GRIM ARABELLA CRANE.
Once on a time there lived a merchant named Fossett, a widower with
three children, of whom a daughter, Arabella, was by some years the
eldest. He was much respected, deemed a warm man, and a safe--attended
diligently to his business--suffered no partner, no foreman, to dictate
or intermeddle--liked his comforts, but made no pretence to fashion. His
villa was at Clapham, not a showy but a solid edifice, with lodge, lawn,
and gardens chiefly notable for what is technically called glass--viz.
a range of glass-houses on the most improved principles, the heaviest
pines, the earliest strawberries. “I’m no judge of flowers,” quoth Mr.
Fossett, meekly. “Give me a plain lawn, provided it be close-shaven. But
I say to my gardener: ‘Forcing is my hobby--a cucumber with my fish all
the year round!’” Yet do not suppose Mr Fossett ostentatious--quite the
reverse. He would no more ruin himself for the sake of dazzling others,
than he would for the sake of serving them. He liked a warm house,
spacious rooms, good living, old wine, for their inherent merits: He
cared not to parade them to public envy. When he dined alone, or with
a single favoured guess, the best Lafitte, the oldest sherry!--when
extending the rites of miscellaneous hospitality to neighbours,
relations, or other slight acquaintances--for Lafitte, Julien; and
for sherry, Cape!--Thus not provoking vanity, nor courting notice, Mr.
Fossett was without an enemy, and seemed without a care. Formal were his
manners, formal his household, formal even the stout cob that bore him
from Cheapside to Clapham, from Claphain to Cheapside. That cob could
not even prick up its ears if it wished to shy--its ears were cropped,
so were its mane and its tail.
Arabella early gave promise of beauty, and more than ordinary power of
intellect and character. Her father be stowed on her every advantage
of education. She was sent to a select boarding-school of the highest
reputation; the strictest discipline, the best masters, the longest
bills. At the age of seventeen she had become the show pupil of the
seminary. Friends wondered somewhat why the prim merchant took such
pains to lavish on his daughter the worldly accomplishments which seemed
to give him no pleasure, and of which he never spoke with pride. But
certainly, if she was so clever--first-rate musician, exquisite artist,
accomplished linguist, “it was very nice in old Fossett to bear it
so meekly, never crying her up, nor showing her off to less fortunate
parents--very nice in him--good sense--greatness of mind.”
“Arabella,” said the worthy man one day, a little time after his eldest
daughter had left school for good; “Arabella,” said he, “Mrs. -------,”
naming the head teacher in that famous school, “pays you a very high
compliment in a letter I received from her this morning. She says it is
a pity you are not a poor man’s daughter--that you are so steady and so
clever that you could make a fortune for yourself as a teacher.”
Arabella at that age could smile gaily, and gaily she smiled at the
notion conveyed in the compliment.
“No one can guess,” resumed the father, twirling his thumbs and speaking
rather through his nose; “the ups and downs in this mortal sphere of
trial, ‘specially in the mercantile community. If ever, when I’m dead
and gone, adversity should come upon you, you will gratefully remember
that I have given you the best of education, and take care of your
little brother and sister, who are both--stupid!”
These doleful words did not make much impression on Arabella, uttered as
they were in a handsome drawing-room, opening on the neat-shaven lawn
it took three gardeners to shave, with a glittering side-view of those
galleries of glass in which strawberries were ripe at Christmas,
and cucumbers never failed to fish. Time--went on. Arabella was now
twenty-three--a very fine girl, with a decided manner--much occupied by
her music, her drawing, her books, and her fancies. Fancies--for, like
most girls with very active heads and idle hearts, she had a vague
yearning for some excitement beyond the monotonous routine of a young
lady’s life; and the latent force of her nature inclined her to admire
whatever was out of the beaten track--whatever was wild and daring.
She had received two or three offers from young gentlemen in the same
mercantile community as that which surrounded her father in this sphere
of trial. But they did not please her; and she believed her father when
he said that they only courted her under the idea that he would come
down with something handsome; “whereas,” said the merchant, “I hope you
will marry an honest man, who will like you for yourself; and wait for
your fortune till my will is read. As King William says to his son, in
the History of England, ‘I don’t mean to strip till I go to bed.’”
One night, at a ball in Clapham, Arabella saw the man who was destined
to exercise so baleful an influence over her existence. Jasper Losely
had been brought to this ball by a young fellow-clerk in the same
commercial house as himself; and then in all the bloom of that
conspicuous beauty, to which the miniature Arabella had placed before
his eyes so many years afterwards did but feeble justice, it may well
be conceived that he concentred on himself the admiring gaze of the
assembly. Jasper was younger than Arabella; but, what with the height of
his stature and the self-confidence of his air, he looked four or five
and twenty. Certainly, in so far as the distance from childhood may be
estimated by the loss of innocence, Jasper might have been any age! He
was told that old Fossett’s daughter would have a very fine fortune;
that she was a strong-minded young lady, who governed her father, and
would choose for herself; and accordingly he devoted himself to Arabella
the whole of the evening. The effect produced on the mind of this
ill-fated woman by her dazzling admirer was as sudden as it proved to
be lasting. There was a strange charm in the very contrast between his
rattling audacity and the bashful formalities of the swains who had
hitherto wooed her as if she frightened them. Even his good looks
fascinated her less than that vital energy and power about the lawless
brute, which to her seemed the elements of heroic character, though
but the attributes of riotous spirits, magnificent formation, flattered
vanity, and imperious egotism. She was a bird gazing spell-bound on
a gay young boa-constrictor, darting from bough to bough, sunning its
brilliant hues, and showing off all its beauty, just before it takes the
bird for its breakfast.
