Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume XXII Part 8

Left to themselves, the two remaining friends of the hour before, but now no longer friends, looked sternly at each other. The one considered himself duped; the other was burning under the imputation of being a cheat and a liar.

"Oh I don't retract," said Campbell, with increased fierceness. "It was upon the faith of your word that I ventured the bet against my own convictions. I have traced the lady to Great King Street, where she resides, as the aunt of the boy; and I am satisfied that, in a case where the boy's mother is alive, and now in her own house, he, of the age he is, never could have used the word mother or mamma, or any word of that import, to his father's sister. All power and energies are comparative. This 10 cracks the spine of my fortune as effectually as ten times the amount. I have not the money, and know no more where to find it than I do to get hold of the philosopher's stone. I repeat I have been cheated, and I demand of you the money."

"Which you shall never get," replied Dewhurst. "I can swear that I heard the words. They thrill on my ears now; and the best proof of my conviction is, that I am myself ruined. Yes," and he began to roll his eyes about, as the terrors of his situation came rushing upon him, on the wake of the now departing effects of the Rainbow wine--"Yes, the swell, the fop, the leader of the college _ton_, whose coat came from the artistic study of Willis, whose necktie could raise a _furore_, whose glove, without a wrinkle, would condescend only to be touched by friendship on the tip of the finger, is now at the mercy of any one of twenty sleasy dogs, who can tell the sheriff I owe them money. Money!

why, I have only fifteen pounds in the wide world, and I must pay that to my landlady."

As he uttered these last words, the door opened, and there stood before him a man with a blue coat, surmounted by a red collar. He held a paper in his hand; his demeanour was deferential and exuberantly polite.

"That sum you have mentioned, sir," he said, looking to the student, "with 10 added, will save you and me much trouble. The debt to Mr. Reid is 25; and here is a certain paper which gives me the power to do an unpolite thing. You comprehend? I am an advocate for painless operations."

"Will you accept the 15?" said Dewhurst, now scarcely able to articulate.

"Yes, if this gentleman here, who is, I presume, your friend, will kindly add the 10. The expenses may stand."

Campbell could only grin at this strange conversation.

"Unwilling?" continued the messenger. "Ah, I see. It is strange that when I devote myself to a gentleman, his friends fly away. This is my misfortune. Well, there is no help for it. We must take a walk to the prison," addressing himself to his debtor. "You are a gentleman, and I shall be your servant in livery."

Dewhurst braced himself with a violent effort, like a spasm, and took his hat.

"Give me the 10," said Campbell. "It will make no difference now. There are no degrees in despair."

"I must take care of my master's money," said the officer, with an attempt at a smile; and without going the full length of imitating that most philanthropic of all executors of the law, Simpson, who patted his victims on the back while he adjusted the rope, he added, "And now, sir, I am at your humble service."

In a very short time after, the strange events of that day were terminated by the young man being placed in the debtor's prison of the Calton. Like other jail birds, he at first shunned his brethren in misfortune, fleeing to his room, and shrouding himself in solitude and partial darkness. The change from a life of gaiety, if not dissipation, to the experiences of prison squalor, had come upon him without preparation, if indeed preparation for evil ever diminishes or much ameliorates the inevitable effects of the visitation. Unfortunates exhibit wonderful diversities in their manifestations. Dewhurst became dejected, broken in spirits, sad, and remorseful. He scarcely stirred from the bed on which he had thrown himself when he entered; and his mind became a theatre where strange plays were acted, and strange personages performed strange parts, under the direction of stage managers over whom he had no control. Though some unhappy predecessor in the same cell had scribbled on the wall,

"A prison is a cannie place, Though viewed with reprobation, Where cheats and thieves, and scants o' grace, Find time for cogitation,"

he did not find that he could properly cogitate or meditate, even if he had been, which he never was, a thinker. All his thoughts were reduced to a continued wild succession of burning images,--the mild face of his mother, so far away, as it smiled upon him when he ran about among the cane groves of the west; the negroes, with their "young ma.s.sa" on their tongues, jabbering their affection; his father scowling upon him as undutiful; another, not so far away, in whose eyes--beautiful to him--love dwelt as his worshipper, looking all endearment, only the next moment to cast upon him the withering glance of her contempt, if not hatred; admirers, toadies, satellites, and sycophants, all there in groups and in succession, beslabbering him with praises, then exploding in peals of laughter. Nor was another awanting in these saturnalia--the form and face of her whose one word of sentence had been to him as a doom, and who fixed that doom in his soul by her red glance of reproof.

