which neither of us ever felt. Pardon me, my father, but this is grave. Again let me claim your promise,—full choice for myself, and no reference to the Wars of the Roses. What War of the Roses like that between Modesty and Love upon the cheek of the virgin!”

LADY LANSMERE.—“Full choice for yourself, Harley: so be it. But we, too, named a condition,—did we not, Lansmere?”

THE EARL (puzzled).—“Eh, did we? Certainly we did.”

HARLEY.—“What was it?”

LADY LANSMERE.—“The son of Lord Lansmere can only marry the daughter of a gentleman.”

THE EARL.—“Of course, of course.”

The blood rushed over Harley’s fair face, and then as suddenly left it pale.

He walked away to the window; his mother followed him, and again laid her hand on his shoulder.

“You were cruel,” said he, gently, and in a whisper, as he winced under the touch of the hand. Then turning to the earl, who was gazing at him in blank surprise,—it never occurred to Lord Lansmere that there could be a doubt of his son’s marrying beneath the rank modestly stated by the countess,—Harley stretched forth his hand, and said, in his soft winning tone, “You have ever been most gracious to me, and most forbearing; it is but just that I should sacrifice the habits of an egotist, to gratify a wish which you so warmly entertain. I agree with you, too, that our race should not close in me,—Noblesse oblige. But you know I was ever romantic; and I must love where I marry; or, if not love, I must feel that my wife is worthy of all the love I could once have bestowed. Now, as to the vague word ‘gentleman’ that my mother employs—word that means so differently on different lips—I confess that I have a prejudice against young ladies brought up in the ‘excellent foppery of the world,’ as the daughters of gentlemen of our rank mostly are. I crave, therefore, the most liberal interpretation of this word ‘gentleman.’ And so long as there be nothing mean or sordid in the birth, habits, and education of the father of this bride to be, I trust you will both agree to demand nothing more,—neither titles nor pedigree.”

“Titles, no, assuredly,” said Lady Lansmere; “they do not make gentlemen.”

“Certainly not,” said the earl; “many of our best families are untitled.”

“Titles—no,” repeated Lady Lansmere; “but ancestors yes.”

“Ah, my mother,” said Harley, with his most sad and quiet smile, “it is fated that we shall never agree. The first of our race is ever the one we are most proud of; and pray, what ancestors had he? Beauty, virtue, modesty, intellect,—if these are not nobility enough for a man, he is a slave to the dead.”

With these words Harley took up his hat and made towards the door.

“You said yourself, ‘Noblesse oblige,’” said the countess, following him to the threshold; “we have nothing more to add.”

Harley slightly shrugged his shoulders, kissed his mother’s hand; whistled to Nero, who started up from a doze by the window, and went his way.

“Does he really go abroad next week?” said the earl. “So he says.”

“I am afraid there is no chance for Lady Mary,” resumed Lord Lansmere, with a slight but melancholy smile.

“She has not intellect enough to charm him. She is not worthy of Harley,” said the proud mother.

“Between you and me,” rejoined the earl, rather timidly, “I don’t see what good his intellect does him. He could not be more unsettled and useless if he were the merest dunce in the three kingdoms. And so ambitious as he was when a boy! Katherine, I sometimes fancy that you know what changed him.”

“I! Nay, my dear Lord, it is a common change enough with the young, when of such fortunes, who find, when they enter life, that there is really little left for them to strive for. Had Harley been a poor man’s son, it might have been different.”

“I was born to the same fortunes as Harley,” said the earl, shrewdly, “and yet I flatter myself I am of some use to old England.”

The countess seized upon the occasion, complimented her Lord, and turned the subject.

