"'If this golden Butterfly fall and break,Farewell the Luck of Gilead P. Beck.'
"'If this golden Butterfly fall and break,Farewell the Luck of Gilead P. Beck.'
"'If this golden Butterfly fall and break,Farewell the Luck of Gilead P. Beck.'
"'If this golden Butterfly fall and break,
Farewell the Luck of Gilead P. Beck.'
"Your own lines, Mr. Dunquerque. Broken into little bits it is. The Ile run dry, the credit exhausted, and the Pile fooled away."
No one spoke.
"I am sorry for you most, Mr. Dunquerque. I am powerful sorry, sir. I had hoped, with the assistance of Miss Fleming, to divide that Pile with you. Now, sir, I've got nothing. Not a red cent left to divide with a beggar.
"Mrs. L'Estrange," he went on, "those last words of mine were prophetic. When I am gone back to America—I suppose the odds and ends here will pay my passage—you'll remember that I said the Luck would some day go."
It was all so sudden, so incomprehensible, that no one present had a word to say, either of sympathy or of sorrow.
Gilead Beck proceeded with his soliloquy:
"I've had a real high time for three months; the best three months of my life. Whatever happens more can't touch the memory of the last three months. I've met English ladies and made friends of English gentlemen. There's Amer'can ladies and Amer'can gentlemen, but I can't speak of them, because I never went into their society You don't find ladies and gentlemen in Empire City. And in all the trades I've turned my attention to, from school-keepin' to editing, there's not been one where Amer'can ladies cared to show their hand. That means that the Stars and Stripes may be as good as the Union Jack—come to know them."
He stopped and pulled himself together with a laugh.
"I can't make it out,—somehow. Seems as if I'm in a dream. Is it real? Is the story of the Golden Butterfly a true story, or is it made up out of some man's brain?"
"It is real, Mr. Beck," said Phillis, softly putting her hand in his. "It is real. No one could have invented such a story. See, dear Mr. Beck, you that we all love so much, there is you in it, and I am in it—and—and the Twins. Why, if people saw us all in a book they would say it was impossible. I am the only girl in all the civilised world who can neither read nor write—and Jack doesn't mind it—and you are the only man who ever found the Golden Butterfly. Indeed it is all real."
"It is all real, Beck," Jack echoed. "You have had the high time, and sorry indeed we are that it is over. But perhaps it is not all over. Surely something out of the two million dollars must have remained."
Mr. Beck pointed sorrowfully to the three pieces which were the fragments of the Butterfly.
"Nothing is left," he said. "Nothing except the solid gold that made his cage. And that will go to pay the hotel-bill."
Mrs. L'Estrange looked on in silence. What was this quiet lady, this woman of even and uneventful life, to say in the presence of such misfortune?
Ladds held out his hand.
"Worth twenty of any of us," he said. "We are in the same boat."
"And you, too, Captain Ladds!" Gilead cried. "It is worse than my own misfortune, because I am a rough man and can go back to the rough life. No, Mrs. L'Estrange—no, my dear young lady—I can't—not with the same light heart as before—you've spoiled me. I must strike out something new—away from Empire City and Ile and gold. I'm spoiled. It's not the cold chunk of pork that I am afraid of; it is the beautiful life and the sweetness that I'm going to lose. I said I hoped I should be prepared to meet the fall of my Luck—when it came. But I never thought it would come like this."
"Stay with us, Mr. Beck," said Phillis. "Don't go back to the old life."
"Stay with us," said Jack. "We will all live together."
"Do not leave us, Mr. Beck," said Mrs. L'Estrange. (Women can blush, although they may be past forty.) "Stay here with your friends."
He looked from one to the other, and something like a tear glittered in his eye. But he shook his head.
Then he took up the wings of the Butterfly, the pretty goldenlaminæcut in the perfect shape of a wing, marked and veined by Nature as if, for once she was determined to show that she too could be an Artist and imitate her self. They lay in her hands, and he looked fondly at them.
"What shall I do with these?" he said softly. "They have been very good to me. They have given me the pleasantest hours of my life. They have made me dream of power as if I was Autocrat of All the Russians. Say, Mrs. L'Estrange—since my chief pleasure has come through Mr. Dunquerque—may I offer the broken Butterfly to Miss Fleming?"
He laid the wings before her with a sweet sad smile. Jack took them up and looked at them. In the white quartz were the little holes where the wings had fitted. He put them back in their old place—the wings in the quartz. They fitted exactly, and in a moment the butterfly was as it had always been.
