DEAD-SEA FRUIT
A Novel
BY THE AUTHOR OF
“LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET,”
ETC., ETC., ETC.
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. II.
LONDON
WARD, LOCK, AND TYLER
WARWICK HOUSE, PATERNOSTER ROW
1868.
[_All rights reserved_]
LONDON:
PRINTED BY J. OGDEN AND CO.,
172, ST. JOHN STREET, E.C.
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
I. ALPHA AND OMEGA 1
II. MISS ST. ALBANS BREAKS HER ENGAGEMENT 52
III. MR. DESMOND TO THE RESCUE 78
IV. A PERILOUS PROTEGEE 105
V. OUT OF THE WORLD 132
VI. MRS. JERNINGHAM IS PHILANTHROPIC 146
VII. DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS 173
VIII. DANIEL MAYFIELD’S COUNSEL 189
IX. BETWEEN EDEN AND EXILE 210
X. “L’OISEAU FUIT COMME LE BONHEUR” 233
XI. “THE DISAPPOINTMENTS OF DION” 250
XII. “INFINITE RICHES IN A LITTLE ROOM” 285
DEAD-SEA FRUIT.
CHAPTER I.
ALPHA AND OMEGA.
THERE were some days on which M. de Bergerac had no work for his
secretary, and on such occasions the young man was free to dispose of
himself as he pleased. These days Eustace Thorburn devoted partly to
reading and meditation, partly to the delightful duty of ministering to
Helen’s caprices--if, indeed, the word “caprice” can fairly be used in
relation to any one so entirely amiable as Mademoiselle de Bergerac.
Happily for the ambitious hopes of the student, there were some days on
which Helen asked no service from her willing slave, and when the slave
could find no excuse for intruding on the privacy of his mistress as
she read, or practised, or worked in her pretty drawing-room.
On these leisure days Eustace made good progress with his own studies.
He cherished the ideas of the ancients as to the requirements of a
poet, and thought that whatever was learnt by Virgil should be at least
attempted by every student who would fain sacrifice at the shrine of
the Muses. On dull days he was wont to spend the morning in his own
room, working his hardest, but in fine weather he preferred a solitary
ramble in the park, or on the banks of the river, with his own thoughts
and a volume of classic prose or poetry for company.
He set out for a day’s ramble, one fine, sharp morning in December, at
the same hour in which a gentleman arrived at Windsor by the morning
express from town.
This gentleman left his luggage and his servant at the station, and
set out to walk from Windsor to Greenlands, as Eustace had done about
four months before. He was a man of middle size and of middle age, with
a slender but muscular form, and a fair patrician face--a face with
an aquiline nose and cold, bright-blue eyes that might have belonged
to some Danish Viking, but a face in which the rugged grandeur of
the old warrior-blood was tempered by the effeminacy of half a dozen
generations of courtiers.
There was an inexpressible languor in the droop of the eyelids, an
extreme hauteur in the carriage of the head. The mouth was perfect in
its modelling, but the lips had the sensuous beauty of a Greek statue,
too feminine in their soft harmonious line, and out of character with
the rest of the face.
Such was Harold Jerningham, owner of Greenlands, in Berkshire, and of
the bijou house in Park Lane. Fifty-two years of an existence that may
be fairly termed exhaustive had left their impress upon him. There were
traces of the crow’s-foot at the corners of the clear, full blue eyes,
and sharp lines across the fair, proud brow. The waving auburn hair was
sprinkled ever so lightly with the first snow-flakes of life’s winter,
and the auburn moustache and beard owed something of their tint to the
care of an assiduous valet; but Mr. Jerningham was the kind of man who
looks his handsomest at fifty years of age; and there were few faces in
foreign Court or ball-room that won more notice than his on those rare
occasions on which the _blasé_ English traveller condescended to
appear in public.
The lively Celts amongst whom Mr. Jerningham made a languid endeavour
to get rid of his existence regarded that gentleman as a striking
example of the English “spleen,” and were prepared to hear at any
moment that Sir Jerningham had made an unusually careful toilet that
morning, and had then proceeded, with insular frigidity, to cut himself
the throat _à la manière Anglaise_.
For the last seven or eight years the world had found no subject
for scandal in the life of Harold Jerningham. It seemed as if those
wild-oats which he had been sowing, more or less industriously, ever
since he left the University must needs be at last exhausted, so
quiet, and even studious, was the existence of the gentleman, who
appeared now in London, anon in Vienna, to-day in Paris, next week in
Norway; and who seemed always to support the burden of his being with
the same heroic endurance, and to combine the cold creed of the Stoic
with the agreeable practice of the Epicurean.
He had lived for himself alone, and had sinned for his own pleasure;
and if his life within the last decade had been comparatively pure and
harmless, it was because the bitter apples of the Dead Sea could tempt
him no longer by their outward beauty. He was unutterably weary of the
inner bitterness, and even the outward beauty had lost its charm. If he
had ceased to be a sinner, it was that he was tired of sinning, rather
than that he lamented his past offences.
A sudden fancy, engendered out of the very emptiness and weariness of
his brain, had brought him to England, and the same fancy brought him
to Greenlands. He wanted to see the old, abandoned place, which had
echoed with his childish laughter in the days when he could still be
amused; the woods that had been peopled by his dreams, in the days when
he had not yet lost the power to dream. He wanted to see these things;
and, more than these things, he wanted to see the one friend whose
society was pleasant, whose friendship was in some wise precious to him.
