Chapter XV
“When God wills, all winds bring rain.”--Ancient Proverb.
The manager had not submitted to the loss of his property in Sophy and L100 without taking much vain trouble to recover the one or the other. He had visited Jasper while that gentleman lodged in St. James’s; but the moment he hinted at the return of the L100, Mr. Losely opened both door and window, and requested the manager to make his immediate choice of the two. Taking the more usual mode of exit, Mr. Rugge vented his just indignation in a lawyer’s letter, threatening Mr. Losely with an action for conspiracy and fraud. He had also more than once visited Mrs. Crane, who somewhat soothed him by allowing that he had been very badly used, that he ought at least to be repaid his money, and promising to do her best to persuade Mr. Losely “to behave like a gentleman.” With regard to Sophy herself, Mrs. Crane appeared to feel a profound indifference. In fact, the hatred which Mrs. Crane had unquestionably conceived for Sophy while under her charge was much diminished by Losely’s unnatural conduct towards the child. To her it was probably a matter of no interest whether Sophy was in Rugge’s hands or Waife’s; enough for her that the daughter of a woman against whose memory her fiercest passions were enlisted was, in either case, so far below herself in the grades of the social ladder.
Perhaps of the two protectors for Sophy, Rugge and Waife, her spite alone would have given the preference to Waife. He was on a still lower step of the ladder than the itinerant manager. Nor, though she had so mortally injured the forlorn cripple in the eyes of Mr. Hartopp, had she any deliberate purpose of revenge to gratify against him! On the contrary, if she viewed him with contempt, it was a contempt not unmixed with pity. It was necessary to make to the Mayor the communications she had made, or that worthy magistrate would not have surrendered the child intrusted to him, at least until Waife’s return. And really it was a kindness to the old man to save him both from an agonizing scene with Jasper, and from the more public opprobrium which any resistance on his part to Jasper’s authority or any altercation between the two would occasion. And as her main object then was to secure Losely’s allegiance to her, by proving her power to be useful to him, so Waifes and Sophys and Mayors and Managers were to her but as pawns to be moved and sacrificed, according to the leading strategy of her game.
Rugge came now, agitated and breathless, to inform Mrs. Crane that Waife had been seen in London. Mr. Rugge’s clown had seen him, not far from the Tower; but the cripple had disappeared before the clown, who was on the top of an omnibus, had time to descend. “And even if he had actually caught hold of Mr. Waife,” observed Mrs. Crane, “what then? You have no claim on Mr. Waife.”
“But the Phenomenon must be with that ravishing marauder,” said Rugge. “However, I have set a minister of justice--that is, ma’am, a detective police--at work; and what I now ask of you is simply this: should it be necessary for Mr. Losely to appear with me before the senate--that is to say, ma’am, a metropolitan police-court--in order to prove my legal property in my own bought and paid for Phenomenon, will you induce that bold bad man not again to return the poisoned chalice to my lips?”
“I do not even know where Mr. Losely is; perhaps not in London.”
“Ma’am, I saw him last night at the theatre,--Princess’s. I was in the shilling gallery. He who owes me L100, ma’am,--he in a private box!”
“Ah! you are sure; by himself?”
“With a lady, ma’am,--a lady in a shawl from Ingee. I know them shawls. My father taught me to know them in early childhood, for he was an ornament to British commerce,--a broker, ma’am,--pawn! And,” continued Rugge, with a withering smile, “that man in a private box, which at the Princess’s costs two pounds two, and with the spoils of Ingee by his side, lifted his eyeglass and beheld me,--me in the shilling gallery! and his conscience did not say, ‘Should we not change places if I paid that gentleman L100?’ Can such things be, and overcome us, ma’am, like a summer cloud, without our special--I put it to you, ma’am--wonder?”
“Oh, with a lady, was he?” exclaimed Arabella Crane, her wrath, which, while the manager spoke, gathered fast and full, bursting now into words. “His ladies shall know the man who sells his own child for a show; only find out where the girl is, then come here again before you stir further. Oh, with a lady! Go to your detective policeman, or rather send him to me; we will first discover Mr. Losely’s address. I will pay all the expenses. Rely on my zeal, Mr. Rugge.”
Much comforted, the manager went his way. He had not been long gone before Jasper himself appeared. The traitor entered with a more than customary bravado of manner, as if he apprehended a scolding, and was prepared to face it; but Mrs. Crane neither reproached him for his prolonged absence, nor expressed surprise at his return. With true feminine duplicity, she received him as if nothing had happened. Jasper, thus relieved, became of his own accord apologetic and explanatory; evidently he wanted something of Mrs. Crane. “The fact is, my dear friend,” said he, sinking into a chair, “that the day after I last saw you I happened to go to the General Post Office to see if there were any letters for me. You smile: you don’t believe me. Honour bright, here they are;” and Jasper took from the side pocket of his coat a pocket-book, a new pocket-book, a brilliant pocket-book, fragrant Russian leather, delicately embossed, golden clasps, silken linings, jewelled pencil-case, malachite pen-knife,--an arsenal of knickknacks stored in neat recesses; such a pocket-book as no man ever gives to himself. Sardanapalus would not have given that pocket-book to himself! Such a pocket-book never comes to you, O enviable Lotharios, save as tributary keepsakes from the charmers who adore you! Grimly the Adopted Mother eyed that pocket-book. Never had she seen it before. Grimly she pinched her lips. Out of this dainty volume--which would have been of cumbrous size to a slim thread-paper exquisite, but scarcely bulged into ripple the Atlantic expanse of Jasper Losely’s magnificent chest--the monster drew forth two letters on French paper,--foreign post-marks. He replaced them quickly, only suffering her eye to glance at the address, and continued, “Fancy! that purse-proud Grand Turk of an infidel, though he would not believe me, has been to France,--yes, actually to ----- making inquiries evidently with reference to Sophy. The woman who ought to have thoroughly converted him took flight, however, and missed seeing him. Confound her!”
“I ought to have been there. So I have no doubt for the present the Pagan remains stubborn. Gone on into Italy I hear; doing me, violating the laws of Nature, and roving about the world, with his own solitary hands in his bottomless pockets,--like the wandering Jew! But, as some slight set-off in my run of ill-luck, I find at the post-office a pleasanter letter than the one which brings me this news. A rich elderly lady, who has no family, wants to adopt a nice child; will take Sophy,--make it worth my while to let her have Sophy. ‘T is convenient in a thousand ways to settle one’s child comfortably in a rich house; establishes rights, subject, of course, to cheques which would not affront me,--a father! But the first thing requisite is to catch Sophy: ‘t is in that I ask your help; you are so clever. Best of creatures! what could I do without you? As you say, whenever I want a friend I come to you,--Bella!”
Mrs. Crane surveyed Jasper’s face deliberately. It is strange how much more readily women read the thoughts of men than men detect those of women. “You know where the child is,” said she, slowly.
“Well, I take it for granted she is with the old man; and I have seen him,--seen him yesterday.”
“Go on; you saw him,--where?”
“Near London Bridge.”
“What business could you possibly have in that direction? Ah! I guess, the railway station to Dover: you are going abroad?”
“No such thing; you are so horribly suspicious. But it is true I had been to the station inquiring after some luggage or parcels which a friend of mine had ordered to be left there; now, don’t interrupt me. At the foot of the bridge I caught a sudden glimpse of the old man,--changed, altered, aged, one eye lost. You had said I should not know him again, but I did; I should never have recognized his face. I knew him by the build of the shoulder, a certain turn of the arms, I don’t know what; one knows a man familiar to one from birth without seeing his face. Oh, Bella; I declare that I felt as soft,--as soft as the silliest muff who ever--” Jasper did not complete his comparison, but paused a moment, breathing hard, and then broke into another sentence. “He was selling something in a basket,--matches, boot-straps, deuce knows what. He! a clever man too! I should have liked to drop into that d----d basket all the money I had about me.”
“Why did not you?”
“Why? How could I? He would have recognized me. There would have been a scene,--a row, a flare up, a mob round us, I dare say. I had no idea it would so upset me; to see him selling matches too; glad we did not meet at Gatesboro’. Not even for that L100 do I think I could have faced him. No; as he said when we last parted, ‘The world is wide enough for both.’ Give me some brandy; thank you.”
“You did not speak to the old man; he did not see you: but you wanted to get back the child; you felt sure she must be with him; you followed him home?”
“I? No; I should have had to wait for hours. A man like me, loitering about London Bridge! I should have been too conspicuous; he would have soon caught sight of me, though I kept on his blind side. I employed a ragged boy to watch and follow him, and here is the address. Now, will you get Sophy back for me without any trouble to me, without my appearing? I would rather charge a regiment of horse-guards than bully that old man.”
“Yet you would rob him of the child,--his sole comfort?”
“Bother!” cried Losely, impatiently; “the child can be only a burden to him; well out of his way; ‘t is for the sake of that child he is selling matches! It would be the greatest charity we could do him to set him free from that child sponging on him, dragging him down; without her he’d find a way to shift for himself. Why, he’s even cleverer than I am! And there--there; give him this money, but don’t say it came from me.”
He thrust, without counting, several sovereigns--at least twelve or fourteen--into Mrs. Crane’s palm; and so powerful a charm has goodness the very least, even in natures the most evil, that that unusual, eccentric, inconsistent gleam of human pity in Jasper Losely’s benighted soul shed its relenting influence over the angry, wrathful, and vindictive feelings with which Mrs. Crane the moment before regarded the perfidious miscreant; and she gazed at him with a sort of melancholy wonder. What! though so little sympathizing with affection that he could not comprehend that he was about to rob the old man of a comfort which no gold could repay; what though so contemptuously callous to his own child,--yet there in her hand lay the unmistakable token that a something of humanity, compunction, compassion, still lingered in the breast of the greedy cynic; and at that thought all that was softest in her own human nature moved towards him, indulgent, gentle. But in the rapid changes of the heart feminine, the very sentiment that touched upon love brought back the jealousy that bordered upon hate. How came he by so much money? more than days ago he, the insatiate spendthrift, had received for his task-work? And that POCKETBOOK!
“You have suddenly grown rich, Jasper.”
For a moment he looked confused, but replied as he rehelped himself to the brandy, “Yes, rouge-et-noir,--luck. Now, do go and see after this affair, that’s a dear good woman. Get the child to-day if you can; I will call here in the evening.”
“Should you take her, then, abroad at once to this worthy lady who will adopt her? If so, we shall meet, I suppose, no, more; and I am assisting you to forget that I live still.”
“Abroad,--that crotchet of yours again! You are quite mistaken; in fact, the lady is in London. It was for her effects that I went to the station. Oh, don’t be jealous; quite elderly.”
“Jealous, my dear Jasper! you forget. I am as your mother. One of your letters, then, announced this lady’s intended arrival; you were in correspondence with this--elderly lady.”
“Why, not exactly in correspondence. But when I left Paris I gave the General Post Office as my address to a few friends in France. And this lady, who took an interest in my affairs (ladies, whether old or young, who have once known me, always do), was aware that I had expectations with respect to the child. So some days ago, when I was so badly off, I wrote a line to tell her that Sophy had been no go, and that, but for a dear friend (that is you), I might be on the pave. In her answer, she said she should be in London as soon as I received her letter; and gave me an address here at which to learn where to find her when arrived,--a good old soul, but strange to London. I have been very busy, helping her to find a house, recommending tradesmen, and so forth. She likes style, and can afford it. A pleasant house enough, but our quiet evenings here spoil me for anything else. Now get on your bonnet, and let me see you off.”
“On one condition, my dear Jasper,--that you stay here till I return.”
Jasper made a wry face. But, as it was near dinner-time and he never wanted for appetite, he at length agreed to employ the interval of her absence in discussing a meal, which experience had told him Mrs. Crane’s new cook would, not unskilfully, though hastily, prepare. Mrs. Crane left him to order the dinner, and put on her shawl and bonnet. But, gaining her own room, she rang for Bridget Greggs, and when that confidential servant appeared, she said, “In the side pocket of Mr. Losely’s coat there is a POCKET-BOOK; in it there are some letters which I must see. I shall appear to go out; leave the street-door ajar, that I may slip in again unobserved. You will serve dinner as soon as possible. And when Mr. Losely, as usual, exchanges his coat for the dressing-gown, contrive to take out that pocket-book unobserved by him. Bring it to me here, in this room: you can as easily replace it afterwards. A moment will suffice to my purpose.”
Bridget nodded, and understood. Jasper, standing by the window, saw Mrs. Crane leave the house, walking briskly. He then threw himself on the sofa, and began to doze: the doze deepened, and became sleep. Bridget, entering to lay the cloth, so found him. She approached on tiptoe, sniffed the perfume of the pocket-book, saw its gilded corners peep forth from its lair. She hesitated; she trembled; she was in mortal fear of that truculent slumberer; but sleep lessens the awe thieves feel or heroes inspire. She has taken the pocketbook; she has fled with the booty; she is in Mrs. Crane’s apartment not five minutes after Mrs. Crane has regained its threshold.
Rapidly the jealous woman ransacked the pocket-book; started to see, elegantly worked with gold threads, in the lining, the words, “SOUVIENS TOI DE TA GABRIELLE;” no other letters, save the two, of which Jasper had vouchsafed to her but the glimpse. Over these she hurried her glittering eyes; and when she restored them to their place, and gave back the book to Bridget, who stood by breathless and listening, lest Jasper should awake, her face was colourless, and a kind of shudder seemed to come over her. Left alone, she rested her face on, her hand, her lips moving as if in self-commune. Then noiselessly she glided down the stairs, regained the street, and hurried fast upon her way.
Bridget was not in time to restore the book to Jasper’s pocket, for when she re-entered he was turning round and stretching himself between sleep and waking. But she dropped the book skilfully on the floor, close beside the sofa: it would seem to him, on waking, to have fallen out of the pocket in the natural movements of sleep.
And, in fact, when he rose, dinner now on the table, he picked up the pocket-book without suspicion. But it was lucky that Bridget had not waited for the opportunity suggested by her mistress. For when Jasper put on the dressing-gown, he observed that his coat wanted brushing; and, in giving it to the servant for that purpose, he used the precaution of taking out the pocket-book, and placing it in some other receptacle of his dress.
Mrs. Crane returned in less than two hours,--returned with a disappointed look, which at once prepared Jasper for the intelligence that the birds to be entrapped had flown.
“They went away this afternoon,” said Mrs. Crane, tossing Jasper’s sovereigns on the table as if they burned her fingers. “But leave the fugitives to me. I will find them.”
Jasper relieved his angry mind by a series of guilty but meaningless expletives; and then, seeing no further use to which Mrs. Crane’s wish could be applied at present, finished the remainder of her brandy, and wished her good-night, with a promise to call again, but without any intimation of his own address. As soon as he was gone, Mrs. Crane once more summoned Bridget.
“You told me last week that your brother-in-law, Simpson, wished to go to America, that he had the offer of employment there, but that he could not afford the fare of the voyage. I promised I would help him if it was a service to you.”
“You are a hangel, miss!” exclaimed Bridget, dropping a low courtesy,--so low that it seemed as if she was going on her knees. “And may you have your deserts in the next blessed world, where there are no black-hearted villings.”
“Enough, enough,” said Mrs. Crane, recoiling perhaps from that grateful benediction. “You have been faithful to me, as none else have ever been; but this time I do not serve you in return so much as I meant to do. The service is reciprocal, if your brother-in-law will do me a favour. He takes with him his daughter, a mere child. Bridget, let them enter their names on the steam-vessel as William and Sophy Waife; they can, of course, resume their own name when the voyage is over. There is the fare for them, and something more. Pooh, no thanks. I can spare the money. See your brother-in-law the first thing in the morning; and remember that they go by the next vessel, which sails from Liverpool on Thursday.”
Chapter XVI
Those poor pocket-cannibals, how society does persecute them! Even a menial servant would give warning if disturbed at his meals. But your man-eater is the meekest of creatures; he will never give warning, and--not often take it.
Whatever the source that had supplied Jasper Losely with the money from which he had so generously extracted the sovereigns intended to console Waife for the loss of Sophy, that source either dried up or became wholly inadequate to his wants; for elasticity was the felicitous peculiarity of Mr. Losely’s wants. They accommodated themselves to the state of his finances with mathematical precision, always requiring exactly five times the amount of the means placed at his disposal. From a shilling to a million, multiply his wants by five times the total of his means, and you arrived at a just conclusion. Jasper called upon Poole, who was slowly recovering, but unable to leave his room; and finding that gentleman in a more melancholy state of mind than usual, occasioned by Uncle Sam’s brutal declaration that “if responsible for his godson’s sins he was not responsible for his debts,” and that he really thought “the best thing Samuel Dolly could do, was to go to prison for a short time and get whitewashed,” Jasper began to lament his own hard fate: “And just when one of the finest women in Paris has come here on purpose to see me,” said the lady-killer,--“a lady who keeps her carriage, Dolly! Would have introduced you, if you had been well enough to go out. One can’t be always borrowing of her. I wish one could. There’s mother Crane would sell her gown off her back for me; but ‘Gad, sir, she snubs, and positively frightens me. Besides, she lays traps to demean me; set me to work like a clerk!--not that I would hurt your feelings, Dolly: if you are a clerk, or something of that sort, you are a gentleman at heart. Well, then, we are both done up and cleaned out; and my decided opinion is, that nothing is left but a bold stroke.”
“I have no objection to bold strokes, but I don’t see any; and Uncle Sam’s bold stroke of the Fleet prison is not at all to my taste.”
“Fleet prison! Fleet fiddlestick! No. You have never been in Russia. Why should we not go there both? My Paris friend, Madame Caumartin, was going to Italy, but her plans are changed, and she is now all for St. Petersburg. She will wait a few days for you to get well. We will all go together and enjoy ourselves. The Russians dote upon whist. We shall get into their swell sets and live like princes.” Therewith Jasper launched forth on the text of Russian existence in such glowing terms that Dolly Poole shut his aching eyes and fancied himself sledging down the Neva, covered with furs; a countess waiting for him at dinner, and counts in dozens ready to offer bets to a fabulous amount that Jasper Losely lost the rubber.
Having lifted his friend into this region of aerial castles, Jasper then, descending into the practical world, wound up with the mournful fact that one could not get to St. Petersburg, nor when there into swell sets, without having some little capital on hand.
“I tell you what we will do. Madame Caumartin lives in prime style. Get old Latham, your employer, to discount her bill at three months’ date for L500, and we will be all off in a crack.” Poole shook his head. “Old Latham is too knowing a file for that. A foreigner! He’d want security.”
“I’ll be security.”
Dolly shook his head a second time, still more emphatically than the first.
“But you say he does discount paper,--gets rich on it?”
“Yes, gets rich on ‘it, which he might not do if he discounted the paper you propose. No offence.”
“Oh, no offence among friends! You have taken him bills which he has discounted?”
“Yes,--good paper.”
“Any paper signed by good names is good paper. We can sign good names if we know their handwritings.”
