What Will He Do With It, Book 8.
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Edward Bulwer Lytton >> What Will He Do With It, Book 8.
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BOOK VIII.
CHAPTER I.
"A LITTLE FIRE BURNS UP A GREAT DEAL OF CORN."--OLD PROVERB.
Guy Darrell resumed the thread of solitary life at Fawley with a calm
which was deeper in its gloom than it had been before. The experiment of
return to the social world had failed. The resolutions which had induced
the experiment were finally renounced. Five years nearer to death, and
the last hope that had flitted across the narrowing passage to the grave,
fallen like a faithless torch from his own hand, and trodden out by his
own foot.
It was peculiarly in the nature of Darrell to connect his objects with
posterity--to regard eminence in the Present but as a beacon-height from
which to pass on to the Future the name he had taken from the Past. All
his early ambition, sacrificing pleasure to toil, had placed its goal at
a distance, remote from the huzzas of bystanders; and Ambition halted
now, baffled and despairing. Childless, his line would perish with
himself--himself, who had so vaunted its restoration in the land! His
genius was childless also--it would leave behind it no offspring of the
brain. By toil he had amassed ample wealth; by talent he had achieved a
splendid reputation. But the reputation was as perishable as the wealth.
Let a half-century pass over his tomb, and nothing would be left to speak
of the successful lawyer the applauded orator, save traditional
anecdotes, a laudatory notice in contemporaneous memoirs--perhaps, at
most, quotations of eloquent sentences lavished on forgotten cases and
obsolete debates--shreds and fragments of a great intellect, which
another half-century would sink without a bubble into the depths of Time.
He had enacted no laws--he had administered no state--he had composed no
books. Like the figure on a clock, which adorns the case and has no
connection with the movement, he, so prominent an or nament to time, had
no part in its works. Removed, the eye would miss him for a while; but a
nation's literature or history was the same, whether with him or without.
Some with a tithe of his abilities have the luck to fasten their names to
things that endure; they have been responsible for measures they did not
not invent, and which, for good or evil, influence long generations.
They have written volumes out of which a couplet of verse, a period in
prose, may cling to the rock of ages, as a shell that survives a deluge.
But the orator, whose effects are immediate--who enthralls his audience
in proportion as he nicks the hour--who, were he speaking like Burke
what, apart from the subject-matter, closet students would praise, must,
like Burke, thin his audience, and exchange present oratorical success
for ultimate intellectual renown--a man, in short, whose oratory is
emphatically that of the DEBATER is, like an actor, rewarded with a loud
applause and a complete oblivion. Waife on the village stage might win
applause no less loud, followed by oblivion not more complete.
Darrell was not blind to the brevity of his fame. In his previous
seclusion he had been resigned to that conviction--now it saddened him.
Then, unconfessed by himself, the idea that he might yet reappear in
active life, and do something which the world would not willingly let
die, had softened the face of that tranquil Nature from which he must
soon now pass out of reach and sight. On the tree of Time he was a leaf
already sear upon the bough--not an inscription graven into the rind.
Ever slow to yield to weak regrets--ever seeking to combat his own
enemies within--Darrell said to himself one night, while Fairthorn's
flute was breathing an air of romance through the melancholy walls: "Is
it too late yet to employ this still busy brain upon works that will live
when I am dust, and make Posterity supply the heir that fails to my
house?"
He shut himself up with immortal authors--he meditated on the choice of a
theme; his knowledge was wide, his taste refined;--words!--he could not
want words! 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! And, least of
all, will he be a writer if he has been an orator by impulse and habit--
an orator too happily gifted to require, and too laboriously occupied to
resort to, the tedious aids of written preparation--an orator as modern
life forms orators--not, of course, an orator like those of the classic
world, who elaborated sentences before delivery, and who, after delivery,
polished each extemporaneous interlude into rhetorical exactitude and
musical perfection. And how narrow the range of compositions to a man
burdened already by a grave reputation! He cannot have the self-
abandonment--he cannot venture the headlong charge--with which Youth
flings the reins to genius, and dashes into the ranks of Fame. Few and
austere his themes--fastidious and hesitating his taste. Restricted are
the movements of him who walks for the first time into the Forum of
Letters with the purple hem on his senatorial toga. Guy Darrell, at his
age, entering among authors as a novice!--he, the great lawyer, to whom
attorneys would have sent no briefs had he been suspected of coquetting
with a muse,--he, the great orator who had electrified audiences in
proportion to the sudden effects which distinguish oral inspiration from
written eloquence--he achieve now, in an art which his whole life had
neglected, any success commensurate to his contemporaneous repute;--how
unlikely! But a success which should outlive that repute, win the
"everlasting inheritance" which could alone have nerved him to adequate
effort--how impossible! He could not himself comprehend why, never at a
loss for language felicitously opposite or richly ornate when it had but
to flow from his thought to his tongue, nor wanting ease, even eloquence,
in epistolary correspondence confidentially familiar--he should find
words fail ideas, and ideas fail words, the moment his pen became a wand
that conjured up the Ghost of the dread Public! The more copious his
thoughts, the more embarrassing their selection; the more exquisite his
perception of excellence in others, the more timidly frigid his efforts
at faultless style. It would be the same with the most skilful author,
if the Ghost of the Public had not long since ceased to haunt him. While
he writes, the true author's solitude is absolute or peopled at his will.
