CHAPTER XVII
Lord L’Estrange followed the spruce servant into Baron Levy’s luxurious study.
The baron looked greatly amazed at his unexpected visitor; but he got up, handed a chair to my Lord with a low bow. “This is an honour,” said he.
“You have a charming abode here,” said Lord L’Estrange, looking round. “Very fine bronzes,—excellent taste. Your reception-rooms above are, doubtless, a model to all decorators?”
“Would your Lordship condescend to see them?” said Levy, wondering, but flattered.
“With the greatest pleasure.”
“Lights!” cried Levy, to the servant who answered his bell. “Lights in the drawing-rooms,—it is growing dark.” Lord L’Estrange followed the usurer upstairs; admired everything,—pictures, draperies, Sevres china, to the very shape of the downy fauteuils, to the very pattern of the Tournay carpets. Reclining then on one of the voluptuous sofas, Lord L’Estrange said smilingly, “You are a wise man: there is no advantage in being rich, unless one enjoys one’s riches.”
“My own maxim, Lord L’Estrange.”
“And it is something, too, to have a taste for good society. Small pride would you have, my dear baron, in these rooms, luxurious though they are, if filled with guests of vulgar exterior and plebeian manners. It is only in the world in which we move that we find persons who harmonize, as it were, with the porcelain of Sevres, and these sofas that might have come from Versailles.”
“I own,” said Levy, “that I have what some may call a weakness in a parvenu like myself. I have a love for the beau monde. It is indeed a pleasure to me when I receive men like your Lordship.”
“But why call yourself a parvenu? Though you are contented to honour the name of Levy, we, in society, all know that you are the son of a long-descended English peer. Child of love, it is true; but the Graces smile on those over whose birth Venus presided. Pardon my old-fashioned mythological similes,—they go so well with these rooms—Louis Quinze.”
“Since you have touched on my birth,” said Levy, his colour rather heightening, not with shame, but with pride, “I don’t deny that it has had some effect on my habits and tastes in life. In fact—”
“In fact, own that you would be a miserable man, in spite of all your wealth, if the young dandies, who throng to your banquets, were to cut you dead in the streets; if, when your high-stepping horse stopped at your club, the porter shut the door in your face; if, when you lounged into the opera-pit, handsome dog that you are, each spendthrift rake in ‘Fop’s Alley,’ who now waits but the scratch of your pen to endorse billets doux with the charm that can chain to himself for a month some nymph of the Ballet, spinning round in a whirlwind of tulle, would shrink from the touch of your condescending forefinger with more dread of its contact than a bailiff’s tap in the thick of Pall Mall could inspire; if, reduced to the company of city clerks, parasite led-captains—”
“Oh, don’t go on, my dear Lord,” cried Levy, laughing affectedly. “Impossible though the picture be, it is really appalling. Cut me off from May Fair and St. James’s, and I should go into my strong closet and hang myself.”
“And yet, my dear baron, all this may happen if I have the whim just to try; all this will happen, unless, ere I leave your house, you concede the conditions I come here to impose.”
“My Lord!” exclaimed Levy, starting up, and pulling down his waistcoat with nervous passionate fingers, “if you were not under my own roof, I would—”
“Truce with mock heroics. Sit down, sir, sit down. I will briefly state my threat, more briefly my conditions. You will be scarcely more prolix in your reply. Your fortune I cannot touch, your enjoyment of it I can destroy. Refuse my conditions, make me your enemy,—and war to the knife! I will interrogate all the young dupes you have ruined. I will learn the history of all the transactions by which you have gained the wealth that it pleases you to spend in courting the society and sharing the vices of men who—go with these rooms, Louis Quinze. Not a roguery of yours shall escape me, down even to your last notable connivance with an Italian reprobate for the criminal abduction of an heiress. All these particulars I will proclaim in the clubs to which you have gained admittance, in every club in London which you yet hope to creep into; all these I will impart to some such authority in the Press as Mr. Henry Norreys; all these I will, upon the voucher of my own name, have so published in some journals of repute, that you must either tacitly submit to the revelations that blast you, or bring before a court of law actions that will convert accusations into evidence. It is but by sufferance that you are now in society; you are excluded when one man like me comes forth to denounce you. You try in vain to sneer at my menace—your white lips show your terror. I have rarely in life drawn any advantage from my rank and position; but I am thankful that they give me the power to make my voice respected and my exposure triumphant. Now, Baron Levy, will you go into your strong closet and hang yourself, or will you grant me my very moderate conditions? You are silent. I will relieve you, and state those conditions. Until the general election, about to take place, is concluded, you will obey me to the letter in all that I enjoin,—no demur and no scruple. And the first proof of obedience I demand is, your candid disclosure of all Mr. Audley Egerton’s pecuniary affairs.”