Dolly started, and turned white. Knave he was,--cheat at cards, blackleg on the turf,--but forgery! that crime was new to him. The very notion of it brought on a return of fever; and while Jasper was increasing his malady by arguing with his apprehensions, luckily for Poole, Uncle Sam came in. Uncle Sam, a sagacious old tradesman, no sooner clapped eyes on the brilliant Losely than he conceived for him a distrustful repugnance, similar to that with which an experienced gander may regard a fox in colloquy with its gosling. He had already learned enough of his godson’s ways and chosen society to be assured that Samuel Dolly had indulged in very anti-commercial tastes, and been sadly contaminated by very anti-commercial friends. He felt persuaded that Dolly’s sole chance of redemption was in working on his mind while his body was still suffering, so that Poole might, on recovery, break with all former associations. On seeing Jasper in the dress of an exquisite, with the thrws of a prize-fighter, Uncle Sam saw the stalwart incarnation of all the sins which a godfather had vowed that a godson should renounce. Accordingly, he made himself so disagreeable that Losely, in great disgust, took a hasty departure. And Uncle Sam, as he helped the nurse to plunge Dolly into his bed, had the brutality to tell his nephew, in very plain terms, that if ever he found that Brummagem gent in Poole’s rooms again, Poole would never again see the colour of Uncle Sam’s money. Dolly beginning to blubber, the good man relenting patted him on the back, and said, “But as soon as you are well, I’ll carry you with me to my country-box, and keep you out of harm’s way till I find you a wife, who will comb your head for you;” at which cheering prospect Poole blubbered more dolefully than before. On retiring to his own lodging in the Gloucester Coffee-house, Uncle Sam, to make all sure, gave positive orders to Poole’s landlady, who respected in Uncle Sam the man who might pay what Poole owed to her, on no account to let in any of Dolly’s profligate friends, but especially the chap he had found there; adding, “‘T is as much as my nephew’s life is worth; and, what is more to the purpose, as much as your bill is.” Accordingly, when Jasper presented himself at Poole’s door again that very evening, the landlady apprised him of her orders; and, proof to his insinuating remonstrances, closed the door in his face. But a French chronicler has recorded that when Henry IV. was besieging Paris, though not a loaf of bread could enter the walls, love-letters passed between city and camp as easily as if there had been no siege at all. And does not Mercury preside over money as well as Love? Jasper, spurred on by Madame Caumartin, who was exceedingly anxious to exchange London for St. Petersburg as soon as possible, maintained a close and frequent correspondence with Poole by the agency of the nurse, who luckily was not above being bribed by shillings. Poole continued to reject the villany proposed by Jasper; but, in course of the correspondence, he threw out rather incoherently--for his mind began somewhat to wander--a scheme equally flagitious, which Jasper, aided perhaps by Madame Caumartin’s yet keener wit, caught up, and quickly reduced to deliberate method. Old Mr. Latham, amongst the bills he discounted, kept those of such more bashful customers as stipulated that their resort to temporary accommodation should be maintained a profound secret in his own safe. Amongst these bills Poole knew that there was one for L1,000 given by a young nobleman of immense estates, but so entailed that he could neither sell nor mortgage, and, therefore, often in need of a few hundreds for pocket money. The nobleman’s name stood high. His fortune was universally known; his honour unimpeachable. A bill of his any one would cash at sight. Could Poole but obtain that bill! It had, he believed, only a few weeks yet to run. Jasper or Madame Caumartin might get it discounted even by Lord -------‘s own banker; and if that were too bold, by any professional bill-broker, and all three be off before a suspicion could arise. But to get at that safe, a false key might be necessary. Poole suggested a waxen impression of the lock. Jasper sent him a readier contrivance,--a queer-looking tool, that looked an instrument of torture. All now necessary was for Poole to recover sufficiently to return to business, and to get rid of Uncle Sam by a promise to run down to the country the moment Poole had conscientiously cleared some necessary arrears of work. While this correspondence went on, Jasper Losely shunned Mrs. Crane, and took his meals and spent his leisure hours with Madame Caumartin. He needed no dressing-gown and slippers to feel himself at home there. Madame Canmartin had really taken a showy house in a genteel street. Her own appearance was eminently what the French call distingue; dressed to perfection from head to foot; neat and finished as an epigram; her face in shape like a thoroughbred cobra-capella,--low smooth frontal widening at the summit, chin tapering but jaw strong, teeth marvellously white, small, and with points sharp as those in the maw of the fish called the “Sea Devil;” eyes like dark emeralds, of which the pupils, when she was angry or when she was scheming, retreated upward towards the temples, emitting a luminous green ray that shot through space like the gleam that escapes from a dark-lantern; complexion superlatively feminine (call it not pale but white, as if she lived on blanched almonds, peach-stones, and arsenic); hands so fine and so bloodless, with fingers so pointedly taper there seemed stings at their tips; manners of one who had ranged all ranks of society from highest to lowest, and duped the most wary in each of them. Did she please it, a crown prince might have thought her youth must have passed in the chambers of porphyry! Did she please it, an old soldier would have sworn the creature had been a vivandiere,--in age, perhaps, bordering on forty. She looked younger, but had she been a hundred and twenty, she could not have been more wicked. Ah, happy indeed for Sophy, if it were to save her youth from ever being fostered in elegant boudoirs by those bloodless hands, that the crippled vagabond had borne her away from Arabella’s less cruel unkindness; better far even Rugge’s village stage; better far stealthy by-lanes, feigned names, and the erudite tricks of Sir Isaac!
But still it is due even to Jasper to state here that, in Losely’s recent design to transfer Sophy from Mr. Waife’s care to that of Madame Caumartin, the Sharper harboured no idea of a villany so execrable as the character of the Parisienne led the jealous Arabella to suspect. His real object in getting the child at that time once more into his power was (whatever its nature) harmless compared with the mildest of Arabella’s dark doubts. But still if Sophy had been regained, and the object, on regaining her, foiled (as it probably would have been), what then might have become of her,--lost, perhaps, forever, to Waife,--in a foreign land and under such guardianship? Grave question, which Jasper Losely, who exercised so little foresight in the paramount question, namely, what some day or other would become of himself? was not likely to rack his brains by conjecturing!
Meanwhile Mrs. Crane was vigilant. The detective police-officer sent to her by Mr. Rugge could not give her the information which Rugge desired, and which she did not longer need. She gave the detective some information respecting Madame Caumartin. One day towards the evening she was surprised by a visit from Uncle Sam. He called ostensibly to thank her for her kindness to his godson and nephew; and to beg her not to be offended if he had been rude to Mr. Losely, who, he understood from Dolly, was a particular friend of hers. “You see, ma’am, Samuel Dolly is a weak young man, and easily led astray; but, luckily for himself, he has no money and no stomach. So he may repent in time; and if I could find a wife to manage him, he has not a bad head for the main chance, and may become a practical man. Repeatedly I have told him he should go to prison, but that was only to frighten him; fact is, I want to get him safe down into the country, and he don’t take to that. So I am forced to say, ‘My box, home-brewed and South-down, Samuel Dolly, or a Lunnon jail and debtors’ allowance.’ Must give a young man his choice, my dear lady.”
Mrs. Crane observing that what he said was extremely sensible, Uncle Sam warmed in his confidence.
“And I thought I had him, till I found Mr. Losely in his sick-room; but ever since that day, I don’t know how it is, the lad has had something on his mind, which I don’t half like,--cracky, I think, my dear lady,--cracky. I suspect that old nurse passes letters. I taxed her with it, and she immediately wanted to take her Bible-oath, and smelt of gin, two things which, taken together, look guilty.”
“But,” said Mrs. Crane, growing much interested, “if Mr. Losely and Mr. Poole do correspond, what then?”
“That’s what I want to know, ma’am. Excuse me; I don’t wish to disparage Mr. Losely,--a dashing gent, and nothing worse, I dare say. But certain sure I am that he has put into Samuel Dolly’s head something which has cracked it! There is the lad now up and dressed, when he ought to be in bed, and swearing he’ll go to old Latham’s to-morrow, and that long arrears of work are on his conscience! Never heard him talk of conscience before: that looks guilty! And it does not frighten him any longer when I say he shall go to prison for his debts; and he’s very anxious to get me out of Lunnon; and when I threw in a word about Mr. Losely (slyly, my good lady,--just to see its effect), he grew as white as that paper; and then he began strutting and swelling, and saying that Mr. Losely would be a great man, and he should be a great man, and that he did not care for my money; he could get as much money as he liked. That looks guilty, my dear lady. And oh,” cried Uncle Sam, clasping his hands, “I do fear that he’s thinking of something worse than he has ever done before, and his brain can’t stand it. And, ma’am, he has a great respect for you; and you’ve a friendship for Mr. Losely. Now, just suppose that Mr. Losely should have been thinking of what your flash sporting gents call a harmless spree, and my sister’s son should, being cracky, construe into something criminal. Oh, Mrs. Crane, do go and see Mr. Losely, and tell him that Samuel Dolly is not safe,--is not safe!”
“Much better that I should go to your nephew,” said Mrs. Crane; “and with your leave I will do so at once. Let me see him alone. Where shall I find you afterwards?”
“At the Gloucester Coffee-house. Oh, my dear lady, how can I thank you enough? The boy can be nothing to you; but to me, he’s my sister’s son,--the blackguard!”
Chapter XVII
“Dices laborantes in uno Penelopen vitreamque Circen.”--HORAT.
Mrs. Crane found Poole in his little sitting-room, hung round with prints of opera-dancers, prize-fighters, race-horses, and the dog Billy. Samuel Dolly was in full dress. His cheeks, usually so pale, seemed much flushed. He was evidently in a state of high excitement, bowed extremely low to Mrs. Crane, called her Countess, asked if she had been lately on the Continent and if she knew Madame Caumartin, and whether the nobility at St. Petersburg were jolly, or stuck-up fellows, who gave themselves airs,--not waiting for her answer. In fact his mind was unquestionably disordered.
Arabella Crane abruptly laid her hand on his shoulder. “You are going to the gallows,” she said suddenly. “Down on your knees, and tell me all, and I will keep your secret, and save you; lie, and you are lost!”
Poole burst into tears, and dropped on his knees as he was told.
In ten minutes Mrs. Crane knew all that she cared to know, possessed herself of Losely’s letters, and, leaving Poole less light-headed and more light-hearted, she hastened to Uncle Sam at the Gloucester Coffee-house. “Take your nephew, out of town this evening, and do not let him from your sight for the next six months. Hark you, he will never be a good man; but you may save him from the hulks. Do so. Take my advice.” She was gone before Uncle Sam could answer. She next proceeded to the private house of the detective with whom she had before conferred; this time less to give than to receive information. Not half an hour after her interview with him, Arabella Crane stood in the street wherein was placed the showy house of Madame Caumartin. The lamps in the street were now lighted; the street, even at day a quiet one, was comparatively deserted. All the windows in the Frenchwoman’s house were closed with shutters and curtains, except on the drawing-room floor. From those the lights within streamed over a balcony filled with gay plants; one of the casements was partially open. And now and then, where the watcher stood, she could just catch the glimpse of a passing form behind the muslin draperies, or hear the sound of some louder laugh. In her dark-gray dress and still darker mantle, Arabella Crane stood motionless, her eyes fixed on those windows. The rare foot-passenger who brushed by her turned involuntarily to glance at the countenance of one so still, and then as involuntarily to survey the house to which that countenance was lifted. No such observer so incurious as not to hazard conjecture what evil to that house was boded by the dark lurid eyes that watched it with so fixed a menace. Thus she remained, sometimes, indeed, moving from her post, as a sentry moves from his, slowly pacing a few steps to and fro, returning to the same place, and again motionless; thus she remained for hours. Evening deepened into night; night grew near to dawn: she was still there in that street, and still her eyes were on that house. At length the door opened noiselessly; a tall man tripped forth with a gay light step, and humming the tune of a gay French chanson. As he came straight towards the spot where Arabella Crane was at watch, from her dark mantle stretched forth her long arm and lean hand and seized him. He started and recognized her.
“You here!” he exclaimed, “you!--at such an hour,--you!”
“Ay, Jasper Losely, here to warn you. To-morrow the officers of justice will be in that accursed house. To-morrow that woman--not for her worst crimes, they elude the law, but for her least by which the law hunts her down--will be a prisoner,--no, you shall not return to warn her as I warn you” (for Jasper here broke away, and retreated some steps towards the house); “or, if you do, share her fate. I cast you off.”
“What do you mean?” said Jasper, halting, till with slow steps she regained his side. “Speak more plainly: if poor Madame Caumartin has got into a scrape, which I don’t think likely, what have I to do with it?”
“The woman you call Caumartin fled from Paris to escape its tribunals. She has been tracked; the French government have claimed her--ho!--you smile. This does not touch you?”
“Certainly not.”
“But there are charges against her from English tradesmen; and if it be proved that you knew her in her proper name,--the infamous Gabrielle Desmarets; if it be proved that you have passed off the French billets de banque that she stole; if you were her accomplice in obtaining goods under her false name; if you, enriched by her robberies, were aiding and abetting her as a swindler here,--though you may be safe from the French law, will you be safe from the English? You may be innocent, Jasper Losely; if so, fear nothing. You may be guilty: if so, hide, or follow me!”
Jasper paused. His first impulse was to trust implicitly to Mrs. Crane, and lose not a moment in profiting by such counsels of concealment or flight as an intelligence so superior to his own could suggest. But suddenly remembering that Poole had undertaken to get the bill for L1,000 by the next day,--that if flight were necessary, there was yet a chance of flight with booty,--his constitutional hardihood, and the grasping cupidity by which it was accompanied, made him resolve at least to hazard the delay of a few hours. And, after all, might not Mrs. Crane exaggerate? Was not this the counsel of a jealous woman? “Pray,” said he, moving on, and fixing quick keen eyes on her as she walked by his side, “pray, how did you learn all these particulars?”
“From a detective policeman employed to discover Sophy. In conferring with him, the name of Jasper Losely as her legal protector was of course stated; that name was already coupled with the name of the false Caumartin. Thus, indirectly, the child you would have consigned to that woman saves you from sharing that woman’s ignominy and doom.”
“Stuff!” said Jasper, stubbornly, though he winced at her words: “I don’t, on reflection, see that anything can be proved against me. I am not bound to know why a lady changes her name, nor how she comes by her money. And as to her credit with tradesmen,--nothing to speak of: most of what she has got is paid for; what is not paid for is less than the worth of her goods. Pooh! I am not so easily frightened; much obliged to you all the same. Go home now; ‘t is horridly late. Good-night, or rather good-morning.”
“Jasper, mark me, if you see that woman again; if you attempt to save or screen her,--I shall know, and you lose in me your last friend, last hope, last plank in a devouring sea!”
These words were so solemnly uttered that they thrilled the heart of the reckless man. “I have no wish to screen or save her,” he said, with selfish sincerity. “And after what you have said I would as soon enter a fireship as that house. But let me have some hours to consider what is best to be done.”
“Yes, consider--I shall expect you to-morrow.”
He went his way up the twilight streets towards a new lodging he had hired not far from the showy house. She drew her mantle close round her gaunt figure, and, taking the opposite direction, threaded thoroughfares yet lonelier, till she gained the door, and was welcomed back by the faithful Bridget.
Chapter XVIII
Hope, tells a flattering tale to Mr. Rugge. He is undeceived by a solicitor; and left to mourn; but in turn, though unconsciously, Mr. Rugge deceives the solicitor, and the solicitor deceives his client,--which is 6s. 8d. in the solicitor’s pocket.
The next morning Arabella Crane was scarcely dressed before Mr. Rugge knocked at her door. On the previous day the detective had informed him that William and Sophy Waife were discovered to have sailed for America. Frantic, the unhappy manager hurried away to the steam-packet office, and was favoured by an inspection of the books, which confirmed the hateful tidings. As if in mockery of his bereaved and defrauded state, on returning home he found a polite note from Mr. Gotobed, requesting him to call at the office of that eminent solicitor, with reference to a young actress, named Sophy Waife, and hinting “that the visit might prove to his advantage!” Dreaming for a wild moment that Mr. Losely, conscience-stricken, might through his solicitor pay back his L100, he rushed incontinent to Mr. Gotobed’s office, and was at once admitted into the presence of that stately practitioner.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Mr. Gotobed, with formal politeness, “but I heard a day or two ago accidentally from my head clerk, who had learned it also accidentally from a sporting friend, that you were exhibiting at Humberston, during the race-week, a young actress, named on the play-bills (here is one) ‘Juliet Araminta,’ and whom, as I am informed, you had previously exhibited in Surrey and elsewhere; but she was supposed to have relinquished that earlier engagement, and left your stage with her grandfather, William Waife. I am instructed by a distinguished client, who is wealthy, and who from motives of mere benevolence interests himself in the said William and Sophy Waife, to discover their residence. Please, therefore, to render up the child to my charge, apprising me also of the address of her grandfather, if he be not with you; and without waiting for further instructions from my client, who is abroad, I will venture to say that any sacrifice in the loss of your juvenile actress will be most liberally compensated.”
“Sir,” cried the miserable and imprudent Rugge, “I paid L100 for that fiendish child,--a three years’ engagement,--and I have been robbed. Restore me the L100, and I will tell you where she is, and her vile grandfather also.”
At hearing so bad a character lavished upon objects recommended to his client’s disinterested charity, the wary solicitor drew in his pecuniary horns.
“Mr. Rugge,” said he, “I understand from your words that you cannot place the child Sophy, alias Juliet Araminta, in my hands. You ask L100 to inform me where she is. Have you a lawful claim on her?”
“Certainly, sir: she is my property.”
“Then it is quite clear that though you may know where she is, you cannot get at her yourself, and cannot, therefore, place her in my hands. Perhaps she ‘s--in Heaven!”
“Confound her, sir! no--in America! or on the seas to it.”
“Are you sure?”
“I have just come from the steam-packet office, and seen the names in their book. William and Sophy Waife sailed from Liverpool last Thursday week.”
“And they formed an engagement with you, received your money; broke the one, absconded with the other. Bad characters indeed!”
“Bad! you may well say that,--a set of swindling scoundrels, the whole kit and kin. And the ingratitude!” continued Rugge; “I was more than a father to that child” (he began to whimper); “I had a babe of my own once; died of convulsions in teething. I thought that child would have supplied its place, and I dreamed of the York Theatre; but”--here his voice was lost in the folds of a marvellously dirty red pocket-handkerchief.
Mr. Gotobed having now, however, learned all that he cared to learn, and not being a soft-hearted man (first-rate solicitors rarely are), here pulled out his watch, and said,
“Sir, you have been very ill-treated, I perceive. I must wish you good-day; I have an engagement in the City. I cannot help you back to your L100, but accept this trifle (a L5 note) for your loss of time in calling” (ringing the bell violently). “Door,--show out this gentleman.”
That evening Mr. Gotobed wrote at length to Guy Darrell, informing him that, after great pains and prolonged research, he had been so fortunate as to ascertain that the strolling player and the little girl whom Mr. Darrell had so benevolently requested him to look up were very bad characters, and had left the country for the United States, as happily for England bad characters were wont to do.
That letter reached Guy Darrell when he was far away, amidst the forlorn pomp of some old Italian city, and Lionel’s tale of the little girl not very fresh in his gloomy thoughts. Naturally, he supposed that the boy had been duped by a pretty face and his own inexperienced kindly heart. And so, and so,--why, so end all the efforts of men who entrust to others the troublesome execution of humane intentions! The scales of earthly justice are poised in their quivering equilibrium, not by huge hundred-weights, but by infinitesimal grains, needing the most wary caution, the most considerate patience, the most delicate touch, to arrange or readjust. Few of our errors, national or individual, come from the design to be unjust; most of them from sloth, or incapacity to grapple with the difficulties of being just. Sins of commission may not, perhaps, shock the retrospect of conscience. Large and obtrusive to view we have confessed, mourned, repented, possibly atoned them. Sins of omission so veiled amidst our hourly emotions, blent, confused, unseen, in the conventional routine of existence,--alas! could these suddenly emerge from their shadow, group together in serried mass and accusing order,--alas, alas! would not the best of us then start in dismay, and would not the proudest humble himself at the Throne of Mercy?
Chapter XIX
Joy, nevertheless, does return to Mr. Rugge: and hope now inflicts herself on Mrs. Crane; a very fine-looking hope too,--six feet one, --strong as Achilles, and as fleet of foot!
Buy we have left Mr. Rugge at Mrs. Crane’s door; admit him. He bursts into her drawing-room wiping his brows. “Ma’am, they’re off to America!”
“So I have heard. You are fairly entitled to the return of your money--”
“Entitled, of course, but--”
“There it is; restore to me the contract for the child’s services.”
Rugge gazed on a roll of bank-notes, and could scarcely believe his eyes. He darted forth his hand,--the notes receded like the dagger in Macbeth. “First the contract,” said Mrs. Crane. Rugge drew out his greasy pocket-book, and extracted the worthless engagement.
“Henceforth, then,” said Mrs. Crane, “you have no right to complain; and whether or not the girl ever again fall in your way, your claim over her ceases.”
“The gods be praised! it does, ma’am, I have had quite enough of her. But you are every inch a lady, and allow me to add that I put you on my free list for life.”
Rugge gone, Arabella Crane summoned Bridget to her presence.
“Lor’, miss,” cried Bridget, impulsively, “who’d think you’d been up all night raking! I have not seen you look so well this many a year.”
“Ah,” said Arabella Crane, “I will tell you why. I have done what for many a year I never thought I should do again,--a good action. That child,--that Sophy,--do you remember how cruelly I used her?”
“Oh, miss, don’t go for to blame yourself; you fed her, you clothed her, when her own father, the villing, sent her away from hisself to you,--you of all people, you. How could you be caressing and fawning on his child,--their child?”
Mrs. Crane hung her head gloomily. “What is past is past. I have lived to save that child, and a curse seems lifted from my soul. Now listen. I shall leave London--England--probably this evening. You will keep this house; it will be ready for me any moment I return. The agent who collects my house-rents will give you money as you want it. Stint not yourself, Bridget. I have been saving and saving and saving for dreary years,--nothing else to interest me, and I am richer than I seem.”
“But where are you going, miss?” said Bridget, slowly recovering from the stupefaction occasioned by her mistress’s announcement.
“I don’t know; I don’t care.”
“Oh, gracious stars! is it with that dreadful Jasper Losely?--it is, it is. You are crazed, you are bewitched, miss!”
“Possibly I am crazed,--possibly bewitched; but I take that man’s life to mine as a penance for all the evil mine has ever known; and a day or two since I should have said, with rage and shame, ‘I cannot help it; I loathe myself that I can care what becomes of him.’ Now, without rage, without shame, I say, ‘The man whom I once so loved shall not die on a gibbet if I can help it’ and, please Heaven, help it I will.”
The grim woman folded her arms on her breast, and raising her head to its full height, there was in her face and air a stern gloomy grandeur, which could not have been seen without a mixed sensation of compassion and awe.
“Go now, Bridget; I have said all. He will be here soon: he will come; he must come; he has no choice; and then--and then--” she closed her eyes, bowed her head, and shivered.
