Part 4

"I shall not withstand your own inclination, Mr. de Montemar," said he, as he turned away with assumed coldness. The words smote on the heart of Louis. Sir Anthony, who had caught their unusual tone, looked towards the Duke and his nephew. He saw the former walk with a grave demeanor towards a window, and the latter gaze after him with an agitated countenance. The baronet approached Louis, and in a whisper asked what had happened.

"I must obey my uncle's command to return to Lindisfarne."

This reply re-called to Sir Anthony his own promise to the same effect. He reddened angrily: "and you have told the Duke, Mr. Athelstone's monkish antipathy to his gaiety and good humour?"

"No, dear Sir, but I have told him, I must go; that I am pledged to go. And though he injures me by supposing that I am such an Insensible as to obey without reluctance; yet I respect my word too much, and hold my uncle's command too sacred, to hesitate about what I ought to do."

With a hurrying step, he was moving towards the door; when the baronet made one angry stride, and stretching forth his athletic arm, grasped his nephew's; and with an enraged countenance drew him into an anti-room, waving his other hand to the Duke to follow. Wharton was too good a general to comply immediately; and Sir Anthony, as soon as he could speak without the observation of strangers, burst into a loud and violent invective on his uncle's unjustifiable prejudices against the Duke.

"What can he charge him with?" cried the baronet,--"That he is young? The fitter to be your companion!--That he is gay? And if a man be not gay in his youth, when is he to be gay?--That he is married, and does not live with his wife? What man of spirit would keep any terms with a woman, who wheedled him into wedlock, before he was out of his teens!--That he is fond of wine? His thirst does not make you drink!--That he is liked by women; and not ungrateful to their kindness? Why Louis, your old uncle had best shut you up at once with the dead bones in the abbey vaults! And then he calls him a rebel to his King! What of that? If the King himself does not fear him, but lets him go at large amongst his subjects; why should the Pastor of Lindisfarne take more care for His Majesty, than His Majesty thinks proper to take for himself! I tell you, Louis, the cloven-foot is under the surplice. It is resentment of an old affront, that excites all this animosity in the mind of Mr. Athelstone."

There was much in this speech, and more in the manner of it, that offended the best feelings of Louis. "Sir," said he, "I thank you for having recalled to me my uncle's arguments on this subject. He may be mistaken as to the extent of the facts; but till he is so far convinced of his error, as to release me from the promise I gave him, to avoid the Duke; I must consider myself bound to abide by it."

The baronet's face now became purple. "Louis! am not I your uncle, as well as this domineering priest? I am your mother's brother; and from her, I have rights, he cannot claim. You respect his commands! By what authority will you disobey mine? I therefore order you, on your peril, not to stir from this house, till it is my pleasure to let you go."

He turned, with a look of defiance, to leave the room; but the voice of Louis arrested him. "Sir Anthony," cried he, "when you command me as becomes my mother's brother, I have ever been eager to shew you obedience; but there is no authority on earth shall compel me to stay where I am to hear words of disrespect coupled with the name of my most revered guardian."

"We will look to that!" said the baronet fiercely; and opening an opposite door, he disappeared, banging it furiously after him. The Duke entered at the same instant, by the one from the drawing-room. He stood for a moment, observing the countenance of Louis; then approaching him with his usual frank air: "De Montemar," said he, "unintentionally, I have overheard something of what has passed between you and your uncle; and I have learnt enough, to be ashamed of the fool's part I have played just now, when I turned from you like a jealous girl!"

Wharton laid his hand on the arm of Louis, and with a gay smile, which was rendered enchanting by the affectionate seriousness of his eyes, he gently added, "but friendship being the sister of love, we must forgive her sharing a little of her brother's infirmities."

Louis could not guess how much of the recent offensive discussion had been overheard by its subject; but he was glad to be cleared in the mind of the Duke from the implied charge of quitting him capriciously. "Chance," said he, "has communicated to your Grace, what I could never have brought myself to utter."