“Has my client, Mr. Egerton, authorized you to request of me that disclosure?”
“On the contrary, all that passes between us you will conceal from your client.”
“You would save him from ruin? Your trusty friend, Mr. Egerton!” said the baron, with a livid sneer.
“Wrong again, Baron Levy. If I would save him from ruin, you are scarcely the man I should ask to assist me.”
“Ah, I guess. You have learned how he—”
“Guess nothing, but obey in all things. Let us descend to your business room.”
Levy said not a word until he had reconducted his visitor into his den of destruction, all gleaming with spoliaria in rosewood. Then he said this: “If, Lord L’Estrange, you seek but revenge on Audley Egerton, you need not have uttered those threats. I too—hate the man.”
Harley looked at him wistfully, and the nobleman felt a pang that he had debased himself into a single feeling which the usurer could share. Nevertheless, the interview appeared to close with satisfactory arrangements, and to produce amicable understanding. For as the baron ceremoniously followed Lord L’Estrange through the hall, his noble visitor said, with marked affability,
“Then I shall see you at Lansmere with Mr. Egerton, to assist in conducting his election. It is a sacrifice of your time worthy of your friendship; not a step farther, I beg. Baron, I have the honour to wish you good-evening.”
As the street door opened on Lord L’Estrange he again found himself face to face with Randal Leslie, whose hand was already lifted to the knocker.
“Ha, Mr. Leslie!—you too a client of Baron Levy’s,—a very useful, accommodating man.”
Randal stared and stammered. “I come in haste from the House of Commons on Mr. Egerton’s business. Don’t you hear the newspaper vendors crying out ‘Great News, Dissolution of Parliament’?”
“We are prepared. Levy himself consents to give us the aid of his talents. Kindly, obliging, clever person!” Randal hurried into Levy’s study, to which the usurer had shrunk back, and was now wiping his brow with his scented handkerchief, looking heated and haggard, and very indifferent to Randal Leslie.
“How is this?” cried Randal. “I come to tell you first of Peschiera’s utter failure, the ridiculous coxcomb, and I meet at your door the last man I thought to find there,—the man who foiled us all, Lord L’Estrange. What brought him to you? Ah, perhaps his interest in Egerton’s election?”
“Yes,” said Levy, sulkily. “I know all about Peschiera. I cannot talk to you now; I must make arrangements for going to Lansmere.”
“But don’t forget my purchase from Thornhill. I shall have the money shortly from a surer source than Peschiera.”
“The squire?”
“Or a rich father-in-law.”
In the mean while, as Lord L’Estrange entered Bond Street, his ears were stunned by vociferous cries from the Stentors employed by “Standard,” “Sun,” and “Globe,”
—“Great News! Dissolution of Parliament—Great News!” The gas-lamps were lighted; a brown fog was gathering over the streets, blending itself with the falling shades of night. The forms of men loomed large through the mist. The lights from the shops looked red and lurid. Loungers usually careless as to politics were talking eagerly and anxiously of King, Lords, Commons, “Constitution at stake,” “Triumph of liberal opinions,”—according to their several biases. Hearing, and scorning—unsocial, isolated—walked on Harley L’Estrange. With his direr passions had been roused up all the native powers that made them doubly dangerous. He became proudly conscious of his own great faculties, but exulted in them only so far as they could minister to the purpose which had invoked them.
“I have constituted myself a Fate,” he said inly; “let the gods be but neutral, while I weave the meshes. Then, as Fate itself when it has fulfilled its mission, let me pass away into shadow, with the still and lonely stride that none may follow,—
“‘Oh, for a lodge in some vast wilderness.’
