CHAPTER II. “OH, PITIFUL YOUNG MAN, STRUCK BLIND WITH BEAUTY.”
Edith Champion was one of the handsomest women in London, a woman whose progress was followed at all great parties and public gatherings by the hum of an admiring multitude, whispering her praises, or telling the uninformed that the dark-eyed woman with the tall, Juno-like form was the Mrs. Champion. Four years ago she had been one of a trio of lovely sisters, the daughters of an impecunious Yorkshire squire, a man who had wasted a fine fortune on the turf, and was ending his days in debt and difficulty at a moated grange in the West Riding. The three lovely sisters were such obviously marketable property that aunts and uncles were quick to compassionate their forlorn condition, and they were duly launched in London society. The two elder were young women of singular calmness and perspicuity, and got themselves well married, the first to a wealthy baronet, the second to a marquis, without giving trouble to anybody concerned in the transaction; but the youngest girl, Edith, showed herself wayward and wilful, and expressed an absurd desire to marry Gerard Hillersdon, the man she loved. This desire was frustrated, but not so promptly as it should have been, and the young lady contrived to make her attachment public property before uncles or aunts could crush the flowers of sentiment under the hoof of worldly wisdom. But the sentiment was crushed somehow, the world knew not with how many tears, or with what girlish pleading for mercy, and the season after this foolish entanglement Edith Champion accepted the addresses of an elderly stockbroker and reputed millionaire, who made a handsomer settlement than the middle-aged marquis had made upon her elder sister.
Mr. Champion was good-natured and unsuspicious, his mind being almost entirely absorbed in that exciting race for wealth which had been the business of his life from boyhood. He wanted a beautiful wife as the solace of his declining years, and the one tiling needed to complete the costly home which he had built for himself on a heathy ridge among those romantic hills where Surrey overlooks Sussex. The wife was the final piece of furniture to be chosen for this splendid mansion, and he had chosen that crowning ornament in a deliberate and leisurely manner. He was the last man to plague himself by any subtle questionings as to the sentiments of the lady so honoured, or to be harassed by doubts of her fidelity. He had no objection to seeing his wife surrounded by youthful admirers. Was she not meant to be admired, as much as his pictures and statues? He found no fault with the chosen band of “nice boys” who attended her afternoon at home, or crowded the back of her box when the curtain was down at opera-house or theatre; and if Gerard Hillersdon were more constant than all the others in his attendance, the fact never presented itself in any unpleasant light to Mr. Champion. Had he given himself the trouble to think about his wife’s relations with her cavaliere servente he would most assuredly have told himself that she was much too well placed to overstep the limits of prudence, and that no woman in her right senses would abandon a palace in Surrey and a model house in Hertford Street for the caravanseries that lodge the divorcée. He would have remembered also with satisfaction that his wife’s settlement, liberal as it was, would be made null and void by a divorce.
And thus for three years of his life — perhaps the best and brightest years in a man’s life, from twenty-five to twenty-eight — Gerard Hillersdon had given up all his thoughts, aspirations, and dreams to the most hopeless of all love affairs, an attachment to an irreproachable matron, a woman who had accepted her lot as an unloving wife and who meant to do her duty, in her own cold and measured way, to an unloved husband; yet who clung to the memory of a girlish love and fostered the passion of her lover, caring, or at least seeming to care, nothing, for his peace, and never estimating the wrong she was doing him.
To this passion everything in the young man’s life had been sacrificed. He had begun his career on fire with ambition, believing in his capacity to succeed in more than one profession; and in the first flush of his manhood he had done some really good work in imaginative literature, had written a novel which took the town, and had made his brief success as an original writer, romantic, light of touch, unconventional; but he had been drifted into idleness by a woman who treated him as some queen or princess in the days of chivalry might have treated her page. She spoilt his career, just when a lasting success was within his reach, needing only earnestness and industry on his part. She had wasted the golden days of his youth, and had given him in exchange only smiles and sweet words, and a place at her dinner-table in a house where he had lost all prestige from being seen too often, the one inevitable guest whose presence counted for nothing. He had been in all things her slave, offending the people she disliked, and wasting his attention and his substance on her favourites, faithful to her caprice of the hour, were it never so foolish.
