Part 67 (2/2)
And as for _egalite!_--the son of a shoemaker who was _homme de lettres_, and wrote in a journal, inserted a jest on the Count's courts.h.i.+p. ”All men are equal before the pistol,” said the Count; and knowing that in that respect he was equal to most, having practised at _poupees_ from the age of fourteen, he called out the son of Crispin and shot him through the lungs. Another of Jasper's travelling friends was an _enfant die peuple_--boasted that he was a foundling. He made verses of lugubrious strain, and taught Jasper how to shuffle at whist. The third, like Jasper, had been designed for trade; and, like Jasper, he had a soul above it. In politics he was a Communist--in talk Philanthropist. He was the cleverest man of them all, and is now at the galleys. The fate of his two compatriots--more obscure it is not my duty to discover. In that peculiar walk of life Jasper is as much as I can possibly manage.
It need not be said that Jasper carefully abstained from reminding his old city friends of his existence. It was his object and his hope to drop all ident.i.ty with that son of a convict who had been sent out of the way to escape humiliation. In this resolve he was the more confirmed because he had no old city friends out of whom anything could be well got. His poor uncle, who alone of his relations in England had been privy to his change of name, was dead; his end hastened by grief for William Losely's disgrace, and the bad reports he had received from France of the conduct of William Losely's son. That uncle had left, in circ.u.mstances too straitened to admit the waste of a s.h.i.+lling, a widow of very rigid opinions; who, if ever by some miraculous turn in the wheel of fortune she could have become rich enough to slay a fatted calf, would never have given the s.h.i.+n-bone of it to a prodigal like Jasper, even had he been her own penitent son, instead of a graceless step-nephew. Therefore, as all civilisation proceeds westward, Jasper turned his face from the east; and had no more idea of recrossing Temple Bar in search of fortune, friends, or kindred, than a modern Welshman would dream of a pilgrimage to Asian sh.o.r.es to re-embrace those distant relatives whom Hu Gadarn left behind him countless centuries ago, when that mythical chief conducted his faithful Cymrians over the Hazy Sea to this happy island of Honey.
[Mel Ynnys--Isle of Honey. One of the poetic names given to England in the language of the ancient Britons.]
Two days after his rencontre with Arabella in the Green Park, the _soi-disant_ Hammond having, in the interim, learned that Darrell was immensely rich, and that Matilda was his only surviving child, did not fail to find himself in the Green Park again--and again--and again!
Arabella, of course, felt how wrong it was to allow him to accost her, and walk by one side of her while Miss Darrell was on the other. But she felt, also, as if it would be much more wrong to slip out and meet him alone. Not for worlds would she again have placed herself in such peril.
To refuse to meet him at all?--she had not strength enough for that! Her joy at seeing him was so immense. And nothing could be more respectful than Jasper's manner and conversation. Whatever of warmer and more impa.s.sioned sentiment was exchanged between them pa.s.sed in notes. Jasper had suggested to Arabella to represent him to Matilda as some near relation. But Arabella refused all such disguise. Her sole claim to self-respect was in considering him solemnly engaged to her--the man she was to marry.
And, after the second time they thus met, she said to Matilda, who had not questioned her by a word-by a look: ”I was to be married to that gentleman before my father died; we are to be married as soon as we have something to live upon.”
Matilda made some commonplace but kindly rejoinder. And thus she became raised into Arabella's confidence, so far as that confidence could be given, without betraying Jasper's real name or one darker memory in herself. Luxury, indeed, it was to Arabella to find, at last, some one to whom she could speak of that betrothal in which her whole future was invested--of that affection which was her heart's sheet-anchor--of that home, humble it might be and far off, but to which Time rarely fails to bring the Two, if never weary of the trust to become as One. Talking thus, Arabella forgot the relations.h.i.+p of pupil and teacher; it was as woman to woman--girl to girl--friend to friend. Matilda seemed touched by the confidence--flattered to possess at last another's secret.
