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LUCIUS DAVOREN




  LONDON:
  ROBSON AND SONS, PRINTERS, PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.




  LUCIUS DAVOREN

  OR

  PUBLICANS AND SINNERS

  A Novel

  BY THE AUTHOR OF
  ‘LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET’
  ETC. ETC. ETC.

  IN THREE VOLUMES

  VOL. I.

  [Illustration: Decoration]

  LONDON
  JOHN MAXWELL AND CO.
  4 SHOE LANE, FLEET STREET
  1873
  [_All rights reserved_]




  This Book is Inscribed

  TO

  VISCOUNT MILTON, M.P. F.R.G.S.
  ETC.

  IN ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF THE AID DERIVED FROM HIS
  ADMIRABLE BOOK OF TRAVELS,
  ‘THE NORTH-WEST PASSAGE OVERLAND,’
  TO WHICH THE AUTHOR IS INDEBTED FOR THE
  SCENERY IN THE PROLOGUE.




CONTENTS OF VOL. I.


  Prologue:—In the Far West.

  CHAP.                                                             PAGE

     I. ‘WHERE THE SUN IS SILENT’                                      1

    II. ‘MUSIC HATH CHARMS’                                           10

   III. HOW THEY LOST THE TRAIL                                       34

    IV. ‘ALL’S CHEERLESS, DARK, AND DEADLY’                           47

     V. ‘O, THAT WAY MADNESS LIES’                                    57


  Book the First.

     I. LOOKING BACKWARDS                                             71

    II. HOMER SIVEWRIGHT                                              95

   III. HARD HIT                                                     132

    IV. ‘O WORLD, HOW APT THE POOR ARE TO BE PROUD!’                 155

     V. ‘I HAD A SON, NOW OUTLAW’D FROM MY BLOOD’                    171

    VI. ‘BY HEAVEN, I LOVE THEE BETTER THAN MYSELF’                  193

   VII. ‘SORROW HAS NEED OF FRIENDS’                                 213

  VIII. GEOFFREY INCLINES TO SUSPICION                               227

    IX. SOMETHING TOO MUCH FOR GRATITUDE                             245

     X. A DAUGHTER’S LOVE, AND A LOVER’S HOPE                        259

    XI. THE BIOGRAPHY OF A SCOUNDREL                                 270

   XII. LUCIUS HAS AN INTERVIEW WITH A FAMOUS PERSONAGE              293

  XIII. HE FEARS HIS FATE TOO MUCH                                   307




LUCIUS DAVOREN




Prologue:—In the Far West.




CHAPTER I.

‘WHERE THE SUN IS SILENT.’


Winter round them: not a winter in city streets, lamplit and glowing,
or on a fair English countryside, dotted with cottage-roofs, humble
village homes, sending up their incense of blue-gray smoke to the
hearth goddess; not the winter of civilisation, with all means and
appliances at hand to loosen the grip of the frost-fiend: but winter in
its bleakest aspect, amid trackless forests, where the trapper walks
alone; winter in a solitude so drear that the sound of a human voice
seems more strange and awful than the prevailing silence; winter in a
pine-forest in British North America, westward of the Rocky Mountains.
It is December, the bleakest, dreariest month in the long winter; for
spring is still far off.

Three men sit crouching over the wood-fire in a roughly-built log-hut
in the middle of a forest, which seems to stretch away indefinitely
into infinite space. The men have trodden that silent region for many
a day, and have found no outlet on either side, only here and there
a frozen lake, to whose margin, ere the waters were changed to ice,
the forest denizens came down to gorge themselves with the small fish
that abound there. They are travellers who have penetrated this dismal
region for pleasure; yet each moved by a different desire. The first,
Lucius Davoren, surgeon, has been impelled by that deep-rooted thirst
of knowledge which in some minds is a passion. He wants to know what
this strange wild territory is like—this unfamiliar land between Fort
Garry and Victoria, across the Rocky Mountains—and if there lies not
here a fair road for the English emigrant. He has even cherished the
hope of some day pushing his way to the northward, up to the ice-bound
shores of the polar sea. He looks upon this trapper-expedition as
a mere experimental business, an education for grander things, the
explorer’s preparatory school.

So much for Lucius Davoren, surgeon without a practice. Mark him as
he sits in his dusky corner by the fire. The hut boasts a couple of
windows, but they are only of elk-skin, through which the winter light
steals dimly. Mark the strongly-defined profile, the broad forehead,
the clear gray eyes. The well-cut mouth and resolute chin are hidden
by that bushy untrimmed beard, which stiffens with his frozen breath
when he ventures outside the hut; but the broad square forehead, the
Saxon type of brow, and clear penetrating eyes, are in themselves
all-sufficient indications of the man’s character. Here are firmness
and patience, or, in one word, the noblest attribute of the human
mind—constancy.

On the opposite side of that rude hearth sits Geoffrey Hossack, three
years ago an undergraduate at Balliol, great at hammer-throwing and the
long jump, doubtful as to divinity exam., and with vague ideas trending
towards travel and adventure in the Far West as the easiest solution of
_that_ difficulty. Young, handsome, ardent, fickle, strong as a lion,
gentle as a sucking dove, Geoffrey has been the delight and glory of
the band in its sunnier days; he is the one spot of sunlight in the
picture now, when the horizon has darkened to so deep a gloom.

The last of the trio is Absalom Schanck, a native of Hamburg, small and
plump, with a perennial plumpness which has not suffered even from
a diet of mouldy pemmican, and rare meals of buffalo or moose flesh,
which has survived intervals of semi-starvation, blank dismal days when
there was absolutely nothing for these explorers to eat.

At such trying periods Absalom is wont to wax plaintive, but it is not
of turtle or venison he dreams; no vision of callipash or callipee, no
mocking simulacrum of a lordly Aberdeen salmon or an aldermanic turbot,
no mirage picture of sirloin or Christmas turkey, torments his soul;
but his feverish mouth waters for the putrid cabbage and rancid pork of
his fatherland; and the sharpest torture which fancy can create for him
is the tempting suggestion of a certain boiled sausage which his soul
loveth.

He has joined the expedition with half-defined ideas upon the subject
of a new company of dealers in skins, to be established beyond the
precincts of Hudson’s Bay; and not a little influenced by a genuine
love of exploration, and a lurking notion that he has in him the stuff
that makes a Van Diemen.

From first to last it is, and has been, essentially an amateur
expedition. No contribution from the government of any nation has
aided these wanderers. They have come, as Geoffrey Hossack forcibly
expresses the fact, ‘on their own hook.’ Geoffrey suggests that
they should found a city, by and by, after the manner of classical
adventurers: whence should arise in remote future ages some new Empire
of the West.

‘Hossack’s Gate would be rather a good name for it,’ he says, between
two puffs of his meerschaum; ‘and our descendants would doubtless be
known as the Hossackides, and the Davorenides, and do their very best
to annihilate one another, you know, Lucius.’

‘We Chermans have giv more names to blaizes than you Englishers,’
chimes in Mr. Schanck with dignity. ‘It is our dalend to disgover.’

‘I wish you’d disgover something to eat, then, my friend Absalom,’
replies the Oxonian irreverently; ‘that mouthful of pemmican Lucius
doled out to us just now has only served as a whet for my appetite.
Like the half-dozen Ostend oysters they give one as the overture to a
French dinner.’

‘Ah, they are goot the oysders of Osdend,’ says Mr. Schanck with a
sigh, ‘and zo are ze muzzles of Blankenberk. I dreamt ze ozer night I
vas in heafen eading muzzles sdewed in _vin de madère_.’

‘Don’t,’ cries Geoffrey emphatically; ‘if we begin to talk about
eating, we shall go mad, or eat each other. How nice you would be,
Schanck, stuffed with chestnuts, and roasted, like a Norfolk turkey
dressed French fashion! It’s rather a pity that one’s friends are
reported to be indigestible; but I believe that’s merely a fable,
designed as a deterring influence. The Maories cannibalised from the
beginning of time; fed in and in, as well as bred in and in. One
nice old man, a chieftain of Rakiraki, kept a register of his own
consumption of prisoners, by means of a row of stones, which, when
reckoned up after the old gentleman’s demise, amounted to eight hundred
and seventy-two: and yet these Maories were a healthy race enough when
civilisation looked them up.’

Lucius Davoren takes no heed of this frivolous talk. He is lying on the
floor of the log-hut, with a large chart spread under him, studying it
intensely, and sticking pins here and there as he pores over it. He has
ideas of his own, fixed and definite, which neither of his companions
shares in the smallest degree. Hossack has come to these wild regions
with an Englishman’s unalloyed love of adventure, as well as for a
quiet escape from the trusting relatives who would have urged him
to go up for Divinity. Schanck has been beguiled hither by the fond
expectation of finding himself in a paradise of tame polar bears and
silver foxes, who would lie down at his feet, and mutely beseech him
to convert them into carriage-rugs. They are waiting for the return of
their guide, an Indian, who has gone to hunt for the lost trail, and to
make his way back to a far distant fort in quest of provisions. If he
should find the journey impossible, or fall dead upon the way, their
last hope must perish with the failure of his mission, their one only
chance of succour must die with his death.

Very shrunken are the stores which Lucius Davoren guards with jealous
care. He doles out each man’s meagre portion day by day with a Spartan
severity, and a measurement so just that even hunger cannot dispute his
administration; the tobacco, that sweet solacer of weary hours, begins
to shrink in the barrel, and Geoffrey Hossack’s lips linger lovingly
over the final puffs of his short black-muzzled meerschaum, with a
doleful looking forward to the broad abyss of empty hours which must be
bridged over before he refills the bowl. Unless the guide returns with
supplies there is hardly any hope that these reckless adventurers will
ever reach the broad blue waters of the Pacific, and accomplish the end
of that adventurous scheme which brought them to these barren regions.
Unless help comes to them in this way, or in some fortuitous fashion,
they are doomed to perish. They have considered this fact among
themselves many times, sitting huddled together under the low roof of
their log-hut, by the feeble glimmer of their lantern.

Of the three wanderers Absalom Schanck is the only experienced
traveller. He is a naturalised Englishman, and a captain in the
merchant navy; having traded prosperously for some years as the owner
of a ship—a sea-carrier in a small way—he had sold his vessel, and
built himself a water-side villa at Battersea, half Hamburgian, half
nautical in design; a cross between a house in Hamburg and half-a-dozen
ships’ cabins packed neatly together; everything planned with as strict
an economy of space as if the dainty little habitation were destined to
put to sea as soon as she was finished. As many shelves and drawers and
hatches in the kitchen as in a steward’s cabin; stairs winding up the
heart of the house, like a companion-ladder; a flat roof, from which
Mr. Schanck can see the sunset beyond the westward-lying swamps of
Fulham, and which he fondly calls the admiral’s poop.

But even this comfortable habitation has palled upon the mind of the
professional rover. Dull are those suburban flats to the eye that for
twenty years has ranged over the vast and various ocean. Absalom has
found the consolation of pipe and case-bottle inadequate; and with
speculative ideas of the vaguest nature, has joined Geoffrey Hossack’s
expedition to the Far West.




CHAPTER II.

‘MUSIC HATH CHARMS.’


Ten days go by, empty days of which only Lucius Davoren keeps a record,
in a journal which may serve by and by for a history of the ill-fated
expedition; which may be found perchance by some luckier sportsmen in
years to come, when the ink upon the paper has gone gray and pale,
and when the date of each entry has an ancient look, and belongs to a
bygone century; nay, when the very fashion of the phrases is obsolete.

Lucius takes note of everything, every cloud in the sky, every red
gleam of the aurora, with its ghostly rustling sound, as of phantom
trees shaken by the north wind. He finds matter for observation where
to the other two there seems only an endless blank, a universe that
is emptied of everything except the unvarying pine-trees rising dark
against a background of everlasting snow.

Geoffrey Hossack practises hammer-throwing with an iron crowbar,
patches the worn-out sleighs, makes little expeditions on his own
account, and discovers nothing, except that he has a non-geographical
mind, and that, instead of the trapper’s unerring instinct, which
enables him to travel always in a straight line, he has an unpleasant
tendency to describe a circle; prowls about with his gun, and the
scanty supply of ammunition which Davoren allows him; makes traps for
silver foxes, and has the mortification of seeing his bait devoured by
a wolverine, who bears a life as charmed as that Macbeth was promised;
and sometimes, but alas too seldom, kills something—a moose, and once a
buffalo. O, then what a hunter’s feast they have in the thick northern
darkness! what a wild orgie seems that rare supper! Their souls expand
over the fresh meat; they feel mighty as northern gods, Odin and Thor.
Hope rekindles in every breast; the moody silence which has well-nigh
grown habitual to them in the gloom of these hungry hopeless days,
melts into wild torrents of talk. They are moved with a kind of rapture
engendered of this roast flesh, and recognise the truth of Barry
Cornwall’s dictum, that a poet should be a high feeder.

The grip of the frost-fiend tightens upon them; the brief days flit by
ghostlike, only the long nights linger. They sit in their log-hut in a
dreary silence, each man seated on the ground, with his knees drawn up
to his chin, and his back against the wall. Were they already dead, and
this their sepulchre, they could wear no ghastlier aspect.

They are silent from no sullen humour. Discord has never risen among
them. What have they to talk about? Swift impending death, the sharp
stings of hunger, the bitterness of an empty tobacco-barrel. Their
dumbness is the dumbness of stoics who can suffer and make no moan.

They have not yet come to absolute starvation; there is a little
pemmican still, enough to sustain their attenuated thread of life for
a few more days. When that is gone, they can see before them nothing
but death. The remains of their buffalo has been eaten by the wolves,
carefully as they hid it under the snow. The region to which they have
pushed their way seems empty of human life—a hyperborean chaos ruled by
Death. What hardy wanderer, half-breed or Indian, would venture hither
at such a season?

They are sitting thus, mute and statue-like, in the brief interval
which they call daylight, when something happens which sets every
heart beating with a sudden violence—something so unexpected, that
they wait breathless, transfixed by surprise. A voice, a human voice,
breaks the dead silence; a wild face, with bright fierce eyes peers in
at the entrance of the hut, from which a bony hand has dragged aside
the tarpaulin that serves for a screen against the keen northern winds,
which creep in round the angle of the rough wooden porch.

The face belongs to neither Indian nor half-breed; it is as white as
their own. By the faint light that glimmers through the parchment
windows they see it scrutinising them interrogatively, with a piercing
scrutiny.

‘Explorers?’ asks the stranger, ‘and Englishmen?’

Yes, they tell him, they are English explorers. Absalom Schanck of
course counts as an Englishman.

‘Are you sent out by the English government?’

‘No, we came on our own hook,’ replies Geoffrey Hossack, who is the
first to recover from the surprise of the man’s appearance, and from
a certain half-supernatural awe engendered by his aspect, which has a
wild ghastliness, as of a wanderer from the under world. ‘But never
mind how we came here; what we want is to get away. Don’t stand there
jawing about our business, but come inside, and drop that tarpaulin
behind you. Where have you left your party?’

‘Nowhere,’ answers the stranger, stepping into the hut, and standing
in the midst of them, tall and gaunt, clad in garments that are half
Esquimaux, half Indian, and in the last stage of dilapidation, torn
mooseskin shoes upon his feet, the livid flesh showing between every
rent; ‘nowhere. I belong to no party—I’m alone.’

‘Alone!’ they all exclaim, with a bitter pang of disappointment. They
had been ready to welcome this wild creature as the forerunner of
succour.

‘Yes, I was up some thousand miles northward of this, among icebergs
and polar bears and Dog-rib Indians and Esquimaux, with a party of
Yankees the summer before last; and served them well, too, for I know
some of the Indian lingo, and was able to act as their interpreter. But
the expedition was a failure. Unsuccessful men are hard to deal with.
In short, we quarrelled, and parted company; they went their way, I
went mine. There’s no occasion to enter into details. It was winter
when I left them—the stores were exhausted, with the exception of a
little ammunition. They had their guns, and may have found reindeer or
musk oxen, but I don’t fancy they can have come to much good. They
didn’t know the country as well as I do.’

‘You have been alone nearly a year?’ asks Lucius Davoren, interested in
this wild-looking stranger. ‘How have you lived during that time?’

‘Anyhow,’ answers the other with a careless shrug of his bony
shoulders. ‘Sometimes with the Indians, sometimes with the
Esquimaux—they’re civil enough to a solitary Englishman, though they
hate the Indians like poison—sometimes by myself. As long as I’ve a
charge for my gun I don’t much fear starvation, though I’ve found
myself face to face with it a good many times since I parted with my
Yankee friends.’

‘Do you know this part of the country?’

‘No; it’s beyond my chart. I shouldn’t be here now if I hadn’t lost my
way. But I suppose, now I am here, you’ll give me shelter.’

The three men looked at one another. Hospitality is a noble virtue, and
a virtue peculiarly appropriate to the dwellers in remote and savage
regions; but hospitality with these men meant a division of their few
remaining days of life. And the last of those days might hold the
chance of rescue. Who could tell? To share their shrunken stores with
this stranger would be a kind of suicide. Yet the dictates of humanity
prevailed. The stranger was not pleasant to look upon, nor especially
conciliating in manner; but he was a fellow sufferer, and he must he
sheltered.

‘Yes,’ says Lucius Davoren, ‘you are welcome to share what we have.
It’s not much. A few days’ rations.’

The stranger takes a canvas bag from his neck, and flings it into a
corner of the hut.

‘There’s more than a week’s food in that,’ he says; ‘dried reindeer,
rather mouldy, but I don’t suppose you’re very particular.’

‘Particular!’ cried Geoffrey Hossack, with a groan. ‘When I think of
the dinners I have turned up my nose at, the saddles of mutton I have
despised because life seemed always saddle of mutton, I blush for the
iniquity of civilised man. I remember a bottle of French plums and a
canister of Presburg biscuits that I left in a chiffonier at Balliol.
Of course my scout consumed them. O, would I had those toothsome cates
to-day!’

‘Balliol!’ says the stranger, looking at him curiously. ‘So you’re a
Balliol man, are you?’

There was something strange in the sound of this question from an
unkempt savage, with half-bare feet, in ragged mooseskin shoes. The
newcomer pushed aside the elf-locks that overhung his forehead, and
stared at Geoffrey Hossack as he waited for the answer to his inquiry.

‘Yes,’ replied Geoffrey with his usual coolness, ‘I have had the honour
to be gated occasionally by the dons of that college. Are you an Oxford
man?’

‘Do I look like it?’ asks the other, with a harsh laugh. ‘I am nothing;
I come from nowhere: I have no history, no kith or kin. I fancy I
know this kind of life better than you do, and I know how to talk to
the natives, which I conclude you don’t. If we can hold on till this
infernal season is over, and the trappers come this way, I’ll be your
interpreter, your servant, anything you like.’

‘If!’ said Lucius gravely. ‘I don’t think we shall ever see the end of
this winter. But you can stay with us, if you please. At the worst, we
can die together.’

The stranger gives a shivering sigh, and drops into an angular heap in
a corner of the hut.

‘It isn’t a lively prospect,’ he says. ‘Death is a gentleman I mean
to keep at arm’s length as long as I can. I’ve had to face him often
enough, but I’ve got the best of it so far. Have you used all your
tobacco?’

‘Every shred,’ says Geoffrey Hossack dolefully. ‘I smoked my last pipe
and bade farewell to the joys of existence three days ago.’

‘Smoke another, then,’ replies the stranger, taking a leather pouch
from his bosom, ‘and renew your acquaintance with pleasure.’

‘Bless you!’ exclaims Geoffrey, clutching the prize. ‘Welcome to our
tents! I would welcome Beelzebub if he brought me a pipe of tobacco.
But if one fills, all fill—that’s understood. We are brothers in
misfortune, and must share alike.’

‘Fill, and be quick about it,’ says the stranger. So the three fill
their pipes, light them, and their souls float into Elysium on the
wings of the seraph tobacco.

The stranger also fills and lights and smokes silently, but not with a
paradisiac air, rather with the gloomy aspect of some fallen spirit,
to whose lost soul sensuous joys bring no contentment. His large dark
eyes—seeming unnaturally large in his haggard face—wander slowly round
the walls of the hut, mark the bunks filled with dried prairie grass,
and each provided with a buffalo robe. Indications of luxury these.
Actual starvation would have reduced the wanderers to boiling down
strips of their buffalo skins into an unsavoury soup. Slowly those
great wan eyes travel round the hut. Listlessly, yet marking every
detail—the hunting knives and fishing tackle hanging against the
wall, Geoffrey’s handsome collection of rifles, which have been the
admiration of every Indian who has ever beheld them. The stranger’s
gaze lingers upon these, and an envious look glimmers in his eyes.
Signs of wealth these. He glances at the three companions, and wonders
which is the man who finds the money for the expedition, and owns these
guns. There could hardly be three rich fools mad enough to waste life
and wealth on such wanderings. He concludes that one is the dupe, the
other two adventurers, trading, or hoping to trade, upon his folly.
His keen eye lights on Hossack, the man who talked about Balliol. Yes,
he has a prosperous stall-fed look. The other, Lucius, has too much
intelligence. The little German is too old to spend his substance upon
so wild a scheme.

Those observant eyes of the stranger’s have nearly completed their
circuit, when they suddenly fix themselves, seem visibly to dilate, and
kindle with a fire that gives a new look to his face. He sees an object
hanging against the wall, to him as far above all the wonders of modern
gunnery as the diamonds of Golconda are above splinters of glass.

He points to it with his bony finger, and utters a strange shrill
cry of rapture—the ejaculation of a creature who by long solitude, by
hardship and privation, and the wild life of forests and deserts, has
lapsed into an almost savage condition.

‘A fiddle!’ he exclaims, after that shrill scream of delight has melted
into a low chuckling laugh. ‘It’s more than a year since I’ve seen a
fiddle, since I lost mine crossing the McKenzie river. Let me play upon
it.’

This in a softer, more human tone than any words he had previously
spoken, looking from one to the other of the three men with passionate
entreaty.

‘What! you play the fiddle, do you?’ asked Lucius, emptying the ashes
from his pipe with a long sigh of regret.

‘It is yours, then?’

‘Yes; you can play upon it, if you like. It’s a genuine Amati. I have
kept it like the apple of my eye.’

‘Yes, and it’s been uncommonly useful in frightening away the Indians
when they’ve come to torment us for fire-water,’ said Geoffrey. ‘We
tried watering the rum, but that didn’t answer. The beggars poured a
few drops on the fire, and finding it didn’t blaze up, came back and
blackguarded us. I only wish I’d brought a few barrels of turpentine
for their benefit. Petroleum would have been still better. _That_
would meet their ideas of excellence in spirituous liquors. They
like something that scorches their internal economy. They led us a
nice life as long as we had any rum; but the violin was too much for
them. They’re uncommonly fond of their own music, and would sometimes
oblige us with a song which lasted all night, but they couldn’t stand
Davoren’s sonatas. Tune up, stranger. I’m rather tired of De Beriot
and Spohr and Haydn myself. Perhaps you could oblige us with a nigger
melody.’

The stranger waited for no farther invitation, but strode across the
narrow hut, and took the violin case from the shelf where it had been
carefully bestowed. He laid it on the rough pine-wood table, opened it,
and gazed fondly on the Amati reposing in its bed of pale-blue velvet;
the very case, or outer husk, a work of art.

Lucius watched him as the young mother watches her first baby in the
ruthless hands of a stranger. Would he clutch the fiddle by its neck,
drag it roughly from its case, at the hazard of dislocation? The
surgeon was too much an Englishman to show his alarm, but sat stolid
and in agony. No; the unkempt stranger’s bony claws spread themselves
out gently, and embraced the polished table of the fiddle. He lifted it
as the young mother lifts her darling from his dainty cradle; he put it
to his shoulder and lowered his chin upon it, as if in a loving caress.
His long fingers stretched themselves about the neck; he drew the bow
slowly across the strings. O, what rapture even in those experimental
notes!

Geoffrey flung a fresh pine-log upon the fire, as if in honour of the
coming performance. Absalom sat and dozed, dreaming he was in his cuddy
at Battersea, supping upon his beloved sausage. Lucius watched the
stranger, with a gaze full of curiosity. He was passionately fond of
music, and his violin had been his chief solace in hours of darkest
apprehension. Strange to find in this other wanderer mute evidence of
the same passion. The man’s hand as it hugged the fiddle, the man’s
face as it bent over the strings, were the index of a passion as deep
as, or deeper than, his own. He waited eagerly for the man to play.

Presently there arose in that low hut a long-drawn wailing sound; a
minor chord, that seemed like a passionate sob of complaint wrung
from a heart newly broken; and with this for his sole prelude the
stranger began his theme. What he played, Lucius strove in vain to
discover. His memory could recall no such music: Wilder, stranger,
more passionate, more solemn, more awful than the strain which Orpheus
played in the under world, was that music: more demoniac than that
diabolical sonata which Tartini pretended to have composed in a dream.
It seemed extemporaneous, for it obeyed none of the laws of harmony,
yet even in its discords was scarcely inharmonious. There was melody,
too, through all—a plaintive under-current of melody, which never
utterly lost itself, even when the player allowed his fancy its wildest
flights. The passionate rapture of his haggard, weather-beaten face
was reflected in the passionate rapture of his music; but it was not
the rapture of joy; rather the sharp agony of those convulsions of
the soul which touch the border-line of madness; like the passion of
a worshipper at one of those Dionysian festivals in which religious
fervour might end in self-slaughter; or like the ‘possession’ of some
Indian devil-dancer, leaping and wounding himself under the influence
of his demon god.

The three men sat and listened, curiously affected by that strange
sonata. Even Absalom Schanck, to whom music was about as familiar a
language as the Cuneiform character, felt that this was something out
of the common way; that it was grander, if not more beautiful, than
those graceful compositions of De Beriot or Rode wherewith Lucius
Davoren had been wont to amuse his friends in their desolate solitude.

Upon Lucius the music had a curious effect. At first and for some time
he listened with no feeling but the connoisseur’s unmixed delight.
Of envy his mind was incapable, though music is perhaps the most
jealous of the arts, and though he felt this man was infinitely his
superior—could bring tones out of the heart of that Amati which no
power of his could draw from his beloved instrument.

But as the man played on, new emotions showed themselves upon Lucius
Davoren’s countenance—wonder, perplexity; then a sudden lighting up of
passion. His brows contracted; he watched the stranger with gleaming
eyes, breathlessly, waiting for the end of the composition. With the
final chord he started up from his seat and confronted the man.

‘Were you ever in Hampshire?’ he asked, sharply and shortly.

The stranger started ever so slightly at this abrupt interrogatory, but
showed no farther sign of discomposure, and laid the fiddle in its case
as tenderly as he had taken it thence ten minutes before.

‘Hampshire, Massachusetts?’ he inquired. ‘Yes, many a time.’

‘Hampshire in England. Were you in that county in the year ’59?’ asked
Lucius breathlessly, watching the stranger as he spoke.

‘I was never in England in my life.’

‘Ah,’ said Lucius with a long-drawn sigh, which might indicate either
disappointment or relief, ‘then you’re not the man I was half inclined
to take you for. Yet that,’ dropping into soliloquy, ‘was a foolish
fancy. There may be more than one man in the world who plays like a
devil.’

‘You are not particularly complimentary,’ returned the stranger,
touching the violin strings lightly with the tips of his skeleton
fingers, repeating the dismal burden of his melody in those pizzacato
notes.

‘You don’t consider it a compliment. Rely upon it, if Lucifer played
the fiddle at all, he’d play well. The spirit who said, “Evil, be thou
my good,” would hardly do anything by halves. Do you remember what
Corelli said to Strengk when he first heard him play? “I have been
called Arcangelo, but by heavens, sir, you must be Arcidiavolo.” I
would give a great deal to have your power over that instrument. Was
that your own composition you played just now?’

‘I believe so, or a reminiscence; but if the latter, I can’t tell you
its source. I left off playing by book a long time ago; but I have a
reserve fund of acquired music—chiefly German—and I have no doubt I
draw upon it occasionally.’

‘Yes,’ repeated Lucius thoughtfully, ‘I should like to play as you do,
only—’

‘Only what?’ asked the stranger.

‘I should be inclined to fancy there was something
uncomfortable—uncanny, as the Scotch say—lurking in the deep waters of
my mind, if my fancies took the shape yours did just now.’

‘As for me,’ exclaimed Geoffrey, with agreeable candour, ‘without
wishing either to flatter or upbraid, I can only say that I feel as if
I had been listening to a distinguished member of the royal orchestra
in Pandemonium—the Paganini of Orcus.’

The stranger laughed—a somewhat harsh and grating cachinnation.

‘You don’t like minors?’ he said.

‘I was a minor myself for a long time, and I only object to the
species on the score of impecuniosity,’ replied Geoffrey. ‘O, I beg
your pardon; you mean the key. If that composition of yours was
minor, I certainly lean to the major. Could you not oblige us with a
Christy-minstrel melody to take the taste out of our mouths?’

The stranger deigned no answer to that request, but sat down on the
rough log which served Lucius for a seat, and made a kind of settle by
the ample fireplace. With lean arms folded and gaze bent upon the fire,
he lapsed into thoughtful silence. The blaze of the pine-logs, now
showing vivid tinges of green or blue as the resin bubbled from their
tough hide, lit up the faces, and gave something of grotesque to each.
Seen by this medium, the stranger’s face was hardly a pleasant object
for contemplation, and was yet singular enough to arrest the gaze of
him who looked upon it.

Heaven knows if, with all the aids of civilisation, soap and water,
close-cut hair, and carefully-trimmed moustache, the man might not
have been ranked handsome. Seen in this dusky hovel, by the changeful
light of the pine-logs, that face was grotesque and grim as a study by
Gustave Doré; the lines as sharply accentuated, the lights and shadows
as vividly contrasted.

The stranger’s eyes were of darkest hue; as nearly black as the human
eye, or any other eye, ever is: that intensest brown which, when in
shadow, looks black, and when the light shines upon it seems to emit
a tawny fire, like the ray which flashes from a fine cat’s-eye. His
forehead was curiously low, the hair growing in a peak between the
temples. His nose was long, and a pronounced aquiline. His cheek-bones
were rendered prominent by famine. The rest of his face was almost
hidden by the thick ragged beard of densest black, through which his
white teeth flashed with a hungry look when he talked or smiled. His
smile was not a pleasant one.

‘If one could imagine his Satanic majesty taking another promenade,
like that walk made famous by Porson, and penetrating to these
hyperborean shores—and why not, when contrast is ever pleasing?—I
should expect to behold him precisely in yonder guise,’ mused Geoffrey,
as he contemplated their uninvited guest from the opposite side of the
hearth. ‘But the age has grown matter-of-fact; we no longer believe
in the pleasing illusions of our childhood—hobgoblins, Jack and the
Beanstalk, and old Nick. Gunpowder and the printing press, as somebody
observes, have driven away Robin Goodfellow and the fairies.’

Lucius sat meditative, staring into the fire. That wild minor theme
had moved him profoundly, yet it was not so much of the music that he
thought as of the man. Five years ago he had heard the description
of music—which seemed to him to correspond exactly with this—of an
amateur whose playing had the same unearthly, or even diabolical
excellence. Certainly that man had been a pianist. And then it was too
wild a fancy to conceive for a moment that he had encountered that man,
whom he had hunted for all over England, and even out of England, here
in this primeval forest. Destiny in her maddest sport could hardly have
devised such a hazard. No, the thought was absurd; no doubt an evidence
of a brain enfeebled by anxiety and famine. Yet the fancy disturbed him
not the less.

‘Unless Geoff stalks another buffalo before long, I shall go off my
head,’ he said to himself.

He brooded upon the stranger’s assertion that he was a Southern
American, and had never crossed the Atlantic; an assertion at variance
with the fact of his accent, which was purely English. Yet Lucius
had known American citizens whose English was as pure, and he could
scarcely condemn the man as a liar on such ground as this.

‘The description of that man’s appearance might fit this man,’ he
thought; ‘due allowance being made for the circumstances under which
we see him. Tall and dark, with a thin lissom figure, a hooked nose,
a hawk’s eye; that was the description they gave me at Wykhamston; I
had it from three separate people. There is no palpable discrepancy,
and yet—bah, I am a fool to think of it! Haven’t I had trouble of mind
enough upon this score, and would it do any good to her—in her grave,
perhaps—if I had my wish: if God gave me the means of keeping the
promise I made five years ago, when I was little more than a boy?’

Lucius’s thoughts rambled on while the stranger sat beside him, with
brooding eyes fixed, like his, upon the flare of the pine-logs.

‘By the way,’ said Lucius presently, rousing himself from that long
reverie, ‘when my friend yonder spoke of Balliol, you pricked up your
ears as if the name were familiar to you. That’s odd, since you have
never been in England.’

‘I suppose there is nothing especially odd in my having had an English
acquaintance in my prosperous days, when even Englishmen were not
ashamed to know me. One may be familiar with the name of a college
without having seen the college itself. I had a friend who was a
student at Balliol.’

‘I wonder whether he was the man who wrote “_Aratus sum!_” upon one of
the tables in the examiners’ room after they ploughed him,’ speculated
Geoffrey idly.

‘I’ll tell you what it is, Mr. Stranger,’ said Lucius presently,
struggling with the sense of irritation caused by that wild fancy which
the stranger’s playing had inspired, ‘it’s all very well for us to
give you a corner in our hut. As good or evil fortune brought you this
way, we could hardly be so unchristian as to refuse you our shelter;
God knows it’s poor enough, and death is near enough inside as well as
outside these wooden walls; but even Christianity doesn’t oblige us to
harbour a man without a name. That traveller who fell among thieves
told the Samaritan his name, rely upon it, as soon as he was able to
say anything. No honest man withholds his name from the men he breaks
bread with. Even the Indians tell us their names; so be good enough to
give us yours.’

‘I renounced my own name when I turned my back upon civilisation,’
answered the stranger doggedly; ‘I brought no card-case to this side
of the Rocky Mountains. If you give me your hospitality,’ with a
monosyllabic laugh and a scornful glance round the hut, ‘solely on
condition that I acquaint you with my antecedents, I renounce your
hospitality. I can go back to the forest and liberty. As you say, death
could not be much farther off out yonder in the snow. If you only want
my name for the purposes of social intercourse, you can call me what
the Indians call me, a sobriquet of their own invention, “Matchi
Mohkamarn.”’

‘That means the Evil Knife, I believe,’ said Lucius; ‘hardly
the fittest name to inspire confidence in the minds of a man’s
acquaintance. But I suppose it must do, since you withhold your real
name.’

‘I am sure you are welcome to our pasteboards,’ said Geoffrey,
yawning; ‘I have a few yonder in my dressing-bag—rather a superfluous
encumbrance by the way, since here one neither dresses nor shaves.
But I have occasionally propitiated ravening Indians with the gift
of a silver-topped scent-bottle or pomatum-pot, so the bag _has_
been useful. Dear, dear, how nice it would be to find oneself back
in a world in which there are dressing-bags and dressing-bells, and
dinner-bells afterwards! And yet one fancied it so slow, the world of
civilisation. Lucius, is it not time for our evening pemmican? Think
of the macaroons and rout-cakes we have trampled under our heels
in the bear-fights that used to wind up our wine-parties; to think
of the anchovy toasts and various devils we have eaten—half from
sheer gluttony, half because it was good form—when we were gorged
like Strasburg geese awaiting their euthanasia. Think how we have
rioted, and wasted and wallowed in what are called the pleasures of
the table; and behold us now, hungering for a lump of rancid fat or
a tallow-candle, to supply our exhausted systems with heat-giving
particles!’




CHAPTER III.

HOW THEY LOST THE TRAIL.


The slow days pass, but the guide does not return. Geoffrey’s sporting
explorations have resulted only in a rare bird, hardly a mouthful for
one of the four starving men, though they divide the appetising morsel
with rigid justice, Lucius dissecting it with his clasp-knife almost as
carefully as if it were a subject.

‘To think that I should live to dine on a section of wood-partridge
without any bread-sauce!’ exclaimed Geoffrey dolefully. ‘Do you know,
when I put the small beast in my bag I was sorely tempted to eat him,
feathers and all! Indeed, I think we make a mistake in plucking our
game. The feathers would at least be filling. It is the sense of a
vacuum from which one suffers most severely; after all it can’t matter
much what a man puts inside him, so long as he fills the cavity. Do
you remember that experimental Frenchman who suggested that a hungry
peasantry should eat grass? The suggestion was hardly popular, and the
mob stuffed the poor wretch’s mouth with a handful of his favourite
pabulum, when they hung him to a convenient lamp-post in ’93. But I
really think the notion was sensible. If there were a rood of pasture
uncovered by the perpetual snow I should imitate Nebuchadnezzar, and go
to grass!’

Vain lamentations! Vainer still those long arguments by the pine-log
fire, in which, with map and compass, they travel over again the
journey which has been so disastrous—try back, and find where it was
they lost time—how they let slip a day here, half a week there, until
the expedition, which should have ended with last September, occupied
a period they had never dreamed of, and left them in the bleak bitter
winter: their trail lost, alone in a trackless forest, the snow rising
higher around them day by day, until even the steep bank upon which
they have built their log-hut stands but a few feet above the universal
level.

From first to last the journey has been attended by misfortune as well
as mistake. They had set forth on this perilous enterprise fondly
hoping they could combine pleasure for themselves, with profit to their
fellow-creatures, and by this wild adventure open up a track for
future emigrants—a high road in the days to come from the shores of
the Atlantic to the Pacific—a path by which adventurers from the old
world should travel across the Rocky Mountains to the gold-fields of
the new world. They had started with high hopes—or Lucius had at least
cherished this dream above all thought of personal enjoyment—hopes
of being reckoned among the golden band of adventurers whose daring
has enlarged man’s dominion over that wide world God gave him for
his heritage—hopes of seeing their names recorded on that grand
muster-roll which begins with Hercules, and ends with Livingstone.
They had started from Fort Edmonton with three horses, two guides, and
a fair outfit; but they had left that point too late in the year, as
the guardians of the fort warned them. They were entreated to postpone
their attempt till the following summer, but they had already spent
one winter in camp between Carlton and Edmonton, and the two young men
were resolutely set against farther delay. Absalom Schanck, much more
phlegmatic, would have willingly wintered at the fort, where there was
good entertainment, and where he could have smoked his pipe and looked
out of window at the pine-tops and the snow from one week’s end to
another, resigned to circumstances, and patiently awaiting remittances
from England. But to Lucius Davoren and Geoffrey Hossack the idea of
such loss of time was unendurable. They had both seen as much as they
cared to see of the trapper’s life during the past winter. Both were
eager to push on to fresh woods and pastures new, Geoffrey moved by
the predatory instincts of the sportsman, Lucius fevered by the less
selfish and more ambitious desire to discover that grand highway which
he had dreamed of, between the two great oceans. The star which guided
his pilgrimage was the lodestar of the discoverer. No idle fancy, no
caprice of the moment, could have tempted him aside from the settled
purpose of his journey. But a mountain-sheep—the bighorn—or a wild
goat, seen high up on some crag against the clear cold sky, was magnet
enough to draw Geoffrey twenty miles out of his course.

Of the two guides, one deserted before they had crossed the range,
making off quietly with one of their horses—the best, by the way—and
leaving them, after a long day and night of wonderment, to the
melancholy conviction that they had been cheated. They retraced their
way for one day’s journey, sent their other guide, an Indian, back some
distance in search of the deserter, but with no result. This cost them
between three and four days. The man had doubtless gone quietly back
to Edmonton. To follow him farther would be altogether to abandon their
expedition for this year. The days they had already lost were precious
as rubies.

‘_En avant!_’ exclaimed Geoffrey.

‘Excelsior!’ cried Lucius.

The German was quiescent. ‘I zink you leat me to my deaths,’ he said;
‘but man must die one time. Gismet, as the Durks say. They are wise
beobles, ze Durks.’

The Indian promised to remain faithful, ay, even to death; of which
fatal issue these savages think somewhat lightly; life for them mostly
signifying hardship and privation, brightened only by rare libations
of rum. He was promoted from a secondary position to the front rank,
and was now their sole guide. With their cavalcade thus shrunken they
pushed bravely on, crossed the mountains by the Yellow Head Pass,
looked down from among snow-clad pinnacles upon the Athabasca river,
rushing madly between its steep banks, and reached Jasper House, a
station of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which they found void of all human
life, a mere shell or empty simulacrum; in the distance a cheering
object to look upon, promising welcome and shelter; and giving neither.

