Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton

“ He promised her the love and protection of natures akin to the happy scene: the simple, affectionate mother, the gentle pastor, the exile wise and kind, Violante, with dark eyes full of the mystic thoughts that solitude calls from childhood,—Violante should be her companion.
“And, oh!” cried Helen, “if life be thus happy there, return with me, return! return!”
“Alas!” murmured the boy, “if the hammer once strike the spark from the anvil, the spark must fly upward; it cannot fall back to earth until light has left it. Upward still, Helen,—let me go upward still!” ”

“ Not there could ever be sympathy in feelings, brilliant and shifting as the tints of the rainbow. When Audley pressed her heart to his own, could he comprehend one finer throb of its beating? Was all the iron of his mind worth one grain of the gold she had cast away in Harley’s love?
Did Nora already discover this? Surely no. Genius feels no want, no repining, while the heart is contented. Genius in her paused and slumbered: it had been as the ministrant of solitude: it was needed no more. ”

“ The common consent of mankind would have acknowledged the supreme royalty of genius when it once leaves its solitude, and strides into the world. What! was this rude villager the child of Fame, who, without an effort, and unconsciously, had inspired in the wearied heart of Beatrice di Negra a love that Randal knew, by an instinct, no arts, no craft, could ever create for him in the heart of woman? And now, did this same youth stand on the same level in the ascent to power as he, the well-born Randal Leslie, the accomplished protege of the superb Audley Egerton? ”

“ But all the town knows that Audley Egerton and Richard Avenel are the members for Lausmere. And flags stream, and drums beat, and men shake each other by the hand heartily; and there is talk of the chairing to-morrow; and the public-houses are crowded; and there is an indistinct hubbub in street and alley, with sudden bursts of uproarious shouting; and the clouds to the west look red and lurid round the sun, which has gone down behind the church tower,—behind the yew-trees that overshadow the quiet grave of Nora Avenel. ”

“ Hear me! hear me!”
“Violante!” murmured Harley, his whole frame heaving with emotion, “bear with me. Do not ask of me the sacrifice of what seems to me the cause of manhood itself,—to sit down, meek and patient, under a wrong that debases me, with the consciousness that all my life I have been the miserable dupe to affections I deemed so honest, to regrets that I believed so holy. Ah, I should feel more mean in my pardon than you can think me in revenge! ”

“ Violante was indeed a bewitching child,—a child to whom I defy Mrs. Caudle herself (immortal Mrs. Caudle!) to have been a harsh stepmother.
Look at her now, as released from those kindly arms, she stands, still clinging with one hand to her new mamma, and holding out the other to Riccabocca, with those large dark eyes swimming in happy tears. What a lovely smile! what an ingenuous, candid brow! She looks delicate, she evidently requires care, she wants the mother. And rare is the woman who would not love her the better for that! ”

“ But woe, woe to thee, Harley L’Estrange, if tomorrow at this hour thou stand at the hearthstone, thy designs accomplished, knowing that, in the fulfilment of thy blind will, thou hast met falsehood with falsehood, and deception with deceit! What though those designs now seem so consummate, so just, so appropriate, so exquisite a revenge,—seem to thee the sole revenge wit can plan and civilized life allow: wilt thou ever wash from thy memory the stain that will sully thine honour? Thou, too, professing friendship still, and masking perfidy under smiles! ”

“ Oh, Helen, fair Helen,—type of the quiet, serene, unnoticed, deep-felt excellence of woman! Woman, less as the ideal that a poet conjures from the air, than as the companion of a poet on the earth! Woman, who, with her clear sunny vision of things actual, and the exquisite fibre of her delicate sense, supplies the deficiencies of him whose foot stumbles on the soil, because his eye is too intent upon the stars! ”

“ HARLEY (seriously) .—“Upon my life, my dear fellow, you are a great philosopher. You have hit the exact question. You see I cannot marry a dream; and where, out of dreams, shall I find this ‘whom’?”
EGERTON.—“You do not search for her.”
HARLEY. “Do we ever search for love? Does it not flash upon us when we least expect it? Is it not like the inspiration to the muse? What poet sits down and says, ‘I will write a poem’? What man looks out and says, ‘I will fall in love’? No! Happiness, as the great German tells us, ‘falls suddenly from the bosom of the gods;’ so does love.” ”

