Graham read the inscription slowly, and with very dimmed eyes. It deserved the praise bestowed on it; for the Duke, though a shy and awkward speaker, was an incisive and graceful writer.
Yet, in his innermost self, Graham shivered when he read that epitaph, it expressed so emphatically the reverential nature of the love which Lady Janet had inspired--the genial influences which the holiness of a character so active in doing good had diffused around it. It brought vividly before Graham that image of perfect spotless womanhood. And a voice within him asked, "Would that cenotaph be placed amid the monuments of an ill.u.s.trious lineage if the secret known to thee could transpire? What though the lost one were really as unsullied by sin as the world deems, would the name now treasured as an heirloom not be a memory of gall and a sound of shame?"
He remained so silent after putting down the inscription, that the Duke said modestly: "My dear Graham, I see that you do not like what I have written. Your pen is much more practised than mine. If I did not ask you to compose the epitaph, it was because I thought it would please you more in coming, as a spontaneous tribute due to her, from the representative of her family. But will you correct my sketch, or give me another according to your own ideas?"
"I see not a word to alter," said Graham; "forgive me if my silence wronged my emotion; the truest eloquence is that which holds us too mute for applause."
"I knew you would like it. Leopold is always so disposed to underrate himself," said the d.u.c.h.ess, whose hand was resting fondly on her husband"s shoulder. "Epitaphs are so difficult to write-especially epitaphs on women of whom in life the least said the better. Janet was the only woman I ever knew whom one could praise in safety."
"Well expressed," said the Duke, smiling: "and I wish you would make that safety clear to some lady friends of yours, to whom it might serve as a lesson. Proof against every breath of scandal herself, Janet King never uttered and never encouraged one ill-natured word against another.
But I am afraid, my dear fellow, that I must leave you to a tete-a-tete with Eleanor. You know that I must be at the House this evening--I only paired till half-past nine."
"I will walk down to the House with you, if you are going on foot."
"No," said the d.u.c.h.ess; "you must resign yourself to me for at least half an hour. I was looking over your aunt"s letters to-day, and I found one which I wish to show you; it is all about yourself, and written within the last few months of her life." Here she put her arm into Graham"s, and led him into her own private drawing-room, which, though others might call it a boudoir, she dignified by the name of her study.
The Duke remained for some minutes thoughtfully leaning his arm on the mantelpiece. It was no unimportant debate in the Lords that night, and on a subject in which he took great interest, and the details of which he had thoroughly mastered. He had been requested to speak, if only a few words, for his high character and his reputation for good sense gave weight to the mere utterance of his opinion. But though no one had more moral courage in action, the Duke had a terror at the very thought of addressing an audience, which made him despise himself.
"Ah!" he muttered, "if Graham Vane were but in Parliament, I could trust him to say exactly what I would rather be swallowed up by an earthquake than stand up and say for myself. But now he has got money he seems to think of nothing but saving it."
CHAPTER V.
The letter from Lady Janet, which the d.u.c.h.ess took from the desk and placed in Graham"s hand, was in strange coincidence with the subject that for the last twenty-four hours had absorbed his thoughts and tortured his heart. Speaking of him in terms of affectionate eulogy, the writer proceeded to confide her earnest wish that he should not longer delay that change in life which, concentrating so much that is vague in the desires and aspirations of man, leaves his heart and his mind, made serene by the contentment of home, free for the steadfast consolidation of their warmth and their light upon the enn.o.bling duties that unite the individual to his race.
"There is no one," wrote Lady Janet, "whose character and career a felicitous choice in marriage can have greater influence over than this dear adopted son of mine. I do not fear that in any case he will be liable to the errors of his brilliant father. His early reverse of fortune here seems to me one of those blessings which Heaven conceals in the form of affliction. For in youth, the genial freshness of his gay animal spirits, a native generosity mingled with desire of display and thirst for applause, made me somewhat alarmed for his future. But, though he still retains these attributes of character, they are no longer predominant; they are modified and chastened. He has learned prudence. But what I now fear most for him is that which he does not show in the world, which neither Leopold nor you seem to detect,--it is an exceeding sensitiveness of pride. I know not how else to describe it.
It is so interwoven with the highest qualities, that I sometimes dread injury to them could it be torn away from the faultier ones which it supports.
"It is interwoven with that lofty independence of spirit which has made him refuse openings the most alluring to his ambition; it communicates a touching grandeur to his self-denying thrift; it makes him so tenacious of his word once given, so cautious before he gives it. Public life to him is essential; without it he would be incomplete; and yet I sigh to think that whatever success he may achieve in it will be attended with proportionate pain. Calumny goes side by side with fame, and courting fame as a man, he is as thin-skinned to calumny as a woman.
