CHAPTER VII
The Results.—Perverted Ambition.—Selfish Passion.—The Intellect Distorted by the Crookedness of the Heart.
Vivian’s schemes thus prospered. He had an income that permitted him the outward appearances of a gentleman,—an independence modest, indeed, but independence still. We were all gone from London. One letter to me with the postmark of the town near which Colonel Vivian lived, sufficed to confirm my belief in his parentage and in his return to his friends. He then presented himself to Trevanion as the young man whose pen I had employed in the member’s service; and knowing that I had never mentioned his name to Trevanion,—for without Vivian’s permission I should not, considering his apparent trust in me, have deemed myself authorized to do so,—he took that of Gower, which he selected, haphazard, from an old Court Guide as having the advantage—in common with most names borne by the higher nobility of England—of not being confined, as the ancient names of untitled gentlemen usually are, to the members of a single family. And when, with his wonted adaptability and suppleness, he had contrived to lay aside or smooth over whatever in his manners would be calculated to displease Trevanion, and had succeeded in exciting the interest which that generous statesman always conceived for ability, he owned candidly one day, in the presence of Lady Ellinor,—for, his experience had taught him the comparative ease with which the sympathy of woman is enlisted in anything that appeals to the imagination, or seems out of the ordinary beat of life,—that he had reasons for concealing his connections for the present; that he had cause to believe I suspected what they were, and, from mistaken regard for his welfare, might acquaint his relations with his whereabout. He therefore begged Trevanion, if the latter had occasion to write to me, not to mention him. This promise Trevanion gave, though reluctantly,—for the confidence volunteered to him seemed to exact the promise; but as he detested mystery of all kinds, the avowal might have been fatal to any further acquaintance, and under auspices so doubtful, there would have been no chance of his obtaining that intimacy in Trevanion’s house which he desired to establish, but for an accident which at once opened that house to him almost as a home.
Vivian had always treasured a lock of his mother’s hair, cut off on her death-bed; and when he was at his French tutor’s, his first pocket-money had been devoted to the purchase of a locket, on which he had caused to be inscribed his own name and his mother’s. Through all his wanderings he had worn this relic; and in the direst pangs of want, no hunger had been keen enough to induce him to part with it. Now, one morning, the ribbon that suspended the locket gave way, and his eye resting on the names inscribed on the gold, he thought, in his own vague sense of right, imperfect as it was, that his compact with his father obliged him to have the names erased. He took it to a jeweller in Piccadilly for that purpose, and gave the requisite order, not taking notice of a lady in the farther part of the shop. The locket was still on the counter after Vivian had left, when the lady, coming forward, observed it, and saw the names on the surface. She had been struck by the peculiar tone of the voice, which she had heard before; and that very day Mr. Gower received a note from Lady Ellinor Trevanion, requesting to see him. Much wondering, he went. Presenting him with the locket, she said smiling, “There is only one gentleman in the world who calls himself De Caxton, unless it be his son. Ah! I see now why you wished to conceal yourself from my friend Pisistratus. But how is this? Can you have any difference with your father? Confide in me, or it is my duty to write to him.”
Even Vivian’s powers of dissimulation abandoned him, thus taken by surprise. He saw no alternative but to trust Lady Ellinor with his secret, and implore her to respect it. And then he spoke bitterly of his father’s dislike to him, and his own resolution to prove the injustice of that dislike by the position he would himself establish in the world. At present his father believed him dead, and perhaps was not ill-pleased to think so. He would not dispel that belief till he could redeem any boyish errors, and force his family to be proud to acknowledge him.
Though Lady Ellinor was slow to believe that Roland could dislike his son, she could yet readily believe that he was harsh and choleric, with a soldier’s high notions of discipline; the young man’s story moved her, his determination pleased her own high spirit. Always with a touch of romance in her, and always sympathizing with each desire of ambition, she entered into Vivian’s aspirations with an alacrity that surprised himself. She was charmed with the idea of ministering to the son’s fortunes, and ultimately reconciling him to the father,—through her own agency; it would atone for any fault of which Roland could accuse herself in the old time.
She undertook to impart the secret to Trevanion, for she would have no secrets from him, and to secure his acquiescence in its concealment from all others.
