Chapter 211

Harley L’Estrange was seated alone in his apartments. He had just put down a volume of some favourite classic author, and he was resting his hand firmly clenched upon the book. Ever since Harley’s return to England, there had been a perceptible change in the expression of his countenance, even in the very bearing and attitudes of his elastic youthful figure. But this change had been more marked since that last interview with Helen which has been recorded. There was a compressed, resolute firmness in the lips, a decided character in the brow. To the indolent, careless grace of his movements had succeeded a certain indescribable energy, as quiet and self-collected as that which distinguished the determined air of Audley Egerton himself. In fact, if you could have looked into his heart, you would have seen that Harley was, for the first time, making a strong effort over his passions and his humours; that the whole man was nerving himself to a sense of duty. “No,” he muttered,--“no! I will think only of Helen; I will think only of real life! And what (were I not engaged to another) would that dark-eyed Italian girl be to me?--What a mere fool’s fancy is this! I love again,--I, who through all the fair spring of my life have clung with such faith to a memory and a grave! Come, come, come, Harley L’Estrange, act thy part as man amongst men, at last! Accept regard; dream no more of passion. Abandon false ideals. Thou art no poet--why deem that life itself can be a poem?”

The door opened, and the Austrian prince, whom Harley had interested in the cause of Violante’s father, entered, with the familiar step of a friend.

“Have you discovered those documents yet?” said the prince. “I must now return to Vienna within a few days; and unless you can arm me with some tangible proof of Peschiera’s ancient treachery, or some more unanswerable excuse for his noble kinsman, I fear that there is no other hope for the exile’s recall to his country than what lies in the hateful option of giving his daughter to his perfidious foe.”

“Alas!” said Harley, “as yet all researches have been in vain; and I know not what other steps to take, without arousing Peschiera’s vigilance, and setting his crafty brains at work to counteract us. My poor friend, then, must rest contented with exile. To give Violante to the count were dishonour. But I shall soon be married; soon have a home, not quite unworthy of their due rank, to offer both to father and to child.”

“Would the future Lady L’Estrange feel no jealousy of a guest so fair as you tell me this young signorina is? And would you be in no danger yourself, my poor friend?”

“Pooh!” said Harley, colouring. “My fair guest would have two fathers; that is all. Pray do not jest on a thing so grave as honour.”

Again the door opened, and Leonard appeared.

“Welcome,” cried Harley, pleased to be no longer alone under the prince’s penetrating eye,--“welcome. This is the noble friend who shares our interest for Riccabocca, and who could serve him so well, if we could but discover the document of which I have spoken to you.”

“It is here,” said Leonard, simply; “may it be all that you require!”

Harley eagerly grasped at the packet, which had been sent from Italy to the supposed Mrs. Bertram, and, leaning his face on his hand, rapidly hurried through the contents.

“Hurrah!” he cried at last, with his face lighted up, and a boyish toss of his right hand. “Look, look, Prince, here are Peschiera’s own letters to his kinsman’s wife; his avowal of what he calls his ‘patriotic designs;’ his entreaties to her to induce her husband to share them. Look, look, how he wields his influence over the woman he had once wooed; look how artfully he combats her objections; see how reluctant our friend was to stir, till wife and kinsman both united to urge him!”

“It is enough,-quite enough,” exclaimed the prince, looking at the passages in Peschiera’s letters which Harley pointed out to him.

“No, it is not enough,” shouted Harley, as he continued to read the letters with his rapid sparkling eyes. “More still! O villain, doubly damned! Here, after our friend’s flight, here is Peschiera’s avowal of guilty passion; here, he swears that he had intrigued to ruin his benefactor, in order to pollute the home that had sheltered him. Ah, see how she answers! thank Heaven her own eyes were opened at last, and she scorned him before she died! She was innocent! I said so. Violante’s mother was pure. Poor lady, this moves me! Has your emperor the heart of a man?”

“I know enough of our emperor,” answered the prince, warmly, “to know that, the moment these papers reach him, Peschiera is ruined, and your friend is restored to his honours. You will live to see the daughter, to whom you would have given a child’s place at your hearth, the wealthiest heiress of Italy,--the bride of some noble lover, with rank only below the supremacy of kings!”

“Ah,” said Harley, in a sharp accent, and turning very pale,--“ah, I shall not see her that! I shall never visit Italy again!--never see her more,--never, after she has once quitted this climate of cold iron cares and formal duties! never, never!” He turned his head for a moment, and then came with quick step to Leonard. “But you, O happy poet! No Ideal can ever be lost to you. You are independent of real life. Would that I were a poet!” He smiled sadly.

“You would not say so, perhaps, my dear Lord,” answered Leonard, with equal sadness, “if you knew how little what you call ‘the Ideal’ replaces to a poet the loss of one affection in the genial human world. Independent of real life! Alas! no. And I have here the confessions of a true poet-soul, which I will entreat you to read at leisure; and when you have read, say if you would still be a poet!”

He took forth Nora’s manuscripts as he spoke.

“Place them yonder, in my escritoire, Leonard; I will read them later.”

“Do so, and with heed; for to me there is much here that involves my own life,--much that is still a mystery, and which I think you can unravel!”

“I!” exclaimed Harley; and he was moving towards the escritoire, in a drawer of which Leonard had carefully deposited the papers, when once more, but this time violently, the door was thrown open, and Giacomo rushed into the room, accompanied by Lady Lansmere.

