Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton

“ If a man of Darrell’s age were bold enough to marry a young wife, a safer wife amongst the young ladies of London he could scarcely find; for though Honoria was only three-and-twenty, she was as staid, as sensible, and as remote from all girlish frivolities, as if she had been eight-and-thirty. Certainly had Guy Darrell been of her own years, his fortunes unmade, his fame to win, a lawyer residing at the back of Holborn, or a pretty squire in the petty demesnes of Fawley, he would have had no charm in the eyes of Honoria Vipont. ”

“ Lionel sprang to the breast that opened to him; and if Darrell had planned how best to remove from the young man’s mind forever the possibility of one selfish pang, no craft could have attained his object like that touching confidence before which the disparities between youth and age literally vanished. And, both made equal, both elevated alike, verily I know not which at the moment felt the elder or the younger! Two noble hearts, intermingled in one emotion, are set free from all time save the present: par each with each, they meet as brothers twin-born. ”

“ The wife is dead. Dead, too, long years ago, the Lothario! The world has forgotten them; they fade out of this very record when ye turn the page; no influence, no bearing have they on such future events as may mark what yet rests of life to Guy Darrell. But as he there stands and gazes into space, the two forms are before his eye as distinct as if living still. Slowly, slowly he gazes them down: the false smiles flicker away from their feeble lineaments; woe and terror on their aspects,—they sink, they shrivel, they dissolve! ”

“ Where is the Caroline I loved? YOU—are—my Lady Montfort! Look round. On these turfs, you, then a child, played beside my children. They are dead, but less dead to me than you. Never dreamed I then that a creature so fair would be other than a child to my grave and matured existence. Then, if I glanced towards your future, I felt no pang to picture you grown to womanhood—another’s bride. My hearth had for years been widowed, I had no thought of second nuptials. My son would live to enjoy my wealth, and realise my cherished dreams—my son was snatched from me! ”

“ Behind that group, shadowed by the Thorn-tree, stands the PREACHER, thoughtful and grave, foreseeing the grief that must come to the old man with the morrow, when he will learn that a guilty son nears his end, and will hasten to comfort Jasper’s last days with pardon. But the Preacher looks not down to the death-couch alone; on and high over death looks the Preacher! By what words Heavenly Mercy may lend to his lips shall he steal away, yet in time, to the soul of the dying, and justify murmurs of hope to the elm of a life so dark with the shades of its past? ”

“ Idolater to the creed of an Ancestor’s NAME, has your own name that hold on the grateful respect of the Future, which men ever give to that genius whose objects are knit with mankind? Suddenly, in the zenith of life, amidst cheers, not of genuine renown,—cheers loud and brief as a mob’s hurrah—calamities, all of which I know not, nor conjecture, interrupt your career;—and when your own life-long object is arrested, or rather when it is snatched from your eye, your genius renounces all uses. Fame, ever-during, was before you still, had your objects been those for which genius is given. ”

“ I heard the silvery laugh of a life fresh as an April morn. ‘Hark!’ I said, ‘is not that the sweet mirth-note at which all my cares were dispelled? Listening, I forgot my weight of years. Why? because listening, I remembered you. ‘Heed not the treacherous blush and the beguiling laugh,’ whispered Prudence. ‘Seek in congenial mind a calm companion to thine own.’ Mind! O frigid pedantry! Mind!—had not yours been a volume open to my eyes; in every page, methought, some lovely poet-truth never revealed to human sense before! No; you had killed to me all womanhood! ”

“ Lady Montfort, you know that this man loves you—as, verily, I believe, never other man in our cold century loved woman;—through desertion—through change—amidst grief—amidst resentment—despite pride;—dead to all other love—shrinking from all other ties—on, constant on-carrying in the depth of his soul to the verge of age, secret and locked up, the hopeless passion of his manhood. Do you not see that it is through you, and you alone, that Guy Darrell has for seventeen years been lost to the country he was intended to serve and to adorn? ”

“ Arabella Crane drew forth her purse. “Take what you will,” said she gently. Jasper, whether from the desire to deceive her, or because her alms were so really distasteful to his strange kind of pride that he stinted to bare necessity the appeal to them, contented himself with the third or fourth of the sovereigns that the purse contained, and after a few words of thanks and promises, he left her side, and soon vanished in the fog that grew darker and darker as the night-like wintry day deepened over the silenced thoroughfares. ”

“ And what were Caroline’s real sentiments for Guy Darrell? She understood them-now on looking back. She saw herself as she was then—as she had stood under the beech-tree, when the heavenly pity that was at the core of her nature—when the venerating, grateful affection that had grown with her growth made her yearn to be a solace and a joy to that grand and solitary life. Love him! ”

“ But to Caroline Montfort, and to her alone, the secret of a career blasted, a fame renounced, was unmistakably revealed. For a time she was tortured, in every society she entered, by speculation and gossip which brought before her the memory of his genius, the accusing sound of his name. But him who withdraws from the world, the world soon forgets; and by degrees Darrell became as little spoken of as the dead. ”

