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Title: Dead-sea fruit, Vol 1 (of 3)
Author: M. E. Braddon
Release date: September 16, 2025 [eBook #76885]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler, 1868
Credits: Peter Becker, Laura Natal and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive).
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEAD-SEA FRUIT, VOL 1 (OF 3) ***
DEAD-SEA FRUIT.
VOL. I.
LONDON:
PRINTED BY J. OGDEN AND CO.,
172, ST. JOHN STREET, E.C.
DEAD-SEA FRUIT
A Novel
BY THE AUTHOR OF
“LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET,”
ETC., ETC., ETC.
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
LONDON
WARD, LOCK, AND TYLER
WARWICK HOUSE, PATERNOSTER ROW
1868.
[_All rights reserved_]
LONDON:
PRINTED BY J. OGDEN AND CO.,
172, ST. JOHN STREET, E.C.
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
I. QUITE ALONE 1
II. A RETROSPECTIVE SURVEY 18
III. “TAKE BACK THESE LETTERS, MEANT FOR HAPPINESS” 38
IV. UN MENAGE A DEUX 61
V. THE EDITOR OF THE “AREOPAGUS” 78
VI. AT BAYHAM 97
VII. MR. JERNINGHAM’S QUEST 123
VIII. GREENLANDS 144
IX. HOW THEY PARTED 169
X. THERE IS ALWAYS THE SKELETON 192
XI. “J’AIME: IL FAUT QUE J’ESPERE” 209
XII. THE GREEN-EYED MONSTER 240
XIII. MISS ST. ALBANS 264
XIV. IN THE GREEN-ROOM 289
DEAD-SEA FRUIT.
CHAPTER I.
QUITE ALONE.
THE marble image of Hubert Van Eyck stood out against the warm blue
sky, and cast a slanting shadow across the sunlit flags. The July
afternoon was drawing to a close. Low sunlight shone golden on the
canals of Villebrumeuse, and changed every westward-looking window into
a casement of gold. Those are no common windows which look out upon
the quiet streets and lonely squares of that sleepy Belgian city. No
handiwork of modern speculative builder is visible amid that grand old
architecture--no flimsy nineteenth-century villa perks its tawdry head
among those mediæval splendours--no upstart semi-detached abominations
of spurious Gothic, picked out with rainbow-coloured brick, affright
the eye by their hideous aspect. To live in Villebrumeuse is to live
in the sixteenth century. A quiet calm, as of the past, pervades the
shady streets. Green trees reflect themselves in the still waters of
the slow canal which creeps athwart the city; and by the side of the
tranquil waters there are pleasant walks o’er-shadowed by the umbrage
of limes, and wooden benches whereon the peaceful citizens may repose
themselves in the evening dusk. In despite of its solemn tranquillity,
this Villebrumeuse is not a dreary dwelling-place. If it has drifted
from amidst the busy places of this earth--if the blustrous ocean of
modern progress has receded from its shores, leaving it far away across
a level waste of reef and sand--this quiet city has, at the worst, been
left stationary, while the noisy tide sweeps on with all its tumult of
success and failure--its prosperous ventures and forgotten wrecks. The
peace which pervades Villebrumeuse is the tranquillity of slumber,
and not the awful stillness of death. There is a jog-trot prosperity
in the place, a comfortable air, which is soothing to the world-worn
spirit; but the wrestling, and scuffling, and striving, and struggling
of modern commerce is unknown among the quiet merchants, who content
themselves with supplying the simple wants of their fellow-citizens in
the simplest fashion. And yet this city was once a mart to which the
Orient brought her richest merchandise; and in the days gone by, these
quaint old squares have been clamorous with the voices of many traders,
and bright with the holiday raiment of busy multitudes.
A young Englishman walked slowly up and down the broad flagged
square, across which the painter’s statue cast its sombre shadow.
He was teacher of English and mathematics in a great public academy
near at hand, and his name was Eustace Thorburn. For three years he
had held his post in the Villebrumeuse academy; for three years he
had done his duty, quietly and earnestly, to the satisfaction of
every one concerned in the performance. And yet he was something of
an enthusiast, and something of a poet, and possessed many of those
attributes which are commonly supposed to constitute a letter of
license for the neglect of vulgar every-day duties.
That was an ardent and an ambitious spirit which shone out of Eustace
Thorburn’s gray eyes; but if the fiery sword had chafed the scabbard
a little during three years of academical routine and Villebrumeuse
monotony, the young man had been patient and contented withal. There
was a public library in Villebrumeuse to which the tutor had free
entrance, and in the mediæval chambers of this institution his leisure
had been spent. That dreamy idleness amongst good books had been very
pleasant to him; his work in the academy was endurable, despite its
tedious and laborious nature; and he had a lurking tenderness for the
quaint old city, the slow canals overshadowed by green trees, the
simple people, and the old-world customs. Thus, if there were times
when the eager spirit would fain have soared to loftier and fairer
regions, the young student and teacher had not been altogether unhappy
since his destiny had brought him to this place to earn his bread
amongst strangers.
Amongst strangers? Were the inhabitants of this Belgian city any
more strange to him than all the other inhabitants of this populous
earth--except the one man and woman who made the sum-total of his
kindred and friends? Amongst strangers? Why, if the statue of Van Eyck
could have descended from yonder pedestal, to walk in the streets of
the city, the animated effigy could scarcely have been a lonelier
creature than the young man who passed to and fro athwart the sloping
shadow on the flags this July afternoon.
Looking backward, through the shadows of the past, how many of those
images, familiar to most men, were wanting in the mystic pictures that
memory presented to Eustace Thorburn! Memory, let him question her
never so closely, could not show him any faint tracing of a father’s
face flickering dimly athwart the half-consciousness of infancy.
Nor could he, in surveying the events of his childhood, recall so
much as one visit to a father’s grave, one accidental utterance of a
father’s name, one object, however trivial, associated with a father’s
existence--a picture, a sword, a book, a watch, a tress of hair. The
time had been when he had been wont to question his mother about this
missing father; but that was long ago. The time had come, and too
quickly in this young man’s life, when a precocious wisdom had checked
his questioning, and he had learned to refrain from all reference to
a father’s name, as the one subject, of all others, most scrupulously
to be avoided by his lips. He was twenty-three years of age, and he
had never been told his father’s name or position in the world. For
the last ten years of his life it had been a common thing for him to
lie awake in the solemn quiet of the night, thinking of that unknown
father, and wondering whether he were alive or dead. He knew that he
had no claim to the name which he bore, and that he had as good a right
to call himself a Guelph or a Plantagenet as he had to call himself
Thorburn.
How many childless men upon this earth would have been glad to call
Eustace Thorburn son! How many of this world’s magnates, with mighty
names to transmit, would have rejoiced with unspeakable rapture, could
they have set the joy-bells ringing for the coming of age of such an
heir! As there are rare and peerless flowers that adorn inaccessible
regions where no hand can gather them, where no eye may delight in
their loveliness, so there are friendless creatures in the world who
might make the joy of empty hearts, and be the pride of desolate
households. The “something in this world amiss,” which the poet has
sung of, pervades every social relation. The plaintive wailing of the
minor mingles itself with every earthly melody; and it is only by and
by that the veil shall be lifted; it is only by and by that the mystic
enigma shall be unriddled, and the full chords of perfect harmony peal
on our ears, unmarred by that undertone of pain.
Not often has a nobler face looked upward to the countenance of
the statue than that which looked at it with a dreamy gaze to-day.
The face of the young man was, like the face of the statue, more
beautiful by reason of, its nobility of expression than because of its
perfect regularity of feature. In Eustace Thorburn’s countenance the
intellectual radiance so far surpassed the physical beauty, that those
who looked at him for the first time were impressed chiefly by the
brightness of his expression, and were likely to take their leave of
him in complete ignorance as to the shape of his nose or the modelling
of his mouth.
It is but a thankless task to catalogue such a face; the dark gray eyes
which pass for black; the mobile mouth which, in one moment, seems
formed to express an unbending pride and an indomitable will, and in
the next will wreathe itself into such a smile that it must needs
appear incapable of any expression but manly tenderness or playful
humour; the loosely arranged auburn hair, which gives something of a
leonine aspect to the lofty head; the complexion of almost womanly
fairness, with a rich glow that comes and goes with every changing
impulse or emotion--all these go such a little way towards the
individuality of the young Englishman, walking up and down the lonely
square during his half-hour’s respite from the monotonous duties of the
afternoon.
This half-hour’s holiday was not Mr. Thorburn’s only privilege. He
had two hours in every day for his own studies--two hours which he
generally spent in the public library, for his ambition had shaped
itself into a palpable form, and had mapped the outline of a career.
He was to be a man of letters. If he had been a rich man, he would
have shut himself in his library and made himself a poet. But as he
was nothing but a nameless and penniless stripling, with his bread to
earn, he had no right to indulge in the luxury of verse-making. The
wide arena of literary labour lay before him, and he had no choice but
to force his way into the lists, and fight for any place that might
happen to be vacant. Fate might make of him what she would--journalist,
novelist, dramatist, magazine hack, penny-a-liner: but she must use him
very cruelly before she could quench the fire of his young ambition, or
bend the crest with which he was prepared to confront the world.
He had selected for himself this profession of literature chiefly
because it was the only calling which demanded no capital from the
beginner, and a little because the only kinsman he had in the world
was a man who lived by his pen, and who might have prospered and won
distinction by means of that fluent pen, had he not chosen to do
otherwise.
The half-hour’s respite expired presently, and a great clanging bell in
the academy near at hand summoned the pupils to their evening lesson.
It was a summons for the master also, and Mr. Thorburn ran across the
square and turned into the street on which one side of the academy
looked. He pushed open a little wooden door in the big gateway, and
passed under the arched entrance; but before going to his class-room,
he stopped to examine a rack in which letters addressed to the masters
were wont to be kept. He rarely omitted to look at this rack, though
he had very few correspondents, and only received about one letter in
a fortnight. To-day there was a letter. His heart turned cold as he
looked at it, for the envelope was bordered with black, and addressed
in the hand of his mother’s brother, who very seldom wrote to him. His
mother had been an invalid for a long time, and such a letter as that
could have but one fatal meaning. For months he had looked forward to
his August holiday, which would enable him to go to England and spend a
few happy weeks with that dear mother--and now the holiday would come
too late.
He went out into one of the dismal playgrounds, a gravelled yard
surrounded by high whitewashed walls, and read his letter.
His tears fell thick and fast upon the flimsy paper as he read. Ten
minutes ago, walking to and fro in the sunshine, he had lamented his
loneliness, remembering that he had only two friends in the world. He
knew now that the dearer of these two was lost to him. The letter told
him of his mother’s death.
“There is no need for you to hurry back, my poor lad,” wrote his uncle.
“The funeral is to take place to-morrow, and will be over when you get
this letter. I saw your mother a fortnight before her death, and she
then told me what she could never find the courage to tell you--that
the end was very near. It came suddenly at the last, and I was out of
the way at the time; but they tell me it was a calm and holy ending.
Her last words were of you. She dwelt much on your goodness and
devotion, Mrs. Bane tells me. The last two days were spent in prayer,
poor innocent soul; and I, who stand in so much greater need of that
kind of thing, can’t bring myself to it for half an hour! Poor soul!
Bane thinks it was for you she was praying, she repeated your name
so often--sometimes in her sleep, sometimes when she was lying in a
languid state between sleeping and waking. But she did not wish you to
be sent for. ‘It is better that he should be away,’ she said; ‘I think
he knew that this day must soon come.’
“And now, my dear boy, try to bear up against this sorrow like a brave,
true-hearted lad, as you are. I say nothing of what I feel myself, for
there are some things which come with a bad grace from certain people.
You know that I loved my sister; though, God knows, _I_ never knew
how dearly till yesterday, when I saw the blinds down at Mrs. Bane’s,
and guessed what had happened. Remember, Eustace, that so long as I
can earn a crust, my sister Celia’s son shall be welcome to his share
of it; and though I may be a disreputable acquaintance, I can be a
faithful friend. If you are tired of that slow old Belgian city, come
back to England. We will manage your establishment here somehow. The
impracticable Daniel has a certain kind of influence; and though he
rarely cares to use it on his own account,--being so bad a lot that he
dare not give himself a decent character,--he will employ it to the
uttermost for a spotless nephew.
“Come, then, dear boy; a kind of heart-sickness has come over me, and
I want to see the brightest face that I know in this world, and the
only face that I love. Come, even if you must needs return to the
whitewashed saloons of the Parthenée. There are letters and papers
of your poor mother’s which it might be well for you to destroy. My
profane hand shall not tamper with them.”
The young man thrust his kinsman’s letter in his breast, and paced the
playground slowly for some time, meditating the loss that had come
upon him. In one of the big class-rooms near at hand his pupils were
waiting for him; and there was wonderment and consternation at this
delay in the most punctual of all the masters. His tears had dropped
fast upon the letter some time ago; but his eyes were dry now. The
dull agony which filled his breast was rather a sense of desolation
than a poignant grief. He had seen and known that his mother was fading
from this troubled earth before his coming to Belgium; and poverty’s
bitterest penalty had been the necessity which had separated him from
her. The shadow of this coming sorrow had long darkened the horizon of
his young life. The sad reality had come upon him a little sooner than
he had expected it, and that was all. He bowed his head, and resigned
himself to this affliction; but there was something to which he could
not resign himself, and that was the manner of his loss.
“Alone--in a hired lodging--with a poor, ill-paid, hard-working drudge
for her sole companion and consoler! O mother, mother, you were too
bright a creature for so sad a fate!”
And then there arose before this young man’s eyes one of those pictures
which were continually haunting him--the picture of what his life and
his mother’s life might have been, had things been different with
them. He fancied himself the beloved and acknowledged son of a good
and honourable man; he fancied his mother a happy wife. Ah! then how
changed all would have been! Sickness and death would have come all
the same, perhaps, since there is no earthly barrier that can exclude
those dark visitors from happy households. They would have come, the
dreaded guests, but with how different an aspect! He made for himself
the picture of two death-beds. By one there knelt a group of loving
children, weeping silently for a dying mother, while a grief-stricken
husband suppressed all outward evidence of his sorrow, lest he should
trouble the departing spirit whose earthly tabernacle was supported
by his fond arms. And the other death-bed! Alas, how sad the contrast
between the two pictures! A woman lying alone in a dingy chamber,
abandoned and forgotten by every creature in the world except her son,
and even he away from her.
“And for this, as well as for all the rest, we have to thank
_him_!” muttered the young man. His face, which until now had
been overshadowed only by a quiet despondency, darkened suddenly as he
said this. It was not the first time he had apostrophized a nameless
enemy in the same bitter spirit. He had very often abandoned himself
to vengeful thoughts about this unknown foe, to whose evil-doing he
attributed every sorrow of his own, and all those hidden griefs and
silent agonies so patiently endured by his mother. He kept a close
account of his mother’s wrongs, and of his own, and he set them all
against this person, whom he had never seen and whose name he might
never discover.
This nameless enemy was his father.
CHAPTER II.
A RETROSPECTIVE SURVEY.
FROM the mediæval tranquillity of Villebrumeuse to the dreary
desolation of Tilbury Crescent is a sorry change. Instead of the
quaint peaked roofs and grand old churches, the verdant avenues and
placid water, there are unfinished streets and terraces of raw-looking
brick, half-built railway-arches, chasm-like cuttings newly made in
the damp clay soil, and patches of rank greensward that mark the site
of desolated fields. The sulphurous odours of a brickfield pervade the
atmosphere about and around Tilbury Crescent. The din of a distant
high-road, the roar of many wheels, and the clamour of excited
costermongers, float in occasional gusts of sound upon the dismal
stillness of the neighbourhood, where the shrill voices of children,
playing hopscotch in an adjacent street, are painfully audible.
Decent poverty has set a seal upon this little labyrinth of streets
and squares and crescents and terraces, before the builder’s men
have left the newest of the houses, while there are still roofless
skeletons at every corner, waiting till the speculator who began them
shall have raised enough money to finish them. The neighbourhood lies
northward, and the rents of those yellow-brick tenements are cheap. So
decent poverty, in all its many guises, comes hitherward for shelter.
Newly-married lawyers’ clerks take up their abode in the eight-roomed
dwellings, and you shall divine, by the fashion of blinds and curtains,
the trim propriety of doorsteps and tiny front gardens, whether the
young householders have drawn prizes in the matrimonial lottery. Small
tradesmen bring their wares to the little shops, which break out here
and there at the corners of the streets, and struggle feebly for a
livelihood. Patient young dressmakers exhibit fly-blown fashion-plates
in parlour windows, and wait hopefully or despairingly, as the case
may be, for custom and patronage. And in more windows than the chance
pedestrian would care to count hangs the pasteboard announcement of
apartments to let.
Eustace Thorburn came to Tilbury Crescent in the blazing July noontide.
He had landed at St. Katherine’s Wharf, and had made his way to this
northern suburb on foot. He was rich enough to have ridden in an
omnibus, or to have enjoyed the luxury of a hansom, had he been so
minded; but he was an ambitious young man, and had cultivated the
nobler Spartan virtues from his earliest boyhood. The few pounds in his
possession would have to serve him until he returned to the Parthenée,
or obtained some new employment; so he had much need to be careful of
shillings, and chary even of pence. The walk through the dirty bustling
London streets seemed long and weary to him; but his thoughts were more
weary than that pedestrian journey under the meridian sun, and the
sad memories of his youth were a heavier burden than the carpet-bag he
carried slung across his shoulder.
He knocked at the door of one of the shabbiest houses in the crescent,
and was admitted by an elderly woman, who was slipshod and slovenly,
but who had a good-natured face, which brightened as she recognized
the traveller. In the next moment she remembered the sad occasion of
his coming, and put on that conventional expression of profound sorrow
which people assume so easily for the affliction of others.
“Ah, dear, dear, Mr. Thorburn!” she cried, “I never thought to see you
come back like this, and she not here to bid you welcome, poor sweet
lamb!”
The young man held up his hand to stay the torrent of sympathy.
“Please, don’t talk to me about my mother,” he said, quietly; “I can’t
bear it--yet.”
The honest woman looked at him wonderingly. She had been accustomed to
deal with people who liked to talk of their griefs, and she did not
understand this quiet way of putting aside a sorrow. The mourners whom
she had encountered had worn their sackcloth and covered themselves
with ashes in the face of the world, and here was a young man who had
not so much as a band upon his hat, and who rejected her friendly
sympathy!
“I can have my--the old rooms, for a week or so, I suppose, Mrs. Bane?”
“Yes, sir. I’ve took the liberty to put a bill up, thinking as perhaps
you might not return from abroad; and if it’s for a week only, perhaps
you’d allow the bill to remain? There are so many apartments about this
neighbourhood, you see, sir, and people are that pushing now-a-days,
that a poor widow-woman has scarcely a chance. It’s a hard thing to be
left alone in the world, Mr. Thorburn.”
There was an open wound in the heart of Eustace Thorburn which ignorant
hands were always striking.
“It’s a hard thing to be left alone in the world,” he thought, echoing
the landlady’s lamentation. “_She_ was left alone in the world
before I was born.”
The landlady repeated her question.
“Oh yes, you can leave the bill; but don’t let any one come to look at
the rooms to-day. I am not likely to be here more than a week. Can I go
upstairs at once?”
Mrs. Bane plunged her hand into a capacious pocket, and, after much
searching the depths of that receptacle, produced a door-key, which she
handed to Eustace.
“Mr. Mayfield told me to lock the door, sir, because of papers and
such-like. The bedroom door is fastened on the inside.”
The young man nodded, and went upstairs with a brisk, rapid footstep,
and not with that ponderous, solemn tread which Mrs. Bane would have
considered appropriate to his bereaved condition.
“And I thought he would have took on dreadful!” she ejaculated, as she
went back to her underground kitchen, where there was generally an
atmosphere laden with the steam of boiling soap-suds, or an odour of
singed ironing-blanket.
Eustace Thorburn unlocked the door, and went into the room which
had so lately been inhabited by his mother. It was a dingy little
sitting-room, opening into a bedroom that was still smaller. It was a
lodging of the same pattern as a thousand other lodgings in newly-built
suburbs. The personalty of the woman who had left it for a still
narrower lodging would scarcely have realized twenty shillings under
the auctioneer’s hammer; and yet to Eustace Thorburn the shabby room
was eloquent of the dead. That dilapidated rosewood workbox--for which
the auctioneer would have been ashamed to propose a starting bid of a
shilling--conjured up the vision of a patient creature bending over her
work. The little stand of books--cheap editions of the poets, in worn
cloth binding--recalled _her_ sweet face, illumined by a transient
splendour, as the inspired verses of her favourites lifted her above
this earth and all her earthly sorrows. The valueless china inkstand,
and worn blotting-book, had been used by her for more than four years.
Eustace Thorburn took the things up one by one, and put them to his
lips. There was something almost passionate in the kiss which he
imprinted upon those lifeless objects--it was the kiss which he would
have pressed upon her pale lips, had he been recalled in time to bid
her farewell. He kissed the books which she had been wont to read, the
pen with which she had written, and then cast himself suddenly into the
low chair where he had so often seen her seated, and abandoned himself
to his grief. Had Mrs. Bane, the landlady, heard these convulsive
sobs, and seen the tears streaming between the fingers which the young
man clasped before his eyes, she would have had no need to complain
of Mr. Thorburn’s want of emotion. For a long time he sat in the same
attitude, still weeping. But the passionate grief wore itself out at
last. He dashed the tears from his eyes with an impatient gesture, and
rose, pale and calm, to begin the work which he had set himself to do.
His love for his mother had been the ruling passion of his life. She
was at rest now, and he could face the future calmly. He could go forth
to meet his destiny with a spirit at once superior to hope and fear. It
was for _her_ he had hoped; it was for her he had feared. He stood
alone now; his breast was no longer a rampart to shield her from “the
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” The arrows might come thick
and fast now; they could only wound him; and he already had suffered
the deepest wound that evil fortune could inflict upon him. He had lost
_her_.
The bitterest sting of all lay in the knowledge that she had never
been happy. Her son had loved her with unspeakable tenderness. He had
protected her and worked for her, and admired and adored her; but he
had never been able to make her happy. That gentle, womanly heart had
been too deeply wounded in the past. Eustace Thorburn had known this;
and knowing this had been patient, because he would not trouble her
mild spirit by any show of impatience. He had known that she had been
wronged, and yet had never asked her the name of the wrong-doer. He,
her natural champion and avenger, had never sought for vengeance upon
the man whose treachery or unkindness had blighted her life. He had
held his peace, because to question her would have been to pain her;
and how could he give her pain? So he had been patient, in spite of
a passionate desire for ever smouldering in his heart--the desire to
avenge his mother’s wrongs.
She was at rest; and the time for vengeance had arrived. The same fatal
influence which had destroyed her happiness had shortened her life. In
the prime of womanhood, before a wrinkle had lined her forehead, or a
silver thread appeared amidst her soft brown hair, she had gone to her
grave, unutterably patient to the last, but broken-hearted from the
very first.
The young man put his grief away from him, and set himself to consider
the new business of his life.
The one desire of his mind was that of vengeance upon his mother’s
nameless enemy; and the thought that this enemy was his own father was
powerless to soften his heart in the smallest measure, or to hinder him
for one single hour from the achievement of his purpose.
“I want to know who he is,” he said to himself. “My first business must
be to discover his name; my next, to make him more ashamed of that name
than I am of my namelessness.”
He went to the chimney-piece, where there was a letter waiting for
him, sealed with a sprawling black seal, and addressed to him in the
inscrutable penmanship of his uncle.
The envelope contained only a few lines, but enclosed in it there was
a little bunch of keys, with every one of which the young man was
familiar. He took them up with a sigh, and looked at them one by one,
almost as tenderly as he had looked at the books. The commonest object
in that chamber had its association for him,--and with every such
association, the grief which he had tried so hard to put away from him
took possession of him anew.
There was a ponderous, old-fashioned mahogany desk on a side-table, and
it was in this desk that the lonely inhabitant of the room had been
accustomed to keep her letters and papers, together with those few
valueless relics--that pitiful jetsam and flotsam from the shipwreck of
hope and happiness which are left to the most desolate creature.
Eustace unlocked and opened the desk as softly as if his mother had
been sleeping near him. He had often seen her seated at this desk; he
had once surprised her in tears, with a little packet of letters in her
hand, but he had never seen the contents of any of those discoloured
papers, tied with faded ribbons, and disfigured by obsolete postmarks.
And now that she was gone, it was his duty to examine those papers,--or
so he considered. Yet there was a shade of compunction in his mind as
he touched the first packet, and he felt as if he had been committing a
sacrilege.
The first packet was labelled “My Mother’s Letters,” and contained the
epistles of some good womanly creature, written to a daughter who was
away at boarding-school. They were full of allusions to a comfortable
middle-class household--a tradesman’s household, as it seemed, for
there were occasional references to events that had occurred in the
shop, and to “my dear husband’s over-exerting himself in the business,”
and to “Daniel’s unsettled ways and indisposition to take to his
father’s occupation.”
Eustace smiled faintly as he read of poor Daniel, whose unsettled ways
had been notorious before Sir Rowland Hill’s post-office amendments,
and who remained unsettled in these latter days of electric telegraphy
and labyrinthine railway cuttings.
The letters were very sweet, by reason of the tender motherly spirit
which pervaded every line,--more or less ill-spelt here and there,
and by no means well written, but over-flowing with affection. Again
and again the writer implored her “dearest Sissy” not to fret, and to
look forward to the holidays, which would come very soon, when Sissy
would see her dear mother and father, whose household love she pined
for in the great middle-class boarding-school, as it was evident by the
tone of maternal letters which replied to lamentations from desolate
home-sick Sissy. There were hampers for dearest Sissy, and little
presents,--a coral necklace from father, a sash from mother, and once,
a tinselled portrait of Mr. Edmund Kean in the character of Othello,
with a tunic of real crimson satin let into the paper,--a tinselled
portrait which had been poor unsettled Daniel’s labour of love in
the long winter evenings, and which the mother dwelt on with evident
pleasure.
Eustace knew that these letters had been written by his
grandmother,--the grandmother who had never held him in her arms,
or taken pride in his baby graces. He lingered lovingly over the
old-fashioned sheets of letter-paper--he gazed fondly upon the
stiffly-formed signature, “Elizabeth Mayfield,” and he dropped some
few tears upon the worn yellow paper, which had been blotted with many
tears before to-day. It was not possible that he could think of his
mother in her innocent school-days without emotion.
The second packet contained only three letters, addressed to dearest
Sissy at home, when she had ceased to be a school-girl, and these were
in a hand not altogether unfamiliar to Eustace. It was a youthful
modification of Daniel Mayfield’s inscrutable calligraphy; and again
Eustace Thorburn smiled with the same faint smile. The letters were
written from a lawyer’s office where the lad was articled; for Daniel
had persisted in his aversion to his father’s business, and had
declared himself unfitted for anything upon earth except the law, for
which he was assured he had a special vocation. They were pleasant,
boyish letters, and full of the slang of the day--such locutions as
“Flare up!” and “What a shocking bad hat!” and “There you go with your
eye out!” and other conversational embellishments peculiar to the
period. But through all the slang and young-mannish affectations there
was an undercurrent of genuine affection for the writer’s “dear little
dark-eyed Sissy.” He knew no end of pretty girls in London, he told
her, but not one worthy to be compared with his darling Celia. “And
when I am on the Rolls, with slap-up chambers of my own in the Fields,
and a first-rate business, you shall come and keep house for me, Sissy;
and we’ll have a little cottage at Putney, and a wherry, and I’ll row
you up the river every evening after business; and while my sentimental
little sister sits in the stern reading a novel, her faithful Daniel
will get himself into training for a sculling-match.”
The first two letters were full of hopeful allusions to the writer’s
prospects. The young man seemed to fancy he was going to make a royal
progress through the different grades of his profession, and there
was scarcely any limit to the pleasant things which he promised his
only sister. But, in the third letter, written after an interval of
six months, all this was changed. The life of an articled clerk was a
slavery, compared to which the existence of a negro in the West Indian
sugar-plantations must be one perpetual delight. Daniel was tired of
his profession, and informed his dearest Sissy, in strict confidence,
that no power on earth would ever make a lawyer of him.
“It isn’t me, my dear Celia,” he wrote; “your impetuous Dan is not
fashioned out of the stuff which makes an attorney. I’ve tried to take
to the law, just as I tried to take to the circulating-library and
fancy-stationery business, to please poor father and mother; but it’s
no use. You mustn’t say anything to the dear old dad, for he’d begin
to be unhappy about the money he wasted on my articles; and before he
discovers that I don’t take to the law, I shall have taken to something
which will make me a rich man, and I shall be able to give him back
his money three times over.”
And then Daniel Mayfield went on to give a flourishing description
of a very bright and splendid castle-in-the-air which he had lately
erected. He had found a Pactolus in his inkstand, and something better
than a landed estate in a quire of foolscap. He was a genius. The
divine _afflatus_ had descended upon him, and Coke and Blackstone
might go hang. He was a poet, an essayist, an historian, a novelist,
a playwright--anything you like. He had been a scribbler from the
days of his childhood, and of late had scribbled more than ever. And
after the innumerable failures and disappointments which constitute
that Slough of Despond through which every literary aspirant must
pass, he had succeeded in getting an article inserted in one of those
coarsely-written and poorly-illustrated comic periodicals from the
ashes whereof arose that bright Phoenix, _Punch_. And the editor
of the periodical had promised to take further contributions from the
same lively pen, Daniel informed his sister. He had received two
guineas sterling coin of the realm for his lucubration, “thrown off
in half an hour,” he told dear Sissy. And thereupon he entered into a
calculation of his future income, at the rate of four guineas an hour
for all the working-hours in the day. “Messrs. Screwem and Swindleton
don’t get as much for their time, in spite of their genius for running
up the six-and-eightpences,” wrote Daniel.
There was a mournful smile upon Eustace Thorburn’s face as he read
the letters. He knew the writer so well, and knew into what a poor,
imperfect, dilapidated habitation that air-built castle had resolved
itself. The young man had not deceived himself as to his own powers; he
had only wasted them. The talents had been his, and he had scattered
the precious gifts here and there with a reckless hand--too rich
to fear poverty, too strong to apprehend exhaustion. He had thrown
his pearls before swine, and had allowed his diamonds to be set in
worthless crowns of brass and tinsel. The flower of his youth had
faded, while he, who might have achieved greatness--and that which
seems a deal more difficult for genius to achieve, respectability--was
only Dan Mayfield, a newspaper hack, one of a modern Jacob Tonson’s
“clever hands,” a lounger in taverns, a penniless Bohemian, with
flowing hair, which time was beginning to thin, and eyes at whose
corners the crow had set the ineffaceable print of his feet.
Eustace replaced the letters with a respectful hand. Was he not
tampering with the ashes of his mother’s youth, and was not every paper
in that desk sanctified by the tears of the dead?
“Poor Uncle Dan!” he murmured, gently; “poor, kind, sanguine Uncle
Dan!”
CHAPTER III.
“TAKE BACK THESE LETTERS, MEANT FOR HAPPINESS.”
THERE were several notes and letters in the next packet which Eustace
Thorburn examined, and over these he lingered very long--reading some
amongst them a second time, and returning to reconsider others which he
had put aside after a first perusal. These letters were written on the
thickest and finest paper, and exhaled a faint odour of millefleurs,
so faint as to be only the impalpable ghost of a departed perfume.
Notes and letters were alike dated, but the only signature to be found
amongst them was the single initial H.
Eustace read them in the order in which they had been written.
“The author of the book which Miss Mayfield was reading on Tuesday
afternoon has called at the library three times since that day, but
has not had the happiness of seeing her. Will Miss Mayfield be good
enough to write one line, saying _when_ she may be seen? The
writer, who feels himself unworthy of her eloquent praises, most
earnestly wishes for an interview, if only of a few minutes’ duration.
“_The George Hotel, June 6, 1843._”
“The author of the book?” repeated Eustace; “what book? Was this man a
writer?”
