Lucile Part 28

Alfred Vargrave strode on (overthrown Heart and mind!) in the darkness bewilder'd, alone: "And so," to himself did he mutter, "and so 'Twas to rescue my life, gentle spirit! and, oh, For this did I doubt her?... a light word--a look-- The mistake of a moment!... for this I forsook-- For this? Pardon, pardon, Lucile! O Lucile!"

Thought and memory rang, like a funeral peal, Weary changes on one dirge-like note through his brain, As he stray'd down the darkness.

x.x.xIV.

Re-entering again The Casino, the Duke smiled. He turned to roulette, And sat down, and play'd fast, and lost largely, and yet He still smiled: night deepen'd: he play'd his last number: Went home: and soon slept: and still smil'd in his slumber.

x.x.xV.

In his desolate Maxims, La Rochefoucauld wrote, "In the grief or mischance of a friend you may note, There is something which always gives pleasure."

Alas!

That reflection fell short of the truth as it was.

La Rochefoucauld might have as truly set down-- "No misfortune, but what some one turns to his own Advantage its mischief: no sorrow, but of it There ever is somebody ready to profit: No affliction without its stock-jobbers, who all Gamble, speculate, play on the rise and the fall Of another man's heart, and make traffic in it."

Burn thy book, O La Rochefoucauld!

Fool! one man's wit All men's selfishness how should it fathom?

O sage, Dost thou satirize Nature?

She laughs at thy page.

CANTO II.

I.

COUSIN JOHN TO COUSIN ALFRED.

LONDON, 18--

"My dear Alfred, Your last letters put me in pain.

This contempt of existence, this listless disdain Of your own life,--its joys and its duties,--the deuce Take my wits if they find for it half an excuse!

I wish that some Frenchman would shoot off your leg, And compel you to stump through the world on a peg.

I wish that you had, like myself (more's the pity!), To sit seven hours on this cursed committee.

I wish that you knew, sir, how salt is the bread Of another--(what is it that Dante has said?) And the trouble of other men's stairs. In a word, I wish fate had some real affliction conferr'd On your whimsical self, that, at least, you had cause For neglecting life's duties, and d.a.m.ning its laws!

This pressure against all the purpose of life, This self-ebullition, and ferment, and strife, Betoken'd, I grant that it may be in truth, The richness and strength of the new wine of youth.

But if, when the wine should have mellow'd with time, Being bottled and binn'd, to a flavor sublime, It retains the same acrid, incongruous taste, Why, the sooner to throw it away that we haste The better, I take it. And this vice of snarling, Self-love's little lapdog, the overfed darling Of a hypochondriacal fancy appears, To my thinking, at least, in a man of your years, At the midnoon of manhood with plenty to do, And every incentive for doing it too, With the duties of life just sufficiently pressing For prayer, and of joys more than most men for blessing; With a pretty young wife, and a pretty full purse, Like poltroonery, puerile truly, or worse!

I wish I could get you at least to agree To take life as it is, and consider with me, If it be not all smiles, that it is not all sneers; It admits honest laughter, and needs honest tears.

Do you think none have known but yourself all the pain Of hopes that retreat, and regrets that remain?

And all the wide distance fate fixes, no doubt, 'Twixt the life that's within, and the life that's without?

What one of us finds the world just as he likes?

Or gets what he wants when he wants it? Or strikes Without missing the thing that he strikes at the first?

Or walks without stumbling? Or quenches his thirst At one draught? Bah! I tell you! I, bachelor John, Have had griefs of my own. But what then? I push on All the faster perchance that I yet feel the pain Of my last fall, albeit I may stumble again.

G.o.d means every man to be happy, be sure.

He sends us no sorrows that have not some cure.

Our duty down here is to do, not to know.

Live as though life were earnest, and life will be so.

Let each moment, like Time's last amba.s.sador, come: It will wait to deliver its message; and some Sort of answer it merits. It is not the deed A man does, but the way that he does it, should plead For the man's compensation in doing it.

"Here, My next neighbor's a man with twelve thousand a year, Who deems that life has not a pastime more pleasant Than to follow a fox, or to slaughter a pheasant.

Yet this fellow goes through a contested election, Lives in London, and sits, like the soul of dejection, All the day through upon a committee, and late To the last, every night, through the dreary debate, As though he were getting each speaker by heart, Though amongst them he never presumes to take part.

One asks himself why, without murmur or question, He foregoes all his tastes, and destroys his digestion, For a labor of which the result seems so small.

'The man is ambitious,' you say. Not at all.

He has just sense enough to be fully aware That he never can hope to be Premier, or share The renown of a Tully;--or even to hold A subordinate office. He is not so bold As to fancy the House for ten minutes would bear With patience his modest opinions to hear.

'But he wants something!'

"What! with twelve thousand a year?

What could Government give him would be half so dear To his heart as a walk with a dog and a gun Through his own pheasant woods, or a capital run?

'No; but vanity fills out the emptiest brain; The man would be more than his neighbor, 'tis plain; And the drudgery drearily gone through in town Is more than repaid by provincial renown.

Enough if some Marchioness, lively and loose, Shall have eyed him with pa.s.sing complaisance; the goose, If the Fas.h.i.+on to him open one of its doors, As proud as a sultan returns to his boors.'

