The Caxtons: A Family Picture Part 51

"Nothing to wound me, yet relate to him!"

It is impossible to convey to the reader the despair that was in those words.

"Perhaps," said I, after a long pause and in a low voice, for I was awe-stricken, "perhaps--if he be dead--he may have repented of all offence to you before he died."

"Repented--ha, ha!"

"Or if he be not dead--"

"Hush, boy, hush!"

"While there is life, there is hope of repentance."

"Look you, nephew," said the Captain, rising, and folding his arms resolutely on his breast,--"look you, I desired that that name might never be breathed. I have not cursed my son yet; could he come to life--the curse might fall! You do not know what torture your words have given me just when I had opened my heart to another son, and found that son in you. With respect to the lost, I have now but one prayer, and you know it,--the heart-broken prayer that his name never more may come to my ears!"

As he closed these words, to which I ventured no reply, the Captain took long, disordered strides across the room; and suddenly, as if the s.p.a.ce imprisoned, or the air stifled him, he seized his hat and hastened into the streets. Recovering my surprise and dismay, I ran after him; but he commanded me to leave him to his own thoughts, in a voice so stern, yet so sad, that I had no choice but to obey. I knew, by my own experience, how necessary is solitude in the moments when grief is strongest and thought most troubled.

CHAPTER V.

Hours elapsed, and the Captain had not returned home. I began to feel uneasy, and went forth in search of him, though I knew not whither to direct my steps. I thought it, however, at least probable that he had not been able to resist visiting Lady Ellinor, so I went first to St.

James's Square. My suspicions were correct; the Captain had been there two hours before. Lady Ellinor herself had gone out shortly after the Captain left. While the porter was giving me this information, a carriage stopped at the door, and a footman, stepping up, gave the porter a note and a small parcel, seemingly of books, saying simply, "From the Marquis of Castleton." At the sound of that name I turned hastily, and recognized Sir Sedley Beaudesert seated in the carriage and looking out of the window with a dejected, moody expression of countenance, very different from his ordinary aspect, except when the rare sight of a gray hair or a twinge of the toothache reminded him that he was no longer twenty-five. Indeed, the change was so great that I exclaimed dubiously,--"Is that Sir Sedley Beaudesert?" The footman looked at me, and touching his hat, said, with a condescending smile, "Yes, sir, now the Marquis of Castleton."

Then, for the first time since the young lord's death, I remembered Sir Sedley's expressions of grat.i.tude to Lady Castleton and the waters of Ems for having saved him from "that horrible marquisate." Meanwhile my old friend had perceived me, exclaiming,--

"What! Mr. Caxton? I am delighted to see you. Open the door, Thomas.

Pray come in, come in."

I obeyed, and the new Lord Castleton made room for me by his side.

"Are you in a hurry?" said he. "If so, shall I take you anywhere? If not, give me half an hour of your time while I drive to the city."

As I knew not now in what direction more than another to prosecute my search for the Captain, and as I thought I might as well call at our lodgings to inquire if he had not returned, I answered that I should be very happy to accompany his lordship; "Though the City," said I, smiling, "sounds to me strange upon the lips of Sir Sedley--I beg pardon, I should say of Lord--"

"Don't say any such thing; let me once more hear the grateful sound of Sedley Beaudesert. Shut the door, Thomas to Gracechurch Street,--Messrs.

Fudge & Fidget."

The carriage drove on.

"A sad affliction has befallen me," said the marquis, "and none sympathize with me!"

"Yet all, even unacquainted with the late lord, must have felt shocked at the death of one so young and so full of promise."

"So fitted in every way to bear the burden of the great Castleton name and property. And yet you see it killed him! Ah! if he had been but a simple gentleman, or if he had had a less conscientious desire to do his duties, he would have lived to a good old age. I know what it is already. Oh, if you saw the piles of letters on my table! I positively dread the post. Such colossal improvement on the property which the poor boy had began, for me to finish. What do you think takes me to Fudge & Fidget's? Sir, they are the agents for an infernal coal-mine which my cousin had re-opened in Durham, to plague my life out with another thirty thousand pounds a year! How am I to spend the money?--how am I to spend it? There's a cold-blooded head steward who says that charity is the greatest crime a man in high station can commit,--it demoralizes the poor. Then, because some half-a-dozen farmers sent me a round-robin to the effect that their rents were too high, and I wrote them word that the rents should be lowered, there was such a hullabaloo, you would have thought heaven and earth were coming together. 'If a man in the position of the Marquis of Castleton set the example of letting land below its value, how could the poorer squires in the country exist? Or if they did exist, what injustice to expose them to the charge that they were grasping landlords, vampires, and bloodsuckers! Clearly if Lord Castleton lowered his rents (they were too low already), he struck a mortal blow at the property of his neighbors if they followed his example, or at their characters if they did not.' No man can tell how hard it is to do good, unless fortune gives him a hundred thousand pounds a-year, and says--'Now, do good with it!' Sedley Beaudesert might follow his whims, and all that would be said against him was 'good-natured, simple fellow!' But if Lord Castleton follow his whims, you would think he was a second Catiline,--unsettling the peace and undermining the prosperity of the entire nation!" Here the wretched man paused, and sighed heavily; then, as his thoughts wandered into a new channel of woe, he resumed: "Ah! if you could but see the forlorn great house I am expected to inhabit, cooped up between dead walls instead of my pretty rooms with the windows full on the park; and the b.a.l.l.s I am expected to give; and the parliamentary interest I am to keep up; and the villanous proposal made to me to become a lord-steward or lord-chamberlain, because it suits my rank to be a sort of a servant.

