The weeks went on. Roland Yorke was hard at work, carrying out his resolve of "putting his shoulder to the wheel." Vague ideas of getting into something good, by which a fortune might be made, floated through his brain in rose-coloured clouds. What the something was to be he did not exactly know; meanwhile, as a preliminary to it, he sought and obtained copying from Greatorex and Greatorex, to be done in spare hours at home. Of which fact Roland (unlike Mr. Brown) made no secret; he talked of it to the whole office; and Mr. Brown supplied him openly.
It was an excessively hot evening, getting now towards dusk. Roland had carried his work to Mrs. Jones's room, not so much because his own parlour was rather close and stuffy, as that he might obtain slight intervals of recreative gossip. He had it to himself, however, for Mrs. Jones was absent on household cares. The window looked on a backyard, in which the maid, who had come out, was hanging up a red table-cover to dry, that had evidently had something spilled on it. Of course Roland arrested his pen to watch the process. He was sitting in his shirtsleeves, and had just complained aloud that it was hotter than Africa.
"Who did that?" he called out through the open window. "You?"
"Mr. Ollivera, sir. He upset some ink; and mistress have been washing the place out in layers of cold water. She don't think it'll show."
"What d'ye call layers?"
"Different lots, sir. About nineteen bowlfuls she swilled it through; and me a emptying of 'em at the sink, and droring off fresh water ready to her hand."
The hanging-out and pulling the damaged part straight took a tolerably long time; Roland, in the old seduction of any amusement being welcome as an accompaniment to work, continued to look on and talk. Suddenly, he remembered his copying, and the young lady for whose sake he had undertaken the labour.
"This is not sticking to it," he soliloquised. "And if I am to have her, I must work for her.Won'tI work, that's all! I'll stick to it like any brick! But this copying is poor stuff to get a fellow on. If I could only slip into something better!"
Considering that Mr. Roland Yorke's earnings the past week, what with mistakes and other failures, had been one shilling and ninepence, and the week previous to that fifteenpence, it certainly did not look as though the copying would prove the high road to fortune. He began casting about other projects in his mind, as he wrote.
"If they'd give me a place under Government, it would be the very thing. But they don't. Old Dick Yorke's as selfish as a camel, and Carrick's hiding his head, goodness knows where. So I am thrown on my own resources. Bless us all! when a fellow wants to get on in this world, he can't."
At this juncture Roland came to the end of his paper. As it was a good opportunity for taking a little respite, he laid down his pen, and exercised his thoughts.
"There's those photographing places--lots of them springing up. You can't turn a corner into a street but you come bang upon a fresh establishment. They can't require a fellow to have any previous knowledge, they can't. I wonder if any of them would take me on, and give me a couple of guineas a-week, or so? Nothing to do there, but talk to the visitors, and take their faces. I should make a good hand at that. But, perhaps,she'dnot like it! She might object to marry a man of that sort. What a difficulty it is to get into anything! I must think of the other plan."
The other plan meant some nice place under Government. To Roland that always seemed a sure harbour of refuge. The doubt was, how to get it?
"There's young Dick--Vincent, as he likes to be called now," soliloquised Roland. "I've never asked him to help me, but perhaps he might: he's not ill-natured where his pocket's not called in question. I'll go to him tomorrow; see if I don't. Now then, are you dry?"
This was to the writing. Roland rose up to get more paper, and then found that he had left it behind him at the office--some that he ought to have brought home.
"There's a bother! I wonder if I could get it by going round? Of course the offices are closed, but I'd not mind asking Bede for the key if he's in the way."
To think and to act were one with Roland. He put on his coat, took his hat, and went hastening along on his expedition. Rather to his surprise, as he drew to his walk's end, his quick eyes, casting themselves into dark spots as well as light ones, caught sight of Bede Greatorex standing in the shade opposite his house, apparently watching its lighted windows, from which sounds of talking and laughing issued forth. Roland conjectured that some gaiety was as usual going on in the house, which its master would escape. Over he went to him, without ceremony.
"You don't like all that, sir?" he said, indicating the supposed company.
"Not too much of it," replied Bede Greatorex, startled out of his reverie by the unexpected address. "The fact is," he condescended to explain to his curious clerk, perhaps as an excuse for standing there, "certain matters have been giving me trouble of late. I was in deep thought."
"Mrs. Bede Greatorex does love society: she did as Louisa Joliffe," remarked Roland, meaning to be confidential.
"I was not thinking of Mrs. Bede Greatorex, but of the loss from my office," spoke his master in a cold, proud tone of reproof.
Crossing the road, as if declining further conversation, he went in. Roland saw he had offended him, and wished his tongue had been tied, laying down his thoughtless speech as usual to the having sojourned at Port Natal. It might not be a propitious moment for requesting the loan of the office keys, and Roland had the sense to foresee it.
Who should come out of the house at that moment, but Annabel Channing, attended by a servant. The sight of her put work, keys, and all else, out of Roland's head. He leaped across, seized her hands, and learnt that she had got leave to spend the evening with Hamish and his wife.
"I'lltake care of you;I'llsee you safely there," cried Roland, impetuously. "You can go back, old Dalla."
Old Dalla--a middle-aged yellow woman who had brought Jane Greatorex from India and remained with the child as her attendant--made no more ado, but took him at his word; glad to be spared the walk, she turned indoors at once. And before Annabel well knew what had occurred, she found herself being whirled away by Roland in an opposite direction to the one she wished to go. It was only twilight yet. Roland had her securely on his arm, and began to pace the square. To say the truth, he looked on the meeting as a special chance, for he had not once set eyes on the young lady, save in the formal presence of others, since that avowal of his a fortnight ago, in Mr. Greatorex's room.
"What are you doing?" she asked, when she could collect herself "This is not the way to Hamish's."
"This is the way to get a few words with you, Annabel; one can't talk in the streets with its glare and its people. We are private here; and I'll take you to Hamish's in a minute or two."