“How weary I am of this world of men!” And again the cry “Great News—National Crisis—Dissolution of Parliament—Great News!” rang through the jostling throng. Three men, arm-in-arm, brushed by Harley, and were stopped at the crossing by a file of carriages. The man in the centre was Audley Egerton. His companions were an ex-minister like himself, and one of those great proprietors who are proud of being above office, and vain of the power to make and unmake Governments.
“You are the only man to lead us, Egerton,” said this last personage. “Do but secure your seat, and as soon as this popular fever has passed away, you must be something more than the leader of Opposition,—you must be the first man in England.”
“Not a doubt of that,” chimed in the fellow ex-minister, a worthy man, perfect red-tapist, but inaudible in the reporters’ gallery. “And your election is quite safe, eh? All depends on that. You must not be thrown out at such a time, even for a month or two. I hear that you will have a contest—some townsmen of the borough, I think. But the Lansmere interest must be all-powerful; and I suppose L’Estrange will come out and canvass for you. You are not the man to have lukewarm friends!”
“Don’t be alarmed about my election. I am as sure of that as of L’Estrange’s friendship.”
Harley heard, with a grim smile, and passing his hand within his vest, laid it upon Nora’s memoir.
“What could we do in parliament without you?” said the great proprietor, almost piteously.
“Rather what could I do without parliament? Public life is the only existence I own. Parliament is all in all to me. But we may cross now.”
Harley’s eye glittered cold as it followed the tall form of the statesman, towering high above all other passers-by. “Ay,” he muttered, “ay, rest as sure of my friendship as I was of thine! And be Lansmere our field of Philippi! There where thy first step was made in the only life that thou own’st as existence, shall the ladder itself rot from under thy footing. There, where thy softer victim slunk to death from the deceit of thy love, shall deceit like thine own dig a grave for thy frigid ambition. I borrow thy quiver of fraud; its still arrows shall strike thee; and thou too shalt say, when the barb pierces home, ‘This comes from the hand of a friend.’ Ay, at Lansmere, at Lansmere, shall the end crown the whole! Go, and dot on the canvas the lines for a lengthened perspective, where my eyes note already the vanishing point of the picture.”
Then through the dull fog and under the pale gas-lights Harley L’Estrange pursued his noiseless way, soon distinguished no more amongst the various, motley, quick-succeeding groups, with their infinite sub-divisions of thought, care, and passion; while, loud over all their low murmurs, or silent hearts, were heard the tramp of horses and din of wheels, and the vociferous discordant cry that had ceased to attract and interest in the ears it vexed, “Great News, Great News—Dissolution of Parliament—Great News!”
CHAPTER XIX
The scene is at Lansmere Park,—a spacious pile, commenced in the reign of Charles II.; enlarged and altered in the reign of Anne. Brilliant interval in the History of our National Manners, when even the courtier dreaded to be dull, and Sir Fopling raised himself on tiptoe to catch the ear of a wit; when the names of Devonshire and Dorset, Halifax and Carteret, Oxford and Bolingbroke, unite themselves, brotherlike, with those of Hobbes and of Dryden, of Prior and Bentley, of Arbuthnot, Gay, Pope, and Swift; and still, wherever we turn, to recognize some ideal of great Lord or fine Gentleman, the Immortals of Literature stand by his side.
The walls of the rooms at Lansmere were covered with the portraits of those who illustrate that time which Europe calls the Age of Louis XIV. A L’Estrange, who had lived through the reigns of four English princes (and with no mean importance through all) had collected those likenesses of noble contemporaries. As you passed through the chambers—opening one on the other in that pomp of parade introduced with Charles II. from the palaces of France, and retaining its mode till Versailles and the Trianon passed, themselves, out of date—you felt you were in excellent company. What saloons of our day, demeaned to tailed coats and white waistcoats, have that charm of high breeding which speaks out from the canvas of Kneller and Jervis, Vivien and Rigaud? And withal, notwithstanding lace and brocade—the fripperies of artificial costume—still those who give interest or charm to that day look from their portraits like men,—raking or debonair, if you will, never mincing nor feminine. Can we say as much of the portraits of Lawrence? Gaze there on fair Marlborough; what delicate perfection of features, yet how easy in boldness, how serene in the conviction of power! So fair and so tranquil he might have looked through the cannon reek at Ramillies and Blenheim, suggesting to Addison the image of an angel of war. Ah, there, Sir Charles Sedley, the Lovelace of wits! Note that strong jaw and marked brow; do you not recognize the courtier who scorned to ask one favour of the king with whom he lived as an equal, and who stretched forth the right hand of man to hurl from a throne the king who had made his daughter—a countess?
