Old Friends Part 5

Was there ever, Belford, a stranger _amoris redintegratio_ than this must have been, when our Lydia heard the old love at the rarely shaken doors:

Me tuo longas pereunte noctes, Lydia, dormis?

Ah, how little hath Madam Sophia taken by despatching her lord to town, and all to break my head. My fellow, who carries this to thee, has just met Fellamar's man, and tells me that _Fellamar yesterday went down into Somerset_. What bodes this rare conjunction and disjunction of man and wife and of old affections? and hath "Thomas, a Foundling," too, gone the way of all flesh?

Thy LOVELACE.

No news of the dear fugitive! Ah, Belford, my conscience and my cousins call me a villain! Minxes all.

XI.

_From Miss Catherine Morland to Miss Eleanor Tilney_.

Miss Catherine Morland, of "Northanger Abbey," gives her account of a visit to Mr. Rochester, and of his governess's peculiar behaviour. Mrs.

Rochester (_nee_ Eyre) has no mention of this in her Memoirs.

Thornfield, Midnight

AT length, my dear Eleanor, the terrors on which you have so often rallied me are become _realities_, and your Catherine is in the midst of those circ.u.mstances to which we may, without exaggeration, give the epithet "horrible." I write, as I firmly believe, from the mansion of a maniac! On a visit to my Aunt Ingram, and carried by her to Thornfield, the seat of her wealthy neighbour, Mr. Rochester, how shall your Catherine's trembling pen unfold the mysteries by which she finds herself surrounded! No sooner had I entered this battlemented mansion than a cold chill struck through me, as with a sense of some brooding terror.

All, indeed, was elegance, all splendour! The arches were hung with Tyrian-dyed curtains. The ornaments on the pale Parian mantelpiece were of red Bohemian gla.s.s. Everywhere were crimson couches and sofas. The housekeeper, Mrs. Fairfax, pointed out to my notice some vases of fine purple spar, and on all sides were Turkey carpets and large mirrors.

Elegance of taste and fastidious research of ornament could do no more; but what is luxury to the mind ill at ease? or can a restless conscience be stilled by red Bohemian gla.s.s or pale Parian mantelpieces?

No, alas! too plainly was this conspicuous when, on entering the library, we found Mr. Rochester-alone! The envied possessor of all this opulence can be no happy man. He was seated with his head bent on his folded arms, and when he looked up a morose-almost a malignant-scowl blackened his features! Hastily beckoning to the governess, who entered with us, to follow him, he exclaimed, "Oh, hang it all!" in an accent of despair, and rushed from the chamber. We distinctly heard the doors clanging behind him as he flew! At dinner, the same hollow reserve; his conversation entirely confined to the governess (a Miss Eyre), whose position here your Catherine does not understand, and to whom I distinctly heard him observe that Miss Blanche Ingram was "an extensive armful."

The evening was spent in the lugubrious mockery of pretending to consult an old gipsy-woman who smoked a short black pipe, and was recognised _by all_ as Mr. Rochester in disguise. I was conducted by Miss Eyre to my bedroom-through a long pa.s.sage, narrow, low, and dim, with two rows of small black doors, all shut; 'twas like a corridor in some Blue Beard's castle. "Hurry, hurry, I hear the chains rattling," said this strange girl; whose position, my Eleanor, in this house causes your Catherine some natural perplexity. When we had reached my chamber, "Be silent, silent as death," said Miss Eyre, her finger on her lip and her meagre body convulsed with some mysterious emotion. "Speak not of what you hear, do not remember what you see!" and she was gone.

