“I eagerly asked the nature of this objection. Was there some cold chill of disappointment in store for me, after all?
“‘Well, you see, Clem,’ said my mother, with some little hesitation, ‘Miss Wentworth is engaged almost all through the day, as her pupils live at long distances from one another, and she has to waste a good deal of time in going backwards and forwards; so the only time she can possibly give Lizzie is either very early in the morning or rather late in the evening. Now I should prefer the evening, as I should like to hear the dear child’s lessons; but the question is, would you object to the noise of the piano while you are at home?’
“Would I object? Would I object to the music of the spheres? In spite of the grand capabilities for falsehood and hypocrisy which had been developed in my nature since the previous evening, it was as much as I could do to answer my mother’s question deliberately, to the effect that I didn’t think I should mind the music-lessons much.
“‘You’ll be out generally, you know, Clem,’ my mother said.
“‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘of course, if I found the music in any way a nuisance.’
“Coming home from the City the next day, I felt like a schoolboy who turns his back upon all the hardships of his life, on some sunny summer holiday. The rattling Hansom seemed a fairy car, that was bearing me in triumph through a region of brightness and splendour. The sunlit suburban roads were enchanted glades; and I think I should have been scarcely surprised to see Aladdin’s jewelled fruit hanging on the trees in the villa gardens, or the gigantic wings of Sinbad’s roc overshadowing the hills of Sydenham. A wonderful transformation had changed the earth to fairy land, and it was in vain that I fought against the subtle influence in the air around me.
“Oh, was I in love, was I really in love at last, with a young lady whose face I had only looked upon eight-and-forty hours before? Was I, who had flirted with the Miss Balderbys; and half lost my heart to Lucy Sedwicke, the surgeon’s sister; and corresponded for nearly a year with Clara Carpenter, with the sanction of both our houses, and everything en règle, only to be jilted ignominiously for the sake of an evangelical curate? — was I, who had railed at the foolish passion — (I have one of Miss Carpenter’s long tresses in the desk on which I am writing, sealed in a sheet of letter-paper, with Swift’s savage inscription, ‘Only a woman’s hair,’ on the cover) — was I caught at last by a pair of hazel eyes and a Raffaellesque profile? Were the wings that had fluttered in so many flames burnt and maimed by the first breath of this new fire? I was ashamed of my silly fancy in one moment, and proud of my love in the next. I was ten years younger all of a sudden, and my heart was all a-glow with chivalrous devotion for this beautiful stranger. I reasoned with myself, and ridiculed my madness, and yet yielded like the veriest craven to the sweet intoxication. I gave the driver of the Hansom five shillings. Had I not a right to pay him a trifle extra for driving me through fairy-land?
“What had we for dinner that day? I have a vague idea that I ate cherry tart and roast veal, fried soles, boiled custard, and anchovy sauce, all mixed together. I know that the meal seemed to endure for the abnormal period of half-a-dozen hours or so; and yet it was only seven o’clock when we adjourned to the drawing-room, and Miss Wentworth was not due until half-past seven. My niece was all in a flutter of expectation, and ran out of the drawing-room window every now and then to see if the new governess was coming. She need not have had that trouble, poor child, had I been inclined to give her information; since, from the chair in which I had seated myself to read the evening papers, I could see the road along which Miss Wentworth must come. My eyes wandered very often from the page before me, and fixed themselves upon this dusty suburban road; and presently I saw a parasol, rather a shabby one, and then a slender figure coming quickly towards our gate, and then the face, which I am weak enough to think the most beautiful face in Christendom.
