A WAIF FROM A WRECK.
"Look into a man's Past, if you would understand his Present, or guess
at his Future." So spake some sage, name unknown, but probably
intermediate in date between the Great King and Mr. M. F. Tupper. The
rule is not implicitly to be relied on, but perhaps there is as much of
truth in it as in most apophthegms of proverbial philosophy.
So it may save some time and trouble hereafter, if we sketch briefly now
some of Alan Wyverne's antecedents; for he is to be the chief character
in this story, which has no _hero_, properly so-called, nor heroine
either.
The main facts are very soon told: his twenty-first birthday saw him in
possession of a perfectly unencumbered estate of L12,000 a year, and all
the accumulations that two paragon guardians had toiled to amass during
an unusually long minority; his twenty-eighth dawned on a comparative
pauper.
The last score of centuries have taught us many things; amongst others,
to go down hill with a certain caution and timidity, if not with
sobriety. We never hear now of those great disasters to which the very
vastness of their proportions lent a false grandeur; where a colossal
fortune foundered suddenly, leaving on the world's surface a vortex of
turbulence and terror, such as surrounds the spot where a three-decker
has gone down. The Regent and his _roues_ were wild in their generation,
but they never quite attained the antique magnificence of recklessness.
The expenses of a contested county election fifty years back, would have
shown poorly by the AEdile's balance-sheet, A. C. 65, when Caesar laughed
to see his last _sestertium_ vanish in the brilliancy of the Circensian
Games. What modern general would carry L20,000 of debt as lightly as he
did half-a-million, when he went out to battle with the Lusitanian? If
we even hear nowadays of a like liability, it is probably in connexion
with a great commercial "smash," involving curious disclosures as to the
capabilities of stamped paper, and the extent of public credulity; but
the interest of such rarely spreads west of Temple-bar. Truth to
say--however moving the tale may be to the unfortunates ruined by the
delinquent, there is little romance to be extracted out of mercantile
atrocities.
Nevertheless, if you only give him time, and don't hurry him beyond his
stride, a dwarf will "go to the dogs" just as easily and surely as a
giant. After our _mesquine_ fashion, that journey is performed so
constantly, that only some peculiarities in Alan's case make it worth
noting at all.
Few men have trodden the road to ruin with such a perfectly smooth and
even pace; there was no rush or hurry about it from beginning to end;
nothing like a crash to attract notice or scandal. He was known to bet
high and play deep; but no one spoke of him at the clubs as having lost
an extraordinary stake on any one night, nor did the chroniclers of the
Turf ever allude to him amongst those "hit hard" on any single event.
_One_ destructive element never showed itself throughout his career. It
must have been gratifying to those much-abused Hetaerae to reflect (do
they ever reflect at all?) that none could charge any one of the
sisterhood with having aided in Wyverne's downfall. Reckless and
extravagant as the son of Clinias, he escaped--at least Timandra. More
than one scruple, probably, helped him to maintain a continence which
soon became so well-known, that the most persevering of feminine fowlers
never thought of laying her snares in his way. Something might be
ascribed to principles learnt at his dead mother's knee, which all the
contagion of Bohemia failed quite to efface--something to a chivalrous
reverence for the sex, which withheld him from deliberately abetting in
its open degradation--something to the pride of race, with which he was
thoroughly imbued. He loved his ancient name too dearly, to see it
dragged through the dust past the statue of Achilles, at the
chariot-wheels of the fairest Phryne of them all. For once--hearing a
story of human folly and frailty, you asked, "_Dove la donna?_" and
waited in vain for a reply.
