“You cannot marry everybody,” replied Jermyn, with a practical air, “and I take it you are irrevocably pledged to the lady yonder,” pointing to the gold and lapis lazuli frame — a gem of jeweller’s work — on the writing-table.
“Yes, I am pledged to her.”
“In any case the world expects you to marry her — and it will go rather hard with her — from a society point of view, if you don’t. But perhaps you care very little what the world says about Mrs. Champion?”
“I care very much. I am bound to care for her reputation, and for her feelings. Till she, of her own free will, release me, I am bound to her by every tie that can bind a man of honour.”
“So!” exclaimed Jermyn, “that means a good deal.”
“It means not one syllable to Edith Champion’s discredit,” answered Hillersdon, hotly. “She was a faithful wife to her husband, and I knew how to respect her position as his wife, although I had been her adoring lover. During the three years of her married life we were friends, and friends only. It may be that we both counted on the days when she would be free, and when the thread of the old story might be taken up again just where we dropped it.”
“And now she is free, and you seem hardly to have taken up the thread.”
‘ “It is her fault,” said Hillersdon, angrily. “She is beautiful, generous, loves me with all her heart; but she is fettered by petty laws which brave women laugh at. She ran away from me just when my salvation lay in her society. I wanted to hold fast by my first love. I wanted to live all my life in her company, to lure back the loves and graces that had fluttered away, to forget that there was another lovely or lovable woman upon this earth; but she told me that people would talk, and that it was better we should see very little of each other until the period of conventional grief was past, and I could decently make Champion’s widow my wife. So she is sketching snow-peaks at Murren while—”
“While you are over head and ears in love with Hester Davenport.”
“It is more than love; it is possession. My world begins and ends with her. I tried to run away, tried to start for Switzerland, to follow my betrothed to her mountain retreat, in defiance of her objection; but it was a futile effort. I was at the station; my servant and portmanteau were on the platform; and at the last moment my resolution failed. I could not place myself beyond the possibility of seeing the face I worship, of hearing the voice that thrills me.”
“And you are content to go on seeing the lovely face and hearing the thrilling voice in the presence of a third person? Isn’t that rather like being in love with a ward in Chancery, and courting her in the presence of the family lawyer? Why don’t you get rid of the old man?”
“That’s not as easy as you suppose. You saw me sent away from Hester’s door to-day. She will not receive me in her father’s absence, and I am not such a cad as to force myself upon her seclusion. I behaved badly enough in the first instance when I acted in direct opposition to her wish.”
“To her alleged wish. Do you think a woman is ever quite candid in these cases, either to her lover or to herself? Look at Goethe’s Gretchen, for instance, somewhat snappish when Faust addresses her in the street, but a few hours after, in the garden! What had become of the snappishness? She is ocean deep in love, ready to throw herself into the lover’s arms. I can’t conceive how you can have gone on with this idle trifling, like an undergraduate smitten by a boarding-school miss. You with your millions, your short lease of life, your passionate desire to make the most of a few golden years. Strange to what hopeless fatuity love can reduce its victim! Get rid of the old father, make a clean sweep of him, and then at least the coast will be clear, and you need not confine your love-making to half-an-hour’s crawl upon the Embankment.”
“How get rid of him? There’s the difficulty. He has been reformed by her care, and it is the business of her life to make his declining years happy. Nothing would induce her to part with him.”
“Perhaps not; but very little would induce him to part with her. Do you suppose that he is not tired of his present life? Do you know what reform means in the habitual drunkard? It means deprivation that makes existence a living death. It means a perpetual craving, a thirst as fierce as that which racks the parched traveller in the African desert, the perishing sailor after a week scorched upon a raft in mid-ocean: only it is the thirst for alcohol, for fire instead of water. To his daughter this poor wretch may pretend resignation, but you may be sure he is miserable, and will resume his darling vice at the first opportunity.”
“And you would suggest that I should find the opportunity, that I should fling him back into the Tophet from which his daughter plucked him. No, Jermyn, I am not so vile as that.”
