Chapter IX

Mad, natural graces, that extinguish art.
KING HENRY THE SIXTH.

Words uttered from the heart, find their way to the heart.
Character is power.--CECIL’S REMAINS.

Ernest still felt as in a state of previous existence while passing along the corridor, and entering the drawing-room at Clare Abbey, in which so many happy hours had, in former days, been passed. All was precisely as he had left it: the same pictures hung against the walls; the same china ornamented the marble slabs; though it all looked bright and fresh, it was the same patterned chintz, with its well-remembered bunches, that covered the furniture; and the furniture itself stood in precisely the same forms in which it had been left by Mrs. De Grey. Most people have a fancy of their own as to the arrangement of their rooms; and even if they come to the perfection of comfort, make some little change to mark their own individuality; but Lady Vere had no thoughts; and if she had found her drawing-room arranged after the approved fashion of houses “to let,” with a round table in the middle, and a sofa against the wall, it is probable she would have been perfectly satisfied with it. To complete the illusion, in the same place, on the same sofa to which ill-health had for many years confined his mother, Lady Vere was indolently reclining. One object only spoke not of the past; and as his eyes, dreamily wandering around, rested on that one, it was sufficient, as once before it had been, to drive him from dreams of the past to still more dream-like thoughts of the future. That one object was Camilla St. Maur, who was seated at the piano-forte, at the farther end of the room.

Lady Vere half rose as Ernest approached her, bowed her beautiful eyelids rather than her head, and, without speaking, occupied herself for the next few moments in placing her feet on a footstool, and arranging a cushion for her back. Camilla came hastily forward, and with the unconscious grace and fearless self-possession which is often the effect of a retired education, held out her hand to him, saying, with a bright smile and a bright blush,

“_We_ are not strangers, Mr. De Grey.”

It has been said, that her beauty was very perfect and regular; but the impression left by her beauty was not that of a perfect and regular kind; it was rather that which is expressed by such words as “interesting,” and “fascinating.” Its peculiar charm seemed to consist in its rapid changes and strong contrasts; all blending into one harmonious whole, but keeping the attention constantly alive, forcing you to watch her countenance, that you might trace what inward feeling it was which in one instant banished her colour and banished her smiles; or, on the contrary, lit up its melancholy beauty into the sparkling loveliness of a child. She was prettily dressed this day in a light muslin gown, ornamented with sea-green ribbons; her long curls loosely turned up, and falling from the back of her head. Ernest, an admirer by instinct of all that was beautiful in art or in nature, thought he never yet had seen in all the world of beauty an object so exquisitely lovely as the young creature before him.

She sat down, slightly moved a chair towards him, and went on.

“I told mamma of our meeting the other night, and how nearly you made our acquaintance under very unpleasant circumstances.”

“Yes, Camilla told me she had almost had a fall,” said Lady Vere, settling herself comfortably in a slanting posture; “it would have been very disagreeable. I am glad you were there.”

“Not that you were of any use, Mr. De Grey,” Camilla said, shaking her head. “I can’t allow you to think you were.”

“I assure you, I did not think so,” Ernest replied, smiling; and he scarcely wondered at finding himself at once on a footing of perfect intimacy with those who, as strangers, had occupied so much of his thoughts, so careless and unconscious was the ease of the young girl.

“What a hot day it is,” remarked Lady Vere.

“The sun is hot, but there is a cold wind.”

“Did you walk all the way from Cranleigh? You must be very tired.”

Ernest smiled.

Camilla said, “You are a great walker, I am sure, Mr. De Grey.”

“Why do you think so?” he asked, smiling; “not because I have walked from Cranleigh?”

“O no! I think nothing of that myself; but I am sure you are given to long solitary rambles. You could not stay quietly at home on Saturday to arrange your things, as you ought to have done, but you must set off and walk for I don’t know how many hours on your first evening.”

“It was _my things_ which drove me out,” he said, laughing. “I could hardly find a place even to put my hat upon. If you know the wretched desolate look of a new, disarranged house, you will not wonder at my escaping from it as fast as I could.”

“I don’t know anything about it; and I am sure I should like it if I did. I am sure I should like a change, even to be uncomfortable. We never once have moved since first we came to this _dull, stupid, tedious_ place; and I don’t care how soon a change comes.” She spoke the words with emphasis.

Ernest involuntarily coloured, and looked annoyed. Was it really thus: the home over which his own heart was yearning--was it but dull and stupid to those who were the envied possessors of it?

Camilla saw his look, reproached herself for her thoughtlessness; and, moving her chair nearer to him, said, blushing deeply, and bending forward, “Now, I should not have said that to _you_. I am very sorry.”

“Pray, don’t be sorry! there is no need. Pray, don’t think that you have annoyed me,” Ernest said, angry with himself, and feeling--but it would be difficult to describe exactly what he did feel towards her at that moment.

“What did you say, Camilla?” asked Lady Vere.

“Something, as usual, that I ought not to have said,” she replied. Then jumping up, she rang the bell, saying, “I quite forgot to send for Reginald. He told me to let him know if Mr. De Grey called.”

