LITMIR.BIZ

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pale scholar seated himself on the bed, “turn your face to mine,—nearer; let the moon fall on it; lift your eyes; look at me—so! Are you not playing false to me? Are you not Lucretia’s spy, while you are pretending to be mine? It is so; your eye betrays you. Now, heed me; you have a mind beyond your years. Do you love best the miserable garret in London, the hard fare and squalid dress, or your lodgment here, the sense of luxury, the sight of splendour, the atmosphere of wealth? You have the choice before you.”

      “I choose, as you would have me, then,” said the boy, “the last.”

      “I believe you. Attend! You do not love me,—that is natural; you are the son of Clara Varney! You have supposed that in loving Lucretia Clavering you might vex or thwart me, you scarce knew how; and Lucretia Clavering has gold and gifts and soft words and promises to bribe withal. I now tell you openly my plan with regard to this girl: it is my aim to marry her; to be master of this house and these lands. If I succeed, you share them with me. By betraying me, word or look, to Lucretia, you frustrate this aim; you plot against our rise and to our ruin. Deem not that you could escape my fall; if I am driven hence,—as you might drive me,—you share my fate; and mark me, you are delivered up to my revenge! You cease to be my son,—you are my foe. Child! you know me.”

      The boy, bold as he was, shuddered; but after a pause so brief that a breath scarce passed between his silence and his words, he replied with emphasis,—

      “Father, you have read my heart. I have been persuaded by Lucretia (for she bewitches me) to watch you,—at least, when you are with Sir Miles. I knew that this was mixed up with Mr. Mainwaring. Now that you have made me understand your own views, I will be true to you,—true without threats.”

      The father looked hard on him, and seemed satisfied with the gaze. “Remember, at least, that your future rests upon your truth; that is no threat,—that is a thought of hope. Now sleep or muse on it.” He dropped the curtain which his hand had drawn aside, and stole from the room as noiselessly as he had entered. The boy slept no more. Deceit and cupidity and corrupt ambition were at work in his brain. Shrink back, Moon and Starbeam! On that child’s brow play the demons who had followed the father’s step to his bed of sleep.

      Back to his own room, close at hand, crept Olivier Dalibard. The walls were lined with books,—many in language and deep in lore. Moon and Starbeam, ye love the midnight solitude of the scholar! The Provencal stole to the casement, and looked forth. All was serene,—breathless trees and gleaming sculpture and whitened sward, girdled by the mass of shadow. Of what thought the man? Not of the present loveliness which the scene gave to his eye, nor of the future mysteries which the stars should whisper to the soul. Gloomily over a stormy and a hideous past roved the memory, stored with fraud and foul with crime,—plan upon plan, schemed with ruthless wisdom, followed up by remorseless daring, and yet all now a ruin and a blank; an intellect at war with good, and the good had conquered! But the conviction neither touched the conscience nor enlightened the reason; he felt, it is true, a moody sense of impotence, but it brought rage, not despondency. It was not that he submitted to Good as too powerful to oppose, but that he deemed he had not yet gained all the mastery over the arsenal of Evil. And evil he called it not. Good and evil to him were but subordinate genii at the command of Mind; they were the slaves of the lamp. But had he got at the true secret of the lamp itself? “How is it,” he thought, as he turned impatiently from the casement, “that I am baffled here where my fortunes seemed most assured? Here the mind has been of my own training, and prepared by nature to my hand; here all opportunity has smiled. And suddenly the merest commonplace in the vulgar lives of mortals,—an unlooked-for rival; rival, too, of the mould I had taught her to despise; one of the stock gallants of a comedy, no character but youth and fair looks,—yea, the lover of the stage starts up, and the fabric of years is overthrown.” As he thus mused, he placed his hand upon a small box on one of the tables. “Yet within this,” resumed his soliloquy, and he struck the lid, that gave back a dull sound,—“within this I hold the keys of life and death! Fool! the power does not reach to the heart, except to still it. Verily and indeed were the old heathens mistaken? Are there no philters to change the current of desire? But touch one chord in a girl’s affection, and all the rest is mine, all, all, lands, station, power, all the rest are in the opening of this lid!”