“I have rather gloried in outraging the prejudices of my fellow-men,”
he had said to himself sometimes, when anatomizing his own character,
in that critical and meditative mood which was habitual to him; “but I
believe I should scarcely like Theodore de Bergerac to think ill of me.
It is not in me to play the hypocrite, and yet I fancy I have always
contrived to keep the darker side of my nature hidden from him.”
The master of Greenlands happened to be in an unusually reflective
mood, and his reflections of to-day were tinged with a certain
despondency. This nineteenth of December was his birthday, the
fifty-second anniversary of his first appearance upon the stage of
life; and the reflections which the day brought with it were far
from pleasant. For the first time in his existence Mr. Jerningham
had this morning been struck by the notion that it was a dreary
thing to eat a solitary breakfast on the anniversary of his birth,
uncheered by the voice of kinsman or friend invoking blessings on his
head. The luxurious little dining-room in Park Lane glowed in the
ruddy fire-light, and glittered with all the chaste splendour of Mr.
Jerningham’s art-treasures, as he trifled with his tea and toast, far
too tired of all the delicacies of this earth to care for the bloated
livers of Strasbourg geese or the savoury flesh of Bayonne pigs.
The room in which he had breakfasted, and the table that had been
spread for him, formed a picture which a painter of still-life might
have dreamed of; but it had seemed very blank and dismal to Harold
Jerningham on this particular occasion, when an accidental glance at
the date of his _Times_ reminded him that his fifty-second year
had come to an end.
He resolved forthwith upon a visit to the only friend whose sincerity
he believed in, and the only living creature from whose lips good
wishes would seem other than a conventionality.
“I suppose it is because I am getting old that such gloomy fancies
come into my head,” he said to himself, as he walked from the station
to Greenlands. “It never struck me before that a childless man’s
latter days must needs be blank and empty. Must it be so? Which is the
lesser of the two evils--to be the father of an heir who languishes
for his heritage, or to know that one’s lands and houses must pass
to a stranger, when the door of the last narrow dwelling has been
sealed upon its silent inhabitant? Who knows? Is not existence at
best a choice of evils--and the negative misery is always the lesser.
Better to suffer the dull sense of loneliness than the sharp agony of
ingratitude. Better to be Timon than Lear.”
This is how the philosopher argued with himself on his fifty-third
birthday, as he walked the lonely road between Windsor and Greenlands.
“Dear old Theodore!” he said to himself; “it is nine years since I have
seen him--three or four since I have heard from him. God grant I may
find him well--and happy!”
Mr. Jerningham had walked this road often in his boyhood and
youth--very often in the days when he had been an Eton boy, and had
boldly levanted from his tutor’s house, and crossed that purely
imaginary boundary, the Thames, for an afternoon’s holiday at home,
where the horses and dogs and servants seemed alike rejoiced by the
presence of the young heir. He had walked the same road at many
different periods of his existence, in every one of which his own
pleasure had been the chief desire of his heart; not always to be
achieved, at any cost, and rarely achieved with ultimate satisfaction
to himself.
He had travelled this road in a barouche, one bright summer afternoon,
with his handsome young wife by his side, and the bells of three
parish-churches ringing their joy-peal in honour of his coming. He
remembered what a folly and a mockery the joy-bells had seemed; and how
very little nearer and dearer his wife’s beauty had been to him than
the beauty of a picture seen and admired in one hour, to be forgotten
in the next.
“I think I was once in love,” he said to himself, when he meditated
on the mistakes and follies of his past life. “Yes, I believe that I
was once in love--fondly, foolishly, deeply in love. But it came to an
end--too soon, perhaps. In his youth a man has so many dreams, and the
newest always seems the brightest. Well, they are all over--dreams and
follies; the end has come at last, and it is rather dreary. I suppose I
have no right to complain. I have lived my life. There are men who seem
in the very heyday of existence at fifty years of age; but those are
not men who have taken life as I have taken it. It is the old story of
the candle burnt at both ends. The illumination is very grand, but the
candle suffers.”
Mr. Jerningham entered the park by that small gate through which
Eustace Thorburn had passed six months before. Greenlands was very
beautiful, even in this bleak winter weather, but there was a
desolation and wildness in its aspect eminently calculated to foster
melancholy thoughts. It was by the express wish of the master that
the park had been permitted to assume this aspect of wildness and
decay. “My good man,” he had said to his bailiff, “I assure you all
this trimness and primness, which you make so much fuss about, is to
the last degree unnecessary, so far as I am concerned. I shall never
again come here to live for any length of time; and when I do come,
it pleases me best to come and go as a stranger. Let those poor old
dawdling men in the grounds take matters as quietly as they like. You
will pay them their wages on Saturday just the same as if they did
wonders in the way of sweeping, and pruning, and clipping. I don’t want
Greenlands to look like a Dutchman’s garden; and I am glad to think
that there is some kind of use in the world for poor dawdling old men
who only excel in the art of not doing things.”
The bailiff stared, but he obeyed his master, whose reputation for
eccentricity had long been established at Greenlands.