But take an audience from an orator, what is he? He commands the living
public--the Ghost of the Public awes himself.
"Surely once," sighed Darrell, as he gave his blurred pages to the
flames--" surely once I had some pittance of the author's talent, and
have spent it upon lawsuits!"
The author's talent, no doubt, Guy Darrell once had--the author's
temperament never. What is the author's temperament? Too long a task to
define. But without it a man may write a clever book, a useful book, a
book that may live a year, ten years, fifty years. He will not stand out
to distant ages a representative of the age that rather lived in him than
he in it. The author's temperament is that which makes him an integral,
earnest, original unity, distinct from all before and all that may
succeed him. And as a Father of the Church has said that the
consciousness of individual being is the sign of immortality, not granted
to the inferior creatures--so it is in this individual temperament one
and indivisible, and in the intense conviction of it, more than in all
the works it may throw off, that the author becomes immortal. Nay, his
works may perish like those of Orpheus or Pythagoras; but he himself, in
his name, in the footprint of his being, remains, like Orpheus or
Pythagoras, undestroyed, indestructible.
Resigning literature, the Solitary returned to Science. There he was
more at home. He had cultivated science, in his dazzling academical
career, with ardour and success; he had renewed the study, on his first
retirement to Fawley, as a distraction from tormenting memories or
unextin guished passions. He now for the first time regarded the
absorbing abstruse occupation as a possible source of fame. To be one in
the starry procession of those sons of light who have solved a new law in
the statute-book of heaven! Surely a grand ambition, not unbecoming to
his years and station, and pleasant in its labours to a man who loved
Nature's outward scenery with poetic passion, and had studied her inward
mysteries with a sage's minute research. Science needs not the author's
art--she rejects its gracess--he recoils with a shudder from its fancies.
But Science requires in the mind of the discoverer a limpid calm. The
lightnings that reveal Diespiter must flash in serene skies. No clouds
store that thunder
"Quo bruta tellus, et vaga flumina,
Quo Styx, et invisi horrida Taenari
Sedes, Atlanteusque finis
Concutitur!"
So long as you take science only as a distraction, science will not lead
you to discovery. And from some cause or other, Guy Darrell was more
unquiet and perturbed in his present than in his past seclusion. Science
this time failed even to distract. In the midst of august meditations--
of close experiment--some haunting angry thought from the far world
passed with rude shadow between Intellect and Truth--the heart eclipsed
the mind. The fact is, that Darrell's genius was essentially formed for
Action. His was the true orator's temperament, with the qualities that
belong to it--the grasp of affairs--the comprehension of men and states
--the constructive, administrative faculties. In such career, and in
such career alone, could he have developed all his powers, and achieved
an imperishable name. Gradually as science lost its interest, he
retreated from all his former occupations, and would wander for long
hours over the wild unpopulated landscapes round him. As if it were his
object to fatigue the body, and in that fatigue tire out the restless
brain, he would make his gun the excuse for rambles from sunrise to
twilight over the manors he had purchased years ago, lying many miles off
from Fawley. There are times when a man who has passed his life in
cultivating his mind finds that the more he can make the physical
existence predominate, the more he can lower himself to the rude vigour
of the gamekeeper, or his day-labourer--why, the more he can harden his
nerves to support the weight of his reflections.
