It was late at night when Sewell arrived at the Priory. He had
had another disastrous night of play, and had scattered his
“acknowledgments” for various sums on every side. Indeed, he had not the
vaguest idea of how much he had lost. Disputes and hot discussions, too,
almost verging on personal quarrels, dashed with all their irritating
influences the gloom of his bad luck; and he felt, as he arose to go
home, that he had not even that sorry consolation of the unfortunate
gambler,--the pitying sympathy of the looker-on.
Over and over, as he went, he asked himself what Fate could possibly
intend by this persistent persecution of him? Other fellows had their
“innings” now and then. Their fortune came checkered with its bright and
dark days. He never emerged, not even passingly, from his ill-luck. “I
suppose,” muttered he, “the whole is meant to tempt me--but to what? I
need very little temptation if the bait be only money. Let me but see
gold enough, and my resistance will not be very formidable. I 'll not
risk my neck; short of that I 'm ready for anything.” Thus thinking, he
plodded onward through the dark night, vaguely wishing at times that no
morning was ever to break, and that existence might prolong itself out
to one long dark autumn night, silent and starless.
As he reached the hall-door, he found his wife seated on the steps as on
a former night. It had become a favorite spot with her to taste the cool
refreshing night-air, and rally her from the feverish closeness of the
sick-room.
“How is he? Is it over yet?” cried he, as he came up.
“He is better; he slept calmly for some hours, and woke much refreshed.”
“I could have sworn it!” burst he in, vehemently. “It is the one way
Fate could have rescued me, and it is denied me. I believe there is a
curse on me! Eh--what?”
“I did n't speak,” said she, meekly.
“You muttered, though. I heard you mumble something below your breath,
as if you agreed with what I said. Say it out, Madam, if you think it.”
She heaved a weary sigh, but said nothing.
“Has Beattie been here?” asked he, hastily.
“Yes; he stayed for above an hour, but was obliged to go at last to
visit another patient. He brought Dr. Lendrick out with him; he arrived
this evening.”
“Lendrick! Do you mean the man from the Cape?”
“Yes.”
“That completes it!” burst he, as he flung his arms wildly up. “I was
just wondering what other malignant piece of spite Fortune could play
me, and there it is! Had you any talk with this man?”
“Yes; he remained with me all the time Dr. Beattie was upstairs.”
“And what was his tone? Has he come back to turn us out?--that of course
he has--but does he avow it?”
“He shows no such intentions. He asked whether you held much to the
Nest, if it was a place that you liked, or if you could relinquish it
without any regret?”
“Why so?”
“Because Sir Brook Fossbrooke has just purchased it.”
“What nonsense! you know as well as I do that he could n't purchase a
dog-kennel. That property was valued at sixteen thousand pounds four
years ago,--it is worth twenty now; and you talk to me of this beggar
buying it!”
“I tell you what he told me, and it was this: Some mine that Sir Brook
owned in Sardinia has turned out to be all silver, and in consequence
he has suddenly become immensely rich,--so rich, indeed, that he has
already determined to settle this estate on Lucy Lendrick; and intends,
if he can induce Lord Drumcarran to part with 'The Forest,' to add it to
the grounds.”
Sewell grasped his hair with both hands, and ground his teeth together
with passion as he listened.
“You believe this story, I suppose?” said he at last.
“Yes; why should I not believe it?”
“I don't believe a word of it. I see the drift--I saw the drift of it
before you had told me ten words. This tale is got up to lull us into
security, and to quiet our suspicions. Lendrick knows well the alarm his
unexpected return is likely to give us, and to allay our anxieties they
have coined this narrative, as though to imply they will be rich enough
not to care to molest us, nor stand between us and this old man's money.
Don't you see that?”
“I do not. It did not occur to me before, and I do not admit it now.”
“I ought not to have asked you. I ought to have remembered what old
Fossbrooke once called 'the beautiful trustfulness of your nature.'”
“If had it once, it has left me many a long day ago!”
“But I deny that you ever had it. You had the woman's trick of affecting
to believe, and thus making out what you assumed to think, to be a
pledge given by another,--a bit of female craft that you all trade on so
long as you are young and good-looking?”
“And what supplies the place of this ingenious device when we are
neither young nor good-looking?”
“I don't know, for the simple reason that I never much interested myself
in the sex after that period.”
“That's a very sad thing for us. I declare I never had an idea how much
we 're to be pitied before.”
