THE WANDERER’S RETURN.
The great city lies seething like some unholy caldron under the
blazing August sun, when a lonely wayfarer returns to it after two
years’ exile on the other side of the world. Rank and fashion,
middle-class wealth, professional respectability, have deserted the
airy western squares and streets for English watering-places, Welsh
mountains, Scottish moors, Irish lakes, or broiling Continental
esplanades, spas, conversation-houses, Rhine steamers, and so on;
but from this eastern end of the city there is no such exodus; here
life holds on patiently through the dog days, here labour knows no
respite, and the grinding of the universal mill slackens not.
Alexis Secretan, just disembarked from the famous clipper ship
_Oronoko_, surveys the dingy street, the driving crowd, with wonder,
not unmingled with loathing. What a weary city it seems to this man,
who walked its stony ways two years ago a seeker for bread, and for
the most part found only the natural product of the soil--a stone! He
has found fortune kinder at the antipodes, man more friendly, Nature
more liberal of her smiles, less shut out and constrained by brick
and mortar. He has achieved no sudden prosperity, he has worked hard
and honestly, and has done well; so well as to be able to come back
to this sophisticated, unfriendly city, whither fate draws him as a
magnet.
It is not possible for a man to feel more lonely than this returning
wayfarer. In all the vast city which spreads itself about and around
him there lives only one person from whom he can hope for a friendly
smile of welcome. His humble friend Dick Plowden is the only being to
whom he can go with any certainty of not being considered a bore and
an intruder. His old brother officers--the companions of his brief
day of prosperity,--alas! he wore out the friendship of those when
he sank to that lowest grade in the animal creation--the borrowing
animal.
Dear old Dick! honest, friendly Dick, to whom he has long since
repaid that ten-pound note borrowed for the false wife who deserted
him--it is to Dick he goes naturally to-day, as brother goes to
brother. It is to Dick’s recommendation to Messrs. Keel and Skrew
he owes the honourable independence of the last two years. But for
Dick’s influence he would never have got that fair start in a new
world which has enabled him to keep his head above water, and do
Messrs. Keel and Skrew honourable service on the other side of the
globe.
He can afford to take a hansom, and drive down to the Brompton Road
as fast as a broken-down thoroughbred can take him. Dear old Dick is
in the little back parlour hard at work, as on that snowy day when
desperation guided Alexis to that last resource of the desperate--the
humble friend of better days. But Dick is not occupied to-day in the
mechanical drudgery of map-painting; he is writing a book, a little
book on astronomy, for the use of schools,--that elementary geography
of his having been a success.
He starts up at sight of Alexis, who has pushed by the maid of all
work and entered unannounced. The two men greet each other heartily.
‘Captain Secretan! What a delightful surprise! and looking so well
too, so handsome, just like my original captain, who took mother’s
first floor.’
‘Dear old Dick!’
‘But I did not expect you home for ever so long. I thought you were
going to stop at Sidney, working for the firm until you had made your
fortune.’
‘Fortune is all very well, Dick--and the firm is all very well.
They have been liberal employers, and I have worked honestly for
them, and been lucky in my dealings for them. But the soul of man
needs something more than fifteen per cent. commission upon all his
dealings. There was an emptiness in my heart, Dick, out yonder--a
cavity that needed filling somehow,--so I took the first opportunity
to slip across to the old world, though God knows there’s little
chance of filling the vacuum here. However, I shall only stop a month
or so, and then go back again. The firm has been very kind about
the matter. I told them my health was failing, and that the voyage
home was my only hope of getting strong again, so they gave me a
free passage both ways, and I’m to hold counsel with them about the
opening of a new branch of the business out yonder.’
‘And were you really ill?’ asks Richard Plowden, sympathetically.
‘What I told the firm was not much more than the truth, old fellow.
When heart-sickness sets in, bodily sickness is pretty sure to
follow. My nights were growing sleepless, full of bad thoughts. Well,
Dick, you can guess my first question. Any news--of her?’
Richard Plowden shakes his head despondingly.
‘I am the last to hear of her,’ he says,--‘I who live as much out of
the world as if I were a hermit in a cave.’