This letter had been delivered by hand. The next bore the postmark of
Bayham, that Dorsetshire watering-place to which Daniel’s letters had
been addressed. It was directed to
“C. M.,
_The Post-Office_,
_Bayham_.
“_To be left till called for._”
“The seducer’s favourite address,” muttered Eustace, as he unfolded the
letter.
“_George Hotel, June 15, 1843._
“MY DEAR MISS MAYFIELD,--If you could know the time I have
wasted since Thursday week, in the vain endeavour to obtain a glimpse
of your face, between the sheets of music and coloured lithographs in
your father’s window, you would be more inclined to believe what I
told you on that day. I told you that, if I did not see you, I should
write, and I told you where I should address my letter. You forbade me
to write, and assured me that my letter would lie at the post-office
unasked for. But you, who are so sweet and gentle, could hardly adhere
to such a cruel resolve. I dare to hope that this will reach your
hands, and that you will forgive me for having disobeyed you.
“I do so much wish to see you again--if only once more--yes, even if
only once. I am haunted day and night by the vision of that sweet face
which I first saw bending over one of my own books. Do you remember
that day?--only three weeks ago; and yet it seems to me as if a new
existence began for me upon that day, and as if I were older by half
a lifetime since then. Sweet tender face, with the dark eyes and
wild-rose bloom, shall I ever learn to forget it? Will it ever cease
to come between me and my books? I was trying to read a grand old
tragedy last night: but you would not let me. You were Electra, and I
saw you bending over your brother’s funereal urn, as I had seen you
bending over the silly volume which you praised so sweetly. The Greek
tragedy reminded me of that doctrine of fatality which we laugh at in
these modern days. And yet surely Destiny has her hand in the fashion
of our lives. I had been writing letters on the day on which I first
saw you, and the people here had given me such wretched pens and paper
that I sallied out to seek better for myself. If they had given me
decent writing materials, I might never have seen you. There are three
other places in the town at which I might have sought what I wanted;
but Destiny laid her hand on my coat-collar, and conducted me to your
father’s library. I went in quietly, with all my thoughts two hundred
miles away from Bayham. I saw you sitting behind the counter, with a
book in your lap; and all my thoughts came back to Bayham, to take up
their abode with you for ever. You were so absorbed in your book, that
you did not hear my modest request for a quire of letter-paper, until
it had been three times enunciated; and I meanwhile had time to read
the title of the book which interested you. I suppose every writer can
read the title of his _own_ book upside-down. You looked up at
last, with such a pretty, shy, innocent look, and the wild-rose bloom
came into your cheeks. And then I asked you what you thought of the
book; and you praised it with such bewitching eloquence, and wondered
who the writer could be. I had heard the book lauded by a great many
people, and abused by more; but I had never until that moment felt
the smallest temptation to reveal myself as the author of it. I
had, indeed, taken great trouble to conceal my identity. But when
_you_ praised my work, I flung prudence to the winds. It was so
delightful to see your bright blush, your bewitching confusion, when I
told you that it was my happiness to have pleased you. O Celia, if you
like my book so well, why is it that you distrust and avoid me? Let me
see you, dear, I implore--anywhere--at any time--under any conditions
you may choose to impose upon me. I wait in this dull town, day after
day, in the hope of seeing you. A hundred duties call me away! and yet
I wait. I shall wait for a week after having posted this letter; and
if I receive no sign from you during that time, I shall leave Bayham,
never again to venture within its fatal precincts.
“Ever and ever faithfully yours,
“H.”
There was an interval of six weeks between the dates of the second and
third letters; and there was a considerable alteration in the tone of
the writer. He no longer pleaded for an interview with the stationer’s
daughter. It was evident that he had seen her very often during the
interval; and his letter was full of allusions to past meetings.
“MY OWN SWEET LOVE,” he began,--(ah, what a change in six
short weeks from “My dear Miss Mayfield!”)--“my ever dearest, there
is _no_ gulf between us, or no gulf so wide that love cannot
bridge it over. Why are you so cruel as to doubt and avoid me? You
know that I love you. You told me that you believed in my love last
night when we stood by the sea in that sweet twilight, and when there
was such a solemn quiet all around us that it would have been easy to
fancy ourselves cast away upon some desert island. You talk to me of
your humble birth,--as if the birth of an angel or a goddess could be
humble,--and you implore me to go back to the world and its slavery,
and to forget this bright glimpse of something better than the world.
I am only five-and-twenty, Celia; and yet I fancied I had outlived
the possibility of such love as that which I feel for you.
“You told me on Saturday that your father’s anger would be something
terrible if he discovered our acquaintance. I should put an end to all
your fears, dearest, by going straight to Mr. Mayfield and demanding
the right to call you my own for ever, if I were not fettered hand and
foot by social difficulties. You have some cause to doubt me, Celia;
and if you were not the most generous of women, I should fear to speak
frankly. Whenever we are married, our marriage must be kept secret
until my father’s death releases me from bondage. You will think me a
coward, perhaps, when I confess to you that I dare not openly defy my
father; but you can scarcely imagine how complete the slavery of a son
may be when he is an only son, and his father cherishes grand views
for his advancement. I write about these wretched obstacles to our
happiness, my sweet one, because when you are with me I _cannot_
speak of the difficulties which beset us. My troubles take flight
when those dear eyes look up at me. I forget this work-a-day world and
all its ills; and I could fancy this earth still the home of the gods,
and foolish Pandora’s casket unopened. When I am away from you, all is
changed, and hope only remains.
“So I shall make no allusion to this letter when we meet, dearest. We
will be children, and fancy this world young again. We will wander
arm-in-arm on that delicious stretch of golden sand beyond the curve
of the bay, and far away from the bustle of the town. We will forget
all our commonplace difficulties and troubles, and that the gods have
abandoned the earth. Ah! if we had only lived in those mythic ages,
when Eros himself might have taken compassion upon our sorrows, and
transported us to some enchanted isle, where our youth and love should
be immortal as his own divinity!
“Let me see you at seven, dear love. I shall await your coming at
the old spot, and you will easily shake off your confidante and
companion, Miss K. Can you suggest any feminine prettiness which Miss
K. would care to possess? I should like to offer her some testimony
of my respectful admiration; she has been so very indulgent to us, in
her own prim fashion. Let me know whether it is to be a necklace, or
a bracelet, or a pair of ear-rings, and I will see what the Bayham
jeweller can do for us. And now, dearest and loveliest, adieu for a
few hours; and may Phaethon whip his horses to the West, and bring the
sweet sunset hour and the rosy light upon our favourite stretch of
sand.
“Ever and ever yours,
“H.”
There were many more letters--less playful and more passionate--the
dates extending over six or seven weeks; and then there was a
considerable interval, and then two letters written in the January of
the following year. The writer had won his dearest Celia’s consent to
a clandestine marriage. She was to leave her home secretly, and was
to go with him to London, where all arrangements had been made. It was
very evident that her consent to this step had not been won without
great difficulty. The letters were full of protestations and promises.
The writer was always repeating how his heart had been wrung by the
sight of her tears, how the thought of her sorrow was almost more than
he could bear. But he had borne it, nevertheless, and had persisted
in his own designs, whatever they might be, for the last letter
contained all necessary directions for the girl’s flight. She was to
meet her lover at the coach-office after dark; and they were to travel
the first stage of the journey by the night-mail, and then take post
across country and get to London by a different road; so that any one
following them, or making inquiries about them on the direct road from
Bayham, would be completely baffled.
This was all--and yet more than enough for the young man, who sat
brooding over the last letter with a gloomy face. It was such a common
story, and so easily put together: the poor, weak, provincial beauty,
who is lured away from her quiet home under the pretence of a secret
marriage, a marriage which is never solemnized, and was never intended
to be solemnized; then the brief dream of happiness, the noontide
holiday in a new garden of Eden, with the fatal serpent, which is
called Remorse, always in hiding beneath the flowers; and the speedy
close to that fever-dream of bliss--utter despair and bitterness.
This was the hackneyed romance which Eustace Thorburn wove out of the
packet of letters signed with the initial H.; and it was so cruel and
humiliating a story that the young man suffered his weary head to sink
upon the little heaps of paper, and wept aloud.
He had recovered in some measure from this passion of grief, and was
employed in arranging the letters, when the door was opened, and a man
came into the room. The man was somewhere between forty and fifty, and
was a very remarkable-looking person. He had once been handsome--of
that there was no doubt, but the flower of his youth had faded in some
pernicious atmosphere, and the chilling blasts of a premature autumn
had blighted him while he should have been still in all the glory of
his midsummer prime. He had a fiery red nose, and fiery black eyes, and
dark hair, which he wore longer than was authorized by the fashion of
the day. There were gray hairs amongst those straggling dark locks, and
the man’s moustache had that tinge of Tyrian purple in its blackness
which betrays the handiwork of the chemist. He was a man of imposing
presence, tall and stalwart; and although he lacked the conventional
graces of a modern gentleman, he was not without a certain style and
dash of his own. To-day he wore mourning, and there was an unwonted
softness in his manner. This was Daniel Mayfield; a man whose genius
had been of much use to other people, but of little benefit to himself,
and a man who contemplated the visage of his deadliest foe whenever he
looked in the glass.
Yes, the only enemy Mr. Mayfield had made was himself. Everybody
liked him. He was your true Bohemian, your genuine Arab of the great
desert of London. Money ran between his fingers like water. He had
been more successful, and had worked harder, than men whose industry
had won for them houses and lands, horses and carriages, plate and
linen and Sèvres china. His acquaintance were always calculating his
income, and wondering what he did with it. Did he gamble? Did he
speculate on the Stock Exchange? Did he consume fifteen hundred a
year in tavern-parlours? Daniel himself could not have answered these
questions. He wondered as much as any one about this mysterious enigma.
He had never known how he spent his money. It went, somehow, and there
came an end to it. Jack borrowed a few pounds; and there was a night’s
card-playing, through which the luck went against poor Dan; and there
was a Greenwich dinner on Tom’s birthday; and he took a fancy to a rare
old copy of the _Diable Boiteux_, on large paper, sold at Willis
and Sotheran’s; and then there were occasional periods of famine,
during which Dan had recourse to a friendly usurer, for whose succour
he ultimately paid something like a hundred and fifty per cent. So the
money went. Daniel was the last person to trouble himself as to the
manner of its departure. When his pockets were empty, he called for
pen, ink, and paper, and set himself to fill them.
To-day this reckless genius was something less than his accustomed
self. The fierce black eyes were shadowed by a settled sadness of
expression, and the rollicking swagger of the Bohemian was changed to
an unwonted quietness of gait and gesture. He stood for a few moments
near the doorway, contemplating his nephew. The young man looked up
suddenly and stretched out his hands.
“Dear Uncle Dan!” he cried, grasping the outstretched hands of his
visitor. The fierce grip of his uncle’s muscular fingers was the only
direct expression of sympathy which he received from that gentleman.
The men understood each other too well for there to be need of many
words between them.
Daniel looked at the open desk.
“You have been examining your mother’s papers,” he said, in a low
voice. “Have you discovered anything?”
“More than enough, and yet not half what I must know, sooner or later.
I have never asked you any questions, Uncle Dan. I couldn’t bring
myself to do it. But now--now that she is gone----”
“I understand you, dear boy. I know little enough myself (for I never
could find it in my heart to question her, God bless her!), but you
have a right to know that little; and if you can put the story together
out of anything you have found there--” said Daniel, pointing to the
desk.
“I understand the story--I want to know the name of the man!” cried
Eustace, passionately.
“I have wanted to know that for the last twenty years,” answered
Daniel.
“Then you can tell me nothing?”
“I can tell you very little. When I left home to be articled to a brace
of London lawyers, I left the brightest and loveliest creature that
ever a man was proud to call his sister. We were the two only children
of comfortable tradespeople in a quiet little watering-place, you know,
Eustace. We lived in a square, brick-built house, facing the sea. My
father kept a circulating-library and reading-room, and my mother did
something in the millinery line. Between them both they made a very
comfortable income. Bayham was a sleepy, out-of-the-world place, in
which a tradesman who once manages to establish himself generally
enjoys a snug monopoly. I know that we were very well off, and that we
were people of importance in our way. My sister was the prettiest girl
in Bayham. She faded so early, became so complete a wreck, that you can
scarcely imagine what a lovely creature she was in those days. She was
ashamed of the notice her beauty drew upon her, and she had a pretty,
childish shyness of manner which made her all the more charming. A
great, hulking hobbledehoy of eighteen seldom knows what beauty is;
but I knew that my sister was lovely, and I admired and loved her. I
used to boast of her to my fellow-clerks, I remember, and made myself
obnoxious by turning up my uncultivated nose at their sisters. I was so
proud of our little Cely.”
He stopped and shaded his eyes with his hands for some minutes, while
Eustace waited impatiently.
“To make a long story short,” continued Daniel, “there came a letter
from my father, written in a very shaky style and almost incoherent
in its wording, to tell me that they were in great trouble at home,
and that I was to go back to them immediately. Of course I thought of
money troubles--we are such sordid creatures by nature, I suppose--and
I fancied there was commercial ruin at home, and thought remorsefully
of all the money I had cost my father, and the little good I had ever
been to him. When I got to Bayham, I found that there was something
worse than want of money in the grief-stricken household. Celia had
disappeared, leaving a letter for my father, in which she told him
that she was going away to be married; but there were reasons why her
marriage and the name of her husband should be kept a secret for some
time; but that he had promised to bring her back to Bayham directly he
was free to reveal his name and position. Of course we all knew what
this meant; and my father and I set out to seek our poor cheated girl,
with as gloomy a despair at our hearts as if we had gone to seek her in
the realms of Pluto.”
“And you failed?”
“Yes, lad, we failed ignominiously. There were neither electric
telegraphs nor private detectives in those days; and after following
several false scents, and spending a great deal of money, we went back
to Bayham--my father looking ten years older for his wasted labour. He
died three years after that, and my mother followed him very quickly,
for they were one of those old-fashioned couples who cling to each
other so fondly through life that they must needs sink together into
the grave. They died; and the poor girl, whom they had forgiven from
the very first hour of her offending, was not permitted to comfort
their last hours. They had been dead more than twelve months when I
saw a woman’s faded face flit past me in the most crowded part of the
Strand. I walked on a few paces, with a strange, sudden pain at my
heart, and then I turned and hurried after the woman, for I knew that I
had seen my sister.”
There was another brief pause--broken only by the short, eager
breathing of Eustace, and one profound sigh from Daniel.
“Well, boy, she had been living in London for more than three years,
hidden in the same big jungle which sheltered me, and Providence
had never sent me across her path. She had been living as many such
lonely creatures do live in London; managing to exist somehow--now by
means of one starvation work, now another. I went home with her, and
we gathered her few pitiful possessions together, and carried them
and you away with us in a cab, and--you know the rest. She lived with
me until you were old enough to be in danger of suffering from a bad
example; and then she made some excuse for leaving me--poor innocent
soul, she was afraid lest dissolute Daniel should contaminate her
pet-lamb. In all the time that we were together, I forbore to question
her; I always believed that she would confide in me sooner or later,
and I waited patiently in that hope. She told me once that she had made
two journeys to Bayham--the first while her father and mother were
still alive, and that she had waited and watched, under cover of the
winter evening darkness, until she had contrived to see them both; the
second when they were lying in the parish churchyard. This was all she
ever told me. I asked her one day if she would tell me the name of your
father. But she looked at me with a sad, frightened face, poor child,
and said No, she could never tell me that; he was away from England--at
the other end of the world, she believed. This was the only attempt I
ever made to penetrate the secret of your birth.”
“The letters--the man’s letters--are full of allusions to an intended
marriage. Do you think there was no marriage?”
“I am sure there was none.”
Eustace groaned aloud. For a long time he had suspected as much as
this; but to hear his suspicions confirmed by the opinion of another
was none the less bitter.
“You have some reason for saying as much, Uncle Dan?” he asked,
presently.
“I have this reason, Eustace: if my sister could have come back to
Bayham, she would have come. The sorrow must have been a very bitter
one which kept her away from her father and mother.”
The young man made no reply to his uncle. He walked to the window, and
looked out at the dreary street, where the perpetual organ-grinder,
who seems to grind all our sorrows in a musical mill, was grinding on
at the usual pace. For the common world the thing which he played was
an Ethiopian melody; but Eustace never afterwards heard the simple air
without recalling this miserable hour, and the story of his mother’s
luckless life.
He came back to his kinsman. Heaven pity him, the law denied him even
this human tie, and it was only by courtesy he could call this man
his uncle. He came away from the window, and flung himself on honest
Daniel’s breast and sobbed aloud.
“And now take me to my mother’s grave,” he said presently.
CHAPTER IV.
UN MENAGE A DEUX.
HAROLD JERNINGHAM lived in Park Lane. To say this, and to say in
addition to this that it was his privilege to inhabit a snug little
bachelor dwelling, with bay-windows from the roof to the basement, is
to say that he was one of those favoured beings for whom this world
must needs be a terrestrial paradise. There are mansions in Park
Lane, stately and gigantic--mansions with lofty picture-galleries,
and staircases of polished marble, and conservatories which roof-in
small forests of tropical verdure: but the glory of this western
Eden lies not in them. Are there not mansions in Belgravia and
Tyburnia, in Piccadilly and Mayfair? Palaces are common enough in
this western hemisphere, and the roturier may find one ready for
his occupation, seek it when he will. But it is only in Park Lane
that those delicious little bachelor snuggeries are to be found,
those enchanting toy-houses, “too small to live in, and too big to
hang at your watch-chain,” as Lord Hervey said of the Duke’s cottage
at Chiswick--those irregular little edifices, with bow-windows,
and balconies, and miniature conservatories breaking out in every
direction, and with a perfume of the country still about them.
The house which Harold Jerningham occupied when he favoured the
metropolis by his presence was one of the most enchanting of these
enviable habitations. The house had been a pretty old-fashioned cottage
with bow-windows, when Mr. Jerningham took it in hand, but in his
possession it had undergone considerable change. He had transformed the
rustic bows into deep roomy bays, and had thrown out balconies of iron
scroll-work, whereon there flourished bright masses of flowers, and
ferns, and mosses, amidst which no eye save that of the nurseryman’s
minions ever beheld a faded leaf. He had built mysterious and spacious
chambers at the back of the small dwelling, on ground that had once
been a garden; and beyond these chambers you came suddenly upon a shady
quadrangle roofed-in with glass, where there was a wonderful tesselated
pavement, which had been transported bodily from a chamber in Pompeii,
and where there were ferns and cool grasses, and a porphyry basin of
water-lilies, and the perpetual plashing of a fountain.
Mr. Jerningham had furnished his house after his own fashion, without
regard to the styles that were “in,” or the styles that were “out.”
One rich carpet of dark crimson velvet-pile lined the house from the
hall to the attics, like a jewel-casket; and the same warm and yet
sombre tint pervaded the window-hangings and the walls. The ordinary
visitor found very little to admire in Mr. Jerningham’s drawing-room.
Thin-legged tables and chairs adorned with goats’ heads and festoons
of flowers; a shabby little writing-table, considerably the worse for
wear, but enlivened by patches of china, whereon rosy little Cupids
frisked and tumbled against a background of deep azure; a generally
untidy effect of scattered bronzes and intaglios, gold-and-enamel
snuff-boxes and bonbonnières, Chelsea tea-cups, and antique miniatures;
and on the walls some tapestry, just a little faded, with the eternal
shepherds and shepherdesses of the Watteau school. The connoisseur
only could have told that the spindle-legged chairs and tables were
in the purest style of the Louis-Seize period; that the shabby little
writing-table with the _plaques_ of old Sèvres had belonged to
Marie Antoinette, and had been sold for something over a thousand
pounds; that the bronzes and intaglios, the miniatures and bonbonnières
were the representatives of a fortune; and that the somewhat faded
tapestry was the choicest work of the Gobelins, after designs by
Boucher.
Harold Jerningham was fifty years of age, and one of the richest men
in London. The poorer members of the world in which he lived talked
of him as “a lucky fellow, by Jove, and a man who ought to consider
himself uncommonly fortunate never to have known what it was to be
hard-up, or to have a pack of extravagant sons sucking his blood,
like so many modern vampires, confound ’em!” Harold Jerningham had
neither sons nor daughters, and lived in a bachelor’s snuggery. But
Harold Jerningham was not a bachelor. He had married a very beautiful
young first cousin some seven years before, and the union had not
been a happy one. It had only endured for two years, at the end of
which time the husband and wife had separated, without open scandal
of any kind whatsoever. Mr. Jerningham had chosen that occasion for a
long-postponed journey to the East, and Mrs. Jerningham had quietly
withdrawn herself from the toy-house in Park Lane to another toy-house
on the banks of the Thames, within two or three hundred yards of
Wolsey’s old palace at Hampton. But let man and wife arrange their
affairs never so quietly, the world will have its own ideas, and
make its own theories on the subject. The world--that is to say, Mr.
Jerningham’s world, which was bounded on the south by Great George
Street, Westminster, and on the north by Bryanstone Square--told
several different stories of Mr. Jerningham’s marriage. The beautiful
young cousin had possessed the real Jerningham pride, which was the
pride of the Miltonic Lucifer himself, wherefore the peaceful union
of two Jerninghams was an impossibility, said one faction. But the
majority were inclined to believe Mr. Jerningham in some manner guilty.
Neither his youth nor his middle age had been spotless. Too proud and
too refined to affect coarse vices or common dissipations, he had done
more mischief and had been infinitely more dangerous than the common
sinner. The master of a ruined household had cursed the name of Harold
Jerningham, and innocent children had grown up to blush at the mention
of that fatal name. For three-and-forty years of his life he had been
a bachelor, and had laughed at the men who bartered their liberty
for the sake of a wife’s monotonous companionship and the prattle of
tiresome children. He had not been a deliberate sinner--indeed, the
deliberate sinners seem to be a very small minority, and even the
man who poisons his wife with minim doses of aconite will tell the
gaol-chaplain that he was a poor, weak creature, led away from time to
time by the impulse of the moment. The Tempter took him by the hand,
and drew him on, foot by foot, to his destruction. There is a thick and
blinding fog for ever hanging over that fatally easy slope which leads
to Avernus, whereby the traveller cannot perceive what progress he has
made upon the dreadful downward road.
Mr. Jerningham had not been a deliberate sinner. He was not
altogether vile and wicked. He was too selfish a man not to wish for
the approbation of his fellow-man; he was too much of a poet and
an artist not to perceive the loveliness of virtue. He was not an
honourable man, but he knew that honour was a very beautiful thing
in the abstract, and he had a vague sense of discomfort when he acted
dishonourably--just such an unpleasant sensation as he would have felt
if he had worn an ill-fitting coat or an ill-made boot. He was not
without benevolence, and could even be generous on occasion; but in
all his useless life he had never sacrificed his own enjoyment for the
good of another. He had taken his pleasure--all was told in those few
words--and if pleasure was only to be had at the cost of evil-doing,
he had shrugged his shoulders regretfully, and paid the price. He
had gathered his roses, and other people had been inconvenienced by
the thorns. The roses were still blooming about his pathway, but Mr.
Jerningham no longer cared to pluck them. A man may grow tired even
of roses. His marriage had been the result of one of those generous
impulses which redeemed his character from utter worthlessness. A
kinsman had died in Paris, in the extreme depths of patrician poverty,
leaving behind him a very lovely daughter, and a letter addressed to
Harold Jerningham. The lovely daughter came to London, unattended,
to deliver the letter, which she presented with her own hands to the
elegant bachelor of three-and-forty. If she had not been a Jerningham,
there is no knowing what story of sin and folly this interview might
have inaugurated. But she was the daughter of Philip Jerningham, and
the direct descendant of a Plantagenet prince; so, after a brief
acquaintance, she became the wife of the eldest representative of her
family, and the mistress of that delicious little house in Park Lane,
to say nothing of parks and mansions, farms and forests, in three of
the fairest counties in England.
She ought to have considered herself the most fortunate of women, said
the western world. Whether she did so consider herself or not, it
speedily transpired that she was not a happy woman. For a few months
the world had the pleasure of beholding Mr. Jerningham in frequent
attendance on his wife. He handed her in and out of carriages, he went
out to dinner with her, he stood behind her chair at the Opera, he was
even seen occasionally to drive her in his unapproachable mail-phaeton;
and this seemed the perfection of domestic felicity. Then there came an
interregnum, during which the Jerninghams were rarely seen together.
They led an erratic existence, the rule of which seemed to be that Mr.
Jerningham should be at Spa when his wife was in London, and that Mrs.
Jerningham should be on her way to one of the country houses whenever
her lord came to town. Then all at once arose the awful rumour that
the Jerninghams had parted from each other for ever. Elegant gossips
discussed the subject at feminine assemblies, and men talked about it
in the clubs. Why had the Jerninghams separated? Was he to blame? Was
she? Had Jerningham, the irresistible, dropped in for it at last? Or
had he been playing his old trick, and had the little woman plucked up
a spirit, and cut him? It is to be observed that Mrs. Jerningham was
amongst the tallest of her sex; but your genuine club-lounger would
call Juno herself a little woman.
It became generally understood before long that Harold Jerningham had
himself alone to thank for the failure of his matrimonial venture. He
made his name somewhat notorious just at this time in conjunction with
that of a French opera-dancer; so Mrs. Grundy shrugged her shoulders
deprecatingly, and pitied Mrs. Jerningham. “A superb creature, my dear;
the very model of propriety; and a thousand times too good for that
dissipated wretch, Harold Jerningham,” exclaimed the sagacious Mrs.
Grundy.
While the world made itself busy with the story of her brief married
life, Emily Jerningham endured her wrongs and sorrows very quietly in
the toy-villa at Hampton. She had an ample income settled on her by
her husband; and as she had been steeped in poverty to the very lips
before her marriage, it is scarcely strange, perhaps, if she forbore
to complain of Mr. Jerningham’s conduct, and elected to talk about
him--whenever intrusive people compelled her to mention his name--as
her friend and benefactor. The world lauded her generosity, but
considered itself injured by her reticence.
For the first twelve months after the separation, Mrs. Jerningham
secluded herself from all society except that of a few chosen friends,
and devoted herself to the cultivation of orchids at the toy-villa.
She started with the intention of passing the remainder of her days
amongst the chosen friends and the orchids; but she was young and
handsome, rich and accomplished, and society had chosen to exalt her
into a social martyr. So people penetrated the depths of her suburban
retreat, and beguiled her to return to the world, of which she had seen
so little. She went into society, tolerably secured from the hazard
of meeting her husband, who had his own particular circle, and that
a very narrow one. Emily Jerningham was liked and admired. She was
a beauty of the Juno type, and the Jerningham pride became her. It
was not by any means an intolerable pride, never parading itself on
unnecessary occasions--pride defensive, and not pride aggressive; the
pride of a prince who will be hand-and-glove with his dear Brummell,
but who will order Mr. Brummell’s carriage when the beau is insolent.
Mrs. Jerningham was very popular. She had all the charm of widowhood
without its danger. There was even the faintest flavour of Bohemianism
about her position, spotless though her reputation might be. She was
a saint and martyr who gave nice little dinners, and drove the most
perfectly appointed of pony-phaetons. It was only by an indescribable
something--a tranquil grace of bearing, a subdued ease of manner,
a pervading harmony in every detail of her surroundings, from the
unobtrusive colouring of her costume to the irreproachable livery
of her servants--that strangers could distinguish her from other
unprotected women of a very different class.
Young men were ready to worship and adore her. “If the gurls a fellah
meets were like Mrs. Jerningham, a fellah might make up his mind to go
in for the domestic,” said young Tyburnia to young Belgravia. “S’pose
the odds are against Jerningham going off the hooks between this and
the first spring-meeting, so as to give a party a chance with Mrs. J.
herself,” speculates young Belgravia, dreamily.
Mrs. Jerningham had enjoyed her quasi-widowhood some two years, when
Mrs. Grundy’s attention was called to a new phenomenon in connection
with that lady.
It was observed that whoever was bidden to the nice little
dinner-parties at the toy villa, there was one gentleman whose presence
was a certainty. It was observed that whenever Mrs. Jerningham dropped
in for an hour or two at any fashionable assembly, this gentleman was
sure to drop in at the same hour, and to depart, listless and weary,
as soon as he had handed that lady to her carriage. He was not one of
the butterflies, but had been admitted amongst those gorgeous creatures
on account of certain gifts and qualities which the butterflies
were able to appreciate. He was a powerful satirist, something of a
poet, and the editor of a fashionable semi-political, semi-literary
periodical, entitled “The Areopagus.” He was five-and-thirty years
of age, as handsome as an intellectual man can venture to be, and as
elegant as a Lauzun or a Hervey. He had chambers in the Temple, a
hunting-box in Berkshire, the _entrée_ to all the best houses in
London, and a hundred country houses always open to him. The Bohemians
of the press watched his career with envious eyes, and would have
rejoiced infinitely to catch him tripping on the difficult editorial
pathway, so that they might band themselves together to rend him in
pieces. The first time these watchful enemies obtained any advantage
over him was when the western world began to whisper that he had
fallen in love with Mrs. Jerningham. Then the literary Bohemians, the
“Cherokees” and “Night-birds,” and all the little clubs and cliques in
London, set up their malicious chatter; and men who had never beheld
Emily Jerningham’s face speculated upon her conduct and gloated over
the anticipation of some tremendous scandal which should terminate in
Laurence Desmond’s expulsion from the Eden of fashion.
The clubs and cliques were doomed to disappointment. No tremendous
scandal ever arose. After a little discussion, the world agreed to
accept this Platonic attachment between the lady and the editor as the
most delightful of social romances. Mrs. Jerningham had taken care
to provide herself with a perfect dragon in the way of an elderly
widowed aunt, whose husband had been in the Church--and, sheltered
thus, she was free to bestow her friendship on whom she pleased. Time,
which sanctifies all things, gave a kind of legality to the Platonic
attachment; and in due course it became an understood thing that Mr.
Desmond would never marry until Harold Jerningham’s death should set
Emily free.
If any rumour of this romantic friendship reached Mr. Jerningham’s
ears, he received the tidings very quietly. No _preux chevalier_
ever spoke of his liege lady in a more reverential spirit than that
in which Harold Jerningham spoke of his wife. It seemed as if these
two people had agreed to sound each other’s praises. Emily declared
her husband to be the most noble and generous of men; Harold lauded
his wife as the purest and most honourable of women. Malicious people
shrugged their shoulders and hinted at hypocrisy.
“Jerningham was always a Jesuit,” said one; “he is the Talleyrand of
social life. And if you want to arrive at what he means, you must take
the reverse of what he says.”
“If they are both such delightful creatures, what a pity it is they
couldn’t live peaceably together!” said another.
CHAPTER V.
THE EDITOR OF THE “AREOPAGUS.”
AMONGST the contributors to the literary periodical of which Mr.
Desmond was the editor, Daniel Mayfield occupied no insignificant
position. The most genial and good-natured of men was at the same time
the most ferocious and acrimonious of critics. When an innocent lamb
was to be led to the slaughter, it was Daniel who assumed the butcher’s
apron and armed himself with the deadly knife. When a wretched
scribbler was, in vulgar phraseology, to be “jumped upon,” honest
Daniel put on his hobnailed boots, and went at the savage operation
with a will. The days were past in which the Edinburgh reviewer
apologized with a gentle courtesy before he ventured to express his
dissent from the opinions of a lady historian. Criticism of to-day
must be racy, at any price. Daniel’s strong arm smote right and left,
cleaving friend and foe indiscriminately asunder; and if it was on a
woman’s head that the blow descended, so much the better. The woman
should have been at home studying her cookery-book, or working that
domestic treadmill, the sewing-machine, instead of jostling her betters
in the literary arena. “Hark forward, tantivy!” cried Daniel the
critic; “run her down, trample her in the mud, make an end of her! She
would quote Greek, would she? Why, the creature can barely spell plain
English! She would prate of gods and goddesses, whose name she picks
haphazard from a cheap abridgment of Lemprière. She would discourse
of fashion and splendour, forsooth, who was “born in a garret, in a
kitchen bred.” Daniel the man was tender and courteous in his treatment
of all womankind; but Daniel the racy essayist knew no mercy.
