Helen Drummond had a tedious voyage from Southampton to St Malo. She was
not a good sailor, nor indeed a good traveller in any way. She was not
rich enough to procure for herself those ameliorations of the weariness
of journeys which are within the reach of everybody who has money. She
had to consult cheapness more than comfort, and when she arrived at last
in the bay, with all its rocky islets rising out of the blue, beautiful
sea, and the little fortress city reigning over it, and all the
white-sailed boats skimming about like so many sea-birds, she would have
been unable to observe the beauty of the scene from sheer weariness, if
anxiety had not already banished from her every thought but one.
Where was he? How should she find him? Was it real? Was it possible?
Could it be true?
The boat was late of arriving; it had been delayed, and was not
expected at the moment when the passengers were ready to land. Helen
looked, with a beating heart, upon all the loungers on shore, wondering
could he be among them; but it was not till almost all her
fellow-passengers had left the vessel that a tattered, grinning
_Commissionaire_ came up to her, and asked if she were Madame Drummond.
When she answered, a voluble explanation followed, which Helen, in her
agitation, and with ears unaccustomed to the voluble Breton-French mixed
with scraps of still less comprehensible English, understood with great
difficulty. Monsieur had been on the pier half the night; he had been
assured by all the officials that the boat could not arrive till noon.
Monsieur had charged himself, François, to be on the watch, and bring
him news as soon as the steamer was in sight; in place of which he, the
delighted François, would have the gratification of leading Madame to
Monsieur. Half dead with excitement and fatigue, Helen followed her
guide. He led her along the rocky shore to where a little steam
ferry-boat puffed and snorted. Then she had to embark again for a five
minutes' passage across the bay. She landed on the other side, so
stupified with suspense, and with the accumulated excitement which was
now coming to a climax, that she felt incapable of uttering a word. Her
body was all one pulse, throbbing wildly; a crimson flush alternated
with dead pallor in her face; her heart choked her, palpitating in her
throat. Whom was she going to meet? What manner of man was it who said
he was her Robert, who wrote as Robert wrote, who had called her to him,
with the force of absolute right? For was not Robert dead, dead, buried
under the cold river, seven years ago? She was not happy, she was
frightened, as Norah said. Her position was incomprehensible to her.
She, Robert's spotless wife, his faithful widow--to whom was she going?
She did not know what the words meant that were being poured into her
ears. The figures she met whirled past her like monsters in a dream. Her
own weary feet obeyed her mechanically; she moved and breathed, and kept
command of herself, she knew not how.
There is a little cottage on the very edge of the cliff, in that village
of Dinard on the Breton coast, which looks across the bay into which the
Rance rushes impetuously meeting the great sea-tides--and from which St
Servan opposite, St Malo with its walls and towers, all the lip of the
bay lined with houses, with fortifications, with bristling masts and
sails, show fair in the sunshine. Coming into it from the dusty road,
so small is it, so light, so close to the water, the traveller feels
that he must have come suddenly into the light poop cabin of some big
ship, lifting its breast high from the sea.
Here it was that Helen came in, her frame all one tremble, breathless,
stupified, carried along in the wild whirl of some dream. She saw some
one get up with a great cry--and then--she saw nothing more. The
excitement, the weariness, the strangeness and terror that possessed
her, were more than she could bear. She fell down at Robert's feet, as
she had done at the foot of the picture in the exhibition. It was
perhaps the easiest, gentlest way of getting over the great shock and
convulsion of the new life that had now to begin.
Helen was conscious after a while of a voice, of two voices talking
vaguely over her, one which she did not know, one----At the sound of
that her brain tried to rally; she tried to recollect. Where was
she?--in St Mary's Road, in the old days before the studio was built?
that was what it felt like. She could not see anything; a whirling,
revolving cloud of darkness went round and round, swallowing her up. She
tried to raise her hand to grasp at something. Now she was sinking,
sinking into that sea which had gleamed upon her for a moment, through
the window--a sea full of ships, yet with no saviour for her. If she
could only move her hand, raise her head, see something beside this
blinding blackness. And then again that voice! She had fallen, fallen
somewhere, and something buzzed loud in her ears, something coming that
was about to crush her--on the steps at St Mary's Road.
