The holidays at Hyde Lodge brought at least repose for Diana Paget. The little ones had gone home, with the exception of two or three young colonists, and even they had perpetual liberty from lessons; so Diana had nothing to do but sit in the shady garden, reading or thinking, in the drowsy summer afternoons. Priscilla Paget had departed with the chief of the teachers for a seaside holiday; other governesses had gone to their homes; and but for the presence of an elderly Frenchwoman, who slept through one half of the day, and wrote letters to her kindred during the other half, Diana would have been the only responsible person in the deserted habitation.
She did not complain of her loneliness, or envy the delights of those who had departed. She was very glad to be quite alone, free to think her own thoughts, free to brood over those unforgotten years in which she had wandered over the face of the earth with her father and Valentine Hawkehurst. The few elder girls remaining at the Lodge thought Miss Paget unsociable because she preferred a lonely corner in the gardens and some battered old book of namby-pamby stories to the delights of their society, and criticised her very severely as they walked listlessly to and fro upon the lawn with big garden-hats, and arms entwined about each other’s waists.
Alas for Diana, the battered book was only an excuse for solitude, and for a morbid indulgence in her own sad thoughts! She had lived the life of unblemished respectability for a year, and looking back now at the Bohemian wanderings, she regretted those days of humiliation and misery, and sighed for the rare delights of that disreputable past! Yes, she had revolted against the degraded existence; and now she was sorry for having lost its uncertain pleasures, its fitful glimpses of sunshine. Was that true which Valentine had said, that no man can eat beef and mutton every day of his life; that it is better to be unutterly miserable one day and uproariously happy the next, than to tread one level path of dull content? Miss Paget began to think that there had been some reason in her old comrade’s philosophy; for she found the level path very dreary. She let her thoughts wander whither they would in this quiet holiday idleness, and they went back to the years which she had spent with her father. She thought of winter evenings in London when Valentine had taken her the round of the theatres, and they had sat together in stifling upper boxes — she pleased, he critical, and with so much to say to each other in the pauses of the performance. How kind he had been to her; how good, how brotherly! And then the pleasant walk home, through crowded noisy thoroughfares, and anon by long lines of quiet streets, in which they used to look up at the lighted windows of houses where parties were being given, and sometimes stop to listen to the music and watch the figures of the dancers flitting across the blinds. She thought of the journeys she had travelled with her father and Valentine by land and sea; the lonely moonlight watches on the decks of steamers; the long chill nights in railway-carriages under the feeble glimmer of an oil-lamp, and how she and Valentine had beguiled the tedious hours with wild purposeless talk while Captain Paget slept. She remembered the strange cities which she and her father’s protégé had looked at side by side; he with a calm listlessness of manner, which might either be real or assumed, but which never varied; she with an inward tremor of excitement and surprise. They had been very happy together, this lonely unprotected girl and the reckless adventurer. If his manner to her had been fitful, it had been sometimes dangerously, fatally kind. She looked back now, and remembered the days which she had spent with him, and knew that all the pleasures possible in a prosperous and successful life could never bring for her such delight as she had known in the midst of her wanderings; though shame and danger lurked at every corner, and poverty, disguised in that tawdry masquerade habit in which the swindler dresses it, accompanied her wherever she went.
She had been happy with him because she had loved him. That close companionship, sisterly and brotherly though it had seemed, had been fatal for the lonely and friendless daughter of Horatio Paget. In her desolation she had clung to the one creature who was kind to her, who did not advertise his disdain for herself and her sex, or openly avow that she was a nuisance and an encumbrance. Every slight put upon her by her father had strengthened the chain that bound her to Valentine Hawkehurst; and as the friendship between them grew closer day by day, until all her thoughts and fancies took their colour from his, it seemed a matter of course that he should love her, and she never doubted his feelings or questioned her own. There had been much in his conduct to justify her belief that she was beloved; so this inexperienced, untutored girl may surely be forgiven if she rested her faith in that fancied affection, and looked forward to some shadowy future in which she and Valentine would be man and wife, all in all to each other, free from the trammels of Captain Paget’s elaborate schemes, and living honestly, somehow or other, by means of literature, or music, or pen-and-ink caricatures, or some of those liberal arts which have always been dear to the children of Bohemia. They would have lodgings in some street near the Thames, and go to a theatre or a concert every evening, and spend long summer days in suburban parks or on suburban commons, he lying on the grass smoking, she talking to him or reading to him, as his fancy might dictate. Before her twentieth birthday, the proudest woman is apt to regard the man she loves as a grand and superior creature; and there had been a certain amount of reverential awe mingled with Diana’s regard for Mr. Hawkehurst, scapegrace and adventurer though he was.
Little by little that bright girlish dream had faded away. Fancy’s enchanted palace had been shattered into a heap of shapeless ruin by those accidental scraps of hard worldly wisdom with which Valentine had pelted the fairy fabric. He a man to love, or to marry for love! Why, he talked like some hardened world-weary sinner who had done with every human emotion. The girl shuddered as she heard him. She had loved him, and believed in his love. She had fancied a tender meaning in the voice which softened when it spoke to her, a pensive earnestness in the dark eyes which looked at her; but just when the voice had seemed softest and sweetest, the pensive eyes most eloquently earnest, the adventurer’s manner had changed all at once, and for ever. He had grown hard, and cold, and indifferent. He had scarcely tried to conceal the fact that the girl’s companionship bored and wearied him. He had yawned in her face, and had abandoned himself to moody abstraction when accident obliged him to be alone with her. Miss Paget’s pride had been equal to the occasion. Mary Anne Kepp would have dissolved into tears at the first unkind word from the lips of her beloved; but Mary Anne Kepp’s daughter, with the blood of the Cromie Pagets in her veins, was quite a different person. She returned Mr. Hawkehurst’s indifference with corresponding disregard. If his manner was cold as a bleak autumn, hers was icy as a severe winter; only now and then, when she was very tired of her joyless existence, her untutored womanhood asserted itself, and she betrayed the real state of her feelings — betrayed herself as she had done on her last night at Forêtdechêne, when she and Valentine had looked down at the lighted windows shining dimly through the purple of the summer night. She looked back at the past now in the quiet of the school-garden, and tried to remember how miserable she had been, what agonies of despair she had suffered, how brief had been her delights, how bitter her disappointments. She tried to remember what tortures she had suffered from that wasted passion, that useless devotion. She tried to rejoice in the consciousness of the peace and respectability of her present life; but she could not. That passionate yearning for the past possessed her so strongly. She could remember nothing except that she had been with him. She had seen his face, she had heard his voice; and now how long and weary the time might be before she could again see that one beloved face or hear the dear familiar voice! The brightest hope she had in these midsummer holidays was the hope of a letter from him; and even that might be the prelude of disappointment. She wrestled with herself, and tried to exorcise those ghosts of memory which haunted her by day and wove themselves into her dreams by night; but they were not to be laid at rest. She hated her folly; but her folly was stronger than herself.
For three weeks Diana Paget had no companions but her sorrowful memories — her haunting shadows; but at the end of that time the stagnant mill-pond of her life was suddenly ruffled — the dull course of existence was disturbed by the arrival of two letters. She found them lying by her plate upon the breakfast-table one bright July morning; and while she was yet far away from the table she could see that one of the envelopes bore a foreign stamp, and was directed by the hand of Valentine Hawkehurst. She seated herself at the table in a delicious flutter of emotion, and tore open that foreign envelope, while the French governess poured out the tea, and while the little group of schoolgirls nudged one another and watched her eager face with insolent curiosity.
The first letter contained only a few lines.
“MY DEAR DIANA,” wrote the young man, “your father has decided on returning to London, where I believe he really intends to make a respectable start, if he can only get the opening and the help he wants. I know you will be glad to hear this. I don’t exactly say where we shall take up our quarters; but the Captain will of course come to see you; and if I can chasten my outward semblance sufficiently to venture within the sacred precincts of a lady’s school, I shall come with him. Direct to the old address, if you write before the end of the month, and believe me, as always, your friend.” “VALENTINE.”
The second letter was in Charlotte Halliday’s big bold hand, and was frank, impetuous, and loving as the girl herself.
“MY OWN DEAREST DI — It is all arranged,” wrote Miss Halliday, dashing at once into the heart of the subject. “I talked mamma over the very first day after my return, and then there was nothing more to be done than to talk over Mr. Sheldon. Of course there was just a little difficulty in that, for he is so awfully practical; and he wanted to know why I wanted a companion, and what use you would be in the house; as if the very last thing one required in a companion was companionship. I’m almost afraid to tell you the iniquitous fables I invented about your extreme usefulness; your genius for millinery, and the mints of money you would save by making up mamma’s flimsy little caps; your taste for dress-making, &c. &c. &c. You are the cleverest creature in the world, you know, Di; for you must remember how you altered, that green silk dress for me when Miss Person had made me a square-shouldered fright. So, after a great deal of humming, and haing, and argufication —is there such a word as ‘argufication,’ I wonder? — my stepfather said that if my heart was set upon having you, and if I thought you would be useful, you might come to us; but that he could not afford to give you any salary, and that if you wanted a new dress now and then, I must buy it for you out of my own allowance; and I will, darling, if you will only come and be my friend and sister. My life is dreadfully dull without you. I walk up and down the stiff little gravel paths, and stare at the geraniums and calceolarias. Mariana might have been dreary in her moated grange; but I daresay the Lincolnshire flowers grew wild and free, and she was spared the abomination of gaudy little patches of red and yellow, and waving ribbons of blue and white, which constitute the glory of modern gardening. Do come to me, dear. I have no one to talk to, and nothing to do. Mamma is a dear good affectionate soul; but she and I don’t understand each other. I don’t care for her twittering little birds, and she doesn’t care for my whims and fancies. I have read novels until I am tired. I am not allowed to go out by myself, and mamma can scarcely walk to Kensington-gardens without sinking under the exertion. We drive out sometimes; but I am sick to death of crawling slowly up and down by the Serpentine staring at people’s bonnets. I might enjoy it, perhaps, if I had you with me to make fun out of some of the bonnets. The house is very comfortable; but it always seems to me unpleasantly like some philanthropic institution in miniature. I long to scratch the walls, or break the windows; and I begin to understand the feelings of those unhappy paupers who tear up their clothes: they get utterly tired of their stagnation, you see, and must do something wicked and rebellious rather than do nothing at all. You will take pity upon my forlorn state, won’t you, Di? I shall come to Hyde Lodge to-morrow afternoon with mamma, to hear your ulti — what’s its name? — and in the meanwhile, and for ever afterwards, believe me to be your devoted and unchanging LOTTA.”
Diana Paget’s eyes grew dim as she read this letter.
“I love her very dearly,” she thought, “but not one hundred-fold as much as I ought to love her.”
And then she went back to Mr. Hawkehurst’s epistle, and read and re-read its half-dozen lines, wondering when he would come to London, and whether she would see him when he came. To see him again! The thought of that possibility seemed like a spot of vivid light, which dazzled her eyes and made them blind to anything around or beyond it. As for this offer of a strange home in the household of Mr. Sheldon, it seemed to her a matter of so very little importance where she went or what became of her, that she was quite willing to let other people decide her existence. Anything would be better than the monotony of Hyde Lodge. If Valentine Hawkehurst came to see her at Mr. Sheldon’s house, he would be permitted to see her alone, most likely, and it would be something like the old times; whereas at the Lodge Priscilla Paget or one of the governesses would undoubtedly be present at any interview between Diana and her old friend, and the real Valentine would be hidden under the semblance of a respectable young man, with very little to say for himself. Perhaps this one thought exercised considerable influence over Miss Paget’s decision. She wanted so much to see Valentine alone, to know whether he had changed, to see his face at the first moment of meeting, and to discover, if possible, the solution of that enigma which was the grand mystery of her life — that one perpetual question which was always repeating itself in her brain — whether he was altogether cold and indifferent, or if there was not some hidden warmth, some secret tenderness beneath that repelling outward seeming.
In the afternoon Miss Halliday called with Mrs. Sheldon, and there was a long discussion about Diana Paget’s future life. Georgy abandoned herself as unhesitatingly to the influence of her daughter as she did to that of her husband, and had been brought to think that it would be the most delightful thing in the world to have Miss Paget for a useful companion.
