Ernest Maltravers Part 48

"My dearest father, I wished to speak with you on a matter of much importance."

"Do you?--what, immediately?"

"Yes."

"Well--what is it?--your Slingsby property, I suppose."

"No, my dear father--pray sit down and hear me patiently."

Lord Saxingham began to be both alarmed and curious--he seated himself in silence, and looked anxiously in the face of his daughter.

"You have always been very indulgent to me," commenced Florence, with a half smile, "and I have had my own way more than most young ladies.

Believe me, my dear father. I am most grateful not only for your affection but your esteem. I have been a strange wild girl, but I am now about to reform; and as the first step, I ask your consent to give myself a preceptor and a guide--"

"A what!" cried Lord Saxingham.

"In other words, I am about to--to--well, the truth must out--to marry."

"Has the Duke of ------ been here to-day?"

"Not that I know of. But it is no duke to whom I have promised my hand--it is a n.o.bler and rarer dignity that has caught my ambition. Mr.

Maltravers has--"

"Mr. Maltravers!--Mr. Devil!--the girl's mad!--don't talk to me, child, I won't consent to any such nonsense. A country gentleman--very respectable, very clever, and all that, but it's no use talking--my mind's made up. With your fortune, too!"

"My dear father, I will not marry without your consent, though my fortune is settled on me, and I am of age."

"There's a good child--and now let me dress--we shall be late."

"No, not yet," said Lady Florence, throwing her arm carelessly round her father's neck--"I shall marry Mr. Maltravers, but it will be with your full approval. Just consider, if I married the Duke of ------, he would expect all my fortune, such as it is. Ten thousand a year is at my disposal; if I marry Mr. Maltravers, it will be settled on you--I always meant it--it is a poor return for your kindness, your indulgence--but it will show that your own Flory is not ungrateful."

"I won't hear."

"Stop--listen to reason. You are not rich--you are ent.i.tled but to a small pension if you ever resign office, and your official salary, I have often heard you say, does not prevent you from being embarra.s.sed.

To whom should a daughter give from her superfluities but to a parent?--from whom should a parent receive, but from a child, who can never repay his love?--Ah, this is nothing; but you--you who have never crossed her lightest whim--do not you destroy all the hopes of happiness your Florence can ever form."

Florence wept, and Lord Saxingham, who was greatly moved, let fall a few tears also. Perhaps it is too much to say that the pecuniary part of the proffered arrangement entirely won him over; but still the way it was introduced softened his heart. He possibly thought that it was better to have a good and grateful daughter in a country gentleman's wife, than a sullen and thankless one in a d.u.c.h.ess. However that may be, certain it is, that before Lord Saxingham began his toilet, he promised to make no obstacle to the marriage, and all he asked in return was, that at least three months (but that, indeed, the lawyers would require) should elapse before it took place; and on this understanding Florence left him, radiant and joyous as Flora herself, when the sun of spring makes the world a garden. Never had she thought so little of her beauty, and never had it seemed so glorious, as that happy evening. But Maltravers was pale and thoughtful, and Florence in vain sought his eyes during the dinner, which seemed to her insufferably long. Afterwards, however, they met and conversed apart the rest of the evening; and the beauty of Florence began to produce upon Ernest's heart its natural effect; and that evening--ah, how Florence treasured the remembrance of every hour, every minute of its annals!

It would have been amusing to witness the short conversation between Lord Saxingham and Maltravers, when the latter sought the earl at night in his lordship's room. To Lord Saxingham's surprise, not a word did Maltravers utter of his own subordinate pretensions to Lady Florence's hand. Coldly, drily, and almost haughtily, did he make the formal proposals, "as if [as Lord Saxingham afterwards said to Ferrers] the man were doing me the highest possible honour in taking my daughter, the beauty of London, with fifty thousand a year, off my hands." But this was quite Maltravers!--if he had been proposing to the daughter of a country curate, without a sixpence, he would have been the humblest of the humble. The earl was embarra.s.sed and discomposed--he was almost awed by the Siddons-like countenance and Coriola.n.u.s-like air of his future son-in-law-he even hinted nothing of the compromise as to time which he had made with his daughter. He thought it better to leave it to Lady Florence to arrange that matter. They shook hands frigidly and parted.

Maltravers went next into Cleveland's room, and communicated all to the delighted old man, whose congratulations were so fervid that Maltravers felt it would be a sin not to fancy himself the happiest, man in the world. That night he wrote his refusal of the appointment offered him.

