Charles Lever - The Daltons; Or, Three Roads In Life. Volume II

“Where can we talk together, Nina?”

“Come this way, holy father,” said she, with a half-sneering smile. “I suppose a poor girl may receive her confessor in her chamber.”

D’Esmonde walked after her without speaking. While crossing a gallery, she unlocked a door, and admitted him into a small but neatly furnished room.

“Dear Lola,” said the priest, as, taking her hand, he looked affectionately at her, – “I must needs call you by the old name, – what turn of fortune has brought you here?”

“It is a question well becomes you,” said the girl, releasing her hand from his grasp, and drawing herself proudly up. “You cut the bark adrift, and you wonder that it has become a wreck!”

“How this old warmth of temper recalls the past, and how I love you for it, as I grieve over it, Lola; but be calm, and tell me everything, just as you used to tell me years ago.”

“Oh, if I had the same pure heart as then!” cried the girl, passionately. “Oh, if I could but shed tears, as once I did, over each slight transgression, and not have my spirit seared and hardened, as the world has made it!”

“We cannot carry the genial freshness of youth into the ripe years of judgment, Lola. Gifts decay, and others succeed them.”

“No more of this casuistry. You are, I see, the same, whatever changes time may have made in me ; but I have outlived these trickeries. Tell me, frankly, what do you want with me?”

“Must there needs be some motive of self-interest in renewing an old but interrupted friendship, Lola? You remember what we once were to each other?”

“Oh that I could forget it! – oh that I could wash out the thought, or even think it but a dream! But how can you recall these memories? If the sorrow be mine, is not the shame all yours?”

“The shame and the sorrow are alike mine,” said D’Es-monde, in a voice of deep dejection, “ You alone, of all the world, were ever able to shake within me the great resolves that in prayer and devotion I had formed. For you, Lola, I was, for a space, willing to resign the greatest cause that ever man engaged in. Ay, for love of you , I was ready to peril everything – even to my soul! Is not this enough for shame and sorrow too? Is not this humiliation for one who wears the robe that I do?”

“You were a student in those days,” said Nina, with a sneering smile; “and I never heard you speak of all those dreadful sacrifices. You used to talk of leaving the college with a light heart. You spoke of the world as if you were impatient to mingle with it. You planned I know not how many roads to fortune and advancement. Among other careers, I remember” – and here she burst into a scornful laugh, that made the priest’s cheek grow crimson with passion – “I remember how you hit upon one which speaks rather for your ardor than your prudence. Do you forget that you would be a Toridor, – you whose cheek grew pale and whose heart sickened as my father’s horse lay embowelled in the ring, and who fainted outright when the bull’s horns were driven into the barricade near you. You a Toridor! A Toridor should have courage!” And as she spoke, her eyes flashed with the fire of passion.

“Courage!” said the priest, in a voice almost guttural from emotion; “and is there no other courage than the vulgar defiance of personal danger, – the quality of the veriest savage and the merest brute in creation? Is there nothing more exalted in courage than to face bodily peril? Are all its instincts selfishness? What think you of the courage of him who, in all the conscious strength of intellect, with powers to win an upward way amongst the greatest and the highest, can stoop to a life of poverty and neglect, can give up all that men strive for, – home, affection, family, citizenship, – content to toil apart and alone, – to watch, to fast, and pray, and think, – ay, think till the very brain reels with labor, – and all this for a cause in which he is but a unit! Courage! Tell me not of courage beside that of him who dares to shake the strongest thrones, and convulses empires with his word, whose counsels brave the might of armies, and dare even kings to controvert; and, greatest of all, the courage that for a cause can risk salvation! Yes, Lola, he who to save others hazards his own eternity! Have I not done it?” cried he, carried away by an impetuous rush of feeling. “Have I not overborne the truth and sustained the falsehood? Have I not warped the judgments, and clouded the faculties, and misdirected the aspirations of many who came to me for counsel, knowing that if there might be evil now there would be good hereafter, and that for present and passing sorrow there would be a glorious day of rejoicing? To this end have I spoke Peace to the guilty man and Hope to the hardened! Not for him, nor for me, but for the countless millions of the Church, – for the mighty hosts who look to her for succor and consolation! This I call courage!”

And he drew himself proudly up, and folded his arms on his breast with an air of haughty composure; while the girl, awed by his manner, and subdued by the impetuosity of his speech, gazed at him in half fear and wonderment.

“Tell me of your father, Lola,” said D’Esmonde, in a low, soft voice, as he drew her low seat to his side.

“ He was killed at Madrid; he died before the Queen!” said she, proudly.

“The death of a Toridor!” muttered the priest, mournfully.

“Yes, and Pueblos too, – he is dead!”

“Not the little child that I remember – ”

“The same. He grew up to be a fine man; some thought him handsomer than my father. My mother’s family would have made a priest of him, but he chose the prouder destiny.”

“I cannot think of him but as the child, – the little fellow who played about my knees; dressed like a matador, his long silky hair in a net.”

“Oh, do not – do not speak of him,” cried the girl, burying her face between her hands; “my heart will not bear those memories.”

The priest’s face was lighted up with a malevolent delight as he bent over her, as if revelling in the thought the emotions could call up.

“Poor little fellow!” said he, as if to himself. “How I remember his bolero that he danced for me.” He stopped, and she sobbed bitterly. “He said that Lola taught him.”

She looked up; the tears were fast coursing along her cheeks, which were pale as death.

“Eustace,” said she, tremulously, “these thoughts will drive me mad; my brain is reeling even now.”

“Let us talk of something else, then,” said he. “When did you leave the ‘Opera’ – and why?”

“How can you ask? you were at Seville at the time. Have you forgotten that famous, marriage, to which, by your persuasion, I consented; was this scheme only one of those unhappy events which are to be the seed of future good?”

The sneer made no impression on the priest, who calmly answered, “Even so, Lola.”

“What do you mean, sir?” cried she, angrily; “to what end am I thus? Was I so base born and so low? Was my lot in life so ignominious that I should not have raised my ambition above a fortune like this, – the waiting-woman of one whose birth is not better than my own?”

“You are right, Lola, – perfectly right; and with patience and prudence you will be her equal yet. Acton is an English noble – ”

“What care I for that?” said she, passionately; “the marriage was a counterfeit.”

“The marriage was a true and valid one.”

“And yet you yourself told me it was not binding.”

“I had my reasons for the deceit, Lola,” said he, persuasively. “You were deserted and desolate; such widowhood would have brought you to the grave with sorrow. It were better that you should strive against misery.”