CHAPTER VII.
"Of all men, I say,
That dare, for 'tis a desperate adventure,
Wear on their free necks the yoke of women,
Give me a soldier."--_Knight of Malta_.
"So lightly doth this little boat
Upon the scarce-touch'd billows float;
So careless doth she seem to be,
Thus left by herself on the homeless sea,
To lie there with her cheerful sail,
Till Heaven shall send some gracious gale."
WILSON: _Isle of Palms_.
Vaudemont returned that evening to London, and found at his lodgings a
note from Lord Lilburne, stating that as his gout was now somewhat
mitigated, his physician had recommended him to try change of air--that
Beaufort Court was in one of the western counties, in a genial climate--
that he was therefore going thither the next day for a short time--that
he had asked some of Monsieur de Vaudemont's countrymen, and a few other
friends, to enliven the circle of a dull country-house--that Mr. and Mrs.
Beaufort would be delighted to see Monsieur de Vaudemont also--and that
his compliance with their invitation would be a charity to Monsieur de
Vaudemont's faithful and obliged, LILBURNE.
The first sensation of Vaudemont on reading this effusion was delight.
"I shall see _her_," he cried; "I shall be under the same roof!" But the
glow faded at once from his cheek;--the roof!--what roof? Be the guest
where he held himself the lord!--be the guest of Robert Beaufort!--Was
that all? Did he not meditate the deadliest war which civilised life
admits of--the _War of Law_--war for name, property, that very hearth,
with all its household gods, against this man--could he receive his
hospitality? "And what then!" he exclaimed, as he paced to and fro the
room,--"because her father wronged me, and because I would claim mine
own--must I therefore exclude from my thoughts, from my sight, an image
so fair and gentle;--the one who knelt by my side, an infant, to that
hard man?--Is hate so noble a passion that it is not to admit one glimpse
of Love?--_Love_! what word is that? Let me beware in time!" He paused
in fierce self-contest, and, throwing open the window, gasped for air.
The street in which he lodged was situated in the neighbourhood of St.
James's; and, at that very moment, as if to defeat all opposition, and to
close the struggle, Mrs. Beaufort's barouche drove by, Camilla at her
side. Mrs. Beaufort, glancing up; languidly bowed; and Camilla herself
perceived him, and he saw her change colour as she inclined her head. He
gazed after them almost breathless, till the carriage disappeared; and
then reclosing the window, he sat down to collect his thoughts, and again
to reason with himself. But still, as he reasoned, he saw ever before
him that blush and that smile. At last he sprang up, and a noble and
bright expression elevated the character of his face,--"Yes, if I enter
that house, if I eat that man's bread, and drink of his cup, I must
forego, not justice--not what is due to my mother's name--but whatever
belongs to hate and vengeance. If I enter that house--and if Providence
permit me the means whereby to regain my rights, why she--the innocent
one--she may be the means of saving her father from ruin, and stand like
an angel by that boundary where justice runs into revenge!--Besides, is
it not my duty to discover Sidney? Here is the only clue I shall
obtain." With these thoughts he hesitated no more--he decided he would
not reject this hospitality, since it might be in his power to pay it
back ten thousandfold. "And who knows," he murmured again, "if Heaven,
in throwing this sweet being in my way, might not have designed to subdue
and chasten in me the angry passions I have so long fed on? I have seen
her,--can I now hate her father?"
He sent off his note accepting the invitation. When he had done so, was
he satisfied? He had taken as noble and as large a view of the duties
thereby imposed on him as he well could take: but something whispered at
his heart, "There is weakness in thy generosity--Darest thou love the
daughter of Robert Beaufort?" And his heart had no answer to this voice.
The rapidity with which love is ripened depends less upon the actual
number of years that have passed over the soil in which the seed is cast,
than upon the freshness of the soil itself. A young man who lives the
ordinary life of the world, and who fritters away, rather than exhausts,
his feelings upon a variety of quick succeeding subjects--the Cynthias of
the minute--is not apt to form a real passion at the first sight. Youth
is inflammable only when the heart is young!
