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+The Project Gutenberg EBook My Novel, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Vol. 7
+#135 in our series by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
+
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+**EBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These EBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers*****
+
+
+Title: My Novel, Volume 7.
+
+Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton
+
+Release Date: March 2005  [EBook #7708]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on April 29, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+
+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY NOVEL, BY LYTTON, V7 ***
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SEVENTH.
+
+
+INITIAL CHAPTER.
+
+MR. CAXTON UPON COURAGE AND PATIENCE.
+
+"What is courage?" said my uncle Roland, rousing himself from a revery
+into which he had fallen, after the Sixth Book in this history had been
+read to our family circle.
+
+"What is courage?" he repeated more earnestly.  "Is it insensibility to
+fear?  That may be the mere accident of constitution; and if so, there is
+no more merit in being courageous than in being this table."
+
+"I am very glad to hear you speak thus," observed Mr. Caxton, "for I
+should not like to consider myself a coward; yet I am very sensible to
+fear in all dangers, bodily and moral."
+
+"La, Austin, how can you say so?" cried my mother, firing up; "was it not
+only last week that you faced the great bull that was rushing after
+Blanche and the children?"
+
+Blanche at that recollection stole to my father's chair, and, hanging
+over his shoulder, kissed his forehead.
+
+MR. CAXTON (sublimely unmoved by these flatteries).--"I don't deny that I
+faced the bull, but I assert that I was horribly frightened."
+
+ROLAND.--"The sense of honour which conquers fear is the true courage of
+chivalry: you could not run away when others were looking on,--no
+gentleman could."
+
+MR. CAXTON.--"Fiddledee!  It was not on my gentility that I stood,
+Captain.  I should have run fast enough, if it had done any good.  I
+stood upon my understanding.  As the bull could run faster than I could,
+the only chance of escape was to make the brute as frightened as myself."
+
+BLANCHE.--"Ah, you did not think of that; your only thought was to save
+me and the children."
+
+MR. CAXTON.--"Possibly, my dear, very possibly, I might have been afraid
+for you too; but I was very much afraid for myself.  However, luckily I
+had the umbrella, and I sprang it up and spread it forth in the animal's
+stupid eyes, hurling at him simultaneously the biggest lines I could
+think of in the First Chorus of the 'Seven against Thebes.' I began with
+ELEDEMNAS PEDIOPLOKTUPOS; and when I came to the grand howl of [A line in
+Greek], the beast stood appalled as at the roar of a lion.  I shall never
+forget his amazed snort at the Greek.  Then he kicked up his hind legs,
+and went bolt through the gap in the hedge.  Thus, armed with AEschylus
+and the umbrella, I remained master of the field; but" (continued Mr.
+Caxton ingenuously) "I should not like to go through that half-minute
+again."
+
+"No man would," said the captain, kindly.  "I should be very sorry to
+face a bull myself, even with a bigger umbrella than yours, and even
+though I had AEschylus, and Homer to boot, at my fingers' ends."
+
+MR. CAXTON.--"You would not have minded if it had been a Frenchman with a
+sword in his hand?"
+
+CAPTAIN.--"Of course not.  Rather liked it than otherwise," he added
+grimly.
+
+MR. CAXTON.--"Yet many a Spanish matador,  who does n't care a button for
+a bull, would take to his heels at the first lunge /en carte/ from a
+Frenchman.  Therefore, in fact, if courage be a matter of constitution,
+it is also a matter of custom.  We face calmly the dangers we are
+habituated to, and recoil from those of which we have no familiar
+experience.  I doubt if Marshal Turenue himself would have been quite at
+his ease on the tight-rope; and a rope-dancer, who seems disposed to
+scale the heavens with Titanic temerity, might possibly object to charge
+on a cannon."
+
+CAPTAIN ROLAND.--"Still, either this is not the courage I mean, or it is
+another kind of it.  I mean by courage that which is the especial force
+and dignity of the human character, without which there is no reliance on
+principle, no constancy in virtue,--a something," continued my uncle,
+gallantly, and with a half bow towards my mother, "which your sex shares
+with our own.  When the lover, for instance, clasps the hand of his
+betrothed, and says, 'Wilt thou be true to me, in spite of absence and
+time, in spite of hazard and fortune, though my foes malign me, though
+thy friends may dissuade thee, and our lot in life may be rough and
+rude?' and when the betrothed answers, 'I will be true,' does not the
+lover trust to her courage as well as her love?"
+
+"Admirably put, Roland," said my father.  "But a propos of what do you
+puzzle us with these queries on courage?"
+
+CAPTAIN ROLAND (with a slight blush).--"I was led to the inquiry (though
+perhaps it may be frivolous to take so much thought of what, no doubt,
+costs Pisistratus so little) by the last chapters in my nephew's story.
+I see this poor boy Leonard, alone with his fallen hopes (though very
+irrational they were) and his sense of shame.  And I read his heart, I
+dare say, better than Pisistratus does, for I could feel like that boy if
+I had been in the same position; and conjecturing what he and thousands
+like him must go through, I asked myself, 'What can save him and them?'
+I answered, as a soldier would answer, 'Courage.'  Very well.  But pray;
+Austin, what is courage?"
+
+MR. CAXTON (prudently backing out of a reply).--"/Papae/!' Brother, since
+you have just complimented the ladies on that quality, you had better
+address your question to them."
+
+Blanche here leaned both hands on my father's chair, and said, looking
+down at first bashfully, but afterwards warming with the subject, "Do you
+not think, sir, that little Helen has already suggested, if not what is
+courage, what at least is the real essence of all courage that endures
+and conquers, that ennobles and hallows and redeems?  Is it not PATIENCE,
+Father?  And that is why we women have a courage of our own.  Patience
+does not affect to be superior to fear, but at least it never admits
+despair."
+
+PISISTRATUS.--"Kiss me, my Blanche, for you have come near to the truth
+which perplexed the soldier and puzzled the sage."
+
+MR. CAXTON (tartly).--"If you mean me by the sage, I was not puzzled at
+all.  Heaven knows you do right to inculcate patience,--it is a virtue
+very much required--in your readers.  Nevertheless," added my father,
+softening with the enjoyment of his joke,--"nevertheless Blanche and
+Helen are quite right.  Patience is the courage of the conqueror; it is
+the virtue, /par excellence/, of Man against Destiny,--of the One against
+the World, and of the Soul against Matter.  Therefore this is the courage
+of the Gospel; and its importance in a social view--its importance to
+races and institutions--cannot be too earnestly inculcated.  What is it
+that distinguishes the Anglo-Saxon from all other branches of the human
+family,--peoples deserts with his children and consigns to them the
+heritage of rising worlds?  What but his faculty to brave, to suffer, to
+endure,--the patience that resists firmly and innovates slowly?  Compare
+him with the Frenchman.  The Frenchman has plenty of valour,--that there
+is no denying; but as for fortitude, he has not enough to cover the point
+of a pin.  He is ready to rush out of the world if he is bitten by a
+flea."
+
+CAPTAIN ROLAND.--"There was a case in the papers the other day, Austin,
+of a Frenchman who actually did destroy himself because he was so teased
+by the little creatures you speak of.  He left a paper on his table,
+saying that 'life was not worth having at the price of such torments.'"
+
+MR. CAXTON (solemnly).--"Sir, their whole political history, since the
+great meeting of the /Tiers Etat/, has been the history of men who would
+rather go to the devil than be bitten by a flea.  It is the record of
+human impatience that seeks to force time, and expects to grow forests
+from the spawn of a mushroom.  Wherefore, running through all extremes of
+constitutional experiment, when they are nearest to democracy they are
+next door to a despot; and all they have really done is to destroy
+whatever constitutes the foundation of every tolerable government.  A
+constitutional monarchy cannot exist without aristocracy, nor a healthful
+republic endure with corruption of manners.  The cry of equality is
+incompatible with civilization, which, of necessity, contrasts poverty
+with wealth; and, in short, whether it be an emperor or a mob I that is
+to rule, Force is the sole hope of order, and the government is but an
+army."
+
+     [Published more than a year before the date of the French empire
+     under Louis Napoleon.]
+
+"Impress, O Pisistratus!  impress the value of patience as regards man
+and men.  You touch there on the kernel of the social system,--the secret
+that fortifies the individual and disciplines the million.  I care not,
+for my part, if you are tedious so long as you are earnest.  Be minute
+and detailed.  Let the real Human Life, in its war with Circumstance,
+stand out.  Never mind if one can read you but slowly,--better chance of
+being less quickly forgotten.  Patience, patience!  By the soul of
+Epictetus, your readers shall set you an example."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+Leonard had written twice to Mrs. Fairfield, twice to Riccabocca, and
+once to Mr. Dale; and the poor proud boy could not bear to betray his
+humiliation.  He wrote as with cheerful spirits,--as if perfectly
+satisfied with his prospects.  He said that he was well employed, in the
+midst of books, and that he had found kind friends.  Then he turned from
+himself to write about those whom he addressed, and the affairs and
+interests of the quiet world wherein they lived.  He did not give his own
+address, nor that of Mr. Prickett.  He dated his letters from a small
+coffee-house near the bookseller's, to which he occasionally went for his
+simple meals.  He had a motive in this.  He did not desire to be found
+out.  Mr. Dale replied for himself and for Mrs. Fairfield, to the
+epistles addressed to these two.  Riccabocca wrote also.
+
+Nothing could be more kind than the replies of both.  They came to
+Leonard in a very dark period in his life, and they strengthened him in
+the noiseless battle with despair.
+
+If there be a good in the world that we do without knowing it, without
+conjecturing the effect it may have upon a human soul; it is when we show
+kindness to the young in the first barren footpath up the mountain of
+life.
+
+Leonard's face resumed its serenity in his intercourse with his employer;
+but he did not recover his boyish ingenuous frankness.  The under-
+currents flowed again pure from the turbid soil and the splintered
+fragments uptorn from the deep; but they were still too strong and too
+rapid to allow transparency to the surface.  And now he stood in the
+sublime world of books, still and earnest as a seer who invokes the dead;
+and thus, face to face with knowledge, hourly he discovered how little he
+knew.  Mr. Prickett lent him such works as he selected and asked to take
+home with him.  He spent whole nights in reading, and no longer
+desultorily.  He read no more poetry, no more Lives of Poets.  He read
+what poets must read if they desire to be great--/Sapere principium et
+fons/,--strict reasonings on the human mind; the relations between motive
+and conduct, thought and action; the grave and solemn truths of the past
+world; antiquities, history, philosophy.  He was taken out of himself; he
+was carried along the ocean of the universe.  In that ocean, O seeker,
+study the law of the tides; and seeing Chance nowhere, Thought presiding
+over all, Fate, that dread phantom, shall vanish from creation, and
+Providence alone be visible in heaven and on earth!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+There was to be a considerable book-sale at a country house one day's
+journey from London.  Mr. Prickett meant to have attended it on his own
+behalf, and that of several gentlemen who had given him commissions for
+purchase; but on the morning fixed for his departure, he was seized with
+a severe return of his old foe the rheumatism.  He requested Leonard to
+attend instead of himself.  Leonard went, and was absent for the three
+days during which the sale lasted.  He returned late in the evening, and
+went at once to Mr. Prickett's house.  The shop was closed; he knocked at
+the private entrance; a strange person opened the door to him, and in
+reply to his question if Mr. Prickett was at home, said, with a long and
+funereal face, "Young man, Mr. Prickett senior is gone to his long home,
+but Mr. Richard Prickett will see you."
+
+At this moment a very grave-looking man, with lank hair, looked forth
+from the side-door communicating between the shop and the passage, and
+then stepped forward.  "Come in, sir; you are my late uncle's assistant,
+Mr. Fairfield, I suppose?"
+
+"Your late uncle!  Heavens, sir, do I understand aright, can Mr. Prickett
+be dead since I left London?"
+
+"Died, sir, suddenly, last night.  It was an affection of the heart.  The
+doctor thinks the rheumatism attacked that organ.  He had small time to
+provide for his departure, and his account-books seem in sad disorder: I
+am his nephew and executor."
+
+Leonard had now--followed the nephew into the shop.  There still burned
+the gas-lamp.  The place seemed more dingy and cavernous than before.
+Death always makes its presence felt in the house it visits.
+
+Leonard was greatly affected,--and yet more, perhaps, by the utter want
+of feeling which the nephew exhibited.  In fact the deceased had not been
+on friendly terms with this person, his nearest relative and heir-at-law,
+who was also a bookseller.
+
+"You were engaged but by the week, I find, young man, on reference to my
+late uncle's papers.  He gave you L1 a week,--a monstrous sum!  I shall
+not require your services any further.  I shall move these books to my
+own house.  You will be good enough to send me a list of those you bought
+at the sale, and your account of travelling expenses, etc.  What may be
+due to you shall be sent to your address.  Good-evening."
+
+Leonard went home, shocked and saddened at the sudden death of his kind
+employer.  He did not think much of himself that night; but when he rose
+the next day, he suddenly felt that the world of London lay before him,
+without a friend, without a calling, without an occupation for bread.
+
+This time it was no fancied sorrow, no poetic dream disappointed.  Before
+him, gaunt and palpable, stood Famine.  Escape!--yes.  Back to the
+village: his mother's cottage; the exile's garden; the radishes and the
+fount.  Why could he not escape?  Ask why civilization cannot escape its
+ills, and fly back to the wild and the wigwam.
+
+Leonard could not have returned to the cottage, even if the Famine that
+faced had already seized him with her skeleton hand.  London releases not
+so readily her fated step-sons.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+One day three persons were standing before an old bookstall in a passage
+leading from Oxford Street into Tottenham Court Road.  Two were
+gentlemen; the third, of the class and appearance of those who more
+habitually halt at old bookstalls.
+
+"Look," said one of the gentlemen to the other, "I have discovered here
+what I have searched for in vain the last ten years,--the Horace of 1580,
+the Horace of the Forty Commentators, a perfect treasury of learning, and
+marked only fourteen shillings!"
+
+"Hush, Norreys," said the other, "and observe what is yet more worth your
+study;" and he pointed to the third bystander, whose face, sharp and
+attenuated, was bent with an absorbed, and, as it were, with a hungering
+attention over an old worm-eaten volume.
+
+"What is the book, my lord?" whispered Mr. Norreys.  His companion
+smiled, and replied by another question, "What is the man who reads the
+book?"
+
+Mr. Norreys moved a few paces, and looked over the student's shoulder.
+"Preston's translation of Boethius's 'The Consolations of Philosophy,'"
+he said, coming back to his friend.
+
+"He looks as if he wanted all the consolations Philosophy can give him,
+poor boy."
+
+At this moment a fourth passenger paused at the bookstall, and,
+recognizing the pale student, placed his hand on his shoulder, and said,
+"Aha, young sir, we meet again.  So poor Prickett is dead.  But you are
+still haunted by associations.  Books, books,--magnets to which all iron
+minds move insensibly.  What is this?  Boethius!  Ah, a book written in
+prison, but a little time before the advent of the only philosopher who
+solves to the simplest understanding every mystery of life--"
+
+"And that philosopher?"
+
+"Is death!" said Mr. Burley.  "How can you be dull enough to ask?  Poor
+Boethius, rich, nobly born, a consul, his sons consuls, the world one
+smile to the Last Philosopher of Rome.  Then suddenly, against this type
+of the old world's departing WISDOM stands frowning the new world's grim
+genius, FORCE,--Theodoric the Ostrogoth condemning Boethius the
+schoolman; and Boethius in his Pavian dungeon holding a dialogue with the
+shade of Athenian Philosophy.  It is the finest picture upon which
+lingers the glimmering of the Western golden day, before night rushes
+over time."
+
+"And," said Mr. Norreys, abruptly, "Boethius comes back to us with the
+faint gleam of returning light, translated by Alfred the Great; and,
+again, as the sun of knowledge bursts forth in all its splendour by Queen
+Elizabeth.  Boethius influences us as we stand in this passage; and that
+is the best of all the Consolations of Philosophy,--eh, Mr. Burley?"
+
+Mr. Burley turned and bowed.
+
+The two men looked at each other; you could not see a greater contrast,--
+Mr. Burley, his gay green dress already shabby and soiled, with a rent in
+the skirts and his face speaking of habitual night-cups; Mr. Norreys,
+neat and somewhat precise in dress, with firm, lean figure, and quiet,
+collected, vigorous energy in his eye and aspect.
+
+"If," replied Mr. Burley, "a poor devil like me may argue with a
+gentleman who may command his own price with the booksellers, I should
+say it is no consolation at all, Mr. Norreys.  And I should like to see
+any man of sense accept the condition of Boethius in his prison, with
+some strangler or headsman waiting behind the door, upon the promised
+proviso that he should be translated, centuries afterwards, by kings and
+queens, and help indirectly to influence the minds of Northern
+barbarians, babbling about him in an alley, jostled by passers-by who
+never heard the name of Boethius, and who don't care a fig for
+philosophy.  Your servant, sir, young man, come and talk."
+
+Burley hooked his arm within Leonard's, and led the boy passively away.
+
+"That is a clever man," said Harley L'Estrange.  "But I am sorry to see
+yon young student, with his bright earnest eyes, and his lip that has the
+quiver of passion and enthusiasm, leaning on the arm of a guide who seems
+disenchanted of all that gives purpose to learning, and links philosophy
+with use to the world.  Who and what is this clever man whom you call
+Burley?"
+
+"A man who might have been famous, if he had condescended to be
+respectable!  The boy listening to us both so attentively interested me
+too,--I should like to have the making of him.  But I must buy this
+Horace."
+
+The shopman, lurking within his hole like a spider for flies, was now
+called out.  And when Mr. Norreys had bought the Horace, and given an
+address where to send it, Harley asked the shopman if he knew the young
+man who had been reading Boethius.
+
+"Only by sight.  He has come here every day the last week, and spends
+hours at the stall.  When once he fastens on a book, he reads it
+through."
+
+"And never buys?" said Mr. Norreys.
+
+"Sir," said the shopman, with a good-natured smile, "they who buy seldom
+read.  The poor boy pays me twopence a day to read as long as he pleases.
+I would not take it, but he is proud."
+
+"I have known men amass great learning in that way," said Mr. Norreys.
+"Yes, I should like to have that boy in my hands.  And now, my lord, I am
+at your service, and we will go to the studio of your artist."
+
+The two gentlemen walked on towards one of the streets out of Fitzroy
+Square.
+
+In a few minutes more Harley L'Estrange was in his element, seated
+carelessly on a deal table smoking his cigar, and discussing art with the
+gusto of a man who honestly loved, and the taste of a man who thoroughly
+understood it.  The young artist, in his dressing robe, adding slow touch
+upon touch, paused often to listen the better.  And Henry Norrey s,
+enjoying the brief respite from a life of great labour, was gladly
+reminded of idle hours under rosy skies; for these three men had formed
+their friendship in Italy, where the bands of friendship are woven by the
+hands of the Graces.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+Leonard and Mr. Burley walked on into the suburbs round the north road
+from London, and Mr. Burley offered to find literary employment for
+Leonard,--an offer eagerly accepted.
+
+Then they went into a public-house by the wayside.  Burley demanded a
+private room, called for pen, ink, and paper; and placing these
+implements before Leonard, said, "Write what you please, in prose, five
+sheets of letter-paper, twenty-two lines to a page,--neither more nor
+less."