Arabella was a little chafed that she did not seem to admire Jasper as much as Arabella thought the whole world must admire. Matilda excused herself. ”She had scarcely noticed Mr. Hammond. Yes: she had no doubt he would be considered handsome; but she owned, though it might be bad taste, that she preferred a pale complexion, with auburn hair;” and then she sighed and looked away, as if she had, in the course of her secret life, encountered some fatal pale complexion, with never-to-be-forgotten auburn hair. Not a word was said by either Matilda or Arabella as to concealing from Mr. Darrell these meetings with Mr. Hammond. Perhaps Arabella could not stoop to ask that secrecy; but there was no necessity to ask; Matilda was always too rejoiced to have something to conceal.
Now, in these interviews, Jasper scarcely ever addressed himself to Matilda; not twenty spoken words could have pa.s.sed between them; yet, in the very third interview, Matilda's sly fingers had closed on a sly note. And from that day, in each interview, Arabella walking in the centre, Jasper on one side, Matilda the other--behind Arabella's back-pa.s.sed the sly fingers and the sly notes, which Matilda received and answered. Not more than twelve or fourteen times was even this interchange effected. Darrell was about to move to Fawley. All such meetings would be now suspended. Two or three mornings before that fixed for leaving London, Matilda's room was found vacant. She was gone.
Arabella was the first to discover her flight, the first to learn its cause. Matilda had left on her writing-table a letter for Miss Fossett. It was very short, very quietly expressed, and it rested her justification on a note from Jasper, which she enclosed--a note in which that gallant hero, ridiculing the idea that he could ever have been in love with Arabella, declared that he would destroy himself if Matilda refused to fly. She need not fear such angelic confidence in him. No!
Even
Had he a heart for falsehood framed, He ne'er could injure her.”
Stifling each noisier cry--but panting--gasping--literally half out of her mind, Arabella rushed into Darrell's study. He, unsuspecting man, calmly bending over his dull books, was startled by her apparition. Few minutes sufficed to tell him all that it concerned him to learn. Few brief questions, few pa.s.sionate answers, brought him to the very worst.
Who, and what, was this Mr. Hammond? Heaven of heavens! the son of William Losely--of a transported felon!
Arabella exulted in a reply which gave her a moment's triumph over the rival who had filched from her such a prize. Roused from his first misery and sense of abas.e.m.e.nt in this discovery, Darrell's wrath was naturally poured, not on the fugitive child, but on the frontless woman, who, buoyed up by her own rage and sense of wrong, faced him, and did not cower. She, the faithless governess, had presented to her pupil this convict's son in another name; she owned it--she had trepanned into the snares of so vile a fortune-hunter an ignorant child: she might feign amaze--act remorse--she must have been the man's accomplice. Stung, amidst all the bewilderment of her anguish, by this charge, which, at least, she did not deserve, Arabella tore from her bosom Jasper's recent letters to herself--letters all devotion and pa.s.sion--placed them before Darrell, and bade him read. Nothing thought she then of name and fame--nothing but of her wrongs and of her woes. Compared to herself, Matilda seemed the perfidious criminal--she the injured victim. Darrell but glanced over the letters; they were signed ”your loving husband.”
”What is this?” he exclaimed; ”are you married to the man?”
”Yes,” cried Arabella, ”in the eyes of Heaven!”
To Darrell's penetration there was no mistaking the significance of those words and that look; and his wrath redoubled. Anger in him, when once roused, was terrible; he had small need of words to vent it.
His eye withered, his gesture appalled. Conscious but of one burning firebrand in brain and heart--of a sense that youth, joy, and hope were for ever gone, that the world could never be the same again--Arabella left the house, her character lost, her talents useless, her very means of existence stopped. Who henceforth would take her to teach? Who henceforth place their children under her charge?
