Part 38 (2/2)
”You think that,” said Gawtrey, mildly, and with a sort of pity in his voice; ”yet you refuse to take even the money to change those rags.”
”Because I know not how the money was gained. Ah, Gawtrey, I am not too proud for charity, but I am for--” He checked the word uppermost in his thoughts, and resumed--
”Yes; your occupations seem lucrative. It was but yesterday Birnie gave me fifty napoleons, for which he said you wished change in silver.”
”Did he? The ras-- Well! and you got change for them?”
”I know not why, but I refused.”
”That was right, Philip. Do nothing that man tells you.”
”Will you, then, trust me? You are engaged in some horrible traffic! it may be blood! I am no longer a boy--I have a will of my own--I will not be silently and blindly entrapped to perdition. If I march thither, it shall be with my own consent. Trust me, and this day, or we part to-morrow.”
”Be ruled. Some secrets it is better not to know.”
”It matters not. I have come to my decision--I ask yours.”
Gawtrey paused for some moments in deep thought. At last he lifted his eyes to Philip, and replied:
”Well, then, if it must be. Sooner or later it must have been so; and I want a confidant. You are bold, and will not shrink. You desire to know my occupation--will you witness it to-night?”
”I am prepared: to-night!”
Here a step was heard on the stairs--a knock at the door--and Birnie entered.
He drew aside Gawtrey, and whispered him, as usual, for some moments.
Gawtrey nodded his head, and then said aloud--
”To-morrow we shall talk without reserve before my young friend.
To-night he joins us.”
”To-night!--very well,” said Birnie, with his cold sneer. ”He must take the oath; and you, with your life, will be responsible for his honesty?”
”Ay! it is the rule.”
”Good-bye, then, till we meet,” said Birnie, and withdrew.
”I wonder,” said Gawtrey, musingly, and between his grinded teeth, ”whether I shall ever have a good fair shot at that fellow? Ho! ho!” and his laugh shook the walls.
Morton looked hard at Gawtrey, as the latter now sank down in his chair, and gazed with a vacant stare, that seemed almost to partake of imbecility, upon the opposite wall. The careless, reckless, jovial expression, which usually characterised the features of the man, had for some weeks given place to a restless, anxious, and at times ferocious aspect, like the beast that first finds a sport while the hounds are yet afar, and his limbs are yet strong, in the chase which marks him for his victim, but grows desperate with rage and fear as the day nears its close, and the death-dogs pant hard upon his track. But at that moment the strong features, with their gnarled muscle and iron sinews, seemed to have lost every sign both of pa.s.sion and the will, and to be locked in a stolid and dull repose. At last he looked up at Morton, and said, with a smile like that of an old man in his dotage--
”I'm thinking that my life has been one mistake! I had talents--you would not fancy it--but once I was neither a fool nor a villain! Odd, isn't it? Just reach me the brandy.”
But Morton, with a slight shudder, turned and left the room.
He walked on mechanically, and gained, at last, the superb Quai that borders the Seine; there, the pa.s.sengers became more frequent; gay equipages rolled along; the white and lofty mansions looked fair and stately in the clear blue sky of early summer; beside him flowed the sparkling river, animated with the painted baths that floated on its surface: earth was merry and heaven serene his heart was dark through all: Night within--Morning beautiful without! At last he paused by that bridge, stately with the statues of those whom the caprice of time honours with a name; for though Zeus and his G.o.ds be overthrown, while earth exists will live the wors.h.i.+p of Dead Men;--the bridge by which you pa.s.s from the royal Tuileries, or the luxurious streets beyond the Rue de Rivoli, to the Senate of the emanc.i.p.ated People, and the gloomy and desolate grandeur of the Faubourg St. Germain, in whose venerable haunts the impoverished descendants of the old feudal tyrants, whom the birth of the Senate overthrew, yet congregate;--the ghosts of departed powers proud of the shadows of great names. As the English outcast paused midway on the bridge, and for the first time lifting his head from his bosom, gazed around, there broke at once on his remembrance that terrible and fatal evening, when, hopeless, friendless, desperate, he had begged for charity of his uncle's hireling, with all the feelings that then (so imperfectly and lightly touched on in his brief narrative to Gawtrey) had raged and blackened in his breast, urging to the resolution he had adopted, casting him on the ominous friends.h.i.+p of the man whose guidance he even then had suspected and distrusted. The spot in either city had a certain similitude and correspondence each with each: at the first he had consummated his despair of human destinies--he had dared to forget the Providence of G.o.d--he had arrogated his fate to himself: by the first bridge he had taken his resolve; by the last he stood in awe at the result--stood no less poor--no less abject--equally in rags and squalor; but was his crest as haughty and his eye as fearless, for was his conscience as free and his honour as unstained?
Those arches of stone--those rivers that rolled between, seemed to him then to take a more mystic and typical sense than belongs to the outer world--they were the bridges to the Rivers of his Life. Plunged in thoughts so confused and dim that he could scarcely distinguish, through the chaos, the one streak of light which, perhaps, heralded the reconstruction or regeneration of the elements of his soul;--two pa.s.sengers halted, also by his side.
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