CHAPTER XXIX
“LORD L’ESTRANGE, noble friend!”
“You!—and here—Violante? Is it I whom you seek? For what? Good heavens! what has happened? Why are you so pale; why tremble?”
“Have you forgiven Helen?” asked Violante, beginning with evasive question, and her cheek was pale no more. “Helen, the poor child! I have nothing in her to forgive, much to thank her for. She has been frank and honest.”
“And Leonard—whom I remember in my childhood—you have forgiven him?”
“Fair mediator,” said Harley, smiling, though coldly, “happy is the man who deceives another; all plead for him. And if the man deceived cannot forgive, no one will sympathize or excuse.”
“But Leonard did not deceive you?”
“Yes, from the first. It is a long tale, and not to be told to you; but I cannot forgive him.”
“Adieu! my Lord. Helen must, then, still be very dear to you!” Violante turned away. Her emotion was so artless, her very anger so charming, that the love, against which, in the prevalence of his later and darker passions, he had so sternly struggled, rushed back upon Harley’s breast; but it came only in storm.
“Stay, but talk not of Helen!” he exclaimed. “Ah, if Leonard’s sole offence had been what you appear to deem it, do you think I could feel resentment? No; I should have gratefully hailed the hand that severed a rash and ungenial tie. I would have given my ward to her lover with such a dower as it suits my wealth to bestow. But his offence dates from his very birth. To bless and to enrich the son of a man who—Violante, listen to me. We may soon part, and forever. Others may misconstrue my actions; you, at least, shall know from what just principle they spring. There was a man whom I singled out of the world as more than a brother. In the romance of my boyhood I saw one who dazzled my fancy, captivated my heart. It was a dream of Beauty breathed into waking life. I loved,—I believed myself beloved. I confided all my heart to this friend,—this more than brother; he undertook to befriend and to aid my suit. On that very pretext he first saw this ill-fated girl, saw, betrayed, destroyed her; left me ignorant that her love, which I had thought mine, had been lavished so wildly on another; left me to believe that my own suit she had fled, but in generous self-sacrifice,—for she was poor and humbly born; that—oh, vain idiot that I was!—the self-sacrifice had been too strong for a young human heart, which had broken in the struggle; left me to corrode my spring of life in remorse; clasped my hand in mocking comfort, smiled at my tears of agony—not one tear himself for his own poor victim! And suddenly, not long since, I learned all this. And in the father of Leonard Fairfield, you behold the man who has poisoned all the well-spring of joy to me. You weep! Oh, Violante! the Past he has blighted and embittered,—that I could forgive; but the Future is blasted too. For just ere this treason was revealed to me, I had begun to awake from the torpor of my dreary penance, to look with fortitude towards the duties I had slighted, to own that the pilgrimage before me was not barren. And then, oh then, I felt that all love was not buried in a grave. I felt that you, had fate so granted, might have been all to my manhood which youth only saw through the delusion of its golden mists. True, I was then bound to Helen; true, that honour to her might forbid me all hope. But still, even to know that my heart was not all ashes, that I could love again, that that glorious power and privilege of our being was still mine, seemed to me so heavenly sweet. But then this revelation of falsehood burst on me, and all truth seemed blotted from the universe. I am freed from Helen; ah, freed, forsooth,—because not even rank and wealth, and benefits and confiding tenderness, could bind to me one human heart! Free from her; but between me and your fresh nature stands Suspicion as an Upas tree. Not a hope that would pass through the tainted air and fly to you, but falls dead under the dismal boughs. I love!
