Paul Clifford — Complete
Through his noble rival--that is (to make our reader's “surety doubly
sure”), through Lord Mauleverer--he had acquired his first lucrative
office, a certain patronage from government, and his seat in parliament.
If he had persevered at the Bar rather than given himself entirely to
State intrigues, it was only because his talents were eminently more
calculated to advance him in the former path to honour than in the
latter. So devoted was he become to public life that he had only
permitted himself to cherish one private source of enjoyment,--his son.
As no one, not even his brother, knew he had been married (during the
two years of his disguised name, he had been supposed abroad), the
appearance of this son made the only piece of scandal whispered against
the rigid morality of his fair fame; but he himself, waiting his own
time for avowing a legitimate heir, gave out that it was the orphan
child of a dear friend whom he had known abroad; and the puritan
demureness not only of life, but manner, which he assumed, gained a
pretty large belief to the statement. This son Brandon idolized. As
we have represented himself to say, ambitious men are commonly fond
of their children, beyond the fondness of other sires. The perpetual
reference which the ambitious make to posterity is perhaps the
main reason. But Brandon was also fond of children generally;
philoprogenitiveness was a marked trait in his character, and would seem
to belie the hardness and artifice belonging to that character, were not
the same love so frequently noticeable in the harsh and the artificial.
It seems as if a half-conscious but pleasing feeling that they too were
once gentle and innocent, makes them delight in reviving any sympathy
with their early state.
Often after the applause and labour of the day, Brandon would repair
to his son's chamber and watch his slumber for hours; often before his
morning toil commenced, he would nurse the infant in his arms with all
a woman's natural tenderness and gushing joy; and often, as a graver
and more characteristic sentiment stole over him, he would mentally say,
“You shall build up our broken name on a better foundation than your
sire. I begin too late in life, and I labour up a painful and stony
road; but I shall make the journey to Fame smooth and accessible for
you. Never, too, while you aspire to honour, shall you steel your heart
to tranquillity. For you, my child, shall be the joys of home and love,
and a mind that does not sicken at the past, and strain, through mere
forgetfulness, towards a solitary and barren distinction for the future.
Not only what your father gains you shall enjoy, but what has cursed him
his vigilance shall lead you to shun!”
It was thus not only that his softer feelings, but all the better and
nobler ones, which even in the worst and hardest bosom find some root,
turned towards his child, and that the hollow and vicious man promised
to become the affectionate and perhaps the wise parent.
One night Brandon was returning home on foot from a ministerial dinner.
The night was frosty and clear, the hour was late, and his way lay
through the longest and best-lighted streets of the metropolis. He
was, as usual, buried in thought, when he was suddenly aroused from his
revery by a light touch laid on his arm. He turned, and saw one of the
unhappy persons who haunt the midnight streets of cities, standing right
before his path. The gaze of each fell upon the other; and it was thus,
for the first time since they laid their heads on the same pillow,
that the husband met the wife. The skies were intensely clear, and the
lamplight was bright and calm upon the faces of both. There was no
doubt in the mind of either. Suddenly, and with a startled and ghastly
consciousuess, they recognized each other. The wife staggered, and clung
to a post for support; Brandon's look was calm and unmoved. The hour
that his bitter and malignant spirit had yearned for was come; his
nerves expanded in a voluptuous calmness, as if to give him a deliberate
enjoyment of his hope fulfilled. Whatever the words that in that
unwitnessed and almost awful interview passed between them, we may
be sure that Brandon spared not one atom of his power. The lost and
abandoned wife returned home; and all her nature, embruted as it
had become by guilt and vile habits, hardened into revenge,--that
preternatural feeling which may be termed the hope of despair.
Three nights from that meeting Brandon's house was broken into. Like
the houses of many legal men, it lay in a dangerous and thinly populated
outskirt of the town, and was easily accessible to robbery. He was
awakened by a noise; he started, and found himself in the grasp of two
men. At the foot of the bed stood a female, raising a light; and her
face, haggard with searing passions, and ghastly with the leprous
whiteness of disease and approaching death, glared full upon him.
“It is now my turn,” said the female, with a grin of scorn which Brandon
himself might have envied; “you have cursed me, and I return the curse!
You have told me that my child shall never name me but to blush. Fool!
I triumph over you; you he shall never know to his dying day! You have
told me that to my child and my child's child (a long transmission of
execration) my name--the name of the wife you basely sold to ruin and
to hell--should be left as a legacy of odium and shame! Man, you shall
teach that child no further lesson whatever: you shall know not whether
he live or die, or have children to carry on your boasted race; or
whether, if he have, those children be not outcasts of the earth, the
accursed of man and God, the fit offspring of the thing you have made
me. Wretch! I hurl back on you the denunciation with which, when we
met three nights since, you would have crushed the victim of your
own perfidy. You shall tread the path of your ambition childless and
objectless and hopeless. Disease shall set her stamp upon your frame.