In the chill wintry morning the desolation of the place was more than
usually apparent, and Mr. Jerningham, being on this particular occasion
inclined to contemplate every object on the darker side, was strongly
impressed by the dreariness of the long avenue, where the bare, black
branches of the elms swayed to and fro against the winter sky, and
where the withered leaves drifted before him with every gust of biting
winter wind.
It was in the avenue that had been the grand approach to the mansion in
the days when the great world visited Greenlands, that Mr. Jerningham
came upon a young man, sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree, reading.
To see any one seated on so cold a morning was in itself a fact for
remark; but this hardy young student had the air of a man who takes his
ease on a sofa in his own snug study, so absorbed was his manner, so
comfortable his attitude. Approaching nearer, the _blasé_ wanderer
in many lands perceived that the young student’s face was flushed as if
with recent exercise, and, while perceiving this, he could not fail to
observe that the face was one of the handsomest, and at the same time
the noblest, he had ever looked upon. As an artist, Harold Jerningham
was impressed by the perfect outline of that grand fair face; as an
observer of mankind, he was conscious that the stamp of high thoughts
had been set upon the countenance, and that the light of a pure young
soul shone out of the eyes that were slowly raised to look at him as he
drew near the log on which the student reclined. He went near enough to
see the title of the book the young man was reading. It was one of the
Platonic Dialogues, in Greek.
“Ho, ho!” thought Mr. Jerningham; “I took my young gentleman for a
gamekeeper, or the son of my bailiff; but even in this levelling age I
doubt if gamekeepers or embryo bailiffs are so far advanced in Greek. I
suppose he is a friend of De Bergerac’s.”
Having arrived at this conclusion, Mr. Jerningham proceeded to accost
the young dreamer, for whom that leafless avenue was peopled day by
day with the images of all that was greatest and most beautiful in
the golden age of this earth, and to whom the romantic desolation of
Greenlands had become far dearer within the last four months than it
had ever been to the lord of mansion and park, forest and upland.
“Do you not find it rather cold for that kind of reading?” asked the
proprietor of the avenue.
The frank young face was turned to him with a smile.
“Not at all; I have been walking for the last hour, and feel as warm as
if it were midsummer.”
He looked just a little wonderingly at Mr. Jerningham as he spoke. He
knew all the visitors to the Grange, and assuredly this gentleman in a
fur-lined overcoat was not one of them. Some stranger, perhaps, who had
found the gate open, and had strayed into the park out of curiosity.
“You seem accustomed to this kind of open-air study,” said the
traveller, seating himself on one end of the fallen log, in order to
get a better view of the student’s face. It was only the listless
curiosity of an idler that beguiled him into loitering thus. He had
for the latter years of his life been at best only a loiterer upon
the highways and byways of this world, and the interest which he felt
in this young student of Plato was the same kind of interest he might
have felt in a solitary little Savoyard with white mice, or some
semi-idiotic old reaper, toiling under a southern sun; an interest by
no means so warm as that which a picture or a statue inspired in this
jaded wanderer.
“Yes,” replied the young man; “I spend all my leisure mornings in the
park, reading and thinking. I fancy one thinks better when one walks
in such a place as this.”
“If by ‘one’ you speak of _yourself_, I have no doubt you are
right; but if your ‘one’ means mankind in general, I am sure you are
wrong. My dreariest thoughts have come to me under these trees this
morning.”
The young man’s face was quick to express sympathy, in a look that was
half wonder, half pity.
“How quick a man’s sympathies are at his age!” thought Harold
Jerningham, “and how soon they wear out!”
And then, after a pause, he added, aloud, “You live somewhere near at
hand, I suppose?”
“I live very near at hand; I live in the park.”
“At the great house!” exclaimed Mr. Jerningham. “After all, my handsome
young student will turn out to be the self-educated son or nephew of my
housekeeper,” he thought, not without some slight sense of vexation;
for he had been studying the young man’s profile, and had given him
credit for patrician blood on the strength of the delicate modelling of
nose and chin.
“No; not at the great house. I live with M. de Bergerac, at the Grange.”
“You live with De Bergerac! You are not his--no, he has no son.”
“I have the honour to be his secretary.”
“Indeed! and an Englishman! Has De Bergerac turned political agitator,
or Orleanist conspirator, that he must needs have a secretary?”
“No; it is my privilege to assist M. de Bergerac in the preparation of
a great literary work.”
“I am pleased to hear you speak as if you valued that privilege, my
young friend,” said Mr. Jerningham, with more warmth than was usual to
him.
“I do indeed prize it more highly than anything on earth,” answered the
young man; and as he said this, his face flushed crimson to the roots
of his hair.
“Why the deuce does he blush like a girl when I say something commonly
civil to him?” thought Mr. Jerningham.
“You speak as if you knew M. de Bergerac,” said the student, presently.
“I do know him. He is the best friend I have in the world.”
“Ah, then, I believe I have the pleasure of speaking to Mr. Jerningham,
the owner of this place?”
“You do enjoy that supreme bliss; I am Mr. Jerningham; and now, as you
have guessed my name, perhaps you will tell me yours.”
“My name is Eustace Thorburn.”
“And why the deuce does he blush like a girl when he tells me his
name?” thought Mr. Jerningham, taking note of a second crimson flush
that came and went upon the brow and cheek of the student.
“And my good friend is well and happy?” he asked, presently.
“Very well, very cheerful. Shall I hurry back to the Grange, and tell
him you have arrived, Mr. Jerningham? I have heard him speak of you
so much, and I know what a pleasure it will be to him to hear of your
coming.”