“And will you really make my caps, dear?” she said, when she had grown at her ease with Diana. “Miss Terly in the Bayswater-road charges me so much for the simplest little lace head-dress; and though Mr. Sheldon is very good about those sort of things, I know he sometimes thinks my bills rather high.”
Diana was very indifferent about her future, and the heart must have been very hard which could have resisted Charlotte’s tender pleading; so it was ultimately decided that Miss Paget should write to her kinswoman to describe the offer that had been made to her of a new home, and to inquire if her services could be conveniently dispensed with at Hyde Lodge. After which decision Charlotte embraced her friend with enthusiasm, and departed, bearing off Mrs. Sheldon to the carriage which awaited them at the gates of Priscilla Paget’s umbrageous domain.
Diana sighed as she went back to the empty schoolroom. Even Charlotte’s affection could not altogether take the sting out of dependence. To go into a strange house amongst strange people, and to hold a place in it only on the condition of being perpetually useful and unfailingly good-tempered and agreeable, is scarcely the pleasantest prospect which this world can offer to a proud and beautiful woman. Diana remembered her bright vision of Bohemianism in a lodging near the Strand. It would be very delightful to ride on sufferance in Mrs. Sheldon’s carriage, no doubt; but O, how much pleasanter it would have been to sit by Valentine Hawkehurst in a hansom cab spinning along the road to Greenwich or Richmond!
She had promised to despatch her letter to Priscilla by that afternoon’s post, and she kept her promise. The reply came by return of post, and was very kind. Priscilla advised her by all means to accept Miss Halliday’s offer, which would give her a much better position than that which she occupied at Hyde Lodge. She would have time to improve herself, no doubt, Priscilla said, and might be able to hope for something still better in the course of two or three years; “for you must look the world straight in the face, Diana,” wrote the schoolmistress, “as I did before I was your age; and make up your mind to rely upon your own exertions, since you know what your father is, and how little you have to hope for from him. As you are to have no salary with the Sheldons, and will no doubt be expected to make a good appearance, I shall do what I can to help you with your wardrobe.”
This letter decided the fate of Captain Paget’s daughter. A week after Miss Halliday’s visit to Hyde Lodge a hack cab carried Diana and all her earthly possessions to the Lawn, where Charlotte received her with open arms, and where she was inducted into a neatly furnished bedchamber adjoining that of her friend. Mr. Sheldon scrutinised her keenly from under the shadow of his thick black brows when he came home to dinner. He treated her with a stiff kind of politeness during the orderly progress of the meal; and once, when he looked at her, he was surprised to find that she was contemplating him with an expression of mingled wonder and reverence.
He was the first eminently respectable man whom Miss Paget had ever encountered in familiar intercourse, and she was regarding him attentively, as an individual with scientific tastes might regard some natural curiosity.
Life at the Lawn went by very smoothly for Mr. Sheldon’s family. Georgy was very happy in the society of a companion who seemed really to have a natural taste for the manufacture of pretty little head-dresses from the merest fragments of material in the way of lace and ribbon. Diana had all that versatile cleverness and capacity for expedients which is likely to be acquired in a wandering and troubled life. She had learned more in her three years of discomfort with her father than in all the undeviating course of the Hyde-Lodge studies; she had improved her French at one table d’h?te, her German at another; she had caught some new trick of style in every concert-room, some fresh combination of costume on every racecourse; and, being really grateful for Charlotte’s disinterested affection, she brought all her accomplishments to bear to please her friend and her friend’s household.
In this she succeeded admirably. Mrs. Sheldon found her daughter’s society much more delightful now that the whole pressure of Charlotte’s intellect and vitality no longer fell entirely upon herself. She liked to sit lazily in her arm-chair while the two girls chattered at their work, and she could venture an occasional remark, and fancy that she had a full share in the conversation. When the summer weather rendered walking a martyrdom and driving an affliction, she could recline on her favourite sofa reading a novel, soothed by the feeble twittering of her birds; while Charlotte and Diana went out together, protected by the smart boy in buttons, who was not altogether without human failings, and was apt to linger behind his fair charges, reading the boards before the doors of newsvendors’ shops, or looking at the cartoons in Punch exhibited in the stationers’ windows.
Mr. Sheldon made a point of pleasing his stepdaughter whenever it was possible for him to do so without palpable inconvenience to himself; and as she was to be gratified by so small a pecuniary sacrifice as the trifling increase of tradesmen’s bills caused by Miss Paget’s residence in the gothic villa, he was the last man in the world to refuse her that indulgence. His own pursuits were of so absorbing a nature as to leave little leisure for concern about other people’s business. He asked no questions about his stepdaughter’s companion; but he was not the less surprised to see this beautiful high-bred woman content to sit at his board as an unsalaried dependent.
“Your friend Miss Paget looks like a countess,” he said one day to Charlotte. “I thought girls generally pitched upon some plain homely young woman for their pet companion, but you seem to have chosen the handsomest girl in the school.”
“Yes, she is very handsome, is she not? I wish some of your rich City men would marry her, papa.”
Miss Halliday consented to call her mother’s husband “papa,” though the caressing name seemed in a manner to stick in her throat. She had loved that blustrous good-tempered Tom Halliday so very dearly, and it was only to please poor Georgy that she brought herself to address any other man by the name that had been his.
“My City men have something better to do than to marry a young woman without a sixpence,” answered Mr. Sheldon. “Why don’t you try to catch one of them for yourself?”
“I don’t like City men,” said Charlotte quickly; and then she blushed, and added apologetically, “at least not the generality of City men, papa.”
Diana had waited until her destiny was settled before answering Valentine Hawkehurst’s letter; but she wrote to him directly she was established at the Lawn, and told him the change in her plans.
“I think papa had better let me come to see him at his lodgings,” she said, “wherever they may be; for I should scarcely care about Mr. Sheldon seeing him. No one here knows anything definite about my history; and as it is just possible Mr. Sheldon may have encountered my father somehow or other, it would be as well for him to keep clear of this house. I could not venture to say this to papa myself, but perhaps you could suggest it without offending him. You see I have grown very worldly-wise, and am learning to protect my own interests in the spirit which you have so instilled into me. I don’t know whether that sort of spirit is likely to secure one’s happiness, but I have no doubt it is the wisest and best for this world.”
Miss Paget could not refrain from an occasional sneer when she wrote to her old companion. He never returned her sneers, or noticed them. His letters were always frank, friendly, and brotherly in tone.
“Neither my good opinion nor my bad opinion is of any consequence to him,” Diana thought bitterly. It was late in August when Captain Paget and his protégé came to town. Valentine suggested the wisdom of leaving Diana in her new home uncompromised by any past associations. But this was a suggestion which Horatio Paget could not accept. His brightest successes in the way of scheming had been matured out of chance acquaintanceships with eligible men. A man who could afford such a luxury as a companion for his daughter must needs be eligible, and the Captain was not inclined to sacrifice his acquaintance from any extreme delicacy.
“My daughter seems to have made new friends for herself, and I should like to see what kind of people they are,” he said conclusively. “We’ll look them up this evening, Val.”
Mr. George Sheldon dined at the Lawn on the day on which Horatio Paget determined on “looking up” his daughter’s new friends, and he and the two girls were strolling in the garden when the Captain and Mr. Hawkehurst were announced. They had been told that Miss Paget was in the garden.
“Be good enough to take me straight to her,” said the Captain to the boy in buttons; “I am her father.”
Horatio Paget was too old a tactician not to know that by an unceremonious plunge into the family circle he was more likely to secure an easy footing in the household than by any direct approach of the master. He had seen the little group in the garden, and had mistaken George for the head of the house.
Diana turned from pale to red, and from red to pale again, as she recognised the two men. There had been no announcement of their coming. She did not even know that they were in England.
“Papa!” she cried, and then held out her hand and greeted him; coldly enough, as it seemed to Charlotte, who fancied that any kind of real father must be very dear.
But Captain Paget was not to be satisfied by that cold greeting. It suited his purpose to be especially paternal on this occasion. He drew his daughter to his breast, and embraced her affectionately, very much to that young lady’s surprise.
Then, having abandoned himself entirely for the moment to this tender impulse of paternity, he suddenly put his daughter aside, as if he had all at once remembered his duty to society, drew himself up stiffly, and saluted Miss Halliday and George Sheldon with uncovered head.
“Mr. Sheldon, I believe?” he murmured.
“George Sheldon,” answered that gentleman; “my brother Philip is in the drawing-room yonder, looking at us.”
Philip Sheldon came out into the garden as George said this, It was one of those sultry evenings on which the most delightful of gothic villas is apt to be too stifling for endurance; and in most of the prim suburban gardens there were people lounging listlessly among the flower-beds. Mr. Sheldon came to look at this patrician stranger who had just embraced his daughter’s companion; whereupon Captain Paget introduced himself and his friend Mr. Hawkehurst. After the introduction Mr. Sheldon and the Captain fell into an easy conversation, while the two girls walked slowly along the gravel pathway with Valentine by their side, and while George loitered drearily along, chewing the stalk of a geranium, and pondering the obscure reminiscences of the last oldest inhabitant whose shadowy memories he had evoked in his search after new links in the chain of the Haygarths.
The two girls walked in the familiar schoolgirl fashion of Hyde Lodge, Charlotte’s arm encircling the waist of her friend. They were both dressed in white muslin, and looked very shadowy and sylph-like in the summer dusk. Mr. Hawkehurst found himself in a new atmosphere in this suburban garden, with these two white-robed damsels by his side; for it seemed to him that Diana with Charlotte’s arm round her waist, and a certain shy gentleness of manner which was new to him, was quite a different person from that Miss Paget whose wan face had looked at him so anxiously in the saloons of the Belgian Kursaal.
At first there was considerable restraint in the tone of the conversation, and some little of that unnecessary discussion as to whether this evening was warmer than the preceding evening, or whether it was not, indeed, the warmest evening of all that summer. And then, when the ice was broken, Mr. Hawkehurst began to talk at his ease about Paris, which city Miss Halliday had never seen; about the last book, the last play, the last folly, the last fashionable bonnet; for it was one of the special attributes of this young Robert Macaire to be able to talk about anything, and to adapt himself to any society. Charlotte opened her eyes to their widest extent as she listened to this animated stranger. She had been so wearied by the dry as dust arguments of City men who had discussed the schemes of great contractors, “which will never be carried out, sir, while money is at its present rate, mark my words,”— or the chances of a company “which is eaten up by debenture-bonds and preference-shares, sir, and will never pay its original proprietors one sixpence of interest on their capital,” with a great deal more of the same character; and it was quite new to her to hear about novels, theatres, and bonnets from masculine lips, and to find that there were men living who could interest themselves in such frivolities. Charlotte was delighted with Diana’s friend. It was she who encouraged Valentine every now and then by some exclamation of surprise or expression of interest, while Miss Paget herself was thoughtful and silent.
It was not thus that she had hoped to meet Valentine Hawkehurst. She stole a look at him now and then as he walked by her side. Yes, it was the old face — the face which would have been so handsome if there had been warmth and life in it, instead of that cold listlessness which repelled all sympathy, and seemed to constitute a kind of mask behind which the real man hid himself.
Diana looked at him, and remembered her parting from him in the chill gray morning on the platform at Forêtdechêne. He had let her go out alone into the dreary world to encounter what fate she might, without any more appearance of anxiety than he might have exhibited had she been starting for a summer-day’s holiday; and now, after a year of separation, he met her with the same air of unconcern, and could discourse conventional small talk to another woman while she walked by his side.
