HOMER SIVEWRIGHT.
There was not a plethora of patients in the Shadrack-road, nor were
the cases which presented themselves to Mr. Davoren for the most
part of a deeply-interesting character. He had a good supply of
casualties, from broken limbs, dislocated shoulders, collar bones, and
crushed ribs, down to black eyes; he had numerous cases of a purely
domestic nature—cases which called him out of his bed of nights; and
he had a good many small patients in the narrow streets and airless
alleys—little sufferers whose quiet endurance, whose meek acceptance
of pain as a necessity of their lives, moved him more than he would
have cared to confess. So profound a pity as he sometimes felt for
these little ones would have seemed hardly professional. His practice
among children was singularly fortunate. He did not drench them with
those nauseous compounds which previous practitioners had freely
administered in a rough-and-ready off-hand fashion; but he did, with a
very small amount of drugs, for the most part succeed in setting these
delicate machines in order, restoring health’s natural hue to pallid
cheeks, breathing life into feeble lungs. It was painful to him often
to find himself obliged to prescribe good broths and nourishing solids
where an empty larder and an unfurnished purse stared him, as it were,
palpably in the face; and there were many occasions when he eked out
his instructions with contributions in kind—a shilling’s worth of beef
or a couple of mutton-chops, from the butcher at the end of the street,
a gill of port from the nearest tavern. But him, too, Poverty held in
his iron grip, and it was not always that he could afford to part with
so much as a shilling.
Such luxuries as fresh air and clean water—restoratives which might
be supposed easy of access even in the Shadrack-road district, though
there were dwellings around and about Shadrack-Basin where even these
were hardly obtainable—he urged upon his patients with all his might,
and in the households he attended there arose a startling innovation in
the way of open windows. From these very poor patients he, of course,
received no money; but he had other patrons, small tradesmen and their
families, who paid him, and paid him honourably, down on the nail for
the most part, and on a scale he felt he must blush to remember by
and by when he became a distinguished west-end physician. Small as
the payments were, however, they enabled him to live, so very small
were his own requirements. His Amati ate nothing. He had, himself, a
stoical indifference to good living, and could have sustained himself
contentedly upon pemmican, within reach of all the richest and rarest
viands earth could yield to a Lucullus. His establishment consisted
of an ancient serving-woman, who had withdrawn herself from a useful
career of charing for his exclusive service, a woman who returned
to the bosom of her family every night and came back to her post in
the early morning, and a boy of a low-spirited turn of mind and an
inconvenient tendency to bleeding at the nose. It irked him that he was
obliged to pay the rent of an entire house, however small, requiring
for his own uses at most three rooms. But people had told him that he
could not hope to do any good in the Shadrack-Basin district if he
began his professional career in lodgings; and he was fain to submit.
He concluded that there must be some lurking element of aristocracy in
the minds of the Shadrackites, not suggested by their outward habits,
which were of the whelk-and-periwinkle-eating order.
His house was small, inconvenient, and shabbily furnished. He had taken
the furniture at a valuation from Mr. Plumsole, his predecessor—a
valuation which, if it had been based on justice, should have been
nothing; since a more rickety race of chairs and tables, a more
evil-looking family of bedsteads and dressing-tables, chiffoniers
and sofas, had never been called into being by the glue-pot. There
was not a perfect set of castors in the house, or a chair which had
not some radical defect in one of its legs, or a table that realised
one’s notion of a correct level. Lucius was obliged to buy a tool-box
and a glue-pot very soon after his investiture as proprietor of Mr.
Plumsole’s goods and chattels; and a good deal of his leisure was
consumed by small experiments in domestic surgery, as applied to
chairs and tables. He performed the most delicate operations; reduced
dislocations, and cured compound fractures in a wonderful way; with the
aid of a handful of tin tacks and a halfpennyworth of glue. But he felt
somehow that this was not the direct road to the mastery of a great
science, and would give a weary little sigh as he went back to his
medical books, after a sharp struggle with a refractory chair-leg, or
an obstinate declivity in the flap of a Pembroke table.
He was very poor, very patient, very much in earnest; as earnest
now as he had been in those days of wild adventure in the Far West,
when amid all the excitement of the chase his thoughts had ever gone
beyond, searching for Nature’s secrets, longing to wrest from her
vast stores of hidden wealth some treasure which might be useful to
his fellow-creatures. Of all those vague unspoken hopes nothing had
come. He had left no footmark behind him in that distant world; he had
brought home no trophy. Nothing had resulted from all those days of
hardship and peril, except a secret which it was horror to remember.
He turned his face now resolutely to the real world—the cold, hard,
workaday world of an over-populated city—and set himself to do what
good there was for him to do in his narrow sphere.
‘It may be some atonement for the blood I shed yonder,’ he said to
himself.