“Since then Miss Wentworth has come three times a week; and somehow or other I have never found myself in any way bored by ‘Non più mesta,’ or even the major and minor scales, which, as interpreted by a juvenile performer, are not especially enthralling to the ear of the ordinary listener. I read my books or papers, or stroll upon the lawn, while the lesson is going on, and every now and then I hear Margaret’s — I really must write of her as Margaret; it is such a nuisance to write Miss Wentworth — pretty voice explaining the importance of a steady position of the wrist, or the dexterous turning over or under of a thumb, or something equally interesting. And then, when the lesson is concluded, my mother rouses herself from her after-dinner nap, and asks Margaret to take a cup of tea, and even insists on her accepting that feminine hospitality. And then we sit talking in the tender summer dusk, or in the subdued light of a shaded lamp on the piano. We talk of books; and it is wonderful to me to find how Margaret’s tastes and opinions coincide with mine. Miss Carpenter was stupid about books, and used to call Carlyle nonsensical; and never really enjoyed Dickens half as much as she pretended. I have lent Margaret some of my books; and a little shower of withered rose-leaves dropped from the pages of ‘Wilhelm Meister,’ after she had returned me the volume. I have put them in an envelope, and sealed it. I may as well burn Miss Carpenter’s hair, by the way.
“Though it is only a month since the evening on which I saw the card in the window at Wandsworth, Margaret and I seem to be old friends. After a year Miss Carpenter and I were as far as ever — farther than ever, perhaps — from understanding each other; but with Margaret I need no words to tell me that I am understood. A look, a smile, a movement of the graceful head, is a more eloquent answer than the most elaborate of Miss Carpenter’s rhapsodies. She was one of those girls whom her friends call ‘gushing;’ and she called Byron a ‘love,’ and Shelley an ‘angel:’ but if you tried her with a stanza that hasn’t been done to death in ‘Gems of Verse,’ or ‘Strings of Poetic Pearls,’ or ‘Drawing-room Table Lyrics,’ she couldn’t tell whether you were quoting Byron or Ben Jonson. But with Margaret — Margaret, — sweet name! If it were not that I live in perpetual terror of the day when the dilettante New Zealander will edit this manuscript, I think I should write that lovely name over and over again for a page or so. If the New Zealander should exercise his editorial discretion, and delete my raptures, it wouldn’t matter; but I might furnish him with the text for an elaborate disquisition on the manners and customs of English lovers. Let me be reasonable about my dear love, if I can. My dear love — do I dare to call her that already, when, for anything I know to the contrary, there may be another evangelical curate in the background?
“We seem to be old friends; and yet I know so little of her. She shuns all allusion to her home or her past history. Now and then she has spoken of her father; always tenderly, but always with a sigh; and I fancy that a deepening shadow steals over her face when she mentions that name.
“Friendly as we are, I can never induce her to let me see her home, though my mother has suggested that I should do so. She is accustomed to go about by herself, she says, after dark, as well as in the daytime. She seems as fearless as a modern Una; and that would indeed be a savage beast which could molest such a pure and lovely creature.”
CHAPTER VII.
AFTER FIVE-AND-THIRTY YEARS.
Joseph Wilmot waited patiently enough, in all outward seeming, for the arrival of the steamer. Everybody was respectful to him now, paying deference to his altered guise, and he went where he liked without question or hindrance.
There were several people waiting for passengers who were expected to arrive by the Electra, and the coming of the steamer was hailed by a feeble cheer from the bystanders grouped about the landing-place.
The passengers began to come on shore at about eleven o’clock. There were a good many children and English nursemaids; three or four military-looking men, dressed in loose garments of grey and nankeen colour; several ladies, all more or less sunburnt; a couple of ayahs; three men-servants; and an aristocratic-looking man of about fifty-five, dressed,
unlike the rest of the travellers, in fine broadcloth, with a black-satin cravat, a gold pin, a carefully brushed hat, and varnished boots.
His clothes, in fact, were very much of the same fashion as those which Joseph Wilmot had chosen for himself.
This man was Henry Dunbar; tall and broad-chested, with grey hair and moustache, and with a haughty smile upon his handsome face.
Joseph Wilmot stood among the little crowd, motionless as a statue, watching his old betrayer.
“Not much changed,” he murmured; “very little changed! Proud, and selfish, and cruel then — proud, and selfish, and cruel now. He has grown older, and stouter, and greyer; but he is the same man he was five-and-thirty years ago. I can see it all in his face.”
He advanced as Henry Dunbar landed, and approached the Anglo-Indian.
“Mr. Dunbar, I believe?” he said, removing his hat.
