Lord Hartford still lies between life and death. His passion is neither weakened by pain, piqued by rejection, nor cooled by absence. On the iron nerves of the man are graven an impression which nothing can efface.
For a long space of time, good-bye reader. I have done my best to please you, and though I know that through feebleness, dullness, and iteration my work terminates rather in failure than triumph, yet you are bound to forgive, for I have done my best — -
January, 1838
MINA LAURY PART II
Late one fine still evening in January the moon arose over a blue summit of the Sydenham Hills and looked down on a quiet road winding from the hamlet of Rivaulx. The earth was bound in frost – hard, mute and glittering. The forest of Hawkscliffe was as still as a tomb, and its black leafless wilds stretched away in the distance and cut off with a harsh serrated line the sky from the country. That sky was all silver blue, pierced here and there with a star like a diamond. Only the moon softened it, large, full, and golden. The by-road I have spoken of received her ascending beam on a path of perfect solitude. Spectral pines and vast old beech trees guarded the way like sentinels from Hawkscliffe. Farther on the rude track wound deep into the shades of the forest, but here it was open and the worn causeway, bleached with frost, ran under an old wall grown over with moss and wild ivy.
Over this scene the sun of winter had gone down in cloudless calm, red as fire, and kindling with its last beams the windows of a mansion on the verge of Hawkescliffe. To that mansion the road in question was the shortest cut from Rivaulx. And here a moment let us wait, wrapped, it is to be hoped, in furs, for a keener frost never congealed the Olympia.
Almost before you are aware a figure strays up the causeway at a leisurely pace, musing amid the tranquillity of evening. Doubtless that figure must be an inmate of the before-mentioned mansion, for it is an elegant and pleasing object. Approaching gradually nearer, you can observe most accurately a lady of distinguished carriage, straight and slender, something inceding and princess-like in her walk, but unconsciously so. Her ankles are so perfect, and her feet – if she tried, she could scarcely tread otherwise than she does – lightly, firmly, erectly. The ermine muff, the silk pelisse, the graceful and ample hat of dark beaver, suit and set off her light youthful form. She is deeply veiled; you must guess at her features – but she passes on and a turn of the road conceals her.
Breaking up the silence, dashing in on the solitude, comes a horseman. Fire flashes from under his steed’s hoofs out of the flinty road. He rides desperately. Now and then he rises in his stirrups and eagerly looks along the track as if to catch a sight of some object that has eluded him. He sees it, and the spurs are struck mercilessly into his horse’s flanks. Horse and rider vanish in a whirlwind.
The lady passing through the iron gates had just entered upon the demesne of Hawkscliffe. She paused to gaze at the moon which, now full risen, looked upon her through the boughs of a superb elm. A green lawn lay between her and the house, and there its light slumbered in gold. Thundering behind her, came the sound of hoofs, and, bending low to his saddle to avoid the contact of oversweeping branches, that wild horseman we saw five minutes since rushed upon the scene. Harshly curbing the charger, he brought it almost upon its haunches close to the spot where she stood.
‘Miss Laury! Good evening!’ he said. The lady threw back her veil, surveyed him with one glance, and replied:
‘Lord Hartford! I am glad to see you, my lord. You have ridden fast. Your horse foams. Any bad news?’
‘No!’
‘Then you are on your way to Adrianopolis. I suppose you will pass the night here?’
‘If you ask me, I will.’
‘If I ask you! Yes; this is the proper half-way house between the capitals. The night is cold, let us go in’.
They were now at the door. Hartford flung himself from his saddle. A servant came to lead the over-ridden steed to the stables, and he followed Miss Laury in.
It was her own drawing room to which she led him, just such a scene as is most welcome after the contrast of a winter evening’s chill; not a large room, simply furnished, with curtains and couches of green silk, a single large mirrow, a Grecian lamp dependent from the centre softly burning now and mingling with the softer illumination of the fire, whose brilliant glow bore testimony to the keenness of the frost.
Hartford glanced round him. He had been in Miss Laury’s drawing room before, but never as her sole guest. He had, before the troubles broke out, more than once formed one of a high and important trio whose custom it was to make the lodge of Rivaulx their occasional rendezvous: Warner, Enara, and himself had often stood on that hearth in a ring round Miss Laury’s sofa, and he recalled how her face looking up to them with its serious, soft intelligence that blent no woman’s frivolity with the heartfelt interest of those subjects on which they conversed. He remembered those first kindlings of the flame that now devoured his life as he watched her beauty and saw the earnest enthusiasm with which she threw her soul into topics of the highest import. She had often done for these great men what they could get no man to do for them. She had kept their secrets and executed their wishes as far as in her lay, for it had never been her part to counse. With humble feminine devotedness she always looked up for her task to be set, and then not Warner himself could have bent his energies more resolutely to the fulfilment of that task than did Miss Laury. Had Mina’s lot in life been different, she never would have interfered in such matters. She did not interfere now: she only served. Nothing like intrigue had ever stained her course in politics. She told her directors what she had done, and she asked for more to do, grateful always that they would trust her so far as to employ her, grateful too for the enthusiasm of their loyalty; in short, devoted to them heart and mind because she believed in them to be devoted as unreservedly to the commom master of all.