And here I must a little digress from the chronological course of my explanatory narrative to inform the reader that when Lady Ellinor had her interview with Roland, she had been repelled by the sternness of his manner from divulging Vivian’s secret. But on her first attempt to sound or conciliate him, she had begun with some eulogies on Trevanion’s new friend and assistant, Mr. Gower, and had awakened Roland’s suspicions of that person’s identity with his son,—suspicions which had given him a terrible interest in our joint deliverance of Miss Trevanion. But so heroically had the poor soldier sought to resist his own fears, that on the way he shrank to put to me the questions that might paralyze the energies which, whatever the answer, were then so much needed. “For,” said he to my father, “I felt the blood surging to my temples; and if I had said to Pisistratus, ‘Describe this man,’ and by his description I had recognized my son, and dreaded lest I might be too late to arrest him from so treacherous a crime, my brain would have given way,—and so I did not dare!”
I return to the thread of my story. From the time that Vivian confided in Lady Ellinor, the way was cleared to his most ambitious hopes; and though his acquisitions were not sufficiently scholastic and various to permit Trevanion to select him as a secretary, yet, short of sleeping at the house, he was little less intimate there than I had been.
Among Vivian’s schemes of advancement, that of winning the hand and heart of the great heiress had not been one of the least sanguine. This hope was annulled when, not long after his intimacy at her father’s house, she became engaged to young Lord Castleton. But he could not see Miss Trevanion with impunity (alas! who, with a heart yet free, could be insensible to attractions so winning?). He permitted the love—such love as his wild, half-educated, half-savage nature acknowledged—to creep into his soul, to master it; but he felt no hope, cherished no scheme while the young lord lived. With the death of her betrothed, Fanny was free; then he began to hope,—not yet to scheme. Accidentally he encountered Peacock. Partly from the levity that accompanied a false good-nature that was constitutional with him, partly from a vague idea that the man might be useful, Vivian established his quondam associate in the service of Trevanion. Peacock soon gained the secret of Vivian’s love for Fanny, and dazzled by the advantages that a marriage with Miss Trevanion would confer on his patron, and might reflect on himself, and delighted at an occasion to exercise his dramatic accomplishments on the stage of real life, he soon practised the lesson that the theatres had taught him; namely, to make a sub-intrigue between maid and valet serve the schemes and insure the success of the lover. If Vivian had some opportunities to imply his admiration, Miss Trevanion gave him none to plead his cause. But the softness of her nature, and that graceful kindness which surrounded her like an atmosphere, emanating unconsciously from a girl’s harmless desire to please, tended to deceive him. His own personal gifts were so rare, and in his wandering life the effect they had produced had so increased his reliance on them, that he thought he wanted but the fair opportunity to woo in order to win. In this state of mental intoxication, Trevanion, having provided for his Scotch secretary, took him to Lord N—s. His hostess was one of those middle-aged ladies of fashion who like to patronize and bring forward young men, accepting gratitude for condescension as a homage to beauty. She was struck by Vivian’s exterior, and that “picturesque” in look and in manner which belonged to him. Naturally garrulous and indiscreet, she was unreserved to a pupil whom she conceived the whim to make “au fait to society.” Thus she talked to him, among other topics in fashion, of Miss Trevanion, and expressed her belief that the present Lord Castleton had always admired her; but it was only on his accession to the marquisate that he had made up his mind to marry, or, from his knowledge of Lady Ellinor’s ambition, thought that the Marquis of Castleton might achieve the prize which would have been refused to Sir Sedley Beaudesert. Then, to corroborate the predictions she hazarded, she repeated, perhaps with exaggeration, some passages from Lord Castleton’s replies to her own suggestions on the subject. Vivian’s alarm became fatally excited; unregulated passions easily obscured a reason so long perverted, and a conscience so habitually dulled. There is an instinct in all intense affection (whether it be corrupt or pure) that usually makes its jealousy prophetic. Thus, from the first, out of all the brilliant idlers round Fanny Trevanion, my jealousy had pre-eminently fastened on Sir Sedley Beaudesert, though, to all seeming, without a cause. From the same instinct Vivian had conceived the same vague jealousy,—a jealousy, in his instance, coupled with a deep dislike to his supposed rival, who had wounded his self-love. For the marquis, though to be haughty or ill-bred was impossible to the blandness of his nature, had never shown to Vivian the genial courtesies he had lavished upon me, and kept politely aloof from his acquaintance; while Vivian’s personal vanity had been wounded by that drawing-room effect which the proverbial winner of all hearts produced without an effort,—an effect that threw into the shade the youth and the beauty (more striking, but infinitely less prepossessing) of the adventurous rival. Thus animosity to Lord Castleton conspired with Vivian’s passion for Fanny to rouse all that was worst by nature and by rearing in this audacious and turbulent spirit.
