Romance and Reality (Landon)/Chapter 66
THE LAST CHAPTER.
"O Jupiter! how weary are my spirits!"
Shakespeare.
The winding-up of a novel is like winding up a skein of silk, or casting up a sum—all the ends must be made neat, all the numbers accounted for, at last. Luckily, in the closing chapter a little explanation goes a great way; and a character, like a rule of morality, may be dismissed in a sentence.
Cecil Spenser married his cousin, Helen Morland: it was very satisfactory to find somebody who looked up to him entirely. He repaired the beautiful old abbey, which his father had allowed to go to ruin—built a library and a picture- gallery—threw open his preserves—refused to stand for the county—and if not happy, believed he was, and in such a case belief is as good as reality. He practised what Lord Mandeville theorised, who, in despite of his convictions of the excellence and happiness of those who are
"Home dwellers on their father's land,"
accepted a foreign embassy to one of the most brilliant of the European courts, but where Lady Mandeville was the most brilliant and the most beautiful.
There is a very acute remark of Crowe's, which says, "the English rather desire to extract a moral than a truth from experience." I must own they do dearly delight in a judgment; and sorry am I that I cannot gratify this laudable propensity by specifying some peculiar evil incurred by Mr. Delawarr's ambition, or Lady Etheringhame's vanity.
Adelaide neither lost her life by eating ice when warm with dancing, nor her features by the small-pox, the usual destiny of vain creatures in the days of moral essays: she went on, like Lady Macbeth,
"For I can smile, and murder while I smile,"
till the rose and the ringlet became alike artificial; and she was left to that "winter of discontent," which shared its reproaches between the maid who could no longer make, and the mirror that could no longer reflect, a beauty.
Mr. Delawarr's life was spent in debates and dinners. Once, for a few weeks, he was in the opposition—caught cold, and decided that such a position was equally bad for his own and his country's constitution—resumed, and never after resigned his post under government. He died the first and last Earl of Delawarr.
Mrs. Francis Boyne Sillery played cards to an interminable old age; and her youthful husband died, five years after their marriage, of the jaundice. There were some on dits afloat respecting a third marriage with a "certain young writer," whose hymns had converted every old lady in Bath; but it never took place.
The respectable family of the Higgs's got on amazingly well in the world: the sons, as their mother was wont exultingly to state, were quite gentlemen, and spent a power of money on their clothes. The Countess, as in their own circle she was invariably called, used always to choose for her favourite topics the uncertainty of worldly distinctions—the horrors of a revolution—and the melancholy situation of a nobleman in a foreign land, where he was forced to abandon his natural sphere, and had only his own consciousness of high birth to sustain him. Signor Giulio rose marvellously in Mr. Higgs's esteem; for, to his wife's dismay and his father-in-law's delight, he set up a manufactory of macaroni, which answered so well, that Mr. Higgs used to rub his hands with great glee, and be very grateful to Providence, who had made even a foreigner turn out so well; taking, however, to himself a due share of credit for the benefit his advice had been, as well as for the credit obtained by an alliance with such a 'sponsible family as that of the Higgs's. "I never gave him no credit for nothing because of his mustachers—but, Lord! he knows a good ha'penny from a bad 'un as well as me."
We regret to state that Miss Carry went on to forty-five, falling, and being crossed in love. By the by, as she never got married, a fine moral lesson might be drawn from her fate, touching the inexpediency of too many attachments. At last she took to a blonde cap with roses, and a flaxen wig; became suddenly faithful to her first love, or rather to his memory; and retired with her blighted affections into the country—that is to say, she took a small cottage at Islington; a sickly-looking passion-flower was trained over the front; a weeping-willow, whose leaves were like "angel visits" in one respect at least, for "they were few and far between," grew by the pump; and over the parlour mantel-piece was hung the profile of the long-forgotten but now ever-to-be-remembered Benjamin Stubbs. And there dwelt Miss Carry Constantia Higgs, with her sorrows, her canary, and her cat.
Mrs. Smithson's laurel and olive branches multiplied equally; to her last child she stood godmother, having gone the round of her friends with that honour, till none were left for the youngest. Her last work she published on her own account, not being able to find a bookseller; and still the pleasure of her life consists in collecting round her a little genteel and literary society.
A change came o'er the spirit of Don Henriquez' dream; from political he turned scientific; and his superabundant activity found ample employment in deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphics. His pursuit soon became a mania; and one fine morning he set off for the pyramids. From them he duly despatched an account of his discoveries to the various learned bodies that have a council and a charter throughout Europe. There was one agreeable piece of self-deception attending it—he called the splendid allowance which Beatrice was made the medium of offering him, a fine proof of the Hon. Mr. Lorraine's devotion to the interests of science. It is an excellent plan to generalise individual gratitude—it makes an obligation sit so very lightly.
Beatrice was still as much an orphan as amid the lonely woods of Andalusia; but now she needed not the care nor the support of her kindred. One heart kept over her the deep and eternal watch of love; and perhaps her own attachment to her husband was more passionate and entire, that earth held not another tie to claim one thought. The world said that the beautiful Spaniard was cold as she was beautiful—too reserved and too proud for attraction. True it was that early habits of silence and reserve, and the timidity born of long solitude, together with a high and ideal creed of the sacredness of affection, made Beatrice shrink away from the many, to concentrate her whole existence upon the one. Edward could scarcely love her the less, because for him only her eye brightened, and her cheek flushed into crimson—that for him only her smile softened into tenderness, or her words grew eloquent with feeling and thought.
Lorraine's future destiny was a stirring and a brilliant one. Lord Byron says, what does a great man purchase by the devotion of his whole life but
"A name, a wretched picture, a worse bust?"
Still, it is something to have a name "familiar as a household word"—a picture, the worst print from which is popular—and also an exceedingly handsome bust: all these were in Edward Lorraine's futurity.
When Miss Arundel's will was opened—that paper which it was her last earthly act to sign—It was found that, after having amply provided for all the old dependants of her house, and bequeathed a few legacies-—slight marks of affection to friends not one of whom was forgotten—Beatrice de los Zoridos was constituted sole heiress. One request was subjoined—that Arundel Hall should be pulled down. "I could not endure that another race should dwell in the house of my fathers" Of course the injunction was fulfilled. The wheat now springs up over the dwelling-place of the ancient house of the Arundels.
In the picture-gallery at Etheringhame Castle hangs a portrait, which bears not the name and claims no affinity with the noble race around; yet the spectator often pauses before it, to ask who is that glad and girlish-looking beauty? and the answer. is, "An early and beloved friend of the Countess's, who died young." There is also one other memorial of the departed—a small marble tablet in the village church, near what was once Arundel Hall, hangs amid the scutcheons of her house: it bears a brief inscription:
EMILY ARUNDEL,
THE LAST SURVIVOR OF HER FAMILY,
aged 21.
THE END.
LONDON:
J. MOYES, CASTLE STREET, LEICESTER SQUARE.