That evening Mr. Gotobed wrote at length to Guy Darrell, informing him that, after great pains and prolonged research, he had been so fortunate as to ascertain that the strolling player and the little girl whom Mr. Darrell had so benevolently requested him to look up were very bad characters, and had left the country for the United States, as happily for England bad characters were wont to do.

That letter reached Guy Darrell when he was far away, amidst the forlorn pomp of some old Italian city, and Lionel's tale of the little girl not very fresh in his gloomy thoughts. Naturally, he supposed that the boy had been duped by a pretty face and his own inexperienced kindly heart.

And so, and so,--why, so end all the efforts of men who entrust to others the troublesome execution of humane intentions! The scales of earthly justice are poised in their quivering equilibrium, not by huge hundred-weights, but by infinitesimal grains, needing the most wary caution, the most considerate patience, the most delicate touch, to arrange or readjust. Few of our errors, national or individual, come from the design to be unjust; most of them from sloth, or incapacity to grapple with the difficulties of being just. Sins of commission may not, perhaps, shock the retrospect of conscience. Large and obtrusive to view we have confessed, mourned, repented, possibly atoned them. Sins of omission so veiled amidst our hourly emotions, blent, confused, unseen, in the conventional routine of existence,--alas! could these suddenly emerge from their shadow, group together in serried ma.s.s and accusing order,--alas, alas! would not the best of us then start in dismay, and would not the proudest humble himself at the Throne of Mercy?

CHAPTER XIX.

Joy, nevertheless, does return to Mr. Rugge: and hope now inflicts herself on Mrs. Crane; a very fine-looking hope too,--six feet one, --strong as Achilles, and as fleet of foot!

Buy we have left Mr. Rugge at Mrs. Crane's door; admit him. He bursts into her drawing-room wiping his brows. "Ma'am, they're off to America!"

"So I have heard. You are fairly ent.i.tled to the return of your money--"

"Ent.i.tled, of course, but--"

"There it is; restore to me the contract for the child's services."

Rugge gazed on a roll of bank-notes, and could scarcely believe his eyes. He darted forth his hand,--the notes receded like the dagger in Macbeth. "First the contract," said Mrs. Crane. Rugge drew out his greasy pocket-book, and extracted the worthless engagement.

"Henceforth, then," said Mrs. Crane, "you have no right to complain; and whether or not the girl ever again fall in your way, your claim over her ceases."

"The G.o.ds be praised! it does, ma'am, I have had quite enough of her.

But you are every inch a lady, and allow me to add that I put you on my free list for life."

Rugge gone, Arabella Crane summoned Bridget to her presence.

"Lor', miss," cried Bridget, impulsively, "who'd think you'd been up all night raking! I have not seen you look so well this many a year."

"Ah," said Arabella Crane, "I will tell you why. I have done what for many a year I never thought I should do again,--a good action. That child,--that Sophy,--do you remember how cruelly I used her?"

"Oh, miss, don't go for to blame yourself; you fed her, you clothed her, when her own father, the villing, sent her away from hisself to you,--you of all people, you. How could you be caressing and fawning on his child,--their child?"

Mrs. Crane hung her head gloomily. "What is past is past. I have lived to save that child, and a curse seems lifted from my soul. Now listen.

I shall leave London--England--probably this evening. You will keep this house; it will be ready for me any moment I return. The agent who collects my house-rents will give you money as you want it. Stint not yourself, Bridget. I have been saving and saving and saving for dreary years,--nothing else to interest me, and I am richer than I seem."

"But where are you going, miss?" said Bridget, slowly recovering from the stupefaction occasioned by her mistress's announcement.

"I don't know; I don't care."

"Oh, gracious stars! is it with that dreadful Jasper Losely?--it is, it is. You are crazed, you are bewitched, miss!"

"Possibly I am crazed,--possibly bewitched; but I take that man's life to mine as a penance for all the evil mine has ever known; and a day or two since I should have said, with rage and shame, 'I cannot help it; I loathe myself that I can care what becomes of him.' Now, without rage, without shame, I say, 'The man whom I once so loved shall not die on a gibbet if I can help it' and, please Heaven, help it I will."

The grim woman folded her arms on her breast, and raising her head to its full height, there was in her face and air a stern gloomy grandeur, which could not have been seen without a mixed sensation of compa.s.sion and awe.

"Go now, Bridget; I have said all. He will be here soon: he will come; he must come; he has no choice; and then--and then--" she closed her eyes, bowed her head, and shivered.

