JOHN HANBURY ALONE.
When John Hanbury closed and locked the door of his own room and threw
himself into an old easy chair, he felt first an overwhelming sense of
relief. A day of many exciting and unpleasant events was over, and he
was encompassed by the security of his home and environed closely by
the privacy of his own sleeping chamber. No one uninvited would enter
by the outer door of the house; no one could enter this room without
his absolute permission. He was secure against the annoyance or
intrusion of people. Here he could rest and be safe. Here he was
protected against even himself, for he could not make himself
ridiculous or commit himself when alone. All trials of great agony
spring from what we conceive to be our relations with others. Beyond
physical pains and pleasures, which are few and unimportant in life,
we owe all our joys and sorrows to what others think or say of us.
Even in the most abstracted spiritual natures the anger of Heaven is
more intolerable to anticipate than the torture of Hell.
John Hanbury's room was in the back of the house. Here, as in the
dining-room, the window was wide open. The stars were dull in the
misty midsummer sky. Now and then came the muffled rattle of a distant
cab, now and then the banging of doors, now and then the sounds of
shooting locks and bolts as servants fastened up the rears of houses
for the night. Beyond these sounds there was none, and these came so
seldom and so dulled by distance, and with intervals so increasing in
length that they seemed like the drowsy muttering of the vast city as
it moved heavily seeking ease and sleep.
For a while Hanbury sat without stirring. He still held in his hand
the paper his mother had given him. He knew he had not escaped the
battle. He was merely reposing between the fights. He sat with his
head drooped low upon his chest, his arms lying listlessly by his
side, his legs stretched out. This was the first rest of body or mind
he had had that day, but, as in a sleep obtained from narcotics, while
it gave him physical relief his mind was gaining no freshness.
At length Hanbury shook himself, shuddered, and rose. The light was
not fully up. He left his window open from the bottom all night. He
went to it, pulled up the blind and sat down on the low window-frame.
He put his hand on the stone window sill, and leaning forward looked
below.
Here the silence was not so deep or monotonous as in the room with the
blind down. There arose sounds, faint sounds of music from the backs
of houses where entertainments were being given, now and then voices
and laughter could be heard indistinctly. In many of the windows shone
lights. No suggestion of tumult or trouble came from any side or from
the sky above. On earth spread a peaceful heaven of man's making and
man's keeping; above a peaceful heaven of God's will.
Here was the largest, and richest, and most powerful, and most
civilized city of all time, lying round the feet of a stupendous
goddess of liberty, whose statue had been reared by wisdom borrowed
from all the ages of the history of man. This was the heart of the
colossal nation whose vital blood flowed in every clime.
Here were powers capable of beneficent application lying ready to the
hand of every strength. To be here and able was to have the key-board
of the most gigantic organ ever devised by human mind open to one's
touch.
Here all creeds were free, all thoughts were free, all words were
free, all men were free. There was no slavery of the soul or the
person. Here, the leader of the people was the ruler of the state. The
people made the laws, and the King saw that the laws were obeyed.
Each man of the people was a monarch who deputed his regal powers to
the King.
An hereditary sovereign was the best, better a thousand times than
elected King.
In this country were no plots and schemings about succession. Here the
King's son came to the throne under the will of the people. This
country was never disturbed by struggles to get a good ruler. This
country always had a good ruler, that is the will of the people.
What a miserable spectacle France, great France, chivalric France
presented now! How many pretenders were there to the throne?--to the
presidential chair? There were the Legitimists, and the Orleanists,
and the Napoleons, two branches of Napoleons, and a dozen aspirants to
the presidency! How miserable! What waste of vigour and dignity.
Yes, he was glad he had made up his mind. He would devote himself,
body and soul, to the sovereign people under the constitutional
sovereign.
He would be as advanced as any man short of revolution, short of
violence. His motto should be All things for the people under the
people's King.
No doubt his mother's talk to him in the dining-room had set him off
on such currents of thought. His mother's talk in the dining-room--by
the way, he had not yet looked at the paper she had given him.
He pulled down the blind, turned up the lights over the mantel, and
standing with his back to the chimney-piece, examined the packet in
his hand.
It was a large envelope, tied in a very elaborate manner, and the
string was sealed in three places at the back. On the front, under the
string, he read his own name in his father's well-known large legible
writing. He cut the string and the envelope, and drew out of the
latter a long narrow parcel. This he opened, and found to consist of
half-a-dozen sheets of brief-paper closely covered on both sides with
the large legible writing of his father. The paper was secured at the
left hand corner by a loop of red tape. He saw at a glance that the
document took the form of a letter to him. It began, "My dear and only
son, John," and finished with "Your most affectionate and anxious
father, William Hanbury." The young man turned over the sheets slowly,
glancing at each in turn. This long letter was not, from first to
finish, broken in any way. There were no general heading, or divisions
into sections, or even paragraphs. From beginning to end no break
appeared. The wide margin bore not a single scratch. There was no mark
from the address to the signature to attract attention.