+
+"I cannot write so."
+
+"Tut, 't is for bread."
+
+The boy's face crimsoned.
+
+"I must forget that," said he.
+
+"There is an arbour in the garden, under a weeping-ash," returned Burley.
+"Go there, and fancy yourself in Arcadia."
+
+Leonard was too pleased to obey.  He found out the little arbour at one
+end of a deserted bowling-green.  All was still,--the hedgerow shut out
+the sight of the inn.  The sun lay warm on the grass, and glinted
+pleasantly through the leaves of the ash.  And Leonard there wrote the
+first essay from his hand as Author by profession.  What was it that he
+wrote?  His dreamy impressions of London, an anathema on its streets and
+its hearts of stone, murmurs against poverty, dark elegies on fate?
+
+Oh, no! little knowest thou true genius, if thou askest such questions,
+or thinkest that there under the weeping-ash the task-work for bread was
+remembered; or that the sunbeam glinted but over the practical world,
+which, vulgar and sordid, lay around.  Leonard wrote a fairy tale,--one
+of the loveliest you can conceive, with a delicate touch of playful
+humour, in a style all flowered over with happy fancies.  He smiled as he
+wrote the last word,--he was happy.  In rather more than an hour Mr.
+Burley came to him, and found him with that smile on his lips.
+
+Mr. Burley had a glass of brandy-and-water in his hand; it was his third.
+He too smiled, he too looked happy.  He read the paper aloud, and well.
+He was very complimentary.  "You will do!" said he, clapping Leonard on
+the back.  "Perhaps some day you will catch my one-eyed perch."  Then he
+folded up the manuscript, scribbled off a note, put the whole in one
+envelope, and they returned to London.
+
+Mr. Burley disappeared within a dingy office near Fleet Street, on which
+was inscribed, "Office of the 'Beehive,'" and soon came forth with a
+golden sovereign in his hand, Leonard's first-fruits.  Leonard thought
+Peru lay before him.  He accompanied Mr. Burley to that gentleman's
+lodging in Maida Hill.  The walk had been very long; Leonard was not
+fatigued.  He listened with a livelier attention than before to Burley's
+talk.  And when they reached the apartments of the latter, and Mr. Burley
+sent to the cookshop, and their joint supper was taken out of the golden
+sovereign, Leonard felt proud, and for the first time for weeks he
+laughed the heart's laugh.  The two writers grew more and more intimate
+and cordial.  And there was a vast deal in Burley by which any young man
+might be made the wiser.  There was no apparent evidence of poverty in
+the apartments,--clean, new, well-furnished; but all things in the most
+horrible litter,--all speaking of the huge literary sloven.
+
+For several days Leonard almost lived in those rooms.  He wrote
+continuously, save when Burley's conversation fascinated him into
+idleness.  Nay, it was not idleness,--his knowledge grew larger as he
+listened; but the cynicism of the talker began slowly to work its way.
+That cynicism in which there was no faith, no hope, no vivifying breath
+from Glory, from Religion,--the cynicism of the Epicurean, more degraded
+in his sty than ever was Diogenes in his tub; and yet presented with such
+ease and such eloquence, with such art and such mirth, so adorned with
+illustration and anecdote, so unconscious of debasement!
+
+Strange and dread philosophy, that made it a maxim to squander the gifts
+of mind on the mere care for matter, and fit the soul to live but as from
+day to day, with its scornful cry, "A fig for immortality and laurels!"
+An author for bread!  Oh, miserable calling!  was there something grand
+and holy, after all, even in Chatterton's despair?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+The villanous "Beehive"!  Bread was worked out of it, certainly; but
+fame, but hope for the future,--certainly not.  Milton's Paradise Lost
+would have perished without a sound had it appeared in the "Beehive."
+
+Fine things were there in a fragmentary crude state, composed by Burley
+himself.  At the end of a week they were dead and forgotten,--never read
+by one man of education and taste; taken simultaneously and indifferently
+with shallow politics and wretched essays, yet selling, perhaps, twenty
+or thirty thousand copies,--an immense sale; and nothing got out of them
+but bread and brandy!
+
+"What more would you have?" cried John Burley.  "Did not stern old Sam
+Johnson say he could never write but from want?"
+
+"He might say it," answered Leonard; "but he never meant posterity to
+believe him.  And he would have died of want, I suspect, rather than have
+written 'Rasselas' for the 'Beehive'!  Want is a grand thing," continued
+the boy, thoughtfully,--"a parent of grand things.  Necessity is strong,
+and should give us its own strength; but Want should shatter asunder,
+with its very writhings, the walls of our prison-house, and not sit
+contented with the allowance the jail gives us in exchange for our work."
+
+"There is no prison-house to a man who calls upon Bacchus; stay, I will
+translate to you Schiller's Dithyramb.  'Then see I Bacchus; then up come
+Cupid and Phcebus, and all the Celestials are filling my dwelling.'"
+
+Breaking into impromptu careless rhymes, Burley threw off a rude but
+spirited translation of that divine lyric.  "O materialist!" cried the
+boy, with his bright eyes suffused.  "Schiller calls on the gods to take
+him to their heaven with them; and you would debase the gods to a
+ginpalace."
+
+"Ho, ho!" cried Burley, with his giant laugh.  "Drink, and you will
+understand the Dithyramb."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+Suddenly one morning, as Leonard sat with Burley, a fashionable
+cabriolet, with a very handsome horse, stopped at the door.  A loud
+knock, a quick step on the stairs, and Randal Leslie entered.  Leonard
+recognized him, and started.  Randal glanced at him in surprise, and
+then, with a tact that showed he had already learned to profit by London
+life, after shaking hands with Burley, approached, and said, with some
+successful attempt at ease, "Unless I am not mistaken, sir, we have met
+before.  If you remember me, I hope all boyish quarrels are forgotten?"
+
+Leonard bowed, and his heart was still good enough to be softened.
+
+"Where could you two ever have met?" asked Burley.  "In a village green,
+and in single combat," answered Randal, smiling; and he told the story of
+the Battle of the Stocks, with a well-bred jest on himself.  Burley
+laughed at the story.  "But," said he, when this laugh was over, "my
+young friend had better have remained guardian of the village stocks than
+come to London in search of such fortune as lies at the bottom of an
+inkhorn."
+
+"Ah," said Randal, with the secret contempt which men elaborately
+cultivated are apt to feel for those who seek to educate themselves,--
+"ah, you make literature your calling, sir?  At what school did you
+conceive a taste for letters?  Not very common at our great public
+schools."
+
+"I am at school now for the first time," answered Leonard, dryly.
+
+"Experience is the best schoolmistress," said Burley; "and that was the
+maxim of Goethe, who had book-learning enough, in all conscience."
+
+Randal slightly shrugged his shoulders, and without wasting another
+thought on Leonard, peasant-born and self-taught, took his seat, and
+began to talk to Burley upon a political question, which made then the
+war-cry between the two great parliamentary parties.  It was a subject in
+which Burley showed much general knowledge; and Randal, seeming to differ
+from him, drew forth alike his information and his argumentative powers.
+The conversation lasted more than an hour.
+
+"I can't quite agree with you," said Randal, taking his leave; "but you
+must allow me to call again,--will the same hour tomorrow suit you?"
+
+"Yes," said Burley.
+
+Away went the young man in his cabriolet.  Leonard watched him from the
+window.
+
+For five days, consecutively, did Randal call and discuss the question in
+all its bearings; and Burley, after the second day, got interested in the
+matter, looked up his authorities, refreshed his memory, and even spent
+an hour or two in the Library of the British Museum.
+
+By the fifth day, Burley had really exhausted all that could well be said
+on his side of the question.
+
+Leonard, during these colloquies, had sat apart seemingly absorbed in
+reading, and secretly stung by Randal's disregard of his presence.  For
+indeed that young man, in his superb self-esteem, and in the absorption
+of his ambitious projects, scarce felt even curiosity as to Leonard's
+rise above his earlier station, and looked on him as a mere journeyman of
+Burley's.
+
+But the self-taught are keen and quick observers; and Leonard had
+remarked that Randal seemed more as one playing a part for some private
+purpose, than arguing in earnest; and that, when he rose, and said, "Mr.
+Burley, you have convinced me," it was not with the modesty of a sincere
+reasoner, but the triumph of one who has gained his end.  But so struck,
+meanwhile, was our unheeded and silent listener with Burley's power of
+generalization and the wide surface over which his information extended,
+that when Randal left the room the boy looked at the slovenly,
+purposeless man, and said aloud, "True; knowledge is not power."
+
+"Certainly not," said Burley, dryly,--"the weakest thing in the world."
+
+"Knowledge is power," muttered Randal Leslie, as, with a smile on his
+lip, he drove from the door.
+
+Not many days after this last interview there appeared a short pamphlet;
+anonymous, but one which made a great impression on the town.  It was on
+the subject discussed between Randal and Burley.  It was quoted at great
+length in the newspapers.  And Burley started to his feet one morning,
+and exclaimed, "My own thoughts!  my very words!  Who the devil is this
+pamphleteer?"
+
+Leonard took the newspaper from Burley's hand.  The most flattering
+encomiums preceded the extracts, and the extracts were as stereotypes of
+Burley's talk.
+
+"Can you doubt the author?" cried Leonard, in deep disgust and ingenuous
+scorn.  "The young man who came to steal your brains, and turn your
+knowledge--"
+
+"Into power," interrupted Burley, with a laugh,--but it was a laugh of
+pain.  "Well, this was very mean; I shall tell him so when he comes."
+
+"He will come no more," said Leonard.  Nor did Randal come again.  But he
+sent Mr. Burley a copy of the pamphlet with a polite note, saying, with
+candid but careless acknowledgment, that he "had profited much by Mr.
+Burley's hints and remarks."
+
+And now it was in all the papers that the pamphlet which had made so
+great a noise was by a very young man, Mr. Audley Egerton's relation.
+And high hopes were expressed of the future career of Mr. Randal Leslie.
+
+Burley still attempted to laugh, and still his pain was visible.  Leonard
+most cordially despised and hated Randal Leslie, and his heart moved to
+Burley with noble but perilous compassion.  In his desire to soothe and
+comfort the man whom he deemed cheated out of fame, he forgot the caution
+he had hitherto imposed on himself, and yielded more and more to the
+charm of that wasted intellect.  He accompanied Burley now to the haunts
+to which his friend went to spend his evenings; and more and more--though
+gradually, and with many a recoil and self-rebuke--there crept over him
+the cynic's contempt for glory, and miserable philosophy of debased
+content.
+
+Randal had risen into grave repute upon the strength of Burley's
+knowledge.  But, had Burley written the pamphlet, would the same repute
+have attended him?  Certainly not.  Randal Leslie brought to that
+knowledge qualities all his own,--a style simple, strong, and logical;
+a certain tone of good society, and allusions to men and to parties that
+showed his connection with a Cabinet minister, and proved that he had
+profited no less by Egerton's talk than Burley's.
+
+Had Burley written the pamphlet, it would have showed more genius, it
+would have had humour and wit, but have been so full of whims and quips,
+sins against taste, and defects in earnestness, that it would have failed
+to create any serious sensation.  Here, then, there was something else be
+sides knowledge, by which knowledge became power.  Knowledge must not
+smell of the brandy-bottle.
+
+Randal Leslie might be mean in his plagiarism, but he turned the useless
+into use.  And so far he was original.  But one's admiration, after all,
+rests where Leonard's rested,--with the poor, riotous, lawless, big,
+fallen man.  Burley took himself off to the Brent, and fished again for
+the one-eyed perch.  Leonard accompanied him.  His feelings were indeed
+different from what they had been when he had reclined under the old
+tree, and talked with Helen of the future.  But it was almost pathetic to
+see how Burley's nature seemed to alter, as he strayed along the banks of
+the rivulet, and discoursed of his own boyhood.  The man then seemed
+restored to something of the innocence of the child.  He cared, in truth,
+little for the perch, which continued intractable, but he enjoyed the air
+and the sky, the rustling grass and the murmuring waters.  These
+excursions to the haunts of youth seemed to rebaptize him, and then his
+eloquence took a pastoral character, and Izaak Walton himself would have
+loved to hear him.  But as he got back into the smoke of the metropolis,
+and the gas-lamps made him forget the ruddy sunset and the soft evening
+star, the gross habits reassumed their sway; and on he went with his
+swaggering, reckless step to the orgies in which his abused intellect
+flamed forth, and then sank into the socket quenched and rayless.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+Helen was seized with profound and anxious sadness.  Leonard had been
+three or four times to see her, and each time she saw a change in him
+that excited all her fears.  He seemed, it is true, more shrewd, more
+worldly-wise, more fitted, it might be, for coarse daily life; but, on
+the other hand, the freshness and glory of his youth were waning slowly.
+His aspirings drooped earthward.  He had not mastered the Practical, and
+moulded its uses with the strong hand of the Spiritual Architect, of the
+Ideal Builder; the Practical was overpowering himself.  She grew pale
+when he talked of Burley, and shuddered, poor little Helen? when she
+found he was daily, and almost nightly, in a companionship which, with
+her native honest prudence, she saw so unsuited to strengthen him in his
+struggles, and aid him against temptation.  She almost groaned when,
+pressing him as to his pecuniary means, she found his old terror of debt
+seemed fading away, and the solid healthful principles he had taken from
+his village were loosening fast.  Under all, it is true, there was what a
+wiser and older person than Helen would have hailed as the redeeming
+promise.  But that something was grief,--a sublime grief in his own sense
+of falling, in his own impotence against the Fate he had provoked and
+coveted.  The Sublimity of that grief Helen could not detect; she saw
+only that it was grief, and she grieved with it, letting it excuse every
+fault,--making her more anxious to comfort, in order that she might save.
+Even from the first, when Leonard had exclaimed, "Ah, Helen, why did you
+ever leave me?" she had revolved the idea of return to him; and when in
+the boy's last visit he told her that Burley, persecuted by duns, was
+about to fly from his present lodgings, and take his abode with Leonard,
+in the room she had left vacant, all doubt was over.  She resolved to
+sacrifice the safety and shelter of the home assured her.  She resolved
+to come back and share Leonard's penury and struggles, and save the old
+room, wherein she had prayed for him, from the tempter's danger ous
+presence.  Should she burden him?  No; she had assisted her father by
+many little female arts in needle and fancy work.  She had improved
+herself in these during her sojourn with Miss Starke.  She could bring
+her share to the common stock.  Possessed with this idea, she determined
+to realize it before the day on which Leonard had told her Burley was to
+move his quarters.  Accordingly she rose very early one morning; she
+wrote a pretty and grateful note to Miss Starke, who was fast asleep,
+left it on the table, and before any one was astir, stole from the house,
+her little bundle on her arm.
+
+She lingered an instant at the garden-gate, with a remorseful sentiment,
+--a feeling that she had ill-repaid the cold and prim protection that
+Miss Starke had shown her.  But sisterly love carried all before it.  She
+closed the gate with a sigh, and went on.
+
+She arrived at the lodging-house before Leonard was up, took possession
+of her old chamber, and presenting herself to Leonard, as he was about to
+go forth, said (story-teller that she was), "I am sent away, brother, and
+I have come to you to take care of me.  Do not let us part again.  But
+you must be very cheerful and very happy, or I shall think that I am
+sadly in your way."
+
+Leonard at first did look cheerful, and even happy; but then he thought
+of Burley, and then of his own means of supporting Helen, and was
+embarrassed, and began questioning her as to the possibility of
+reconciliation with Miss Starke.  And Helen said gravely, "Impossible,--
+do not ask it, and do not go near her."
+
+Then Leonard thought she had been humbled and insulted, and remembered
+that she was a gentleman's child, and felt for her wounded pride, he was
+so proud himself.  Yet still he was embarrassed.
+
+"Shall I keep the purse again, Leonard?" said Helen, coaxingly.
+
+"Alas!" replied Leonard, "the purse is empty."
+
+"That is very naughty in the purse," said Helen, "since you put so much
+into it."
+
+"Did not you say that you made, at least, a guinea a week?"
+
+"Yes; but Burley takes the money; and then, poor fellow!  as I owe all to
+him, I have not the heart to prevent him spending it as he likes."
+
+"Please, I wish you could settle the month's rent," said the landlady,
+suddenly showing herself.  She said it civilly, but with firmness.
+
+Leonard coloured.  "It shall be paid to-day."
+
+Then he pressed his hat on his head, and putting Helen gently aside, went
+forth.
+
+"Speak to me in future, kind Mrs. Smedley," said Helen, with the air of a
+housewife.  "He is always in study, and must not be disturbed."
+
+The landlady--a good woman, though she liked her rent--smiled benignly.
+She was fond of Helen, whom she had known of old.
+
+"I am so glad you are come back; and perhaps now the young man will not
+keep such late hours.  I meant to give him warning, but--"
+
+"But he will be a great man one of these days, and you must bear with him
+now."  And Helen kissed Mrs. Smedley, and sent her away half inclined to
+cry.
+
+Then Helen busied herself in the rooms.  She found her father's box,
+which had been duly forwarded.  She re-examined its contents, and wept as
+she touched each humble and pious relic.  But her father's memory itself
+thus seemed to give this home a sanction which the former had not; and
+she rose quietly and began mechanically to put things in order, sighing
+as she saw all so neglected, till she came to the rosetree, and that
+alone showed heed and care.  "Dear Leonard!" she murmured, and the smile
+resettled on her lips.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+Nothing, perhaps, could have severed Leonard from Burley but Helen's
+return to his care.  It was impossible for him, even had there been
+another room in the house vacant (which there was not), to install this
+noisy, riotous son of the Muse by Bacchus, talking at random and smelling
+of spirits, in the same dwelling with an innocent, delicate, timid,
+female child.  And Leonard could not leave her alone all the twenty-four
+hours.  She restored a home to him and imposed its duties.  He therefore
+told Mr. Burley that in future he should write and study in his own room,
+and hinted, with many a blush, and as delicately as he could, that it
+seemed to him that whatever he obtained from his pen ought to be halved
+with Burley, to whose interest he owed the employment, and from whose
+books or whose knowledge he took what helped to maintain it; but that the
+other half, if his, he could no longer afford to spend upon feasts or
+libations.  He had another life to provide for.
+
+Burley pooh-poohed the notion of taking half his coadjutor's earning with
+much grandeur, but spoke very fretfully of Leonard's sober appropriation
+of the other half; and though a good-natured, warm-hearted man, felt
+extremely indignant at the sudden interposition of poor Helen.  However,
+Leonard was firm; and then Burley grew sullen, and so they parted.  But
+the rent was still to be paid.  How?  Leonard for the first time thought
+of the pawnbroker.  He had clothes to spare, and Riccabocca's watch.  No;
+that last he shrank from applying to such base uses.
+
+He went home at noon, and met Helen at the street-door.  She too had been
+out, and her soft cheek was rosy red with unwonted exercise and the sense
+of joy.  She had still preserved the few gold pieces which Leonard had
+taken back to her on his first visit to Miss Starke's.  She had now gone
+out and bought wool and implements for work; and meanwhile she had paid
+the rent.
