Complete Novels of Maria Edgeworth

by Maria Edgeworth

  “What will become of me!” cried Devereux. “Never was a harder task set by cruel patroness. I would rather ‘turn a Persian tale for half-a-crown.’ Read this, my lord, and tell me whether it will be easy to turn my Lady Kilrush into Petrarch’s Laura.”

  “This sonnet, to be sure, is rather difficult to translate, or at least to modernize, as bespoke,” said Lady Geraldine, after she had perused the sonnet;82 “but I think, Mr. Devereux, you brought this difficulty upon yourself. How came you to show these lines to such an amateur, such a fetcher and carrier of bays as Lady Kilrush? You might have been certain that, had they been trash, with the name of Francis the First, and with your fashionable approbation, and something to say about Petrarch and Laura, my Lady Kilrush would talk for ever, et se pâmerait d’affectation.”

  “Mr. Devereux,” said I, “has only to abide by the last lines, as a good and sufficient apology to Lady Kilrush for his silence:

  ‘Qui te pourra louer qu’en se taisant?

  Car la parole est toujours réprimée

  Quand le sujet surmonte le disant.’”

  “There is no way to get out of my difficulties,” said Mr. Devereux, with a very melancholy look; and with a deep sigh he sat down to attempt the translation of the poem. In a few minutes, however, he rose and left the room, declaring that he had the bad habit of not being able to do any thing in company.

  Lady Geraldine now, with much energy of indignation, exclaimed against the pretensions of rich amateurs, and the mean and presumptuous manner in which some would-be great people affect to patronise genius.

  “Oh! the baseness, the emptiness of such patronising ostentation!” cried she. “I am accused of being proud myself; but I hope — I believe — I am sure, that my pride is of another sort. Persons of any elevation or generosity of mind never have this species of pride; but it is your mean, second-rate folk, who imagine that people of talent are a sort of raree-show for their entertainment. At best, they consider men of genius only as artists formed for their use, who, if not in a situation to be paid with money, are yet to be easily recompensed by praise — by their praise — their praise! Heavens! what conceit! And these amateur-patrons really think themselves judges, and presume to advise and direct genius, and employ it to their petty purposes! Like that Pietro de Medici, who, at some of his entertainments, set Michael Angelo to make a statue of snow. My lord, did you ever happen to meet with Les Mémoires de Madame de Staël?”

  “No: I did not know that they were published.”

  “You mistake me: I mean Madame de Staël of Louis the Fourteenth and the Regent’s time, Mademoiselle de Launay.”

  I had never heard of such a person, and I blushed for my ignorance.

  “Nay, I met with them myself only yesterday,” said Lady Geraldine: “I was struck with the character of the Duchess de la Ferté, in which this kind of proud patronising ignorance is admirably painted from the life. It is really worth your while, my lord, to look at it. There’s the book on that little table; here is the passage. You see, this Duchess de la Ferté is showing off to a sister-duchess a poor girl of genius, like a puppet or an ape.

  “‘Allons, mademoiselle, parlez — Madame, vous allez voir comme elle parle — Elle vit que j’hésitois à répondre, et pensa qu’il falloit m’aider comme une chanteuse à qui l’on indique ce qu’on désire d’entendre — Parlez un peu de religion, mademoiselle, vous direz ensuite autre chose.’

  “This speech, Mr. Devereux tells me, has become quite proverbial in Paris,” continued Lady Geraldine; “and it is often quoted, when any one presumes in the Duchess de la Ferte’s style.”

  “Ignorance, either in high or low life, is equally self-sufficient, I believe,” said I, exerting myself to illustrate her ladyship’s remarks. “A gentleman of my acquaintance lately went to buy some razors at Packwood’s. Mrs. Packwood alone was visible. Upon the gentleman’s complimenting her on the infinite variety of her husband’s ingenious and poetical advertisements, she replied, ‘La! sir, and do you think husband has time to write them there things his-self? Why, sir, we keeps a poet to do all that there work.’”

