What Will He Do with It? Part 58

"Of course."

The bravo threw himself at length on one of the tables, and, closing his eyes, moaned. His vast strength had become acquainted with physical pain. In its stout knots and fibres, aches and sharp twinges, the dragon-teeth of which had been sown years ago in revels or brawls, which then seemed to bring but innocuous joy and easy triumph, now began to gnaw and grind. But when Cutts reappeared with coa.r.s.e viands and the brandy bottle, Jasper shook off the sense of pain, as does a wounded wild beast that can still devour; and after regaling fast and ravenously, he emptied half the bottle at a draught, and felt himself restored and fresh.

"Shall you fling yourself amongst the swell fellows who hold their club here, General?" asked Cutts; "'tis a bad trade; every year it gets worse. Or have you not some higher game in your eye?"

"I have higher game in my eye. One bird I marked down this very night.

But that may be slow work, and uncertain. I have in this pocket-book a bank to draw upon meanwhile."

"How? forged French _billets de banque_? dangerous."

"Pooh! better than that,--letters which prove theft against a respectable rich man."

"Ah, you expect hush-money?"

"Exactly so. I have good friends in London."

"Among them, I suppose, that affectionate 'adopted mother,' who would have kept you in such order."

"Thousand thunders! I hope not. I am not a superst.i.tious man, but I fear that woman as if she were a witch, and I believe she is one. You remember black Jean, whom we call Sansculotte. He would have filled a churchyard with his own brats for a five-franc piece; but he would not have crossed a churchyard alone at night for a thousand naps. Well, that woman to me is what a churchyard was to black Jean. No: if she is in London, I have but to go to her house and say, 'Food, shelter, money;'

and I would rather ask Jack Ketch for a rope."

"How do you account for it, General? She does not beat you; she is not your wife. I have seen many a stout fellow, who would stand fire without blinking, show the white feather at a scold's tongue. But then he must be spliced to her--"

"Cutts, that Griffin does not scold: she preaches. She wants to make me spoony, Cutts: she talks of my young days, Cutts; she wants to blight me into what she calls an honest man, Cutts,--the virtuous dodge! She snubs and cows me, and frightens me out of my wits, Cutts; for I do believe that the witch is determined to have me, body and soul, and to marry me some day in spite of myself, Cutts; and if ever you see me about to be clutched in those horrible paws, poison me with ratsbane, or knock me on the head, Cutts."

The little man laughed a little laugh, sharp and eldrich, at the strange cowardice of the stalwart dare-devil. But Jasper did not echo the laugh.

"Hush!" he said timidly, "and let me have a bed, if you can; I have not slept in one for a week, and my nerves are shaky."

The imp lighted a candle-end at the gas-lamp, and conducted Losely up the stairs to his own sleeping-room, which was less comfortless than might be supposed. He resigned his bed to the wanderer, who flung himself on it, rags and all. But sleep was no more at his command than it is at a king's.

"Why the ---- did you talk of that witch?" he cried peevishly to Cutts, who was composing himself to rest on the floor. "I swear I fancy I feel her sitting on my chest like a nightmare."

He turned with a vehemence which shook the walls, and wrapped the coverlet round him, plunging his head into its folds. Strange though it seem to the novice in human nature, to Jasper Losely the woman who had so long lived but for one object--namely, to save him from the gibbet--was as his evil genius, his haunting fiend. He had conceived a profound terror of her from the moment he perceived that she was resolutely bent upon making him honest. He had broken from her years ago, fled, resumed his evil courses, hid himself from her,--in vain.

Wherever he went, there went she. He might baffle the police, not her.