"And therefore," returned the Duke, "I suppose you leave me to guess the good Pastor's reason for excluding me from his fold? I see it in the sin of my youth. You have forgotten it; but in my beardless days, I offended Mr. Athelstone in a way that deserved a cat-o-nine-tails. Had he laid his horse-whip over my shoulders at that time, it would have been wholesome chastisement: but this interdict--"

"It is not for that!" exclaimed Louis, "but could my guardian know the generous character he so misjudges; I feel he would court that friendship for me, he now so fearfully deprecates."

The Duke shook his head: "thanks, dear Montemar, for that profession of your faith! But when prejudice gets possession of an old head, neither argument nor _auto de fé_ can dislodge the evil spirit."

"Indeed," cried Louis, "my excellent uncle is not fuller of years than of candour! It is not one prejudice, but reports--slanders--"

"Aye," interrupted the Duke, "Dan Bacon warns us that _Envy, like the sun, beats hottest on the highest grounds!_ But I could have spared this proof of my merit.--de Montemar," added he, in a graver and more earnest tone; "shall I tell you, that you;--with that guileless heart, that ingenuous soul, that maiden reputation; will one day be _reported! slandered!_ made a pest, as I am, to be avoided!"

Clouds collected over the Duke's brow as he proceeded. He walked a few paces towards the opposite side of the room, and then turned round with his usual bright countenance.--"De Montemar, my life has been a comet's track; and therefore may astonish and alarm. It is not given to every man to know whither my eccentric course tends:--but I tell you, its aim is to the sun!"

Louis's heart glowed, as the Duke thus animatedly delivered himself. "Oh, my Lord," cried he, "why are you thus misapprehended? Or rather, why will that noble spirit give any licence to slander, by stooping to such associates as----" he paused.

"We will not name them!" replied Wharton laughing; "But such things are my toys, or my tools. Did men of our sort keep only with our likes, we should prove but useless animals. The world is a multitude, where every creature must partake the fellowship of poor dependent human nature; or at once claim kindred with the gods by doffing his clay, and ascending post-haste to the regions above!"

The castle bell rang for dinner; and with its last peal, Sir Anthony presented himself at the drawing-room door.--He came haughtily forward. "My Lord Duke, the ladies await your hand to lead them down stairs.--Louis, you are come to your senses, I see, and will follow his Grace."

The manner with which the baronet said this, shewed he rather expected to intimidate his nephew into compliance; than really thought he had made up his mind to obey. Louis answered with firmness, "I cannot, Sir, transgress what I know to be my duty."

Sir Anthony's eyes flashed fire: "That is to say," cried he, "you know it is your duty to obey me!--and you will obey me!--or abide by the consequence." "Nay, Athelstone," interrupted the Duke, "this is shot and bounce with a vengeance! What man, with the spirit of a weazel, but would grub through your very towers, to shew you he despised such threatenings? Open your gates to the uncontrouled egress and regress of your nephew; or my free pinions will spurn them in a moment!" "I am no jailor, Duke Wharton," replied the angry baronet, "But that boy should know his uncle is not to be insulted with impunity. He presumes on my avowed affection for him, to affront my company before my face; and then mocks me with an apology still more galling, by declaring that he must prefer the caprices of a selfish old priest, to all the gratitude he owes an uncle who indulges his every wish; and has already made him heir to this castle and its estates."

"Athelstone! Athelstone!" exclaimed the Duke, "am I to tell you _that boy_ is one exception to Walpole's theory of mankind? You cannot bribe Louis de Montemar to act against his conscience. Open your gates, and let him go."

Sir Anthony looked from the playful remonstrance of the Duke, to the perturbed countenance of his nephew.--"Louis," said he, in a more temperate tone, "You know how this has been wrung from me. Is there no terms to be kept with my affection for you? No middle way between outraging all respect to me, and breaking your extorted promise to this lord of penance?"

"How can I listen, Sir, to such epithets attached to the idea of the most venerable of men?"

"He may indulge the boy's-play!" cried the Duke, "Ill names stick only to such sorry fellows as I."

