“Not very clearly. It was one of the first French novels I read; a kind of fairy tale, I think.”
“It is more an allegory than a fairy tale. A young man, tired of life, like you, is on the brink of suicide — has made up his mind to die, as you made up your mind to-day — when, to beguile the time betwixt afternoon and night, he goes into a bric-à-brac shop and turns over the wonders of worlds old and new. Here, amidst treasures of art and relics of extinct civilisations, he finds the queerest curio of all in the person of the bric-à-brac dealer, a man who boasts of his century and more of life, the quiet passionless life of the thinker. This man shows him the Peau de Chagrin, the skin of a wild ass, hanging against the wall. With that talisman he offers to make the intending suicide richer, more powerful, and more renowned than the king of the French. ‘Read,’ he cries, and the young man reads a Sanscrit inscription whose letters are so interwoven in the metallic lustre of the skin that no knife can eradicate the faintest line. The Sanscrit translated runs thus: —
‘If you possess me you possess all,
But your life will be mine. Wish,
And your wishes will be fulfilled,
But rule your wishes by
Your life. At every wish
I shall dwindle like
Your days. Would’st
Have me,
Take.’
“This inscription is the allegory of life. The old man told the youth how he had offered the talisman to many, but how, though one and all laughed at its possible influence over their future destinies, all had refused to traffic with that unknown power. And for the owner of the talisman, why had he never tested its value? The old man answered that question by expounding his theory of life.”
“And what was his theory?”
“‘The mystery of human life lies in a nutshell,’ said the centenarian. ‘The life of action and the life of passion drain the sources of existence. To will, to do, to desire ardently, is to die. With every quickening of the pulse above normal health, with every tumult of the heart, with every fever of the brain, fired by ardent hopes and conflicting wishes, a shred is torn off the fabric of a man’s life. The men who live to age like mine are the men whose passions and desires, ambitions and greed of power have been rigidly suppressed, the men of calm and contemplative temperament, in whom mind rises superior to heart and senses, who are content to reason, to know, to see, and understand the world in which they live.’ And that old man was right. There is a hidden meaning in that sentence of Holy Writ — The race is not to the swift. If you would live long take life largo, not presto.”
“Who cares for length of years?” exclaimed Hillersdon. “What a man wants is to live, not to crawl for a century on the face of this planet, afraid to lift his head from the earth lest a thunderbolt should strike him. I wish I could stroll into a bric-à-brac shop and find the peau de chagrin. I would be content to see the talisman dwindle daily, if every diminution marked an hour of happiness, a wish realised.”
“Well, I suppose that is the only philosophy of life congenial to a young mind,” said Jermyn lightly. “The centenarian who never really lived boasts of length of days, and cheats himself with the idea that he has had the best of the bargain; but to live for ten joyous, reckless years must be better than to vegetate for a century.”
“Infinitely better,” said Hillersdon, rising in a fever of excitement, and beginning to walk about the room, looking at this and that, the bronze idols, the enamelled vases and old ivory carvings in the niches and recesses of a Bombay blackwood cabinet.
“You have the peau de chagrin hidden somewhere in your rooms, perhaps,” he suggested laughingly, “or, at any rate, some talisman which enables you to make light of life — to see a jest where other men see a problem only to be solved by death.”
“No, I have no talisman. I have nothing but will — will strong enough to conquer passion — and insight by which I can read the mystery of mankind. You who have a stronger individuality — a passionate, exacting personality, an intolerable ego which must be satisfied somehow — are created to suffer. I am created to enjoy. For me life, as you say, is a jest.”
“So it was for Goethe’s Devil,” answered Hillersdon. “I believe there is a touch of the diabolical in your composition, and that you have about as much heart and conscience as Mephistopheles. However, I am beholden to you for your persistence in bringing me here to-night, for you have amused me, mystified me, stimulated my curiosity, and routed thoughts which I confess were of the darkest.”
“Didn’t I tell you a supper and a bottle of wine would be your best counsellor?” exclaimed Jermyn, laughing.