While Mr. Hawkehurst was talking to Mr. Sheldon’s stepdaughter, Captain Paget had contrived to make himself very agreeable to that gentleman himself. Lord Lytton has said that “there is something strange and almost mesmerical in the rapport between two evil natures. Bring two honest men together, and it is ten to one if they recognise each other as honest; differences in temper, manner, even politics, may make each misjudge the other. But bring together two men unprincipled and perverted — men who, if born in a cellar, would have been food for the hulks or gallows — and they understand each other by instant sympathy.” However this might be with these two men, they had speedily become upon very easy terms with each other. Mr. Sheldon’s plans for the making of money were very complicated in their nature, and he had frequent need of clever instruments to assist in the carrying out of his arrangements. Horatio Paget was the exact type of man most likely to be useful to such a speculator as Philip Sheldon. He was the very ideal of the “Promoter,” the well-dressed, well-mannered gentleman, beneath whose magic wand new companies arise as if by magic; the man who, without a sixpence in his own pocket, can set a small Pactolus flowing from the pockets of other people; the man who, content himself to live in a humble second floor at Chelsea, can point to gigantic hotels which are as the palaces of a new Brobdignag, and say, “Lo, these arose at my bidding!” Mr. Sheldon was always on the alert to discover anything or anybody likely to serve his own interest, either in the present or the future; and he came to the conclusion that Miss Paget’s father was a person upon whom an occasional dinner might not be altogether thrown away.
“Take a chop with us to-morrow at six,” he said, on parting from the Captain, “and then you can hear the two girls play and sing. They play remarkably well, I believe, from what other people tell me; but I am not a musical man myself.”
Horatio Paget accepted the invitation as cordially as it was given. It is astonishing how genial and friendly these men of the world can be at the slightest imaginable notice. One can fancy the striped tigers of Bengal shaking paws in the jungle, the vultures hob-nobbing in a mountain cleft over the torn carcass of a stag, the kites putting their beaks together after dining on a nest of innocent doves.
“Then we shall expect to see you at sharp six,” said Mr. Sheldon, “and your friend Mr. Hawkehurst with you, of course.”
After this the two gentlemen departed. Valentine shook hands with Diana, and took a more ceremonious leave of Charlotte. George Sheldon threw away his chewed geranium-stalk in order to bid good evening to the visitors; and the little party walked to the garden-gate together.
“That Sheldon seems a very clever fellow,” said Captain Paget, as he and Valentine walked towards the Park, which they had to cross on their way to Chelsea, where the Captain had secured a convenient lodging. “I wonder whether he is any relation to the Sheldon who is in with a low set of money-lenders?”
“What, the Sheldon of Gray’s Inn?” exclaimed Mr. Hawkehurst. “We can easily find that out.”
Horatio Paget and Valentine Hawkehurst were frequent visitors at the Lawn after that first evening. Mr. Sheldon found the Captain useful to him in the carrying out of certain business arrangements on more than one occasion, and the relations between the respectable stockbroker and the disreputable adventurer assumed a very friendly character. Diana wondered to see so spotless a citizen as Philip Sheldon hand-and-glove with her father. Mrs. Sheldon and Charlotte were delighted with the Captain and his protégé; these two penniless Bohemians were so much more agreeable to the feminine mind than the City men who were wont to sit in the dining-room slowly imbibing Mr. Sheldon’s old port in the long summer evenings, while their wives endured the abomination of desolation with Georgy and Charlotte in the drawing-room. Captain Paget paid Mrs. Sheldon flowery compliments, and told her delightful stories of the aristocracy and all that shining West-end world with which he had once been familiar. Poor simple Georgy regarded him with that reverential awe which a middle-class country-bred woman is prone to feel for a man who bears upon him that ineffaceable stamp of high birth and good breeding, not to be destroyed by half a century of degradation. Nor could Charlotte withhold her admiration from the man whose tone was so infinitely superior to that of all the other men she had encountered. In his darkest hour Captain Paget had found his best friends, or his easiest dupes, among women. It had gone hard with him when his dear friend had withheld the temporary accommodation of a five-pound note; but it had been much harder when his friend’s wife had refused the loan of “a little silver.”
Valentine Hawkehurst came very often to the Lawn, sometimes with his friend and patron, sometimes alone. He brought the young ladies small offerings in the way of a popular French novel adapted for feminine perusal, or an occasional box for some theatre which had fallen upon evil days, and was liberal in the circulation of “paper.” He met the two girls sometimes in their morning walks in Kensington-gardens, and walked with them in the leafy avenues, and only left them at the gate by which they departed. So much of his life was a listless waiting for the arising of new chances, that he had ample time to waste in feminine society, and he seemed very well inclined to loiter away the leisure hours of existence in the companionship of Diana and her friend.
And was Miss Paget glad of his coming, and pleased to be in his company? Alas, no! The time had been, and only within a few months, when she had sickened for the sight of his familiar face, and fancied that the most exquisite happiness life could afford her would be to see him once more, anywhere, under any circumstances. She saw him now almost daily, and she was miserable. She saw him; but another woman had come between her and the man she loved: and now, if his voice took a softer tone, or if his eyes assumed a tender earnestness of expression, it might be Charlotte’s influence which wrought the transformation. Who could say that it was not on Charlotte’s account he came so often, and lingered so long? Diana looked at him sometimes with haggard angry eyes, which saw that it was Miss Halliday who absorbed his attention. It was Charlotte — Charlotte, who was so bright and happy a creature that the coldest heart must needs have been moved and melted by her fascination. What was the cold patrician beauty of Miss Paget’s face when compared with the changeful charm of this radiant girl, with the flashing gray eyes and piquant features, and all those artless caprices of manner which made her arch loveliness irresistible? Diana’s heart grew sick and cold as she watched these two day by day, and saw the innocent school-girl’s ascendancy over the adventurer. The attributes which made Charlotte charming were just those very attributes which Valentine Hawkehurst had been least accustomed to discover in the womankind he had hitherto encountered. He had seen beautiful women, elegant and fascinating women, without number; but this frank girlish nature, this happy childlike disposition, was entirely new to him. How should he have met bright childlike creatures in the pathways which he had trodden? For the first time in his life a fresh young heart revealed its treasures of purity and tenderness before his world-weary eyes, and his own heart was melted by the new influence. He had admired Diana; he had been touched by her girlish fancy for him, and had loved her as well as he had believed himself capable of loving any woman. But when Prudence and Honour counselled him to stifle and crush his growing affection for the beautiful companion of his wanderings, the struggle had involved no agony of regret or despair. He had told himself that no good could ever come of his love for Captain Paget’s daughter, and he had put aside that love before it had taken any vital root in his heart. He had been very strong and resolute in this matter — resisting looks of sad surprise which would have melted a softer nature. And he had been proud of his own firmness. “Better for her, and better for me,” he had said to himself: “let her outlive her foolish schoolgirl fancies, and wait patiently till her beauty wins her a rich husband. As for me, I must marry some prosperous tradesman’s widow, if I ever marry at all.”
The influence of the world in which his life had been spent had degraded Valentine Hawkehurst, and had done much to harden him; and yet he was not altogether hard. He discovered his own weakness very soon after the beginning of his acquaintance with Mr. Sheldon’s stepdaughter. He knew very well that if he had been no fitting lover for Diana Paget, he was still less a fitting lover for Charlotte Halliday. He knew that although it might suit Mr. Sheldon’s purpose to make use of the Captain and himself as handy instruments for the accomplishment of somewhat dirty work, he would be the very last man to accept one of those useful instruments as a husband for his stepdaughter. He knew all this; and knew that, apart from all worldly considerations, there was an impassable gulf between himself and Charlotte. What could there be in common between the unprincipled companion of Horatio Paget and this innocent girl, whose darkest sin had been a neglected lesson or an ill-written exercise? If he could have given her a home and a position, an untarnished name and respectable associations, he would even yet have been unworthy of her affection, unable to assure her happiness.
“I am a scoundrel and an adventurer,” he said to himself, in his most contemptuous spirit. “If some benevolent fairy were to give me the brightest home that was ever created for man, and Charlotte for my wife, I daresay I should grow tired of my happiness in a week or two, and go out some night to look for a place where I could play billiards and drink beer. Is there any woman upon this earth who could render my existence supportable without billiards and beer?”
Knowing himself much better than the Grecian philosopher seemed to think it possible for human nature to know itself, Mr. Hawkehurst decided that it was his bounden duty, both for his own sake and that of the young lady in question, to keep clear of the house in which Miss Halliday lived, and the avenue in which she was wont to walk. He told himself this a dozen times a day, and yet he made his appearance at the Lawn whenever he had the poorest shadow of an excuse for going there; and it seemed as if the whole business of his life lay at the two ends of Charlotte’s favourite avenue, so often did he find himself called upon to perambulate that especial thoroughfare. He knew that he was weak and foolish and dishonourable; he knew that he was sowing the dragon’s teeth from which were to spring up armed demons that would rend and tear him. But Charlotte’s eyes were unspeakably bright and bewitching, and Charlotte’s voice was very sweet and tender. A thrilling consciousness that he was not altogether an indifferent person in Charlotte’s consideration had possessed him of late when he found himself in that young lady’s society, and a happiness which had hitherto been strange to him gave a new zest to his purposeless life.
He still affected the old indifference of manner, the idle listless tone of a being who has finished with all the joys and sorrows, affections and aspirations, of the world in which he lives. But the pretence had of late become a very shallow one. In Charlotte’s presence he was eager and interested in spite of himself — childishly eager about the veriest trifles which interested her. Love had taken up the glass of Time; and the days and hours were reckoned by a new standard; everything in the world had suffered some wondrous change, which Valentine Hawkehurst tried in vain to understand. The very earth upon which he walked had undergone some mystic process of transformation; the very streets of London were new to him. He had known Kensington-gardens from his boyhood; but not those enchanted avenues of beech and elm in which he walked with Charlotte. In the plainest and most commonplace phraseology, Mr. Hawkehurst had fallen in love. This penniless adventurer, who at eight-and-twenty years of age was steeped to the lips in the worst experiences of a very indifferent world, found himself all at once hanging upon the words and living upon the looks of an ignorant schoolgirl.
The discovery that he was capable of this tender weakness had an almost overwhelming effect upon Mr. Hawkehurst. He was ashamed of this touch of humanity, this foolish affection which had awakened all that was purest and best in a nature that had been so long abandoned to degrading influences. For some time he fought resolutely against that which he considered his folly; but the training which had made him the master of many a perplexing position had not given him the mastery over his own inclinations; and when he found that Charlotte’s society had become the grand necessity of his life, he abandoned himself to his fate without further resistance. He let himself drift with the tide that was so much stronger than himself; and if there were breakers ahead, or fatal rocks lurking invisible beneath the blue waters, he must take his chance. His frail bark must go to pieces when her time came. In the meanwhile it was so delicious to float upon the summer sea, that a man could afford to forget future possibilities in the way of rocks and quicksands.
Miss Paget had known very few pleasures in the course of her uncared-for youth; but she hitherto had experienced no such anguish as that which she had now to endure in her daily intercourse with Valentine and Charlotte. She underwent her martyrdom bravely, and no prying eye discovered the sufferings which her proud nature supported in silence. “Who takes any heed of my feelings, or cares whether I am glad or sorry?” she thought; “he does not.”
The sand which ran so swiftly in the glass which that bright young urchin Love had wrested from the hand of grim old Time ran with an almost equal swiftness in the hour-glasses of lodging-house keepers and tradespeople, and the necessities of every day demanded perpetual exertion on the part of Mr. Hawkehurst, let Charlotte’s eyes be never so bright, and Charlotte’s society never so dear. For Captain Paget and his protégé there was no such thing as rest; and the ingenious Captain took care that the greater part of the labour should be performed by Valentine, while the lion’s share of the spoil was pounced upon by the ready paw of the noble Horatio. Just now he found his pupil unusually plastic, unusually careless of his own interests, and ready to serve his master with agreeable blindness. Since that awkward little affair at Forêtdechêne, that tiresome entanglement about a King of Spades which had put in an appearance at a moment when no such monarch was to be expected, Captain Paget had obtained the means of existence in a manner which was almost respectable, if not altogether honest; for it is not to be supposed that honesty and respectability are by any means synonymous terms. It was only by the exercise of superhuman address that the Captain had extricated himself from that perplexing predicament at the Belgian watering-place; and it may be that the unpleasant experiences of that particular evening were not without a salutary effect upon the adventurer’s future plans.
“It was touch-and-go work, Val,” he said to his companion; “and if I hadn’t carried matters with a high hand, and sprung my position as an officer in the English service upon those French ruffians, I don’t know where it would have ended.”
