2. CHAPTER II.
A green angel (I mean an angel ignorant of the
world) would probably suppose that the feeding of
these animal bodies of ours, if not done in secret, must
at least be the one act of human life separated entirely
from the more heavenly emotions. Yet the dinner is
a meal dear to lovers; and novelists and tale-tellers
choose the moments stolen from fork and plate for the
birth and interchange of the most delicious and tender
sentiments of our existence. Miss Hitchings, while
unconsciously shocking Monsieur Sansou by tilting
her soup-plate for the last spoonful of vermicelli, was
controlling the beating of a heart full of feminine and
delicate tenderness; and as the tutor was careful never
to direct his regards to the other end of the table (for
reasons of his own), Miss Henrietta laid the unction
to her soul that such indifference to the prettiest girl
who had ever honored them as a guest, proved the
strength of her own magnet, and put her more at ease
on the subject of Monsieur Sansou's admiration. He,
indeed, was committing the common fault of men
whose manners are naturally agreeable—playing that
passive and grateful game of courtesy and attention so
easy to the object of regard, and so delightful to woman,
who is never so blest as in bestowing. Besides,
he had an object in suppressing his voice to the lowest
audible pitch, and the rich and deep tone, sunk only to
escape the ear of another, sounded, to the watchful
and desiring sense of her to whom it was addressed,
like the very key-note and harmony of affection.
At a table so surrounded with secrets, conversation
flagged, of course. Mr. Hitchings thought thought it very
up-hill work to entertain Miss Hervey, whose heart
and senses were completely absorbed in the riddle of
Belaccueil's disguise and presence; Mr. Hervey, the
uncle, found old Mrs. Plantagenet rather absent, for
the smitten dame had eyes for every movement of
Monsieur Sansou; and the tutor himself, with his resentment
toward his host, and his suspicions of the
ove of his daughter, his reviving passion for Miss
Hervey, and his designs on Mrs. Plantagenet, had
enough to render him as silent as the latter could wish,
and as apparently insensible to the attraction of the
fair stranger.
How little we know what is in the bosoms of those
around us! How natural it is, however, to feel and
act as if we knew—to account for all that appears on
the surface by the limited acquaintance we have with
circumstances and feelings—to resent an indifference
of which we know not the cause—to approve or condemn,
without allowance for chagrin, or despair, or
love, or hope, or distress—any of the deep undercurrents
for ever at work in the depths of human bosoms.
The young man at your side at a dinner-party may
have a duel on his hands for the morning, or a disgrace
imminent in credit or honor, or a refused heart or an
accepted one, newly crushed or newly made happy;
or (more common still, and less allowed for) he may
feel the first impression of disease, or the consequences
of an indigestion; and, for his agreeableness or
disagreeableness, you try to account by something in
yourself, some feeling toward yourself—as if you and
you only could affect his spirits or give a color to his
mood of manners. The old man's thought of death,
the mother's overwhelming interest in her child, the
woman's up-spring of emotion or love, are visiters to
the soul that come unbidden and out of time, and you
can neither feast nor mourn, secure against their interruption.
It would explain many a coldness, could
we look into the heart concealed from us. We should
often pity when we hate, love when we think we can
not even forgive, admire where we curl the lip with
scorn and indignation. To judge without reserve of
any human action is a culpable temerity, of all our
sins the most unfeeling and frequent.
I will deal frankly with you, dear reader. I have
arrived at a stage of my story which, of all the stages
of story-writing, I detest the most cordially. Poets
have written about the difficulty of beginning a story
(vide Byron)—Ca ne me coute pas; others of the ending.
That I do with facility, joy, and rejoicing. But
the love pathos of a story—the place where the reader
is expected to sigh, weep, or otherwise express his
emotion—that is the point, I confess, the most difficult
to write, and the most unsatisfactory when written.
“Pourquoy, Sir Knight?” Not because it is difficult
to write love-scenes—according to the received mode—
not that it is difficult to please those (a large majority)
who never truly loved, and whose ideas, therefore, of
love and its making, are transcendentalized out of all
truth and nature—not that it would be more labor to
do this than to copy a circular, or write a love-letter
for a modest swain (this last my besetting occupation)
—but because, just over the inkstand there peers a
face, sometimes of a man of forty, past the nonsense
of life, but oftener of some friend, a woman who has
loved, and this last more particularly knows that
true love is never readable or sensible—that if its language
be truly written, it is never in polished phrase
or musical cadence—that it is silly, but for its concealed
meaning, embarrassed and blind, but for the
interpreting and wakeful heart of one listener—that
love, in short, is the god of unintelligibility, mystery,
and adorable nonsense, and, of course, that which I
have written (if readable and sensible) is out of taste
and out of sympathy, and none but fancy-lovers and
enamored brains (not hearts) will approve or believe it.