I undressed, after testing the walls for secret panels and looking for a.s.sa.s.sins in the usual place, but was haunted all the time by an unnatural sound of laughter. At length, groping my way to the bed, I jumped hastily in, and would have sought some suspension of anguish by creeping far underneath the clothes. But even this refuge was denied to your wretched Catherine! I could not stretch my limbs; for the sheet, my dear Eleanor, had been so arranged, in some manner which I do not understand, as to render this impossible. The laughter seemed to redouble. I heard a footstep at my door. I hurried on my frock and shawl and crept into the gallery. A strange dark figure was gliding in front of me, stooping at each door; and every time it stooped, came _a low gurgling noise_! Inspired by I know not what desperation of courage, I rushed on the figure and seized it by the neck. It was Miss Eyre, the governess, filling the boots of all the guests with water, which she carried in a can. When she saw me she gave a scream and threw herself against a door hung with a curtain of Tyrian dye. It yielded, and there poured into the pa.s.sage a blue cloud of smoke, with a strong and odious smell of cigars, into which (and to what company?) she vanished. I groped my way as well as I might to my own chamber: where each hour the clocks, as they struck, found an echo in the apprehensive heart of

THE ILL-FATED

CATHERINE MORLAND.

XII.

_From Montague Tigg_, _Esq._, _to Mr. David Crimp_.

The following letter needs no explanation for any who have studied the fortunes and admired the style of that celebrated and sanguine financier, Mr. Montague Tigg, in "Martin Chuzzlewit." His chance meeting with the romantic Comte de Monte Cristo naturally suggested to him the plans and hopes which he unfolds to an unsympathetic capitalist.

1542 Park Lane, May 27, 1848.

MY PREMIUM POMEGRANATE,-Oracles are not in it, David, with you, my pippin, as auspicious counsellors of ingenious indigence. The remark which you uttered lately, when refusing to make the trumpery advance of half-a-crown on a garment which had been near to the ill.u.s.trious person of my friend Chevy Slime, that remark was inspired. "Go to Holborn!" you said, and the longest-bearded of early prophets never uttered aught more pregnant with Destiny. I went to Holborn, to the humble establishment of the tuneful tonsor, Sweedle-pipe. All things come, the poet says, to him who knows how to wait-especially, I may add, to him who knows how to wait behind thin part.i.tions with a c.h.i.n.k in them. Ensconced in such an ambush-in fact, in the back shop-I bided my time, intending to solicit pecuniary accommodation from the barber, and studying human nature as developed in his customers.

There are odd customers in Kingsgate Street, Holborn-foreign gents and refugees. Such a cove my eagle eye detected in a man who entered the shop wearing a long black beard streaked with the snows of age, and who requested Poll to shave him clean. He was a sailor-man to look at; but his profile, David, might have been carved by a Grecian chisel out of an iceberg, and that steel grey eye of his might have struck a chill, even through a c.h.i.n.k, into any heart less stout than beats behind the vest of Montague Tigg. The task of rasping so hirsute a customer seemed to sit heavy on the soul of Poll, and threatened to exhaust the resources of his limited establishment. The barber went forth to command, as I presume, a fresher strop, or more keenly tempered steel, and glittering cans of water heated to a fiercer heat. No sooner was the coast clear than the street-door opened, and my stranger was joined by a mantled form, that glided into Poll's emporium. The new-comer doffed a swart sombrero, and disclosed historic features that were not unknown to the concealed observer-meaning me. Yes, David, that aquiline beak, that long and waxed moustache, that impa.s.sible mask of a face, I had seen them, Sir, conspicuous (though their owner be of alien and even hostile birth) among England's special chivalry. The foremost he had charged on the Ides of April (I mean against the ungentlemanly Chartist throng) and in the storied lists of Eglinton. The new-comer, in short, was the nephew of him who ate his heart out in an English gaol (like our ill.u.s.trious Chiv)-in fact, he was Prince Louis N- B-.

Gliding to the seat where, half-lathered, the more or less ancient Mariner awaited Poll's return, the Prince muttered (in the French lingo, familiar to me from long exile in Boulogne):

"Hist, goes all well?"

"Magnificently, Sire!" says the other chap.

"Our pa.s.sages taken?"