+
+Leonard did not object to the work, but he blushed deeply when he knew
+about the rent, and was very angry.  He paid back to her that night what
+she had advanced; and Helen wept silently at his pride, and wept more
+when she saw the next day a woful hiatus in his wardrobe.
+
+But Leonard now worked at home, and worked resolutely; and Helen sat by
+his side, working too; so that next day, and the next, slipped peacefully
+away, and in the evening of the second he asked her to walk out in the
+fields.  She sprang up joyously at the invitation, when bang went the
+door, and in reeled John Burley,--drunk,--and so drunk!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+And with Burley there reeled in another man,--a friend of his, a man who
+had been a wealthy trader and once well to do, but who, unluckily, had
+literary tastes, and was fond of hearing Burley talk.  So, since he had
+known the wit, his business had fallen from him, and he had passed
+through the Bankrupt Court.  A very shabby-looking dog he was, indeed,
+and his nose was redder than Burley's.
+
+John made a drunken dash at poor Helen.  "So you are the Pentheus in
+petticoats who defies Bacchus," cried he; and therewith he roared out a
+verse from Euripides.  Helen ran away, and Leonard interposed.
+
+"For shame, Burley!"
+
+"He's drunk," said Mr. Douce, the bankrupt trader, "very drunk; don't
+mind him.  I say, sir, I hope we don't intrude.  Sit still, Burley, sit
+still, and talk, do,--that's a good man.  You should hear him--ta--ta--
+talk, sir."  Leonard meanwhile had got Helen out of the room into her
+own, and begged her not to be alarmed, and keep the door locked.  He then
+returned to Burley, who had seated himself on the bed, trying wondrous
+hard to keep himself upright; while Mr. Douce was striving to light a
+short pipe that he carried in his button-hole--without having filled it--
+and, naturally failing in that attempt, was now beginning to weep.
+
+Leonard was deeply shocked and revolted for Helen's sake; but it was
+hopeless to make Burley listen to reason.  And how could the boy turn
+out of his room the man to whom he was under obligations?
+
+Meanwhile there smote upon Helen's shrinking ears loud jarring talk and
+maudlin laughter, and cracked attempts at jovial songs.  Then she heard
+Mrs. Smedley in Leonard's room, remonstrating; and Burley's laugh was
+louder than before, and Mrs. Smedley, who was a meek woman, evidently got
+frightened, and was heard in precipitate retreat.  Long and loud talk
+recommenced, Burley's great voice predominant, Mr. Douce chiming in with
+hiccoughy broken treble.  Hour after hour this lasted, for want of the
+drink that would have brought it to a premature close.  And Burley
+gradually began to talk himself somewhat sober.  Then Mr. Douce was
+heard descending the stairs, and silence followed.  At dawn, Leonard
+knocked at Helen's door.  She opened it at once, for she had not gone
+to bed.
+
+"Helen," said he, very sadly, "you cannot continue here.  I must find out
+some proper home for you.  This man has served me when all London was
+friendless, and he tells me that he has nowhere else to go,--that the
+bailiffs are after him.  He has now fallen asleep.  I will go and find
+you some lodging close at hand, for I cannot expel him who has protected
+me; and yet you cannot be under the same roof with him.  My own good
+angel, I must lose you."
+
+He did not wait for her answer, but hurried down stairs.  The morning
+looked through the shutterless panes in Leonard's garret, and the birds
+began to chird from the elmtree, when Burley rose and shook himself, and
+stared round.  He could not quite make out where he was.  He got hold of
+the water-jug, which he emptied at three draughts, and felt greatly
+refreshed.  He then began to reconnoitre the chamber,--looked at
+Leonard's manuscripts,  peeped into the drawers, wondered where the devil
+Leonard himself had gone to, and finally amused himself by throwing down
+the fireirons, ringing the bell, and making all the noise he could, in
+the hopes of attracting the attention of somebody or other, and procuring
+himself his morning dram.
+
+In the midst of this charivari the door opened softly, but as if with a
+resolute hand, and the small quiet form of Helen stood before the
+threshold.  Burley turned round, and the two looked at each other for
+some moments with silent scrutiny.
+
+BURLEY (composing his features into their most friendly expression).--
+"Come hither, my dear.  So you are the little girl whom I saw with
+Leonard on the banks of the Brent, and you have come back to live with
+him,--and I have come to live with him too.  You shall be our little
+housekeeper, and I will tell you the story of Prince Pettyman, and a
+great many others not to be found in 'Mother Goose.'  Meanwhile, my dear
+little girl, here's sixpence,--just run out and change this for its worth
+in rum."
+
+HELEN (coming slowly up to Mr. Burley, and still gazing earnestly into
+his face).--"Ah, sir, Leonard says you have a kind heart, and that you
+have served him; he cannot ask you to leave the house; and so I, who have
+never served him, am to go hence and live alone."
+
+BURLEY (moved).--"You go, my little lady; and why?  Can we not all live
+together?"
+
+HELEN.--"No, sir.  I left everything to come to Leonard, for we had met
+first at my father's grave; but you rob me of him, and I have no other
+friend on earth."
+
+BURLEY (discomposed).--"Explain yourself.  Why must you leave him because
+I come?"
+
+Helen looked at Mr. Burley again, long and wistfully, but made no answer.
+
+BURLEY (with a gulp).--"Is it because he thinks I am not fit company for
+you?"
+
+Helen bowed her head.
+
+Burley winced, and after a moment's pause said, "He is right."
+
+HELEN (obeying the impulse of her heart, springs forward and takes
+Burley's hand).--"Ah, sir," she cried, "before he knew you he was so
+different; then he was cheerful, then, even when his first disappointment
+came, I grieved and wept but I felt he would conquer still, for his heart
+was so good and pure.  Oh, sir, don't think I reproach you; but what is
+to become of him if--if---No, it is not for myself I speak.  I know that
+if I was here, that if he had me to care for, he would come home early,
+and work patiently, and--and--that I might save him.  But now when I am
+gone, and you live with him,--you to whom he is grateful, you whom he
+would follow against his own conscience (you must see that, sir), what is
+to become of him?"
+
+Helen's voice died in sobs.
+
+Burley took three or four long strides through the room; he was greatly
+agitated.  "I am a demon," he murmured.  "I never saw it before; but it
+is true, I should be this boy's ruin."  Tears stood in his eyes, he
+paused abruptly, made a clutch at his hat, and turned to the door.
+
+Helen stopped the way, and taking him gently by the arm, said, "Oh, sir,
+forgive me,--I have pained you;" and looked up at him with a
+compassionate expression, that indeed made the child's sweet face
+as that of an angel.
+
+Burley bent down as if to kiss her, and then drew back, perhaps with a
+sentiment that his lips were not worthy to touch that innocent brow.
+
+"If I had had a sister,--a child like you, little one," he muttered,
+"perhaps I too might have been saved in time.  Now--"
+
+"Ah, now you may stay, sir; I don't fear you any more."
+
+"No, no; you would fear me again ere night-time, and I might not be
+always in the right mood to listen to a voice like yours, child.  Your
+Leonard has a noble heart and rare gifts.  He should rise yet, and he
+shall.  I will not drag him into the mire.  Good-by,--you will see me no
+more."  He broke from Helen, cleared the stairs with a bound, and was out
+of the house.
+
+When Leonard returned he was surprised to hear his unwelcome guest was
+gone,--but Helen did not venture to tell him of her interposition.  She
+knew instinctively how such officiousness would mortify and offend the
+pride of man; but she never again spoke harshly of poor Burley.  Leonard
+supposed that he should either see or hear of the humourist in the course
+of the day.  Finding he did not, he went in search of him at his old
+haunts; but no trace.  He inquired at the "Beehive" if they knew there of
+his new address, but no tidings of Burley could be obtained.
+
+As he came home disappointed and anxious, for he felt uneasy as to the
+disappearance of his wild friend, Mrs. Smedley met him at the door.
+
+"Please, sir, suit yourself with another lodging," said she.  "I can have
+no such singings and shoutings going on at night in my house.  And that
+poor little girl, too! you should be ashamed of yourself."
+
+Leonard frowned, and passed by.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+Meanwhile, on leaving Helen, Burley strode on; and, as if by some better
+instinct, for he was unconscious of his own steps, he took his way
+towards the still green haunts of his youth.  When he paused at length,
+he was already before the door of a rural cottage, standing alone in the
+midst of fields, with a little farmyard at the back; and far through the
+trees in front was caught a glimpse of the winding Brent.
+
+With this cottage Burley was familiar; it was inhabited by a good old
+couple who had known him from a boy.  There he habitually left his rods
+and fishing-tackle; there, for intervals in his turbid, riotous life, he
+had sojourned for two or three days together, fancying the first day that
+the country was a heaven, and convinced before the third that it was a
+purgatory.
+
+An old woman, of neat and tidy exterior, came forth to greet him.
+
+"Ah, Master John," said she, clasping his nerveless hand, "well, the
+fields be pleasant now; I hope you are come to stay a bit?  Do; it will
+freshen you; you lose all the fine colour you had once, in Lunnon town."
+
+"I will stay with you, my kind friend," said Burley, with unusual
+meekness; "I can have the old room, then?"
+
+"Oh, yes, come and look at it.  I never let it now to any one but you,
+--never have let it since the dear beautiful lady with the angel's face
+went away.  Poor thing, what could have become of her?"
+
+Thus speaking, while Burley listened not, the old woman drew him within
+the cottage, and led him up the stairs into a room that might have well
+become a, better house, for it was furnished with taste, and even
+elegance.  A small cabinet pianoforte stood opposite the fireplace, and
+the window looked upon pleasant meads and tangled hedgerows, and the
+narrow windings of the blue rivulet.  Burley sank down exhausted, and
+gazed wistfully from the casement.
+
+"You have not breakfasted?" said the hostess, anxiously.
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, the eggs are fresh laid, and you would like a rasher of bacon,
+Master John?  And if you will have brandy in your tea, I have some that
+you left long ago in your own bottle."
+
+Burley shook his head.  "No brandy, Mrs. Goodyer; only fresh milk.  I
+will see whether I can yet coax Nature."
+
+Mrs. Goodyer did not know what was meant by coaxing Nature, but she
+said," Pray do, Master John," and vanished.  That day Burley went out
+with his rod, and he fished hard for the one-eyed perch; but in vain.
+Then he roved along the stream with his hands in his pockets, whistling.
+He returned to the cottage at sunset, partook of the fare provided for
+him, abstained from the brandy, and felt dreadfully low.
+
+He called for pen, ink, and paper, and sought to write, but could not
+achieve two lines.  He summoned Mrs. Goodyer.  "Tell your husband to come
+and sit and talk."
+
+Up came old Jacob Goodyer, and the great wit bade him tell him all the
+news of the village.  Jacob obeyed willingly, and Burley at last fell
+asleep.  The next day it was much the same, only at dinner he had up the
+brandy-bottle, and finished it; and he did not have up Jacob, but he
+contrived to write.
+
+The third day it rained incessantly.  "Have you no books, Mrs. Goodyer?"
+asked poor John Burley.
+
+"Oh, yes, some that the dear lady left behind her; and perhaps you would
+like to look at some papers in her own writing?"
+
+"No, not the papers,--all women scribble, and all scribble the same
+things.  Get me the books."
+
+The books were brought up,--poetry and essays--John knew them by heart.
+He looked out on the rain, and at evening the rain had ceased.  He rushed
+to his hat and fled.
+
+"Nature, Nature!" he exclaimed, when he was out in the air and hurrying
+by the dripping hedgerows, "you are not to be coaxed by me!  I have
+jilted you shamefully, I own it; you are a female, and unforgiving.  I
+don't complain.  You may be very pretty, but you are the stupidest and
+most tire some companion that ever I met with.  Thank Heaven, I am not
+married to you!"
+
+Thus John Burley made his way into town, and paused at the first public-
+house.  Out of that house he came with a jovial air, and on he strode
+towards the heart of London.  Now he is in Leicester Square, and he gazes
+on the foreigners who stalk that region, and hums a tune; and now from
+yonder alley two forms emerge, and dog his careless footsteps; now
+through the maze of passages towards St. Martin's he threads his path,
+and, anticipating an orgy as be nears his favourite haunts, jingles the
+silver in his pockets; and now the two forms are at his heels.
+
+"Hail to thee, O Freedom!" muttered John Burley, "thy dwelling is in
+cities, and thy palace is the tavern."
+
+"In the king's name," quoth a gruff voice; and John Burley feels the
+horrid and familiar tap on the shoulder.
+
+The two bailiffs who dogged have seized their prey.  "At whose suit?"
+asked John Burley, falteringly.  "Mr. Cox, the wine-merchant."
+
+"Cox!  A man to whom I gave a check on my bankers not three months ago!"
+
+"But it war n't cashed."
+
+"What does that signify?--the intention was the same.  A good heart takes
+the will for the deed.  Cox is a monster of ingratitude, and I withdraw
+my custom."
+
+"Sarve him right.  Would your honour like a jarvey?"
+
+"I would rather spend the money on something else," said John Burley.
+"Give me your arm, I am not proud.  After all, thank Heaven, I shall not
+sleep in the country."
+
+And John Burley made a night of it in the Fleet.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+Miss Starke was one of those ladies who pass their lives in the direst of
+all civil strife,--war with their servants.  She looked upon the members
+of that class as the unrelenting and sleepless enemies of the unfortunate
+householders condemned to employ them.  She thought they ate and drank to
+their villanous utmost, in order to ruin their benefactors; that they
+lived in one constant conspiracy with one another and the tradesmen, the
+object of which was to cheat and pilfer.  Miss Starke was a miserable
+woman.  As she had no relations or friends who cared enough for her to
+share her solitary struggle against her domestic foes; and her income,
+though easy, was an annuity that died with herself, thereby reducing
+various nephews, nieces, or cousins to the strict bounds of a natural
+affection,--that did not exist; and as she felt the want of some friendly
+face amidst this world of distrust and hate,--so she had tried the
+resource of venal companions.  But the venal companions had never stayed
+long, either they disliked Miss Starke, or Miss Starke disliked them.
+Therefore the poor woman had resolved upon bringing up some little girl,
+whose heart, as she said to herself, would be fresh and uncorrupted, and
+from whom she might expect gratitude.  She had been contented, on the
+whole, with Helen, and had meant to keep that child in her house as long
+as she (Miss Starke) remained upon the earth,--perhaps some thirty years
+longer; and then, having carefully secluded her from marriage and other
+friendship, to leave her nothing but the regret of having lost so kind a
+benefactress.  Conformably with this notion, and in order to secure the
+affections of the child, Miss Starke had relaxed the frigid austerity
+natural to her manner and mode of thought, and been kind to Helen in an
+iron way.  She had neither slapped nor pinched her, neither had she
+starved.  She had allowed her to see Leonard, according to the agreement
+made with Dr. Morgan, and had laid out tenpence on cakes, besides
+contributing fruit from her garden for the first interview,--a
+hospitality she did not think it fit to renew on subsequent occasions.
+In return for this, she conceived she had purchased the right to Helen
+bodily and spiritually, and nothing could exceed her indignation when she
+rose one morning and found the child had gone.  As it never had occurred
+to her to ask Leonard's address, though she suspected Helen had gone to
+him, she was at a loss what to do, and remained for twenty-four hours in
+a state of inane depression.  But then she began to miss the child so
+much that her energies woke, and she persuaded herself that she was
+actuated by the purest benevolence in trying to reclaim this poor
+creature from the world into which Helen had thus rashly plunged.
+
+Accordingly she put an advertisement into the "Times," to the following
+effect, liberally imitated from one by which in former years she had
+recovered a favourite Blenheim:--
+
+                           TWO GUINEAS' REWARD.
+
+     STRAYED, from Ivy Cottage, Highgate, a Little Girl,--answers to the
+     name of Helen; with blue eyes and brown hair; white muslin frock,
+     and straw hat with blue ribbons.  Whoever will bring the same to Ivy
+     Cottage, shall receive the above Reward.
+
+     N. B.---Nothing more will be offered.
+
+
+Now it so happened that Mrs. Smedley had put an advertisement in the
+"Times" on her own account, relative to a niece of hers who was coming
+from the country, and for whom she desired to find a situation.  So,
+contrary to her usual habit, she sent for the newspaper, and close by her
+own advertisement, she saw Miss Starke's.
+
+It was impossible that she could mistake the description of Helen; and as
+this advertisement caught her eye the very day after the whole house had
+been disturbed and scandalized by Burley's noisy visit, and on which she
+had resolved to get rid of a lodger who received such visitors, the good-
+hearted woman was delighted to think that she could restore Helen to some
+safe home.  While thus thinking, Helen herself entered the kitchen where
+Mrs. Smedley sat, and the landlady had the imprudence to point out the
+advertisement, and talk, as she called it, "seriously," to the little
+girl.
+
+Helen in vain and with tears entreated her to take no step in reply to
+the advertisement.  Mrs. Smedley felt that it was an affair of duty, and
+was obdurate, and shortly afterwards put on her bonnet and left the
+house.  Helen conjectured that she was on her way to Miss Starke's, and
+her whole soul was bent on flight.  Leonard had gone to the office of the
+"Beehive" with his manuscripts; but she packed up all their joint
+effects, and just as she had done so, he returned.  She communicated the
+news of the advertisement, and said she should be so miserable if
+compelled to go back to Miss Starke's, and implored him so pathetically
+to save her from such sorrow, that he at once assented to her proposal of
+flight.  Luckily, little was owing to the landlady,--that little was left
+with the maid-servant; and, profiting by Mrs. Smedley's absence, they
+escaped without scene or conflict.  Their effects were taken by Leonard
+to a stand of hackney vehicles, and then left at a coach-office while
+they went in search of lodgings.  It was wise to choose an entirely new
+and remote district; and before night they were settled in an attic in
+Lambeth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+As the reader will expect, no trace of Burley could Leonard find: the
+humourist had ceased to communicate with the "Beehive."  But Leonard
+grieved for Burley's sake; and, indeed, he missed the intercourse of the
+large, wrong mind.  But he settled down by degrees to the simple, loving
+society of his child companion, and in that presence grew more tranquil.
+The hours in the daytime that he did not pass at work, he spent as
+before, picking up knowledge at book-stalls; and at dusk he and Helen
+would stroll out,--sometimes striving to escape from the long suburb into
+fresh rural air; more often wandering to and fro the bridge that led to
+glorious Westminster--London's classic land--and watching the vague lamps
+reflected on the river.  This haunt suited the musing, melancholy boy.
+He would stand long and with wistful silence by the balustrade, seating
+Helen thereon, that she too might look along the dark mournful waters,
+which, dark though they be, still have their charm of mysterious repose.
+
+As the river flowed between the world of roofs, and the roar of human
+passions on either side, so in those two hearts flowed Thought--and all
+they knew of London was its shadow.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+There appeared in the "Beehive" certain very truculent political papers,
+--papers very like the tracts in the tinker's bag.  Leonard did not heed
+them much, but they made far more sensation in the public that read the
+"Beehive" than Leonard's papers, full of rare promise though the last
+were.  They greatly increased the sale of the periodical in the
+manufacturing towns, and began to awake the drowsy vigilance of the Home
+Office.  Suddenly a descent was made upon the "Beehive" and all its
+papers and plant.  The editor saw himself threatened with a criminal
+prosecution, and the certainty of two years' imprisonment: he did not
+like the prospect, and disappeared.  One evening, when Leonard,
+unconscious of these mischances, arrived at the door of the office, he
+found it closed.  An agitated mob was before it, and a voice that was not
+new to his ear was haranguing the bystanders, with many imprecations
+against "tyrants."  He looked, and, to his amaze, recognized in the
+orator Mr. Sprott the Tinker.
