Edward Bulwer-Lytton

“ How poor, how slight, how insignificant William Losely, the hanger-on of rural Thanes, compared with that William Waife whose entrance into this house, you—despite that felon's brand when you knew it was the martyr's glory—greeted with noble reverence: whom, when the mind itself was stricken down—only the soul left to the wreck of the body—you tended with such pious care as he lay on your father's bed! And do you, who hold Nobleness in such honor—do you, of all men, tell me that you cannot recognize that Celestial tenderness which ennobled a Spirit for all Eternity?"
"George, you are right!" ”

“ Harkye, Lionel, you are nearer akin to these fine folks than I knew of. Promise me one thing: you may become of their set, by right of your famous Mr. Darrell; if ever you hear an artist, musician, scribbler, no matter what, ridiculed as a tuft-hunter—seeking the great—and so forth—before you join in the laugh, ask some great man's son, with a pedigree that dates from the Ark, 'Are you not a toad-eater too? Do you want political influence?—do you stand contested elections?—do you curry and fawn upon greasy Sam the butcher, and grimy Tom the blacksmith for a vote? ”

“ What my feelings may be toward him are not for you to conjecture; man could not conjecture them; I am woman. What they once were I might blush for; what they are now, I could own without shame. But you, Mr. Darrell—you, in the hour of my uttermost anguish, when all my future was laid desolate, and the world lay crushed at my feet—you—man, chivalrous man!—you had for me no human compassion—you thrust me in scorn from your doors—you saw in my woe nothing but my error—you sent me forth, stripped of reputation, branded by your contempt, to famine or to suicide. ”

“ The old smile will sometimes light the eye, and awake the old playfulness of the lip. But what a great and critical sorrow does leave behind is often far worse than the sorrow itself has been. It is a change in the inner man, which strands him, as Guy Darrell seemed stranded, upon the shoal of the Present; which the more he strives manfully to bear his burden warns him the more from dwelling on the Past; and the more impressively it enforces the lesson of the vanity of human wishes strikes the more from his reckoning illusive hopes in the Future. ”

“ Lionel. "Is it scorn—is it pity? Is it but serene indifference?"
Darrell. "As we ourselves interpret; if scorn be present in our own hearts, it will be seen in the disc of Jupiter. Man, egotist though he be, exacts sympathy from all the universe. Joyous, he says to the sun, 'Lifegiver, rejoice with me.' Grieving, he says to the moon, ' Pensive one, thou sharest my sorrow.' Hope for fame; a star is its promise! Mourn for the dead; a star is the land of reunion! ”

“ What shall we do if we give up acting altogether?"
"Give up acting altogether, when you like it so! No, no. I will like it too, Grandy. But—but—" she stopped short, afraid to imply blame or to give pain.
"But what? let us make clean breasts, one to the other; tell truth, and shame the Father of Lies."
"Tell truth," said Sophy, lifting up to him her pure eyes with such heavenly, loving kindness that, if the words did imply reproof, the eyes stole it away. "Could we but manage to tell truth off the stage, I should not dislike acting! ”

“ Suddenly from the opposite bank came the music of the magic flute, and her voice as suddenly stopped and failed her.
"Again—again," said Darrell, dreamily. "The same music! the same air! and this the same place on which we two stood together when I first dared to say, 'I love!' Look, we are under the very tree! Look, there is the date I carved on the bark when you were gone, but had left Hope behind. Ah! Caroline, why can I not now resign myself to age? Why is youth, while I speak, rushing back into my heart, into my soul? ”

“ Lightly, as a wolf enters a sheepfold, he swung himself over the moss-grown fence; he gained the buttresses of the great raw pile; high and clear above, from Darrell's chamber, streamed the light; all the rest of the old house was closed and dark, buried, no doubt, in slumber.
He is now in the hollows of the skeleton pile; he mounts the ladder; the lock of the door before him yields to his rude implements but artful hand. He is in the long gallery; the moonlight comes broad and clear through the large casements. What wealth of art is on the walls! but how profitless to the robber's greed! ”

“ She bring disgrace upon him, in return for such generous, magnanimous affection! She drive his benefactor, her grandsire's vindicator, from his own hearth! She—she—that Sophy who, as a mere infant, had recoiled from the thought of playful subterfuge and tamperings with plain honest truth! She rose before Fairthorn had done; indeed the tormentor, left to himself, would not have ceased till nightfall.
"Fear not, Mr. Fairthorn," she said, resolutely, "Mr. Darrell will be no exile; his house will not be destroyed. Lionel Haughton shall not wed the child of disgrace! Fear not, Sir; all is safe!" ”

