When, this year, he re-appeared, he and I grew more intimate than we had ever been since we had left school; for though the same capital held us before, he was then too occupied for much familiarity with an idle man like me. But just when I was intertwining what is left of my life with the bright threads of his, he snaps the web asunder: he quits this London world again; says he will return to it no more."

GEORGE.--"Yet I did hear that he proposed to renew his parliamentary career; nay, that he was about to form a second marriage, with Honoria Vipont?"

COLONEL MORLEY.--"Mere gossip-not true. No, he will never marry again.

Three days ago I thought it certain that he would--certain that I should find for my old age a nook in his home--the easiest chair in his social circle; that my daily newspaper would have a fresh interest, in the praise of his name or the report of his speech; that I should walk proudly into White's, sure to hear there of Guy Darrell; that I should keep from misanthropical rust my dry knowledge of life, planning shrewd panegyrics to him of a young happy wife, needing all his indulgence--panegyrics to her of the high-minded sensitive man, claiming tender respect and delicate soothing;--that thus, day by day, I should have made more pleasant the home in which I should have planted myself, and found in his children boys to lecture and girls to spoil. Don't be jealous, George. I like your wife, I love your little ones, and you will inherit all I have to leave. But to an old bachelor, who would keep young to the last, there is no place so sunny as the hearth of an old school-friend. But my house of cards is blown down--talk of it no more--'tis a painful subject. You met Lionel Haughton here the last time you called--how did you like him!"

"Very much indeed."

"Well, then, since you cannot call on Darrell, call on him."

GEORGE (with animation).--"It is just what I meant to do--what is his address?"

COLONEL MORLEY--"There is his card--take it. He was here last night to inquire if I knew where Darrell had gone, though no one in his household, nor I either, suspected till this morning that Darrell had left town for good. You will find Lionel at home, for I sent him word I would call. But really I am not up to it now. Tell him from me that Mr.

Darrell will not return to Carlton Gardens this season, and is gone to Fawley. At present Lionel need not know more--you understand? And now, my dear George, good day."

CHAPTER XX.

EACH GENERATION HAS ITS OWN CRITICAL CANONS IN POETRY AS WELL AS IN POLITICAL CREEDS, FINANCIAL SYSTEMS, OR WHATEVER OTHER CHANGEABLE MATTERS OF TASTE ARE CALLED "SETTLED QUESTIONS" AND "FIXED OPINIONS."

George, musing much over all that his uncle had said respecting Darrell, took his way to Lionel's lodgings. The young man received him with the cordial greeting due from Darrell's kinsman to Colonel Morley's nephew, but tempered by the respect no less due to the distinction and the calling of the eloquent preacher.

Lionel was perceptibly affected by learning that Darrell had thus suddenly returned to the gloomy beech-woods of Fawley; and he evinced his anxious interest in his benefactor with so much spontaneous tenderness of feeling that George, as if in sympathy, warmed into the same theme. "I can well conceive," said he, "your affection for Mr.

Darrell. I remember, when I was a boy, how powerfully he impressed me, though I saw but little of him. He was then in the zenith of his career, and had but few moments to give to a boy like me; but the ring of his voice and the flash of his eye sent me back to school, dreaming of fame and intent on prizes. I spent part of one Easter vacation at his house in town; he bade his son, who was my schoolfellow, invite me."

LIONEL.--"You knew his son? How Mr. Darrell has felt that loss!"

GEORGE.--"Heaven often veils its most provident mercy in what to man seems its sternest inflictions. That poor boy must have changed his whole nature, if his life had not, to a father like Mr. Darrell, occasioned grief sharper than his death."

LIONEL.--"You amaze me. Mr. Darrell spoke of him as a boy of great promise."

GEORGE.--"He had that kind of energy which to a father conveys the idea of promise, and which might deceive those older than himself--a fine bright-eyed, bold-tongued boy, with just enough awe of his father to bridle his worst qualities before him."

LIONEL.--"What were those?"

GEORGE.--"Headstrong arrogance--relentless cruelty. He had a pride which would have shamed his father out of pride, had Guy Darrell detected its nature--purse pride! I remember his father said to me with a half-laugh: 'My boy must not be galled and mortified as I was every hour at school--clothes patched and pockets empty.' And so, out of mistaken kindness, Mr. Darrell ran into the opposite extreme, and the son was proud, not of his father's fame, but of his father's money, and withal not generous, nor exactly extravagant, but using money as power-power that allowed him to insult an equal or to buy a slave. In a word, his nickname at school was 'Sir Giles Overreach.' His death was the result of his strange pa.s.sion for tormenting others. He had a f.a.g who could not swim, and who had the greatest terror of the water; and it was while driving this child into the river out of his depth that cramp seized himself, and he was drowned. Yes, when I think what that boy would have been as a man, succeeding to Darrell's wealth--and had Darrell persevered (as he would, perhaps, if the boy had lived) in his public career--to the rank and t.i.tles he would probably have acquired and bequeathed--again, I say, in man's affliction is often Heaven's mercy."

