CHAPTER XXXI.THE MESSENGER OF DISGRACE.Thosewords, ‘I am Mrs. Jordan,’ were not unexpected by Margaret. There was no need for her visitor to speak them or to throw back her hood; she had known her from the first. Whatever evil news there was to tell, it was made ten times worse by the messenger that brought it. She felt like Antony’s wife in the presence of Cleopatra. ‘You have been his ruin,’ were thewords that trembled on her lips. But there was something in the other’s tone that prevented their utterance. That it was a beautiful face was nothing; she detested and abhorred its beauty. That it was full of sympathy and compassion was nothing; she resented its compassion as an insult. But there was also sorrow in it, genuine and unmistakable sorrow. Whatever wrong this woman had done her—so Margaret reasoned—she had repented of; perhaps had come to confess, when it was too late, but still to confess. There were tears in her eyes; she was an actress it is true, but they were real tears.‘Well, what is it you want, madam?’‘Nothing. I am here on your account, not on my own.’‘And Willie sent you?’She uttered this with great bitterness, experiencing the same sort of satisfaction in the humiliation it cost her, as some persons in physical pain derive from the self-infliction of another pain.‘He did not send me: he does not even know that I am here.’‘But you come from him. You have been with him after he left the theatre?’‘Yes, for hours; two long miserable hours.’‘And you dare to tell me that?’‘Yes. Oh, Margaret—for that is the only name I know you by—put away from you, I beseech you, all thoughts that wrong him. He has sins enough—Heaven help him—to answer for, but not such as you would impute to him. He is faithful to you and despairing.’‘What do you mean? Why should he despair?’ The other’s words had somewhat disarmed her, the gentleness and pity in her companion’s looks had won upon her in spite of herself. The woman was certainly not there to exult over her. It was a bitter reflection that her lover had not come straight to her; that he had sought a go-between (and such a go-between!) to speak for him. But that sad word ‘despairing’ altered matters in other respects. What Willie in his modesty and self-denunciation doubtless feared, was not only that Mr. Erin would stick to the letter of his agreement respecting his consent to his son’smarriage (which, indeed, he had just announced his intention to do), but that she herself would assent to his change of views; that the idea of waiting, probably for years, until William Henry should have made sufficient means upon which to marry, would be abhorrent to her; that, in a word, her love for him did not comprehend hope and patience. It was possible indeed that his omission to come in person arose from delicacy of mind, and the disinclination to embarrass her by a personal appeal; and as for his choice of an intermediary he had perhaps but poured out his woes into the ears of the first person who had professed to sympathise with them, and who, it must be confessed, had shown him kindness. And yet how mistaken the dear lad had been in supposing for a moment that mere misfortune—the ill success of the play—could cut the bonds that bound her heart to his! It had had an effect indeed, but it was only to strengthen them, for when the object of a woman’s love is in adversity, he becomes the more dear to her in proportion to the difficulties by which he issurrounded. Since his love was as genuine as her own, he ought indeed to have known as much. And that he should despair of her! Well, indeed, might she ask with much amazement, ‘What do you mean? Why should he despair?’But Mrs. Jordan’s pretty face only grew more grave and sad.‘I wish to heaven, my dear girl,’ she said, ‘that I could use another word. If you knew the pain it costs me to come here and see you face to face, and tell you what I have to tell, you would pity me—if you shall presently have any pity to spare, save for your unhappy self and your still more wretched Willie.’ The earnestness and fervour of her tone, and its solemnity, which seemed to prepare the way for the revelation of some overwhelming misfortune, made Margaret’s blood run cold.‘You said that he was not ill,’ she murmured hoarsely, ‘and yet he has not come home. He is not dead? Oh, tell me that my Willie is not dead?’‘He is not dead, Margaret, but there areworse things that happen to those we love than death. Worse things than even when you thought the worst of your Willie and of me.’‘Great heaven, how you terrify me! Tell me what has happened in one word.’‘That is impossible, or, if it were possible, you would never, without proof, believe it. I must begin at the beginning. You know what happened to-night—the failure of the play; the peril only just averted, that threatened your uncle and yourself.’Margaret shook her head, not so much in denial as in indifference. ‘What mattered anything that had threatened herself, even though the menace had been carried out?’‘Is it possible that you are unaware of your escape to-night? How the rioters, led by an enemy of you and yours, were rushing to your box, when some young fellow threw himself between it and them; how he seized their leader by the throat, at risk of his own life, and threw him down the stairs, and how all the rest of them came tumbling after him?’If the actress hoped to lead her companion’smind into other channels, to interest her for one instant in any subject save that supreme one in which her whole soul was wrapped, her endeavour failed.‘But Willie?’ murmured Margaret impatiently. ‘Why do you speak of anything save Willie?’‘That will come soon enough. Too soon, dear girl. I must needs tell you it as it all happened. He was behind the scenes, you know, throughout the evening. At first, things seemed to be going pretty well in spite of the opposition; but he was never very hopeful, even then, as he afterwards told me. The greatness of the reward which would be his in case of the success of the play—that is, his claiming you for his own—oppressed him; it seemed too high a fortune even though he had felt himself to be deserving of it.’‘Heisdeserving of it, and of better fortune,’ put in Margaret quietly.Mrs. Jordan took no notice of the interruption. ‘He seemed depressed and downhearted from the first,’ she continued, ‘though Mrs.Powell and myself said all we could to encourage him. Presently, amid the tempest of disapprobation, he recognised a particular voice—the voice of an enemy; of the same person, I have no doubt, who urged on the mob to your box. From that moment he seemed to give up all hope. “That man is come to ruin me!“ he said; and he spoke the truth.’‘It was Reginald Talbot,’ exclaimed Margaret suddenly. ‘Frank always warned Willie against him. The vile, treacherous wretch!’‘Yes, it was Reginald Talbot—a base creature enough, no doubt; but honest people, Margaret, are not ruined by anything the base can say or shout. We must be base ourselves to enable them to ruin us.’Margaret rose from her chair. ‘I do not understand you, Mrs. Jordan. I thought that you were speaking of my Willie.’‘Listen, Margaret. Keep calm and listen; I would give half of what I have in the world to spare you, but it must be told.’‘I will hear no evil of Willie.’‘You shall hear, at least, nothing that hasnot fallen from his own lips. When he showed such fear of his enemy, I reproached him for his lack of courage, and through a gap in the stage curtain pointed you out to him as you sat in your box, exposed to all those shouts and jeers, and apparently unmoved by them. But the sight of you only seemed to depress him still more.’‘“That is the last I shall see of my Margaret,” he said; “I have lost her for ever.” And again he spoke the truth.’‘He did not,’ cried Margaret vehemently; ‘he only thought he spoke it. He imagined because the play had failed that I should give him back his troth. But what is the play to me? My heart is his; I can wait for him. We are still very young; what need is there for despair?’‘That is what I thought, that is what I said,’ returned Mrs. Jordan pitifully, ‘because I was in the dark, as you are. I said, “It will matter nothing to Margaret, if she really loves you; you will still be the same to her.”‘“No, I shall not,“ he answered; “I cannever be the same to her. If not to-night, to-morrow, if not to-morrow, the next day, that villain yonder will unmask me; she will know me for what I am, and loathe me.”‘I had to leave him then, to speak the epilogue, and when I returned, he looked like one who had utterly lost heart and hope. No one troubled himself about him. Mrs. Powell had gone away, and the others departed, cursing the play and all who had had any hand in its production. I dared not leave him to himself, and besought him to go home at once. “I have no home,“ he said; then I took him to my own house.’‘That was good of you,’ murmured Margaret, pale as death.Then Mrs. Jordan knew that the worst was over; that what she had to tell, however sad and terrible, would fall upon ears prepared to hear it. And yet even now she could not tell her right out, ‘Your Willie is a cheat and a liar.’‘In the carriage the poor fellow sat like a dead man, huddled in one corner, withoutspeech and motion; but once within doors, I insisted on his taking some wine, which revived him a little. “You cannot stop here,“ I said, speaking to him as severely as I could, for kindness only seemed to unnerve him; “I will send out and get you a bed at some inn. But if it will be any comfort to you to relieve your mind, I am ready to hear whatever you have to say.“ He made a movement towards his breast-pocket which filled me with apprehensions. “If you have a pistol there,“ I said, “give it to me at once. Whatever you may have done, however you may have wronged Margaret, you will surely not add self-slaughter to your other sins? You will not break her heart by killing yourself?”‘“No, no,“ he murmured; “it is not that.”‘I found it was impossible to get any connected narrative out of him, so I put a question or two.‘“Who is this enemy of yours, and why should it be in his power to harm you?”‘“Because he knows my secret—my shameful secret. His name is Reginald Talbot,and he was at one time my friend. We quarrelled about some poems of his, and from that moment he has done his best to ruin me. He tried to prove that I had forged one of the Shakespeare papers, and failed in it; he pretended to be satisfied at the time with the evidence in the matter, as the others were, but from that moment he dogged my footsteps. He is a sneaking, prying hound.