Part 17 (1/2)
Had Guy spoken then, as he ought to have done, I believe all might have been amended; but an angry devil was busy within him, and would not let go his prey; he stood with his black brows downcast, and with folded arms, never seeming to notice the slender fingers that sought to touch his hand. True it is that nothing makes a man so unforgiving as the consciousness of having inflicted a bitter wrong. He heard a sigh, heavy and despairing as Francesca's when her dying prayer was spurned, a light shadow flitted across the streak of moonlit gra.s.s, and, when he raised his head, he was left alone, like Alp on the sea-sh.o.r.e, to judge the battle between a remorseful conscience and a hardened heart.
Livingstone was seen no more that night; Constance glided in alone, and her absence had been scarcely noticed. During the short time that she remained, no one could have guessed from her face that her heart was broken, any more than did Napoleon that the aid-de-camp who brought the news of Lannes' victory had been almost cut in two by a grape-shot.
I speak it diffidently, with the fear of the divine voice of the people before my eyes, as is but fitting in these equalizing days, when territories, the t.i.tle to which is possession immemorial, are being plucked away acre by acre, and hereditary privileges mined one by one; but it seems to me, in this, perhaps, solitary attribute, ”the brave old houses” still keep their pre-eminence.
They are not better, nor wiser in their generation (forbid it, Manchester!), nor even more daring in confronting danger than the thousands whose grandsires are creations of a powerful fancy or of a complaisant king-at-arms. In that terrible charge which swept away the Russian cavalry at Eylau, three lengths in front of the best blood in France rode the innkeeper's son. The ”First Grenadier” himself was not more splendidly reckless, though he was a La Tour d'Auvergne. But in pa.s.sive uncomplaining endurance, in the power of obliterating outward tokens of suffering, physical or mental, may we not still say, _n.o.blesse oblige_?
Hundreds of similar isolated instances may be quoted from the annals of the Third Estate; but, in the cla.s.s I speak of, this quality seems a sixth sense wholly independent of, and often contradicting the rest of the individual's disposition.
I remember meeting in France an old Italian refugee. He had not much principle and very little pride; he was ready _quidvis facere aut pati_ to get a five-franc piece, which he would incontinently stake and lose at baccarat or ecarte, as he had done aforetime with a large ancestral inheritance; but his quiet fort.i.tude under privations that were neither few nor light was worthy of Belisarius.
Very often, I am sure, his evening meal must have been eaten with the Barmecide; but his pale, handsome face, finished off so gracefully by the white, pointed beard, still met you, courteous and unruffled, the idea of an exiled doge, or a Rohan in disgrace. Once only I saw him moved--when the landlord of our inn, a vast bloated _bourgeois_, smote the Count familiarly on the shoulder, and bantered him pleasantly on the brilliant prospects of his eldest son. It was not unkindly meant, perhaps, but the old man shrunk away from the large fat hand as if it hurt him, and turned toward us a look piteously appealing, which was not lost on myself or Livingstone. When mine host, later in the evening, shook in his gouty slippers before an ebullition of Guy's wrath, excited by the most shadowy pretext, I wonder if he guessed at the remote cause of that outpouring of the vials? Count Ma.s.sa did, for he smiled intensely, as only an Italian can smile when amply revenged.
One instance more to close a long digression. I have read of a baron in the fifteenth century who once in his life said a good thing. He was a coa.r.s.e, brutal marauder, illiterate enough to have satisfied Earl Angus, and as unromantic as the Integral Calculus. He was mortally wounded in a skirmish; and when his men came back from the pursuit, he was bleeding to death, resting against a tree. When they lifted him up, they noticed his eyes fixed with a curious, complacent expression on the red stream that surged and gurgled out of his wound, just as a _gourmand_ looks at a b.u.mper of a rare vintage held up to the light. They heard him growl to himself, ”_Qu'il coule rouge et fort, le bon vieux sang de Bourgogne_.”
And then he fell back--dead.
O Publicola Thompson! Phosphor to the Tower Hamlets and Boanerges of the platform--will you not allow that, amid a wilderness of weeds, this one fair plant flourishes under ”the cold shade?”
CHAPTER XXII.
”Shy she was, and I thought her cold; Thought her proud, and fled over the sea; Filled I was with folly and spite, When Ellen Adair was dying for me.”