When they parted that night, their intimacy had so far advanced
that arrangements had been made for its continuance. Arabella had
an instinctive foreboding that her father would be less charmed than
herself with Jasper Losely; that, if Jasper were presented to him,
he would possibly forbid her farther acquaintance with a young clerk,
however superb his outward appearance. She took the first false step.
She had a maiden aunt by the mother’s side, who lived in Bloomsbury,
gave and went to small parties, to which Jasper could easily get
introduced. She arranged to pay a visit for some weeks to this aunt, who
was then very civil to her, accepting with marked kindness seasonable
presents of strawberries, pines, spring chickens, and so forth, and
offering in turn, whenever it was convenient, a spare room, and whatever
amusement a round of small parties, and the innocent flirtations
incidental thereto, could bestow. Arabella said nothing to her father
about Jasper Losely, and to her aunt’s she went. Arabella saw Jasper
very often; they became engaged to each other, exchanged vows and
love-tokens, locks of hair, &c. Jasper, already much troubled by duns,
became naturally ardent to insure his felicity and Arabella’s supposed
fortune. Arabella at last summoned courage, and spoke to her father. To
her delighted surprise, Mr. Fossett, after some moralising, more on
the uncertainty of life in general than her clandestine proceedings
in particular, agreed to see Mr. Jasper Losely, and asked him down to
dinner. After dinner, over ‘a bottle of Lafitte, in an exceedingly plain
but exceedingly weighty silver jug, which made Jasper’s mouth water (I
mean the jug), Mr. Fossett, commencing with that somewhat coarse though
royal saying of William the Conqueror, with which he had before edified
his daughter, assured Jasper that he gave his full consent to the young
gentleman’s nuptials with Arabella, provided Jasper or his relations
would maintain her in a plain respectable way, and wait for her fortune
till his (Fossett’s) will was read. What that fortune would be, Mr.
Fossett declined even to hint. Jasper went away very much cooled. Still
the engagement remained in force; the nuptials were tacitly deferred.
Jasper and his relations maintain a wife! Preposterous idea! It would
take a clan of relations and a Zenana of wives to maintain in that state
to which he deemed himself entitled--Jasper himself! But just as he was
meditating the possibility of a compromise with old Fossett, by which
he would agree to wait till the will was read for contingent advantages,
provided Fossett, in his turn, would agree in the mean while to afford
lodging and board, with a trifle for pocket-money, to Arabella and
himself, in the Clapham villa, which, though not partial to rural
scenery, Jasper preferred, on the whole, to a second floor in the
City,--old Fossett fell ill, took to his bed; was unable to attend to
his business, some one else attended to it; and the consequence
was, that the house stopped payment, and was discovered to have been
insolvent for the last ten years. Not a discreditable bankruptcy. There
might perhaps be seven shillings in the pound ultimately paid, and not
more than forty families irretrievably ruined. Old Fossett, safe in
his bed, bore the affliction with philosophical composure; observed
to Arabella that he had always warned her of the ups and downs in this
sphere of trial; referred again with pride to her first-rate education;
commended again to her care Tom and Biddy; and, declaring that he died
in charity with all men, resigned himself to the last slumber.
Arabella at first sought a refuge with her maiden aunt. But that lady,
though not hit in pocket by her brother-in-law’s failure, was more
vehement against his memory than his most injured creditor--not only
that she deemed herself unjustly defrauded of the pines, strawberries,
and spring chickens, by which she had been enabled to give small parties
at small cost, though with ample show, but that she was robbed of the
consequence she had hitherto derived from the supposed expectations of
her niece. In short, her welcome was so hostile, and her condolences
so cutting, that Arabella quitted her door with a solemn determination
never again to enter it.
And now the nobler qualities of the bankrupt’s daughter rose at once
into play. Left penniless, she resolved by her own exertions to support
and to rear her young brother and sister. The great school to which she
had been the ornament willingly received her as a teacher, until some
more advantageous place in a private family, and with a salary worthy of
her talents and accomplishments, could be found.
Her intercourse with Jasper became necessarily suspended. She had the
generosity to write, offering to release him from his engagement. Jasper
considered himself fully released without that letter; but he deemed
it neither gallant nor discreet to say so. Arabella might obtain
a situation with larger salary than she could possibly need, the
superfluities whereof Jasper might undertake to invest. Her aunt had
evidently something to leave, though she might have nothing to give.