Lionel listened aghast. George continued: "Would that I could speak as plainly to Mr. Darrell himself! For we find constantly in the world that there is no error that misleads us like the error that is half a truth wrenched from the other half; and nowhere is such an error so common as when man applies it to the judgment of some event in his own life, and separates calamity from consolation."

LIONEL.--"True; but who could have the heart to tell a mourning father that his dead son was worthless?"

GEORGE.--"Alas! my young friend, the preacher must sometimes harden his own heart if he would strike home to another's soul. But I am not sure that Mr. Darrell would need so cruel a kindness. I believe that his clear intellect must have divined some portions of his son's nature which enabled him to bear the loss with fort.i.tude. And he did bear it bravely. But now, Mr. Haughton, if you have the rest of the day free, I am about to make you an unceremonious proposition for its disposal. A lady who knew Mr. Darrell when she was very young has--a strong desire to form your acquaintance. She resides on the banks of the Thames, a little above Twickenham. I have promised to call on her this evening.

Shall we dine together at Richmond? and afterwards we can take a boat to her villa."

Lionel at once accepted, thinking so little of the lady that he did not even ask her name. He was pleased to have a companion with whom he could talk of Darrell. He asked but delay to write a few lines of affectionate inquiry to his kinsman at Fawley, and, while he wrote, George took out Arthur Branthwaite's poems, and resumed their perusal. Lionel having sealed his letter, George extended the book to him. "Here are some remarkable poems by a brother-in-law of that remarkable artist, Frank Vance."

"Frank Vance! True, he had a brother-in-law a poet. I admire Frank so much; and, though he professes to sneer at poetry, he is so a.s.sociated in my mind with poetical images that I am prepossessed beforehand in favour of all that brings him, despite himself, in connection with poetry."

"Tell me then," said George, pointing out a pa.s.sage in the volume, "what you think of these lines. My good uncle would call them gibberish. I am not sure that I can construe them; but when I was your age, I think I could--what say you?"

Lionel glanced. "Exquisite indeed!--nothing can be clearer--they express exactly a sentiment in myself that I could never explain."

"Just so," said George, laughing. "Youth has a sentiment that it cannot explain, and the sentiment is expressed in a form of poetry that middle age cannot construe. It is true that poetry of the grand order interests equally all ages; but the world ever throws out a poetry not of the grandest; not meant to be durable--not meant to be universal, but following the shifts and changes of human sentiment, and just like those pretty sundials formed by flowers, which bloom to tell the hour, open their buds to tell it, and, telling it, fade themselves from time."

Not listening to the critic, Lionel continued to read the poems, exclaiming, "How exquisite!--how true!"

CHAPTER XXI.

IN LIFE, AS IN ART, THE BEAUTIFUL MOVES IN CURVES.

They have dined.--George Morley takes the oars, and the boat cuts through the dance of waves flushed by the golden sunset. Beautiful river! which might furnish the English tale-teller with legends wild as those culled on sh.o.r.es licked by Hydaspes, and sweet as those which Cephisus ever blended with the songs of nightingales and the breath of violets! But what true English poet ever names thee, O Father Thames, without a melodious tribute? And what child ever whiled away summer noons along thy gra.s.sy banks, nor hallowed thy remembrance among the fairy days of life?

Silently Lionel bent over the side of the gliding boat; his mind carried back to the same soft stream five years ago. How vast a s.p.a.ce in his short existence those five years seemed to fill! And how distant from the young man, rich in the attributes of wealth, armed with each weapon of distinction, seemed the hour when the boy had groaned aloud, "'Fortune is so far, Fame so impossible!'" Farther and farther yet than his present worldly station from his past seemed the image that had first called forth in his breast the dreamy sentiment, which the sternest of us in after life never, utterly forget. Pa.s.sions 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! Yes--Laura was an affectation--Beatrice a reality!

George's voice broke somewhat distastefully on Lionel's reverie. "We near our destination, and you have not asked me even the name of the lady to whom you are to render homage. It is Lady Montfort, widow to the last Marquess. You have no doubt heard Mr. Darrell speak of her?"

