Hillersdon had been in many bachelor-rooms within the precincts of The Albany, in Piccadilly, St. James’s, and Mayfair, but he had seen nothing more studiously luxurious than the Fate-reader’s den. Heavy velvet curtains, of darkish green, draped the shuttered windows. The ingle-nook was quaint, artistic, comfortable; the glistening tiles were decorated with storks and sea-birds, which might have been painted by Stacey Marks himself. The furniture was all that is most rare and genuine in the relics of the Chippendale era. The carpet was a marvel of Oriental undertones, and Oriental richness of fabric. The few pieces of pottery which made spots of vivid colour here and there amidst the prevailing sombreness of hue, were choicest specimens of Indian and Italian ware. The pictures were few. A Judas, by Titian; a wood nymph, naked and unashamed, against a background of dark foliage, by Guido; and three curious bits of the early German school, made up the show of art, save for a bust of the Fate-reader in black marble, a curiously faithful likeness, in which the faun-like character of the bead, and the elfin smile, were but slightly accentuated. This bust stood upon a pedestal of dark red porphyry, and seemed to command the room.
The inner room was furnished as a library. There the lamps were shaded and the light subdued. Here, under the centre lamp that hung low over the small round table appeared all the arrangements for a dainty little supper. Two covered dishes on a chafing dish; a truffled pullet and a miniature York ham, a lobster salad, strawberries, peaches, champagne in a brazen ice-pail, ornamented with Bacchanalian figures in repoussé work.
“My servant has gone to bed,” said Jermyn, “but he has left everything ready, and we can wait upon each other. Cutlets, salmi aux olives,” he said, lifting the covers; “which will you start with?”
“Neither, thanks. I told you I had no appetite.”
“Discouraging to a man who is as hungry as a hunter,” retorted Jermyn, helping himself. “Try that Madeira, it may give you an appetite.”
Hillersdon seated himself opposite his host and took a glass of wine. His curiosity was stimulated by the Fate-reader’s surroundings; and, after all, the thing which he had to do might remain undone for a few hours. He could not help being interested in this young man, who, either by instinct or by a subtle guess, had fathomed his purpose. The luxury of these rooms piqued him, so striking a contrast with the shabbiness of his own West End lodging, albeit that lodging was far from cheap. He was supposed to pay for “situation.” Of luxury he had nothing, of comfort very little. How did Jermyn contrive to be so well off, he wondered? Did he live by fate-reading, or had he means of his own?
Jermyn was eating his supper all this time with a fine appetite and an epicurean gusto. After a couple of glasses of Madeira, his guest helped himself to lobster salad, and when Jermyn opened the champagne the two men were hobnobbing comfortably, and, that wine being choice of its kind and admirably iced, Hillersdon drank the best part of a bottle, and found himself enjoying his supper more than he had enjoyed anything in the way of meat and drink for a long time.
The conversation during supper was of the lightest, Jermyn letting off his criticisms, mostly unfavourable, upon people known to them both, and laughing tremendously at his own wit. He was careful not to mention Mrs. Champion, however, and Hillersdon had no objection to spatter mud upon the ruck of his acquaintance. Supper over, and a box of cigars open between them, with a silver spirit-lamp, shaped like a serpent offering its flaming jaws for their use, the men grew more serious. It was past one o’clock. They had been a long time over their supper, and they seemed no longer strangers — intimates, rather, not united by any particular esteem for each other, but one in their contempt for other people.
The champagne has wiped out that ugly wrinkle already,” said Jermyn, with his friendly air; “and now tell me what could induce you to contemplate such a thing.”
“What thing?” asked Hillersdon, waxing moody.
Jermyn’s reply was pantomimic. He passed his hand across his throat, significant of a razor; he turned his hand towards his open mouth, suggestive of a pistol; he tossed off an imaginary poison draught.
“You insist upon suggesting—” began Hillersdon, angrily.