[Sedley was so tenacious of his independence that when his affairs were most embarrassed, he refused all pecuniary aid from Charles II. His bitter sarcasm, in vindication of the part he took in the deposition of James II., who had corrupted his daughter, and made her Countess of Dorchester, is well known. “As the king has made my daughter a countess, the least I can do, in common gratitude, is to assist in making his Majesty’s daughter—a queen!”]
Perhaps, from his childhood thus surrounded by the haunting faces—that spoke of their age as they looked from the walls—that age and those portraits were not without influence on the character of Harley L’Estrange. The whim and the daring, the passion for letters and reverence for genius, the mixture of levity and strength, the polished sauntering indolence, or the elastic readiness of energies once called into action,—all might have found their prototypes in the lives which those portraits rekindled. The deeper sentiment, the more earnest nature, which in Harley L’Estrange were commingled with the attributes common to a former age,—these, indeed, were of his own. Our age so little comprehended, while it colours us from its atmosphere! so full of mysterious and profound emotions, which our ancestors never knew!—will those emotions be understood by our descendants?
In this stately house were now assembled, as Harley’s guests, many of the more important personages whom the slow length of this story has made familiar to the reader. The two candidates for the borough in the True Blue interest,—Audley Egerton and Randal Leslie; and Levy,—chief among the barons to whom modern society grants a seignorie of pillage, which, had a baron of old ever ventured to arrogate, burgess and citizen, socman and bocman, villein and churl, would have burned him alive in his castle; the Duke di Serrano, still fondly clinging to his title of Doctor and pet name of Riccabocca; Jemima, not yet with the airs of a duchess, but robed in very thick silks, as the chrysalis state of a duchess; Violante, too, was there, sadly against her will, and shrinking as much as possible into the retirement of her own chamber. The Countess of Lansmere had deserted her lord, in order to receive the guests of her son; my lord himself, ever bent on being of use in some part of his country, and striving hard to distract his interest from his plague of a borough, had gone down into Cornwall to inquire into the social condition of certain troglodytes who worked in some mines which the earl had lately had the misfortune to wring from the Court of Chancery, after a lawsuit commenced by his grandfather; and a Blue Book, issued in the past session by order of parliament, had especially quoted the troglodytes thus devolved on the earl as bipeds who were in considerable ignorance of the sun, and had never been known to wash their feet since the day when they came into the world,—their world underground, chipped off from the Bottomless Pit!
With the countess came Helen Digby, of course; and Lady Lansmere, who had hitherto been so civilly cold to the wife elect of her son, had, ever since her interview with Harley at Knightsbridge, clung to Helen with almost a caressing fondness. The stern countess was tamed by fear; she felt that her own influence over Harley was gone; she trusted to the influence of Helen—in case of what?—ay, what? It was because the danger was not clear to her that her bold spirit trembled: superstitions, like suspicions, are “as bats among birds, and fly by twilight.” Harley had ridiculed the idea of challenge and strife between Audley and himself; but still Lady Lansmere dreaded the fiery emotions of the last, and the high spirit and austere self-respect which were proverbial to the first. Involuntarily she strengthened her intimacy with Helen. In case her alarm should appear justified, what mediator could be so persuasive in appeasing the angrier passions, as one whom courtship and betrothal sanctified to the gentlest?