“Oh, my Lord, my Lord!” cried Giacomo, in Italian, “the signorina! the signorina! Violante!”

“What of her? Mother, Mother! what of her? Speak, speak!”

“She has gone,--left our house!”

“Left! No, no!” cried Giacomo. “She must have been deceived or forced away. The count! the count! Oh, my good Lord, save her, as you once saved her father!”

“Hold!” cried Harley. “Give me your arm, Mother. A second such blow in life is beyond the strength of man,--at least it is beyond mine. So, so! I am better now! Thank you, Mother. Stand back, all of you! give me air. So the count has triumphed, and Violante has fled with him! Explain all,--I can bear it!”

BOOK TWELFTH.

INITIAL CHAPTER.

WHEREIN THE CAXTON FAMILY REAPPEAR.

“Again,” quoth my father,--“again behold us! We who greeted the commencement of your narrative, who absented ourselves in the midcourse when we could but obstruct the current of events, and jostle personages more important,--we now gather round the close. Still, as the chorus to the drama, we circle round the altar with the solemn but dubious chant which prepares the audience for the completion of the appointed destinies; though still, ourselves, unaware how the skein is to be unravelled, and where the shears are to descend.”

So there they stood, the Family of Caxton,--all grouping round me, all eager officiously to question, some over-anxious prematurely to criticise.

“Violante can’t have voluntarily gone off with that horrid count,” said my mother; “but perhaps she was deceived, like Eugenia by Mr. Bellamy, in the novel of ‘CAMILLA’.”

“Ha!” said my father, “and in that case it is time yet to steal a hint from Clarissa Harlowe, and make Violante die less of a broken heart than a sullied honour. She is one of those girls who ought to be killed! All things about her forebode an early tomb!”

“Dear, dear!” cried Mrs. Caxton, “I hope not!”

“Pooh, brother,” said the captain, “we have had enough of the tomb in the history of poor Nora. The whole story grows out of a grave, and if to a grave it must return--if, Pisistratus, you must kill somebody--kill Levy.”

“Or the count,” said my mother, with unusual truculence. “Or Randal Leslie,” said Squills. “I should like to have a post-mortem cast of his head,--it would be an instructive study.”

Here there was a general confusion of tongues, all present conspiring to bewilder the unfortunate author with their various and discordant counsels how to wind up his story and dispose of his characters.

“Silence!” cried Pisistratus, clapping his hands to both ears. “I can no more alter the fate allotted to each of the personages whom you honour with your interest than I can change your own; like you, they must go where events lead there, urged on by their own characters and the agencies of others. Providence so pervadingly governs the universe, that you cannot strike it even out of a book. The author may beget a character, but the moment the character comes into action, it escapes from his hands,--plays its own part, and fulfils its own inevitable doom.”

“Besides,” said Squills, “it is easy to see, from the phrenological development of the organs in those several heads which Pisistratus has allowed us to examine, that we have seen no creations of mere fiction, but living persons, whose true history has set in movement their various bumps of Amativeness, Constructiveness, Acquisitiveness, Idealty, Wonder, Comparison, etc. They must act, and they must end, according to the influences of their crania. Thus we find in Randal Leslie the predominant organs of Constructiveness, Secretiveness, Comparison, and Eventuality, while Benevolence, Conscientiousness, Adhesiveness, are utterly nil. Now, to divine how such a man must end, we must first see what is the general composition of the society in which he moves, in short, what other gases are brought into contact with his phlogiston. As to Leonard, and Harley, and Audley Egerton, surveying them phrenologically, I should say that--”

“Hush!” said my father, “Pisistratus has dipped his pen in the ink, and it seems to me easier for the wisest man that ever lived to account for what others have done than to predict what they should do. Phrenologists discovered that Mr. Thurtell had a very fine organ of Conscientiousness; yet, somehow or other, that erring personage contrived to knock the brains out of his friend’s organ of Individuality. Therefore I rise to propose a Resolution,--that this meeting be adjourned till Pisistratus has completed his narrative; and we shall then have the satisfaction of knowing that it ought, according to every principle of nature, science, and art, to have been completed differently. Why should we deprive ourselves of that pleasure?”

“I second the motion,” said the captain; “but if Levy be not hanged, I shall say that there is an end of all poetical justice.”

“Take care of poor Helen,” said Blanche, tenderly: “nor, that I would have you forget Violante.”

“Pish! and sit down, or they shall both die old maids.” Frightened at that threat, Blanche, with a deprecating look, drew her stool quietly near me, as if to place her two proteges in an atmosphere mesmerized to matrimonial attractions; and my mother set hard to work--at a new frock for the baby. Unsoftened by these undue female influences, Pisistratus wrote on at the dictation of the relentless Fates. His pen was of iron, and his heart was of granite. He was as insensible to the existence of wife and baby as if he had never paid a house bill, nor rushed from a nursery at the sound of an infant squall. O blessed privilege of Authorship!

“O testudinis aureae Dulcem quae strepitum, Pieri, temperas! O mutis quoque piscibus Donatura cyeni, si libeat, sonum!”

[“O Muse, who dost temper the sweet sound of the golden shell of the tortoise, and couldst also give, were it needed, to silent fishes the song of the swan.”]