“You would be to be pitied if you knew how we all think of you;” and he
spoke with a spiteful malignity almost demoniac.
“It's better, then, for each of us that we should not know this. The
trustfulness that you sneer at does us good service, after all.”
“And it was this story of the mine that induced Lendrick to come home
from the Cape, wasn't it?”
“No; he only heard of the mine since he arrived here.”
“I thought,” rejoined he, with a sneer, “that he ought to have resigned
his appointment on account of this sudden wealth, all the more because
I have known that he intended to come back this many a day. And what is
Fossbrooke going to do for you? Is there a diamond necklace ordered? or
is it one of the brats he is going to adopt?”
“By the way, I have been robbed; some one has carried off my gold comb
and some pins; they were on my dressing-table last night. Jane saw them
when I went into my room.”
“Now 's your time to replace the loss! It's the sort of tale old
Fossbrooke always responded to.”
She made no answer; and for several minutes each sat in silence. “One
thing is pretty evident,” said he at last, as he made figures with his
cane on the ground,--“we 'll have to troop off, whether the Lendricks
come here or not. The place will not be tenable once they are in the
vicinity.”
“I don't know.”
“You don't know! Do you mean that the doctor and his daughter will
stand the French cook here, and the dinners, and let the old man make a
blessed fool of himself, as he has been doing for the last eight or
ten months past? or do you pretend that if we were to go back to the
leg-of-mutton days, and old Haire for company, that it would be worth
holding on to? _I_ don't; and I tell you frankly that I intend to demand
my passports, as the Ministers say, and be off.”
“But _I_ can't 'be off.' I have no such alternative!”
“The worse luck yours, or rather the worse skill; for if you had played
your hand better, it would not have been thus with you. By the way, what
about Trafford? I take it he 'll marry this girl now.”
“I have not heard,” said she, pinching her lips, and speaking with a
forced composure.
“If I were you, I 'd make myself Lucy's confidante, get up the match,
and go and live with them. These are the really happy _ménages_. If
there be such a thing as bliss, perfect bliss, in this world, it is
where a wife has a dear friend in the house with her, who listens to all
her sorrows, and helps her to manage the tyrant that inflicts them.
It was a great mistake of ours not to have known this in early life.
Marriage was meant to be a triangle.”
“If you go, as you speak of going, have you any objection to my
addressing myself to Sir Brook for some assistance?”
“None whatever. I think it the most natural thing in life; he was your
guardian, and you have a right to ask what has become of your fortune.”
“He might refer me to _you_ for the information.”
“Very unmannerly if he should, and very ungallant, too, for an old
admirer. I 'm certain if I were to be--what is the phrase?--removed,
yes, removed--he 'd marry you. Talk of three-volume novels and virtue
rewarded, after that.”
“You have been playing to-night,” said she, gravely.
“Yes.”
“And lost?”
“Lost heavily.”
“I thought so. Your courtesies to me have been the measure of your bad
luck for many a day. I have often felt that 'four by honors' has saved
me from a bad headache.”
“Then there has been more sympathy between us than I ever suspected,”
said he, rising, and stretching himself; and after a moment or two
added, “Must I call on this Dr. Lendrick?--will he expect me to visit
him?”
“Perhaps so,” said she, carelessly; “he asked after you.”
“Indeed!--did he ask after Trafford too? Do you remember the day at the
Governor's dinner he mistook you for Trafford's wife, and explained his
mistake by the familiarity of his manner to you in the garden? It was
the best bit of awkwardness I ever witnessed.”
“I suppose you felt it so?”
“_I_--_I_ felt it so! I suspect not! I don't believe there was a man at
table enjoyed the blunder as heartily.”
“I wish--how I wish!” said she, clasping her hands together.
“Well--what?”
“I wish I could be a man for one brief half-hour!” cried she; and her
voice rang with a mild but clear resonance, that made it seem louder
than it really was.
“And then?” said he, mockingly.
“Oh, do not ask me more!” cried she, as she bent down and hid her face
in her hands.
“I think I _will_ call on Lendrick,” said he, after a moment. “It may
not be exactly the sort of task a man would best like; but I opine, if
he is about to give his daughter in marriage to this fellow, he ought
to know more about him. Now _I_ can tell him something, and my wife can
tell him more. There's no indiscretion in saying so much, is there?”
She made no reply; and after a pause he went on: “If Trafford had n't
been a shabby dog, he 'd not have higgled about buying up those letters.
