Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton

“ CHAPTER XXIX. "LORD L'ESTRANGE, noble friend!"
"You!—and here—Violante? Is it I whom you seek? For what? Good heavens! what has happened? Why are you so pale; why tremble?"
"Have you forgiven Helen?" asked Violante, beginning with evasive question, and her cheek was pale no more. "Helen, the poor child! I have nothing in her to forgive, much to thank her for. She has been frank and honest."
"And Leonard—whom I remember in my childhood—you have forgiven him?"
"Fair mediator," said Harley, smiling, though coldly, "happy is the man who deceives another; all plead for him. ”

“ I will explain all, and Lord L'Estrange shall right you! That is,—that must be his intention!"
"IS—must be his intention—when he has just so wronged me!"
"Yes, yes," faltered the poor parson, mindful of his promise to L'Estrange not to reveal his own interview with that nobleman, and yet not knowing otherwise how to explain or to soothe; but still believing Leonard to be Harley's son, and remembering all that Harley had so pointedly said of atonement, in apparent remorse for crime, Mr. Dale was wholly at a loss himself to understand why Harley should have thus prefaced atonement by an insult. ”

“ The baron gnashed his teeth as, hastily entering the carriage, he drew down the blinds. The post-boys cracked their whips, and the wheels rolled away.
"Who can judge," thought Harley, "through what modes retribution comes home to the breast? That man is chastised in his wealth, ever gnawed by desire for what his wealth cannot buy!" He roused himself, cleared his brow, as from a thought that darkened and troubled; and, entering the saloon, laid his hand upon Leonard's shoulder, and looked, rejoicing, into the poet's mild, honest, lustrous eyes. ”

“ One word more, Lord L'Estrange,—but one. You will not hear me. I am a comparative stranger, but you have a friend, a friend dear and intimate, now under the same roof. Will you consent, at least, to take counsel of Mr. Audley Egerton? None can doubt his friendship for you; none can doubt that whatever he advise will be that which best becomes your honour. What, my Lord, you hesitate,—you feel ashamed to confide to your dearest friend a purpose which his mind would condemn? Then I will seek him, I will implore him to save you from what can but entail repentance. ”

“ Were they to be rivals in the same arena of practical busy life? Randal gnawed his quivering lip.
All the while, however, the young man whom he so envied was a prey to sorrows deeper far than could ever find room or footing in the narrow and stony heart of the unloving schemer.
As Leonard walked through the crowded streets with the friend and monitor of his childhood, confiding the simple tale of his earlier trials,—when, amidst the wreck of fortune and in despair of fame, the Child-angel smiled by his side, like Hope,—all renown seemed to him so barren, all the future so dark! ”

“ Child, child, do not be so wayward. Strive, at least, against a prejudice that you cannot defend. My Violante, my darling, this is no trifle. Here I must cease to be the fond, foolish father, whom you can do what you will with. Here I am Alphonso, Duke di Serrano; for here my honour as noble and my word as man are involved. I, then, but a helpless exile, no hope of fairer prospects before me, trembling like a coward at the wiles of my unscrupulous kinsman, grasping at all chances to save you from his snares,—self offered your hand to Randal Leslie,—offered, promised, pledged it ”

“ But it will not cost that," said Dick, cooling, "nor anything like it; for when the popular tide runs in one's favour, 't is astonishing how cheap an election may be. It will cost him enough though, and all for nothing,—worse than nothing. Think of it, my Lord."
"I will, Mr. Avenel. And I say, in my turn, that my friendship is as strong as your hate; and that if it costs me, not half, but my whole fortune, Audley Egerton shall come in without a shilling of expense to himself, should we once decide that he stand the contest." ”

