The Caxtons: A Family Picture Part 56

"It is," he said, folding his arms deliberately on his breast, "it is for me to command in this house; all who are within it must submit to my orders. You, sir, who hold reputation, name, and honor at so high a price, how can you fail to see that you would rob them from the lady whom you would protect from the insult of my affection? How would the world receive the tale of your rescue of Miss Trevanion; how believe that--Oh! pardon me, madam--Miss Trevanion--f.a.n.n.y--pardon me--I am mad.

Only hear me,--alone, alone; and then if you too say, 'Begone!' I submit without a murmur I allow no arbiter but you."

But f.a.n.n.y still clung closer and closer still to Roland. At that moment I heard voices and the trampling of feet below; and supposing that the accomplices in this villany were mustering courage perhaps to mount to the a.s.sistance of their employer, I lost all the compa.s.sion that had hitherto softened my horror of the young man's crime, and all the awe with which that confession had been attended. I therefore this time seized the false Vivian with a grip that he could no longer shake off, and said sternly, "Beware how you aggravate your offence! If strife ensues, it will not be between father and son, and--"

f.a.n.n.y sprang forward. "Do not provoke this bad, dangerous man! I fear him not. Sir, I will hear you, and alone."

"Never!" cried I and Roland simultaneously.

Vivian turned his look fiercely to me, and with a sullen bitterness to his father; and then, as if resigning his former prayer, he said: "Well, then, be it so; even in the presence of those who judge me so severely, I will speak at least." He paused, and throwing into his voice a pa.s.sion that, had the repugnance at his guilt been less, would not have been without pathos, he continued to address f.a.n.n.y: "I own that when I first saw you I might have thought of love as the poor and ambitious think of the way to wealth and power. Those thoughts vanished, and nothing remained in my heart but love and madness. I was as a man in a delirium when I planned this snare. I knew but one object, saw but one heavenly vision. Oh! mine--mine at least in that vision--are you indeed lost to me forever?"

There was that in this man's tone and manner which, whether arising from accomplished hypocrisy or actual, if perverted, feeling, would, I thought, find its way at once to the heart of a woman who, however wronged, had once loved him; and with a cold misgiving, I fixed my eyes on Miss Trevanion. Her look, as she turned with a visible tremor, suddenly met mine, and I believe that she discerned my doubt; for after suffering her eyes to rest on my own with something of mournful reproach, her lips curved as with the pride, of her mother, and for the first time in my life I saw anger on her brow.

"It is well, sir, that you have thus spoken to me in the presence of others, for in their presence I call upon you to say, by that honor which the son of this gentleman may for a while forget, but cannot wholly forfeit,--I call upon you to say whether, by deed, word, or sign, I, Frances Trevanion, ever gave you cause to believe that I returned the feeling you say you entertained for me, or encouraged you to dare this attempt to place me in your power."

"No!" cried Vivian, readily, but with a writhing lip, "no; but where I loved so deeply, perilled all my fortune for one fair and free occasion to tell you so alone, I would not think that such love could meet only loathing and disdain. What! has Nature shaped me so unkindly that where I love no love can reply? What! has the accident of birth shut me out from the right to woo and mate with the high-born? For the last, at least that gentleman in justice should tell you since it has been his care to instil the haughty lesson into me, that my lineage is one that befits lofty hopes and warrants fearless ambition. My hopes, my ambition--they were you Oh, Miss Trevanion, it is true that to win you I would have braved the world's laws, defied every foe save him who now rises before me. Yet, believe me, believe me, had I won what I dared to aspire to, you would not have been disgraced by your choice; and the name, for which I thank not my father, should not have been despised by the woman who pardoned my presumption, nor by the man who now tramples on my anguish and curses me in my desolation."

Not by a word had Roland sought to interrupt his son,--nay, by a feverish excitement which my heart understood in its secret sympathy, he had seemed eagerly to court every syllable that could extenuate the darkness of the offence, or even imply some less sordid motive for the baseness of the means. But as the son now closed with the words of unjust reproach and the accents of fierce despair,--closed a defence that showed, in its false pride and its perverted eloquence, so utter a blindness to every principle of that Honor which had been the father's idol,--Roland placed his hand before the eyes that he had previously, as if spell-bound, fixed on the hardened offender, and once more drawing f.a.n.n.y towards him, said,--

"His breath pollutes the air that innocence and honesty should breathe.

He says all in this house are at his command,--why do we stay? Let us go." He turned towards the door, and f.a.n.n.y with him.

Meanwhile the louder sounds below had been silenced for some moments; but I heard a step in the hall. Vivian started, and placed himself before us.

"No, no; you cannot leave me thus, Miss Trevanion. I resign you,--be it so; I do not even ask for pardon. But to leave this house thus, without carriage, without attendants, without explanation! The blame falls on me,--it shall do so; but at least vouchsafe me the right to repair what I yet can repair of the wrong, to protect all that is left to me,--your name."