There are certain times of life when, in either sex, the affections are
prepared, as it were, to be impressed with the first fair face that
attracts the fancy and delights the eye. Such times are when the heart
has been long solitary, and when some interval of idleness and rest
succeeds to periods of harsher and more turbulent excitement. It was
precisely such a period in the life of Vaudemont. Although his ambition
had been for many years his dream, and his sword his mistress, yet
naturally affectionate, and susceptible of strong emotion, he had often
repined at his lonely lot. By degrees the boy's fantasy and reverence
which had wound themselves round the image of Eugenie subsided into that
gentle and tender melancholy which, perhaps by weakening the strength of
the sterner thoughts, leaves us inclined rather to receive, than to
resist, a new attachment;--and on the verge of the sweet Memory trembles
the sweet Hope. The suspension of his profession, his schemes, his
struggles, his career, left his passions unemployed. Vaudemont was thus
unconsciously prepared to love. As we have seen, his first and earliest
feelings directed themselves to Fanny. But he had so immediately
detected the clanger, and so immediately recoiled from nursing those
thoughts and fancies, without which love dies for want of food, for a
person to whom he ascribed the affliction of an imbecility which would
give to such a sentiment all the attributes either of the weakest
rashness or of dishonour approaching to sacrilege--that the wings of the
deity were scared away the instant their very shadow fell upon his mind.
And thus, when Camilla rose upon him his heart was free to receive her
image. Her graces, her accomplishments, a certain nameless charm that
invested her, pleased him even more than her beauty; the recollections
connected with that first time in which he had ever beheld her, were also
grateful and endearing; the harshness with which her parents spoke to her
moved his compassion, and addressed itself to a temper peculiarly alive
to the generosity that leans towards the weak and the wronged; the
engaging mixture of mildness and gaiety with which she tended her peevish
and sneering uncle, convinced him of her better and more enduring
qualities of disposition and womanly heart. And even--so strange and
contradictory are our feelings--the very remembrance that she was
connected with a family so hateful to him made her own image the more
bright from the darkness that surrounded it. For was it not with the
daughter of his foe that the lover of Verona fell in love at first sight?
And is not that a common type of us all--as if Passion delighted in
contradictions? As the Diver, in Schiller's exquisite ballad, fastened
upon the rock of coral in the midst of the gloomy sea, so we cling the
more gratefully to whatever of fair thought and gentle shelter smiles out
to us in the depths of Hate and Strife.
But, perhaps, Vaudemont would not so suddenly and so utterly have
rendered himself to a passion that began, already, completely to master
his strong spirit, if he had not, from Camilla's embarrassment, her
timidity, her blushes, intoxicated himself with the belief that his
feelings were not unshared. And who knows not that such a belief, once
cherished, ripens our own love to a development in which hours are as
years?
It was, then, with such emotions as made him almost insensible to every
thought but the luxury of breathing the same air as his cousin, which
swept from his mind the Past, the Future--leaving nothing but a joyous,
a breathless PRESENT on the Face of Time, that he repaired to Beaufort
Court. He did not return to H---- before he went, but he wrote to Fanny
a short and hurried line to explain that he might be absent for some days
at least, and promised to write again, if he should be detained longer
than he anticipated.
In the meanwhile, one of those successive revolutions which had marked
the eras in Fanny's moral existence took its date from that last time
they had walked and conversed together.
The very evening of that day, some hours after Philip was gone, and after
Simon had retired to rest, Fanny was sitting before the dying fire in the
little parlour in an attitude of deep and pensive reverie. The old
woman-servant, Sarah, who, very different from Mrs. Boxer, loved Fanny
with her whole heart, came into the room as was her wont before going to
bed, to see that the fire was duly out, and all safe: and as she
approached the hearth, she started to see Fanny still up.
"Dear heart alive!" she said; "why, Miss Fanny, you will catch your
death of cold,-what are you thinking about?"
"Sit down, Sarah; I want to speak to you." Now, though Fanny was
exceedingly kind, and attached to Sarah, she was seldom communicative to
her, or indeed to any one. It was usually in its own silence and
darkness that that lovely mind worked out its own doubts.
"Do you, my sweet young lady? I'm sure anything I can do--" and Sarah
seated herself in her master's great chair, and drew it close to Fanny.
There was no light in the room but the expiring fire, and it threw upward
a pale glimmer on the two faces bending over it,--the one so strangely
beautiful, so smooth, so blooming, so exquisite in its youth and
innocence,--the other withered, wrinkled, meagre, and astute. It was
like the Fairy and the Witch together.
"Well, miss," said the crone, observing that, after a considerable pause,
Fanny was still silent,--"Well--"
"Sarah, I have seen a wedding!"
