M. Varbarriere converses with his Nephew.
Here then Sir Jekyl bid them good-night, and descended the great
staircase, and navigated the long line of passage to the back stairs
leading up to his own homely apartment.
The elder man nodded to Jacque, and moved the tips of his fingers
towards the door--a silent intimation which the adroit valet perfectly
understood; so, with a cheerful bow, he withdrew.
There was a gay little spluttering fire in the grate, which the
sharpness of the night made very pleasant. The clumsy door was shut, and
the room had an air of comfortable secrecy which invited a talk.
It was not to come, however, without preparation. He drew a chair before
the fire, and sat down solemnly, taking a gigantic cigar from his case,
and moistening it diligently between his lips before lighting it. Then
he pointed to a chair beside the hearth, and presented his cigar-case to
his young companion, who being well versed in his elder's ways, helped
himself, and having, like him, foreign notions about smoking, had of
course no remorse about a cigar or two in their present quarters.
Up the chimney chiefly whisked the narcotic smoke. Over the ponderous
features and knotted forehead of the sage flushed the uncertain light of
the fire, revealing all the crows' feet--all the lines which years,
thought, passion, or suffering had traced on that large, sombre, and
somewhat cadaverous countenance, reversing oddly some of its shadows,
and glittering with a snakelike brightness on the eyes, which now gazed
grimly into the bars under their heavy brows.
The large and rather flat foot, shining in French leather, of the portly
gentleman in the ample black velvet waistcoat, rested on the fender, and
he spoke not a word until his cigar was fairly smoked out and the stump
of it in the fire. Abruptly he began, without altering his pose or the
direction of his gaze.
"You need not make yourself more friendly with any person here than is
absolutely necessary."
He was speaking French, and in a low tone that sounded like the boom of
a distant bell.
Young Strangways bowed acquiescence.
"Be on your guard with Sir Jekyl Marlowe. Tell him _nothing_. Don't let
him be kind to you. He will have no kind motive in being so. Fence with
his questions--don't answer them. Remember he is an artful man without
any scruple. I know him and all about him."
M. Varbarriere spoke each of these little sentences in an isolated way,
as a smoker might, although he was no longer smoking, between his puffs.
"Therefore, not a word to him--no obligations--no intimacy. If he
catches you by the hand, even by your little finger, in the way of
friendship, he'll cling to it, so as so impede your _arm_, should it
become necessary to exert it."
"I don't understand you, sir," said the young man, in a deferential
tone, but looking very hard at him.
"You _partly_ don't understand me; the nature of my direction, however,
is clear. Observe it strictly."
There was a short silence here.
"I don't understand, sir, what covert hostility can exist between us;
that is, why I should, in your phrase, keep my hand free to exert it
against him."
"No, I don't suppose you do."
"And I can't help regretting that, if such are our possible relations, I
should find myself as a guest under his roof," said the young man, with
a pained and almost resentful look.
"You can't help regretting, and--you can't help the circumstance,"
vibrated his Mentor, in a metallic murmur, his cadaverous features
wearing the same odd character of deep thought and apathy.
"I don't know, with respect to _him_--I know, however, how it has
affected me--that I have felt unhappy, and even guilty since this
journey commenced, as if I were a traitor and an impostor," said the
young man, with a burst of impatience.
"Don't, sir, use phrases which reflect back upon _me_," said the other,
turning upon him with a sudden sternness. "All you have done is by my
direction."
The ample black waistcoat heaved and subsided a little faster than
before, and the imposing countenance was turned with pallid fierceness
upon the young man.
"I am sorry, uncle."
"So you should--you'll see one day how little it is to me, and how much
to you."
Here was a pause. The senior turned his face again toward the fire. The
little flush that in wrath always touched his forehead subsided slowly.
He replaced his foot on the fender, and chose another cigar.
"There's a great deal you don't see now that you will presently. I did
not want to see Sir Jekyl Marlowe any more than you did or do; but I did
want to see this place. You'll know hereafter why. I'd rather not have
met him. I'd rather not be his guest. Had he been as usual at Dartbroke,
I should have seen all I wanted without that annoyance. It is an
accident his being here--another, his having invited me; but no false
ideas and no trifling chance shall regulate, much less stop, the action
of the machine which I am constructing and will soon put in motion."
And with these words he lighted his cigar, and after smoking for a while
he lowered it, and said--
"Did Sir Jekyl put any questions to you, with a view to learn
particulars about you or me?"
"I don't recollect that he did. I rather think not; but Captain Drayton
did."
"I know, _Smithers_?"
"Yes, sir."
"With an object?" inquired the elder man.
"I think not--merely impertinence," answered Guy Strangways.
"You are right--it is nothing to him. I do not know that even Marlowe
has a suspicion. Absolutely impertinence."
And upon this M. Varbarriere began to smoke again with resolution and
energy.
"You understand, Guy; you may be as polite as you please--but no
friendship--nowhere--you must remain quite unembarrassed."
Here followed some more smoke, and after it the question--
"What do you think of the young lady, Mademoiselle Marlowe?"
"She sings charmingly, and for the rest, I believe she is agreeable; but
my opportunities have been very little."
"What do you think of our fellow Jacque--is he trustworthy?"
"Perfectly, so far as I know."
"You never saw him peep into letters, or that kind of thing?"
"Certainly not."
"There is a theory which must be investigated, and I should like to
employ him. You know nothing against him, nor do I."
"Suppose we go to our beds?" resumed the old gentleman, having finished
his cigar.
A door at either side opened from the dressing-room, by whose fire they
had been sitting.
"See which room is meant for me--Jacque will have placed my things
there."
