Charlotte's Inheritance Part 59

"You won't refuse to do something for me, George," he whined piteously.

"I will do nothing for you. Do you hear that, my man? Nothing! You taught me that blood is not thicker than water twelve years ago, when you married Tom Halliday's widow, and drew your purse-strings, after flinging me a beggarly hundred as you'd throw a bone to a dog. You made me understand that was all I should ever get out of your brotherly love, or your fear of my telling the world what I knew. You gave me a dinner now and then, because it suited you to keep your eye upon me; and you had generally some piece of dirty work on hand that made the advice of a sharp pract.i.tioner like me uncommonly useful to you. I don't believe that you ever gave me so much as a dinner that you didn't take payment for in meal or in malt. Don't come howling here now, trying to persuade me that blood is thicker than water, or that brotherhood means anything more than the accident of birth. And now I've said all I have to say; and the sooner you make yourself scarce, the better for both of us."

"George!" cried the miserable suppliant, clasping his bony hands convulsively, and whimpering as he had whimpered when he begged his bread in the streets of New York, "you can't mean to turn me out of doors on such a night. Look at me. It was as much as I could do to crawl to this room. I have walked every step of the way from Liverpool; my wretched limbs have been frost-bitten, and ulcered, and bruised, and racked with rheumatism, and bent double with cramp. I came over in an emigrant vessel, with a herd of miserable creatures who had tried their luck on the other side of the Atlantic, and had failed, like me, and were coming home to their native workhouses. You don't know what some of your emigrant ships are, perhaps. People talk about the Black Hole of Calcutta, and the Middle Pa.s.sage; but let them try the cabin of an emigrant vessel, and they'll have a pretty fair idea of what human beings have to suffer when Poverty drives the ship. I landed in Liverpool with half-a-dollar in my pocket, and I've had neither decent food nor decent shelter since I landed. Give me some hole to lie in, George, till you can get me an order for the nearest hospital. It's a toss-up whether I ever come out of it."

"Do you think I'd sleep under the roof that sheltered you?" cried George.

"Why not?"

"Why not! Because I'm afraid of you. Because I'd as soon have a cobra for my companion, or a wolf for my bedfellow. I know you. I've seen what you can do, and how you can do it. And if you could do those things when the only pressure upon you was one that you could have cast off by going through the _Gazette_, what would you _not_ do now when you are as desperate as a famished wolf, and governed by no better law than that which governs a wolf--the law of self-preservation? Am I to trust a tiger because he tells me he is hungry? No, Phil Sheldon; neither will I trust you."

"You will give me some money--enough to keep me alive for a week or two."

"Not one sixpence. I'll establish no precedent; I'll acknowledge no tie between us. You'd better march. I don't want to send for a policeman; but if you won't go quietly, you must do the other thing."

"You mean that?"

"Most emphatically yes."

"I didn't think it was in you to be so hard upon me," faltered; the wretch in that faint hoa.r.s.e voice which had grown fainter and hoa.r.s.er during this interview.

"Did you think that I would trust you?" cried George. "Trust _you_! You call me hard because I won't give you a corner to lie in. And if I did, you would creep out of your corner to poison me, or cut my throat. You would crawl into my room in the dead of the night and put a pillow over my face, and kneel upon it till you'd done the trick for me; and then you'd walk off with as much as you could carry, and begin the same kind of work over again with some one else. I tell you, Mr. Phil Sheldon, I will hold no intercourse with you. You've escaped hanging, but there's something that's worse than hanging, to my mind, and that is the state of a man whom n.o.body will trust. You've come to that; and if you had a spark of gentlemanly feeling, you'd have bought two-pennyworth of rope and hung yourself rather than come cringing to me."

"Suppose I don't cringe," said the outcast, dropping the fawning tone of the mendicant for the threatening ferocity of the social wolf; "you'd better give me a trifle to keep body and soul together for the next few weeks. I'm a desperate man, George! You and I are alone up here. You are pretty sure to have ready money about you. And there's your watch; that's worth something. I didn't come here to go away empty-handed. AND I WON'T!"

He sprang to his feet, and in the next moment the lawyer heard the sharp clicking noise made by the opening of a clasp-knife.

"O," cried he, "that's what you want, is it!"

He bent over his desk, with his eyes fixed on those other evil eyes that still retained some likeness to his own, and with his left arm raised in a boxer's defensive att.i.tude, to guard his head, while his right hand groped for something in a drawer. It was a moment's work. Philip had seized that uplifted left arm, and was hanging on to it like a cat, with his knife between his teeth, when George clapped the muzzle of a revolver to his brow.

"There are plenty of wild beasts in London besides you," he said, "and I am not such a fool as to be without the means of settling a chance visitor of your sort. Drop your knife, and march."

The outcast dropped his knife submissively. He was too weak for anything more than a spasmodic violence.

"Take your pistol away from my head," he whined.

"Certainly, when you are outside my door."

"You might give me a handful of silver, George. I haven't a week's life left in me."

"All the better for society if you hadn't an hour's life in you. Be off.

I'm tired of holding this revolver to your head, and I don't mean to let it go till you're off my premises."

Philip saw that there was no hope. Food and shelter were all he had hoped for; but even these blessings were not for him. He backed out of the office, closely followed by George, holding the muzzle of the revolver within an inch or so of the fraternal brains. Upon the threshold only did he pause.

