“You saw me not yesterday,” he wrote in one letter, “but I saw you;
all day I was by you: you gave not a look which passed me unnoticed;
you made not a movement which I did not chronicle in my memory.
Julia, do you tremble when I tell you this? Yes, if you have a
heart, I know these words would stab it to the core! You may affect
to answer me indignantly! Wise dissembler! it is very skilful,
very, to assume anger when you have no reply. I repeat during the
whole of that party of pleasure (pleasure! well, your tastes, it
must be acknowledged, are exquisite!) which you enjoyed yesterday,
and which you so faintly asked me to share, my eye was on you. You
did not know that I was in the wood when you took the grin of the
incomparable Digby, with so pretty a semblance of alarm at the
moment the snake which my foot disturbed glided across your path.
You did not know I was within hearing of the tent where you made so
agreeable a repast, and from which your laughter sent peals so many
and so numerous. Laughter! O Julia, can you tell me that you love,
and yet be happy, even to mirth, when I am away! Love! O God, how
different a sensation is mine! Mine makes my whole principle of
life! Yours! I tell you that I think at moments I would rather
have your hate than the lukewarm sentiment you bear to me, and
honour by the name of affection.' Pretty phrase! I have no
affection for you! Give me not that sickly word; but try with me,
Julia, to invent some expression that has never filtered a paltry
meaning through the lips of another! Affection! why, that is a
sister's word, a girl's word to her pet squirrel! Never was it made
for that ruby and most ripe mouth! Shall I come to your house this
evening? Your mother has asked me, and you—you heard her, and said
nothing. Oh! but that was maiden reserve, was it? and maiden
reserve caused you to take up a book the moment I left you, as if my
company made but an ordinary amusement instantly to be replaced by
another! When I have seen you, society, books, food, all are
hateful to me; but you, sweet Julia, you can read, can you? Why,
when I left you, I lingered by the parlour window for hours, till
dusk, and you never once lifted your eyes, nor saw me pass and
repass. At least I thought you would have watched my steps when I
left the house; but I err, charming moralist! According to you,
that vigilance would have been meanness.”
In another part of the correspondence a more grave if not a deeper gush of feeling struggled for expression.
“You say, Julia, that were you to marry one who thinks so much of
what he surrenders for you, and who requires from yourself so vast a
return of love, you should tremble for the future happiness of both
of us. Julia, the triteness of that fear proves that you love not
at all. I do not tremble for our future happiness; on the contrary,
the intensity of my passion for you makes me know that we never can
be happy, never beyond the first rapture of our union. Happiness is
a quiet and tranquil feeling. No feeling that I can possibly bear
to you will ever receive those epithets,—I know that I shall be
wretched and accursed when I am united to you. Start not! I will
presently tell you why. But I do not dream of happiness, neither
(could you fathom one drop of the dark and limitless ocean of my
emotions) would you name to me that word. It is not the mercantile
and callous calculation of chances for 'future felicity' (what
homily supplied you with so choice a term?) that enters into the
heart that cherishes an all-pervading love. Passion looks only to
one object, to nothing beyond; I thirst, I consume, not for
happiness, but you. Were your possession inevitably to lead me to a
gulf of anguish and shame, think you I should covet it one jot the
less! If you carry one thought, one hope, one dim fancy, beyond the
event that makes you mine, you may be more worthy of the esteem of
others, but you are utterly undeserving of my love.
....................
