Produced by J. Ingram, G. Smith, T. Riikonen, and PG
Distributed Proofreaders
BIRDS OF PREY
BY
M.E. BRADDON
[Illustration: "Be good enough to take me straight to her," said the
Captain, "I am her father."]
CONTENTS:
Book the First.
FATAL FRIENDSHIP.
I. THE HOUSE IN BLOOMSBURY
II. PHILIP SHELDON READS THE "LANCET"
III. MR. AND MRS. HALLIDAY
IV. A PERPLEXING ILLNESS
V. THE LETTER FROM THE "ALLIANCE" OFFICE
VI. MR. BURKHAM'S UNCERTAINTIES
Book the Second.
THE TWO MACAIRES.
I. A GOLDEN TEMPLE
II. THE EASY DESCENT
III. "HEART BARE, HEART HUNGRY, VERY POOR"
Book the Third.
HEAPING UP RICHES.
I. A FORTUNATE MARRIAGE
II. CHARLOTTE
III. GEORGE SHELDON'S PROSPECTS
IV. DIANA FINDS A NEW HOME
V. AT THE LAWN
VI. THE COMPACT OF GRAY'S INN
VII. AUNT SARAH
VIII. CHARLOTTE PROPHESIES RAIN
IX. MR. SHELDON ON THE WATCH
Book the Fourth.
VALENTINE HAWKEHURST'S RECORD.
I. THE OLDEST INHABITANT
II. MATTHEW HAYGARTH'S RESTING-PLACE
III. MR. GOODGE'S WISDOM
Book the Fifth.
RELICS OF THE DEAD.
I. BETRAYED BY A BLOTTING-PAD
II. VALENTINE INVOKES THE PHANTOMS OF THE PAST
III. HUNTING THE JUDSONS
IV. GLIMPSES OF A BYGONE LIFE
Book the Sixth.
THE HEIRESS OF THE HAYGARTHS.
I. DISAPPOINTMENT
II. VALENTINE'S RECORD CONTINUED
III. ARCADIA
IV. IN PARADISE
V. TOO FAIR TO LAST
VI. FOUND IN THE BIBLE
Book the Seventh.
CHARLOTTE'S ENGAGEMENT.
I. "IN YOUR PATIENCE YE ARE STRONG"
II. MRS. SHELDON ACCEPTS HER DESTINY
III. MR. HAWKEHURST AND MR. GEORGE SHELDON COME TO AN UNDERSTANDING
IV. MR. SHELDON IS PROPITIOUS
V. MR. SHELDON IS BENEVOLENT
VI. RIDING THE HIGH HORSE
VII. MR. SHELDON IS PRUDENT
VIII. CHRISTMAS PEACE
BIRDS OF PREY
BOOK THE FIRST.
FATAL FRIENDSHIP.
CHAPTER I.
THE HOUSE IN BLOOMSBURY.
"What about?" There are some houses whereof the outward aspect is
sealed with the seal of respectability--houses which inspire confidence
in the minds of the most sceptical of butchers and bakers--houses at
whose area-gates the tradesman delivers his goods undoubtingly, and
from whose spotless door-steps the vagabond children of the
neighbourhood recoil as from a shrine too sacred for their gambols.
Such a house made its presence obvious, some years ago, in one of the
smaller streets of that west-central region which lies between Holborn
and St. Pancras Church. It is perhaps the nature of
ultra-respectability to be disagreeably conspicuous. The unsullied
brightness of No. 14 Fitzgeorge-street was a standing reproach to every
other house in the dingy thorough-fare. That one spot of cleanliness
made the surrounding dirt cruelly palpable. The muslin curtains in the
parlour windows of No. 15 would not have appeared of such a smoky
yellow if the curtains of No. 14 had not been of such a pharisaical
whiteness. Mrs. Magson, at No. 13, was a humble letter of lodgings,
always more or less in arrear with the demands of quarter-day; and it
seemed a hard thing that her door-steps, whereon were expended much
labour and hearthstone--not to mention house-flannel, which was in
itself no unimportant item in the annual expenses--should be always
thrown in the shade by the surpassing purity of the steps before No. 14.
Not satisfied with being the very pink and pattern of respectability,
the objectionable house even aspired to a kind of prettiness. It was as
bright, and pleasant, and rural of aspect as any house within earshot
of the roar and rattle of Holborn can be. There were flowers in the
windows; gaudy scarlet geraniums, which seemed to enjoy an immunity
from all the ills to which geraniums are subject, so impossible was it
to discover a faded leaf amongst their greenness, or the presence of
blight amidst their wealth of blossom. There were birdcages within the
shadow of the muslin curtains, and the colouring of the newly-pointed
brickwork was agreeably relieved by the vivid green of Venetian blinds.
The freshly-varnished street-door bore a brass-plate, on which to look
was to be dazzled; and the effect produced by this combination of white
door-step, scarlet geranium, green blind, and brass-plate was
obtrusively brilliant.
Those who had been so privileged as to behold the interior of the house
in Fitzgeorge-street brought away with them a sense of admiration that
was the next thing to envy. The pink and pattern of propriety within,
as it was the pink and pattern of propriety without, it excited in
every breast alike a wondering awe, as of a habitation tenanted by some
mysterious being, infinitely superior to the common order of
householders.
The inscription on the brass-plate informed the neighbourhood that No.
14 was occupied by Mr. Sheldon, surgeon-dentist; and the dwellers in
Fitzgeorge-street amused themselves in their leisure hours by
speculative discussions upon the character and pursuits, belongings and
surroundings, of this gentleman.
Of course he was eminently respectable. On that question no
Fitzgeorgian had ever hazarded a doubt. A householder with such a
door-step and such muslin curtains could not be other than the most
correct of mankind; for, if there is any external evidence by which a
dissolute life or an ill-regulated mind will infallibly betray itself,
that evidence is to be found in the yellowness and limpness of muslin
window-curtains. The eyes are the windows of the soul, says the poet;
but if a man's eyes are not open to your inspection, the windows of his
house will help you to discover his character as an individual, and his
solidity as a citizen. At least such was the opinion cherished in
Fitzgeorge-street, Russell-square.
The person and habits of Mr. Sheldon were in perfect harmony with the
aspect of the house. The unsullied snow of the door-step reproduced
itself in the unsullied snow of his shirt-front; the brilliancy of the
brass-plate was reflected in the glittering brightness of his
gold-studs; the varnish on the door was equalled by the lustrous
surface of his black-satin waistcoat; the careful pointing of the
brickwork was in a manner imitated by the perfect order of his polished
finger-nails and the irreproachable neatness of his hair and whiskers.
No dentist or medical practitioner of any denomination had inhabited
the house in Fitzgeorge-street before the coming of Philip Sheldon. The
house had been unoccupied for upwards of a year, and was in the last
stage of shabbiness and decay, when the bills disappeared all at once
from the windows, and busy painters and bricklayers set their ladders
against the dingy brickwork. Mr. Sheldon took the house on a long
lease, and spent two or three hundred pounds in the embellishment of
it. Upon the completion of all repairs and decorations, two great
waggon-loads of furniture, distinguished by that old fashioned
clumsiness which is eminently suggestive of respectability, arrived
from the Euston-square terminus, while a young man of meditative aspect
might have been seen on his knees, now in one empty chamber, anon in
another, performing some species of indoor surveying, with a three-foot
rule, a loose little oblong memorandum-book, and the merest stump of a
square lead-pencil. This was an emissary from the carpet warehouse; and
before nightfall it was known to more than one inhabitant in
Fitzgeorge-street that the stranger was going to lay down new carpets.
The new-comer was evidently of an active and energetic temperament, for
within three days of his arrival the brass-plate on his street-door
announced his profession, while a neat little glass-case, on a level
with the eye of the passing pedestrian, exhibited specimens of his
skill in mechanical dentistry, and afforded instruction and amusement
to the boys of the neighbourhood, who criticised the glistening white
teeth and impossibly red gums, displayed behind the plate-glass, with a
like vigour and freedom of language. Nor did Mr. Sheldon's announcement
of his profession confine itself to the brass-plate and the glass-case.
A shabby-genteel young man pervaded the neighbourhood for some days
after the surgeon-dentist's advent, knocking a postman's knock, which
only lacked the galvanic sharpness of the professional touch, and
delivering neatly-printed circulars to the effect that Mr. Sheldon,
surgeon-dentist, of 14 Fitzgeorge-street, had invented some novel
method of adjusting false teeth, incomparably superior to any existing
method, and that he had, further, patented an improvement on nature in
the way of coral gums, the name whereof was an unpronounceable compound
of Greek and Latin, calculated to awaken an awful reverence in the
unprofessional and unclassical mind.
The Fitzgeorgians shook their heads with prophetic solemnity as they
read these circulars. Struggling householders, who find it a hard task
to keep the two ends which never have met and never will meet from
growing farther and farther asunder every year, are apt to derive a
dreary kind of satisfaction from the contemplation of another man's
impending ruin. Fitzgeorge-street and its neighbourhood had existed
without the services of a dentist, but it was very doubtful that a
dentist would be able to exist on the custom to be obtained in
Fitzgeorge-street. Mr. Sheldon may, perhaps, have pitched his tent
under the impression that wherever there was mankind there was likely
to be toothache, and that the healer of an ill so common to frail
humanity could scarcely fail to earn his bread, let him establish his
abode of horror where he might. For some time after his arrival people
watched him and wondered about him, and regarded him a little
suspiciously, in spite of the substantial clumsiness of his furniture
and the unwinking brightness of his windows. His neighbours asked one
another how long all that outward semblance of prosperity would last;
and there was sinister meaning in the question.
The Fitzgeorgians were not a little surprised, and were perhaps just a
little disappointed, on finding that the newly-established dentist did
manage to hold his ground somehow or other, and that the muslin
curtains were renewed again and again in all their spotless purity;
that the supplies of rotten-stone and oil, hearthstone and
house-flannel, were unfailing as a perennial spring; and that the
unsullied snow of Mr. Sheldon's shirt-fronts retained its primeval
whiteness. Wonderland suspicion gave place to a half-envious respect.
Whether much custom came to the dentist no one could decide. There is
no trade or profession in which the struggling man will not receive
some faint show of encouragement. Pedestrians of agonised aspect, with
handkerchiefs held convulsively before their mouths, were seen to rush
wildly towards the dentist's door, then pause for a moment, stricken by
a sudden terror, and anon feebly pull the handle of an inflexible bell.
Cabs had been heard to approach that fatal door--generally on wet days;
for there seems to be a kind of fitness in the choice of damp and
dismal weather for the extraction of teeth. Elderly ladies and
gentlemen had been known to come many times to the Fitzgeorgian
mansion. There was a legend of an old lady who had been seen to arrive
in a brougham, especially weird and nut-crackery of aspect, and to
depart half an hour afterwards a beautified and renovated creature. One
half of the Fitzgeorgians declared that Mr. Sheldon had established a
very nice little practice, and was saving money; while the other half
were still despondent, and opined that the dentist had private
property, and was eating up his little capital. It transpired in course
of time that Mr. Sheldon had left his native town of Little
Barlingford, in Yorkshire, where his father and grandfather had been
surgeon-dentists before him, to establish himself in London. He had
disposed advantageously of an excellent practice, and had transferred
his household goods--the ponderous chairs and tables, the wood whereof
had deepened and mellowed in tint under the indefatigable hand of his
grandmother--to the metropolis, speculating on the chance that his
talents and appearance, address and industry, could scarcely fail to
achieve a position. It was further known that he had a brother, an
attorney in Gray's Inn, who visited him very frequently; that he had
few other friends or acquaintance; that he was a shining example of
steadiness and sobriety; that he was on the sunnier side of thirty, a
bachelor, and very good-looking; and that his household was comprised
of a grim-visaged active old woman imported from Barlingford, a girl
who ran errands, and a boy who opened the door, attended to the
consulting-room, and did some mysterious work at odd times with a file
and sundry queer lumps of plaster-of-paris, beeswax, and bone, in a
dark little shed abutting on the yard at the back of the house. This
much had the inhabitants of Fitzgeorge-street discovered respecting Mr.
Sheldon when he had been amongst them four years; but they had
discovered no more. He had made no local acquaintances, nor had he
sought to make any. Those of his neighbours who had seen the interior
of his house had entered it as patients. They left it as much pleased
with Mr. Sheldon as one can be with a man at whose hands one has just
undergone martyrdom, and circulated a very flattering report of the
dentist's agreeable manners and delicate white handkerchief, fragrant
with the odour of eau-de-Cologne. For the rest, Philip Sheldon lived
his own life, and dreamed his own dreams. His opposite neighbours, who
watched him on sultry summer evenings as he lounged near an open window
smoking his cigar, had no more knowledge of his thoughts and fancies
than they might have had if he had been a Calmuck Tartar or an
Abyssinian chief.
CHAPTER II.
PHILIP SHELDON READS THE "LANCET."
Fitzgeorge-street was chill and dreary of aspect, under a gray March
sky, when Mr. Sheldon returned to it after a week's absence from
London. He had been to Little Barlingford, and had spent his brief
holiday among old friends and acquaintance. The weather had not been in
favour of that driving hither and thither in dog-carts, or riding
rakish horses long distances to beat up old companions, which is
accounted pleasure on such occasions. The blustrous winds of an
unusually bitter March had buffeted Mr. Sheldon in the streets of his
native town, and had almost blown him off the door-steps of his
kindred. So it is scarcely strange if he returned to town looking none
the better for his excursion. He looked considerably the worse for his
week's absence, the old Yorkshire-woman said, as she waited upon him
while he ate a chop and drank two large cups of very strong tea.
Mr. Sheldon made short work of his impromptu meal. He seemed anxious to
put an end to his housekeeper's affectionate interest in himself and
his health, and to get her out of the room. She had nursed him nearly
thirty years before, and the recollection that she had been very
familiar with him when he was a handsome black-eyed baby, with a
tendency to become suddenly stiff of body and crimson of visage without
any obvious provocation, inclined her to take occasional liberties now.
She watched him furtively as he sat in a big high-backed arm-chair
staring moodily at the struggling fire, and would fain have questioned
him a little about Barlingford and Barlingford people.
But Philip Sheldon was not a man with whom even a superannuated nurse
can venture to take many liberties. He was a good master, paid his
servants their wages with unfailing punctuality, and gave very little
trouble. But he was the last person in the world upon whom a garrulous
woman could venture to inflict her rambling discourse; as Nancy
Woolper--by courtesy, Mrs. Woolper--was fain to confess to her
next-door neighbour, Mrs. Magson, when her master was the subject of an
afternoon gossip. The heads of a household may inhabit a neighbourhood
for years without becoming acquainted even with the outward aspect of
their neighbours; but in the lordly servants' halls of the West, or the
modest kitchens of Bloomsbury, there will be interchange of civilities
and friendly "droppings in" to tea or supper, let the master of the
house be never so ungregarious a creature.
"You can take the tea-things, Nancy," Mr. Sheldon said presently,
arousing himself suddenly from that sombre reverie in which he had been
absorbed for the last ten minutes; "I am going to be very busy
to-night, and I expect Mr. George in the course of the evening. Mind, I
am not at home to anybody but him."
The old woman arranged the tea-things on her tray, but still kept a
furtive watch on her master, who sat with his head a little bent, and
his bright black eyes fixed on the fire with that intensity of gaze
peculiar to eyes which see something far away from the object they seem
to contemplate. She was in the habit of watching Mr. Sheldon rather
curiously at all times, for she had never quite got over a difficulty
in realising the fact that the black-eyed baby with whom she had been
so intimate _could_ have developed into this self-contained inflexible
young man, whose thoughts were so very far away from her. To-night she
watched him more intently than she was accustomed to do, for to-night
there was some change in his face which she was trying in a dim way to
account for.
He looked up from the fire suddenly, and found her eyes fixed upon him.
It may be that he had been disturbed by a semi-consciousness of that
curious gaze, for he looked at her angrily,--"What are you staring at,
Nancy?"
It was not the first time he had encountered her watchful eyes and
asked the same impatient question. But Mrs. Woolper possessed that
north-country quickness of intellect which is generally equal to an
emergency, and was always ready with some question or suggestion which
went to prove that she had just fixed her eyes on her master, inspired
by some anxiety about his interests.
"I was just a-thinking, sir," she said, meeting his stern glance
unflinchingly with her little sharp gray eyes, "I was just
a-thinking--you said not at home to _any one_, except Mr. George. If it
should be a person in a cab wanting their teeth out sudden--and if
anything could make toothache more general in this neighbourhood it
would be these March winds--if it should be a patient, sir, in a
cab----"
The dentist interrupted her with a short bitter laugh.
"Neither March winds nor April showers are likely to bring me patients,
Nancy, on foot or in cabs, and you ought to know it. If it's a patient,
ask him in, by all means, and give him last Saturday week's _Times_ to
read, while I rub the rust off my forceps. There, that will do; take
your tray--or, stop; I've some news to tell you." He rose, and stood
with his back to the fire and his eyes bent upon the hearthrug, while
Mrs. Woolper waited by the table, with the tray packed ready for
removal. Her master kept her waiting so for some minutes, and then
turned his face half away from her, and contemplated himself absently
in the glass while he spoke.
"You remember Mrs. Halliday?" he asked.
"I should think I did, sir; Miss Georgina Cradock that was--Miss Georgy
they called her; your first sweetheart. And how she could ever marry
that big awkward Halliday is more than I can make out. Poor fondy! I
suppose she was took with those great round blue eyes and red whiskers
of his."
"Her mother and father were 'took' by his comfortable farmhouse and
well-stocked farm, Nancy," answered Mr. Sheldon, still contemplating
himself in the glass. "Georgy had very little to do with it. She is one
of those women who let other people think for them. However, Tom is an
excellent fellow, and Georgy was a lucky girl to catch such a husband.
Any little flirtation there may have been between her and me was over
and done with long before she married Tom. It never was more than a
flirtation; and I've flirted with a good many Barlingford girls in my
time, as you know, Nancy."
It was not often that Mr. Sheldon condescended to be so communicative
to his housekeeper. The old woman nodded and chuckled, delighted by her
master's unwonted friendliness.
"I drove over to Hyley while I was at home, Nancy," continued the
dentist--he called Barlingford home still, though he had broken most of
the links that had bound him to it--"and dined with the Hallidays.
Georgy is as pretty as ever, and she and Tom get on capitally."
"Any children, sir?"
"One girl," answered Mr. Sheldon carelessly. "She's at school in
Scarborough, and I didn't see her; but I hear she's a fine bouncing
lass. I had a very pleasant day with the Hallidays. Tom has sold his
farm; that part of the world doesn't suit him, it seems--too cold and
bleak for him. He's one of those big burly-looking men who seem as if
they could knock you down with a little finger, and who shiver at every
puff of wind. I don't think he'll make old bones, Nancy. But that's
neither here nor there. I daresay he's good for another ten years; or
I'm sure I hope so, on Georgy's account."
"It was right down soft of him to sell Hyley Farm, though," said Nancy
reflectively; "I've heard tell as it's the best land for forty mile
round Barlingford. But he got a rare good price for it, I'll lay."
"O, yes; he sold the property uncommonly well, he tells me. You know if
a north-countryman gets the chance of making a profit, he never lets it
slip through his fingers."
Mrs. Woolper received this compliment to her countrymen with a
gratified grin, and Mr. Sheldon went on talking, still looking at the
reflection of his handsome face in the glass, and pulling his whiskers
meditatively.
"Now as Tom was made for a farmer and nothing but a farmer, he must
find land somewhere in a climate that does suit him; so his friends
have advised him to try a place in Devonshire or Cornwall, where he may
train his myrtles and roses over his roof, and grow green peas for the
London markets as late as November. There are such places to be had if
he bides his time, and he's coming to town next week to look about him.
So, as Georgy and he would be about as capable of taking care of
themselves in London as a couple of children, I have recommended them
to take up their quarters here. They'll have their lodgings for
nothing, and we shall chum together on the Yorkshire system; for of
course I can't afford to keep a couple of visitors for a month at a
stretch. Do you think you shall be able to manage for us, Nancy?"
"O, yes, I'll manage well enough. I'm not one of your lazy London
lasses that take half an hour to wipe a teacup. I'll manage easy
enough. Mr. and Mrs. Halliday will be having your room, I'll lay."
"Yes; give them the best room, by all means. I can sleep anywhere. And
now go downstairs and think it over, Nancy. I must get to my work. I've
some letters that must be written to-night."
Mrs. Woolper departed with her tray, gratified by her master's unwonted
familiarity, and not ill pleased by the thought of visitors. They would
cause a great deal of trouble, certainly; but the monotony of Nancy's
easy life had grown so oppressive to her as to render the idea of any
variety pleasing. And then there would be the pleasure of making that
iniquitous creature the London lass bestir herself, and there would be
furthermore the advantage of certain little perquisites which a clever
manager always secures to herself in a house where there is much eating
and drinking. Mr. Sheldon himself had lived like a modern anchorite for
the last four years; and Mrs. Woolper, who was pretty well acquainted
with the state of his finances, had pinched and contrived for his
benefit, or rather for the benefit of the black-eyed baby she had
nursed nine-and-twenty years before. For his sake she had been careful
and honest, willing to forego all the small profits to which she held
herself entitled; but if well-to-do people were going to share her
master's expenses, there would be no longer need for such scrupulous
integrity; and if things were rightly managed, Thomas Halliday might be
made to bear the entire cost of the household during his month's visit
on the Yorkshire system.
While Mrs. Woolper meditated upon her domestic duties, the master of
the domicile abandoned himself to reflections which were apparently of
a very serious character. He brought a leathern desk from a side-table,
unlocked it, and took out a quire of paper; but he made no further
advance towards the writing of those letters on account of which he had
dismissed his housekeeper. He sat, with his elbows on the table,
nibbling the end of a wooden penholder, and staring at the opposite
wall. His face looked pale and haggard in the light of the gas, and the
eyes, fixed in that vacant stare, had a feverish brightness.
Mr. Sheldon was a handsome man--eminently handsome, according to the
popular notion of masculine beauty; and if the popular ideal has been a
little vulgarised by the waxen gentlemen on whose finely-moulded
foreheads the wig-maker is wont to display the specimens of his art,
that is no discredit to Mr. Sheldon. His features were regular; the
nose a handsome aquiline; the mouth firm and well modelled; the chin
and jaw rather heavier than in the waxen ideal of the hair-dresser; the
forehead very prominent in the region of the perceptives, but obviously
wanting in the higher faculties. The eye of the phrenologist, unaided
by his fingers, must have failed to discover the secrets of Mr.
Sheldon's organisation; for one of the dentist's strong points was his
hair, which was very luxuriant, and which he wore in artfully-arranged
masses that passed for curls, but which owed their undulating grace
rather to a skilful manipulation than to any natural tendency. It has
been said that the rulers of the world are straight-haired men; and Mr.
Sheldon might have been a Napoleon III. so far as regards this special
attribute. His hair was of a dense black, and his whiskers of the same
sombre hue. These carefully-arranged whiskers were another of the
dentist's strong points; and the third strong point was his teeth, the
perfection whereof was a fine advertisement when considered in a
professional light. The teeth were rather too large and square for a
painter's or a poet's notion of beauty, and were apt to suggest an
unpleasant image of some sleek brindled creature crunching human bones
in an Indian jungle. But they were handsome teeth notwithstanding, and
their flashing whiteness made an effective contrast to the clear sallow
tint of the dentist's complexion.
Mr. Sheldon was a man of industrious habits,--fond indeed of work, and
distinguished by a persistent activity in the carrying out of any
labour he had planned for himself. He was not prone to the indulgence
of idle reveries or agreeable day-dreams. Thought with him was labour;
it was the "thinking out" of future work to be done, and it was an
operation as precise and mathematical as the actual labour that
resulted therefrom. The contents of his brain were as well kept as a
careful trader's ledger. He had his thoughts docketed and indexed, and
rarely wasted the smallest portion of his time in searching for an
idea. Tonight he sat thinking until he was interrupted by a loud double
knock, which was evidently familiar to him, for he muttered "George!"
pushed aside his desk, and took up his stand upon the hearthrug, ready
to receive the expected visitor.