In this impulsive fashion, he began telling her his plans and his dreams. That he had determined to make an income and a home for her: as a beginning, until something better turned up, he was working all his spare time at copying deeds, "nearly night and day." One less unsophisticated than Roland Yorke, might have suppressed a small item of the programme--that which related to Annabel's contributing to the fund herself, by obtaining pupils. Not he. He avowed it just as openly as his own intention of getting "something under Government." In short, Roland made the young lady a regular offer. Or, rather, did not so muchmakethe offer, as assume that it had been already made, and was, so far, settled. His arguments were sensible; his plans looked really feasible; the day-dreams tolerably bright.
"But I have not said I would have you yet," spoke Annabel all in a flutter, when she could get a word in edgeways. "You should not make so sure of things."
"Not make sure of it! Not have me!" cried Roland, in indignant remonstrance. "Now look you here, Annabel--youknowyou'll have me: it is all nonsense to make believe you won't. I don't suppose I've asked you in the proper way, or put things in the proper light; but you ought to make allowance for a fellow who has had his manners knocked out of him at Port Natal. When the time arrives that I've got a little house and a few chairs and tables in its rooms, you'll come home to me and I'll try and make you happy in it, and work for you till I drop! There! If I knew how to say it better, I would: and you need not despise a man for his incapable way of putting it. Not have me! I'd like to know who you would have, if not me!"
Annabel Channing offered no farther remonstrance. That she had contrived to fall in love with Roland Yorke, and would rather marry him than anybody else in the world, she knew all too well. The home and the chairs and the tables in it, and the joint working together to keep it going, wore a bright vista to her heart, looked at from a distance with youth's hopeful eyes. But she did not speak: and Roland, mistaking her silence, regarded it as a personal injury.
"When I and Arthur are the dearest friends in the world! He'd give you to me off-hand; I know it. It is not kind of you, Annabel. We engaged ourselves to each other when you were a little one and I was a tall donkey of fourteen, and if I've ever thought of a wife at all since I grew up, it was of you. I have done nothing but think of you since I came back. I wonder howyou'dfeel if I turned round and said, 'I don't know that I shall have you.' Not jovial, I know."
"You should not bring up the nonsense we said when we were children," returned Annabel, at a loss what else to answer. "I'm sure I could not have been above seven. We were playing at oranges and lemons: I remember the evening quite well: and you----"
"Now just you be open, Annabel, and say what it is your mind's harbouring against me," interrupted Roland, in a tone of deep feeling. "Is it that twenty-pound note of old Galloway's?--or is it because I went knocking about at Port Natal?"
"Oh, Roland, how foolish you are! As if I could think of either!"
And there was something in the words and tone, in the pretty, shy, blushing face that reassured Roland. From that moment he looked upon matters as irrevocably settled, gave Annabel's hand a squeeze against his side, and went on to enlarge upon his dreams of the future.
"I've taken counsel with myself and with Mrs. J., and I don't think the pair of us are likely to be led astray by romance, Annabel, for she is one of the strong-minded ones. She agrees with me that we might do well on three hundred a year; and, what with my work and your pupils, we could make that easily. But, I said to her, let's be on the safe side, and put it down at only two hundred. Just to begin with, you know, Annabel. She said, 'Yes, we might do on that if we were both economical'--and I'm sure if I've not learnt to bethatI've learnt nothing. I would not risk the temptation of giving away--which I am afraid I'm prone to--for you should be cash-keeper, Annabel; just as Mrs. J. keeps my sovereign a week now. My goodness! the having no money in one's pocket is a safeguard. When I see things in the shop windows, whether it's eatables, or what not, I remember my lack of cash, and pass on. I stopped to look at a splendid diamond necklace yesterday in Regent Street, and thought how much I should like to get it for you; but with empty pockets, where was the use of going in to enquire the price?"
"I do not care for diamonds," said Annabel.
"You will have them some time, I hope, when my fortune's made. But about the two hundred a year? Mrs. J. said if we could be sure of making that regularly, she thought we might risk it; only,shesaid there might be interruptions. It would not be Mrs. J. if she didn't croak."
"Interruptions!" exclaimed Annabel, something as Roland had interrupted Mrs. Jones, and quite as unsuspicious as he. "Of what kind?"
"Sickness, Mrs. J. mentioned, and--but I don't think I'll tell you that," considered Roland. "Let's say, and general contingencies. I'm sure I should as soon have thought of setting up a menagerie of owls, but for her putting it into my head. A fellow who has helped to land boats at Port Natal can't be expected to foresee everything. Would you be afraid to encounter the two hundred a year?"
"I fear mamma would for me. And Hamish."
"Now Annabel, don't you get bringing up objections for other people. Time enough for that when they come down with them of their own accord. I intend to speak to Hamish tonight if I can get the opportunity. I don't want you to keep your promise a secret. You are a dear good girl, and the little home shall be ours before a twelvemonth's gone by, if I have to work my hands off."
The little home! Poor Roland! If he could but have foreseen what twelve months would bring forth.
Hamish Channing's book had come out under more favourable auspices than Gerald's. The publisher, far from demanding money in advance for expenses, had made fair terms with him. Of course the result would depend on the sale. When Hamish held the first copies in his hand, his whole being was lighted up with silent enthusiasm; the joy it was to bring, the appreciation, had already set in. He sent a copy to his mother; and he sent one to Gerald Yorke, with a brief, kind note: in the simplicity of his heart, he supposed Gerald would rejoice, just as he at first had rejoiced for him.
How good the book was, Hamish knew. The publisher knew. The world, Hamish thought, would soon know. He did not deceive himself in its appreciation, or exaggerate the real worth and merits of the work: in point of fact, the praise meted out to Gerald's would have been really applicable to his. Never did Hamish, even in his moments of extremest doubt and diffidence, cast a thought to the possibility that his book would be cried down. Already he was thinking of beginning a second; and his other work, the occasional papers, went on with a zest.
He sat with his little girl, Nelly, on his knee, on this selfsame evening that Roland had pounced on Annabel. The child had her blue eyes and her bright face turned to him as she chattered. He looked down fondly at her and stroked the pretty curls of her golden hair.