'Helen! don't you know me? Look at me, if you can, my own love!'
She gave a long, sobbing cry. She opened her eyes heavily. 'Yes,
Robert,' she said. The wonder and the terror had gone away in her faint,
with the seven years that created them. When the soul loses the common
thread of time and place it comes back to its primal elements, to the
things in it that are everlasting. She answered out of her
unconsciousness as (God send it!) we shall answer our friends in heaven
out of the death-trance, not wondering--restored to the unity of love
which is for ever and ever, not for a time.
She was lying on a little sofa, that window on one side of her, with its
glorious sea and sky and sunshine. On the other, a man, with hair as
white as snow, with Norah's eyes, looking at her in an agony of
tenderness, with a face worn and lined by suffering and toil. The sight
of him startled her so that she came to herself in a moment. It startled
her into the consciousness that she was his wife, and in a manner
responsible for him, for his well-being and comfort. She started up,
wondering how she could think of herself, indignant at herself for
taking up the foreground for a moment. 'Oh, my dear, my dear!' she
cried. 'What have they done to you, Robert?' and drew him to her, taking
him into her arms.
Not frightened now, not wondering, not strange at all. The strangeness
was that he had been kept away from her so long, cruelly kept away, to
make him like this, whitened, worn, old. All at once strength and calm
and self-command came back to Helen. Except for his looks, the harm some
one had done to him, this interval crumpled away like a burnt paper, and
disappeared, and was as if it had never been. She put her arms round
him, drew him to her with an indignant love and tenderness. 'My poor
Robert! my poor Robert! how you have wanted me,' she said, with the
tears in her eyes.
'Ah! wanted you!' he cried; and he too gave in to this impulse of
nature. He was not an impassioned man claiming his own, but a weary one
come back to his natural rest. He put his white head down upon hers,
and in the relief and sudden ease and consolation, wept like a child. It
was more than joy; terrible fears had come to him at the last, terrors
that his appeal might be unwelcome--that his recollection might have
died out of her heart. He knew that she was in the sight of the world
faithful to him; but whether her heart was true, whether the surprise
would be a joy, he did not know.
Let us leave them to tell their mutual story. The reader knows one side
of it. The other had come about thus. It took a long time to tell it so
as to satisfy Helen; but it may be put here into fewer words.
On the night when Robert, as he said, died, he had been picked up by a
tug steamboat, which was on its way down stream to take a vessel going
to America down to the sea. He had been all but dead, and with the
addition of the care, distress, and anxiety through which he had passed
before, partial drowning was no joke to him. How it was that he managed
to get transferred from the little steamer into the ship, he had never
very clearly discovered. Whether he had passionately entreated to be
taken on board, or whether he had dashed himself once more into the
river and been rescued this time by the sea-going vessel, he could not
tell. But, anyhow, he had been taken on board the American; and there,
amid all the discomforts of a merchant ship, where there was no room for
passengers, and where his presence was most unwelcome, he had an
illness, which made his slow passage across the Atlantic look like a
feverish dream to him. He knew nothing about it, except as a horror and
misery which had been. When the ship arrived, he had been transferred to
an hospital, where he lingered until all hope of life had gone out of
him, if indeed any ever existed. And then, all at once, and
unaccountably, he had got well again, as people do over whom no anxious
nurses watch, who are of importance to no one. When he came to life
again he was one of the poorest of the poor, unknown, penniless, an
object of charity. In that position he could never go home, never make
himself known to those whom (he felt) he had ruined, whom he had already
made up his mind to leave free at the cost of his life. Forlorn,
hopeless, and miserable, poor Robert had still the necessity upon him of
maintaining the worthless life which Providence had, as it were, thrust
back upon his hands. He went to the studio of a painter in New
York--that same John Sinclair whose name had been attached to the
'Dives.' He had told his story fully and truly. When a man asserts in a
painter's studio that he is himself a painter, the means are at hand for
the verification of his assertion; and when Robert took the palette in