His confidant Peacock suggested, from his stage experience, the outlines of a plot, to which Vivian’s astuter intellect instantly gave tangibility and coloring. Peacock had already found Miss Trevanion’s waiting-woman ripe for any measure that might secure himself as her husband and a provision for life as a reward. Two or three letters between them settled the preliminary engagements. A friend of the ex-comedian’s had lately taken an inn on the north road, and might be relied upon. At that inn it was settled that Vivian should meet Miss Trevanion, whom Peacock, by the aid of the abigail, engaged to lure there. The sole difficulty that then remained would, to most men, have seemed the greatest; namely, the consent of Miss Trevanion to a Scotch marriage. But Vivian hoped all things from his own eloquence, art, and passion; and by an inconsistency, however strange, still not unnatural in the twists of so crooked an intellect, he thought that by insisting on the intention of her parents to sacrifice her youth to the very man of whose attractions he was most jealous,—by the picture of disparity of years, by the caricature of his rival’s foibles and frivolities, by the commonplaces of “beauty bartered for ambition,” etc.,—he might enlist her fears of the alternative on the side of the choice urged upon her. The plan proceeded, the time came: Peacock pretended the excuse of a sick relation to leave Trevanion; and Vivian a day before, on pretence of visiting the picturesque scenes in the neighborhood, obtained leave of absence. Thus the plot went on to its catastrophe.
“And I need not ask,” said I, trying in vain to conceal my indignation, “how Miss Trevanion received your monstrous proposition!”
Vivian’s pale cheek grew paler, but he made no reply.
“And if we had not arrived, what would you have done? Oh, dare you look into the gulf of infamy you have escaped!”
“I cannot and I will not bear this!” exclaimed Vivian, starting up. “I have laid my heart bare before you, and it is ungenerous and unmanly thus to press upon its wounds. You can moralize, you can speak coldly; but—I—I loved!”
“And do you think,” I burst forth, “do you think that I did not love too,—love longer than you have done; better than you have done; gone through sharper struggles, darker days, more sleepless nights than you; and yet—”
Vivian caught hold of me.
“Hush!” he cried; “is this indeed true? I thought you might have had some faint and fleeting fancy for Miss Trevanion, but that you curbed and conquered it at once. Oh, no! It was impossible to have loved really, and to have surrendered all chance as you did,—have left the house, have fled from her presence! No, no; that was not love!”
“It was love! And I pray Heaven to grant that, one day, you may know how little your affection sprang from those feelings which make true love sublime as honor, and meek as is religion! Oh, cousin, cousin, with those rare gifts, what you might have been; what, if you will pass through repentance and cling to atonement, what, I dare hope, you may yet be! Talk not now of your love; I talk not of mine! Love is a thing gone from the lives of both. Go back to earlier thoughts, to heavier wrongs,—your father, that noble heart which you have so wantonly lacerated, which you have so little comprehended!”
Then, with all the warmth of emotion, I hurried on,—showed him the true nature of honor and of Roland (for the names were one!); showed him the watch, the hope, the manly anguish I had witnessed, and wept—I, not his son—to see; showed him the poverty and privation to which the father, even at the last, had condemned himself, so that the son might have no excuse for the sins that Want whispers to the weak. This and much more, and I suppose with the pathos that belongs to all earnestness, I enforced, sentence after sentence, yielding to no interruption, overmastering all dissent, driving in the truth, nail after nail, as it were, into the obdurate heart that I constrained and grappled to. And at last the dark, bitter, cynical nature gave way, and the young man fell sobbing at my feet and cried aloud, “Spare me, spare me! I see it all now, wretch that I have been!”
CHAPTER VIII
On leaving Vivian I did not presume to promise him Roland’s immediate pardon. I did not urge him to attempt to see his father. I felt the time was not come for either pardon or interview. I contented myself with the victory I had already gained. I judged it right that thought, solitude, and suffering should imprint more deeply the lesson, and prepare the way to the steadfast resolution of reform. I left him seated by the stream, and with the promise to inform him at the small hostelry, where he took up his lodging, how Roland struggled through his illness.
