He leaped into the street, and the father drew in the outstretched arms, smote his heart, and said: “Well, then, my task in the world of man is over! I will back to the old ruin,—the wreck to the wrecks; and the sight of tombs I have at least rescued from dishonor shall comfort me for all!”
CHAPTER VII.
The Results.—Perverted Ambition.—Selfish Passion.—The Intellect Distorted by the Crookedness of the Heart.
Vivian’s schemes thus prospered. He had an income that permitted him the outward appearances of a gentleman,—an independence modest, indeed, but independence still. We were all gone from London. One letter to me with the postmark of the town near which Colonel Vivian lived, sufficed to confirm my belief in his parentage and in his return to his friends. He then presented himself to Trevanion as the young man whose pen I had employed in the member’s service; and knowing that I had never mentioned his name to Trevanion,—for without Vivian’s permission I should not, considering his apparent trust in me, have deemed myself authorized to do so,—he took that of Gower, which he selected, haphazard, from an old Court Guide as having the advantage—in common with most names borne by the higher nobility of England—of not being confined, as the ancient names of untitled gentlemen usually are, to the members of a single family. And when, with his wonted adaptability and suppleness, he had contrived to lay aside or smooth over whatever in his manners would be calculated to displease Trevanion, and had succeeded in exciting the interest which that generous statesman always conceived for ability, he owned candidly one day, in the presence of Lady Ellinor,—for, his experience had taught him the comparative ease with which the sympathy of woman is enlisted in anything that appeals to the imagination, or seems out of the ordinary beat of life,—that he had reasons for concealing his connections for the present; that he had cause to believe I suspected what they were, and, from mistaken regard for his welfare, might acquaint his relations with his whereabout. He therefore begged Trevanion, if the latter had occasion to write to me, not to mention him. This promise Trevanion gave, though reluctantly,—for the confidence volunteered to him seemed to exact the promise; but as he detested mystery of all kinds, the avowal might have been fatal to any further acquaintance, and under auspices so doubtful, there would have been no chance of his obtaining that intimacy in Trevanion’s house which he desired to establish, but for an accident which at once opened that house to him almost as a home.
Vivian had always treasured a lock of his mother’s hair, cut off on her death-bed; and when he was at his French tutor’s, his first pocket-money had been devoted to the purchase of a locket, on which he had caused to be inscribed his own name and his mother’s. Through all his wanderings he had worn this relic; and in the direst pangs of want, no hunger had been keen enough to induce him to part with it. Now, one morning, the ribbon that suspended the locket gave way, and his eye resting on the names inscribed on the gold, he thought, in his own vague sense of right, imperfect as it was, that his compact with his father obliged him to have the names erased. He took it to a jeweller in Piccadilly for that purpose, and gave the requisite order, not taking notice of a lady in the farther part of the shop. The locket was still on the counter after Vivian had left, when the lady, coming forward, observed it, and saw the names on the surface. She had been struck by the peculiar tone of the voice, which she had heard before; and that very day Mr. Gower received a note from Lady Ellinor Trevanion, requesting to see him. Much wondering, he went. Presenting him with the locket, she said smiling, “There is only one gentleman in the world who calls himself De Caxton, unless it be his son. Ah! I see now why you wished to conceal yourself from my friend Pisistratus. But how is this? Can you have any difference with your father? Confide in me, or it is my duty to write to him.”
Even Vivian’s powers of dissimulation abandoned him, thus taken by surprise. He saw no alternative but to trust Lady Ellinor with his secret, and implore her to respect it. And then he spoke bitterly of his father’s dislike to him, and his own resolution to prove the injustice of that dislike by the position he would himself establish in the world. At present his father believed him dead, and perhaps was not ill-pleased to think so. He would not dispel that belief till he could redeem any boyish errors, and force his family to be proud to acknowledge him.
Though Lady Ellinor was slow to believe that Roland could dislike his son, she could yet readily believe that he was harsh and choleric, with a soldier’s high notions of discipline; the young man’s story moved her, his determination pleased her own high spirit. Always with a touch of romance in her, and always sympathizing with each desire of ambition, she entered into Vivian’s aspirations with an alacrity that surprised himself. She was charmed with the idea of ministering to the son’s fortunes, and ultimately reconciling him to the father,—through her own agency; it would atone for any fault of which Roland could accuse herself in the old time.
She undertook to impart the secret to Trevanion, for she would have no secrets from him, and to secure his acquiescence in its concealment from all others.
And here I must a little digress from the chronological course of my explanatory narrative to inform the reader that when Lady Ellinor had her interview with Roland, she had been repelled by the sternness of his manner from divulging Vivian’s secret. But on her first attempt to sound or conciliate him, she had begun with some eulogies on Trevanion’s new friend and assistant, Mr. Gower, and had awakened Roland’s suspicions of that person’s identity with his son,—suspicions which had given him a terrible interest in our joint deliverance of Miss Trevanion. But so heroically had the poor soldier sought to resist his own fears, that on the way he shrank to put to me the questions that might paralyze the energies which, whatever the answer, were then so much needed. “For,” said he to my father, “I felt the blood surging to my temples; and if I had said to Pisistratus, ‘Describe this man,’ and by his description I had recognized my son, and dreaded lest I might be too late to arrest him from so treacherous a crime, my brain would have given way,—and so I did not dare!”