In his small way he prospered—prospered in doing good. When he had
been at this drudgery a little more than a year, the parish surgeon
died—popular report said of a too genial temper and a leaning towards
good fellowship, not unassociated with Irish whisky—and Lucius was
elected in his stead. This gave him a pittance which helped him, paid
his rent and taxes and the charwoman, and gave him admittance to the
dwellings of the poor. Thus it was he came to have so many children in
his case-book, and to spend his scanty surplus in small charities among
his patients.
He worked hard all day, and, after the manner of his kind, was often
called up in the night; but he had his evenings for the most part to
himself, to use as he listed. These precious intervals of leisure
he spent in reading—reading which was chiefly professional—solacing
himself sometimes with a dip into a favourite author. His library
consisted of a shelf-full of books on one of the decrepit chiffoniers,
and was at least select. The Greek playwrights, Shakespeare, Montaigne,
St. Thomas à Kempis, Molière, Sterne, De Musset, Shelley, Keats,
Byron made up his stock; and of these he never knew weariness. He
opened one of these volumes haphazard when the scientific reading
had been unusually tough, and he had closed his medical books with a
sigh of relief, opened one of his pet volumes anywhere, and read on
till he read himself into dreamland. Dreams will come, even in the
Shadrack-Basin district, to a man who has not yet crossed the boundary
line of his thirtieth birthday; but Lucius Davoren’s were only vague
dreams, inchoate visions of future success, of the days when he was
to be famous, and live among the lofty spirits of the age, and feel
that he had made his name a name to be remembered in centuries to come.
Perhaps every young man who has been successful at a public school and
at the university begins life with the same vision; but upon Lucius
the fancy had a stronger hold than on most men, and almost amounted
to a belief, the belief that it was his destiny to be of use to his
fellow-creatures.
But he had another key to open the gates of dreamland, a key more
potent than Shakespeare. When things had gone well with him, when
in the day’s work there had been some little professional success,
some question that interested his keen fancy, and had been solved to
his satisfaction; above all, when he had done some good thing for
his fellow-creatures, he would take a shining mahogany-case from the
chiffonier beneath his book-shelf, lay it tenderly on the table, as if
it were a living thing, open it with a dainty little key which he wore
attached to his watch-chain, and draw forth his priceless treasure,
the Amati violin, for which he, to whom pounds were verily pounds, had
given in his early student days the sum of one hundred guineas. How
many deprivations, how many small sacrifices—gloves, opera-tickets,
ay, even dinners—that violin represented! He naturally loved it so much
the better for the pangs it had cost him. He had earned it, if not with
the sweat of his brow, at least by the exercise of supreme self-denial.
Then, with careful hand, with delicate sympathetic touch, fingers light
as those with which a woman gathers her favourite flower, he would draw
forth his fiddle, and soon the little room would be filled with gentle
strains—plaintive, soothing, meditative, the music of dreams; full of
tender thoughts, of pensive memories; music which was like thinking
aloud. And after those fond memories of familiar melody, music which
was as easy a language as his mother tongue, he would open one of his
battered old volumes, and pore over the intricate pages of Viotti, or
Spohr, or De Beriot, or Lafont, until midnight, and even the quieter
hours that follow, had sounded from all the various steeple-clocks and
dockyard-clocks and factory-clocks of that watery district.
He had been working upwards of a year as parish surgeon, and in all
that time, and the time that went before it, had not been favoured
with any more aristocratic patronage than that of the neighbouring
tradesmen, his wealthiest patient being a publican at the corner of
the great Essex-road, reported the richest man in the district; when
chance, or that combination of small causes which seems generally
to lead up to the greatest effects, brought him into friendly and
professional relations with a man of a different class; a man about
whom the Shadrack-road knew little, but thought much.
Lucius was returning from his daily round one winter afternoon, towards
the end of November, when the skies that roof in the Shadrack-Basin
region begin to darken soon after three o’clock. It was nearer five
when the parish surgeon set his face homeward, and the Shadrack-road
was enfolded in its customary fog; the street-lamps—not too brilliant
in the clearest weather—and the lighted shop-windows showing dimly
athwart that sombre smoke-curtain. Suddenly, gleaming a little brighter
than the rest, he saw a moving lamp, the lamp of a fast hansom; then
heard an execration, in the usual cabman-voice; a crash, a grinding
noise as of wheels grating against wheels; a volley of execrations
rising in terrible crescendo; and then the loud commanding voice of the
passenger in the stranded vehicle, demanding to be let out.
Lucius went to the assistance of the distressed passenger—if that could
be called distress which could command so lusty an utterance—and
extricated him from the hansom, which had run foul of a monster dray,
laden with beer barrels.
The passenger availed himself of Mr. Davoren’s arm, and alighted, not
without some show of feebleness. It seemed as if his chief strength
were in his voice. Seen somewhat dimly beneath that fog curtain,
he appeared an old man, tall but bent, with a leonine head and a
penetrating eye—keen as the eye of hawk or eagle.
He thanked the surgeon briefly, dismissed the cabman with a stern
reproof and without his fare.
‘You know me,’ he said; ‘Homer Sivewright, Cedar House. You can take
out a summons if you fancy you’re badly treated. You’ve jerked a great
deal more than eighteenpence out of my constitution.’
