LUCIUS SURRENDERS A DOUBTFUL CHANCE.
Lucius saw Mr. Pullman next day, and told him of the impression Lucille
had made on her great-aunt.
‘Upon my word, sir, she’s a very lucky young woman,’ said the lawyer;
‘for Miss Glenlyne has a snug little fortune to dispose of, and has not
a near relative to leave it to; for the Spalding Glenlynes are only
third or fourth cousins, and she detests them. Now, Mr. Davoren, do you
mean to put forward Miss Lucille Glenlyne’s claim to the estate now in
the possession of Mr. Spalding Glenlyne?’
‘That will depend on various circumstances, Mr. Pullman,’ answered
Lucius. ‘First and foremost, you think the case a weak one.’
‘Lamentably weak. You are able to prove the marriage;—granted. You may
be able to prove the birth of a child; but how are you to identify the
young lady you put forward with the child born at Sidmouth? How are you
to supply the link which will unite the two ends of the chain?’
‘Miss Glenlyne has acknowledged her niece.’
‘Yes; but let Miss Glenlyne come forward to bear witness to her niece’s
identity, and she will be laughed at as a weak old woman—almost an
idiot. The only person who could have sworn to the girl’s identity
was Ferdinand Sivewright. He is dead, and you did not even take his
deposition to the facts within his knowledge. Even had you done so,
such a document might have been useless; the man’s notoriously bad
character would have vitiated his testimony. Mr. Davoren, I regret
to say your case is as weak as it well can be. It is a case which a
speculative attorney might take up perhaps, hazarding his not too
valuable time and trouble against the remote contingency of success;
but no respectable firm would be troubled with such a business, unless
you could guarantee their costs at the outset.’
‘I am not greedy for money, Mr. Pullman,’ replied Lucius, in no
manner crestfallen at this disheartening opinion. ‘Were my case, or
rather Lucille’s case, the strongest, it would still be doubtful
with me how far I should do battle for her interests. She has been
acknowledged by her great-aunt as a Glenlyne—that is the chief point
in my mind. The name so long lost to her has been restored, and she
has found a relative whose kindness may in some measure atone for her
father’s cruelty. This Mr. Spalding Glenlyne acquired the estate by no
wrongdoing of his own. It would be rather hard to oust him from it.’
‘If you had a leg to stand on, sir, I should be the last to let any
consideration of Mr. Spalding Glenlyne’s feelings restrain us from
taking action in this matter.’
‘You don’t like Mr. Glenlyne?’
‘Frankly, I detest him.’
‘Is he a bad man?’
‘No, Mr. Davoren; therein lies his most objectionable quality. He is a
man who at once enforces respect and provokes detestation.’
‘Paradoxical, rather.’
‘I suppose so; but it is strictly true, nevertheless. Mr. Spalding
Glenlyne is a man whom everybody acknowledges to be a useful member of
society. He has improved the Glenlyne estate to an almost unprecedented
extent. His turnips swell like nobody else’s turnips; his mangolds
would have been big enough for the stables of Gargantua. One can only
comfort oneself with the reflection that those big turnips are often
watery. His cattle thrive as no one else’s cattle thrive. He is like
the wicked man in the Psalms, everything flourishes with him. And when
he dies there will be a splendid monument erected in his honour by
public subscription. Yes, sir, people who abhorred him living will come
down handsomely to pay him posthumous homage.’
‘But a man like that must do some good in his generation,’ said Lucius;
‘he distributes money—he employs labour.’
‘Yes, he is no doubt useful. He builds model cottages. His farm
labourers are as sleek as his other cattle. Churches and schools spring
up upon his estate. He brags and hectors intolerably, but I daresay he
does good.’
‘Let him retain his opportunities of usefulness then, Mr. Pullman.
Were my case so strong as to make success almost a certainty, I think
I would forego all chance of gaining it as willingly as I forego
an attempt which you assure me would be futile. Let Mr. Spalding
Glenlyne keep the estate which he is so well able to administer for
the advantage of himself and other people. I will not seek to banish
him and his children from the roof-tree that has sheltered them for
ten prosperous years. The Glenlyne property would be but a white
elephant for Lucille and me. My heart is in my profession, and I would
infinitely rather succeed in that—even though success fell far short
of hopes which may be somewhat too high—than grow the biggest turnips
that ever sprouted from the soil of Norfolk. My dear girl has been
acknowledged by her nearest surviving relation. That is enough for me.’