"And when will the ship be home, papa?"
"Very soon now. It is nearing the port."
"But when will it be quite, quite, quite home?"
"In a few days, I think, Nelly. I am not sure, but I ought to say it has come."
"It was those books that came in the parcel last night?" said shrewd little Nelly.
"Even so, darling."
"Mamma has been reading them all day. I saw"--Nelly put her sweet face close up and dropped her voice--"I saw her crying at places of them."
A soft faint crimson stole into Hamish Channing's cheeks; his lips parted, his breath came quicker; a sudden radiance illuminated his whole countenance. This whisper of the child's brought to his heart its first glad sense of that best return--appreciation.
Company arrived to interrupt the quiet home happiness. Mrs. Gerald Yorke and her three meek children. Winny had a face of distress, and made a faint apology for bringing the little ones, but it was over early to leave them in bed. Close upon this, Roland and Annabel entered, and had the pleasure of being in time to hear Gerald's wife tell out her grievances.
They were of the old description. No money, importunate creditors, Gerald unbearably cross. Annabel felt inclined to smile; Roland was full of sympathy. Had the prospective fortune (that he was sure to make) been already in his hands, he would have given a purse of gold to Winny, and carried off the three little girls to a raree-show there and then. The next best thing was to promise them the treat: which he did largely.
"And me too, Roland," cried eager Nelly, dancing in and out amid the impromptu visitors in the highest glee, her shining curls never still.
"Of courseyou," said Roland to the fair child who had come to an anchor before him, flinging her arms upon his knees. "I'd not go anywhere without you, you know, Nelly. If I were not engaged to somebody else, I'd make you my little wife."
"Who is the somebody else? Kitty?"
"Not Kitty. She's too little."
"Let it be me, then."
Roland laughed, and looked across at Hamish. "If I don't ask you for her, I may for somebody else. So prepare."
"I'm sure, I hope, Roland, if ever you do marry, that you'll not be snappish with your wife and little girls, as your brother is with us," interposed Winny with a sob. "I think it is something in Mr. Channing's book that has put him out today. As soon as it came this morning, he locked himself in the room alone with it, and never came out for hours; but when he did come--oh, was he not in a temper! He pushed Winnifred and she fell on the carpet, and he shook Rosy till she cried; and nobody knows for what. I'm sure they are like mice for quietness when he's there; they are too much afraid of him to be otherwise."
It was well for Gerald Yorke that he committed no grave crimes; for his wife, in her childish simplicity, in her inability to bear in silence, would be safe to have betrayed them. She was right in her surmises--in fact, Winny, with all her silliness, had a great deal of discernment--that the cause of her husband's temper being worse than usual was Hamish Channing's book. Seizing upon it when it came, Gerald locked himself up with it, forbidding any interruption in terms that might not be disobeyed. On the surface alone he could see that it was no sham book: Gerald's book had about twenty lines in a page, and the large, wide, straggling type might have been read a mile off. This was different: it was closely printed, rather than not, as if the writer were at no fault for matter. In giving a guinea and a half for this work, the public would not find itself deluded into finding nothing to read. Gerald sat down. He was about to peruse this long-expected book, and he devoutly hoped to find it bad and worthless.
But, if Gerald Yorke could not write, he could appreciate: and with the first commencing pages he saw what the work really was--rare, good, of powerful interest; essentially the production of a good man, a scholar, and a gentleman.
As he read on and on, his brow grew dark with a scowl, his lips were angrily bitten: the book, properly noticed, would certainly set the world a-longing: and Gerald might experience some difficulty in writing it down. The knowledge did not tend to soften his generally ill-conditioned state of mind, and he flung the last volume on the table with a harsh word. Even at that early stage, some of the damnatory terms he would use to extinguish the book passed through his active brain.
Emerging from his retreat towards evening in this genial mood, he made those about him suffer from it. Winny, the non-enduring, might well wish to escape with her helpless children! Gerald departed; to keep an engagement at a white-bait entertainment; and she came to Hamish Channing's.
How different were the two men! Hamish Channing's heart had ached to pain at the badness of Gerald's book, for Gerald's sake; had he been a magician, he would have transformed its pages, with a stroke of his wand, to the brightest and best ever given to the world. Gerald Yorke put on the anger of a fiend because Hamish's work wasnotbad; and laid out his plans to ruin it.
"Man, vain man, dressed in a little brief authority,Plays such fantastic tricks before high heavenAs make the angels weep."
"Man, vain man, dressed in a little brief authority,Plays such fantastic tricks before high heavenAs make the angels weep."
If the world is not entirely made up of these two types of men, the bad and the good, the narrow-hearted and the wide, the kindly generous and the cruelly selfish, believe me there are a vast many of each in it.
"It's getting worse and worse," sobbed Winny, continuing her grievances over the tea-table. "I don't mean Gerald now, but the shortness of money and the worry. I know we shall have to go into the workhouse!"
"Bless you, don't lose heart!" cried Roland with a beaming face. "Ican never lose that again, after the ups and downs in Africa. I'll tell you of one, Mrs. Gerald.--Another piece of muffin, Kitty? there it is.--I and another fellow had had no food to speak of for two days; awfully low we were. We went into a store and they gave us some advertising bills to paste on the walls. Well, somehow I lost the fellow and the bills, for he had taken possession of them. I went rushing about everywhere, looking for him--and that's not so pleasant when your inside's as hollow as an empty herring barrel--but he never turned up again. Whether he decamped with the bills, or whether he was put out of the way by a knock on the head, I don't know to this hour. Anyhow I had to go back to the store the next day, and tell about it. If you'll believe me they accused me of swallowing the bills, or otherwise making away with them, and called for a man to take me into custody. A day and a night I lay in their detention cell, with nothing to eat and the rats running over me. Oh, wasn't it good! One can't be nice, over there, our experiences don't let us be; but I always had a horror of rats. Well, I got over that, Mrs. Gerald."
"Did they try you for it?" questioned Mrs. Gerald, who had suspended her tea to listen, full of interest.