his hand, Mr Sinclair believed his story. He had begun humbly, under
this kind stranger's help; he had become a portrait-painter, a branch of
art which, in his youth, he had followed for the sake of bread and
butter, as so many do. But Robert, friendless and hopeless, driven out
of everything but art, had, by a mere instinct of self-preservation, to
keep himself alive, taken to his work in a way which made it a very
different thing from the paint which is done for bread and butter. A
very little bread and butter sufficed him. But man does not live by
bread alone; and all the better aliment, the food of his soul, he had to
get somehow out of his portraits. The consequence of this was, that
gradually these portraits became things to talk of, things that people
went far to see, and competed to have. He cared so little for it--was
that why the stream of fortune came to him? But when his languid soul
awoke after a while to a sense of the work he was doing, Robert ceased
to care little for it. He began to care much; and as his portraits kept
their popularity his gains increased. He became hungry for gain; he grew
a miser, and over-worked himself, thinking of his wife, thinking of the
child to whom he was dead, he managed to get some news of them
incidentally through his friend and former patron Sinclair; he heard
where they were, and that they were well. At length, when he had scraped
so much money together that he thought he might venture upon some
communication, his heart went back to the agony of his parting, and the
subject of his last sketch returned to him. Ah! was he not Dives now,
stretching out vain hands, not daring to cry! He could not summon
courage enough to write, but he could paint--he could put all his
despairing soul, which yet had a faint hope in it, into that imploring
face, those beseeching hands. He worked at it night and day, throwing
his whole heart and soul into the canvas. And, with a heart trembling at
his own temerity, after he sent his picture to England he himself had
come back, but not to England--he had not courage for that; he was not
even sufficiently instructed to know whether it would be safe for him to
go back--whether he might bring the law upon him with fresh bugbears and
troubles in its train--but he went to France. He had come to Brest, and
he had wandered to this the nearest point from which communication with
England was easy. He had arrived at St Malo in May, at the very time
when Helen saw the picture in the Exhibition, and received its message
into her very heart. But he had not ventured to send his letter till
months after--not till now.
'Helen!' he said, trembling; 'will you stay with me here? will you go
with me, back to New York? What shall we do?'
'Robert, let us go home.'
'Can I go home? I do not think so. I have a little money, for the child
and you. I made it hardly--after I died. I should not like to give it
once again to satisfy people who suffered no more than we did.'
'Oh, Robert,' she said. 'I have my story to tell you too.' And her story
took as long in telling as his did; for it was difficult to her to
remember that he knew nothing--that he did not know what he had been
accused of; as difficult as it was for him to understand the allusions
she made to the lost books and the censure which had been passed upon
his name. He would stop her and say, 'What does that mean?' a dozen
times in a single sentence. And then, as the story advanced to its
climax, impatience seized him, and a growing excitement. He got up from
his seat beside her, and paced about the little room. Then she saw, for
the first time, that he was lame. How he had suffered! The seven years
had not made much difference to her; her peaceful life had smoothed out
the lines which sorrow had made in her face. There was not a white
thread in her brown hair; she had almost grown younger instead of older,
having upon her wherever she went a reflection of Norah's youth, which
somehow she shared. But Robert was lame, and walked with difficulty, a
consequence of his almost suicide; he was old, thin, white-haired, with
furrows of anxiety and longing and heart-hunger in his face. All this
had been done by the man who had beguiled him into the doomed bank, who
had looked on calmly at his ruin, who had willingly countenanced the
destruction of his good name. Mrs Drummond had lived through it all, had
got over her hot fits of rage and indignation, and at this moment had
her heart softened towards Reginald Burton, whom she had saved. She was
not prepared for the excitement, the suppressed fury, the passionate
indignation of her husband, to whom all this was new. She told him of
the paper she had extorted from her cousin that last night, 'which
clears you entirely--' she said.
