The Fortunes Of Glencore Part 21

Upton, who detected the secret working of men's minds with a marvellous exactness, saw how the poor Colonel was suffering, and that, in all probability, some unhappy explosion would at last ensue, and took an opportunity of remarking that though all this chit-chat was delightful for them, Glencore was still a sick man.

"We must n't forget, Harcourt," said he, "that a chicken-broth diet includes very digestible small-talk; and here we are leading our poor friend through politics, war, diplomacy, and the rest of it, just as if he had the stomach of an old campaigner and--"

"And the brain of a great diplomatist! Say it out, man, and avow honestly the share of excellence you accord to each of us," broke in Harcourt, laughing.

"I would to Heaven we could exchange," sighed Upton, languidly.

"The saints forbid!" exclaimed the other; "and it would do us little good if we were able."

"Why so?"

"I'd never know what to do with that fine intellect if I had it; and as for _you_, what with your confounded pills and mixtures, your infernal lotions and embrocations, you'd make my sound system as bad as your own in three months' time."

"You are quite wrong, my dear Harcourt; I should treat the stomach as you would do the brain,--give it next to nothing to do, in the hopes it might last the longer."

"There now, good night," said Harcourt; "he's always the better for bitters, whether he gives or takes them." And with a good-humored laugh he left the room.

Glencore's eyes followed him as he retired; and then, as they closed, an expression as of long-repressed suffering settled down on his features so marked that Upton hastily asked,--

"Are you ill, are you in pain, Glencore?"

"In pain? Yes," said he, "these two hours back I have been suffering intensely; but there's no help for it! Must you really leave this to-morrow, Upton?"

"I must. This letter from the Foreign Office requires my immediate presence in London, with a very great likelihood of being obliged to start at once for the Continent."

"And I had so much to say,--so many things to consult you on," sighed the other.

"Are you equal to it now?" asked Upton.

"I must try, at all events. You shall learn my plan." He was silent for some minutes, and sat with his head resting on his hand, in deep reflection. At last he said, "Has it ever occurred to you, Upton, that some incident of the past, some circ.u.mstance in itself insignificant, should rise up, as it were, in after life to suit an actual emergency, just as though fate had fashioned it for such a contingency?"

"I cannot say that I have experienced what you describe, if, indeed, I fully understand it."

"I'll explain better by an instance. You know now,"--here his voice became slow, and the words fell with a marked distinctness,--"you know now what I intend by this woman. Well, just as if to make my plan more feasible, a circ.u.mstance intended for a very different object offers itself to my aid. When my uncle, Sir Miles Herrick, heard that I was about to marry a foreigner, he declared that he would never leave me a shilling of his fortune. I am not very sure that I cared much for the threat when it was uttered. My friends, however, thought differently; and though they did not attempt to dissuade me from my marriage, they suggested that I should try some means of overcoming this prejudice; at all events, that I should not hurry on the match without an effort to obtain his consent. I agreed,--not very willingly, indeed,--and so the matter remained. The circ.u.mstance was well known amongst my two or three most intimate friends, and constantly discussed by them. I need n't tell you that the tone in which such things are talked of as often partakes of levity as seriousness. They gave me all manner of absurd counsels, one more outrageously ridiculous than the other. At last, one day,--we were picnicking at Baia,--Old Clifford,--you remember that original who had the famous schooner-yacht 'The Breeze,'--well, he took me aside after dinner, and said, 'Glencore, I have it,--I have just hit upon the expedient. Your uncle and I were old chums at Christ Church fifty years ago. What if we were to tell him that you were going to marry a daughter of mine? I don't think he'd object. I 'm half certain he 'd not. I have been abroad these five-and-thirty years. n.o.body in England knows much about me now. Old Herrick can't live forever; he is my senior by a good ten or twelve years; and if the delusion only lasts his time--'

"'But perhaps you have a daughter?' broke I in.

"'I have, and she is married already, so there is no risk on that score.' I need n't repeat all that he said for, nor that I urged against, the project; for though it was after dinner, and we all had drunk very freely, the deception was one I firmly rejected. When a man shows a great desire to serve you on a question of no common difficulty, it is very hard to be severe upon his counsels, however unscrupulous they may be. In fact, you accept them as proofs of friendship only the stronger, seeing how much they must have cost him to offer."

Upton smiled dubiously, and Glencore, blushing slightly, said, "You don't concur in this, I perceive."

"Not exactly," said Upton, in his silkiest of tones; "I rather regard these occasions as I should do the generosity of a man who, filling my hand with base money, should say, 'Pa.s.s it if you can!'"