“But the dark thoughts will return in a day or two, no doubt, since you have no talisman to offer me which will pour gold into empty pockets, and you do not even propose to buy my shadow. I would run the risk of being as conspicuous as Peter Schlemihl, for the same power to create illimitable heaps of sterling coin.”
“Ah, those are old stories — allegories all, be assured. If I were to say I saw the promise of fortune on that perplexed brow of yours you would laugh at me. All I ask is that if Fortune does pour her gifts into your lap you will remember that I bade you tarry at the gate of death.”
CHAPTER IV. “WE ARE SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE OF.”
THE domes and steeples of the great city, towers and warehouses, roofs old and new, showed dark against a saffron sky, as Gerard Hillersdon set his face to the west in the freshness and quiet of early morning. He had drunk enough and talked enough to exalt his spirits with an unwonted elation, as if life and the world were new, and all his troubles and perplexities cast off like a slough, and flung behind him into the universal dust-heap men call the Past. There is no Nepenthe like a night’s debauch for obliterating worldly cares. Unhappily the effect is but transient, and Memory will resume her sway. In this summer dawning Gerard walked through the empty streets with a tread as light as if his youth had never been shadowed by a care. In this mood of his he accepted Justin Jermyn as a serious fact, a man of unusual gifts and faculties; a man who by fair means or foul had plucked him by the sleeve and held him back from the brink of a dark gulf which he shuddered to think upon.
“To be or not to be?” he muttered, slackening his steps in the morning solitude of Lincoln’s Inn, where there were faint odours of foliage and flowers freshened by the dews of night. “To be or not’ to be? I was a fool to think that my choice was inevitable. Faust had the poison at his lips, when the Easter joybells stayed his hand. And after that burst of heavenly gladness — and after that thrilling chorus, ‘Christ is risen’ — came the fiend with his worldly-wise philosophy, and his gifts of wealth and power. Is the influence that stayed my hand from heaven or from hell, I wonder?”
His thoughts reverted to the face of the girl at the sewing-machine. He was in no mood to trouble himself as to the nature of the vision he had seen; whether it were hypnotic, or some juggler’s trick produced by mechanical means. It was of the face that he thought, for it was a familiar face; a face out of the long ago; and he tried in vain to fix it in his memory. It floated there, vaguely mixed with the vision of his vanished boyhood — a dream of summer and sunny days, of woods and waters, in the far-off west, which seemed as another and half-forgotten world in the midst of this grey, smoke-stained city.
He let himself into the dark and airless lodging-house passage with his latchkey, a privilege he could scarcely hope to enjoy many days longer, unless he could comply with, or compromise, the demand in his landlord’s letter. Yet even the possibility of being turned out of doors seemed hardly to trouble him this morning. At the worst he could go down to his father’s rectory, and bury himself among green leaves and village faces. And if he must be bankrupt, see his name in the Gazette, shameful as the thing would seem to the rural rector and his wife, he would not be the first. Among the youthful scions of the nobility bankruptcy is as common as scarlet fever; nay, almost as inevitable as measles.
His sitting-room and the ad
joining bedroom looked shabbier than usual in the clear morning light, after those luxurious rooms of Justin Jermyn’s. The furniture had been good enough once upon a time, for its specific purpose — brass bedstead, bird’s-eye-maple wardrobe and dressing-table in the bedroom, walnut-wood and cretonne in the sitting-room — but everything in the rooms had grown shabby and squalid with the wear and tear of successive lodgers; and the landlord, crippled by bad debts, had never been rich enough to renew the cretonne, or improve upon the Philistinism of the walnut-wood. A sordid den, repulsive to the eye of a man with any feeling for the beautiful.
Hillersdon was tired and exhausted, but slumber was far from his eyelids, and he knew it was useless to go to bed while his brain was working with a forty-horse power, and his temples were racked with neuralgic pain. He flung himself into an arm-chair, lighted a cigar which Jermyn had thrust upon him at parting, and looked idly round the room.