In fine, Arabella, if not rich enough for a wife, might be often rich
enough for a friend at need; and so long as he was engaged to her for
life, it must be not more her pleasure than her duty to assist him
to live. Besides, independently of these prudential though not ardent
motives for declaring unalterable fidelity to troth, Jasper at that
time really did entertain what he called love for the handsome young
woman--flattered that one of attainments so superior to all the girls
he had ever known should be so proud even less of his affection for
her than her own affection for himself. Thus the engagement
lasted--interviews none--letters frequent. Arabella worked hard, looking
to the future; Jasper worked as little as possible, and was very much
bored by the present.
Unhappily, as it turned out, so great a sympathy, not only amongst the
teachers, but amongst her old schoolfellows, was felt for Arabella’s
reverse; her character for steadiness, as well as talent, stood so high,
and there was something so creditable in her resolution to maintain
her orphan brother and sister, that an effort was made to procure her
a livelihood much more lucrative, and more independent, than she could
obtain either in a school or a family. Why not take a small house of
her own, live there with her fellow-orphans, and give lessons out by the
hour? Several families at once agreed so to engage her, and an income
adequate to all her wants was assured. Arabella adopted this plan. She
took the house; Bridget Greggs, the nurse of her infancy, became her
servant, and soon to that house, stealthily in the shades of evening,
glided Jasper Losely. She could not struggle against his influence--had
not the heart to refuse his visits--he was so poor--in such scrapes--and
professed himself to be so unhappy. There now became some one else
to toil for, besides the little brother and sister. But what were
Arabella’s gains to a man who already gambled? New afflictions smote
her. A contagious fever broke out in the neighborhood; her little
brother caught it; her little sister sickened the next day; in less
than a week two small coffins were borne from her door by the Black
Horses--borne to that plot of sunny turf in the pretty suburban
cemetery, bought with the last earnings made for the little ones by the
mother-like sister:--Motherless lone survivor! what! no friend on earth,
no soother but that direful Jasper! Alas! the truly dangerous Venus is
not that Erycina round whom circle Jest and Laughter. Sorrow, and that
sense of solitude which makes us welcome a footstep as a child left in
the haunting dark welcomes the entrance of light, weaken the outworks
of female virtue more than all the vain levities of mirth, or the
flatteries which follow the path of Beauty through the crowd. Alas, and
alas! let the tale hurry on!
Jasper Losely has still more solemnly sworn to marry his adored
Arabella. But when? When they are rich enough. She feels as if
her spirit was gone--as if she could work no more. She was no weak
commonplace girl, whom love can console for shame. She had been rigidly
brought up; her sense of female rectitude was keen; her remorse was
noiseless, but it was stern. Harassments of a more vulgar nature beset
her: she had forestalled her sources of income; she had contracted debts
for Jasper’s sake;--in vain: her purse was emptied, yet his no fuller.
His creditors pressed him; he told her that he must hide. One winter’s
day he thus departed; she saw him no more for a year. She heard, a few
days after he left her, of his father’s crime and committal. Jasper was
sent abroad by his maternal uncle, at his father’s prayer; sent to a
commercial house in France, in which the uncle obtained him a situation.
In fact, the young man had been despatched to France under another name,
in order to save him from the obloquy which his father had brought upon
his own.
Soon came William Losely’s trial and sentence. Arabella felt the
disgrace acutely--felt how it would affect the audacious insolent
Jasper; did not wonder that he forbore to write to her. She conceived
him bowed by shame, but she was buoyed up by her conviction that they
should meet again. For good or for ill, she held herself bound to him
for life. But meanwhile the debts she had incurred on his account came
upon her. She was forced to dispose of her house; and at this time Mrs.
Lyndsay, looking out for some first-rate superior governess for Matilda
Darrell, was urged by all means to try and secure for that post Arabella
Fossett. The highest testimonials from the school at which she had been
reared, from the most eminent professional masters, from the families
at which she had recently taught, being all brought to bear upon Mr.
Darrell, he authorised Mrs. Lyndsay to propose such a salary as could
not fail to secure a teacher of such rare qualifications. And thus
Arabella became governess to Miss Darrell.
There is a kind of young lady of whom her nearest relations will say, “I
can’t make that girl out.” Matilda Darrell was that kind of young lady.
She talked very little; she moved very noiselessly; she seemed to regard
herself as a secret which she had solemnly sworn not to let out. She
had been steeped in slyness from her early infancy by a sly mother.
Mrs. Darrell was a woman who had always something to conceal. There was
always some note to be thrust out of sight; some visit not to be spoken
of; something or other which Matilda was not on any account to mention
to Papa.
When Mrs. Darrell died, Matilda was still a child, but she still
continued to view her father as a person against whom prudence demanded
her to be constantly on her guard. It was not that she was exactly
afraid of him--he was very gentle to her, as he was to all children; but
his loyal nature was antipathetic to hers. She had no sympathy with him.
