автордың кітабын онлайн тегін оқу Davenport Dunn, a Man of Our Day. Volume 2 (of 2)
DAVENPORT DUNN,
A MAN OF OUR TIMES
Volume Two of Two
By Charles Lever.
With Illustrations By Phiz.
CONTENTS
DAVENPORT DUNN: A MAN OF OUR DAY
CHAPTER I. THE TELEGRAPHIC DESPATCH
CHAPTER II. "THE RUN FOR GOLD”
CHAPTER III. A NOTE FROM DAVIS
CHAPTER IV. LAZARUS, STEIN, GELDWECHSLER
CHAPTER V. A VILLAGE NEAR THE RHINE
CHAPTER VI. IMMINENT TIDINGS
CHAPTER VII. A DISCURSIVE CONVERSATION
CHAPTER VIII. A FAMILY MEETING
CHAPTER IX. A SAUNTER BY MOONLIGHT
CHAPTER X. A RIDE TO NEUWIED
CHAPTER XI. HOW GROG DAVIS DISCOURSED, AND ANNESLEY BEECHER LISTENED
CHAPTER XII. REFLECTIONS OF ANNESLEY BEECHER
CHAPTER XIII. A DARK CONFIDENCE
CHAPTER XIV. SOME DAYS AT GLENGARIFF
CHAPTER XV. A BRIDLE-PATH
CHAPTER XVI. THE DISCOVERY
CHAPTER XVII. THE DOUBLE BLUNDER
CHAPTER XVIII. DOWNING STREET
CHAPTER XIX. THE COTTAGE NEAR SNOWDON
CHAPTER XX. A SUPPER
CHAPTER XXI. A SHOCK
CHAPTER XXII. A MASTER AND MAN
CHAPTER XXIII. ANNESLEY BEECHER IN A NEW PART
CHAPTER XXIV. A DEAD HEAT
CHAPTER XXV. STUNNING TIDINGS
CHAPTER XXVI. UNPLEASANT EXPLANATIONS
CHAPTER XXVII. OVERREACHINGS
CHAPTER XXVIII. AT ROME
CHAPTER XXIX. THE TWO VISCOUNTESSES
CHAPTER XXX. MRS. SEACOLE’S
CHAPTER XXXI. THE CONVENT OF ST. GEORGE
CHAPTER XXXII. SHOWING “HOW WOUNDS ARE HEALED”
CHAPTER XXXIII. "GROG” IN COUNCIL
CHAPTER XXXIV. THE TRAIN
CHAPTER XXXV. THE TRIAL
CHAPTER XXXVI. THE END OF ALL THINGS
DAVENPORT DUNN: A MAN OF OUR DAY
CHAPTER I. THE TELEGRAPHIC DESPATCH
When Mr. Davenport Dunn entered the drawing-room before dinner on that day, his heart beat very quickly as he saw Lady Augusta Arden was there alone. In what spirit she remembered the scene of the morning,—whether she felt resentment towards him for his presumption, was disposed to scoff down his pretensions, or to regard them, if not with favor, with at least forgiveness, were the themes on which his mind was yet dwelling. The affable smile with which she now met him did more to resolve these doubts than all his casuistry.
“Was it not very thoughtful of me,” said she, “to release you this morning, and suffer you to address yourself to the important things which claimed your attention? I really am quite vain of my self-denial.”
“And yet, Lady Augusta,” said he, in a low tone, “I had felt more flattered if you had been less mindful of the exigency, and been more interested in what I then was speaking of.”
“What a selfish speech!” said she, laughing. “Now that my forbearance has given you all the benefits it could confer, you turn round and say you are not grateful for it. I suppose,” added she, half pettishly, “the despatch was not very pressing after all, and that this was the cause of some disappointment.”
“I am unable to say,” replied he, calmly.
“What do you mean? Surely, when you read it—”
“But I have not read it,—there it is still, just as you saw-it,” said he, producing the packet with the seal unbroken.
“But really, Mr. Dunn,” said she, and her face flushed up as she spoke, “this does not impress me with the wonderful aptitude for affairs men ascribe to you. Is it usual to treat these messages so cavalierly?”
“It never happened with me till this morning, Lady Augusta,” said he, in the same low tone. “Carried away by an impulse which I will not try to account for, I had dared to speak to you of myself and of my future in a way that showed how eventful to both might prove the manner in which you heard me.”
“Well, Dunn,” cried Lord Glengariff, entering, “I suppose you have made a day of work of it; we have never seen you since breakfast.”
“On the contrary, my Lord,” replied he, in deep confusion, “I have taken my idleness in the widest sense. Never wrote a line,—not looked into a newspaper.”
“Wouldn’t even open a telegraphic message which came to his hands this morning,” said Lady Augusta, with a malicious drollery in her glance towards him.
“Incredible!” cried my Lord.
“Quite true, I assure your Lordship,” said Dunn, in deeper confusion, and not knowing what turn to give his explanation.
“The fact is,” broke in Lady Augusta, hurriedly, “Mr. Dunn was so implicit in his obedience to our prescription of perfect rest and repose, that he made it a point of honor not even to read a telegram without permission.”
“I must say it is very flattering to us,” said Lord Glengariff; “but now let us reward the loyalty, and let him see what his news is.”
Dunn looked at Lady Augusta, who, with the very slightest motion of her head, gave consent, and he broke open the despatch.
Dunn crushed the paper angrily in his hand when he finished reading it, and muttered some low words of angry meaning.
“Nothing disagreeable, I trust?” asked his Lordship.
“Yes, my Lord, something even worse than disagreeable,” said he; then flattening out the crumpled paper, he held it to him to read.
Lord Glengariff, putting on his spectacles, perused the document slowly, and then, turning towards Dunn, in a voice of deep agitation, said, “This is very disastrous indeed; are you prepared for it?”
Without attending to the question, Dunn took the despatch from Lord Glengariff, and handed it to Lady Augusta.
“A run for gold!” cried she, suddenly. “An attempt to break the Ossory Bank! What does it all mean? Who are they that make this attack?”
“Opponents—some of them political, some commercial, a few, perhaps, men personally unfriendly,—enemies of what they call my success!” and he sighed heavily on the last word. “Let me see,” said he, slowly, after a pause; “to-day is Thursday—to-morrow will be the 28th—heavy payments are required for the Guatemala Trunk Line,—something more than forty thousand pounds to be made up. The Parma Loan, second instalment, comes on the 80th.”
“Dinner, my Lord,” said a servant, throwing open the door.
“A thousand pardons, Lady Augusta,” said Dunn, offering his arm. “I am really shocked at obtruding these annoyances upon your notice. You see, my Lord,” added he, gayly, “one of the penalties of admitting the ‘working-men of life’ into your society.”
It was only as they passed on towards the dinner-room that Lord Glengariff noticed Miss Kellett’s absence.
“She has a headache or a cold, I believe,” said Lady Augusta, carelessly; and they sat down to dinner.
So long as the servants were present the conversation ranged over commonplace events and topics, little indeed passing, since each seemed too deeply impressed with grave forebodings for much inclination for mere talking. Once alone—and Lord Glengariff took the earliest moment to be so—they immediately resumed the subject of the ill-omened despatch.
“You are, at all events, prepared, Dunn?” said the Earl; “this onslaught does not take you by surprise?”
“I am ashamed to say it does, my Lord,” said he, with a painful smile. “I was never less suspectful of any malicious design upon me. I was, for the first time perhaps in all my life, beginning to feel strong in the consciousness that I had faithfully performed my allotted part in the world, advanced the great interests of my country and of humanity generally. This blow has, therefore, shocked me deeply.”
“What a base ingratitude!” exclaimed Lady Augusta, indignantly.
“After all,” said Dunn, generously, “let us remember that I am not a fair judge in my own cause. Others have taken, it may be, another reading of my character; they may deem me narrow-minded, selfish, and ambitious. My very success—I am not going to deny it has been great—may have provoked its share of enmity. Why, the very vastness and extent of my projects were a sort of standing reproach to petty speculators and small scheme-mongers.”
“So that it has really come upon you unawares?” said the Earl, reverting to his former remark.
“Completely so, my Lord. The tranquil ease and happiness I have enjoyed under this roof—the first real holiday in a long life of toil—are the best evidences I can offer how little I could have anticipated such a stroke.”
“Still I fervently hope it will not prove more than inconvenience,” said he, feelingly.
“Not even so much, my Lord, as regards money. I cannot believe that the movement will be general. There is no panic in the country, rents are paid, prices remunerating, markets better than we have seen them for years; the sound sense and intelligence of the people will soon detect in this attack the prompting of some personal malice. In all likelihood a few thousands will meet the whole demand.”
“I am so glad to hear you say so!” said Lady Augusta, smiling. “Really, when I think of all our persuasions to detain you here, I never could acquit us of some sort of share in any disaster your delay might have occasioned.”
“Oh, Dunn would never connect his visit here with such consequences, I ‘m certain,” said the Earl.
“Assuredly not, my Lord,” said he; and as his eyes met those of Lady Augusta, he grew red, and felt confused.
“Are your people—your agents and men of business, I mean,” said the Earl—“equal to such an emergency as the present, or will they have to look to you for guidance and direction?”
“Merely to meet the demand for gold is a simple matter, my Lord,” said Dunn, “and does not require any effort of mind or forethought. To prevent the back-water of this rushing flood submerging and engulfing other banking-houses; to defend, in a word, the lines of our rivals and enemies; to save from the consequences of their recklessness the very men who have assailed us,—these are weighty cares!”
“And are you bound in honor to take this trouble in their behalf?”
“No, my Lord, not in honor any more than in law, but bound by the debt we owe to that commercial community by whose confidence we have acquired fortune. My position at the head of the great industrial movement in this country imposes upon me the great responsibility that ‘no injury should befall the republic’ Against the insane attacks of party hate, factious violence, or commercial knavery, I am expected to do my duty, nay, more, I am expected to be provided with means to meet whatever emergency may arise,—defeat this scheme, expose that, denounce the other. Am I wrong in calling these weighty cares?”
Self-glorification was not usually one of Davenport Dunn’s weaknesses,—indeed, “self,” in any respect, was not a theme on which he was disposed to dwell,—and yet now, for reasons which may better be suspected than alleged, he talked in a spirit of even vain exultation of his plans, his station, and his influence. If it was something to display before the peer claims to national respect, which, if not so ancient, were scarcely less imposing than his own, it was more pleasing still to dilate upon a theme to which the peer’s daughter listened so eagerly. It was, besides, a grand occasion to exhibit the vast range of resources, the widespread influences, and far-reaching sympathies of the great commercial man, to show him, not the mere architect of his own fortune, but the founder of a nation’s prosperity. While he thus held forth, and in a strain to which fervor had lent a sort of eloquence, a servant entered with another despatch.
“Oh! I trust this brings you better news,” cried Lady Augusta, eagerly; and, as he broke the envelope, he thanked her with a grateful look.
“Well?” interposed she, anxiously, as he gazed at the lines without speaking,—“well?”
“Just as I said,” muttered Dunn, in a deep and suppressed voice,—“a systematic plot, a deep-laid scheme against me.”
“Is it still about the Bank?” asked the Earl, whose interest had been excited by the tenor of the recent conversation.
“Yes, my Lord; they insist on making me out a bubble speculator, an adventurer, a Heaven knows what of duplicity and intrigue. I would simply ask them: ‘Is the wealth with which this same Davenport Dunn has enriched you real, solid, and tangible; are the guineas mint-stamped; are the shares true representatives of value?’ But why do I talk of these people? If they render me no gratitude, they owe me none,—my aims were higher and greater than ever they or their interests comprehended.” From the haughty defiance of his tone, his voice fell suddenly to a low and quick key, as he said: “This message informs me that the demand upon the Ossory to-morrow will be a great concerted movement. Barnard, the man I myself returned last election for the borough, is to head it; he has canvassed the county for holders of our notes, and such is the panic that the magistrates have sent for an increased force of police and two additional companies of infantry. My man of business asks, ‘What is to be done?’”
“And what is to be done?” asked the Earl.
“Meet it, my Lord. Meet the demand as our duty requires us.”
There was a calm dignity in the manner Dunn spoke the words that had its full effect upon the Earl and his daughter. They saw this “man of the people” display, in a moment of immense peril, an amount of cool courage that no dissimulation could have assumed. As they could, and did indeed say afterwards, when relating the incident, “We were sitting at the dessert, chatting away freely about one thing or another, when the confirmed tidings arrived by telegraph that an organized attack was to be made against his credit by a run for gold. You should really have seen him,” said Lady Augusta, “to form any idea of the splendid composure he manifested. The only thing like emotion he exhibited was a sort of haughty disdain, a proud pity, for men who should have thus requited the great services he had been rendering to the country.”
It is but just to own that he did perform his part well; he acted it, too, as theatrical critics would say, “chastely;” that is, there was no rant, no exaggeration,—not a trait too much, not a tint too strong.
“I wish I knew of any way to be of service to you in this emergency, Dunn,” said the Earl, as they returned to the drawing-room; “I’m no capitalist, nor have I a round sum at my command—”
“My dear Lord,” broke in Dunn, with much feeling, “of money I can command whatever amount I want. Baring, Hope, Rothschild, any of them would assist me with millions, if I needed them, to-morrow, which happily, however, I do not. There is still a want which they cannot supply, but which, I am proud to say, I have no longer to fear. The kind sympathy of your Lordship and Lady Augusta has laid me under an obligation—” Here Mr. Dunn’s voice faltered; the Earl grasped his hand with a generous clasp, and Lady Augusta carried her handkerchief to her eyes as she averted her head.
“What a pack of hypocrites!” cries our reader, in disgust. No, not so. There was a dash of reality through all this deceit. They were moved,—their own emotions, the tones of their own voices, the workings of their own natures, had stirred some amount of honest sentiment in their hearts; how far it was alloyed by less worthy feeling, to what extent fraud and trickery mingled there, we are not going to tell you,—perhaps we could not, if we would.
“You mean to go over to Kilkenny, then, to-morrow, Dunn?” asked his Lordship, after a painful pause.
“Yes, my Lord, my presence is indispensable.”
“Will you allow Lady Augusta and myself to accompany you? I believe and trust that men like myself have not altogether lost the influence they once used to wield in this country, and I am vain enough to imagine I may be useful.”
“Oh, my Lord, this overwhelms me!” said Dunn, and covered his eyes with his hand.
CHAPTER II. “THE RUN FOR GOLD”
The great Ossory Bank, with its million sterling of paid-up capital, its royal charter, its titled directory, and its shares at a premium, stood at the top of Patrick Street, Kilkenny, and looked, in the splendor of its plate-glass windows and the security of its iron railings, the very type of solvency and safety. The country squire ascended the hall-door steps with a sort of feeling of acquaintanceship, for he had known the Viscount who once lived there in days before the Union, and the farmer experienced a sense of trustfulness in depositing his hard-earned gains in what he regarded as a temple of Croesus. What an air of prosperity and business did the interior present! The massive doors swung noiselessly at the slightest touch, meet emblem of the secrecy that prevailed, and the facility that pervaded all transactions, within. What alacrity, too, in that numerous band of clerks who counted and cashed and checked unceasingly! How calmly they passed from desk to desk, a word, a mere whisper, serving for converse; and then what a grand and mysterious solemnity about that back office with its double doors, within which some venerable cashier, bald-headed and pursy, stole at intervals to consult the oracle who dwelt within! In the spacious apartment devoted to cash operations, nothing denoted the former destiny of the mansion but a large fireplace, with a pretentious chimney-piece of black oak, over which a bust of our gracious Queen now figured, an object of wonderment and veneration to many a frieze-coated gazer.
On the morning of the 12th August, to which day we have brought our present history, the street in front of the Bank presented a scene of no ordinary interest. From an early hour people continued to pour in, till the entire way was choked up with carriages and conveyances of every description, from the well-equipped barouche of the country gentleman to the humblest “shandradan” of the petty farmer. Sporting-looking fellows upon high-conditioned thoroughbreds, ruddy old squires upon cobs, and hard-featured country-folk upon shaggy ponies, were all jammed up together amidst a dense crowd of foot passengers. A strong police-force was drawn up in front of the Bank, although nothing in the appearance of the assembled mass seemed to denote the necessity for their presence. A low murmur of voices ran through the crowd as each talked to his neighbor, consulting, guessing, and speculating, as temperament inclined: some were showing placards and printed notices they had received through the post; some pointed to newspaper paragraphs; others displayed great rolls of notes; but all talked with a certain air of sadness that appeared to presage coming misfortune. As ten o’clock drew nigh, the hour for opening the Bank, the excitement rose to a painful pitch; every eye was directed to the massive door, whose gorgeous brass knocker shone with a sort of insolent brilliancy in the sun. At every moment watches were consulted, and in muttered whispers men broke their fears to those beside them. Some could descry the heads of people moving about in the cash-office, where a considerable bustle appeared to prevail; and even this much of life seemed to raise the spirits of the crowd, and the rumor ran quickly on every side that the Bank was about to open. At last the deep bell of the town-hall struck ten. At each fall of the hammer all expected to see the door move, but it never stirred; and now the pent-up feeling of the multitude might be marked in a sort of subdued growl,—a low, ill-boding sound, that seemed ta come out of the very earth. As if to answer the unspoken anger of the crowd,—a challenge accepted ere given,—a heavy crash was heard, and the police proceeded to load with ball in the face of the people,—a demonstration whose significance there was no mistaking. A cry of angry defiance burst from the assembled mass at the sight, but as suddenly was checked again as the massive door was seen to move, and then, with a loud bang, fly wide open. The rush was now tremendous. With some vague impression that everything depended upon being amongst the first, the people poured in with all the force of a mighty torrent. Each, fighting his way as if for life itself, regardless of the cries of suffering about him, strove to get forward; nor could all the efforts of the police avail to restrain them in the slightest. Bleeding, wounded, half suffocated, with bruised faces and clothes torn to tatters, they struggled on,—no deference to age, no respect to condition. It was a fearful anarchy, where every thought of the past was lost in the present emergency. On they poured, breathless and bloody, with gleaming eyes and faces of demoniacal meaning; they pushed, they jostled, and they tore, till the first line gained the counter, against which the force behind now threatened to crush them to death.
What a marvellous contrast to the storm-tossed multitude, steaming and disfigured, was the calm attitude of the clerks within the counter! Not deigning, as it seemed, to bestow a glance upon the agitated scene before them, they moved placidly about, pen behind the ear, in voices of ordinary tone, asking what each wanted, and counting over the proffered notes with all the impassiveness of every-day habit. “Gold for these, did you say?” they repeated, as though any other demand met the ear! Why, the very air rang with the sound, and the walls gave back the cry. From the wild voice of half-maddened recklessness to the murmur that broke from fainting exhaustion, there was but one word,—“Gold!” A drowning crew, as the surging waves swept over them, never screamed for succor with wilder eagerness than did that tangled mass shout, “Gold, gold!”
In their savage energy they could scarcely credit that their demands should be so easily complied with; they were half stupefied at the calm indifference that met their passionate appeal. They counted and recounted the glittering pieces over and over, as though some trick were to be apprehended, some deception to be detected. When drawn or pulled back from the counter by others eager as themselves, they might be seen in corners, counting over their money, and reckoning it once more. It was so hard to believe that all their terrors were for nothing, their worst fears without a pretext. Even yet they couldn’t imagine but that the supply must soon run short, and they kept asking those that came away whether they, too, had got their gold. Hour after hour rolled on, and still the same demand, and still the same unbroken flow of the yellow tide continued. Some very large checks had been presented; but no sooner was their authenticity acknowledged than they were paid. An agent from another bank arrived with a formidable roll of “Ossory” notes, but was soon seen issuing forthwith two bursting little bags of sovereigns. Notwithstanding all this, the pressure never ceased for a moment; nay, as the day wore on, the crowds seemed to have grown denser and more importunate; and when the half-exhausted clerks claimed a few minutes’ respite for a biscuit and a glass of wine, a cry of impatience burst from the insatiable multitude. It was three o’clock. In another hour the Bank would close, as many surmised, never to open again. It was evident, from the still increasing crowd and the excitement that prevailed, how little confidence the ready payments of the Bank had diffused. They who came forth loaded with gold were regarded as fortunate, while they who still waited for their turn were in all the feverish torture of uncertainty.
A little after three the crowd was cleft open by the passage of a large travelling-barouche, which, with four steaming posters, advanced slowly through the dense mass.
“Who comes here with an earl’s coronet?” said a gentleman to his neighbor, as the carriage passed. “Lord Glengariff, and Davenport Dunn himself, by George!” cried he suddenly.
The words were as quickly caught up by those at either side, and the news, “Davenport Dunn has arrived,” ran through the immense multitude. If there was an eager, almost intense anxiety to catch a glimpse of him, there was still nothing that could indicate, in the slightest degree, the state of popular feeling towards him. Slightly favorable it might possibly have been, inasmuch as a faint effort at a cheer burst forth at the announcement of his name; but it was repressed just as suddenly, and it was in a silence almost awful that he descended from the carriage at the private door of the Bank.
“Do, I beg of you, Mr. Dunn,” said Lady Augusta, as he stood to assist her to alight; “let me entreat of you not to think of us. We can be most comfortably accommodated at the hotel.”
“By all means, Dunn. I insist upon it,” broke in the Earl.
“In declining my poor hospitality, my Lord,” said Dunn, “you will grieve me much, while you will also favor the impression that I am not in a condition to offer it.”
“Ah! quite true,—very justly observed. Dunn is perfectly right, Augusta. We ought to stop here.” And he descended at once, and gave his hand to his daughter.
Lady Augusta turned about ere she entered the house, and looked at the immense crowd before her. There was something of almost resentfulness in the haughty gaze she bestowed; but, let us own, the look, whatever it implied, well became her proud features; and more than one was heard to say, “What a handsome woman she is!”
This little incident in the day’s proceedings gave rise to much conjecture, some auguring that events must be grave and menacing when Dunn’s own presence was required, others inferring that he came to give assurance and confidence to the Bank. Nor was the appearance of Lord Glen-gariff less open to its share of surmise; and many were the inquiries how far he was personally interested,—whether he was a large stockholder of the concern, or deep in its books as debtor. Leaving the speculative minds who discussed the subject without doors, let us follow Mr. Dunn, as, with Lady Augusta on his arm, he led the way to the drawing-room.
The rooms were handsomely furnished, that to the back opening upon a conservatory filled with rich geraniums, and ornamented with a pretty marble fountain, now in full play. Indeed, so well had Dunn’s orders been attended to, that the apartments which he scarcely occupied for above a day or so in a twelvemonth had actually assumed the appearance of being in constant use. Books, prints, and newspapers were scattered about, fresh flowers stood in the vases, and recent periodicals lay on the tables.
“What a charming house!” exclaimed Lady Augusta; and, really, the approbation was sincere, for the soft-cushioned sofas, the perfumed air, the very quiet itself, were in delightful contrast to the heat and discomfort of a journey by “rail.”
It was in vain Dunn entreated his noble guests to accept some luncheon; they peremptorily refused, and, in fact, declared that they would only remain there on the condition that he bestowed no further thought upon them, addressing himself entirely to the weighty cares around him.
“Will you, at least, tell me at what hour you’d like dinner, my Lord? Shall we say six?”
“With all my heart. Only, once more, I beg, never think of us. We are most comfortable here, and want for nothing.”
With a deep bow of obedience, Dunn moved towards the door, when suddenly Lady Augusta whispered a few rapid words in her father’s ear.
“Stop a moment, Dunn!” cried the Earl. “Augusta is quite right. The observation is genuine woman’s wit She says I ought to go down along with you, to show myself in the Bank; that my presence there will have a salutary effect. Eh, what d’ye think?”
“I am deeply indebted to Lady Augusta for the suggestion,” said Dunn, coloring highly. “There cannot be a doubt that your Lordship’s countenance and support at such a moment are priceless.”
“I ‘m glad you think so, glad she thought of it,” muttered the Earl, as he arranged his white locks before the glass, and made a sort of hasty toilet for his approaching appearance in public.
To judge from the sensation produced by the noble Lord’s appearance in the Bank, Lady Augusta’s suggestion was admirable. The arrival of a wagon-load of bullion could scarcely have caused a more favorable impression. If Noah had been an Englishman, the dove would have brought him not an olive-branch but a lord. I say it in no spirit of sarcasm or sneer, for, coteris paribus, lords are better company than commoners; I merely record it passingly, as a strong trait of our people and our race. So was it now, that from the landed gentleman to the humblest tenant-farmer, the Earl’s presence seemed a fresh guarantee of solvency. Many remarked that Dunn looked pale,—some thought anxious; but all agreed that the hearty-faced, white-haired old nobleman at his side was a perfect picture of easy self-satisfaction.
They took their seats in the cash-office, within the counter, to be seen by all, and see everything that went forward. If Davenport Dunn regarded the scene with a calm and unmoved indifference, his attention being, in fact, more engrossed by his newspaper than by what went on around, Lord Glengariff’s quick eye and ear were engaged incessantly. He scanned the appearance of each new applicant as he came up to the table; he listened to his demand, noted its amount, and watched with piercing glance what effect it might produce on the cashier. Nor was he an unmoved spectator of the scene; for while he simply contented himself with an angry stare at the frieze-coated peasant, he actually scowled an insolent defiance when any of higher rank or more pretentious exterior presented himself, muttering in broken accents beneath his breath, “Too bad, too bad!” “Gross ingratitude!” “A perfect disgrace!” and so on.
He was at the very climax of his indignation, when a voice from the crowd addressed him with “How d’ ye do, my Lord? I was not aware you were in this part of the country.”
He put up his double eyeglass, and speedily recognized the Mr. Barnard whom Dunn mentioned as so unworthily requiting all he had done for him.
“No, sir,” said the Earl, haughtily; “and just as little did I expect to see you here on such an errand as this. In my day, country gentlemen were the first to give the example of trust and confidence, and not foremost in propagating unworthy apprehensions.”
“I’m not a partner in the Bank, my Lord, and know nothing of its solvency,” said the other, as he handed in two checks over the counter.
“Eight thousand six hundred and forty-eight. Three thousand, twelve, nine, six,” said the clerk, mechanically. “How will you have it, sir?”
“Bank of Ireland notes will do.”
Dunn lifted his eyes from the paper, and then, raising his hat, saluted Mr. Barnard.
“I trust you left Mrs. Barnard well?” said he, in a calm voice.
“Yes, thank you—well—quite well,” said Barnard, in some confusion.
“Will you remember to tell her that she shall have the acorns of the Italian pines next week? I have heard of their arrival at the Custom-house.”
While Barnard muttered a very confused expression of thanks, the old Earl looked from one to the other of the speakers in a sort of bewilderment. Where was the angry indignation he had looked for from Dunn,—where the haughty denunciation of a black ingratitude?
“Why, Dunn, I say,” whispered he, “isn’t this Barnard the fellow you spoke of,—the man you returned to Parliament t’ other day?”
“The same, my Lord,” replied Dunn, in a low, cautious voice. “He is here exacting a right,—a just right,—and no more. It is not now, nor in this place, that I would remind him how ungraciously he has treated me. This day is his. Mine will come yet.”
Before Lord Glengariff could well recover from the astonishment of this cold and calculating patience, Mr. Hankes pushed his way through the crowd, with an open letter in his hand.
It was a telegram just received, with an account of an attack made by the mob on Mr. Dunn’s house in Dublin. Like all such communications, the tidings were vague and unsatisfactory: “A terrific attack by mob on No. 18. Windows smashed, and front door broken, but not forced. Police repulsed; military sent for.”
“So much for popular gratitude, my Lord,” said Dunn, as he handed the slip of paper to the Earl. “Fortunately, it was never the prize on which I had set my heart. Mr. Hankes,” said he, in a bland, calm voice, “the crowd seems scarcely diminished outside. Will you kindly affix a notice on the door, to state that, to convenience the public, the Bank will on this day continue open till five o’clock?”
“By Heaven! they don’t deserve such courtesy!” cried the old Lord, passionately. “Be as just as you please, but show them no generosity. If it be thus they treat the men who devote their best energies, their very lives, to the country, I, for one, say it is not a land to live in, and I spurn them as countrymen!”
“What would you have, my Lord? The best troops have turned and fled under the influence of a panic; the magic words, ‘We are mined!’ once routed the very column that had stormed a breach! You don’t expect to find the undisciplined masses of mankind more calmly courageous than the veterans of a hundred fights.”
A wild hoarse cheer burst forth in the street at this moment, and drowned all other sounds.
“What is it now? Are they going to attack us here?” cried the Earl.
The cry again arose, louder and wilder, and the shouts of “Dunn forever! Dunn forever!” burst from a thousand voices.
“The placard has given great satisfaction, sir,” said Hankes, reappearing. “Confidence is fully restored.”
And, truly, it was strange to see how quickly a popular sentiment spread its influence; for they who now came forward to exchange their notes for gold no longer wore the sturdy air of defiance of the earlier applicants, but approached half reluctantly, and with an evident sense of shame, as though yielding to an ignoble impulse of cowardice and fear. The old Earl’s haughty stare and insolent gaze were little calculated to rally the diffident; for with his double eyeglass he scanned each new-comer with the air of a man saying, “I mark, and I ‘ll not forget you!”
What a contrast was Dunn’s expression,—that look so full of gentle pity and forgiveness! Nothing of anger, no resentfulness, disfigured the calm serenity of his pale features. He had a word of recognition—even a smile and a kind inquiry—for some of those who now bashfully tried to screen themselves from notice. The great rush was already over; a visible change had come over that vast multitude who so lately clamored aloud for gold. The very aspect of that calm, unmoved face was a terrible rebuke to their unworthy terror.
“It’s nigh over, sir,” whispered Hankes to his chief, as he stood with his massive gold watch in the hollow of his hand. “Seven hundred only have been paid out in the last twelve minutes. The battle is finished!”
The vociferous cheering without continued unceasingly, and yells for Dunn to come forth and show himself filled the air.
“Do you hear them?” asked Lord Glengariff, looking eagerly at Dunn.
“Yes, my Lord. It is a very quick reaction. Popular opinion is generally correct in the main; but it is rare to find it reversing its own judgments so suddenly.”
“Very dispassionately spoken, sir,” said the old Lord, haughtily; “but what if you had been unprepared for this onslaught to-day,—what if they had succeeded in compelling you to suspend payments?”
“Had such been possible, my Lord, we would have richly deserved any reverse that might have befallen us. What is it, Hankes?” cried he, as that gentleman endeavored to get near him.
“You’ll have to show yourself, sir; you must positively address them in a few words from the balcony.”
“I do not think so, Hankes. This is a mere momentary burst of popular feeling.”
“Not at all, sir. Listen to them now; they are shouting madly for you. To decline the call will be taken as pride. I implore you to come out, if only for a few minutes.”
“I suppose he is right, Dunn,” said Lord Glengariff, half doggedly. “For my own part, I have not the slightest pretension to say how popular demonstrations—I believe that is the word for them—are to be treated. Street gatherings, in my day, were called mobs, and dispersed by horse police; our newer civilization parleys to them and flatters them. I suppose you understand the requirements of the times we live in.”
The clamor outside was now deafening, and by its tone seemed, in some sort, to justify what Hankes had said, that Dunn’s indifference to their demands would be construed into direct insult.
“Do it at once!” cried Hankes, eagerly, “or it will be too late. A few words spoken now will save us thirty thousand pounds to-morrow.”
This whisper in Dunn’s ear decided the question, and, turning to the Earl, he said, “I believe, my Lord, Mr. Hankes is right; I ought to show myself.”
“Come along, then,” said the old Lord, heartily; and he took his arm with an air that said, “I ‘ll stand by you throughout.”
Scarcely had Dunn entered the drawing-room, than Lady Augusta met him, her cheek flushed and her eyes flashing. “I am so glad,” cried she, “that you are going to address them. It is a proud moment for you.”
When the window opened, and Davenport Dunn appeared on the balcony, the wild roar of the multitude made the air tremble; for the cry was taken up by others in remote streets, and came echoing back, again and again. I have heard that consummate orators—men practised in all the arts of public speaking—have acknowledged that there is no such severe test, in the way of audience, as that mixed assemblage called a mob, wherein every class has its representative, and every gradation its type. Now, Dunn was not a great public speaker. The few sentences he was obliged to utter on the occasions of his health being drunk cost him no uncommon uneasiness; he spoke them, usually, with faltering accents and much diffidence. It happens, however, that the world is often not displeased at these small signs of confusion—these little defects in oratorical readiness—in men of acknowledged ability, and even prefer them to the rapid flow and voluble ease of more practised orators. There is, so to say, a mock air of sincerity in the professions of a man whose feelings seem fuller than his words,—something that implies the heart to be in the right place, though the tongue be but a poor exponent of its sentiments; and lastly, the world is always ready to accept the embarrassment of the speaker as an evidence of the grateful emotions that are swaying him. Hence the success of country gentlemen in the House; hence the hearty cheers that follow the rambling discursiveness of bucolic eloquence!
If Mr. Dunn was not an orator, he was a keen and shrewd observer, and one fact he had noticed, which was that the shouts and cries of popular assemblages are to an indifferent speaker pretty much what an accompaniment is to a bad singer,—the aids by which he surmounts difficult passages and conceals his false notes. Mr. Hankes, too, well understood how to lead this orchestra, and had already taken his place on the steps of the door beneath.
Dunn stood in front of the balcony, Lord Glengariff at his side and a little behind him. With one hand pressed upon his heart, he bowed deeply to the multitude. “My kind friends,” said he, in a low voice, but which was audible to a great distance, “it has been my fortune to have received at different times of my life gratifying assurances of sympathy and respect, but never in the whole course of a very varied career do I remember an occasion so deeply gratifying to my feelings as the present. (Cheers, that lasted ten minutes and more.) It is not,” resumed he, with more energy,—“it is not at a moment like this, surrounded by brave and warm hearts, when the sentiments of affection that sway you are mingled with the emotions of my own breast, that I would take a dark or gloomy view of human nature, but truth compels me to say that the attack made this day upon my credit—for I am the Ossory Bank—(loud and wild cheering)—yes, I repeat it, for the stability of this institution I am responsible by all I possess in this world. Every share, every guinea, every acre I own are here! Far from me to impute ungenerous or unworthy motives to any quarter; but, my worthy friends, there has been foul play—(groans)—there has been treachery—(deeper groans)—and my name is not Davenport Dunn but it shall be exposed and punished. (Cries of “More power to ye,” and hearty cheers, greeted this solemn assurance.)
“I am, as you are well aware, and I glory in declaring it, one of yourselves. (Here the enthusiasm was tremendous.) By moderate abilities, hard work, and unflinching honesty—for that is the great secret—I have become that you see me to-day! (Loud cheering.) If there be amongst you any who aspire to my position, I tell him that nothing is easier than to attain it. I was a poor scholar—you know what a poor scholar is—when the generous nobleman you see now at my side first noticed me. (Three cheers for the Lord were proposed and given most heartily.) His generous patronage gave me my first impulse in life. I soon learned how to do the rest. (“That ye did;” “More power and success to ye,” here ran through the mob.) Now, it was at the table of that noble Lord—enjoying the first real holiday in thirty years of toil—that I received a telegraphic despatch, informing me there would be a run for gold upon this Bank before the week was over. I vow to you I did not believe it. I spurned the tidings as a base calumny upon the people, and as I handed the despatch to his Lordship to read, I said, ‘If this be possible—and I doubt it much—it is the treacherous intrigue of an enemy, not the spontaneous movement of the public.’ (Here Lord Glengariff bowed an acquiescence to the statement, a condescension on his part that speedily called for three vociferous cheers for “the Lord,” once more.)
“I am no lawyer,” resumed Dunn, with vigor,—“I am a plain man of the people, whose head was never made for subtleties; but this I tell you, that if it be competent for me to offer a reward for the discovery of those who have hatched this conspiracy, my first care will be on my return to Dublin to propose ten thousand pounds for such information as may establish their guilt! (Cheering for a long time followed these words.) They knew that they could not break the Bank,—in their hearts they knew that our solvency was as complete as that of the Bank of England itself,—but they thought that by a panic, and by exciting popular feeling against me, I, in my pride of heart and my conscious honesty, might be driven to some indignant reaction; that I might turn round and say, Is this the country I have slaved for? Are these the people for whose cause I have neglected personal advancement, and disregarded the flatteries of the great? Are these the rewards of days of labor and nights of anxiety and fatigue?”
They fancied, possibly, that, goaded by what I might have construed into black ingratitude, I would say, like Coriolanus, ‘I banish you!’ But they little knew either you or me, my warm-hearted friends! (Deafening cheers.) They little knew that the well-grounded confidence of a nation cannot be obliterated by the excitement of a moment. A panic in the commercial, like a thunder-storm in the physical world, only leaves the atmosphere lighter, and the air fresher than before; and so I say to you, we shall all breathe more freely when we rise to-morrow,—no longer to see the dark clouds overhead, nor hear the rumbling sounds that betoken coming storm.
“I have detained you too long. (“No, no!” vociferously broke forth.) I have spoken also too much about myself. (“Not a bit; we could listen to ye till mornin’,” shouted a wild voice, that drew down hearty laughter.) But, before I go, I wish to say, that, hard pressed as we are in the Bank—sorely inconvenienced by the demands upon us—I am yet able to ask your excellent Mayor to accept of five hundred pounds from me for the poor of this city—(what a yell followed this announcement! plainly indicating what a personal interest the tidings seemed to create )—and to add—(loud cheers)—and to add—(more cheers)—and to add,” cried he, in his deepest voice, “that the first toast I will drink this day shall be, The Boys of Kilkenny!”
It is but justice to add that Mr. Dunn’s speech was of that class of oratory that “hears” better than it reads, while his audience was also less critically disposed than may be our valued reader. At all events, it achieved a great success; and within an hour after its delivery hawkers cried through the streets of the city, “The Full and True Account of the Run for Gold, with Mr. Dunn’s Speech to the People;” and, sooth to say, that though the paper was not “cream laid,” and though many of the letters were upside down, the literature had its admirers, and was largely read. Later on, the city was illuminated, two immense letters of D. D. figuring in colored lamps in front of the town-hall, while copious libations of whiskey-punch were poured forth in honor of the Man of the People. In every rank and class, from the country gentleman who dined at the club-house, to the smallest chop-house in John Street, there was but one sentiment,—that Dunn was a fine fellow, and his enemies downright scoundrels. If a few of nicer taste and more correct feeling were not exactly pleased with his speech, they wisely kept their opinions to themselves, and let “the Ayes have it,” who pronounced it to be manly, above-board, modest, and so forth.
Throughout the entire evening Mr. Hankes was everywhere, personally or through his agents; his care was to collect public sentiment, to ascertain what popular opinion thought of the whole events of the morning, and to promote, so far as he could with safety, the flattering estimate already formed of his chief. Scarcely half an hour elapsed without Dunn’s receiving from his indefatigable lieutenant some small scrap of paper, with a few words hastily scrawled in this fashion:—
“Rice and Walsh’s, Nine o’clock.—Company in the coffee-room enthusiastic; talk of a public dinner; some propose portrait in town-hall.”
“A quarter to Ten, Judy’s, Rose Inn Street.—Comic song, with a chorus:—
“‘If for gold ye run,
Says the Shan van Voght;
If for gold ye run,
I’ll send for Davy Dunn,
He’s the boy to show ye fun,
Says the Shan van Voght!’”
“Eleven o’clock, High Street.—Met the Dean, who says, ‘D. D. is an honor to us; we are all proud of him.’ The county your own when you want it.”
“Twelve o’clock.—If any one should venture to ask for gold to-morrow, he will be torn to pieces by the mob.”
Assuredly it was a triumph; and every time that the wild cheers from the crowds in the street broke in upon the converse in the drawing-room, Lady Augusta’s eyes would sparkle as she said, “I don’t wonder at your feeling proud of it all!”
And he did feel proud of it. Strange as it may seem, he was as proud as though the popularity had been earned by the noblest actions and the most generous devotion. We are not going to say why or wherefore this. And now for a season we take our leave of him to follow the fortunes of some others whose fate we seem to have forgotten. We have the less scruple for deserting Davenport Dunn at this moment, that we leave him happy, prospering, and in good company.
CHAPTER III. A NOTE FROM DAVIS
Am I asking too much of my esteemed reader, if I beg of him to remember where and how I last left the Honorable Annesley Beecher? for it is to that hopeful individual and his fortunes I am now about to return.
If it be wearisome to the reader to have his attention suddenly drawn from the topic before him, and his interest solicited for those he has well-nigh forgotten, let me add that it is almost as bad for the writer, who is obliged to hasten hither and thither, and, like a huntsman with a straggling pack, to urge on the tardy, correct the loiterer, and repress the eager.
When we parted with Annesley Beecher, he was in sore trouble and anxiety of mind; a conviction was on him that he was “squared,” “nobbled,” “crossed,” “potted,” or something to the like intent and with a like euphonious designation. “The Count and Spicer were conspiring to put him in a hole!” As if any “hole” could be as dark, as hopeless, and as deep as the dreary pitfall of his own helpless nature!
His only resource seemed flight; to break cover at once and run for it, appeared the solitary solution of the difficulty. There was many a spot in the map of Europe which offered a sanctuary against Grog Davis. But what if Grog were to set the law in motion, where should he seek refuge then? Some one had once mentioned to him a country with which no treaty connected us with regard to criminals. It began, if he remembered aright, with an S; was it Sardinia or Sweden or Spain or Sicily or Switzerland? It was surely one of them, but which? “What a mass of rubbish, to be sure,” thought he, “they crammed me with at Rugby, but not one solitary particle of what one could call useful learning! See now, for instance, what benefit a bit of geography might be to me!” And he rambled on in his mind, concocting an educational scheme which would really fit a man for the wear and tear of life.
It was thus reflecting he entered the inn and mounted to his room; his clothes lay scattered about, drawers were crammed with his wearables, and the table covered with a toilet equipage, costly, and not yet paid for. Who was to pack all these? Who was to make up that one portmanteau which would suffice for flight, including all the indispensable and rejecting the superfluous? There is a case recorded of a Frenchman who was diverted from his resolve on suicide by discovering that his pistols were not loaded, and, incredible as it may seem, Beecher was deterred from his journey by the thought of how he was to pack his trunk; He had never done so much for himself since he was born, and he did n’t think he could do it; at all events, he wasn’t going to try. Certain superstitious people are impressed with the notion that making a will is a sure prelude to dying; so others there are who fancy that, by the least effort on their own behalf, they are forecasting a state of poverty in which they must actually work for subsistence.
How hopelessly, then, did he turn over costly waistcoats and embroidered shirts, gaze on richly cut and crested essence-bottles and boot-boxes, whose complexity resembled mathematical instruments! In what manner they were ever conveyed so far he could not imagine. The room seemed actually filled with them. It was Rivers had “put them up;” but Rivers could no longer be trusted, for he was evidently in the “lay” against him.
He sighed heavily at this: it was a dreary, hopeless sigh over the depravity of the world and mankind in general. “And what a paradise it might be,” he thought, “if people would only let themselves be cheated quietly and peaceably, neither threatening with their solicitors, nor menacing with the police. Heaven knew how little he asked for: a safe thing now and then on the Derby, a good book on the Oaks; he wanted no more! He bore no malice nor ill-will to any man breathing; he never wished to push any fellow to the wall. If ever there was a generous heart, it beat in his bosom; and if the world only knew the provocation he had received! No matter, he would never retaliate,—he ‘d die game, be a brick to the last;” and twenty other fine things of the same sort that actually brought the tears to his own eyes over his own goodness.
Goodness, however, will not pack a trunk, nor will moral qualities, however transcendent, fold cravats and dress-coats, and he looked very despondently around him, and thought over what he half fancied was the only thing he could n’t do. So accustomed had he been of late to seek Lizzy Davis’s counsel in every moment of difficulty, that actually, without knowing it, he descended now to the drawing-room, some vague, undefined feeling impelling him to be near her.
She was singing at the piano, all alone, as he entered; the room, as usual, brilliantly lighted up as if to receive company, rare flowers and rich plants grouped tastefully about, and “Daisy”—for she looked that name on this occasion—in one of those charming “toilettes” whose consummate skill it is to make the most costly articles harmonize into something that seems simplicity itself. She wore a fuchsia in her hair, and another—only this last was of coral and gold elaborately and beautifully designed—on the front of her dress, and, except these, nothing more of ornament.
“Tutore mio,” said she, gayly, as he entered, “you have treated me shamefully; for, first of all, you were engaged to drive with me to the Kreutz Berg, and, secondly, to take me to the opera, and now, at half-past nine, you make your appearance. How is this, Monsieur? Expliquez-vous.”
“Shall I tell the truth?” said he.
“By all means, if anything so strange should n’t embarrass you.”
“Well, then, I forgot all about both the drive and the opera. It’s all very well to laugh,” said he, in a tone of half pique; “young ladies, with no weightier cares on their hearts than whether they ought to wear lilac or green, have very little notion of a man’s anxieties. They fancy that life is a thing of white and red roses, soft music and bouquets; but it ain’t.”
“Indeed! are you quite sure?” asked she, with an air of extreme innocence.
“I suspect I am,” said he, confidently; “and there’s not many a man about town knows more of it than I do.”
“And now, what may be the cares, or, rather, for I don’t want to be curious, what sort of cares are they that oppress that dear brain? Have you got any wonderful scheme for the amelioration of mankind to which you see obstacles? Are your views in politics obstructed by ignorance or prejudice? Have you grand notions about art for which the age is not ripe; or are you actually the author of a wonderful poem that nobody has had taste enough to appreciate?”
“And these are your ideas of mighty anxieties, Miss Lizzy?” said he, in a tone of compassionate pity. “By Jove! how I’d like to have nothing heavier on my heart than the whole load of them.”
“I think you have already told me you never were crossed in love?”
“Well, nothing serious, you know. A scratch or so, as one may say, getting through the bushes, but never a cropper,—nothing like a regular smash.”
“It would seem to me, then, that you have enjoyed a singularly fortunate existence, and been just as lucky in life as myself.”
Beecher started at the words. What a strange chaos did they create within him! There is no tracing the thoughts that came and went, and lost themselves in that poor bewildered head. The nearest to anything like, consistency was the astonishment he felt that she—Grog Davis’s daughter—should ever imagine she had drawn a prize in the world’s lottery.
