“Bless my soul! is it possible?”
“Too true, indeed. You now perceive in what embarrassing circumstances I was placed. This pretty girl on my hands, with her immense and unencumbered property; nothing short of the utmost prudence and energy on my part could save her from being the prey of fortune-hunters (alas! for poor human nature!—the lady uttered this without a blush)—rest assured, Jasper, that nothing would have induced me in these perilous times to cross the Atlantic, but my duty to my orphan niece.”
“And the remote prospect of benefiting me, my dear mother.”
Mrs. Meredith was too intent on the interesting subject upon which she was entering, to notice the sarcasm her son had not the grace to suppress. “I had my anxieties,” she continued, “I frankly confess to you, I had my anxieties before 378I arrived about Miss Linwood, and—some few I have had since—”
Mrs. Meredith paused and fixed her eyes on Jasper. “On my honour you have not the slightest ground for them,” he said.
She proceeded. “Miss Linwood is in some respects a superior young person—she has not the—the—the talent of Helen Ruthven—nor the—the—the grace of Lady Anne (no wonder the perplexed diplomatist hesitated for a comparative that should place Isabella Linwood below these young ladies); but, as I said, she is a superior young person—a remarkable looking person, certainly; at least, she is generally thought so. I do not particularly like her style—tenderness and manageableness, like our dear Anne’s, are particularly becoming in a female. Miss Linwood is too lofty—one does not feel quite comfortable with her. On the whole, I consider it quite fortunate you did not form an attachment in that quarter—prudence must be consulted—not that I would be swayed by prudential considerations—certainly not—no one thinks more than I do of the heart; but when, as in your case, Jasper, the taste and affections accord with a wise consideration of—of—”
“Fortune, my dear mother?”
“Yes, Jasper, frankly, fortune—I esteem it a remarkably happy circumstance. Your own fortune may or may not be large. The American portion of it depends upon contingencies, and therefore it would have been rash for you to have encumbered yourself with a ruined family; for, as I am informed, the Linwoods have but just enough to subsist decently upon from day to day. It is true, they keep up a respectable appearance. Anne, by-the-way, tells me they get up the most delicious petits soupers there. It is amazing what pride will do!—what sacrifices some people make to appearances!”
379“There must be something else than mere table luxuries to make these suppers so attractive to my cousin.”
“Undoubtedly; for as to that, you know, we have every thing that money can purchase in this demi-savage country; to be sure, Anne might have a foolish, girlish liking for Miss Linwood, but then I am quite confident—I hesitate, for if there is any thing on which I pride myself, it is being scrupulous towards my own sex in affairs of the heart; but I betray nothing, for though you are perfectly free from coxcombry, you are not blind, and you must have seen—”
“Not seen, but hoped, my dear mother,” replied Meredith, with a smile that indicated assurance doubly sure.
“Hope is the fitting word for you—but your hope may be my certainty. I betray no secrets. Anne has not been confidential, but the dear child is so transparent—”
“She seems, however, to have been rather opaque in this Linwood attachment.”
“Yes, I confess myself baffled there—you may have opened a vein of coquetry, Jasper. I know not what it means, but it can mean nothing to alarm us. It is very odd, though—there is nothing there to gratify her, and every thing here. This very evening Governor Tryon called with the young prince, to propose to get up a concert for her. By-the-way, a pretty youth is Prince William!—he left this bouquet for Lady Anne. The honourable Mr. Barton and Sir Reginald were here too, and the Higbys—and there she is, mewed up with that old fretful Mr. Linwood. She must think, Jasper, you are not sufficiently devoted to her.”
“She shall not think so in future.”
“Hark, there is the carriage!—I sent her word that I was not well. In truth, her absence has teased me into a headache, and my own room will be the best place for me.” Thus concluding her tedious harangue, the lady made a hasty retreat; and before Lady Anne had exchanged a salutation with Meredith, 380and thrown aside her hat and cloak, her aunt’s maid appeared with a message from this “frank” lady, importing her sense of Lady Anne’s kindness in coming home, and informing her that prudence obliged her to abstain from seeing her niece till morning.
