Country Lodgings | Page 5

the mother; and the garden, that garden abandoned since the memory of man, (for the Court, previous to the arrival of the present tenant, had been for years uninhabited,) was, under his exertions and superintendence, rapidly assuming an aspect of luxuriance and order. It was not impossible but Helen might realise her playful vaunt, and beat me in my own art after all.
John (our gardening lad) was as near being jealous as possible, and, considering the estimation in which John is known to hold our doings in the flower way, such jealousy must be accepted as the most flattering testimony to his rival's success. To go beyond our garden was, in John's opinion, to be great indeed!
Every thought of the Count Choynowski was engrossed by the fair Helen; and we saw with some anxiety that she in her turn was but too sensible of his attentions, and that everything belonging to his country assumed in her eyes an absorbing importance. She sent to London for all the books that could be obtained respecting Poland; ordered all the journals that interested themselves in that interesting though apparently hopeless cause; turned liberal,--she who had been reared in the lap of conservatism, and whom my father used laughingly to call the little Tory;--turned Radical, turned Republican,--for she far out-soared the moderate doctrines of whiggism in her political flights; denounced the Emperor Nicholas as a tyrant; spoke of the Russians as a nation of savages; and in spite of the evident uneasiness with which the Polish exile listened to any allusion to the wrongs of his country, for he never mingled in such discussions, omitted no opportunity of proving her sympathy by declaiming with an animation and vehemence, as becoming as anything so like scolding well could be, against the cruelty and wickedness of the oppressors of that most unfortunate of nations.
It was clear that the peace of both was endangered, perhaps gone; and that it had become the painful duty of friendship to awaken them from their too bewitching dream.
We had made an excursion, on one sunny summer's day, as far as the Everley Hills. Helen, always impassioned, had been wrought into a passionate recollection of her own native country, by the sight of the heather just bursting into its purple bloom; and M. Choynowski, usually so self-possessed, had been betrayed into the expression of a kindred feeling by the delicious odour of the fir plantations, which served to transport him in imagination to the balm-breathing forests of the North. This sympathy was a new, and a strong bond of union between two spirits but too congenial; and I determined no longer to defer informing the gentleman, in whose honour I placed the most implicit reliance, of the peculiar position of our fair friend.
Detaining him, therefore, to coffee, (we had taken an early dinner in the fir grove,) and suffering Helen to go home to her little boy, I contrived, by leading the conversation to capricious wills, to communicate to him, as if accidentally, the fact of her forfeiting her whole income in the event of a second marriage.--He listened with grave attention.
"Is she also deprived," inquired he, "of the guardianship of her child?"
"No. But as the sum allowed for the maintenance is also to cease from the day of her nuptials, and the money to accumulate until he is of age, she would, by marrying a poor man, do irreparable injury to her son, by cramping his education. It is a grievous restraint."
He made no answer. And after two or three attempts at conversation, which his mind was too completely pre-occupied to sustain, he bade us good-night, and returned to the Court. The next morning we heard that he had left Upton and gone, they said, to Oxford. And I could not help hoping that he had seen his danger, and would not return until the peril was past.
I was mistaken. In two or three days he returned, exhibiting less self-command than I had been led to anticipate. The fair lady, too, I took occasion to remind of this terrible will, in hopes, since he would not go, that she would have had the wisdom to have taken her departure. No such thing; neither party would move a jot I might as well have bestowed my counsel upon the two stone figures on the great gateway. And heartily sorry, and a little angry, I resolved to let matters take their own course.
Several weeks passed on, when one morning she came to me in the sweetest confusion, the loveliest mixture of bashfulness and joy.
"He loves me!" she said; "he has told me that he loves me!"
"Well?"
"And I have referred him to you. That clause----"
"He already knows it." And then I told her, word for word, what had passed.
"He knows of that clause, and