Daniel the pitiless was one of Mr. Desmond’s most valued coadjutors,
and had received many offers of kindly service from that gentleman; but
the literary Bohemian had refused all.
“A government appointment for me!” he cried, when the popular editor
offered to use his influence with a Cabinet minister in Daniel’s
favour; “why, I should languish in the trammels of an official life.
Regular hours and a regular salary would be the death of me in less
than six months. I was born a dweller in tents, my dear Desmond, and
my instincts are naturally disreputable. I can work seven hours at a
stretch, and produce more copy in a given time than any man in London.
I have been locked up in a room with a wet towel, a bottle of Scotch
whiskey, and half a ream of paper, and have written five-and-thirty
pages of a popular magazine between sunset and sunrise. But I must take
it out in vagabondage afterwards. I am of the stuff which makes your
Savages and your Morlands, and I shall die in a sponging-house when my
time comes, I have no doubt. Nevertheless, I will ask a favour of you
some day, Desmond; but it shall be for somebody better worth serving
than I am.”
Within a week of Eustace Thorburn’s return, Daniel Mayfield presented
himself at the editor’s chambers. He had done no work for the
_Areopagus_ for some little time, and Mr. Desmond was glad to bid
him welcome.
“I’ve been thinking of looking you up for the last three weeks, Dan,”
said the editor, striking his pen across half a page of proof. “What
second-hand twaddle this man writes! We want the sterling metal of your
stylus, old fellow.”
“Any new victim to be flayed alive?” asked Daniel. “I’ve been rather
seedy for the last week or two, and perhaps a little of the old work
will set me right again.”
“You’ll find plenty of material there,” answered Mr. Desmond, pointing
to a heap of cloth-covered volumes. “What have you been doing with
yourself since I saw you last? No good, I suppose,” he added, without
looking up from the proofs on which he was operating.
“Well, no, not much good. It’s a business I shouldn’t care about
repeating; but it’s a business that must be done--it must be done,
Desmond, sooner or later, in every man’s life, I suppose.”
The unwonted gravity of Daniel Mayfield’s tone surprised his friend.
Laurence Desmond looked up from his desk, and for the first time
perceived the change in his erratic contributor’s costume.
“In mourning, Dan! I’m sorry to see that,” he said, gently.
“Yes; I have buried the dearest friend I ever had--my only sister. God
bless her! The _Freethinker’s Quarterly_ people won’t get me to
do any more deistical articles for them, Laurence. I’m a bad fellow
myself, with no opinions in particular about anything in heaven or
earth. How should I have opinions? I’ve sold ’em too often to other
people to have any left for myself. But I like to think that _she_
is in heaven, and I’ll never write a ‘rational’ essay again as long as
I live.”
The two men shook hands upon this, _without_ effusion--as it is
the habit of Englishmen to do.
“And now to business,” said Daniel. “You once offered to get me a
government appointment, and I told you I wasn’t fit for one. I haven’t
forgotten your offer, or the kindness that prompted it. My sister
has left a son--a lad of three-and-twenty. He is clever, honourable,
ambitious, and indefatigable; but, except myself, he has neither friend
nor relative in the world. He has been a tutor in a great Belgian
academy, and the principal will certify his merits. If you can serve
him, Desmond, you will do me treble service.”
“What kind of thing do you want for him?”
“A private tutorship, or the post of secretary to a man worth serving.
The lad is a fair classical scholar, and a good linguist. He is a great
deal more than this into the bargain; but I am so fond of the fellow
that I am afraid of praising him too much.”
“Bring him here to dine to-morrow night,” said Mr. Desmond; “I’ll think
the matter over in the meantime. I dare say I shall hit upon something
to suit him. Why doesn’t he take to this sort of thing?”
The editor of the _Areopagus_ laid his hand upon the proofs.
Daniel Mayfield shook his head sadly.
“Anything but that, Desmond. I don’t want him to be a publisher’s
hack. I don’t want him to put my worn-out old shoes on his brave young
feet, and tread the miry road along which I have travelled. I don’t
want him to make merchandise of his best and purest feelings while the
stock lasts him, and deal in sham sentiments and spurious emotions
when the real ones are worn out. I don’t want him to weep maudlin
tears over philanthropic leaders, or work himself into an unreal fury
over the denunciation of a political measure he has barely had leisure
to consider. I don’t want him to sell his convictions to the highest
bidder--to be Conservative one day, Liberal the next, and Radical the
day after. He’s too good for my work, Desmond, and he’s too good for
my company. When he was old enough to be injured by a bad example, his
poor mother took him away from me--though I was sorry enough to part
with the little rascal, and it went to her heart to give me sorrow. She
is gone now, Desmond, and it is my duty to see that the boy comes to no
harm.”
“Has he any of your talent, Dan?”
“He has something better than my talent, sir,” answered Mayfield,
gravely. “The lad has the soul of a poet, and is destined to be one.
There is real genius there, sir--not the marketable trash I deal in. He
has written verses which have brought the tears into my eyes; consider
that, sir--tears from such a hardened wretch as your Daniel should
count for something. I want some quiet, comfortable position for him,
in which he will have a little leisure to think his own thoughts. I
want him to bide his time; and some day, when his intellect has ripened
and mellowed, the divine breath will inflate his nostrils, and we
shall have a new poet.”
“I think I can get him exactly the sort of thing you want,” answered
Laurence Desmond; “but I must first make sure he is fit for it. Bring
him at half-past seven to-morrow, and let me see if he is worthy of
your praises. You’ll take those books, and send me copy to-morrow, eh?”
Daniel nodded, took the books under his arm, shook hands with his
friend, and departed--departed, with peace and goodwill and all
Christian feelings in his big, generous heart, to annihilate the
luckless wretch who had written a stupid novel.
Daniel and Eustace dined in the Temple the next evening, and sat late
over their wine in the summer twilight. Laurence Desmond was delighted
with the young man. He led him on to talk freely on his own sentiments
and opinions, while Daniel listened with a fond smile to his nephew’s
eloquent discourse. It was pleasant to Mr. Desmond, whose lot had
been cast in that serene and exalted sphere in which there was no
such thing as emotion--it was very pleasant to the popular editor to
come in contact with this fresh, young nature, and to discover that,
even in this age of high-pressure, a man may retain youthfulness of
spirit, faith in his fellow-creatures, pure and poetic aspirations, and
childlike simplicity of feeling, after his twenty-third birthday.
“The young men I know have been used up at nineteen,” thought Laurence;
“and there are hardened wretches of five-and-twenty more _blasé_
than Philip of Orleans at forty-eight.”
From talking of his opinions, Laurence Desmond led Eustace on to talk
of himself and his own experiences; and before Daniel and his nephew
departed, the young man’s future was in some measure provided for.
“A very old and dear friend of mine,” said Mr. Desmond, “has for some
time been in want of a secretary and amanuensis to assist him in the
completion and publication of a great work to which he has devoted
many years of his life--a work which he calls the _History of
Superstition_, and which, I believe, is as dear to him as his only
child. I have been trying to find him the kind of person he wants, but
have hitherto failed most completely. There are plenty of shallow,
flippant young fellows who would like the position well enough, for
the salary will be a decent one, and my friend is the best and kindest
of men; but, until now, I have met no one capable of giving him the
assistance he wants. Your knowledge of languages and your Villebrumeuse
reading--which seems to have been very wisely chosen,--exactly fit you
for the position. If you can tolerate a quiet life in the heart of the
country, I can offer you the situation, Mr. Thorburn, and may conclude
all arrangements with you, on my own responsibility.”
“If your friend is a gentleman, I say ‘Done!’” cried Daniel Mayfield,
heartily; “nothing could be better suited to this boy.”
He laid his hand caressingly on the young man’s shoulder as he spoke.
“And you’ll be safe out of my way, lad,” he murmured, softly, “and I
shall lose my bright-faced boy--so much the better for him, so much the
worse for me!”
“My friend is something more than a gentleman,” answered Laurence
Desmond. “He is a _preux chevalier_. He is the descendant of a
noble old Spanish family--a Frenchman by birth and education, and half
an Englishman by long residence in England. He lives in a picturesque
old house near Windsor, and on the banks of the Thames; such a spot as
one scarcely expects to see out of Creswick’s pictures. I don’t see
much of him, for my life is too busy for friendship; and--and there
are other reasons that keep us asunder,” added Mr. Desmond, with some
slight embarrassment of manner.
“Can you exist in the country, Mr. Thorburn?” he asked presently.
“I love the country so well that I can scarcely exist in London,
except for the sake of my uncle’s society.”
“Which is about the worst thing you can have!” growled Daniel.
“Ah! you are a poet, and a poet should live amongst lonely woods and
sylvan streams. Well, you will be delighted with my friend, Theodore
de Bergerac, and still more delighted with the place he lives in. I’ll
write to him to-morrow, and tell him I’ve found the blue diamond of the
nineteenth century, a young man who does not affect to be old. Can you
go to him immediately?”
“M. de Bergerac will no doubt wish to hear from my late employer, the
principal of the Parthenée,” Eustace answered, after some hesitation.
“Not at all. I will be responsible for the character and qualifications
of my old friend’s nephew. There need be no delay on that account,”
said Laurence.
“There need be no delay on any account, then,” exclaimed Daniel; “the
boy is ready to leave London to-morrow, if necessary.”
“I beg your pardon, Uncle Dan. Unless M. de Bergerac really wants me
immediately, I should be glad of a week’s delay,” said Eustace, with
considerable embarrassment. “I have some business to do before I leave
London.”
“Business!” cried Daniel; “what business?”
“I will tell you all about it by and by, Uncle Dan.”
“My friend has waited six months, and he can afford to wait another
week,” said Laurence, good-naturedly. “Come and see me when your
business is finished, Mr. Thorburn.”
“Good-night, and thank you, Desmond,” said Daniel, wringing his
friend’s hand with muscular heartiness. “I told you that a favour to
him is thrice a favour to me; and if ever I have a chance of proving
that I meant what I said, I won’t let the opportunity slip.”
When the two men had left the Temple, and were walking homewards
through quiet back-streets, Daniel Mayfield turned sharply upon his
nephew.
“What the deuce is to keep you in London for a week, Eustace?” he asked.
“I want to go to Bayham, Uncle Dan, to make some inquires that may help
me.”
Daniel laid his hand on the young man’s arm.
“Drop that, lad,” he said, earnestly. “I’ve thought about it for
twenty years to no end. No good will ever come of it--nothing but
disappointment and vexation, shame and sorrow. Forget the past, and
start fair; the world is all before you. You have got your chance now.
Desmond is a friend worth having; and this man De Bergerac may be a
good friend too, if you serve him well. Wipe out the memory of that
old story, my lad. Your father has chosen to ignore you; ignore him,
and cry quits. The day may come when he’ll hear your name, and regret
that he has forfeited the right to call you his son. Don’t waste your
thoughts upon him, Eustace. The man may be dead and gone for aught we
know. Let him rest.”
“And my mother’s wrongs--are they to be forgotten? Do you remember
the other evening in Highgate Cemetery, Uncle Dan? You thought I was
praying, perhaps, when I knelt by my mother’s grave; but I was not
praying. On my knees beside that newly laid turf I swore to be revenged
on the man who blighted the life of her who lies beneath it. I must
find that man, Uncle Daniel, and you must help me to find him.”
“Was there no clue to his identity to be found in those letters?” asked
Daniel, after a pause.
“Only one, and that a very slight one. He had written a book,--a book
which seems to have been popular, and which my poor mother was reading
when first he saw her. Can you remember any particular book which
attracted attention in ’43?”
“No, my lad; my memory is not good enough for that. There are people
who might be able to remember, and there are literary papers that might
help you. But scarcely a year goes by in which there are not a dozen
books that make some slight sensation. This must have been a woman’s
book, though,--a poem or a novel, or something of that kind,--or your
mother would scarcely have been reading it.”
“The book was published either anonymously or under some _nom de
plume_,” said Eustace; “and even if I discover the right book, I may
not be able to identify it with the writer. So you see the clue is a
very poor one. I shall go to Bayham, Uncle Dan. Accident may help me to
some better clue than the letters afford. The man was staying at the
George Hotel; I may make some discovery there. He speaks of a Miss K.,
a friend and confidante of my mother. Can you tell me who she was?”
“Sarah Kimber!” cried Daniel,--“undoubtedly Sarah Kimber, a girl whose
father kept a linendraper’s shop, and who went to school with Celia. My
poor sister and she were fast friends; but I never could endure her.
She was a lank, lantern-jawed, whitey-brown girl, and I always thought
her deceitful. Good God! how the old time comes back as you talk to me!
I can see the little parlour at Bayham, and those two girls seated side
by side on an old-fashioned chintz-covered sofa, with an open window
and a green trellis-work of honeysuckle and jasmine behind them. I
can see it all, Eustace, as fresh and vivid as a picture at a private
view--Celia so bright and lovely; that Kimber girl an unconscious foil
to her beauty.”
“Do you know if this Miss Kimber is still alive?”
“No, lad. Bayham may lie fathoms deep beneath the sea, like the mystic
city of Lyonesse, for anything I know. I have never been there since
the day of my mother’s funeral.”
“I shall try to find Miss Kimber, Uncle Dan. She may be able to tell me
a great deal.”
“As you will, dear boy. If you took poor old Dan’s advice, you would
let the story rest. But youth is fiery and impetuous, and must take its
own course. If ever you do find _that man_, Eustace, let me know
his name, for he and I have a heavy reckoning to settle.”
CHAPTER VI.
AT BAYHAM.
EUSTACE THORBURN went to Bayham, and took up his quarters at the George
Hotel. The Dorsetshire watering-place had once been fashionable; but
its fashion had departed, and an atmosphere of decay pervaded the
grandeurs of that bygone day. Happily, the departure of fashion,
which had never had any hand in the loveliness of the bay and the
broad yellow sands, had robbed the Bayham shore of no grace or charm.
The changing opal waters retained their brightest hues, though only
west-country gentry came to look upon them. The golden sands were
golden still, though the crystal chandeliers and sconces which had once
adorned the assembly-room had been sold by auction, and the room itself
converted into a Baptist chapel.
There had been many changes at the George within the last twenty years.
That once popular establishment had been superseded by a gigantic,
stuccoed railway-hotel--itself a dismal failure--and the last two
proprietors had been insolvent. Eustace Thorburn sought in vain for a
visitors’ book dated ’43. All such books had been sold for waste paper
years ago, and the only creature to be found in the hotel who had
belonged to the same establishment in the year ’43 was a semi-idiotic
ostler. Eustace abandoned all hope of information in this quarter, and
went out into the little seaside town to look for the house in which
his mother’s childhood had been spent.
He found the place easily enough. It was still a circulating-library
and reading-room, and as he lingered before the gaily decorated window,
Eustace Thorburn could fancy that nameless stranger, who dated his
letters from the George, peering between the lithographs and sheets of
music in the hope of seeing Celia Mayfield’s fair young face.
“Why could not an honest man have fallen in love with her?” he asked
himself, savagely. “Why must it needs be a villain who was first to
discover the charm of her innocent beauty?”
He went into the shop. There was a girl sitting behind the counter,
half hidden by a high desk, and busy with some shred of needlework. The
young man pictured his mother sitting in the same spot, and all of a
sudden the face and figure of the girl grew dim and blurred before his
eyes. He was fain to look about him for a few moments, as if seeking
some special object, before he could trust himself to speak. Then he
asked for some stationery, and contrived to occupy the girl for a
considerable time, while he selected what he wanted, and questioned her
about the townsfolk.
“Was there any person of the name of Kimber still living in Bayham?” he
asked. The girl told him that there were several Kimbers: Mr. Kimber,
the plumber, in New Street; Mr. Kimber, the house-agent, at the corner
of the Parade; and Kimber and Willows, the drapers, in High Street.
“The person I wish to find is, or was, a Miss Kimber--Sarah Kimber,”
said Eustace; “and I believe her father was a draper.”
“Ah!” exclaimed the damsel; “then that is the Miss Kimber who married
Mr. Willows. Mr. Willows was head-assistant to old Mr. Kimber, who
died five years ago. He left all his money and his business to Miss
Kimber--being his only daughter, you see, sir; and as soon as she left
off her mourning, she married Mr. Willows. He is a very handsome man,
Mr. Willows, and nearly ten years younger than Miss Kimber that was,
and they do say Mr. and Mrs. Willows do not live happily together.”
Eustace went straight from the library to the establishment of Messrs.
Kimber and Willows. It was a big, glaring shop, with a great deal of
plate-glass and gilding, and a gaudy display of dresses and ribbons,
bonnets and parasols. A smirking young man pounced immediately upon
the stranger, asking what he might please to want; and by him Eustace
was conducted to Mrs. Willows, who sat at a desk at the end of the
shop, in a perfect bower of ribbons and millinery. She was attended
by a bevy of damsels, who were busied in the construction of caps
and bonnets, and whom she addressed with extreme acidity of tone and
manner. She was not a pleasant-looking person; and if old Mr. Kimber’s
money had changed into withered leaves on her inheritance of it, she
could scarcely have seemed to have profited less by the dead man’s
wealth, so pinched and hungry was her aspect.
She favoured Eustace with the nearest approach to a smile of which her
thin lips were capable, but regarded him with evident suspicion when
she heard that he wished for a private interview.
“If you are travelling in the drapery line you needn’t trouble yourself
to show your patterns,” she said, decisively; “we have dealt with
Grossam and Grinder for the last twenty years, and we never take
goods from strangers. There are some new people on the other side of
the way who may wish to deal with you, if you’ll give them long credit
and take their bill for your goods, I dare say; but I don’t recommend
you to trust them. When people come into a town without sixpence of
capital, and try to undersell an old-established house, they have only
themselves to blame if they get into the _Gazette_. However,
_I_ say nothing; it’s no affair of _mine_. The increase of
our business is wearing me to the grave, and I should be the last
to begrudge new people a chance, however unfair _their_ way of
proceeding may be.”
Eustace had been quite unable to stay this torrent of indignation
against the people on the other side of the street; but when Mrs.
Willows paused to take breath, he informed her that he was not a
commercial traveller, and that he had nothing to do with drapery,
either wholesale or retail.
“I very much wish to obtain a few minutes’ conversation with you in
private,” he said, glancing towards the young milliners, who had
honoured him with a furtive scrutiny while Mrs. Willows was not looking
at them, and had returned to their work with an exaggerated appearance
of industry directly they felt her cold gray eyes upon them.
That important personage hesitated. It was rather an agreeable
sensation to have a handsome young man pleading for a private
interview, and she looked towards the other end of the shop, where her
husband was displaying cotton prints to an elderly customer of the
housekeeper class, with the faint hope of awakening in that gentleman’s
breast some twinge of the jealousy which so often racked her own.
“If you will step upstairs to the drawing-room,” she said to Eustace,
“you can explain your business without interruption.”
Eustace followed Mrs. Willows to an apartment on the first floor, an
apartment which was made splendid by a great deal of bead-work, and by
occasional glimpses of a very gaudy Brussels carpet; but the splendour
whereof was somewhat subdued by chaste coverings of brown holland and
crochet-work.
The linendraperess seated herself in one of the holland-covered
arm-chairs, and arranged the rustling folds of her stiff silk dress.
Having settled herself deliberately thus, she sat looking at Eustace
with her hard gray eyes, waiting for him to speak.
And this had been his mother’s friend, this hard, prosperous, vulgar
woman! they had been girls together, and had shared all manner of
simple, girlish pleasures! Eustace looked at the woman sadly, thinking
how wide a difference there must needs have been between the two girls,
and how little real sympathy or womanly tenderness could have ever
softened the heart of Mrs. Willows.
“I have to apologize for this intrusion,” he said, after a pause; “for
the business that brings me to Bayham is a personal matter, which can
have very little interest for you. I am anxious to obtain all possible
information respecting a family of the name of Mayfield, and more
especially Miss Mayfield, the only daughter of a librarian in this
town, who, I am given to understand, was very intimate with you some
four-and-twenty years ago.”
The lady’s mouth, tight and hard at the best of times, tightened and
hardened itself to an abnormal degree as Eustace said this. A pale fire
kindled in the cold, gray eyes, and the stiff shoulders and elbows
adjusted themselves anew with increased stiffness.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Willows, “I knew Celia Mayfield.”
“You and she were friends, I believe?”
“We were _companions_,” replied Mrs. Willows, with spiteful
promptitude. “Even at this distance of time I should blush to own that
Celia Mayfield and I were ever friends.”
The whitey-brown complexion of the draper’s wife seemed incapable of
anything approaching a blush; but Eustace’s face glowed with an angry
crimson as the woman said this.
“May I inquire _why_ you would be ashamed to confess your
friendship for Miss Mayfield?” he asked, his voice tremulous with
suppressed passion. It was so difficult to sit quietly by while a
spiteful woman belied his mother’s name; it was so difficult to refrain
from crying out: “I am her son, and am ready to uphold her as the best
and purest of women!” And to own himself her son, would have been to
betray the sad secret of her hapless life.
“May I ask what reason you have to be ashamed of your girlish
friendship?” he repeated, in steadier tones, when he had waited some
moments for Mrs. Willows’ reply.
“Because Celia Mayfield’s conduct was shameful,” answered the woman;
“though, goodness knows, it’s not much wonder that a girl who had been
spoiled, and petted, and flattered, until she didn’t know whether she
stood on her head or her heels, _did_ turn out badly. Mr. and Mrs.
Mayfield made a fool of their daughter. _I_ was an only daughter,
and an only child, too, for the matter of that; but my father was a
sensible man, and _I_ was never brought up to read novels and
think myself a beauty. I kept house for my poor pa when I was fourteen
years of age; and if there was a halfpenny wrong in my accounts, he
didn’t hesitate to box my ears. And I feel the benefit of it now,”
added Mrs. Willows, triumphantly. “This business would not be what it
is if my father’s property had been left to a frivolous person.”
“And you considered Miss Mayfield a frivolous person?”
“Frivolous to a degree that makes me wonder I could ever waste my time
in her company.”
“Will you do me the favour to tell me all you know of the circumstances
under which Miss Mayfield left her home?” said Eustace. “I can assure
you that my motive for making these inquiries is no idle or unworthy
one. You will be doing me a great service if you will give me what
information you can in relation to this subject.”
“If you put it in that manner, I will tell you all I know,” answered
Mrs. Willows, “though it is not a pleasant subject--especially to me,
who might have suffered by Celia Mayfield’s conduct. Goodness knows
what people might have said of _me_ if my pa’s position in Bayham
hadn’t been what it was.”
There was a pause, during which the woman rearranged her silk dress,
and then she began her friend’s story with a stony face, and extreme
deliberation of manner.
“I suppose you are aware that Celia Mayfield ran away from her home
with a gentleman called Hardwick, or at least calling himself Hardwick,
who was staying at the George Hotel when he became acquainted with
her, and who it was easy to see was very much above her in station.
Indeed, how she could ever bring herself to think that he would marry
her, would be a mystery to me if I did not know how her vanity had
been fostered and her looks praised by people who ought to have known
better. She did think so; and when I warned her of the danger her
imprudent conduct might lead her into, she persuaded me to think
the same. ‘Very well, Celia,’ I said; ‘you know best; but it isn’t
often that a gentleman whose pa is in parliament marries the daughter
of a stationer.’ He had let it slip that his father was a member of
parliament, and he had let many things slip which proved that he
belonged to rich people and to high people.”
“He was a young man, I believe?”
“Five-and-twenty at most, and very handsome.”
As Mrs. Willows pronounced these words, her gaze became suddenly fixed,
and she sat staring at her visitor with an expression of extreme
astonishment.
“Perhaps you are related to him?” she said, interrogatively.
“I never saw him in my life. But why do you ask the question?”
“Because you are like him. I didn’t notice the resemblance until just
now; for it’s so long since I saw him that I’d almost forgotten what he
was like. But as I spoke to you his face came back to me. Yes, you are
very like him. And you are really not related?”
“I tell you again, Mrs. Willows, that I never saw this man in my life.
It is the Mayfield family in which I am interested. Pray go on with
your story.”
The beating of his heart quickened as he spoke. He had discovered
something at least from this woman. It was something to know that he
resembled the nameless father who had abandoned him.
“The likeness between us is a birthright of which he could not rob me,”
thought the young man; “or he would have deprived me of that, as well
as of the rest.”
“I believe the gentleman had written a book,” resumed Mrs. Willows:
“a story, or a novel, or something of that kind. Celia went on about
it in her childish way. It was the most beautiful story that ever
was written, and so on, she said. My poor pa forbade me reading
novels, and I had to give my solemn promise that no book from the
circulating-library should ever enter this house, before he would
allow me to walk out with Celia Mayfield. When she began to read the
book, she didn’t know anything about the author; but while she was
reading it, he happened to go into the shop, and she went on about
the story to him as she had gone on about it to me; and I suppose his
vanity was flattered by her childish talk, for there never was such a
childish creature about books and flowers and birds. He told her that
he had written the book; and then he wrote to her, first a note, which
was delivered by his servant, who hung about the library until he got
the opportunity of giving it to Celia unknown to any one; and then
letters, which were addressed to the post-office: and she showed me the
letters. I said, ‘Celia, these are not letters which a prudent young
woman ought to receive.’ But it was no use talking to her. The first
letter that was sent to the post-office lay there nearly a fortnight
before she went to fetch it; and all that time she went on about it
to me when we were out walking; for he had told her he should write,
and address his letter to the post-office. Should she fetch it, or
shouldn’t she? I said, ‘If you take my advice, Celia, you will have
nothing to do with it. People who mean honourably don’t send their
letters to post-offices.’ But one evening, when we were coming home
from a walk, we passed through the street where the office is; and she
let go my arm all of a sudden, ran into the shop, and came out with a
letter in her hand. As soon as we turned the corner into a bye-lane,
where there was nobody about, she kissed the letter, and went on like a
mad thing, and then she read it to me; and she was as proud and happy
as if a king had written to her.”
“God help her, poor innocent soul!” murmured Eustace, tenderly.
“I don’t know what you call _innocence_,” exclaimed the matron,
with severity; “but if you consider _that_ the conduct of a
prudent young woman, I do not. The end of the story proved that I was
right. Celia and I had been in the habit of walking on the sands in a
sheltered place beyond the bay, where there was very little company,
and where two young women could walk together without being followed
or stared at. We walked there almost every evening when it was fine,
and the gentleman at the George used to meet us there, and talk to
Celia. I told her that I disapproved of these meetings; but she had a
way of talking people over, and she talked me over, and made me believe
what she believed. If the gentleman really wanted to marry her, there
could be no harm in her meeting him in the company of a young female
friend. Things went on like this for some time, and then, when the
summer season was quite over, the gentleman went away. Celia fretted a
great deal; but she told me he was coming back in the winter to see her
father and to explain everything, and there’d be an end to all secresy.
I said, ‘Celia, don’t build upon his coming back. It’s not my wish to
make you unhappy; but, if you take _my_ advice, you’ll forget all
about him.’”
“But he did return?”
“I suppose he did, though I never saw him after the summer. I gave
Celia Mayfield good advice, and she wasn’t pleased to hear it. We had
some words upon the subject; and as my pa’s position was very superior
to Mr. Mayfield’s, it was not likely I should suffer myself to be put
upon by his daughter. When Celia wanted to make friends with me, I
declined; and from that time we never spoke. I sat under Mr. Slowcome,
at the Baptist chapel in Walham Lane, and Celia Mayfield attended the
parish-church; so we didn’t often meet. When we did meet, Celia used
to look at me in her childish way, as if she wanted to be friends; but
I made a point of looking straight before me. I heard nothing more of
the Mayfields until one morning in the winter, when a young person came
into our shop and told me that Celia had run away from home.”
“Was the manner of her leaving generally known?”
“It was not. The Mayfields kept things very close. There was a great
deal of talk, as you may suppose, and people had their opinions; but
nothing was ever known for certain; and from that time to this I have
never set eyes on Celia Mayfield.”
“And you never will,” said Eustace, solemnly. “She is dead.”
Mrs. Willows murmured an expression of surprise. Her hard, grim face
softened a little, and when she spoke again, her tone was less severe.
“I am sorry to hear that,” she said. “I never expected to meet Celia
Mayfield again; but I am sorry to hear that she is dead.”
Even for this hard nature the sanctity of the grave had some softening
influence. The linendraper’s wife could afford to think a little more
indulgently of the spoiled and petted beauty whose loveliness had
been so bitter to her, now that she knew her rival had passed into
those shadowy regions where earthly charms count for so little. Some
faint touch of tenderness, some memory of her own youth--when Bayham
was gayer and more pleasant, and even the sands and the sea had
seemed brighter to her than now--came back to the grim, purse-proud
tradeswoman, and one solitary tear glittered in her stern, gray eye.
She brushed it away quickly, ashamed of the human emotion.
“You can tell me nothing more respecting the man who lured your friend
from her home?”
“Nothing. Celia told me that the name by which we knew him was an
assumed one, but she never told me his real name. I don’t believe that
even she knew it. She told me that he was very grand and very rich; and
it was easy for any one to discover from his conversation that he was a
gentleman, and had travelled half over the world.”
“Do you remember the title of the book that he had written?”
Mrs. Willows shook her head.
“In one or more volumes?”
“In one volume. I have seen it in Celia’s hand. Mr. Hardwick gave her a
copy of it, bound in green morocco.”
“Had Miss Mayfield any other friend than yourself?” Eustace asked,
after a brief pause. “Was there any one else in whom she would have
been likely to confide?”
“No one else. Society in Bayham is very limited. Mr. Mayfield was so
wrapped up in his daughter, and had such high ideas, on account of
being the son of a clergyman, that he scarcely thought any one good
enough to associate with her. I was Celia’s only female friend.”
“I hope you will think more tenderly of her in future,” said Eustace,
gently; “she is now beyond all human praise or blame, and the turf
will lie none the less lightly above her grave, let the world judge
her never so harshly. But I, who knew her and loved her, would like to
think that the companion of her youth remembered her kindly.”
A second solitary tear bedewed the eye of Mrs. Willows.
“I’m sure I bear no malice,” she said, in an injured tone. “If Celia
and I were at variance for some months before she left, it was more
her fault than mine, for I gave her the best advice, and gave it with
the best intentions. But I am quite willing to forget all that. Do you
know if the gentleman who called himself Mr. Hardwick really did marry
her? People in Bayham concluded, by her not coming back, that she was
altogether deceived and deluded by his fine promises; and it was said
her father’s heart was broken by her conduct. He died very soon after,
as you may be aware; and his wife did not long survive him.”
“I know very little of your friend’s sad story,” answered Eustace; “but
I know that her life for twenty years was as pure as the life of an
angel--as self-denying as that of a saint.”
There was no more to be said. Eustace thanked Mrs. Willows for her
compliance with his wishes, and took his departure. He went out into
the High Street of Bayham very little wiser than when he had entered
the prosperous emporium of Kimber and Willows. He walked slowly along
the quiet street, and found himself by and by on the outskirts of the
town, strolling onward in an objectless manner, and meditating upon his
mother’s broken story.
When he paused for the first time to look about him he was face to face
with the sea. Behind him a terrace of white houses reflected the full
blaze of the southern sun. Before him lay the bay--a wide expanse of
tawny sand, with pools of sunlit water glimmering here and there.
The tide was low, and the sandy amphitheatre lay open to the foot of
the pedestrian. On one side of the bay rose a tall cliff; on the other
a stretch of sand lay beyond the jutting line of rocks. Eustace crossed
the bay in this direction. He wanted to see the place in which Celia
Mayfield had walked with her false lover, and he knew that this lonely
stretch of sand beyond the rocks must be the spot alluded to in his
father’s letters, and mentioned that day by Mrs. Willows.
It was a fit spot for a lovers’ trysting-place--remote from the voices
of the little town, and yet within the sound of church-bells, which
took a silvery tone as they floated hitherward across the rippling
water. Summer visitors to Bayham rarely penetrated beyond the screen of
rocks which sheltered the bay, and this smooth stretch of sand was not
often invaded by the spades and barrows of noisy children or the feet
of idle damsels. It was an enchanted cove, which might have been sacred
to the sea-nymphs, so seldom did human creatures disturb its poetic
calm.