“Ha, ha! I—I, whom the past has taught the impossibility to be loved again. No: if those soft lips murmured ‘Yes’ to the burning prayer that, had I been free but two short weeks ago, would have rushed from the frank deeps of my heart, I should but imagine that you deceived yourself,—a girl’s first fleeting delusive fancy,—nothing more! Were you my bride, Violante, I should but debase your bright nature by my own curse of distrust. At each word of tenderness, my heart would say, ‘How long will this last; when will the deception come?’ Your beauty, your gifts, would bring me but jealous terror, eternally I should fly from the Present to the Future, and say. ‘These hairs will be gray, while flattering youth will surround her in the zenith of her charms.’ Why then do I hate and curse my foe? Why do I resolve upon revenge? I comprehend it now. I knew that there was something more imperious than the ghost of the Past that urged me on. Gazing on you, I feel that it was the dim sense of a mighty and priceless loss; it is not the dead Nora,—it is the living Violante. Look not at me with those reproachful eyes: they cannot reverse my purpose; they cannot banish suspicion from my sickened soul; they cannot create a sunshine in the midst of this ghastly twilight. Go, go; leave me to the sole joy that bequeaths no disappointment, the sole feeling that unites me to social man; leave me to my revenge.”
“Revenge! Oh, cruel!” exclaimed Violante, laying her hand on his arm. “And in revenge, it is your own life that you will risk!”
“My life, simple child! This is no contest of life against life. Could I bare to all the world my wrongs for their ribald laughter, I should only give to my foe the triumph to pity my frenzy, to shun the contest; or grant it, if I could find a second—and then fire in the air. And all the world would say, ‘Generous Egerton! soul of honour!’”
“Egerton, Mr. Egerton! He cannot be this foe? It is not on him you can design revenge,—you who spend all your hours in serving his cause, you to whom he trusts so fondly, you who leaned yesterday on his shoulder, and smiled so cheeringly in his face?”
“Did I? Hypocrisy against hypocrisy, snare against snare: that is my revenge.”
“Harley, Harley! Cease, cease!”
The storm of passion rushed on unheeding.
“I seem to promote his ambition but to crush it into the mire. I have delivered him from the gentler gripe of an usurer, so that he shall hold at my option alms or a prison—”
“Friend, friend! Hush, hush!”
“I have made the youth he has reared and fostered into treachery like his own (your father’s precious choice, Randal Leslie) mine instrument in the galling lesson how ingratitude can sting. His very son shall avenge the mother, and be led to his father’s breast as victor, with Randal Leslie, in the contest that deprives sire and benefactor of all that makes life dear to ambitious egotism. And if, in the breast of Audley Egerton, there can yet lurk one memory of what I was to him and to truth, not his least punishment will be the sense that his own perfidy has so changed the man whose very scorn of falsehood has taught him to find in fraud itself the power of retribution.”
“If this be not a terrible dream,” murmured Violante, recoiling, “it is not your foe alone that you will deprive of all that makes life dear. Act thus—and what, in the future, is left to me?”
“To you? Oh, never fear. I may give Randal Leslie a triumph over his patron, but in the same hour I will unmask his villany, and sweep him forever from your path. What in the future is left to you?—your birthright and your native land; hope, joy, love, felicity. Could it be possible that in the soft but sunny fancy which plays round the heart of maiden youth, but still sends no warmth into its deeps,—could it be possible that you had Honoured me with a gentler thought, it will pass away, and you will be the pride and delight of one of your own years, to whom the vista of Time is haunted by no chilling spectres, one who can look upon that lovely face, and not turn away to mutter, ‘Too fair, too fair for me!’”
“Oh, agony!” exclaimed Violante, with sudden passion. “In my turn hear me. If, as you promise, I am released from the dreadful thought that he, at whose touch I shudder, can claim this hand, my choice is irrevocably made. The altars which await me will not be those of a human love. But oh, I implore you—by all the memories of your own life, hitherto, if sorrowful, unsullied, by the generous interest you yet profess for me, whom you will have twice saved from a danger to which death were mercy—leave, oh, leave to me the right to regard your image as I have done from the first dawn of childhood. Leave me the right to honour and revere it. Let not an act accompanied with a meanness—oh that I should say the word!—a meanness and a cruelty that give the lie to your whole life—make even a grateful remembrance of you an unworthy sin. When I kneel within the walls that divide me from the world, oh, let me think that I can pray for you as the noblest being that the world contains! Hear me! hear me!”