  Though Lady Geraldine spoke only in general of amateur-patrons and of men of genius, yet I could not help fancying, from the warmth with which she expressed herself, and from her dwelling on the subject so long, that her feelings were peculiarly interested for some individual of this description. Thus I discovered that Lady Geraldine had a heart; and I suspected that her ladyship and Mr. Devereux had also made the same discovery. This suspicion was strengthened by a slight incident, which occurred the following evening.

  Lady Geraldine and Cecil Devereux, as we were drinking coffee, were in a recessed window, while some of the company stood round them, amused by their animated conversation. They went on, repartee after repartee, as if inspired by each other’s spirits.

  “You two,” said a little girl of six years old, who was playing in the window, “go on singing to one another like two nightingales; and this shall be your cage,” added she, drawing the drapery of the window-curtains across the recessed window. “You shall live always together in this cage: will you, pretty birds?”

  “No, no; some birds cannot live in a cage, my dear,” cried Lady Geraldine, playfully struggling to get free, whilst the child held her prisoner.

  “Mr. Devereux seems tolerably quiet and contented in his cage,” said the shrewd Mrs. O’Connor.

  “I can’t get out! I can’t get out!” cried Devereux, in the melancholy tone of the starling in the Sentimental Journey.

  “What is all this?” said my Lady Kildangan, sailing up to us.

  “Only two birds,” the child began.

  “Singing-birds,” interrupted Lady Geraldine, catching the little girl up in her arms, and stopping her from saying more, by beginning to sing most charmingly.

  Lady Kildangan returned to the sofa without comprehending one word of what had passed. For my part, I now felt almost certain of the justice of my suspicions: I was a little vexed, but not by any means in that despair into which a man heartily in love would have been thrown by such a discovery.

  Well, thought I, it is well it is no worse: it was very lucky that I did not fall quite in love with this fair lady, since it seems that she has given her heart away. But am I certain of this? I was mistaken once. Let me examine more carefully.

  Now I had a new motive to keep my attention awake.

  CHAPTER XI.

  To preserve the continuity of my story, and not to fatigue the reader with the journals of my comings and goings from Ormsby Villa to Glenthorn Castle, and from Glenthorn Castle to Ormsby Villa, I must here relate the observations I made, and the incidents that occurred, during various visits at Sir Harry Ormsby’s in the course of the summer.

  After the incident of the birds and cage, my sagacity was for some time at fault. I could not perceive any further signs of intelligence between the parties: on the contrary, all communication seemed abruptly to cease. As I was not well versed in such affairs, this quieted my suspicions, and I began to think that I had been entirely mistaken. Cecil Devereux spent his days shut up in his own apartment, immersed, as far as I could understand, in the study of the Persian language. He talked to me of nothing but his hopes of an appointment which Lord O’Toole had promised to procure for him in India. When he was not studying, he was botanizing or mineralogizing with O’Toole’s chaplain. I did not envy him his new mode of life. Lady Geraldine took no notice of it. When they did meet, which happened as seldom as possible, there was an air of haughty displeasure on her part; on his, steady and apparently calm respect and self-satisfaction. Her spirits were exuberant, but variable; and, at times, evidently forced: his were not high, but even and certain. Towards me, her ladyship’s manners were free from coquetry, yet politely gratifying, as she marked, by the sort of conversation she addressed to me, her opinion that I was superior in ability and capability to what she had at first thought me, and to what I had always thought myself.

  Mr. Devere
ux, though with more effort, treated me with distinction, and showed a constant desire to cultivate my friendship. On every occasion he endeavoured to raise my opinion of myself: to give me ambition and courage to cultivate my mind. Once, when I was arguing in favour of natural genius, and saying that I thought no cultivation could make the abilities of one man equal to those of another, he, without seeming to perceive that I was apologizing at once for my own indolence and my intellectual inferiority, answered in general terms, “It is difficult to judge what are the natural powers of the mind, they appear so different in different circumstances. You can no more judge of a mind in ignorance than of a plant in darkness. A philosophical friend told me, that he once thought he had discovered a new and strange plant growing in a mine. It was common sage; but so degenerated and altered, that he could not know it: he planted it in the open air and in the light, and gradually it resumed its natural appearance and character.”