Here Eustace lingered for some time, still meditating the story of his
mother’s youth, and with strangely intermingled feelings of tenderness
and anger in his heart. How could he ever think of _her_ with
sufficient love and pity? How could he ever think of her destroyer
without considering how he should avenge her wrongs?
“So trusting, so childlike, and deceived so cruelly! What a villain he
must have been! what an unutterable villain!” thought Celia’s son,
as he contemplated the scene of his mother’s love-story. It should
have been such a sweet idyll--a modern fairy tale of rustic beauty and
princely truth and chivalry--and it had been instead so dark a history
of falsehood and shame.
The sun was low in the west when Eustace left that lonely sea-shore. He
had been walking there for hours, indifferent alike to the progress of
time and to the fact that he had eaten nothing since nine o’clock that
morning. And after leaving the sands he did not return immediately to
his hotel, but made his way to the parish churchyard, guided by the old
Norman tower, which stood out in sombre relief against a rosy evening
sky. There was just light enough to serve him in his search amongst
the tombstones; nor was he long finding that which he sought--a tall,
white head-stone, standing near the low wall which bounded the crowded
burial-place. The churchyard stood on rising ground; and the irregular
roofs and chimneys of the town, with here and there a glimpse of
foliage, and the broad purple sea for a background, made no unlovely
picture in the soft evening light.
Eustace knelt upon the grass beside the simple grave, and in that pious
attitude read the inscription on the head-stone:
Sacred to the Memory
OF
EUSTACE THORNBURN MAYFIELD,
YOUNGEST SON OF THE LATE SAMUEL MAYFIELD, CURATE OF
ASHE, IN THIS COUNTY,
Obiit April 3, 1846, ætat. 52;
AND OF
MARY CELIA,
HIS WIDOW, SECOND DAUGHTER OF THE LATE MR. JAMES
HOWDEN, FARMER,
Obiit February 1, 1847, ætat. 49.
This stone is erected by their affectionate children.
“Have I any right to think of them as my grandfather and my
grandmother?” the young man asked himself. “The law would tell me no.
But I take my stand upon a higher law than that made by political
economists, and claim the right to call these my kindred, and to avenge
their injuries.”
CHAPTER VII.
MR. JERNINGHAM’S GUEST.
THEODORE DE BERGERAC and Harold Jerningham were friends of thirty
years’ standing. There was some distant relationship between them--some
remote cousinship arising from the marriage of an exiled Jerningham
of Jacobite principles with a De Bergerac, in the reign of George
the Second. But this inscrutable cousinship had nothing to do with
the friendship between the two men. _That_ was a sincere and
spontaneous affection, such as exists now and then between two people
as different from each other as it is possible for creatures of the
same species to be. Harold was ten years younger than his friend in
actual years, and his senior by a century in all qualities of heart and
mind. The elder man retained the freshness and simplicity of a child
at sixty years of age; the younger had parted with every attribute
of youth before the advent of his twenty-fifth birthday. Both were
highly gifted: but one had scattered the treasures of intellect on
every road, and wasted the powers of his brain in a hundred ignoble
pursuits; while the other had enriched his mind unconsciously in the
calm seclusion of a scholar’s retreat. An angel might have read the
innermost secrets of Theodore de Bergerac’s heart, and would have
found therein no taint of earthly grossness; but there had been times
when devils might have rejoiced in the thoughts of Harold Jerningham.
And yet the two men were friends, and had preserved an unbroken
friendship for nearly thirty years. A Philip of Orleans, steeped to
the very lips in the poisonous teaching of a Dubois, will in the hour
of his deepest degradation respect the purity of childhood. Before
the stainless robes of perfect innocence the most hardened profligate
bows his head and covers his face, ashamed of the vices he is wont to
be proud of--softened, melted, vanquished by that invincible purity.
Thus it had been with Harold Jerningham. For this world-weary, hardened
sinner the simple-minded scholar was sacred as a child. De Bergerac
knew nothing of that Jerningham of the bachelor’s house in Park Lane:
Jerningham the irresistible, the man who was an exile from the houses
of careful fathers and devoted husbands; the man whose life would have
furnished subject-matter for half a dozen romances and more than one
tragedy. When Harold Jerningham entered his friend’s house he put away
the baser half of himself. A little cynical, a little bitter, a little
hard and worldly he must needs be, even in that innocent society; but
Jerningham the free-thinker and the profligate melted into thin air on
the threshold of Theodore de Bergerac’s dwelling.
The two friends did not meet very often, though the house which
Theodore de Bergerac had occupied ever since his first coming to
England stood on the border of Mr. Jerningham’s park in Berkshire,--a
grand old park, in the midst of which there was a great house that
had once been splendid, but about which there was now a certain air
of shabbiness and decay. How should a mansion preserve its warmth
and grandeur when the master crossed its threshold so rarely, and
during his brief visits preferred a couple of dingy chambers on the
ground-floor to that spacious suite of apartments, with panelled walls
and painted ceilings, in which his forefathers had held their state?
M. de Bergerac was a warm partizan of the Orleans family, and in the
revolution of ’48 had turned his back upon his father’s country. He had
come straight to England, where he had found a fair young English wife
in the person of a Berkshire curate’s eldest daughter, and had accepted
the hospitality of his friend, Mr. Jerningham, so far as to occupy an
old-fashioned farm-house on the borders of the park--a house which had
been built for a bailiff in the days of some departed Jerningham, but
which had long fallen into disuse. Harold would fain have persuaded the
exile to take up his quarters in the big house, with all the lazy,
over-fed retainers at his disposal; but De Bergerac ridiculed his
friend’s offer.
“What should I do with your thirty bedchambers,” he wrote in answer to
Harold’s letter of invitation, “and your great corridors, along which
one could drive a coach-and-pair, and your housekeeper in a stiff silk
gown, and all your grooms and hangers-on? I would as soon live in
the palace of Versailles. Even kings and queens grow tired of their
palaces, you will perceive; and the man who has sunk millions in the
creation of a Versailles must needs seek domestic comfort at Marly.
You cannot endure your howling wilderness yourself,--you, who have
been accustomed to splendid habitations,--and yet ask me to take up my
abode in your thirty bedchambers, and abandon myself to the tyranny
of your awful housekeeper. No, my dear Jerningham; give me the little
Trianon--that tumble-down old farm-house you showed me last year, in
the midst of a quaint Dutch flower-garden--and I shall be happy. All I
want is a room big enough and dry enough to hold my books, and I will
not envy your gracious Queen her pompous château of Windsor.”
So the scholar and lover of books came to the farm-house, which Harold
Jerningham had taken care to make weather-tight and snug before the
exile’s arrival. De Bergerac recognized the handiwork of his friend in
the arrangement of this comfortable English hermitage. There were a few
rare old Dutch pictures, a small head by Holbein, a highly-finished
little bit by Canaletti, hanging in the oak-panelled parlour, which
no farm-bailiff had been privileged to gaze upon. There were quaint
little inlaid cabinets between the windows, with that delightful
shabbiness of aspect and mellow depth of tint which distinguishes the
treasures of Christie and Manson’s saleroom from the glaring freshness
of modern marqueterie. And on the cabinets were fragile odds and ends
of Derby and Worcester, Chelsea and Battersea, intermingled with those
dingy-looking bronzes and intaglios which the soul of the collector
loveth. And the biggest room in the old farm-house, once a kitchen, had
been lined from floor to ceiling with carved oaken shelves, for the
reception of the newcomer’s library; while the great yawning fireplace,
in which hinds and shepherds had supped their evening ale, and roasted
their sturdy legs, in the days that were gone, was now lined with
encaustic tiles, and furnished with a modern-antique grate of black
iron-work and glittering steel. When Harold Jerningham was pleased to
be generous, he obeyed his impulses in a princely fashion. He was not
a good man; but his vices and virtues were alike of the _vieille
roche_, and were instinct with a kind of dignity. Let Lucifer fall
never so low, he is the prince of devils still, and will show himself
grander in his debasement than fiends of meaner rank.
The country-people in the neighbourhood of Greenlands were ready to
receive M. de Bergerac with open arms: but he did not often avail
himself of their friendly hospitality. He was serenely happy among his
books and manuscripts, in the chamber which his friend had beautified
for him, and had no thought of seeking any other kind of happiness. The
great scheme of his life, the very beginning and end of his existence,
was the completion of a book which was to supply an existing void in
the world of books. To this achievement he devoted his days and nights,
choosing all his reading with reference to his one great scheme. The
subject possessed unfailing fascination for the mind of the scholar.
It was an inexhaustible quarry, rich with gems of purest water; and
De Bergerac dug patiently for the precious jewels, content to let the
years slip past him unmarked, save by the slow growth of his mighty
treatise. When the work seemed ripening, and the hour of its completion
near at hand, the scholar trembled, for he remembered Gibbon’s walk in
the moonlit garden at Lausanne, and the desolation which came down upon
the worker when he felt that his task was finished. Happily, the hour
of completion, which De Bergerac dreaded, was very slow to come. There
was an end to the history of ancient Rome; but it appeared, at times,
as if there could be no end to the history of superstition.
The exile had passed his fortieth birthday, and had been but six
months in England, when he married a fair young English girl--in a
fit of absence of mind, said the ignorant, who tried to account for
this unexpected alliance. But Harold Jerningham fathomed the secret of
his friend’s marriage. The girl was the daughter of a curate, an old
Orientalist, of whose reading De Bergerac had gladly availed himself
for his beloved work, and in whose pleasant cottage he had therefore
been a constant visitor. The curate’s daughter had been charmed out of
the dullness of her life by the society of the courteous exile; and
from looking up to him with reverential tenderness as a mentor and
friend, she had unconsciously grown to regard him with a deeper and
more tender feeling than that gentle, womanly friendship. A tone, a
look, an imperceptible something not to be defined by words, revealed
this feeling to De Bergerac before the girl was fully aware of it
herself; and could he be less than grateful, this exile of forty? could
his own heart fail to yield to so insidious and innocent an attack?
Hence arose this marriage, which was so great a wonder to those who had
only a superficial knowledge of the Frenchman’s character.
It was a union of perfect happiness. M. de Bergerac’s modest income
was more than enough for the Arcadian existence which he and his
young wife led in the Berkshire farm-house. The curate’s daughter was
country-bred, and was a fitting mistress for such an establishment. She
brought the garden to the rarest perfection of floricultural beauty,
and she distinguished herself by the administration of a wonderful
poultry-yard. She was as happy as the summer day was long among her
simple duties; while he, who in her eyes appeared the greatest of human
scholars and the most adorable of men, sat alone in the sacred chamber,
which she entered always with subdued footsteps, as if it had been a
religious temple. It was her pride and delight to be useful to the man
she loved. She worked for him, and managed for him, and hoarded for
him; and he found himself all the richer, even in the matter of sordid
cash, for her sweet companionship. The student, looking up from his
books and manuscripts, beheld cows grazing in the rich meadow before
his window, and was told that the cows were his, and that the produce
of those stupid creatures could be transformed into money, with which
rare old black-letter volumes and manuscripts of unspeakable value
could be bought in London sale-rooms.
For seven years Theodore de Bergerac tasted the perfection of calm
domestic happiness, and then the cup was snatched away from him. The
bright face faded; the indefatigable housewife was fain to rest from
her beloved labours. Little by little the bitter truth--which at first
seemed almost an impossibility--came home to the stricken heart of the
husband, and he knew that he was doomed to survive his young wife.
The dreaded hour came, and she left him--very lonely without her,
but, happily, not quite alone. She left one little girl--a fairer and
brighter likeness of herself; and upon this young life the widower set
his hopes of earthly happiness.
It was only natural that his unfinished book should become so much the
dearer to him by reason of this great human sorrow. The stricken heart
refused all comfort, but the agonized mind sought to beguile itself
into forgetfulness of pain. The student went back to his books, and
buried himself more deeply than of old amidst the ruins and ashes of
the past. His days were spent at his desk. His soul, sorely stricken
in this lower world of hard realities, wandered away and lost itself
in the infinite regions of mythic poetry. As the years crept past him
unawares, and his daughter blossomed into early womanhood, and the same
bright face peeped in again at his window which had shone upon him in
the brief happiness of his married life, it almost seemed to him as if
that terrible anguish, that desolating loss, had been no more than a
dreadful dream.
To this man’s quiet home Harold Jerningham came sometimes as to a haven
of shelter. He was wont to drop in upon the modest Berkshire household
unexpectedly, with the bronze of an Oriental sun still upon his face,
or a fur coat, in which he had travelled from St. Petersburgh, hanging
loosely on his arm. He came hither for rest, for a brief interval of
repose from “the fever called living;” and it was here, in the house
that had been built for his great-grandfather’s bailiff, that the owner
of three country-seats and an almost inexhaustible revenue found the
nearest approach to happiness which he had experienced during the last
twenty years.
Eustace Thorburn’s arrangements for beginning his new life were of the
simplest order. He found a letter from M. de Bergerac waiting for him
on his return to London--such a letter as only a gentleman can write--a
letter which placed the secretary at once on the footing of a friend,
and gave him promise of friendly welcome.
The young man spent the last night of his stay in London with Daniel
Mayfield. The uncle and nephew dined together at one of those snug
little haunts which the literary Bohemian affected, and Daniel’s soul
expanded under the influence of Chambertin at nine shillings a bottle.
He had received a cheque in payment of his latest Massacre of the
Innocents in the way of reviewing, and it was in vain that Eustace
tried to arrest his extravagant orders.
“The best you can do for us in the shape of dinner, Tom,” he
said to the waiter, with whom he was on the familiar terms of an
_habitué_; “and--let me see the wine-card: yes, Dancer sticks to
his old prices, I perceive. What nethermost circle can that man expect
to inhabit in the under world, I wonder? Johannisberg with the oysters,
Tom: if you were well up in your Charles de Bernard, you would be aware
that Chablis is the mistake of the half-educated diner. After the
soup you may give us a bottle of the old Madeira--_the_ Madeira,
remember--no modern French concoction, flavoured with burnt-sugar.
We will not go into sparkling, Tom--sparkling is the luxury of the
vulgar; wines that leap and bubble are the pet delusion of the _oi
polloi_; we will therefore confine ourselves to the borders of the
Rhine. If your still Moselle is worthy of a gentleman’s attention, you
may bring us a bottle. The Chambertin I know to be tolerable; so after
dinner we will stick to _that_.”
Never before had Daniel Mayfield introduced his sister’s son to any of
the haunts in which the best hours of his own careless life had been
wasted. The young man was as temperate as a girl, and the dinner-giver
had his carefully chosen wines to himself. But as Mayfield grew gay and
eloquent with the warming influence of the Burgundian hillside, Eustace
Thorburn’s spirits rose in sympathy with his companion. For there is a
subtle influence in wine which communicates itself to the man who does
not drink as well as to the man who does; and he must be slow and dull
of soul who can sit amongst the worshippers of Bacchus and not feel the
fiery presence of the god, let his own beverage be no stronger than
water.
“I have never brought you here before, and I should not have brought
you here to-night, Eustace,” said Daniel, and he passed his newly
filled glass of Burgundy beneath his nostrils, with the gesture of a
connoisseur; “I should not have brought you here to-night, my lad,
pleasant though it is to me to see your bright face across the rosy
vapour of the South, if you and I were not going to part company.
This is Bohemia, Eustace--the land in which jolly good fellows go to
the dogs in their own jolly way--and I’m not quite certain that it’s
the worst way a man can travel to his ruin. We spend our money, and
we live in fear of sheriff’s officers, and we die in sponging-houses;
but, after all, we escape many of the heartburnings which your very
respectable people suffer. We are no shams--we live our own lives;
and are ourselves alone--no phantasmal simulacra of other men. We
take existence lightly--share our own good fortune with our needy
brothers--and envy no man his luck. But if you have poetic aspirations
and noble ambitions, if you want to be a great and a good man, keep
clear of us--no great man ever issued from our ranks. We have talent,
we have sometimes even genius; but we never achieve. Jones is of the
stuff that makes a noble historian; but Jones must have his night in
his pet tavern, and a five-pound note at the service of the Pythias of
the hour; so he writes showy essays for the magazines. Smith turns his
unfinished picture to the wall, in the hour when he was budding into
a Rubens, to paint pot-boilers for the fashionable dealers--a young
man and woman in a boat off Twickenham, with spinachy foliage and a
flimsy blue sky, spotted with little ragged dabs of the palette-knife;
or a girl in a striped petticoat playing croquet against a background
in which you may count the threads of the canvas. Browne might write
a comedy which would remind the critics of Sheridan; but he cannot
afford to polish the graceful turns of his dialogue or study the unity
of his design, so he does a bad adaptation of a bad French vaudeville,
and gets twenty pounds down on the nail for his labour. We possess
the elements of greatness; but we can’t wait--we want ready money.
The man with a wife and seven children may struggle out of poverty
into greatness; but for the jolly good-fellow, with half a dozen
boon-companions, enduring success is an impossibility.”
Eustace had never before heard his uncle speak so seriously of himself
and his own set.
“You may do great things yet, Uncle Dan,” he said, earnestly; “let me
give up this Berkshire engagement, and stop in town to work with you.
Cut all the boon-companions, and let us go in earnestly for honest hard
work. I want to see your name allied to some perfect book; your talent
gets frittered away upon anonymous reviews and essays. Oliver Goldsmith
wrote the _Vicar of Wakefield_, and you know he was something of
a Bohemian.”
“He was a Bohemian, who lived among such men as Johnson and Burke and
Reynolds,” answered Daniel; “Bohemia has degenerated since those days.
And how many more stories, as perfect as the _Vicar of Wakefield_,
might _not_ simple-hearted Noll have written if he had not been
something of a Bohemian! Your great workers are jog-trot stay-at-home
creatures. William Shakespeare was a respectable citizen, who saved
money, and settled himself comfortably in his native town before he was
my age, and sued his friend for a trifling debt, and made a will in
which his domestic carefulness reveals itself by allusions to bedsteads
and such-like household furniture; whereby you may perceive the
legendary character of all popular records of the poet’s youth, for the
man who began life by stealing deer and holding horses would never have
developed into the bequeather of bedsteads. So no more, lad; I shall
hide my light in anonymous essays and reviews as long as I live, for I
shall always be in want of ready money.”
“Unless I can make a fortune big enough for us both, Uncle Dan,” said
the young man, hopefully. At three-and-twenty one fancies it such an
easy thing to make a fortune. All the high-roads to the temple of fame
radiate before the feet of youth, and it seems a mere matter of choice
whether one is to be Shakespeare or Bacon.
“If you made the fortune of a Rothschild or a Pereira, you would never
make me a rich man,” cried Daniel. “Turn the waters of the Pactolus
into my pocket to-day, and before a month is out there will not be left
one vestige of the golden river. If I were a second Midas, endowed with
the power of changing vulgar wooden chairs and tables into so much
solid gold, my friends and companions and the tavern-keepers would take
the chairs and tables, and leave me a pauper. I must go my own way,
dear boy; and the further my road lies from yours the better for you.
Let me hear from you sometimes; and even if your letters are left
unanswered, think that they are carried in the pocket nearest your
Daniel’s heart, and that they are his consolation when the world goes
ill with him.”
CHAPTER VIII.
GREENLANDS.
IT was the drowsiest hour of a drowsy August afternoon when Eustace
Thorburn made his way on foot from the Windsor terminus to the
bailiff’s house at Greenlands. He had put his luggage into a great
lumbering fly, which was to crawl after him to his destination; and
he went on foot through the rich pastoral country, with the grandest
castle in the world looming upon him at every turn, in all its proud
array of battlemented tower and terrace, keep and chapel. He went to
begin his new life, and the country through which he went seemed to
him more beautiful than his dreams of Paradise. Remember that he had
newly come from the sandy flats of Flemish Flanders, and that the
fairest landscape he had beheld of late was a row of lindens sheltering
a sluggish canal, and a herd of cattle browsing upon sun-burnt
table-lands. The shadow of a bitter grief was about and around him,
and all the sunlight and beauty of the outer world seemed very dim and
remote to him--something fair and beautiful in which he had no actual
part, like a picture seen from afar off. But the influence of all this
outward loveliness penetrated to his poor desolate heart, and warmed
and melted it. His thoughts amidst these woods and pastures could
never be so bitter, it seemed to him, as they had been in the stony
quadrangle at Villebrumeuse. He thought of his mother as he walked
slowly along the quiet roads and byways; but he no longer brooded
gloomily upon her wrongs on earth as he had been wont to brood. He
fancied her happy in heaven.
His way to Greenlands led him by the low meads athwart which the
Thames winds like a silver ribbon, for the great neglected park of
which Harold Jerningham was owner lay on the border of that delicious
river. The way was very lonely, and somewhat intricate. Eustace had
occasion to stop at more than one cottage-door, and to ask his way of
more than one rosy-faced rustic matron, who came from her wash-tub to
answer his inquiries, sometimes accompanied by a toddling child, that
peered curiously at the stranger from between the lattice-work of a
garden-gate. The way was long and lonely; but at last, when the sun was
low, the pedestrian came to a gate in a stout oak fence, and knew that
he was on the threshold of Harold Jerningham’s domain. The gate was
unlocked, as the country people had told Eustace that it would be. The
gate opened into the wildest region of the park; but at the end of a
deep glade the traveller saw the great red-brick mansion, massive and
stately, on the summit of a grassy slope.
“A noble domain,” he thought, as he stopped to contemplate the scene
before him. “Perhaps the heir to it is a young man with a father who is
prouder of him than of lands or houses, or wealth or name. I can fancy
the festivities and rejoicings when _he_ came of age. There were
great tents on the lawn yonder, I dare say, and oxen roasted whole, and
monster casks of ale set running.”
Eustace Thorburn’s imagination filled in all the details of that
possible picture. He could see that imaginary heir walking slowly
through a joyous crowd, with his arm linked in his father’s. It was
upon the image of that father the young man’s mind dwelt with a strange
melancholy yearning, half sorrow, half bitterness. How the proud face
softened into tenderness, and the eyes grew dim with tears, as the
father listened to the shouts and clamour of an admiring throng! This
fatherless young man could so vividly imagine the love which must exist
between a father and his son. Perhaps he imagined some more exalted
feeling than ever did exist in human breasts. Perhaps he exaggerated
the joys of such an affection; as the parched traveller in the desert
may imagine unutterable deliciousness in a draught of the water that is
spilt and wasted by heedless hands at the public fountain of a city.
As the traveller drew near to the red-brick mansion the vision of the
possible festivity melted away, for he saw that no festival could have
been celebrated in that place for many a year gone by. The palace of
the Sleeping Beauty, buried deep in the innermost recesses of a forest,
and forgotten by waking mankind, could have scarcely been more lonely
or neglected of aspect than this old Berkshire mansion. The rabbits
frisked across the young man’s pathway as he went through the shadowy
arcades, and the golden plumage of a pheasant glimmered here and there
among the fern and underwood. Everywhere there was neglect and decay.
The grass grew long and rank, and even in the gardens, where the
handiwork of the gardener was visible, and where Eustace saw two feeble
old men mowing the grass, it was evident that the work was only half
done.
The path which Eustace had been directed to take led him past the
gardens, which were only divided by an invisible fence from the park.
He could have gone to the bailiff’s house by the high-road had he
chosen; but this short-cut across the park saved him nearly a mile,
and was a pleasanter way. To Eustace it was unspeakably delightful.
The solemn quiet of the place imparted a new charm to its natural
loveliness. A turn in the path brought him presently upon a wide
expanse of smooth turf, shadowed here and there by great oaks and
beeches, and across this wooded lawn he saw the river, gleaming
bright and blue, athwart a fringe of trembling rushes. He paused for
a few moments, transfixed by the tranquil loveliness of this English
landscape, steeped in the rosy light of a summer evening.
“I suppose the owner of the place is a poor man, who cannot afford to
occupy it,” he thought; whereby it may be seen how a stranger, who
judges by appearances, is likely to form a false conclusion.
Eustace Thorburn was ready to bestow his compassion upon the man
who was lord of this enchanting domain, and yet unable to enjoy its
loveliness.
The gray walls and red-tiled roof of the bailiff’s house appeared
between two masses of foliage as he drew near the border of the park.
It was a house with many gables and great stacks of rickety-looking
chimneys. Such a house as inspires contempt in the mind of a practical
modern architect, by reason of the space that is frittered away on
unnecessary passages, and little bits of rooms too small and dark
for any civilized inhabitant, and ghastly cupboards in unsuspected
places. It was a house in whose ample cellarage a gang of burglars
might have lain perdu for a week, without the family being made aware
of their presence. It was a house in which one could hardly retire to
rest without expecting to see a pair of appalling Eyes staring at one
through a crevice in the panelling, or two dreadful Boots emerging from
beneath the drapery of the bed. If furniture of the commonest fashion,
and fresh from the upholsterer, takes to itself awful voices after
midnight, and creaks and groans with dismal significance in a modern
London habitation, as it will--witness universal experience--what might
not be expected from old oak bureaus and Elizabethan arm-chairs in this
gabled dwelling? The out-buildings and disused chambers had that damp,
earthy odour, which is known to every imaginative mind as the smell of
ghosts; and that ubiquitous and nameless suicide, who seems to have
hung himself or cut his throat at some remote date in every old house,
had hung himself here, and made himself obnoxious to simple Berkshire
maid-servants by those Cock-lane-like scrapings and tappings and
rushings which the sternly commonplace mind is apt to attribute to rats.
This was the place to which Eustace Thorburn came in the rosy summer
evening to begin his new life. The garden, which he entered by a low
wooden gate, was the growth of a hundred and fifty years, and was as
securely walled in by thick and high hedges of holly and yew as it
could have been by the work of any mortal builder. The air was odorous
with the perfume of bright English flowers; and as the stranger drew
near the house he was greeted with such a burst of honest woodland
music from the throats of blackbirds and thrushes, larks and linnets,
as he never remembered to have heard in all his life before.
They were caged birds that sang so blithely, and their cages hung
in the roomy wooden porch with a thatched roof, over which there
was spread a curtain of flowering clematis and rich crimson-veined
honeysuckle. Out of this dusky porch a great Newfoundland dog sprang at
the intruder, awakening distant echoes by his deep-toned thunder. But
a woman’s voice, very sweet and melodious, as the young man thought,
called from the cottage, “Down, Hephæstus!--quiet, boy; quiet!” Eustace
wondered what kind of woman this could be who lived in the student’s
cottage, and called her dog Hephæstus.
The Newfoundland crouched at the stranger’s feet, obedient to the
sound of that familiar voice; and then a man’s footstep sounded in
the porch, and Theodore de Bergerac came out to meet his secretary.
Eustace had been too much occupied by bitter and sorrowful thoughts
within the last week to puzzle himself by speculative ideas about his
new employer; but of course he had some vague notion--unconsciously
conceived--of what M. de Bergerac would be like, and the real M.
de Bergerac was the very reverse of that shadowy creature of his
imagining. There had been in his mind some faint picture of a little
wizen old man, with a weird face and a black-velvet skull-cap. Why a
black-velvet skull-cap he could not have said; but possibly that kind
of head-gear is in a manner allied with the idea of extreme erudition
and much consumption of midnight oil. He had fancied a frail, wasted
creature, with long, straggling white hair falling in unkempt locks
upon the greasy collar of a dressing-gown; and lo! the man who came to
greet him was tall and stalwart, with a bright, frank face, which had
once been very handsome, and was handsome still, and iron-gray hair
arranged with scrupulous neatness. He walked rather lame, and carried
a cane with a head of oxidized silver, exquisitely modelled--a gem in
its way, like all the surroundings of its possessor, who had the taste
of a Bernard or a Bohn.
This was Theodore de Bergerac, the man who at sixty years of age
retained the freshness and gaiety of six-and-twenty. The lameness from
which he suffered had afflicted him for the last thirty years, for it
was the result of a musket-wound received at the siege of Antwerp. The
student had been a soldier in those days, and had done good service
under the brave leader he loved so well.
M. de Bergerac greeted Eustace with friendly courtesy. He spoke the
English language perfectly; and it was only by a certain delicate
precision of pronunciation--a somewhat measured accent--and by an
occasional Gallic locution that strangers discovered his nationality.
“Welcome to Greenlands, Mr. Thorburn. If you are fond of the country,
I think you will love Berkshire. It has all the richness of southern
France, and all the home-like comfort of Normandy. If we were a little
nearer the sea, and could catch the breath of the ocean now and then
from the summit of our hills, we should be in Paradise. But a man
cannot expect to be _quite_ in Paradise; and I suppose this is as
near an approach to Eden as we can hope for upon earth. Have you dined?
We live as people lived in French provincial towns when I was a boy;
and our hours are as early as those of the country-people round about
us. I suppose in London the world is beginning to dress for dinner.
We dined half a dozen hours ago; but I can promise you an excellent
supper. My little _ménagère_ has made arrangements for a perfect
banquet in your honour.”
Eustace wondered whether the little _ménagère_ and the lady who
called to the dog were one and the same person. It was very foolish of
him to wish that it might be so, and to imagine that the person must
needs be young and beautiful. But then poetical three-and-twenty is
subject to such foolish wishes and imaginings.
Theodore de Bergerac and his secretary went into the house, where
lights began to glimmer here and there in the dusk. The room into
which the Frenchman led Eustace had that sweet rustic charm peculiar
to country drawing-rooms; but the stranger fancied it had a certain
harmonious beauty which he had never beheld in any other apartment.
_Every_ thing in it was beautiful. There were no false forms,
no discordant tones lurking here and there to mar the harmony of the
general effect. No pert young Cupid in Parian folded his mis-shapen
wings, or uplifted his insolent pug nose before the outraged
beholder--no hideous form of modern vase or flower-pot--no gaudy
abomination of cheap Bohemian glass offended the eye; no impossible
roses and lilies in Berlin-wool and bead-work offered themselves as a
flowery couch for the visitor’s repose. A subdued harmony of form and
colour pervaded every object. The valuable books scattered lavishly
in every direction made no parade of their costliness. The rare old
china needed examination before its beauty revealed itself. Everything
was fresh and pure and delicate. There was a perfume of many flowers
mingled with the subtle aroma of Russia-leather bindings, very pleasant
to the stranger’s nostrils. New though the place was to him, he had
no sense of strangeness; he felt rather as if he had come home to
some delicious and familiar resting-place for which he had long been
yearning. Perhaps this feeling may have been a vague foreshadowing of
his fate. Perhaps he had a faint semi-consciousness of the fact that
perfect happiness was to come to him in that house.
The two men sat for some little time in the dimly-lighted room--lighted
only by a pair of small wax candles in antique bronze candle-sticks.
They talked of many things, gliding imperceptibly from one subject to
another without either jerks or pauses in the smooth current of talk.
De Bergerac was a delightful talker--playful and serious, gay and
earnest by turns--now childishly emphatic about trifles, now touching
the profoundest subjects with a graceful lightness. Eustace was charmed
by his new employer, and began to think that his lines had fallen in
pleasant places.
He may have been still more inclined to think so a few minutes later,
when a trim little maid-servant announced that supper was ready, and M.
de Bergerac led him into the dining-room.
The dining-room was only an old-fashioned oak-panelled chamber, like
the drawing-room; but the hands which had beautified the one had
imparted the same air of grace and refinement to the other. There
were more pictures and books and china, more fresh flowers in vases
of dark-blue Wedgwood: and, above all, there was that sweet home-like
aspect, which has a deeper charm than is to be imparted by the choicest
treasures of art or the fairest gifts of nature. A small round table
was laid for supper; and the bright colouring of a lobster, the
tender green of a salad, the varied hues of some fruit piled high in a
basket-shaped china dish, to say nothing of all the glitter and sparkle
of rare old-fashioned glass and silver, or the amber and ruby of wines,
made no uninviting picture under the mellow light of the lamp.