Hunger had often forced him to accept her aid. As soon as he received it, he hid from her again, burying himself deeper and deeper in the mud, like a persecuted tench. He a.s.sociated her idea with all the ill-luck that had befallen him. Several times some villanous scheme on which he had counted to make his fortune had been baffled in the most mysterious way; and just when baffled, and there seemed no choice but to cut his own throat or some one else's, up turned grim Arabella Crane, in the iron-gray gown, and with the iron-gray ringlets,--hatefully, awfully beneficent,--offering food, shelter, gold,--and some demoniacal, honourable work. Often had he been in imminent peril from watchful law or treacherous accomplice. She had warned and saved him, as she had saved him from the fell Gabrielle Desmarets, who, unable to bear the sentence of penal servitude, after a long process, defended with astonishing skill and enlisting the romantic sympathies of young France, had contrived to escape into another world by means of a subtle poison concealed about her _distinguee_ person, and which she had prepared years ago with her own bloodless hands, and no doubt scientifically tested its effects on others. The cobra di capella is gone at last!

"_Souviens-toi de ta Gabrielle_," O Jasper Losely! But why Arabella Crane should thus continue to watch over him whom she no longer professed to love, how she should thus have acquired the gift of ubiquity and the power to save him, Jasper Losely could not conjecture.

The whole thing seemed to him weird and supernatural. Most truly did he say that she had cowed him. He had often longed to strangle her; when absent from her, had often resolved upon that act of grat.i.tude. The moment he came in sight of her stern, haggard face, her piercing lurid eyes; the moment he heard her slow, dry voice in some such sentences as these: "Again you come to me in your trouble, and ever shall. Am I not still as your mother, but with a wife's fidelity, till death us do part?

There's the portrait of what you were: look at it, Jasper. Now turn to the gla.s.s: see what you are. Think of the fate of Gabrielle Desmarets!

But for me, what, long since, had been your own? But I will save you: I have sworn it. You shall be wax in these hands at last,"--the moment that voice thus claimed and insisted on redeeming him, the ruffian felt a cold shudder, his courage oozed, he could no more have nerved his arm against her than a Thug would have lifted his against the dire G.o.ddess of his murderous superst.i.tion. Jasper could not resist a belief that the life of this dreadful protectress was, somehow or other, made essential to his; that, were she to die, he should perish in some ghastly and preternatural expiation. But for the last few months he had, at length, escaped from her; diving so low, so deep into the mud, that even her net could not mesh him. Hence, perhaps, the imminence of the perils from which he had so narrowly escaped, hence the utterness of his present dest.i.tution. But man, however vile, whatever his peril, whatever his dest.i.tution, was born free, and loves liberty. Liberty to go to Satan in his own way was to Jasper Losely a supreme blessing compared to that benignant compa.s.sionate espionage, with its relentless eye and restraining hand. Alas and alas! deem not this perversity unnatural in that headstrong self-destroyer! How many are there whom not a grim, hard-featured Arabella Crane, but the long-suffering, divine, omniscient, gentle Providence itself, seeks to warn, to aid, to save; and is shunned, and loathed, and fled from, as if it were an evil genius! How many are there who fear nothing so much as the being made good in spite of themselves?--how many? who can count them?

CHAPTER VI.

The public man needs but one patron; namely, THE LUCKY MOMENT.

"At his house in Carlton Gardens, Guy Darrell, Esq., for the season."

Simple insertion in the pompous list of Fashionable Arrivals! the name of a plain commoner embedded in the amber which glitters with so many coronets and stars! Yet such is England, with all its veneration for t.i.tles, that the eyes of the public pa.s.sed indifferently over the rest of that chronicle of ill.u.s.trious "whereabouts," to rest with interest, curiosity, speculation, on the unemblazoned name which but a day before had seemed slipped out of date,--obsolete as that of an actor who figures no more in play-bills. Unquestionably the sensation excited was due, in much, to the "ambiguous voices" which Colonel Morley had disseminated throughout the genial atmosphere of club-rooms. "Arrived in London for the season!"--he, the orator, once so famous, long so forgotten, who had been out of the London world for the s.p.a.ce of more than half a generation. "Why now? why for the season?" Quoth the Colonel, "He is still in the prime of life as a public man, and--a CRISIS is at hand!"

But that which gave weight and significance to Alban Morley's hints was the report in the newspapers of Guy Darrell's visit to his old const.i.tuents, and of the short speech he had addressed to them, to which he had so slightly referred in his conversation with Alban. True, the speech was short: true, it touched but little on pa.s.sing topics of political interest; rather alluding, with modesty and terseness, to the contests and victories of a former day. But still, in the few words there was the swell of the old clarion, the wind of the Paladin's horn which woke Fontarabian echoes.