Arabella Crane was, as usual, right in her predictions. Before noon Jasper came,--came, not with his jocund swagger, but with that sidelong sinister look--of the man whom the world cuts--triumphantly restored to its former place in his visage. Madame Caumartin had been arrested; Poole had gone into the country with Uncle Sam; Jasper had seen a police-officer at the door of his own lodgings. He slunk away from the fashionable thoroughfares, slunk to the recesses of Podden Place, slunk into Arabella Crane's prim drawing-room, and said sullenly, "All is up; here I am!"

Three days afterwards, in a quiet street in a quiet town of Belgium,--wherein a sharper, striving to live by his profession, would soon become a skeleton,--in a commodious airy apartment, looking upon a magnificent street, the reverse of noisy, Jasper Losely sat secure, innocuous, and profoundly miserable. In another house, the windows of which--facing those of Jasper's sitting-room, from an upper story-commanded so good a view therein that it placed him under a surveillance akin to that designed by Mr. Bentham's reformatory Panopticon, sat Arabella Crane. Whatever her real feelings towards Jasper Losely (and what those feelings were no virile pen can presume authoritatively to define; for lived there ever a man who thoroughly understood a woman?), or whatever in earlier life might have been their reciprocated vows of eternal love,--not only from the day that Jasper, on his return to his native sh.o.r.es, presented himself in Podden Place, had their intimacy been restricted to the austerest bonds of friendship, but after Jasper had so rudely declined the hand which now fed him, Arabella Crane had probably perceived that her sole chance of retaining intellectual power over his lawless being necessitated the utter relinquishment of every hope or project that could expose her again to his contempt. Suiting appearances to reality, the decorum of a separate house was essential to the maintenance of that authority with which the rigid nature of their intercourse invested her. The additional cost strained her pecuniary resources, but she saved in her own accommodation in order to leave Jasper no cause to complain of any stinting in his.

There, then, she sat by her window, herself unseen, eying him in his opposite solitude, accepting for her own life a barren sacrifice, but a jealous sentinel on his. Meditating as she sat and as she eyed him,--meditating what employment she could invent, with the bribe of emoluments to be paid furtively by her, for those strong hands that could have felled an ox, but were nerveless in turning an honest penny, and for that restless mind hungering for occupation, and with the digestion of an ostrich for dice and debauch, riot and fraud, but queasy as an exhausted dyspeptic at the reception of one innocent amus.e.m.e.nt, one honourable toil. But while that woman still schemes how to rescue from hulks or halter that execrable man, who shall say that he is without a chance? A chance he has: WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT?

BOOK V.

CHAPTER I.

Envy will be a science when it learns the use of the microscope.

When leaves fall and flowers fade, great people are found in their country-seats. Look!--that is Montfort Court,--a place of regal magnificence, so far as extent of pile and amplitude of domain could satisfy the pride of ownership, or inspire the visitor with the respect due to wealth and power. An artist could have made nothing of it. The Sumptuous everywhere; the Picturesque nowhere. The house was built in the reign of George I., when first commenced that horror of the beautiful, as something in bad taste, which, agreeably to our natural love of progress, progressively advanced through the reigns of succeeding Georges. An enormous fafade, in dull brown brick; two wings and a centre, with double flights of steps to the hall-door from the carriage-sweep. No trees allowed to grow too near the house; in front, a stately flat with stone bal.u.s.trades. But wherever the eye turned, there was nothing to be seen but park, miles upon miles of park; not a cornfield in sight, not a roof-tree, not a spire, only those _lata silentia_,--still widths of turf, and, somewhat thinly scattered and afar, those groves of giant trees. The whole prospect so vast and so monotonous that it never tempted you to take a walk. No close-neighbouring poetic thicket into which to plunge, uncertain whither you would emerge; no devious stream to follow. The very deer, fat and heavy, seemed bored by pastures it would take them a week to traverse. People of moderate wishes and modest fortunes never envied Montfort Court: they admired it; they were proud to say they had seen it. But never did they say--

"Oh, that for me some home like this would smile!"

Not so, very, very great people!--they rather coveted than admired.

Those oak trees so large, yet so undecayed; that park, eighteen miles at least in circ.u.mference; that solid palace which, without inconvenience, could entertain and stow away a king and his whole court; in short, all that evidence of a princely territory and a weighty rent-roll made English dukes respectfully envious, and foreign potentates gratifyingly jealous.