For Hossack, that mighty mountain range, those snow-clad peaks,
towering skyward, had an irresistible attraction. He had done a good
deal of Alpine climbing in his long vacations, had scaled peaks which
few have ever succeeded in surmounting, and had made his name a
household word among the Swiss guides, but such a range as this was
new to him. Here there was a larger splendour, an infinite beauty. The
world which he had looked down upon from Mont Blanc—lakes, valleys,
and villages dwarfed by the distance—was a mere tea-board landscape, a
toy-shop panorama, compared with this. He drew in his breath and gazed
in a dumb rapture,

    ‘Or like stout Cortez, when, with eagle eyes,
     He stared at the Pacific.’

Here, again, they lost considerable time; for even Davoren’s
stronger mind was beguiled by the glory of that splendid scene. He
consented to a week’s halt on the margin of the Athabasca, climbed
the mountain-steeps with his friend, chased the bighorn with footstep
light and daring as the chamois-hunter’s; and found himself sometimes,
after the keen pleasures of the hunt, with his moccasins in rags, and
his naked feet cut and bleeding, a fact of which he had been supremely
unconscious so long as the chase lasted. Sometimes, after descending
to the lower earth, laden with their quarry, the hunters looked upward
and saw the precipices they had trodden, the narrow cornice of rock
along which they had run in pursuit of their prey—saw, and shuddered.
Had they been really within a hair’s-breadth of death?

These were the brightest days of their journey. Their stores were yet
ample, and seemed inexhaustible. They feasted on fresh meat nightly;
yet, with a laudable prudence, smoked and dried some portion of
their prey. In the indulgence of their sporting propensities they
squandered a good deal of ammunition. They smoked half-a-dozen pipes
of tobacco daily. In a word, they enjoyed the present, with a culpable
shortsightedness as to the future.

This delay turned the balance against them. While they loitered, autumn
stole on with footstep almost impalpable, in that region of evergreen.

The first sharp frost of early October awakened Lucius to a sense of
their folly. He gave the word for the march forward, refusing to listen
to Geoffrey’s entreaty for one day more—one more wild hunt among those
mighty crags between earth and sky.

The sea-captain and Kekek-ooarsis, their Indian guide, had been
meritoriously employed during this delay in constructing a raft for the
passage of the Athabasca, at this point a wide lake whose peaceful
waters spread themselves amid an amphitheatre of mountains.

While they were getting ready for the passage of the river they were
surprised by a party of half-breeds—friendly, but starving. Anxious
as they were to husband their resources, humanity compelled them
to furnish these hapless wanderers with a meal. In return for this
hospitality, the natives gave them some good advice, urging them on
no account to trust themselves to the current of the river—a mode of
transit which seemed easy and tempting—as it abounded in dangerous
rapids. They afforded farther information as to the trail on ahead,
and these sons of the old and new world parted, well pleased with one
another.

Soon after this began their time of trial and hardship. They had
to cross the river many times in their journey—sometimes on rafts,
sometimes fording the stream—and often in imminent peril of an abrupt
ending of their troubles by drowning. They crossed pleasant oases of
green prairie, verdant valleys all abloom with wild flowers, gentian
and tiger lilies, cineraria, blue borage—the last-lingering traces of
summer’s footfall in the sheltered nooks. Sometimes they came upon
patches where the forest-trees were blackened by fire, or had fallen
among the ashes of the underwood. Sometimes they had to cut their way
through the wood, and made slow and painful progress. Sometimes they
lost the trail, and only regained it after a day’s wasted labour. One
of their horses died—the other was reduced to a mere skeleton—so rare
had now become the glimpses of pasture. They looked at this spectral
equine with sad prophetic eyes, not knowing how long it might be before
they would be reduced to the painful necessity of cooking and eating
him; and with a doleful foreboding that, when famine brought them to
that strait, the faithful steed would be found to consist solely of
bone and hide.

So they tramped on laboriously and with a dogged patience till they
lost the trail once more; and this time even the Indian’s sagacity
proved utterly at fault, and all their efforts to regain it were
vain. They found themselves in a trackless ring of forest, to them
as darksome a circle as the lowest deep in Dante’s Inferno, and here
beheld the first snow-storm fall white upon the black pine-tops. Here,
in one of their vain wanderings in search of the lost track, they came
upon a dead Indian, seated stark and ghastly at the foot of a giant
pine, draped in his blanket, and bent as if still stooping over the
ashes of the fire wherewith he had tried to keep the ebbing life warm
in his wasted clay. This gruesome stranger was headless. Famine had
wasted him to the very bone; his skin was mere parchment, stretched
tightly over the gaunt skeleton; the whitening bones of his horse
bestrewed the ground by his side. How he came in that awful condition,
what had befallen the missing head, they knew not. Even conjecture
was here at fault. But the spectacle struck them with indescribable
horror. So too might they be found; the skeleton horse crouched dead at
their feet, beside the ashes of the last fire at which their dim eyes
had gazed in the final agonies of starvation. This incident made them
desperate.

‘We are wasting our strength in a useless hunt for the lost track,’
said Lucius decisively. ‘We have neither the instinct nor the
experience of the Indian. Let us make a log-hut here, and wait for the
worst quietly, while Kekek-ooarsis searches for the path, or tries to
work his way back to the fort to fetch help and food. He will make
his way three times as fast when he is unencumbered by us and our
incapacity. We may be able to ward off starvation meanwhile with the
aid of Geoff’s guns. At the worst, we only face death. And since a man
can but die once, it is after all only a question of whether we get
full or short measure of the wine of life.

    ‘And come he slow or come he fast,
     It is but Death who comes at last.’

‘Brezisely,’ said the Hamburgher. ‘It is drue. A man can but die one
time—Gismet. Yet ze wine of life is petter zan ze vater of death, in
most beoble’s obinion.’

Kekek-ooarsis had been absent nearly five weeks at the time of the
stranger’s appearance, and the length of his absence had variously
affected the three men who waited with a gloomy resignation for his
return, or the coming of that other stranger, Death. At times, when
Geoffrey’s gun had not been useless, when they had eaten, and were
inclined to take a somewhat cheerful view of their situation, they
told each other that he had most likely recovered the lost track at a
considerable distance from their hut, and had pushed on to the fort,
to procure fresh horses and supplies. They calculated the time such a
journey to and fro must take him, allowed a wide margin for accidental
delays, and argued that it was not yet too late for the possibility of
his return.

‘I hope he hasn’t cut and run like that other beggar,’ said Geoffrey.
‘It was rather a risky thing to trust him with our money to buy the
horses and provender. Yet it was our only resource.’

‘I believe in his honesty,’ replied Davoren. ‘If he deserts us, Death
will be the tempter who lures him away. These Indians have nobler
qualities than you are inclined to credit them with. Do you remember
that starving creature who came to our hut by the Saskatchewan one day
while we were out hunting, and sat by our hearth, famishing amidst
plenty, for twelve mortal hours, and did not touch a morsel till we
returned and offered him food? I’ll forfeit my reputation as a judge of
character, if Kekek-ooarsis tries to cheat us. That other fellow was a
half-breed.’

‘The Greeks weren’t half-breeds,’ said Geoffrey, whose reading had of
late years been chiefly confined to the Greek historians and the more
popular of the French novelists, ‘yet they were the most treacherous
ruffians going. I don’t pin my faith on your chivalrous Indian.
However, there’s no use in contemplating the gloomiest side of the
question. Let’s take a more lively view of it, and say that he’s frozen
to death in the pass, with our money intact in his bosom, exactly where
you sewed it into his shirt.’

Thus they speculated; the German venturing no opinion, but smoking the
only obtainable substitute for tobacco in stolid silence. Indeed, when
hard pressed by his companions, he admitted that he had never had any
opinion. ‘Vat is ze goot ov obinions?’ he demanded. ‘Man is no petter
vor zem, and it is zo much vasted lapour of prain. I do not know how
to tink. Zomedimes I have ask my froints vat it is like, tinking. Zey
gannot tell me. Zey tink zey tink, put zey to not tink.’




CHAPTER IV.

‘ALL’S CHEERLESS, DARK, AND DEADLY.’


The stranger, having had their exact circumstances laid before him,
took the gloomiest view of the position. The first deep fall of snow
had occurred a week after the guide’s departure. If he had not ere that
time regained a track, with landmarks familiar to his eye, all hope of
his having been able to reach the fort was as foolish as it was vain.

‘For myself,’ said the stranger, ‘I give him up.’

This man, who was henceforth known among them as Matchi, a contraction
of the sobriquet bestowed on him by the Indians, fell into his place
in that small circle easily enough. They neither liked him nor
trusted him. But he had plenty to say for himself, and had a certain
originality of thought and language that went some little way towards
dispelling the deep gloom that surrounded them. In their wretched
position, any one who could bring an element of novelty into their life
was welcome. The desperation of his character suited their desperate
circumstances. In a civilised country they would have shut their doors
in his face. But here, with Death peering in at their threshold, this
wild spirit helped them to sustain the horrors of suspense, the dreary
foreboding of a fatal end.

But there was one charm in his presence which all felt, even the
phlegmatic German. With Lucius Davoren’s violin in his hand, he could
beguile them into brief forgetfulness of that grisly spectre watching
at the door. That passionate music opened the gates of dreamland.
Matchi’s _répertoire_ seemed inexhaustible: but everything he played,
even melodies the world knows by heart, bore the stamp of his own
genius. Whatever subject of Corelli, or Viotti, or Mozart, or Haydn,
formed the groundwork of his theme, the improvisatore sported with
the air at pleasure, and interwove his own wild fancies with the
original fabric. Much that he played was obviously his own composition,
improvised as the bow moved over the strings; wild strains which
interpreted the gloom of their surroundings; dismal threnodies in which
one heard the soughing of the wind among the snow-laden pine-branches;
the howling of wolves at sunrise.

He proved no drone in that little hive, but toiled at such labour as
there was to be done with a savage energy which seemed in accord with
his half-savage nature. He felled the pine-trunks with his axe, and
brought new stores of fuel to the hut. He fetched water from a distant
lake, where there was but one corner which the ice had not locked
against him. He slept little, and those haggard eyes of his had a
strange brightness and vivacity as he sat by the hearth and stared into
the fire which his toil had helped to furnish.

Though he talked much at times, but always by fits and starts, it was
curious to note how rarely he spoke directly of himself or his past
life. Even when Lucius questioned him about his musical education, in
what school he had learned, who had been his master, he contrived to
evade the question.

‘There are some men who have not the knack of learning from other
people, but who must be their own teachers,’ he said. ‘I am one of
those. Shut me up in a prison for ten years, with my fiddle for my only
companion, and when I come out I shall have discovered a new continent
in the world of music.’

‘You play other instruments,’ hazarded Lucius; ‘the cello?’

‘I play most stringed instruments,’ the other answered carelessly.

‘The piano?’

‘Yes, I play the piano. A man has fingers; what is there strange in his
using them?’

‘Nothing; only one wonders that you should be content to hide so many
accomplishments in the backwoods.’

Matchi shrugged his lean shoulders.

‘There are a thousand various reasons why a man should grow tired of
his own particular world,’ he said.

‘To say nothing of the possibility that a man’s own particular world
may grow tired of him,’ returned Lucius.

Instead of himself and his own affairs—that subject which exalts
the most ungifted speaker into eloquence—the stranger spoke of men
and manners, the things he had seen from the outside as a mere
spectator; the books he had read, and they were legion. Never was a
brain stocked with a more heterogeneous collection of ideas. Queer
books, out-of-the-way books, had evidently formed his favourite study.
Geoffrey heard, and was amused. Lucius heard, and wondered, and
rendered to this man that unwilling respect which we give to intellect
unallied with the virtues.

Thus three days and nights went by, somewhat less slowly than the
days had gone of late. On the morning of the fourth the stranger grew
impatient—paced the narrow bounds of his hut like an imprisoned jaguar.

‘Death lies yonder, I doubt not,’ he said, pointing to the forest,
‘while here there is the possibility—a mere possibility—that we may
outlive our troubles; that some luckier band of emigrants may come this
way to succour us before we expire. But I tell you frankly, my friends,
that I can’t stand this sort of life three days longer—to sit down and
wait for death, arms folded, without so much as a pipe of tobacco to
lull the fever in one’s brain. _That_ needs a Roman courage which I
possess not. I shall not trouble your hospitality much longer.’

‘What will you do?’ asked Geoffrey.

‘Push ahead. I have my chart here,’ touching his forehead. ‘I shall
push on towards the Pacific with no better guide than the stars. I can
but perish; better to be frozen to death on the march—like a team of
sleigh-dogs I saw once by the Saskatchewan, standing stark and stiff in
the snow, as their drivers had left them—than to sit and doze by the
fire here till Death comes in his slowest and most hideous shape—death
by famine.’

‘You had better stay with us and share our chances,’ said Lucius; ‘our
guide may even yet return.’

‘Yes,’ answered Matchi, ‘at the general muster roll, with the rank and
file of the dead.’

His words were strangely belied ere that brief day darkened into
night. The four men were sitting huddled round the fire, smoking their
final pipe—for Matchi had now shared among them the last remnant of
his tobacco—when a curious hollow cry, like the plaintive note of a
distressed bird, was heard in the distance.

Lucius was the first to divine its meaning.

‘Kekek-ooarsis!’ he cried, starting to his feet. ‘He has come back at
last. Thank God! thank God!’

The call was repeated, this time distinctly human.

‘Yes,’ said Geoffrey, ‘that’s the identical flute.’

He ran to the door of the hut. Lucius snatched up one of the blazing
pine-branches from the hearth, and went out, waving this fiery brand
aloft, and shouting in answer to the Indian’s cry. In this moment of
glad surprise and hope the man’s return meant succour, comfort, plenty.
Too soon were they to be undeceived. He emerged from among the shadowy
branches, half limping, half crawling towards them across the snow,
which was solid enough to bear that light burden without the faintest
impression on its frozen surface. He came into the glare of the
pine-branch, a wasted ghastly figure, more spectral than their own—the
very image and type of famine.

He came back to them empty-handed. No dogs or horses followed him. He
came, not to bring them the means of life, but to die with them.

The faithful creature crawled about them like a dog, hugged their
knees, laid his wasted body at their feet, looked up at them with
supplicating eyes, too feeble for words. They carried him into the
hut, put him by the fire, and gave him food, which he devoured like a
famished wolf.

Restored by that welcome heat and food, he told them his adventures;
how he had striven in vain to regain the track and make his way back
to the fort; how, after weary wanderings, he had found himself at
last among a little band of Indians, whose camp lay northward of
the Englishmen’s hut, and who were as near famine as they. Here he
had fallen ill with frostbite and rheumatism, but had been kindly
succoured by the Indians, not of his tribe. He had lain in one of their
shelters—not worthy to be dignified even by the name of hut—for a long
time, how long he knew not, having lost consciousness during the
period, and thus missed his reckoning. With recovery came the ardent
desire to return to them, to show them that he had not betrayed his
trust. The bank-notes sewn into his garments had escaped observation
and pillage, supposing the Indians inclined to plunder their guest. He
asked them to sell him provisions that he might take to his masters,
tried to tempt them with liberal offers of payment, but they had
unhappily nothing to sell. Buffalo had vanished from that district,
the lakes and rivers were frozen. The Indians themselves were living
from hand to mouth, and hardly living at all, so meagre was their fare.
Convinced at last that the case was hopeless, Kekek-ooarsis had left
them to return to the hut—a long and difficult journey, since in his
efforts to regain the road, to the fort he had made a wide circuit.
Only fidelity—the dog’s faithful allegiance to the master he loves—had
brought him back to that hunger-haunted dwelling.

‘I cannot help you,’ he said piteously in his native language; ‘I have
come back to die with you.’

‘One more or less to die makes little difference,’ answered the
stranger, speaking the man’s exact dialect with perfect fluency. ‘Let
us see if we cannot contrive to live. You have failed once in your
endeavour to find your way back to the fort. That is no reason you
should fail a second time. Few great things have been done at the first
attempt. Get your strength back, my friend, and you and I will set out
together as soon as you are fit for the journey. I know something of
the country; and with your native eyes and ears to help me, we could
hardly fail.’

Kekek-ooarsis looked up at him wonderingly. He was not altogether
favourably impressed by the stranger’s appearance, if one might judge
by his own countenance, which expressed doubt and perplexity.

‘I will do whatever my masters bid me,’ he said submissively.

His masters let him rest, and eat, and bask in the warmth of the
pine-logs for two days; after which he declared himself ready to set
out upon any quest they might order.

The stranger had talked them into a belief in his intelligence being
superior to that of the guide; and they consented to the two setting
out together to make a second attempt to find the way to the fort. In
a condition so hopeless it seemed to matter very little what they did.
Anything was better than sitting, arms folded, as the stranger had
said, face to face with death.

But Lucius was now chained to the hut by a new tie. The day after the
Indian’s return, Geoffrey, the light-hearted, the fearless, had been
struck down with fever. Lucius had henceforward no care so absorbing as
that which bound him to the side of his friend. The German looked on,
phlegmatic but not unsympathising, and made no moan.

‘I shall gatch ze fefer aftervarts, no tout,’ he said, ‘and you vill
have dwo do nurse. Hart ubon you.’




CHAPTER V.

‘O, THAT WAY MADNESS LIES.’


The fever raged severely. Delirium held Geoffrey’s brain in its hideous
thraldom. Horrid sights and scenes pursued him. He looked at his
friend’s face with blank unseeing eyes, or looked and beheld something
that was not there—the countenance of an enemy.

Lucius felt himself now between two fires—disease on one side, famine
on the other. Between these two devastators death seemed inevitable.
Absalom Schanck, sorely wasted from his native plumpness, sat by the
hearth and watched the struggle, resigned to the idea of his own
approaching end.

Geoffrey’s illness reduced them to a far worse situation than they had
been in before, since he was their chief sportsman, and had done much
to ward off starvation. Lucius took his gun out for a couple of hours
every morning, leaving the invalid in Absalom’s charge, and prowled
the forest in search of game. But with the exception of one solitary
marten, whose tainted flesh had been revolting even to their hunger,
his wanderings had been barren of everything but disappointment.

Matchi and the guide had been gone a week, when Lucius set out one
morning more desperate than usual, hunger gnawing his entrails, and
worse than hunger, a fear that weighed upon his heart like lead—the
fear that before many days were gone Geoffrey Hossack would have
set forth upon a longer and a darker journey than that they two had
started upon together, in the full flush of youth and hope, a year and
a half ago. He could not conceal from himself that his friend was in
imminent danger—that unless the fever, for which medicine could do so
little, abated speedily, all must soon be over. Nor could he conceal
from himself another fact—namely, that the stores he had doled out
with such a niggard hand would not yield even that scanty allowance
for twenty-four hours longer. A sorry frame of mind in which to stalk
buffalo or chase the moose!

Again Fortune was unkind. He wandered farther than usual in his
determination not to go back empty-handed. He knew but too well that
in Geoffrey’s desperate state there was nothing his experience could
do that Absalom’s ignorance could not do as well. In fact there was
nothing to be done. The patient lay in a kind of stupor. Only the
gentle nursing-mother Nature could help him now.

He came upon a circular patch of prairie in the heart of the forest,
and surprised a lean and lonely buffalo, the first he had seen for more
than a month. The last had been shot by Geoffrey some days before the
guide’s departure on his useless journey. The animal was scratching
in the snow, trying to get at the scanty herbage under that frozen
surface, when Lucius came upon it. His footsteps, noiseless in his
moccasins, did not startle the quarry. He stole within easy range,
and fired. The first shot hit the animal in the shoulder; then came a
desperate chase. The buffalo ran, but feebly. Lucius fired his second
barrel, this time at still closer quarters, and the brute, gaunt and
famished like himself, rolled head downwards on the snow.

He took out his hunting-knife, cut out the tongue and choicer morsels,
as much as he could carry, and then with infinite labour buried his
prey in the snow, meaning to return next morning with Absalom to fetch
the remainder; provided always that the snow kept his secret, and
wolves or wolverines did not devour his prize in the interval. He was
able to carry away with him food that would serve for more than a
week. No matter how hard or skinny the flesh might be,—it was flesh.

Darkness had closed round him when these labours were finished,
but stars shone faintly above the pine-tops: and he carried a
pocket-lantern which he could light on emergency. Where was he? That
was the first question to be settled. He found some difficulty in
recalling the track he had taken. Great Heaven! if he had strayed too
far afield, and should find return impossible! Geoffrey yonder dying,
without his brotherly arm to support the drooping head, his loving
hand to wipe the brow on which the death-damps gathered! The very
thought made him desperate. He looked up at the stars, his only guides,
shouldered his burden, and walked rapidly in that direction which he
supposed the right one.

During their enforced idleness, Geoffrey and Lucius had made themselves
tolerably familiar with the aspect of the forest within a radius of
ten miles or so from their hut. They knew the course of the river,
and its tributary streams. They had even cut rude avenues through the
pine-wood, in their quest of fuel, cutting down trees in a straight
line at a dozen yards apart, leaving six feet or so of the trunk
standing, like a rude pillar; so that within half a mile of their
encampment there were on every side certain roughly-marked approaches.

But to-night Lucius had lost ken of the river, and knew himself to be a
good ten miles from any tree that he or Geoffrey had ever hewn asunder.
He stopped after about half-an-hour’s tramp; felt himself at fault;
lighted his lantern, and looked about him.

An impenetrable forest; a scene of darksome grandeur, gigantic
pine-trees towering skyward, laden with snow; but over all a dreadful
monotony, that made the picture gloomy as the shores of Acheron. Nor
could Lucius discover any landmark whereby he might steer his course.

He stopped for some minutes, his heart beating heavily. It was not the
fear of peril to himself that tormented him. His mind—rarely a prey to
selfish fears—was full of his dying friend.

‘To be away at such a time!’ he thought; ‘to have shared all the
brightest hours of my youth with him, and not to be near him at the
last!’

This was bitter. He pushed on desperately, muttering a brief prayer;
telling himself that Heaven could not be so cruel as to sever him from
the friend who was dear as a brother, who represented to him all he had
ever known of brotherly love.

He paused suddenly, startled by a sight so unexpected that his
arm dropped nerveless, and his burden fell at his feet. A light
in the thick forest; the welcome glare of a traveller’s fire. Not
the far-spreading blaze of conflagration, the devouring flames
stretching from tree to tree—a spectacle he had seen in the course
of his wanderings—but the steady light of a mighty fire of heaped-up
pine-logs; a fire to keep wolves and grisly bears at bay, and to defy
the blighting presence of the frost-fiend himself.

Lucius resumed his burden, and made straight for the fire. A wide and
deep circle, making a kind of basin, had been dug out of the snow. In
the centre burned a huge fire, and before it a man lay on his stomach,
his chin resting on his folded arms, lazily watching the blazing logs;
a man with wild hair and wilder eyes; a man whose haggard face even the
red glow of the fire could not brighten.

‘What!’ cried Lucius, recognising him at the first glance; ‘have you
got no farther than this, Matchi? A sorry result of your boasted
cleverness! Where’s the Indian?’

‘I don’t know,’ the other answered shortly. ‘Dead, perhaps, before
this. We quarrelled and parted two days ago. The man’s a knave and a
ruffian.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ said Lucius. ‘He persevered, I suppose; pushed
on towards the fort, and you didn’t. That’s the meaning of your
quarrel.’

‘Have it so, if you like,’ returned the stranger with scornful
carelessness. Then seeing that Lucius still stood upon the edge of the
circle—a bank of snow—looking down at him, he lifted his dark eyes
slowly, and returned the gaze.

‘Have things brightened with you since we parted company?’ he asked.

‘How should they brighten, unless Providence sent some luckier
wanderers across our track?—not a likely event at this time of year.
No, the aspect of our affairs has darkened to the deepest gloom.
Geoffrey Hossack is dying of fever.’

‘Amidst universal cold—strange anomaly!’ said the other, in his hard
unpitying voice. ‘But since death seems inevitable for all of us, I’d
gladly change lots with your friend—burn with fever—and go out of this
world unconscious. It is looking death in the face that tortures me: to
lie here, looking into that fire, and calculate the slow but too swift
hours that stand between me and—annihilation. _That_ gnaws my vitals.’

Lucius looked down at the strongly-marked passionate face, half in
scorn, half in pity.

‘You can see no horizon beyond your grave under these pine-trees,’ he
said. ‘You do not look upon this life as an education for the better
life that is to succeed it?’

‘No. I had done with that fable before I was twenty.’

A hard cruel face, with the red fire shining in it—the face of a
man who, knowing himself unfit for heaven, was naturally disposed
to unbelief in a future, which for this dark soul could only mean
expiation.

‘Can you help me to find my way back to the hut?’ Lucius asked, after a
meditative pause.

‘Not I. I thought I was a hundred miles from it. I have been wandering
in a circle, I suppose.’

‘Evidently. Where did you leave Kekek-ooarsis?’

The stranger looked at him doubtfully, as if hardly understanding the
drift of the question. Lucius repeated it.

‘I don’t know. There is no “where” in this everlasting labyrinth. We
disagreed, and parted—somewhere!’

Lucius Davoren’s gaze, wandering idly about that sunken circle in
the snow, where every inch of ground was fitfully illuminated by the
ruddy glare of the pine-logs, was suddenly attracted by an object that
provoked his curiosity—a little heap of bones, half burnt, at the edge
of the fire. The flame licked them every now and then, as the wind blew
it towards them.

‘You have had a prize, I see,’ he said, pointing to these bones.
‘Biggish game! How did you manage without a gun?’

‘A knife is sometimes as good as a gun!’ said the other, without
looking up. He stretched out his long lean arm as he spoke, and pushed
the remainder of his prey farther into the fire.

In a moment—before the other was aware—Lucius had leaped down into the
circle, and was on his knees, dragging the bones back out of the fire
with his naked hands.

‘Assassin! devil!’ he cried, turning to the stranger with a look of
profoundest loathing: ‘I thought as much. These are human bones. This
is the fore-arm of a man.’

‘That’s a lie,’ the other answered coolly. ‘I snared a wolf, and
stabbed him with my clasp-knife.’

‘I have not worked in the dissecting-room for nothing,’ said Lucius
quietly. ‘Those are human bones. You have staved off death by murder.’

‘If I had, it would be no worse than the experience of a hundred
shipwrecks,’ answered the other, glancing from Lucius to his gun, with
an air at once furtive and ferocious, like some savage beast at bay.

‘I have half a mind to shoot you down like the wolf you are,’ said
Lucius, rising slowly from his knees, after throwing the bones back
into the blaze.

‘Do it, and welcome,’ answered the stranger, casting off all reserve
with a contemptuous tone, that might be either the indifference of
desperation or mere bravado. ‘Famine knows no law. I have done only
what I daresay you would have done in my situation. We had starved,
literally starved—no half rations, but sheer famine—for five days, when
I killed him with a sudden stroke of my hatchet. I cut off one arm, and
buried the rest of him—yonder, under the snow. I daresay I was half-mad
when I did it. Yet it was a mercy to put him out of his misery. If he
had been a white skin, I should have tossed up with him which was to
go, but I didn’t stand on punctilio with a nigger. It may be my turn
next, perhaps. Shoot me, and welcome, if you’ve a mind to waste a
charge of powder on so miserable a wretch.’

‘No,’ said Lucius, ‘no one has made me your judge or your executioner.
I leave you to your conscience. But if ever you darken the threshold of
our hut again—be your errand what it may—by the God above us both, you
shall die like a dog!’

Matchi’s keen eyes followed the vanishing form of his accuser, and his
thin lips shaped themselves into a triumphant grin.

‘You didn’t inquire about the money the Indian carried,’ he muttered.
‘_That_ was my real motive. Better to be thought a cannibal than a
thief. And with that money I can begin life again if ever I get clear
of this forest.’

       *       *       *       *       *

Lucius Davoren spent that night in the forest, by a fire of his own
kindling, after having put some distance between himself and that other
wanderer. He recruited exhausted nature with a buffalo steak, and then
sat out the night by his lonely fire; sometimes dozing, more often
watching, knowing not when murder might creep upon him with stealthy
footfall across the silent snow. Morning came, however, and the night
had brought no attack. By daylight he regained the lost trail, found
his way back to the hut, laden with his spoil, and to his unspeakable
joy found a change for the better in the sick man.

‘I have gaven him his traft, bongdual,’ said Mr. Schanck, pointing to
the empty medicine bottle, ‘and he is gooller; he bersbires. Dat is
goot.’

    ‘Von der Stirne heisse,
     Rinnen muss der Schweiss.’

Yes, perspiration had arisen, nature’s healing dew; not the awful
damps of swift-coming death. Lucius knelt by the rough bed, and thanked
God for this happy change. How sweet was prayer at such a moment! He
thought of that murderous wretch in the forest, waiting for the death
he had sought to defer by famine’s last loathsome resource; that
revolting expedient which it was horror to think of—a lost wretch
without a hope beyond the grave, without belief in a God.

On his knees, his breast swollen by the rapture of gratitude and glad
surprise, Lucius thought of that wretch almost with pity.

He made a strong broth with some of the buffalo flesh, and fed his
patient by spoonfuls. To rally from such prostration must needs be a
slow process; but once hopeful of his friend’s recovery, Lucius was
content to wait for the issue in quiet confidence.

He told Absalom his adventure in the forest, the hideous discovery of
the faithful Indian’s fate.

‘Vat for a man! And vhen he has digesded the Indian, and feels again
vhat boor Geoffrey used to gall a vaguum, he vill gome and ead us,’
said the German despondently.

‘He will not cross this threshold. What! do you think I would let that
ravening beast approach _him_?’ pointing to the prostrate figure on the
bed. ‘I have told him what I should do if he came here. He knows the
penalty.’

‘You vould gill him?’

‘Without one scruple.’

‘I tink you are in your right,’ answered Absalom tranquilly. ‘It is an
onbleasant itea do be eaden.’

Two days passed slowly. Geoffrey rallied. Very slow was the progress
towards recovery—almost imperceptible to the non-professional eye, but
it was progress. Lucius perceived it, and was thankful. He had not
slept since that night in the forest, but watched all night beside the
patient’s bed—his gun within reach of his hand, loaded with ball.

On the third night of his watch, when Geoffrey had been wandering a
little, and then had fallen into a placid slumber, there came a sound
at the door—a sound that was neither the waving of a pine-branch nor
the cry of bird or beast; a sound distinctly human.

Lucius had barricaded his door with a couple of pine-trunks, placed
transversely, like a St. Andrew’s cross. The door itself was a
fragile contrivance (three or four roughly-hewn planks nailed loosely
together), but the St. Andrew’s cross made a formidable barrier.

He heard the door tried with a rough impatient hand. The pine-trunks
groaned, but held firm. The door was shaken again; then, after a
moment’s pause, the same impatient hand shook the little parchment
window. This offered but a frail defence; it rattled, yielded, then,
after one vigorous thrust, burst inward, and a dark ragged head and
strong bony shoulders appeared in the opening.

‘I am starving,’ cried a hoarse voice, faint, yet with a strange force
in its hollow tones. It was the voice of the man who called himself
Matchi. ‘Give me shelter—food—if you have any to give. It is my last
chance,’ he gasped breathlessly.

He widened the space about him with those strong desperate arms, and
made as if he would have leapt into the hut. Lucius raised his gun,
cocked it, and took aim deliberately, without an instant’s hesitation.

‘I told you what would happen if you came here,’ he said, and, with the
words, fired.

The man fell backwards, dragging the thin parchment window and some
part of its fragile framework with him. His death-clutch had fastened
on the splintered wood. A wild gust of north-east wind rushed in
through the blank space in the log wall, but Lucius Davoren did not
feel it.

‘Great God!’ he asked himself, a slow horror creeping through his
ice-cold veins, ‘was that a murder?’


END OF THE PROLOGUE.




Book the First.




CHAPTER I.

LOOKING BACKWARDS.


Behold, O reader, the eastern end of the great city; a region strange
beyond all measure to the dwellers in the west; a low flat marshy
district, where the land and the river seem to have become entangled
with each other in inextricable confusion, by reason of manifold creeks
and creeklets, basins, and pools, which encroach upon the shore, and
where the tall spars of mighty merchantmen and giant emigrant-ships
rise cheek by jowl with factory chimneys; where the streets are dark
and narrow, and the sound of engines hoarsely labouring greets the ear
at every turn; where the staple commodity seems to be ship-biscuit;
where the shipchandler has his stronghold; where the provision-dealer
has his storehouse, in which vast hoards of dried meats and tinned
provisions, pickles, and groceries are piled from floor to ceiling
and from cellar to garret; a world in which the explorer stumbles
unawares upon ropewalks, or finds himself suddenly involved in a cloud
of bonnetless factory girls, thick as locusts in Arabia, who jibe and
flout at the stranger. Roads there are, broad and airy enough, which
lead away from the narrow streets and the stone basins, the quays,
the docks, the steam-cranes, and tall ships—not to the country, there
seems no such thing as country accessible from this peculiar world—but
to distant marshes and broader water; roads fringed with dingy houses,
and here and there a factory, and here and there a house of larger
size and greater pretension than its neighbours, shut in by high walls
perchance, and boasting an ancient garden; a garden where the tall elms
were saplings in the days when kings went hunting on the Essex coast
yonder; and when this east-end of London had its share of fashion and
splendour.

Perhaps of all these broader thoroughfares, Shadrack-road was the
shabbiest. It had struggled into existence later than the rest, and
in all its dismal length could boast but one of those substantial old
red-brick mansions whose occasional appearance redeemed the commonness
of the other high roads. There was a sprinkling of humble shops, a
seamen’s lodging-house, a terrace or two of shabby-genteel houses,
three-storied, with little iron balconies that had never been painted
within the memory of man; poor sordid-looking little houses, which were
always putting bills in their smoke-darkened windows, beseeching people
to come and lodge in them. There were a few modern villas, of the
speculative-builders’ pattern, whose smart freshness put to shame their
surroundings; and one of these, a corner one, with about half a perch
of garden-ground, was distinguished by a red lamp and a brass-plate, on
which appeared the following inscription:

  MR. LUCIUS DAVOREN,
  _Surgeon_.

Here Lucius Davoren had begun the battle of life; actual life, in all
its cold reality; hard and common and monotonous, and on occasion
hopeless; a life strangely different from the explorer’s adventurous
days, from the trapper’s lonely commune with nature in the trackless
pine-woods; a life wherein the veriest dreamer could find scant margin
for poetry; a life whose dull realities weigh down the soul of man
as though an iron hand were laid upon his brain, grinding out every
aspiration for better things than the day’s food and the night’s
shelter.

He stands alone in the world; there is comfort at least in that. Let
the struggle be sharp as it may, there is no cherished companion to
share the pain. Let poverty’s stern grip pinch him never so sharply, he
feels the pinch alone. Father, mother, the child sister, whom he loved
so dearly fifteen years ago, are all dead. Their graves lie far away in
a Hampshire churchyard, the burial-place of that rural village of which
his father was Rector for thirty years of his unambitious life.

He has another sister, but she was counted lost some years ago, and to
think of her is worse than to think of the dead. In all those years,
from the time when he was a lad just emancipated from Winchester school
to this present hour, he has never been heard to speak her name; but he
keeps her in his memory nevertheless, and has the record of her hapless
fate hidden away in the secret-drawer of his desk, with a picture of
the face whose beauty was fatal.

She was his favourite sister, his senior by two years, fond and
proud of him, his counsellor and ally in all things; like himself,
passionately fond of music; like himself a born musician. This charm,
in conjunction with her beauty, had made her the glory and delight
of a small provincial circle, which widened before her influence.
Wykhamston society was the narrowest and stiffest of systems; but the
fame of Janet Davoren’s beauty and Janet Davoren’s voice travelled
beyond the bounds of Wykhamston society. In a word, Miss Davoren was
taken notice of by the county. The meek old Rector, with his pleasant
face, and bald head scantily garnished with iron-gray hair, was made to
emerge from retirement, in order to gratify the county. He was bidden
to a ball at the Marquis of Guildford’s; to a private concert at Sir
Horatio and Lady Veering Baker’s; to dinners and evening parties twenty
miles away from the modest Rectory. Miss Davoren was even invited to
stay at Lady Baker’s; and, going ostensibly for a few days, remained
her ladyship’s guest for nearly a month. They were all so fond of the
dear girl, Lady Baker informed the Rector.

‘_I_ am not good enough, I suppose,’ said Mrs. Davoren, when the
Marchioness and the Baronet’s wife, after calling upon her, and being
intensely civil for fifteen minutes, ignored her in their cards of
invitation. ‘Never mind, Stephen, if you and Janet enjoy yourselves,
I’m satisfied; and it’s lucky they haven’t invited me, for I’ve nothing
to wear but my old black satin and the Indian scarf, and _they’d_
never do for the Castle or Lady Veering Baker’s. They’re well enough
in Wykhamston, where people are accustomed to them.’

So the Rector’s worthy wife, who had supreme control of the family
purse, arrayed her handsome daughter in the prettiest dresses the
Wykhamston milliner could achieve, and ornamented the girl’s dark hair
with camelias from the little greenhouse, and was content to sit at
home and wonder what the grand Castle folks thought of her Janet, and
whether her dear old man was having an agreeable rubber; content to sit
up late into the night, while the rectory handmaidens snored in their
attic chambers, till the creaky old covered wagonette brought home the
revellers, when she would sit up yet another hour to hear the tidings
of her darling’s triumphs; what songs she had sung, what dances she had
danced, and all the gracious things that had been said of her and to
her.

About this time, the idea that Miss Davoren was destined to make a
splendid marriage became a fixed belief in the minds of the Rector’s
family, from the head thereof to the very cook who cooked the dinner,
always excepting the young lady herself, who seemed to take very little
thought of anything but music; the organ which she played in the old
church; the old-fashioned square piano in the rectory drawing-room.
It did not seem possible to the simple mind of Mrs. Davoren that all
this admiration could result in nothing; that her daughter could be
the cynosure of every eye at Guildford Castle, the acknowledged belle
at Lady Veering Baker’s musical evenings, and yet remain plain Janet
Davoren, or be reduced to the necessity of marrying a curate or a
struggling country surgeon. Something must come of all this patronage,
which had kindled the fire of jealousy in many a Wykhamston breast. But
when the fond mother ventured to suggest as much to the girl herself,
she was put off with affectionate reproof.

‘Dearest mother, can you be so innocent as not to see that all this
notice means nothing more than the gratification of the moment? The
Marchioness and Lady Baker had happened to hear that I sing tolerably,
and as the common run of amateur music is not worth much, thought they
might as well have me. It only cost the trouble of calling upon you,
and pretending to be interested in your poultry and papa’s garden. If
this were London, and they could get professional singers, they would
not have taken even so much trouble as that about me.’

‘Never mind what the Marchioness and Lady Baker mean,’ said the mother;
‘I am not thinking of them, but of the people you meet there; the
young men who pay you such compliments, and crowd round you after your
songs.’

Janet laughed, almost bitterly, at this speech and at the mother’s
eager look, full of anticipated triumph.

‘And who will go back to their own world and forget my existence, when
they leave Hampshire,’ she said.

‘But there must be some whose attentions are more marked than others,’
urged Mrs. Davoren; ‘county people, perhaps. There is that Mr.
Cumbermere, for instance, who has an immense estate on the borders of
Berkshire. I’ve heard your papa talk of him; quite a young man, and
unmarried. Come, Janet, be candid with your poor old mother. Isn’t
there one among them all who seems a little in earnest?’

‘Not one among them, mother,’ the girl answered, looking downward with
a faint, faint sigh, so faint as to escape even the mother’s ear; ‘not
one. They all say the same thing, or the same kind of thing, in just
the same way. They think me rather good-looking, I believe, and they
seem really to like my singing and playing. But they will go away and
forget both, and my good looks as well. There is not one of them ever
so little in love with me; and if I were in love with one of them I
might almost as well be in love with all, for they are all alike.’

This was discouraging, but the mother still cherished her dream;
cherished it until the bitter hour of awakening—that fatal hour in
which she learned from a letter in the girl’s own hand that Janet had
abandoned home, friends, reputation—the very hope of heaven, as it
seemed to the heartbroken father and mother—to follow the fortunes of
a villain, of whose identity they had not the faintest idea, whose
opportunities for the compassing of this deadly work would seem to have
been of the smallest.

The girl’s letter—passionate, despairing, with a wild and deep despair
which told how desperate had been the conflict between love and
duty—gave no hint of her betrayer’s name or place in the world.

The letter was somewhat vaguely worded. There are some things which
no woman could write. Janet Davoren did not tell them that she went
of her own free will to perdition. But so much despair could hardly
accompany an innocent passion; sorrow so deep and hopeless implied
guilt. To the Rector and his wife there seemed no room for doubt. They
read and re-read the long wild appeal for forgiveness or oblivion; that
their only daughter, the pride and idol of both, might be pardoned or
forgotten. They weighed every word, written with a swift impetuous
hand, blotted by remorseful tears, but no ray of hope shone between the
lines. They could arrive at but one miserable conclusion. The girl had
accepted dishonour as the cost of a love she was too weak to renounce.
The letter was long, wild, recklessly worded; but in all there was no
clue to the traitor.