How confide her thoughts to him? She had an instinctive knowledge that
those thoughts were not such as could harmonise with his. Yet, though
taciturn, uncaressing, undemonstrative, she appeared mild and docile.
Her reserve was ascribed to constitutional timidity. Timid to a degree
she usually seemed; yet, when you thought you had solved the enigma, she
said or did something so coolly determined, that you were forced again
to exclaim, “I can’t make that girl out!” She was not quick at her
lessons. You had settled in your mind that she was dull, when, by a
chance remark, you were startled to find that she was very sharp; keenly
observant, when you had fancied her fast asleep. She had seemed, since
her mother’s death, more fond of Mrs. Lyndsay and Caroline than of any
other human beings--always appeared sullen or out of spirits when
they were absent; yet she confided to them no more than she did to
her father. You would suppose from this description that Matilda
could inspire no liking in those with whom she lived. Not so; her very
secretiveness had a sort of attraction--a puzzle always creates some
interest. Then her face, though neither handsome nor pretty, had in it
a treacherous softness--a subdued, depressed expression. A kind observer
could not but say with an indulgent pity; “There must be a good deal of
heart in that girl, if one could but--make her out.”
She appeared to take at once to Arabella, more than she had taken to
Mrs. Lyndsay, or even to Caroline, with whom she had been brought up as
a sister, but who, then joyous and quick and innocently fearless--with
her soul in her eyes and her heart on her lips--had no charm for
Matilda, because there she saw no secret to penetrate, and her she had
no object in deceiving.
But this stranger, of accomplishments so rare, of character so decided,
with a settled gloom on her lip, a gathered care on her brow--there was
some one to study, and some one with whom she felt a sympathy; for she
detected at once that Arabella was also a secret.
At first, Arabella, absorbed in her own reflections, gave to Matilda
but the mechanical attention which a professional teacher bestows on an
ordinary pupil. But an interest in Matilda sprung up in her breast, in
proportion as she conceived a venerating gratitude for Darrell. He was
aware of the pomp and circumstance which had surrounded her earlier
years; he respected the creditable energy with which she had devoted
her talents to the support of the young children thrown upon her care;
compassionated her bereavement of those little fellow-orphans for
whom toil had been rendered sweet; and he strove, by a kindness of
forethought and a delicacy of attention, which were the more prized in
a man so eminent and so preoccupied, to make her forget that she was a
salaried teacher--to place her saliently, and as a matter of course, in
the position of a gentlewoman, guest, and friend. Recognising in her
a certain vigour and force of intellect apart from her mere
accomplishments, he would flatter her scholastic pride, by referring to
her memory in some question of reading, or consulting her judgment
on some point of critical taste. She, in return, was touched by his
chivalrous kindness to the depth of a nature that, though already
seriously injured by its unhappy contact with a soul like Jasper’s,
retained that capacity of gratitude, the loss of which is humanity’s
last deprivation. Nor this alone: Arabella was startled by the intellect
and character of Darrell into that kind of homage which a woman, who has
hitherto met but her own intellectual inferiors, renders to the first
distinguished personage in whom she recognises, half with humility and
half with awe, an understanding and a culture to which her own reason is
but the flimsy glass-house, and her own knowledge but the forced exotic.
Arabella, thus roused from her first listlessness, sought to requite
Darrell’s kindness by exerting every energy to render his insipid
daughter an accomplished woman. So far as mere ornamental education
extends, the teacher was more successful than, with all her experience,
her skill, and her zeal, she had presumed to anticipate. Matilda,
without ear, or taste, or love for music, became a very fair mechanical
musician. Without one artistic predisposition, she achieved the science
of perspective--she attained even to the mixture of colours--she filled
a portfolio with drawings which no young lady need have been ashamed to
see circling round a drawing-room. She carried Matilda’s thin mind to
the farthest bound it could have reached without snapping, through
an elegant range of selected histories and harmless feminine
classics--through Gallic dialogues--through Tuscan themes--through
Teuton verbs--yea, across the invaded bounds of astonished Science into
the Elementary Ologies. And all this being done, Matilda Darrell was
exactly the same creature that she was before. In all that related to
character, to inclinations, to heart, even that consummate teacher could
give no intelligible answer, when Mrs. Lyndsay in her softest accents
(and no accents ever were softer) sighed: “Poor dear Matilda! can you
make her out, Miss Fossett?” Miss Fossett could not make her out. But,
after the most attentive study, Miss Fossett had inly decided that there
was nothing to make out--that, like many other very nice girls, Matilda
Darrell was a harmless nullity, what you call “a Miss” white deal or
willow, to which Miss Fossett had done all in the way of increasing
its value as ornamental furniture, when she had veneered it over with
rosewood or satinwood, enriched its edges with ormolu, and strewed its
surface with nicknacks and albums. But Arabella firmly believed Matilda
Darrell to be a quiet, honest, good sort of “Miss,” on the whole--very
