Sir Jasper Carew Part 70

"Anatole," said I, addressing him with an emotion I could not repress, "I desire to be frank and candid with you. This name of Jasper Carew I believe firmly to be mine."

A burst of laughter, insulting to the last degree, stopped me in my speech.

"Why, Gervois, this is madness, my worthy fellow. Just bethink you of how this plot originated; who suggested, who carried it on,--ay, and where it stands at this very moment. That you yourself are as nothing in it; the breath that made can still unmake you; and that I have but to declare you an impostor and a cheat,--hard words, but you will have them,--and the law will deal with you as it knows how to deal with those who trade on false pretences. Yours be the blame if I be pushed to such reprisals!"

"And what if I defied you, Count Ysaffich?" said I, boldly.

"If you but dared to do it!" said he, with a menace of his clenched hand.

"Now listen to me calmly," said I; "and there is the more need of calm, since, possibly, these are the very last words that shall ever pa.s.s between us. My claim can neither be aided nor opposed by you."

"Is the fellow mad?" exclaimed he, staring wildly at me.

"I am in my calm and sober senses," replied I, quietly.

"Then what say you to this bond?" said he, taking a paper from his pocket-book. "Is this a written promise that if you succeed to the fortune and estates of the late Walter Carew, you will pay me, Count Anatole Ysaffich, one hundred thousand pounds?"

"I own every word of it," said I.

"And for what service is this the recompense? Answer me that."

"That I am indebted to you for having opened to me the path by which my right was to be established."

"Say rather that by me was the fraud of a false name, and birth, and rank first suggested; that from Gervois the courier I created you Carew the gentleman. The whole scheme was and is my own. You are as nothing in it."

Stupefied, almost stunned, by the outrageous insult of his words, I did not speak, and he went on,--

"But you have not taken me unawares. I was not without my suspicion that such an incident as this might arise. I foresaw at least its possibility, and was prepared for it. Be advised, then, in time, since if your foot was on the very threshold of that door you hope to call your own, the power lies with me to drag you back again and proclaim you to all the world a swindler."

My pa.s.sion boiled over at the word, and I sprung towards him, I know not with what thoughts of vengeance. He darted back suddenly, and gained the door.

"If you had dared," said he, with a savage grin, "you had been a corpse on that floor the minute after."

The shining blade of a stiletto glanced within his waistcoat as he spoke. The next moment he had descended the stairs, and was gone.

I will not speak of the suffering this scene cost me,--a misery, I am free to declare, less proceeding from my dread of his resentment than from the thought that one of the very few with whom I had ever lived on terms approaching friendship had now become a declared and bitter enemy.

Oh for the hollowness of such attachments! The bonds which bind men to evil are the deadliest snares that beset us; and thus the very qualities which seem our best and purest, are among the weakest and the worst of our depraved natures.

To add to my discomfiture, Hanchett was obliged to go over to London in some case before the House of Lords, and my cause was intrusted to the second counsel, one with whom I had little intercourse, and few opportunities of knowing. Ysaffich's defection, too, threw a great gloom over all my supporters. His readiness in every difficulty was not less remarkable than his unwearied and untiring energy. He was, in fact, the bond of union between all the parties, stimulating, encouraging, and cheering them on. Even they who were least disposed towards him personally, avowed that his loss was irreparable; and some, taking a still graver view of the matter, owned their fears that he might seek service with the enemy.

I cannot tell the relief I experienced on hearing that he had sailed from Ireland the very night of our quarrel; and, from the observations he had dropped, it was believed with the intention of going abroad.

As the day fixed for the trial drew nigh, public curiosity rose to the very highest degree. The real nature of the claim to be set up was no longer a secret, and the case became the town talk of every club and society of the capital. Curtis had long ceased to be popular with any party. His dissolute life had thrown a disrepute upon those who sided with him; and the newspapers, almost without an exception, inclined towards my side. There is, perhaps, something too that savors of generosity in such cases, and disposes many to favor what they feel to be the weaker party. I am sure I had reason to experience much of this kind of sympathy, nor do I think of it even now without grat.i.tude.

Early as it was when I prepared to leave my hotel, I found a considerable crowd had a.s.sembled in the street without, curious to see one whose story had attracted so much popular notice. They were mostly of the lower cla.s.ses, but I observed that a knot of gentlemen had gathered on the steps of an adjoining door, and were eagerly watching for my appearance. As the window of my room was almost directly over their heads, and lay open, I could hear the conversation which pa.s.sed between them. Shall I own that the words I overheard set my heart a beating violently?

"You knew Carew intimately, Parsons?" asked one.

"Watty! to be sure I did. We were cla.s.s-fellows at school and at college."

"And liked him, I have heard you say?"

"Extremely. There was no better fellow to be found. He had his weaknesses like the rest of us; but he was a true-hearted, generous friend, and a resolute enemy also."

"Were you acquainted with his wife, Ned?" asked another.

"I was presented to her the day he brought her over," replied he; "we all lunched with him at the hotel, but I never saw her after. The fact was, Watty made a foolish match, and never was the same man to his old friends after. Perhaps we were as much in fault as he was; at all events, except MacNaghten and a few who were very intimate with him, all fell off, and Carew, who was a haughty fellow, drew back from us, and left the breach still wider."

"And what's your opinion of this claim?" asked another, who had not spoken before.

"That I 'd not give sixpence for the chance of its success," said he, laughingly. "Why, everybody knows that no trace of any doc.u.ment establishing Carew's marriage could be found after his death. Some went so far as to say that there never had been a marriage at all; and as to the child, Dan MacNaghten told me years ago that the boy was killed in some street skirmish in Paris,--so that, taking all the doubts and difficulties together, and bearing in mind that old Joe Curtis has a strong purse and is in possession, is there any man with common sense to guide him would think the contest worth a trial?"

