CHAPTER XI.

“J’AIME: IL FAUT QUE J’ESPERE.”

EUSTACE THORBURN found existence altogether a new kind of thing at the old house amongst the Berkshire woods. His sorrow for the death of his mother was no transient shadow, to be dispelled by the first bright glimpse of sunlight that fell across his pathway. It was a deep and enduring sorrow; but it was a grief which held a fixed place in his mind, apart from the common joys and vexations of life. All through those bright summer days the young man showed himself a cheerful companion, an enthusiastic student, a willing and devoted worker; and it was only by his mourning dress that those amongst whom he lived were reminded of his recent loss. But every night, in the stillness of his own room, the familiar agony came back to his breast; memory and imagination travelled again upon the beaten track; and he thought of his mother’s joyless womanhood and lonely death with a pain as bitter as that which he had felt when he stood beside her newly made grave.

Such things as these are not to be forgotten. Are they not the “pathetic minor” which underlies all the harmonies of earth, heard more or less distinctly, but silent never?

The one clue which his mother’s letter afforded had been sedulously followed up by Eustace. The stranger calling himself Hardwick was the writer of a book first published in the year ’43; and a book of some repute, as the young man gathered from the letters of his unknown father. Eustace had Mrs. Willows’ authority for the fact that the book was some kind of novel or romance; and acting upon this information, he devoted himself for three consecutive days to an examination of the critical magazines and periodicals of that year in the reading-room of the British Museum.

The result of his labours was not particularly satisfactory. So many romances published within the year were spoken of as the best novels of the season, or as works bearing the seal of genius, or as the promise of greater things from the matured mind of the writer, that it needed much sifting of all this chaff before the amount of genuine wheat contained therein could be fairly estimated. But at last, after a careful study of the _Literary Gazette_ and _Athenæum_, the quarterlies and monthlies, Eustace Thorburn selected, from a long list of brilliant successes and best novels of the season, three books, each of which seemed to bear upon it the stamp of something greater than amiable mediocrity.

These are the titles of the three books which Eustace Thorburn selected, after having read them carefully and thoughtfully:

1. _Dion_: a Confession.

2. _Latimer’s Sister_: a Story. By Marcus Anderton.

3. _The Spectre of Walden_: a Romance. By G. G. G.

Of these three, _Dion_ was the most singular; _Latimer’s Sister_ the most tender; _The Spectre_ the most poetical. Any one of these books might have exercised a powerful effect upon the mind of a sentimental woman. That they were all three written by men, and by young men, Eustace entertained no doubt. He did not, indeed, trust entirely to his own judgment; for he enlisted the services of his Uncle Dan, and induced that practised reviewer to read the three books.

“All masculine work!” cried Mr. Mayfield. “No woman could have written _Latimer’s Sister_ without telling us when the young lady who figures as the heroine wore blue silk, or how lovely she looked in pink tarlatane. _The Spectre_ is a translation from the German. No Englishman would have been as simple and true to nature in his peasant-life; and I recognize untranslatable German compounds in my friend’s phraseology. The book which indicates power, and even genius, is _Dion_. I have a sort of hazy recollection of hearing that book talked about when I was a young man, and of hearing that it was written by some sprig of quality. In my opinion, Eustace, that story of _Dion_ is the kind of book to fascinate a girl.”

“It is so morbid, so gloomy.”

“Gloom is the very thing a girl loves, especially when it is the gloom of the storm-cloud--passion, and anguish, and so on. Depend upon it, my dear lad, _Dion_ is the book that man wrote--the book your mother was reading in the unlucky hour in which he first saw her face.”

“I am inclined to believe that you are right, Uncle Dan,” Eustace answered, thoughtfully. “It is evidently the work of a scholar.”

“Yes, but of a very young scholar. The learning is there, but in a crude, half-digested state. The pages bristle with fragments of old-world wisdom. The wisdom does not underlie the whole, it is not interwoven with the very fabric of the book, as in the work of a mature mind. There is passion and poetry,--a hazy kind of poetry, but with a certain fascination and grace of its own,--the poetry of a man who has never written for bread, or been troubled by uncertainties about his dinner. That parting with the girl Una is very pretty; and the dream in the ruined manor-house has a weird power. One almost feels the cold winds blowing through the windows that will not shut; one almost sees the midnight shadows of ash and poplar lying black on the moss-grown flags of the quadrangle, and all the nakedness and desolation of the place. Yes, Eustace, there is the glamour of youth and poetry upon _Dion_; I should not wonder if the man who wrote that book were the man who won your mother’s heart.”