There was the sound of a man's voice below,--very like Philip Sheldon's
own voice; then a quick firm tread on the stairs; and then the door was
opened, and a man, who himself was very like Philip Sheldon, came into
the room. This was the dentist's brother George, two years his junior.
The likeness between the two men was in no way marvellous, but it was
nevertheless very obvious. You could scarcely have mistaken one man for
the other, but you could hardly have failed to perceive that the two
men were brothers. They resembled each other more closely in form than
in face. They were of the same height--both tall and strongly built.
Both had black eyes with a hard brightness in them, black whiskers,
black hair, sinewy hands with prominent knuckles, square finger-tops,
and bony wrists. Each man seemed the personification of savage health
and vigour, smoothed and shapened in accordance with the prejudices of
civilised life. Looking at these two men for the first time, you might
approve or disapprove their appearance; they might impress you
favourably or unfavourably; but you could scarcely fail to be reminded
vaguely of strong, bright-eyed, savage creatures, beautiful and
graceful after their kind, but dangerous and fatal to man.
The brothers greeted each other with a friendly nod. They were a great
deal too practical to indulge in any sentimental display of fraternal
affection. They liked each other very well, and were useful to each
other, and took their pleasure together on those rare occasions when
they were weak enough to waste time upon unprofitable pleasure; but
neither of them would have comprehended the possibility of anything
beyond this.
"Well, old fellow," said George, "I'm glad you're back again. You're
looking rather seedy, though. I suppose you knocked about a good deal
down there?"
"I had a night or two of it with Halliday and the old set. He's going
it rather fast."
"Humph!" muttered Mr. Sheldon the younger; "it's a pity he doesn't go
it a little faster, and go off the hooks altogether, so that you might
marry Georgy."
"How do I know that Georgy would have me, if he did leave her a widow?"
asked Philip dubiously.
"O, she'd have you fast enough. She used to be very sweet upon you
before she married Tom; and even if she has forgotten all that, she'd
have you if you asked her. She'd be afraid to say no. She was always
more or less afraid of you, you know, Phil."
"I don't know about that. She was a nice little thing enough; but she
knew how to drop a poor sweetheart and take up with a rich one, in
spite of her simplicity."
"O, that was the old parties' doing. Georgy would have jumped into a
cauldron of boiling oil if her mother and father had told her she must
do it. Don't you remember when we were children together how afraid she
used to be of spoiling her frocks? I don't believe she married Tom
Halliday of her own free will, any more than she stood in the corner of
her own free will after she'd torn her frock, as I've seen her stand
twenty times. She stood in the corner because they told her she must;
and she married Tom for the same reason, and I don't suppose she's been
particularly happy with him."
"Well, that's her look-out," answered Philip gloomily; "I know I want a
rich wife badly enough. Things are about as bad with me as they can be."
"I suppose they _are_ rather piscatorial. The elderly dowagers don't
come up to time, eh? Very few orders for the complete set at
ten-pound-ten?"
"I took about seventy pounds last year," said the dentist, "and my
expenses are something like five pounds a week. I've been making up the
deficiency out of the money I got for the Barlingford business,
thinking I should be able to stand out and make a connection; but the
connection gets more disconnected every year. I suppose people came to
me at first for the novelty of the thing, for I had a sprinkling of
decent patients for the first twelve months or so. But now I might as
well throw my money into the gutter as spend it on circulars or
advertisements."
"And a young woman with twenty thousand pounds and something amiss with
her jaw hasn't turned up yet!"
"No, nor an old woman either. I wouldn't stick at the age, if the money
was all right," answered Mr. Sheldon bitterly.
The younger brother shrugged his shoulders and plunged his hands into
his trousers-pockets with a gesture of seriocomic despair. He was the
livelier of the two, and affected a slanginess of dress and talk and
manner, a certain "horsey" style, very different from his elder
brother's studied respectability of costume and bearing. His clothes
were of a loose sporting cut, and always odorous with stale tobacco. He
wore a good deal of finery in the shape of studs and pins and dangling
lockets and fusee-boxes; his whiskers were more obtrusive than his
brother's, and he wore a moustache in addition--a thick ragged black
moustache, which would have become a guerilla chieftain rather than a
dweller amidst the quiet courts and squares of Gray's Inn. His position
as a lawyer was not much better than that of Philip as a dentist; but
he had his own plans for making a fortune, and hoped to win for himself
a larger fortune than is often made in the law. He was a hunter of
genealogies, a grubber-up of forgotten facts, a joiner of broken links,
a kind of legal resurrectionist, a digger in the dust and ashes of the
past; and he expected in due time to dig up a treasure rich enough to
reward the labour and patience of half a lifetime.
"I can afford to wait till I'm forty for my good luck," he said to his
brother sometimes in moments of expansion; "and then I shall have ten
years in which to enjoy myself, and twenty more in which I shall have
life enough left to eat good dinners and drink good wine, and grumble
about the degeneracy of things in general, after the manner of elderly
human nature."
The men stood one on each side of the hearth; George looking at his
brother, Philip looking down at the fire, with his eyes shaded by their
thick black lashes. The fire had become dull and hollow. George bent
down presently and stirred the coals impatiently.
"If there's one thing I hate more than, another--and I hate a good many
things--it's a bad fire," he said. "How's Barlingford--lively as ever,
I suppose?"
"Not much livelier than it was when we left it. Things have gone amiss
with me in London, and I've been more than once sorely tempted to make
an end of my difficulties with a razor or a few drops of prussic acid;
but when I saw the dull gray streets and the square gray houses, and
the empty market-place, and the Baptist chapel, and the Unitarian
chapel, and the big stony church, and heard the dreary bells
ding-donging for evening service, I wondered how I could ever have
existed a week in such a place. I had rather sweep a crossing in London
than occupy the best house in Barlingford, and I told Tom Halliday so."
"And Tom is coming to London I understand by your letter."
"Yes, he has sold Hyley, and wants to find a place in the west of
England. The north doesn't suit his chest. He and Georgy are coming up
to town for a few weeks, so I've asked them to stay here. I may as well
make some use of the house, for it's very little good in a professional
sense."
"Humph!" muttered George; "I don't see your motive."
"I have no particular motive. Tom's a good fellow, and his company will
be better than an empty house. The visit won't cost me
anything--Halliday is to go shares in the housekeeping."
"Well, you may find it answer that way," replied Mr. Sheldon the
younger, who considered that every action of a man's life ought to be
made to "answer" in some way. "But I should think you would be rather
bored by the arrangement: Tom's a very good fellow in his way, and a
great friend of mine, but he's rather an empty-headed animal."
The subject dropped here, and the brothers went on talking of
Barlingford and Barlingford people--the few remaining kindred whose
existence made a kind of link between the two men and their native
town, and the boon companions of their early manhood. The dentist
produced the remnant of a bottle of whisky from the sideboard, and rang
for hot water and sugar, wherewith to brew grog, for his own and his
brother's refreshment; but the conversation flagged nevertheless.
Philip Sheldon was dull and absent, answering his companion at random
every now and then, much to that gentleman's aggravation; and he owned
at last to being thoroughly tired and worn out.
"The journey from Barlingford in a slow train is no joke, you know,
George, and I couldn't afford the express," he said apologetically,
when his brother upbraided him for his distraction of manner.
"Then I should think you'd better go to bed," answered Mr. Sheldon the
younger, who had smoked a couple of cigars, and consumed the contents
of the whisky-bottle; "so I'll take myself off. I told you how
uncommonly seedy you were looking when I first came in. When do you
expect Tom and his wife?"
"At the beginning of next week."
"So soon! Well, good-night, old fellow; I shall see you before they
come, I daresay. You might as well drop in upon me at my place
to-morrow night. I'm hard at work on a job."
"Your old kind of work?"
"O, yes. I don't get much work of any other kind."
"And I'm afraid you'll never get much good out of that."
"I don't know. A man who sits down to whist may have a run of ill-luck
before he gets a decent hand; but the good cards are sure to come if he
only sits long enough. Every man has his chance, depend upon it, Phil,
if he knows how to watch for it; but there are so many men who get
tired and go to sleep before their chances come to them. I've wasted a
good deal of time, and a good deal of labour; but the ace of trumps is
in the pack, and it must turn up sooner or later. Ta-ta."
George Sheldon nodded and departed, whistling gaily as he walked away
from his brother's door. Philip heard him, and turned his chair to the
fire with a movement of impatience.
"You may be uncommonly clever, my dear George," soliloquised the
dentist, "but you'll never make a fortune by reading wills and hunting
in parish-registers for heirs-at-law. A big lump of money is not very
likely to go a-begging while any one who can fudge up the faintest
pretence of a claim to it is above ground. No, no, my lad, you must
find a better way than that before you'll make your fortune."
The fire had burnt low again, and Mr. Sheldon sat staring gloomily at
the blackening coals. Things were very bad with him--he had not cared
to confess how bad they were, when he had discussed his affairs with
his brother. Those neighbours and passers-by who admired the trim
brightness of the dentist's abode had no suspicion that the master of
that respectable house was in the hands of the Jews, and that the
hearthstone which whitened his door-step was paid for out of
Israelitish coffers. The dentist's philosophy was all of this world,
and he knew that the soldier of fortune, who would fain be a conqueror
in the great battle, must needs keep his plumage undrabbled and the
golden facings of his uniform untarnished, let his wounds be never so
desperate.
Having found his attempt to establish a practice in Fitzgeorge-street a
failure, the only course open to Mr. Sheldon, as a man of the world,
was to transfer his failure to somebody else, with more or less profit
to himself. To this end he preserved the spotless purity of his muslin
curtains, though the starch that stiffened them and the
bleaching-powder that whitened them were bought with money for which he
was to pay sixty per cent. To this end he nursed that wan shadow of a
practice, and sustained that appearance of respectability which, in a
world where appearance stands for so much, is in itself a kind of
capital. It certainly was dull dreary work to hold the citadel of No.
14 Fitzgeorge-street, against the besieger Poverty; but the dentist
stood his ground pertinaciously, knowing that if he only waited long
enough, the dupe who was to be his victim would come, and knowing also
that there might arrive a day when it would be very useful for him to
be able to refer to four years' unblemished respectability as a
Bloomsbury householder. He had his lines set in several shady places
for that unhappy fish with a small capital, and he had been tantalised
by more than one nibble; but he made no open show of his desire to sell
his business--since a business that is obviously in the market seems
scarcely worth any man's purchase.
Things had of late grown worse with him every day; for every interval
of twenty-four hours sinks a man so much the deeper in the mire when
renewed accommodation-bills with his name upon them are ripening in the
iron safes of Judah. Philip Sheldon found himself sinking gradually and
almost imperceptibly into that bottomless pit of difficulty in whose
black depths the demon Insolvency holds his dreary court. While his
little capital lasted he had kept himself clear of debt, but that being
exhausted, and his practice growing worse day by day, he had been fain
to seek assistance from money-lenders; and now even the money-lenders
were tired of him. The chair in which he sat, the poker which he swung
slowly to and fro as he bent over his hearth, were not his own. One of
his Jewish creditors had a bill of sale on his furniture, and he might
come home any day to find the auctioneer's bills plastered against the
wall of his house, and the auctioneer's clerk busy with the catalogue
of his possessions. If the expected victim came now to buy his
practice, the sacrifice would be made too late to serve his interest.
The men who had lent him the money would be the sole gainers by the
bargain.
Seldom does a man find himself face to face with a blacker prospect
than that which lay before Philip Sheldon; and yet his manner to-night
was not the dull blank apathy of despair. It was the manner of a man
whose brain is occupied by busy thoughts; who has some elaborate scheme
to map out and arrange before he is called upon to carry his plans into
action.
"It would be a good business for me," he muttered, "if I had pluck
enough to carry it through."
The fire went out as he sat swinging the poker backwards and forwards.
The clocks of Bloomsbury and St. Pancras struck twelve, and still
Philip Sheldon pondered and plotted by that dreary hearth. The servants
had retired at eleven, after a good deal of blundering with bars and
shutters, and unnecessary banging of doors. That unearthly silence
peculiar to houses after midnight reigned in Mr. Sheldon's domicile,
and he could hear the voices of distant roisterers, and the miauling of
neighbouring cats, with a painful distinctness as he sat brooding in
his silent room. The fact that a mahogany chiffonier in a corner gave
utterance to a faint groan occasionally, as of some feeble creature in
pain, afforded him no annoyance. He was superior to superstitious
fancies, and all the rappings and scratchings of spirit-land would have
failed to disturb his equanimity. He was a strictly practical man--one
of those men who are always ready, with a stump of lead-pencil and the
back of a letter, to reduce everything in creation to figures.
"I had better read up that business before they come," he said, when he
had to all appearance "thought out" the subject of his reverie. "No
time so good as this for doing it quietly. One never knows who is
spying about in the daytime." He looked at his watch, and then went to
a cupboard, where there were bundles of wood and matches and old
newspapers,--for it was his habit to light his own fire occasionally
when he worked unusually late at night or early in the morning. He
relighted his fire now as cleverly as any housemaid in Bloomsbury, and
stood watching it till it burned briskly. Then he lit a taper, and went
downstairs to the professional torture-chamber. The tall horsehair
chair looked unutterably awful in the dim glimmer of the taper, and a
nervous person could almost have fancied it occupied by the ghost of
some patient who had expired under the agony of the forceps. Mr.
Sheldon lighted the gas in a movable branch which he was in the habit
of turning almost into the mouths of the patients who consulted him at
night. There was a cupboard on each side of the mantelpiece, and it was
in these two cupboards that the dentist kept his professional library.
His books did not form a very valuable collection, but he kept the
cupboards constantly locked nevertheless.
He took the key from his waistcoat-pocket, opened one of the cupboards,
and selected a book from a row of dingy-looking volumes. He carried the
book to the room above, where he seated himself under the gas, and
opened the volume at a place in which there was a scrap of paper,
evidently left there as a mark. The book was a volume of the _Lancet_,
and in this book he read with close attention until the Bloomsbury
clocks struck three.
CHAPTER III.
MR. AND MRS. HALLIDAY.
Mr. Sheldon's visitors arrived in due course. They were provincial
people of the middle class, accounted monstrously genteel in their own
neighbourhood, but in nowise resembling Londoners of the same rank.
Mr. Thomas Halliday was a big, loud-spoken, good-tempered Yorkshireman,
who had inherited a comfortable little estate from a plodding,
money-making father, and for whom life had been very easy. He was a
farmer, and nothing but a farmer; a man for whom the supremest pleasure
of existence was a cattle-show or a country horse-fair. The farm upon
which he had been born and brought up was situated about six miles from
Barlingford, and all the delights of his boyhood and youth were
associated with that small market town. He and the two Sheldons had
been schoolfellows, and afterwards boon companions, taking such
pleasure as was obtainable in Barlingford together; flirting with the
same provincial beauties at prim tea-parties in the winter, and getting
up friendly picnics in the summer--picnics at which eating and drinking
were the leading features of the day's entertainment. Mr. Halliday had
always regarded George and Philip Sheldon with that reverential
admiration which a stupid man, who is conscious of his own mental
inferiority, generally feels for a clever friend and companion. But he
was also fully aware of the advantage which a rich man possesses over a
poor one, and would not have exchanged the fertile acres of Hyley for
the intellectual gifts of his schoolfellows. He had found the
substantial value of his comfortably furnished house and well-stocked
farm when he and his friend Philip Sheldon became suitors for the hand
of Georgina Cradock, youngest daughter of a Barlingford attorney, who
lived next door to the Barlingford dentist, Philip Sheldon's father.
Philip and the girl had been playfellows in the long-walled gardens
behind the two houses, and there had been a brotherly and sisterly
intimacy between the juvenile members of the two families. But when
Philip and Georgina met at the Barlingford tea-parties in later years,
the parental powers frowned upon any renewal of that childish
friendship. Miss Cradock had no portion, and the worthy solicitor her
father was a prudent man, who was apt to look for the promise of
domestic happiness in the plate-basket and the linen-press, rather than
for such superficial qualifications as black whiskers and white teeth.
So poor Philip was "thrown over the bridge," as he said himself, and
Georgy Cradock married Mr. Halliday, with all attendant ceremony and
splendour, according to the "lights" of Barlingford gentry.
But this provincial bride's story was no passionate record of anguish
and tears. The Barlingford Juliet had liked Romeo as much as she was
capable of liking any one; but when Papa Capulet insisted on her union
with Paris, she accepted her destiny with decent resignation, and, in
the absence of any sympathetic father confessor, was fain to seek
consolation from a more mundane individual in the person of the
Barlingford milliner. Nor did Philip Sheldon give evidence of any
extravagant despair. His father was something of a doctor as well as a
dentist; and there were plenty of dark little phials lurking on the
shelves of his surgery in which the young man could have found "mortal
drugs" without the aid of the apothecary, had he been so minded.
Happily no such desperate idea ever occurred to him in connection with
his grief. He held himself sulkily aloof from Mr. and Mrs. Halliday for
some time after their marriage, and allowed people to see that he
considered himself very hardly used; but Prudence, which had always
been Philip Sheldon's counsellor, proved herself also his consoler in
this crisis of his life. A careful consideration of his own interests
led him to perceive that the successful result of his love-suit would
have been about the worst thing that could have happened to him.
Georgina had no money. All was said in that. As the young dentist's
worldly wisdom ripened with experience, he discovered that the worldly
ease of the best man in Barlingford was something like that of a
canary-bird who inhabits a clean cage and is supplied with abundant
seed and water. The cage is eminently comfortable, and the sleepy,
respectable, elderly bird sighs for no better abiding-place, no wider
prospect than that patch of the universe which he sees between the
bars. But now and then there is hatched a wild young fledgeling, which
beats its wings against the inexorable wires, and would fain soar away
into that wide outer world, to prosper or perish in its freedom.
Before Georgy had been married a year, her sometime lover had fully
resigned himself to the existing state of things, and was on the best
possible terms with his friend Tom. He could eat his dinner in the
comfortable house at Hyley with an excellent appetite; for there was a
gulf between him and his old love far wider than any that had been dug
by that ceremonial in the parish church of Barlingford. Philip Sheldon
had awakened to the consciousness that life in his native town was
little more than a kind of animal vegetation--the life of some pulpy
invertebrate creature, which sprawls helplessly upon the sands whereon
the wave has deposited it, and may be cloven in half without feeling
itself noticeably worse for the operation. He had awakened to the
knowledge that there was a wider and more agreeable world beyond that
little provincial borough, and that a handsome face and figure and a
vigorous intellect were commodities for which there must be some kind
of market.
Once convinced of the utter worthlessness of his prospects in
Barlingford, Mr. Sheldon turned his eyes Londonwards; and his father
happening at the same time very conveniently to depart this life,
Philip, the son and heir, disposed of the business to an aspiring young
practitioner, and came to the metropolis, where he made that futile
attempt to establish himself which has been described.
The dentist had wasted four years in London, and ten years had gone by
since Georgy's wedding; and now for the first time he had an
opportunity of witnessing the domestic happiness or the domestic misery
of the woman who had jilted him, and the man who had been his
successful rival. He set himself to watch them with the cool
deliberation of a social anatomist, and he experienced very little
difficulty in the performance of this moral dissection. They were
established under his roof, his companions at every meal; and they were
a kind of people who discuss their grievances and indulge in their
"little differences" with perfect freedom in the presence of a third,
or a fourth, or even a fifth party.
Mr. Sheldon was wise enough to preserve a strict neutrality. He would
take up a newspaper at the beginning of a little difference, and lay it
down when the little difference was finished, with the most perfect
assumption of unconsciousness; but it is doubtful whether the
matrimonial disputants were sufficiently appreciative of this good
breeding. They would have liked to have had Mr. Sheldon for a court of
appeal; and a little interference from him would have given zest to
their quarrels. Meanwhile Philip watched them slyly from the covert of
his newspaper, and formed his own conclusions about them. If he was
pleased to see that his false love's path was not entirely
rose-bestrewn, or if he rejoiced at beholding the occasional annoyance
of his rival, he allowed no evidence of his pleasure to appear in his
face or manner.
Georgina Cradock's rather insipid prettiness had developed into
matronly comeliness. Her fair complexion and pink cheeks had lost none
of their freshness. Her smooth auburn hair was as soft and bright as it
had been when she had braided it preparatory to a Barlingford tea-party
in the days of her spinsterhood. She was a pretty, weak little woman,
whose education had never gone beyond the routine of a provincial
boarding-school, and who believed that she had attained all necessary
wisdom in having mastered Pinnock's abridgments of Goldsmith's
histories and the rudiments of the French language. She was a woman who
thought that the perfection of feminine costume was a moire-antique
dress and a conspicuous gold chain. She was a woman who considered a
well-furnished house and a horse and gig the highest form of earthly
splendour or prosperity.
This was the shallow commonplace creature whom Philip Sheldon had once
admired and wooed. He looked at her now, and wondered how he could ever
have felt even as much as he had felt on her account. But he had little
leisure to devote to any such abstract and useless consideration. He
had his own affairs to think about, and they were very desperate.
In the meantime Mr. and Mrs. Halliday occupied themselves in the
pursuit of pleasure or business, as the case might be. They were eager
for amusement: went to exhibitions in the day and to theatres at night,
and came home to cozy little suppers in Fitzgeorge-street, after which
Mr. Halliday was wont to waste the small hours in friendly conversation
with his quondam companion, and in the consumption of much
brandy-and-water.
Unhappily for Georgy, these halcyon days were broken by intervals of
storm and cloud. The weak little woman was afflicted with that
intermittent fever called jealousy; and the stalwart Thomas was one of
those men who can scarcely give the time of day to a feminine
acquaintance without some ornate and loud-spoken gallantry. Having no
intellectual resources wherewith to beguile the tedium of his idle
prosperous life, he was fain to seek pleasure in the companionship of
other men; and had thus become a haunter of tavern parlours and small
racecourses, being always ready for any amusement his friends proposed
to him. It followed, therefore, that he was very often absent from his
commonplace substantial home, and his pretty weak-minded wife. And poor
Georgy had ample food for her jealous fears and suspicions; for where
might a man not be who was so seldom at home? She had never been
particularly fond of her husband, but that was no reason why she should
not be particularly jealous about him; and her jealousy betrayed itself
in a peevish worrying fashion, which was harder to bear than the
vengeful ferocity of a Clytemnestra. It was in vain that Thomas
Halliday and those jolly good fellows his friends and companions
attested the Arcadian innocence of racecourses, and the perfect purity
of that smoky atmosphere peculiar to tavern parlours. Georgy's
suspicions were too vague for refutation; but they were nevertheless
sufficient ground for all the alternations of temper--from stolid
sulkiness to peevish whining, from murmured lamentations to loud
hysterics--to which the female temperament is liable.
In the meantime poor honest, loud-spoken Tom did all in his power to
demonstrate his truth and devotion. He bought his wife as many stiff
silk gowns and gaudy Barlingford bonnets as she chose to sigh for. He
made a will, in which she was sole legatee, and insured his life in
different offices to the amount of five thousand pounds.
"I'm the sort of fellow that's likely to go off the hooks suddenly, you
know, Georgy," he said, "and your poor dad was always anxious I should
make things square for you. I don't suppose you're likely to marry
again, my lass, so I've no need to tie up Lottie's little fortune. I
must trust some one, and I'd better confide in my little wife than in
some canting methodistical fellow of a trustee, who would speculate my
daughter's money upon some Stock-Exchange hazard, and levant to
Australia when it was all swamped. If you can't trust me, Georgy, I'll
let you see that I can trust you", added Tom reproachfully.
Whereupon poor weak little Mrs. Halliday murmured plaintively that she
did not want fortunes or life insurances, but that she wanted her
husband to stay at home, content with the calm and rather sleepy
delights of his own fireside. Poor Tom was wont to promise amendment,
and would keep his promise faithfully so long as no supreme temptation,
in the shape of a visit from some friend of the jolly-good-fellow
species, arose to vanquish his good resolutions. But a good-tempered,
generous-hearted young man who farms his own land, has three or four
good horses in his stable, a decent cellar of honest port and
sherry--"none of your wishy-washy sour stuff in the way of hock or
claret," cried Tom Halliday--and a very comfortable balance at his
banker's, finds it no easy matter to shake off friends of the
jolly-good-fellow fraternity.