"Have you seen this young fellow yet?"

"No; and I am rather curious to have a look at him, for there were strong family traits about the Carews."

As I heard these last words, I walked boldly out upon the balcony as if to examine the state of the weather. There was a slight murmur of voices heard beneath as I came forward, and one speaker exclaimed, "Indeed!" to which Parsons quickly replied,--

"Positively astounding! It is not only that he has Carew's features, but the carriage of the head and a certain half supercilious look are exactly his!"

The words sent a thrill of hope through me, more than enough to recompense me for the pain his former speech had inflicted; and as I left the window, I felt a degree of confidence in the future that never entirely deserted me after.

CHAPTER XLIX. THE FIRST DAY

I can more easily imagine a man being able to preserve the memory of all his sensations during some tremendous operation of surgery than to recall the varied tortures of his mind in the progress of a long and eventful trial. Certain incidents will impress themselves more powerfully than others, not always those of the deepest importance,--far from it; the veriest trifles--a stern look of the presiding judge, a murmur in the court--will live in the recollection for long years after the great events of the scene; and a casual glance, a half-uttered word, become texts of sorrow for many a day to come.

I could myself be better able to record my sensations throughout a long fever than tell of the emotions which I suffered in the three days of that trial. I awake occasionally from a dream full of every circ.u.mstance all sharply defined, clear, and distinct. My throbbing temples and moist brow evidence the agonies I have gone through; my nerves still tingle with the torture; but with the first moments of wakefulness the memory is gone!--the sense of pain alone remains; but the cause fades away in dim indistinctness, and my heart throbs with grat.i.tude at last to know it was but a dream, and has pa.s.sed away.

But there are days, too, when all these memories are revived; and I could recount, even to the slightest circ.u.mstance, the whole progress of the case, from the moment when a doorkeeper drew aside a heavy curtain to let me pa.s.s into the court, to the dreadful instant when--But I cannot go on; already are images and forms crowding around me. To continue this theme would be to call up spirits of torture to the bedside, or the lonely chamber where, friendless and solitary, I sit as I write these lines.

I owe it to him whose patience and sympathy may have carried him so far as my listener, to complete this much of the story of my life; happily a few words will now suffice to do so.

A newspaper of "Old Dublin," a great authority in those days, the "Morning Advertiser," informed its readers on a certain day of February that the interesting events of a recent trial should be its apology for any deficiency in its attention to foreign news, or even the domestic occurrences of the country, since the editor could not but partic.i.p.ate in the intense anxiety felt by all cla.s.ses of his fellow-citizens in the progress of one of the most remarkable cases ever submitted before a jury.

After a brief announcement of the trial, he proceeds:

"Mr. Foxley opened the plaintiff's case, in the absence of Serjeant Hanchett; and certainly even the distinguished leader of the Western Circuit never exceeded in clearness, accuracy, or close reasoning the admirable statement then delivered,--a statement which, while supported by a vast variety of well-known incident, may yet vie with romance for the strangeness of the events it records.

"Probably, with a view of enlisting public sympathy in his client's behalf, not impossibly also to give a semblance of consistency to a narrative wherein any individual incident might have startled credulity, the learned counsel gave a brief history of the claimant from his birth; and certainly a stranger tale it would be hard to conceive. Following all the vicissitudes of fortune, fighting to-day in the ranks of the revolutionists in Paris, we find him to-morrow the bearer of important despatches from crowned heads to the members of the exiled family of France. Ever active, ever employed, and ever faithful to his trust, this extraordinary youth became mixed up with great events, and conversant with great people everywhere. If a consciousness that he was a man of birth, and with just claims to station and property, often sustained him in moments of difficulty, there were also times when this thought suggested his very saddest reflections. He saw himself poor, and almost unfriended; he knew the scarcely pa.s.sable barriers the law erects against all pretenders, whatever the justice of their demands; he was aware that his adversary would have all the benefit which vast resources and great wealth can command. No wonder, then, if he felt faint-hearted and dispirited! Another and a very different train of reasoning may, possibly, have also had its influence on his mind.

"This boy grew up to manhood in the midst of all the startling theories of the French Revolution. He had imbibed the doctrines of equality and universal brotherhood; he had been taught that a state was a family, and its population were the children, amongst whom no inequality of condition should prevail. To sue for the rest.i.tution of his own was, then, but a sorry recognition of the principles he professed. The society of the time enjoined the theory that property was a mere usurpation; and I say it is by no means improbable that, educated in such opinions, he should have deemed the prosecution of such a suit a direct falsification of his professions. The world, however, changed.

"After the Revolution came the reaction of order. To the guillotine succeeded the court-martial; then the Consulate, then the Empire. All the external forms of society underwent a less change than did the very nature of men themselves.

"Wearied of anarchy, they sought the repose of a despotism. With monarchy, too, came back all the illusions of pomp and splendor, all the tastes that wealth fosters and wealth alone confers. Carew, who had never bewailed his condition when a 'sansculottes,' now saw himself degraded in the midst of the new movement. He knew that he had been born to fortune and high estate. He had heard of the vast domains of his ancestry, from his cradle. He had got off by heart the names of townlands and baronies that all belonged to his family; and though, at the time he learned the lesson, the more stern teaching of democracy instilled the maxim that 'all property was a wrong,' yet now another impression had gained currency in the world, and he saw that even for the purposes of public utility, and the benefit of society, a man was powerless who was poor.