In these rambles he was not always alone. Fairthorn contrived to
insinuate himself much more than formerly into his master's habitual
companionship. The faithful fellow had missed Darrell so sorely in that
long unbroken absence of five years, that on recovering him, Fairthorn
seemed resolved to make up for lost time. Departing from his own habits,
he would, therefore, lie in wait for Guy Darrell--creeping out of a
bramble or bush, like a familiar sprite; and was no longer to be awed
away by a curt syllable or a contracted brow. And Darrell, at first
submitting reluctantly, and out of compassionate kindness to the flute-
player's obtrusive society, became by degrees to welcome and relax in it.
Fairthorn knew the great secrets of his life. To Fairthorn alone on all
earth could he speak with out reserve of one name and of one sorrow.
Speaking to Fairthorn was like talking to himself, or to his pointers, or
to his favourite doe, upon which last he bestowed a new collar, with an
inscription that implied more of the true cause that had driven him a
second time to the shades of Fawley than he would have let out to Alban
Morley or even to Lionel Haughton. Alban was too old for that confidence
--Lionel much too young. But the Musician, like Art itself, was of no
age; and if ever the gloomy master unbent his outward moodiness and
secret spleen in any approach to gaiety, it was in a sort of saturnine
playfulness to this grotesque, grown-up infant. They cheered each other,
and they teased each other. Stalking side by side over the ridged
fallows, Darrell would sometimes pour forth his whole soul, as a poet
does to his muse; and at Fairthorn's abrupt interruption or rejoinder,
turn round on him with fierce objurgation or withering sarcasm, or what
the flute-player abhorred more than all else, a truculent quotation from
Horace, which drove Fairthorn away into some vanishing covert or hollow,
out of which Darrell had to entice him, sure that, in return, Fairthorn
would take a sly occasion to send into his side a vindictive prickle.
But as the two came home in the starlight, the dogs dead beat and poor
Fairthorn too,--ten to one but what the musician was leaning all his
weight on his master's nervous arm, and Darrell was looking with tender
kindness in the face of the SOMEONE left to lean upon him still.
One evening, as they were sitting together in the library, the two
hermits, each in his corner, and after a long silence, the flute-player
said abruptly
"I have been thinking--"
"Thinking!" quoth Darrell, with his mechanical irony; "I am sorry for
you. Try not to do so again."
FAIRTHORN.--"Your poor dear father--"
DARRELL (wincing, startled, and expectant of a prickle).--"Eh? my
father--"
FAIRTHORN.--"Was a great antiquary. How it would have pleased him could
he have left a fine collection of antiquities as an heirloom to the
nation!--his name thus preserved for ages, and connected with the studies
of his life. There are the Elgin Marbles. The parson was talking to me
yesterday of a new Vernon Gallery; why not in the British Museum an
everlasting Darrell room? Plenty to stock it mouldering yonder in the
chambers which you will never finish."
"My dear Dick," Said Darrell, starting up, "give me your hand. What a
brilliant thought! I could do nothing else to preserve my dear father's
name. Eureka! You are right. Set the carpenters at work to-morrow.
Remove the boards; open the chambers; we will inspect their stores, and
select what would worthily furnish 'A Darrell Room.' Perish Guy Darrell
the lawyer! Philip Darrell the antiquary at least shall live!"
It is marvellous with what charm Fairthorn's lucky idea seized upon
Darrell's mind. The whole of the next day he spent in the forlorn
skeleton of the unfinished mansion slowly decaying beside his small and
homely dwelling. The pictures, many of which were the rarest originals
in early Flemish and Italian art, were dusted with tender care, and hung
from hasty nails upon the bare ghastly walls. Delicate ivory carvings,
wrought by the matchless hand of Cellini-early Florentine bronzes,
priceless specimens of Raffaele ware and Venetian glass--the precious
trifles, in short, which the collector of mediaeval curiosities amasses
for his heirs to disperse amongst the palaces of kings and the cabinets
of nations--were dragged again to unfamiliar light. The invaded
sepulchral building seemed a very Pompeii of the /Cinque Cento/.
To examine, arrange, methodise, select for national purposes, such
miscellaneous treasures would be the work of weeks. For easier access,
Darrell caused a slight hasty passage to be thrown over the gap between
the two edifices. It ran from the room nicked into the gables of the old
house, which, originally fitted up for scientific studies, now became his
habitual apartment, into the largest of the uncompleted chambers which
had been designed for the grand reception-gallery of the new building.