The Rector and his wife made no outcry. They were even heroic enough
to suppress all outward token of their grief, lest their little world
should discover the cruel truth. The father went about his daily
work pale and shaken, but calm of aspect. The only noticeable fact
in his life was that from this day forth he neglected his garden and
his poultry-yard. His innocent delight in Dorking fowls and standard
rose-trees perished for ever with his daughter’s disappearance. The
mother wept in secret, and suffered not so much as a single tear to be
seen by her household.

The servants were told that Miss Davoren had gone upon a visit to some
friends in London. Janet had left the house in the early morning,
unseen by any one except the lad who attended to the garden, and him
she had employed to convey a small portmanteau to the railway station.
The manner of her departure therefore had been commonplace enough;
but the servants were accustomed to hear a good deal of preliminary
discussion before any movement of the family, and wondered not a little
that there should have been nothing said about Miss Davoren’s departure
beforehand, and that she should have gone away so early, before any
one was up, and without so much as a cup of tea, as the cook remarked
plaintively.

The wretched father and mother read that farewell letter till every
word it contained seemed written on their hearts, but it helped them
in no manner towards the knowledge of their daughter’s fate. They went
over the names in their own little circle; the half-dozen or so of
young men—more or less unattractive—who were on visiting terms at the
Rectory; but there was no member of Wykhamston society they could for a
moment consider guilty: and indeed, the answer to every suspicion was
obvious in the fact that every member of that small community was in
his place: the curate going his quiet rounds on a hog-maned pony; the
unmarried doctor scouring the neighbourhood from breakfast to tea-time
in his travel-worn dog-cart; the lawyer’s son true to the articles that
bound him to his father’s service; the small landowners and gentlemanly
tenant-farmers of the immediate vicinity to be seen as of old at
church and market-place. No, there was no one the Rector could suspect
of act or part in his darling’s flight.

A little later, and with extreme caution, he ventured to inquire
among certain of his parishioners if any stranger had been seen about
Wykhamston within the last month or so. He contrived to put this
question to a well-to-do corn-chandler, the chief gossip of the little
town, in a purely conversational manner.

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Huskings the corn-chandler, assenting to a general
remark upon the dulness that had prevailed of late in Wykhamston, ‘the
place has been quiet enough. It ain’t much of a place for strangers at
the best of times, unless it’s one of them measuring chaps that come
spying about, with a yard measure, after a new railway, that’s to take
everybody away from the town and never bring nobody to it, and raise
the price of meat and vegibles. There was that horgan-playin’ chap at
the George the other day; what _he_ come for nobody could find out,
for he didn’t measure nothing; only poked about the old church on
workadays, and played the horgan. But of course you’d know all about
him from Miss Davoren, as must have seen him sometimes when she went to
practise with the coheer.’

The Rector’s sad face blanched a little. This was the man!

‘No,’ he said, somewhat falteringly, ‘my daughter never spoke of him;
or if she did I didn’t take any notice. She’s away now for a little
time, staying with friends in London. She may have told us about him; I
don’t remember.’

‘Strange old gentleman, the Rector!’ Mr. Huskings remarked to his wife
afterwards; ‘such a nervous way with him lately; breaking fast, I’m
afeard.’

‘Miss Davoren could hardly have missed seein’ of him,’ he answered. ‘He
were always about the church, when he warn’t fishin’, but he were a
great hand at fishin’. Rather a well-looking chap, with dark eyes and
long dark hair; looked summat like a furriner, but spoke English plain
enough in spite of his furrin looks.’

‘Young?’ asked the Rector.

‘Might be anything betwixt twenty-five and thirty-five.’

‘And a gentleman, I suppose?’

‘His clothes was fust-class, and he paid his way honourable. Had the
best rooms over yonder,’ with a jerk of his head in the direction
of the George, ‘and tipped everybody ’andsome. He warn’t here above
a month or six weeks; but he hired a pianner from Mr. Stammers, up
street, and there he’d sit by the hour together, Mrs. Capon told me,
strum, strum, strum. “Music that made you feel creepy-crawly like,”
says Mrs. Capon; “not a good hearty tune as you could understand, but
meandering and meandering like till you felt as if you’d gone to sleep
in a cathedral while the organ was playin’,” says Mrs. Capon.’

Music! Yes, that was the spell which had lured his child to her ruin.
Nothing less than that fatal magic, which had held her from her
babyhood, could have been strong enough to beguile that poor young soul.

‘Did you hear the man’s name?’ asked the Rector.

‘I heerd it, sure enough, sir; but I never were a good hand at
remembering names. Mrs. Capon ud tell you in a moment.’

‘No, no,’ exclaimed the Rector nervously; ‘I’ve no curiosity; it’s of
no importance. Good-afternoon, Huskings. You—you may send me a sack of
barley;’ this with a little pang, remembering what a joyless business
his poultry-yard had become of late.

He went ‘up street’ to Mr. Stammers, who kept a little music-shop and
let out pianos.

‘You’d better look in at the Rectory and tune the piano before my
daughter comes home, Stammers,’ said the Rector, with a bitter pain at
his heart, and then sat down in the chair by Mr. Stammers’ door—set
wide open on this warm afternoon—a little out of breath, though the
High-street from the corn-merchant’s door to the music-seller’s was a
dead level.

‘Yes, sir. Miss Davoren away, sir? I thought I missed her at church
last Sunday. Mr. Filby’s playing don’t come anything nigh hers. What a
wonderful gift she has, sir! The Marchioness was up town yesterday—they
are at the Castle for a week, ong parsong—and drew up here to give an
order. I made bold to show her the little fantasia I took the liberty
to dedicate to Miss Davoren. She smiled so sweet when she saw the name.
“You’ve reason to be proud of your Rector’s daughter, Mr. Stammers,”
she said; “such a lovely young lady, and such a fine musician! I wish I
had time to call at the Rectory.” And then she arst after your ’elth,
sir, and your good lady’s, and Miss Davoren’s, quite affable, just
before she drove away. She was drivin’ her own ponies.’

‘She was very good,’ said Mr. Davoren absently. O, vain delight in
earthly pomp and pride! The notice of these magnates of the land had
not saved his child from destruction; nay, perhaps had been, in some
unknown manner, the primary cause of her fall.

‘Yes, you had better tune the piano, Stammers,’ he went on, with a
feeble sigh. ‘She will like to find it in good tune when she comes
back. By the way, you let a piano to the gentleman at the George the
other day—Mr.—’

‘Mr. Vandeleur,’ said Stammers briskly. ‘Let him the best piano I
have—a brand-new Collard—at thirty shillings a month, bein’, as it
was, a short let. And wonderful it was to hear him play upon it, too!
I’ve stood on the staircase at the George half an hour at a stretch,
listenin’ to him.’

‘A fine musician?’ inquired the Rector, with another sigh. Fatal music,
deadly art!

‘Fine isn’t the word, sir. There’s a many fine musicians, as far
as pianoforte playing goes,’ with a little conscious air of inward
swelling, as of a man who numbered himself among these gifted ones. ‘I
don’t think there’s anythink of Mozart’s, or ’Andels, or ’Aydn’s, or
Beethoven’s—that’s the king of ’em all, is Beethoven—you could put a
name to that I wouldn’t play at sight; but I don’t rank myself with Mr.
Vandeleur, the gentleman at the George, for all that.’

‘What is the difference?’

Mr. Stammers tapped his forehead.

‘There, sir; there’s where the difference lies. I ’aven’t ’is ’ead.
Not but what I had a taste for music when I was that ’igh,’ indicating
the altitude of a foot and a half from the floor, ‘and was took notice
of by the gentry of these parts in consequence, my father bein’, as
you are aware, sir, a numble carpenter. But I ’aven’t the ’ead that
man ’as. To hear him ’andle Beethoven, sir, the Sonater Pathetick, or
the “Moonlight,” wonderful! And not that alone. There was sonaters and
fugues he played, sir—whether they was his own composition or wasn’t,
I can’t say; but they were fugues and sonaters I never heard before,
and I don’t believe mortal man ever wrote ’em. They outraged all the
laws of ’armony, sir. Why, there was consecutive fifths in ’em as thick
as gooseberries, and yet they was as fine as anythink in Mozart. Such
music! It turned one’s blood cold to hear him. If you could fancy the
old gentleman playing the piano—which, bein’ a clergyman, of course you
wouldn’t give your mind to—you could fancy him playing like that.’

‘An eccentric style?’ inquired the Rector.

‘Eccentric! It was the topsy-turviest kind of thing I ever heard in my
life. Yet if that man was to play in public, he’d take the town by
storm; they’d run after him like mad.’

‘Do you think he is a professional performer?’

‘Hardly; he hadn’t the professional way with him. I’ve seen plenty of
the profession, havin’ managed for all the concerts that have been
given in Wykhamston for the last twenty years. No; and a professional
wouldn’t dawdle away close upon six weeks in a small country town such
as this. No; what I take him for is a wealthy amateur—a gentleman that
had been living a little too fast up in London, and come down here to
freshen himself up a bit with country air and quiet.’

‘How did he spend his time?’

‘In the church, a good bit of it, playing the organ. He used to get the
keys from old Bopolt, the clerk. I wonder you didn’t hear of it, sir.’

‘No,’ said the Rector, ‘they told me nothing.’ This with a sigh so
deep, so near akin to a groan, that it smote the heart of the lively
Stammers.

‘I’m afraid you’re tired, sir, this ’ot day—tryin’ weather—so
changeable; the thermumitor has gone up to eighty-one, Farren’s heat.
Can I get you a glass of water, sir, with a dash of somethink, if I
might take the liberty?’

‘Thank you, Stammers; no, it’s nothing. I’ve been a little worried
lately. Bopolt had no business to admit any one into the church
habitually.’

‘I daresay Mr. Vandeleur made it worth his while, sir. He was quite a
gentleman, I assure you. And it wasn’t as if you was in the ’abit of
keepin’ the sacramential plate in the vestry.’

‘There are other things that a man can steal,’ said the Rector moodily;
‘more precious things than paten or chalice. But no matter. I don’t
suppose Bopolt meant any harm, only—only he might have told me.
Good-afternoon, Mr. Stammers.’

‘Do you feel yourself strong enough for the walk ’ome, sir? You look
rather pale—overcome by the ’eat.’

‘Yes, yes; quite strong. Good-afternoon;’ and Stephen Davoren plodded
his way down the shadeless High-street till he came to a little court
leading to the church; Wykhamston Church being, for some reason or
other, hidden away at the back of the High-street, as though it were an
unsightly thing, and only approachable by courts and alleys.

Old John Bopolt, the parish clerk, quavering and decrepit after the
manner of rural clerks, had his habitation in the court which made the
isthmus of communication between the High-street and the churchyard.
He rose hastily from his tea-table at sight of his Rector, and made
a little old-world bow, while Mrs. Bopolt and Mrs. Bopolt’s married
daughter, and the married daughter’s Betsy Jane, an unkempt girl of
fourteen or so, huddled together with a respectful and awestricken air
before that dignitary.

‘Bopolt,’ said the Rector, in a sterner tone than he was wont to use,
‘what right had you to allow the church to be made a lounging-place for
idle strangers?’

‘A lounging-place, sir! I never did any such-like thing. There was
no lounging went on, to my knowledge; but I’ve been in the habit
of showing the monniments occasionally, as you know, sir, to any
respectable stranger, and the rose winder over the south door.’

‘Showing the monuments; yes, that’s one thing. But to let a stranger
have the key habitually—’

‘Meanin’ the gentleman at the George, sir,’ faltered the clerk, with
an embarrassed air. ‘He was quite the gentleman; and Mr. Filby, the
organist, sir, knew as he was in the ’abit of playin’ the organ for
a ’our or so, and left the keys for him regular, did Mr. Filby, and
says to me, “John, whenever Mr. Vandeleur at the George likes to play
the organ, he’s free and welcome, and you can tell him so, with my
respects.”’

‘He bribed you, I suppose?’ said Mr. Davoren.

‘He may have given me a trifle at odd times as some recompensation for
my trouble in opening the door for him, sir. I don’t wish to deceive
you; and if I’d thought for a moment there was any harm, I’d have cut
my fingers off sooner than open the churchdoor for him. But I made
certain as you knew, sir, more particularly as I’d seen Miss Davoren go
into the church more than once when Mr. Vandeleur was there.’

‘Of course,’ said the Rector, without flinching, ‘she had her choir
work to attend to. Well, John, there’s no use in being angry about a
mistake; only remember the church is not a place for the amusement of
amateur musicians. Good-afternoon.’

The family, who had looked on in unspeakable awe during this brief
dialogue, now began to breathe freely again, and a kettle, which
had been sputtering destruction over Mrs. Bopolt’s bright fender
unregarded, was now snatched off the top bar by that careful matron,
who had not dared to move hand or foot in the presence of an offended
Rector.

Stephen Davoren walked slowly homeward, a little more sick at heart
than when he began his voyage of discovery. Other people had known the
seducer; other people had seen his daughter go into the church to meet
her tempter, polluting that sacred place by the conflict of an earthly
passion. Other people had guessed something of the dreadful truth,
perhaps. He only had been blind.

The thought of this, that his little world might be in the secret of
his sad story, helped to break his heart. If it had not been broken by
the mere fact of his daughter’s ruin, it would have been crushed by the
weight of his own shame. He could not look the world in the face any
more. He tried to do his duty manfully, preached the old sound homely
sermons; but when he spoke of sin and sorrow, he seemed to speak of his
lost daughter. He went among his poor, but the thought of Janet set
his wits wandering in the midst of his simple talk, and he would make
little feeble speeches, and repeat himself helplessly, hardly knowing
what he said.

His parishioners perceived the change, and told each other that the
Rector was breaking fast; it was a pity Miss Davoren was away: ‘She’d
have cheered him up a bit, poor old gentleman.’

Lucius came home from Winchester later in the year—his school course
ended, and the winner of a scholarship which would help him at the
university—came home to hear the story of his sister’s flight, his
Janet, the sister whose genius and beauty had been his highest pride.

He took the news of this calamity more quietly than his father and
mother had dared to hope; insisted upon hearing every detail of the
event, but said little.

‘You made inquiries about this man, this Mr. Vandeleur, of course,
father?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ answered the Rector in his despondent way, ‘I wrote to
Harwood—you remember my old friend Harwood, the solicitor?—and set
him to work, not telling him the whole story, as you may suppose. But
it resulted in nothing. I put an advertisement into the _Times_, too,
imploring your sister—’ with a little husky noise before the word, as
if he would fain have uttered his missing girl’s name but could not,
‘imploring her to come back, offering forgiveness, affection, silence,
so worded that none but she could understand. I think she must have
left England, Lucius. I do not believe she would have left that appeal
unanswered.’

‘Vandeleur!’ said Lucius quietly; ‘an assumed name, no doubt. Some
scoundrel she met at the Castle, or at Lady Baker’s. Vandeleur, I pray
God I may come across him before I’m many years older.’

This was all he said, and from this time forth he never pronounced his
sister’s name. He saw how far this grief had gone towards shortening
his father’s life, how dark a cloud it had spread over his mother’s
declining years. A twelvemonth later, and both were gone; the father
dying suddenly one bright spring morning of heart-disease, organic
disorder of long standing, but who shall say how accelerated by that
bitter trouble? The faithful wife drooped from the day of her husband’s
death, and only four months afterwards sank quietly to her rest,
thankful that her journey was ended, placidly happy in the secure hope
of a swift and easy passage to the better land, where she would find
the partner of her life waiting for her, the little daughter who died
years ago greeting her with loving welcome.

And thus Lucius Davoren had been left quite alone in the world in the
first year of his university life, two years before he came up to
London to walk the hospitals, and just five years before he started for
America with Geoffrey Hossack.




CHAPTER II.

HOMER SIVEWRIGHT.


There was not a plethora of patients in the Shadrack-road, nor were
the cases which presented themselves to Mr. Davoren for the most
part of a deeply-interesting character. He had a good supply of
casualties, from broken limbs, dislocated shoulders, collar bones, and
crushed ribs, down to black eyes; he had numerous cases of a purely
domestic nature—cases which called him out of his bed of nights; and
he had a good many small patients in the narrow streets and airless
alleys—little sufferers whose quiet endurance, whose meek acceptance
of pain as a necessity of their lives, moved him more than he would
have cared to confess. So profound a pity as he sometimes felt for
these little ones would have seemed hardly professional. His practice
among children was singularly fortunate. He did not drench them with
those nauseous compounds which previous practitioners had freely
administered in a rough-and-ready off-hand fashion; but he did, with a
very small amount of drugs, for the most part succeed in setting these
delicate machines in order, restoring health’s natural hue to pallid
cheeks, breathing life into feeble lungs. It was painful to him often
to find himself obliged to prescribe good broths and nourishing solids
where an empty larder and an unfurnished purse stared him, as it were,
palpably in the face; and there were many occasions when he eked out
his instructions with contributions in kind—a shilling’s worth of beef
or a couple of mutton-chops, from the butcher at the end of the street,
a gill of port from the nearest tavern. But him, too, Poverty held in
his iron grip, and it was not always that he could afford to part with
so much as a shilling.

Such luxuries as fresh air and clean water—restoratives which might
be supposed easy of access even in the Shadrack-road district, though
there were dwellings around and about Shadrack-Basin where even these
were hardly obtainable—he urged upon his patients with all his might,
and in the households he attended there arose a startling innovation in
the way of open windows. From these very poor patients he, of course,
received no money; but he had other patrons, small tradesmen and their
families, who paid him, and paid him honourably, down on the nail for
the most part, and on a scale he felt he must blush to remember by
and by when he became a distinguished west-end physician. Small as
the payments were, however, they enabled him to live, so very small
were his own requirements. His Amati ate nothing. He had, himself, a
stoical indifference to good living, and could have sustained himself
contentedly upon pemmican, within reach of all the richest and rarest
viands earth could yield to a Lucullus. His establishment consisted
of an ancient serving-woman, who had withdrawn herself from a useful
career of charing for his exclusive service, a woman who returned
to the bosom of her family every night and came back to her post in
the early morning, and a boy of a low-spirited turn of mind and an
inconvenient tendency to bleeding at the nose. It irked him that he was
obliged to pay the rent of an entire house, however small, requiring
for his own uses at most three rooms. But people had told him that he
could not hope to do any good in the Shadrack-Basin district if he
began his professional career in lodgings; and he was fain to submit.
He concluded that there must be some lurking element of aristocracy in
the minds of the Shadrackites, not suggested by their outward habits,
which were of the whelk-and-periwinkle-eating order.

His house was small, inconvenient, and shabbily furnished. He had taken
the furniture at a valuation from Mr. Plumsole, his predecessor—a
valuation which, if it had been based on justice, should have been
nothing; since a more rickety race of chairs and tables, a more
evil-looking family of bedsteads and dressing-tables, chiffoniers
and sofas, had never been called into being by the glue-pot. There
was not a perfect set of castors in the house, or a chair which had
not some radical defect in one of its legs, or a table that realised
one’s notion of a correct level. Lucius was obliged to buy a tool-box
and a glue-pot very soon after his investiture as proprietor of Mr.
Plumsole’s goods and chattels; and a good deal of his leisure was
consumed by small experiments in domestic surgery, as applied to
chairs and tables. He performed the most delicate operations; reduced
dislocations, and cured compound fractures in a wonderful way; with the
aid of a handful of tin tacks and a halfpennyworth of glue. But he felt
somehow that this was not the direct road to the mastery of a great
science, and would give a weary little sigh as he went back to his
medical books, after a sharp struggle with a refractory chair-leg, or
an obstinate declivity in the flap of a Pembroke table.

He was very poor, very patient, very much in earnest; as earnest
now as he had been in those days of wild adventure in the Far West,
when amid all the excitement of the chase his thoughts had ever gone
beyond, searching for Nature’s secrets, longing to wrest from her
vast stores of hidden wealth some treasure which might be useful to
his fellow-creatures. Of all those vague unspoken hopes nothing had
come. He had left no footmark behind him in that distant world; he had
brought home no trophy. Nothing had resulted from all those days of
hardship and peril, except a secret which it was horror to remember.
He turned his face now resolutely to the real world—the cold, hard,
workaday world of an over-populated city—and set himself to do what
good there was for him to do in his narrow sphere.

‘It may be some atonement for the blood I shed yonder,’ he said to
himself.

In his small way he prospered—prospered in doing good. When he had
been at this drudgery a little more than a year, the parish surgeon
died—popular report said of a too genial temper and a leaning towards
good fellowship, not unassociated with Irish whisky—and Lucius was
elected in his stead. This gave him a pittance which helped him, paid
his rent and taxes and the charwoman, and gave him admittance to the
dwellings of the poor. Thus it was he came to have so many children in
his case-book, and to spend his scanty surplus in small charities among
his patients.

He worked hard all day, and, after the manner of his kind, was often
called up in the night; but he had his evenings for the most part to
himself, to use as he listed. These precious intervals of leisure
he spent in reading—reading which was chiefly professional—solacing
himself sometimes with a dip into a favourite author. His library
consisted of a shelf-full of books on one of the decrepit chiffoniers,
and was at least select. The Greek playwrights, Shakespeare, Montaigne,
St. Thomas à Kempis, Molière, Sterne, De Musset, Shelley, Keats,
Byron made up his stock; and of these he never knew weariness. He
opened one of these volumes haphazard when the scientific reading
had been unusually tough, and he had closed his medical books with a
sigh of relief, opened one of his pet volumes anywhere, and read on
till he read himself into dreamland. Dreams will come, even in the
Shadrack-Basin district, to a man who has not yet crossed the boundary
line of his thirtieth birthday; but Lucius Davoren’s were only vague
dreams, inchoate visions of future success, of the days when he was
to be famous, and live among the lofty spirits of the age, and feel
that he had made his name a name to be remembered in centuries to come.
Perhaps every young man who has been successful at a public school and
at the university begins life with the same vision; but upon Lucius
the fancy had a stronger hold than on most men, and almost amounted
to a belief, the belief that it was his destiny to be of use to his
fellow-creatures.

But he had another key to open the gates of dreamland, a key more
potent than Shakespeare. When things had gone well with him, when
in the day’s work there had been some little professional success,
some question that interested his keen fancy, and had been solved to
his satisfaction; above all, when he had done some good thing for
his fellow-creatures, he would take a shining mahogany-case from the
chiffonier beneath his book-shelf, lay it tenderly on the table, as if
it were a living thing, open it with a dainty little key which he wore
attached to his watch-chain, and draw forth his priceless treasure,
the Amati violin, for which he, to whom pounds were verily pounds, had
given in his early student days the sum of one hundred guineas. How
many deprivations, how many small sacrifices—gloves, opera-tickets,
ay, even dinners—that violin represented! He naturally loved it so much
the better for the pangs it had cost him. He had earned it, if not with
the sweat of his brow, at least by the exercise of supreme self-denial.

Then, with careful hand, with delicate sympathetic touch, fingers light
as those with which a woman gathers her favourite flower, he would draw
forth his fiddle, and soon the little room would be filled with gentle
strains—plaintive, soothing, meditative, the music of dreams; full of
tender thoughts, of pensive memories; music which was like thinking
aloud. And after those fond memories of familiar melody, music which
was as easy a language as his mother tongue, he would open one of his
battered old volumes, and pore over the intricate pages of Viotti, or
Spohr, or De Beriot, or Lafont, until midnight, and even the quieter
hours that follow, had sounded from all the various steeple-clocks and
dockyard-clocks and factory-clocks of that watery district.

He had been working upwards of a year as parish surgeon, and in all
that time, and the time that went before it, had not been favoured
with any more aristocratic patronage than that of the neighbouring
tradesmen, his wealthiest patient being a publican at the corner of
the great Essex-road, reported the richest man in the district; when
chance, or that combination of small causes which seems generally
to lead up to the greatest effects, brought him into friendly and
professional relations with a man of a different class; a man about
whom the Shadrack-road knew little, but thought much.

Lucius was returning from his daily round one winter afternoon, towards
the end of November, when the skies that roof in the Shadrack-Basin
region begin to darken soon after three o’clock. It was nearer five
when the parish surgeon set his face homeward, and the Shadrack-road
was enfolded in its customary fog; the street-lamps—not too brilliant
in the clearest weather—and the lighted shop-windows showing dimly
athwart that sombre smoke-curtain. Suddenly, gleaming a little brighter
than the rest, he saw a moving lamp, the lamp of a fast hansom; then
heard an execration, in the usual cabman-voice; a crash, a grinding
noise as of wheels grating against wheels; a volley of execrations
rising in terrible crescendo; and then the loud commanding voice of the
passenger in the stranded vehicle, demanding to be let out.

Lucius went to the assistance of the distressed passenger—if that could
be called distress which could command so lusty an utterance—and
extricated him from the hansom, which had run foul of a monster dray,
laden with beer barrels.

The passenger availed himself of Mr. Davoren’s arm, and alighted, not
without some show of feebleness. It seemed as if his chief strength
were in his voice. Seen somewhat dimly beneath that fog curtain,
he appeared an old man, tall but bent, with a leonine head and a
penetrating eye—keen as the eye of hawk or eagle.

He thanked the surgeon briefly, dismissed the cabman with a stern
reproof and without his fare.

‘You know me,’ he said; ‘Homer Sivewright, Cedar House. You can take
out a summons if you fancy you’re badly treated. You’ve jerked a great
deal more than eighteenpence out of my constitution.’

The cabman vanished in the fog, grumbling but acquiescent.

‘At seventy and upwards,’ said Mr. Sivewright to Lucius, ‘the human
economy will hardly bear shaking. I shall walk home.’

He seemed feeble, somewhat uncertain upon his legs; and Lucius’s
humanity came to the rescue.

‘Take my arm as far as your house,’ he said; ‘my time is not especially
valuable.’

‘Isn’t it?’ demanded the old man, looking at him suspiciously; ‘a young
man about London whose time is of no use to him is in a bad road.’

‘I didn’t say my time was of no use to me. Perhaps there are not many
men in London who work harder than I. Only, as I take no pleasure, I
have sometimes a margin left after work. I can spare half-an-hour just
now, and if you like to lean on my arm it is at your service.’

‘I accept your friendly offer. You speak like a gentleman and an honest
man. My house is not half a mile from here; you must know it if you
know this neighbourhood—Cedar House.’

‘I think I do. A curious old house, belonging evidently to two
periods, half stone, half brick, standing back from the road behind a
heavily-buttressed wall. Is that it?’

‘Yes. It was once a palace or a royal hunting-lodge, or whatever you
like to call it. It was afterwards enlarged, in the reign of Anne, and
became a wealthy citizen’s country seat, before there were all these
abominations of factories and ropewalks and docks between the City and
the eastern suburbs. I got the place for an almost nominal rent, and
it suits me, as an empty hogshead would suit a mouse—plenty of room to
turn round in it.’

‘The house looks very large, but your family is large, no doubt.’

‘My family consists of myself and my granddaughter, with two old
servants,—trustworthy, of course. That is to say, they have learned by
experience exactly to what extent they may safely rob me.’

They were walking in an eastward direction as they talked; the old man
leaning somewhat heavily on the younger.

Lucius laughed pleasantly at his companion’s cynicism.

‘Then you don’t believe even in the honesty of faithful servants?’

‘I believe in nothing that is not demonstrable by the rule of three.
The fidelity of old servants is like the fidelity of your household
cat—they are faithful to their places; the beds they have slept upon
so many years; the fireside at which they have a snug corner where the
east wind cannot touch their rheumatism.’

‘Yet there are instances of something better than mere feline
constancy. Sir Walter Scott’s servants, for instance, who put their
shoulders to the wheel manfully when Fortune played their master
false—the old butler turning scrub and jack-of-all-trades, the old
coachman going to the plough-tail. There is something awful in the
descent of a butler, too, like the downfall of an archbishop.’

‘I don’t know anything about your Sir Walter Scott,’ growled Mr.
Sivewright; ‘I suppose it is natural to youth to look at all things
brightly, though I have known youth that didn’t. You talk gaily enough
for a young man who devotes no time to pleasure.’

‘Do you think pleasure—in the common acceptation of the word, meaning
late hours and mixed company—really conduces to good spirits?’

‘Only as opium engenders sleep—to leave a man three times as wakeful
afterwards,’ said Mr. Sivewright. ‘I have done without that kind of
pleasure myself throughout a long life, yet I hardly count myself
wise. Fairly to estimate the lightness of his own particular burden,
a man should try to carry a heavier one. There is no better tonic for
the hard-worker than a course of pleasure. You are in some trade or
profession, I presume,’ he added, turning his sharp glance upon his
companion; ‘a clerk, perhaps?’

‘No; but something that works harder than a clerk. A parish doctor.’

Mr. Sivewright recoiled palpably.

‘Don’t be alarmed,’ said Lucius; ‘it was not as a possible patient that
I pulled you out of the cab. My practice doesn’t lie among the upper
classes.’

‘Nor do I belong to the upper classes,’ answered the other quickly. ‘I
forgive you your profession, though I am among those prejudiced people
who have an innate aversion from doctors, lawyers, and parsons. But
the machinery of commerce won’t allow us to dispense with the lawyers;
and I suppose among the poor there still lingers a remnant of the old
belief that there’s some use in doctors. The parsons thrive upon the
foolishness of women. So there is a field still left for your three
learned professions.’

‘That way of talking is a fashion,’ said Lucius quietly; ‘but I
daresay if you were seriously ill to-morrow, your thoughts would turn
instinctively towards Savile-row. And perhaps if you were going to die,
you’d feel all the happier if the friendly voice of your parish priest
breathed familiar words of hope and comfort beside your pillow.’

‘I know nothing of my parish, except that its rates are
four-and-twopence in the pound,’ returned the other in his incisive
voice.

A quarter of an hour’s walking, beguiled by such talk as this, brought
them to the house of which Lucius had spoken, a dwelling altogether
out of keeping with the present character of the Shadrack-road.
That heavily-buttressed wall, dark with the smoke and foul weather
of centuries; that rusty iron gate, with its florid scroll work, and
forgotten coat-of-arms (a triumph of the blacksmith’s art two hundred
years old); that dark-browed building within, formed of a red-brick
centre, square, many-windowed, and prosaic, with a tall narrow doorway,
overshadowed by a stone shell, sustained by cherubic heads of the
Anne period, flanked by an older wing of gray moss-discoloured stone,
with massive mullioned windows, had nothing in common with the shabby
rows and shops and skimpy terraces and bulkheads and low-roofed,
disreputable habitations of the neighbourhood. It stood alone, a
solitary relic of the past; splendid, gloomy, inscrutable.

Nothing in the man Sivewright interested Lucius Davoren half so much
as the fact that he lived in this queer old house. After all a man’s
surroundings are often half the man, and our first impression of a new
acquaintance is generally taken from his chairs and tables.

The grim old iron gate was not a portal to be opened with a latch-key.
It looked like one of the outworks of a fortification, to be taken by
assault. Mr. Sivewright pulled at an iron ring, suspended beyond the
reach of the gutter children of the district, and a remote bell rang
within the fastness, a hoarse old bell, rusty no doubt like the gate.
After a lengthy interval measured by the gauge of a visitor’s patience,
but which Mr. Sivewright accepted with resignation as a thing of
course, this summons produced an elderly female, with slippered feet,
a bonnet, and bare arms, who unlocked the gate, and admitted them to
an enclosure of fog, stagnant as compared with the fog in circulation
without, and which seemed to the doctor of a lower temperature, as if
in crossing that narrow boundary he had travelled a degree northward.

‘Come in,’ said Mr. Sivewright, with the tone of a man who offers
reluctant hospitality, ‘and have a glass of wine. You’ve had a cold
walk on my account; you’d better take a little refreshment.’

‘No, thanks; but I should like to see your house.’

‘Should you? There’s not much to see; an old barrack, that’s all,’ said
the old man, stopping short, with a doubtful air, as if he would have
infinitely preferred leaving the surgeon outside. ‘Very few strangers
ever cross my threshold, except the taxgatherer. However,’ with an air
of resignation, ‘come in.’

The old woman had opened the tall narrow door meanwhile, revealing
an interior dimly lighted by a lamp which must have been feeble
always, but which was now the veriest glimmer. Lucius followed his
new acquaintance through this doorway into a large square hall, from
which a broad oaken staircase ascended to an open gallery. There
was just enough light for Lucius to see that this hall, instead of
being bare and meagrely furnished as he had expected to find it, was
crowded with a vast assemblage of heterogeneous objects. Pictures
piled against the gloomy panelled walls. Sculpture, porcelain, and
delf of every nation and every period, from monster vases of imperial
lacquer to fragile déjeuners of Dresden and Copenhagen; from inchoate
groups of vermin and shell-fish from the workshop of Pallissy, to the
exquisite modelling of teacups resplendent with gods and goddesses from
Capo-di-Monte; from gaudy dishes and bowls of old Rouen delf, to the
perfection of Louis-Seize Sèvres. Armour of every age, vases of jasper
and porphyry, carved-oak cabinets, the particoloured plumage of stuffed
birds, Gobelins tapestry, South-Sea shells, Venetian glass, Milan
ironwork, were curiously intermingled; as if some maniac artist in the
confusion of a once fine taste had heaped these things together. By
that dim light, Lucius saw only the fitful glimmer of steel casques and
breastplates, the half-defined shapes of marble statues, the outline
of jasper vases and huge Pallissy dishes. Later he came to know all
those treasures by heart.

A Louis-Quatorze clock on a bracket began to strike six, and
immediately a chorus of clocks in adjacent rooms, in tones feeble or
strong, tenor or bass, took up the strain.

‘I am like Charles the Fifth, particular about my clocks,’ said Mr.
Sivewright. ‘I keep them all going. This way, if you please, Mr.—’

‘Davoren.’

‘Davoren! That sounds a good name.’

‘My father cherished a tradition to that effect—a good middle-class
family. Our ancestor represented his native county in Queen Elizabeth’s
first Parliament. But I inherited nothing except the name.’

He was staring about him in that doubtful light, as he spoke, trying to
penetrate the gloom.

‘You are surprised to see such a collection as that in the
Shadrack-road? Dismiss your wonder. I am not an antiquarian; but a
dealer. Those things represent the remnant of my stock-in-trade. I kept
a shop in Bond-street for five-and-thirty years.’

‘And when you retired from business you kept all those things?’

‘I kept them as some men keep their money, at compound interest.
Every year I live increases the value of those things. They belong to
manufactures that are extinct. With every year examples perish. Ten
years hence the value of my stock will have multiplied by the square of
my original capital.’

Mr. Sivewright opened a door on one side of the hall, and, motioning
to his guest to follow him, entered a room somewhat brighter of aspect
than the hall without. It was a large room, sparsely furnished as
to the luxurious appliances of modern homes, but boasting, here and
there, in rich relief against the panelled walls, one of those rare and
beautiful objects upon which the virtuoso is content to gaze throughout
the leisure moments of a lifetime. In the recess on one side of the
fireplace stood a noble old buffet, in cherry wood and ebony; in the
corresponding recess on the other side a cabinet in Florentine mosaic;
from one corner came the solemn tick of an eight-day clock, whose
carved and inlaid walnut-wood case was a miracle of art; and upon each
central panel of the walls hung a cabinet picture of the Dutch school.
So much for the pleasure of the eye. Mere sensual comfort had been less
regarded in the arrangement of Mr. Sivewright’s sitting-room. A small
square of threadbare Persian carpet covered the centre of the oaken
floor, serving more for ornament than for luxury. The rest was bare.
A mahogany Pembroke table, value about fifteen shillings, occupied the
middle of the room; one shabby-looking arm-chair, horsehair-cushioned,
high-backed, and by no means suggestive of repose; two other chairs, of
the same family, but without arms; and a business-like deal desk in one
of the windows, completed the catalogue of Mr. Sivewright’s goods and
chattels.

Preparations for dinner, scanty like the furniture, occupied the table;
or rather preparations for that joint meal which, in some economic
households, combines the feminine refreshment of tea with the more
masculine and substantial repast. On one side of the table a small
white cloth neatly spread, with a single knife and fork, tumbler, and
Venetian flask half-full of claret, indicated that Mr. Sivewright was
going to dine: on the other side, a small oval mahogany tray, with a
black Wedgewood teapot, suggested that some one else was going to drink
tea. A handful of fire burned cheerfully in the wide old-fashioned
grate, contracted into the smallest possible compass by cheeks of
firebrick. Throughout the room, scrupulously neat in every detail,
Lucius recognised the guiding spirit of parsimony, tempered in all
things by some gentler household spirit which contrived to impart some
look of comfort even to those meagre surroundings. A pair of candles,
not lighted, stood on the table. Mr. Sivewright lighted one of these,
and for the first time Lucius was able to see what manner of man his
new acquaintance was. All he had been able to discover in the fog was
the leonine head and hawk’s eye.

The light of the candle showed him a countenance once handsome, but now
deeply lined, the complexion dark and sallow, deepening to almost a
copper tint in the shadows. The nose aquiline and strongly marked; the
upper lip singularly long, the mouth about as indicative of softness
or flexibility as if it had been fashioned out of wrought iron; the
cheeks worn and hollow; the brow and temples almost hidden by the
long loose gray hair, which gave that lion-like aspect to the large
head—altogether a face and head to be remembered. The figure tall and
spare, but with breadth of shoulder; at times bent, but in some moments
of vivacity drawn suddenly erect, as if the man by mere force of will
could at pleasure recover the lost energy of his departed youth.

‘A curious face,’ thought Lucius; ‘and there is something in
it—something that seems like a memory or an association—which strikes
me more forcibly than the face itself. Yet I know not what. I daresay I
have dreamed of such a face, or have shaped it in my own fancy to fit
some poetic creation—Ugolino, Lear, who knows?’

‘Sit down,’ said Mr. Sivewright, pointing to a chair opposite his own,
into which he had established himself with as comfortable an air as if
the chair itself had been the crowning triumph of luxurious upholstery.
‘You can drink claret, I suppose?’ taking a couple of glasses from the
Florentine cabinet, and filling them with the wine on the table. ‘I
drink no other wine myself. A sound light Medoc, which can hurt nobody.’

‘Nobody whose stomach is fortified with a double casing of iron,’
thought Lucius, as he sipped the acrid beverage, which he accepted out
of courtesy.

‘Ten minutes past six,’ said Mr. Sivewright, ringing a bell; ‘my dinner
ought to be on the table.’

An inner door behind Lucius opened as he spoke, and a girl came into
the room carrying a little tray, with two small covered dishes. Lucius
supposed the newcomer to be a servant, and did not trouble himself to
look up till she had placed her dishes on the table, and lingered to
give the finishing touches to the arrangement of the board. He did look
up then, and saw that this ministering spirit was no common hireling,
but one of the most interesting women he had ever seen.

She was hardly to be called a woman; she was but in the opening blossom
of girlhood; a fragile-looking flower, pale as some waxen-petalled
exotic reared under glass, with the thermometer at seventy-six. She had
something foreign, or even tropical, in her appearance; eyes dark as
night, hair of the same sombre hue. Her figure was of middle height,
slim, but with no sharpness of outline; every curve perfection, every
line grace. Her features were delicately pencilled, but not strikingly
beautiful. Indeed, the chief and all-pervading charm of her appearance
was that exquisite delicacy, that flower-like fragility which moved one
to exclaim, ‘How lovely, but how short-lived!’

Yet it is not always these delicate blossoms which fade the first; the
tough-stemmed poppy will sometimes be mown down by Death’s inexorable
sickle, while the opal-hued petals of the dog-rose still breast the
storm. There was a strength of endurance beneath this fragile exterior
which Lucius would have been slow to believe in.

The girl glanced at the stranger with much surprise, but without the
slightest embarrassment. Rarely did a stranger sit beside that hearth.
But there had been such intruders from time to time, traders or
clients of the old man’s. She had no curiosity upon the subject.

‘Your dinner is quite ready, grandfather,’ she said; ‘you had better
eat it before it grows cold.’

She lifted the covers from the two dainty little dishes—a morsel of
steak cooked in some foreign fashion—a handful of sliced potato fried
in oil.

Lucius rose to depart.

‘I won’t intrude upon you any longer, Mr. Sivewright,’ he said; ‘but if
you will allow me to call upon you some day and look at your wonderful
collection, I shall be very glad.’

‘Stay where you are,’ answered the other in his authoritative way;
‘you’ve dined, I’ve no doubt.’ A convenient way of settling _that_
question. ‘Lucille, my granddaughter, can give you a cup of tea.’

Lucille smiled, with a little gesture of assent strikingly foreign,
Lucius thought. An English girl would hardly have been so gracious to a
nameless stranger.

