OUR OLD FRIEND THE POCKET-CANNIBAL EVINCES UNEXPECTED PATRIOTISM AND
PHILOSOPHICAL MODERATION, CONTENTED WITH A STEAK OFF HIS OWN
SUCCULENT FRIEND IN THE AIRS OF HIS OWN NATIVE SKY.
Colonel Morley had a second interview with Mr. Poole. It needed not
Alban’s knowledge of the world to discover that Poole was no partial
friend to Jasper Losely; that, for some reason or other, Poole was no
less anxious than the Colonel to get that formidable client, whose cause
he so warmly advocated, pensioned and packed off into the region most
remote from Great Britain in which a spirit hitherto so restless might
consent to settle. And although Mr. Poole had evidently taken offence
at Mr. Darrell’s discourteous rebuff of his amiable intentions, yet
no grudge against Darrell furnished a motive for conduct equal to his
Christian desire that Darrell’s peace should be purchased by Losely’s
perpetual exile. Accordingly, Colonel Morley took leave, with a
well-placed confidence in Poole’s determination to do all in his power
to induce Jasper to listen to reason. The Colonel had hoped to learn
something from Poole of the elder Losely’s present residence and
resources. Poole, as we know, could give him there no information. The
Colonel also failed to ascertain any particulars relative to that
female pretender on whose behalf Jasper founded his principal claim to
Darrell’s aid. And so great was Poole’s embarrassment in reply to all
questions on that score--Where was the young person? With whom had she
lived? What was she like? Could the Colonel see her, and hear her own
tale?--that Alban entertained a strong suspicion that no such girl was
in existence; that she was a pure fiction and myth; or that, if Jasper
were compelled to produce some petticoated fair, she would be an artful
baggage hired for the occasion.
Poole waited Jasper’s next visit with impatience and sanguine delight.
He had not a doubt that the ruffian would cheerfully consent to allow
that, on further inquiry, he found he had been deceived in his belief of
Sophy’s parentage, and that there was nothing in England so peculiarly
sacred to his heart, but what he might consent to breathe the freer air
of Columbian skies, or even to share the shepherd’s harmless life
amidst the pastures of auriferous Australia! But, to Poole’s ineffable
consternation, Jasper declared sullenly that he would not consent to
expatriate himself merely for the sake of living.
“I am not so young as I was,” said the bravo; “I don’t speak of years,
but feeling. I have not the same energy; once I had high spirits--they
are broken; once I had hope--I have none: I am not up to exertion; I
have got into lazy habits. To go into new scenes, form new plans, live
in a horrid raw new world, everybody round me bustling and pushing--No!
that may suit your thin dapper light Hop-o’-my-thumbs! Look at me! See
how I have increased in weight the last five years--all solid bone and
muscle. I defy any four draymen to move me an inch if I am not in the
mind to it; and to be blown off to the antipodes as if I were the down
of a pestilent thistle, I am not in the mind for that, Dolly Poole!”
“Hum!” said Poole, trying to smile. “This is funny talk. You always
were a funny fellow. But I am quite sure, from Colonel Morley’s decided
manner, that you can get nothing from Darrell if you choose to remain in
England.”
“Well, when I have nothing else left, I may go to Darrell myself, and
have that matter out with him. At present I am not up to it. Dolly,
don’t bore!” And the bravo, opening a jaw strong enough for any
carnivorous animal, yawned--yawned much as a bored tiger does in the
face of a philosophical student of savage manners in the Zoological
Gardens.
“Bore!” said Poole, astounded and recoiling from that expanded jaw.
“But I should have thought no subject could bore you less than the
consideration of how you are to live?”
“Why, Dolly, I have learned to be easily contented, and you see at
present I live upon you.”
“Yes,” groaned Poole, “but that can’t go on for ever; and, besides, you
promised that you would leave me in peace as soon as I had got Darrell
to provide for you.”
“So I will. Zounds, sir, do you doubt my word? So I will. But I don’t
call exile ‘a provision’--Basta! I understand from you that Colonel
Morley offers to restore the niggardly L200 a year Darrell formerly
allowed to me, to be paid monthly or weekly, through some agent in Van
Diemen’s Land, or some such uncomfortable half-way house to Eternity,
that was not even in the Atlas when I studied geography at school. But
L200 a year is exactly my income in England, paid weekly too, by your
agreeable self, with whom it is a pleasure to talk over old times.
Therefore that proposal is out of the question. Tell Colonel Morley,
with my compliments, that if he will double the sum, and leave me to
spend it where I please, I scorn haggling, and say ‘done.’ And as to the
girl, since I cannot find her (which, on penalty of being threshed to
a mummy, you will take care not to let out), I would agree to leave Mr.
Darrell free to disown her. But are you such a dolt as not to see that I
put the ace of trumps on my adversary’s pitiful deuce, if I depose
that my own child is not my own child, when all I get for it is what
I equally get out of you, with my ace of trumps still in my hands?
Basta!--I say again Basta! It is evidently an object to Darrell to get
rid of all fear that Sophy should ever pounce upon him tooth and claw:
if he be so convinced that she is not his daughter’s child, why make
a point of my saying that I told him a fib, when I said she was?
Evidently, too, he is afraid of my power to harass and annoy him; or
why make it a point that I shall only nibble his cheese in a trap at the
world’s end, stared at by bushmen, and wombats, and rattlesnakes, and
alligators, and other American citizens or British settlers! L200 a
year, and my wife’s father a millionaire! The offer is an insult. Ponder
this: put on the screw; make them come to terms which I can do them the
honour to accept; meanwhile, I will trouble you for my four sovereigns.”
