My Novel Part 165

"I care for nothing on earth like those old lands of my forefathers,"

said Randal, with unusual vehemence; "I reverence so little amongst the living, and I do reverence the dead. And my marriage will take place so soon; and the dower would so amply cover the paltry advance required."

"Yes; but the mere prospect of a marriage to the daughter of a man whose lands are still sequestered would be no security to a money-lender."

"Surely," said Randal, "you, who once offered to a.s.sist me when my fortunes were more precarious, might now accommodate me with this loan, as a friend, and keep the t.i.tle-deeds of the estate as--"

"As a money-lender," added the baron, laughing pleasantly. "No, mon cher, I will still lend you half the sum required in advance, but the other half is more than I can afford as friend, or hazard as money-lender; and it would damage my character,--be out of all rule,--if, the estates falling by your default of payment into my own hands, I should appear to be the real purchaser of the property of my own distressed client. But, now I think of it, did not Squire Hazeldean promise you his a.s.sistance in this matter?"

"He did so," answered Randal, "as soon as the marriage between Frank and Madame di Negra was off his mind. I meant to cross over to Hazeldean immediately after the election. How can I leave the place till then?"

"If you do, your election is lost. But why not write to the squire?"

"It is against my maxim to write where I can speak. However, there is no option; I will write at once. Meanwhile, communicate with Thornhill; keep up his hopes; and be sure, at least, that he does not close with this greedy alderman before the day fixed for decision."

"I have done all that already, and my letter is gone. Now, do your part: and if you write as cleverly as you talk, you would coax the money out from a stonier heart than poor Mr. Hazeldean's. I leave you now; good-night."

Levy took up his candlestick, nodded, yawned, and went. Randal still suspended the completion of his speech, and indited the following epistle:--

MY DEAR MR. HAZELDEAN,--I wrote to you a few hasty lines on leaving town, to inform you that the match you so dreaded was broken off, and proposing to defer particulars till I could visit your kind and hospitable roof, which I trusted to do for a few hours during my stay at Lansmere, since it is not a day's journey hence to Hazeldean. But I did not calculate on finding so sharp a contest.

In no election throughout the kingdom do I believe that a more notable triumph, or a more stunning defeat, for the great landed interest can occur. For in this town--so dependent on agriculture-- we are opposed by a low and sordid manufacturer, of the most revolutionary notions, who has, moreover, the audacity to force his own nephew--that very boy whom I chastised for impertinence on your village green, son of a common carpenter--actually the audacity, I say, to attempt to force this peasant of a nephew, as well as himself, into the representation of Lansmere, against the earl's interest, against your distinguished brother,--of myself I say nothing. You should hear the language in which these two men indulge against all your family! If we are beaten by such persons in a borough supposed to be so loyal as Lansmere, every one with a stake in the country may tremble at such a prognostic of the ruin that must await not only our old English Const.i.tution, but the existence of property itself. I need not say that on such an occasion I cannot spare myself. Mr. Egerton is ill too. All the fatigue of the canva.s.s devolves on me. I feel, my dear and revered friend, that I am a genuine Hazeldean, fighting your battle; and that thought carries me through all. I cannot, therefore, come to you till the election is over; and meanwhile you, and my dear Mrs.

Hazeldean, must be anxious to know more about the affair that so preyed on both your hearts than I have yet informed you, or can well trust to a letter. Be a.s.sured, however, that the worst is over; the lady has gone abroad. I earnestly entreated Frank (who showed me Mrs. Hazeldean's most pathetic letter to him) to hasten at once to the Hall and relieve your minds. Unfortunately he would not be ruled by me, but talked of going abroad too--not, I trust (nay, I feel a.s.sured), in pursuit of Madame di Negra; but still--In short, I should be so glad to see you, and talk over the whole. Could you not come hither--I pray do. And now, at the risk of your thinking that in this I am only consulting my own interest (but no--your n.o.ble English heart will never so misiudge me!), I will add with homely frankness, that if you could accommodate me immediately with the loan you not long since so generously offered, you would save those lands once in my family from pa.s.sing away from us forever. A city alderman--one Jobson--is meanly taking advantage of Thornhill's necessities, and driving a hard bargain for those lands. He has fixed the --th inst. for Thornhill's answer, and Levy (who is here a.s.sisting Mr. Egerton's election) informs me that Thornhill will accept his offer, unless I am provided with L10,000 beforehand; the other L10,000, to complete the advance required, Levy will lend me.