"Have you?" and the old woman laughed. "Oh! I heard it was to be
to-day!--young Waldron's wedding! Yes, they have been long sweethearts."
"Were you ever married, Sarah?"
"Lord bless you,--yes! and a very good husband I had, poor man! But he's
dead these many years; and if you had not taken me, I must have gone to
the workhus."
"He is dead! Wasn't it very hard to live after that, Sarah?"
"The Lord strengthens the hearts of widders!" observed Sarah,
sanctimoniously.
"Did you marry your brother, Sarah?" said Fanny, playing with the corner
of her apron.
"My brother!" exclaimed the old woman, aghast. "La! miss, you must not
talk in that way,--it's quite wicked and heathenish! One must not marry
one's brother!"
"No!" said Fanny, tremblingly, and turning very pale, even by that light.
"No!--are you sure of that?"
"It is the wickedest thing even to talk about, my dear young mistress;--
but you're like a babby unborn!"
Fanny was silent for some moments. At length she said, unconscious that
she was speaking aloud, "But he is not my brother, after all!"
"Oh, miss, fie! Are you letting your pretty head run on the handsome
gentleman. _You_, too,--dear, dear! I see we're all alike, we poor femel
creturs! You! who'd have thought it? Oh, Miss Fanny!--you'll break your
heart if you goes for to fancy any such thing."
"Any what thing?"
"Why, that that gentleman will marry you!--I'm sure, tho' he's so simple
like, he's some great gentleman! They say his hoss is worth a hundred
pounds! Dear, dear! why didn't I ever think of this before? He must be
a very wicked man. I see, now, why he comes here. I'll speak to him,
that, I will!--a very wicked man!"
Sarah was startled from her indignation by Fanny's rising suddenly, and
standing before her in the flickering twilight, almost like a shape
transformed,--so tall did she seem, so stately, so dignified.
"Is it of him that you are speaking?" said she, in a voice of calm but
deep resentment--"of him! If so, Sarah, we two can live no more in the
same house."
And these words were said with a propriety and collectedness that even,
through all her terrors, showed at once to Sarah how much they now
wronged Fanny who had suffered their lips to repeat the parrot-cry of the
"idiot girl!"
"O! gracious me!--miss--ma'am--I am so sorry--I'd rather bite out my
tongue than say a word to offend you; it was only my love for you, dear
innocent creature that you are!" and the honest woman sobbed with real
passion as she clasped Fanny's hand. "There have been so many young
persons, good and harmless, yes, even as you are, ruined. But you don't
understand me. Miss Fanny! hear me; I must try and say what I would say.
That man, that gentleman--so proud, so well-dressed, so grand-like, will
never marry you, never--never. And if ever he says he does love you, and
you say you love him, and you two don't marry, you will be ruined and
wicked, and die--die of a broken heart!"
The earnestness of Sarah's manner subdued and almost awed Fanny. She
sank down again in her chair, and suffered the old woman to caress and
weep over her hand for some moments in a silence that concealed the
darkest and most agitated feelings Fanny's life had hitherto known. At
length she said:--
"Why may he not marry me if he loves me?--he is not my brother,--indeed
he is not! I'll never call him so again."
"He cannot marry you," said Sarah, resolved, with a sort of rude
nobleness, to persevere in what she felt to be a duty; "I don't say
anything about money, because that does not always signify. But he
cannot marry you, because--because people who are hedicated one way never
marry those who are hedicated and brought up in another. A gentleman of
that kind requires a wife to know--oh--to know ever so much; and you--"
"Sarah," interrupted Fanny, rising again, but this time with a smile on
her face, "don't say anything more about it; I forgive you, if you
promise never to speak unkindly of him again--never--never--never,
Sarah!"
"But may I just tell him that--that--"
"That what?"
"That you are so young and innocent, and has no pertector like; and that
if you were to love him it would be a shame in him--that it would!"
And then (oh, no, Fanny, there was nothing clouded _now_ in your
reason!)--and then the woman's alarm, the modesty, the instinct, the
terror came upon her:--
"Never! never! I will not love him, I do not love him, indeed, Sarah. If
you speak to him, I will never look you in the face again. It is all
past--all, dear Sarah!"
She kissed the old woman; and Sarah, fancying that her sagacity and
counsel had prevailed, promised all she was asked; so they went up-stairs
together--friends.