‘“One day, when I was at work in my chambers, forging manuscripts, I saw his face at my window; he had climbed up to it by a ladder, and perceived what I was about. There was no hope of concealment any longer, so I unlocked the door and let him in. I told him all—it is a long story, but it is written here (again he touched his breast-pocket), and besought him to have mercy upon me. His heart was like the nether millstone, as I knew it would be. He asked me with a sneer what I should do now, and whether I had any new treasure of Shakespeare’s with which to enrich the world. I told him of the ‘Vortigern,’ which I was then projecting, but which, of course, it was now inhis power to put a stop to. Then he proposed a compromise. He was very vain of his verses, and he undertook, upon condition that he was allowed to write some portion of the play himself, to keep silence upon the matter. He had the same mad desire that I had, that the world should take his poetry to be from Shakespeare’s pen. I consented of course, for I had no choice. All his wrath against me seemed to have evaporated at once. He was intensely pleased; and from that time we worked together. Moreover, when the committee appointed to decide upon the genuineness of the Shakespeare manuscripts hesitated to accept them because there was no other witness to their discovery save myself, Talbot came forward, as we had agreed that he should do, and deposed that he had seen my patron from the Temple, and the collection from which the paper had been taken. His evidence carried the day and assured me of my position. On the other hand, Talbot wrote so feebly that I felt convinced not a line of his would survive criticism, and, unknown to him,I composed the whole play independently of his assistance.‘“He had to leave London for Ireland, so I had no difficulty in deceiving him in this matter. We corresponded in cipher about it, and I led him to imagine that the ‘Vortigern,’ as accepted in Drury Lane, was the play that we had composed together. I thought if it were successful that I should be in a position to defy him, and that only those who were already my enemies would believe his story. He had told me that it was impossible for him to be in London the first night of its performance, and I flattered myself that I was quite safe. The instant I recognised his voice in the theatre, I felt that all was over with me. He would find out the absence of his own rhapsodies from the drama; and that I had deceived him, as indeed I had—whom have I not deceived? From that moment my fate was sealed.”‘“Unhappy boy!“ cried I; “is it possible, then, that you acknowledge yourself to be a forger and a cheat?”‘“I do,“ he answered; “here is the record of my transgression.”‘He took from his breast-pocket this paper, his confession, which, it appears, he always carried about with him; an imprudence which would have been unintelligible in any one else, but to him who had trodden, as it were, every day on the crust of a volcano, it mattered little. I felt sure at once that this was written for your eye, Margaret, in case of discovery; thus, to the very last, some will say, the straightforward course was the one he was disinclined to take. But let us rather believe that to tell you of his own unworthiness to your face was an ordeal beyond his strength. In vain I represented to him the anxiety and apprehensions which his absence must be exciting at home.‘“I have no home,“ was his reply. “But think of your father!“ “I have no father,“ was his miserable rejoinder. “But Margaret; have you no pity for Margaret?“ “I cannot see her. I dare not see her,“ was his pitiful cry. So I have come to you instead of him.’Margaret answered nothing, She sat with the confession in her hand, without sign or word, looking straight before her.‘I must go now,’ continued her companion tenderly. ‘If I can be of any use, if I can say anything for you; a word of forgiveness with your farewell—he is but seventeen, remember—well, another time, perhaps.’ She had reached the door when Margaret called her back with a pitiful cry.‘Kiss me! kiss me!’As their lips met, the touch of sympathy, like Moses’ wand, drew the tears from that face of marble, whereby, even though she left no hope and the bitter conviction of a wasted love behind her, the messenger of pity knew that she had not come altogether in vain.CHAPTER XXXII.THE FEET OF CLAY.Itis a terrible thing to be left alone with one’s dead, and this might in some sort be said to have been Margaret’s case when Mrs. Jordan had departed. Her Willie had become as dead to her; all that was left of him was the shameful record that lay upon the table before her. Never more—save once—was she to see his face again in this life, nor did she desire to do so. She would have shrunk from his hand had he offered it to her, and the touch of his lips would have been contamination. He had obtained her kisses as it were under false pretences, and she flushed with shame when she thought of them. She did not conceal from herself that his behaviour up to the very last had been in keeping with his whole career.He should have come in person, whatever it had cost him, and confessed his guilt, and not have left her a prey to unfounded terrors. It was cowardly and base and selfish. Miserable as she had been on his account an hour ago, she was now infinitely more wretched. It was better to have thought him dead—and honest, than to know he was alive and a cheat. ‘He is only seventeen, remember,’ had been Mrs. Jordan’s words in appeal to her charity and pity, but they found no response in Margaret’s bosom. ‘One can forgive anything at seventeen,’ was her reflection, ‘save hypocrisy and deceit.’ She forgave him as a very charitable person might forgive a cardsharper; there was no malice nor hatred in her heart against him, but she could never take him to her heart again.Was it possible, she wondered, that he could have been always base? When he had made that passionate protestation in Anne Hathaway’s garden, for example, and besought her only to keep her heart free for him for a little time, to give him a chance of provinghimself worthy of her; had he had this hateful plan of fraud and falsehood in his mind even then? If he was not to be believedthen, if what he said then was not the utterance of genuine love and honesty, what word of man was to be credited? And if he was honest then, when did he begin to lie?It had been her intention not to read this hateful paper; to commit it to the flames; but a sort of terrible curiosity now urged her to peruse it. She had no expectation of finding in it any mitigation of her lost lover’s conduct; any plea for pardon or even for pity. She had no wish to hear what he had to say for himself; only a certain morbid interest in it.Yet as she opened the manuscript and her eyes fell on the well-known handwriting, they filled with unbidden tears. Great heavens! how she had believed in him, how she had loved him! Nay, how she had sympathised unwittingly with his very frauds, and longed and prayed for their success.Prayedfor it—the thought of this especially appalled her. She found herself, for the first time, face toface with the mystery of life; with the difficulties of spiritual things. It is strange enough (what happens often enough), that we should fall on our knees and implore the divine assistance to avert misfortunes from our dear ones that (if we did but know) have already happened; but that we should implore it (if we did but know) on behalf of falsehood, fraud—with the intent to prosper wickedness! This man, among his other villanies, almost made her doubt of the goodness of God!The manuscript was voluminous. It was written in the form of a diary, but interspersed with reflections and protestations.‘I protest,’ it began, ‘that I had no premeditated design or the idea of any continued course of duplicity when my first error—the production of the Hemynge note of hand—was committed.’‘He calls it “an error,”’ thought Margaret with a moan, and indeed the opening remark was the keynote of the whole composition, significant of all that was to come. He had been weak, it avowed, but never wicked; the victimnot so much of temptation, but of overwhelming circumstances. ‘You know, Margaret——’This unexpected personal appeal came upon her like a thunderclap; it was as though in that solitary room and in that solemn hour when night and morning were about to meet, his very voice had addressed her. ‘You know, Margaret, what sort of relations existed at that time between Mr. Erin and myself: how, though he permitted me to pass as his son, he was far from having any paternal feelings towards me; that he had no sympathy with my tastes, no interest in my doings, and that he grudged me the cost of my very maintenance. Was it so very reprehensible that, having attempted in vain to gain his affection by the usual road to a father’s heart, by diligence and duty, that I looked about me for some other way? Knowing his passion for any reliques of Shakespeare, it struck me that I might conciliate him by affecting to discover that of which he was always in search. I do not seek to justify what I did, but there was surely some extenuation for it.‘To show you how little of settled purpose there was in the matter, I took that note of hand, before presentation to your uncle, to Mr. Lavine, the bookseller, in New Inn Passage, and showed him the document for his opinion. He said it seemed to him to have been written a good many years ago (taking for granted that it was an imitation), but that the ink was not what it should be. He told me that he could give me a mixture much more like old ink if it was my humour to produce the semblance of antiquity, and immediately mixed together in a bottle three different liquids used by book-binders in marbling covers, and this I always henceforth used. I have applied to him again and again for more ink: a circumstance I mention not only to show the simplicity of the means employed in these so-called forgeries of mine, but also the everyday risks I ran of discovery. Do you think I could have endured such a position, had I been merely actuated by the motive I have mentioned? Could human nature have borne it? No, Margaret, I was sustained by a far higher ambition, for a manmay strive for a reward unworthily, and even though he is aware that he does not deserve it.’The calmness of this reasoning appalled Margaret even more by its speciousness than by its falseness. Her instinct, though she knew nothing of these abstract matters, told her that such philosophy was rotten at the core.