The Convict: A Tale. G. P. R. James
and penetrated not only all the ordinary aspects of society, but the hearts and spirits of thousands of individuals. There was not a subject that he could not talk upon, whether gay or grave; from the green-room of the theatre or opera-house, to the cabinets of statesmen and the saloons of monarchs. His conversation was graceful, easy, flowing, and becoming; and although there was a point of sarcastic wit in it which gave it, in the opinion of Dudley, almost too great a piquancy, yet when that gentleman recollected what had been said, he could not find one word that was unfitted to the character of a well-bred man and a priest. It was all so quietly done too: the stinging gibe, the light and flashing jest, that the young tutor sometimes thought the whole must have received point and peculiar application from the manner; but yet he could not recollect emphasis laid upon any word; and he carried away from that table, when he retired to rest at night, much matter for thought upon all that he had seen, and many a deep feeling re-awakened in his heart, which he had hoped and trusted had been laid asleep by the power of reason, and the struggle of a strong mind against a warm and enthusiastic heart.
CHAPTER IV.
The wind had blown away the clouds which lay so heavy on the sky the night before. The morning rose bright and sparkling, with a brisk gale stirring the air, and a clear, fresh, frosty look over the whole earth. At an early hour--for matutinal habits had become inveterate--Mr. Dudley rose, and going to the window, gazed out upon a scene of which he had been able to discover little at the dark hour of his arrival.
I will not pause to describe all that he beheld, for the public taste is as capricious in matters of composition as in regard to mere dress; and the detailed description of scenery, the pictures with the pen, which please much at one time, weary at another. It is a railroad age, too: all the world is anxious to get on, and we hurry past remorselessly all the finer traits of mind and character which were objects of thought and study to our ancestors, just as the traveller, in the long screaming, groaning, smoking train, is hurried past those sweet and beautiful spots in which the contemplative man of former days was accustomed to pause and ponder.
On one small portion of the landscape, however, I must dwell, for I shall have to speak of it presently, and must recur to it more than once hereafter. The house was situated in an extensive park; and a long avenue of beech trees, not perfectly straight, but sweeping with a graceful curve over the undulations of the ground, led down to the park gates and to the lodge. At a short distance from that lodge, a little thicket of wood joined on to the avenue, and ran along in irregular masses till it reached the park wall: and these objects, the avenue, the wavy green slopes of the park, the thicket beyond, and the top of the park wall, were those upon which Mr. Dudley's eye first rested. Beyond the limits of the park, again, in the same direction, he caught a glimpse of a varied country, apparently tolerably fertile and well-cultivated, close to the park, but growing rapidly wilder and more rude, as it extended into some high and towering downs, which Dudley conceived to be those he had traversed the night before.
As the reader well knows, some kinds of beech tree retain their leaves longer than almost any other tree or shrub, except the tribe of evergreens; and even through frost, and wind, and rain, they hang yellow upon the wintry boughs, till the coming of the new green buds, like ambitious children, forces their predecessors down to the earth. The avenue was thus thickly covered, so that any one might have walked there long unseen from most parts of the house or park. But when Lord Hadley, on his way back to London from the Continent, had accepted a kind, though not altogether disinterested invitation to Brandon--for so the place was called--he had merely mentioned that his tutor was with him, and to the tutor had been assigned a room considerably higher in the house than the apartments of more lordly guests. Dudley did not feel at all displeased that it should be so; and now as he looked forth, he had a bird's-eye view, as it were, of the avenue, and a fine prospect over the distant country. Thus he was well contented; and as he had been informed that the family did not meet at breakfast till half-past nine, and it was then little more than six, he determined to dress himself at once, and roam for an hour or two through the park, and perhaps extend his excursion somewhat beyond its walls.
One of the first operations in a man's toilet--I say it for the benefit of ladies, who cannot be supposed to know the mysteries thereof--is to shave himself; and an exceedingly disagreeable operation it is. I know not by what barbarous crotchet it has happened that men have tried to render their faces effeminate, by taking off an ornament and a distinction with which nature decorated them; but so it is, that men every morning doom themselves to a quarter of an hour's torture, for the express purpose of making their chins look smug, and as unlike the grown man of God's creation as possible. Dudley's beard was thick and black, and required a good deal of shaving. He therefore opened a very handsome dressing-case--it was one which had been a gift to him in his days of prosperity; and taking out a small finely-polished mirror, he fastened it--for the sake of more light than he could obtain at the looking-glass on the toilet-table--against the left-hand window of the room; then with a little Naples soap, brought by himself from the city of the syren, a soft badger's-hair brush and cold water--for he did not choose to ring the servants up at that early hour of the morning--he set to work upon as handsome a face as probably had ever been seen. The brush and the soap both being good, he produced a strong lather, notwithstanding the cold water; and turning to put down the brush and take up the razor, which he had laid down on a little table in the window, his eyes naturally fell upon that part of the park grounds beneath him, where the avenue terminated close to the house. As they did so, they rested upon a human figure passing rapidly from the mansion to the shade of the beech trees; and Dudley instantly recognised Edgar Adelon, the son of his host. There was nothing very extraordinary in the sight; but Dudley was a meditative man by habit, and while he reaped the sturdy harvest of his chin, he went on thinking of Edgar Adelon, his appearance, his character, his conversation; and then his mind turned from the youth to another subject, near which it had been fluttering a great deal both that morning and the night before, and settled upon Eda Brandon. Whatever was the course of his meditations, it produced a sigh, which is sometimes like a barrier across a dangerous road, giving warning not to proceed any further in that direction.
He then gazed out of the window again, and following with his eyes the course of the avenue, he once more caught sight of the young gentleman, he had just seen, hurrying on as fast as he could go. He had no gun with him, no dogs; and a slight degree of curiosity was excited in the tutor's mind, which he would have laughed at had it been anything but very slight. Shortly after, he lost sight of the figure, which, as it seemed to him, entered the thicket on the right hand of the avenue; and Dudley thought to himself, "Poor youth! he seemed, last night, though brilliant and imaginative enough at times, sadly absent, and even sad at others. He is gone, perhaps, to meditate over his love; ay, he knows not how many more pangs may be in store for him, or what may be the dark turn of fate near at hand. I was once as prosperous and as fair-fortuned as himself, and now--"
He would not go on, for it was a part of his philosophy--and it was a high-minded one--never to repine. As he passed to and fro, however, in the room, he looked from time to time out of the window again; and just as he was putting on his coat, he suddenly saw a figure emerge from the thicket where it approached closest to the park wall, beheld it climb easily over the boundary, as if by a stile or ladder, and disappear. At that distance, he could not distinguish whether the person he saw was Edgar Adelon or not; but he thought the whole man[oe]uvre strange, and was meditating over it, with his face turned to the window, when he heard a knock at his door, and saying, "Come in," was visited by the Reverend Mr. Filmer.
The priest advanced with a calm, gentlemanly smile and quiet step, saying, "I heard you moving in your room, Mr. Dudley, which adjoins mine, and came in to wish you good morning, and to say that if I can be of any service in pointing out to you the objects of interest in this neighbourhood, of which there are several, I shall be most happy. Also in my room I have a very good, though not very extensive, collection of books, some of great rarity; and though I suppose we are priests of different churches, you are too much a man of the world, I am sure, to suffer that circumstance to cause any estrangement between us."
"It could cause none, my dear sir," replied Dudley, "even if your supposition were correct; but I am not an ecclesiastic, and I can assure you I view your church with anything but feelings