Daniel Mayfield spoke with an air of conviction that had considerable influence upon his nephew. He went back to the reviews of _Dion_, in the hope of finding some clue to the writer in the opinions and speculations of the reviewers.

In this he was disappointed. The reviewers told him no more than his Uncle Dan had told him. They judged the writer as Mr. Mayfield had judged him, from the evidence of the book; they had evidently no knowledge outside the book. The mystery of anonymous publication had been religiously preserved, and as the book had created some sensation at the time of its appearance, there had been considerable speculation as to the individuality of the writer.

The result of all this speculation was limited to the following deductions:

1st. The writer of the book was a young man who had gone through the usual curriculum of a university education.

2nd. The style and manner of thinking were eminently Oxonian.

3rd. The writer was well acquainted with Continental life.

4th. He was as familiar with German literature as with the classics.

5th. His proclivities were aristocratic; his contempt for the masses supreme and undisguised.

6th. His philosophy was Epicurean; his gods the graceful divinities of Greece; his nature sensuous, selfish, but not altogether base. He was an ardent worshipper of the beautiful. He thirsted for woman’s love,--the pure, the true; but it was the purity and truth of earth’s primæval freedom for which he languished, rather than the divine sentiment allowed by Christian rule.

Upon these points the reviewers were strong, and they had sufficient justification for their opinion. The book was pervaded by the personality of the writer. It was indeed a confession, an autobiographical record, in which the events and circumstances of actual life were doubtless altered and disguised, but a record which laid bare the heart and mind of the man.

Eustace read the book at the British Museum, and persuaded his uncle to read it at the same place. He tried to obtain a copy of the story; but _Dion_ had long been out of print. The booksellers had only the faintest recollection of a book of that name, and of the fact that it had created some slight stir during the brief season of its popularity.

“I’ll get you a copy of the book, sooner or later, if your heart is set upon it, lad,” said Daniel Mayfield. “You know what a habitual book-stall lounger I am, and how many times I have had my pocket picked while I have been dipping into one of the Neo-Platonists, or an Amsterdam edition of Hysminias and Hysmine, before a second-hand bookseller’s emporium. _Dion_ is just the sort of book to figure in a bookseller’s box of odd volumes--‘All these at twopence,’--and, depend upon it, I shall meet with the gentleman some day. I know a man who is very clever at picking up any out-of-the-way book I happen to want; and if you wish it, I’ll set him to work.”

“I shall be very glad if you do; I would willingly give a guinea for that book.”

“I’ll get it you for half the money; but I wish to heaven you would abandon all speculations about this man, who, after all, may not be the author of _Dion_.”

“That I shall never do while my brain has power to speculate; so let us say no more about that, Uncle Dan.”

It was rather late in the autumn when Eustace Thorburn made his researches at the British Museum. He obtained a few days’ holiday from his employer, and shared his Uncle Daniel’s lodgings in Great Ormond Street,--big rooms that had once been very grand and noble, and which, even now, had a pleasant airy aspect, and some remains of old-world splendour.

The “few days” stretched themselves into a week before the young man had completed his studies, but at the end of the week he bade his kinsman good-bye, and went back to Berkshire, in no wise sorry to return to the park and forest, the winding river and odorous flower-garden of his new home.

In no wise sorry? Could there be gladness more complete than that which filled his breast as he returned to the house he had learned to think of as a home?

“M. de Bergerac’s book will be finished by and by, and he will have no further need of my services,” thought the returning traveller, as the sober goddess of common-sense projected her dark shadow athwart the sunlit realms of fancy. “I shall have to bid farewell to these new friends, and begin the world once more among strangers. I suppose that will be the story of my life. I may find friends; I may attach myself to a stranger’s house, until I almost fancy I have kindred and a home, like the rest of mankind; and then, just when I am happiest, my foolish dream will end all at once, and I shall have to begin life again. Oh, let me be patient when the trial comes! My life can never be so sad and dreary as _hers_ was.”