Do not be surprised at the usurer's liberality; he knows that I am about shortly to marry a very great heiress (you will be pleased when you learn whom, and will then be able to account for my indifference to Miss Sticktorights), and her dower will amply serve to repay his loan and your own, if I may trust to your generous affection for the grandson of a Hazeldean! I have the less scruple in this appeal to you, for I know bow it would grieve you that a Jobson, who perhaps never knew a grandmother, should foist your own kinsman from the lands of his fathers. Of one thing I am convinced,--we squires and sons of squires must make common cause against those great moneyed capitalists, or they will buy us all out in a few generations. The old race of country gentlemen is already much diminished by the grasping cupidity of such leviathans; and if the race be once extinct, what will become of the boast and strength of England?

Yours, my dear Mr. Hazeldean, with most affectionate and grateful respect,

RANDAL LESLIE.

CHAPTER XXII.

Nothing to Leonard could as yet be more distasteful or oppressive than his share in this memorable election. In the first place, it chafed the secret sores of his heart to be compelled to resume the name of Fairfeld, which was a tacit disavowal of his birth. It had been such delight to him that the same letters which formed the name of Nora should weave also that name of Oran, to which he had given distinction, which he had a.s.sociated with all his n.o.bler toils, and all his hopes of enduring fame,--a mystic link between his own career and his mother's obscurer genius. It seemed to him as if it were rendering to her the honours accorded to himself,--subtle and delicate fancy of the affections, of which only poets would be capable, but which others than poets may perhaps comprehend! That earlier name of Fairfield was connected in his memory with all the ruder employments, the meaner trials of his boyhood; the name of Oran, with poetry and fame. It was his t.i.tle in the ideal world, amongst all fair shapes and spirits. In receiving the old appellation, the practical world, with its bitterness and strife, returned to him as at the utterance of a spell. But in coming to Lansmere he had no choice. To say nothing of d.i.c.k, and d.i.c.k's parents with whom his secret would not be safe, Randal Leslie knew that he had gone by the name of Fairfield,--knew his supposed parentage, and would be sure to proclaim them. How account for the latter name without setting curiosity to decipher the anagram it involved, and perhaps guiding suspicion to his birth from Nora, to the injury of her memory, yet preserved from stain?

His feelings as connected with Nora--sharpened and deepened as they all had been by his discovery of her painful narrative-were embittered still more by coming in contact with her parents. Old John was in the same helpless state of mind and body as before,--neither worse nor better; but waking up at intervals with vivid gleams of interest in the election at the wave of a blue banner, at the cry of "Blue forever!" It was the old broken-clown charger, who, dozing in the meadows, starts at the roll of the drum. No persuasions d.i.c.k could employ would induce his father to promise to vote even one Yellow. You might as well have expected the old Roman, with his monomaniac cry against Carthage, to have voted for choosing Carthaginians for consuls. But poor John, nevertheless, was not only very civil, but very humble to d.i.c.k,--"very happy to oblige the gentleman."

"Your own son!" bawled d.i.c.k; "and here is your own grandson."

"Very happy to serve you both; but you see you are the wrong colour."

Then as he gazed at Leonard, the old man approached him with trembling knees, stroked his hair, looked into his face, piteously. "Be thee my grandson?" he faltered. "Wife, wife, Nora had no son, had she? My memory begins to fail me, sir; pray excuse it; but you have a look about the eyes that--" Old John began to weep, and his wife led him away.

"Don't come again," she said to Leonard, harshly, when she returned.

"He'll not sleep all night now." And then, observing that the tears stood in Leonard's eyes, she added, in softened tones, "I am glad to see you well and thriving, and to hear that you have been of great service to my son Richard, who is a credit and an honour to the family, though poor John cannot vote for him or for you against his conscience; and he should not be asked," she added, firing up; "and it is a sin to ask it, and he so old, and no one to defend him but me. But defend him I will while I have life!"

The poet recognized woman's brave, loving, wife-like heart here, and would have embraced the stern grandmother, if she had not drawn back from him; and, as she turned towards the room to which she had led her husband, she said over her shoulder,--

"I'm not so unkind as I seem, boy; but it is better for you, and for all, that you should not come to this house again,--better that you had not come into the town."

"Fie, Mother!" said d.i.c.k, seeing that Leonard, bending his head, silently walked from the room. "You should be prouder of your grandson than you are of me."

"Prouder of him who may shame us all yet?"

"What do you mean?"

But Mrs. Avenel shook her head and vanished.

"Never mind her, poor old soul," said d.i.c.k, as he joined Leonard at the threshold; "she always had her tempers. And since there is no vote to be got in this house, and one can't set a caucus on one's own father,--at least in this extraordinary rotten and prejudiced old country, which is quite in its dotage,--we'll not come here to be snubbed any more. Bless their old hearts, nevertheless!"