On arriving at Lansmere, the countess, however, felt somewhat relieved. Harley had received her, if with a manner less cordial and tender than had hitherto distinguished it, still with easy kindness and calm self-possession. His bearing towards Audley Egerton still more reassured her: it was not marked by an exaggeration of familiarity or friendship, which would at once have excited her apprehensions of some sinister design,—nor; on the other hand, did it betray, by covert sarcasms, an ill-suppressed resentment. It was exactly what, under the circumstances, would have been natural to a man who had received an injury from an intimate friend, which, in generosity or discretion, he resolved to overlook, but which those aware of it could just perceive had cooled or alienated the former affection. Indefatigably occupying himself with all the details of the election, Harley had fair pretext for absenting himself from Audley, who, really looking very ill, and almost worn out, pleaded indisposition as an excuse for dispensing with the fatigues of a personal canvass, and, passing much of his time in his own apartments, left all the preparations for contest to his more active friends. It was not till he had actually arrived at Lansmere that Audley became acquainted with the name of his principal opponent. Richard Avenel! the brother of Nora! rising up from obscurity, thus to stand front to front against him in a contest on which all his fates were cast. Egerton quailed as before an appointed avenger. He would fain have retired from the field; he spoke to Harley.
“How can you support all the painful remembrances which the very name of my antagonist must conjure up?”
“Did you not tell me,” answered Harley, “to strive against such remembrances,—to look on them as sickly dreams? I am prepared to brave them. Can you be more sensitive than I?”
Egerton durst not say more. He avoided all further reference to the subject. The strife raged around him, and he shut himself out from it,—shut himself up in solitude with his own heart. Strife enough there! Once, late at night, he stole forth and repaired to Nora’s grave. He stood there, amidst the rank grass and under the frosty starlight, long, and in profound silence. His whole past life seemed to rise before him; and, when he regained his lonely room, and strove to survey the future, still he could behold only that past and that grave.
In thus declining all active care for an election, to his prospects so important, Audley Egerton was considered to have excuse, not only in the state of his health, but in his sense of dignity. A statesman so eminent, of opinions so well known, of public services so incontestable, might well be spared the personal trouble that falls upon obscurer candidates. And besides, according to current report, and the judgment of the Blue Committee, the return of Mr. Egerton was secure. But though Audley himself was thus indulgently treated, Harley and the Blue Committee took care to inflict double work upon Randal. That active young spirit found ample materials for all its restless energies. Randal Leslie was kept on his legs from sunrise to starlight. There does not exist in the Three Kingdoms a constituency more fatiguing to a candidate than that borough of Lansmere. As soon as you leave the High Street, wherein, according to immemorial usage, the Blue canvasser is first led, in order to put him into spirits for the toils that await him (delectable, propitious, constitutional High Street, in which at least two-thirds of the electors, opulent tradesmen employed at the Park, always vote for “my lord’s man,” and hospitably prepare wine and cakes in their tidy back-parlours!)—as soon as you quit this stronghold of the party, labyrinths of lanes and defiles stretch away into the farthest horizon; level ground is found nowhere; it is all up hill and down hill,—now rough, craggy pavements that blister the feet, and at the very first tread upon which all latent corns shook prophetically; now deep, muddy ruts, into which you sink ankle-deep, oozing slush creeping into the pores, and moistening the way for catarrh, rheum, cough, sore throat, bronchitis, and phthisis; black sewers and drains Acherontian, running before the thresholds, and so filling the homes behind with effluvia, that, while one hand clasps the grimy paw of the voter, the other instinctively guards from typhus and cholera your abhorrent nose. Not in those days had mankind ever heard of a sanitary reform! and, to judge of the slow progress which that reform seems to make, sewer and drain would have been much the same if they had. Scot-and-lot voters were the independent electors of Lansmere, with the additional franchise of Freemen. Universal suffrage could scarcely more efficiently swamp the franchises of men who care a straw what becomes of Great Britain! With all Randal Leslie’s profound diplomacy, all his art in talking over, deceiving, and (to borrow Dick Avenel’s vernacular phrase) “humbugging” educated men, his eloquence fell flat upon minds invulnerable to appeals, whether to State or to Church, to Reform or to Freedom. To catch a Scot-and-lot voter by such frivolous arguments—Randal Leslie might as well have tried to bring down a rhinoceros by a pop-gun charged with split peas! The young man who so firmly believed that “knowledge was power” was greatly disgusted. It was here the ignorance that foiled him. When he got hold of a man with some knowledge, Randal was pretty sure to trick him out of a vote.