In London Mr. Halliday found the spirit of jolly-dog-ism rampant.
George Sheldon had always been his favourite of these two brothers; and
it was George who lured him from the safe shelter of Fitzgeorge-street
and took him to mysterious haunts, whence he returned long after
midnight, boisterous of manner and unsteady of gait, and with garments
reeking of stale tobacco-smoke.
He was always good-tempered, even after these diabolical orgies on some
unknown Brocken, and protested indistinctly that there was no
harm,--"'pon m' wor', ye know, ol' gur'! Geor' an' me--half-doz'
oyst'r--c'gar--botl' p'l ale--str't home," and much more to the same
effect. When did any married man ever take more than half a dozen
oysters--or take any undomestic pleasure for his own satisfaction? It
is always those incorrigible bachelors, Thomas, Richard, or Henry, who
hinder the unwilling Benedick from returning to his sacred Lares and
Penates.
Poor Georgy was not to be pacified by protestations about oysters and
cigars from the lips of a husband who was thick of utterance, and who
betrayed a general imbecility of mind and unsteadiness of body. This
London excursion, which had begun in sunshine, threatened to end in
storm and darkness. George Sheldon and his set had taken possession of
the young farmer; and Georgy had no better amusement in the long
blustrous March evenings than to sit at her work under the flaming gas
in Mr. Sheldon's drawing-room, while that gentleman--who rarely joined
in the dissipations of his friend and his brother--occupied himself
with mechanical dentistry in the chamber of torture below.
Fitzgeorge-street in general, always on the watch to discover evidences
of impecuniosity or doubtful morality on the part of any one citizen in
particular, could find no food for scandal in the visit of Mr. and Mrs.
Halliday to their friend and countryman. It had been noised abroad,
through the agency of Mrs. Woolper, that Mr. Sheldon had been a suitor
for the lady's hand, and had been jilted by her. The Fitzgeorgians had
been, therefore, especially on the alert to detect any sign of
backsliding in the dentist. There would have been much pleasant
discussion in kitchens and back-parlours if Mr. Sheldon had been
particularly attentive to his fair guest; but it speedily became known,
always by the agency of Mrs. Woolper and that phenomenon of idleness
and iniquity, the London "girl," that Mr. Sheldon was not by any means
attentive to the pretty young woman from Yorkshire; but that he
suffered her to sit alone hour after hour in her husband's absence,
with no amusement but her needlework wherewith to "pass the time,"
while he scraped and filed and polished those fragments of bone which
were to assist in the renovation of decayed beauty.
The third week of Mr. and Mrs. Halliday's visit was near its close, and
as yet the young farmer had arrived at no decision as to the subject
which had brought him to London. The sale of Hyley Farm was an
accomplished fact, and the purchase-money duly bestowed at Tom's
banker's; but very little had been done towards finding the new
property which was to be a substitute for the estate his father and
grandfather had farmed before him. He had seen auctioneers, and had
brought home plans of estates in Herefordshire and Devonshire, Cornwall
and Somersetshire, all of which seemed to be, in their way, the most
perfect things imaginable--land of such fertility as one would scarcely
expect to find out of Arcadia--live stock which seemed beyond all
price, to be taken at a valuation.--roads and surrounding neighbourhood
unparalleled in beauty and convenience--outbuildings that must have
been the very archetypes of barns and stables--a house which to inhabit
would be to adore. But as yet he had seen none of these peerless
domains. He was waiting for decent weather in which to run down to the
West and "look about him," as he said to himself. In the meantime the
blustrous March weather, which was so unsuited to long railroad
journeys, and all that waiting about at junctions and at little windy
stations on branch lines, incidental to the inspection of estates
scattered over a large area of country, served very well for
"jolly-dog-ism;" and what with a hand at cards in George Sheldon's
chambers, and another hand at cards in somebody else's chambers, and a
run down to an early meeting at Newmarket, and an evening at some rooms
where there was something to be seen which was as near prize-fighting
as the law allowed, and other evenings in unknown regions, Mr. Halliday
found time slipping by him, and his domestic peace vanishing away.
It was on an evening at the end of this third week that Mr. Sheldon
abandoned his mechanical dentistry for once in a way, and ascended to
the drawing-room where poor Georgy sat busy with that eternal
needlework, but for which melancholy madness would surely overtake many
desolate matrons in houses whose common place comfort and respectable
dulness are more dismal than the picturesque dreariness of a moated
grange amid the Lincolnshire fens. To the masculine mind this
needlework seems nothing more than a purposeless stabbing and sewing of
strips of calico; but to lonely womanhood it is the prison-flower of
the captive, it is the spider of Latude.
Mr. Sheldon brought his guest an evening newspaper.
"There's an account of the opening of Parliament," he said, "which you
may perhaps like to see. I wish I had a piano, or some female
acquaintances to drop in upon you. I am afraid you must be dull in
these long evenings when Tom is out of the way."
"I am indeed dull," Mrs. Halliday answered peevishly; "and if Tom cared
for me, he wouldn't leave me like this evening after evening. But he
doesn't care for me."
Mr Sheldon laid down the newspaper, and seated himself opposite his
guest. He sat for a few minutes in silence, beating time to some
imaginary air with the tips of his fingers on the old-fashioned
mahogany table. Then he said, with a half-smile upon his face,--
"But surely Tom is the best of husbands! He has been a little wild
since his coming to London, I know; but then you see he doesn't often
come to town."
"He's just as bad in Yorkshire," Georgy answered gloomily; "he's always
going to Barlingford with somebody or other, or to meet some of his old
friends. I'm sure, if I had known what he was, I would never have
married him."
"Why, I thought he was such a good husband. He was telling me only a
few days ago how he had made a will leaving you every sixpence he
possesses, without reservation, and how he has insured his life for
five thousand pounds."
"O yes, I know that; but I don't call _that_ being a good husband. I
don't want him to leave me his money. I don't want him to die. I want
him to stay at home."
"Poor Tom! I'm afraid he's not the sort of man for that kind of thing.
He likes change and amusement. You married a rich man, Mrs. Halliday;
you made your choice, you know, without regard to the feelings of any
one else. You sacrificed truth and honour to your own inclination, or
your own interest, I do not know, and do not ask which. If the bargain
has turned out a bad one, that's your look-out."
Philip Sheldon sat with his folded arms resting on the little table and
his eyes fixed on Georgy's face. They could be very stern and hard and
cruel, those bright black eyes, and Mrs. Halliday grew first red and
then pale under their searching gaze. She had seen Mr. Sheldon very
often during the years of her married life, but this was the first time
he had ever said anything to her that sounded like a reproach. The
dentist's eyes softened a little as he watched her, not with any
special tenderness, but with an expression of half-disdainful
compassion--such as a strong stern man might feel for a foolish child.
He could see that this woman was afraid of him, and it served his
interests that she should fear him. He had a purpose in everything he
did, and his purpose to-night was to test the strength of his influence
over Georgina Halliday. In the old time before her marriage that
influence had been very strong. It was for him to discover now whether
it still endured.
"You made your choice, Mrs. Halliday," he went on presently, "and it
was a choice which all prudent people must have approved. What chance
had a man, who was only heir to a practice worth four or five hundred
pounds, against the inheritor of Hyley Farm with its two hundred and
fifty acres, and three thousand pounds' worth of live stock, plant, and
working capital? When do the prudent people ever stop to consider truth
and honour, or old promises, or an affection that dates from childhood?
They calculate everything by pounds, shillings, and pence; and
according to their mode of reckoning you were in the right when you
jilted me to marry Tom Halliday."
Georgy laid down her work and took out her handkerchief. She was one of
those women who take refuge in tears when they find themselves at a
disadvantage. Tears had always melted honest Tom, was his wrath never
so dire, and tears would no doubt subdue Philip Sheldon.
But Georgy had to discover that the dentist was made of a stuff very
different from that softer clay which composed the rollicking
good-tempered farmer. Mr. Sheldon watched her tears with the
cold-blooded deliberation of a scientific experimentalist. He was glad
to find that he could make her cry. She was a necessary instrument in
the working out of certain plans that he had made for himself, and he
was anxious to discover whether she was likely to be a plastic
instrument. He knew that her love for him had never been worth much at
its best, and that the poor little flickering flame had been utterly
extinguished by nine years of commonplace domesticity and petty
jealousy. But his purpose was one that would be served as well by her
fear as by her love, and he had set himself to-night to gauge his power
in relation to this poor weak creature.
"It's very unkind of you to say such dreadful things, Mr. Sheldon," she
whimpered presently; "you know very well that my marriage with Tom was
pa's doing, and not mine. I'm sure if I'd known how he would stay out
night after night, and come home in such dreadful states time after
time, I never would have consented to marry him."
"Wouldn't you?--O yes, you would. If you were a widow to-morrow, and
free to marry again, you would choose just such another man as Tom--a
man who laughs loud, and pays flourishing compliments, and drives a gig
with a high-stepping horse. That's the sort of man women like, and
that's the sort of man you'd marry."
"I'm sure I shouldn't marry at all," answered Mrs. Halliday, in a voice
that was broken by little gasping sobs. "I have seen enough of the
misery of married life. But I don't want Tom to die, unkind as he is to
me. People are always saying that he won't make old bones--how horrid
it is to talk of a person's bones!--and I'm sure I sometimes make
myself wretched about him, as he knows, though he doesn't thank me for
it."
And here Mrs Halliday's sobs got the better of her utterance, and Mr.
Sheldon was fain to say something of a consolatory nature.
"Come, come," he said, "I won't tease you any more. That's against the
laws of hospitality, isn't it?--only there are some things which you
can't expect a man to forget, you know. However, let bygones be
bygones. As for poor old Tom, I daresay he'll live to be a hale, hearty
old man, in spite of the croakers. People always will croak about
something; and it's a kind of fashion to say that a big, hearty,
six-foot man is a fragile blossom likely to be nipped by any wintry
blast. Come, come, Mrs. Halliday, your husband mustn't discover that
I've been making you cry when he comes home. He may be home early this
evening, perhaps; and if he is, we'll have an oyster supper, and a chat
about old times."
Mrs. Halliday shook her head dolefully.
"It's past ten o'clock already," she said, "and I don't suppose Tom
will be home till after twelve. He doesn't like my sitting up for him;
but I wonder _what_ time he would come home if I didn't sit up for him?"
"Let's hope for the best," exclaimed Mr. Sheldon cheerfully. "I'll go
and see about the oysters."
"Don't get them for me, or for Tom," protested Mrs. Halliday; "he will
have had his supper when he comes home, you may be sure, and I couldn't
eat a morsel of anything."
To this resolution Mrs. Halliday adhered; so the dentist was fain to
abandon all jovial ideas in relation to oysters and pale ale. But he
did not go back to his mechanical dentistry. He sat opposite his
visitor, and watched her, silently and thoughtfully, for some time as
she worked. She had brushed away her tears, but she looked very peevish
and miserable, and took out her watch several times in an hour. Mr.
Sheldon made two or three feeble attempts at conversation, but the talk
languished and expired on each occasion, and they sat on in silence.
Little by little the dentist's attention seemed to wander away from his
guest. He wheeled his chair round, and sat looking at the fire with the
same fixed gloom upon his face which had darkened it on the night of
his return from Yorkshire. Things had been so desperate with him of
late, that he had lost his old orderly habit of thinking out a business
at one sitting, and making an end of all deliberation and hesitation
about it. There were subjects that forced themselves upon his thoughts,
and certain ideas which repeated themselves with a stupid persistence.
He was such an eminently practical man, that this disorder of his brain
troubled him more even than the thoughts that made the disorder. He sat
in the same attitude for a long while, scarcely conscious of Mrs.
Halliday's presence, not at all conscious of the progress of time.
Georgy had been right in her gloomy forebodings of bad behaviour on the
part of Mr. Halliday. It was nearly one o'clock when a loud double
knock announced that gentleman's return. The wind had been howling
drearily, and a sharp, slanting rain had been pattering against the
windows for the last half-hour, while Mrs. Halliday's breast had been
racked by the contending emotions of anxiety and indignation.
"I suppose he couldn't get a cab," she exclaimed, as the knock startled
her from her listening attitude--for however intently a midnight
watcher may be listening for the returning wanderer's knock, it is not
the less startling when it comes. "And he has walked home through the
wet, and now he'll have a violent cold, I daresay," added Georgy
peevishly.
"Then it's lucky for him he's in a doctor's house," answered Mr.
Sheldon, with a smile. He was a handsome man, no doubt, according to
the popular idea of masculine perfection, but he had not a pleasant
smile. "I went through the regular routine, you know, and am as well
able to see a patient safely through a cold or fever as I am to make
him a set of teeth."
Mr. Halliday burst into the room at this moment, singing a fragment of
the "Chough and Crow" chorus, very much out of tune. He was in
boisterously high spirits, and very little the worse for liquor. He had
only walked from Covent Garden, he said, and had taken nothing but a
tankard of stout and a Welsh rarebit. He had been hearing the divinest
singing--boys with the voices of angels--and had been taking his supper
in a place which duchesses themselves did not disdain to peep at from
the sacred recesses of a loge grillee, George Sheldon had told him. But
poor country-bred Georgina Halliday would not believe in the duchesses,
or the angelic singing boys, or the primitive simplicity of Welsh
rarebits. She had a vision of beautiful women, and halls of dazzling
light, where there was the mad music of perpetual Post-horn Galops,
with a riotous accompaniment of huzzas and the popping of champagne
corks--where the sheen of satin and the glitter of gems bewildered the
eye of the beholder. She had seen such a picture once on the stage, and
had vaguely associated it with all Tom's midnight roisterings ever
afterwards.
The roisterer's garments were very wet, and it was in vain that his
wife and Philip Sheldon entreated him to change them for dry ones, or
to go to bed immediately. He stood before the fire relating his
innocent adventures, and trying to dispel the cloud from Georgy's fair
young brow; and, when he did at last consent to go to his room, the
dentist shook his head ominously.
"You'll have a severe cold to-morrow, depend upon it, Tom, and you'll
have yourself to thank for it," he said, as he bade the good-tempered
reprobate good night. "Never mind, old fellow," answered Tom; "if I am
ill, you shall nurse me. If one is doomed to die by doctors' stuff,
it's better to have a doctor one does know than a doctor one doesn't
know for one's executioner."
After which graceful piece of humour Mr. Halliday went blundering up
the staircase, followed by his aggrieved wife.
Philip Sheldon stood on the landing looking after his visitors for some
minutes. Then he went slowly back to the sitting-room, where he
replenished the fire, and seated himself before it with a newspaper in
his hand.
"What's the use of going to bed, if I can't sleep?" he muttered, in a
discontented tone.
CHAPTER IV.
A PERPLEXING ILLNESS.
Mr. Sheldon's prophecy was fully realised. Tom Halliday awoke the next
day with a violent cold in his head. Like most big boisterous men of
herculean build, he was the veriest craven in the hour of physical
ailment; so he succumbed at once to the malady which a man obliged to
face the world and fight for his daily bread must needs have made light
of.
The dentist rallied his invalid friend.
"Keep your bed, if you like, Tom," he said, "but there's no necessity
for any such coddling. As your hands are hot, and your tongue rather
queer, I may as well give you a saline draught. You'll be all right by
dinner-time, and I'll get George to look round in the evening for a
hand at cards."
Tom obeyed his professional friend--took his medicine, read the paper,
and slept away the best part of the dull March day. At half-past five
he got up and dressed for dinner, and the evening passed very
pleasantly--so pleasantly, indeed, that Georgy was half inclined to
wish that her husband might be afflicted with chronic influenza,
whereby he would be compelled to stop at home. She sighed when Philip
Sheldon slapped his friend's broad shoulder, and told him cheerily that
he would be "all right to-morrow." He would be well again, and there
would be more midnight roistering, and she would be again tormented by
that vision of lighted halls and beautiful diabolical creatures
revolving madly to the music of the Post-horn Galop.
It seemed, however, that poor jealous Mrs. Halliday was to be spared
her nightly agony for some time to come. Tom's cold lasted longer than
he had expected, and the cold was succeeded by a low fever--a bilious
fever, Mr. Sheldon said. There was not the least occasion for alarm, of
course. The invalid and the invalid's wife trusted implicitly in the
friendly doctor who assured them both that Tom's attack was the most
ordinary kind of thing; a little wearing, no doubt, but entirely
without danger. He had to repeat this assurance very often to Georgy,
whose angry feelings had given place to extreme tenderness and
affection now that Tom was an invalid, quite unfitted for the society
of jolly good fellows, and willing to receive basins of beef-tea and
arrow-root meekly from his wife's hands, instead of those edibles of
iniquity, oysters and toasted cheese.
Mr. Halliday's illness was very tiresome. It was one of those
perplexing complaints which keep the patient himself, and the patient's
friends and attendants, in perpetual uncertainty. A little worse one
day and a shade better the next; now gaining a little strength, now
losing a trifle more than he had gained. The patient declined in so
imperceptible a manner that he had been ill three weeks, and was no
longer able to leave his bed, and had lost alike his appetite and his
spirits, before Georgy awoke to the fact that this illness, hitherto
considered so lightly, must be very serious.
"I think if--if you have no objection, I should like to see another
doctor, Mr. Sheldon," she said one day, with considerable embarrassment
of manner. She feared to offend her host by any doubt of his skill.
"You see--you--you are so much employed with teeth--and--of course you
know I am quite assured of your talent--but don't you think that a
doctor who had more experience in fever cases might bring Tom round
quicker? He has been ill so long now; and really he doesn't seem to get
any better."
Philip Sheldon shrugged his shoulders.
"As you please, my dear Mrs. Halliday," he said carelessly; "I don't
wish to press my services upon you. It is quite a matter of friendship,
you know, and I shall not profit sixpence by my attendance on poor old
Tom. Call in another doctor, by all means, if you think fit to do so;
but, of course, in that event, I must withdraw from the case. The man
you call in may be clever, or he may be stupid and ignorant. It's all a
chance, when one doesn't know one's man; and I really can't advise you
upon that point, for I know nothing of the London profession."
Georgy looked alarmed. This was a new view of the subject. She had
fancied that all regular practitioners were clever, and had only
doubted Mr. Sheldon because he was not a regular practitioner. But how
if she were to withdraw her husband from the hands of a clever man to
deliver him into the care of an ignorant pretender, simply because she
was over-anxious for his recovery?
"I always am foolishly anxious about things," she thought.
And then she looked piteously at Mr. Sheldon, and said, "What do you
think I ought to do? Pray tell me. He has eaten no breakfast again this
morning; and even the cup of tea which I persuaded him to take seemed
to disagree with him. And then there is that dreadful sore throat which
torments him so. What ought I to do, Mr. Sheldon?"
"Whatever seems best to yourself, Mrs. Halliday," answered the dentist
earnestly. "It is a subject upon, which I cannot pretend to advise you.
It is a matter of feeling rather than of reason, and it is a matter
which you yourself must determine. If I knew any man whom I could
honestly recommend to you, it would be another affair; but I don't.
Tom's illness is the simplest thing in the world, and I feel myself
quite competent to pull him through it, without fuss or bother; but if
you think otherwise, pray put me out of the question. There's one fact,
however, of which I'm bound to remind you. Like many fine big stalwart
fellows of his stamp, your husband is as nervous as a hysterical woman;
and if you call in a strange doctor, who will pull long faces, and put
on the professional solemnity, the chances are that he'll take alarm,
and do himself more mischief in a few hours than your new adviser can
undo in as many weeks."
There was a little pause after this. Georgy's opinions, and suspicions,
and anxieties were alike vague; and this last suggestion of Mr.
Sheldon's put things in a new and alarming light. She was really
anxious about her husband, but she had been accustomed all her life to
accept the opinion of other people in preference to her own.
"Do you really think that Tom will soon be well and strong again?" she
asked presently.
"If I thought otherwise, I should be the first to advise other
measures. However, my dear Mrs. Halliday, call in some one else, for
your own satisfaction."
"No," said Georgy, sighing plaintively, "it might frighten Tom. You are
quite right, Mr. Sheldon; he is very nervous, and the idea that I was
alarmed might alarm him. I'll trust in you. Pray try to bring him round
again. You will try, won't you?" she asked, in the childish pleading
way which was peculiar to her.
The dentist was searching for something in the drawer of a table, and
his back was turned on the anxious questioner.
"You may depend upon it, I'll do my best, Mrs. Halliday," he answered,
still busy at the drawer. Mr. Sheldon the younger had paid many visits
to Fitzgeorge-street during Tom Halliday's illness. George and Tom had
been the Damon and Pythias of Barlingford; and George seemed really
distressed when he found his friend changed for the worse. The changes
in the invalid were so puzzling, the alternations from better to worse
and from worse to better so frequent, that fear could take no hold upon
the minds of the patient's friends. It seemed such a very slight affair
this low fever, though sufficiently inconvenient to the patient
himself, who suffered a good deal from thirst and sickness, and showed
an extreme disinclination for food, all which symptoms Mr. Sheldon said
were the commonest and simplest features of a very mild attack of
bilious fever, which would leave Tom a better man than it had found him.
There had been several pleasant little card-parties during the earlier
stages of Mr. Halliday's illness; but within the last week the patient
had been too low and weak for cards--too weak to read the newspaper, or
even to bear having it read to him. When George came to look at his old
friend--"to cheer you up a little, old fellow, you know," and so on--he
found Tom, for the time being, past all capability of being cheered,
even by the genial society of his favourite jolly good fellow, or by
tidings of a steeplechase in Yorkshire, in which a neighbour had gone
to grief over a double fence.
"That chap upstairs seems rather queerish," George had said to his
brother, after finding Tom lower and weaker than usual. "He's in a bad
way, isn't he, Phil?"
"No; there's nothing serious the matter with him. He's rather low
to-night, that's all."
"Rather low!" echoed George Sheldon. "He seems to me so very low, that
he can't sink much lower without going to the bottom of his grave. I'd
call some one in, if I were you."
The dentist shrugged his shoulders, and made a little contemptuous
noise with his lips.
"If you knew as much of doctors as I do, you wouldn't be in any hurry
to trust a friend to the mercy of one," he said carelessly. "Don't you
alarm yourself about Tom. He's right enough. He's been in a state of
chronic over-eating and over-drinking for the last ten years, and this
bilious fever will be the making of him."
"Will it?" said George doubtfully; and then there followed a little
pause, during which the brothers happened to look at each other
furtively, and happened to surprise each other in the act.
"I don't know about over-eating or drinking," said George presently;
"but something has disagreed with Tom Halliday, that's very evident."
CHAPTER V.
THE LETTER FROM THE "ALLIANCE" OFFICE.
Upon the evening of the day on which Mrs. Halliday and the dentist had
discussed the propriety of calling in a strange doctor, George Sheldon
came again to see his sick friend. He was quicker to perceive the
changes in the invalid than the members of the household, who saw him
daily and hourly, and he perceived a striking change for the worse
to-night.
He took care, however, to suffer no evidence of alarm or surprise to
appear in the sick chamber. He talked to his friend in the usual cheery
way; sat by the bedside for half an hour; did his best to arouse Tom
from a kind of stupid lethargy, and to encourage Mrs. Halliday, who
shared the task of nursing her husband with brisk Nancy Woolper, an
invaluable creature in a sick-room. But he failed in both attempts; the
dull apathy of the invalid was not to be dispelled by the most genial
companionship, and Georgy's spirits had been sinking lower and lower
all day as her fears increased.
She would fain have called in a strange doctor--she would fain have
sought for comfort and consolation from some new quarter. But she was
afraid of offending Philip Sheldon; and she was afraid of alarming her
husband. So she waited, and watched, and struggled against that
ever-increasing anxiety. Had not Mr. Sheldon made light of his friend's
malady, and what motive could he have for deceiving her?
A breakfast-cup full of beef-tea stood on the little table by the
bedside, and had been standing there for hours untouched.