Wrong again! if you think so, "For, primo; my friend Is the head of a family known from one end Of his s.h.i.+re to the other as the oldest; and therefore He despises fine lords and fine ladies. HE care for A peerage? no truly! Secondo; he rarely Or never goes out: dines at Bellamy's sparely, And abhors what you call the gay world.

"Then, I ask, What inspires, and consoles, such a self-imposed task As the life of this man,--but the sense of its duty?

And I swear that the eyes of the haughtiest beauty Have never inspired in my soul that intense, Reverential, and loving, and absolute sense Of heart-felt admiration I feel for this man, As I see him beside me;--there, wearing the wan London daylight away, on his humdrum committee; So unconscious of all that awakens my pity, And wonder--and wors.h.i.+p, I might say?

"To me There seems something n.o.bler than genius to be In that dull patient labor no genius relieves, That absence of all joy which yet never grieves; The humility of it! the grandeur withal!

The sublimity of it! And yet, should you call The man's own very slow apprehension to this, He would ask, with a stare, what sublimity is!

His work is the duty to which he was born; He accepts it, without ostentation or scorn: And this man is no uncommon type (I thank Heaven!) Of this land's common men. In all other lands, even The type's self is wanting. Perchance, 'tis the reason That Government oscillates ever 'twixt treason And tyranny elsewhere.

"I wander away Too far, though, from what I was wis.h.i.+ng to say.

You, for instance, read Plato. You know that the soul Is immortal; and put this in rhyme, on the whole, Very well, with sublime ill.u.s.tration. Man's heart Is a mystery, doubtless. You trace it in art:-- The Greek Psyche,--that's beauty,--the perfect ideal.

But then comes the imperfect, perfectible real, With its pain'd aspiration and strife. In those pale Ill-drawn virgins of Giotto you see it prevail.

You have studied all this. Then, the universe, too, Is not a mere house to be lived in, for you.

Geology opens the mind. So you know Something also of strata and fossils; these show The bases of cosmical structure: some mention Of the nebulous theory demands your attention; And so on.

"In short, it is clear the interior Of your brain, my dear Alfred, is vastly superior In fibre, and fulness, and function, and fire, To that of my poor parliamentary squire; But your life leaves upon me (forgive me this heat Due to friends.h.i.+p) the sense of a thing incomplete.

You fly high. But what is it, in truth, you fly at?

My mind is not satisfied quite as to that.

An old ill.u.s.tration's as good as a new, Provided the old ill.u.s.tration be true.

We are children. Mere kites are the fancies we fly, Though we marvel to see them ascending so high; Things slight in themselves,--long-tail'd toys, and no more: What is it that makes the kite steadily soar Through the realms where the cloud and the whirlwind have birth But the tie that attaches the kite to the earth?

I remember the lessons of childhood, you see, And the hornbook I learn'd on my poor mother's knee.

In truth, I suspect little else do we learn From this great book of life, which so shrewdly we turn, Saving how to apply, with a good or bad grace, What we learn'd in the hornbook of childhood.

"Your case Is exactly in point.

"Fly your kite, if you please, Out of sight: let it go where it will, on the breeze; But cut not the one thread by which it is bound, Be it never so high, to this poor human ground.

No man is the absolute lord of his life.

You, my friend, have a home, and a sweet and dear wife.

If I often have sigh'd by my own silent fire, With the sense of a sometimes recurring desire For a voice sweet and low, or a face fond and fair, Some dull winter evening to solace and share With the love which the world its good children allows To shake hands with,--in short, a legitimate spouse, This thought has consoled me: 'At least I have given For my own good behavior no hostage to heaven.'

You have, though. Forget it not! faith, if you do, I would rather break stones on a road than be you.

If any man wilfully injured, or led That little girl wrong, I would sit on his head, Even though you yourself were the sinner!

"And this Leads me back (do not take it, dear cousin, amiss!) To the matter I meant to have mention'd at once, But these thoughts put it out of my head for the nonce.

Of all the preposterous humbugs and shams, Of all the old wolves ever taken for lambs, The wolf best received by the flock he devours Is that uncle-in-law, my dear Alfred, of yours.

At least, this has long been my unsettled conviction, And I almost would venture at once the prediction That before very long--but no matter! I trust, For his sake and our own, that I may be unjust.

But Heaven forgive me, if cautious I am on The score of such men as with both G.o.d and Mammon Seem so shrewdly familiar.

"Neglect not this warning.

There were rumors afloat in the City this morning Which I scarce like the sound of. Who knows? would he fleece At a pinch, the old hypocrite, even his own niece?

For the sake of Matilda I cannot importune Your attention too early. If all your wife's fortune Is yet in the hands of that specious old sinner, Who would dice with the devil, and yet rise up winner, I say, lose no time! get it out of the grab Of her trustee and uncle, Sir Ridley McNab.

I trust those deposits, at least, are drawn out, And safe at this moment from danger or doubt.

A wink is as good as a nod to the wise.

Verb.u.m sap. I admit nothing yet justifies My mistrust; but I have in my own mind a notion That old Ridley's white waistcoat, and airs of devotion, Have long been the only ostensible capital On which he does business. If so, time must sap it all, Sooner or later. Look sharp. Do not wait, Draw at once. In a fortnight it may be too late.

I admit I know nothing. I can but suspect; I give you my notions. Form yours and reflect.