CHAPTER II.--THE MOTH AND THE CANDLE.

Philip Caradoc, perceiving that I was somewhat dull and disposed to

indulge in reverie, soon retired also, and we separated, intending to

mature our plans after morning parade next day, as I knew that

secretly Caradoc was very much attached to Winifred Lloyd, though that

young lady by no means reciprocated his affection. But I, seized by an

irresistible impulse, could not wait for our appointed time; so, the

moment he was gone, I opened my desk, wrote my application for leave,

and desiring Evans to take it to the orderly-room among his first

duties on the morrow, threw open a second window to admit the soft

breeze of the summer night, lit another cigar, and sat down to indulge

in the train of thought Sir Madoc's unexpected letter had awakened

within my breast.

Yet I was not much given to reflection--far from it, perhaps; and it

is lucky for soldiers that they rarely indulge much in thought, or

that the system of their life is apt to preclude time or opportunity

for it. I had come home on a year's sick-leave from the West Indies,

where the baleful night-dews, and a fever caught in the rainy season,

had nearly finished my career while stationed at Up Park Camp; and

now, through the friendly interest of Sir Madoc, I had been gazetted

to the Welsh Fusileers, as I preferred the chances of the coming war

and military service in any part of Europe to broiling uselessly in

the land of the Maroons. Our army was in the East, I have said,

encamped in the vale of Aladdyn, between Varna and the sea. There

camp-fever and the terrible cholera were filling fast with graves the

grassy plain and all the Valley of the Plague, as the Bulgarians so

aptly named it; and though I was not sorry to escape the perils

encountered where no honour could be won, I was pretty weary of the

daily round at Winchester, of barrack life, of in-lying pickets,

guards, parades, and drill. I had been seven years in the service, and

deemed myself somewhat of a veteran, though only five-and-twenty. I

was weary too of belonging to a provisional battalion, wherein, beyond

the narrow circle of one's own depôt, no two men have the slightest

interest in each other, or seem to care if they ever meet again, the

whole organisation being temporary, and where the duties of such a

battalion--it being, in effect, a strict military school for training

recruits--are harassing to the newly-fledged, and a dreadful bore to

the fully-initiated, soldier. So, till the time came when the order

would be, "Eastward, ho!" Sir Madoc had opportunely offered me a

little relaxation and escape from all this; and though he knew it not,

his letter might be perhaps the means of doing much more--of opening

up a path to happiness and fortune, or leaving one closed for ever

behind me in sorrow, mortification, and bitterness of heart.

Good old Sir Madoc (or, as he loved to call himself, Madoc ap Meredyth

Lloyd) had in his youth been an unsuccessful lover of my mother, then

the pretty Mary Vassal, a belle in her second season; and now, though

she had long since passed away, he had a strong regard for me. For her

sake he had a deep and kindly interest in my welfare; and as he had no

son (no heir to his baronetcy, with all its old traditional honours,)

he quite regarded me in the light of one; and having two daughters,

desired nothing more than that I should cut the service and become one

in reality. So many an act of friendship and many a piece of stamped

paper he had done for me, when in the first years of my career, I got

into scrapes with rogues upon the turf, at billiards, and with those

curses of all barracks, the children of Judea. Had I seen where my own

good fortune really lay, I should have fallen readily into the snare

so temptingly baited for me, a half-pennyless sub.; for Winifred Lloyd

was a girl among a thousand, so far as brilliant attractions go, and,

moreover, was not indisposed to view me favourably (at least, so my

vanity taught me). But this world is full of cross purposes; people

are too often blind to their profit and advantage, and, as Jaques has

it, "thereby hangs a tale."

All the attractions of bright-eyed Winny Lloyd, personal and

pecuniary, were at that time as nothing to me. I had casually, when

idling in London, been introduced to, and had met at several places,

this identical Lady Cressingham, whom my friend had mentioned so

incidentally and in such an offhand way in his letter; and that

sentence it was which brought the blood to my temples and quickened

all the pulses of my heart.