"I did take such pains to make it strong and clear," said Mrs. Woolper
regretfully, as she came to the little table during a tidying process,
"and poor dear Mr. Halliday hasn't taken so much as a spoonful. It
won't be fit for him to-morrow, so as I haven't eaten a morsel of
dinner, what with the hurry and anxiety and one thing and another, I'll
warm up the beef-tea for my supper. There's not a blessed thing in the
house; for you don't eat nothing, Mrs. Halliday; and as to cooking a
dinner for Mr. Sheldon, you'd a deal better go and throw your victuals
out into the gutter, for then there'd be a chance of stray dogs
profiting by 'em, at any rate."
"Phil is off his feed, then; eh, Nancy?" said George.
"I should rather think he is, Mr. George. I roasted a chicken yesterday
for him and Mrs. Halliday, and I don't think they eat an ounce between,
them; and such a lovely tender young thing as it was too--done to a
turn--with bread sauce and a little bit of sea-kale. One invalid makes
another, that's certain. I never saw your brother so upset as he is
now, Mr. George, in all his life.
"No?" answered George Sheldon thoughtfully; "Phil isn't generally one
of your sensitive sort."
The invalid was sleeping heavily during this conversation. George stood
by the bed for some minutes looking down at the altered face, and then
turned to leave the room.
"Good night, Mrs. Halliday," he said; "I hope I shall find poor old Tom
a shade better when I look round to-morrow."
"I am sure I hope so," Georgy answered mournfully.
She was sitting by the window looking out at the darkening western sky,
in which the last lurid glimmer of a stormy sunset was fading against a
background of iron gray.
This quiet figure by the window, the stormy sky, and ragged hurrying
clouds without, the dusky chamber with all its dismally significant
litter of medicine-bottles, made a gloomy picture--a picture which the
man who looked upon it carried in his mind for many years after that
night.
George Sheldon and Nancy Woolper left the room together, the
Yorkshirewoman carrying a tray of empty phials and glasses, and amongst
them the cup of beef-tea.
"He seems in a bad way to-night, Nancy," said George, with a backward
jerk of his head towards the sick-chamber.
"He is in a bad way, Mr. George," answered the woman gravely, "let Mr.
Philip think what he will. I don't want to say a word against your
brother's knowledge, for such a steady studious gentleman as he is had
need be clever; and if I was ill myself, I'd trust my life to him
freely; for I have heard Barlingford folks say that my master's advice
is as good as any regular doctor's, and that there's very little your
regular doctors know that he doesn't know as well or better. But for
all that, Mr. George, I don't think he understands Mr. Halliday's case
quite as clear as he might."
"Do you think Tom's in any danger?"
"I won't say that, Mr. George; but I think he gets worse instead of
getting better."
"Humph!" muttered George; "if Halliday were to go off the hooks, Phil
would have a good chance of getting a rich wife."
"Don't say that, Mr. George," exclaimed the Yorkshirewoman
reproachfully; "don't even think of such a thing while that poor man
lies at death's door. I'm sure Mr. Sheldon hasn't any thoughts of that
kind. He told me before Mr. and Mrs. Halliday came to town that he and
Miss Georgy had forgotten all about past times."
"O, if Phil said so, that alters the case. Phil is one of your blunt
outspoken fellows, and always says what he means," said George Sheldon.
And then he went downstairs, leaving Nancy to follow him at her leisure
with the tray of jingling cups and glasses. He went down through the
dusk, smiling to himself, as if he had just given utterance to some
piece of intense humour. He went to look for his brother, whom he found
in the torture-chamber, busied with some mysterious process in
connection with a lump of plaster-of-paris, which seemed to be the
model of ruined battlements in the Gothic style. The dentist looked up
as George entered the room, and did not appear particularly delighted
by the appearance of that gentleman.
"Well," said Mr. Sheldon the younger, "busy as usual? Patients seem to
be looking up."
"Patients be----toothless to the end of time!" cried Philip, with a
savage laugh. "No, I'm not working to order; I'm only
experimentalising."
"You're rather fond of experiments, I think, Phil," said George,
seating himself near the table at which his brother was working under
the glare of the gas. The dentist looked very pale and haggard in the
gas-light, and his eyes had the dull sunken appearance induced by
prolonged sleeplessness. George sat watching his brother thoughtfully
for some time, and then produced his cigar-case. "You don't mind my
smoke here?" he asked, as he lighted a cigar.
"Not at all. You are very welcome to sit here, if it amuses you to see
me working at the cast of a lower jaw."
"O, that's a lower jaw, is it? It looks like the fragment of some
castle-keep. No, Phil, I don't care about watching you work. I want to
talk to you seriously."
"About that fellow upstairs--poor old Tom. He and I were great cronies,
you know, at home. He's in a very bad way."
"Is he? You seem to be turning physician all at once, George. I
shouldn't have thought your grubbing among county histories, and
tattered old pedigrees, and parish registers had given you so deep an
insight into the science of medicine!" said the dentist in a sneering
tone.
"I don't know anything of medicine; but I know enough to be sure that
Tom Halliday is about as bad as he can be. What mystifies me is, that
he doesn't seem to have had anything particular the matter with him.
There he lies, getting worse and worse every day, without any specific
ailment. It's a strange illness, Philip."
"I don't see anything strange in it."
"Don't you? Don't you think the surrounding circumstances are strange?
Here is this man comes to your house hale and hearty; and all of a
sudden he falls ill, and gets lower and lower every day, without
anybody being able to say why or wherefore."
"That's not true, George. Everybody in this house knows the cause of
Tom Halliday's illness. He came home in wet clothes, and insisted on
keeping them on. He caught a cold; which resulted in low fever. There
is the whole history and mystery of the affair."
"That's simple enough, certainly. But if I were you, Phil, I'd call in
another doctor."
"That is Mrs. Halliday's business," answered the dentist coolly; "if
she doubts my skill, she is free to call in whom she pleases. And now
you may as well drop the subject, George. I've had enough anxiety about
this man's illness, and I don't want to be worried by you."
After this there was a little conversation upon general matters, but
the talk dragged and languished drearily, and George Sheldon rose to
depart directly he had finished his cigar.
"Good night, Philip!" he said; "if ever you get a stroke of good luck,
I hope you'll stand something handsome to me."
This remark had no particular relevance to anything that had been said
that night by the two men; yet Philip Sheldon seemed in nowise
astonished by it.
"If things ever _do_ take a turn for the better with me, you'll find me
a good friend, George," he said gravely; and then Mr. Sheldon the
younger bade him good night, and went out into Fitzgeorge-street.
He paused for a moment at the corner of the street to look back at his
brother's house. He could see the lighted windows of the invalid's
chamber, and it was at those he looked.
"Poor Tom," he said to himself, "poor Tom! We were great cronies in the
old times, and have had many a pleasant evening together!"
Mr. Sheldon the dentist sat up till the small hours that night, as he
had done for many nights lately. He finished his work in the
torture-chamber, and went up to the common sitting-room, or
drawing-room as it was called by courtesy, a little before midnight.
The servants had gone to bed, for there was no regular nightly watch in
the apartment of the invalid. Mrs. Halliday lay on a sofa in her
husband's room, and Nancy Woolper slept in an adjoining apartment,
always wakeful and ready if help of any kind should be wanted.
The house was very quiet just now. Philip Sheldon walked up and down
the room, thinking; and the creaking of his boots sounded unpleasantly
loud to his ears. He stopped before the fireplace, after having walked
to and fro some time, and began to examine some letters that lay upon
the mantelpiece. They were addressed to Mr. Halliday, and had been
forwarded from Yorkshire. The dentist took them up, one by one, and
deliberately examined them. They were all business letters, and most of
them bore country post-marks. But there was one which had been, in the
first instance, posted from London and this letter Mr. Sheldon examined
with especial attention.
It was a big, official-looking document, and embossed upon the adhesive
envelope appeared the crest and motto of the Alliance Insurance Office.
"I wonder whether that's all square," thought Mr. Sheldon, as he turned
the envelope about in his hands, staring at it absently. "I ought to
make sure of that. The London postmark is nearly three weeks old." He
pondered for some moments, and then went to the cupboard in which he
kept the materials wherewith to replenish or to make a fire. Here he
found a little tin tea-kettle, in which he was in the habit of boiling
water for occasional friendly glasses of grog. He poured some water
from a bottle on the sideboard into this kettle, set fire to a bundle
of wood, and put the kettle on the blazing sticks. After having done
this he searched for a tea-cup, succeeded in finding one, and then
stood watching for the boiling of the water. He had not long to wait;
the water boiled furiously before the wood was burned out, and Mr.
Sheldon filled the tea-cup standing on the table. Then he put the
insurance-letter over the cup, with the seal downwards, and left it so
while he resumed his walk. After walking up and down for about ten
minutes he went back to the table and took up the letter. The adhesive
envelope opened easily, and Mr. Sheldon, by this ingenious stratagem,
made himself master of his friend's business.
The "Alliance" letter was nothing more than a notice to the effect that
the half-yearly premium for insuring the sum of three thousand pounds
on the life of Thomas Halliday would be due on such a day, after which
there would be twenty-one days' grace, at the end of which time the
policy would become void, unless the premium had been duly paid.
Mr. Halliday's letters had been suffered to accumulate during the last
fortnight. The letters forwarded from Yorkshire had been detained some
time, as they had been sent first to Hyley Farm, now in the possession
of the new owner, and then to Barlingford, to the house of Georgy's
mother, who had kept them upwards of a week, in daily expectation of
her son-in-law's return. It was only on the receipt of a letter from
Georgy, containing the tidings of her husband's illness, that Mr.
Halliday's letters had been sent to London. Thus it came about that the
twenty-one days of grace were within four-and-twenty hours of expiring
when Philip Sheldon opened his friend's letter.
"This is serious," muttered the dentist, as he stood deliberating with
the open letter in his hand; "there are three thousand pounds depending
on that man's power to write a check!"
After a few minutes' reflection, he folded the letter and resealed it
very carefully.
"It wouldn't do to press the matter upon him to-night," he thought; "I
must wait till to-morrow morning, come what may."
CHAPTER VI.
MR. BURKHAM'S UNCERTAINTIES.
The next morning dawned gray and pale and chill, after the manner of
early spring mornings, let them ripen into never such balmy days; and
with the dawn Nancy Woolper came into the invalid's chamber, more wan
and sickly of aspect than the morning itself.
Mrs. Halliday started from an uneasy slumber.
"What's the matter, Nancy?" she asked with considerable alarm. She had
known the woman ever since her childhood, and she was startled this
morning by some indefinable change in her manner and appearance. The
hearty old woman, whose face had been like a hard rosy apple shrivelled
and wrinkled by long keeping, had now a white and ghastly look which
struck terror to Georgy's breast. She who was usually so brisk of
manner and sharp of speech, had this morning a strange subdued tone and
an unnatural calmness of demeanour. "What is the matter, Nancy?" Mrs.
Halliday repeated, getting up from her sofa.
"Don't be frightened, Miss Georgy," answered the old woman, who was apt
to forget that Tom Halliday's wife had ever ceased to be Georgy
Cradock; "don't be frightened, my dear. I haven't been very well all
night,--and--and--I've been worrying myself about Mr. Halliday. If I
were you, I'd call in another doctor. Never mind what Mr. Philip says.
He may be mistaken, you know, clever as he is. There's no telling. Take
my advice, Miss Georgy, and call in another
doctor--directly--directly," repeated the old woman, seizing Mrs.
Halliday's wrist with a passionate energy, as if to give emphasis to
her words. Poor timid Georgy shrank from her with terror.
"You frighten me, Nancy," she whispered; "do you think that Tom is so
much worse? You have not been with him all night; and he has been
sleeping very quietly. What makes you so anxious this morning?"
"Never mind that, Miss Georgy. You get another doctor, that's all; get
another doctor at once. Mr. Sheldon is a light sleeper. I'll go to his
room and tell him you've set your heart upon having fresh advice; if
you'll only bear me out afterwards."
"Yes, yes; go by all means," exclaimed Mrs. Halliday, only too ready to
take alarm under the influence of a stronger mind, and eager to act
when supported by another person.
Nancy Woolper went to her master's room. He must have been sleeping
very lightly, if he was sleeping at all; for he was broad awake the
next minute after his housekeeper's light knock had sounded on the
door. In less than five minutes he came out of his room half-dressed.
Nancy had told him that Mrs. Halliday had taken fresh alarm about her
husband, and wished for further advice.
"She sent you to tell me that?" asked Philip.
"Yes."
"And when does she want this new doctor called in?"
"Immediately, if possible."
It was seven o'clock by this time, and the morning was brightening a
little.
"Very well," said Mr. Sheldon; "her wishes shall be attended to
directly. Heaven forbid that I should stand between my old friend and
any chance of his speedy recovery! If a stranger can bring him round
quicker than I can, let the stranger come."
* * * * *
Mr. Sheldon was not slow to obey Mrs. Halliday's behest. He was
departing on his quest breakfastless, when Nancy Woolper met him in the
hall with a cup of tea. He accepted the cup almost mechanically from
her hand, and took it into the parlour, whither Nancy followed him.
Then for the first time he perceived that change in his housekeeper's
face which had so startled Georgina Halliday. The change was somewhat
modified now; but still the Nancy Woolper of to-day was not the Nancy
Woolper of yesterday.
"You're looking very queer, Nancy," said the dentist, gravely
scrutinising the woman's face with his bright penetrating eyes. "Are
you ill?"
"Well, Mr. Philip, I have been rather queer all night,--sickish and
faintish-like."
"Ah, you've been over-fatiguing yourself in the sick-room, I daresay.
Take care you don't knock yourself up."
"No; it's not that, Mr. Philip. There's not many can stand hard work
better than I can. It's not _that_ as made me ill. I took something
last night that disagreed with me."
"More fool you," said Mr. Sheldon curtly; "you ought to know better
than to ill-use your digestive powers at your age. What was it? Hard
cold meat and preternaturally green pickles, I suppose; or something of
that kind."
"No, sir; it was only a drop of beef-tea that I made for poor Mr.
Halliday. And that oughtn't to have disagreed with a baby, you know,
sir."
"Oughtn't it?" cried the dentist disdainfully. "That's a little bit of
vulgar ignorance, Mrs. Woolper. I suppose it was stuff that had been
taken up to Mr. Halliday."
"Yes, Mr. Philip; you took it up with your own hands."
"Ah, to be sure; so I did. Very well, then, Mrs. Woolper, if you knew
as much about atmospheric influences as I do, you'd know that food
which has been standing for hours in the pestilential air of a
fever-patient's room isn't fit for anybody to eat. The stuff made you
sick, I suppose."
"Yes, sir; sick to my very heart," answered the Yorkshirewoman, with a
strange mournfulness in her voice.
"Let that be a warning to you, then. Don't take anything more that
comes down from the sick-room."
"I don't think there'll be any chance of my doing that long, sir."
"What do you mean?"
"I don't fancy Mr. Halliday is long for this world."
"Ah, you women are always ravens."
"Unless the strange doctor can do something to cure him. O, pray bring
a clever man who will be able to cure that poor helpless creature
upstairs. Think, Mr. Philip, how you and him used to be friends and
playfellows,--brothers almost,--when you was both bits of boys. Think
how bad it might seem to evil-minded folks if he died under your roof."
The dentist had been standing near the door drinking his tea during
this conversation; and now for the first time he looked at his
housekeeper with an expression of unmitigated astonishment.
"What, in the name of all that's ridiculous, do you mean, Nancy?" he
asked impatiently. "What has my roof to do with Tom Halliday's
illness--or his death, if it came to that? And what on earth can people
have to say about it if he should die here instead of anywhere else?"
"Why, you see, sir, you being his friend, and Miss Georgy's sweetheart
that was, and him having no other doctor, folks might take it into
their heads he wasn't attended properly."
"Because I'm his friend? That's very good logic! I'll tell you what it
is, Mrs. Woolper; if any woman upon earth, except the woman who nursed
me when I was a baby, had presumed to talk to me as you have been
talking to me just this minute, I should open the door yonder and tell
her to walk out of my house. Let that serve as a hint for you, Nancy;
and don't you go out of your way a second time to advise me how I
should treat my friend and my patient."
He handed her the empty cup, and walked out of the house. There had
been no passion in his tone. His accent had been only that of a man who
has occasion to reprove an old and trusted servant for an unwarrantable
impertinence. Nancy Woolper stood at the street-door watching him as he
walked away, and then went slowly back to her duties in the lower
regions of the house.
"It can't be true," she muttered to herself; "it can't be true."
* * * * *
The dentist returned to Fitzgeorge-street in less than an hour,
bringing with him a surgeon from the neighbourhood, who saw the
patient, discussed the treatment, spoke hopefully to Mrs. Halliday, and
departed, after promising to send a saline draught. Poor Georgy's
spirits, which had revived a little under the influence of the
stranger's hopeful words, sank again when she discovered that the
utmost the new doctor could do was to order a saline draught. Her
husband had taken so many saline draughts, and had been getting daily
worse under their influence.
She watched the stranger wistfully as he lingered on the threshold to
say a few words to Mr. Sheldon. He was a very young man, with a frank
boyish face and a rosy colour in his cheeks. He looked like some fresh
young neophyte in the awful mysteries of medical science, and by no
means the sort of man to whom one would have imagined Philip Sheldon
appealing for help, when he found his own skill at fault. But then it
must be remembered that Mr. Sheldon had only summoned the stranger in
compliance with what he considered a womanish whim.
"He looks very young," Georgina said regretfully, after the doctor's
departure.
"So much the better, my dear Mrs. Halliday," answered the dentist
cheerfully; "medical science is eminently progressive, and the youngest
men are the best-educated men."
Poor Georgy did not understand this; but it sounded convincing, and she
was in the habit of believing what people told her; so she accepted Mr.
Sheldon's opinion. How could she doubt that he was wiser than herself
in all matters connected with the medical profession?
"Tom seems a little better this morning," she said presently.
The invalid was asleep, shrouded by the curtain of the heavy
old-fashioned four-post bedstead.
"He is better," answered the dentist; "so much better, that I shall
venture to give him a few business letters that have been waiting for
him some time, as soon as he wakes."
He seated himself by the head of the bed, and waited quietly for the
awakening of the patient.
"Your breakfast is ready for you downstairs, Mrs. Halliday," he said
presently; "hadn't you better go down and take it, while I keep watch
here? It's nearly ten o'clock."
"I don't care about any breakfast," Georgina answered piteously.
"Ah, but you'd better eat something. You'll make yourself an invalid,
if you are not careful; and then you won't be able to attend upon Tom."
This argument prevailed immediately. Georgy went downstairs to the
drawing-room, and tried bravely to eat and drink, in order that she
might be sustained in her attendance upon her husband. She had
forgotten all the throes and tortures of jealousy which she had endured
on his account. She had forgotten his late hours and unholy
roisterings. She had forgotten everything except that he had been very
tender and kind throughout the prosperous years of their married life,
and that he was lying in the darkened room upstairs sick to death.
* * * * *
Mr. Sheldon waited with all outward show of patience for the awakening
of the invalid. But he looked at his watch twice during that half-hour
of waiting; and once he rose and moved softly about the room, searching
for writing materials. He found a little portfolio of Georgina's, and a
frivolous-minded inkstand, after the semblance of an apple, with a gilt
stalk and leaflet. The dentist took the trouble to ascertain that there
was a decent supply of ink in the green-glass apple, and that the pens
were in working order. Then he went quietly back to his seat by the
bedside and waited.
The invalid opened his eyes presently, and recognised his friend with a
feeble smile.
"Well, Tom, old fellow, how do you feel to-day?--a little better I hear
from Mrs. H.," said the dentist cheerily.
"Yes, I think I am a shade better. But, you see, the deuce of it is I
never get more than a shade better. It always stops at that. The little
woman can't complain of me now, can she, Sheldon? No more late hours,
or oyster suppers, eh?"
"No, no, not just yet. You'll have to take care of yourself for a week
or two when you get about again." Mr. Halliday smiled faintly as his
friend said this.
"I shall be very careful of myself if I ever do get about again, you
may depend upon it, old fellow. But do you know I sometimes fancy I
have spent my last jolly evening, and eaten my last oyster supper, on
this earth? I'm afraid it's time for me to begin to think seriously of
a good many things. The little woman is all right, thank God. I made my
will upwards of a year ago, and insured my life pretty heavily soon
after my marriage. Old Cradock never let me rest till that was done. So
Georgy will be all safe. But when a man has led a careless, godless
kind of a life,--doing very little harm, perhaps, but doing no
particular good,--he ought to set about making up his account somehow
for a better world, when he feels himself slipping out of this. I asked
Georgy for her Bible yesterday, and the poor dear loving little thing
was frightened out of her wits. 'O, don't talk like that, Tom,' she
cried; 'Mr. Sheldon says you are getting better every hour,'--by which
you may guess what a rare thing it is for me to read my Bible. No,
Phil, old fellow, you've done your best for me, I know; but I'm not
made of a very tough material, and all the physic you can pour down
this poor sore throat of mine won't put any strength into me."
"Nonsense, dear boy; that's just what a man who has not been accustomed
to illness is sure to think directly he is laid up for a day or two."
"I've been laid up for three weeks," murmured Mr. Halliday rather
fretfully.
"Well, well, perhaps this Mr. Burkham will bring you round in three
days, and then you'll say that your friend Sheldon was an ignoramus."
"No, no, I shan't, old fellow; I'm not such a fool as that. I'm not
going to blame you when it's my own constitution that's in fault. As to
that young man you brought here just now, to please Georgy, I don't
suppose he'll be able to do any more for me than you have done."
"We'll contrive to bring you round between us, never fear, Tom,"
answered Philip Sheldon in his most hopeful tone. "Why, you are looking
almost your old self this morning. You are so much improved that I may
venture to talk to you about business. There have been some letters
lying about for the last few days. I didn't like to bore you while you
were so very low. But they look like business letters; and perhaps it
would be as well for you to open them."
The sick man contemplated the little packet which the dentist had taken
from his breast-pocket; and then shook his head wearily.
"I'm not up to the mark, Sheldon," he said; "the letters must keep."
"O, come, come, old fellow! That's giving way, you know. The letters
may be important; and it will do you good if you make an effort to
rouse yourself."
"I tell you it isn't in me to do it, Philip Sheldon. I'm past making
efforts. Can't you see that, man? Open the letters yourself, if you
like."
"No, no, Halliday, I won't do that. Here's one with the seal of the
Alliance Insurance Office. I suppose your premium is all right."
Tom Halliday lifted himself on his elbow for a moment, startled into
new life; but he sank back on the pillows again immediately, with a
feeble groan.
"I don't know about that," he said anxiously; "you'd better look to
that, Phil, for the little woman's sake. A man is apt to think that his
insurance is settled and done with, when he has been pommelled about by
the doctors and approved by the board. He forgets there's that little
matter of the premium. You'd better open the letter, Phil. I never was
a good hand at remembering dates, and this illness has thrown me
altogether out of gear."
Mr. Sheldon tore open that official document, which, in his benevolent
regard for his friend's interest, he had manipulated so cleverly on the
previous evening, and read the letter with all show of deliberation.
"You're right, Tom," he exclaimed presently. "The twenty-one days'
grace expire to-day. You'd better write me a check at once, and I'll
send it on to the office by hand. Where's your check-book?"
"In the pocket of that coat hanging up there."
Philip Sheldon found the check-book, and brought it to his friend, with
Georgy's portfolio, and the frivolous little green-glass inkstand in
the shape of an apple. He adjusted the writing materials for the sick
man's use with womanly gentleness. His arm supported the wasted frame,
as Tom Halliday slowly and laboriously filled in the check; and when
the signature was duly appended to that document, he drew a long
breath, which seemed to express infinite relief of mind.
"You'll be sure it goes on to the Alliance Office, eh, old fellow?"
asked Tom, as he tore out the oblong slip of paper and handed it to his
friend. "It was kind of you to jog my memory about this business. I'm
such a fellow for procrastinating matters. And I'm afraid I've been a
little off my load during the last week."
