What Will He Do with It? Part 85

"What! would it then be no joy to know that your line did not close with yourself--that your child might--"

"Cease, madam, cease--it matters not to a man nor to a race when it perish, so that it perish at last with honour. Who would have either himself or his lineage live on into a day when the escutcheon is blotted and the name disgraced? No; if that be Matilda's child, tell me, and I will bear, as man may do, the last calamity which the will of Heaven may inflict. If, as I have all reason to think, the tale be an imposture, speak and give me the sole comfort to which I would cling amidst the ruin of all other hopes."

"Verily," said Arabella, with a kind of musing wonder in the tone of her softened voice; "verily, has a man's heart the same throb and fibre as a woman's? Had I a child like that blue-eyed wanderer with the frail form needing protection, and the brave spirit that enn.o.bles softness, what would be my pride! my bliss! Talk of shame--disgrace! Fie--fie--the more the evil of others darkened one so innocent, the more cause to love and shelter her. But--I--am childless! Shall I tell you that the offence which lies heaviest on my conscience has been my cruelty to that girl?

She was given an infant to my care. I saw in her the daughter of that false, false, mean, deceiving friend, who had taken my confidence, and bought, with her supposed heritage, the man sworn by all oaths to me. I saw in her, too, your descendant, your rightful heiress. I rejoiced in a revenge on your daughter and yourself. Think not I would have foisted her on your notice! No. I would have kept her without culture, without consciousness of a higher lot; and when I gave her up to her grandsire, the convict, it was a triumph to think that Matilda's child would be an outcast. Terrible thought! but I was mad then. But that poor convict whom you, in your worldly arrogance, so loftily despise--he took to his breast what was flung away as a worthless weed. And if the flower keep the promise of the bud, never flower so fair bloomed from your vaunted stem! And yet you would bless me if I said, 'Pa.s.s on, childless man; she is nothing to you!'"

"Madam, let us not argue. As you yourself justly imply, man's heart and woman's must each know throbs that never are, and never should be, familiar to the other. I repeat my question, and again I implore your answer."

"I cannot answer for certain; and I am fearful of answering at all, lest on a point so important I should mislead you. Matilda's child? Jasper affirmed it to me. His father believed him--I believed him. I never had the shadow of a doubt till--"

"Till what? For Heaven's sake speak."

"Till about five years ago, or somewhat more, I saw a letter from Gabrielle Desmarets, and--"

"Ah! which made you suspect, as I do, that the child is Gabrielle Desmaret's daughter."

Arabella reared her crest as a serpent before it strikes. "Gabrielle's daughter! You think so. Her child that I sheltered! Her child for whom I have just pleaded to you! Hers!" She suddenly became silent. Evidently that idea had never before struck her; evidently it now shocked her; evidently something was pa.s.sing through her mind which did not allow that idea to be dismissed. As Darrell was about to address her, she exclaimed abruptly: "No! say no more now. You may hear from me again should I learn what may decide at least this doubt one way or the other.

Farewell, sir."

"Not yet. Permit me to remind you that you have saved the life of a man whose wealth is immense."

"Mr. Darrell, my wealth in relation to my wants is perhaps immense as yours, for I do not spend what I possess."

"But this unhappy outlaw, whom you would save from himself, can henceforth be to you but a burthen and a charge. After what has pa.s.sed to-night, I do tremble to think that penury may whisper other houses to rob, other lives to menace. Let me, then, place at your disposal, to be employed in such mode as you deem the best, a sum that may suffice to secure an object which we have in common."

"No, Mr. Darrell," said Arabella, fiercely; "whatever he be, never with my consent shall Jasper Losely be beholden to you for alms. If money can save him from shame and a dreadful death, that money shall be mine. I have said it. And, hark you, Mr. Darrell, what is repentance without atonement? I say not that I repent; but I do know that I seek to atone."

The iron-grey robe fluttered an instant, and then vanished from the room.

When Alban Morley returned to the library, he saw Darrell at the farther corner of the room, on his knees. Well might Guy Darrell thank Heaven for the mercies vouchsafed to him that night. Life preserved? Is that all? Might life yet be bettered and gladdened? Was there aught in the grim woman's words that might bequeath thoughts which reflection would ripen into influences over action?--aught that might suggest the cases in which, not ign.o.bly, Pity might subjugate Scorn? In the royal abode of that Soul, does Pride only fortify Honour?--is it but the mild king, not the imperial despot? Would it blind, as its rival, the Reason? Would it chain, as a rebel, the Heart? Would it man the dominions, that might be serene, by the treasures it wastes-by the wars it provokes?