+
+The police came in numbers to disperse the crowd, and Mr. Sprott
+prudently vanished.  Leonard learned, then, what had befallen, and again
+saw himself without employment and the means of bread.
+
+Slowly he walked back.  "O knowledge, knowledge!---powerless, indeed!" he
+murmured.
+
+As he thus spoke, a handbill in large capitals met his eyes on a dead
+wall, "Wanted, a few smart young men for India."
+
+A crimp accosted him.  "You would make a fine soldier, my man.  You have
+stout limbs of your own."  Leonard moved on.
+
+"It has come back then to this,--brute physical force after all!  O Mind,
+despair!  O Peasant, be a machine again!"  He entered his attic
+noiselessly, and gazed upon Helen as she sat at work, straining her eyes
+by the open window--with tender and deep compassion.  She had not heard
+him enter, nor was she aware of his presence.  Patient and still she sat,
+and the small fingers plied busily.  He gazed, and saw that her cheek was
+pale and hollow, and the hands looked so thin!  His heart was deeply
+touched, and at that moment he had not one memory of the baffled Poet,
+one thought that proclaimed the Egotist.
+
+He approached her gently, laid his hand on her shoulder, "Helen, put on
+your shawl and bonnet, and walk out,--I have much to say."
+
+In a few moments she was ready, and they took their way to their
+favourite haunt upon the bridge.  Pausing in one of the recesses, or
+nooks, Leonard then began, "Helen, we must part!"
+
+"Part?--Oh, brother!"
+
+"Listen.  All work that depends on mind is over for me, nothing remains
+but the labour of thews and sinews.  I cannot go back to my village and
+say to all, 'My hopes were self-conceit, and my intellect a delusion!'  I
+cannot.  Neither in this sordid city can I turn menial or porter.  I
+might be born to that drudgery, but my mind has, it may be unhappily,
+raised me above my birth.  What, then, shall I do?  I know not yet,--
+serve as a soldier, or push my way to some wilderness afar, as an
+emigrant, perhaps.  But whatever my choice, I must henceforth be alone;
+I have a home no more.  But there is a home for you, Helen, a very humble
+one (for you too, so well born), but very safe,--the roof of--of--my
+peasant mother.  She will love you for my sake, and--and--"
+
+Helen clung to him trembling, and sobbed out, "Anything, anything you
+will.  But I can work; I can make money, Leonard.  I do, indeed, make
+money,--you do not know how much, but enough for us both till better
+times come to you.  Do not let us part."
+
+"And I--a man, and born to labour--to be maintained by the work of an
+infant!  No, Helen, do not so degrade me."
+
+She drew back as she looked on his flushed brow, bowed her head
+submissively, and murmured, "Pardon."
+
+"Ah," said Helen, after a, pause, "if now we could but find my poor
+father's friend!  I never so much cared for it before."
+
+"Yes, he would surely provide for you."
+
+"For me!" repeated Helen, in a tone of soft, deep reproach, and she
+turned away her head to conceal her tears.
+
+"You are sure you would remember him, if we met him by chance?"
+
+"Oh, yes.  He was so different from all we see in this terrible city, and
+his eyes were like yonder stars, so clear and so bright; yet the light
+seemed to come from afar off, as the light does in yours, when your
+thoughts are away from all things round you.  And then, too, his dog,
+whom he called Nero--I could not forget that."
+
+"But his dog may not be always with him."
+
+"But the bright clear eyes are!  Ah, now you look up to heaven, and yours
+seem to dream like his."
+
+Leonard did not answer, for his thoughts were indeed less on earth than
+struggling to pierce into that remote and mysterious heaven.
+
+Both were silent long; the crowd passed them by unheedingly.  Night
+deepened over the river, but the reflection of the lamp-lights on its
+waves was more visible than that of the stars.  The beams showed the
+darkness of the strong current; and the craft that lay eastward on the
+tide, with sail-less spectral masts and black dismal hulks, looked death-
+like in their stillness.
+
+Leonard looked down, and the thought of Chatterton's grim suicide came
+back to his soul; and a pale, scornful face, with luminous haunting eyes,
+seemed to look up from the stream, and murmur from livid lips, "Struggle
+no more against the tides on the surface,--all is calm and rest within
+the deep."
+
+Starting in terror from the gloom of his revery, the boy began to talk
+fast to Helen, and tried to soothe her with descriptions of the lowly
+home which he had offered.
+
+He spoke of the light cares which she would participate with his mother
+(for by that name he still called the widow), and dwelt, with an
+eloquence that the contrast round him made sincere and strong, on the
+happy rural life, the shadowy woodlands, the rippling cornfields, the
+solemn, lone churchspire soaring from the tranquil landscape.
+
+Flatteringly he painted the flowery terraces of the Italian exile, and
+the playful fountain that, even as he spoke, was flinging up its spray to
+the stars, through serene air untroubled by the smoke of cities, and
+untainted by the sinful sighs of men.  He promised her the love and
+protection of natures akin to the happy scene: the simple, affectionate
+mother, the gentle pastor, the exile wise and kind, Violante, with dark
+eyes full of the mystic thoughts that solitude calls from childhood,--
+Violante should be her companion.
+
+"And, oh!" cried Helen, "if life be thus happy there, return with me,
+return! return!"
+
+"Alas!" murmured the boy, "if the hammer once strike the spark from the
+anvil, the spark must fly upward; it cannot fall back to earth until
+light has left it.  Upward still, Helen,--let me go upward still!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+The next morning Helen was very ill,--so ill that, shortly after rising,
+she was forced to creep back to bed.  Her frame shivered, her eyes were
+heavy, her hand burned like fire.  Fever had set in.  Perhaps she might
+have caught cold on the bridge, perhaps her emotions had proved too much
+for her frame.  Leonard, in great alarm, called in the nearest
+apothecary.  The apothecary looked grave, and said there was danger.
+And danger soon declared itself,--Helen became delirious.  For several
+days she lay in this state, be tween life and death.  Leonard then felt
+that all the sorrows of earth are light, compared with the fear of losing
+what we love.  How valueless the envied laurel seemed beside the dying
+rose!
+
+Thanks, perhaps, more to his heed and tending than to medical skill, she
+recovered sense at last.  Immediate peril was over; but she was very weak
+and reduced, her ultimate recovery doubtful, convalescence, at best,
+likely to be very slow.
+
+But when she learned how long she had been thus ill, she looked anxiously
+at Leonard's face as he bent over her, and faltered forth, "Give me my
+work; I am strong enough for that now,--it would amuse me."
+
+Leonard burst into tears.
+
+Alas!  he had no work himself; all their joint money had melted away.
+The apothecary was not like good Dr. Morgan; the medicines were to be
+paid for, and the rent.  Two days before, Leonard had pawned Riccabocca's
+watch; and when the last shilling thus raised was gone, how should he
+support Helen?  Nevertheless he conquered his tears, and assured her that
+he had employment; and that so earnestly that she believed him, and sank
+into soft sleep.  He listened to her breathing, kissed her forehead, and
+left the room.  He turned into his own neighbouring garret, and leaning
+his face on his hands, collected all his thoughts.
+
+He must be a beggar at last.  He must write to Mr. Dale for money,--Mr.
+Dale, too, who knew the secret of his birth.  He would rather have begged
+of a stranger; it seemed to add a new dishonour to his mother's memory
+for the child to beg of one who was acquainted.  with her shame.  Had he
+himself been the only one to want and to starve, he would have sunk inch
+by inch into the grave of famine, before he would have so subdued his
+pride.  But Helen, there on that bed,--Helen needing, for weeks perhaps,
+all support, and illness making luxuries themselves like necessaries!
+Beg he must.  And when he so resolved, had you but seen the proud, bitter
+soul he conquered, you would have said, "This, which he thinks is
+degradation,--this is heroism."  Oh, strange human heart!  no epic ever
+written achieves the Sublime and the Beautiful which are graven, unread
+by human eye, in thy secret leaves.
+
+Of whom else should he beg?  His mother had nothing, Riccabocca was poor,
+and the stately Violante, who had exclaimed, "Would that I were a man!
+"--he could not endure the thought that she should pity him and despise.
+The Avenels!  No,--thrice No.  He drew towards him hastily ink and paper,
+and wrote rapid lines that were wrung from him as from the bleeding
+strings of life.
+
+But the hour for the post had passed, the letter must wait till the next
+day; and three days at least would elapse before he could receive an
+answer.  He left the letter on the table, and, stifling as for air, went
+forth.  He crossed the bridge, he passed on mechanically, and was borne
+along by a crowd pressing towards the doors of parliament.  A debate that
+excited popular interest was fixed for that evening, and many bystanders
+collected in the street to see the members pass to and fro, or hear what
+speakers had yet risen to take part in the debate, or try to get orders
+for the gallery.
+
+He halted amidst these loiterers, with no interest, indeed, in common
+with them, but looking over their heads abstractedly towards the tall
+Funeral Abbey,--imperial Golgotha of Poets and Chiefs and Kings.
+
+Suddenly his attention was diverted to those around by the sound of a
+name, displeasingly known to him.  "How are you, Randal Leslie?  coming
+to hear the debate?" said a member, who was passing through the street.
+
+"Yes; Mr. Egerton promised to get me under the gallery.  He is to speak
+himself to-night, and I have never heard him.  As you are going into the
+House, will you remind him of his promise to me?"
+
+"I can't now, for he is speaking already,--and well too.  I hurried from
+the Athenaeum, where I was dining, on purpose to be in time, as I heard
+that his speech was making a great effect."
+
+"This is very unlucky," said Randal.  "I had no idea he would speak so
+early."
+
+"C-----  brought him up by a direct personal attack.  But follow me;
+perhaps I can get you into the House; and a, man like you, Leslie, from
+whom we expect great things some day, I can tell you, should not miss any
+such opportunity of knowing what this House of ours is on a field-night.
+Come on!"
+
+The member hurried towards the door; and as Randal followed him,
+a bystander cried, "That is the young man who wrote the famous pamphlet,
+--Egerton's relation."
+
+"Oh, indeed!" said another.  "Clever man, Egerton,--I am waiting for
+him."
+
+"So am I"
+
+"Why, you are not a constituent, as I am."
+
+"No; but he has been very kind to my nephew, and I must thank him.  You
+are a constituent--he is an honour to your town."
+
+"So he is: enlightened man!"
+
+"And so generous!"
+
+"Brings forward really good measures," quoth the politician.
+
+"And clever young men," said the uncle.
+
+Therewith one or two others joined in the praise of Audley Egerton, and
+many anecdotes of his liberality were told.  Leonard listened at first
+listlessly, at last with thoughtful attention.  He had heard Burley, too,
+speak highly of this generous statesman, who, without pretending to
+genius himself, appreciated it in others.  He suddenly remembered, too,
+that Egerton was half-brother to the squire.  Vague notions of some
+appeal to this eminent person, not for charity, but employment to his
+mind, gleamed across him,--inexperienced boy that he yet was!  And while
+thus meditating, the door of the House opened and out came Audley Egerton
+himself.  A partial cheering, followed by a general murmur, apprised
+Leonard of the presence of the popular statesman.  Egerton was caught
+hold of by some five or six persons in succession; a shake of the hand, a
+nod, a brief whispered word or two, sufficed the practised member for
+graceful escape; and soon, free from the crowd, his tall, erect figure
+passed on, and turned towards the bridge.  He paused at the angle and
+took out his watch, looking at it by the lamp-light.
+
+"Harley will be here soon," he muttered,--"he is always punctual; and now
+that I have spoken, I can give him an hour or so.  That is well."
+
+As he replaced his watch in his pocket and re-buttoned his coat over his
+firm, broad chest, he lifted his eyes, and saw a young man standing
+before him.
+
+"Do you want me?" asked the statesman, with the direct brevity of his
+practical character.
+
+"Mr. Egerton," said the young man, with a voice that slightly trembled
+and yet was manly amidst emotion, "you have a great name, and great
+power; I stand here in these streets of London without a friend, and
+without employment.  I believe that I have it in me to do some nobler
+work than that of bodily labour, had I but one friend,--one opening for
+my thoughts.  And now I have said this, I scarcely know how, or why, but
+from despair, and the sudden impulse which that despair took from the
+praise that follows your success, I have nothing more to add."
+
+Audley Egerton was silent for a moment, struck by the tone and address of
+the stranger; but the consummate and wary man of the world, accustomed to
+all manner of strange applications and all varieties of imposture,
+quickly recovered from a passing and slight effect.
+
+"Are you a native of?" (naming the town which the statesman represented).
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Well, young man, I am very sorry for you; but the good sense you must
+possess (for I judge of that by the education you have evidently
+received) must tell you that a public man, whatever be his patronage, has
+it too fully absorbed by claimants who have a right to demand it, to be
+able to listen to strangers."
+
+He paused a moment, and as Leonard stood silent, added with more kindness
+than most public men so accosted would have shown,
+
+"You say you are friendless,--poor fellow!  In early life that happens to
+many of us, who find friends enough before the close.  Be honest, and
+well-conducted: lean on yourself, not on strangers; work with the body if
+you can't with the mind; and, believe me, that advice is all I can give
+you, unless this trifle"--and the minister held out a crown-piece.
+
+Leonard bowed, shook his head sadly, and walked away.  Egerton looked
+after him with a slight pang.
+
+"Pooh!" said he to himself, "there must be thousands in the same state in
+these streets of London.  I cannot redress the necessities of
+civilization.  Well educated!  It is not from ignorance henceforth that
+society will suffer,--it is from over-educating the hungry thousands who,
+thus unfitted for manual toil, and with no career for mental, will some
+day or other stand like that boy in our streets, and puzzle wiser
+ministers than I am."
+
+As Egerton thus mused, and passed on to the bridge, a bugle-horn rang
+merrily from the box of a gay four-in-hand.  A drag-coach with superb
+blood-horses rattled over the causeway, and in the driver Egerton
+recognized his nephew, Frank Hazeldean.
+
+The young Guardsman was returning with a lively party of men from dining
+at Greenwich, and the careless laughter of these children of pleasure
+floated far over the still river; it vexed the ear of the careworn
+statesman,--sad, perhaps, with all his greatness, lonely amidst all his
+crowd of friends.  It reminded him, perhaps, of his own youth, when such
+parties and companionships were familiar to him, though through them all
+he had borne an ambitious, aspiring soul.  "Le jeu vaut-il la chandelle?"
+said he, shrugging his shoulders.
+
+The coach rolled rapidly past Leonard, as he stood leaning against the
+corner of the bridge, and the mire of the kennel splashed over him from
+the hoofs of the fiery horses.  The laughter smote on his ear more
+discordantly than on the minister's, but it begot no envy.
+
+"Life is a dark riddle," said he, smiting his breast.
+
+And he walked slowly on, gained the recess where he had stood several
+nights before with Helen, and, dizzy with want of food, and worn out for
+want of sleep, he sank down into the dark corner; while the river that
+rolled under the arch of stone muttered dirge-like in his ear,--as under
+the social key-stone wails and rolls on forever the mystery of Human
+Discontent.  Take comfort, O Thinker by the stream!  'T is the river that
+founded and gave pomp to the city; and, without the discontent, where
+were progress, what were Man?  Take comfort, O THINKER!  wherever the
+stream over which thou bendest, or beside which thou sinkest, weary and
+desolate, frets the arch that supports thee, never dream that, by
+destroying the bridge, thou canst silence the moan of the wave!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+Before a table, in the apartments appropriated to him in his father's
+house at Knightsbridge, sat Lord L'Estrange, sorting or destroying
+letters and papers,--an ordinary symptom of change of residence.  There
+are certain trifles by which a shrewd observer may judge of a man's
+disposition.  Thus, ranged on the table, with some elegance, but with
+soldier-like precision, were sundry little relics of former days,
+hallowed by some sentiment of memory, or perhaps endeared solely by
+custom; which, whether he was in Egypt, Italy, or England, always made
+part of the furniture of Harley's room.  Even the small, old-fashioned,
+and somewhat inconvenient inkstand into which he dipped the pen as he
+labelled the letters he put aside, belonged to the writing-desk which had
+been his pride as a schoolboy.  Even the books that lay scattered round
+were not new works, not those to which we turn to satisfy the curiosity
+of an hour, or to distract our graver thoughts; they were chiefly either
+Latin or Italian poets, with many a, pencil-mark on the margin; or books
+which, making severe demand on thought, require slow and frequent
+perusal, and become companions.  Somehow or other, in remarking that even
+in dumb, inanimate things the man was averse to change, and had the habit
+of attaching himself to whatever was connected with old associations, you
+might guess that he clung with pertinacity to affections more important,
+and you could better comprehend the freshness of his friendship for one
+so dissimilar in pursuits and character as Audley Egerton.  An affection
+once admitted into the heart of Harley L'Estrange seemed never to be
+questioned or reasoned with; it became tacitly fixed, as it were, into
+his own nature, and little less than a revolution of his whole system
+could dislodge or disturb it.
+
+Lord L'Estrange's hand rested now upon a letter in a stiff, legible
+Italian character, and instead of disposing of it at once as he had done
+with the rest, he spread it before him, and re-read the contents.  It was
+a letter from Riccabocca, received a few weeks since, and ran thus:--
+
+
+            LETTER FROM SIGNOR RICCABOCCA TO LORD L'ESTRANGE.
+
+I thank you, my noble friend, for judging of me with faith in my honour,
+and respect for my reverses.
+
+No, and thrice no, to all concessions, all overtures, all treaty with
+Giulio Franzini.  I write the name, and my emotions choke me.  I must
+pause, and cool back into disdain.  It is over.  Pass from that subject.
+But you have alarmed me.  This sister!  I have not seen her since her
+childhood; but she was brought up under his influence,
+
+--she can but work as his agent.  She wish to learn my residence!  It
+can be but for some hostile and malignant purpose.  I may trust in you,
+--I know that.  You say I may trust equally in the discretion of your
+friend.  Pardon me,--my confidence is not so elastic.  A word may give
+the clew to my retreat.  But, if discovered, what harm can ensue?  An
+English roof protects me from Austrian despotism: true; but not the
+brazen tower of Danae could protect me from Italian craft.  And, were
+there nothing worse, it would be intolerable to me to live under the eyes
+of a relentless spy.  Truly saith our proverb, 'He sleeps ill for whom
+the enemy wakes.'  Look you, my friend, I have done with my old life,
+--I wish to cast it from me as a snake its skin.  I have denied myself
+all that exiles deem consolation.  No pity for misfortune, no messages
+from sympathizing friendship, no news from a lost and bereaved country
+follow me to my hearth under the skies of the stranger.  From all these
+I have voluntarily cut thyself off.  I am as dead to the life I once
+lived as if the Styx rolled between it and me.  With that sternness which
+is admissible only to the afflicted, I have denied myself even the
+consolation of your visits.  I have told you fairly and simply that your
+presence would unsettle all my enforced and infirm philosophy, and remind
+me only of the past, which I seek to blot from remembrance.  You have
+complied on the one condition, that whenever I really want your aid I
+will ask it; and, meanwhile, you have generously sought to obtain me
+justice from the cabinets of ministers and in the courts of kings.  I did
+not refuse your heart this luxury; for I have a child--Ah! I have taught
+that child already to revere your name, and in her prayers it is not
+forgotten.  But now that you are convinced that even your zeal is
+unavailing, I ask you to discontinue attempts which may but bring the
+spy upon my track, and involve me in new misfortunes.  Believe me,
+O brilliant Englishman, that I am satisfied and contented with my lot.