"Tell me one thing," he said. "You won't give me sixpence to buy a loaf of bread or a gla.s.s of gin. Give me one sc.r.a.p of comfort. It need cost you nothing. Tell me something bad of Valentine Hawkehurst: that he's gone to the dogs, or drowned himself; that his wife has run away from him, or his house been burned to the ground. Tell me that he's had a taste of my luck; and that Ann Woolper has died in a workhouse. It will be as good as meat and drink to me, and it will cost you nothing."

"If I told you anything of the kind, I should tell you a lie; Valentine Hawkehurst is doing uncommonly well, and has got one of the prettiest little boxes between Wimbledon and Kingston. Ann Woolper lives with them, and is in better feather than she ever was in your time."

With this, Mr. Sheldon of Gray's Inn pushed his brother out on to the staircase, and shut his door. Philip sat upon the stairs, and drew his rags together a little, and rubbed his wretched limbs, while the bolts and chains whereby the lawyer defended his citadel clanked close behind him.

"I wonder whether he'll pay Hawkehurst a visit," thought George, as he bolted his door; and he had a kind of grim satisfaction in the idea that Valentine's Christmas peace might be disturbed by the advent of that grisly visitor.

CHAPTER X.

"ACCORDING TO THEIR DEEDS."

"Between Wimbledon and Kingston," muttered the tramp. "If I can drag myself as far as that, I'll go there this night."

He went down stairs and out into the pitiless cold and snow, and made his way down Fetter Lane, and across Blackfriars Bridge to the Surrey side of the water, stopping to beg here and there.

Upon this snowy Christmas night there were plenty of people abroad; and amongst them Philip Sheldon found pitying matrons, who explored the depths of their capacious pockets to find him a halfpenny, and good-natured young men, who flung the "copper" he besought with piteous professional whine.

When he had collected the price of a gla.s.s of gin, he went into the first public-house he came to, and spent his money. He was too ill to stay the cravings of his stomach with substantial food. Gin gave him temporary warmth and temporary strength, and enabled him to push on vigorously for a little while; and then came dreary periods of faintness and exhaustion, in which every step was sheer pain and weariness.

Something of his old self, some remnant of that hard strength of purpose which had once characterized him, remained with him still, utterly fallen and brutalized as he was. As a savage creature of the jungle might pursue a given course, pushing always onward to that camp or village whence the scent of human flesh and blood was wafted to his quivering nostrils, so Philip Sheldon pushed on towards the dwelling-place of that man and that woman whom of all creatures upon this earth he most savagely hated.

"There's nothing left for me but to turn housebreaker," he said to himself; "and the first house I'll try my hand upon shall be Valentine Hawkehurst's."

The idea of violence in such a creature was the idea of a madman. Weapon he had none, nor the physical strength that would have enabled him to grapple with a boy of twelve years old. Half intoxicated with the spirits he had consumed on his long tramp, half delirious with fever, he had a vague notion that he could make an entrance into some ill-defended house under cover of night, and steal something that should procure him food and shelter. And let the house be Valentine Hawkehurst's, the man who had baffled his plans and crushed him!

If blood must be shed, let the blood be his! Never was man better primed for murder than the man who tramped across Wimbledon Common at eleven o'clock this night, with the snow drifting against his face, and his limbs shaken every now and then by an ague-fit.

Happily for the interests of society, his hand lacked the power to execute that iniquity which his heart willed.

He reached a little wayside inn near the Robin Hood gate of Richmond Park, just as the shutters were being closed, and asked a man if any one of the name of Hawkehurst lived in that neighbourhood.

"What do _you_ want with Mr. Hawkehurst?" asked the man, contemptuously.

"I've got a letter for him."

"Have you? A begging letter, I should think, from the look of you."

"No; it's a business letter. You'd better show me where he lives, if he's a customer of yours. The business is particular."

"Is it? You're a queer kind of messenger to trust with particular business. Mr. Hawkehurst's house is the third you come to on the opposite side of the way. But I don't suppose you'll find anybody up as late as this. Their lights are out by eleven, in a general way."

The third house on the opposite side of the road was half a mile distant from the little run. Lights shone bright in the lower windows as the tramp dragged his tired limbs to the stout oaken gate. The gate was fastened only by a latch, and offered no resistance to the intruder. He crept with stealthy footsteps along the smooth gravel walk, sheltered by dark laurels, on which the light flashed cheerily from those bright windows. Sounds of laughter and of music pealed out upon the wintry air.

Shadows flitted across the blinds of the broad bay windows. Philip Sheldon crept into a sheltered nook beside the rustic porch, and sank down exhausted in the shadow of the laurels.

He sat there in a kind of stupor. He had lost the power of thought, somehow, on that dreary journey. It seemed almost as if he had left some portion of his being out yonder in the cold and darkness. He had difficulty in remembering why he had come to this place, and what that deed was which he meant to do.

"Hawkehurst," he muttered to himself--"Hawkehurst, the man who leagued against me with Jedd! I swore to be even with him if ever I found the opportunity--if ever! And George refused me a few shillings; my brother, my only brother, refused to stand my friend!"

Hawkehurst and George--big only brother--the images of these two men floated confusedly in his brain: he could scarcely separate them.