"Never Mr. Darrell--Colonel Morley often. And in the world I have heard her cited as perhaps the handsomest, and certainly the haughtiest, woman in England."

"Never heard Mr. Darrell mention her! that is strange indeed," said George Morley, catching at Lionel's first words, and unnoticing his after comment. "She was much in his house as a child, shared in his daughter's education."

"Perhaps for that very reason he shuns her name. Never but once did I hear him allude to his daughter; nor can I wonder at that, if it be true, as I have been told by people who seem to know very little of the particulars, that, while yet scarcely out of the nursery, she fled from his house with some low adventurer--a Mr. Hammond--died abroad the first year of that unhappy marriage."

"Yes, that is the correct outline of the story; and, as you guess, it explains why Mr. Darrell avoids mention of one, whom he a.s.sociates with his daughter's name; though, if you desire a theme dear to Lady Montfort, you can select none that more interests her grateful heart than praise of the man who saved her mother from penury, and secured to herself the accomplishments and instruction which have been her chief solace."

"Chief solace! Was she not happy with Lord Montfort? What sort of man was he?"

"I owe to Lord Montfort the living I hold, and I can remember the good qualities alone of a benefactor. If Lady Montfort was not happy with him, it is just to both to say that she never complained. But there is much in Lady Montfort's character which the Marquess apparently failed to appreciate; at all events, they had little in common, and what was called Lady Montfort's haughtiness was perhaps but the dignity with which a woman of grand nature checks the pity that would debase her--the admiration that would sully--guards her own beauty, and protects her husband's name. Here we are. Will you stay for a few minutes in the boat, while I go to prepare Lady Montfort for your visit?"

George leapt ash.o.r.e, and Lionel remained under the covert of mighty willows that dipped their leaves into the wave. Looking through the green interstices of the foliage, he saw at the far end of the lawn, on a curving bank by which the glittering tide shot oblique, a simple arbour--an arbour like that from which he had looked upon summer stars five years ago--not so densely covered with the honeysuckle; still the honeysuckle, recently trained there, was fast creeping up the sides; and through the trellis of the woodwork and the leaves of the flowering shrub, he just caught a glimpse of some form within--the white robe of a female form in a slow gentle movement-tending perhaps the flowers that wreathed the arbour. Now it was still, now it stirred again; now it was suddenly lost to view. Had the inmate left the arbour? Was the inmate Lady Montfort? George Morley's step had not pa.s.sed in that direction.

CHAPTER XXII.

A QUIET SCENE-AN UNQUIET HEART.

Meanwhile, not far from the willow-bank which sheltered Lionel, but far enough to be out of her sight and beyond her hearing, George Morley found Lady Montfort seated alone. It was a spot on which Milton might have placed the lady in "Comus"--a circle of the smoothest sward, ringed everywhere (except at one opening which left the gla.s.sy river in full view) with thick bosks of dark evergreens and shrubs of livelier verdure; oak and chest nut backing and overhanging all. Flowers, too, raised on rustic tiers and stages; a tiny fountain, shooting up from a basin starred with the water-lily; a rustic table, on which lay hooks and the implements of woman's graceful work; so that the place had the home-look of a chamber, and spoke that intense love of the out-door life which abounds in our old poets from Chaucer down to the day when minstrels, polished into wits, took to Will's Coffee-house, and the lark came no more to bid bards

"Good morrow From his watch-tower in the skies."

But long since, thank Heaven we have again got back the English poetry which chimes to the babble of the waters, and the riot of the birds; and just as that poetry is the freshest which the out-door life has the most nourished, so I believe that there is no surer sign of the rich vitality which finds its raciest joys in sources the most innocent, than the childlike taste for that same out-door life. Whether you take from fortune the palace or the cottage, add to your chambers a hall in the courts of Nature. Let the earth but give you room to stand on; well, look up--Is it nothing to have for your roof-tree--Heaven?

Caroline Montfort (be her t.i.tles dropped) is changed since we last saw her. The beauty is not less in degree, but it has gained in one attribute, lost in another; it commands less, it touches more. Still in deep mourning, the sombre dress throws a paler shade over the cheek. The eyes, more sunken beneath the brow, appear larger, softer. There is that expression of fatigue which either accompanies impaired health or succeeds to mental struggle and disquietude. But the coldness or pride of mien which was peculiar to Caroline as a wife is gone--as if in widowhood it was no longer needed. A something like humility prevailed over the look and the bearing which had been so tranquilly majestic.