The illness of my uncle, and my renewed acquaintance with Vivian, had naturally sufficed to draw my thoughts from the rash and unpropitious love I had conceived for Fanny Trevanion. During the absence of the family from London, (and they stayed some time longer than had been expected,) I had leisure, however, to recall my father's touching history, and the moral it had so obviously preached to me; and I formed so many good resolutions, that it was with an untrembling hand that I welcomed Miss Trevanion at last to London, and with a firm heart that I avoided, as much as possible, the fatal charm of her society. The slow convalescence of my uncle gave me a just excuse for discontinuing our rides. What time Trevanion spared me, it was natural that I should spend with my family. I went to no balls or parties. I even absented myself from Trevanion's periodical dinners. Miss Trevanion at first rallied me on my seclusion with her usual lively malice. But I continued worthily to complete my martyrdom. I took care that no reproachful look at the gaiety that wrung my soul should betray my secret. Then Fanny seemed either hurt or disdainful, and avoided altogether entering her father's study; all at once, she changed her tactics, and was seized with a strange desire for knowledge, which brought her into the room to look for a book, or ask a question, ten times a-day. I was proof to all. But, to speak truth, I was profoundly wretched. Looking back now, I am dismayed at the remembrance of my own sufferings: my health became seriously affected; I dreaded alike the trial of the day and the anguish of the night. My only distractions were in my visits to Vivian, and my escape to the dear circle of home. And that home was my safeguard and preservative in that crisis of my life. Its atmosphere of unpretending honour and serene virtue strengthened all my resolutions; it braced me for my struggles against the strongest passion which youth admits, and counteracted the evil vapours of that air in which Vivian's envenomed spirit breathed and moved. Without the influence of such a home, if I had succeeded in the conduct that probity enjoined towards those in whose house I was a trusted guest, I do not think I could have resisted the contagion of that malign and morbid bitterness against fate and the world which love, thwarted by fortune, is too inclined of itself to conceive, and in the expression of which Vivian was not without the eloquence that belongs to earnestness, whether in truth or falsehood. But, somehow or other, I never left the little room that contained the grand suffering in the face of the veteran soldier, whose lip, often quivering with anguish, was never heard to murmur; and the tranquil wisdom which had succeeded my father's early trials, (trials like my own,) and the loving smile on my mother's tender face, and the innocent childhood of Blanche, (by which name the Elf had familiarised herself to us,) whom I already loved as a sister,—without feeling that those four walls contained enough to sweeten the world, had it been filled to its capacious brim with gall and hyssop.
Trevanion had been more than satisfied with Vivian's performance—he had been struck with it. For though the corrections in the mere phraseology had been very limited, they went beyond verbal amendments—they suggested such words as improved the thoughts; and, besides that notable correction of an arithmetical error, which Trevanion's mind was formed to over-appreciate, one or two brief annotations on the margin were boldly hazarded, prompting some stronger link in a chain of reasoning, or indicating the necessity for some further evidence in the assertion of a statement. And all this from the mere natural and naked logic of an acute mind, unaided by the smallest knowledge of the subject treated of! Trevanion threw quite enough work into Vivian's hands, and at a remuneration sufficiently liberal to realise my promise of an independence. And more than once he asked me to introduce to him my friend. But this I continued to elude—heaven knows, not from jealousy, but simply because I feared that Vivian's manner and way of talk would singularly displease one who detested presumption, and understood no eccentricities but his own.
Still Vivian, whose industry was of a strong wing, but only for short flights, had not enough to employ more than a few hours of his day, and I dreaded lest he should, from very idleness, fall back into old habits, and reseek old friendships. His cynical candour allowed that both were sufficiently disreputable to justify grave apprehensions of such a result; accordingly, I contrived to find leisure in my evenings to lessen his ennui, by accompanying him in rambles through the gas-lit streets, or occasionally, for an hour or so, to one of the theatres.