Jack deftly bent round it again the golden wire which held it to the golden flower. Singular to relate, the wire fitted like the wings just the same as before, and the Butterfly vibrated on its perch again.
"It's wonderful!" cried Gilead Beck. "It's the Luck I've given away. It's gone to you, Miss Fleming. But it won't take the form of Ile."
"Then take it back, Mr. Beck," cried Phillis.
"No, young lady. The Luck left me of its own accord. That was shown when the Butterfly fell off the wires. It is yours now, yours; and you will make a better use of it.
"I think," he went on, with his hand upon the golden case,—"I think there's a Luck in the world which I never dreamed of, a better Luck than Ile. Mrs. L'Estrange, you know what sort of Luck I mean?"
"Yes, Mr. Beck, I know," she replied.
Phillis laid her hands on Jack's shoulder, while his arm stole round her waist.
"It is Love. Mr. Beck," said the girl. "Yes; that is the best Luck in all the world, and I am sure of it."
Jack stooped and kissed her. The simplicity and innocence of this maiden went to Gilead Beck's heart. They were a religion to him, an education. In the presence of that guileless heart all earthly thoughts dropped from his soul, and he was, like the girl before him, pure in heart and clean in memory. That is indeed the sweet enchantment of innocence; a bewitchment out of which we need never awake unless we like.
"Take the case and all, Miss Fleming," said Gilead Beck.
But she would not have the splendid case with its thick plate glass and solid gold pillars.
Then Gilead Beck brought out the little wooden box, the same in which the Golden Butterfly lay when he ran from the Bear on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada. And Phillis laid her new treasure in the cotton-wool and slung the box by its steel chain round his neck, laughing in a solemn fashion.
While they talked thus sadly, the door opened, and Lawrence Colquhoun stood before them.
Agatha cried out when she saw him, because he was transformed. The lazy insouciant look was gone; a troubled look was in its place. Worse than a troubled look—a look of misery; a look of self-reproach; a look as of a criminal brought to the bar and convicted.
"Lawrence!" cried Mrs. L'Estrange.
He came into the room in a helpless sort of way, his hands shaking before him like those of some half-blind old man.
"Phillis," he said, in hoarse voice, "forgive me!"
"What have I to forgive, Lawrence?"
"Forgive me!" he repeated humbly. "Nay, you do not understand. Dunquerque, it is for you to speak—for all of you—you all love Phillis. Agatha—you love her—you used to love me too. How shall I tell you?"
"I think we guess," said Gilead.
"I did it for the best, Phillis. I thought to double your fortune. Cassilis said I should double it. I thought to double my own. I put all your money, child, every farthing of your money, in Eldorado Stock by his advice, and all my own too. And it is all gone—every penny of it gone."
Jack Dunquerque clasped Phillis tighter by the hand.
She only laughed.
"Why, Lawrence," she said, "what if you have lost all my money? Jack doesn't care. Do you Jack?"
"No, darling, no," said Jack. And at the moment—such was the infatuation of this young man—he really did not care.
"Lawrence," said Agatha, "you acted for the best. Don't dear Lawrence, don't trouble too much. Captain Ladds has lost all his fortune, too—and Mr. Beck has lost all his—and we are all ruined together."
"All ruined together!" echoed Gilead Beck, looking at Mrs. L'Estrange. "Gabriel Cassilis is a wonderful man. I always said he was a wonderful man."
In the evening the three ruined men sat together in Gilead's room.
"Nothing saved, Colquhoun?" asked Ladds, after a long pause.
"Nothing, The stock was 70 when I bought in: 70 at 10 percent. It is now anything you like—4, 6, 8, 16—what you please—because no one will buy it."
"Wal," said Gilead Beck, "it does seem rough on us all, and perhaps it's rougher on you two than it is on me. But to think, only to think, that such an almighty Pile should be fooled away on a darned half-caste State like Eldorado! And for all of us to believe Mr. Gabriel Cassilis a whole-souled, high toned speculator.
"Once I thought," he continued, "that we Amer'cans must be the Ten Tribes; because, I said, nobody but one out of the Ten Tribes would get such a providential lift as the Golden Butterfly. Gentlemen, my opinions are changed since this morning. I believe we're nothing better, not a single cent better, than one of the kicked-out Tribes. I may be an Amalekite, or I may be a Hivite; but I'm darned if I ever call myself again one of the children of Abraham."