CHAPTER XVII

Harley spent his day in his usual desultory, lounging manner,—dined in his quiet corner at his favourite club. Nero, not admitted into the club, patiently waited for him outside the door. The dinner over, dog and man, equally indifferent to the crowd, sauntered down that thoroughfare which, to the few who can comprehend the Poetry of London, has associations of glory and of woe sublime as any that the ruins of the dead elder world can furnish,—thoroughfare that traverses what was once the courtyard of Whitehall, having to its left the site of the palace that lodged the royalty of Scotland; gains, through a narrow strait, that old isle of Thorney, in which Edward the Confessor received the ominous visit of the Conqueror; and, widening once more by the Abbey and the Hall of Westminster, then loses itself, like all memories of earthly grandeur, amidst humble passages and mean defiles.

Thus thought Harley L’Estrange—ever less amidst the actual world around him than the images invoked by his own solitary soul-as he gained the bridge, and saw the dull, lifeless craft sleeping on the “Silent Way,” once loud and glittering with the gilded barks of the antique Seignorie of England.

It was on that bridge that Audley Egerton had appointed to meet L’Estrange, at an hour when he calculated he could best steal a respite from debate. For Harley, with his fastidious dislike to all the resorts of his equals, had declined to seek his friend in the crowded regions of Bellamy’s.

Harley’s eye, as he passed along the bridge, was attracted by a still form, seated on the stones in one of the nooks, with its face covered by its hands. “If I were a sculptor,” said he to himself, “I should remember that image whenever I wished to convey the idea of Despondency!” He lifted his looks and saw, a little before him in the midst of the causeway, the firm, erect figure of Audley Egerton. The moonlight was full on the bronzed countenance of the strong public man, with its lines of thought and care, and its vigorous but cold expression of intense self-control.

“And looking yonder,” continued Harley’s soliloquy, “I should remember that form, when I wished to hew out from the granite the idea of Endurance.”

“So you are come, and punctually,” said Egerton, linking his arm in Harley’s.

HARLEY—“Punctually, of course, for I respect your time, and I will not detain you long. I presume you will speak to-night?”

EGERTON.—“I have spoken.”

HARLEY (with interest).—“And well, I hope?”

EGERTON.—“With effect, I suppose, for I have been loudly cheered, which does not always happen to me.”

HARLEY.—“And that gave you pleasure?”

EGERTON (after a moment’s thought).—“No, not the least.”

HARLEY.—“What, then, attaches you so much to this life,—constant drudgery, constant warfare, the more pleasurable faculties dormant, all the harsher ones aroused, if even its rewards (and I take the best of those to be applause) do not please you?”

EGERTON.—“What? Custom.”

HARLEY.—“Martyr.”

EGERTON.—“You say it: but turn to yourself; you have decided, then, to leave England next week?”

HARLEY (moodily).—“Yes. This life in a capital, where all are so active, myself so objectless, preys on me like a low fever. Nothing here amuses me, nothing interests, nothing comforts and consoles. But I am resolved, before it be too late, to make one great struggle out of the Past, and into the natural world of men. In a word, I have resolved to marry.”

EGERTON.—“Whom?”

HARLEY (seriously).—“Upon my life, my dear fellow, you are a great philosopher. You have hit the exact question. You see I cannot marry a dream; and where, out of dreams, shall I find this ‘whom’?”

EGERTON.—“You do not search for her.”

HARLEY. “Do we ever search for love? Does it not flash upon us when we least expect it? Is it not like the inspiration to the muse? What poet sits down and says, ‘I will write a poem’? What man looks out and says, ‘I will fall in love’? No! Happiness, as the great German tells us, ‘falls suddenly from the bosom of the gods;’ so does love.”

EGERTON.—“You remember the old line in Horace: ‘The tide flows away while the boor sits on the margin and waits for the ford.’”

HARLEV.—“An idea which incidentally dropped from you some weeks ago, and which I have before half-meditated, has since haunted me. If I could but find some child with sweet dispositions and fair intellect not yet formed, and train her up according to my ideal. I am still young enough to wait a few years. And meanwhile I shall have gained what I so sadly want,—an object in life.”

EGERTON.—“You are ever the child of romance. But what—”

Here the minister was interrupted by a messenger from the House of Commons, whom Audley had instructed to seek him on the bridge should his presence be required. “Sir, the Opposition are taking advantage of the thinness of the House to call for a division. Mr. ——- is put up to speak for time, but they won’t hear him.”

