"His breath pollutes the air that innocence and honesty should breathe. He says all in this house are at his command,—why do we stay? Let us go." He turned towards the door, and Fanny with him.
Meanwhile the louder sounds below had been silenced for some moments; but I heard a step in the hall. Vivian started, and placed himself before us.
"No, no; you cannot leave me thus, Miss Trevanion. I resign you,—be it so; I do not even ask for pardon. But to leave this house thus, without carriage, without attendants, without explanation! The blame falls on me,—it shall do so; but at least vouchsafe me the right to repair what I yet can repair of the wrong, to protect all that is left to me,—your name."
As he spoke he did not perceive (for he was facing us, and with his back to the door) that a new actor had noiselessly entered on the scene, and, pausing by the threshold, heard his last words.
"The name of Miss Trevanion, sir,—and from what?" asked the new comer as he advanced and surveyed Vivian with a look that, but for its quiet, would have seemed disdain.
"Lord Castleton!" exclaimed Fanny, lifting up the face she had buried in her hands.
Vivian recoiled in dismay, and gnashed his teeth.
"Sir," said the marquis, "I await your reply; for not even you, in my presence, shall imply that one reproach can be attached to the name of that lady."
"Oh, moderate your tone to me, my Lord Castleton!" cried Vivian; "in you, at least, there is one man I am not forbidden to brave and defy. It was to save that lady from the cold ambition of her parents; it was to prevent the sacrifice of her youth and beauty to one whose sole merits are his wealth and his titles,—it was this that impelled me to the crime I have committed; this that hurried me on to risk all for one hour when youth at least could plead its cause to youth; and this gives me now the power to say that it does rest with me to protect the name of the lady, whom your very servility to that world which you have made your idol forbids you to claim from the heartless ambition that would sacrifice the daughter to the vanity of the parents. Ha! the future Marchioness of Castleton on her way to Scotland with a penniless adventurer! Ha! if my lips are sealed, who but I can seal the lips of those below in my secret? The secret shall be kept, but on this condition,—you shall not triumph where I have failed; I may lose what I adored, but I do not resign it to another. Ha! have I foiled you, my Lord Castleton? Ha, ha!"
"No, Sir; and I almost forgive you the villany you have not effected, for informing me, for the first time, that had I presumed to address Miss Trevanion, her parents at least would have pardoned the presumption. Trouble not yourself as to what your accomplices may say. They have already confessed their infamy and your own. Out of my path, Sir!"
Then, with the benign look of a father and the lofty grace of a prince, Lord Castleton advanced to Fanny. Looking round with a shudder, she hastily placed her hand in his, and by so doing perhaps prevented some violence on the part of Vivian, whose heaving breast and eye bloodshot, and still unquailing, showed how little even shame had subdued his fiercer passions. But he made no offer to detain them, and his tongue seemed to cleave to his lips. Now, as Fanny moved to the door she passed Roland, who stood motionless and with vacant looks, like an image of stone; and with a beautiful tenderness, for which (even at this distant date, recalling it) I say, "God requite thee, Fanny," she laid her other hand on Roland's arm and said, "Come, too: your arm still."
But Roland's limbs trembled and refused to stir; his head, relaxing, drooped on his breast, his eyes closed. Even Lord Castleton was so struck (though unable to guess the true and terrible cause of his dejection) that he forgot his desire to hasten from the spot, and cried with all his kindliness of heart, "You are ill, you faint; give him your arm, Pisistratus."
"It is nothing," said Roland, feebly, as he leaned heavily on my arm while I turned back my head, with all the bitterness of that reproach which filled my heart speaking in the eyes that sought him whose place should have been where mine now was. And oh!—thank Heaven, thank Heaven!—the look was not in vain. In the same moment the son was at the father's knees.
"Oh, pardon, pardon! Wretch, lost wretch though I be, I bow my head to the curse. Let it fall,—but on me, and on me only; not on your own heart too."
Fanny burst into tears, sobbing out, "Forgive him, as I do."
Roland did not heed her.
"He thinks that the heart was not shattered before the curse could come," he said, in a voice so weak as to be scarcely audible. Then, raising his eyes to heaven, his lips moved as if he prayed inly. Pausing, he stretched his hands over his son's head, and averting his face, said, "I revoke the curse. Pray to thy God for pardon."
Perhaps not daring to trust himself further, he then made a violent effort and hurried from the room.
We followed silently. When we gained the end of the passage, the door of the room we had left closed with a sullen jar.