      Hide in the cloud, O Moon! shrink back, ye Stars! send not your holy, pure, and trouble-lulling light to the countenance blanched and livid with the thoughts of murder.

      CHAPTER III. CONFERENCES

      The next day Sir Miles did not appear at breakfast,—not that he was unwell, but that he meditated holding certain audiences, and on such occasions the good old gentleman liked to prepare himself. He belonged to a school in which, amidst much that was hearty and convivial, there was much also that nowadays would seem stiff and formal, contrasting the other school immediately succeeding him, which Mr. Vernon represented, and of which the Charles Surface of Sheridan is a faithful and admirable type. The room that Sir Miles appropriated to himself was, properly speaking, the state apartment, called, in the old inventories, “King James’s chamber;” it was on the first floor, communicating with the picture-gallery, which at the farther end opened upon a corridor admitting to the principal bedrooms. As Sir Miles cared nothing for holiday state, he had unscrupulously taken his cubiculum in this chamber, which was really the handsomest in the house, except the banquet-hall, placed his bed in one angle with a huge screen before it, filled up the space with his Italian antiquities and curiosities; and fixed his favourite pictures on the faded gilt leather panelled on the walls. His main motive in this was the communication with the adjoining gallery, which, when the weather was unfavourable, furnished ample room for his habitual walk. He knew how many strides by the help of his crutch made a mile, and this was convenient. Moreover, he liked to look, when alone, on those old portraits of his ancestors, which he had religiously conserved in their places, preferring to thrust his Florentine and Venetian masterpieces into bedrooms and parlours, rather than to dislodge from the gallery the stiff ruffs, doublets, and farthingales of his predecessors. It was whispered in the house that the baronet, whenever he had to reprove a tenant or lecture a dependant, took care to have him brought to his sanctum, through the full length of this gallery, so that the victim might be duly prepared and awed by the imposing effect of so stately a journey, and the grave faces of all the generations of St. John, which could not fail to impress him with the dignity of the family, and alarm him at the prospect of the injured frown of its representative. Across this gallery now, following the steps of the powdered valet, strode young Ardworth, staring now and then at some portrait more than usually grim, more often wondering why his boots, that never creaked before, should creak on those particular boards, and feeling a quiet curiosity, without the least mixture of fear or awe as to what old Squaretoes intended to say to him. But all feeling of irreverence ceased when, shown into the baronet’s room, and the door closed, Sir Miles rose with a smile, and cordially shaking his hand, said, dropping the punctilious courtesy of Mister: “Ardworth, sir, if I had a little prejudice against you before you came, you have conquered it. You are a fine, manly, spirited fellow, sir; and you have an old man’s good wishes,—which are no bad beginning to a young man’s good fortune.”

      The colour rushed over Ardworth’s forehead, and a tear sprang to his eyes. He felt a rising at his throat as he stammered out some not very audible reply.

      “I wished to see you, young gentleman, that I might judge myself what you would like best, and what would best fit you. Your father is in the army: what say you to a pair of colours?”

      “Oh, Sir Miles, that is my utmost ambition! Anything but law, except the Church; anything but the Church, except the desk and a counter!”

      The baronet, much pleased, gave him a gentle pat on the shoulder. “Ha, ha! we gentlemen, you see (for the Ardworths are very well born, very), we gentlemen understand each other! Between you and me, I never liked the law, never thought a man of birth should belong to it. Take money for lying,—shabby, shocking! Don’t let that go any farther! The Church-Mother Church—I honour her! Church and State go together! But one ought to be very good to preach to others,—better than you and I are, eh? ha, ha! Well, then, you like the army,—there’s a letter for you to the Horse

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