Egerton turned hastily to Lord L’Estrange. “You see, you must excuse me now. To-morrow I must go to Windsor for two days: but we shall meet on my return.”

“It does not matter,” answered Harley; “I stand out of the pale of your advice, O practical man of sense. And if,” added Harley, with affectionate and mournful sweetness,—“if I weary you with complaints which you cannot understand, it is only because of old schoolboy habits. I can have no trouble that I do not confide to you.”

Egerton’s hand trembled as it pressed his friend’s, and without a word, he hurried away abruptly. Harley remained motionless for some seconds, in deep and quiet revery; then he called to his dog, and turned back towards Westminster.

He passed the nook in which had sat the still figure of Despondency; but the figure had now risen, and was leaning against the balustrade. The dog, who preceded his master, passed by the solitary form and sniffed it suspiciously.

“Nero, sir, come here,” said Harley.

“Nero,”—that was the name by which Helen had said that her father’s friend had called his dog; and the sound startled Leonard as he leaned, sick at heart, against the stone. He lifted his head and looked wistfully, eagerly into Harley’s face. Those eyes, bright, clear, yet so strangely deep and absent, which Helen had described, met his own, and chained them. For L’Estrange halted also; the boy’s countenance was not unfamiliar to him. He returned the inquiring look fixed on his own, and recognized the student by the bookstall.

“The dog is quite harmless, sir,” said L’Estrange, with a smile.

“And you call him ‘Nero’?” said Leonard, still gazing on the stranger.

Harley mistook the drift of the question.

“Nero, sir; but he is free from the sanguinary propensities of his Roman namesake.” Harley was about to pass on, when Leonard said falteringly,

“Pardon me, but can it be possible that you are one whom I have sought in vain on behalf of the child of Captain Digby?”

Harley stopped short. “Digby!” he exclaimed, “where is he? He should have found me easily. I gave him an address.”

“Ah, Heaven be thanked!” cried Leonard. “Helen is saved—she will not die,” and he burst into tears.

A very few moments and a very few words sufficed to explain to Harley the state of his old fellow-soldier’s orphan. And Harley himself soon stood in the young sufferer’s room, supporting her burning temples on his breast, and whispering into ears that heard him as in a happy dream, “Comfort, comfort; your father yet lives in me.”

And then Helen, raising her eyes, said, “But Leonard is my brother—more than brother-and he needs a father’s care more than I do.”

“Hush, hush, Helen. I need no one, nothing now!” cried Leonard, and his tears gushed over the little hand that clasped his own.

CHAPTER XVIII

Harley L’Estrange was a man whom all things that belong to the romantic and poetic side of our human life deeply impressed. When he came to learn the ties between these two Children of Nature, standing side by side, alone amidst the storms of fate, his heart was more deeply moved than it had been for many years. In those dreary attics, overshadowed by the smoke and reek of the humble suburb, the workday world in its harshest and tritest forms below and around them, he recognized that divine poem which comes out from all union between the mind and the heart. Here, on the rough deal table (the ink scarcely dry), lay the writings of the young wrestler for fame and bread; there, on the other side of the partition, on that mean pallet, lay the boy’s sole comforter, the all that warmed his heart with living mortal affection. On one side the wall, the world of imagination; on the other, this world of grief and of love. And in both, a spirit equally sublime,—unselfish devotion,—“the something afar from the sphere of our sorrow.”

He looked round the room into which he had followed Leonard, on quitting Helen’s bedside. He noted the manuscripts on the table, and pointing to them, said gently, “And these are the labours by which you supported the soldier’s orphan?—soldier yourself in a hard battle!”

“The battle was lost,—I could not support her,” replied Leonard, mournfully.

“But you did not desert her. When Pandora’s box was opened, they say Hope lingered last—”

“False, false,” said Leonard; “a heathen’s notion. There are deities that linger behind Hope,—Gratitude, Love, and Duty.”

