The Disowned — Complete

by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton

“I know not,” said Mordaunt, with a melancholy smile, “whether you judge rightly in thinking the sphere of political exertion the one most calculated for me; but I feel at my heart a foreboding that my planet is not fated to shine in any earthly sphere. Sorrow and misfortune have dimmed it in its birth, and now it is waning towards its decline.”

“Its decline!” repeated his companion, “no, rather its meridian. You are in the vigor of your years, the noon of your prosperity, the height of your intellect and knowledge; you require only an effort to add to these blessings the most lasting of all,—Fame!”

“Well,” said Mordaunt, and a momentary light flashed over his countenance, “the effort will be made. I do not pretend not to have felt ambition. No man should make it his boast, for it often gives to our frail and earth-bound virtue both its weapon and its wings; but when the soil is exhausted its produce fails; and when we have forced our hearts to too great an abundance, whether it be of flowers that perish or of grain that endures, the seeds of after hope bring forth but a languid and scanty harvest. My earliest idol was ambition; but then came others, love and knowledge, and afterwards the desire to bless. That desire you may term ambition: but we will suppose them separate passions; for by the latter I would signify the thirst for glory, either in evil or in good; and the former teaches us, though by little and little, to gain its object, no less in secrecy than for applause; and Wisdom, which opens to us a world, vast, but hidden from the crowd, establishes also over that world an arbiter of its own, so that its disciples grow proud, and, communing with their own hearts, care for no louder judgment than the still voice within. It is thus that indifference not to the welfare but to the report of others grows over us; and often, while we are the most ardent in their cause, we are the least anxious for their esteem.”

“And yet,” said Lord Ulswater, “I have thought the passion for esteem is the best guarantee for deserving it.”

“Nor without justice: other passions may supply its place, and produce the same effects; but the love of true glory is the most legitimate agent of extensive good, and you do right to worship and enshrine it. For me it is dead: it Survived—ay, the truth shall out!—poverty, want, disappointment, baffled aspirations,—all, all, but the deadness, the lethargy of regret when no one was left upon this altered earth to animate its efforts, to smile upon its success, then the last spark quivered and died; and—and—but forgive me—on this subject I am not often wont to wander. I would say that ambition is for me no more; not so are its effects: but the hope of serving that race whom I have loved as brothers, but who have never known me,—who, by the exterior” (and here something bitter mingled with his voice), “pass sentence upon the heart; in whose eyes I am only the cold, the wayward, the haughty, the morose,—the hope of serving them is to me, now, a far stronger passion than ambition was heretofore; and whatever for that end the love of fame would have dictated, the love of mankind will teach me still more ardently to perform.”

They were now upon the bridge. Pausing, they leaned over, and looked along the scene before them. Dark and hushed, the river flowed sullenly on, save where the reflected stars made a tremulous and broken beam on the black surface of the water, or the lights of the vast City, which lay in shadow on its banks, scattered at capricious intervals a pale but unpiercing wanness rather than lustre along the tide, or save where the stillness was occasionally broken by the faint oar of the boatman or the call of his rude voice, mellowed almost into music by distance and the element.

But behind them, as they leaned, the feet of passengers on the great thoroughfare passed not oft,—but quick; and that sound, the commonest of earth’s, made rarer and rarer by the advancing night, contrasted rather than destroyed the quiet of the heaven and the solemnity of the silent stars.

“It is an old but a just comparison,” said Mordaunt’s companion, “which has likened life to a river such as we now survey, gliding alternately in light or in darkness, in sunshine or in storm, to that great ocean in which all waters meet.”

“If,” said Algernon, with his usual thoughtful and pensive smile, “we may be allowed to vary that simile, I would, separating the universal and eternal course of Destiny from the fleeting generations of human life, compare the river before us to that course, and not it, but the city scattered on its banks, to the varieties and mutability of life. There (in the latter) crowded together in the great chaos of social union, we herd in the night of ages, flinging the little lustre of our dim lights over the sullen tide which rolls beside us,—seeing the tremulous ray glitter on the surface, only to show us how profound is the gloom which it cannot break, and the depths which it is too faint to pierce. There Crime stalks, and Woe hushes her moan, and Poverty couches, and Wealth riots,—and Death, in all and each, is at his silent work. But the stream of Fate, unconscious of our changes and decay, glides on to its engulfing bourne; and, while it mirrors the faintest smile or the lightest frown of heaven, beholds, without a change upon its surface, the generations of earth perish, and be renewed, along its banks!”

There was a pause; and by an involuntary and natural impulse, they turned from the waves beneath to the heaven which, in its breathing contrast, spread all eloquently, yet hushed, above. They looked upon the living and intense stars, and felt palpably at their hearts that spell—wild, but mute—which nothing on or of earth can inspire; that pining of the imprisoned soul, that longing after the immortality on high, which is perhaps no imaginary type of the immortality ourselves are heirs to.