“Yes, Mr. Beecher,” said she, with the ready tact with which she often read his thoughts and answered them, “even so. I do think myself very, very fortunate! And why should I not? I have excellent health, capital spirits, fair abilities, and, bating an occasional outbreak of anger, a reasonably good temper. As regards personal traits, Mr. Annesley Beecher once called me beautiful; Count Lienstahl would say something twice as rapturous; at all events, quite good-looking enough not to raise antipathies against me at first sight; and lastly, but worth all the rest, I have an intense enjoyment in mere existence; the words ‘I live’ are to me, ‘I am happy.’ The alternations of life, its little incidents and adventures, its passing difficulties, are, like the changeful aspects of the seasons, full of interest, full of suggestiveness, calling out qualities of mind and resources of temperament that in the cloudless skies of unbroken prosperity might have lain unused and unknown. And now, sir, no more sneers at my fancied good fortune; for, whatever you may say, I feel it to be real.”
There was that in her manner—a blended energy and grace—which went far deeper into Beecher’s heart than her mere words, and he gazed at her slightly flushed cheek and flashing eyes with something very nearly rapture; and he muttered to himself, “There she is, a half-bred ‘un, and no training, and able to beat them all!”
This time, at all events, she did not read his thoughts; as little, perhaps, did she care to speculate about them. “By the by,” said she, suddenly approaching the chimney and taking up a letter, “this has arrived here, by private hand, since you went out, and it has a half-look of papa’s writing, and is addressed to you.”
Beecher took it eagerly. With a glance he recognized it as from Grog, when that gentleman desired to disguise his hand.
“Am I correct?” asked she,—“am I correct in my guess?”
He was too deep in the letter to make her any reply. Its contents were as follows:—
“Dear B.,—They ‘ve kicked up such a row about that affair
at Brussels that I have been obliged to lie dark for the
last fortnight, and in a confoundedly stupid hole on the
right bank of the Rhine. I sent over Spicer to meet the
Baron, and take Klepper over to Nimroeguen and Magdeburg,
and some other small places in Prussia. They can pick up in
this way a few thousand florins, and keep the mill going. I
gave him strict orders not to see my daughter, who must know
nothing whatever of these or any like doings. The Baron she
might see, for he knows life thoroughly, and if he is not a
man of high honor, he can assume the part so well that it
comes pretty much to the same thing. As to yourself, you
will, on receipt of this, call on a certain Lazarus Stein,
Juden Gasse, Nov 41 or 42, and give him your acceptance for
two thousand gulden, with which settle your hotel bill, and
come on to Bonn, where, at the post-office, you will find a
note, with my address. Tramp, you see, has won the
Cotteswold, as I prophesied, and ‘Leo the Tenth’ nowhere.
Cranberry must have got his soup pretty hot, for he has come
abroad, and his wife and the children gone down to Scotland.
As to your own affairs, Ford says you are better out of the
way; and if anything is to be done in the way of
compromise, it must be while you are abroad. He does not
think Strich can get the rule, and you must n’t distress
yourself for an extra outlawry or two. There will be some
trouble about the jewels, but I think even that matter may
be arranged also. I hope you keep from the tables, and I
look for a strict reckoning as to your expenses, and a
stricter book up as regards your care of my daughter. ‘All
square’ is the word between pal and pal, and there never
was born the man did n’t find that to be his best policy
when he dealt with
“Your friend,
“Christopher Davis.
“To while away the time in this dreary dog-hole, I have been
sketching out a little plan of a martingale for the
roulette-table. There’s only one zero at Homburg, and we can
try it there as we go up. There’s a flaw in it after the
twelfth ‘pass,’ but I don’t despair of getting over the
difficulty. Old Stein, the money-changer, was upwards of
thirty years croupier at the Cursaal, and get him to tell
you the average runs, black and red, at rouge-et-noir, and
what are the signs of an intermitting game; and also the
six longest runs he has ever known. He is a shrewd fellow,
and seeing that you come from me will be confidential.
“There has been another fight in the Crimea, and somebody
well licked. I had nothing on the match, and don’t care a
brass farthing who claimed the stakes.
“Tell Lizey that I ‘m longing to see her, and if I didn’t
write it is because I ‘m keeping everything to tell her when
we meet. If it was n’t for her picture, I don’t know what
would have become of me since last Tuesday, when the rain
set in.”
Beecher re-read the letter from the beginning; nor was it an easy matter for him to master at once all the topics it included. Of himself and his own affairs the information was vague and unsatisfactory; but Grog knew how to keep him always in suspense,—to make him ever feel that he was swimming for his life, and he himself the only “spar” he could catch at.
“Bring me to book about my care of his daughter!” muttered he, over and over, “just as if she was n’t the girl to take care of herself. Egad! he seems to know precious little about her. I ‘d give a ‘nap’ to show her this letter, and just hear what she ‘d say of it all. I suppose she ‘d split on me. She ‘d go and tell Davis, ‘Beecher has put me up to the whole “rig;”’ and if she did—What would happen then?” asked he, replying to the low, plaintive whistle which concluded his meditation. “Eh—what! did I say anything?” cried he, in terror.
“Not a syllable. But I could see that you had conjured up some difficulty which you were utterly unable to deal with.”
“Well, here it is,” said he, boldly. “This letter is from your father. It’s all full of private details, of which you know nothing, nor would you care to hear; but there is one passage—just one—that I’d greatly like to have your opinion upon. At the same time I tell you, frankly, I have no warranty from your father to let you see it; nay, the odds are he ‘d pull me up pretty sharp for doing so without his authority.”
“That’s quite enough, Mr. Beecher, about your scruples. Now, mine go a little further still; for they would make me refuse to learn anything which my father’s reserve had kept from me. It is a very easy rule of conscience, and neither hard to remember nor to follow.”
“At all events, he meant this for your own eye,” said Beecher, showing her the last few lines of the letter.
She read them calmly over; a slight trembling of the lip—so slight that it seemed rather like a play of light over her face—was the only sign of emotion visible, and then, carefully folding the letter, she gave it back, saying, “Yes, I had a right to see these lines.”
“He is fond of you, and proud of you, too,” said Beecher. A very slight nod of her head gave an assent to his remark, and she was silent. “We are to leave this at once,” continued he, “and move on to Bonn, where we shall find a letter with your father’s address, somewhere, I take it, in that neighborhood.” He waited, hoping she would say something, but she did not speak. And then he went on:
“And then you will be once more at home,—emancipated from this tiresome guardianship of mine.”
“Why tiresome?” asked she, suddenly.
“Oh, by Jove! I know I’ m very slow sort of fellow as a ladies’ man; have none of the small talents of those foreigners; couldn’t tell Mozart from Verdi; nor, though I can see when a woman is well togged, could I tell you the exact name of any one part of her dress.”
“If you really did know all these, and talked of them, I might have found you very tiresome,” said she, in that half-careless voice she used when seeming to think aloud. “And you,” asked she, suddenly, as she turned her eyes fully upon him,—“and you, are you to be emancipated then,—are you going to leave us?”
“As to that,” replied he, in deep embarrassment, “there ‘a a sort of hitch in it I ought, if I did the right thing, to be on my way to Italy now, to see Lackington,—my brother, I mean. I came abroad for that; but Gr—your father, I should say—induced me to join him, and so, with one thing and the other, here I am, and that’s really all I know about it.”
“What a droll way to go through life!” said she, with one of her low, soft laughs.
“If you mean that I have n’t a will of my own, you ‘re all wrong,” said he, in some irritation. “Put me straight at my fence, and see if I won’t take it. Just say, ‘A. B., there’s the winning-post,’ and mark whether I won’t get my speed up.”
What a strange glance was that which answered this speech! It implied no assent; as little did it mean the reverse. It was rather the look of one who, out of a maze of tangled fancies, suddenly felt recalled to life and its real interests. To poor Beecher’s apprehension it simply seemed a sort of half-compassionate pity, and it made his cheek tingle with wounded pride.
“I know,” muttered he to himself, “that she thinks me a confounded fool; but I ain’t. Many a fellow in the ring made that mistake, and burned his fingers for it after.”
“Well,” said she, after a moment or so of thought, “I am ready; at least, I shall be ready very soon. I ‘ll tell Annette to pack up and prepare for the road.”
“I wish I could get you to have some better opinion of me, Miss Lizzy,” said he, seriously. “I’d give more than I ‘d like to say, that you ‘d—you ‘d—”
“That I’d what?” asked she, calmly.
“That you ‘d not set me down as a regular flat,” said he, with energy.
“I ‘m not very certain that I know what that means; but I will tell you that I think you very good tempered, very gentle-natured, and very tolerant of fifty-and-one caprices which must be all the more wearisome because unintelligible. And then, you are a very fine gentleman, and—the Honor-Able Annesley Beecher.” And holding out her dress in minuet fashion, she courtesied deeply, and left the room.
“I wish any one would tell me whether I stand to win or not by that book,” exclaimed Beecher, as he stood there alone, nonplussed and confounded. “Would n’t she make a stunning actress! By Jove! Webster would give her a hundred a week, and a free benefit!” And with this he went off into a little mental arithmetic, at the end of which he muttered to himself, “And that does not include starring it in the provinces!”
With the air of a man whose worldly affairs went well, he arranged his hair before the glass, put on his hat, gave himself a familiar nod, and went out.
CHAPTER IV. LAZARUS, STEIN, GELDWECHSLER
The Juden Gasse, in which Beecher was to find out the residence of Lazarus Stein, was a long, straggling street, beginning in the town and ending in the suburb, where it seemed as it were to lose itself. It was not till after a long and patient search that Beecher discovered a small door in an old ivy-covered wall, on which, in irregular letters, faint and almost illegible, stood the words, “Stein, Geldwechsler.”
As he rang stoutly at the bell, the door opened, apparently of itself, and admitted him into a large and handsome garden. The walks were flanked by fruit-trees in espalier, with broad borders of rich flowers at either side; and although the centre spaces were given up to the uses of a kitchen garden, the larger beds, rich in all the colors of the tulip and ranunculus, showed how predominant was the taste for flowers over mere utility. Up one alley, and down another, did Beecher saunter without meeting any one, or seeing what might mean a habitation; when, at length, in a little copse of palm-trees, he caught sight of a smalt diamond-paned window, approaching which, he found himself in front of a cottage whose diminutive size he had never seen equalled, save on the stage. Indeed, in its wooden framework, gaudily painted, its quaint carvings, and its bamboo roof, it was the very type of what one sees in a comic opera. One sash of the little window lay open, and showed Beecher the figure of a very small old man, who, in a long dressing-gown of red-brown stuff, and a fez cap, was seated at a table, writing. A wooden tray in front of him was filled with dollars and gold pieces in long stately columns, and a heap of bank-notes lay pressed under a heavy leaden slab at his side. No sooner had Beecher’s figure darkened the window than the old man looked up and came out to meet him, and, taking off his cap with a deep reverence, invited him to enter. If the size of the chamber, and its curious walls covered over with cabinet pictures, might have attracted Beecher’s attention at another moment, all his wonderment, now, was for the little man himself, whose piercing black eyes, long beard, and hooked nose gave him an air of almost unearthly meaning.
“I suppose I have the honor to speak to Mr. Stein?” said he, in English, “and that he can understand me in my own tongue?”
“Yaas,—go on,” said the old man.
“I was told to call upon you by Captain Davis; he gave me your address.”
“Ah, der Davis—der Davis—a vaary goot man—my vaary dear friend. You are der rich Englander that do travel wit him,—eh?”
“I am travelling with him just now,” said Beecher, laughing slightly; “but as to being rich,—why, we ‘ll not dispute about it.”
“Yaas, here is his letter. He says, Milord will call on you hisself, and so I hold myself—how you say ‘bereit?’—ready—hold myself ready to see you. I have de honor to make you very mush welcome to my poor house.”
Beecher thanked him courteously, and, producing Davis’s letter, mentioned the amount for which he desired to draw.
The old man examined the writing, the signature, and then the seal, handing the document back when he had finished, muttering to himself, “Ah, der Davis—der Davis!”
“You know my friend very intimately, I believe?” asked Beecher.
“I belief I do,—I belief I do,” said he, with a low chuckle to himself.
“So he mentioned to me and added one or two little matters on which I was to ask you for some information. But first this bill,—you can let me have these two thousand florins?”
“And what do he do now, der Davis?” asked the Jew, not heeding the question.
“Well, I suppose he rubs on pretty much the same as ever,” said Beecher, in some confusion.
“Yaas—yaas—he rub on—and he rub off, too, sometimes—ha! ha! ha!” laughed out the old man, with a fiendish cackle. “Ach, der Davis!”
Without knowing in what sense to take the words, Beecher did not exactly like them; and as little was he pleased with that singular recurrence to “der Davis,” and the little sigh that followed. He was growing impatient, besides, to get his money, and again reverted to the question.
“He look well? I hope he have de goot gesundheit—what you call it?”
“To be sure he does; nothing ever ails him. I never heard him complain of as much as a headache.
“Ach, der Davis, der Davis!” said the old man, shaking his head.
Seeing no chance of success by his direct advances, Beecher thought he ‘d try a little flank attack by inducing a short conversation, and so he said, “I am on my way to Davis, now, with his daughter, whom he left in my charge.”
“Whose daughter?” asked the Jew.
“Davis’s,—a young lady that was educated at Brussels.”
“He have no daughter. Der Davis have no daughter.”
“Has n’t he, though? Just come over to the ‘Four Nations,’ and I ‘ll show her to you. And such a stunning girl too!”
“No, no, I never belief it—never; he did never speak to me of a daughter.”
“Whether he did or not—there she is, that’s all I know.”
The Jew shook his head, and sought refuge in his former muttering of “Ach, der Davis!”
“As far as not telling you about his daughter, I can say he never told me, and I fancy we were about as intimate as most people; but the fact is as I tell you.”
Another sigh was all his answer, and Beecher was fast reaching the limit of his patience.
“Daughter, or no daughter, I want a matter of a couple of thousand florins,—no objection to a trifle more, of course,—and wish to know how you can let me have them.”
“The Margraf was here two week ago, and he say to me, ‘Lazarus,’ say he,—‘Lazarus, where is your goot friend Davis?’ ‘Highness,’ say I, ‘dat I know not.’ Den he say, ‘I will find him, if I go to Jerusalem;’ and I say, ‘Go to Jerusalem.’”
“What did he want with him?”
“What he want?—what every one want, and what nobody get, except how he no like—ha! ha! ha! Ach, der Davis!”
Beecher rose from his seat, uncertain how to take this continued inattention to his demand. He stood for a moment in hesitation, his eyes wandering over the walls where the pictures were hanging.
“Ah! if you do care for art, now you suit yourself, and all for a noting! I sell all dese,—dat Gerard Dow, dese two Potters, de leetle Cuyp,—a veritable treasure, and de Mieris,—de best he ever painted, and de rest, wit de land-schaft of Both, for eighty tousand seven hundred florins. It is a schenk—a gift away—noting else.”
“You forget, my excellent friend Stein,” said Beecher, with more assurance than he had yet assumed, “that it was to receive and not spend money I came here this morning.”
“You do a leetle of all de two—a leetle of both, so to say,” replied the Jew. “What moneys you want?”
“Come, this is speaking reasonably. Davis’s letter mentions a couple of thousand florins; but if you are inclined to stretch the amount to five, or even four thousand, we ‘ll not fall out about the terms.”
“How you mean—no fall out about de terms?” said the other, sharply.
“I meant that for a stray figure or so, in the way of discount, we should n’t disagree. You may, in fact, make your own bargain.”
“Make my own bargain, and pay myself too,” muttered the Jew. “Ach, der Davis, how he would laugh!—ha! ha! ha!”
“Well, I don’t see much to laugh at, old gent, except it be at my own folly, to stand here so long chaffering about these paltry two thousand florins. And now I say, ‘Yea or nay, will you book up, or not?’”
“Will you buy de Cuyp and de Wouvermans and de Ostade?—dat is the question.”
“Egad, if you furnish the ready, I ‘ll buy the Cathedral and the Cursaal. I ‘m not particular as to the investment when the cash is easily come at.”
“De cash is very easy to come at,” said the Jew, with a strange grin.
“You ‘re a trump, Lazarus!” cried Beecher, in ecstasy at his good fortune. “If I had known you some ten years ago, I ‘d have been another man to-day. I was always looking out for one really fair, honester-hearted fellow to deal with, but I never met with him till now.”
“How you have it,—gold or notes?” said Lazarus.
“Well, a little of both, I think,” said Beecher, his eyes greedily devouring the glittering little columns of gold before him.
“How your title?—how your name?” asked Stein, taking up a pen.
“My name is Annesley Beecher. You may write me the ‘Honorable Annesley Beecher.’”
“Lord of—”
“I ‘m not Lord of anything. I’m next in succession to a peerage, that’s all.”
“He call you de Viscount—I forget de name.”
“Lackington, perhaps?”
“Yaas, dat is de name; and say, give him de moneys for his bill. Now, here is de acceptance, and here you put your sign, across dis.”
“I ‘ll write Annesley Beecher, with all my heart; but I ‘ll not write myself Lackington.”
“Den you no have de moneys, nor de Cuyp, nor de Ostade,” said the Jew, replacing the pen in the ink-bottle.
“Just let me ask you, old boy, how would it benefit you that I should commit a forgery? Is that the way you like to do business?”
“I do know myself how I like my business to do, and no man teach me.”
“What the devil did Davis mean, then, by sending me on this fool’s errand? He gave me a distinct intimation that you ‘d cash my acceptance—”
“Am I not ready? You never go and say to der Davis dat I refuse it! Ah, der Davis!” and he sighed as if from the very bottom of his heart.
“I’ll tell him, frankly, that you made it a condition I was to sign a name that does not belong to me,—that I ‘ll tell him.”
“What care he for dat? Der Davis write his own name on it and pay it hisself.”
“Oh! and Davis was also to indorse this bill, was he?” asked Beecher.
“I should tink he do; oderwise I scarce give you de moneys.”
“That, indeed, makes some difference. Not, in reality, that it would n’t be just as much a forgery; but if the bill come back to Grog’s own hands—”
“Ach, der Grog,—ha! ha! ha! ‘Tis so long dat I no hear de name,—Grog Davis!” and the Jew laughed till his eyes ran over.
“If there’s no other way of getting at this money—”
“Dere is no oder way,” said Lazarus, in a tone of firmness..
“Then good-morning, friend Lazarus, for you ‘ll not catch me spoiling a stamp at that price. No, no, old fellow. I ‘m up to a thing or two, though you don’t suspect it. I only rise to the natural fly, and no mistake.”
“I make no mistake; I take vaary goot care of dat,” said Lazarus, rising, and taking off his fez, to say adieu. “I wish you de vaary goot day.”
Beecher turned away, with a stiff salutation, into the garden. He was angry with Davis, with himself, and with the whole world. It was a rare event in his life to see gold so much within his reach and yet not available, just for a scruple—a mere scruple—for, after all, what was it else? Writing “Lackington” meant nothing, if Lack-ington were never to see, much less to pay the bill. Once “taken up,” as it was sure to be by Grog, what signified it if the words across the acceptance were Lackington or Annesley Beecher? And yet, what could Davis mean by passing him off as the Viscount? Surely, for such a paltry sum as a couple of thousand florins, it was not necessary to assume his brother’s name and title. It was some “dodge,” perhaps, to acquire consequence in the eyes of his friend Lazarus that he was the travelling-companion of an English peer; and yet, if so, it was the very first time Beecher had known him yield to such a weakness. He had a meaning in it, that much was certain, for Grog made no move in the game of life without a plan! “It can’t be,” muttered Beecher to himself,—“it can’t be for the sake of any menace over me for the forgery, because he has already in his hands quite enough to push me to the wall on that score, as he takes care to remind me he might any fine morning have me ‘up’ on that charge.” The more Beecher ruminated over what possible intention Davis might have in view, the more did he grow terrified, lest, by any short-comings on his own part, he might thwart the great plans of his deep colleague.
“I never met his equal yet to put a fellow in a cleft stick,” muttered Beecher, as he walked to and fro in intense agitation, “and he’s just the man also, whenever anything goes wrong, not to listen to a word of explanation. ‘Why didn’t you do as I bade you?’ or, ‘As I ordered you?’ for that’s his phrase generally. ‘Who told you that you had any option in the matter? Did I take you into consultation? Play up to my hand!’ that’s his cry. ‘Play up to my hand, and never mind your own!’ Well, I have been doing so some ten or twelve years back, and a nice game I’ve made of it! Break with him!—of course I’d break with him, if any one would tell me how! Egad, sometimes I begin to think that transportation and the rest of it would not be a bit harder to bear than old Grog’s tyranny! It wears one out,—it positively drains a man’s nature dry!” There are volcanic throes, that, however they may work and struggle, throw up no lava; so with Beecher. All his passionate indignation could not rouse him to action, although his actual suffering might have prompted energy to any amount. He took out Davis’s letter and re-read it. One line which had escaped his attention before, now caught his eye on the blank leaf. It ran thus: “Take care that you do not delay at Aix after receipt of this. Benson’s fellows are after you.” A cold shudder came over Beecher as he perused the line. Benson’s fellows meant bailiffs, detectives, or something of the like. Benson was a money-lender of the most inveterate villany,—a fellow who had pursued more men of station and condition than any one living. He was the terror of the “swells.” To be in Benson’s hands meant ruin in its most irretrievable shape; and at the very moment he stood there his minions were on his track!
Ere he was well aware of it, he was back at the little window of the cottage.
“I must have this money on your own terms, Stein,” said he. “I find that Davis has some urgent need of my presence. I can’t delay here another day.”
“How many tousend gulden, milord?” asked the Jew respectfully, as he dipped his pen in the ink-bottle.
“Davis says two—I should like to say four, or even five.”
“Five if you wish it, milord; to me is it all as one—five, fifteen, or fifty; whatever sum you want.”
Beecher put his hand on the other’s wrist to detain him while he took a moment’s counsel with himself. Never had such a golden opportunity as this presented itself. Never before had he seen the man who so generously proffered his services. It was ask and have. Was he to reject such good fortune?—was he to turn his back on the very first piece of luck that had ever befallen him? What heartburnings might he be storing up for future years when he looked back to the time that, with a word, he might have made his fortune!
“But are you quite sure, friend Lazarus, that if I say eight or ten thousand,—for I don’t want more,—Davis will be as willing to back the bill?”
“I am quite sure.”
“Well, now, I am not so very certain of that; and as it is Davis will have to book up, it might be safer, perhaps, that I did n’t go beyond the amount he mentions,—eh?”
“As you will,—as you please yourself. I only say, dere is der Herr Davis’s name; he send it to me and say, ‘Milord will do de rest.’”
“So that he sent you a blank acceptance?” cried Beecher, in amazement.
“Yaas, Just as you see,—‘Christopher Davis,’ and de flourish as usual. Ach, der Davis!” and he sighed once more.
The man who held Grog’s signature on a blank stamp assumed no common shape in Annesley Beecher’s eyes, and he continued to gaze on the old man with a strange sense of awe and astonishment. If he had not the document there before him on the table, he would not have believed it. The trustful courage of Van Amburgh, who used to place his head in the lion’s mouth, seemed poor in comparison with such heroic boldness as this; and he gazed at the writing in a sort of fascination.
“And Grog actually sent you that over by letter?” asked he again.
“Yaas, as you see,” was the calm answer.
“Well, here goes then, Abraham—Lazarus, I mean; make it out for a matter of—five—no, eight—hang it, let as say ten thousand florins when we are about it! Ten thousand, at six months,—eh?”
“Better at tree months,—we can always renew,” said Stein, calmly.
“Of course; and by that time we may want a little more liquor in the decanter,—eh! old boy?” said Beecher, laughing joyfully.
“To be sure, vaary mush more liquor as you want it.”
“What a brick!” said Beecher, clapping him on the shoulder in all the ecstasy of delight.
“Dere!” said the Jew, as he finished writing, “all is done; only to say where it be paid,—what bank at London.”
“Well, that is a bit of a puzzle, I must own!” said Beecher, rubbing his chin with an air of doubt and hesitation.
“Where do de Lord Lackington keep his account?” asked the Jew; and the question was so artfully posed that Beecher Answered promptly,—
“Harmer and Gore’s, Lombard Street, or Pall Mall, whichever you like.”
“Hanper and Gore. I know dem vaary well,—that will do; you do sign your name dere.”
“I wish I could persuade you that Annesley Beecher would be enough,—eh?”
“You write de name as der Davis say, and no oder!”
“Here goes, then! ‘In for a penny,’ as the proverb says,” muttered he; and in a bold, dashing hand, wrote “Lackington” across the bill.
“Ah!” said the Jew, as he examined it with his glass, and scanned every letter over and over; “and now, vat you say for de Cuyp, and de Mieris, and de Ostade,—vill you take ‘era all, as I say?”
“I ‘ll think over it,—I ‘ll reflect a bit first, Master Stein. As for pictures, they ‘re rather an encumbrance when a man has n’t a house to hang them in.”
“You have de vaary fine house in town, and an oder vaary fine house in de country, beside a what you call box—shoot-box—”
“Nothing of the kind, Lazarus. I haven’t a thing as big as the crib we are standing in. Your mind is always running upon my brother; but there’s a wide difference between our fortunes, I assure you. He drew the first ticket in the lottery of life; and, by the way, that reminds me of something in Grog’s letter that I was to ask you.” And Beecher took the epistle from his pocket and ran his eye over it. “Ah! here it is! ‘Ask Stein what are the average runs at rouge-et-noir, what are the signs of an intermitting game, and what are the longest runs he remembers on one color?’ Can you answer me these?”
“Some of dem I have here,” said Stein, taking down from a shelf a small vellum-bound volume, fastened with a padlock and chain, the key of which he wore attached to his watch. “Here is de grand ‘arcanum,’” said he, laughing; “here are de calculs made in de experience of forty-one year! Where is de man in Europe can say as mush as dat? In dis book is recounted de great game of de Duc de Brancas, where he broke de bank every night of de week till Saturday,—two million tree hundred tousand francs! Caumartin, the first croupier, shot hisself, and Nogeot go mad. He reckon de moneys in de casette, for when he say on Friday night, ‘Monseigneur,’ say he, ‘we have not de full sum here,—there’s one hundred and seventy tousand francs too little,’ de Duc reply, ‘Never mind, mon cher Monsieur Nogeot, I am noways pressed,—don’t distress yourself,—only let it be pay before I go home to bed.’ Nogeot lose his reason when he hear it. Ah! here is de whole ‘Greschichte,’ and here de table of chances.”
Beecher gazed on the precious volume as Aladdin might have done on the lamp. It was the mystic key to untold riches. With that marvellous book a man needed no more in life; there lay all the “cabals,” all the “martingales,” that years of intense toil and deep study had discovered. To win that knowledge, too, what hearts had been broken, what desolation, what death! It was a record of martyrs in his eyes, and he really regarded it with a sort of rapturous veneration.
Old Lazarus did not fail to detect the expression of wonderment and admiration. He saw depicted there the glowing ecstasy that all the triumphs of high art could not call up. The vigorous energy of Wouvermans, the glowing coloring of Cuyp, the mellow richness of Mieris, had not touched that nature which now vibrated in every chord to the appeal of Fortune. It was the submissive worship of a devotee before some sacred relic! Stein read that gaze, and tracked its every motive; and with a solemn gesture he clasped the volume and locked it.
“But you are surely going to show me—I mean, you are about to tell me the answer to these questions?”
Stein shook his head dubiously, as he said: “Dat is my Kleinod, my idol,—in dat book lie de secret of secrets, and I say to myself, ‘Lazarus, be poor, be destitute, be houseless to-morrow, and you know how to get rich if you will.’ De great law of Chances—de rule dat guide what we call ‘Luck’—dere it is written! I have but to say I will have, and I have! When I die, I will burn it, or have it lay wit me in my grave.”
“It’s not possible you could do this!” cried Beecher, in horror: far less of indignation had it cost him to hear that any one should carry out of the world with him the cure of cancer, of cholera, or some such dread scourge of poor humanity. The black-hearted selfishness of such a crime seemed without a parallel, and for a second or two, as he looked at the decrepid object before him, and saw the lonely spot, the isolation, and the propitious moment, a strange wild thought flashed across his mind that it might be not only pardonable, but praiseworthy, to seize upon and carry it off by force.
Whether the old man read what was passing within him is hard to say, but he returned the other’s look as steadily and as fiercely, and Beecher felt abashed and cowed.
“I’ ll tell you what, Stein,” said he, after a pause, “I ‘ll buy that same old volume of yours, just for the curiosity of the thing, and I ‘ll make you a sporting offer,—I ‘ll give you ten thousand francs for it!”
A low wailing whistle of utter contempt was all the Jew replied.
“Well, it’s a splendid bid, if you come to think of it; for, just suppose it be everything you say—and I own I can’t believe it is,—but suppose it were, who is to guarantee the continuance of these great public play-tables? All the Governments of Europe are setting their faces against them,—not a year passes without one or two being closed. This very spring there was a talk of suppressing play at Baden. Who can tell what the first outbreak of fanatic zeal may effect?”
“No, no. So long as men live, dey will do tree tings,—make love, make war, and gamble. When dey give up dese, de world shut up.”
There was a truthful force about this Beecher felt could not be gainsaid, and he stood silent and confuted. There was another appeal that he had not tried, and he resolved to neglect nothing that gave even the faintest chance of success. He addressed himself to the Jew’s goodness of heart,—to the benevolence that he knew must have its home in his nature. To what end, therefore, should he carry to the grave, or destroy, a secret that might be a blessing to thousands? He depicted, not without knowledge, some of the miseries of the man “forgotten of Fortune,”—the days of fevered anxiety,—the nights of agonizing torture, as, half maddened by his losses, he played wildly, recklessly on,—suicide in all its darkest forms ever present to his aching faculties, while all this time one glance within that little book would save him. And he wound up all by a burst of enthusiastic praise of a man who could thus transmit happiness to generations unborn.
“I never wish to sell dat book. I mean it alway to die wit myself! but if you will give me one tousand pounds, it is yours. If you delay, I will say two tousands.”
“Done—I take it. Of course a bill will do—eh?”
“Yaas, I will take a bill,—a bill at tree months. When it is yours, I will tell you dat you are de luckiest man in all Europe. You have dere, in dat leetle volume, all man strive for, fight for, cheat for, die for!”
As he said this, he sat down again at his desk to write the acceptance Beecher was to sign; while the other, withdrawing into the window recess, peered eagerly into the pages of the precious book.
“Mind,” said the Jew, “you no let any one see de ‘Cabal.’ If it be once get abroad, de bank will change de play. You just carry in your head de combinations, and you, go in, and win de millions dat you want at de time.”
“Just so,” said Beecher, in ecstasy, the very thought of the golden cataract sending a thrill of rapture through him. “I suppose, however, I may show it to Davis?”
“Ach, der Davis, yaas,—der Davis can see it,” said the Jew, with a laugh whose significance it were very hard to interpret. “Dere now,” said Stein, handing him the pen, “write de name dere as on de oder.”
“Still Lackington, I suppose—eh?” asked Beecher.
“Yaas,—just de same,” said Stein, gravely.
“‘Just as good for a sheep as a lamb,’ as the proverb says,” muttered Beecher. And he dashed off the name with a reckless flourish. “I ‘ll tell you one thing, Master Stein,” said he, as he buttoned up the magic volume in the breast of his coat, “if this turn out the good dodge you say it is, I ‘ll behave handsomely to you. I pledge you my word of honor, I’ll stand to you for double—treble the sum you have got written there. You don’t know the fellow you’re dealing with,—very few know him, for the matter of that,—but though he has got a smart lesson or two in life, he has good stuff in him still; and if—I say if, because, of course, all depends on that—if I can give the bank at Hamburg a spring in the air with the aid of this, I ‘ll not forget you, old boy.”
“You make dem all spring in de air!—Ems, Wiesbaden, Baden—all go up togeder!” And the Jew laughed with the glee of a demon.
“Not that I want to hurt any one,—not that I ‘d like to squeeze a fellow too hard,” broke in Beecher, suddenly, for a quick thrill of superstitious fear—the gambler’s innate conscience—shot through him, and made him tremble to think that by a chance word or thought he might disgust the Fortune he would propitiate. “No, no; my motto is, ‘Live and let live!’ There’s room for us all!” And with the utterance of a sentiment he believed so truly generous, he took leave of the Jew, and departed.
CHAPTER V. A VILLAGE NEAR THE RHINE
It was at a little village called Holbach, about fifteen miles from the right bank of the Rhine, Grog Davis had taken up his quarters while awaiting the arrival of his daughter. Near as it was to that great high-road of Europe, scarcely out of earshot of whizzing steamers and screaming trains, the spot was wonderfully secluded and unvisited. A little trout-stream, known to a few, who treasured the secret like fishermen, made the inn resorted to in the months of May and June; but for the rest of the year the “Golden Hook” had few customers, and the landlord almost abdicated his functions till spring came round again. The house, originally intended for a mill, was built over the river itself, so that the indolent angler might actually have fished from the very window. The pine-clad mountains of Nassau enclosed the narrow glen, which straggled irregularly along for miles, now narrowing to a mere strip, now expanding into little plains of fertile meadow-land, with neat cottages and speckled cattle scattered around them. A narrow belt of garden flanked the river, on whose edge a walk of trellised vines was fashioned,—a charming spot in the sultry heat of summer, with its luxuriant shade above and the rippling stream below. Davis had seen the place years before in some hurried Journey; but his retentive mind carried a full memory of the spot, and he soon found that it comprised all he was in search of,—it was easy of access, secret, and cheap.
Only too well pleased to meet with a guest at this dead season of the year, they gave up to him the choicest apartment, and treated him with every solicitude and attention.
His table was supplied well, almost luxuriously; the good wine of Ettleberg given in liberal profusion; the vine alley converted into a pistol gallery for his use; and all for such a sum per diem as would not have satisfied a waiter at the Clarendon. But it was the calm seclusion, the perfect isolation that gratified him most. Let him stroll which way he would, he never chanced upon a traveller. It was marvellous, indeed, how such a place could have escaped that prying tribe of ramblers which England each year sends forth to wrangle, dispute, and disparage everything over Europe; and yet here were precisely the very objects they usually sought after,—beautiful scenery, a picturesque peasantry, and a land romantic in all its traits and traditions.
Not that Grog cared for these: rocks, waterfalls, ruins, leafy groves, or limpid streams made no appeal to him, He lived for the life of men, their passions and their ambitions. He knew some people admired this kind of thing, and there were some who were fond of literature; others liked pictures; others, again, fancied old coins. He had no objection. They were, if not very profitable, at least, harmless tastes. All he asked was, not to be the companion of such dreamers. “Give me the fellow that knows life,” would he say; and I am afraid that the definition of that same “life” would have included some things scarcely laudable.
If the spot were one to encourage indolence and ease, Davis did not yield to this indulgence. He arose early; walked for health; shot with the pistol for practice; studied his martingale for the play-table; took an hour with the small-sword with an old maître d’armes whom he found in the village; and, without actually devoting himself to it as a task, practised himself in German by means of conversation; and, lastly, he thought deeply and intently over the future. For speculations of this kind he had no mean capacity. If he knew little of the human heart in its higher moods, he understood it well in its shortcomings and its weaknesses; to what temptations a man might yield, when to offer them, and how, were mysteries he had often brooded over. In forecastings of this order, therefore, Davis exercised himself. Strange eventualities, “cases of conscience,” that I would fain believe never occurred to you, dear reader, nor to me, arose before him, and he met them manfully.
The world is generous in its admiration of the hard-worked minister, toiling night-long at his desk, receiving and answering his twenty despatches daily, and rising in the House to explain this, refute that, confirm the other, with all the clearness of an orator and all the calmness of a clerk; but, after all, he is but a fly-wheel in that machine of government of which there are some hundred other component parts, all well fitting and proportioned. Précis writers and private secretaries cram, colleagues advise him. The routine of official life hedges him in his proper groove; and if not overcome by indolence or affected by zeal, he can scarcely blunder. Not so your man of straits and emergency, your fellow living by his wits, and wresting from the world, that fancies it does not want him, reward and recognition. It is no marvel if a proud three-decker sail round the globe; but very different is our astonishment if a cockboat come safely from the China Seas, or brave the stormy passage round the Cape. Such a craft as this was Grog, his own captain: himself the crew, he had neither owner nor underwriter; and yet, amidst the assembled navies of the world, he would have shown his bunting!
The unbroken calm of his present existence was most favorable to these musings, and left him to plan his campaign in perfect quiet Whether the people of the inn regarded him as a great minister in disgrace come, by hard study, to retrieve a lost position, a man of science deeply immersed in some abstruse problem, or a distinguished author seeking isolation for the free exercise of his imagination, they treated him not only with great respect, but a sort of deference was shown in their studious effort to maintain the silence and stillness around. When he was supposed to be at his studies, not a voice was heard, not a footfall on the stairs. There is no such flattery to your man of scapes and accidents, your thorough adventurer, as that respectful observance that implies he is a person of condition. It is like giving of free will to the highwayman the purse he expected to have a fight for. Davis delighted in these marks of deference, and day by day grew more eager in exacting them.
“I heard some noise outside there this morning, Carl,” said he to the waiter; “what was the meaning of it?” For a moment or two the waiter hesitated to explain; but after a little went on to speak of a stranger who had been a resident of the inn for some months back without ever paying his bill; the law, singularly enough, not giving the landlord the power of turning him adrift, but simply of ceasing to afford him sustenance, and waiting for some opportunity of his leaving the house to forbid his re-entering it. Davis was much amused at this curious piece of legislation, by which a moneyless guest could be starved out but not expelled, and put many questions as to the stranger, his age, appearance, and nation. All the waiter knew was that he was a venerable-looking man, portly, advanced in life, with specious manners, a soft voice, and a benevolent smile; as to his country, he could n’t guess. He spoke several languages, and his German was, though peculiar, good enough to be a native’s.
“But how does he live?” said Davis; “he must eat.”
“There’s the puzzle of it!” exclaimed Carl; “for a while he used to watch while I was serving a breakfast or a dinner, and sallying out of his room, which is at the end of the corridor, he ‘d make off, sometimes with a cutlet,—perhaps a chicken,—now a plate of spinach, now an omelette, till, at last, I never ventured upstairs with the tray without some one to protect it. Not that even this always sufficed, for he was occasionally desperate, and actually seized a dish by force.”
“Even these chances, taken at the best, would scarcely keep a man alive,” said Davis.
“Nor would they; but we suspect he must have means of getting out at night and making a ‘raid’ over the country. We constantly hear of fowls carried off; cheese and fruit stolen. There he is now, creeping along the gallery. Listen! I have left some apples outside.”
With a gesture to enforce caution, Davis arose, and placed a percussion-cap on a pistol, a motion of his hand sufficing to show that the weapon was not loaded.
“Open the door gently,” said he; and the waiter, stealing over noiselessly, turned the handle. Scarcely had the door been drawn back, when Grog saw the figure of a man, and snapped off the pistol. At the same moment he sprang from the spot, and rushed out to the corridor. The stranger, to all seeming, was not even startled by the report, but was gravely occupied in examining his sleeve to see if he had been struck. He lifted up his head, and Davis, with a start, cried out,—
“What, Paul!—Paul Classon! Is this possible!”
“Davis—old fellow!—do I see you here?” exclaimed the other, in a deep and mellow voice, utterly devoid of irritation or even excitement.
“Come in,—come in here, Paul,” said Davis, taking him by the arm; and he led him within the room. “Little I suspected on whom I was playing this scurvy trick.”
“It was not loaded,” said the other, coolly.
“Of course not”
“I thought so,” said he, with an easy smile; “they ‘ve had so many devices to frighten me.”
“Come, Paul, old fellow, pour yourself out a tumbler of that red wine, while I cut you some of this ham; we ‘ll have plenty of time for talk afterwards.”
The stranger accepted the invitation, but without the slightest show of eagerness or haste. Nay, he unfolded his napkin leisurely, and fastened a corner in one buttonhole, as some old-fashioned epicures have a trick of doing. He held his glass, too, up to the light, to enjoy the rich color of the wine, and smacked his lips, as he tasted it, with the air of a connoisseur.
“A Burgundy, Davis, eh?” asked he, sipping again.
“I believe so. In truth, I know little about these wines.”
“Oh, yes, a ‘Pomard,’ and very good of its kind. Too loaded, of course, for the time of year, except for such palates as England rears.”
Davis had now covered his friend’s plate with ham and capon, and, at last, was pleased to see him begin his breakfast.
We are not about to impose upon our reader the burden of knowing more of Mr. Classon than is requisite for the interests of our story; but while he eats the first regular meal he has tasted for two months and more, let us say a word or so about him. He was a clergyman, whose life had been one continued history of mischances. Occasionally the sun of prosperity would seem disposed to shine genially on his head; but for the most part his lot was to walk with dark and lowering skies above him.
If he held any preferment, it was to quarrel with his rector, his dean, or his bishop; to be cited before commissions, tried by surrogates, pronounced contumacious, suspended, and Heaven knows what else. He was everlastingly in litigation with churchwardens and parish authorities, discovering rights of which he was defrauded, and privileges of which he was deprived. None like him to ferret out Acts of Edward or Henry, and obsolete bequests of long-buried founders of this, that, or t’other, of which the present guardians were little better than pickpockets. Adverse decisions and penalties pressing on him, he grew libellous, he spoke, wrote, and published all manner of defamatory things, accused every one of peculation, fraud, and falsehood, and, as the spirit of attack strengthened in him by exercise, menaced this man with prosecution, and that with open exposure. Trials by law, and costs accumulated against him, and he was only out of jail here, to enter it again there. From the Courts “above” he soon descended to those “below;” he became dissipated and dissolute, his hireling pen scrupled at nothing, and he assailed anything or any one, to order. Magistrates “had him up” as the author of threatening letters or begging epistles. To-day he was the mock secretary of an imaginary charity; tomorrow he ‘d appear as a distressed missionary going out to some island in the Pacific. He was eternally before the world, until the paragraph that spoke of him grew to be headed by the words, “The Reverend Paul Classon again!” or, more briefly, “Paul Classon’s last!” His pen, all this while, was his sole subsistence; and what a bold sweep it took!—impeachment of Ministers, accusation of theft, forgery, intimation of even worse crimes against the highest names in the realm, startling announcements of statesmen bribed, ambassadors corrupted, pasquinades against bishops and judges, libellous stories of people in private life, prize fights, prophetic almanacs, mock missionary journals, stanzas to celebrate quack remedies,—even street ballads were amongst his literary efforts; while, personally, he presided at low singing-establishments, and was the president of innumerable societies in localities only known to the police. It was difficult to take up a newspaper without finding him either reported drunk and disorderly in the police-sheet, obstructing the thoroughfare by a crowd assembled to hear him, having refused to pay for his dinner or his bed, assaulted the landlady, or, crime of crimes, used intemperate language to “G 493.” At last they got actually tired of trying him for begging, and imprisoning him for battery; the law was wearied out; but the world also had its patience exhausted, and Paul saw that he must conquer a new hemisphere. He came abroad.
What a changeful life was it now that he led,—at one time a tutor, at another a commissionaire for an hotel, a railway porter, a travelling servant, a police spy, the doorkeeper of a circus company, editor of an English journal, veterinary, language master, agent for patent medicines, picture-dealer, and companion to a nervous invalid, which, as Paul said, meant a furious maniac. There is no telling what he went through of debt and difficulty, till the police actually preferred passing him quietly over the frontier to following up with penalty so incurable an offender. In this way had he wandered about Europe for years, the terror of legations, the pestilence of charitable committees. Contributions to enable the Rev. Paul Classon to redeem his clothes, his watch, his divinity library, to send him to England, to the Andes, to Africa, figured everywhere. I dare not say how often he had been rescued out of the lowest pit of despondency, or snatched like a brand from the burning; in fact, he lived in a pit, and was always on fire.
“I am delighted,” said Davis, as he replenished his friend’s plate,—“I am delighted to see that you have the same good, hearty appetite as of old, Paul.”
“Ay, Kit,” said he, with a gentle sigh, “the appetite has been more faithful than the dinner; on the same principle, perhaps, that the last people who desert us are our creditors!”
“I suspect you ‘ve had rather a hard time of it,” said Davis, compassionately.
“Well, not much to complain of,—not anything that one would call hardships,” said Classon, as he pushed his plate from him and proceeded to light a cigar; “we ‘re all stragglers, Kit, that’s the fact of it.”
“I suppose it is; but it ain’t very disagreeable to be a straggler with ten thousand a year.”
“If the having and enjoying were always centred in the same individual,” said Classon, slowly, “what you say would be unanswerable; but it’s not so, Kit. No, no; the fellows who really enjoy life never have anything. They are, so to say, guests on a visit to this earth, come to pass a few months pleasantly, to put up anywhere, and be content with everything.” Grog shook his head dissentingly, and the other went on, “Who knows the truth of what I am saying better than either of us? How many broad acres did your father or mine bequeath us? What debentures, railroad shares, mining scrip, or mortgages? And yet, Kit, if we come to make up the score of pleasant days and glorious nights, do you fancy that any noble lord of them all would dispute the palm with us? Oh,” said he, rapturously, “give me the unearned enjoyments of life,—pleasures that have never cost me a thought to provide, nor a sixpence to pay for! Pass the wine, Kit,—that bottle is better than the other;” and be smacked his lips, while his eyes closed in a sort of dreamy rapture.
“I ‘d like to hear something of your life, Paul,” said Davis. “I often saw your name in the ‘Times’ and the ‘Post,’ but I ‘d like to have your own account of it.”
“My dear Kit, I ‘ve had fifty lives. It’s the man you should understand,—the fellow that is here;” and he slapped his broad chest as he spoke. “As for mere adventures, what are they? Squalls that never interfere with the voyage,—not even worth entering in the ship’s log.”
“Where’s your wife, Paul?” asked Davis, abruptly, for he was half impatient under the aphorizing tone of his companion.
“When last I heard of her,” said Classon, slowly, as he eyed his glass to the light, “she was at Chicago,—if that be the right prosody of it,—lecturing on ‘Woman’s Rights.’ Nobody knew the subject better than Fanny.”
“I heard she was a very clever woman,” said Davis.
“Very clever,” said Classon; “discursive; not always what the French call ‘consequent,’ but, certainly, clever, and a sweet poetess.” There was a racy twinkle in that reverend eye as he said the last words, so full of malicious drollery that Davis could not help remarking it; but all Classon gave for explanation was, “This to her health and happiness!” and he drained off a bumper. “And yours, Kit,—what of her?” asked he.