“Yes, I am Mr. Dunbar.”
“I have been sent from the office in St. Gundolph Lane, sir,” returned Joseph; “I have a letter for you from Mr. Balderby. I came to meet you, and to be of service to you.”
Henry Dunbar looked at him doubtfully.
“You are not one of the clerks in St. Gundolph Lane?” he said.
“No, Mr. Dunbar.”
“I thought as much; you don’t look like a clerk; but who are you, then?”
“I will tell you presently, sir. I am a substitute for another person, who was taken ill upon the road. But there is no time to speak of that now. I came to be of use to you. Shall I see after your luggage?”
“Yes, I shall be glad if you will do so.”
“You have a servant with you, Mr. Dunbar?”
“No, my valet was taken ill at Malta, and I left him behind.”
“Indeed!” exclaimed Joseph Wilmot; “that was a misfortune.”
A sudden flash of light sparkled in his eyes as he spoke.
“Yes, it was devilish provoking. You’ll find the luggage packed, and directed to Portland Place; be so good as to see that it is sent off immediately by the speediest route. There is a portmanteau in my cabin, and my travelling-desk. I require those with me. All the rest can go on.”
“I will see to it, sir.”
“Thank you; you are very good. At what hotel are you staying?”
“I have not been to any hotel yet. I only arrived this morning. The Electra was not expected until to-morrow.”
“I will go on to the Dolphin, then,” returned Mr. Dunbar; “and I shall be glad if you will follow me directly you have attended to the luggage. I want to get to London to-night, if possible.”
Henry Dunbar walked away, holding his head high in the air, and swinging his cane as he went. Ha was one of those men who most confidently believe in their own merits. The sin he had committed in his youth sat very lightly upon his conscience. If he thought about that old story at all, it was only to remember that he had been very badly used by his father and his Uncle Hugh.
And the poor wretch who had helped him — the clever, bright-faced, high-spirited lad who had acted as his tool and accomplice — was as completely forgotten as if he had never existed.
Mr. Dunbar was ushered into a great sunny sitting-room at the Dolphin; a vast desert of Brussels carpet, with little islands of chairs and tables scattered here and there. He ordered a bottle of soda-water, sank into an easy-chair, and took up the Times newspaper.
But presently he threw it down impatiently, and took his watch from his waistcoat-pocket.
Attached to the watch there was a locket of chased yellow gold. Henry Dunbar opened this locket, which contained the miniature of a beautiful girl, with fair rippling hair as bright as burnished gold, and limpid blue eyes.
“My poor little Laura!” he murmured; “I wonder whether she will be glad to see me. She was a mere baby when she left India. It isn’t likely she’ll remember me. But I hope she may be glad of my coming back — I hope she may be glad.”
He put the locket again in its place, and took a letter from his breast-pocket. It was directed in a woman’s hand, and the envelope was surrounded by a deep border of black.
“If there’s any faith to be put in this, she will be glad to have me home at last,” Henry Dunbar said, as he drew the letter out of its envelope.
He read one passage softly to himself.
“If anything can console me for the loss of my dear grandfather, it is the thought that you will come back at last, and that I shall see you once more. You can never know, dearest father, what a bitter sorrow this cruel separation has been to me. It has seemed so hard that we who are so rich should have been parted as we have been, while poor children have their fathers with them. Money seems such a small thing when it cannot bring us the presence of those we love. And I do love you, dear papa, truly and devotedly, though I cannot even remember your face, and have not so much as a picture of you to recall you to my recollection.”
The letter was a very long one, and Henry Dunbar was still reading it when Joseph Wilmot came into the room.
The Anglo-Indian crushed the letter into his pocket, and looked up languidly.
“Have you seen to all that?” he asked.
“Yes, Mr. Dunbar; the luggage has been sent off.”
Joseph Wilmot had not yet removed his hat. He had rather an undecided manner, and walked once or twice up and down the room, stopping now and then, and then walking on again, in an unsettled way; like a man who has some purpose in his mind, yet is oppressed by a feverish irresolution as to the performance of that purpose.