The cabman vanished in the fog, grumbling but acquiescent.
‘At seventy and upwards,’ said Mr. Sivewright to Lucius, ‘the human
economy will hardly bear shaking. I shall walk home.’
He seemed feeble, somewhat uncertain upon his legs; and Lucius’s
humanity came to the rescue.
‘Take my arm as far as your house,’ he said; ‘my time is not especially
valuable.’
‘Isn’t it?’ demanded the old man, looking at him suspiciously; ‘a young
man about London whose time is of no use to him is in a bad road.’
‘I didn’t say my time was of no use to me. Perhaps there are not many
men in London who work harder than I. Only, as I take no pleasure, I
have sometimes a margin left after work. I can spare half-an-hour just
now, and if you like to lean on my arm it is at your service.’
‘I accept your friendly offer. You speak like a gentleman and an honest
man. My house is not half a mile from here; you must know it if you
know this neighbourhood—Cedar House.’
‘I think I do. A curious old house, belonging evidently to two
periods, half stone, half brick, standing back from the road behind a
heavily-buttressed wall. Is that it?’
‘Yes. It was once a palace or a royal hunting-lodge, or whatever you
like to call it. It was afterwards enlarged, in the reign of Anne, and
became a wealthy citizen’s country seat, before there were all these
abominations of factories and ropewalks and docks between the City and
the eastern suburbs. I got the place for an almost nominal rent, and
it suits me, as an empty hogshead would suit a mouse—plenty of room to
turn round in it.’
‘The house looks very large, but your family is large, no doubt.’
‘My family consists of myself and my granddaughter, with two old
servants,—trustworthy, of course. That is to say, they have learned by
experience exactly to what extent they may safely rob me.’
They were walking in an eastward direction as they talked; the old man
leaning somewhat heavily on the younger.
Lucius laughed pleasantly at his companion’s cynicism.
‘Then you don’t believe even in the honesty of faithful servants?’
‘I believe in nothing that is not demonstrable by the rule of three.
The fidelity of old servants is like the fidelity of your household
cat—they are faithful to their places; the beds they have slept upon
so many years; the fireside at which they have a snug corner where the
east wind cannot touch their rheumatism.’
‘Yet there are instances of something better than mere feline
constancy. Sir Walter Scott’s servants, for instance, who put their
shoulders to the wheel manfully when Fortune played their master
false—the old butler turning scrub and jack-of-all-trades, the old
coachman going to the plough-tail. There is something awful in the
descent of a butler, too, like the downfall of an archbishop.’
‘I don’t know anything about your Sir Walter Scott,’ growled Mr.
Sivewright; ‘I suppose it is natural to youth to look at all things
brightly, though I have known youth that didn’t. You talk gaily enough
for a young man who devotes no time to pleasure.’
‘Do you think pleasure—in the common acceptation of the word, meaning
late hours and mixed company—really conduces to good spirits?’
‘Only as opium engenders sleep—to leave a man three times as wakeful
afterwards,’ said Mr. Sivewright. ‘I have done without that kind of
pleasure myself throughout a long life, yet I hardly count myself
wise. Fairly to estimate the lightness of his own particular burden,
a man should try to carry a heavier one. There is no better tonic for
the hard-worker than a course of pleasure. You are in some trade or
profession, I presume,’ he added, turning his sharp glance upon his
companion; ‘a clerk, perhaps?’
‘No; but something that works harder than a clerk. A parish doctor.’
Mr. Sivewright recoiled palpably.
‘Don’t be alarmed,’ said Lucius; ‘it was not as a possible patient that
I pulled you out of the cab. My practice doesn’t lie among the upper
classes.’
‘Nor do I belong to the upper classes,’ answered the other quickly. ‘I
forgive you your profession, though I am among those prejudiced people
who have an innate aversion from doctors, lawyers, and parsons. But
the machinery of commerce won’t allow us to dispense with the lawyers;
and I suppose among the poor there still lingers a remnant of the old
belief that there’s some use in doctors. The parsons thrive upon the
foolishness of women. So there is a field still left for your three
learned professions.’
‘That way of talking is a fashion,’ said Lucius quietly; ‘but I
daresay if you were seriously ill to-morrow, your thoughts would turn
instinctively towards Savile-row. And perhaps if you were going to die,
you’d feel all the happier if the friendly voice of your parish priest
breathed familiar words of hope and comfort beside your pillow.’
‘I know nothing of my parish, except that its rates are
four-and-twopence in the pound,’ returned the other in his incisive
voice.
A quarter of an hour’s walking, beguiled by such talk as this, brought
them to the house of which Lucius had spoken, a dwelling altogether
out of keeping with the present character of the Shadrack-road.