"Whisper Love, ye breezes; sighIn Love's content, soft air of morn;Let eve in brighter sunsets die,And day with brighter dawn be born."
"Whisper Love, ye breezes; sighIn Love's content, soft air of morn;Let eve in brighter sunsets die,And day with brighter dawn be born."
"Whisper Love, ye breezes; sighIn Love's content, soft air of morn;Let eve in brighter sunsets die,And day with brighter dawn be born."
"Whisper Love, ye breezes; sigh
In Love's content, soft air of morn;
Let eve in brighter sunsets die,
And day with brighter dawn be born."
It is a week since the disastrous day. Gilead Beck has sold the works of art with which he intended to found his Grand National Collection; he has torn up his great schemes for a National Theatre, a Grand National Paper; he has ceased to think, for the delectation of the Golden Butterfly, about improving the human race. His gratitude to that prodigy of Nature has so far cooled that he now considers it more in the light of a capricious sprite, a sort of Robin Good-fellow, than as a benefactor. He has also changed his views as to the construction of the round earth, and all that is therein. Ile, he says, may be found by other lucky adventures; but Ile is not to be depended on for a permanence. He would now recommend those who strike Ile to make their Pile as quickly as may be, and devote all their energies to the safety of that pile. And as to the human race, it may slide.
"What's the good," he says to Jack Dunquerque, "of helpin' up those that are bound to climb? Let them climb. And what's the good of tryin' to save those that are bound to fall? Let them fall. I'm down myself; but I mean to get up again."
It is sad to record that Mr. Burls, the picture-dealer, refused to buy back again the great picture of "Sisera and Jael." No one would purchase the work at all. Mr. Beck offered it to the Langham Hotel as a gift. The directors firmly declined to accept it. When it was evident that this remarkable effort of genius was appreciated by no one, Gilead Beck resolved on leaving it where it was. It is rumoured that the manager of the hotel bribed the owner of a certain Regent Street restaurant to take it away; and I have heard that it now hangs, having been greatly cut down, on the wall of that establishment, getting its tones mellowed day by day with the steam of roast and boiled. As for the other pictures, Mr. Burls expressed his extreme sorrow that temporary embarrassment prevented him purchasing them back at the price given for them. He afterwards told Mr. Beck that the unprincipled picture-dealer who did ultimately buy them, at the price of so much a square foot, and as second-rate copies, was a disgrace to his honourable profession. He, he said, stood high in public estimation for truth, generosity, and fair dealing. None but genuine works came from his own establishment; and what he called a Grooze was a Grooze, and nothing but a Grooze.
As for the Pile, Gilead's power of attorney had effectually destroyed that. There was not a cent left; not one single coin to rub against another. All was gone in that great crash.
He called upon Gabriel Cassilis. The financier smiled upon him with his newly-born air of sweetness and trust; but, as we have seen, he could no longer speak, and there was nothing in his face to express sorrow or repentance.
Gilead found himself, when all was wound up, the possessor of that single cheque which Joseph Jagenal had placed in his hands, and which, most fortunately for himself, he had not paid into the bank.
Four hundred pounds. With that, at forty-five, he was to begin the world again. After all, the majority of mankind at forty five have much less than four hundred pounds.
He heard from Canada that the town he had built, the whole of which belonged to him, was deserted again. There was a quicker rush out of it than into it. It stands there now, more lonely than Empire City—its derricks and machinery rusting and dropping to pieces, the houses empty and neglected, the land relapsing into its old condition of bog and marsh. But Gilead Beck will never see it again.
He kept away from Twickenham during this winding-up and settlement of affairs. It was a week later when, his mind at rest and his conscience clear of bills and doubts, because now there was nothing more to lose, he called at the house where he had spent so many pleasant hours.
Mrs. L'Estrange received him. She was troubled in look, and the traces of tears were on her face.
"It is a most onfortunate time," Gilead said sympathetically; "a most onfortunate time."
"Blow after blow, Mr. Beck," Agatha sobbed. "Stroke upon stroke."
"That is so, madam. They've got the knife well in, this time, and when they give it a twist we're bound to cry out. You've thought me selfish, I know, not to inquire before."
"No, Mr. Beck; no. It is only too kind of you to think of us in your overwhelming disaster. I have never spent so wretched a week. Poor Lawrence has literally not a penny left, except what he gets from the sale of his horses, pictures and things. Captain Ladds is the same; Phillis has no longer a farthing; and now, Oh dear, Oh dear. I am going to lose her altogether!"