‘I told you, when we first met in that abominable fog, that I liked
your voice,’ said Mr. Sivewright. ‘I’ll go farther now, and say I like
your face. I forgive you your profession, as I said before. Stay, and
see my collection to-night.’

‘That is as much as to say, “See all you want to see to-night, and
don’t plague me with any future visits,”’ thought Lucius, who found
that meagrely-furnished room, that scanty fire, more attractive since
the appearance of Lucille.

He accepted the invitation, however; drew his chair to the tea-table,
and drank two cups of tea and ate two or three small slices of
bread-and-butter with a sublime disregard of the fact that he had not
broken his fast since eight o’clock in the morning. He had acquired a
passion for mild decoctions of congou in those days of privation far
away beyond the Saskatchewan; and this particular tea seemed to have
a subtle aroma which made it better than any he had ever brewed for
himself beside his solitary hearth.

‘I became a tea-drinker four years ago, in the Far West,’ he said, as
an excuse for his second cup.

‘Do you mean in America?’ the girl asked eagerly.

‘Yes. Have you ever been over yonder?’

‘Never; only I am always interested in hearing of America.’

‘You had much better be interested in hearing of the moon,’ said Mr.
Sivewright, with an angry look; ‘you are just as likely to discover
anything there that concerns you.’

‘You have relations or friends in America, perhaps, Miss Sivewright?’
inquired Lucius; but a little warning look and gesture from Lucille
prevented his repeating the question.

He began to tell her some of his adventures beyond the Red River—not
his hours of dire strait and calamity, not the horror of his forest
experiences. Those were things he never spoke of, scenes he dared not
think of, days which it was misery to him to remember.

‘You must have gone through great hardship,’ she said, after listening
to him with keen interest. ‘Were you never in actual peril?’

‘Once. We were lost in a forest westward of the Rocky Mountains.
But that is a period I do not care to speak of. My dearest friend
was ill—at the point of death. Happily for us a company of Canadian
emigrants, bound for the gold-fields, came across our track just in
time to save us. But for that providential circumstance I shouldn’t be
here to tell you the story. Wolves or wolverines would have picked my
bones.’

‘Horrible!’ exclaimed Lucille, with a shudder.

‘Yes. Wolves are not agreeable society. But human nature is still more
horrible when it casts off the mask of civilisation.’

Mr. Sivewright had finished his dinner by this time, and had absorbed
two glasses of the sound Medoc without a single contortion of his
visage; a striking instance of the force of habit.

‘Come,’ said he. ‘I’ll show you some of my collection. You’re no judge
of art, I suppose. I never knew a young man who was; though they’re
always ready enough with their opinions.’

He took up one of the candles, and led the way to the hall, thence
to a room on the other side of the house, larger than the family
sitting-room, and used as a storehouse for his treasures. Here Lucius
beheld the same confusion of bric-à-brac which had bewildered him
on his first entrance into that singular mansion, only on a larger
scale. Pictures again, statues again, cabinets, tables, fragmentary
pieces of mediæval oak carving, stray panels that had once lined old
Flemish churches, choir-stalls with sacred story carved upon their
arms and backs; armour again, grim and ghastly as the collection of
the Hôtel Cluny, demonstrating how man’s invention, before it entered
the vast field of gunnery, had lavished its wanton cruelty on forms
that hack and hew, and jag and tear and saw; spiky swords, pole-axes
with serrated edges, pikes from which dangled iron balls studded with
sharp points; and so on. Ceramic ware, again, of every age, from
a drinking-vessel dug from beneath one of the earth-mounds on the
shores of the Euphrates to the chocolatière out of which Marie Jeanne
Vaubernier, otherwise Du Barri, took her last breakfast. And, rising
grim above the frivolities of art, loomed the gaunt outline of a
Scottish Maiden, the rough germ of the Gallic guillotine.

The old man looked round his storehouse with a smile of triumph,
holding aloft his single candle, every object showing strangely, and
casting uncanny shadows in that feeble light, he himself not the least
curious figure in the Rembrandtesque picture. He looked like some
enchanter, who, at a breath, had called these things into being.

‘You astound me!’ exclaimed Lucius, looking about him with unaffected
wonder. ‘You spoke some time ago of having saved the remnant of your
stock; but you have here a collection larger than I should have
supposed any dealer in curiosities would care to amass, even in the
full swing of his business.’

‘Perhaps,’ answered Mr. Sivewright with a dreamy air. ‘For the mere
purposes of trade—for trade upon the nimble-ninepence system—there
is no doubt too much. But these things have accumulated since I left
off business. The passion for collecting them was not to be put away
as easily as I put up my shutters with the expiry of a long lease.
My harpy of a landlord asked a rent so exorbitant, that I preferred
cutting short a successful trade to pandering to his greed. True that
the situation had increased in value during the last twenty-one years
of my residence; but I declined to toil for another man’s profit. I
turned my hack upon Bond-street, determined to take life quietly in
future. I found this old house—to be let cheap, and roomy enough to
hold my treasures. Since that time I have amused myself by attending
all the great sales, and a good many of the little ones. I have been
to Paris, Brussels, Antwerp—and farther afield—on special occasions.
My collection has grown upon me—it represents all I possess in the
world, all that I can ever leave to my descendants. As I told you, I
anticipate that as the value of money decreases, and the age grows more
artistic, the value of these specimens, all relics of departed arts,
will be multiplied fourfold.’

‘A wise investment, in that case,’ replied Lucius; ‘but if the age
should have touched its highest point of luxurious living, if the
passion for splendid surroundings, once the attribute only of a
Buckingham or a Hertford, now the vice of the million, should work its
own cure, and give place to a Spartan simplicity, how then?’

‘My collection would most likely be purchased by the State,’ said the
old man coolly; ‘a destiny which I should infinitely prefer to its
disintegration, however profitable. _Then_, Mr. Davoren, the name of
Homer Sivewright would go down to posterity linked with one of the
noblest Museums ever created by a single individual.’

‘Pardon me,’ said Lucius; ‘but your name Homer—is that a family or
merely a Christian name?’

‘The name given me by my foolish old father—whose father was a
contemporary of Bentley—who gave his life to the study of Homer, and
tried to establish the thesis that early Greece had but one poet;
that the cyclic poets were the merest phantasma; and that Stasinus,
Arctinus, Lesches, and the rest, were but the mouthpieces of that one
mighty bard. Every man is said to be mad upon one point, or mad once in
twenty-four hours. My father was very mad about Greek. He gave me my
ridiculous name—which made me the laughing-stock of my schoolfellows—a
university education and his blessing. He had no more to give. My
college career cost him the only fortune he could have left me; and
I found myself, at one-and-twenty, fatherless, motherless, homeless,
and penniless, and—what to my poor father would have seemed worst of
all—plucked for my incapacity to appreciate the niceties of Homeric
Greek.’

‘How did you weather the storm?’

‘I might not have weathered it at all, but for a self-delusion which
sustained me in the very face of starvation. But for that I could
hardly have crossed Waterloo-bridge without being sorely tempted to
take the shortest cut out of my perplexities. I fancied myself a
painter. That dream kept me alive. I got bread somehow; sold my daubs
to a dealer; made some progress even in the art of daubing; and only
after five years of hard work and harder living awoke one day to the
bitter truth that I was no more a painter than I was a Grecian, no
nearer Reynolds than Porson.’

‘You bore your disappointment bravely, I imagine.’

‘Why imagine that?’

‘Because your physiognomy teaches me your ability to come safely
through such an ordeal—a will strong enough to stand against even a
worse shock.’

‘You are right. I parted with my delusion quietly enough, though it
had brightened my boyhood, and kept me alive during five weary years.
As I could not be a painter of pictures, I determined to be a dealer
in them, and began life once more in a little den of a shop, in a
court near Leicester-square—began with ten pounds for my capital;
bought a bit of old china for three-and-sixpence, and sold it for
ten shillings; had an occasional stroke of luck as time went by; once
picked up a smoke-darkened picture of a piggery, which turned out an
indisputable Morland; went everywhere and saw everything that was
to be seen in the shape of pictures and ceramic ware; lived in an
atmosphere of art, and brought to bear upon my petty trade a genuine
passion for art, which stood me in good stead against bigwigs whose
knowledge was only technical. In four years I had a stock worth three
thousand pounds, and was able to open a shop in Bond-street. A man
with a window in Bond-street must be an arrant ass if he can’t make
money. The dilettanti found me out, and discovered that I had received
the education of a gentleman. Young men about town made my shop a
lounge. I sold them the choicest brands of cigars, under the rose,
and occasionally lent them money; for which I charged them about half
the interest they would have paid a professed usurer. My profits were
reinvested in fresh stock as fast as they accumulated. I acquired a
reputation for judgment and taste; and, in a word, I succeeded; which I
should never have done had I insisted upon thinking myself a neglected
Raphael.’

‘I thank you for your history, more interesting to my mind than any
object in your collection. I do not wonder that you were loth to part
with the gems of art you had slowly gathered. But had none of your
children the inclination to continue so fascinating a trade?’

‘My children!’ repeated Homer Sivewright, with a gloomy look; ‘I have
no children. When you talk to a stranger, Mr. Davoren, beware of
commonplace questions. They sometimes gall a raw spot.’

‘Pardon me; only seeing that interesting young lady—your granddaughter—’

‘That granddaughter represents all my kindred upon earth. I _had_ a
son—that girl’s father. But there is not a figure carved on yonder
oaken choir-stalls of less account to me than that son is now.’

Lucius was silent. He had been unlucky enough to stumble upon the
threshold of a family mystery. Yes, he had fancied some touch of
sadness, some vague shadow of a quiet grief, in that sweet young face.
The child of a disgraced father; her gentle spirit even yet weighed
down by the memory of some ancient shame. He thought of the sorrow that
had darkened his own youth—the bitter memory which haunted him even
yet—the memory of his lost sister.

He went through the collection, seeing things as well as he could by
the light of a solitary candle. Mr. Sivewright displayed his various
treasures with infinite enthusiasm; dilating upon the modelling here,
the colouring there; through all the technicalities of art. He kept his
guest absorbed in this investigation for nearly two hours, although
there were moments when the younger man’s thoughts wandered back to the
parlour where they had left Lucille.

He was thinking of her even while he appeared to listen with intense
interest to Mr. Sivewright’s explanation of the difference between
_pâte tendre_ and _pâte dure_; wondering if she lived alone in that
huge rambling house with her grandfather, like little Nell in the
_Old Curiosity Shop_; only it was to be hoped with no such diabolical
familiar as Quilp privileged to intrude upon her solitude. So anxious
was he to be satisfied on this point, that he ventured to ask the
question, despite his previous ill-fortune.

‘Yes,’ answered Mr. Sivewright coolly, ‘we live quite alone. Dull,
you’ll say, perhaps, for my granddaughter. If it is, she must resign
herself to circumstances. There are worse things to bear than want of
company. If she hadn’t this home, she’d have none. Well, I suppose
you’ve seen as many of these things as you care about. I can see your
mind’s wandering. So we may as well bid each other good-night. I’m
obliged to you for your civility this afternoon. This way.’

He opened the door into the hall. A somewhat abrupt dismissal, and one
Lucius had not expected. He had reckoned upon finishing his evening far
more pleasantly in the society of Lucille.

‘I should like to bid Miss Sivewright good-evening,’ he said.

‘There’s no occasion. I can do it for you. There’s your hat, on the
black-marble slab yonder,’ said the old man, seeing his visitor looking
round in search of that article, with a faint hope that he might have
left it in the parlour.

‘Thanks. But I hope you don’t forbid my coming to see you again
sometimes?’ Lucius asked bluntly.

‘Humph!’ muttered the old man, ‘it would sound ungracious to talk of
forbidding any future visit. But I have lived in this house five years,
and have not made an acquaintance. One of the chief attractions of this
place, to my mind, was the fact that it was cut off by a ten-foot wall
from the world outside. With every wish to be civil, I can’t see why I
should make an exception in your favour. Besides, you’ve seen all there
is worth seeing within these walls; you could have no possible pleasure
in coming to us. We are poor, and we live poorly.’

‘I am not a seeker of wealthy acquaintance. A quiet fireside—an
atmosphere of home—brightened by the refinements of art; that is what I
should value above all things in a house where I was free to visit; and
that your house could give me. But if you say No, I submit. I cannot
force myself upon you.’

‘I have a granddaughter who will be penniless if she offends me,’ said
the old man, with the same gloomy look which had darkened his face when
he spoke of his son. ‘I do not care for any strange influence to come
between us. As it is, we are happy—not loving each other in any silly
romantic fashion, but living together in mutual endurance. No; I should
be a fool to admit any disturbing element.’

‘Be it so,’ said Lucius. ‘I am a struggling man, and have hardly
trodden the first stage of an uphill journey. The friendship I offer is
not worth much.’

‘I should refuse it in exactly the same manner if you were a
millionnaire,’ answered the other, opening the heavy old door, and
admitting the fog. He led the way across the forecourt, unlocked the
tall iron gate, and his visitor passed out into the sordid realities of
the Shadrack-road.

‘Once more, good-night,’ said Mr. Sivewright.

‘Good-night,’ answered Lucius, as the gate closed upon him, with
a creak like the caw of an evil-minded raven. He turned his face
homeward, intensely mortified. He was a proud man, and had offered his
friendship to a retired bric-à-brac dealer, only to have it flatly
rejected. But it was not wounded pride which vexed him as he walked
home through the fog.

‘There’s no such thing as love at first sight,’ he said to himself;
‘yet when a man has lived for half-a-dozen years without seeing a
pretty face in his own rank of life, his heart is apt to be rather
inflammable.’




CHAPTER III.

HARD HIT.


Lucius Davoren found himself curiously disturbed by the memory of
that pretty face in his own rank of life—that glimpse of a fireside
different from the common firesides of the Shadrack-Basin district—the
fat and prosperous hearths, where the atmosphere was odorous with tea,
shrimps, muffins, and gin-and-water; the barren hearth-stoves by which
destitution hugged itself in its rags. He went about his daily work
with his accustomed earnestness, was no whit the less tender to the
little children, watched with the same anxious care by pauper sick
beds, handled shattered limbs or loathsome sores with the same gentle
touch; in a word, did his duty thoroughly, in this dismal, initiative
stage of his career.

But he never passed Cedar House without a regretful sigh and a
lingering gaze at its blank upper windows; which, showing no trace of
the life within, had a wall-eyed look that was worse than the utter
blindness of closed shutters. He sometimes went out of his way even,
for the sake of passing those inexorable walls. He wasted a few minutes
of his busy day loitering by the iron gate, hoping that by some kindly
caprice of Fortune the pale sweet face of Lucille Sivewright would
appear behind the rusty bars, the ponderous hinge would creak, and the
girl who haunted his thoughts would emerge from her gloomy prison.

‘Does she never come out?’ he asked himself one fine winter day, when
there was sunshine even in the realms of Shadrack. It was a month
after his adventure with Homer Sivewright, and he had lingered by
the gate a good many times. ‘Does she never breathe the free air of
heaven, never see the faces of mankind? Is she a cloistered nun in all
but the robe, and without the companionship which may make a convent
tolerable?—without even the affection of that grim old grandfather? for
how coldly he spoke of her! What a life!’

Lucius was full of pity for this girl, whom he had only known one
brief hour. If any one had suggested that he was in love with her, he
would have scorned the notion. Yet there are passions which endure
for a lifetime; which defy death and blossom above a grave; though
their history may be reckoned by rare hours of brightness, too easily
reckoned in the dull sum of life.

‘Love at sight is but the fancy of poets and fools,’ thought Lucius;
‘but it would be strange if I were not sorry for a fair young life thus
blighted.’

His violin had a new pathos for him now, in those occasional hours of
leisure when he laid aside his books and opened the case which held
that magician. His favourite sonatas breathed a languid melancholy,
which sounded to him like the complaint of an imprisoned soul—that
princess of fairy tale—the bric-à-brac dealer’s granddaughter. But to
think of her thus, as he played dreamily by his lonely fireside, was
only to feel a natural compassion for an oppressed fellow-creature.

This tendency to dwell upon one subject, and that a foolish one, since
his pity could not be of the smallest service to its object, finally
worried him not a little. Thus it was that, finding himself his own
master an hour or so earlier than usual one January afternoon, he told
himself that the wisest thing he could do would be to get away from the
Shadrack-road atmosphere altogether.

‘The life I lead is too narrow, too completely monotonous,’ he thought.
‘No wonder I have taken to exaggerate the importance of trifles. Yes,
I will refresh myself by a few hours’ liberty in a brighter world. I
will go and hunt up Geoffrey Hossack.’

They were firm friends still, though their lives lay as wide apart as
two rivers which have their source from the same watershed, and wander
off by opposite ways to the sea, never to touch again. They had lost
sight of each other for some time of late. Geoffrey, ever a peripatetic
spirit, had been doing Norway, with an excursus into Lapland during
the last two years; but a letter received just before Christmas had
announced his return, and his sojourn at a manor-house in Yorkshire.

‘I shall begin the new year in the City of cities,’ he wrote; ‘and
one of my first occupations will be to beat up your quarters in that
queer world of yours beyond the Tower. But if you are kind enough to
forestall me, you will find me in my old rooms at Philpott’s.—Yours, as
per usual, G. H.’

The new year had begun, and had brought no sign from Geoffrey; so
Lucius took advantage of his leisure to go westward in quest of his
friend. He detested the slow tortures of an omnibus, and was too poor
to afford himself a hansom; so he gave himself the luxury of a walk.

That journey took him almost from one end of London to the other.
The forest of spars, the ropewalk, the open gates of the docks,
the perpetual procession of hogsheads, cotton bales, iron bars,
packing-cases, and petroleum barrels, gave place to the crowded streets
of the City, where all the operations of commerce seemed to be carried
on quietly, by men who walked to and fro, carrying no merchandise,
but buying and selling as it were by sign and countersign. Then came
that borderland on the westward side of Temple Bar—that somewhat
shabby and doubtful region where loom the churches of St. Clement and
St. Mary, which seem to have been especially designed as perpetual
standing impediments to the march of architectural progress in this
quarter; then the brighter shop-windows and more holiday air of the
western Strand; and then Charing-cross; and a little way farther on,
hanging-on to the skirts of Pall Mall and the Clubs, behold Philpott’s
or the Cosmopolitan Hotel, an old-fashioned house with a narrow façade
in red-brick, pinched-in between its portlier neighbours—a house which
looked small, but boasted of making up forty beds, and retaining all
the year round a staff of thirty servants.

Mr. Hossack was at home. The waiter of whom Lucius asked the question
brightened at the sound of his name, as if he had been a personal
friend, and took Lucius under his protection on the instant.

‘This way, sir; the first-floor. Mr. Hossack has his own particular
rooms here. We once refused them to a Cabinet Minister, because Mr.
Hossack wanted them.’

‘A general favourite, I suppose.’

‘Lord bless you, sir, down to the vegetable maid, we worship him.’

The enthusiastic waiter opened a door, and ushered in the guest.
There had been no question as to card or name. Geoffrey Hossack was
accessible as the sunshine.

He was half buried in a low capacious chair, his head flung back on the
cushions, a cigar between his lips, an open French novel flung face
downwards on the carpet beside him, amongst a litter of newspapers. The
winter dusk had almost deepened into night, and the room was unlighted
save by the fire. Yet even in that fitful light Lucius saw that his
friend’s countenance was moody; a fact so rare as to awaken curiosity,
or even concern.

‘Geoff, old fellow!’

‘Why, Davoren!’ cried Geoffrey, starting up from his luxurious repose,
and flinging the unfinished cigar into the fire. ‘How good of you! And
I ought to have come to your place. I’ve been in London a fortnight.’

‘My dear old boy, one hardly expects Alcibiades beyond the Minories. I
have been living at that dingy end of town until to come westward is a
new sensation. When I saw Trafalgar-square and the lighted windows of
yonder Club to-night, I felt like Columbus when he sighted the coast of
San Salvador. I had a leisure afternoon, and thought I couldn’t spend
it better than in looking you up. And now, Geoff, for your Norwegian
and Laplandian experiences. You were looking uncommonly gloomy when I
came in; as if your memories of the north were not of the brightest.’

‘My northern memories are pleasant enough,’ said the other, putting
aside the question lightly, just in that old familiar way Lucius knew
so well. ‘Come, Lucius, plant yourself there,’ rolling over another
capacious chair, the last device of some satanic upholsterer for the
propagation of slothful habits; ‘take one of those Havanas, and light
up. I can never talk freely to a man till I can hardly see his face
across the clouds of his tobacco—a native modesty of disposition, I
suppose; or perhaps that disinclination to look my fellow-man straight
in the face which is accounted one of the marks of a villanous
character. Goodish weed, isn’t it? Do you remember British Columbia,
Davoren, and the long days and nights when there was no tobacco?’

‘Do I remember?’ echoed the surgeon, looking at the fire. ‘Am I ever
likely to forget?’

‘Of course not. The question was a mere _façon de parler_. There are
things that no man can forget. Can I forget, for instance, how you
saved my life? how through all those wearisome nights and days when I
was lying rolled up in my buffalo skins raving like a lunatic, fancying
myself in all sorts of places and among all sorts of people, you were
at once doctor and sick-nurse, guardian and provider?’

‘Please don’t talk of that time, Geoff. There are some things better
forgotten. I did no more for you than I’d have done for a stranger;
except that my heart went with my service, and would have almost broken
if you had died. Our sufferings and our peril at that time seem to me
too bitter even for remembrance. I can’t endure to look back at them.’

‘Strange!’ exclaimed Geoffrey lightly. ‘To me they afford an unfailing
source of satisfaction. I rarely order a dinner without thinking of
the days when my vital powers were sustained—“sustained” is hardly
the word, say rather “suspended”—by mouldy pemmican. I seldom open a
new box of cigars without remembering those doleful hours in which
I smoked dried grass, flavoured with the last scrapings of nicotine
from my meerschaum. It is the converse of what somebody says about a
sorrow’s crown of sorrow. The memory of past hardship sweetens the
comfort of the present. But I do shudder sometimes when I remember
awakening from _my_ delirium to find _you_ down with brain-fever, and
poor little Schanck sitting awestricken by your side, like a man who
had been holding converse with spirits. I don’t mean schnapps, but
something uncanny. Thank God, those Canadian emigrants found us out
soon afterwards, or He only knows how our story would have ended.’

‘Thank God!’ echoed Lucius solemnly. ‘I know nothing of my illness,
can remember nothing till I found myself strapped like a bundle upon a
horse’s back, riding through the snow.’

‘We moved you before you were quite right in your head,’ answered
Geoffrey apologetically. ‘The Canadians wouldn’t wait any longer. It
was our only chance of being put into the right track.’

‘You did a wise thing, Geoff. It was good for me to wake up far from
that wretched log-hut.’

‘Come now, after all, we had some very jolly times there,’ said
Geoffrey, with his habit of making the best of life; ‘sitting by the
blazing pine-logs jawing away like old boots. It was only when our
’baccy ran out that existence became a burden. I give you my honour
that sometimes when civilised life begins to hang heavy, I look back
to the days when we crossed the Rocky Mountains with a regretful sigh.
I almost envy that plucky little German sea-captain who left us at
Victoria, and went on to San Francisco to dig for gold.’

‘I verily believe, Geoff, you would have contrived to be cheerful
in the Black Hole at Calcutta, or on the middle passage. You have a
limitless reserve fund of animal spirits.’

‘There you’re wrong. I believed as much myself till the other day. But
I have lately discovered a latent faculty hitherto unsuspected even by
myself; the capacity for being miserable.’

‘You have sustained some family affliction,—or you have taken to
wearing tight boots?’

‘Neither. I wish you’d help yourself to some brandy-and-soda yonder,’
interjected Mr. Hossack, pointing to a side-table on which those
refreshments were provided, and ringing the bell clamorously; ‘I’ll
order dinner before I unbosom myself. George,’ to the enthusiastic
waiter, who appeared in prompt answer to the noisy summons, ‘the best
you can do for this gentleman and me, at seven sharp; and don’t
come fidgeting in and out to lay the cloth until five minutes before
you bring the soup tureen. By the way, we’ll begin with oysters and
Montrachet, and you can give us a bottle of Yquem afterwards. No
sparkling wine. We’ll wind up with Chambertin, if you’ve a bottle in
good condition. But don’t bring it half-frozen out of the cellar,
or muddled by hasty thawing. Exercise judgment, George; you have
to deal with connoisseurs. Now,’ continued this epicurean youth,
flinging himself back into the depths of his chair, ‘before I begin my
egotistical prosing, let me hear what you’ve been doing all this time,
my Lucius.’

‘That may be told in two words. Hard work.’

‘Poor old Davoren!’

‘Don’t take that simple statement as a complaint. It is work I like. I
might have set up my Penates in what is called a genteel neighbourhood,
and earned my crust a good deal more easily than I can earn it yonder.
But I wanted wide experience—a complete initiation—and I went where
humanity is thickest. The result has more than satisfied me. If ever I
move westward it will be to Savile-row.’

The sybarite contemplated his friend admiringly, yet with a stifled
yawn, as if the very contemplation of so much vital force were
fatiguing.

‘Upon my word, I don’t know that I wouldn’t exchange my three-per-cents
for your ambition, Lucius,’ he said. ‘To have something to achieve,
something to win—that is the keenest rapture of the human mind, that
makes the chief delight of the chase. Upon my honour, I envy you. I
seem to awake to the conviction that it is a misfortune to be born with
the proverbial silver spoon in one’s mouth.’

‘The man who begins life with a fortune starts ahead of the penniless
struggler in the race for fame,’ answered the surgeon. ‘There is plenty
of scope for your ambition, Geoff, in spite of the three-per-cents.’

‘What could I do?’

‘Try to make yourself famous.’

‘Not possible! Unless I took to a pea-green coat, like that rich
young West Indian swell in the last generation. Fame! bah! for Brown,
Jones, or Robinson to talk of making themselves famous is about as
preposterous as it would be for Hampstead-hill to try and develop a
volcano. Men born to fame have a special brand upon their foreheads,
like the stamp on Veuve Clicquot’s champagne corks. I think I see it in
the anxious lines that mark yours, Lucius.’

‘There is the senate,’ said Davoren; ‘the natural aim of an
Englishman’s ambition.’

‘What! truckle to rural shopkeepers for the privilege of wasting
the summer evenings and the spring tides in a stuffy manufactory of
twaddle. _Pas si bête!_’

‘After all,’ returned Lucius, with a faint sigh, ‘you have something
better than ambition, which is only life in the future—mere fetish
worship, perhaps—or the adoration of a shadow which may never become
a substance. You have youth, and the power to enjoy all youth’s
pleasures; that is to say, life in the present.’

‘So I thought till very lately,’ answered Geoffrey, with another sigh;
‘but there is a new flavour of bitterness in the wine of life. Lucius,
I’m going to ask you a serious question. Do you believe in love at
first sight?’

A startling question at any rate, for it brought the blood into the
surgeon’s toil-worn face. Happily they were still sitting in the
fire-light, which just now waxed dim.

‘About as much as I believe in ghosts or spirit-rapping,’ he answered
coldly.

‘Which means that you’ve never seen a ghost or had a message from
spirit-land,’ answered Geoffrey. ‘Six months ago I should have called
any one an ass who could love a woman of whom he knew no more than that
her face was lovely and her voice divine. But as somebody—a baker’s
daughter, wasn’t she?—observed, “We know what we are, but we know not
what we may be.”’

‘You have fallen in love, Geoff?’

‘Descended into abysmal depths of folly, a million fathoms below the
soundings of common sense. There’s nothing romantic in the business
either, which of course makes it worse. It’s only foolish. I didn’t
save the lady’s life; by stopping a pair of horses that were galloping
to perdition with her; or by swimming out a mile or so to snatch
her from the devouring jaws of an ebb tide. I have no excuse for my
madness. The lady is a concert-singer, and I first saw her while
dancing attendance upon some country cousins who were staying in town
the other day, and led me like a victim to musical mornings and evening
recitals, and so on. You know that I have not a passionate love of
music.’

‘I know that you had a very moderate appreciation of my violin.’

‘All the tunes sounded so much alike. Want of taste on my part, of
course. However, my cousins—Arabella and Jessie, nice girls, but
domineering—insisted that I should go to concerts, so I went. They
both sing and play, and wanted to improve their style, they said;
selfishly ignoring the fact that I had no style to improve; and
allowing me to pay for all the tickets. One morning—splendid weather
for snowballing; I wished myself young again and at Winchester, as
I looked at the streets—we went to a Recital, which took place in a
dreary-looking house near Manchester-square, by the kind permission
of the tenant. The concert people might as well have borrowed a
roomy family vault. It would have been quite as cheerful. Well, we
surrendered our tickets—parallelograms of sky-blue pasteboard, and
uncommonly dear at half a guinea—to a shabby footman, who ushered us
up-stairs over a threadbare stair carpet to a faded drawing-room, where
we found some elderly ladies of the dowdy order, and a miscellaneous
collection of antique gentlemen in well-worn coats of exploded cut.
These I took to represent the musical nobility. It was not a cheerful
concert. First came a quartette, in ever so many parts, like a dull
sermon; a quartette for a piano, violoncello, and two fiddles, with
firstly, and secondly, and thirdly. Every now and then, when the
violoncello gave forth rather deeper groans than usual, or one of
the fiddles prolonged a wire-drawn note, the musical nobility gave a
little gasp, and looked at one another, and one of the old gentlemen
tapped the lid of his snuffbox. After the quartette we had a pianoforte
solo, to my unenlightened mind an arid waste of tuneless chords,
and little meandering runs to nowhere in particular, a little less
interesting than a problem in Euclid. I prefer my cousin Arabella’s
hearty thumping, and frantic rushes up and down the keyboard, to this
milk-and-water style, which is, I understand, classical. Number three
was a vocal duet by Handel, which I won’t describe, as it lulled me
into a placid slumber. When I reopened my eyes there was a gentle
murmur of admiration floating in the atmosphere; and I beheld a lady
dressed in black, with a sheet of music in her hand, waiting for the
end of the symphony.’

‘_The_ lady, I suppose,’ said Lucius, duly interested.

‘The lady. I won’t attempt to describe her; for after all what can one
say of the loveliest woman except that she has a straight nose, fine
eyes, a good complexion? And yet these constitute so small a part of
Beauty. One may see them in the street every day. This one stood there
like a statue in the cold wintry light, and seemed to me the most
perfect being I had ever beheld. She appeared divinely unconscious of
her beauty, as unconscious as Aphrodite must have been in that wild
free world of newborn Greece, though all creation worshipped her. She
didn’t look about her with a complacent smile, challenging admiration.
Her dark-fringed eyelids drooped over the violet-gray eyes, as she
looked downward at the music. Her dress was Quaker-like, a linen collar
round the full firm throat, the perfect arm defined by the plain black
sleeve. Art had done nothing to enhance or to detract from her beauty.
She sang “Auld Robin Gray” in a voice that went to my inmost heart. The
musical nobility sniffed and murmured rapturously. The old gentleman
rapped his snuffbox, and said Bwava! and the song was re-demanded. She
curtsied and began something about a blue bodice and Lubin, and in this
there were bird-like trills, and a prolonged shake, clear and strong
as the carol of a sky-lark. Lucius, I was such a demented ass at that
moment, that if the restraints of civilisation hadn’t been uncommonly
strong upon me, I should have wept like a schoolboy before a caning.’

‘Something in the _timbre_ of the voice,’ said Lucius, ‘simpatica.’

‘Sim-anybody you like; it knocked me over as if I’d been a skittle.’

‘Have you seen her since?’

‘Have I seen her! I have followed her from concert-room to
concert-room, until my _sensorium_—that’s the word, isn’t it?—aches
from the amount of classical music that has been inflicted upon it—the
x minors and z majors, and so forth. Sometimes I hunted her down in
some other aristocratic drawing-room, by the kind permission, &c.;
sometimes I found her at the Hanover-square Rooms. Mitchell has a
standing order to send me a ticket for every concert at which she
sings. It’s deuced hard work. I’m due this time to-morrow at St.
George’s Hall, Liverpool.’

‘But, my dear old Geoff, can anything be more foolish?’ expostulated
Lucius, forgetful of that rusty old gate in the Shadrack-road, to which
purest pity had so often led him.

‘I daresay not. But I can’t help myself.’

‘Do you know anything about the lady?’

‘All that a diligent process of private inquiry could discover; and yet
very little. The lady is a widow—’

‘Disenchanting fact.’

‘Her name, Bertram.’

‘Assumed, no doubt.’

‘Very possibly. She has lodgings in Keppel-street, Russell-square, and
lives a life of extreme seclusion with one little girl. I saw the child
one morning, a seraph of seven or eight, with flowing flaxen hair,
blue frock, and scarlet legs, like a tropical bird, or a picture by
Millais.’

‘That sounds like respectability.’

‘Respectability!’ cried Geoffrey, flaming with indignation. ‘I would no
more doubt her honour than I would question that of my dead mother. If
you had heard her sing “Voi che sapéte,” the clear thrilling tones, now
swelling into a flood of melody, now sinking to the tenderest whisper!
Could such tones as those come from an impure heart? No, Lucius. I need
no certificate of character to tell me that Jane Bertram is true.’

Lucius smiled—the slow smile of worldly wisdom—and then breathed a
faint regretful sigh for his friend’s delusion.

‘My dear Geoff,’ he said, ‘I daresay the conclusion you arrive at is
natural to the unsophisticated mind. A great orator addresses us like
a demigod; ergo, he must be by nature godlike. Yet his life may be no
better than Thurlow’s or Wilkes’s. A woman is divinely beautiful; and
we argue that her soul, too, must be divine. The history of the musical
stage tells us that in days gone by there were women who sang like
angels, yet were by no means perfect as women. For God’s sake, dear old
friend, beware of music. Of all man’s ensnarers the siren with lyre and
voice is the most dangerous. Of all woman’s tempters he who breathes
his earthly desires in heavenly-sounding melody is the most fatal. In
my own family there has been a wretched example of this nature. I speak
with all the bitterness that comes from bitter experience.’

‘That may be so,’ returned the other, unconvinced; ‘but there are
instincts which cannot lie. My belief in Jane Bertram is fixed as the
sun in heaven.’

‘Did you contrive to obtain an introduction?’

‘No. I found that impossible. She knows no one, goes nowhere, except
for her professional engagements. Even the people who engage her—music
publishers, and what not—know nothing about her; except that she
sings better than five out of six sopranos of established reputation,
and that she has struggled into her present modest position out of
obscurity and hard work. She was only a teacher of music until very
lately. She would do wonders if she went on the stage, my informant
told me; and such a course was suggested to her; but she peremptorily
declined to entertain the idea. She earns, in the season, about five
pounds a week. What a pittance for a goddess!’

‘And who was Mr. Bertram?’

‘I was not curious upon that subject; enough for me to know that he is
in his grave. But had I been ever so inquisitive my curiosity must
have gone unsatisfied. The people who know so little about her know
still less about her late husband. He has been dead some years. That is
all they could tell me.’

‘And you positively go down to Liverpool to hear her sing!’

‘As I would go back to the shores of the Red River for the same
purpose. Ay, live again on mouldy pemmican, and hear again the howling
of the wolves at sunset.’

‘And is this kind of thing to go on indefinitely?’

‘It will go on until circumstances favour my passion, until I can win
my way to her friendship, to her confidence; until I can say to her,
without fear of repulse or discouragement, “Jane, I love you.” I am
quite content to serve a longish apprenticeship, even to classical
music, for the sake of that reward.’

Lucius stretched out his hand, and the two men’s broad palms met in the
grasp of friendship.

‘Upon my honour, Geoffrey, I admire you,’ said the surgeon. ‘I won’t
preach any more. Granted that your passion is foolish, at least it’s
thorough. I honour a man who can say to himself, “That woman I will
marry, and no other; that woman I will follow, through honour and
dishonour, evil report and good report—”’

‘Stop,’ cried Geoffrey; ‘let there be no mention of dishonour in the
same breath with her name. If I did not believe in her truth and
purity, I would pluck this passion out of my breast—as the Carthusian
prior in the mediæval legend plucked deadly sin out of the entrails of
St. Hugo of Lincoln—though I cut my heart open to do it. I love her,
and I believe in her.’

‘And if you ceased to believe in her, you would cease to love her?’

‘Yes,’ answered Geoffrey Hossack firmly.

He had risen from his seat by the hearth, and was pacing the dusky
chamber, where the street lamps without and the red fire within made a
curious half-light. Truly had his friend called him thorough. Intense,
passionate, and impulsive was this generous nature—a nature which had
never been spoiled by that hard school in which all men must learn
whose first necessity is to get their living, that dreary breadwinner’s
academical career to which God condemned Adam as the direst punishment
of his disobedience and deceit. ‘No longer shalt thou wander careless
in these flowery vales and groves, where generous emotions and
affectionate impulses and noble thoughts might bud and blossom in the
happy idlesse. For thee, sinner, the daily round of toil, the constant
hurry, the ever-goading pressure of sordid necessities, which shall
make thee selfish and hard and remorseless, with no leisure in which
to be kind to thy brother strugglers, with hardly a pause in which to
remember thy God!’




CHAPTER IV.

‘O WORLD, HOW APT THE POOR ARE TO BE PROUD!’


Lucius thought much of his friend after that frank confession at the
Cosmopolitan. Geoffrey had dined none the less well because of his
passion. He had eaten oysters, and bisque soup, and stewed calves’ head
with truffles, and mutton, and wild duck, with the appetite that had
been educated in an American pine-forest; had drunk Château d’Yquem,
and Chambertin, and wound up with curaçoa, and had waxed merry to
riotousness as the evening grew late,—Lucius taking but a moderate
share in the revel, yet enjoying it. Was it not a glimpse of a new
life, after the Shadrack-road, where pleasure had a universal flavour
of gin-and-water?

They parted after midnight with warm protestations of friendship. They
were to see each other again. Geoffrey was to look his friend up in the
Shadrack district as soon as his engagements permitted. But wherever
_she_ went, he would follow her, were it to that possible continent or
archipelago at the southern pole.

So Lucius went back to the region of many spars and much rigging, and
solaced his lonely evenings with the pensive strains of his violin,
and pondered long and gravely upon that wondrous mystery of love which
could befool even so healthy a nature as that of honest, open-hearted,
plain-spoken Geoffrey Hossack. Love allied with music! ‘Yes,’ he
thought, as he sighed over the long-drawn chords of an adagio, ‘_that_
is the fatal witchcraft.’

Anon came February, season of sleet and east winds, the month in which
winter—after seeming, towards the end of January, to have grown genial
and temperate, with even faint whispers of coming spring—generally
undergoes a serious relapse, and plunges anew into hyperborean
darkness, fog, tempest, snow. Lucius had passed the old house in the
Shadrack-road almost every day since November (even when it lay out of
his beat he contrived to walk that way), but had seen no more sign of
human life about that dismal mansion than if it had been in Chancery;
not even the old woman in a bonnet—not even a baker’s barrow delivering
the daily loaf—not so much as a postman. He might almost have beguiled
himself into the belief that the whole experience of that November
evening—the old man—the pale poetic-looking girl—the marvellous
collection of art treasures seen by the flickering light of a single
candle—were the mere phantasmagoria of an overworked brain, a waking
dream, the inchoate vision of a disordered fancy.

He went twice every Sunday to a church that stood midway between his
own house and the once regal mansion; a new church of the Pugin-Gothic
order, with open seats, a painted window, other windows which awaited
the piety of the congregation to be also painted, and a very young
incumbent of the advanced type, deeply read in the lives of the saints,
and given to early services. This temple was so small that Lucius
fancied he could scarcely have failed to see Miss Sivewright were she
a worshipper there. Sunday after Sunday, during the hymns, ancient and
modern, he looked with anxious gaze round the fane, hoping to see that
one interesting face among the crowd of uninteresting faces. Four out
of five of the congregation were women, but Lucille Sivewright was not
one of them. He began to resign himself to the dreary truth that they
two were doomed never to meet again.

Hope, in its last agony, was suddenly recalled to new life. He came
home from his daily drudgery one evening, thoroughly tired, even a
little disheartened; ‘discouraged,’ as the American lady described
herself, when she confessed to poisoning eight of her relations, simply
because she began to regard them as encumbrances, and feared that, if
permitted to live, they might reduce her to poverty. On this particular
evening the star of science—that grand and ever-sustaining idea that he
was to sow the seed of some new truth in the broad field of scientific
progress—waxed paler than usual, and Lucius also was discouraged. He
came home bodily and mentally tired. He had been tramping to and fro
all day under a drizzling rain, and in a leaden atmosphere laden with
London smoke.