“It might have come to a metallic ornamentation of the ankle, and some amiable 444, who has murdered his grandmother with a red-hot poker and extenuating circumstances, for your companion,” murmured Valentine. “I wouldn’t try it on with that supererogatory king again on this side of the Channel, if I were you.”
The Captain bestowed a freezing look on his flippant protégé and then commenced a very grave discussion of future ways and means, which ended in an immediate departure for Paris, where the two men entered upon an unpretentious career in the commercial line as agents and travellers for the patentees of an improved kind of gutta percha, which material was supposed to be applicable to every imaginable purpose, from the sole of an infant’s boot to the roof of a cathedral. There are times when genius must stoop to pick up its daily pittance; and for twelve months the elegant Horatio Paget was content to devote his best energies to the perpetual praise of the Incorrodible and Indestructible and Incombustible India-rubber, in consideration of a very modest percentage on his commercial transactions in that material. To exert the persuasive eloquence of a Burke or a Thurlow in order to induce a man to roof his new warehouses with a fabric which you are aware will be torn into ribbons by the first run of stormy weather, for the sake of obtaining two-and-a-half per cent on his investment, may not be in accordance with the honourable notions of a Bayard, and yet in a commercial sense may be strictly correct. It was only when Captain Paget had made a comfortable little purse out of his percentage upon the Incorrodible and Incombustible that he discovered the extreme degradation of his position as agent and traveller. He determined on returning to the land of his birth. Joint-stock companies were beginning to multiply in the commercial world at this period; and wherever there are many schemes for the investment of public capital there is room for such a man as Horatio Paget — a man who, with the aid of a hired brougham, can inspire confidence in the breast of the least daring speculator.
The Captain came, accompanied as usual by that plastic tool and subaltern, Valentine Hawkehurst, who, being afflicted with a chronic weariness of everything in life, was always eager to abandon any present pursuit in favour of the vaguest contingency, and to shake off the dust of any given locality from his vagabond feet. Captain Paget and his protégé came to London, where a fortunate combination of circumstances threw them in the way of Mr. Sheldon.
The alliance which arose between that gentleman and the Captain opened a fair prospect for the latter. Mr. Sheldon was interested in the formation of a certain joint-stock company, but had his own reasons for not wishing to be identified with it. A stalking-horse is by no means a difficult kind of animal to procure in the cattle-fairs of London; but a stalking-horse whose paces are sufficiently showy and imposing — a high-stepper, of thoroughbred appearance, and a mouth sensitively alive to the lightest touch of the curb, easy to ride or drive, warranted neither a kicker nor a bolter — is a quadruped of rare excellence, not to be met with every day. Just such a stalking-horse was Captain Paget; and Mr. Sheldon lost no time in putting him into action. It is scarcely necessary to say that the stockbroker trusted his new acquaintance only so far as it was absolutely necessary to trust him; or that the Captain and the stockbroker thoroughly understood each other without affecting to do so. For Horatio Paget the sun of prosperity arose in unaccustomed splendour. He was able to pay for his lodgings, and was an eminently respectable person in the eyes of his landlord. He enjoyed the daily use of a neatly-appointed brougham, in which only the most practised eye could discover the taint of the livery stable. He dined sumptuously at fashionable restaurants, and wore the freshest of lavender gloves, the most delicate of waxen heath-blossoms or creamy-tinted exotics in the button-hole of his faultless coat.
While the chief flourished, the subaltern was comparatively idle. The patrician appearance and manners of the Captain were a perennial source of profit to that gentleman; but Valentine Hawkehurst had not a patrician appearance; and the work which Mr. Sheldon found for him was of a more uncertain and less profitable character than that which fell to the share of the elegant Horatio. But Valentine was content. He shared the Captain’s lodging, though he did not partake of the Captain’s dinners or ride in the smart little brougham. He had a roof to shelter him, and was rarely unprovided with the price of some kind of dinner; and as this was the highest order of prosperity he had ever known, he was content. He was more than content; for the first time in his existence he knew what it was to be happy. A purer joy than life had ever held for him until now made him careless whether his dinner cost eighteenpence or eighteen shillings; whether he rode in the most perfect of broughams or walked in the mud. He took no heed for the future; he forgot the past, and abandoned himself heart and soul to the new delights of the present.
Never had Philip Sheldon found so willing a tool, so cheap a drudge. Valentine was ready to do anything or everything for Charlotte’s stepfather, since his relations with that gentleman enabled him to spend so much of his life with Charlotte.
But even in this sublimated state of mind Mr. Hawkehurst was not exempt from the great necessity of Mr. Skimpole and humanity at large. He wanted pounds. His garments were shabby, and he desired new and elegant raiment in which to appear to advantage before the eyes of the woman he loved. It had been his privilege on several occasions to escort Mrs. Sheldon and the two younger ladies to a theatre; and even this privilege had cost him money. He wanted pounds to expend upon those new books and music which served so often as the excuse for a visit to the Lawn. He wanted pounds for very trivial purposes; but he wanted them desperately. A lover without pounds is the most helpless and contemptible of mankind; he is a knight-errant without his armour, a troubadour without his lute.
In his dilemma Mr. Hawkehurst resorted to that simple method which civilisation has devised for the relief of pecuniary difficulties of a temporary nature. He had met George Sheldon several times at the Lawn, and had become tolerably intimate with that gentleman, whom he now knew to be “the Sheldon of Gray’s Inn,” and the ally and agent of certain bill-discounters. To George he went one morning; and after requesting that Captain Paget should know nothing of his application, explained his requirements. It was a very small sum which he asked for, modestly conscious that the security he had to offer was of the weakest. He only wanted thirty pounds, and was willing to give a bill at two months for five-and-thirty.
There was a good deal of hesitation on the part of the lawyer; but Valentine had expected to meet with some difficulty, and was not altogether unprepared for a point-blank refusal. He was agreeably surprised when George Sheldon told him he would manage that “little matter; only the bill must be for forty.” But in proof of the liberal spirit in which Mr. Hawkehurst was to be treated, the friendly lawyer informed him that the two months should be extended to three.
Valentine did not stop to consider that by this friendly process he was to pay at the rate of something over a hundred and thirty per cent per annum for the use of the money he wanted. He knew that this was his only chance of getting money; so he shut his eyes to the expensive nature of the transaction, and thanked Mr. Sheldon for the accommodation granted to him.
“And now we’ve settled that little business, I should like to have a few minutes’ private chat with you,” said George, “on the understanding that what passes between you and me is strictly confidential.”
“Of course!”
“You seem to have been leading rather an idle life for the last few months; and it strikes me, Mr. Hawkehurst, you’re too clever a fellow to care about that sort of thing.”
“Well, I have been in some measure wasting my sweetness on the desert air,” Valentine answered carelessly. “The governor seems to have slipped into a good berth by your brother’s agency; but I am not Horatio Nugent Cromie Paget, and the brougham and lavender kids of the Promoter are not for me.”
“There is money to be picked up by better dodges than promoting,” replied the attorney ambiguously; “but I suppose you wouldn’t care for anything that didn’t bring immediate cash? You wouldn’t care to speculate the chances, however well the business might promise?”
“C’est selon! That’s as may be,” answered Valentine coolly. “You see those affairs that promise so much are apt to fail when it comes to a question of performance. I’m not a capitalist; I can’t afford to become a speculator. I’ve been living from hand to mouth lately by means of occasional contributions to a sporting weekly, and a little bit of business which your brother threw in my way. I’ve been able to be tolerably useful to him, and he promises to get me something in the way of a clerkship, foreign correspondence, and that kind of thing.”
“Humph!” muttered George Sheldon; “that means eighty pounds a year and fourteen hours’ work a day, letters that must be answered by this mail, and so on. I don’t think that kind of drudgery would ever suit you, Hawkehurst. You’ve not served the right apprenticeship for that sort of thing; you ought to try for some higher game. What should you say to an affair that might put two or three thousand pounds in your pocket if it was successful?”
“I should feel very much inclined to fancy it a bubble — one of those dazzling rainbow-tinted globes which look so bright dancing about in the sunshine, and explode into nothing directly they encounter any tangible substance. However, my dear Sheldon, if you really have any employment to offer to a versatile young man who is not overburdened with vulgar prejudices, you’d better put the business in plain words.”
“I will,” answered George; “but it’s not an affair that can be discussed in five minutes. It’s rather a serious matter, and involves a good deal of consideration. I know that you’re a man of the world, and a very clever fellow into the bargain; but there’s something more than that wanted for this business, and that is patience. The hare is a very fine animal in her way, you know; but a man must have a little of the tortoise in him if he wants to achieve anything out of the common run in the way of good luck. I have been working, and waiting, and speculating the chances for the last fifteen years, and I think I’ve got a good chance at last. But there’s a good deal of work to be done before the business is finished; and I find that I must have some one to help me.”
“What sort of business is it?”
“The search for the heir-at-law of a man who has died intestate within the last ten years.”
The two men looked at each other at this juncture; and Valentine Hawkehurst smiled significantly.
“Within the last ten years?” he said. “That’s rather a wide margin.”
“Do you think you would be a good hand at hunting up the missing links in the chain of a family history?” asked Mr. Sheldon. “It’s rather tiresome work, you know, and requires no common amount of patience and perseverance.”
“I can persevere,” said Valentine decisively, “if you can show me that it will be worth my while to do so. You want an heir-at-law, and I’m to look for him. What am I to get while I’m looking for him? and what is to be my reward if I find him?”
“I’ll give you a pound a week and your travelling expenses while you’re employed in the search; and I’ll give you three thousand pounds on the day the heir gets his rights.”
“Humph!” muttered Mr. Hawkehurst, rather doubtfully; “three thousand pounds is a very respectable haul. But then, you see, I may fail to discover the heir; and even if I do find him the chances are ten to one that the business would be thrown into Chancery at the last moment; in which case I might wait till doomsday for the reward of my labours.”
George Sheldon shrugged his shoulders impatiently. He had expected this penniless adventurer to catch eagerly at the chance he offered. “Three thousand pounds are not to be picked up in the streets,” he said. “If you don’t care to work with me, I can find plenty of clever fellows in London who’ll jump at the business.”
“And you want me to begin work —?”
“Immediately.”
“And how am I to pay forty pounds in three months out of a pound a week?”
“Never mind the bill,” said Mr. Sheldon, with lofty generosity. “If you work heart and soul for me, I’ll square that little matter for you; I’ll get it renewed for another three months.”
“In that case I’m your man. I don’t mind a little hard work just now, and I can live upon a pound a week where another man would starve. So now for my instructions.”
There was a brief pause, during which the lawyer refreshed himself by walking up and down his office two or three times with his hands in his pockets. After which relief he seated himself before his desk, took out a sheet of foolscap, and selected a pen from the inkstand.
“It’s just as well to put things in a thoroughly business-like manner,” he said presently. “I suppose you’d have no objection to signing a memorandum of agreement — nothing that would be of any use in a court of law, you know, but a simple understanding between man and man, for our own satisfaction, as a safeguard against all possibility of misunderstanding in the future. I’ve every reason to consider you the most honourable of men, you know; but honourable men turn round upon each other sometimes. You might ask me for something more than three thou’ if you succeeded in your search.”
“Precisely; or I might make terms with the heir-at-law, and throw you over. Perhaps that was your idea?”
“Not exactly. The first half of the chain is in my hands, and the second half will be worth nothing without it. But to prevent all unpleasantness we may as well put our intentions upon record.”
“I’ve not the least objection,” replied Valentine with supreme indifference. “Draw up whatever memorandum you please, and I’ll sign it. If you don’t mind smoke, I should like to console myself with a cigar while you draw the bond.”
The question was a polite formula, the atmosphere of George Sheldon’s office being redolent of stale tobacco.
“Smoke away,” said the lawyer; “and if you can drink brandy-and-soda at this time of day, you’ll find the de quoi in that cupboard. Make yourself at home.”
Mr. Hawkehurst declined the brandy-and-soda, and regaled himself only with a cigar, which he took from his own case. He sat in one of the second-floor windows smoking, and looking dreamily into the gardens, while George Sheldon drew up the agreement. He was thinking that any hazard which took him away from London and Charlotte Halliday might be a fortunate one.