"But when she marries Mr. Dunquerque you will see her often."
"No, no. Haven't they told you? Jack has got almost nothing—only ten thousand pounds altogether; and they have made up their minds to emigrate. They are going to Virginia, where Jack will buy a small estate."
"Is that so?" asked Gilead meditatively.
"Lawrence says that he and Captain Ladds will go away together somewhere; perhaps back to Empire City."
"And you will be left alone—you, Mrs. L'Estrange—all alone in this country, and ruined. It mustn't be." He straightened himself up, and looked round the room. "It must not be, Mrs. L'Estrange. You know me partly—that is you know the manner of man I wish to seem and try to be; you know what I have been. You do not know, because you cannot guess, the things which you have put into my head."
Mrs. L'Estrange blushed and began to tremble. Could it be possible that he was actually going to—
He was.
"You and I together, Mrs. L'Estrange, are gone to wreck in this almighty hurricane. I've got one or two thousand dollars left; perhaps you will have as much, perhapsnot. Mrs. L'Estrange, you will think it presumptuous in a rough American—not an American gentleman by birth and raising—to offer you such protection and care as he can give to the best of women? We, too, will go to Virginia with Mr. Dunquerque and his wife; we will settle near them, and watch their happiness. The Virginians are a kindly folk, and love the English people, especially if they are of gentle birth. Say, Mrs. L'Estrange."
"O Mr. Beck! I am forty years of age!"
"And I am five and forty."
Just then Phillis and Jack burst into the room. They did not look at all like being ruined; they were wild with joy and good spirits.
"And you are going to Virginia, Mr. Dunquerque?" said Gilead. "I am thinking of going, too, if I can persuade this lady to go with me."
"O Agatha! come with us!"
"Come with me," corrected Gilead.
Then Phillis saw how things lay—what a change in Phillis, to see so much?—and half laughing, but more in seriousness than in mirth, threw her arms round Agatha's neck.
"Will you come, dear Agatha? He is a good man, and he loves you; and we will all live near together and be happy."
Three short scenes to conclude my story.
It is little more than a year since Agatha L'Estrange, as shy and blushing as any maiden—much more shy than Phillis—laid her hand in Gilead's, with the confession, half sobbed out, "And it isn't a mistake you are making, because I am not ruined at all. It is only you and these poor children and Lawrence."
We are back again to Empire City. It is the early fall, September. The yellow leaves clothe all the forests with brown and gold; the sunlight strikes upon the peaks and ridges of the great Sierra, lights up the broad belt of wood making shadows blacker than night, and lies along the grass grown streets of the deserted Empire City. Two men in hunting-dress are making their way slowly through the grass and weeds that choke the pathway.
"Don't like it, Colquhoun," says one; "more ghostly than ever."
They push on, and presently the foremost, Ladds, starts back with a cry.
"What is it?" asks Colquhoun.
They push aside the brambles, and behold a skeleton. The body has been on its knees, but now only the bones are left. They are clothed in the garb of the celestial, and one side of the skull is broken in, as if with a shot.
"It must be my old friend Achow," said Colquhoun calmly. "See, he's been murdered."
In the dead of night Ladds awakened Colquhoun.
"Can't help it," he said; "very sorry. Ghosts walking about the stairs. Says the ghost of Achow to the shade Leeching, 'No your piecy pidgin makee shootee me.' Don't like ghosts, Colquhoun."
Next morning they left Empire City. Ladds was firm in the conviction that he had heard and seen a Chinaman's ghost, and was resolute against stopping another night in the place.
Just outside the town they made another discovery.
"Good Lord!" cried Ladds, frightened out of sobriety of speech. "It rains skeletons. Look there; he's beckoning!"
And, to be sure, before them was raised, with finger as of invitation, a skeleton hand.
This, too, belonged to a complete assortment of human bones clad in Chinese dress. By its side lay a rusty pistol. Lawrence picked it up.
"By Gad!" he said, "it's the same pistol I gave to Leeching. How do you read this story, Ladds?"
Ladds sat down and replied slowly. He said that he never did like reading ghost stories, and since the apparition of the murdered Achow, the night before, he should like them still less. Ghost stories, he said, are all very well until you come to see and hear a ghost. Now that he had a ghost story of his own—an original one in pigeon English—he did not intend ever to read another. Therefore Colquhoun must excuse him if he gave up the story of Leeching's skeleton entirely to his own reading. He then went on to say that he never had liked skeletons, and that he believed Empire City was nothing but a mouldy old churchyard without the church, while, as a cemetery, it wasn't a patch upon Highgate. And the mention of Highgate, he said, reminded him of Phillis; and he proposed they should both get to Virginia, and call upon Jack and his wife.