“And it will be a pleasure to me to announce it with my own lips. You
must not come between me and my pleasures, Mr.--Mr. Thorburn; they are
very few.”
“Believe me, I should be sorry to do so,” replied Eustace, as the two
men bowed and parted; Mr. Jerningham to walk on towards the house,
Eustace to resume his lonely ramble.
“You would be sorry? Not you!” mused the owner of Greenlands, as he
walked slowly along the pathway that was so thickly strewn with dead
leaves. “What does youth care how it tramples on the hopes of the old?
When I refused the young bride my father and mother had chosen for me,
and the alliance that had been the fairest dream they had woven for my
future, what heed had I for the bitterness of their disappointment? The
girl was pretty, and true and innocent, the daughter of a nobler house
than mine, and the beloved of my kindred; but she was not----. Well;
she was not Ægeria; she was not the mystic nymph of an enchanted grot;
she was only an amiable young lady whom I had known from childhood,
and about whom some mischievous demon had whispered into my ear the
hateful fact that she was intended for me. I met my Ægeria after; and
what came of it? Ah, me! that our brightest dreams must end so coldly!
Numa’s nymph came to him only in the evening; and perhaps there are
few men who could retain the fervour of their devotion for an Ægeria
of all day long, and to-morrow, and the day after, and the day after
that again. And then your mortal Ægeria has such a capacity for tears.
A cold look, a hasty word, an accidental reference to the past, a hint
of the uncertainty of the future--and the nymph is transformed into a
waterfall. It is the fable of Hippocrene over again; but the fount is
not so revivifying as that classic spring.”
From thinking of his own past, Mr. Jerningham fell to musing upon
Eustace Thorburn’s future.
“He has that which all the lands of the Jerninghams could not buy for
me, were I free to barter them,” he said to himself, bitterly: “youth
and hope, youth and hope! Will he waste both treasures as I wasted
them, I wonder? I think not. He has a thoughtfulness and gravity
of expression that promise well for his future. And how his face
brightens when he smiles! Was I ever so handsome as that, I wonder,
in the days when the world called me--dangerous? No, never! At its
best, my face wanted the earnestness that is the highest charm of
his. Why do I compare myself with him? Because I have ended life just
as he is beginning it, I suppose. The Alpha and the Omega meet, and
Omega is jealous of his fair young rival. How little the landscape
has changed since I was like that youngster yonder, newly returned
from Oxford, with my head crammed with the big talk of Greek orators
and the teaching of Greek sophists, eager to exhaust the delights of
the universe in the shortest period possible; eager to gather all the
flowers of youth and manhood, so as to leave the great Sahara of middle
age without a blossom! And the flowers have been gathered and have
faded, and have been thrown away, and the great Sahara remains entirely
barren. No, not entirely; there is at least one solitary leaflet--one
poor little pale blossom--my friendship for De Bergerac.”
Musing thus, the owner of Greenlands turned aside from that solemn
avenue, at the end of which there frowned upon him the noble red-brick
dwelling-house of England’s Augustine era. He had no desire to reënter
that stately abode, where the plump goddesses and nymphs of Kneller
disported themselves upon the domed ceilings, and where the twelve
Cæsars in black marble scowled upon him from their niches in the
circular entrance-hall. Solomon himself could have been no more weary
of the vineyards he had planted--and vines of one’s own planting are
at best but poor creatures--than was Mr. Jerningham of Sir Godfrey’s
nymphs and the scowling Cæsars.
“And Cleopatra once tolerated one of _ces messieurs_,” he had said
to himself sometimes, as he looked round the grand, gloomy chamber.
“Cleopatra, the _espiègle_, the despotic, the Semiramis of Egypt,
the Mary Stuart of the Nile, the Ninon of the ancient world.”
Between the great avenue and the Queen Anne mansion there stretched
the stiff walks of an Italian garden, and across this Mr. Jerningham
went to a gate, which opened into the woodiest part of the park. A
narrow path across this woody region brought him to the boundary of
M. de Bergerac’s territory, protected by a six-foot holly-hedge, more
formidable than any wall ever fashioned by mortal builder.
A gate cut in this hedge opened into the quaint old flower-garden, and
through this gate Mr. Jerningham went to visit his friend, after having
passed unknown and unnoticed beneath the shadow of the house in which
he had been born.
“‘’Tis sweet to hear the watchdog’s honest bark bay deep-mouthed
welcome--as we draw near home,’” Mr. Jerningham said to himself; “but
it is not quite so sweet when the watchdog rushes out of his kennel,
possessed with an evident thirst for one’s blood, as that old mastiff
yonder rushed at me just now. Every traveller is not a Belisarius.
Ah, here we are! there is the pretty old-fashioned lawn, with its
flower-beds and evergreens, and there the low rambling cottage in which
Jack Fermor, the bailiff, used to live when I was a boy. I remember
going to him one summer morning to get my fishing-tackle mended, when
I was a lad at Eton. Yes, this looks like a home! Dear old Theodore! I
shall be content if he is only half as glad to see me as I shall be to
see him.”
The returning traveller found the door under the thatched porch
unsecured by bolt or bar. In the heart of Greenlands Park no one ever
thought of bolting a door. But the inmates of the Grange were not
without their guardians. An enormous black dog sprang forth to meet the
stranger as he approached the threshold, formidable as the dragon whose
fiery eyes glared upon the luckless companions of Cadmus.