“I tell you I saw it in your face. The man who contemplates suicide has a look which no man who reads the human countenance can mistake. There is a fixed horror in the eyes, as of one who stares into the unknown, and knows that he is nearing the mystery of life and death. There are perplexed lines about the brow, ‘shall I, or shall I not?’ and there is a nervous hurry, as of one who wants to get a disagreeable business over as soon as may be. I have never been mistaken yet in that look. Why, my dear fellow, why? Surely life at eight and twenty is too precious a thing to be frittered away for a trifle.”
“‘You take my life when you do take the means by which I live,’” quoted Hillersdon.
“Bacon again! That fellow has something to say about everything. You imply that you are impecunious, and would rather be dead than penniless.”
“Take it so, if you please.”
“Good. Now, how can you tell that fortune is not waiting for you at some turn in the road you know not; that road of the future which no man knows till he treads it? So long as a man is alive he has always a chance of becoming a millionaire. So long as a woman is unmarried there is always the possibility of her marrying a duke.”
“The chance of fortune in my case is so remote that it is not worth considering. I am the son of a country parson. I have no relative living likely to leave me the smallest legacy. Unless I could make a fortune by literature, I have no chance of making one by any exertion of my own, and my second book was so dire a failure that I have it not in me to write a third.”
“Fortunes drop from the clouds sometimes. Have yon never done any rich man a service which might prompt him — when distributing superfluous thousands — to leave a few to you?”
“Never, within my recollection.”
“Come, now, looking back at your life, is there no act in it of which you might fairly be proud, no touch of the heroic, no deed worthy a paragraph in the papers?”
“None. I once saved an old man’s life; but I doubt if the life were worth saving, since the old wretch did not trouble himself to thank me for having risked my own life in his service.”
“You saved an old man’s life, at hazard of your own! Come, that sounds heroic,” cried Jermyn, flinging his fair head back against the blackish green of the velvet chair cover, and laughing with all his might. The black bust showed a little to the left, above the level of his head, and it seemed to Hillersdon that the black face was laughing as broadly as the white one.
“Tell me the whole story — pray now — it sounds absolutely heroic,” urged Jermyn.
“There is very little to tell,” replied Hillersdon, coolly. “Nothing either to laugh at or to be thrilled by. I did only what any other active young man would have done in my position, seeing a feeble old man in peril of immediate death. It was at Nice. You know what a wilderness of iron the railway station there is, and how one has to hunt about for one’s train. It was at carnival time, dusk, and a great many people were going back to Cannes, I myself among them. The old man had arrived from another train going eastwards, and was making for the platform, when a great high engine bore steadily down upon him, by no means at express speed, but fast enough to paralyse him, so that, instead of getting out of the way, he stood staring, hesitating, helpless. An instant more, and that vast mass of iron would have cut him down and dashed the life out of him. I had but time to drag him out of the track before the engine passed me, brushing my shoulder as it went by. I took him to the platform. Hardly any one had seen our adventure. I had a friend with me at the station, with whom I had lunched at the Cosmopolitan, and who had insisted on seeing me oft. I told him briefly what had happened, left the old man in his care, and rushed back to look for my own train, which I caught by the skin of my teeth.”
“And the old churl never thanked you?”
“Not by one civi
l word. His only remark was an inquiry about his umbrella, which had fallen out of his hand when I plucked him from the jaws of death. I believe he felt himself aggrieved because I had not rescued his umbrella as well as himself.”
“Was he English, do you think?”
“Distinctly British. A Frenchman or Italian would at least have been loquacious, if not grateful.”
“The shock may have made him speechless.”
“He found speech to inquire after his umbrella.”
“True, that looked black!” said Jermyn, laughing; “I’m afraid he must have been a thankless old dog. And you took no trouble to find out who he was, I suppose — what manner of man you had snatched from sudden death?”
“I had not the slightest interest in his identity.”