"Nonsense, Tom; not you."
"O yes, I have. I've had all sorts of queer fancies. Did you come into
this room the night before last, when Georgy was asleep?" Mr. Sheldon
reflected for a moment before answering.
"No," he said, "not the night before last."
"Ah, I thought as much," murmured the invalid. "I was off my head that
night then, Phil, for I fancied I saw you; and I fancied I heard the
bottles and glasses jingling on the little table behind the curtain."
"You were dreaming, perhaps."
"O no, I wasn't dreaming. I was very restless and wakeful that night.
However, that's neither here nor there. I lie in a stupid state
sometimes for hours and hours, and I feel as weak as a rat, bodily and
mentally; so while I have my wits about me, I'd better say what I've
been wanting to say ever so long. You've been a good and kind friend to
me all through this illness, Phil, and I'm not ungrateful for your
kindness. If it does come to the worst with me--as I believe it
will--Georgy shall give you a handsome mourning ring, or fifty pounds
to buy one, if you like it better. And now let me shake hands with you,
Philip Sheldon, and say thank you heartily, old fellow, for once and
for ever."
The invalid stretched out a poor feeble attenuated hand, and, after a
moment's pause, Philip Sheldon clasped it in his own muscular fingers.
He did hesitate for just one instant before taking that hand.
He was no student of the gospel; but when he had left the sick-chamber
there arose before him suddenly, as if written in letters of fire on
the wall opposite to him, one sentence which had been familiar to him
in his school-days at Barlingford:
_And as soon as he was come, he goeth straightway to him, and saith,
Master, master; and kissed him._
* * * * *
The new doctor came twice a day to see his patient. He seemed rather
anxious about the case, and just a little puzzled by the symptoms.
Georgy had sufficient penetration to perceive that this new adviser was
in some manner at fault; and she began to think that Philip Sheldon was
right, and that regular practitioners were very stupid creatures. She
communicated her doubts to Mr. Sheldon, and suggested the expediency of
calling in some grave elderly doctor, to supersede Mr. Burkham. But
against this the dentist protested very strongly.
"You asked me to call in a stranger, Mrs. Halliday, and I have done
so," he said, with the dignity of an offended man. "You must now abide
by his treatment, and content yourself with his advice, unless he
chooses to summon further assistance."
Georgy was fain to submit. She gave a little plaintive sigh, and went
back to her husband's room, where she sat and wept silently behind the
bed-curtains. There was a double watch kept in the sick-chamber now;
for Nancy Woolper rarely left it, and rarely closed her eyes. It was
altogether a sad time in the dentist's house; and Tom Halliday
apologised to his friend more than once for the trouble he had brought
upon him. If he had been familiar with the details of modern history,
he would have quoted Charles Stuart, and begged pardon for being so
long a-dying.
But anon there came a gleam of hope. The patient seemed decidedly
better; and Georgy was prepared to revere Mr. Burkham, the Bloomsbury
surgeon, as the greatest and ablest of men. Those shadows of doubt and
perplexity which had at first obscured Mr. Burkham's brow cleared away,
and he spoke very cheerfully of the invalid.
Unhappily this state of things did not last long. The young surgeon
came one morning, and was obviously alarmed by the appearance of his
patient. He told Philip Sheldon as much; but that gentleman made very
light of his fears. As the two men discussed the case, it was very
evident that the irregular practitioner was quite a match for the
regular one. Mr. Burkham listened deferentially, but departed only half
convinced. He walked briskly away from the house, but came to a dead
stop directly after turning out of Fitzgeorge-street.
"What ought I to do?" he asked himself. "What course ought I to take?
If I am right, I should be a villain to let things go on. If I am
wrong, anything like interference would ruin me for life."
He had finished his morning round, but he did not go straight home. He
lingered at the corners of quiet streets, and walked up and down the
unfrequented side of a gloomy square. Once he turned and retraced his
steps in the direction of Fitzgeorge-street. But after all this
hesitation he walked home, and ate his dinner very thoughtfully,
answering his young wife at random when she talked to him. He was a
struggling man, who had invested his small fortune in the purchase of a
practice which had turned out a very poor one, and he had the battle of
life before him.
"There's something on your mind to-day, I'm sure, Harry," his wife said
before the meal was ended.
"Well, yes, dear," he answered; "I've rather a difficult case in
Fitzgeorge-street, and I'm anxious about it."
The industrious little wife disappeared after dinner, and the young
surgeon walked up and down the room alone, brooding over that difficult
case in Fitzgeorge-street. After spending nearly an hour thus, he
snatched his hat suddenly from the table on which he had set it down,
and hurried from the house.
"I'll have advice and assistance, come what may," he said to himself,
as he walked rapidly in the direction of Mr. Sheldon's house. "The case
may be straight enough--I certainly can't see that the man has any
motive--but I'll have advice."
He looked up at the dentist's spotless dwelling as he crossed the
street. The blinds were all down, and the fact that they were so sent a
sudden chill to his heart. But the April sunshine was full upon that
side of the street, and there might lie no significance in those
closely-drawn blinds. The door was opened by a sleepy-looking boy, and
in the passage Mr. Burkham met Philip Sheldon.
"I have been rather anxious about my patient since this morning, Mr.
Sheldon," said the surgeon; "and I have come to the conclusion that I
ought to confer with a man of higher standing than myself. Do you think
Mrs. Halliday will object to such a course?"
"I am sure she would not have objected to it," the dentist answered
very gravely, "if you had suggested it sooner. I am sorry to say the
suggestion comes too late. My poor friend breathed his last half an
hour ago."
BOOK THE SECOND.
THE TWO MACAIRES.
CHAPTER I.
A GOLDEN TEMPLE.
In the very midst of the Belgian iron country, under the shadow of tall
sheltering ridges of pine-clad mountain-land, nestles the fashionable
little watering-place called Forêtdechêne. Two or three handsome
hotels; a bright white new pile of building, with vast windows of
shining plate-glass, and a stately quadrangular courtyard; a tiny
street, which looks as if a fragment of English Brighton had been
dropped into this Belgian valley; a stunted semi-classic temple, which
is at once a post-office and a shrine whereat invalids perform their
worship of Hygeia by the consumption of unspeakably disagreeable
mineral waters; a few tall white villas scattered here and there
upon the slopes of pine-clad hills; and a very uncomfortable
railway-station--constitute the chief features of Forêtdechêne. But right
and left of that little cluster of shops and hotels there stretch deep
sombre avenues of oak, that look like sheltered ways to Paradise--and
the deep, deep blue of the August sky, and the pure breath of the warm
soft air, and the tender green of the young pine-woods that clothe the
sandy hills, and the delicious tranquillity that pervades the sleepy
little town and bathes the hot landscape in a languorous mist, are
charms that render Forêtdechêne a pleasant oasis amid the lurid woods
and mountains of the iron country.
Only at stated intervals the quiet of this sleepy hollow is broken by
the rolling of wheels, the jingling of bells, the cracking of whips,
the ejaculations of drivers, and supplications of touters: only when
the railroad carries away departing visitors, or brings fresh ones, is
there anything like riot or confusion in the little town under the
pine-clad hills--and even then the riot and confusion are of a very
mild order, and create but a transient discord amongst the harmonies of
nature.
And yet, despite the Arcadian tranquillity of the landscape, the drowsy
quiet of the pine-groves, the deep and solemn shade of those dark
avenues, where one might fondly hope to find some Druidess lingering
beneath the shelter of the oaks, there is excitement of no common order
to be found in the miniature watering-place of Forêtdechêne; and the
reflective and observant traveller, on a modern sentimental journey,
has only to enter the stately white building with the glittering
plate-glass windows in order to behold the master-passions or the human
breast unveiled for his pleasure and edification.
The ignorant traveller, impelled by curiosity, finds no bar to his
entrance. The doors are as wide open as if the mansion were an hotel;
and yet it is not an hotel, though a placard which he passes informs
the traveller that he may have ices and sorbets, if he will; nor is the
bright fresh-looking building a theatre, for another placard informs
the visitor that there are dramatic performances to be witnessed every
evening in a building on one side of the quadrangle, which is a mere
subsidiary attachment to the vast white mansion. The traveller, passing
on his way unhindered, save by a man in livery, who deprives him of his
cane, ascends a splendid staircase and traverses a handsome
antechamber, from which a pair of plate-glass doors open into a
spacious saloon, where, in the warm August sunlight, a circle of men
and women are gathered round a great green table, gambling.
The ignorant traveller, unaccustomed to the amusements of a Continental
watering-place, may perhaps feel a little sense of surprise--a
something almost akin to shame--as he contemplates that silent crowd,
whose occupation seems so much the more strange to him because of their
silence. There is no lively bustle, none of that animation which
generally attends every kind of amusement, none of the clamour of the
betting-ring or the exchange. The gamblers at Forêtdechêne are terribly
in earnest: and the ignorant visitor unconsciously adapts himself to
the solemn hush of the place, and steps softly as he approaches the
table round which they are clustered--as many sitting as can find room
round the green-cloth-covered board; while behind the sitters there are
people standing two or three rows deep, the hindermost watching the
table over the shoulders of their neighbours. A placard upon the wall
informs visitors that only constant players are permitted to remain
seated at that sacred table. Perhaps a third of the players and a third
of the lookers-on are women. And if there are lips more tightly
contracted than other lips, and eyes with a harder, greedier light in
them than other eyes, those lips and those eyes belong to the women.
The ungloved feminine hands have a claw-like aspect as they scrape the
glittering pieces of silver over the green cloth; the feminine throats
look weird and scraggy as they crane themselves over masculine
shoulders; the feminine eyes have something demoniac in their steely
glare as they keep watch upon the rapid progress of the game.
Half a dozen moderate fortunes seem to be lost and won while the
traveller looks on from the background, unnoticed and unseen; for if
those plate-glass doors swung suddenly open to admit the seven angels
of the Apocalypse, carrying the seven golden vials filled with the
wrath of God, it is doubtful whether the splendour of their awful
glory, or the trumpet-notes that heralded their coming, would have
power to arouse the players from their profound abstraction.
Half a dozen comfortable little patrimonies seem to have changed hands
while the traveller has been looking on; and yet he has only watched
the table for about ten minutes; and this splendid _salon_ is but an
outer chamber, where one may stake as shabby a sum as two francs, if
one is shabby enough to wish to do so, and where playing for half an
hour or so on a pleasant summer morning one could scarcely lose more
than fifty or sixty pounds. Another pair of plate-glass doors open into
an inner chamber, where the silence is still more profound, and where
around a larger table sit one row of players; while only here and there
a little group of outsiders stand behind their chairs. There is more
gilding on the walls and ceiling of this chamber; the frescoes are more
delicate; the crystal chandeliers are adorned with rich clusters of
sparkling drops, that twinkle like diamonds in the sun. This is the
temple of gold; and in this splendid chamber one may hazard no smaller
stake than half a napoleon. There are women here; but not so many women
as in the outer saloon; and the women here are younger and prettier and
more carefully dressed than those who stake only silver.
The prettiest and the youngest woman in this golden chamber on one
particular August afternoon, nine years after the death of Tom
Halliday, was a girl who stood behind the chair of a military-looking
Englishman, an old man whose handsome face was a little disfigured by
those traces which late hours and dissipated habits are supposed to
leave behind them.
The girl held a card in one hand and a pin in the other, and was
occupied in some mysterious process, by which she kept note of the
Englishman's play. She was very young, with a delicate face, in whose
softer lines there was a refined likeness to the features of the man
whose play she watched. But while his eyes were hard and cold and gray,
hers were of that dense black in which there seems such an unfathomable
and mysterious depth. As she was the handsomest, so she was also the
worst-dressed woman in the room. Her flimsy silk mantle had faded from
black to rusty brown; the straw hat which shaded her face was sunburnt;
the ribbons had lost their brightness; but there was an air of
attempted fashion in the puffings and trimmings of her alpaca skirt;
and there was evidence of a struggle with poverty in the tight-fitting
lavender gloves, whose streaky lines bore witness to the imperfection
of the cleaner's art. Elegant Parisians and the select of Brussels
glanced at the military Englishman and his handsome daughter with some
slight touch of supercilious surprise--one has no right to find
shabbily-dressed young women in the golden temple--and it is scarcely
necessary to state that it was from her own countrywomen the young
person in alpaca received the most chilling glances. But those Parthian
arrows shot from feminine eyes had little power to wound their object
just now. The girl looked up from her perforated card very seldom; and
when she raised her eyes, it was always to look in one
direction--towards the great glass doors opening from the outer saloon.
Loungers came and went; the doors swung open and closed again as
noiselessly as it is possible for well-regulated doors to open and
shut; footsteps sounded on the polished floors; and sometimes when the
young person in alpaca lifted her eyes, a passing shadow of
disappointment darkened her face. A modern Laurence Sterne, on a new
Sentimental Journey, might have derived some interest from the study of
the girl's countenance; but the reflective and observant traveller is
not to be encountered very often in this age of excursionists; and
Maria and her goat may roam the highways and byways for a long time
before she will find any dreamy loiterer with a mind attuned to
sympathy.
The shabbily-dressed girl was looking for some one. She watched her
father's play carefully--she marked her card with unfailing precision;
but she performed these duties with a mechanical air; and it was only
when she lifted her eyes to the great shining plate-glass doors which
opened into this dangerous Paradise, that any ray of feeling animated
her countenance. She was looking for some one, and the person watched
for was so long coming. Ah, how difficult for the arithmetician to
number the crushing disappointments, the bitter agonies that one woman
can endure in a single half-hour! This girl was so young--so young; and
already she had learnt to suffer.
The man played with the concentrated attention and the impassible
countenance of an experienced gamester, rarely lifting his eyes from
the green cloth, never looking back at the girl who stood behind him.
He was winning to-day, and he accepted his good fortune as quietly as
he had often accepted evil fortune at the same table. He seemed to be
playing on some system of his own; and neighbouring players looked at
him with envious eyes, as they saw the pile of gold grow larger under
his thin nervous hands. Ignorant gamesters, who stood aloof after
having lost two or three napoleons, contemplated the lucky Englishman
and wondered about him, while some touch of pity leavened the envy
excited by his wonderful fortune. He looked like a decayed gentleman--a
man who had been a military dandy in the days that were gone, and who
had all the old pretensions still, without the power to support them--a
Brummel languishing at Caen; a Nash wasting slowly at Bath.
At last the girl's face brightened suddenly as she glanced upwards; and
it would have been very easy for the observant traveller--if any such
person had existed--to construe aright that bright change in her
countenance. The some one she had been watching for had arrived.
The doors swung open to admit a man of about five-and-twenty, whose
darkly-handsome face and careless costume had something of that air
which was once wont to be associated with the person and the poetry of
George Gordon Lord Byron. The new-comer was just one of those men whom
very young women are apt to admire, and whom worldly-minded people are
prone to distrust. There was a perfume of Bohemianism, a flavour of the
Quartier Latin, about the loosely-tied cravat, the wide trousers, and
black-velvet morning coat, with which the young man outraged the
opinions of respectable visitors at Forêtdechêne. There was a
semi-poetic vagabondism in the half-indifferent, half-contemptuous
expression of his face, with its fierce moustache, and strongly-marked
eyebrows overshadowing sleepy gray eyes--eyes that were half hidden, by
their long dark lashes; as still pools of blue water lie sometimes
hidden among the rushes that nourish round them.
He was handsome, and he knew that he was handsome; but he affected to
despise the beauty of his proud dark face, as he affected to despise
all the brightest and most beautiful things upon earth: and yet there
was a vagabondish kind of foppery in his costume that contrasted
sharply with the gentlemanly dandyism of the shabby gamester sitting at
the table. There was a distance of nearly half a century between the
style of the Regency dandy and the Quartier-Latin lion.
The girl watched the new-comer with sad earnest eyes as he walked
slowly towards the table, and a faint blush kindled in her cheeks as he
came nearer to the spot where she stood. He went by her presently,
carrying an atmosphere of stale tobacco with him as he went; and he
gave her a friendly nod as he passed, and a "Good morning, Diana;" but
that was all. The faint blush faded and left her very pale: but she
resumed her weary task with the card and the pin; and if she had
endured any disappointment within those few moments, it seemed to be a
kind of disappointment that she was accustomed to suffer.
The young man walked round the table till he came to the only vacant
chair, in which he seated himself, and after watching the game for a
few minutes, began to play. From the moment in which he dropped into
that vacant seat to the moment in which he rose to leave the table,
three hours afterwards, he never lifted his eyes from the green cloth,
or seemed to be conscious of anything that was going on around or about
him. The girl watched him furtively for some little time after he had
taken his place at the table; but the stony mask of the professed
gambler is a profitless object for a woman's earnest scrutiny.
She sighed presently, and laid her hand heavily on the chair behind
which she was standing. The action aroused the man who sat in it, and
he turned and looked at her for the first time.
"You are tired, Diana?"
"Yes, papa, I am very tired."
"Give me your card, then, and go away," the gamester answered
peevishly; "girls are always tired."
She gave him the mysteriously-perforated card, and left her post behind
his chair; and then, after roaming about the great saloon with a weary
listless air, and wandering from one open window to another to look
into the sunny quadrangle, where well-dressed people were sitting at
little tables eating ices or drinking lemonade, she went away
altogether, and roamed into another chamber where some children were
dancing to the sound of a feeble violin. She sat upon a velvet-covered
bench, and watched the children's lesson for some minutes, and then
rose and wandered to another open window that overlooked the same
quadrangle, where the well-dressed people were enjoying themselves in
the hot August sunshine.
"How extravagantly everybody dresses!" she thought, "and what a shabby
poverty-stricken creature one feels amongst them! And yet if I ask papa
to give me a couple of napoleons out of the money he won to-day, he
will only look at me from head to foot, and tell me I have a gown and a
cloak and a bonnet, and ask me what more I can want, in the name of all
that is unreasonable? And I see girls here whose fathers are so fond of
them and so proud of them--ugly girls, decked out in silks and muslins
and ribbons that have cost a small fortune--clumsy awkward girls, who
look at _me_ as if I were some new kind of wild animal."
The saloons at Forêtdechêne were rich in monster sheets of
looking-glass; and in wandering discontentedly about the room Diana
Paget saw herself reflected many times in all her shabbiness. It was
only very lately she had discovered that she had some pretension to
good looks; for her father, who could not or would not educate her
decently or clothe her creditably, took a very high tone of morality in
his paternal teaching, and, in the fear that she might one day grow
vain of her beauty, had taken care to impress upon her at an early age
that she was the very incarnation of all that is lean and sallow and
awkward.
CHAPTER II.
THE EASY DESCENT
Amongst the many imprudences of which Horatio Paget--once a cornet in a
crack cavalry regiment, always a captain in his intercourse with the
world--had been guilty during the course of a long career, there was
none for which he so bitterly reproached himself as for a certain
foolish marriage which he had made late in his life. It was when he had
thrown away the last chance that an indulgent destiny had given him,
that the ruined fop of the Regency, the sometime member of the
Beef-steak Club, the man who in his earliest youth had worn a silver
gridiron at his button-hole, and played piquet in the gilded saloons of
Georgina of Devonshire, found himself laid on a bed of sickness in
dingy London lodgings, and nearer death than he had ever been in the
course of his brief military career; so nearly gliding from life's
swift-flowing river into eternity's trackless ocean, that the warmest
thrill of gratitude which ever stirred the slow pulses of his cold
heart quickened its beating as he clasped the hand that had held him
back from the unknown region whose icy breath had chilled him with an
awful fear. Such men as Horatio Paget are apt to feel a strange terror
when the black night drops suddenly down upon them, and the "Gray
Boatman's" voice sounds hollow and mysterious in the darkness,
announcing that the ocean is near. The hand that held the ruined
spendthrift back when the current swept so swiftly oceanward was a
woman's tender hand; and Heaven only knows what patient watchfulness,
what careful administration of medicines and unwearying preparation of
broths and jellies and sagos and gruels, what untiring and devoted
slavery, had been necessary to save the faded rake who looked out upon
the world once more, a ghastly shadow of his former self, a penniless
helpless burden for any one who might choose to support him.
"Don't thank _me_," said the doctor, when his feeble patient whimpered
flourishing protestations of his gratitude, unabashed by the
consciousness that such grateful protestations were the sole coin with
which the medical man would be paid for his services; "thank that young
woman, if you want to thank anybody; for if it had not been for her you
wouldn't be here to talk about gratitude. And if ever you get such
another attack of inflammation on the lungs, you had better pray for
such another nurse, though I don't think you're likely to find one."
And with this exordium, the rough-and-ready surgeon took his departure,
leaving Horatio Paget alone with the woman who had saved his life.
She was only his landlady's daughter; and his landlady was no
prosperous householder in Mayfair, thriving on the extravagance of
wealthy bachelors, but an honest widow, living in an obscure little
street leading out of the Old Kent-road, and letting a
meagrely-furnished little parlour and a still more meagrely-furnished
little bedroom to any single gentleman whom reverse of fortune might
lead into such a locality. Captain Paget had sunk very low in the world
when he took possession of that wretched parlour and laid himself down
to rest on the widow's flock-bed.
There is apt to be a dreary interval in the life of such a man--a blank
dismal interregnum, which divides the day in which he spends his last
shilling from the hour in which he begins to prey deliberately upon the
purses of other people. It was in that hopeless interval that Horatio
Paget established himself in the widow's parlour. But though he slept
in the Old Kent-road, he had not yet brought himself to endure
existence on that Surrey side of the water. He emerged from his lodging
every morning to hasten westward, resplendent in clean linen and
exquisitely-fitting gloves, and unquestionable overcoat, and varnished
boots.
The wardrobe has its Indian summer; and the glory of a first-rate
tailor's coat is like the splendour of a tropical sun--it is glorious
to the last, and sinks in a moment. Captain Paget's wardrobe was in its
Indian summer in these days; and when he felt how fatally near the
Bond-street pavement was to the soles of his feet, he could not refrain
from a fond admiration of the boots that were so beautiful in decay.
He walked the West-end for many weary hours every day during this
period of his decadence. He tried to live in an honest gentlemanly way,
by borrowing money of his friends, or discounting an accommodation-bill
obtained from some innocent acquaintance who was deluded by his
brilliant appearance and specious tongue into a belief in the transient
nature of his difficulties. He spent his days in hanging about the
halls and waiting-rooms of clubs--of some of which he had once been a
member; he walked weary miles between St James's and Mayfair,
Kensington Gore and Notting Hill, leaving little notes for men who were
not at home, or writing a little note in one room while the man to whom
he was writing hushed his breath in an adjoining chamber. People who
had once been Captain Paget's fast friends seemed to have
simultaneously decided upon spending their existence out of doors, as
it appeared to the impecunious Captain. The servants of his friends
were afflicted with a strange uncertainty as to their masters'
movements. At whatever hall-door Horatio Paget presented himself, it
seemed equally doubtful whether the proprietor of the mansion would be
home to dinner that day, or whether he would be at home any time next
day, or the day after that, or at the end of the week, or indeed
whether he would ever come home again. Sometimes the Captain, calling
in the evening dusk, in the faint hope of gaining admittance to some
friendly dwelling, saw the glimmer of light under a dining-room door,
and heard the clooping of corks and the pleasant jingling of glass and
silver in the innermost recesses of a butler's pantry; but still the
answer was--not at home, and not likely to be home. All the respectable
world was to be out henceforth for Horatio Paget. But now and then at
the clubs he met some young man, who had no wife at home to keep watch
upon his purse and to wail piteously over a five-pound note
ill-bestowed, and who took compassion on the fallen spendthrift, and
believed, or pretended to believe, his story of temporary
embarrassment; and then the Captain dined sumptuously at a little
French restaurant in Castle-street, Leicester-square, and took a
half-bottle of chablis with his oysters, and warmed himself with
chambertin that was brought to him in a dusty cobweb-shrouded bottle
reposing in a wicker-basket.