There were some letters upon the table, at least half a dozen, the usual thing no doubt — bills and threatening letters from lawyers of obscure address, calling his attention to neglected applications from tradesmen. Common as such letters were, it was always a shock to him to find that the bland and obliging purveyor had handed him over to the iron hand of the solicitor. He was in no haste to open those letters, which would supply so many items in his schedule, perhaps, a few days later. Insolvency had been staring him in the face for a long time, and there was no alternative between death and the Gazette.
He finished his cigar, and then began to open his letters, deliberately, and as it were with a gloomy relish.
The first was from his hatter, piteously respectful; the second was from a solicitor in Bloomsbury, calling attention to an account of three years’ standing with a Bond Street hairdresser; and the third and fourth were those uninforming yet significant documents, bill delivered, bearing date of the vanished years, and with a footnote requesting his earliest attention. Bill delivered. What value had he received for the sums demanded? A scarf, a pair of gloves, now and again, bought casually pour passer le temps, a set of shirts, perhaps, ordered to please the tradesman rather than from any need of his own, a dressing-jacket or two, and behold the man was clamouring for thirty-seven pounds odd shillings and pence!
He opened the fifth letter, which announced itself upon the envelope as from Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and which, by the thickness of the paper and style of the address, was at least from a solicitor of position and respectability. Yet doubtless the tune was only the old tune, played upon a superior instrument. No, by Heaven! it was not the old formula.
“190, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, W.C.
“July 17, 188 —
“Sir,
“If you are the same Mr. Gerard Hillersdon who in 1879 rescued an old gentleman from an approaching engine in the station at Nice, we have the honour to inform you that our late client, Mr. Milford, banker, of London, Marseilles, and Nice, has bequeathed the bulk of his large fortune to you, as residuary legatee. Our client was of somewhat eccentric habits, but we have no reason to doubt his disposing power at the date of the will, nor do we at present apprehend any attempt to dispute the said will, since Mr. Milford leaves no near relations.
“We shall be glad to see you, either here or at your own residence, at your earliest convenience.
“We have the honour to be, sir,
“Yours, etc., etc.,
“CRAFTON AND CRANBERRY.”
Hillersdon turned the letter over and over in his hands, as if expecting that solid sheet of paper to change into a withered leaf under his touch; and then he burst into a laugh, as loud but not as joyous as Jermyn’s gnome-like mirth.
“A trick,” he cried, “a palpable trick, of the fate-reader, hypnotist, whatever he may please to call himself. A cruel jest, rather; to mock parched lips with the promise of the fountain; to exercise his fancy upon a destitute man. Well, I am not to be caught so easily. The churl whose remnant of life I saved at Nice was no wealthy banker, I’ll be sworn, but some impecunious nobody who was soured by losses at Monte Carlo.”
He looked at his watch. Half-past five. A good many hours must pass before it would be possible to discover the existence or non-existence of Crafton and Cranberry, and the authenticity of the letter on the table there, where he had flung it, a most respectable looking letter assuredly, if looks were anything to the purpose.
“Easy enough for him to get a lawyer’s clerk to write on the firm’s paper,” he thought. Yet it were a hazardous thing to be done by any clerk, unless a discarded servant.
“How did he know?” mused Hillersdon. “It was after midnight I told him my adventure at Nice, and this letter was delivered by the last post at ten o’clock.”
It was not impossible, though, for Jermyn to have heard of the old hunks at the Nice Station from Gilbert Watson, Hillersdon’s friend, who had seen the end of the adventure, and heard the old man clamouring for his umbrella. Watson was a man about town, and might have been in contact with Jermyn, who was a season celebrity, and went everywhere.
Gerard threw himself dressed upon his bed, slept a troubled sleep in briefest intervals, and lay awake for the rest of the time between half-past five and half-past eight, when his servant Dodd — an old retainer, who had married and outlived the rectory nurse — brought him his early cup of tea and prepared his bath. He was dressed and out of doors by half-past nine, and a handsom took him to Lincoln’s Inn Fields before the stroke of ten.