+I am sure it would not be for my happiness to change it, 'Chi non ha
+provato il male non conosce il bone.'
+
+     ["One does not know when one is well off till one has known
+     misfortune."]
+
+You ask me how I live,--I answer, /alla giornata/,--[To the day]--not for
+the morrow, as I did once.  I have accustomed myself to the calm
+existence of a village.  I take interest in its details.  There is my
+wife, good creature, sitting opposite to me, never asking what I write,
+or to whom, but ready to throw aside her work and talk the moment the pen
+is out of my hand.  Talk--and what about?  Heaven knows!  But I would
+rather hear that talk, though on the affairs of a hamlet, than babble
+again with recreant nobles and blundering professors about commonwealths
+and constitutions.  When I want to see how little those last influence
+the happiness of wise men, have I not Machiavelli and Thucydides?  Then,
+by and by, the parson will drop in, and we argue.  He never knows when he
+is beaten, so the argument is everlasting.  On fine days I ramble out by
+a winding rill with my Violante, or stroll to my friend the squire's, and
+see how healthful a thing is true pleasure; and on wet days I shut myself
+up, and mope, perhaps till, hark! a gentle tap at the door, and in comes
+Violante, with her dark eyes, that shine out through reproachful tears,--
+reproachful that I should mourn alone, while she is under my roof; so she
+puts her arms round me, and in five minutes all is sunshine within.  What
+care we for your English gray clouds without?
+
+Leave me, my dear Lord,--leave me to this quiet happy passage towards old
+age, serener than the youth that I wasted so wildly; and guard well the
+secret on which my happiness depends.
+
+Now to yourself, before I close.  Of that same yourself you speak too
+little, as of me too much.  But I so well comprehend the profound
+melancholy that lies underneath the wild and fanciful humour with which
+you but suggest, as in sport, what you feel so in earnest.  The laborious
+solitude of cities weighs on you.  You are flying back to the /dolce far
+niente/,--to friends few, but intimate; to life monotonous, but
+unrestrained; and even there the sense of loneliness will again seize
+upon you; and you do not seek, as I do, the annihilation of memory,--your
+dead passions are turned to ghosts that haunt you, and unfit you for the
+living world.  I see it all,--I see it still, in your hurried fantastic
+lines, as I saw it when we two sat amidst the pines and beheld the blue
+lake stretched below, I troubled by the shadow of the Future, you
+disturbed by that of the Past.
+
+Well, but you say, half seriously, half in jest, "I will escape from this
+prison-house of memory; I will form new ties, like other men, and before
+it be too late; I will marry.  Ay, but I must love,--there is the
+difficulty."  Difficulty,--yes, and Heaven be thanked for it!  Recall all
+the unhappy marriages that have come to your knowledge: pray, have not
+eighteen out of twenty been marriages for Love?  It always has been so,
+and it always will; because, whenever we love deeply, we exact so much
+and forgive so little.  Be content to find some one with whom your hearth
+and your honour are safe.  You will grow to love what never wounds your
+heart, you will soon grow out of love with what must always disappoint
+your imagination. /Cospetto/!  I wish my Jemima had a younger sister for
+you.  Yet it was with a deep groan that I settled myself to a--Jemima.
+
+Now, I have written you a long letter, to prove how little I need of your
+compassion or your zeal.  Once more let there be long silence between us.
+It is not easy for me to correspond with a man of your rank, and not
+incur the curious gossip of my still little pool of a world which the
+splash of a pebble can break into circles.  I must take this over to a
+post-town some ten miles off, and drop it into the box by stealth.
+Adieu, dear and noble friend, gentlest heart and subtlest fancy that I
+have met in my walk through life.  Adieu.  Write me word when you have
+abandoned a day-dream and found a Jemima.
+
+                                        ALPHONSO.
+
+P. S.--For Heaven's sake, caution and recaution your friend the minister
+not to drop a word to this woman that may betray my hiding-place.
+
+
+"Is he really happy?" murmured Harley, as he closed the letter; and he
+sank for a few moments into a revery.
+
+"This life in a village, this wife in a lady who puts down her work to
+talk about villagers--what a contrast to Audley's full existence!  And I
+cannot envy nor comprehend either! yet my own existence--what is it?"
+
+He rose, and moved towards the window, from which a rustic stair
+descended to a green lawn, studded with larger trees than are often found
+in the grounds of a suburban residence.  There were calm and coolness in
+the sight, and one could scarcely have supposed that London lay so near.
+
+The door opened softly, and a lady past middle age entered, and
+approaching Harley, as he still stood musing by the window, laid her hand
+on his shoulder.  What character there is in a hand!  Hers was a hand
+that Titian would have painted with elaborate care!  Thin, white, and
+delicate, with the blue veins raised from the surface.  Yet there was
+something more than mere patrician elegance in the form and texture.  A
+true physiologist would have said at once, "There are intellect and pride
+in that hand, which seems to fix a hold where it rests; and lying so
+lightly, yet will not be as lightly shaken off."
+
+"Harley," said the lady--and Harley turned--"you do not deceive me by
+that smile," she continued sadly; "you were not smiling when I entered."
+
+"It is rarely that we smile to ourselves, my dear mother; and I have done
+nothing lately so foolish as to cause me to smile at myself."
+
+"My son," said Lady Lansmere, somewhat abruptly, but with great
+earnestness, "you come from a line of illustrious ancestors; and methinks
+they ask from their tombs why the last of their race has no aim and no
+object, no interest, no home, in the land which they served, and which
+rewarded them with its honours."
+
+"Mother," said the soldier, simply, "when the land was in danger I served
+it as my forefathers served,--and my answer would be the scars on my
+breast."
+
+"Is it only in danger that a country is served, only in war that duty is
+fulfilled?  Do you think that your father, in his plain, manly life of
+country gentleman, does not fulfil, though perhaps too obscurely, the
+objects for which aristocracy is created, and wealth is bestowed?"
+
+"Doubtless he does, ma'am,--and better than his vagrant son ever can."
+
+"Yet his vagrant son has received such gifts from nature, his youth was
+so rich in promise, his boyhood so glowed at the dream of glory!"
+
+"Ay," said Harley, very softly, "it is possible,--and all to be buried in
+a single grave!"
+
+The countess started, and withdrew her hand from Harley's shoulder.
+
+Lady Lansmere's countenance was not one that much varied in expression.
+She had in this, as in her cast of feature, little resemblance to her
+son.
+
+Her features were slightly aquiline,--the eyebrows of that arch which
+gives a certain majesty to the aspect; the lines round the mouth were
+habitually rigid and compressed.  Her face was that of one who had gone
+through great emotion and subdued it.  There was something formal, and
+even ascetic, in the character of her beauty, which was still
+considerable, in her air and in her dress.  She might have suggested to
+you the idea of some Gothic baroness of old, half chatelaine, half-
+abbess; you would see at a glance that she did not live in the light
+world around her, and disdained its fashion and its mode of thought; yet
+with all this rigidity it was still the face of the woman who has known
+human ties and human affections.  And now, as she gazed long on Harley's
+quiet, saddened brow, it was the face of a mother.
+
+"A single grave," she said, after a long pause.  "And you were then but a
+boy, Harley!  Can such a memory influence you even to this day?  It is
+scarcely possible: it does not seem to me within the realities of man's
+life,--though it might be of woman's."
+
+"I believe," said Harley, half soliloquizing, "that I have a great deal
+of the woman in me.  Perhaps men who live much alone, and care not for
+men's objects, do grow tenacious of impressions, as your sex does.  But
+oh," he cried, aloud, and with a sudden change of countenance, "oh, the
+hardest and the coldest man would have felt as I do, had he known HER,
+had he loved HER.  She was like no other woman I have ever met.  Bright
+and glorious creature of another sphere!  She descended on this earth and
+darkened it when she passed away.  It is no use striving.  Mother, I have
+as much courage as our steel-clad fathers ever had.  I have dared in
+battle and in deserts, against man and the wild beast, against the storm
+and the ocean, against the rude powers of Nature,--dangers as dread as
+ever pilgrim or Crusader rejoiced to brave.  But courage against that one
+memory! no, I have none!"
+
+"Harley, Harley, you break my heart!" cried the countess, clasping her
+hands.
+
+"It is astonishing," continued her son, so rapt in his own thoughts that
+he did not, perhaps, hear her outcry.  "Yea, verily, it is astonishing,
+that considering the thousands of women I have seen and spoken with, I
+never see a face like hers,--never hear a voice so sweet.  And all this
+universe of life cannot afford me one look and one tone that can restore
+me to man's privilege,--love.  Well,  well, well, life has other things
+yet; Poetry and Art live still; still smiles the heaven and still wave
+the trees.  Leave me to happiness in my own way."
+
+The countess was about to reply, when the door was thrown hastily open,
+and Lord Lansmere walked in.
+
+The earl was some years older than the countess, but his placid face
+showed less wear and tear,--a benevolent, kindly face, without any
+evidence of commanding intellect, but with no lack of sense in its
+pleasant lines; his form not tall, but upright and with an air of
+consequence,--a little pompous, but good-humouredly so,--the pomposity of
+the Grand Seigneur who has lived much in provinces, whose will has been
+rarely disputed, and whose importance has been so felt and acknowledged
+as to react insensibly on himself;--an excellent man; but when you
+glanced towards the high brow and dark eye of the countess, you marvelled
+a little how the two had come together, and, according to common report,
+lived so happily in the union.
+
+"Ho, ho! my dear Harley," cried Lord Lansmere, rubbing his hands with an
+appearance of much satisfaction, "I have just been paying a visit to the
+duchess."
+
+"What duchess, my dear father?"
+
+"Why, your mother's first cousin, to be sure,--the Duchess of
+Knaresborough, whom, to oblige me, you condescended to call upon; and
+delighted I am to hear that you admire Lady Mary--"
+
+She is very high bred, and rather--high-nosed," answered Harley.  Then,
+observing that his mother looked pained, and his father disconcerted, he
+added seriously, "But handsome certainly."
+
+"Well, Harley," said the earl, recovering himself, "the duchess, taking
+advantage of our connection to speak freely, has intimated to me that
+Lady Mary has been no less struck with yourself; and to come to the
+point, since you allow that it is time you should think of marrying, I do
+not know a more desirable alliance.  What do you say, Katherine?"
+
+"The duke is of a family that ranks in history before the Wars of the
+Roses," said Lady Lansmere, with an air of deference to her husband; "and
+there has never been one scandal in its annals, nor one blot on its
+scutcheon.  But I am sure my dear Lord must think that the duchess should
+not have made the first overture,--even to a friend and a kinsman?"
+
+"Why, we are old-fashioned people," said the earl, rather embarrassed,
+"and the duchess is a woman of the world."
+
+"Let us hope," said the countess, mildly, "that her daughter is not."
+
+"I would not marry Lady Mary, if all the rest of the female sex were
+turned into apes," said Lord L'Estrange, with deliberate fervour.
+
+"Good heavens!" cried the earl, "what extraordinary language is this?
+And pray why, sir?"
+
+HARLEY.--"I can't say; there is no why in these cases.  But, my dear
+father, you are not keeping faith with me."
+
+LORD LANSMERE.--"HOW?"
+
+HARLEY.--"You and my Lady, here, entreat me to marry; I promise to do my
+best to obey you, but on one condition, that I choose for myself, and
+take my time about it.  Agreed on both sides.  Whereon, off goes your
+Lordship--actually before noon, at an hour when no lady, without a
+shudder, could think of cold blonde and damp orange flowers--off goes
+your Lordship, I say, and commits poor Lady Mary and your unworthy son to
+a mutual admiration,--which neither of us ever felt.  Pardon me, my
+father, but this is grave.  Again let me claim your promise,--full choice
+for myself, and no reference to the Wars of the Roses.  What War of the
+Roses like that between Modesty and Love upon the cheek of the virgin!"
+
+LADY LANSMERE.--"Full choice for yourself, Harley: so be it.  But we,
+too, named a condition,--did we not, Lansmere?"
+
+THE EARL  (puzzled).--"Eh,  did we?  Certainly we did."
+
+HARLEY.--"What was it?"
+
+LADY LANSMERE.--"The son of Lord Lansmere can only marry the daughter of
+a gentleman."
+
+THE EARL.---"Of course, of course."
+
+The blood rushed over Harley's fair face, and then as suddenly left it
+pale.
+
+He walked away to the window; his mother followed him, and again laid her
+hand on his shoulder.
+
+"You were cruel," said he, gently, and in a whisper, as he winced under
+the touch of the hand.  Then turning to the earl, who was gazing at him
+in blank surprise,--it never occurred to Lord Lansmere that there could
+be a doubt of his son's marrying beneath the rank modestly stated by the
+countess,--Harley stretched forth his hand, and said, in his soft winning
+tone, "You have ever been most gracious to me, and most forbearing; it is
+but just that I should sacrifice the habits of an egotist, to gratify a
+wish which you so warmly entertain.  I agree with you, too, that our race
+should not close in me,--Noblesse oblige.  But you know I was ever
+romantic; and I must love where I marry; or, if not love, I must feel
+that my wife is worthy of all the love I could once have bestowed.  Now,
+as to the vague word 'gentleman' that my mother employs--word that means
+so differently on different lips--I confess that I have a prejudice
+against young ladies brought up in the 'excellent foppery of the world,'
+as the daughters of gentlemen of our rank mostly are.  I crave,
+therefore, the most liberal interpretation of this word 'gentleman.'
+And so long as there be nothing mean or sordid in the birth, habits, and
+education of the father of this bride to be, I trust you will both agree
+to demand nothing more,--neither titles nor pedigree."
+
+"Titles, no, assuredly," said Lady Lansmere; "they do not make
+gentlemen."
+
+"Certainly not," said the earl; "many of our best families are untitled."
+
+"Titles--no," repeated Lady Lansmere; "but ancestors yes."
+
+"Ah, my mother," said Harley, with his most sad and quiet smile, "it is
+fated that we shall never agree.  The first of our race is ever the one
+we are most proud of; and pray, what ancestors had he?  Beauty, virtue,
+modesty, intellect,--if these are not nobility enough for a man, he is a
+slave to the dead."
+
+With these words Harley took up his hat and made towards the door.
+
+"You said yourself, 'Noblesse oblige,'" said the countess, following him
+to the threshold; "we have nothing more to add."
+
+Harley slightly shrugged his shoulders, kissed his mother's hand;
+whistled to Nero, who started up from a doze by the window, and went his
+way.
+
+"Does he really go abroad next week?" said the earl.  "So he says."
+
+"I am afraid there is no chance for Lady Mary," resumed Lord Lansmere,
+with a slight but melancholy smile.
+
+"She has not intellect enough to charm him.  She is not worthy of
+Harley," said the proud mother.
+
+"Between you and me," rejoined the earl, rather timidly, "I don't see
+what good his intellect does him.  He could not be more unsettled and
+useless if he were the merest dunce in the three kingdoms.  And so
+ambitious as he was when a boy!  Katherine, I sometimes fancy that you
+know what changed him."
+
+"I!"  Nay, my dear Lord, it is a common change enough with the young,
+when of such fortunes, who find, when they enter life, that there is
+really little left for them to strive for.  Had Harley been a poor man's
+son, it might have been different."
+
+"I was born to the same fortunes as Harley," said the earl, shrewdly,
+"and yet I flatter myself I am of some use to old England."
+
+The countess seized upon the occasion, complimented her Lord, and turned
+the subject.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+Harley spent his day in his usual desultory, lounging manner,--dined in
+his quiet corner at his favourite club.  Nero, not admitted into the
+club, patiently waited for him outside the door.  The dinner over,
+dog and man, equally indifferent to the crowd, sauntered down that
+thoroughfare which, to the few who can comprehend the Poetry of London,
+has associations of glory and of woe sublime as any that the ruins of the
+dead elder world can furnish,--thoroughfare that traverses what was once
+the courtyard of Whitehall, having to its left the site of the palace
+that lodged the royalty of Scotland; gains, through a narrow strait, that
+old isle of Thorney, in which Edward the Confessor received the ominous
+visit of the Conqueror; and, widening once more by the Abbey and the Hall
+of Westminster, then loses itself, like all memories of earthly grandeur,
+amidst humble passages and mean defiles.
+
+Thus thought Harley L'Estrange--ever less amidst the actual world around
+him than the images invoked by his own solitary soul-as he gained the
+bridge, and saw the dull, lifeless craft sleeping on the "Silent Way,"
+once loud and glittering with the gilded barks of the antique Seignorie
+of England.
+
+It was on that bridge that Audley Egerton had appointed to meet
+L'Estrange, at an hour when he calculated he could best steal a respite
+from debate.  For Harley, with his fastidious dislike to all the resorts
+of his equals, had declined to seek his friend in the crowded regions of
+Bellamy's.
+
+Harley's eye, as he passed along the bridge, was attracted by a still
+form, seated on the stones in one of the nooks, with its face covered by
+its hands.  "If I were a sculptor," said he to himself, "I should
+remember that image whenever I wished to convey the idea of Despondency!"
+He lifted his looks and saw, a little before him in the midst of the
+causeway, the firm, erect figure of Audley Egerton.  The moonlight was
+full on the bronzed countenance of the strong public man, with its lines
+of thought and care, and its vigorous but cold expression of intense
+self-control.
+
+"And looking yonder," continued Harley's soliloquy, "I should remember
+that form, when I wished to hew out from the granite the idea of
+Endurance."
+
+"So you are come, and punctually," said Egerton, linking his arm in
+Harley's.
+
+HARLEY--"Punctually, of course, for I respect your time, and I will not
+detain you long.  I presume you will speak to-night?"
+
+EGERTON.--"I have spoken."
+
+HARLEY (with interest).--"And well, I hope?"
+
+EGERTON.--" With effect, I suppose, for I have been loudly cheered, which
+does not always happen to me."
+
+HARLEY.--"And that gave you pleasure?"
+
+EGERTON (after a moment's thought).--"No,  not the least."
+
+HARLEY.--"What, then, attaches you so much to this life,--constant
+drudgery, constant warfare, the more pleasurable faculties dormant, all
+the harsher ones aroused, if even its rewards (and I take the best of
+those to be applause) do not please you?"
+
+EGERTON.--"What?  Custom."
+
+HARLEY.--"Martyr."
+
+EGERTON.--"You say it: but turn to yourself; you have decided, then, to
+leave England next week?"
+
+HARLEY (moodily).---"Yes.  This life in a capital, where all are so
+active, myself so objectless, preys on me like a low fever.  Nothing here
+amuses me, nothing interests, nothing comforts and consoles.  But I am
+resolved, before it be too late, to make one great struggle out of the
+Past, and into the natural world of men.  In a word, I have resolved to
+marry."