"The wife for Graham should have qualities, not taken individually, uncommon in English wives, but in combination somewhat rare.
"She must have mind enough to appreciate his--not to clash with it.
She must be fitted with sympathies to be his dearest companion, his confidante in the hopes and fears which the slightest want of sympathy would make him keep ever afterwards pent within his breast. In herself worthy of distinction, she must merge all distinction in his. You have met in the world men who, marrying professed beauties, or professed literary geniuses, are spoken of as the husband of the beautiful Mrs.
A------, or of the clever Mrs. B-------: can you fancy Graham Vane in the reflected light of one of those husbands? I trembled last year when I thought he was attracted by a face which the artists raved about, and again by a tongue which dropped bons mots that went the round of the club. I was relieved, when, sounding him, he said, laughingly, "No, dear aunt, I should be one sore from head to foot if I married a wife that was talked about for anything but goodness."
"No,--Graham Vane will have pains sharp enough if he live to be talked about himself. But that tenderest half of himself, the bearer of the name he would make, and for the dignity of which he alone would be responsible,--if that were the town talk, he would curse the hour he gave any one the right to take on herself his man"s burden of calumny and fame. I know not which I should pity the most, Graham Vane or his wife.
"Do you understand me, dearest Eleanor? No doubt you do so far, that you comprehend that the women whom men most admire are not the women we, as women ourselves, would wish our sons or brothers to marry. But perhaps you do not comprehend my cause of fear, which is this--for in such matters men do not see as we women do--Graham abhors, in the girls of our time, frivolity and insipidity. Very rightly, you will say. True, but then he is too likely to be allured by contrasts. I have seen him attracted by the very girls we recoil from more than we do from those we allow to be frivolous and insipid. I accused him of admiration for a certain young lady whom you call "odious," and whom the slang that has come into vogue calls "fast;" and I was not satisfied with his answer, "Certainly I admire her; she is not a doll--she has ideas." I would rather of the two see Graham married to what men call a doll, than to a girl with ideas which are distasteful to women."
Lady Janet then went on to question the d.u.c.h.ess about a Miss Asterisk, with whom this tale will have nothing to do, but who, from the little which Lady Janet had seen of her, might possess all the requisites that fastidious correspondent would exact for the wife of her adopted son.
This Miss Asterisk had been introduced into the London world by the d.u.c.h.ess. The d.u.c.h.ess had replied to Lady Janet, that if earth could be ransacked, a more suitable wife for Graham Vane than Miss Asterisk could not be found; she was well born--an heiress; the estates she inherited were in the county of--(viz., the county in which the ancestors of D"Altons and Vanes had for centuries established their whereabout). Miss Asterisk was pretty enough to please any man"s eye, but not with the beauty of which artists rave; well informed enough to be companion to a well-informed man, but certainly not witty enough to supply bons mots to the clubs. Miss Asterisk was one of those women of whom a husband might be proud, yet with whom a husband would feel safe from being talked about.
And in submitting the letter we have read to Graham"s eye, the d.u.c.h.ess had the cause of Miss Asterisk pointedly in view. Miss Asterisk had confided to her friend, that, of all men she had seen, Mr. Graham Vane was the one she would feel the least inclined to refuse.
So when Graham Vane returned the letter to the d.u.c.h.ess, simply saying, "How well my dear aunt divined what is weakest in me!" the d.u.c.h.ess replied quickly, "Miss Asterisk dines here to-morrow; pray come; you would like her if you knew more of her."
"To-morrow I am engaged--an American friend of mine dines with me; but "tis no matter, for I shall never feel more for Miss Asterisk than I feel for Mont Blanc."
CHAPTER VI.