“I suggest nothing. Only if you want to win the daughter you must get the father out of the way; unless, indeed, you prefer to take the other line — throw over Mrs. Champion and make a formal offer for Miss Davenport’s hand. No doubt the old man would be very proud of you as a son-in-law, though you might have some occasion to be ashamed of him as a father-in-law when the opportunities of an establishment like this should lure him back to his old habits.” —
“I have told you that I cannot break with Edith.”
“And you will marry her next year, while you are still passionately in love with another woman?”
“I dare not think of next year. I may not live till next year.
I can think only of the present, and of the woman I love.”
“You are wise. A year is a long time, measured by a passion like yours. You have offered Davenport and his daughter an income through your sister. You have acted with most admirable delicacy, and yet your offers have been rejected. Have you ever offered Davenport money, directly — with the golden sovereigns or the crisp bank-notes in your hand?”
“Never. I would not degrade him by any such offer. And I believe that he would reject any gift of that kind.”
“A gift perhaps, but not a loan. A man of that kind will always take your money if you humour his pride by pretending to lend it to him. Or there are other ways. He is a good classic, you say, or was so once. Let him write a book for you. A literary commission would be an excuse for giving him ample means for enjoying his evenings in his own way, and then your moonlit walks upon the Embankment would have the charm which such walks have when heart answers to heart.”
“What a villain I should be if I were to take your advice and Undo the work to which that heroic girl has devoted herself for the brightest years of her girlhood — those years which for the young lady in society mean a triumphant progress of dances and tennis-tournaments, and pretty frocks and adulation, a pathway of flowers. She has given all the brightness of her youth to this one holy aim, and you would have me undo her work.”
“My dear fellow, the end is inevitable. I tell you that for the habitual drunkard there is no such thing as reformation. There is the semblance of it, while the sinner is cut off from the possibility of Bin; but backsliding comes with opportunity, and the reaction is so much the more violent because of that slow agony of deprivation through which the sinner has been passing. I no more believe in Mr. Davenport’s reform than the Broad Church believes that Joshua 6topped the sun.”
The conversation drifted into other channels. They discussed that great problem of man’s destiny which is always being argued in some form or other. They asked each other that universal riddle which is always being answered and is yet unanswerable. In this line of argument Justin Jermyn showed an impish facility for shifting his ground; and at the end of an hour’s argument Hillersdon hardly knew whether he was full of vague aspirations and vague beliefs in purer and better worlds beyond this insignificant planet, or whether his creed was blank negation.
It was late when they parted, and after the man himself was gone Gerard Hillersdon sat for a long time face to face with the marble image, the sly smile, the curious sidelong glance of the long narrow eyes seeming to carry on the argument, which the living lips had dropped, to strange and wicked conc
lusions.
“Wealth without limit,” mused Gerard, “and so little power to enjoy — so brief a lease of life. Why, if I were sure of living to eighty or ninety I should still think it hard that the end must come — that it is inevitable — foreshadowed in the freshness of life’s morning; stealing nearer and nearer with the ripening noon; hurrying with ever quickening pace in the twilight of life’s evening, when the last sun-rays gild an open grave. Oh, that inevitable end — bane of every life, but most hideous where wealth makes existence a kind of royalty. I shudder when I read the wills of triple or quadruple millionaires. The riches remain — a long array of figures, astounding in their magnitude — and the man who owned all that gold is lying in the dark, and knows the end of all things.”
He went over to the wall against which he had affixed his talisman, drew aside the curtain, and then stepped quickly back to the table and dipped his pen in the ink. It was the same large broad-nibbed pen with which he had drawn the last line upon the night after his interview with Hester Davenport. He dashed his pen upon the paper in a fury, and drew an inner line with one hurried sweep of his wrist. If determination could have assured firmness that line would have been bold and strong as Giotto’s O; but the tracing was even weaker than the last, and might have been the effort of a sick man, so feebly did the line falter from point to point.”