‘Upon my word, Mr. Davoren, you’re a noble fellow,’ exclaimed the
lawyer, melted by Lucius’s earnestness, by tones whose absolute
truthfulness even an attorney could not doubt; ‘and I only wish your
case were a trifle stronger, for it would give me pleasure to protect
your interests. However, the case is weak, and I think your decision is
as worldly wise as it is generous in spirit, and I can only say, stick
to Miss Glenlyne. She’s a very old lady. She began life with seven
hundred a year of her own, and has been saving money ever since she was
twenty-one.’
‘Neither Lucille nor I belong to the race of toadies,’ said
Lucius; ‘but I am grateful to Providence for Miss Glenlyne’s ready
acknowledgment of her niece.’
‘I have very little doubt the old lady will act handsomely towards you
both,’ replied the lawyer, solacing himself with a comfortable pinch of
snuff. He seemed to have taken a wonderful liking to Lucius, and even
asked him to dine, an invitation which Lucius was unable to accept.
‘I shall not have a leisure hour this week,’ he said; ‘and on Sunday I
am going down to Brighton to spend the day with Miss Glenlyne.’
From Lincoln’s-inn Lucius went to Cedar House. He was especially
anxious that Mr. Sivewright should not think himself neglected during
Lucille’s absence. He found the old man friendly, but depressed. His
son’s sudden reappearance and awful death had shaken him severely, and,
despite his outward stoicism, and that asperity of manner which it was
his pride to maintain, the hidden heart of the man bled inwardly.
The wise physician reads the hearts of his patients almost as easily as
he divines their physical ailments. Lucius saw that an unspoken grief
weighed heavily on the old man’s mind. His first thought was of the
simplest remedies—change of scene—occupation. That house was full of
bitter associations.
‘You are an annual tenant here, I think,’ he said, when Mr. Sivewright
had told him, complainingly, how a jobbing builder was patching the
broken panelling of his bedroom, by order of the agent, Mr. Agar.
‘Yes, I only took the place for a year certain, and then from quarter
to quarter. I might have had it for ten pounds a year less had I been
willing to take a lease. But I was too wise to saddle myself with the
repairs of such a dilapidated barrack.’
‘Then you can leave at any time by the sacrifice of a quarter’s rent,
or by giving a quarter’s notice.’
‘Of course I can, but I am not going to leave. The house suits my
collection, and it suits me.’
‘I fear that you subordinate yourself to your collection. This house
must keep alive painful memories.’
‘Do you think that fire needs any breath to fan it?’ asked Homer
Sivewright bitterly. ‘Keep alive! Memory never dies, nor grows weaker
in the mind of age. It strengthens with advancing years, until the
shadows of things gone by seem to the old more real than reality. The
old live in the past as the young live in the future. I have come to
the age of backward-going thoughts. And it matters nothing what scenes
are round me—what walls shut-in my declining days. Memory makes its own
habitation.’
Finding it vain to press the point just now, and trusting to the
great healer Time, Lucius began to talk cheerily about Lucille. Mr.
Sivewright seemed heartily glad to hear of Miss Glenlyne’s kindness,
and the probability of fortune following from that kindness by and by,
as the lawyer had suggested. There was no touch of jealousy in the old
man’s half regretful tone when he said:
‘She will not quite forget me, I hope, now that she has this new and
wealthy friend. I think I cling more tenderly to the thought of her now
that I know there is no bond of kindred between us.’
‘Believe me she loves you, and has loved you always, although you have
often wounded her affectionate heart by your coldness.’
‘That heart shall be wounded no more. She has never been ungrateful.
She has never striven to trade upon my affection. She has never robbed
me, or lied to me. She is worthy of trust as well as of love, and she
shall have both, if she does not desert me now that fortune seems to
smile upon her.’
‘I will answer for her there. In a very few days she shall be with you
again—your nurse and comforter and companion.’
‘Yes, she has been all those, and I have tried to shut my heart against
her. I will do so no longer.’
When Lucius paid his next visit upon the following evening he found the
old man in a still softer mood. Tender thoughts had visited him in the
deep night silence—so long for the sleeplessness of age.
‘I have been thinking a great deal about you both, you and my
granddaughter,’ he said to Lucius, and have come to a determination,
which is somewhat foreign to my most cherished ideas, yet which I
believe to be wise.’
‘What is that, my dear sir?’
‘I mean to sell the greater part of my collection.’
‘Indeed, that is quite a new idea!’