On returning to the inn I was uneasy to see how long a time had elapsed since I had left my uncle. But on coming into his room, to my surprise and relief I found him up and dressed, and with a serene, though fatigued, expression of countenance. He asked me no questions where I had been,—perhaps from sympathy with my feelings in parting with Miss Trevanion; perhaps from conjecture that the indulgence of those feelings had not wholly engrossed my time.
But he said simply, “I think I understood from you that you had sent for Austin,—is it so?”
“Yes, sir; but I named—, as the nearest point to the Tower, for the place of meeting.”
“Then let us go hence forthwith,—nay, I shall be better for the change. And here there must be curiosity, conjecture, torture!” said he, locking his hands tightly together. “Order the horses at once!”
I left the room accordingly; and while they were getting ready the horses, I ran to the place where I had left Vivian. He was still there, in the same attitude, covering his face with his hands, as if to shut out the sun. I told him hastily of Roland’s improvement, of our approaching departure, and asked him an address in London at which I could find him. He gave me as his direction the same lodging at which I had so often visited him. “If there be no vacancy there for me,” said he, “I shall leave word where I am to be found. But I would gladly be where I was before—” He did not finish the sentence. I pressed his hand, and left him.
CHAPTER IX
Some days have elapsed: we are in London, my father with us; and Roland has permitted Austin to tell me his tale, and received through Austin all that Vivian’s narrative to me suggested, whether in extenuation of the past or in hope of redemption in the future. And Austin has inexpressibly soothed his brother. And Roland’s ordinary roughness has gone, and his looks are meek and his voice low. But he talks little, and smiles never. He asks me no questions, does not to me name his son, nor recur to the voyage to Australia, nor ask why it is put off, nor interest himself, as before, in preparations for it,—he has no heart for anything.
The voyage is put off till the next vessel sails, and I have seen Vivian twice or thrice, and the result of the interviews has disappointed and depressed me. It seems to me that much of the previous effect I had produced is already obliterated. At the very sight of the great Babel,—the evidence of the ease, the luxury, the wealth, the pomp; the strife, the penury, the famine, and the rags, which the focus of civilization, in the disparities of old societies, inevitably gathers together,—the fierce, combative disposition seemed to awaken again; the perverted ambition, the hostility to the world; the wrath, the scorn; the war with man, and the rebellious murmur against Heaven. There was still the one redeeming point of repentance for his wrongs to his father,—his heart was still softened there; and, attendant on that softness, I hailed a principle more like that of honor than I had yet recognized in Vivian. He cancelled the agreement which had assured him of a provision at the cost of his father’s comforts. “At least there,” he said, “I will injure him no more!”
But while on this point repentance seemed genuine, it was not so with regard to his conduct towards Miss Trevanion. His gypsy nurture, his loose associates, his extravagant French romances, his theatrical mode of looking upon love intrigues and stage plots, seemed all to rise between his intelligence and the due sense of the fraud and treachery he had practised. He seemed to feel more shame at the exposure than at the guilt, more despair at the failure of success than gratitude at escape from crime. In a word, the nature of a whole life was not to be remodelled at once,—at least by an artificer so unskilled as I.
After one of these interviews I stole into the room where Austin sat with Roland, and watching a seasonable moment when Roland, shaking off a revery, opened his Bible and sat down to it, with each muscle in his face set, as I had seen it before, into iron resolution, I beckoned my father from the room.
Pisistratus.—“I have again seen my cousin. I cannot make the way I wished. My dear father, you must see him.”
Mr. Caxton.—“I? Yes, assuredly, if I can be of any service. But will he listen to me?”
Pisistratus.—“I think so. A young man will often respect in his elder what he will resent as a presumption in his contemporary.”
Mr. Caxton.—“It may be so. [Then more thoughtfully] But you describe this strange boy’s mind as a wreck! In what part of the mouldering timbers can I fix the grappling-hook? Here it seems that most of the supports on which we can best rely, when we would save another, fail us,—religion, honor, the associations of childhood, the bonds of home, filial obedience, even the intelligence of self-interest, in the philosophical sense of the word. And I, too,—a mere bookman! My dear son, I despair!”