Leonard's acute sensibility in all that concerned his birth, deeply wounded by Mrs. Avenel's allusions, which he comprehended better than his uncle did, was also kept on the edge by the suspense to which he was condemned by Harley's continued silence as to the papers confided to that n.o.bleman. It seemed to Leonard almost unaccountable that Harley should have read those papers, be in the same town with himself, and yet volunteer no communication. At length he wrote a few lines to Lord L'Estrange, bringing the matter that concerned him so deeply before Harley's recollection, and suggesting his own earnest interest in any information that could supply the gaps and omissions of the desultory fragments. Harley, in replying to this note, said, with apparent reason, "that it would require a long personal interview to discuss the subject referred to, and that such an interview, in the thick of the contest between himself and a candidate opposed to the Lansmere party, would be sure to get wind, be ascribed to political intrigues, be impossible otherwise to explain, and embarra.s.s all the interests confided to their respective charge. That for the rest, he had not been unmindful of Leonard's anxiety, which must now mainly be to see justice done to the dead parent, and learn the name, station, and character of the parent yet surviving. And in this Harley trusted to a.s.sist him as soon as the close of the poll would present a suitable occasion." The letter was unlike Harley's former cordial tone: it was hard and dry. Leonard respected L'Estrange too much to own to himself that it was unfeeling.

With all his rich generosity of nature, he sought excuses for what he declined to blame. Perhaps something in Helen's manner or words had led Harley to suspect that she still cherished too tender an interest in the companion of her childhood; perhaps under this coldness of expression there lurked the burning anguish of jealousy. And, oh, Leonard so well understood, and could so n.o.bly compa.s.sionate even in his prosperous rival, that torture of the most agonizing of human pa.s.sions, in which all our reasonings follow the distorted writhings of our pain.

And Leonard himself, amidst his other causes of disquiet, was at once so gnawed and so humbled by his own jealousy. Helen, he knew, was still under the same roof as Harley. They, the betrothed, could see each other daily, hourly. He would soon hear of their marriage. She would be borne afar from the very sphere of his existence,--carried into a loftier region, accessible only to his dreams. And yet to be jealous of one to whom both Helen and himself were under such obligations debased him in his own esteem,--jealousy here was so like ingrat.i.tude. But for Harley, what could have become of Helen, left to his boyish charge,--he who had himself been compelled, in despair, to think of sending her from his side, to be reared into smileless youth in his mother's humble cottage, while he faced famine alone, gazing on the terrible river, from the bridge by which he had once begged for very alms,--begged of that Audley Egerton to whom he was now opposed as an equal; or flying from the fiend that glared at him under the lids of the haunting Chatterton? No, jealousy here was more than agony,--it was degradation, it was crime!

But, all! if Helen were happy in these splendid nuptials! Was he sure even of that consolation? Bitter was the thought either way,--that she should wholly forget him, in happiness from which he stood excluded as a thing of sin; or sinfully herself remember, and be wretched!

With that healthful strength of will which is more often proportioned to the susceptibility of feeling than the world suppose, the young man at last wrenched himself for awhile from the iron that had entered into his soul, and forced his thoughts to seek relief in the very objects from which they otherwise would have the most loathingly recoiled. He aroused his imagination to befriend his reason; he strove to divine some motive not explained by Harley, not to be referred to the mere defeat, by counter-scheme, of the scheming Randal, nor even to be solved by any service to Audley Egerton, which Harley might evolve from the complicated meshes of the election,--some motive that could more interest his own heart in the contest, and connect itself with Harley's promised aid in clearing up the mystery of his parentage. Nora's memoir had clearly hinted that his father was of rank and station far beyond her own. She had thrown the glow of her glorious fancies over the ambition and the destined career of the lover in whom she had merged her ambition as poetess, and her career as woman. Possibly the father might be more disposed to own and to welcome the son, if the son could achieve an opening, and give promise of worth, in that grand world of public life in which alone reputation takes precedence of rank. Possibly, too, if the son thus succeeded, and became one whom a proud father could with pride acknowledge, possibly he might not only secure a father's welcome, but vindicate a mother's name. This marriage, which Nora darkly hinted she had been led to believe was fraudulent, might, after all, have been legal,--the ceremony concealed, even till now, by worldly shame at disparity of rank. But if the son could make good his own footing--there where rank itself owned its chiefs in talent--that shame might vanish.

