LONDON.
London is the candle which, ever attracting country moths by its
feverish glare destroys them remorselessly in its cruel flame.
Reginald Blake was not enjoying himself very much in Town owing to his
disturbed state of mind. For years he had pictured to himself the
marvellous city and his life therein; how he would one day find
himself a denizen of the great metropolis, eager to win fame and
fortune by the magic of his voice, how he would delight in leading the
ambitious, half Bohemian, wholly delightful existence of a singer, and
how he would be able to wander about the streets and see the brilliant
life of the mighty city with its restless activity and ardent
strivings after wealth, fame and novelty. Grey Westminster Abbey,
noble St. Paul's, the enormous pile of the Parliament House, the
golden-topped column of the Monument, he would see all these, with
their wealth of historical, religious and artistic associations. He
would tread the very streets over whose stones wandered proud
poverty-stricken Chatterton, courtly Addison and ponderous Dr.
Johnson; he would find the picturesque alleys, houses and roads
described in the fascinating pages of Dickens, and he would stray
about the sacred purlieus of Drury Lane, haunted by the stately shades
of Wilkes, of Siddons, of Bracegirdle, and David Garrick. Good
heavens, what innumerable fantastic castles did he not build in Cloud
Cuckoo Land about the unseen glories of London, where every street and
stone was redolent of the glorious history of England from Plantagenet
to Guelph.
Oh, beautiful castles of Cloudland, how rapidly did their gorgeousness
disappear from his fancy before the disenchanting touch of chilling
reality. He was indeed in London, but alas it was not the magic London
of his dreams, this enormous assemblage of houses through which flowed
a melancholy grey river and over which hung a dismal dark cloud of
smoke and fog. The London of romance and the London of reality were
two very different things, yet the disenchantment of this dreaming
youth was not wholly due to the prosaic appearance of the city itself
but rather to the gloom and depression of his spirits.
The recollection of how his wealth had come to him weighed heavily on
his mind, causing him to view all things in a most dismal manner, and
tortured his sensitive disposition with irritating thoughts and
maddening delusions. In vain he tried hard to shake off this gloomy
feeling and enjoy the many-coloured life of the great city; in vain he
told himself that the accident of his birth was no fault of his own
and in vain he strove to take pleasure in the society of the men and
women to whom he had been introduced by Basil Beaumont. It was all
useless, for a dark cloud of bitterness and distrust seemed to settle
upon the joyousness of his life which led him to view everything with
jaundiced eyes. He felt that he had lost the adolescent zest for life
as Donatello must have done after he had stained his hands with blood,
and although he had youth, talent, good looks, and wealth, yet all
these delightful gifts of the fairies were neutralized by the fatal
gift of dishonour bestowed upon him by the malignant beldame who had
proved herself the evil genius of his life.
As soon as the business connected with the Garsworth estate was
properly completed and he had been fully recognized as the heir of the
old Squire, Bolby considering that he had done his duty, left the
young man and his friend Dick pretty well to their own devices. Dick
enjoyed everything with the inexhaustible appetite of youth, but
Reginald took his pleasures, such as they were, in a listless manner,
which showed how completely he had lost all capabilities of enjoyment.
Mr. Pemberton had been rather irritated by the prosaic life they led
when in the leading strings of Mr. Bolby, whose ideas of amusement
were of the most primitive nature, rarely extending beyond an
afternoon at the Zoo or a night at Madame Tussaud's or the Egyptian
Hall. The only thing Dick saw in Mr. Bolby's ideas of life, which he
considered at all meritorious were the excellent dinners which the
little lawyer gave them, but Dick in his flying visits to Town had
tasted of the Tree of Knowledge beneath whose shade were the music
halls and the burlesque theatres, so he was anxious to go to such like
places for his amusement.
When they left Mr. Bolby, therefore, and were comfortably established
in a quiet hotel in Jermyn Street, Dick, seeing that Reginald was
absolutely indifferent as to where he went, or what he did, took the
whole arrangement of their London life into his own hands and
succeeded in going to a good many places which would have terribly
shocked the vicar had he known. Not that such forbidden pleasures did
them much harm, for both lads were extremely sensible for their age,
still Dick finding himself able, through Reginald's generosity, to
spend a good deal of money, took his friend and himself to sundry
shady places of which they might just as well have been ignorant. But
Nemesis soon came down upon the unhappy Richard, and just as he was
developing into a fair specimen of a man about Town his bachelor uncle
at Folkestone wrote him a letter asking him to come down on a visit
and as Dick was supposed to be his bachelor uncle's heir, he had to
leave Town, much to his own disgust and to the regret of Reginald, who
missed his lively friend every hour of the day.