“I am very sorry!” said Lady Anne, heaving a deep sigh, sinking down in the arm-chair her aunt had just left, resting her elbow on it, and looking pensively in the fire.
“You need not be so deeply concerned, my kind cousin; my mother is not very ill,” said Meredith, with difficulty forbearing a laugh at the disparity between the cause and the effect on his apparently sympathizing cousin.
“Ill!” exclaimed Lady Anne, starting, “I did not suppose that she was ill.”
“Then why, in the name of Heaven, that deep sigh?”
“There are many causes of sighs, cousin Jasper.”
“To you, Lady Anne, so young, so gifted, so lovely, so beloved.”
“That should be happiness!” she replied, covering her face with her hands to hide the tears that, in spite of all the anti-crying tendencies of her nature, gushed from her eyes.
“Those dimpled hands,” thought Meredith, “hiding so childishly her melting face, might move an anchoret; but they move not me. I am too pampered—to know that I have been loved by Isabella Linwood, with all the bitter, cursed mortification that attends it, is worth a world of such triumphs as this. Poor Bessie—I remember too! but, allons, I will take the good ‘the gods provide,’ since I cannot have that which they deny. Cousin—”
“Did you speak to me, Jasper?”
“Now, by my life,” thought Meredith, “my words are congealed—they will not flow to such willing ears.”
“I am playing the fool,” exclaimed Lady Anne, suddenly rising and dashing off her tears. “Good night, Jasper—I have 381betrayed myself—no, no, I did not mean that—pray forget my weakness—I am nervous this evening for the first time in my life, and I know nothing of managing nerves—good night, Jasper!”
Meredith seized her hand and held her back. “Indeed, my sweet coz, you must not go now.”
“Must not go! Why not?” she replied, excessively puzzled by the expressive smile that hovered on his lips.
“Why not! Because you are too much of an angel to shut your heart so suddenly against me after allowing me a glimpse at the paradise within.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, now beginning, from Meredith’s manner, and from the well-tutored expression of his most sentimental eyes, to have some dim perception of his meaning, and to be disconcerted by it.
“Dear Anne, did you not, with your own peculiar, enchanting ingenuousness, say you had betrayed yourself? Never was there a sweeter—a more welcome treachery.” He fell on his knee, and pressed her hand to his lips.
“For the love of Heaven, Jasper,” she cried, snatching her hand away, “tell me what I have said or done.”
“Nothing that you should not, dearest cousin; your betrayal, as you called it, was, I know, involuntary, and for that the dearer.”
“Are you in earnest, Jasper?”
“In earnest! most assuredly; and do you, Lady Anne, like all your sex, delight in torturing your captives?—your captive I certainly am, for life.”
The truth was now but too evident to Lady Anne; but she was so unprepared for it, her mind had been so wholly preoccupied, that it seemed to her the marvellous result of some absurd misunderstanding. At first she blushed, and stammered, and then, following her natural bent, laughed merrily.
382To Meredith, this appeared a childish artifice to shelter her mortification at having made, in military phrase, a first demonstration. His interest was stimulated by this slight obstacle; and r
allying all his powers, he began a passionate declaration in the good set terms “in such cases made and provided;” but Lady Anne cut him off before he had finished his peroration. “This is a most absurd business, Jasper; I entreat you never to speak of it again. Aunt, or somebody, or something, has misled you—misled you certainly are. I never in my life thought of you in any other light, than as a very agreeable cousin, nor ever shall. I am very sorry for you, Jasper; but really, I am not in fault, for I never, by word or look, could have expressed what I never felt. Good night, Jasper.” She was running away, when she turned back to add, “Pray, say nothing of this to my aunt, and let us meet to-morrow as we have always met before.” She then disappeared, and left Meredith baffled, mortified, irritated, and most thoroughly awakened from his dreams. Her face, voice, and manner, were truth itself; and rapidly reviewing their past intercourse, and carefully weighing the words that had misled him, he came to the conclusion that he had been partly misguided by his mother, and partly the dupe of his previous impressions. The measure of his humiliations was filled up.