‘She might have come to you to inquire about my fate, knowing you
were the only friend adversity had left me.’
‘She has never come.’
‘Nor written?’
‘Not a line. Forgive me if I wound you, Captain Secretan----.’
‘Call me Alex, Dick, or we shall quarrel.’
‘Forgive me if I seem to speak hardly of her, but upon my honour,
Alex, it seems to me that you have nothing to do but to forget her.
She deserted you when you had the most need of her love, when, if she
had been a true woman, she would have clung to you most fondly.’
‘Granted, Dick. She was selfish, base, cowardly. We had sunk together
into the slough of despond, and she contrived to scramble out of it
and leave me in the mire. She was clever enough to make use of me
to accomplish her escape, sent me out among hard-hearted humanity
to borrow, beg, or steal the means by which she meant to separate
herself from my fallen fortunes. Do you think I came across the
world to seek for her? No, Dick, I am not such a fool. I have been
cheated once. I shall never be her dupe again. Do you think I could
ever trust her any more?--that if fortune smiled upon us, and she
pretended to love me, I could feel any confidence in her truth, any
security in her affection? The void in my heart is to be filled, but
not by her. I came back to the old world to look for my child,--the
child that was to be born to me when my cruel wife left me.’
‘You do not even know that the child survived its birth?’
‘What a Job’s comforter you are, Dick! I know nothing except that I
am going to hunt for the mother in order that I may find the child.’
‘The law would give the custody of so young a child to the mother.’
‘I snap my fingers at the law. Truth is great and shall prevail. So
base a wife must be an unworthy mother. I will find her price for
the child. She will sell that as she sold me--for a mess of pottage.
When I left England I was desperate--mad, perhaps, or I should not
have left the land that held my child. My loneliness in that strange
world yonder awakened a father’s feelings, I found out how dreary
a prospect life is to a man who stands alone--a blank and barren
desert, with no green oasis--no distant city to which he may direct
his steps--a lonely pilgrimage leading nowhere.’
‘How shall you commence your search?’
‘I have thought of that question many a time on board the _Oronoko_.
There is little choice of plan left open to me. You remember that
before Messrs. Keel and Skrew took me into their employment, I went
to Redcastle, the place my wife came from when she came to London
as Mrs. Hazleton’s governess. I saw Sibyl’s younger sister, made my
inquiries, and found that Sibyl had not been heard of at Redcastle.
She had not gone straight home to her uncle, the parish doctor, as
I had supposed it probable she would, and flung herself and her
troubles upon his shoulders. No, she was too artful for that. She
had some deeper game in view--some rich relative from whom she had
expectations, as I gathered dimly from her letter. I could find out
nothing more from the girl than that Sibyl was supposed still to be
in Mrs. Hazleton’s employment--that her marriage was not known to her
family, that she had not reappeared at Redcastle, or received any
help from her uncle the doctor. Where could she be, and how could she
be living? She must have found the wealthy friend whose existence I
inferred from her letter, and this wealthy friend or relative was
evidently not an inhabitant of Redcastle. She must have found a safe
haven somewhere. I made no further attempt to trace her. I was too
deeply stung by her abandonment. “Let her go,” I said to myself, as
I crawled wearily away from that dismal country town, through the
January weather, “she and I have done with each other.” I did not
foresee that the hour would come in which the thought of my child
would be more precious to me than my false wife’s love had ever
been. But in my lonely days in a strange land--lonely in spite of
what the world calls friendship--I have suffered my hopes to build
themselves round that one image--the child whose face I have never
seen. Now, Dick, there seem to be only two sources of information
open to me. I can go down to Redcastle again, and renew my inquiries
at Dr. Faunthorpe’s; or, before doing that, I can hunt up an honest
creature who used to be housemaid at Mrs. Hazleton’s, and who made
herself useful to my wife in sending her letters, and so helping her
to sustain the falsehood which she chose to practise upon her uncle,
for quite inadequate reasons, as they always seemed to me. But there
are minds to which double-dealing is an absolute pleasure, and hers
may be of that order,’ adds Alexis, bitterly.