The lawyer finished his document, which he read aloud for the benefit of the gentleman who was to sign it. The agreement was in the following terms:—
“Memorandum of agreement between George Sheldon on the one part, and Valentine Hawkehurst on the other part, whereby it is this day mutually agreed by and between the parties hereto as follows:
“1. That, in consideration of a weekly salary of one pound while in pursuit of certain inquiries, and of the sum of three thousand pounds to be paid upon the arising of a certain event, namely, the establishment of an heir-at-law to the estates of the late John Haygarth, the said Valentine Hawkehurst shall act as agent for the said George Sheldon, and shall not at any time during the continuance of this agreement do any act to prejudice the inquiry or the steps now being taken by the said George Sheldon to discover and establish an heir-at-law to the estates of the late John Haygarth.
“2. That at no time hereafter shall the said Valentine Hawkehurst be entitled to a larger recompense than is herein-before provided; nor shall he be liable to the said George Sheldon for the return of any moneys which the said George Sheldon may advance on account of the said inquiries in the event of the same not resulting in the establishment of an heir to the estates of the late John Haygarth.
“3. That the said Valentine Hawkehurst shall not alter his character of agent to the said George Sheldon during the prosecution of the said inquiry; that he shall deliver over to the said George Sheldon all documents and other forms of evidence that may arise from his, the said Valentine Hawkehurst’s, inquires; and that he shall week by week, and every week, and as often as may be necessary, report to the said George Sheldon the result of such inquiries, and that he shall not on any pretence whatever be at liberty to withhold such fruits of his researches, nor discover the same to any one else than the said George Sheldon, under a penalty of ten thousand pounds, to be recovered as liquidated damages previously agreed between the parties as the measure of damages payable to the said George Sheldon upon the breach of this agreement by the said Valentine Hawkehurst.
“In witness whereof the parties hereto have this 20th day of September 1862 set their hands and affixed their seals.” “That sounds stiff enough to hold water in a court of law,” said Valentine, when George Sheldon had recited the contents of the document.
“I don’t suppose it would be much good in Chancery-lane,” returned the lawyer carelessly; “though I daresay it sounds rather formidable to you. When one gets the trick of the legal jargon, it’s not easy to draw the simplest form of agreement without a few superfluous words. I may as well call in my clerk to witness our signatures, I suppose.”
“Call in any one you like.”
The clerk was summoned from a sunless and airless den at the back of his principal’s office. The two men appended their signatures to the document; the clerk added his in witness of the genuine nature of those signatures. It was an affair of two minutes. The clerk was dismissed. Mr. Sheldon blotted and folded the memorandum, and laid it aside in one of the drawers of his desk.
“Come,” he said cheerily, “that’s a business-like beginning at any rate. And now you’d better have some brandy-and-soda, for what I’ve got to say will take some time in the saying of it.”
On this occasion Mr. Hawkehurst accepted the lawyer’s hospitality, and there was some little delay before the conversation proceeded.
It was a very long conversation. Mr. Sheldon produced a bundle of papers, and exhibited some of them to his agent, beginning with that advertisement in the Times which had first attracted his notice, but taking very good care not to show his coadjutor the obituary in the Observer, wherein the amount of the intestate’s fortune was stated. The ready wits which had been sharpened at so many different grindstones proved keen enough for the occasion. Valentine Hawkehurst had had little to do with genealogies or baptismal registers during his past career; but his experiences were of such a manifold nature that he was not easily to be baffled or mystified by any new experience. He showed himself almost as quick at tracing up the intricacies of a family tree as Mr. Sheldon, the astute attorney and practised genealogist.
“I have traced these Haygarths back to the intestate’s great-grandfather, who was a carpenter and a Puritan in the reign of Charles the First. He seems to have made money — how I have not been able to discover with any certainty; but it is more than probable he served in the civil wars, and came in for some of the plunder those crop-eared, psalm-singing, pierce-the-brain-of-the-tyrant-with-the-nail-of-Jael scoundrels were always in the way of, at the sack of Royalist mansions. The man made money; and his son, the grandfather of the intestate, was a wealthy citizen in the reigns of Anne and the first George. He was a grocer, and lived in the market-place of Ullerton in Leicestershire; an out-of-the-way sleepy place it is now, but was prosperous enough in those days, I daresay. This man (the grandfather) began the world well off, and amassed a large fortune before he had done with it. The lucky beggar lived in the days when free trade and competition were unknown, when tea was something like sixty shillings a pound, and when a psalm-singing sleek-haired fellow, with a reputation for wealth and honesty, might cheat his customers to his heart’s content. He had one son, Matthew, who seems, from what I can gather, to have been a wild sort of fellow in the early part of his career, and not to have been at any time on the best possible terms with the sanctimonious dad. This Matthew married at fifty-three years of age, and died a year after his marriage, leaving one son, who afterwards became the reverend intestate; with whom, according to the evidence at present before me, ends the direct line of the Haygarths.” The lawyer paused, turned over two or three papers, and then resumed his explanation. “The sanctimonious grocer, Jonathan Haygarth, had one other child besides the son — a daughter called Ruth, who married a certain Peter Judson, and became the mother of a string of sons and daughters; and it is amongst the descendants of these Judsons that we may have to look for our heir at law, unless we find him nearer home. Now my idea is that we shall find him nearer home.”
“What reason have you for forming that idea?” asked Valentine.
“I will tell you. This Matthew Haygarth is known to have been a wild fellow. I obtained a good deal of fragmentary information about him from an old man in some almshouses at Ullerton, whose grandfather was a schoolfellow of Matthew’s. He was a scapegrace, and was always spending money in London while the respectable psalm-singer was hoarding it in Ullerton. There used to be desperate quarrels between the two men, and towards the end of Jonathan Haygarth’s life the old man made half a dozen different wills in favour of half a dozen different people, and cutting off scapegrace Matthew with a shilling. Fortunately for scapegrace Matthew, the old man had a habit of quarrelling with his dearest friends — a fashion not quite exploded in this enlightened nineteenth century — and the wills were burnt one after another, until the worthy Jonathan became as helpless and foolish as his great contemporary and namesake, the Dean of St. Patrick’s; and after having died ‘first at top,’ did his son the favour to die altogether, intestate, whereby the roisterer and spendthrift of Soho and Covent-garden came into a very handsome fortune. The old man died in 1766, aged eighty; a very fine specimen of your good old English tradesman of the Puritanical school. The roisterer, Matthew, was by this time forty-six years of age, and, I suppose, had grown tired of roistering. In any case he appears to have settled down very quietly in the old family house in the Ullerton market-place, where he married a respectable damsel of the Puritan school, some seven years after, and in which house, or in the neighbourhood whereof, he departed this life, with awful suddenness, one year after his marriage, leaving his son and heir, the reverend intestate. And now, my dear Hawkehurst, you’re a sharp fellow, and I daresay a good hand at guessing social conundrums; so perhaps you begin to see my idea.”
“I can’t say I do.”
“My notion is, that Matthew Haygarth may possibly have married before he was fifty-three years of age. Men of his stamp don’t often live to that ripe age without being caught in matrimonial toils somehow or other. It was in the days of Fleet marriages — in the days when young men about town were even more reckless and more likely to become the prey of feminine deception than they are now. The fact that Matthew Haygarth revealed no such marriage is no conclusive evidence against my hypothesis. He died very suddenly — intestate, as it seems the habit of these Haygarths to die; and he had never made any adjustment of his affairs. According to the oldest inhabitant in Ullerton almshouses, this Matthew was a very handsome fellow, generous-hearted, open-handed — a devil-may-care kind of a chap, the type of the rollicking heroes in old comedies; the very man to fall over head and ears in love before he was twenty, and to go through fire and water for the sake of the woman he loved: in short, the very last man upon earth to live a bachelor until his fifty-fourth year.”
“He may —”
“He may have been a profligate, you were going to say, and have had baser ties than those of Church and State. So he may; but if he was a scoundrel, tradition flatters him. Of course all the information one can gather about a man who died in 1774 must needs be of a very uncertain and fragmentary character. But if I can trust the rather hazy recollections of my oldest inhabitant about what his father told him his father had said of wild Mat Haygarth, the young man’s wildness was very free from vice. There is no legend of innocence betrayed or infamy fostered by Matthew Haygarth. He appears to have enjoyed what the young men of that day called life — attended cock-fights, beat the watch, gambled a little, and was intimately acquainted with the interior of the Fleet and Marshalsea prisons. For nearly twenty years he seems to have lived in London; and during all those years he was lost sight of by the Ullerton people. My oldest inhabitant’s grandfather was clerk to a merchant in the city of London, and had therefore some opportunity of knowing his old schoolfellow’s proceedings in the metropolis. But the two townsmen don’t seem to have seen much of each other in the big city. Their meetings were rare, and, so far as I can make out, for the most part accidental. But, as I said before, my oldest inhabitant is somewhat hazy, and excruciatingly prolix; his chaff is in the proportion of some fifty to one of his wheat. I’ve given a good deal of time to this case already, you see, Mr. Hawkehurst; and you’ll find your work very smooth sailing compared to what I’ve gone through.”
“I daresay that sort of investigation is rather tiresome in the earlier stages.”
“You’d say so, with a vengeance, if you had to do it,” answered George Sheldon almost savagely. “You start with the obituary of some old bloke who was so disgustingly old when he consented to die that there is no one living who can tell you when he was born, or who were his father and mother; for, of course, the old idiot takes care not to leave a blessed document of any kind which can aid a fellow in his researches. And when you’ve had the trouble of hunting up half a dozen men of the same name, and have addled your wretched brains in the attempt to patch the half dozen men — turning up at different periods and in different places — into one man, they all tumble to pieces like a child’s puzzle, and you find yourself as far as ever from the man you want. However, you won’t have to do any of that work,” added Mr. Sheldon, who was almost in a passion when he remembered the trouble he had gone through. “The ground has been all laid out for you, by Jove, as smooth as a bowling-green; and if you look sharp, you’ll pick up your three thou’ before you know where you are.”
“I hope I shall,” answered Valentine coolly. He was not the sort of person to go into raptures about three thousand pounds, though such a sum must needs have seemed to him the wealth of a small Rothschild. “I know I want money badly enough, and am ready and willing to work for it conscientiously, if I get the chance. But to return to this Matthew Haygarth. Your idea is that there may have been a marriage previous to the one at Ullerton?”
“Precisely. Of course there may have been no such previous marriage; but you see it’s on the cards; and since it is on the cards, my notion is that we had better hunt up the history of Matthew Haygarth’s life in London, and try to find our heir-at-law there before we go in for the Judsons. If you knew how the Judsons have married and multiplied, and lost themselves among herds of other people, you wouldn’t care about tracing the ramifications of their family tree,” said Mr. Sheldon, with a weary sigh. “So be it,” exclaimed Mr. Hawkehurst carelessly; “we’ll leave the Judsons alone, and go in for Matthew Haygarth.”
He spoke with the air of an archaeological Hercules, to whom difficulties were nothing. It seemed as if he would have been quite ready to “go in” for some sidereal branch of the Plantagenets, or the female descendants of the Hardicanute family, if George Sheldon had suggested that the intestate’s next of kin was to be found there.
“Mat Haygarth, by all means,” he said. He was on jolly-good-fellow-ish terms with the dead-and-gone grocer’s son already, and had the tone of a man who had been his friend and boon companion. “Mat Haygarth is our man. But how are we to ferret out his doings in London? A man who was born in 1720 is rather a remote kind of animal.”
“The secret of success in these matters is time,” answered the lawyer sententiously: “a man must have no end of time, and he must keep his brain clear of all other business. Those two conditions are impossible for me, and that’s why I want a coadjutor: now you’re a clever young fellow, with no profession, with no particular social ties, as I can make out, and your time is all your own; ergo, you’re the very man for this business. The thing is to be done: accept that for a certainty. It’s only a question of time. Indeed, when you look at life philosophically, what is there on earth that is not a question of time? Give the crossing-sweeper between this and Chancery-lane time enough, and he might develop into a Rothschild. He might want nine hundred years or so to do it in; but there’s no doubt he could do it, if you gave him time.”