That heavily-buttressed wall, dark with the smoke and foul weather
of centuries; that rusty iron gate, with its florid scroll work, and
forgotten coat-of-arms (a triumph of the blacksmith’s art two hundred
years old); that dark-browed building within, formed of a red-brick
centre, square, many-windowed, and prosaic, with a tall narrow doorway,
overshadowed by a stone shell, sustained by cherubic heads of the
Anne period, flanked by an older wing of gray moss-discoloured stone,
with massive mullioned windows, had nothing in common with the shabby
rows and shops and skimpy terraces and bulkheads and low-roofed,
disreputable habitations of the neighbourhood. It stood alone, a
solitary relic of the past; splendid, gloomy, inscrutable.
Nothing in the man Sivewright interested Lucius Davoren half so much
as the fact that he lived in this queer old house. After all a man’s
surroundings are often half the man, and our first impression of a new
acquaintance is generally taken from his chairs and tables.
The grim old iron gate was not a portal to be opened with a latch-key.
It looked like one of the outworks of a fortification, to be taken by
assault. Mr. Sivewright pulled at an iron ring, suspended beyond the
reach of the gutter children of the district, and a remote bell rang
within the fastness, a hoarse old bell, rusty no doubt like the gate.
After a lengthy interval measured by the gauge of a visitor’s patience,
but which Mr. Sivewright accepted with resignation as a thing of
course, this summons produced an elderly female, with slippered feet,
a bonnet, and bare arms, who unlocked the gate, and admitted them to
an enclosure of fog, stagnant as compared with the fog in circulation
without, and which seemed to the doctor of a lower temperature, as if
in crossing that narrow boundary he had travelled a degree northward.
‘Come in,’ said Mr. Sivewright, with the tone of a man who offers
reluctant hospitality, ‘and have a glass of wine. You’ve had a cold
walk on my account; you’d better take a little refreshment.’
‘No, thanks; but I should like to see your house.’
‘Should you? There’s not much to see; an old barrack, that’s all,’ said
the old man, stopping short, with a doubtful air, as if he would have
infinitely preferred leaving the surgeon outside. ‘Very few strangers
ever cross my threshold, except the taxgatherer. However,’ with an air
of resignation, ‘come in.’
The old woman had opened the tall narrow door meanwhile, revealing
an interior dimly lighted by a lamp which must have been feeble
always, but which was now the veriest glimmer. Lucius followed his
new acquaintance through this doorway into a large square hall, from
which a broad oaken staircase ascended to an open gallery. There
was just enough light for Lucius to see that this hall, instead of
being bare and meagrely furnished as he had expected to find it, was
crowded with a vast assemblage of heterogeneous objects. Pictures
piled against the gloomy panelled walls. Sculpture, porcelain, and
delf of every nation and every period, from monster vases of imperial
lacquer to fragile déjeuners of Dresden and Copenhagen; from inchoate
groups of vermin and shell-fish from the workshop of Pallissy, to the
exquisite modelling of teacups resplendent with gods and goddesses from
Capo-di-Monte; from gaudy dishes and bowls of old Rouen delf, to the
perfection of Louis-Seize Sèvres. Armour of every age, vases of jasper
and porphyry, carved-oak cabinets, the particoloured plumage of stuffed
birds, Gobelins tapestry, South-Sea shells, Venetian glass, Milan
ironwork, were curiously intermingled; as if some maniac artist in the
confusion of a once fine taste had heaped these things together. By
that dim light, Lucius saw only the fitful glimmer of steel casques and
breastplates, the half-defined shapes of marble statues, the outline
of jasper vases and huge Pallissy dishes. Later he came to know all
those treasures by heart.
A Louis-Quatorze clock on a bracket began to strike six, and
immediately a chorus of clocks in adjacent rooms, in tones feeble or
strong, tenor or bass, took up the strain.
‘I am like Charles the Fifth, particular about my clocks,’ said Mr.
Sivewright. ‘I keep them all going. This way, if you please, Mr.—’
‘Davoren.’
‘Davoren! That sounds a good name.’
‘My father cherished a tradition to that effect—a good middle-class
family. Our ancestor represented his native county in Queen Elizabeth’s
first Parliament. But I inherited nothing except the name.’
He was staring about him in that doubtful light, as he spoke, trying to
penetrate the gloom.
‘You are surprised to see such a collection as that in the
Shadrack-road? Dismiss your wonder. I am not an antiquarian; but a
dealer. Those things represent the remnant of my stock-in-trade. I kept
a shop in Bond-street for five-and-thirty years.’
‘And when you retired from business you kept all those things?’
‘I kept them as some men keep their money, at compound interest.
Every year I live increases the value of those things. They belong to
manufactures that are extinct. With every year examples perish. Ten
years hence the value of my stock will have multiplied by the square of
my original capital.’
Mr. Sivewright opened a door on one side of the hall, and, motioning
to his guest to follow him, entered a room somewhat brighter of aspect
than the hall without. It was a large room, sparsely furnished as
to the luxurious appliances of modern homes, but boasting, here and
there, in rich relief against the panelled walls, one of those rare and
beautiful objects upon which the virtuoso is content to gaze throughout
the leisure moments of a lifetime. In the recess on one side of the
fireplace stood a noble old buffet, in cherry wood and ebony; in the
corresponding recess on the other side a cabinet in Florentine mosaic;
from one corner came the solemn tick of an eight-day clock, whose
carved and inlaid walnut-wood case was a miracle of art; and upon each
central panel of the walls hung a cabinet picture of the Dutch school.