+
+EGERTON.--" Whom?"
+
+HARLEY (seriously).--" Upon my life, my dear fellow, you are a great
+philosopher.  You have hit the exact question.  You see I cannot marry a
+dream; and where, out of dreams, shall I find this 'whom'?"
+
+EGERTON.--"You do not search for her."
+
+HARLEY. "Do we ever search for love?  Does it not flash upon us when we
+least expect it?  Is it not like the inspiration to the muse?  What poet
+sits down and says, 'I will write a poem'?  What man looks out and says,
+'I will fall in love'?  No!  Happiness, as the great German tells us,
+'falls suddenly from the bosom of the gods;' so does love."
+
+EGERTON.--"You remember the old line in Horace: 'The tide flows away
+while the boor sits on the margin and waits for the ford.'"
+
+HARLEV.--"An idea which incidentally dropped from you some weeks ago, and
+which I have before half-meditated, has since haunted me.  If I could but
+find some child with sweet dispositions and fair intellect not yet
+formed, and train her up according to my ideal.  I am still young enough
+to wait a few years.  And meanwhile I shall have gained what I so sadly
+want,--an object in life."
+
+EGERTON.--"You are ever the child of romance.  But what--"
+
+Here the minister was interrupted by a messenger from the House of
+Commons, whom Audley had instructed to seek him on the bridge should his
+presence be required.  "Sir, the Opposition are taking advantage of the
+thinness of the House to call for a division.  Mr. ----- is put up to
+speak for time, but they won't hear him."
+
+Egerton turned hastily to Lord L'Estrange.  "You see, you must excuse me
+now.  To-morrow I must go to Windsor for two days: but we shall meet on
+my return."
+
+"It does not matter," answered Harley; "I stand out of the pale of your
+advice, O practical man of sense.  And if," added Harley, with
+affectionate and mournful sweetness,--"if I weary you with complaints
+which you cannot understand, it is only because of old schoolboy habits.
+I can have no trouble that I do not confide to you."
+
+Egerton's hand trembled as it pressed his friend's, and without a word,
+he hurried away abruptly.  Harley remained motionless for some seconds,
+in deep and quiet revery; then he called to his dog, and turned back
+towards Westminster.
+
+He passed the nook in which had sat the still figure of Despondency; but
+the figure had now risen, and was leaning against the balustrade.  The
+dog, who preceded his master, passed by the solitary form and sniffed it
+suspiciously.
+
+"Nero, sir, come here," said Harley.
+
+"Nero,"--that was the name by which Helen had said that her father's
+friend had called his dog; and the sound startled Leonard as he leaned,
+sick at heart, against the stone.  He lifted his head and looked
+wistfully, eagerly into Harley's face.  Those eyes, bright, clear, yet so
+strangely deep and absent, which Helen had described, met his own, and
+chained them.  For L'Estrange halted also; the boy's countenance was not
+unfamiliar to him.  He returned the inquiring look fixed on his own, and
+recognized the student by the bookstall.
+
+"The dog is quite harmless, sir," said L'Estrange, with a smile.
+
+"And you call him 'Nero'?" said Leonard, still gazing on the stranger.
+
+Harley mistook the drift of the question.
+
+"Nero, sir; but he is free from the sanguinary propensities of his Roman
+namesake."  Harley was about to pass on, when Leonard said falteringly,
+
+"Pardon me, but can it be possible that you are one whom I have sought in
+vain on behalf of the child of Captain Digby?"
+
+Harley stopped short.  "Digby!" he exclaimed, "where is he?  He should
+have found me easily.  I gave him an address."
+
+"Ah, Heaven be thanked!" cried Leonard.  "Helen is saved--she will not
+die," and he burst into tears.
+
+A very few moments and a very few words sufficed to explain to Harley the
+state of his old fellow-soldier's orphan.  And Harley himself soon stood
+in the young sufferer's room, supporting her burning temples on his
+breast, and whispering into ears that heard him as in a happy dream,
+"Comfort, comfort; your father yet lives in me."
+
+And then Helen, raising her eyes, said, "But Leonard is my brother--more
+than brother-and he needs a father's care more than I do."
+
+"Hush, hush, Helen.  I need no one, nothing now!" cried Leonard, and his
+tears gushed over the little hand that clasped his own.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+Harley L'Estrange was a man whom all things that belong to the romantic
+and poetic side of our human life deeply impressed.  When he came to
+learn the ties between these two Children of Nature, standing side by
+side, alone amidst the storms of fate, his heart was more deeply moved
+than it had been for many years.  In those dreary attics, overshadowed by
+the smoke and reek of the humble suburb, the workday world in its
+harshest and tritest forms below and around them, he recognized that
+divine poem which comes out from all union between the mind and the
+heart.  Here, on the rough deal table (the ink scarcely dry), lay the
+writings of the young wrestler for fame and bread; there, on the other
+side of the partition, on that mean pallet, lay the boy's sole comforter,
+the all that warmed his heart with living mortal affection.  On one side
+the wall, the world of imagination; on the other, this world of grief and
+of love.  And in both, a spirit equally sublime,--unselfish devotion,--
+"the something afar from the sphere of our sorrow."
+
+He looked round the room into which he had followed Leonard, on quitting
+Helen's bedside.  He noted the manuscripts on the table, and pointing to
+them, said gently, "And these are the labours by which you supported the
+soldier's orphan?--soldier yourself in a hard battle!"
+
+"The battle was lost,--I could not support her," replied Leonard,
+mournfully.
+
+"But you did not desert her.  When Pandora's box was opened, they say
+Hope lingered last--"
+
+"False, false," said Leonard; "a heathen's notion.  There are deities
+that linger behind Hope,--Gratitude, Love, and Duty."
+
+"Yours is no common nature," exclaimed Harley, admiringly, "but I must
+sound it more deeply hereafter: at present I hasten for the physician; I
+shall return with him.  We must move that poor child from this low close
+air as soon as possible.  Meanwhile, let me qualify your rejection of the
+old fable.  Wherever Gratitude, Love, and Duty remain to man, believe me
+that Hope is there too, though she may be often invisible, hidden behind
+the sheltering wings of the nobler deities."
+
+Harley said this with that wondrous smile of his, which cast a brightness
+over the whole room, and went away.  Leonard stole softly towards the
+grimy window; and looking up towards the stars that shone pale over the
+roof-tops, he murmured, "O Thou, the All-seeing and All-merciful!  how it
+comforts me now to think that, though my dreams of knowledge may have
+sometimes obscured the heavens, I never doubted that Thou wert there!
+as luminous and everlasting, though behind the cloud!  "So, for a few
+minutes, he prayed silently, then passed into Helen's room, and sat
+beside her motionless, for she slept.  She woke just as Harley returned
+with a physician; and then Leonard, returning to his own room, saw
+amongst his papers the letter he had written to Mr. Dale, and muttering,
+"I need not disgrace my calling,--I need not be the mendicant now"--held
+the letter to the flame of the candle.  And while he said this, and as
+the burning tinder dropped on the floor, the sharp hunger, unfelt during
+his late anxious emotions, gnawed at his entrails.  Still, even hunger
+could not reach that noble pride which had yielded to a sentiment nobler
+than itself, and he smiled as he repeated, "No mendicant!--the life that
+I was sworn to guard is saved.  I can raise against Fate the front of Man
+once more."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+A few days afterwards, and Helen, removed to a pure air, and under the
+advice of the first physicians, was out of all danger.
+
+It was a pretty detached cottage, with its windows looking over the wild
+heaths of Norwood, to which Harley rode daily to watch the convalescence
+of his young charge: an object in life was already found.  As she grew
+better and stronger, he coaxed her easily into talking, and listened to
+her with pleased surprise.  The heart so infantine and the sense so
+womanly struck him much by its rare contrast and combination.  Leonard,
+whom he had insisted on placing also in the cottage, had stayed there
+willingly till Helen's recovery was beyond question.  Then he came to
+Lord L'Estrange, as the latter was about one day to leave the cottage,
+and said quietly, "Now, my Lord, that Helen is safe, and now that she
+will need me no more, I can no longer be a pensioner on your bounty.  I
+return to London."
+
+"You are my visitor, not my pensioner, foolish boy," said Harley, who had
+already noticed the pride which spoke in that farewell; "come into the
+garden and let us talk."
+
+Harley seated himself on a bench on the little lawn; Nero crouched at his
+feet; Leonard stood beside him.
+
+"So," said Lord L'Estrange, "you would return to London?  What to do?"
+
+"Fulfil my fate."
+
+"And that?"
+
+"I cannot guess.  Fate is the Isis whose veil no mortal can ever raise."
+
+"You should be born for great things," said Harley, abruptly.  "I am sure
+that you write well.  I have seen that you study with passion.  Better
+than writing and better than study, you have a noble heart, and the proud
+desire of independence.  Let me see your manuscripts, or any copies of
+what you have already printed.  Do not hesitate,--I ask but to be a
+reader.  I don't pretend to be a patron: it is a word I hate."
+
+Leonard's eyes sparkled through their sudden moisture.  He brought out
+his portfolio, placed it on the bench beside Harley, and then went softly
+to the farther part of the garden.  Nero looked after him, and then rose
+and followed him slowly.  The boy seated himself on the turf, and Nero
+rested his dull head on the loud heart of the poet.
+
+Harley took up the various papers before him, and read them through
+leisurely.  Certainly he was no critic.  He was not accustomed to analyze
+what pleased or displeased him; but his perceptions were quick, and his
+taste exquisite.  As he read, his countenance, always so genuinely
+expressive, exhibited now doubt and now admiration.  He was soon struck
+by the contrast, in the boy's writings, between the pieces that sported
+with fancy and those that grappled with thought.  In the first, the young
+poet seemed so unconscious of his own individuality.  His imagination,
+afar and aloft from the scenes of his suffering, ran riot amidst a
+paradise of happy golden creations.  But in the last, the THINKER stood
+out alone and mournful, questioning, in troubled sorrow, the hard world
+on which he gazed.  All in the thought was unsettled, tumultuous; all in
+the fancy serene and peaceful.  The genius seemed divided into twain
+shapes,--the one bathing its wings amidst the starry dews of heaven; the
+other wandering, "melancholy, slow," amidst desolate and boundless sands.
+Harley gently laid down the paper and mused a little while.  Then he rose
+and walked to Leonard, gazing on his countenance as he neared the boy,
+with a new and a deeper interest.
+
+"I have read your papers," he said, "and recognize in them two men,
+belonging to two worlds, essentially distinct."  Leonard started, and
+murmured, "True, true!"
+
+"I apprehend," resumed Harley, "that one of these men must either destroy
+the other, or that the two must become fused and harmonized into a single
+existence.  Get your hat, mount my groom's horse, and come with me to
+London; we will converse by the way.  Look you, I believe you and I agree
+in this,--that the first object of every noble spirit is independence.
+It is towards this independence that I alone presume to assist you, and
+this is a service which the proudest man can receive without a blush."
+
+Leonard lifted his eyes towards Harley's, and those eyes swam with
+grateful tears; but his heart was too full to answer.  "I am not one of
+those," said Harley, when they were on the road, "who think that because
+a young man writes poetry he is fit for nothing else, and that he must be
+a poet or a pauper.  I have said that in you there seems to me to be two
+men,--the man of the Actual world, the man of the Ideal.  To each of
+these men I can offer a separate career.  The first is perhaps the more
+tempting.  It is the interest of the State to draw into its service all
+the talent and industry it can obtain; and under his native State every
+citizen of a free country should be proud to take service.  I have a
+friend who is a minister, and who is known to encourage talent,--Audley
+Egerton.  I have but to say to him, 'There is a young man who will repay
+the government whatever the government bestows on him;' and you will rise
+to-morrow independent in means, and with fair occasions to attain to
+fortune and distinction.  This is one offer,--what say you to it?"
+
+Leonard thought bitterly of his interview with Audley Egerton, and the
+minister's proffered crown-piece.  He shook his head, and replied,
+
+"Oh, my Lord, how have I deserved such kindness?  Do with me what you
+will; but if I have the option, I would rather follow my own calling.
+This is not the ambition that inflames me."
+
+"Hear, then, the other offer.  I have a friend with whom I am less
+intimate than Egerton, and who has nothing in his gift to bestow.  I
+speak of a man of letters,--Henry Norreys,--of whom you have doubtless
+heard, who, I should say, conceived an interest in you when be observed
+you reading at the bookstall.  I have often heard him say that literature
+as a profession is misunderstood, and that rightly followed, with the
+same pains and the same prudence which are brought to bear on other
+professions, a competence at least can be always ultimately obtained.
+But the way may be long and tedious, and it leads to no power but over
+thought; it rarely attains to wealth; and though reputation may be
+certain, fame, such as poets dream of, is the lot of few.  What say you
+to this course?"
+
+"My Lord, I decide," said Leonard, firmly; and then, his young face
+lighting up with enthusiasm, he exclaimed, "Yes, if, as you say, there be
+two men within me, I feel that were I condemned wholly to the mechanical
+and practical world, one would indeed destroy the other.  And the
+conqueror would be the ruder and the coarser.  Let me pursue those ideas
+that, though they have but flitted across me, vague and formless, have
+ever soared towards the sunlight.  No matter whether or not they lead to
+fortune or to fame,--at least they will lead me upward!  Knowledge for
+itself I desire; what care I if it be not power!"
+
+"Enough," said Harley, with a pleased smile at his young companion's
+outburst.  "As you decide so shall it be settled.  And now permit me, if
+not impertinent, to ask you a few questions.  Your name is Leonard
+Fairfield?"
+
+The boy blushed deeply, and bowed his head as if in assent.
+
+"Helen says you are self-taught; for the rest she refers me to you,--
+thinking, perhaps, that I should esteem you less--rather than yet more
+highly--if she said you were, as I presume to conjecture, of humble
+birth."
+
+"My birth," said Leonard, slowly, "is very--very--humble."
+
+"The name of Fairfield is not unknown to me.  There was one of that name
+who married into a family in Lansmere, married an Avenel," continued
+Harley, and his voice quivered.  "You change countenance.  Oh, could your
+mother's name have been Avenel?"
+
+"Yes," said Leonard, between his set teeth.  Harley laid his hand on the
+boy's shoulder.  "Then, indeed, I have a claim on you; then, indeed, we
+are friends.  I have a right to serve any of that family."
+
+Leonard looked at him in surprise--"For," continued Harley, recovering
+himself, "they always served my family; and my recollections of Lansmere,
+though boyish, are indelible."  He spurred on his horse as the words
+closed, and again there was a long pause; but from that time Harley
+always spoke to Leonard in a soft voice, and often gazed on him with
+earnest and kindly eyes.
+
+They reached a house in a central, though not fashionable street.  A man-
+servant of a singularly grave and awful aspect opened the door,--a man
+who had lived all his life with authors.  Poor fellow, he was indeed
+prematurely old!  The care on his lip and the pomp on his brow--no
+mortal's pen can describe!
+
+"Is Mr. Norreys at home?" asked Harley.
+
+"He is at home--to his friends, my Lord," answered the man, majestically;
+and he stalked across the hall with the step of a Dangeau ushering some
+Montmorenci into the presence of Louis le Grand.
+
+"Stay; show this gentleman into another room.  I will go first into the
+library; wait for me, Leonard."  The man nodded, and conducted Leonard
+into the dining-room.  Then pausing before the door of the library, and
+listening an instant, as if fearful to disturb some mood of inspiration,
+opened it very softly.  To his ineffable disgust, Harley pushed before,
+and entered abruptly.  It was a large room, lined with books from the
+floor to the ceiling.  Books were on all the tables, books were on all
+the chairs.  Harley seated himself on a folio of Raleigh's "History of
+the World," and cried, "I have brought you a treasure!"
+
+"What is it?" said Norreys, good-humouredly, looking up from his desk.
+
+"A mind!"
+
+"A mind!" echoed Norreys, vaguely.
+
+"Your own?"
+
+"Pooh!  I have none,--I have only a heart and a fancy.  Listen.  You
+remember the boy we saw reading at the book stall.  I have caught him for
+you, and you shall train him into a man.  I have the warmest interest in
+his future, for I know some of his family, and one of that family was
+very dear to me.  As for money, he has not a shilling, and not a shilling
+would he accept gratis from you or me either.  But he comes with bold
+heart to work,--and work you must find him."  Harley then rapidly told
+his friend of the two offers he had made to Leonard, and Leonard's
+choice.
+
+"This promises very well; for letters a man must have a strong vocation,
+as he should have for law.  I will do all that you wish."
+
+Harley rose with alertness, shook Norreys cordially by the hand, hurried
+out of the room, and returned with Leonard.
+
+Mr. Norreys eyed the young man with attention.  He was naturally rather
+severe than cordial in his manner to strangers,--contrasting in this, as
+in most things, the poor vagabond Burley; but he was a good judge of the
+human countenance, and he liked Leonard's.  After a pause he held out his
+hand.
+
+"Sir," said he, "Lord L'Estrange tells me that you wish to enter
+literature as a calling, and no doubt to study it as an art.  I may help
+you in this, and you meanwhile can help me.  I want an amanuensis,--I
+offer you that place.  The salary will be proportioned to the services
+you will render me.  I have a room in my house at your disposal.  When I
+first came up to London, I made the same choice that I hear you have
+done.  I have no cause, even in a worldly point of view, to repent my
+choice.  It gave me an income larger than my wants.  I trace my success
+to these maxims, which are applicable to all professions: 1st, Never to
+trust to genius for what can be obtained by labour; 2dly, Never to
+profess to teach what we have not studied to understand; 3dly, Never to
+engage our word to what we do not our best to execute.
+
+"With these rules, literature--provided a man does not mistake his
+vocation for it, and will, under good advice, go through the preliminary
+discipline of natural powers, which all vocations require--is as good a
+calling as any other.  Without them, a shoeblack's is infinitely better."
+
+"Possibly enough," muttered Harley; "but there have been great writers
+who observed none of your maxims."
+
+"Great writers, probably, but very unenviable men.  My Lord, my Lord,
+don't corrupt the pupil you bring to me."  Harley smiled, and took his
+departure, and left Genius at school with Common-Sense and Experience.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+While Leonard Fairfield had been obscurely wrestling against poverty,
+neglect, hunger, and dread temptation, bright had been the opening day
+and smooth the upward path of Randal Leslie.  Certainly no young man,
+able and ambitious, could enter life under fairer auspices; the
+connection and avowed favourite of a popular and energetic statesman,
+the brilliant writer of a political work that had lifted him at once into
+a station of his own, received and courted in those highest circles, to
+which neither rank nor fortune alone suffices for a familiar passport,
+--the circles above fashion itself.  the circles of POWER,--with every
+facility of augmenting information, and learning the world betimes
+through the talk of its acknowledged masters,--Randal had but to move
+straight onward, and success was sure.  But his tortuous spirit
+delighted in scheme and intrigue for their own sake.  In scheme and
+intrigue he saw shorter paths to fortune, if not to fame.
