Part 23 (1/2)
The cast-steel smile which was peculiar to him hardened the colonel's face.
”You must come down on Miss Bellasys for compensation. She pays well, I have no doubt. You never get another _sou_ from our side, if it were to keep you from starving. My second thought was the best, after all; it saved time and--money. (He put the note back into his purse.) I'll give you one caution, though. Keep out of Mr. Livingstone's way. If he meets you, after hearing all this, he'll break your neck, I believe in my conscience.” So he left him.
For the second time that evening Willis looked in the gla.s.s--the reflection was not so satisfactory. Was that unseemly crumpled ruin the white tie, sublime in its scientific wrinkles, on which its author had gazed with a pardonable paternal pride? No wonder that he stamped in wrath, not the less bitter because impotent, while he shook off the dust from his garments as a testimony against Ralph Mohun.
He repaired the damages, though, to the best of his power, and then went off to keep his appointment; but the _pates a la bechamelle_ were as ashes, and the _gelee au marisquin_ as gall to his parched, disordered palate. He made himself so intensely disagreeable that poor Heloise thenceforth swore an enmity against his compatriots, which endured to the end of her brief misspent existence. ”_Gredin d'Anglais, va!_” she was wont to say, grinding her little white teeth melodramatically, whenever she recalled that dreary entertainment, and the failure of her simple stratagems to enliven her saturnine host.
CHAPTER XXVII.
”Then let the funeral bells be tolled, a requiem be sung, An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young; A dirge for her--the doubly dead, in that she died so young.”
For the first few minutes after the train had moved off Guy was unable to collect his thoughts. As the tall figure of Mohun pa.s.sed from his view, it seemed as if a sustaining prop had been suddenly cut away from under him, and he felt more than ever helpless. The stubborn strength of his character a.s.serted itself before long, and he faced his great sorrow as he would have done an enemy in bodily shape; but neither then, nor for many days after, could he pursue any one train of reflection long unbroken.
First he began to think how Constance would look when he saw her. Would she be much changed? How beautiful she was the night they parted, with the blue myosotis gleaming through her bright hair! Would her eyes be as cold as he remembered them then (he had not seen their _last_ look), or would they forgive him at once, and tell him so? Not if she knew all.
And then, in hideous contrast to her pure stately beauty, there rose before him faces and figures which had shared his orgies during the past months, gay with paint and jewels, and meretricious ornament. There was a deeper horror in those mocking shapes than in the most loathsome phantasms of corporeal corruption that feverish dreams ever called up from the grave-yard. If his lips were unworthy, months ago, to touch Constance's cheek or hand, what were they now? He ground his teeth in the bitterness of self-condemnation. It would be easier to bear, if she met him coldly and proudly, than if she yielded at once, as her letter seemed to promise. Her letter! What became of the first one? If that had reached him, how much had been saved! Perhaps Constance's life--certainly much of his own dishonor. The idea did cross him that Flora might have been concerned in intercepting it, but it seemed improbable, and he drove it away. With all his revived devotion to Constance, he did not like to think hardly of her rival; in a lesser degree he had wronged her too.
You will rarely find the sternest or wisest of men disposed to be harsh toward errors that spring from a devotion to themselves. It is only just, as well as natural, that it should be so. If the second cause of the crime did not find an excuse for the defendant, I don't know where he or she would look for an advocate. St. Kevin need not have troubled himself: there were plenty of people ready to push poor Kathleen down. I think it is a pity they canonized him.
Through all Guy's reflections there ran this under-current--”how easily all might have been avoided if the slightest things had turned out differently.” Just so, after a heavy loss at play, a man _will_ keep thinking how he might have won a large stake if he had played one card otherwise, or backed the In instead of the Out. I have heard good judges say that this pertinacious after-thought is the hardest part to bear of all the annoyance. Of course he worries himself about it, just as if ”great results from small beginnings” were not the tritest of all truisms. I don't wish to be historical, or I would reflect how often the Continent has been convulsed by a dish that disagreed with some one, or by a s.h.i.+p that did not start to its time. The Jacobites were very wise in toasting ”the little gentleman in black velvet” that raised the fatal mole-hill. Does not the old romance say that an adder starting from a bush brought on the terrible battle in which all the chivalry of England were strewn like leaves around Arthur on Barren Down?