So much for the pleasure of the eye. Mere sensual comfort had been less
regarded in the arrangement of Mr. Sivewright’s sitting-room. A small
square of threadbare Persian carpet covered the centre of the oaken
floor, serving more for ornament than for luxury. The rest was bare.
A mahogany Pembroke table, value about fifteen shillings, occupied the
middle of the room; one shabby-looking arm-chair, horsehair-cushioned,
high-backed, and by no means suggestive of repose; two other chairs, of
the same family, but without arms; and a business-like deal desk in one
of the windows, completed the catalogue of Mr. Sivewright’s goods and
chattels.
Preparations for dinner, scanty like the furniture, occupied the table;
or rather preparations for that joint meal which, in some economic
households, combines the feminine refreshment of tea with the more
masculine and substantial repast. On one side of the table a small
white cloth neatly spread, with a single knife and fork, tumbler, and
Venetian flask half-full of claret, indicated that Mr. Sivewright was
going to dine: on the other side, a small oval mahogany tray, with a
black Wedgewood teapot, suggested that some one else was going to drink
tea. A handful of fire burned cheerfully in the wide old-fashioned
grate, contracted into the smallest possible compass by cheeks of
firebrick. Throughout the room, scrupulously neat in every detail,
Lucius recognised the guiding spirit of parsimony, tempered in all
things by some gentler household spirit which contrived to impart some
look of comfort even to those meagre surroundings. A pair of candles,
not lighted, stood on the table. Mr. Sivewright lighted one of these,
and for the first time Lucius was able to see what manner of man his
new acquaintance was. All he had been able to discover in the fog was
the leonine head and hawk’s eye.
The light of the candle showed him a countenance once handsome, but now
deeply lined, the complexion dark and sallow, deepening to almost a
copper tint in the shadows. The nose aquiline and strongly marked; the
upper lip singularly long, the mouth about as indicative of softness
or flexibility as if it had been fashioned out of wrought iron; the
cheeks worn and hollow; the brow and temples almost hidden by the
long loose gray hair, which gave that lion-like aspect to the large
head—altogether a face and head to be remembered. The figure tall and
spare, but with breadth of shoulder; at times bent, but in some moments
of vivacity drawn suddenly erect, as if the man by mere force of will
could at pleasure recover the lost energy of his departed youth.
‘A curious face,’ thought Lucius; ‘and there is something in
it—something that seems like a memory or an association—which strikes
me more forcibly than the face itself. Yet I know not what. I daresay I
have dreamed of such a face, or have shaped it in my own fancy to fit
some poetic creation—Ugolino, Lear, who knows?’
‘Sit down,’ said Mr. Sivewright, pointing to a chair opposite his own,
into which he had established himself with as comfortable an air as if
the chair itself had been the crowning triumph of luxurious upholstery.
‘You can drink claret, I suppose?’ taking a couple of glasses from the
Florentine cabinet, and filling them with the wine on the table. ‘I
drink no other wine myself. A sound light Medoc, which can hurt nobody.’
‘Nobody whose stomach is fortified with a double casing of iron,’
thought Lucius, as he sipped the acrid beverage, which he accepted out
of courtesy.
‘Ten minutes past six,’ said Mr. Sivewright, ringing a bell; ‘my dinner
ought to be on the table.’
An inner door behind Lucius opened as he spoke, and a girl came into
the room carrying a little tray, with two small covered dishes. Lucius
supposed the newcomer to be a servant, and did not trouble himself to
look up till she had placed her dishes on the table, and lingered to
give the finishing touches to the arrangement of the board. He did look
up then, and saw that this ministering spirit was no common hireling,
but one of the most interesting women he had ever seen.
She was hardly to be called a woman; she was but in the opening blossom
of girlhood; a fragile-looking flower, pale as some waxen-petalled
exotic reared under glass, with the thermometer at seventy-six. She had
something foreign, or even tropical, in her appearance; eyes dark as
night, hair of the same sombre hue. Her figure was of middle height,
slim, but with no sharpness of outline; every curve perfection, every
line grace. Her features were delicately pencilled, but not strikingly
beautiful. Indeed, the chief and all-pervading charm of her appearance
was that exquisite delicacy, that flower-like fragility which moved one
to exclaim, ‘How lovely, but how short-lived!’
Yet it is not always these delicate blossoms which fade the first; the
tough-stemmed poppy will sometimes be mown down by Death’s inexorable
sickle, while the opal-hued petals of the dog-rose still breast the
storm. There was a strength of endurance beneath this fragile exterior
which Lucius would have been slow to believe in.