He glanced at the opening words of this long letter. From them it was
plain his father meant him to read them quietly and deliberately in
the sequence in which they ran. The first sentence was this:
"It is of the greatest importance to the object I have in view that
the facts I am about to disclose to you should reach your mind in the
order I have here put them; otherwise the main fact in the revelation
might have a pernicious effect upon you, my son."
The young man lowered the manuscript and mused a moment. It was
obvious to him that no matter what he should think of the contents of
this document his father had considered them of first-rate importance,
and likely to influence his own mind and actions in no ordinary way.
His father's sense and judgment! had never been called in question by
any of his father's oldest and closest friends, and those who knew him
most intimately never saw reason to account him liable to exaggerated
estimates of the influence of ideas, except in his morbid
sensitiveness to anything like popular revolutions or dynastic
intrigues.
John Hanbury raised the document and recommenced where he had left
off. That first sentence was cautionary: the second sentence took away
the breath of the young man, by reason of the large field it opened to
view, and the strange and intense personal interest it at once
aroused. It ran thus:
"About the middle of the last century, when George the Second sat on
the throne of England, and the usurper, Elizabeth, daughter of Peter
the Great, on the throne of Russia, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams was
appointed our ambassador to Russia. To Sir Charles Hanbury Williams
you and I owe our name, although a drop of his blood does not flow in
our veins, nor are we in any way that I know of related to him or
his."
Again the young man lowered the manuscript from before his eyes. His
face suddenly flushed, his eyes contracted, he thrust his head forward
as though listening intently. What could be coming? He strained his
hearing to catch sounds and voices muttering and mumbling on the
limits of his thoughts. He was at sea, gazing with wild eagerness into
the haze ahead, trying to determine whether what he saw was sea-smoke
or cloud or land. Why these great chords in the prelude? What meant
these muffled trumpets, telling of ambassadors and courts and kingdoms
and empires? What concords were these preluding? What stately themes
and regal confluences of harmony? Were these words the first taps of
the kettle drums in his march upon some soul-expanding knowledge? What
should he now see with his eyes and hear with his ears and touch with
his hands? Upon what marvellous scenes of the undisclosed past was the
curtain about to rise? Were some mighty engines that had wrought in
the world's history about to be exhibited to his eyes? What mysteries
of councils and of courts was he destined to witness and understand?
Who was he? Of whom was he? Whence was he? Hanbury and yet no Hanbury.
How came it he owned the middle and not the final name of the
diplomatist and poet of the days of George the Second?
God of Heaven, could it be there was the blood of a shameful woman in
his veins?
His face suddenly blanched. The thick dark veins of his temples and
forehead lay down flat and then sank hollow. His swarthy rough skin
shrank and puckered. His lips drew backward thinned and livid. His
clenched white teeth shone out, and his breath came though them with a
hissing noise. He drew himself up to his full height, and for a moment
looked round defiantly.
All at once the blood flew back to his cheeks, his forehead, his neck.
He covered his face with his bent arm and sank into a chair, crying:
"Not that! Oh God, not that! Anything but that!"
He remained for a long time motionless, with his face covered by his
arm, and the hand of that arm holding the paper against his shoulder.
At first no thoughts passed through his mind. He was no longer trying
to see or hear or divine. He felt overwhelmed, and if he had the power
to do it he would there and then have ceased to think, have
annihilated the power of thought for ever. To his sensitive and
highly-wrought mind, base blood of even four or five generations back
would have forbidden him any part in public life, and, worse than that
a thousand times, have destroyed his personal interest and pride in
himself for ever.
"I would rather," he moaned, when his mind became more orderly, "carry
the hump upon the withered, distorted legs of that man, Oscar Leigh,
than a bend sinister. A noble woman may fall, but no noble woman who
has fallen would take money for her sin. It is not the sin that would
hurt me, but the hire of the sin, the notion that I had the blood of
shame in my veins, and the price of shame in my pocket. Bah! I would
die of fever if it were so. My blood, the blood in my veins would
ferment and stew my flesh. I should rot from within."
He dropped his arm and looked around him. The sight of the familiar
room and well-known objects allayed the agony of despair. He drew a
deep breath and sat up.