As he spoke he did not perceive (for he was facing us, and with his back to the door) that a new actor had noiselessly entered on the scene, and, pausing by the threshold, heard his last words.

"The name of Miss Trevanion, sir,--and from what?" asked the new comer as he advanced and surveyed Vivian with a look that, but for its quiet, would have seemed disdain.

"Lord Castleton!" exclaimed f.a.n.n.y, lifting up the face she had buried in her hands.

Vivian recoiled in dismay, and gnashed his teeth.

"Sir," said the marquis, "I await your reply; for not even you, in my presence, shall imply that one reproach can be attached to the name of that lady."

"Oh, moderate your tone to me, my Lord Castleton!" cried Vivian; "in you, at least, there is one man I am not forbidden to brave and defy. It was to save that lady from the cold ambition of her parents; it was to prevent the sacrifice of her youth and beauty to one whose sole merits are his wealth and his t.i.tles,--it was this that impelled me to the crime I have committed; this that hurried me on to risk all for one hour when youth at least could plead its cause to youth; and this gives me now the power to say that it does rest with me to protect the name of the lady, whom your very servility to that world which you have made your idol forbids you to claim from the heartless ambition that would sacrifice the daughter to the vanity of the parents. Ha! the future Marchioness of Castleton on her way to Scotland with a penniless adventurer! Ha! if my lips are sealed, who but I can seal the lips of those below in my secret? The secret shall be kept, but on this condition,--you shall not triumph where I have failed; I may lose what I adored, but I do not resign it to another. Ha! have I foiled you, my Lord Castleton? Ha, ha!"

"No, Sir; and I almost forgive you the villany you have not effected, for informing me, for the first time, that had I presumed to address Miss Trevanion, her parents at least would have pardoned the presumption. Trouble not yourself as to what your accomplices may say.

They have already confessed their infamy and your own. Out of my path, Sir!"

Then, with the benign look of a father and the lofty grace of a prince, Lord Castleton advanced to f.a.n.n.y. Looking round with a shudder, she hastily placed her hand in his, and by so doing perhaps prevented some violence on the part of Vivian, whose heaving breast and eye bloodshot, and still unquailing, showed how little even shame had subdued his fiercer pa.s.sions. But he made no offer to detain them, and his tongue seemed to cleave to his lips. Now, as f.a.n.n.y moved to the door she pa.s.sed Roland, who stood motionless and with vacant looks, like an image of stone; and with a beautiful tenderness, for which (even at this distant date, recalling it) I say, "G.o.d requite thee, f.a.n.n.y," she laid her other hand on Roland's arm and said, "Come, too: your arm still."

But Roland's limbs trembled and refused to stir; his head, relaxing, drooped on his breast, his eyes closed. Even Lord Castleton was so struck (though unable to guess the true and terrible cause of his dejection) that he forgot his desire to hasten from the spot, and cried with all his kindliness of heart, "You are ill, you faint; give him your arm, Pisistratus."

"It is nothing," said Roland, feebly, as he leaned heavily on my arm while I turned back my head, with all the bitterness of that reproach which filled my heart speaking in the eyes that sought him whose place should have been where mine now was. And oh!--thank Heaven, thank Heaven!--the look was not in vain. In the same moment the son was at the father's knees.

"Oh, pardon, pardon! Wretch, lost wretch though I be, I bow my head to the curse. Let it fall,--but on me, and on me only; not on your own heart too."

f.a.n.n.y burst into tears, sobbing out, "Forgive him, as I do."

Roland did not heed her.

"He thinks that the heart was not shattered before the curse could come," he said, in a voice so weak as to be scarcely audible. Then, raising his eyes to heaven, his lips moved as if he prayed inly.

Pausing, he stretched his hands over his son's head, and averting his face, said, "I revoke the curse. Pray to thy G.o.d for pardon."

Perhaps not daring to trust himself further, he then made a violent effort and hurried from the room.

We followed silently. When we gained the end of the pa.s.sage, the door of the room we had left closed with a sullen jar.

As the sound smote on my ear, with it came so terrible a sense of the solitude upon which that door had closed, so keen and quick an apprehension of some fearful impulse, suggested by pa.s.sions so fierce to a condition so forlorn, that instinctively I stopped, and then hurried back to the chamber. The lock of the door having been previously forced, there was no barrier to oppose my entrance. I advanced, and beheld a spectacle of such agony as can only be conceived by those who have looked on the grief which takes no fort.i.tude from reason, no consolation from conscience,--the grief which tells us what would be the earth were man abandoned to his pa.s.sions, and the Chance of the atheist reigned alone in the merciless heavens. Pride humbled to the dust; ambition shivered into fragments; love (or the pa.s.sion mistaken for it) blasted into ashes; life, at the first onset, bereaved of its holiest ties, forsaken by its truest guide; shame that writhed for revenge; and remorse that knew not prayer,--all, all blended, yet distinct, were in that awful spectacle of the guilty son.

