What a soft, fresh, delicious evening it was!
He had quitted his carriage at the lodge, and followed
it across the small but picturesque park alone and
on foot. He had not seen the place since childhood—he
had quite forgotten its aspect. He now wondered
how he could have lived anywhere else. The trees
did not stand in stately avenues, nor did the antlers
of the deer wave above the sombre fern; it was not
the domain of a grand seigneur, but of an old, long-descended
English squire. Antiquity spoke in the moss-grown
palings in the shadowy groves, in the sharp gable-ends
and heavy mullions of the house, as it now came in
view, at the base of a hill covered with wood—and
partially veiled by the shrubs of the neglected pleasure-ground,
separated from the park by the invisible ha-ha.
There, gleamed in the twilight the watery face of
the oblong fish-pool, with its old-fashioned willows
at each corner—there, grey and quaint,
was the monastic dial—and there was the
long terrace walk, with discoloured and broken vases,
now filled with the orange or the aloe, which, in
honour of his master’s arrival, the gardener
had extracted from the dilapidated green-house.
The very evidence of neglect around, the very weeds
and grass on the half-obliterated road, touched Maltravers
with a sort of pitying and remorseful affection for
his calm and sequestered residence. And it was
not with his usual proud step and erect crest that
he passed from the porch to the solitary library,
through a line of his servants:—the two
or three old retainers belonging to the place were
utterly unfamiliar to him, and they had no smile for
their stranger lord.
CHAPTER IV.
“Lucian. He that is born
to be a man neither should nor can
be anything nobler, greater, and
better than a man.
“Peregrine. But, good Lucian,
for the very reason that he may
not become less than a man, he should
be always striving to be
more.”—WIELAND’S
Peregrinus Proteus.
IT was two years from the date of the last chapter
before Maltravers again appeared in general society.
These two years had sufficed to produce a revolution
in his fate. Ernest Maltravers had lost the happy
rights of the private individual; he had given himself
to the Public; he had surrendered his name to men’s
tongues, and was a thing that all had a right to praise,
to blame, to scrutinise, to spy. Ernest Maltravers
had become an author.
Let no man tempt Gods and Columns, without weighing
well the consequences of his experiment. He
who publishes a book, attended with a moderate success,
passes a mighty barrier. He will often look back
with a sigh of regret at the land he has left for ever.
The beautiful and decent obscurity of hearth and
home is gone. He can no longer feel the just
indignation of manly pride when he finds himself ridiculed
or reviled. He has parted with the shadow of
Copyrights
Ernest Maltravers — Volume 05 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