“Dead these many years. Do you remember her?”
“Of course I do. I wrote the article on her first appearance at the Surrey. What a handsome creature she was then! It was I predicted her great success; it was I that saved her from light comedy parts, and told her to play Lady Teazle!”
“I ‘ll show you her born image to-morrow,—her daughter,” said Davis, with a strange choking sensation that made him cough; “she’s taller than her mother,—more style also.”
“Very difficult, that,—very difficult, indeed,” said Classon, gravely. “There was a native elegance about her I never saw equalled; and then her walk, the carriage of the head, the least gesture, had all a certain grace that was fascination.”
“Wait till you see Lizzy,” said Davis, proudly; “you ‘ll see these all revived.”
“Do you destine her for the boards, Kit?” asked Classon, carelessly.
“For the stage? No, of course not,” replied Davis, rudely.
“And yet these are exactly the requirements would fetch a high price just now. Beauty is not a rare gift in England; nor are form and symmetry; but, except in the highly born, there is a lamentable deficiency in that easy gracefulness of manner, that blended dignity and softness, that form the chief charm of woman. If she be what you say, Kit,—if she be, in short, her mother’s daughter,—it is a downright insanity not to bring her out.”
“I ‘ll not hear of it! That girl has cost me very little short of ten thousand pounds,—ay, ten thousand pounds,—schooling, masters, and the rest of it. She ‘s no fool, so I take it; it ain’t thrown away! As regards beauty, I’ll stake fifteen to ten, in hundreds, that, taking your stand at the foot of St. James’s Street on a drawing-room day, you don’t see her equal. I’m ready to put down the money to-morrow, and that’s giving three to two against the field! And is that the girl I ‘m to throw away on the Haymarket? She’s a Derby filly, I tell you, Paul, and will be first favorite one of these days.”
“Faustum sit augurium!” said Classon, as he raised his glass in a theatrical manner, and then drained it off. “Still, if I be rightly informed, the stage is often the antechamber to the peerage. The attractions that dazzle thousands form the centre of fascination for some one.”
“She may find her way to a coronet without that,” said Davis, rudely.
“Ah, indeed!” said Paul, with a slight elevation of the eyebrow; but though his tone invited a confidence, the other made no further advance’s.
“And now for yourself, Classon, what have you been at lately?” said Davis, wishing to change the subject.
“Literature and the arts. I have been contributing to a London weekly, as Crimean correspondent, with occasional letters from the gold diggings. I have been painting portraits for a florin the head, till I have exhausted all the celebrities of the three villages near us. My editor has, I believe, run away, however, and supplies have ceased for some time back.”
“And what are your plans now?”
“I have some thoughts of going back to divinity. These newly invented water-cure establishments are daily developing grander proportions; some have got German bands, some donkeys, some pleasure-boats, others rely upon lending libraries and laboratories; but the latest dodge is a chaplain.”
“But won’t they know you, Paul? Have not the newspapers ‘blown you’?”
“Ah, Davis, my dear friend,” said he, with a benevolent smile, “it’s far easier to live down a bad reputation than to live up to a good one. I ‘d only ask a week—one week’s domestication with the company of these places—to show I was a martyred saint. I have, so to say, a perennial fount of goodness in my nature that has never failed me.”
“I remember it at school,” said Davis, dryly.
“You took the clever line, Kit, ‘suum cuique;’ it would never have suited me. You were born to thrive upon men’s weaknesses, mine the part to have a vested interest in their virtues.”
“If you depend upon their virtues for a subsistence, I ‘m not surprised to see you out at elbows,” said Davis, roughly.
“Not so, Kit,—not so,” said the other, blandly, in rebuke. “There ‘s a great deal of weak good-nature always floating about life. The world is full of fellows with ‘Pray take me in’ written upon them.”
“I can only vouch for it very few have come in my way,” said Davis, with a harsh laugh.
“So much the better for them,” said Paul, gravely.
A pause of considerable duration now ensued between them, broken, at last, by Davis abruptly saying, “Is it not a strange thing, it was only last night I was saying to myself, ‘What the deuce has become of Holy Paul?—the newspapers have seemingly forgotten him. It can’t be that he is dead.’”
“Lazarus only sleepeth,” said Classon; “and, indeed, my last eleven weeks here seem little other than a disturbed sleep.”
Continuing his own train of thought, Davis went on, “If I could chance upon him now, he’s just the fellow I want, or, rather, that I may want.”
“If it is a lampoon or a satire you ‘re thinking of, Kit, I ‘ve given them up; I make no more blistering ointments, but turn all my skill to balsams. They give no trouble in compounding, and pay even better. Ah, Davis, my worthy friend, what a mistake it is to suppose that a man must live by his talents, while his real resource is his temperament. For a life of easy enjoyment, that blessed indolence that never knew a care, it is heart, not head, is needed.”
“All I can say is, that with the fellows I ‘ve been most with, heart had very little to do with them, and the best head was the one that least trusted his neighbors.”
“A narrow view, my dear friend,—a narrow view, take my word for it; as one goes on in life he thinks better of it.”
A malicious grin was all the answer Davis made to this remark. At last he turned his eyes full upon the other, and in a low but distinct voice said: “Let us have no more of this, Paul. If we are to play, let us play, as the Yankees say, without the ‘items,’—no cheating on either side. Don’t try the Grand Benevolence dodge with me,—don’t. When I said awhile ago, I might want you, it was no more than I meant. You may be able to render me a service,—a great service.”
“Say how,” said Classon, drawing his chair nearer to him,—“say how, Kit, and you’ll not find the terms exorbitant.”
“It’s time enough to talk about the stakes when we are sure the match will come off,” said Davis, cautiously. “All I ‘ll say for the present is, I may want you.”
Classon took out a small and very greasy-looking notebook from his waistcoat-pocket, and with his pencil in hand, said, “About what time are you likely to need me? Don’t be particular as to a day or a week, but just in a rough-guessing sort of way say when.”
“I should say in less than a month from this time,—perhaps within a fortnight.”
“All right,” said Classon, closing his book, after making a brief note. “You smile,” said he, blandly, “at my methodical habits, but I have been a red-tapist all my life, Kit I don’t suppose you ‘ll find any man’s papers, letters, documents, and so forth, in such trim order as mine,—all labelled, dated, and indexed. Ah! there is a great philosophy in this practical equanimity; take my word for it, there is.”
“How far are we from Neuwied here?” asked Davis, half pettishly; for every pretension of his reverend friend seemed to jar upon his nerves.
“About sixteen or eighteen miles, I should say?”
“I must go or send over there to-morrow,” continued Davis. “The postmaster sends me word that several letters have arrived,—some to my address, some to my care. Could you manage to drive across?”
“Willingly; only remember that once I leave this blessed sanctuary I may find the door closed against my return. They ‘ve a strange legislation here—”
“I know—I ‘ve heard of it,” broke in Davis. “I ‘ll guarantee everything, so that you need have no fears on that score. Start at daybreak, and fetch back all letters you find there for me or for the Honorable Annesley Beecher.”
“The Honorable Annesley Beecher!” said Classon, as he wrote the name in his note-book. “Dear me! the last time I heard that name was—let me see—fully twelve years ago. It was after that affair at Brighton. I wrote an article for the ‘Heart of Oak,’ on the ‘Morality of our Aristocracy.’ How I lashed their vices! how I stigmatized their lives of profligacy and crime!”
“You infernal old hypocrite!” cried Davis, with a half-angry laugh.
“There was no hypocrisy in that, Kit. If I tell you that a statue is bad in drawing, or incorrect in anatomy, I never assert thereby that I myself have the torso of Hercules or the limbs of Antinous.”
“Leave people’s vices alone, then; they ‘re the same as their debts; if you’re not going to pay them, you ‘ve no right to talk about them.”
“Only on public grounds, Kit Our duty to society, my dear friend, has its own requirements!”
“Fiddlestick!” said Davis, angrily, as he pushed his glass from before him; then, after a moment, went on: “Do you start early, so as to be back here before evening,—my mind is running on it. There’s three naps,” said he, placing the gold pieces on the table. “You’ll not want more.”
“Strange magnetism is the touch of gold to one’s palm,” said Classon, as he surveyed the money in the hollow of his hand. “How marvellous that these bits of stamped metal should appeal so forcibly to my inner consciousness!”
“Don’t get drunk with them, that’s all,” said Davis, with a stern savagery of manner, as he arose from his seat. “There’s my passport,—you may have to show it at the office. And now, good-bye, for I have a long letter to write to my daughter.”
Classon poured the last of the Burgundy into a tumbler, and drank it off, and hiccuping out, “I’ll haste me to the Capitol!” left the room.
CHAPTER VI. IMMINENT TIDINGS
It was a very wearisome day to Davis as he waited for the return of Paul Classon. Grog’s was not a mind made for small suspicions or petty distrusts,—he was a wholesale dealer in iniquity, and despised minute rogueries; yet he was not altogether devoid of anxiety as hour, by hour went over, and no sign of Classon. He tried to pass the time in his usual mode. He shot with the pistol, he fenced, he whipped the trout-stream, he went over his “martingale” with the cards, but somehow everything went amiss with him. He only hit the bull’s-eye once in three shots; he fenced wide; a pike carried off his tackle; and, worst of all, he detected a flaw in the great “Cabal,” that, if not remediable, must render it valueless.
“A genuine Friday, this!” muttered he, as he sauntered up a little eminence, from which a view might be had of the road for above a mile. “And what nonsense it is people saying they ‘re not superstitions! I suppose I have as little of that kind of humbug about me as my neighbors; yet I would n’t play half-crowns at blind-hookey today. I’d not take the favorite even against a chance horse. I’d not back myself to leap that drain yonder; and why? Just because I ‘m in what the French call guignon. There’s no other word for it that ever I heard. These are the days Fortune says to a man, ‘Shut up, and don’t book a bet!’ It’s a wise fellow takes the warning. I know it so well that I always prepare for a run against me, and as sure as I am here, I feel that something or other is going wrong elsewhere. Not a sign of him,—not a sign!” said he, with a heavy sigh, as he gazed long and earnestly along the line of road. “He has n’t bolted, that I’m sure of; he’d not ‘try that on’ with me. He remembers to this very hour a licking I gave him at school. I know what it is, he’s snug in a wine ‘Schenke.’ He’s in for a big drink, the old beast, as if he could n’t get blind drunk when he came home. I think I see him holding forth to the boors, and telling them what an honor it is to them to sit in his company; that he took a high class at Oxford, and was all but Bishop of—Eh, is that he? No, it ‘s going t’ other way. Confounded fool!—but worse fool myself for trusting him. That’s exactly what people would say: ‘He gave Holy Paul three naps, and expected to see him come back sober!’ Well, so I did; and just answer me this: Is not all the work of this world done by rogues and vagabonds? It suits them to be honest for a while; they ride to order so long as they like the stable. Not a sign of him!” And with a comfortless sigh he turned back to the house.
“I wish I knew how Lizzy was to-night!” muttered he, as he rested his head on his hand, and sat gazing at her picture. “Ay, that is your own saucy smile, but the world will take that out of you, and put a puckered-up mouth and hard lines in its place, that it will, confound it! And those eyes will have another kind of brightness in them, too, when they begin to read life glibly. My poor darling, I wish you could stay as you are. Where are you now, I wonder? Not thinking of old Kit, I ‘m certain! And yet, maybe, I wrong her,—maybe she is just dwelling on long—long ago—home, and the rest of it. Ay, darling, that’s what the lucky ones have in life, and never so much as know their luck in having it. By Jove! she is handsome!” cried he, as he held up the miniature in ecstasy before him. “‘If she’s so beautiful, Mr. Ross, why don’t she come to the Drawing-room?’ say the Court people. Ay, you’ll see her there yet, or I’m not Kit Davis! Don’t be impatient, ladies; make your running while the course is your own, for there’s a clipper coming. I’d like to see where they’ll be when Lizzy takes the field.”
And now, in his pride, he walked the room, with head erect and arms folded. It was only for a very short space, however, that these illusions withdrew him from his gloomier reveries; for, with a start, he suddenly recurred to all the anxieties of the morning, and once more issued forth upon the high-road to look out for Classon. The setting sun sent a long golden stream of light down the road, on which not a living thing was to be seen. Muttering what were scarcely blessings on the head of his messenger, he strolled listlessly along. Few men could calculate the eventualities of life better or quicker than Davis. Give him the man and the opportunities, and he would speedily tell you what would be the upshot. He knew thoroughly well how far experience and temperament mould the daring spirit, and how the caution that comes of education tames down the wild influences suggested by temptation.
“No,” said he to himself, “though he had my passport and three Napoleons besides, he has not levanted. He is far too deep a fellow for that.”
At last a low rumbling sound came up from the distance; he stopped and listened. It came and went at intervals, till, at last, he could distinctly mark the noise of wheels, and the voice of a man urging on his horse. Davis quickened his pace, till, in the gray half-light, he descried a little one-horse carriage slowly advancing towards him. He could only see one man in it; but as it came nearer, he saw a heap of clothes, surmounted by what indicated the presence of another in the bottom of the conveyance, and Grog quickly read the incident by the aid of his own anticipation. There, indeed, lay Paul Classon, forgetful of the world and all its cares, his outstretched arm almost touching the wheel, and the heavy wooden shoe of the peasant grazing his face.
“Has he got the letters? Where are they?” cried Davis, eagerly, to the driver.
“They’re in his hat”
Grog snatched it rudely from his head, and found several letters of various sizes and shapes, and with what, even in that dim light, seemed a variety of addresses and superscriptions.
“Are you certain none have fallen out or been lost on the road?” said Davis, as he reckoned them over.
“That I am,” said the man; “for at every jolt of the wagon he used to grip his hat and hold it fast, as if it was for very life, till we came to the last village. It was there he finished off with a flask of Laubthaler that completely overcame him.”
“So, then, he was sober on leaving Neuwied?”
“He was in the so-called ‘bemuzzed’ state!” said the man, with a half-apologetic air.
“Take him down to the inn; throw him into the hay-yard—or the river, if you like,” said Davis, contemptuously, and turned away.
Once in his own room, the candles lighted, the door locked, Davis sat down to the table on which the letters were thrown. Leisurely he took them up one by one and examined their superscriptions.
“Little news in these,” said he, throwing three or four to one side; “the old story,—money-seeking.” And he mumbled out, “‘Your acceptance being duly presented this day at Messrs. Haggitts and Drudge’s, and no provision being made for payment of the same—’ It’s like the burden of an old song in one’s ears. Who is this from? Oh, Billy Peach, with some Doncaster news. I do wonder will the day ever come that will bring me good tidings by the post; I ‘ve paid many a pound in my life for letters, and I never yet chanced upon one that told me my uncle Peter had just died, leaving me all his estates in Jamaica, or that my aunt Susan bequeathed to me all her Mexican stock and the shares in four tin-mines. This is also from Peach, and marked ‘Immediate;’” and he broke it open. It contained only these lines: “Dark is the word for a week or two still. On Tuesday your name will appear amongst the passengers for New York by the ‘Persia.’ Saucy Sal is a dead break-down, and we net seven hundred safe; Pot did it with a knitting-needle while they were plaiting her. What am I to do about the jewels?”
Davis’s brow darkened as he crushed the paper in his hand, while he muttered, “I wish these infernal fools had not been taught to write! He ought to know that addressing me Captain Christopher never deceived a ‘Detective’ yet. And this is for the Honorable Annesley Beecher,” said he, reading aloud the address, “‘care of Captain Christopher, Coblentz—try Bingen—try Neuwied.’ A responsible-looking document this; it looks like a despatch, with its blue-post paper and massive seal; and what is the name here, in the corner? ‘Davenport Dunn,’ sure enough,—‘Davenport Dunn.’ And with your leave, sir, we ‘ll see what you have to say,” muttered he, as he broke the seal of the packet. A very brief note first met his eyes; it ran thus:—
“Dear Sir,—While I was just reading a very alarming account
of Lord Lackington’s illness in a communication from Messrs.
Harmer and Gore, the post brought me the enclosed letter for
yourself, which I perceive to be in her Ladyship’s hand; I
forward it at once to Brussels, in the hope that it may
reach you there. Should her Ladyship’s tidings be better
than I can fain persuade myself to hope, may I presume to
suggest that you should lose no time in repairing to Italy.
I cannot exaggerate the peril of his Lordship’s state; in
fact, I am hourly expecting news of his death; and, the
peculiar circumstances of the case considered, it is
highly important you should possess yourself of every
information the exigencies of the event may require. I beg
to enclose you a bank post-bill for two-hundred pounds,
payable at any banker’s on your signature, and have the
honor to be, with sincere respect,
“Your humble Servant,
“Davenport Dunn.
“P. S.—I have reason to know that certain claims are now
under consideration, and will be preferred erelong, if
suitable measures be not adopted to restrain them.”
“From which side do you hold your brief, Master Davenport Dunn? I should like to know that!” said Davis, as he twice over read aloud this postscript. He looked at Lady Lackington’s letter, turned it over, examined the seal and the postmark, and seemed to hesitate about breaking it open. Was it that some scruple of conscience arrested his hand, and some mysterious feeling that it was a sisterly confidence he was about to violate? Who knows! At all events, if there was a struggle it was a brief one, for he now smashed the seal and spread the open letter before him.
With a muttered expression of impatience did he glance over the four closely written pages indited in the very minutest of hands and the faintest possible ink. Like one addressing himself, however, to a severe task, he set steadily to work, and for nigh an hour never rose from the table. We have no right, as little have we the wish, to inflict upon our reader any portion of the labor this process of deciphering cost Davis, so that we will briefly state what formed the substance of the epistle. The letter was evidently begun before Lord Lackington had been taken ill, for it opened with an account of Como and the company at the Villa d’Este, where they had gone to resume the water-cure. Her Ladyship’s strictures upon the visitors, their morals, and their manners, were pleasantly and flippantly thrown off. She possessed what would really seem an especial gift of her class,—the most marvellous use of the perceptive faculties,—and could read not alone rank and condition, but character and individuality, by traits of breeding and manner that would have escaped the notice of hundreds of those the world calls shrewd observers. This fragment, for it was such, was followed, after a fortnight, by a hastily written passage, announcing that Lord Lackington had been seized with an attack resembling apoplexy, and for several hours remained in great danger. She had detained the letter to give the latest tidings before the post closed, and ultimately decided on not despatching it till the next day. The following morning’s communication was a minute account of medical treatment, the bleedings, the blisterings, the watchings, and the anxieties of a sick-bed, with all the vacillating changes that mark the course of malady, concluding with these words: “The doctors are not without hopes, but confess that their confidence is rather based on the great strength and energy of his constitution than upon any success that has attended their treatment, from which I may say that up to this no benefit has accrued. So well as I can interpret his utterance, he seems very anxious to see you, and made an effort to write something to you, which, of course, he could not accomplish. Come out here, therefore, as quickly as possible; the route by Lucerne is, they tell me, the shortest and speediest. If I were to give my own opinion, it would be that he is better and stronger than yesterday; but I do not perceive the doctors disposed to take this view.” After this came a lengthened statement of medical hopes and fears, balanced with all the subtle minuteness known to “the Faculty.” They explained to a nicety how if that poor watch were to stop it could not possibly be from any fault of theirs, but either from some vice in its original construction, or some organic change occasioned by time. They demonstrated, in fact, that great as was their art, it was occasionally baffled; but pointed with a proud humility to the onward progress of science, in the calm assurance that, doubtless, we should one day know all these things, and treat them as successfully as we now do—I am afraid to say what. One thing, however, was sufficiently clear,—Lord Lackington’s case was as bad as possible, his recovery almost hopeless. On the turn-down of the last page was the following, written in evident haste, if not agitation: “In opening the letters which have arrived since his illness, I am astonished to find many referring to some suit, either meditated or actually instituted, against our right to the title. Surely some deep game of treachery is at work here. He never once alluded to such a possibility to myself, nor had I the slightest suspicion that any pretended claim existed. One of these letters is from Mr. Davenport Dunn, who has, I can see from the tone in which he writes, been long conversant with the transaction, and as evidently inclines to give it a real or feigned importance. Indeed, he refers to a ‘compromise’ of some sort or other, and strongly impresses the necessity of not letting the affair proceed further. I am actually distracted by such news coming at such a moment. Surely Lackington could never have been weak enough to yield to mere menace, and have thus encouraged the insolent pretensions of this claim? As you pass through London, call at Fordyce’s, somewhere in Furnival’s Inn, and, just in course of conversation, showing your acquaintance with the subject, learn all you can on the matter. Fordyce has all our papers, and must necessarily know what weight is due to these pretensions. Above all, however, hasten out here; there is no saying what any day—any hour—may produce. I have no one here to give me a word of advice, or even consolation; for, though Lady Grace is with us, she is so wrapped up in her new theological studies—coquetting with Rome as she has been all the summer—that she is perfectly useless.
“Have you any idea who is Terence Driscoll? Some extraordinary notes bearing this signature, ill-written and ill-spelt, have fallen into my hands as I rummaged amongst the papers, and they are all full of this claim. It is but too plain Lackington suffered these people to terrify him, and this Driscoll’s tone is a mixture of the meanest subserviency and outrageous impertinence. It is not unlikely Fordyce may know him. Of course, I need not add one word of caution against your mention of this affair, even to those of your friends with whom you are in closest intimacy. It is really essential not a hint of it should get abroad.
“I have little doubt, now, looking back on the past, that anxiety and care about this matter have had a large share in bringing on Lackington’s attack. He had been sleepless and uneasy for some time back, showing an eagerness, too, about his letters, and the greatest impatience if any accident delayed the post Although all my maturer thoughts—indeed, my convictions—reject attaching any importance to this claim, I will not attempt to conceal from you how unhappy it has made me, nor how severely it has affected my nerves.”
With one more urgent appeal to lose not an hour in hastening over the Alps, the letter concluded; the single word “weaker,” apparently written after the letter was sealed, giving a deep meaning to the whole.
Davis was not satisfied with one perusal of the latter portion of this letter, but read it over carefully a second time; after which, taking a sheet of paper, he wrote down the names of Fordyce and Terence Driscoll. He then opened a Directory, and running his eye down a column, came to “Fordyce and Fraude, 7 Furnivats Inn, solicitors.” Of Terence Driscolls there were seventeen, but all in trade,—tanners, tinmen, last-makers, wharfingers, and so on; not one upon whom Davis could fix the likelihood of the correspondence with the Viscount. He then walked the room, cigar in mouth, for about an hour, after which he sat down and wrote the note to Beecher which we have given in a former chapter, with directions to call upon Stein, the moneylender, and then hasten away from Aix as speedily as possible. This finished, he addressed another and somewhat longer epistle to Lazarus Stein himself, of which latter document this true history has no record.
We, perhaps, owe an apology to our reader for inverting in our narrative the actual order of these events. It might possibly have been more natural to have preceded the account of Beecher’s reception of the letter by the circumstances we have just detailed. We selected the present course, however, to avoid the necessity of that continual change of scene, alike wearisome to him who reads as to him who writes; and as we are about to sojourn in Mr. Davis’s company for some time to come, we have deferred the explanation to a time when it should form part of a regular series of events. Nor are we sorry at the opportunity of asking the reader to turn once again to that brief note, and mark its contents. Though Davis was fully impressed with the conviction that Lord Lackington’s days were numbered; though he felt that, at any moment, some chance rumor, some flying report might inform Beecher what great change was about to come over his fortunes,—yet this note is written in all the seeming carelessness of a gossiping humor: he gives the latest news of the turf, he alludes to Beecher’s new entanglements at home, to, his own newly discovered martingale for the play-table, trusting to the one line about “Benson’s people” to make Beecher hasten away from Aix, and from the chance of hearing that his brother was hopelessly ill. While Grog penned these lines, he would have given—if he had it—ten thousand pounds that Beecher was beside him. Ay, willingly had he given it, and more, too, that Beecher might be where no voice could whisper to him the marvellous change that any moment might cause in his destiny. Oh, ye naturalists, who grow poetical over the grub and the butterfly, what is there, I ask ye, in the transformation at all comparable with that when the younger brother, the man of strait and small fortune, springs into the peer, exchanging a life of daily vicissitudes, cheap dinners and duns, dubious companionships and high discounts, for the assured existence, the stately banquets, the proud friendships, the pomp and circumstance of a lord? In a moment he soars out of the troubled atmosphere of debts and disabilities, and floats into the balmy region whose very sorrows never wear an unbecoming mourning.
Grog’s note was thus a small specimen of what the great Talleyrand used to call the perfection of despatch writing, “not the best thing that could be said on the subject, but simply that which would produce the effect you desired.” Having sent off this to Beecher, he then telegraphed to his man of business, Mr. Peach, to ascertain at Fordyce’s the latest accounts of Lord Lackington’s health, and answer “by wire.”
It was far into the night when Davis betook himself to bed, but not to sleep. The complications of the great game he was playing had for him all the interest of the play-table. The kind of excitement he gloried in was to find himself pitted against others,—wily, subtle, and deep-scheming as himself,—to see some great stake on the board, and to feel that it must be the prize of the best player. With the gambler’s superstition, he kept constantly combining events with dates and eras, recalling what of good or ill-luck had marked certain periods of his life. He asked himself if September had usually been a fortunate month; did the 20th imply anything; what influence might Holy Paul exert over his destiny; was he merely unlucky himself, or did he bring evil fortune upon others? If he suffered himself to dwell upon such “vain auguries” as these, they still exerted little other sway over his mind than to nerve it to greater efforts; in fact, he consulted these signs as a physician might investigate certain symptoms which, if not of moment enough to call for special treatment, were yet indicative of hidden mischief.
His gambling experiences had given him the ready tact, by a mere glance around the table, to recognize those with whom the real struggle should be waged; to detect, in a second, the deep head, the crafty intelligence, that marvellous blending of caution with rashness that make the gamester; and in the same spirit be now turned over in thought each of those with whom he was now about to contend, and muttered the name of Davenport Dunn over and over. “Could we only ‘hit it off’ together, what a game might we not play!” was his last reflection ere he fell off to sleep.
CHAPTER VII. A DISCURSIVE CONVERSATION
Davis was surprised, and something more, as he entered the breakfast-room the next morning to find the Rev. Paul Classon already seated at the table, calmly arranging certain little parallelograms of bread-and-butter and sardines. No signs of discomfiture or shame showed themselves in that calmly benevolent countenance. Indeed, as he arose and extended his hand there was an air of bland protection in the gesture perfectly soothing.
“You came back in a pretty state last night,” said Davis, roughly.
“Overtaken, Kit,—overtaken. It was a piece of good news rather than the grape juice did the mischief. As the poet says,—
“‘Good tidings flowed upon his heart
Like a sea o’er a barren shore,
And the pleasant waves refreshed the spot
So parched and bleak before.’
“The fact is, Kit, you brought me luck. Just as I reached the Post-Office, I saw a letter addressed to the Rev. Paul Classon, announcing that I had been accepted as Chaplain to the great Hydropathic Institution at Como! and, to commemorate the event, I celebrated in wine the triumphs of water! You got the letters all safely?”
“Little thanks to you if I did; nor am I yet certain how many may have dropped out on the road.”
“Stay,—I have a memorandum here,” said Paul, opening his little note-book. “Four, with London post-marks, to Captain Christopher; two from Brussels for the same; a large packet for the Hon. Annesley Beecher. That’s the whole list.”
“I got these!” said Grog, gruffly; “but why, might I ask, could you not have kept sober till you got back here?”
“He who dashes his enthusiasm with caution, waters the liquor of life. How do we soar above the common ills of existence save by yielding to those glorious impulses of the heart, which say, ‘Be happy!’”
“Keep the sermon for the cripples at the water-cure,” said Davis, savagely. “When are you to be there?”
“By the end of the month. I mentioned the time myself. It would be as soon, I thought, as I could manage to have my divinity library out from England.”
The sly drollery of his eye, as he spoke, almost extorted a half-smile from Davis.
“Let me see,” muttered Grog, as he arose and lighted his cigar, “we are, to-day, the 21st, I believe. No, you can’t be there so early. I shall need you somewhere about the first week in October; it might chance to be earlier. You mustn’t remain here, however, in the interval. You’ll have to find some place in the neighborhood, about fifteen or twenty miles off.”
“There’s Höchst, on the Lahn, a pleasant spot, eighteen miles from this.”
“Höchst be it; but, mark me, no more of last night’s doings.”
“I pledge my word,” said Paul, solemnly. “Need I say, it is as good as my bond?”
“About the same, I suspect; but I ‘ll give you mine too,” said Davis, with a fierce energy. “If by any low dissipation or indiscretion of yours you thwart the plans I am engaged in, I ‘ll leave you to starve out the rest of your life here.”
“‘So swear we all as liegemen true, So swear to live and die!’” cried out Paul, with a most theatrical air in voice and gesture.
“You know a little of everything, I fancy,” said Davis, in a more good-humored tone. “What do you know of law?”
“Of law?” said Paul, as he helped himself to a dish of smoking cutlets,—“if it be the law of debtor and creditor, false arrest, forcible possession, battery, or fraudulent bankruptcy, I am indifferently well skilled. Nor am I ignorant in divorce cases, separate maintenance, and right of guardianship. Equity, I should say, is my weak point.”
“I believe you,” said Davis, with a grin, for he but imperfectly understood the speech. “But it is of another kind of law I ‘m speaking. What do you know about disputed title to a peerage? Have you any experience in such cases?”
“Yes; I have ransacked registries, rummaged out gravestones in my time. I very nearly burned my fingers, too, with a baptismal certificate that turned out to be—what shall I call it?—unauthentic!”
“You forged it!” said Grog, gruffly.
“They disputed its correctness, and, possibly, with some grounds for their opinion. Indeed,” added he, carelessly, “it was the first thing of the kind I had ever done, and it was slovenly—slovenly.”
“It would have been transportation!” said Davis, gravely.
“With hard labor,” added Classon, sipping his tea.
“At all events, you understand something of these sort of cases?”
“Yes; I have been concerned, one way or another, with five. They are interesting when you take to them; there are so many, so to say, surprises; always something turning up you never looked for,—somebody’s father that never had a child, somebody’s mother that never was married. Then people die,—say a hundred and fifty years ago,—and no proof of the death can be made out; or you build wonderfully upon an act of Parliament, and only find out at the last hour that it has been repealed. These traits give a great deal of excitement to the suit. I used to enjoy them much when I was younger.” And Mr. Classon sighed as if he had been calling up memories of cricket-matches, steeple-chases, or the polka,—pleasures that advancing years had rudely robbed him of.
Davis sat deep in thought for some time. Either he had not fully made up his mind to open an unreserved confidence with his reverend friend, or which is perhaps as likely, he was not in possession of such knowledge as might enable him to state his case.
“These suits, or actions, or whatever you call them,” said he, at length, “always drag on for years,—don’t they?”
“Of course they do; the lawyers take care of that. There are trials at bar, commissions, special examinations before the Masters, arguments before the peers, appeals against decisions; in fact, it is a question of the purse of the litigants. Like everything else, however, in this world, they ‘ve got economy-struck. I remember the time—it was the Bancroft case—they gave me five guineas a day and travelling expenses to go out to Ravenna and take the deposition of an old Marchess, half-sister of the Dowager, and now, I suppose, they ‘d say the service was well paid with one half. Indeed, I may say I had as good as accepted a sort of engagement to go out to the Crimea and examine a young fellow whom they fancy has a claim to a peerage, and for a mere trifle,—fifteen shillings a day and expenses. But they had got my passport stopped here, and I could n’t get away.”
“What was the name of the claimant?”
“Here it is,” said he, opening his note-book. “Charles Conway, formerly in the 11th Hussars, supposed to be serving as orderly on the staff of General La Marmora. I have a long letter of instructions Froode forwarded me, and I suspect it is a strong case got up to intimidate.”
“What is the peerage sought for?” asked Davis, with an assumed indifference.
“I can tell you in five minutes if you have any curiosity on the subject,” said Paul, rising. “The papers are all in my writing-desk.”
“Fetch them,” said Davis, as he walked to the window and looked out.
Classon soon re-entered the room with a large open letter in his hand.
“There’s the map of the country!” said he, throwing it down on the table. “What would you call the fair odds in such a case, Kit,—a private soldier’s chance of a peerage that has been undisturbed since Edward the Third?”
“About ten thousand to one, I ‘d call it.”
“I agree with you, particularly since Froode is in it. He only takes up these cases to make a compromise. They ‘re always ‘settled.’ He’s a wonderful fellow to sink the chambers and charge the mine, but he never explodes,—never!”
“So that Froode can always be squared, eh?” asked Davis.
“Always.” Classon now ran his eyes over the letter, and, mumbling the lines half aloud, said, “In which case the Conways of Abergeldy, deriving from the second son, would take precedence of the Beecher branch.’ The case is this,” added he, aloud: “Viscompt Lackington’s peerage was united to the estates by an act of Edward; a motion for a repeal of this was made in Elizabeth’s time, and lost—some aver the reverse; now the claimant, Conway, relies upon the original act, since in pursuit of the estates he invalidates the title. It’s a case to extort money, and a good round sum too. I ‘d say Lord Lack-ington might give twenty thousand to have all papers and documents of the claim surrendered into his hands.”
“A heavy sum, twenty thousand,” muttered Davis, slowly.
“So it is, Kit; but when you come to tot up suits at Nisi Prius, suits in Equity, searches at the Herald’s office, and hearings before the Lords, you ‘ll see it is a downright saving.”
“But could Lackington afford this? What is he worth?”
“They call the English property twelve thousand a year, and he has a small estate in Ireland besides. In fact, it is out of that part of the property the mischief has come. This Conway’s claim was discovered in some old country-house there, and Froode is only partially instructed in it.”
“And now, Paul,” said Davis, slowly, “if you got a commission to square this here affair and make all comfortable, how would you go about it?”
“Acting for which party, do you mean?” asked Paul.
“I mean for the Lackingtons.”
“Well, there are two ways. I ‘d send for Froode, and say, ‘What’s the lowest figure for the whole?’ or I’d despatch a trusty fellow to the Crimea to watch Conway, and see what approaches they are making to him. Of course they’ll send a man out there, and it ought n’t to be hard to get hold of him, or, if not himself, of all his papers and instructions.”
“That looks business-like,” said Grog, encouragingly.
“After all, Kit, these things, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, are only snaps of the percussion-cap. There ‘s scarcely a peerage in England is not menaced with an attempt of the kind; but such is the intermarriage—such the close tie of affinity between them—they stand manfully to the fellow in possession. They know in their hearts, if once they let the world begin to pick out a stone here or there, the whole wall may come tumbling down, and so they say, ‘Here ‘s one of us since Henry II.‘s time going to be displaced for some upstart fellow none of us ever heard of.’ What signifies legitimacy that dates seven centuries back, in favor of one probably a shoemaker or a house-painter? They won’t stand that, Kit, and reasonably enough, too. I suppose you’ve heard all about this case from Beecher?”
“Well, I have heard something about it,” said Grog, in confusion, for the suddenness of the question disconcerted him; “but he don’t care about it.”
“Very likely not. If Lackington were to have a son, it would n’t concern him much.”
“Not alone that, but he does n’t attach any importance to the claim; he says it’s all got up to extort money.”
“What of that? When a highwayman stops you with the same errand, does n’t the refusal occasionally provoke him to use force? I know very few things so hard to deal with as menaces to extort money. Life is, after all, very like the game the Americans call ‘Poker,’ where the grand secret is, never to ‘brag’ too far on a bad hand. What was your part in this business, Kit?” asked he, after a brief silence.
“How do you mean by my part?” rejoined Davis, gruffly.
“I mean, how were you interested? Do you hold any of Lackington’s paper?—have you got any claims on the reversion?—in a word, does it in any way concern you which king reigns in Israel?”
“It might, or it might not,” said Grog, dryly. “Now for a question to you. Could you manage to get employed in the affair,—to be sent out after this Conway,—or is it too late?”
“It might, or it might not,” said Classon, with a significant imitation of the other’s tone and manner. Davis understood the sarcasm in a moment, and in a voice of some irritation said,—
“Don’t you try to come the whip-hand over me, Holy Paul. If there be anything to do in this matter, it is I, and not you, will be paymaster; so much for this, so much for that,—there’s the terms!”
“It is such dealings I like best,” said Classon, blandly “Men would have benefited largely in this world had probity been parcelled out as task-work instead of being made daily labor.”
“I suspect that neither you nor I would have had much employment either way,” said Davis, with a bitter laugh. “But come, you must be stirring. You ‘ll have to be off out of this before the afternoon. The Rhine steamer touches at Neuwied at three, and I expect my daughter by this boat. I don’t want her to see you just yet awhile, Paul. You ‘ll start for Höchst, put up at the inn there, and communicate with me at once, so that I may be able to reckon upon you when needed. It were as well, too, that you’d write a line to Froode, and say that on second thoughts that expedition to the Crimea might suit; explore the way, in fact, and let me know the tidings. As to terms,” said Grog,—for the other’s blank look expressed hesitation,—“if I say, ‘Go,’ you shall say ‘For what?’”
“I do love these frank and open dealings,” said Paul, warmly.
“Look here!” said Davis, as the other was about to leave the room; “old Joe Morris, of Mincing Lane, made his fortune by buying up all the forged bills of exchange he could lay hands on, well knowing that the fellows he could hang or transport any day would be trusty allies. Now, I have all my life committed every critical thing to somebody or other that no other living man would trust with a sixpence. They stood to me as I stood to them, and they knew why. Need I tell you that why?”
“No necessity in the world to do so,” said Paul, blandly.
“That ‘s enough,” said Davis. “Come to me when you’re ready, and I’ll have some cash for you.”
CHAPTER VIII. A FAMILY MEETING.
Along a road pleasantly shaded by linden-trees, Davis strolled leisurely that afternoon to meet his daughter. It was a mellow autumnal day,—calm, silent, and half sombre,—one of those days in which the tranquil aspect of nature has an influence of sad but soothing import, and even the least meditative minds are led to reflection. Down the deep valley, where the clear trout-stream eddied along, while the leafy chestnut-trees threw their shadows over the water; over the rich pasture-lands, where the spotted cattle roamed; high up the blue mountains, whose snowy summits mingled with the clouds,—Davis wandered with his eyes, and felt, he knew not why or how, a something of calming, subduing effect upon a brain racked with many a scheme, wearied with many a plot.
As he gazed down upon that fair scene where form and color and odor were blended into one beauteous whole, a struggling effort of fancy sent through his mind the question, “Is this, after all, the real prize of life? Is this peaceful existence worth all the triumphs that we strive and fight for?” And then came the thought, “Could this be lasting, what would a nature like mine become, thus left in rust and disuse? Could I live? or should I enjoy life without that eternal hand-to-hand conflict with my fellow-men, on which skill and ready wit are exercised?” He pondered long over this notion, nor could he satisfy himself with any conclusion.
He thought he could remember a time when he would thoroughly have liked all this,—when he could have taken leave of the busy world without one regret, and made the great race of life a mere “walk over;” but now that he had tasted the poisonous fascination of that combat, where man is pitted against man, and where even the lust of gain is less stimulating than a deadly sense of jealous rivalry, it was too late—too late! How strange, too, did it seem to him, as he looked back upon his wild and stormy life, with all its perils and all its vicissitudes, to think that an existence so calm, so uneventful, and so safe, could yet be had,—that a region existed where craft could find no exercise, where subtlety might be in disuse! It was to him like a haven that he was rejoiced to know,—a harbor whose refuge, some one day or other, he would search out; but there was yet one voyage to make,—one grand venture,—which, if successful, would be the crowning fortune of his life!
The sharp crack, crack of a postilion’s whip started him from his musings, and, looking up, he saw a post-carriage approaching at full speed. He waved his hat as the carriage came near for the men to draw up, and the next moment Lizzy Davis was in her father’s arms. He kissed her twice, and then, holding her back, gazed with proud delight at her beautiful features, never more striking than in that moment of joyful meeting.
“How well you are looking, Lizzy!” said he, with a thick utterance.
“And you too, dear papa,” said she, caressingly. “This quiet rural life seems to have agreed wonderfully with you. I declare you look five years younger for it, does he not, Mr. Beecher?”
“Ah, Beecher, how are you?” cried Davis, warmly shaking the other’s hand. “This is jolly, to be all together again,” said he, as, drawing his daughter’s arm within his own, and taking Beecher on the other side, he told the postilions to move forward, while they would find their way on foot.
“How did you ever hit upon this spot?” asked Beecher; “we could n’t find it on the map.”
“I came through here some four-and-twenty years ago, and I never forget a place nor a countenance. I thought at the time it might suit me, some one day or other, to remember, and you see I was right. You are grown fatter, Lizzy; at least I fancy so. But come, tell me about your life at Aix,—was it pleasant? was the place gay?”
“It was charming, papa!” cried she, in ecstasy; “had you only been with us, I could not have come away. Such delightful rides and drives, beautiful environs, and then the Cursaal of an evening, with all its odd people,—not that my guardian, here, fancied so much my laughing at them.”
“Well, you did n’t place much restraint upon yourself, I must say.”
“I was reserved even to prudery; I was the caricature of Anglo-Saxon propriety,” said she, with affected austerity.
“And what did they think of you, eh?” asked Davis trying to subdue the pride that would, in spite of him, twinkle in his eye.
“I was the belle of the season. I assure you it is perfectly true!”
“Come, come, Lizzy—”
“Well, ask Mr. Beecher. Be honest now, and confess frankly, were you not sulky at driving out with me the way the people stared? Didn’t you complain that you never expected to come home from the play without a duel or something of the kind on your hands? Did you not induce me to ruin my toilette just to escape what you so delicately called ‘our notoriety’? Oh, wretched man! what triumphs did I not relinquish out of compliance to your taste for obscurity!”
“By Jove! we divided public attention with Ferouk Khan and his wives. I don’t see that my taste for obscurity obtained any brilliant success.”
“I never heard of such black ingratitude!” cried she, in mock indignation. “I assure you, pa, I was a martyr to his English notions, which, to me, seem to have had their origin in Constantinople.”
“Poor Beecher!” said Davis, laughingly.
“Poor Beecher, no, but happy Beecher, envied by thousands. Not indeed,” added she, with a smile, “that his appearance at this moment suggests any triumphant satisfaction. Oh, papa, you should have seen him when the Russian Prince Ezerboffsky asked me to dance, or when the Archduke Albrecht offered me his horses; or, better still, the evening the Margrave lighted up his conservatory just to let me see it.”
“Your guardianship had its anxieties, I perceive,” said Davis, dryly.
“I think it had,” said Beecher, sighing. “There were times I ‘d have given five thousand, if I had it, that she had been safe under your own charge.”
“My dear fellow, I’d have given fifty,” said Davis, “if I did n’t know she was just in as good hands as my own.” There was a racy heartiness in this speech that thrilled through Beecher’s heart, and he could scarcely credit his ears that it was Grog spoke it. “Ay, Beecher,” added he, as he drew the other’s arm closer to his side, “there was just one man—one single man in Europe—I ‘d have trusted with the charge.”
“Really, gentlemen,” said Lizzy, with a malicious sparkle of the eye, “I am lost in my conjectures whether I am to regard myself as a sort of human Koh-i-noor—a priceless treasure—or something so very difficult to guard, so perilous to protect, as can scarcely be accounted a flattery. Say, I entreat of you, to which category do I belong?”
“A little to each, I should say,—eh, Beecher?” cried Grog, laughingly.
“Oh, don’t appeal to him, papa. He only wants to vaunt his heroism the higher, because the fortress he guarded was so easy of assault!”
Beecher was ill-fitted to engage in such an encounter, and stammered out some commonplace apology for his own seeming want of gallantry.
“She’s too much for us, Beecher,—too much for us. It’s a pace we can’t keep up,” muttered Grog in the other’s ear. And Beecher nodded a ready assent to the speech.
“Well,” said Lizzy, gayly, “now that your anxieties are well over, I do entreat of you to unbend a little, and let us see the lively, light-hearted Mr. Annesley Beecher, of whose pleasant ways I have heard so much.”
“I used to be light-hearted enough once, eh, Davis?” said Beecher, with a sigh. “When you saw me first at the Derby—of, let me see, I don’t remember the year, but it was when Danby’s mare Petrilla won,—with eighteen to one ‘given and taken’ against her, the day of the race,—Brown Davy, the favorite, coming in a bad third,—he died the same night.”
“Was he ‘nobbled’?” asked Lizzy, dryly.
“What do you mean?” cried Grog, gruffly. “Where did you learn that word?”
“Oh, I’m quite strong in your choice vocabulary,” said she, laughingly; “and you are not to fancy that in the dissipations of Aix I have forgotten the cares of my education. My guardian there set me a task every morning,—a page of Burke’s Peerage and a column of the ‘Racing Calendar;’ and for the ninth Baron of Fitzfoodle, or the fifteenth winner of the Diddlesworth, you may call on me at a moment.”
The angry shadow on Davis’s brow gradually faded away, and he laughed a real, honest, and good-humored laugh.
“What do you say to the Count, Lizzy?” asked he next. “There was a fine gentleman, wasn’t he?”
“There was the ease and the self-possession of good breeding without the manners. He was amusing from his own self-content, and a sort of latent impression that he was taking you in, and when one got tired of that, he became downright stupid.”
“True as a book, every word of it!” cried Beecher, in hearty gratitude, for he detested the man, and was envious of his small accomplishments.
“His little caressing ways, too, ceased to be flatteries, when you saw that, like the cheap bonbons scattered at a carnival, they were made for the million.”
“Hit him again, he has n’t got no friends!” said Beecher, with an assumed slang in his tone.
“But worst of all was that mockery of good nature,—a false air of kindliness about him. It was a spurious coinage, so cleverly devised that you looked at every good guinea afterwards with distrust.”
“How she knows him,—how she reads him!” cried Davis, in delight.
“He was very large print, papa,” said she, smiling.
“Confound me!” cried Beecher, “if I didn’t think you liked him, you used to receive him so graciously; and I’ll wager he thinks himself a prime favorite with you.”
“So he may, if it give him any pleasure,” said she, with a careless laugh.
Davis marked the expression of Beecher’s face as she said these words; he saw how that distrustful nature was alarmed, and he hastened to repair the mischief.
“I am sure you never affected to feel any regard for him, Lizzy?” said Davis.