‘The imitation of that note of hand was a false step I admit,’ continued the writer, ‘but it succeeded beyond my most sanguine expectations. It altered my relations with Mr. Erin entirely, which of itself encouraged me to new deceptions; but above all it became a basis on which to build my hopes of your becoming my wife. Hitherto I had loved you, Margaret, passionately, devotedly indeed, but with little hopes of ever winning you. When I obtained that promise from your dear lips in the garden at Shottery, it was not merely with the selfish intention of excluding for a few months from your heart the rival whom I feared; I believed, as I still believe, that my talents were of a high order, and I thought that at no distant date they would meet with public recognition; thatsome of that praise, in short, which I have gained under false pretences would have been accorded to my own legitimate efforts. The time during which you promised to keep yourself free for me, however, was now drawing to a close, and I felt that I had not advanced a single step on the road to either fame or fortune. I was madly in love with you. I felt that you were slipping out of the reach of my arms, and the terrible temptation suggested itself to secure you by the means that had already gained me so much in so unlooked-for a manner. If I could only make myself necessary to your uncle by ministering to his ruling passion, perhaps he would give his consent (which otherwise I well knew could never be obtained) to our immediate union. Not greed, I swear it, no, nor even the desire of recognition (though only as it were by proxy) for my genius, were my inducements to persevere in my course—Love only was my call,And if I lost thy love, I lost my all.’It was terrible to Margaret to read suchwords; they almost made her feel as though she had been a confederate in the delinquencies of this unhappy boy. Terrible, too, was the appearance, under dates, of his particular acts of forgery, each set down in a matter-of-fact and methodical manner, and concerning which the total absence of penitence and self-reprobation was less painful to her than the fallacious self-justification in which he had indulged elsewhere.‘Nov. 2nd.—Love-letter and verses to Anne Hathaway. Five stanzas and a braid of hair. Hair agage d’amourfrom a young playmate; the silk that bound it had attached the seals to some old deed. It was thickly woven and twisted in some peculiar manner, which I judged would suggest antiquity.‘Nov. 7th.—Playhouse receipts. String for them, some worsted thread taken out of some old tapestry in the waiting-room of the House of Lords, where I went to hear his Majesty’s speech with Mr. Erin.‘Dec. 2nd.—The Profession of Faith. My most ambitious performance (except the play).I solemnly affirm that but for the praises bestowed upon my good fortune (as it was held) on the previous occasions, I should have hesitated to compose this document. On the other hand, you know, Margaret, how earnestly desirous Mr. Erin always was that Shakespeare should be proved to have been a Protestant; if I could please him in this I thought that my way to his heart would be made easy indeed. Moreover, I had myself the most rooted objection to anything like bigotry or superstition. In penning the Profession I formed the twelve letters contained in the Christian and surname of Shakespeare as much as possible to resemble those in his original autographs, but as for the rest I was only careful to produce as many doubleyous and esses as possible. It was a most simple performance, and executed with so little prudence that (as you remember) the word “leffee“ was introduced instead of “leafless.” Nor did I take much more trouble with the composition itself. When, therefore, I heard Dr. Warton pronounce such an eulogiumupon it—”Sir, we have many fine things in our Church Service, and our Litany abounds with beauties; but here, sir, is a man who has distanced us all”—it is hardly to be wondered at that I was intoxicated with so unexpected a success. It corroborated very strongly the high estimation in which I had always held my talents, and I resolved, since the world would not recognise them in my proper person, to compel it to acknowledge them under another name. If I was not so great as Shakespeare—and indeed I have sometimes believed myself to be so—I had at all events a soul akin to him.’The inordinate and monstrous vanity of this remark did not escape Margaret’s notice, but it did not give her the pain that his other reflections had done; it even afforded some palliation of his deplorable conduct. The approbation of so many learned men, deceived by a great name, had been evidently taken by him as an involuntary recognition of his own genius, and in a manner turned his head. Shetried to persuade herself that he henceforth at least became in some degree irresponsible for his own actions.‘It was about this time,’ the confession continued, ‘that I was almost ruined by the treachery and malignity of Reginald Talbot, for it was he, you remember, who induced Mr. Albany Wallis to confront me with a genuine signature of John Hemynge. I look upon that as the most dangerous peril I had yet encountered, and, at the same time, the cause of my greatest triumph. It seemed incredible, and no wonder, that I should have produced within the space of one hour and a quarter (including the time spent in going and coming, as was supposed, to the Temple, but in reality to my own rooms at the New Inn), a facsimile of the other John Hemynge’s handwriting, unless it had been a genuine document. By that time I had become an adept in imitation, and could also retain in my recollection the form of letters in any autograph which I had once beheld. I brought back a deed sufficiently similar to the original to set all Mr. Wallis’sdoubts at rest. It did not, however, satisfy my own mind, and that very evening I executed another deed more carefully, which I substituted for the former one, and which stood the test of all future examinations. From that moment indeed, save those who had been my enemies from the first, and who probably never would have believed in the Shakespeare manuscripts, even though they had been really genuine, I had no serious opponent, with one exception, and for some reason or another of his own, he has never shown himself antagonistic to me.’There was much more of it; the whole composition of the ‘Vortigern’ was described, with Talbot’s connection with it, just as it had been narrated by Mrs. Jordan. But what chiefly engaged Margaret’s thoughts, and caused her to refer to it again and again, was that allusion of William Henry’s to that one person who, not belonging to the Malone faction, had all along discredited his statements, though, ‘for some reason or another of his own, he had not shown himself antagonistic.’ This wascertainly not Talbot, who had shown himself antagonistic enough, nor was it evidently any confidant of the unhappy boy’s. It could, therefore, only have been Frank Dennis; he had, she well remembered, always kept silence when the question of the manuscripts was mentioned, and had even incurred Mr. Erin’s indignation by doing so. But his nature was so frank and open that she could not understand how he could have tacitly countenanced such a fraud had he been really convinced that it was being enacted. It was curious, considering the great distress and perturbation of her mind, that a matter so comparatively small should have thus intruded itself; but it did so.Otherwise, as may well be imagined, her thoughts had bitter food enough provided for them. That whole night long Margaret never sought her couch. The revelation of the worthlessness of her lover, made by his own hand, and, what was worse, made in no spirit of penitence or remorse, put sleep far from her eyes, and filled her soul with wretchedness.If the thought that things might have been worse can afford consolation, that indeed she had, for William Henry might have married her. If the play had been successful, and if Reginald Talbot had held his tongue, and indeed if he had not held it—for she would never have disbelieved in her Willie had he not torn the mask from his face with his own hand—she might have become William Henry’s wife! The very idea of it chilled her blood. Bound to a liar, a cheat, a forger, by an indissoluble bond for life! Vowed to love, revere, and honour a man the baseness of whose nature she would have been certain to have discovered sooner or later, but in any case too late! She had been saved from that at least; and yet how terrible was the blow that had been inflicted upon her!Sad it is to be left alone with our dead, how much sadder to be left alone, after they have died, with the revelation of their baseness, to find our love has been wasted on an unworthy object, our reverence paid to a false god. In Margaret’s case matters were stillworse, for she could not even keep the revelation to herself; she had not the miserable satisfaction that some bereaved ones have when they chance upon the proof of a once loved one’s shame, of concealing it. It was necessary that she should tell Mr. Erin, and in revealing the fraud of which he had been the victim, what misery was she about to inflict upon him! How the whole fabric of the old man’s pride would be shattered to the dust, and how triumphantly would his enemies trample upon it.CHAPTER XXXIII.BREAKING IT.AsMargaret and her uncle sat at breakfast the next morning—later than usual, as was their wont on Sundays—scarce a word was interchanged between them. Her pale face and haggard eyes evoked no remark from him, who, indeed, himself looked pale and worn enough. If he had spoken upon the subject of the play it might have been made easier to her to tell him her dreadful tidings. But as it was, she felt herself unequal to the task; she could not break in upon his gloomy thoughts with such black news. She almost hoped, from his set lips and knitted brow, that he suspected something of the truth; otherwise surely, surely, she thought, he would express some anxiety concerning the continued absence of William Henry.She was, however, mistaken. Where affection is not concerned, even the catastrophes that happen to others (and much less the apprehensions of them) do not concern us so much as our own material interests.After a mere pretence of a meal, the antiquary produced pen and ink, and proceeded to make some calculations.In the middle of them arrived Mr. Albany Wallis. His face was even graver than usual, which his host, however, thought natural enough. He took it for granted that he had come upon business connected with the play, the failure of which was sufficient to account for his depression; or his melancholy, perhaps, might have been put on with a view of cheapening the terms that had been agreed upon with his employers. But Margaret felt, the first instant she caught sight of the visitor’s face, that he knew all, and did not need that dumb assurance of human sympathy, the close, lingering pressure of his hand, to convince her of it.‘This is a bad job,’ said Mr. Erin, with apretence of briskness. ‘I suppose Sheridan will not give the play another chance?’‘Certainly not,’ said Mr. Wallis decisively. ‘Almeyda is on the bill for to-morrow.’‘Then there is nothing for it but to settle, and have done with it. It is quite as great a disappointment to me as to the management, I do assure you, and eventually will be as great a loss. I have ordered the paper for the publication of the play, and must needs go on with it. I cannot break faith with the public.’‘You are a man of honour, I know,’ said Mr. Wallis gently; ‘but for that very reason you must not print this play.’‘And why not, sir?’‘Because it is spurious.’‘That was not your opinion yesterday, Mr. Wallis, nor is it mine to-day. What, because a few scoundrels have bespattered it, and done their best to make it a failure, and succeeded, you call it spurious!’‘Mr. Erin, I entreat you to be calm. I am as sorry for what has happened as you can be, though not, perhaps’ (here he stole atender look at Margaret), ‘for the same reason.’