"Good gracious, no! They let me out. Oh, but I could tell you of worse fixes than that.Youtake heart, I say; and never trouble your thoughts about workhouses. Things are safe to turn round when they seem at the worst."
The tea over, Mrs. Yorke said she must take her departure: the children were weary; she scarcely knew how she should get them back. Hamish had a cab called: when it came he went out and lifted the little ones into it. Winny looked at it dubiously.
"You'll not tell Gerald that I said he was in a temper about your book, Mr. Channing?" she said pleadingly, as she took her seat.
"I'll not tell Gerald tales of any sort," answered Hamish with his gay smile. "Take heart, as Roland tells you to do, and look forward to better days both for you and your husband. Perhaps there is a little glimmer of their dawn already showing itself, though you cannot yet see it."
"Do you mean through Gerald's book?" she asked half crossly.
"Oh dear no. What I mean has nothing to do with Gerald's book. Who has the paper of cakes?--Fredy. All right. Good night. The cab's paid, Mrs. Yorke."
Mrs. Yorke burst into tears, leaned forward, and clasped Hamish's hand. The intimation, as to the cab, had solved a difficulty running through her mind. It was a great relief.
"God bless you, Mr. Channing! You are always kind."
"Only trust in God," he whispered gravely. "Trust Him ever, and He will take care of you."
The cab drove off, and Hamish turned away, to encounter Roland Yorke. That gentleman, making his opportunity, had followed Hamish out; and now poured into his ear the tale he had to tell about himself and Annabel. Hamish did not hear it with altogether the stately dignity that might be expected to attend the reception of an offer of marriage for one's sister. On the contrary, he burst out laughing in Roland's face.
"Come now! be honest," cried Roland, deeply offended. "Is it me you despise, Mr. Channing, or the small prospect I can offer her?"
"Neither," said Hamish, laughing still. "As to yourself, old fellow, if Annabel and the mother approve,Ishould not object. I never gave a heartier handshake to any man than I would to you as my brother-in-law. I like you better than I do the other one, William Yorke; and there's the truth."
"Oh--him! you easily might," answered Roland, jerking his nose into the air, with his usual depreciation of the Reverend William Yorke's merits. "Then why do you laugh at me?"
"I laughed at the idea of your making two hundred a year at copying deeds."
"I didn't say I should. You couldn't have been listening to me, Hamish--I wish, then, you'd not laugh so, as if you only made game of a fellow! What I said was, that I was putting my shoulder to the wheel in earnest, and had begun with copying, not to waste time. I have been thinking I'd try young Dick Yorke."
"Try him for what?"
"Why, to get me a post of some sort. I think he'll do it if he can. I'm sure it's not much I shall ask for--only a couple of hundreds a year, or so. And if Annabel secures a nice pupil or two, there'd be three hundred a year to start with. You'd not mind her teaching a little, would you, Hamish, while I was waiting for the skies to rain gold?"
"Not I. That would be for her own consideration."
"And when we shall have got the three hundred a year in secure prospect, you'll talk to Mrs. Channing of Helstonleigh for me, won't you?"
Hamish thought he might safely say Yes. The idea of Roland's "putting his shoulder to the wheel" sufficiently to earn two hundred pounds income, seemed to be amidst the world's improbabilities. He could not get over his laughing, and it vexed Roland.
"You think I can't work. You'll see. I'll go off to young Dick Yorke this very hour, and sound him. Nothing like taking time by the forelock. He is likely to be married, I hear."
"Who is?"
"Young Dick. They call him Vincent now, but before I went to Port Natal 'Dick' was good enough for him. My father never spoke of them but as old Dick and young Dick. Not that we had anything to do with the lot: they held themselves aloof from us. I never saw either of them but once, and that was when they came down to Helstonleigh to my father's funeral. He died in residence, you know, Hamish."
Hamish nodded: he remembered all the circumstances perfectly. Dr. Yorke's death had been unexpected until quite the last. Ailing for some time, he had yet been sufficiently well to enter on what was called his close residence of twenty-one days as Prebendary of the cathedral, of which he was also sub-dean. The disease made so rapid progress that before the residence was out he had expired.
"Old Dick made some promises to George that day, saying he'd get him on because George was the eldest, I suppose; he took little notice of the rest of us," resumed Roland. "It was after we came in from the funeral, in our crape scarfs and hat-bands. But he never did an earthly thing for him, Hamish--as poor George could tell you, if he were alive. My father always said his brother Dick was selfish."
"You may find young Dick the same," said Hamish.
"So I should if it were his pocket I wanted to touch. But it's not, you know. And now I'll be off to him. I had intended to spend this evening at my copying, but I left the paper in the office, and there was likely to be a hitch about my getting it I'll make up for it tomorrow night. I shall be back in time to tell you of my success, and to help you take Annabel home."
Roland's way of taking time by the forelock was to dash through the streets at his utmost speed, no matter what impediments he might have to overthrow in his way, and into the fashionable clubhouse frequented by Vincent Yorke, who dined there quite as often as he did at his father's house in Portland Place. Roland was in luck, and met him coming out.
"I say Vincent, do stay and hear me for a minute or two. It is something of consequence."
Vincent Yorke, not altogether approving of this familiar mode of salutation from Roland, although fate had made them cousins, did not quite see his way to refuse the request. As Roland had said, young Dick was sufficiently good-natured where his pocket was not attacked. He led the way to a corner in a room where they could be private, sat down, and offered a chair to Roland.
It was declined. Roland was a great deal too excited and too eager to sit. He poured forth his wants and hopes--that he wished co work honestly for just bread and cheese, and to get his own living, and be beholden to nobody: would he, Dick, help him to a place? He did not mind how hard he worked; till his shirtsleeves were wet with honest sweat, if need be; and live on potatoes and half a pint of beer a day; so that he might just get on a little, and make a sum of two hundred pounds a year: or one hundred to begin with.
