Page:What will he do with it.djvu/780

770 House of Vipont, and immortal glory!—eloquent as Ulysses haranguing the son of Peleus in Troilus and Cressida.

Darrell listened coldly; only while Alban dwelt on "the Measure" in which, when it was yet too unripe for practical statesmen, he had attached his faith as a thinker, the orator's eye flashed with young fire. A great truth is eternally clear to a great heart that has once nourished its germ and foreseen its fruits. But when Alban quitted that part of his theme, all the rest seemed wearisome to his listener. They had now wound their walk to the opposite side of the lake, and paused near the thick beech-trees, hallowed and saddened by such secret associations to the mournful owner.

"No, my dear Alban," said Darrell, "I cannot summon up sufficient youth and freshness of spirit to re-enter the turbulent arena I have left. Ah! look yonder where Lionel and Sophy move! Give me, I do not say Lionel's years, but Lionel's wealth of hope, and I might still have a wish for fame and a voice for England; but it is a subtle truth that where a man misses a home, a link between his country and himself is gone. Vulgar ambition may exist—the selfish desire of power; they were never very strong in me, and now less strong than the desire of rest; but that beautiful, genial, glorious union of all the affections of social citizen, which begins at the hearth and widens round the land, is not for the hermit's cell."

Alban was about to give up the argument in irritable despair, when, happening to turn his eye toward the farther depth of the beech-grove, he caught a glimpse—no matter what of; but quickening his step in the direction to which his glance had wandered, he seated himself on the gnarled roots of a tree that seemed the monarch of the wood, wide-spreading as that under which Tityrus reclined of old; and there, out of sight of the groups on the opposite banks of the lake—there, as if he had sought the gloomiest and most secret spot for what he had yet to say, he let fall, in the most distinct yet languid tones of his thoroughbred, cultured enunciation, "I have a message to you from Lady Montfort. Restless man, do come nearer, and stand still. I am tired to death." Darrell approached, and, leaning against the trunk of the giant tree, said, with folded arms and compressed lips.

"A message from Lady Montfort!"

"Yes. I should have told you, by the bye, that it was she who, being a woman, of course succeeded where I, being a man, despite incredible pains and trouble, signally failed, discovered Arabella Fossett, alias Crane, and obtained from her the docu-