“ The whim and the daring, the passion for letters and reverence for genius, the mixture of levity and strength, the polished sauntering indolence, or the elastic readiness of energies once called into action,—all might have found their prototypes in the lives which those portraits rekindled. The deeper sentiment, the more earnest nature, which in Harley L’Estrange were commingled with the attributes common to a former age,—these, indeed, were of his own. Our age so little comprehended, while it colours us from its atmosphere! ”

“ But to live with peace, to live with dignity, to live with freedom, to live in harmony with your thoughts, your habits, your aspirations—and this in the perpetual companionship of a person to whom you have given the power to wound your peace, to assail your dignity, to cripple your freedom, to jar on each thought and each habit, and bring you down to the meanest details of earth, when you invite her, poor soul, to soar to the spheres—that makes the To Be or Not To Be, which is the question. ”

“ Thus if the man’s genius made the home a temple, the woman’s wisdom gave to the temple the security of the fortress. They have only one child,—a girl; they call her Nora. She has the father’s soul-lit eyes, and the mother’s warm human smile. She assists Helen in the morning’s noiseless domestic duties; she sits in the evening at Leonard’s feet, while he reads or writes. In each light grief of childhood she steals to the mother’s knee; but in each young impulse of delight, or each brighter flash of progressive reason, she springs to the father’s breast. ”

“ Afar, their sound borne into that room, the joy-bells were pealing triumph; mobs roaring out huzzas; the weak cry of John Avenel might be blent in those shouts, as the drunken zealots reeled by his cottage door, and startled the screaming ravens that wheeled round the hollow oak. The boom which is sent from the waves on the surface of life, while the deeps are so noiseless in their march, was wafted on the wintry air into the chamber of the statesman it honoured, and over the grass sighing low upon Nora’s grave. ”

“ It is not the noble, it is the parvenu, who has only to grow rich, in order to forget those whom in poverty he hailed as his friends. Is it for me to make the poor excuse, never heard on the lips of an Italian prince, ‘that I cannot command the obedience of my child;’ subject myself to the galling answer, ‘Duke of Serrano, you could once command that obedience, when, in exile, penury, and terror you offered me a bride without a dower’? Child, Violante, daughter of ancestors on whose honour never slander set a stain, I call on you to redeem your father’s plighted word. ”

“ And thou, thyself, O nature, shrinking and humble, that needest to be courted forth from the shelter, and developed under the calm and genial atmosphere of holy, happy love—can such affection as Harley L’Estrange may proffer suffice to thee? Will not the blossoms, yet folded in the petal, wither away beneath the shade that may protect them from the storm, and yet shut them from the sun? Thou who, where thou givest love, seekest, though meekly, for love in return ”

“ But Hate comes covertly forth from some self-interest we have crossed, or some self-love we have wounded; and, dullards that we are, how seldom we are aware of our offence! You may be hated by a man you have never seen in your life: you may be hated as often by one you have loaded with benefits; you may so walk as not to tread on a worm; but you must sit fast on your easy-chair till you are carried out to your bier, if you would be sure not to tread on some snake of a foe. But, then, what harm does the hate do us? Very often the harm is as unseen by the world as the hate is unrecognized by us. ”

“ Yet, O dear child, you who, when almost an infant, ere yet you knew what snares and pitfalls, for all who trust to another, lie under the sward at our feet, even when decked the fairest with the flowers of spring; you who put your small hands around my neck, and murmured in your musical voice, ‘Save us,—save my father,’—you at least I will not forsake, in a peril worse than that which menaced you then,—a peril which affrights you more than that which threatened you in the snares of Peschiera. Randal Leslie may thrive in his meaner objects of ambition ”

“ Egerton, I fear that even your fortune will not enable you to clear those liabilities which will leave him, perhaps, a pauper!”
“Baron Levy,” said Harley, abruptly, “if I have forgiven Mr. Egerton, cannot you too forgive? Me he has wronged; you have wronged him, and more foully.”
“No, my Lord, I cannot forgive him. You he has never humiliated, you he has never employed for his wants, and scorned as his companion. You have never known what it is to start in life with one whose fortunes were equal to your own, whose talents were not superior. ”