Poole had the chagrin to report to the Colonel, Jasper’s refusal of the
terms proposed, and to state the counter-proposition he was commissioned
to make. Alban was at first surprised, not conjecturing the means of
supply, in his native land, which Jasper had secured in the coffers
of Poole himself. On sounding the unhappy negotiator as to Jasper’s
reasons, he surmised, however, one part of the truth--viz., that Jasper
built hopes of better terms precisely on the fact that terms had been
offered to him at all; and this induced Alban almost to regret that he
had made any such overtures, and to believe that Darrell’s repugnance to
open the door of conciliation a single inch to so sturdy a mendicant was
more worldly-wise than Alban had originally supposed. Yet partly, even
for Darrell’s own security and peace, from that persuasion of his own
powers of management which a consummate man of the world is apt to
entertain, and partly from a strong curiosity to see the audacious soil
of that poor dear rascal Willy, and examine himself into the facts he
asserted, and the objects he aimed at, Alban bade Poole inform Jasper
that Colonel Morley would be quite willing to convince him, in a
personal interview, of the impossibility of acceding to the propositions
Jasper had made; and that he should be still more willing to see the
young person whom Jasper asserted to be the child of his marriage.
Jasper, after a moment’s moody deliberation, declined to meet Colonel
Morley, actuated to some extent in that refusal by the sensitive vanity
which once had given him delight, and now only gave him pain. Meet
thus--altered, fallen, imbruted--the fine gentleman whose calm eye
had quelled him in the widow’s drawing-room in his day of comparative
splendour--that in itself was distasteful to the degenerated bravo. But
he felt as if he should be at more disadvantage in point of argument
with a cool and wary representative of Darrell’s interests, than he
should be even with Darrell himself. And unable to produce the child
whom he arrogated the right to obtrude, he should be but exposed to a
fire of cross-questions without a shot in his own locker. Accordingly
he declined, point-blank, to see Colonel Morley; and declared that the
terms he himself had proposed were the lowest he would accept. “Tell
Colonel Morley, however, that if negotiations fail, I shall not fail,
sooner or later, to argue my view of the points in dispute with my kind
father-in-law, and in person.”
“Yes, hang it!” cried Poole, exasperated; “go and see Darrell yourself.
He is easily found.”
“Ay,” answered Jasper, with the hardest look of his downcast sidelong
eye--“Ay; some day or other it may come to that. I would rather not, if
possible. I might not keep my temper. It is not merely a matter of money
between us, if we two meet. There are affronts to efface. Banished his
house like a mangy dog--treated by a jackanapes lawyer like the dirt
in the kennel! The Loselys, I suspect, would have looked down on the
Darrells fifty years ago; and what if my father was born out of wedlock,
is the blood not the same? Does the breed dwindle down for want of a
gold ring and priest? Look at me. No; not what I now am; not even as
you saw me five years ago; but as I leapt into youth! Was I born to cast
sums and nib pens as a City clerk? Aha, my poor father, you were wrong
there! Blood will out! Mad devil, indeed, is a racer in a citizen’s gig!
Spavined, and wind-galled, and foundered--let the brute go at last to
the knockers; but by his eye, and his pluck, and his bone, the brute
shows the stock that he came from!”
Dolly opened his eyes and-blinked. Never in his gaudy days had Jasper
half so openly revealed what, perhaps, had been always a sore in his
pride; and his outburst now may possibly aid the reader to a subtler
comprehension of the arrogance, and levity, and egotism, which
accompanied his insensibility to honour, and had converted his very
claim to the blood of a gentleman into an excuse for a cynic’s disdain
of the very virtues for which a gentleman is most desirous of obtaining
credit. But by a very ordinary process in the human mind, as Jasper had
fallen lower and lower into the lees and dregs of fortune, his pride had
more prominently emerged from the group of the other and gaudier vices,
by which, in health and high spirits, it had been pushed aside and
outshone.
“Humph!” said Poole, after a pause. “If Darrell was as uncivil to you as
he was to me, I don’t wonder that you owe him a grudge. But even if you
do lose temper in seeing him, it might rather do good than not. You can
make yourself cursedly unpleasant if you choose it; and perhaps you will
have a better chance of getting your own terms if they see you can bite
as well as bark! Set at Darrell, and worry him; it is not fair to worry
nobody but me!”
“Dolly, don’t bluster! If I could stand at his door, or stop him in the
streets, with the girl in my hand, your advice would be judicious.
The world would not care for a row between a rich man and a penniless
son-in-law. But an interesting young lady, who calls him grandfather,
and falls at his knees,--he could not send her to hard labour; and if
he does not believe in her birth, let the thing but just get into the
newspapers, and there are plenty who will: and I should be in a very
different position for treating. ‘Tis just because, if I meet Darrell
again, I don’t wish that again it should be all bark and no bite, that
I postpone the interview. All your own laziness--exert yourself and find
the girl.”
“But I can’t find the girl, and you know it. And I tell you what, Mr.
Losely, Colonel Morley, who is a very shrewd man, does not believe in
the girl’s existence.”
“Does not he! I begin to doubt it myself. But, at all events, you can’t
doubt of mine, and I am grateful for yours; and since you have given me
the trouble of coming here to no purpose, I may as well take the next
week’s pay in advance--four sovereigns if you please, Dolly Poole.”