“Yours is no common nature,” exclaimed Harley, admiringly, “but I must sound it more deeply hereafter: at present I hasten for the physician; I shall return with him. We must move that poor child from this low close air as soon as possible. Meanwhile, let me qualify your rejection of the old fable. Wherever Gratitude, Love, and Duty remain to man, believe me that Hope is there too, though she may be often invisible, hidden behind the sheltering wings of the nobler deities.”

Harley said this with that wondrous smile of his, which cast a brightness over the whole room, and went away. Leonard stole softly towards the grimy window; and looking up towards the stars that shone pale over the roof-tops, he murmured, “O Thou, the All-seeing and All-merciful! how it comforts me now to think that, though my dreams of knowledge may have sometimes obscured the heavens, I never doubted that Thou wert there! as luminous and everlasting, though behind the cloud!” So, for a few minutes, he prayed silently, then passed into Helen’s room, and sat beside her motionless, for she slept. She woke just as Harley returned with a physician; and then Leonard, returning to his own room, saw amongst his papers the letter he had written to Mr. Dale, and muttering, “I need not disgrace my calling,—I need not be the mendicant now”—held the letter to the flame of the candle. And while he said this, and as the burning tinder dropped on the floor, the sharp hunger, unfelt during his late anxious emotions, gnawed at his entrails. Still, even hunger could not reach that noble pride which had yielded to a sentiment nobler than itself, and he smiled as he repeated, “No mendicant!—the life that I was sworn to guard is saved. I can raise against Fate the front of Man once more.”

CHAPTER XIX

A few days afterwards, and Helen, removed to a pure air, and under the advice of the first physicians, was out of all danger.

It was a pretty detached cottage, with its windows looking over the wild heaths of Norwood, to which Harley rode daily to watch the convalescence of his young charge: an object in life was already found. As she grew better and stronger, he coaxed her easily into talking, and listened to her with pleased surprise. The heart so infantine and the sense so womanly struck him much by its rare contrast and combination. Leonard, whom he had insisted on placing also in the cottage, had stayed there willingly till Helen’s recovery was beyond question. Then he came to Lord L’Estrange, as the latter was about one day to leave the cottage, and said quietly, “Now, my Lord, that Helen is safe, and now that she will need me no more, I can no longer be a pensioner on your bounty. I return to London.”

“You are my visitor, not my pensioner, foolish boy,” said Harley, who had already noticed the pride which spoke in that farewell; “come into the garden and let us talk.”

Harley seated himself on a bench on the little lawn; Nero crouched at his feet; Leonard stood beside him.

“So,” said Lord L’Estrange, “you would return to London? What to do?”

“Fulfil my fate.”

“And that?”

“I cannot guess. Fate is the Isis whose veil no mortal can ever raise.”

“You should be born for great things,” said Harley, abruptly. “I am sure that you write well. I have seen that you study with passion. Better than writing and better than study, you have a noble heart, and the proud desire of independence. Let me see your manuscripts, or any copies of what you have already printed. Do not hesitate,—I ask but to be a reader. I don’t pretend to be a patron: it is a word I hate.”

Leonard’s eyes sparkled through their sudden moisture. He brought out his portfolio, placed it on the bench beside Harley, and then went softly to the farther part of the garden. Nero looked after him, and then rose and followed him slowly. The boy seated himself on the turf, and Nero rested his dull head on the loud heart of the poet.

Harley took up the various papers before him, and read them through leisurely. Certainly he was no critic. He was not accustomed to analyze what pleased or displeased him; but his perceptions were quick, and his taste exquisite. As he read, his countenance, always so genuinely expressive, exhibited now doubt and now admiration. He was soon struck by the contrast, in the boy’s writings, between the pieces that sported with fancy and those that grappled with thought. In the first, the young poet seemed so unconscious of his own individuality. His imagination, afar and aloft from the scenes of his suffering, ran riot amidst a paradise of happy golden creations. But in the last, the THINKER stood out alone and mournful, questioning, in troubled sorrow, the hard world on which he gazed. All in the thought was unsettled, tumultuous; all in the fancy serene and peaceful. The genius seemed divided into twain shapes,—the one bathing its wings amidst the starry dews of heaven; the other wandering, “melancholy, slow,” amidst desolate and boundless sands. Harley gently laid down the paper and mused a little while. Then he rose and walked to Leonard, gazing on his countenance as he neared the boy, with a new and a deeper interest.