‘It needs no ghost from the grave to assure me of that much,’ replied the antiquary derisively. ‘You have your own interests, and those of your employers, to look to, and I have mine. You are here, as I conclude, to pay me the three hundred pounds agreed upon for the play and half the profits of the first night. The house was full enough, at all events.’‘Yes, it was a good house. Your share of the adventure is a hundred and five pounds exactly. I have therefore to pay you four hundred and five pounds.’‘Very good; I cannot permit any deductions. If it was worth while to discuss the matter, I might on my part reasonably make complaint of the manner in which the play was acted. Kemble never gave it a fair chance. At Covent Garden it would have had more justice done to it, and might have met with a better fate.’‘Then it would have met with a fate that it did not deserve, Mr. Erin.’‘I do not wish to discuss the subject,’ said the antiquary curtly. His reply would probably have been much less courteous but for the production of the bills—Mr. Sheridan paid everything in bills—for the amount in question. Bills and banknotes are the best ‘soft answers’ for the turning away of wrath.‘You misunderstand me altogether, Mr. Erin,’ continued the other with dignity. ‘I had no intention, as you seem to have apprehended, of disturbing your business arrangements with Mr. Sheridan, which may be taken as concluded. I am sorry to say I am come here upon a much more unpleasant errand. I am here at the request of your son, William Henry.’‘Ah! I see,’ broke in the antiquary with bitterness; ‘his professional adviser. He shall not have one penny more than the share—one-third of the profits—that has been agreed upon.’Then he turned to Margaret.‘So you have told him my determination of last night, have you, and he meets it by adeclaration of war? Let him do as he pleases; but I warn you, hussey, that if once you throw in your lot with his, I have done with you. The money that is his by rights is not much, as you will find, to keep house upon.’Margaret strove to speak, but her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth. It was shocking to see the old man’s rage, and none the less so because it was so misdirected. If his passion was so aroused by the mere opposition (as he supposed it to be) to his will, how would he take the destruction of his hopes, and the knowledge that he had been made a public laughing-stock? Whatever he had been to others, he had been kind to her; and, abhorrent to her as was the crime of ingratitude, she would have been willing to rest under its imputation if by so doing she could have spared him the revelation of the truth.‘Dear uncle,’ she presently murmured, with faltering voice, and laying her little hand upon the old man’s arm, ‘you wrong me in your thoughts; but that is nothing as compared with the wrong which has been done toyou.All between William Henry and me is over; for the rest of my life I will endeavour to supply his place with you, and to remedy, as far as in me lies, the evil that he has committed against you.’‘What is it? What is she saying? I do not understand,’ inquired the antiquary in trembling tones.‘She is telling you the truth, sir,’ said Mr. Wallis impressively. ‘Heaven send you the strength to bear it!’‘Dear uncle, you have been deceived,’ said Margaret with tender gravity. ‘From first to last you have been deceived, as we all have been. The Shakespeare manuscripts, of which you thought so much, are forgeries—every one of them. William Henry has confessed it.’‘You lie, you baggage, you lie!’ he cried with fury.‘I wish I did,’ sighed Margaret bitterly.He did not hear her; there was a singing in his ears that shut out all other sounds.‘So this is the last card you have to play,you two, is it? I am to be frightened into compliance with your wishes; frightened into annihilating common sense, and making two beggars happy! And you,you, sir!’ he added, turning to Mr. Wallis; ‘you are not ashamed to be a confederate in such a scheme as this? These two young fools think it is for their sake, but I know better. You are one of Malone’s creatures. Having already failed by fair means to disprove the genuineness of these manuscripts, you have bought over this ungrateful lad to your side. “If you will perjure yourself,“ you have said to him, “and admit yourself to be a forger, we will see that you do not lose by it; we will give you money—since the old man will not—upon which you and yours can subsist together.“ Oh, liars and villains!’It was pitiful to see and hear him. King Lear himself, deserted by his own flesh and blood and invoking heaven’s vengeance on them, could hardly have been a more dreadful spectacle.‘Mr. Erin,’ said Mr. Wallis gravely, ‘if yousee me in no way moved by the infamous accusation you have made against me, and even restraining a still more natural indignation at the dishonour your words have cast upon that innocent girl, it is not because I do not feel it; it is because I pity you from the bottom of my heart. That you have been duped and fooled by the falsehood of this unhappy young man is only what has happened to others, myself amongst them; but in your own case the reflection must be infinitely more bitter, since he who wrought the wrong was your own flesh and blood—one who has taken your bread, and bitten the hand that fed him. If you do not believe us, Miss Margaret has his own words for it in black and white.’Here Margaret drew the confession from her bosom, and laid it on the table beside her uncle; his fingers were grasping the arms of his chair, and his face was fixed full upon his visitor in hate and rage.‘If you will read it at your leisure,’ continued the lawyer gently, ‘you will at least have the satisfaction of knowing that, with one exception,no one has had any hand in this shameful fraud save the miserable lad himself; that your niece was as innocent of any knowledge in it, from first to last, as you were; so much even those who have been inclined to suspect you of any connivance in it must needs acknowledge when they read that paper——’Mr. Erin leaped from his chair, with an inarticulate cry of fury, and seizing the confession before him, tore it from left to right, and from right to left, into a hundred pieces.‘Begone,’ he cried, ‘begone, both of you! Take her with you, I say, lest I do her a mischief; take her to the Perjurer, send her to the devil for all I care; but never let me see her false face again!’With that he threw himself out of the room like one demented, and after the door had clanged behind him they heard his heavy step at first at a speed beyond his years, but presently with the tread of exhaustion and old age, creep up to his own room.‘Is it safe to leave him, think you?’ inquired Mr. Wallis in a hushed voice. ‘Onceconvinced of the truth, his reflections must be terrible. To be deceived by one’s own flesh and blood!’‘William Henry is not his son,’ said Margaret quietly; in a time of anguish and distress it is easy to speak of matters which under ordinary circumstances we should shrink from mentioning.‘Thank heaven for that!’ ejaculated the lawyer; ‘there is no fear, then, that he will not get over it. What I took for paternal resentment is partly, no doubt, exasperation at the exposure of his own credulity. The only reason for your remaining here after his express commandment to the contrary no longer therefore exists. Your doing so for the present at least will only remind him of his misfortune and aggravate its bitterness. I have a sister who keeps my house for me, and who will welcome you as a mother; I entreat you to accept of her hospitality, not only for your own sake, but for that of your uncle. Indeed, after the threat he has made use of, I must insist upon your accompanying me.’‘I am not afraid for myself; I am sure he will never harm me. Indeed, Mr. Wallis, I cannot leave him in his solitude and wretchedness.’‘He will not be solitary, Miss Margaret. I will drop a hint to Mr. Dennis, whose intention I know it is to call upon him this afternoon, to take up his quarters with him for a while.’At the mention of Frank Dennis’s name Margaret changed colour; the idea of meeting him had suddenly become intolerable.‘If your sister will give me an asylum for a few days,’ she hurriedly replied, ‘I think I will take advantage of your most kind offer.’In a few minutes she had made her preparations for departure; she trembled lest there should come a knock at the front door while she was yet in the house. She glanced apprehensively up the little street, as she sallied forth on Mr. Wallis’s arm, lest some one with eyes that spoke reproof, without intending it, should come across her before she had gained the shelter of another roof. Some one whom she had never estimated at his true worth, ortreated as he deserved; some one she had blamed for his coldness and incredulity, but who had suspected all along—she was as convinced of it as of the fraud itself—the deception which had been practised upon her, but whom the nobleness of a nature that shrank from the exposure of a rival had kept silent.CHAPTER XXXIV.A COMFORTER.Thereis nothing more astonishing in the history of mankind than the high estimation in which credulity—under the form of belief—has been held by all nations who have had the least claim to be civilised. Yet the vast majority of the human race, mere slaves as they are to custom and convention, imbibing their faith with their mother’s milk, and as disinclined to change as a wheel that has found its rut, are absolutely unable to be sceptical. This is probably why persecution has been so lightly permitted—even among Christians, whose connivance at it is otherwise unintelligible; those who suffered for their scepticism were comparatively so few that their martyrdom was disregarded. It is an immense recommendation to a creed, that the merefact of accepting it is accounted the highest virtue, since ninety-nine persons out of a hundred who have been brought up in it, find no sort of difficulty in fulfilling its chief obligation. With the same ease with which the doctrines of Mahomet or of Buddha are embraced by their disciples, had the story of the discovery of the Shakespeare manuscripts been accepted by Mr. Samuel Erin. Nay, he had not been only a disciple but a devotee. He had been looking forward all his life to some revelation of a similar kind, and it had been manifested under circumstances that not only corroborated his views, but flattered hisamour propre. A member of his own house had been the discoverer of the MSS., and he himself their apostle and exponent. To confess, even to himself, that he had been preaching a false faith, and been the dupe of a lying boy, seemed impossible. The very idea of it was wormwood to him. Even the discovery that Margaret had taken him at his word and left his roof did not at first shake him. It even strengthened his suspicion that the whole affairwas a trick to catch his consent to her marriage with William Henry. It was only done to frighten him into submission.But as the solitary hours went by, this obstinate conviction began to slacken; as his indignation grew and grew against the author of his calamity, he began to admit that such a scoundrel might be capable of anything, even sacrilege. It was the affront to the Immortal Bard that he put first, and the offence to himself afterwards. Perhaps William Henry was aware that he was not his son, but he was also aware of the greatness of Shakespeare. And yet, what rankled more, was the consciousness that his own intelligence had been trifled with—that he had been made a fool of. It was a subject terrible to think about, and worse to talk about, and yet he longed for sympathy; the solitude of his own thoughts was intolerable to him.In the afternoon, at the same time he had been wont to appear in the days that seemed to be long past, Frank Dennis arrived. The antiquary seized his hand with a warmth that hehad never before exhibited, though he had loved him well, and bade him be seated. The only thing that had ever come between them was this man’s disinclination to accept the very facts which he himself was beginning to doubt, and at first this rendered the meeting embarrassing; on the other hand, when once the ice was broken, it smoothed matters.