CHAPTER XXXII
But while Harley had thus occupied the hours of night with cares for the living, Audley Egerton had been in commune with the dead. He had taken from the pile of papers amidst which it had fallen, the record of Nora’s silenced heart. With a sad wonder he saw how he had once been loved. What had all which successful ambition had bestowed on the lonely statesman to compensate for the glorious empire he had lost,—such realms of lovely fancy; such worlds of exquisite emotion; that infinite which lies within the divine sphere that unites spiritual genius with human love? His own positive and earthly nature attained, for the first time, and as if for its own punishment, the comprehension of that loftier and more ethereal visitant from the heavens, who had once looked with a seraph’s smile through the prison-bars of his iron life; that celestial refinement of affection, that exuberance of feeling which warms into such varieties of beautiful idea, under the breath of the earth-beautifier, Imagination,—all from which, when it was all his own, he had turned half weary and impatient, and termed the exaggerations of a visionary romance, now that the world had lost them evermore, he interpreted aright as truths. Truths they were, although illusions. Even as the philosopher tells us that the splendour of colours which deck the universe is not on the surface whereon we think to behold it, but in our own vision; yet, take the colours from the universe, and what philosophy can assure us that the universe has sustained no loss?
But when Audley came to that passage in the fragment which, though but imperfectly, explained the true cause of Nora’s flight; when he saw how Levy, for what purpose he was unable to conjecture, had suggested to his bride the doubts that had offended him,—asserted the marriage to be a fraud, drawn from Audley’s own brief resentful letters to Nora proof of the assertion, misled so naturally the young wife’s scanty experience of actual life, and maddened one so sensitively pure into the conviction of dishonour,—his brow darkened, and his hand clenched. He rose and went at once to Levy’s room. He found it deserted, inquired, learned that Levy was gone forth, and had left word he might not be at home for the night. Fortunate, perhaps, for Audley, fortunate for the baron, that they did not then meet. Revenge, in spite of his friend’s admonition, might at that hour have been as potent an influence on Egerton as it had been on Harley, and not, as with the latter, to be turned aside.
Audley came back to his room and finished the tragic record. He traced the tremor of that beloved hand through the last tortures of doubt and despair; he saw where the hot tears had fallen; he saw where the hand had paused, the very sentence not concluded; mentally he accompanied his—fated bride in the dismal journey to her maiden home, and beheld her before him as he had last seen, more beautiful even in death than the face of living woman had ever since appeared to him; and as he bent over the last words, the blank that they left on the leaf, stretching pale beyond the quiver of the characters and the blister of the tears,—pale and blank as the void which departed love leaves behind it,—he felt his Heart suddenly stand still, its course arrested as the record closed. It beat again, but feebly,—so feebly! His breath became labour and pain, his sight grew dizzy; but the constitutional firmness and fortitude of the man clung to him in the stubborn mechanism of habit, his will yet fought against his disease, life rallied as the light flickers up in the waning taper.
The next morning, when Harley came into his friend’s room, Egerton was asleep. But the sleep seemed much disturbed; the breathing was hard and difficult; the bed-clothes were partially thrown off, as if in the tossing of disturbed dreams; the sinewy strong arm, the broad athletic breast, were partly bare. Strange that so deadly a disease within should leave the frame such apparent power that, to the ordinary eye, the sleeping sufferer seemed a model of healthful vigour. One hand was thrust with uneasy straining over the pillows,—it had its hold on the fatal papers; a portion of the leaves was visible; and where the characters had been blurred by Nora’s tears, were the traces, yet moist, of tears perhaps more bitter.
Harley felt deeply affected; and while he still stood by the bed, Egerton sighed heavily and woke. He stared round him, as if perplexed and confused, till his eyes resting on Harley, he smiled and said,
“So early! Ah, I remember, it is the day for our great boat-race. We shall have the current against us; but you and I together—when did we ever lose?”
Audley’s mind was wandering; it had gone back to the old Eton days. But Harley thought that he spoke in metaphorical allusion to the present more important contest.
“True, my Audley,—you and I together—when did we ever lose? But will you rise? I wish you would be at the polling-place to shake hands with your voters as they come up. By four o’clock you will be released, and the election won.”
“The election! How! what!” said Egerton, recovering himself. “I recollect now. Yes,—I accept this last kindness from you. I always said I would die in harness. Public life—I have no other. Ah, I dream again! Oh, Harley my son, my son!”