“Dr. South and Justin Jermyn are right,” thought Gerard. “It is passionate feeling that saps the life of a man — most of all a hopeless passion — most of all a struggle between honour and inclination. I will see South to-morrow, and if he tells me the shadows are deepening upon the dial — if—”
The sentence remained unfinished even in his own mind. He spent a restless night, broken by brief slumbers and long dreams — vivid dreams in which he was haunted by the image of Nicholas Davenport, under every strange and degrading aspect. In one dream he was in his father’s church at evensong in the quiet summer evening. He heard the organ and the voices of the village choir in the closing phrases of his mother’s favourite hymn, “Abide with me:” and amidst the hush that followed the Amen he saw Nicholas Davenport lolling over the worn velvet cushions of the old-fashioned pulpit, gesticulating dumbly, mad with drink, but voiceless. There was no sound in the church after that tender closing phrase of the hymn. All that followed was silence; but as he looked at that degraded figure leaning out of the pulpit the church changed to the pit of hell, and the village congregation became an assembly of devils, and on the steps of Satan’s throne stood a figure like Goethe’s Mephistopheles, and the face under the little red cap with the cock’s feather was the face of Justin Jermyn.
There was nothing strange in the fact that he should so dream, for he had long ago in his own mind likened the Fate-reader to Goethe’s fiend.
Gerard drove to Harley Street before ten o’clock next morning, and was lucky in catching Dr. South, who was in London, en passant, having finished his own cure at Homburg, and being on the point of starting for a holiday at Braemar.
There were no patients in the waiting-room, as the doctor was supposed to be out of town, and on sending in his card Gerard was at once admitted to the consulting-room.
Dr. South looked up from his pile of newly-opened letters with a pleasant smile.
“My little patient of the Devonshire Rectory,” he said cheerily; and then, with a keen look and a changed tone, he said, “But how is this, Mr. Hillersdon, you are not looking so well as when you were here last. I’m afraid you have been disregarding my advice!”
“Perhaps I have,” Gerard answered gloomily. “You told me that in order to spin out the thin thread of my life I must only vegetate, I must teach myself to become a human jelly-fish, without passions or emotions, thought or desire.”
“I did not forbid pleasant emotions,” said Dr. South; “I only urged you to avoid those stormy passions which strain the cordage of the human vessel, and sometimes wreck her.”
“You urged that which is impossible. To live is to feel and to suffer. I have not been able to obey you. I am passionately in love with a woman whom I cannot marry.”
“You mean that the lady is married already?”
“No; but there are other reasons—”
“If it is a question of social inequality, waive it, and marry. You cannot afford to be unhappy. The disappointment which another man would get over in a year, might in your case have a fatal effect. You are not of the temper which can live down trouble.”
“Tell me, frankly and ruthlessly, how long I have to live.”
“Take off your coat and waistcoat,” said the doctor quietly, and then, as his patient obeyed, he said, “I should be an impudent empiric if I pretended to measure the sands in the glass of life, but I can, if you like, tell you if your chances now are any worse than when you were with me last year. I remember your case perfectly, and even what I said to you at that time. I was especially interested in you as one of my little patients who had faith enough to come back to me in manhood. Now let me see,” and the thoughtful head was bent to listen to that terrible tell-tale machinery we all carry about with us, ticking off the hours that remain to each of us in this poor sum of life. The downward bent brow was unseen by the patient, or he might have read his doom in the physician’s countenance. When Dr. South looked up his features wore only the studied gravity of the professional aspect.
“Well,” questioned Hillersdon, when the auscultation was finished, “am I much worse than when I was here last?”
“You are not any better.”
“Speak out, for God’s sake,” cried Gerard, roughly, “I — I beg your pardon, doctor, but I want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, no making the best of a bad case. What is the outlook?”
“Bad.”
“Shall I live a year — two — three years? How much do you give me?”
“With care — extreme care — you may live some years yet. Nay, I do not say that you might not last ten years; but if you are reckless the end may come quickly. Worry, agitation, fretting of any kind may hasten your doom. I am sorry to be obliged to tell you this.”
“I thank you for having told me the truth. It settles one question, at least. I shall try to be happy my own way.”