Guy could still hardly realize to himself the certainty of Constance's approaching death. He tried to fix his thoughts on this till a heavy, listless torpor, like drowsiness, began to steal over him. He roused himself impatiently, and began to think how slow they were going.
Nevertheless, the green _coteaux_ that swell between Rouen and the sea were flying past rapidly, and they arrived at Havre, as Mohun had said, just in time to catch the Southampton packet.
There was threatening of foul weather to windward. The clouds, in ma.s.ses of indigo just edged with copper, were banking up fast, and the ”white horses,” more and more frequent, were beginning to toss their manes against the dark sky-line.
To the few travelers whom the stern necessities of business drove forth, lingering and s.h.i.+vering, from their comfortable inns on to the deck, already wet and unsteady, Livingstone was an object of great interest and many theories. His impatience to be gone was so marked that the conscientious official looked more than once suspiciously at his pa.s.sport.
Mr. Phineas Hackett, of Boston, U.S., Marchand (so self-described in the Livre des Voyageurs at Chamounix), made up his mind that he saw before him the hero of some gigantic forgery, or a fraudulent bankrupt on a large scale; but, just as he had fixed on the astute question which was to drive the first wedge into the mystery, Guy turned in his quick walk and met him full. I doubt if he even saw the smooth-shaven, eager face at his elbow; but he was thinking again of the lost letter, and the savage glare in his eyes made the heart of the ”earnest inquirer” quiver under his black satin waistcoat. ”D----d hard knot, that,” he muttered, disconsolately, and retreated with great loss, to writhe during the rest of the pa.s.sage in an o.r.g.a.s.m of unsatisfied curiosity.
The weather looked worse every moment as the wild north wind came roaring from seaward with a challenge to the vessels that lay tossing within the jetty to come forth and meet him. The waste-pipe of the _Sea-gull_ screamed out shrilly in answer; and the brave old s.h.i.+p, shaking the foam from her bows after every plunge, as her namesake might do from its breast-feathers, steamed out right in the teeth of the gale.
A regular ”Channel night”--a night which Mr. Augustus Winder, Paris traveler to H---- and Co., the mighty mercers of Regent Street, spoke of in after days with a shudder of reminiscence mingling with the pride of one who has endured and survived great peril; who has gone down to the sea in s.h.i.+ps, and seen the wonders of the deep. His a.s.sociates--the _elite_ of the silk-and-ribbon department--youths of polished manners and fascinating address, than whom _non alii leviore saltu_ took the counter in their stride--would gather round the narrator in respectful admiration, just as the young sea-dogs of Nantucket might listen to a veteran hunter of the sperm whale as he tells of a hurricane that caught him in the strait between the Land of Fire and terrible Cape Horn.
Mr. Winder represented himself as having a.s.sisted all on board, from the captain down to the cabin-boy, with his counsel and encouragement, and as having been materially useful to the man at the wheel. The fact was, that he cried a good deal during the night, and was incessant in his appeals to the steward and Heaven for help. In his appeals to the latter power he employed often a strangely modified form of the Apostles'
Creed; for his religious education had been neglected, and this was his solitary and simple idea of an orison. However, no one was present to detract from his triumph or to controvert his concluding words:
”An awful night, gents; but duty's duty, and the firm behaved handsome.
Mr. Sa.s.snett, I'll trouble you for a light, sir.” And so he ignited a fuller-flavored Cuba, and drank, in a sweeter grog, ”Our n.o.ble selves”--_olim haec meminisse juvabit_.
There was one striking contrast on board to the gallant Winder.
Livingstone did not go below, but walked the deck all night long, straining his eyes eagerly forward through the thick darkness and the driving rain.
Captain Weatherby regarded him approvingly, as, halting in his walk, Guy stood near him, upright and steady as a mainmast of Memel pine. ”That's the sort I like to carry,” the old sailor remarked confidentially to his second in command as they shared an amicable grog under the shelter of the companion.
The wind abated toward morning; and, as the dawn broke, they were under the lee of the Wight, and moving steadily into the quiet Solent.