Mr. Sheldon was becoming expansive under the influence of the brandy-and-soda; for even that mild beverage is not without its effect on the intellectual man.
“As to this Haygarth case,” he resumed, after the consumption of a little more soda and a little more brandy, “it’s a sure success, if we work it properly; and you know three thou’ is not to be despised,” added George persuasively, “even if a fellow has to wait some time for it.”
“Certainly not. And the bulk of the Haygarthian fortune — I suppose that’s something rather stiff?” returned Valentine, in the same persuasive tone.
“Well, you may suppose it’s a decent figure,” answered Mr. Sheldon, with an air of deprecation, “or how could I afford to give you three thou’ out of the share I’m likely to get?”
“No, to be sure. I think I shall take to the work well enough when once I get my hand in; but I shall be very glad of any hint you can give me at starting.”
“Well, my advice is this: begin at the beginning; go down to Ullerton; see my oldest inhabitant. I pumped him as dry as I could, but I couldn’t give myself enough time for thoroughly exhaustive pumping; one has to waste a small eternity before one gets anything valuable out of those hazy old fellows. Follow up this Matthew from his birth; see the place where he was born; ferret out every detail of his life, so far as it is to be ferreted; trace his way step by step to London, and when you get him there, stick to him like a leech. Don’t let him slip through your fingers for a day; hunt him from lodging to lodging, from tavern to tavern, into jail and out of jail — tantivy, yoicks, hark-forward! I know it’s deuced hard work; but a man must work uncommonly hard in these days before he picks up three thou’. In a few words, the game is all before you; so go in and win,” concluded George Sheldon, as he poured the last amber drops from the slim smoke-coloured bottle, and swallowed his glass of brandy undiluted by soda.
After that interview in Gray’s Inn, there were more interviews of a like character. Valentine received further instructions from George Sheldon, and got himself posted up in the Haygarthian history, so far as the lawyer’s information furnished the materials for such posting. But the sum total of Mr. Sheldon’s information seemed very little to his coadjutor when the young man looked the Haygarthian business full in the face and considered what he had to do. He felt very much like a young prince in the fairy tale who has been bidden to go forth upon an adventurous journey in a trackless forest, where if he escape all manner of lurking dangers, and remember innumerable injunctions, such as not to utter a single syllable during the whole course of his travels, or look over his left shoulder, or pat any strange dog, or gather forest fruit or flower, or look at his own reflection in mirror or water-pool, shining brazen shield or jewelled helm, he will ultimately find himself before the gates of an enchanted castle, to which he may or may not obtain admittance.
Valentine fancied himself in the position of this favourite young prince. The trackless forest was the genealogy of the Haygarths; and in the enchanted castle he was to find the crown of success in the shape of three thousand pounds. Could he marry Charlotte on the strength of those three thousand pounds, if he were so fortunate as to unravel the tangled skein of the Haygarth history? Ah, no; that black-whiskered stockbroking stepfather would ask for something more than three thousand pounds from the man to whom he gave his wife’s daughter.
“He will try to marry her to some rich City swell, I dare say,” thought Valentine. “I should be no nearer her with three thousand pounds for my fortune than I am without a sixpence. The best thing I can do for her happiness and my own is to turn my back upon her, and devote myself to hunting the Haygarths. It’s rather hard too, just as I have begun to fancy that she likes me a little.”
In the course of those interviews in Gray’s Inn which occurred before Valentine took any active steps in his new pursuit, certain conditions were agreed upon between him and Mr. Sheldon. The first and most serious of these conditions was, that Captain Paget should be in nowise enlightened as to his protégé‘s plans. This was a strong point with George Sheldon. “I have no doubt Paget’s a very good fellow,” he said. (It was his habit to call everybody a good fellow. He would have called Nana Sahib a good fellow, and would have made some good-natured excuse for any peccadilloes on the part of that potentate). “Paget’s an uncommonly agreeable man, you know; but he is not the man I should care to trust with this kind of secret.” Mr. Sheldon said this with a tone that implied his willingness to trust Captain Paget with every other kind of secret, from the contents of his japanned office-boxes to the innermost mysteries of his soul.
“You see Paget is thick with my brother Phil,” he resumed; “and whenever I find a man thick with my relations, I make it a point to keep clear of that man myself. Relations never have worked well in harness, and never will work well in harness. It seems to be against nature. Now Phil has a dim kind of idea of the game I want to play, in a general way, but nothing more than a dim idea. He fancies I’m a fool, and that I’m wasting my time and trouble. I mean him to stick to that notion. For, you see, in a thing of this kind there’s always a chance of other people cutting in and spoiling a man’s game. Of course, that advertisement I read to you was seen by other men besides me, and may have been taken up. My hope is that whoever has taken it up has gone in for the female branch, and got himself snowed up under a heap of documentary evidence about the Judsons. That’s another reason why we should put our trust in Matthew Haygarth. The Judson line is the obvious line to follow, and there are very few who would think of hunting up evidence for a hypothetical first marriage until they had exhausted the Judsons. Now, I rely upon you to throw dust in Paget’s eyes, so that there may be no possibility of my brother getting wind of our little scheme through him.”
“I’ll take care of that,” answered Valentine; “he doesn’t want me just now. He’s in very high feather, riding about in broughams and dining at West-end taverns. He won’t be sorry to get rid of me for a short time.” “But what’ll be your excuse for leaving town? He’ll be sure to want a reason, you know.”
“I’ll invent an aunt at Ullerton, and tell him I’m going down to stop with her.”
“You’d better not say Ullerton; Paget might take it into his head to follow you down there in order to see what sort of person your aunt was, and whether she had any money. Paget’s an excellent fellow, but there’s never any knowing what that sort of man will do. You’d better throw him off the scent altogether. Plant your aunt in Surrey — say Dorking.”
“But if he should want to write to me?”
“Tell him to address to the post-office, Dorking, as your aunt is inquisitive, and might tamper with your correspondence. I daresay his letters will keep.”
“He could follow me to Dorking as easily as to Ullerton.”
“Of course he could,” answered George Sheldon; “but then, you see, at Dorking the most he could find out would be that he’d been made a fool of; whereas if he followed you to Ullerton, he might ferret out the nature of your business there.”
Mr. Hawkehurst perceived the wisdom of this conclusion, and agreed to make Dorking the place of his relative’s abode.
“It’s very near London,” he suggested thoughtfully; “the Captain might easily run down.”
“And for that very reason he’s all the less likely to do it,” answered the lawyer; “a man who thinks of going to a place within an hour’s ride of town knows he can go any day, and is likely to think of going to the end of the chapter without carrying out his intention. A man who resolves to go to Manchester or Liverpool has to make his arrangements accordingly, and is likely to put his idea into practice. The people who live on Tower-hill very seldom see the inside of the Tower. It’s the good folks who come up for a week’s holiday from Yorkshire and Cornwall who know all about the Crown jewels and John of Gaunt’s armour. Take my advice, and stick to Dorking.”
Acting upon this advice, Valentine Hawkehurst lay in wait for the Promoter that very evening. He went home early, and was seated by a cheery little bit of fire, such as an Englishman likes to see at the close of a dull autumn day, when that accomplished personage returned to his lodgings.
“Deuced tiresome work,” said the Captain, as he smoothed the nap of his hat with that caressing tenderness of manipulation peculiar to the man who is not very clear as to the means whereby his next hat is to be obtained — “deuced slow, brain-belabouring work! How many people do you think I’ve called upon to-day, eh, Val? Seven-and-thirty! What do you say to that? Seven-and-thirty interviews, and some of them very tough ones. I think that’s enough to take the steam out of a man.”
“Do the moneyed swells bite?” asked Mr. Hawkehurst, with friendly interest.
“Rather slowly, my dear Val, rather slowly. The mercantile fisheries have been pretty well whipped of late years, and the fish are artful — they are uncommonly artful, Val. Indeed, I’m not quite clear at this present moment as to the kind of fly they’ll rise to most readily. I’m half inclined to be doubtful whether your gaudy pheasant-feather, your brougham and lavender-kid business is the right thing for your angler. It has been overdone, Val, considerably overdone; and I shouldn’t wonder if a sober little brown fly — a shabby old chap in a rusty greatcoat, with a cotton umbrella under his arm — wouldn’t do the trick better. That sort of thing would look rich, you see, Val — rich and eccentric; and I think on occasions — with a very downy bird — I’d even go so far as a halfp’orth of snuff in a screw of paper. I really think a pinch of snuff out of a bit of paper, taken at the right moment, might turn the tide of a transaction.”
Impressed by the brilliancy of this idea, Captain Paget abandoned himself for the moment to profound meditation, seated in his favourite chair, and with his legs extended before the cheerful blaze. He always had a favourite chair in every caravanserai wherein he rested in his manifold wanderings, and he had an unerring instinct which guided him in the selection of the most comfortable chair, and that one corner, to be found in every room, which is a sanctuary secure from the incursions of Boreas.
The day just ended had evidently not been a lucky one, and the Captain’s gaze was darkly meditative as he looked into the ruddy little fire.
“I think I’ll take a glass of cold water with a dash of brandy in it, Val,” he said presently; and he said it with the air of a man who rarely tasted such a beverage; whereas it was as habitual with him to sit sipping brandy-and-water for an hour or so before he went to bed as it was for him to light his chamber candle. “That fellow Sheldon knows how to take care of himself,” he remarked thoughtfully, when Valentine had procured the brandy-and-water. “Try some of that cognac, Val; it’s not bad. To tell you the truth, I’m beginning to get sick of this promoting business. It pays very little better than the India-rubber agency, and it’s harder work. I shall look about me for something fresh, if Sheldon doesn’t treat me handsomely. And what have you been doing for the last day or two?” asked the Captain, with a searching glance at his protégé‘s face. “You’re always hanging about Sheldon’s place; but you don’t seem to do much business with him. You and his brother George seem uncommonly thick.”
“Yes, George suits me better than the stockbroker. I never could get on very well with your ultra-respectable men. I’m as ready to ‘undertake a dirty job’ as any man; but I don’t like a fellow to offer me dirty work and pretend it’s clean.”
“Ah, he’s been getting you to do a little of the bear business, I suppose,” said the Captain. “I don’t see that your conscience need trouble you about that. Amongst a commercial people money must change hands. I can’t see that it much matters how the change takes place.”
“No, to be sure; that’s a comfortable way of putting it, at any rate. However, I’m tired of going about in the ursine guise, and I’m going to cut it. I’ve an old aunt settled at Dorking who has got a little bit of money to leave, and I think I’ll go and look her up.”
“An aunt at Dorking! I never heard of her before.”
“O yes you have,” answered Mr. Hawkehurst, with supreme nonchalance; “you’ve heard of her often enough, only you’ve a happy knack of not listening to other people’s affairs. But you must have been wrapped up in yourself with a vengeance if you don’t remember to have heard me speak of my aunt — Sarah.”
“Well, well, it may be so,” murmured the Captain, almost apologetically. “Your aunt Sarah? Ah, to be sure; I have some recollection: is she your father’s sister?”
“No; she’s the sister of my maternal grandmother — a great-aunt, you know. She has a comfortable little place down at Dorking, and I can get free quarters there whenever I like; so as you don’t particularly want me just now, I think I’ll run down to her for a week or two.”
The Captain had no objection to offer to this very natural desire on the part of his adopted son; nor did he concern himself as to the young man’s motive for leaving London.
Mr. Hawkehurst had no excuse for going to the Lawn before his departure; but the stately avenues between Bayswater and Kensington are free to any man; and, having nothing better to do, Valentine put a shabby little volume of Balzac in his pocket, and spent his last morning in town under the shadow of the mighty elms, reading one of the great Honoré‘s gloomiest romances, while the autumn leaves drifted round him, dancing fairy measures on the grass, and scraping and scuffling on the gravel, and while children with hoops and children with balls scampered and screamed in the avenue by which he sat. He was not particularly absorbed by his book. He had taken it haphazard from the tattered collection of cheap editions which he carried about with him in his wanderings, ignominiously stuffed into the bottom of a portmanteau, amongst boots and clothes-brushes and disabled razors.