  Mr. Devereux excited, without fatiguing, my mind by his conversation; and I was not yet sufficiently in love to be seriously jealous. I was resolved, however, to sound him upon the subject of Lady Geraldine, I waited for a good opportunity: at length, as we were looking together over the prints of Bürger’s Lenore, he led to the sort of conversation that I desired, by telling me an anecdote relative to the poet, which he had lately heard from a German baron.

  Burger was charmed with a sonnet, which an unknown fair one addressed to him, in praise of his poetry; he replied in equal strains; and they went on flattering one another, till both believed themselves in love: without ever having met, they determined to marry: they at length met, and married: they quarrelled and parted: in other words, the gentleman was terribly disappointed in his unknown mistress; and she consoled herself by running away from him with another lover.

  The imprudence of this poetic couple led us to reflections on love and marriage in general. Keeping far away from all allusion to Lady Geraldine, I rallied Mr. Devereux about the fair Clementina, who was evidently a romantic admirer of his.

  “Who, except Cupid, would barter his liberty for a butterfly?” said he; “and Cupid was a child. Men now-a-days are grown too wise to enslave themselves for women. Love occupies a vast space in a woman’s thoughts, but fills a small portion in a man’s life. Women are told, that ‘The great, th’ important business of their life, is love;’ but men know that they are born for something better than to sing mournful ditties to a mistress’s eyebrow. As to marriage, what a serious, terrible thing! Some quaint old author says, that man is of too smooth and oily a nature to climb up to heaven, if, to make him less slippery, there be not added to his composition the vinegar of marriage. This may be; but I will keep as long as possible from the vinegar.”

  “Really, Devereux,” said I, smiling, “you talk so like a cynic and an old bachelor, and you look so little like either, that it is quite ridiculous.”

  “A man must be ridiculous sometimes,” said he, “and bear to be thought so. No man ever distinguished himself, who could not bear to be laughed at.”

  Mr. Devereux left the room singing,

  “No more for Amynta fresh garlands I wove;

  Ambition, I said, will soon cure me of love.”

  I was uncertain what to think of all this. I inclined to believe that ambition was his ruling passion, notwithstanding the description of that Hell which he showed me in Spenser. His conduct to his patron-lords, by which a surer judgment of his character could be formed than by his professions, was not, however, that of a man merely intent upon rising in the world.

  I remember once hearing Lord O’Toole attack a friend of this gentleman’s, calling him, in a certain tone, a philosopher. Mr. Devereux replied, “that he could not consider that as a term of reproach; that where a false or pretended philosopher was meant, some other name should be used, equivalent to the Italian term of reproach, filosofastro.”

  Lord O’Toole would by no means admit of this Italianism: he would make no distinctions: he deemed philosophers altogether a race of beings dangerous and inimical to states.

  “For states read statesmen,” said Devereux, who persisted in the vindication of his friend till Lord O’Toole grew pale with anger, while Captain Andrews smiled with ineffable contempt at the political bévue: Lady Geraldine glowed with generous indignation.

  Afterwards, in speaking to me of Lord O’Toole, Devereux said, “His lordship’s classification of men is as contracted as the savage’s classification of animals: he divides mankind into two classes, knaves and fools; and when he meets with an honest man, he does not know what to make of him.”

  My esteem for Mr. Devereux was much increased by my daily observations upon his conduct: towards Lady Geraldine, I thought it particularly honourable: when her displeasure evidently merged in esteem, when her manners again became most winning and attractive, his continued uniformly the same; never passing the bounds of friendly respect, or swerving, in the slightest degree, from the line of conduct which he had laid down for himself. I thought I now understood him perfectly. That he liked Lady Geraldine I could scarcely doubt; but I saw that he refrained from aiming at the prize which he knew he ought not to obtain; that he perceived her ladyship’s favourable disposition towards him, yet denied himself not only the gratification of his vanity, but the exquisite pleasure of conversing with her, lest he should stand in the way of her happier prospects. He frequently spoke to me of her ladyship in terms of the warmest approbation. He said, that all the world saw and admired her talents and beauty, but that he had had opportunities, as a relation, of studying her domestic life. “With all her vivacity, she has a heart formed for tenderness,” said he; “a high sense of duty, the best security for a woman’s conduct; and in generosity and magnanimity, I never found her superior in either sex. In short, I never saw any woman whose temper and disposition were more likely to make a man of sense and feeling supremely happy.”