It is astonishing how capricious, how sudden, are the changes in value of a public man. All depends upon whether the public want, or believe they want, the man; and that is a question upon which the public do not know their own minds a week before; nor do they always keep in the same mind, when made up, for a week together. If they do not want a man; if he do not hit the taste, nor respond to the exigency of the time,--whatever his eloquence, his abilities, his virtues, they push him aside or cry him down. Is he wanted? does the mirror of the moment reflect his image?--that mirror is an intense magnifier--his proportions swell; they become gigantic. At that moment the public wanted some man; and the instant the hint was given, "Why not Guy Darrell?" Guy Darrell was seized upon as the man wanted. It was one of those times in our Parliamentary history when the public are out of temper with all parties; when recognized leaders have contrived to damage themselves; when a Cabinet is shaking, and the public neither care to destroy nor to keep it,--a time too, when the country seemed in some danger, and when, mere men of business held unequal to the emergency, whatever name suggested a.s.sociations of vigour, eloquence, genius rose to a premium above its market price in times of tranquillity and tape. Without effort of his own, by the mere force of the undercurrent, Guy Darrell was thrown up from oblivion into note. He could not form a Cabinet, certainly not; but he might help to bring a Cabinet together, reconcile jarring elements, adjust disputed questions, take in such government some high place, influence its councils, and delight a public weary of the oratory of the day with the eloquence of a former race. For the public is ever a _laudator temporis acti_, and whatever the authors or the orators immediately before it, were those authors and orators Homers and Ciceros, would still shake a disparaging head, and talk of these degenerate days as Homer himself talked ages before Leonidas stood in the pa.s.s of Thermopylae, or Miltiades routed Asian armaments at Marathon. Guy Darrell belonged to a former race. The fathers of those young members rising now into fame had quoted to their sons his pithy sentences, his vivid images; and added, as Fox added when quoting Burke, "But you should have heard and seen the man!"

Heard and seen the man! But there he was again! come up as from a grave,--come up to the public just when such a man was wanted. Wanted how? wanted where? Oh, somehow and somewhere! There he is! make the most of him. The house in Carlton Gardens is prepared, the establishment mounted. Thither flock all the Viponts, nor they alone; all the chiefs of all parties, nor they alone; all the notabilities of our grand metropolis. Guy Darrell might be startled at his own position; but he comprehended its nature, and it did not discompose his nerves. He knew public life well enough to be aware how much the popular favour is the creature of an accident. By chance he had nicked the time; had he thus come to town the season before, he might have continued obscure, a man like Guy Darrell not being wanted then. Whether with or without design, his bearing confirmed and extended the effect produced by his reappearance. Gracious, but modestly reserved, he spoke little, listened beautifully. Many of the questions which agitated all around him had grown up into importance since his day of action; nor in his retirement had he traced their progressive development, with their changeful effects upon men and parties. But a man who has once gone deeply into practical politics might sleep in the Cave of Trophonius for twenty years, and find, on waking, very little to learn. Darrell regained the level of the day, and seized upon all the strong points on which men were divided, with the rapidity of a prompt and comprehensive intellect, his judgment perhaps the clearer from the freshness of long repose and the composure of dispa.s.sionate survey. When partisans wrangled as to what should have been done, Darrell was silent; when they asked what should be done, out came one of his terse sentences, and a knot was cut. Meanwhile it is true this man, round whom expectations grouped and rumour buzzed, was in neither House of Parliament; but that was rather a delay to his energies than a detriment to his consequence.