He still stayed in Town, however, but as he knew no one, his existence
was to say the least extremely dull. Reginald was essentially of a
social nature and wanted someone to whom he could talk, therefore he
was not sorry when one day Basil Beaumont, who had been waiting for
the departure of Dick, called upon him and henceforth constituted
himself his bear leader. As they had seen nothing of the artist since
their arrival in Town, Dick had never thought of telling Reginald his
mistrust of the fascinating Beaumont, so the young man, remembering
the artist's kindness about his probable career as a singer, felt very
friendly towards him and was quite prepared to accept his offer of
companionship as the outcome of a kindly disposition and not the
result of a carefully calculated scheme.
A more dangerous companion for a young man in a depressed state of
mind than Beaumont could hardly be imagined, for he led Reginald to
plunge into riotous pleasures for the sake of distraction, from which
he would have otherwise recoiled. Having an eminently refined mind,
and a delight in cultured company, had he been thoroughly healthy he
would never have been drawn by this modern Mephistopheles into the
vortex of frenzied pleasure in which his days and nights were now
engulfed. But, being in a morbid state of mind, he brooded eternally
over the presumed stigma attached to his name until it became a
perfect nightmare to him. He thought that everyone knew his miserable
story and despised him for the anomalous position he now occupied, so,
in a mad spirit of bravado, he became quite reckless, and determined
to defy the world which his sensitive spirit imagined to be sneering
at him as a bastard. Terrible to relate, in spite of the relationship
existing between them, Beaumont, who should have prevented the young
man from falling into such an unhealthy state of mind, rather
encouraged his gloomy fits than otherwise, as he thought it would give
him a greater hold than ever over his son, so deliberately led the
unhappy young man on to ruin--ruin, not of his fortune or position,
but of his physical and moral nature.
In his best days, the circle of Beaumont's acquaintances had not been
a very large or reputable one, but now it was smaller and worse than
ever; nevertheless, he introduced the young master of Garsworth Grange
to his friends, whose manners, generally speaking, were as polished as
their morals were bad. Broken down professional men, played-out lords,
ruined gentlemen of fortune, shady hangers-on of society; these were
the daily associates of Reginald Blake, until his mind, eminently
calculated to receive impressions, began to grow corrupted. The
society of hawks is rather a dangerous thing for doves, and this poor
unsophisticated dove was of far too guileless a nature to mistrust the
birds of prey by which he found himself surrounded, though, to be
sure, his natural instincts of right and wrong saved him from many a
pitfall.
Not that the hawks around him did any harm to his pecuniary position,
for Beaumont was too selfish to allow anyone to have the plucking of
this well-feathered pigeon save himself, and there being an unwritten
code of honour even among hawks, the young man was left entirely to
the tender mercies of his evil-minded Mentor. Nevertheless, the long
nights of play, the wiles of women whose beauty did not redeem their
frailty, and the constant life of excitement passed under the feverish
glare of the gaslight, soon destroyed the fresh healthy feeling of
youth Reginald Blake had possessed during the quiet years of his
country life.
When at times his better feelings prevailed, and he would have fled
this unhealthy life of bitter-tasting pleasures, Beaumont was always
at his elbow with some new device wherewith to beguile him to
destruction. Blake was not a weak-minded man by any means, still he
was young and impressionable, and the sudden change from the poverty
and quiet living of Garsworth, to the opulent, brilliant life of
London, threw him off his moral balance.
No doubt he should have bravely resisted the allurements of sin, and
the shallow frivolities to which he yielded with the apathy of
despair, but, in the Armida-like gardens of London, the keenest eyes
are blinded, the acutest senses are bewildered and dazed by the hubbub
and brilliance around him, the victim falls only too easily into the
snares hidden below the splendid pageant.
One thing, however, Reginald stoutly resisted, and that was the
temptation to drink--he played nap and baccarat, losing comparatively
large sums thereat, mixed in the society of women who lured him onward
to destruction with siren voices, but in spite of Beaumont's insidious
enticements he never took more wine than was good for him, and this
temperance was in a certain measure a guard against the fatal
influence of his otherwise foolish life. However, Beaumont was not
impatient, as he knew from experience the effect of time in wearing
away good resolutions, and waited calmly until some lucky chance
should enable him to put a finishing stroke to the ruin of his unhappy
son. It seems almost incredible that such a man as Basil Beaumont,
from whom not even his own flesh and blood was safe, could exist; but,
unhappily, he is only one of the many men in whom all natural love and
affection is entirely destroyed by the vicious, feverish life which
they lead.
Behold, therefore, this unhappy country moth lured to destruction by
the garish glitter of the lights of London beneath which sat the fatal
Circe of pleasure, with rose-crowned hair and wine-filled cup. Around
her moved the splendid throng of pleasure seekers, dancing, singing,
eating and drinking, taking no heed of the morrow in the evil joy of
the present; but, below this glittering maelstrom of vice and
rascality, were the rose-hidden pitfalls into which every moment sank
some gay reveller, his dying cry of despair drowned in the riotous
crowd dancing gaily over his unseen grave.