“I will tell you now why I know we cannot be happy. In the first
place, when you say that I am proud of birth, that I am morbidly
ambitious, that I am anxious to shine in the great world, and that
after the first intoxication of love has passed away I shall feel
bitterness against one who has so humbled my pride and darkened my
prospects, I am not sure that you wholly err. But I am sure that
the instant remedy is in your power. Have you patience, Julia, to
listen to a kind of history of myself, or rather of my feelings? If
so, perhaps it may be the best method of explaining all that I would
convey. You will see, then, that my family pride and my worldly
ambition are not founded altogether on those basements which move my
laughter in another; if my feelings thereon are really, however, as
you would insinuate, equal matter for derision, behold, my Julia, I
can laugh equally at them! So pleasant a thing to me is scorn, that
I would rather despise myself than have no one to despise! But to
my narrative! You must know that there are but two of us, sons of a
country squire, of old family, which once possessed large
possessions and something of historical renown. We lived in an old
country-place; my father was a convivial dog, a fox-hunter, a
drunkard, yet in his way a fine gentleman,—and a very disreputable
member of society. The first feelings towards him that I can
remember were those of shame. Not much matter of family pride here,
you will say! True, and that is exactly the reason which made me
cherish family pride elsewhere. My father's house was filled with
guests,—some high and some low; they all united in ridicule of the
host. I soon detected the laughter, and you may imagine that it did
not please me. Meanwhile the old huntsman, whose family was about
as ancient as ours, and whose ancestors had officiated in his
capacity for the ancestors of his master time out of mind, told me
story after story about the Brandons of yore. I turned from the
stories to more legitimate history, and found the legends were
tolerably true. I learned to glow at this discovery; the pride,
humbled when I remembered my sire, revived when I remembered my
ancestors. I became resolved to emulate them, to restore a sunken
name, and vowed a world of nonsense on the subject. The habit of
brooding over these ideas grew on me. I never heard a jest broken
on my paternal guardian, I never caught the maudlin look of his
reeling eyes, nor listened to some exquisite inanity from his
besotted lips, but that my thoughts flew instantly back to the Sir
Charleses and the Sir Roberts of my race, and I comforted myself
with the hope that the present degeneracy should pass away. Hence,
Julia, my family pride; hence, too, another feeling you dislike in
me,—disdain! I first learned to despise my father, the host, and I
then despised my acquaintances, his guests; for I saw, while they
laughed at him, that they flattered, and that their merriment was
not the only thing suffered to feed at his expense. Thus contempt
grew up with me, and I had nothing to check it; for when I looked
around I saw not one living thing that I could respect. This father
of mine had the sense to think I was no idiot. He was proud (poor
man!) of 'my talents,' namely, of prizes won at school, and
congratulatory letters from my masters. He sent me to college.
My mind took a leap there; I will tell you, prettiest, what it was!
Before I went thither I had some fine vague visions about virtue.
I thought to revive my ancestral honours by being good; in short, I
was an embryo King Pepin. I awoke from this dream at the
University. There, for the first time, I perceived the real
consequence of rank.
“At school, you know, Julia, boys care nothing for a lord. A good
cricketer, an excellent fellow, is worth all the earls in the
peerage. But at college all that ceases; bats and balls sink into
the nothingness in which corals and bells had sunk before. One
grows manly, and worships coronets and carriages. I saw it was a
fine thing to get a prize, but it was ten times a finer thing to get
drunk with a peer. So, when I had done the first, my resolve to be
worthy of my sires made me do the second,—not, indeed, exactly; I
never got drunk: my father disgusted me with that vice betimes. To
his gluttony I owe my vegetable diet, and to his inebriety my
addiction to water. No, I did not get drunk with peers; but I was
just as agreeable to them as if I had been equally embruted. I knew
intimately all the 'Hats' in the University, and I was henceforth
looked up to by the 'Caps,' as if my head had gained the height of
every hat that I knew.
[At Cambridge the sons of noblemen and the eldest sons of
baronets are allowed to wear hats instead of the academical
cap.]
But I did not do this immediately. I must tell you two little
anecdotes that first initiated me into the secret of real greatness.
“The first was this: I was sitting at dinner with some fellows of a
college, grave men and clever. Two of them, not knowing me, were
conversing about me; they heard, they said, that I should never be
so good a fellow as my father,—have such a cellar or keep such a
house. 'I have met six earls there and a marquess,' quoth the other
senior. 'And his son,' returned the first don, 'only keeps company
with sizars, I believe.' 'So then,' said I to myself, 'to deserve
the praise even of clever men, one must have good wines, know plenty
of earls, and forswear sizars.' Nothing could be truer than my
conclusion.
“Anecdote the second is this: On the day I gained a high university
prize I invited my friends to dine with me. Four of them refused
because they were engaged (they had been asked since I asked them),
—to whom? the richest man at the University. These occurrences,
happening at the same time, threw me into a profound revery. I
awoke, and became a man of the world. I no longer resolved to be
virtuous, and to hunt after the glory of your Romans and your
Athenians,—I resolved to become rich, powerful, and of worldly
repute.
“I abjured my honest sizars, and as I said before, I courted some
rich 'Hats.' Behold my first grand step in the world! I became the
parasite and the flatterer. What! would my pride suffer this?
Verily, yes, my pride delighted in it; for it soothed my spirit of
contempt to put these fine fellows to my use! It soothed me to see
how easily I could cajole them, and to what a variety of purposes I
could apply even the wearisome disgust of their acquaintance.