The next day, Lord Saxingham went to his office in Downing Street as usual, and Lady Florence and Ernest found an opportunity to ramble through the grounds alone.

There it was that occurred those confessions, sweet alike to utter and to hear. Then did Florence speak of her early years--of her self-formed and solitary mind--of her youthful dreams and reveries. Nothing around her to excite interest or admiration, or the more romantic, the higher, or the softer qualities of her nature, she turned to contemplation and to books. It is the combination of the faculties with the affections, exiled from action, and finding no worldly vent, which produces Poetry, the child of pa.s.sion and of thought. Hence, before the real cares of existence claim them, the young, who are abler yet lonelier than their fellows, are nearly always poets; and Florence was a poetess. In minds like this, the first book that seems to embody and represent their own most cherished and beloved trains of sentiment and ideas, ever creates a reverential and deep enthusiasm. The lonely, and proud, and melancholy soul of Maltravers, which made itself visible in all his creations, became to Florence like a revealer of the secrets of her own nature.

She conceived an intense and mysterious interest in the man whose mind exercised so pervading a power over her own. She made herself acquainted with his pursuits, his career--she fancied she found a symmetry and harmony between the actual being and the breathing genius--she imagined she understood what seemed dark and obscure to others. He whom she had never seen grew to her a never-absent friend. His ambition, his reputation, were to her like a possession of her own. So at length, in the folly of her young romance, she wrote to him, and dreaming of no discovery, antic.i.p.ating no result, the habit once indulged became to her that luxury which writing for the eye of the world is to an author oppressed with the burthen of his own thoughts. At length she saw him, and he did not destroy her illusion. She might have recovered from the spell if she had found him ready at once to worship at her shrine. The mixture of reserve and frankness--frankness of language, reserve of manner--which belonged to Maltravers, piqued her. Her vanity became the auxiliary to her imagination. At length they met at Cleveland's house; their intercourse became more unrestrained--their friendship was established, and she discovered that she had wilfully implicated her happiness in indulging her dreams; yet even then she believed that Maltravers loved her, despite his silence upon the subject of love. His manner, his words bespoke his interest in her, and his voice was ever soft when he spoke to women; for he had much of the old chivalric respect and tenderness for the s.e.x. What was general it was natural that she should apply individually--she who had walked the world but to fascinate and to conquer. It was probable that her great wealth and social position imposed a check on the delicate pride of Maltravers--she hoped so--she believed it--yet she felt her danger, and her own pride at last took alarm. In such a moment she had resumed the character of the unknown correspondent--she had written to Maltravers--addressed her letter to his own house, and meant the next day to have gone to London, and posted it there. In this letter she had spoken of his visit to Cleveland, of his position with herself. She exhorted him, if he loved her, to confess, and if not, to fly. She had written artfully and eloquently--she was desirous of expediting her own fate; and then, with that letter in her bosom, she had met Maltravers, and the reader has learned the rest. Something of all this the blushing and happy Florence now revealed: and when she ended with uttering the woman's soft fear that she had been too bold, is it wonderful that Maltravers, clasping her to his bosom, felt the grat.i.tude, and the delighted vanity, which seemed even to himself like love? And into love those feelings rapidly and deliciously will merge, if fate and accident permit!

And now they were by the side of the water; and the sun was gently setting as on the eve before. It was about the same hour, the fairest of an autumn day; none were near--the slope of the hill hid the house from their view. Had they been in the desert they could not have been more alone. It was not silence that breathed around them, as they sat on that bench with the broad beech spreading over them its trembling canopy of leaves;--but those murmurs of living nature which are sweeter than silence itself--the songs of birds--the tinkling bell of the sheep on the opposite bank--the wind sighing through the trees, and the gentle heaving of the glittering waves that washed the odorous reed and water-lily at their feet. They had both been for some moments silent; and Florence now broke the pause, but in tones more low than usual.

"Ah!" said she, turning towards him, "these hours are happier than we can find in that crowded world whither your destiny must call us. For me, ambition seems for ever at an end. I have found all; I am no longer haunted with the desire of gaining a vague something,--a shadowy empire, that we call fame or power. The sole thought that disturbs the calm current of my soul, is the fear to lose a particle of the rich possession I have gained."

"May your fears ever be as idle!"