“Violante!” murmured Harley, his whole frame heaving with emotion, “bear with me. Do not ask of me the sacrifice of what seems to me the cause of manhood itself,—to sit down, meek and patient, under a wrong that debases me, with the consciousness that all my life I have been the miserable dupe to affections I deemed so honest, to regrets that I believed so holy. Ah, I should feel more mean in my pardon than you can think me in revenge! Were it an acknowledged enemy, I could open my arms to him at your bidding; but the perfidious friend!—ask it not. My cheek burns at the thought, as at the stain of a blow. Give me but to-morrow—one day—I demand no more—wholly to myself and to the past, and mould me for the future as you will. Pardon, pardon the ungenerous thoughts that extended distrust to you. I retract them; they are gone,—dispelled before those touching words, those ingenuous eyes. At your feet, Violante, I repent and I implore! Your father himself shall banish your sordid suitor. Before this hour to-morrow you will be free. Oh, then, then! will you not give me this hand to guide me again into the paradise of my youth? Violante, it is in vain to wrestle with myself, to doubt, to reason, to be wisely fearful! I love, I love you! I trust again in virtue and faith. I place my fate in your keeping.” If at times Violante may appear to have ventured beyond the limit of strict maiden bashfulness, much may be ascribed to her habitual candour, her solitary rearing, and remoteness from the world, the very innocence of her soul, and the warmth of heart which Italy gives its daughters. But now that sublimity of thought and purpose which pervaded her nature, and required only circumstances to develop, made her superior to all the promptings of love itself. Dreams realized which she had scarcely dared to own; Harley free, Harley at her feet; all the woman struggling at her heart, mantling in her blushes, still stronger than love, stronger than the joy of being loved again, was the heroic will,—will to save him, who in all else ruled her existence, from the eternal degradation to which passion had blinded his own confused and warring spirit.
Leaving one hand in his impassioned clasp, as he still knelt before her, she raised on high the other. “Ah,” she said, scarce audibly,—“ah, if heaven vouchsafe me the proud and blissful privilege to be allied to your fate, to minister to your happiness, never should I know one fear of your distrust. No time, no change, no sorrow—not even the loss of your affection—could make me forfeit the right to remember that you had once confided to me a heart so noble. But”—here her voice rose in its tone, and the glow fled from her cheek—“but, O Thou the Ever Present, hear and receive the solemn vow. If to me he refuse to sacrifice the sin that would debase him, that sin be the barrier between us evermore; and may my life, devoted to Thy service, atone for the hour in which he belied the nature he received from Thee! Harley, release me! I have spoken: firm as yourself, I leave the choice to you.”
“You judge me harshly,” said Harley, rising, with sullen anger; “but at least I have not the meanness to sell what I hold as justice, though the bribe may include my last hope of happiness.”
“Meanness! Oh, unhappy, beloved Harley!” exclaimed Violante, with such a gush of exquisite reproachful tenderness, that it thrilled him as the voice of the parting guardian angel. “Meanness! But it is that from which I implore you to save yourself. You cannot judge, you cannot see. You are dark, dark. Lost Christian that you are, what worse than heathen darkness to feign the friendship the better to betray; to punish falsehood by becoming yourself so false; to accept the confidence even of your bitterest foe, and then to sink below his own level in deceit? And oh, worse than all—to threaten that a son—son of the woman you professed to love—should swell your vengeance against a father! No! it was not you that said this,—it was the Fiend!”
“Enough!” exclaimed Harley, startled, conscience-stricken, and rushing into resentment, in order to escape the sense of shame. “Enough! you insult the man you professed to honour.”
“I honoured the prototype of gentleness and valour. I honoured one who seemed to me to clothe with life every grand and generous image that is born from the souls of poets. Destroy that ideal, and you destroy the Harley whom I honoured. He is dead to me forever. I will mourn for him as his widow, faithful to his memory, weeping over the thought of what he was.” Sobs choked her voice; but as Harley, once more melted, sprang forward to regain her side, she escaped with a yet quicker movement, gained the door, and darting down the corridor, vanished from his sight.
