Part 68 (1/2)
Jasper started. ”Arabella! Best of creatures! And can you deign to speak to such a vil---”
”Hush--let us walk. Never mind the advertis.e.m.e.nt of a stranger. I may find a home for a motherless child--a home that will cost you nothing.”
She drew him into the street. ”But can this be the child of--of--Matilda Darrell?”--
”Bella!” replied, in coaxing accents, that most execrable of lady-killers, ”can I trust you?--can you be my friend in spite of my having been such a very sad dog? But money--what can one do without money in this world? 'Had I a heart for falsehood framed, it would ne'er have injured you'--if I had not been so cursedly hard up! And indeed, now, if you would but condescend to forgive and forget, perhaps some day or other we may be Darby and Joan--only, you see, just at this moment I am really not worthy of such a Joan. You know, of course, that I am a widower--not inconsolable.”
”Yes; I read of Mrs. Hammond's death in an old newspaper.”
”And you did not read of her baby's death, too--some weeks afterwards?”'
”No; it is seldom that I see a newspaper. Is the infant dead?”
”Hum--you shall hear.” And Jasper entered into a recital, to which Arabella listened with attentive interest. At the close she offered to take, herself, the child for whom Jasper sought a home. She informed him of her change of name and address. The wretch promised to call that evening with the infant; but he sent the infant, and did not call.
Nor did he present himself again to her eyes, until, several years afterwards, those eyes so luridly welcomed him to Podden Place. But though he did not even condescend to write to her in the mean while, it is probable that Arabella contrived to learn more of his habits and mode of life at Paris than she intimated when they once more met face to face.
And now the reader knows more than Alban Morley, or Guy Darrell, perhaps ever will know, of the grim woman in iron-grey,
CHAPTER X.
”Sweet are the uses of Adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Bears yet a precious jewel in its head.”
MOST PERSONS WILL AGREE THAT THE TOAD IS UGLY AND VENOMOUS, BUT FEW INDEED ARE THE PERSONS WHO CAN BOAST OF HAVING ACTUALLY DISCOVERED THAT ”PRECIOUS JEWEL IN ITS HEAD,” WHICH THE POET a.s.sURES US IS PLACED THERE. BUT CALAMITY MAY BE CLa.s.sED IN TWO GREAT DIVISIONS-- 1ST, THE AFFLICTIONS, WHICH NO PRUDENCE CAN AVERT; 2ND, THE MISFORTUNES, WHICH MEN TAKE ALL POSSIBLE PAINS TO BRING UPON THEMSELVES. AFFLICTIONS OF THE FIRST CLa.s.s MAY BUT CALL FORTH OUR VIRTUES, AND RESULT IN OUR ULTIMATE GOOD. SUCH IS THE ADVERSITY WHICH MAY GIVE US THE JEWEL. BUT TO GET AT THE JEWEL WE MUST KILL THE TOAD. MISFORTUNES OF THE SECOND CLa.s.s BUT TOO OFTEN INCREASE THE ERRORS OR THE VICES BY WHICH THEY WERE CREATED. SUCH IS THE ADVERSITY WHICH IS ALL TOAD AND NO JEWEL. IF YOU CHOOSE TO BREED AND FATTEN YOUR OWN TOADS, THE INCREASE OF THE VENOM ABSORBS EVERY BIT OF THE JEWEL.
Never did I know a man who was an habitual gambler, otherwise than notably inaccurate in his calculations of probabilities in the ordinary affairs of life. Is it that such a man has become so chronic a drunkard of hope, that he sees double every chance in his favour?
Jasper Losely had counted upon two things as matters of course.
1st. Darrell's speedy reconciliation with his only child. 2nd. That Darrell's only child must of necessity be Darrell's heiress.
In both these expectations the gambler was deceived. Darrell did not even answer the letters that Matilda addressed to him from France, to the sh.o.r.es of which Jasper had borne her, and where he had hastened to make her his wife under the a.s.sumed name of Hammond, but his true Christian name of Jasper.
In the disreputable marriage Matilda had made, all the worst parts of her character seemed suddenly revealed to her father's eye, and he saw what he had hitherto sought not to see, the true child of a worthless mother. A mere mesalliance, if palliated by long or familiar acquaintance with the object, however it might have galled him, his heart might have pardoned; but here, without even a struggle of duty, without the ordinary coyness of maiden pride, to be won with so scanty a wooing, by a man who she knew was betrothed to another--the dissimulation, the perfidy, the combined effrontery and meanness of the whole transaction, left no force in Darrell's eyes to the common place excuses of experience and youth. Darrell would not have been Darrell if he could have taken back to his home or his heart a daughter so old in deceit, so experienced in thoughts that dishonour.
Darrell's silence, however, little saddened the heartless bride, and little dismayed the sanguine bridegroom. Both thought that pardon and plenty were but the affair of time a little more or little less. But their funds rapidly diminished; it became necessary to recruit them. One can't live in hotels entirely upon hope. Leaving his bride for a while in a pleasant provincial town, not many hours distant from Paris, Jasper returned to London, intent upon seeing Darrell himself; and, should the father-in-law still defer articles of peace, Jasper believed that he could have no trouble in raising a present supply upon such an El Dorado of future expectations. Darrell at once consented to see Jasper, not at his own house, but at his solicitor's. Smothering all opposing disgust, the proud gentleman deemed this condescension essential to the clear and definite understanding of those resolves upon which depended the worldly station and prospects of the wedded pair.