Self-knowledge! self-knowledge! From Heaven, indeed, descends the precept, "KNOW THYSELF." That truth was told to us by the old heathen oracle. But what old heathen oracle has told us how to know?

CHAPTER IV.

THE MAN-EATER HUMILIATED. HE ENCOUNTERS AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE IN A TRAVELLER, WHO, LIKE SHAKESPEARE'S JAQUES, IS "A MELANCHOLY FELLOW"; WHO ALSO, LIKE JAQUES, HATH "GREAT REASON TO BE BAD"; AND WHO, STILL LIKE JAQUES, IS "FULL OF MATTER."

Jasper Losely rode slowly on through the clear frosty night; not back to the country town which he had left on his hateful errand, nor into the broad road to London. With a strange desire to avoid the haunts of men, he selected--at each choice of way in the many paths branching right and left, between waste and woodland--the lane that seemed the narrowest and the dimmest. It was not remorse that gnawed him, neither was it mere mercenary disappointment, nor even the pang of baffled vengeance--it was the profound humiliation of diseased self-love--the conviction that, with all his brute power, he had been powerless in the very time and scene in which he had pictured to himself so complete a triumph. Even the quiet with which he had escaped was a mortifying recollection.

Capture itself would have been preferable, if capture had been preceded by brawl and strife--the exhibition of his hardihood and prowess.

Gloomily bending over his horse's neck, he cursed himself as fool and coward. What would he have had!--a new crime on his soul? Perhaps he would have answered, "Anything rather than this humiliating failure." He did not rack his brains with conjecturing if Cutts had betrayed him, or by what other mode a.s.sistance had been sent in such time of need to Darrell. Nor did he feel that hunger for vengeance, whether on Darrell or on his accomplice (should that accomplice have played the traitor), which might have been expected from his characteristic ferocity. On the contrary, the thought of violence and its excitements had in it a sickness as of shame. Darrell at that hour might have ridden by him scathless. Cutts might have jeered and said, "I blabbed your secret, and sent the aid that foiled it"; and Losely would have continued to hang his head, nor lifted the herculean hand that lay nerveless on the horse's mane. Is it not commonly so in all reaction from excitements in which self-love has been keenly galled? Does not vanity enter into the l.u.s.t of crime as into the desire of fame?

At sunrise Losely found himself on the high-road into which a labyrinth of lanes had led him, and opposite to a milestone, by which he learned that he had been long turning his back on the metropolis, and that he was about ten miles distant from the provincial city of Ouzelford. By this time his horse was knocked up, and his own chronic pains began to make themselves acutely felt; so that, when, a little farther on, he came to a wayside inn, he was glad to halt; and after a strong drain, which had the effect of an opiate, he betook himself to bed, and slept till the noon was far advanced.

When Losely came down-stairs, the common room of the inn was occupied by a meeting of the trustees of the highroads; and, on demanding breakfast, he was shown into a small sanded parlour adjoining the kitchen. Two other occupants--a man and a woman--were there already, seated at a table by the fireside, over a pint of half-and-half. Losely, warming himself at the hearth, scarcely noticed these humble revellers by a glance. And they, after a displeased stare at the stalwart frame which obscured the cheering glow they had hitherto monopolised, resumed a muttered conversation; of which, as well as of the vile modic.u.m that refreshed their lips, the man took the lion's share. Shabbily forlorn were that man's habiliments--turned and re-turned, patched, darned, weather-stained, grease-stained--but still retaining that kind of mouldy, grandiose, b.a.s.t.a.r.d gentility, which implies that the wearer has known better days; and, in the downward progress of fortunes when they once fall, may probably know still worse.

The woman was some years older than her companion, and still more forlornly shabby. Her garments seemed literally composed of particles of dust glued together, while her face might have insured her condemnation as a witch before any honest jury in the reign of King James the First.

His breakfast, and the brandy-bottle that flanked the loaf, were now placed before Losely; and, as distastefully he forced himself to eat, his eye once more glanced towards, and this time rested on, the shabby man, in the sort of interest with which one knave out of elbows regards another. As Jasper thus looked, gradually there stole on him a reminiscence of those coa.r.s.e large features--that rusty disreputable wig. The recognition, however, was not mutual; and presently, after a whisper interchanged between the man and the woman, the latter rose, and approaching Losely, dropped a curtsey, and said, in a weird, under voice: "Stranger! luck's in store for you. Tell your fortune!" As she spoke, from some dust-hole in her garments she produced a pack of cards, on whose half-obliterated faces seemed incrusted the dirt of ages.

Thrusting these antiquities under Jasper's nose, she added, "Wish and cut."

