Alice, or the Mysteries — Book 02

								

one point in especial,--not to talent, knowledge, mental gifts, still
less to the vulgar commonplaces of birth and fortune; it rather resulted
from a supreme and wholesale contempt of all other men, and all their
objects,--of ambition, of glory, of the hard business of life.  His
favourite virtue was fortitude; it was on this that he now mainly valued
himself.  He was proud of his struggles against others, prouder still of
conquests over his own passions.  He looked upon FATE as the arch enemy
against whose attacks we should ever prepare.  He fancied that against
fate he had thoroughly schooled himself.  In the arrogance of his heart
he said, "I can defy the future."  He believed in the boast of the vain
old sage,--"I am a world to myself!"  In the wild career through which
his later manhood had passed, it is true that he had not carried his
philosophy into a rejection of the ordinary world.  The shock occasioned
by the death of Florence yielded gradually to time and change; and he had
passed from the deserts of Africa and the East to the brilliant cities of
Europe.  But neither his heart nor his reason had ever again been
enslaved by his passions.  Never again had he known the softness of
affection.  Had he done so, the ice had been thawed, and the fountain had
flowed once more into the great deeps.  He had returned to England,--he
scarce knew wherefore, or with what intent, certainly not with any idea
of entering again upon the occupations of active life; it was, perhaps,
only the weariness of foreign scenes and unfamiliar tongues, and the
vague, unsettled desire of change, that brought him back to the
fatherland.  But he did not allow so unphilosophical a cause to himself:
and, what was strange, he would not allow one much more amiable, and
which was, perhaps, the truer cause,--the increasing age and infirmities
of his old guardian, Cleveland, who prayed him affectionately to return.
Maltravers did not like to believe that his heart was still so kind.
Singular form of pride!  No, he rather sought to persuade himself that he
intended to sell Burleigh, to arrange his affairs finally, and then quit
forever his native land.  To prove to himself that this was the case, he
had intended at Dover to hurry at once to Burleigh, and merely write to
Cleveland that he was returned to England.  But his heart would not
suffer him to enjoy this cruel luxury of self-mortification, and his
horses' heads were turned to Richmond when within a stage of London.  He
had spent two days with the good old man, and those two days had so
warmed and softened his feelings that he was quite appalled at his own
dereliction from fixed principles!  However, he went before Cleveland had
time to discover that he was changed; and the old man had promised to
visit him shortly.
This, then, was the state of Ernest Maltravers at the age of
thirty-six,--an age in which frame and mind are in their fullest
perfection; an age in which men begin most keenly to feel that they are