DOWNIE'S REFLECTIONS.
His odious visitor and tempter gone, Downie sat long, sunk in
reverie. He lay back in the softly-cushioned chair, with his eyes
vacantly and dreamily gazing through the lozenged panes, between the
moulded mullions of the oriel windows, to where the sunlight fell in
bright patches between the spreading oaks and elms, on the green
sward of the chace, to where the brown deer nestled cosily among the
tender ferns of spring, and to the distant isles of Scilly, afar in
the deep blue sea; but he saw nothing of all these. His mind was
completely inverted, and his thoughts were turned inward. "The
wildest novel," says Ouida, "was never half so wild as the real state
of many a human life, that to superficial eyes looks serene and
placid and uneventful enough; but life is just the same as in the
ages of Oedipus' agony and the Orestes' crime."
Doubtless, the reader thought it very barbarous in the fierce
Mohammedan Amen Oollah Khan to twist off his elder brother's head,
and so secure his inheritance; but had the civilised Christian,
Downie, been in the Khan's place, he would have acted precisely in
the same way. The men's instincts were the same; the modes of
achievement only different.
But a month before this, and Downie, at his club in Pall Mall, had
read with exultation, that, of all General Elphinstone's army, his
own son, Audley, and Doctor Brydone, of the Shah's 6th Regiment, had
alone reached Jellalabad. Little cared he who perished on that
disastrous retreat, so that his son was safe, for, selfish though he
was, he loved well and dearly that son, his successor--the holder of
a young life that was to stretch, perhaps, for half a century beyond
his own shorter span. Now it had chanced that on the very morning of
this remarkable visit, he had seen, with disgust, in the _Times_,
that, among those alleged to be safe in the hands of an Afghan chief
"was Ensign Denzil Devereaux, of the Cornish Light Infantry, an
officer, who, according to a letter received from Taj Mohammed Khan
the Wuzeer, had succeeded in saving a colour of Her Majesty's 44th
Regiment."
The daughter, whose artful plans upon his son's affections he had, as
he conceived, so cleverly thwarted--the daughter Sybil gone no one
knew whither; the son, a captive in a barbarous land beyond the
Indian frontier, and their mother dead, the little family of Richard
Trevelyan seemed on the verge of being quietly blotted out
altogether; and now here was this ill-omened Derrick Braddon, this
Old Man of the Sea, come suddenly on the tapis, with his confounded
papers!
General Elphinstone had died in the hands of the Afghans; so might
Denzil; or he and the other survivors or hostages might yet be slain
or--unless rescued by the troops from Candahar or Jellalabad--be sold
by Ackbar Khan (as Downie had heard in his place in the House) to the
chiefs in Toorkistan, after which they would never be heard of more.
Oh, thought Downie, that I could but correspond with this Shireen
Khan of the Kuzzilbashes; doubtless such a worthy would "not be above
taking a retaining fee."
By the dreadful slaughter in the Khyber Pass, and the capture of all
the ladies and children, the sympathies, indignation, and passions of
the people were keenly roused at home; thus if Denzil returned at
this crisis, with the slightest military _éclat_, it would greatly
favour any claims he might advance.
If the documents were genuine and could be proved so in a court of
Law--or Justice (these being distinctly separate), were his title,
his own honour (as Downie thought it), the honour, wealth, and
position, privileges and prospects of his wife and children, to be at
the mercy of a mercenary wretch like Schotten Sharkley; or of a
broken-down, wandering, and obscure Chelsea pensioner, who possessed
the papers in question?
It was maddening even for one so cold in blood--so cautious and so
slimy in his proceedings, as Mr. Downie Trevelyan. He had no great
talents, but only instinct and cunning; barrister though he was, the
cunning of the pettifogger. A legal education had developed all that
were corrupt and vile in his nature. A country squire, Downie would
have been a blackleg on the turf and a grinding landlord; a
tradesman, he would have been far from being an honest one; a
soldier, he might have been a poltroon and a malingerer; a legal man,
he was--exactly what we find him, a master in subtlety, with a heart
of stone. In the same luxurious chair in which he was now seated in
fierce and bitter reverie, he had sat and regarded his brother's
widow, in her pale and picturesque beauty, and watched the torture of
her heart with something of the half amused expression of a cat when
playing with the poor little mouse of which it intends to make a
repast; and now he sat there shrinking from vague terrors of the
future, and in abhorrence of suspense; but there was a species of
dogged courage which he could summon to meet any legal emergency or
danger, if he would but know its full extent. He was in the dark as
yet, and his heart writhed within him at the prospect of coming
peril, even as that of Constance had been wrung by the emotions of
sorrow and unmerited shame.
He knew himself to be degraded by acting the part of a conspirator in
all this; yet how much was at stake! No family in ancient Cornwall
was older in history or tradition than his, and none was more
honoured: yet here by intrigue, fatality, and the debasing influence
of association was he, the twelfth Lord Lamorna, the coadjutor of a
man whose father had been a poor rat-catcher, and, if report said
true, a felon. He felt as if on Damien's bed of steel, or as if the
velvet cushions of his chair had been stuffed with long iron nails,
and he repeated bitterly aloud,--
"What! am I to be but a _locum tenens_ after all--and to whom?