The office was evidently just opened, a most respectable office. An elderly clerk showed Mr. Hillersdon into a handsome waiting-room, where the newly-cut newspapers were systematically arranged upon a massive mahogany office table. Neither of the principals had arrived from their West End houses.
Gerard’s impatience could not brook delay.
“Do you know anything about this letter?” he asked, showing the open document.
“I ought, sir, for it was I who wrote it,” answered the grey-haired clerk.
“By way of a practical joke, I suppose,” said Hillersdon grimly, “to oblige a facetious friend.”
“Messrs. Crafton and Cranberry do not deal in practical jokes, sir,” replied the clerk, with dignity. “I wrote that letter at Mr. Crafton’s dictation, and if you are the Mr. Hillersdon there referred to it really ought to be a very pleasant letter for you to receive.”
“Very pleasant, if I could venture to take it seriously.”
“Why should you suspect a jest, sir, in so grave a matter, and coming to you from a firm of undoubted respectability?”
Hillersdon sighed impatiently, and passed his hand across his forehead with a troubled gesture. How did he know that this scene of the lawyer’s office, the letter in his hand, the grey-haired, grave old clerk talking to him, were not part and parcel of some hypnotic vision, no more real than the figure of the girl at the sewing-machine which those same eyes of his had looked at last night. He stood irresolute, incredulous, silent, while the old clerk deferentially awaited his pleasure. The outer door opened as he stood there, and the measured footsteps of dignified middle-age crossed the hall.
“Mr. Crafton,” said the clerk. “He will be able to assure you that there has been no jesting, sir.”
Mr. Crafton entered, tall, broad, bulky, imposing, faultlessly dressed for his role of man of the world, not unaccustomed to society, and trustworthy family lawyer.
“Mr. Hillersdon, sir,” said the clerk. “He has been disposed to think that the letter from the firm was a practical joke.”
“I am hardly surprised at your incredulity, Mr. Hillersdon,” said the solicitor, in an unctuous and comfortable voice, calculated to reassure desponding clients. “That letter may well take your breath away. A romance of real life, isn’t it? A young man does a plucky thing on the spur of the moment, thinks no more about it, and some years after wakes up one morning to find himself — a very rich man,” concluded Mr. Crafton, pulling up suddenly, as if he might have used a much bigger phrase. “Kindly step into my private r
oom. You can bring us the copy of the will, Coxfield.”
The clerk retired, and Mr. Crafton ushered his visitor into a large front office, as imposing as his own figure.
“Pray be seated, Mr. Hillersdon” — waving his hand towards a spacious arm chair. “Yes, the whole story comes within the region of romance; yet it is not the first time in testamentary history that a large fortune has been left to a stranger as a reward for some service barely acknowledged when it was rendered. Our late client, Mr. Milford, was a curious man. I’ll warrant now he took very little trouble to show his gratitude when you had hazarded your life in his service.”
“The only trouble he took was about his umbrella, which he was vociferously anxious to recover.”
“So like him, dear old man. A character, my dear sir, a character. You wouldn’t have given twenty shillings for the clothes he wore that day, I dare say — umbrella included.”
“If clothes and umbrella had been on my premises, I would have given ten shillings to get them taken away.”
“Precisely,” exclaimed the lawyer, with his genial chuckle. “A very remarkable man. I doubt if he paid his tailor ten pound a year — or five. Yet a man of large benevolence, a man whose left hand knew not what his right hand gave. But now we have to come to the crucial question. Can you establish your identity with the Gerard Hillersdon whose name our late client took down from Mr. Gilbert Watson’s dictation in the station at Nice.”
“Very easily, I think. In the first place, I doubt if there is any other Gerard Hillersdon in the directory, as the name Gerard comes from my mother’s side of the house, and was not in the Hillersdon family before I was christened. Secondly, my friend Watson is now in London, and will readily identify me as the man about whose name your client inquired when I had left the platform. Thirdly, it would be easy, were further evidence needed, to establish the fact that I was residing at the Hôtel Mont Fleuri, Cannes, at that date, and that I went to Nice on the first day of the Carnival.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 894