She was very beautiful--as the reader will find when we meet her

by-and-by--and I had soon learned to love her, but without quite

venturing to say so; to love her as much as it was possible for one

without hope of ultimate success, and so circumstanced as I was--a

poor gentleman, with little more in the world save my sword and

epaulettes. Doubtless she had seen and read the emotion with which she

had inspired me, for women have keen perceptions in such matters; and

though it seems as if it was on her very smile that the mainspring of

my existence turned, the whole affair might be but a source of quiet

amusement, of curiosity, or gratified vanity to her. Yet, by every

opportunity that the chances and artificial system of society in town

afforded, I had evinced this passion, the boldness of which my secret

heart confessed. Her portrait, a stately full-length, was in the

Academy, and how often had I gazed at it, till in fancy the limner's

work seemed to become instinct with life! Traced on the canvas by no

unskilful hand, it seemed to express a somewhat haughty consciousness

of her own brilliant beauty, and somehow I fancied a deuced deal more

of her own exalted _position_, as the only daughter of a deceased but

wealthy peer, and as if she rather disdained alike the criticism and

the admiration of the crowd of middle-class folks who thronged the

Academy halls.

Visions of her--as I had seen her in the Countess's curtained box at

the opera, her rare and high-class beauty enhanced by all the

accessories of fashion and costume, by brilliance of light and the

subtle flash of many a gem amid her hair; when galloping along the

Row on her beautiful satin-skinned bay; or while driving after

in the Park, with all those appliances and surroundings that wealth

and rank confer--came floating before me, with the memory of words

half-uttered, and glances responded to when eye met eye, and told so

much more than the tongue might venture to utter. Was it mere vanity,

or reality, that made me think her smile _had_ brightened when she met

me, or that when I rode by her side she preferred me to the many

others who daily pressed forward to greet her amid that wonderful

place, the Row? Her rank, and the fact that she was an heiress, had no

real weight with me; nor did these fortuitous circumstances enhance

her merit in my eyes, though they certainly added to the difficulty of

winning her. Was it possible that the days of disinterested and

romantic love, like those of chivalry, were indeed past--gone with the

days when

"It was a clerk's son, of low degree,

Loved the king's daughter of Hongarie?"

With the love that struggled against humble fortune in my heart, I had

that keenly sensitive pride which is based on proper self-respect.

Hope I seemed to have none. What hope could I, Harry Hardinge, a mere

subaltern, with little more than seven-and-sixpence per diem, have of

obtaining such a wife as Lady Estelle Cressingham, and, more than all,

of winning the good wishes of her over-awing mamma? Though "love will

venture in when it daurna weel be seen," I could neither be hanged nor

reduced to the ranks for my presumption, like the luckless Captain

Ogilvie; who, according to the Scottish ballad, loved the Duke of

Gordon's bonnie daughter Jean. Yet defeat and rejection might cover me

with certain ridicule, leaving the stings of wounded self-esteem to

rankle all the deeper, by thrusting the partial disparity of our

relative positions in society more unpleasantly and humiliatingly

before me and the world; for there is a snobbery in rank that is only

equalled by the snobbery of wealth, and here I might have both to

encounter. And so, as I brooded over these things, some very levelling

and rather democratic, if not entirely Communal, ideas began to occur

to me. And yet, for the Countess and those who set store upon such

empty facts, I could have proved my descent from Nicholas Hardinge,

knight, of King's Newton, in Derbyshire; who in the time of Henry VII.

held his lands by the homely and most sanitary tenure of furnishing

clean straw for his Majesty's bed when he and his queen, Elizabeth of

York, passed that way, together with fresh rushes from the margin of

the Trent wherewith to strew the floor of the royal apartment. But

this would seem as yesterday to the fair Estelle, who boasted of an

ancestor, one Sir Hugh Cressingham, who, as history tells us, was

defeated and _flayed_ by the Scots after the battle of Stirling; while

old Sir Madoc Lloyd, who doubtless traced himself up to Noah ap

Lamech, would have laughed both pedigrees to scorn.