‘Have you heard the new story about William Henry?’ he asked in hesitating tones.‘Yes; I wish I could think of it as I did of the old story. It is true, sir, every word of it.’‘You think so?’ returned the antiquary with a forced smile of incredulity.‘I am sure of it,’ was the quiet reply.There was a long silence.‘What proof have you to substantiate your assertion?’The irony of fate had caused this question to be asked in the very room where proof used to be so constantly in view, and on the wall of which the ‘certificate’ of the believers in the Shakespeare documents still hung suspended.It was met by another question. ‘Have you not seen his confession?’Mr. Erin pointed to the carpet on which the fragments of the document still remained. ‘It was placed in my hands,’ said he in a hoarse dry voice, ‘but I never read it.’‘No matter; it would only have given you pain. I have seen the unhappy lad and heard the truth from his own lips.’‘The truth!’ echoed the old man bitterly.‘Yes, the truth at last. Here is a copy of an affidavit it is his intention to make to-morrow morning before a magistrate. There are things in it which one regrets; the tone of it is unsatisfactory. He does not seem so penetrated with the sense of his misconduct as would be becoming, but at all events he is careful to absolve everyone from complicity in his crime, and particularly yourself. “I solemnly declare,” he says, “that my father was totally unacquainted with the whole affair, believing most firmly the papers to be productions of Shakespeare.”’The antiquary’s brow grew very dark. ‘Iwill never see that young man’s face if I can help it,’ he said solemnly, ‘or speak one word to him again, so help me Heaven!’‘He does not expect it,’ answered the other quietly. ‘Henceforward he will take his own way in the world. After “expressing regret for any offence he may have given the world or any individual, trusting at the same time they will deem the whole the act of a boy without any evil intention, but hurried on by vanity and the praise of others,“ he goes on to say, “Should I attempt any other play, or work of imagination, I shall hope the public will lay aside all prejudice my conduct may have deserved, and grant me their indulgence.” I suppose, therefore, he intends to live by his pen.’‘You mean to starve by it,’ answered the old man bitterly. The style of the composition he had just heard struck him as fustian: he had heard it before and expressed another opinion of it, but then the circumstances were different. In Art and Literature the views of most people are less affected by the work itselfthan by the name under which it is presented to their notice.There was a long pause. As in a reservoir, when once its contents have begun to percolate drop by drop through the dam, the drops soon become a stream, and the stream a torrent, and the dam is swept away, so it was with Mr. Erin’s obstinacy. The dam was gone by this time, and the bitter waters of conviction rolled in upon his mind like a flood. There was no longer a dry place on it to afford a perch for the mocking-bird of incredulity.‘When was it, Frank,’ he inquired in an altered voice, ‘when you yourself began to suspect this—this infamous deception?’‘From the very first. You remember giving me the document with the seals attached, that had the quintin upon them? It accidentally fell from my hands, when a portion of the back of one of the seals broke off, and disclosed the inside, which was made of new wax! The—the forger—though he had contrived to cut the old seal without breaking, found it had lost its moisture, so that the slip of parchmentwhich he had introduced into it could only be held by new wax. The next day I perceived that the two parts had been bound together by black silk, which, if anyone had given himself the trouble to untwist, would have made him as wise as I.’‘And yet you held your peace, Dennis,’ groaned the old man reproachfully.‘In the first place you would have disbelieved had the proofs of imposture been twice as strong; and secondly—well, there were other reasons into which it is not necessary now to enter. You are quite aware that I never lent my countenance to the deception, and believe me, Mr. Erin, if I could have saved you from your present humiliation—with honour—I would have done so. It was not possible. I am come here to-day to make what amends are in my power for the wrong my silence may have done you. William Henry’s affidavit will acquit you of all blame in this matter in the eyes of unprejudiced persons, but you have your enemies, and many persons who were your friends,’ he pointed to thecertificate, ‘will now join their ranks. For some time, at least, residence in London must needs be painful to you. I had taken a cottage near Bath, intending for the present to dwell there; but circumstances’ (here the colour came into the young man’s cheeks) ‘have altered my intention. I shall now reside in town, and my little country home is at your service; there, out of the reach of malicious tongues, you may reside in peace and quiet as long as you think proper.’For the first time throughout the interview something like satisfaction came into the old man’s face. The notion of escaping from the flouts and jeers of his acquaintances, and from their equally galling silence, was very welcome to him.‘I thank you,’ he said, ‘with all my heart, Dennis.’‘There is only one condition, sir,’ hesitated the other. ‘I think the proposition would be more acceptable to—to Miss Margaret—if she did not know that she was accepting any hospitalityof mine. You will be so good as to conceal from her that fact.’‘Yes, yes,’ assented the old man. He did not like to confess that Margaret was elsewhere; that she had been driven from his roof by his own insensate anger. His companion’s offer had touched him and turned the current of his thoughts from their accustomed groove—himself and his own affairs—into other channels. He recognised the patience and forbearance of this young fellow, and the temptation to unmask a rival which he had resisted and left to other hands to do. He was curious to know the full extent to which this self-sacrifice would have extended.‘But suppose matters had gone still further, Dennis? If the play had been successful, and its genuineness acknowledged, and Margaret——?’‘It was not possible,’ broke in the other, with a flush. ‘No one could have read the “Vortigern”—I mean could have seen it acted,’ he added, hurriedly, ‘and believed it to be aplay of William Shakespeare’s. I felt confident of that.’‘Still, some of us were deceived,’ insisted the antiquary, with a melancholy smile, ‘and why not more? Suppose the play had succeeded, the contingency on which, as you know, my niece’s marriage with this scoundrel depended, what would you have done then?’‘I should have still kept silence. I only suspected, remember. I was not quite sure. Moreover, Margaret herself might have been spared the knowledge of the truth, and it was not for me to undeceive her.’‘You would have permitted her, then, for a delicate scruple, to entrust her happiness to a scoundrel?’‘You press me hard, sir, though I do not say you have not a right to do so,’ replied Dennis, greatly agitated. ‘I have thought of this a thousand times; it has cost me days and nights of misery, Heaven knows. But on the whole I have satisfied my conscience. When one has lost all hope in a matter that has once concerned one to the uttermost, one takes aclear view of it. The young man of whom you speak has, doubtless, many faults; he is weak and vain, and greedy of applause, however gained; he is to some extent unprincipled, he has even committed a serious crime; but he is not altogether what you have called him, a scoundrel. He is not unkind; under less adverse circumstances than those in which, from the very first, he has been placed, he would have shown himself a better man. An exceptional temptation assailed him, and he succumbed to it. He would not necessarily—or I have tried to think so—have made a bad husband.’This speech was uttered with grave deliberation, and the manner of it was most impressive; the speaker might have stood for some personification of Justice, weighing his words with equal hand. Indeed this man was more than just, he was magnanimous.The antiquary could not withhold his admiration from his companion, though with his sentiments he was wholly unable to sympathise.‘You are throwing good feeling away,Frank Dennis,’ he said, ‘upon a thankless cur. If you think to move me to compassion for him, you are pleading to deaf ears. He is henceforth as a dead man to me and mine.’‘You will act as you think right, no doubt,’ said the young man quietly, ‘and I am only doing the same.’He felt that whatever his own wrongs had been, the wrongs of his companion were far greater. Cajoled, deceived, and stricken in years, his reputation smirched, if not destroyed; humiliated in his own eyes, degraded in those of others; if he did not do well to be angry, it could hardly be said, being human, that he did ill.Dennis gave the antiquary the address of his cottage, and the necessary information for reaching the spot, and bade him adieu with much emotion.‘But you will not desert us?’ said Mr. Erin imploringly. ‘If you stand apart from us——’ His voice trembled and he left the sentence unfinished. He not only, as the other guessed, meant to imply that in such a casethey would be friendless indeed, but that Dennis’s withdrawal from his society would be construed as condemnation.‘If you write to me to come,’ he answered, ‘if you are quite sure that my presence will be acceptable to you and yours——’ and in his turn he hesitated.‘I understand,’ said the antiquary gently. ‘I shall think of others for the future, as well as of myself, if only’ (here he gave a mournful smile) ‘to distract my thoughts from what is painful.’‘There is sunshine still behind the clouds,’ said Dennis, as he shook hands.‘True, true,’ replied the other; then added to himself with a deep sigh as he closed the door after his visitor, ‘foryou, but not for me.’