Even in that shabby ill-built domicile which he called home, sorry
comfort awaited him. His ancient serving-woman, Mrs. Babb, had let
the parlour fire go out. The kettle, which, singing on the hob above
a cheerful blaze, seemed almost a sentient thing, now leaned on one
side disconsolately against a craggy heap of black coal, like a vessel
aground upon a coral reef. The tray of tea-things—the neat white cloth
indicative of chop or steak—adorned not his small round table. Mrs.
Babb, absorbed in the feminine delights of a weekly cleaning, had
suffered herself to become unconscious of the lapse of time.

He gave the loose, ill-hung bell-wire an angry jerk, flung himself
into his accustomed arm-chair, and stretched out his hand haphazard in
search of a book. Plato, Montaigne, Sterne, any philosopher who should
teach him how to hear the petty stings of the scorpion—daily life.

But before his hand touched the volumes, its motion was arrested. He
beheld something more interesting than Plato, since in all probability
it concerned himself, namely, a letter, at a corner of the mantelpiece,
just on a level with his eye. Egotism triumphed over philosophy. The
letter, were it even a bill, was more vital to him for the moment than
all the wisdom of Socrates.

He snatched the envelope, which was directed in a rugged uncompromising
caligraphy, unfamiliar to him. He tore it open eagerly, and looked at
the signature, ‘Homer Sivewright.’

 ‘Dear Sir,—When you obliged me with your assistance the other day, I
 believe I made some profane remark about your profession, which you
 took in good part. One forgives such gibes from a testy old man. You
 told me that when I found myself ill, my thoughts would naturally tend
 towards Savile-row. There you were wrong. I do find something out of
 gear in my constitution—possibly liver—or perhaps general break-up.
 But instead of thinking of the high-flyers of the West-end, with their
 big fees and pompous pretensions, I think of you.

 ‘I told you the other night that I liked your face. This is not all.
 My housekeeper, who has kindred in this district, informs me that you
 have worked some marvellous cure upon her husband’s brother’s second
 cousin’s wife’s sister. The relationship is remote, but the rumour
 of your skill has reached my servant. Will you come this way at your
 convenience? Don’t come out of your way on purpose to see me. My
 means, as I informed you, and as you might see for yourself in all my
 surroundings, are scanty, and I can afford to pay very little more
 than the poorest among your patients. I state the case thus plainly
 that there may be no future disagreement.—Truly yours,

  ‘HOMER SIVEWRIGHT.’

‘Is the old man a miser; or an enthusiast, who has sacrificed himself
and his granddaughter to his love of art? Equally hard upon the
granddaughter in either case,’ reflected Lucius, trying to contemplate
the business in the chilly light of common sense, wondering at and
half-ashamed of the sudden delight which had moved him when he found
that Mr. Sivewright’s letter was nothing less than a passport to
Lucille Sivewright’s home.

‘I’ll go the instant I’ve dined,’ he said to himself, giving another
tug at the loose bell-wire. ‘Yet who knows whether the old churl will
let me see his interesting granddaughter? Perhaps he’ll put me on a
strictly professional footing; have me shown up to his den by that old
woman, and shown down again without so much as a glimpse of Lucille’s
pensive face. Yet he can hardly pay me badly and treat me badly too.
I’ll ask permission to attend him as a friend; and then perhaps he’ll
melt a little, and admit me to his hearth. I like the look of that
old wainscoted room, with its bare floor and clean-swept hearth, and
handful of bright fire. It seemed to breathe the poetry of poverty.’

Mrs. Babb came clattering in with the tea-things and chop all together,
profuse in apologies for having forgotten to wind up the kitchen clock,
and thus become oblivious as to time.

‘On a clear day I can see the clock at the public round the corner by
stretching my head out of the back-attic window,’ she said; ‘but being
thick to-day I couldn’t, and I must have been an hour behind ever since
dinner. And the fire gone out too!’

The fire was quickly lighted; the kettle carried off to boil
down-stairs; but Lucius didn’t wait for his tea. That gentle decoction,
which was, in a general way, the very support of his life, to-night
was almost indifferent to him. He ate his chop, ran up to his narrow
dressing-room, where the weekly cleansing process had left a healthy
odour of mottled soap and a refreshing dampness, washed away the smoke
and grime of the day with much cold water, changed all his garments,
lest he should carry the taint of fever-dens whither he was going, and
went forth as gaily as to a festival.

‘Am I as great a fool as dear old Geoffrey?’ he asked himself during
that rapid walk. ‘No; at least I know something of my goddess. I could
read the story of her patient self-sacrificing life even in that one
hour. Besides, I am by no means in love with her. I am only interested.’

It was a new feeling for him to approach the gate with the certainty of
admission. He tugged resolutely at the iron ring, and heard the rusty
wires creak their objection to such disturbance. Then came a shuffling
slipshod step across the barren forecourt, which, with different
tenants, might have been a garden. This footstep announced the old
woman in the bonnet, who seemed to him the twin sister of his own
housekeeper, so closely do old women in that sphere of life resemble
each other—like babies. She mumbled something, and admitted him to the
sacred precincts. The same half-light glimmered in the hall as when
he had seen it first; the whole treasury of art wrapped in shadow.
The same brighter glow streamed from the panelled parlour as the old
woman opened the door and announced ‘Dr. Davory.’ Homer Sivewright
was sitting in his high-backed arm-chair by the hearth, getting all
the heat he could out of the contracted fire. His granddaughter sat
opposite him, knitting with four needles, which flashed like electric
wires under the guidance of the soft white hands. The tea-tray—with its
quaint old teapot in buff and black Wedgewood—adorned the table.

‘I thought you’d come,’ said the old man, ‘though my letter was not
very inviting, if you cultivate wealthy patients.’

‘I do not,’ answered Lucius, taking the chair indicated to him, after
receiving a stately foreign curtsy from Miss Sivewright, an unfamiliar
recognition which seemed to place him at an ineffable distance. ‘I was
very glad to get your note, and to respond to it promptly. I shall be
still more glad if you will place my medical services upon a friendly
footing. At your age a man requires the constant attendance of a doctor
who knows his constitution. There may be very little treatment wanted,
only the supervision of an experienced eye. Let me be your friend as
well as your medical adviser, and drop in whenever I am wanted, without
question of payment.’

The old man shot a keen glance from his cold gray eyes; eyes which
looked as if they had been in the habit of prying into men’s thoughts.
‘Why should you be so generous?’ he asked; ‘I have no claim upon you,
not even that hollow pretence which the world calls friendship. You
have nothing to gain from me. My will, disposing of my collection—which
is all I have to bequeath—was made ten years ago; and nothing would
ever tempt me to alter it by so much as a ten-pound legacy. You see
there’s nothing to be gained by showing me kindness.’

‘Grandfather!’ remonstrated the girl, in her low serious voice.

‘I am sorry you should impute to me any such sordid motive,’ said
Lucius quietly. ‘My reason for offering my services gratis is plain and
above board. There is no fireside at this end of the town at which I
care to sit, no society congenial to me. I spend all my evenings alone,
generally in hard study, sometimes with the books I love, or with my
violin for my companion. This kind of life suits me well enough on
the whole. Yet there are intervals of depression in which I feel its
exceeding loneliness. No man is all-sufficient to himself. Give me the
privilege of spending an evening here now and then—I will not wear out
my welcome—and let me watch your case as a labour of love. You say that
the recompense you can offer me will be small. Better for both your
dignity and mine that there should be none at all.’

‘You speak fair,’ answered Sivewright, ‘but that’s a common
qualification. I have a granddaughter there whom you may imagine to
be my heiress. If she is, she is heiress only to my collection; and
even my judgment may be mistaken as to the value of that. In any case,
consider her disposed of—put her put of the question.’

‘Grandfather!’ remonstrated the girl again, this time blushing
indignantly.

‘Better to speak plainly, Lucille.’

‘Since you cannot see me in any character except that of a
fortune-hunter, sir,’ said Lucius, rising, ‘we had better put an end to
the discussion. There are plenty of medical men in this neighbourhood.
You can find an adviser among them. I wish you good-evening.’

‘Stop,’ exclaimed Sivewright, as the surgeon walked straight to the
door, wounded inexpressibly, ‘I didn’t mean to offend you. But you
offered me your friendship, and it was best you should know upon what
footing I could accept the offer. You now know that I have no money to
leave any one—don’t suppose me a miser because I live poorly; that’s a
common error—and that my granddaughter is disposed of. Knowing this, do
you still offer me your professional services for nothing? do you still
wish for a place beside my hearth?’

‘I do,’ said the young man eagerly, and with one swift involuntary
glance at Lucille, who sat motionless, except for the dexterous hands
that plied those shining wires. He thought of the humiliation of
Hercules, and how well it would have pleased him to sit at her feet and
hold the worsted that she wound.

‘So be it then; you are henceforth free of this house. My door, which
so seldom opens to a stranger, shall offer no barrier to you. If you
discover circumstances in our lives that puzzle you, do not trouble
yourself to wonder about them. You will know all in good time. Be a
brother to Lucille.’ She held out her hand to the visitor frankly at
these words. He took it far more shyly than it was given. ‘And be a
son,’ with a long regretful sigh, ‘if you can, to me. I told you the
other day that I liked your voice, that I liked your face. I will go
farther to-night and say, I like you.’

‘Thank you,’ answered Lucius gravely, ‘that is just what I want. I
doubt if I have a near relation in the world, and I know but one man
whom I count my friend. Friendship with me, therefore, means something
very real. It is not a hackneyed sentiment, worn threadbare by long
usage. But now that we have arranged things pleasantly, let us have our
medical inspection.’

‘Not to-night,’ said Mr. Sivewright. ‘Come to me to-morrow, if you can
spare me the time. My symptoms are not of a pressing kind. I only feel
the wheels of life somewhat clogged; the mainspring weaker than it used
to be. Let us give to-night to friendship.’

‘Willingly,’ answered Lucius. ‘I will be with you at ten o’clock
to-morrow morning.’

He drew his chair nearer to the hearth, feeling that he was now really
admitted to the charmed circle. To most young men it would have been
far from an attractive house; for him it possessed an almost mysterious
fascination. Indeed, it was perhaps the element of mystery which made
Lucille Sivewright so interesting in his eyes. He had seen plenty of
women who were as pretty—some who were more beautiful—but not one who
had ever filled his thoughts as she did.

‘Pour out the tea, child,’ said Mr. Sivewright, and that fragrant
beverage was dispensed by Lucille’s white hands. It was one of the few
details of housekeeping in which the old man permitted extravagance.
The tea was of the choicest, brewed without stint, and the small
antique silver jug, adorned with elaborate _repoussé_ work, contained
cream. Lucius thought he had never tasted anything so exquisite as that
cup of tea. They sat round the fire, and the old man talked well and
freely—talked of the struggles of his youth, his art-worship, those
wonderful strokes of fortune to which the dealer in bric-à-brac is
ever liable—talked of everything connected with his career, except his
domestic life. On that one subject he was dumb.

Lucius thought of the castaway, the son who was of no more account to
his father than one of the wooden images in the crowded storehouse
across the hall. What had been his crime? Perhaps never to have
been loved at all. This old man’s nature seemed of a hard-grained
wood, which could scarcely put forth tender shoots and blossoms of
affection—a man who would consider his son his natural enemy.

‘You spoke of your violin some time ago,’ Lucille said, by and
by, in a pause of the conversation. Mr. Sivewright, having talked
about himself to his heart’s content, leaned back in his chair and
contemplated the fire. ‘Do you really play? I am so fond of the violin.’

‘Are you, indeed?’ cried Lucius, enraptured. ‘I’ll bring it some night,
and—’

‘Don’t!’ ejaculated the old man decisively. ‘I am something of
Chesterfield’s opinion, that fiddling is beneath a gentleman. If I hear
you scraping catgut I shall lose all confidence in your medicines.’

‘Then you shall not hear me,’ said Lucius, with perfect good humour. He
was determined to make friends with this grim old bric-à-brac dealer
if he could, just as one resolves to overcome the prejudices of an
unfriendly dog, believing that beneath his superficial savagery there
must be a substratum of nobility. ‘I only thought a little quiet music
might amuse Miss Sivewright, since she says she is fond of the violin.’

‘She doesn’t know what she is fond of,’ replied Sivewright testily;
‘she is full of fancies and whims, and likes everything that I abhor.
There, no tears, child,’ as those dark gentle eyes filled; ‘you know I
hate those most of all.’

Lucius came to the rescue, and began to talk with renewed vivacity,
thus covering Lucille’s confusion. He spoke of himself, giving all
those details of his childhood and youth, the knowledge of which
between new acquaintances at once establishes the familiarity that is
half-way towards friendship.

He left early, fearful of outstaying his welcome; left with a sense
of perfect content in this quiet domestic evening, although the old
man had certainly not gone out of his way to conciliate his visitor.
Lucille had talked very little, but even her silence had been
interesting to Lucius. It seemed to him the indication, not of dulness,
but of a gentle melancholy; a mind overshadowed by some olden sorrow,
and perhaps depressed by the solitude of that dreary mansion. He was
not satisfied with a continental curtsy at parting, but offered Lucille
his hand, which she took as frankly as if she had fully accepted him in
the character of an adopted brother.




CHAPTER V.

‘I HAD A SON, NOW OUTLAW’D FROM MY BLOOD.’


Ten o’clock the next morning beheld Lucius again at the tall gate. He
was admitted without question, and the open door of the parlour showed
him Lucille—in a gray stuff gown, a large linen apron, and a white
muslin cap, like a French grisette’s—rubbing the oaken wainscot with a
beeswaxed cloth; while a small tub of water on the table and some china
cups and saucers set out to drain, showed that she had been washing the
breakfast things. This circumstance explained the spotless neatness of
all he had seen—the shining wainscot, the absence of a grain of dust
upon any object in the room. She came out to wish him good-morning,
nowise abashed.

‘I daresay your English young ladies would think this very shocking,’
she said. ‘I ought to be practising Czerny’s _Exercises de Facilité_,
ought I not, at this time in the morning?’

‘Our English girls are very stupid when they devote all their time
to Czerny,’ he answered, ‘to the utter disregard of their domestic
surroundings. I’m not going to talk that hackneyed trash which Cobbett
brought into fashion, about preferring the art of making puddings to
music and literature; but I think it simply natural to a woman of
refinement to superintend the arrangements of her home—yes, and to use
brooms and dusters, rather than allow resting-place for so much as a
drachm of flue or dust. But you talk of our English ladies as a race
apart. Are you not English, Miss Sivewright?’

‘Only on my father’s side, and his mother was a Spanish-American. My
mother’ (with a sigh) ‘was a Frenchwoman.’

‘Ah,’ thought Lucius, ‘it is in such mixed races one finds beauty and
genius.’

How pretty she looked in her little muslin cap, adorning but not
concealing the rich dark hair! How well the neutral-tinted gown, with
its antique simplicity, became her graceful form!

‘Talking of music,’ he said, ‘have you no piano?’

‘No, I am sorry to say. My grandfather has a prejudice against music.’

‘Indeed! There are few who care to confess such a singular prejudice.’

‘Perhaps it is because’—falteringly and trifling nervously with the
linen band of her apron—’ because a person with whom he quarrelled
long ago was fond of music.’

‘A somewhat unreasonable reason. And you are thus deprived of even such
companionship as you might find in a piano! That seems hard.’

‘Pray do not blame my grandfather: he is very good to me. I have an old
guitar—my mother’s—with which I amuse myself sometimes in my own room,
where he can’t hear me. Shall I show you the way to my grandfather’s
bedroom? He seldom comes down-stairs till after twelve o’clock.’

Lucius followed her up the broad oak staircase, which at each spacious
landing was encumbered with specimens of those ponderous Flemish
cabinets and buffets, which would seem to have sprung into being
spontaneous as toadstools from the fertile soil of the Low Countries.
Then along a dusky corridor, where ancient tapestry and dingy pictures
covered the walls, to a door at the extreme end, which she opened.

‘This is grandpapa’s room,’ she said, upon the threshold, and there
left him.

He knocked at the half-open door, not caring to enter the lion’s den
unauthorised. A stern voice bade him ‘Come in.’

The room was large and lofty, but so crowded with the same species of
lumber as that which he had seen below that there was little more
than a passage, or strait, whereby he could approach his patient.
Here, too, were cabinets of ebony inlaid with _pietra dura_; in one
corner stood an Egyptian mummy—perchance a departed Pharaoh, whose
guilt-burdened soul had shivered at the bar of Osiris six thousand
years ago; while on the wall above him hung a grim picture—of the
early German school—representing the flaying of a saint and martyr,
hideously faithful to anatomy. The opposite wall was entirely covered
by moth-eaten tapestry, upon which the fair fingers of mediæval
chatelaines had depicted the Dance of Death. Gazing with wondering eyes
round the room, Lucius beheld elaborately-carved arm-chairs in Bombay
black wood, peacock mosquito-fans, sandal-wood caskets, poonah work,
and ivory chessmen; lamps that had lighted Roman catacombs or burned on
Pagan altars; Highland quaichs from which Charles Edward may have drunk
the native usquebaugh; a Greek shield, of the time of Alexander, shaped
like the back of a tortoise; a Chinese idol; a South Sea islander’s
canoe. A hundred memories of lands remote, of ages lost in the midst of
time, were suggested by this heterogeneous mass of property, which to
the inexperienced eye of Lucius seemed more interesting than valuable.

The old man’s bed stood in a corner near the fireplace—a small
four-poster, with clumsily-carved columns, somewhat resembling that
bedstead which the student of history gazes upon with awe in Mary
Stuart’s bedchamber at Holyrood, thinking how often that fair head
must have laid itself down there, weary of cark and care, and crown
and royal robes, and false friends and falser lovers—a shabby antique
bedstead, with ragged hangings of faded red silk.

There was a fire in the grate, pinched like the grate below; a
three-cornered chair of massive carved ebony, covered with stamped and
gilded leather, stood beside it. Here sat the master of these various
treasures, his long gray hair crowned with a black-velvet skullcap;
his gaunt figure wrapped in a ragged damask dressing-grown, edged with
well-worn fur; a garment which may have been coeval with the bedstead.

‘Good-morning,’ said Mr. Sivewright, looking up from his newspaper.
‘You look surprised at the furniture of my bedroom; not room enough to
swing a cat, is there? But you see I don’t want to swing cats. When I
get a bargain I bring it in here, and have it about me till I get tired
of looking at it, and then Wincher and I carry it down-stairs to the
general collection.’

‘Wincher?’

‘Yes, Jacob Wincher, my old Jack-of-all-trades; you haven’t seen
him yet? He burrows somewhere in the back premises—sleeps in the
coal-cellar, I believe—and is about as fond of daylight and fresh
air as a mole. A faithful fellow enough. He was my clerk and general
assistant in Bond-street; here he amuses himself pottering about among
my purchases; catalogues them after his own fashion, and could give a
better statement of my affairs than any City accountant.’

‘A valuable servant,’ said Lucius.

‘Do you think so? I haven’t paid him anything for the last seven years.
He stays with me, partly because he likes me in his slavish canine way,
partly because he has nowhere else to go. His wife keeps my house, and
takes care of Lucille. And now for our consultation; the pain in my
side has been a trifle worse this morning.’

Lucius began his interrogatory. Gently, and with that friendly
persuasiveness which had made him beloved by his parish patients, he
drew from the old man a full confession of his symptoms. The case was
grave. An existence joyless, hard, laborious, monotonous to weariness,
will sometimes exhaust the forces of the body, sap the vital power, as
perniciously as the wear and tear of riotous living. High pressure
has pretty much the same effect, let the motive power be love of gain
or love of pleasure. In a word, Homer Sivewright had worn himself
out. There was chronic disease of long standing; there was general
derangement which might end fatally sooner or later. He was over sixty
years of age. He might die within the year; he might live two, three,
four, five years longer.

‘You have not spared yourself, I fear,’ said Lucius, as he put his
stethoscope into his pocket.

‘No; I have always had one great object in life. A man who has that
rarely spares himself.’

‘Yet a man who wears himself out before his time by reckless labour is
hardly wiser than those foolish virgins who left their lamps without
oil.’

‘Perhaps. It is not always easy to be wise. A man whose domestic life
is a disappointment is apt to concentrate his labour and his thoughts
upon some object outside his home. My youth was a hard one from
necessity, my middle age was hard from habit. I had not acquired the
habit of luxury. My trade grew daily more interesting to me, ten times
more so than anything the world calls pleasure. I spent my days in
sale-rooms, or wandering in those strange nooks and corners to which
art treasures sometimes drift—the mere jetsam and flotsam of life’s
troubled sea, the unconsidered spoil of ruined homes. My nights were
devoted to the study of my ledger, or the text-books of my trade. I had
no desire for any other form of life. If I could have afforded all the
comforts and pleasures of modern civilisation—which of course I could
not—my choice would have kept me exactly where I was.’

‘In future,’ said Lucius in his cheery tone—he never discouraged a
patient—‘it will be well for you, to live more luxuriously. Stint
yourself in nothing, and let the money you have hitherto spent in
adding to your collection be henceforth devoted to good old port and a
liberal dietary.’

‘I have spent nothing lately,’ said Sivewright sharply; ‘I have had
nothing to spend.’

‘I don’t want to doubt your word,’ replied Lucius; ‘but I tell you
frankly you must live better than you have done, if you wish to live
much longer.’

‘I do,’ cried the old man with sudden energy; ‘I have prayed for long
life—I who pray so little. Yes, I have sent up that one supplication to
the blind blank sky. I want to live for long years to come. If I had
been born three hundred years ago, I should have sought for the sublime
secret—the elixir of life. But I live in an age when men believe in
nothing,’ with a profound sigh.

‘Say rather in an age when men reserve their faith for the God who made
them, instead of exhausting their powers of belief upon crucibles and
alembics,’ answered Lucius in his most practical tone.

Then followed his _régime_, simple and sagacious, but to be followed
strictly.

‘I should like to say a few words to your granddaughter,’ he said; ‘so
much in these cases depends upon good nursing.’

‘Say what you please,’ replied Mr. Sivewright, ringing his bell, ‘but
let it be said in my hearing. I don’t relish the notion of being
treated like a child; of having powders given me unawares in jam,
or senna in my tea. If you have a sentence of death to pronounce,
pronounce it fearlessly. I am stoic enough to hear my death-warrant
unmoved.’

‘I shall make no such demand upon your stoicism. The duration of your
life will depend very much on your own prudence. Of course at sixty
the avenue at the end of which a man sees his grave is not an endless
perspective. But you have a comfortable time before you yet, Mr.
Sivewright, if you will live wisely and make the most of it.’

Lucille came in response to the bell, and to her Lucius repeated his
directions as to diet and general treatment.

‘I am not going to dose your grandfather with drugs,’ he said; ‘a mild
tonic, to promote appetite, is all I shall give him. He complains of
sleeplessness, a natural effect of thinking much, and monotonously
brooding on some one theme, and that not a pleasant one.’

The old man looked at him sharply, angrily even.

‘I don’t want any fortune-telling,’ he said; ‘stick to your text. You
profess to cure the body, and not the mind.’

‘Unless the mind will consent to assist the cure, my art is hopeless,’
answered Lucius.

He finished his advice, dwelling much on that essential point, a
generous diet. The girl looked at her grandfather doubtfully. He seemed
to answer the look.

‘The money must be found, child,’ he said, in a fretful tone, ‘if I
part with the gems of my collection. After all, life is the great
necessity; all ends with that.’

‘You will find your spare cash better bestowed upon your own
requirements than on Egyptian mummies,’ said Lucius, with a disparaging
glance at the defunct Pharaoh.

Mr. Sivewright promised to be guided by his counsel, and civilly
dismissed him.

‘Come to me as often as you like,’ he said, ‘since you come as a
friend; and let it be in the evening if that is pleasantest to you. I
suppose there will be no necessity for any more serious examinations
like this morning’s,’ with a faint smile, and a disagreeable
recollection of the stethoscope, which instrument seemed to him as much
an emblem of death as the skull and crossbones on an old tombstone.

Lucius and Lucille went down-stairs together, and he lingered a little
in the oak-panelled parlour, from which all tokens of her housewifery
cares had now vanished. A bunch of violets and snowdrops in a tall
Venetian beaker stood in the centre of the table; a few books, an open
workbasket, indicated the damsel’s morning occupation. She had taken
off her linen apron, but not the cap, which gave the faintest spice
of coquetry to her appearance, and which Lucius thought the prettiest
headgear he had ever seen.

They talked a little of the old man up-stairs; but the surgeon was
careful not to alarm Mr. Sivewright’s granddaughter. Alas, poor child,
coldly and grudgingly as he acknowledged her claim upon him, he was her
only guardian, the sole barrier between her and the still colder world
outside her gloomy home.

‘You do not think him _very_ ill?’ she asked anxiously.

‘I do not think there is any reason for you to be anxious. Careful I am
sure you will be; and care may do much to prolong his life. He has used
himself hardly.’

‘Yes,’ she answered in a mournful tone. ‘He has had troubles, heavy
troubles, and he broods upon them.’

‘Change of air and scene might be advantageous. There is an oppressive
atmosphere in such a house as this, in such a quarter of the town.’

‘I have sometimes found it so.’

‘When the spring comes, say about the middle of April, I should
strongly recommend a change for you both. To Hastings, for instance.’

The girl shook her head despondently.

‘He would never consent to spend so much money,’ she said. ‘We are very
poor.’

‘Yet Mr. Sivewright can find money for his purchases.’

‘They cost so little; a few shillings at a time. The things he buys are
bargains, which he discovers in strange out-of-the-way places.’

‘Is he often out of doors?’

‘Yes, and for long hours together. But lately he has been more fatigued
after those long rambles than he used to be.’

‘He must abandon them altogether. And you have spent some years alone
in this old house?’

‘Yes. I am accustomed to solitude. It is rather dull sometimes. But I
have my books, and the house to take care of, for old Mrs. Wincher does
only the rougher part of the work, and some pleasant memories of the
past to amuse me when I sit and think.’

‘Is your past a very bright one?’

‘Only the quiet life of a school in Yorkshire, where I was sent when I
was very young, and where I stayed till I was seventeen. But the life
seemed bright to me. I had governesses and schoolfellows whom I loved,
and green hills and woods that were only less dear than my living
friends.’

This paved the way for farther confidences. She spoke of her youth, he
of his; of his father and mother, of his sister, the little one buried
in the family grave, not that other whose fate he knew not; his college
days; things he had spoken of the night before. She stopped him in the
middle.

‘Tell me about America,’ she said; ‘I want to know all about America.
Some one I loved very much went to America.’

‘I should have hardly thought your life had been eventful enough for
much love,’ said Lucius somewhat coldly.

‘I have not seen the person I speak of since I was seven years old,’
she answered, with a sigh. ‘I think I may trust you; we are friends,
are we not?’

‘Did not your grandfather authorise me to consider myself almost your
adopted brother?’

‘The person I spoke of just now is one whose very name is forbidden
here. But that cruelty cannot make me forget him. It only strengthens
my memory. He is my father.’

‘Your father? Yes, I understand; the son whom your grandfather cast
off. But not without cause, I suppose?’

‘Perhaps not,’ answered Lucille, the dark deep eyes filling with
tears that were quickly brushed away. ‘He may have been to blame. My
grandfather has never told me why they quarrelled. He has only told me
in hard cruel words that they learned to hate each other before they
learned to forget each other. I was not old enough to know anything
except that my father was always kind to me, and always dear to me.
I did not see him very much. He was out a great deal, out late at
night, and I was alone with an old servant in my grandfather’s house
in Bond-street, where we had lived ever since I could remember, though
I was not born there. We had a dark little parlour behind the shop,
which went back a long way, and was crowded like the room on the other
side of the hall. The days used to seem very long and dull, so little
sunshine, so little air. But everything grew bright when papa came in
for an hour, and took me on his knee, and told me long wild stories,
German stories, I believe, yet half his own invention; stories of
kelpies and lurleys and haunted castles, of a world that was peopled
with fairies, where every leaf and every flower had its sprite. But
I shall tire you with all this talk,’ she said, checking herself
suddenly; ‘and perhaps your patients are waiting for you.’

‘They must wait a few minutes longer. Tire me? no, I am deeply
interested in all you tell me. Pray go on. Those were your happy hours
which your father spent at home.’

‘Happy beyond all measure. Sometimes, of a winter’s evening—winter was
the pleasantest time in that dark little parlour—he would sit idly by
the fire in a great arm-chair; sometimes he would take his violin from
a shelf in the corner by the chimney-piece, and play to me. I used
to climb upon his knee, and sit half buried in the big chair while
he played; such sweet music, low and solemn, like the music of one’s
dreams. I have heard nothing like it since. Those were happy nights
when he stayed at home till I went to bed, happy hours beside the
fire. We used to have no light in the room but the fire-light, and I
fancied the shadowy corners were full of fairies.’

‘Did you hear nothing of the quarrel between your father and your
grandfather? Children, even at seven years old, are quick to observe.’

‘No. If they quarrelled it was not in my hearing. My grandfather lived
entirely in his business. He seldom came into the parlour except for
his meals, or until late at night, when I had gone to bed. I only know
that one morning he was very ill, and when he came down-stairs he had
an awful look in his face, like the face of a man risen from the grave,
and he beckoned me to him, and told me my father had gone away, for
ever. I cannot tell you my grief, it was almost desperate. I wanted to
run away, to follow my father. And one night, which I remember, O so
well, a wet winter night, I got up and put on my clothes somehow, after
Mrs. Wincher had put me to bed, and crept down the dark staircase,
and opened the door in the passage at the side of the shop, which was
rarely used, and went out into the wet streets. I can see the lamps
reflected on the shining pavement to this day, if I shut my eyes, and
feel the cold wet wind blowing upon my face.’

‘Poor child!’

‘Yes, I was a very miserable child that night. I wandered about for a
long time, looking for my father in the crowd; sometimes following a
figure that looked like his ever so far, only to find I had followed a
stranger. I remember the shop-windows being shut one by one, and the
streets growing dark and empty, and how at last I grew frightened, and
sat down on a doorstep and began to cry. A policeman came across the
street and looked at me, and shook me roughly by the arm, and then
began to question me. I was quite disheartened by this time, and had
given up all hope of finding my father: so I told him my name and where
I lived, and he took me home, through a great many narrow streets and
turnings and windings. I must have walked a long way, for I know I had
crossed one of the bridges over the river. Everybody had gone to bed
when the policeman knocked at the door in Bond-street. My flight had
not been found out. My grandfather came down to open the door in his
dressing-gown and slippers. He didn’t even scold me, he seemed too much
surprised for that, when he saw me wet and muddy and footsore. He gave
the man money, and carried me up to my little bedroom at the top of
the house, and lighted a fire with his own hands, and did all he could
to make me warm and comfortable. He asked me why I had gone out, and
I told him. Then for the first time that I can remember, he took me
in his arms and kissed me. “Poor Luce,” he said, “poor little orphan
girl!” He was very kind to me for the next three days, and then took me
down to Yorkshire to the school, where I stayed nearly ten years.’

‘A strange sad story,’ said Lucius, deeply interested. ‘And have you
never been told your father’s fate?’

‘Only that he went to America, and that my grandfather has never heard
of him from the hour in which they parted until now.’

‘May he not have had some tidings, and kept the truth from you?’

‘I don’t think he would tell me a direct falsehood; and he has most
positively declared that he has received no letter from my father, and
has heard nothing of him from any other source. He is dead, no doubt. I
cannot think that he would quite forget the little girl who used to sit
upon his knee.’

‘You believe him to have been a good father then, in spite of your
grandfather’s condemnation of him?’

‘I believed that he loved me.’

‘Have you no recollection of your mother?’

‘No. She must have died when I was very young. I have seen her
portrait. My grandfather keeps it hidden away in his desk, with old
letters, and other relics of the past. I begged him once to give it
to me, but he refused. “Better forget that you ever had a father or a
mother,” he said, in his bitterest tone. But I have not forgotten my
mother’s face, and its sweet thoughtful beauty.’

‘I am ready to believe that she was beautiful,’ said Lucius, with a
tender smile. Lucille’s story had brought them ever so much nearer
together. Now, indeed, he might allow himself to be interested in
her—might freely surrender himself captive to the charm of her gentle
beauty—the magic of her sympathetic voice. That little pathetic picture
of her sorrowful childhood—a tender heart overflowing with love that
none cared to garner—_that_ made him her slave for ever. Was this love
at first sight, that foolish unreasoning passion, which in Geoffrey
Hossack he deemed akin to lunacy? No, rather an intuitive recognition
of the one woman in all the world created to be the sharer of his
brightest hopes, the object of his sweetest solicitude, the recompense
and crown of his life. He had to tear himself away after only a few
friendly words, for Duty, speaking with the voice of his parish
patients, seemed to call him from this enchanted scene.

‘I shall look in once or twice a week, in the evening,’ he said, ‘and
keep a watchful eye upon my patient. Good-bye.’

Towards the end of that week he spent another evening at Cedar House,
and in the following week two more evenings and so on, through windy
March, and in the lengthening days of April, until he looked back and
wondered how he had managed to live before his commonplace existence
had been brightened by these glimpses of a fairer world. The old man
grew still more familiar—friendly even—and allowed the two young people
to talk at their ease; nor did he seem to have any objection to their
growing intimacy. As the days grew longer, he suffered them to wander
about the old house in the spring twilight, and out into a desert in
the rear, which had once been a garden, where there still remained an
ancient cedar, with skeleton limbs that took grim shapes in the dusk.
Not a second Eden, by any means, for this blossomless garden ended in
a creek, where grimy barges, laden with rubble or sand, or rags, or
bones, or coal, or old iron, lay lopsided in the inky mud, against the
mouldering woodwork of a dilapidated wharf, waiting to be disburdened
of their freight.

Yet to one at least these wanderings, these lingering _tête-à-têtes_ by
the creek, looking down dreamily at the Betsy Jane of Wapping, or the
Ann Smith of Bermondsey, were all-sufficient for happiness.

Seeing the old man thus indulgent, Lucius assured himself that he could
have formed no other views about his granddaughter; since, as Lucius
himself thought, it would naturally occur to him that he, Lucius,
must needs fall madly in love with her. He felt all the more secure
upon this point since he had so long been a constant visitor at Cedar
House, and had met no one there who could pretend to Miss Sivewright’s
favour. A snuffy old dealer had been once or twice closeted with Mr.
Sivewright, but that was all. And however base a tyrant Lucille’s
grandfather might be, he could scarcely contemplate bestowing his
lovely grandchild upon an old man in a shabby coat, who presented
himself on the threshold of the parlour with an abject air, and brought
some object of art or virtu wrapped in a blue-cotton handkerchief for
the connoisseur’s inspection.

So the year grew older, and Lucius Davoren looked out upon a new
existence, cheered by new hopes, and happy thoughts which went with him
through the long days of toil, and whispered to his soul in the pauses
of his studious nights.

Even the hideous memory of what went before his illness in America—that
night in the pine-forest, that winter dusk when the wicked face looked
in at his window, when the wolfish eyes glared at him for the last
time, save in his dreams—even that dread picture faded somewhat, and he
could venture to meditate calmly upon the details of that tragedy, and
say to himself, ‘The blood I shed yonder was justly shed.’




CHAPTER VI.

‘BY HEAVEN, I LOVE THEE BETTER THAN MYSELF.’


While Lucius dreamed his dream beside the wharf where the barges lay
moored under the smoky London sky, Geoffrey was following his siren
from one provincial town to another, not without some enjoyment in
the chase, which filled his empty life with some kind of object, no
matter though it were a foolish one. Given youth, health, activity,
and a handsome income, there yet remains something wanting to a man’s
existence, without which it is apt to become more or less a burden
to him. That something is a purpose. Geoffrey having failed—from
very easiness of temper, from being everybody’s favourite, first in
every pleasure-party, foremost in every sport that needed pluck and
endurance, rather than from lack of ability—to achieve distinction at
the University, had concluded that he was fit for nothing particular in
life; that he had no vocation, no capacity for distinguishing himself
from the ruck of his fellow men; and that the best thing he could do
was to live upon the ample fortune his merchant father had amassed for
him, and get as much pleasure as he could out of life.

Almost his first experience of pleasure and independence had been those
two years’ travel in the Far West. Pleasure in that particular instance
had brought him face to face with death, but was counted pleasure
nevertheless. After doing America, he had done as much of the old
world as he happened to feel interested in doing, not scampering round
the globe in ninety days like Mr. Cook’s excursionists, but taking
an autumn in Norway, a winter in Rome, a spring in Greece, a summer
in Sweden, and so on, until he began to feel, in his own colloquial
phrase, that he had used up the map of Europe.

Apart from his passion for the lovely concert-singer, Mrs. Bertram,
which was strong enough to have sustained his energies had the siren
sought to lure him to the summit of Mount Everest, he really enjoyed
this scamper from one provincial town to another, these idle days spent
in sleepy old cities, which were as new to him as any unexplored region
in central Europe. The great dusky cathedrals or abbey-churches into
which he strolled before breakfast, careless but not irreverent; and
where he sometimes found white-robed curates and choristers chanting
the matin service; the empty square, where the town-pump and a mediæval
cross had it all to themselves, except on market-days; the broad
turnpike-road beyond the High-street, where, perhaps, an avenue of elms
on the outskirt of the town testified to the beneficent care of some
bygone corporation not quite destitute of a regard for the picturesque;
these things, which repeated themselves, with but little variety, in
most of the towns he explored, were not without a certain mild interest
for Mr. Hossack.

He would gaze in wondering contemplation upon those handsome red-brick
houses at the best end of the High-street, those respectable
middle-class houses which every one knows, and of which every English
town can boast, no matter how remote from the fever of that commerce
which makes the wealth of nations. Houses whose windows shine
resplendent, without stain or blemish of dust, smoke, or weather;
houses on whose spotless doorstep no foot seems to have trodden, whose
green balconies are filled with geraniums more scarlet than other
geraniums, and on whose stems no faded leaf appears; houses whose
sacred interior—archtemple of those homelier British virtues, ready
money and soapsuds—is shrouded from the vulgar eye by starched muslin
curtains pendant from brazen rods; houses at which the taxgatherer
never calls twice, doors whose shining knockers have never trembled in
the rude grasp of a dun.

Sometimes, in the gloaming, Geoffrey beheld the bald head of an elderly
gentleman above the brass curtain-rod, and a pair of elderly eyes
gazing gravely across the empty street, not as if they expected to see
anything. The brass-plate on the door would inform him of the elderly
gentleman’s profession—whether he was family solicitor or family
surgeon, architect or banker; and then Mr. Hossack would lose himself
in a labyrinth of wonder, marvelling how this old man had borne the
burden of his days in that atmosphere of monotonous respectability,
always looking out of the same shining window, above the same brazen
bar. He would go back to his hotel, after this small study of human
life, a wiser and a happier man, thanking Providence for that agreeable
combination of youth, health, and independent fortune which gave him,
in a manner, the key of the universe.

Stillmington, in Warwickshire, was a place considerably in advance of
the dull old market towns where one could hear the butcher’s morning
salutation to his neighbour from one end of the street to the other,
where, indeed, the buzzing of a lively bluebottle made an agreeable
interruption of the universal silence. Stillmington lay in the bosom of
a fine hunting country, and, as long as foxes were in season, was gay
with the cheery clatter of horses’ hoofs on its well-kept roads, the
musical clink of spurs on its spotless pavements. Stillmington boasted
an aristocratic hotel, none of your modern limited-liability palaces,
but a family hotel of the fine old English expensive and exclusive
school, where people ate and drank in the splendid solitude of their
private apartments, and stared at one another superciliously when they
met in the corridors or on the staircase, instead of herding together
at stated intervals to gorge themselves in the eye of their fellow man,
like the passengers on board a Cunard steamer. Stillmington possessed
also a wholesome spring, whose health-restoring waters were, however,
somewhat out of vogue, and a public garden, through whose leafy groves
meandered that silvern but weedy stream the river Still; a garden
whose beauties were somewhat neglected by the upper five hundred of
Stillmington, except on the occasion of an archery meeting or a croquet
tournament.

In the bright April weather, all sunshine and blue skies, like a
foretaste of summer, Geoffrey found himself at Stillmington. His
enchantress had been delighting the ruder inhabitants of Burleysbury,
the great manufacturing town fifteen miles away, whose plethora of
wealth served to sustain the expensive elegance of her unproductive
neighbour, and was now at Stillmington. There were to be two concerts,
with an interval of a week between them, and Geoffrey, whose knowledge
of Mrs. Bertram’s movements was of the fullest, had ascertained that
she meant to spend that intervening week in Stillmington. He had
followed her from town to town, through all the deviations of a most
circuitous tour; now at Brighton, anon at Liverpool, now at Cheltenham,
anon at York. He had heard her sing the same songs again and again,
and had known no weariness. But in all his wanderings he had never
yet spoken to her. It was not that he lacked boldness. He had written
to her—letters enough to have made a bulky volume had he cared to
publish those sentimental compositions—but on her part there had been
only the sternest silence. No response whatever had been vouchsafed to
those fervid epistles, offering his hand and fortune, his heart’s best
blood even, if she should happen to desire such a sacrifice; letters
teeming with unconscious and somewhat garbled quotations from Byron,
made eloquent by plagiarism from Moore, with here and there a touch of
that energetic passion which glows in the love-songs of Robert Burns;
yet to the very core honest and manly and straightforward and true.
She must have been colder than ice surely to have been unmoved by such
letters.