"Ay, and private cabins paid for to boot, in case of the storm's inclemency."

The Prince nodded and seemed pleased; then he asked anxiously,

"The Bird? You have been to Jamrach's?"

"Pardon me, Sire," says the man who was waiting to be shaved, "I can slip from your jesses no mercenary eagle. These limbs have yet the pith to climb and this heart the daring to venture to the airiest crag of Monte d'Oro, and I have ravished from his eyrie a true Corsican eagle to be the omen of our expedition. Wherever this eagle is your uncle's legions will gather together."

"'Tis well; and the gold?"

"_Trust Monte Cristo_!" says the bearded man; and then, David, begad! I knew I had them!

"We meet?"

"At Folkestone pier, 7.45, tidal train."

"I shall be there without fail," says the Prince, and sneaks out of the street-door just as Poll comes in with the extra soap and strop.

Well, David, to make it as short as I can, the man of the icy glance was clean-shaved at last, and the mother who bore him would not have known him as he looked in the gla.s.s when it was done. He chucked Poll a diamond worth about a million piastres, and, remarking that he would not trouble him for the change, he walked out. By this characteristic swagger, of course, he more than confirmed my belief that he was, indeed, the celebrated foreigner the Count of Monte Cristo; whose name and history even _you_ must be acquainted with, though you may not be what I have heard my friend Chevy Slime call himself, "the most literary man alive." A desperate follower of the star of Austerlitz from his youth, a martyr to the cause in the Chateau d'If, Monte Cristo has not deserted it now that he has come into his own-or anybody else's.

Of course I was after him like a shot. He walked down Kingsgate Street and took a four-wheeler that was loitering at the corner. I followed on foot, escaping the notice of the police from the fact, made only too natural by Fortune's cursed spite, that under the toga-like simplicity of Montague Tigg's costume these minions merely guessed at a cab-tout.

Well, David, he led me a long chase. He got out of the four-wheeler (it was dark now) at the Travellers', throwing the cabman a purse-of sequins, no doubt. At the door of the Travellers' he entered a brougham; and, driving to the French Emba.s.sy in Albert Gate, he alighted, _in different togs_, quite the swell, and _let himself in with his own latch-key_.

In fact, Sir, this conspirator of barbers' shops, this prisoner of the Chateau d'If, this climber of Corsican eyries, is to-day the French Minister accredited to the Court of St. James's!

And now perhaps, David, you begin to see how the land lies, the Promised Land, the land where there is corn and milk and honey-dew. I hold those eminent and highly romantic parties in the hollow of my hand. A letter from me to M. Lecoq, of the Rue Jerusalem, and their little game is up, their eagle moults, the history of Europe is altered. But what good would all that do Montague Tigg? Will it so much as put that delightful coin, a golden sovereign, in the pocket of his nether garments? No, Tigg is no informer; a man who has charged at the head of his regiment on the coast of Africa is no vulgar spy. There is more to be got by making the Count pay through the nose, as we say; _chanter_, as the French say; "sing a song of sixpence"-to a golden tune.

But, as Fortune now uses me, I cannot personally approach his Excellency.

Powdered menials would urge me from his portals. An advance, a small advance-say 30_l._-is needed for preliminary expenses: for the charges of the clothier, the bootmaker, the hosier, the barber. Give me 30_l._ for the restoration of Tigg to the semblance of the Montagues, and with that sum I conquer millions. The diamonds of Monte Cristo, the ingots, the rubies, the golden crowns with the image and superscription of Pope Alexander VI.-all are mine: I mean are ours.

More, David; more, my premium tulip: we shall make the Count a richer man than ever he has been. We shall promote new companies, we shall put him on the board of directors. I see the prospectuses from afar.

UNIVERSAL INTERNATIONAL TREASURE RECOVERY COMPANY.

_Chairman_.

His Excellency the COMTE DE MONTE CRISTO. K.G., K.C.B., Knight of the Black Eagle.