Cane & Kincaid offered them to him for a thousand pounds. I suspect he
'd like to have the offer repeated now, but he shall not. He believes,
or affects to believe, that, for my own sake, I 'll not make a public
scandal; he doesn't know his man when he thinks this. _You_, Madam,
might have taught him better, eh?” Still no reply, and he continued:
“There 's not a man living despises public opinion as I do. If you are
rich you trample on it, if poor it tramples on _you_; but so long as
a fellow braves the world, and declares that he shrinks from
nothing,--evades nothing,--neither turns right nor left to avoid its
judgments,--the coward world gives away and lets him pass. _I 'll_ let
them see that I don't care a straw for my own life, when at the price of
it I can blow up a magazine.”
“No, no, no!” muttered she, in a low but clear tone.
“What do you mean by No, no?” cried he, in a voice of passion.
“I mean that you care a great deal for your own life, and a great
deal for your own personal safety; and that if your tyranny to a poor,
crushed, weak woman has any bounds, it is from your fear, your abject
fear, that in her desperation she might seek a protector, and find him.”
“I told you once before, Madam, men don't like this sort of
protectorate. The old bullying days are gone by. Modern decorum 'takes
it out' in damages.” She sat still and silent; and after waiting some
time, he said, in a calm, unmoved voice, “These little interchanges
of courtesy do no good to either of us; they haven't even the poor
attraction of novelty; so, as my friend Mr. O'Reardon says, let us 'be
practical.' I had hoped that the old gentleman upstairs was going to do
the polite thing, and die; but it appears now he has changed his mind
about it. This, to say the least of it, is very inconvenient to me. My
embarrassments are such that I shall be obliged to leave the country;
my only difficulty is, I have no money. Are you attending? Are you
listening to me?”
“Yes, I hear you,” said she, in a faint whisper.
“_You_, I know, cannot help me; neither can my mother. Of course the
old Judge is out of the question. As for the fellows at the Club, I
am deeply in debt to many of them; and Kincaid only reminds me of his
unsettled bill of costs when I ask for a loan. A blank look-out, on the
whole; isn't it?”
She muttered something like assent, and he went on. “I have gone through
a good many such storms before, but none fully as bad as this; because
there are certain things which in a few days must come out--ugly little
disclosures--one or two there will be. I inadvertently sold that beech
timber to two different fellows, and took the money too.”
She lifted up her face, and stared at him without speaking.
“Fact, I assure you! I have a confoundedly bad memory; it has got
me into scores of scrapes all through life. Then, this very evening,
thinking that the Chief could n't rub through, I made a stupid wager
with Balfour that the seat on the Bench would be vacant within a week;
and finished my bad run of luck by losing--I can't say how much, but
very heavily, indeed--at the Club.”
A low faint sigh escaped her, but not a word.
“As to bills renewed, protested, and to be protested,” said he, in the
same easy tone, “they are legion. These take their course, and are no
worse than any other man's bills; I don't fret myself about _them_. As
in the old days of chivalry one never cared how scurvily he treated the
'villeins,' so he behaved like a knight to his equals; so nowadays a
man must book up at Tattersall's though he cheat his tailor. I like the
theory too; it keeps 'the ball rolling,' if it does nothing else.”
All this he rattled out as though his own fluency gave him a sort of
Dutch courage; and who knows, too,--for there is a fund of vanity in
these men,--if he was not vain of showing with what levity he could
treat dangers that might have made the stoutest heart afraid?
“Taking the 'tottle of the whole' of these,--as old Joe Hume used to
say,--it's an ugly balance!”
“What do you mean to do?” said she, quietly.
“Bolt, I suppose. I see nothing else for it.”
“And will that meet the difficulty?”
“No, but it will secure _me_; secure me from arrest, and the other
unpleasant consequences that might follow arrest. To do this, however, I
need money, and I have not five pounds--no, nor, I verily believe, five
shillings--in the world.”
“There are a few trinkets of mine upstairs. I never wear them--”
“Not worth fifty pounds, the whole lot; nor would one get half fifty for
them in a moment of pressure.”
“We have some plate--”
“We had, but I sold it three weeks ago; and that reminds me there was a
rum old tea-urn got somehow mixed up with our things, and I sold it too,
though it has Lendrick's crest upon it. You 'll have to get it back some
of these days,--I told the fellow not to break it up till he heard from
you.”
“Then what is to be done?” said she, eagerly.