And now after three years of this fond slavery the end had come. He was ruined, and was worse than ruined. He had been living from hand to mouth, writing for magazines and newspapers, earning a good deal of money in a casual way, but never enough to keep him out of debt; and now he saw bankruptcy staring him in the face, and with bankruptcy dishonour, for he had gambling debts which, as the son of a country parson, he ought never to have incurred, and which it would be disgrace not to pay.
Had this dread of disgrace been his only trouble, he might have treated it as other men have treated such dark episodes. He might have told himself that England is not the world, and that there is always room for youth and daring under the tropic stars, and that the name with which a man has been labelled at starting in life is not so interwoven with his being that he need mind changing it for another, and giving himself a fresh start. He might have reasoned thus had he still felt the delight in life which makes the adventurer live down shame and set his face to untrodden worlds across the sea. But he had no such delight. The zest of life had gone out of him. Love itself had lost all fervour. He hardly knew whether he cared any more for the woman to whom he had sacrificed his youth, whether the flame of love had not expired altogether amidst the vacuity of two conventional existences. The only thing which he knew for certain was that he loved no other woman, and that ho took no interest in life adequate to the struggle it would cost him to live through the crisis that was coming.
And thus, with all serious consideration, he had decided upon a sudden exit from a scene which no longer interested him. Yet with a curious inconsistency he wanted to spend his last hours in Edith Champion’s society, and never had he seemed gayer or happier than he seemed that evening at the triangular dinner in Hertford Street.
They were dining in a little octagon room at the back of the house, a room upholstered like a tent, and furnished in so Oriental a fashion that it seemed a solecism to be sitting upon chaire, and not to be eating pillau or kibobs with one’s fingers. The clerical cousin was a very agreeable personage — plump and rosy, strongly addicted to good living, and looking upon the beautiful Mrs. Champion as a being whose normal state was to be adored by well-bred young men, and to dispense hospitality to poor relations.
Not a word was said about Justin Jermyn throughout the dinner, but while Gerard was helping Mrs. Champion to put on her cloak, she asked suddenly —
“How did you get on with the Fate-reader?”
“Very badly. He struck me as an insolent farceur. I wonder society can encourage such a person.”
“Yes, he is decidedly insolent. I was rather scared by the things he said to me, but a few minutes’ thought showed me that his talk was mere guess work. I shall never ask him to any party of mine.”
“You must have rushed away in a great hurry. I was only five minutes closeted with the oracle, but when I went to the hall you and your carriage had vanished.”
“I had an irresistible desire to get out of the house. I felt as if I were escaping from Tophet; and then I had to call for Mrs. Gresham” — the cousin—” at the Knightsbridge Riding School, where the poor thing had been slaving at Lady Penniddock’s refreshment stall.”
“It was abject slavery,” protested Mrs. Gresham. “I’m afraid
I shall detest tea and coffee all the days of my life, and I was so fond of them” — with profound regret. “The very look of a bath bun will make me ill.”
“Dépêchons,” said Mrs. Champion. “We shall hear very little of the new Zerlina if we go on dawdling here.”
And so in a feverish hurry she led the way to her carriage, where there was just room enough for Gerard on the front scat.
CHAPTER III. “THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY.”
The opera house was not brilliantly filled. There were a great many important functions going on that evening, events thickening as the season sloped towards its close, and it may be that the new Zerlina had not been sufficiently puffed, or that those enthusiasts who can never have too much Mozart are only the minority among opera-goers. There were a good many blank spaces in the stalls, and a good many untenanted boxes, nor was the display of diamonds and beauty as dazzling as it might have been.