Arabella Crane was, as usual, right in her predictions. Before noon Jasper came,--came, not with his jocund swagger, but with that sidelong sinister look--of the man whom the world cuts--triumphantly restored to its former place in his visage. Madame Caumartin had been arrested; Poole had gone into the country with Uncle Sam; Jasper had seen a police-officer at the door of his own lodgings. He slunk away from the fashionable thoroughfares, slunk to the recesses of Podden Place, slunk into Arabella Crane’s prim drawing-room, and said sullenly, “All is up; here I am!”
Three days afterwards, in a quiet street in a quiet town of Belgium,--wherein a sharper, striving to live by his profession, would soon become a skeleton,--in a commodious airy apartment, looking upon a magnificent street, the reverse of noisy, Jasper Losely sat secure, innocuous, and profoundly miserable. In another house, the windows of which--facing those of Jasper’s sitting-room, from an upper story-commanded so good a view therein that it placed him under a surveillance akin to that designed by Mr. Bentham’s reformatory Panopticon, sat Arabella Crane. Whatever her real feelings towards Jasper Losely (and what those feelings were no virile pen can presume authoritatively to define; for lived there ever a man who thoroughly understood a woman?), or whatever in earlier life might have been their reciprocated vows of eternal love,--not only from the day that Jasper, on his return to his native shores, presented himself in Podden Place, had their intimacy been restricted to the austerest bonds of friendship, but after Jasper had so rudely declined the hand which now fed him, Arabella Crane had probably perceived that her sole chance of retaining intellectual power over his lawless being necessitated the utter relinquishment of every hope or project that could expose her again to his contempt. Suiting appearances to reality, the decorum of a separate house was essential to the maintenance of that authority with which the rigid nature of their intercourse invested her. The additional cost strained her pecuniary resources, but she saved in her own accommodation in order to leave Jasper no cause to complain of any stinting in his. There, then, she sat by her window, herself unseen, eying him in his opposite solitude, accepting for her own life a barren sacrifice, but a jealous sentinel on his. Meditating as she sat and as she eyed him,--meditating what employment she could invent, with the bribe of emoluments to be paid furtively by her, for those strong hands that could have felled an ox, but were nerveless in turning an honest penny, and for that restless mind hungering for occupation, and with the digestion of an ostrich for dice and debauch, riot and fraud, but queasy as an exhausted dyspeptic at the reception of one innocent amusement, one honourable toil. But while that woman still schemes how to rescue from hulks or halter that execrable man, who shall say that he is without a chance? A chance he has: WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT?
Chapter I
Envy will be a science when it learns the use of the microscope.
When leaves fall and flowers fade, great people are found in their country-seats. Look!--that is Montfort Court,--a place of regal magnificence, so far as extent of pile and amplitude of domain could satisfy the pride of ownership, or inspire the visitor with the respect due to wealth and power. An artist could have made nothing of it. The Sumptuous everywhere; the Picturesque nowhere. The house was built in the reign of George I., when first commenced that horror of the beautiful, as something in bad taste, which, agreeably to our natural love of progress, progressively advanced through the reigns of succeeding Georges. An enormous fafade, in dull brown brick; two wings and a centre, with double flights of steps to the hall-door from the carriage-sweep. No trees allowed to grow too near the house; in front, a stately flat with stone balustrades. But wherever the eye turned, there was nothing to be seen but park, miles upon miles of park; not a cornfield in sight, not a roof-tree, not a spire, only those lata silentia,--still widths of turf, and, somewhat thinly scattered and afar, those groves of giant trees. The whole prospect so vast and so monotonous that it never tempted you to take a walk. No close-neighbouring poetic thicket into which to plunge, uncertain whither you would emerge; no devious stream to follow. The very deer, fat and heavy, seemed bored by pastures it would take them a week to traverse. People of moderate wishes and modest fortunes never envied Montfort Court: they admired it; they were proud to say they had seen it. But never did they say--
“Oh, that for me some home like this would smile!”
Not so, very, very great people!--they rather coveted than admired. Those oak trees so large, yet so undecayed; that park, eighteen miles at least in circumference; that solid palace which, without inconvenience, could entertain and stow away a king and his whole court; in short, all that evidence of a princely territory and a weighty rent-roll made English dukes respectfully envious, and foreign potentates gratifyingly jealous.
But turn from the front. Open the gate in that stone balustrade. Come southward to the garden side of the house. Lady Montfort’s flower-garden. Yes; not so dull!--flowers, even autumnal flowers, enliven any sward. Still, on so large a scale, and so little relief; so little mystery about those broad gravel-walks; not a winding alley anywhere. Oh, for a vulgar summer-house; for some alcove, all honeysuckle and ivy! But the dahlias are splendid! Very true; only, dahlias, at the best, are such uninteresting prosy things. What poet ever wrote upon a dahlia! Surely Lady Montfort might have introduced a little more taste here, shown a little more fancy! Lady Montfort! I should like to see my lord’s face if Lady Montfort took any such liberty. But there is Lady Montfort walking slowly along that broad, broad, broad gravel-walk; those splendid dahlias, on either side, in their set parterres. There she walks, in full evidence from all those sixty remorseless windows on the garden front, each window exactly like the other. There she walks, looking wistfully to the far end [‘t is a long way off), where, happily, there is a wicket that carries a persevering pedestrian out of sight of the sixty windows into shady walks, towards the banks of that immense piece of water, two miles from the house. My lord has not returned from his moor in Scotland; my lady is alone. No company in the house: it is like saying, “No acquaintance in a city.” But the retinue is full. Though she dined alone she might, had she pleased, have had almost as many servants to gaze upon her as there were windows now staring at her lonely walk with their glassy spectral eyes.
Just as Lady Montfort gains the wicket she is overtaken by a visitor, walking fast from the gravel sweep by the front door, where he has dismounted, where he has caught sight of her: any one so dismounting might have caught sight of her; could not help it. Gardens so fine were made on purpose for fine persons walking in them to be seen.
“Ah, Lady Montfort,” said the visitor, stammering painfully, “I am so glad to find you at home.”
“At home, George!” said the lady, extending her hand; “where else is it likely that I should be found? But how pale you are! What has happened?”
She seated herself on a bench, under a cedar-tree, just without the wicket; and George Morley, our old friend the Oxonian, seated himself by her side familiarly, but with a certain reverence. Lady Montfort was a few years older than himself, his cousin: he had known her from his childhood.
“What has happened!” he repeated; “nothing new. I have just come from visiting the good bishop.”
“He does not hesitate to ordain you?” “No; but I shall never ask him to do so.”
“My dear cousin, are you not over-scrupulous? You would be an ornament to the Church, sufficient in all else to justify your compulsory omission of one duty, which a curate could perform for you.”
Morley shook his head sadly. “One duty omitted!” said he. “But is it not that duty which distinguishes the priest from the layman? and how far extends that duty? Whereever there needs a voice to speak the word,--not in the pulpit only, but at the hearth, by the sick-bed,--there should be the Pastor! No: I cannot, I ought not, I dare not! Incompetent as the labourer, how can I be worthy of the hire?” It took him long to bring out these words: his emotion increased his infirmity. Lady Montfort listened with an exquisite respect visible in her compassion, and paused long before she answered.
George Morley was the younger son of a country gentleman, with a good estate settled upon the elder son. George’s father had been an intimate friend of his kinsman, the Marquess of Montfort (predecessor and grandsire of the present lord); and the marquess had, as he thought, amply provided for George in undertaking to secure to him, when of fitting age, the living of Humberston, the most lucrative preferment in his gift. The living had been held for the last fifteen years by an incumbent, now very old, upon the honourable understanding that it was to be resigned in favour of George, should George take orders. The young man, from his earliest childhood thus destined to the Church, devoted to the prospect of that profession all his studies, all his thoughts. Not till he was sixteen did his infirmity of speech make itself seriously perceptible: and then elocution masters undertook to cure it; they failed. But George’s mind continued in the direction towards which it had been so systematically biased. Entering Oxford, he became absorbed in its academical shades. Amidst his books he almost forgot the impediment of his speech. Shy, taciturn, and solitary, he mixed too little with others to have it much brought before his own notice. He carried off prizes; he took high honours. On leaving the University, a profound theologian, an enthusiastic Churchman, filled with the most earnest sense of the pastor’s solemn calling,--he was thus complimentarily accosted by the Archimandrite of his college, “What a pity you cannot go into the Church!”
“Cannot; but I am going into the Church.”
“You! is it possible? But, perhaps, you are sure of a living--”
“Yes,--Humberston.”
“An immense living, but a very large population. Certainly it is in the bishop’s own discretionary power to ordain you, and for all the duties you can keep a curate.” But the Don stopped short, and took snuff.
That “but” said as plainly as words could say, “It may be a good thing for you; but is it fair for the Church?”
So George Morley at least thought that “but” implied.
His conscience took alarm. He was a thoroughly noble-hearted man, likely to be the more tender of conscience where tempted by worldly interests. With that living he was rich, without it very poor. But to give up a calling, to the idea of which he had attached himself with all the force of a powerful and zealous nature, was to give up the whole scheme and dream of his existence. He remained irresolute for some time; at last he wrote to the present Lord Montfort, intimating his doubts, and relieving the Marquess from the engagement which his lordship’s predecessor had made. The present Marquess was not a man capable of understanding such scruples. But, luckily perhaps for George and for the Church, the larger affairs of the great House of Montfort were not administered by the Marquess. The parliamentary influences, the ecclesiastical preferments, together with the practical direction of minor agents to the vast and complicated estates attached to the title, were at that time under the direction of Mr. Carr Vipont, a powerful member of Parliament, and husband to that Lady Selina whose condescension had so disturbed the nerves of Frank Vance the artist. Mr. Carr Vipont governed this vice-royalty according to the rules and traditions by which the House of Montfort had become great and prosperous. For not only every state, but every great seignorial House has its hereditary maxims of policy,--not less the House of Montfort than the House of Hapsburg. Now the House of Montfort made it a rule that all admitted to be members of the family should help each other; that the head of the House should never, if it could be avoided, suffer any of its branches to decay and wither into poverty. The House of Montfort also held it a duty to foster and make the most of every species of talent that could swell the influence or adorn the annals of the family. Having rank, having wealth, it sought also to secure intellect, and to knit together into solid union, throughout all ramifications of kinship and cousinhood, each variety of repute and power that could root the ancient tree more firmly in the land. Agreeably to this traditional policy, Mr. Carr Vipont not only desired that a Vipont Morley should not lose a very good thing, but that a very good thing should not lose a Vipont Morley of high academical distinction,-a Vipont Morley who might be a bishop. He therefore drew up an admirable letter, which the Marquess signed,--that the Marquess should take the trouble of copying it was out of the question,--wherein Lord Montfort was made to express great admiration of the disinterested delicacy of sentiment, which proved George Vipont Morley to be still more fitted to the cure of souls; and, placing rooms at Montfort Court at his service (the Marquess not being himself there at the moment), suggested that George should talk the matter over with the present incumbent of Humberston (that town was not many miles distant from Montfort Court), who, though he had no impediment in his speech, still never himself preached nor read prayers, owing to an affection of the trachea, and who was, nevertheless, a most efficient clergy man. George Morley, therefore, had gone down to Montfort Court some months ago, just after his interview with Mrs. Crane. He had then accepted an invitation to spend a week or two with the Rev. Mr. Allsop, the Rector of Humberston; a clergyman of the old school, a fair scholar, a perfect gentleman, a man of the highest honour, good-natured, charitable, but who took pastoral duties much more easily than good clergymen of the new school--be they high or low-are disposed to do. Mr. Allsop, who was then in his eightieth year, a bachelor with a very good fortune of his own, was perfectly willing to fulfil the engagement on which he held his living, and render it up to George; but he was touched by the earnestness with which George assured him that at all events he would not consent to displace the venerable incumbent from a tenure he had so long and honourably held, and would wait till the living was vacated in the ordinary course of nature. Mr. Allsop conceived a warm affection for the young scholar. He had a grand-niece staying with him on a visit, who less openly, but not less warmly, shared that affection; and with her George Morley fell shyly and timorously in love. With that living he would be rich enough to marry; without it, no. Without it he had nothing but a fellowship, which matrimony would forfeit, and the scanty portion of a country squire’s younger son. The young lady herself was dowerless, for Allsop’s fortune was so settled that no share of it would come to his grand-niece,--another reason for conscience to gulp down that unhappy impediment of speech. Certainly, during this visit, Morley’s scruples relaxed; but when he returned home they came back with greater force than ever,--with greater force, because he felt that now not only a spiritual ambition, but a human love was a casuist in favour of self-interest. He had returned on a visit to Humberston Rectory about a week previous to the date of this chapter; the niece was not there. Sternly he had forced himself to examine a little more closely into the condition of the flock which (if he accepted the charge) he would have to guide, and the duties that devolved upon a chief pastor in a populous trading town. He became appalled. Humberston, like most towns under the political influence of a great House, was rent by parties,--one party, who succeeded in returning one of the two members for Parliament, all for the House of Montfort; the other party, who returned also their member, all against it. By one half the town, whatever came from Montfort Court was sure to be regarded with a most malignant and distorted vision. Meanwhile, though Mr. Allsop was popular with the higher classes and with such of the extreme poor as his charity relieved, his pastoral influence generally was a dead letter. His curate, who preached for him--a good young man, but extremely dull-was not one of those preachers who fill a church. Tradesmen wanted an excuse to stay away or choose another place of worship; and they contrived to hear some passages in the sermons--over which, while the curate mumbled, they habitually slept--that they declared to be “Puseyite.” The church became deserted; and about the same time a very eloquent Dissenting minister appeared at Humberston, and even professed Church folks went to hear him. George Morley, alas! perceived that at Humberston, if the Church there were to hold her own, a powerful and popular preacher was essentially required. His mind was now made up. At Carr Vipont’s suggestion the bishop of the diocese, being then at his palace, had sent to see him; and, while granting the force of his scruples, had yet said, “Mine is the main responsibility. But if you ask me to ordain you, I will do so without hesitation; for if the Church wants preachers, it also wants deep scholars and virtuous pastors.” Fresh from this interview, George Morley came to announce to Lady Montfort that his resolve was unshaken. She, I have said, paused long before she answered. “George,” she began at last, in a voice so touchingly sweet that its very sound was balm to a wounded spirit, “I must not argue with you: I bow before the grandeur of your motives, and I will not say that you are not right. One thing I do feel, that if you thus sacrifice your inclinations and interests from scruples so pure and holy, you will never be to be pitied; you will never know regret. Poor or rich, single or wedded, a soul that so seeks to reflect heaven will be serene and blessed.” Thus she continued to address him for some time, he all the while inexpressibly soothed and comforted; then gradually she insinuated hopes even of a worldly and temporal kind,--literature was left to him,--the scholar’s pen, if not the preacher’s voice. In literature he might make a career that would lead on to fortune. There were places also in the public service to which a defect in speech was no obstacle. She knew his secret, modest attachment; she alluded to it just enough to encourage constancy and rebuke despair. As she ceased, his admiring and grateful consciousness of his cousin’s rare qualities changed the tide of his emotions towards her from himself, and he exclaimed with an earnestness that almost wholly subdued his stutter,
“What a counsellor you are! what a soother! If Montfort were but less prosperous or more ambitious, what a treasure, either to console or to sustain, in a mind like yours!”
As those words were said, you might have seen at once why Lady Montfort was called haughty and reserved. Her lip seemed suddenly to snatch back its sweet smile; her dark eye, before so purely, softly friend-like, became coldly distant; the tones of her voice were not the same as she answered,--
“Lord Montfort values me, as it is, far beyond my merits: far,” she added with a different intonation, gravely mournful.
“Forgive me; I have displeased you. I did not mean it. Heaven forbid that I should presume either to disparage Lord Montfort--or--or to--” he stopped short, saving the hiatus by a convenient stammer. “Only,” he continued, after a pause, “only forgive me this once. Recollect I was a little boy when you were a young lady, and I have pelted you with snowballs, and called you ‘Caroline’.” Lady Montfort suppressed a sigh, and gave the young scholar back her gracious smile, but not a smile that would have permitted him to call her “Caroline” again. She remained, indeed, a little more distant than usual during the rest of their interview, which was not much prolonged; for Morley felt annoyed with himself that he had so indiscreetly offended her, and seized an excuse to escape. “By the by,” said he, “I have a letter from Mr. Carr Vipont, asking me to give him a sketch for a Gothic bridge to the water yonder. I will, with your leave, walk down and look at the proposed site. Only do say that you forgive me.”
“Forgive you, cousin George, oh, yes! One word only: it is true you were a child still when I fancied I was a woman, and you have a right to talk to me upon all things, except those that relate to me and Lord Montfort; unless, indeed,” she added with a bewitching half laugh, “unless you ever see cause to scold me, there. Good-by, my cousin, and in turn forgive me, if I was so petulant. The Caroline you pelted with snowballs was always a wayward, impulsive creature, quick to take offence, to misunderstand, and--to repent.”
Back into the broad, broad gravel-walk, walked, more slowly than before, Lady Montfort. Again the sixty ghastly windows stared at her with all their eyes; back from the gravelwalk, through a side-door into the pompous solitude of the stately house; across long chambers, where the mirrors reflected her form, and the huge chairs, in their flaunting damask and flaring gold, stood stiff on desolate floors; into her own private room,--neither large nor splendid that; plain chintzes, quiet book shelves. She need not have been the Marchioness of Montfort to inhabit a room as pleasant and as luxurious. And the rooms that she could only have owned as marchioness, what were those worth to her happiness? I know not. “Nothing,” fine ladies will perhaps answer. Yet those same fine ladies will contrive to dispose their daughters to answer, “All.” In her own room Lady Montfort sank on her chair; wearily, wearily she looked at the clock; wearily at the books on the shelves, at the harp near the window. Then she leaned her face on her hand, and that face was so sad, and so humbly sad, that you would have wondered how any one could call Lady Montfort proud.
“Treasure! I! I! worthless, fickle, credulous fool! I! I!”
The groom of the chambers entered with the letters by the afternoon post. That great house contrived to worry itself with two posts a day. A royal command to Windsor--
“I shall be more alone in a court than here,” murmured Lady Montfort.
Chapter II
Truly saith the proverb, “Much corn lies under the straw that is not seen.”
Meanwhile George Morley followed the long shady walk,--very handsome walk, full of prize roses and rare exotics, artificially winding too,--walk so well kept that it took thirty-four men to keep it,--noble walk, tiresome walk, till it brought him to the great piece of water, which, perhaps, four times in the year was visited by the great folks in the Great House. And being thus out of the immediate patronage of fashion, the great piece of water really looked natural, companionable, refreshing: you began to breathe; to unbutton your waistcoat, loosen your neckcloth, quote Chaucer, if you could recollect him, or Cowper, or Shakspeare, or Thomson’s “Seasons;” in short, any scraps of verse that came into your head,--as your feet grew joyously entangled with fern; as the trees grouped forest-like before and round you; trees which there, being out of sight, were allowed to grow too old to be worth five shillings a piece, moss-grown, hollow-trunked, some pollarded,--trees invaluable! Ha, the hare! How she scuds! See, the deer marching down to the water side. What groves of bulrushes! islands of water-lily! And to throw a Gothic bridge there, bring a great gravel road over the bridge! Oh, shame, shame!
So would have said the scholar, for he had a true sentiment for Nature, if the bridge had not clean gone out of his head. Wandering alone, he came at last to the most umbrageous and sequestered bank of the wide water, closed round on every side by brushwood, or still, patriarchal trees. Suddenly he arrested his steps; an idea struck him,--one of those old, whimsical, grotesque ideas which often when we are alone come across us, even in our quietest or most anxious moods. Was his infirmity really incurable? Elocution masters had said certainly not; but they had done him no good. Yet had not the greatest orator the world ever knew a defect in utterance? He, too, Demosthenes, had, no doubt, paid fees to elocution masters, the best in Athens, where elocution masters must have studied their art ad unguem, and the defect had baffled them. But did Demosthenes despair? No, he resolved to cure himself,--how? Was it not one of his methods to fill his mouth with pebbles, and practise, manfully to the roaring sea? George Morley had never tried the effect of pebbles. Was there any virtue in them? Why not try? No sea there, it is true; but a sea was only useful as representing the noise of a stormy democratic audience. To represent a peaceful congregation that still sheet of water would do as well. Pebbles there were in plenty just by that gravelly cove, near which a young pike lay sunning his green back. Half in jest, half in earnest, the scholar picked up a handful of pebbles, wiped them from sand and mould, inserted them between his teeth cautiously, and, looking round to assure himself that none were by, began an extempore discourse. So interested did he become in that classical experiment, that he might have tortured the air and astonished the magpies (three of whom from a neighbouring thicket listened perfectly spell-bound) for more than half an hour, when seized with shame at the ludicrous impotence of his exertions, with despair that so wretched a barrier should stand between his mind and its expression, he flung away the pebbles, and sinking on the ground, he fairly wept, wept like a baffled child.
The fact was, that Morley had really the temperament of an orator; he had the orator’s gifts in warmth of passion, rush of thought, logical arrangement; there was in him the genius of a great preacher. He felt it,--he knew it; and in that despair which only genius knows when some pitiful cause obstructs its energies and strikes down its powers, making a confidant of Solitude he wept loud and freely.