These suppositions were not improbable; nor were they uncongenial to Leonard's experience of Harley's delicate benignity of purpose. Here, too, the image of Helen allied itself with those of his parents, to support his courage and influence his new ambition. True, that she was lost to him forever. No worldly success, no political honours, could now restore her to his side. But she might hear him named with respect in those circles in which alone she would hereafter move, and in which parliamentary reputation ranks higher than literary fame. And perhaps in future years, when love, retaining its tenderness, was purified from its pa.s.sion, they might thus meet as friends. He might without a pang take her children on his knees, and say, perhaps in their old age, when he had climbed to a social equality even with her high-born lord, "It was the hope to regain the privilege bestowed on our childhood, that strengthened me to seek distinction when you and happiness forsook my youth." Thus regarded, the election, which had before seemed to him so poor and vulgar an exhibition of vehement pa.s.sions for petty objects, with its trumpery of banners and its discord of trumpets, suddenly grew into vivid interest, and a.s.sumed dignity and importance. It is ever thus with all mortal strife. In proportion as it possesses, or is void of, the diviner something that quickens the pulse of the heart, and elevates the wing of the imagination, it presents a mockery to the philosopher, or an inspiration to the bard. Feel that something, and no contest is mean! Feel it not, and, like Byron, you may cla.s.s with the slaughter of Cannae that field which, at Waterloo, restored the landmarks of nations; or may jeer with Juvenal at the dust of Hannibal, because he sought to deliver Carthage from ruin, and free a world from Rome.

CHAPTER XXIII.

Once then, grappling manfully with the task he had undertaken, and constraining himself to look on what Riccabocca would have called "the southern side of things," whatever there was really great in principle or honourable to human nature, deep below the sordid details and pitiful interests apparent on the face of the agitated current, came clear to his vision. The ardour of those around him began to be contagious: the generous devotion to some cause apart from self, which pervades an election, and to which the poorest voter will often render sacrifices that may be called sublime; the warm personal affection which community of zeal creates for the defender of beloved opinions,--all concurred to dispel that indifference to party politics, and counteract that disgust of their baser leaven, which the young poet had first conceived. He even began to look with complacency, for itself, on a career of toil and honours strange to his habitual labours and intellectual ambition. He threw the poetry of idea within him (as poets ever do) into the prose of action to which he was hurried forward. He no longer opposed d.i.c.k Avenel when that gentleman represented how detrimental it would be to his business at Screwstown if he devoted to his country the time and the ac.u.men required by his mill and its steamengine; and how desirable it would be, on all accounts, that Leonard Fairfield should become the parliamentary representative of the Avenels. "If, therefore," said d.i.c.k, "two of us cannot come in, and one must retire, leave it to me to arrange with the Committee that you shall be the one to persist. Oh, never fear but what all scruples of honour shall be satisfied. I would not for the sake of the Avenels have a word said against their representative."

"But," answered Leonard, "if I grant this, I fear that you have some intention of suffering the votes that your resignation would release to favour Leslie at the expense of Egerton."

"What the deuce is Egerton to you?"

"Nothing, except through my grat.i.tude to his friend Lord L'Estrange."

"Pooh! I will tell you a secret. Levy informs me privately that L'Estrange will be well satisfied if the choice of Lansmere fall upon Leslie instead of Egerton; and I think I convinced my Lord--for I saw him in London--that Egerton would have no chance, though Leslie might."

"I must think that Lord L'Estrange would resist to the utmost any attempt to prefer Leslie--whom he despises--to Egerton, whom he honours.

And, so thinking, I too would resist it, as you may judge by the speeches which have so provoked your displeasure."

"Let us cut short a yarn of talk which, when it comes to likings and dislikings, might last to almighty crack: I'll ask you to do nothing that Lord L'Estrange does not sanction. Will that satisfy you?"

"Certainly, provided I am a.s.sured of the sanction."

And now, the important day preceding the poll, the day in which the candidates were to be formally nominated, and meet each other in all the ceremony of declared rivalship, dawned at last. The town-hall was the place selected for the occasion; and before sunrise, all the streets were resonant with music, and gay with banners.

Audley Egerton felt that he could not--without incurring some just sarcasm on his dread to face the const.i.tuency he had formerly represented, and by the malcontents of which he had been burned in effigy--absent himself from the townhall, as he had done from balcony and hostel. Painful as it was to confront Nora's brother, and wrestle in public against all the secret memories that knit the strife of the present contest with the anguish that recalled the first,--still the thing must be done; and it was the English habit of his life to face with courage whatever he had to do.

CHAPTER XXIV.