fond of her, Arabella. The teacher had been several months in Darrell’s
family, when Caroline Lyndsay, who had been almost domesticated with
Matilda (sharing the lessons bestowed on the latter, whether by Miss
Fossett or visiting masters), was taken away by Mrs. Lyndsay on a visit
to the old Marchioness of Montfort. Matilda, who was to come out the
next year, was thus almost exclusively with Arabella, who redoubled all
her pains to veneer the white deal, and protect with ormolu its feeble
edges--so that, when it “came out,” all should admire that thoroughly
fashionable piece of furniture. It was the habit of Miss Fossett and her
pupil to take a morning walk in the quiet retreats of the Green
Park; and one morning, as they were thus strolling, nursery-maids and
children, and elderly folks who were ordered to take early exercises,
undulating round their unsuspecting way,--suddenly, right upon their
path (unlooked--for as the wolf that startled Horace in the Sabine
wood, but infinitely more deadly than that runaway animal), came Jasper
Losely! Arabella uttered a faint scream. She could not resist--had no
thought of resisting--the impulse to bound forward--lay her hand on his
arm. She was too agitated to perceive whether his predominant feeling
was surprise or rapture. A few hurried words were exchanged, while
Matilda Darrell gave one sidelong glance towards the handsome stranger,
and walked quietly by them. On his part, Jasper said that he had
just returned to London--that he had abandoned for ever all idea of
a commercial life--that his father’s misfortune (he gave that gentle
appellation to the incident of penal transportation) had severed him
from all former friends, ties, habits--that he had dropped the name of
Losely for ever--entreated Arabella not to betray it--his name now was
Hammond--his “prospects,” he said, “fairer than they had ever been.”
Under the name of Hammond, as an independent gentleman, he had made
friends more powerful than he could ever have made under the name of
Losely as a city clerk. He blushed to think he had ever been a city
clerk. No doubt he should get into some Government office; and then, oh
then, with assured income and a certainty to rise, he might claim the
longed-for hand of the “best of creatures.”
On Arabella’s part, she hastily explained her present position. She
was governess to Miss Darrell--that was Miss Darrell. Arabella must not
leave her walking on by herself--she would write to him. Addresses
were exchanged--Jasper gave a very neat card--“Mr. Hammond, No.--, Duke
Street, St. James’s.”
Arabella, with a beating heart, hastened to join her friend. At the
rapid glance she had taken of her perfidious lover, she thought him, if
possible, improved. His dress, always studied, was more to the fashion
of polished society, more simply correct--his air more decided.
Altogether he looked prosperous, and his manner had never been more
seductive, in its mixture of easy self-confidence and hypocritical
coaxing. In fact, Jasper had not been long in the French commercial
house--to which he had been sent out of the way while his father’s trial
was proceeding and the shame of it fresh--before certain licenses of
conduct had resulted in his dismissal. But, meanwhile, he had made many
friends amongst young men of his own age--those loose wild viveurs who,
without doing anything the law can punish as dishonest, contrive for
a few fast years to live very showily on their wits. In that strange
social fermentation which still prevails in a country where an
aristocracy of birth, exceedingly impoverished, and exceedingly numerous
so far as the right to prefix a De to the name, or to stamp a coronet
on the card, can constitute an aristocrat--is diffused amongst
an ambitious, adventurous, restless, and not inelegant young
democracy--each cemented with the other by that fiction of law called
egalite; in that yet unsettled and struggling society in which so much
of the old has been irretrievably destroyed, and so little of the
new has been solidly constructed--there are much greater varieties,
infinitely more subtle grades and distinctions, in the region of life
which lies between respectability and disgrace, than can be found in a
country like ours. The French novels and dramas may apply less a mirror
than a magnifying-glass to the beings that move through that region. But
still those French novels and dramas do not unfaithfully represent
the classifications of which they exaggerate the types. Those
strange combinations, into one tableau, of students and grisettes;
opera-dancers, authors, viscounts, swindlers, romantic Lorettes,
gamblers on the Bourse, whose pedigree dates from the Crusades;
impostors, taking titles from villages in which their grandsires might
have been saddlers--and if detected, the detection but a matter of
laugh; delicate women living like lawless men; men making trade out
of love, like dissolute women, yet with point of honour so nice, that,
doubt their truth or their courage, and--piff! you are in Charon’s
boat,--humanity in every civilised land may present single specimens,
more or less, answering to each thus described. But where, save in
France, find them all, if not precisely in the same salons, yet so
crossing each other to and fro as to constitute a social phase, and give
colour to a literature of unquestionable genius? And where, over orgies
so miscellaneously Berecynthian, an atmosphere so elegantly Horatian?
And where can coarseness so vanish into polished expression as in that
diamond-like language--all terseness and sparkle--which, as friendly
to Wit in its airiest prose, as hostile to Passion in its torrent of
cloud-wrack of poetry, seems invented by the Grace out of spite to the
Muse?