Important const.i.tuencies, antic.i.p.ating a vacancy, were already on the look-out for him; a smaller const.i.tuency, in the interim, Carr Vipont undertook to procure him any day. There was always a Vipont ready to accept something, even the Chiltern Hundreds. But Darrell, not without reason, demurred at re-entering the House of Commons after an absence of seventeen years. He had left it with one of those rare reputations which no wise man likes rashly to imperil. The Viponts sighed. He would certainly be more useful in the Commons than the Lords, but still in the Lords he would be of great use. They would want a debating lord, perhaps a lord acquainted with law in the coming CRISIS,--if he preferred the peerage? Darrell demurred still. The man's modesty was insufferable; his style of speaking might not suit that august a.s.sembly: and as to law, he could never now be a law lord; he should be but a ci-devant advocate, affecting the part of a judicial amateur.

In short, without declining to re-enter public life, seeming, on the contrary, to resume all his interest in it, Darrell contrived with admirable dexterity to elude for the present all overtures pressed upon him, and even to convince his admirers, not only of his wisdom, but of his patriotism in that reticence. For certainly he thus managed to exercise a very considerable influence: his advice was more sought, his suggestions more heeded, and his power in reconciling certain rival jealousies was perhaps greater than would have been the case if he had actually entered either House of Parliament, and thrown himself exclusively into the ranks, not only of one party, but of one section of a party. Nevertheless, such suspense could not last very long; he must decide at all events before the next session. Once he was seen in the arena of his old triumphs, on the benches devoted to strangers distinguished by the Speaker's order. There, recognized by the older members, eagerly gazed at by the younger, Guy Darrell listened calmly, throughout a long field-night, to voices that must have roused from forgotten graves kindling and glorious memories; voices of those veterans now--by whose side he had once struggled for some cause which he had then, in the necessary exaggeration of all honest enthusiasm, identified with a nation's life-blood. Voices, too of the old antagonists over whose routed arguments he had marched triumphant amidst applauses that the next day rang again through England from side to side. Hark! the very man with whom, in the old battle-days, he had been the most habitually pitted, is speaking now! His tones are embarra.s.sed, his argument confused. Does he know who listens yonder? Old members think so,--smile; whisper each other, and glance significantly where Darrell sits.

Sits, as became him, tranquil, respectful, intent, seemingly, perhaps really, unconscious of the sensation he excites. What an eye for an orator! how like the eye in a portrait; it seems to fix on each other eye that seeks it,--steady, fascinating. Yon distant members, behind the Speaker's chair, at the far distance, feel the light of that eye travel towards them. How lofty and ma.s.sive, among all those rows of human heads, seems that forehead, bending slightly down, with the dark strong line of the weighty eyebrow! But what is pa.s.sing within that secret mind? Is there mournfulness in the retrospect? Is there eagerness to renew the strife? Is that interest in the hour's debate feigned or real?

Impossible for him who gazed upon that face to say. And that eye would have seemed to the gazer to read himself through and through to the heart's core, long ere the gazer could hazard a single guess as to the thoughts beneath that marble forehead,--as to the emotions within the heart over which, in old senatorial fashion, the arms were folded with so conventional an ease.

CHAPTER VII.

Darrell and Lionel.

Darrell had received Lionel with some evident embarra.s.sment, which soon yielded to affectionate warmth. He took to the young man whose fortunes he had so improved; he felt that with the improved fortunes the young man's whole being was improved: a.s.sured position, early commune with the best social circles, in which the equality of fashion smooths away all disparities in rank, had softened in Lionel much of the wayward and morbid irritability of his boyish pride; but the high spirit, the generous love of independence, the scorn of mercenary calculation, were strong as ever; these were in the grain of his nature. In common with all who in youth aspire to be one day noted from the "undistinguishable many," Lionel had formed to himself a certain ideal standard, above the ordinary level of what the world is contented to call honest, or esteem clever. He admitted into his estimate of life the heroic element, not undesirable even in the most practical point of view, for the world is so in the habit of decrying; of disbelieving in high motives and pure emotions; of daguerreotyping itself with all its ugliest wrinkles, stripped of the true bloom that brightens, of the true expression that redeems, those defects which it invites the sun to limn, that we shall never judge human nature aright, if we do not set out in life with our gaze on its fairest beauties, and our belief in its latent good. In a word we should begin with the Heroic, if we would learn the Human. But though to himself Lionel thus secretly prescribed a certain superiority of type, to be sedulously aimed at, even if never actually attained, he was wholly without pedantry and arrogance towards his own contemporaries. From this he was saved not only by good-nature, animal spirits, frank hardihood, but by the very affluence of ideas which animated his tongue, coloured his language, and whether to young or old, wise or dull, made his conversation racy and original. He was a delightful companion; and if he had taken much instruction from those older and wiser than himself, he so bathed that instruction in the fresh fountain of his own lively intelligence, so warmed it at his own beating impulsive heart, that he could make an old man's gleanings from experience seem a young man's guesses into truth. Faults he had, of course,--chiefly the faults common at his age; amongst them, perhaps, the most dangerous were,--firstly, carelessness in money matters; secondly, a distaste for advice in which prudence was visibly predominant. His tastes were not in reality extravagant: but money slipped through his hands, leaving little to show for it; and when his quarterly allowance became due, ample though it was,--too ample, perhaps,--debts wholly forgotten started up to seize hold of it. And debts as yet being manageable were not regarded with sufficient horror.