"And you really love me! I repeat to myself ever and ever that one phrase. I could once have borne to lose you, now it would be my death. I despaired of ever being loved for myself; my wealth was a fatal dower; I suspected avarice in every vow, and saw the base world lurk at the bottom of every heart that offered itself at my shrine. But you, Ernest,--you, I feel, never could weigh gold in the balance--and you--if you love--love me for myself."

"And I shall love thee more with every hour."

"I know not that: I dread that you will love me less when you know me more. I fear I shall seem to you exacting--I am jealous already. I was jealous even of Lady T------, when I saw you by her side this morning. I would have your every look--monopolise your every word."

This confession did not please Maltravers, as it might have done if he had been more deeply in love. Jealousy, in a woman of so vehement and imperious a nature, was indeed a pa.s.sion to be dreaded.

"Do not say so, dear Florence," said he, with a very grave smile; "for love should have implicit confidence as its bond and nature--and jealousy is doubt, and doubt is the death of love."

A shade pa.s.sed over Florence's too expressive face, and she sighed heavily.

It was at this time that Maltravers, raising his eyes, saw the form of Lumley Ferrers approaching towards them from the opposite end of the terrace: at the same instant, a dark cloud crept over the sky, the waters seemed overcast and the breeze fell: a chill and strange presentiment of evil shot across Ernest's heart, and, like many imaginative persons, he was unconsciously superst.i.tious as to presentiments.

"We are no longer alone," said he, rising; "your cousin has doubtless learned our engagement, and comes to congratulate your suitor."

"Tell me," he continued musingly, as they walked on to meet Ferrers, "are you very partial to Lumley? what think you of his character?--it is one that perplexes me; sometimes I think it has changed since we parted in Italy--sometimes I think it has not changed, but ripened."

"Lumley, I have known from a child," replied Florence, "and see much to admire and like in him; I admire his boldness and candour; his scorn of the world's littleness and falsehood; I like his good-nature--his gaiety--and fancy his heart better than it may seem to the superficial observer."

"Yet he appears to me selfish and unprincipled."

"It is from a fine contempt for the vices and follies of men that he has contracted the habit of consulting his own resolute will--and, believing everything done in this noisy stage of action a cheat, he has accommodated his ambition to the fashion. Though without what is termed genius, he will obtain a distinction and power that few men of genius arrive at."

"Because _genius_ is essentially honest," said Maltravers. "However, you teach me to look on him more indulgently. I suspect the real frankness of men whom I know to be hypocrites in public life--but, perhaps, I judge by too harsh a standard."

"Third persons," said Ferrers, as he now joined them, "are seldom unwelcome in the country; and I flatter myself that I am the exact thing wanting to complete the charm of this beautiful landscape."

"You are ever modest, my cousin."

"It is my weak side, I know; but I shall improve with years and wisdom.

What say you, Maltravers?" and Ferrers pa.s.sed his arm affectionately through Ernest's.

"By the by, I am too familiar--I am sunk in the world. I am a thing to be sneered at by you old-family people. I am next heir to a bran-new Brummagem peerage. 'Gad, I feel bra.s.sy already!"

"What, is Mr. Templeton--"

"Mr. Templeton is no more; he is defunct, extinguished--out of the ashes rises the phoenix Lord Vargrave. We had thought of a more sounding t.i.tle; De Courval has a n.o.bler sound,--but my good uncle has nothing of the Norman about him: so we dropped the De as ridiculous--Vargrave is euphonious and appropriate. My uncle has a manor of that name--Baron Vargrave of Vargrave."

"Ah--I congratulate you."

"Thank you. Lady Vargrave may destroy all my hopes yet. But nothing venture, nothing have. My uncle will be gazetted to-day. Poor man, he will be delighted; and as he certainly owes it much to me, he will, I suppose, be very grateful--or hate me ever afterwards--that is a toss up. A benefit conferred is a complete hazard between the thumb of pride and the forefinger of affection. Heads grat.i.tude, tails hatred! There, that's a simile in the fashion of the old writers: 'Well of English undefiled!' humph!"

"So that beautiful child is Mrs. Templeton's, or rather Lady Vargrave's, daughter by a former marriage?" said Maltravers, abstractedly.

"Yes, it is astonishing how fond he is of her. Pretty little creature--confoundedly artful though. By the way, Maltravers, we had an unexpectedly stormy night the last of the session--strong division--ministers hard pressed. I made quite a good speech for them. I suppose, however, there will be some change--the moderates will be taken in. Perhaps by next session I may congratulate you."