“ Now you see, I am not what is called Demonstrative,—a long word, Sophy, which means, that I don't show to you always how fond I am of you; and, indeed," he added ingenuously, "I am not always aware of it myself. I like acting,—I like the applause, and the lights, and the excitement, and the illusion,—the make-belief of the whole thing: it takes me out of memory and thought; it is a world that has neither past, present, nor future, an interlude in time,-an escape from space. ”

“ Ah, Vance, could I but be of some comfort to him! Now that I am older, I think I understand in him much that perplexed me as a boy, when we parted. Darrell is one of those men who require a home. Between the great world and solitude, he needs the intermediate filling up which the life domestic alone supplies: a wife to realize the sweet word helpmate—children, with whose future he could knit his own toils and his ancestral remembrances. That intermediate space annihilated, the great world and the solitude are left, each frowning on the other. ”

“ At each turn of the street you may find them in basketfuls—blue-eyed or black-eyed, just the same worthless frippery or senseless toys; but every man dandling his own doll, whether he call it sweetheart or daughter, makes the same puling boast that he has an angel of purity in his puppet of wax. Nay, hear me! to that girl I owe nothing. You know what I owe to you. You bid me not seek her, and say, 'I am your father!' Do you think it does not misbecome me more, and can it wound you less, when I come to you, and remind you that I am your son!"
"Jasper!" ”

“ All other marriage, with vows of love so solemn, with intimacy of commune so close—all other marriage, in my eyes, is an acted falsehood—a varnished sin. Ah! if I had thought so always! But away, regret and repentance! The Future alone is now before me. Alban Morley, I would sign away all I have in the world (save the old house at Fawley) , ay, and after signing, cut off, to boot, this right hand, could I but once fall in love; love, and be loved again, as any two of Heaven's simplest human creatures may love each other while life is fresh! Strange, strange—look out into the world ”

“ Oh Sophy—Ay or No?"
"No!" fell from her pale, firm lips—and in a moment more she was at Waife's side, and had drawn him away from George. "Grandfather!—home, home; let us go home at once, or I shall die!"
Darrell has kept his keen sight upon her movements—upon her countenance. He sees her gesture—her look—as she now clings to her grandfather. The blue eyes are not now coldly fixed on level air, but raised upward, as for strength from above. The young face is sublime with its woe, and with its resolve.
"Noble child!" muttered Darrell. "I think I see into her heart. If so, poor Lionel indeed! ”

“ 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 close of a life so dark with the shades of its past? ”

“ Luck against one—wait! double the capital ere you send the half. Luck with one—how balk the tide? how fritter the capital just at the turn of doubling? Soon it grew irksome even to think of you; yet still, when I did, I said ' Life is long; I shall win riches; he shall share them some day or other!'—Basta, Basta!—what idle twaddle or hollow brag all this must seem to you!"
"No," said Waife, feebly—and his hand drooped till it touched Jasper's bended shoulder, but, at the touch, recoiled as with an electric spasm. ”

“ The goddess whose boons adorn the outward shell of the human spirit, came back to her favorite's death-couch as she had come to the cradle—not now as the Venus Erycina, goddess of Smile and Jest, but as the warning Venus Libitina, the goddess of Doom and the Funeral.
"I'm a very poor creature," said Jasper, after a pause. "I can't rise—I can't move without help. Very strange!—supernatural! She always said that if I raised my hand against her, it would fall palsied!" He turned his eyes toward Arabella with a glare of angry terror. "She is a witch!" ”

“ Poor old man," continued Jasper, in a tone that positively betrayed feeling—" I don't wonder that he dreads and flies me; yet I would not hurt him more than I have done, even to be as well off as you are—blinking at me from your mahogany perch like a pet owl with its crop full of mice. And if I would take the girl from him, it is for her own good. For if Darrell could be got to make a provision on her, and, through her, on myself, why, of course, the old man should share the benefit of it. ”

“ Most boys of great ability and strong passion write verses—it is nature's relief to brain and heart at the critical turning-age. Most boys thus gifted do so; a few do not, and out of those few Fate selects the great men of action—those large, luminous characters that stamp poetry on the world's prosaic surface. Lionel had in him the pith and substance of Fortune's grand nobodies, who become Fame's abrupt somebodies when the chances of life throw suddenly in their way a noble something, to be ardently coveted and boldly won. ”