"Oh, Sir," rejoined Louis, "I have only to represent to my guardian the candour with which the Duke of Wharton has just treated his unhappy prejudice; and I am sure he will instantly permit me to return to the castle."

"Then you persist in going to-night?"

"Now, Sir," replied Louis, "the tide serves: and if I delay, I must remain till midnight."

Sir Anthony walked the room in great agitation. Wharton looked at his young friend with a persuasion in his eyes, to which he did not give words; and their beset object, unable to give a favourable answer to such pleading, bent his to the ground.

At last the baronet stopped opposite to him. "Louis, you are not a generous adversary. You deal hardly with the heart you so well know is all your own. And there you stand, so silent, so stern, to compel your uncle--the man whose life you saved,--to beg your pardon for his violence; and to entreat you, even with prayers, not to leave his roof in anger!" Sir Anthony caught his nephew's hand, and sobbed out the last words. Louis threw himself on his uncle's neck; and quite overcome, hardly articulated, "I will stay to-night, but to-morrow morning--Oh, my dear Sir, do not urge me to forfeit my own esteem!"

Wharton took the arm of the baronet, who covered his face with his handkerchief, while he obeyed the impulse which drew him away through the gallery-door. The Duke bent back, and whispered to Louis, "You will follow us to the dining-room?" He bowed his head in troubled silence; and the baronet and his friend turned down the gallery.

"A few hours yielded to my uncle's feelings," said Louis to himself, "will, I trust, make no essential difference in the performance of my word to Mr. Athelstone. And indeed I am true to its spirit, for I stay not willingly. And yet, were it not for my pledged word, what delight should I have in the society of this amiable, this ingenuous, this generous Wharton!"

When Louis joined the party at dinner, the flush of his hardly-subsided agitation was still on his cheek; but his manner was composed, and his looks cheerful. The company were all seated; and the place left for him was between the lively Frenchwoman and the Earl of Warwick. The ruddy face of the baronet was burnished with smiles from his recent victory, which he hoped was a final one over the future influence of the Pastor with his nephew: and the pride of triumph did not a little inspirit the vivacity with which he did the honours of his table; challenging Louis to pledge the ladies in sparkling Champagne, while he drank to their ruby lips in glowing Burgundy.

For a little time the Duke appeared thoughtful; and frequently turned his eyes upon Louis, rather as if he were the object of his thoughts, than of his sight: but the actress who sat next him, rallying him once or twice on his portentous abstraction, he suddenly shook off a mood so little according with the company; and replying with answering badinage, warned her dramatic majesty to beware of forcing Eneas from his cloud. The lady dared his threats; and a dialogue of wit, and playful gallantry, passed between the two, that delighted the sportive fancy of Louis, and set the grosser spirits of the party in a roar.

In the first pause of this noisy mirth, the black-eyed Italian challenged the Duke to bear his part with her in a new duetto of Apostola Zero. It was from the opera of Sappho and Phaon, and described the lover's last interview in the Lesbian shades. Louis loved music; and always listened with pleasure to his cousins chanting their border-legends, or giving utterance to the sweeter ballads of Scotland: but he had never heard Italian singing until now; and he was in so wrapt an ecstacy, that, lost to the objects around him, he sat during the performance with his hands clasped, and his eyes rivetted alternately on the Duke and on the Signora, as they severally took up the thrilling melody; but when their voices mingled at the close with all the harmonious interchange of height, and depth, faultless execution, and exquisite pathos, the heart of Louis seemed dissolving within him; and as the last notes trembled, and died on his ear, he leaned back in his chair and covered his face with his hand.

The momentary pause that followed, and which his throbbing heart would fain have prolonged, was rudely broken by an universal clapping of hands, and cries of bravo! By a side glance, Wharton had observed Louis's attention to the singing; and now seeing the disgust with which he pushed his chair back from the discordant uproar, he bent behind the Frenchwoman, and tapping his young friend on the shoulder, whispered--

"This universal shout, and shrill applause, Seem to the outraged ear of listening Silence, Strange as the hiss of hell, whose sound perverse Went forth to hail its sovereign's victory!"