The word "Dick" slipped out inadvertently in Roland's heat. Not a man living so little capable, as he, of remembering conventionalities when thus excited. Vincent Yorke, detecting the earnest purpose, the sanguine hope, the real single-mindedness of the applicant, could but stare and laugh, and excuse mistakes under the circumstances. The very boldness of the request, preferred with straightforward candour and without the slightest reticence, told on him favourably, because it was so opposite to the crafty diplomacy that most men would have brought to bear on such an application. Favourably only, you understand, in so far as that he did not return a haughty repulse off-hand, but condescended to answer civilly.
"Such things are not in my line," he said, and--face to face with that realistic Port Natal traveller, he for once put aside his beloved fashionable attribute, the mincing lisp. "I don't go in for politics; never did go in for 'em; and Government places are not likely to come in my way. You should have applied to Sir Richard. He knows one or two of the Cabinet Ministers."
"I did apply to him once," replied Roland, "and he sent me off with a flea in my ear. I said then, I'd never ask him for any thing again, though it were to keep me from starving."
Vincent Yorke smiled. "Look here," said he; "you take him in his genial moods. Go up to him now; he'll just have dined. If anything can be got out of him, that's the time."
Mr. Vincent Yorke hit upon this quite as much to get rid of Roland, as in any belief in its efficacy. In the main what he said was true--that Sir Richard's after-dinner moods were his genial ones; but that Roland had not the ghost of a chance of being helped, he very well knew. That unsophisticated voyager, however, took it all in.
"I'll run up at once," he said. "I'm so much obliged to you, Vincent. I say, are you not soon going to be married? I heard so."
"Eh--yes," replied Vincent, with frigid coldness, relapsing into himself and the fine gentleman.
"I wish you the best of good luck," returned Roland, heartily shaking the somewhat unwilling hand with a grip that he might have learned at Port Natal. "And I hope she'll make you as good a wife as I know somebody else will make me. Good night, Vincent, I'm off."
Vincent nodded. It struck him that, with all his drawbacks and deficiencies, Roland was rather a nice young fellow.
Outside the club door stood a hansom. Roland, in his eagerness and haste, was only kept from bolting into it by the slight deterrent accident of having no change in his pocket to pay the fare. He did not lose much. The speed at which he tore up Regent Street might have kept pace with the wheels of most cabs; and the resounding knock and ring he gave at Sir Richard's door in Portland Place, must surely have caused the establishment to think it announced the arrival of a fire-escape.
The door was flung open on the instant, as if to an expected visitor. But that Roland was not the one waited for, was proved by the surprise of the servant. He arrested the further entrance.
"You are not the doctor!"
"Doctor!" said Roland, "I am no doctor. Let me pass if you please. I am Mr. Roland Yorke."
"I beg your pardon, sir," said the man, recognizing the name as one borne by a nephew of the house. "You can go up, sir, of course if you please, but my master is just taken ill. He has got a stroke."
"Bless me!" cried Roland, in concern. "Is it a bad one?"
"I'm afraid it is for death, sir," whispered the man. "We left him at his wine after dinner, all comfortable; and when we went in a few minutes ago, there he was, drawed together so that you couldn't know him, and no breath in his body that we could hear. The nearest doctor's coming, and James is running to fifteen likely places to see if he can find Mr. Vincent."
"I'll go for him; I know where he is," cried Roland. And without further reflection he hailed another hansom that happened to be passing, jumped into it and ordered it to the clubhouse. Vincent was only then coming down the steps. He took Roland's place and galloped home.
"I hope he'll be in time," thought Roland. "Poor old Dick!"
He was not in time. And the next morning London woke up to the news of Sir Richard Yorke's sudden death from an attack of apoplexy. And his son, the third baronet, had succeeded to the family estates and honours as Sir Vincent Yorke.
Something fresh, though not much, had turned up, relating to the case of the late Mr. Ollivera. That it should do so after so many years had elapsed--or, rather, that it should not have done so before--was rather remarkable. But as it bears very little upon the history in its present stage, it may be dismissed in a chapter.
When John Ollivera departed on the circuit which was destined to bring him his death, a young man of the name of Willett accompanied the bar. He had been "called," but in point of fact only went as clerk to one of the leading counsel. There are barristers and barristers just as there are young men and young men. Mr. Charles Willett had been of vast trouble to his family; and one of his elder brothers, Edmund, who was home from India on a temporary sojourn to recruit his health, had taken up the cause against him rather sharply: which induced a quarrel between them and lasting ill-feeling.
An intimacy had sprung up between Edmund Willett and John Ollivera, and they had become the closest of friends They took a (supposed) final leave of each other when Mr. Ollivera departed on his circuit, for Mr. Willett was on the point of returning to India. His health had not improved, but he was obliged to go back; he was in a merchant's house in Calcutta; and the probabilities certainly were that he would not live to come home again. However, contrary to his own and general expectations, as is sometimes the case the result proved that everybody's opinion was mistaken. He not only did not die, but he grew better, and finally lived: and he had now come to England on business matters. The minute details attendant on John Ollivera's death had never reached him, either through letters or newspapers, and he became acquainted with them for the first time in an interview with the Rev. Mr. Ollivera. When the unfinished letter was mentioned, and the fact that they had never been able to trace out the smallest information as to whom it was intended for Mr. Willett at once said that it must have been intended for himself. He had charged John Ollivera (rather against the latter's will) to carry out, if possible, an arrangement with Charles Willett upon a certain disagreeable matter which had only come recently to the knowledge of his family, and to get that young man's written promise to arrest himself in, at least, one of his downward courses towards ruin. The letter to Mr. Ollivera, urging the request, was written and posted in London on the Saturday; Mr. Ollivera (receiving it on Sunday morning at Helstonleigh) would no doubt see Charles Willett in the course of Monday. That this was the "disagreeable commission" he had spoken of to Mr. Kene, as having been entrusted to him, and which he had left the Court at half-past three o'clock to enter upon, there could be no manner of doubt. Mr. Willett had expected an answer from him on Tuesday morning--it was the last day of his stay in London, for he would take his departure by the Dover mail in the evening--which answer never came. That Mr. Ollivera was writing the letter for the nine o'clock night despatch from Helstonleigh, and that the words in the commencing lines, "should I never see you again," referred solely to Mr. Willett's precarious health, and to the belief that he would not live to return again from India, also appeared to be indisputable. If this were so, why then, the first part of the letter, at any rate, was the sane work of a perfectly sane man, and no more pointed at self-destruction than it did at self-shampooing. The clergyman and Mr. Willett, arriving at this most natural conclusion, sat and looked at each other for a few moments in painful silence. That unexplained and apparently unexplainable letter had been the one sole stumbling-block in Henry William Ollivera's otherwise perfect belief.