"Yshaw," said Jasper, who, though sufficiently superst.i.tious in some matters and in regard to some persons, was not so completely under the influence of that imaginative infirmity as to take the creature before him for a sibyl. "Get away; you turn my stomach. Your cards smell; so do you!"

"Forgive her, worthy sir," said the man, leaning forward. "The hag may be unsavoury, but she is wise. The Three Sisters who accosted the Scottish Thane, sir (Macbeth--you have seen it on the stage?) were not savoury. Withered, and wild in their attire, sir, but they knew a thing or two! She sees luck in your face. Cross her hand and give it vent!"

"Fiddledee," said the irreverent Losely. "Take her off, or I shall scald her," and he seized the kettle.

The hag retreated grumbling; and Losely, soon despatching his meal, placed his feet 'on the hobs, and began to meditate what course to adopt for a temporary subsistence. He had broken into the last pound left of the money which he had extracted from Mrs. Crane's purse some days before. He recoiled with terror from the thought of returning to town and placing himself at her mercy. Yet what option had he? While thus musing, he turned impatiently round, and saw that the shabby man and the dusty hag were engaged in an amicable game of ecarte, with those very cards which had so offended his olfactory organs. At that sight the old instinct of the gambler struggled back; and, raising himself up, he looked over the cards of the players. The miserable wretches were, of course, playing for nothing; and Losely saw at a glance that the man was, nevertheless, trying to cheat the woman! Positively he took that man into more respect; and that man, noticing the interest with which Losely surveyed the game, looked up, and said:

"While the time, sir? What say you? A game or two? I can stake my pistoles--that is, sir, so far as a fourpenny bit goes. If ignorant of this French game, sir, cribbage or all fours?"

"No," said Losely, mournfully; "there is nothing to be got out of you; otherwise"--he stopped and sighed. "But I have seen you under other circ.u.mstances. What has become of your Theatrical Exhibition? Gambled it away? Yet, from what I see of your play, I think you ought not to have lost, Mr. Rugge."

The ex-manager started.

"What! You knew me before the Storm?--before the lightning struck me, as I may say, sir--and falling into difficulties, I became-a wreck? You knew me?--not of the Company?--a spectator?"

"As you say--a spectator. You had once in your employ an actor--clever old fellow. Waife, I think, he was called."

"Ah! hold! At that name, sir, my wounds bleed afresh. From that execrable name, sir, there hangs a tale!"

"Indeed! Then it will be a relief to you to tell it," said Losely, resettling his feet on the hob, and s.n.a.t.c.hing at any diversion from his own reflections.

"Sir, when a gentleman, who is a gentleman, asks as a favour a specimen of my powers of recital, not professionally, and has before him the sparkling goblet, which he does not invite me to share, he insults my fallen fortunes. Sir, I am poor--I own it; I have fallen into the sere and yellow leaf, sir; but I have still in this withered bosom the heart of a Briton!"

"Warm it, Mr. Rugge. Help yourself to the brandy--and the lady too."

"Sir, you are a gentleman; sir, your health. Hag, drink better days to us both. That woman, sir, is a hag, but she is an honour to her s.e.x-faithful!"

"It is astonishing how faithful ladies are when not what is called beautiful. I speak from painful experience," said Losely, growing debonnair as the liquor relaxed his gloom, and regaining that levity of tongue which sometimes strayed into wit, and which-springing originally from animal spirits and redundant health--still came to him mechanically whenever roused by companionship from alternate intervals of lethargy and pain. "But, now, Mr. Rugge, I am all ears; perhaps you will be kind enough to be all tale."

With tragic aspect, unrelaxed by that _jeu de mots_, and still wholly unrecognising in the ma.s.sive form and discoloured swollen countenance of the rough-clad stranger, the elegant proportions, the healthful, blooming, showy face, and elaborate fopperies of the Jasper Losely who had sold to him a Phenomenon which proved so evanishing, Rugge entered into a prolix history of his wrongs at the hands of Waife, of Losely, of Sophy. Only of Mrs. Crane did he speak with respect; and Jasper then for the first time learned--and rather with anger for the interference than grat.i.tude for the generosity--that she had repaid the L100, and thereby cancelled Rugge's claim upon the child. The ex-manager then proceeded to the narrative of his subsequent misfortunes--all of which he laid to the charge of Waife and the Phenomenon. "Sir," said he, "I was ambitious.