Further reflection developed consoling ideas that brought back a happy smile to the traveller’s lips.

“The _History of Superstition_ will not be finished for many a long year at its present rate of progress,” he said to himself. “I could wish for nothing better than to live for ever at the bailiff’s cottage, working for the kindest of employers.”

He could not, indeed, imagine any state of happiness more perfect than that which he enjoyed in Theodore de Bergerac’s quiet home, after all due reservation had been made for that secret sorrow which was not altogether to be put away from his mind, even when his surroundings were brightest.

Life at Greenlands was very quiet. The scholar and his daughter were a modern Prospero and Miranda, with trim maid-servants to wait upon them instead of Caliban; and the new Miranda’s life was not much less lonely than that of her prototype on the enchanted isle. Mademoiselle de Bergerac had very few friends and no acquaintance. She had never been to school, and she had scarcely heard the names of those pleasures and excitements which are the necessities of fashionable damsels. To take tea with the curate’s daughters, under the walnut-trees in the prettiest corner of the lawn, was a delightful festivity; to picnic at Burnham Beeches with her father and two or three chosen friends was a matter of almost bewildering excitement; to creep along by the willowy margin of the river in her own light skiff, while her father sat in the stern reciting some of Victor Hugo’s noblest verses for her edification, was a quiet rapture above and beyond all those unknown pleasures of whose existence she was vaguely conscious.

Never was maiden better pleased with her own life and her own surroundings than Helen de Bergerac. She had the Gallic vivacity of disposition, the sanguine, romantic temperament of the Celt. She adored her father, and adored the fair English country, and the river, and her dog, and Greenlands; and it was only sometimes, in a tender reverie, that she pictured to herself sunnier lands,--the vineyards of Provence, the towers and steeples of Norman cities, the broad blue waters of the Seine, broken by islets of tender green, and curving like a silver bow, by valley and woodland, chalky cliff and quaint nestling town, gray rock and mediæval castle, half-fortress, half-château.

Mademoiselle de Bergerac thought of this romantic land sometimes, and sighed for a state of things that might bring about her father’s return to his native country. For the exiled family she entertained a sentiment that was akin to adoration, confounding all distinction between _famille aînée_ and _famille cadette_; and beholding in the quiet country gentlemen of Twickenham and Bushey the direct descendants of that bold warrior whose white plume flashed like a star athwart the serried ranks at Fontenoy.

But second only to her affection for that country whereof she knew so little, and which must always be more or less a dreamland for her, was Mademoiselle de Bergerac’s affection for Berkshire, the land of her birth, the pastoral scene amidst which there was one corner, one quiet grave in a village churchyard--a grave above which there bloomed roses more beautiful than common flowers growing in common gardens--that must for ever make this one spot holier in her eyes than all other regions of this lower world. To keep her father’s house, to supply in some measure the place of that dear companion who was lost to him, to sustain the student’s ambition, and to watch the scholar’s health, meting out the midnight oil, and restraining the too eager spirit in the interests of the ill-used flesh,--in these things was comprised the desire of Helen de Bergerac’s heart and mind.

She received her father’s secretary with a most delightful cordiality, accepting this new member of the family with a grace as easy as if he had been some long-absent brother or cousin come from beyond seas to take his place in the household. Prudery and affectation were unknown to this sylvan damsel. She found it rather agreeable than otherwise to have a well-bred, well-informed young man in attendance upon her when she inspected her garden, or supervised the arrangement of a rustic banquet under the chestnuts on the lawn. She found it agreeable to be assisted in her reading by some one whose time was less occupied, and whose erudition was less alarming than her father’s. She found it pleasant to have a friend who went to the extremest lengths in the worship of Beethoven and Weber,--a friend who could discourse most eloquently of Hugo and Shakespeare, Bulwer and Göthe, Balzac and Thackeray, while her father dozed in the quiet summer twilights, wearied out by his long day’s labour,--a friend who seemed, strange to say, always intensely interested in every subject that happened to interest her, a knight-errant who, living perchance in a prosaic century, was fain to demonstrate his devotion by the clipping of faded rose-leaves, and the hunting out of recondite islands and promontories in the classic atlas,--a friend who, by some unerring instinct, contrived always to do and say precisely what she wished,--a friend who was always the right man in the right place.

