She paused between the two last words, and their imploring accent was almost piteous. There must have been a strange fascination about Livingstone, for, saint as she was, no other living creature would have won such a concession from the Christian charity of Constance Brandon.
Had Guy spoken then, as he ought to have done, I believe all might have been amended; but an angry devil was busy within him, and would not let go his prey; he stood with his black brows downcast, and with folded arms, never seeming to notice the slender fingers that sought to touch his hand. True it is that nothing makes a man so unforgiving as the consciousness of having inflicted a bitter wrong. He heard a sigh, heavy and despairing as Francesca's when her dying prayer was spurned, a light shadow flitted across the streak of moonlit grass, and, when he raised his head, he was left alone, like Alp on the sea-shore, to judge the battle between a remorseful conscience and a hardened heart.
Livingstone was seen no more that night; Constance glided in alone, and her absence had been scarcely noticed. During the short time that she remained, no one could have guessed from her face that her heart was broken, any more than did Napoleon that the aid-de-camp who brought the news of Lannes' victory had been almost cut in two by a grape-shot.
I speak it diffidently, with the fear of the divine voice of the people before my eyes, as is but fitting in these equalizing days, when territories, the title to which is possession immemorial, are being plucked away acre by acre, and hereditary privileges mined one by one; but it seems to me, in this, perhaps, solitary attribute, "the brave old houses" still keep their pre-eminence.
They are not better, nor wiser in their generation (forbid it, Manchester!), nor even more daring in confronting danger than the thousands whose grandsires are creations of a powerful fancy or of a complaisant king-at-arms. In that terrible charge which swept away the Russian cavalry at Eylau, three lengths in front of the best blood in France rode the innkeeper's son. The "First Grenadier" himself was not more splendidly reckless, though he was a La Tour d'Auvergne. But in passive uncomplaining endurance, in the power of obliterating outward tokens of suffering, physical or mental, may we not still say, Noblesse oblige?
Hundreds of similar isolated instances may be quoted from the annals of the Third Estate; but, in the class I speak of, this quality seems a sixth sense wholly independent of, and often contradicting the rest of the individual's disposition.
I remember meeting in France an old Italian refugee. He had not much principle and very little pride; he was ready quidvis facere aut pati to get a five-franc piece, which he would incontinently stake and lose at baccarat or ecarté, as he had done aforetime with a large ancestral inheritance; but his quiet fortitude under privations that were neither few nor light was worthy of Belisarius.
Very often, I am sure, his evening meal must have been eaten with the Barmecide; but his pale, handsome face, finished off so gracefully by the white, pointed beard, still met you, courteous and unruffled, the idea of an exiled doge, or a Rohan in disgrace. Once only I saw him moved—when the landlord of our inn, a vast bloated bourgeois, smote the Count familiarly on the shoulder, and bantered him pleasantly on the brilliant prospects of his eldest son. It was not unkindly meant, perhaps, but the old man shrunk away from the large fat hand as if it hurt him, and turned toward us a look piteously appealing, which was not lost on myself or Livingstone. When mine host, later in the evening, shook in his gouty slippers before an ebullition of Guy's wrath, excited by the most shadowy pretext, I wonder if he guessed at the remote cause of that outpouring of the vials? Count Massa did, for he smiled intensely, as only an Italian can smile when amply revenged.
One instance more to close a long digression. I have read of a baron in the fifteenth century who once in his life said a good thing. He was a coarse, brutal marauder, illiterate enough to have satisfied Earl Angus, and as unromantic as the Integral Calculus. He was mortally wounded in a skirmish; and when his men came back from the pursuit, he was bleeding to death, resting against a tree. When they lifted him up, they noticed his eyes fixed with a curious, complacent expression on the red stream that surged and gurgled out of his wound, just as a gourmand looks at a bumper of a rare vintage held up to the light. They heard him growl to himself, "Qu'il coule rouge et fort, le bon vieux sang de Bourgogne." And then he fell back—dead.
O Publicola Thompson! Ph[=o]sphor to the Tower Hamlets and Boanerges of the platform—will you not allow that, amid a wilderness of weeds, this one fair plant flourishes under "the cold shade?"