But his vanity survived the severe and repeated blows of that evening. Vanity has a wonderful tenacity of life: it resembles those reptiles that feed greedily on every species of food, the most delicate and the grossest, and that can subsist on their own independent vitality.
383CHAPTER XXXV.
“Heart! what’s that?
“Oh, a thing servant-maids have, and break for John the footman.”
If Meredith could have borne off his charming heiress-cousin, his love for Isabella might have gone to the moon, or to any other repository of lost and forgotten things. But, balked in that pursuit, it resumed its empire over him. He passed a feverish, sleepless night, revolving the past, and reconsidering Isabella’s every word and look during their interview of the preceding evening; and finally, he came to a conclusion not unnatural (for few persons give others credit for less of a given infirmity than they themselves possess), that Isabella’s vanity had been wounded by the conviction that she had been, for a time, superseded by Bessie Lee; and that the ground he had thus lost might, by a dexterous manœuvre, be regained. Engrossed with his next move, he appeared at breakfast-table as usual, attentive to his mother, and polite to Lady Anne, who, anxious to express her good-will, was more than ordinarily kind; and Mrs. Meredith concluded that if matters had not gone as far as she had hoped, they were going on swimmingly. The breakfast finished, Lady Anne ran away from her aunt’s annoying devotions to the Linwoods, and Meredith retired to his own room to write, after weighing and sifting each word, the following note to Isabella. He did not send it, however, till he had taken the 384precaution to precede it by a written request to Lady Anne (with whom he had found out too late that honest dealing was far the safest) that she would, on no account—he asked it for her own sake—communicate to any one their parting scene of the preceding evening. His evil star ruled the ascendant, and Lady Anne received the note too late.
To Miss Linwood.
“Montaigne says, and says truly, that ‘toutes passions que se laissent, gouster et digerer ne sont que mediocres;’ but how would he—how shall I characterize a passion which has swallowed up every other passion, desire, and affection of my nature—has grown and thriven upon that which would have seemed fatal to its existence!
“Isabella, these are not hollow phrases; you know they are not; and be not angry at my boldness; I know your heart responds to them, and, though I was stretched on the rack to obtain this knowledge, I thank my tormentors. Yes, by Heaven! I would not exchange that one instant of intoxicating, bewildering joy, when, even in the presence of witnesses, and such witnesses! you confessed you had loved me, for ages of a common existence. Thank Heaven, too, the precious confession was not through the hackneyed medium of words. Such a sentiment is not born in your bosom to die. I judge from my own inferior nature. I have loved on steadily, through absence, coldness, disdain, caprice (pardon me, my proud, my adored Isabella), in spite of the canker and rust of delay after delay; in spite of all the assaults of those temptations to which the young and fortunate are exposed. Can I estimate your heart at a lower rate than my own?
“As to that silly scene last evening, though it stung me at the moment, and goaded me to an unmeaning impertinence, yet, on a review of it, do you not perceive that we were both the dupes of a little dramatic effect? and that there is no reality 385in the matter, except so far as concerns the lost wits of the crazed girl, and the very natural affliction of her well-meaning brother, whose unjust and hasty indignation towards me, being the result of false impressions, I most heartily forgive.
“As to poor Bessie Lee, I can only say, God help her! I am most sincerely sorry for her; but neither you nor I can be surprised that she should be the dupe of her lively imagination, and the victim of her nervous temperament. I ask but one word in reply. Say you will see me at any hour you choose; and, for God’s sake, Isabella, secure our interview from interruption.”