But turn from the front. Open the gate in that stone bal.u.s.trade.

Come southward to the garden side of the house. Lady Montfort's flower-garden. Yes; not so dull!--flowers, even autumnal flowers, enliven any sward. Still, on so large a scale, and so little relief; so little mystery about those broad gravel-walks; not a winding alley anywhere. Oh, for a vulgar summer-house; for some alcove, all honeysuckle and ivy! But the dahlias are splendid! Very true; only, dahlias, at the best, are such uninteresting prosy things. What poet ever wrote upon a dahlia! Surely Lady Montfort might have introduced a little more taste here, shown a little more fancy! Lady Montfort!

I should like to see my lord's face if Lady Montfort took any such liberty. But there is Lady Montfort walking slowly along that broad, broad, broad gravel-walk; those splendid dahlias, on either side, in their set parterres. There she walks, in full evidence from all those sixty remorseless windows on the garden front, each window exactly like the other. There she walks, looking wistfully to the far end ('t is a long way off), where, happily, there is a wicket that carries a persevering pedestrian out of sight of the sixty windows into shady walks, towards the banks of that immense piece of water, two miles from the house. My lord has not returned from his moor in Scotland; my lady is alone. No company in the house: it is like saying, "No acquaintance in a city." But the retinue is full. Though she dined alone she might, had she pleased, have had almost as many servants to gaze upon her as there were windows now staring at her lonely walk with their gla.s.sy spectral eyes.

Just as Lady Montfort gains the wicket she is overtaken by a visitor, walking fast from the gravel sweep by the front door, where he has dismounted, where he has caught sight of her: any one so dismounting might have caught sight of her; could not help it. Gardens so fine were made on purpose for fine persons walking in them to be seen.

"Ah, Lady Montfort," said the visitor, stammering painfully, "I am so glad to find you at home."

"At home, George!" said the lady, extending her hand; "where else is it likely that I should be found? But how pale you are! What has happened?"

She seated herself on a bench, under a cedar-tree, just without the wicket; and George Morley, our old friend the Oxonian, seated himself by her side familiarly, but with a certain reverence. Lady Montfort was a few years older than himself, his cousin: he had known her from his childhood.

"What has happened!" he repeated; "nothing new. I have just come from visiting the good bishop."

"He does not hesitate to ordain you?" "No; but I shall never ask him to do so."

"My dear cousin, are you not over-scrupulous? You would be an ornament to the Church, sufficient in all else to justify your compulsory omission of one duty, which a curate could perform for you."

Morley shook his head sadly. "One duty omitted!" said he. "But is it not that duty which distinguishes the priest from the layman? and how far extends that duty? Whereever there needs a voice to speak the word,--not in the pulpit only, but at the hearth, by the sick-bed,--there should be the Pastor! No: I cannot, I ought not, I dare not! Incompetent as the labourer, how can I be worthy of the hire?" It took him long to bring out these words: his emotion increased his infirmity. Lady Montfort listened with an exquisite respect visible in her compa.s.sion, and paused long before she answered.

George Morley was the younger son of a country gentleman, with a good estate settled upon the elder son. George's father had been an intimate friend of his kinsman, the Marquess of Montfort (predecessor and grandsire of the present lord); and the marquess had, as he thought, amply provided for George in undertaking to secure to him, when of fitting age, the living of Humberston, the most lucrative preferment in his gift. The living had been held for the last fifteen years by an inc.u.mbent, now very old, upon the honourable understanding that it was to be resigned in favour of George, should George take orders. The young man, from his earliest childhood thus destined to the Church, devoted to the prospect of that profession all his studies, all his thoughts. Not till he was sixteen did his infirmity of speech make itself seriously perceptible: and then elocution masters undertook to cure it; they failed. But George's mind continued in the direction towards which it had been so systematically biased. Entering Oxford, he became absorbed in its academical shades. Amidst his books he almost forgot the impediment of his speech. Shy, taciturn, and solitary, he mixed too little with others to have it much brought before his own notice. He carried off prizes; he took high honours. On leaving the University, a profound theologian, an enthusiastic Churchman, filled with the most earnest sense of the pastor's solemn calling,--he was thus complimentarily accosted by the Archimandrite of his college, "What a pity you cannot go into the Church!"

"Cannot; but I am going into the Church."

"You! is it possible? But, perhaps, you are sure of a living--"