"Your marriage, I think, Lord Lilburne, was not blessed with children.
Perhaps sometimes you feel the want of them?"
"If I did, I could have them by the dozen. Other ladies have been more generous in that department than the late Lady Lilburne, Heaven rest her!"
"And," said Vaudemont, fixing his eyes with some earnestness on his host, "if you were really persuaded that you had a child, or perhaps a grandchild—the mother one whom you loved in your first youth—a child affectionate, beautiful, and especially needing your care and protection, would you not suffer that child, though illegitimate, to supply to you the want of filial affection?"
"Filial affection, mon cher!" repeated Lord Lilburne, "needing my care and protection! Pshaw! In other words, would I give board and lodging to some young vagabond who was good enough to say he was son to Lord Lilburne?"
"But if you were convinced that the claimant were your son, or perhaps your daughter—a tenderer name of the two, and a more helpless claimant?"
"My dear Monsieur de Vaudemont, you are doubtless a man of gallantry and of the world. If the children whom the law forces on one are, nine times out of ten, such damnable plagues, judge if one would father those whom the law permits us to disown! Natural children are the pariahs of the world, and I—am one of the Brahmans."
"But," persisted Vaudemont, "forgive me if I press the question farther. Perhaps I seek from your wisdom a guide to my own conduct;—suppose, then, a man had loved, had wronged, the mother;—suppose that in the child he saw one who, without his aid, might be exposed to every curse with which the pariahs (true, the pariahs!) of the world are too often visited, and who with his aid might become, as age advanced, his companion, his nurse, his comforter—"
"Tush!" interrupted Lilburne, with some impatience; "I know not how our conversation fell on such a topic—but if you really ask my opinion in reference to any case in practical life, you shall have it. Look you, then Monsieur de Vaudemont, no man has studied the art of happiness more than I have; and I will tell you the great secret—have as few ties as possible. Nurse!—pooh! you or I could hire one by the week a thousand times more useful and careful than a bore of a child. Comforter!—a man of mind never wants comfort. And there is no such thing as sorrow while we have health and money, and don't care a straw for anybody in the world. If you choose to love people, their health and circumstances, if either go wrong, can fret you: that opens many avenues to pain. Never live alone, but always feel alone. You think this unamiable: possibly. I am no hypocrite, and, for my part, I never affect to be anything but what I am—John Lilburne."
As the peer thus spoke, Vaudemont, leaning against the door, contemplated him with a strange mixture of interest and disgust. "And John Lilburne is thought a great man, and William Gawtrey was a great rogue. You don't conceal your heart?—no, I understand. Wealth and power have no need of hypocrisy: you are the man of vice—Gawtrey, the man of crime. You never sin against the law—he was a felon by his trade. And the felon saved from vice the child, and from want the grandchild (Your flesh and blood) whom you disown: which will Heaven consider the worse man? No, poor Fanny, I see I am wrong. If he would own you, I would not give you up to the ice of such a soul:—better the blind man than the dead heart!"
"Well, Lord Lilburne," said De Vaudemont aloud, shaking off his reverie,
"I must own that your philosophy seems to me the wisest for yourself.
For a poor man it might be different—the poor need affection."