“Regard for him!” said she, haughtily; “I should think not! Such people as he are like the hired horses that every one uses, and only asks that they should serve for the day they have taken them.”
“There, Beecher,” said Davis, with a laugh. “I sincerely hope she’s not going to discuss your character or mine.”
“By Jove! I hope not.” And in the tone in which Beecher uttered this there was an earnestness that made the other laugh heartily.
“Well, here we are. This is your home for the present,” said Davis, as he welcomed them to the little inn, whose household were all marshalled to receive them with fitting deference.
The arrangements within doors were even better than the picturesque exterior promised; and when Lizzy came down to dinner, she was in raptures about her room, its neatness even to elegance, and the glorious views that opened before the windows.
“I’m splendidly lodged too,” said Beecher; “and they have given me a dressing-room, with a little winding-stair to the river, and a bath in the natural rock. It is downright luxury, all this.”
Davis smiled contentedly as he listened. For days past had he been busied with these preparations, determined to make the spot appear in all its most favorable colors. Let us do him justice to own that his cares met a full success. Flowers abounded in all the rooms; and the perfumed air, made to seem tremulous by the sounds of falling water, was inexpressibly calming after the journey. The dinner, too, would have done honor to a more pretentious “hostel;” and the Steinberger, a cabinet wine, that the host would not part with except for “love as well as money,” was perfection. Better than all these,—better than the fresh trout with its gold and azure speckles,—better than the delicate Rehbraten with its luscious sauce,—better than the red partridges in their bed of truffles, and a dessert whose grapes rivalled those of Fontainebleau,—better, I say, than all, was the happy temper of the hour! Never were three people more disposed for enjoyment. To Lizzy, it was the oft dreamed-of home, the quiet repose of a spot surrounded with all the charm of scenery, coming, too, just as the dissipations of gayety had begun to weary and pall upon her. To Beeeher, it was the first moment of all his life in which he tasted peace. Here were neither duns nor bailiffs. It was a Paradise where no writ had ever wandered, nor the word “outlawry” had ever been uttered. As for Davis, if he had not actually won his game, he held in his hand the trump card that he knew must gain it. What signified, now, a day or even a week more or less; the labor of his long ambition was all but completed, and he saw the goal reached that he had striven for years to attain.
Nor were they less pleased with each other. Never had Lizzy seemed to Beecher’s eyes more fascinating than now. In all the blaze of full dress she never looked more beautiful than in that simple muslin, with the sky-blue ribbon in her glossy hair, and the boquet of moss roses coquettishly placed above her ear, for—I mention it out of accuracy—she wore her hair drawn back, as was the mode about a century ago, and was somewhat ingenious in her imitation of that mock-shepherdess coiffure so popular with fine ladies of that time. She would have ventured on a “patch” if it were not out of fear for her father; not, indeed, that the delicate fairness of her skin, or the dazzling brilliancy of her eyes, needed the slightest aid from art. Was it with some eye to keeping a toilette that she wore a profusion of rings, many of great price and beauty? I know not her secret; if I did, I should assuredly tell it, for I suspect none of her coquetries were without their significance. To complete Beecher’s satisfaction, Davis was in a mood of good humor, such as he had never seen before.
Not a word of contradiction, not one syllable of disparagement fell from his lips, that Beecher usually watched with an utmost childish terror, dreading reproof at every moment, and not being over certain when his opinions would pass without a censure. Instead of this, Grog was conciliating even to gentleness, constantly referred to Beecher what he thought of this or that, and even deferred to his better judgment on points whereon he might have been supposed to be more conversant. Much valued reader, has it ever been your fortune in life to have had your opinions on law blandly approved of by an ex-Chancellor, your notions of medicine courteously confirmed by a great physician, or your naval tactics endorsed by an admiral of the fleet? If so, you can fully appreciate the ecstasy of Annesley Beecher as he found all his experiences of the sporting world corroborated by the “Court above.” This was the gold medal he had set his heart on for years,—this the great prize of all his life; and now he had won it, and he was really a “sharp fellow.” There is an intense delight in the thought of having realized a dream of ambition, of which, while our own hearts gave us the assurance of success, the world at large only scoffed at our attempting. To be able to say, “Yes, here I am, despite all your forebodings and all your predictions,—I knew it was ‘in me’!” is a very proud thing, and such a moment of vaingloriousness is pardonable enough.
How enjoyable at such a moment of triumph was it to hear Lizzy sing and play, making that miserable old piano discourse in a guise it had never dreamed of! She was in one of those moods wherein she blended the wildest flights of fancy with dashes of quaint humor, now breathing forth a melody of Spohr’s in accents of thrilling pathos, now hitting off in improvised doggerel a description of Aix and its company, with mimicries of their voice and manner irresistibly droll. In these imitations the Count, and even Beecher himself, figured, till Grog, fairly worn out with laughter, had to entreat her to desist.
As for Beecher, he was a good-tempered fellow, and the little raillery at himself took nothing from the pleasure of the description, and he laughed in ready acknowledgment of many a little trait of his own manner that he never suspected could have been detected by another.
“Ain’t she wonderful,—ain’t she wonderful?” exclaimed Grog, as she strolled out into the garden, and left them alone together.
“What I can’t make out is, she has no blank days,” said Beecher. “She was just as you saw her there, the whole time we were at Aix; and while she’s rattling away at the piano, and going on with all manner of fun, just ask her a serious question,—I don’t care about what,——and she’ll answer you as if she had been thinking of nothing else for the whole day before.”
“Had she been born in your rank of life, Beecher, where would she be be now,—tell me that?” said Davis; and there was an almost fierce energy in the words as he spoke them.
“I can tell you one thing,” cried Beecher, in a transport of delight,—“there’s no rank too high for her this minute.”
“Well said, boy,—well said,” exclaimed Davis, warmly; “and here’s to her health.”
“That generous toast and cheer must have been in honor of myself,” said Lizzy, peeping in at the window, “and in acknowledgment I beg to invite you both to tea.”
CHAPTER IX. A SAUNTER BY MOONLIGHT.
Lizzy Davis had retired to her room somewhat weary after the day’s journey, not altogether unexcited by her meeting with her father. How was it that there was a gentleness, almost a tenderness, in his manner she had never known before? The short, stern address, the abrupt question, the stare piercing and defiant of one who seemed ever to distrust what he heard, were all replaced by a tone of quiet and easy confidence, and a look that bespoke perfect trustfulness.
“Have I only seen him hitherto in moments of trial and excitement; are these the real traits of his nature; is it the hard conflict of life calls forth the sterner features of his character; and might he, in happier circumstances, be ever kind and confiding, as I see him now?” What a thrill of ecstasy did the thought impart! What a realization of the home she had often dreamed of! “He mistakes me, too,” said she, aloud, “if he fancies that my heart is set upon some high ambition. A life of quiet obscurity, in some spot peaceful and unknown as this, would suffice for all my wishes. I want no triumphs,—I covet no rivalries.” A glance at herself in the glass at this moment sent the deep color to her cheek, and she blushed deeply. Was it that those bright, flashing eyes, that fair and haughty brow, and those lips tremulous with proud significance gave a denial to these words? Indeed, it seemed as much, for she quickly added, “Not that I would fly the field, or ingloriously escape the struggle—Who’s there?” cried she, quickly, as a low tap came to the door.
“It is I, Lizzy. I heard you still moving about, and I thought I ‘d propose half an hour’s stroll in the moonlight before bed. What do you say to it?”
“I should like it of all things, papa,” cried she, opening the door at once.
“Throw a shawl across your shoulders, child,” said he; “the air is not always free from moisture. We ‘ll go along by the river-side.”
A bright moon in a sky without a cloud lit up the landscape, and by the strongly marked contrast of light and shadow imparted a most striking effect to a scene wild, broken, and irregular. Fantastically shaped rocks broke the current of the stream; at every moment gnarled and twisted roots straggled along the shelving banks, and in the uncertain light assumed goblin shapes and forms, the plashing stream, as it rushed by, appearing to give motion to the objects around. Nor was the semblance all unreal, for here and there a pliant branch rose and fell on the surging water like the arm of some drowning swimmer.
The father and daughter walked along for some time in utter silence, and the thoughts of each filled with the scene before them. Lizzy fancied it was a conflict of river gods,—some great Titanic war, where angry giants were the combatants; or again, as fairer forms succeeded, they seemed a group of nymphs bathing in the soft moonlight. As for Grog, it reminded him of a row at Ascot, where the swell-mob smashed the police; and so strikingly did it call up the memory of the event that he laughed aloud and heartily.
“Do tell me what you are laughing at, papa,” said she, entreatingly.
“It was something that I saw long ago,—something I was reminded of by those trees yonder, bobbing up and down with the current.”
“But what was it?” asked she, more eagerly; for even yet the memory kept him laughing.
“Nothing that could interest you, girl,” said he, bluntly; and then, as if ashamed of the rudeness of his speech, he added, “Though I have seen a good deal of life, Lizzy, there’s but little of it I could recall for either your benefit or instruction.”
Lizzy was silent; she wished him to speak on, but did not choose to question him. Strangely enough, too, though be shunned the theme, he had been glad if she had led him on to talk of it.
After a long pause he sighed heavily, and said: “I suppose every one, if truth were told, would have rather a sad tale to tell of the world when he comes to my age. It don’t improve upon acquaintance, I promise you. Not that I want to discourage you about it, my girl. You ‘ll come to my way of thinking one of these days, and it will be quite soon enough.”
“And have you really found men so false and worthless as you say?”
“I’ll tell you in one word the whole story, Lizzy. The fellows that are born to a good station and good property are all fair and honest, if they like it; the rest of the world must be rogues, whether they like it or not.”
“This is a very disenchanting picture you put before me.” “Here ‘s how it is, girl,” said he, warming with his subject. “Every man in the world is a gambler; let him rail against dice, racing, cards, or billiards, he has a game of his own in his heart, and he’s playing for a seat in the Cabinet, a place in the colonies, a bishopric, or the command of a regiment. The difference is, merely, that your regular play-man admits chance into his calculations, the other fellows don’t; they pit pure skill against the table, and trust to their knowledge of the game.”
She sighed deeply, but did not speak.
“And the women are the same,” resumed he: “some scheming to get their husbands high office, some intriguing for honors or Court favor; all of them ready to do a sharp thing,—to make a hit on the Stock Exchange.”
“And are there none above these mean and petty subterfuges?” cried she, indignantly.
“Yes; the few I have told you,—they who come into the world to claim the stakes. They can afford to be high-minded, and generous, and noble-hearted, as much as they please. They are booked ‘all right,’ and need never trouble their heads about the race; and that is the real reason, girl, why these men have an ascendancy over all others. They are not driven to scramble for a place; they have no struggles to encounter; the crowd makes way for them as they want to pass; and if they have anything good, ay, or even good-looking, about them, what credit don’t they get for it!”
“But surely there must be many a lowly walk where a man with contentment can maintain himself honorably and even proudly?”
“I don’t know of them, if there be,” said Davis, sulkily. “Lawyers, parsons, merchants, are all, I fancy, pretty much alike,—all on ‘the dodge.’”
“And Beecher,—poor Beecher?” broke in Lizzy. And there was a blended pity and tenderness in the tone that made it very difficult to say what her question really implied.
“Why do you call him poor Beecher?” asked he, quickly. “He ain’t so poor in one sense of the word.”
“It was in no allusion to his fortune I spoke. I was thinking of him solely with reference to his character.”
“And he is poor Beecher, is he, then?” asked Davis, half sternly.
If she did not reply, it was rather in the fear of offending her father, whose manner, so suddenly changing, apprised her of an interest in the subject she had never suspected.
“Look here, Lizzy,” said he, drawing her arm more closely to his side, while he bespoke her attention; “men born in Beecher’s class don’t need to be clever; they have no necessity for the wiles and schemes and subtleties that—that fellows like myself, in short, must practise. What they want is good address, pleasing manners,—all the better if they be good-looking. It don’t require genius to write a check on one’s banker; there is no great talent needed to say ‘Yes,’ or ‘No,’ in the House of Lords. The world—I mean their own world—likes them all the more if they have n’t got great abilities. Now Beecher is just the fellow to suit them.”
“He is not a peer, surely?” asked she, hastily.
“No, he ain’t yet, but he may be one any day. He is as sure of the peerage as—I am not! and then, poor Beecher—as you called him awhile ago—becomes the Lord Viscount Lackington, with twelve or fourteen thousand a year! I tell you, girl, that of all the trades men follow, the very best, to enjoy life, is to be an English lord with a good fortune.”
“And is it true, as I have read,” asked Lizzy, “that this high station, so fenced around by privileges, is a prize open to all who have talent or ability to deserve it,—that men of humble origin, if they be gifted with high qualities, and devote them ardently to their country’s service, are adopted, from time to time, into that noble brotherhood?”
“All rubbish; don’t believe a word of it. It’s a flam and a humbug,—a fiction like the old story about an Englishman’s house being his castle, or that balderdash, ‘No man need criminate himself.’ They ‘re always inventing ‘wise saws’ like these in England, and they get abroad, and are believed, at last, just by dint of repeating. Here ‘s the true state of the case,” said he, coming suddenly to a halt, and speaking with greater emphasis. “Here I stand, Christopher Davis, with as much wit under the crown of my hat as any noble lord on the woolsack, and I might just as well try to turn myself into a horse and be first favorite for the Oaks, as attempt to become a peer of Great Britain. It ain’t to be done, girl,—it ain’t to be done!”
“But, surely, I have heard of men suddenly raised to rank and title for the services—”
“So you do. They want a clever lawyer, now and then, to help them on with a peerage case; or, if the country grows forgetful of them, they attract some notice by asking a lucky general to join them; and even then they do it the way a set of old ladies would offer a seat in the coach to a stout-looking fellow on a road beset with robbers,—they hope he ‘ll fight for ‘em; but, after all, it takes about three generations before one of these new hands gets regularly recognized by the rest.”
“What haughty pride!” exclaimed she; but nothing in her tone implied reprobation.
“Ain’t it haughty pride?” cried he; “but if you only knew how it is nurtured in them, how they are worshipped! They walk down St. James’s Street, and the policeman elbows me out of the way to make room for them; they stroll into Tattersall’s, and the very horses cock their tails and step higher as they trot past; they go into church, and the parson clears his throat and speaks up in a fine round voice for them. It’s only because the blessed sun is not an English institution, or he ‘d keep all his warmth and light for the peerage!”
“And have they, who render all this homage, no shame for their self-abasement?”
“Shame! why, the very approach to them is an honor. When a lord in the ring at Newmarket nods his head to me and says, ‘How d’ ye do, Davis?’ my pals—my acquaintances, I mean—are twice as respectful to me for the rest of the day. Not that I care for that,” added he, sternly; “I know them a deuced sight better than they fancy!—far better than they know me!”
Lizzy fell into a revery; her thoughts went back to a conversation she had once held with Beecher about the habits of the great world, and all the difficulties to its approach.
“I wish I could dare to put a question to you, papa,” said she, at last.
“Do so, girl. I ‘ll do my best to answer it”
“And not be angry at my presumption,—not be offended with me?”
“Not a bit. Be frank with me, and you ‘ll find me just as candid.”
“What I would ask, then, is this,—and mind, papa, it is in no mere curiosity, no idle indulgence of a passing whim I would ask it, but for sake of self-guidance and direction,—who are we?—what are we?”
The blood rose to Davis’s face and temples till he became crimson; his nostrils dilated, and his eyes flashed with a wild lustre. Had the bitterest insult of an enemy been hurled at his face before the open world, his countenance could not have betrayed an expression of more intense passion.
“By heaven!” said he, with a long-drawn breath, “I did n’t think there was one in Europe would have asked me that much to my face. There’s no denying it, girl, you have my own pluck in you.”
“If I ever thought it would have moved you so—”
“Only to make me love you the more, girl,—to make me know you for my own child in heart and soul,” cried he, pressing her warmly to him.
“But I would not have cost you this emotion, dearest pa—”
“It’s over now; I am as cool as yourself. There ‘s my hand,—there ‘s not much show of nervousness there. ‘Who are we?’” exclaimed he, fiercely, echoing her question. “I ‘d like to know how many of that eight-and-twenty millions they say we are in England could answer such a question? There’s a short thick book or two tells about the peerage and baronetage, and says who are they; but as for the rest of us—” A wave of the hand finished the sentence. “My own answer would be that of many another: I ‘m the son of a man who bore the same name, and who, if alive, would tell the same story. As to what we are, that’s another question,” added he, shrewdly; “though, to be sure, English life and habits have established a very easy way of treating the matter. Everybody with no visible means of support, and who does nothing for his own subsistence, is either a gentleman or a vagrant. If he be positively and utterly unable to do anything for himself, he ‘s a gentleman; if he can do a stroke of work in some line or other, he ‘s only a vagrant.”
“And you, papa?” asked she, with an accent as calm and unconcerned as might be.
“I?—I am a little of both, perhaps,” said he, after a pause.
A silence ensued, long enough to be painful to each; Lizzy did not dare to repeat her question, although it still remained unanswered, and Davis knew well that he had not met it frankly, as he promised. What a severe struggle was that his mind now endured! The hoarded secret of his whole life,—the great mystery to which he had sacrificed all the happiness of a home, for which he had consented to estrange himself from his child, training her up amidst associations and habits every one of which increased the distance between them,—there it was now on his lip; a word might reveal it, and by its utterance might be blasted all the fondest hopes his heart had ever cherished. To make Lizzy a lady, to surround her not only with all the wants and requirements of station, but to imbue her mind with sentiments and modes of thought such as befit that condition, had been the devoted labor of his life. For this he had toiled and struggled, contrived, plotted, and schemed for years long. What terrible scenes had he not encountered, with what desperate characters not associated! In the fearful commerce of the play-table there was not a dark passion of the human heart he had not explored,—to know men in their worst aspects, in their insolence of triumph, the meanness of their defeat, in their moments of avarice, in their waste; to read their natures so that every start or sigh, a motion of the finger, a quivering of the lip should have its significance; to perceive, as by an instinct, wherein the craft or subtlety of each lay, and by the same rapid intuition to know his weak point also! Men have won high collegiate honors with less intensity of study than he gave to this dark pursuit; men have come out of battle with less peril to life than he faced every day of his existence, and all for one object,—all that his daughter might breathe an atmosphere from which he must live excluded, and know a world whose threshold he should never pass. Such was the terrible conflict that now raged within him as he reviewed the past, and saw to what a narrow issue he had reduced his one chance of happiness. “There she stands now,” thought he, “all that my fondest hopes had ever fashioned her; and who is to say what one word—one single word uttered by my lips—may not make of that noble nature, pure and spotless as it is? How will she bear to hear that her station is a deception, her whole life a lie,—that she is the daughter of Grog Davis, the leg?” Heaven knows with what dexterous artifices he had often met this difficulty as it used to present itself to his mind, how he had seen in what way he could extricate himself, how reconcile his own shortcomings with her high-soaring tastes and habits! Whatever such devices he had ever conceived, none came to his aid now; not one offered him the slightest assistance.
Then came another thought,—“How long is this deception to be carried on? Am I to wait?” said he, “and if so, for what? Ay, there’s the question, for what? Is it that some other may break the news to her, and tell her whose daughter she is?” In that world he knew best he could well imagine with what especial malice such a tale would be revealed. Not that slander need call imagination to its aid. Alas! his life had incidents enough for malignity to gloat over!
His stout arm shook, and his strong frame trembled with a sort of convulsive shudder as these thoughts flashed across his mind.
“Are you cold, dearest pa? Are you ill?” asked she, eagerly.
“No. Why do you ask?” said he, sternly.
“You trembled all over; I was afraid you were not well.”
“I ‘m never ill,” said he, in the same tone. “There ‘s a bullet in me somewhere about the hip—they can’t make out exactly where—gives me a twinge of pain now and then. Except that, I never knew what ailment means.”
“In what battle?”
“It was n’t a battle,” broke he in; “it was a duel. It’s an old story now, and not worth remembering. There, you need not shudder, girl; the fellow who shot me is alive, though, I must say, he has n’t a very graceful way of walking. Do you ever read the newspapers,—did they allow you ever to read them at school?”
“No; but occasionally I used to catchy a glance at them in the drawing-room. It was a kind of reading fascinated me intensely, it was so real. But why do you ask me?”
“I don’t know why I asked the question,” muttered he, half moodily, and hung his head down. “Yes, I do,” cried he, after a pause. “I wanted to know if you ever saw my name—our name—in the public prints.”
“Once,—only once, and very long ago, I did, and I asked the governess if the name were common in England, and she said, ‘Yes.’ I remember the paragraph that attracted me to this very hour. It was the case of a young man—I forget the name—who shot himself in despair, after some losses at play, and the narrative was headed, ‘More of Grog Davis!’”
Davis started back, and, in a voice thick and hoarse with passion, cried out,—
“And then? What next?” The words were uttered in a voice so fearfully wild that Lizzy stood in a sort of stupefied terror, and unable to reply. “Don’t you hear me, girl?” cried he. “I asked you what came next.”
“There was an account of an inquest,—some investigation as to how the poor fellow had met his death. I remember little about that. I was only curious to learn who this Grog Davis might be—”
“And they could n’t tell you, it seems!”
“No; they had never heard of him.”
“Then I ‘ll tell you, girl. Here he stands before you.”
“You! papa—you—dearest pa! Oh, no, no!” cried she, imploringly, as she threw herself on his neck and sobbed bitterly,—“oh no! I ‘ll not believe it.”
“And why not believe it? What was there in that same story that should prejudice me? There, there, girl, if you give way thus, it will offend me,—ay, Lizzy, offend me.”
She raised her head from his shoulder, dried her eyes, and stood calm and unmoved before him. Her pale face, paler in the bright moonlight, now showed not a trace of passion or emotion.
Davis would have given his right hand at that moment that she had been led into some burst of excitement, some outbreak of passionate feeling, which, in rebuking, might have carried him away from all thoughts about himself; but she was cold and still and silent, like one who has heard some terrible tidings, but yet has summoned up courage for the trial. There was that in her calm, impassive stare that cut him to the very heart; nor could any words have reproached him so bitterly as that steadfast look.
“If you don’t know who we are, you know what we are, girl. Is that not so?” cried he, in a thick and passionate tone. “I meant to have told it you fifty times. There was n’t a week in the last two years that I did n’t, at least, begin a letter to you about it I did more: I cut all the things out of the newspapers and made a collection of them, and intended, some day or other, you should read them. Indeed, it was only because you seemed so happy there that, I spared you. I felt the day must come, though. Know it you must, sooner or later, and better from me than another I mean better for the other; for, by heaven! I ‘d have shot him who told you. Why don’t you speak to me, girl? What’s passing in your mind?”
“I scarcely know,” said she, in a hollow voice. “I don’t quite feel sure I am awake!”
“Yes!” cried he, with a terrible oath, “you are awake; it was the past was the dream! When you were the Princess, and every post brought you some fresh means of extravagance,—that was the dream! The world went well with myself in those days. Luck stood to me in whatever I touched. In all I ventured I was sure to come right, as if I had made my bargain with Fortune. But the jade threw me over at last, that she did. From the hour I went in against Hope’s stables at Rickworth,—that’s two years and eleven days to-day,—I never won a bet! The greenest youngsters from Oxford beat me at my own weapons. I went on selling,—now a farm, now a house, now a brood mare. I sent the money all to you, girl, every guinea of it. What I did myself I did on tick till the September settling at Cottiswoode, and then it was all up. I was ruined!”
“Ruined!” echoed she, while she grasped his arm and drew him closer to her side; “you surely had made friends—”
“Friends are capital things when the world goes well with you, but friends are fond of a good cook and iced champagne, and they don’t fancy broken boots and a bad hat. Besides, what credit is to the merchant, luck is to one of us. Let the word get abroad luck is against you; let them begin to say, ‘There ‘s that poor devil Davis in for it again; he’s so unlucky!’—once they say that, you are shunned like a fellow with the plague; none will associate with you, none give you a helping hand or a word of counsel. Why, the grooms wouldn’t gallop if I was on the ground, for fear my bad luck might strain a sinew and slip a ligament! And they were right too! Smile if you like, girl,—I am not a very superstitious fellow,—but nobody shall persuade me there ain’t such a thing as luck. Be that as it may, mine turned,—I was ruined!”
“And were there none to come to your aid? You must surely have lent a helping hand to many—”
“Look here, girl,” said he; “now that we are on this subject, you may as well understand it aright. If a gentleman born—a fellow like Beecher, there—comes to grief, there’s always plenty of others ready to serve him; some for the sake of his family, some for his name, some because there’s always the chance that he may pay one day or other. Snobs, too, would help him, because he ‘s the Honorable Annesley Beecher; but it’s vastly different when it’s Grog Davis is in case. Every one rejoices when a leg breaks down.”
“A leg is the slang for—for—”
“For a betting man,” interposed Davis. “When a fellow takes up the turf as a profession, they call him ‘a leg,’—not that they ‘d exactly say it to his face!” added he, with a smile of intense sarcasm.
“Go on,” said she, faintly, after a slight pause.
“Go on with what?” cried he, rudely. “I’ve told you everything. You wanted to know what I was, and how I made my living. Well, you know it all now. To be sure, the newspapers, if you read them, could give you more precise details; but there’s one thing, girl, they could n’t blink,—there’s not one of them could say that what my head planned overnight my hand was not ready to defend in the morning! I can’t always throw a main, but I ‘ll hit my man,—and at five-and-thirty paces, if he don’t like to stand closer.”
“And what led you to this life, papa? Was it choice?”
“I have told you enough already; too much, mayhap,” said he, doggedly. “Question me no more!”
Had Davis but seen the face of her at his side, what a terrible shock it would have given him, hard and stern as he was! She was pale as marble,—even the lips were colorless; while along her cheeks a heavy tear stole slowly along. It was the only one she shed, but it cost an agony.
“And this is the awaking from that glorious dream I have long been lost in?—this the explanation of that life of costly extravagance, where every wish was answered, every taste pampered. This is the reverse of that medal which represented me as noble by birth and high in station!” If these were the first bitter thoughts that crossed her mind, her next were to ask herself why it was that the tidings had not humiliated her more deeply. “How is it that while I see and hear all this,” cried she, “I listen in a spirit of defiance, not defeat? Is it that in my heart I dare to arraign the decrees the world has adopted for its guidance? Do I presume to believe that I can play the rebel successfully against the haughtiest aristocracy of Europe?—There is yet one question, papa,” said she, slowly and deliberately, “that I would wish to ask you. It is the last I will ever put, leaving to your own discretion to answer it or not. Why was it—I mean, with what object did you place me where by habit and education I should contract ideas of life so widely different from those I was born to?”
“Can’t you guess?” said he, rudely.
“Mayhap I do guess the reason,” said she, in a low but unbroken voice. “I remember your saying one night to Mr. Beecher, ‘When a colt has a turn of speed, he ‘s always worth the training.’”
Davis grew crimson; his very ears tingled as the blood mounted to his head. Was it shame, was it anger, was it a strange pride to see the traits of his own heart thus reflected on his child, or was it a blending of all three together? At all events, he never uttered a word, but walked slowly along at her side.
A low faint sigh from Lizzy suddenly aroused him, and he said, “Are you ill,—are you tired, girl?”
“I ‘d like to go back to the house,” said she, calmly but weakly. He turned without a word, and they walked on towards the inn.
“When I proposed this walk, Lizzy, I never meant it to have been so sad a one.”
“Nor yours the fault if it is so,” said she, drearily.
“I could, it is true, have kept you longer in the dark. I might have maintained this deception a week or two longer.”
“Oh, that were useless; the mistake was in not—No matter—it was never a question wherein I could have a voice. Has n’t the night grown colder?”
“No; it’s just what it was when we came out,” said he, gruffly. “Now that you know all this affair,” resumed he, after a lapse of some minutes, “there ‘s another matter I ‘d like to talk over; it touches yourself, too, and we may as well have it now as later. What about Beecher; he has been paying you attentions, hasn’t he?”
“None beyond what I may reasonably expect from one in his position towards me.”
“Yes, but he has, though. I sent over Lienstahl to report to me, and he says that Beecher’s manner implied attachment, and yours showed no repugnance to him. Is this true?”
“It may be, for aught I know,” said she, indifferently. “Mr. Beecher probably knows what he meant. I certainly can answer for myself, and will say that whatever my manner might imply, my heart—if that be the name for it—gave no concurrence to what the Count attributed to me.”
“Do you dislike him?”
“Dislike? No; certainly not; he is too gentle, too obliging, too conciliating in manner, too well bred to create dislike. He is not very brilliant—”
“He ‘ll be a peer,” broke in Davis.
“I suspect that all his views of life are deeply tinged with prejudice?”
“He’ll be a peer,” continued Davis.
“He has been utterly neglected in education.”
“He don’t want it.”
“I mean that to suit the station he fills—”
“He has got the station; he’s sure of it; he can’t be stripped of it. In one word, girl, he has, by right and birth, rank and fortune, such as ten generations of men like myself, laboring hard every hour of their lives, could never win. He ‘ll be a peer of England, and I know of no title means so much.”
“But of all his failings,” said Lizzy, who seemed to take little heed of her father’s interruptions, while steadily following out her own thoughts,—“of all his failings, he has none greater or more pernicious than the belief that it is a mark of intelligence to outwit one’s neighbor; that cunning is a high quality, and craft means genius.”
“These might be poor qualities to gain a living with,” said Davis, “but I tell you, once for all, he does n’t need to be brilliant, or witty, or any other nonsense of that kind. He ‘ll have the right to go where all the cleverness of the world couldn’t place him, to live in a set where, if he could Write plays like Shakspeare, build bridges like Brunel, or train a horse like John Scott, it would n’t avail him a brass farthing; and if you only knew, child, what these people think of each other, and what the world thinks of them, you ‘d see it’s the best stake ever was run for.”
Lizzy never replied a word; every syllable of her father’s speech was, as it were, “filtering down” into her mind, and she brooded long over the thoughts thus suggested. Thus, walking along in silence, side by side, they drew nigh the house. They had now gained the little garden before the door, and were standing in the broad full moonlight, face to face, Davis saw that her eyes were red and her cheeks marked by tears; but an impassive calm, and a demeanor subdued even to coldness, seemed to have succeeded to this emotion. “Oh, my poor girl,” broke he out, in a voice of deepest feeling, “if I did n’t know the world so well,—if I did n’t know how little one gains by indulging affection,—if I did n’t know, besides, how you yourself will think of all this some ten or twelve years hence, I could n’t have the heart for it.”
“And—must—it—be?” faltered she out, in a broken accent.
Davis threw his arm around her, and, pressing her to him, sobbed bitterly. “There, there,” cried he, “go in,—go in, child; go to bed, and get some sleep.” And with this he turned quickly away and left her.
CHAPTER X. A RIDE TO NEUWIED
Long before Lizzy had composed herself to sleep—for her heart was torn by a first sorrow, and she lay restless and fevered—her father, mounted on a post-horse, was riding away towards the Rhine. He had desired that the reply to his telegraphic message should be addressed to him at the post-office of Neuwied, and thither he was now bent. It is a strange thing, that when the affections of men of this stamp are deeply moved,—when their sensibilities, long dulled and hardened by the rubs of life, are once evoked,—the feelings excited are less those of gentleness and tenderness than an almost savage desire for some personal conflict. Urging his horse to full speed, Davis spared neither whip nor spur. Alone upon that solitary road, he asked himself aloud if he were less alone in the broad, bleak world? “Is not the ‘field’ against me wherever I go? I never heard of the fellow that had not some ‘moorings’—some anchorage—except myself.” But a brief hour ago and there was one who loved him with all her heart,—who saw, or fancied she saw, a rich mine of generous qualities in his rough manners and blunt address,—who pictured to her mind what such a nature might have been under happier circumstances and with better culture. “And now,” cried he, aloud,—“now she knows me for what I am, how will she bear this? Will she sink under it, will it crush her, or has she enough of my own blood in her veins to meet it courageously? Oh! if she only knew the world as I do,—what a mean coward it is, how it bullies the weak and truckles to the strong, how it frowns down the timid and simpers to the sturdy! Every man—ay, and every woman—can sell his life dearly; and strange it is, one only learns the value of this secret too late. Let a fellow start with it, and see what it does for him. I went at them single-handed; I went down all alone into the ring, and have they beaten me? I had no honorable or right honorable friends to pick me out of a scrape. It would be hard to find three men, with good hats on them, would bail me to the amount of ten pounds; and here I am to-day just as ready to face them all as ever.”
What canting nonsense do we occasionally read in certain quarters to disparage mere personal courage,—“mere personal courage”! We are reminded that the ignoble quality is held in common with the bull-dog, and that in this essential he is our master; we are reminded that it is a low and vulgar attribute that neither elevates nor enlightens, that the meanest creatures are often gifted with it, and the noblest natures void of it. To all this we give a loud and firm denial; and we affirm as steadfastly, that without it there is neither truth nor manliness. The self-reliance that makes a man maintain his word, be faithful to his friendships, and honorable in his dealings, has no root in a heart that shakes with craven fear. The life of a coward is the voyage of a ship with a leak,—eternal contrivance, never-ceasing emergency. All thoughts dashed with a perpetual fear of death, what room is there for one generous emotion, one great or high-hearted ambition?
What a quality must that be, I would ask, that gives even to such a nature as this man’s a sort of rugged dignity? Yes, with all his failings and short-comings, and I am not going to hide one of them, his personal courage lifted him out of that category of contempt to which his life assigned him. How well the world understands such men to be the feræ naturæ of humanity! It may shun, deprecate, disparage, but it never despises them. If then of such value be a gift that makes even the bad appear tolerable, there is this evil in the quality, that it disposes men like Davis to be ever on the attack. Their whole policy of life is aggressive.
It was about eight o’clock, on a mellow autumnal morning, as Grog reached Neuwied, and rode down the main street, already becoming thronged with the peasantry for the market: Guiding his horse carefully through the booths of flaunting wares, gay stalls of rural finery, and stands of fruit, he reached the little inn where he meant to breakfast.
The post was not to open for an hour, so that he ordered his meal to be at once got ready, and looked also to the comfort of his beast, somewhat blown by a long stage. His breakfast had been laid in the public room, in which two travellers were seated, whose appearance, even before he heard them speak, proclaimed them to be English. They were both young, fresh-looking, and well favored; that stamp of half-modesty, half-boldness, so essentially British, was on them, and, notwithstanding the entrance of a stranger, they talked away in their native language with all the fearless security your genuine John Bull feels that no confounded foreigner can understand him. It is but fair to admit that Grog’s beard and moustaches, his frogged and braided grass-green coat, and his blue spectacles made him resemble anything on earth rather than a subject of Queen Victoria.
In the mere glance Grog bestowed upon them as he passed, he saw the class to which they pertained,—young Oxford or Cambridge men, “out” for their vacation,—an order for which he ever entertained a supreme contempt. He despised their mock shrewdness, their assumed craft, and that affectation of being “fast men,” which in reality never soared above running up a bill at the pastrycook’s, thrashing a townsman, and giving a stunning wine-party at their rooms. To what benefit could such miniature vices be turned? It was only “punting” with the Evil One, and Grog thought so and avoided them.
Deep in the “mysterious gutturals” of the “Cologne Gazette,” or busily discussing his carbonadoed beefsteak, Davis gave no heed to the bald, disjointed chat of his neighbors; broken phrases reached him at intervals about proctors and the “little go,” the stroke oar of Brazennose, or some new celebrity of the ballet, when suddenly the name of Annesley Beecher startled him. He now listened attentively, and heard one of them relating to the other that while waiting for his arrival at Aix la-Chapelle, he had devoted himself to watching Beecher and “the stunning girl” that was with him. It appeared from what he said that all Aix was wildly excited by curiosity on her account. That she was neither wife, sister, nor mistress, none disputed. Who was she, then? or what could be the explanation of that mysterious companionship? “You should have seen her at the rooms,” continued the narrator; “she used to make her appearance about eleven—rarely before—dressed with a magnificence that threw all the little German royalties into the shade,—such lace and ornaments! They said, of course, it was all false; I can only tell you that old Lady Bamouth got beside her one night just to examine her scarf, and she proclaimed it real Brussels, and worth I can’t say how much; and for the recovery of an opal that fell out of her bracelet one night Beecher gave six hundred francs next morning.”
“Then it was the money was false,” broke in the other; “Beecher is ruined, he hasn’t sixpence,—at least I’ve always heard him mentioned as a fellow regularly cleaned out years ago.”
“He was before my day,” resumed the first; “but I heard the same story you did. But what’s the meaning of calling a fellow ruined that can go about the world stopping at first-rate hotels, having carriages, horses, opera-boxes? Why, the waiter at Aix told me that he paid above five hundred florins for flowers. This girl, whoever she was, was wild about moss-roses and pink hyacinths, and they fetched them from Rotterdam for her. Pretty well that for a ruined man!”
“Perhaps it was she herself had the money,” suggested the other, half carelessly.
“That’s possible, too; I know that whenever she came down to the wells and took a glass of the waters, she always gave a gold piece to the girl that served her.”
“Then she was not a lady by birth; that trait is quite sufficient to decide the point.”
Davis started as if he had been stung; here, from the lips of these raw youths, was he to receive a lesson in life, and be told that all the cost and splendor by which he purposed to smooth over the difficult approaches to society were fatal blunders and no more,—that the very extravagance so imposing in one of acknowledged station becomes “suspect” in those of dubious rank. Like all men of quick resentments, he soon turned the blame from himself to others. It was Lizzy’s fault. What right had she to draw upon herself all the censorious tongues of a watering-place? Why should she have attracted this foolish notoriety? After all, she was new to life and the world, and might be pardoned; but Beecher,—it was just the one solitary thing he did know,—Beecher ought to have warned her against this peril; he ought to have guarded against it himself. Why should such a girl be exposed to the insolent comments of fellows like these? and he measured them deliberately, and thought over in his mind how little trouble it would cost him to put two families into mourning,—mayhap, to throw a life-long misery into some happy home, and change the whole destinies of many he had never seen,—never should see! There was, however, this difficulty, that in doing so he drew a greater publicity upon her,—all whose interests required secrecy and caution. “‘Till she have the right to another name than mine, she must not be the talk of newspapers,” said he to himself; and, like many a prudent reflection, it had its sting of pain.
These meditations were rudely cut short by the sound of his own name. It was the elder of the two young men who was discussing the duel at Brussels, and detailing, with all the influence of his superior experience, the various reasons “why no man was called upon to meet such a fellow as Davis.” “I talked it over with Stan worth and Ellis, and they both agreed with me.”
“But what is to be done?” asked the younger.
“You hand him over to the police, or you thrash him right well with a horsewhip, pay five pounds penalty for the assault, and there’s an end on’t.”
“And is ‘Grog’ as they call him, the man to put up with that mode of treatment?”
“What can he do? Notoriety must ruin him. The moment it gets abroad that a wolf has been seen near a village, all turn out for the pursuit.”
Had he who uttered this sentiment only cast his eyes towards the stranger at the table in the corner, he would have seen, by the expression of the features, that his simile was not a bad one. Davis shook with passion, and his self-control, to sit still and listen, was almost like a fit.
“All the more ungenerous, then, would be the conduct,” said the younger, “to resent a personal wrong by calling in others to your aid.”
“Don’t you see, George,” broke in the other, “that men have their beasts of prey like other animals, and agree to hunt them down, out of common security, for the mischief he causes, and the misery he spreads through the world? One of these fellows in his lair is worse than any tiger that ever crouched in a jungle. And as to dealing with him, as Ellis says, do you ever talk of giving a tiger fair play,—do you make a duel of it, with equal weapons; or do you just shoot him down when you can and how you can?”
Davis arose and drew himself up, and there was a moment of irresolution in his mind, of which, could the two travellers-have read the secret, they would almost as soon have smoked their cigars in the den of a wild beast. And yet there they sat, puffing indolently away the blue cloud, scarcely deigning a passing glance at Grog, as he proceeded to leave the room.
Anatomists assure us that if we but knew the delicate tissues by which the machinery of our life is carried on, how slight the fibres, how complex the functions on which vitality depends, we should not have courage to move, or even speak, lest we should destroy an organization so delicate and sensitive. In like manner, did we but know in life the perils over which we daily pass, the charged mines over which we walk, the volcanoes that are actually throbbing beneath our feet, what terrors would it give to mere existence! It was on the turn of a straw how Davis decided,—a word the more, a look from one of them, a laugh, might have cost a life. With a long-drawn breath, the sigh of a pent-up emotion, Grog found himself in the open air; there was a vague feeling in his mind of having escaped a peril, but what or where or how he could n’t remember.
He sat down in the little porch under the clustering vines; the picturesque street, with its carved gables and tasteful balconies, sloped gently down to the Rhine, which ran in swift eddies beneath. It was a fair and pleasant scene, nor was its influence all lost upon him. He was already calmed. The gay dresses and cheerful faces of the peasants, as they passed and repassed, their merry voices, their hearty recognitions and pleasant greetings, gave a happier channel to his thoughts. He thought of Lizzy,—how she would like it, how enjoy it! and then a sudden pang shot through his heart, and he remembered that she, too, was no longer the same. The illusion that had made her life a fairy tale was gone,—dissipated forever. The spell that gave the charm to her existence was broken! What was all the cultivation of mind,—what the fascinations by which she moved the hearts of all around her,—what the accomplishments by which she adorned society, if they only marked the width of that chasm that separated her from the well-born and the wealthy? To be more than their equal in grace, beauty, and genius, less than their inferior in station, was a sad lesson to learn, and this the last night had taught her.
“Ay,” muttered he, below his breath, “she knows who she is now, but she has yet to learn all that others think of her.” How bitterly, at that instant, did he reproach himself for having revealed his secret! A thousand times better to have relinquished all ambition, and preserved the warm and confiding love she bore him. “We might have gone to America,—to Australia. In some far-away country I could easily earn subsistence, and no trace of my former life follow me. She, at least, would not have been lost to me,—her affection would have clung to me through every trial. Mere reverse of fortune—for such and no more had it seemed—would never have chilled the generous glow of her woman’s heart, and I need not have shocked her self-love, nor insulted her dignity, by telling her that she was the gambler’s daughter.”
As he was thus musing, the two travellers came out and seated themselves in the porch; the elder one, needing a light for his cigar, touched his hat to Davis, and muttered some broken words of German, to request permission to light it from him. Grog bowed a stiff acquiescence; and the younger said, “Not over-courteous,—a red Jew, I take it!”
“A travelling jeweller, I fancy,” said the other; “twig the smart watch-chain.”
Oh, young gentlemen, how gingerly had you trod there if you only knew how thin was the ice under your feet, and how cold the depth beneath it! Davis arose and walked down the street. The mellow notes of a bugle announced the arrival of the post, and the office must now open in a few minutes. Forcing his way through the throng to the open window, he asked if there were any letters for Captain Christopher? None. Any for Captain Davis? None. Any for the Hon. Annesley Beecher? The same reply. He was turning away in disappointment, when a voice called out, “Wait! here’s a message just come in from the Telegraph-office. Please to sign the receipt for it.” He wrote the name C. Christopher boldly, and pushed his way through the crowd once more.
If his heart throbbed painfully with the intensity of anxiety, his fingers never trembled as he broke the seal of the despatch. Three brief lines were all that were there; but three brief lines can carry the tidings of a whole destiny. We give it as it stood:—
“William Peach to Christopher, Neuwied, in Nassau.
“The Viscount died yesterday, at four p. m. Lawyers want A. B.‘s address immediately.
“Proceedings already begun.”
Davis devoured the lines four—five times over, and then muttered between his teeth, “Safe enough now,—the match as good as over!”
“I say, George,” said one of the young travellers to his companion, “our friend in the green frock must have got news of a prize in the lottery. Did you ever see anything like his eyes? They actually lit up the blue spectacles.”
“Clap the saddle on that black horse,” cried Grog, as he passed into the stable; “give him a glass of Kirsch-wasser and bring him round to the door.”
“He knows how to treat an old poster,” said the ostler; “it’s not the first ride he has taken on a courier’s saddle.”
CHAPTER XI. HOW GROG DAVIS DISCOURSED, AND ANNESLEY BEECHER LISTENED
When Davis reached the little inn at evening, he was surprised to learn that Annesley Beecher had passed the day alone. Lizzy complained of headache, and kept her room. Grog listened to this with a grave, almost stern look; he partly guessed that the ailment was a mere pretext; he knew better to what to attribute her absence. They dined tête-à-tête; but there was a constraint over each, and there was little of that festive enjoyment that graced the table on the day before. Beecher was revolving in his mind all the confessions that burdened his conscience about Stein and the mystical volume he had bought from him; the large sums he had drawn for were also grievous loads upon his heart, and he knew not in what temper or spirit Davis would hear of them. Grog, too, had many things in his head; not, indeed, that he meant to reveal them, but they were like secret instructions to his own heart, to be referred to for guidance and direction.
They sipped their wine under the trellised vines, and smoked their cigars in an atmosphere fragrant with the jessamine and the rose, the crystal river eddying along at their feet, and the purple mountain glowing in the last tints of declining day. “We want Lizzy to enliven us,” said Davis, after a long silence on both sides. “We ‘re dull and heavy without her.”
“By Jove! it does make a precious difference whether she’s here or not,” said Beecher, earnestly.
“There’s a light-heartedness about that girl does one good,” said Davis, as he puffed his cigar. “And she’s no fool, either.”
“I should think she’s not,” muttered Beecher, half indignantly.
“It could n’t be supposed she should know life like you or me, for instance; she hasn’t seen the thing,—never mixed with it; but let the time come that she shall take her part in the comedy, you ‘ll see whether she ‘ll not act it cleverly.”
“She has head for anything!” chimed in Beecher.
“Ay, and what they call tact too. I don’t care what company you place her in; take her among your duchesses to-morrow, and see if she’ll not keep her own place,—and that a good one.”
Beecher sighed, but it was not in any despondency.
And now a long silence ensued; not a sound heard save the light noise of the bottle as it passed between them, and the long-drawn puffs of smoke that issued from their lips.
“What did you do with Stein? Did he give you the money?” asked Davis, at last.
“Oh yes, he gave it—he gave it freely enough; in fact, he bled so easily that, as the doctors say, I took a good dash from him. You mentioned two thousand florins, but I thought, as I was about it, a little more would do us no harm, and so I said, ‘Lazarus, old fellow, what if we make this for ten thousand—”
“Ten thousand!” said Davis, removing his cigar from his lips and staring earnestly, but yet not angrily, at the other.