The worm shall batten upon your heart. You shall have honours and enjoy
them not; you shall gain your ambition, and despair; you shall pine for
your son, and find him not; or, if you find him, you shall curse the
hour in which he was born. Mark me, man,--I am dying while I speak,--I
know that I am a prophet in my curse. From this hour I am avenged, and
you are my scorn!”
As the hardest natures sink appalled before the stony eye of the maniac,
so, in the dead of the night, pinioned by ruffians, the wild and solemn
voice, sharpened by passion and partial madness, of the ghastly figure
before him curdling through his veins, even the haughty and daring
character of William Brandon quailed! He uttered not a word. He was
found the next morning bound by strong cords to his bed. He spoke not
when he was released, but went in silence to his child's chamber,--the
child was gone! Several articles of property were also stolen; the
desperate tools the mother had employed worked not perhaps without their
own reward.
We need scarcely add that Brandon set every engine and channel of
justice in motion for the discovery of his son. All the especial
shrewdness and keenness of his own character, aided by his professional
experience, he employed for years in the same pursuit. Every research
was wholly in vain; not the remotest vestige towards discovery could
be traced until were found (we have recorded when) some of the articles
that had been stolen. Fate treasured in her gloomy womb, altogether
undescried by man, the hour and the scene in which the most ardent wish
of William Brandon was to be realized.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
O Fortuna, viris invida fortibus
Quam non aqua bonis praemia dividis.
SENECA.
............
And as a hare, whom hounds and horns pursue,
Pants to the place from whence at first he flew.
............
Here, to the houseless child of want,
My door is open still.
GOLDSMITH.
Slowly for Lucy waned the weeks of a winter which to her was the most
dreary portion of life she had ever passed. It became the time for the
judge to attend one of those periodical visitations so fraught with
dread and dismay to the miserable inmates of the dark abodes which the
complex laws of this country so bounteously supply,--those times of
great hilarity and eating to the legal gentry,--
“Who feed on crimes and fatten on distress,
And wring vile mirth from suffering's last excess.”
Ah! excellent order of the world, which it is so wicked to disturb! How
miraculously beautiful must be that system which makes wine out of
the scorching tears of guilt; and from the suffocating suspense,
the agonized fear, the compelled and self-mocking bravery, the awful
sentence, the despairing death-pang of one man, furnishes the smirking
expectation of fees, the jovial meeting, and the mercenary holiday to
another! “Of Law, nothing less can be said than that her seat is the
bosom of God.”--[Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity.]--To be sure not;
Richard Hooker, you are perfectly right. The divinity of a sessions and
the inspiration of the Old Bailey are undeniable!
The care of Sir William Brandon had effectually kept from Lucy's ear the
knowledge of her lover's ignominious situation. Indeed, in her delicate
health even the hard eye of Brandon and the thoughtless glance of
Mauleverer perceived the danger of such a discovery. The earl, now
waiting the main attack on Lucy till the curtain had forever dropped on
Clifford, proceeded with great caution and delicacy in his suit to his
purposed bride. He waited with the more patience inasmuch as he had
drawn in advance on his friend Sir William for some portion of the
heiress's fortune; and he readily allowed that he could not in the mean
while have a better advocate than he found in Brandon. So persuasive,
indeed, and so subtle was the eloquence of this able sophist, that
often in his artful conversations with his niece he left even on the
unvitiated and strong though simple mind of Lucy an uneasy and restless
impression, which time might have ripened into an inclination towards
the worldly advantages of the marriage at her command. Brandon was no
bungling mediator or violent persecutor. He seemed to acquiesce in her
rejection of Mauleverer. He scarcely recurred to the event. He rarely
praised the earl himself, save for the obvious qualities of liveliness
and good-nature. But he spoke, with all the vivid colours he could
infuse at will into his words, of the pleasures and the duties of rank
and wealth. Well could he appeal alike to all the prejudices and all the
foibles of the human breast, and govern virtue through its weaknesses.
Lucy had been brought up, like the daughters of most country gentlemen
of ancient family, in an undue and idle consciousness of superior birth;
and she was far from inaccessible to the warmth and even feeling (for
here Brandon was sincere) with which her uncle spoke of the duty of
raising a gallant name sunk into disrepute, and sacrificing our own
inclination for the redecorating the mouldered splendour of those who
have gone before us. If the confusion of idea occasioned by a vague
pomposity of phrase, or the infant inculcation of a sentiment that is
mistaken for a virtue, so often makes fools of the wise on the subject
of ancestry; if it clouded even the sarcastic and keen sense of Brandon
himself, we may forgive its influence over a girl so little versed in
the arts of sound reasoning as poor Lucy, who, it may be said, had never
learned to think until she had learned to love. However, the impression
made by Brandon, in his happiest moments of persuasion, was as yet only