As the sound smote on my ear, with it came so terrible a sense of the solitude upon which that door had closed, so keen and quick an apprehension of some fearful impulse, suggested by passions so fierce to a condition so forlorn, that instinctively I stopped, and then hurried back to the chamber. The lock of the door having been previously forced, there was no barrier to oppose my entrance. I advanced, and beheld a spectacle of such agony as can only be conceived by those who have looked on the grief which takes no fortitude from reason, no consolation from conscience,—the grief which tells us what would be the earth were man abandoned to his passions, and the Chance of the atheist reigned alone in the merciless heavens. Pride humbled to the dust; ambition shivered into fragments; love (or the passion mistaken for it) blasted into ashes; life, at the first onset, bereaved of its holiest ties, forsaken by its truest guide; shame that writhed for revenge; and remorse that knew not prayer,—all, all blended, yet distinct, were in that awful spectacle of the guilty son.
And I had told but twenty years, and my heart had been mellowed in the tender sunshine of a happy home, and I had loved this boy as a stranger; and lo, he was Roland's son! I forgot all else, looking upon that anguish; and I threw myself on the ground by the form that writhed there, and folding my arms round the breast which in vain repelled me, I whispered, "Comfort, comfort: life is long. You shall redeem the past, you shall efface the stain, and your father shall bless you yet!"
CHAPTER II
I could not stay long with my unhappy cousin, but still I stayed long enough to make me think it probable that Lord Castleton's carriage would have left the inn; and when, as I passed the hall, I saw it standing before the open door, I was seized with fear for Roland,—his emotions might have ended in some physical attack. Nor were those fears without foundation. I found Fanny kneeling beside the old soldier in the parlor where we had seen the two women, and bathing his temples, while Lord Castleton was binding his arm; and the marquis's favorite valet, who, amongst his other gifts, was something of a surgeon, was wiping the blade of the penknife that had served instead of a lancet. Lord Castleton nodded to me. "Don't be uneasy,—a little fainting fit; we have bled him. He is safe now,—see, he is recovering." Roland's eyes, as they opened, turned to me with an anxious, inquiring look. I smiled upon him as I kissed his forehead, and could, with a safe conscience, whisper words which neither father nor Christian could refuse to receive as comfort.
In a few minutes more we had left the house. As Lord Castleton's carriage only held two, the marquis, having assisted Miss Trevanion and Roland to enter, quietly mounted the seat behind and made a sign to me to come by his side, for there was room for both. (His servant had taken one of the horses that had brought thither Roland and myself, and already gone on before.) No conversation took place between us then. Lord Castleton seemed profoundly affected, and I had no words at my command.
When we reached the inn at which Lord Castleton had changed horses, about six miles distant, the marquis insisted on Fanny's taking some rest for a few hours; for indeed she was thoroughly worn out.
I attended my uncle to his room; but he only answered my assurances of his son's repentance with a pressure of the hand, and then, gliding from me, went into the farthest recess of the room and there knelt down. When he rose, he was passive and tractable as a child. He suffered me to assist him to undress; and when he had lain down on the bed, he turned his face quietly from the light, and after a few heavy sighs, sleep seemed mercifully to steal upon him. I listened to his breathing till it grew low and regular, and then descended to the sitting-room in which I had left Lord Castleton, for he had asked me in a whisper to seek him there.
I found the marquis seated by the fire, in a thoughtful and dejected attitude.
"I am glad you are come," said he, making room for me on the hearth, "for I assure you I have not felt so mournful for many years; we have much to explain to each other. Will you begin? They say the sound of the bell dissipates the thunder-cloud; and there is nothing like the voice of a frank, honest nature to dispel all the clouds that come upon us when we think of our own faults and the villany of others. But I beg you a thousand pardons: that young man your relation,—your brave uncle's son? Is it possible?"
My explanations to Lord Castleton were necessarily brief and imperfect. The separation between Roland and his son; my ignorance of its cause; my belief in the death of the latter; my chance acquaintance with the supposed Vivian; the interest I took in him; the relief it was to the fears for his fate with which he inspired me, to think he had returned to the home I ascribed to him; and the circumstances which had induced my suspicions, justified by the result,—all this was soon hurried over.
"But I beg your pardon," said the marquis, interrupting me "did you, in your friendship for one so unlike you, even by your own partial account, never suspect that you had stumbled upon your lost cousin?"
"Such an idea never could have crossed me."
And here I must observe that though the reader, at the first introduction of Vivian, would divine the secret, the penetration of a reader is wholly different from that of the actor in events. That I had chanced on one of those curious coincidences in the romance of real life which a reader looks out for and expects in following the course of narrative, was a supposition forbidden to me by a variety of causes. There was not the least family resemblance between Vivian and any of his relations; and, somehow or other, in Roland's son I had pictured to myself a form and a character wholly different from Vivian's. To me it would have seemed impossible that my cousin could have been so little curious to hear any of our joint family affairs; been so unheedful, or even weary, if I spoke of Roland,—never, by a word or tone, have betrayed a sympathy with his kindred. And my other conjecture was so probable,—son of the Colonel Vivian whose name he bore. And that letter, with the post-mark of "Godalming," and my belief, too, in my cousin's death,—even now I am not surprised that the idea never occurred to me.