But, to leave no loophole of uncertainty, Charles Willett was sought out. When found (with slippers down at heel, a short pipe in his mouth, and a pewter pint-pot at his elbow) he avowed, without the smallest reticence, that John Ollivera's appointment for half-past three on that long-past Monday afternoon in Helstonleigh,hadbeen with him; and that, in answer to Mr. Ollivera's interference in his affairs, he had desired him to mind his own business and to send word to his brother to do the same.
This left no doubt whatever on the clergyman's mind that the commenced letter had been as sensible and ordinary a letter as any man could sit down to pen, and that the blotted words were appended to it by a different hand--that of the murderer.
In the full flush of his newly-acquired information, he went straight to the house of Mr. Greatorex, to pour the story into his uncle's ear. It happened to be the very day alluded to in the last chapter--in the evening of which you had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Roland Yorke industriously putting his shoulder to the wheel, after the ordinary hours of office work were over.
Mr. Greatorex had been slightly discomposed that day in regard to business matters. It seemed to him that something or other was perpetually arising to cause annoyance to the firm. Their connection was on the increase, requiring the unwearied, active energies of its three heads more fully than it had ever done; whereas one of those heads was less efficient in management than he used to be--the second of them, Bede Greatorex. Mr. Greatorex, a remarkably capable man, always had more hard, sterling, untiring work in him than Bede, and he had it still. With his mother's warm Spanish blood, Bede had inherited the smallest modicum of temperamental indolence. As he had inherited (so ran the suspicion), the disease which had proved fatal to her.
"I cannot reproach him as I would," thought Mr. Greatorex, throwing himself into a chair in his room, when he quitted the office for the day, urged to despair almost at this recent negligence, or whatever it was, that had been brought home to them, and which had been traced to some forgetfulness of Bede's. "With that wan, weary look in his face, just as his mother's wore when her sickness was coming on, it goes against me to blow him up harshly, as I should Frank. He must be very ill; he could not, else, look as he does; perhaps already nearly past hope: it was only when she was past hope that she suddenly failed in her round of duties and broke down. And he has one misery that his mother had not--trouble of mind, with that wife of his."
It was at this juncture that Mr. Greatorex was broken in upon by Henry William Ollivera. The clergyman, standing so that the bright slanting rays of the hot evening sun, falling across his face, lighted up its pallor and its suppressed eagerness, imparted the tale that he had come to tell: the discovery that he and Edmund Willett had that day made.
It a little excited Mr. Greatorex. Truth to say, he had always looked upon that unfinished letter as a nearly certain proof that his nephew's deathhadbeen in accordance with the verdict of the jury. To him, as well as to the dead man's brother, the apparent impossibility of discovering any cause for its having been penned, or person for whom it could have been intended, had remained the great gulf of difficulty which could not be bridged over.
In this, the first moment of the disclosure, it seemed to him a great discovery. We all know how exaggerated a view we sometimes take of matters, when they are unexpectedly presented to us. Mr. Greatorex went forth, calling aloud for his son Bede: who came down, in return to the call, in dinner attire. As Bede entered, his eye fell on his cousin Henry--or William, as Mr. Greatorex generally liked to call him--whose usually placid countenance was changed by the scarlet hectic on its thin cheeks. Bede saw that something, great or little, was about to be disclosed, and wished himself away again: for some time past he had felt no patience with the fancies and crotchets of Henry Ollivera.
It was Mr. Greatorex who disclosed what there was to tell. Bede received it ungraciously; that is, in spite of disbelieving mockery. Henry Ollivera was accustomed to these moods of his. The clergyman did not resent it openly; he simply stood with his deep eyes fixed watchingly on Bede's face, as if the steady gaze, the studied silence, carried their own reproof.
"I believe, if some wight came down on a voyage from the moon, and fed you with the most improbable fable ever invented by the erratic imagination of man, you would place credence in it," said Bede, turning sharply on Mr. Ollivera.
"Edmund Willett has not come from the moon," quietly spoke the clergyman.
"But Charles Willett--lost man!--is no better than a lunatic in his drinking bouts," retorted Bede.
"At any rate, he was neither a lunatic nor drunk today."
"His story does not hold water," pursued Bede. "Is it likely--is it possible, I should almost say,--that had he been the man with whom the appointment was held that afternoon, he would have kept the fact in until now?--and when so much stir and enquiry were made at the time?"
"Edmund Willett says it is just exactly the line of conduct his brother might have been expected to pursue," said Mr. Ollivera. "He was always of an ill-conditioned temper--morose, uncommunicative. That what Charles Willett says is perfectly true, I am as sure of as I am that I stand hers, You had better see him yourself, Bede."
"To what end?"
"That you may be also convinced."
"And if I were convinced?" questioned Bede, after a pause. "What then?"
"I think the enquiry should be reopened," said Mr. Ollivera, addressing chiefly his uncle. "When I have spoken of pursuing it before, I was always met, both by Butterby and others, with the confuting argument that this letter was in my way. To say the truth, I found it a little so myself always. Always until this day."
"Don't bring up Butterby as an authority, William," interposed Mr. Greatorex. "If Butterby cannot conduct other cases better than he has conducted the one concerning our lost cheque, I'd not give a feather for him and his opinions."
For the purloiner of that cheque remained an undiscovered puzzle; and the house of Greatorex and Greatorex (always excepting one of them) felt very sore upon the point, and showed it.