But there was a fairer picture to be seen in that chamber, which
distracted the stranger’s gaze from the hospitable preparations that
had been made for him--the picture of a girl standing by a ponderous
old easy-chair, with her white hands loosely folded on the cushion, and
with the great black Newfoundland dog at her feet.
In the course of his eventless life Eustace Thorburn had not seen
many beautiful women, so it is a small thing to say that the girl he
saw to-night seemed to him the loveliest creature he had ever beheld.
The dark beauties of Villebrumeuse, rich in the southern graces of
their Spanish ancestors, had flashed their black eyes upon the young
Englishman sometimes, as he paced the quiet streets of their city,
but had gone by unnoticed by him. It may have been that to-night his
imagination was unusually exalted, his mind peculiarly prone to receive
impressions, for it seemed to him as if he had passed out of the dull,
beaten tracks of every-day life into an enchanted region, a kind of
Arcadian fairy-land, of which this beauteous creature was a fitting
queen.
She was an honest English beauty, and the brightness of her complexion
had ripened under an English sun. Her dark-blue eyes seemed darker and
bluer by reason of the rosy bloom of her cheeks and the crimson of
her perfect mouth. The dusky gold of her hair was no fictitious charm
derived from the costly washes of a court perfumer. She was no spurious
Venetian beauty, with locks of tawny red; but a fair English girl,
fresh and bright as a woodland summer morning, pure as a flower with
the dew upon its opening petals. Her white muslin dress was unrelieved
by a trinket or a ribbon; but what need had she of colour or jewels,
whose eyes were more brilliant than the rarest sapphires, whose lips
were more precious than Neapolitan coral, and in whose innocent young
beauty there was a brightness surpassing the radiance of earthly gems?
“My daughter,” said M. de Bergerac; “my daughter Helen--Mr. Thorburn.”
Whereupon this enchanting creature greeted the stranger with a bright
smile and some indistinct murmur of welcome. They seated themselves
at the little supper-table presently, and this divine Helen looked on
admiringly while her father carved a fore-quarter of lamb. It was a
long time since Eustace had taken a hasty snack of luncheon with his
uncle, before starting for Windsor, yet he had little appetite for
that innocent Berkshire lamb. His gaze wandered from the contents of
his plate to Helen de Bergerac’s fair young face; and if he had been
sharing the Barmecide’s shadowy feast, he could scarcely have been more
unconscious of the flavour of the viands or the aroma of the wines.
“Help yourself to some of that Medoc, Mr. Thorburn,” said his host;
“and be sure you do justice to my daughter’s salad. Helen is a
salad-maker whom Brillat Savarin might have approved. The salad is the
_chef-d’œuvre_ of amateur art. No hired cook ever yet excelled in
the composition of a salad. The task is too delicate for a hand that
has been soiled by wages.”
Eustace blushed. Three-and-twenty is so painfully sensitive. Was he
not going to take wages in that house? He stole a look at his host’s
daughter, and wondered whether she felt a patrician contempt for her
father’s secretary. She had the blood of Spanish grandees in her veins,
despite her English beauty. Heaven knows what haughty hidalgo might
have infused his pride into those azure veins.
“She is aptly named,” thought the young man; “Helen, the destroyer of
ships and of men. Helen, the daughter of Jupiter and Nemesis--for I
will never believe that poor Leda was any more than the nurse of that
fatal creature. Helen, the daughter of Nemesis--let me remember her
parentage, and beware of her.”
He discovered one fact in relation to Mademoiselle de Bergerac before
the evening was over, though he could only watch her furtively now and
then while her father was talking. He discovered that the damsel’s
heart was already engaged, and that he who came to lay siege to it
would have need of patience and constancy. She was in love with her
father. She watched him with tender, reverential eyes, and listened to
him as to the voice of an oracle. Once, when his hand lay on the arm of
his chair, she lifted it gently to her lips. And in all this there was
no taint of affectation. No dryad of those Berkshire woods could have
been more innocently natural than this descendant of Spanish hidalgos.
No consciousness of her loveliness and fascination disturbed her sweet
serenity as she talked to her father’s secretary. She talked to him
of pastoral pleasures and pursuits, and he divined from her talk that
her country life was very dear to her. Her father went to London very
often, she told Eustace in the course of the evening, to buy books; and
sometimes, but very rarely, took her with him.
“And then I see the SHOPS,” she said; and by the tone of
subdued ecstacy with which she pronounced this word, Eustace discovered
for the first time that she was mortal. “I am afraid you will despise
me very much for liking to see the shops. Papa does. He thinks it is
the most foolish thing in the world to be fond of standing on a crowded
pavement to look at dresses and bonnets that one is never likely to
have.”
“Or to want,” interposed M. de Bergerac, looking proudly at the girl’s
animated face. “What could a little girl who makes butter do with fine
silk dresses; and she is able to make butter for Windsor market, this
young lady, as well as she is able to read Greek,” added the father,
fondly.
Eustace watched the two faces with a pensive admiration. Here was that
ideal father of whom he had dreamed so often; here was that pure and
perfect love which he had fancied.
It was late before the little party separated, for M. de Bergerac had
a student’s attachment to the quiet of midnight, and an absent-minded
man’s unconsciousness of the flight of time. The clock of some
village church-tower, hidden away somewhere beyond the beeches and
oaks of Greenlands, struck twelve half an hour before the Frenchman
conducted Eustace to the room that had been prepared for him. It was
only a rustic chamber, with lattice casements set deep in a wall of
old-fashioned solidity. The white draperies were faintly perfumed with
that odour of rose-leaves and lavender which is as the very breath of
the country. The lattice was open, and there was a vase of flowers
on the broad window-ledge. Eustace wondered who had arranged those
flowers. Not the trim little maid-servant surely. _She_ would have
squeezed the tender blossoms into a tightly-packed circular bunch;
while these were only a few loose half-budding roses nestling among
cool green leaves.
The lattice was open, and the harvest-moon shone full and bright above
the woods of which Harold Jerningham was master. Eustace stood at the
open casement for some time after his host had left him. He stood there
in the solemn stillness, looking out across those sombre masses of
foliage towards the moonlit river--so difficult to believe in by this
light as an earthly river, navigable by coal-barges, and instrumental
in the turning of paper-mills. He looked out upon that landscape of
semi-divine beauty, and thought with a half-contemptuous pity of
the man who owned it. Theodore de Bergerac had talked of his friend
during the varied course of that evening’s conversation, and Eustace
had discovered that the lord of Greenlands was a lonely and childless
wanderer--a wanderer in first-class carriages, and a dweller in the
most expensive caravanseries; but not the less homeless, and joyless,
and purposeless--not the less a standing example of the worthlessness
of earthly prosperity.
Eustace Thorburn, the nameless and fatherless, pitied this childless
man. It was scarcely strange if he let the underwood grow wild in his
park, and foul weeds lie thick upon his lake. For whom should he be
careful, for whom should he adorn and beautify, for whose sake should
he plant young trees, or cut new avenues in the woodland? For what
purpose should he heap up riches, who knew not what strange hand was
destined to gather them?
But the secretary did not brood long on the sorrowful fate of that
unknown Harold Jerningham. A fairer image came between him and the
moonlit park, and it bore the likeness of Helen de Bergerac.
“I waste my thoughts upon a girl’s lovely face, when I ought to be
thinking of the work that lies before me,” the young man said to
himself, in angry scorn of his weakness. “Let me remember why I am
here, and keep my brain clear of my employer’s daughter, in order that
I may be able to help him honestly with his book.”
He slept soundly and sweetly, lulled by the faint rustling of the
foliage and the far-away murmur of the river. But his slumbers were not
dreamless. He thought he saw the old red-brick mansion all ablaze with
light. Long rows of windows shone on the darkness of the night, joyous
music was wafted from the open lattices, and an indistinguishable some
one in a crowd, that seemed all confusion and clamour, told him the
heir of Greenlands had come of age.
He woke to see the sunshine in his room, and to hear Helen de Bergerac
singing a waltz of Verdi’s; while the song-birds in the porch strained
their melodious throats to the uttermost, in the endeavour to drown
their mistress’s music.
CHAPTER IX.
HOW THEY PARTED.
IN the earlier years of her loneliness, Mrs. Jerningham’s efforts in
the way of little dinners were generally crowned with success. Women
liked to dine at the toy-villa, because they knew the most eligible
men were to be met there. Men were pleased to accept Mrs. Jerningham’s
invitations, sure that at her house they would encounter none but
handsome or agreeable women. She displayed a delightful tact in the
selection of her society. She would invite a lovely inanity to sit at
her table, as a beautiful object for the contemplation of her guests;
but she would take care to balance her soulless divinity by some
decent-looking woman with brains. If the Household-Brigade element
threatened to preponderate, and there was reason to dread that the
whole talk at dinner would be about the wonderful things “fellows”
present, and other fellows absent, who were the intimate friends of
those fellows, had done in the way of deer-stalking in the Trossachs,
or salmon-fishing in Norway, during the last autumn, Mrs. Jerningham
took care to leaven it, and would despatch an invitation to some
popular littérateur or fashionable actor, some clever amateur, well up
in all the art-gossip, or a gentlemanly young explorer, lately returned
from Africa with the last ideas about the source of the Nile, and
delightful serio-comic anecdotes about encounters with crocodiles and
Abyssinian damsels.
The mistress of River Lawn made her parties pleasant at any cost of
trouble to herself. Even the dragon that guarded the enchanted garden,
in the shape of an elderly aunt, was a pleasant dragon, who dressed
well, and could talk cleverly on occasion. And then the dinners were
not those shadowy repasts which are wont to be served in mansions
where a lady reigns unassisted by masculine counsel. Mrs. Colton, the
elderly aunt, had entertained archbishops in her day, and knew how to
compose a _menu_. The wines that sparkled into brightness under
the light of beauty’s eye at Mrs. Jerningham’s table were supplied by
Mr. Jerningham’s own wine-merchant, who would not have dared to impose
on the lady’s possible innocence.
The house was very agreeable. That slight accident of Mr. Desmond’s
perpetual presence was only an additional advantage for people who
wanted to beg favours from the fashionable editor--a good word for a
new book, or a new play, or a new picture. It had become an established
fact, that wherever Mrs. Jerningham appeared, Laurence Desmond was to
appear also. His chosen friends gathered round her, like the knightly
circle about a queen in the days when there was chivalry in the land,
and a queen was a sacred creature. It was he who had brought that
agreeable circle to River Lawn; how could a poor lonely woman have
beguiled the shining lights of the crack London clubs to illuminate her
dinner-table? It was Desmond who kept a strict account of her feminine
acquaintance, watchful lest the faintest shadow in the reputation of a
friend should be reflected on her. The editor of the _Areopagus_
knew everything and everybody. The inner mysteries of Belgravia and
Tyburnia, which outsiders discussed in solemn whispers and with
awful shrugs, were stale and hackneyed facts for him. He knew that
Emily Jerningham paid a certain price for his friendship--pure and
chivalrous though that friendship might be--and that she must continue
to pay it to the end. She had been very friendless immediately after
her separation from her husband; and when the tide of public opinion
was at its flood, ready to turn either way, it was Laurence’s subtle
influence which had set it flowing pleasantly for her. But he knew
that his friendship cost her a price, notwithstanding. There was the
savour of patronage in the friendliness of the people he had won to
be her intimates. Spotless dowagers visited her and received her; but
they were apt to affect a sort of pitying kindness when they spoke of
her to other intimates. She was “that poor Mrs. Jerningham, who is
separated from her husband, you know, my dear--Harold Jerningham, a
dreadful person, I believe, though very nice in society. She lives with
a widowed aunt, at the sweetest place, near Hampton, and gives charming
parties; highly correct and proper in every way; and, you know, I
think it a kind of duty to take notice of a woman in that position,
when nothing can be said to her prejudice;” and so on, and so on, with
inexhaustible variations on the perpetual theme. Laurence Desmond had
heard the stereotyped talk a hundred times, and the recollection of it
stung him to the very quick, when he thought of it in relation to the
woman whom he could remember a girl of seventeen, dressed in white, and
walking by his side in a little garden at Passy.
Yes, he had known Emily Jerningham before she became the wife of
her wealthy kinsman; he had known her in the days of her genteel
poverty--the patient daughter of a peevish valetudinarian. He had been
allied with this poorer branch of the Jerningham family by friendships
and associations of many years’ standing, and had never spent a week
in Paris without paying more than one visit to the shabby, little
furnished-house at Passy, in which Philip Jerningham dragged out the
tiresome remnant of his useless existence with Emily for his companion
and nurse, his secretary, butler, and steward. He had come at first
prompted by a kindly feeling for the friend of his dead father; he came
afterwards for his own pleasure; and those flying visits to Paris,
which had been wont to occur two or three times in the year, began to
repeat themselves at very short intervals.
He had fallen in love with Emily Jerningham, and he had sufficient
reason for believing that his love was returned. Those evenings in the
little flower-garden at Passy were the happiest hours of his busy
life. The paradise was very prim and dusty and arid, and all the roar
and clamour of Paris thundered a hoarse chorus in the distance; but it
was Eden, nevertheless; and when, a few years afterwards, he wasted
an idle hour by going to look at the old place, he was surprised to
discover what a shabby scene it was, now that the glamour had departed
from it.
He was a proud man, and it was his misfortune to live in a world in
which the splendour and luxuries of the million were accounted the
necessities of existence. The women he met were women who would have
been panic-stricken if they had found themselves on foot and alone in
a crowded London street. They were women who, if suddenly reduced to
the depths of poverty, would have thought the delf-plates and mugs
of destitution a greater hardship than its bread and water. They
were delicate creatures--“not too bright or good for human nature’s
daily food,” but quite unable to cope with human nature’s pecuniary
embarrassments. They were creatures who thought that a cheque-book
went on for ever, like the Laureate’s brook: and that so long as there
were any of those nice oblong slips of paper left in the world, papas
and husbands and brothers had nothing to do but to sign their names at
the bottom of them.
Laurence Desmond intended to ask Miss Jerningham to be his wife, but
he was determined not to marry until he was secure of something like
fifteen hundred a year. He reckoned his future expenditure sometimes as
he meditated by his bachelor hearth, with a cigar between his lips. Two
hundred a year for a house somewhere within reasonable distance of the
Park; a hundred for his wife’s dress, fifty for his own; a miniature
brougham would be rather a tight squeeze at a hundred and fifty; his
own expenses, cigars, diplomatic dinners given at his club, cab-hire,
books and newspapers, say two hundred more; and the remaining eight
hundred for the vulgar necessities of every-day existence. Mr. Desmond
mapped out his future very pleasantly for himself and the woman he
loved; but in those days he was yet very far from the possession of
the indispensable fifteen hundred. So he held his peace in the little
flower-garden at Passy, and was content to talk agreeable nonsense to
Emily Jerningham, while the poor little fountain trickled and dripped
in the sunshine, and the gaudy red geraniums in the plaster vases on
the wall made patches of vivid colour against the hot blue sky, and
that hoarse chorus of Paris sounded its perpetual accompaniment--the
roar of wheels and the rattle of vehicles, the tinkling of bells,
the jingling of spoons and glasses on the pavement outside the
coffee-houses, and the voices of the excited million, all blended into
one indistinguishable clamour, rising and falling like the waves of a
distant sea.
Mr. Desmond waited, satisfied with his prospects, content to abide
the ripening of his fortunes, and convinced that good feeling and
policy alike were involved in patience. Unhappily, the man who plans
his own life is like a chess-player in London matched against a
chess-player in Paris, and with _no_ telegraphic communications
of his adversary’s moves. His theory of the game is perfect. His
plan of action is decided upon with the cool deliberation of an
accomplished strategist. He sees his way to the very end of the
encounter: his castle there, his bishop here, his queen in the centre
of the board, and--lo, his enemy is checkmated! But that hidden
player in Paris adopts unimaginable tactics; and suddenly, after
one never-to-be-expected move, the player in London finds himself
ignominiously beaten.
While Laurence Desmond was dreaming lazily of the future, lingering
over his midnight cigar in Temple chambers--nearer the chimney pots
than the handsome rooms he afterwards occupied--Philip Jerningham
took it into his head to die suddenly, and Emily came to London with
a letter to her cousin ever-so-many-times-removed, the irresistible
Harold. By one of those insignificant accidents which make the links
in the great chain of destiny, it happened that the announcement
of Philip Jerningham’s death escaped the eye of Emily’s undeclared
admirer. It was not to be expected that a bereaved daughter, who was
left very desolate and helpless, could write ceremonious notes to all
her late father’s masculine acquaintance; and Emily had the Jerningham
pride, and, for some unknown reason, was peculiarly inclined to be
resentful of small offences where Laurence Desmond was concerned. So
the editor went on smoking his midnight cigars, and pushing on steadily
towards the achievement of the indispensable income; deferring week
after week and month after month the Parisian holiday which he was
always promising himself.
The time drifted by him with that imperceptible progress which is so
peculiar to time when a man is always wrestling with the arrears of his
labour, and trying to get seventy minutes out of an hour. Time puts on
a special pair of wings for the slave who fills a waste-paper basket
and uses half-a-crown’s worth of postage-stamps every day of his life
except Sunday, and who sits under a popular preacher on that day,
weighed down by the consciousness of a hundred unanswered letters, and
the knowledge that a hundred offended correspondents are swelling with
indignation because of his neglect.
Mr. Desmond was roughly awakened from his pleasant day-dreams one
morning on reading the announcement of Harold Jerningham’s marriage.
The blow was a severe one, and for some days the writer’s arguments
were rather weak and inconsequential, and the editor’s eye unusually
careless of flaws and blemishes in the work of his contributors. Only
now that Emily was lost to him did he know how very dear she had been;
but even more bitter to Laurence Desmond than the thought of his loss
was the idea of his folly.
“I fancy myself a man of the world,” he said to himself, “and yet I
am the dupe of masculine fatuity which would be contemptible in a
stripling newly escaped from the university. I thought she loved me;
I thought her love was as entirely my own as if I had received the
assurance of it in the plainest words that were ever spoken.”
The idea that he had been duped by his own vanity stung him to the
quick. He studiously avoided the places in which he was likely to
encounter Emily Jerningham, and it was not until a year after her
marriage that he met her. He came upon her suddenly one bright autumn
day in an obscure foreign picture-gallery. For years after that day he
was able to recall the scene of their unexpected meeting--the quaint
old chamber in the courtyard of an hospital, the grim pre-Raphaelite
pictures of unpleasant martyrdoms, the dusty motes dancing in the
sunlight, and the listless grace of a woman who stood with her back
towards him, leaning on the top rail of a chair, with an open catalogue
held loosely in her hand. There was no one but this woman in the
gallery. The door banged behind Mr. Desmond as he went in, and startled
by the noise, she turned and looked at him.
This is how he met Emily Jerningham. The white change in her face
told him that he had not been the dupe of a delusion when he fancied
himself beloved. He felt that he must be something more than a
common acquaintance to the woman who looked at him with that pale,
terror-stricken face. For a moment he feared that Mrs. Jerningham would
faint; but the fear was groundless. She belonged to a class in which
the women have some touch of the Roman’s grandeur mingled with the
sensuous softness of the Greek. The colour came back to her cheeks and
lips in a few moments, and she held out her hand to her dead father’s
friend.
“How do you do, Mr. Desmond?” she said. “I did not know that you were
in Germany.”
“No. I am taking a brief holiday. Is Mr. Jerningham with you?”
“Yes; he had letters to write this morning, and sent me to explore this
curious old hospital by myself. Do you stay long here?”
“I go on to Vienna this evening.”
The beautiful face grew pale again. Mrs. Jerningham looked at her
catalogue.
“I think I have seen all the pictures,” she said. “My guide has gone
to look for the key of some mysterious chamber; I must go in search of
him. Good-morning, Mr. Desmond. Oh, here is my husband!”
Mr. Jerningham sauntered into the gallery.
“I couldn’t stand any more letter-writing, so I came to see your
pictures, Emily,” he said. “Ah, Desmond, how do you do? What brings you
to this queer old place, so completely out of the beaten track--almost
beyond the ken of _Murray_? You know my wife? Ah, I remember; your
father and her father were great cronies. How is it you never told me
you knew Desmond, Emily?”
Mrs. Jerningham’s reply was only a vague murmur; but her husband was
not one of those men who hang upon the utterances or watch the looks
of their wives. He allowed the woman he had chosen ample liberty, only
requiring that her toilette should be perfect, her voice harmonious,
her movements graceful, and her reputation spotless. For it is an
understood thing, that whatever character Cæsar himself may bear, there
must be no possibility of suspicion with regard to Cæsar’s wife.
Harold Jerningham and Laurence Desmond had met very often before
to-day. It happened that the Jerninghams were also on their way
to Vienna, and had made their arrangements for travelling by the
same train as that chosen by Laurence. They met at the station,
and travelled together, Mr. Jerningham being very well pleased to
find the tedium of the journey beguiled by masculine companionship.
Mrs. Jerningham sat in a corner of the carriage, very silent and
impenetrable, but beautiful to look upon in the fitful glare of the
railway lamp, or in occasional glimpses of moonlight.
That night-journey was the beginning of a closer acquaintanceship
between Harold Jerningham and Laurence Desmond. During the ensuing
London season the younger man was a frequent visitor at the house of
the elder. The Jerninghams met Mr. Desmond at parties. They met him
in the following winter at a country house; sat round the same fire at
Christmas time, and shuddered at the same ghost-stories; danced in the
same condescending quadrille at a ball of servants and tenantry, and
plucked costly trinkets from the same Christmas-tree--Harold always
more or less distinguished by the tone of a being who had endured a
previous existence in every star in the planetary system, and was
wearily “doing” his last world before final extinction.
Mrs. Jerningham had learned by this time to meet her old friend without
sudden pallor or sudden blushes. If she met him very often, she met him
by favour of that chain of accidents which links together the lives of
some men and women. She happened to be buying hyacinths in the Pantheon
during the hour which the hard-working editor snatched from the cares
of journalism in the sweet cause of friendship, bringing to bear all
the forces of his mighty intellect on the selection of a squirrel,
intended for a birthday-gift to a fellow-worker’s little girl. If the
purchase of the hyacinths and the squirrel occupied a longer time than
is usually devoted to such small transactions, it must be remembered
that there is great room for the exercise of taste and discretion in
the choice of flowers which are to fill a jardinière of the real old
_bleu de roi_ Sèvres, and an animal which is to twirl perpetually
for the delight of one’s friend. Nor was there anything extraordinary
in the fact that Mr. Jerningham and his wife encountered Laurence
Desmond ever and anon at the Opera, at the Botanical and Zoological
Gardens, and at other places of public resort. The circle in which
decent people revolve is such a narrow one that there must needs be
these accidental encounters at every turn in the crowded ring.
“I fancy we meet Mr. Desmond a little more frequently than other
people,” Harold Jerningham said one day to his wife; and this was the
only occasion on which he made any special mention of the editor’s
name.
It was about a week after Mr. Jerningham made this remark, that Emily
found a letter awaiting her on the table of her morning-room. The
letter was addressed in her husband’s hand, sealed with her husband’s
arms and cipher. It was his habit to write her little notes informing
her of his movements when the pressing business of their useless
existence separated them for a day or so; but he did not usually seal
his letters. This letter was sealed: and there must have been something
in the appearance of the document which startled Mrs. Jerningham, for
she grew very pale, and her hand trembled as it tore open the envelope.
The length of the letter was not calculated to alarm a woman who
expected a marital lecture.
“MY DEAR EMILY,--The tulip-wood cabinet in which I keep
coins is exactly the same as that which you use for your letters. The
keys are duplicates. I opened yours instead of my own this morning,
in a fit of absence of mind, and saw some letters. I did not read
them. The fact of their existence, their number, and the address they
bear--which is not to any house of mine, is sufficiently suggestive.
Be good enough to remain at home to-morrow. Mr. Halfont will call upon
you in the course of the morning.--Truly yours,
“H. J.”
This was all. Mr. Halfont was the family lawyer, a person whose name
was generally heard in connection with leases. Mrs. Jerningham looked
at the two cabinets, one on each side of the fireplace. Yes, they were
exactly alike. She had known that always, and might have guessed that
the locks and keys were the same. But she had never thought on the
subject; the apartment was so entirely her own sanctum; and Harold
Jerningham possessed so many cabinets filled with coins and medallions,
cameos and intaglios, which he never looked at, and which, after the
feverish delight of bidding for them at Christie’s, were supremely
indifferent to him. How, then, should she have foreseen the possibility
of the accident that had happened?
Was it altogether an accident?
Emily took a key from a little casket on the table, and went to one of
the cabinets--her own. She opened it, and seated herself in the chair
before it--the chair in which Harold Jerningham had sat an hour ago,
no doubt. The piece of furniture was half-cabinet, half-secrétaire;
and it was here that Mrs. Jerningham was wont to fill in the blanks in
those lithographed protestations of rapture or expressions of regret
wherewith she accepted or declined the invitations of her acquaintance.
It was here she wrote her letters, and it was here she kept the MSS. of
those correspondents whose letters were worthy of preservation. They
were in a row of pigeon-holes; and amongst those in the pigeon-hole
marked D there was a packet tied with ribbon. That tendency to render
a bundle of dangerous letters conspicuous by a circle of bright-hued
ribbon is one of womanhood’s fatal weaknesses.
Mrs. Jerningham took out the packet and contemplated it thoughtfully.
“I wish he had read the letters,” she said to herself; “it would have
been much better for both of us if he had read them.”
She looked at the address upon the topmost envelope:
“E. J.,
_Post Office_,
_Vigo Street_.”
“It was very wrong to have them directed to a post-office,” she thought
to herself.
She packed the letters in a sheet of paper, and directed the packet
to her husband, with a brief note, the composition of which cost her
much trouble. She shed some few tears while she was writing this
note; but she took care that they should not fall on the paper. There
was a certain firmness and decision in her manner which was scarcely
compatible with the feelings of an utterly guilty woman.
Mrs. Jerningham had a long interview with her husband’s lawyer on the
following day, an interview which had in it none of the unpleasant
elements of a “scene.” After this the house in Park Lane was abandoned
by both master and mistress. Mr. Jerningham was abroad; Mrs. Jerningham
at one of the country houses. It was not till the following season
that the world in which the Jerninghams lived became aware that the
Jerninghams had parted. So small an amount of union is necessary to
constitute marriage in this upper world that the fact of the separation
only became patent on the establishment of the toy-villa at Hampton.
CHAPTER X.
THERE IS ALWAYS THE SKELETON.
IN this bright summer-time the gardens of the toy-villa were a paradise
of roses. The lawns were dotted by great clumps and mounds of blossom;
red and white damask and maiden’s-blush jostling one another in rich
profusion. Tall standard-roses climbed skyward on iron rods, rustic
baskets brimmed over with the precious flowers; and there were so many
creeping tendrils entwining thin iron-work arches and airy colonnades,
that the visitor who approached Mrs. Jerningham made his way to her
presence beneath a gentle shower of perfumed petals.
Under the falling rose-petals went the editor of the _Areopagus_
one sultry morning. He had come from London by rail, and the dust of
the journey was white upon his dark-blue coat. He looked a little wan
and jaded in the searching July sunshine, a little the worse for late
hours and perennial anxieties; and he sighed ever so faintly as a warm
gust of summer wind flung a spray of blossom against his face.
The river lay before him, deeply blue under the cloudless sky; and on
his left, half hidden amongst guelder-roses and the dark foliage of
myrtle and magnolia, there was the villa, a fantastical edifice, in
which the Tudor, the Moorish, the Italian, and the mediæval Norman
forms of architecture had struggled for preeminence; a house which
seemed all windows, and in which every window was of a different
type--the house of all others to be dear to the heart of a woman.
The garden of roses, the river, and the fantastical villa made
altogether a very charming picture--a picture which Mr. Desmond
contemplated with a half-regretful sigh.
“Surely one ought to find happiness in such a place!” he said to
himself.
He had entered by a little gate that was rarely locked; and he went
across the lawn towards an open drawing-room window, with the air of a
man who has no need of ceremonial announcement. Mrs. Jerningham came
out of the window as he approached.
“Good morning, Mr. Desmond,” she said, as they shook hands. “Have you
come by rail--on such a warm day too? That is very good of you. I think
a noonday ride in a railway carriage at this time of year is a species
of martyrdom. One thinks of the iron coffin and the Piombi at Venice,
and that kind of thing.”
Mr. Desmond looked at the speaker, doubtfully. This was evidently not
exactly the reception he was accustomed to receive from Mrs. Jerningham.
“If you are going to talk to me like a stage-widow, Emily, I had better
go back to town,” said he, gravely.
“How should I talk to you? I see you so seldom now, that I lose
the habit of adapting my conversation to your taste. I think
stage-widows are very charming people. At any rate, they always find
_something_ to say, and that is an important consideration.”
“I have been very much occupied lately.”
“It seems to me that you are always very much occupied. I saw your
name, by the bye, amongst the names of the people at the breakfast at
Pembury.”
“I was obliged to go to Pembury.”
“And you were at Marble Hill on Tuesday.”
“I had particular business with Lord Chorlton.”
“And you chose the occasion of an archery fête for your business.”
“I was glad to seize any opportunity. Chorlton is not easily to be got
at.”
“Oh, please don’t speak of him as if he were a jockey,” exclaimed the
lady, with an air of irrepressible irritation.
“What has happened to annoy you this morning, Mrs. Jerningham?”
“Nothing--this morning.”
“But something _has_ annoyed you.”
“Yes, I am tired of my life; that is all that ails me, Mr. Desmond.
I am tired of my life. Of course you will tell me that it is very
wicked to be tired of one’s life, and that there are people starving in
those dreadful London alleys who would be very glad to come and live
here, and stare at the river, and wonder whether the swans are tired
of _their_ lives, as I do hour after hour in all the long, long
days of the long, long summer. But, you see, that doesn’t make my case
any better. I am very sorry for the poor people; and if it were not so
impossible to imagine them in conjunction with amber-silk furniture, I
am sure they would be very welcome to come here. I have made a feeble
attempt to do some good in my neighbourhood; but I find that other
people can do that kind of thing much better than I, and that my money
is all that is really necessary. My life passes, and the time, which
is so long as it crawls by, leaves no mark behind it. And then, when I
look forward to the future, I see--a blank.”
Her tone and manner had become more serious as she went on. They
had walked away from the house, and by this time were in a sheltered
pathway that bordered the river.
“Yet the future may not be altogether blank, Emily,” answered Laurence.
“There may come a time when----”
“Yes; I know what you mean. There may come a time when I shall be as
free as you were before you met me in the hospital at Bundersbad. I
sometimes fancy that, if you or I ever see that day, it will come too
late. There are sacrifices which cost too much, and the sacrifice which
you have made for me is one of them.”
“The greater sacrifice has been on your side,” said the editor, very
gravely.
“I do not know that, Laurence. I sometimes think that your bondage must
be harder to bear than mine. For nine years you have patiently endured
all the complaints and caprices of a discontented woman, when you might
have had a bright home, and a happy wife to bid you welcome in it, but
for me.”
“The bright home and the happy wife may be mine yet, Emily.”
“If they ever are yours, they will come to you too late. A home is one
of the blessings which must not be waited for. A man loses the habit
of home-life. I have seen something of this, you know, in my father’s
life. He did not marry till he was between forty and fifty; and when
he married, he had lost the capability of being happy at home. It will
be the same with you, Laurence, if you do not marry soon. The hard,
worldly way of thinking, and the self-contained feelings of a bachelor,
are growing stronger with you day by day, and even a wife whom you
loved would hardly be able to make home agreeable to you. And this is
all my fault, Laurence--my fault!”
“This is not fair, Emily,” said Mr. Desmond, almost sternly. “When
I lament the restraints of my position, it will be time for you to
reproach yourself on my account, and not till then. Pray let us be
reasonable. When you and Harold Jerningham parted for ever, it was
agreed between us that we should be friends, and friends only, so
long as your husband’s life should last. He is so many years our
senior, that it is not possible for us to ignore the fact that in all
likelihood the day will come when you and I can be united by a sweeter
tie than that of friendship. If there be a sin involved in looking
forward to that day hopefully, but not impatiently--I have been guilty
of that sin; but I have been guilty of no other wrong against the man
who bears your name. God knows, and you know, that I have been true
to our compact. I have been your friend, and nothing but your friend.
