Tancred | Page 6

by bond, by living usury, or by post-obit
liquidation, by all the means that private friends or public offices could
supply, the sinews of war would have been forthcoming. They would
have beaten their fathers' horses at Newmarket, eclipsed them with
their mistresses, and, sitting for their boroughs, voted against their
party. But Montacute was not one of those young heroes who rendered
so distinguished the earlier part of this century. He had passed his life
so much among women and clergymen that he had never emancipated
himself from the old law that enjoined him to honour a parent. Besides,
with all his shyness and timidity, he was extremely proud. He never
forgot that he was a Montacute, though he had forgotten, like the world
in general, that his grandfather once bore a different and humbler name.
All merged in the great fact, that he was the living representative of
those Montacutes of Bellamont, whose wild and politic achievements,
or the sustained splendour of whose stately life had for seven hundred
years formed a stirring and superb portion of the history and manners
of our country. Death was preferable, in his view, to having such a
name soiled in the haunts of jockeys and courtesans and usurers; and,
keen as was the anguish which the conduct of the duke to his mother or
himself had often occasioned him, it was sometimes equalled in degree

by the sorrow and the shame which he endured when he heard of the
name of Bellamont only in connection with some stratagem of the turf
or some frantic revel. Without a friend, almost without an acquaintance,
Montacute sought refuge in love. She who shed over his mournful life
the divine ray of feminine sympathy was his cousin, the daughter of his
mother's brother, an English peer, but resident in the north of Ireland,
where he had vast possessions. It was a family otherwise little
calculated to dissipate the reserve and gloom of a depressed and
melancholy youth; puritanical, severe and formal in their manners, their
relaxations a Bible Society, or a meeting for the conversion of the Jews.
But Lady Katherine was beautiful, and all were kind to one to whom
kindness was strange, and the soft pathos of whose solitary spirit
demanded affection.
Montacute requested his father's permission to marry his cousin, and
was immediately refused. The duke particularly disliked his wife's
family; but the fact is, he had no wish that his son should ever marry.
He meant to perpetuate his race himself, and was at this moment, in the
midst of his orgies, meditating a second alliance, which should
compensate him for his boyish blunder. In this state of affairs,
Montacute, at length stung to resistance, inspired by the most powerful
of passions, and acted upon by a stronger volition than his own, was
planning a marriage in spite of his father (love, a cottage by an Irish
lake, and seven hundred a-year) when intelligence arrived that his
father, whose powerful frame and vigorous health seemed to menace a
patriarchal term, was dead.
The new Duke of Bellamont had no experience of the world; but,
though long cowed by his father, he had a strong character. Though the
circle of his ideas was necessarily contracted, they were all clear and
firm. In his moody youth he had imbibed certain impressions and
arrived at certain conclusions, and they never quitted him. His mother
was his model of feminine perfection, and he had loved his cousin
because she bore a remarkable resemblance to her aunt. Again, he was
of opinion that the tie between the father and the son ought to be one of
intimate confidence and refined tenderness, and he resolved that, if
Providence favoured him with offspring, his child should ever find in

him absolute devotion of thought and feeling.
A variety of causes and circumstances had impressed him with a
conviction that what is called fashionable life was a compound of
frivolity and fraud, of folly and vice; and he resolved never to enter it.
To this he was, perhaps, in some degree unconsciously prompted by his
reserved disposition, and by his painful sense of inexperience, for he
looked forward to this world with almost as much of apprehension as of
dislike. To politics, in the vulgar sense of the word, he had an equal
repugnance. He had a lofty idea of his duty to his sovereign and his
country, and felt within him the energies that would respond to a
conjuncture. But he acceded to his title in a period of calmness, when
nothing was called in question, and no danger was apprehended; and as
for the fights of factions, the duke altogether held himself aloof from
them; he wanted nothing, not even the blue ribbon which he was soon
obliged to