But in these latter days such glimpses of sunshine very rarely
illumined the dull stream of the Captain's life. Failure and
disappointment had become the rule of his existence--success the rare
exception. Crossing the river now on his way westward, he was wont to
loiter a little on Waterloo Bridge, and to look dreamily down at the
water, wondering whether the time was near at hand when, under cover of
the evening dusk, he would pay his last halfpenny to the toll-keeper,
and never again know the need of an earthly coin.
"I saw a fellow in the Morgue one day,--a poor wretch who had drowned
himself a week or two before. Great God, how horrible he looked! If
there was any certainty they would find one immediately, and bury one
decently, there'd be no particular horror in that kind of death. But to
be found _like that_, and to lie in some riverside deadhouse down by
Wapping, with a ghastly placard rotting on the rotting door, and
nothing but ooze and slime and rottenness round about one--waiting to
be identified! And who knows, after all, whether a dead man doesn't
_feel_ that sort of thing?"
It was after such musings as these had begun to be very common with
Horatio Paget that he caught the chill which resulted in a very
dangerous illness of many weeks. The late autumn was wet and cold and
dreary; but Captain Paget, although remarkably clever after a certain
fashion, had never been a lover of intellectual pursuits, and
imprisonment in Mrs. Kepp's shabby parlour was odious to him. When he
had read every page of the borrowed newspaper, and pished and pshawed
over the leaders, and groaned aloud at the announcement of some wealthy
marriage made by one of his quondam friends, or chuckled at the record
of another quondam friend's insolvency--when he had poked the fire
savagely half a dozen times in an hour, cursing the pinched grate and
the bad coals during every repetition of the operation--when he had
smoked his last cigar, and varnished his favourite boots, and looked
out of the window, and contemplated himself gloomily in the wretched
little glass over the narrow chimney-piece,--Captain Paget's
intellectual resources were exhausted, and an angry impatience took
possession of him. Then, in defiance of the pelting rain or the
lowering sky, he flung his slippers into the farthest corner--and the
farthest corner of Mrs. Kepp's parlour was not very remote from the
Captain's arm-chair--he drew on the stoutest of his varnished
boots--and there were none of them very stout now--buttoned his perfect
overcoat, adjusted his hat before the looking-glass, and sallied forth,
umbrella in hand, to make his way westward. Westward always, through
storm and shower, back to the haunts of his youth, went the wanderer
and outcast, to see the red glow of cheery fires reflected on the
plate-glass windows of his favourite clubs; to see the lamps in
spacious reading-rooms lit early in the autumn dusk, and to watch the
soft light glimmering on the rich bindings of the books, and losing
itself in the sombre depths of crimson draperies. To this poor worldly
creature the agony of banishment from those palaces of Pall Mall or St.
James's-street was as bitter as the pain of a fallen angel. It was the
dullest, deadest time of the year, and there were not many loungers in
those sumptuous reading-rooms, where the shaded lamps shed their
subdued light on the chaste splendour of the sanctuary; so Captain
Paget could haunt the scene of his departed youth without much fear of
recognition: but his wanderings in the West grew more hopeless and
purposeless every day. He began to understand how it was that people
were never at home when he assailed their doors with his fashionable
knock. He could no longer endure the humiliation of such repulses, for
he began to understand that the servants knew his errand as well as
their masters, and had their answers ready, let him present himself
before them when he would: so he besieged the doors of St. James's and
Mayfair, Kensington Gore and Netting Hill, no longer. He knew that the
bubble of his poor foolish life had burst, and that there was nothing
left for him but to die.
It seemed about this time as if the end of all was very near. Captain
Paget caught a chill one miserable evening on which he returned to his
lodging with his garments dripping, and his beautiful varnished boots
reduced to a kind of pulp; and the chill resulted in a violent
inflammation of the lungs. Then it was that a woman's hand was held out
to save him, and a woman's divine tenderness cared for him in his dire
extremity.
The ministering angel who comforted this helpless and broken-down
wayfarer was only a low-born ignorant girl called Mary Anne Kepp--a
girl who had waited upon the Captain during his residence in her
mother's house, but of whom he had taken about as much notice as he had
been wont to take of the coloured servants who tended him when he was
with his regiment in India. Horatio Paget had been a night-brawler and
a gamester, a duellist and a reprobate, in the glorious days that were
gone; but he had never been a profligate; and he did not know that the
girl who brought him his breakfast and staggered under the weight of
his coal-scuttle was one of the most beautiful women he had ever looked
upon.
The Captain was so essentially a creature of the West-end, that Beauty
without her glitter of diamonds and splendour of apparel was scarcely
Beauty for him. He waited for the groom of the chambers to announce her
name, and the low hum of well-bred approval to accompany her entrance,
before he bowed the knee and acknowledged her perfection. The Beauties
whom he remembered had received their patent from the Prince Regent,
and had graduated in the houses of Devonshire and Hertford. How should
the faded bachelor know that this girl, in a shabby cotton gown, with
unkempt hair dragged off her pale face, and with grimy smears from the
handles of saucepans and fire-irons imprinted upon her cheeks--how
should he know that she was beautiful? It was only during the slow
monotonous hours of his convalescence, when he lay upon the poor faded
little sofa in Mrs. Kepp's parlour--the sofa that was scarcely less
faded and feeble than himself--it was then, and then only, that he
discovered the loveliness of the face which had been so often bent over
him during his delirious wanderings.
"I have mistaken you for all manner of people, my dear," he said to his
landlady's daughter, who sat by the little Pembroke-table working,
while her mother dozed in a corner with a worsted stocking drawn over
her arm and a pair of spectacles resting upon her elderly nose. Mrs.
Kepp and her daughter were wont to spend their evenings in the lodger's
apartment now; for the invalid complained bitterly of "the horrors"
when they left him.
"I have taken you for all sorts of people, Mary Anne," pursued the
Captain dreamily. "Sometimes I have fancied you were the Countess of
Jersey, and I could see her smile as she looked at me when I was first
presented to her. I was very young in the beautiful Jersey's time; and
then there was the other one--whom I used to drink tea with at
Brighton. Ah me! what a dull world it seems nowadays! The King gone,
and everything changed--everything--everything! I am a very old man,
Mary Anne."
He was fifty-two years of age; he felt quite an old man. He had spent
all his money, he had outlived the best friends of his youth; for it
had been his fate to adorn a declining era, and he had been a youngster
among elderly patrons and associates. His patrons were dead and gone,
and the men he had patronised shut their doors upon him in the day of
his poverty. As for his relations, he had turned his back upon them
long ago, when first he followed in the shining wake of that gorgeous
vessel, the Royal George. In this hour of his penniless decline there
was none to help him. To have outlived every affection and every
pleasure is the chief bitterness of old age; and this bitterness
Horatio Paget suffered in all its fulness, though his years were but
fifty-two.
"I am a very old man, Mary Anne," he repeated plaintively. But Mary
Anne Kepp could not think him old. To her eyes he must for ever appear
the incarnation of all that is elegant and distinguished. He was the
first gentleman she had ever seen. Mrs. Kepp had given shelter to other
lodgers who had called themselves gentlemen, and who had been pompous
and grandiose of manner in their intercourse with the widow and her
daughter; but O, what pitiful lacquered counterfeits, what Brummagem
paste they had been, compared to the real gem! Mary Anne Kepp had seen
varnished boots before the humble flooring of her mother's dwelling was
honoured by the tread of Horatio Paget, but what clumsy vulgar boots,
and what awkward plebeian feet had worn them! The lodger's slim white
hands and arched instep, the patrician curve of his aquiline nose, the
perfect grace of his apparel, the high-bred modulation of his courteous
accents,--all these had impressed Mary Anne's tender little heart so
much the more because of his poverty and loneliness. That such a man
should be forgotten and deserted--that such a man should be poor and
lonely, seemed so cruel a chance to the simple maiden: and then when
illness overtook him, and invested him with a supreme claim upon her
tenderness and pity,--then the innocent girl lavished all the treasures
of a compassionate heart upon the ruined gentleman. She had no thought
of fee or reward; she knew that her mother's lodger was miserably poor,
and that his payments had become more and more irregular week by week
and month by month. She had no consciousness of the depth of feeling
that rendered her so gentle a nurse; for her life was a busy one, and
she had neither time nor inclination for any morbid brooding upon her
own feelings.
She protested warmly against the Captain's lamentation respecting his
age.
"The idear of any gentleman calling hisself old at fifty!" she
said--and Horatio shuddered at the supererogatory "r" and the
"hisself," though they proceeded from the lips of his
consoler;--"you've got many, many years before you yet, sir, please
God," she added piously; "and there's good friends will come forward
yet to help you, I make no doubt."
Captain Paget shook his head peevishly.
"You talk as if you were telling my fortune with a pack of cards," he
said. "No, my girl, I shall have only one friend to rely upon, if ever
I am well enough to go outside this house; and that friend is myself. I
have spent the fortune my father left me; I have spent the price of my
commission; and I have parted with every object of any value that I
ever possessed--in vulgar parlance, I am cleaned out, Mary Anne. But
other men have spent every sixpence belonging to them, and have
contrived to live pleasantly enough for half a century afterwards; and
I daresay I can do as they have done. If the wind is tempered to the
shorn lamb, I suppose the hawks and vultures take care of themselves. I
have tried my luck as a shorn lamb, and the tempest has been very
bitter for me; so I have no alternative but to join the vultures."
Mary Anne Kepp stared wonderingly at her mother's lodger. She had some
notion that he had been saying something wicked and blasphemous; but
she was too ignorant and too innocent to follow his meaning.
"O, pray don't talk in that wild way, sir," she entreated. "It makes me
so unhappy to hear you go on like that."
"And why should anything that I say make you unhappy, Mary Anne?" asked
the lodger earnestly.
There was something in his tone that set her pale face on fire with
unwonted crimson, and she bent very low over her work to hide those
painful blushes. She did not know that the Captain's tone presaged a
serious address; she did not know that the grand crisis of her life was
close upon her.
Horatio Paget had determined upon making a sacrifice. The doctor had
told him that he owed his life to this devoted girl; and he would have
been something less than man if he had not been moved with some
grateful emotion. He was grateful; and in the dreary hours of his slow
recovery he had ample leisure for the contemplation of the woman to
whom he owed so much, if his poor worthless life could indeed be much.
He saw that she was devoted to him; that she loved him more truly than
he had ever been conscious of being loved before. He saw too that she
was beautiful. To an ugly woman Captain Paget might have felt extremely
grateful; but he could never have thought of an ugly woman as he
thought of Mary Anne Kepp. The end of his contemplation and his
deliberation came to this: She was beautiful, and she loved him, and
his life was utterly wretched and lonely; so he determined on proving
his gratitude by a sublime sacrifice. Before the girl had lifted her
face from the needlework over which she had bent to hide her blushes,
Horatio Paget had asked her to be his wife. Her emotion almost
overpowered her as she tried to answer him; but she struggled against
it bravely, and came to the sofa on which he lay and dropped upon her
knees by his side. The beggar-maid who was wooed by a king could have
felt no deeper sense of her lover's condescension than that which
filled the heart of this poor simple girl as she knelt by her mother's
gentleman lodger.
"I--to be your wife!" she exclaimed. "O, surely, sir, you cannot mean
it?"
"But I do mean it, with all my heart and soul, my dear," answered the
Captain. "I'm not offering you any grand chance, Mary Anne; for I'm
about as low down in the world as a man can be. But I don't mean to be
poor all my life. Come, my dear, don't cry," he exclaimed, just a
little impatiently--for the girl had covered her face with her hands,
and tears were dropping between the poor hard-working fingers--"but
lift up your head and tell me whether you will take a faded old
bachelor for your husband or not."
Horatio Paget had admired many women in the bright years of his youth,
and had fancied himself desperately in love more than once in his life;
but it is doubtful whether the mighty passion had ever really possessed
the Captain's heart, which was naturally cold and sluggish, rarely
fluttered by any emotion that was not engendered of selfishness.
Horatio had set up an idol and had invented a religion for himself very
early in life; and that idol was fashioned after his own image, and
that religion had its beginning and end in his own pleasure. He might
have been flattered and pleased by Miss Kepp's agitation; but he was
ill and peevish; and having all his life been subject to a profound
antipathy to feminine tearfulness, the girl's display of emotion
annoyed him.
"Is it to be yes, or no, my dear?" he asked, with, some vexation in his
tone.
Mary Anne looked up at him with tearful, frightened eyes.
"O, yes, sir, if I can be of any use to you, and nurse you when you are
ill, and work for you till I work my fingers to the bone."
She clenched her hands spasmodically as she spoke. In imagination she
was already toiling and striving for the god of her idolatry--the
GENTLEMAN whose varnished boots had been to her as a glimpse of another
and a fairer world than that represented by Tulliver's-terrace, Old
Kent-road. But Captain Paget checked her enthusiasm by a gentle gesture
of his attenuated hands.
"That will do, my dear," he murmured languidly; "I'm not very strong
yet, and anything in the way of fuss is inexpressibly painful to me.
Ah, my poor child," he exclaimed, pityingly, "if you could have seen a
dinner at the Marquis of Hertford's, you would have understood how much
can be achieved without fuss. But I am talking of things you don't
understand. You will be my wife; and a very good, kind, obedient little
wife, I have no doubt. That is all settled. As for working for me, my
love, it would be about as much as these poor little hands could do to
earn me a cigar a day--and I seldom smoke less than half a dozen
cigars; so, you see, that is all so much affectionate nonsense. And now
you may wake your mother, my dear; for I want to take a little nap, and
I can't close my eyes while that good soul is snoring so intolerably;
but not a word about our little arrangement, Mary Anne, till you and
your mother are alone."
And hereupon the Captain spread a handkerchief over his face and
subsided into a gentle slumber. The little scene had fatigued him;
though it had been so quietly enacted, that Mrs. Kepp had slept on
undisturbed by the brief fragment of domestic drama performed within a
few yards of her uneasy arm-chair. Her daughter awoke her presently,
and she resumed her needlework, while Mary Anne made some tea for the
beloved sleeper. The cups and saucers made more noise to-night than
they were wont to make in the girl's careful hands. The fluttering of
her heart seemed to communicate itself to the tips of her fingers, and
the jingling of the crockery-ware betrayed the intensity of her
emotion. He was to be her husband! She was to have a gentleman for a
husband; and such a gentleman! Out of such base trifles as a West-end
tailor's coat and a West-end workman's boots may be engendered the
purest blossom of womanly love and devotion. Wisely may the modern
philosopher cry that the history of the world is only a story of old
clothes. Mary Anne had begun by admiring the graces of Stultz and Hoby,
and now she was ready to lay down her life for the man who wore the
perishing garments.
* * * * *
Miss Kepp obeyed her lover's behest; and it was only on the following
day, when she and her mother were alone together in the dingy little
kitchen below Captain Paget's apartments, that she informed that worthy
woman of the honour which had been vouchsafed to her. And thereupon
Mary Anne endured the first of the long series of disappointments which
were to arise out of her affection for the penniless Captain. The widow
was a woman of the world, and was obstinately blind to the advantages
of a union with a ruined gentleman of fifty. "How's he to keep you, I
should like to know," Mrs. Kepp exclaimed, as the girl stood blushing
before her after having told her story; "if he can't pay me
regular?--and you know the difficulty I have had to get his money, Mary
Anne. If he can't keep hisself, how's he to keep you?"
"Don't talk like that, mother," cried the girl, wincing under her
parent's practical arguments; "you go on as if all I cared for was
being fed and clothed. Besides, Captain Paget is not going to be poor
always. He told me so last night, when he----"
"_He_ told you so!" echoed the honest widow with unmitigated scorn;
"hasn't he told me times and often that I should have my rent regular
after this week, and regular after that week, and have I _ever_ had it
regular? And ain't I keeping him out of charity now?--a poor
widow-woman like me--which I may be wanting charity myself before long:
and if it wasn't for your whimpering and going on he'd have been out of
the house three weeks ago, when the doctor said he was well enough to
be moved; for I ast him."
"And you'd have turned him out to die in the streets, mother!" cried
Mary; "I didn't think you was so 'artless."
From this time there was ill-feeling between Mrs. Kepp and her
daughter, who had been hitherto one of the most patient and obedient of
children. The fanatic can never forgive the wretch who disbelieves in
the divinity of his god; and women who love as blindly and foolishly as
Mary Anne Kepp are the most bigoted of worshippers. The girl could not
forgive her mother's disparagement of her idol,--the mother had no
mercy upon her daughter's folly; and after much wearisome contention
and domestic misery--carefully hidden from the penniless sybarite in
the parlour--after many tears and heart-burnings, and wakeful nights
and prayerful watches, Mary Anne Kepp consented to leave the house
quietly one morning with the gentleman lodger while the widow had gone
to market. Miss Kepp left a piteous little note for her mother, rather
ungrammatical, but very womanly and tender, imploring pardon for her
want of duty; and, "O, mother, if you knew how good and nobel he is,
you coudent be angery with me for luving him has I do, and we shall
come back to you after oure marige, wich you will be pade up honourabel
to the last farthin'."
After writing this epistle in the kitchen, with more deliberation and
more smudging than Captain Paget would have cared to behold in the
bride of his choice, Mary Anne attired herself in her Sabbath-day
raiment, and left Tulliver's-terrace with the Captain in a cab. She
would fain have taken a little lavender paper-covered box that
contained the remainder of her wardrobe, but after surveying it with a
shudder, Captain Paget told her that such a box would condemn them
_anywhere_.
"You may get on sometimes without luggage, my dear," he said
sententiously; "but with such luggage as _that_, never!"
The girl obeyed without comprehending. It was not often that she
understood her lover's meaning, nor did he particularly care that she
should understand him. He talked to her rather in the same spirit in
which one talks to a faithful canine companion--as Napoleon III. may
talk to his favourite Nero; "I have great plans yet unfulfilled, my
honest Nero, though you may not be wise enough to guess their nature.
And we must have another Boulevard, old fellow; and we must settle that
little dispute about Venetia; and we must do something for those
unfortunate Poles, eh--good dog?" and so on.
Captain Paget drove straight to a registrar's office, where the new
Marriage Act enabled him to unite himself to Miss Kepp _sans façon_, in
presence of the cabman and a woman who had been cleaning the door-step.
The Captain went through the brief ceremonial as coolly as if it had
been the settlement of a water-rate, and was angered by the tears that
poor Mary Anne shed under her cheap black veil. He had forgotten the
poetic superstition in favour of a wedding-ring, but he slipped a
little onyx ring off his own finger, and put it on the clumsier finger
of his bride. It was the last of his jewels--the rejected of the
pawnbrokers, who, not being learned in antique intaglios, had condemned
the ring as trumpery. There is always something a little ominous in the
bridegroom's forgetfulness of that simple golden circle which typifies
an eternal union; and a superstitious person might have drawn a
sinister augury from the subject of Captain Paget's intaglio, which was
a head of Nero--an emperor whose wife was by no means the happiest of
women. But as neither Mary Anne nor the registrar, neither the cabman
nor the charwoman who had been cleaning the door-step, had ever heard
of Nero, and as Horatio Paget was much too indifferent to be
superstitious, there was no one to draw evil inferences: and Mary Anne
went away with her gentleman husband, proud and happy, with a happiness
that was only disturbed now and then by the image of an infuriated
mother.
Captain Paget took his bride to some charming apartments in
Halfmoon-street, Mayfair; and she was surprised to hear him tell the
landlady that he and his wife had just arrived from Devonshire, and
that they meant to stay a week or so in London, _en passant_, before
starting for the Continent.
"My wife has spent the best part of her life in the country," said the
Captain, "so I suppose I must show her some of the sights of London in
spite of the abominable weather. But the deuce of it is, that my
servant has misunderstood my directions, and gone on to Paris with the
luggage. However, we can set that all straight to-morrow."
Nothing could be more courteously acquiescent than the manner of the
landlady; for Captain Paget had offered her references, and the people
to whom he referred were among the magnates of the land. The Captain
knew enough of human nature to know that if references are only
sufficiently imposing, they are very unlikely to be verified. The
swindler who refers his dupe to the Duke of Sutherland and Baring
Brothers has a very good chance of getting his respectability accepted
without inquiry, on the mere strength of those sacred names.
* * * * *
From this time until the day of her death Mary Anne Paget very seldom
heard her husband make any statement which she did not know to be
false. He had joined the ranks of the vultures. He had lain down upon
his bed of sickness a gentlemanly beggar; he arose from that couch of
pain and weariness a swindler.
Now began those petty shifts and miserable falsifications whereby the
birds of prey thrive on the flesh and blood of hapless pigeons. Now the
dovecotes were fluttered by a new destroyer--a gentlemanly vulture,
whose suave accents and perfect manners were fatal to the unwary.
Henceforth Horatio Cromie Nugent Paget flourished and fattened upon the
folly of his fellow-men. As promoter of joint-stock companies that
never saw the light; as treasurer of loan-offices where money was never
lent; as a gentleman with capital about to introduce a novel article of
manufacture from the sale of which a profit of five thousand a year
would infallibly be realized, and desirous to meet with another
gentleman of equal capital; as the mysterious X.Y.Z. who will--for so
small a recompense as thirty postage-stamps--impart the secret of an
elegant and pleasing employment, whereby seven-pound-ten a-week may be
made by any individual, male or female;--under every flimsy disguise
with which the swindler hides his execrable form, Captain Paget plied
his cruel trade, and still contrived to find fresh dupes. Of course
there were occasions when the pigeons were slow to flutter into the
fascinating snare, and when the vulture had a bad time of it; and it
was a common thing for the Captain to sink from the splendour of
Mayfair or St. James's-street into some dingy transpontine
hiding-place. But he never went back to Tulliver's-terrace, though Mary
Anne pleaded piteously for the payment of her poor mother's debt. When
her husband was in funds, he patted her head affectionately, and told
her that he would see about it--i.e. the payment of Mrs. Kepp's bill;
while, if she ventured to mention the subject to him when his purse was
scantily furnished, he would ask her fiercely how he was to satisfy her
mother's extortionate claims when he had not so much as a sixpence for
his own use.
Mrs. Kepp's bill was never paid, and Mary Anne never saw her mother's
face again. Mrs. Paget was one of those meek loving creatures who are
essentially cowardly. She could not bring herself to encounter her
mother without the money owed by the Captain; she could not bring
herself to endure the widow's reproaches, the questioning that would be
so horribly painful to answer, the taunts that would torture her poor
sorrowful heart.
Alas for her brief dream of love and happiness! Alas for her foolish
worship of the gentleman lodger! She knew now that her mother had been
wiser than herself, and that it would have been better for her if she
had renounced the shadowy glory of an alliance with Horatio Cromie
Nugent Paget, whose string of high-sounding names, written on the cover
of an old wine-book, had not been without its influence on the ignorant
girl. The widow's daughter knew very little happiness during the few
years of her wedded life. To be hurried from place to place; to dine in
Mayfair to-day, and to eat your dinner at a shilling ordinary in
Whitecross-street to-morrow; to wear fine clothes that have not been
paid for, and to take them off your back at a moment's notice when they
are required for the security of the friendly pawnbroker; to know that
your life is a falsehood and a snare, and that to leave a place is to
leave contempt and execration behind you,--these things constitute the
burden of a woman whose husband lives by his wits. And over and above
these miseries, Mrs. Paget had to endure all the variations of temper
to which the schemer is subject. If the pigeons dropped readily into
the snare, and if their plumage proved well worth the picking, the
Captain was very kind to his wife, after his own fashion; that is to
say, he took her out with him, and after lecturing her angrily because
of the shabbiness of her bonnet, bought her a new one, and gave her a
dinner that made her ill, and then sent her home in a cab, while he
finished the evening in more congenial society. But if the times were
bad for the vulture tribe--O, then, what a gloomy companion for the
domestic hearth was the elegant Horatio! After smiling his false smile
all day, while rage and disappointment were gnawing at his heart, it
was a kind of relief to the Captain to be moody and savage by his own
fireside. The human vulture has something of the ferocity of his
feathered prototype. The man who lives upon his fellow-men has need to
harden his heart; for one sentiment of compassion, one touch of human
pity, would shatter his finest scheme in the hour of its fruition.