“Do not despond, sir, I undertake to cure you,” said a voice behind.
George started up in confusion; a man, elderly, but fresh and vigorous, stood beside him, in a light fustian jacket, a blue apron, and with rushes in his hands, which he continued to plait together nimbly and deftly as he bowed to the startled scholar.
“I was in the shade of the thicket yonder, sir; pardon me, I could not help hearing you.”
The Oxonian rubbed his eyes, and stared at the man with a vague impression that he had seen him before;--when? where?
“You can cure me,” he stuttered out; “what of?--the folly of trying to speak in public? Thank you, I am cured.”
“Nay, sir, you see before you a man who can make you a very good speaker. Your voice is naturally fine. I repeat, I can cure a defect which is not in the organ, but in the management!”
“You can! you--who and what are you?”
“A basketmaker, sir; I hope for your custom.” “Surely this is not the first time I have seen you?”
“True, you once kindly suffered me to borrow a resting-place on your father’s land. One good turn deserves another.”
At that moment Sir Isaac peered through the brambles, and restored to his original whiteness, and relieved from his false, horned ears, marched gravely towards the water, sniffed at the scholar, slightly wagged his tail, and buried himself amongst the reeds in search of a water-rat he had therein disturbed a week before, and always expected to find again.
The sight of the dog immediately cleared up the cloud in the scholar’s memory; but with recognition came back a keen curiosity and a sharp pang of remorse.
“And your little girl?” he asked, looking down abashed.
“Better than she was when we last met. Providence is so kind to us.”
Poor Waife! He never guessed that to the person he thus revealed himself he owed the grief for Sophy’s abduction. He divined no reason for the scholar’s flushing cheek and embarrassed manner.
“Yes, sir, we have just settled in this neighbourhood. I have a pretty cottage yonder at the outskirts of the village, and near the park pales. I recognized you at once; and as I heard you just now, I called to mind that when we met before, you said your calling should be the Church, were it not for your difficulty in utterance; and I said to myself, ‘No bad thing those pebbles, if his utterance were thick, which is it not;’ and I have not a doubt, sir, that the true fault of Demosthenes, whom I presume you are imitating, was that he spoke through his nose.”
“Eh!” said the scholar, “through his nose? I never knew that?--and I--”
“And you are trying to speak without lungs; that is without air in them. You don’t smoke, I presume?”
“No; certainly not.”
“You must learn; speak between each slow puff of your pipe. All you want is time,--time to quiet the nerves, time to think, time to breathe. The moment you begin to stammer, stop, fill the lungs thus, then try again! It is only a clever man who can learn to write,--that is, to compose; but any fool can be taught to speak. Courage!”
“If you really can teach me,” cried the learned man, forgetting all self-reproach for his betrayal of Waife to Mrs. Crane in the absorbing interest of the hope that sprang up within him, “if you can teach me; if I can but con-con-con--conq--”
“Slowly, slowly, breath and time; take a whiff from my pipe; that’s right. Yes, you can conquer the impediment.”
“Then I will be the best friend to you that man ever had. There’s my hand on it.”
“I take it, but I ask leave to change the parties in the contract. I don’t want a friend: I don’t deserve one. You’ll be a friend to my little girl instead; and if ever I ask you to help me in aught for her welfare and happiness--”
“I will help, heart and soul! slight indeed any service to her or to you compared with such service to me. Free this wretched tongue from its stammer, and thought and zeal will not stammer whenever you say, ‘Keep your promise.’ I am so glad your little girl is still with you.”
Waife looked surprised, “Is still with me!--why not?” The scholar bit his tongue. That was not the moment to confess; it might destroy all Waife’s confidence in him. He would do so later. “When shall I begin my lesson?”
“Now, if you like. But have you a book in your pocket?”
“I always have.”
“Not Greek, I hope, sir?”
“No, a volume of Barrow’s Sermons. Lord Chatham recommended those sermons to his great son as a study for eloquence.”
“Good! Will you lend me the volume, sir? and now for it. Listen to me; one sentence at a time; draw your breath when I do.”
The three magpies pricked up their ears again, and, as they listened, marvelled much.
Chapter III
Could we know by what strange circumstances a man’s genius became prepared for practical success, we should discover that the most serviceable items in his education were never entered in the bills which his father paid for it.
At the end of the very first lesson George Morley saw that all the elocution masters to whose skill he had been consigned were blunderers in comparison with the basketmaker.
Waife did not puzzle him with scientific theories. All that the great comedian required of him was to observe and to imitate. Observation, imitation, lo! the groundwork of all art! the primal elements of all genius! Not there, indeed to halt, but there ever to commence. What remains to carry on the intellect to mastery? Two steps,--to reflect, to reproduce. Observation, imitation, reflection, reproduction. In these stands a mind complete and consummate, fit to cope with all labour, achieve all success.
At the end of the first lesson George Morley felt that his cure was possible. Making an appointment for the next day at the same place, he came thither stealthily and so on day by day. At the end of a week he felt that the cure was nearly certain; at the end of a month the cure was self-evident. He should live to preach the Word. True, that he practised incessantly in private. Not a moment in his waking hours that the one thought, one object, was absent from his mind! True, that with all his patience, all his toil, the obstacle was yet serious, might never be entirely overcome. Nervous hurry, rapidity of action, vehemence of feeling, brought back, might at unguarded moments always bring back, the gasping breath, the emptied lungs, the struggling utterance. But the relapse, rarer and rarer now with each trial, would be at last scarce a drawback. “Nay,” quoth Waife, “instead of a drawback, become but an orator, and you will convert a defect into a beauty.”
Thus justly sanguine of the accomplishment of his life’s chosen object, the scholar’s gratitude to Waife was unspeakable. And seeing the man daily at last in his own cottage,--Sophy’s health restored to her cheeks, smiles to her lip, and cheered at her light fancy-work beside her grandsire’s elbow-chair, with fairy legends instilling perhaps golden truths,--seeing Waife thus, the scholar mingled with gratitude a strange tenderness of respect. He knew nought of the vagrant’s past, his reason might admit that in a position of life so at variance with the gifts natural and acquired of the singular basketmaker, there was something mysterious and suspicious. But he blushed to think that he had ever ascribed to a flawed or wandering intellect the eccentricities of glorious Humour,--abetted an attempt to separate an old age so innocent and genial from a childhood so fostered and so fostering. And sure I am that if the whole world had risen up to point the finger of scorn at the one-eyed cripple, George Morley--the well-born gentleman, the refined scholar, the spotless Churchman--would have given him his arm to lean upon, and walked by his side unashamed.
Chapter IV
To judge human character rightly, a man may sometimes have very small experience, provided he has a very large heart.
Numa Pimpilius did not more conceal from notice the lessons he received from Egeria than did George Morley those which he received from the basketmaker. Natural, indeed, must be his wish for secrecy; pretty story it would be for Humberston, its future rector learning how to preach a sermon from an old basketmaker! But he had a nobler and more imperious motive for discretion: his honour was engaged to it. Waife exacted a promise that he would regard the intercourse between them as strictly private and confidential.
“It is for my sake I ask this,” said Waife, frankly, “though I might say it was for yours;” the Oxonian promised, and was bound. Fortunately Lady Montfort quitted the great house the very day after George had first encountered the basketmaker, and writing word that she should not return to it for some weeks, George was at liberty to avail himself of her lord’s general invitation to make use of Montfort Court as his lodgings when in the neighbourhood; which the proprieties of the world would not have allowed him to do while Lady Montfort was there without either host or female guests. Accordingly, he took up his abode in a corner of the vast palace, and was easily enabled, when he pleased, to traverse unobserved the solitudes of the park, gain the waterside, or stroll thence through the thick copse leading to Waife’s cottage, which bordered the park pales, solitary, sequestered, beyond sight of the neighbouring village. The great house all to himself, George was brought in contact with no one to whom, in unguarded moments, he could even have let out a hint of his new acquaintance, except the clergyman of the parish, a worthy man, who lived in strict retirement upon a scanty stipend. For the Marquess was the lay impropriator; the living was therefore but a very poor vicarage, below the acceptance of a Vipont or a Vipont’s tutor, sure to go to a worthy man forced to live in strict retirement. George saw too little of this clergyman, either to let out secrets or pick up information. From him, however, George did incidentally learn that Waife had some months previously visited the village, and proposed to the bailiff to take the cottage and osier land, which he now rented; that he represented himself as having known an old basketmaker who had dwelt there many years ago, and as having learned the basket craft of that long deceased operative. As he offered a higher rent than the bailiff could elsewhere obtain, and as the bailiff was desirous to get credit with Mr. Carr Vipont for improving the property, by reviving thereon an art which had fallen into desuetude, the bargain was struck, provided the candidate, being a stranger to the place, could furnish the bailiff with any satisfactory reference. Waife had gone away, saying he should shortly return with the requisite testimonial. In fact, poor man, as we know, he was then counting on a good word from Mr. Hartopp. He had not, however, returned for some months. The cottage, having been meanwhile wanted for the temporary occupation of an under-gamekeeper, while his own was under repair, fortunately remained unlet. Waife, on returning, accompanied by his little girl, had referred the bailiff to a respectable house-agent and collector of street rents in Bloomsbury, who wrote word that a lady, then abroad, had authorized him, as the agent employed in the management of a house property from which much of her income was derived, not only to state that Waife was a very intelligent man, likely to do well whatever he undertook, but also to guarantee, if required, the punctual payment of the rent for any holding of which he became the occupier. On this the agreement was concluded, the basketmaker installed. In the immediate neighbourhood there was no custom for basket-work, but Waife’s performances were so neat, and some so elegant and fanciful, that he had no difficulty in contracting with a large tradesman (not at Humberston, but a more distant and yet more thriving town about twenty miles off) for as much of such work as he could supply. Each week the carrier took his goods and brought back the payments; the profits amply sufficed for Waife’s and Sophy’s daily bread, with even more than the surplus set aside for the rent. For the rest, the basketmaker’s cottage being at the farthest outskirts of the straggling village inhabited by a labouring peasantry, his way of life was not much known nor much inquired into. He seemed a harmless, hard-working man; never seen at the beer-house; always seen with his neatly-dressed little grandchild in his quiet corner at church on Sundays; a civil, well-behaved man too; who touched his hat to the bailiff and took it off to the vicar.
An idea prevailed that the basketmaker had spent much of his life in foreign countries, favoured partly by a sobriety of habits which is not altogether national, partly by something in his appearance, which, without being above his lowly calling, did not seem quite in keeping with it,--outlandish in short,--but principally by the fact that he had received since his arrival two letters with a foreign postmark. The idea befriended the old man,--allowing it to be inferred that he had probably outlived the friends he had formerly left behind him in England, and, on his return, been sufficiently fatigued with his rambles to drop contented in any corner of his native soil wherein he could find a quiet home, and earn by light toil a decent livelihood.
George, though naturally curious to know what had been the result of his communication to Mrs. Crane,--whether it had led to Waife’s discovery or caused him annoyance,--had hitherto, however, shrunk from touching upon a topic which subjected himself to an awkward confession of officious intermeddling, and to which any indirect allusion might appear an indelicate attempt to pry into painful family affairs. But one day he received a letter from his father which disturbed him greatly, and induced him to break ground and speak to his preceptor frankly. In this letter, the elder Mr. Morley mentioned incidentally, amongst other scraps of local news, that he had seen Mr. Hartopp, who was rather out of sorts, his good heart not having recovered the shock of having been abominably “taken in” by an impostor for whom he had conceived a great fancy, and to whose discovery George himself had providentially led (the father referred here to what George had told him of his first meeting with Waife, and his visit to Mrs. Crane); the impostor, it seemed, from what Mr. Hartopp let fall, not being a little queer in the head, as George had been led to surmise, but a very bad character. “In fact,” added the elder Morley, “a character so bad that Mr. Hartopp was too glad to give up to her lawful protectors the child, whom the man appears to have abducted; and I suspect, from what Hartopp said, though he does not like to own that he was taken in to so gross a degree, that he had been actually introducing to his fellow-townsfolk and conferring familiarly with a regular jail-bird,--perhaps a burglar. How lucky for that poor, soft-headed, excellent Jos Hartopp, whom it is positively as inhuman to take in as it would be to defraud a born natural, that the lady you saw arrived in time to expose the snares laid for his benevolent credulity. But for that, Jos might have taken the fellow into his own house (just like him!), and been robbed by this time, perhaps murdered,--Heaven knows!”
Incredulous and indignant, and longing to be empowered to vindicate his friend’s fair name, George seized his hat, and strode quick along the path towards the basketmaker’s cottage. As he gained the water-side, he perceived Waife himself, seated on a mossy bank, under a gnarled fantastic thorntree, watching a deer as it came to drink, and whistling a soft mellow tune,--the tune of an old English border-song. The deer lifted his antlers from the water, and turned his large bright eyes towards the opposite bank, whence the note came, listening and wistful. As George’s step crushed the wild thyme, which the thorn-tree shadowed, “Hush!” said Waife, “and mark how the rudest musical sound can affect the brute creation.” He resumed the whistle,--a clearer, louder, wilder tune,--that of a lively hunting-song. The deer turned quickly round,--uneasy, restless, tossed its antlers, and bounded through the fern. Waife again changed the key of his primitive music,--a melancholy belliny note, like the belling itself of a melancholy hart, but more modulated into sweetness. The deer arrested its flight, and, lured by the mimic sound, returned towards the water-side, slowly and statelily.
“I don’t think the story of Orpheus charming the brutes was a fable; do you, sir?” said Waife. “The rabbits about here know me already; and, if I had but a fiddle, I would undertake to make friends with that reserved and unsocial water-rat, on whom Sir Isaac in vain endeavours at present to force his acquaintance. Man commits a great mistake in not cultivating more intimate and amicable relations with the other branches of earth’s great family. Few of them not more amusing than we are; naturally, for they have not our cares. And such variety of character too, where you would least expect it!”
GEORGE MORLEY.--“Very true. Cowper noticed marked differences of character in his favourite hares.”
WAIFE.--“Hares! I am sure that there are not two house-flies on a window-pane, two minnows in that water, that would not present to us interesting points of contrast as to temper and disposition. If house-flies and minnows could but coin money, or set up a manufacture,--contrive something, in short, to buy or sell attractive to Anglo-Saxon enterprise and intelligence,--of course we should soon have diplomatic relations with them; and our despatches and newspapers would instruct us to a T in the characters and propensities of their leading personages. But, where man has no pecuniary nor ambitious interests at stake in his commerce with any class of his fellow-creatures, his information about them is extremely confused and superficial. The best naturalists are mere generalizers, and think they have done a vast deal when they classify a species. What should we know about mankind if we had only a naturalist’s definition of man? We only know mankind by knocking classification on the head, and studying each man as a class in himself. Compare Buffon and Shakspeare! Alas, sir! can we never have a Shakspeare for house-flies and minnows?”
GEORGE MORLEY.--“With all respect for minnows and house-flies, if we found another Shakspeare, he might be better employed, like his predecessor, in selecting individualities from the classifications of man.”
WAIFE.--“Being yourself a man, you think so: a housefly might be of a different opinion. But permit me, at least, to doubt whether such an investigator would be better employed in reference to his own happiness, though I grant that he would be so in reference to your intellectual amusement and social interests. Poor Shakspeare! How much he must have suffered!”
GEORGE MORLEY.--“You mean that he must have been racked by the passions he describes,--bruised by collision with the hearts he dissects. That is not necessary to genius. The judge on his bench, summing up evidence and charging the jury, has no need to have shared the temptations or been privy to the acts of the prisoner at the bar. Yet how consummate may be his analysis!”
“No,” cried Waife, roughly. “No! Your illustration destroys your argument. The judge knows nothing of the prisoner. There are the circumstances; there is the law. By these he generalizes, by these he judges,--right or wrong. But of the individual at the bar, of the world--the tremendous world--within that individual heart, I repeat, he knows nothing. Did he know, law and circumstances might vanish, human justice would be paralyzed. Ho, there! place that swart-visaged, ill-looking foreigner in the dock, and let counsel open the case; hear the witnesses depose! Oh, horrible wretch! a murderer! unmanly murderer!--a defenceless woman smothered by caitiff hands! Hang him up! hang him up! ‘Softly,’ whispers the POET, and lifts the veil from the assassin’s heart. ‘Lo! it is Othello the Moor!’ What jury now dare find that criminal guilty? what judge now put on the black cap? who now says, ‘Hang him up! hang him up!”
With such lifelike force did the Comedian vent this passionate outburst that he thrilled his listener with an awe akin to that which the convicted Moor gathers round himself at the close of the sublime drama. Even Sir Isaac was startled; and leaving his hopeless pursuit of the water-rat, uttered a low bark, came to his master, and looked into his face with solemn curiosity.
WAIFE (relapsing into colloquial accents).--“Why do we sympathize with those above us more than with those below? why with the sorrows of a king rather than those of a beggar? why does Sir Isaac sympathize with me more than (let that water-rat vex him ever so much) I can possibly sympathize with him? Whatever be the cause, see at least, Mr. Morley, one reason why a poor creature like myself finds it better employment to cultivate the intimacy of brutes than to prosecute the study of men. Among men, all are too high to sympathize with me; but I have known two friends who never injured nor betrayed. Sir Isaac is one; Wamba was another. Wamba, sir, the native of a remote district of the globe (two friends civilized Europe is not large enough to afford any one man), Wamba, sir, was less gifted by nature, less refined by education, than Sir Isaac; but he was a safe and trustworthy companion: Wamba, sir, was--an opossum.”
GEORGE MORLEY.--“Alas, my dear Mr. Waife, I fear that men must have behaved very ill to you.”
WAIFE.--“I have no right to complain. I have behaved very ill to myself. When a man is his own enemy, he is very unreasonable if he expect other men to be his benefactors.”
GEORGE MORLEY (with emotion).--“Listen, I have a confession to make to you. I fear I have done you an injury, where, officiously, I meant to do a kindness.” The scholar hurried on to narrate the particulars of his visit to Mrs. Crane. On concluding the recital, he added, “When again I met you here, and learned that your Sophy was with you, I felt inexpressibly relieved. It was clear then, I thought, that your grandchild had been left to your care unmolested, either that you had proved not to be the person of whom the parties were in search, or family affairs had been so explained and reconciled that my interference had occasioned you no harm. But to-day I have a letter from my father which disquiets me much. It seems that the persons in question did visit Gatesboro’, and have maligned you to Mr. Hartopp. Understand me, I ask for no confidence which you may be unwilling to give; but if you will arm me with the power to vindicate your character from aspersions which I need not your assurance to hold unjust and false, I will not rest till that task be triumphantly accomplished.”
WAIFE (in a tone calm but dejected).--“I thank you with all my heart. But there is nothing to be done. I am glad that the subject did not start up between us until such little service as I could render you, Mr. Morley, was pretty well over. It would have been a pity if you had been compelled to drop all communication with a man of attainted character, before you had learned how to manage the powers that will enable you hereafter to exhort sinners worse than I have been. Hush, sir! you feel that, at least now, I am an inoffensive old man, labouring for a humble livelihood. You will not repeat here what you may have heard, or yet hear, to the discredit of my former life. You will not send me and my grandchild forth from our obscure refuge to confront a world with which we have no strength to cope. And, believing this, it only remains for me to say, Fare-you-well, sir.”
“I should deserve to lose spe-spe-speech altogether,” cried the Oxonian, gasping and stammering fearfully as he caught Waife firmly by the arm, “if I suffered--suff-suff-suff--”
“One, two! take time, sir!” said the Comedian, softly. And with a sweet patience he reseated himself on the bank. The Oxonian threw himself at length by the outcast’s side; and, with the noble tenderness of a nature as chivalrously Christian as Heaven ever gave to priest, he rested his folded hands upon Waife’s shoulder, and looking him full and close in the face, said thus, slowly, deliberately, not a stammer, “You do not guess what you have done for me; you have secured to me a home and a career; the wife of whom I must otherwise have despaired; the Divine Vocation on which all my earthly hopes were set, and which I was on the eve of renouncing: do not think these are obligations which can be lightly shaken off. If there are circumstances which forbid me to disabuse others of impressions which wrong you, imagine not that their false notions will affect my own gratitude,--my own respect for you!”
“Nay, sir! they ought; they must. Perhaps not your exaggerated gratitude for a service which you should not, however, measure by its effects on yourself, but by the slightness of the trouble it gave to me; not perhaps your gratitude, but your respect, yes.”
“I tell you no! Do you fancy that I cannot judge of a man’s nature without calling on him to trust me with all the secrets--all the errors, if you will--of his past life? Will not the calling to which I may now hold myself destined give me power and commandment to absolve all those who truly repent and unfeignedly believe? Oh, Mr. Waife! if in earlier days you have sinned, do you not repent? and how often, in many a lovely gentle sentence dropped unawares from your lips, have I had cause to know that you unfeignedly believe! Were I now clothed with sacred authority, could I not absolve you as a priest? Think you that, in the meanwhile, I dare judge you as a man? I,--Life’s new recruit, guarded hitherto from temptation by careful parents and favouring fortune,--I presume to judge, and judge harshly, the gray-haired veteran, wearied by the march, wounded in the battle!”