If the Sirens failed to seduce Wyverne, that was about the only peril or
temptation from which he escaped scathless. Profuse hospitality all the
year round in London, Leicestershire, and at his home in the north, cost
something: a string of ten horses in training (besides yearlings and
untried two-year-olds), which only won when their owner had backed
something else heavily, cost more: backing other men's bills _currente
calamo_, receiving no substantial considerations for so doing, cost most
of all. Alan's bold, careless handwriting was as well known in a certain
branch of commerce as the official signature on the Bank of England's
notes. There was joy in Israel when they saw his autograph: Ezekiel and
Solomon--most cautious of their tribe (those crack bill-discounters are
always lineally descended, it would seem, from some prophet or
king)--smacked their bulbous lips in satisfaction as they clutched the
paper bearing his endorsement: their keen eyes looked three months
forward into futurity, and saw the spoil of the Egyptian secure. Alan's
own resources, though rapidly diminishing, always sufficed his own
wants: but he never tired of paying these disinterested liabilities as
long as his friends could furnish him with any decent excuse for his
doing so: if the defaulter failed in making out even a shadow of a case,
Wyverne still paid, but never consorted with him afterwards. Then the
dark side of his character came out. Generous and kind-hearted to a
fault, he was at times obstinate to relentlessness: slow to take offence
or to suspect intentional injury, he was yet slower in forgiving or
forgetting either: he did not trouble himself to detect the falsehood at
the bottom of any tale of distress, but against imposture carried with a
high hand he set his face as it were a millstone.
Hercules St. Levant (of the Chilian Cuirassiers) would tell you--if he
could be brought to speak coherently on the subject--that he dates his
ruin from the day when he miscalculated the extent of Sir Alan Wyverne's
long-suffering or laziness. Surely some of us can remember that
wonderful Copper Captain--the round, ringing tones tempting you with a
point over the proper odds--the scarfs and waistcoats blinding in their
gorgeousness, so "loud" that you _heard_ them coming all the way up from
the distance post--the supernatural whiskers, whose sable volutes shaded
his broad shoulders like the leaves of a talipat-palm? Hercules was very
successful at first: he must have started with a nominal capital, but he
had plenty of courage, some judgment, and more luck; so, by dint of
industry, and now and then picking up crumbs from the table of those by
whom the "good things" of the turf are shared, he contrived to ruffle it
for awhile with the best of them. Men of mark and high estate would meet
and hold communion with him--as they have done with deeper and darker
villains--on the neutral ground at "The Corner," without caring to
inquire too closely what Cacique had signed his commission, or on what
foughten-fields the rainbow of his ribbons was won. With common prudence
he might have held his own till now. But St. Levant was a buccaneer to
the backbone: he spent his winnings as lavishly as any one of the young
patricians whom he delighted to honour and imitate; and took his ease in
the sunshine, scorning to make the slightest provision for the season of
the rains. It came at last, in an Epsom Summer Meeting. The adverse
Fates had it all their own way there: several of the Captain's
certainties were overturned, and several promising "plants" were
withered in their bud. It was the fourth "day of rebuke and blasphemy,"
and still the battle went hard against the Peruvian plunger. The Oaks
dealt him the _coup de grace_: it was won by an extreme outsider.
Hercules saw the number go up, and staggered out of the enclosure like a
drunken man, with hardly breath enough left to hiss out a curse between
his white lips. "Hecuba" was one of six that Wyverne had taken with him
against the field for an even thousand: her name had never been
mentioned in the betting at the time, and Alan only selected her because
he chanced to know her owner and breeder well.
St. Levant was ruined horse-and-foot, without power or hope of
redemption: that one bet would have pulled him through. Some pleasanter
engagement had kept Wyverne away from The Corner on the "comparing day,"
and with his usual carelessness he had even omitted to send his book
down by other hands: Hercules saw a last desperate chance, and grasped
at it, as drowning men will do. He appeared at the settling with his
well-known betting book (gorgeous, like all his other belongings, in
green morocco and gold,) but Hecuba's name was replaced by the second
favourite's. He chanced to have in his possession a fac-simile of the
original volume, and had copied out, in the interim, every bet it
contained, with this one trifling alteration. The matter came before the
authorities, of course. The discussion that ensued, though stormy (on
one side) was very short and decisive: the swindler's foamy
asseverations were shivered, like spray, on the granite of the other's
calm, contemptuous firmness. The judges did not hesitate long in
pronouncing against St. Levant their sentence of perpetual banishment.