Seemingly very indifferent objects a.s.sumed in the new lights of his spirit gigantic and affraying features,--the sea-gull, with its torn back, bleeding and quivering, and those diamond eyes so bright even in its looks of agony--an object low indeed in the scale of nature, but here elevated by some overruling power into the very heart of man's actions and destinies, as if to show out of what humble things the lightnings of retribution may come. Nay, these diamond eyes haunted him; they were everywhere in these saturnalian reveries, following every recurring image as an inevitable concomitant which he had no power to drive away, entering into the orbits of the personages, gleaming out of the heads of negroes, that of his father, that of his mother, even that of his mistress, imparting to the looks and glances of the latter a brilliancy which enhanced beauty, while it sharpened them into poignancy. But most of all were they in some way a.s.sociated with the form of the unknown lady. She never appeared to him as the being on whom his destiny was suspended; but, sooner or later, her own comparatively l.u.s.treless...o...b.. changed into those diamonds, which could fulminate scorn not less than they could beam out supplication.

For several days and nights he had scarcely any intervals of peace from these soul-penetrating fancies, and these moments were due to visits.

But who came to visit? Not the writer to the signet, the brother of his affianced, whom he had expected to see first of all as a friend, if not as a relation, ready to extend the hand that would save him; not any of those with whom he had shared the folly of extravagance, if not dissipation, on whom he had lavished favours in the wildness of his generosity. The first was felicitating himself on his sister's escape; the latter received the lesson that teaches prudence _a la distance_.

His only visitors were one or two heads of families where he had been received as a fashionable friend, and these came only to look and inquire. Their curiosity was satisfied when they got out of him the amount of his debt, and pleased when they considered that their daughters were at home, and under no chance of becoming allied to a prisoner. One or two old a.s.sociates, too, paid their respects to him, but they were of those who had resisted his fascinations and found their pleasures in their studies. We seek for the virtues, but we do not always find them in the high places, where masks, copied from them and bearing their beautiful lineaments and their effulgence, are worn in their stead only to cover the vices which are their very antipodes. No: more often in lowlier regions, lying _perdu_ behind vices, not voluntary, but often, as it were, inflicted and peering out, ashamed to be seen, because arrayed in the rags of poverty. A solitary female stole in to him. Who was she? One with whom he had formed a connection of not an honourable kind, only now interrupted by the walls of the prison? No. One whom he had long before cast off, only because the vice he had inoculated her with had cast off the beauty that had inflamed him. Nor did he know the meaning of that stealthy visit, which lasted only for a few minutes--so unexpected, for he had not seen her during many months, so singular, so unnatural, so unlike the world, returning grat.i.tude for injury, benediction for infamy, until, after she had suddenly slipped away, he found by the side of the wall a small bottle of wine. That form and face, once more beautiful in his estimation than were those even now of his honourable affianced, entered among the imagery of his reveries; but the diamond eyes never displaced those of her gentle nature. He had wronged her, but they never filled with the fire of denunciation. She had looked her grief at him only through the tears he had raised in them, and had never attempted to dry. Yes, the diamond eyes entered everywhere, and into every form but that one where the red heat of revenge might have been expected to shrivel up and harden the issues of tears.

Further on in the same evening, the jailer, a good-natured sort of fellow, came in to him while he was absorbed in these thoughts. He was at the time sitting on his bed.

"A lady called in the dusk," he said, "and inquired if it was true you were here. I told her it was."

"And what more?" asked the youth, as he started out of his day-dream.

"But, stay--what like was she?"

"I could scarcely see her," replied the man; "middling tail, rather young, as I thought--with a veil, through which I could see a pair of pretty, bright eyes."

"Were they like diamonds?" cried the student, absolutely forgetting that he was speaking to an ordinary mortal about very ordinary things.

"Ha, ha! I never saw diamond eyes," answered the jailer; "but I've seen gla.s.s ones in a doll's head looking very bright. Why, you 'aven't got mad, like some of the chicken-hearted birds in our cage?"

"Yes," cried the youth, "I'm frantic-mad; but stay, have patience. Did she want to see me?"

"Yes, she asked if she could; but when I told her she might, she seemed to get afeared to come into a jail, and said she would call again to-morrow night at the same hour."

"Can you tell me nothing more of what she was like?--not she who was here this evening?"

"Why, no; don't you think I know her kind? Oh, we see many o' them. They stick closest to the unfortunate, but 'tis because they are unfortunate themselves. Common thing, sir. Never feel for others till we have something to feel for ourselves. The visitor is a lady, sir."

"Can you tell me nothing more?" said the student eagerly. "How was she dressed?"

"A large, elegant cloak, sir; can scarcely say more."

"Was it trimmed with fur?"