In half an hour, and just as Meredith was sallying forth to allay his restlessness by a walk in the open air, he met his messenger with a note from Miss Linwood. He turned back, entered the unoccupied drawing-room, and read the following:—
“I have received your note, Jasper; I do not reply to it hastily; hours of watchfulness and reflection at the bedside of my friend have given the maturity of years to my present feeling. I have loved you, I confess it now; not by a treacherous blush, but calmly, deliberately, in my own handwriting, without faltering or emotion of any sort. Yes, I have loved you, if a sentiment springing from a most attachable nature, originating in the accidental intercourse of childhood, fostered by pride, nurtured by flattery, and exaggerated by an excited imagination, can be called love.
“I have loved you, if a sentiment struggling with doubt and distrust, seeking for rest and finding none, becoming fainter and fainter in the dawning light of truth, and vanishing, like an exhalation in the full day, can be called love.
“You say truly. Bessie Lee is the dupe of a too lively imagination, and the victim of a nervous temperament. To these you might have added, an exquisitely organized frame, and a conscience 386too susceptible for a creature liable to the mistakes of humanity. Oh, how despicable, how cruel, was the vanity that could risk the happiness of such a creature for its own gratification! I have wept bitterly over her; I should scarcely have pitied her, had she been the unresisting slave and victim of a misplaced and unrequited passion.
“After what I have written, you will perceive that you need neither seek nor avoid an interview with me; that the only emotion you can now excite, is a devout gratitude that our former interviews were interrupted, and circumstances were made strong enough to prevail over my weakness.
“Isabella Linwood.
“P.S.—I have detained my messenger, and opened my note to add, that your cousin has just come in, and with a confidence befitting her frank nature, has communicated to me the farce with which you followed up the tragedy of last evening.”
Meredith felt, what was in truth quite evident, that Isabella Linwood was herself again. He threw the note from him in a paroxysm of vexation, disappointment, and utter and hopeless mortification; and covering his face with his hands, he endured one of those moments that occur even in this life, when the sins, follies, and failures of by-gone years are felt with the vividness and acuteness of the actual and present, and memory and conscience are endued with supernatural energy and retributive power.
What a capacity of penal suffering has the All-wise infused into the moral nature of man, even the weakest!
“The mind is its own place, and in itself,
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
Meredith was roused by the soft fall of a footstep. He started, and saw Helen Ruthven, who had just entered, and 387was in the act of picking up the note he had thrown down. She looked at the superscription, then at Meredith. Her lustrous eyes suffused with tears, and the tears formed into actual drops, and rolled down her cheek
s. “Oh, happy, most happy Isabella Linwood!” she exclaimed. Meredith took the note from her and threw it into the fire. Miss Ruthven stared at him, and lifted up her hands with an unfeigned emotion of astonishment. After a moment’s pause, she added, “I still say, most happy Isabella Linwood. And yet, if she cannot estimate the worth of the priceless kingdom she sways, is she most happy? You do not answer me; and you, of all the world, cannot.” Meredith did not reply by word; but Miss Ruthven’s quick eye perceived the cloud clearing from his brow; and she ventured to try the effect of a stronger light. “I cannot comprehend this girl,” she continued; “she is a riddle—an insolvable riddle to me. A passionless mortal seems to me to approach nearer to a monster than to a divinity deserving your idolatry, Meredith. She cannot be the cold, apathetic, statue-like person she appears—”
“And why not, Miss Ruthven?”
“Simply because a passionless being cannot inspire passion—and yet—and yet, if she were a marble statue, your love should have been the Promethean touch to infuse a soul. Pardon me—pity me, if I speak too plainly; there are moments when the heart will burst the barriers of prudence—there are moments of desperation, of self-abandonment. I cannot be bound by those petty axioms and frigid rules that shackle my sex—I cannot weigh my words—I must pour out my heart, even though this prodigality of its treasures ‘naught enriches you, and makes me poor indeed!’”
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