“I’m sick of them all,” he thought; “the De Beauseants, and Rastignacs, the German Jews, and the patrician beauties, and the Israelitish Circes of the Rue Taitbout, and the sickly self-sacrificing provincial angels, and the ghastly vieilles filles. Had that man ever seen such a woman as Charlotte, I wonder — a bright creature, all smiles and sunshine, and sweet impulsive tenderness; an angel who can be angelic without being poitri-naire, and whose amiability never degenerates into scrofula? There is an odour of the dissecting-room pervading all my friend Balzac’s novels, and I don’t think he was capable of painting a fresh, healthy nature. What a mass of disease he would have made Lucy Ashton, and with what dismal relish he would have dilated upon the physical sufferings of Amy Robsart in the confinement of Cumnor Hall! No, my friend Honoré, you are the greatest and grandest of painters of the terrible school; but the time comes when a man sighs for something brighter and better than your highest type of womanhood.”
Mr. Hawkehurst put his book in his pocket, and abandoned himself to meditation, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his face buried in his hands, unconscious of the trundling hoops and screaming children.
“She is better and fairer than the fairest heroine of a novel,” he thought. “She is like Heloise. Yes, the quaint old French fits her to a nicety:
‘Elle ne fu oscure ne brune,
Ains fu clere comme la lune,
Envers qui les autres estoiles
Ressemblent petites chandoiles.’
Mrs. Browning must have known such a woman:
‘Her air had a meaning, her movements a grace;
You turned from the fairest to gaze on her face;’
and yet
‘She was not as pretty as women I know.’
Was she not?” mused the lover. “Is she not? Yes,” he cried suddenly, as he saw a scarlet petticoat gleaming in the distance, and a bright young face under a little black turban hat — prettiest and most bewitching of all feminine headgear, let fashion change as it may. “Yes,” he cried, “she is the loveliest creature in the world, and I love her to distraction.” He rose, and went to meet the loveliest creature in the world, whose earthly name was Charlotte Halliday. She was walking with Diana Paget, who, to more sober judges, might have seemed the handsomer woman of the two. Alas for Diana! the day had been when Valentine Hawkehurst considered her very handsome, and had need to fight a hard battle with himself in order not to fall in love with her. He had been conqueror in that struggle of prudence and honour against nascent love, only to be vanquished utterly by Charlotte’s brighter charms and Charlotte’s sunnier nature.
The two girls shook hands with Mr. Hawkehurst. An indifferent observer might have perceived that the colour faded from the face of one, while a blush mounted to the cheeks of the other. But Valentine did not see the sudden pallor of Diana’s face — he had eyes only for Charlotte’s blushes. Nor did Charlotte herself perceive the sudden change in her dearest friend’s countenance. And that perhaps is the bitterest sting of all. It is not enough that some must weep while others play; the mourners must weep unnoticed, unconsoled; happiness is so apt to be selfish.
Of course the conversation was the general sort of thing under the given circumstances — just a little more inane and disjointed than the ordinary small talk of people who meet each other in their walks abroad.
“How do you do, Mr. Hawkehurst? — Very well, thank you. — Mamma is very well; at least no, not quite well; she has one of her headaches this morning. She is rather subject to headache, you know; and the canaries sing so loud. Don’t the canaries sing abominably loud, Diana? — loudly they would have made me say at Hyde Lodge; but it is only awfully clever people who know when to use adverbs.”
And Miss Halliday having said all this in a hurried and indeed almost breathless manner, stopped suddenly, blushing more deeply than at first, and painfully aware of her blushes. She looked imploringly at Diana; but Diana would not come to the rescue; and this morning Mr. Hawkehurst seemed as a man struck with sudden dumbness.
There followed presently a little discussion of the weather. Miss Halliday was possessed by the conviction that there would be rain — possibly not immediate rain, but before the afternoon inevitable rain. Valentine thought not; was, indeed, positively certain there would be no rain; had a vague idea that the wind was in the north; and quoted a dreary Joe-Millerism to prove the impossibility of rain while the wind came from that quarter. Miss Halliday and Mr. Hawkehurst held very firmly to their several opinions, and the argument was almost a quarrel — one of those little playful quarrels which form some of the most delicious phases of a flirtation. “I would not mind wagering a fortune — if I had one — on the certainty of rain,” cried Charlotte with kindling eyes.
“And I would not shrink from staking my existence on the conviction that there will be no rain,” exclaimed Valentine, looking with undisguised tenderness at the glowing animated face.
Diana Paget took no part in that foolish talk about the possibilities of the weather. She walked silently by the side of her friend Charlotte, as far away from her old comrade, it seemed to her, as if the Atlantic’s wild waste of waters had stretched between them. The barrier that divided them was only Charlotte; but then Miss Paget knew too well that Charlotte in this case meant all the world.
The ice had been broken by that discussion as to rain or no rain, and Miss Halliday and Mr. Hawkehurst talked pleasantly for some time, while Diana still walked silently by her friend’s side, only speaking when compelled to do so. The strangeness of her manner would have been observed by any one not utterly absorbed by that sublime egotism called love; but Valentine and Charlotte were so absorbed, and had no idea that Miss Paget was anything but the most delightful and amusing of companions.
They had taken more than one turn in the broad avenue, when Charlotte asked Mr. Hawkehurst some question about a piece which was speedily to be played at one of the theatres.
“I do so much want to see this new French actress,” she said. “Do you think there is any possibility of obtaining orders, Mr. Hawkehurst? You know what a dislike Mr. Sheldon has to paying for admission to a theatre, and my pocket-money was exhausted three weeks ago, or I wouldn’t think of giving you any trouble about it.”
Philosophers have observed that in the life of the plainest woman there is one inspired moment in which she becomes beautiful. Perhaps it is when she is asking a favour of some masculine victim — for women have a knack of looking their prettiest on such occasions. Charlotte Halliday’s pleading glance and insinuating tone were irresistible. Valentine would have given a lien on every shilling of his three thousand pounds rather than disappoint her, if gold could purchase the thing she craved. It happened fortunately that his occasional connection with the newspapers made it tolerably easy for him to obtain free admissions to theatres.
“Do not speak of the trouble; there will be no trouble. The orders shall be sent you, Miss Halliday.”
“O, thanks — a thousand thanks! Would it be possible to get a box, and for us all to go together?” asked the fair encroacher; “mamma is so fond of the theatre. She used to go often with poor papa, at York and in London. And you are such an excellent critic, Mr. Hawkehurst, and it would be so nice to have you with us — wouldn’t it, Di? You know what a good critic Mr. Hawkehurst is?”
“Yes,” answered Diana; “we used to go to theatres together very often.”
This was a cry of anguish wrung from a bleeding heart; but to the two absorbed egotists it seemed the simplest of casual observations.
“Do you think you could manage to get a box, Mr. Hawkehurst?” asked the irresistible enslaver, putting her head on one side, in a manner which, for the protection of weak mankind, should be made penal.
“I will try my uttermost,” answered Valentine.
“O, then I’m sure you will succeed. And we shall be amused by your deliciously bitter criticisms between the acts. One would think you had studied under Douglas Jerrold.”
“You do me too much honour. But before the new piece is produced I shall have left London, and shall not have the pleasure of accompanying you to the theatre.”
“You are going to leave London?”
“Yes, to-morrow.”
“So soon!” cried Charlotte, with undisguised regret; “and for a long time, I suppose?” she added, very mournfully.
Miss Paget gave a little start, and a feverish flush lit up her face for one brief moment.
“I am glad he is going,” she thought; “I am very glad he is going.”
“Yes,” said Valentine, in reply to Charlotte’s inquiry, “I am likely to be away for a considerable time; indeed my plans are at present so vague, that I cannot tell when I may come back to town.”
He could not resist the temptation to speak of his absence as if it were likely to be the affair of a lifetime. He could not refrain from the delight of sounding the pure depths of that innocent young heart. But when the tender gray eyes looked at him, so sweet in their sudden sadness, his heart melted, and he could trifle with her unconscious love no longer.
“I am going away on a matter of business,” he said, “which may or may not occupy some time; but I don’t suppose I shall be many weeks away from London.”
Charlotte gave a little sigh of relief.
“And are you going very far?” she asked.
“Some distance; yes — a — hundred and fifty miles or so,” Valentine answered very lamely. It had been an easy thing to invent an ancient aunt Sarah for the mystification of the astute Horatio; but Valentine Hawkehurst could not bring himself to tell Charlotte Halliday a deliberate falsehood. The girl looked at him wonderingly, as he gave that hesitating answer to her question. She was at a loss to understand why he did not tell her the place to which he was going, and the nature of the business that took him away.
She was very sorry that he was going to disappear out of her life for a time so uncertain, that while on the one hand it might be only a few weeks, it might on the other hand be for ever. The life of a young English damsel, in a prim villa at Bayswater, with a very commonplace mother and a practical stockbroking stepfather, is rather a narrow kind of existence; and to such a damsel the stranger whose hand lifts the curtain that shrouds new and brighter worlds is apt to become a very important personage, especially when the stranger happens to be young and handsome, and invested with that dash of Bohemianism which to artless and sentimental girlhood has such a flavour of romance.
Charlotte was very silent as she retraced her steps along the broad gravel walk. As they drew near the Bayswater-gate she looked at her watch. It was nearly one o’clock, and she had promised Mrs. Sheldon to be home at one for luncheon, and afterwards shopping.
“I’m afraid we must hurry home, Di,” she said.
“I am quite ready to go,” answered Miss Paget promptly. “Good-bye, Valentine.”
“Good-bye, Diana; good-bye, Miss Halliday.”
Mr. Hawkehurst shook hands with both young ladies; but shaking hands with Charlotte was a very slow process compared to the same performance with Diana.
“Good-bye,” he repeated, in a lingering tone; and then, after standing for some moments silent and irresolute, with his hat in his hand, he put it on suddenly and hurried away.
The two girls had walked a few steps towards the gate when Charlotte stopped before a stony-looking alcove, which happened at this nursery-dinner-hour to be empty.
“I’m so tired, Di,” she said, and went into the alcove, where she sat down to rest. She had a little veil attached to her turban hat — a little veil which she now drew over her face. The tears gathered slowly in her eyes and fell through that flimsy morsel of lace with which she would fain have hidden her childish sorrow. The tears gathered and fell on her lap as she sat in silence, pretending not to cry. This much rain at least was there to justify her prediction, uttered in such foolish gaiety of heart half an hour before.
Miss Halliday’s eyes were undimmed by tears? when she went back to the gothic villa; but she had a feeling that some great sorrow had come upon her — a vague idea that the last lingering warmth and brightness of summer had faded all in a moment, and that chill gray winter had closed in upon Bayswater without any autumnal interval. What was it that she had lost? Only the occasional society of a young man with a handsome pale face, a little haggard and wan from the effect of dissipated habits and a previous acquaintance with care and difficulty — only the society of a penniless Bohemian who had a certain disreputable cleverness and a dash of gloomy sentimentality, which the schoolgirl mistook for genius. But then he was the first man whose eyes had ever softened with a mysterious tenderness as they looked at her — the first whose voice had grown faintly tremulous when it syllabled her name.
There was some allusion to Mr. Hawkehurst’s departure in the course of dinner, and Philip Sheldon expressed some surprise.
“Going to leave town?” he said.
“Yes, papa,” Charlotte answered; “he is going a long way into the country — a hundred and fifty miles, he said.”
“Did he tell you where he was going?”
“No; he seemed unwilling to mention the place. He only said something about a hundred and fifty miles.”
Mr. Sheldon had occasion to see Captain Paget early the following day, and questioned him closely about his protégé‘s movements. He had found Valentine a very useful tool in sundry intricate transactions of the commercial kind, and he expected his tools to be ready for his service. He was therefore considerably annoyed by Valentine’s abrupt departure.
“I think young Hawkehurst might have told me he was going out of town,” he said. “What the deuce has taken him off in such a hurry?”
“He is going to see some mysterious old aunt at Dorking, from whom he seems to expect money,” the Captain answered carelessly. “I daresay I can do what you want, Sheldon.”
