MEPHISTOPHELES AGAIN.
A prisoner, and without a crime!
Mary Lennox felt that fate was indeed dealing hardly with her. When
the first wild paroxysms of grief and mortification were past, she
learned to understand that she should be released and free the moment
the robber's trial was over; but whither was she to turn then? Could
she seek for any employment, however humble, and say that her last
abode had been a public prison? Her purse would be restored to her
she had been told; but how long might its contents avail her,
especially when all the wardrobe she possessed was the fast fading
suit of black she now wore.
All these reflections, and others, coursed through her mind, causing
such pangs of pain in her heart, that each was like a probe of hot
steel?
There was a valuable diamond in Cyril's ring, but the idea of parting
with it never occurred to her, or that it possessed other value than
accrued to it in her own estimation, from being his gift to her in a
time of vanished happiness.
Three weeks after the scene we have narrated, saw Mary still in a
cell of the prison, gazing in listless abstraction, and with eyes
that were becoming dull and stony in aspect, from a grated window at
the high brick boundary-wall of the place, a barrier to liberty and
the external world, defended by two rows of crooked spikes.
The chaplain had been kind, and gave her a few dreary books and pious
publications; while the matron, whose occupation rendered her
naturally suspicious, and who could not be convinced that Mary was
not an evil girl in some way, otherwise she should certainly have
friends of some kind, supplied her with work, and urged her to "do a
little white seam," that she might have more money by her when set at
liberty.
But she had ever one thought which rankled bitterly in her heart,
that she was a prisoner, though guiltless of a crime!
Should she ever smile--ever sing again--she who had so often sung
with an aching heart? Deadened by the massive walls, the roar of
mighty London came to her ears like a drowsy hum, and dreamily she
listened to it.
Within every shadow there is a deeper shade. To Mary it seemed
strange that she should have been able to undergo so many shocks to
her nervous system, so many humiliations to her proper pride, so many
bitter mortifications, so many sorrows and affronts, and not have
died! Yet she was still living, with all the impulses of life strong
within her, save its best and brightest one--hope, for that was
fading now.
Her lover! He was a feature of the past; yet she could not look on
his betrothal ring without a strange thrill running through her
bosom, while fond memory flew back to many an hour of quiet joy
beside the lonely stile and by the old pine wood. Anon she dismissed
these regrets as unworthy of her; but she longed and yearned amid the
solitude of her cell, for one caress, one kind word from the poor old
man who had so loved and petted her!
"Never more--never more!" she would moan and mutter. Could she but
join him! The attempt would be a crime against her Maker--yea, even
the thought thereof, was a sin; but the dark idea would come to her
again and again.
Memories grew strong and keen out of the monotony of her existence.
And the most vivid, were of her father, so fond and doting, so
passionate and querulous, and yet, withal, ever so gentle and
affectionate to her. So, then, would come before her with morbid and
painful distinctness the scene of his death-bed, his passing away,
and the wistful look, which when once seen is never forgotten--the
glance we must all give one day, when the world is receding from us,
and its smallness appears more small than ever. His was a smile of
unutterable fondness and sadness, and there came the great change
that chilled her heart then, and chilled it now--the pallor of
death--the forerunner of eternity and peace.
On whose face would her last smile rest? And who would close her
eyes when the hour came?
Times there were when a terror filled her soul lest she might come
forth only to fall lower than poverty could make her; for she
remembered painfully one or two poor girls whom she had seen brought
up before Alderman Figsley. But--no, no, she could only die, and be
at rest for ever!
She knew that while she was gazing at the smoke-blackened brick wall
or into the paved yard, where not a blade of grass was visible, the
leaves would be thick and green in the rustling woods of the Merse;
the blossoms of the white and pink hawthorn and of the golden
laburnum, must have passed away; but the honey bees would be humming
drowsily in the sunshine among the flowers she had planted, and over
the beautiful heath-clad hills that looked down on what was once her
home. There still, in the breezy and sunny morning, the mavis and
merle were singing, and the voice of the cushat-dove would sound in
the old coppice, the _lone wood_; but never more for her!
A pile of odious work for the matron was lying untouched before her,
when she was roused from these dull thoughts by a warder announcing
that "a gentleman, with an order from Alderman Figsley, had come to
visit her."
She started from her seat with heightening colour; a foreboding of
the heart told her who this visitor would too probably be--and
Chesters, bowing and smiling, was ushered in. He presented his hand;
but Mary drew back, and covered her eyes with her hand and arm, as if
to shut out the sight of him.
"That man--that man again! You here, sir?"
"As you see, Miss Lennox; or will you permit me, as an old friend, to
call you Mary?"
"Friend!" she exclaimed, with loathing in her half averted face.
He was now attired in a blue undress uniform, elaborately frogged and
braided about the breast. He wore a gilded waistbelt, and a sabre
with a white ivory hilt, and carried in one hand a scarlet fez with a
long blue silk tassel; for he was in the undress of an officer of the
Turkish Contingent. His appearance was always that of a gentleman,
but there was in his eyes the jaded and dissipated expression
habitual to them: and there were certain hard lines about the mouth,
at least the angles thereof, that indicated him to be a _roué_ or
worse, and a gambler who played at high stakes with honour, fortune,
and destiny.
