at a shilling weekly, which was paid in advance. I had delayed making
application for employment till our last sixpence was spent. We had
passed a day without food; my child appeared dying; my wife said
nothing, but she gazed upon her dear boy, and shook her head with an
expression that wrung me to the soul. I rushed out almost in madness,
and, in a state of unconsciousness, hurried from shop to shop in
agitation and in misery. It was vain; appearances were against me. I was
broken down and dejected, and my state of mind and manner appeared a
compound of the maniac and the blackguard. At night I was compelled to
return to the suffering victims of my propensity, penniless and
unsuccessful. It was a dreadful and a sleepless night with us all; or if
I did slumber upon the hard floor for a moment (for we had neither seat
nor covering), it was to startle at the cries of my child wailing for
hunger, or the smothered sighs of my unhappy partner. Again and again I
almost thought them the voice of the Judge, saying, 'Depart from me, ye
cursed.'
"I again hurried out with daybreak, for I was wretched, and resumed my
inquiries; but night came, and I again returned equally successful. The
yearnings of my child were now terrible, and the streaming eyes of his
fond mother, as she pressed his head with her cold hand upon her lap,
alone distinguished her from death. The pains of hunger in myself were
becoming insupportable; my teeth gnashed against each other, and worms
seemed gnawing my heartstrings. At this moment, my dear wife looked me
in the face, and, stretching her hand to me, said, 'Farewell, my love,
in a few hours I and our dear child shall be at rest! Oh! hunger,
hunger!' I could stand no more. Reason forsook me. I could have died for
them; but I could not beg. We had nothing to pledge. Our united wearing
apparel would not have brought a shilling. My wife had a pair of pocket
Bibles (I had once given them in a present): my eyes fell upon them--I
snatched them up unobserved--rushed from the house, and--Oh heaven! let
the cause forgive the act--pawned them for eighteenpence. It saved our
lives, it obtained employment, and for a few weeks appeared to overcome
my curse.
"I am afraid I grow tedious with particulars, sir; it is an old man's
fault--though I am not old either; I am scarce fifty-five. After being
three years in London, I was appointed foreman of an extensive
establishment in the Strand. I remained in this situation about four
years. It was one of respectability and trust, demanding, hourly, a
vigilant and undivided attention. To another, it might have been
attended with honour and profit; but to me it terminated in disgrace.
Amongst other duties, I had the payment of the journeymen, and the
giving out of the work. They being numerous, and their demands frequent,
it would have required a clerk for the proper discharge of that duty
alone. I delayed entering at the moment in my books the materials and
cash given to each, until they, multiplying upon my hands, and begetting
a consequent confusion, it became impossible for me to make their entry
with certainty or correctness. The workmen were not slow in discovering
this, and not a few of the more profligate improved upon it to their
advantage. Thus I frequently found it impossible to make both ends of my
account meet; and in repeated instances, where the week's expenditure
exceeded the general average, though satisfied in my own mind of its
accuracy, from my inability to state the particulars, in order to
conceal my infirmity, I have accounted for the overplus from my own
pocket. Matters went on in this way for a considerable time. You will
admit I was rendered feelingly sensible of my error, and I resolved to
correct it. But my resolutions were always made of paper; they were like
a complaisant debtor--full of promises, praying for grace, and
dexterously evading performance. Thus, day after day, I deferred the
adoption of my new system to a future period. For, sir, you must be
aware there is a pleasure in procrastination, of a nature the most
alluring and destructive; but it is a pleasure purchased by the
sacrifice of judgment: in its nature and results it resembles the
happiness of the drunkard; for, in exact ratio as our spirits are raised
above their proper level, in the same proportion, when the ardent
effects have evaporated, they sink beneath that level.
"I was now too proud to work as a mere journeyman, and I commenced
business for myself; but I began without capital, and a gourd of sorrow
hung over me, while I stood upon sand. I had some credit; but, as my
bills became payable, I ever found I had put off, till the very day they
became due, the means of liquidating them; then had I to run and borrow
five pounds from one, and five shillings from another, urged by despair,
from a hundred quarters. My creditors grew clamorous; my wife upbraided
me; I flew to the bottle--to the bottle!" he repeated; "and my ruin was
complete--my family, business, everything, was neglected. Bills of
Middlesex were served on me, declarations filed; I surrendered myself,
and was locked up in Whitecross Street. It is a horrid place; the Fleet
is a palace to it; the Bench, paradise! But, sir, I will draw my painful
story to a close. During my imprisonment my wife died--died, not by my
hands, but from the work of them! She was laid in a strange grave, and
strangers laid her head in the dust, while I lay a prisoner in the city
where she was buried. My boy--my poor Willie--who had been always
neglected, was left without father and without mother! Sir! sir! my boy
was left without food! He forsook visiting me in the prison; I heard he
had turned the associate of thieves; and from that period five years
have passed, and I have obtained no trace of him. But it is my doing--my
poor Willie!"