Horatio Paget and compassion parted fellowship very early in the course
of his unscrupulous career. What if the pigeon has a widowed mother
dependent on his prosperity, or half a dozen children who will be
involved in his ruin? Is the hawk to forego his natural prey for any
such paltry consideration as a vulgar old woman or a brood of squalling
brats?
Captain Paget was not guilty of any persistent unkindness towards the
woman whose fate he had deigned to link with his own. The consciousness
that he had conferred a supreme honour on Mary Anne Kepp by offering
her his hand, and a share of his difficulties, never deserted him. He
made no attempt to elevate the ignorant girl into companionship with
himself. He shuddered when she misplaced her h's and turned from her
peevishly, with a muttered oath, when she was more than usually
ungrammatical: but though he found it disagreeable to hear her, he
would have found it troublesome to set her right; and trouble was a
thing which Horatio Paget held in gentlemanly aversion. The idea that
the mode of his existence could be repulsive to his wife--that this
low-born and low-bred girl could have scruples that he never felt, and
might suffer agonies of remorse and shame of which his coarser nature
was incapable--never entered the Captain's mind. It would have been too
great an absurdity for the daughter of plebeian Kepps to affect a
tenderness of conscience unknown to the scion of Pagets and Cromies and
Nugents. Mary Anne was afraid of her elegant husband; and she
worshipped and waited upon him in meek silence, keeping the secret of
her own sorrows, and keeping it so well that he never guessed the
manifold sources of that pallor of countenance and hollow brightness of
eye which had of late annoyed him when he looked at his wife. She had
borne him a child--a sweet girl baby, with those great black eyes that
always have rather a weird look in the face of infancy; and she would
fain have clung to the infant as the hope and consolation of her
joyless life. But the vulture is not a domestic bird, and a baby would
have been an impediment in the rapid hegiras which Captain Paget and
his wife were wont to make. The Captain put an advertisement in a daily
paper before the child was a week old; and in less than a fortnight
after Mary Anne had looked at the baby face for the first time, she was
called upon to surrender her treasure to an elderly woman of fat and
greasy aspect, who had agreed to bring the infant up "by hand" in a
miserable little street in a remote and dreary district lying between
Vauxhall and Battersea.
Mary Anne gave up the child uncomplainingly, as meekly as she would
have surrendered herself if the Captain had brought a masked
executioner to her bedside, and had told her a block was prepared for
her in the adjoining chamber. She had no idea of resistance to the will
of her husband. She endured her existence for nearly five years after
the birth of her child, and during those miserable years the one effort
of her life was to secure the miserable stipend paid for the little
girl's maintenance; but before the child's fifth birthday the mother
faded off the face of the earth. She died in a miserable lodging not
very far from Tulliver's-terrace, expiring in the arms of a landlady
who had comforted her in her hour of need, as she had comforted the
ruined gentleman. Captain Paget was a prisoner in Whitecross-street at
the time of his wife's death, and was much surprised when he missed her
morning visits, and the little luxuries she had been wont to bring him.
He had missed her for more than a week, and had written to her
twice--rather angrily on the second occasion--when a rough unkempt boy
in corduroy waited upon him in the dreary ward, where he and half a
dozen other depressed and melancholy men sat at little tables writing
letters, or pretending to read newspapers, and looking at one another
furtively every now and then. There is no prisoner so distracted by his
own cares that he will not find time to wonder what his neighbour is
"in for."
The boy had received instructions to be careful how he imparted his
dismal tidings to the "poor dear gentleman;" but the lad grew nervous
and bewildered at sight of the Captain's fierce hook-nose and
scrutinising gray eyes, and blurted out his news without any dismal
note of warning.
"The lady died at two o'clock this morning, please, sir; and mother
said I was to come and tell you, please, sir."
Captain Paget staggered under the blow.
"Good God!" he cried, as he dropped upon a rickety Windsor chair, that
creaked under his weight; "and I did not even know that she was ill!"
Still less did he know that all her married life had been one long
heart-sickness--one monotonous agony of remorse and shame.
CHAPTER III.
"HEART BARE, HEART HUNGRY, VERY POOR."
Diana Paget left the Kursaal, and walked slowly along the pretty rustic
street; now dawdling before a little print-shop, whose contents she
knew by heart, now looking back at the great windows of that temple of
pleasure which she had just quitted.
"What do they care what becomes of me?" she thought, as she looked up
at the blank vacant windows for the last time before she left the main
street of Forêtdechêne, and turned into a straggling side-street, whose
rugged pavement sloped upward towards the pine-clad hills. The house in
which Captain Paget had taken up his abode was a tall white habitation,
situated in the narrowest of the narrow by-ways that intersect the main
street of the pretty Belgian watering-place; a lane in which the
inhabitants of opposite houses may shake hands with one another out of
the window, and where the odour of the cabbages and onions so liberally
employed in the _cuisine_ of the native offends the nose of the
foreigner from sunrise to sunset.
Diana paused for a moment at the entrance to this lane, but, after a
brief deliberation, walked onwards.
"What is the use of my going home?" she thought; "_they_ won't be home
for hours to come."
She walked slowly along the hilly street, and from the street into a
narrow pathway winding upward through the pine-wood. Here she was quite
alone, and the stillness of the place soothed her. She took off her
hat, and slung the faded ribbons across her arm; and the warm breeze
lifted the loose hair from her forehead as she wandered upwards. It was
a very beautiful face from which that loose dark hair was lifted by the
summer wind. Diana Paget inherited something of the soft loveliness of
Mary Anne Kepp, and a little of the patrician beauty of the Pagets. The
eyes were like those which had watched Horatio Paget on his bed of
sickness in Tulliver's-terrace. The resolute curve of the thin flexible
lips, and the fine modelling of the chin, were hereditary attributes of
the Nugent Pagets; and a resemblance to the lower part of Miss Paget's
face might have been traced in many a sombre portrait of dame and
cavalier at Thorpehaven Manor, where a Nugent Paget, who acknowledged
no kindred with the disreputable Captain, was now master.
The girl's reflections as she slowly climbed the hill were not
pleasant. The thoughts of youth should be very beautiful; but youth
that has been spent in the companionship of reprobates and tricksters
is something worse than age; for experience has taught it to be bitter,
while time has not taught it to be patient. For Diana Paget, childhood
had been joyless, and girlhood lonely. That blank and desolate region,
that dreary flat of fenny waste ground between Vauxhall and Battersea,
on which the child's eyes had first looked, had been typical of her
loveless childhood. With her mother's death faded the one ray of light
that had illumined her desolation. She was shifted from one nurse to
another; and bar nurses were not allowed to love her, for she remained
with them as an encumbrance and a burden. It was so difficult for the
Captain to pay the pitiful sum demanded for his daughter's support--or
rather it was so much easier for him not to pay it. So there always
came a time when Diana was delivered at her father's lodgings like a
parcel, by an indignant nurse, who proclaimed the story of her wrongs
in shrill feminine treble, and who was politely informed by the Captain
that her claim was a common debt, and that she had the remedy in her
own hands, but that the same code of laws which provided her with that
remedy, forbade any obnoxious demonstration of her anger in a
gentleman's apartment. And then Miss Paget, after hearing all the
tumult and discussion, would be left alone with her father, and would
speedily perceive that her presence was disagreeable to him.
When she outgrew the age of humble foster-mothers and cottages in the
dreariest of the outlying suburbs, the Captain sent his daughter to
school: and on this occasion he determined on patronising a person whom
he had once been too proud to remember among the list of his kindred.
There are poor and straggling branches upon every family tree; and the
Pagets of Thorpehaven had needy cousins who, in the mighty battle of
life, were compelled to fight amongst the rank and file. One of these
poor cousins was a Miss Priscilla Paget, who at an early age had
exhibited that affection for intellectual pursuits and that
carelessness as to the duties of the toilet which are supposed to
distinguish the predestined blue-stocking. Left quite alone in the
world, Priscilla put her educational capital to good use; and after
holding the position of principal governess for nearly twenty years in
a prosperous boarding-school at Brompton, she followed her late
employer to her grave with unaffected sorrow, and within a month of the
funeral invested her savings in the purchase of the business, and
established herself as mistress of the mansion. To this lady Captain
Paget confided his daughter's education; and in Priscilla Paget's house
Diana found a shelter that was almost like a home, until her kinswoman
became weary of promises that were never kept, and pitiful sums paid on
account of a debt that grew bigger every day--very weary likewise of
conciliatory hampers of game and barrels of oysters, and all the flimsy
devices of a debtor who is practised in the varied arts of the
gentlemanly swindler.
The day came when Miss Paget resolved to be rid of her profitless
charge; and once more Diana found herself delivered like a parcel of
unordered goods at the door of her father's lodging. Those are
precocious children who learn their first lessons in the school of
poverty; and the girl had been vaguely conscious of the degradation
involved in this process at the age of five. How much more keenly did
she feel the shame at the age of fifteen! Priscilla did her best to
lessen the pain of her pupil's departure.
"It isn't that I've any fault to find with you, Diana, though you must
remember that I have heard some complaints of your temper," she said,
with gentle gravity; "but your father is too trying. If he didn't make
me any promises, I should think better of him. If he told me frankly
that he couldn't pay me, and asked me to keep you out of
charity,"--Diana drew herself up with a little shiver at this
word,--"why, I might turn it over in my mind, and see if it could be
done. But to be deceived time after time, as I've been deceived--you
know the solemn language your father has used, Diana, for you have
heard him--and to rely on a sum of money on a certain date, as I have
relied again and again, after Horatio's assurance that I might depend
upon him--it's too bad, Diana; it's more than any one can endure. If
you were two or three years older, and further advanced in your
education, I might manage to do something for you by making you useful
with the little ones; but I can't afford to keep you and clothe you
during the next three years for nothing, and so I have no alternative
but to send you home."
The "home" to which Diana Paget was taken upon this occasion was a
lodging over a toyshop in the Westminster-road, where the Captain lived
in considerable comfort on the proceeds of a Friendly and Philanthropic
Loan Society.
But no very cordial welcome awaited Diana in the gaudily-furnished
drawing-room over the toyshop. She found her father sleeping placidly
in his easy-chair, while a young man, who was a stranger to her, sat at
a table near the window writing letters. It was a dull November day--a
very dreary day on which to find one's self thrown suddenly on a still
drearier world; and in the Westminster-bridge-road the lamps were
already making yellow patches of sickly light amidst the afternoon fog.
The Captain twitched his silk handkerchief off his face with an
impatient gesture as Diana entered the room.
"Now, then, what is it?" he asked peevishly, without looking at the
intruder.
He recognised her in the next moment; but that first impatient
salutation was about as warm a welcome as any which Miss Paget received
from her father. In sad and bitter truth, he did not care for her. His
marriage with Mary Anne Kepp had been the one grateful impulse of his
life; and even the sentiment which had prompted that marriage had been
by no means free from the taint of selfishness. But he had been quite
unprepared to find that this grand sacrifice of his life should involve
another sacrifice in the maintenance of a daughter he did not want; and
he was very much inclined to quarrel with the destiny that had given
him this burden.
"If you had been a boy, I might have made you useful to me sooner or
later," the Captain said to his daughter when he found himself alone
with her late on the night of her return; "but what on earth am I to do
with a daughter, in the unsettled life I lead? However, since that old
harridan has sent you back, you must manage in the best way you can,"
concluded Captain Paget with a discontented sigh.
From this time Diana Paget had inhabited the nest of the vultures, and
every day had brought its new lesson of trickery and falsehood. There
are men--and bad men too--who would have tried to keep the secret of
their shifts and meannesses hidden from an only child; but Horatio
Paget believed himself the victim of man's ingratitude, and his
misdoings the necessity of an evil destiny. It is not easy for the
unsophisticated intellect to gauge those moral depths to which the man
who lives by his wits must sink before his career is finished, or to
understand how, with every step in the swindler's downward road, the
conscience grows tougher, the perception of shame blunter, the savage
selfishness of the animal nature stronger. Diana Paget had discovered
some of her father's weaknesses during her miserable childhood; and in
the days of her unpaid-for schooling she had known that his most solemn
promises were no more to be relied on than the capricious breath of a
summer breeze. So the revelations which awaited her under the paternal
roof were not utterly strange or entirely unexpected. Day by day she
grew more accustomed to that atmosphere of fraud and falsehood. The
sense of shame never left her; for there is a pride that thrives amidst
poverty and degradation, and of such pride Diana Paget possessed no
small share. She writhed under the consciousness that she was the
daughter of a man who had forfeited all right to the esteem of his
fellow-men. She valued the good opinion of others, and would fain have
been beloved and admired, trusted and respected; for she was ambitious:
and the though that she might one day do something which should lift
her above the vulgar level was the day-dream that had consoled her in
many an hour of humiliation and discomfort. Diana Paget felt the
Captain's shame as keenly as her mother had felt it; but the remorse
which had agonised gentle Mary Anne, the tender compassion for others
which had wrung that fond and faithful heart, had no place in the
breast of the Captain's daughter.
Diana felt so much compassion for herself, that she had none left to
bestow upon other people. Her father's victims might be miserable, but
was not she infinitely more wretched? The landlady who found her
apartments suddenly tenantless and her rent unpaid might complain of
the hardness of her fortune; but was it not harder for Diana, with the
sensitive feelings and keen pride of the Pagets, to endure all the
degradation involved in the stealthy carrying away of luggage and a
secret departure under cover of night?
At first Miss Paget had been inclined to feel aggrieved by the presence
of the young man whom she had seen writing letters in the gloomy dusk
of the November afternoon; but in due time she came to accept him as a
companion, and to feel that her joyless life would have been drearier
without him. He was the secretary of the Friendly and Philanthropic
Loan Society, and of any other society organised by the Captain. He was
Captain Paget's amanuensis and representative--Captain Paget's tool,
but not Captain Paget's dupe; for Valentine Hawkehurst was not of that
stuff of which dupes are made.
The man who lives by his wits has need of a faithful friend and
follower. The chief of the vultures must not be approached too easily.
There must be a preparatory ordeal, an outer chamber to be passed,
before the victim is introduced to the sanctuary which is irradiated by
the silver veil of the prophet. Captain Paget found an able coadjutor
in Valentine Hawkehurst, who answered one of those tempting
advertisements in which A. B.C. or X. Y. Z. was wont to offer a salary
of three hundred a year to any gentlemanly person capable of performing
the duties of secretary to a newly-established company. It was only
after responding to this promising offer that the applicant was
informed that he must possess one indispensable qualification in the
shape of a capital of five hundred pounds. Mr Hawkehurst laughed aloud
when the Captain imparted this condition with that suave and yet
dignified manner which was peculiar to him.
"I ought to have known it was a dodge of that kind," said the young man
coolly. "Those very good things--duties light and easy, hours from
twelve till four, speedy advancement certain for a conscientious and
gentlemanly person, and so on--are always of the genus _do_. Your
advertisement is very cleverly worded, my dear sir; only it's like the
rest of them, rather _too_ clever. It is so difficult for a clever man
not to be too clever. The prevailing weakness of the human intellect
seems to me to be exaggeration. However, as I haven't a five-pound note
in the world, or the chance of getting one, I'll wish you good morning,
Captain Paget."
There are people whose blood would have been turned to ice by the stony
glare of indignation with which Horatio Paget regarded the man who had
dared to question his probity. But Mr. Hawkehurst had done with strong
impressions long before he met the Captain; and he listened to that
gentleman's freezing reproof with an admiring smile. Out of this very
unpromising beginning there arose a kind of friendship between the two
men. Horatio Paget had for some time been in need of a clever tool; and
in the young man whose cool insolence rose superior to his own dignity
he perceived the very individual whom he had long been seeking. The
young man who was unabashed by the indignation of a scion of Nugents
and Cromies and Pagets must be utterly impervious to the sense of awe;
and it was just such an impervious young man that the Captain wanted as
his coadjutor. Thus arose the alliance, which grew stronger every day,
until Valentine took up his abode under the roof of his employer and
patron, and made himself more thoroughly at home there than the
unwelcome daughter of the house.
The history of Valentine Hawkehurst's past existence was tolerably well
known to the Captain; but the only history of the young man's early
life ever heard by Diana was rather vague and fragmentary. She
discovered, little by little, that he was the son of a spendthrift
_littérateur_, who had passed the greater part of his career within the
rules of the King's Bench; that he had run away from home at the age of
fifteen, and had tried his fortune in all those professions which
require no educational ordeal, and which seem to offer themselves
invitingly to the scapegrace and adventurer. At fifteen Valentine
Hawkehurst had been errand-boy in a newspaper office; at seventeen a
penny-a-liner, whose flimsy was pretty sure of admission in the lower
class of Sunday papers. In the course of a very brief career he had
been a provincial actor, a _manège_ rider in a circus, a
billiard-marker, and a betting agent. It was after having exhausted
these liberal professions that he encountered Captain Paget.
Such was the man whom Horatio Paget admitted to companionship with his
only daughter. It can scarcely be pleaded in excuse for the Captain
that he might have admitted a worse man than Valentine Hawkehurst to
his family circle, for the Captain had never taken the trouble to sound
the depths of his coadjutor's nature. There is nothing so short-sighted
as selfishness; and beyond the narrow circle immediately surrounding
himself, there was no man more blind than Horatio Paget.
* * * * *
It was dusk when Diana grew tired of the lonely pathways among the
hills, where the harmonies of a band stationed in the valley were
wafted in gusts of music by the fitful summer breeze. The loneliness of
the place soothed the girl's feverish spirits; and, seated in a little
classic temple upon the summit of a hill, she looked pensively downward
through the purple mists at the newly-lighted lamps twinkling faintly
in the valley.
"One does not feel the sting of one's shabbiness here," thought Miss
Paget: "the trees are all dressed alike. Nature makes no distinction.
It is only Fortune who treats her children unfairly."
The Captain's daughter walked slowly back to the little town in the
deepening dusk. The lodging occupied by Horatio Paget and his household
consisted of four roomy chambers on the second story of a big rambling
house. The rooms were meanly furnished, and decorated with the tawdry
ornamentation dear to the continental mind; but there were long wide
windows and an iron balcony, on which Diana Paget was often pleased to
sit.
She found the sitting-room dark and empty. No dinner had been prepared;
for on lucky days the Captain and his _protégé_ were wont to dine at
the _table d'hôte_ of one of the hotels, or to feast sumptuously _à la
carte_, while on unlucky days they did not dine at all. Diana found a
roll and some cream cheese in a roomy old cupboard that was flavoured
with mice; and after making a very indifferent meal in the dusky
chamber, she went out upon the balcony, and sat there looking down upon
the lighted town.
She had been sitting there for nearly an hour in the same attitude,
when the door of the sitting-room was opened, and a footstep sounded
behind her. She knew the step; and although she did not lift her head,
her eyes took a new brightness in the summer dusk, and the listless
grace of her attitude changed to a statuesque rigidity, though there
was no change in the attitude itself.
She did not stir till a hand was laid softly on her shoulder, and a
voice said,--"Diana!"
The speaker was Valentine Hawkehurst, the young man whose entrance to
the golden temple had been so closely watched by Captain Paget's
daughter.
She rose as he spoke, and turned to him. "You have been losing, I
suppose, Mr. Hawkehurst," she said, "or you would not have come home?"
"I am compelled to admit that you are right in your premise, Miss
Paget, and your deduction is scarcely worth discussion. I _have_ been
losing--confoundedly; and as they don't give credit at the board of
green cloth yonder, there was no excuse for my staying. Your father has
not been holding his own within the last hour or two; but when I left
the rooms he was going to the Hotel d'Orange with some French fellows
for a quiet game of _écarté_. Our friend the Captain is a great card,
Miss Paget, and has a delightful talent for picking up distinguished
acquaintance."
There are few daughters who would have cared to hear a father spoken of
in this free-and-easy manner; but Diana Paget was quite unmoved. She
had resumed her old attitude, and sat looking towards the lighted
windows of the Kursaal, while Mr. Hawkehurst lounged against the angle
of the window with his hands in his pockets and a cigar in his mouth.
For three years Valentine Hawkehurst had lived in constant
companionship with the Captain's daughter; and in that time his manner
to her had undergone considerable variation. Of late it had been
something in the manner of an elder brother, whose fraternal breast is
impervious to the influence of a sister's loveliness or a sister's
fascination. If Diana Paget had been a snub-nosed young person with red
hair and white eyelashes, Mr. Hawkehurst could scarcely have treated
her with a more friendly indifference, a more brotherly familiarity.
Unhappily this line of conduct, which is perhaps the wisest and most
honourable plan that a man can pursue when he finds himself thrown into
a dangerously familiar association with a beautiful and unprotected
woman, is the very line of proceeding which a beautiful woman can never
bring herself to forgive. A chivalrous stiffness, a melancholy dignity,
a frozen frigidity, which suggest the fiery bubbling of the lava flood
beneath the icy surface,--these are delightful to the female mind. But
friendly indifference and fraternal cordiality constitute the worst
insult that can be offered to her beauty, the most bitter outrage upon
the majesty of her sex.
"I suppose it will be midnight before papa comes home, Mr. Hawkehurst,"
Diana said abruptly, when her companion had finished his cigar, and had
thrown the end of it over the balcony.
"Past midnight more likely, Miss Paget. May I ask how I have become Mr.
Hawkehurst all of a sudden, when for the last three years I have been
usually known as Valentine--or Val?"
The girl turned her head with a gesture in which the carelessness of
his own manner was imitated. She stole a rapid look at him as she
answered, "What does it matter whether I call you by one name or
another?"
"What does anything matter? I believe Mr. Toots was an unconscious
philosopher. There is nothing in the world of any consequence, except
money. Go and look at those poor devils yonder, and you will see what
that is worth," he cried, pointing to the lighted Kursaal; "there you
behold the one great truth of the universe in action. There is nothing
but money, and men are the slaves of money, and life is only another
name for the pursuit of money. Go and look at beauty yonder fading in
the light and heat; at youth that changes to age before your eyes; at
friendship which turns to hate when the chances of the game are with my
friend and against me. The Kursaal is the world in little, Diana; and
this great globe of ours is nothing but a gigantic gaming-table--a
mighty temple for the worship of the golden calf."
"Why do you imitate those people yonder, if you despise them so
heartily?"
"Because I am like them and of them. I tell you that money is the
beginning and end of all things. Why am I here, and why is my life made
up of baseness and lies? Because my father was an improvident
scoundrel, and did not leave me five hundred a year. I wonder what I
should have been like, by the bye, if I had been blest with five
hundred a year?"
"Honest and happy," answered the girl earnestly. She forgot her
simulated indifference, and looked at him with sad earnest eyes. He met
the glance, and the expression of his own face changed from its cynical
smile to a thoughtful sadness.
"Honest perhaps; and yet I almost doubt if anything under five thousand
a year would have kept me honest. Decidedly not happy; the men who can
be happy on five hundred a year are made of a duller stuff than the
clay which serves for a Hawkehurst."
"You talk about not being happy with five hundred a year!" Diana
exclaimed impatiently. "Surely any decent existence would be happiness
to you compared to the miserable life you lead,--the shameful, degraded
life which shuts you out of the society of respectable people and
reduces you to the level of a thief. If you had any pride, Valentine,
you would feel it as bitterly as I do."
"But I haven't any pride. As for my life,--well, I suppose it is
shameful and degraded, and I know that it's often miserable; but it
suits me better than jog-trot respectability, I can dine one day on
truffled turkey and champagne, another day upon bread and cheese and
small beer; but I couldn't eat beef and mutton always. That's what
kills people of my temperament. There are born scamps in the world,
Diana, and I am one of them. My name is Robert Macaire, and I was
created for the life I lead. Keep clear of me if you have any hankering
after better things; but don't try to change my nature, for it is
wasted labour."
"Valentine, it is so cruel of you to talk like that."
"Cruel to whom?"
"To--those--who care for you."
It was quite dark now; but even in the darkness Diana Paget's head
drooped a little as she said this. Mr. Hawkehurst laughed aloud.