Leaving London, I had striven to stifle as simply absurd the passion

that had grown within me, and had joined at Winchester in the honest

and earnest hope that ere long the coming campaign would teach me to

forget the fair face and witching eyes, and, more than all, the

winning manner that haunted me; and now I was to be cast within their

magic influence once more, and doubtless to be hopelessly lost. To

have acted wisely, I should have declined the invitation and pleaded

military duty; yet to see her once, to be with her once again, without

that cordon of guardsmen and cavaliers who daily formed her mounted

escort in Rotten-row, and with all the chances our quiet mutual

residence in a sequestered country mansion, when backed by all the

influence and friendship of Sir Madoc, must afford me, proved a

temptation too strong for resistance or for my philosophy; so, like

the poor moth, infatuated and self-doomed, I resolved once more to

rush at the light which dazzled me.

"She seems to know you, _and would like to see more of you_," ran the

letter of Sir Madoc. I read that line over and over again, studying it

minutely in every way. Were those dozen words simply the embodiment of

his own ideas, or were they her personally expressed wish put

literally into writing? Were they but the reflex of some casual

remark? Even that conviction would bring me happiness. And so, after

my friends left me, I sat pondering thus, blowing long rings of

concentric smoke in the moonlight; and on those words of Sir Madoc

raising not only a vast and aerial castle, but a "bower of bliss," as

the pantomimes have it at Christmas time.

But how about this Mr. Hawkesby Guilfoyle? was my next thought. Could

_his_ attentions be tolerated by such a stately and watchful dowager as

the Countess of Naseby? Could Sir Madoc actually hint that such as he

might have a chance of success, when I had none? The idea was too

ridiculous; for I had heard whispers of this man before, in London and

about the clubs, where he was generally deemed to be a species of

adventurer, the exact source of whose revenue no one knew. One fact

was pretty certain: he was unpleasantly successful at billiards and on

the turf. If he--to use his own phraseology--was daring enough to

enter stakes for such a prize as Lord Cressingham's daughter, why

should not I?

Thus, in reverie of a somewhat chequered kind, I lingered on, while

the shadows of the cathedral, its lofty tower and choir, the spire of

St. Lawrence, and many other bold features of the view began to deepen

or become more uncertain on the city roofs below, and from amid which

their masses stood upward in a flood of silver sheen. Ere long the

full-orbed moon--that seemed to float in beauty beneath its snow-white

clouds, looking calmly down on Winchester, even as she had done ages

ago, ere London was a capital, and when the white city was the seat of

England's Saxon, Danish, and Norman dynasties, of Alfred's triumphs

and Canute's glories--began at last to pale and wane; and the solemn

silence of the morning--for dewy morning it was now--was broken only

by the chime of the city bells and clocks, and by the tread of feet in

the gravelled barrack-yard, as the reliefs went round, and the

sentinels were changed.

The first red streak of dawn was beginning to steal across the east;

the bugles were pealing reveilles, waking all the hitherto silent

echoes of the square; and just about the time when worthy and

unambitious Charley Gwynne would be parading his first squad for

"aiming drill" at sundry bull's-eyes painted on the barrack-walls, I

retired to dream over a possible future, and to hope that if the stars

were propitious, at the altar of that somewhat dingy fane, St.

George's, Hanover-square, I might yet become the son-in-law of the

late Earl of Naseby, Baron Cressingham of Cotteswold, in the county of

Northampton, and of Walcot Park in Hants, Lord-lieutenant, _custos

rotulorum_, and so forth, as I had frequently and secretly read in the

mess-room copy of Sir Bernard Burke's thick royal octavo; "the

Englishman's Bible" according to Thackeray, and, as I greatly feared,

the somewhat exclusive _libro d'oro_ of Mamma Cressingham, who was apt

to reverence it pretty much as the Venetian nobles did the remarkable

volume of that name.