“Very likely. But how comes that young fellow to have an aunt at Dorking? I fancy I’ve heard him say he was without a relative or a friend in the world — always excepting yourself.”
“The aunt may be another exception; some poor old soul that he’s half ashamed to own, I daresay — the inmate of an almshouse, perhaps. Val’s expectations may be limited to a few pounds hoarded in a china teapot.”
“I should have thought Hawkehurst the last man in the world to care about looking after that sort of thing. I could have given him plenty to do if he had stopped in town. He and my brother George are uncommonly intimate, by the bye,” added Mr. Sheldon meditatively. It was his habit to be rather distrustful of his brother and of all his brother’s acquaintance. “I suppose you can give me Hawkehurst’s address, in case I should want to write to him?” he said.
“He told me to send my letters to the post-office, Dorking,” answered the Captain, “which really looks as if the aunt’s residence were something in the way of an almshouse.”
No more was said about Valentine’s departure. Captain Paget concluded his business with his patron and departed, leaving the stockbroker leaning forward upon his desk in a thoughtful attitude and scribbling purposeless figures upon his blotting-paper.
“There’s something queer in this young man running away from town; there’s some mystification somewhere,” he thought. “He has not gone to Dorking, or he would scarcely have told Lotta that he was going a hundred and fifty miles from town. He would be likely to be taken off his guard by her questions, and would tell the truth. I wonder whether Paget is in the secret. His manner seemed open enough; but that sort of man can pretend anything. I’ve noticed that he and George have been very confidential lately. I wonder whether there’s any underhand game on the cards between those two.”
The game of which Mr. Sheldon thought as he leant over his blotting-paper was a very different kind of game from that which really occupied the attention of George and his friend.
“I’ll go to his lodgings at once,” he said to himself by-and-by, rising and putting on his hat quickly in his eagerness to act upon his resolution. “I’ll see if he really has left town.”
The stockbroker hailed the first empty hansom to be seen in the crowded thoroughfare from which his shady court diverged. In less than an hour he alighted before the door of the house in which Captain Paget lodged.
“Is Mr. Hawkehurst in?” he asked of the girl who admitted him.
“No, sir; he’s just left to go into the country. He hasn’t been gone ten minutes. You might a’most have met him.”
“Do you know where he has gone?”
“I heard say it was Dorking, sir.”
“Humph! I should like to have seen him before he went. Did he take much luggage?”
“One portmanter, sir.”
“I suppose you didn’t notice where he told the man to drive?”
“Yes, sir; it was Euston-square.”
“Ah! Euston-square. I’ll go there, then, on the chance of catching him,” said Mr. Sheldon.
He bestowed a donation upon the domestic, reentered his hansom, and told the man to drive to Euston-square “like a shot.”
“So! His destination is Dorking, and he goes from Euston-square!” muttered Mr. Sheldon, in sombre meditation, as the hansom rattled and rushed, and jingled and jolted, over the stones. “There’s something under the cards here.”
Arrived at the great terminus, the stockbroker made his way to the down platform. There was a lull in the day’s traffic, and only a few listless wretches lounging disconsolately here and there, with eyes ever and anon lifted to the clock. Amongst these there was no Valentine Hawkehurst.
Mr. Sheldon peered into all the waiting-rooms, and surveyed the refreshment-counter; but there was still no sign of the man he sought. He went back to the ticket-office; but here again all was desolate, the shutters of the pigeon-holes hermetically closed, and no vestige of Valentine Hawkehurst.
The stockbroker was disappointed, but not defeated. He returned to the platform, looked about him for a few moments, and then addressed himself to a porter of intelligent aspect.
“What trains have left here within the last half-hour?” he asked.
“Only one, sir; the 2.15 down, for Manchester.”
“You didn’t happen to notice a dark-eyed, dark-haired young man among the passengers — second class?” asked Mr. Sheldon.
“No, sir. There are always a good many passengers by that train; I haven’t time to notice their faces.”
The stockbroker asked no further questions. He was a man who did not care to be obliged to others for information which he could obtain for himself. He walked straight to a place where the time-tables were pasted on the wall, and ran his finger along the figures till he came to those he wanted.
The 2.15 train was a fast train, which stopped at only four places — Rugby, Ullerton, Murford, and Manchester.
“I daresay he has gone to Manchester,” thought Mr. Sheldon —“on some racing business most likely, which he wants to keep dark from his patron the Captain. What a fool I am to trouble myself about him, as if he couldn’t stir without meaning mischief to me! But I don’t understand the friendship between him and George. My brother George is not likely to take up any man without some motive.”
After these reflections Mr. Sheldon left the station and went back to his office in another hansom, still extremely thoughtful and somewhat disquieted.
“What does it matter to me where they go or what they do?” he asked himself, impatient of some lurking weakness of his own; “what does it matter to me whether those two are friendly or unfriendly? They can do me no harm.”
There happened to be a kind of lull in the stormy regions of the Stock Exchange at the time of Valentine Hawkehurst’s departure. Stagnation had descended upon that commercial ocean, which is such a dismal waste of waters for the professional speculator in its hour of calm. All the Bulls in the zoological creation would have failed to elevate the drooping stocks and shares and first-preference bonds and debentures, which hung their feeble heads and declined day by day, the weaker of them threatening to fade away and diminish to a vanishing-point, as it seemed to some dejected holders who read the Stock-Exchange lists and the money article in the Times with a persistent hopefulness which struggled against the encroachments of despair. The Bears had been busy, but were now idle — having burnt their fingers, commercial gentlemen remarked. So Bulls and Bears alike hung listlessly about a melancholy market, and conversed together dolefully in corners; and the burden of all their lamentations was to the effect that there never had been such times, and things never had been so bad, and it was a question whether they would ever right themselves. Philip Sheldon shared in the general depression. His face was gloomy, and his manner for the time being lost something of its brisk, business-like cheerfulness. The men who envied his better fortunes watched him furtively when he showed himself amongst them, and wondered whether Sheldon, of Jull, Girdlestone, and Sheldon, had been hit by these bad times.
It was not entirely the pressure of that commercial stagnation which weighed on the spirits of Philip Sheldon. The stockbroker was tormented by private doubts and uncertainties which had nothing to do with the money-market.
On the day after Valentine’s journey to Ullerton, Mr. Sheldon the elder presented himself at his brother’s office in Gray’s Inn. It was his habit to throw waifs and strays of business in the attorney’s way, and to make use of him occasionally, though he had steadily refused to lend or give him money; and it was big habit, as it were, to keep an eye upon his younger brother — rather a jealous eye, which took note of all George’s doings, and kept suspicious watch upon all George’s associates. Going unannounced into his brother’s office on this particular morning, Philip Sheldon found him bending over an outspread document — a great sheet of cartridge-paper covered with a net-work of lines, dotted about with circles, and with little patches of writing in red and black ink in the neatest possible penmanship. Mr. Sheldon the elder, whose bright black eyes were as the eyes of the hawk, took note of this paper, and had caught more than one stray word that stood out in larger and bolder characters than its neighbours, before his brother could fold it; for it is not an easy thing for a man to fold an elephantine sheet of cartridge when he is nervously anxious to fold it quickly, and is conscious that the eyes of an observant brother are upon him.
Before George had mastered the folding of the elephantine sheet, Philip had seen and taken note of two words. One of these was the word INTESTATE, and the other the name HAYGARTH.
“You seem in a great hurry to get that document out of the way,” said Philip, as he seated himself in the client’s chair.
“Well, to tell the truth, you rather startled me,” answered George. “I didn’t know who it might be, you know; and I was expecting a fellow who —” And then Mr. Sheldon the younger broke off abruptly, and asked, with rather a suspicious air, “Why didn’t that boy announce you?”
“Because I wouldn’t let him. Why should he announce me? One would think you were carrying on some political conspiracy, George, and had a modern Thistlewood gang hidden in that cupboard yonder. How thick you and Hawkehurst are, by the bye!”
In spite of the convenient “by the bye,” this last remark of the stockbroker’s sounded rather irrelevant.
“I don’t know about being ‘thick.’ Hawkehurst seems a very decent young fellow, and he and I get on pretty well together. But I’m not as ‘thick’ with him as I was with Tom Halliday.”
It was to be observed that Mr. Sheldon the younger was very apt to refer to that friendship with the dead Yorkshireman in the course of conversation with Philip.
“Hawkehurst has just left town,” said Philip indifferently.
“Yes, I know he has.”
“When did you hear it?”
“I saw him last night,” answered George, taken off his guard by the carelessness of his brother’s manner.
“Did you?” cried Mr. Sheldon. “You make a mistake there. He left town at two o’clock yesterday.”
“How do you happen to know that?” asked George sharply.
“Because I happened to be at the station and saw him take his ticket. There’s something underhand in that journey of his by the way; for Paget told me he was going to Dorking. I suppose he and Paget have some game of their own on the cards. I was rather annoyed by the young man’s departure, as I had some work for him. However, I can find plenty of fellows to do it as well as Hawkehurst could have done.”
George was looking into an open drawer in his desk while his brother said this. He had a habit of opening drawers and peering into them absently during the progress of an interview, as if looking for some particular paper, that was never to be found.
After this the conversation became less personal. The brothers talked a little of the events of the day, the money-article in that morning’s Times, the probability or improbability of a change in the rate of discount. But this conversation soon flagged, and Mr. Sheldon rose to depart.
“I suppose that sheet of cartridge-paper which you had so much trouble to fold is one of your genealogical tables,” he said as he was going. “You needn’t try to keep things dark from me, George. I’m not likely to steal a march upon you; my own business gives me more work than I can do. But if you have really got a good thing at last, I shouldn’t mind going into it with you, and finding the money for the enterprise.”
George Sheldon looked at his elder brother with a malicious flitter in his eyes.
“On condition that you got the lion’s share of the profits,” he said. “O yes; I know how generous you are, Phil. I have asked you for money before today, and you have refused it.”
Mr. Sheldon’s face darkened just a little at this point. “Your manner of asking it was offensive,” he said.
“Well, I’m sorry for that,” answered George politely. “However, you refused me money when I did want it; so you needn’t offer it me now I don’t want it. There are some people who think I have sacrificed my life to a senseless theory; and perhaps you are one of them. But there is one thing you may be certain of, Philip Sheldon: if ever I do get a good chance, I shall know how to keep it to myself.”
There are men skilled in the concealment of their feelings on all ordinary occasions, who will yet betray themselves in a crisis of importance. George Sheldon would fain have kept his project hidden from his elder brother; but in this one unguarded moment he forgot himself, and allowed the sense of triumph to irradiate his face.
The stockbroker was a reader of men rather than books; and it is a notable thing what superiority in all worldly wisdom is possessed by men who eschew books. He was able to translate the meaning of George’s smile — a smile of mingled triumph and malice.
“The fellow has got a good thing,” he thought to himself, “and Hawkehurst is in it. It must be a deuced good thing too, or he wouldn’t refuse my offer of money.” Mr. Sheldon was the last man in the world to reveal any mortification which he might experience from his brother’s conduct.
“Well, you’re quite right to stick to your chance, George,” he said, with agreeable frankness. “You’ve waited long enough for it. As for me, I’ve got my fingers in a good many pies just at present; so perhaps I had better keep them out of yours, whatever plums there may be to be picked out of it by an enterprising Jack Horner. Pick out your plums for yourself, old fellow, and I’ll be one of the first to call you a good boy for your pains.”
With this Mr. Sheldon slapped his brother’s shoulder and departed.
“I think I’ve had the best of Master Phil for once,” muttered George; and then he thrust his sinewy hands into the depths of his trousers-pocket, and indulged in a silent laugh, which displayed his strong square white teeth to perfection. “I flatter myself I took a rise out of Phil to-day,” he muttered.
The sense of a malicious triumph over a social enemy is a very delightful kind of thing — so delightful that a man is apt to ignore the possible cost of the enjoyment. It is like the pleasure of kicking a man who is down — very delicious in its way; only one never knows how soon the man may be up again.
George Sheldon, who was tolerably skilled in the science of human nature, should have known that “taking a rise” out of his brother was likely to be a rather costly operation. Philip was not the safest man to deal with at any time; but he was most dangerous when he was “jolly.”