Chapter 14

He brings Earl Osmond to receive my vows.
O dreadful change! for Tancred, haughty Osmond.
--TANCRED AND SIGISMUNDA.

Mr. Vere, whom long practice of dissimulation had enabled to model his
very gait and footsteps to aid the purposes of deception, walked along
the stone passage, and up the first flight of steps towards Miss Vere's
apartment, with the alert, firm, and steady pace of one who is bound,
indeed, upon important business, but who entertains no doubt he can
terminate his affairs satisfactorily. But when out of hearing of the
gentlemen whom he had left, his step became so slow and irresolute, as
to correspond with his doubts and his fears. At length he paused in an
antechamber to collect his ideas, and form his plan of argument, before
approaching his daughter.

"In what more hopeless and inextricable dilemma was ever an unfortunate
man involved!" Such was the tenor of his reflections.--"If we now fall
to pieces by disunion, there can be little doubt that the government
will take my life as the prime agitator of the insurrection. Or, grant I
could stoop to save myself by a hasty submission, am I not, even in that
case, utterly ruined? I have broken irreconcilably with Ratcliffe, and
can have nothing to expect from that quarter but insult and persecution.
I must wander forth an impoverished and dishonoured man, without
even the means of sustaining life, far less wealth sufficient to
counterbalance the infamy which my countrymen, both those whom I
desert and those whom I join, will attach to the name of the political
renegade. It is not to be thought of. And yet, what choice remains
between this lot and the ignominious scaffold? Nothing can save me but
reconciliation with these men; and, to accomplish this, I have promised
to Langley that Isabella shall marry him ere midnight, and to Mareschal,
that she shall do so without compulsion. I have but one remedy betwixt
me and ruin--her consent to take a suitor whom she dislikes, upon such
short notice as would disgust her, even were he a favoured lover--But
I must trust to the romantic generosity of her disposition; and let
me paint the necessity of her obedience ever so strongly, I cannot
overcharge its reality."

Having finished this sad chain of reflections upon his perilous
condition, he entered his daughter's apartment with every nerve bent up
to the support of the argument which he was about to sustain. Though a
deceitful and ambitious man, he was not so devoid of natural affection
but that he was shocked at the part he was about to act, in practising
on the feelings of a dutiful and affectionate child; but the
recollections, that, if he succeeded, his daughter would only be
trepanned into an advantageous match, and