“Marry the woman you love, even if she is a housemaid,” said the doctor, kindly, “and let her make your life happy in some quiet retreat, far from the excitements and agitations of the world of fashion or politics. You will go to the South, of course, before the winter. I should recommend Sorrento or Corsica. Your wealth will surround you with all the luxuries that make life easy wherever a man has to live.”
CHAPTER XVI. “HE IS THE VERY SOUL OF BOUNTY.”
GERARD HILLERSDON left Harley Street almost persuaded to break faith with the woman he had loved for more than three years, and offer himself to the woman he had loved less than three months. But that one word “almost” lost the early Christian Church a royal convert, and Gerard had not quite made up his mind to marry Nicholas Davenport’s daughter.
“So short a lease of life — and were I but happy with such a wife as Hester I might prolong my span to the uttermost,” he told himself, and then that advocate of evil which every worldly man has at his elbow whispered, “Why marry her, when your wealth would enable you to make so liberal a settlement that she need never feel the disadvantage of a false position? Win her for your mistress, cherish and hide her from the eye of the world. To marry her would be to bring a drunken madman into the foreground of your life — to cut off every chance of distinction in the few years that may be left to you. A man in your position can be true to Esther without renouncing Vashti. And your Vashti has been loyal and constant. It would be the act of a villain to break faith with her.”
As if to accentuate that evil counsel he found a letter from Vashti waiting for him on his study table — a letter upon which Vashti’s image was smiling, beautiful in court plumes and diamonds. There was nothing new in her letter, but it stabbed him where be was weakest, and th
e writer dwelt fondly upon her trust in him, and upon that happy future which they were to lead together.
He dawdled away the summer noontide in his garden, smoking, and dreaming, and he drove to Rosamond Road, Chelsea, at the hour when he knew he was likely to find Nicholas Davenport alone. His horses and stablemen had been idle of late, as he always employed a hansom when he went to Chelsea — and the inquiry, “would the horses be wanted any more to-day?” was generally answered in the negative.
He found the old man dozing in his arm-chair, with the Standard lying across his knees. He looked pale and worn, the mere wreck of a man, his silvery hair falling in loose wisps over the high, narrow forehead. There were fresh flowers in the room, and all was exquisitely neat, from the books upon the dwarf cupboard to the muslin cover of the sewing-machine. Gerard seldom entered that room without being reminded of Faust’s emotion in Gretchen’s modest chamber — where, in the gentle maiden’s absence, he felt her spirit hovering near him, her pure and innocent mind expressed in the purity and neatness of her surroundings.
He had time to glance round him, and to recall that scene — Ein kleines, reinliches Zimmer — before Nicholas Davenport started up out of his light slumber, and shook hands with him.
“This is uncommonly kind of you,” said the old man. “These summer afternoons are infernally long when Hester is out of the way. And the papers are as dull as ditchwater — politicians on the stump all over the countiy — one Parliamentary machine thrashing his bundle of political corn at Leeds on Tuesday, and another machine thrashing the very same bundle of facts and fallacies, and prophecies that never come true, at Halifax! And so the ball rolls on.”
“I dare say if we had lived at Athens we should have found politics just as great a bore, and orators no less windy,” answered Gerard, lightly. “But you are not looking well, Mr. Davenport.”
“I am feeling a little low to-day — the weather, perhaps,” and here the old man sighed, and began to fold up his newspaper with the tremulous movement of hands that had never recovered the firmness or repose lost under the influence of alcohol. “To be candid with you, my dear Hillersdon, I am suffering from a profound misapprehension in one of the best of creatures. My daughter is an angel. Her devotion to me” — here the ready tears stole down his withered cheeks—” is beyond all praise; but she is a woman, and a young woman, and she doesn’t understand my constitution, or the circumstances of my life. She has taken up temperance as a craze, and she thinks she is doing me a kindness by depriving me of every form of stimulant. She hugs herself with the idea that she has saved me from destruction, and she cannot see that she is reducing me to a state of weakness, mental and physical, which must result in imbecility or death.”
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