During his quiet sojourn at Capri, Mr. Earnscliffe heard of his wife's death, and there, too, he received Flora's letter. His pride took fire even at the trustful love which she had shown to him. It was too much for him to receive with the meekness and thankfulness which it deserved, and so by turns he battled with and yielded to the sweet delight which it foreshadowed to him, as it recalled all the happiness which her confiding affection had given him from the well remembered evening at Achensee to that of the fatal ball in Paris.
As our hero's struggle with himself continued and his egotism was from time to time overcome, a soft light would steal into his eyes, and he would stretch out his arms longing to clasp Flora to his heart again and for ever; but that brightening—like the lightning's flash across a stormy sky—was gone almost as soon as seen, and left behind it only darkness. One day, with a look of proud despair, he turned away his head from the letter which lay before him, and muttered—"No, no! I am not so love-sick as to trust again to one who was so ready to sacrifice me to a senseless regulation of what she calls religion! Flora Adair, you shall be torn from my heart whatever it may cost me!"
He seized the letter and crushed it in his hand. After a few moments of seeming thought, however, he threw it, all crushed as it was, into a corner of his desk, and locked it up. Like Count Azo, he was now, indeed, bearing within him "a heart which would not yield nor could forget."
There were times when evidences of the heroic trust produced by the religion in which Flora Adair believed, crowded before his mind. These testimonies Mr. Earnscliffe had seen in the Catacombs, in history, in the world around him, and, lastly, in Flora's sacrifice of happiness to principle. But pride chased even these away, and his unbending will again and again perverted his better but weaker judgment. "It is impossible!" he would exclaim, "that I have been mistaken after all these years of thought and study! No! I see what this is: it is a weak clinging to a woman whose prejudice is stronger than her love; but I will not yield to it! She shall know that I have sufficient strength to bear wretchedness and loneliness even rather than accept the second place in her heart!" Yet the thought of that letter lying crushed in the corner of his desk haunted him. He longed to look upon her writing again—to read once more all those fond expressions of her constancy; for he was forced to admit that, at least, she had been constant; but he refused himself even that gratification.
In this turmoil of his heart and mind Mr. Earnscliffe became a more ardent partisan than ever of Italian independence, and we find him at Sorrento, after an interview which he had come there to seek with one of the leaders of that party on the previous Friday. He was about to return to Capri, and even as he spoke with Mr. Blake he was expecting the arrival of Paolo and Anina, as he had promised the latter that she should accompany il babbo whenever he came to fetch him home. In mixing himself up with all this party spirit, Mr. Earnscliffe's will had betrayed his judgment into a contradiction of his former respect for things established, his veneration for time-honoured institutions, and the wisdom which experience had tested.
It was an endeavour to justify his new opinions to himself, and to quiet the misgivings which he now so often felt, that had led him to the conversation in which we now find him engaged.
Having reasoned in his book against the existence of any Divine law promulgated in mankind by a living authority, he was endeavouring to persuade Mr. Blake—and perhaps himself—that opinion, or, as he sometimes more speciously called it, conviction and conscience, being the only guide in matters of Divine government, by a stronger reason it was the only authority in human things, and that, therefore, "the voice of the people is the voice of God." So far had he already, by the revolt of his will, drifted and well nigh stranded upon the quicksands of revolution!
Mr. Blake was not a yielding listener; he was an older man than Mr. Earnscliffe, and one of those who distrusted the modern notions of progress and liberty; moreover, he did not believe that the same government is good for different peoples, and in his estimate of such things he took large account of "the age and body" of the nations governed. He had read de Maistre, and was strongly inclined to think with him that "Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite." He disapproved of the Italian revolution, not in a religious, but in a political point of view, and as the work of foreigners. It shocked his conservative mind to see the uprooting of so much that time had honoured, and principles, rights, and duties treated as if they were things of nought.
"I do not like your revolutionary men," he continued, "much better than their opinions. I find them for the most part gain-seekers for themselves and their followers. It is the result of egotism in all time, and to me a pretty sure sign of wrong-doing. I am not of the Pope's religion, although but a century ago my ancestors were, and there is much in it that I cannot comprehend; but it has one charm for me which I confess is great—those who espouse this cause in general are thoughtful and steadfast, ever ready to make any sacrifice for their principles. It is a great test, and a great proof of sincerity."
"Sacrifice! You call it sacrifice? Why, surely their's is the worst of all bondage, the enslaving of the heart, the mind, the whole being; and to what? To a system which governed the dark ages, and which our brighter civilisation has outrun,—the resolute enemy of all progress and enlightenment!"