Romance and Reality (Landon)/Chapter 29
CHAPTER V.
"Who loves, raves—'tis youth's frenzy—but the cure
Is bitterer still; as charm by charm unwinds
Which robed our idols, and we see, too sure,
Nor worth nor beauty dwells from out the mind's
Ideal shape of such; yet still it binds
The fatal spell, and still it draws us on."
Byron.
We shall find her such an acquisition to our circle.
Common Country Expression.
It is said, when things come to the worst, they mend. General assertions, like general truths, are not always applicable to individual cases; and though Fortune's wheel is generally on the turn, sometimes when it gets into the mud, it sticks there. However, the present case is confirmatory of the good old rule; for Emily's situation was on the point of being greatly altered, by one of those slight circumstances which are the small hinges on which the ponderous gates of futurity turn.
The entrance to Fonthill—that truly cloud-capt palace, so fantastic and so transitory—was by two stupendous doors, which seemed to defy the strength of giants. A black dwarf came, and opened them at a touch: the mighty doors revolved on some small spring. These portals are the seemingly insuperable difficulties and obstacles of life, and the dwarf is the small and insignificant circumstance which enables us to pass through them.
A severe shower in the park, which wetted Frank Mandeville to the skin, gave him cold, and in a few weeks reduced the beautiful and delicate child to a skeleton. Half the doctors in London were summoned; Lady Mandeville never stirred from his bedside; when one of them said, "The child is being petted to death;—let him try his native air, run about, and don't let him eat till he is hungry."
His advice was followed. Norville Abbey, uninhabited since the first year of her marriage, was ordered to be prepared. Windows were opened, fires lighted, rooms dusted, the avenues cleared, the shrubbery weeded, with all the celerity of the rich and the wilful. Ah! money is the true Aladdin's lamp; and I have often thought the Bank of England is the mysterious roc's egg, whose movements are forbidden to mortal eye.
The village and the bells were alike set in motion;—the butcher and the baker talked of the patriotism of noblemen who resided on their estates, and went up to solicit orders;—Mrs. Clarke wondered whether her ladyship would visit in the country;—Mrs. Arundel simpered, and hinted "she dare-sayed some time hence they would be delightful neighbours;"—Emily said that Lady Mandeville, whom she had seen in London, was a very lovely woman, and thought no more about her—except, one day, when she heard a carriage drive into the court, to be out of the way—and once, when she caught sight of a strange shawl, to turn into another path; for she had gradually sunk into that sickly and depressed state of spirits which dreads change, and nervously shrinks from the sight of a stranger;—when, one morning, her path was fairly beset by two fairy-like children, and Lady Mandeville stepping forward, said, laughingly, "My prisoner, by all the articles of war; I shall not let you go without ransom." Escape was now impossible. They took the remainder of the walk together; and, her first embarrassment past, Emily was surprised, when they reached the little shrubbery-gate, to find the morning had passed so quickly.
The next day brought her the following note from Lady Mandeville:—
"In begging you, my dear Miss Arundel, to come to-day and dine with Lord Mandeville and myself, I only hold out, as your inducement, that a good action is its own reward. Hospitality is the virtue of the country;—do give me an opportunity of practising it. To be the third in a matrimonial tête-à-tête is, I confess, rather an alarming prospect; but we promise not to quarrel, and to make a great deal of yourself.
"So do oblige yours truly,
"Ellen Mandeville."
Lady Mandeville, even in London, where only to remember any body is an effort, had always liked Emily; and in the country, which her ladyship thought might be healthy, but that was all that could be said for it—such a companion would be inestimable; and, to do her justice, she had other and kinder motives. A week's residence had given her sufficient knowledge of the statistics of the county to pity Emily's situation very sincerely. She foresaw all the disagreeables of her foolish aunt's still more foolish marriage, to one especially who was so friendless and whose beauty and fortune seemed to be so singularly without their usual advantages.
Lady Mandeville was, like most affectionate tempers, hasty in her attachments. The person to whom she could be kind was always the person she liked, and was, moreover, the most perfect person possible. Perhaps there was a little authority in her affection—certainly it was a very creative faculty; and long before Emily came, her new friend had sketched out for her a most promising futurity—a brilliant marriage, &c. &c. &c.; nay, had communicated a portion to her husband, who, as usual, smiled, and said, "Very well, my dear; we shall see."
Whatever the future might be, the present was most delightful. It had been so long since Emily had spoken to any one capable of even comprehending a single idea, much less of entering into a single feeling, that conversation was like a new sense of existence.