“ Don't talk to me of heiresses, Dolly, I have been the victim of heiresses. But a rich widow is an estimable creature. Against widows, if rich, I have not a word to say; and to tell you the truth, there is a widow whom I suspect I have fascinated, and whose connection I have a particular private reason for deeming desirable! She has a whelp of a son, who is a spoke in my wheel—were I his father-in-law would not I be a spoke in his? I'd teach the boy life, Dolly." Here all trace of beauty vanished from Jasper's face, and Poole, staring at him, pushed away his chair. ”

“ Lady Montfort, you know that this man loves you—as, verily. I believe, never man in our cold century loved woman—through desertion—through change—amidst grief—amidst resentment—despite pride; dead to another 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? ”

“ He has missed, too, his more habitual and less irritating conversation with Darrell. In short, altogether he is put out, and he vents his spleen on the swans, who follow him along the wave as he walks along the margin, intimating either their affection for himself, or their anticipation of the bread-crumbs associated with his image—by the amiable note, half snort and half grunt, towhich change of time or climate has reduced the vocal accomplishments of those classical birds, so pathetically melodious in the age of Moschus and on the banks of Cayster. ”

“ Send a young fellow to the camp with his spirits broken, his heart heavy as a lump of lead, and the first of those epidemics which thin ranks more than the cannon says to itself, 'There is a man for me!' Any doctor will tell you that, even at home, the gay and light-hearted walk safe through the pestilence, that settles on the moping as malaria settles on a marsh. Confound Guy Darrell's ancestors, they have spoiled Queen Victoria as good a young soldier as ever wore sword by his side. Six months ago, and how blithely Lionel Haughton looked forth to the future!—all laurel!—no cypress! ”

“ To penetrate into the home of this haughty scorner—to confront him in his own chamber at the dead of night, man to man, force to force; to say to him, "None now can deliver you from me—I come no more as a suppliant—I command you to accept my terms;" to gloat over the fears which, the strong man felt assured, would bow the rich man to beg for mercy at his feet;—this was the picture which Jasper Losely conjured up; and even the spoil to be won by violence smiled on him less than the grand position which the violence itself would bestow. ”

“ Vance. "Fancy, Miss Sophy, that this young gentleman is very dear to you. Have you got a brother?"
Sophy. "Ah no, Sir."
Vance. "Hum. But you have, or have had, a doll?"
Sophy. "Oh, yes; grandfather gave me one."
Vance. "And you were fond of that doll?"
Sophy. "Very."
Vance. "Fancy that young gentleman is your doll grown big—that it is asleep, and you are watching that no one hurts it—Mr. Rugge, for instance. Throw your whole soul into that thought—love for doll, apprehension of Rugge. Lionel, keep still and shut your eyes—do." ”

“ Lionel, however, was not perhaps sorry to be thus compelled to trust to writing his own and Sophy's cause. Darrell was one of those men whose presence inspires a certain awe—one of those men whom we feel, upon great occasions, less embarrassed to address by letter than in person. Lionel's pen moved rapidly—his whole heart and soul suffused with feeling, and, rushing over the page, he reminded Darrell of the day when he had told to the rich man the tale of the lovely wandering child, and how, out of his sympathy for that child, Darrell's approving, fostering tenderness to himself had grown. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We can no more say why we like the man than we can say why we fall in love with a woman in whom no one else would discover a charm. "There is," says a Latin love-poet, "no why or wherefore in liking." Hartopp, therefore, had taken, from the first moment, to Waife—the staid, respectable, thriving man, all muffled up from head to foot in the whitest lawn of reputation—to the wandering, shifty, tricksome scatterling, who had not seemingly secured, through the course of a life bordering upon age, a single certificate for good conduct. ”

“ They had now wound their walk to the opposite side of the lake, and paused near the thick beech-trees, hallowed and saddened by such secret associations to the mournful owner.
"No, my dear Alban," said Darrell, "I cannot summon up sufficient youth and freshness of spirit to re-enter the turbulent arena I have left. Ah! look yonder where Lionel and Sophy move! Give me, I do not say Lionel's years, but Lionel's wealth of hope, and I might still have a wish for fame and a voice for England; but it is a subtle truth that where a man misses a home, a link between his country and himself is gone. ”