CHAPTER XXXIX

At a season when the pleasant South-western Island has few attractions to other than invalids and hermits enamoured of wind and rain, the potent nobleman, Lord Mountfalcon, still lingered there to the disgust of his friends and special parasite.  “Mount’s in for it again,” they said among themselves.  “Hang the women!” was a natural sequence.  For, don’t you see, what a shame it was of the women to be always kindling such a very inflammable subject!  All understood that Cupid had twanged his bow, and transfixed a peer of Britain for the fiftieth time:  but none would perceive, though he vouched for it with his most eloquent oaths, that this was a totally different case from the antecedent ones.  So it had been sworn to them too frequently before.  He was as a man with mighty tidings, and no language:  intensely communicative, but inarticulate.  Good round oaths had formerly compassed and expounded his noble emotions.  They were now quite beyond the comprehension of blasphemy, even when emphasized, and by this the poor lord divinely felt the case was different.  There is something impressive in a great human hulk writhing under the unutterable torments of a mastery he cannot contend with, or account for, or explain by means of intelligible words.  At first he took refuge in the depths of his contempt for women.  Cupid gave him line.  When he had come to vent his worst of them, the fair face now stamped on his brain beamed the more triumphantly:  so the harpooned whale rose to the surface, and after a few convulsions, surrendered his huge length.  My lord was in love with Richard’s young wife.  He gave proofs of it by burying himself beside her.  To her, could she have seen it, he gave further proofs of a real devotion, in affecting, and in her presence feeling, nothing beyond a lively interest in her well-being.  This wonder, that when near her he should be cool and composed, and when away from her wrapped in a tempest of desires, was matter for what powers of cogitation the heavy nobleman possessed.

The Hon. Peter, tired of his journeys to and fro, urged him to press the business.  Lord Mountfalcon was wiser, or more scrupulous, than his parasite.  Almost every evening he saw Lucy.  The inexperienced little wife apprehended no harm in his visits.  Moreover, Richard had commended her to the care of Lord Mountfalcon, and Lady Judith.  Lady Judith had left the Island for London:  Lord Mountfalcon remained.  There could be no harm.  If she had ever thought so, she no longer did.  Secretly, perhaps, she was flattered.  Lord Mountfalcon was as well educated as it is the fortune of the run of titled elder sons to be:  he could talk and instruct:  he was a lord:  and he let her understand that he was wicked, very wicked, and that she improved him.  The heroine, in common with the hero, has her ambition to be of use in the world—­to do some good:  and the task of reclaiming a bad