All his piteous petitions addressed to Wyverne in after days to induce
the latter to obtain a mitigation of his punishment, remained absolutely
unanswered. There still survives--a pale, blurred shadow of his former
self--as it were, the _wraith_ of the Great Captain. We see occasionally
a hirsute head rising above the sea of villanous figures and faces that
seethe and surge against the rails of the enclosure: we catch glimpses
of a meteoric waistcoat flashing through the surrounding seediness; and
we hear a voice, thunderous as that of the elder Ajax, dominating the
din of the meaner _melee_; but there is no reversal of his doom. The
poor lost spirit must ramp and roar among the "welshers" of the outer
darkness, for the paradise of the Ring is closed to him for evermore.
Everybody--including the two or three friends who might hope to ride his
horses--was sorry for Wyverne when a heavy fall over timber laid him up,
quite early in the season, with a broken arm and collar-bone. The only
pity was, that the fortunate accident should not have happened three
years earlier. The indoor resources of a country-town, where all one's
associates hunt five days a-week at least, are limited. One morning Alan
felt so bored, that the whim seized him to look into his affairs, and
ascertain how he stood with the world: so he went for his solicitor (as
much for the sake of having some one to talk to as anything else), and
went in at business with great patience and determination. The men who
sat with him on the second evening after the lawyer's arrival, thought
Wyverne looking paler and graver than usual, but he listened to their
account of the run with apparently undiminished interest, and
sympathized with his friends' mishaps or successes as cordially as ever.
Only once his lips shook a little as he answered in the negative a
question--"If he felt in much pain?" Yet that morning had been a sore
trial both of brain and nerve. It is not a pleasant time, when you have
to call for the reckoning of ten thousand follies and faults, and to pay
it too--when the bitter _quart d'heure de Rabelais_ is prolonged through
days.
Though they arrived then at a tolerably accurate idea of the state of
Alan's finances, it took months to complete the final arrangements. When
everything in town and country that could well be sold had been disposed
of, Wyverne was left with a life-income of just as many hundreds a-year
as he had started with thousands. But all his personal debts, and
liabilities incurred for others, were paid in full. The only absolute
luxuries that he retained (with the exception of all the presents that
he had ever received) were the two best hunters in his stud, and his
gray Arab, "Maimouna." That residue might have been nearly doubled, if
Alan would have consented to dismantle the Abbey. But he could not help
looking upon its antique furniture and fittings in the light of
heirlooms. He had added little to them when he came into his
inheritance: he took nothing away when he lost it. So the great, grave
mansion still retained its old-fashioned and somewhat faded
magnificence; and few changes, so far, were to be seen there, except
that the grass grew long on the lawns, and the flowers wandered over the
parterres at their own sweet will, and instead of thick reeks of
unctuous smoke, only a thin blue line stole out modestly from two or
three chimneys now and then in the shooting season. The game was still
kept up, and the farmers watched it as jealously and zealously as if
they had been keepers in their landlord's pay.
The sternest Stoic alive could scarcely have fallen into his new
position more naturally, or adapted himself to its requirements more
gracefully, than did that gay, careless Epicurean. If he had any
regrets for the irrevocable Past, he kept them to himself, and never
wearied his friends for their sympathy or compassion; he accused no one
with reference to his ruin; I doubt if he even blamed himself very
severely. There was no more of recklessness in his conduct, than there
was of despondency in his demeanour; but he comported himself exactly as
you would expect to see a man do, of good birth and breeding, and
average steadiness, born to a modest competency. His experience, brief
as it was, might have taught him to be somewhat sceptical as to the
virtues of our human nature, more especially having regard to such
trifles as truth and honesty; but no amount of punishment will beat
wisdom or knowledge into a confirmed dunce or idler. His constitutional
indolence may have had something to say to it; but to the last hour of
his life Alan Wyverne never learnt to be suspicious, or sullen, or
cynical.