“That's the question; travelling is the one thing that can't be done on
tick.”
“If you were to go down to the Nest--”
“But our tenure expires on the seventeenth, just one fortnight
hence,--not to say that I couldn't call myself safe there one hour. No,
no; I must manage to get abroad, and instantly, that I may escape from
my present troubles; but I must strike out some way of life,--something
that will keep me.”
She sat still and almost stupefied, trying to see an escape from these
difficulties, but actually overwhelmed by the number and the nature of
them.
“I told you awhile ago that I did not believe one word of this story
of the mine, and the untold wealth that has fallen to old Fossbrooke:
_you_, however, do believe it; you affirm the tale as if you had seen
and touched the ingots; so that you need have no reluctance to ask him
to help you.”
“You do not object to this course, then?” asked she, eagerly.
“How can I object? If I clutch at a plank when I'm drowning, I don't
let go because it may have nails in it. Tell him that you want to buy me
off, to get rid of me; that by a couple of hundred pounds,--I wish he 'd
make it five,--you can insure my leaving the country, and that my debts
here will prevent my coming back again. It's the sort of compact he 'll
fully concur in; and you can throw in, as if accidentally, how useless
it is for him to go on persecuting me, that his confounded memory for
old scores has kept my head under water all my life; and hint that those
letters of Trafford's he insists on having--”
“_He_ insists on having!”
“To be sure he does; I thought I had told you what brought him over
here! The old meddling humbug, in his grand benevolence vein, wants to
smooth down the difficulties between Lucy Lendrick and Trafford, one of
which was thought to be the fellow's attachment to _you_. Don't
blush; take it as coolly as I do. I 'm not sure whether reading the
correspondence aloud isn't the best way to dispel this illusion. You can
say that better than I can.”
“Trafford never wrote one line to me of which I should be afraid or
ashamed to see in print.”
“These are matters of taste. There are scores of women like publicity,
and would rather be notorieties for scandal than models of unnoticed
virtue, so we 'll not discuss that. There, there; don't look so
supremely indignant and contemptuous. That expression became you well
enough at three-and-twenty; but ten years, ten long years of not the
very smoothest existence, leave their marks!”
She shook her head mournfully, but in silence.
“At all events,” resumed he, “declare that you object to the letters
being in other hands than your own; and as to a certain paper of
mine,--a perfectly worthless document, as he well knows,--let him give
it to you or burn it in your presence.”
She pushed her hair back from her temples, and pressed her hands to
either side of her head, as though endeavoring to collect her thoughts,
and rally herself to an effort of calm determination'.
“How much of this is true?” said she, at last.
“What do you mean?” said he, sternly.
“I mean this,” said she, resolutely,--“that I want to know, if you
should get this money, is it really your intention to go abroad?”
“You want a pledge from me on this?” said he, with a jeering laugh.
“You are not willing to stoop to all this humiliation without having the
price of it afterwards? Is not that your meaning?”
Her lips moved, but no sound was audible.
“All fair and reasonable,” said he, calmly. “It's not every woman in
the world would have the pluck to tell her husband how much meanness
she would submit to simply to get rid of him; but you were always
courageous, that I will say,--you have courage enough.”
“I had need of it.”
“Go on, Madam, finish your speech. I know what you would say. 'You had
need of courage for two;' that was the courteous speech that trembled on
your lip. The only thing that beats your courage is your candor! Well, I
must content myself with humbler qualities. I cannot accompany you into
these high flights of excellence, but I can go away; and that, after
all, is something. Get me this money, and I will go,--I promise you
faithfully,--go, and not come back.”
“The children,” said she, and stopped.
“Madam!” said he, with a mock-heroic air, “I am not a brute! I respect
your maternal feelings, and would no more think of robbing you of your
children--”
“There,--there, that will do. Where is Sir Brook to be found,--where
does he live?”
“I have his address written down,--here it is,” said he,--“the last
cottage on the southern side of Howth. There is a porch to the door,
which, it would seem, is distinctive, as well as three chimneys; my
informant was as descriptive as Figaro. You had better keep this piece
of paper as a reminder; and the trains deposit you at less than half a
mile from the place.”
“I will go early to-morrow morning. Shall I find you here on my return?”
“Of that you may be certain. I can't venture to leave the house all day;
I 'm not sure there will not be a writ out against me.”
She arose and seemed about to say something,--hesitated for a moment or
two, and then slowly entered the house, and disappeared.