Happily for Mr. Jerningham, the faithful animal was under admirable
control. After giving utterance to one low growl, that sounded a
warning rather than a threat, he surveyed the intruder with a critical
eye, and sniffed at him with a suspicious sniff; and then, being
satisfied that the master of Greenlands was not a member of the
dangerous classes, he drew politely aside and permitted the visitor to
enter.
The door of the drawing-room was wide open, and a cheerful fire burning
in the low grate lighted the pleasant picture of a young lady seated at
a table reading, with books and writing materials scattered about her.
It was nine years since Harold Jerningham had seen his friend, and it
was rather difficult for him to realize the fact that this young lady
could by any possibility be the same individual he remembered in the
shape of a pretty, fair-haired child, roaming about the gardens with an
ugly mongrel-puppy in her arms, and to whom he had promised the finest
dog that Newfoundland could produce.
He had remembered his promise, though he had forgotten the fair young
damsel to whom the pledge was given. Hephæstus was the animal imported
at the command of Mr. Jerningham. He had been brought to Greenlands a
puppy, with big clumsy head and paws, and an all-pervading sleepiness
of aspect, and he had flourished and waxed strong under the loving care
of Helen, who was fondly attached to him.
The visitor’s light footstep scarcely sounded on the carpeted floor,
but a warning “yap” from Hephæstus proclaimed the advent of a stranger.
Helen rose to receive her father’s guest, and welcomed him with a smile
and a blush.
“How these Berkshire people blush!” thought Mr. Jerningham; “it is the
veritable Arcadia. The inhabitants of Ardennes were not more primitive.
Indeed, Rosalind was the most _rusée_ of coquettes compared to
this young lady.”
“What a delightful surprise, Mr. Jerningham!” said Helen, with a frank
smile; “papa will be so pleased to see you.”
“Then you remember me, Mademoiselle de Bergerac, after so long an
interval--an interval that has changed you so much that I could
scarcely believe my little playfellow of the garden had grown into this
tall young lady?”
“Oh, yes, indeed; I remember you perfectly. The time has changed you
very little. And I should have been most ungrateful if I had forgotten
you after your kindness.”
“My kindness----?”
“In sending me Hephæstus--the Newfoundland puppy, you know. Papa
christened him Hephæstus on account of his blackness. He has grown
such a noble, faithful creature, and we all love him so dearly.”
“You all love him? Has your dog so many friends as that emphatic ‘all’
implies?” asked Mr. Jerningham, wonderingly.
“I mean myself and papa, and papa’s secretary, Mr. Thorburn.”
The girl stopped suddenly, and this time it was a very vivid blush
which dyed her fair young face, for it seemed to her that the eyes of
her father’s friend were fixed upon her with a pitiless scrutiny.
“Oh, now,” thought the master of Greenlands, “I begin to understand why
that young man blushed when he spoke of the privilege involved in his
position here.”
He glanced at the open book which lay under Mademoiselle de Bergerac’s
hand, and was surprised to perceive that it was a duplicate of the
volume he had seen in the hands of the student in the park.
“You read Greek, Mdlle. de Bergerac?”
“Yes, papa taught me a little Greek ever so long ago. Will you not
call me Helen, please? I should like it so much better.”
“I shall be much honoured if you will permit me to do so. And you are
reading Plato, I see. Is he not rather a difficult author for a young
student in Greek?”
“Yes, he seems rather difficult, but I get a great deal of help. I am
reading the Phædo with Mr. Thorburn, who is working very hard at the
classics. I believe he means to try for his degree by and by, when he
leaves papa. He has a German degree already, but he seems to think that
worth very little. I think he is rather ambitious.”
“He seems to be altogether a wonderful person, this Mr. Thorburn.”
“Yes, he is very clever--at least, papa says so, and you know papa is
very well able to form a judgment on that point. And papa likes him
exceedingly.”
“Indeed! and has he been long established here--domiciled with you, in
his post of secretary?”
“He has been with us about four months.”
“May I ask where your father picked him up--by whose recommendation he
came here?”
“It was Mr. Desmond who introduced him to papa,--Mr. Desmond, the
editor of the _Areopagus_.”
“Ah! that Mr. Desmond has a knack of obliging one.”
“Papa has considered himself very fortunate in finding any one able
to take the warm interest which Mr. Thorburn takes in his book. It is
rather dry work, you know, Mr. Jerningham, verifying quotations in half
a dozen languages, and hunting out dates, and names, and all those
petty details which used to absorb so much of papa’s time when he was
without a secretary. Do you know that Mr. Thorburn has often travelled
to London and back in the same day, in order to consult some book or
manuscript in the British Museum; and he has taught himself Sanscrit
since he has been with us, in the hope of making himself still more
useful to papa.”
The young lady’s face glowed with enthusiasm as she said this. To do
service for her father was to win the highest claim upon her gratitude.
Mr. Jerningham looked at her with a half-smile of amusement, which was
not without some shade of bitterness.