+
+His besetting sin was also his besetting weakness.  He did not aspire,--
+he coveted.  Though in a far higher social position than Frank Hazeldean,
+despite the worldly prospects of his old schoolfellow, he coveted the
+very things that kept Frank Hazeldean below him,--coveted his idle
+gayeties, his careless pleasures, his very waste of youth.  Thus, also,
+Randal less aspired to Audley Egerton's repute than he coveted Audley
+Egerton's wealth and pomp, his princely expenditure, and his Castle
+Rackrent in Grosvenor Square.  It was the misfortune of his birth to be
+so near to both these fortunes,--near to that of Leslie, as the future
+head of that fallen House; near even to that of Hazeldean, since, as we
+have seen before, if the squire had had no son, Randal's descent from the
+Hazeldeans suggested himself as the one on whom these broad lands should
+devolve.  Most young men brought into intimate contact with Audley
+Egerton would have felt for that personage a certain loyal and admiring,
+if not very affectionate, respect.  For there was something grand in
+Egerton,--something that commands and fascinates the young.  His
+determined courage, his energetic will, his almost regal liberality,
+contrasting a simplicity in personal tastes and habits that was almost
+austere, his rare and seemingly unconscious power of charming even the
+women most wearied of homage, and persuading even the men most obdurate
+to counsel,--all served to invest the practical man with those spells
+which are usually confined to the ideal one.  But, indeed, Audley Egerton
+was an Ideal,--the ideal of the Practical.  Not the mere vulgar,
+plodding, red-tape machine of petty business, but the man of strong
+sense, inspired by inflexible energy and guided to definite earthly
+objects.  In a dissolute and corrupt form of government, under a decrepit
+monarchy or a vitiated republic, Audley Egerton might have been a most
+dangerous citizen: for his ambition was so resolute, and his sight to its
+ends was so clear.  But there is something in public life in England
+which compels the really ambitious man to honour, unless his eyes are
+jaundiced and oblique, like Randal Leslie's.  It is so necessary in
+England to be a gentleman.  And thus Egerton was emphatically considered
+a gentleman.  Without the least pride in other matters, with little
+apparent sensitiveness, touch him on the point of gentleman, and no one
+so sensitive and so proud.  As Randal saw more of him, and watched his
+moods with the lynx-eyes of the household spy, he could perceive that
+this hard mechanical man was subject to fits of melancholy, even of
+gloom; and though they did not last long, there was even in his habitual
+coldness an evidence of something compressed, latent, painful, lying deep
+within his memory.  This would have interested the kindly feelings of a
+grateful heart; but Randal detected and watched it only as a clew to some
+secret it might profit him to gain.  For Randal Leslie hated Egerton; and
+hated him the more because, with all his book-knowledge and his conceit
+in his own talents, he could not despise his patron; because he had not
+yet succeeded in making his patron the mere tool or stepping-stone;
+because he thought that Egerton's keen eye saw through his wily heart,
+even while, as if in profound disdain, the minister helped the protege.
+But this last suspicion was unsound.  Egerton had not detected Leslie's
+corrupt and treacherous nature.  He might have other reasons for keeping
+him at a certain distance, but he inquired too little into Randal's
+feelings towards himself to question the attachment, or doubt the
+sincerity, of one who owed to him so much.  But that which more than all
+embittered Randal's feelings towards Egerton was the careful and
+deliberate frankness with which the latter had, more than once, repeated
+and enforced the odious announcement, that Randal had nothing to expect
+from the minister's WILL, nothing to expect from that wealth which glared
+in the hungry eyes of the pauper heir to the Leslies of Rood.  To whom,
+then, could Egerton mean to devise his fortune?  To whom but Frank
+Hazeldean?  Yet Audley took so little notice of his nephew, seemed so
+indifferent to him, that that supposition, however natural, was exposed
+to doubt.  The astuteness of Randal was perplexed.  Meanwhile, however,
+the less he himself could rely upon Egerton for fortune, the more he
+revolved the possible chances of ousting Frank from the inheritance of
+Hazeldean,--in part, at least, if not wholly.  To one less scheming,
+crafty, and remorseless than Randal Leslie, such a project would have
+seemed the wildest delusion.  But there was something fearful in the
+manner in which this young man sought to turn knowledge into power, and
+make the study of all weakness in others subservient to his own ends.  He
+wormed himself thoroughly into Frank's confidence.  He learned, through
+Frank, all the squire's peculiarities of thought and temper, and pondered
+over each word in the father's letters, which the son gradually got into
+the habit of showing to the perfidious eyes of his friend.  Randal saw
+that the squire had two characteristics, which are very common amongst
+proprietors, and which might be invoked as antagonists to his warm
+fatherly love.  First, the squire was as fond of his estate as if it were
+a living thing, and part of his own flesh and blood; and in his lectures
+to Frank upon the sin of extravagance, the squire always let out this
+foible,--"What was to become of the estate if it fell into the hands of a
+spendthrift?  No man should make ducks and drakes of Hazeldean; let Frank
+beware of that," etc.  Secondly, the squire was not only fond of his
+lands, but he was jealous of them,--that jealousy which even the
+tenderest fathers sometimes entertain towards their natural heirs.
+He could not bear the notion that Frank should count on his death; and he
+seldom closed an admonitory letter without repeating the information that
+Hazeldean was not entailed; that it was his to do with as he pleased
+through life and in death.  Indirect menace of this nature rather wounded
+and galled than intimidated Frank; for the young man was extremely
+generous and high-spirited by nature, and was always more disposed to
+some indiscretion after such warnings to his self-interest, as if to show
+that those were the last kinds of appeal likely to influence him.  By the
+help of such insights into the character of father and son, Randal
+thought he saw gleams of daylight illumining his own chance to the lands
+of Hazeldean.  Meanwhile, it appeared to him obvious that, come what
+might of it, his own interests could not lose, and might most probably
+gain, by whatever could alienate the squire from his natural heir.
+Accordingly, though with consummate tact, he instigated Frank towards the
+very excesses most calculated to irritate the squire, all the while
+appearing rather to give the counter advice, and never sharing in any of
+the follies to which he conducted his thoughtless friend.  In this he
+worked chiefly through others, introducing Frank to every acquaintance
+most dangerous to youth, either from the wit that laughs at prudence, or
+the spurious magnificence that subsists so handsomely upon bills endorsed
+by friends of "great expectations."
+
+The minister and his protege were seated at breakfast, the first reading
+the newspaper, the last glancing over his letters; for Randal had arrived
+to the dignity of receiving many letters,--ay, and notes, too, three-
+cornered and fantastically embossed.  Egerton uttered an exclamation, and
+laid down the newspaper.  Randal looked up from his correspondence.  The
+minister had sunk into one of his absent reveries.
+
+After a long silence, observing that Egerton did not return to the
+newspaper, Randal said, "Ahem, sir, I have a note from Frank Hazeldean,
+who wants much to see me; his father has arrived in town unexpectedly."
+
+"What brings him here?" asked Egerton, still abstractedly.  "Why, it
+seems that he has heard some vague reports of poor Frank's extravagance,
+and Frank is rather afraid or ashamed to meet him."
+
+"Ay, a very great fault, extravagance in the young!--destroys
+independence; ruins or enslaves the future.  Great fault,--very!
+And what does youth want that it should be extravagant?  Has it not
+everything in itself, merely because it is?  Youth is youth--what needs
+it more?"
+
+Egerton rose as he said this, and retired to his writing-table, and in
+his turn opened his correspondence.  Randal took up the newspaper, and
+endeavoured, but in vain, to conjecture what had excited the minister's
+exclamations and the revery that succeeded it.
+
+Egerton suddenly and sharply turned round in his chair--"If you have done
+with the 'Times,' have the goodness to place it here."
+
+Randal had just obeyed, when a knock at the street-door was heard, and
+presently Lord L'Estrange came into the room, with somewhat a quicker
+step and somewhat a gayer mien than usual.
+
+Audley's hand, as if mechanically, fell upon the newspaper,--fell upon
+that part of the columns devoted to births, deaths, and marriages.
+Randal stood by, and noted; then, bowing to L'Estrange, left the room.
+
+"Audley," said L'Estrange, "I have had an adventure since I saw you,--an
+adventure that reopened the Past, and may influence my future."
+
+"How?"
+
+"In the first place, I have met with a relation of--of--the Avenels."
+
+"Indeed!  Whom,--Richard Avenel?"
+
+"Richard--Richard--who is he?  Oh, I remember, the wild lad who went off
+to America; but that was when I was a mere child."
+
+"That Richard Avenel is now a rich, thriving trader, and his marriage is
+in this newspaper,--married to an Honourable Mrs. M'Catchley.  Well, in
+this country who should plume himself on birth?"
+
+"You did not say so always, Egerton," replied Harley, with a tone of
+mournful reproach.
+
+"And I say so now pertinently to a Mrs. M'Catchley, not to the heir of
+the L'Estranges.  But no more of these--these Avenels."
+
+"Yes, more of them.  I tell you I have met a relation of theirs--a nephew
+of--of--"
+
+"Of Richard Avenel's?" interrupted Egerton; and then added in the slow,
+deliberate, argumentative tone in which he was wont to speak in public,
+"Richard Avenel the trader!  I saw him once,--a presuming and intolerable
+man!"
+
+"The nephew has not those sins.  He is full of promise, of modesty, yet
+of pride.  And his countenance--oh, Egerton, he has her eyes."
+
+Egerton made no answer, and Harley resumed,
+
+"I had thought of placing him under your care.  I knew you would provide
+for him."
+
+"I will.  Bring him hither," cried Egerton, eagerly.  "All that I can do
+to prove my--regard for a wish of yours."  Harley pressed his friend's
+hand warmly.
+
+"I thank you from my heart; the Audley of my boyhood speaks now.  But the
+young man has decided otherwise; and I do not blame him.  Nay, I rejoice
+that he chooses a career in which, if he find hardship, he may escape
+dependence."
+
+"And that career is--"
+
+"Letters."
+
+"Letters!  Literature!" exclaimed the statesman.  "Beggary!  No, no,
+Harley, this is your absurd romance."
+
+"It will not be beggary, and it is not my romance: it is the boy's.
+Leave him alone, he is my care and my charge henceforth.  He is of her
+blood, and I said that he had HER eyes."
+
+"But you are going abroad; let me know where he is; I will watch over
+him."
+
+"And unsettle a right ambition for a wrong one?  No, you shall know
+nothing of him till he can proclaim himself.  I think that day will
+come."
+
+Audley mused a moment, and then said, "Well, perhaps you are right.
+After all, as you say, independence is a great blessing, and my ambition
+has not rendered myself the better or the happier."
+
+"Yet, my poor Audley, you ask me to be ambitious."
+
+"I only wish you to be consoled," cried Egerton, with passion.
+
+"I will try to be so; and by the help of a milder remedy than yours.
+I said that my adventure might influence my future; it brought me
+acquainted not only with the young man I speak of, but the most winning,
+affectionate child,--a girl."
+
+"Is this child an Avenel too?"
+
+"No, she is of gentle blood,--a soldier's daughter; the daughter of that
+Captain Digby on whose behalf I was a petitioner to your patronage.  He
+is dead, and in dying, my name was on his lips.  He meant me, doubtless,
+to be the guardian to his orphan.  I shall be so.  I have at last an
+object in life."
+
+"But can you seriously mean to take this child with you abroad?"
+
+"Seriously, I do."
+
+"And lodge her in your own house?"
+
+"For a year or so, while she is yet a child.  Then, as she approaches
+youth, I shall place her elsewhere."
+
+"You may grow to love her.  Is it clear that she will love you,--not
+mistake gratitude for love?  It is a very hazardous experiment."
+
+"So was William the Norman's,--still he was William the Conqueror.  Thou
+biddest me move on from the Past, and be consoled, yet thou wouldst make
+me as inapt to progress as the mule in Slawkenbergius's tale, with thy
+cursed interlocutions, 'Stumbling, by Saint Nicholas, every step.  Why,
+at this rate, we shall be all night in getting into'--HAPPINESS!
+Listen," continued Harley, setting off, full pelt, into one of his wild
+whimsical humours.  "One of the sons of the prophets in Israel felling
+wood near the river Jordan, his hatchet forsook the helve, and fell to
+the bottom of the river; so he prayed to have it again (it was but a
+small request, mark you); and having a strong faith, he did not throw the
+hatchet after the helve, but the helve after the hatchet.  Presently two
+great miracles were seen.  Up springs the hatchet from the bottom of the
+water, and fixes itself to its old acquaintance, the helve.  Now, had he
+wished to coach it up to heaven in a fiery chariot like Elias, be as rich
+as Job, strong as Samson, and beautiful as Absalom, would he have
+obtained the wish, do you think?  In truth, my friend, I question
+it very much."
+
+"I can't comprehend what you mean.  Sad stuff you are talking."
+
+"I cannot help that; 'Rabelais is to be blamed for it.  I am quoting him,
+and it is to be found in his Prologue to the Chapters on the 'Moderation
+of Wishes.'  And a propos of 'moderate wishes in point of hatchet,' I
+want you to understand that I ask but little from Heaven.  I fling but
+the helve after the hatchet that has sunk into the silent stream.  I want
+the other half of the weapon that is buried fathom deep, and for want of
+which the thick woods darken round me by the Sacred River, and I can
+catch not a glimpse of the stars."
+
+"In plain English," said Audley Egerton, "you want--" he stopped short,
+puzzled.
+
+"I want my purpose and my will, and my old character, and the nature God
+gave me.  I want the half of my soul which has fallen from me.  I want
+such love as may replace to me the vanished affections.  Reason not,--I
+throw the helve after the hatchet."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+Randal Leslie, on leaving Audley, repaired to Frank's lodgings, and after
+being closeted with the young Guardsman an hour or so, took his way to
+Limmer's hotel, and asked for Mr. Hazeldean.  He was shown into the
+coffee-room, while the waiter went up-stairs with his card, to see if the
+squire was within, and disengaged.  The "Times" newspaper lay sprawling
+on one of the tables, and Randal, leaning over it, looked with attention
+into the column containing births, deaths, and marriages.  But in that
+long and miscellaneous list he could not conjecture the name which had so
+excited Mr. Egerton's interest.
+
+"Vexatious!" he muttered; "there is no knowledge which has power more
+useful than that of the secrets of men."
+
+He turned as the waiter entered and said that Mr. Hazeldean would be glad
+to see him.
+
+As Randal entered the drawing-room, the squire, shaking hands with him,
+looked towards the door as if expecting some one else; and his honest
+face assumed a blank expression of disappointment, when the door closed,
+and he found that Randal was unaccompanied.
+
+"Well," said he, bluntly, "I thought your old schoolfellow, Frank, might
+have been with you."
+
+Have you not seen him yet, sir?"
+
+"No, I came to town this morning; travelled outside the mail; sent to his
+barracks, but the young gentleman does not sleep there, has an apartment
+of his own; he never told me that.  We are a plain family, the
+Hazeldeans, young sir; and I hate being kept in the dark,--by my own son,
+too."
+
+Randal made no answer, but looked sorrowful.  The squire, who had never
+before seen his kinsman, had a vague idea that it was not polite to
+entertain a stranger, though a connection to himself, with his family
+troubles, and so resumed good-naturedly, "I am very glad to make your
+acquaintance at last, Mr. Leslie.  You know, I hope, that you have good
+Hazeldean blood in your veins?"
+
+RANDAL (smiling).--"I am not likely to forget that; it is the boast of
+our pedigree."
+
+SQUIRE (heartily).--"Shake hands again on it, my boy.  You don't want a
+friend, since my grandee of a half-brother has taken you up; but if ever
+you should, Hazeldean is not very far from Rood.  Can't get on with your
+father at all, my lad,--more 's the pity, for I think I could have given
+him a hint or two as to the improvement of his property.  If he would
+plant those ugly commons--larch and fir soon come into profit, sir; and
+there are some low lands about Rood that would take mighty kindly to
+draining."
+
+RANDAL.--"My poor father lives a life so retired--and you cannot wonder
+at it.  Fallen trees lie still, and so do fallen families."
+
+SQUIRE.--"Fallen families can get up again, which fallen trees can't."
+
+RANDAL.--"Ah, sir, it often takes the energy of generations to repair the
+thriftlessness and extravagance of a single owner."
+
+SQUIRE (his brow lowering).--"That's very true.  Frank is d---d
+extravagant; treats me very coolly, too--not coming; near three o'clock.
+By the by, I suppose he told you where I was, otherwise how did you find
+me out?"
+
+RANDAL (reluctantly).--"Sir, he did; and to speak frankly, I am not
+surprised that he has not yet appeared."
+
+SQUIRE.--"Eh!"
+
+RANDAL.--"We have grown very intimate."
+
+SQUIRE.--"So he writes me word,--and I am glad of it.  Our member, Sir
+John, tells me you are a very clever fellow, and a very steady one.  And
+Frank says that he wishes he had your prudence, if he can't have your
+talent.  He has a good heart, Frank," added the father, relentingly.
+"But zounds, sir, you say you are not surprised he has not come to
+welcome his own father!"
+
+"My dear sir," said Randal, "you wrote word to Frank that you had heard
+from Sir John and others of his goings-on, and that you were not
+satisfied with his replies to your letters."
+
+"Well."
+
+"And then you suddenly come up to town."
+
+"Well."
+
+"Well.  And Frank is ashamed to meet you.  For, as you say, he has been
+extravagant, and he has exceeded his allowance; and knowing my respect
+for you and my great affection for himself, he has asked me to prepare
+you to receive his confession and forgive him.  I know I am taking a
+great liberty.  I have no right to interfere between father and son;
+but pray--pray think I mean for the best."
+
+"Humph!" said the squire, recovering himself very slowly, and showing
+evident pain, "I knew already that Frank had spent more than he ought;
+but I think he should not have employed a third person to prepare me to
+forgive him.  (Excuse me,--no offence.)  And if he wanted a third person,
+was not there his own mother?  What the devil!  [firing up] am I a
+tyrant, a bashaw, that my own son is afraid to speak to me?  'Gad, I'll
+give it him!"
+
+"Pardon me, sir," said Randal, assuming at once that air of authority
+which superior intellect so well carries off and excuses, "but I strongly
+advise you not to express any anger at Frank's confidence in me.  At
+present I have influence over him.  Whatever you may think of his
+extravagance, I have saved him from many an indiscretion, and many a
+debt,--a young man will listen to one of his own age so much more readily
+than even to the kindest friend of graver years.  Indeed, sir, I speak
+for your sake as well as for Frank's.  Let me keep this influence over
+him; and don't reproach him for the confidence placed in me.  Nay, let
+him rather think that I have softened any displeasure you might otherwise
+have felt."
+
+There seemed so much good sense in what Randal said, and the kindness of
+it seemed so disinterested, that the squire's native shrewdness was
+deceived.
+
+"You are a fine young fellow," said he, "and I am very much obliged to
+you.  Well, I suppose there is no putting old heads upon young shoulders;
+and I promise you I'll not say an angry word to Frank.  I dare say, poor
+boy, he is very much afflicted, and I long to shake hands with him.  So,
+set his mind at ease."
+
+"Ah, sir," said Randal, with much apparent emotion, "your son may well
+love you: and it seems to be a hard matter for so kind a heart as yours
+to preserve the proper firmness with him."
+
+"Oh, I can be firm enough," quoth the squire,--"especially when I don't
+see him,--handsome dog that he is: very like his mother--don't you think
+so?
+
+"I never saw his mother, sir."
+
+"'Gad!  Not seen my Harry?  No more you have; you must come and pay us a
+visit.  I suppose my half-brother will let you come?"