And I had told but twenty years, and my heart had been mellowed in the tender sunshine of a happy home, and I had loved this boy as a stranger; and lo, he was Roland's son! I forgot all else, looking upon that anguish; and I threw myself on the ground by the form that writhed there, and folding my arms round the breast which in vain repelled me, I whispered, "Comfort, comfort: life is long. You shall redeem the past, you shall efface the stain, and your father shall bless you yet!"

CHAPTER II.

I could not stay long with my unhappy cousin, but still I stayed long enough to make me think it probable that Lord Castleton's carriage would have left the inn; and when, as I pa.s.sed the hall, I saw it standing before the open door, I was seized with fear for Roland,--his emotions might have ended in some physical attack. Nor were those fears without foundation. I found f.a.n.n.y kneeling beside the old soldier in the parlor where we had seen the two women, and bathing his temples, while Lord Castleton was binding his arm; and the marquis's favorite valet, who, amongst his other gifts, was something of a surgeon, was wiping the blade of the penknife that had served instead of a lancet. Lord Castleton nodded to me. "Don't be uneasy,--a little fainting fit; we have bled him. He is safe now,--see, he is recovering." Roland's eyes, as they opened, turned to me with an anxious, inquiring look. I smiled upon him as I kissed his forehead, and could, with a safe conscience, whisper words which neither father nor Christian could refuse to receive as comfort.

In a few minutes more we had left the house. As Lord Castleton's carriage only held two, the marquis, having a.s.sisted Miss Trevanion and Roland to enter, quietly mounted the seat behind and made a sign to me to come by his side, for there was room for both. (His servant had taken one of the horses that had brought thither Roland and myself, and already gone on before.) No conversation took place between us then.

Lord Castleton seemed profoundly affected, and I had no words at my command.

When we reached the inn at which Lord Castleton had changed horses, about six miles distant, the marquis insisted on f.a.n.n.y's taking some rest for a few hours; for indeed she was thoroughly worn out.

I attended my uncle to his room; but he only answered my a.s.surances of his son's repentance with a pressure of the hand, and then, gliding from me, went into the farthest recess of the room and there knelt down.

When he rose, he was pa.s.sive and tractable as a child. He suffered me to a.s.sist him to undress; and when he had lain down on the bed, he turned his face quietly from the light, and after a few heavy sighs, sleep seemed mercifully to steal upon him. I listened to his breathing till it grew low and regular, and then descended to the sitting-room in which I had left Lord Castleton, for he had asked me in a whisper to seek him there.

I found the marquis seated by the fire, in a thoughtful and dejected att.i.tude.

"I am glad you are come," said he, making room for me on the hearth, "for I a.s.sure you I have not felt so mournful for many years; we have much to explain to each other. Will you begin? They say the sound of the bell dissipates the thunder-cloud; and there is nothing like the voice of a frank, honest nature to dispel all the clouds that come upon us when we think of our own faults and the villany of others. But I beg you a thousand pardons: that young man your relation,--your brave uncle's son? Is it possible?"

My explanations to Lord Castleton were necessarily brief and imperfect.

The separation between Roland and his son; my ignorance of its cause; my belief in the death of the latter; my chance acquaintance with the supposed Vivian; the interest I took in him; the relief it was to the fears for his fate with which he inspired me, to think he had returned to the home I ascribed to him; and the circ.u.mstances which had induced my suspicions, justified by the result,--all this was soon hurried over.

"But I beg your pardon," said the marquis, interrupting me "did you, in your friendship for one so unlike you, even by your own partial account, never suspect that you had stumbled upon your lost cousin?"

"Such an idea never could have crossed me."

And here I must observe that though the reader, at the first introduction of Vivian, would divine the secret, the penetration of a reader is wholly different from that of the actor in events. That I had chanced on one of those curious coincidences in the romance of real life which a reader looks out for and expects in following the course of narrative, was a supposition forbidden to me by a variety of causes.

There was not the least family resemblance between Vivian and any of his relations; and, somehow or other, in Roland's son I had pictured to myself a form and a character wholly different from Vivian's. To me it would have seemed impossible that my cousin could have been so little curious to hear any of our joint family affairs; been so unheedful, or even weary, if I spoke of Roland,--never, by a word or tone, have betrayed a sympathy with his kindred. And my other conjecture was so probable,--son of the Colonel Vivian whose name he bore. And that letter, with the post-mark of "G.o.dalming," and my belief, too, in my cousin's death,--even now I am not surprised that the idea never occurred to me.

I paused from enumerating these excuses for my dulness, angry with myself, for I noticed that Lord Castleton's fair brow darkened; and he exclaimed, "What deceit he must have gone through before he could become such a master in the art!"

"That is true, and I cannot deny it," said I. "But his punishment now is awful; let us hope that repentance may follow the chastis.e.m.e.nt. And though certainly it must have been his own fault that drove him from his father's home and guidance, yet, so driven, let us make some allowance for the influence of evil companionship on one so young,--for the suspicions that the knowledge of evil produces, and turns into a kind of false knowledge of the world. And in this last and worst of all his actions--"

"Ah, how justify that?"