Paid or put aside, as the case might be, they were merely looked upon as bores. Youth is in danger till it learn to look upon them as furies. For advice, he took it with pleasure, when clothed with elegance and art, when it addressed ambition, when it exalted the loftier virtues. But advice, practical and prosy, went in at one ear and out at the other. In fact, with many talents, he had yet no adequate ballast of common-sense; and if ever he get enough to steady his bark through life's trying voyage, the necessity of so much dull weight must be forcibly stricken home less to his reason than his imagination or his heart. But if, somehow or other, he get it not, I will not insure his vessel.

I know not if Lionel Haughton had genius; he never a.s.sumed that he had: but he had something more like genius than that prototype, RESOLVE, of which he boasted to the artist. He had YOUTH,--real youth,--youth of mind, youth of heart, youth of soul. Lithe and supple as he moved before you, with the eye to which light or dew sprang at once from a nature vibrating to every lofty, every tender thought, he seemed more than young,--the incarnation of youth.

Darrell took to him at once. Amidst all the engagements crowded on the important man, he contrived to see Lionel daily. And what may seem strange, Guy Darrell felt more at home with Lionel Haughton than with any of his own contemporaries,--than even with Alban Morley. To the last, indeed, he opened speech with less reserve of certain portions of the past, or of certain projects in the future. But still, even there, he adopted a tone of half-playful, half-mournful satire, which might be in itself disguise. Alban Morley, with all his good qualities, was a man of the world; as a man of the world, Guy Darrell talked to him. But it was only a very small part of Guy Darrell the Man, of which the world could say "mine."

To Lionel he let out, as if involuntarily, the more amiable, tender, poetic attributes of his varying, complex, uncomprehended character; not professedly confiding, but not taking pains to conceal. Hearing what worldlings would call "Sentiment" in Lionel, he seemed to glide softly down to Lionel's own years and talk "sentiment" in return. After all, this skilled lawyer, this noted politician, had a great dash of the boy still in him. Reader, did you ever meet a really clever man who had not?

CHAPTER VIII.

Saith a very homely proverb (pardon its vulgarity), "You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear." But a sow's ear is a much finer work of art than a silk purse; and grand, indeed, the mechanician who could make a sow's ear out of a silk purse, or conjure into creatures of flesh and blood the sarcenet and _tulle_ of a London drawing-room.

"Mamma," asked Honoria Carr Vipont, "what sort of a person was Mrs.

Darrell?"

"She was not in our set, my dear," answered Lady Selina. "The Vipont Crookes are just one of those connections with which, though of course one is civil to all connections, one is more or less intimate according as they take after the Viponts or after the Crookes. Poor woman! she died just before Mr. Darrell entered Parliament and appeared in society.

But I should say she was not an agreeable person. Not nice," added Lady Selina, after a pause, and conveying a world of meaning in that conventional monosyllable.

"I suppose she was very accomplished, very clever?"

"Quite the reverse, my dear. Mr. Darrell was exceedingly young when he married, scarcely of age. She was not the sort of woman to suit him."

"But at least she must have been very much attached to him, very proud of him?"