CHAPTER XXXI.THE MESSENGER OF DISGRACE.Thosewords, ‘I am Mrs. Jordan,’ were not unexpected by Margaret. There was no need for her visitor to speak them or to throw back her hood; she had known her from the first. Whatever evil news there was to tell, it was made ten times worse by the messenger that brought it. She felt like Antony’s wife in the presence of Cleopatra. ‘You have been his ruin,’ were thewords that trembled on her lips. But there was something in the other’s tone that prevented their utterance. That it was a beautiful face was nothing; she detested and abhorred its beauty. That it was full of sympathy and compassion was nothing; she resented its compassion as an insult. But there was also sorrow in it, genuine and unmistakable sorrow. Whatever wrong this woman had done her—so Margaret reasoned—she had repented of; perhaps had come to confess, when it was too late, but still to confess. There were tears in her eyes; she was an actress it is true, but they were real tears.‘Well, what is it you want, madam?’‘Nothing. I am here on your account, not on my own.’‘And Willie sent you?’She uttered this with great bitterness, experiencing the same sort of satisfaction in the humiliation it cost her, as some persons in physical pain derive from the self-infliction of another pain.‘He did not send me: he does not even know that I am here.’‘But you come from him. You have been with him after he left the theatre?’‘Yes, for hours; two long miserable hours.’‘And you dare to tell me that?’‘Yes. Oh, Margaret—for that is the only name I know you by—put away from you, I beseech you, all thoughts that wrong him. He has sins enough—Heaven help him—to answer for, but not such as you would impute to him. He is faithful to you and despairing.’‘What do you mean? Why should he despair?’ The other’s words had somewhat disarmed her, the gentleness and pity in her companion’s looks had won upon her in spite of herself. The woman was certainly not there to exult over her. It was a bitter reflection that her lover had not come straight to her; that he had sought a go-between (and such a go-between!) to speak for him. But that sad word ‘despairing’ altered matters in other respects. What Willie in his modesty and self-denunciation doubtless feared, was not only that Mr. Erin would stick to the letter of his agreement respecting his consent to his son’smarriage (which, indeed, he had just announced his intention to do), but that she herself would assent to his change of views; that the idea of waiting, probably for years, until William Henry should have made sufficient means upon which to marry, would be abhorrent to her; that, in a word, her love for him did not comprehend hope and patience. It was possible indeed that his omission to come in person arose from delicacy of mind, and the disinclination to embarrass her by a personal appeal; and as for his choice of an intermediary he had perhaps but poured out his woes into the ears of the first person who had professed to sympathise with them, and who, it must be confessed, had shown him kindness. And yet how mistaken the dear lad had been in supposing for a moment that mere misfortune—the ill success of the play—could cut the bonds that bound her heart to his! It had had an effect indeed, but it was only to strengthen them, for when the object of a woman’s love is in adversity, he becomes the more dear to her in proportion to the difficulties by which he issurrounded. Since his love was as genuine as her own, he ought indeed to have known as much. And that he should despair of her! Well, indeed, might she ask with much amazement, ‘What do you mean? Why should he despair?’But Mrs. Jordan’s pretty face only grew more grave and sad.‘I wish to heaven, my dear girl,’ she said, ‘that I could use another word. If you knew the pain it costs me to come here and see you face to face, and tell you what I have to tell, you would pity me—if you shall presently have any pity to spare, save for your unhappy self and your still more wretched Willie.’ The earnestness and fervour of her tone, and its solemnity, which seemed to prepare the way for the revelation of some overwhelming misfortune, made Margaret’s blood run cold.‘You said that he was not ill,’ she murmured hoarsely, ‘and yet he has not come home. He is not dead? Oh, tell me that my Willie is not dead?’‘He is not dead, Margaret, but there areworse things that happen to those we love than death. Worse things than even when you thought the worst of your Willie and of me.’‘Great heaven, how you terrify me! Tell me what has happened in one word.’‘That is impossible, or, if it were possible, you would never, without proof, believe it. I must begin at the beginning. You know what happened to-night—the failure of the play; the peril only just averted, that threatened your uncle and yourself.’Margaret shook her head, not so much in denial as in indifference. ‘What mattered anything that had threatened herself, even though the menace had been carried out?’‘Is it possible that you are unaware of your escape to-night? How the rioters, led by an enemy of you and yours, were rushing to your box, when some young fellow threw himself between it and them; how he seized their leader by the throat, at risk of his own life, and threw him down the stairs, and how all the rest of them came tumbling after him?’If the actress hoped to lead her companion’smind into other channels, to interest her for one instant in any subject save that supreme one in which her whole soul was wrapped, her endeavour failed.‘But Willie?’ murmured Margaret impatiently. ‘Why do you speak of anything save Willie?’‘That will come soon enough. Too soon, dear girl. I must needs tell you it as it all happened. He was behind the scenes, you know, throughout the evening. At first, things seemed to be going pretty well in spite of the opposition; but he was never very hopeful, even then, as he afterwards told me. The greatness of the reward which would be his in case of the success of the play—that is, his claiming you for his own—oppressed him; it seemed too high a fortune even though he had felt himself to be deserving of it.’‘Heisdeserving of it, and of better fortune,’ put in Margaret quietly.Mrs. Jordan took no notice of the interruption. ‘He seemed depressed and downhearted from the first,’ she continued, ‘though Mrs.Powell and myself said all we could to encourage him. Presently, amid the tempest of disapprobation, he recognised a particular voice—the voice of an enemy; of the same person, I have no doubt, who urged on the mob to your box. From that moment he seemed to give up all hope. “That man is come to ruin me!“ he said; and he spoke the truth.’‘It was Reginald Talbot,’ exclaimed Margaret suddenly. ‘Frank always warned Willie against him. The vile, treacherous wretch!’‘Yes, it was Reginald Talbot—a base creature enough, no doubt; but honest people, Margaret, are not ruined by anything the base can say or shout. We must be base ourselves to enable them to ruin us.’Margaret rose from her chair. ‘I do not understand you, Mrs. Jordan. I thought that you were speaking of my Willie.’‘Listen, Margaret. Keep calm and listen; I would give half of what I have in the world to spare you, but it must be told.’‘I will hear no evil of Willie.’‘You shall hear, at least, nothing that hasnot fallen from his own lips. When he showed such fear of his enemy, I reproached him for his lack of courage, and through a gap in the stage curtain pointed you out to him as you sat in your box, exposed to all those shouts and jeers, and apparently unmoved by them. But the sight of you only seemed to depress him still more.’‘“That is the last I shall see of my Margaret,” he said; “I have lost her for ever.” And again he spoke the truth.’‘He did not,’ cried Margaret vehemently; ‘he only thought he spoke it. He imagined because the play had failed that I should give him back his troth. But what is the play to me? My heart is his; I can wait for him. We are still very young; what need is there for despair?’‘That is what I thought, that is what I said,’ returned Mrs. Jordan pitifully, ‘because I was in the dark, as you are. I said, “It will matter nothing to Margaret, if she really loves you; you will still be the same to her.”‘“No, I shall not,“ he answered; “I cannever be the same to her. If not to-night, to-morrow, if not to-morrow, the next day, that villain yonder will unmask me; she will know me for what I am, and loathe me.”‘I had to leave him then, to speak the epilogue, and when I returned, he looked like one who had utterly lost heart and hope. No one troubled himself about him. Mrs. Powell had gone away, and the others departed, cursing the play and all who had had any hand in its production. I dared not leave him to himself, and besought him to go home at once. “I have no home,“ he said; then I took him to my own house.’‘That was good of you,’ murmured Margaret, pale as death.Then Mrs. Jordan knew that the worst was over; that what she had to tell, however sad and terrible, would fall upon ears prepared to hear it. And yet even now she could not tell her right out, ‘Your Willie is a cheat and a liar.’‘In the carriage the poor fellow sat like a dead man, huddled in one corner, withoutspeech and motion; but once within doors, I insisted on his taking some wine, which revived him a little. “You cannot stop here,“ I said, speaking to him as severely as I could, for kindness only seemed to unnerve him; “I will send out and get you a bed at some inn. But if it will be any comfort to you to relieve your mind, I am ready to hear whatever you have to say.“ He made a movement towards his breast-pocket which filled me with apprehensions. “If you have a pistol there,“ I said, “give it to me at once. Whatever you may have done, however you may have wronged Margaret, you will surely not add self-slaughter to your other sins? You will not break her heart by killing yourself?”‘“No, no,“ he murmured; “it is not that.”‘I found it was impossible to get any connected narrative out of him, so I put a question or two.‘“Who is this enemy of yours, and why should it be in his power to harm you?”‘“Because he knows my secret—my shameful secret. His name is Reginald Talbot,and he was at one time my friend. We quarrelled about some poems of his, and from that moment he has done his best to ruin me. He tried to prove that I had forged one of the Shakespeare papers, and failed in it; he pretended to be satisfied at the time with the evidence in the matter, as the others were, but from that moment he dogged my footsteps. He is a sneaking, prying hound.‘“One day, when I was at work in my chambers, forging manuscripts, I saw his face at my window; he had climbed up to it by a ladder, and perceived what I was about. There was no hope of concealment any longer, so I unlocked the door and let him in. I told him all—it is a long story, but it is written here (again he touched his breast-pocket), and besought him to have mercy upon me. His heart was like the nether millstone, as I knew it would be. He asked me with a sneer what I should do now, and whether I had any new treasure of Shakespeare’s with which to enrich the world. I told him of the ‘Vortigern,’ which I was then projecting, but which, of course, it was now inhis power to put a stop to. Then he proposed a compromise. He was very vain of his verses, and he undertook, upon condition that he was allowed to write some portion of the play himself, to keep silence upon the matter. He had the same mad desire that I had, that the world should take his poetry to be from Shakespeare’s pen. I consented of course, for I had no choice. All his wrath against me seemed to have evaporated at once. He was intensely pleased; and from that time we worked together. Moreover, when the committee appointed to decide upon the genuineness of the Shakespeare manuscripts hesitated to accept them because there was no other witness to their discovery save myself, Talbot came forward, as we had agreed that he should do, and deposed that he had seen my patron from the Temple, and the collection from which the paper had been taken. His evidence carried the day and assured me of my position. On the other hand, Talbot wrote so feebly that I felt convinced not a line of his would survive criticism, and, unknown to him,I composed the whole play independently of his assistance.‘“He had to leave London for Ireland, so I had no difficulty in deceiving him in this matter. We corresponded in cipher about it, and I led him to imagine that the ‘Vortigern,’ as accepted in Drury Lane, was the play that we had composed together. I thought if it were successful that I should be in a position to defy him, and that only those who were already my enemies would believe his story. He had told me that it was impossible for him to be in London the first night of its performance, and I flattered myself that I was quite safe. The instant I recognised his voice in the theatre, I felt that all was over with me. He would find out the absence of his own rhapsodies from the drama; and that I had deceived him, as indeed I had—whom have I not deceived? From that moment my fate was sealed.”‘“Unhappy boy!“ cried I; “is it possible, then, that you acknowledge yourself to be a forger and a cheat?”‘“I do,“ he answered; “here is the record of my transgression.”‘He took from his breast-pocket this paper, his confession, which, it appears, he always carried about with him; an imprudence which would have been unintelligible in any one else, but to him who had trodden, as it were, every day on the crust of a volcano, it mattered little. I felt sure at once that this was written for your eye, Margaret, in case of discovery; thus, to the very last, some will say, the straightforward course was the one he was disinclined to take. But let us rather believe that to tell you of his own unworthiness to your face was an ordeal beyond his strength. In vain I represented to him the anxiety and apprehensions which his absence must be exciting at home.‘“I have no home,“ was his reply. “But think of your father!“ “I have no father,“ was his miserable rejoinder. “But Margaret; have you no pity for Margaret?“ “I cannot see her. I dare not see her,“ was his pitiful cry. So I have come to you instead of him.’Margaret answered nothing, She sat with the confession in her hand, without sign or word, looking straight before her.‘I must go now,’ continued her companion tenderly. ‘If I can be of any use, if I can say anything for you; a word of forgiveness with your farewell—he is but seventeen, remember—well, another time, perhaps.’ She had reached the door when Margaret called her back with a pitiful cry.‘Kiss me! kiss me!’As their lips met, the touch of sympathy, like Moses’ wand, drew the tears from that face of marble, whereby, even though she left no hope and the bitter conviction of a wasted love behind her, the messenger of pity knew that she had not come altogether in vain.