Here the victim of procrastination finished his narrative. The storm had
passed away, and the sun again shone out. The man had interested me, and
we left the gardens together. I mentioned that I had to go into the
city; he said he had business there also, and asked to accompany me. I
could not refuse him. From the door by which we left the gardens, our
route lay by way of Oxford Street. As we proceeded down Holborn, the
church bell of St. Sepulchre's began to toll; and the crowd, collected
round the top of Newgate Street, indicated an execution. As we
approached the place, the criminal was brought forth. He was a young man
about nineteen years of age, and had been found guilty of an aggravated
case of housebreaking. As the unhappy being turned round to look upon
the spectators, my companion gave a convulsive shriek, and, springing
from my side, exclaimed, "Righteous Heaven! my Willie! my murdered
Willie!" He had proceeded but a few paces, when he fell with his face
upon the ground. In the wretched criminal he discovered his lost, his
only son. The miserable old man was conveyed, in a state of
insensibility, to St. Bartholomew's Hospital, where I visited him the
next day: he seemed to suffer much, and in a few hours he died with a
shudder, and the word _procrastination_ on his tongue.
THE TEN OF DIAMONDS.
At length I reached the Moated Grange, on a visit to my friend Graeme.
But since I am to speak a good deal of this place, I may as well explain
that it was misnamed. There was no moat, nor had there been for a
hundred years; but round the old pile--hoary, and shrivelled, and
palsied enough, in all conscience, for delighting the mole-eye of any
antiquarian hunks--- there was a visible trace of the old ditch in a
hollow covered with green sward going all round the house, which hollow
was the only place clear of trees. And these trees! They stood for a
mile round, like an army of giants seventy feet high, all intent, it
would seem, upon choking the poor old pile, throwing their big arms over
the hollow, swinging them to and fro, and dashing their points against
the panes as the wind listed. It would come by-and-by to be a hard task
for the stone and lime victim to hold its place, with its sinews of run
mortar, against these tyrants of the wood. And then they were as full of
noises as Babel itself--noises a thousand times more
heterogeneous--croaking, chirping, screeching, cawing, whistling,
billing, cooing, cuckooing. "What a place to live in!" I thought, fresh
as I was from town, "where, if there are noises, one knows something of
their meaning--maledictory, yea, devilish as it often is, expressive of
the passions of men which will never sleep. But these! what could one
make of such a _tintamarre_? Nothing but the reflection--that is, if you
happen to be a philosopher, which, thank God, I am not--that not one
note of all this rural oratorio is without its intention; and thus we
always satisfy ourselves. But when we run the matter up a little
further, we find it a very small affair: two responses, one to each of
two chords vibrating for ever and ever throughout all nature--pleasure
and pain, pain and pleasure, turn by turn--the last pain being death!"
"How can you live here, Graeme?" I said, as we stood under the old
porch, looking out, or rather having our look blocked up by the
thickness, and our ears deaved by the eternal screeching and cawing of
five thousand crows overhead.
"There's gloom everywhere where man is," he replied, "and screeching
owls in every brain. You can't get quit." Then, lowering his voice, "I
am haunted, and yet live here in this Moated Grange! The difference is
this: in the town the gaslight and eternal clatter distract a man like
me who is plagued from within; here I find some concord between the
inside and the out, only the owls in the inside are more grotesque and
horrible."
"Well, Graeme," said I, "it is needless to disguise what brought me
here. The secret is out. The choke-damp has got wind. If the idiot had
not blown his brains out, it would have been nothing. You could have
paid him back, and he might now have had both his money and his brains."
"Got wind!" cried he, clutching me by the breast of the coat with the
fury of a highwayman or a spasmodic actor. "Did the villain Ruggieri
tell you?"
"No."