The girl glanced at the stranger with much surprise, but without the
slightest embarrassment. Rarely did a stranger sit beside that hearth.
But there had been such intruders from time to time, traders or
clients of the old man’s. She had no curiosity upon the subject.
‘Your dinner is quite ready, grandfather,’ she said; ‘you had better
eat it before it grows cold.’
She lifted the covers from the two dainty little dishes—a morsel of
steak cooked in some foreign fashion—a handful of sliced potato fried
in oil.
Lucius rose to depart.
‘I won’t intrude upon you any longer, Mr. Sivewright,’ he said; ‘but if
you will allow me to call upon you some day and look at your wonderful
collection, I shall be very glad.’
‘Stay where you are,’ answered the other in his authoritative way;
‘you’ve dined, I’ve no doubt.’ A convenient way of settling _that_
question. ‘Lucille, my granddaughter, can give you a cup of tea.’
Lucille smiled, with a little gesture of assent strikingly foreign,
Lucius thought. An English girl would hardly have been so gracious to a
nameless stranger.
‘I told you, when we first met in that abominable fog, that I liked
your voice,’ said Mr. Sivewright. ‘I’ll go farther now, and say I like
your face. I forgive you your profession, as I said before. Stay, and
see my collection to-night.’
‘That is as much as to say, “See all you want to see to-night, and
don’t plague me with any future visits,”’ thought Lucius, who found
that meagrely-furnished room, that scanty fire, more attractive since
the appearance of Lucille.
He accepted the invitation, however; drew his chair to the tea-table,
and drank two cups of tea and ate two or three small slices of
bread-and-butter with a sublime disregard of the fact that he had not
broken his fast since eight o’clock in the morning. He had acquired a
passion for mild decoctions of congou in those days of privation far
away beyond the Saskatchewan; and this particular tea seemed to have
a subtle aroma which made it better than any he had ever brewed for
himself beside his solitary hearth.
‘I became a tea-drinker four years ago, in the Far West,’ he said, as
an excuse for his second cup.
‘Do you mean in America?’ the girl asked eagerly.
‘Yes. Have you ever been over yonder?’
‘Never; only I am always interested in hearing of America.’
‘You had much better be interested in hearing of the moon,’ said Mr.
Sivewright, with an angry look; ‘you are just as likely to discover
anything there that concerns you.’
‘You have relations or friends in America, perhaps, Miss Sivewright?’
inquired Lucius; but a little warning look and gesture from Lucille
prevented his repeating the question.
He began to tell her some of his adventures beyond the Red River—not
his hours of dire strait and calamity, not the horror of his forest
experiences. Those were things he never spoke of, scenes he dared not
think of, days which it was misery to him to remember.
‘You must have gone through great hardship,’ she said, after listening
to him with keen interest. ‘Were you never in actual peril?’
‘Once. We were lost in a forest westward of the Rocky Mountains.
But that is a period I do not care to speak of. My dearest friend
was ill—at the point of death. Happily for us a company of Canadian
emigrants, bound for the gold-fields, came across our track just in
time to save us. But for that providential circumstance I shouldn’t be
here to tell you the story. Wolves or wolverines would have picked my
bones.’
‘Horrible!’ exclaimed Lucille, with a shudder.
‘Yes. Wolves are not agreeable society. But human nature is still more
horrible when it casts off the mask of civilisation.’
Mr. Sivewright had finished his dinner by this time, and had absorbed
two glasses of the sound Medoc without a single contortion of his
visage; a striking instance of the force of habit.
‘Come,’ said he. ‘I’ll show you some of my collection. You’re no judge
of art, I suppose. I never knew a young man who was; though they’re
always ready enough with their opinions.’
He took up one of the candles, and led the way to the hall, thence
to a room on the other side of the house, larger than the family
sitting-room, and used as a storehouse for his treasures. Here Lucius
beheld the same confusion of bric-à-brac which had bewildered him
on his first entrance into that singular mansion, only on a larger
scale. Pictures again, statues again, cabinets, tables, fragmentary
pieces of mediæval oak carving, stray panels that had once lined old
Flemish churches, choir-stalls with sacred story carved upon their
arms and backs; armour again, grim and ghastly as the collection of
the Hôtel Cluny, demonstrating how man’s invention, before it entered
the vast field of gunnery, had lavished its wanton cruelty on forms
that hack and hew, and jag and tear and saw; spiky swords, pole-axes
with serrated edges, pikes from which dangled iron balls studded with
sharp points; and so on. Ceramic ware, again, of every age, from
a drinking-vessel dug from beneath one of the earth-mounds on the
shores of the Euphrates to the chocolatière out of which Marie Jeanne
Vaubernier, otherwise Du Barri, took her last breakfast. And, rising
grim above the frivolities of art, loomed the gaunt outline of a
Scottish Maiden, the rough germ of the Gallic guillotine.
The old man looked round his storehouse with a smile of triumph,
holding aloft his single candle, every object showing strangely, and
casting uncanny shadows in that feeble light, he himself not the least
curious figure in the Rembrandtesque picture. He looked like some
enchanter, who, at a breath, had called these things into being.