“Don’t you see that as I have the money with me,” began Beecher, in a tone of apology and terror, “and as the old fellow didn’t put ‘the screw on’ as to discount—”
“No, he’s fair enough about that; indeed, so far as my own experience goes, all Jews are. It’s your high-class Christian I’m afraid of; but you took the cash?”
“Yes!” said Beecher, timidly, for he was n’t sure he was yet out of danger.
“It was well done,—well thought of,” said Grog, blandly. “We ‘ll want a good round sum to try this new martingale of mine. Opening with five naps, we must be able to bear a run of four hundred and eighty, which, according to the rule of chances, might occur once in seventeen thousand three hundred and forty times.”
“Oh, as to that,” broke in Beecher, “I have hedged famously. I bought old Stein’s conjuring-book; what he calls his ‘Kleinod,’ showing how every game is to be played, when to lay on, when to draw off. Here it is,” said he, producing the volume from his breast-pocket. “I have been over it all day. I tried three problems with the cards myself, but I couldn’t make them come up right.”
“How did you get him to part with this?” asked Davis, as he examined the volume carefully.
“Well, I gave him a fancy price,—that is, I am to give it, which makes all the difference,” said Beecher, laughing. “In short, I gave him a bit of stiff, at three months, for one thousand—”
“Florins?”
“No, pounds,—pounds sterling,” said Beecher, with a half-choking effort.
“It was a fancy price,” said Grog, slowly, not the slightest sign of displeasure manifesting itself on his face as he spoke.
“You don’t think, then, that it was too much?” faltered out Beecher.
“Perhaps not, under the circumstances,” said Davis, keenly.
“What do you mean by ‘under the circumstances’?”
Davis threw his cigar into the stream, pushed bottle and glasses away from him,—far enough to permit him to rest both his arms on the table,—and then, steadfastly fixing his eyes on the other, with a look of intense but not angry significance, said, “How often have I told you, Beecher, that it was no use to try a ‘double’ with me? Why, man, I know every card in your hand.”
“I give you my sacred word of honor, Grog—”
“To be renewed at three months, I suppose?” said Davis, sneeringly. “No, no, my boy, it takes an earlier rise to get to the blind side of Kit Davis. I ‘m not angry with you for trying it,—not a bit, lad; there ‘s nothing wrong in it but the waste of time.”
“May I be hanged, drawn, and quartered, if I know what you are at, Grog!” exclaimed the other, piteously.
“Well, all I can say is I read you easier than you read me. You gave old Lazarus a thousand pounds for that book after reading that paragraph in the ‘Times.’”
“What paragraph?”
“I mean that about your brother’s title not being legal.”
“I never saw it,—never heard of it,” cried Beecher, in undisguised terror.
“Well, I suppose I ‘m to believe you,” said Davis, half reluctantly. “It was in a letter from the Crimea, stating that so confident are the friends of a certain claimant to the title and estates now enjoyed by Lord Lackington, that they have offered the young soldier who represents the claim any amount of money he pleases to purchase promotion in the service.”
“I repeat to you my word of honor, I never saw nor heard of it”
“Of course, then, I believe you,” said Grog.
Again and again did Beecher reiterate assurances of his good faith; he declared that during all his stay at Aix he had never looked into a newspaper, nor had he received one single letter, except from Davis himself; and Davis believed him, from the simple fact that such a paragraph as he quoted had no existence,—never was in print, never uttered till Grog’s own lips had fashioned it.
“But, surely, Grog, it is not a flying rumor—the invention of some penny-a-liner—would find any credence with you?”
“I don’t know,” said Davis, slowly; “I won’t say I ‘d swear to it all, but just as little would I reject it as a fable. At all events, I gave you credit for having trimmed your sails by the tidings; and if you did n’t, why, there’s no harm done, only you ‘re not so shrewd a fellow as I thought you.”
Beecher’s face grew scarlet; how near, how very near, he was of being “gazetted” the sharp fellow he had been striving for years to become, and now, by his own stupid admission, had he invalidated his claim to that high degree.
“And this is old Stein’s celebrated book? I ‘ve heard of it these five-and-thirty years, though I never saw it till now. Well, I won’t say you made a bad bargain—”
“Indeed, Grog,—indeed, by George! I ‘m as glad as if I won five hundred to hear you say so. To tell you the truth, I was half afraid to own myself the purchaser. I said to myself, ‘Davis will chaff me so about this book, he ‘ll call me all the blockheads in Europe—‘”
“No, no, Beecher, you ain’t a blockhead, nor will I suffer any one to call you such. There are things—there are people, too, Just as there are games—that you don’t know, but before long you ‘ll be the match of any fellow going. I can put you up to them, and I will. There’s my hand on it.”
Beecher grasped the proffered hand, and squeezed it with a warmth there was no denying. What wonderful change had come over Grog he could not guess. Whence this marvellous alteration in his manner towards him? No longer scoffing at his mistaken notions of people, or disparaging his abilities, Davis condescended now to talk and take counsel with him as an equal.
“That ‘s the king of wines,” said Davis, as he pushed a fresh bottle across the table. “When you can get Marcobrunner like that, where’s the Burgundy ever equalled it? Fill up your glass, and drink a bumper to our next venture, whatever it be!”
“‘Our next venture, whatever it be!’” echoed Beecher, as he laid the empty glass on the table.
“Another toast,” said Davis, replenishing the glasses. “‘May all of our successes be in company.’”
“I drink it with all my heart, old fellow. You ‘ve always stood like a man to me, and I ‘ll never desert you,” cried Beecher, whose head was never proof against the united force of wine and excitement.
“There never were two fellows on this earth so made to run in double harness,” said Davis, “as you and myself. Let us only lay our heads together, and there’s nothing can resist us.”
Grog now launched forth into one of those descriptions which he could throw off with a master’s hand, sketching life as a great hunting-ground, and themselves as the hunters. What zest and vigor could he impart to such a picture!—how artfully, too, could he make Beecher the foreground figure, he himself only shadowed forth as an accessory! Listening with eagerness to all he said, Beecher continued to drink deeply; the starry night, the perfumed air, the rippling sounds of the river, all combining with the wine and the converse to make up a dreamland of fascination. Nor was the enchantment less perfect that the objects described passed before him like a series of dissolving views. They represented, all of them, a life of pleasure and enjoyment,—means inexhaustible, means for every extravagance, and, what he relished fully as much, the undisputed recognition by the world to the claim of being a “sharp fellow,”—a character to which Grog’s aid was so dexterously contributed as to escape all detection.
Perhaps our reader might not have patience with us were we to follow Davis through all the devious turns and windings of this tortuous discourse. Perhaps, too, we should fail signally were we to attempt to convey in our cold narrative what came from his lips with all the marvellous power of a good story-teller, whose voice could command many an inflection, and whose crafty nature appreciated the temper of the metal beneath his beat If we could master all these, another and a greater difficulty would still remain; for how could we convey, as Davis contrived to do, that through all these gorgeous scenes of worldly success, in the splendor of a life of magnificence, amidst triumphs and conquests, one figure should ever pass before the mind’s eye, now participating in the success, now urging its completion, now, as it were, shedding a calm and chastened light over all,—a kind of angelic influence that heightened every enjoyment of the good, and averted every approach of evil?
Do not fancy, I beseech you, that this was a stroke of high art far above the pencil of Grog Davis. Amongst the accidents of his early life the “stage” had figured, and Grog had displayed very considerable talents for the career. It was only at the call of what he considered a higher ambition he had given up “the boards” for “the ring.” Besides this, he was inspired by the Marcobrunner, which had in an equal degree affected the brain of him who listened. If Grog were eloquent, Beecher was ductile. Indeed, so eagerly did he devour all that the other said, that when a moment of pause occurred, he called out, “Go on, old fellow,—go on! I could listen to you forever!”
Nor was it altogether surprising that he should like to hear words of praise and commendation from lips that once only opened in sarcasm and ridicule of him. How pleasant to know, at last, that he was really and truly a great partner in the house of Davis and Co., and not a mere commission agent, and that this partnership—how that idea came to strike him we cannot determine—was to be binding forever. How exalting, too, the sentiment that it was just at the moment when all his future looked gloomiest this friendship was ratified. The Lackington peerage might go, but there was Grog Davis, stanch and true,—the ancient estates be torn from his house, but there was the precious volume of old Lazarus, with wealth untold within its pages. Thus threading his way through these tortuous passages of thought, stumbling, falling, and blundering at every step, that poor brain lost all power of coherency and all guidance, and he wavered between a reckless defiance of the world and a sort of slavish fear of its censure.
“And Lackington, Grog,—Lackington,” cried he, at length,—“he’s as proud as Lucifer; what will he say?”
“Not so much as you think!” remarked Grog, dryly. “Lackington will take it easier than you suspect.”
“No, no, you don’t know him,—don’t know him at all. I wouldn’t stand face to face with him this minute for a round sum!”
“I ‘d not like it over-much myself!” muttered Davis, with a grim smile.
“It’s all from pride of birth and blood, and he ‘d say, ‘Debts, if you like; go ahead with Jews and the fifty per centers, but, hang it, don’t tie a stone round your throat, don’t put a double ditch between you and your own rank! Look where I am,’ he ‘d say,—‘look where I am!’”
“Well, I hope he finds it comfortable!” muttered Grog, with a dry malice.
“Look where I am!” resumed Beecher, trying to imitate the pretentious tones of his brother’s voice. “And where is it, after all?”
“Where we ‘ll all be, one day or other,” growled out Grog, who could not help answering his own reflections.
“‘And are you sure of where you are?’—that’s what I ‘d ask him, eh, Grog?—‘are you sure of where you are?’”
“That would be a poser, I suspect,” said Davis, who laughed heartily; and the contagion catching Beecher, he laughed till the tears came.
“I might ask him, besides, ‘Are you quite sure how long you are to remain where you are?’ eh, Grog? What would he say to that?”
“The chances are, he ‘d not answer at all,” said Davis, dryly.
“No, no! you mistake him, he’s always ready with a reason; and then he sets out by reminding you that he’s the head of the house,—a fact that a younger brother does n’t need to have recalled to his memory. Oh, Grog, old fellow, if I were the Viscount,—not that I wish any ill to Lack-ington,—not that I ‘d really enjoy the thing at any cost to him,—but if I were—”
“Well, let’s hear. What then?” cried Davis, as he filled the other’s glass to the top,—“what then?”
“Would n’t I trot the coach along at a very different pace. It’s not poking about Italy, dining with smoke-dried cardinals and snuffy old ‘marchesas,’ I ‘d be; but I ‘d have such a stable, old fellow, with Jem Bates to ride and Tom Ward to train them, and yourself, too, to counsel me. Would n’t we give Binsleigh and Hawksworth and the rest of them a cold bath, eh?”
“That ain’t the style of thing at all, Beecher,” said Grog, deprecatingly; “you ought to go in for the ‘grand British nobleman dodge,’—county interests, influence with a party, and a vote in the Lords. If you were to try it, you ‘d make a right good speech. It wouldn’t be one of those flowery things the Irish fellows do, but a manly, straightforward, genuine English discourse.”
“Do you really think so, Grog?” asked he, eagerly.
“I ‘m sure of it I never mistook pace in my life; and I know what’s in you as well as if I saw it. The real fact is, you have a turn of speed that you yourself have no notion of, but it will come out one of these days if you ‘re attacked,—if they say anything about your life on the turf, your former companions, or a word about the betting-ring.”
The charm of this flattery was far more intoxicating than even the copious goblets of Marcobrunner, and Beecher’s flushed cheeks and flashing eyes betrayed how it overpowered him. Davis went on:—
“You are one of those fellows that never show ‘the stuff they ‘re made of’ till some injustice is done them,—eh?”
“True as a book!” chimed in Beecher.
“Take you fairly, and a child might lead you; but try it on to deny you what you justly have a right to,—let them attempt to dictate to you, and say, ‘Do this, and don’t do the other,’—little they know on what back they ‘ve put the saddle. You ‘ll give them such a hoist in the air as they never expected!”
“How you read every line of me!” exclaimed Beecher, in ecstasy.
“And I ‘ll tell you more; there’s not another man breathing knows you but myself. They ‘ve always seen you in petty scrapes and little difficulties, pulling the devil by the last joint of his tail, as Jack Bush says; but let them wait till you come out for a cup race,—the Two Thousand Guinea Stakes,—then I’m not Kit Davis if you won’t be one of the first men in England.”
“I hope you ‘re right, Davis. I almost feel as if you were,” said Beecher, earnestly.
“When did you find me in the wrong, so far as judgment went? Show me one single mistake I ever made in a matter of opinion? Who was it foretold that Bramston would bolt after the Cotteswold if Rugby didn’t win? Who told the whole yard at Tattersall’s that Grimsby would sell Holt’s stable? Who saw that Rickman Turner was a coward, and would n’t fight?—and I said it, the very day they gave him ‘the Bath’ for his services in China! I don’t know much about books, nor do I pretend to; but as to men and women—men best—I ‘ll back myself against all England and the Channel Islands.”
“And I ‘ll take as much as you ‘ll spare me out of your book, Grog,” said Beecher, enthusiastically, while he filled his glass and drained it.
“You see,” said Davis, in a low, confidential tone, as if imparting a great secret, “I’ve always remarked that the way they smash a fellow in Parliament—I don’t care in which House—is always by raking up something or other he did years before. If he wrote a play, or a novel, or a book of poems, they ‘re down on him at once, about his imagination and his fancy,—that means, he never told a word of truth in his life. If he was unfortunate in business, they ‘re sure to refer to him about some change in the Law of Bankruptcy, and say, ‘There’s my honorable friend yonder ought to be able to help us by his experiences!’ Then, if a fellow has only his wits about him, how he floors them! You see there’s a great deal of capital to be made out of one of these attacks. You rise to reply, without any anger or passion; only dignity,—nothing but dignity! You appeal to the House if the assault of the right honorable baronet opposite was strictly in good taste,—whatever that means. You ask why you are signalled out to be the mark of his eloquence, or his wit, or whatever it be; and then you come out with a fine account of yourself, and all the honorable motives that nobody ever suspected you of. That’s the moment to praise everything you ever did, or meant to do, or couldn’t do; that’s the time to show them what a man they have amongst them.”
“Capital, glorious, excellent!” cried Beecher, in delight “Well, suppose now,” said Davis, “there ‘s a bill about marriages,—they ‘re always changing the law about them; it’s evidently a contract does n’t work quite smoothly for all parties,—well, there’s sure to be many a spicy remark and impertinent allusion in the debate; it’s a sore subject, and every one has a ‘raw’ on it; and, at last, somebody says something about unequal matches, alliances with an inferior class, ‘noble lords that have not scrupled to mingle the ancient blood of their race with the—the thin and washy current that flows in plebeian veins.’ I ‘m the Lord Chancellor, now,” said Grog, boldly, “and I immediately turn round and fix my eyes upon you. Up you get at once, and say, ‘I accept, my Lords,—I accept for myself, and my own case, every word the noble Duke or Marquis has just uttered. It never would have occurred to me to make my personal history the subject of your Lordships’ attention; but when thus rudely brought before you,—rudely and gratuitously introduced—‘Here you ‘d frown at the last speaker, as much as to say, ‘You ‘ll hear more about this outside—‘”
“Go on,—go on!” cried Beecher, with impatience.
“‘I rise in this place,’—that has always a great impression, to say ‘this place,’—‘I rise in this place to say that I am prouder in the choice that shares with me the honors of my coronet, than in all the dignity and privilege that same coronet confers.’ What a cheer, what a regular hurrah follows that, for they have seen her,—ay, that have they! They have beheld her sweeping down the gilded drawing-room,—the handsomest woman in England! Where’s the Duchess with her eyes, her skin, her dignity, and her grace? Does n’t she look ‘thoroughbred in every vein of her neck’? Where did she get that graceful sweep, that easy-swimming gait, if she had n’t it in her very nature’?”
“By Heaven, it’s true, every syllable of it!” cried out Beecher, in all the wild ecstasy of delight.
“Where is the man—I don’t care what his rank might be—who would n’t envy you after you ‘d made that speech? You ‘d walk down Westminster the proudest man in England after it.”
Beecher’s features glowed with a delight that showed he had already anticipated the sense of his popularity.
“And then how the newspapers will praise you! It will be as if you built a bridge over the gulf that separates two distinct classes of people. You ‘ll be a sort of noble reformer. What was the wisest thing Louis Napoleon ever did? His marriage. Do you mark that he was always following his uncle’s footsteps in all his other policy; he saw that the only great mistake he ever made was looking out for a high match, and, like a shrewd fellow, he said, ‘I have station, rank, power, and money enough for two. It ‘s not to win the good favor of a wrinkled old Archduchess or a deaf old Princess, I ‘m going to marry. I ‘ll go in for the whole field. I ‘ll take the girl that, if I was n’t an Emperor, I ‘d be proud to call my own.’ And signs on ‘t, they all cried out, ‘See if he has n’t his heart in the right place; there’s an honest drop there! Let him be as ambitious as you like, he married just as you or I would.’ Ain’t it a fine thing,” exclaimed Grog, enthusiastically, “when one has all the middle classes in one’s favor,—the respectable ruck that’s always running, but seldom showing a winner? Get these fellows with you, and it’s like Baring’s name on the back of your bill. And now, Beecher,” said Davis, grasping the other’s hand, and speaking with a deep earnestness,—“and now that I ‘ve said what you might have done, I ‘ll tell you what I will do. I have just been sketching out this line of country to see how you ‘d take your fences, nothing more. You ‘ve shown me that you ‘re the right sort, and I ‘m not the man to forget it. If I had seen the shadow of a shade of a dodge about you,—if I ‘d have detected one line in your face, or one shake in your voice, like treachery,—so help me! I ‘d have thrown you over like winking! You fancied yourself a great man, and was stanch and true to your old friends; and now it’s my turn to tell you that I would n’t give that empty flask yonder for all your brother Lackington’s lease of his peerage! Hear me out I have it from his own lawyers,—from the fellows in Furnival’s Inn,—it’s up with him; the others are perfectly sure of their verdict There’s how it is! And now, Annesley Beecher, you were willing to marry Kit Davis’s daughter when you thought you could make her a peeress; now I say, that when you ‘ve nothing, nor haven’t a sixpence to bless yourself with, it’s Kit himself will give her to you, and say, there’s not the other man breathing he’d as soon see the husband of this same Lizzy Davis!”
The burst of emotion with which Beecher met this speech was, indeed, the result of very conflicting feelings. Shock at the terrible tidings of his brother’s downfall, and the insult to his house and name, mingled with a burst of gratitude to Davis for his fidelity; but stronger and deeper than these was another sentiment,—for, smile if you will, most sceptical reader, the man was in love, after his fashion. I do not ask of you to believe that he felt as you or I might or ought to feel the tender passion. I do not seek to persuade you that the object of his affection, mingled with all his thoughts, swayed them and etherealized them; that she was the theme of many a heart-woven story, the heroine of many an ecstatic dream: still she was one who could elicit from that nature, in all its selfishness, little traits of generous feeling, little bursts of honest sentiment, that made him appear better to his own heart. And so far has the adage truth with it, virtue is its own reward, in the conscious sense of well doing, in the peaceful calm of an unrepining spirit, and, not least of all, in that sympathy which good men so readily bestow upon even faint efforts to win their suffrage.
And so he sobbed out something that meant grief and gratitude; hope, fear, and uncertainty—worse than fear—all agitating and distracting him by turns.
Very little time did Grog give himself for calmer reflection; away he went at full speed to sketch out their future life. They were to make the tour of Europe, winning all before them. All the joyous part, all the splendor of equipage, retinue, mode of life, and outlay being dictated by Beecher; all the more business detail, the play and the money-getting, devolving upon Davis. Baden, Ems, Wiesbaden, Hamburg, and Aix,—all glowed in the descriptions like fields of foretold glory. How they were to outshine Princes in magnificence and Royal Highnesses in display; the envy of Beecher, of his unvarying luck; the splendor of all his belongings; Lizzy’s beauty, tool What a page would he fill in the great gossip calendar of Europe!
Well Davis knew how to feed the craving vanity of that weak nature, whose most ardent desire was to be deemed cunning and sharp, the cautious reserve of prudent men in his company being a tribute to his acuteness, the dearest his heart could covet Oh, if he longed for anything as success, it was for a time when his coming would spread a degree of terror at a play-table, and men would rise rather than risk their fortune against his! Should such a moment ever be his? Was that great triumph ever to befall him? And all this as the husband of Lizzy Davis!
“Ay!” said Grog, as he read and traced each succeeding emotion in that transparent nature,—“ay! that’s what may be called life; and when we ‘ve done Europe, smashed every bank on the Continent, we ‘ll cross the Atlantic, and give Jonathan a ‘touch of our quality.’ I know all their games well, and I ‘ve had my ‘three bullets and a poker’ before now on a Mississippi steamer! Your Yankee likes faro, and I’ve a new cabal to teach him; in short, my boy, there’s a roving commission of fun before us, and if it don’t pay, my name ain’t Davis!”
“Was this your scheme, then, Grog,” asked Beecher, “when you told me at Brussels that you could make a man of me?”
“It was, my boy,” cried Davis, eagerly. “You ‘ve guessed it. There was only one obstacle to the success of the plan at that time, and this exists no longer.”
“What was the obstacle you speak of?”
“Simply, that so long as you fancied yourself next in succession to a peerage, you ‘d never lay yourself down regularly to your work; you’d say, ‘Lackington can’t live forever; he’s almost twenty years my senior. I must be the Viscount yet. Why should I, therefore, cumber myself with cares that I have no need of, and involve myself amongst people I’ll have to cut one of these days? No, I’ll just make a waiting race of it, and be patient.’ Now, however, that you can’t count upon this prospect,—now that to-morrow or next day will declare to the world that Henry Hastings Beecher is just Henry Hastings Beecher, and not Viscount Lackington, and that the Honorable Annesley is just Annesley, and no more,—now, I say, that you see this clearly with your own eyes, you ‘ll buckle to, and do your work manfully. And there was another thing—” And here Davis paused, and seemed to meditate.
“What was that, Grog? Be candid, old fellow, and tell me all.”
“So I will, then,” resumed Davis. “That other thing was this. So long as you were the great man in prospective, and might some fine day be a Lord, you could always persuade yourself—or some one else could persuade you—that Kit Davis was hanging on you just for your rank; that he wanted the intimacy of a man in your station, and so on. Now, if you ever came to believe this, there would have been an end of all confidence between us; and without confidence, what can a fellow do for his pal? This was, therefore, the obstacle; and even if you could have got over it, I couldn’t. No, hang me if I could! I was always saying to myself, ‘It’s all very nice and smooth now, Kit, between you and Beecher,—you eat, drink, and sleep together,—but wait till he turns the corner, old fellow, and see if he won’t give you the cold shoulder.”
“You could n’t believe—”
“Yes, but I could, and did too; and many’s the time I said to myself, ‘If Beecher was n’t a top-sawyer, what a trump he ‘d be! He has head for anything, and address for anything.’ And do you know,”—here Grog dropped his-voice to a whisper, and spoke as if under great emotion,—“and do you know that I could n’t be the same man to you myself just because of your rank? That was the reason I used to be so sulky, so suspicious, and so—ay, actually cruel with you, telling you, as I did, what could n’t I do with certain acceptances? Now, look here, Beecher—Light that taper beside you; there’s a match in that box at your elbow.”
Unsteady enough was Beecher’s hand; indeed, it was not wine alone now made him tremble. An intense agitation shook his frame, and he shivered like one in an ague fit. He couldn’t tell what was coming; the theme alone was enough to arrest all process of reasoning on his part. It was like the force of a blow that stunned and stupefied at once.
“There, that will do,” said Grog, as he drew a long pocket-book from his breast-pocket, and searched for some time amongst its contents. “Ay, here they are; two—three—four of them,—insignificant-looking scraps of paper they look; and yet there’s a terrible exposure in open court, a dreary sea-voyage over the ocean, and a whole life of a felon’s suffering in those few lines.”
“For the love of mercy, Davis, if you have a spark of pity in your heart,—if you have a heart at all,—don’t speak in this way to me!” cried Beecher, in a voice almost choked with sobs.
“It is for the last time in my life you’ll ever hear such words,” said Grog, calmly. “Read them over carefully; examine them well. Yes, I wish and require it.”
“Oh, I know them well!” said Beecher, with a heavy sigh. “Many’s the sleepless night the thought of them has cost me.”
“Go over every line of them; satisfy yourself that they ‘re the same,—that the words ‘Johnstone Howard’ are in your own hand.”
Beecher bent over the papers; but, with his dimmed eyes and trembling fingers, it was some time ere he could decipher them. A sigh from the very bottom of his heart was all the reply he could make.
“They’ll never cost you another sleepless night, old fellow!” said Davis, as he held them over the flame of the taper. “There’s the end of ‘em now!”
CHAPTER XII. REFLECTIONS OF ANNESLEY BEECHER
A wiser head than that of Annesley Beecher might have felt some confusion on awaking the morning after the events we have just related. Indeed, his first sensations were those of actual bewilderment as he opened his eyes, and beheld the pine-clad mountains rising in endless succession; the deep glens; the gushing streams, crossed by rude bridges of a single tree; the rustic saw-mills all dripping with spray. And trembling with the force of their own machinery. Where was he? What strange land was this? How came he there? Was this in reality the “new world beyond the seas” Davis had so often described to him? By a slow, laborious process, like filtering, stray memories dropped, one by one, through his clouded faculties; and, at length, he remembered the scene of the preceding night, and all that had passed between Davis and himself. Yet, withal, there was much of doubt and uncertainty mixed up, nor could he, by any effort, satisfy himself how much was fact, how much mere speculation. Was it true that Lackington was to lose his peerage? Was it possible such a dreadful blow was to fall on their house? If so, what portion of the estates would follow the title? Would a great part—would all the property be transferred to the new claimant? What length of time, too, might the suit occupy?—such things often lasted for years upon years. Was it too late for a compromise? Could not some arrangement be come to “some way”? Grog was surely the man to decree a plan for this; at all events, he could protract and spin out proceedings. “It’s not p.p.; the match may never come off,” muttered Beecher, “and I ‘ll back old Grog to ‘square it’ somehow.”
And then the bills, the forged acceptances,—they were actually burned before his face! It was well-nigh incredible; but he had seen them, held them in his own hand, and watched them as the night wind wafted away their blackened embers never more to rise in judgment against him,—never to cost him another night of sleepless terror! Who would have believed Davis capable of such magnanimity? Of all men living, he had deemed him the last to forego any hold over another; and then the act was his own spontaneous doing, without reservation, without condition.
Beecher’s heart swelled proudly as he thought over this trait of his friend. Was it that he felt a sense of joy in believing better of mankind? Was it that it awoke within his breast more hopeful thoughts of his fellow-men? Did it appeal to him like a voice, saying, “Despair of no man; there are touches of kindliness in natures the very roughest, that redeem whole lives of harshness”? No, my good reader, it would be unfair and unjust to you were I to say that such sentiments as these swayed him. Annesley Beecher’s thoughts flowed in another and very different channel. The words he whispered to his heart were somewhat in this wise: “What a wonderful fellow must you be, Beecher, to acquire such influence over a man like Davis; what marvellous gifts must you not be endowed with! Is it any wonder that Grog predicts a brilliant future to him who can curb to his will the most stubborn of natures, and elicit traits of sacrifice out of the most selfish of men? Who but yourself could work this miracle?” Mean and ignoble as such a mode of arguing may seem, take my word for it, most patient reader, it is not unfrequent in this world of ours, nor is Annesley Beecher the only one who has ascribed all his good fortune to his own deservings.
“Shrewd fellow, that Davis! He always saw what stuff was in me; he recognized the real metal, while others were only sneering at the dross,—just as he knows this moment, that if I start fresh without name, fortune, or title, that I ‘m sure to be at the top of the tree at last. Give me his daughter! I should think he would! It’s not all up with Lackington yet, dark as it looks; we ‘re in possession, and there is a ‘good line of country’ between the Honorable Annesley Beecher, next Viscount in succession, and Kit Davis, commonly called Grog of that ilk! Not that the girl isn’t equal to any station,—there’s no denying that! Call her a Greville, a Stanley, or a Seymour, and she’s a match for the finest man in England! Make her a Countess to-morrow, and she ‘ll look it!”
It is but fair to acknowledge that Beecher was not bewildered without some due cause; for if Davis had at one time spoken to him as one who no longer possessed claim to rank and station, but was a mere adventurer like himself, at another moment he had addressed him as the future Viscount, and pictured him as hurling a proud defiance to the world in the choice he had made of his wife. This was no blunder on Grog’s part. That acute individual had, in the course of his legal experiences, remarked that learned counsel are wont to insert pleas which are occasionally even contradictory, alleging at times that “there was no debt,” and then, that “if there had been, it was already paid.” In the same spirit did Davis embrace each contingency of fortune, showing that, whether Peer or Commoner, Annesley Beecher “stood to win” in making Lizzy his wife. “Scratch the pedigree, and she ‘ll be a stunning peeress; and if the suit goes against us, show me the girl like her to meet the world!” This was the sum of the reflections that cost him a whole morning’s intellectual labor, and more of actual mental fatigue than befalls a great parliamentary leader after a stormy debate.
That Davis had no intention to intimidate him was clearly shown by his destroying the acceptances: had he wished to lean on coercion, here was the means. Take your choice between matrimony and a felony, was a short and easy piece of argumentation, such as would well have suited Grog’s summary notions; and yet he had, of his own accord, freely and forever relinquished this vantage ground. Beecher was now free. For the first time for many a long year of life he arose from his bed without a fear of the law and its emissaries. The horrible nightmare that had scared him so often, dashing the wildest moments of dissipation with sudden fear, deepening the depths of despondency with greater gloom, had all fled, and he awoke to feel that there was no terror in a “Beak’s” eye, nothing to daunt him in the shrewd glances of a detective. They who have lived years long of insecurity, tortured by the incessant sense of an impending peril, to befall them to-day, tomorrow, or next day, become at length so imbued with fear that when the hour of their emancipation arrives, they are not able for a considerable time to assure themselves of their safety. The captive dreams of his chains through many a night after he has gained his liberty; the shipwrecked sailor can never forget the raft and the lone ocean on which he tossed; nor was it altogether easy for Beecher to convince himself that he could walk the world with his head high, and bid defiance to Crown prosecutors and juries!
“I ‘m out of your debt, Master Grog,” said he, with a pleasant laugh to himself; “catch me if you can running up another score in your books. Wait till you see me slipping my neck into a noose held by your fingers. You made me feel the curb pretty sharp for many a long day, and might still, if you had n’t taken off the bridle with your own hands; but I ‘m free now, and won’t I show you a fair pair of heels! Who could blame me, I ‘d like to know? When a fellow gets out of jail, does he take lodgings next door to the prison? I never asked him to burn those bills. It was all his own doing. I conclude that a fellow as shrewd as he knew what he was about. Mayhap he said to himself, ‘Beecher’s the downiest cove going. It will be a deuced sight better to have him as my friend and pal than to send him to break stones in Australia. I can stand to win a good thing on him, and why should I send him over seas just out of spite? I’ll come the grand magnanimous dodge over him,—destroy the papers before his face, and say, “Now, old fellow, what do you say to that for a touch of generosity?”’
“‘Well, I’ll tell you what I say, Master Davis,’” said he, drawing himself up, and speaking boldly out. “‘I say that you’re a regular trump, and no mistake; but you ‘re not the sharp fellow I took you for. No, no, old gent, you ‘re no match for A. B.! He’s been running in bandages all this time past; and now that his back sinews are all right, you’ll see if he hasn’t a turn of speed in him.’ And what is more, I ‘d say to him, ‘Look here, Grog, we’ve jogged along these ten or twelve years or so without much profit to either of us,—what say you if we dissolve the partnership and let each do a little business on his own account? If I should turn out anything very brilliant, you ‘ll be proud of me, just as England says she is when a young colony takes a great spring of success, and say, “Ay, he was one of my rearing!”’ Of course all dictation, all that bullying intolerance is at an end now, and time it was! Wasn’t I well weary of it! wasn’t I actually sick of life with it! I couldn’t turn to anything, could n’t think of anything, with that eternal fear before me, always asking myself, ‘Is he going to do it now?’ It is very hard to believe it’s all over.” And he heaved a deep sigh as though disburdening his heart of its last load of sorrow.
“Davis is very wide awake,” continued he; “he ‘ll soon see how to trim his sails to this new wind; he ‘ll know that he can’t bully, can’t terrorize.”
A sharp quick report of a pistol, with a clanging crash, and then a faint tinkle of a bell, cut short his musings, and Beecher hastened to the window and looked out. It was Davis in the vine alley practising with the pistol; he had just sent a ball through the target, the bell giving warning that the shot had pierced the very centre. Beecher watched him as he levelled again; he thought he saw a faint tremor of the hand, a slight unsteadiness of the wrist; vain illusion,—bang went the weapon, and again the little bell gave forth the token of success.
“Give me the word—one—two,” cried out Davis to the man who loaded and handed him the pistols. “One—two,” called out the other; and the same instant rang out the bell, and the ball was true to its mark.
“What a shot,—what a deadly shot!” muttered Beecher, as a cold shudder came over him.
As quickly as he could take the weapons, Davis now fired; four—five—six balls went in succession through the tiny circle, the bell tinkling on and never ceasing, so rapidly did shot follow upon shot, till, as if sated with success, he turned away, saying, “I’ ll try to-morrow blindfold!”
“I’m certain,” muttered Beecher, “no man is bound to go out with a fellow like that. A duel is meant to be a hazard, not a dead certainty! To stand before him at twenty—ay, forty paces, is a suicide, neither more nor less; he must kill you. I’d insist on his fighting across a handkerchief. I ‘d say, ‘Let us stand foot to foot!’” No, Beecher, not a bit of it; you ‘d say nothing of the kind, nor, if you did, would it avail you! Your craven heart could not beat were those stern gray eyes fixed upon you, looking death into you from a yard off. He ‘d shoot you down as pitilessly, too, at one distance as at the other.
Was it in the fulness of a conviction that his faltering lips tried to deny, that he threw himself back upon a chair, while a cold, clammy sweat covered his face and forehead, a sickness like death crept over him, objects grew dim to his eyes, and the room seemed to turn and swim before him? Where was his high daring now? Where the boastful spirit in which he had declared himself free, no more the slave of Grog’s insolent domination, nor basely cowering before his frown? Oh, the ineffable bitterness. Of that thought, coming, too, in revulsion to all his late self-gratulations! Where was the glorious emancipation he had dreamed of, now? He could not throw him into prison, it is true, but he could lay him in a grave.
“But I ‘d not meet him,” whispered he to himself. “One is not bound to meet a man of this sort.”
There is something marvellously accommodating and elastic in the phrase, “One is not bound” to do this, that, and t’ other. As the said bond is a contract between oneself and an imaginary world, its provisions are rarely onerous or exacting. Life is full of things “one is not bound to do.” You are “not bound,” for instance, to pay your father’s debts, though, it might be, they were contracted in your behalf and for your benefit. You are not bound to marry the girl whose affections have been your own for years if you can do better in another quarter, and she has nothing in your handwriting to establish a contract. You are not bound,—good swimmer though you be,—to rescue a man from drowning, lest he should clutch too eagerly and peril your safety. You are not bound to risk the chance of a typhus by visiting a poor friend on his sick-bed. You are not bound to aid charities you but half approve,—to assist people who have been improvident,—to associate with many who are uninteresting to you. But why go on with this expurgatorial catalogue? It is quite clear the only things “one is bound” to do are those the world will enforce at his hands; and let our selfishness be ever so inveterate, and ever so crafty, the majority will beat us, and the Ayes have it at last!
Now, few men had a longer list of the things they were “not bound to do” than Annesley Beecher; in reality, if the balance were to be struck between them and those he acknowledged to be obligatory, it would have been like Falstaff’s sack to the miserable morsel of bread. Men of his stamp fancy themselves very wise in their generation. They are not easy-natured, open, trustful, and free-handed, like that Pharisee! Take my word for it, the system works not so well as it looks, and they pass their existence in a narrow prison-ward of their own selfish instincts,—their fears their fetters, their cowardly natures heavy as any chains!
Beecher reasoned somewhat in this wise. Grog was “not bound” to destroy the acceptances. He might have held them in terrorism over him for a long life, and used them, at last, if occasion served. At all events, they were valuable securities, which it was pure and wanton waste to burn. Still, the act being done, Beecher was “bound” in the heaviest recognizances to his own heart to profit by the motion; and the great question with him was, what was the best and shortest road to that desirable object? Supposing Lackington all right,—no disputed claim to the title, no litigation of the estate,—Beecher’s best course had possibly been to slip his cable, make all sail, and part company with Davis forever. One grave difficulty, however, opposed itself to this scheme. How was it possible for any man walking the earth to get out of reach of Grog Davis? Had there been a planet allotted for the special use of peers,—were there some bright star above to which they could betake themselves and demand admission by showing their patent, and from which all of inferior birth were excluded, Beecher would assuredly have availed himself of his privilege; but, alas! whatever inequalities pervade life, there is but one earth to bear us living, and cover us when dead! Now, the portion of that earth which constitutes the continent of Europe Davis knew like a detective. A more hopeless undertaking could not be imagined than to try to escape him. Great as was his craft, it was nothing to his courage,—a courage that gave him a sort of affinity to a wild animal, so headlong, reckless, and desperate did it seem. Provoke him, he was ever ready for the conflict; outrage him, and only your life’s blood could be the expiation. And what an outrage had it been if Beecher had taken this moment,—the first, perhaps the only one in all his life, in which Davis had accomplished a noble and generous action,—to desert him! How he could picture to his mind Grog, when the tidings were told him!—not overwhelmed by astonishment, not stunned by surprise, not irresolute even for a second, but starting up like a wounded tiger, and eager for pursuit, his fierce eyeballs glaring, and his sinewy hands closed with a convulsive grip. It was clear, therefore, that escape was impossible. What, then, was the alternative that remained? To abide,—sign a lifelong partnership with Grog, and marry Lizzy. “A stiff line of country,—a very stiff line of country, Annesley, my boy,” said he, addressing himself: “many a dangerous rasper, many a smashing fence there,—have you nerve for it?” Now Beecher knew life well enough to see that such an existence was, in reality, little else than a steeple-chase, and he questioned himself gravely whether he possessed head or hand for the effort. Grog, to be sure, was a marvellous trainer, and Lizzy,—what might not Lizzy achieve of success, with her beauty, her gracefulness, and her genius! It was not till after a long course of reflection that her image came up before him; but when once it did come, it was master of the scene. How he recalled all her winning ways, her siren voice, her ready wit, her easy, graceful motion, her playful manner, that gave to her beauty so many new phases of attraction! What a fascination was it that in her company he never remembered a sorrow,—nay, to think of her was the best solace he had ever found against the pain of gloomy reveries. She was never out of humour, never out of spirits,—always brilliant, sparkling, and happy-minded.
What a glorious thing to obtain a share of such a nature,—the very next best thing to having it oneself! “But all this was not Love,” breaks in my impatient reader. Very true; I admit it in all humility. It was not what you, nor perhaps I, would call by that name; but yet it was all that Annesley Beecher had to offer in that regard.
Have you never remarked the strange and curious efforts made by men who have long lived on narrow fortunes to acquit themselves respectably on succeeding to larger means? They know well enough that they need not pinch and screw and squeeze any longer,—that fortune has enlarged her boundaries, and that they can enter into wider, richer, and pleasanter pasturage,—and yet, for the life of them, they cannot make the venture! or if they do, it is with a sort of convulsive, spasmodic effort far more painful than pleasurable. Their old instincts press heavily upon them, and bear down all the promptings of their present prosperity; they really do not want all these bounties of fate,—they are half crashed by the shower of blessings. So is it precisely with your selfish man in his endeavors to expand into affection, and so was it with Beecher when he tried to be a lover.
Some moralists tell us that, even in the best natures, love is essentially a selfish passion. What amount of egotism, then, does it not include in those who are far—very far—from being “the best”? With all this, let us be just to poor Beecher. Whatever there was of heart about him, she had touched; whatever of good or kind or gentle in his neglected being existed, she had found the way to it. If he were capable of being anything better, she alone could have aided the reformation. If he were not to sink still lower and lower, it was to her helping hand his rescue would be owing. And somehow—though I cannot explain how—he felt and knew this to be the case. He could hear generous sentiments from her, and not deem them hypocrisy. He could listen to words of trust and hopefulness, and yet not smile at her credulity. She had gained that amount of ascendancy over his mind which subjugated all his own prejudices to her influence, and, like all weak natures, he was never so happy as in slavery. Last of all, what a prize it would be to be the husband of the most beautiful woman in Europe! There was a notoriety in that, far above the fame of winning “Derbys” or breaking Roulette Banks; and he pictured to himself how they would journey through the Continent, admired, worshipped, and envied,—for already he had invested himself with the qualities of his future wife, and gloried in the triumphs she was so sure to win.
“By Jove! I’ll do it,” cried he, at last, as he slapped his hand on the table. “I don’t care what they’ll say, I will do it; and if there’s any fellow dares to scoff or sneer at it, Grog shall shoot him. I’ll make that bargain with him; and he ‘ll like it, for he loves fighting.” He summed up his resolution by imagining that the judgment of the world would run somehow in this fashion: “Wonderful fellow, that Annesley Beecher! It’s not above a year since his brother lost the title, and there he is now, married to the most splendid woman in all Europe, living like a prince,—denying himself nothing, no matter what it cost,—and all by his own wits! Show me his equal anywhere! Lackington used to call him a ‘flat.’ I wonder what he ‘d say now!”
CHAPTER XIII. A DARK CONFIDENCE
What a wound would it inflict upon our self-love were we occasionally to know that the concessions we have extorted from our own hearts by long effort and persuasion would be deemed matters of very doubtful acceptance by those in whose favor they were made. With what astonishment should we learn that there was nothing so very noble in our forgiveness, nothing so very splendid in our generosity! I have been led to this reflection by thinking over Annesley Beecher’s late resolve, and wondering what effect it might have had on him could he have overheard what passed in the very chamber next his own.
Though Lizzy Davis was dressed and ready to come down to breakfast, she felt so ill and depressed that she lay down again on her bed, telling the maid to close the shutters and leave her to herself.
“What’s this, Lizzy? What’s the matter, girl?” said Davis, entering, and taking a seat at her bedside. “Your hand is on fire.”
“I slept badly,—scarcely at all,” said she, faintly, “and my head feels as if it would split with pain.”
“Poor child!” said he, as he kissed her burning forehead; “I was the cause of all this. Yes, Lizzy, I know it, but I had been staving off this hour for many and many a year. I felt in my heart that you were the only one in all the world who could console or cheer me, and yet I was satisfied to forego it all—to deny myself what I yearned after—just to spare you.”
The words came with a slow and faltering utterance from him, and his lips quivered when he had done speaking.
“I ‘m not quite sure the plan was a good one,” said she, in a low voice.
“Nor am I now,” said he, sternly; “but I did it for the best.”
She heaved a heavy sigh, and was silent.
“Mayhap I thought, too,” said he, after a pause, “that when you looked back at all the sacrifices I had made for you, how I toiled and labored,—not as other men toil and labor, for my handicraft was always exercised with a convict ship in the offing—There, you needn’t shudder now; I ‘m here beside you safe. Well, I thought you ‘d say, ‘After all, he gave me every advantage in his power. If he could n’t bestow on me station and riches, he made me equal to their enjoyment if they ever befell me. He didn’t bring me down to his own level, nor to feel the heartburnings of his own daily life, but he made me, in thought and feeling, as good as any lady in the land.’”
“And for what—to what end?” said she, wildly.
“That you might be such, one day, girl,” said he, passionately. “Do you think I have not known every hour, for the last thirty-odd years, what I might have been, had I been trained, and schooled, and taught the things that others know? Have I not felt that I had pluck, daring, energy, and persistence that only wanted knowledge to beat them all, and leave them nowhere? Have I not said to myself, ‘She has every one of these, and she has good looks to boot; and why shouldn’t she go in and carry away the cup?’ And do you think, when I said that, that I was n’t striking a docket of bankruptcy against my own heart forever? for to make you great was to make me childless!”
Lizzy covered her face with her hands, but never uttered a word.
“I did n’t need any one to tell me,” resumed he, fiercely, “that training you up in luxury and refinement was n’t the way to make you satisfied with poverty, or proud of such a father as myself. I knew deuced well what I was preparing for myself there. ‘But no matter,’ I said, ‘come what will, she shall have a fair start of it. Show me the fellow will try a balk,—show me the man will cross the course while she’s running.’”
Startled by the thick and guttural utterance of his words, Lizzy removed her hands from her face, and stared eagerly at him. Strongly shaken by passion as he was, every line and lineament tense with emotion, there was a marvellous resemblance between her beautiful features and the almost demoniac savagery of his. Had he not been at her side, the expression was only that of intense pain on a face of surpassing beauty, but, seen through the baneful interpretation of his look, she seemed the type of a haughty nature spirited by the very wildest ambition.
“Ay, girl,” said he, with a sigh, “you ‘ve cost me more than money or money’s worth; and if I ever come to have what they call a ‘conscience,’ I ‘ll have an ugly score to settle on your account.”
“Oh, dearest father!” cried she, bitterly, “do not wring my heart by such words as these.”
“There, you shall hear no more of it,” said he, withdrawing his hand from her grasp and crossing his arm on his breast.
“Nay,” said she, fondly, “you shall tell me all and everything. It has cost you heavily to make this confidence to me. Let us try if it cannot requite us both. I know the worst. No?” cried she, in terror, as he shook his head; “why, what is there remains behind?”