“You are a noble-hearted human being,” said Waife, greatly affected. “And, mark my words, a mantle of charity so large you will live to wear as a robe of honour. But hear me, sir! Mr. Hartopp also is a man infinitely charitable, benevolent, kindly, and, through all his simplicity, acutely shrewd; Mr. Hartopp, on hearing what was said against me, deemed me unfit to retain my grandchild, resigned the trust I had confided to him, and would have given me alms, no doubt, had I asked them, but not his hand. Take your hands, sir, from my shoulder, lest the touch sully you.”
George did take his hands from the vagrant’s shoulder, but it was to grasp the hand that waived them off and struggled to escape the pressure. “You are innocent! you are innocent! forgive me that I spoke to you of repentance as if you had been guilty. I feel you are innocent,--feel it by my own heart. You turn away. I defy you to say that you are guilty of what has been laid to your charge, of what has darkened your good name, of what Mr. Hartopp believed to your prejudice. Look me in the face and say, ‘I am not innocent; I have not been belied.”’
Waife remained voiceless, motionless.
The young man, in whose nature lay yet unproved all those grand qualities of heart, without which never was there a grand orator, a grand preacher,--qualities which grasp the results of argument, and arrive at the end of elaborate reasoning by sudden impulse,--here released Waife’s hand, rose to his feet, and, facing Waife, as the old man sat with face averted, eyes downcast, breast heaving, said loftily,
“Forget that I may soon be the Christian minister whose duty bows his ear to the lips of Shame and Guilt; whose hand, when it points to Heaven, no mortal touch can sully; whose sublimest post is by the sinner’s side. Look on me but as man and gentleman. See, I now extend this hand to you. If, as man and gentleman, you have done that which, could all hearts be read, all secrets known, human judgment reversed by Divine omniscience, forbids you to take this hand,--then reject it, go hence: we part! But if no such act be on your conscience, however you submit to its imputation,--THEN, in the name of Truth, as man and gentleman to man and gentleman, I command you to take this right hand, and, in the name of that Honour which bears no paltering, I forbid you to disobey.”
The vagabond rose, like the Dead at the spell of a Magician,--took, as if irresistibly, the hand held out to him. And the scholar, overjoyed, fell on his breast, embracing him as a son.
“You know,” said George, in trembling accents, “that the hand you have taken will never betray, never desert; but is it--is it really powerless to raise and to restore you to your place?”
“Powerless amongst your kind for that indeed,” answered Waife, in accents still more tremulous. “All the kings of the earth are not strong enough to raise a name that has once been trampled into the mire. Learn that it is not only impossible for me to clear myself, but that it is equally impossible for me to confide to mortal being a single plea in defence if I am innocent, in extenuation if I am guilty. And saying this, and entreating you to hold it more merciful to condemn than to question me,--for question is torture,--I cannot reject your pity; but it would be mockery to offer me respect!”
“What! not respect the fortitude which calumny cannot crush? Would that fortitude be possible if you were not calm in the knowledge that no false witnesses can mislead the Eternal Judge? Respect you! yes,--because I have seen you happy in despite of men, and therefore I know that the cloud around you is not the frown of Heaven.”
“Oh,” cried Waife, the tears rolling down his cheeks, “and not an hour ago I was jesting at human friendship, venting graceless spleen on my fellow-men! And now--now--ah, sir! Providence is so kind to me! And,” said he, brushing away his tears, as the old arch smile began to play round the corner of his mouth, “and kind to me in the very quarter in which unkindness had so sorely smitten me. True, you directed towards me the woman who took from me my grandchild, who destroyed me in the esteem of good Mr. Hartopp. Well, you see, I have my sweet Sophy back again; we are in the home of all others I most longed for; and that woman, yes, I can, at least, thus far, confide to you my secrets, so that you may not blame yourself for sending her to Gatesboro’,--that very woman knows of my shelter; furnished me with the very reference necessary to obtain it; has freed my grandchild from a loathsome bondage, which I could not have legally resisted; and should new persecutions chase us will watch and warn and help us. And if you ask me how this change in her was effected; how, when we had abandoned all hope of green fields, and deemed that only in the crowd of a city we could escape those who pursued us when discovered there, though I fancied myself an adept in disguise, and the child and the dog were never seen out of the four garret walls in which I hid them,--if you ask me, I say, to explain how that very woman was suddenly converted from a remorseless foe into a saving guardian, I can only answer ‘By no wit, no device, no persuasive art of mine. Providence softened her heart, and made it kind, just at a moment when no other agency on earth could have rescued us from--from--”
“Say no more: I guess! the paper this woman showed me was a legal form authorizing your poor little Sophy to be given up to the care of a father. I guess! of that father you would not speak ill to me; yet from that father you would save your grandchild. Say no more. And yon quiet home, your humble employment, really content you?”
“Oh, if such a life can but last! Sophy is so well, so cheerful, so happy. Did not you bear her singing the other day? She never used to sing! But we had not been here a week when song broke out from her,--untaught, as from a bird. But if any ill report of me travel hither from Gatesboro’ or elsewhere, we should be sent away, and the bird would be mute in my thorn-tree: Sophy would sing no more.”
“Do not fear that slander shall drive you hence. Lady Montfort, you know, is my cousin, but you know not--few do--how thoroughly generous and gentle-hearted she is. I will speak of you to her,--oh! do not look alarmed. She will take my word when I tell her, ‘That is a good man;’ and if she ask more, it will be enough to say, ‘Those who have known better days are loth to speak to strangers of the past.’”
“I thank you earnestly, sincerely,” said Waife, brightening up. “One favour more: if you saw in the formal document shown to you, or retain on your memory, the name of--of the person authorized to claim Sophy as his child, you will not mention it to Lady Montfort. I am hot sure if ever she heard that name, but she may have done so, and--and--” he paused a moment, and seemed to muse; then went on, not concluding his sentence. “You are so good to me, Mr. Morley, that I wish to confide in you as far as I can. Now, you see, I am already an old man, and my chief object is to raise up a friend for Sophy when I am gone,--a friend in her own sex, sir. Oh, you cannot guess how I long, how I yearn, to view that child under the holy fostering eyes of a woman. Perhaps if Lady Montfort saw my pretty Sophy she might take a fancy to her. Oh, if she did! if she did! And Sophy,” added Waife, proudly, “has a right to respect. She is not like me,--any hovel is good enough for me; but for her! Do you know that I conceived that hope, that the hope helped to lead me back here when, months ago, I was at Humberston, intent upon rescuing Sophy; and saw--though,” observed Waife, with a sly twitch of the muscles round his mouth, “I had no right at that precise moment to be seeing anything--Lady Montfort’s humane fear for a blind old impostor, who was trying to save his dog--a black dog, sir, who had dyed his hair--from her carriage wheels. And the hope became stronger still, when, the first Sunday I attended yon village church, I again saw that fair--wondrously fair--face at the far end,--fair as moonlight and as melancholy. Strange it is, sir, that I--naturally a boisterous, mirthful man, and now a shy, skulking fugitive--feel more attracted, more allured towards a countenance, in proportion as I read there the trace of sadness. I feel less abased by my own nothingness, more emboldened to approach and say, ‘Not so far apart from me: thou too hast suffered.’ Why is this?”
GEORGE MORLEY.--“‘The fool hath said in his heart that there is no God;’ but the fool hath not said in his heart that there is no sorrow,--pithy and most profound sentence; intimating the irrefragable claim that binds men to the Father. And when the chain tightens, the children are closer drawn together. But to your wish: I will remember it. And when my cousin returns, she shall see your Sophy.”
Chapter V
Mr. Waife, being by nature unlucky, considers that, in proportion as fortune brings him good luck, nature converts it into bad. He suffers Mr. George Morley to go away in his debt, and Sophy fears that he will be dull in consequence.
George Morley, a few weeks after the conversation last recorded, took his departure from Montfort Court, prepared, without a scruple, to present himself for ordination to the friendly bishop. From Waife he derived more than the cure of a disabling infirmity; he received those hints which, to a man who has the natural temperament of an orator, so rarely united with that of the scholar, expedite the mastery of the art that makes the fleeting human voice an abiding, imperishable power. The grateful teacher exhausted all his lore upon the pupil whose genius he had freed, whose heart had subdued himself. Before leaving, George was much perplexed how to offer to Waife any other remuneration than that which, in Waife’s estimate, had already overpaid all the benefits he had received; namely, unquestioning friendship and pledged protection. It need scarcely be said that George thought the man to whom he owed fortune and happiness was entitled to something beyond that moral recompense. But he found, at the first delicate hint, that Waife would not hear of money, though the ex-Comedian did not affect any very Quixotic notion on that practical subject. “To tell you the truth, sir, I have rather a superstition against having more money in my hands than I know what to do with. It has always brought me bad luck. And what is very hard,--the bad luck stays, but the money goes. There was that splendid sum I made at Gatesboro’. You should have seen me counting it over. I could not have had a prouder or more swelling heart if I had been, that great man Mr. Elwes the miser. And what bad luck it brought me, and how it all frittered itself away! Nothing to show for it but a silk ladder and an old hurdy-gurdy, and I sold them at half price. Then when I had the accident, which cost me this eye, the railway people behaved so generously, gave me L120,--think of that! And before three days the money was all gone!”
“How was that?” said George, half-amused, half-pained,--“stolen perhaps?”
“Not so,” answered Waife, somewhat gloomily, “but restored. A poor dear old man, who thought very ill of me, and I don’t wonder at it,--was reduced from great wealth to great poverty. While I was laid up, my landlady read a newspaper to me, and in that newspaper was an account of his reverse and destitution. But I was accountable to him for the balance of an old debt, and that, with the doctor’s bills, quite covered my L120. I hope he does not think quite so ill of me now. But the money brought good luck to him, rather than to me. Well, sir, if you were now to give me money, I should be on the look-out for some mournful calamity. Gold is not natural to me. Some day, however, by and by, when you are inducted into your living, and have become a renowned preacher, and have plenty to spare, with an idea that you will feel more comfortable in your mind if you had done something royal for the basketmaker, I will ask you to help me to make up a sum, which I am trying by degrees to save,--an enormous sum, almost as much as I paid away from my railway compensation: I owe it to the lady who lent it to release Sophy from an engagement which I--certainly without any remorse of conscience--made the child break.”
“Oh, yes! What is the amount? Let me at least repay that debt.”
“Not yet. The lady can wait; and she would be pleased to wait, because she deserves to wait: it would be unkind to her to pay it off at once. But in the meanwhile if you could send me a few good books for Sophy,--instructive, yet not very, very dry,-and a French dictionary, I can teach her French when the winter days close in. You see I am not above being paid, sir. But, Mr. Morley, there is a great favour you can do me.”
“What is it? Speak.”
“Cautiously refrain from doing me a great disservice! You are going back to your friends and relations. Never speak of me to them. Never describe me and my odd ways. Name not the lady, nor--nor--nor--the man who claimed Sophy.
“Your friends might not hurt me; others might. Talk travels. The hare is not long in its form when it has a friend in a hound that gives tongue. Promise what I ask. Promise it as ‘man and gentleman.’”
“Certainly. Yet I have one relation to whom I should like, with your permission, to speak of you, with whom I could wish you acquainted. He is so thorough a man of the world, that he might suggest some method to clear your good name, which you yourself would approve. My uncle, Colonel Morley--”
“On no account!” cried Waife, almost fiercely, and he evinced so much anger and uneasiness that it was long before George could pacify him by the most earnest assurances that his secret should be inviolably kept, and his injunctions faithfully obeyed. No men of the world consulted how to force him back to the world of men that he fled from! No colonels to scan him with martinet eyes, and hint how to pipeclay a tarnish! Waife’s apprehensions gradually allayed and his confidence restored, one fine morning George took leave of his eccentric benefactor.
Waife and Sophy stood gazing after him from their garden-gate, the cripple leaning lightly on the child’s arm. She looked with anxious fondness into the old man’s thoughtful face, and clung to him more closely as she looked.
“Will you not be dull, poor Grandy? will you not miss him?”
“A little at first,” said Waife, rousing himself. “Education is a great thing. An educated mind, provided that it does us no mischief,--which is not always the case,--cannot be withdrawn from our existence without leaving a blank behind. Sophy, we must seriously set to work and educate ourselves!”
“We will, Grandy dear,” said Sophy, with decision; and a few minutes afterwards, “If I can become very, very clever, you will not pine so much after that gentleman,--will you, Grandy?”
Chapter VI
Being a chapter that comes to an untimely end.
Winter was far advanced when Montfort Court was again brightened by the presence of its lady. A polite letter from Mr. Carr Vipont had reached her before leaving Windsor, suggesting how much it would be for the advantage of the Vipont interest if she would consent to visit for a month or two the seat in Ireland, which had been too long neglected, and at which my lord would join her on his departure from his Highland moors. So to Ireland went Lady Montfort. My lord did not join her there; but Mr. Carr Vipont deemed it desirable for the Vipont interest that the wedded pair should reunite at Montfort Court, where all the Vipont family were invited to witness their felicity or mitigate their ennui.
But before proceeding another stage in this history, it becomes a just tribute of respect to the great House of Vipont to pause and place its past records and present grandeur in fuller display before the reverential reader. The House of Vipont!--what am I about? The House of Vipont requires a chapter to itself.
VII. The House of Vipont,--“Majora canamus.”
The House of Vipont! Looking back through ages, it seems as if the House of Vipont were one continuous living idiosyncrasy, having in its progressive development a connected unity of thought and action, so that through all the changes of its outward form it had been moved and guided by the same single spirit,--“Le roi est mort; vive le roi!”--A Vipont dies; live the Vipont! Despite its high-sounding Norman name, the House of Vipont was no House at all for some generations after the Conquest. The first Vipont who emerged from the obscurity of time was a rude soldier of Gascon origin, in the reign of Henry II.,--one of the thousand fighting-men who sailed from Milford Haven with the stout Earl of Pembroke, on that strange expedition which ended in the conquest of Ireland. This gallant man obtained large grants of land in that fertile island; some Mac or some O’----- vanished, and the House of Vipont rose.
During the reign of Richard I., the House of Vipont, though recalled to England (leaving its Irish acquisitions in charge of a fierce cadet, who served as middleman), excused itself from the Crusade, and, by marriage with a rich goldsmith’s daughter, was enabled to lend moneys to those who indulged in that exciting but costly pilgrimage. In the reign of John, the House of Vipont foreclosed its mortgages on lands thus pledged, and became possessed of a very fair property in England, as well as its fiefs in the sister isle.
The House of Vipont took no part in the troublesome politics of that day. Discreetly obscure, it attended to its own fortunes, and felt small interest in Magna Charta. During the reigns of the Plantagenet Edwards, who were great encouragers of mercantile adventure, the House of Vipont, shunning Crecy, Bannockburn, and such profitless brawls, intermarried with London traders, and got many a good thing out of the Genoese. In the reign of Henry IV. the House of Vipont reaped the benefit of its past forbearance and modesty. Now, for the first time, the Viponts appear as belted knights; they have armorial bearings; they are Lancasterian to the backbone; they are exceedingly indignant against heretics; they burn the Lollards; they have places in the household of Queen Joan, who was called a witch,--but a witch is a very good friend when she wields a sceptre instead of a broomstick. And in proof of its growing importance, the House of Vipont marries a daughter of the then mighty House of Darrell. In the reign of Henry V., during the invasion of France, the House of Vipont--being afraid of the dysentery which carried off more brave fellows than the field of Agincourt--contrived to be a minor. The Wars of the Roses puzzled the House of Vipont sadly. But it went through that perilous ordeal with singular tact and success. The manner in which it changed sides, each change safe, and most changes lucrative, is beyond all praise.
On the whole, it preferred the Yorkists; it was impossible to be actively Lancasterian with Henry VI. of Lancaster always in prison. And thus, at the death of Edward IV., the House of Vipont was Baron Vipont of Vipont, with twenty manors. Richard III. counted on the House of Vipont, when he left London to meet Richmond at Bosworth: he counted without his host. The House of Vipont became again intensely Lancasterian, and was amongst the first to crowd round the litter in which Henry VII. entered the metropolis. In that reign it married a relation of Empson’s, did the great House of Vipont! and as nobles of elder date had become scarce and poor, Henry VII. was pleased to make the House of Vipont an Earl,--the Earl of Montfort. In the reign of Henry VIII., instead of burning Lollards, the House of Vipont was all for the Reformation: it obtained the lands of two priories and one abbey. Gorged with that spoil, the House of Vipont, like an anaconda in the process of digestion, slept long. But no, it slept not. Though it kept itself still as a mouse during the reign of Bloody Queen Mary (only letting it be known at Court that the House of Vipont had strong papal leanings); though during the reigns of Elizabeth and James it made no noise, the House of Vipont was silently inflating its lungs and improving its constitution. Slept, indeed! it was wide awake. Then it was that it began systematically its grand policy of alliances; then was it sedulously grafting its olive branches on the stems of those fruitful New Houses that had sprung up with the Tudors; then, alive to the spirit of the day, provident of the wants of the morrow, over the length and breadth of the land it wove the interlacing network of useful cousinhood! Then, too, it began to build palaces, to enclose parks; it travelled, too, a little, did the House of Vipont! it visited Italy; it conceived a taste: a very elegant House became the House of Vipont! And in James’s reign, for the first time, the House of Vipont got the Garter. The Civil Wars broke out: England was rent asunder. Peer and knight took part with one side or the other. The House of Vipont was again perplexed. Certainly at the commencement it, was all for King Charles. But when King Charles took to fighting, the House of Vipont shook its sagacious head, and went about, like Lord Falkland, sighing, “Peace, peace!” Finally, it remembered its neglected estates in Ireland: its duties called it thither. To Ireland it went, discreetly sad, and, marrying a kinswoman of Lord Fauconberg,--the connection least exposed to Fortune’s caprice of all the alliances formed by the Lord Protector’s family,--it was safe when Cromwell visited Ireland; and no less safe when Charles II. was restored to England. During the reign of the merry monarch the House of Vipont was a courtier, married a beauty, got the Garter again, and, for the first time, became the fashion. Fashion began to be a power. In the reign of James II. the House of Vipont again contrived to be a minor, who came of age just in time to take the oaths of fealty to William and Mary. In case of accidents, the House of Vipont kept on friendly terms with the exiled Stuarts, but it wrote no letters, and got into no scrapes. It was not, however, till the Government, under Sir Robert Walpole, established the constitutional and parliamentary system which characterizes modern freedom, that the puissance accumulated through successive centuries by the House of Vipont became pre-eminently visible. By that time its lands were vast; its wealth enormous; its parliamentary influence, as “a Great House,” was a part of the British Constitution. At this period, the House of Vipont found it convenient to rend itself into two grand divisions,--the peer’s branch and the commoner’s. The House of Commons had become so important that it was necessary for the House of Vipont to be represented there by a great commoner. Thus arose the family of Carr Vipont. That division, owing to a marriage settlement favouring a younger son by the heiress of the Carrs, carried off a good slice from the estate of the earldom: uno averso, non deficit alter; the earldom mourned, but replaced the loss by two wealthy wedlocks of its own; and had long since seen cause to rejoice that its power in the Upper Chamber was strengthened by such aid in the Lower. For, thanks to its parliamentary influence, and the aid of the great commoner, in the reign of George III. the House of Vipont became a Marquess. From that time to the present day, the House of Vipont has gone on prospering and progressive. It was to the aristocracy what the “Times” newspaper is to the press. The same quick sympathy with public feeling, the same unity of tone and purpose, the same adaptability, and something of the same lofty tone of superiority to the petty interests of party. It may be conceded that the House of Vipont was less brilliant than the “Times” newspaper, but eloquence and wit, necessary to the duration of a newspaper, were not necessary to that of the House of Vipont. Had they been so, it would have had them.
The head of the House of Vipont rarely condescended to take office. With a rent-roll loosely estimated at about L170,000 a year, it is beneath a man to take from the public a paltry five or six thousand a year, and undergo all the undignified abuse of popular assemblies, and “a ribald press.” But it was a matter of course that the House of Vipont should be represented in any Cabinet that a constitutional monarch could be advised to form. Since the time of Walpole, a Vipont was always in the service of his country, except in those rare instances when the country was infamously misgoverned. The cadets of the House, or the senior member of the great commoner’s branch of it, sacrificed their ease to fulfil that duty. The Montfort marquesses in general were contented with situations of honour in the household, as of Lord Steward, Lord Chamberlain, or Master of the Horse, etc.,--not onerous dignities; and even these they only deigned to accept on those special occasions when danger threatened the star of Brunswick, and the sense of its exalted station forbade the House of Vipont to leave its country in the dark.