All this took time to explain; and meanwhile Lawrence was poking the butt end of his gun about in the grass to see if there was anything more. There was something more. It was a bag of coarse yellow canvas, tied by a string round what had been the waist of a man. Lawrence cut the string, and opened the bag.
"We're in luck, Tommy. Look at this."
It was the gold so laboriously scraped together by the two Chinamen, which had caused, in a manner, the death of both.
"Lift it, Tommy." Colquhoun grew excited at his find. "Lift it—there must be a hundred and fifty ounces, I should think. It will be worth four or five hundred pounds. Here's a find!"
To this pair, who had only a year ago chucked away their thousands, the luck of picking up a bag of gold appeared something wonderful.
"Tommy," said Colquhoun, "I tell you what we will do. We will add this little windfall to what Beck would call your little pile and my little pile. And we'll go and buy a little farm in Virginia, too; and we will live there close to Jack and Phillis. Agatha will like it too. And there's capital shooting."
Gabriel Cassilis and his wife reside at Brighton. The whole of the great fortune being lost, they have nothing but Victoria's settlement. That gives them a small income. "Enough to subsist upon," Victoria tells her friends. The old man—he looks very old and fragile now—is wheeled about in a chair on sunny days. When he is not being wheeled about he plays with his child, to whom he talks; that is, pours out a stream of meaningless words, because he will never again talk coherently. Victoria is exactly the same as ever—cold, calm, and proud. Nor is there anything whatever in her manner to her husband, if she accidentally meets him, to show that she has the slightest sorrow, shame, or repentance for the catastrophe she brought about. Joseph Jagenal is working the great Dyson will case for them, and is confident that he will get the testator's intentions, which can now be only imperfectly understood, set aside, when Gabriel Cassilis will once more become comparatively wealthy.
On a verandah in sunny Virginia, Agatha Beck sits quietly working, and crooning some old song in sheer content and peace of heart. Presently she lifts her head as she hears a step. That smile with which she greets her husband shows that she is happy in her new life. Gilead Beck is in white, with a broad straw hat, because it is in hot September. In his hand he has a letter.
"Good news, wife; good news," he says. "Jack and Phillis are coming here to-day, and will stay till Monday. Will be here almost as soon as the note. Baby coming, too."
"Of course, Gilead," says Agatha, smiling superior. "As if the dear girl would go anywhere without her little Philip. And six weeks old to-morrow."
(Everybody who has appreciated how very far from clever Jack Dunquerque was will be prepared to hear that he committed an enormous etymological blunder in the baptism of his boy, whom he named Philip, in the firm belief that Philip was the masculine form of Phillis.)
"Here they come! Here they are!"
Jack comes rattling up to the house in his American trap, jumps out, throws the reins to the boy, and hands out his wife with the child. Kisses and greetings.
Phillis seems at first, unchanged, except perhaps that the air of Virginia has made her sweet delicacy of features more delicate. Yet look again, and you find that she is changed. She was a child when we saw her first; then we saw her grow into a maiden; she is a wife and a mother now.
She whispers her husband.
"All right, Phil, dear.—Beck, you've got to shut your eyes for just one minute. No, turn your back so. Now you may look."
Phillis has hung round the neck of her unconscious baby, by a golden chain, the Golden Butterfly. It seems as strong and vigorous as ever; and as it lies upon the child's white dress, it looks as if it were poised for a moment's rest, but ready for flight.
"That Inseck!" said Gilead sentimentally. "Wal, it's given me the best thing that a man can get"—he took the hand of his wife—"love and friendship. You are welcome, Phillis, to all the rest, provided that all the rest does not take away these."
"Nay," she said, her eyes filling with the gentle dew of happiness and content; "I have all that I want for myself. I have my husband and my boy—my little, little Philip! I am more than happy; and so I give to tiny Phil all the remaining Luck of the Golden Butterfly."
THE END.
Transcriber's NoteMinor typographical errors have been corrected without note.Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have been retained as printed.The Table of Contents was not present in the original text and has been produced for the reader's convenience.
Transcriber's Note
Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note.
Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have been retained as printed.
The Table of Contents was not present in the original text and has been produced for the reader's convenience.