"Not sure; but now, when I think, there was some lightish tr.i.m.m.i.n.g--I mean lighter than the cloak."

"And the bonnet?"

"Why, I think velvet; but you'll maybe see her yourself to-morrow. The like o' her may do you good. The unfortunates who stick so close to the unfortunate do no good--they're a plaster that don't cure."

"It is Maria!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Dewhurst, as the jailer shut the door. "She feels for me, and has come in spite of her hard-hearted brother. Her diamond eyes are of another kind. They speak wealth, and love to bestow it. Her fortune is her own, and with that I may yet turn that wayward destiny, and laugh at my persecutors."

That ray of hope, illuminating his soul, changed almost in an instant the whole tenor of his mind. It might be compared to a stream of nervous energy, emanating from the brain, and shooting down through the network of chords, confirming convulsed muscles, and; imparting to trembling members consistency of action and graces of motion. His reveries were scared by it, as owls under the influence of a sunbeam, and retreated into the dark recesses from which they had been charmed by the enchantment of despair. The personages of these visions were no longer avengers, casting upon him the burning beams of the diamond eyes. They were hopeful, pitiful; the flatterers and fawners were at their old work again, and Pleasure, with her siren face, smiled blandishments on him.

Then he would justify the favours of the heaven he made for himself. He would be a logician, for once, in that kind of dialectics called the "wish-born."

"What was I afraid of?" he said to himself. "There is no turpitude, no shame in a fair bet. I was worsted in an honourable contest. What crazy power mocked me into the belief that all this that has befallen me was connected with the flaying of a bird? Don't we break the necks of innocent, yea, gentle fowls, not depredators like gulls, every day for our dinners? And don't ladies, as delicate as the unknown censor who dared to chastise me with her eyes, eat of the same, with a relish delightful to the tongues that p.r.o.nounce the fine words of pity and philanthropy? But, even admitting there was cruelty in the act, where is the link that binds it with the consequences which have brought me here? The bet upon the maternity was not an effect of the flaying of the bird. If it followed the prior bet, it would have followed another, in which I was gainer, equally the same. The mad energy which weaves in my head these day-dreams, and pursues me with these diamond eyes of wrath, is a lying power, and I shall master it by the strength of my reason, which at least is G.o.d's gift. Come, my Maria, as my good angel, and enable me to free my mind from illusions. I will sit and look into your eyes, as I have done so often. Yes, I will satisfy myself that they shine still with the l.u.s.tre of love, hope, and happiness; and oh, let these, and these only, enter into my dreams."

And thus he satisfied himself, as all do, whose hope weaves the syllogisms of their wishes, and sits to see pleasure caught on the wing.

The day pa.s.sed apace to usher in the evening with its messenger of peace. Where, in that squalid place, would he seat her, whose peculiar province was the drawing-room? How would he receive her first look of sympathy? how repay it? with what words express his emotions? with what fervour kiss those lips redolent of forgiveness? with what ecstasy look into those eyes refulgent with love? He would control himself, and be calm. He would rehea.r.s.e, that he might not fail in the forms of an interview on which hung his destiny, almost his life. The hour of seven arrived. He heard the heavy foot of the jailer come tramp, tramp along the lobby. There was a softer step behind, as if the echo of the heavier tread. A stern voice and a softer one mingled their notes. The door opened.

"My Mar--! O G.o.d! these scornful eyes again."

"Not scornful now," replied the soft voice of a woman, as she came forward, and stood before him in the dusk.

"Were there light enough," she continued, "I would lift my veil and show you that they are capable of a kindlier light than even that they now carry, for the offering I made to heaven has been more than answered."

"Ah, you come to retract," he said, "to speak the truth at last. It is not too late to say you _are_ the mother--the mother of the boy. Nor need you be ashamed: there may be reasons; but many a woman lives to repent--"

"Hold, sir," she cried with indignation, as she fixed upon him a look even more penetrating than that he so well remembered. "I have nothing to retract--nothing to be ashamed of. I came here out of pure sympathy, to make amends to one who has fallen for a prayer which burst from me in my anger. Your friend, who called for me, told me that you were a prisoner, and that your imprisonment was the consequence of the wager which it fell to me to decide. I did not come to repeat to you what I said before, that I am not the mother of the boy, but to make an explanation."

"And I have one to ask," said he.

"I am ready to answer."

"How could I be deceived?" said he. "I heard the boy address you as his mother."

"And that is what I came to explain. I have taxed my memory since Mr.

Campbell insisted, in my presence, that Frederick did address me in the manner you have stated. Shall I tell you the precise words he used?"

"I wait for them."