His slightly aquiline nose, and his somewhat full lips closed firmly over an unbroken and even range of strong teeth, and his firm and resolute mouth betokened an ardent, passionate nature. A beard and moustache, of nearly the same colour as his hair, covered the lower part of his face, which was naturally fair, but somewhat bronzed by southern suns.
He was dressed in a dark morning suit, without any recherche; but in a peasant's costume there would have been that same air of ease and high breeding which so strikingly distinguished him,—that distinction of nature which no outward adornment of wealth or fashion, or even birth with all its advantages, could give. "It is the soul," says the great Christian doctor and philosopher, "which is the form of the body and which gives its beauty to it."
We have heard from Mrs. Elton that Mr. Earnscliffe was rich. Why then did he live in this unfashionable quarter? Probably because it was unfashionable, and out of the way of his sight-seeing, gaiety-hunting country people, who congregate about the Corso and the Piazza di Spagna; probably also because in the Piazza di Trajana, where the houses look down upon the remains of that once magnificent Forum and the unrivalled column which still stands there, he lived in some degree in the Rome of old, "the mistress of the world, whose people were a nation of kings," as he had said on that day at Frascati, and not in the modern Rome, which to his clouded vision appeared so despicable.
If the pride of human reason, which was so strong in him, would have permitted him to endeavour to pierce that cloud, he would have seen how much more glorious is her diadem now than it then was. Then her sovereignty rested on material force alone,—she was the capital of the peoples whom she had conquered for her Cæsars by the force of arms, and her government was the lower one—the government of power; now her sovereignty is a moral sovereignty,—she is the capital of Christendom, of the nations which she has won to God by the power of persuasion, and her government is the highest of all—the government of love! But these things were hidden from Mr. Earnscliffe,—he "did not believe, and therefore he could not understand."
Upon the table beside him lay Nibbi's "Roma Antica e Moderna," "Les Catacombes de Rome," by Louis Perret, an open volume of Plato, Bulwer's "Zanoni" and "Godolphin." It was a small but somewhat miscellaneous collection, and formed a fair index to the mind of him who sat in the armchair. There were few men who had read or thought more than he had done in his own way; but the more he read and the more he thought, the more baseless everything seemed to him. At times he would sit with an open volume beside him, and, ceasing to read, bitterly ask himself what he gained by all his study and thought? It only isolated him, he would say, from the generality of people, and left him tossing without a rudder upon the unstable waters of human opinion, to which there seemed to be no attainable shore.... Yet the shore was close to him, only he would not see it.
There had just risen up before him a vision of years long past and gone, when he dreamed of love, of the unutterable delight of conferring happiness upon another; and for a moment his blue eyes regained their natural soft expression—but for a moment only; the next it had passed away; and throwing his head back impatiently, as if he would shake off
"Those spectres whom no exorcism can bind,"
he exclaimed, "What nonsense all this is! Do I not know by experience the hollowness of love? The best of women are but the best of actresses—for they are all so more or less—and would I sigh again for aught so worthless? A thousand times, no. I made my choice long ago; I determined to be self-sufficing, true and virtuous for my own sake, and to prove what man can be of himself alone! Ay, Plato," and he drew the book towards him, "thou art my best friend, my only master! But even thou dost not teach enough! Yet come, thou canst teach me more than any other!" And, with the old stern look in his face, he began to read again.
Will his proud spirit of self-reliance, his iron will, ever be humbled? Will he ever learn to kiss the rod under which he writhes? If so, it must indeed be after a deadly struggle with his mortal enemy, himself.
He did not go much into society, and rather avoided that of ladies, although he could make himself most pleasing to them when he chose to do so, as indeed he had proved in regard to Flora Adair. His sense of justice was unusually strong, and therefore it was that he had broken through his rule of rarely visiting by going so often to the Adairs; he considered it as a sort of moral debt to render the time of Flora's imprisonment as little wearisome as possible, having been, as he said, the remote cause of her accident. As that obligation was now over, he tried to persuade himself that he was delighted at it; yet many things which had happened during their conversations were constantly recurring to him; he wished he had said this, or that,—something, in short, which he had not said. He thought, moreover, that he should like to be able to study Flora Adair more closely, but merely to find her out, as no doubt she was an actress like the rest of her sex. He was generous too, ever ready to give money to relieve others, and, notwithstanding his assumed stoicism, his tell-tale eyes would light up with a passing glow whenever he felt that he had been the means of doing good to a suffering creature, or given any pleasure to others. To his servants he was a kind master, although habitually reserved and distant, but never to them was he proud and scornful, as he often was to his equals. For the rest, his character must develop itself. We shall not now be astonished at acts of apparent inconsistency caused by that perpetual warfare between the two natures, the real and the acquired. Thus flashes of the enthusiastic spirit of his youth would every now and then dart athwart the sombre hues of the philosopher and fatalist of later years.