No shadow of a lover’s caprice, no touch of a lover’s jealousy, has
ever clouded our friendship. It has been the one bright oasis in the
desert of an anxious and laborious life. And if you think that the
treasure is unvalued by me because I do not spend three days a week
in the delicious idleness of this garden, or because I do not waste
all my evenings in your drawing-room, you are only a new example of
the ignorance which obtains among your class with regard to the
necessities of a working life.”
Mrs. Jerningham’s face brightened considerably while Mr. Desmond was
speaking. It was a fine patrician face, with the bloom of youth still
upon it, in spite of the lady’s nine-and-twenty years’ residence in
this planet. She turned to Mr. Desmond with a smile, and held out her
hand.
“Shake hands, Laurence, and forgive me,” she said, gently. It was part
of their covenant that they should be at liberty to address each other
by their Christian names, but that none of the epithets sacred to the
use of lovers should ever obtain currency between them.
“And you are really not tired of your position?” said Mrs. Jerningham,
with a pleading smile.
“Have I ever hinted a complaint?”
“No, Laurence. But then you are not the kind of person to complain.
You would be like that dreadful Spartan boy one never hears the last
of: you would hide the animal--why do some people call it a wolf,
and others a fox, by the bye?--under your waistcoat, and go about the
world smiling the smile of martyrdom. I am so afraid of doing you a
great wrong. Poets and novelists are always preaching about a woman’s
unselfishness; but I really think that is one of the formulas of
their art. Have I not shown myself very selfish, Laurence? I allowed
my foolish eyes to be dazzled by that Dead-Sea fruit which the world
calls a splendid marriage; and having bitten the apple and found the
bitterness of its core, I share the ashes with you.”
“I am very well content with the ashes.”
“Some day you will be tired of your bondage.”
“When that day comes, I will ask you for my freedom.”
“Will you promise me that, Laurence?”
“With all my heart.”
“In that case I am quite happy,” answered the lady, eagerly. “And you
really do not wish to claim your freedom immediately, Laurence?”
“Neither immediately nor in the remote future. If Mr. Jerningham
should live to be a hundred years of age, at which period I should be
eighty, the bachelor habits which you reprobate may perhaps have taken
complete possession of me; but as Mr. Jerningham is not the kind of man
whose life would be taken on the most reasonable terms by the Norwich
Union or the European, I can afford to place my faith in time.”
“Laurence, there is something so horrible in this calculation.”
“I do not calculate; I wait. And now let us talk of something else. You
have not asked me any of your usual questions about the toilettes at
Marble Hill.”
“I don’t want to know anything about them,” replied Mrs. Jerningham,
frigidly.
Mr. Desmond winced. A man’s intellect, however acute, is rarely
equal to the exigences of feminine society. The châtelaine of Marble
Hill happened to be one of those matrons who cannot bring themselves
to think well of any woman living apart from her husband. Emily
Jerningham’s name had been wont to figure in the lady’s visiting-list,
and had vanished therefrom immediately after the establishment of the
villa at Hampton.
“The fête was rather a dull affair,” said Mr. Desmond, presently, with
that clumsy hypocrisy which is the male creature’s best substitute for
tact.
“What did Lady Laura Paunceford wear?” asked Mrs. Jerningham, with
feminine inconsistency.
“Oh, some wonderful costume of blue, very cloudy and voluminous, like
the dress of a goddess in one of Sir Godfrey Kneller’s ceilings. I
believe she wore something that was intended for a bonnet--a blue gauze
butterfly, skewered to her head by silver arrows.”
“Did she look well?”
“By no means; she is not a daylight beauty.”
“And Miss Fitzormond?”
“Miss Fitzormond’s dress was absolutely dowdy. A new style, Mrs.
Castlemaine told me; the last rage in Paris; and supposed to have been
developed from the fair Eugénie’s inner consciousness. It is rather
hard upon the Empress that she should be accredited with every atrocity
invented by the enterprising milliners of the Fauburg St. Honoré.”
“What was the dress?” Mrs. Jerningham demanded, languidly.
“Something mauve, festooned with steel chains and spikes; Miss
Fitzormond looked like a mauve prisoner escaped from Newgate.”
“Were there many pretty women at the fête? No; you needn’t answer me.
Of course you will declare that you found yourself amidst an assemblage
of Gorgons. Men are so fearful of wounding a woman’s vanity, that they
rarely remember she may by some possibility possess a grain or two of
common-sense. Let us go to the dining-room. It is time for luncheon,
and I dare say my aunt has been sending skirmishers out to look for me.”
“There is a parcel of books and music at the station. Will you send for
it?”
“With delight. How good of you to bring me more new books!”
“Are you prepared to stand a competitive examination in the last I
brought you?”
“Better than you in the works of the authors you have lately
annihilated, Mr. Editor and Reviewer.”
On this they went back to the house, where they were received by the
most amiable of dragons, dressed in dove-coloured silk, and a pale-blue
morning-cap, which made middle age a state for youth to envy. The
luncheon, in common with all the surroundings of Harold Jerningham’s
wife, was perfection. The spirit of the elegant Harold himself pervaded
this house, across the threshold whereof his foot had never passed.
It was Mr. Jerningham’s pet architect who had restored the miniature
mansion, and Mr. Jerningham’s favourite upholsterer who had decorated
and furnished the interior. When Mrs. Jerningham wanted a new servant,
it was Mr. Jerningham’s steward who supplied the vacancy in her
well-organized establishment. Life had been made very easy for her
since her separation from her husband--a little too easy, perhaps; for
a woman who has none of the ordinary cares of her sex is apt to create
troubles of her own.
People who wondered and speculated about the separation were often
surprised to hear Mr. Jerningham say: “I have bought that picture for
my wife;” or, “I am looking for a safe pony-phaeton for my wife;” or,
“I want to find a good binder for some books of my wife’s.” He took
pains to let the world know that he was on excellent terms with the
lady in the toy-villa; and this certificate of character had served
Emily Jerningham in good stead. Her husband’s diplomacy might have kept
even the sacred portals of such houses as Marble Hill open to her, if
Mr. Desmond had not been quite so frequent a visitor at her house. But
the world is slow to believe in a Platonic attachment, and it is not
to be denied that the friendship of Laurence Desmond had cost Mrs.
Jerningham a certain price.
Nor was that friendship altogether pleasant to her. The conversation
of this morning was only a variation upon a very familiar theme. Again
and again Mr. Desmond had been called upon to listen to the same
complaints, and to dispel the same doubts. There were times when he
was very conscious of the pain and weariness involved in this state of
things. There were times when a still, small voice within him echoed
Emily Jerningham’s wish that they had never met in the hospital at
Bundersbad, never renewed the friendship so near akin to love, never
interchanged those foolish, sentimental letters which had caused the
separation of Harold and his wife. It seemed such a weak, frivolous,
despicable piece of wrong-doing, now that it was done, and had
exercised a lifelong influence upon the destinies of three people.
If Mrs. Jerningham was doubtful and suspicious of Mr. Desmond, he, on
his part, was not entirely at his ease about her. Was she happy? He
asked himself that question very often, and the answer was not always
pleasant to him.
“No real happiness ever came of wrong-doing,” he said to himself; “we
did wrong, and we are paying the price of our folly.”
It was only to himself that Mr. Desmond ever said so much as this. To
Emily Jerningham he was always the same--an attentive and respectful
friend--patient, chivalrous, and self-sacrificing as a social Bayard;
but not to be beguiled from the duties of his professional position,
even by the claims of friendship.
CHAPTER XI.
“J’AIME: IL FAUT QUE J’ESPERE.”
EUSTACE THORBURN found existence altogether a new kind of thing at the
old house amongst the Berkshire woods. His sorrow for the death of his
mother was no transient shadow, to be dispelled by the first bright
glimpse of sunlight that fell across his pathway. It was a deep and
enduring sorrow; but it was a grief which held a fixed place in his
mind, apart from the common joys and vexations of life. All through
those bright summer days the young man showed himself a cheerful
companion, an enthusiastic student, a willing and devoted worker; and
it was only by his mourning dress that those amongst whom he lived
were reminded of his recent loss. But every night, in the stillness of
his own room, the familiar agony came back to his breast; memory and
imagination travelled again upon the beaten track; and he thought of
his mother’s joyless womanhood and lonely death with a pain as bitter
as that which he had felt when he stood beside her newly made grave.
Such things as these are not to be forgotten. Are they not the
“pathetic minor” which underlies all the harmonies of earth, heard more
or less distinctly, but silent never?
The one clue which his mother’s letter afforded had been sedulously
followed up by Eustace. The stranger calling himself Hardwick was the
writer of a book first published in the year ’43; and a book of some
repute, as the young man gathered from the letters of his unknown
father. Eustace had Mrs. Willows’ authority for the fact that the book
was some kind of novel or romance; and acting upon this information,
he devoted himself for three consecutive days to an examination of the
critical magazines and periodicals of that year in the reading-room of
the British Museum.
The result of his labours was not particularly satisfactory. So many
romances published within the year were spoken of as the best novels
of the season, or as works bearing the seal of genius, or as the
promise of greater things from the matured mind of the writer, that
it needed much sifting of all this chaff before the amount of genuine
wheat contained therein could be fairly estimated. But at last, after a
careful study of the _Literary Gazette_ and _Athenæum_, the
quarterlies and monthlies, Eustace Thorburn selected, from a long list
of brilliant successes and best novels of the season, three books, each
of which seemed to bear upon it the stamp of something greater than
amiable mediocrity.
These are the titles of the three books which Eustace Thorburn
selected, after having read them carefully and thoughtfully:
1. _Dion_: a Confession.
2. _Latimer’s Sister_: a Story. By Marcus Anderton.
3. _The Spectre of Walden_: a Romance. By G. G. G.
Of these three, _Dion_ was the most singular; _Latimer’s
Sister_ the most tender; _The Spectre_ the most poetical. Any
one of these books might have exercised a powerful effect upon the mind
of a sentimental woman. That they were all three written by men, and
by young men, Eustace entertained no doubt. He did not, indeed, trust
entirely to his own judgment; for he enlisted the services of his Uncle
Dan, and induced that practised reviewer to read the three books.
“All masculine work!” cried Mr. Mayfield. “No woman could have written
_Latimer’s Sister_ without telling us when the young lady who
figures as the heroine wore blue silk, or how lovely she looked in
pink tarlatane. _The Spectre_ is a translation from the German.
No Englishman would have been as simple and true to nature in his
peasant-life; and I recognize untranslatable German compounds in my
friend’s phraseology. The book which indicates power, and even genius,
is _Dion_. I have a sort of hazy recollection of hearing that
book talked about when I was a young man, and of hearing that it was
written by some sprig of quality. In my opinion, Eustace, that story of
_Dion_ is the kind of book to fascinate a girl.”
“It is so morbid, so gloomy.”
“Gloom is the very thing a girl loves, especially when it is the gloom
of the storm-cloud--passion, and anguish, and so on. Depend upon it, my
dear lad, _Dion_ is the book that man wrote--the book your mother
was reading in the unlucky hour in which he first saw her face.”
“I am inclined to believe that you are right, Uncle Dan,” Eustace
answered, thoughtfully. “It is evidently the work of a scholar.”
“Yes, but of a very young scholar. The learning is there, but in
a crude, half-digested state. The pages bristle with fragments of
old-world wisdom. The wisdom does not underlie the whole, it is not
interwoven with the very fabric of the book, as in the work of a mature
mind. There is passion and poetry,--a hazy kind of poetry, but with a
certain fascination and grace of its own,--the poetry of a man who has
never written for bread, or been troubled by uncertainties about his
dinner. That parting with the girl Una is very pretty; and the dream
in the ruined manor-house has a weird power. One almost feels the cold
winds blowing through the windows that will not shut; one almost sees
the midnight shadows of ash and poplar lying black on the moss-grown
flags of the quadrangle, and all the nakedness and desolation of the
place. Yes, Eustace, there is the glamour of youth and poetry upon
_Dion_; I should not wonder if the man who wrote that book were
the man who won your mother’s heart.”
Daniel Mayfield spoke with an air of conviction that had considerable
influence upon his nephew. He went back to the reviews of _Dion_,
in the hope of finding some clue to the writer in the opinions and
speculations of the reviewers.
In this he was disappointed. The reviewers told him no more than his
Uncle Dan had told him. They judged the writer as Mr. Mayfield had
judged him, from the evidence of the book; they had evidently no
knowledge outside the book. The mystery of anonymous publication had
been religiously preserved, and as the book had created some sensation
at the time of its appearance, there had been considerable speculation
as to the individuality of the writer.
The result of all this speculation was limited to the following
deductions:
1st. The writer of the book was a young man who had gone through the
usual curriculum of a university education.
2nd. The style and manner of thinking were eminently Oxonian.
3rd. The writer was well acquainted with Continental life.
4th. He was as familiar with German literature as with the classics.
5th. His proclivities were aristocratic; his contempt for the masses
supreme and undisguised.
6th. His philosophy was Epicurean; his gods the graceful divinities
of Greece; his nature sensuous, selfish, but not altogether base. He
was an ardent worshipper of the beautiful. He thirsted for woman’s
love,--the pure, the true; but it was the purity and truth of earth’s
primæval freedom for which he languished, rather than the divine
sentiment allowed by Christian rule.
Upon these points the reviewers were strong, and they had
sufficient justification for their opinion. The book was pervaded
by the personality of the writer. It was indeed a confession, an
autobiographical record, in which the events and circumstances of
actual life were doubtless altered and disguised, but a record which
laid bare the heart and mind of the man.
Eustace read the book at the British Museum, and persuaded his uncle to
read it at the same place. He tried to obtain a copy of the story; but
_Dion_ had long been out of print. The booksellers had only the
faintest recollection of a book of that name, and of the fact that it
had created some slight stir during the brief season of its popularity.
“I’ll get you a copy of the book, sooner or later, if your heart is
set upon it, lad,” said Daniel Mayfield. “You know what a habitual
book-stall lounger I am, and how many times I have had my pocket
picked while I have been dipping into one of the Neo-Platonists, or
an Amsterdam edition of Hysminias and Hysmine, before a second-hand
bookseller’s emporium. _Dion_ is just the sort of book to figure
in a bookseller’s box of odd volumes--‘All these at twopence,’--and,
depend upon it, I shall meet with the gentleman some day. I know a man
who is very clever at picking up any out-of-the-way book I happen to
want; and if you wish it, I’ll set him to work.”
“I shall be very glad if you do; I would willingly give a guinea for
that book.”
“I’ll get it you for half the money; but I wish to heaven you would
abandon all speculations about this man, who, after all, may not be the
author of _Dion_.”
“That I shall never do while my brain has power to speculate; so let us
say no more about that, Uncle Dan.”
It was rather late in the autumn when Eustace Thorburn made his
researches at the British Museum. He obtained a few days’ holiday from
his employer, and shared his Uncle Daniel’s lodgings in Great Ormond
Street,--big rooms that had once been very grand and noble, and which,
even now, had a pleasant airy aspect, and some remains of old-world
splendour.
The “few days” stretched themselves into a week before the young
man had completed his studies, but at the end of the week he bade
his kinsman good-bye, and went back to Berkshire, in no wise sorry
to return to the park and forest, the winding river and odorous
flower-garden of his new home.
In no wise sorry? Could there be gladness more complete than that which
filled his breast as he returned to the house he had learned to think
of as a home?
“M. de Bergerac’s book will be finished by and by, and he will have
no further need of my services,” thought the returning traveller, as
the sober goddess of common-sense projected her dark shadow athwart
the sunlit realms of fancy. “I shall have to bid farewell to these new
friends, and begin the world once more among strangers. I suppose that
will be the story of my life. I may find friends; I may attach myself
to a stranger’s house, until I almost fancy I have kindred and a home,
like the rest of mankind; and then, just when I am happiest, my foolish
dream will end all at once, and I shall have to begin life again. Oh,
let me be patient when the trial comes! My life can never be so sad and
dreary as _hers_ was.”
Further reflection developed consoling ideas that brought back a happy
smile to the traveller’s lips.
“The _History of Superstition_ will not be finished for many a
long year at its present rate of progress,” he said to himself. “I
could wish for nothing better than to live for ever at the bailiff’s
cottage, working for the kindest of employers.”
He could not, indeed, imagine any state of happiness more perfect
than that which he enjoyed in Theodore de Bergerac’s quiet home, after
all due reservation had been made for that secret sorrow which was not
altogether to be put away from his mind, even when his surroundings
were brightest.
Life at Greenlands was very quiet. The scholar and his daughter were
a modern Prospero and Miranda, with trim maid-servants to wait upon
them instead of Caliban; and the new Miranda’s life was not much less
lonely than that of her prototype on the enchanted isle. Mademoiselle
de Bergerac had very few friends and no acquaintance. She had never
been to school, and she had scarcely heard the names of those pleasures
and excitements which are the necessities of fashionable damsels. To
take tea with the curate’s daughters, under the walnut-trees in the
prettiest corner of the lawn, was a delightful festivity; to picnic
at Burnham Beeches with her father and two or three chosen friends
was a matter of almost bewildering excitement; to creep along by the
willowy margin of the river in her own light skiff, while her father
sat in the stern reciting some of Victor Hugo’s noblest verses for her
edification, was a quiet rapture above and beyond all those unknown
pleasures of whose existence she was vaguely conscious.
Never was maiden better pleased with her own life and her own
surroundings than Helen de Bergerac. She had the Gallic vivacity of
disposition, the sanguine, romantic temperament of the Celt. She adored
her father, and adored the fair English country, and the river, and her
dog, and Greenlands; and it was only sometimes, in a tender reverie,
that she pictured to herself sunnier lands,--the vineyards of Provence,
the towers and steeples of Norman cities, the broad blue waters of the
Seine, broken by islets of tender green, and curving like a silver bow,
by valley and woodland, chalky cliff and quaint nestling town, gray
rock and mediæval castle, half-fortress, half-château.
Mademoiselle de Bergerac thought of this romantic land sometimes, and
sighed for a state of things that might bring about her father’s
return to his native country. For the exiled family she entertained
a sentiment that was akin to adoration, confounding all distinction
between _famille aînée_ and _famille cadette_; and beholding
in the quiet country gentlemen of Twickenham and Bushey the direct
descendants of that bold warrior whose white plume flashed like a star
athwart the serried ranks at Fontenoy.
But second only to her affection for that country whereof she knew so
little, and which must always be more or less a dreamland for her, was
Mademoiselle de Bergerac’s affection for Berkshire, the land of her
birth, the pastoral scene amidst which there was one corner, one quiet
grave in a village churchyard--a grave above which there bloomed roses
more beautiful than common flowers growing in common gardens--that
must for ever make this one spot holier in her eyes than all other
regions of this lower world. To keep her father’s house, to supply in
some measure the place of that dear companion who was lost to him,
to sustain the student’s ambition, and to watch the scholar’s health,
meting out the midnight oil, and restraining the too eager spirit in
the interests of the ill-used flesh,--in these things was comprised the
desire of Helen de Bergerac’s heart and mind.
She received her father’s secretary with a most delightful cordiality,
accepting this new member of the family with a grace as easy as if he
had been some long-absent brother or cousin come from beyond seas to
take his place in the household. Prudery and affectation were unknown
to this sylvan damsel. She found it rather agreeable than otherwise to
have a well-bred, well-informed young man in attendance upon her when
she inspected her garden, or supervised the arrangement of a rustic
banquet under the chestnuts on the lawn. She found it agreeable to
be assisted in her reading by some one whose time was less occupied,
and whose erudition was less alarming than her father’s. She found
it pleasant to have a friend who went to the extremest lengths in
the worship of Beethoven and Weber,--a friend who could discourse
most eloquently of Hugo and Shakespeare, Bulwer and Göthe, Balzac
and Thackeray, while her father dozed in the quiet summer twilights,
wearied out by his long day’s labour,--a friend who seemed, strange
to say, always intensely interested in every subject that happened
to interest her, a knight-errant who, living perchance in a prosaic
century, was fain to demonstrate his devotion by the clipping of faded
rose-leaves, and the hunting out of recondite islands and promontories
in the classic atlas,--a friend who, by some unerring instinct,
contrived always to do and say precisely what she wished,--a friend who
was always the right man in the right place.
“I don’t know how it is, but it seems to me that I am always right,”
remarked the young Duchess of Burgundy with charming _naïveté_;
and Mademoiselle de Bergerac on more than one occasion gave utterance
to observations quite as _naïf_ on the subject of her new
acquaintance.
“I really cannot tell how it is Mr. Thorburn always contrives to make
himself so agreeable, papa,” she said.
The simple-hearted book-worm was no less blind than his daughter.
“I am glad you like him, my love,” he replied, carelessly. “I was
rather afraid you might object to a third person in the house. He is a
most admirable young man. For hunting out a reference or a quotation,
he is, I think, unrivalled. I only hope I shall be able to keep him
till my book is finished; but that will be a long time, Helen, a very
long time--if I live to finish it at all.”
“Dear, dear father,” murmured the girl, tenderly; and then she
continued, with some appearance of alarm, “Do you think Mr. Thorburn
wishes to leave us?”
“No, my dear, I have no reason to think that. But he is very young, you
know; and this must be a dull kind of life for a young man.”
“And yet I am sure Mr. Thorburn is not unhappy. He had only just lost
his mother, you know, when he came to us; and of course the memory of
that loss makes him thoughtful and melancholy sometimes. But I am sure
he is quite content to lead our quiet life, papa, and that he takes
a very deep interest in your book. He told me the other day that he
cannot venture to look forward to the end of that book; it seems to him
like looking forward to the end of his life.”
“It is, indeed, an interesting subject, my love,” replied M. de
Bergerac, with complacency, “and an almost inexhaustible one--the
history of superstition: a mighty record, a vast survey, embracing
the length and breadth of this earth, from the monstrous temples of
the East to the classic shrines of the West--from the altar of the
Carthaginian Æsculapius to the funeral pyre of the Scandinavian Balder.
I am much pleased to think the young man likes his work. He is very
clever.”
“Is he not clever, papa? He wrote a little poem the other day, and he
asked my opinion of it. As if _my_ opinion could be worth having!
It was charming. I do not think your favourite Catullus, whom you
praise so much, and yet will not allow me to read, could have written
anything more graceful. It is full of that mournful langour that there
is in some of Victor Hugo’s minor poems, and in Longfellow’s--a sweet,
calm sadness that pierces one’s heart.”
“I am glad he distracts himself by the composition of verses,” said
the scholar. “There are some who consider such a course of reading as
he is now engaged in dry and laborious; but to my mind there can be no
better nurture for a poet. I trust Mr. Thorburn may achieve some kind
of success in the future.”
“I think he writes or studies a good deal at night, after you have done
with him.”
“How do you know that, my dear?”
“Through Susan, papa. She is always complaining about the candles.
You know how economical she is; and I assure you Mr. Thorburn’s
consumption of candles is quite an affliction to her. I wonder whether
the Grecian _ménagères_ were angry when their lords consumed the
midnight oil. Perhaps that was one of Xantippe’s grievances. I don’t
think Socrates could have been a _very_ agreeable husband.”
“That point is open to discussion,” said the scholar, slyly. “We
possess the sage’s opinion of Xantippe, but we do not possess
Xantippe’s opinion of the sage.”
The weeks and months slipped by, and the fern was sear and brown in
Windsor Great Park and Forest, and all the woodlands of Berkshire were
leafless; but Eustace Thorburn showed no signs of distaste for his
labours as secretary and amanuensis, collator and collaborateur. He
languished for no change, he pined for no pleasure. His considerate
employer had borrowed an extra horse from the stables of the great
house, where there was still the remnant of a noble stud; and at his
suggestion the young man took long rides in the early morning, before
the day’s studious drudgery began. It was very pleasant to come home
to breakfast in the snug old-fashioned parlour, and to be welcomed by
Mademoiselle de Bergerac, whose bright eyes grew brighter at sight
of some sprig of rare comb-bearing fern. Life at Greenlands seemed,
indeed, to be altogether an existence of perfect and serene delight,
only overshadowed now and then by the vague consciousness that it was
too sweet to last.
“The time will come when I shall have to pack my portmanteau and bid
her good-bye,” the young man said to himself, in moments of sober
meditation at night, when he sat alone in his pleasant room, and some
break, some stagnation in the course of his composition brought him to
a stand-still; “or some one will come and see her, and learn to love
her as dearly as I love her even; and he will be in a position to say
the sweet words I dare not say to her; and I shall hear the jangling
village-bells some misty summer morning, and she will come in her white
bridal dress to bid me farewell. Men have to bear such pain as that,
and to bear it quietly.”
By these reflections it will be seen that Eustace Thorburn, without
fortune, friends, or name, and with the ever-present consciousness of
the bar-sinister on his escutcheon, had presumed to fall in love with
the only child of his employer. Could he have done otherwise? “Lives
there a wretch with soul so dead” as to be able to inhabit the same
dwelling with a Helen de Bergerac for six months and not own himself
her worshipper and slave ere the sixth month is ended? Eustace Thorburn
had surrendered himself an unresisting victim to the pitiless goddess
who sways the weak souls of men, as her kinswoman Artemis rules the
tides of ocean. He had allowed himself to be cradled in the shadowy
arms of Fancy, rocked to the sweetest sleep that was ever broken by
bitter waking.
“I know that it must end in misery,” he said to himself; “but it is so
sweet--while it lasts.”
He loved her, and he feared that his love was hopeless. Simple as M.
de Bergerac’s life might be, he bore upon him the stamp of the old
_noblesse_. He was of that nation whose _dernière grand dame_
died with Queen Marie-Amélie; and it was not to be supposed there was
no latent pride of birth beneath that graceful humility of manner which
rendered the exile so dear to the cottagers and peasant children about
Greenlands.
“I think he would give his daughter to a poor man,” thought Eustace,
when he meditated this vital question; “for his soul seems to me so
pure and noble as to be above all consideration of worldly wealth; and
then Helen’s simple habits fit her for a poor man’s wife. But I cannot
think that he would consent to an alliance with a man of low origin, or
of unknown origin, which to that proud and pure mind would seem worse
than the lowest, since it must bear the stigma of shame.”
There were times when a hope--vague but exquisite--awoke in the young
man’s breast as he pondered on the future. If he was nameless to-day,
must he needs go nameless to the grave? Might he not win for himself a
renown that would give grace and lustre to that simple family name of
Thorburn, which he had seen on his grandfather’s tombstone? Was it only
a foolish presumption, the besotted vanity of a young pedant, which
buoyed him up and supported him in his hours of depression? Was that
word _Parvenir_, which he had taken for himself as his motto, and
cherished in secret as the watch-word of his life, only the formula of
a braggart? Was that pleasant land of dreams, in which he was wont to
take refuge when the world of realities seemed dark and dreary, only a
fool’s paradise?
Insomuch as poetic dreams and aspirations can make a man a poet,
Eustace Thorburn was a member of that glorious brotherhood which began
with Homer; but it yet remained to be shown whether he were gifted with
something more than the vague yearnings and lofty imaginings of the
dreamer who would fain admit the world within the mystic portals of
his fair shadowland. To think high thoughts, to dream delicious dreams,
is one thing; but to be able to translate thought and dream into the
eloquent verse of a Byron, or the polished syllables of a Tennyson,
is another thing. To how many eyes the Coliseum and the Adriatic,
the Drachenfels and the quiet field that lies beyond Ardennes, may
have seemed as fair as they appeared to the eyes of that one lonely
traveller who has recorded his wanderings in words that can never die!
How many brains must have been crowded by grand imaginings, how many
hearts must have beat high with the dreamer’s enthusiasm, as the youth
of England have trodden the ground that is hallowed by the footsteps of
heroes and demigods! and yet, of all the youth of England, there has
been but one whose poetic record of his emotions has reached a second
edition, and held a place in the memory of mankind. Of all the men
who read the rugged legends of Macbeth and Lear, the Italian story of
Othello’s passion and Iago’s cunning, there was only one man who could
give to the crude unshapely records life and form, immortal as his own
genius!
Whether Eustace Thorburn possessed that subtle and wondrous power of
expression, that mystic sympathy with the minds of his fellowmen, that
marvellous perception which is a kind of clairvoyance, time alone could
show. He had his moments of proud hope, his hours of abject depression;
but he worked on patiently, steadily, devoting more than one quiet
hour of every night to the composition of a narrative poem--dramatic,
philosophical, passionate, and perhaps just a little tainted with the
egotism which is so common in the work of youthful genius.
Eustace Thorburn had no suspicion that the hero of his poetic fiction
was a shadow of himself, a projection of his own brain; but he knew
that the heroine was an airy sister of Helen de Bergerac, and that the
love of his Egbert for his Amy was very near akin to his own love for
Helen.
There was no odour of the midnight oil in the poet’s verses. They
breathed the freshness of youth, the perfume of woods and groves; the
harmonious lines were musical with the ripple of cool waters, the low
sound of leafy branches swaying gently in the summer wind. The life
which Eustace Thorburn led at Greenlands was the ideal existence for
which the poet sighs, for which he yearns with fond imaginings, pent
up in the darksome city counting-house, chained to the cruel wheel of
distasteful labour. Nor was the young man ungrateful to Providence, or
to the kindly kinsman who had procured for him so pleasant a position.
He thanked God for his easy existence, his congenial labours; and he
wrote sweet, playful letters, full of affection and gratitude, to Uncle
Dan, who treasured those effusions, and was pleased to favour his
friends and boon-companions with the recital of eloquent little bits in
those delightful epistles.
“What would you give to be able to write like that, Tom Granger?” he
said to one of his associates. “You write uncommonly well, you know,
dear boy, and so does John Harrington, and Ted Rochester, and Frank
Dorset; and there’s plenty of _chic_ in all you do. You all write
uncommonly well, Tom; you can all describe the things you see every
day, _from the outside_, with a certain amount of smartness; but
there is no more evidence of thought in your compositions than if you
were so many copying-machines; and you all write so like one another,
that if Frank wrote page one, and Ted page two, and John page three,
no one but themselves and the compositors who set-up their copy would
be any the wiser. You have all got the slang of the day, and you all
write for the current market, and you are all wise in your generation.
But the day will come when this boy here will show you that a writer
may have something more than ‘a knack,’ and be something better than a
publisher’s ‘clever hand.’”
“I wouldn’t mind giving you long odds against that immaculate nephew
of yours ever writing a book that will sell,” replied the incredulous
Tom, in no wise put out of countenance by his friend’s exordium. “They
all begin in the same style, these young uns. Epic poem about King
Arthur, or King Alfred, or King Athelstane, that is to be the Iliad
of future generations,--high-falutin sentiment, pure aspirations, and
so on. And they write their epic poems, and pass them on from one
publisher’s office to another, till the poor valueless manuscripts
are limp and dirty; and then they learn to adapt themselves to the
requirements of their generation, and turn into ‘clever hands’ like
you and me, Dan. They must all go through the same apprenticeship, and
‘learn in suffering what they teach in song,’--that is to say, learn in
Whitecross Street what they teach in the monthly magazines, unless they
happen to be careful souls, with snug little incomes: in which case
they hug their sweet delusions to the last, and publish their epics at
their own expense. Epic poems, forsooth! Do you think the Greeks would
have read Homer if they had possessed periodical literature?”
“I look upon periodical literature as the sworn foe to learning.”
“You are not the first of dirty birds, Daniel Mayfield,” cried his
friend, sternly; “and now for the divine Louisa.”
The “divine Louisa” was Mr. Granger’s playful name for unlimited loo, a
pastime which cost Daniel Mayfield many a five-pound note in the course
of the year, but which he had not the moral courage to forswear. He
had his reputation as a Bohemian, and he was too old to hope for a new
reputation amongst the ranks of the respectable; so he was fain to be
true to the brotherhood in which he had some _status_.