"William is right, Bede. This discovery removes a mountain of uncertainty and doubt. And if, by ventilating the unhappy affair again we can unfold the mystery that attaches to it, and so clear John's name and memory, it ought to be done."
"But what can be tried, sir, or done, more than has been?" asked Bede, in a tone of reasoning.
"I don't know. Something may be. Of one thing I have felt a conviction all along--that if John's life was rudely taken by man's wicked hand, heaven will in time bring it to light. The old saying, that 'Murder will out,' is a very sure one."
"I do not think it has proved so in every instance," returned Bede, dreamily carrying his recollection backwards. "Some cases have remained undiscovered always."
"Yes, to the world," acquiesced Mr. Greatorex. "But there lies a firm belief in my mind that no man--or woman either--over committed a wilful murder, but someone or other suspected him in their secret heart, and saw him in all his naked, miserable sin."
"Don't bring woman's name in, father. I never like to hear it done."
Bede spoke in the somewhat fractious tone he had grown often to use; that it was but the natural outlet of some inward pain none could doubt. Mr. Greatorex put it down chiefly to bodily suffering.
"Women have done worse deeds than men," was the elder man's answer. And Mr. Ollivera took a step forward.
"Whether man or woman did this--that is, took my dear brother's life--and then suffered the slur to rest on his own innocent self--suffered him to be buried like a dog--suffered his best relatives to think of him as one who had forfeited Heaven's redeeming mercy, I know not," said the clergyman. "But from this time forward, I vow never to slacken heart, or hand, or energy, until I shall have brought the truth to light. The way was long and dark, and seemed hopeless; it might be that I lost patience and grew slack and weary; perhaps this discovery has arisen to reprove me and spur me on."
"But what can you do in it?" again asked Bede.
"Whatever I do in it, I shall not come to you to aid me, Bede," was the reply. "It appears to me--and I have told you this before--that you would rather keep the dark cloud on my brother's name than help to lift it. What had he ever done to you in life that you should so requite him?"
"Heaven knows my heart and wish would be good to clear him," spoke Bede, with an earnestness that approached agitation. "But if I am unable to do it,--if I cannot see how it may be done,--if the power of elucidation does not lie with me--what would you?"
"You have invariably thrown cold water upon every effort of mine. My most earnest purposes you have all but ridiculed."
"No, Henry. I have been sorry, vexed if you will, at what I thought the mistaken view you take up. Over-reiteration of a subject leads to weariness. If I was unable to see any other probable solution than the one arrived at by the coroner and jury, it was not my fault. As to John--if by sacrificing my own life, at any moment since I saw him lying dead, could have restored his, I would willingly have offered it up."
"I beg your pardon, Bede; I spoke hastily," said the man of peace. "Of course I had no right to be vexed that you and others cannot see with my eyes. But, rely upon it, the avowal now made by Charles Willett is true."
"Yes, perhaps it may be," acknowledged Bede.
"William," interrupted Mr. Greatorex, lifting his head after a pause of thought--and his voice had sunk to a whisper. "It could not be that--that--Charles Willett was the one to slink in, and harm him?"
A kind of eager light flashed into the dark eyes of Bede Greatorex, as he turned them on his cousin. If it did not express a belief in the possibility of the suggestion, it at least betrayed that the idea stirred up his interest.
"No," said Mr. Ollivera. "No, no. Charles Willett has not behaved in a straightforward manner over it, but he is cool and open now. He says he has made it a rule for many years never to interfere voluntarily in the remotest degree with other people's business; and therefore he did not mention this until questioned today. Had he never been questioned, he says, he would never have spoken. I cannot understand such a man; it seems to me a positive sin not to have disclosed these facts at the time; but I am sure he tells the whole of the truth now. And now I must wish you good evening, for I have an engagement."
Bede went along the passage with his cousin, and thence was turning to ascend the staircase. His father called him. "What is it?" Bede asked, advancing.
"What is it?--why I want to talk to you about this."
"Another time, father. The dinner's waiting."
"You would go to dinner if the house were falling," spoke Mr. Greatorex, in his hasty vexation.
"Will you not come, sir?"
"No. I don't want dinner. I shall get tea here and a chop with it. Things that are happening worry me, Bede; if they don't you."
Bede went away with a heavy sigh. Perhaps he was more worried, and had greater cause for it too, than his father; but he did not choose to let more of it than he could help be seen.
Guests were at his table this evening, only some three or four; they were bidden by Mrs. Bede, preparatory to going to the opera together. It is more than probable that the suspicion of this assembly of guests kept Mr. Greatorex away.
The dinner was elaborate and expensive as usual. Bede ate nothing. He sat opposite to his wife and talked with the company, and took viand after viand on his plate when handed to him; but only to toy with the morsel for a few moments, and send it away all but untasted. Why did his wife gather around her this continual whirl of gaiety?--he nearly asked it aloud with a groan. Did she want to get rid of care? as, heaven knew, he did. A looker-on, able to dive into Bede's heart, might rather have asked, "Nay, why did he suffer her to gather it?"
The heat of the room oppressed him; the courses were long, but he sat on--on, until quiescence became intolerable. When lights came in he rose abruptly, went to the furthermost window, and threw it wide open. Twilight encompassed the earth with her soft folds; the day's bold garishness was over for at least some welcome hours. A woman was singing in the street below, her barefooted children standing round her with that shrinking air peculiar to such a group, and she turned up a miserable, sickly, famine-stricken face to Bede, in piteous, mute appeal. It was not ineffectual. Whatever his own cares and illness might be, he at least could feel for others. Just as he flung the woman a shilling, his wife came to him in a whisper, whose tone had an unpleasant ring of taunt in it.
"Have you, as usual, the headache, tonight?"
"Headache and heartache, both, Louisa."
"I should suppose so, by your quitting the table. You might have apologized."
"And you might give the house a little rest. How far I am from wishing to complain or interfere unnecessarily, you must know, Louisa; but I declare that this incessant strain of entertaining people will drive me crazy. It is telling upon my nerves. It is telling in a different way upon my father."