D'Israeli the younger is one of the few men of genius
who, having seen truth without a veil, dare to reveal
the vision; and he has written Henrietta Temple
—the silliest yet truest love-book of modern time.
The critics (not an amative race) have given him a
benefit of the “besom” of ridicule, but D'Israeli, far
from being the effeminate intellect they would make
him, is one of the most original and intrepid men of
genius living, and whether the theme be “wine, woman,
or war,” he writes with fearless truth, piquancy,
and grace. Books on love, however, should be read
by lovers only, and pity it is, that there is not an ink
in chemistry, invisible save to the eye kindled with amatory
fire. But “to our muttons.”
It was not leap-year, but Monsieur Belaccueil, on
the day of the dinner-party at Hitchings park, was
made aware (I will not say by proposals, for ladies make
known their inclinations in ways much less formidable)
—he was made aware, I say, that the hearts of three
of the party were within the flight of his arrow. Probably
his humble situation reversed the usual relative
position of the sexes in the minds of the dame and
damsels—and certainly there is no power woman exercises
so willingly as a usurpation of the masculine
privilege. I have stated my objection to detail the
dialogue between Miss Hitchings and her tutor at the
dinner-table. To be recorded faithfully, the clatter
of silver forks on China, the gurgle of wine, the interruptions
of the footmen with champagne and vegetables,
should all be literally interspersed—for to all the
broken sentences (so pathetic when properly punctuated—vide
Neal's novels) these were the sequels and
the accompaniments: “No, thank you!” and “If you
please,” and “May I fill your glass?”—have filled out,
to the perfect satisfaction of the lady, many an unfinished
sentence upon which depended the whole destiny
of her affections; and, as I said before, the truth
is not faithfully rendered when these interstices are
unsupplied.
It was dark when the ladies left the dinner-table,
followed by Monsieur Sansou, and, at the distance of
a few feet from the windows opening on the lawn, the
air was black and impenetrable. There were no stars
visible and no moon, but the clouds which were gathering
after a drought, seemed to hush the air with
their long expected approach, and it was one of those
soft, still, yet murky and fragrant nights when the
earth seems to breathe only—without light, sound, or
motion. What lover does not remember such a night?
Oppressed with the glaring lights and the company
of people she cared nothing about, Miss Hervey
stepped out upon the lawn, and with her face lifted as
if to draw deeper inhalations of the dew and freshness,
she strolled leisurely over the smooth carpet of grass.
At a slight turn to avoid a clump of shrubbery, she
encountered Belaccueil, who was apologizing and
about to pass her, when she called him by his name,
and passing her arm through his, led him on to the
extremity of the lawn. A wire fence arrested their
progress, and leaning against it, Miss Hervey inquired
into the cause of the disguise she had penetrated, and
softened and emboldened by the fragrant darkness,
said all that a woman might say of tenderness and encouragement.
Belaccueil's heart beat with pride and
gratified amour propre, but he confined himself to the
expression of this feeling, and leaving the subject open,
took advantage of Mrs. Plantagenet's call to Miss
Hervey from the window, to leave her and resume his
ramble through the grounds.
The supper tray had been brought in, and the party
were just taking their candles to separate, when the
tutor entered at the glass door and arrested the steps
of Mrs. Plantagenet. She set down her candle and
courtesied a good-night to the ladies (Mr. Hitchings had
gone to bed, for wine made him sleepy, and Mr. Hervey
always retired early—where he was bored), and
closing the windows, mixed a glass of negus for Monsieur
Sansou; and, herself pulling a sandwich to
pieces, deliberately, and it must be confessed, somewhat
patronisingly, invited the Frenchman to become
her lord. And after a conversation, which (la verite
avant tout) turned mainly on will and investments, the
window dame sailed blissfully to bed, and Belaccueil
wrote the following letter to his friend and adviser:—
“My dear St. Leger: Enclosed you have the
only surviving lock of my grizzled wig—sign and symbol
that my disguises are over and my object attained.
The wig burns at this instant in the grate, item my
hand-ruffles, item sundry embroidered cravats a la
vielle cour, item (this last not without some trouble at
my heart) a solitary love-token from Constantia Hervey.
One faded rose—given me at Pæstum, the day
before I was driven disgraced from her presence by
the interference of this insolent fool—one faded rose
has crisped and faded into smoke with the rest. And
so fled from the world the last hope of a warm and
passionate heart, which never gave up its destiny till
now—never felt that it was made in vain, guarded, refined,
cherished in vain, till that long-loved flower lay
in ashes. I am accustomed to strip emotion of its
drapery—determined to feel nothing but what is real—yet this moment, turn it and strip it, and deny its illusions
as I will, is anguish. `Self-inflicted,' you smile
and say!