“I have read your papers,” he said, “and recognize in them two men, belonging to two worlds, essentially distinct.” Leonard started, and murmured, “True, true!”

“I apprehend,” resumed Harley, “that one of these men must either destroy the other, or that the two must become fused and harmonized into a single existence. Get your hat, mount my groom’s horse, and come with me to London; we will converse by the way. Look you, I believe you and I agree in this,—that the first object of every noble spirit is independence. It is towards this independence that I alone presume to assist you, and this is a service which the proudest man can receive without a blush.”

Leonard lifted his eyes towards Harley’s, and those eyes swam with grateful tears; but his heart was too full to answer. “I am not one of those,” said Harley, when they were on the road, “who think that because a young man writes poetry he is fit for nothing else, and that he must be a poet or a pauper. I have said that in you there seems to me to be two men,—the man of the Actual world, the man of the Ideal. To each of these men I can offer a separate career. The first is perhaps the more tempting. It is the interest of the State to draw into its service all the talent and industry it can obtain; and under his native State every citizen of a free country should be proud to take service. I have a friend who is a minister, and who is known to encourage talent,—Audley Egerton. I have but to say to him, ‘There is a young man who will repay the government whatever the government bestows on him;’ and you will rise to-morrow independent in means, and with fair occasions to attain to fortune and distinction. This is one offer,—what say you to it?”

Leonard thought bitterly of his interview with Audley Egerton, and the minister’s proffered crown-piece. He shook his head, and replied,

“Oh, my Lord, how have I deserved such kindness? Do with me what you will; but if I have the option, I would rather follow my own calling. This is not the ambition that inflames me.”

“Hear, then, the other offer. I have a friend with whom I am less intimate than Egerton, and who has nothing in his gift to bestow. I speak of a man of letters,—Henry Norreys,—of whom you have doubtless heard, who, I should say, conceived an interest in you when he observed you reading at the bookstall. I have often heard him say that literature as a profession is misunderstood, and that rightly followed, with the same pains and the same prudence which are brought to bear on other professions, a competence at least can be always ultimately obtained. But the way may be long and tedious, and it leads to no power but over thought; it rarely attains to wealth; and though reputation may be certain, fame, such as poets dream of, is the lot of few. What say you to this course?”

“My Lord, I decide,” said Leonard, firmly; and then, his young face lighting up with enthusiasm, he exclaimed, “Yes, if, as you say, there be two men within me, I feel that were I condemned wholly to the mechanical and practical world, one would indeed destroy the other. And the conqueror would be the ruder and the coarser. Let me pursue those ideas that, though they have but flitted across me, vague and formless, have ever soared towards the sunlight. No matter whether or not they lead to fortune or to fame,—at least they will lead me upward! Knowledge for itself I desire; what care I if it be not power!”

“Enough,” said Harley, with a pleased smile at his young companion’s outburst. “As you decide so shall it be settled. And now permit me, if not impertinent, to ask you a few questions. Your name is Leonard Fairfield?”

The boy blushed deeply, and bowed his head as if in assent.

“Helen says you are self-taught; for the rest she refers me to you,—thinking, perhaps, that I should esteem you less—rather than yet more highly—if she said you were, as I presume to conjecture, of humble birth.”

“My birth,” said Leonard, slowly, “is very—very—humble.”

“The name of Fairfield is not unknown to me. There was one of that name who married into a family in Lansmere, married an Avenel,” continued Harley, and his voice quivered. “You change countenance. Oh, could your mother’s name have been Avenel?”