'Clears me!' he cried, gnashing his teeth. 'My God! _clears_ me! I who
have done nothing but suffer by him. Clears _me_!'
'I do not quite mean that, Robert. You were cleared before. No one
believed it. But we thought Golden only was to blame. Now this paper is
formal, and explains everything. It makes it all easy for you.'
He did not stop, as if this was anything consolatory; he kept moving up
and down, painfully, with his lameness. 'And that scoundrel has got
off,' he cried between his teeth--'got off! and has the audacity to
clear me.'
Poor Helen was disconcerted. She had forgotten her own fury of
indignation when she first saw the accusation against him. She had long,
long grown used to all that, and used to the reflection that nobody
believed it whose opinion was worth anything. She had insisted upon
Burton's confession and explanation, she scarcely knew why--more as a
punishment to him than as a vindication of Robert. She was confused
about it altogether, not quite knowing what she meant. And now, in the
light of his indignation, she felt almost as if she had done her husband
an injury--insulted him. She faltered, and looked at him wistfully, and
did not know what to say. She had not lost the habit of love, but she
had lost the habit of companionship; she had told her story wrongly; she
did not know how to bring him to her state of feeling, or to transport
herself into his. And this too was the fault of the man who had driven
Robert to despair--the man whom she had saved.
'He has got off,' she said humbly, 'by my means. Robert, I tried revenge
once, but I will never try it again. I could not give him up, however
bad he had been, when he was in my power.'
The sound of trembling in her voice went to his heart. 'My poor Helen!
my sweet Helen!' he cried, coming to her. 'Do you think I blame you? You
could not have done otherwise. For you there was but one course--but if
I had the chance now----'
Just then there was a commotion at the door, and sounds of many voices.
A great many exclamations in French, with one or two broken questions in
English, came to their ears. 'You has you papiers. Domm you papiers. You
say you is Jean--Jean Smiff, et pas----'
'Je me fie à monsieur ici. Monsieur est-il chez lui? C'est un Anglais.
Il nous expliquera tout ça,' said another voice. It was the voice of the
maire, whom Robert had made friends with in his hunger for human
companionship. The parley at the door went on for a few minutes longer,
and then there entered a band of excited Frenchmen. One, a gendarme from
St Malo, carried an open telegram in his hand; another, in a blouse,
kept his hand upon the shoulder of a burly Englishman in a light coat.
The maire brought up the rear. They seemed such a crowd of people as
they entered the little, light room, that it was some moments before the
three English people thus brought face to face recognised each other.
Helen with difficulty suppressed a cry. Robert stood confronting the
party with the flush of his indignation not yet subsided, with a wonder
beyond words in his eyes. As for the other, he showed no sign of
surprise. He was driven back to his last stronghold, forced to use all
his strength to keep himself up and maintain his courage. His eye
dilated and gave a flutter of wonder at the sight of Helen. It was
evident that he did not recognise her companion. He kept his arms
folded, as if for self-preservation, to keep within him all the warmth,
all the courage possible, physically to keep up and support himself.
The three men rushed into explanation all at once. A telegram had been
received at St Malo, describing an Englishman who was supposed to have
gone there, and whose description, which the gendarme held out, in the
telegram, corresponded exactly with that of the prisoner. The prisoner,
however, called himself Smith. Smiff--or Smitt, as his pursuers
pronounced it--and produced papers which were _en règle_; but he could
not explain what he was doing here; he showed no inclination to be taken
to the English consul. On the contrary, he had crossed to Dinard as soon
as he heard that inquiries had been made about him at his hotel. While
all this was being told the stranger stood immovable, with his arms
folded; he did not understand half of it. His French was as deficient as
the French of untravelled Englishmen usually is, and the tumult around
him, at the same time, confused his mind and quickened his outward
senses. He could not make out what his chances of liberation were; but
his eyes were open to any possibility of escape. They were bloodshot and
strained those eyes; now and then that flutter of wonder, of excitement,
of watchfulness, came into them, but he showed no other sign of emotion.