The young man did as he was bid, and made his report.
"Well, get you to bed, Guy, and remember--no friendships and no
follies."
And so the old man rose, and shook his companion's hand, not smiling,
but with a solemn and thoughtful countenance, and they separated for the
night.
Next morning as the Rev. Dives Marlowe stood in his natty and
unexceptionable clerical costume on the hall-door steps, looking with a
pompous and, perhaps, a somewhat forbidding countenance upon the morning
prospect before him, his brother joined him.
"Early bird, Dives, pick the worm--eh? Healthy and wise already, and
wealthy to be. Slept well, eh?"
"Always well here," answered the parson. He was less of a parson and
more like himself with Jekyl than with anyone else. His brother was so
uncomfortably amused with his clerical airs, knew him so well, and so
undisguisedly esteemed him of the earth earthy, that the cleric,
although the abler as well as the better read man, always felt
invariably a little sheepish before him, in his silk vest and
single-breasted coat with the standing collar, and the demi-shovel,
which under other eyes he felt to be imposing properties.
"You look so like that exemplary young man in Watt's hymns, in the
old-fashioned toggery, Dives--the fellow with the handsome round
cheeks, you know, piously saluting the morning sun that's rising with a
lot of spokes stuck out of it, don't you remember?"
"I look like something that's ugly, I dare say," said the parson, who
had not got up in a good temper. "There never was a Marlowe yet who
hadn't ugly points about him. But a young man, though never so ugly, is
rather a bold comparison--eh? seeing I'm but two years your junior,
Jekyl."
"Bitterly true--every word--my dear boy. But let us be pleasant. I've
had a line to say that old Moulders is very ill, and really dying this
time. Just read this melancholy little bulletin."
With an air which seemed to say, "well, to please you," he took the note
and read it. It was from his steward, to mention that the Rev. Abraham
Moulders was extremely ill of his old complaint, and that there was
something even worse the matter, and that Doctor Winters had said that
morning he could not possibly get over this attack.
"Well, Dives, there is a case of 'sick and weak' for you; you'll have
prayers for him at Queen's Chorleigh, eh?"
"Poor old man!" said Dives, solemnly, with his head thrown back, and his
thick eyebrows elevated a little, and looking straight before him as he
returned the note, "he's very ill, indeed, unless this reports much too
unfavourably."
"Too favourably, you mean," suggested the Baronet.
"But you know, poor old man, it is only wonderful he has lived so long.
The old people about there say he is eighty-seven. Upon my word, old
Jenkins says he told him, two years ago, himself, he was eighty-five;
and Doctor Winters, no chicken--just sixty--says his father was in the
same college with him, at Cambridge, nearly sixty-seven years ago. You
know, my dear Jekyl, when a man comes to that time of life, it's all
idle--a mere pull against wind and tide, and everything. It is appointed
unto all men once to die, you know, and the natural term is threescore
years and ten. All idle--all in vain!"
And delivering this, the Rev. Dives Marlowe shook his head with a
supercilious melancholy, as if the Rev. Abraham Moulders' holding out in
that way against the inevitable was a piece of melancholy bravado,
against which, on the part of modest mortality, it was his sad duty to
protest.
Jekyl's cynicism was tickled, although there was care at his heart, and
he chuckled.
"And how do you know you have any interest in the old fellow's demise?"
The Rector coughed a little, and flushed, and looked as careless as he
could, while he answered--
"I said nothing of the kind; but you have always told me you meant the
living for me. I've no reason, only your goodness, Jekyl."
"No goodness at all," said Jekyl, kindly. "You shall have it, of course.
I always meant it for you, Dives, and I wish it were better, and I'm
very glad, for I'm fond of you, old fellow."
Hereupon they both laughed a little, shaking hands very kindly.
"Come to the stable, Dives," said the Baronet, taking his arm. "You must
choose a horse. You don't hunt now?"
"I have not been at a cover for _ten_ years," answered the reverend
gentleman, speaking with a consciousness of the demi-shovel.
"Well, come along," continued the Baronet. "I want to ask you--let's be
serious" (everybody likes to be serious over his own business). "What do
you think of these foreign personages?"
"The elder, I should say, an able man," answered Dives; "I dare say
could be agreeable. It is not easy to assign his exact rank though, nor
his profession or business. You remarked he seems to know something in
detail and technically of nearly every business one mentions."
"Yes; and about the young man--that Mr. Guy Strangways, with his foreign
accent and manner--did anything strike you about him?"
"Yes, certainly, could not fail. The most powerful likeness, I think, I
ever saw in my life."
They both stopped, and exchanged a steady and anxious look, as if each
expected the other to say more; and after a while the Rev. Dives Marlowe
added, with an awful sort of nod--
"Guy Deverell."
The Baronet nodded in reply.
"Well, in fact, he appeared to me something _more_ than like--the
same--identical."
"And old Lady Alice saw him in Wardlock Church, and was made quite
ill," said the Baronet gloomily. "But you know he's gone these thirty
years; and there is no necromancy now-a-days; only I wish you would take
any opportunity, and try and make out all about him, and what they want.
I brought them here to pump them, by Jove; but that old fellow seems
deuced reserved and wary. Only, like a good fellow, if you can find or
make an opportunity, you must get the young fellow on the subject--for I
don't care to tell you, Dives, I have been devilish uneasy about it.
There are things that make me confoundedly uncomfortable; and I have a
sort of foreboding it would have been better for me to have blown up
this house than to have come here; but ten to one--a hundred to
one--there's nothing, and I'm only a fool."
As they thus talked they entered the gate of the stable-yard.