Harley stood still one moment, thoroughly irresolute, nay, almost subdued. Then sternness, though less rigid than before, gradually came to his brow. The demon had still its hold in the stubborn and marvellous pertinacity with which the man clung to all that once struck root at his heart. With a sudden impulse that still withheld decision, yet spoke of sore-shaken purpose, he strode to his desk, drew from it Nora’s manuscript, and passed from his room.
Harley had meant never to have revealed to Audley the secret he had gained until the moment when revenge was consummated. He had contemplated no vain reproach. His wrath would have spoken forth in deeds, and then a word would have sufficed as the key to all. Willing, perhaps, to hail some extenuation of perfidy, though the possibility of such extenuation he had never before admitted, he determined on the interview which he had hitherto so obstinately shunned, and went straight to the room in which Audley Egerton still sat, solitary and fearful.
CHAPTER XXX
Egerton heard the well-known step advancing near and nearer up the corridor, heard the door open and reclose; and he felt, by one of those strange and unaccountable instincts which we call forebodings, that the hour he had dreaded for so many secret years had come at last. He nerved his courage, withdrew his hands from his face, and rose in silence.
No less silent, Harley stood before him. The two men gazed on each other; you might have heard their breathing.
“You have seen Mr. Dale?” said Egerton, at length. “You know—”
“All!” said Harley, completing the arrested sentence. Audley drew a long sigh. “Be it so; but no, Harley, you deceive yourself; you cannot know all, from any one living, save myself.”
“My knowledge comes from the dead,” answered Harley, and the fatal memoir dropped from his hand upon the table. The leaves fell with a dull, low sound, mournful and faint as might be the tread of a ghost, if the tread gave sound. They fell, those still confessions of an obscure, uncomprehended life, amidst letters and documents eloquent of the strife that was then agitating millions,—the fleeting, turbulent fears and hopes that torture parties and perplex a nation; the stormy business of practical public life, so remote from individual love and individual sorrow.
Egerton’s eye saw them fall. The room was but partially lighted. At the distance where he stood, he did not recognize the characters; but involuntarily he shivered, and involuntarily drew near.
“Hold yet awhile,” said Harley. “I produce my charge, and then I leave you to dispute the only witness that I bring. Audley Egerton, you took from me the gravest trust one man can confide to another. You knew how I loved Leonora Avenel. I was forbidden to see and urge my suit; you had the access to her presence which was denied to myself. I prayed you to remove scruples that I deemed too generous, and to woo her not to dishonour, but to be my wife. Was it so? Answer.”
“It is true,” said Audley, his hand clenched at his heart. “You saw her whom I thus loved,—her thus confided to your honour. You wooed her for yourself. Is it so?”
“Harley, I deny it not. Cease here. I accept the penalty; I resign your friendship; I quit your roof; I submit to your contempt; I dare not implore your pardon. Cease; let me go hence, and soon!”
The strong man gasped for breath. Harley looked at him steadfastly, then turned away his eyes, and went on. “Nay,” said he, “is that ALL? You wooed her for yourself,—you won her. Account to me for that life which you wrenched from mine. You are silent. I will take on myself your task; you took that life and destroyed it.”
“Spare me, spare me!”
“What was the fate of her who seemed so fresh from heaven when these eyes beheld her last? A broken heart, a dishonoured name, an early doom, a forgotten gravestone!”
“No, no—forgotten,—no!”
“Not forgotten! Scarce a year passed, and you were married to another. I aided you to form those nuptials which secured your fortunes. You have had rank and power and fame. Peers call you the type of English gentlemen; priests hold you as a model of Christian honour. Strip the mask, Audley Egerton; let the world know you for what you are!”
Egerton raised his head, and folded his arms calmly; but he said, with a melancholy humility, “I bear all from you; it is just. Say on.”