“ As he and his companions reached the land, they saw the vessel in movement, gliding slowly down the river. "Courage, Leonard, courage!" murmured Harley. "You grieve, and nobly. But you have shunned the worst and most vulgar deceit in civilized life; you have not simulated love. Better that yon poor lady should be, awhile, the sufferer from a harsh truth, than the eternal martyr of a flattering lie! Alas, my Leonard! with the love of the poet's dream are linked only the Graces; with the love of the human heart come the awful Fates!" ”

“ In this election, this strife for objects wholly foreign to all my habits, unsuited to my poverty, at war with aspirations so long devoted to fairer goals, though by obscurer paths, I obeyed but his will or whim,—at a moment too when my whole soul sickened for repose and solitude. I had forced myself at last to take interest in what I had before loathed. But in every hope for the future, every stimulant to ambition, Lord L'Estrange's esteem still stood before me. Now, what do I here longer? All of his conduct, save his contempt for myself, is an enigma. ”

“ CHAPTER XXXII But while Harley had thus occupied the hours of night with cares for the living, Audley Egerton had been in commune with the dead. He had taken from the pile of papers amidst which it had fallen, the record of Nora's silenced heart. With a sad wonder he saw how he had once been loved. What had all which successful ambition had bestowed on the lonely statesman to compensate for the glorious empire he had lost,—such realms of lovely fancy; such worlds of exquisite emotion; that infinite which lies within the divine sphere that unites spiritual genius with human love? ”

“ HARLEY.—-"One whom your father obstinately persists in obtruding on your repugnance? 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. ”

“ 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. Sweet Helen, thou hast taught her this, taking to thyself the shadows even of thine infant's life, and leaving to thy partner's eyes only its rosy light! ”

“ 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! ”

“ Beatrice paused; her breast heaved visibly under her dress.
"Stay," she said slowly. "As you say, we are both women of the same noble House; you would reject the suit of my brother, yet you have seen him; his the form to please the eye, his the arts that allure the fancy. He offers to you rank, wealth, your father's pardon and recall. If I could remove the objections which your father entertains, prove that the count has less wronged him than he deems, would you still reject the rank and the wealth and the hand of Giulio Franzini?" ”

“ By this time to-morrow the bailiffs will seize his person,—ruined, beggared, pauper, and captive,—all because he has trusted and been deceived! good! And if he blame you, prudent Baron Levy, if he accuse smooth Mr. Randal Leslie, forget not to say, 'We were both but the blind agents of your friend Harley L'Estrange. Ask him why you are so miserable a dupe.'"
"And might I now ask your Lordship for one word of explanation?"
"No, sir!—it is enough that I have spared you. But you were never my friend; I have no revenge against a man whose hand I never even touched." ”

“ You think his affection will console you for every sacrifice. Folly! the love of poets is for a mist, a moonbeam, a denizen of air, a phantom that they call an Ideal. They suppose for a moment that they have found that Ideal in Chloe or Phyllis, Helen or a milkmaid. Bah! the first time you come to the poet with the baker's bill, where flies the Ideal? I knew one more brilliant than Leonard, more exquisitely gifted by nature; that one was a woman; she saw a man hard and cold as that stone at your feet,—a false, hollow, sordid worldling ”

“ It was not enough that the friend of his youth, the confidant of his love, had betrayed his trust,—been the secret and successful rival; not enough that the woman his boyhood had madly idolized, and all the while be had sought her traces with pining, remorseful heart-believing she but eluded his suit from the emulation of a kindred generosity, desiring rather to sacrifice her own love than to cost to his the sacrifice of all which youth rashly scorns and the world so highly estimates,—not enough that all this while her refuge had been the bosom of another. ”

“ Dale?" said Egerton, at length. "You know—"
"All!" said Harley, completing the arrested sentence. Audley drew a long sigh. "Be it so; but no, Harley, you deceive yourself; you cannot know all, from any one living, save myself."
"My knowledge comes from the dead," answered Harley, and the fatal memoir dropped from his hand upon the table. The leaves fell with a dull, low sound, mournful and faint as might be the tread of a ghost, if the tread gave sound. ”