What Will He Do with It? Part 31

"So," said the voice from above, "so we do meet at last, Jasper Losely!

you are come!"

Drawing a loose kind of dressing-robe more closely round her, the mistress of the house now descended the stairs, rapidly, flittingly, with a step noiseless as a spectre's, and, grasping Losely firmly by the hand, led him into a chill, dank, sunless drawing-room, gazing into his face fixedly all the while.

He winced and writhed. "There, there, let us sit down, my dear Mrs.

Crane."

"And once I was called Bella."

"Ages ago! Basta! All things have their end. Do take those eyes of yours off my face; they were always so bright! and--really--now they are perfect burning-gla.s.ses! How close it is! Peuh! I am dead tired. May I ask for a gla.s.s of water; a drop of wine in it--or--brandy will do as well."

"Ho! you have come to brandy and morning drams, eh, Jasper?" said Mrs.

Crane, with a strange, dreary accent. "I, too, once tried if fire could burn up thought, but it did not succeed with me; that is years ago; and--there--see the bottles are full still!"

While thus speaking, she had unlocked a chiffonniere of the shape usually found in "genteel lodgings," and taken out a leathern spirit-case containing four bottles, with a couple of wine-gla.s.ses. This case she placed on the table before Mr., Losely, and contemplated him at leisure while he helped himself to the raw spirits.

As she thus stood, an acute student of Lavater might have recognized, in her harsh and wasted countenance, signs of an original nature superior to that of her visitor; on her knitted brow, a sense higher in quality than on his smooth low forehead; on her straight stern lip, less cause for distrust than in the false good-humour which curved his handsome mouth into that smile of the fickle, which, responding to mirth but not to affection, is often lighted and never warmed. It is true that in that set pressure of her lip there might be cruelty, and, still more, the secretiveness which can harbour deceit; and yet, by the nervous workings of that lip, when relieved from such pressure, you would judge the woman to be rather by natural temperament pa.s.sionate and impulsive than systematically cruel or deliberately-false,--false or cruel only as some predominating pa.s.sion became the soul's absolute tyrant, and adopted the tyrant's vices. Above all, in those very lines destructive to beauty that had been ploughed, not by time, over her sallow cheeks, there was written the susceptibility to grief, to shame, to the sense of fall, which was not visible in the unreflective, reckless aspect of the sleek human animal before her.

In the room, too, there were some evidences of a cultivated taste. On the walls, book-shelves, containing volumes of a decorous and severe literature, such as careful parents allow to studious daughters,--the stately masterpieces of Fenelon and Racine; selections approved by boarding-schools from Ta.s.so, Dante, Metastasio; amongst English authors, Addison, Johnson, Blair (his lectures as well as sermons); elementary works on such sciences as admit female neophytes into their porticos, if not into their penetralia,--botany, chemistry, astronomy. Prim as soldiers on parade stood the books,--not a gap in their ranks,--evidently never now displaced for recreation; well bound, yet faded, dusty; relics of a bygone life. Some of them might perhaps have been prizes at school, or birthday gifts from proud relations. There, too, on the table, near the spirit-case, lay open a once handsome workbox,--no silks now on the skeleton reels; discoloured, but not by use, in its nest of tarnished silk slept the golden thimble. There, too, in the corner, near a music-stand piled high with musical compositions of various schools and graduated complexity from "lessons for beginners"

to the most arduous gamut of a German oratorio, slunk pathetically a poor lute-harp, the strings long since broken. There, too, by the window, hung a wire bird-cage, the bird long since dead. In a word, round the woman gazing on Jasper Losely, as he complacently drank his brandy, grouped the forlorn tokens of an early state,--the lost golden age of happy girlish studies, of harmless girlish tastes.

"Basta, eno'," said Mr. Losely, pushing aside the gla.s.s which he had twice filled and twice drained, "to business. Let me see the child: I feel up to it now."

A darker shade fell over Arabella Crane's face, as she said, "The child!

she is not here! I have disposed of her long ago."

"Eh!--disposed of her! what do you mean?"

"Do you ask as if you feared I had put her out of the world? No! Well, then,--you come to England to see the child? You miss--you love, the child of that--of that--" She paused, checked herself, and added in an altered voice, "of that honest, high-minded gentlewoman whose memory must be so dear to me,--you love that child; very natural, Jasper."

"Love her! a child I have scarcely seen since she was born! do talk common-sense. No. But have I not told you that she ought to be money's worth to me; ay, and she shall be yet, despite that proud man's disdainful insolence."

"That proud man! what, you have ventured to address him--visit him--since your return to England?"

"Of course. That's what brought me over. I imagined the man would rejoice at what I told him, open his pursestrings, lavish blessings and bank-notes. And the brute would not even believe me; all because--"

"Because you had sold the right to be believed before. I told you, when I took the child, that you would never succeed there, that--I would never encourage you in the attempt. But you had sold the future as you sold your past,--too cheaply, it seems, Jasper."

"Too cheaply, indeed. Who could ever have supposed that I should have been fobbed off with such a pittance?"

"Who, indeed, Jasper! You were made to spend fortunes, and call them pittances when spent, Jasper! You should have been a prince, Jasper; such princely tastes! Trinkets and dress, horses and dice, and plenty of ladies to look and die! Such princely spirit too! bounding all return for loyal sacrifice to the honour you vouchsafed in accepting it!"