She had recognised the writer. That he knew. However crowded the hall
where she sang, Geoffrey knew that his presence was not unperceived
by her. He saw a swift sudden glance shot from those deep gray eyes
as she curtsied her acknowledgment of the applause that welcomed her
entrance; that keen glance which swept the crowd and rested for one
ecstatic moment upon him. The lovely face never stirred from its almost
statuesque repose—a pensive gravity, as of one who had done with the
joys and emotions of life—yet he had fancied more than once that
the eyes brightened as they recognised him; as if even to that calm
spirit there were some sense of triumph in the idea of so much dogged
devotion, such useless worship.

‘I daresay she feels pretty much as Astarte, or Baal, or any of those
ancient parties would have felt, if they had been capable of feeling,
when they were propitiated with human sacrifices. She won’t answer my
letters, or afford me a ray of encouragement, but likes to know that
there is an honest fool breaking his heart for her. No matter. I would
rather break my heart for her than live happy ever afterwards, as the
story-books say, with any one else. So courage, Geoffrey; let us show
her how much ill-usage true lovers can bear, and still love on, and
hope on, till love and hope are extinguished together in one untimely
grave.’

And Geoffrey, whose philosophic mind was wont thus to relieve the
tedium of the toilet, would contemplate his visage in the glass as he
arranged his white tie, and wonder that ill-starred passion had not
made greater ravages in his countenance; that he had not grown pale and
wan, and seamed with premature wrinkles.

‘I wonder I’m not as grim-looking as Count Ugolino, by this time,’ he
said to himself; and then went down to his private sitting-room at the
Royal George, to eat a dinner of five courses in solitary state, for
the benefit of that old-established family hotel. Love as yet had not
affected his appetite. He did excellent justice to the _cuisine_ of
the _chef_ at the George, an artist far above the common type of hotel
cooks.

This young worldling was not without expedients. Inaccessible as
his bright particular star might be, he yet contrived to scrape
acquaintance with one of the lesser lights in that planetary system
of which she was a part. A little finesse and a good deal of
brandy-and-soda obtained for him the friendship of a youthful pianist,
whose duty it was to accompany the singers. From this youth, who wore
his hair long, affected the dreamily classical school, and believed
himself a mute inglorious Chopin, Geoffrey heard all that was to be
heard about Mrs. Bertram. But, alas, this all was little more than the
musicsellers had already told him.

No one knew any more about her than the one fact of her supreme
isolation, and that reserve of manner which was, perhaps unjustly,
called pride. She lived alone; received no one, visited no one, kept
her fellow performers at the farthest possible distance. If she took a
lodging, it was always remote from the quarter affected by the rest of
the little company; if she stayed at an hotel, it was never the hotel
chosen by the others.

So much as this Geoffrey contrived to hear—not once only, but many
times—without committing himself to the faintest expression of his
feelings. He would have perished sooner than degrade his passion by
making it the subject of vulgar gossip.

‘If I cannot win her without a go-between,’ he said to himself, ‘I am
not worthy of her.’

Many times, stung to the quick by the freezing contempt with which
she treated his letters, he had watched and lain in wait for her,
determined to force an interview, should the opportunity arise. But
no such opportunity had yet arisen. He would do nothing to create a
scandal.

Here at Stillmington he had new hopes. The little town was almost
empty, and offered a depressing prospect to the speculator who was to
give the two concerts. The hunting season was over; the water-drinking
and summer-holiday season had not yet begun. Stillmington had assumed
its most exclusive aspect. The residents—a class who held themselves
infinitely above those birds of passage who brought life and gaiety
and a brisk circulation of ready money to the place—had it all to
themselves. Respectable old Anglo-Indian colonels and majors paraded
the sunny High-street, slow and solemn and gouty, and passed the time
of day with their acquaintance on the opposite pavements in stentorian
voices, which all the town might hear, and with as much confidence
in the splendour of their social position as if they had been the
ground-landlords of the town. Indeed, the lords of the soil were for
the most part a very inferior race of men, who wore dusty coats, shabby
hats with red-cotton handkerchiefs stuffed into the crown, and had a
sprinkling of plaster of paris in their hair, and a three-foot rule
sticking out of their breast pockets—men who belong to the bricklaying
interest, and had come into Stillmington thirty years ago, footsore and
penniless, in search of labour. These in their secret souls made light
of the loud-voiced majors.

The town was very quiet; the glades and groves in the subscription
garden—where the young lilacs put forth their tender leaves in the
spring sunshine, and the first of the nightingales began her plaintive
jug-jug at eventide—were lonely as those pathless regions of brushwood
at the mouth of the Mississippi where the alligator riots at large
among his scaly tribe. To this garden came Geoffrey, on the second day
of his residence at Stillmington. Mr. Shinn, the pianist, had dropped a
few words that morning, which were all-sufficient to make this one spot
the most attractive in the world for Geoffrey Hossack. Mrs. Bertram and
her little girl had walked here yesterday afternoon. Mr. Shinn had seen
them go in at the gate while he was enjoying a meditative cigar, and
thinking out a reverie in C minor during his after-dinner stroll.

Geoffrey was prompt to act upon this information. “What more likely
than that his divinity would walk in the same place this afternoon?
There was a blue sky, and the west wind was balmy as midsummer
zephyrs. All nature invited her to those verdant groves.”

Mr. Hossack paid his money at the little gate, where a
comfortable-looking gatekeeper was dozing over a local newspaper, and
went in. Nature had liberally assisted the landscape gardener who laid
out the Stillmington Eden. Geoffrey followed a path which wound gently
through a shady grove, athwart whose undergrowth of rhododendron and
laurel flashed the bright winding river. Here and there a break in
the timber revealed a patch of green lawn sloping to the bank, where
willows dipped their tremulous leafage into the rippling water. Ferns,
and such pale flowers as will flourish in the shade—primrose, wild
hyacinth, and periwinkle—grew luxuriantly upon the broken ground beside
the path, where art had concealed itself beneath an appearance of
wildness. To the right of this grove there was a wide stretch of lawn,
where the toxophilites held their festivals—where the croquet balls
went perpetually on certain days of the week, from the first of May
to the last of September. But happily the croquet season had not yet
begun, and the birds had grove and lawn to themselves.

Geoffrey went to the end of the grove, meeting no one. He strolled
down to the bank and looked at the river, contemplated the weeds with
the eye of boatman and of angler.

‘It ought to be a good place for jack,’ he muttered, yawned, and went
back to the grove.

It was lonely as before. Thrushes, linnets, blackbirds, burst forth
with their little gushes of melody, now alone, now together, then
lapsed into silence. He could hear the fish leap in the river; he could
hear the faint splash of the willow branches shaken by the soft west
wind. He yawned again, walked back to within a few yards of the gate,
came back again, stretched himself, looked at his watch, and sank
exhausted on a rustic seat under the leafy arm of a chestnut.

‘I wonder if she will come to-day,’ he thought, wishing he had been
at liberty to solace himself with a cigar. ‘It would be just like my
luck if she didn’t. If I had only seen her yesterday instead of that
ass Shinn, with his confounded reverie in C minor. But there was I
loafing at the other end of the town, expecting to find her looking at
the shop-windows, or getting a novel at the circulating library, when
I ought to have been down here. And if I ever do contrive to speak
to her, I wonder what she’ll say. Treat me with contumely, no doubt;
blight me with her scorn, as she has blighted my epistolary efforts.
And yet, sometimes, I have seen a look in those gray eyes that seemed
to say, “What, are you so true? Would to God I could reward your
truth!” A delusion, of course—mad as my love for her.’

The mildness of the atmosphere, those little gushes of song from the
birds, the booming buzz of an industrious bee, the faint ripple of the
river, made a combination of sound that by and by beguiled him into
forgetfulness, or not quite forgetfulness, rather a pleasant blending
of waking thought and dreaming fancy. How long this respite from the
cares of actual life lasted he knew not; but after a while the sweet
voice of his enchantress, which had mingled itself with all his dreams,
seemed to grow more distinct, ceased to be a vague murmur responsive
to the voice of his heart, and sounded clear and ringing in the still
afternoon atmosphere. He woke with a start, and saw a tall slim figure
coming slowly along the path, half in sunshine, half in shadow—a lady
with a face perfect as a Greek sculptor’s Helen, dark chestnut hair,
eyes of that deep gray which often seems black—a woman about whose
beauty there could hardly be two opinions. She was dressed in black
and gray—a black-silk dress of the simplest fashion, a loose mantle of
some soft gray stuff, which draped her like a statue, a bonnet made of
black lace and violets.

She was talking to a little girl with a small round face, which might
or might not by and by develop into some likeness of the mother’s
beauty. The child carried a basket, and knelt down every now and then
to gather primroses and violets on the uneven ground beside the path.

‘Sweet child,’ said Geoffrey within himself, apostrophising the infant,
‘if you would only run ever so far away, and leave me quite free to
talk to your mamma!’

He rose and went to meet her, taking off his hat as she approached.

‘I would not lose such an opportunity for worlds,’ he thought, ‘even at
the risk of being considered a despicable cad. I’ll speak to her.’

She tried to pass him, those glorious eyes overlooking him with a
superb indifference, not a sign of discomposure in her countenance. But
he was resolute.

‘Mrs. Bertram,’ he began, ‘pray pardon me for my audacity: desperation
is apt to be rash. I have tried every means of obtaining an
introduction to you, and am driven to this from very despair.’

She gave him a look which made him feel infinitely small in his own
estimation.

‘You have chosen a manner of introducing yourself which is hardly
a recommendation,’ she said, ‘even were I in the habit of making
acquaintances, which I am not. Pray allow me to continue my walk. Come,
Flossie, pick up your basket, and come with mamma.’

‘How can you be so cruel?’ he asked, almost piteously. ‘Why are you so
determined to avoid me? I am not a scoundrel or a snob. If my mode of
approaching you to-day seems ungentlemanlike—’

‘Seems!’ she repeated, with languid scorn.

‘If it _is_ ungentlemanlike, you must consider that there is no other
means open to me. Have I not earned some kind of right to address you
by the constancy of my worship, by the unalterable devotion which has
made me follow you from town to town, patiently waiting for some happy
hour like this, in which I should find myself face to face with you?’

‘I do not know whether I ought to feel grateful for what you call your
devotion,’ she said coldly; ‘but I can only say that I consider it very
disagreeable to be followed from town to town in the manner you speak
of, and that I shall be extremely obliged if you will discontinue your
most useless pursuit.’

‘Must it be always useless? Is there no hope for me? My letters have
told you who and what I am, and what I have dared to hope.’

‘Your letters?’

‘Yes; you have received them, have you not?’

‘I have received some very foolish letters. Are you the writer?’

‘Yes; I am Geoffrey Hossack.’

‘And you go about the world, Mr. Hossack, asking ladies of whom you
know nothing whatever to marry you,’ she replied, looking him full in
the face, with a penetrating look in the full clear gray eyes—eyes
which reminded him curiously of other eyes, yet he knew not whose.

‘Upon my honour, madam,’ he answered gravely, and with an earnest
warmth that attested his sincerity, ‘you are the first and the only
woman I ever asked to be my wife.’

That truthful tone, those candid eyes boldly meeting her gaze, may
have touched her. A faint crimson flushed her cheek, and her eyelids
drooped. It was the first sign of emotion he had seen in her face.

‘If that be true, I can only acknowledge the honour of your preference,
and regret that you have wasted so much devotion upon one who can never
be anything more than a stranger to you.’

Geoffrey shot a swift glance after the child before opening the
floodgates of his passion. Blessed innocent, she had strayed off to
a distant patch of sunlit verdure carpeted with wild hyacinths—‘the
heavens upbreaking through the earth.’

‘Never?’ he echoed; ‘never more than a stranger? Is it wise to make
so light of an honest passion—a love that is strong to suffer or to
dare? Put me to the test, Mrs. Bertram. I don’t ask you to trust me
or believe in me all at once. God knows I will be patient. Only look
me in the face and say, “Geoffrey Hossack, you may hope,” and I will
abide your will for all the rest. I will follow you with a spaniel’s
fidelity, worship you with the blind idolatry of an Indian fakir; will
do for you what I should never dream of doing for myself—strive to win
reputation and position. Fortune has been won for me.’

‘Were you the Lord Chancellor,’ she said, with a slow sad smile, ‘it
would make no difference. You and I can never be more than strangers,
Mr. Hossack. I am sorry for your foolish infatuation, just as I should
pity a spoiled child who cried for the moon. But that young moon
sailing cold and dim in the sky yonder is as near to you as I can ever
be.’

‘I won’t believe it!’ he exclaimed passionately, feeling very much like
that spoiled child who will not forego his desire for the moon. ‘Give
me only a chance. Do not be so cruel as to refuse me your friendship:
let me see you sometimes, as you might if we had met in society.
Forgive me for my audacity in approaching you as I have done to-day.
Remember it was only by such a step I could cross the barrier that
divides us. I have waited so long for this opportunity: for pity’s sake
do not tell me that I have waited in vain.’

He stood bareheaded in the fading sunlight—young, handsome—his candid
face glowing with fervour and truth; a piteous appealing expression in
those eyes that had been wont to look out upon life with so gay and
hopeful a glance,—not a man to be lightly scorned, it would seem; not a
wooer whose loyal passion a wise woman would have spurned.

‘I can only repeat what I have already told you,’ Mrs. Bertram said
quietly, as unmoved by his appeal as if beneath her statuesque beauty
there had been nothing but marble; no pitiful impulsive woman’s heart
to be melted by his warmth, or touched by his self-abasement. ‘Nothing
could be more foolish or more useless than this fancy—’

‘Fancy!’ he repeated bitterly. ‘It is the one heartfelt passion of a
lifetime, and you call it fancy!’

‘Nothing could be more foolish,’ she went on, regardless of his
interruption. ‘I cannot accept your friendship in the present; I
cannot contemplate the possibility of returning your affection in the
future. My path in life lies clear and straight before me—very narrow,
very barren, perhaps—and it must be trodden in solitude, except for
that dear child. Forget your mistaken admiration for one who has done
nothing to invite it. Go back to the beaten way of life. What is that
Byron says, Byron who had drained the cup of all passions? Love makes
so little in a man’s existence. You are young, rich, unfettered, with
all the world before you, Mr. Hossack. Thank God for so many blessings,
and’—with a little laugh that had some touch of bitterness—‘do not cry
for the moon.’

She left him, with a grave inclination of the proud head, and went away
to look for her child—left him planted there, ashamed of himself and
his failure; loving her desperately, yet desperately angry with her;
ready, had there only been a loaded pistol within reach, to blow his
brains out on the spot.




CHAPTER VII.

‘SORROW HAS NEED OF FRIENDS.’


Geoffrey went to the concert at the Stillmington Assembly Rooms that
evening, his disappointment notwithstanding. Granted that he had
comported himself in a mean and cad-like fashion; granted that this
woman he loved was colder than granite, unapproachable as the rocky
spurs of Australian mountains, whose sheer height the foot of man
has never scaled; granted that his passion was of all follies the
maddest,—he loved her still. That one truth remained, unshaken and
abiding, fixed as the centre of this revolving globe. He loved her.

The audience at the Assembly Rooms that evening was not large;
indeed, Stillmington spent so much money upon gentility as to have
little left for pleasure. The Stillmingtonites visited one another in
closed flies, which were solemnly announced towards the end of each
entertainment as Colonel or Mr. So-and-so’s carriage. The distance that
divided their several abodes was of the smallest, yet he was a daring
innovator who ventured to take his wife on foot to a Stillmington
dinner-party, rather than immure her during the brief journey in one
of Spark’s flies. Concerts, however, the Stillmingtonites approved as
a fashionable and aristocratic form of entertainment—not boisterously
amusing, and appealing to the higher orders, for the most part
through the genteel medium of foreign languages. There was generally,
therefore, a fair sprinkling of the _élite_ of Stillmington in the
Assembly Room on such occasions, and there was a fair sprinkling
to-night—a faint flutter of fans, an assortment of patrician shoulders
draped with opera cloaks of white or crimson; an imposing display of
elderly gentlemen with shining bald heads and fierce gray whiskers;
and, on the narrower benches devoted to the vulgar herd, a sparse
assemblage of tradesmen’s wives and daughters in their best bonnets.

Geoffrey Hossack sat amongst the _élite_, sick at heart, yet full of
eager longing, of feverish expectancy, knowing that his only hope now
was to see her thus, that the fond vain dream of being something nearer
to her was ended. Nothing was left him but the privilege of dogging her
footsteps, of gazing at her from among the crowd, of hearing the sweet
voice whose Circean strains had wrought this madness in his mind, of
following her to the end of life with his obnoxious love.

‘I shall become a modern Wandering Jew,’ he thought, ‘and she will hate
me. I shall provoke her with my odious presence till she passes from
indifference to aversion. I can’t help it. My destiny is to love her,
and a man can but fulfil his destiny.’

She sang the old Italian song he loved so well—that melody whose
pathetic tones have breathed their sad sweetness into so many
ears—recalling fond memories and vain regrets, thoughts of a love that
has been and is no more, of lives only beyond the grave.

To Geoffrey those pensive strains spoke of love in the present—love
dominant, triumphant in its springtide of force and passion.

‘Voi che sapéte che cosa è amor,’ he repeated to himself bitterly; ‘I
should rather think I did. It’s the only thing I do know in the present
obfuscation of my faculties.’

Their eyes met once in the look she cast round the room. Great Heaven,
what regretful tenderness in hers! Such a look as that maddened him.
Had she but looked at him thus to-day in the garden, he would surely
have done something desperate—clasped her in his arms, and sworn to
carry her to the uttermost ends of the earth, if thereby he might be
sure of his prize. Could she look at him thus, she who had been colder
than the icy breath of the polar seas, when he had pleaded with all the
force of his passion two short hours ago?

His eyes never left her face while she sang. When she vanished, the
platform was a blank. Other performers came and went; there was other
music, vocal and instrumental—to him it seemed no more than the
vague murmur of a far-off waterfall in the ears of slumber. She came
back again, after an interval that seemed intolerably long, and sang
something of Balfe’s—a poem by Longfellow, called ‘Daybreak’—mournful,
like most of her songs, but full of music.

During the interval between the two concerts Geoffrey paced
Stillmington and its environs with an indefatigable industry that might
have shamed the local postman, for _he_ at least was weary, while
Geoffrey knew not weariness. Vainly did he haunt that aristocratic
High-street, vainly linger by the door of the circulating library, the
fancy repository, the music-shop where somebody was perpetually trying
pianos with woolly basses and tinkling trebles; vainly did he stroll in
and out of the garden where he had dared to molest Mrs. Bertram with
his unwelcome adoration,—she was nowhere to be met with.

One comfort only remained to him, a foolish one, like all those
fancies whence love derives consolation. He knew where his enchantress
lived, and in the quiet dusk, when the gentle hush of evening enfolded
Stillmington like a mantle, he would venture to pace the lonely street
beneath her windows; would watch her taper gleaming faintly in that
gray nightfall which was not yet darkness, would, as it were, project
his spirit into her presence, and keep her company in spite of herself.

The street where she lodged was on the outskirts of the town, newly
built—a street of commonplace dwellings of the speculative builder’s
pattern; a row of square boxes, with not a variation of an inch from
number one to number thirty; sordid, unpicturesque: habitations which
even love could not beautify. Mrs. Bertram occupied the upper floor
above a small haberdasher’s shop, such a shop as one felt could be
kept only by a widow—a scanty display of poor feminine trifles in the
window, children’s pinafores, cheap gloves, cheap artificial flowers,
cheap finery of divers kinds, whose unsubstantial fabric a spring
shower would reduce to mere pulp or rag useless even for the paper-mill.

Here, between seven and eight o’clock, Mr. Hossack used to smoke his
after-dinner cigar, despairing yet deriving a dismal pleasure from the
sense of his vicinity to the beloved, like those who, in the gloaming,
pace a churchyard within whose pale their treasure lies. The twinkling
light shining palely athwart the white blind cheered him a little.
Her hand had perhaps kindled it. She was there alone—for Geoffrey, in
whom the parental instinct was unawakened, did not count a child as
company—amidst those humble surroundings, she whose loveliness would
enhance the splendour of a palace. Thus, with all love’s exaggeration,
he thought of her.

One evening he was bold enough to penetrate the little shop. ‘Had
they any gloves that would fit him?—eights or nines he believed he
required.’ As he had supposed, the shopkeeper was a widow. She emerged
from the little parlour at the back, dressed in rusty weeds, to assist
a young woman with a small pinched visage and corkscrew ringlets, who
was feebly groping among the shelves and little paper packets with
hieroglyphical labels.

‘Lor, Matilda Jane, you never know where to find anything! There’s a
parcel of drab men’s on that top shelf. I’m sorry to keep you waiting,
sir. We have a large selection of cloth and lisle-thread gloves. You’d
like lisle-thread, perhaps, as the weather’s setting in so warm?’

‘Yes, lisle-thread will do,’ answered Geoffrey, who had never worn
anything but Jouvin’s best, at five shillings a pair.

He seated himself, and looked round the stuffy little shop. Above this
gloomy den Mrs. Bertram lived. He listened for her light step while the
drab men’s were being hunted for.

‘I think you have one of the ladies who sang at the concert lodging
with you?’ said this hypocrite, while he made believe to try on the
thread gloves.

‘Yes, sir; Mrs. Bertram: a very sweet young person; so mild and
affable.’

‘But not chatty, mother,’ interjected the damsel in ringlets. ‘It’s as
much as one can do to get half-a-dozen words out of her; and it’s my
belief she’s as proud as she can be, in spite of her soft voice.’

‘Hold your tongue, Matilda Jane; you’re always running people down,’
remonstrated the matron. ‘I think that pair will fit you nicely, sir,’
as Geoffrey thrust his strong fingers into the limp thread. ‘Poor dear
lady, there wasn’t much pride left in her this morning, when she spoke
to me about her little girl.’

‘Her little girl! There is nothing the matter, I hope?’

‘Yes, sir, there is. The poor little dear has took the scarlatina.
Where she could have took it, I can’t imagine; for it’s not in this
street: indeed, we’re very free from everything except measles in
this part of the town; and they’re everywhere, as you may say, where
there’s children. But the little girl has took the scarlatina somehow,
and Mrs. Bertram’s dreadful down-hearted about it. The poor child’s
got it rather bad, I grant you; but then, as I tell her mar, it’s only
scarlatina: those things ending with a “tina” are never dangerous—it
isn’t as if it was scarlet-fever.’

‘You are sure the child is in no danger?’ cried Geoffrey anxiously; not
that he cared for children in the abstract; but _her_ child—a priceless
treasure, doubtless—_that_ must not be imperilled.

‘No, sir; indeed I don’t think as there’s any danger. I’ll allow the
fever’s been very high, and the child has been brought down by it;
but the doctor hasn’t hinted at danger. He is to look in again this
evening.’

‘He comes twice a day, does he? That looks as if the case were serious.’

‘It was Mrs. Bertram’s wish, sir. Feeling anxious like, she asked him.’

Geoffrey was silent for a few minutes, meditating. If he could
establish some kind of _rapport_ between himself and these people, it
would be something gained: he would feel himself nearer to his beloved
in her affliction. Alas, that she should be sorrowful, and he powerless
to comfort her; so much a stranger to her, that any expression of
sympathy would seem an impertinence!

‘I have heard Mrs. Bertram sing a great many times,’ he said, ‘and
have been charmed with her singing. I am deeply interested in her (as
a musical amateur), and in anything that concerns her welfare. I shall
venture to call again to-morrow evening, to inquire how the little girl
is going on. But pray do not mention me to Mrs. Bertram; I am quite
unknown to her, and the idea that a stranger had expressed an interest
in her might be displeasing. I’ll take half-a-dozen pairs of gloves.’

He threw down a sovereign—a delightful coin, which not often rang upon
that humble counter. The widow emptied her till in order to find change
for this lavish customer.

‘Half-a-dozen gloves, at fifteenpence, seven-and-sixpence. Thank you,
sir. Is there anything in socks or pocket-handkerchiefs I can show you?’

‘Not to-night, thanks. I’ll look at some handkerchiefs to-morrow,’
said Geoffrey; and departed, rejoiced to find that by the expenditure
of a few shillings he could keep himself informed of Mrs. Bertram’s
movements.

He went straight to the best fruiterer in the town, whose shop was on
the point of closing. Here he bought some hot-house grapes, at fourteen
shillings a pound, which he dispatched at once to Mrs. Bertram’s
lodging. He had sent her his tribute of choice flowers continually, in
the course of his long pursuit, but she had never deigned to wear a
blossom of his sending.

She was to sing on the following evening. ‘If her child is worse, she
will not appear,’ he thought. But when he called at the little shop
that afternoon, he heard the child was somewhat better, and that she
meant to sing.

‘There was some grapes came last night, sir, soon after you left,’ said
the widow. ‘Was it you that sent them? Mrs. Bertram seemed so pleased.
The poor little thing was parched with fever, and the grapes was such a
comfort.’

‘You didn’t say anything about me?’ said Geoffrey.

‘Not a syllable, sir.’

‘That’s right. I’ll send more grapes. If there is anything else I can
do, pray let me know. I’m such a stupid fellow. You may send me a dozen
of those handkerchiefs,’—without looking at the fabric, which was
about good enough for his groom. ‘I shall be so grateful to you if you
can suggest anything that I could do for the little girl.’

‘I don’t think there’s anything, sir. Her mar lets her want for
nothing. But the grapes was a surprise. “I didn’t think there were
any to be had,” Mrs. Bertram said. But perhaps she’d hardly go to the
price, sir; for she doesn’t seem to be very well off.’

Pinched by poverty! What a pang the thought gave him! And he squandered
his useless means without being able to purchase contentment. He had
been happy enough, certainly, in his commonplace way, before he had
seen her; but now that he had tasted the misery of loving her, he could
not go back to that empty happiness—the joy of vulgar minds, which need
only vulgar pleasures.

He was in his seat in the front row when the concert began. Whatever
musical faculty might be latent in his composition stood a fair chance
of development nowadays, so patiently did he sit out pianoforte solos,
concertante duets, trios for piano, violin, and ’cello; warblings,
soprano and contralto, classical or modern; hearing all alike with the
same callous ear till she appeared—a tall slim figure simply robed; a
sad sweet face, full of a quiet pride that seemed to hold him aloof,
yet with that fleeting look of love and pity in those tender eyes which
seemed to draw him near.

To-night that serious countenance was in his eyes supremely pathetic;
for he knew her secret sorrow, knew that her heart was with her sick
child.

She sang one of the old familiar songs—nothing classical, only an
old-fashioned English ballad, ‘She wore a wreath of roses,’ a simple
sentimental story of love and sorrow. The plaintive notes moved many to
tears, even the Stillmingtonites, who were not easily melted, being too
eminently genteel for emotion.

‘Good heavens, what a fool she makes of me!’ thought Geoffrey; ‘I who
never cared a straw for music.’

He waited near a little door at the back of the Assembly Rooms, by
which he knew the concert people went in and out—waited until Mrs.
Bertram emerged, one of the earliest. She was not alone. Her landlady’s
daughter, the young woman in corkscrew ringlets, accompanied her. He
followed them at a respectful distance, observed by neither.

Pity and impetuous love made him bold. No sooner were they in a quiet
unfrequented street than he quickened his pace, came up with them, and
dared once more to address the woman who had scorned him.

‘Forgive me, Mrs. Bertram,’ he said. ‘I have heard of your little
girl’s illness, and I am so anxious to know if I can be of any use to
you. Is there anything I can do?’

‘Nothing,’ she answered sadly, not slackening her pace for a moment.
‘It is kind of you to wish to help me, but unless you could give my
darling health and strength—she was so well and strong only a few days
ago—you can do nothing. She is in God’s hands; I must be patient.
I daresay it is only a childish illness, which need not make me
miserable. But—but she is all the world to me.’

‘Are you satisfied with your doctor, or shall I get you other medical
advice? I will telegraph to London for any one you would like to have.’

‘You are very kind,’ she answered gently, her manner strangely
different from what it had been in the garden. ‘No; I have no reason to
be dissatisfied with the doctor who is attending my pet. He is kind,
and seems clever. I thank you for your wish to help me in my trouble.
Good-night.’

They were in the street where she lived by this time. She made him
a little curtsy, and passed on very quickly to the shop door, and
vanished from his eager eyes. He paced the street for an hour,
watching the light in the two little windows above the shop, before he
went back to his hotel, and for him the night was sleepless. How could
he rest while she was unhappy?




CHAPTER VIII.

GEOFFREY INCLINES TO SUSPICION.


Towards morning self-indulgent habits triumphed over anxious love.
After tossing all night in feverish unrest, Mr. Hossack slept soundly
till noon; but not a commonplace slumber, for the visions of his head
upon his bed were made beautiful to him by the image of his beloved.
She was with him in that dream-world where all is smooth and fair as
the wide bosom of Danube when no storm-wind ruffles his waters; a
world where there were neither sick children nor concerts—nothing but
happiness and love.

He awakened himself reluctantly from so sweet a delusion, dressed and
breakfasted hurriedly, and went straight to the little draper’s shop
at the fag end of Stillmington. After Mrs. Bertram’s gentler manner
last night, he felt as if he might venture to approach her. Sorrow had
brought them nearer to each other; she who had so sternly repulsed his
love had not rejected his sympathy. She had thanked him, even, for his
proffered aid, in that thrilling voice which in speech as in song went
straight to his heart.

The young woman was behind the counter when he went in, reading a
number of the _London Journal_ in pensive solitude.

‘How is the little girl this morning?’ he asked eagerly.

‘O, sir, I’m sorry to say she’s not so well. She was light-headed last
night, and her poor mar sat up, and looks as pale as a ghost to-day,
and the doctor seemed more serious like. But as mother tells Mrs.
Bertram, it’s only scarlatina; it isn’t as if it was scarlet fever, you
know.’

The little door of communication between the shop and the staircase
opened at this moment, and Jane Bertram’s pale face appeared—how pale
and wan! He could not have thought one night’s suffering would have
worked such a change.

‘She is worse,’ she said, looking at the girl with haggard eyes that
hardly seemed to have sight in them. ‘For God’s sake run for the
doctor.’

‘She can’t be so bad as all that. Come, bear up, Mrs. Bertram, that’s
a dear,’ answered the girl kindly. ‘You’re so nervous, and you’re not
used to illness. I’ll run and fetch Mr. Vincent if you like, but I
daresay there’s no need.’

She shuffled on her bonnet as she spoke.

‘I don’t know,’ Mrs. Bertram said helplessly; ‘I don’t know what I
ought to do; she was never so ill before.’

She went up-stairs, Geoffrey following, emboldened by pity. He stood
by the open door of the little bedroom—commonly furnished, but neat
and spotless in its pure drapery of white dimity, its well-scrubbed
floor, and freshly-papered wall. The sick child lay with her golden
hair spread loosely on the pillow, her blue eyes bright with fever. The
landlady sat by the bed, sharing the mother’s watch.

Mrs. Bertram bent over the child, kissed her with fond passionate
kisses, and murmured broken words of love, then turned towards the
door, surprised to see the intruder.

‘You here!’ she exclaimed, seeing Geoffrey, but with no anger in the
sorrowful face.

‘Yes, I want so much to be of use to you. Will you spare me two
minutes, in here?’ he asked, pointing to the sitting-room, the door of
which stood open. ‘The little girl is safe with our good friend.’

‘Yes,’ the mother answered piteously. ‘I can do nothing for her. Only
God can help us—only He who pitied the sinful woman in her agony.’

The words struck strangely on his ear, but he let them pass unnoticed
as the wild cry of an almost despairing soul. What should she have
to do with sin? she in whose countenance reigned purity and a proud
innocence none could dare impeach.

‘I spoke to you last night about getting farther advice,’ he said.
‘Mind, I don’t suppose it’s in the least degree necessary; your child’s
recovery is no doubt merely a question of time. These childish fevers
must run their course. But I can see that you are unduly anxious. It
might be a comfort to you to see another doctor, a man especially
experienced in the treatment of children. I knew just such a man—one
who has been particularly successful with children; not an eminent man
by any means, but one who has worked among the poor, whose heart is in
his profession, whose work is really a labour of love. I can speak of
him with perfect confidence, for he is my friend, and I know all this
to be true. Let me telegraph for him; I am sure that he will come as
quickly as an express train can bring him.’

Her eyes brightened a little, and she gave him a look full of gratitude.

‘How good of you to think of this!’ she said. ‘O yes, pray, pray send
for him. Such a man as that might save my darling, even if she were in
danger, and the doctor here says there is no danger. Pray send for
this good man. I am not very rich, but I will gladly pay any fee within
my means, and be his debtor for farther payment in the future.’

‘He will not want payment,’ answered Geoffrey, with a smile. ‘He is my
friend, and would make a longer journey than from London here to serve
me. Rely upon it, he will be with you before this evening. Good-bye,
Mrs. Bertram, and try to be hopeful. If I thought there were a better
man in all London than the man I am going to summon, rely upon it I
would have that better man.’

He gave her his hand, which she did not refuse; at least, she let
her feverish little hand rest in his for one brief delicious moment,
perhaps unconsciously. But he felt that he had gained ground since that
day in the garden. He had won the right to approach her.

He jumped into the first fly he met, told the man to drive his hardest
to the railway station—it was before the days of postal telegraph
offices—and dispatched his message, paying for both telegram and reply.

The message ran thus:

 ‘_From Geoffrey Hossack, Stillmington, Warwickshire, to Lucius
 Davoren, 103 Shadrack-road, London._

 ‘Come here at once to see a sick child. No time to be lost. Your
 coming quickly will be the greatest favour you can do me. The
 patient’s address is 15 Marlow-street, New-town, Stillmington. Answer
 paid for.’

The telegram handed over to the clerk, he began to speculate upon the
probabilities of delay. After all, this telegraphic system, which would
have seemed so miraculous to our ancestors, is not rapid enough for the
impatience of Young England’s impetuous spirit.

It seems a slow business at the best. Science has made the matter
swift as light, but clerkly sluggishness and slow-footed messengers
clog electricity’s wings, and a message which takes a hundred seconds
for its actual transmission from the operator to the dial may not be
delivered for a couple of hours.

Geoffrey went back to Marlow-street to hear the last tidings of the
little patient. She was sleeping peacefully, and her mother seemed
more hopeful. This lightened his heart a good deal, and he went back
to his hotel, smoked a cigar, played a game at pyramids with some
officers from the Stillmington Barracks, and thus beguiled the time
until a waiter brought him the answer to his telegram. It was brief and
decisive:

‘I shall come to Stillmington by the last train. Must see patients
before leaving.’

The last train! That meant considerable delay. It was now four o’clock,
and the last train came into Stillmington at eleven. How coolly these
doctors take things! Geoffrey felt as if his friend ought to have
abandoned all his other patients to their fates for the sake of this
sick child. The last train! Was this the measure of friendship?

Happily the latest report of the little girl was cheering. Doubtless
all would be well. On the strength of this hope Geoffrey dined; and
dined tolerably well, having asked the officers to share his meal. This
hospitality prolonged the business of dining till after nine o’clock,
when Geoffrey pleaded an engagement as an excuse for getting rid of his
guests, and went for the third time that day to Marlow-street. He had
drunk little or nothing at the social board, and had felt the exercise
of hospitality somewhat irksome; but he was the kind of young man to
whom dinner-giving is an absolute necessity.

The draper’s shop in Marlow-street had closed its shutters, but the
door stood open, and the damsel in ringlets was airing herself on the
threshold after the labours of a day which had brought her about half a
dozen customers.

To Geoffrey’s question, which had become almost a formula, she answered
hopefully. The child was better. She had sat up for a minute and had
drunk a cup of milk, and had taken sundry spoonfuls of beef-tea, and
had eaten three grapes, and had spoken ‘quite lively and sensible-like.
Children are so soon down, and so soon up again,’ said the damsel.
‘It’s no good taking on about them, as I told Mrs. Bertram this
morning.’

‘She is happier now, I suppose,’ said Geoffrey.

‘O dear, yes, quite herself again.’

‘Will you ask her if I may see her for a minute or two? I want to tell
her about the doctor I have sent for.’

The girl went up-stairs and returned speedily.

‘Mrs. Bertram will be happy to see you,’ she said, ‘if you’ll please to
walk up.’

If he would please to walk up! Would he please to enter paradise, did
its gates stand open for him? To see her even in her grief was sweet as
a foretaste of heaven. She received him this evening with a smile.

‘God has heard my prayer,’ she said; ‘my little darling is better. I
really don’t think I need have troubled your kind friend to come down.
I begin to feel more confidence in Mr. Vincent, now that my treasure is
better.’

‘I am rejoiced to hear it. But my friend will be here to-night. He is
one of the best of men. He saved my life once under circumstances of
much hardship and danger. We have faced death together. I should not be
here to tell you this but for Lucius Davoren.’

‘Lucius Davoren!’ She repeated the name with a wondering look,
horror-stricken, her hand clutching the back of the chair from which
she had risen. ‘Is your friend’s name Lucius Davoren?’

‘Yes. Can it be possible that you know him? That would be very strange.’

‘No,’ she said slowly; ‘I do not know this friend of yours. But his
name is associated with a somewhat painful memory.’

‘Very painful, I fear, or you would hardly have grown so pale at the
mention of his name,’ said Geoffrey, with a jealous horror of anything
like a secret in his divinity’s past life.

‘I was foolish to be agitated by such a trifle. After all it’s only a
coincidence. I daresay there are a good many Davorens in the world,’
she answered carelessly.

‘I doubt it. Davoren is not a common name.’

‘Has your friend, this Mr. Lucius Davoren, been successful in life?’

‘I can hardly say that. As I told you when I first spoke of him, he
is by no means distinguished. He is indeed almost at the beginning of
his professional career. Yet were I racked with the most obscure of
diseases, I should laugh all your specialists to scorn and cry, “Send
for Lucius Davoren.”’

‘He is poor, I suppose?’ she asked curiously.

‘Very likely; in the sense of having no money for luxury, splendour,
or pleasure—things which he holds in sovereign contempt. He can afford
to give the best years of his youth to patient labour among the poor.
That is the education he has chosen for himself, rather than a West-end
practice and a single brougham; and I believe he will find it the
shortest road to everlasting fame.’

‘I am glad you believe in him,’ she said warmly, ‘since he is such a
great man.’

‘But you have not yet recovered from the shock his name caused you just
now.’

‘Not quite. My darling’s illness has made me nervous. If you think
your friend will not be offended, I would rather avoid seeing him,’
she added, in a pleading tone. ‘I really don’t feel well enough to see
a stranger. I have passed through such alternations of hope and fear
during the last few days. Will your friend forgive me if I leave Mrs.
Grabbit to receive his instructions? She is a good soul, and will
forget nothing he tells her.’

‘Do just as you like,’ replied Geoffrey, mystified, and somewhat
disturbed in mind by this proposition; ‘of course you needn’t see him
unless you please. But he’s a very good fellow, and my truest friend.
I should like you to have made his acquaintance. You’ll think me a
selfish beg—fellow for saying so; but I really believe you’d have
a better opinion of me if you knew Lucius Davoren. His friendship
is a kind of certificate. But of course, if you’d rather not see
him, there’s an end of it. I’ll tell him that you have unpleasant
associations with his name, and that the very mention of it agitated
you.’

‘No!’ she cried, with a vehemence that startled him. ‘For God’s sake
say nothing, tell him nothing, except that I am too ill to see any one.
I detest anything like fuss. And why make a mountain out of the veriest
molehill? His name reminded me of past sorrow, that is all.’

‘Capricious,’ thought Geoffrey; ‘with a temper by no means as regular
as the classic beauty of her face, I daresay. But were she as violent
as Shakespeare’s shrew before Petruchio tamed her, I should not the
less adore her. Past sorrow! Some doctor called Davoren may have
attended her husband on his death-bed. She is just the kind of woman
to lock her heart up in a tomb, and then go about the world luring
mankind to their destruction by her calm passionless beauty, and
answering all with the same dismal sentence, “My heart is with the
dead.”’

He submitted to Mrs. Bertram’s decision. He promised to meet his
friend at the station, bring him straight to the sick-room, and with
his own hand carry Mr. Davoren’s prescription to the chief chemist of
Stillmington.