At such a terrible crisis all secondary sensations perish; he had no
time to wonder what Helen, whom he had left behind him in England,
should be doing here. Rather it was natural that everybody connected
with his fate should be here, gathering round him silently to see the
end.
Thus this encounter had but little effect upon Burton; but it would be
impossible to describe the effect it had upon the man who stood opposite
to him, whom he had not recognised. Robert Drummond had suffered as few
men ever suffered. He had died--he had come alive again--he had lived
two separate lives. For some years up to this day his existence had been
that of a man deprived of all the hopes and consolations of life--a man
miserably alone, dead to every one belonging to him. Even the return to
life which he had tried to realise this morning was no more than an
experiment. He might never be able to conquer, to forget those seven
ghosts which stood between him and his wife and child. He could not take
up his life again where he left it--that was impossible. And all this
had been done by the influence of the man before him, who was in his
power, whom he might if he would give over to prison and trial and
punishment. A gleam of fierce joy shot through Drummond's heart, and
then----
They stood facing each other, with the Frenchmen grouped about them. But
Burton had not, beyond the first glance, looked at his judge. His face
confronted him, but his eyes did not; he had escaped as yet the
knowledge who it was.
A thousand and a thousand thoughts whirled through Drummond's mind; he
had only a moment to decide in; he had the past to satisfy, and the
burning, fiery indignation of the present moment, in which for the first
time he had identified and comprehended the past. Give him up! punish
him! Should such a scoundrel get off, when innocent men had so bitterly
suffered? Let him fall, and bring down in his train all who were
concerned--all who made a prey of the ignorant and the poor! This wave
of thought possessed him with a whirl and sweep like the rushing
tide--and then there came the interval of silence, the moment when the
waters fell back and all was still.
Revenge! 'I tried revenge, once, but I will never try it again!' Who was
it that had said this close to him, so that the very air repeated and
repeated it, whispering it in his ear? He had himself been dead, and he
had come alive again. His new life, which had commenced this morning,
was spotless as yet. He had to decide, decide, decide in a moment how it
should be inaugurated, by mercy or by judgment--by the sin (was it not
a sin?) of helping the escape of a criminal, or by the righteous deed
(where was it said that this might be a sin too?) of handing him over to
punishment. How his soul was tossed upon these waves! He stood as in the
midst of a great battle, which raged round him. Fierce arrows tore his
heart, coming from one side and another, he could not tell how. Give up
the accursed thing--punish the unworthy soul--be just! be just! But then
that other, 'Neither have I condemned thee; go, and sin no more.' And
all had to be done in a minute, while those voluble explanations
interlaced each other, and each man expounded his case. Drummond glanced
at his wife for help, but she dared not look at him. She sat on the sofa
against the light, with her hands tightly clasped in her lap. Was she
praying? For so long, out of the depths of his hell, Dives, poor Dives,
had not dared to pray.
He did not know what he said when at length he spoke; it was some
commonplace, some nothing. But it attracted at once the attention of the
prisoner. Burton turned round, and gazed at the man whom he thought
dead. He did not recognise the voice, except that it was a voice he
knew; he did not even recognise the face, which had grown prematurely
old, framed in its white hair, at the first glance; but there crept
over him a shudder of enlightenment, a gleam of perception. His senses
were quickened by his own position. He shook where he stood as if with
cold or palsy. He looked at Helen, he looked at the man by her side.
Then an inarticulate cry came from him; terror of he knew not what
deprived him, fortunately, of all power of speech. He fell back in his
fear, and his attendants thought he meant to escape. They threw
themselves between him and the door. It was then that Drummond spoke in
his haste, scarcely knowing what he said.