“Better to be a prince among the nomad tribes than a nobody among the
Philistines,” he said to himself. “One might submit to that, if the
Philistines were a perfect race; but when a man sees how much malice
and selfishness there may be in the Pharisees and Sadducees, he is apt
to prefer the society of publicans and sinners.”
These were the arguments with which Daniel Mayfield was wont to stifle
the upbraidings of conscience; for the sinner can forgive himself all
his other sins more easily than the one sin of a wasted life. Mr.
Mayfield had his hours of depression, his moments of savage bitterness;
and to escape from these, he fled to the scenes he liked and the
friends he loved--the friends who in some sort loved him.
CHAPTER XII.
THE GREEN-EYED MONSTER.
MRS. JERNINGHAM spent her autumn at Spa, where Mrs. Colton, the
amiable dragon, drank the waters with the patient regularity of a
valetudinarian, and wondered at the Continental toilettes with the
pious wonder of a well-bred provincial Englishwoman, to whom these
daring eccentricities of custom--these _bottes à mi-jambe, en cuir
de Russie_, these dainty braided jackets _à la Rigolboche_,
these robes _à queue-sans-fin_, and _chapeaux à l’infiniment
petit_--were all so much confusion, the climax of horror and infamy
foreshadowed by the Prophet, the abomination of desolation sitting in
the high places.
For Emily Jerningham, life at Spa seemed a very dull business. She
had no pet ailment to be subjugated by the mineral waters. The
pine-woods and stately avenues were very beautiful on fine summer
mornings, or beneath the broad glory of the harvest moon; but she had
seen them before. It seemed to her as if she knew every pine on the
steep hillside, every branch of the lofty oaks in the valley, every
hard, worldly face that was to be seen in the Kursaal. Was there not
something wanting in her life, a something for lack of which she must
needs be lonely and purposeless wherever she went?
All the pleasures and luxuries that wealth can buy; all the
consideration that a good old name can exact; all the respect that a
reputation which, despite an occasional shrug from some Rochefoucauld
of this generation, may fairly be called stainless, can command--were
at the disposal of this fortunate lady, and yet she was not happy. She
had too much, and too little. If she had been an utterly selfish and
narrow-minded woman, she might have found the perfection of bliss in
splendid toilettes and well-appointed equipages, an elegant house and
distinguished acquaintance; but something more than these was necessary
to complete the sum of Mrs. Jerningham’s happiness.
“Of what use am I in the world?” she asked herself, wearily, as she
drove her graceful pony-carriage through the crowd which admired and
envied her. “I am an expense to my husband; a burden and a restraint
for Laurence, who no doubt would have married before this, if it were
not for me; and a weariness to myself.”
Perhaps this unspoken lament might have been translated thus;
“I have been here a month, and Mr. Desmond has not found time to come
to me. He writes me a hurried letter once in ten days, in which, under
an unlimited amount of respect, I perceive the lurking poison of
indifference; and I am too proud to tell him how intensely I wish to
see him, too proud to confess even to myself the pain I suffer because
of his absence.”
In bidding adieu to Mrs. Jerningham and her companion at the London
Bridge station on the morning of their departure, the editor of the
_Areopagus_ had declared that, if he could give himself a holiday,
he would take that holiday at Spa; and the eyes of the younger lady had
said “Do!” and the proud line of her lips had softened into a grateful
smile.
“We shall expect to see you, Mr. Desmond,” she said, at the very last,
when he had brought her _Punch_ and a damp copy of the newly
issued _Areopagus_. Ah, how many a youthful scribbler’s ardour has
been damped by those cold clammy papers, deadly chill as the skin of
the cobra, and venomous as his sting!
“We shall expect to see you--soon,” repeated the lady, with that pretty
air of insistence which is so charming in an elegant woman.
“But, my dear Mrs. Jerningham, I did not say I would come. I said, I
will come, if I can get a holiday.”
“As if any one could refuse you a holiday! But I will not allow the
arrangement to be left in that vague manner. Shall we see you in a
week?”
“I fear not.”
“In a fortnight?”
“I scarcely like to promise anything till this month is over. There are
so many rows on the political _tapis_; and we are bound to go in
for an analysis of all the rows. And there is Cumberland’s fourteenth
volume of “Catharine II.;” that is a book I am pledged to review
myself.”
“Pledged to the author?”
“No; to the publisher. Do you think anyone on the _Areopagus_ ever
writes a review to oblige an author? I think, in three weeks, I may be
free; and if----”
“Oh, pray do not imperil the fortunes of the _Areopagus_ for
any caprice of mine! I am sure I should be immensely distressed if
my pleasure interfered with the prompt notice of Mr. Cumberland’s
‘Catharine,’” cried Mrs. Jerningham, with supreme hauteur, and with
the injured air of a woman who thinks your regard for her must be very
small, if at her behest you refuse to jeopardize a paltry newspaper
which cost only twenty thousand pounds or so to establish, or the
reputation of a trumpery author, who has only given the labour of a
lifetime to his absurd book.
The Dover express moved away before Mr. Desmond could reply to the
lady’s angry speech, and left him standing on the platform, with a
smile, that was half-sad, half-cynical, upon his face.
“They are all alike,” he said to himself; “beautiful, delightful,
unreasonable, and profoundly selfish. How well that tone of _grande
dame_ becomes her! How lovely she looked just now, with that
crimson flush of wounded pride, and that angry light in her eyes! What
a pity it is that a woman cannot believe in the regard of a man who
is not ready to behave like an idiot in all the affairs of life for
her pleasure! ‘You pretend that you love me,’ cries offended Beauty,
‘and yet you won’t forfeit a colonelcy in the Life Guards in order
to attend me to a garden-party at Miss Burdett Coutts’s! You declare
that you adore me, and yet refuse to make a bonfire of your father’s
family-seat for my amusement!’”
Mr. Desmond’s mind was not altogether in his work that day, and more
than once the remorseless pen of the editor lay idle in his hand, while
he pondered on a subject which within the last year had become the
unanswerable enigma of his existence. It was much easier for him to
soothe Emily’s doubts with pretty, reassuring speeches than to satisfy
the perplexities of his own mind.
Was this lukewarm friendship an alliance that good men and pure-minded
women could approve--this friendship which must needs be continually
measured by the thermometer of the proprieties, lest it should become
a degree or so warmer than society could warrant? Was it a fair and
honourable thing, this tacit engagement, the fulfilment whereof was
contingent on the death of a man whose hand Laurence had taken in
friendship many times in the past, whom he might meet with friendly
greeting to-morrow? No, a thousand times no! Laurence Desmond was well
aware that he occupied one of those false positions into which men
sometimes slip unawares, and from which extrication is so difficult.
Could he bring himself to tell Emily Jerningham that this friendship
was wrong, and that it lacked even the charm that sweetens some
wrong-doing? Could he do this, could he inflict pain upon her, when his
own conscience told him that the keen sense of the dishonour involved
in his position had only arisen in his mind since the position itself
had become wearisome to him?
Yes, this was the _mot de l’énigme_. He had loved her very dearly;
but he loved her no longer. He looked backward to the days in which
he had walked with her in the little garden at Passy, and thought how
happy they might both have been if he had been less prudent, if he had
obeyed the impulses of his heart, instead of the hard axioms of the
worldly-wise. The time and the opportunity were past and gone, and he
felt that some part of his own youth and hope had gone with them.
He made his appearance at Spa when Mrs. Jerningham and Mrs. Colton had
been at that pleasant watering-place for more than a month, and he was
received somewhat coldly by the younger lady, who could not forgive
him for doing his duty as editor of the _Areopagus_. But she soon
melted. It was not possible that she should long conceal the delight
she felt in his presence.
“I am angry with myself for being so glad to see you,” she cried at
last; “but, oh, you cannot imagine how dull and hopeless my life has
been in this place! My poor aunt likes the humdrum gaiety, and the
nauseous waters, and the dawdling drives, and the Tauchnitz novels; and
I have stayed to please her. But more than once I have been tempted to
take the train for Liége, and offer myself as a novice at the first
convent I came to after leaving the station. Why should I not go into a
convent, or at least a béguinage? What use am I in the world?”
Hereupon Mr. Desmond had to reiterate the old protestations, to the
effect that the lady’s friendship was the pride and happiness of
his life, and that to him, at least, she was a person of supreme
importance--the very pole-star, or guiding influence, of his life; and
then, after speaking to her with great warmth and kindness, he began to
lecture her a little upon the emptiness of her existence.
“You would not be so foolish as to imagine these things, if you were
more employed, Emily,” he said.
“How shall I employ myself?” asked the lady, with an incredulous
laugh. “Shall I tat? The tatting of our great-grandmothers has come
into fashion. I have tried it, and for a little while it seemed really
delightful; but there is a time when one gets tired even of that. I
have worked screens in Berlin wool with beads--or have begun them;
my aunt has a knack of finishing my work. I paint ever so little in
water-colours; but after sitting in a damp meadow for two or three
hours, exposed to a midsummer sun, the result is only that I hate
myself because I am not Creswick. And with music it is the same. The
morning-concerts spoil one for amateur music. I devoted last summer
to the harmonium--I suppose because there is such a rage for it;
but it was like the tatting--there came a stage at which it seemed
all weariness. If it were not for my orchids, I think I should go
melancholy mad; but for the cultivator of orchids there can be no such
thing as satiety until all the forests on the shores of the Amazon have
been rifled by exploring botanists.”
“Don’t you think it just possible you might find a better source of
interest even than orchids?” suggested the editor, gravely. “Your
fellow-creatures, for instance--a little sympathy for them might not be
thrown away.”
“You mean that I should turn district-visitor, and go about with
tracts and packets of tea and sugar,” replied the lady, listlessly.
“My aunt does all that. She is a clergyman’s widow, you know, and that
kind of thing is very easy to her. My maid goes with her sometimes,
and tells me dreadful things about the poor people, as she brushes my
hair--the St. Anthony’s fires and St. Vitus’s dances, and wens and
whitlows, and frightful complaints that they suffer from; and really
there seems a particular class of diseases that poor people have
entirely to themselves, just as if they have a copyright in them, you
know. I am sure I am very sorry for the poor creatures; and when there
is anything out of the common way, we send money; besides which, our
rector knows that my cheque-book is at his service in any emergency. I
cannot see that I should do any particular good by walking about in the
hot sun with tracts.”
“I dare say, so far as your own parish goes, you and your aunt are
ministering angels, my dear Emily; but you see that is a very narrow
sphere, and there are people of a higher class than those you help who
may have more need of your sympathy.”
“If you are going to ask me to be philanthropic, I warn you at once
that it is useless,” exclaimed the lady, with a little cry of alarm. “I
have not the elements of the philanthropist. I do not care the least
in the world for woman’s rights; and if I had the privilege of an
electress to-morrow, I should--what do you call it?--plump unblushingly
for the man who could offer me a new orchid. I do not care about female
printers or female doctors. I think it very sad that poor seamstresses
should work in stuffy rooms until they fade and die; but I can only
pity them, and send money to the newspapers for them, or for their
survivors. I have not strength of mind enough to be of any practical
use to them.”
Mr. Desmond sighed. He saw no remedy for the weariness of spirit from
which Mrs. Jerningham suffered. Did not Madame de Maintenon complain of
a like weariness when she was the envied of all French men and women,
thereby drawing upon herself a trenchant and somewhat impious remark
from her brother D’Aubigné? She was happier, perhaps, in the old days,
before Scarron pitied and married her--the days in which she did or did
not share the chamber of Ninon de l’Enclos.
“I do not ask you to take up the human race,” said Mr. Desmond, after a
pause; “but I think your life is too--pardon me if I say egotistical.
If you had more friends--I don’t mean visitors; you have plenty of
them, but intimate acquaintance--intimate enough to fly to you in their
perplexities, to consult you in their social arrangements, and to--”
“They would only bore me.”
“Perhaps; but they would occupy you, they would take you out of
yourself; and even when they were dullest and most obnoxious, they
would give a keener zest to your hours of solitude. Depend upon it,
one must consent to be bored now and then, in order to appreciate the
rapture of not being bored. I am sure, Emily, you would be happier if
you took a little more interest in the affairs of your neighbours, or
if you had more people dependent on your kindness.”
“You may be right,” returned the lady, listlessly; “but I do not care
for my neighbours. I cannot bring myself to sympathize with their
serio-comic woes about recalcitrant butlers and flaunting housemaids.
Nor have I any dependents whom my kindness could benefit. My father and
I were the only poor members of the family, and there is no one who
would care to profit by my prosperity.”
What could be said after this? Laurence Desmond felt that this lonely
lady’s life wanted a something that gives form and purpose to the
lives of other women. Existence for Emily Jerningham had been made too
easy, and, extremes meeting in this as in all other cases, it was fast
becoming difficult. She was like some dowager sultana, weaned of palace
and gardens, fountains and slaves, peacocks and birds of paradise. All
the ease and luxury of her life palled on her, and that most fatal of
moral diseases, discontent, was fast gaining a hold upon her mind.
That old story of the greedy apprentice in the pastrycook’s shop is a
fable of wide application. The boy fancies he can never be weary of
an existence that is all raspberry-tarts and bath-buns; and being let
loose in his master’s shop, makes himself bilious in a week, and hates
the sight of a raspberry-tart ever afterwards.
There had been a time when Miss Jerningham, sadly restricted in all the
aspirations of young-ladyhood, had believed that an open account with
a West-end milliner, a perfectly appointed barouche for the Park, and
a miniature brougham for shopping, must constitute the supreme good of
earthly existence; but after half a dozen years’ enjoyment of these
blessings, she discovered that the most accomplished of milliners,
and the most perfect of establishments, cannot give happiness. The
toy-villa at Hampton was a place to dream of; but its mistress found
the hours intolerably long in those Paradisaic gardens, the evenings
unutterably weary in that fairy drawing-room, the drives by Bushey and
Richmond, Kingston and Chertsey, very little gayer than the prisoner’s
tramp in the grim gaol-yard, under surveillance of a hard-visaged
warder.
The lady had nothing to do. If she read a volume of a novel, and paid
a few visits, or received a few callers, to-day, she could only look
forward to another volume, and another visit, or visitor, to-morrow.
The days were all alike, and they left no mark behind them. When a year
came to an end, Mrs. Jerningham told herself that she was twelve months
older than when it began, and that was the sole effect the passage of
time could exercise upon her fate.
“It is all very well for Laurence to be happy and active,” she said to
herself. “He has that odious _Areopagus_ to interest him, and the
hope of going into parliament by and by. He is getting rich, and has
had the excitement of earning his money. He has his social triumphs
and his literary successes, the friendship of great men. It is always
the same story. _They_ have ‘the court, camp, church; the vessel
and the mart; sword, gown, gain, glory;’ and we have only the London
Library and Jaques’s croquet.”
Mr. Desmond stayed a fortnight at Spa, and then hurried back to the
British Isles, being “due” at a ducal palace in the Highlands--a grand
old château, romantic as a picture by Gustave Doré. To say that he
assured Mrs. Jerningham he had not the faintest expectation of deriving
pleasure from this visit, and that he went to Scotland simply because
the political interests of the _Areopagus_ obliged him to stalk
the duke’s deer and shoot the duke’s grouse, is only to say that he was
a _man_.
Within a week from his departure Mrs. Jerningham and her companion
also turned their backs upon the romantic Belgian valley. Emily would
have liked much to make the return journey under the escort of the
editor; but this would have just a little outstepped the bounds of this
carefully regulated friendship, and Mr. Desmond was too profoundly
versed in the philosophy of his own world to suggest the measure. He
knew exactly how much would be permitted to himself and the woman
he--had loved, and still hoped to marry; and he adhered closely to the
letter of that unwritten law which is Society’s Koran.
When autumn was fast fading into the chill gray of early winter, Mr.
Desmond came back to town, and resumed his visits at the Hampton villa,
where his pleasure and his caprices were studied with affectionate
solicitude, but where a good deal was exacted from him in return for
this solicitude. If Mrs. Jerningham for her part paid a certain price
for Laurence Desmond’s friendship, so surely did he for his part pay
somewhat heavily for the honour and privilege of the lady’s regard.
In plain English, she was jealous. The agony which neither “mandragora
nor all the drowsy syrups of the East” can lull to rest was the agony
that racked the soul of Emily Jerningham. Little wonder that the
pleasures and luxuries of her life palled upon her. There was a poison
in her cup which flavoured every joy and embittered every pleasure. All
the petty doubts and frivolous misgivings of the jealous mind harassed
this lady’s quiet days, and tormented her through the slow hours of
her wakeful nights. She was miserable when Laurence Desmond was away
from her; she was restless and anxious when he was with her. If he were
grave, she fancied him bored by her society; if he were especially
gay, her demon-familiar suggested that his gaiety might be assumed.
She tortured him by her eager curiosity about the manner in which his
life was spent when he was away from her. She insulted him by the air
of incredulity with which she received his answers. The mention of some
beautiful or distinguished woman whom he had met in society sufficed to
fan the flame that was always burning.
“Why do you pretend not to admire Laura Courtenay, and why do you
give your shoulders that depreciating shrug when you talk of Lady
Sylvester?” she would exclaim, with suppressed anger. “Do you think I
am deceived by that kind of thing? You dined at the Sylvesters’ four
times last season; and you are always dancing attendance upon those
Courtenay girls, though you make quite a favour of coming here once
a week. I shall ask Laura and Julia Courtenay to stay with me next
summer, and then perhaps I shall be honoured by your society.”
Of course Mr. Desmond did his uttermost to satisfy the lady’s doubts
and cheer her spirits; but he found it not a little wearisome to repeat
the same protestations, the same assurances, week after week, to very
small effect.
“If I could see Emily contented and happy,” he said to himself, “I
should be the last to count the cost of our friendship; but her tears,
and misgivings, and accusations harass and worry me almost beyond
endurance.”
Nor did Mr. Desmond feel thus without justification. The lady’s
jealousy might, indeed, be the strongest possible evidence of her
affection, but it was an evidence which Laurence Desmond could have
gladly dispensed with.
“Surely there must be within the limits of possibility a love that
means peace, trust, unselfishness. Is every woman like Emily, exacting,
suspicious, insatiable of devotion and protestation, for ever on the
watch to discover falsehood and hypocrisy in the man who loves her?
Poor girl! I am hard and cruel perhaps, when I blame her. These doubts
and suspicions may be some of the penalties of our position. There can
be no true union of hearts where there is a separation of existences.
It is all very well to talk sentimental balderdash about the union
of souls, the sympathy of minds that think alike, the sighs that are
wafted from Indus to the Pole; but, in spite of poetry and metaphysics,
real union means the family breakfast-table, the daily dinner, the
constitutional walk, the drowsy home-evening when there are no
visitors, the summer trip to Switzerland, the quiet, half-tearful talk
in the big, darkened bedroom when first the faint squeal of babyhood
is heard in the family mansion. Out upon Platonic friendship between
men and women who have once knelt together at the shrine of Venus! It
is a delusion, a mockery, a lie! There is no union except marriage.”
This was the shape which Mr. Desmond’s reflections were wont to assume
after a painful interview with Emily Jerningham. She loved him, and she
would fain have believed in his love, but her familiar demon would not
allow her so much peace, such pure delight. If Laurence succeeded in
convincing her of his truth and devotion to-night, and left her at the
gate of her pretty garden, smiling and happy, after a cordial pressure
of her soft white hand, it was as likely as not that an hour’s solitary
promenade and contemplation in the same pretty garden would enable the
lady to develop new doubts and misgivings from her inner consciousness,
which would result in a melancholy letter of five or six pages, written
that night, and delivered next morning at Mr. Desmond’s late breakfast.
Those who knew the editor of the _Areopagus_, and knew or guessed
his position _auprès de_ Mrs. Jerningham, envied and hated him as
the most fortunate of literary highflyers. What more could he desire?
Had he not the regard of one of the handsomest and best-bred women in
London, who would in all probability come in for a princely fortune
whenever Jerningham should go off the hooks? Mr. Desmond was the last
of men to admit the pinching of the shoe which he wore with so good
a grace. No one among his intimates ventured the impertinence of a
congratulation; but it was a generally understood thing that he was
supremely happy, and that Mrs. Jerningham’s friendship was a blessing
which he would not have bartered for a kingdom. And while his friends
were permitted to suppose this, Laurence Desmond was profoundly
miserable.
“How will it end?” he asked himself sometimes; “and will it ever end?”
CHAPTER XIII.
MISS ST. ALBANS.
AS an individual who, by arduous and unremitting labour--by the sweat
of his brow and the ceaseless working of his brain--had contrived
to secure for himself a decent income in the present and a moderate
provision for the future, Mr. Desmond was of course a fitting mark
for the arrows of that free-lance of modern civilization--the
begging-letter writer. Men and women whose faces he had never seen
wrote him pitiful letters, or impudent letters, as the case might
be, urging requests which, if all or even half of them had been
granted, would speedily have left him penniless. That he should have
those of his own kith or kin--that he should have personal friends,
or benefactors of the past with powerful claims upon him in the
present--that he should have obligations to discharge, or debts to pay,
or artistic tastes to gratify, never entered the heads of these poor
needy people. His name and address were in the Directory, and he was
supposed to be tolerably well off; so there was no more to do but to
procure a sheet of paper and a penny stamp, and entreat of him the loan
or donation of any given number of pounds, from five to a hundred.
These applications were as painful to Mr. Desmond as such applications
must always be to a man who has power to feel the extent of human want
and wretchedness around and about him, without the power to relieve it.
He read the piteous letters with a sigh, and passed them over to his
sub-editor, who answered every appeal with the same polite formula.
Laurence Desmond was not a hard man, however, and to an appeal that
came from an old friend or fellow-worker he never turned a deaf ear.
Such an appeal came to him one dull, wintry morning after his return
from the ducal château in Scotland. Among his letters there was a very
painful one from Mrs. Jerningham, with the usual jealous murmurs, the
oft-repeated complaints of neglect. This he read with a thoughtful
brow, and laid aside with a sigh so heavy as to be almost a groan.
“I am tired of protestation and justification,” he said to himself;
“there must be an end of these letters. If she doubts my truth because
I spend half a dozen days without going to her, she can have little
power to appreciate the unselfishness of my regard in the three long
years in which I have made myself her slave. There must come an end to
a bondage that is intolerable to me, and only a source of unhappiness
to her.”
The rest of Mr. Desmond’s letters, with one exception, were on business
connected with his journal. This one exception was a letter addressed
in a hand that was very familiar to him.
“My old coach, Tristram Alford!” he cried, as he tore open the
envelope. “I wonder how the poor fellow has been getting on since the
old days at Henley, when Max Waldon, Frank Lawsley, and I were there
with our boat, reading for ‘Greats.’ I suppose he has been writing a
book, or doing a translation of a Greek tragedy, and wants me to give
him a lift. It’s a long time since I’ve heard anything of him.”
This was the tutor’s letter:--
“MY DEAR DESMOND,--If I had not already tested and proved
the goodness of your heart when I appealed to you some three or four
years since for a loan,--which I then hoped would have been of a
temporary character, but which, I regret to remember, has not yet been
liquidated,--I should not now venture to address you as a suppliant.
“The favour which I am now about to ask is not of a pecuniary kind,
and it is a favour which will be very easy for you to grant. You
remember my little girl Lucy, who was so fond of your dogs and boats,
and who used to sit listening with open eyes and mouth when we were
construing _Sophocles_. The little rogue had an innate love of
the drama, and performed the part of Electra with a metal tea-pot in a
most affecting manner. Well, my dear boy, that inborn dramatic taste,
which showed itself when the child was in pinafores, has grown with
her growth; and when old enough to consider the question of getting
her own living,--the generous-minded child being sensitively averse to
remaining a burden to me,--she decided on becoming an actress.
“I need scarcely inform you, my dear Desmond, that such an idea was to
me, at the first blush, absolute HORROR; but when my sweet
girl urged her predilection for the drama, and reminded me of the
handsome fortunes realized by Garrick, Mrs. Siddons, Miss O’Neill, and
other professors of that classic art, I relented, and allowed Lucy
to have her own way. The dear girl had educated herself and reared
herself, as it were, with so little help from me, that it would have
seemed ill in me to frustrate her hopes by my cold reasoning or timid
doubts. Nor had I any very agreeable alternative to offer her. My
circumstances have year by year become more embarrassed since that
pleasant summer we spent together at Henley, and the home which I can
provide for my only child is of the poorest. Was I, then, to stand in
the way of her advancement?
“To make a long story short, I yielded, and have since that time
devoted my best energies to my dear girl’s service. She is but
nineteen, and has already appeared at the Theatres Royal, Stony
Stratford, Market Deeping, Oswestry, and Stamford, with considerable
success. Her sympathies are with the buskin, rather than with the
sock; but at Oswestry she performed the part of Lady Teazle, and
received much applause from an appreciative, although somewhat
limited, audience.
“We have now essayed a bolder venture. My Lucy has obtained, with
inordinate difficulty, a London engagement. I had, in my ignorance
of the dramatic world, fondly imagined that a young person of
unmistakeable genius had only to apply to the manager of one of the
patent theatres, in order to be placed at once upon the boards that
Siddons trod. But I find, alas! that in most cases it is only after
years of patient and ill-paid drudgery in small provincial towns
the dramatic aspirant works his or her way to the metropolis,--nay,
indeed, there are many who never reach that splendid goal, but who
journey through life as the favourite actor of the Theatre Royal,
Market Deeping or Oswestry, and who are not ill-pleased with their
renown.
“But to return. My daughter’s engagement will be a brief one; but she
is to appear in a wide range of the drama, in conjunction with Mr.
Henry de Mortemar, a gentleman of some local celebrity, though as yet
unknown to the metropolitan critics. The theatre is an obscure one,
and Lucy must speedily return to the drudgery of a provincial stage
unless some powerful and friendly hand shall be interposed in her
behalf. Yours, my good friend, is the influence which I would solicit
for my dear child. A word from you would doubtless immediately secure
a profitable engagement at one of the West-end theatres. I beseech
you, for the sake of ‘auld lang syne,’ to say that all-powerful word,
and to confer a lasting obligation on your poor old friend and tutor,
“TRISTRAM ALFORD.
“_Paul’s Terrace, Islington, Nov. 14, 186--_”
“Poor Alford!” murmured the editor, somewhat touched by the earnestness
of this appeal. “So he has allowed his daughter to go on the stage,
and cherishes the fond delusion that she must needs be a Siddons or an
O’Neill, because she has a childish fancy for gas-lamps and spangled
petticoats. Yes, I remember the little girl--an angular chit in brown
holland; a nice little girl, I think she was, with pretty, dreamy,
blue eyes, and shy, childish ways, but an embryo blue-stocking,
nevertheless. I have a faint recollection of her playing at Electra
with the tea-pot one night, when she did not know that Waldon and I
were looking at her. Well, I’ll do all I can. The West-end managers are
_tant soit peu difficile_ now-a-days; but as the _Areopagus_
comes down rather savagely upon the modern drama and its professors
now and then, they may strain a point to oblige me. I suppose the most
friendly way of going to work would be to call on poor Alford.”
When his morning’s work was over, Mr. Desmond took a hansom from the
nearest stand, and rattled up to the topmost heights of Islington,
where, after considerable difficulty and aggravating waste of time, the
cabman found Paul’s Terrace, a shabby little row of newly built houses,
on the road to Ball’s Pond. The tutor, whom Mr. Desmond remembered the
occupant of a pretty cottage near Henley, must indeed have fallen upon
evil fortunes.
“Mr. Halford ’ave just stepped hout,” said a grimy-looking servant-girl
who opened the door; “but he won’t be gone long, sir; which Miss Sent
Halbans is in the parlour. P’r’aps you’d like to wait?”
“Well, yes, I think I had better wait,” replied the editor, disinclined
to sacrifice his afternoon without benefit to his old friend.
The girl opened a door, and admitted Mr. Desmond into a very small
parlour, powerfully perfumed with stale tobacco, and occupied by a
young lady, who was standing by the window, with a little book in her
hand.
This must of course be the Miss St. Albans of whom the servant had
spoken,--a visitor or hanger-on of the old tutor, perhaps. Laurence
Desmond wondered how Mr. Alford came to burden himself with a visitor,
and how the visitor came by so fine a name.
Miss St. Albans was a fair-haired young lady, with a slight, girlish
figure, and one of those faces which some people call “sweetly pretty,”
and some only “interesting,”--a tender, winning countenance, with soft
blue eyes and lovely mouth, but without the splendour of complexion
and feature which attract universal admiration and secure immediate
attention. Nor was this young lady’s appearance rendered striking
by the art of milliner or mantua-maker. Upon her person, as upon the
room she occupied, poverty had set its stamp. She wore a brown merino
dress that had seen much service, and her head-dress was of the most
unsophisticated order, consisting only of a small forest of curl-papers.
Mr. Desmond wondered to behold this exploded style of head-gear, and
wondered still more at the manner of the young person, who started and
blushed at sight of him, and then came towards him, with a certain
hesitation and timidity that were not unpleasing.
“Mr. Desmond, I think?” she faltered.
“Yes, my name is Desmond.”
“Ah,” murmured the damsel in curl-papers, somewhat regretfully, “I see
you have quite forgotten me.”
“Forgotten you! I don’t think that could have been possible, if I had
ever had the honour to know you, Miss St. Albans,” replied the editor,
smiling very kindly; for there was something in the girl’s candid
and yet modest demeanour which pleased this _blasé habitué_ of
West-end drawing-rooms.
“_If_ you had ever known me!” cried the young lady, reproachfully.
“Then you have quite forgotten Henley, and our boat, and Champion, the
Scotch terrier, and----”
“Not at all. I have a lively recollection of Henley and of Champion;
but I cannot recall the name of St. Albans.”
“Ah, no, I forgot that the name is strange to you. But I must be
very much altered since those happy days, or you would scarcely have
forgotten Lucy.”
“Lucy--Lucy Alford!”
“Yes, Mr. Desmond. The Lucy to whom you used to be so kind.”
“Was I kind? You are very good to think so. And you are really Miss
Alford, my dear old tutor’s daughter? Let me shake hands in token of
our renewed friendship. Yes, I have a vague recollection of a very nice
little girl, who had the prettiest blue eyes, and wore the cleanest
holland pinafores in Christendom; and I am quite charmed to behold the
same young lady, now she has outgrown the pinafores, but not the eyes.”
“You have only a vague recollection of me; yet I knew you directly you
stepped out of the cab,” said the girl, in a tone of disappointment.
“Yes, but you are more changed than I, Miss Alford. You must consider
what a gulf there is between seven and nineteen; while there is
not much outward difference between twenty-three and thirty-five.
Thirty-five is only so much dustier, and grayer, and shabbier; like a
garment that has been worn and faded by continued hard wear.”
“Indeed you do not look worn and faded,” said the tutor’s daughter,
with an involuntary glance at the hot-house flower in the fashionable
editor’s faultless overcoat.
“I received a letter from your father this morning, Miss Alford; and I
thought my best course would be to answer it in person. I am all the
more happy to attend to my old friend’s request because your interests
are involved in it.”
Lucy blushed again--not the blush of self-consciousness or coquetry,
but the honest red of innocent gratitude and impulsive feeling.
“It was very, very kind of you to come,” she said. “Papa has told me
how valuable your time is, and what a high position you hold on the
press. He had no idea that you would respond so quickly to his appeal;
and--and I am sure I ought to apologize for receiving you in these
horrible curl-papers. They are for Pauline.”
“For Pauline!”
“Yes, I play Pauline to-night in the _Lady of Lyons_, you know;
and she is always played in ringlets--I don’t exactly know why.”
“Pray do not apologize for the curl-papers. I know there is a prejudice
against them; but I really think them becoming in your case. And so you
play Pauline to-night? I remember seeing Helen----”
“Oh, please don’t!” cried the girl, with a pretty look of piteous
supplication; “every one says that. ‘My dear,’ the ladies at the
theatre say to me, ‘I have seen Miss Faucit in that character; and,
without wishing to wound your feelings, I am bound to tell you that if
you knew how _she_ played the cottage-scene, you would go home and
cut your throat.’ At least that’s what Mrs. M’Grudder, who plays old
women on the Oswestry circuit, said to me after--after I came off, so
pleased at having been applauded.”