Into circles such as those of which the dim outline is here so
imperfectly sketched, Jasper Losely niched himself, as _le bel Anglais_.
(Pleasant representative of the English nation!) Not that those circles
are to have the sole credit of his corruption. No! Justice is justice!
Stand we up for our native land! _Le bel Anglais_ entered those circles
a much greater knave than most of those whom he found there. But
there, at least, he learned to set a yet higher value on his youth, and
strength, and comeliness--on his readiness of resource--on the reckless
audacity that browbeat timid and some even valiant men--on the six
feet one of faultless symmetry that captivated foolish, and some even
sensible women. Gaming was, however, his vice by predilection. A month
before Arabella met him, he had had a rare run of luck. On the strength
of it he had resolved to return to London, and (wholly oblivious of the
best of creatures till she had thus startled him) hunt out and swoop off
with an heiress. Three French friends accompanied him. Each had the same
object. Each believed that London swarmed with heiresses. They were all
three fine-looking men. One was a Count,--at least he said so. But proud
of his rank?--not a bit of it: all for liberty (no man more likely to
lose it)--all for fraternity (no man you would less love as a brother).
And as for _egalite!_--the son of a shoemaker who was _homme de
lettres_, and wrote in a journal, inserted a jest on the Count’s
courtship. “All men are equal before the pistol,” said the Count; and
knowing that in that respect he was equal to most, having practised at
_poupees_ from the age of fourteen, he called out the son of Crispin and
shot him through the lungs. Another of Jasper’s travelling friends was
an _enfant die peuple_--boasted that he was a foundling. He made verses
of lugubrious strain, and taught Jasper how to shuffle at whist. The
third, like Jasper, had been designed for trade; and, like Jasper,
he had a soul above it. In politics he was a Communist--in talk
Philanthropist. He was the cleverest man of them all, and is now at the
galleys. The fate of his two compatriots--more obscure it is not my duty
to discover. In that peculiar walk of life Jasper is as much as I can
possibly manage.
It need not be said that Jasper carefully abstained from reminding his
old city friends of his existence. It was his object and his hope to
drop all identity with that son of a convict who had been sent out of
the way to escape humiliation. In this resolve he was the more confirmed
because he had no old city friends out of whom anything could be well
got. His poor uncle, who alone of his relations in England had been
privy to his change of name, was dead; his end hastened by grief for
William Losely’s disgrace, and the bad reports he had received from
France of the conduct of William Losely’s son. That uncle had left, in
circumstances too straitened to admit the waste of a shilling, a widow
of very rigid opinions; who, if ever by some miraculous turn in the
wheel of fortune she could have become rich enough to slay a fatted
calf, would never have given the shin-bone of it to a prodigal like
Jasper, even had he been her own penitent son, instead of a graceless
step-nephew. Therefore, as all civilisation proceeds westward, Jasper
turned his face from the east; and had no more idea of recrossing Temple
Bar in search of fortune, friends, or kindred, than a modern Welshman
would dream of a pilgrimage to Asian shores to re-embrace those distant
relatives whom Hu Gadarn left behind him countless centuries ago, when
that mythical chief conducted his faithful Cymrians over the Hazy Sea to
this happy island of Honey.
[Mel Ynnys--Isle of Honey. One of the poetic names given to England
in the language of the ancient Britons.]
Two days after his rencontre with Arabella in the Green Park, the
_soi-disant_ Hammond having, in the interim, learned that Darrell was
immensely rich, and that Matilda was his only surviving child, did not
fail to find himself in the Green Park again--and again--and again!
Arabella, of course, felt how wrong it was to allow him to accost her,
and walk by one side of her while Miss Darrell was on the other. But she
felt, also, as if it would be much more wrong to slip out and meet him
alone. Not for worlds would she again have placed herself in such peril.
To refuse to meet him at all?--she had not strength enough for that! Her
joy at seeing him was so immense. And nothing could be more respectful
than Jasper’s manner and conversation. Whatever of warmer and more
impassioned sentiment was exchanged between them passed in notes. Jasper
had suggested to Arabella to represent him to Matilda as some near
relation. But Arabella refused all such disguise. Her sole claim to
self-respect was in considering him solemnly engaged to her--the man she
was to marry.
And, after the second time they thus met, she said to Matilda, who had
not questioned her by a word-by a look: “I was to be married to that
gentleman before my father died; we are to be married as soon as we have
something to live upon.”
Matilda made some commonplace but kindly rejoinder. And thus she became
raised into Arabella’s confidence, so far as that confidence could be
given, without betraying Jasper’s real name or one darker memory in
herself. Luxury, indeed, it was to Arabella to find, at last, some one
to whom she could speak of that betrothal in which her whole future was
invested--of that affection which was her heart’s sheet-anchor--of that
home, humble it might be and far off, but to which Time rarely fails
to bring the Two, if never weary of the trust to become as One. Talking
thus, Arabella forgot the relationship of pupil and teacher; it was as
woman to woman--girl to girl--friend to friend. Matilda seemed touched
by the confidence--flattered to possess at last another’s secret.
