And this was the end of Sir Lionel's wooing.
CHAPTER III.
A QUIET LITTLE DINNER.
Sir Henry Harcourt was married and took his bride to Paris and Nice; and Sir Lionel Bertram tried to get married, but his bride—bride as he hoped her to have been—ran away by herself to Hadley. In the meantime George Bertram lived alone in his dark dull chambers in London.
He would fain have been all alone; but at what was perhaps the worst moment of his misery, his father came to him. It may be remembered how anxiously he had longed to know his father when he first commenced that journey to Jerusalem, how soon he became attached to him, how fascinated he had been by Sir Lionel's manners, how easily he forgave the first little traits of un-paternal conduct on his father's part, how gradually the truth forced itself upon his mind. But now, at this time, the truth had forced itself on his mind. He knew his father for what he was.
And his mind was not one which could reject such knowledge, or alter the nature of it because the man was his father. There are those to whom a father's sins, or a husband's sins, or a brother's sins are no sins at all. And of such one may say, that though we must of compulsion find their judgment to be in some sort delinquent, that their hearts more than make up for such delinquency. One knows that they are wrong, but can hardly wish them to be less so.
But George Bertram was not one of them: he had been in no hurry to condemn his father; but, having seen his sins, he knew them for sins, and did condemn them. He found that his uncle had been right, and that Sir Lionel was a man whom he could in no wise respect, and could hardly love. Money he perceived was his father's desire. He would therefore give him what money he could spare; but he would not give him his society.
When, therefore, Sir Lionel announced his arrival in town and his intention to remain there some little time, George Bertram was by no means solaced in his misery. In those days he was very miserable. It was only now that he knew how thoroughly he loved this woman—now that she was so utterly beyond his reach. Weak and wavering as he was in many things, he was not weak enough to abandon himself altogether to unavailing sorrow. He knew that work alone could preserve him from sinking—hard, constant, unflinching work, that one great cure for all our sorrow, that only means of adapting ourselves to God's providences.
So he set himself to work—not a lazy, listless reading of counted pages; not history at two volumes a week, or science at a treatise a day; but to such true work as he found it in him to do, working with all his mind and all his strength. He had already written and was known as a writer; but he had written under impulse, carelessly, without due regard to his words or due thought as to his conclusions. He had written things of which he was already ashamed, and had put forth with the ex cathedra air of an established master ideas which had already ceased to be his own. But all that should be altered now. Then he had wanted a quick return for his writing. It had piqued him to think that the names of others, his contemporaries, were bruited about the world, but that the world knew nothing of his own. Harcourt was already a noted man, while he himself had done no more than attempted and abandoned a profession. Harcourt's early success had made him an early author; but he already felt that his authorship was unavailing. Harcourt's success had been solid, stable, such as men delight in; his had as yet resulted only in his all but forced withdrawal from the only respectable position which he had achieved.