"So far well," he added, taking a long pull with his lungs, as if he had
got quit of an attack of asthma; "but though I may satisfy the widow,
how am I to appease Heaven? Come," he added, again seizing me with a
force in which there was a tremble, "I want to ease my mind. You are my
oldest friend, and a load divided is more easily carried."
And leading the way into the parlour, where the fire had got into a fine
red heat, and was sending a glare through the ruby and golden contents
of several strangely-shaped bottles on the table, he threw himself on a
chair on the one side, I taking one on the other. A few minutes of
silence intervened.
"If it be as painful for you," he continued, "to hear a confession as it
is for me to make it, you may help yourself to bear the infliction by
pouring into your stomach some of that Burgundy. I will take none. I
have fire enough in my brain already;" and he pushed the bottle to me.
"You were a bit of a blackleg yourself," he continued, as he threw
himself back in the arm-chair, and compressed his chest with his folded
arms till the blood seemed to mount to his face. "You were present at
that game where I took the five thousand by a trick from Gourlay. You
know, as a gambler yourself, that all the tribe are by constitution
cheats. It is folly to speak of an honest gambler. The passion is a ten
thousand times distilled selfishness, with no qualm of obligation to God
or religion to keep it in check--only a little fear of that bugbear,
society. Our club at the 'Red Lion' all knew this in our souls; but
every one of us knew also that the moment he would be discovered
cheating, he would be scorched with our hatred and contempt. He must
leave our pure society on the instant--not of course that he was any
worse than the rest of us, but only that he was unfortunate in being
discovered. That night Gourlay and I were demons. We had baffled each
other, and drank till our brains seethed, though our countenances and
speech betrayed nothing but the extreme of coolness. He had won a
thousand of me, and hounded me from post to pillar, offering to be
cleared out by my _skill_, as he called it sneeringly. The fellow, in
short, hated me, because the year before, at Baden-Baden, I had taken
two thousand out of him, and would not give him his revenge."
"He must have thought you honest," said I; "otherwise he would not have
thus badgered you to play."
"No; he had not the generosity to think me honest. I repeat, no gambler
ever thinks another gambler honest, and he lies when he says so. He knew
himself to be a rogue, and thought it diamond in the teeth of diamond;"
and, pausing and meditating, he repeated the word,
"diamond--diamond--diamond."
I looked at him in surprise. He continued to keep up the cuckoo sound,
trying to laugh, and yet totally unable to accomplish even a cackle, as
if some internal force clutched the diaphragm and mocked him, so that
his efforts were reduced to a gurgling as in cynanche--like a dog
choking with a rope round his craig, the sounds coming jerking out in
barks, and dying away again in yelps and whines.
"You will know presently why that word produces these strange effects
upon me," he at length contrived to be able to say. "Nor less the form
of the figure as painted in these hell-books. It is blazoned everywhere.
The devil wears it in fiery lines on his face as he hounds me a-nights
through these thick woods. Yet I am not afraid of it--rather court it,
as if I yearned for the burning pain of its red signature in, and in,
and in to my brain, as far as thought goes."
"Have you got mad, Graeme?" I ejaculated. "What has the figure of a
diamond, or of ten diamonds----"
"_Ten_, you would say?" he immediately cried, as he started up, and
immediately threw himself down; "_the_ ten, if you dared. You are
commissioned by the powers yonder--you, you, too, along with the others,
including the devil."
"I have no wish to be in the same commission with that great personage,"
said I, with a very poor attempt to laugh, for I felt anxious about my
friend. "I gave him up when I threw his books into the fire, and swore
never more to touch the unhallowed thing."
I perceived that my attempt at humour increased his excitement. "Repeat
the words," he cried. "Say 'the ten of diamonds' right out with open
mouth, and repeat them a thousand times, so as to give me ear-proof that
the powers yonder," pointing to the roof, "are against me."
At this moment the door of the parlour was opened by some timid hand.
"Come hither, my pretty Edith," he said, in a calmer voice, as a little
cherub-looking child, with a head so like as if, after the fashion of
Danäe's, it had been powdered by Jupiter with gold dust, and a pair of
blue eyes, as if the said god, in making them, had tried to emulate the
wing of the Halcyon in a human orb, and intended, moreover, the light
thereof to calm the storm in those of her father.
And so it did, to a certain extent; for Edith got upon his knee, and,
putting her arms round his neck, kept peering with those eyes into the
very pupils of her father's, till the light of innocence, softening the
rigid nerve, enabled them to regain somewhat of their natural lustre.