Nevertheless, Randal Leslie walked and talked on, with most creditable perseverance. The Blue Committee allowed that he was an excellent canvasser. They conceived a liking for him, mingled with pity. For, though sure of Egerton’s return, they regarded Randal’s as out of the question. He was merely there to keep split votes from going to the opposite side; to serve his patron, the ex-minister; shake the paws, and smell the smells which the ex-minister was too great a man to shake and to smell. But, in point of fact, none of that Blue Committee knew anything of the prospects of the election. Harley received all the reports of each canvass-day. Harley kept the canvass-book locked up from all eyes but his own, or it might be Baron Levy’s, as Audley Egerton’s confidential, if not strictly professional adviser, Baron Levy, the millionaire, had long since retired from all acknowledged professions. Randal, however—close, observant, shrewd—perceived that he himself was much stronger than the Blue Committee believed; and, to his infinite surprise, he owed that strength to Lord L’Estrange’s exertions on his behalf. For though Harley, after the first day, on which he ostentatiously showed himself in the High Street, did not openly canvass with Randal, yet when the reports were brought in to him, and he saw the names of the voters who gave one vote to Audley, and withheld the other from Randal, he would say to Randal, dead beat as that young gentleman was, “Slip out with me, the moment dinner is over, and before you go the round of the public-houses; there are some voters we must get for you to-night.” And sure enough a few kindly words from the popular heir of the Lansmere baronies usually gained over the electors, from whom, though Randal had proved that all England depended on their votes in his favour, Randal would never have extracted more than a “Wu’ll, I shall waute gin the Dauy coomes!” Nor was this all that Harley did for the younger candidate. If it was quite clear that only one vote could be won for the Blues, and the other was pledged to the Yellows, Harley would say, “Then put it down to Mr. Leslie,”—a request the more readily conceded, since Audley Egerton was considered so safe by the Blues, and alone worth a fear by the Yellows.
Thus Randal, who kept a snug little canvass-book of his own, became more and more convinced that he had a better chance than Egerton, even without the furtive aid he expected from Avenel; and he could only account for Harley’s peculiar exertions in his favour by supposing that Harley, unpractised in elections, and deceived by the Blue Committee, believed Egerton to be perfectly safe, and sought, for the honour of the family interest, to secure both the seats.
Randal’s public cares thus deprived him of all opportunity of pressing his courtship on Violante; and, indeed, if ever he did find a moment in which he could steal to her reluctant side, Harley was sure to seize that very moment to send him off to canvass an hesitating freeman, or harangue in some public-house.
Leslie was too acute not to detect some motive hostile to his wooing, however plausibly veiled in the guise of zeal for his election, in this officiousness of Harley’s. But Lord L’Estrange’s manner to Violante was so little like that of a jealous lover, and he was so well aware of her engagement to Randal, that the latter abandoned the suspicion he had before conceived, that Harley was his rival. And he was soon led to believe that Lord L’Estrange had another, more disinterested, and less formidable motive for thus stinting his opportunities to woo the heiress.
“Mr. Leslie,” said Lord L’Estrange, one day, “the duke has confided to me his regret at his daughter’s reluctance to ratify his own promise; and knowing the warm interest I take in her welfare, for his sake and her own; believing, also, that some services to herself, as well as to the father she so loves, give me a certain influence over her inexperienced judgment, he has even requested me to speak a word to her in your behalf!”
“Ah, if you would!” said Randal, surprised.
“You must give me the power to do so. You were obliging enough to volunteer to me the same explanations which you gave to the duke, his satisfaction with which induced him to renew or confirm the promise of his daughter’s hand. Should those explanations content me, as they did him, I hold the duke bound to fulfil his engagement, and I am convinced that his daughter would, in that case, not be inflexible to your suit. But, till such explanations be given, my friendship for the father, and my interest in the child, do not allow me to assist a cause which, however, at present suffers little by delay.”
“Pray, listen at once to those explanations.”
“Nay, Mr. Leslie, I can now only think of the election. As soon as that is over, rely on it you shall have the amplest opportunity to dispel any doubts which your intimacy with Count di Peschiera and Madame di Negra may have suggested.—a propos of the election, here is a list of voters you must see at once in Fish Lane. Don’t lose a moment.”
In the mean while, Richard Avenel and Leonard had taken up their quarters in the hotel appropriated to the candidates for the Yellows; and the canvass on that side was prosecuted with all the vigour which might be expected from operations conducted by Richard Avenel, and backed by the popular feeling.