The consequence of this species of deeply confidential intercourse between the statesmen and their beautiful lieutenant had been intense and chivalric admiration on the part of Mr Warner; strong fond attachment on that of General Enara; and on Lord Hartford’s the burning brand of passion. His Lordship had always been a man of strong and ill-regulated feelings, and in his youth (if report may be credited) of somewhat dissolute habits, but he had his own ideas of honour strongly implanted in his breast, and though he would not have scrupled if the wife of one of his equals, or the daughter of one of his tenants had been in the question, yet as it was he stood beset and nonplussed.
Miss Laury belonged to the Duke of Zamorna. She was indisputably his property, as much as the Lodge of Rivaulx or the stately wood of Hawkscliffe, and in that light she considered herself. All his dealings with her had been on matters connected with the Duke, and she had ever shown an habitual, rooted, solemn devotedness to his interest which seemed to leave her hardly a thought for anything else in the world beside. She had but one idea – Zamorna!Zamorna! It had grown up with her, become a part of her nature. Absence, coldness, total neglect for long periods together went for nothing. She could not more feel alienation from him than she could from herself. She did not even repine when he forgot her any more than the religious devotee does when his Deity seems to turn away his face for a time and leave him to the ordeal of temporal afflictions. It seemed as if she could have lived on the remembrance of what he had once been to her without asking for anything more.
All this Hartford knew, and he knew, too, that she valued himself in proportion as she believed him to be royal to his sovereign. Her friendship for him turned on this hinge: ‘We have been fellow-labourers and fellow-sufferers together in the same good cause’ These were her own words which she had uttered one night as she took leave of her three noble collegues just befre the storm broke over Angria. Hartford had noticed the expression of her countenance as she spoke, and thought what a young and beautiful being thus appealed for sympathy with minds scarcely like her own in mould.
However, let us dwell no longer on these topics. Suffuce it to sa
y that Lord Hartford, against reason and without hope, had finally delivered himself wholly up to the guidance of his vehement passions; and it was with the resolution to make one desperate effort in the attainment of their end that he now stood before the lady of Rivaulx.
Above two hours had elapsed since Lord Hartford had entered the house. Tea was over, and in the perfect quiet of evening he and Miss Laury were left together. He sat on one side of the hearth, and she on the other – her work-table only between them, and on that her little hand rested within his reach. It was embedded in a veil of lace, the embroidering of which she had just relinquished for a moment’s thought. Lord Hartford’s eye was fascinated by the white soft fingers. His own heart at the moment was in a tumult of bliss. To be so near, to be received so benignly, so kindly – he forgot himself. His own hand closed half involuntarily upon hers. Miss Laury looked at him …. Shocked for a moment, almost overwhelmed , she yet speedily mastered her emotions, took her hand away, resumed her work, and with head bent down, seemed endeavouring to conceal embarrassment under the appearance of occupation.
The dead silence that followed would not do, so she broke it in a very calm, self-possessed tone.
‘That ring, Lord Hartford, which you were admiring just now belonged once to the Duchess of Wellington’
‘ And was it given you by her son?’ asked the General bitterly.
‘No, my lord, the Duchess herself gave it me a few days before she died. It has her maiden name ‘’Catherine Pakenham’’, engraved within the stone’.
‘But’, pursued Hartford, ‘I was not admiring the ring when I touched your hand. No; the thought struck me, if ever I marry I should like my wife’s hand to be just as white and snowy and taper as that.’
‘I am the daughter of a common soldier, my lord, and it is said that ladies of high descent have fairer hands than peasant women.’
Hartford made no reply. He rose restlessly from his seat and stood against the mantelpiece.
‘Miss Laury, shall I tell you which was the happiest hour of my life?’
‘I will guess, my lord. Perhaps when the bill passed which made Angria an independent kingdom.’
‘No. ‘ replied Hartford with an expressive smile.
‘Perhaps, then, when Lord Northangerland resigned the seals - for I know you and the Earl were never on good terms’.
‘No. I hated his lordship, but there are moment of deeper felicity even than those which see the triumph of a fallen enemy’.
‘I will hope that it was at the Restoration.’
‘Wrong again! Why, madam, young as you are your mind is so used to the harness of politics that you can imagine no happiness or misery unconnected with them. You remind me of Warner.’
‘I believe I am like him’, returned Miss Laury. ‘He often tells me so himself, but I live so much with men and statesmen I almost lose the ideas of a woman’.
‘Do you?’ muttered Hartford with the dark sinister smile peculiar to him’.
Miss Laury passed over this equivocal remark and proceeded with the conversation.
‘I cannot guess your riddle, my lord, so I think you must explain it’.
‘Then, Miss Laury, prepare to be astonished. You are so patriotic, so loyal that you will scarcely credit me when I say that the happiest hour I have ever known fell on the darkest day in the deadliest crisis of Angria’s calamities’.
‘How, Lord Hartford?’