How irksome, how wearying, to be doomed always to the society of those who are like people speaking different languages! It resembles travelling through the East, with a few phrases of lingua franca—just enough for the ordinary purposes of life—enow of words to communicate a want, but not to communicate a thought! Then, again, though it be sweet to sit in the dim twilight, singing the melancholy song whose words are the expression of our inmost soul, till we could weep as the echo of our own music, still it is also very pleasant to have our singing sometimes listened to. At all events, it was much more agreeable to hear Lord Mandeville say, "We must have that song again—it is one of my great favourites," than Mrs. Arundel's constant exclamation, "Well, I am so sick of that piano!"
One day led to another, till Emily passed the greater part of her time at the Abbey. Her spirits regained something of their naturally buoyant tone, and she no longer believed that every body was sent into the world to be miserable. Not that Lorraine was forgotten. Often did she think, "Of what avail is it to be loved or admired?—he knows nothing of it;" and often, after some gay prediction of Lady Mandeville's, of the sensation she was to produce next season, she would weep, in the loneliness of her own chamber, over one remembrance, which distance, absence, and hopelessness, seemed only to render more dear.
"Is it possible," she often asked herself, "that I am the same person who, last spring, fancied a visit to London the summit of earthly enjoyment? I remember how my heart beat while reading Mr. Delawarr's letter: what did I hope for? what did I expect?—no one positive object. But how little it took then to give me pleasure!—how many things I then took pleasure in, that are now, some indifferent, many absolutely distasteful! I no longer read with the enjoyment I did: instead of identifying myself with the creations of the writer, I pause over particular passages—I apply the sorrows they depict to my own feelings; and turn from their lighter and gayer pages—they mock me with too strong a contrast. I do not feel so kind as I did. I wonder how others can be gratified with things that seem to me positively disagreeable. I ought to like people more than I do. Alas! I look forward to next year and London with disgust. I would give the world to remain quiet and unmolested—to make my own life like a silent shadow—and to think my own thoughts. I wish for nothing—I expect nothing."
Emily had yet to learn, that indifference is but another of the illusions of youth: there is a period in our life before we know that enjoyment is a necessity—that, if the sweet cup of pleasure palls, the desire for it fades too—that employments deepen into duties—and that, while we smile, ay, and sigh too, over the many vain dreams we have coloured, and the many vain hopes we have cherished—a period of re-action, whose lassitude we have all felt:—this influence was now upon Emily. She was young for such a feeling—and youth made the knowledge more bitter.
"I do not think," said a welcome though unexpected visitor, in the shape of Mr. Morland, "that Miss Arundel's roses are so blooming in the country as they were in town. Pray, young lady, what have you done with your allegiance to the house of Lancaster?"
"What!" exclaimed Lady Mandeville, "Mr. Morland among the rural philosophers, who talk of health as if it grew upon the hawthorns?"
"My dear Ellen," said her husband, who had his full share of love for the divers species of slaughtering,
"Whether in earth, in sea, in air,"
that make up the rustic code of gentlemanlike tastes, "I do wonder what you see in London to like."
"Every thing. I love perfumes: will you tell me the fragrant shower from my crystal flask of bouquet de roi is not equal to your rose, from which I inhale some half-dozen insects, and retain some dozen thorns? I love music: is not the delicate flute-like voice of Sontag equal at least to the rooks which scream by day, and the owls which hoot by night? Is not Howel and James's shop filled with all that human art can invent, or human taste display—bijouterie touched with present sentiment, or radiant with future triumph? Or your milliner's, where vanity is awakened but to be gratified, and every feminine feeling is called into action? Are not those objects of more interest than a field with three trees and a cow? And then for society—heaven defend me from localities, your highways and byways of conversation; where a squire, with a cast-iron and crimson countenance, details the covey of fourteen, out of which he killed five; or his lady, with the cotton velvet gown—her dinner-dress ever since she married—recounts the trouble she has with her servants, or remarks that it is a great shame—indeed, a sign of the ruin to which every thing is hastening—that all the farmers' daughters come to church in silk gowns; a thing which the Queen will not allow in the housemaids of Windsor Castle. Then the drives, where you see no carriage but your own—the walks, where you leave on every hedge a fragment of your dress. Deeply do I sympathise with the French Countess, who (doomed to the society of three maiden aunts, two uncles—one of the farming, the other of the shooting species—and a horde of undistinguishable cousins) said, when advised to fish for her amusement, or knit for her employment, 'Alas! I have no taste for innocent pleasures.'"
"I do think," returned Mr. Morland, "that the country owes much of its merit to being unknown. The philosopher speaks of its happiness, the poet of its beauties, on the very reverse principle to Pope's: they should alter this line, and say,
'They best can paint them who have known them least.'