“Where is Reginald?”

“Reading in his room, mamma. I went and rattled at the door a little while ago, but he would not notice me. He fastens his door to keep me out,” she went on, turning to Ernest, “for five or six hours a day; he says he can’t read if I am there. Isn’t it very hard?”

The thought that passed through Ernest’s mind would, if expressed, have taken the form of a vapid compliment,--and he was no complimenter; so he only laughed, and said nothing.

“You have no sister to worry you at your studies, have you, Mr. De Grey?”

“No. If my studies don’t get on as well as they should, I have nobody to blame but myself.”

“But they do get on very well, I suppose? Reginald says,--but here is Reginald.”

“Mr. De Grey is here, my dear Reginald,” remarked Lady Vere. “Camilla sent to tell you.”

Camilla got up, and drew a chair for her brother between herself and Ernest. He thanked her with a smile, and sat down; but the ease of the visit was gone. Camilla left her brother to speak; and he, anxious as he was to make Ernest feel at home, and unrestrained, had not the gift of easy conversation, which his sister possessed. Long pauses ensued, and the intervals were filled up by wise observations from Lady Vere, which seemed, in her son’s presence, to be more utterly without point or meaning than before.

Ernest soon got up and took leave, and Reginald followed him. He took down his hat in the corridor, and, opening a side glass-door, led him into the garden. He then said--

“Another day, Mr. De Grey, I shall ask you to pay _me_ a visit, and a longer one. But I know that your first visit to us must have been painful, and if my presence annoys you, and you would rather go through these well-known ways alone, only say so, and I shall not misunderstand you.”

Ernest’s heart _was_ full of many thoughts and many sensations, but they were not now thoughts of himself, or regretful mournings over the past; they were rather strange sweet feelings of gratitude and love for those who had shown such unbidden thoughtfulness and consideration for him. It took a moment to overcome a perhaps somewhat unmanly softness, which the combination of these new feelings, with the feelings natural to the spot where he stood, was tending to produce; and Reginald, fancying he was answered, turned away.

“Pray, don’t think I wish to be alone!” Ernest said, recovering his bewildered senses; “I was silent only because I could not thank you for your kindness as I should wish to do. I will not deny,” he continued, after a moment’s thought, “that it was painful to me to come here to-day; I was very fond of this place, and I had not quite made up my mind to see it in other hands; but if I say this honestly, will you equally believe me when I say that it is painful no more.”

They walked on together. Reginald suddenly said,

“I have thought so much of you, Mr. De Grey, all my life long.”

“Have you?” Ernest said, with some surprise. “I have thought of you,--but then that was but natural.”

“Have you thought of me as I have thought of you, _with envy_?” Reginald asked with a slight smile.

“With envy!--of me!” Poor Ernest had never been in the habit of contemplating his own destiny as one to be envied.

“You wonder that I should envy you,” said his companion; “but it has always seemed to me that you were born to be great. Beginning life with such a sacrifice, thrown entirely upon yourself, yours was a destiny to create ambition, and to fulfil it.” The eyes of the young man sparkled, and his colour rose as he spoke.

“And how do you think of me now?” asked Ernest, with some sadness in his tone.

Reginald was silent.

“Not with envy now?”

“I confess,” Reginald said, after a short silence, “that when I first heard, three years ago, of the life you had chosen, I heard it with such wonder and regret, that I ceased to ask about you from old Mr. Temple, ceased to think of you as I had done. I was disappointed in you. I thought you had thrown your destiny away. But latterly, since I heard of your returning here, although I have ceased to envy, I have thought of you again.”

“You despise the life I have....” Ernest hesitated before he said the word, but he did at last say it--“chosen.”

“No, not despise,” replied Reginald, gravely. “I respect, even admire, those who devote themselves to it. But then, it is a life open to all; it needs no peculiar talents, it leads to no greatness; it is a good path, a holy life, but it is not a life for the ambition of those who would rise high and do great and lofty deeds. I do not think it was the life which _you_ should have chosen, Mr. De Grey.”

Ernest had said the same to himself a hundred times; his constant feeling was (though prompted by motives less high than those which animated his youthful companion), that he was “cabin’d, cribb’d, confined;” but answers which we seek for in vain, to the questionings of our own discontented spirits, come at our call when those questionings fall from the lips of others. Arguments unthought of before now rose in Ernest’s mind.

“I have often felt as you do,” he said, thoughtfully, “but I suppose we are wrong in thinking so much of the greatness which is in the sight of men. Your ambition would be to influence on a large scale, to influence or lead your countrymen, to guide the destinies of nations. But if we consider the point seriously, and remember how nations are made up of separate individuals, the life of a country clergyman, whose office is to lead to the highest virtue, say but five or six hundred ignorant human beings, is, in fact, as important,--as important in the fate even of nations,--as the more enlarged but less certain influence of a statesman. Should not we who are Christians think the greatest of all deeds, the highest as well as the holiest, to preach the faith which we profess?”