When Jasper was shown into Mr. Gotobed's office, Darrell was alone, standing near the hearth, and by a single quiet gesture repelled that tender rush towards his breast which Jasper had elaborately prepared; and thus for the first time the two men saw each other, Darrell perhaps yet more resentfully mortified while recognising those personal advantages in the showy profligate which had rendered a daughter of his house so facile a conquest: Jasper (who had chosen to believe that a father-in-law so eminent must necessarily be old and broken) shocked into the most disagreeable surprise by the sight of a man still young, under forty, with a countenance, a port, a presence, that in any a.s.semblage would have attracted the general gaze from his own brilliant self, and looking altogether as unfavourable an object, whether for pathos or for post-obits, as unlikely to breathe out a blessing or to give up the ghost, as the worst brute of a father-in-law could possibly be. Nor were Darrell's words more comforting than his aspect.
”Sir, I have consented to see you, partly that you may learn from my own lips once for all that I admit no man's right to enter my family without my consent, and that consent you will never receive; and partly that, thus knowing each other by sight, each may know the man it becomes him most to avoid. The lady who is now your wife is ent.i.tled by my marriage-settlement to the reversion of a small fortune at my death; nothing more from me is she likely to inherit. As I have no desire that she to whom I once gave the name of daughter should be dependent wholly on yourself for bread, my solicitor will inform you on what conditions I am willing, during my life, to pay the interest of the sum which will pa.s.s to your wife at my death. Sir, I return to your hands the letters that lady has addressed to me, and which, it is easy to perceive, were written at your dictation. No letter from her will I answer. Across my threshold her foot will never pa.s.s. Thus, sir, concludes all possible intercourse between you and myself; what rests is between you and that gentleman.”
Darrell had opened a side-door in speaking the last words--pointed towards the respectable form of Mr. Gotobed standing tall beside his tall desk--and, before Jasper could put in a word, the father-in-law was gone.
With becoming brevity, Mr. Gotobed made Jasper fully aware that not only all, Mr. Darrell's funded or personal property was entirely at his own disposal--that not only the large landed estates he had purchased (and which Jasper had vaguely deemed inherited and in strict entail) were in the same condition--condition enviable to the proprietor, odious to the bridegroom of the proprietor's sole daughter; but that even the fee-simple of the poor Fawley Manor House and lands were vested in Darrell, enc.u.mbered only by the portion of L10,000 which the late Mrs.
Darrell had brought to her husband, and which was settled, at the death of herself and Darrell, on the children of the marriage.
In the absence of marriage-settlements between Jasper and Matilda, that sum at Darrell's death was liable to be claimed by Jasper, in right of his wife, so as to leave no certainty that provision would remain for the support of his wife and family; and the contingent reversion might, in the mean time, be so dealt with as to bring eventual poverty on them all.
”Sir,” said the lawyer, ”I will be quite frank with you. It is my wish, acting for Mr. Darrell, so to settle this sum of L10,000 on your wife, and any children she may bear you, as to place it out of your power to antic.i.p.ate or dispose of it, even with Mrs. Hammond's consent. If you part with that power, not at present a valuable one, you are ent.i.tled to compensation. I am prepared to make that compensation liberal. Perhaps you would prefer communicating with me through your own solicitor. But I should tell you, that the terms are more likely to be advantageous to you in proportion as negotiation is confined to us two. It might, for instance, be expedient to tell your solicitor that your true name (I beg you a thousand pardons) is not Hammond. That is a secret which, the more you can keep it to yourself, the better I think it will be for you. We have no wish to blab it out.”
Jasper, by this time, had somewhat recovered the first shock of displeasure and disappointment; and with that quickness which so erratically darted through a mind that contrived to be dull when anything honest was addressed to its apprehension, he instantly divined that his real name of Losely was worth something. He had no idea of reusing--was, indeed, at that time anxious altogether to ignore and eschew it; but he had a right to it, and a man's rights are not to be resigned for nothing. Accordingly, he said with some asperity: ”I shall resume my family name whenever I choose it. If Mr. Darrell does not like his daughter to be called Mrs. Jasper Losely--or all the malignant t.i.ttle-tattle which my poor father's unfortunate trial might provoke--he must, at least, ask me as a favour to retain the name I have temporarily adopted--a name in my family, sir. A Losely married a Hammond, I forget when--generations ago--you'll see it in the Baronetage. My grandfather, Sir Julian, was not a crack lawyer, but he was a baronet of as good birth as any in the country; and my father, sir”--(Jasper's voice trembled) ”my father,” he repeated, fiercely striking his clenched hand on the table, ”was a gentleman every inch of his body; and I'll pitch any man out of the window who says a word to the contrary!”
”Sir,” said Mr. Gotobed, shrinking towards the bell pull, ”I think, on the whole, I had better see your solicitor.”
Jasper cooled down at that suggestion; and, with a slight apology for natural excitement, begged to know what Mr. Gotobed wished to propose.