On leaving his cousin"s house Graham walked on, he scarce knew or cared whither, the image of the beloved dead so forcibly recalled the solemnity of the mission with which he had been intrusted, and which hitherto he had failed to fulfil. What if the only mode by which he could, without causing questions and suspicions that might result in dragging to day the terrible nature of the trust he held, enrich the daughter of Richard King, repair all wrong hitherto done to her, and guard the sanct.i.ty of Lady Janet"s home,--should be in that union which Richard King had commended to him while his heart was yet free? In such a case, would not grat.i.tude to the dead, duty to the living, make that union imperative at whatever sacrifice of happiness to himself? The two years to which Richard King had limited the suspense of research were not yet expired. Then, too, that letter of Lady Janet"s,--so tenderly anxious for his future, so clear-sighted as to the elements of his own character in its strength or its infirmities--combined with graver causes to withhold his heart from its yearning impulse, and--no, not steel it against Isaura, but forbid it to realise, in the fair creature and creator of romance, his ideal of the woman to whom an earnest, sagacious, aspiring man commits all the destinies involved in the serene dignity of his hearth. He could not but own that this gifted author--this eager seeker after fame--this brilliant and bold compet.i.tor with men on their own stormy battle-ground-was the very person from whom Lady Janet would have warned away his choice. She (Isaura) merge her own distinctions in a husband"s;--she leave exclusively to him the burden of fame and calumny!--she shun "to be talked about!" she who could feel her life to be a success or a failure, according to the extent and the loudness of the talk which it courted!
While these thoughts racked his mind, a kindly hand was laid on his arm, and a cheery voice accosted him. "Well met, my dear Vane! I see we are bound to the same place; there will be a good gathering to-night."
"What do you mean, Bevil? I am going nowhere, except to my own quiet rooms."
"Pooh! Come in here at least for a few minutes,"--and Bevil drew him up to the door-step of a house close by, where, on certain evenings, a well-known club drew together men who seldom meet so familiarly elsewhere--men of all callings; a club especially favoured by wits, authors, and the flaneurs of polite society.
Graham shook his head, about to refuse, when Bevil added, "I have just come from Paris, and can give you the last news, literary, political, and social. By the way, I saw Savarin the other night at the Cicogna"s--he introduced me there." Graham winced; he was spelled by the music of a name, and followed his acquaintance into the crowded room, and, after returning many greetings and nods, withdrew into a remote corner, and motioned Bevil to a seat beside him.
"So you met Savarin? Where, did you say?"
"At the house of the new lady-author--I hate the word auth.o.r.ess--Mademoiselle Cicogna! Of course you have read her book?"
"Yes."
"Full of fine things, is it not?--though somewhat highflown and sentimental: however, nothing succeeds like success. No book has been more talked about at Paris: the only thing more talked about is the lady-author herself."
"Indeed, and how?"
"She doesn"t look twenty, a mere girl--of that kind of beauty which so arrests the eye that you pa.s.s by other faces to gaze on it, and the dullest stranger would ask, "Who, and what is she?" A girl, I say, like that--who lives as independently as if she were a middle-aged widow, receives every week (she has her Thursdays), with no other chaperon than an old ci-devant Italian singing woman, dressed like a guy--must set Parisian tongues into play even if she had not written the crack book of the season."
"Mademoiselle Cicogna receives on Thursdays,--no harm in that; and if she have no other chaperon than the Italian lady you mention, it is because Mademoiselle Cicogna is an orphan, and having a fortune, such as it is, of her own, I do not see why she should not live as independently as many an unmarried woman in London placed under similar circ.u.mstances.
I suppose she receives chiefly persons in the literary or artistic world, and if they are all as respectable as the Savarins, I do not think ill-nature itself could find fault with her social circle."
"Ah! you know the Cicogna, I presume. I am sure I did not wish to say anything that could offend her best friends, only I do think it is a pity she is not married, poor girl!"
"Mademoiselle Cicogna, accomplished, beautiful, of good birth (the Cicogna"s rank among the oldest of Lombard families), is not likely to want offers."
"Offers of marriage,--h"m--well, I dare say, from authors and artists.
You know Paris better even than I do, but I don"t suppose authors and artists there make the most desirable husbands; and I scarcely know a marriage in France between a man-author and lady-author which does not end in the deadliest of all animosities--that of wounded amour propre.
Perhaps the man admires his own genius too much to do proper homage to his wife"s."
"But the choice of Mademoiselle Cicogna need not be restricted to the pale of authorship--doubtless she has many admirers beyond that quarrelsome borderland."
"Certainly-countless adorers. Enguerrand de Vandemar--you know that diamond of dandies?"
"Perfectly--is he an admirer?"
"Cela va sans dire--he told me that though she was not the handsomest woman in Paris, all other women looked less handsome since he had seen her. But, of course, French lady-killers like Enguerrand, when it comes to marriage, leave it to their parents to choose their wives and arrange the terms of the contract. Talking of lady-killers, I beheld amid the throng at Mademoiselle Cicogna"s the ci-devant Lovelace whom I remember some twenty-three years ago as the darling of wives and the terror of husbands-Victor de Mauleon."
"Victor de Mauleon at Mademoiselle Cicogna"s!--what, is that man restored to society?"