In an audience at half power Mrs. Champion’s commanding loveliness and Mrs. Champion’s tiara of diamond stars shone conspicuous. She was dressed with that careless air which was her speciality, in some filmy fabric of daffodil colour, which was arranged in loose folds across her bust and shoulders, caught here and there, as if at random, with a diamond star. A great cluster of yellow orchids was fastened on one shoulder, and there were yellow orchids pinned on her black lace fan, while long black gloves gave a touch of eccentricity to her toilette. Her one object in dressing herself was to be different from other women. She never wore the fashionable colour or the fashionable fabric, but gloried in opposition, and took infinite pains to find something in Paris or Vienna which nobody was wearing in London.
The awe-inspiring music which closes the second act, and seems to presage the horror of the scenes that are coming, was hurrying to its brilliant finish, when Gerard, looking idly down upon the stalls, started at sight of the man who had mystified him more than any other human being had ever done. There, lounging in his place between two unoccupied seats, he saw Justin Jermyn, apparently enjoying the music with that keen delight which only the real music-lover can feel. His head was thrown back, his thin pale lips were slightly parted, and his large blue eyes beamed with rapture. Yes, a man who passionately loved music, or else a consummate actor.
The very presence of the man recalled Gerard Hillersdon to the business which was to be done after the green curtain had fallen, and his fair companions had been handed into their carriage. Ten minutes in a hansom, and he would be in his lodgings, and there would be no excuse for delay. His time would have come before the clock of St. James’s Church struck midnight. He had looked at his pistol-case involuntarily while he was dressing for the evening. He knew where it stood ready to his hand; and close beside the pistol-case was a business-like letter from his landlord requesting the settlement of a long account for rent and maintenance — only such breakfasts and casual meals as a young man of fashion takes at his lodgings — which had mounted to formidable figures. And an ounce of lead was to be the sole settlement. For the first time in his life Mr. Hillersdon felt sorry for those eminently respectable people, his landlord and landlady. He began to consider whether he ought not at least to shoot himself out of doors, rather than to inflict upon an old-established lodging-house the stigma of a suicide; but the inconvenience of self-destruction sub jove was too apparent to him, and he felt that he must be selfish in this final act of a selfish life.
Yes, there sat Justin Jermyn, complacent, full of enjoyment; the man who had told him what he was going to do. How the modern sorcerer would pride himself upon that fore-knowledge to-morrow when the evening papers told of the deed that had been done. There would doubtless be a paragraph in the papers — three lines at most — and perhaps a line on the contents bill: Distressing Suicide of a Gentleman. Suicides are always described as distressing when the self-slaughterer is of gentle blood.
He felt angry with Jermyn for having contrived to haunt these closing hours of his life. He sat watching the sorcerer all through the last act of the opera, noting his elfin enjoyment of all that was diabolical in the music and the libretto. How he grinned at the discomfiture of Don Giovanni! how he rocked himself with laughter at the abject terror of Leperello! No one approached him as an acquaintance. He sat in complete isolation, but in supreme enjoyment, apparently the happiest man in that great theatre, the youngest and the freshest in the capacity to enjoy.
“And that laughing fool read my purpose as if my, brain had been an open book,” mused Hillersdon savagely.
His anger was not lessened when he glanced round while he was conducting Mrs. Champion to her carriage, and saw the Fate-reader’s slim, supple figure behind him, and the Fate-reader’s gnome-like countenance smiling at him under an opera hat.
“I am so sorry you are leaving London so soon,” said Edith Champion, as he lingered at the carriage-door for the one half-minute allowed by the Jack in office at his elbow.
She gave him her hand, and even pressed the hand which held hers, with more sentiment than she was wont to show.
“Drive on, coachman,” shouted the Commissionaire. “Now then, next carriage.”
No time for sentimental partings there!
Hillersdon walked away from the theatre, meaning to pick up the first hansom that offered itself. He had not gone three steps along the Bow Street pavement when Jermyn was close beside him.