‘Moreover, miss Laury, it was at no bright period of your own life. It was to you an hour of the most acute agony; to me one of ecstasy’.
Miss Laury turned aside her head with a disturbed air and trembled. She seemed to know to what he alluded.
‘You remember the first of July, ’36?’ continued Hartford.
She bowed.
‘You remember that the evening of that day closed in a tremendous storm?’
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘You recollect how you sat in this very room by this fireside, fearful of retiring for the night lest you should awake in another world in the morning. The country was not then as quiet as it is now. You have not forgotten that deep explosion which roared up at midnight and told you that your life and liberty hung on a thread, that the enemy had come suddenly upon Rivaulx, and that we who lay thre to defend the forlon hope were surprised and routed by a night attack. Then madam, perhaps you recollect the warning which I brought you at one o’clock in the morning, to fly instantly, unless you chose the alternative of infamous captivity in the hands of Jordan. I found you here, sitting by a black hearth without fire, and Ernest Fitz-Arthur lay on your knee asleep. You told me you had heard the firing, and that you were waiting for some communication from me, determined not to stir without orders lest a precipitate step on your part should embarass me. I had a carriage already in waiting for you. I put you in, and with the remains of my defeated followers escorted you as far as Zamorna. What followed after that, Miss Laury?’
Miss Laury covered her eyes with her hand. She seemed as if she could not answer.
‘Well’, continued Hartford. ‘In the midst of darkness and tempest, and while the whole city of Zamorna seemed changed into a hell peopled with fiends and inspired with madness, my lads were hewed down about you, and your carriage was stopped. I very well remember what you did – how frantically you struggled to save Fitz-Arthur, and how you looked at me when he was snatched from you. As to your own preservation – that, I need not repeat – only my arm did it. You acknowledge that, Miss Laury?’
‘Hartford, I do, but why do you dwell on that terrible scene?’
‘Because I am now approaching the happiest hour of my life. I took you to the house of one of my tenants whom I could depend upon, and just as morning dawned you and I sat together and alone in the little chamber of a farm-house, and you were in my arms, your head upon my shoulder, and weeping out all your anguish on a breast that longed to bleed for you’.
Miss Laury agitatedly rose. She approached Hartford.
‘My lord, you have been very kind to me and I feel very grateful for that kindness. Perhaps sometime I may be able to repay it. We know not how the chances of fortune may turn. The weak have aided the strong, and I will watch vigilantly for the slightest opportunity to serve you, but d not talk in this way. I scarcely know whither your words tend’.
Lord Hartford paused a moment before he replied. Gazing at her with bended brows and folded arms he said:
‘Miss Laury, what do you think of me?’
‘That you are one of the noblest hearts in the world!’ she replied unhesitatingly. She was standing just before Hartford, looking up at him, her hair in that attitude falling back from her brow, shading with exquisite curls her temples and slender neck; her small, sweet features, with that high seriousness deepening their beauty, lit up by her eyes so large, so dark, so swimming, so full of pleading benignity, of an expression of alarmed regard, as if she at once feared for and pitied the sinful abstraction of a great mind. Hartford couldn’t stand it. He could have borne female anger or terror, but the look of enthusiastic gratitude softened by compassion nearly unmanned him. He turned his head for a moment aside but then passion prevailed. Her beauty when he looked again struck through him – maddening sensation whetted to acuter power by a feeling like despair.
‘You shall love me!’ he exclaimed desperately; ‘Do I not adore you? Would I not die for you? And must I in return receive only the cold regard of friendship? I am not a Platonist, Miss Laury – I am not your friend. I am, hear me, madam, your declasred lover! Nay, you shall not leave me; by heaven -–I am stronger than you are’.
She had stepped a pace or two back, appalled by his vehemence. He thought she meant to withdraw, and, determined not to be so baulked, he clasped her at once in both his arms and kissed her furiously rather than fondly. Miss Laury did not struggle.
‘Hartford’, said she steadying her voice, though it faletered in spite of her effort, ‘ this must be our parting scene. I will never see you again if you do not
restrain yourself.’
Hartford saw that she turned pale, and he felt her tremble violently. His arms relaxed their hold. He allowed her to leave him.
She sat down on a chair opposite and hurriedly wiped her brow which was damp and marble-pale.
‘Now, Miss Laury’, said his lordship, ‘no man in the world loves you as I do. Will you accept my title and my coronet? I fling them at your feet’.
‘My lord, do you know whose I am?’ she replied in a hollow and very suppressed tone. ‘Do you know with what a sound those proposals fall on my ear – how impious and blasphemous they seem to be? Do you at all conceive how utterly impossible it is that I should ever love you? The scene I have just witnessed has given a strange wrench to all my accustomed habits of thought. I thought you a true-hearted, faithful man: I find that you are a traitor’.
‘And do you despise me?’ asked Hartford.
‘No, my lord, I do not’.
She paused and looked down. The colour rose rapidly into her pale face. She sobbed, not in tears, but in the overmastering approach of an impulse born of a warm and Western heart. Again she looked up. Her eyes had changed, their aspect beaming with a wild, bright inspiration, truly, divinely Irish.
Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Page 213