Great Houses like that of Vipont assist the work of civilization by the law of their existence. They are sure to have a spirited and wealthy tenantry, to whom, if but for the sake of that popular character which doubles political influence, they are liberal and kindly landlords. Under their sway fens and sands become fertile; agricultural experiments are tested on a large scale; cattle and sheep improve in breed; national capital augments, and, springing beneath the ploughshare, circulates indirectly to speed the ship and animate the loom. Had there been no Woburn, no Holkham, no Montfort Court, England would be the poorer by many a million. Our great Houses tend also to the refinement of national taste; they have their show places, their picture galleries, their beautiful grounds. The humblest drawing-rooms owe an elegance or comfort, the smallest garden a flower or esculent, to the importations which luxury borrowed from abroad, or the inventions it stimulated at home, for the original benefits of great Houses. Having a fair share of such merits, in common with other great Houses, the House of Vipont was not without good qualities peculiar to itself. Precisely because it was the most egotistical of Houses, filled with the sense of its own identity, and guided by the instincts of its own conservation, it was a very civil, good-natured House,--courteous, generous, hospitable; a House (I mean the head of it, not of course all its subordinate members, including even the august Lady Selina) that could bow graciously and shake hands with you. Even if you had no vote yourself, you might have a cousin who had a vote. And once admitted into the family, the House adopted you; you had only to marry one of its remotest relations and the House sent you a wedding present; and at every general election, invited you to rally round your connection,--the Marquess. Therefore, next only to the Established Church, the House of Vipont was that British institution the roots of which were the most widely spread.
Now the Viponts had for long generations been an energetic race. Whatever their defects, they had exhibited shrewdness and vigour. The late Marquess (grandfather to the present) had been perhaps the ablest (that is, done most for the House of Vipont) of them all. Of a grandiose and superb mode of living; of a majestic deportment; of princely manners; of a remarkable talent for the management of all business, whether private or public; a perfect enthusiast for the House of Vipont, and aided by a marchioness in all respects worthy of him,--he might be said to be the culminating flower of the venerable stem. But the present lord, succeeding to the title as a mere child, was a melancholy contrast, not only to his grandsire, but to the general character of his progenitors. Before his time, every Head of the House had done something for it; even the most frivolous had contributed one had collected the pictures, another the statues, a third the medals, a fourth had amassed the famous Vipont library; while others had at least married heiresses, or augmented, through ducal lines, the splendour of the interminable cousinhood. The present Marquess was literally nil. The pith of the Viponts was not in him. He looked well; he dressed well: if life were only the dumb show of a tableau, he would have been a paragon of a Marquess. But he was like the watches we give to little children, with a pretty gilt dial-plate, and no works in them. He was thoroughly inert; there was no winding him up: he could not manage his property; he could not answer his letters,--very few of them could he even read through. Politics did not interest him, nor literature, nor field-sports. He shot, it is true, but mechanically; wondering, perhaps, why he did shoot. He attended races, because the House of Vipont kept a racing stud. He bet on his own horses, but if they lost showed no vexation. Admirers (no Marquess of Montfort could be wholly without them) said, “What fine temper! what good breeding!” it was nothing but constitutional apathy. No one could call him a bad man: he was not a profligate, an oppressor, a miser, a spendthrift; he would not have taken the trouble to be a bad man on any account. Those who beheld his character at a distance would have called him an exemplary man. The more conspicuous duties of his station--subscriptions, charities, the maintenance of grand establishments, the encouragement of the fine arts--were virtues admirably performed for him by others. But the phlegm or nullity of his being was not, after all, so complete as I have made it, perhaps, appear. He had one susceptibility which is more common with women than with men,--the susceptibility to pique. His amour propre was unforgiving: pique that, and he could do a rash thing, a foolish thing, a spiteful thing; pique that, and, prodigious! the watch went! He had a rooted pique against his marchioness. Apparently he had conceived this pique from the very first. He showed it passively by supreme neglect; he showed it actively by removing her from all the spheres of power which naturally fall to the wife when the husband shuns the details of business. Evidently he had a dread lest any one should say, “Lady Montfort influences my lord.” Accordingly, not only the management of his estates fell to Carr Vipont, but even of his gardens, his household, his domestic arrangements. It was Carr Vipont or Lady Selina who said to Lady Montfort, “Give a ball;” “You should ask so and so to dinner;” “Montfort was much hurt to see the old lawn at the Twickenham villa broken up by those new bosquets. True, it is settled on you as a jointure-house, but for that very reason Montfort is sensitive,” etc. In fact, they were virtually as separated, my lord and my lady, as if legally disunited, and as if Carr Vipont and Lady Selina were trustees or intermediaries in any polite approach to each other. But, on the other hand, it is fair to say that where Lady Montfort’s sphere of action did not interfere with her husband’s plans, habits, likings, dislikings, jealous apprehensions that she should be supposed to have any ascendency over what exclusively belonged to himself as Roi faineant of the Viponts, she was left free as air. No attempt at masculine control or conjugal advice. At her disposal was wealth without stint, every luxury the soft could desire, every gewgaw the vain could covet. Had her pin-money, which in itself was the revenue of an ordinary peeress, failed to satisfy her wants; had she grown tired of wearing the family diamonds, and coveted new gems from Golconda,--a single word to Carr Vipont or Lady Selina would have been answered by a carte blanche on the Bank of England. But Lady Montfort had the misfortune not to be extravagant in her tastes. Strange to say, in the world Lord Montfort’s marriage was called a love-match; he had married a portionless girl, daughter to one of his poorest and obscurest cousins, against the uniform policy of the House of Vipont, which did all it could for poor cousins except marrying them to its chief. But Lady Montfort’s conduct in these trying circumstances was admirable and rare. Few affronts can humiliate us unless we resent them--and in vain. Lady Montfort had that exquisite dignity which gives to submission the grace of cheerful acquiescence. That in the gay world flatterers should gather round a young wife so eminently beautiful, and so wholly left by her husband to her own guidance, was inevitable. But at the very first insinuated compliment or pathetic condolence, Lady Montfort, so meek in her household, was haughty enough to have daunted Lovelace. She was thus very early felt to be beyond temptation, and the boldest passed on, nor presumed to tempt. She was unpopular; called “proud and freezing;” she did not extend the influence of “The House;” she did not confirm its fashion,--fashion which necessitates social ease, and which no rank, no wealth, no virtue, can of themselves suffice to give. And this failure on her part was a great offence in the eyes of the House of Vipont. “She does absolutely nothing for us,” said Lady Selina; but Lady Selina in her heart was well pleased that to her in reality thus fell, almost without a rival, the female representation, in the great world, of the Vipont honours. Lady Selina was fashion itself.
Lady Montfort’s social peculiarity was in the eagerness with which she sought the society of persons who enjoyed a reputation for superior intellect, whether statesmen, lawyers, authors, philosophers, artists. Intellectual intercourse seemed as if it was her native atmosphere, from which she was habitually banished, to which she returned with an instinctive yearning and a new zest of life; yet was she called, even here, nor seemingly without justice, capricious and unsteady in her likings. These clever personages, after a little while, all seemed to disappoint her expectations of them; she sought the acquaintance of each with cordial earnestness; slid from the acquaintance with weary languor,--never, after all, less alone than when alone.
And so wondrous lovely! Nothing so rare as beauty of the high type: genius and beauty, indeed, are both rare; genius, which is the beauty of the mind,-beauty, which is the gen ius of the body. But, of the two, beauty is the rarer. All of us can count on our fingers some forty or fifty persons of undoubted and illustrious genius, including those famous in action, letters, art. But can any of us remember to have seen more than four or five specimens of first-rate ideal beauty? Whosoever had seen Lady Montfort would have ranked her amongst such four or five in his recollection. There was in her face that lustrous dazzle to which the Latin poet, perhaps, refers when he speaks of the--
“Nitor Splendentis Pario marmore purius... Et voltus, niminm lubricus adspici,”
and which an English poet, with the less sensuous but more spiritual imagination of northern genius, has described in lines that an English reader may be pleased to see rescued from oblivion,--
“Her face was like the milky way i’ the sky, A meeting of gentle lights without a name.” (Suckling)
The eyes so purely bright, the exquisite harmony of colouring between the dark (not too dark) hair and the ivory of the skin; such sweet radiance in the lip when it broke into a smile. And it was said that in her maiden day, before Caroline Lyndsay became Marchioness of Montfort, that smile was the most joyous thing imaginable. Absurd now; you would not think it, but that stately lady had been a wild, fanciful girl, with the merriest laugh and the quickest tear, filling the air round her with April sunshine. Certainly, no beings ever yet lived the life Nature intended them to live, nor had fair play for heart and mind, who contrived, by hook or by crook, to marry the wrong person!
Chapter VIII
The interior of the great house.--The British Constitution at home in a family party.
Great was the family gathering that Christmas-tide at Montfort Court. Thither flocked the cousins of the House in all degrees and of various ranks. From dukes, who had nothing left to wish for that kings and cousinhoods can give, to briefless barristers and aspiring cornets, of equally good blood with the dukes,--the superb family united its motley scions. Such reunions were frequent: they belonged to the hereditary policy of the House of Vipont. On this occasion the muster of the clan was more significant than usual; there was a “CRISES” in the constitutional history of the British empire. A new Government had been suddenly formed within the last six weeks, which certainly portended some direful blow on our ancient institutions; for the House of Vipont had not been consulted in its arrangements, and was wholly unrepresented in the Ministry, even by a lordship of the Treasury. Carr Vipont had therefore summoned the patriotic and resentful kindred.
It is an hour or so after the conclusion of dinner. The gentlemen have joined the ladies in the state suite, a suite which the last Marquess had rearranged and redecorated in his old age, during the long illness that finally conducted him to his ancestors. During his earlier years that princely Marquess had deserted Montfort Court for a seat nearer to London, and therefore much more easily filled with that brilliant society of which he had been long the ornament and centre,--railways not then existing for the annihilation of time and space, and a journey to a northern county four days with posthorses making the invitations even of a Marquess of Montfort unalluring to languid beauties and gouty ministers. But nearing the end of his worldly career, this long neglect of the dwelling identified with his hereditary titles smote the conscience of the illustrious sinner. And other occupations beginning to pall, his lordship, accompanied and cheered by a chaplain, who had a fine taste in the decorative arts, came resolutely to Montfort Court; and there, surrounded with architects and gilders and upholsterers, redeemed his errors; and, soothed by the reflection of the palace provided for his successor, added to his vaults--a coffin.
The suite expands before the eye. You are in the grand drawing-room, copied from that of Versailles. That is the picture, full length, of the late Marquess in his robes; its pendant is the late Marchioness, his wife. That table of malachite is a present from the Russian Emperor Alexander; that vase of Sevres which rests on it was made for Marie Antoinette,--see her portrait enamelled in its centre. Through the open door at the far end your eye loses itself in a vista of other pompous chambers,--the music-room, the statue hall, the orangery; other rooms there are appertaining to the suite, a ballroom fit for Babylon, a library that might have adorned Alexandria,--but they are not lighted, nor required, on this occasion; it is strictly a family party, sixty guests and no more.
In the drawing-room three whist-tables carry off the more elderly and grave. The piano, in the music-room, attracts a younger group. Lady Selina Vipont’s eldest daughter, Honoria, a young lady not yet brought out, but about to be brought out the next season, is threading a wonderfully intricate German piece,
“Link’d sweetness, long drawn out,”
with variations. Her science is consummate. No pains have been spared on her education; elaborately accomplished, she is formed to be the sympathizing spouse of a wealthy statesman. Lady Montfort is seated by an elderly duchess, who is good-natured and a great talker; near her are seated two middle-aged gentlemen, who had been conversing with her till the duchess, having cut in, turned dialogue into monologue.
The elder of these two gentlemen is Mr. Carr Vipont, bald, with clipped parliamentary whiskers; values himself on a likeness to Canning, but with a portlier presence; looks a large-acred man. Carr Vipont has about L40,000 a year; has often refused office for himself, while taking care that other Viponts should have it; is a great authority in committee business and the rules of the House of Commons; speaks very seldom, and at no great length, never arguing, merely stating his opinion, carries great weight with him, and as he votes vote fifteen other members of the House of Vipont, besides admiring satellites. He can therefore turn divisions, and has decided the fate of cabinets. A pleasant man, a little consequential, but the reverse of haughty,--unctuously overbearing. The other gentleman, to whom he is listening, is our old acquaintance Colonel Alban Vipont Morley, Darrell’s friend, George’s uncle,--a man of importance, not inferior, indeed, to that of his kinsman Carr; an authority in clubrooms, an oracle in drawing-rooms, a first-rate man of the beau monde. Alban Morley, a younger brother, had entered the Guards young; retired young also from the Guards with the rank of Colonel, and on receipt of a legacy from an old aunt, which, with the interest derived from the sum at which he sold his commission, allowed him a clear income of L1,000 a year. This modest income sufficed for all his wants, fine gentleman though he was. He had refused to go into Parliament,--refused a high place in a public department. Single himself, he showed his respect for wedlock by the interest he took in the marriages of other people; just as Earl Warwick, too wise to set up for a king, gratified his passion for royalty by becoming the king-maker. The Colonel was exceedingly accomplished, a very fair scholar, knew most modern languages. In painting an amateur, in music a connoisseur; witty at times, and with wit of a high quality, but thrifty in the expenditure of it; too wise to be known as a wit. Manly too, a daring rider, who had won many a fox’s brush; a famous deer-stalker, and one of the few English gentlemen who still keep up the noble art of fencing,--twice a week to be seen, foil in hand, against all comers in Angelo’s rooms. Thin, well-shaped,--not handsome, my dear young lady, far from it, but with an air so thoroughbred that, had you seen him in the day when the opera-house had a crushroom and a fops’ alley,--seen him in either of those resorts, surrounded by elaborate dandies and showy beauty-men, dandies and beauty-men would have seemed to you secondrate and vulgar; and the eye, fascinated by that quiet form,--plain in manner, plain in dress, plain in feature,--you would have said, “How very distinguished it is to be so plain!” Knowing the great world from the core to the cuticle, and on that knowledge basing authority and position, Colonel Morley was not calculating, not cunning, not suspicious,--his sagacity the more quick because its movements were straightforward; intimate with the greatest, but sought, not seeking; not a flatterer nor a parasite, but when his advice was asked (even if advice necessitated reproof) giving it with military candour: in fine, a man of such social reputation as rendered him an ornament and prop to the House of Vipont; and with unsuspected depths of intelligence and feeling, which lay in the lower strata of his knowledge of this world to witness of some other one, and justified Darrell in commending a boy like Lionel Haughton to the Colonel’s friendly care and admonitory counsels. The Colonel, like other men, had his weakness, if weakness it can be called: he believed that the House of Vipont was not merely the Corinthian capital, but the embattled keep--not merely the dulce decus, but the praesidium columenque rerum--of the British monarchy. He did not boast of his connection with the House; he did not provoke your spleen by enlarging on its manifold virtues; he would often have his harmless jest against its members, or even against its pretensions: but such seeming evidences of forbearance or candour were cunning devices to mitigate envy. His devotion to the House was not obtrusive: it was profound. He loved the House of Vipont for the sake of England: he loved England for the sake of the House of Vipont. Had it been possible, by some tremendous reversal of the ordinary laws of nature, to dissociate the cause of England from the cause of the House of Vipont, the Colonel would have said, “Save at least the Ark of the Constitution! and rally round the old House!”
The Colonel had none of Guy Darrell’s infirmity of family pride; he cared not a rush for mere pedigrees,--much too liberal and enlightened for such obsolete prejudices. No! He knew the world too well not to be quite aware that old family and long pedigrees are of no use to a man if he has not some money or some merit. But it was of use to a man to be a cousin of the House of Vipont, though without any money, without any merit at all. It was of use to be part and parcel of a British institution; it was of use to have a legitimate indefeasible right to share in the administration and patronage of an empire, on which (to use a novel illustration) “the sun never sets.” You might want nothing for yourself; the Colonel and the Marquess equally wanted nothing for themselves but man is not to be a selfish egotist! Man has cousins: his cousins may want something. Demosthenes denounces, in words that inflame every manly breast, the ancient Greek who does not love his POLIS or State, even though he take nothing from it but barren honour, and contribute towards it--a great many disagreeable taxes. As the POLIS to the Greek, was the House of Vipont to Alban Vipont Morley. It was the most beautiful, touching affection imaginable! Whenever the House was in difficulties, whenever it was threatened by a CRISIS, the Colonel was by its side, sparing no pains, neglecting no means, to get the Ark of the Constitution back into smooth water. That duty done, he retired again into private life, and scorned all other reward than the still whisper of applauding conscience.
“Yes,” said Alban Morley, whose voice, though low and subdued in tone, was extremely distinct, with a perfect enunciation. “Yes, it is quite true, my nephew has taken orders,--his defect in speech, if not quite removed, has ceased to be any obstacle, even to eloquence; an occasional stammer may be effective,--it increases interest, and when the right word comes, there is the charm of surprise in it. I do not doubt that George will be a very distinguished clergyman.”
MR. CARR VIPONT.--“We want one; the House wants a very distinguished clergyman: we have none at this moment,--not a bishop, not even a dean! all mere parish parsons, and among them not one we could push. Very odd, with more than forty livings too. But the Viponts seldom take to the Church kindly: George must be pushed. The more I think of it, the more we want a bishop: a bishop would be useful in the present CRISIS.” (Looking round the rooms proudly, and softening his voice), “A numerous gathering, Morley! This demonstration will strike terror in Downing Street, eh! The old House stands firm,--never was a family so united: all here, I think,--that is, all worth naming,--all, except Sir James, whom Montfort chooses to dislike, and George--and George comes to-morrow.”
COLONEL MORLEY.--“You forget the most eminent of all our connections,--the one who could indeed strike terror into Downing Street, were his voice to be heard again!”
CARR VIPONT.--“Whom do you mean? Ah, I know! Guy Darrell. His wife was a Vipont; and he is not here. But he has long since ceased to communicate with any of us; the only connection that ever fell away from the House of Vipont, especially in a CRISIS like the present. Singular man! For all the use he is to us, he might as well be dead! But he has a fine fortune: what will he do with it?”
THE DUCHESS.--“My dear Lady Montfort, you have hurt yourself with that paper cutter.”
LADY MONTFORT.--“NO, indeed. Hush! we are disturbing Mr. Carr Vipont!”
The Duchess, in awe of Carr Vipont, sinks her voice, and gabbles on, whisperously.
CARR VIPONT (resuming the subject).--“A very fine fortune: what will he do with it?”
COLONEL MORLEY.--“I don’t know; but I had a letter from him some months ago.”
CARR VIPONT.--“You had, and never told me!”
COLONEL MORLEY.--“Of no importance to you, my dear Carr. His letter merely introduced to me a charming young fellow,--a kinsman of his own (no Vipont),--Lionel Haughton, son of poor Charlie Haughton, whom you may remember.”
CARR VIPONT.--“Yes, a handsome scamp; went to the dogs. So Darrell takes up Charlie’s son: what! as his heir?”
COLONEL MORLEY.--“In his letter to me he anticipated that question in the negative.”
CARR VIPONT.--“Has Darrell any nearer kinsman?”
COLONEL MORLEY.--“Not that I know of.”
CARR VIPONT.--“Perhaps he will select one of his wife’s family for his heir,--a Vipont; I should not wonder.”
COLONEL MORLEY (dryly).--“I should. But why may not Darrell marry again? I always thought he would; I think so still.”
CARR VIPONT (glancing towards his own daughter Honoria).--“Well, a wife well chosen might restore him to society, and to us. Pity, indeed, that so great an intellect should be suspended,--a voice so eloquent hushed. You are right; in this CRISIS, Guy Darrell once more in the House of Commons, we should have all we require,--an orator, a debater! Very odd, but at this moment we have no speakers,--WE the Viponts!”
COLONEL MORLEY.--“Yourself!”
CARR VIPONT.--“You are too kind. I can speak on occasions; but regularly, no. Too much drudgery; not young enough to take to it now. So you think Darrell will marry again? A remarkably fine-looking fellow when I last saw him: not old yet; I dare say well preserved. I wish I had thought of asking him here--Montfort!” (Lord Montfort, with one or two male friends, was passing by towards a billiard-room, opening through a side-door from the regular suite) “Montfort! only think, we forgot to invite Guy Darrell. Is it too late before our party breaks up?”
LORD MONTFORT (sullenly).--“I don’t choose Guy Darrell to be invited to my house.”
Carr Vipont was literally stunned by a reply so contumacious. Lord Montfort demur at what Carr Vipont suggested? He could not believe his senses.
“Not choose, my dear Montfort! you are joking. A monstrous clever fellow, Guy Darrell, and at this CRISIS--”
“I hate clever fellows; no such bores!” said Lord Montfort, breaking from the caressing clasp of Carr Vipont, and stalking away.
“Spare your regrets, my dear Carr,” said Colonel Morley. “Darrell is not in England: I rather believe he is in Verona.” Therewith the Colonel sauntered towards the group gathered round the piano. A little time afterwards Lady Montfort escaped from the Duchess, and, mingling courteously with her livelier guests, found herself close to Colonel Morley. “Will you give me my revenge at chess?” she asked, with her rare smile. The Colonel was charmed. As they sat down and ranged their men, Lady Montfort remarked carelessly,
“I overheard you say you had lately received a letter from Mr. Darrell. Does he write as if well,--cheerful? You remember that I was much with his daughter, much in his house, when I was a child. He was ever most kind to me.” Lady Montfort’s voice here faltered.