Still, the country is very pleasant sometimes. I do not feel at all discontented just now," glancing first round the breakfast table, and then to the scene without, which was quite lovely enough to fix the glance that it caught.
Spring and Morning are ladies that owe half their charms to their portrait-painters. What are they in truth? One, a mixture of snow that covers the fair earth, or thaws that turn it into mud—keen east winds, with their attendant imps, coughs and colds—sunshine, which just looks enough in at the window to put out the fire, and then leaves you to feel the want of both. As for the other, what is it but damp grass, and an atmosphere of fog—to enjoy which, your early rising makes you sick and tired the rest of the day? These are the harsh and sallow realities of the red-lipped and coral-cheeked divinities of the picture.
After all, the loveliness of Spring and Morning is like that of youth—the beauty of promise; beauty, perhaps, the most precious to the soul. Campbell exquisitely says,
"'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view:"
and let the heart be thankful from its inmost depths for that imaginative and self-existent faculty which first lends enchantment to the distance.
Spring, however, now and then gives us a beautiful day—to shew, if she does make a promise, she has a stock of sunshine on hand wherewith to keep it. Such a day was now shining on Norville Abbey. The gray mist, which imparts such indescribable beauty to an English landscape, was now illuminated with the morning light, and hung round the turrets a bright transparent mass of vapour, which you seemed to expect would every moment clear away, like those which, in the valley of St. John, opened and gave to view the enchanted castle. They never did clear away—still it was something to have expected.
One side of the building was completely covered with ivy: it was like a gigantic bower; and the numerous windows where the branches had been pruned, seemed like vistas cut in the luxuriant foliage. The rest of the walls were stained and gray, carved with all varieties of ornament; flowers cut in the stone, the cross at every angle, the winged heads representing the cherubim—niches, where male and female saints stood in divers attitudes of prayer—and arched lattices, whose small glittering panes seemed too thankful for a sunbeam not to reflect it to the utmost. The imagination must have been cold, and the memory vacant indeed, which gazed unexcited on the venerable pile.
Religion was never more picturesque than in the ancient monastery. History, poetry, romance, have alike made it the shrine for their creations. The colour thrown over its remembrances is like the rich and purple hues the stained glass of the painted window flings on the monuments beneath.
The situation, too, was one of great natural beauty. At the back was a smooth turf, unbroken save by two gigantic cedars, stately as their native Lebanon, and shadowy as the winters they had braved. This sloped down to a large lake, where the image of the abbey lay as in a mirror—every turret, every arch, dim, softened, but distinct: beyond were fields covered with the luxuriant and rich-looking green of the young corn—for the park had not been preserved—till the varied outlines of undulating hedge, groups of old elms, distant meadows, and the verdant hills, were lost in the blue sky.
The view from the breakfast-room was of an utterly different and confined character. The thick growth of the fine old trees, and the unclipped shrubs, shut out all but the small portion of shrubbery, which was like one bright and blooming spot in a wilderness. The windows opened upon a broad terrace, against whose stone balustrade a few pots of early flowers were placed—not very rare, for the hothouse had been neglected; still there were some rose-trees, putting forth buds at least, some myrtles, some deep purple hyacinths. The steps led down into the garden, whose beds were rich in white and crimson daisies, hepaticas, and violets, whose breath perfumed the whole place. The turf was of that rich dark emerald which promises softness fit for the chariot of the fairy queen; and, spreading his magnificent plumage in the sunshine, which brought out a thousand new colours, a peacock stood gazing round, either for admiration, or with an Alexander Selkirk-looking feeling, which said, "I am monarch of all I survey."
"I must say," observed Lord Mandeville, opening the window till the room seemed filled with fragrance and sunshine, "a street sacred to Macadam's dynasty of mud, and the blinds, brick, and smoke of our opposite neighbours, are not quite equal to a scene like this."
"On to the combat, say your worst;
And foul fall him who flinches first!"
replied Lady Mandeville. "The exception proves the rule; but there is such an argument in your favour, that for once I will give up the dispute—but mind, it is not to be considered a precedent."
So saying, she stepped upon the terrace to meet a beautiful boy, who came, glowing and out of breath, to ask for bread for the peacock. In sober seriousness, there is more poetry than truth in the sweet poem of Allan Cunningham—the Town and Country Child: witness the cheerful voices of the rosy faces to be met with in the smallest street and closest alley in London; but if an artist had wished for a model for the children so beautifully painted by the poet, Frank Mandeville—two months ago pale and languid, and now Frank Mandeville bright-eyed and cheerful—might fairly have sat for both likenesses.