"What did Trott, the crazy girl who spaes fortunes, give you, Edith?"
and coruscations began again to mix with the softer light.
"A card," replied the girl, as she undid her embrace, and, casting her
head to a side, viewed him timidly.
"She has been frightened," thought I, "by some consequences resulting
from the same question put at some former time."
"And what was the name of the card?" he continued.
But the girl was now on her guard. She hesitated, and struggled to get
away.
"Tell this gentleman, then."
"The ten of diamonds," cried she; and no sooner were the words out than
she fled, like a beam of light chased by the shadow of a tombstone.
"You see how it is," continued Graeme, getting into his former
expression: "through this channel, this innocent medium, this creature
the fruit of my loins, the idol of my heart, is the lightning of reproof
hurled. A wandering idiot is prompted by the very inspiration of her
imbecility to put into the hands of my child the emblem of my
wickedness, that she in her love might place it before my eyes, there to
develop the sin-print in the dark camera of my mind. No wonder she is
alarmed at the mention of the words, for she read the horror produced in
me when she held up what she called the pretty picture in my face. But,
thank God! thank God!"----
And he fell for a moment into meditation.
"For what?" said I, as my wonder increased.
"That her mother, who is within a week of her confinement, knows nothing
of this mystery."
I was silent. I might have said, "What mystery?" but I would only have
irritated him.
"Rymer!"
I started. I was looking into the fire, with my ear altogether his, yet
the strange mention of my name startled me.
"What could infamy--infamy, with just a beam of consciousness to tell
it was infamy, and no more but that beam--think and feel to be
worshipped by purity and love? I have shrunk from the embrace of that
woman with a recoil equal to that produced by the enfolding of a snake."
"Though she knows not, and may never know, anything of this affair which
has taken such a hold of you?" said I, rather as a speaking automaton,
forced to vocabulate.
"The very reason why I recoil and shudder."
I had made a mistake--I would not risk another. "The man has got into
the enfolding arms of mania," I thought, "and I must be chary."
"Will you keep in your remembrance," he continued, "the words uttered by
Edith, and how she came by them? Will you?"
"Yes."
"Then take another glass; you will need it, and another too."
I obeyed not quite so mechanically. The Burgundy was better than the
conversation, and I made the pleasure of the palate compensate for the
pain of the ear.
He now drew out his watch, and, going to the window, withdrew the
curtains. The shades of night had fallen. It looked black as Tartarus,
contrasted with the light within.
"Come here!" he cried; and when I had somewhat reluctantly obeyed what I
considered the request of one whose internal sense had got a jerk from
some mad molecule out of its orbit in the brain--"Do you see anything?"
"Yes," said I--"a big black negative; but as for anything positive, you
might as well look into a coal-pit and find what philosophers do in the
wells of truth. There's nothing to be seen."
"No? Look there--there! See," pointing with his finger, and clutching me
tremulously, "once more--the traces as vivid as ever! See!"
I verily did think I saw something luminous, but it quickly disappeared.
"Oh, probably the reflection of a lantern," I said.
"Yes, a magic one," he replied sneeringly.
"I know of no more magical lantern than a man's head," I replied, a
little disconcerted by his sneer. "Chemists say there's more phosphorus
in the brain than anywhere else; and so I sometimes think."
He made no reply, but, seizing me by the coat, dragged me after him as
he hurried out of the room, and making for a back door, led me out,
bareheaded as I was, into the wood. The darkness had waxed to
pitchiness, and the noises were hushed. The crows had gone to roost; and
had it not been for some too-hoos of the jolly owl, sounding his horn as
he rejoiced that the hated sun had gone to annoy other owls in the west,
the silence would have been complete. But, in truth, I hate silence as
well as darkness, and have no more sympathy with the followers of
Pythagoras than I have with the triumph of the blind Roman who silenced
the covey of pretty women, in the heat of their condolences for his
blindness, by reminding them that they forgot he could feel in the dark.
I thought more of the fire inside, and the bottle of Burgundy, on which
I had made as yet only a small impression.
"If I want darkness, I can as well shut my eyes," said I peevishly, "and
I would even have the advantage of some phosphorescent touches of the
fancy."