Into the pompous gallery thus made contiguous to his monk-like cell, he
gradually gathered the choicest specimens of his collection. The damps
were expelled by fires on grateless hearthstones; sunshine admitted from
windows now for the first time exchanging boards for glass; rough iron
sconces, made at the nearest forge, were thrust into the walls, and
sometimes lighted at night-Darrell and Fairthorn walking arm-in-arm along
the unpolished floors, in company with Holbein's Nobles, Perugino's
Virgins. Some of that highbred company displaced and banished the next
day, as repeated inspection made the taste more rigidly exclusive.
Darrell had found object, amusement, occupation--frivolous if Compared
with those lenses, and glasses, and algebraical scrawls which had once
whiled lonely hours in the attic-room hard by; but not frivolous even to
the judgment of the austerest sage, if that sage had not reasoned away
his heart. For here it was not Darrell's taste that was delighted; it
was Darrell's heart that, ever hungry, had found food. His heart was
connecting those long-neglected memorials of an ambition baffled and
relinquished--here with a nation, there with his father's grave! How his
eyes sparkled! how his lip smiled! Nobody would have guessed it--none of
us know each other; least of all do we know the interior being of those
whom we estimate by public repute;--but what a world of simple, fond
affection lay coiled and wasted in that proud man's solitary breast!
CHAPTER II.
THE LEARNED COMPUTE THAT SEVEN HUNDRED AND SEVEN MILLIONS OF
MILLIONS OF VIBRATIONS HAVE PENETRATED THE EYE BEFORE THE EYE CAN
DISTINGUISH THE TINTS OF A VIOLET. WHAT PHILOSOPHY CAN CALCULATE
THE VIBRATIONS OF THE HEART BEFORE IT CAN DISTINGUISH THE COLOURS OF
LOVE?
While Guy Darrell thus passed his hours within the unfinished fragments
of a dwelling builded for posterity, and amongst the still relics of
remote generations, Love and Youth were weaving their warm eternal idyll
on the sunny lawns by the gliding river.
There they are, Love and Youth, Lionel and Sophy, in the arbour round
which her slight hands have twined the honeysuckle, fond imitation of
that bower endeared by the memory of her earliest holiday--she seated
coyly, he on the ground at her feet, as when Titania had watched his
sleep. He has been reading to her, the book has fallen from his hand.
What book? That volume of poems so unintelligibly obscure to all but the
dreaming young, who are so unintelligibly obscure to themselves. But to
the merit of those poems, I doubt if even George did justice. It is not
true, I believe, that they are not durable. Some day or other, when all
the jargon so feelingly denounced by Colonel Morley about "esthetics,"
and "objective," and "subjective," has gone to its long home, some critic
who can write English will probably bring that poor little volume fairly
before the public; and, with all its manifold faults, it will take a
place in the affections, not of one single generation of the young, but
--everlasting, ever-dreaming, ever-growing youth. But you and I, reader,
have no other interest in these poems, except this--that they were
written by the brother-in-law of that whimsical, miserly Frank Vance, who
perhaps, but for such a brother-in-law, would never have gone through the
labour by which he has cultivated the genius that achieved his fame; and
if he had not cultivated that genius, he might never have known Lionel;
and if he had never known Lionel, Lionel might never perhaps have gone to
the Surrey village, in which he saw the Phenomenon: And, to push farther
still that Voltaireian philosophy of ifs--if either Lionel or Frank Vance
had not been so intimately associated in the minds of Sophy and Lionel
with the golden holiday on the beautiful river, Sophy and Lionel might
not have thought so much of those poems; and if they had not thought so
much of those poems, there might not have been between them that link of
poetry without which the love of two young people is a sentiment, always
very pretty it is true, but much too commonplace to deserve special
commemoration in a work so uncommonly long as this is likely to be. And
thus it is clear that Frank Vance is not a superfluous and episodical
personage amongst the characters of this history, but, however
indirectly, still essentially, one of those beings without whom the
author must have given a very different answer to the question, "What
will he do with it?"
Return we to Lionel and Sophy. The poems have brought their hearts
nearer and nearer together. And when the book fell from Lionel's hand,
Sophy knew that his eyes were on her face, and her own eyes looked away.
And the silence was so deep and so sweet! Neither had yet said to the
other a word of love. And in that silence both felt that they loved and
were beloved. Sophy! how childlike she looked still! How little she is
changed!--except that the soft blue eyes are far more pensive, and that
her merry laugh is now never heard. In that luxurious home, fostered
with the tenderest care by its charming owner, the romance of her
childhood realised, and Lionel by her side, she misses the old crippled
vagrant. And therefore it is that her merry laugh is no longer heard!