But Mr. Dunbar took no notice of this. He sat with the newspaper in his hand, and did not deign to lift his eyes to his companion, after that first brief question. He was accustomed to be waited upon, and to look upon the people who served him as beings of an inferior class: and he had no idea of troubling himself about this gentlemanly-looking clerk from St. Gundolph Lane.
Joseph Wilmot stopped suddenly upon the other side of the table, near which Mr. Dunbar sat, and, laying his hand upon it, said quietly —
“You asked me just now who I was, Mr. Dunbar.”
The banker looked up at him with haughty indifference.
“Did I? Oh, yea, I remember; and you told me you came from the office. That is quite enough.”
“Pardon me, Mr. Dunbar, it is not quite enough. You are mistaken: I did not say I came from the office in St. Gundolph Lane. I told you, on the contrary, that I came here as a substitute for another person, who was ordered to meet you.”
“Indeed! That is pretty much the same thing. You seem a very agreeable fellow, and will, no doubt, be quite as useful as the original person could have been. It was very civil of Mr. Balderby to send some one to meet me — very civil indeed.”
The Anglo-Indian’s head sank back upon the morocco cushion of the easy-chair, and he looked languidly at his companion, with half-closed eyes.
Joseph Wilmot removed his hat.
“I don’t think you’ve looked at me very closely, have you, Mr. Dunbar?” he said.
“Have I looked at you closely!” exclaimed the banker. “My good fellow, what do you mean?”
“Look me full in the face, Mr. Dunbar, and tell me if you see anything there that reminds you of the past.”
Henry Dunbar started.
He opened his eyes widely enough this time, and started at the handsome face before him. It was as handsome as his own, and almost as aristocratic-looking. For Nature has odd caprices now and then, and had made very little distinction between the banker, who was worth half a million, and the runaway convict, who was not worth sixpence.
“Have I met you before?” he said. “In India?”
“No, Mr. Dunbar, not in India. You know that as well as I do. Carry your mind farther back. Carry it back to the time before you went to India.”
“What then?”
“Do you remember losing a heap of money on the Derby, and being in so desperate a frame of mind that you took the holster-pistols down from their place above the chimney-piece in
your barrack sitting-room, and threatened to blow your brains out? Do you remember, in your despair, appealing to a lad who served you, and who loved you, better perhaps than a brother would have loved you, though he was your inferior by birth and station, and the son of a poor, hard-working woman? Do you remember entreating this boy — who had a knack of counterfeiting other people’s signatures, but who had never used his talent for any guilty purpose until that hour, so help me Heaven! — to aid you in a scheme by which your creditors were to be kept quiet till you could get the money to pay them? Do you remember all this? Yes, I see you do — the answer is written on your face; and you remember me — Joseph Wilmot.”
He struck his hand upon his breast, and stood with his eyes fixed upon the other’s face. They had a strange expression in them, those eyes — a sort of hungry, eager look, as if the very sight of his old foe was a kind of food that went some way towards satisfying this man’s vengeful fury.
“I do remember you,” Henry Dunbar said slowly. He had turned deadly pale, and cold drops of sweat had broken out upon his forehead: he wiped them away with his perfumed cambric handkerchief as he spoke.
“You do remember me?” the other man repeated, with no change in the expression of his face.
“I do; and, believe me, I am heartily sorry for the past. I dare say you fancy I acted cruelly towards you on that wretched day in St. Gundolph Lane; but I really could scarcely act otherwise. I was so harassed and tormented by my own position, that I could not be expected to get myself deeper into the mire by interceding for you. However, now that I am my own master, I can make it up to you. Rely upon it, my good fellow, I’ll atone for the past.”
“Atone for the past!” cried Joseph Wilmot. “Can you make me an honest man, or a respectable member of society? Can you remove the stamp of the felon from me, and win for me the position I might have held in this hard world but for you? Can you give me back the five-and-thirty blighted years of my life, and take the blight from them? Can you heal my mother’s broken heart, — broken, long ago by my disgrace? Can you give me back the dead? Or can you give me pleasant memories, or peaceful thoughts, or the hope of God’s forgiveness? No, no; you can give me none of these.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 284