She shrank into a gloomy lodging--she--shut herself up alone with her despair. Strange though it may seem, her anger against Jasper was slight as compared with the in tensity of her hate to Matilda. And stranger still it may seem, that as her thoughts recovered from their first chaos, she felt more embittered against the world, more crushed by a sense of shame, and yet galled by a no less keen sense of injustice, in recalling the scorn with which Darrell had rejected all excuse for her conduct in the misery it had occasioned her, than she did by the consciousness of her own lamentable errors. As in Darrell's esteem there was something that, to those who could appreciate it, seemed invaluable, so in his contempt to those who had cherished that esteem there was a weight of ignominy, as if a judge had p.r.o.nounced a sentence that outlaws the rest of life.
Arabella had not much left out of her munificent salary. What she had hitherto laid by had pa.s.sed to Jasper--defraying, perhaps, the very cost of his flight with her treacherous rival. When her money was gone, she p.a.w.ned the poor relics of her innocent happy girlhood, which she had been permitted to take from her father's home, and had borne with her wherever she went, like household G.o.ds, the prize-books, the lute, the costly work-box, the very bird-cage, all which the reader will remember to have seen in her later life, the books never opened--the lute broken, the bird long, long, long vanished from the cage! Never did she think she should redeem those pledges from that Golgotha, which takes, rarely to give back, so many hallowed tokens of the Dreamland called ”Better Days,”--the trinkets worn at the first ball, the ring that was given with the earliest love-vow--yea, even the very bells and coral that pleased the infant in his dainty cradle, and the very Bible in which the lips, that now bargain for sixpence more, read to some grey-haired father on his bed of death!
Soon the sums thus miserably raised were as miserably doled away. With a sullen apathy the woman contemplated famine. She would make no effort to live--appeal to no relations, no friends. It was a kind of vengeance she took on others, to let herself drift on to death. She had retreated from lodging to lodging, each obscurer, more desolate than the other. Now, she could no longer pay rent for the humblest room; now, she was told to go forth--whither? She knew not--cared not--took her way towards the River, as by that instinct which, when the mind is diseased, tends towards self-destruction, scarce less involuntarily than it turns, in health, towards self-preservation. Just as she pa.s.sed under the lamp-light at the foot of Westminster Bridge, a man looked at her, and seized her arm. She raised her head with a chilly, melancholy scorn, as if she had received an insult--as if she feared that the man knew the stain upon her name, and dreamed, in his folly, that the dread of death might cause her to sin again.
”Do you not know me?” said the man; ”more strange that I should recognise you! Dear, dear, and what a dress!--how you are altered! Poor thing!”
At the words ”poor thing” Arabella burst into tears; and in those tears the heavy cloud on her brain seemed to melt away.
”I have been inquiring, seeking for you everywhere, Miss,” resumed the man. ”Surely, you know me now! Your poor aunt's lawyer! She is no more--died last week. She has left you all she had in the world; and a very pretty income it is, too, for a single lady.”
Thus it was that we find Arabella installed in the dreary comforts of Podden Place. ”She exchanged,” she said, ”in honour to her aunt's memory, her own name for that of Crane, which her aunt had borne--her own mother's maiden name.” She a.s.sumed, though still so young, that t.i.tle of ”Mrs.” which spinsters, grown venerable, moodily adopt when they desire all mankind to know that henceforth they relinquish the vanities of tender misses--that, become mistress of themselves, they defy and spit upon our worthless s.e.x, which, whatever its repentance, is warned that it repents in vain. Most of her aunt's property was in houses, in various districts of Bloombury. Arabella moved from one to the other of these tenements, till she settled for good into the dullest of all. To make it duller yet, by contrast with the past, the Golgotha for once gave up its buried treasures--broken lute, birdless cage!
Somewhere about two years after Matilda's death, Arabella happened to be in the office of the agent who collected her house-rents, when a well-dressed man entered, and, leaning over the counter, said: ”There is an advertis.e.m.e.nt in to-day's Times about a lady who offers a home, education, and so forth, to any little motherless girl; terms moderate, as said lady loves children for their own sake. Advertiser refers to your office for particulars--give them!”
The agent turned to his books; and Arabella turned towards the inquirer.
”For whose child do you want a home, Jasper Losely?”
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