‘Yes, but it is a resolution deliberately arrived at. True that every
year will increase the value of those things, but in the mean time
you and Lucille are deprived of all use of the money they would now
realise. That money would procure you a West-end practice—would make a
fitting home for Lucille. It would open the turnpike-gates on the great
high-road to success; a road which is cruelly long for the traveller
who has to push his way across ploughed fields and through thorny
hedges, and over almost impassable dykes, for want of money to pay the
turnpikes. Yes, Lucius, I mean to send two-thirds of my collection to
Christie and Hanson’s as soon as I can revise and modify my catalogue.
You might give me an hour or so every evening to help me with the task.’
‘I will do anything you wish. But pray do not make this sacrifice on my
account.’
‘It is no sacrifice. I bought these things to sell again, only I have
clung to them with a weak and foolish affection. The result of that
folly has been that I have lost some of the gems of my collection,
I shall set to work upon a new catalogue this evening. The task will
amuse me. You need not shake your head so gravely. I promise not to
overwork myself. I will take my time, and have the catalogue finished
when the winter sales begin at Christie’s. I know the public humour
about these things, and the things which will sell best. The residue I
shall arrange in a kind of museum; and perhaps, some day, when I am in
a particularly good humour, I may be induced to present this remainder
to some Mechanics’ Institution at this end of London.’
‘You could not make a better use of it.’
‘I suppose not. After all, the masses, ignorant of art as they must
needs be, must still be capable of some interest in relics which are
associated with the past. There is an innate sentiment of beauty in the
mind of man—an innate passion for the romantic and the ancient which
not the most sordid surroundings can extinguish. I have seen dirty
bare-footed children—wanderers from the purlieus of Oxford-market or
Cleveland-road—flatten their noses against my window in Bond-street,
and gloat over the beauty of Sèvres and Dresden, as if they had the
appreciation of the connoisseur.’
Lucius encouraged this idea of the East-end museum. He saw that this
fancy, and the determination to dispose of the more saleable portion of
his collection, had already lightened the old man’s spirits. He agreed
in the wisdom of turning these hoarded and hidden treasures into the
sinews of life’s warfare. He declared himself quite willing to owe
advancement to Mr. Sivewright’s generosity.
The catalogue was begun that very evening; for Homer Sivewright, once
having taken up this idea, pursued it with extraordinary eagerness. He
dictated a new list of his treasures from the old one, and Lucius did
all the penmanship; and at this employment they both worked sedulously
for two hours, at the end of which time Lucius ordered his patient
off to bed, and took leave for the night. This went on for three
nights, and on the third, which was Saturday, the catalogue had made
considerable progress. All those objects which addressed themselves to
the antiquarian rather than to the connoisseur, and all articles of
doubtful or secondary value, Mr. Sivewright kept back for his East-end
Museum. He knew that the public appreciation of his collection depended
upon its being scrupulously weeded of all inferior objects. He had
been known to amateurs as an infallible judge; and in this, his final
appearance before the public, he wished to maintain his reputation.
Lucius left him on Saturday night wonderfully improved in spirits. That
occupation of catalogue-making had been the best possible distraction.
Early on Sunday morning Lucius started for Brighton, so early that the
hills and downs of Sussex were still wrapped in morning mists as he
approached that pleasant watering-place. He was in time to take Lucille
to the eleven-o’clock service at the famous St. Paul’s. It was the
first time they had ever gone to church together, and to kneel thus
side by side in the temple seemed as blissful as it was new to both.
After church they took a stroll by the seaside, walking towards
Cliftonville, and avoiding as much as possible the Brightonian
throng of well-dressed church-goers, airing their finery on the
Parade. They had plenty to say to each other, that fond lover’s talk
which wells exhaustless from youthful hearts. Miss Glenlyne rarely
left her bedroom—where she muddled through the morning attended by
Spilling—until the day was half over, so Lucille felt herself at
liberty till two o’clock. As the clock struck two, the lovers reëntered
the shades of Selbrook-place.
Miss Glenlyne was in her favourite chair by the drawing-room fire,
looking much smarter, and sooth to say even fresher and cleaner, than
when Lucius had last beheld her. This improvement was Lucille’s work.
She had found handsome garments in her aunt’s roomy wardrobe,—garments
left to the despoiling moth, or discolouring mildew, and had suggested
emendations of all kinds in Miss Glenlyne’s toilet. Dressed in a
pearl-gray watered silk, and draped with a white china-crape shawl, the
old lady looked far more agreeable than in her dingy black silk gown
and dirty olive-green cashmere. Spilling had contrived to keep these
things out of their owner’s sight and memory, in the pious hope of
possessing them herself by and by, very little the worse for wear.