Denzil Devereaux--this _filius nullius_, this son of an adventuress,
or of nobody perhaps!"
The grave, grim, and somewhat grotesque portraits of Launcelot, Lord
Lamorna, in Cavalier dress--he who hid from Fairfax's troopers in the
Trewoofe; of Lord Henry, with beard, ruff, and ribbed armour, who was
Governor of Rougemont in Devon, and whose scruples did not find him
favour with the "Virgin" Queen; and even of his late uncle, with his
George IV. wig, false teeth, and brass-buttoned blue swallow-tail,
seemed to look coldly and contemptuously down on him.
"Pshaw!" muttered Downie, "am I a fool or a child to be swayed by
such fancies?--I should think not; the days of superstition are gone!"
Yet he felt an influence, or something, he knew not what, and averted
his stealthy eyes from the painted faces of the honester dead.
The irony of the malevolent and the vulgar; the gossip and surmises
of the anonymous press; the "Honourable" cut from Audley's name in
the Army List, the Peerage, and elsewhere, and from that of his
daughter Gartha, who was just about to be brought out, and had begun
to anticipate, with all a young beauty's pleasure, the glories of her
first presentation at Court, were all before him now.
To have felt, enjoyed, and to lose all the sweets of rank, of wealth,
of power, and patronage; the worship of the empty world, the slavish
snobbery of trade, to have been congratulated by all the begowned and
bewigged members of the Inns of Court, and by all his tenantry, for
nothing--all this proved too much for Downie's brain, and certainly
too much for his heart. It was intolerable.
He thought of his cold, unimpressionable, pale-faced, and
aristocratic wife deprived of her place (not of rank, for she was a
peer's daughter), through that "Canadian connection" of Richard's, as
they were wont to term poor Constance--an issue to be tried at the
bar, every legal celebrity of the day perhaps retained in the cause;
money wasted, bets made, and speculation rife; himself eventually
shut out from a sphere in which he had begun to figure, and to figure
well! Would, he thought, that the sea had swallowed up Braddon, even
as it had done his master! Would that some Afghan bullet might lay
low this upstart lad, this Denzil Devereaux, and then his claims and
papers might be laughed to scorn! Downie had never been without a
secret dread of hearing more of Constance and her marriage, and that
one day or other it might admit of legal proof, and now the dread was
close and palpable.
He cherished a dire vengeance against his dead brother, for what he
deemed his duplicity in contracting such a marriage, unknown to all;
and in his unjust ire forgot their late uncle's insane family pride,
which was the real cause of all that had occurred.
Novelists, dramatists, and humourists, are usually severe upon the
legal profession; yet in our narrative, Downie and his agent Sharkley
are given but as types of a bad class of men. Far be it from us to
think evil generally of that vast body from whose ranks have sprung
so many brilliant orators, statesmen, and writers, especially in
England; though Lord Brougham, in his Autobiography, designates the
law as "the cursedest of all cursed professions," and even Sir Walter
Scott, a member of the Scottish College of Justice, where the
practice is loose, often barbarous and antiquated, wrote in his
personal memoirs, that he liked it little at first, and it pleased
God to make that little less upon further acquaintance; for the
spirit and chicanery of the profession are liable to develop to the
full that which the Irish, not inaptly, term "the black drop" which
is in so many human hearts.
Downie Trevelyan sat long buried in thoughts that galled and wrung
his spirit of self-love, till the house-bell rang, sleek Mr. Jasper
Funnel with his amplitude of paunch and white waistcoat came to
announce that "luncheon was served," and Mr. Boxer, powdered and
braided elaborately, came to ascertain at what time "her ladyship
wished the carriage;" and even these trivial incidents, by their
suggestiveness, were not without adding fuel to his evil instincts
and passions.
Three entire days passed away--days of keen suspense and intense
irritation to Downie, though far from being impulsive by nature, yet
he heard nothing of his tool or agent, whom he began to doubt,
fearing that he had pocketed the five hundred pounds, or obtained the
documents thereby, and gone over with them to the enemy. But just as
the third evening was closing in, and when, seated in the library
alone, he was considering how he should find some means of
communicating with Sharkley--write he would not, being much too
eautious and legal to commit himself in that way, forgetting also
that the other would be equally so--the door was thrown noiselessly
open, and a servant as before announced "Mr. W. S. Sharkley,
Solicitor," and the cadaverous and unwholesome-looking attorney, in
his rusty black suit, sidled with a cringing air into the room, his
pale visage and cat-like eyes wearing an unfathomable expression, in
which one could neither read success nor defeat.
"Be seated, Mr. Sharkley," said his host, adding in a low voice, and
with a piercing glance, when the door was completely closed, and
striving to conceal his agitation, "You have the papers, I presume?"
"Your lordship shall hear," replied the other, who, prior to saying
more, opened the door suddenly and sharply, to see that no "Jeames"
had his curious ear at the keyhole, and then resumed his seat.
But before relating all that took place at this interview, we must go
back a little in our story, to detail that which Mr. Sharkley would
have termed his _modus operandi_ in the matter.