Behold the hero embarked in the redemption of an erring beautiful woman.

“Alas!” writes the Pilgrim at this very time to Lady Blandish, “I cannot get that legend of the Serpent from me, the more I think.  Has he not caught you, and ranked you foremost in his legions?  For see:  till you were fashioned, the fruits hung immobile on the boughs.  They swayed before us, glistening and cold.  The hand must be eager that plucked them.  They did not come down to us, and smile, and speak our language, and read our thoughts, and know when to fly, when to follow! how surely to have us!

“Do but mark one of you standing openly in the track of the Serpent.  What shall be done with her?  I fear the world is wiser than its judges!  Turn from her, says the world.  By day the sons of the world do.  It darkens, and they dance together downward.  Then comes there one of the world’s elect who deems old counsel devilish; indifference to the end of evil worse than its pursuit.  He comes to reclaim her.  From deepest bane will he bring her back to highest blessing.  Is not that a bait already?  Poor fish! ’tis wondrous flattering.  The Serpent has slimed her so to secure him!  With slow weary steps he draws her into light:  she clings to him; she is human; part of his work, and he loves it.  As they mount upward, he looks on her more, while she, it may be, looks above.  What has touched him?  What has passed out of her, and into him?  The Serpent laughs below.  At the gateways of the Sun they fall together!”

This alliterative production was written without any sense of the peril that makes prophecy.

It suited Sir Austin to write thus.  It was a channel to his acrimony moderated through his philosophy.  The letter was a reply to a vehement entreaty from Lady Blandish for him to come up to Richard and forgive him thoroughly:  Richard’s name was not mentioned in it.

“He tries to be more than he is,” thought the lady:  and she began insensibly to conceive him less than he was.

The baronet was conscious of a certain false gratification in his son’s apparent obedience to his wishes and complete submission; a gratification he chose to accept as his due, without dissecting or accounting for it.  The intelligence reiterating that Richard waited, and still waited; Richard’s letters, and more his dumb abiding and practical penitence; vindicated humanity sufficiently to stop the course of virulent aphorisms.  He could speak, we have seen, in sorrow for this frail nature of ours, that he had once stood forth to champion.  “But how long will this last?” he demanded, with the air of Hippias.  He did not reflect how long it had lasted.  Indeed, his indigestion of wrath had made of him a moral Dyspepsy.