When I came to Livingstone's chambers on the following morning, I found him alone. His head was resting listlessly against the back of the vast easy-chair in which he was reclining, and his face, thrown out in relief against the crimson velvet, looked haggard and drawn. The calumet--not of peace--was between his lips, and the dense blue clouds were wreathing round him like a Scotch mist. On a table near lay a heap of gold and notes. He had finished the night at his club, where lansquenet had been raging till long after sunrise. Fortune had been more kind than usual, and the fruits of ”pa.s.sing” eight times lay before me. An open liqueur-case close at his elbow showed that play was not the only counter-excitement to which he had resorted.
I hoped to have found him in a repentant mood, but his first words undeceived me: ”I start for Paris by this evening's train;” and then I remarked all about me the signs of immediate departure.
I only had a confused idea of what had happened, and was anxious to know the truth, but he was very brief in his answers: the particulars of what had pa.s.sed I learned long afterward.
”Can nothing be done?” I asked, when he had finished all he chose to tell me.
”Nothing!” replied Livingstone, decisively. ”If excuse or explanation had been of any use, I think I should have tried them last night. You would not advise me to humiliate myself to no purpose, I suppose?”
There is a certain scene in aeschylus which came into my mind just then.
A group of elderly men, with grave, rather vacuous faces, and grizzled beards, stand in the court-yard of an ancient palace. On one side is the peristyle, with its square stunted pillars, looking as if the weight above crushed them, though it wearies them no more than the heavens do Atlas; on the other, a gateway, vast, low-browed, shadowy with Cyclopean stones. Somewhat apart is a strange weird figure, ever and anon starting up and tossing her arms wildly as she utters some new denunciation, and then cowering down again in a despairing weariness. There are traces yet in the thin, wan face of the beauty which enslaved Loxian Apollo, and of the pride which turned his great love into a greater hate: round it hang the black elf-locks, disheveled, that have never been braided since the gripe of Telamonian Ajax ruffled them so rudely. In her great, troubled eyes you read terrible memories, and a prescience of coming death--death, most grateful to the dishonored princess, but before which the frail womanhood can not but shudder and quail. No wonder that the reverend men glance at her uneasily, scarcely mustering courage enough sometimes to answer her with a pious plat.i.tude. Alas! alas! Ca.s.sandra.
While we gaze, forth from the recesses of the gynaeceum there breaks a cry, expressing rather wrath and surprise than mere pain. Then there comes another, more plaintive--the moan of a strong man in the death-throe.
We know that voice very well; we have heard it many times, calm and regal, above the wrangle of councils and the roar of battle; often it prayed for victory or for the people's weal, but it never yet called on earth or heaven to help Agamemnon. The Chorus hear it too; but they linger and palter, while each gives his grave sentence deliberately in his proper turn. One or two advise action and interference, and stand perfectly still. At last we hear a heavy, choking groan, and a great stillness follows. We know that all is over--we know that there is a stir already down there in Hades--we seem to catch a far-off murmur raised by a thousand weak, tremulous voices--the very ghost of a wail--as the shadows of those who died gallantly in their harness before Troy gather to meet their old leader, the mightiest Atride.
In the background of all we fancy a hideous Eidolon, from whose side even the d.a.m.ned recoil in loathing. There is a grin on the lips yet red and wet with the traces of the unholy banquet. Thyestes exalts over the fulfillment of another chapter in the inevitable curse.
Who has not grown savage over that scene? We hate the old drivelers less when, a few minutes later, they truckle and temporize with the awful shape, who comes forth with a splash of blood on her slender wrist, and a speck or two on her white, lofty forehead.
Just so helpless and useless I felt at that moment. I was standing by while a foul wrong was being wrought. I saw nothing but ruin for Guy, and desolate misery for Constance, in the black future. Yet I could think of no argument or counsel that would in the least avail. I felt sick at heart. It was some minutes before I answered his last question.
At last the words broke from me almost unconsciously: ”Ah! how will you answer to G.o.d and man for last night's work?”
I forgot that I was quoting the cry of the Covenanter's widow when she knelt by her husband's corpse, and looked up into Claverhouse's face with those sad eyes that were ever dim and cloudy after the carbines flashed across them. But Guy remembered it, and answered instantly in the words of his favorite hero,