THE MESSENGER OF DISGRACE.
Thosewords, ‘I am Mrs. Jordan,’ were not unexpected by Margaret. There was no need for her visitor to speak them or to throw back her hood; she had known her from the first. Whatever evil news there was to tell, it was made ten times worse by the messenger that brought it. She felt like Antony’s wife in the presence of Cleopatra. ‘You have been his ruin,’ were thewords that trembled on her lips. But there was something in the other’s tone that prevented their utterance. That it was a beautiful face was nothing; she detested and abhorred its beauty. That it was full of sympathy and compassion was nothing; she resented its compassion as an insult. But there was also sorrow in it, genuine and unmistakable sorrow. Whatever wrong this woman had done her—so Margaret reasoned—she had repented of; perhaps had come to confess, when it was too late, but still to confess. There were tears in her eyes; she was an actress it is true, but they were real tears.
‘Well, what is it you want, madam?’
‘Nothing. I am here on your account, not on my own.’
‘And Willie sent you?’
She uttered this with great bitterness, experiencing the same sort of satisfaction in the humiliation it cost her, as some persons in physical pain derive from the self-infliction of another pain.
‘He did not send me: he does not even know that I am here.’
‘But you come from him. You have been with him after he left the theatre?’
‘Yes, for hours; two long miserable hours.’
‘And you dare to tell me that?’
‘Yes. Oh, Margaret—for that is the only name I know you by—put away from you, I beseech you, all thoughts that wrong him. He has sins enough—Heaven help him—to answer for, but not such as you would impute to him. He is faithful to you and despairing.’
‘What do you mean? Why should he despair?’ The other’s words had somewhat disarmed her, the gentleness and pity in her companion’s looks had won upon her in spite of herself. The woman was certainly not there to exult over her. It was a bitter reflection that her lover had not come straight to her; that he had sought a go-between (and such a go-between!) to speak for him. But that sad word ‘despairing’ altered matters in other respects. What Willie in his modesty and self-denunciation doubtless feared, was not only that Mr. Erin would stick to the letter of his agreement respecting his consent to his son’smarriage (which, indeed, he had just announced his intention to do), but that she herself would assent to his change of views; that the idea of waiting, probably for years, until William Henry should have made sufficient means upon which to marry, would be abhorrent to her; that, in a word, her love for him did not comprehend hope and patience. It was possible indeed that his omission to come in person arose from delicacy of mind, and the disinclination to embarrass her by a personal appeal; and as for his choice of an intermediary he had perhaps but poured out his woes into the ears of the first person who had professed to sympathise with them, and who, it must be confessed, had shown him kindness. And yet how mistaken the dear lad had been in supposing for a moment that mere misfortune—the ill success of the play—could cut the bonds that bound her heart to his! It had had an effect indeed, but it was only to strengthen them, for when the object of a woman’s love is in adversity, he becomes the more dear to her in proportion to the difficulties by which he issurrounded. Since his love was as genuine as her own, he ought indeed to have known as much. And that he should despair of her! Well, indeed, might she ask with much amazement, ‘What do you mean? Why should he despair?’
But Mrs. Jordan’s pretty face only grew more grave and sad.
‘I wish to heaven, my dear girl,’ she said, ‘that I could use another word. If you knew the pain it costs me to come here and see you face to face, and tell you what I have to tell, you would pity me—if you shall presently have any pity to spare, save for your unhappy self and your still more wretched Willie.’ The earnestness and fervour of her tone, and its solemnity, which seemed to prepare the way for the revelation of some overwhelming misfortune, made Margaret’s blood run cold.
‘You said that he was not ill,’ she murmured hoarsely, ‘and yet he has not come home. He is not dead? Oh, tell me that my Willie is not dead?’
‘He is not dead, Margaret, but there areworse things that happen to those we love than death. Worse things than even when you thought the worst of your Willie and of me.’
‘Great heaven, how you terrify me! Tell me what has happened in one word.’
‘That is impossible, or, if it were possible, you would never, without proof, believe it. I must begin at the beginning. You know what happened to-night—the failure of the play; the peril only just averted, that threatened your uncle and yourself.’
Margaret shook her head, not so much in denial as in indifference. ‘What mattered anything that had threatened herself, even though the menace had been carried out?’
‘Is it possible that you are unaware of your escape to-night? How the rioters, led by an enemy of you and yours, were rushing to your box, when some young fellow threw himself between it and them; how he seized their leader by the throat, at risk of his own life, and threw him down the stairs, and how all the rest of them came tumbling after him?’
If the actress hoped to lead her companion’smind into other channels, to interest her for one instant in any subject save that supreme one in which her whole soul was wrapped, her endeavour failed.
‘But Willie?’ murmured Margaret impatiently. ‘Why do you speak of anything save Willie?’
‘That will come soon enough. Too soon, dear girl. I must needs tell you it as it all happened. He was behind the scenes, you know, throughout the evening. At first, things seemed to be going pretty well in spite of the opposition; but he was never very hopeful, even then, as he afterwards told me. The greatness of the reward which would be his in case of the success of the play—that is, his claiming you for his own—oppressed him; it seemed too high a fortune even though he had felt himself to be deserving of it.’
‘Heisdeserving of it, and of better fortune,’ put in Margaret quietly.
Mrs. Jordan took no notice of the interruption. ‘He seemed depressed and downhearted from the first,’ she continued, ‘though Mrs.Powell and myself said all we could to encourage him. Presently, amid the tempest of disapprobation, he recognised a particular voice—the voice of an enemy; of the same person, I have no doubt, who urged on the mob to your box. From that moment he seemed to give up all hope. “That man is come to ruin me!“ he said; and he spoke the truth.’
‘It was Reginald Talbot,’ exclaimed Margaret suddenly. ‘Frank always warned Willie against him. The vile, treacherous wretch!’
‘Yes, it was Reginald Talbot—a base creature enough, no doubt; but honest people, Margaret, are not ruined by anything the base can say or shout. We must be base ourselves to enable them to ruin us.’
Margaret rose from her chair. ‘I do not understand you, Mrs. Jordan. I thought that you were speaking of my Willie.’
‘Listen, Margaret. Keep calm and listen; I would give half of what I have in the world to spare you, but it must be told.’
‘I will hear no evil of Willie.’
‘You shall hear, at least, nothing that hasnot fallen from his own lips. When he showed such fear of his enemy, I reproached him for his lack of courage, and through a gap in the stage curtain pointed you out to him as you sat in your box, exposed to all those shouts and jeers, and apparently unmoved by them. But the sight of you only seemed to depress him still more.’
‘“That is the last I shall see of my Margaret,” he said; “I have lost her for ever.” And again he spoke the truth.’
‘He did not,’ cried Margaret vehemently; ‘he only thought he spoke it. He imagined because the play had failed that I should give him back his troth. But what is the play to me? My heart is his; I can wait for him. We are still very young; what need is there for despair?’
‘That is what I thought, that is what I said,’ returned Mrs. Jordan pitifully, ‘because I was in the dark, as you are. I said, “It will matter nothing to Margaret, if she really loves you; you will still be the same to her.”
‘“No, I shall not,“ he answered; “I cannever be the same to her. If not to-night, to-morrow, if not to-morrow, the next day, that villain yonder will unmask me; she will know me for what I am, and loathe me.”
‘I had to leave him then, to speak the epilogue, and when I returned, he looked like one who had utterly lost heart and hope. No one troubled himself about him. Mrs. Powell had gone away, and the others departed, cursing the play and all who had had any hand in its production. I dared not leave him to himself, and besought him to go home at once. “I have no home,“ he said; then I took him to my own house.’
‘That was good of you,’ murmured Margaret, pale as death.
Then Mrs. Jordan knew that the worst was over; that what she had to tell, however sad and terrible, would fall upon ears prepared to hear it. And yet even now she could not tell her right out, ‘Your Willie is a cheat and a liar.’