To be sure, the world in this case broke through an established rule,
and behaved better to him when he was at the bottom of the wheel than it
had ever done at the culminating point of his fortunes. There seemed to
be a general impression that he had been very badly treated by some
"person or persons unknown," and it became the fashion to compassionate
Wyverne (in his absence) exceedingly. People who in former days met and
parted from him quite indifferently, found out suddenly that they had
always been very fond of him, and contended as to who should attract him
to their house in the hunting or shooting season. The Marquis of
Montserrat, for instance, roused himself from where he lay, surrounded
by every delight of a Mussulman's paradise, in his summer palace by the
Bosphorus, to send a sort of _firmun_, giving Alan powers of life and
death over the keepers and coverts of all his territory marching with
the lands of Wyverne Abbey; an instance of good-nature which was the
more remarkable, inasmuch as the great Absentee not only carries
laziness and selfishness to a pitch of sublimity, but has of late
registered a vow against befriending any one under any circumstances
whatever. This last and rather superfluous hardening process was brought
about in this wise.
Some years ago there appeared suddenly in the firmament of fashion a
little star; no one knew whence it came--though it was supposed to have
risen in the East; and when, after twinkling brightly for a brief space,
it shot down into utter darkness, no one cared to ask whither it went.
Mr. Richardson had advanced just so far in intimacy with the magnates of
the land that they began to call him "Tom" (his Christian name was
Walter), when the crash came, and he subsided into nothingness. He lived
upon that recollection, and little else, for the remainder of his days.
Yet one chance was given him. Wandering about the Continent, he met the
Marquis of Montserrat. The mighty golden Crater and the poor shattered
Amphora had once floated side by side, for a league or two, down the
same stream. After a _tete-a-tete_ dinner (the _cotelettes a la
Pompadour_ were a success), old recollections, or his own Clos Vougeot,
made the peer's heart warm, and he bethought himself how he might serve
the unlucky pauper. At last he said,
"Tom, there is a regular establishment at Grandmanoir, and there always
will be in my time, though I never mean to see it again. Go and live
there; you'll be more comfortable than in lodgings, and save rent and
firing besides. Make yourself quite at home; slay the venison; eat the
fruit of the vine, and drink the juice thereof (the cellar ought to be
well filled); and grow as fat as Jeshurun, if you like. I only insist on
one thing. Whether matters are going on well or ill in the house or out
of it--don't bother _me_ about them. I don't want to hear a word on the
subject. Is it settled so?"
You may fancy Tom Richardson's profuse thanks and his great joy and
gladness at finding himself chatelain of Grandmanoir. The _valetaille_
treated him at first with no small kindness (he was a meek little man,
averse to giving unnecessary trouble), and for some months all went
merrily. But before a year had passed there began to dawn on the
stranger's mind suspicions, which soon changed into certainties. There
existed at Grandmanoir the most comprehensive and consistent system of
robbery that could well be conceived. It would have been harder to find
one honest menial there than ten saints in a City of the Plain.
Everybody was in it, from the agent and house-steward, who plundered _en
prince_, down to the scullion (fat, but _not_ foolish), who peculated
_en paysanne_. There was commercial blood in Tom Richardson's veins, and
the sight of these enormous misdeeds vexed his righteous soul
exceedingly. One day he could withhold himself no longer, but sat down
in a fury and wrote,
"My dear lord,--In spite of your prohibition, I feel it my duty," &c.
And so went through all the disagreeable details regularly. The reply
came by return of post, though not exactly in the shape that he
expected. The steward came in with scant ceremony, an evil smile on his
face (he probably guessed at the truth), charged with his lord's
commands that the visitor should quit Grandmanoir before sunset and
never return there. Thus rudely was broken the last of poor Tom's golden
dreams. The Great Marquis, when the circumstances were alluded to, never
could be brought to see any harshness in his own conduct, but spoke of
his _protege's_ rather plaintively as "an instance of human ingratitude
that he was really not prepared for." He did not give the species many
chances of surprising him in _that_ way again.