“I don’t know how it is, but it seems to me that I am always right,” remarked the young Duchess of Burgundy with charming _naïveté_; and Mademoiselle de Bergerac on more than one occasion gave utterance to observations quite as _naïf_ on the subject of her new acquaintance.

“I really cannot tell how it is Mr. Thorburn always contrives to make himself so agreeable, papa,” she said.

The simple-hearted book-worm was no less blind than his daughter.

“I am glad you like him, my love,” he replied, carelessly. “I was rather afraid you might object to a third person in the house. He is a most admirable young man. For hunting out a reference or a quotation, he is, I think, unrivalled. I only hope I shall be able to keep him till my book is finished; but that will be a long time, Helen, a very long time--if I live to finish it at all.”

“Dear, dear father,” murmured the girl, tenderly; and then she continued, with some appearance of alarm, “Do you think Mr. Thorburn wishes to leave us?”

“No, my dear, I have no reason to think that. But he is very young, you know; and this must be a dull kind of life for a young man.”

“And yet I am sure Mr. Thorburn is not unhappy. He had only just lost his mother, you know, when he came to us; and of course the memory of that loss makes him thoughtful and melancholy sometimes. But I am sure he is quite content to lead our quiet life, papa, and that he takes a very deep interest in your book. He told me the other day that he cannot venture to look forward to the end of that book; it seems to him like looking forward to the end of his life.”

“It is, indeed, an interesting subject, my love,” replied M. de Bergerac, with complacency, “and an almost inexhaustible one--the history of superstition: a mighty record, a vast survey, embracing the length and breadth of this earth, from the monstrous temples of the East to the classic shrines of the West--from the altar of the Carthaginian Æsculapius to the funeral pyre of the Scandinavian Balder. I am much pleased to think the young man likes his work. He is very clever.”

“Is he not clever, papa? He wrote a little poem the other day, and he asked my opinion of it. As if _my_ opinion could be worth having! It was charming. I do not think your favourite Catullus, whom you praise so much, and yet will not allow me to read, could have written anything more graceful. It is full of that mournful langour that there is in some of Victor Hugo’s minor poems, and in Longfellow’s--a sweet, calm sadness that pierces one’s heart.”

“I am glad he distracts himself by the composition of verses,” said the scholar. “There are some who consider such a course of reading as he is now engaged in dry and laborious; but to my mind there can be no better nurture for a poet. I trust Mr. Thorburn may achieve some kind of success in the future.”

“I think he writes or studies a good deal at night, after you have done with him.”

“How do you know that, my dear?”

“Through Susan, papa. She is always complaining about the candles. You know how economical she is; and I assure you Mr. Thorburn’s consumption of candles is quite an affliction to her. I wonder whether the Grecian _ménagères_ were angry when their lords consumed the midnight oil. Perhaps that was one of Xantippe’s grievances. I don’t think Socrates could have been a _very_ agreeable husband.”

“That point is open to discussion,” said the scholar, slyly. “We possess the sage’s opinion of Xantippe, but we do not possess Xantippe’s opinion of the sage.”

The weeks and months slipped by, and the fern was sear and brown in Windsor Great Park and Forest, and all the woodlands of Berkshire were leafless; but Eustace Thorburn showed no signs of distaste for his labours as secretary and amanuensis, collator and collaborateur. He languished for no change, he pined for no pleasure. His considerate employer had borrowed an extra horse from the stables of the great house, where there was still the remnant of a noble stud; and at his suggestion the young man took long rides in the early morning, before the day’s studious drudgery began. It was very pleasant to come home to breakfast in the snug old-fashioned parlour, and to be welcomed by Mademoiselle de Bergerac, whose bright eyes grew brighter at sight of some sprig of rare comb-bearing fern. Life at Greenlands seemed, indeed, to be altogether an existence of perfect and serene delight, only overshadowed now and then by the vague consciousness that it was too sweet to last.