From my childhood's hour I dreamed of the great York Theatre--dreamed of it literally thrice. Fatal Vision! But like other dreams, that dream would have faded--been forgotten in the workday world--and I should not have fallen into the sere and yellow, but have had, as formerly, troops of friends, and not been reduced to the horrors of poverty and a faithful Hag. But, sir, when I first took to my bosom that fiend William Waife, he exhibited a genius, sir, that Dowton (you have seen Dowton?--grand) was a stick as compared with. Then my ambition, sir, blazed and flared up-obstreperous, and my childhood's dream haunted me; and I went about musing [Hag, you recollect!]--and muttering 'The Royal Theatre at York.' But, incredible though it seem, the ungrateful scorpion left me with a treacherous design to exhibit the parts I had fostered on the London boards; and even-handed Justice, sir, returned the poisoned chalice to his lips, causing him to lose an eye and to hobble--besides splitting up his voice--which served him right. And again I took the scorpion for the sake of the Phenomenon. I had a babe myself once, sir, though you may not think it. Gormerick (that is this faithful Hag) gave the babe Daffy's Elixir, in teething; but it died--convulsions. I comforted myself when that Phenomenon came out on my stage--in pink satin and pearls. 'Ha,' I said, 'the great York Theatre shall yet be mine!' The haunting idea became a Mania, sir. The learned say that there is a Mania called Money Mania--[Monomania??]--when one can think but of the one thing needful--as the guilty Thane saw the dagger, sir--you understand. And when the Phenomenon had vanished and gone, as I was told, to America, where I now wish I was myself, acting Rolla at New York or elsewhere, to a free and enlightened people--then, sir, the Mania grew on me still stronger and stronger. There was a pride in it, sir, a British pride.

"I said to this faithful Hag: 'What--shall I not have the York because that false child has deserted me? Am I not able to realise a Briton's ambition without being beholden to a Phenomenon in spangles?' Sir, I took the York! Alone I did it!"

"And," said Losely, feeling a sort of dreary satisfaction in listening to the grotesque sorrows of one whose condition seemed to him yet more abject than his own--"And the York Theatre alone perhaps did you."

"Right, sir," said Rugge--half-dolorously, half-exultingly. "It was a Grand Concern, and might have done for the Bank of England! It swallowed up my capital with as much ease, sir, as I could swallow an oyster if there were one upon that plate! I saw how it would be, the very first week--when I came out myself, strong--Kean's own part in the Iron Chest--Mortimer, sir; there warn't three pounds ten in the house--packed audience, sir, and they had the face to hiss me. 'Hag,' said I to Mrs. Gormerick, 'this Theatre is a howling wilderness.' But there is a fascination in a Grand Concern, of which one is the head--one goes on and on. All the savings of a life devoted to the British Drama and the production of native genius went in what I may call--a jiffey! But it was no common object, sir, to your sight displayed--but what with pleasure, sir (I appeal to the Hag), Heaven itself surveyed!--a great man struggling, sir, with the storms of fate, and greatly falling, sir, with--a sensation! York remembers it to this day! I took the benefit of the Act--it was the only benefit I did take--and n.o.body was the better for it. But I don't repine--I realised my dream: that is more than all can say. Since then I have had many downs, and no ups. I have been a messenger, sir--a prompter, sir, in my own Exhibition, to which my own clown, having married into the tragic line, succeeded, sir, as proprietor; buying of me when I took the York, the theatre, scenery, and properties, sir, with the right still to call himself 'Rugge's Grand Theatrical Exhibition,' for an old song, sir--Melancholy. Tyrannised over, sir--snubbed and bullied by a creature dressed in a little brief authority; and my own tights--scarlet--as worn by me in my own applauded part of 'The Remorseless Baron.' At last, with this one faithful creature, I resolved to burst the chains--to be free as air--in short, a chartered libertine, sir. We have not much, but thank the immortal G.o.ds, we are independent, sir--the Hag and I--chartered libertines! And we are alive still--at which, in strict confidence, I may own to you that I am astonished."

"Yes! you do live," said Jasper, much interested--for how to live at all was at that moment a matter of considerable doubt to himself; "you do live--it is amazing! How?"

"The Faithful tells fortunes; and sometimes we pick up windfalls--widows and elderly single ladies--but it is dangerous. Labour is sweet, sir: but not hard labour in the dungeons of a Bridewell. She has known that labour, sir; and in those intervals I missed her much, Don't cry, Hag; I repeat, I live!"

"I understand now; you live upon her! They are the best of creatures, these hags, as you call them, certainly. Well, well, no saying what a man may come to! I suppose you have never seen Waife, nor that fellow you say was so well-dressed and good-looking, and who sold you the Phenomenon, nor the Phenomenon herself--Eh?" added Losely, stretching himself, and yawning, as he saw the brandybottle was finished.

"I have seen Waife--the one-eyed monster! Aha!--I have seen him!--and yesterday too; and a great comfort it was to me too!"

"You saw Waife yesterday--where?"