“He writes with no reference to himself, his health, or his spirits. But his young kinsman described him to me as in good health,--wonderfully young-looking for his years. But cheerful,--no! Darrell and I entered the world together; we were friends as much as a man so busy and so eminent as he could be friends with a man like myself, indolent by habit and obscure out of Mayfair. I know his nature; we both know something of his family sorrows. He cannot be happy! Impossible!--alone, childless, secluded. Poor Darrell, abroad now; in Verona, too!--the dullest place! in mourning still for Romeo and Juliet! ‘T is your turn to move. In his letter Darrell talked of going on to Greece, Asia, penetrating into the depths of Africa,--the wildest schemes! Dear County Guy, as we called him at Eton! what a career his might have been! Don’t let us talk of him, it makes me mournful. Like Goethe, I avoid painful subjects upon principle.”
LADY MONTFORT.--“No; we will not talk of him. No; I take the Queen’s pawn. No, we will not talk of him! no!” The game proceeded; the Colonel was within three moves of checkmating his adversary. Forgetting the resolution come to, he said, as she paused, and seemed despondently meditating a hopeless defence,
“Pray, my fair cousin, what makes Montfort dislike my old friend Darrell?”
“Dislike! Does he! I don’t know. Vanquished again, Colonel Morley!” She rose; and as he restored the chessmen to their box, she leaned thoughtfully over the table.
“This young kinsman, will he not be a comfort to Mr. Darrell?”
“He would be a comfort and a pride to a father; but to Darrell, so distant a kinsman,--comfort!--why and how? Darrell will provide for him, that is all. A very gentlemanlike young man; gone to Paris by my advice; wants polish and knowledge of life. When he comes back he must enter society: I have put his name up at White’s; may I introduce him to you?”
Lady Montfort hesitated, and, after a pause, said, almost rudely, “No.”
She left the Colonel, slightly shrugging his shoulders, and passed into the billiard-room with a quick step. Some ladies were already there looking at the players. Lord Montfort was chalking his cue. Lady Montfort walked straight up to him: her colour was heightened; her lip was quivering; she placed her hand on his shoulder with a wife-like boldness. It seemed as if she had come there to seek him from an impulse of affection. She asked with a hurried fluttering kindness of voice, if he had been successful, and called him by his Christian name. Lord Montfort’s countenance, before merely apathetic, now assumed an expression of extreme distaste. “Come to teach me to make a cannon, I suppose!” he said mutteringly, and turning from her, contemplated the balls and missed the cannon.
“Rather in my way, Lady Montfort,” said he then, and, retiring to a corner, said no more.
Lady Montfort’s countenance became still more flushed. She lingered a moment, returned to the drawing-room, and for the rest of the evening was unusually animated, gracious, fascinating. As she retired with her lady guests for the night she looked round, saw Colonel Morley, and held out her hand to him.
“Your nephew comes here to-morrow,” said she, “my old play-fellow; impossible quite to forget old friends; good night.”
Chapter IX
“Les extremes se touchent.”
The next day the gentlemen were dispersed out of doors, a large shooting party. Those who did not shoot, walked forth to inspect the racing stud or the model farm. The ladies had taken their walk; some were in their own rooms, some in the reception-rooms, at work, or reading, or listening to the piano,--Honoria Carr Vipont again performing. Lady Montfort was absent; Lady Selina kindly supplied the hostess’s place. Lady Selina was embroidering, with great skill and taste, a pair of slippers for her eldest boy, who was just entered at Oxford, having left Eton with a reputation of being the neatest dresser, and not the worst cricketer, of that renowned educational institute. It is a mistake to suppose that fine ladies are not sometimes very fond mothers and affectionate wives. Lady Selina, beyond her family circle, was trivial, unsympathizing, cold-hearted, supercilious by temperament, never kind but through policy, artificial as clock work. But in her own home, to her husband, her children, Lady Selina was a very good sort of woman,--devotedly attached to Carr Vipont, exaggerating his talents, thinking him the first man in England, careful of his honour, zealous for his interest, soothing in his cares, tender in his ailments; to her girls prudent and watchful, to her boys indulgent and caressing; minutely attentive to the education of the first, according to her high-bred ideas of education,--and they really were “superior” girls, with much instruction and well-balanced minds,--less authoritative with the last, because boys being not under her immediate control, her sense of responsibility allowed her to display more fondness and less dignity in her intercourse with them than with young ladies who must learn from her example, as well as her precepts, the patrician decorum which becomes the smooth result of impulse restrained and emotion checked: boys might make a noise in the world, girls should make none. Lady Selina, then, was working the slippers for her absent son, her heart being full of him at that moment. She was describing his character and expatiating on his promise to two or three attentive listeners, all interested, as being themselves of the Vipont blood, in the probable destiny of the heir to the Carr Viponts.
“In short,” said Lady Selina, winding up, “as soon as Reginald is of age we shall get him into Parliament. Carr has always lamented that he himself was not broken into office early; Reginald must be. Nothing so requisite for public men as early training; makes them practical, and not too sensitive to what those horrid newspaper men say. That was Pitt’s great advantage. Reginald has ambition; he should have occupation to keep him out of mischief. It is an anxious thing for a mother, when a son is good-looking: such danger of his being spoiled by the women. Yes, my dear, it is a small foot, very small,--his father’s foot.”
“If Lord Montfort should have no family,” said a somewhat distant and subaltern Vipont, whisperingly and hesitating, “does not the title--”
“No, my dear,” interrupted Lady Selina; “no, the title does not come to us. It is a melancholy thought, but the marquisate, in that case, is extinct. No other heir-male from Gilbert, the first marquess. Carr says there is even likely to be some dispute about the earldom. The Barony, of course, is safe; goes with the Irish estates, and most of the English; and goes (don’t you know?) to Sir James Vipont, the last person who ought to have it; the quietest, stupidest creature; not brought up to the sort of thing,--a mere gentleman-farmer on a small estate in Devonshire.”
“He is not here?”
“No. Lord Montfort does not like him. Very natural. Nobody likes his heir, if not his own child; and some people don’t even like their own eldest sons! Shocking; but so it is. Montfort is the kindest, most tractable being that ever was, except where he takes a dislike. He dislikes two or three people very much.”
“True; how he did dislike poor Mrs. Lyndsay!” said one of the listeners, smiling.
“Mrs. Lyndsay, yes,--dear Lady Montfort’s mother. I can’t say I pitied her, though I was sorry for Lady Montfort. How Mrs. Lyndsay ever took in Montfort for Caroline I can’t conceive! How she had the face to think of it! He, a mere youth at the time! Kept secret from all his family, even from his grandmother,--the darkest transaction. I don’t wonder that he never forgave it.”
FIRST LISTENER.--“Caroline has beauty enough to--”
LADY SELINA (interrupting).--“Beauty, of course: no one can deny that. But not at all suited to such a position, not brought up to the sort of thing. Poor Montfort! he should have married a different kind of woman altogether,--a woman like his grandmother, the last Lady Montfort. Caroline does nothing for the House,--nothing; has not even a child,--most unfortunate affair.”
SECOND LISTENER.--“Mrs. Lyndsay was very poor, was not she? Caroline, I suppose, had no opportunity of forming those tastes and habits which are necessary for--for--”
LADY SELINA (helping the listener).--“For such a position and such a fortune. You are quite right, my dear. People brought up in one way cannot accommodate themselves to another; and it is odd, but I have observed that people brought up poor can accommodate themselves less to being very rich than people brought up rich can accommodate themselves to being very poor. As Carr says, in his pointed way, ‘It is easier to stoop than to climb.’ Yes; Mrs. Lyndsay was, you know, a daughter of Seymour Vipont, who was for so many years in the Administration, with a fair income from his salary, and nothing out of it. She married one of the Scotch Lyndsays,--good family, of course, with a very moderate property. She was left a widow young, with an only child, Caroline. Came to town with a small jointure. The late Lady Montfort was very kind to her. So were we all; took her up; pretty woman; pretty manners; worldly,--oh, very! I don’t like worldly people. Well, but all of a sudden a dreadful thing happened. The heir-at-law disputed the jointure, denied that Lyndsay had any right to make settlements on the Scotch property; very complicated business. But, luckily for her, Vipont Crooke’s daughter, her cousin and intimate friend, had married Darrell, the famous Darrell, who was then at the bar. It is very useful to have cousins married to clever people. He was interested in her case, took it up. I believe it did not come on in the courts in which Darrell practised. But he arranged all the evidence, inspected the briefs, spent a great deal of his own money in getting up the case; and in fact he gained her cause, though he could not be her counsel. People did say that she was so grateful that after his wife’s death she had set her heart on becoming Mrs. Darrell the second. But Darrell was then quite wrapped up in politics,--the last man to fall in love, and only looked bored when women fell in love with him, which a good many did. Grand-looking creature, my dear, and quite the rage for a year or two. However, Mrs. Lyndsay all of a sudden went off to Paris, and there Montfort saw Caroline, and was caught. Mrs. Lyndsay, no doubt, calculated on living with her daughter, having the run of Montfort House in town and Montfort Court in the country. But Montfort is deeper than people think for. No, he never forgave her. She was never asked here; took it to heart, went to Rome, and died.”
At this moment the door opened, and George Morley, now the Rev. George Morley, entered, just arrived to join his cousins.
Some knew him, some did not. Lady Selina, who made it a point to know all the cousins, rose graciously, put aside the slippers, and gave him two fingers. She was astonished to find him not nearly so shy as he used to be: wonderfully improved; at his ease, cheerful, animated. The man now was in his right place, and following hope on the bent of inclination. Few men are shy when in their right places. He asked after Lady Montfort. She was in her own small sitting-room, writing letters,--letters that Carr Vipont had entreated her to write,--correspondence useful to the House of Vipont. Before long, however, a servant entered, to say that Lady Montfort would be very happy to see Mr. Morley. George followed the servant into that unpretending sitting-room, with its simple chintzes and quiet bookshelves,--room that would not have been too fine for a cottage.
Chapter X
In every life, go it fast, go it slow, there are critical pausing- places. When the journey is renewed the face of the country is changed.
How well she suited that simple room; herself so simply dressed, her marvellous beauty so exquisitely subdued! She looked at home there, as if all of home that the house could give were there collected.
She had finished and sealed the momentous letters, and had come, with a sense of relief, from the table at the farther end of the room, on which those letters, ceremonious and conventional, had been written,--come to the window, which, though mid-winter, was open, and the redbreast, with whom she had made friends, hopped boldly almost within reach, looking at her with bright eyes and head curiously aslant. By the window a single chair, and a small reading-desk, with the book lying open. The short day was not far from its close, but there was ample light still in the skies, and a serene if chilly stillness in the air without.
Though expecting the relation she had just summoned to her presence, I fear she had half forgotten him. She was standing by the window deep in revery as he entered, so deep that she started when his voice struck her ear and he stood before her. She recovered herself quickly, however, and said with even more than her ordinary kindliness of tone and manner towards the scholar, “I am so glad to see and congratulate you.”
“And I so glad to receive your congratulations,” answered the scholar in smooth, slow voice, without a stutter.
“But, George, how is this?” asked Lady Montfort. “Bring that chair, sit down here, and tell me all about it. You wrote me word you were cured,--at least sufficiently to re move your noble scruples. You did not say how. Your uncle tells me, by patient will and resolute practice.”
“Under good guidance. But I am going to confide to you a secret, if you will promise to keep it.”
“Oh, you may trust me: I have no female friends.”
The clergyman smiled, and spoke at once of the lessons he had received from the basketmaker.
“I have his permission,” he said in conclusion, “to confide the service he rendered me, the intimacy that has sprung up between us, but to you alone,--not a word to your guests. When you have once seen him, you will understand why an eccentric man, who has known better days, would shrink from the impertinent curiosity of idle customers. Contented with his humble livelihood, he asks but liberty and repose.”
“That I already comprehend,” said Lady Montfort, half sighing, half smiling. “But my curiosity shall not molest him, and when I visit the village, I will pass by his cottage.”
“Nay, my dear Lady Montfort, that would be to refuse the favour I am about to ask, which is that you would come with me to that very cottage. It would so please him.”
“Please him! why?”
“Because this poor man has a young female grandchild, and he is so anxious that you should see and be kind to her, and because, too, he seems most anxious to remain in his present residence. The cottage, of course, belongs to Lord Montfort, and is let to him by the bailiff, and if you deign to feel interest in him, his tenure is safe.”
Lady Montfort looked down, and coloured. She thought, perhaps, how false a security her protection, and how slight an influence her interest would be; but she did not say so. George went on; and so eloquently, and so touchingly did he describe both grandsire and grandchild, so skilfully did he intimate the mystery which hung over them, that Lady Montfort became much moved by his narrative; and willingly promised to accompany him across the park to the basketmaker’s cottage the first opportunity. But when one has sixty guests in one’s house, one has to wait for an opportunity to escape from them unremarked. And the opportunity, in fact, did not come for many days; not till the party broke up, save one or two dowager she-cousins who “gave no trouble,” and one or two bachelor he-cousins whom my lord retained to consummate the slaughter of pheasants, and play at billiards in the dreary intervals between sunset and dinner, dinner and bedtime.
Then one cheerful frosty noon George Morley and his fair cousin walked boldly en evidence, before the prying ghostly windows, across the broad gravel walks; gained the secluded shrubbery, the solitary deeps of park-land; skirted the wide sheet of water, and, passing through a private wicket in the paling, suddenly came upon the patch of osier-ground and humble garden, which were backed by the basketmaker’s cottage.
As they entered those lowly precincts a child’s laugh was borne to their ears,--a child’s silvery, musical, mirthful laugh; it was long since the great lady had heard a laugh like that,--a happy child’s natural laugh. She paused and listened with a strange pleasure. “Yes,” whispered George Morley, “stop--and hush! there they are.”
Waife was seated on the stump of a tree, materials for his handicraft lying beside neglected. Sophy was standing before him,--he raising his finger as if in reproof, and striving hard to frown. As the intruders listened, they overheard that he was striving to teach her the rudiments of French dialogue, and she was laughing merrily at her own blunders, and at the solemn affectation of the shocked schoolmaster. Lady Montfort noted with no unnatural surprise the purity of idiom and of accent with which this singular basketmaker was unconsciously displaying his perfect knowledge of a language which the best-educated English gentleman of that generation, nay, even of this, rarely speaks with accuracy and elegance. But her attention was diverted immediately from the teacher to the face of the sweet pupil. Women have a quick appreciation of beauty in their own sex; and women who are themselves beautiful, not the least. Irresistibly Lady Montfort felt attracted towards that innocent countenance so lively in its mirth, and yet so softly gay. Sir Isaac, who had hitherto lain perdu, watching the movements of a thrush amidst a holly-bush, now started up with a bark. Waife rose; Sophy turned half in flight. The visitors approached.
Here slowly, lingeringly, let fall the curtain. In the frank license of narrative, years will have rolled away ere the curtain rise again. Events that may influence a life often date from moments the most serene, from things that appear as trivial and unnoticeable as the great lady’s visit to the basketmaker’s cottage. Which of those lives will that visit influence hereafter,--the woman’s, the child’s, the vagrant’s? Whose? Probably little that passes now would aid conjecture, or be a visible link in the chain of destiny. A few desultory questions; a few guarded answers; a look or so, a musical syllable or two, exchanged between the lady and the child; a basket bought, or a promise to call again. Nothing worth the telling. Be it then untold. View only the scene itself as the curtain drops reluctantly. The rustic cottage, its garden-door open, and open its old-fashioned lattice casements. You can see how neat and cleanly, how eloquent of healthful poverty, how remote from squalid penury, the whitewashed walls, the homely furniture within. Creepers lately trained around the doorway; Christmas holly, with berries red against the window-panes; the bee-hive yonder; a starling, too, outside the threshold, in its wicker cage; in the background (all the rest of the neighbouring hamlet out of sight), the church spire tapering away into the clear blue wintry sky. All has an air of repose, of safety. Close beside you is the Presence of HOME; that ineffable, sheltering, loving Presence, which amidst solitude murmurs “not solitary,”--a Presence unvouchsafed to the great lady in the palace she has left. And the lady herself? She is resting on the rude gnarled root-stump from which the vagrant had risen; she has drawn Sophy towards her; she has taken the child’s hand; she is speaking now, now listening; and on her face kindness looks like happiness. Perhaps she is happy that moment. And Waife? he is turning aside his weatherbeaten mobile countenance with his hand anxiously trembling upon the young scholar’s arm. The scholar whispers, “Are you satisfied with me?” and Waife answers in a voice as low but more broken, “God reward you! Oh, joy! if my pretty one has found at last a woman friend!” Poor vagabond, he has now a calm asylum, a fixed humble livelihood; more than that, he has just achieved an object fondly cherished. His past life,--alas! what has he done with it? His actual life, broken fragment though it be, is at rest now. But still the everlasting question,--mocking terrible question, with its phrasing of farce and its enigmas of tragical sense,--“WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT?” Do with what? The all that remains to him, the all he holds! the all which man himself, betwixt Free-will and Pre-decree, is permitted to do. Ask not the vagrant alone: ask each of the four there assembled on that flying bridge called the Moment. Time before thee,--what wilt thou do with it? Ask thyself! ask the wisest! Out of effort to answer that question, what dream-schools have risen, never wholly to perish,--the science of seers on the Chaldee’s Pur-Tor, or in the rock-caves of Delphi, gasped after and grasped at by horn-handed mechanics to-day in their lanes and alleys. To the heart of the populace sink down the blurred relics of what once was the law of the secretest sages, hieroglyphical tatters which the credulous vulgar attempt to interpret. “WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT?” Ask Merle and his Crystal! But the curtain descends! Yet a moment, there they are,--age and childhood,--poverty, wealth, station, vagabondage; the preacher’s sacred learning and august ambition; fancies of dawning reason; hopes of intellect matured; memories of existence wrecked; household sorrows; untold regrets; elegy and epic in low, close, human sighs, to which Poetry never yet gave voice: all for the moment personified there before you,--a glimpse for the guess, no more. Lower and lower falls the curtain! All is blank!
Chapter I
Etchings of Hyde Park in the month of June, which, if this history escapes those villains the trunk-makers, may be of inestimable value to unborn antiquarians.--Characters, long absent, reappear and give some account of themselves.
Five years have passed away since this history opened. It is the month of June once more,--June, which clothes our London in all its glory, fills its languid ballrooms with living flowers, and its stony causeways with human butterflies. It is about the hour of six P.M. The lounge in Hyde Park is crowded; along the road that skirts the Serpentine crawl the carriages one after the other; congregate by the rails the lazy lookers-on,--lazy in attitude, but with active eyes, and tongues sharpened on the whetstone of scandal,--the Scaligers of club windows airing their vocabulary in the Park. Slowly saunter on foot idlers of all degrees in the hierarchy of London idlesse: dandies of established-fame; youthful tyros in their first season. Yonder in the Ride, forms less inanimate seem condemned to active exercise; young ladies doing penance in a canter; old beaux at hard labour in a trot. Sometimes, by a more thoughtful brow, a still brisker pace, you recognize a busy member of the Imperial Parliament, who, advised by physicians to be as much on horseback as possible, snatches an hour or so in the interval between the close of his Committee and the interest of the Debate, and shirks the opening speech of a well-known bore. Among such truant lawgivers (grief it is to say it) may be seen that once model member, Sir Gregory Stollhead. Grim dyspepsia seizing on him at last, “relaxation from his duties” becomes the adequate punishment for all his sins. Solitary he rides, and communing with himself, yawns at every second. Upon chairs beneficently located under the trees towards the north side of the walk are interspersed small knots and coteries in repose. There you might see the Ladies Prymme, still the Ladies Prymme,--Janet and Wilhelmina; Janet has grown fat, Wilhelmina thin. But thin or fat, they are no less Prymmes. They do not lack male attendants; they are girls of high fashion, with whom young men think it a distinction to be seen talking; of high principle, too, and high pretensions (unhappily for themselves, they are co-heiresses), by whom young men under the rank of earls need not fear to be artfully entrapped into “honourable intentions.” They coquet majestically, but they never flirt; they exact devotion, but they do not ask in each victim a sacrifice on the horns of the altar; they will never give their hands where they do not give their hearts; and being ever afraid that they are courted for their money, they will never give their hearts save to wooers who have much more money than themselves. Many young men stop to do passing homage to the Ladies Prymme: some linger to converse; safe young men,--they are all younger sons. Farther on, Lady Frost and Mr. Crampe, the wit, sit amicably side by side, pecking at each other with sarcastic beaks; occasionally desisting, in order to fasten nip and claw upon that common enemy, the passing friend! The Slowes, a numerous family, but taciturn, sit by themselves; bowed to much, accosted rarely.