“So! Well, now, let us talk still further of yourself and your prospects. You know that people call me the Fate-reader. Now, I have a fancy that your fortunes are on the threshold of a great change — and that, apart from the folly of anticipating Death, the inevitable enemy, in your case it may be very much worth while to live.”
“You are vague and general. What form of good fortune do you predict for me?”
“I pretend to no gift of prophecy. I only profess the power of insight. I can read what men are — not what is going to happen to them; but as in many cases character is fate, I have been able to hazard some shrewd guesses about the future.”
“And in my case, what are your guesses?”
“I would rather not tell you.”
“The outlook is not satisfactory, then?”
“Not altogether. The character of a man who at eight and twenty can contemplate suicide as the shortest way out of his embarrassments is not a character that promises well. I am frank, you see.”
“Vastly frank.”
“Don’t be angry,” laughed Jermyn. “I pretend to be no hero myself, and if I were very hard up, or very much bored, I dare say I too might think of a bullet or a dose of prussic acid. Only that kind of idea argues a character at once weak and selfish. The man who takes his own life runs away from the universal battle, and shows a selfish indifference to those he leaves behind, in whose minds the memory of his death will be a lasting pain.”
“My poor mother,” sighed Hillersdon, recognising the truth of this assertion.
“You would have killed yourself because you were ennuied and unhappy; because you have wasted opportunities, and given the best years of your life to a hopeless passion. Your reasons were not strong enough; and even if I were not hero to demonstrate your folly, I think your hand must have faltered at the last moment, and you would have asked yourself — Is the outlook so very black after all? Does not one gleam of light pierce the darkness?”
“The outlook is as black as pitch,” answered Hillersdon, expanding under the influence of the wine he had been drinking so freely, ready now to talk to this acquaintance of a day as if he were his bosom friend and companion of years; “there is not a gleam of light, not one! I have wasted my chances: I have frittered away whatever talent or capacity I may have possessed when I left the University. I am a dependent upon a father who can ill afford to support a son in idleness, and to whom I ought to be a help rather than a burden. I have been — and must be as long as I live — the slave of a woman who exacts servitude and gives nothing — whose heart and mind after years of closest association are still mysteries to me; who will not own that she loves me, yet will not let me go.”
“Mrs. Champion is a remarkably clever woman,” said Jermyn, coolly; “but there are depths which you have never fathomed under that calm and virtuous surface. Leave her for another divinity, and you will see of what she is capable. If that hopeless attachment is your only trouble, I snap my fingers at the necessity of suicide. A day, an hour may bring you face to face with a woman whose influence will make you forget Edith Champion.”
“You have no right to make free with Mrs. Champion’s name. How do you know that she has any influence over my life?”
I know what all the world knows — your world of Mayfair and Belgravia, Hyde Park and South Kensington — and I know what I read in the lady’s face. A dangerous woman for you, Mr. Hillersdon; witness these wasted years of which you complain. But there are women as fair, to love whom would be a less abject servitude. Do you remember the vision that Mephistopheles showed Faust in the witch’s kitchen?”
“Gretchen at her spinning-wheel!”
“Gretchen at her wheel belongs to the opera, I fancy. The vision Faust saw in the witch’s looking-glass was the vision of abstract beauty. You may remember that when he sees Gretchen in the street there is no recognition of that supernal face he had just seen in the glass. He was only caught by a pretty girl tripping modestly home from church. The vision may have been Aphrodite or Helen, for aught we know. A clever trick, no doubt, that vision in the glass. Look yonder, Hillersdon, look at that face there, known to you in the past — the face of a girl steeped in poverty, beautiful as a dream, yet no better off in this world for her loveliness. Look at that fragile form bending over a sewing-machine, our modem substitute for the spinning-wheel. Look at me, Hillersdon,” repeated Jermyn, fixing him with those cold, calm, blue eyes, from which there radiated a sudden influence that steeped Gerard Hillersdon’s senses in a dreamy light, as of another world and atmosphere; I; and now look yonder.”