Oh, Pisistratus, you lucky dog,--not twenty-one, and with, I dare say, not two hundred pounds a-year in the world!"

Thus bemoaning and bewailing his sad fortunes, the poor marquis ran on, till at last he exclaimed, in a tone of yet deeper despair,--

"And everybody says I must marry too;--that the Castleton line must not be extinct! The Beaudeserts are a good old family ono,'--as old, for what I know, as the Castletons; but the British empire would suffer no loss if they sank into the tomb of the Capulets. But that the Castleton peerage should expire is a thought of crime and woe at which all the mothers of England rise in a phalanx! And so, instead of visiting the sins of the fathers on the sons, it is the father that is to be sacrificed for the benefit of the third and fourth generation!"

Despite my causes for seriousness, I could not help laughing; my companion turned on me a look of reproach.

"At least," said I, composing my countenance, "Lord Castleton has one comfort in his afflictions,--if he must marry, he may choose as he pleases."

"That is precisely what Sedley Beaudesert could, and Lord Castleton cannot do," said the marquis, gravely. "The rank of Sir Sedley Beaudesert was a quiet and comfortable rank, he might marry a curate's daughter, or a duke's, and please his eye or grieve his heart as the caprice took him. But Lord Castleton must marry, not for a wife, but for a marchioness,--marry some one who will wear his rank for him; take the trouble of splendor oft his hands, and allow him to retire into a corner and dream that he is Sedley Beaudesert once more! Yes, it must be so,--the crowning sacrifice must be completed at the altar. But a truce to my complaints. Trevanion informs me you are going to Australia,--can that be true?"

"Perfectly true."

"They say there is a sad want of ladies there."

"So much the better,--I shall be all the more steady."

"Well, there's something in that. Have you seen Lady Ellinor?"

"Yes,--this morning."

"Poor woman! A great blow to her,--we have tried to console each other. f.a.n.n.y, you know, is staying at Oxton, in Surrey, with Lady Castleton,--the poor lady is so fond of her,--and no one has comforted her like f.a.n.n.y."

"I was not aware that Miss Trevanion was out of town."

"Only for a few days, and then she and Lady Ellinor join Trevanion in the North,--you know he is with Lord N--, settling measures on which--But, alas! they consult me now on those matters,--force their secrets on me. I have, Heaven knows how many votes! Poor me! Upon my word, if Lady Ellinor was a widow, I should certainly make up to her: very clever woman, nothing bores her." (The marquis yawned,--Sir Sedley Beaudesert never yawned.) "Trevanion has provided for his Scotch secretary, and is about to get a place in the Foreign Office for that young fellow Gower, whom, between you and me, I don't like. But he has bewitched Trevanion!"

"What sort of a person is this Mr. Gower? I remember you said that he was clever and good-looking."

"He is both; but it is not the cleverness of youth,--he is as hard and sarcastic as if he had been cheated fifty times, and jilted a hundred!

Neither are his good looks that letter of recommendation which a handsome face is said to be. He has an expression of countenance very much like that of Lord Hertford's pet bloodhound when a stranger comes into the room. Very sleek, handsome dog the bloodhound is certainly,--well-mannered, and I dare say exceedingly tame; but still you have but to look at the corner of the eye to know that it is only the habit of the drawing-room that suppresses the creature's const.i.tutional tendency to seize you by the throat, instead of giving you a paw. Still, this Mr. Gower has a very striking head,--something about it Moorish or Spanish, like a picture by Murillo--I half suspect that he is less a Gower than a gypsy!"

"What!"--I cried, as I listened with rapt and breathless attention to this description. "He is then very dark, with high, narrow forehead, features slightly aquiline, but very delicate, and teeth so dazzling that the whole face seems to sparkle when he smiles,--though it is only the lip that smiles, not the eye."

"Exactly as you say; you have seen him, then?"

"Why, I am not sure, since you say his name is Gower."

"He says his name is Gower," returned Lord Castleton, dryly, as he inhaled the Beaudesert mixture.

"And where is he now,--with Mr. Trevanion?"

"Yes, I believe so. Ah! here we are--Fudge & Fidget! But perhaps," added Lord Castleton, with a gleam of hope in his blue eye,--"perhaps they are not at home!"

Alas! that was an illusive "imagining," as the poets of the nineteenth century unaffectedly express themselves. Messrs. Fudge & Fidget were never out to such clients as the Marquis of Castleton; with a deep sigh, and an altered expression of face, the Victim of Fortune slowly descended the steps of the carriage.

"I can't ask you to wait for me," said he; "Heaven only knows how long I shall be kept! Take the carriage where you will, and send it back to me."

"A thousand thanks, my dear lord, I would rather walk. But you will let me call on you before I leave town."

"Let you!--I insist on it. I am still at the old quarters,--under pretence," said the marquis, with a sly twinkle of the eyelid, "that Castleton House wants painting!"