‘You astound me!’ exclaimed Lucius, looking about him with unaffected
wonder. ‘You spoke some time ago of having saved the remnant of your
stock; but you have here a collection larger than I should have
supposed any dealer in curiosities would care to amass, even in the
full swing of his business.’
‘Perhaps,’ answered Mr. Sivewright with a dreamy air. ‘For the mere
purposes of trade—for trade upon the nimble-ninepence system—there
is no doubt too much. But these things have accumulated since I left
off business. The passion for collecting them was not to be put away
as easily as I put up my shutters with the expiry of a long lease.
My harpy of a landlord asked a rent so exorbitant, that I preferred
cutting short a successful trade to pandering to his greed. True that
the situation had increased in value during the last twenty-one years
of my residence; but I declined to toil for another man’s profit. I
turned my hack upon Bond-street, determined to take life quietly in
future. I found this old house—to be let cheap, and roomy enough to
hold my treasures. Since that time I have amused myself by attending
all the great sales, and a good many of the little ones. I have been
to Paris, Brussels, Antwerp—and farther afield—on special occasions.
My collection has grown upon me—it represents all I possess in the
world, all that I can ever leave to my descendants. As I told you, I
anticipate that as the value of money decreases, and the age grows more
artistic, the value of these specimens, all relics of departed arts,
will be multiplied fourfold.’
‘A wise investment, in that case,’ replied Lucius; ‘but if the age
should have touched its highest point of luxurious living, if the
passion for splendid surroundings, once the attribute only of a
Buckingham or a Hertford, now the vice of the million, should work its
own cure, and give place to a Spartan simplicity, how then?’
‘My collection would most likely be purchased by the State,’ said the
old man coolly; ‘a destiny which I should infinitely prefer to its
disintegration, however profitable. _Then_, Mr. Davoren, the name of
Homer Sivewright would go down to posterity linked with one of the
noblest Museums ever created by a single individual.’
‘Pardon me,’ said Lucius; ‘but your name Homer—is that a family or
merely a Christian name?’
‘The name given me by my foolish old father—whose father was a
contemporary of Bentley—who gave his life to the study of Homer, and
tried to establish the thesis that early Greece had but one poet;
that the cyclic poets were the merest phantasma; and that Stasinus,
Arctinus, Lesches, and the rest, were but the mouthpieces of that one
mighty bard. Every man is said to be mad upon one point, or mad once in
twenty-four hours. My father was very mad about Greek. He gave me my
ridiculous name—which made me the laughing-stock of my schoolfellows—a
university education and his blessing. He had no more to give. My
college career cost him the only fortune he could have left me; and
I found myself, at one-and-twenty, fatherless, motherless, homeless,
and penniless, and—what to my poor father would have seemed worst of
all—plucked for my incapacity to appreciate the niceties of Homeric
Greek.’
‘How did you weather the storm?’
‘I might not have weathered it at all, but for a self-delusion which
sustained me in the very face of starvation. But for that I could
hardly have crossed Waterloo-bridge without being sorely tempted to
take the shortest cut out of my perplexities. I fancied myself a
painter. That dream kept me alive. I got bread somehow; sold my daubs
to a dealer; made some progress even in the art of daubing; and only
after five years of hard work and harder living awoke one day to the
bitter truth that I was no more a painter than I was a Grecian, no
nearer Reynolds than Porson.’
‘You bore your disappointment bravely, I imagine.’
‘Why imagine that?’
‘Because your physiognomy teaches me your ability to come safely
through such an ordeal—a will strong enough to stand against even a
worse shock.’
‘You are right. I parted with my delusion quietly enough, though it
had brightened my boyhood, and kept me alive during five weary years.
As I could not be a painter of pictures, I determined to be a dealer
in them, and began life once more in a little den of a shop, in a
court near Leicester-square—began with ten pounds for my capital;
bought a bit of old china for three-and-sixpence, and sold it for
ten shillings; had an occasional stroke of luck as time went by; once
picked up a smoke-darkened picture of a piggery, which turned out an
indisputable Morland; went everywhere and saw everything that was
to be seen in the shape of pictures and ceramic ware; lived in an
atmosphere of art, and brought to bear upon my petty trade a genuine
passion for art, which stood me in good stead against bigwigs whose
knowledge was only technical. In four years I had a stock worth three
thousand pounds, and was able to open a shop in Bond-street. A man
with a window in Bond-street must be an arrant ass if he can’t make
money. The dilettanti found me out, and discovered that I had received
the education of a gentleman. Young men about town made my shop a
lounge. I sold them the choicest brands of cigars, under the rose,
and occasionally lent them money; for which I charged them about half
the interest they would have paid a professed usurer. My profits were
reinvested in fresh stock as fast as they accumulated. I acquired a
reputation for judgment and taste; and, in a word, I succeeded; which I
should never have done had I insisted upon thinking myself a neglected
Raphael.’