“I have no doubt Mr. Thorburn is an inestimable treasure,” he said,
coldly. “I know a little humpbacked German who is a perfect prodigy of
learning--a man who is master of all the dialects of India, and has the
Râmâyana at his fingers’ ends. I am sure he would have been very glad
to perform Mr. Thorburn’s duties for half the money my friend gives
that ambitious young student; but my German is a perfect Quasimodo in
the matter of ugliness, and your papa might object to that.”
“I will run to tell papa that you have arrived,” said Helen. “I know
what real pleasure the news will give him.”
She left the room, and Mr. Jerningham remained for some minutes
standing by the table, with the volume of Platonic Dialogues open in
his hand, in the very attitude in which she had left him, profoundly
meditative of aspect.
“How lovely she is!” he said to himself. “Has this Berkshire air the
property of making youth beautiful? That young Thorburn is a model for
a Greek sculptor, and she--she is as lovely as Phrynè, when Praxiteles
saw her returning from her sea-bath. And Mademoiselle and the secretary
are in love with each other. I arrive, like the _seigneur du
village_ in a French operetta, just in time to assist in a little
Arcadian romance. I wonder that De Bergerac should be so absurdly
imprudent as to admit this man into his household. He is, no doubt, a
nameless adventurer, with nothing but his good looks and some amount of
education to recommend him. And he, perhaps, labours under the delusion
that our dear recluse is rich. I will take the opportunity of talking
to him to-morrow, and opening his eyes on that point. And I must take
Theodore to task for his folly. He is as proud as Lucifer, after his
own fashion, and would be the last of men to sanction the alliance of
his only child with an English adventurer.”
It seemed as if Mr. Jerningham took somewhat kindly to his part of
_seigneur du village_, and was by no means inclined to the policy
of non-intervention in the affairs of these two young people. It may be
that, having so long been an actor in the great drama of human passion,
he could not resign himself all at once to the passive share of the
spectator, who applauds and delights in the youth and beauty, the joy
and the hope in which he has no longer an active interest. He knew that
it was time for him to fall back into the ranks, and see a new hero
lead the great procession; but he could not retire with the perfect
grace of a man who has played his part, and is content to know that the
part has been well played, and has come to a decent finish. The art
of growing old is the one accomplishment which the _beau garçon_
never acquires.
For his own part, Harold Jerningham believed that he had retired with
a very decent grace from that field in which his victories had been
so many. Prone though he was to anatomize the follies of himself and
other men, he had not learned the mystery of that vague sentiment of
bitterness and disappointment which had tinged his mind during the
later years of his life.
He had taken existence lightly, and had taught himself to believe
that the ills of life which press most heavily on other men had left
him unscathed; but there were times in which the tide that carried
him along so pleasantly seemed all at once to come to a dead stop.
The rapid river was transformed into a dreary patch of stagnant
water, black with foul weeds, and poisonous with fatal miasmas; and
Mr. Jerningham was compelled to acknowledge that no man, of his own
election, can resign his share in the sorrows of humanity.
He told himself very often that he had done with emotion, and that
life henceforth must be for him an affair of sensation only; his peace
of mind depended on the perfect adjustment of his _ménage_ when
he was at home, and on the tact of his courier when he travelled.
But there were moments in which the subtle voice of his conscience
whispered that this was only one more among the many delusions of
his life. Thus, when circumstances transpired to prove that his
young wife’s heart had been given to another, even while her honour
was yet unsullied, he had arranged an immediate separation, with
the nonchalance of a man who settles the most trivial affair in the
business of life, fancying that he should escape thereby all those slow
agonies and bitter throes that are wont to rack the breasts of men who
find themselves compelled to part from their wives. But in this, as in
all other transactions of his existence, he had been the dupe of his
own selfish philosophy. The sting of his wife’s ingratitude was none
the less keen because he thrust her from him with a careless hand.
The sense of his own desolation was none the less intense because he
had not suffered himself to love the woman to whom he had given his
name. Even considered from a selfish man’s point of view, his Horatian
philosophy of indifference had been a failure. The fact that it had
been so, and that he might have lived a better life for himself in
living a little for other people, was just beginning to dawn upon him.
One pure pleasure he was to taste on this day--the pleasure that
springs from real friendship. That one unselfish impulse which had
prompted him to provide a pleasant home for an old friend, won him an
ample return. Theodore de Bergerac’s welcome touched him to the heart.
It was so warm, so real, so different from the polished flatteries
he had been of late accustomed to receive, with a conventional smile
upon his lips and the bitterness of unspeakable scorn in his heart. To
this man, so courted, so flattered, it was a new thing to know himself
honestly loved.
De Bergerac was delighted by his friend’s return.
“I thought we were never to see you again, Jerningham,” he said, after
the first welcomes had been spoken, the first inquiries made; “and this
little girl here, has been so anxious to behold her benefactor. I think
she is more grateful to you for her big black dog than for the home
that has sheltered her since her birth.”
And hereupon Helen blushed, and looked shyly downward to her friend
and worshipper, the Newfoundland. Mr. Jerningham began to think that
those maidenly blushes which he had observed while talking to the young
lady about her father’s secretary, were only the result of a certain
youthful bashfulness, very charming in a pretty girl, rather than an
indication of that tender secret which he had at first suspected.
Helen looked first at the dog and then at her father, just a little
reproachfully.
“As if I could ever be sufficiently grateful for my home, papa!” she
said; and then raising those innocent blue eyes to the visitor’s
face, she added, gently, “You can never imagine how papa and I love
Greenlands, Mr. Jerningham, or how grateful we are to you for our
beautiful home. I think it is the loveliest place in the whole world.”