"In this case, however," resumed Glencore, "he took his share of the fraud, or at least was willing to do so, for I distinctly said 'No' to the whole scheme. He grew very warm about it; at one moment appealing to my 'good sense, not to kick seven thousand a year out of the window;' at the next, in half-quarrelsome mood, asking 'if it were any objection I had to be connected with his family.' To get rid of a very troublesome subject, and to end a controversy that threatened to disturb a party, I said at last, 'We 'll talk it over to-morrow, Clifford, and if your arguments be as good as your heart, then perhaps they may yet convince me.' This ended the theme, and we parted. I started the next day on a shooting excursion into Calabria, and when I got back it was not of meeting Clifford I was thinking. I hastened to meet the Delia Torres, and then came our elopement. You know the rest. We went to the East, pa.s.sed the winter in Upper Egypt, and came to Cairo in spring, where Charley was born. I got back to Naples after a year or two, and then found that my uncle had just died, and in consequence of my marrying the daughter of his old and attached friend, Sir Guy Clifford, had reversed the intention of his will, and by a codicil left me his sole heir. It was thus that my marriage, and even my boy's birth, became inserted in the Peerage; my solicitor, in his vast eagerness for my interests, having taken care to indorse the story with his own name. The disinherited nephews and nieces, the half-cousins and others, soon got wind of the real facts, and contested the will, on the ground of its being executed under a delusion. I, of course, would not resist their claim, and satisfied myself by denying the statement as to my marriage; and so, after affording the current subject of gossip for a season, I was completely forgotten, the more as we went to live abroad, and never mixed with English. And now, Upton, it is this same incident I would utilize for the present occasion, though, as I said before, when it originally occurred it had a very different signification."

"I don't exactly see how," said Upton.

"In this wise. My real marriage was never inserted in the Peerage.

I'll now manage that it shall so appear, to give me the opportunity of formally contradicting it, and alluding to the strange persistence with which, having married me some fifteen years ago to a lady who never existed, they now are pleased to unite me to one whose character might have secured me against the calumny. I 'll threaten an action for libel, etc., obtain a most full, explicit, and abject apology, and then, when this has gone the round of all the journals of Europe, her doom is sealed!"

"But she has surely letters, writings, proofs of some sort."

"No, Upton, I have not left a sc.r.a.p in her possession; she has not a line, not a letter to vindicate her. On the night I broke open her writing-desk, I took away everything that bore the traces of my own hand. I tell you again she is in my power, and never was power less disposed to mercy."

"Once more, my dear friend," said Upton, "I am driven to tell you that I cannot be a profitable counsellor in a matter to every detail of which I object. Consider calmly for one moment what you are doing. See how, in your desire to be avenged upon _her_, you throw the heaviest share of the penalty on your own poor boy. I am not her advocate now. I will not say one word to mitigate the course of your anger towards her, but remember that you are actually defrauding him of his birthright. This is not a question where you have a choice. There is no discretionary power left you."

"I 'll do it," said Glencore, with a savage energy.

"In other words, to wreak a vengeance upon one, you are prepared to immolate another, not only guiltless, but who possesses every claim to your love and affection."

"And do you think that if I sacrifice the last tie that attaches me to life, Upton, that I retire from this contest heart-whole? No, far from it; I go forth from the struggle broken, blasted, friendless!"

"And do you mean that this vengeance should outlive you? Suppose, for instance, that she should survive you."

"It shall be to live on in shame, then," cried he, savagely.

"And were she to die first?"

"In that case--I have not thought well enough about that. It is possible,--it is just possible; but these are subtleties, Upton, to detach me from my purpose, or weaken my resolution to carry it through. You would apply the craft of your calling to the case, and, by suggesting emergencies, open a road to evasions. Enough for me the present. I neither care to prejudge the future, nor control it. I know,"

cried he, suddenly, and with eyes flashing angrily as he spoke,--"I know that if you desire to use the confidence I have reposed in you against me, you can give me trouble and even difficulty; but I defy Sir Horace Upton, with all his skill and all his cunning, to outwit me."

There was that in the tone in which he uttered these words, and the exaggerated energy of his manner, that convinced Upton, Glencore's reason was not intact. It was not what could amount to aberration in the ordinary sense, but sufficient evidence was there to show that judgment had become so obscured by pa.s.sion that the mental power was weakened by the moral.

"Tell me, therefore, Upton," cried he, "before we part, do you leave this house my friend or my enemy?"

"It is as your sincere, attached friend that I now dispute with you, inch by inch, a dangerous position, with a judgment under no influence from pa.s.sion, viewing this question by the coldest of all tests,--mere expediency--'

"There it is," broke in Glencore; "you claim an advantage over me, because you are devoid of feeling; but this is a case, sir, where the sense of injury gives the instinct of reparation. Is it nothing to me, think you, that I am content to go down dishonored to my grave, but also to be the last of my name and station? Is it nothing that a whole line of honorable ancestry is extinguished at once? Is it nothing that I surrender him who formed my sole solace and companionship in life? You talk of your calm, unbia.s.sed mind; but I tell you, till your brain be on fire like mine, and your heart swollen to very bursting, that you have no right to dictate to _me!_ Besides, it is done! The blow has fallen,"

added he, with a deeper solemnity of voice. "The gulf that separates us is already created. She and I can meet no more. But why continue this contest? It was to aid me in directing that boy's fortunes I first sought your advice, not to attempt to dissuade me from what I will not be turned from."

"In what way can I serve you?" said Upton, calmly.

"Will you consent to be his guardian?"

"I will."

Glencore seized the other's hand, and pressed it to his heart, and for some seconds he could not speak.

"This is all that I ask, Upton," said he. "It is the greatest boon friendship could accord me. I need no more. Could you have remained here a day or two more, we could have settled upon some plan together as to his future life; as it is, we can arrange it by letter."

"He must leave this," said Upton, thoughtfully.

"Of course,--at once!"

"How far is Harcourt to be informed in this matter; have you spoken to him already?"

"No; nor mean to do so. I should have from _him_ nothing but reproaches for having betrayed the boy into false hopes of a station he was never to fill. You must tell Harcourt. I leave it to yourself to find the suitable moment."