Vivian's first care, on finding himself rich enough, had been bestowed on his person; and those two faculties of observation and imitation which minds so ready always eminently possess, had enabled him to achieve that graceful neatness of costume peculiar to the English gentleman. For the first few days of his metamorphosis, traces indeed of a constitutional love of show, or vulgar companionship, were noticeable; but one by one they disappeared. First went a gaudy neckcloth, with collars turned down; then a pair of spurs vanished; and lastly, a diabolical instrument that he called a cane—but which, by means of a running bullet, could serve as a bludgeon at one end, and concealed a dagger in the other—subsided into the ordinary walking-stick adapted to our peaceable metropolis. A similar change, though in a less degree, gradually took place in his manner and conversation. He grew less abrupt in the one, and more calm, perhaps more cheerful, in the other. It was evident that he was not insensible to the elevated pleasure of providing for himself by praiseworthy exertion—of feeling for the first time that his intellect was of use to him, creditably. A new world, though still dim—seen through mist and fog, began to dawn upon him.
Such is the vanity of us poor mortals, that my interest in Vivian was probably increased, and my aversion to much in him materially softened, by observing that I had gained a sort of ascendency over his savage nature. When we had first met by the roadside, and afterwards conversed in the churchyard, the ascendency was certainly not on my side. But I now came from a larger sphere of society than that in which he had yet moved. I had seen and listened to the first men in England. What had then dazzled me only, now moved my pity. On the other hand, his active mind could not but observe the change in me; and, whether from envy or a better feeling, he was willing to learn from me how to eclipse me, and resume his earlier superiority—not to be superior chafed him. Thus he listened to me with docility when I pointed out the books which connected themselves with the various subjects incidental to the miscellaneous matters on which he was employed. Though he had less of the literary turn of mind than any one equally clever I have ever met, and had read little, considering the quantity of thought he had acquired, and the show he made of the few works (chiefly plays) with which he had voluntarily made himself familiar, he yet resolutely sate himself down to study; and though it was clearly against the grain, I augured the more favourably from tokens of a determination to do what was at the present irksome for a purpose in the future. Yet, whether I should have approved the purpose—had I thoroughly understood it—is another question! There were abysses, both in his past life and in his character, which I could not penetrate. There was in him both a reckless frankness and a vigilant reserve. His frankness was apparent in his talk on all matters immediately before us; in the utter absence of all effort to make himself seem better than he was. His reserve was equally shown in the ingenious evasion of every species of confidence that could admit me into such secrets of his life as he chose to conceal: where he had been born, reared, and educated; how he came to be thrown on his own resources; how he had contrived, how he had subsisted, were all matters on which he seemed to have taken an oath to Harpocrates, the god of silence. And yet he was full of anecdotes of what he had seen, of strange companions, whom he never named, but into whose society he had been thrown. And, to do him justice, I remarked that, though his precocious experience seemed to have been gathered from the holes and corners, the sewers and drains of life, and though he seemed wholly without dislike to dishonesty, and to regard virtue or vice with as serene an indifference as some grand poet who views them both merely as ministrants to his art, yet he never betrayed any positive breach of honesty in himself. He could laugh over the story of some ingenious fraud that he had witnessed, and seem insensible to its turpitude; but he spoke of it in the tone of an unreproving witness, not of an actual accomplice. As we grew more intimate, he felt gradually, however, that pudor, or instinctive shame, which the contact with minds habituated to the distinctions between wrong and right unconsciously produces,—and such stories ceased. He never but once mentioned his family, and that was in the following odd and abrupt manner,—
"Ah!" cried he one day, stopping suddenly before a print-shop, "how that reminds me of my dear, dear mother."
"Which?" said I eagerly, puzzled between an engraving of Raffaelle's "Madonna," and another of "The Brigand's Wife."
Vivian did not satisfy my curiosity, but drew me on in spite of my reluctance.
"You loved your mother, then?" said I, after a pause.
"Yes, as a whelp may a tigress."