‘You have not dined,’ says Richard Plowden, by way of changing
the conversation. ‘I’ll order a steak and potatoes. You’ll enjoy
an English rump-steak after ship fare, and you know mother’s a
first-rate cook. You’ll take up your quarters with us, of course,
while you are in London?’
‘I shall go to Redcastle to-morrow, Dick, if I can find Jane Dimond,
the housemaid, this evening. But if you can give me a bed for
to-night, I will accept it with all gratitude. Don’t trouble about
dinner. I had a substantial lunch on board the _Oronoko_. I’ll go to
Lowther Street at once, and we can smoke our pipes together when I
come back, and talk over old times, when I was a careless, thriftless
bachelor. How selfish I am, talking of my own affairs all this time,
and never so much as congratulating you on your success as an author!’
‘Don’t call me an author,’ protests Dick, blushing. ‘That’s putting
me too much upon a level with Scott and Bulwer, and geniuses of that
kind. I was lucky enough to hit upon an easy, simple way of stating
hard facts--making information a little more attractive than it has
been made for young minds, and the style took with the schools and
teachers. My little handbook of geography has gone through fifteen
editions, and has been quite a fortune to me, and I’m now doing the
sixth in a series of handbooks, all more or less geographical, up
to the present one, in which I venture upon astronomy. So you see
map-painting led to something, after all.’
‘Intelligence and industry always lead to something, Dick. There
would be a screw loose in the scheme of the universe if they could
ever lead to nothing.’
‘Those little books have done wonders for us,’ exclaims Dick, with
harmless pride. ‘Mother doesn’t work half so hard as she used,
though she will stick to the cooking; and she has a silk gown to wear
on Sundays,--doesn’t it rustle, too! you can hear it at the very top
of the staircase,--none of your soft silks for mother, but a silk
that stands alone and lets you know that it’s there. And I’ve got a
garden. See!’
The Duke of Devonshire could feel no loftier pride in the possession
of Chatsworth than swells Richard Plowden’s breast to-day, as he
draws up the Venetian blind and allows his cherished garden to burst
upon Alexis Secretan’s admiring gaze.
It is a quadrangle of fifteen feet square, shut in by whitewashed
walls, overshadowed by leaden cisterns, bounded by the slated roofs
of a mews, but Dick has built rockeries in the corners, rockeries
where ferns flourish greenly. He has trained ivy over one wall--that
blessed parasite which is so fair and quick-growing a screen for
brick and mortar abominations--Virginia creeper over another. The
grass is soft and green, and in the middle of the little plot there
is a stone basin--a timeworn old basin which Dick has picked up
for half a sovereign in a builder’s yard, but a basin in which a
slender jet of water actually plays. Scarlet geraniums in green tubs
give colour to the picture; an old stone bench, also a bargain of
Dick’s, offers repose to the idler in this narrow pleasaunce. Shut
in as it is by mews and back kitchens,--overshadowed as it is by
cisterns,--Richard Plowden’s garden is absolutely pretty. Alexis
accords it his unmeasured approbation.
‘It’s the first English garden I’ve seen for the last two years,
Dick, and it smiles at me like a welcome home. Yes, I’ll come back in
time to smoke a cigar on that stone bench of yours under the summer
stars.’
‘We drink tea out there on fine Sunday afternoons in the warm
weather,’ says Dick, smiling at the ferns and rockwork, ‘and you
can’t imagine how proud mother is. I’ve got the real _Osmunda
regalis_, or flowering fern, in that corner, though you’d hardly
believe it; and there’s a _Polypodium_ over there that a friendly
lodger of ours brought me from Ilfracombe.’
‘Well, Dick, I must go and look for Jane Dimond, but I’ll be back in
a couple of hours at latest.’
Dick limps to the door with his friend, and follows his figure with
admiring eyes till it vanishes in the current of wayfarers.
‘What a fine fellow he is! and to think that a wife could desert him!
I’ll ask mother to get a bit of something nice for supper, a veal
cutlet and a few peas, or a chicken and a slice of broiled ham.’