The Disowned — Complete. Эдвард Бульвер-Литтон

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      “Well!” said the youth, slowly, and as if in a profound reverie, “well, Bossolton is certainly the most singular name I ever heard; he does right to put it in a book: it is quite a curiosity! is he clever?”

      “Very, sir,” said the landlady, somewhat sharply; “but it is your name, not his, that he wishes to put into his book.”

      “Mine?” said the youth, who appeared to have been seeking to gain time in order to answer a query which most men find requires very little deliberation, “mine, you say; my name is Linden—Clarence Linden—you understand?”

      “What a pretty name!” thought the landlady’s daughter, who was listening at the keyhole; “but how could he admire that odious cap of Ma’s!”

      “And, now, landlady, I wish you would send up my boxes; and get me a newspaper, if you please.”

      “Yes, sir,” said the landlady, and she rose to retire.

      “I do not think,” said the youth to himself, “that I could have hit on a prettier name, and so novel a one too!—Clarence Linden,—why, if I were that pretty girl at the bar I could fall in love with the very words. Shakspeare was quite wrong when he said,—

        ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’”

      “A rose by any name would not smell as sweet; if a rose’s name was Jeremiah Bossolton, for instance, it would not, to my nerves at least, smell of anything but an apothecary’s shop!”

      When Mordaunt called the next morning, he found Clarence much better, and carelessly turning over various books, part of the contents of the luggage superscribed C. L. A book of whatever description was among the few companions for whom Mordaunt had neither fastidiousness nor reserve; and the sympathy of taste between him and the sufferer gave rise to a conversation less cold and commonplace than it might otherwise have been. And when Mordaunt, after a stay of some length, rose to depart, he pressed Linden to return his visit before he left that part of the country; his place, he added, was only about five miles distant from W——. Linden, greatly interested in his visitor, was not slow in accepting the invitation, and, perhaps for the first time in his life, Mordaunt was shaking hands with a stranger he had only known two days.

      CHAPTER VI

        While yet a child, and long before his time,

        He had perceived the presence and the power

        Of greatness.

      .....

        But eagerly he read, and read again.

      .....

           Yet still uppermost

        Nature was at his heart, as if he felt,

        Though yet he knew not how, a wasting power

        In all things that from her sweet influence

        Might seek to wean him. Therefore with her hues,

        Her forms, and with the spirit of her forms,

        He clothed the nakedness of austere truth.

                      WORDSWORTH.

      Algernon Mordaunt was the last son of an old and honourable race, which had centuries back numbered princes in its line. His parents had had many children, but all (save Algernon, the youngest) died in their infancy. His mother perished in giving him birth. Constitutional infirmity and the care of mercenary nurses contributed to render Algernon a weakly and delicate child: hence came a taste for loneliness and a passion for study; and from these sprung, on the one hand, the fastidiousness and reserve which render us apparently unamiable, and, on the other, the loftiness of spirit and the kindness of heart which are the best and earliest gifts of literature, and more than counterbalance our deficiencies in the “minor morals” due to society by their tendency to increase our attention to the greater ones belonging to mankind. Mr. Mordaunt was a man of luxurious habits and gambling propensities: wedded to London, he left the house of his ancestors to moulder into desertion and decay; but to this home Algernon was constantly consigned during his vacations from school; and its solitude and cheerlessness gave to a disposition naturally melancholy and thoughtful those colours which subsequent events were calculated to deepen, not efface.

      Truth obliges us to state, despite our partiality to Mordaunt, that, when he left his school after a residence of six years, it was with the bitter distinction of having been the most unpopular boy in it. Why, nobody could exactly explain, for his severest enemies could not accuse him of ill-nature, cowardice, or avarice, and these make the three capital offences of a school-boy; but Algernon Mordaunt had already acquired the knowledge of himself, and could explain the cause, though with a bitter and swelling heart. His ill health, his long residence at home, his unfriended and almost orphan situation, his early habits of solitude and reserve, all these, so calculated to make the spirit shrink within itself, made him, on his entrance at school, if not unsocial, appear so: this was the primary reason of his unpopularity; the second was that he perceived, for he was sensitive (and consequently acute) to the extreme, the misfortune of his manner, and in his wish to rectify it, it became doubly unprepossessing; to reserve, it now added embarrassment, to coldness, gloom; and the pain he felt in addressing or being addressed by another was naturally and necessarily reciprocal, for the effects of sympathy are nowhere so wonderful, yet so invisible, as in the manners.

      By degrees he shunned the intercourse which had for him nothing but distress, and his volatile acquaintances were perhaps the first to set him the example. Often in his solitary walks he stopped afar off to gaze upon the sports which none ever solicited him to share; and as the shout of laughter and of happy hearts came, peal after peal, upon his ear, he turned enviously, yet not malignantly away, with tears, which not all his pride could curb, and muttered to himself, “And these, these hate me!”

      There are two feelings common to all high or affectionate natures,—that of extreme susceptibility to opinion and that of extreme bitterness at its injustice. These feelings were Mordaunt’s: but the keen edge which one blow injures, the repetition blunts; and by little and little, Algernon became not only accustomed, but, as he persuaded himself, indifferent, to his want of popularity; his step grew more lofty, and his address more collected, and that which was once diffidence gradually hardened into pride.

      His residence at the University was neither without honour nor profit. A college life was then, as now, either the most retired or the most social of all others; we need scarcely say which it was to Mordaunt, but his was the age when solitude is desirable, and when the closet forms the mind better than the world. Driven upon itself, his intellect became inquiring and its resources profound; admitted to their inmost recesses, he revelled among the treasures of ancient lore, and in his dreams of the Nymph and Naiad, or his researches after truth in the deep wells of the Stagyrite or the golden fountains of Plato, he forgot the loneliness of his lot and exhausted the hoarded enthusiasm of his soul.

      But his mind, rather thoughtful than imaginative, found no idol like “Divine Philosophy.” It delighted to plunge itself into the mazes of metaphysical investigation; to trace the springs of the intellect; to connect the arcana of the universe; to descend into the darkest caverns, or to wind through the minutest mysteries of Nature, and rise, step by step, to that arduous elevation on which Thought stands dizzy and confused, looking beneath upon a clouded earth, and above upon an unfathomable heaven.

      Rarely СКАЧАТЬ