“How shall I tell you what remains behind?” broke he in, sternly; “how shall I teach you to know the world as I know it,—to feel that every look bent on me is insult,—every word uttered as I pass a sarcasm,—that fellows rise from the table when I sit down at it? and though, now and then, I ‘m lucky enough to catch one who goes too far, and make him a warning to others, they can do enough to spite me, and yet never come within twelve paces of me. I went over to Neuwied yesterday to fetch my letters from the post. You ‘d fancy that in a little village on this untravelled bank of the Rhine I might have rested an hour to bait my horse and eat my breakfast unmolested and without insult. You ‘d say that in a secluded spot like that I would be safe. Not a bit of it. Scandal has its hue and cry, and every man that walks the earth is its agent. Two young fellows fresh from England—by their dress, their manner, and their bad French, I judged them to be young students from Oxford or Cambridge—breakfasted in the same room with me, and deeming me a foreigner, and therefore—for it is a right English conclusion—unable to understand them, talked most freely of events and people before me. I paid little attention to their vapid talk till my ear caught the name of Beecher. They were discussing him and a lady who had been seen in his company at Aix-la-Chapelle. Yes, they had seen her repeatedly in her rides and drives, followed her to the Cursaal, and stared at her at the opera. They were quite enthusiastic about her beauty, and only puzzled to know who this mysterious creature might be that looked like a queen and dressed like a queen. One averred she was not Beecher’s sister,—the peerage told them that; as little was she his wife. Then came the other and last alternative. And I had to sit still and listen to every pro and con of this stupid converse,—their miserable efforts to reason, or their still more contemptible attempts to jest, and dare not stand up before them and say, ‘Hold your slanderous tongues, for she is my daughter,’ because, to the first question they would put to me, I must say, ‘My name is Davis—Christopher Davis’—ay, ‘Grog Davis,’ if they would have it so. No, no, girl, all your beauty, all your grace, all your fascinations would not support such a name,—the best horse that ever won the Derby will break down if you overweight him; and so I had to leave my breakfast uneaten and come away how I could. For one brief moment I was irresolute. I felt that if I let them off so easily I ‘d pine and fret over it after, and maybe give way to passion some other time with less excuse; but my thoughts came back to you, Lizzy, and I said, ‘What signifies about me? I have no object, no goal in life, but her. She must not be talked of, nor made matter for newspaper gossip. She will one day or other hold a place at which slander and malevolence only talk in whispers, and even these must be uttered with secrecy!’ I could n’t help laughing as I left the room. One of them declined to eat salad because it was unwholesome. Little he knew on what a tiny chance it depended whether that was to be his last breakfast. The devilish pleasure of turning back and telling him so almost overcame my resolution.”
“There was, then, an impropriety in my living at Aix as I did?” asked Lizzy, calmly.
“The impropriety, as you call it, need not have been notorious,” said he, in angry confusion. “If people will attract notice by an ostentatious display,—horses, equipage, costly dressing, and so on,—the world will talk of them. You could n’t know this, but Beecher did. It was his unthinking folly drew these bad tongues on you. It is a score he ‘ll have to settle with me yet.”
“But, dearest papa, let me bear the blame that is my due. It was I—I myself—who encouraged, suggested these extravagances. I fancied myself possessed of boundless wealth; he never undeceived me; nay, he would not even answer my importunate questions as to my family, my connections, whence we came, and of what county.”
“If he had,” muttered Grog, “I ‘d be curious to have heard his narrative.”
“I saw, at last, that there was a secret, and then I pressed him no more.”
“And you did well. Had you importuned, and had he yielded, it had been worse for him.”
“Just as little did I suspect,” continued she, rapidly, “that any reproach could attach to my living in his society; he was your friend; it was at your desire he accepted this brief guardianship; he never, by a word, a look, transgressed the bounds of respectful courtesy; and I felt all the unconstrained freedom of old friendship in our intercourse.”
“All his reserve and all your delicacy won’t silence evil tongues, girl. I intended you to have stayed a day or two, at most, at Aix. You passed weeks there. Whose fault that, you say? Mine,—of course, mine, and no one else’s. But what but my fault every step in your whole life? Why was n’t I satisfied to bring you up in my own station, with rogues and swindlers for daily associates? Then I might have had a daughter who would not be ashamed to own me.”
“Oh, that I am not; that I will never be,” cried she, throwing her arm around his neck. “What has your whole life been but a sacrifice to me? It may be that you rate too highly these great prizes of life; that you attach to the station you covet for me a value I cannot concur in. Still, I feel that it was your love for me prompted this hope, and that while you trod the world darkly and painfully, you purchased a path of light and pleasantness for me.”
“You have paid me for it all by these words,” said he, drawing his hand across his eyes. “I ‘d work as a daily laborer on the road, I’d be a sailor before the mast, I’d take my turn with the chain-gang and eat Norfolk Island biscuit, if it could help to place you where I seek to see you.”
“And what is this rank to which you aspire so eagerly?”
“I want you to be a peeress, girl. I want you to be one of the proudest guild the world ever yet saw or heard of; to have a station so accredited that every word you speak, every act you do, goes forth with its own authority.”
“But stay!” broke she in, “men’s memories will surely carry them back to who I was.”
“Let them, girl. Are you the stuff to be chilled by that? Have I made you what you are, that you cannot play their equal? There are not many of them better looking; are there any cleverer or better informed? Even those Oxford boys said you looked like an empress. If insult will crush you, girl, you ‘ve got little of my blood in you.”
Lizzy’s face flushed scarlet, and her eyes glittered wildly, as they seemed to say, “Have no fears on that score.” Then, suddenly changing to an ashy pallor, and in a voice trembling with intense feeling, she said: “But why seek out an existence of struggle and conflict? It is for me and my welfare that all your anxieties are exercised. Is it not possible that these can be promoted without the dangerous risk of this ambition? You know life well; tell me, then, are there not some paths a woman may tread for independence, and yet cause no blush to those who love her best? Of the acquirements you have bestowed upon me, are there not some which could be turned to this account? I could be a governess.”
“Do you know what a governess is, girl?—a servant in the garb of a lady; one whose mind has been cultivated, not to form resources for herself, but to be drained and drawn on by others. They used to kill a serf, in the middle ages, that a noble might warm his feet in the hot entrails; our modern civilization is satisfied by driving many a poor girl crazy, to cram some stupid numbskull with a semblance of knowledge. You shall not be a governess.”
“There is the stage, then,” cried she. “I’m vain enough to imagine I should succeed there.”
“I’ll not hear of it,” broke in Davis, passionately. “If I was certain you could act like Siddons herself, you should not walk the boards. I know what a theatre is. I know the life of coarse familiarity it leads to. The corps is a family gathered together like what jockeys call ‘a scratch team,’—a wheeler here, and a leader there, with just smartness enough to soar above the level of a dull audience, crammed with the light jest of low comedy, and steered by no higher ambition than a crowded benefit, or a junketing at Greenwich. How would you consort with these people?”
“Still, if I achieved success—”
“I won’t have it,—that’s enough. I tell you, girl, that there is but one course for you. You must be declared winner at the stand-house before you have been seen on the ground. If you have to run the gauntlet through all the slanders and stories they will rake up of me,—if, before you reach the goal, you have to fight all the lost battles of my life over again,—you ‘ll never see the winning-post.”
“And is it not better to confront the storm, and risk one’s chances with the elements, than suffer shipwreck at once? I tell you, father,” cried she, eagerly, “I ‘ll face all the perils you speak of, boldly; I’ll brave insolence, neglect, sarcasm,—what they will,—only let me feel one honest spot in my heart, and be able to say to myself, ‘You have toiled lowly, and fared ill; you have dared a conflict and been worsted; but you have not made traffic of your affections, nor bought success by that which makes it valueless.’”
“These are the wild romances of a girl’s fancy,” said Davis. “Before a twelvemonth was over, you could n’t say, on your oath, whether you had married for love or interest, except that poverty might remind you of the one, and affluence suggest the other. Do you imagine that the years stop short with spring, and that one is always in the season of expectancy? No, no; months roll along, and after summer comes autumn, and then winter, and the light dress you fancied that you never need change would make but scanty clothing.”
“But if I am not able to bring myself to this?”
“Are you certain you will be able to bring me to worse?” said he, solemnly. “Do you feel, Lizzy, as if you could repay my long life of sacrifice and struggle by what would undo them all? Do you feel strong enough to say, ‘My old father was a fool to want to make me better than himself; I can descend to the set he is ashamed of; and, more still, I can summon courage to meet taunts and insults on him, which, had I station to repel them from, had never been uttered’?”
“Oh, do not tempt me this way!” cried she, bitterly.
“But I will, girl; I will leave nothing unsaid that may induce you to save yourself from misery, and me from disgrace. I tell you, girl, if I face the world again, it must be with such security as only you can give me,—you, a lady high in rank and position, can then save me. My enemies will know that their best game will not be to ruin me.”
“And are you sure it would save you?” said she, sternly and coldly.
“I am,” said he, in a voice like her own.
“Will you take a solemn oath to me that you see no other road out of these difficulties, whatever they are, than by my doing this?”
“I will swear it as solemnly as ever words were sworn. I believe—before Heaven I say it—that there’s not another chance in life by which your future lot can be secured.”
“Do not speak of mine; think solely of your fortunes, and say if this alone can save them.”
“Just as firmly do I say, then, that once in the position I mean, you can rescue me out of every peril. You will be rich enough to pay some, powerful enough to promote others, great enough to sway and influence all.”
“Good God! what have you done, then, that it is only by sacrificing all my hopes of happiness that you can be ransomed?” cried she, with a burst of irrepressible passion.
“You want a confession, then,” said Davis, in a tone of most savage energy; “you ‘d like to hear my own indictment of myself. Well, there are plenty of counts in it.”
“Stand forward, Kit Davis. You are charged with various acts of swindling and cheating,—light offences, all of them,—committed in the best of company, and in concert with honorable and even noble colleagues. By the virtue of your oath, Captain Davis, how many horses have you poisoned, how many jockeys have you drugged, what number of men have you hocussed at play, what sums have you won from others in a state of utter insensibility? Can you state any case where you enforced a false demand by intimidation? Can you charge your memory with any instance of shooting a man who accused you of foul play? What names besides your own have you been in the habit of signing to bills? Have you any revelations to make about stock transferred under forgery? Will you kiss the book, and say that nineteen out of twenty at the hulks have not done a fiftieth part of what you have done? Will you solemnly take oath that there are not ten, fifteen, twenty charges, which might be prosecuted against you, to transportation for life? and are there not two—or, certainly, is there not one—with a heavier forfeiture on it? Are there not descriptions of you in almost every police bureau in Europe, and photographic likenesses, too, on frontier passport-offices of little German States, that Hesse and Cassel and Coburgh should not be ravaged by the wolf called Grog Davis?”
“And if this be so, to what end do I sacrifice myself?” cried she, in bitter anguish. “Were it not better to seek out some far-away land where we cannot be traced? Let us go to America, to Australia,—I don’t care how remote it be,—the country that will shelter us—”
“Not a step. I’ll not budge out of Europe; win or lose, here I stay! Do as I tell you, girl, and the game is our own. It has been my safety this many a year that I could compromise so many in my own fall. Well, time has thinned the number marvellously. Many have died. The Cholera, the Crimea, the Marshalsea, broken hearts, and what not, have done their work; and of the few remaining, some have grown indifferent to exposure, others have dropped out of view, and now it would be as much as I could do to place four or five men of good names in the dock beside me. That ain’t enough. I must have connections.
“I want those relations that can’t afford disgrace. Let me only have them, they ‘ll take care of their own reputations. You don’t know, but I know, what great folk can do in England. There ‘s not a line in the Ten Commandments they could n’t legalize with an Act of Parliament. They can marry and unmarry, bind and loosen, legitimize or illegitimize, by a vote ‘of the House;’ and by a vote of society they can do just as much: make a swindling railroad contractor the first man in London, and, if they liked it, and saw it suited their book, they could make Kit Davis a member of White’s, or the Carlton; and once they did it, girl, they ‘d think twice before they ‘d try to undo it again. All I say is, give me a Viscount for a son-in-law, and see if I don’t ‘work the oracle.’ Let me have just so much backing as secures a fair fight, and my head be on’t if they don’t give in before I do! They ‘re very plucky with one another, girl, because they keep within the law; but mark how they tremble before the fellow that does n’t mind the law,—that goes through it, at one side of it, or clean over it. That’s the pull I have over them. The man that don’t mind a wetting can always drag another into the water; do you see that?”
Davis had now so worked upon himself that he walked the room with hasty steps, his cheeks burning, and his eyes wildly, fiercely glaring. Amongst the traits which characterize men of lawless and depraved lives, none is more remarkable than the boastful hardihood with which they will at times deploy all the resources of their iniquity, even exaggerating the amount of the wrongs they have inflicted on society. There is something actually satanic in their exultation over a world they have cheated, bullied, injured, and insulted, so that, in their infernal code, honesty and trustfulness seem only worthy of contempt, and he alone possessed of true courage who dares and defies the laws that bind his fellow-men.
Davis was not prone to impulsiveness; very few men were less the slaves of rash or intemperate humors. He had been reared in too stern a school to let mere temper master him; but his long practised self-restraint deserted him here. In his eagerness to carry his point, he was borne away beyond all his prudence, and once launched into the sea of his confessions, he wandered without chart or compass. Besides this, there was that strange, morbid sense of vanity which is experienced in giving a shock to the fears and sensibilities of another. The deeper the tints of his own criminality, the more terrible the course he had run in life, so much the more was he to be feared and dreaded. If he should fail to work upon her affections, he might still hope to extract something from her terror; for who could say of what a man like him was not capable? And last of all, he had thrown off the mask, and he did not care to retain a single rag of the disguise he so long had worn; thus was it, then, that he stood before her in all the strong light of his iniquities,—a criminal, whose forfeitures would have furnished Guilt for fifty.
“Shall I go on?” said he, in a voice of thick and labored utterance, “or is this enough?”
“Oh, is it not enough?” cried she, bitterly.
“You asked me to tell you all,—everything,—and now that you ‘ve only caught a passing glimpse of what I could reveal, you start back affrighted. Be it so; there are, at least, no concealments between us now; and harsh as my lesson has been, it is not a whit harsher than if the world had given it I ‘ve only one word more to say, girl,” said he, as he drew nigh the door and held his hand on the lock; “if it be your firm resolve to reject this fortune, the sooner you let me know it the better. I have said all that I need say; the rest is within your own hands; only remember that if such be your determination, give me the earliest notice, for I, too, must take my measures for the future.”
If there was nothing of violence in the manner he uttered these words, there was a stern, impassive serenity that made them still more impressive; and Lizzy, without a word of reply, buried her face between her hands and wept.
Davis stood irresolute; for a moment it seemed as if his affection had triumphed, for he made a gesture as though he would approach her; then, suddenly correcting himself with a start, he muttered, below his breath, “It is done now,” and left the room.
CHAPTER XIV. SOME DAYS AT GLENGARIFF
The little Hermitage of Glengariff, with its wooded park, its winding river, its deep solitudes fragrant with wild-rose and honeysuckle, is familiar to my reader. He has lingered there with me, strolling through leafy glades, over smooth turf, catching glimpses of blue sea through the dark foliage, and feeling all the intense ecstasy of a spot that seemed especially created for peaceful enjoyment. What a charm was in those tangled pathways, overhung with jessamine and arbutus, or now flanked by moss-clad rock, through whose fissures small crystal rivulets trickled slowly down into little basins beneath. How loaded the air with delicious perfume; what a voluptuous sense of estrangement from all passing care crept over one as he stole noiselessly along over the smooth sward, and drank in the mellow blackbird’s note, blended with the distant murmur of the rippling river! And where is it all now? The park is now traversed in every direction with wide, unfinished roads; great open spaces appear at intervals, covered with building materials; yawning sand-quarries swarming with men; great brick-fields smoking in all the reeking oppression of that filthy manufacture; lime-kilns spreading their hateful breath on every side; vast cliffs of slate and granite-rock, making the air resound with their discordant crash, with all the vulgar tumult of a busy herd. If you turn seaward, the same ungraceful change is there: ugly and misshapen wharfs have replaced the picturesque huts of the fishermen; casks and hogsheads and bales and hampers litter the little beach where once the festooned net was wont to hang, and groups of half-drunken sailors riot and dispute where once the merry laugh of sportive childhood was all that woke the echoes. If the lover of the picturesque could weep tears of bitter sorrow over these changes, to the man of speculation and progress they were but signs of a glorious prosperity. The Grand Glengariff Villa Allotment and Marine Residence Company was a splendid scheme, whose shares were eagerly sought after at a high premium. Mr. Dunn must assuredly have lent all his energies to the enterprise, for descriptions of the spot were to be found throughout every corner of the three kingdoms. Colored lithographs and stereoscopes depicted its most seductive scenes through the pages of popular “weeklies,” and a dropping fire of interesting paragraphs continued to keep up the project before the public through the columns of the daily press. An “Illustrated News” of one week presented its subscribers with an extra engraving of the “Yachts entering Glengariff harbor after the regatta;” the next, it was a finished print of the “Lady Augusta Arden laying the foundation-stone of the Davenport Obelisk.” At one moment the conflict between wild nature and ingenious art would be shown by a view of a clearing in Glengariff forest, where the solid foundations of some proud edifice were seen rising amidst prostrate pines and fallen oak-trees, prosaic announcements in advertising columns giving to these pictorial devices all the solemn stability of fact, so that such localities as “Arden Terrace,” “Lackington Avenue,” “Glengariff Crescent,” and “Davenport Heights” became common and familiar to the public ear.
The imaginative literature of speculation—industrial fiction it might be called—has reached a very high development in our day. Not content with enlisting all the graces of fancy in the cause of enterprise, heightening the charms of scenery and aiding the interests of romance by historic association, it actually allies itself with the slighter infirmities of our social creed, and exalts the merits of certain favored spots by the blessed assurance that they are patronized by our betters. Amongst the many advantages fortune bestowed upon the grand Glengariff scheme was conspicuously one,—Dukes had approved, and Earls admired it “We are happy to learn,” said the “Post,” “that the Marquis of Duckington has intrusted the construction of his marine villa at Glengariff to the exquisite skill and taste of Sir Jeffrey Blocksley, who is, at present, engaged in preparing Noodleton Hall for his Grace the Duke of Rowood, at the same charming locality.” In the “Herald” we find: “The Earl of Hanaper is said to have paid no less than twelve thousand guineas for the small plot of land in which his bathing-lodge at Glengariff is to stand. It is only right to mention that the view from his windows will include the entire bay, from the Davenport Obelisk to Dunn Lighthouse,—a prospect unequalled, we venture to assert, in Europe.” And, greater than these, the “Chronicle” assures us, the arrival of a Treasury Lord, accompanied by the Chairman of the Board of Works, on Monday last, at Glengariff, proclaimed the gracious intention of her Majesty to honor this favored spot by selecting it for a future residence. “‘Queen’s Cot,’ as it will be styled, will stand exactly on the site formerly occupied by the late residence of Lord Glengariff, well known as the Hermitage, and be framed and galleried in wood in the style so frequently seen in the Tyrol.”
Where is the born Briton would not feel the air balmier and the breeze more zephyr-like if he could see that it waved a royal standard? Where the Anglo-Saxon who would not think the sea more salubrious that helped to salt a duke? Where the alley that was not cooler if a marquis walked beneath its shadow? It is not that honest John Bull seeks the intimacy or acquaintance of these great folk; he has no such weakness or ambition,—he neither aspires to know or be known of them; the limit of his desire is to breathe the same mountain air, to walk the same chain pier, to be fed by their poulterer and butcher, and, maybe, buried by their undertaker. Were it the acquaintanceship he coveted, were it some participation in the habits of refined and elegant intercourse, far be it from us to say one word in disparagement of such ambition, satisfied, as we are, that in all that concerns the enjoyment of society, for the charms of a conversation where fewest prejudices prevail, where least exaggerations are found, where good feeling is rarely, good taste never, violated, the highest in rank are invariably the most conspicuous. But, unhappily, these are not the prizes sought after; the grand object being attained if the Joneses and Simpkinses can spend their autumn in the same locality with titled visitors, bathe in the same tides, and take their airings at the same hours. What an unspeakable happiness might it yield them to know they had been “bored” by the same monotony, and exhausted by the same ennuis!
They who were curious in such literature fancied they could detect the fine round hand of Mr. Hankes in the glowing descriptions of Glengariff. Brought up at the feet of that Gamaliel of appraisers, George Robins, he really did credit to his teachings. Nor was it alone the present delights of the spot he dwelled upon, but expatiated on the admirable features of an investment certain to realize, eventually, two or three hundred per cent It was, in fact, like buying uncleared land in the Bush, upon which, within a few years, streets and squares were to be found, purchasing for a mere nominal sum whole territories that to-morrow or next day were to be sold as building lots and valued by the foot.
As in a storm the tiniest creeks and most secluded coves feel in their little bays the wild influence that prevails without, and see their quiet waters ruffled and wave-tossed, so, too, prosperity follows the same law, and spreads its genial sunshine in a wide circle around the spot it brightens. For miles and miles along the shore the grand Glengariff scheme diffused the golden glory of its success. Little fishing-villages, solitary cottages in sequestered glens, lonely creeks, whose yellow strands had seldom seen a foot-track,—all felt it. The patient habits of humble industry seemed contemptible to those who came back to their quiet homesteads after seeing the wondrous doings at Glengariff; and marvellous, indeed, were the narratives of sudden fortunes. One had sold his little “shebeen” for more gold than he knew how to count; another had become rich by the price of the garden before his door; the shingly beach seemed paved with precious stones, the rocks appeared to have grown into bullion. How mean and despicable seemed daily toil; the weary labor of the field, the precarious life of the fisherman, in presence of such easy prosperity, were ignoble drudgery. It savored of superior intelligence to exchange the toil of the hands for the exercise of speculative talents, and each began to compute what some affluent purchaser might not pay for this barren plot, what that bleak promontory might not bring in this market of fanciful bidders.
Let us note the fact that the peasant was not a little amused by the absurd value which the rich man attached to objects long familiar and unprized by himself. The picturesque and the beautiful were elements so totally removed from all his estimate of worth, that he readily ascribed to something very like insanity the great man’s fondness for them. That a group of stone pines on a jutting cliff, a lone and rocky island, a ruined wall, an ancient well canopied by a bower of honeysuckle, should be deemed objects of price, appeared to be the most capricious of all tastes; and, in his ignorance as to what imparted this value, he glutted the market with everything that occurred to him. Spots of ground the least attractive, tenements occupying the most ill-chosen sites, ugly and misshapen remains of cottages long deserted, were all vaunted as fully as good or better than their neighbors had sold for thousands. It must be owned, the market price of any article seemed the veriest lottery imaginable. One man could actually find no purchaser for four acres of the finest potato-garden in the county; another got a hundred guineas for his good-will of a bit of stony land that wouldn’t feed a goat; here was a slated house no one would look at, there was a mud hovel a Lord and two Members of Parliament were outbidding each other over these three weeks. Could anything be more arbitrary or inexplicable than this? In fact, it almost seemed as if the old, the ruinous, the neglected, and the unprofitable had now usurped the place of all that was neat, orderly, or beneficial.
If we have suffered ourselves to be led into these remarks, they are not altogether digressionary. The Hermitage, we have said, was doomed. Common report alleged that the Queen had selected the spot for her future residence, and of a truth it was even worthy of such a destiny. Whether in reality royalty had made the choice, or that merely it was yet a speculation in hope of such an event, we cannot say, but an accomplished architect had already begun the work of reconstruction, and more than two-thirds of the former building were now demolished. The fragment that still remained was about the oldest part of the cottage, and not the least picturesque. It was a little wing with three gables to the front, the ancient framework, of black oak, quaintly ornamented with many a tasteful device and grim decoration. A little portico, whose columns were entirely concealed by the rich foliage of a rhododendron, stood before the windows, whose diamond panes told of an era when glass bore a very different value; a gorgeous flower-plat, one rich expanse of rare tulips and ranunculi, sloped from the portico to the river, over which a single plank formed a bridge. The stream, which was here deep and rock-bottomed, could be barely seen between the deep hanging branches of the weeping-ash; but its presence might be recognized by the occasional plash of a leaping trout, or the still louder stroke of a swan’s wing as he sailed in solemn majesty over his silent domain. So straggling and wide-spreading had been the ancient building, that, although a part of the condemned structure, the clank of the mason’s trowel and the turmoil of the falling materials could scarcely be heard in this quiet, sequestered spot. Here Sybella Kellett still lived,—left behind by her great protectors,—half in forgetfulness. Soon after the triumph of the Ossory Bank they had removed to Dublin, thence to London, where they now awaited the passage of a special bill to make the Glen-gariff allotment scheme a chartered company. Although the great turn in the fortunes of Glengariff had transmitted to other hands the direction and guidance of events there, her zeal, energy, and, above all, her knowledge of the people, especially marked her out as one whose services were most valuable. English officials, new to Ireland and its ways, quickly discovered the vast superiority she possessed over them in all dealings with the peasantry, whose prejudices she understood, and whose modes of thought were familiar to her. By none were her qualities more appreciated than by Mr. Hankes. There was a promptitude and decision in all she did, a ready-witted intelligence to encounter whatever difficulty arose, and a bold, purpose-like activity of character about her that amazed and delighted that astute gentleman.
“She ‘s worth us all, sir,” he would say to Sir Elkanah Paston, the great English engineer,—“worth us all. Her suggestions are priceless; see how she detected the cause of those shifting sands in the harbor, and supplied the remedy at once; mark how she struck out that line of road from the quarries; think of her transplanting those pinasters five-and-thirty feet high, and not a failure,—not one failure amongst them; and there’s the promontory, now the most picturesque feature of the bay: and as to those terraced gardens that she laid out last week, I vow and declare Sir Joseph himself couldn’t have done it better. And then, after a day of labor—riding, perhaps, five-and-twenty or thirty miles—she ‘ll sit down to her desk and write away half the night.”
If it had not been for one trait, Mr. Hankes would have pronounced her perfection; there was, however, a flaw, which the more he thought over the more did it puzzle him. She was eminently quick-sighted, keen to read motives and appreciate character, and yet with all this she invariably spoiled every bargain made with the people. Instead of taking advantage of their ignorance and inexperience, she was continually on the watch over their interests; instead of endeavoring to overreach them, she was mindful of their advantage, cautiously abstaining from everything that might affect their rights.
“We might have bought up half the county for a song, sir, if it were not for that girl,” Mr. Hankes would say; “she has risen the market on us everywhere. ‘Let us be just,’ she says. I want to be just, Miss Kellett, but just to ourselves.”
A pleasant phrase is that same one “just to ourselves;” but Mr. Hankes employed it like many other people, and never saw its absurdity.
Now, Sybella Kellett fancied that justice had a twofold obligation, and found herself very often the advocate of the poor man, patiently sustaining his rights, and demanding their recognition. Confidence, we are told by a great authority, is a plant of slow growth, and yet she acquired it in the end. The peasantry submitted to her claims the most complex and involved; they brought their quaint old contracts, half illegible by time and neglect; they recited, and confirmed by oral testimony, the strangest possible of tenures; they recounted long narratives of how they succeeded to this holding, and what claims they could prefer to that; histories that would have worn out almost any human patience to hear, and especially trying to one whose apprehension was of the quickest. And yet she would listen to the very end, make herself master of the case, and give it a deep and full consideration. This done, she decided; and to that decision none ever objected. Whatever her decree, it was accepted as just and fair, and even if a single disappointed or discontented suitor could have been found, he would have shrunk from avowing himself the opponent of public opinion.
It was, however, by the magic of her sympathy, by the secret charm of understanding their natures, and participating in every joy and sorrow of their hearts, that she gained her true ascendancy over them. There was nothing feigned or factitious in her feeling for them; it was not begotten of that courtly tact which knows names by heart, remembers little family traits, and treasures up an anecdote; it was true, heart-felt, honest interest in their welfare. She had watched them long and closely; she knew that the least amiable trait in their natures was also that which oftenest marred their fortunes,—distrust; and she set herself vigorously to work to uproot this vile, pernicious weed, the most noxious that ever poisoned the soil of a human heart. By her own truthful dealings with them she inspired truth, by her fairness she exacted fairness, and by the straightforward honesty of her words and actions they grew to learn how far easier and pleasanter could be the business of life where none sought to overreach his neighbor.
To such an extent had her influence spread that it became at last well-nigh impossible to conclude any bargain for land without her co-operation. Unless her award had decided, the peasant could not bring himself to believe that his claim had met a just or equitable consideration; but whatever Miss Bella decreed was final and irrevocable. From an early hour each morning the suitors to her court began to arrive. Under a large damson-tree was placed a table, at which she sat, busily writing away, and listening all the while to their long-drawn-out narratives. It was her rule never to engage in any purchase when she had not herself made a visit to the spot in question, ascertained in person all its advantages and disadvantages, and speculated how far its future value should influence its present price. In this way she had travelled far and near over the surrounding country, visiting localities the wildest and least known, and venturing into districts where a timid traveller had not dared to set foot. It required all her especial acuteness, often-times, to find out—from garbled and incoherent descriptions—the strange and out-of-the-way places no map had ever indicated. In fact, the wild and untravelled country was pathless as a sea, and nothing short of her ready-witted tact had been able to navigate it.
She was, as usual, busied one morning with her peasant levee when Mr. Hankes arrived. He brought a number of letters from the post, and was full of the importance so natural to him who has the earliest intelligence.
“Great news, Miss Bella,” said he, gayly,—“very great news. One of the French Princes announces his intention to build a villa here. He requires a small park of some forty or fifty acres, access to the sea, and a good anchorage for his yacht. This note here will give all particulars. Here is an application from Sir Craven Tollemache; he wants us to build him a house on any picturesque site near the shore, and contracts to take it on lease. Here is a demand for one hundred shares, fifty to be exchanged for shares in the Boquantilla Cobalt and Zinc Mines, now at a premium. Kelsal and Waterline wish to know what facilities we would afford them to establish yacht-building in Crooke’s Harbor. If liberally dealt with, they propose to expend fifty thousand on permanent improvements. Lord Drellington is anxious for a house in Lackington Crescent. I believe he is too late. There are also seven applications for ‘Arden House,’ which, I fancy, has been promised to Sir Peter Parkeswith. Founde’s Cliff, too, is eagerly run after; that sketch you made of it has been a great success. We must extend our territories, Miss Bella,—we must widen our frontier; never was there such a hit. It is the grandest operation of Mr. Dunn’s life. Seven hundred and twenty-three thousand pounds,—one-fourth already paid, the remainder available at short calls. Those Welsh people, Plimnon and Price, are eager about our lead-mine, and we can run up the shares there to sixty-five or seventy whenever we please. Here, too, are the plans for the new Casino and Baths. This is the sketch of a Hydropathic Establishment,—a pet scheme of Lord Glengariffs; we must let him have it. And here is Truevane’s report about the marble. It will serve admirably for every purpose but statuary. Our slate slabs are pronounced the finest ever imported. We mean to flag the entire terrace along the sea with them. This is from Dunn himself; it is very short, and hurriedly written: ‘Chevass will move the second reading of our bill on Tuesday. I have spoken to the Chancellor, and it is all right. Before it goes to the Lords we must have a new issue of shares. I want, at least, two hundred and fifty thousand by the end of the year.’ He says nothing about politics; indeed, he is so occupied with gayeties and fine company, he has little time for business. He only mentions that ‘till we have done with this stupid war we cannot hope for any real extension to our great enterprise.’”
“And does he put our miserable plottings here in competition with the noble struggle of our glorious soldiers in the Crimea?” cried she, now breaking silence for the first time.
Mr. Hankes actually started with the energy of her manner, and for a moment could scarcely collect himself to reply.
“Well, you know, Miss Bella,” said he, faltering at every word, “we are men of peace,—we are people engaged in the quiet arts of trade,—we cannot be supposed indifferent to the interests our lives are passed in forwarding.”
“But you are Englishmen, besides, sir; not to say you are brothers and kinsmen of the gallant men who are fighting our enemies.”
“Very true, Miss Bella,—very true; they have their profession and we have ours. We rejoice in their success as we participate in all the enthusiasm of their gallantry. I give you my word of honor, I could n’t help filling out an extra glass of sherry yesterday to the health of that fine fellow who dashed at the Russian staff and carried off a colonel prisoner. You saw it, I suppose, in the papers?”
“No. Pray let me hear it,” said she, eagerly.
“Well, it was an observation—a ‘reconnaissance’ I think they called it—the Russians were making of the Sardinian lines, and they came so near that a young soldier—an orderly of General La Marmora’s—heard one of them say, ‘Yes, I have the whole position in my head.’ Determining that so dangerous a fellow should not get back to head-quarters, he watched him closely, till he knew he could not be mistaken in him, and then setting off at speed,—for he was mounted,—he crossed the Tchernaya a mile or so further up, and, waiting for them, he lay concealed in a small copse. His plan was to sell his own life for this officer’s; but whether he relinquished that notion, or that chance decided the event, there’s no knowing. In he dashed, into the midst of them, cut this colonel’s bridle-arm across at the wrist, and, taking his horse’s reins, rode for it with all speed towards his own lines. He got a start of thirty or forty strides before they could rally in pursuit, which they did actually up to the very range of the rifle-pits, and only retired at last when three fell dead or wounded.”
“But he escaped?” cried she.
“That he did, and carried his prisoner safe into the lines, and presented him to the General, modestly remarking, ‘He is safer here than over yonder,’—pointing to Sebastopol; and, strangest part of the whole thing, he turns out to be an Englishman.”
“An Englishman?”
“Yes. He was serving, by some strange accident, on General La Marmora’s staff, as a simple orderly, though evidently a man of some education and position,—one of those wild young bloods, doubtless, that had gone too fast at home, but who really do us no discredit when it comes to a question of pluck and daring.”
“Do us no discredit!” cried she; “and have you nothing more generous to say of one who has asserted the honor of England so nobly in the face of an entire army? Do us no discredit! Why, one such feat as this adds more glory to the nation than all the schemes of all the jobbers who deal in things like these.” And she threw contemptuously from her the colored plans and pictures that littered the table.
“Dear me, Miss Kellett, here’s a whole ink-bottle spilled over the Davenport Obelisk.”
“Do us no discredit!” burst out she again. “Are we really the nation of shopkeepers that France calls us? Have we no pride save in successful bargaining, no glory save in growing rich? Is money-getting so close at the nation’s heart that whatever retards or delays its hoardings savors of misfortune? When you were telling me that anecdote, how I envied the land that owned such a hero; and when you said he was our own,—our countryman; my heart felt bursting with gratitude. Tell me his name.”
“His name,—his name,—how strange that I should have forgotten it; for, as I told you, I toasted his health only yesterday.”
“Yes, you remember the sherry!” said she, bitterly.
Mr. Hankes’s cheek tingled and grew crimson. It was a mood of passionate excitement he had never witnessed in her before, and he was astounded at the change in one usually so calm and self-possessed. It was then in no small confusion that he turned over the letter before him to find something which might change the topic in discussion.
“Ah, here is a matter,” said he, referring once more to Dunn’s letter. “He says: ‘Beg of Miss Kellett to see a small holding called “Kilmaganagh;” I cannot exactly say where, but it lies to the north of Bantry Bay. I suspect that it possesses few recommendations such as would entitle it to a place in the “scheme;” but, if to be had on reasonable terms, I would be well pleased to obtain it. Driscoll had effected a part purchase, but, having failed to pay up the instalment due last March, his claim lapses. By the way, can you ascertain for me where this same Driscoll has gone to? It is now above four months since I have heard of him. Trace him, if possible. As to Kilmaganagh, tell Miss K. that she may indulge that generosity she is not indisposed to gratify, and be on this occasion a liberal purchaser.’ He fancies you lean a little to the country-people, Miss Bella,” said Hankes, as he stole a cautious glance at her now heightened color. “I will even consent to what is called a fancy price for the tenement, and certainly not lose it for a hundred or two above its actual value. Look to this, and look to Driscoll. There’s a riddle here, Miss Bella, if we knew how to read it,” said Hankes, as he looked over the few lines once more.
“I have but scant wits to read riddles, Mr. Hankes. Let us see where this place lies.” And she turned to a large map on the table, the paths and cross-paths of which had been marked in different colored inks by her own hand. “I remember the name. There was an old tower called Kilmaganagh Fort, which used to be visible from the bay. Yes, here it is,—a strange, wild spot, too, and, as Mr. Dunn opines, scarcely available for his great scheme.”
“But he has so many great schemes,” said Hankes, with a sly and sidelong glance towards her.
Sybella, however, paid no attention to the remark, but, leaning over the map, continued to trace out the line of route to the spot in question. “By crossing Bantry Bay at Gortalassy, one might save above thirty miles of way. I have been over the road before, and remember it well.”
“And you really mean to undertake the journey?” asked Hankes, in some astonishment.
“Of course I do. I ask nothing better than to be fully occupied, and am well pleased when in so doing I can exchange the desk for the saddle, or, almost better, the stern-sheets of a Bantry Hooker. You are not a woman, and you cannot feel, therefore, the sense of pride inspired by mere utility.”
“I wish I might ask you a favor, Miss Kellett,” said he, after a moment’s thought.
“A favor of me!” said she, laughing, as though the idea amused her.
“Yes,” said he, resuming. “I would beg to be permitted to accompany you on this same journey. I have never been any of these wild, untravelled tracts, and it would be a great additional charm to visit them in your company.”
“So far as I am concerned, I grant you the permission freely; but it were well for you to remember that you must not only be well mounted, but prepared to ride over some rough country. I go, usually, as the crow flies, and, as nearly as I can, the same pace too. Now, between this and Loughbeg, there are, at least, three trying fences: one a wall with a deep drop beyond it, and another a steep bank, where I remember that somebody narrowly escaped having an ugly fall; there’s a small estuary, too, to cross, near Gortalassy. But I am ashamed to enumerate these petty obstacles; such as they are, they are the only ones,—there are none on my part.”
“When do you mean to set out?” asked Hankes, in a tone far less eager than his former question.
“There’s a full moon to-morrow night, so that, leaving this about midnight, we might reach the bay by six or seven o’clock, and then, if we should be fortunate with the wind, arrive at Kilmaganagh by about four o’clock. Taking there three or four hours to see the place, we could start again about eight, or even nine—”
“Good heavens! that gives nothing for repose,—no time to recruit.”
“You forget there are fully five hours on board the boat. I ‘ll not be the least offended if you sleep the entire time. If there ‘s not wind enough to take in a reef, I ‘ll give the tiller to old Mark Spillane, and take a sleep myself.”
“It is really like a Tartar journey,” said the terrified Hankes.
“I have told you the worst of it, I must own,” said she, laughing, “for I feel I have no right to obtain your escort on false pretences.”
“And you would go alone over this long distance,—land and sea?”
“Land and sea are very grand words, Mr. Hankes, for some five-and-twenty miles of heather and a few hours in an open boat; but such as they are, I would go them alone.”
Mr. Hankes would like to have said something complimentary, something flattering, but it did not exactly occur to him how he was to do it. To have exalted her heroism would be like a confession of his own poltroonery; to have seen any surprising evidence of boldness in her daring might possibly reflect upon her delicacy. He felt—none could have felt more thoroughly—that she was very courageous and very full of energy; but, somehow, these were humble aid to propagate that notion,—I had almost said that fallacy. “Only hear me out,” said she, as he tried to interrupt “I began my duties in the most sanguine of all moods. Heaven knows not what dreams I had of a land of abundance and content. Well, I have seen the abundance,—the wealth has really poured in; every one is richer, better fed, clothed, housed, and cared for, and almost in an equal ratio are they grown more covetous, grasping, envious, and malevolent—You won’t let me finish,” cried she, as he showed an increasing impatience. “Well, perhaps, as we stroll along the cliffs to-morrow, you will be more disposed to listen; that is, if I have not already terrified you from accepting the companionship.”
“Oh, no! by no means; but how are we to go,—do we drive?”
“Drive! why, my dear Mr. Hankes, it is only a Kerry pony has either legs or head for the path we must follow. Cast your eye along this coast-line; Jagged and fanciful as it looks, it conveys no notion of its rugged surface of rock, and its wild and darksome precipices. Take my word for it, you have as much to learn of the scenery as of the temperament of the land.”
“But I’d like to go,” repeated he, his accent being marvellously little in accordance with the sentiment.
“Nothing easier, sir. I’ll give orders to have a pony—a most reliable pony—ready for you here to-morrow evening, when I shall expect you at tea.”
Mr. Hankes bowed his grateful acknowledgments.
“I suspect, sir,” said she, playfully, “that I have guessed your reason for this journey.”
“My reason, my dear Miss Kellett,” said he, in confusion,—“my reason is simply the pleasure and honor of your company, and the opportunity of visiting an interesting scene with—with—with—”
“No matter for the compliment; but I began really to imagine that you wished to learn my secret of bargaining with the people; that you wanted to witness one of these contracts you have heard so much of. Well, sir, you shall have it: our sole secret is, we trust each other.”
CHAPTER XV. A BRIDLE-PATH
Sybella Kellett was less than just when she said that the country which lay between the Hermitage and Bantry Bay had few claims to the picturesque. It may possibly have been that she spoke with reference to what she fancied might have been Mr. Hankes’s judgment of such a scene. There was, indeed, little to please an English eye,—no rich and waving woods, no smiling corn-fields, no expanse of swelling lawn or upland of deep meadow; but there was a wild and grand desolation, a waving surface fissured with deep clefts opening on the sea, which boomed in many a cavern far beneath. There were cliffs upright as a wall, hundreds of feet in height, on whose bare summits some rude remains were still traceable,—the fragment of a church, or shrine, or some lone cross, symbol of a faith that dated from centuries back. Heaths of many a gorgeous hue—purple, golden, and azure—clad a surface ever changing, and ferns that would have overtopped a tall horseman mingled their sprayey leaves with the wild myrtle and the arbutus. The moon was at her full as Sybella, accompanied by Mr. Hankes, and followed by an old and faithful groom,—a servant of her father’s in times past,—took her way across this solitary tract.
If my reader is astonished that Mr. Hankes should have offered himself for such an expedition, it is but fair to state that the surprise was honestly shared in by that same gentleman. Was it that he made the offer in some moment of rash enthusiasm; had any impulse of wild chivalry mastered his calmer reason; was it that curious tendency which occasionally seems to sway Cockney natures to ascend mountains, cross dangerous ledges, or peep into volcanic craters? I really cannot aver that any of these was his actual motive, while I have my suspicion that a softer, a gentler, though a deeper sentiment influenced him on this occasion. Mr. Hankes—to use a favorite phrase of his own—“had frequent occasion to remark” Miss Kellett’s various qualities of mind and intelligence; he had noticed in her the most remarkable aptitude for “business.” She wrote and answered letters with a facility quite marvellous; details, however complicated, became by her treatment simple and easy; no difficulties seemed to deter her; and she possessed a gift—one of the rarest and most valuable of all—never to waste a moment on the impracticable, but to address herself, with a sort of intuition, at once, to only such means as could be rendered available.
Now, whether it was that Mr. Hankes anticipated a time when Mr. Dunn, in his greatness, might soar above the meaner cares of a business life,—when, lifted into the Elysian atmosphere of the nobility, he would look down with contemptuous apathy at the straggles and cares of enterprise,—or whether Mr. Hankes, from sources of knowledge available peculiarly to himself, knew that the fortunes of that great man were not built upon an eternal foundation, but shared in that sad lot which threatens all things human with vicissitude; whether stern facts and sterner figures taught him that all that splendid reputation, all that boundless influence, all that immense riches, might chance, one day or other, to be less real, less actual, and less positive than the world now believed them to be; whether, in a word, Mr. Hankes felt that Fortune, having smiled so long and so blandly on her favorite, might not, with that capriciousness so generally ascribed to her, assume another and very different aspect,—whatever the reason, in short, he deemed the dawn of his own day was approaching, and that, if only true to himself, Mr. Hankes was sure to be the man of the “situation,”—the next great star in the wide hemisphere that stretches from the Stock Exchange to—the Marshalsea, and includes all from Belgravia to Boulogne-sur-Mer.
Miss Kellett’s abilities, her knowledge, her readiness, her tact, a certain lightness of hand in the management of affairs that none but a woman ever possesses, and scarcely one woman in ten thousand combines with the more male attributes of hard common-sense, pointed her out to Mr. Hankes as one eminently suited to aid his ambition. Now, men married for money every day in the week; and why not marry for what secured not alone money, but fame, station, and influence? Mr. Hankes was a widower; his own experience of married life had not been fortunate. The late Mrs. Hankes was a genius, and had the infirmities of that unsocial class; she despised her husband, quarrelled with him, lampooned him in a book, and ran off with the editor of a small weekly review that eulogized her novel. It was supposed she died in Australia,—at least, she never came back again; and as the first lieutenant gravely confirms the sun’s altitude when he mutters, “Make it noon,” so Mr. Hankes, by as simple a fiat, said, “Make her dead,” and none disputed him. At all events, he was a widower by brevet, and eligible to be gazetted a husband at any moment.
Miss Kellett possessed many personal attractions, nor was he altogether insensible to them; but he regarded them, after all, pretty much as the intended purchaser of an estate might have regarded an ornamental fish-pond or a flower-garden on the property,—something, in short, which increased the attraction, but never augmented the value. He was glad they were there, though they by no means would have decided him to the purchase. He knew, besides, that the world set a high price on these things, and he was not sorry to possess what represented value of any kind. It was always scrip, shares, securities, even, although one could not well say how, when, or where the dividend was to be paid.
There was another consideration, too, weighed materially with him. The next best thing, in Mr. Hankes’s estimation, to marrying into a good connection, was to have none at all,—no brothers, no sisters-in-law, no cousins-german or otherwise, no uncles, aunts, or any good friends of parental degree. Now, except a brother in the Crimea,—with an excellent chance of being killed,—Sybella had none belonging to her. In the happy phrase of advertisements, she had no encumbrances. There was no one to insist upon this or that settlement; none to stipulate for anything in her favor; and these were, to his thinking, vast advantages. Out of these various considerations our reader is now to fashion some of the reasons which induced Mr. Hankes to undertake an excursion alike foreign to his taste and uncongenial to his habits; but as a placeman would not decline the disagreeables of a sea-voyage as the preliminary to reaching the colony he was to govern, so this gentleman consoled himself by thinking that it was the sole penalty attached to a very remunerative ambition.
If Sybella was not without some astonishment at his proposal to accompany her, she never gave herself the slightest trouble to explain the motive. She acceded to his wish from natural courtesy and the desire to oblige, and that was all. He had been uniformly polite and civil in all their intercourse; beyond that, he was not a person whose companionship she would have sought or cared for, and so they rode along, chatting indifferently of whatever came uppermost,—the scene, the road, the season, the condition of the few people who formed the inhabitants of this wild region, and how their condition might possibly be affected by the great changes then in progress near them.
