CHAPTER XVII.
Shakspeare.
Whilst the contest still continued, Oakley had not felt any despondency at his daily diminishing hopes of success. The reputation of a martyr was one peculiarly suited to his character. It was almost the only distinction which, whilst it elevated him in his own opinion, at the same time fed that distrust of others in which it pleased him to indulge. Whilst he persuaded himself, in attempting to persuade others, that he was the victim of an unprincipled conspiracy, it is to be doubted whether at the moment he would have exchanged the liberty of expressing his opinion of his opponents in unmeasured terms, for that situation on the poll which would have burdened his tongue with a weight of gratitude, and deprived him of the pleasure of considering himself as a virtuous victim to the ignorance and corruption of the age.
But, as the excitement subsided, other feelings blended themselves with the retrospect. He left the town in Lady Boreton’s carriage: her ladyship had been active in her assistance to the very last, and would now, if she had received any encouragement, have been equally ready with her consolations, but Oakley’s taciturnity seemed invincible; therefore Lady Boreton, whose busy mind was never unoccupied, entered at once into eager conversation with her literary hanger-on, who sat opposite, and was soon as far off as the gardens of the Hesperides, discussing their recently-discovered locality. Sir John, who was opposite Oakley, lest he should be expected to say any thing, kept his eyes as intently fixed upon the passing hedges, as if he had been counting the blackberries on them.
Oakley therefore was allowed, undisturbed, the indulgence of his reflections at much greater length than they need be recorded. It is sufficient to say, that every ground of consolation gradually faded away upon further examination. He now felt disposed to doubt the justice, or even the excellence of some of those philippics of which he had not been a little proud, when they found a ready approval in the acclamations of his party. Their effect however still remained to be felt; they had alienated the only person whose friendship he had ever valued, and separated him farther from her who had awakened in his heart an interest, strong in proportion to the newness of the feeling to him.
He was roused by hearing Lady Boreton say, after a check to their progress, caused by meeting another carriage at a turnpike, “There is Lady Latimer, of course all smiles; and can that possibly be Miss Mordaunt moping in the corner? How that girl is altered since she first came to my house! I can’t think what has come over her; I never saw any thing so melancholy as she looked last time she came into town with Lady Latimer.”
The carriages crossed; no one replied to Lady Boreton’s remark; she therefore returned to her golden-fruited gardens, Sir John to his blackberry-bushes, and Oakley resumed his reverie, which was now somewhat less political than it had originally been. They thus arrived at the first stage where they were to separate; Sir John and Lady Boreton continuing their route homewards, and Oakley mounting his horse and crossing to Goldsborough. The groom who had come to meet him with the horse, brought with him from thence a packet which otherwise affected his destination.
It was with some surprise that he read a letter from Mrs. Mordaunt to him, in which she stated that she was already under such heavy obligations to him, that she had the less hesitation in applying to him now to extricate her from difficulties of a delicate and distressing nature. Her health had latterly, she said, been breaking rapidly; she had been anxious not to alarm Helen on the subject unnecessarily, till warned by her physician that she had no time to lose. As her daughter’s intimacy with Lady Latimer had originated in an accidental occurrence, with which she had herself no concern, she was unwilling now to open a communication with that lady, which might lead to inquiries, that, for many reasons, she would rather avoid; and yet she could not bear that her daughter should return to her unprepared to find her much changed since last they parted. She therefore knew not to whom to confide the task of imparting to Helen the painful necessity for her return, unless it was to him from whom she had had no secret, and to whom she owed the double debt of having, by his liberality, given comfort to her latter days, and by his kindness, smoothed her daughter’s first entrance into the world.
Oakley’s faculties had been so bewildered and exhausted by the excitement under which he had been lately labouring, that he read this letter over several times before he could form any consistent plan for complying with the request it contained. It appeared as if Mrs. Mordaunt had been ignorant of many late circumstances, which made him a peculiarly inconvenient medium for communicating any thing to Helen whilst under Lord Latimer’s roof. And such indeed was the case. Helen could have related nothing to her mother on the subject of the election, except those prejudiced versions of the contest which were perpetually repeated in her hearing at Latimer, and which she was extremely unwilling to believe; she had therefore adopted the alternative of utter silence on that subject, and so completely secluded was Mrs. Mordaunt’s mode of life, that she was very unlikely to know any thing about it from any other source.
She therefore had written in the full confidence that Mr. Oakley’s intercourse with her daughter was still upon the same easy footing that it had formerly been. Her own early experience of the workings of the heart, and the deductions which, in the calm of her latter days, she had drawn from that experience, leading her to believe that Helen’s comparative omission of Oakley’s name in her most recent letters, arose from other causes than either separation or indifference. Not that it ought, therefore, to be supposed that Mrs. Mordaunt had formed any interested scheme for her daughter’s advantageous settlement in life, by a union with Oakley, but occasionally, in her solitude, indistinct hopes of that nature would come across her. She had so studied Helen’s character, she had so sifted its freedom from the seeds of those errors which had been her own ruin, that when year after year she found it only more “lovely in blossom, rich in fruit,” she justly considered that one so perfect as a daughter, would be invaluable as a wife.