And thus he left her; perplexed, but not all unhappy. Blessings on that
sweet child for her timeous indisposition! It had opened the way to his
acquaintance with the mother; an acquaintance which, beginning with
service and sympathy, promised to ripen quickly into friendship.

The last train brought Lucius. The friends met with a strong
hand-grasp, a few hearty words of greeting, and then walked swiftly
from the station, which, after the manner of provincial stations, had
been placed a good half mile from the town, for the advantage of local
fly-drivers, no doubt, and the livery-stable interest.

‘And pray who is this small patient in whose welfare you are so
concerned, Geoff?’ asked Lucius. ‘Has some piteous case of local
distress awakened your dormant philanthropy? I know you’re a good
fellow, but I didn’t know you went in for district-visiting.’

‘There’s no philanthropy in the question, Lucius. Only selfish,
pig-headed love. I say pig-headed, because the lady doesn’t value
my affection; scorns it, in fact. But I hold on with a bulldog
pertinacity. After all, you see, an Englishman’s highest quality is his
bulldoggedness.’

‘But what has your bulldog affection to do with a sick child?’

‘Heaven bless the little innocent! One would suppose she had fallen ill
on purpose to bring about my acquaintance with her most unapproachable
mother. Don’t you remember my telling you that Mrs. Bertram has a
little girl—a red-legged angel, after Millais?’

‘O, yes, by the way, there was a child,’ said Lucius indifferently.
Then warming as he contemplated the case in its professional aspect,
‘She is not very ill, I hope?’

‘Scarlatina,’ replied Geoffrey. ‘But she seems to be mending to-night.’

‘Scarlatina!’ exclaimed Lucius; ‘and you brought me down to
Stillmington to see a case of scarlatina, which any local apothecary
would understand just as well as I!’

‘You dear old fellow! don’t be angry. It wasn’t so much the scarlatina.
I wanted you to see Mrs. Bertram. I wanted you to see with your own
eyes that the woman I love is worthy of any man’s affection.’

‘And, you think I should be in a position to decide that question after
half-an-hour’s acquaintance? A question which has taken some men a
lifetime to solve, and which some have left unanswered at their death.
No, Geoff, I don’t pretend to be wiser than other men where a woman’s
character is in question. And if my instinct warned me against your
enchantress, and if I should advise you speedily to forget her, how
much do you think my counsel would influence you?’

‘Not much, I’m afraid, Lucius. It wouldn’t be very easy for me to cast
off her thrall. I am her willing bondslave. Nothing less than the
knowledge that she is unworthy of my love—that her past life holds some
dishonourable secret—would change my purpose. She has left my letters
unanswered, she has rejected my offered devotion, and with something
like scorn; yet there has been a look in her face, more transient than
an April sunbeam, that has given me hope. I mean to hold on—I mean to
win her love—in spite of herself, if need be.’

He gave a brief sketch of that little scene in the garden, his
audacity, her almost contemptuous indifference; and then explained how
Fortune, or, as he put it, the scarlatina, had smiled upon him.

‘And you think, notwithstanding her affected indifference, that she
loves you?’

‘Loves is too strong a word. What have I done to merit her love, except
follow her as a collie follows a flock of sheep? What is there in me
to deserve or attract her love? I am not ravishingly beautiful. I do
not sing with a heart-penetrating voice. It is only natural I should
worship her. It is the old story of the moon and the water brooks.’

‘But you talked about a look which gave you hope.’

‘A look! Yes, Davoren. Such a look—sorrow and tenderness, regret,
despair, all blended in one swift glance from those divine eyes—a look
that might madden a man. Such a look as Paris may have seen in Helen’s
eyes before he planned the treason that ended in flaming Troy. But
after all it may have meant nothing; it may have existed only in my
wild imagining. When a man is as deep in love as I am, Heaven only
knows to what hallucinations he may be subject.’

‘Well,’ said Lucius cheerily, with that practical spirit which men
bring to bear upon other men’s passions, ‘I shall see the lady, and be
able at least to form some opinion as to whether she loves you or not.
Whether she be worthy of your love is a question I would not attempt
to solve, but the other is easier. I think I shall discover if she
loves you. What a pleasant smell of the country—newly-turned earth and
budding hedgerows—there is about here! It refreshes my senses after the
odours of the Shadrack-road, where we have a wonderful combination of
bone-burning, tan-yard, and soap-caldron.’

‘I am glad you enjoy the country air,’ said Geoffrey, in a somewhat
sheepish tone, ‘and I do hope you’ll be able to spare to-morrow for a
dog-cart exploration of the neighbourhood, as that may atone for my
having brought you here somewhat on a fool’s errand. The fact is, Mrs.
Bertram would rather not see you.’

‘Rather not see the doctor who has come from London to attend her sick
child! An odd kind of mother.’

‘You’re wrong, Lucius; she’s a most devoted mother. I never saw any one
so broken down as she was this morning, before the little thing took a
turn for the better. Don’t run away with any false notion of that kind;
she idolises that child. Only she has knocked herself up with nursing;
and she has been alarmed, and agitated, and, in short, isn’t in a fit
state to see any one.’

‘Except you,’ said Lucius.

‘My dear fellow, in her distress about the child she has thought no
more of me than if I were—a—a gingham umbrella,’ said Geoffrey, after
casting about wildly for a comparison. ‘She thinks of nothing but that
red-legged angel. And you can imagine that at such a moment she would
shrink from seeing a stranger.’

‘Even the doctor who comes to see her child. She is the first mother I
ever knew to act in such a manner. Don’t be angry with me, Geoff, if I
say that this looks to me very much as if your divinity feared to trust
herself to eyes less blind than yours—as if she knew there is that
in herself, or in her life, which would not impress a dispassionate
observer favourably. Your blind worship has made her a goddess. She
doesn’t want to come down from her pedestal in the shadowy temple of
your imagination into the broad glare of every-day life.’

Of course Geoffrey was angry. Was he a fool, or a schoolboy, to be
caught by meretricious charms—to take tinsel for gold?

‘I have seen women enough in my time to know a good one when I meet
one; and that this woman is good and true I will stake my life, my hope
of winning her even, which is dearer to me than life.’

‘And if you found her less than you believe her, you would do what you
said three months ago—pluck her out of your heart?’

‘Yes, though her jesses were my heartstrings.’

‘Good; that’s all I want to know. I tell you frankly, Geoff, I don’t
like this wandering apprenticeship to your new divinity. I don’t like
the idea of a life-passion picked up by the roadside—of all your hopes
of future happiness being grounded upon a woman of whom you know
absolutely nothing.’

‘Only that she is the noblest woman I ever met,’ said Geoffrey doggedly.

‘Which means that she has a handsome face,’ said the other.




CHAPTER IX.

SOMETHING TOO MUCH FOR GRATITUDE.


By this time Mr. Hossack and his friend had come from the pleasant
country road into the shabbiest outskirt of Stillmington, that outskirt
which contained Marlow-street. Strange that even in so select a town as
Stillmington, Poverty will set up its tents.

The shop had been shut some time, but the door stood ajar, and a light
burnt dimly within. Geoffrey and his companion were expected. Miss
Grabbit was yawning over a tattered novel in her accustomed place
behind the counter.

‘O, is it the doctor, sir?’ she exclaimed, brightening. ‘Will you
walk up-stairs, please? Mother’s with the little girl, and she’s been
sleeping beautiful. I feel sure she’s took a turn.’

‘Is Mrs. Bertram up-stairs?’ asked Geoffrey.

‘No, she’s lying down a bit on our sofa in there,’ pointing to the
closed door of communication between the shop and parlour. ‘She was
right down worn out, and mother persuaded her to try and get a little
rest. Mother will take all your directions, sir,’ she added to Lucius.

That gentleman bowed, but said nothing. A curious mother this! The
mothers he knew were wont to hang upon his words as on the sacred
sentences of an oracle. He followed Geoffrey up the narrow stairs to
the little bedroom where the child lay asleep. The pure spotless look
of the small chamber struck him, and the beauty of the child’s face
was no common beauty. There was something in it which impressed him
curiously—something that seemed familiar—familiar as a half-remembered
dream. Good Heaven, was it not his dead sister’s face that this one
recalled to him—the face of the little sister who died years ago?

The fancy moved him deeply; and his hand trembled a little as he
lightly raised the bedclothes from the child’s throat and chest, with
that gentle touch of the doctor’s skilful hand, and bent down to listen
to the breathing. All was satisfactory. He went through his examination
calmly enough, that transient emotion once conquered; felt the slender
wrist, performed that unpleasant operation with a silver spoon to which
we have all submitted our unwilling throats at divers periods, and
then pronounced that all was going on well.

He had gone round the bed to the side facing the door, in order to get
nearer to his patient, who lay nearer this side than the other. He sat
by the pillow, and gave his directions to Mrs. Grabbit without looking
up from the little girl, whose hot hand lay gently held in his, while
his grave eyes were bent upon the small fever-flushed face. Geoffrey
had entered softly during the last few moments, and stood at the foot
of the bed.

When Lucius had finished his instructions as to treatment, he looked up.

The door opposite the bed was open, and a woman stood upon the
threshold—a tall slim figure dressed in black, a pale anxious face,
beautiful even in its sadness.

At sight of that silent figure, the surgeon started from his seat with
a smothered cry of surprise. The sad eyes met his steadily with an
imploring look, a look that for him spoke plainly enough.

Geoffrey looked at him wonderingly, perplexed by that startled movement.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

‘Nothing. But I saw a lady looking in at that door. The mother
perhaps.’

Geoffrey darted into the sitting-room. Yes she was there, standing by
the window in the wan light of a week-old moon, with tears streaming
down her face.

‘My dear Mrs. Bertram, pray, pray do not distress yourself!’ cried
Geoffrey, to whom the office of consoler was new and strange. ‘All is
going on well; nothing could be more satisfactory—Lucius says so. She
will be herself again in a few days.’

‘Thank God, and thank your friend for me,’ she said, in a voice choked
with sobs. ‘I could not rest down-stairs; I wanted to hear what he
said. Tell him I thank him with all my heart.’

‘Thank him with your own lips,’ pleaded Geoffrey; ‘he will value your
words far above mine. And you don’t know what a good fellow he is.’

‘Let Mrs. Bertram feel assured that I am only too happy to have been of
use,’ said the voice of Lucius from the threshold.

Mrs. Bertram hurried to the door, where the surgeon’s figure stood,
tall and dark, on the unlighted landing.

‘O, let me speak to him, let me take his hand!’ she cried, with
uncontrollable agitation; and the next moment stood face to face with
Lucius Davoren, with her hand clasped in his.

They could hardly see each other’s faces, but that was a lingering
handclasp. Geoffrey stood a little way apart, watching them with some
slight wonder, and thinking that quite so much gratitude could hardly
be necessary even for a doctor who had travelled over a hundred miles
to write a prescription for an idolised child.

‘It’s a pity I’m not in the medical line myself,’ he thought, somewhat
bitterly; and yet he had been anxious that Mrs. Bertram should
acknowledge his friend’s services.

He reflected that a doating mother was doubtless a foolish creature. He
must not be angry with his divinity if she seemed hysterical, or even
in a state bordering on distraction.

‘Come, Lucius,’ he said; ‘Mrs. Bertram has gone through no end of
agitation to-day, or rather yesterday, for it’s past midnight. We had
better leave her to rest.’

‘Yes,’ said Lucius, in a slow thoughtful tone, ‘good-night. I will
come to see the little girl again early to-morrow morning—say at eight
o’clock—as I must leave Stillmington soon after nine.’

‘O, come,’ remonstrated Geoffrey, ‘you must give yourself a holiday
to-morrow.’

‘Impossible. Pain and disease will not give my patients a holiday.’

‘But surely their complaints can stand over for a day or so,’ said
Geoffrey. ‘Parish patients can’t have such complicated diseases. I
thought all the worst evils flesh is heir to came from high living.’

‘There are numerous diseases that come from low feeding, or almost no
feeding at all. No; I must go back by an early train to-morrow. But I
should like to see you at eight o’clock, if that will not be too soon,
Mrs. Bertram.’

‘Not at all too soon,’ she answered; and they departed, Geoffrey with
an uncomfortable foreboding that, so soon as the little girl recovered,
his occupation would be gone. What other excuse could he find for
intruding himself upon Mrs. Bertram’s solitude?

‘Well, Lucius,’ he began, as soon as they were clear of the house,
‘what do you think of her?’

‘I think she is very handsome,’ answered Lucius, with a thoughtful
slowness which was peculiarly irritating to his friend. ‘What more
can I think of her after so brief an interview? She seems,’ with an
almost painful effort, ‘very fond of her child. I am very sorry for her
unprotected and solitary position; but—’

‘But what?’ cried Geoffrey impatiently. ‘How you torment the soul of a
fellow with your measured syllables!’

‘I think the very wisest—nay, the only rational—thing you can do is to
forget her.’

‘Never! And why should I wish to forget her?’

‘Because all surrounding circumstances point to the conclusion that she
is no fitting wife for you. A woman so lovely, so accomplished, would
hardly lead so lonely a life—I don’t speak of her professional career,
since that is a natural use for a woman to make of a fine voice if she
wants to get her own living—if there were not some strong reason for
her seclusion—some painful secret in the past, some fatal tie in the
present. She knows you to be young, generous, wealthy, and her devoted
slave; yet she rejects your devotion. She would scarcely repulse such
a lover were she free to marry. Believe me, there is something in the
background, some obstacle which you will never overcome. Be warned in
time, my dear true-hearted Geoffrey; don’t waste the best years of your
life in the pursuit of a woman who can never reward your affection, who
was not born to make you happy. There are plenty of women in the world
quite as lovely, and—I won’t say better worthy of you,’ with ever so
faint a quiver of his voice, ‘but better able to bless your love.’

‘When I meet such a woman I will forget her,’ answered the other. ‘I
thought you were a better judge of human nature, Lucius; I thought you
would be able to recognise a good and pure woman when you saw one. True
that you had seen very little of this one; yet you saw her with her
fond mother’s heart bared before you; you saw her warm and grateful
nature. You had sneered at her as a heartless mother: see how facts
belied your unkind suspicion. You saw her moved to passionate tears by
the mere thought of your kindness to her child.’

‘For God’s sake, say no more about her!’ cried Lucius, with sudden
passion. ‘The subject will breed a quarrel between us. You wanted my
advice, and I have given it you—dispassionately. Reason, not feeling,
has influenced my words. Pure, good, true: yes, I would willingly
believe her all that, did I not—did not circumstances point to the
other conclusion. It is hard to look in her face and say, This is not a
woman to be loved and trusted. But are you the man to endure a shameful
secret in your wife’s past history? Could you face the hazard of some
cruel discovery after marriage—a discovery which should show you the
woman you love as a victim, perhaps, but not without guilt?’

‘I will never believe her less than she seems to me at this moment!’
cried Geoffrey. ‘What makes you speculate on her past life? why
suppose that there must be some ignominious secret? Only because she
gets her own living, I suppose; because she is obliged to travel about
the world without her own maid, and has no footman, or carriage, or
circle of polite acquaintances, and possibly has never been presented
at court. I wonder at you, Davoren; I could not have believed you were
so narrow-minded.’

‘Think me narrow-minded, if you like, but be warned by me. My voice
to-night is the voice of the majority, which always takes the narrowest
view of every question. You have asked for my advice, and you shall
have it, however distasteful. Don’t marry a woman of whom you know so
little as you know about Mrs. Bertram.’

‘Thanks for your advice. Of course I know you mean well, old fellow;
but if Mrs. Bertram would take me for her husband to-morrow, I should
be the proudest man in Stillmington, or in Christendom.’

‘I think I know enough of her to feel very sure she will never consent
to marry you,’ said Lucius.

‘You are quick in forming conclusions,’ exclaimed Geoffrey, with a
somewhat distrustful glance at his friend, ‘considering that you saw
Mrs. Bertram for something less than five minutes.’

They arrived at the hotel, where Geoffrey, although displeased with
his friend, was not forgetful of hospitality’s sacred rites. He
ordered a spatchcock and a bottle of Roederer, and over this repast
the two young men sat till late, talking of that subject which filled
Geoffrey’s heart and mind. Like a child, he was one moment angry with
his friend, and in the next eager to hear all that Lucius could say
about his passion and its object—eager for advice which he had no idea
of following; bent upon proving, by love’s eloquent oratory, that
his divinity was all that is perfect among women. And so the night
waned; and Geoffrey and his guest were the last among the inmates of
that respectable family hotel to retire to their chambers in the long
corridor, where the old-fashioned eight-day clock ticked solemnly in
the deep of night.

       *       *       *       *       *

Geoffrey would fain have presented himself in Marlow-street next
morning with his friend, but having no reasonable excuse for visiting
Mrs. Bertram at such an early hour, he contented himself with
accompanying Lucius to the end of the street and then walking on to the
station, there to await his coming.

He had to wait a good deal longer than he had expected, and as
the slow minute hand crept round the dial of the station clock his
impatience increased to fever point. He had a good mind to go back to
Marlow-street. What in heaven’s name could Lucius have to say about
that simple case of scarlatina which could not be said in a quarter of
an hour? Ten minutes had been enough last night; to-day he had been
more than an hour. Nine had struck on that slow-going station clock.
The next up-train went at 9.15. Did Lucius mean to miss it, after all
his talk about his London patients? As it was, he could not be in
London till the afternoon. It seemed to Geoffrey as if this morning
visit to the sick child was somewhat supererogatory, since Lucius had
declared the case to be one of the simplest.

Fretting himself thus he left the station, and on the windy high road
between trim hedges, in which the hawthorn was sprouting greenly, and
the little white flower-buds already began to show themselves, saw
Lucius hurrying towards him at a sharp pace.

‘I thought you meant to lose the next train,’ said Geoffrey somewhat
sharply. ‘Well, what’s your news?’

‘The little girl has passed a very quiet night and is going on
capitally, and you need have no farther alarm.’

‘I didn’t ask you about the little girl. You would hardly spend an
hour talking about the scarlatina—Keep her cool, and give her the
mixture regularly; and as soon as she is able to eat it let her have
the wing of a chicken—as if one didn’t know all that bosh. Why, you
doctors rattle it off just as we used to say our Latin verbs at
Winchester—_amo_, _amas_, _amat_, and so on. Of course, you have been
talking about other things—drawing Mrs. Bertram out, I suppose? Come,
Lucius, we’ve only five minutes. What did you think of her to-day?’

‘The same as I thought last night. That she is a beautiful and noble
woman, but that her past life has been overshadowed by some sad secret
which we are never likely to know.’

‘And you still warn me against her?’

‘Still, with all my strength. Admire her, and respect her for all that
is admirable in her nature, pity her for her misfortunes, but keep
aloof.’

‘Thanks for your remarkably disinterested advice,’ said Geoffrey, with
a bitter laugh. ‘After devoting an hour of your precious time to this
lady’s society, you arrive at the conclusion that she is the last woman
in the world for me. Yet you pay that child an unnecessary visit this
morning in order to see the mother once more, and you come to me with
a face as pale as—as the countenance of treachery itself.’

‘Geoffrey!’

‘However, as I don’t mean to take your advice it makes very little
difference. By the bye, here’s your fee, Lucius; I promised Mrs.
Bertram to see to that.’ And he tried to thrust a folded cheque into
the surgeon’s hand.

This Lucius rejected with infinite scorn.

‘What! you first ask my opinion, then call me a traitor because it
happens not to jump with your own fancy, and then offer me money for
a service for which you must know I could never dream of accepting
payment. How utterly this foolish infatuation has changed you! But I
have no time for discussion. Good-bye. There goes the bell, and I have
to get my ticket.’

They ran into the station. Geoffrey, penitent already, stuck close to
his friend until Lucius was seated in the second-class carriage which
was to take him back to London and hard labour. Then he stretched out
his hand.

‘Shake hands, old fellow,’ he said, with a remorseful look; ‘of course
I didn’t mean anything; or only in a Pickwickian sense. Good-bye.’

The train bore off its burden and left Geoffrey stranded on the
platform, perplexed, unhappy.

‘I daresay he is right,’ he said to himself, ‘and I _know_ that he is a
good fellow. Yet why did he stay so long with her, and why did he look
so pale and thoughtful when I met him?’




CHAPTER X.

A DAUGHTER’S LOVE, AND A LOVER’S HOPE.


Lucius Davoren’s life had taken a new colour since that letter which
opened the doors of the dismal old house in the Shadrack-road. His
existence had now an object nearer to his human heart than even
professional success. Dearly as he loved his profession, it is just
possible that he loved himself a little better, and this new object,
this new hope, concerned himself alone. Yet it did not in any manner
distract him from his patient labours, from his indefatigable studies,
but rather gave him a new incentive to industry. How better could he
serve the interests of her whom he loved than by toiling steadily on
upon the road which he believed must ultimately lead him to success,
and even to fame—that far brighter reward than mere material prosperity?

Mr. Sivewright’s condition had in no wise improved. That gradual decay
had gone on a long time before the sturdy old man had cared to make his
pains and languors known to any human being, much less to a member
of that fraternity he affected to despise—the medical profession. All
Lucius Davoren’s care failed to bring back the vigour that had been
wasted. He kept the feeble lamp of life burning, somewhat faintly, and
that was all he could do yet awhile.

For some little time after the surgeon’s admission to the house,
Mr. Sivewright spent his evenings by the fireside in the parlour
down-stairs. At Lucius’s earnest request he had consented to the
purchase of a more luxurious chair than the straight-backed instrument
of torture in which he had been accustomed to sit. Here by the hearth,
where a better fire burned than of old—for Lucius insisted that
mistaken economy meant death—the bric-à-brac dealer sat and talked;
talked of his youth, his bargains, his petty triumph over rival
traders, but of that lost wanderer, his son, never.

‘There must be something hard in a man’s nature when even the approach
of death does not soften his heart towards his own flesh and blood,’
thought Lucius.

There came a time when the old man felt himself altogether too weak to
leave his room. The broad shallow steps of the solid old staircase—so
easy to the tread of youth and strength—became for him too painful a
journey. He only left his bed to sit by the little bit of fire in his
own room, or on warmer days by the open window.

This was some time after Lucius Davoren’s visit to Stillmington,
when spring had been succeeded by summer, which in the Shadrack-road
district was distinguishable from the other seasons chiefly by an
Egyptian plague of flies and an all-pervading atmosphere of dust;
also by the shrill cries of costermongers vending cheap lots of
gooseberries or periwinkles, and by an adoption of somewhat oriental or
_al-fresco_ habits among the population, who lounged at their doors,
and stood about the streets a good deal in the long warm evenings,
while respectable matrons did their domestic needlework seated on their
doorsteps, whence they might watch their young barbarians at play in
the adjacent gutter.

From this somewhat shabby and ragged out-of-door life on the king’s
highway, it was a relief for Lucius to enter the calm seclusion of the
shadowy old house, where the June sunshine was tempered at midday by
half-closed oaken shutters, and where it seemed to the surgeon there
was ever a peculiar coolness and freshness, and faint perfume of some
simple garden flower unknown elsewhere. In this sultry weather, when
the outer world was as one vast oven, that sparsely-furnished parlour
with its dark wainscot walls was a place to dream in; the dim old hall
with its chaotic treasures saved from the wreck of time, a delicious
retreat from the clamour and toil of life. Here Lucius loved to come,
and here he was sure of a sweet welcome from her whom he had loved at
first sight, and whom familiarity had made daily dearer to him.

Yes, he confessed now that the interest he had felt in Lucille
Sivewright from the very first had its root in a deeper feeling than
compassion. He was no longer ashamed to own that it was love, and love
only, that had made yonder rusty iron gate, by which he had so often
lingered, sad and longing, seem to him as the door of paradise.

One evening, after the old man had taken to his room up-stairs, and
Lucille had been sorrowful and anxious, and had seemed in peculiar need
of consolation, the old, old story was told once more under the pale
stars of evening, as these two wandered about that patch of dusty sward
above which the old cedar stretched his shrunken branches, and cast
grim shadows on the shadowy grass. The creek with its black barges lay
before them; beyond, a forest of roofs, and attic windows, and tall
factory chimneys, and distant spars of mighty merchantmen faintly
visible against the pale-gray sky. Not a romantic spot, or a scene
calculated to inspire the souls of lovers, by any means. Yet Lucius was
every whit as eloquent as he would have been had they wandered on the
shores of Leman, or watched the sun go down from the orange groves of
Cintra.

The girl heard him in profound silence. They had come to a pause
in their desultory wanderings by the decaying ruin of an ancient
summer-house, at an angle of the wall close to the creek—a spot which
to the simpler tastes of untravelled citizens in the last century may
have seemed eminently picturesque. Lucille sat on the broken bench
in a somewhat dejected attitude, her arms resting on a battered old
table, her face turned away from Lucius towards the dingy hulls that
lay moored upon those muddy waters, unbeautiful as that dark ferry-boat
which Dante saw advancing shadowy athwart the ‘woeful tide of Acheron.’

He had spoken earnestly, and had pleaded well, but had been unable
to read any answer in those truthful eyes, whose every expression he
fancied he knew. Those had been persistently averted from him.

‘Lucille, why do you turn from me? My dearest, why this discouraging
silence? Do my words pain you? I had dared to hope they would not be
unwelcome, that you must have expected to hear them. You must have
known that I loved you, ever so long ago, for I have loved you from the
very first.’

‘You have been very good to me,’ she said, in a low broken voice.

‘Good to you!’

‘So good that I have sometimes thought you—liked me a little.’ (A
woman’s periphrasis; feminine lips hardly dare utter that mighty word
‘love.’) ‘But if it is really so—which seems almost too much for me to
believe’ (if he could but have seen the proud happy look in her eyes
as she said that!) ‘I can only beg you never to say any more about
it—until—’

‘Until what, Lucille?’ exclaimed Lucius impatiently. He had not
expected to find hindrance or stumbling-block in the way of his
happiness here. From Homer Sivewright there would no doubt be
opposition, but surely not here. Had he so grossly deceived himself
when he believed his love returned?

‘Until my life is changed from what it is now, such a broken life, the
merest fragment of a life,’ answered Lucille quietly. ‘How can I think
of returning the affection you speak of—you so worthy to be loved—while
I am in this miserable state of uncertainty about my father—not
knowing if he is living or dead, fortunate or unhappy? I can never
give my heart to any one, however noble’—with a lingering tenderness
which might have told him that he was beloved—‘until all doubts are
cleared upon that one subject. Until then, I belong to my father. At
any moment he might appear to claim me; and I am his’—with a passionate
emphasis—‘his, by the memory of that childhood, when I loved him so
dearly. Let him order me to follow him to the other end of the world,
and I should go—without one fear, without one regret.’

Lucius was silent for some moments, stung to the quick. Was a mere
memory, the very shadow of her childhood’s affection, so much nearer
to her than his deep unselfish love—his love, which might brighten
her dull life in the present, and open a fair vista of future
happiness—that hopeful active love, which was to make a home for her,
and win fame for him in the days to come, always for her sake?

‘What, Lucille,’ he said reproachfully, ‘you hold my love so lightly
that it can count for nothing when weighed against the memory of a
father who deserted you—who has let all the years of your girlhood go
by without making the faintest attempt to claim you, or even to see
you?’

‘How do I know what may have prevented him?’ she asked—‘what barrier
may have stood between him and me? Death perhaps. He did not desert me.’

‘Was not his sudden departure from your grandfather’s house desertion
of you?’

‘No. He was driven away. I am very sure of that. My grandfather was
hard and cruel to him.’

‘Perhaps. But whatever quarrel may have parted those two, your claim on
your father remained. You had not been hard or cruel; yet he abandoned
you—tacitly renounced all claim upon you when he left his father’s
house. I don’t want to blame him, Lucille; I don’t want to spoil that
idealised image which you carry in your heart; but surely it is not
for you to sacrifice a very real affection in the present for a vague
memory of the past.’

‘It is not vague. My memory of those days is as vivid as my memory of
yesterday—more vivid even. I have but to close my eyes—now, at this
very moment while you are talking to me—and I can see my father’s face;
it is not your voice I hear, but his.’

‘Infatuation, Lucille,’ exclaimed the surgeon sadly. ‘Had you known
your father a few years longer, you might have discovered that he was
utterly unworthy of your love—that fond confiding love of a child’s
guileless heart, prone to make for itself an idol.’

‘If I had found him unworthy, I do not believe my love would have
altered; I should only have been so much the more sorry for him.
Remember, I am used to hear him badly spoken of. My grandfather’s
bitterest words have never lessened my love for him.’

‘Granted that your love for him is indestructible, why should it stand
between you and me—if I am not quite indifferent to you? Answer me that
question first, Lucille; I am too much in earnest to be satisfied with
half knowledge. Do you care for me, ever so little?’

She looked round at him for the first time, smiling, yet with tearful
eyes—an expression that was half mournful, half arch.

‘Ever so little,’ she repeated. ‘I might own to that. It does not
commit me to much.’

‘More than a little, then? O, be frank, Lucille! I have shown you all
the weakness—or the strength—of _my_ heart.’

‘I love you very dearly,’ she said shyly.

She was clasped to his breast before the words were half spoken, the
kiss of betrothal pressed upon her trembling lips. She withdrew
herself hastily from that first fond embrace.

‘You have not heard half that I have to say, Mr. Davoren.’

‘I will never consent to be Mr. Davoren again.’

‘I will call you Lucius, then; only you must hear what I have to say.
I do love you, very truly,’ with a warning gesture that stopped any
farther demonstration on his part; ‘I do think you good and brave and
noble. I am very proud to know that you care for me. But I can bind
myself by no new tie until the mystery of my father’s fate has been
solved, until I am very sure that he will never claim my love and my
obedience.’

‘If I were to solve that mystery, Lucille—or at least attempt to solve
it,’ said Lucius thoughtfully.

‘Ah, if! But you would never think of that! You could not spare time
and thought for that; you have your profession.’

‘Yes, and all my hopes of winning a position which might make you
proud of being my wife by and by. It would be a hard thing to forego
all those, Lucille—to devote my mind and my life to a perhaps hopeless
endeavour. Fondly as I love you, I am not chivalrous enough to say
I will shut up my surgery to-morrow and start on the first stage to
the Antipodes, or the Japan Islands, or Heaven knows where, in quest
of your father. Yet I might do something. If I had but the slightest
foundation to work upon I should hardly be afraid of success. I would
willingly do anything, anything less than the entire sacrifice of my
prospects—which must be your prospects too, Lucille—to prove how dear
you are to me.’

‘You really would? Ah! if you could find him—if you could reunite
us, I should love you so dearly—at least, no,’ with a little gush of
tenderness, ‘I could not love you better than I do now. But you would
make me so happy.’

‘Then I will try, dearest, try honestly. But if I fail—after earnest
endeavour, and at the end of a reasonable period—if I fail in bringing
your father to you living, or discovering when and how he died, you
will not punish me for my failure. You will be my wife two or three
years hence, come what may, Lucille. Give me that hope, sweet one. It
will make me strong enough to face all difficulties.’

‘I love you,’ she said in her low serious voice, putting her little
hand into his; and that simple admission he accepted as a promise.




CHAPTER XI.

THE BIOGRAPHY OF A SCOUNDREL.


The weakness and the languor that kept Homer Sivewright a prisoner in
his bedroom were not the tokens of mortal illness. Death kept as yet at
a respectful distance. The patient’s life might be prolonged even to
man’s appointed measure of three score and ten, with care and skilful
treatment. There was organic disease, but of a mild type. Lucius was
not without hopes of a rally—that a period of perfect repose and quiet
might, in some measure, restore the enfeebled frame—which, gaunt and
wasted by sickness, was yet so mighty a skeleton. The man was tough; a
creature of strong fibres, and muscles that had once been like iron.
Above all, his life had been strictly temperate. Lucius augured well
from these facts. The disease would remain always, more or less subject
to treatment, but there might be a partial recovery.

‘You need not be anxious,’ he said, when Lucille questioned him
earnestly about her grandfather. ‘Mr. Sivewright will be a long time
dying. Or, in other words, he will fight hard with Death. We may keep
him alive for some years longer, Lucille, if we take trouble.’

‘I shall not think anything a trouble. I do not forget how good he
has been to me, in his own cold way. But he has seemed so much weaker
lately.’

‘Only because he has at last consented to succumb to Nature. He would
not before admit, even to himself, that he is an old man. Nature
counselled him to rest, but it pleased him better to go on labouring,
and, as it were, pretending to be still young. He has given in at last;
and Nature, the great restorer, may do much for him, always assisted
by careful nursing—and I think you are the best nurse I ever met with,
Lucille.’

‘I have not much experience, but I do my best.’

‘And your best is better than other people’s. You have the soft low
voice, the gentle footstep, which make a woman’s help precious in a
sick-room. Don’t be anxious about your grandfather, dearest. We shall
pull him through, rely upon it.’

There was that in his protecting tone, the fond look in the grave eyes,
which told how secure the lover felt, despite that hard condition
wherewith Lucille had hampered the promise of her love. Thus time went
on in the dull old house, which to these two was not all gloomy—which
to one at least was full of hope and pleasant thoughts, and bright
dreams of a fair life to come.

Propriety, as known in what is called society, had no bondage for
these lovers. In their lives there was actually no Mrs. Grundy; not
even a next-door neighbour of the maiden-lady persuasion to keep
count of Mr. Davoren’s visits, and to wonder what old Mr. Sivewright
meant by allowing such an outrage of the proprieties under his very
nose. Lucius came and went as he pleased, stayed as long as he liked,
within reasonable limits. He read Shakespeare to Lucille in the summer
gloaming; he poured out all the wealth of his mind to her in long
conversations that were almost monologues, the girl eager to learn, he
eager to teach; or rather to make the woman he loved a sharer in all
his thoughts, fancies, creeds, and dreams—verily the better and purer
half of himself. At other times they wandered about the bare old garden
together, or sat in the ruined summer-house; and happy in that complete
and perfect universe which they possessed in each other, forgot that
the mud-bespattered wharf was not the Rialto, the slimy water that
stagnated beneath the barges something less lovely than the Adriatic’s
sunlit blue.

They talk much of the future, after the manner of lovers. Although they
were so completely happy in each other’s company, and in that calm
security which blesses innocent reciprocal love, this little spot of
time, the present, counted for nothing in their scheme of life. It may
be said that they were happy without being aware of their happiness.
And this is true of many lives. The one happy hour in the long dull
life slips by unnoted, like water-drops running between one’s fingers.
And then years after—when, remembering that brief glimpse of paradise,
we look back and would fain return to that green spot beside life’s
long dusty beaten turnpike-road—the grass is withered, or the Commons
Enclosure Act has swallowed up our pleasant resting-place: or where
Poetry’s fairy palace shone radiant in youth’s morning sunlight, there
is now only the cold marble of a Tomb.

Lucius and Lucille talked of their future—the fame that he was to win,
the good that he was to do; noble schemes for the welfare of others,
to be realised when fame and wealth were gained; cottage hospitals in
pleasant suburban spots, near enough at hand for the sick or worn-out
Londoner, and yet with green fields and old trees and song birds
about them; chosen retreats where the country yet lingered; little
bits of rustic landscape over which the enterprising builder had not
yet spread his lime-whitened paw; meadows whose hawthorn hedges were
undefiled by smoke, across whose buttercups and crimson sorrel-flowers
no speculative eye had yet ranged with a view to ground rents.

The young surgeon had various schemes for the improvement of his
fellow-creatures’ condition—some wholly philanthropic, others
scientific. To all Lucille listened with the same eager interest,
worshipping him in her loving womanly way, as if he had been as wise
as Socrates. After that first confession of her love, wrung from
unwilling lips, there had been no more reserve. She made no mystery of
her affection, which was childlike in its simple reverence for those
lofty qualities that women are apt to perceive in the object of their
regard some time before the rest of the world has awakened to a sense
thereof. But she held firmly by the condition which she had imposed on
her lover. She would never be his wife, she would begin no new stage of
existence, until the mystery of her father’s fate had been solved.

The time had now come when Lucius deemed it a point of honour to inform
Mr. Sivewright of this engagement, but not of the condition attaching
thereto. He had not forgotten what the old man had said in the first
instance, ‘My granddaughter is disposed of;’ but this he imagined was
only an idle threat. Day by day he found himself more necessary to the
invalid. Mr. Sivewright looked anxiously for his visits, detained him
as long as it was possible for him to stay, would have him come back
in the evening to sit for an hour or so in the sick-room, talking,
or reading the day’s news to him; proved himself, in fact, the most
exacting of patients. But in all their intercourse he had expressed
no dislike to that intimacy between Lucius and Lucille which he must
needs have been aware of; since he saw them together daily, and must
have been blind if he failed to see that they were something nearer and
dearer to each other than common friends.

‘He cannot be very much surprised when he hears the truth,’ thought
Lucius, and only deferred his confession until he perceived a marked
improvement in his patient.

This arose a little later in the summer, when the old man was able to
come down-stairs again, now and then, and even creep about the dreary
waste he called his garden.

One evening, in the very spot where he had first told his love to
Lucille, Lucius mustered courage and took Mr. Sivewright into his
confidence, only reserving that hard condition which Lucille had
attached to her promise.

The old man received this communication with a cynical grin.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I have seen it all along. As if one ever could
trust a young man and a young woman to play at being brother and sister
without their exchanging that sentimental make-believe for the reality
of love-making! Well, I am not angry. I told you my granddaughter was
disposed of. That was true so far as it went. I had views for her; but
they were vague, and hinged upon my own health and vigour. I thought I
had a stronger part to play in life’s drama. Well,’ with a faint sigh,
‘I can afford to resign those old hopes. You may marry Lucille whenever
you can afford to keep her in comfort and respectability. Now, my dear
Mr. Davoren,’ turning to the surgeon with a look of infinite cunning in
his keen eyes, ‘I daresay you think you have made a lucky hit—that, in
spite of all I have told you, this show of poverty is only a miser’s
pretence: that I have railway shares and consols and debentures and
Heaven knows what in my shabby old desk, and that I shall die worth
half-a-million. Dismiss that delusion from your mind at once and for
ever. If you take Lucille Sivewright for your wife you take a pauper.
My collection is all I possess: and I shall leave that most likely to a
museum.’

Thus ungraciously did Mr. Sivewright receive Lucius into the bosom of
his family. Yet, in his own eccentric fashion, he seemed attached to
the young man; courted his society, and had evidently an exalted belief
in his honour.

Nothing had Lucius yet done towards even the beginning of that
endeavour to which he had pledged himself; but he had thought deeply
and constantly of the task that had been imposed upon him, and had
tried to see his way to its accomplishment.

Given a man who had been missing twelve years, who in person,
profession, and surroundings was utterly unknown to him, and who had
cut every tie that bound him to kindred or home; who might be in any
quarter of the globe, or in his grave—and how to set about the work of
finding him? That was the problem which Lucille had proposed to him as
calmly as if it were the simplest thing in the world.

A very little consideration showed him that his only hope lay in
beginning his investigation close at home. Unless he could obtain
certain details from the old man—unless he could overcome Homer
Sivewright’s objection to the subject, and induce him to talk freely
about his missing son—the case seemed beyond all measure hopeless. And
even if the father could be made to speak, even if Lucius could learn
all that was to be told of Ferdinand Sivewright’s history at the time
he left his home in Bond-street, there would be still a dreary gulf of
twelve years to be bridged over.

To question the old man was, however, the easiest and most obvious
course. He might or might not remain obstinately dumb.

One morning, when the patient’s case seemed more than usually
promising—pain banished, and something of his old strength
regained—Lucius made his first approach to this difficult subject.

Their conversation, which was apt to wander widely, from the sordid
business of life to the loftiest regions of metaphysical speculation,
had on this occasion drifted into a discussion of the Christian faith.

Mr. Sivewright contemplated that mighty theme from a purely critical
standpoint; talked of the Gospel as he talked of the _Iliad_; admitted
this and denied that; brought the hard dry logic of an unpoetical mind,
the narrow scepticism of a suspicious nature, to bear upon divine
truths. Lucius spoke with the quiet conviction of a man who believed
and was not ashamed to stand to his colours. From a theological
argument he led the old man to the question of Christian charity, as
distinguished from mere Pagan humanitarianism; and here he found his
opportunity.

‘I have often wondered,’ he said, ‘that you—who seem in most things a
man of a calm temperament, even if somewhat stern—should yet cherish
a lifelong anger against an only son. Forgive me for touching upon a
subject which I know is painful to you—’

‘It is not painful,’ answered Sivewright sharply; ‘no more painful than
if you spoke to me of any scoundrel in the next street whose face I
had never seen. Do you think that hearts are everlasting wear? There
was a time when to think of my false, ungrateful guilty son was like
the smart of a gun-shot wound. But that was years ago. All the tissues
of my body have been changed since he deserted me. Do you suppose that
regret and affection and shame, and the sense of kinship, do not wear
out as well as flesh and blood? Twelve years ago Homer Sivewright
lamented the only son who had disgraced him. I, the man who speaks to
you to-day,’ touching his breast with his lean hand, ‘have no son.’