“If you were speaking of the life of a missionary, I could understand and agree with you,” Reginald replied. “To convert the multitudes of the heathen, to be the first to plant the Cross on an idolatrous shore--I have dreamed of such a life myself,” he added, with a smile and a sparkling eye, “but it is, not too high, but too holy for me.”

Ernest looked up at his companion, and while he gazed with strange feelings of admiration on his pure and lofty beauty, his heart was stirred and saddened,--stirred with vague, aspiring, ambitious dreams, and saddened as he thought of the vows and chains of filial duty, which bound him to a life from which for the moment he recoiled with something of contempt. But he never yet had expressed to a human being, not even to his mother, the reluctance with which he had entered upon that life, and the struggles through which its duties were performed; and they were not expressed now. With a violent effort, quelling the rising discontent, he said, with a grave smile:

“You must not make me discontented with my life; at any rate, for the present, my duties lie in England, and _here_; and lowly as those duties may be, even already I feel that they are higher than I can perform.”

Reginald made no answer, but walked thoughtfully on. Stopping at last, and turning suddenly round, he waved his hand over the landscape which lay stretched, and smiling, in the luxuriance of early autumn, before them, and said, musingly:

“How strange the destinies of this world are, Mr. De Grey! I remember hearing, when first we came here, that it had broken your heart to leave your home; and still I see that, however well and nobly you have borne the loss of your inheritance, and the change of life to which that loss has condemned you, your mind, and thoughts, and love are centred upon it still; and yet it is taken from you, and given to me--to whom it is _nothing_.”

“Is it really so?--Is it nothing to you?” Ernest said, sadly and wonderingly. Reginald was right; every flower of the field, every blade of grass that was trampled under his feet was dear to him. In some minds, the sense of local attachment is a passion strong as the attachments of human love; and his was one of these.

“I see and own its beauty,” Reginald replied; “I like it as my home; and if I were allowed to choose my home from all the world, I might probably choose this one; but still, it is nothing to me. My hopes are not here. The duties which may one day be mine,--important ones, I own, and which you, I feel, would so well have performed,--are trifling and irksome to me. I long to be free and unshackled, to follow where my destiny would lead me,--free as you were, Mr. De Grey.”

“It _is_ strange,” said Ernest, thoughtfully. After a moment, however, he continued, “But as we are bound to believe that the circumstances in which we are placed are, if we use them rightly, the best discipline for our minds, I think I can see, without much thought, the use which we should make of ours. You must learn to stoop, and I must learn to rise. Yours is the easiest task. A very short experience will teach you, that events and duties are not great and small in themselves, but in the motives that prompt, and the consequences that follow them. My task is harder--” he paused, and sighed; then added with a smile, though rather a melancholy one, “I believe I have been using my office and preaching to you; but I feel much more the need of your preaching to me.”

They parted shortly after, and each went thoughtfully on his way.

A character like Reginald’s had never crossed Ernest’s path before. Had he met with such an one in earlier days, it is probable that he would have been less tied and bound with the chains of human feelings, and human infirmities than he now was; for his nature was impressible, needing but a spark to kindle its fire and animate it into exertion; but such characters as Reginald’s are rare,--and more rare, I think, in men, at least at the present day, than in women. The cold outside,--the ambition burning and consuming within,--the indifference to all which the world calls good, and the eyes set on dreams in which the world perceives no beauty!--such are not, I think, met with more than once or twice in life; or if they are, it is under circumstances which, from position, command less attention; or from want of outward attractions, have less power to win admiration and love. If there were many like Reginald, with pure hearts and lofty dreams, with the prominence of position to win all eyes, and the seraphic beauty to fix them, I do not know what this world might not be.

There is no subject of meditation so strange or, it might be said, so awful, as the consideration how one human being seems to be given into the power of another to be moulded at his will. Words at random spoken--good words and evil words--serious yet unintentional expressions of good feeling, and light sportive words of unintentional carelessness or irreverence--have had power to form a character, to direct a destiny for ever. We cannot open our mouths and be absolutely certain that our words will not sink deep into the heart of some man, woman, or child, who may be an unobserved or neglected bystander;--a single sentence has before now haunted a mind for ever. Such considerations give an awful responsibility to the power of speech; and yet how few think of this! even of the best, how few sufficiently consider it! Happy those who use their tongues as responsible instruments; and happy, too, those who from the truth and purity of the inward fountain do a good work, and know it not. There are many, I hope and believe, of the latter sort. Neither Ernest nor Reginald were in the habit of considering their words in so solemn a light. In their conversation this day, each had but expressed his feelings as they rose in his mind, and yet the words which each had said, were carried away as new principles by the hearts of each. Ernest was animated, strengthened, and filled full of thoughts of a higher zeal; for a few hours the hopes of earth, earthly passions, earthly ties, seemed “like dust and dross to his eye,” and he turned to his lowly duties with an ardent spirit, with fresh and vigorous resolution, and with glowing pictures of successful labour in his high calling. If this strength, and these higher hopes quickly faded, it was not the influence that faded,--_that_ remained on his mind; it was the stronger influence of human feeling and human weakness which superseded without effacing them. On Reginald the effect of his companion’s words was less felt, and less immediate; but an effect they had.