HELEN.—"Oh, Lord L'Estrange, how can you speak thus; how so wrong yourself? Hate—hate to you! and from Leonard Fairfield!"
HARLEY.—"You evade my question. Would his hate or hostility to me affect your sentiments towards him?"
HELEN (looking down).—"I could not force myself to believe in it."
HARLEY.—"Why?"
HELEN.—"Because it would be so unworthy of him."
HARLEY.—"Poor child! You have the delusion of your years. You deck a cloud in the hues of the rainbow, and will not believe that its glory is borrowed from the sun of your own fancy. But here, at least, you are not deceived. Leonard obeys but my wishes, and, I believe, against his own will. He has none of man's noblest attribute, Ambition."
HELEN.—"No ambition!"
HARLEY.—"It is vanity that stirs the poet to toil,—if toil the wayward chase of his own chimeras can be called. Ambition is a more masculine passion."
Helen shook her head gently, but made no answer.
HARLEY.—"If I utter a word that profanes one of your delusions, you shake your head and are incredulous. Pause: listen one moment to my counsels,—perhaps the last I may ever obtrude upon you. Lift your eyes; look around. Far as your eye can reach, nay, far beyond the line which the horizon forms in the landscape, stretch the lands of my inheritance. Yonder you see the home in which my forefathers for many generations lived with honour, and died lamented. All these, in the course of nature, might one day have been your own, had you not rejected my proposals. I offered you, it is true, not what is commonly called Love; I offered you sincere esteem, and affections the more durable for their calm. You have not been reared by the world in the low idolatry of rank and wealth; but even romance cannot despise the power of serving others, which rank and wealth bestow. For myself, hitherto indolence, and lately disdain, rob fortune of these nobler attributes. But she who will share my fortune may dispense it so as to atone for my sins of omission. On the other side, grant that there is no bar to your preference for Leonard Fairfield, what does your choice present to you? Those of his kindred with whom you will associate are unrefined and mean. His sole income is derived from precarious labours; the most vulgar of all anxieties—the fear of bread itself for the morrow—must mingle with all your romance, and soon steal from love all its poetry. You think his affection will console you for every sacrifice. Folly! the love of poets is for a mist, a moonbeam, a denizen of air, a phantom that they call an Ideal. They suppose for a moment that they have found that Ideal in Chloe or Phyllis, Helen or a milkmaid. Bah! the first time you come to the poet with the baker's bill, where flies the Ideal? I knew one more brilliant than Leonard, more exquisitely gifted by nature; that one was a woman; she saw a man hard and cold as that stone at your feet,—a false, hollow, sordid worldling; she made him her idol, beheld in him all that history would not recognize in a Caesar, that mythology would scarcely grant to an Apollo: to him she was the plaything of an hour; she died, and before the year was out he had married for money! I knew another instance,—I speak of myself. I loved before I was your age. Had an angel warned me then, I would have been incredulous as you. How that ended, no matter: but had it not been for that dream of maudlin delirium, I had lived and acted as others of my kind and my sphere,—married from reason and judgment, been now a useful and happy man. Pause, then. Will you still reject me for Leonard Fairfield? For the last time you have the option, —me and all the substance of waking life, Leonard Fairfield and the shadows of a fleeting dream. Speak! You hesitate. Nay, take time to decide."