"Ah!" said Lionel, softly breaking the pause at length, "do not turn your
eyes from me, or I shall think that there are tears in them!" Sophy's
breast heaved, but her eyes were averted still. Lionel rose gently, and
came to the other side of her quiet form. "Fie! there are tears, and you
would hide them from me. Ungrateful!"
Sophy looked at him now with candid, inexpressible, guileless affection
in those swimming eyes, and said with touching sweetness: "Ungrateful!
Should I not be so if I were gay and happy?"
And in self-reproach for not being sufficiently unhappy while that young
consoler was by her side, she too rose, left the arbour, and looked
wistfully along the river. George Morley was expected; he might bring
tidings of the absent. And now while Lionel, rejoining her, exerts all
his eloquence to allay her anxiety and encourage her hopes, and while
they thus, in that divinest stage of love, ere the tongue repeats what
the eyes have told, glide along-here in sunlight by lingering flowers-
there in shadow under mournful willows, whose leaves are ever the latest
to fall, let us explain by what links of circumstance Sophy became the
great lady's guest, and Waife once more a homeless wanderer.
CHAPTER III.
COMPRISING MANY NEEDFUL EXPLANATIONS ILLUSTRATIVE OF WISE SAWS; AS
FOR EXAMPLE, "HE THAT HATH AN ILL NAME IS HALF HANGED." "HE THAT
HATH BEEN BITTEN BY A SERPENT IS AFRAID OF A ROPE." "HE THAT LOOKS
FOR A STAR PUTS OUT HIS CANDLES;" AND, "WHEN GOD WILLS, ALL WINDS
BRING RAIN."
The reader has been already made aware how, by an impulse of womanhood
and humanity, Arabella Crane had been converted from a persecuting into a
tutelary agent in the destinies of Waife and Sophy. That evolution in
her moral being dated from the evening on which she had sought the
cripple's retreat, to warn him of Jasper's designs. We have seen by what
stratagem she had made it appear that Waife and his grandchild had sailed
beyond the reach of molestation; with what liberality she had advanced
the money that freed Sophy from the manager's claim; and how
considerately she had empowered her agent to give the reference which
secured to Waife the asylum in which we last beheld him. In a few stern
sentences she had acquainted Waife with her fearless inflexible resolve
to associate her fate henceforth with the life of his lawless son; and,
by rendering abortive all his evil projects of plunder, to compel him at
last to depend upon her for an existence neither unsafe nor sordid,
provided only that it were not dishonest. The moment that she revealed
that design, Waife's trust in her was won. His own heart enabled him to
comprehend the effect produced upon a character otherwise unamiable and
rugged, by the grandeur of self-immolation and the absorption of one
devoted heroic thought. In the strength and bitterness of passion which
thus pledged her existence to redeem another's, he obtained the key to
her vehement and jealous nature; saw why she had been so cruel to the
child of a rival; why she had conceived compassion for that child in
proportion as the father's unnatural indifference had quenched the anger
of her own self-love; and, above all, why, as the idea of reclaiming and
appropriating solely to herself the man who, for good or for evil, had
grown into the all-predominant object of her life, gained more and more
the mastery over her mind, it expelled the lesser and the baser passions,
and the old mean revenge against an infant faded away before the light of
that awakening conscience which is often rekindled from ashes by the
sparks of a single better and worthier thought. And in the resolute
design to reclaim Jasper Losely, Arabella came at once to a ground in
common with his father, with his child. Oh what, too, would the old man
owe to her, what would be his gratitude, his joy, if she not only guarded
his spotless Sophy, but saved from the bottomless abyss his guilty son!
Thus when Arabella Crane had, nearly five years before, sought Waife's
discovered hiding-place, near the old bloodstained Tower, mutual
interests and sympathies had formed between them a bond of alliance not
the less strong because rather tacitly acknowledged than openly
expressed. Arabella had written to Waife from the Continent, for the
first half-year pretty often, and somewhat sanguinely, as to the chance
of Losely's ultimate reformation. Then the intervals of silence became
gradually more prolonged, and the letters more brief. But still, whether
from the wish not unnecessarily to pain the old man, or, as would be more
natural to her character, which, even in its best aspects, was not
gentle, from a proud dislike to confess failure, she said nothing of the
evil courses which Jasper had renewed. Evidently she was always near
him. Evidently, by some means or another, his life, furtive and dark,
was ever under the glare of her watchful eyes.