“You took from me the heart of Nora Avenel. You abandoned her, you destroyed. And her memory cast no shadow over your daily sunshine; while over my thoughts, over my life—oh, Egerton—Audley, Audley—how could you have deceived me thus!” Here the inherent tenderness under all this hate, the fount imbedded under the hardening stone, broke out. Harley was ashamed of his weakness, and hurried on,
“Deceived,—not for an hour, a day, but through blighted youth, through listless manhood,—you suffered me to nurse the remorse that should have been your own; her life slain, mine wasted,—and shall neither of us have revenge?”
“Revenge! Ah, Harley, you have had it!”
“No, but I await it! Not in vain from the charnel have come to me the records I produce. And whom did fate select to discover the wrongs of the mother, whom appoint as her avenger? Your son,—your own son; your abandoned, nameless son!”
“Son! son!”
“Whom I delivered from famine, or from worse; and who, in return, has given into my hands the evidence which proclaims in you the perjured friend of Harley L’Estrange, and the fraudulent seducer, under mock marriage forms—worse than all franker sin—of Leonora Avenel.”
“It is false! false!” exclaimed Egerton, all his stateliness and all his energy restored to him. “I forbid you to speak thus to me. I forbid you by one word to sully the memory of my lawful wife!”
“Ah!” said Harley, startled. “Ah! false? prove that, and revenge is over! Thank Heaven!”
“Prove it! What so easy? And wherefore have I delayed the proof; wherefore concealed, but from tenderness to you,—dread, too—a selfish but human dread—to lose in you the sole esteem that I covet; the only mourner who would have shed one tear over the stone inscribed with some lying epitaph, in which it will suit a party purpose to proclaim the gratitude of a nation. Vain hope. I resign it! But you spoke of a son. Alas, alas! you are again deceived. I heard that I had a son,—years, long years ago. I sought him, and found a grave. But bless you, Harley, if you succoured one whom you even erringly suspect to be Leonora’s child!” He stretched forth his hands as he spoke.
“Of your son we will speak later,” said Harley, strangely softened. “But before I say more of him, let me ask you to explain; let me hope that you can extenuate what—”
“You are right,” interrupted Egerton, with eager quickness. “You would know from my own lips at last the plain tale of my own offence against you. It is due to both. Patiently hear me out.”
Then Egerton told all,—his own love for Nora, his struggles against what he felt as treason to his friend, his sudden discovery of Nora’s love for him; on that discovery, the overthrow of all his resolutions; their secret marriage, their separation; Nora’s flight, to which Audley still assigned but her groundless vague suspicion that their nuptials had not been legal, and her impatience of his own delay in acknowledging the rite.
His listener interrupted him here with a few questions, the clear and prompt replies to which enabled Harley to detect Levy’s plausible perversion of the facts; and he vaguely guessed the cause of the usurer’s falsehood, in the criminal passion which the ill-fated bride had inspired.
“Egerton,” said Harley, stifling with an effort his own wrath against the vile deceiver both of wife and husband, “if, on reading those papers, you find that Leonora had more excuse for her suspicions and flight than you now deem, and discover perfidy in one to whom you trusted your secret, leave his punishment to Heaven. All that you say convinces me more and more that we cannot even see through the cloud, much less guide the thunderbolt. But proceed.”
Audley looked surprised and startled, and his eye turned wistfully towards the papers; but after a short pause he continued his recital. He came to Nora’s unexpected return to her father’s house, her death, his conquest of his own grief, that he might spare Harley the abrupt shock of learning her decease. He had torn himself from the dead, in remorseful sympathy with the living. He spoke of Harley’s illness, so nearly fatal, repeated Harley’s jealous words, “that he would rather mourn Nora’s death, than take comfort from the thought that she had loved another.” He spoke of his journey to the village where Mr. Dale had told him Nora’s child was placed—“and, hearing that child and mother were alike gone, whom now could I right by acknowledging a bond that I feared would so wring your heart?” Audley again paused a moment, and resumed in short, nervous, impressive sentences. This cold, austere man of the world for the first time bared his heart,—unconscious, perhaps, that he did so; unconscious that he revealed how deeply, amidst State cares and public distinctions, he had felt the absence of affections; how mechanical was that outer circle in the folds of life which is called a “career;” how valueless wealth had grown—none to inherit it. Of his gnawing and progressive disease alone he did not speak; he was too proud and too masculine to appeal to pity for physical ills. He reminded Harley how often, how eagerly, year after year, month after month, he had urged his friend to rouse himself from mournful dreams, devote his native powers to his country, or seek the surer felicity of domestic ties. “Selfish in these attempts I might be,” said Egerton; “it was only if I saw you restored to happiness that I could believe you could calmly hear my explanation of the past, and on the floor of some happy home grant me your forgiveness. I longed to confess, and I dared not. Often have the words rushed to my lips,—as often some chance sentence from you repelled me. In a word, with you were so entwined all the thoughts and affections of my youth—even those that haunted the grave of Nora—that I could not bear to resign your friendship, and, surrounded by the esteem and honour of a world I cared not for, to meet the contempt of your reproachful eye.”