True, with bitter humiliation she felt that her own character might be a bar to any connexion of that kind; and to think of her, separated and estranged, was more than she could bear: but it had long been in her daughter and for her daughter alone she had lived, and for her sake she hoped soon to die.
It was in the prospects which the visit to Lady Latimer seemed to have opened to Helen, that Mrs. Mordaunt found her consolation for the present separation. Lady Latimer had first met Miss Mordaunt at the house of an old governess of hers, who had retired to the same secluded neighbourhood as her mother. She was a very respectable elderly gentlewoman, with whom Lady Latimer kept up an occasional intercourse, in gratitude for some early moral instruction which Lady Flamborough had, as in duty bound, in the first instance, hired her to implant, and afterwards had herself been at some pains to eradicate. This good old lady had taken a great fancy to Miss Mordaunt, and had introduced her to the notice of Lady Latimer, as the orphan-child of an officer in the army, whose widow lived in that neighbourhood.
But to return to Oakley and the letter. It is to be feared that one of the first reflections that it raised in his mind was, that the death of a person in Mrs. Mordaunt’s unfortunate situation would be no disadvantage to Helen; but he checked the idea, when he recollected the shock her affectionate nature would sustain in the final separation from a mother, from whom she had received nothing but kindness, and of whom she knew nothing but good. Again he cursed this unlucky election, which had laid an embargo upon personal communication at present. How could he, especially after the language he had used about Lord Latimer and his friends, attempt to cross his threshold uninvited and unexpected?
He sat down determined to write the painful intelligence he had to convey to Miss Mordaunt. But he could not satisfy himself with either the style or substance of what he had committed to paper. Besides, what right had he to address Miss Mordaunt at all? Many things, which an additional word or look might explain or soften, at the moment looked abrupt when staring nakedly and unalterably upon paper.
At one time he thought of returning home to Goldsborough and committing to some delegated person the task that had been assigned to himself. But who should be that person? became the next question. Mr. Gardner from his character, would have been peculiarly fitted to undertake it, but he could not think of asking such a favour of him, after parting from him in a temper of suspicion, which did not render it easy to make the next meeting one of unrestrained confidence.
He read the letter again, and it appeared that something must be decided on speedily. Whilst he was still deliberating, the shades of night thickened around him, and after having made a last ineffectual attempt to finish what he had written by the uncertain fire-light in the little room to which he had retired, he took the sudden resolution of returning himself alone, and under cover of the darkness, (he trusted unobserved,) to the county town where Helen had accompanied Lady Latimer.
“There at least,” thought he, “whilst they are occupied with their petty triumph, I can have an opportunity of a few minutes’ private conversation with Miss Mordaunt without trespassing upon Lord Latimer’s hospitality.”
This resolution was no sooner taken than executed, and he was without further delay on horseback, and again, but more rapidly gliding past those hedges of which Sir John had some hours before so accurately examined the details, but which now appeared, by the uncertain twilight of an autumnal evening, to stalk by in gloomy, gigantic masses, as he galloped between them. He heeded not their threatening shadows, nor the more substantial discomforts of the coming storm, entirely occupied with arranging, as far as the confusion of his ideas would admit, the manner in which he might best break the unwelcome tidings with which he was charged, to one whom he was most unwilling to pain.
The first thing that at all dissipated the deep abstraction in which these thoughts involved him, was soon after entering the town, a sudden and violent start of his horse at a blazing pile which flared across the streets. This appeared to rise out of a cask, which the drunken assemblage who surrounded it, having previously emptied, had now filled with combustibles, and on the top of it was exposed a stuffed figure, which, from its black wig and oratorical attitude, was evidently meant for Oakley himself.
Enraged at the sight, he spurred his horse furiously through the mob, who fled on all sides, scared at the sight, as the lurid glare fell for a moment upon the haggard apparition of him whose image they had just been reviling, but whose actual presence they had seen removed from the town some hours before. In another second he was lost in the thick cloud of smoke which rolled onward the way he went, and it ever after remained an unexplained mystery, what it was the boys saw that night near Tom Smith’s rag-yard. Even the old gossip (who, as the first authority in ghost-stories was consulted on the subject) only shook his head, and said, “It was na a canny task to burn a sinfu’ cratur afore his day—there was na tilling wha might com in sim shape or other to thankee for saving of his fuel.”
Meantime Oakley rode on, not much improved in temper by the late incident, and having put up his horse, sought out Lady Latimer’s lodging.