Nothing is so foolish as to say the idle great are of no use; they
can be put to any use whatsoever that a wise man is inclined to make
of them. Well, Julia, lo! my character already formed; the family
pride, disdain, and worldly ambition,—there it is for you. After
circumstances only strengthened the impression already made. I
desired, on leaving college, to go abroad; my father had no money to
give me. What signified that? I looked carelessly around for some
wealthier convenience than the paternal board; I found it in a Lord
Mauleverer. He had been at college with me, and I endured him
easily as a companion,—for he had accomplishments, wit, and good-
nature. I made him wish to go abroad, and I made him think he
should die of ennui if I did not accompany him. To his request to
that effect I reluctantly agreed, and saw everything in Europe,
which he neglected to see, at his expense. What amused me the most
was the perception that I, the parasite, was respected by him; and
he, the patron, was ridiculed by me! It would not have been so if I
had depended on 'my virtue.' Well, sweetest Julia, the world, as I
have said, gave to my college experience a sacred authority. I
returned to England; and my father died, leaving to me not a
sixpence, and to my brother an estate so mortgaged that he could not
enjoy it, and so restricted that he could not sell it. It was now
the time for me to profit by the experience I boasted of. I saw
that it was necessary I should take some profession. Professions
are the masks to your pauper-rogue; they give respectability to
cheating, and a diploma to feed upon others. I analyzed my talents,
and looked to the customs of my country; the result was my
resolution to take to the Bar. I had an inexhaustible power of
application; I was keen, shrewd, and audacious. All these qualities
'tell' at the courts of justice. I kept my legitimate number of
terms; I was called; I went the circuit; I obtained not a brief,—
not a brief, Julia! My health, never robust, gave way beneath study
and irritation. I was ordered to betake myself to the country. I
came to this village, as one both salubrious and obscure. I lodged
in the house of your aunt; you came hither daily,—I saw you,—you
know the rest. But where, all this time, were my noble friends?
you will say. 'Sdeath, since we had left college, they had learned
a little of the wisdom I had then possessed; they were not disposed
to give something for nothing; they had younger brothers, and
cousins, and mistresses, and, for aught I know, children to provide
for. Besides, they had their own expenses; the richer a man is, the
less he has to give. One of them would have bestowed on me a
living, if I had gone into the Church; another, a commission if I
had joined his regiment. But I knew the day was past both for
priest and soldier; and it was not merely to live, no, nor to live
comfortably, but to enjoy power, that I desired; so I declined these
offers. Others of my friends would have been delighted to have kept
me in their house, feasted me, joked with me, rode with me, nothing
more! But I had already the sense to see that if a man dances
himself into distinction, it is never by the steps of attendance.
One must receive favours and court patronage, but it must be with
the air of an independent man. My old friends thus rendered
useless, my legal studies forbade me to make new, nay, they even
estranged me from the old; for people may say what they please about
a similarity of opinions being necessary to friendship,—a
similarity of habits is much more so. It is the man you dine,
breakfast, and lodge with, walk, ride, gamble, or thieve with, that
is your friend; not the man who likes Virgil as well as you do, and
agrees with you in an admiration of Handel. Meanwhile my chief
prey, Lord Mauleverer, was gone; he had taken another man's
Dulcinea, and sought out a bower in Italy. From that time to this I
have never heard of him nor seen him; I know not even his address.
With the exception of a few stray gleanings from my brother, who,
good easy man! I could plunder more, were I not resolved not to
ruin the family stock, I have been thrown on myself; the result is
that, though as clever as my fellows, I have narrowly shunned
starvation,—had my wants been less simple, there would have been no
shunning in the case; but a man is not easily starved who drinks
water, and eats by the ounce. A more effectual fate might have
befallen me. Disappointment, wrath, baffled hope, mortified pride,
all these, which gnawed at my heart, might have consumed it long
ago; I might have fretted away as a garment which the moth eateth,
had it not been for that fund of obstinate and iron hardness which
nature—I beg pardon, there is no nature—circumstance bestowed upon
me. This has borne me up, and will bear me yet through time and
shame and bodily weakness and mental fever, until my ambition has
won a certain height, and my disdain of human pettiness rioted in
the external sources of fortune, as well as an inward fountain of
bitter and self-fed consolation. Yet, oh, Julia! I know not if
even this would have supported me, if at that epoch of life, when I
was most wounded, most stricken in body, most soured in mind, my
heart had not met and fastened itself to yours. I saw you, loved
you; and life became to me a new object. Even now, as I write to
you, all my bitterness, my pride, vanish; everything I have longed
for disappears; my very ambition is gone. I have no hope but for
you, Julia; beautiful, adored Julia! when I love you, I love even my
kind. Oh, you know not the power you possess over me! Do not
betray it; you can yet make me all that my boyhood once dreamed, or
you can harden every thought, feeling, sensation, into stone.
................