Amidst all that Audley said, amidst all that admitted of no excuse, two predominant sentiments stood clear, in unmistakable and touching pathos,—remorseful regret for the lost Nora, and self-accusing, earnest, almost feminine tenderness for the friend he had deceived. Thus, as he continued to speak, Harley more and more forgot even the remembrance of his own guilty and terrible interval of hate; the gulf that had so darkly yawned between the two closed up, leaving them still standing side by side, as in their schoolboy days. But he remained silent, listening, shading his face from Audley, and as if under some soft but enthralling spell, till Egerton thus closed,
“And now, Harley, all is told. You spoke of revenge?”
“Revenge!” muttered Harley, starting.
“And believe me,” continued Egerton, “were revenge in your power, I should rejoice at it as an atonement. To receive an injury in return for that which, first from youthful passion, and afterwards from the infirmity of purpose that concealed the wrong, I have inflicted upon you—why, that would soothe my conscience, and raise my lost self-esteem. The sole revenge you can bestow takes the form which most humiliates me,—to revenge is to pardon.”
Harley groaned; and still hiding his face with one hand, stretched forth the other, but rather with the air of one who entreats than who accords forgiveness. Audley took and pressed the hand thus extended.
“And NOW, Harley, farewell. With the dawn I leave this house. I cannot now accept your aid in this election. Levy shall announce my resignation. Randal Leslie, if you so please it, may be returned in my stead. He has abilities which, under safe guidance, may serve his country; and I have no right to reject from vain pride whatever will promote the career of one whom I undertook, and have failed, to serve.”
“Ay, ay,” muttered Harley; “think not of Randal Leslie; think but of your son.”
“My son! But are you sure that he still lives? You smile; you—you—oh, Harley, I took from you the mother,—give to me the son; break my heart with gratitude. Your revenge is found!”
Lord L’Estrange rose with a sudden start, gazed on Audley for a moment,—irresolute, not from resentment, but from shame. At that moment he was the man humbled; he was the man who feared reproach, and who needed pardon. Audley, not divining what was thus passing in Harley’s breast, turned away.
“You think that I ask too much; and yet all that I can give to the child of my love and the heir of my name is the worthless blessing of a ruined man. Harley, I say no more. I dare not add, ‘You too loved his mother! and with a deeper and a nobler love than mine.’” He stopped short, and Harley flung himself on his breast.
“Me—me—pardon me, Audley! Your offence has been slight to mine. You have told me your offence; never can I name to you my own. Rejoice that we have both to exchange forgiveness, and in that exchange we are equal still, Audley, brothers still. Look up! look up! think that we are boys now as we were once,—boys who have had their wild quarrel, and who, the moment it is over, feel dearer to each other than before.”
“Oh, Harley, this is revenge! It strikes home,” murmured Egerton, and tears gushed fast from eyes that could have gazed unwinking on the rack. The clock struck; Harley sprang forward.
“I have time yet,” he cried. “Much to do and to undo. You are saved from the grasp of Levy; your election will be won; your fortunes in much may be restored; you have before you honours not yet achieved; your career as yet is scarce begun; your son will embrace you to-morrow. Let me go—your hand again! Ah, Audley, we shall be so happy yet!”