Ernest Maltravers — Complete. Эдвард Бульвер-Литтон

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Maltravers was suddenly startled by hearing close behind him, a sharp, significant voice, saying in French, “Hein, hein! I’ve my suspicions—I’ve my suspicions.”

      Madame de Ventadour looked round with a smile. “It is only my husband,” said she, quietly; “let me introduce him to you.”

      Maltravers rose and bowed to a little thin man, most elaborately dressed, and with an immense pair of spectacles upon a long sharp nose.

      “Charmed to make your acquaintance, sir!” said Monsieur de Ventadour. “Have you been long in Naples?... Beautiful weather—won’t last long—hein, hein, I’ve my suspicions! No news as to your parliament—be dissolved soon! Bad opera in London this year!—hein, hein—I’ve my suspicions.”

      This rapid monologue was delivered with appropriate gesture. Each new sentence Mons. de Ventadour began with a sort of bow, and when it dropped in the almost invariable conclusion affirmative of his shrewdness and incredulity, he made a mystical sign with his forefinger by passing it upward in a parallel line with his nose, which at the same time performed its own part in the ceremony by three convulsive twitches, that seemed to shake the bridge to its base.

      Maltravers looked with mute surprise upon the connubial partner of the graceful creature by his side, and Mons. de Ventadour, who had said as much as he thought necessary, wound up his eloquence by expressing the rapture it would give him to see Mons. Maltravers at his hotel. Then, turning to his wife, he began assuring her of the lateness of the hour, and the expediency of departure. Maltravers glided away, and as he regained the door was seized by our old friend, Lumley Ferrers. “Come, my dear fellow,” said the latter; “I have been waiting for you this half hour. Allons. But, perhaps, as I am dying to go to bed, you have made up your mind to stay supper. Some people have no regard for other people’s feelings.”

      “No, Ferrers, I’m at your service;” and the young man descended the stairs and passed along the Chiaja towards their hotel. As they gained the broad and open space on which it stood, with the lovely sea before them, sleeping in the arms of the curving shore, Maltravers, who had hitherto listened in silence to the volubility of his companion, paused abruptly.

      “Look at that sea, Ferrers.... What a scene!—what delicious air! How soft this moonlight! Can you not fancy the old Greek adventurers, when they first colonised this divine Parthenope—the darling of the ocean—gazing along those waves, and pining no more for Greece?”

      “I cannot fancy anything of the sort,” said Ferrers.... “And, depend upon it, the said gentlemen, at this hour of the night, unless they were on some piratical excursion—for they were cursed ruffians, those old Greek colonists—were fast asleep in their beds.”

      “Did you ever write poetry, Ferrers?”

      “To be sure; all clever men have written poetry once in their lives—small-pox and poetry—they are our two juvenile diseases.”

      “And did you ever feel poetry!”

      “Feel it!”

      “Yes, if you put the moon into your verses, did you first feel it shining into your heart?”

      “My dear Maltravers, if I put the moon into my verses, in all probability it was to rhyme to noon. ‘The night was at her noon’—is a capital ending for the first hexameter—and the moon is booked for the next stage. Come in.”

      “No, I shall stay out.”

      “Don’t be nonsensical.”

      “By moonlight there is no nonsense like common sense.”

      “What! we—who have climbed the Pyramids, and sailed up the Nile, and seen magic at Cairo, and been nearly murdered, bagged, and Bosphorized at Constantinople, is it for us, who have gone through so many adventures, looked on so many scenes, and crowded into four years events that would have satisfied the appetite of a cormorant in romance, if it had lived to the age of a phoenix;—is it for us to be doing the pretty and sighing to the moon, like a black-haired apprentice without a neckcloth on board of the Margate hoy? Nonsense, I say—we have lived too much not to have lived away our green sickness of sentiment.”

      “Perhaps you are right, Ferrers,” said Maltravers, smiling. “But I can still enjoy a beautiful night.”

      “Oh, if you like flies in your soup, as the man said to his guest, when he carefully replaced those entomological blackamoors in the tureen, after helping himself—if you like flies in your soup, well and good—buona notte.”

      Ferrers certainly was right in his theory, that when we have known real adventures we grow less morbidly sentimental. Life is a sleep in which we dream most at the commencement and the close—the middle part absorbs us too much for dreams. But still, as Maltravers said, we can enjoy a fine night, especially on the shores of Naples.

      Maltravers paced musingly to and fro for some time. His heart was softened—old rhymes rang in his ear—old memories passed through his brain. But the sweet dark eyes of Madame de Ventadour shone forth through every shadow of the past. Delicious intoxication—the draught of the rose-coloured phial—which is fancy, but seems love!

      CHAPTER II

      “Then ‘gan the Palmer thus—‘Most wretched man

      That to affections dost the bridle lend:

      In their beginnings they are weak and wan,

      But soon, through suffrance, growe to fearfull end;

      While they are weak, betimes with them contend.’”

SPENSER.

      MALTRAVERS went frequently to the house of Madame de Ventadour—it was open twice a week to the world, and thrice a week to friends. Maltravers was soon of the latter class. Madame de Ventadour had been in England in her childhood, for her parents had been emigres. She spoke English well and fluently, and this pleased Maltravers; for though the French language was sufficiently familiar to him, he was like most who are more vain of the mind than the person, and proudly averse to hazarding his best thoughts in the domino of a foreign language. We don’t care how faulty the accent, or how incorrect the idiom, in which we talk nothings; but if we utter any of the poetry within us, we shudder at the risk of the most trifling solecism.

      This was especially the case with Maltravers; for, besides being now somewhat ripened from his careless boyhood into a proud and fastidious man, he had a natural love for the Becoming. This love was unconsciously visible in trifles: it is the natural parent of Good Taste. And it was indeed an inborn good taste which redeemed Ernest’s natural carelessness in those personal matters in which young men usually take a pride. An habitual and soldier-like neatness, and a love of order and symmetry, stood with him in the stead of elaborate attention to equipage and dress.

      Maltravers had not thought twice in his life whether he was handsome or not; and, like most men who have a knowledge of the gentler sex, he knew that beauty had little to do with engaging the love of women. The air, the manner, the tone, the conversation, the something that interests, and the something to be proud of—these are the attributes of the man made to be loved. And the Beauty-man is, nine times out of ten, little more than the oracle of his aunts, and the “Sich СКАЧАТЬ