"My Novel" — Volume 12

by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton

"So I conclude," said Harley. "A Charles Fox might be a gamester, and a William Pitt be a pauper. But Audley Egerton is not of their giant stature; he stands so high because he stands upon heaps of respectable gold. Audley Egerton, needy and impoverished, out of parliament, and, as the vulgar slang has it, out at elbows, skulking from duns, perhaps in the Bench—"

"No, no; our party would never allow that; we would subscribe—"

"Worse than all, living as the pensioner of the party he aspired to lead!
You say truly, his political prospects would be blasted. A man whose
reputation lay in his outward respectability! Why, people would say that
Audley Egerton has been—a solemn lie; eh, my father?"

"How can you talk with such coolness of your friend? You need say nothing to interest me in his election—if you mean that. Once in parliament, he must soon again be in office,—and learn to live on his salary. You must get him to submit to me the schedule of his liabilities. I have a head for business, as you know. I will arrange his affairs for him. And I will yet bet five to one, though I hate wagers, that he will be prime minister in three years. He is not brilliant, it is true; but just at this crisis we want a safe, moderate, judicious, conciliatory man; and Audley has so much tact, such experience of the House, such knowledge of the world, and," added the earl, emphatically summing up his eulogies, "he is so thorough a gentleman!"

"A thorough gentleman, as you say,—the soul of honour! But, my dear father, it is your hour for riding; let me not detain you. It is settled, then; you do not come yourself to Lansmere. You put the house at my disposal, and allow me to invite Egerton, of course, and what other guests I may please; in short, you leave all to me?"

"Certainly; and if you cannot get in your friend, who can? That borough,
it is an awkward, ungrateful place, and has been the plague of my life.
So much as I have spent there, too,—so much as I have done to its trade!
"And the earl, with an indignant sigh, left the room.

Harley seated himself deliberately at his writing-table, leaning his face on his hand, and looking abstractedly into space from under knit and lowering brows.

Harley L'Estrange was, as we have seen, a man singularly tenacious of affections and impressions. He was a man, too, whose nature was eminently bold, loyal, and candid; even the apparent whim and levity which misled the world, both as to his dispositions and his powers, might be half ascribed to that open temper which, in its over-contempt for all that seemed to savour of hypocrisy, sported with forms and ceremonials, and extracted humour, sometimes extravagant, sometimes profound, from "the solemn plausibilities of the world." The shock he had now received smote the very foundations of his mind, and, overthrowing all the airier structures which fancy and wit had built upon its surface, left it clear as a new world for the operations of the darker and more fearful passions. When a man of a heart so loving and a nature so irregularly powerful as Harley's suddenly and abruptly discovers deceit where he had most confided, it is not (as with the calmer pupils of that harsh teacher, Experience) the mere withdrawal of esteem and affection from the one offender; it is, that trust in everything seems gone; it is, that the injured spirit looks back to the Past, and condemns all its kindlier virtues as follies that conduced to its own woe; and looks on to the Future as to a journey beset with smiling traitors, whom it must meet with an equal simulation, or crush with a superior force. The guilt of treason to men like these is incalculable,—it robs the world of all the benefits they would otherwise have lavished as they passed; it is responsible for all the ill that springs from the corruption of natures whose very luxuriance, when the atmosphere is once tainted, does but diffuse disease,—even as the malaria settles not over thin and barren soils, not over wastes that have been from all time desolate, but over the places in which southern suns had once ripened delightful gardens, or the sites of cities, in which the pomp of palaces has passed away.

It was not enough that the friend of his youth, the confidant of his love, had betrayed his trust,—been the secret and successful rival; not enough that the woman his boyhood had madly idolized, and all the while be had sought her traces with pining, remorseful heart-believing she but eluded his suit from the emulation of a kindred generosity, desiring rather to sacrifice her own love than to cost to his the sacrifice of all which youth rashly scorns and the world so highly estimates,—not enough that all this while her refuge had been the bosom of another. This was not enough of injury. His whole life had been wasted on a delusion; his faculties and aims, the wholesome ambition of lofty minds, had been arrested at the very onset of fair existence; his heart corroded by a regret for which there was no cause; his conscience charged with the terror that his wild chase had urged a too tender victim to the grave, over which he had mourned. What years that might otherwise have been to himself so serene, to the world so useful, had been consumed in objectless, barren, melancholy dreams! And all this while to whom had his complaints been uttered?—to the man who knew that his remorse was an idle spectre and his faithful sorrow a mocking self-deceit. Every thought that could gall man's natural pride, every remembrance that could sting into revenge a heart that had loved too deeply not to be accessible to hate, conspired to goad those maddening Furies who come into every temple which is once desecrated by the presence of the evil passions. In that sullen silence of the soul, vengeance took the form of justice. Changed though his feelings towards Leonora Avenel were, the story of her grief and her wrongs embittered still more his wrath against his rival. The fragments of her memoir left naturally on Harley's mind the conviction that she had been the victim of an infamous fraud, the dupe of a false marriage. His idol had not only been stolen from the altar,—it had been sullied by the sacrifice; broken with remorseless hand, and thrust into dishonoured clay; mutilated, defamed; its very memory a thing of contempt to him who had ravished it from worship. The living Harley and the dead Nora—both called aloud to their joint despoiler, "Restore what thou hast taken from us, or pay the forfeit!"

Thus, then, during the interview between Helen and Leonard, thus Harley L'Estrange sat alone! and as a rude irregular lump of steel, when wheeled round into rapid motion, assumes the form of the circle it describes, so his iron purpose, hurried on by his relentless passion, filled the space into which he gazed with optical delusions, scheme after scheme revolving and consummating the circles that clasped a foe.