Uttering this embittered irony, which nevertheless seemed rather to please than to offend her guest, she kept moving about the room, and (whether from some drawer in the furniture, or from her own person, Losely's careless eye did not observe) she suddenly drew forth a miniature, and, placing it before him, exclaimed, "Ah, but you are altered from those days; see what you then were!"

Losely's gaze, thus abruptly invited, fixed itself on the effigies of a youth eminently handsome, and of that kind of beauty which, without being effeminate, approaches to the fineness and brilliancy of the female countenance,--a beauty which renders its possessor inconveniently conspicuous, and too often, by winning that ready admiration which it costs no effort to obtain, withdraws the desire of applause from successes to be achieved by labour, and hardens egotism by the excuses it lends to self-esteem. It is true that this handsome face had not the elevation bestowed by thoughtful expression but thoughtful expression is not the attribute a painter seeks to give to the abstract comeliness of early youth; and it is seldom to be acquired without that const.i.tutional wear and tear which is injurious to mere physical beauty. And over the whole countenance was diffused a sunny light, the freshness of buxom health, of luxuriant vigour; so that even that arrogant vanity which an acute observer might have detected as the prevailing mental characteristic seemed but a glad exultation in the gifts of benignant Nature. Not there the look which, in the matured man gazing on the bright ghost of his former self, might have daunted the timid and warned the wise. "And I was like this! True! I remember well when it was taken, and no one called it flattering," said Mr. Losely, with pathetic self-condolence. "But I can't be very much changed," he added, with a half laugh. "At my age one may have a manlier look, yet--"

"Yet still be handsome, Jasper," said Mrs. Crane. "You are so. But look at me; what am I?"

"Oh, a very fine woman, my dear Crane,--always were. But you neglect yourself: you should not do that; keep it up to the last. Well, but to return to the child. You have disposed of her without my consent, without letting me know?"

"Letting you know! How many years is it since you even gave me your address! Never fear: she is in good hands."

"Whose? At all events I must see her."

"See her! What for?"

"What for! Hang it, it is natural that, now I am in England, I should at least wish to know what she is like. And I think it very strange that you should send her away, and then make all these difficulties. What's your object? I don't understand it."

"My object? What could be my object but to serve you? At your request I took, fed, reared a child, whom you could not expect me to love, at my own cost. Did I ever ask you for a shilling? Did I ever suffer you to give me one? Never! At last, hearing no more from you, and what little I heard of you making me think that, if anything happened to me (and I was very ill at the time), you could only find her a burden,--at last I say, the old man came to me,--you had given him my address,--and he offered to take her, and I consented. She is with him."

"The old man! She is with him! And where is he?"

"I don't know."

"Humph; how does he live? Can he have got any money?"

"I don't know."

"Did any old friends take him up?"

"Would he go to old friends?"

Mr. Losely tossed off two fresh gla.s.ses of brandy, one after the other, and, rising, walked to and fro the room, his hands buried in his pockets, and in no comfortable vein of reflection. At length he paused and said, "Well, upon the whole, I don't see what I could do with the girl just at present, though, of course, I ought to know where she is, and with whom. Tell me, Mrs. Crane, what is she like,--pretty or plain?"

"I suppose the chit would be called pretty,--by some persons at least."

"Very pretty? handsome?" asked Losely, abruptly. "Handsome or not, what does it signify? what good comes of beauty? You had beauty enough; what have you done with it?"

At that question, Losely drew himself up with a sudden loftiness of look and gesture, which, though prompted but by offended vanity, improved the expression of the countenance, and restored to it much of its earlier character. Mrs. Crane gazed on him, startled into admiration, and it was in an altered voice, half reproachful, half bitter, that she continued,

"And now that you are satisfied about her, have you no questions to ask about me?--what I do? how I live?" "My dear Mrs. Crane, I know that you are comfortably off, and were never of a mercenary temper. I trust you are happy, and so forth: I wish I were; things don't prosper with me. If you could conveniently lend me a five-pound note--"

"You would borrow of me, Jasper? Ah! you come to me in your troubles.

You shall have the money,--five pounds, ten pounds, what you please, but you will call again for it: you need me now; you will not utterly desert me now?"

"Best of creatures!--never!" He seized her hand and kissed it. She withdrew it quickly from his clasp, and, glancing over him from head to foot, said, "But are you really in want?--you are well-dressed, Jasper; that you always were."

"Not always; three days ago very much the reverse: but I have had a trifling aid, and--"

"Aid in England? from whom? where? Not from him whom you say you had the courage to seek?"

"From whom else? Have I no claim? A miserable alms flung to me. Curse him! I tell you that man's look and language so galled me,--so galled,"

echoed Losely, shifting his hold from the top of his switch to the centre, and bringing the murderous weight of the lead down on the palm of his other hand, "that, if his eye had quitted mine for a moment, I think I must have brained him, and been--"

"Hanged!" said Mrs. Crane.

"Of course, hanged," returned Losely, resuming the reckless voice and manner in which there was that peculiar levity which comes from hardness of heart, as from the steel's hardness comes the blade's play. "But if a man did not sometimes forget consequences, there would be an end of the gallows. I am glad that his eye never left mine." And the leaden head of the switch fell with a dull dumb sound on the floor.