  I could not forbear smiling, and asking Cecil Devereux how all this accorded with his late professions of hatred to marriage. “My professions were sincere,” said he. “It would be misery to me to marry any inferior woman, and I am not in circumstances to marry as I could wish. I could not think of Lady Geraldine without a breach of trust, of which your lordship, I hope, cannot suspect me. Her mother places confidence in me. I am not only a relation, but treated as a friend of the family. I am not in love with Lady Geraldine. I admire, esteem, respect her ladyship; and I wish to see her united to a man, if such a man there be, who may deserve her. We understand one another now. Your lordship will have the goodness never more to speak to me on this subject.” He spoke with much emotion, but with steadiness, and left me penetrated with feelings that were entirely new to me.

  Much as I admired his conduct, I was yet undecided as to my own: my aversion to a second marriage was not yet conquered: — I was amused, I was captivated by Lady Geraldine; but I could not bring myself to think of making a distinct proposal. Captain Andrews himself was not more afraid of being committed than I was upon this tender subject. To gain time, I now thought it necessary to verify all the praises Mr. Devereux had bestowed on her ladyship. Magnanimity was a word that particularly struck my ear as extraordinary when applied to a female. However, by attending carefully to this lady, I thought I discovered what Mr. Devereux meant. Lady Geraldine was superior to manoeuvring little arts and petty stratagems to attract attention: she would not stoop, even to conquer. From gentlemen she seemed to expect attention as her right, as the right of her sex; not to beg or accept of it as a favour: if it were not paid, she deemed the gentleman degraded, not herself. Far from being mortified by any preference shown to other ladies, her countenance betrayed only a sarcastic sort of pity for the bad taste of the men, or an absolute indifference and look of haughty absence. I saw that she beheld with disdain the paltry competitions of the young ladies her companions: as her companions, indeed, she hardly seemed to consider them; she tolerated their foibles, forgave their envy, and never exerted any superiority, except to show her
contempt of vice and meanness. To be in any degree excepted from the common herd; to be in any degree distinguished by a lady so proud, and with so many good reasons to be proud, was flattering to my self-love. She gave me no direct encouragement; but I never advanced far enough to require encouragement, much less to justify repulse. Sometimes I observed, or I fancied, that she treated me with more favour when Mr. Devereux was present than at other times; perhaps — for she was a woman, not an angel — to pique Devereux, and try if she could move him from the settled purpose of his soul. He bore it all with surprising constancy: his spirits, however, and his health, began visibly to decline.

  “If I do not intrude too much on your valuable time, Mr. Devereux,” said her ladyship to him one evening, in her most attractive manner, “may I beg you to read to us some of these beautiful poems of Sir William Jones?”

  There was a seat beside her ladyship on the sofa: the book was held out by the finest arm in the world.

  “Nay,” said Lady Geraldine, “do not look so respectfully miserable; if you have any other engagements, you have only to say so: or if you cannot speak you may bow: a bow, you know, is an answer to every thing. And here is my Lord Glenthorn ready to supply your place: pray, do not let me detain you prisoner. You shall not a second time say, I can’t get out.”

  Devereux made no further effort to escape, but took the book and his dangerous seat. He remained with us, contrary to his custom, the whole evening. Afterwards, as if he felt that some apology was necessary to me for the pleasure in which he had indulged himself, “Perhaps, my lord,” said he, “another man in my situation, and with my feelings, would think it necessary to retreat, and prudent to secure his safety by flight; but flight is unworthy of him who can combat and conquer: the man who is sure of himself does not skulk away to avoid danger, but advances to meet it, armed secure in honesty.”