Arabella was a little chafed that she did not seem to admire Jasper as
much as Arabella thought the whole world must admire. Matilda excused
herself. “She had scarcely noticed Mr. Hammond. Yes: she had no doubt
he would be considered handsome; but she owned, though it might be bad
taste, that she preferred a pale complexion, with auburn hair;” and then
she sighed and looked away, as if she had, in the course of her secret
life, encountered some fatal pale complexion, with never-to-be-forgotten
auburn hair. Not a word was said by either Matilda or Arabella as to
concealing from Mr. Darrell these meetings with Mr. Hammond. Perhaps
Arabella could not stoop to ask that secrecy; but there was no necessity
to ask; Matilda was always too rejoiced to have something to conceal.
Now, in these interviews, Jasper scarcely ever addressed himself to
Matilda; not twenty spoken words could have passed between them; yet,
in the very third interview, Matilda’s sly fingers had closed on a sly
note. And from that day, in each interview, Arabella walking in the
centre, Jasper on one side, Matilda the other--behind Arabella’s
back-passed the sly fingers and the sly notes, which Matilda received
and answered. Not more than twelve or fourteen times was even this
interchange effected. Darrell was about to move to Fawley. All such
meetings would be now suspended. Two or three mornings before that
fixed for leaving London, Matilda’s room was found vacant. She was gone.
Arabella was the first to discover her flight, the first to learn its
cause. Matilda had left on her writing-table a letter for Miss
Fossett. It was very short, very quietly expressed, and it rested her
justification on a note from Jasper, which she enclosed--a note in which
that gallant hero, ridiculing the idea that he could ever have been in
love with Arabella, declared that he would destroy himself if Matilda
refused to fly. She need not fear such angelic confidence in him. No!
Even
Had he a heart for falsehood framed,
He ne’er could injure her.”
Stifling each noisier cry--but panting--gasping--literally half out of
her mind, Arabella rushed into Darrell’s study. He, unsuspecting man,
calmly bending over his dull books, was startled by her apparition. Few
minutes sufficed to tell him all that it concerned him to learn. Few
brief questions, few passionate answers, brought him to the very worst.
Who, and what, was this Mr. Hammond? Heaven of heavens! the son of
William Losely--of a transported felon!
Arabella exulted in a reply which gave her a moment’s triumph over
the rival who had filched from her such a prize. Roused from his first
misery and sense of abasement in this discovery, Darrell’s wrath was
naturally poured, not on the fugitive child, but on the frontless woman,
who, buoyed up by her own rage and sense of wrong, faced him, and did
not cower. She, the faithless governess, had presented to her pupil this
convict’s son in another name; she owned it--she had trepanned into the
snares of so vile a fortune-hunter an ignorant child: she might feign
amaze--act remorse--she must have been the man’s accomplice. Stung,
amidst all the bewilderment of her anguish, by this charge, which, at
least, she did not deserve, Arabella tore from her bosom Jasper’s recent
letters to herself--letters all devotion and passion--placed them
before Darrell, and bade him read. Nothing thought she then of name and
fame--nothing but of her wrongs and of her woes. Compared to herself,
Matilda seemed the perfidious criminal--she the injured victim. Darrell
but glanced over the letters; they were signed “your loving husband.”
“What is this?” he exclaimed; “are you married to the man?”
“Yes,” cried Arabella, “in the eyes of Heaven!”
To Darrell’s penetration there was no mistaking the significance of
those words and that look; and his wrath redoubled. Anger in him, when
once roused, was terrible; he had small need of words to vent it.
His eye withered, his gesture appalled. Conscious but of one burning
firebrand in brain and heart--of a sense that youth, joy, and hope were
for ever gone, that the world could never be the same again--Arabella
left the house, her character lost, her talents useless, her very
means of existence stopped. Who henceforth would take her to teach? Who
henceforth place their children under her charge?
She shrank into a gloomy lodging--she--shut herself up alone with her
despair. Strange though it may seem, her anger against Jasper was slight
as compared with the in tensity of her hate to Matilda. And stranger
still it may seem, that as her thoughts recovered from their first
chaos, she felt more embittered against the world, more crushed by a
sense of shame, and yet galled by a no less keen sense of injustice, in
recalling the scorn with which Darrell had rejected all excuse for
her conduct in the misery it had occasioned her, than she did by the
consciousness of her own lamentable errors. As in Darrell’s esteem there
was something that, to those who could appreciate it, seemed invaluable,
so in his contempt to those who had cherished that esteem there was a
weight of ignominy, as if a judge had pronounced a sentence that outlaws
the rest of life.