“The old harridan! I suppose she is a very great actress herself, this
Mrs. M’Grudder.”
“Oh, no; she speaks the broadest, broadest Scotch; and in Lady Macbeth
the boys in the gallery laugh at her dreadfully.”
“Then I do not think you need be made unhappy by that lady’s sneers.
Are you very fond of acting?”
“I love it dearly, and I hope some day to get on, for papa’s sake. But
I find the life of an actress much harder than I thought, and it is
very difficult to get on. And I am so nervous.”
“You are afraid of your audience?”
“Oh, no, I don’t so much mind them; it is of the other actors and
actresses I am most afraid.”
“Indeed.”
“Yes; they come to the wings and watch me; and then they tell me what
they think; and they give me advice; and somehow they always contrive
to make me miserable. I am sure sometimes, when I have been playing
Ophelia, and have been quite carried away by the part, fancying that
I have loved a prince and been forsaken by him, and that my father
has been killed, and I am mad, I have happened to look towards the
prompt entrance and see Mrs. M’Grudder standing there staring at me in
her dreadful stony way, and have heard her say, ‘St--st--st!’ quite
loud, and it has made me break down directly. You see, most actors and
actresses have been a long time in the profession, and they have a kind
of prejudice against amateurs and novices, and try to put them down.
Mrs. M’Grudder had two daughters in the theatre, who both wanted to
play the juveniles, and I suppose that’s what made her so unkind to me.”
“But I suppose you have done with Mrs. M’Grudder now you have come to
London?”
“Oh, no, I fear not. My engagement at the Oxford-road Theatre is only
for a fortnight. Mr. Mortemar has taken the house at his own risk, you
know, in order to introduce himself to a London public; and when the
season is over, I must go back to the country--and most likely to the
Oswestry circuit--unless I can get a permanent engagement in town.”
She glanced at Mr. Desmond when she said this, as much as to say, “You
are the all-powerful benefactor who can procure for me that inestimable
boon.”
Laurence Desmond understood the meaning of that look, and replied to
its appeal.
“If any influence of mine can get you the engagement you want, you
shall not be long without it,” he said, kindly. “I don’t think you’ll
find any Mrs. M’Grudders at the Pall Mall or the Terence.”
Mr. Alford came in while Laurence was saying this. He was an elderly
man, and he looked older than he was, by reason of the whiteness of his
straggling locks, and the stooping attitude which had become habitual
to his tall frame. He was a man who bore upon him the unmistakeable
stamp of gentle blood--a man whose good breeding no shabbiness of
attire could disguise; and it must be confessed that he was very shabby.
“My dear Desmond,” he cried, delighted to recognize his old pupil,
“this is more than kind! I expected kindness from you, but not such
promptitude as this.”
“I should be very ungrateful if I were otherwise than prompt, when I
remember how well you pulled me through when I was reading for ‘Greats’
twelve years ago,” answered Laurence, heartily. “Miss Alford and I have
renewed our old acquaintance, and have become very confidential. I have
pledged myself to do my uttermost on her behalf, and if a West-end
engagement is her supreme desire, I think I can promise to gratify her
wishes through my kind friend Hartstone, of the Theatre Royal, Pall
Mall. But I cannot promise to secure her such characters as Pauline or
Ophelia. Hartstone is one of the best fellows in Christendom, but he
will think he does a good deal for friendship if he gives Miss Lucy
some pretty little young-ladylike part in a _lever du rideau_.”
And hereupon Miss Alford murmured that to appear at the Pall Mall would
be the honour and delight of her existence, however insignificant the
character she might be permitted to perform. After this Mr. Desmond
and his old tutor entered upon a very pleasant conversation about the
coaching days at Henley, and the three jolly young fellows who had
boated and read with Laurence at the Henley villa.
“Poor Max Waldon was ploughed,” said the editor. “He was asked who Saul
was. ‘Which Saul?’ asked Max, in that sweetly calm way of his; ‘Saul of
Tarsus?’ ‘No, sir; King Saul,’ replied the examiner, sternly. ‘Oh,’
said Max, ‘he was not a bad sort of fellow, only he had a nasty trick
of throwing javelins at one.’ And they ploughed him; but he is doing
wonders at the Equity bar, notwithstanding. Lawsley died at Pau the
year after he took his degree; and I fear the ’Varsity training and
pedestrianism had something to do with the decline that carried him
off.”
The reminiscences of the Long Vacation seemed by no means unpleasant to
Lucy Alford. She took up her work--it was Pauline’s bridal veil that
she was patching and darning for the evening’s performance--and sat
quietly by while her father and his pupil talked; but every now and
then her face kindled, and she looked up with a smile that meant, “I
too remember that.”
Mr. Desmond had been sitting in the shabby little lodging-house parlour
a long time, when he stole a look at his watch, and was surprised to
discover the lateness of the hour.
“I should like to see you play Pauline to-night, Miss Alford,” he
said, as he shook hands with his tutor’s daughter.
Lucy blushed, and looked at her father.
“The _Market Deeping Examiner_ compared her to Helen Faucit,
Desmond, and I doubt if any lady except Miss Faucit could touch Lucy’s
Pauline.”
“Papa, how can you say such things!” cried the girl. “Please do not
laugh at him, Mr. Desmond. I like the part of Pauline so much, and--and
I should like you to be in the theatre to-night, only I know you will
make me nervous.”
“What! do you place me in the same category as Mrs. M’Grudder?”
“O no, no, no! Only----”
“Only what?”
“I should be so anxious to please you; and the more I wished to please
you, the more nervous I should be.”
“I suppose that is the penalty I am to pay for my editorial position.
Very well, Miss Alford, I shall not say whether I am coming to the
theatre to-night; but look out for the _Areopagus_ next Saturday
morning, and----”
“And expect a washing,” cried the old tutor, rejoicing in the ’Varsity
slang.
“Good-bye, Miss Lucy,” said Laurence, lingering over these adieux just
a little more than was necessary. “Oh, by the way, I have not had the
pleasure of seeing your friend Miss St. Albans after all. Is she too a
member of the dramatic profession?”
Mr. Alford and his daughter laughed heartily at this question.
“The girl has one requisite for comedy if she can laugh like that on
the stage,” thought the editor.
“I am Miss St. Albans,” said Lucy; “St. Albans is my stage name, you
know. I really thought you understood that just now.”
“Not at all; I fully believed in Miss St. Albans as a separate entity.
And so that is your _nom de théâtre_!--rather a high-sounding
name, is it not?”
Mr. Alford blushed.
“Well, my dear boy, they like fine names, you see,” he explained, “the
managers and the public. In point of fact, they will have something
that looks well in the play-bills. St. Albans--De Mortemar: of course
the more enlightened public are aware that those are not real names;
but they go down, my dear Desmond, they go down.”
“I can only hope that the happiness of Miss Alford may be promoted
by the success of Miss St. Albans,” said the editor of the
_Areopagus_, as he made his farewell bow to the young lady in
curl-papers.
Mr. Alford accompanied him to the street-door, and apologized for his
inability to invite his old pupil to dinner.
“The world has not used me too well, Desmond, as you must perceive,”
he said; “and yet I have worked my hardest. I have a couple of
tragedies in my desk that might conduce to the revival of original
dramatic literature in this country; but the ignorance and prejudice of
theatrical managers are not easily overcome. I look to my daughter’s
genius to elevate the English stage. She is a star, my dear Desmond--a
newly-risen star; but one that will shine far and wide before long, if
she has a chance. Go and see her to-night at the Oxford, and you will
find that her poor old father does not exaggerate her merits.”
“Yes, I will go,” answered Laurence, smiling at the old man’s
enthusiasm. “You must let me give you this, Alford, to--to make things
a little pleasanter while you stay in town, for ‘auld lang syne.’”
It was a cheque for twenty pounds in his friend’s favour, which Mr.
Desmond contrived to crush into the old man’s hand as he said this.
He was gone before Tristram Alford could find time to thank him or
remonstrate with him; but the help thus offered by friendship was too
sweet to be rejected by pride, nor was Tristram Alford a man who had
ever cherished that particular sin amongst the deadly seven. There were
tears--grateful tears--in the old man’s eyes when he went back to his
daughter.
“That noble-hearted fellow has given me twenty pounds, Lucy,” he said;
“we can rub on comfortably for the next six weeks.”
To “rub on comfortably” had been Mr. Alford’s highest notion of
financial prosperity for the last thirty years. He was a man upon whom
the burden of youthful debts, the penalties of juvenile indiscretion,
had pressed so heavily as to frustrate every attempt at progress in the
race of life. Poor at school, poor at college, poor in youth, and poor
in middle age, Tristram Alford had come at last to accept Poverty as a
fellow-traveller, whose companionship must needs be endured to the end
of the troublesome journey. The utmost he asked of Providence was a
brief interval of rest and refreshment at some wayside inn, while his
companion of the chain waited for him at the door.
CHAPTER XIV.
IN THE GREEN-ROOM.
IT happened that the day on which Mr. Desmond paid his visit to Paul’s
Terrace, Islington, was a day unmarked by any particular engagement.
There had been a time when he was only too glad to snatch such a day
for a quiet afternoon at the Hampton villa; but he no longer felt the
same alacrity when the occasion offered itself. He was still fully
alive to the fact that Mrs. Jerningham was one of the handsomest and
most elegant women he had ever seen, and that to be preferred by her
was an honour; but to be submitted to the slow torture of the domestic
inquisition is none the less painful because the inquisitor-in-chief is
a beautiful woman, from whose fair lips the victim had hoped to hear
sweet words instead of captious questionings and ungenerous reproaches.
Thus did it come to pass that Mr. Desmond, having no imperative claim
on his leisure, found himself at the doors of the Oxford Road Theatre,
within two or three hours of his visit to Mr. Alford’s lodging. He
had eaten a hurried dinner at his club, and had driven thence to the
Oxford, which house of entertainment was to be found amidst a labyrinth
of streets northward of Cumberland Gate.
It is not a fashionable theatre, but amongst the inhabitants of the
immediate district it is at times a very popular resort; while there
are other times in which this temple of the drama fades and languishes
for lack of public patronage, in common with more brilliant temples of
the same order. It is a theatre whose normal splendour is ever and anon
brightened by the extra brilliancy of some wandering star, whose name,
all renowned though it may be in the district, is comparatively unknown
to the ears of fashionable playgoers, or known only as a bye-word and
a reproach.
The great T. N. Buffboote, better known to his admirers as Brayvo
Buffboote, is a favourite at the Oxford. Miss Marian Fitz-Kemble, the
celebrated lady Lear, here performs her round of tragedy, from Macbeth
to Julius Cæsar, with much satisfaction to herself and her friends.
Here has the famous Transatlantic equestrian, best known to fame as
the divine Miss Godiva Jones, pranced and galloped in her celebrated
performances of Dick Turpin and Timour the Tartar. Here in the summer
months, when the closing of West-end theatres affords a brief respite
to manager and company, there come occasionally actors and actresses of
higher repute, eager to gather new laurels in these untrodden regions,
and not ill pleased to find themselves received with noisy rapture and
outspoken admiration by the ruder gods and homelier goddesses of a
threepenny gallery.
But while stars may come and stars may go at the Oxford Road Theatre,
there is a regular company which goes on for ever, glad to be tragical
with Miss Fitz-Kemble, melodramatic with the great Buffboote, or
equestrian with the divine Godiva, as the case may be--a company which
takes life as it comes, and asks no more from existence than that its
swift-recurring Saturday shall witness the payment of every man’s
salary.
Urged by the promptings of a fiery and ambitious soul, Mr. de
Mortemar had been induced to take the Oxford Road Theatre at the
very deadest and dullest time of the year--that dreary pause in
the theatrical season which precedes the glory of Boxing-day--that
fag-end of the year, during which the combined forces of a Macready
and a Charles Mathews would scarcely suffice to illumine the profound
darkness that foreshadows the rising of that brilliant luminary,
the genuine face-distorting, policeman-overturning, baby-squashing,
redhot-poker-brandishing, parcel-snatching, crinoline-flourishing
Christmas clown--that wonder of wit and humour, who convulses his
audience by asking them what they had for dinner the day after
to-morrow, or by some sarcastic inquiry about a missing fourpenny-piece.
Mr. de Mortemar had a soul above such small considerations as good
or bad seasons. He had that within him which whispered that wherever
the English language was spoken there must be an audience able to
comprehend and admire his rendering of Hamlet and Romeo, Master Walter
and Claude Melnotte, Alfred Evelyn, Charles Surface, John Mildmay,
Citizen Sangfroid, Miles na Coppaleen, Sir Charles Coldstream, and Paul
Pry.
In _these_ few characters Mr. de Mortemar (_né_ Morris) felt
himself unapproachable. Other provincial stars might pretend to a wider
range of character; the modest De Mortemar only sought to surpass a
Kean in Hamlet, a Gustavus Brooke in Master Walter, a Macready in Lear,
a Charles Mathews in Coldstream, a Wigan in John Mildmay, a Boucicault
in the faithful Miles, and a Wright in the inquisitive Paul. This much
he felt that he could do, and he had no greedy desire to outstep the
limit which liberal Nature had set upon his genius.
“I played a burlesque character of Robson’s for my benefit at Market
Deeping last year,” Mr. de Mortemar remarked to a friend at the little
tavern next door to the Oxford Road Theatre; “and the _Deeping
Examiner_ said that if it were possible I could excel in anything
where all was excellence, I did excel in burlesque. But I don’t care
to make my mark in London as a burlesque actor. A man can’t help it if
Nature made him versatile, you see, Tommy; but there’s some kind of
principle in these things, and what Edmund Kean wouldn’t have done, I
won’t do. That’s my principle, and I mean to stick to it.”
“And so I would, Morty, if I was you. Whatever Teddy Kean could do, you
can do,” replied the humble Pylades. “And I’ll take another glass of
bitter, if you’ll stand Sam.”
“I _have_ played clown for my ben,” murmured the great De
Mortemar; “but, though I drew an enormous house, I felt the injury to
my self-respect was poorly paid for by a clear half.”
“There ain’t nothing you can’t do, Morty, from Shylock to a flipflap.
That ale’s uncommon hard; I think a six of brandy-and-water warm would
do you more good, and wouldn’t hurt _me_.”
And thus the simple De Mortemar discoursed of the greatness that was in
him, while the scantily furnished benches of pit and gallery attested
the badness of the season.
“They haven’t heard of me yet,” said the star, serene even in the
hour of disappointment. “London is a large place, and a man can’t get
a reputation in a week. The metropolitan papers are slow, sir--very
slow--to a man who has been accustomed to see a column and a half of
criticism written upon every new character performed by him; but they
can’t afford to leave me unnoticed much longer; and when they do speak,
they’ll speak out, depend upon it. I look upon the Oxford Road Theatre
as a stepping-stone to Drury Lane, and it was with that view I took
it.”
Mr. de Mortemar had engaged Miss St. Albans for the heroines of those
dramas and comedies in which he intended to shine, not because he
believed in her talent--for in plain truth this great man believed in
the existence of no talent except his own--but because she was very
young and inexperienced, and he could do as he liked with her; which
means, in a dramatic sense, that he could keep her with her back to the
audience, in an ignominious corner of the stage, through the greater
part of a scene, while he shouted and ranted at her from the centre of
the boards; and that he could take her up so sharply at the end of her
most telling speeches as to deprive her of that just meed of applause
an approving audience might naturally have bestowed upon her, and in
bestowing which they would have divided that coronal of glory Mr. de
Mortemar desired to obtain for himself alone.
Mr. Desmond found that portion of the boxes playfully entitled the
dress-circle in occupation of two young women in scarlet Garibaldi
jackets and black velvet head-dresses; one fat elderly lady, in a cap
which offered to the eye of the observer a small museum of natural
and artistic curiosities in the way of shells, feathers, beads,
butterflies, and berries; three warm-looking young men, sprawling and
lounging and giggling and whispering amongst themselves in a corner
box; and a scanty sprinkling of that class of spectators who come with
free admissions, and rarely come prepared for the removal of their
bonnets, which removal being rigorously exacted, leaves them wild and
haggard of aspect and soured in temper.
Amongst this audience the editor of the _Areopagus_ meekly took
his place, and prepared to await the rising of the curtain, while a
subdued crunching of apples and sucking of oranges, mingled with a
chorus of sibilant whisperings, went on round and about him.
Why, in a poorly-filled house, there should always be dispiriting and
aggravating delays between the falling and the rising of the act-drop,
unknown to a well-attended theatre, is one of the enigmas of theatrical
existence only to be solved by the masters of the craft; but it is
indisputable that a scanty audience, naturally disposed to be captious
and low-spirited, is always rendered more dismal and more captious by
heart-sickening intervals of waiting, that would spoil the pleasure
of an evening with Edmund Kean, or Charles Mathews, but which, when
endured for the sake of a De Mortemar, are exasperating in the highest
degree.
During such an interval, Laurence Desmond waited with tolerable
patience, entertained by the most hackneyed of waltzes and polkas,
performed by a feeble orchestra, before the curtain rose for the
third act of the _Lady of Lyons_. The flabby act-drop, with its
faded picture, did at last ascend, and, after a little preliminary
skirmishing, Miss St. Albans appeared, conducted by the great De
Mortemar, who wore a long black cloak, and looked unutterable things at
the gallery with his solemn eyes, the darkness whereof was intensified
by very palpable half-circles of Indian ink. Miss St. Albans had very
little to do in this scene. She had only to appear bewildered, and a
little alarmed by the grinning landlord and servants, and very much in
love with her prince. If she had any difficulty in giving expression to
such simple sentiments, Mr. De Mortemar saved her from the exhibition
of her incompetency, for he contrived to keep her back to the audience
throughout the scene, and so stifled and smothered her against his
manly breast, that all Mr. Desmond could see of his tutor’s daughter
was a slender girlish figure robed in white, and a fair head half
concealed by the stiff curve of Mr. de Mortemar’s encircling arm.
The first scene was short and unimportant; and after it came the
cottage-scene--the great scene for Pauline--in which the merchant’s
haughty daughter finds that her Italian prince is only a self-educated
gardener’s son, with a mother in a white apron.
Mr. Desmond set himself to watch this scene with a critical eye, for
he wished to discover what hope of dramatic success there might be for
his old friend’s daughter. Well, she was a very pretty, winning girl,
and she spoke her lines in a low soft voice, and with a gentle accent
which stamped her as of different breeding from the people who acted
with her, but--but she was not a genius; or if in her soul there was
by chance some spark of the divine fire, it was choked and obscured by
the smoke of her surroundings, and had yet to kindle into flame. She
spoke her pretty poetical speeches, and wept, and trembled, and covered
her face at the right moment; but she was only a timid young actress
trying to act. She was not the Demoiselle Deschapelles--proud, loving,
passionate, and maddened by the cheat that had been put upon her. The
supreme exaltation of mind, the positive intoxication of the intellect,
which constitutes great acting, had not yet come to her. She was timid,
self-conscious, nervously anxious to please her audience, and secure
the reward of a little hand-clapping and feet-stamping from pit and
gallery, when she should have been stung almost to madness by the sense
of outraged faith and love abused, as unconscious of spectators as
Ariadne at Naxos, or Dido on her funeral pyre.
But if Miss St. Albans was not yet an actress, it is to be remembered
that she was only nineteen years of age, and had had little more than a
twelvemonth’s experience or practice of an art which is perhaps amongst
the most difficult and exacting of all arts, and which has no formulæ
whereby the student may arrive at some comprehension of its mysteries.
It is an art that is rarely taught well, and very often taught badly;
an art which demands from its professors a moral courage, and an
expenditure of physical energy, intellectual power, and emotional
feeling demanded by no other art; and when a man happens to be endowed
with those many gifts necessary to perfection in this art, he is spoken
of in a patronizing tone as “only an actor;” and it is somewhat a
matter of wonder that he should be “received in society.”
“She is very young,” thought Mr. Desmond, when the act-drop had fallen
on Pauline’s passion and Claude’s remorse, and when the star had been
recalled by three particular friends in the pit, and one shrill boy in
the gallery. “She is very young, and she is pretty and interesting, and
might learn to be a good actress, if there were any school in which she
could be taught. But to act with such a conventional ranter and tearer
as this De Mortemar, would be destruction to an embryo Siddons. This
girl seems eminently sympathetic, and is of the stuff that makes our
Faucits and Herberts; but where is she to get the right training?--that
is the question.”
Mr. Desmond kept his place patiently throughout the third and fourth
acts of the drama, though the dreary blank between the two acts was
a sharp test of man’s capacity for suffering. He saw Pauline come
downstairs to breakfast, in her smart bridal-dress of lace and satin,
to go through all those phases of pride and anger, tenderness and
yielding love, which form the crucial test of the young tragédienne’s
power and genius; and after the curtain had fallen upon Pauline, the
subjugated and devoted, Laurence Desmond left the apple-munchers, and
whisperers, and gigglers of the dress-boxes to their own devices, and
departed, with the intention of penetrating to those mysterious regions
which lie behind the boundary-line of the footlights.
To an ordinary individual the stage-door of the Oxford Road
Theatre might have been an impassable barrier; but the name of the
_Areopagus_ was an “open sesame,” against which no stage-door
keeper could afford to shut his eyes. The stage-door keeper was not
a reader of the popular literary journal, but he had a vague notion
that the _Areopagus_ was a paper affected by swells, and that it
sometimes came down heavily upon the great ones of the dramatic world,
whose genius no meaner organ dared gainsay. To the editor of such a
periodical, Mr. de Mortemar would, of course, desire to be civil; and
the door-keeper admitted Mr. Desmond, after having submitted him to a
sharp scrutiny, or, in his own phraseology, “taken stock of him, to
make sure as he was none of them milingtary coves a-tryin’ it on to
git behind, and hang about the place a-talking to Mamsell Pasdebasque,
which she ought to know better.”
Mr. Desmond had never before been behind the scenes of the Oxford Road
Theatre, but he had run the gauntlet of the West-end houses; and except
that the passages and stairs in the Oxford Road Theatre were a shade
or so darker, and dingier, and dirtier, and a little more eminently
adapted for the spraining of ankles and the breaking of necks, the
Oxford Road was as other theatres.
After some groping and stumbling in the wrong passages and on the
wrong stairs, the Editor made his way to the green-room. He could
scarcely have told himself why he took this trouble in order to say
a few kind words to his old tutor’s daughter, or whether the saying
of kind words was at all required from him. It may be that, having
given up his evening to this visit to the Oxford Road Theatre, he
came behind the scenes merely because he could no longer endure the
dreary misery of the boxes; or it may be that he wanted to observe
the manners and customs of actors of a different class from those he
had been accustomed to meet. Mr. Desmond, however, did not trouble
himself with any consideration of his motive. He came to the green-room
to see Miss Alford, or Miss St. Albans, because it was the humour of
the moment to come. He had given himself an evening’s holiday from
the ever-alternating labours of literary and social life, and he was
not sorry to lose the sense of his own cares and perplexities amongst
strange surroundings.
The green-room was a long narrow slip of a room underground, furnished
with a few shabby chairs and benches, some flaring gas-lamps, and
a cheval-glass, before which the actors and actresses contemplated
themselves afresh after every change of costume, more or less pleased
with the result of their scrutiny.
Mr. Desmond found his friend’s daughter standing before this glass,
arranging the scanty festoons of a black tulle ball-dress, dotted about
with little bunches of violets--a dress that Mademoiselle Deschapelles
could by no possibility have worn at any period of her existence, but
which poor Lucy Alford fondly believed was the exact thing for the last
act.
“How do you do, once more, Miss--St. Albans?” said the editor, going up
to the glass.
“How do you do, Mr. Desmond?” the girl said, startled, and blushing
brightly beneath the artificial pallor which marked the mental agonies
of Pauline. “I--I didn’t think you’d come behind; it’s not generally
allowed, you know; but of course with you it’s different. I saw you in
the dress-circle. How kind of you to come! But it made me so nervous.”
“Yes, I could see that you were nervous.”
“You could see it! I am sorry for that!” said Lucy, just a little
mortified.
“My dear young lady, if you were not nervous, you would not be of the
sensitive stuff that makes an artist.
“You--you were not displeased with me?”
What could he say when she asked this question?--in faltering, pleading
tones, that seemed to say, “Oh! for pity’s sake, give me a word of
praise, or I shall die at your feet.” What could he say, when the soft
blue eyes looked up to him with such a beseeching expression? Could he
be candid, and reply, “You are at present the kind of actress whom the
coarse-minded critic calls ‘a stick;’ your idea of Pauline Deschapelles
is a schoolgirl’s notion, without force, or depth, or passion; but when
you are ten years older, and have thought, and suffered, and studied,
and have lost all the youthful beauty which now enables you to look the
part, you may possibly be able to act it?”
Instead of this, Mr. Desmond fenced the question with diplomatic art.
“It gave me great pleasure to see you act,” he said; “and you looked
charming. I think fortune is a great deal too kind to Claude in giving
him such a lovely and devoted wife after his shabby conduct.”
“Do you like Mr. de Mortemar?” asked Lucy, delighted by the small meed
of praise conveyed in this artful speech.
“Well, not very much,” replied Laurence, smiling; “he is not exactly my
style.”
“And yet he was such an enormous favourite at Market Deeping,” said
Lucy, opening her eyes to their widest extent. “But, to tell you the
real truth, I do not very much admire him myself; only I wouldn’t say
so to any one except you for the world, as it was so very good of him
to give me a London engagement.”
“It is not very good of him to keep you in a corner of the stage all
through your best scenes.”
“Yes, that is a disagreeable way he has; but I don’t think he knows
when he does it.”
“Oh yes, my dear Miss St. Albans, depend upon it he knows very well.
Ah, here he is.”
Mr. de Mortemar entered the green-room with his grandest tragedy stalk.
He had been informed of Mr. Desmond’s visit.
“They have heard of me already,” he said to himself. “Perhaps the
_Areopagus_ will be the first to speak out. I knew they couldn’t
afford to continue their vile attempt to crush me by silence. They have
been paid--bribed by some London actors whose names I could mention--to
keep my fame from the public. But there must come a time when they
will find it dangerous for their own reputation to play that game any
longer. They attempted to crush Kean, and they are attempting to crush
me. But they will find it even harder work to destroy me than they
found it to destroy poor little Ted.”
This is what Mr. De Mortemar told his friends, whom he rarely
entertained with any other topic than his own triumphs, past, present,
and future; and this is what he told himself. Impressed with this
conviction, he approached Mr. Desmond, and introduced himself to that
gentleman with the air of a man who confers a favour, and who is fully
aware of the fact.
“I saw you in the boxes during the third and fourth acts,” he said, in
his grand, high-tragedy manner. “You could scarcely have chosen your
time better for forming a fair judgment of my Claude. I do not consider
it one of my _great_ parts, though my friends are pleased to tell
me that I have left William Charles Macready some distance behind in my
rendering of that character. You were, no doubt, struck by some points
which are not only new to the stage, but which go a step or two beyond
the original meaning of the author. As, for instance, at the close of
the third act, where, instead of the ordinary, ‘Ho, my mother!’--a mere
commonplace summons to a parent who is desired to come downstairs--I
have adopted the heavy sigh of despair: ‘Oh, my mother!’--expressive of
Claude’s remorseful consciousness that he has disregarded the widow’s
very sensible advice in the first act. This reading opens up--if I
may be permitted to say so--long vistas of thought, and also gives an
importance and an elevation to the character of the Widow Melnotte,
for which the lady performing that part can scarcely be sufficiently
grateful. ‘Oh, my mother! Oh, my second self, my guide, my counsellor,
by whose sustaining wisdom I might have escaped my present degradation
and despair!’ All that, I flatter myself, is implied in the sigh and
the gesture which I introduce at this point. Subtle, is it not?”
“Extremely subtle,” said Laurence; “you must have studied the German
critics, Mr. de Mortemar? There is a profundity in your ideas that
reminds me of Schlegel.”
“No, sir; I have studied _this_,” replied the tragedian, thumping
the breast of his green-cloth coat, whereon glittered the tin-foil
crosses and spangled stars which the soldier of the Republic was
supposed to have won for himself in Italy. “I have drawn my inspiration
from my own heart, sir; and I am the less surprised when I find that
the fire that burns _here_ is quick to kindle an electric spark
in the breasts of other men. The people of Market Deeping will tell
you who and what I am, sir, if you can take the trouble to interrogate
them. There are some there, sir, who know what good acting is, and
who know how to appreciate a great actor. In London, you seem not to
want great actors. The age of your Garricks and your Kembles is past;
and when new Garricks and Kembles arise, you shut the doors of your
principal theatres in their faces, and do your best to ignore them, or
to write them down in your newspapers. But this kind of thing cannot
last for ever, sir. The voice of the mighty British public is clamorous
for a great actor; and you, sir, garble and misrepresent the truth as
you may, cannot long interpose yourself between that mighty public and
that great actor. I am, of course, understood to speak in a broad and
general sense, sir, and to mean no offence to you in person.”
“Of course not. I shall accept all you say in a strictly parliamentary
sense, as the Pickwickians did upon a memorable occasion. And believe
me, Mr. de Mortemar, when Garrick _redivivus_ appears, mine shall
not be the pen to dispute his genius. In the meantime the public must
be content with--ah, you are called, I see, Mr. de Mortemar.”
A grimy-faced boy summoned the hero of the night, and the great De
Mortemar was compelled to depart before he had extorted from the editor
of the _Areopagus_ the smallest modicum of that praise for which
his soul hungered.
Mr. Desmond did not find himself alone with Miss St. Albans on the
departure of Mr. De Mortemar. An elderly and bloated individual, in a
very shabby gray suit of the Georgian era, hovered near, and surveyed
the stranger ever and anon with an observant eye--an eye in which there
was that watery lustre, by some physiologists supposed to betoken a
partiality for strong drinks. Mr. Desmond remembered this gentleman
as the parent of Pauline, and perceived in his shabby and faded
appearance the decadence of the wealthy merchant of Lyons.
“That’s rather a strong case of coals, a’nt it?” inquired this
individual, indicating by a turn of his head that the departing De
Mortemar was the subject of his discourse.
“A case of coals?” repeated Laurence, doubtfully.
“Yes, coals--nuts--barcelonas. The gorger’s awful coally on his own
slumming, eh?”
“I really am at a loss--” faltered the bewildered Laurence.
“Don’t understand our patter, I suppose,” said M. Deschapelles, with
an affable smile. “I mean to say that our friend the manager is rather
sweet upon his own acting.”
“Well, yes; Mr. De Mortemar appears to have considerable confidence in
his own powers.”
“Rather! Bless your heart, they’re always coming up to London like
that, thinking they’re going to set the town in a blaze. There was
William Harford--Howling Billy, they used to call him on the Northern
Circuit--he came to London thinking he was going to put Macready’s
nose out of joint--and didn’t. He was a wicked actor, he was. Satan
will have him some day. A man can’t go on murdering Shakespeare as
Howling Billy did without coming to Satan at last.
“P’line! Deechappells!--Miss St. Albans! Mr. Jackson!--last scene!”
roared the grimy-faced boy at this juncture, and Mr. Desmond was fain
to bid his tutor’s daughter a brief good-night.
He did not return to the front of the house. He had seen enough of Miss
Alford’s acting to enable him to judge very fairly what she could do in
the present, and what she might achieve in the future.
“I will try my best to get her out of this wretched school,” he said
to himself. “I will try to get her away from Mr. de Mortemar and
that curious, good-tempered-looking old man, who talked about Satan
and Howling Billy. I dare say I can get Hartstone to engage her for
the Pall Mall. He wants pretty, lady-like girls for his farces, and
gives very liberal salaries; and though she won’t get the experience
that makes a Helen Faucit, she will at any rate get away from the De
Mortemar school. I should like to put her in the right path, for poor
old Alford’s sake.”
END OF VOL. I.
J. Ogden and Co., Printers, 172, St. John Street, E.C.
=TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES=
Simple typographical errors have been silently corrected; unbalanced
quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and
otherwise left unbalanced.
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
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