“Everybody marries except myself,” said Lothair, rather peevishly.
“But your lordship is too young to think of that yet,” said Mr. Putney Giles.
“I feel very old,” said Lothair.
At this moment there arrived a note from Bertram, saying his mother was quite surprised and disappointed that Lothair had not asked to see her in the morning. She had expected him, as a matter of course, at luncheon, and begged that he would come on the morrow.
“I have had many pleasant luncheons in that house,” said Lothair, “but this will be the last. When all the daughters are married, nobody eats luncheon.”
“That would hardly apply to this family,” said Mr. Putney Giles, who always affected to know every thing, and generally did. “They are so united, that I fancy the famous luncheons at Crecy House will always go on, and be a popular mode of their all meeting.”
“I half agree with St. Aldegonde,” said Lothair, grumbling to himself, “that if one is to meet that Duke of Brecon every day at luncheon, for my part I had rather stay away.”
In the course of the evening there also arrived invitations to all the impending balls and assemblies, for Lothair; and there seemed little prospect of his again being forced to dine with his faithful solicitor as a refuge from melancholy.
On the morrow he went in his brougham to Crecy House, and he had such a palpitation of the heart when he arrived, that, for a moment, he absolutely thought he must retire. His mind was full of Jerusalem, the Mount of Olives, and the Sea of Galilee. He was never nervous there, never agitated, never harassed, no palpitations of the heart, no dread suspense. There was repose alike of body and soul. Why did he ever leave Palestine and Paraclete? He should have remained in Syria forever, cherishing, in a hallowed scene, a hallowed sorrow, of which even the bitterness was exalted and ennobling.
He stood for a moment in the great hall at Crecy House, and the groom of the chambers in vain solicited his attention. It was astonishing how much passed through his mind while the great clock hardly described sixty seconds. But in that space he had reviewed his life, arrived at the conclusion that all was vanity and bitterness, that he had failed in every thing, was misplaced, had no object and no hope, and that a distant and unbroken solitude in some scene, where either the majesty of Nature was overwhelming, or its moral associations were equally sublime, must be his only refuge. In the meditation of the Cosmos, or in the divine reverie of sacred lands, the burden of existence might be endured.