Note that man of good presence, somewhere about thirty, or a year or two more, who, recognized by most of the loungers, seems not at home in the lounge. He has passed by the various coteries just described, made his obeisance to the Ladies Prymme, received an icy epigram from Lady Frost, and a laconic sneer from Mr. Crampe, and exchanged silent bows with seven silent Slowes. He has wandered on, looking high in the air, but still looking for some one not in the air, and evidently disappointed in his search, comes to a full stop at length, takes off his hat, wipes his brow, utters a petulant “Prr--r--pshaw!” and seeing, a little in the background, the chairless shade of a thin, emaciated, dusty tree, thither he retires, and seats himself with as little care whether there to seat himself be the right thing in the right place, as if in the honeysuckle arbour of a village inn. “It serves me right,” said he to himself: “a precocious villain bursts in upon me, breaks my day, makes an appointment to meet me here, in these very walks, ten minutes before six; decoys me with the promise of a dinner at Putney,--room looking on the river and fried flounders. I have the credulity to yield: I derange my habits; I leave my cool studio; I put off my easy blouse; I imprison my freeborn throat in a cravat invented by the Thugs; the dog-days are at hand, and I walk rashly over scorching pavements in a black frock-coat and a brimless hat; I annihilate 3s. 6d. in a pair of kid gloves; I arrive at this haunt of spleen; I run the gauntlet of Frosts, Slowes, and Prymmes: and my traitor fails me! Half-past six,--not a sign of him! and the dinner at Putney,--fried flounders? Dreams! Patience, five minutes more; if then he comes not, breach for life between him and me! Ah, voila! there he comes, the laggard! But how those fine folks are catching at him! Has he asked them also to dinner at Putney, and do they care for fried flounders?”
The soliloquist’s eye is on a young man, much younger than himself, who is threading the motley crowd with a light quick step, but is compelled to stop at each moment to interchange a word of welcome, a shake of the hand. Evidently he has already a large acquaintance; evidently he is popular, on good terms with the world and himself. What free grace in his bearing! what gay good-humour in his smile! Powers above! Lady Wilhelmina surely blushes as she returns his bow. He has passed Lady Frost unblighted; the Slowes evince emotion, at least the female Slowes, as he shoots by them with that sliding bow. He looks from side to side, with the rapid glance of an eye in which light seems all dance and sparkle: he sees the soliloquist under the meagre tree; the pace quickens, the lips part half laughing.
“Don’t scold, Vance. I am late, I know; but I did not make allowance for interceptions.”
“Body o’ me, interceptions! For an absentee just arrived in London, you seem to have no lack of friends.”
“Friends made in Paris and found again here at every corner, like pleasant surprises,--but no friend so welcome and dear as Frank Vance.”
“Sensible of the honour, O Lionello the Magnificent. Verily you are bon prince! The Houses of Valois and of Medici were always kind to artists. But whither would you lead me? Back into that treadmill? Thank you, humbly; no.”
“A crowd in fine clothes is of all mobs the dullest. I can look undismayed on the many-headed monster, wild and rampant; but when the many-headed monster buys its hats in Bond Street, and has an eyeglass at each of its inquisitive eyes, I confess I take fright. Besides, it is near seven o’clock; Putney not visible, and the flounders not fried!”
“My cab is waiting yonder; we must walk to it: we can keep on the turf, and avoid the throng. But tell me honestly, Vance, do you really dislike to mix in crowds; you, with your fame, dislike the eyes that turn back to look again, and the lips that respectfully murmur, ‘Vance the Painter’? Ah, I always said you would be a great painter,--and in five short years you have soared high.”
“Pooh!” answered Vance, indifferently. “Nothing is pure and unadulterated in London use; not cream, nor cayenne pepper; least of all Fame,--mixed up with the most deleterious ingredients. Fame! did you read the ‘Times’ critique on my pictures in the present Exhibition? Fame indeed Change the subject. Nothing so good as flounders. Ho! is that your cab? Superb! Car fit for the ‘Grecian youth of talents rare,’ in Mr. Enfield’s ‘Speaker;’ horse that seems conjured out of the Elgin Marbles. Is he quiet?”
“Not very; but trust to my driving. You may well admire the horse,--present from Darrell, chosen by Colonel Morley.” When the young men had settled themselves into the vehicle, Lionel dismissed his groom, and, touching his horse, the animal trotted out briskly.
“Frank,” said Lionel, shaking his dark curls with a petulant gravity, “your cynical definitions are unworthy that masculine beard. You despise fame! what sheer affectation!
“‘Pulverem Olympicum Collegisse juvat; metaque fervidis Evitata rotis-----’”
“Take care,” cried Vance; “we shall be over.” For Lionel, growing excited, teased the horse with his whip; and the horse bolting, took the cab within an inch of a water-cart.
“Fame, fame!” cried Lionel, unheeding the interruption. “What would I not give to have and to hold it for an hour?” “Hold an eel, less slippery; a scorpion, less stinging! But--” added Vance, observing his companion’s heightened colour--“but,” he added seriously, and with an honest compunction, “I forgot, you are a soldier, you follow the career of arms! Never heed what is said on the subject by a querulous painter! The desire of fame may be folly in civilians: in soldiers it is wisdom. Twin-born with the martial sense of honour, it cheers the march; it warms the bivouac; it gives music to the whir of the bullet, the roar of the ball; it plants hope in the thick of peril; knits rivals with the bond of brothers; comforts the survivor when the brother falls; takes from war its grim aspect of carnage; and from homicide itself extracts lessons that strengthen the safeguards to humanity, and perpetuate life to nations. Right: pant for fame; you are a soldier!”
This was one of those bursts of high sentiment from Vance, which, as they were very rare with him, had the dramatic effect of surprise. Lionel listened to him with a thrilling delight. He could not answer: he was too moved. The artist resumed, as the cabriolet now cleared the Park, and rolled safely and rapidly along the road. “I suppose, during the five years you have spent abroad completing your general education, you have made little study, or none, of what specially appertains to the profession you have so recently chosen.”
“You are mistaken there, my dear Vance. If a man’s heart be set on a thing, he is always studying it. The books I loved best, and most pondered over, were such as, if they did not administer lessons, suggested hints that might turn to lessons hereafter. In social intercourse, I never was so pleased as when I could fasten myself to some practical veteran,--question and cross-examine him. One picks up more ideas in conversation than from books; at least I do. Besides, my idea of a soldier who is to succeed some day is not that of a mere mechanician-at-arms. See how accomplished most great captains have been. What observers of mankind! what diplomatists! what reasoners! what men of action, because men to whom reflection had been habitual before they acted! How many stores of idea must have gone to the judgment which hazards the sortie or decides on the retreat!”
“Gently, gently!” cried Vance. “We shall be into that omnibus! Give me the whip,--do; there, a little more to the left,--so. Yes; I am glad to see such enthusiasm in your profession: ‘t is half the battle. Hazlitt said a capital thing, ‘The ‘prentice who does not consider the Lord Mayor in his gilt coach the greatest man in the world will live to be hanged!’”
“Pish!” said Lionel, catching at the whip.
VANCE (holding it back).--“No. I apologize. I retract the Lord Mayor: comparisons are odious. I agree with you, nothing like leather. I mean nothing like a really great soldier,--Hannibal, and so forth. Cherish that conviction, my friend: meanwhile, respect human life; there is another omnibus!”
The danger past, the artist thought it prudent to divert the conversation into some channel less exciting.
“Mr. Darrell, of course, consents to your choice of a profession?”
“Consents! approves, encourages. Wrote me such a beautiful letter! what a comprehensive intelligence that man has!”
“Necessarily; since he agrees with you. Where is he now?”
“I have no notion: it is some months since I heard from him. He was then at Malta, on his return from Asia Minor.”
“So! you have never seen him since he bade you farewell at his old Manor-house?”
“Never. He has not, I believe, been in England.”
“Nor in Paris, where you seem to have chiefly resided.”
“Nor in Paris. Ah, Vance, could I but be of some comfort to him. Now that I am older, I think I understand in him much that perplexed me as a boy when we parted. Darrell is one of those men who require a home. Between the great world and solitude, he needs the intermediate filling-up which the life domestic alone supplies: a wife to realize the sweet word helpmate; children, with whose future he could knit his own toils and his ancestral remembrances. That intermediate space annihilated, the great world and the solitude are left, each frowning on the other.”
“My dear Lionel, you must have lived with very clever people: you are talking far above your years.”
“Am I? True; I have lived, if not with very clever people, with people far above my years. That is a secret I learned from Colonel Morley, to whom I must present you,--the subtlest intellect under the quietest manner. Once he said to me, ‘Would you throughout life be up to the height of your century,--always in the prime of man’s reason, without crudeness and without decline,--live habitually while young with persons older, and when old with persons younger, than yourself.’”
“Shrewdly said indeed. I felicitate you on the evident result of the maxim. And so Darrell has no home,--no wife and no children?”
“He has long been a widower; he lost his only son in boyhood, and his daughter--did you never hear?”
“No, what?”
“Married so ill--a runaway match--and died many years since, without issue.”
“Poor man! It was these afflictions, then, that soured his life, and made him the hermit or the wanderer?”
“There,” said Lionel, “I am puzzled; for I find that, even after his son’s death and his daughter’s unhappy marriage and estrangement from him, he was still in Parliament and in full activity of career. But certainly he did not long keep it up. It might have been an effort to which, strong as he is, he felt himself unequal; or, might he have known some fresh disappointment, some new sorrow, which the world never guesses? What I have said as to his family afflictions the world knows. But I think he will marry again. That idea seemed strong in his own mind when we parted; he brought it out bluntly, roughly. Colonel Morley is convinced that he will marry, if but for the sake of an heir.”
VANCE.--“And if so, my poor Lionel, you are ousted of--”
LIONEL (quickly interrupting).--“Hush! Do not say, my dear Vance, do not you say--you!--one of those low, mean things which, if said to me even by men for whom I have no esteem, make my ears tingle and my cheek blush. When I think of what Darrell has already done for me,--me who have no claim on him,--it seems to me as if I must hate the man who insinuates, ‘Fear lest your benefactor find a smile at his own hearth, a child of his own blood; for you may be richer at his death in proportion as his life is desolate.’”
VANCE.--“You are a fine young fellow, and I beg your pardon. Take care of that milestone: thank you. But I suspect that at least two-thirds of those friendly hands that detained you on the way to me were stretched out less to Lionel Haughton, a subaltern in the Guards, than to Mr. Darrell’s heir presumptive.”
LIONEL.--“That thought sometimes galls me, but it does me good; for it goads on my desire to make myself some one whom the most worldly would not disdain to know for his own sake. Oh for active service! Oh for a sharp campaign! Oh for fair trial how far a man in earnest can grapple Fortune to his breast with his own strong hands! You have done so, Vance; you had but your genius and your painter’s brush. I have no genius; but I have a resolve, and resolve is perhaps as sure of its ends as genius. Genius and Resolve have three grand elements in common,--Patience, Hope, and Concentration.”
Vance, more and more surprised, looked hard at Lionel without speaking. Five years of that critical age, from seventeen to twenty-two, spent in the great capital of Europe; kept from its more dangerous vices partly by a proud sense of personal dignity, partly by a temperament which, regarding love as an ideal for all tender and sublime emotion, recoiled from low profligacy as being to love what the Yahoo of the mocking satirist was to man; absorbed much by the brooding ambition that takes youth out of the frivolous present into the serious future, and seeking companionship, not with contemporary idlers, but with the highest and maturest intellects that the free commonwealth of good society brought within his reach: five years so spent had developed a boy, nursing noble dreams, into a man fit for noble action,--retaining freshest youth in its enthusiasm, its elevation of sentiment, its daring, its energy, and divine credulity in its own unexhausted resources; but borrowing from maturity compactness and solidity of idea,--the link between speculation and practice, the power to impress on others a sense of the superiority which has been self-elaborated by unconscious culture.
“So!” said Vance, after a prolonged pause, “I don’t know whether I have resolve or genius; but certainly if I have made my way to some small reputation, patience, hope, and concentration of purpose must have the credit of it; and prudence, too, which you have forgotten to name, and certainly don’t evince as a charioteer. I hope, my dear fellow, you are not extravagant? No doubt, eh?--why do you laugh?”
“The question is so like you, Frank,--thrifty as ever.”
“Do you think I could have painted with a calm mind if I knew that at my door there was a dun whom I could not pay? Art needs serenity; and if an artist begin his career with as few shirts to his back as I had, he must place economy amongst the rules of perspective.”
Lionel laughed again, and made some comments on economy which were certainly, if smart, rather flippant, and tended not only to lower the favourable estimate of his intellectual improvement which Vance had just formed, but seriously disquieted the kindly artist. Vance knew the world,--knew the peculiar temptations to which a young man in Lionel’s position would be exposed,--knew that contempt for economy belongs to that school of Peripatetics which reserves its last lessons for finished disciples in the sacred walks of the Queen’s Bench.
However, that was no auspicious moment for didactic warnings.
“Here we are!” cried Lionel,--“Putney Bridge.”
They reached the little inn by the river-side, and while dinner was getting ready they hired a boat. Vance took the oars.
VANCE.--“Not so pretty here as by those green quiet banks along which we glided, at moonlight, five years ago.”
LIONEL.--“Ah, no! And that innocent, charming child, whose portrait you took,--you have never heard of her since?”
VANCE.--“Never! How should I? Have you?”
LIONEL.--“Only what Darrell repeated to me. His lawyer had ascertained that she and her grandfather had gone to America. Darrell gently implied that, from what he learned of them, they scarcely merited the interest I felt in their fate. But we were not deceived, were we, Vance?”
VANCE--“No; the little girl--what was her name? Sukey? Sally? Sophy, true--Sophy had something about her extremely prepossessing, besides her pretty face; and, in spite of that horrid cotton print, I shall never forget it.”
LIONEL--“Her face! Nor I. I see it still before me!”
VANCE--“Her cotton print! I see it still before me! But I must not be ungrateful. Would you believe it,--that little portrait, which cost me three pounds, has made, I don’t say my fortune, but my fashion?”
LIONEL--“How! You had the heart to sell it?”
VANCE.--“No; I kept it as a study for young female heads--‘with variations,’ as they say in music. It was by my female heads that I became the fashion; every order I have contains the condition, ‘But be sure, one of your sweet female heads, Mr. Vance.’ My female heads are as necessary to my canvas as a white horse to Wouvermans’. Well, that child, who cost me three pounds, is the original of them all. Commencing as a Titania, she has been in turns a ‘Psyche,’ a ‘Beatrice-Cenci,’ a ‘Minna,’ ‘A Portrait of a Nobleman’s Daughter,’ ‘Burns’s Mary in Heaven,’ ‘The Young Gleaner,’ and ‘Sabrina Fair,’ in Milton’s ‘Comus.’ I have led that child through all history, sacred and profane. I have painted her in all costumes (her own cotton print excepted). My female heads are my glory; even the ‘Times’ critic allows that! ‘Mr. Vance, there, is inimitable! a type of childlike grace peculiarly his own,’ etc. I’ll lend you the article.”
LIONEL.--“And shall we never again see the original darling Sophy? You will laugh, Vance, but I have been heartproof against all young ladies. If ever I marry, my wife must have Sophy’s eyes! In America!”
VANCE.--“Let us hope by this time happily married to a Yankee! Yankees marry girls in their teens, and don’t ask for dowries. Married to a Yankee! not a doubt of it! a Yankee who thaws, whittles, and keeps a ‘store’!”
LIONEL.--“Monster! Hold your tongue. A propos of marriage, why are you still single?”
VANCE.--“Because I have no wish to be doubled up! Moreover, man is like a napkin, the more neatly the housewife doubles him, the more carefully she lays him on the shelf. Neither can a man once doubled know how often he may be doubled. Not only his wife folds him in two, but every child quarters him into a new double, till what was a wide and handsome substance, large enough for anything in reason, dwindles into a pitiful square that will not cover one platter,--all puckers and creases, smaller and smaller with every double, with every double a new crease. Then, my friend, comes the washing-bill! and, besides all the hurts one receives in the mangle, consider the hourly wear and tear of the linen-press! In short, Shakspeare vindicates the single life, and depicts the double in the famous line, which is no doubt intended to be allegorical of marriage,
“‘Double, double, toil and trouble.’
Besides, no single man can be fairly called poor. What double man can with certainty be called rich? A single man can lodge in a garret, and dine on a herring: nobody knows; nobody cares. Let him marry, and he invites the world to witness where he lodges, and how he dines. The first necessary a wife demands is the most ruinous, the most indefinite superfluity; it is Gentility according to what her neighbours call genteel. Gentility commences with the honeymoon; it is its shadow, and lengthens as the moon declines. When the honey is all gone, your bride says, ‘We can have our tea without sugar when quite alone, love; but, in case Gentility drop in, here’s a bill for silver sugar-tongs!’ That’s why I’m single.”
“Economy again, Vance.”
“Prudence,--dignity,” answered Vance, seriously; and sinking into a revery that seemed gloomy, he shot back to shore.
Chapter II
Mr. Vance explains how he came to grind colours and save half-pence. --A sudden announcement.
The meal was over; the table had been spread by a window that looked upon the river. The moon was up: the young men asked for no other lights; conversation between them--often shifting, often pausing--had gradually become grave, as it usually does with two companions in youth; while yet long vistas in the Future stretch before them deep in shadow, and they fall into confiding talk on what they wish,--what they fear; making visionary maps in that limitless Obscure.
“There is so much power in faith,” said Lionel, “even when faith is applied but to things human and earthly, that let a man be but firmly persuaded that he is born to do, some day, what at the moment seems impossible, and it is fifty to one but what he does it before he dies. Surely, when you were a child at school, you felt convinced that there was something in your fate distinct from that of the other boys, whom the master might call quite as clever,--felt that faith in yourself which made you sure that you would be one day what you are.”
“Well, I suppose so; but vague aspirations and self-conceits must be bound together by some practical necessity--perhaps a very homely and a very vulgar one--or they scatter and evaporate. One would think that rich people in high life ought to do more than poor folks in humble life. More pains are taken with their education; they have more leisure for following the bent of their genius: yet it is the poor folks, often half self-educated, and with pinched bellies, that do three-fourths of the world’s grand labour. Poverty is the keenest stimulant; and poverty made me say, not ‘I will do,’ but ‘I must.’”
“You knew real poverty in childhood, Frank?”
“Real poverty, covered over with sham affluence. My father was Genteel Poverty, and my mother was Poor Gentility. The sham affluence went when my father died. The real poverty then came out in all its ugliness. I was taken from a genteel school, at which, long afterwards, I genteelly paid the bills; and I had to support my mother somehow or other,--somehow or other I succeeded. Alas, I fear not genteelly! But before I lost her, which I did in a few years, she had some comforts which were not appearances; and she kindly allowed, dear soul, that gentility and shams do not go well together. Oh, beware of debt, Lionello mio; and never call that economy meanness which is but the safeguard from mean degradation.”
“I understand you at last, Vance; shake hands: I know why you are saving.”
“Habit now,” answered Vance, repressing praise of himself, as usual. “But I remember so well when twopence was a sum to be respected that to this day I would rather put it by than spend it. All our ideas--like orange-plants--spread out in proportion to the size of the box which imprisons the roots. Then I had a sister.” Vance paused a moment, as if in pain, but went on with seeming carelessness, leaning over the window-sill, and turning his face from his friend. “I had a sister older than myself, handsome, gentle.”
“I was so proud of her! Foolish girl! my love was not enough for her. Foolish girl! she could not wait to see what I might live to do for her. She married--oh! so genteelly!--a young man, very well born, who had wooed her before my father died. He had the villany to remain constant when she had not a farthing, and he was dependent on distant relations, and his own domains in Parnassus. The wretch was a poet! So they married. They spent their honeymoon genteelly, I dare say. His relations cut him. Parnassus paid no rents. He went abroad. Such heart-rending letters from her. They were destitute. How I worked! how I raged! But how could I maintain her and her husband too, mere child that I was? No matter. They are dead now, both; all dead for whose sake I first ground colours and saved halfpence. And Frank Vance is a stingy, selfish bachelor. Never revive this dull subject again, or I shall borrow a crown from you and cut you dead. Waiter, ho!--the bill. I’ll just go round to the stables, and see the horse put to.”
As the friends re-entered London, Vance said, “Set me down anywhere in Piccadilly; I will walk home. You, I suppose, of course, are staying with your mother in Gloucester Place?”
“No,” said Lionel, rather embarrassed; “Colonel Morley, who acts for me as if he were my guardian, took a lodging for me in Chesterfield Street, Mayfair. My hours, I fear, would ill suit my dear mother. Only in town two days; and, thanks to Morley, my table is already covered with invitations.”
“Yet you gave me one day, generous friend!”
“You the second day, my mother the first. But there are three balls before me to-night. Come home with me, and smoke your cigar while I dress.”
“No; but I will at least light my cigar in your hall, prodigal!”
Lionel now stopped at his lodging. The groom, who served him also as valet, was in waiting at the door. “A note for you, sir, from Colonel Morley,--just come.” Lionel hastily opened it, and read,
MY DEAR HAUGHTON,--Mr. Darrell has suddenly arrived in London. Keep yourself free all to-morrow, when, no doubt, he will see you. I am hurrying off to him.
Yours in haste, A. V. M.