“Or, if not—why, then, believe that all search is hopeless. My friend! if you mean Lord L’Estrange, he is innocent. I—I—I—(the voice faltered)—am convinced of it.”
The curate sighed, but made no answer. “Oh, ye men of the world!” thought he. He gave the address which the member for Lansmere had asked for, and went his way, and never heard again from Audley Egerton. He was convinced that the man who had showed such deep feeling had failed in his appeal to Harley’s conscience, or had judged it best to leave Nora’s name in peace, and her child to her own relations and the care of heaven.
Harley L’Estrange, scarcely yet recovered, hastened to join our armies on the Continent, and seek the Death which, like its half-brother, rarely comes when we call it.
As soon as Harley was gone, Egerton went to the village to which Mr Dale had directed him, to seek for Nora’s child. But here he was led into a mistake which materially affected the tenor of his own life, and Leonard’s future destinies. Mrs Fairfield had been naturally ordered by her mother to take another name in the village to which she had gone with the two infants, so that her connexion with the Avenel family might not be traced, to the provocation of inquiry and gossip. The grief and excitement through which she had gone dried the source of nutriment in her breast. She put Nora’s child out to nurse at the house of a small farmer, at a little distance from the village, and moved from her first lodging to be nearer to the infant. Her own child was so sickly and ailing, that she could not bear to intrust it to the care of another. She tried to bring it up by hand; and the poor child soon pined away and died. She and Mark could not endure the sight of their baby’s grave; they hastened to return to Hazeldean, and took Leonard with them. From that time Leonard passed for the son they had lost.
When Egerton arrived at the village, and inquired for the person whose address had been given to him, he was referred to the cottage in which she had last lodged, and was told that she had been gone some days—the day after her child was buried. Her child buried! Egerton staid to inquire no more; thus he heard nothing of the infant that had been put out to nurse. He walked slowly into the churchyard, and stood for some minutes gazing on the small new mound; then, pressing his hand on the heart to which all emotion had been forbidden, he re-entered his chaise and returned to London. The sole reason for acknowledging his marriage seemed to him now removed. Nora’s name had escaped reproach. Even had his painful position with regard to Harley not constrained him to preserve his secret, there was every motive to the World’s wise and haughty son not to acknowledge a derogatory and foolish marriage, now that none lived whom concealment could wrong.
Audley mechanically resumed his former life,—sought to resettle his thoughts on the grand objects of ambitious men. His poverty still pressed on him; his pecuniary debt to Harley stung and galled his peculiar sense of honour. He saw no way to clear his estates, to repay his friend, but by some rich alliance. Dead to love, he faced this prospect first with repugnance, then with apathetic indifference. Levy, of whose treachery towards himself and Nora he was unaware, still held over him the power that the money-lender never loses over the man that has owed, owes, or may owe again. Levy was ever urging him to propose to the rich Miss Leslie;—Lady Lansmere, willing to atone, as she thought, for his domestic loss, urged the same;—Harley, influenced by his mother, wrote from the Continent to the same effect.
“Manage it as you will,” at last said Egerton to Levy, “so that I am not a wife’s pensioner.”
“Propose for me if you will,” he said to Lady Lansmere—“I cannot woo—I cannot talk of love.”
Somehow or other the marriage, with all its rich advantages to the ruined gentleman, was thus made up. And Egerton, as we have seen, was the polite and dignified husband before the world—married to a woman who adored him. It is the common fate of men like him to be loved too well!
On her deathbed his heart was touched by his wife’s melancholy reproach—“Nothing I could do has ever made you love me!” “It is true,” answered Audley, with tears in his voice and eyes—“Nature gave me but a small fund of what women like you call ‘love,’ and I lavished it all away.” And he then told her, though with reserve, some portion of his former history;—and that soothed her; for when she saw that he had loved, and could grieve, she caught a glimpse of the human heart she had not seen before. She died, forgiving him, and blessing.