“The time will come when I shall have to pack my portmanteau and bid her good-bye,” the young man said to himself, in moments of sober meditation at night, when he sat alone in his pleasant room, and some break, some stagnation in the course of his composition brought him to a stand-still; “or some one will come and see her, and learn to love her as dearly as I love her even; and he will be in a position to say the sweet words I dare not say to her; and I shall hear the jangling village-bells some misty summer morning, and she will come in her white bridal dress to bid me farewell. Men have to bear such pain as that, and to bear it quietly.”

By these reflections it will be seen that Eustace Thorburn, without fortune, friends, or name, and with the ever-present consciousness of the bar-sinister on his escutcheon, had presumed to fall in love with the only child of his employer. Could he have done otherwise? “Lives there a wretch with soul so dead” as to be able to inhabit the same dwelling with a Helen de Bergerac for six months and not own himself her worshipper and slave ere the sixth month is ended? Eustace Thorburn had surrendered himself an unresisting victim to the pitiless goddess who sways the weak souls of men, as her kinswoman Artemis rules the tides of ocean. He had allowed himself to be cradled in the shadowy arms of Fancy, rocked to the sweetest sleep that was ever broken by bitter waking.

“I know that it must end in misery,” he said to himself; “but it is so sweet--while it lasts.”

He loved her, and he feared that his love was hopeless. Simple as M. de Bergerac’s life might be, he bore upon him the stamp of the old _noblesse_. He was of that nation whose _dernière grand dame_ died with Queen Marie-Amélie; and it was not to be supposed there was no latent pride of birth beneath that graceful humility of manner which rendered the exile so dear to the cottagers and peasant children about Greenlands.

“I think he would give his daughter to a poor man,” thought Eustace, when he meditated this vital question; “for his soul seems to me so pure and noble as to be above all consideration of worldly wealth; and then Helen’s simple habits fit her for a poor man’s wife. But I cannot think that he would consent to an alliance with a man of low origin, or of unknown origin, which to that proud and pure mind would seem worse than the lowest, since it must bear the stigma of shame.”

There were times when a hope--vague but exquisite--awoke in the young man’s breast as he pondered on the future. If he was nameless to-day, must he needs go nameless to the grave? Might he not win for himself a renown that would give grace and lustre to that simple family name of Thorburn, which he had seen on his grandfather’s tombstone? Was it only a foolish presumption, the besotted vanity of a young pedant, which buoyed him up and supported him in his hours of depression? Was that word _Parvenir_, which he had taken for himself as his motto, and cherished in secret as the watch-word of his life, only the formula of a braggart? Was that pleasant land of dreams, in which he was wont to take refuge when the world of realities seemed dark and dreary, only a fool’s paradise?

Insomuch as poetic dreams and aspirations can make a man a poet, Eustace Thorburn was a member of that glorious brotherhood which began with Homer; but it yet remained to be shown whether he were gifted with something more than the vague yearnings and lofty imaginings of the dreamer who would fain admit the world within the mystic portals of his fair shadowland. To think high thoughts, to dream delicious dreams, is one thing; but to be able to translate thought and dream into the eloquent verse of a Byron, or the polished syllables of a Tennyson, is another thing. To how many eyes the Coliseum and the Adriatic, the Drachenfels and the quiet field that lies beyond Ardennes, may have seemed as fair as they appeared to the eyes of that one lonely traveller who has recorded his wanderings in words that can never die! How many brains must have been crowded by grand imaginings, how many hearts must have beat high with the dreamer’s enthusiasm, as the youth of England have trodden the ground that is hallowed by the footsteps of heroes and demigods! and yet, of all the youth of England, there has been but one whose poetic record of his emotions has reached a second edition, and held a place in the memory of mankind. Of all the men who read the rugged legends of Macbeth and Lear, the Italian story of Othello’s passion and Iago’s cunning, there was only one man who could give to the crude unshapely records life and form, immortal as his own genius!