As the Duke spoke, the cadence with which he repeated the lines recalled the strains which yet vibrated on the entranced sense of his auditor; and Louis, turning his eyes on him who had charmed him out of himself, expressed, in broken but energetic language, the delight he had felt, the wonder that such powers could belong to the human voice: "I have heard fine singing, before;" said he, "but this is more than singing!--It is the voice of the soul--or, shall I say, it is the very ineffable language which love breathed into the heart of Psyché?"

"Say what you please, my own De Montemar!" cried the Duke, his face radiant with animation; "you have the soul I want!--meet me to-night in the old library."

His friend the actress heard the last words; and gaily protesting against any appointment which tended to break up the present festivity; the rest of the ladies rapturously seconded her motion to close the night with a dance. Sir Anthony rubbed his hands with glee at the proposal: and when the ladies soon after ascended to their tea-table, he ordered the band, which usually travelled in the retinue of the magnificent Duke, to take its station in the great drawing-room.

The healths of the fair dames being drank on their departure, the native topics of the chace, races, justice-meetings, and county-politics, gradually gave way before the ascendancy of high spirits in men of wit and genius. Louis had insensibly drank more wine at dinner, than was his custom. Its fumes, and the entrancing power of the music, united with the charms of the Duke's ever-varying discourse, had thrown his faculties into a kind of enchanted mist, where all that is pleasurable played on the surface; all that was alarming, remained behind the cloud.

At a late hour they joined the ladies, who were seated at ombre and piquet; but the moment the men appeared, the tables were pushed aside; and the leading actress, rising from her chair, invited the Duke to a minuet. He presented her his hand, while the violins obeyed the nod of his head; and then moved through the elegant evolvements of the dance, with a grace the more charming from the air of gay indifference with which he approached, and retreated from her gliding steps.

The pretty Frenchwoman shewed the agile varieties of her art, in a _pas seul_, which filled the northern squires with a wonder and satisfaction more level to their apprehensions, than had been the science of the fair Italian. Louis stood, leaning over the back of a chair, smiling, and nodding his approbation to the exhilarating time of the music. As soon as Mam'selle Violante had made her concluding whirl in the air, she tripped lightly forward, and gaily demanded his hand for the country-dance. He bowed delightedly; and obeyed her volant motion, as she bounded with him down the room to join Wharton and his fair partner at the head of the set. The ball became general; and the jouissance so intoxicating; that the whole scene swam in delicious, delirious pleasure, with the newly-initiated sons of rough Northumberland.

When the party broke up as the sun rose, and Louis retired to his chamber, he hardly knew himself to be the same man who had left it the morning before. In that very chamber, four centuries ago, the gay and profligate Piers Gaveston had been a prisoner! and Louis had issued from it, only the preceding day, censuring in his mind the vices of its ancient possessor; and marvelling how any temptation addressed to the mere senses of rational man, could betray his virtue.

With a whirling brain he now threw himself upon his pillow.--The music still sounded in his ears; he yet wound with airy step through the mazes of the dance; the familiar pressure of the laughing Violante was still warm on his hand; and he yet thrilled under the soft glances of the fair Italian. Till that day, he had never seen the manners of women so unzoned. He had never thought it possible, that any behaviour, freer than what he saw in the behaviour of his aunt and cousins, could excite other emotions in him, than those of dislike and disgust. He had admired the magic painting of Homer, Tasso, and Spenser, in their Circé, Armida, and Adessa; and he had trembled for the constancy of their respective heroes, before the allurements of such sorcery:--but he never expected to find similar trials in real life. He believed the fair tempters in romance, were indebted for the beautiful mask with which they concealed their mental deformity, entirely to the spells of the poet's genius. Vice, in living woman, he expected to find as odious in outward shape, as it is loathsome within.