“You will marvel what stars will not come into
conjunction, when I tell you that Miss Hervey is at
this moment under the same roof with me and my
affianced bride, and you will marvel what good turn I
have done the devil, that he should, in one day, offer
me my enemy's daughter, my enemy's fortune (with
the drawback of an incumbrance), and the woman who
I thought had spurned me. After all, it is a devil's
gift—for in choosing that to which I am most impelled,
I crush hope, and inflict pain, and darken my own
heart for ever. I could not have done this once.
Manhood and poverty have embittered me.
“Miss Hitchings has chosen to fall in love with her
tutor. She is seventeen, a sweet blonde, with large,
suffused eyes, tender, innocent, and (without talent)
singularly earnest and confiding. I could be very
happy with such a woman, and it would have been a
very tolerable revenge (failing the other) to have stolen
her from her father. But he would have disinherited
and forgotten us, and I have had enough of poverty,
and can not afford to be forgotten—by my enemy.
“You never saw Miss Hervey. It is not much to
tell you she is the most beautiful woman I have met.
If she were not beautiful, her manners would win all
hearts. If her manners were less fascinating, her singular
talents would make her remarkable. She is not
appreciated, because her beauty blinds people to her
talents, and her manners make them forget her beauty.
She is something in the style of the Giorgione we
adored at Venice—a transparently dark beauty, with
unfathomable eyes and lashes that sweep her cheek;
her person tall and full, and her neck set on like Zenobia's.
Yet she is not a proud woman—I think she
is not. She is too natural and true to do anything
which looks like pride, save walk like an empress.
She says everything rightly—penetrates instantly to
the core of meaning—sings, dances, talks, with the
ease, confidence, grace, faultlessness, with which a
swallow flies. Perfection in all things is her nature.
I am jotting down her qualities now as they are allowed
by the world. I will not write of them like a
lover. Oh, my friend, with what plummet can you
fathom the depth of my resentments, when, for them.
I forego possession of this woman! She offered me,
two hours since, the unqualified control of her destiny!
She asked me with tremulous voice to forgive
her for the wrong done me in Italy. She dropped
that faultless and superb head on my bosom, and told
me that she loved me—and I never answered! The
serpent in my heart tied up my tongue, and with cold
thanks and fiend-like resistance to the bliss of even
once pressing her to my bosom, I left her. I do not
know myself when I remember that I have done this.
I am possessed—driven out—by some hard and bitter
spirit who neither acts nor speaks like me. Yet could
I not undo what I have done.
“To-morrow morning will disappear Monsieur Sansou
from Hitchings park, and, on the brief condition
of a brief ceremony, the law, the omnipotent law, will
deliver into my hands the lands, tenements, goods,
chattels, and liberty of my enemy—for even so deeply,
has he sunk into the open pocket of Mrs. Plantagenet!
She holds mortgages on all he has, for money
advanced, and all that is hers will be mine, without
reserve. The roof I have been living in degradation
under, will be to-morrow my own. The man who
called me an adventurer, who stood between me and
my love, who thrust me from my heaven without cause
or provocation—the meddling fool who boasts that he
saved a countrywoman from a French swindler (he
has recurred to it often in my presence), will be tomorrow
my dependant, beggar for shelter, suppliant
for his liberty and subsistence! Do you ask if
that outweighs the love of the woman I have lost?
Alas! yes.
“You are older, and have less taste for sentiment
even than I. I will not bore you with my crowd of
new feelings in this situation. My future wife is amiable
and good. She is also vain, unattractive, and old.
I shall be kind to her and endeavor that she shall not
be disenchanted, and if I can make her happy, it may
mollify my penance for the devil with which I am possessed.
Miss Hitchings will lose nothing by having
loved me, for she shall be the heiress of my wealth,
and her father—but I will not soil my heart by
thinking of an alleviation to his downfall.
“Farewell, mon ami. Congratulate and pity me.
“Adolphe Belaccueil.”
In one of the most fashionable squares of London
lives, “in the season,” Monsieur Belaccueil, one of
the most hospitable foreigners in that great metropolis.
He is a pensive and rather melancholy-looking
man by day; but society, which he seems to seek like
an opiate to restless feeling, changes him to a gay
man, the most mirth-loving of Amphytrions. His
establishment is presided over by his wife, who, as his
society is mostly French, preserves a respectable silence,
but seems contented with her lot and proud of
her husband; while in Miss Plantagenet (ci-devant
Hitchings) his guests find his table's chief attraction—
one of the prettiest heiresses and most loveable girls in
London. How deeply Monsieur Belaccueil still rejoices
at his success in “getting to windward,” is matter of
problem. Certainly there is one chariot which passes
him in his solitary ride in the park, to which he bows
with a pang of unabating and miserable anguish. And
if the occupant of that plain chariot share at all in his
suffering, she has not the consolation to which he flies
in society—for a more secluded and lonely woman
lives not in the great solitude of London, than Constantia
Hervey.
