Part 49 (1/2)

I saw them.--How can I write it? Yet I will.--I saw them sitting together on the sofa. Their arms were round each other. Her head lay upon his breast; he bent over her with an intense gaze, as of a basilisk, I thought; how do I know that it was not the fierceness of his love? Who could have helped loving her?

Suddenly she raised her head, and looked up in his face--her eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g with tenderness, her cheeks burning with mingled delight and modesty--their lips met, and clung together.... It seemed a life--an eternity--before they parted again. Then the spell was broken, and I rushed from the room.

Faint, giddy, and blind, I just recollect leaning against the wall of the staircase. He came hastily out, and started as he saw me. My face told all.

”What? Eavesdropping?” he said, in a tone of unutterable scorn. I answered nothing, but looked stupidly and fixedly in his face, while he glared at me with that keen, burning, intolerable eye. I longed to spring at his throat, but that eye held me as the snake's holds the deer. At last I found words.

”Traitor! everywhere--in everything--tricking me--supplanting me--in my friends--in my love!”

”Your love? Yours?” And the fixed eye still glared upon me. ”Listen, cousin Alton! The strong and the weak have been matched for the same prize: and what wonder, if the strong man conquers? Go and ask Lillian how she likes the thought of being a Communist's love!”

As when, in a nightmare, we try by a desperate effort to break the spell, I sprang forward, and struck at him, he put my hand by carelessly, and felled me bleeding to the ground. I recollect hardly anything more, till I found myself thrust into the street by sneering footmen, and heard them call after me ”Chartist” and ”Communist” as I rushed along the pavement, careless where I went.

I strode and staggered on through street after street, running blindly against pa.s.sengers, das.h.i.+ng under horses' heads, heedless of warnings and execrations, till I found myself, I know not how, on Waterloo Bridge. I had meant to go there when I left the door. I knew that at least--and now I was there.

I buried myself in a recess of the bridge, and stared around and up and down.

I was alone--deserted even by myself. Mother, sister, friends, love, the idol of my life, were all gone. I could have borne that. But to be shamed, and know that I deserved it; to be deserted by my own honour, self-respect, strength of will--who can bear that?

I could have borne it, had one thing been left--faith in my own destiny--the inner hope that G.o.d had called me to do a work for him.

”What drives the Frenchman to suicide?” I asked myself, arguing ever even in the face of death and h.e.l.l--”His faith in nothing but his own l.u.s.ts and pleasures; and when they are gone, then comes the pan of charcoal--and all is over. What drives the German? His faith in nothing but his own brain. He has fallen down and wors.h.i.+pped that miserable 'Ich' of his, and made that, and not G.o.d's will, the centre and root of his philosophy, his poetry, and his self-idolizing aesthetics; and when it fails him, then for prussic acid, and nonent.i.ty. Those old Romans, too--why, they are the very experimentum crucis of suicide! As long as they fancied that they had a calling to serve the state, they could live on and suffer. But when they found no more work left for them, then they could die--as Porcia died--as Cato--as I ought.

What is there left for me to do? outcast, disgraced, useless, decrepit--”

I looked out over the bridge into the desolate night. Below me the dark moaning river-eddies hurried downward. The wild west-wind howled past me, and leapt over the parapet downward. The huge reflexion of Saint Paul's, the great tap-roots of light from lamp and window that shone upon the lurid stream, pointed down--down--down. A black wherry shot through the arch beneath me, still and smoothly downward. My brain began to whirl madly--I sprang upon the step.--A man rushed past me, clambered on the parapet, and threw up his arms wildly.--A moment more, and he would have leapt into the stream. The sight recalled me to my senses--say, rather, it reawoke in me the spirit of manhood. I seized him by the arm, tore him down upon the pavement, and held him, in spite of his frantic struggles. It was Jemmy Downes! Gaunt, ragged, sodden, blear-eyed, drivelling, the worn-out gin-drinker stood, his momentary paroxysm of strength gone, trembling and staggering.

”Why won't you let a cove die? Why won't you let a cove die? They're all dead--drunk, and poisoned, and dead! What is there left?”--he burst out suddenly in his old ranting style--”what is there left on earth to live for? The prayers of liberty are answered by the laughter of tyrants; her sun is sunk beneath the ocean wave, and her pipe put out by the raging billows of aristocracy! Those starving millions of Kennington Common--where are they? Where? I axes you,” he cried fiercely, raising his voice to a womanish scream--”where are they?”

”Gone home to bed, like sensible people; and you had better go too.”

”Bed! I sold ours a month ago; but we'll go. Come along, and I'll show you my wife and family; and we'll have a tea-party--Jacob's Island tea. Come along!

”Flea, flea, unfortunate flea!

Bereft of his wife and his small family!”

He clutched my arm, and dragging me off towards the Surrey side, turned down Stamford Street.

I followed half perforce; and the man seemed quite demented--whether with gin or sorrow I could not tell. As he strode along the pavement, he kept continually looking back, with a perplexed terrified air, as if expecting some fearful object.

”The rats!--the rats! don't you see 'em coming out of the gullyholes, atween the area railings--dozens and dozens?”

”No; I saw none.”

”You lie; I hear their tails whisking; there's their s.h.i.+ny hats a glistening, and every one on 'em with peelers' staves! Quick! quick! or they'll have me to the station-house.”

”Nonsense!” I said; ”we are free men! What are the policemen to us?”

”You lie!” cried he, with a fearful oath, and a wrench at my arm which almost threw me down. ”Do you call a sweater's man a free man?”

”You a sweater's man?”