"So, you foolish little girl, it has come to this," said he,
surveying the bare walls of the whitewashed cell. "Why would you not
permit me to become your security--to speak for you, I mean?"
"Rather would I have died than have accepted from your hands the
smallest favour on any terms, and least of all on such as you dared
to offer me--the daughter of a gentleman, every way your superior!
And how basely done--in French, too, lest the magistrate should
overhear or understand you. Begone, sir! What seek you here?" she
demanded, while surveying him with intense disgust and drawing
herself up the while, with the air of a little tragedy queen, her
eyes sparkling with resentment, and her hands clenched with energy.
"Why intrude upon me, unasked, unwanted, and so abhorred as you are?"
"This is a cell in a prison," said he mockingly.
"True. But here my privacy is as sacred as if I occupied the saloon
of a palace! And I am here--here--a prisoner, without crime!" And
her voice died away as she spoke.
After a pause she asked,--
"Is it manly of you to come here and mock me in my misery?"
"I did not come to mock you, Mary."
"Leave me, sir. Whatever be my fate, I am stainless and guiltless."
"Notwithstanding all that, your character will be utterly gone, and a
taint shall be upon you that will cause all to shrink from
befriending you. If you seek for work, or aid of any kind, however
menial, however humble, can you refer people only to the chaplain or
the turnkey of a prison? I should think not! Oh, Mary Lennox, you
will starve, or do worse, in the streets of this vast modern Babylon!"
Mary trembled in her soul, for he was speaking her own terrible
thoughts; but he was minute in his wish to torture her, and pitiless
in his desire to bend her to his wishes.
"There are, of course, houses of refuge for casuals, and the
hospitals for those who are ailing; and when the unknown or the
unclaimed die there, where do their remains go? To the surgical
theatre, where your beauty, which is undeniable, and where the very
perfections of your person, may be made a source of speculation,
perhaps of banter, for a rabble of young sprigs of anatomy; and
thence to a grave, God knows where or how! Avoid the contingencies
of a fate so terrible; I entreat you, dearest Mary, to listen to me,
and--and----"
"Go with you?"
"Yes." And he drew nearer, as he spoke, earnestly.
"Never," said she, through her clenched teeth, while shrinking back.
"Better death--any death, however black and desperate! Oh, how have
I the patience to degrade myself by talking with you on such a
subject? But I am becoming familiar with humiliation now and misery
too!"
"I could prove a strong friend, Mary."
"Hitherto you have been a dangerous enemy--a veritable fiend."
"As you please, as you please. In this epoch of ours, much as we
boast of enlightenment and advancement, passion is as strong, hate as
bitter, and Destiny quite as inexorable and pitiless, as ever they
were in the dark and middle ages."
Mary cowered and shivered as he spoke; and in the depth of her
misery--a misery rendered all the more keen by the girl's extreme
sensibility, he surveyed her with exactly such a glance or smile, as
one might fancy in the face of Mephistopheles, while watching
Goethe's heroine, poor Margaret, when she lay prostrate on the straw
in prison, with a piece of brown bread and a pitcher of cold water
beside her.
Mary's unconcealed repugnance and aversion for him, kindled at last
the rage of this would-be lover; and, in revenge, he adopted an
undisguised insolence of tone.
"So you hate me?"
"Say rather that I--despise you!"
"So you won't come with me to the East on any terms? By Jove, I
could give you such a pretty gilded kiosk on the shore of the
Bosphorus, where you might see all the gardens of Pera on one side;
Scutari, with its mosques on the other, and all that sort of thing.
I daresay that, as senior officer, I could get you out with me in the
transport somehow; and we should do the Mediterranean and the Levant
at Her Majesty's expense, and without requiring even a 'John Murray.'
Say you'll come, and I shall get you out of this den in a twinkling.
I shall soon make it all square with yonder Alderman, who made such a
fuss about you. I am in funds, my girl, I can tell you: cleared two
thousand odd, by a few strokes at billiards last night, after getting
the IOU's of two noble lords--swell friends--by whose aid my leave at
home has been somewhat protracted, as I threatened monetary pressure.
Say you'll come. I have plenty of gold to pave the way, and won't we
be jolly while it lasts? 'See; the mountains kiss high heaven'--you
know the rest. Ah, you will find it better fun steaming past the
isles of the Levant, than moping here or mooning at Lonewoodlee!"
Even his brusque insolence failed to rouse anger in her heart.
"Lonewoodlee--oh, Lonewoodlee!" she repeated, pressing her slender
white fingers interlaced upon her sunken eyes and speaking in a soft
and agitated voice; "my father's home! It is gone, and I have but
the memory of it now, and of all I have lost, to remind me of the
words of David," and lifting up her hands and eyes with much of
sublime resignation in the expression of her pallid face, she said,
"Dominus dedit, Dominus abstulit, sed nomen Domini benedictum!"
After a pause,
"Are you mad that you begin jabbering Latin in a place like this?" he
asked with an air of astonishment that was really genuine.
"I am not mad, sir, though I might well be; and now I have but once
more to entreat--nay to command you, as you are a man, to leave me to
my fate and trouble me no more."
"I shall do so--and be assured it will be a sad and degrading one."
"As God pleases."
She turned her back upon him, and with a glance in which rage and
baffled desire triumphed over pity, he retired and left her in an
almost fainting condition.