Guarded and cautious as he was in all he said, Mr. Hankes could not entirely conceal how completely he separated, in his own mind, the success of the great scheme and the advantage that might accrue to the people; nor was she slow to detect this reservation. She took too true and just a view of her companion’s temper and tone to approach this theme with the scruples that agitated herself, but at once said,—
“Let us suppose this scheme to be as prosperous as its best friends can wish it, Mr. Hankes; that you all—I mean you great folk, who are directors, chairmen, secretaries, and so forth—become as rich and powerful as you desire, see your shares daily increasing in value, your speculations more and more lucrative, what becomes of the people—the poor man—all this while?”
“Why, of course he participates in all these successes; he grows rich too; he sells what he has to sell at a better market, obtains higher wages for his labor, and shares all our prosperity.”
“Granted. But who is to teach him the best use of this newly acquired prosperity? You, and others like you, have your tastes already formed; the channels are already made in which your affluence is to run: not so with him; abundance may—nay, it will—suggest waste, which will beget worse. Who are to be his guides,—who his examples?”
“Oh, as to that, his increase of fortune will suggest its own appropriate increase of wants. He will be elevated by the requirements of his own advancing condition, and even if he were not, it is not exactly any affair of ours; we do our part when we afford him the means of a higher civilization.”
“I don’t think so. I suspect that not alone do you neglect a duty, but that you inflict a wrong. But come, I will take another alternative; I will suggest—what some are already predicting—that the project will not prove a success.”
“Who says that?” cried Hankes, hastily, and in his haste forgetting his habitual caution of manner.
“Many have said it. Some of those whose opinions I am accustomed to place trust in, have told myself that the speculation is too vast,—disproportioned to the country, undertaken on a scale which nothing short of imperial resources could warrant—”
“But surely you do not credit such forebodings?” broke he in.
“It is of little consequence how far I credit them. I am as nothing in the event. I only would ask, What if all were to fail?—what if ruin were to fall upon the whole undertaking, what is to become of all those who have invested their entire fortunes in the scheme? The great and affluent have many ventures,—they trust not their wealth to one argosy; but how will it be with those who have embarked their all in one vessel?”
Mr. Hankes paused, as if to reflect over his reply, and she continued: “It is a question I have already dared to address to Mr. Dunn himself. I wrote to him twice on the subject. The first time I asked what guarantee could be given to small shareholders,—those, for instance, who had involved their whole wealth in the enterprise. He gave me no answer. To my second application came the dry rejoinder that I had possibly forgotten in whose service I was retained; that I drew my resources from the Earl of Glengariff, and not from the peasantry, whose advocate I had constituted myself.”
“Well?” cried Hankes, curious to hear what turn the correspondence took.
“Well,” said she, smiling gently, “I wrote again. I said it was true I had forgotten the fact of which he reminded me, but I pleaded in excuse that neither the Earl nor her Ladyship had refreshed my memory on the circumstance by any replies to eight, or, I believe, nine letters I sent them. I mentioned, too, that though I could endure the slight of this neglect for myself, I could not put up with it for the sake of those whose interest I watched over. Hear me out,” said she, perceiving that he was about to interrupt. “It had become known in Glengariff that all the little fortune I was possessed of—the few hundred pounds Mr. Dunn had rescued for me out of the wreck of our property—was invested in this scheme. Mr. Dunn counselled this employment of the money, and I consented to it. Now, this trustfulness on my part induced many others to imitate what they deemed my example.”
“And you really did make this investment?” said Hankes, whose eagerness could not brook longer delay.
“Yes,” said she, with a quiet smile, “though, evidently, had I consulted Mr. Hankes, he would never have counselled the step.” After a moment, she resumed, “I have half a mind to tell you how it happened.”
“I pray you let me hear it.”
“Well, it was in this way: Shortly after that affair of the Ossory Bank,—the run for gold, I mean,—I received a few hurried lines from Mr. Dunn, urging me to greater exertion on the score of the Glengariff scheme, and calling upon me to answer certain newspaper insinuations against its solvency, and so forth. Before replying to these attacks, I was, of course, bound to read them; and, shall I confess it, such was the singular force of the arguments they employed, so reasonable did their inferences appear, and so terrible the consequences should the plan prove a failure, that I for the first time perceived that it was by no means impossible the vast superstructure we were raising might be actually on the brink of a volcano. I did not like exactly to tell Mr. Dunn these misgivings; in fact, though I attempted two or three letters to that effect, I could not, without great risk of offending, convey my meaning, and so I reflected and pondered over the matter several days, working my brain to find some extrication from the difficulty. At last, I bethought me of this: Mr. Dunn was my guardian; by his efforts was the small fragment of property that fell to me rescued and saved. What if I were to request him to invest the whole of it in this scheme? Were its solvency but certain, where could the employment of the money be safer or more profitable? If he consented, I might fairly suppose my fears were vain, and my misgivings unfounded. If, however, he showed any reluctance, even backwardness, to the project, the very phrase he might employ to dissuade me would have its especial significance, and I could at once have something to reason upon. Well, I wrote to him, and he answered by the next post: ‘I fully coincide with your suggestion, and, acting on it, you are now the possessor of fifty-four shares in the allotment. As the moment for buying in is favorable, it is a thousand pities you could not make an equally profitable investment for your brother, whose twelve hundred pounds is yielding the very inglorious interest of the bank.’”
“And so you took the shares?” said Hankes, sighing; then added, “But let me see,—at what rate did you buy?”
“I am ashamed to confess, I forget; but I know the shares were high?”
“After the Ossory run,” muttered he,—“that was about September. Shares were then something like one hundred and twenty-seven and a quarter; higher afterwards; higher the whole month of November; shaky towards the end of the year; very shaky, indeed, in January. No, no,” said he to himself, “Dunn ought not to have done it.”
“I perceive,” said she, half smiling, “Mr. Hankes opines that the money had been better in the bank.”
“After all,” continued he, not heeding her remark, “Dunn could n’t do anything else. You own, yourself, that if he had attempted to dissuade you, you would immediately have taken alarm; you ‘d have said, ‘This is all a sham. All these people will find themselves “let in” some fine morning;’ and as Dunn could very readily make good your few hundred pounds, why, he was perfectly justified in the advice he gave.”
“Not when his counsel had the effect of influencing mine,” said she, quickly; “not when it served to make me a perfidious example to others. No, no, Mr. Hankes; if this scheme be not an honest and an upright one, I accept no partnership in its details.”
“I am only putting a case, remember,” said Hankes, hurriedly,—“a possible, but most improbable case. I am supposing that a scheme with the finest prospectus, the best list of directors, the most respectable referees in the empire, to be—what shall I say?—to be sickly,—yes, sickly,—in want of a little tonic treatment, generous diet, and so forth.”
“You ‘ll have to follow me here, Mr. Hankes,” broke in Sybella; “the pathway round this cliff only admits one at a time. Keep close to the rock, and if your head be not steady, don’t look down.”
“Good heavens! we are not going round that precipice!” cried Hankes, in a voice of the wildest terror.
“My servant will lead your horse, if you prefer it,” said she, without answering his question; “and mind your footing, for the moss is often slippery with the spray.”
Sybella made a signal with her whip to the groom, who was now close behind, and then, without awaiting for more, moved on. Hankes watched her as she descended the little slope to the base of a large rock, around which the path wound itself on the very verge of an immense precipice. Even from where he now stood the sea could be seen surging and booming hundreds of feet below; and although the night was calm and still, the ever-restless waves beat heavily against the rocks, and sent masses of froth and foam high into the air. He saw her till she turned the angle of the path, and then she was lost to his view.
“I don’t think I have head for it. I ‘m not used to this kind of thing,” said Hankes, in a voice of helpless despondency to the old groom, who now stood awaiting him to dismount “Is there much danger? Is it as bad as it looks?”
“‘Tis worse when you get round the rock there,” said the groom, “for it’s always going down you are, steeper than the roof of a house, with a shingle footing, and sloping outwards.”
“I’ll not go a step; I ‘ll not venture,” broke in Hankes.
“Indeed, I wouldn’t advise your honor,” said the man, in a tone too sincere to be deemed sarcastic.
“I know my head could n’t bear it,” said he, with the imploring accents of one who entreated a contradiction. But the old groom, too fully convinced of the sentiment to utter a word against it, was now only thinking of following his mistress.
“Wait a moment,” cried Hankes, with an immense effort. “If I were once across this”—he was going to add an epithet, but restrained himself—“this place, is there nothing more of the same kind afterwards?”
“Is n’t there, faith!” cried the man. “Isn’t there the Clunk, where the beast has to step over gullies five-and-thirty or forty feet deep? Isn’t there Tim’s Island, a little spot where you must turn your horse round with the sea four hundred feet under you? Is n’t there the Devil’s Nose—”
“There, there, you need n’t go on, my good fellow; I ‘ll turn back.”
“Look where she is now,” said the man, pointing with his whip to a rocky ledge hundreds of feet down, along which a figure on horseback might be seen creeping slowly along. “‘Tis there, where she’s stealing along now, you need the good head and the quick hand. May I never!” exclaimed he, in terror, “if them isn’t goats that’s coming up to meet her! Merciful Joseph! what’ll she do? There, they are under the horse’s legs, forcing their way through! Look how the devils are rushing all round and about her! If the beast moves an inch—” A wild cry broke from the old man here, for a fragment of rock, displaced by the rushing herd, had just come thundering down the cliff, and splashed into the sea beneath. “The heavens be praised! she’s safe,” muttered he, piously crossing himself; and then, without a word more, and as if angry at his own delay, he pressed his horse forward to follow her.
It was in vain Hankes cried to him to wait,—to stop for only an instant,—that he, too, was ready to go,—not to leave him and desert him there,—that he knew not where to turn him, nor could ever retrace his way,—already the man was lost to view and hearing, and all the vain entreaties were uttered to the winds. As for Sybella, her perilous pathway gave her quite enough to do not to bestow a thought upon her companion; nor, indeed, had she much recollection of him till the old groom overtook her on the sandy beach, and recounted to her, not without a certain touch of humor, Mr. Hankes’s terror and despair.
“It was cruel to leave him, Ned,” said she, trying to repress a smile at the old man’s narrative. “I think you must go back, and leave me to pursue my way alone.”
“Sorra one o’ me will go back to the likes of him. ‘T is for your own self, and ne’er another, I’d be riskin’ my neck in the same spot,” said he, resolutely.
“But what’s to become of him, Ned? He knows nothing of the country; he ‘ll not find his way back to Glengariff.”
“Let him alone; devil a harm he ‘ll come to. ‘T is chaps like that never comes to mischief. He ‘ll wander about there till day breaks, and maybe find his way to Duffs Mill, or, at all events, the boy with the letter-bag from Caherclough is sure to see him.”
Even had this last assurance failed to satisfy Sybella, it was so utterly hopeless a task to overrule old Ned’s resolve that she said no more, but rode on in silence. Not so Ned; the theme afforded him an opportunity for reflecting on English character and habits which was not to be lost.
“I ‘d like to see your brother John turn back and leave a young lady that way,” said he, recurring to the youth whose earliest years he had watched over.
No matter how impatiently, even angrily, Bella replied to the old man’s bigoted preference of his countrymen, Ned persisted in deploring the unhappy accident by which fate had subjected the finer and more gifted race to the control and dominion of an inferior people. To withdraw him effectually from a subject which to an Irish peasant has special attraction, she began to tell him of the war in the East and of her brother Jack, the old man listening with eager delight to the achievements of one he had carried about in his arms as a child. Her mind filled with the wondrous stories of private letters,—the intrepid daring of this one, the noble chivalry of that,—she soon succeeded in winning all his attention. It was singular, however, that of all the traits she recorded, none made such a powerful appeal to the old man’s heart as the generous self-devotion of those women who, leaving home, friends, country, and all, gave themselves up to the care of the sick and wounded. He never wearied of hearing how they braved death in its most appalling shape amidst the pestilential airs of the hospital, in the midst of such horrors as no pen can picture, taking on them the most painful duties, accepting fatigue, exhaustion, and peril as the common incidents of life, braving scenes of agony such as in very recital sickened the heart, descending to all that was menial in their solicitude for some poor sufferer, and all this with a benevolence and a kindness that made them seem less human beings than ministering angels from heaven.
“Oh, Holy Joseph! is n’t it yourself ought to be there?” cried the old man, enthusiastically. “Was there ever your like to give hope to a sick heart? Who ever could equal you to cheer up the sinking spirit, and even make misery bearable? Miss Bella, darling, did you never think of going out?”
“Ay, Ned, a hundred times,” said she, sighing drearily. “I often, too, said to myself, There’s not one of these ladies—for they are ladies born and bred—who has n’t a mother, father, sisters, and brothers dear to her, and to whom she is herself dear. She leaves a home where she is loved, and where her vacant place is daily looked at with sorrow; and yet here am I, who have none to care for, none to miss me, who would carry over the sea with me no sorrows from those I was leaving, for I am friendless,—surely I am well fitted for such a task—”
“Well,” said he, eagerly, as she seemed to hesitate, “well, and why—”
“It was not fear held me back,” resumed she. “It was not that I shrank from the sights and sounds of agony that must have been more terrible than any death; it was simply a hope—a wish, perhaps, more than a hope—that I might be doing service to those at home here, who, if I were to leave them, would not have one on their side. Perhaps I overrated what I did, or could do; perhaps I deemed my help of more value than it really was; but every day seemed to show me that the people needed some one to counsel and to guide them,—to show them where their true interests lay, and by what little sacrifices they could oftentimes secure a future benefit.”
“That’s thrue, every word of it. Your name is in every cabin, with a blessing tacked to it. There’s not a child does n’t say a prayer for you before he goes to sleep; and there’s many a grown man never thought of praying at all till he axed a blessing for yourself!”
“With that, too,” resumed she, “was coupled power, for my Lord left much to my management. I was able to help the deserving, to assist the honest and industrious; now I aided this one to emigrate, now I could contribute a little assistance of capital. In fact, Ned, I felt they wanted me, and I knew I liked them. There was one good reason for not going away. Then there were other reasons,” said she, falteringly. “It is not a good example to give to others to leave, no matter how humble, the spot where we have a duty, to seek out a higher destiny. I speak as a woman.”
“And is it thrue, Miss Bella, that it’s Mister Dunn has it all here under his own hand,—that the Lord owns nothing only what Dunn allows him, and that the whole place down to Kenmare River is Dunn’s?”
“It is quite true, Ned, that the control and direction of all the great works here are with Mr. Dunn. All the quarries and mines, the roads, harbors, quays, ‘bridges, docks, houses, are all in his hands.”
“Blessed hour! and where does he get the money to do it all?” cried he, in amazement.
Now, natural as was the question, and easy of reply as it seemed, Sybella heard it with something almost like a shock. Had the thought not occurred to her hundreds of times? And, if so, how had she answered it? Of course there could be no difficulty in the reply; of course such immense speculations, such gigantic projects as Mr. Dunn engaged in, supplied wealth to any amount. But equally true was it, that they demanded great means; they were costly achievements,—these great lines of railroad, these vast harbors. Nor were they always successful; Mr. Hankes himself had dropped hints about certain “mistakes” that were very significant. The splendid word “Credit” would explain it all, doubtless, but how interpret credit to the mind of the poor peasant? She tried to illustrate it by the lock of a canal, in which the water is momentarily utilized for a particular purpose, and then restored, unimpaired, to the general circulation; but Ned unhappily damaged the imagery by remarking, “But what’s to be done if there’s no water?” Fortunately for her logic, the road became once more only wide enough for one to proceed at a time, and Sybella was again left to her own musings.
Scarcely conscious of the perilous path by which she advanced, she continued to meditate over the old man’s words, and wonder within herself how it was that he, the poor, unlettered peasant, should have conceived that high notion of what her mission ought to be,—when and how her energies should be employed. She had been schooling herself for years to feel that true heroism consisted in devoting oneself to some humble, unobtrusive career, whose best rewards were the good done to others, where self-denial was a daily lesson, and humility a daily creed; but, do what she could, there was within her heart the embers of the fire that burned there in childhood. The first article of that faith taught her that without danger there is no greatness,—that in the hazardous conflicts where life is ventured, high qualities only are developed. What but such noble excitement could make heroes of those men, many of whom, without such stimulus, had dropped down the stream of life unnoticed and undistinguished? “And shall I,” cried she, aloud, “go on forever thus, living the small life of petty cares and interests, confronting no dangers beyond a dark December day, encountering no other hazards than the flippant rebuke of my employer?” “There’s the yawl, Miss Bella; she’s tacking about, waiting for us,” said Ned, as he pointed to a small sailboat like a speck in the blue sea beneath; and at the same instant a little rag of scarlet bunting was run up to the peak, to show that the travellers had been seen from the water.
CHAPTER XVI. THE DISCOVERY
It is possible that my reader might not unwillingly accompany Sybella as she stepped into the little boat, and, tripping lightly over the “thwarts,” seated herself in the stern-sheets. The day was bright and breezy, the sea scarcely ruffled, for the wind was off the land; the craft, although but a fishing-boat, was sharp and clean built, the canvas sat well on her, and, last of all, she who held the tiller was a very pretty girl, whose cheek, flushed with exercise, and loosely waving hair, gave to her beauty the heightened expression of which care occasionally robbed it. The broad bay, with its mountain background and its wide sea-reach, studded with tall three-masters, was a fine and glorious object; and as the light boat heeled over to the breeze, and the white foam came rustling over the prow, Sybella swept her fair hand through the water, and bathed her brow with the action of one who dismissed all painful thought, and gave herself to the full enjoyment of the hour. Yes, my dear reader, the companionship of such a girl on such a day, in such a scene, was worth having; and so even those rude fishermen thought it, as, stretched at full length on the shingle ballast, they gazed half bashfully at her, and then exchanged more meaning looks with each other as she talked with them.
Just possible it is, too, that some curiosity may exist as to what became of Mr. Hankes. Did that great projector of industrial enterprise succeed in retracing his steps with safety? Did he fall in with some one able to guide him back to Glengariff? Did he regain the Hermitage after fatigue and peril, and much self-reproach for an undertaking so foreign to his ways and habits; and did he vow to his own heart that this was to be the last of such excursions on his part? Had he his misgivings, too, that his conduct had not been perfectly heroic; and did he experience a sense of shame in retiring before a peril braved by a young and delicate girl? Admitted to a certain share of that gentleman’s confidence, we are obliged to declare that his chief sorrows were occasioned by the loss of time, the amount of inconvenience, and the degree of fatigue the expedition had caused him. It was not till late in the afternoon of the day that he chanced upon a fisherman on his way to Bantry to sell his fish. The poor peasant could not speak nor understand English, and after a vain attempt at explanation on either side, the colloquy ended by Hankes joining company with the man, and proceeding along with him, whither he knew not.
If we have not traced the steps of Sybella’s wanderings, we are little disposed to linger along with those of Mr. Hankes, though, if his own account were to be accepted, his journey was a succession of adventures and escapes. Enough if we say that he at last abandoned his horse amid the fissured cliffs of the coast, and, as best he might, clambered over rock and precipice, through tall mazes of wet fern and deep moss, along shingly shores and sandy beaches, till he reached the little inn at Bantry, the weariest and most worn-out of men, his clothes in rags, his shoes in tatters, and he himself scarcely conscious, and utterly indifferent as to what became of him.
A night’s sound sleep and a good breakfast were already contributing much to efface the memory of past sufferings, when Sybella Kellett entered his room. She had been over to the cottage, had visited the whole locality, transacted all the business she had come for, and only diverged from her homeward route on hearing that Mr. Hankes had just arrived at Bantry. Rather apologizing for having left him than accusing him of deserting her, she rapidly proceeded to sketch out her own journey. She did not dwell upon any incidents of the way,—had they been really new or strange she would not have recalled them,—she only adverted to what had constituted the object of her coming,—the purchase of the small townland which she had completed.
“It is a dear old place,” said she, “of a fashion one so rarely sees in Ireland, the house being built after that taste known as Elizabethan, and by tradition said to have once been inhabited by the poet Spenser. It is very small, and so hidden by a dense beech-wood, that you might pass within fifty yards of the door and never see it. This rude drawing may give you some idea of it.”
“And does the sea come up so close as this?” asked Hankes, eagerly.
“The little fishing-boat ran into the cove you see there; her mainsail dropped over the new-mown hay.”
“Why, it ‘s the very thing Lord Lockewood is looking for, He is positively wild about a spot in some remote out-of-the-way region; and then, what you tell me of its being a poet’s house will complete the charm. You said Shakspeare—”
“No, Spenser, the poet of the ‘Faërie Queene,’” broke she in, with a smile.
“It’s all the same; he ‘ll give it a fanciful name, and the association with its once owner will afford him unceasing amusement.”
“I hope he is not destined to enjoy the pleasure you describe.”
“No?—why not, pray?”
“I hope and trust that the place may not pass into his hands; in a word, I intend to ask Mr. Dunn to allow me to be the purchaser. I find that the sum is almost exactly the amount I have invested in the Allotment scheme,—these same shares we spoke of,—and I mean to beg as a great favor,—a very great favor,—to be permitted to make this exchange. I want no land,—nothing but the little plot around the cottage.”
“The cottage formerly inhabited by the poet Spenser, built in the purest Elizabethan style, and situated in a glen,—you said a glen, I think, Miss Kellett?” said Hankes,—“in a glen, whose wild enclosure, bosomed amongst deep woods, and washed by the Atlantic—”
“Are you devising an advertisement, sir?”
“The very thing I was doing, Miss Kellett. I was just sketching out a rough outline of a short paragraph for the ‘Post.’”
“But remember, sir, I want to possess this spot. I wish to be its owner—”
“To dispose of, of course, hereafter,—to make a clear three, four, or five thousand by the bargain, eh?”
“Nothing of the kind, Mr. Hankes. I mean to acquire enough—some one day or other—to go back and dwell there. I desire to have what I shall always, to myself at least, call mine—my home. It will be as a goal to win, the time I can come back and live there. It will be a resting-place for poor Jack when he returns to England.”
Mr. Hankes paused. It was the first time Miss Kellett had referred to her own fortunes in such a way as permitted him to take advantage of the circumstance, and he deliberated with himself whether he ought not to profit by the accident. How would she receive a word of advice from him? Would it be well taken? Might it possibly lead to something more? Would she be disposed to lean on his counsels; and, if so, what then? Ay, Mr. Hankes, it was the “what then?” was the puzzle. It was true his late conduct presented but a sorry emblem of that life-long fidelity he thought of pledging; but if she were the clear-sighted, calm-reasoning intelligence he believed, she would lay little stress upon what, after all, was a mere trait of a man’s temperament. Very rapidly, indeed, did these reflections pass through his mind; and then he stole a glance at her as she sat quietly sipping her tea, looking a very ideal of calm tranquillity. “This cottage,” thought he, “has evidently taken a hold of her fancy. Let me see if I cannot turn the theme to my purpose.” And with this intention he again brought her back to speak of the spot, which she did with all the eagerness of true interest.
“As to the association with the gifted spirit of song,” said Mr. Hankes, soaring proudly into the style he loved, “I conclude that to be somewhat doubtful of proof, eh?”
“Not at all, sir. Spenser lived at a place called Kilcoleman, from which he removed for two or three years, and returned. It was in this interval he inhabited the cottage. Curiously enough, some manuscript in his writing—part of a correspondence with the Lord-Deputy—was discovered yesterday when I was there. It was contained in a small oak casket with a variety of other papers, some in quaint French, some in Latin. The box was built in so as to form a portion of a curiously carved chimney-piece, and chance alone led to its discovery.”
“I hope you secured the documents?” cried Hankes, eagerly.
“Yes, sir; here they are, box and all. The Rector advised me to carry them away for security’ sake.” And so saying, she laid upon the table a massively bound and strong-built box, of about a foot in length.
It was with no inexperienced hand that Mr. Hankes proceeded to investigate the contents. His well-practised eye rapidly caught the meaning of each paper as he lifted it up, and he continued to mutter to himself his comments upon them. “This document is an ancient grant of the lands of Cloughrennin to the monks of the Abbey of Castlerosse, and bears date 1104. It speaks of certain rights reserved to the Baron Hugh Pritchard Conway. Conway—Conway,” mumbled he, twice or thrice; “that’s the very name I tried and could not remember yesterday, Miss Kellett. You asked me about a certain soldier whose daring capture of a Russian officer was going the round of the papers. The young fellow had but one arm too; now I remember, his name was Conway.”
“Charles Conway! Was it Charles Conway?” cried she, eagerly; “but it could be no other,—he had lost his right arm.”
“I ‘m not sure which, but he had only one, and he was called an orderly on the staff of the Piedmontese General.”
“Oh, the noble fellow! I could have sworn he would distinguish himself. Tell me it all again, sir; where did it happen, and how, and when?”
Mr. Hankes’s memory was now to be submitted to a very searching test, and he was called on to furnish details which might have puzzled “Our own Correspondent.” Had Charles Conway been rewarded for his gallantry? What notice had his bravery elicited? Was he promoted, and to what rank? Had he been decorated, and with what order? Were his wounds, as reported, only trifling? Where was he now?—was he in hospital or on service? She grew impatient at how little he knew,—how little the incident seemed to have impressed him. “Was it possible,” she asked, “that heroism like this was so rife that a meagre paragraph was deemed enough to record it,—a paragraph, too, that forgot to state what had become of its hero?”
“Why, my dear Miss Kellett,” interposed he, at length, “one reads a dozen such achievements every week.”
“I deny it, sir,” cried she, angrily. “Our soldiers are the bravest in the world; they possess a courage that asks no aid from the promptings of self-interest, nor the urgings of vanity; they are very lions in combat; but it needs the chivalrous ardor of the gentleman, the man of blood and lineage to conceive a feat like this. It was only a noble patriotism could suggest the thought of such an achievement.”
“I must say,” said Hankes, in confusion, “the young fellow acquitted himself admirably; but I would also beg to observe that there is nothing in the newspaper to lead to the conclusion you are disposed to draw. There’s not a word of his being a gentleman.”
“But I know it, sir,—the fact is known to me. Charles Conway is a man of family; he was once a man of fortune: he had served as an officer in a Lancer regiment; he had been extravagant, wild, wasteful, if you will.”
“Why, it can’t be the Smasher you’re talking of?—the great swell that used to drive the four chestnuts in the Park, and made the wager he ‘d go in at one window of Stagg and Mantle’s and out at t’other?”
“I don’t care to hear of such follies, sir, when there are better things to be remembered. Besides, he is my brother’s dearest friend, and I will not hear him spoken of but with respect. Take my word for it, sir, I am but asking what you had done, without a hint, were he only present.”
“I believe you,—by Jove, I believe you!” cried Hankes, with an honesty in the tone of his voice that actually made her smile. “And so this is Conway the Smasher!”
“Pray, Mr. Hankes, recall him by some other association. It is only fair to remember that he has given us the fitting occasion.”
“Ay, very true,—what you say is perfectly just; and, as you say, he is your brother’s friend. Who would have thought it!—who would have thought it!”.
Without puzzling ourselves to inquire what it was that thus excited Mr. Hankes’s astonishment, let us observe that gentleman, as he turns over, one by one, the papers in the box, muttering his comments meanwhile to himself: “Old title-deeds,—very old indeed,—all the ancient contracts are recited. Sir Gwellem Conway must have been a man of mark and note in those days. Here we find him holding ‘in capite’ from the king, twelve thousand acres, with the condition that he builds a strong castle and a ‘bawn.’ And these are, apparently, Sir Gwellem’s own letters. Ah! and here we have him or his descendant called Baron of Ackroyd and Bedgellert, and claimant to the title of Lackington, in which he seems successful. This is the writ of summons calling him to the Lords as Viscount Lackington. Very curious and important these papers are,—more curious, perhaps, than important,—for in all likelihood there have been at least half a dozen confiscations of these lands since this time.”
Mr. Hankes’s observations were not well attended to, for Sybella was already deep in the perusal of a curious old letter from a certain Dame Marian Conway to her brother, then Sheriff of Cardigan, in which some very strange traits of Irish chieftain life were detailed.
“I have an antiquarian friend who’d set great store by these old documents, Miss Kellett,” said Hankes, with a sort of easy indifference. “They have no value save for such collectors; they serve to throw a passing light over a dark period of history, and perhaps explain a bygone custom or an obsolete usage. What do you mean to do with them?”
“Keep them. If I succeed in my plans about the cottage, these letters of Spenser to Sir Lawrence Esmond are in themselves a title. Of course, if I fail in my request, I mean to give them to Mr. Dunn.”
“These were Welsh settlers, it would seem,” cried Hankes, still bending over the papers. “They came originally from Abergedley.”
“Abergedley!” repeated Sybella, three or four times over. “How strange!”
“What is strange, Miss Kellett?” asked Hankes, whose curiosity was eagerly excited by the expression of her features.
Instead of reply, however, she had taken a small notebook from her pocket, and sat with her eyes fixed upon a few words written in her own hand: “The Conways of Abergedley—of what family—if settled at any time in Ireland, and where?” These few words, and the day of the year when they were written, recalled to her mind a conversation she had once held with Terry Driscoll.
“What is puzzling you, Miss Kellett?” broke in Hankes; “I wish I could be of any assistance to its unravelment.”
“I am thinking of ‘long ago;’ something that occurred years back. Didn’t you mention,” asked she, suddenly, “that Mr. Driscoll had been the former proprietor of thia cottage?”
“Yes, in so far as having paid part of the purchase-money. Does his name recall anything to interest you, Miss Kellett?”
If she heard she did not heed his question, but sat deep sunk in her own musings.
If there was any mood of the human mind that had an especial fascination for Mr. Hankes, it was that frame of thought which indicated the possession of some mysterious subject,—some deep and secret theme which the possessor retained for himself alone,—a measure of which none were to know the amount, to which none were to have the key. It would be ignoble to call this passion curiosity, for, in reality, it was less exercised by any desire to fathom the mystery than it was prompted by an intense jealousy of him who thus held in his own hands the solution of some portentous difficulty. To know on what schemes other men were bent, what hopes and fears filled them, by what subtle trains of reasoning they came to this conclusion or to that, were the daily exercises of his intelligence. He was eternally, as the phrase is, putting things together, comparing events, confronting this circumstance with that, and drawing inferences from every chance and accident of life. Now, it was clear to him Miss Kellett had a secret; or, at least, had the clew to one. Driscoll was “in it,” and this cottage was “in it,” and, not impossibly too, some of these Conway s were “in it.” There was something in that note-book; how was he to obtain sight of it? The vaguest line—-a word—would be enough for him. Mr. Hankes remembered how he had once committed himself and his health to the care of an unskilful physician simply because the man knew a fact which he wanted, and did worm out of him during his attendance. He had, at another time, undertaken a short voyage in a most unsafe craft, with a drunken captain, because the stewardess was possessed of a secret of which, even in his sea-sickness, he obtained the key. Over and over again had he assumed modes of life he detested, dissipation the most distasteful to him, to gain the confidence of men that were only assailable in these modes; and now he bethought him that if he only had a glimmering of his present suspicion, the precipice and the narrow path and the booming sea below had all been braved, and he would have followed her unflinchingly through every peril with this goal before him. Was it too late to reinstate himself in her esteem? He thought not; indeed, she did not seem to retain any memory of his defection. At all events, there was little semblance of it having influenced her in her manner towards him.
“We shall meet at Glengariff, Mr. Hankes,” said Sybella, rising, and replacing the papers in the box. “I mean to return by the coast road, and will not ask you to accompany me.”
“It is precisely what I was about to beg as a favor. I was poorly yesterday,—a nervous headache, an affection I am subject to; in short, I felt unequal to any exertion, or even excitement.”
“Pray let me counsel you to spare yourself a journey of much fatigue with little to reward it. Frequency and long habit have deprived the mountain tract of all terror for me, but I own that to a stranger it is not without peril. The spot where we parted yesterday is the least dangerous of the difficulties, and so I would say be advised, and keep to the high-road.”
Now, there was not the slightest trace of sarcasm in what she said; it was uttered in all sincerity and good faith, and yet Mr. Hankes could not help suspecting a covert mockery throughout.
“I ‘m determined she shall see I am a man of courage,” muttered he to himself; and then added, aloud, “You must permit me to disobey you, Miss Kellett. I am resolved to bear you company.”
There was a dash of decision in his tone that made Sybella turn to look at him, and, to her astonishment, she saw a degree of purpose and determination in his face very unlike its former expression. If she did not possess the craft and subtlety which long years had polished to a high perfection in him, she had that far finer and more delicate tact by which a woman’s nature reads man’s coarser temperament. She watched his eye, too, and saw how it rested on the oaken box, and, even while awaiting her answer, never turned from that object.
“Yes,” said she to herself, “there is a game to be played out between us, and yonder is the stake.”
Did Mr. Hankes divine what was passing in her mind? I know not. All he said was,—
“May I order the horses, Miss Kellett?”
“Yes, I am ready.”
“And this box, what is to be done with it? Best to leave it here in the possession of the innkeeper. I suppose it will be safe?” asked he, half timidly.
“Perfectly safe; it would be inconvenient to carry with us. Will you kindly tell the landlord to come here?”
No sooner had Mr. Hankes left the room on his errand, than Sybella unlocked the box, and taking out the three papers in which the name of Conway appeared, relocked it. The papers she as quickly consigned to a small bag, which, as a sort of sabretasche, formed part of her riding-costume.
Mr. Hankes was somewhat longer on his mission than appeared necessary, and when he did return there was an air of some bustle and confusion about him, while between him and the landlord an amount of intimacy had grown up—a sort of confidence was established—that Bella’s keen glance rapidly read.
“An old-fashioned lock, and doubtless worth nothing, Miss Kellett,” said Hankes, as with a contemptuous smile he regarded the curiously carved ornament of the keyhole. “You have the key, I think?”
“Yes; it required some ingenuity to withdraw it from where, I suppose, it has been rusting many a year.”
“It strikes me I might as well put a band over the lock and affix my seal. It will convey the notion of something very precious inside,” added he, laughing, “and our friend here, Mr. Rorke, will feel an increased importance in the guardianship of such a treasure.”
“I ‘ll guard it like goold, sir; that you may depend on,” chimed in the landlord.
Why was it that, as Bella’s quick glance was bent upon him, he turned so hastily away, as if to avoid the scrutiny?
Do not imagine, valued reader, that while this young girl scanned the two faces before her, and tried to discover what secret understanding subsisted between these two men,—strangers but an hour ago,—that she herself was calm and self-possessed. Far from it; as little was she self-acquitted. It was under the influence of a sudden suspicion flashing across her mind—whence or how she knew not—that some treachery was being planned, that she withdrew these documents from the box. The expression of Hankes’s look, as it rested on the casket, was full of significance. It meant much, but of what nature she could not read. The sudden way he had questioned her about Driscoll imparted a link of connection between that man and the contents of the box, or part of them; and what part could that be except what concerned the name of Conway? If these were her impulses, they were more easily carried out than forgiven, and in her secret heart she was ashamed of her own distrust, and of what it led her to do.
“It would be a curious question at law,” said Hankes, as he affixed the third and last seal,—“a very curious question, who owns that box. Not that its contents would pay for the litigation,” added he, with a mocking laugh; “but the property being sold this morning, with an unsettled claim of Driscoll’s over it, and the purchaser being still undeclared,—for I suppose you bought it in for the Earl, or for Mr. Dunn, perhaps—”
“No, sir, in my own name, and for myself, waiting Mr. Dunn’s good pleasure to confirm the sale in the way I have told you.”
“Indeed!” exclaimed he, looking with an unfeigned admiration at a young girl capable of such rapid and decisive action, “so that you really may consider yourself its owner.”
“I do consider myself its owner,” was her calm reply.
“Then pray excuse my officiousness in this sealing up. I hope you will pardon my indiscreet zeal.”
She smiled without answering, and the blood mounted to Mr. Hankes’s face and forehead till they were crimson. He, too, felt that there was a game between them, and was beginning to distrust his “hand.”
“Are we to be travelling-companions, Mr. Hankes?” asked she. And though nothing was said in actual words, there was that in the voice and manner of the speaker that made the question run thus: “Are we, after what we have just seen of each other, to journey together?”
“Well, if you really wish me to confess the truth, Miss Kellett, I must own I am rather afraid of my head along these mountain paths,—a sort of faintness, a rushing of blood to the brain, and a confusion; in short, Nature never meant me for a chamois-hunter, and I should bring no credit on your training of me.”
“Your resolve is all the wiser, sir, and so to our next meeting.” She waved him a half-familiar, half-cold farewell, and left the room.
Mr. Hankes saw her leave the town, and he loitered about the street till he could mark two mounted figures ascending the mountain. He then ordered a chaise to the door with all speed.
“Will you take it now, sir, or send for it, as you said at first?” asked the innkeeper, as he stood with the oak box in his hands.
“Keep it till I write,—keep it till you hear from me; or, no, put it in the chaise,—that’s better.”
CHAPTER XVII. THE DOUBLE BLUNDER
Short as had been Sybella’s absence from the Hermitage, a vast number of letters had arrived for her in the mean while. The prospect of a peace, so confidently entertained at one moment, was now rudely destroyed by the abrupt termination of the Vienna conferences, and the result was a panic in the money-market.
The panic of an army rushing madly on to victory; the panic on shipboard when the great vessel has struck, and after three or four convulsive throes the mighty masts have snapped, and the blue water, surging and bounding, has riven the hatchways and flooded the deck; the panic of a mob as the charge of cavalry is sounded, and the flash of a thousand sabres is seen through the long vista of a street; the panic of a city stricken by plague or cholera,—are all dreadful and appalling things, and have their scenes of horror full of the most picturesque terror; still are there incidents of an almost equal power when that dread moment has arrived which is called a “Panic on ‘Change.”
It was but yesterday, and the world went well and flourishingly, mills were at work, foundries thundered with their thousand hammers, vessels sailed forth from every port, and white-sailed argosies were freighted with wealth from distant colonies. None had to ask twice for means to carry out his speculations, for every enterprise there was capital; and now scarcely twenty-four hours have passed, and all is changed. A despatch has been received in the night; a messenger has arrived at Downing Street; the Minister has been aroused from his sleep to hear that we have met some great reverse; a terrible disaster has befallen us; two line-of-battle ships, whose draught of water was too great, have grounded under an enemy’s fire; in despite of the most heroic resistance, they have been captured; the union-jacks are on their way to Moscow. Mayhap the discomfiture, less afflicting to national pride, is the blunder of a cavalry officer or the obstinacy of an envoy. Little matter for the cause, we have met a check. Down goes credit, and up go the discounts; the mighty men of millions have drawn their purse-strings, and not a guinea is to be had; the city is full of sad-visaged men in black, presaging every manner of misfortune. More troops are wanted; more ships; we are going to have an increase of the income-tax,—a loan,—a renewal of war burdens in fifty shapes! Each fancies some luxury of which he must deprive himself, some expense to be curtailed; and all are taking the dreariest view of a future whose chief feature is to be privation.
So was it now. Amidst a mass of letters was one from Davenport Dunn, written with brevity and in haste. By a mistake, easily made In the hurry and confusion of such correspondence, it was, though intended for Mr. Hankes, addressed to Miss Kellett; the words “Strictly private and confidential” occupying a conspicuous place across the envelope, while lower down was written “Immediate.”
It was a very rare event, latterly, for Mr. Dunn to write to Miss Kellett, nor had she, in all their intercourse, once received from him a letter announced thus “confidential.”
It was, then, in some surprise, and not without a certain anxiety, that she broke the seal. It was dated “Wednesday, Irish Office,” and began thus: “Dear S.”—she started,—he had never called her Sybella in his life; he had been most punctiliously careful ever to address her as Miss Kellett. She turned at once to the envelope, and read the address, “Miss Kellett, the Hermitage, Glengariff.” And yet there could be no mistake. It opened, “Dear S.” “He has forgotten a word,” thought she; “he meant in his mood of confidence to call me Miss Sybella, and has omitted the title.” The letter ran thus: “We have failed at Vienna, as we do everywhere and in everything. The war is to continue; consequently, we are in a terrible mess. Glumthal telegraphs this morning that he will not go on; the Frankfort people will, of course, follow his lead, so that Mount Cenis will be ‘nowhere’ by the end of the week. I am, however, more anxious about Glengariff, which must be upheld, for the moment, at any cost To-day I can manage to keep up the shares; perhaps, also, to-morrow.. The old Earl is more infatuated about the scheme than ever, though the accounts he receives from that girl”—“That girl,” muttered she; “who can he mean?”—“from that girl occasionally alarm him. She evidently has her own suspicions, though I don’t clearly see by what they have been suggested. The sooner, therefore, you can possess yourself of the correspondence, the better. I have written to her by this post with a proposition she will most probably accept; advise it, by all means.”—“This is scarcely intelligible,” said she, once more reverting to the direction of the letter.—“Should the Ministry be beaten on Monday, they mean to dissolve Parliament. Now, they cannot go to the country, in Ireland, without me, and my terms I have already fixed. They must give us aid,—material, substantial aid; I will not be put off with office or honors,—it is no time for either. Meanwhile, I want all the dividend warrants, and a brief sketch of our next statement; for we meet on Saturday. Come what will, the Allotment must be sustained till the new election be announced. I hope Lackington’s check was duly presented, for I find that his death was known here on the 4th. Where the new Viscount is, no one seems even to guess. Get rid of the girl, and believe me, yours ever,—D. D.”
“Surely, there is some strange mystification here,” said she, as she sat pondering over this letter. “There are allusions which, had they not been addressed to me, I might have fancied were intended for myself. This girl, whose accounts have terrified Lord Glengariff, and who herself suspects that all is not right, may mean me; but yet it is to me he writes, confidentially and secretly. I cannot complain that the letter lacks candor; it is frank enough; every word forebodes coming disaster, the great scheme is threatened with ruin, nothing can save it but Government assistance,—an infamous compact, if I read it aright. And if all this be so, in what a game have I played a part! This great venture is a swindling enterprise! All these poor people whose hard-earned gains have been invested in it will be ruined; my own small pittance, too, is gone. Good heavens! to what a terrible network of intrigue and deception have I lent myself! How have I come to betray those whose confidence I strove so hard to gain! This girl,—this girl,—who is she, and of whom does he speak?” exclaimed she, as, in an outburst of emotion, she walked the room, her whole frame trembling, and her eyes glaring in all the wildness of high excitement.
“May I come in?” whispered a soft voice, as a low tap was heard at the door; and without waiting for leave, Mr. Hankes entered. Nothing could be silkier nor softer than his courteous approach; his smile was the blandest, his step the smoothest, his bow the nicest blending of homage and regard; and, as he took Miss Kellett’s hand, it was with the air of a courtier dashed with the devotion of an admirer. Cruel is the confession that she noticed none—not one—of these traits. Her mind was so engrossed by the letter, that, had Mr. Hankes made his entry in a suit of chain armor, and with a mace in his hand, she would not have minded it.
“I am come to entreat forgiveness,—to sue your pardon, Miss Kellett, for a very great offence, of which, however, I am the guiltless offender. The letter which I hold here, and which, as you see, is addressed S. Hankes, Esq.,’ was certainty intended for you, and not me.”
“What—how—misdirected—a mistake in the address?” cried she, eagerly.
“Just so; placed in a wrong enclosure,” resumed he, in a tone of well-graduated calm. “A blunder which occurs over and over in life, but I am fain to hope has never happened with less serious results.”
“In short,” said she, hastily, “my letter, or the letter meant for me, came directed to you?”
“Precisely. I have only to plead, as regards myself, that immediately on discovery—and I very soon discovered that it could not have been destined for my perusal—I refolded the epistle and hastened to deliver it to your own hands.”
“More discreet and more fortunate than I,” said she, with a very peculiar smile, “since this letter which I hold here, and which bore my address, I now perceive was for you, and this I have not read merely once or twice, but fully a dozen times; in truth, I believe I could repeat it, word for word, if the task were required of me.”
What has become of Mr. Hankes’s soft and gentle manner? Where are his bland looks, his air of courtesy and kindness, his voice so full of sweetness and deference? Why, the man seems transfixed, his eyeballs are staring wildly, and he actually clutches, not takes, the letter from her hands.
“Why, the first words might have undeceived you,” cried he, rudely. “Your name is not Simpson Hankes.”
“No, sir; but it is Sybella, and the writer begins ‘Dear S.,’—a liberty, I own, I felt it, but one which I fancied my position was supposed to permit. Pray read on, sir, and you will see that there was matter enough to puzzle finer faculties than mine.”
Perhaps the tone in which she spoke these words was intentionally triumphant; perhaps Mr. Hankes attributed this significance to them causelessly; at all events, he started and stared at her for above a minute steadfastly, he then addressed himself suddenly to the letter.
“Gracious heavens! what a terrible blunder!” exclaimed he, when he had finished the reading.
“A great mistake, certainly, sir,” said she, calmly.
“But still one of which you are incapable to take advantage, Miss Kellett,” said he, with eagerness.
“Is it to the girl who is to be got rid of, sir, you address this speech? Is it to her whose trustfulness has been made the instrument to deceive others and lure them to their ruin? Nay, Mr. Hankes, your estimate of my forbearance is, indeed, too high.”
“But what would you do, young lady?”
“Do, sir! I scarcely know what I would not do,” burst she in, passionately. “This letter was addressed to me. I know nothing of the mistake of its direction; here is the envelope with my name upon it. It is, consequently, mine,—mine, therefore, to publish, to declare to the world, through its words, that the whole of this grand enterprise is a cheat; that its great designer is a man of nothing, living the precarious life of a gambling speculator, trading on the rich man’s horde and the poor man’s pittance, making market of all, even to his patriotism. I would print this worthy document with no other comment than the words, ‘Received by me, Sybella Kellett, this day of September, and sworn to as the handwriting of him whose initials it bears, Davenport Dunn.’ I would publish it in such type that men might read it as they went, that all should take warning and put no faith in these unprincipled tricksters. Ay, sir, and I would cling, as my hope of safety from the world’s scorn, to that insulting mention of myself, and claim as my vindication that I am the girl to be ‘got rid of.’ None shall dare to call me complice, since the little I once called my own is lost. But I would do more, sir. The world I have unwittingly aided to deceive has a full right to an expiation at my hands. I would make public the entire correspondence I have for months back been engaged in. You seem to say ‘No’ to this. Is it my right you dispute, or my courage to assert the right?”