"I have been terrifying myself with shadows, with less than shadows,
with absolute blanks; nay, I have been terrifying myself with less
than nothing! I have been trying to change the absolute and manifest,
and vouched sunlight into gloom and the people of gloom, phantoms. The
only evidence before me is evidence against my fears. Instead of an
intangible horror, there is an affirmed and ponderable assurance that
although my name is Hanbury, and I got that name from Sir Hanbury
Williams, not a drop of his blood is in my veins! Why, I am more like
a girl with her first love-letter, trying to guess its contents from
the outside, than a man with a business document in his hand! Let me
read this thing through now as I discussed another matter awhile ago,
as if it were a brief put into my hands as a counsel. It is exactly,
or almost exactly like a brief." He tossed the sheets carelessly in
his hand. "Let us see what the case is."
He sat himself back deliberately in his chair, thrust out his legs
before him, and holding the manuscript in both hands began it again.
With contracted brows and face of stern attention he read on. He
betrayed no more excitement than if he held in his hand a bluebook
which he desired to master for some routine speech. Now and then he
cleared his throat softly, imperfectly, indifferent to the result; for
all other sound he made he might have been fashioned of marble. Now
and then he turned the leaves and moved slightly from side to side;
for all other motion he made he might have been dead.
At last he came to the final line, to his father's signature. He read
all and then allowing the manuscript to fall from his hands and his
arms to drop to his side, sat in the chair motionless, staring into
vacancy.
For an hour he remained thus. Beyond the heaving of his chest and his
calm regular respiration, he was perfectly still. At length he sighed
profoundly, not from sadness, but deep musing, shook himself,
shuddered, looked round him as though he had just waked from sleeping
in a strange place.
He rose slowly and going to the window drew up the blind.
No lights were now to be seen in the rear of any of the houses, and
complete silence filled the windless air.
"How peaceful," he whispered, "how calm. All the loyal subjects of Her
Majesty Queen Victoria are now sleeping in calm security. What a
contrast! Here the person of the subject is as sacred as the person
of the sovereign. Good heavens, what a contrast! Gracedieu in
Derbyshire. I seem to have heard of that place before, but I cannot
recollect, when or where. Gracedieu must be a very small place,
for my father says it is near the village of Castleton. I don't know
where Castleton is, beyond the fact that it is in Derbyshire.
Gracedieu--Gracedieu--Gracedieu. The name seems familiar enough, but
joined with what or whom I cannot think. It is a common name. There
must be many places of the name in England. My memory of it must be
connected with some circumstance or people, for I am sure I have never
been in the place myself or in Castleton either; or in Derbyshire at
all, for the matter of that, except passing through. I don't think I
can be familiar with the name in connection with the Peak. My only
knowledge of the Peak and its neighbourhood is from some written
description, and my only memory of the name Gracedieu is one of the
ear, not of the eye.
"I am sure my memory of it is of the ear, and that it is a pleasant
memory too! but I can get no further now. To-morrow I shall go and see
the place for myself. This whole history is astounding. I am too much
stunned by it to think about it yet.
"There's two o'clock striking. I must not wake my mother to tell her.
I feel as if my reason were a little disturbed. I feel choked and
smothered up--as if I could not breathe. I am worn out and weak. The
day has been too much for me. I will go to bed. I am sure I shall
sleep. I am half asleep as it is."
He drew back from the window and stretched up his hand for the cord.
"The Queen of England sleeps secure, with all her subjects secure
around her--and I----" He did not finish the sentence. He shook his
head and pulled down the blind.
Suddenly he struck his thigh with his clenched fist, calling out in a
whisper: "Of course, I now remember where I heard of Gracedieu. What a
stupid fool I have been not to recall it at once! It's the place that
beautiful girl the dwarf introduced me to comes from! My head must be
dull not to remember that! His Pallas-Athena, and I----"
He turned out the lights, and began undressing in the dim twilight;
there were already faint blue premonitions of dawn upon the blind.
"I wonder," he muttered in the twilight, "will his figures of time
include Cophetua and the Beggar Maid! Ha--ha--ha. I am half asleep.
"That old story I read this night was not unlike Cophetua and the
Beggar Maid, only--I must not think of it now, I am too dazed and
stunned and stupid."
He was in bed, and in a few minutes was asleep. On a sudden he woke up
at the sound of his own voice, crying out loud in the profound peace
of the early dawn:--
"Thieves! Thieves! Kosciusko to the rescue. The king is on your side!"
He found himself standing up in the bed gesticulating wildly. The
sweat was pouring down from his forehead and he was trembling
violently in all his limbs.
He stood listening awhile to ascertain if his shout had wakened the
household, but unbroken silence followed his cry. Then he lay down and
soon fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.