He waved Ms hand carelessly towards the inner room, where in the subdued light Hillersdon saw the figure of a girl, shadowy, dim, and vague at first, and then developing gradually from pale grey shadow into luminous distinctness. The face was turned to him, but the eyes saw him not; they gazed sadly out into space, full of hopeless melancholy, while the hands moved monotonously backwards and forwards across the table of a sewing-machine. A girl in a grey cotton frock, sitting at work at a sewing-machine. That was the vision Gerard Hillersdon saw against the dark background of Mr. Jermyn’s library; but the girl’s pinched and pallid face was as beautiful in form as the face of Raffaelle’s loveliest Madonna, and in its profound melancholy there was a sweetness that melted his heart. Something, too, in that fair Gretchen-like countenance struck him as strangely familiar. He had seen the face before, not in a picture or in a statue, but in commonplace everyday life. When or where he knew not.
Jermyn threw his half-smoked cigar up into the air, and burst into his elfin laugh. The vision faded on the instant, as if he had laughed it away.
“There is your modern Gretchen,” he said, “a poor little sempstress, slaving from dawn to dark for daily, bread, as beautiful as a Greek goddess, and virtuous enough to prefer poverty to degradation. There is your true type of a nineteenth-century Gretchen. How would you like to be Faust?”
“I should like to possess Faust’s power; not to betray Gretchen, but to secure my own happiness.”
“And what is your idea of happiness?” asked Jermyn, lighting a fresh cigar.
“Wealth,” answered Hillersdon, quickly. “For a man who has lived under the goad of poverty, who has felt day by day, and hour by hour, the torment of being poorer than his fellow-men, there can be but one idea of bliss. Money, and plenty of it. From my school days upwards I have lived among men better off than myself. At the University I got into trouble because I exceeded my allowance. My father could just afford to give me two hundred a year, I spent from three to four hundred; but the excess, though it caused no end of trouble at home, left me still a pauper among men who spent a thousand. I had been sent to an expensive college, and told to economise; to enjoy all the privileges of contact with men of rank and position, to be among them but not of them. I happened to be popular, and so could not altogether seclude myself from my fellow-men. I was pinched and harassed at every turn, and yet plunged in debt, and a malefactor to my family. I came to London, studied for the Bar, ate my dinners, wasted my father’s substance on fees, and never got a brief. I wrote a book which won instantaneous success, and for the moment I was rich. I thought I had opened a gold mine, bought my mother a pair of di
amond earrings which she did not want, and Bent my father a fine set of Jeremy Taylor, which he had been longing for ever since I could remember. I fell in love with a beautiful girl, who reciprocated my affection, but was not allowed to marry a man whose only resources were in his inkstand. She was not inconsolable, and our engagement was no sooner broken than she married a man old enough to be her grandfather, and rich enough to make her a personage in the smart world. My nest book, written while I was writhing under the sting of this disappointment, was a dead failure. I had no heart to begin another book. I have lived since, as a good many young men contrive to live in this great city, from hand to mouth, and the emptiness and hopelessness of my life have been known to me for a long time. Do you wonder that I began to think actual nothingness better than this middle state between life and death — this perpetual weariness of an inane and purposeless existence!”
“And you think that wealth would open up a new future, and that life would be no longer aimless?”
“Wealth means power,” answered Hillersdon. “With wealth and youth no man should be unhappy, unless racked with physical pain. A rich man is master of the universe.”
“Yes, but while he enjoys the power wealth gives, his life is ebbing. Every day of enjoyment, every ardent hope satisfied, every extravagant wish realised, is a nail in his coffin. The men who five longest are men of moderate means — not worried by poverty nor elated by wealth — men in whose obscure and retired fives society takes very little interest — scholars, thinkers, inventors, some of them perhaps, whom the world hears of only after they are dead — men who think, and dream, and reason, but experience nothing of life’s feverish movement or man’s fiercer passions. Do you remember Balzac’s story of the Peau de Chagrin?”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 893