“ Happiness enough, where even Peace does but seldom preside, when each can bring to the altar, if not the flame, still the incense. Where man’s thoughts are all noble and generous, woman’s feelings all gentle and pure, love may follow if it does not precede; and if not, if the roses be missed from the garland, one may sigh for the rose, but one is safe from the thorn.
The morning was mild, yet somewhat overcast by the mist which announces coming winter in London, and Helen walked musingly beneath the trees that surrounded the garden of Lord Lansmere’s house. ”

“ O Audley, embrace your son!”
“Here, here!” exclaimed Egerton, as Leonard bent his knee,—“here to my heart! Look at me with those eyes!—kindly, forgivingly: they are your mother’s!” His proud head sunk on his son’s shoulder.
“But this is not enough,” said Harley, leading Helen, and placing her by Leonard’s side. “You must open your heart for more. Take into its folds my sweet ward and daughter. What is a home without the smile of woman? They have loved each other from children. Audley, yours be the hand to join,—yours be the lips to bless.” ”

“ I love you, it is true; but it is not for my happiness to marry one who dislikes me, nor for my ambition to connect myself with one whose poverty is greater than my own. I marry but to keep my plighted faith with your father, and to save you from a villain you would hate more than myself, and from whom no walls are a barrier, no laws a defence. One person, indeed, might perhaps have preserved you from the misery you seem to anticipate with me; that person might defeat the plans of your father’s foe,—effect, it might be, terms which could revoke his banishment and restore his honours ”

“ Never did Violante pause to remember that the same years which ripened herself from infancy into woman were passing less gently over that smooth cheek and dreamy brow,—that the world might be altering the nature as time the aspect. To her the hero of the Ideal remained immortal in bloom and youth. Bright illusion, common to us all, where Poetry once hallows the human form! ”

“ Is John Burley now of man’s common standard? Man himself seems to have vanished from the scene,—his soul stolen from him, his form gone away with the fumes of the smoke, and the nauseous steam from that fiery bowl. And Leonard looked round, and saw but the swine of Circe,—some on the floor, some staggering against the walls, some hugging each other on the tables, some fighting, some bawling, some weeping. The divine spark had fled from the human face; the Beast is everywhere growing more and more out of the thing that had been Man. ”

“ Evidently thought, though intense for the moment, was not habitual to the man; evidently he had lived the life which takes all things lightly,—so he rose with a look of fatigue, shook and stretched himself, as if to cast off, or grow out of, an unwelcome and irksome mood. An hour afterwards, the Count of Peschiera was charming all eyes, and pleasing all ears, in the saloon of a high-born beauty, whose acquaintance he had made at Vienna, and whose charms, according to that old and never-truth-speaking oracle, Polite Scandal, were now said to have attracted to London the brilliant foreigner. ”

“ Oh, unhappy, beloved Harley!” exclaimed Violante, with such a gush of exquisite reproachful tenderness, that it thrilled him as the voice of the parting guardian angel. “Meanness! But it is that from which I implore you to save yourself. You cannot judge, you cannot see. You are dark, dark. Lost Christian that you are, what worse than heathen darkness to feign the friendship the better to betray; to punish falsehood by becoming yourself so false; to accept the confidence even of your bitterest foe, and then to sink below his own level in deceit? ”

“ The new image thus introduced is one of her own years, perhaps; nay, it may be younger still, for it is a boy that is described, with his profuse fair curls, and eyes new to grief, and confronting the sun as a young eagle’s; with veins so full of the wine of life, that they overflow into every joyous whim; with nerves quiveringly alive to the desire of glory; with the frank generous nature, rash in its laughing scorn of the world, which it has not tried. Who was this boy? it perplexed Leonard. ”

“ Had Nora looked from heaven into her mother’s heart Nora would not have thought so. A good name when the burial stone closes over dust is still a possession upon the earth; on earth it is indeed our only one! ”

“ What, till then, had Harley L’Estrange been to Violante? An ideal, a dream of some imagined excellence, a type of poetry in the midst of the common world. It had not been Harley the man,—it had been Harley the Phantom. ”

“ Harley stood still one moment, thoroughly irresolute, nay, almost subdued. Then sternness, though less rigid than before, gradually came to his brow. The demon had still its hold in the stubborn and marvellous pertinacity with which the man clung to all that once struck root at his heart. With a sudden impulse that still withheld decision, yet spoke of sore-shaken purpose, he strode to his desk, drew from it Nora’s manuscript, and passed from his room.
Harley had meant never to have revealed to Audley the secret he had gained until the moment when revenge was consummated. ”