“And from such a traveller that opinion should stand for something,”
added her father, laughing at the girl’s enthusiasm.
“I am almost inclined to agree with Miss De Bergerac--with Helen, since
she has given me permission to call her Helen,” said Harold, with some
slight significance of tone; “I am inclined to think Greenlands the
loveliest place in the world.”
“And yet you so rarely come to it, Mr. Jerningham!” cried Helen.
“I did not know the power of its charm until to-day. A returning
wanderer is very sensitive to such impressions, you see, Helen.”
“Yes, I can fancy that. But you have been in very beautiful places. You
wrote to papa from Switzerland last year. Ah, how I envied you then!”
“Indeed! you wish to see Switzerland?”
“Oh! yes. Switzerland and Italy are just the two countries that I do
really languish to behold; the first for its beauty, the second for
its associations.”
“Your father must contrive to take you to both countries.”
“I think he would do so, perhaps, if it were not for his book. I could
not be so selfish as to take him away from that.”
“But the book is near completion, is it not, De Bergerac?”
The student shook his head rather despondently.
“It is a subject that grows upon one,” he said, doubtfully; “my
material is all prepared, and the extent of it is something enormous. I
find the work of classification very laborious. Indeed, there have been
times when I should have well-nigh abandoned myself to despair, if it
had not been for my young coadjutor.”
“Ah! yes; your secretary, the young fellow I met in the park--something
of a pedant and prig, is he not?”
“Not the least in the world. He is a born poet.”
“Indeed!” cried Mr. Jerningham, with a sneer; “your pedant is a
nuisance, and your prig is a bore; but of all the insufferable
creatures in this world, your born poet is the worst.”
“I don’t think you will dislike Eustace Thorburn when you come to
know him,” answered De Bergerac; “and I shall be very glad if you can
interest yourself in his career. He is highly gifted, and I believe
quite friendless.”
Mr. Jerningham looked at Helen, curious to see how she was affected
by this conversation; but this time her face betrayed no emotion, and
in the next minute she quickly left the room, “on hospitable thoughts
intent,” and eager to hold counsel with the powers of the household.
Mr. Jerningham would, in all probability, dine at the cottage, and
weighty questions, involving a choice of fish and poultry, for the time
banished all other thoughts from the young lady’s mind.
“Let me congratulate you upon being the father of that lovely girl,”
said Harold, when she was gone.
“Yes, I suppose she is very pretty. Like a Madonna, by Raphael, is she
not? the _belle jardinière_, or the _Madone de la chaise_.
And she is as good as she is beautiful. Yes, I thank God for having
given me that dear child. Without her I should be only a bookish
abstraction; with her I am a happy man.”
“Unluckily for you, the day must come when she will make the happiness
of some other man.”
“Why unluckily? I do not suppose my daughter’s husband will refuse me a
corner by his fireside.”
“That depends upon the kind of man he may be.”
“She would scarcely choose the kind of man who would deny her father’s
right to take his place in her home; not as a dependant, but in the
simple Continental fashion, as a member of the household, with a due
share in all its responsibilities.”
“You will, perhaps, arrange your daughter’s marriage in the Continental
fashion, and choose her husband for her when the fitting time comes?”
“By no means. I have scarcely ever contemplated the question. My dear
child is all in all to me; and it is just possible I may be a little
jealous of the man who shall divide her heart with me. But I will not
tamper with the ways of Providence in so solemn a question as her
happiness. She shall marry the man of her choice, be he rich or poor,
noble or simple.”
“And if she should make a foolish choice?”
“She will not make a foolish choice. She is the child of my own
teaching, and I will answer for her wisdom. She will be the dupe
of no falsehood, the victim of no artifice. She will never mistake
_clinquant_ for gold.”
“You are very bold, my dear De Bergerac. Certainly the young lady seems
the first remove from an angel; and I suppose the angels see all things
clearly. And now let us talk about your secretary. How did you pick him
up?”
“He was recommended to me by Mr. Desmond, of the _Areopagus_.
I think you know Mr. Desmond?” added the simple scholar, who lived
remote from those regions in which the Platonic attachment of the lady
and the editor was current gossip.
“Yes,” said Mr. Jerningham, briefly, “I know him. And he recommended
this young man--Thorburn? And now you must not be angry with me if I
seem impertinent. Do you think it was quite wise to admit this protégé
of Mr. Desmond’s to such very intimate association with your household?”
“Why not?”
“I suppose you happened to forget that you have a daughter?”
Theodore de Bergerac flushed crimson to the temples.
“Do you imagine that this young man would repay my confidence by a
clandestine courtship of my daughter, or that she would receive his
addresses?” he cried, indignantly.
“My dear De Bergerac, far be it from me to imagine anything. I only
wish to suggest that it is rather foolish to bring a handsome young
man, with a taste for poetry and a love for learning, and a very lovely
girl, more or less affected by the same tastes, into such intimate
association, unless you wish them to fall in love with each other.”
“Yes, I dare say you are right; I dare say I have acted foolishly,”
replied the student, thoughtfully. “But I really never looked at the
affair in that light; and then I have such perfect confidence in
Helen’s purity of mind, and in the soundness of her judgment. I am so
fully assured that no such thing as secresy could ever exist where
she is concerned. And then, again, as for this young Thorburn, I have
watched him closely, and I believe him to be all that is honourable and
excellent.”