In short, in meditation, nothing is beautiful without goodness. The unbiassed heart, speculating upon these subjects, never unites admiration with any thing foreign to that character; and mistaking taste for principle, when it comes to the proof, too often substitutes the approbation of virtue for virtue itself. The discourses of Mrs. Coningsby fostered in the mind of her nephew this natural idea of the indivisibility of goodness and beauty. She described the empire of vice to be absolute, when it takes possession of a woman; and that its immediate effects were to obliterate every feminine grace, and transmute her at once into a monster of sin and disgust. Believing this, Louis was not prepared for the scene he had just witnessed. The pit, he expected to behold yawning like the mouth of hell, and so warning him from its approach, he saw overlaid with a verdure, brighter than all around: and no wonder his unwary feet trod the tempting spot, and found it treacherous.

Footnote A: The reader is requested to call to mind, that this is the description of the Theatrical Profession, at that period of its history in this country, when the plays of Farquhar, and others of the same taste, occupied the stage; and were performed by persons who too nearly resembled in reality the characters they represented.--With Garrick and revived Shakspeare, morals and propriety were restored:--and at the head of our present British actresses who possess the "grace of delicate reserve, which is the indispensable work of a true English gentlewoman;" no one can fail to respect Mrs. Siddons.

CHAP. IV.

He slept, and the scene was renewed with a thousand strange varieties. Imagination recalled, in fantastic vision, all that he had read of enchanted pleasures, or of descending goddesses mingling their immortal nature with favoured man. He now lost his own identity in the person of Rogero, slumbering away life in the arms of Alcina; and then became the indignant Rinaldo, cutting his way through the entangling thickets of Armida's wood.--He awoke heated, and unrefreshed. His heart panted with his imaginary contest; and his fevered temples beat to agony as he sprung from his disordered bed, and throwing open the window towards the breezes of the sea, inhaled their cooling freshness. His tremulous frame gradually recovered a braced tone; and wrapping his dressing-gown around him, he stood gazing on the opposite rocks of Lindisfarne, with feelings as new to him as had been the spectacle of the night before. He blushed as he thought of rejoining the dear inhabitants of that sacred spot.--A strange faintness seized on his heart--a sense of shame!

"For what?" cried he, "what have I done, to cause this self-accusation?--I have not broken my word with my uncle; I did not consent willingly, to stay till this morning: I made the sacrifice to Sir Anthony's feelings."

Thus far, his conscience acquitted him; and he breathed freer: but still he could not say, my heart is lightened of its load.

"I feel myself polluted!" cried he; "I know not what was said and done last night, to change me thus; but the wine I drank, and those women's looks and words; and my very dreams, seem to have contaminated my soul and body!--Oh, holy Lindisfarne!--My uncle, my sweet cousins, why did I ever leave your innocent presence!"

With this agonized invocation, he hastened to dress himself; that he might fly from the castle, and all its present mischiefs.

Violante had informed him the preceding night, how so strange a party came together; and why they had intruded themselves on the hospitality of his uncle. She described, with satirical pleasantry, a week's visit, which she and her Thespian sisters had been making to a noble _amateur_ in Teviotdale.--Lord Warwick was there; and soon after, Duke Wharton came in his way from the Highlands. At the time of his arrival, the whole company were on the eve of departure; but as he was coming southward, and they were to travel in the same direction, he complied with Warwick's entreaties to join the party.--The storm caught them on the moors; and as it was attended with thunder, the women became so frightened, it was necessary to take them to some place of shelter.--A minute's thought brought to Wharton's recollection that Bamborough was in the neighbourhood; and without hesitation he ordered the horses heads of half a dozen carriages to be turned towards the mansion of the convivial baronet.

As Louis ran over these circumstances in his mind, and recalled the lively indifference with which the Duke seemed to dally with all this youth and beauty, and female witchery; turning from one to the other with the gay caprice of the frolic butterfly, which flies from flower to flower, hovering and touching, and straight to flight again:--"Happy Wharton!" exclaimed he, "yours is indeed the spirit which _skims the earth, and does not soil its wings_! while mine, has only to approach its surface, and be made but too sensible, that dust I am, and would to dust return!"