Pisistratus.—“No, you do not despair; no, you must succeed,—for if you do not, what is to become of Uncle Roland? Do you not see his heart is fast breaking?”
Mr. Caxton.—“Get me my hat. I will go; I will save this Ishmael,—I will not leave him till he is saved!”
Pisistratus. (Some minutes after, as they are walking towards Vivian’s lodging).—“You ask me what support you are to cling to: a strong and a good one, sir.”
Mr. Caxton. “Ah! what is that?”
Pisistratus.—“Affection! There is a nature capable of strong affection at the core of this wild heart. He could love his mother,—tears gush to his eyes at her name; he would have starved rather than part with the memorial of that love. It was his belief in his father’s indifference or dislike that hardened and embruted him; it is only when he hears how that father loved him that I now melt his pride and curb his passions. You have affection to deal with! Do you despair now?
“My father turned on me those eyes so inexpressibly benign and mild, and replied softly, ‘No!’
“We reached the house; and my father said, as we knocked at the door, ‘If he is at home, leave me. This is a hard study to which you have set me; I must work at it alone.’
“Vivian was at home, and the door closed on his visitor. My father stayed some hours.
“On returning home, to my great surprise I found Trevanion with my uncle. He had found us out,—no easy matter, I should think. But a good impulse in Trevanion was not of that feeble kind which turns home at the sight of a difficulty. He had come to London on purpose to see and to thank us.
“I did not think there had been so much of delicacy—of what I may call the ‘beauty of kindness’—in a man whom incessant business had rendered ordinarily blunt and abrupt. I hardly recognized the impatient Trevanion in the soothing, tender, subtle respect that rather implied than spoke gratitude, and sought to insinuate what he owed to the unhappy father, without touching on his wrongs from the son. But of this kindness—which showed how Trevanion’s high nature of gentleman raised him aloof from that coarseness of thought which those absorbed wholly in practical affairs often contract—of this kindness, so noble and so touching, Roland seemed scarcely aware. He sat by the embers of the neglected fire, his hands grasping the arms of his elbow-chair, his head drooping on his bosom; and only by a deep hectic flush on his dark cheek could you have seen that he distinguished between an ordinary visitor and the man whose child he had helped to save. This minister of state, this high member of the elect, at whose gift are places, peerages, gold-sticks, and ribbons, has nothing at his command for the bruised spirit of the half-pay soldier. Before that poverty, that grief, and that pride, the King’s Counsellor was powerless. Only when Trevanion rose to depart, something like a sense of the soothing intention which the visit implied seemed to rouse the repose of the old man and to break the ice at its surface; for he followed Trevanion to the door, took both his hands, pressed them, then turned away, and resumed his seat. Trevanion beckoned to me, and I followed him downstairs and into a little parlor which was unoccupied.
“After some remarks upon Roland, full of deep and considerate feeling, and one quick, hurried reference to the son,—to the effect that his guilty attempt would never be known by the world,—Trevanion then addressed himself to me with a warmth and urgency that took me by surprise. ‘After what has passed,’ he exclaimed, ‘I cannot suffer you to leave England thus. Let me not feel with you, as with your uncle, that there is nothing by which I can repay—No, I will not so put it,—stay, and serve your country at home; it is my prayer, it is Ellinor’s. Out of all at my disposal it will go hard but what I shall find something to suit you.’ And then, hurrying on, Trevanion spoke flatteringly of my pretensions, in right of birth and capabilities, to honorable employment, and placed before me a picture of public life, its prizes and distinctions, which for the moment, at least, made my heart beat loud and my breath come quick. But still, even then I felt (was it an unreasonable pride?) that there was something that jarred, something that humbled, in the thought of holding all my fortunes as a dependency on the father of the woman I loved, but might not aspire to; something even of personal degradation in the mere feeling that I was thus to be repaid for a service, and recompensed for a loss. But these were not reasons I could advance; and, indeed, so for the time did Trevanion’s generosity and eloquence overpower me that I could only falter out my thanks and my promise that I would consider and let him know.
With that promise he was forced to content himself; he told me to direct to him at his favorite country seat, whither he was going that day, and so left me. I looked round the humble parlor of the mean lodging-house, and Trevanion’s words came again before me like a flash of golden light. I stole into the open air and wandered through the crowded streets, agitated and disturbed.