“Are you going home, Mr. Hillersdon?” he asked, in a friendly tone. “Delightful opera, ‘Don Giovanni,’ ain’t it? The best out and away. ‘Faust’ is my next favourite; but even Gounod can’t touch Mozart.”
“I dare say not; but I am no connoisseur. Good night, Mr. Jermyn. I am going home immediately.”
“Don’t. Come and have some supper with me. I only half told your fortune this afternoon, you were so infernally impatient. I have a good deal more to tell you. Come and have some supper in my chambers.”
“Some other night, perhaps, Mr. Jermyn. I am going straight home.”
“And you mean there shall be no other nights in your life?” said Jermyn, in a low, silky voice that made Hillersdon savage, for it jarred upon his irritated nerves more than the harshest accents could have done.
“Good night,” he said curtly, turning on his heel.
Jermyn was not to be repulsed.
“Come home with me,” he said; “I won’t leave you while you have the suicide’s line on your forehead. Come to supper with me, Hillersdon. I have a brand of champagne that will smooth out that ugly wrinkle, if you’ll only give the stuff a fair trial.”
“I don’t know where you live, and I don’t care a jot for your wines or anybody else’s. I am leaving town to-morrow morning, and I want my last hours in London for my own purposes.”
Jermyn put his arm through Hillersdon’s, wheeled him round in the direction of Long-acre, and quietly led him away. That was his answer to Hillersdon’s testy speech, and the young man submitted, feeling a vis inertia;, a languid indifference which made him consentient to a stranger’s will, having lost all will-power of his own.
He was angry with Jermyn, yet even more angry with himself, and in that perturbation of mind, tempered curiously with supineness, he took but little note of which way they went. He remembered going by Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the Turnstile. He remembered crossing Holborn, but knew not afterwards whether the shabby, squalid looking Inn, beneath whose gloomy gate-house Jermyn led him, did, or did not, open directly out of the great thoroughfare.
He remembered always that it was a most dismal assemblage of tall, shabby houses, forming a quadrangle, in whose stony centre there was a dilapidated basin, which might once have been a fountain. The summer moon, riding high and fast among wind-tossed clouds, shone full into the stony yard, and lit up the shabby fronts of the houses, but not one lamp-lit window cheered with the suggestion of life and occupation.
“Do you mean to say you live in this ghastly hole?” he exclaimed, speaking for the first time since they left Bow Street; “it looks as if it were tenan
ted by a company of ghosts.”
“A good many of the houses are empty, and I dare say the ghosts of dead usurers and dishonest lawyers and broken-hearted clients do have a high time in the old rooms now and again,” answered Jermyn, with his irrepressible laugh; “but I have never seen any company but rats, mice, and such small deer, as Bacon says. Of course, he was Bacon. We’re all agreed upon that.”
Hillersdon ignored this frivolity, and stood dumbly, while Jermyn put his key into a door, opened it, and led the way into a passage that was pitch dark. Not a pleasant situation to be alone in a dark passage at midnight in a sparely inhabited block of buildings quite cut off from the rest of the world, in company with a man whose repute was decidedly diabolical.
Jermyn struck a match and lighted a small hand-lamp, which improved the situation just a little.
“My den is on the second floor,” he said, “and I’ve made the place pretty comfortable inside, though it looks rather uncanny outside.”
He led the way up an old oak staircase, narrow, shabby, and unadorned, but oak-panelled, and therefore precious in the eyes of those who cling fondly to the past and to that old London which is so swiftly vanishing off the face of the earth.
The little lamp gave but just light enough to make the darkness of the staircase visible, till they came to a landing where the moon looked in through the murky panes of a tall window, and anon to a higher landing, where a vivid streak of lamplight under a door gave the first token of habitation. Jermyn opened this door, and his guest stood half-blinded by the brilliant light, and not a little astonished by the elegant luxury of those two rooms, opening into each other with a wide archway, which Mr. Jermyn had denominated his “den.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 892