‘A hard saying,’ replied Lucius compassionately, for there was more
real feeling in this man’s assumed coldness than in many a loud-spoken
and demonstrative grief; ‘yet I can but believe—unworthy as he may have
seemed to you—he still holds a corner in your heart.’

A cloud came over the keen eyes, the gray head drooped, but Homer
Sivewright made no admission of weakness.

‘Seemed unworthy,’ he repeated; ‘he _was_ unworthy.’

‘You have never told me his crime.’

The old man lifted his head, and looked at the speaker with those
penetrating eyes of his, for an instant resentfully, then with the
cynicism which was his second nature.

‘What, are you curious?’ he said. ‘Well, I suppose you have a right to
know something of the family you propose to honour with your alliance.
Know, then, that the father of your intended wife was a liar and a
thief.’

Lucius recoiled as if some outrageous insult had been offered to
himself.

‘I cannot believe—’ he began.

‘Wait till you have heard the story before you attempt to dispute the
facts. You know what my youth was—laborious, self-denying. I married
early, but my marriage was a disappointment. I made the somewhat
common error of taking a handsome face as a certificate of womanly
excellence. My wife was a Spanish American, with a face like an old
Italian picture. Unhappily, she had a temper which made her own life
a burden, and produced a corresponding effect upon the lives of other
people. She had an infinite capacity for discontent. She could he
spasmodically gay under the influence of what is called pleasure, but
happy never. Had I been monarch of the world, I doubt if I could have
ever gratified half her wishes, or charmed the sullen demon in her
breast. She rarely desired anything that was not unattainable. Judge,
then, how she endured the only kind of existence I could offer her.

‘I did all in my power to make her life pleasant, or at least
tolerable. As my means improved I gave her the command of money;
bought birds and flowers for her sitting-room, and furnished it with
my choicest Buhl cabinets, my prettiest Louis-Seize sofa, the spoil
of French palaces; but she laughed to scorn my attempts to beautify
a home above a shop. Her father—a planter, and when I married her a
bankrupt—had once been rich. The days of his prosperity had scarcely
outlasted her childhood, but they had lasted long enough to accustom
her to habits of recklessness and extravagance which no after
experience could eradicate. I soon found that to give her freedom in
money matters would be to accomplish my own ruin. From an indulgent
husband I became what she called a miserly tyrant. Passive discontent
now changed to active aversion; and she began a series of quarrels
which, on more than one occasion, ended in her running away from home,
and taking refuge with a distant relation of her mother’s—a frivolous
extravagant widow whom I detested. I followed and brought her back from
these flights; but she returned unwillingly, and each occasion widened
the breach.

‘Our child made no link between us. When the boy grew old enough to
take any part in our quarrels, he invariably sided with his mother.
Naturally enough, since he was always with her, heard her complaints of
my ill-usage, was indulged by her with wanton folly, and gratified with
pleasures that were paid for with money stolen from me. Yes, that was
the beginning of his unprincipled career. The mother taught her son to
plunder my cash-box or my till.’

‘Very horrible!’ said Lucius.

‘Even to him, however,’ continued Mr. Sivewright, who, having once
drifted into the story of his domestic wrongs, waxed garrulous, ‘even
to him she was violent; and I discovered ere long that there was often
ill-blood between them. Taunts, innuendoes, sneers, diversified the
sullen calm of our wretched hearth; and one day the boy, Ferdinand,
came to me and entreated me to send him to school; he could not endure
life with his mother any longer. “Why, I thought you doated on her,”
said I. “I am fond enough of _her_,” he answered, “but I can’t stand
her temper. You’d better send me to school, father, or something
unpleasant may happen. I threw a knife at her after dinner yesterday.
You remember what you told me about that Roman fellow whose head you
showed me on a coin the other day—the man who murdered his mother. I’m
not likely to go in for the business in his cold-blooded way; but if
she goes on provoking me as she does sometimes, I may be goaded into
stabbing her.”

‘He wound up this cool avowal by informing me that he would like to
complete his education in Germany. He was at this time about twelve.’

‘You complied, I suppose?’ suggested Lucius.

‘Not entirely. I wished my son to be an English gentleman. I wanted,
if possible, to eradicate the South American element, which had
already exhibited itself in violent passions and an inordinate love
of pleasure. One talent, and one only, he had displayed to any great
extent; and that was a talent, or, as his mother and her few friends
declared, a genius for music. From five years old his chief delight was
scraping a fiddle or strumming on his mother’s piano. Now, for my own
part,’ added Mr. Sivewright candidly, ‘I hate music.’

‘And I have loved it,’ said Lucius thoughtfully. ‘Yet it is strange
that the darkest memories of my life are associated with music.’

‘I didn’t want the son for whom I had toiled, and was willing to go on
toiling for the rest of my days, to become a fiddler. I told him as
much in the plainest words, and sent him to a private tutor; in that
manner beginning an education which was to cost me as much as if I had
been a man of wealth and position. I hoped that education might cure
the vices of his childhood, and make him a good man. From the tutor he
went to Harrow, from Harrow to Oxford, your own college, Balliol. But
before this period of his life his mother ran away from me for the last
time. I declined to go through the usual business of bringing her home
again, but gave her a small allowance and requested her to remain away.
She stayed with the South American widow in Thistle-grove; spent her
allowance, I fear, chiefly upon brandy, and died in less than a year
after she left me. My son went to see her when she was dying; heard
her last counsel, which doubtless advised him to hate me; and went back
to Harrow, a boy, with the passions of a man.’

There was a pause, and once more the old man’s chin sunk upon his
breast, the cold gray eyes fixed themselves with that far-off gaze
which sees the things that are no more. Then rousing himself with an
impatient sigh he went on.

‘I needn’t trouble you with the details of his University life. Enough
that he contrived to make it an epitome of the vices. He assented
sullenly to adopt a profession—the law; skulked; spent his days and
nights in dissipation; wasted my money; and compelled me at last to
say, “Shut up your books, if you have ever opened them. Nature never
meant you for a lawyer. But you have all the sharpness of your mother’s
wily race. Come home, and in my petty business learn the science of
commerce. You may be a great merchant by and by.”’

‘You must have loved him in those days, or you would hardly have been
so lenient,’ said Lucius.

‘Loved him, yes,’ answered the other, with a long regretful sigh. ‘I
loved him and was proud of him; proud in spite of his vices; proud
of his good looks, his cleverness, his plausible tongue—the tongue
that lied to me and swindled me. God help me, he was the only thing
I had to love! He came home, pretended to take to the business. Never
was a man better qualified to prosper in such a trade. He had a keen
appreciation of art; was quick at learning the jargon which deludes
amateur buyers; and in the business of bargain-driving would have
Jewed the veriest Jew alive. But his habits were against anything like
sustained industry. It was not till after he had won my confidence, and
wheedled me into giving him a partnership, that I discovered how little
he had changed his old ways. As he had robbed me before he was twelve
years old, so he robbed me now; only as his necessities were larger, I
felt his dishonesty more. I saw my stock shrinking, my books doctored.
Vainly I tried to battle with an intellect that was stronger than my
own. Long after I knew him to be a rogue, he was able to demonstrate to
me, by what seemed the soundest logic, that I was mistaken. One day,
when he had been living with me something more than a year, he informed
me, in his easy-going way, that he had married some years before, lost
his wife soon after, and that I was a grandfather. “You’re fond of
children,” he said. “I’ve seen you notice those little curly-headed
beggars next door. You’d better let me send for Lucille.”’

‘You consented?’

‘Of course. Lucille came the same night. A pale melancholy child, in
whose small face I saw no likeness to any of my race. Of her mother
I could ascertain very little. My son was reticent. His wife was of
decent birth, he said, and had possessed a little money, which he had
spent, and that was all he ever told me. Of how or where she died, he
said nothing. Lucille talked of green fields and flowers and the sea;
but knew no more of the whereabouts of her previous home than if she
had come straight from Paradise.’

‘Then you do not even know her mother’s maiden-name?’

‘No. That’s hard upon you, isn’t it? There’ll be a blank in your
children’s pedigree.’

‘I will submit to the blank; only it seems rather hard upon Lucille
that she should never have known her mother’s relatives, that she
should have been cheated of any affection they might have given her.’

‘Affection! the affection of aunts and uncles and cousins!
Milk-and-water!’

‘Well, sir, you and your son contrived to live together for some years.’

‘Yes, it lasted a long time—I knowing I was cheated, yet unable to
prove it; he spending his days in sloth, his nights in dissipation,
yet every now and then, by some brilliant stroke of business,
compelling me to admire him. My customers liked him, the young men
especially; for he had all those modern ideas which were as strange
to me as a Cuneiform inscription. Somehow he brought grist to the
mill. His University friends found him out, made my shop a lounge,
borrowed my money, and paid me a protective rate of interest. We had
our quarrels—not violent and noisy, like the quarrels in which women
are concerned, but perhaps all the more lasting in their effect. Where
he went at night I knew not, until going into his room very early one
morning to wake him—there was to be a great picture-sale twenty miles
from London that day, and I wanted him to attend it—I saw some gold
and notes scattered on the table by his bedside. From that moment I
knew the worst of his vices. He was a gambler. Where he played or with
whom I never knew. I never played the spy upon him, or attempted to
get at his secrets in any underhand manner. One day I taxed him with
this vice. He shrugged his shoulders, and affected supreme candour. “I
play a little sometimes,” he said—“games of skill, not chance. It is
impossible to keep such company as I keep and not take an occasional
hand at whist or écarté. And you ought not to forget that my friends
have been profitable to you.” A year after this I had occasion to sell
a portion of my stock at Christie’s, in order to obtain ready money to
purchase the lease of premises adjoining my own—premises which would
enable me to enlarge my art gallery. The things were sold, and, a few
days afterwards, settled for. I brought home the money—between five and
six hundred pounds—locked it in my safe, impregnable even to my junior
partner, and sat down to dinner with the key in my pocket, and, as I
believed, my money secure.’

Again there was a pause, painful recollections contracting the
deeply-lined brow, gloomy thoughts clouding the eyes.

‘Well, I had come home late; the child was in bed, and my son and I
dined together by the fire in the little parlour behind the shop—my
wife’s fine drawing-room had been absorbed long ago into the art
gallery. Never had Ferdinand been so genial or so gay. He was full
of talk about the extension of our premises; discussed our chances
of success like a thorough man of business. We had a bottle of good
old burgundy in honour of our brilliant prospects. I did not drink
more than usual; yet half an hour after dinner I was in the deepest
sleep that ever stole my senses, and reduced me to the condition of a
lifeless log. In a word, the wine had been drugged, and by the hand of
my son. When I awoke it was long after midnight, the hearth was black
and cold, the candles had burned down to the sockets. I woke with a
violent headache, and that nausea which is the after-taste of opium or
morphine. I sat for some minutes shivering, and wondering what was the
matter with me. Almost mechanically I felt in my pocket for the key
of the safe. Yes, there it lay, snug enough. I staggered up to bed,
surprised at the unusual effect of a couple of glasses of burgundy, and
was so ill next morning that my old housekeeper sent for the nearest
apothecary. He felt my pulse, looked at my eyes, and asked if I had
taken an opiate. Then it flashed upon me in a moment that I had been
drugged. The instant the apothecary left me I got out of bed, dragged
on my clothes, and went down to examine my safe. The money was gone.
Ferdinand knew when I was to receive the cash, and knew my habits well
enough to know where I should put it, careful as I had been not to let
him see me dispose of it. I had been robbed—dexterously—by my own son.’

‘Scoundrel!’ muttered Lucius.

‘Yes. I might have stomached the theft; I couldn’t forgive the opiate.
That stung me to the quick. A man who would do that would poison me,
I thought; and I plucked my only son out of my heart, as you drag up a
foul weed whose roots have gone deep and have a tough hold in a clay
soil. It was a wrench, and left a feeling of soreness for after years;
but I think my love for him died in that hour. Could one love so paltry
a villain? I made no attempt to pursue him, nor to regain my money. One
can hardly deliver one’s own flesh and blood to the tender mercies of
the criminal code.’

‘You never told his daughter?’

‘No; I was not cruel enough for that. I did my best to impress upon her
mind that he was unworthy of affection or regret, without stating the
nature of his offence. Unhappily, with her romantic temperament, to be
unfortunate is to be worthy of compassion. I know that she has wept for
him and regretted him, and even set up his image in her heart, in spite
of me.’

‘How much do you know of your son’s fate?’

‘Almost nothing. By mere accident I heard that he went to America
within a month of the day on which he robbed me. More than that I never
heard.’

‘Do you remember the name of the ship—or steamer—in which he went?’

‘That’s a curious question; however, I don’t mind answering it. He
went in a Spanish sailing-ship, El Dorado, bound for Rio.’

This was all—a poor clue wherewith to discover the whereabouts of a man
who had been missing twelve years.




CHAPTER XII.

LUCIUS HAS AN INTERVIEW WITH A FAMOUS PERSONAGE.


It is one thing for a man to make a rash promise, but another thing for
him to keep it. A man in love will pledge himself to any enterprise—to
any adventure—even to the discovery of a new planet or a new continent,
should his mistress demand as much. After contemplating the question
from every possible point of view, Lucius Davoren was disposed to think
that he had pledged himself to the performance of something that was
more impossible than astronomical or geographical discovery, when he
promised to find Lucille Sivewright’s father, or, failing that, obtain
for her at least the story of his fate.

It had seemed a great point to get the old man to speak freely of his
lost son; but even with this new light thrown upon the business, an
Egyptian darkness still surrounded the figure of the missing man. He
had sailed for a certain port. He might be still a denizen of that
Southern city. Yet what less likely in such a man’s career than
continued residence anywhere? The criminal is naturally a wanderer.
He has no fixed abiding-place. Fresh woods and pastures new are the
necessity of his contraband existence. Like a smuggled keg of cognac,
he passes from place to place under a cloud of mystery. None see him
arrive or depart. Like the chameleon, he changes colour—now wearing
dyed whiskers and a wig, now returning to the hues of nature. He has as
many names as the Roman Jupiter.

Had Lucius been a free man, he might have gone straight to Rio, and
hunted up the traces of the missing man, unaided and alone. He might
have discovered some clue even after the lapse of years since the
sailing of the Spanish merchantman El Dorado. It was just within the
limits of possibility that he might have found the man himself.

But to do this would have involved the abandonment of much that was
of vital moment to himself—would have indeed thrown the whole scheme
of his existence out of gear. In the first place he was poor, and his
pitiful salary as parish doctor was of inestimable value to him. Now, a
parish doctor has no more liberty to rove than the parish turncock, and
vast would be the wonder of the vestry—or the overseers—if informed
that the parish surgeon had gone for a fortnight’s grouse shooting on
the Sutherland hills, or set sail for the Mediterranean in a friend’s
yacht, or joined one of the great Cook’s caravans bound for Egypt or
Peru.

Again, Lucius had now the nucleus of a very fair private practice.
His patients, for the most part small tradesmen, paid punctually, and
there were among them some wealthy traders whose custom was worth
having. He saw the beginning, very small it is true, but the beginning
of fortune. That dream of Savile-row was to be realised out of such
small beginnings. His patients believed in him, and talked of him; and
so far as reputation can be made in such a place as the Shadrack-Basin
district, his reputation was fast being made. To turn his back upon all
this would be to sacrifice, or at any rate to postpone indefinitely,
his hope of winning a home for the woman he loved.

Beyond this there remained a third reason why he should refrain from
setting forth upon that wild-goose chase which, however barren as
to result, would at least serve to prove him the most devoted and
chivalrous of lovers. To go to Rio was to leave Lucille, and for an
indefinite period; since the business upon which he would go was
essentially a business requiring deliberation, ample leisure, time for
inquiry, for travelling to and fro, time enough to waste in following
up trails which, though promising much, might prove false,—time and
indomitable patience. How could he afford time and patience with his
heart racked by fears for the safety of Lucille? What might not happen
during his absence? The old man was in so precarious a condition
that his illness might at any moment take a fatal turn—in a state so
critical that to deliver him over to a strange doctor, and perhaps a
careless one, would be a kind of assassination.

Thus, after profound thought, Lucius determined that even love should
not impel him to so rash a course as a voyage to Rio in quest of
Ferdinand Sivewright.

‘After all,’ he said to himself, ‘there is no wiser saying than that
of Apelles to the cobbler, “Let every man stick to his own trade.” I
may be a clever surgeon, but a very poor detective-officer; and it will
be safer to spend the little money I can spare in employing a retired
policeman than in trying my ’prentice hand in the art of detection. We
bluster a good deal in the newspapers about the incompetence of the
police, when they fail to hunt up a criminal who has plunged into the
great sea of humanity, leaving not a bubble to mark the place where
he went down; yet I doubt if any of those brilliant journalists who
furnish indignant editorials on the police question would do much
better in the detective line than the officials whose failures they
ridicule. Yes, I will submit the case to Mr. Otranto, the private
detective.’

Once resolved, Lucius lost no more time; but called at Mr. Otranto’s
office in the city, and was fortunate enough to find that gentleman at
home—a plain-mannered little man, with a black frock-coat buttoned up
to the chin, and the half-military stamp of the ex-policeman strong
upon him. He was a brisk little man, too, disinclined to waste time
upon unnecessary detail.

To him Lucius freely confided all he knew about Ferdinand
Sivewright—his character, antecedents, the ship in which he sailed, the
port from which he went, the approximate date of his departure.

Mr. Otranto shrugged his shoulders. He had whistled a little impromptu
accompaniment to Mr. Davoren’s statement under his breath; a kind of
internal whistling, indicative of deepest thought.

‘I’m afraid it’s not the most hopeful case,’ he said; ‘twelve years
is a long time. See what a number of earthquakes and shipwrecks and
revolutions and what you may call general blow-ups you get in a dozen
years; and then consider the case of one individual man who may drop
through at any moment, who, being by nature a bad lot, will change
his name any number of times. However, I can put the business into the
hands of a party out yonder who will do all that can be done on the
spot.’

‘Yonder, meaning Rio?’ inquired Lucius. ‘Have you correspondents so far
afield?’

‘Sir,’ said Mr. Otranto, with a complacent glance at the map of the
world which hung against the wall opposite him, ‘there are very few
corners of this habitable earth where I have _not_ a correspondent.’

The business was settled without farther discussion. Lucius gave Mr.
Otranto a substantial deposit, to prove that his inquiry was not
prompted by frivolity, and to insure that gentleman’s zeal; private
inquiry being, as Mr. Otranto indirectly informed his client, a
somewhat expensive luxury.

This done, Lucius felt that he had not been false to his pledge.
He told Lucille nothing, however, except that he meant to keep his
promise, so far as it was possible and reasonable for him to keep it.

‘If I tell you that I think you foolish for cherishing a wild hope,
dearest, you will tell me that I am unkind,’ he said, as they paced
their favourite walk in the barren old garden at sunset that evening.

‘Lucius,’ asked Lucille, not long after this, ‘I am going to ask you a
favour.’

‘My dearest, what do I live for except to please you?’

‘O, Lucius, a great many things; for your patients, for science, for
the hope of being a famous doctor by and by.’

‘Only secondary objects in my life now, Lucille. They once made the sum
of life, I grant; they are henceforth no more than means to an end—and
that end is the creation of a home for you.’

‘How good of you to say that! I am hardly worthy of such love, when my
heart dwells so much upon the past. Yet, Lucius, if you could only know
how I cling to the memory of that dim strange time, which seems almost
as far away as a dream, you would forgive me even for putting that
memory above my affection for you.’

‘I forgive you freely, darling, for a sentiment which does but prove
the tenderness and constancy of your nature. I am content even to hold
the second place. But what is the favour you have to ask, Lucille?’

‘Let me hear you play. Poor grandpapa is seldom down-stairs of an
evening now. There could be no harm in your bringing your violin, and
playing a little now and then when he has gone back to his room. His
room is so far from the parlour that he would never hear you; and,
after all, playing the violin is not a crime. Do let me hear you,
Lucius! The old sweet sad music will remind me of my father. And I know
you play divinely,’ she added, looking up at him with innocent admiring
eyes.

What could he do? He was mortal, loved music to distraction, and had
some belief in his own playing.

‘So be it, my sweetest. I’ll bring the Amati; but you must stow him
away in some dusky corner between whiles, where your grandfather
cannot possibly discover him, or he might wreak his vengeance upon my
treasure. After all, as you say, there can be no harm in a violin, and
it will be hardly a breach of honour for me to play you a sonata now
and then, after my patient has gone to bed. Your father must have been
a fine player, or his playing would have hardly made such an impression
upon you as a child of seven.’

‘Yes,’ she answered dreamily, ‘I suppose it was what you call fine
playing. I know that it was sometimes mournful as the cry of a broken
heart, sometimes wild and strange—so strange that it has made me cling
closer to his knees, as I sat at his feet in the dusky room, afraid to
look round lest I should see some unearthly form conjured out of the
shadows by that awful music. You know how children look behind them
with scared faces as they cower round the Christmas fire, listening to
a ghost story. I have felt like that when I listened to my father’s
playing.’

‘I will bring you pleasanter music, Lucille, and conjure no ghosts out
of the evening shadows—only happy thoughts of our future.’

This was the prelude to many peaceful evenings, full of a placid
happiness which knew not satiety. Lucius brought his Amati, feeling
very much like a conspirator when he conveyed the instrument into Mr.
Sivewright’s house by stealth, as it were, and gave it into Lucille’s
keeping, to be hidden by day, and only to be brought forth at night,
when her grandfather had retired to his remote bedchamber, beyond ken
of those sweet sounds.

The old woman in the bonnet—who was at once housekeeper, cook,
laundress, and parlour-maid in this curious establishment—was of course
in the secret. But Lucius had found this ancient female improve upon
acquaintance, and he was now upon intimate and friendly terms with her.
She had lived for an indefinite length of years in Mr. Sivewright’s
service—remembered Lucille’s childhood in the dark old back rooms in
Bond-street—but no power of persuasion could extract any information
from her. Upon entering Mr. Sivewright’s household in the remote past
she had promised to hold her tongue; and she was religiously silent
to this hour. Of the old man she could never be induced to say more
than that he was a ‘carrack-ter;’ a remark which, accompanied as it
always was with a solemn shake of her head, might be complimentary or
otherwise.

Lucille she praised with fondest enthusiasm, but of Lucille’s father
she said not a word. On the various occasions when Lucius had ventured
to press his questions on this subject, she had acted always in the
same manner. Her countenance assumed a dark and forbidding aspect; she
abruptly set down the dish, or tray, or teapot, or whatever object she
might happen to be carrying, and as abruptly vanished from the room.
Persistence here availed nothing.

‘Mr. Sivewright bound me over not to talk about his business when he
first engaged me,’ she said once, when hard pressed by Lucius, who had
hoped through her to obtain some better clue to the fate of Ferdinand
Sivewright. ‘I’ve held my tongue for uppards o’ five-and-twenty years.
It ain’t likely I should begin to blab now.’

Although uncommunicative, this faithful domestic was not unfriendly.
She treated Lucille with an affectionate familiarity, and in a manner
took the lovers under her wing.

‘I was sure and certain, the first time I laid eyes on him, that you
and Dr. Davory would keep company,’ she said to Lucille; and her
protecting influence overshadowed the lovers at all times, like the
wings of a guardian angel. She evidently regarded herself in the light
of Miss Sivewright’s duenna; and would come away from some mysterious
operations in the labyrinthine offices and outhouses of the ancient
mansion, where she had a piece of lumber which she spoke of casually
as her good gentleman, in order to hover about Lucille and Lucius in
their walks, or to listen, awestricken and open-mouthed, to the strains
of the violin. Discovering ere long that this rough unpolished jewel
was not wanting in some of the finer qualities of the diamond, Lucius
admitted Mrs. Wincher, in some measure, to his confidence—discussed his
future freely in her presence, imparted his hopes and fears, and felt
that perhaps within this unbeauteous husk dwelt the soul of a friend;
and assuredly neither he nor Lucille could afford to sacrifice a friend
on account of external shortcomings. So Mrs. Wincher was accepted by
him, bonnet and all, and her hoverings about the pathway of innocent
love went unreproved.

‘I am so glad you are not angry with Wincher for being a little too
familiar,’ said Lucille. ‘She cannot forget that she took care of me
when I was a poor solitary child in those back rooms in Bond-street;
and I know she is faithful and good.’

Jacob Wincher, or Mrs. Wincher’s good gentleman, was a feeble prowling
old man, who took charge of the collection, and pottered about
from morn till dewy eve—which, by the way, never was dewy in the
Shadrack district—dusting, polishing, arranging, and rearranging Mr.
Sivewright’s treasures—a very feeble old man, but learned in all the
mysteries of bric-à-brac, and enthusiastic withal; a man whose skilful
hands wandered about among egg-shell china, light as the wings of a
butterfly. He had been Mr. Sivewright’s factotum in Bond-street, but
was no more inclined to be communicative than Mrs. Wincher, whom he
spoke of, with reciprocal respect, as his good lady.

Happy summer evenings, when, in the deepening dusk, Lucius awoke the
sweet sad strains of his violin, while Lucille sat knitting by the
window, and Mrs. Wincher, in the inevitable bonnet, occupied the
extreme edge of a chair by the door, listening with folded arms and the
serious attention of a musical critic.

‘I can’t say but what I’ve a preference for livelier toons,’ she would
remark, after patiently awaiting the end of a dirge by Spohr, ‘but
the fingering is beautiful. I like to watch the fingering. My good
gentleman used to play the fiddle very sweet afore we was married—“John
Anderson my Jones,” and the “Bird Waltz,” and “British Grenayders,” and
such-like—but he give it up afterwards. There was no time to waste upon
music in Bond-street. Up early and abed late, and very often travel a
hundred miles backards and forrards between morning and night to attend
a sale in the country—that was Mr. Sivewright’s motter.’

These musical entertainments were naturally of rare occurrence. Mr.
Sivewright had been for some time gradually improving, and was more
inclined for society as his strength returned, but was, on the other
hand, disinclined to come down-stairs; so Lucius and Lucille had
to spend the greater part of their time in his room, where Lucius
entertained his patient with tidings of the outer world, while Lucille
made tea at a little table in the narrow space which the collector
had left clear in the midst of his crowded chamber. There were a few
flowers now in the one unobstructed window, and Lucille had done all
she could, with her small means, to make the room pretty and homelike.

Mr. Sivewright listened while the lovers discussed their future, but
with no indulgent ear.

‘Love and poverty!’ he said, with his harsh laugh; ‘a nice
stock-in-trade upon which to set up in the business of life! However,
I suppose you are no more foolish than all the fools who have
travelled the same beaten road before your time: and the same old
question remains to be solved by you, just as it has been solved by
others—whether the love will outwear the poverty, or the poverty wear
out the love.’

‘We are not afraid to stand the test,’ said Lucius.

‘We are not afraid,’ echoed Lucille.




CHAPTER XIII.

HE FEARS HIS FATE TOO MUCH.


The quiet course of Lucius Davoren’s life, so full of hard work and
high hopes and simple unalloyed happiness, was by and by interrupted
by a summons from Geoffrey, that spoiled child of fortune, who, in his
hour of perplexity, turned again to that staunch friend whose counsel
he had set at naught.

This was Geoffrey Hossack’s letter:

  ‘Stillmington, August 13th.

 ‘Dear Lucius,—I daresay you’ll be surprised to see me still abiding
 in this sleepy old place, when yesterday’s gray dawn saw the first
 shot fired on many a moor from York to Inverness. However, here I
 am, and in sore distress of mind, no nearer a hopeful issue out of
 my perplexities than I was when you ran down here nearly four months
 ago to see that dear child. Will you come down again, like a good old
 fellow, forget how rude and ungracious I was the last time I saw you,
 and hear my difficulties, and help me if you can?

 ‘After all, you are the only man whose good sense and honour I would
 trust in such a crisis of my life—the only friend before whom I would
 bare the secrets of my heart. Do come, and promptly.

  ‘Yours, as ever,      G. H.’

Of course Lucius complied. He left London early in the afternoon, and
arrived at Stillmington towards evening. He found Geoffrey waiting
on the platform, with much of the old brightness and youthfulness of
aspect, but with a more thoughtful expression than of old in the candid
face, a graver look about the firm well-cut mouth. They greeted each
other in the usual off-hand manner.

‘Uncommonly sweet of you to come, old fellow,’ said Geoffrey. ‘I ought
to have run up to you, of course, only—only I’ve taken root here, you
see. I know every post in the streets, every tree in the everlasting
avenues that make the glory of this slow old town. But still I remain.
You’re looking fagged, Lucius, but bright as of old.’

‘I have been working a little harder than usual, that is all,’ replied
Lucius, who was disinclined to speak of his new happiness yet awhile.
It would be time enough to tell Geoffrey when the future lay clearer
before him; and as he had somewhat ridiculed his friend’s passion, he
did not care to own himself a slave.

‘Now, Geoffrey, what is the matter?’ he asked presently, as they
strolled slowly along one of those verdant avenues of lime and chestnut
which surrounded the little gem-like town of Stillmington with a
network of greenery. ‘Still the old story, I suppose.’

‘Yes, Lucius, the old story, with very little variation. She is here,
and I can’t tear myself away, but go dawdling on from day to day and
hour to hour. Half-a-dozen times I have packed my portmanteaus and
ordered the fly to take me to the station, and then at the last moment
I have said to myself, “Why should I go away? I am a free man, and an
idle one, and may just as well live here as anywhere else.”’

‘Ah, Geoff, that comes of your being without a profession.’

‘It would be just the same if I were half-way towards the Woolsack—ay,
if I were Lord Chancellor—I should only be torn in twain between my
profession and my hopeless foolish love.’

‘But how does it happen that she—Mrs. Bertram—is still here? Are there
perpetual concerts in Stillmington?’

‘No; but after the little girl’s illness, perhaps in consequence of
that, she took a disgust for concert singing. She fancied the hurrying
from place to place—the excitement caused by frequent change of
scene—bad for her darling’s health. Nor was this her only reason; she
has often told me her own dislike of public life. So when the little
girl recovered, Mrs. Bertram advertised for pupils in the local papers.
The doctor, who had taken a great fancy to her, recommended her to all
his patients, and in less than a month she had secured half-a-dozen
pupils, and had taken nicer rooms than those in which you saw her.
She has now a singing class three times a week. I hear them sol-faing
when I pass the windows during my morning walk. There is even a little
brass-plate on the door: “Mrs. Bertram, teacher of music.” Imagine,
Lucius, the woman I love to the verge of idolatry is obliged to put
a brass-plate on her door and teach squalling misses, while I am
wallowing in wealth.’

‘A much better life for any woman than that of a public singer,’ said
Lucius; ‘above all for—’

‘Such a lovely woman as Jane Bertram. Yes, I agree with you. Who could
see her and not adore her? But think, Lucius, how superior this woman
must be to all the things which most women love, when she can willingly
surrender professional success, the admiration of the public, even the
triumph of her art, for the love of her child: and shut herself in from
the world, and resign herself to lead a life as lonely and joyless as
the life of a convent.’

‘It proves, as you say, that the lady possesses a superior mind; for
which I should have given her credit even without such evidence. But it
appears that in her seclusion she has not closed her door against you;
since you are so familiar with her opinions and her mode of life.’

‘There you are wrong. I have never crossed the threshold of her present
abode. On the very day you left Stillmington she told me in the
plainest words, but with a gentleness that made even unkind words seem
sweet, that she could receive no farther visits from me. “You have been
very good,” she said, “and in the hour of trouble such friendship as
you have shown to me is very precious. But now the danger is past I can
only return to my old position. It is my destiny to live quite alone;
pray do not try to come between me and Fate.”’

‘You pleaded against this decision, I suppose?’

‘With all the force of the truest passion that man ever felt. I think
I was almost eloquent, Lucius, for at the last she burst into tears;
she entreated me to desist, told me that I was too hard upon her, that
I tempted her too cruelly. How could I tempt her if she did not care
a straw for me? These ambiguous phrases fanned the flame of hope. I
left her at her command, which I dared not disobey; but I stayed in
Stillmington.’

‘You have stayed on all this time and seen no more of her?’

‘_Pas si bête._ No, I have seen her and talked to her now and then. She
is obliged to give her child an airing every fine afternoon. She has
no maid here, and the mother and child walk out together. Sometimes,
but not too often, for that would seem like persecution, I contrive to
meet them, and join them in their ramble in one of the long avenues
or across a breezy common; and then, Lucius, for a little while I
am in Paradise. We talk of all manner of things; of life and its
many problems, of literature, art, nature, religion, and its deepest
mysteries; but of her past life she never speaks, nor of her dead
husband. I have studiously refrained from any word that might seem to
pry into her secrets, and every hour I have spent with her has served
but to increase my love and honour for her.’

‘You have again asked her to be your wife?’

‘Over and over again, and she has refused with the same steadfast
persistence, with a constancy of purpose that knows no change. And yet,
Lucius, I believe she loves me. I am neither such a blockhead nor such
a scoundrel as to pursue any woman to whom I was an object of dislike,
or even of indifference. But I see her face light up when we meet; I
hear the sweet tremulous tones of her voice when she speaks of the love
she refuses to grant me. No, Lucius, there is no indifference, there is
no obstinate coldness there. God only knows the reason which keeps us
asunder, but to me it is an inexorable mystery.’

‘And you have sent for me only to tell me this. In your letter you
spoke of my helping you. How can any help of mine aid you here?’

‘In the first place, because you are a much cleverer fellow than I
am, a better judge of human nature, able to read aright much that is
a mystery to me. In the second place, you, who are not blinded by
passion, ought speedily to discover whether I am only fooling myself
with the fancy that my love is returned. You know I was just a little
inclined to be jealous of you the last time you were here, old fellow.’

‘You had not the faintest reason.’

‘I know. Of course not. But I was fool enough to grudge you even her
gratitude. I don’t mean to repeat that idiotcy. You are the only friend
whose opinions I really respect. The common run of one’s acquaintance
I look upon as egotistical monomaniacs; that is to say, they have all
gone mad upon the subject of self, and are incompetent to reason upon
anything that has not self for its centre. But you, Lucius, have a
wider mind; and I believe, your judgment being untroubled by passion,
you will be able to read this mystery aright, to fathom the secret my
darkened eyes have vainly striven to pierce.’

‘I believe that I can, Geoffrey,’ said Lucius gravely. ‘But tell me
first, do you really wish this mystery solved, for good or for evil, at
the risk even of disenchantment?’

‘At any hazard; the present uncertainty is unbearable. I am tortured
by the belief that she loves me, and yet withholds her love. That if
inclination were her only guide, she would be my wife. And yet she
toils on, and lives on, lonely, joyless, with nothing but her child’s
love to brighten her dreary days.’

‘There are many women who find that enough for happiness. But, no
doubt, as your wife her existence might be gayer, her position more
secure.’

‘Of course. Think of her, Lucius, that loveliest and most refined among
women, slaving for a pittance.’

‘I do think of her, I sympathise with her, I admire and honour her,’
answered the other, with unwonted earnestness.

‘And yet you advise me against marrying her. That seems hardly
consistent.’

‘I have advised you not to marry her in ignorance of her past life. If
she will tell you the secret of that past—without reserve—and you find
nothing in the story to diminish your love, I will no longer say do not
marry her. But there must be nothing kept back—nothing hidden. She must
tell you all; even if her heart almost breaks in the telling. And it
will then be for you to renounce her and your love; or to take her to
your heart of hearts to reign there for ever.’

‘I do not fear the test,’ cried Geoffrey eagerly. ‘She can have nothing
to tell me that she should blush to speak or I to hear. She is all
goodness and truth.’

‘Have you ever asked for her confidence?’

‘Never. Remember, Lucius, I possess her friendship only on sufferance.
In a moment she may give me my irrevocable dismissal, forbid me ever to
speak to her any more, as she has forbidden me to visit her. I could
not afford to surrender even those occasional hours we spend together.’

‘In that case why send for me? I thought you wanted to bring matters to
a crisis.’

‘Why, so I do. Yet at the thought of her anger I grow the veriest
coward. Banishment from her means such unutterable misery, and to
offend her is to provoke the sentence of banishment.’

‘If she is as good and true as you believe, and as I too believe her to
be, she will not be offended by your candour. She may have a confession
to make to you which she could hardly make unasked; but which, once
being made, might clear away all doubt, remove every impediment to your
happiness.’

‘You are right. Yes, I will hazard all. What is that old verse?

    “He either fears his fate too much,
       Or his desert is small,
     Who dares not put it to the touch,
       To gain or lose it all.”

Just imagine my feelings on the twelfth, Lucius, when I thought of my
collection of guns going to rust, and those Norwegian hills that I had
made up my mind to shoot over this very August.’

‘Bravely said, Geoff. And now I will do my uttermost to aid you. I
think that I may have some small influence with Mrs. Bertram. Her
gratitude exaggerated the trifling service I did her sick child. I will
write her a letter; as your friend I can say much more than you could
say for yourself. You shall deliver it into her hands, and then ask
her, in the simplest, plainest words, to tell you whether she loves or
does not love you; and, if she owns to caring for you a little, why it
is she rejects your love. I think you will come at the truth then.’

‘You will write to her!’ cried Geoffrey aghast. ‘You, almost a
stranger!’

‘How can I be a stranger when she thinks I saved her child’s life?
Come, Geoffrey, if I am to help you I must go to work in my own way.
Give Mrs. Bertram my letter, and I’ll answer for it, she will give you
her confidence.’

Geoffrey looked at his friend with the gaze of suspicion. Yet, after
entreating his aid, he could hardly reject it, even if the manner of it
seemed clumsy and undiplomatic.

‘Very well, I’ll do it. Only, I must say, it strikes me as a hazardous
business. Write your letter; but for heaven’s sake remember she is a
woman of a most sensitive nature, a most delicate mind! I implore you
not to offend her.’

‘I know more of her mind than you do,—by the light of psychology.’

‘Very likely,’ replied Geoffrey rather gloomily. ‘But you haven’t hung
upon her words or studied her looks day after day as I have done.
Psychology is an uncommonly easy way of getting at a woman’s mind if
you know much of her after a single interview. However, write your
letter, and I’ll deliver it. I can cut my throat if it makes her angry.’

‘One does not cut one’s throat at seven-and-twenty,’ said Lucius
coolly. ‘And now, Geoff, if you have no objection, I should not be
sorry to bend my steps towards your hotel with a view to refreshment.
We seem to have wandered rather far afield.’

Geoffrey, in his desire for unrestrained converse with his friend, had
led him away from the town, by a winding road that ascended a gentle
hill; a wooded hill covered with richest green sward, whence they
looked downward on the gentlemanlike town of Stillmington, with its
white villas and spotless streets and close-cut lawns and weedless
flower-beds, over which the sister spirits of order and prosperity
spread their protecting wings. The respectable family hotel proudly
dominated the smaller tenements of the High-street, its well-kept
garden gaudy with geraniums, its fountain spirting mildly in the
sunset.

‘Come along, old fellow,’ said Geoffrey; ‘it was rather too bad of me
to forget how far you’d travelled. I’ve ordered dinner for eight sharp;
and hark, the clock of Stillmington parish church proclaims half-past
seven, just time enough to get rid of the dust of the journey before we
sit down. And after—’

‘After dinner,’ said Lucius, ‘I’ll write to Mrs. Bertram.’

‘Then by Apollo, as old Lear says, I’ll deliver the letter to-night. I
couldn’t afford to sleep upon it. My courage would evaporate, like Bob
Acres’s, before morning.’

Thus, with simulated lightness, spoke the lover, while strange doubts
and gnawing fears consumed his heart.


END OF VOL. I.

  LONDON:
  ROBSON AND SONS, PRINTERS, PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.




  Transcriber’s Notes

  pg 2 Changed: It is December, the bleakest, deariest month
            to: It is December, the bleakest, dreariest month

  pg 14 Changed: torn moosekin shoes upon his feet
             to: torn mooseskin shoes upon his feet

  pg 113 Changed: a cabinet in Forentine mosaic
              to: a cabinet in Florentine mosaic

  pg 236 Changed: hope and fear during the ast few days
              to: hope and fear during the last few days

  pg 294 Changed:  Like the chamelion, he changes colour
              to:  Like the chameleon, he changes colour

  pg 300 Changed: So be it, my weestest.
              to: So be it, my sweetest.

  pg 302 Changed: she praised with fondest enthusiam
              to: she praised with fondest enthusiasm



*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75875 ***