"Those who care for me!" he cried; "no such people ever lived. My
father was a drunken scoundrel, who suffered his children to grow up
about him as he would have suffered a litter of puppies to sprawl upon
his hearth, only because there was less trouble in letting them lie
there than in kicking them out. My mother was a good woman in the
beginning, I know; but she must have been something more than a mortal
woman if she had not lost some of her goodness in twelve years of such
a life as she led with my father. I believe she was fond of me, poor
soul; but she died six months before I ran away from a lodging in the
Rules, which it is the bitterest irony to speak of as my home. Since
then I have been Robert Macaire, and have about as many friends as such
a man usually has."
"You can scarcely wonder if you have few friends," said Miss Paget,
"since there is no one in the world whom you love."
She watched him through the darkness after saying this, watched him
closely, though it was too dark for her to see the expression of his
face, and any emotion to which her words might have given rise could be
betrayed only by some gesture or change of attitude. She watched him in
vain, for he did not stir. But after a pause of some minutes he said
slowly,--
"Such a man as I cannot afford to love any one. What have I to offer to
the woman I might pretend to love? Truth, or honour, or honesty, or
constancy? Those are commodities I have never dealt in. If I know what
they are, and that I have never possessed them, it is about as much as
I do know of them. If I have any redeeming grace, Diana Paget, it lies
in the fact that I know what a worthless wretch I am. Your father
thinks he is a great man, a noble suffering creature, and that the
world has ill-used him. I know that I am a scoundrel, and that let my
fellow-men treat me as badly as they please, they can never give me
worse usage than I deserve. And am I a man to talk about love, or to
ask a woman to share my life? Good God, what a noble partner I should
offer her! what a happy existence I could assure her!"
"But if the woman loved you, she would only love you better for being
unfortunate."
"Yes, if she was very young and foolish and romantic. But don't you
think I should be a villain if I traded on her girlish folly? She would
love me for a year or two perhaps, and bear all the changes of my
temper; but the day would come when she would awake from her delusion,
and know that she had been cheated. She would see other women--less
gifted than herself, probably--and would see the market they had made
of their charms; would see them rich and honoured and happy, and would
stand aside in the muddy streets to be splashed by the dirt from their
carriage-wheels. And then she would consider the price for which she
had bartered her youth and her beauty, and would hate the man who had
cheated her. No, Diana, I am not such a villain as the world may think
me. I am down in the dirt myself, and I'm used to it. I won't drag a
woman into the gutter just because I may happen to love her."
There was a long silence after this--a silence during which Diana Paget
sat looking down at the twinkling lights of the Kursaal. Valentine
lighted a second cigar and smoked it out, still in silence. The clocks
struck eleven as he threw the end of his cigar away; a tiny, luminous
speck, which shot through the misty atmosphere below the balcony like a
falling star.
"I may as well go and see how your father is getting on yonder," he
said, as the spark of light vanished in the darkness below. "Good
night, Diana. Don't sit too long in the cold night air; and don't sit
up for your father--there's no knowing when he may be home."
The girl did not answer him. She listened to the shutting of the door
as it closed behind him, and then folded her arms upon the iron rail of
the balcony, laid her head upon them, and wept silently. Her life was
very dreary, and it seemed to her as if the last hope which had
sustained her against an unnatural despair had been taken away from her
to-night.
Twelve o'clock sounded with a feeble little _carillon_ from one of the
steeples, and still she sat with her head resting upon her folded arms.
Her eyes were quite dry by this time, for with her tears were very
rare, and the passion which occasioned them must needs be intense. The
night air grew chill and damp; but although she shivered now and then
beneath that creeping, penetrating cold which is peculiar to night air,
she did not stir from her place in the balcony till she was startled by
the opening of the door in the room behind her.
All was dark within, but Diana Paget was very familiar with the
footstep that sounded on the carpetless floor. It was Valentine
Hawkehurst, and not her father, whose step her quick ear distinguished.
"Diana," he called; and then he muttered in a tone of surprise, "all
dark still. Ah! she has gone to bed, I suppose. That's a pity!" The
figure in the balcony caught his eye at this moment.
"What in goodness' name has kept you out there all this time?" he
asked; "do you want to catch your death of cold?"
He was standing by the mantelpiece lighting a candle as he asked this
unceremonious question. The light of the candle shone full upon his
face when Diana came into the room, and she could see that he was paler
than usual.
"Is there anything the matter?" she asked anxiously.
"Yes; there is a great deal the matter. You will have to leave
Forêtdechêne by the earliest train to-morrow morning, on the first
stage of your journey to England. Look here, my girl! I can give you
just about the money that will carry you safely to London; and when you
are once there, Providence must do the rest."
"Valentine, what do you mean?"
"I mean, that you cannot get away from this place--you cannot dissever
yourself from the people you have been living with, too soon. Come,
come, don't shiver, child. Take a few drops of this cognac, and let me
see the colour come back to your face before I say any more."
He poured the dregs of a bottle of brandy into a glass, and made her
drink the spirit. He was obliged to force the rim of the glass between
her set teeth before he could succeed in this.
"Come, Diana," he said, after she had drunk, "you have been a pupil in
the school of adversity so long, that you ought to be able to take
misfortunes pretty quietly. There's a balance struck, somehow or other,
depend upon it, my girl; and the prosperous people who pay their debts
have to suffer, as well as the Macaire family. I'm a scamp and a
scoundrel, but I'm your true friend nevertheless, Diana; and you must
promise to take my advice. Tell me that you will trust me."
"I have no one else to trust."
"No one else in this place. But in England you have your old
friend,--the woman with whom you were at school. Do you think she would
refuse to give you a temporary home if you sued to her _in formâ
pauperis?_"
"No, I don't think she would refuse. She was very good to me. But why
am I to go back to London?"
"Because to stay here would be ruin and disgrace to you; because the
tie that links you to Horatio Paget must be cut at any hazard."
"But why?"
"For the best or worst of reasons. Your father has been trying a trick
to-night which has been hitherto so infallible, that I suppose he had
grown careless as to his execution of it. Or perhaps he took a false
measure of the man he was playing with. In any case, he has been found
out, and has been arrested by the police."
"Arrested, for cheating at cards!" exclaimed the girl, with a look of
unspeakable disgust and horror. Valentine's arm was ready to support
her, if she had shown any symptom of fainting; but she did not. She
stood erect before him, very pale but firm as a rock.
"And you want me to go away?" she said.
"Yes, I want you to disappear from this place before you become
notorious as your father's daughter. That would be about the worst
reputation which you could carry through life. Believe me that I wish
you well, Diana, and be ruled by me."
"I will," she answered, with a kind of despairing resignation. "It
seems very dreary to go back to England to face the world all alone.
But I will do as you tell me."
She did not express any sympathy for her father, then languishing under
arrest, whereby she proved herself very wicked and unwomanly, no doubt.
But neither womanly virtues nor Christian graces are wont to flourish
in the school in which Diana Paget had been reared. She obeyed
Valentine Hawkehurst to the letter, without any sentimental
lamentations whatever. Her scanty possessions were collected, and
neatly packed, in little more than an hour. At three o'clock she lay
down in her tawdry little bed-chamber to take what rest she might in
the space of two hours. At six she stood by Valentine Hawkehurst on the
platform of the railway station, with her face hidden by a brown gauze
veil, waiting till the train was made ready to start.
It was after she was seated in the carriage that she spoke for the
first time of her father.
"Is it likely to go very hard with him?" she asked.
"I hope not. We must try to pull him through it as well as we can. The
charge may break down at the first examination. Good bye."
"Good bye, Valentine."
They had just time to shake hands before the train moved off. Another
moment and Miss Paget and her fellow-passengers were speeding towards
Liége.
Mr. Hawkehurst drew his hat over his eyes as he walked away from the
station.
"The world will seem very dull and empty to me without her," he said to
himself. "I have done an unselfish thing for once in my life. I wonder
whether the recording angel will carry that up to my credit, and
whether the other fellow will blot out any of the old score in
consideration of this one little bit of self-sacrifice."
BOOK THE THIRD.
HEAPING UP RICHES.
CHAPTER I.
A FORTUNATE MARRIAGE.
Eleven years had passed lightly enough over the glossy raven locks of
Mr. Philip Sheldon. There are some men with whom Time deals gently, and
he was one of them. The hard black eyes had lost none of their fierce
brightness; the white teeth flashed with all their old brilliancy; the
complexion, which had always been dusky of hue, was perhaps a shade or
two darker; and the fierce black eyes seemed all the blacker by reason
of the purple tinge beneath them. But the Philip Sheldon of to-day was,
taken altogether, a handsomer man than the Philip Sheldon of eleven
years ago.
Within those eleven years the Bloomsbury dentist had acquired a higher
style of dress and bearing, and a certain improvement of tone and
manner. He was still an eminently respectable man, and a man whose
chief claim to the esteem of his fellows lay in the fact of his
unimpeachable respectability; but his respectability of to-day, as
compared with that of eleven years before, was as the respectability of
Tyburnia when contrasted with that of St. Pancras. He was not an
aristocratic-looking man, or an elegant man; but you felt, as you
contemplated him, that the bulwarks of the citadel of English
respectability are defended by such as he.
Mr. Sheldon no longer experimentalised with lumps of beeswax and
plaster-of-paris. All the appalling paraphernalia of his cruel art had
long since been handed over to an aspiring young dentist, together with
the respectable house in Fitzgeorge-street, the furniture, and--the
connexion. And thus had ended Philip Sheldon's career as a
surgeon-dentist. Within a year of Tom Halliday's death his disconsolate
widow had given her hand to her first sweetheart, not forgetful of her
dead husband or ungrateful for much kindness and affection experienced
at his hands, but yielding rather to Philip's suit because she was
unable to advance any fair show of reason whereby she might reject him.
"I told you, she'd be afraid to refuse you," said George Sheldon, when
the dentist came home from Barlingford, where Tom Halliday's widow was
living with her mother.
Philip had answered his brother's questions rather ambiguously at
first, but in the end had been fain to confess that he had asked Mrs.
Halliday to marry him, and that his suit had prospered.
"That way of putting it is not very complimentary to me," he said,
drawing himself up rather stiffly. "Georgy and I were attached to each
other long ago, and it is scarcely strange if----"
"If you should make a match of it, Tom being gone. Poor old Tom! He and
I were such cronies. I've always had an idea that neither you nor the
other fellow quite understood that low fever of his. You did your best,
no doubt; but I think you ought to have pulled him through somehow.
However, that's not a pleasant subject to talk of just now; so I'll
drop it, and wish you joy, Phil. It'll be rather a good match for you,
I fancy," added George, contemplating his brother with a nervous
twitching of his lips, which suggested that his mouth watered as he
thought of Philip's good fortune.
"It's a very nice thing you drop into, old fellow, isn't it?" he asked
presently, seeing that his brother was rather disinclined to discuss
the subject.
"You know the state of my affairs well enough to be sure that I
couldn't afford to marry a poor woman," answered Philip.
"And that it has been for a long time a vital necessity with you to
marry a rich one," interjected his brother.
"Georgy will have a few hundreds, and----"
"A few thousands, you mean, Phil," cried Sheldon the younger with
agreeable briskness; "shall I tot it up for you?"
He was always eager to "tot" things up, and would scarcely have shrunk
from setting down the stars of heaven in trim double columns of
figures, had it seemed to his profit to do so.
"Let us put it in figures, Phil," he said, getting his finger-tips in
order for the fray. "There's the money for Hyley Farm--twelve thousand
three hundred and fifty, I had it from poor Tom's own lips. Then
there's that little property on Sheepfield Common--say seven-fifty,
eh?--well, say seven hundred, if you like to leave a margin; and then
there are the insurances--three thou' in the Alliance, fifteen hundred
in the Phoenix, five hundred in the Suffolk Friendly; the total of
which, my dear boy, is eighteen thousand five hundred pounds; and a
very nice thing for you to drop into, just as affairs were looking
about as black as they could look."
"Yes," answered Mr. Sheldon the elder, who appeared by no means to
relish this "totting-up" of his future wife's fortune; "I have no
doubt I ought to consider myself a very lucky man."
"So Barlingford folks will say when they hear of the business. And now
I hope you're not going to forget your promise to me."
"What promise?"
"That if you ever did get a stroke of luck, I should have a share of
it--eh, Phil?"
Mr. Sheldon caressed his chin, and looked thoughtfully at the fire.
"If my wife lets me have the handling of any of her money, you may
depend upon it I'll do what I can for you," he said, after a pause.
"Don't say that, Phil," remonstrated George. "When a man says he'll do
what he can for you, it's a sure sign he means to do nothing.
Friendship and brotherly feeling are at an end when it comes to a
question of 'ifs' and 'cans.' _If_ your wife lets you have the handling
of any of her money!" cried the lawyer, with unspeakable derision;
"that's too good a joke for you to indulge in with me. Do you think I
believe you will let that poor little woman keep custody of her money a
day after she is your wife, or that you will let her friends tie it up
for her before she marries you? No, Phil, you didn't lay your plans for
that."
"What do you mean by my laying plans?" asked the dentist.
"That's a point we won't discuss, Philip," answered the lawyer coolly.
"You and I understand each other very well without entering into
unpleasant details. You promised me a year ago--before Tom Halliday's
death--that if you ever came into a good thing, I should share in it.
You have come into an uncommonly good thing, and I shall expect you to
keep your promise."
"Who says I am going to break it?" demanded Philip Sheldon with an
injured air. "You shouldn't be in such a hurry to cry out, George. You
take the tone of a social Dick Turpin, and might as well hold a pistol
to my head while you're about it. Don't alarm yourself. I have told you
I will do what I can for you. I cannot, and I shall not, say more."
The two men looked at each other. They were in the habit of taking the
measure of all creation in their own eminently practical way, and each
took the other's measure now. After having done which, they parted with
all cordial expressions of good-will and brotherly feeling. George went
back to his dusty chambers in Gray's Inn, and Philip prepared for his
return to Barlingford and his marriage with Georgina Halliday.
For ten years Georgy had been Philip Sheldon's wife, and she had found
no reason to complain of her second choice. The current of her life had
flowed smoothly enough since her first lover had become her husband.
She still wore moire-antique dresses and gold chains; and if the
dresses were of more simple fashion, and the chains were less
obtrusively displayed, she had to thank Mr. Sheldon for the refinement
in her taste. Her views of life in general had expanded under Mr.
Sheldon's influence. She no longer thought a high-wheeled dog-cart and
a skittish mare the acme of earthly splendour; for she had a carriage
and pair at her service, and a smart little page-boy to leap off the
box in attendance on her when she paid visits or went shopping. Instead
of the big comfortable old-fashioned farmhouse at Hyley, with its
mysterious passages and impenetrable obscurities in the way of
cupboards, she occupied an intensely new detached villa in Bayswater,
in which the eye that might chance to grow weary of sunshine and
glitter would have sought in vain for a dark corner wherein to repose
itself.
Mr. Sheldon's fortunes had prospered since his marriage with his
friend's widow. For a man of his practical mind and energetic
temperament, eighteen thousand pounds was a strong starting-point. His
first step was to clear off all old engagements with Jews and Gentiles,
and to turn his back on the respectable house in Fitzgeorge-street. The
earlier months of his married life he devoted to a pleasant tour on the
Continent; not wasting time in picturesque by-ways, or dawdling among
inaccessible mountains, or mooning about drowsy old cathedrals, where
there were pictures with curtains hanging before them, and prowling
vergers who expected money for drawing aside the curtains; but rattling
at the highest continental speed from one big commercial city to
another, and rubbing off the rust of Bloomsbury in the exchanges and on
the quays of the busiest places in Europe. The time which Mr. Sheldon
forbore to squander in shadowy gothic aisles and under the shelter of
Alpine heights, he accounted well bestowed in crowded cafés, and at the
public tables of noted hotels, where commercial men were wont to
congregate; and as Georgy had no aspirings for the sublimity of Vandyke
and Raphael, or the gigantic splendours of Alpine scenery, she was very
well pleased to see continental life with the eyes of Philip Sheldon.
How could a half-educated little woman, whose worldly experience was
bounded by the suburbs of Barlingford, be otherwise than delighted by
the glare and glitter of foreign cities? Georgy was childishly
enraptured with everything she saw, from the sham diamonds and rubies
of the Palais Royal, to the fantastical bonbons of Berlin.
Her husband was very kind to her--after his own particular fashion,
which was very different from blustering Tom Halliday's weak
indulgence. He allotted and regulated her life to suit his own
convenience, it is true; but he bought her handsome dresses, and took
her with him in hired carriages when he drove about the strange cities.
He was apt to leave Georgy and the hired carriage at the corner of some
street, or before the door of some cafe, for an hour at a time, in the
course of his peregrinations; but she speedily became accustomed to
this, and provided herself with the Tauchnitz edition of a novel,
wherewith to beguile the tedium of these intervals in the day's
amusement. If Tom Halliday had left her for an hour at a street-corner,
or before the door of a café, she would have tortured herself and him
by all manner of jealous suspicions and vague imaginings. But there was
a stern gravity in Mr. Sheldon's character which precluded the
possibility of any such shadowy fancies. Every action of his life
seemed to involve such serious motives, the whole tenor of his
existence was so orderly and business-like, that his wife was fain to
submit to him, as she would have submitted to some ponderous infallible
machine, some monster of modern ingenuity and steam power, which cut
asunder so many bars of iron, or punched holes in so many paving-stones
in a given number of seconds, and was likely to go on dividing iron or
piercing paving-stones for ever and ever.
She obeyed him, and was content to fashion her life according to his
will, chiefly because she had a vague consciousness that to argue with
him, or to seek to influence him, would be to attempt the impossible.
Perhaps there was something more than this in her mind--some
half-consciousness that there was a shapeless and invertebrate skeleton
lurking in the shadowy background of her new life, a dusky and
impalpable creature which it would not be well for her to examine or
understand. She was a cowardly little woman, and finding herself
tolerably happy in the present, she did not care to pierce the veil of
the future, or to cast anxious glances backward to the past. She
thought it just possible that there might be people in the world base
enough to hint that Philip Sheldon had married her for love of her
eighteen thousand pounds, rather than from pure devotion to herself.
She knew that certain prudent friends and kindred in Barlingford had
elevated their hands and eyebrows in speechless horror when they
discovered that she had married her second husband without a
settlement; while one grim and elderly uncle had asked her whether she
did not expect her father to turn in his grave by reason of her folly.
Georgy had shrugged her shoulders peevishly when her Barlingford
friends remonstrated with her, and had declared that people were very
cruel to her, and that it was a hard thing she could not choose for
herself for once in her life. As to the settlements that people talked
of, she protested indignantly that she was not so mean as to fancy her
future husband a thief, and that to tie up her money in all sorts of
ways would be to imply as much. And then, as it was only a year since
poor dear Tom's death, she had been anxious to marry without fuss or
parade. In fact, there were a hundred reasons against legal
interference, and legal tying-up of the money, with all that dreadful
jargon about "whereas," and "hereinafter," and "provided always," and
"nothing herein contained," which seems to hedge round a sum of money
so closely, that it is doubtful whether the actual owner will ever be
free to spend a sixpence of it after the execution of that formidable
document intended to protect it from possible marauders.
George Sheldon had said something very near the truth when he had told
Philip that Mrs. Halliday would be afraid to refuse him. The
fair-haired, fair-faced little woman did in some manner fear the first
lover of her girlhood. She had become his wife, and so far all things
had gone well with her; but if misery and despair had been the
necessary consequences of her union with him, she must have married him
all the same, so dominant was the influence by which he ruled her. Of
course Georgy was not herself aware of her own dependence. She accepted
all things as they were presented to her by a stronger mind than her
own. She wore her handsome silk dresses, and was especially particular
as to the adjustment of her bonnet-strings, knowing that the smallest
impropriety of attire was obnoxious to the well-ordered mind of her
second husband. She obeyed him very much as a child obeys a strict but
not unkind schoolmaster. When he took her to a theatre or a racecourse,
she sat by his side meekly, and felt like a child who has been good and
is reaping the reward of goodness. And this state of things was in
nowise disagreeable to her. She was perhaps quite as happy as it was in
her nature to be; for she had no exalted capacity for happiness or
misery. She felt that it was pleasant to have a handsome man, whose
costume was always irreproachable, for her husband. Her only notion of
a bad husband was a man who stayed out late, and came home under the
influence of strong liquors consumed in unknown localities and amongst
unknown people. So, as Mr. Sheldon rarely went out after dinner, and
was on all occasions the most temperate of men, she naturally
considered her second husband the very model of conjugal perfection.
Thus it was that domestic life had passed smoothly enough for Mr.
Sheldon and his wife during the ten years which had elapsed since their
marriage.
As to the eighteen thousand pounds which she had brought Philip
Sheldon, Georgy asked no questions. She knew that she enjoyed luxuries
and splendours which had never been hers in Tom Halliday's lifetime,
and she was content to accept the goods which her second husband
provided. Mr. Sheldon had become a stockbroker, and occupied an office
in some dusky court within a few hundred yards of the Stock Exchange.
He had, according to his own account, trebled Georgy's thousands since
they had been in his hands. How the unsuccessful surgeon-dentist had
blossomed all at once into a fortunate speculator was a problem too
profound for Georgy's consideration. She knew that her husband had
allied himself to a certain established firm of stockbrokers, and that
the alliance had cost him some thousands of Tom Halliday's money. She
had heard of preliminary steps to be taken to secure his admission as a
member of some mysterious confraternity vaguely spoken of as "the
House;" and she knew that Tom Halliday's thousands had been the seed
from which had sprung other thousands, and that her husband had been
altogether triumphant and successful.
It may be that it is easier to rig the market than to induce a given
number of people to resort to a certain dull street in Bloomsbury for
the purpose of having teeth extracted by an unknown practitioner. It is
possible that the stockbroker is like the poet, a creature who is born,
and not made; a gifted and inspired being, not to be perfected by any
specific education; a child of spontaneous instincts and untutored
faculties. Certain it is that the divine afflatus from the nostrils of
the god Plutus seemed to have descended upon Philip Sheldon; for he had
entered the Stock Exchange an inexperienced stranger, and he held his
place there amongst men whose boyhood had been spent in the offices of
Capel-court, and whose youthful strength had been nourished in the
chop-houses of Pinch-lane and Thread-needle-street.
Mrs. Sheldon was satisfied with the general knowledge that Mr. Sheldon
had been fortunate, and had never sought any more precise knowledge of
her husband's affairs. Nor did she seek such knowledge even now, when
her daughter was approaching womanhood, and might ere long need some
dower out of her mother's fortune. Poor Tom, trusting implicitly in the
wife he loved, and making his will only as a precautionary measure, at
a time when he seemed good for fifty years of life and strength, had
not troubled himself about remote contingencies, and had in no wise
foreseen the probability of a second husband for Georgy and a
stepfather for his child.
Two children had been born to Mr. Sheldon since his marriage, and both
had died in infancy. The loss of these children had fallen very heavily
on the strong hard man, though he had never shed a tear or uttered a
lamentation, or wasted an hour of his business-like existence by reason
of his sorrow. Georgy had just sufficient penetration to perceive that
her husband was bitterly disappointed when no more baby-strangers came
to replace those poor frail little lives which had withered away and
vanished in spite of his anxiety to hold them.
"It seems as if there was a blight upon _my_ children," he once said
bitterly; and this was the only occasion on which his wife heard him
complain of his evil fortune.
But one day, when he had been particularly lucky in some speculation,
when he had succeeded in achieving what his brother George spoke of as
the "biggest line he had ever done," Philip Sheldon came home to the
Bayswater villa in a particularly bad humour, and for the first time
since her marriage Georgy heard him quote a line of Scripture.
"Heaping up riches," he muttered, as he paced up and down the room;
"heaping up riches, and ye cannot tell who shall gather them."
His wife knew then that he was thinking of his children. During the
brief lives of those two fragile boy-babies the stockbroker had been
wont to talk much of future successes in the way of money-making to be
achieved by him for the enrichment and exaltation of these children.
They were gone now, and no more came to replace them. And though Philip
Sheldon still devoted himself to the sublime art of money-making, and
still took delight in successful time-bargains and all the scientific
combinations of the money-market, the salt of life had lost something
of its savour, and the chink of gold had lost somewhat of its music.