+
+"To be sure, sir.  Will you not call on him while you are in town?"
+
+"Not I.  He would think I expected to get something from the Government.
+Tell him the ministers must go on a little better, if they want my vote
+for their member.  But go, I see you are impatient to tell Frank that all
+'s forgot and forgiven.  Come and dine with him here at six, and let him
+bring his bills in his pocket.  Oh, I sha'n't scold him."
+
+"Why, as to that," said Randal, smiling, "I think (forgive me still) that
+you should not take it too easily; just as I think that you had better
+not blame him for his very natural and praiseworthy shame in approaching
+you, so I think, also, that you should do nothing that would tend to
+diminish that shame,--it is such a check on him.  And therefore, if you
+can contrive to affect to be angry with him for his extravagance, it will
+do good."
+
+"You speak like a book, and I'll try my best."
+
+"If you threaten, for instance, to take him out of the army, and settle
+him in the country, it would have a very good effect."
+
+"What!  would he think it so great a punishment to come home and live
+with his parents?"
+
+"I don't say that; but he is naturally so fond of London.  At his age,
+and with his large inheritance, that is natural."
+
+"Inheritance!" said the squire, moodily,--"inheritance!  he is not
+thinking of that, I trust?  Zounds, sir, I have as good a life as his
+own.  Inheritance!--to be sure the Casino property is entailed on him;
+but as for the rest, sir, I am no tenant for life.  I could leave the
+Hazeldean lands to my ploughman, if I chose it.  Inheritance; indeed!"
+
+"My dear sir, I did not mean to imply that Frank would entertain the
+unnatural and monstrous idea of calculating on your death; and all we
+have to do is to get him to sow his wild oats as soon as possible,--marry
+and settle down into the country.  For it would be a thousand pities if
+his town habits and tastes grew permanent,--a bad thing for the Hazeldean
+property, that!  And," added Randal, laughing, "I feel an interest in the
+old place, since my grandmother comes of the stock.  So, just force
+yourself to seem angry, and grumble a little when you pay the bills."
+
+"Ah, ah, trust me," said the squire, doggedly, and with a very altered
+air.  "I am much obliged to you for these hints, my young kinsman."  And
+his stout hand trembled a little as he extended it to Randal.
+
+Leaving Limmer's, Randal hastened to Frank's rooms in St.  James's
+Street.  "My dear fellow," said he, when he entered, "it is very
+fortunate that I persuaded you to let me break matters to your father.
+You might well say he was rather passionate; but I have contrived to
+soothe him.  You need not fear that he will not pay your debts."
+
+"I never feared that," said Frank, changing colour; "I only feared his
+anger.  But, indeed, I fear his kindness still more.  What a reckless
+hound I have been!  However, it shall be a lesson to me.  And my debts
+once paid, I will turn as economical as yourself."
+
+"Quite right, Frank.  And, indeed, I am a little afraid that, when your
+father knows the total, he may execute a threat that would be very
+unpleasant to you."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"Make you sell out, and give up London."
+
+"The devil!" exclaimed Frank, with fervent emphasis; "that would be
+treating me like a child."
+
+"Why, it would make you seem rather ridiculous to your set, which is not
+a very rural one.  And you, who like London so much, and are so much the
+fashion!"
+
+"Don't talk of it," cried Frank, walking to and fro the room in great
+disorder.
+
+"Perhaps, on the whole, it might be well not to say all you owe, at once.
+If you named half the sum, your father would let you off with a lecture;
+and really I tremble at the effect of the total."
+
+"But how shall I pay the other half?"
+
+"Oh, you must save from your allowance; it is a very liberal one; and the
+tradesmen are not pressing."
+
+"No; but the cursed bill-brokers--"
+
+"Always renew to a young man of your expectations.  And if I get into an
+office, I can always help you, my dear Frank."
+
+"Ah, Randal, I am not so bad as to take advantage of your friendship,"
+said Frank, warmly.  "But it seems to me mean after all, and a sort of a
+lie, indeed, disguising the real state of my affairs.  I should not have
+listened to the idea from any one else; but you are such a sensible,
+kind, honourable fellow."
+
+"After epithets so flattering, I shrink from the responsibility of
+advice.  But apart from your own interests, I should be glad to save your
+father the pain he would feel at knowing the whole extent of the scrape
+you have got into.  And if it entailed on you the necessity to lay by--
+and give up hazard, and not be security for other men--why, it would be
+the best thing that could happen.  Really, too, it seems hard upon Mr.
+Hazeldean that he should be the only sufferer, and quite just that you
+should bear half your own burdens."  "So it is, Randal; that did not
+strike me before.  I will take your counsel; and now I will go at once
+to Limmer's.  My dear father!  I hope he is looking well?"
+
+"Oh, very.  Such a contrast to the sallow Londoners!  But I think you had
+better not go till dinner.  He has asked me to meet you at six.  I will
+call for you a little before, and we can go together.  This will prevent
+a good deal of /gene/ and constraint.  Good-by till then.  Ha!  by the
+way, I think if I were you, I would not take the matter too seriously and
+penitentially.  You see the best of fathers like to keep their sons under
+their thumb, as the saying is.  And if you want at your age to preserve
+your independence, and not be hurried off and buried in the country, like
+a schoolboy in disgrace, a little manliness of bearing would not be
+amiss.  You can think over it."
+
+The dinner at Limmer's went off very differently from what it ought to
+have done.  Randal's words had sunk deep, and rankled sorely in the
+squire's mind; and that impression imparted a certain coldness to his
+manner which belied the hearty, forgiving, generous impulse with which he
+had come up to London, and which even Randal had not yet altogether
+whispered away.  On the other hand, Frank, embarrassed both by the sense
+of disingenuousness, and a desire "not to take the thing too seriously,"
+seemed to the squire ungracious and thankless.
+
+After dinner the squire began to hum and haw, and Frank to colour up and
+shrink.  Both felt discomposed by the presence of a third person; till,
+with an art and address worthy of a better cause, Randal himself broke
+the ice, and so contrived to remove the restraint he had before imposed,
+that at length each was heartily glad to have matters made clear and
+brief by his dexterity and tact.
+
+Frank's debts were not in reality large; and when he named the half of
+them, looking down in shame, the squire, agreeably surprised, was about
+to express himself with a liberal heartiness that would have opened his
+son's excellent heart at once to him.
+
+But a warning look from Randal checked the impulse; and the squire
+thought it right, as he had promised, to affect an anger he did not feel,
+and let fall the unlucky threat, "that it was all very well once in a way
+to exceed his allowance; but if Frank did not, in future, show more sense
+than to be led away by a set of London sharks and coxcombs, he must cut
+the army, come home, and take to farming."
+
+Frank imprudently exclaimed, "Oh, sir, I have no taste for farming.  And
+after London, at my age, the country would be so horribly dull."
+
+"Aha!" said the squire, very grimly--and he thrust back into his pocket-
+book some extra bank-notes which his fingers had itched to add to those
+he had already counted out.  "The country is terribly dull, is it?  Money
+goes there not upon follies and vices, but upon employing honest
+labourers, and increasing the wealth of the nation.  It does not please
+you to spend money in that way: it is a pity you should ever be plagued
+with such duties."
+
+"My dear father--"
+
+"Hold your tongue, you puppy.  Oh, I dare say, if you were in my shoes,
+you would cut down the oaks, and mortgage the property; sell it, for what
+I know,--all go on a cast of the dice!  Aha, sir--very well, very well--
+the country is horribly dull, is it?  Pray stay in town."
+
+"My dear Mr. Hazeldean," said Randal, blandly, and as if with the wish to
+turn off into a joke what threatened to be serious, "you must not
+interpret a hasty expression so literally.  Why, you would make Frank as
+bad as Lord A-----, who wrote word to his steward to cut down more
+timber; and when the steward replied, 'There are only three sign-posts
+left on the whole estate,' wrote back, 'They've done growing at all
+events,--down with them!'  You ought to know Lord A-----, sir; so witty;
+and--Frank's particular friend."
+
+"Your particular friend, Master Frank?  Pretty friends!" and the squire
+buttoned up the pocket to which he had transferred his note-book, with a
+determined air.
+
+"But I'm his friend, too," said Randal, kindly; "and I preach to him
+properly, I can tell you."  Then, as if delicately anxious to change the
+subject, he began to ask questions upon crops and the experiment of bone
+manure.  He spoke earnestly, and with gusto, yet with the deference of
+one listening to a great practical authority.  Randal had spent the
+afternoon in cramming the subject from agricultural journals and
+parliamentary reports; and like all practised readers, had really learned
+in a few hours more than many a man, unaccustomed to study, could gain
+from books in a year.  The squire was surprised and pleased at the young
+scholar's information and taste for such subjects.
+
+"But, to be sure," quoth he, with an angry look at poor Frank, "you have
+good Hazeldean blood in you, and know a bean from a turnip."
+
+"Why, sir," said Randal, ingenuously, "I am training myself for public
+life; and what is a public man worth if be do not study the agriculture
+of his country?"
+
+"Right--what is he worth?  Put that question, with my compliments, to my
+half-brother.  What stuff he did talk, the other night, on the malt-tax,
+to be sure!"
+
+"Mr. Egerton has had so many other things to think of, that we must
+excuse his want of information upon one topic, however important.  With
+his strong sense he must acquire that information, sooner or later; for
+he is fond of power; and, sir, knowledge is power!"
+
+"Very true,--very fine saying," quoth the poor squire, unsuspiciously, as
+Randal's eye rested on Mr. Hazeldean's open face, and then glanced
+towards Frank, who looked sad and bored.
+
+"Yes," repeated Randal, "knowledge is power;" and he shook his head
+wisely, as he passed the bottle to his host.
+
+Still, when the squire, who meant to return to the Hall next morning,
+took leave of Frank, his heart warmed to his son; and still more for
+Frank's dejected looks.  It was not Randal's policy to push estrangement
+too far at first, and in his own presence.
+
+"Speak to poor Frank,--kindly now, sir--do;" whispered be, observing the
+squire's watery eyes, as he moved to the window.
+
+The squire, rejoiced to obey, thrust out his hand to his son.
+
+"My dear boy," said he, "there, don't fret--pshaw!--it was but a trifle
+after all.  Think no more of it."
+
+Frank took the hand, and suddenly threw his arm round his father's broad
+shoulder.
+
+"Oh, sir, you are too good,--too good."  His voice trembled so that
+Randal took alarm, passed by him, and touched him meaningly.
+
+The squire pressed his son to his heart,--heart so large, that it seemed
+to fill the whole width under his broadcloth.  "My dear Frank," said he,
+half blubbering, "it is not the money; but, you see, it so vexes your
+poor mother; you must be careful in future; and, zounds, boy, it will be
+all yours one day; only don't calculate on it; I could not bear that,
+I could not, indeed."
+
+"Calculate!" cried Frank.  "Oh, sir, can you think it?"
+
+"I am so delighted that I had some slight hand in your complete
+reconciliation with Mr. Hazeldean," said Randal, as the young men walked
+from the hotel.  "I saw that you were disheartened, and I told him to
+speak to you kindly."
+
+"Did you?  Ah--I am sorry he needed telling."
+
+"I know his character so well already," said Randal, "that I flatter
+myself I can always keep things between you as they ought to be.  What an
+excellent man!"
+
+"The best man in the world," cried Frank, heartily; and then, as his
+accents drooped, "yet I have deceived him.  I have a great mind to go
+back--"
+
+"And tell him to give you twice as much money as you bad asked for?  He
+would think you had only seemed so affectionate in order to take him in.
+No, no, Frank! save, lay by, economize; and then tell him that you have
+paid half your own debts.  Something high-minded in that."
+
+"So there is.  Your heart is as good as your head.  Goodnight."
+
+"Are you going home so early?  Have you no engagements!"
+
+"None that I shall keep."
+
+"Good-night, then."
+
+They parted, and Randal walked into one of the fashionable clubs.  He
+neared a table where three or four young men (younger sons, who lived in
+the most splendid style, Heaven knew how) were still over their wine.
+
+Leslie had little in common with these gentlemen, but he forced his
+nature to be agreeable to them, in consequence of a very excellent piece
+of worldly advice given to him by Audley Egerton.  "Never let the dandies
+call you a prig," said the statesman.  "Many a clever fellow fails
+through life, because the silly fellows, whom half a word well spoken
+could make his claqueurs, turn him into ridicule.  Whatever you are,
+avoid the fault of most reading men: in a word, don't be a prig!"
+
+"I have just left Hazeldean," said Randal.  "What a good fellow he is!"
+
+"Capital!" said the Honourable George Borrowell.  "Where is he?"
+
+"Why, he is gone to his rooms.  He has had a little scene with his
+father, a thorough, rough country squire.  It would be an act of charity
+if you would go and keep him company, or take him with you to some place
+a little more lively than his own lodgings."
+
+"What! the old gentleman has been teasing him!--a horrid shame!  Why,
+Frank is not extravagant, and he will be very rich, eh?"
+
+"An immense property," said Randal, "and not a mortgage on it: an only
+son," he added, turning away.
+
+Among these young gentlemen there was a kindly and most benevolent
+whisper, and presently they all rose, and walked away towards Frank's
+lodgings.
+
+"The wedge is in the tree," said Randal to himself, "and there is a gap
+already between the bark and the wood."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+Harley L'Estrange is seated beside Helen at the lattice-window in the
+cottage at Norwood.  The bloom of reviving health is on the child's face,
+and she is listening with a smile, for Harley is speaking of Leonard with
+praise, and of Leonard's future with hope.  "And thus," he continued,
+"secure from his former trials, happy in his occupation, and pursuing the
+career he has chosen, we must be content, my dear child, to leave him."
+
+"Leave him!" exclaimed Helen, and the rose on her cheek faded.
+
+Harley was not displeased to see her emotion.  He would have been
+disappointed in her heart if it had been less susceptible to affection.
+
+"It is hard on you, Helen," said he, "to be separated from one who has
+been to you as a brother.  Do not hate me for doing so.  But I consider
+myself your guardian, and your home as yet must be mine.  We are going
+from this land of cloud and mist, going as into the world of summer.
+Well, that does not content you.  You weep, my child; you mourn your own
+friend, but do not forget your father's.  I am alone, and often sad,
+Helen; will you not comfort me?  You press my hand, but you must learn to
+smile on me also.  You are born to be the comforter.  Comforters are not
+egotists; they are always cheerful when they console."
+
+The voice of Harley was so sweet and his words went so home to the
+child's heart, that she looked up and smiled in his face as he kissed her
+ingenuous brow.  But then she thought of Leonard, and felt so solitary,
+so bereft, that tears burst forth again.  Before these were dried,
+Leonard himself entered, and, obeying an irresistible impulse, she sprang
+to his arms, and leaning her head on his shoulder, sobbed out,
+
+"I am going from you, brother; do not grieve, do not miss me."
+
+Harley was much moved: he folded his arms, and contemplated them both
+silently,--and his own eyes were moist.  "This heart," thought he, "will
+be worth the winning!"
+
+He drew aside Leonard, and whispered, "Soothe, but encourage and support
+her.  I leave you together; come to me in the garden later."
+
+It was nearly an hour before Leonard joined Harley.
+
+"She was not weeping when you left her?" asked L'Estrange.
+
+"No; she has more fortitude than we might suppose.  Heaven knows how that
+fortitude has supported mine.  I have promised to write to her often."
+
+Harley took two strides across the lawn, and then, coming back to
+Leonard, said, "Keep your promise, and write often for the first year.
+I would then ask you to let the correspondence drop gradually."
+
+"Drop!  Ah, my Lord!"
+
+"Look you, my young friend, I wish to lead this fair mind wholly from the
+sorrows of the past.  I wish Helen to enter, not abruptly, but step by
+step, into a new life.  You love each other now, as do two children,--as
+brother and sister.  But later, if encouraged, would the love be the
+same?  And is it not better for both of you that youth should open upon
+the world with youth's natural affections free and unforestalled?"
+
+"True!  And she is so above me," said Leonard, mournfully.
+
+"No one is above him who succeeds in your ambition, Leonard.  It is not
+that, believe me."
+
+Leonard shook his head.
+
+"Perhaps," said Harley, with a smile, "I rather feel that you are above
+me.  For what vantage-ground is so high as youth?  Perhaps I may become
+jealous of you.  It is well that she should learn to like one who is to
+be henceforth her guardian and protector.  Yet how can she like me as she
+ought, if her heart is to be full of you?"
+
+The boy bowed his head; and Harley hastened to change the subject, and
+speak of letters and of glory.  His words were eloquent and his voice
+kindling; for he had been an enthusiast for fame in his boyhood, and in
+Leonard's his own seemed to him to revive.  But the poet's heart gave
+back no echo,--suddenly it seemed void and desolate.  Yet when Leonard
+walked back by the moonlight, he muttered to himself, "Strange, strange,
+so mere a child!  this cannot be love!  Still, what else to love is there
+left to me?"
+
+And so he paused upon the bridge where he had so often stood with Helen,
+and on which he had found the protector that had given to her a home, to
+himself a career.  And life seemed very long, and fame but a dreary
+phantom.  Courage still, Leonard!  These are the sorrows of the heart
+that teach thee more than all the precepts of sage and critic.
+
+Another day, and Helen had left the shores of England, with her fanciful
+and dreaming guardian.  Years will pass before our tale re-opens.  Life
+in all the forms we have seen it travels on.  And the squire farms and
+hunts; and the parson preaches and chides and soothes; and Riccabocca
+reads his Machiavelli, and sighs and smiles as he moralizes on Men and
+States; and Violante's dark eyes grow deeper and more spiritual in their
+lustre, and her beauty takes thought from solitary dreams.  And Mr.
+Richard Avenel has his house in London, and the Honourable Mrs. Avenel
+her opera-box; and hard and dire is their struggle into fashion, and
+hotly does the new man, scorning the aristocracy, pant to become
+aristocrat.  And Audley Egerton goes from the office to the parliament,
+and drudges, and debates, and helps to govern the empire in which the sun
+never sets.  Poor sun, how tired he must be--but not more tired than the
+Government!  And Randal Leslie has an excellent place in the bureau of a
+minister, and is looking to the time when he shall resign it to come into
+parliament, and on that large arena turn knowledge into power.  And
+meanwhile he is much where he was with Audley Egerton; but he has
+established intimacy with the squire, and visited Hazeldean twice, and
+examined the house and the map of the property, and very nearly fallen a
+second time into the ha-ha, and the squire believes that Randal Leslie
+alone can keep Frank out of mischief, and has spoken rough words to his
+Harry about Frank's continued extravagance.  And Frank does continue to
+pursue pleasure, and is very miserable, and horribly in debt.  And Madame
+di Negra has gone from London to Paris, and taken a tour into
+Switzerland, and come back to London again, and has grown very intimate
+with Randal Leslie; and Randal has introduced Frank to her; and Frank
+thinks her the loveliest woman in the world, and grossly slandered by
+certain evil tongues.  And the brother of Madame di Negra is expected in
+England at last; and what with his repute for beauty and for wealth,
+people anticipate a sensation.  And Leonard, and Harley, and Helen?
+Patience,--they will all re-appear.
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY NOVEL, BY LYTTON, V7 ***
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