If the chiefs of his tribe were ready to comfort and cherish the
disabled "brave," now that he could no longer put on paint and plume,
and go forth with them on the "war-trail," be sure that the matrons and
maidens were yet more active and demonstrative in sympathy. There must
be extraordinarily bad features in the case of distress that fails to
secure feminine compassion; except in a matrimonial point of view, our
sisters rarely consider a man deteriorated because he is ruined. Though
he was a general favourite in his set, Wyverne possessed many more real
friends of the other sex than of his own. If there is anything in
reciprocity, it was only fair that it should be so. Alan's reverence and
affection for Womanhood in the abstract were so intense and sincere, as
to be almost independent of individual attributes. His companion for the
moment might be the homeliest, humblest, least attractive female you can
conceive; but with the first word his tone and manner would change and
soften in a way that she could not but perceive, even if she did not
appreciate it. Most of them _did_ appreciate it, though, and this was
the secret of his invariable and proverbial success. Wyverne could like
a woman honestly, and let her know it, without a thought of love, and
could always render courtesy where admiration, or even respect,
unfortunately, were out of the question. However good the sport might be
in other ways, he considered the day comparatively lost in which the
feminine element was wanting. While his comrades were resting for an
hour before dinner--dead beat with seven hours' hard stalking in the
corries of Benmac-Dhui--Alan would be found loitering about the door of
the chief keeper's bothy, carrying on, under extreme difficulties of
dialect, a flirtation on first principles with his orange-haired
daughter. He seemed to derive some refreshment from the process, though
the absence of a beard, and the (occasional) presence of a petticoat,
were about the only distinctive characteristics of her sex that the
robust Oread could boast of. When the season was at the flood, he would
spend hours of an afternoon in the quiet twilight of a boudoir in
Mayfair, by the side of an invalid's sofa. Sooth to say, that room held
no ordinary attractions. Lady Rutherglen had been a famous beauty in the
Waterloo year; and though long illness had somewhat sharpened her
delicate features, she still retained the low sweet voice and winning
manner which had made wild work with the heart of the Great Czar (the
imperial wooing was utterly wasted, for the witty, wayward Countess
could guard her honour as well as the stupidest of Pamelas); there was
hardly a wrinkle on the little white hand, and the lovely silver hair
looked softer and silkier now than it had ever done in its golden prime.
Sad and strange shapes of sin and sorrow cross our path sometimes, as we
walk home from club or ball through the early morning. Saddest, perhaps,
and strangest of all, is the spectacle of one of God's creatures,
unsexed and deformed by passion and fiery liquor, struggling in blind
undiscriminating rage, and shrieking out defiance alike of friends and
foes. The Menad ceased to be romantic when the Great Pan died. Erigone
may be magnificent on canvas, but even Beranger failed in making her
attractive on paper: in flesh and blood she is simply repellent. Public
sympathy would side rather with Pentheus nowadays than with his cruelly
convivial mother; and we hold the disguise of drink to be the least
becoming of all Myrrha's masquerades. Such a sight affected Wyverne with
a disgust and pain that few men could have fully appreciated; but he
rarely would pass by without an attempt at mediation. They say that his
kind, gentle voice was almost magical in its soothing power. The
exasperated guardian of the night would relax the roughness of his
grasp; and the "strayed reveller" would subside from shrill fury into
murmurs placable and plaintive, yielding, in spite of the devil that
possessed her, to the charm of his cordial compassion and invincible
courtesy.
All things considered, womankind had rather a better reason for petting
Alan than could be given for most of their whims. When his resources
were almost unlimited, he was always so perfectly regardless of time and
trouble and cost in endeavouring to gratify even their unexpressed
wishes, that it was no wonder if, when the positions were reversed, he
began to reap his reward, and found out that he had laid up treasure
against the time of need.
I have said more than enough to give you some insight into a character
in which the elements of hardness and ductility, passionate impulse and
consummate coolness, recklessness and self-control, were strangely
mingled, like the gold, brass, iron, and clay in the frame of the giant
Image that stood beside the prophet in his trance, on the banks of "the
great river Hiddekel."
With all his faults and failings, Hubert Vavasour would have chosen him
out of broad England for a son-in-law. Lady Mildred thought that such a
bridal dress would become her daughter worse than a winding-sheet.
Which of the two was right? Probably neither. There is little wisdom in
extremes.