The will of the dead man was duly accomplished. The young man was reared in the school of evil and became a curious, experimental subject for his master. The late Lord Mowbray had been a reclaimed fanatic; after his own fashion he preached as do nearly all of his compatriots. Lebeau contented himself with observation, and consigned these observations to a certain manuscript, written in French, which was entitled: "A Treatise on Pleasure; or, A Rational Journal of a Young English Nobleman. To be published one hundred years after my death."
Lebeau remarked many things; among others these:—
"This youth, reared in the very lap of happiness, was not happy. The pleasure which formed his daily lessons seemed to him stale and forced. Over and beyond the delights which were multiplied for him and almost imposed upon him, he dreamed of others to which he could not attain, thereby proving that the true vocation of man is the unattainable, the unreal. He was bred according to nature, that is to say, after the fashion of savages; his joys revolved in the narrow, wretched circle in which the primitive inhabitants of the globe vegetate. Five or six thousand years of civilization have delicately undermined, modelled, and ameliorated this block of confused sensations which we represent. The thousand constraints which man has imposed upon himself, and his privations, voluntary or obligatory, not to mention his griefs, have refined him, perfected his organs of pleasure, increased his faculty of happiness an hundred-fold. Suppress these constraints, these tests, these combats, and you leave him but the swift, bestial joys in which the aborigines, our ancestors, forgot for a moment in the obscurity of their caverns the frightful misery of their existence. Young Mowbray at twenty years of age had run the gamut of fallacious love. He had learned the principles of gallantry and debauchery as one learns Latin; but never having trembled, wept, nor suffered, he was totally ignorant of genuine love."
All at once towards Lebeau, that man of infinite complaisance, he experienced a sense of secret resistance. It was upon the day when first he was smitten by the charms of Miss Woodville. A will seemed to interpose between him and the object of his desire, seeming to say: "All women, but not this one!"
Was it not sufficient that she had become dearer to him than all others?
CHAPTER VI.
THE HOUSE IN TOTHILL FIELDS.
In her turn Esther had been awakened, as she was every morning, by a sort of dull buzzing, which for a space continued and finally died away. It was Reuben droning the morning prayers in the lower hall in presence of his mother and the aged servant, Maud. She raised herself upon her elbow and glanced about her with an expression of disgust. However, there was nothing displeasing to the sight about the chamber. To be sure, the appointments were of the simplest description, and the walls were bare; but everything exhaled the perfection of neatness and propriety. The window opened upon extensive meadows, called Tothill Fields, where some years later rose the quarter known as Pimlico. On this side no building intercepted the light of day; consequently the fresh, pure radiance of morning flooded the room, flecking the draperies and white furniture. But Esther for a long time had indulged herself in a dream of luxury and grandeur. It seemed to her that each night renewed for her special benefit the story of Cinderella. During the entire evening she walked in her glory beneath the fire of glances, like a little queen, envied, admired, adored, tasting, as an homage more enduring than the applause of men, the jealousy of her comrades. The curtain having fallen, the beautiful costume replaced by a modest gown of some dark stuff, she escaped from the scene of her triumph with her arm firmly locked in that of Mrs. Marsham. When she awoke in the morning there was nothing to prevent her from believing that it had all been a dream, and that she was after all only an ordinary little being destined to set a good example to her neighbors, and be the joy of some commonplace, honest husband. What was there in store for her but to share this insipid existence, take her part in the usual housework, and listen to the babble of her aunt, who represented simple, tender devotion, as Reuben was the exponent of the suspicious and fierce kind? But patience! It would not be long ere emancipation would lend her wings to escape from this irksome prison.
More than ever this morning was she disposed to view her surroundings with a disapproving and dissatisfied eye. When should she have a boudoir like Lady Vereker's, and a gilded coach, a footman with a plumed hat, a great nobleman for her husband, subject to her caprices, sighing at her feet, and breathing soft nothings in the pretty, affected language, mingled with French, which the heroes in the fashionable plays made use of? Like Lord Mowbray, she deceived herself on the score of love, but after a different fashion. He saw in it but the satisfaction of the senses; she, the triumph of vanity. To be forever and a day the personage she appeared to be three evenings out of the week, from seven o'clock until ten; to be in reality ingenuous, anxious, coquettish, and impassioned; to play the comedy, and play it to the life, amidst men who were by no means acting; to heave real sighs, shed genuine tears, commit actual follies,—such was her idea of happiness, which would have been perverse had it not been childish.