The old lady received Lucius with extreme graciousness. Spilling was
invisible, having been relegated to her original position of maid,
and banished to the housekeeper’s-room. A nice little luncheon was
served in the back drawing-room, at which Miss Glenlyne again produced
a bottle of champagne, an unaccustomed libation to the genius of
hospitality. The meal was cheerful almost to merriment, and the old
lady appeared thoroughly to enjoy the novel pleasure of youthful
society. She encouraged the lovers to talk of themselves, their plans
and prospects, cordially entered into the discussion of their future,
and Lucius perceived, by many a trifling indication, how firm a hold
Lucille had already won upon her aunt’s heart. After luncheon Miss
Glenlyne would have dismissed them to walk on the Parade, but Lucille
insisted on staying at home to read to her aunt. She read a good deal
of the _Observer_, through which medium Miss Glenlyne took the news of
the week, in a dry and compressed form, like Liebig’s Extract. After
the _Observer_ the conversation became literary, and Miss Glenlyne
gave them her opinion of the Lake poets, Sir Walter Scott, Monk Lewis,
Byron, Mrs. Radcliffe, and the minor lights who had illumined the world
of letters in her youth. She clung fondly to the belief that ‘Thalaba’
was better than anything that had been done or ever could be done by
that young man called Tennyson, with whose name rumour had acquainted
her some years back, but whose works she had not yet looked into. And
finally, for the gratification of the young folks, she recited, in a
quavering voice, Southey’s famous verses upon ‘Lodore.’
Then came afternoon tea, and it was a pretty sight for Lucius to behold
his dear one officiating at Miss Glenlyne’s tea-table, whose massive
silver equipage glittered in the ruddy firelight; pretty to see her so
much at her ease in her kinswoman’s home, and to know that if he had
not been able to regain her birthright for her, he had at least given
her back her father’s name. Altogether that quiet Sunday afternoon in
Selbrook-place was as pleasant as it was curious. After the early tea
Lucius and Lucille went out, at Miss Glenlyne’s special request, for
half-an-hour’s walk in the autumn gloaming. Perhaps autumnal evenings
at Brighton are better than they are anywhere else. At any rate, this
one seemed so to these lovers. There was no sea fog, the newly lighted
lamps glimmered with a pale brightness in the clear gray atmosphere,
the crimson of the setting sun glowed redly yonder, where the dim
outlines of distant headlands showed like vague purple shadows against
the western sky.
Never had these two been able to talk so hopefully of the future as
they could talk to-night. They arranged everything during that happy
half-hour, which, brief as it seemed, did in actual time, as computed
by vulgar clocks, stretch itself to nearly an hour-and-a-half. If Mr.
Sivewright carried out his plan of selling the bric-à-brac, and did
verily endow Lucius with some of the proceeds thereof, he Lucius would
assuredly establish himself in some pleasanter quarter of London, where
his patients would be more lucrative, yet where he might still be a
help and comfort to the poor, whom this hard-working young doctor loved
with something of that divine affection which made Francis of Assisi
one of the greatest among saints. He would set up afresh in a more airy
and cheerful quarter of the great city, and make a worthy home for his
fair young bride.
The girl’s little hand stole gently into his.
‘As if I cared what part of town I am to live in with you,’ she
said fondly. ‘I should be just as happy in the Shadrack-road as in
Cavendish-square, just as proud of my husband as a parish doctor as I
should be if he were a famous physician. Think of yourself only, dear
Lucius, and of your own power to do good—not of me.’
‘My darling, the more prominent a man’s position is the more good he
can do, provided it be in him to do good at all. But depend upon it,
Lucille, if I go to the West-end, I shall not turn my back upon the
sufferings of the East.’
EPILOGUE.
It is the April of the following year. Mr. Sivewright’s collection
has been sold in February, and the sale, happening in a halcyon
period for the disposal of bric-à-brac, has justified the collector’s
proudest hopes. He has divided the proceeds into two equal portions,
one of which he has bestowed upon Lucius as Lucille’s dower; and with
a part of this money Lucius has bought a modest practice, with the
potentiality of unlimited improvement, in a narrow street, situated in
that remote, but not unaristocratic region, beyond Manchester-square.
It is late in April, Lent is just over; there are wallflowers for sale
on the greengrocers’ stalls, a perfume of spring in the atmosphere,
even at the eastern end of London. The spar-forests yonder in the docks
rise gaily against a warm blue sky, whence the smoke clouds have been
swept by the brisk westerly breeze.