“I was to tell you why I look not for happiness in our union. You
have now seen my nature. You have traced the history of my life, by
tracing the history of my character. You see what I surrender in
gaining you. I do not deny the sacrifice. I surrender the very
essentials of my present mind and soul. I cease to be worldly. I
cannot raise myself, I cannot revive my ancestral name; nay, I shall
relinquish it forever. I shall adopt a disguised appellation. I
shall sink into another grade of life. In some remote village, by
means of some humbler profession than that I now follow, we must
earn our subsistence, and smile at ambition. I tell you frankly,
Julia, when I close the eyes of my heart, when I shut you from my
gaze, this sacrifice appalls me. But even then you force yourself
before me, and I feel that one glance from your eye is more to me
than all. If you could bear with me,—if you could soothe me,—if
when a cloud is on me you could suffer it to pass away unnoticed,
and smile on me the moment it is gone,—O Julia! there would be then
no extreme of poverty, no abasement of fortune, no abandonment of
early dreams which would not seem to me rapture if coupled with the
bliss of knowing that you are mine. Never should my lip, never
should my eye tell you that there is that thing on earth for which I
repine or which I could desire. No, Julia, could I flatter my heart
with this hope, you would not find me dream of unhappiness and you
united. But I tremble, Julia, when I think of your temper and my
own; you will conceive a gloomy look from one never mirthful is an
insult, and you will feel every vent of passion on Fortune or on
others as a reproach to you. Then, too, you cannot enter into my
nature; you cannot descend into its caverns; you cannot behold, much
less can you deign to lull, the exacting and lynx-eyed jealousy that
dwells there. Sweetest Julia! every breath of yours, every touch of
yours, every look of yours, I yearn for beyond all a mother's
longing for the child that has been torn from her for years. Your
head leaned upon an old tree (do you remember it, near ———?), and
I went every day, after seeing you, to kiss it. Do you wonder that
I am jealous? How can I love you as I do and be otherwise! My
whole being is intoxicated with you!
................
“This then, your pride and mine, your pleasure in the admiration of
others, your lightness, Julia, make me foresee an eternal and
gushing source of torture to my mind. I care not; I care for
nothing so that you are mine, if but for one hour.”
It seems that, despite the strange, sometimes the unloverlike and fiercely selfish nature of these letters from Brandon, something of a genuine tone of passion,—perhaps their originality,—aided, no doubt, by some uttered eloquence of the writer and some treacherous inclination on the part of the mistress, ultimately conquered; and that a union so little likely to receive the smile of a prosperous star was at length concluded. The letter which terminated the correspondence was from Brandon: it was written on the evening before the marriage, which, it appeared by the same letter, was to be private and concealed. After a rapturous burst of hope and joy, it continued thus:—
“Yes, Julia, I recant my words; I have no belief that you or I shall
ever have cause hereafter for unhappiness. Those eyes that dwelt so
tenderly on mine; that hand whose pressure lingers yet in every
nerve of my frame; those lips turned so coyly, yet, shall I say,
reluctantly from me,—all tell me that you love me; and my fears are
banished. Love, which conquered my nature, will conquer the only
thing I would desire to see altered in yours. Nothing could ever
make me adore you less, though you affect to dread it,—nothing but
a knowledge that you are unworthy of me, that you have a thought for
another; then I should not hate you. No; the privilege of my past
existence would revive; I should revel in a luxury of contempt, I
should despise you, I should mock you, and I should be once more
what I was before I knew you. But why do I talk thus? My bride,
my blessing, forgive me!”
In concluding our extracts from this correspondence, we wish the reader to note, first, that the love professed by Brandon seems of that vehement and corporeal nature which, while it is often the least durable, is often the most susceptible of the fiercest extremes of hatred or even of disgust; secondly, that the character opened by this sarcastic candour evidently required in a mistress either an utter devotion or a skilful address; and thirdly, that we have hinted at such qualities in the fair correspondent as did not seem sanguinely to promise either of these essentials.
While with a curled yet often with a quivering lip the austere and sarcastic Brandon slowly compelled himself to the task of proceeding through these monuments of former folly and youthful emotion, the further elucidation of those events, now rapidly urging on a fatal and dread catastrophe, spreads before us a narrative occurring many years prior to the time at which we are at present arrived.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
Clem. Lift the dark veil of years! Behind, what waits?
A human heart. Vast city, where reside
All glories and all vilenesses; while foul,
Yet silent, through the roar of passions rolls
The river of the Darling Sin, and bears
A life and yet a poison on its tide.
..............
Clem. Thy wife?
Vict. Avaunt! I've changed that word to “scorn”!
Clem. Thy child?
Vict. Ay, that strikes home,—my child, my child!
Love and Hatred, by ————