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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75875 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+  Transcriber’s Note
+  Italic text displayed as: _italic_
+
+
+
+
+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 ***