Bells are ringing gaily from the crocketed finial of the little
Gothic church whose services Lucius Davoren has been wont faithfully
to attend on his lonely bachelor Sundays; and Lucius, nevermore a
bachelor, leads forth his fair young bride from the same Gothic
temple. Not alone doth he issue forth as bridegroom, for behind him
follow Geoffrey and Janet, who have also made glad surrender of their
individual liberty before the altar in the rose-coloured light of
yonder Munich window, a rose glow which these happy people accept as
typical of the atmosphere of all their lives to come. Trouble can
scarcely approach those whose love and faith are founded on so firm a
rock.
Lucius has kept his promise, and waited for the same April sunlight to
shine upon Geoffrey’s nuptials and his own. Miss Glenlyne has been one
of the foremost figures in the little wedding group, and Mr. Sivewright
has stood up before the altar, strong and solid of aspect as one of the
various pillars of the church, to bestow his adopted granddaughter upon
the man of her choice. Lucille has but one bridesmaid, in the person of
Flossie, who looks like a small Titania, in her airy dress and wreath
of spring blossoms. Never was there a smaller wedding party at a double
marriage, never a simpler wedding.
They go straight from the church to the old house in the Shadrack-road,
which no persuasion can induce Mr. Sivewright to abandon. Here, in the
old panelled parlour, endeared to Lucius by the memory of many a happy
hour with his betrothed, they find a modest banquet awaiting them, and
a serious individual of the waiter-tribe, in respectable black, who has
been sent from Birch’s with the banquet. Moselle corks fly merrily. Mr.
Sivewright does the honours of the feast as gracefully as if he had
been entertaining his friends habitually for the last twenty years.
Lucille and Lucius go round the old house for a kind of farewell,
but carefully avoid that one locked chamber which was the scene of
Ferdinand Sivewright’s dreadful fate, and which has never been occupied
since that night.
It is quite late in the afternoon when two carriages bear the two
couples off to different railway stations: Lucius and Lucille on
their way to Stillmington, where they are to spend their brief
honeymoon of a week or ten days before beginning real and earnest
life in the neatly-furnished, newly papered and painted house near
Manchester-square, where Mr. and Mrs. Wincher and the inevitable
Mercury are to compose their modest establishment; Geoffrey and
Janet to Dover, whence they are to travel southwards, to climb Swiss
mountains and do Rhine and Danube ere they return to take possession of
a small but perfect abode in Mayfair, where Mrs. Hossack is to give
musical evenings to her heart’s content, and where Flossie’s nursery is
to be a very bower of bliss, full to overflowing of Siraudin’s bonbon
boxes and illuminated fairy-tale books.
When Lucius and his bride take leave of Miss Glenlyne, the old lady,
who has ‘borne up,’ as she calls it, wonderfully hitherto, melts into
tears, and tells them that she means in future to spend the summer
months in London, whether Spilling likes it or not, that she will
take lodgings near Lucille’s new house, so that her darling may come
and make tea for her every day. And then she adds in a whisper, that
she has made a new will, and made Lucille her residuary legatee. ‘And
except forty pounds a year to Spilling, and a legacy of fifty to each
of the other servants, every sixpence I have is left to you, dear,’ she
adds confidentially. She squeezes a fifty-pound note into Lucille’s
hand just at the last, wrapped in a scrap of paper, on which is written
in the old lady’s tremulous hand, ‘For hotel expenses at Stillmington.’
So they depart, happy, to begin that new life whose untrodden path to
most of this world’s wayfarers seems somewhat rose-bestrewn. These
begin their journey with a fair promise of finding more roses than
thorns.
Thus it happens that Mr. Glenlyne Spalding Glenlyne remains in
undisputed possession of his lands, tenements, and hereditaments, to
grow big turnips, and employ labour, and do good in his generation;
while Lucius, unburdened by superfluous wealth, yet amply provided
against the hazards of professional income, is left free to pursue that
calling which to him is at once exalted and congenial; and every one is
content.
THE END.
LONDON:
ROBSON AND SONS, PRINTERS, PANCRAS ROAD, N. W.
Transcriber’s Notes
pg 64 Changed: Where else out of Holland could he see such lantsgapes?
to: Where else out of Holland could he see such landscapes?
pg 124 Changed: drop of rich cream for your breakfastes
to: drop of rich cream for your breakfasts
pg 276 Changed: Miss Glenlyne would smetimes remark candidly
to: Miss Glenlyne would sometimes remark candidly