“You have not watched him with the eyes of worldly experience.”
“Perhaps not; but I fancy there is an inner light better than a worldly
man’s wisdom. I would pledge myself for that young man’s honour and
honesty.”
“The fact that he is such a paragon will not prevent your daughter
from falling in love with him.”
“No; it is just possible that she might become attached to him. I know
she likes and admires him; but I fancy she only does so on account of
his usefulness to me. However, the danger is incurred. I cannot dismiss
a faithful coadjutor hurriedly or abruptly; and I am really very much
interested in Eustace Thorburn. I believe there is the fire of real
genius in all he does; and to my mind real genius must secure ultimate
success.”
“Surely Chatterton’s was genius?”
“Undoubtedly; and Chatterton must have succeeded if he had been
patient; but genius without patience is the flame without the oil. I
believe there is a bright career before Eustace Thorburn; and if I knew
that my daughter and he loved each other, earnestly and truly, I would
not be the man to stand between them and say, ‘It shall not be.’”
“How much do you know of Mr. Thorburn’s antecedents?”
“Not very much. I know that he was educated at a great public school
in Belgium, and for the last few years was a tutor in the same school.
His mother seems to have been a widow from an early period. She died a
few weeks before he came to me. He speaks of her very rarely, but with
extreme tenderness. Of his father he never speaks.”
“He has no doubt excellent reasons for such reticence. In plain
English, my dear De Bergerac, I take it that your young favourite is an
adventurer.”
“He is an adventurer who has earned his bread by the exercise of his
intellect since he was seventeen years of age,” answered De Bergerac.
“I have seen his testimonials, signed by the powers of the Parthenée
at Villebrumeuse, and I need no man’s attestation of his honour and
honesty. You are prejudiced against him, my dear Harold.”
“I am prejudiced against all the world except you, Theodore,” replied
the master of Greenlands, with some touch of feeling.
There was a certain amount of truth in this sweeping assertion. This
man, to whom fortune had been so liberal, had of late abandoned himself
to a spirit of bitterness that involved all men and all things. But
of all things hateful to this weary sybarite, the most hateful was
the insolence of youth and hope, the glory of that morning sunshine
which must shine on him no more. It may be that in his jaundiced eyes
Eustace had seemed to wear his bright young manhood with a certain air
of insolence, to blazon the freshness and sunlight of life’s morning
before the jaded traveller hastening down the westward-sloping hill
that leads to the realms of night. However this was, Mr. Jerningham
was evidently disposed to be captious and argumentative on the subject
of his friend’s secretary. Theodore de Bergerac, perceiving this,
contrived to change the drift o the conversation. He talked of his
book; and Mr. Jerningham, who was faintly interested in all literary
questions, expressed a really warm interest in this one labour. He
talked of old acquaintances, old associations; and the smile of the
wanderer brightened with unwonted animation.
It was four o’clock when dinner was announced. The two men had
been talking so pleasantly, that it was only by the deepening of
the afternoon shadows they knew the progress of time. The little
dining-room was bright with the light of moderator-lamps on table and
sideboard, when Mr. Jerningham and his host entered.
Helen stood waiting for them in the soft lamplight, with Eustace
Thorburn by her side.
“Neither Mr. Thorburn nor I would come into the drawing-room to disturb
your talk, papa,” she said. “He has been giving me my Greek lesson by
the fire in here, while Sarah laid the cloth. You should see how she
stares when we come to the sonorous words. I am sure she thinks we are
a little out of our minds. You are to sit opposite papa, if you please,
Mr. Jerningham. I hope you won’t dislike dining at this early hour. We
generally dine at three; and a really late dinner would have frightened
our cook.”
“My dear Helen, I have eaten nothing to-day, and am as hungry as a
hunter. If you are going to make excuses, it must be for not having
given us our dinner at three. How pretty your table looks, with that
old Indian bowl of cream-coloured china asters and scarlet geraniums!”
“They are from one of the greenhouses at the great house. The gardeners
are very good to me, and allow me as many flowers as a like, when our
own dear little garden is exhausted.”
“They should be no gardeners of mine if they were otherwise than good
to you.--How do you do, once more, Mr. Thorburn?” added the master of
Greenlands, looking across the table at the secretary, who had quietly
seated himself in his accustomed place. “I did not think we should dine
together when I came upon you this morning in the park.”
This was an extreme concession on the part of Mr. Jerningham. As the
two men faced each other in the lamplight, Theodore de Bergerac looked
at them with an expression of surprise.
“Did nothing strike you this morning, Jerningham, when you first saw
Mr. Thorburn?” he asked, smiling.
“A great many things struck me. But what especial thing should have
struck me, that you know of, my dear De Bergerac?”
“The likeness of your own youth. It really seems to me that there is
something of a resemblance between you and Thorburn.”
“I did not perceive it,” said Mr. Jerningham, with a coolness of tone
that was not flattering to the younger man.
“Nor did I,” added the secretary, promptly.
This was a kind of preliminary passage-at-arms between the two men, who
seemed foredoomed to be enemies in the great conflict of life.
“Well, I suppose every one sees these things with a different eye,”
said De Bergerac; “but really I fancy there is some likeness between
you two.”