“ Never, therefore, while conferring with Nature, is Man wholly alone, nor is she a single companion with uniform shape. Ever new, ever various, she can pass from gay to severe, from fancy to science,—quick as thought passes from the dance of a leaf, from the tint of a rainbow, to the theory of motion, the problem of light. But lose Nature, forget or dismiss her, make companions, by hundreds, of men who ignore her, and I will not say with the poet, ‘This is solitude.’ But in the commune, what stale monotony, what weary sameness! ”

“ And ever with the dawn of that sentiment the moon and the stars take a strange and haunting fascination. Few persons in middle life-even though they be genuine poets—feel the peculiar spell in the severe stillness and mournful splendour of starry skies which impresses most of us, even though no poets at all, in that mystic age when Childhood nearly touches upon Youth, and turns an unquiet heart to those marvellous riddles within us and without, which we cease to conjecture when experience has taught us that they have no solution upon this side the grave. ”

“ Certes, there are hours in our being, long before the last and dreaded one, when this phenomenon comes to warn us that, if memory were always active, time would be never gone. Rose before this woman—who, whatever the justice of Darrell’s bitter reproaches, had a nature lovely enough to justify his anguish at her loss—the image of herself at that turning point of life, when the morning mists are dimmed on our way, yet when a path chosen is a fate decided. ”

“ Darrell had offered up his youth—Waife his age; Darrell to a Father and the unrequiting Dead—Waife to a Son whose life had become his terror. To one man, NAME had been an idol; to the other, NAME had been a weed cast away into the mire. To the one man, unjoyous, evanescent glory—to the other, a shame that had been borne with a sportive cheerfulness, dashed into sorrow only when the world’s contumely threatened to despoil Affection of its food. ”

“ Passions rage and vanish, and when all their storms are gone, yea, it may be, at the verge of the very grave, we look back and see like a star the female face, even though it be a child’s, that first set us vaguely wondering at the charm in a human presence, at the void in a smile withdrawn! How many of us could recall a Beatrice through the gaps of ruined hope, seen, as by the Florentine, on the earth a guileless infant, in the heavens a spirit glorified! ”

“ And my heart tells me that I might become cruel, and mean, and vindictive, if I were to live day by day with one who created in me, while my life was at noon, a love never known in its morn, and to feel that that love’s sole return was the pity vouchsafed to the nightfall of my age. No; if she pitied, but did not love me, when, eighteen years ago, we parted under yonder beech-tree, I should be a dotard to dream that woman’s pity mellows into love as our locks become grey, and Youth turns our vows into ridicule. ”

“ Darrell? Pride in him! not a jot of it; such pride were unchristian. Were he proud of her, as a Christian husband ought to be of so elegant a wife, would he still be in Bloomsbury? Envy him! the high gentleman, so true to his blood, all galled and blistered by the moral vulgarities of a tuft-hunting, toad-eating mimic of the Lady Selinas. Envy him! Well, why not? All women have their foibles. Wise husbands must bear and forbear. Is that all? wherefore, then, is her aspect so furtive, wherefore on his a wild, vigilant sternness? ”

“ I am but a man unhappily in earnest—a man who placed in those hands his life of life—who said to you, while yet in his prime, ‘There is my future, take it, till it vanish out of earth! You have made that life substanceless as a ghost—that future barren as the grave. And when you dare force yourself again upon my way, and would dictate laws to my very hearth—if I speak as a man what plain men must feel—‘Oh! Mr. Darrell,’ says your injured ladyship, ‘how can you have the heart?’ Woman! were you not false as the falsest? Falsehood has no dignity to awe rebuke—falsehood no privilege of sex. ”

“ George. Now you have all that you then despaired of; you have the dignity of your sacred calling—you have the eloquence of the preacher. I cannot cope with Mr. Darrell—you can. He has a heart—it can be softened; he has a soul—it can be freed from the wither that tether it down; he has the virtues you can appeal to; and he has the pride which you, as a Christian minister, have the right to prove to be a sin. I cannot argue with him; I cannot reprove the man to whom I owe so much. All ranks of men and of mind should be equal to you, the pastor, the divine. ”

“ Why should he not write? Alas; why indeed?—He who has never been a writer in his youth, can no more be a writer in his age than he can be a painter—a musician. What! not write a book! Oh, yes—as he may paint a picture or set a song. But a writer, in the emphatic sense of the word—a writer as Darrell was an orator—oh, no! ”

“ As a land the day after a flood, as a field the day after a battle, is the sight of our own sorrow, when we no longer have to steer its raging, but to endure the destruction it has made. Distinct before Caroline Montfort’s vision stretched the waste of her misery—the Past, the Present, the Future, all seemed to blend in one single Desolation. A strange thing it is how all time will converge itself, as it were, into the burning-glass of a moment! ”