Whether Eustace Thorburn possessed that subtle and wondrous power of expression, that mystic sympathy with the minds of his fellowmen, that marvellous perception which is a kind of clairvoyance, time alone could show. He had his moments of proud hope, his hours of abject depression; but he worked on patiently, steadily, devoting more than one quiet hour of every night to the composition of a narrative poem--dramatic, philosophical, passionate, and perhaps just a little tainted with the egotism which is so common in the work of youthful genius.

Eustace Thorburn had no suspicion that the hero of his poetic fiction was a shadow of himself, a projection of his own brain; but he knew that the heroine was an airy sister of Helen de Bergerac, and that the love of his Egbert for his Amy was very near akin to his own love for Helen.

There was no odour of the midnight oil in the poet’s verses. They breathed the freshness of youth, the perfume of woods and groves; the harmonious lines were musical with the ripple of cool waters, the low sound of leafy branches swaying gently in the summer wind. The life which Eustace Thorburn led at Greenlands was the ideal existence for which the poet sighs, for which he yearns with fond imaginings, pent up in the darksome city counting-house, chained to the cruel wheel of distasteful labour. Nor was the young man ungrateful to Providence, or to the kindly kinsman who had procured for him so pleasant a position. He thanked God for his easy existence, his congenial labours; and he wrote sweet, playful letters, full of affection and gratitude, to Uncle Dan, who treasured those effusions, and was pleased to favour his friends and boon-companions with the recital of eloquent little bits in those delightful epistles.

“What would you give to be able to write like that, Tom Granger?” he said to one of his associates. “You write uncommonly well, you know, dear boy, and so does John Harrington, and Ted Rochester, and Frank Dorset; and there’s plenty of _chic_ in all you do. You all write uncommonly well, Tom; you can all describe the things you see every day, _from the outside_, with a certain amount of smartness; but there is no more evidence of thought in your compositions than if you were so many copying-machines; and you all write so like one another, that if Frank wrote page one, and Ted page two, and John page three, no one but themselves and the compositors who set-up their copy would be any the wiser. You have all got the slang of the day, and you all write for the current market, and you are all wise in your generation. But the day will come when this boy here will show you that a writer may have something more than ‘a knack,’ and be something better than a publisher’s ‘clever hand.’”

“I wouldn’t mind giving you long odds against that immaculate nephew of yours ever writing a book that will sell,” replied the incredulous Tom, in no wise put out of countenance by his friend’s exordium. “They all begin in the same style, these young uns. Epic poem about King Arthur, or King Alfred, or King Athelstane, that is to be the Iliad of future generations,--high-falutin sentiment, pure aspirations, and so on. And they write their epic poems, and pass them on from one publisher’s office to another, till the poor valueless manuscripts are limp and dirty; and then they learn to adapt themselves to the requirements of their generation, and turn into ‘clever hands’ like you and me, Dan. They must all go through the same apprenticeship, and ‘learn in suffering what they teach in song,’--that is to say, learn in Whitecross Street what they teach in the monthly magazines, unless they happen to be careful souls, with snug little incomes: in which case they hug their sweet delusions to the last, and publish their epics at their own expense. Epic poems, forsooth! Do you think the Greeks would have read Homer if they had possessed periodical literature?”

“I look upon periodical literature as the sworn foe to learning.”

“You are not the first of dirty birds, Daniel Mayfield,” cried his friend, sternly; “and now for the divine Louisa.”

The “divine Louisa” was Mr. Granger’s playful name for unlimited loo, a pastime which cost Daniel Mayfield many a five-pound note in the course of the year, but which he had not the moral courage to forswear. He had his reputation as a Bohemian, and he was too old to hope for a new reputation amongst the ranks of the respectable; so he was fain to be true to the brotherhood in which he had some _status_.

“Better to be a prince among the nomad tribes than a nobody among the Philistines,” he said to himself. “One might submit to that, if the Philistines were a perfect race; but when a man sees how much malice and selfishness there may be in the Pharisees and Sadducees, he is apt to prefer the society of publicans and sinners.”

These were the arguments with which Daniel Mayfield was wont to stifle the upbraidings of conscience; for the sinner can forgive himself all his other sins more easily than the one sin of a wasted life. Mr. Mayfield had his hours of depression, his moments of savage bitterness; and to escape from these, he fled to the scenes he liked and the friends he loved--the friends who in some sort loved him.