"I shall entertain people every day, when I am not engaged out myself," said Mrs. Bede Greatorex. "Take a house for me away, in Hyde Park, or Belgravia; or I'd not mind Portland Place; and then we should not annoy Mr. Greatorex. As long as you are obstinate about the one, I shall be about the other."
Bede seized her hand; partly in anger, partly--as it seemed--in tenderness: and drew her nearer, that she might hear his impressive whisper.
"I am not sure but your wish, that we should quit the house, will be gratified--though not as you expect. My father's patience is being tried. He is the real owner of the house; and at any moment he may say to us, Go out of it. Louisa, I. have thought of mentioning this to you for some little time; but the subject is not a pleasant one."
"I wish he would say it."
"But don't you see the result? You are thinking of a west-end mansion. My means would not allow me to take a dwelling half so good as this one. That's the simple truth, Louisa."
She flung his hand from her with a defiant laugh of power, as she prepared to rejoin the guests. "Youmight not, but I would."
And Bede knew that to run him helplessly into debt would have been fun, rather than otherwise, to his wife.
Coffee came in at once, and Bede took the opportunity to escape. There was no formal after-dinner sitting this evening, or withdrawal of the ladies. As he passed along the corridor, Miss Channing was standing at the door of the study. He enquired in a kind tone if she wanted anything.
"I am waiting for Mrs. Greatorex--to ask her if I may go for an hour to my brother's," answered Annabel. "Old Dalla will take me."
"Go by all means, if you wish," he said. "Why did you think it necessary to ask? Do make yourself at home with us, Miss Channing, and be as happy as you can."
Annabel thanked him, and he went downstairs, little supposing how very far from happy it was possible for her to be, exposed to all the caprices of his wife. Halting at the door for a moment he wandered across the street, and stood there in the shade, mechanically listening to the ballad woman's singing, wafted faintly from the distance, just as he mechanically looked up at his own lighted windows, and heard the gay laughter that now and again came forth from them.
"I never ought to have married her," said the voice of conscience, breathing its secrets from the cautious depths of his inmost heart. "Every law, human and divine, should have warned me against it. I was infatuated to blindness: nay, not to blindness; I cannot plead that: but to folly. It was very wrong: it was horribly sinful: and heaven is justly punishing me. The fault was mine: I might have kept aloof from her after that miserably eventful night. I ought to have done so; to have held her at more than arm's distance evermore. Ought!--lives there another man on the face of the earth, I wonder, who would not? The fault of our union was mine wholly, not hers; and so, whatsoever trials she brings on me I will bear, patiently, as I best may.Isoughther. She would never have dared to seek me, after that night and the discovery I made the day subsequently in poor John's room: and the complication of ill arising, or to arise, from our marriage,Ihave to answer for. I am nearly tired of the inward warfare: three years of it! Three years and more, since I committed the mad act of tying myself to her for life: for better or for worse: and it has been nothing for me but one prolonged, never-shifting scene of self-repentance. We are wearing a mask to each other: God grant that I may go to my grave without being forced to lift it! For her sake; for her sake!"
He paused to raise his hat from his brow and wipe the sweat that had gathered there. And then he took a step forward and a step backward in the dim shade. But he could not drive away, even for a moment, the care ever eating away his heart, or turn his vision from the threatening shadow that always seemed looming in the distance.
"Of all the wild infatuation that ever took possession of the heart of man for woman, surely mine for Louisa Joliffe was the worst! Did Satan lead me on? It must have been so. 'Be sure your sin shall find you out.' Since that fatal moment when I stood at the altar with her, those ominous words have never, I think, been quite absent from my memory. Every hour of my life, every minute of the day and night as they pass, does my sin find me. Knowing what I did know, could I not have been content to let her go her own way, while I went mine? Heaven help me! for I love her yet, as man rarely has loved. And when my father, or any other, casts a reflection on her, it is worse to me than a dagger's thrust. So long as I may, I will shield her from----"
It was at this moment that the soliloquy, so pregnant with weighty if vague revelation, was broken in upon by Mr. Roland Yorke. Little guessed careless Roland what painful regrets he had put a temporary stop to. Bede, as was previously seen, went indoors, and Roland departed with Miss Channing on her evening visit, dismissing Dalla without the smallest ceremony.
The carriage, to convey Mrs. Bede Greatorex and her friends abroad, drove up. Bede, somewhat neglectful of the rest, came out with his wife, and placed her in it.
"Are you not coming with us?" she bent forward to whisper, seeing he was about to close the door.
"Not tonight. I have some work to do."
"Sulky as usual, Bede?"
His lips parted to retort, but he closed them, and endured meekly. Sulky to her he had never been, and she knew it. The carriage moved away with her: and Bede lifted his hat; a smile, meant to deceive the world, making his face one of careless gaiety.
Whether he had work to do, or not, he did not get to it. Sauntering away from the door, away and away, hardly knowing and not heeding whither, he found himself presently in the Strand, and thence at the river-side. There he paced backwards and forwards with unequal steps, his mind lost in many things, but more especially in the communication made that day by Henry Ollivera.
The fragmentary letter connected with that long-past history, and the appointment spoken of by Mr. Kene, that John Ollivera went out of court to keep, had been as much of a puzzle to Bede Greatorex as it was to other people. Upon reflection, he came now to think that the present solution of the affair was the true one. Would it lead to further discovery? Very fervently he hoped that it would not. There were grave reasons, as none knew better than Bede, for keeping all further discovery back; for, if it came, it would hurl down confusion, dismay, and misery, upon innocent heads as well as guilty ones.
The river, flowing on in its course, was silent and dull in the summer's night. A line of light illumined the sky in the west where the sultry sun had gone down in heat: and as Bede looked towards it and thought of the All-seeing Eye that lay beyond that light, he felt how fruitless it was for him to plot and plan, and to say this shall be or this shall not be. The course of the future rested in the hands of one Divine Ruler, and his own poor, short-sighted, impotent will was worse than nothing.