"Will you see that with your eyes shut?" he exclaimed triumphantly, as
he bent his body forward to an angle of forty-five, and pointed with
his finger to an object clearly illumined, and exhibiting distinctly a
large card, with ten red diamonds sharply traced upon it. The advantage
he had got over me was lost in the rapture of his gaze; and he seemed to
be charmed by the apparition, for he began to move slowly forward, still
pointing his finger, and without apparently drawing a breath. Though a
little taken by surprise for the instant, it was not easy for me to give
up my practical wisdom, which, as a matter of course, pointed to a
trick.
"You do see it, then?" said he.
"Surely," said I. "There is no mistake it is the figure of the ten of
diamonds, probably stuck upon a turnip lantern."
"I did not ask you for a banter," he replied angrily. "I can draw my own
conclusions. All I wanted was to satisfy myself that I was free from a
monomaniacal illusion. We cannot both be mad; besides, you're a sceptic,
and the testimony of a sceptic's eyes is better than the sneer of his
tongue."
Still he proceeded, I following, and the apparition retreating. "I told
you to remember what Edith said," he continued, as he still pointed his
finger; "and I fancy you can never forget that before you. The two
things are wide apart."
"And so are the two ends of a rope with which a man hangs himself," said
I.
"It is gone!" cried my friend, without noticing my remark. "It has
receded into that infinite from whence it was commissioned to earth to
strike its lightning upon the eye of a falling, erring, miserable
mortal."
"It is gone," said I; "and I am gone also--to finish my bottle of
Burgundy, which I have as little doubt was commissioned from finitude
to strike a little fire into the heart of another erring mortal, not at
this moment perfectly happy."
And I made my way as quick as possible into the parlour, glad to get
quit of the chill of the night air. Meanwhile, there appeared signs of
some extraordinary movement in the other parts of the house, the nature
of which Graeme probably ascertained as he came along the lobby, for I
heard bustling and earnest conversation; and presently little Edith came
stepping in beside me, with something very mysterious in her blue eyes,
far too mysterious for being confided to loud words, and so a whisper
told me that her mother was taken ill, and that Dr. Rogers had been sent
for. This little bit of information carried more to my mind than it
brought away from Edith's. I knew before that Mrs. Graeme was on the eve
of confinement, and it now appeared she had been taken in labour. I saw,
too, that my visit had not been very well timed, and the worse that
Graeme himself was in the extraordinary frame of mind in which I found
him--unfit for facing the dangers, repaying the affections, performing
the duties, and receiving the honours or enjoying the hopes of his
situation. A rap at the door was the signal for Edith's departure, with
the words on her tongue that she knew the doctor's knock. I was now, I
thought, to be left to myself; nor was I displeased, for I wanted a
lounge and a meditation; though of the latter I could not see that I
could make much, if any, more than confirming myself against all
preternaturals as agents on earth, however certain their existence may
be beyond the mystic veil that divides the two worlds. I had known
Graeme's crime and Gourlay's self-murder; but the crime was a trick
among blacklegs, and the suicide was the madness of a gambler, who had
risked his money and was ruined at the moment he wanted to ruin another.
Surely Heaven had something else to do with its retributive lightnings
than employ them, in subversion of all natural laws, in a cause so
inferior in turpitude to others that every hour pass into oblivion, with
more of a mark of natural, and less or none of supernatural
chastisement. I thought I might be contented with such a view of these
prodigies as might quickly consign them to the limbo of men's
machinations; yet somehow or other--perhaps the Burgundy bottle, if it
could have spoken, like that of Asmodeus, might have helped the
solution--I got dreamy, and of course foolish, raising objections
against my own conclusions, and instituting an _alter ego_ to argue
against myself for Graeme's theory. It has always seemed strange to me,
that though mankind hate metaphysics, they are all natural
metaphysicians, especially when a little _wined_. Perhaps the true
reason may be, that as wine came from the gods, it is endued with the
power of raising us to its source. At least, our aspirations, from being
_devine_, become wonderfully _divine_, so that supernatural agencies wax
less difficult to our imaginations; and while we are ten times more
ready to meet a ghost, we are as many times more ready to admit their
possibility. But the end of these grand and elevated conditions is
generally sleep and an ugly nightmare; and though my case was an
exception as regards the latter, I awoke in not a very happy mood, just
as Graeme entered the room and told me it was twelve o'clock. As I
rubbed my eyes, he sat down in his chair, and seemed inclined to court
silence; but it was clear he could not achieve repose.