Arabella had not much left out of her munificent salary. What she had
hitherto laid by had passed to Jasper--defraying, perhaps, the very cost
of his flight with her treacherous rival. When her money was gone, she
pawned the poor relics of her innocent happy girlhood, which she had
been permitted to take from her father’s home, and had borne with her
wherever she went, like household gods, the prize-books, the lute, the
costly work-box, the very bird-cage, all which the reader will remember
to have seen in her later life, the books never opened--the lute broken,
the bird long, long, long vanished from the cage! Never did she think
she should redeem those pledges from that Golgotha, which takes, rarely
to give back, so many hallowed tokens of the Dreamland called “Better
Days,”--the trinkets worn at the first ball, the ring that was given
with the earliest love-vow--yea, even the very bells and coral that
pleased the infant in his dainty cradle, and the very Bible in which
the lips, that now bargain for sixpence more, read to some grey-haired
father on his bed of death!
Soon the sums thus miserably raised were as miserably doled away. With a
sullen apathy the woman contemplated famine. She would make no effort to
live--appeal to no relations, no friends. It was a kind of vengeance she
took on others, to let herself drift on to death. She had retreated from
lodging to lodging, each obscurer, more desolate than the other. Now,
she could no longer pay rent for the humblest room; now, she was told
to go forth--whither? She knew not--cared not--took her way towards
the River, as by that instinct which, when the mind is diseased, tends
towards self-destruction, scarce less involuntarily than it turns,
in health, towards self-preservation. Just as she passed under the
lamp-light at the foot of Westminster Bridge, a man looked at her, and
seized her arm. She raised her head with a chilly, melancholy scorn, as
if she had received an insult--as if she feared that the man knew the
stain upon her name, and dreamed, in his folly, that the dread of death
might cause her to sin again.
“Do you not know me?” said the man; “more strange that I should
recognise you! Dear, dear, and what a dress!--how you are altered! Poor
thing!”
At the words “poor thing” Arabella burst into tears; and in those tears
the heavy cloud on her brain seemed to melt away.
“I have been inquiring, seeking for you everywhere, Miss,” resumed
the man. “Surely, you know me now! Your poor aunt’s lawyer! She is no
more--died last week. She has left you all she had in the world; and a
very pretty income it is, too, for a single lady.”
Thus it was that we find Arabella installed in the dreary comforts
of Podden Place. “She exchanged,” she said, “in honour to her aunt’s
memory, her own name for that of Crane, which her aunt had borne--her
own mother’s maiden name.” She assumed, though still so young, that
title of “Mrs.” which spinsters, grown venerable, moodily adopt when
they desire all mankind to know that henceforth they relinquish the
vanities of tender misses--that, become mistress of themselves, they
defy and spit upon our worthless sex, which, whatever its repentance,
is warned that it repents in vain. Most of her aunt’s property was in
houses, in various districts of Bloombury. Arabella moved from one to
the other of these tenements, till she settled for good into the dullest
of all. To make it duller yet, by contrast with the past, the Golgotha
for once gave up its buried treasures--broken lute, birdless cage!
Somewhere about two years after Matilda’s death, Arabella happened to
be in the office of the agent who collected her house-rents, when a
well-dressed man entered, and, leaning over the counter, said: “There
is an advertisement in to-day’s Times about a lady who offers a home,
education, and so forth, to any little motherless girl; terms moderate,
as said lady loves children for their own sake. Advertiser refers to
your office for particulars--give them!”
The agent turned to his books; and Arabella turned towards the inquirer.
“For whose child do you want a home, Jasper Losely?”
Jasper started. “Arabella! Best of creatures! And can you deign to speak
to such a vil---”
“Hush--let us walk. Never mind the advertisement of a stranger. I may
find a home for a motherless child--a home that will cost you nothing.”
She drew him into the street. “But can this be the child of--of--Matilda
Darrell?”--
“Bella!” replied, in coaxing accents, that most execrable of
lady-killers, “can I trust you?--can you be my friend in spite of my
having been such a very sad dog? But money--what can one do without
money in this world? ‘Had I a heart for falsehood framed, it would ne’er
have injured you’--if I had not been so cursedly hard up! And indeed,
now, if you would but condescend to forgive and forget, perhaps some day
or other we may be Darby and Joan--only, you see, just at this moment
I am really not worthy of such a Joan. You know, of course, that I am a
widower--not inconsolable.”
“Yes; I read of Mrs. Hammond’s death in an old newspaper.”
“And you did not read of her baby’s death, too--some weeks afterwards?”’
“No; it is seldom that I see a newspaper. Is the infant dead?”
“Hum--you shall hear.” And Jasper entered into a recital, to which
Arabella listened with attentive interest. At the close she offered to
take, herself, the child for whom Jasper sought a home. She informed
him of her change of name and address. The wretch promised to call that
evening with the infant; but he sent the infant, and did not call.
Nor did he present himself again to her eyes, until, several years
afterwards, those eyes so luridly welcomed him to Podden Place. But
though he did not even condescend to write to her in the mean while, it
is probable that Arabella contrived to learn more of his habits and
mode of life at Paris than she intimated when they once more met face to
face.
And now the reader knows more than Alban Morley, or Guy Darrell, perhaps
ever will know, of the grim woman in iron-grey,