'I know him,' he said in French. 'It is a long time since we have met,
and he has just recognised me, you perceive. We are not friends, so you
may trust me. His papers are quite right, and it is a mistake about the
telegram. Look here; this is not his description. "Nez ordinaire;" why,
he has a long nose. "Teint brun;" he is quite fresh-coloured, and his
hair is grey. This is a great mistake. Monsieur le Maire, I know the
man, and I will be responsible for him. You must let him go.'
'I thought so,' said the maire, pleased with his own discrimination. 'Je
l'ai dit. Monsieur nous expliquera tout ça. Voilà que j'ai dit.'
'Mais, monsieur----' began the gendarme.
Helen sat against the light, seeing nothing, and closed her eyes, and
clasped her hands in her lap. Burton, bewildered and terror-stricken,
looked on without showing any emotion. Perhaps the passiveness of his
face was his best safeguard. Five minutes of expostulation and
explanation followed, and then gradually the Frenchmen edged themselves
out of the room. Fortunately Monsieur le Maire had taken this view from
the beginning; he had been sure it was a mistake. When they were got rid
of at last, the three who were left behind looked at each other in a
silence which was more significant than words. Burton dropped into a
chair; he was not able to stand nor to speak, but kept gazing at
Drummond with a pitiful wonder and terror. At last--
'Are you Robert Drummond?' he asked hoarsely. 'Have you come back from
your grave----'
'I am Robert Drummond,' said the other; 'and you are--John Smith, who
must be got out of here as soon as possible. Have you money?'
'Yes.'
'Then I advise you to go away at once. Go up to Dinan by the river-side,
or walk to St Brieuc to get the train. In the one case you are on your
way to Brest, where there are ships always sailing; by the other you
can get to Paris or wherever you please. You may wait here till the
evening, if you choose; but then go.'
'I will go to Brest,' he said humbly.
'I would rather not know where you went; but go you must. My wife and I
met to-day for the first time for seven years; we do not wish for
company, you may suppose.'
Drummond's voice was very stern. He had no compassion for the man who
stood thus humbled and miserable before him; not for him had he done
this. And Burton was too much stupefied, too much bewildered, to make
any direct reply. He looked at Helen with dull wonder, and asked under
his breath--'
'Did you know?'
'No,' she said. 'It came upon me almost as suddenly as upon you.'
Then he pulled some papers out of his pocket.
'These are English papers. I don't know if it is long since you have
left. But you might like to see them.' When he had done this, he made a
few steps towards the door, where the old French bonne was waiting to
show him where to go. Then he paused, and turned round again, facing
them. 'What a man says in my position is very little to anybody,' he
said; 'but--I want to say to you, Forgive me. I have helped to do you
dreadful harm; but I--I did not mean it. I never meant it. I meant to
get gain myself; but I never wished to harm you.'
And then he disappeared, saved again, saved at his uttermost
need--surely this time finally saved--and by those whom he had injured
the most. When he reached the clean little room where he was to stay all
day, it appeared to Reginald Burton that he must be in a dream. The same
feeling had been in his mind ever since he escaped from England. All was
strange to him; and strangest of all was the fact that he could no
longer command or regulate matters by his own will, but was the sport of
circumstances, driven about he knew not how. His bewilderment was so
great that he was not able to think. Saved first by a helpless woman,
whose powers he would have laughed at a month ago; saved now by a ghost
out of the grave!
That night he left Dinard under cover of the darkness, and walked to St
Brieuc, where he got the train for Brest. He arrived there in time to
get on board of a vessel about to sail for America. And thus Reginald
Burton escaped from the immediate penal consequences of his sins. From
the other consequences no man ever escapes. The prison, the trial, the
weary round of punishment he had eluded; but his life was over and
ended, and everything that was worth having in the world had abandoned
him. Love was not his to carry away with him; reputation, honour,
wealth, even comfort were gone. He had to make a miserable new
beginning, to shrink into poverty, obscurity, and dependence. It would
be hard to say whether these were more or less easy to bear than the
prison work, prison life, prison garb from which he had escaped.