“You must be aware, Miss Kellett,” said he, deprecatingly, “that you became possessed of this letter by a mistake; that you had no right to the intelligence it contains, and, consequently, have none to avail yourself of that knowledge. It may be perfectly true that you can employ it to our detriment. It would, I have little doubt, serve to shake our credit for a day or two; but do you know what misery, what utter ruin, your rashness will have caused meanwhile? By the fall of our securities you will beggar hundreds. All whose necessities may require them to sell out on the day of your disclosures will be irretrievably ruined. You meditate a vengeance upon Mr. Dunn, and your blow falls on some poor struggling creatures that you never so much as heard of. I do not speak,” continued he, more boldly, as he saw the deep effect his words produced,—“I do not speak of the destitution and misery you will spread here,—all works stopped, all enterprise suspended, thousands thrown out of employment. These are the certain, the inevitable evils of what you propose to do. And now, let me ask, What are to be the benefits? You would depose from his station of power and influence the only man in the kingdom who has a brain to conceive, or a courage to carry out these gigantic enterprises,—the only man of influence sufficient to treat with the Government, and make his own terms. You would dethrone him, to install in his place some inferior intelligence,—some mere creature of profit and loss, without genius or patriotism; and all for what?—for a mere phrase, and that, too, in a letter which was never intended for your eyes.”
Mr. Hankes saw that he was listened to, and he continued. Artfully contriving to take the case out of its real issue, he made it appear to Miss Kellett that she was solely impelled by personal motives, and had no other object in view than a vengeance on the man who had insulted her. “And now just throw your eyes over the letter intended for yourself. I only glanced at it, but it seemed to me written in a tone of sincerest well-wishing.”
It was so. It contained the offer of a most advantageous position. A new Governor-General of India desired a suitable companion for his daughters, who had lost their mother. He was a nobleman of highest rank and influence. The station was one which secured great advantages, and Dunn had obtained the promise of it in her behalf by considerable exertion on his part Nay, more. Knowing that her fortune was engaged in the “Allotment scheme,” he volunteered to take her shares at the highest rate they had ever borne, as she would, probably, require immediate means to procure an Indian outfit. The whole wound up with a deeply expressed regret at the loss Glengariff would sustain by her departure; “but all my selfishness,” added he, “could not blind me to the injustice of detaining in obscurity one whose destiny so certainly points her out for a station lofty and distinguished.”
She smiled at the words, and, showing them to Hankes, said, “It is most unfortunate, sir, that I should have seen the other letter. I could so readily have yielded myself up to all this flattery, which, even in its hollowness, has a certain charm.”
“I am certain Miss Kellett has too much good sense—too much knowledge of life—too much generosity, besides—”
“Pray, sir, let me stop you, or the catalogue of my perfections may become puzzling, not to say that I need all the good gifts with which you would endow me to aid me to a right judgment here. I wish I knew what to do.”
“Can you doubt it?”
“If the road be so clear, will you not point it out?”
“Write to Mr. Dunn. Well, let me write to him. I will inform him how this mischance occurred. I will tell him that you had read and re-read his letter before discovering the mistake of the address; that, consequently, you are now—so far as this great enterprise is concerned—one of ourselves; that, although you scorn to take advantage of a circumstance thus accidentally revealed, yet that, as chance has put you in possession of certain facts, that—-that, in short—”
“That, in short, I ought to profit by my good fortune,” said she, calmly, finishing the phrase for him.
“Unquestionably,” chimed in Hankes, quickly; “and, what’s more, demand very high terms too. Dunn is a practical man,” added he, in a lower and more confidential tone; “nobody knows better when liberality is the best policy.”
“So that this is a case for a high price?” asked she, in the same calm tone.
“I ‘d make it so if I were in your place. I ‘d certainly say a ‘high figure,’ Miss Keliett.”
“Shall I confess, sir, that, in so far as knowing how to profit by it, I am really unworthy of this piece of fortune? Is Mr. Hankes enough my friend to enlighten me?”
There was a smile that accompanied this speech which went far—very far—to influence Mr. Hankes. Once again did his personal fortunes rise before him; once again did he bethink him that this was an alliance that might lead to much.
“I can give you a case in point, Miss Keliett,—I mean as to the value of a secret. It was when Sir Robert Peel meditated his change in the Corn-laws. One of the council—it does not matter to say his name—accidentally divulged the secret intention, and a great journal gave no less than ten thousand pounds for the intelligence,—ten thousand pounds sterling!”
She seemed to pause over this story, and reflect upon it.
“Now,” resumed Hankes, “it is just as likely he ‘d say, ‘Money is scarce just now; your demand comes at an inconvenient moment’ This would be true,—there’s no gainsaying it; and I’d reply, ‘Let me have it in shares,—some of the new preference scrip just issued.’”
“How it does allay difficulties to deal with persons of great practical intelligence,—men of purpose-like mind!” said Sybella, gravely.
“Ah, Miss Kellett, if I could only believe that this was a favorable moment to appeal to you in their behalf,—at least, in so far as regards one of their number,—one who has long admired your great qualities in silence, and said to himself, ‘What might she not be if allied to one well versed in life, trained to all its chances and changes—‘”
“It never occurred to me to fancy I had inspired all this interest, sir,” said she, calmly.
“Probably because your thoughts never dwelt on me,” said Hankes, with a most entreating look; “but I assure you,” added he, warmly, “the indifference was not reciprocal. I have been long—very long attracted by those shining abilities you display. Another might dwell upon your personal attractions, and say the impression your beauty had made upon him; but beauty is a flower,—a perishable hot-house flower. Not,” added he, hastily, “that I pretend to be insensible to its fascinations; no, Miss Kellett, I have my weaknesses like the rest.”
Sybella scarcely heard his words. It was but a day before, and a poor unlettered peasant, an humble creature unread in life and human nature, told her that he deemed her one fit for high and devoted enterprise, and that her rightful place was amidst the wounded and the dying in the Crimea. Had he construed her, then, more truly? At all events, the career was a noble one. She did not dare to contrast it any longer with her late life, so odious now did it seem to her, with all its schemes for wealth, its wily plot-tings and intrigues.
“I am afraid, sir, I have been inattentive,—I fear that my thoughts were away from what you have been saying,” said she, hastily.
“Shall I just throw my ideas on paper, Miss Kellett, and wait your answer—say to-morrow?”
“My answer to what, sir?”
“I have been presumptuous enough to make you an offer of my hand, Miss Kellett,” said he, with a half-offended dignity. “There are, of course, a number of minor considerations—I call them minor, as they relate to money matters—to be discussed after; for instance, with regard to these shares—”
“It will save us both a world of trouble, sir, when I thank you deeply for the honor you would destine me, and decline to accept it.”
“I know there is a discrepancy in point of years—”
“Pray, sir, let us not continue the theme. I have given my answer, and my only one.”
“Or if it be that any meddling individual should have mentioned the late Mrs. H.,” said he, bristling up,— “for she is the late, that I can satisfy you upon,—I have abundant evidence to show how that woman behaved—”
“You are confiding to me more than I have the right or wish to hear, sir.”
“Only in vindication,—only in vindication. I am aware how her atrocious book has libelled me. It made me a perfect martyr for the season after it came out; but it is out of print,—not a copy to be had for fifty pounds, if it were offered.”
“But really, sir—”
“And then, Miss Kellett,” added he, in a sort of thrilling whisper, “she drank; at first sherry,—brown sherry—but afterwards brandy,—ay, ma’am, brandy neat and a matter of a bottle daily. If you only knew what I went through with her,—the scenes in the streets, in the playhouses, in coffee-rooms,—ay, and police-offices,—I give you my sacred word of honor Simpson Hankes was rapidly becoming as great a public scandal as the Rev. Paul Classon himself!”
“Cannot you perceive, sir, that these details are less than uninteresting to me?”
“Don’t say that, Miss Kellett,—don’t, I beg you, or else you ‘ll make me fear that you ‘ll not read the little pamphlet I published, entitled ‘A Brief Statement by Simpson Hankes,’—a brochure that I am proud to believe decided the world in my favor.”
“Once for all, Mr. Hankes, I decline to hear more of these matters. If I have not more plainly told you how little they claim to interest me, it is because my own selfish cares fill up my thoughts. I will try to hand you the correspondence Mr. Dunn desires to see in your keeping by to-morrow morning. There are many circumstances will require special explanation in it. However I will do my best to be ready.”
“And my offer, Miss Kellett?”
“I have declined it, sir.”
“But really, young lady, are you well aware of what it is you refuse?” asked he, angrily.
“I will not discuss the question, sir,” said she, haughtily. “Give me that letter I showed you.”
“The letter, I opine, is mine, Miss Kellett. The address alone pertains to you.”
“Do you mean, then, to retain possession of the letter?” asked she, hurriedly.
“I protest, I think it is better—better for all of us—that I should do so. You will pardon me if I observe that you are now under the influence of excited feelings,—you are irritated. Any line of action, under such circumstances, will necessarily be deficient in that calm, matured judgment which is mainly your characteristic.”
“It needed but this, sir, to fill up the measure!” ex-claimed she, passionately.
“I don’t perfectly apprehend you, Miss Kellett.”
“I mean, sir, that this last trait of yours was alone wanting to complete the utter contempt I now feel for my late life and its associates. Mr. Dunn’s letter, with all its disgraceful disclosures,—your own crafty counsels how best to profit by the accidental knowledge,—and now this refusal to restore the letter,—this mean distrust based on a breach of confidence—”
“By no means, madam. In withholding this letter, I maintain it to be my own. I have already explained to you that the address is all you can lay claim to; a recent legal decision is in my favor. It was tried last Hilary term before Justice Whitecroff. The case was Barnes versus Barnes.”
“If my anger prompt me to rasher acts than my calmer reason might have counselled,” broke in Sybella, “remember, sir, it is to yourself you owe it. At least upon one point you may rely. Whatever I decide to do in this affair, it will not be swayed by any—the slightest—regard for your friends or their interests. I will think of others alone,—never once of them. Your smile seems to pay, ‘The war between us is an unequal one.’ I know it. I am a woman, poor, friendless, unprotected; you and yours are rich, and well thought of; and yet, with all this odds, if I accept the conflict I do not despair of victory.”
As she left the room and the door closed after her, Mr. Hankes wiped the perspiration from his forehead, and sat down, the perfect picture of dismay.
“What is she up to?” cried he, three or four times to himself. “If she resolves to make a public scandal of it, there’s an end of us! The shares would be down—down to nothing—in four-and-twenty hours! I’ll telegraph to Dunn at once!” said he, rising, and taking his hat. “The mischance was his own doing; let him find the remedy himself.”
With all that perfection of laconic style which practice confers, Mr. Hankes communicated to Davenport Dunn the unhappy mistake which had just befallen. Under the safeguard of a cipher used between them, he expressed his deepest fears for the result, and asked for immediate counsel and guidance.
This despatch, forwarded by telegraph, he followed by a long letter, entering fully into all the details of the mischance, and reporting with—it must be acknowledged—a most scrupulous accuracy an account of the stormy scene between Miss Kellett and himself. He impressed upon his chief that no terms which should secure her silence would be too high, and gently insinuated that a prompt and generous offer on Dunn’s part might not impossibly decide the writer to seal his devotion to the cause, by making the lady Mrs. Hankes. “Only remember,” added he, “it must be in cash or approved bills.”
Partly to illustrate the difficulty of the negotiation he was engaged in, partly to magnify the amount of the sacrifice he proposed to make, he depicted Sybella in colors somewhat less flattering than ardent love usually employs. “It is clear to me now,” wrote he, “from what I witnessed to-day, that neither you nor I ever understood this girl aright. She has a temper of her own, and an obstinacy perfectly invincible. Acting on the dictate of what she fancies to be her conscience, she is quite capable of going to any extreme, and I have the strongest doubt that she is one to be moved by affection or deterred by fear.” After a little more of this eulogistic strain, he wound up by repeating his former generous proposal He adroitly pointed out that it was in the interest of only such a patron he could ever dream of so great a sacrifice; and then in that half-jocular way in which he often attained to all the real and businesslike elements of a project, he added, “Say ten thousand, and the ‘match’ will come off,—a very moderate stake, if you only remember the ‘forfeit.’”
In a brief postscript he mentioned the discovery of the ancient document found at the cottage, with, as he said, “some curious papers about the Conway family. These I have duly sealed up in the box, and retain in my possession, although Miss K. has evidently an eye upon them.
“Write fully and explicitly whatever you mean to do; should you, however, fully agree to what I propose, telegraph back to
“Yours, ever faithfully,
“Simpson Hankes.
“They have come to tell me she is packing up her things and has sent a twenty-pound note to be changed.”
CHAPTER XVIII. DOWNING STREET.
If our story had a hero—which it has not—that hero would be Mr. Davenport Dunn himself, and we might, consequently, feel certain compunctious scruples as to the length of time that has elapsed since we last saw him. When we parted, however, we took care to remind our reader that we left him in good company, and surely such a fact ought to allay all apprehensions on his behalf.
Months have rolled over; the London season has passed; Parliament has but a few days to run; the wearied speakers are longing to loiter along green lanes, or be touring or water-curing it in Germany; cities are all but deserted, and town-houses have that dusty, ill-cared-for air that reminds one of an estate in Chancery, or a half-pay lieutenant. Why is it, then, that Mr. Dunn’s residence in Merrion Square wears a look of unusual trimness? Fresh paint—that hypocrisy of architecture—has done its utmost; the hall door is a marvel of mock oak, as are the columns of spurious marble; the Venetian blinds are of an emerald green, and the plate-glass windows mirror the parched trees in the square, and reflect back the almost equally picturesque jaunting-cars as they drive past; the balcony, too, throughout its whole length, is covered with rich flowers and flowery shrubs. In a word, there is a look of preparation that bespeaks a coming event. What can it be?
Various rumors are afloat as to the reason of these changes, some averring that Mr. Dunn is about to take a high official position, and be raised to a distinguished rank; others opine that he is about to retire from the cares of a business life, and marry. What may he not be? Whom may he not aspire to? Surely the world has gone well with this roan. What a great general is to an army in the field,—what a great leader to a party in the “House,” was he to every industrial enterprise. His name was a guarantee for all that was accurate in discipline and perfect in organization. The Board over which he presided as Chairman was sure to meet with regularity and act with energy. The officials who served under him, even to the very humblest, seemed to typify the wise principles by which he had himself been guided in life. They appeared as though imbued with the same patient industry; the same untiring application, the same grave demeanor marked them. “I served under Mr. Davenport Dunn,” “Mr. Dunn knows me,” “Mr. Dunn will speak for me,” were characters that had the force of a diploma, since they vouched not alone for capacity, but for conduct.
It is a very high eminence to attain when a man’s integrity and ability throw such a light about him that they illumine not alone the path he treads in life, but shine brightly on those who follow his track, making an atmosphere in which all around participate. To this height had Dunn arrived, and he stood the confessed representative of those virtues Englishmen like to honor, and that character they boast to believe national,—the man of successful industry. The fewer the adventitious advantages he derived from fortune, the greater and more worthy did he appear. He was no aristocrat, propped and bolstered by grand relatives. He had no Most Noble or Right Honorable connections to push him. He was not even gifted with those qualities that win popular favor,—he had none of those graces of easy cordiality that others possess,—he was not insinuating in address, nor ready of speech. They who described him called him an awkward, bashful man, always struggling against his own ignorance of society, and only sustained by a proud consciousness that whispered the “sterling stuff that was inside,”—qualities which appeal to large audiences, and are intelligible to the many. Ay, there was indeed his grand secret. Genius wounds deeply, talent and ability offend widely, but the man of mere commonplace faculties, using common gifts with common opportunities, trading rather upon negative than positive properties, succeeding because he is not this, that, and t’ other, plodding along the causeway of life steadily and unobtrusively, seen by all, patched and noticed in every successive stage of his upward progress, so that each may say, “I remember him a barefooted boy, running errands in the street,—a poor clerk at forty pounds a year,—I knew him when he lived in such an alley, up so many pair of stairs!” Strange enough, the world likes all this; there is a smack of self-gratulation in it that seems to say, “If I liked it, I could have done as well as he.” Success in life won, these men rise into another atmosphere, and acquire another appreciation. They are then used to point the moral of that pleasant fallacy we are all so fond of repeating to each other, when we assert, amongst the blessings of our glorious Constitution, that there is no dignity too great, no station too high, for the Englishman who combines industry and integrity with zeal and perseverance. Shame on us, that we dare to call fallacy that which great Lord Chancellors and Chief Justices have verified from their own confessions; nay, we have even heard a Lord Mayor declare that he was, once upon a time, like that “poor” publican! The moral of it all is that with regard to the Davenport Dunns of this world, we pity them in their first struggles, we are proud of them in their last successes, and we are about as much right in the one sentiment as in the other.
The world—the great wide world of man—is marvellously identical with the small ingredient of humanity of whose aggregate it consists. It has its moods of generosity, distrust, liberality, narrowness, candor, and suspicion,—its fevers of noble impulse, and its cold fits of petty meanness,—its high moments of self-devotion, and its dark hours of persecution and hate. Men are judged differently in different ages, just as in every-day life we hear a different opinion from the same individual, when crossed by the cares of the morning and seated in all the voluptuous repose of an after-dinner abandonnement.
Now it chanced that Mr. Dunn’s lot in life had thrown him into a fortunate conjuncture of the world’s temper. The prosperity of a long peace had impressed us with an exaggerated estimate of all the arts that amass wealth; riches became less the reward than the test of ability; success and merit had grown to be convertible terms; clever speakers and eloquent writers assured us that wars pertained only to ages of barbarism,—that a higher civilization would repudiate them,—that men, now bent upon a high and noble philanthropy, would alone strive to diffuse the benefits of abundance and refinement amongst their fellows, and that we were about to witness an elysian age of plenty, order, and happiness. The same men who stigmatized the glory of war as the hypocrisy of carnage, invented another hypocrisy infinitely meaner and more ignoble, and placed upon the high altars of our worship the golden image of Gain.
As the incarnation of this passion Davenport Dunn stood out before the world; nor was there a tribute of its flattery that was not laid at his feet. Even they who had neither wish nor necessity to benefit by his peculiar influence did not withhold their homage, but joined in the general acclamation that pronounced him the great man of our time; and at his Sunday dinners were met the most distinguished in rank,—all that the country boasted of great in station, illustrious by services or capacity. His splendid house in Piccadilly—rented for the season for a fabulous sum—was beset all the morning by visitors, somewhat unlike, it must be owned, the class who frequented his Dublin levees. Here they were not deputations or bank directors, railway chairmen or drainage commissioners; they were all that fashion claims as her own,—proud duchesses of princely fortune, great countesses high in courtly favor, noble ladies whose smile of recognition was a firman to the highest places. They met there, by one of those curious compacts the grand world occasionally makes with itself, to do something, in a sort of half imitation of that inferior race of mortals who live and marry and die in the spheres beneath them. In fact, Dunn’s house was a sort of bourse, where shares were trafficked in, and securities bought and sold, with an eagerness none the less that the fingers that held them wore gloves fastened with rubies and emeralds.
In those gorgeous drawing-rooms, filled with objects of high art, statues stolen from the Vatican, gems obtained by Heaven knows what stratagems from Italian or Spanish convents, none deigned to notice by even a passing look the treasures that surrounded them. In vain the heavenly beauty of Raphael beamed from the walls,—in vain the seductive glances of Greuze in all their languishing voluptuousness,—in vain the haughty nobility of Van Dyck claimed the homage of a passing look. All were eagerly bent upon lists of stocks and shares, and no words were heard save such as told of rise or fall,—the alternations of that chance which makes or mars humanity.
It was while in the midst of that distinguished company Mr. Dunn received the telegram we have mentioned in our last chapter as despatched by Mr. Hankes. His was a nature long inured to the ups and downs of fortune; his great self-teaching had been principally directed to the very point of how best to meet emergencies; and yet, as he read over these brief lines, for a moment his courage seemed to have deserted him.
“Chimbarago Artesian Well and Water Company,” lisped out a very pale, sickly-looking Countess. “Shares are rising, Mr. Dunn; may I venture upon them?”
“Here’s the Marquesas Harbor of Refuge scheme going to smash, Dunn!” whispered an old gentleman, with a double eye-glass, his hand trembling as it held the share-list. “Eh, what do you say to that?”
“Glengariff ‘s going steadily up,—steadily up,” muttered Lord Glengariff, in Dunn’s ear. Then, struck by the sudden pallor of his face, he added, “Are you ill?—are you faint?”
“A mere nothing,” said Dunn, carelessly. “By the way, what hour is it? Near one, and I have an appointment with the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Yes, Lady Massingberd, perfectly safe; not a splendid investment, but quite sure. Cagliari Cobalts are first-rate, Sir George; take all you can get of them. The Dalmatian line is guaranteed ‘by the Austrian Government, my Lord. I saw the Ambassador yesterday. Pray excuse a hasty leave-taking.”
His carriage was quickly ordered, but before he set out he despatched a short telegraphic message to Hankes. It ran thus: “Detain her; suffer no letters from her to reach the post.” This being duly sent off, he drove to Downing Street. That dingy old temple of intrigue was well known to him. His familiar steps had mounted that gloomy old stair some scores of times; but now, for the first—the very first time in his life, instead of being at once ushered into the presence of the Minister, he was asked to “wait for a few moments.” What a shock did the intimation give him! Was the news already abroad,—had the fell tidings escaped? A second’s consideration showed this was impossible; and yet what meant this reserve?
“Is the Council sitting, Mr. Bagwell?” asked he, of a very well-dressed young gentleman, with a glass fixed in his eye, who acted as Private Secretary to the Minister.
“No; they’re chatting, I fancy,” lisped out the other. “The Council was up half an hour ago.”
“Have you mentioned my name, sir?” asked Dunn, with a formidable emphasis on the pronoun.
“Yes,” said he, arranging his hair before the glass; “I sent in your card.”
“Well, and the answer?”
“There was no answer, which, I take it, means ‘wait,’” replied he, in the same light and graceful tone of voice.
Dunn took his hat hastily from the table; and with a stern stare, intended to mean “I shall remember your face again,” said,—
“You may inform Lord Jedburg that I came by appointment; that I was here punctually at one o’clock; that I waited full fifteen minutes; that—”
What more Mr. Dunn was about to say was cut short by the opening of a-door, and the issuing forth of some five or six gentlemen, all laughing and talking together.
“How d’ye do, Mr. Dunn?” “How d’ye do, Dunn?” “How are you, Dunn?” said some three or four, familiarly, as they passed through the room. And ere he could acknowledge the salutations, Lord Jedburg himself appeared at the door, and made a sign for him to enter. Never before had Davenport Dunn crossed those precincts with so nervous a heart. If his reason assured him that there was no cause of fear, his instincts and his conscience spoke a different language. He bent one quick penetrating glance on the Minister ere he sat down, as though to read there what he might of the future; but there was nothing to awaken anxiety or distrust in that face. His Lordship was far advanced in life, his hair more white than gray, his brow wrinkled and deep-furrowed; and yet, if, instead of the cares of a mighty empire, his concern had been the passing events of a life of society and country habits, nothing could have more suited the easy expression, the graceful smile, and the pleasant bonhomie of that countenance. Resuming the cigar he had been smoking as Dunn came in, he lounged back indolently in his deep chair, and said,—
“What can I do for you at the Isle of Wight, Dunn? I fancy we shall have a trip to Osborne to-morrow morning.”
“Indeed, my Lord?” asked he, anxiously; “are you going out?”
“So they say,” replied the other, carelessly. “Do you smoke? You ‘ll find those Cubans very mild. So they say, Dunn. Monksley assures us that we shall be in a minority to-night of fifteen or sixteen. Drake thinks five-and-twenty.”
“From your Lordship’s easy mode of taking it, I conclude that there is either a remedy for the disaster, or that—”
“It is no disaster at all,” chimed in his Lordship, gayly. “Well, the Carlton Club are evidently of that mind, and some of the evening papers too.”
“I perceive, my Lord,” said Dunn, with a peculiar smile, “the misfortune is not irremediable.”
“You are right, Dunn,” said the other, promptly. “We have decided to accept a defeat, which, as our adversaries have never anticipated, will find them perfectly unprepared how to profit by it They will beat us, but, when called upon to form a Government, will be utterly unable. The rest is easy enough: a new Parliament, and ourselves stronger than ever.”
“A very clever countryman of mine once told me, my Lord, that he made a ruinous coach-line turn out a most lucrative speculation by simply running an opposition and breaking it; so true are the world in their attachment to success.”
A hearty laugh from the Minister acknowledged the parallel, and he added carelessly,—
“Sir George Bosely has a story of a fellow who once established a run on his own bank just to get up his credit. A hit above even you, Master Dunn,—eh?”
If Dunn laughed, it was with a face of deepest crimson, though he saw, the while, his secret was safe. Indeed, the honest frankness of his Lordship’s laugh guaranteed that all was well.
“The fellow ought to have been a Cabinet Minister, Dunn. He had the true governing element in him, which is a strong sense of human gullibility.”
“A little more is needed, my Lord,—how to turn that flame tendency to profit.”
“Of course,—of course. By the way, Dunn, though not apropos,” said he, laughingly, “what of the great Glengariff scheme? Is it prospering?”
“The shares stand at one hundred and seventy-seven and an eighth, my Lord,” said Dunn, calmly. “I can only wish your Lordship’s party as favorable a fortune.”
“Well, we are rather below par just now,” said the Minister, laughing, while he busied himself to select another cigar from the heap before him.
“It was just about that very enterprise I came to speak to your Lordship this morning,” said Dunn, drawing his chair closer. “I need not tell you how far the assurance of Government support has aided our success. The report of the Parliamentary Committee as to the Harbor of Refuge, the almost certain promise of her Majesty’s marine residence, the flattering reception your Lordship gave to the deputation in the matter of the American packet-station, have all done us good and efficient service. But we want more, my Lord,—we want more!”
“The deuce you do! Why, my good friend, these marks of our preference for your scheme have cost us some hundred angry addresses and recriminations from all parts of the kingdom, where, we are told, there is more picturesque scenery, more salubrious air, deeper water, and better anchorage. If you built a villa for every member of the Cabinet, and settled it on us in freehold there, it would not repay us for all we have suffered in your cause.”
“We should be both proud and happy to accommodate your Lordship’s colleagues on Jedburg Crescent,” said Dunn, bowing with a well-assumed seriousness.
“But what do you want us to do?” said his Lordship, peevishly; for he had the dislike great men generally feel to have their joke capped. It is for them to be smart, if they please, but not for the Mr. Davenport Dunns of this world to take up the clew of the facetiousness.
Mr. Dunn seemed somewhat posed by the abrupt directness of this question. Lord Jedburg went on:—
“You surely never supposed that we could send you material assistance. You are far too conversant with the working of our institutions to expect such. These things are possible in France, but they won’t do here. No, Dunn; perfectly impossible here.”
“And yet, my Lord, it is precisely in France that they ought to be impossible. Ministers in that country have no responsibility except towards their sovereign. If they become suddenly enriched, one sees at once how they have abused the confidence of their master.”
“I’ll not enter upon that question,” said his Lordship, smartly. “Tell me, rather, something about Ireland; how shall we fare there in a general election?”
“With proper exertions you may be able to hold your own,” was the dry rejoinder.
“Not more? Not any more than this?”
“Certainly not, my Lord, nor do I see how you could expect it. What you are in the habit of calling concessions to Irish interests have been little other than apologies for the blunders of your colleagues. You remove some burden imposed by yourselves, or express sorrow for some piece of legislation your own hands have inflicted—”
“Come, come, Mr. Dunn, the only course of lectures I attend are delivered in the House of Commons; besides, I have no time for these things.” There was a tone of prompt decision in the way he uttered this that satisfied Dunn he had gone fully as far as was safe. “Now as to Ireland, we shall look for at least sixty, or perhaps seventy, sure votes. Come, where’s your list, Dunn? Out with it, man! We are rather rich in patronage just now. We can make a Bishop, a Puisne Judge, three Assistant Barristers, a Poor Law Commissioner, not to say that there are some fifty smaller things in the Revenue. Which will you have?”
“All, my Lord,” said Dunn, coolly,—“all, and some colonial appointments besides, for such of our friends as find living at home inexpedient.”
His Lordship lay back in his chair, and laughed pleasantly. “There’s Jamaica just vacant; would that suit you?”
“The Governorship? The very thing I want, and for a very old supporter of your Lordship’s party.”
“Who is he?”
“The Earl of Glengariff, my Lord, a nobleman who has never received the slightest acknowledgment for a political adherence of fifty-odd years.”
“Why, the man must be in second childhood. If I remember aright, he was—”
“He is exactly four years your Lordship’s senior; he says you fagged for him his last half at Eton.”
“Pooh, pooh! he mistakes; it was of my father he was thinking. But to the point: what can he do for us?”
“I was alluding to what he had done, my Lord,” said Dunn, pointedly.
“Ah, Dunn, we are not rich enough for gratitude. That is the last luxury of a ‘millionnaire;’ besides, you are aware how many claimants there will be for so good a thing as this.”
“Which of them all, my Lord, can promise you ten votes in the Houses?”
“Well, is the bargain finished? Is all paid?”
“Not yet, my Lord; not yet You are averse to affording us any support to the Glengariff scheme, and, for the present, I will not hamper you with the consideration; you can, however, serve us in another way. Glumthal is very anxious about the Jew Bill; he wishes, Heaven knows why, to see his brother in the House. May I promise him that the next session will see it law? Let me just have your Lordship’s word to that effect, so that I may telegraph to him when I leave this.”
His Lordship shook his head dubiously, and said, “You forget that I have colleagues, Dunn.”
“I remember it well, my Lord, and I only asked for your own individual pledge. The fact is, my Lord, the Jews throughout the world have attached an immense importance to this question; and if Glumthal—confidentially, of course—be made the depositary of the secret, it will raise him vastly in the estimation of his co-religionists.”
“Let us see if the thing can be done. Is it practicable, and how?” “Oh, as to that, my Lord, modern legislation is carried on pretty much like a mercantile concern; you advertise your want, and it is supplied at once. Ask the newspapers. ‘How are we to admit the Jews?’ and you ‘ll get your answer as regularly as though it were a question of sport addressed to ‘Bell’s Life.’”
“Candor being the order of the day, what does Mr. Davenport Dunn want for himself?”
“I am coming to him, my Lord, but not just yet.”
“Why, really, Dunn, except that we turn Colonel Blood in your behalf, and steal the crown for you, I don’t see what more we can do.”
“It is a mere trifle in point of patronage, my Lord, though, in my ignorance of such matters, it may be, possibly, not without difficulty,” said Dunn; and, for the first time, his manner betrayed a sign of embarrassment “The Earl of Glengariff has an only unmarried daughter, a lady of great personal attractions, and remarkably gifted in point of ability; one of those persons, in short, on whom Nature has set the stamp of high birth, and fitted to be the ornament of a Court.”
“But we are all married in the Cabinet. Even the Treasury Lords have got wives,” said Lord Jedburg, laughing, and enjoying the discomfiture of Dunn’s face even more than his own jest.
“I am aware of it, my Lord,” replied Dunn, with inflexible gravity; “my ambitious hopes did not aspire so highly. What I was about to entreat was your Lordship’s assistance to have the lady I have mentioned appointed to a situation in the household,—one of her Majesty’s ladies—”
“Impossible! perfectly impossible, Dunn!” said the Minister, flinging away his cigar in impatient anger; “really, you seem to have neither measure nor moderation in your demands. Such an interference on my part, if I were mad enough to attempt it, would meet a prompt rebuke.”
“If your Lordship’s patience had permitted me to finish, you would have heard that what I proposed was nothing beyond the barren honor of a ‘Gazette.’ On the day week that her Ladyship’s name had so appeared she would be married.”
“It does not alter the matter in the least. It is not in my province to make such a recommendation, and I refuse it flatly.”
“I am sorry for it, my Lord. Your Lordship’s refusal may inflict great evils upon the country,—the rule of an incompetent and ungenial Government,—the accession to power of men the most unscrupulous and reckless.”. “Cannot you see, sir,” said the Minister, sharply, “that I am in a position to comprehend what my office admits of, and where its limits are laid? I have told you that these appointments are not in our hands.”
“Sir Robert Peel did not say so, my Lord; he insisted—actually insisted—on his right to surround the throne with political partisans.”
“The Cabinet is not an Equity Court, to be ruled by precedents; and I tell you once more, Dunn, I should fail if I attempted it.”
“The Viscountess might obtain this favor,” said Dunn, with an obdurate persistence that was not to be resisted; “and even if unsuccessful, it would inflict no rebuff on your Lordship. Indeed, it would come more gracefully as a proposition from her Ladyship, who could also mention Lady Augusta’s approaching marriage.”
“I almost think I might leave you to finish the discussion with my wife,” said his Lordship, laughing; “I half suspect it would be the best penalty on your temerity. Are you engaged for Sunday?—well, then, dine with us. And now, that bill being adjourned,” said he, with a weary sigh, “what next?”
“I am now coming to myself,—to my own case, my Lord,” said Dunn, with the very slightest tremor in his voice. “Need I say that I wish it were in the hands of any other advocacy? I am so far fortunate, however, that I address one fully conversant with my claims on his party. For five-and-twenty years I have been the careful guardian of their interests in a country where, except in mere name, they never possessed any real popularity. Your Lordship smiles a dissent; may I enter upon the question?”
“Heaven forbid!” broke in the Minister, smiling good-humoredly.
“Well, my Lord, were I to reduce my services to a mere monetary estimate, and furnish you with a bill of costs, for what a goodly sum should I stand in the estimates. I have mainly sustained the charge of seven county elections, hardly contested. I have paid the entire charges on twenty-two borough contests. I have subsidized the provincial press in your favor at a cost of several thousand pounds out of my own pocket I have compromised three grave actions about to be brought against the Government. Of the vast sums I have contributed to local charities, schools, nunneries, societies of various denominations, all in the interest of your party, I take no account I have spent in these and like objects a princely fortune, and yet these hundreds of thousands of pounds are as nothing—mere nothing to the actual personal services I have rendered to your party. In the great revolution effected by the sale of encumbered estates, I have so watchfully guarded your interests that I have replaced the old rampant Toryism of the land by a gentry at once manageable and practicable,—men intent less upon party than personal objects, consequently available to the Minister, always accessible by an offer of direct advantage. I have, with all this, so thrown a Whig light over the rising prosperity of the country, that it might seem the result of your wise rule that stimulated men to the higher civilization they have attained to, and that a more forbearing charity and a more liberal spirit went hand in hand with improved agriculture and higher farming. To identify a party with the great march of this prosperity, to make of your policy a cause of these noble results, was the grand conception which, for a quarter of a century, I have carried out. When Mr. O’Connell kept your predecessors in power, his price was the bit-by-bit surrender of what in your hearts you believed to be bulwarks of the constitution. In return for my support what have I got? Some patronage—be it so—for my own dependants and followers, no doubt! Show me one man of my name, one man of my convictions, holding place under the Crown. No, my Lord, my power to serve your party was based on this sure foundation, that I was open to no imputation; I was the distributor of your patronage to the men best worthy to receive it,—no more.”
“Four o’clock, Dunn; time’s up,” said his Lordship. “I must go down to the House.”
“I am sorry to have detained your Lordship with so ungracious a theme.”
“Well, I do think you might have spared me some of it I know well my colleagues all know your invaluable services,—an admirable member of the party, active and able, but not quite neglected, either, eh, Dunn?—not entirely left in oblivion?”
While he spoke, he busied himself in the search for a paper amidst the heap of those before him, and could not, therefore, notice the mortification so palpably expressed on Dunn’s face.
“I can’t find it,” muttered he; “I should like, however, to show you the memorandum itself, in which your name stands recommended to her Majesty for a baronetcy.”
Dunn’s sudden start made the speaker look up; and as he turned his eyes on him, there was no mistaking the look of determined anger on his features.
“A baronetcy, my Lord,” said he, with a slow, thick utterance, “has become the recognized reward of a popular writer, or a fashionable physician, whose wives acquire a sort of Brummagem rank in calling themselves ‘My Lady;’ but men like myself,—men who have sustained a party,—men who, wielding many arms of strength, have devoted them all to the one task of maintaining in power a certain administration, which, whatever their gifts, assuredly did not possess the art of conciliating—”
“Come, it is a peerage you want?” broke in his Lordship, whose manner betrayed a temper pushed to its last limits.
“If I am to trust your Lordship’s tone, the pretension would seem scarcely credible,” said Dunn, calmly.
“I believe I can understand how it would appear to others. I can, without great difficulty, imagine the light in which it would be viewed.”
“As to that, my Lord, any advancement to a man like me will evoke plenty of animadversion. I have done too-much for your party not to have made many enemies. The same objection would apply were I to accept the paltry acknowledgment you so graciously contemplated for me, and which I warn you not to offer me.”
Was it the naked insolence of this speech, or was it that in uttering it the proud pretension of the man summoned a degree of dignity to his manner; but certainly the Minister now looked at him with a sort of respect, he had not deigned hitherto to bestow.
“You know well, Dunn,” he began, in a tone of conciliation, “that fitness for the elevation is only one of the requirements in such a case. There are a mass of other considerations,—the ostensible claims; I mean such as can be-avowed and declared openly,—of the pretending party,—the services he has rendered to the country at large,—the merits he can show for some great public recognition. The press, whatever be its faults nowadays, has no defects on the score of frankness, and we shall have the question put in twenty different quarters, ‘What brilliant campaign has Mr. Dunn concluded?’ ‘What difficult negotiation carried to successful issue?’ ‘Where have been his great achievements in the law courts?’ To be sure, it might be said that we honor the industrial spirit of our country in ennobling one who has acquired a colossal fortune by his own unaided abilities; but Manchester and Birmingham have also their ‘millionnaires.’”
“Your Lordship’s time is far too valuable to be passed in such discussion; even mine might be more profitably spent than in listening to it, My demand is now before you; in some three weeks hence it is not impossible it may await the consideration of your Lordship’s successors. In one word, if I leave this room without your distinct pledge on the subject, you will no longer reckon me amongst the followers of your party.”
“Half-past four, I protest,” said Lord Jedburg, taking up his gloves. “I shall be too late at the House. Let us conclude this to-morrow morning. Come down here at eleven.”
“Excuse me, my Lord. I leave town to-night I am going over to Ireland.”
“Yes, you ought to be there; I forgot. Well, you must leave this affair in my hands. I ‘ll speak to Croydon and Locksley about it,—both stanch friends of yours. I can make no pledge, you know,—no actual promise—”
“Nor I either, my Lord,” said Dunn, rising. “Let me, however, ask you to accept of my excuses for Sunday at dinner.”
“I regret much that we are not to have the pleasure of your company,” said his Lordship, with a formal courtesy.
“These appointments,” said Dunn, laying down a list he had made on the table, “are, of course, in your Lordship’s hands.”
“I conclude so,” was the dry reply, as the Minister but-toned his coat.
“I wish your Lordship a very good morning. Good-bye, my Lord.” And the words had their peculiar utterance.
“Good-bye, Mr. Dunn,” said the Minister, shortly, and rang for his carriage.
Dunn had but reached the foot of the stairs, when he heard a rapid tread behind him. “I beg pardon, Mr. Dunn,” cried Bagwell, the private secretary; “his Lordship sent me to overtake you, and say that the matter you are desirous about shall be done. His Lordship also hopes you can dine with him on Sunday.”
“Oh, very well; say ‘Yes, with much pleasure.’ Has his Lordship gone?”
“Yes, by the private door. He was in a great hurry, and will, I fear, be late, after all.”
“There’s a good thing to be done just now in potash, Bagwell, at Pesaro. If you have a spare hundred or two, give me a call to-morrow morning.” And with a gesture to imply secrecy, Dunn moved away, leaving Bagwell in a dream of gold-getting.
CHAPTER XIX. THE COTTAGE NEAR SNOWDON
At an early portion of this true story, our reader was incidentally told that Charles Conway had a mother, and that she lived in Wales. Her home was a little cottage near the village of Bedgellert, a neighborhood wherein her ancestors had once possessed large estates, but of which not an acre now acknowledged her as owner. Here, on a mere pittance, she had lived for years a life of unbroken solitude. The few charities to the poor her humble means permitted had served to make her loved and respected; while her gentle manners and kind address gave her that sort of eminence which such qualities are sure to attain in remote and simple circles.
All her thoughts in life, all her wishes and ambitions, were centred in her son; and although it was to the wild and reckless extravagance of his early life that she owed the penury which now pressed her, although but for his wasteful excesses she had still been in affluence and comfort, she never attached to him the slightest blame, nor did her lips ever utter one syllable of reproach. Strong in the conviction that so long as the wild excesses of youth stamp nothing of dishonor on the character, the true nature within has sustained no permanent injury, she waited patiently for the time when, this season of self-indulgence over, the higher dictates of manly reason would assert their influence, and that Charley, having sown his wild oats, would come forth rather chastened and sobered than stained by his intercourse with the world.
If this theory of hers has its advocates, there are many—and wise people, too—who condemn it, and who deem those alone safe who have been carefully guarded from the way of temptation, and have been kept estranged from the seductions of pleasure. To ourselves the whole question resolves itself into the nature of the individual, at the same time that we had far rather repose our confidence in one who had borne his share in life’s passages, gaining his experience, mayhap, with cost, but coming honorably through the trial, than on him who, standing apart, had but looked out over the troubled ocean of human passion, nor risked himself on the sea of man’s temptations.
The former was Conway’s case: he had led a life of boundless extravagance; without any thought of the cost, he had launched out into every expensive pursuit. What we often hear applied to others figuratively, was strictly applicable to him; he never knew the value of money; he never knew that anything one desired could be overpaid for. The end came at last. With a yacht ready stored and fitted out for a Mediterranean cruise, with three horses heavily engaged at Doncaster, with a shooting-lodge filled with distinguished company in the Highlands, with negotiations all but completed for the Hooksley hounds, with speculations rife as to whether the Duchess of This or the Countess of That had secured him for a daughter or a niece, there came, one morning, the startling information from his solicitor that a large loan he had contemplated raising was rendered impossible by some casualty of the money-market Recourse must be had to the Jews; heavy liabilities incurred at Newmarket must be met at once and at any cost. A week of disaster fell exactly at this conjuncture; he lost largely at the Portland, largely on the turf; a brother officer, for whom he had given surety, levanted immensely in debt; while a local bank, in which a considerable sum of his was vested, failed. The men of sixty per cent saved him from shipwreck; but they took the craft for the salvage, and Conway was ruined.
Amidst the papers which Conway had sent to his solicitor as securities for the loan, a number of family documents had got mingled, old deeds and titles to estates of which the young man had not so much as heard, claims against property of whose existence he knew nothing. When questioned about them by the man of law, he referred him coolly to his mother, saying, frankly, “it was a matter on which he had never troubled his head.’” Mrs. Conway herself scarcely knew more. She had heard that there was a claim in the family to a peerage; her husband used to allude to it in his own dreamy, indolent fashion, and say that it ought to be looked after, and that was all.
Had the information come to the mind of an active or enterprising man of business, it might have fared differently. The solicitor to the family was, however, himself a lethargic, lazy sort of person, and he sent back the papers to Mrs. Conway, stating that he was not sure “something might not be made of them;” that is, added he, “if he had five or six thousand pounds to expend upon searches, and knew where to prosecute them.”
This was but sorry comfort, but it did not fall upon a heart high in hope or strong in expectation. Mrs. Conway had never lent herself to the impression that the claim had much foundation, and she heard the tidings with calm; and all that was remembered of the whole transaction was when some jocular allusion would be made by Charles to the time when he should succeed to his peerage, or some as light-hearted jest of the old lady as to whether she herself was to enjoy a title or not The more stirring incidents of a great campaign had latterly, however, so absorbed all the young soldier’s interest that he seemed totally to have forgotten the oft-recurring subject of joke between them. Strange enough was it, yet, that in the very letter which conveyed to his mother an account of his Tchernaya achievement, a brief postscript had the following words:—
“Since I have been confined to hospital, a person connected
with the newspapers, I believe, has been here to learn the
exact story of my adventure, and, curiously enough, has been
pumping me about our family history. Can it be that ‘our
peerage’ is looking up again? This last sabre-cut on my
skull makes me rather anxious to exchange a chako for a
coronet. Can you send me anything hopeful in this
direction?”
It was on an answer to this letter the old lady was occupied, seated at an open window, as the sun was just setting on a calm and mellow evening in late autumn. Well understanding the temperament of him she addressed, she adverted little to the danger of his late achievement, and simply seemed to concur in his own remark when recounting it, that he who has made his name notorious from folly has, more than others, the obligation to achieve a higher and better reputation; and added, at the same time: “Charley, what I liked best in your feat was its patriotism. The sense of rendering a good and efficient service to the cause of your country was a nobler prompting than any desire for personal distinction.” From this she turned to tell him about what she well knew he loved best to hear of,—her home and her daily life, with its little round of uneventful cares, the little Welsh pony “Crw,” and his old spaniel “Belle,” and the tulips he had taken such pains about, and the well he had sunk in the native rock. She had good tidings, too, that the railroad—the dreadful railroad—was not to take the line of their happy valley, but to go off in some more “favored” direction. Of the cottage itself she had succeeded in obtaining a renewed lease,—a piece of news well calculated to delight him, “if,” as she said, “grand dreams of the peerage might not have impaired his relish for the small hut at the foot of Snowdon.” She had just reached so far when a little chaise, drawn by a mountain pony, drew up before the door, and a lady in a sort of half-mourning dress got out and rang the bell. As the old lady rose to admit her visitor,—for her only servant was at work in the garden,—she felt no small astonishment. She was known to none but the peasant neighborhood about her; she had not a single acquaintance in the country with its gentry; and although the present arrival came with little display, in her one glance at the figure of the stranger she saw her to be distinctly of a certain condition in life.
It will conduce equally to brevity and to the interests of our story if we give what followed in the words wherein Mrs. Conway conveyed it to her son:—
“Little, I thought, my dear Charley, that I should have to
cross this already long letter,—little suspected that its
real and only interest was to have been suggested as I drew
to its close; and here, if I had the heart for it, were the
place to scold you for a pretty piece of mystification you
once practised upon me, when you induced me to offer the
hospitality of this poor cottage to an humble gentlewoman,
whose poverty would not deem even my life an existence of
privation,—the sister of a fellow-soldier you called her,
and made me to believe—whose the fault I am not sure—that
she was some not very young or very attractive person, but
one whose claim lay in her friendless lot and forlorn
condition. Say what you will, such was my impression, and it
could have no other source than your description.