‘I thank you for your history, more interesting to my mind than any
object in your collection. I do not wonder that you were loth to part
with the gems of art you had slowly gathered. But had none of your
children the inclination to continue so fascinating a trade?’
‘My children!’ repeated Homer Sivewright, with a gloomy look; ‘I have
no children. When you talk to a stranger, Mr. Davoren, beware of
commonplace questions. They sometimes gall a raw spot.’
‘Pardon me; only seeing that interesting young lady—your granddaughter—’
‘That granddaughter represents all my kindred upon earth. I _had_ a
son—that girl’s father. But there is not a figure carved on yonder
oaken choir-stalls of less account to me than that son is now.’
Lucius was silent. He had been unlucky enough to stumble upon the
threshold of a family mystery. Yes, he had fancied some touch of
sadness, some vague shadow of a quiet grief, in that sweet young face.
The child of a disgraced father; her gentle spirit even yet weighed
down by the memory of some ancient shame. He thought of the sorrow that
had darkened his own youth—the bitter memory which haunted him even
yet—the memory of his lost sister.
He went through the collection, seeing things as well as he could by
the light of a solitary candle. Mr. Sivewright displayed his various
treasures with infinite enthusiasm; dilating upon the modelling here,
the colouring there; through all the technicalities of art. He kept his
guest absorbed in this investigation for nearly two hours, although
there were moments when the younger man’s thoughts wandered back to the
parlour where they had left Lucille.
He was thinking of her even while he appeared to listen with intense
interest to Mr. Sivewright’s explanation of the difference between
_pâte tendre_ and _pâte dure_; wondering if she lived alone in that
huge rambling house with her grandfather, like little Nell in the
_Old Curiosity Shop_; only it was to be hoped with no such diabolical
familiar as Quilp privileged to intrude upon her solitude. So anxious
was he to be satisfied on this point, that he ventured to ask the
question, despite his previous ill-fortune.
‘Yes,’ answered Mr. Sivewright coolly, ‘we live quite alone. Dull,
you’ll say, perhaps, for my granddaughter. If it is, she must resign
herself to circumstances. There are worse things to bear than want of
company. If she hadn’t this home, she’d have none. Well, I suppose
you’ve seen as many of these things as you care about. I can see your
mind’s wandering. So we may as well bid each other good-night. I’m
obliged to you for your civility this afternoon. This way.’
He opened the door into the hall. A somewhat abrupt dismissal, and one
Lucius had not expected. He had reckoned upon finishing his evening far
more pleasantly in the society of Lucille.
‘I should like to bid Miss Sivewright good-evening,’ he said.
‘There’s no occasion. I can do it for you. There’s your hat, on the
black-marble slab yonder,’ said the old man, seeing his visitor looking
round in search of that article, with a faint hope that he might have
left it in the parlour.
‘Thanks. But I hope you don’t forbid my coming to see you again
sometimes?’ Lucius asked bluntly.
‘Humph!’ muttered the old man, ‘it would sound ungracious to talk of
forbidding any future visit. But I have lived in this house five years,
and have not made an acquaintance. One of the chief attractions of this
place, to my mind, was the fact that it was cut off by a ten-foot wall
from the world outside. With every wish to be civil, I can’t see why I
should make an exception in your favour. Besides, you’ve seen all there
is worth seeing within these walls; you could have no possible pleasure
in coming to us. We are poor, and we live poorly.’
‘I am not a seeker of wealthy acquaintance. A quiet fireside—an
atmosphere of home—brightened by the refinements of art; that is what I
should value above all things in a house where I was free to visit; and
that your house could give me. But if you say No, I submit. I cannot
force myself upon you.’
‘I have a granddaughter who will be penniless if she offends me,’ said
the old man, with the same gloomy look which had darkened his face when
he spoke of his son. ‘I do not care for any strange influence to come
between us. As it is, we are happy—not loving each other in any silly
romantic fashion, but living together in mutual endurance. No; I should
be a fool to admit any disturbing element.’
‘Be it so,’ said Lucius. ‘I am a struggling man, and have hardly
trodden the first stage of an uphill journey. The friendship I offer is
not worth much.’
‘I should refuse it in exactly the same manner if you were a
millionnaire,’ answered the other, opening the heavy old door, and
admitting the fog. He led the way across the forecourt, unlocked the
tall iron gate, and his visitor passed out into the sordid realities of
the Shadrack-road.
‘Once more, good-night,’ said Mr. Sivewright.
‘Good-night,’ answered Lucius, as the gate closed upon him, with
a creak like the caw of an evil-minded raven. He turned his face
homeward, intensely mortified. He was a proud man, and had offered his
friendship to a retired bric-à-brac dealer, only to have it flatly
rejected. But it was not wounded pride which vexed him as he walked
home through the fog.
‘There’s no such thing as love at first sight,’ he said to himself;
‘yet when a man has lived for half-a-dozen years without seeing a
pretty face in his own rank of life, his heart is apt to be rather
inflammable.’