Alice, or the Mysteries — Book 04

								

Caroline Merton.  By the way, now, there is a young lady of a proper age
for you,--handsome and clever, too."
"You talk of antidotes to matrimony; and so Miss Cameron--"
"Oh, no more of Miss Cameron now, or I shall sit up all night; she has
half turned my head.  I can't help pitying her,--married to one so
careless and worldly as Lord Vargrave, thrown so young into the whirl of
London.  Poor thing! she had better have fallen in love with
Legard,--which I dare say she will do, after all.  Well, good-night!"

CHAPTER II.


PASSION, as frequently is seen,
Subsiding, settles into spleen;
Hence, as the plague of happy life,
I ran away from party strife.--MATTHEW GREEN.


Here nymphs from hollow oaks relate
The dark decrees and will of fate.--Ibid.
ACCORDING to his engagement, Vargrave breakfasted the next morning at
Burleigh.  Maltravers at first struggled to return his familiar
cordiality with equal graciousness.  Condemning himself for former and
unfounded suspicions, he wrestled against feelings which he could not or
would not analyze, but which made Lumley an unwelcome visitor, and
connected him with painful associations, whether of the present or the
past.  But there were points on which the penetration of Maltravers
served to justify his prepossessions.
The conversation, chiefly sustained by Cleveland and Vargrave, fell on
public questions; and as one was opposed to the other, Vargrave's
exposition of views and motives had in them so much of the self-seeking
of the professional placeman, that they might well have offended any man
tinged by the lofty mania of political Quixotism.  It was with a strange
mixture of feelings that Maltravers listened: at one moment he proudly
congratulated himself on having quitted a career where such opinions
seemed so well to prosper: at another, his better and juster sentiments
awoke the long-dormant combative faculty, and he almost longed for the
turbulent but sublime arena, in which truths are vindicated and mankind
advanced.
The interview did not serve for that renewal of intimacy which Vargrave
appeared to seek, and Maltravers rejoiced when the placeman took his
departure.
Lumley, who was about to pay a morning visit to Lord Doltimore, had
borrowed Mr. Merton's stanhope, as being better adapted than any
statelier vehicle to get rapidly through the cross-roads which led to
Admiral Legard's house; and as he settled himself in the seat, with his
servant by his side, he said laughingly, "I almost fancy myself naughty
master Lumley again in this young-man-kind of two-wheeled cockle-boat:
not dignified, but rapid, eh?"
And Lumley's face, as he spoke, had in it so much of frank gayety, and
his manner was so simple, that Maltravers could with difficulty fancy him
the same man who, five minutes before, had been uttering sentiments that
might have become the oldest-hearted intriguer whom the hot-bed of
ambition ever reared.