‘In the carriage the poor fellow sat like a dead man, huddled in one corner, withoutspeech and motion; but once within doors, I insisted on his taking some wine, which revived him a little. “You cannot stop here,“ I said, speaking to him as severely as I could, for kindness only seemed to unnerve him; “I will send out and get you a bed at some inn. But if it will be any comfort to you to relieve your mind, I am ready to hear whatever you have to say.“ He made a movement towards his breast-pocket which filled me with apprehensions. “If you have a pistol there,“ I said, “give it to me at once. Whatever you may have done, however you may have wronged Margaret, you will surely not add self-slaughter to your other sins? You will not break her heart by killing yourself?”
‘“No, no,“ he murmured; “it is not that.”
‘I found it was impossible to get any connected narrative out of him, so I put a question or two.
‘“Who is this enemy of yours, and why should it be in his power to harm you?”
‘“Because he knows my secret—my shameful secret. His name is Reginald Talbot,and he was at one time my friend. We quarrelled about some poems of his, and from that moment he has done his best to ruin me. He tried to prove that I had forged one of the Shakespeare papers, and failed in it; he pretended to be satisfied at the time with the evidence in the matter, as the others were, but from that moment he dogged my footsteps. He is a sneaking, prying hound.
‘“One day, when I was at work in my chambers, forging manuscripts, I saw his face at my window; he had climbed up to it by a ladder, and perceived what I was about. There was no hope of concealment any longer, so I unlocked the door and let him in. I told him all—it is a long story, but it is written here (again he touched his breast-pocket), and besought him to have mercy upon me. His heart was like the nether millstone, as I knew it would be. He asked me with a sneer what I should do now, and whether I had any new treasure of Shakespeare’s with which to enrich the world. I told him of the ‘Vortigern,’ which I was then projecting, but which, of course, it was now inhis power to put a stop to. Then he proposed a compromise. He was very vain of his verses, and he undertook, upon condition that he was allowed to write some portion of the play himself, to keep silence upon the matter. He had the same mad desire that I had, that the world should take his poetry to be from Shakespeare’s pen. I consented of course, for I had no choice. All his wrath against me seemed to have evaporated at once. He was intensely pleased; and from that time we worked together. Moreover, when the committee appointed to decide upon the genuineness of the Shakespeare manuscripts hesitated to accept them because there was no other witness to their discovery save myself, Talbot came forward, as we had agreed that he should do, and deposed that he had seen my patron from the Temple, and the collection from which the paper had been taken. His evidence carried the day and assured me of my position. On the other hand, Talbot wrote so feebly that I felt convinced not a line of his would survive criticism, and, unknown to him,I composed the whole play independently of his assistance.
‘“He had to leave London for Ireland, so I had no difficulty in deceiving him in this matter. We corresponded in cipher about it, and I led him to imagine that the ‘Vortigern,’ as accepted in Drury Lane, was the play that we had composed together. I thought if it were successful that I should be in a position to defy him, and that only those who were already my enemies would believe his story. He had told me that it was impossible for him to be in London the first night of its performance, and I flattered myself that I was quite safe. The instant I recognised his voice in the theatre, I felt that all was over with me. He would find out the absence of his own rhapsodies from the drama; and that I had deceived him, as indeed I had—whom have I not deceived? From that moment my fate was sealed.”
‘“Unhappy boy!“ cried I; “is it possible, then, that you acknowledge yourself to be a forger and a cheat?”
‘“I do,“ he answered; “here is the record of my transgression.”
‘He took from his breast-pocket this paper, his confession, which, it appears, he always carried about with him; an imprudence which would have been unintelligible in any one else, but to him who had trodden, as it were, every day on the crust of a volcano, it mattered little. I felt sure at once that this was written for your eye, Margaret, in case of discovery; thus, to the very last, some will say, the straightforward course was the one he was disinclined to take. But let us rather believe that to tell you of his own unworthiness to your face was an ordeal beyond his strength. In vain I represented to him the anxiety and apprehensions which his absence must be exciting at home.
‘“I have no home,“ was his reply. “But think of your father!“ “I have no father,“ was his miserable rejoinder. “But Margaret; have you no pity for Margaret?“ “I cannot see her. I dare not see her,“ was his pitiful cry. So I have come to you instead of him.’
Margaret answered nothing, She sat with the confession in her hand, without sign or word, looking straight before her.
‘I must go now,’ continued her companion tenderly. ‘If I can be of any use, if I can say anything for you; a word of forgiveness with your farewell—he is but seventeen, remember—well, another time, perhaps.’ She had reached the door when Margaret called her back with a pitiful cry.
‘Kiss me! kiss me!’
As their lips met, the touch of sympathy, like Moses’ wand, drew the tears from that face of marble, whereby, even though she left no hope and the bitter conviction of a wasted love behind her, the messenger of pity knew that she had not come altogether in vain.
CHAPTER XXXII.THE FEET OF CLAY.Itis a terrible thing to be left alone with one’s dead, and this might in some sort be said to have been Margaret’s case when Mrs. Jordan had departed. Her Willie had become as dead to her; all that was left of him was the shameful record that lay upon the table before her. Never more—save once—was she to see his face again in this life, nor did she desire to do so. She would have shrunk from his hand had he offered it to her, and the touch of his lips would have been contamination. He had obtained her kisses as it were under false pretences, and she flushed with shame when she thought of them. She did not conceal from herself that his behaviour up to the very last had been in keeping with his whole career.He should have come in person, whatever it had cost him, and confessed his guilt, and not have left her a prey to unfounded terrors. It was cowardly and base and selfish. Miserable as she had been on his account an hour ago, she was now infinitely more wretched. It was better to have thought him dead—and honest, than to know he was alive and a cheat. ‘He is only seventeen, remember,’ had been Mrs. Jordan’s words in appeal to her charity and pity, but they found no response in Margaret’s bosom. ‘One can forgive anything at seventeen,’ was her reflection, ‘save hypocrisy and deceit.’ She forgave him as a very charitable person might forgive a cardsharper; there was no malice nor hatred in her heart against him, but she could never take him to her heart again.Was it possible, she wondered, that he could have been always base? When he had made that passionate protestation in Anne Hathaway’s garden, for example, and besought her only to keep her heart free for him for a little time, to give him a chance of provinghimself worthy of her; had he had this hateful plan of fraud and falsehood in his mind even then? If he was not to be believedthen, if what he said then was not the utterance of genuine love and honesty, what word of man was to be credited? And if he was honest then, when did he begin to lie?It had been her intention not to read this hateful paper; to commit it to the flames; but a sort of terrible curiosity now urged her to peruse it. She had no expectation of finding in it any mitigation of her lost lover’s conduct; any plea for pardon or even for pity. She had no wish to hear what he had to say for himself; only a certain morbid interest in it.Yet as she opened the manuscript and her eyes fell on the well-known handwriting, they filled with unbidden tears. Great heavens! how she had believed in him, how she had loved him! Nay, how she had sympathised unwittingly with his very frauds, and longed and prayed for their success.Prayedfor it—the thought of this especially appalled her. She found herself, for the first time, face toface with the mystery of life; with the difficulties of spiritual things. It is strange enough (what happens often enough), that we should fall on our knees and implore the divine assistance to avert misfortunes from our dear ones that (if we did but know) have already happened; but that we should implore it (if we did but know) on behalf of falsehood, fraud—with the intent to prosper wickedness! This man, among his other villanies, almost made her doubt of the goodness of God!The manuscript was voluminous. It was written in the form of a diary, but interspersed with reflections and protestations.‘I protest,’ it began, ‘that I had no premeditated design or the idea of any continued course of duplicity when my first error—the production of the Hemynge note of hand—was committed.’‘He calls it “an error,”’ thought Margaret with a moan, and indeed the opening remark was the keynote of the whole composition, significant of all that was to come. He had been weak, it avowed, but never wicked; the victimnot so much of temptation, but of overwhelming circumstances. ‘You know, Margaret——’This unexpected personal appeal came upon her like a thunderclap; it was as though in that solitary room and in that solemn hour when night and morning were about to meet, his very voice had addressed her. ‘You know, Margaret, what sort of relations existed at that time between Mr. Erin and myself: how, though he permitted me to pass as his son, he was far from having any paternal feelings towards me; that he had no sympathy with my tastes, no interest in my doings, and that he grudged me the cost of my very maintenance. Was it so very reprehensible that, having attempted in vain to gain his affection by the usual road to a father’s heart, by diligence and duty, that I looked about me for some other way? Knowing his passion for any reliques of Shakespeare, it struck me that I might conciliate him by affecting to discover that of which he was always in search. I do not seek to justify what I did, but there was surely some extenuation for it.‘To show you how little of settled purpose there was in the matter, I took that note of hand, before presentation to your uncle, to Mr. Lavine, the bookseller, in New Inn Passage, and showed him the document for his opinion. He said it seemed to him to have been written a good many years ago (taking for granted that it was an imitation), but that the ink was not what it should be. He told me that he could give me a mixture much more like old ink if it was my humour to produce the semblance of antiquity, and immediately mixed together in a bottle three different liquids used by book-binders in marbling covers, and this I always henceforth used. I have applied to him again and again for more ink: a circumstance I mention not only to show the simplicity of the means employed in these so-called forgeries of mine, but also the everyday risks I ran of discovery. Do you think I could have endured such a position, had I been merely actuated by the motive I have mentioned? Could human nature have borne it? No, Margaret, I was sustained by a far higher ambition, for a manmay strive for a reward unworthily, and even though he is aware that he does not deserve it.’The calmness of this reasoning appalled Margaret even more by its speciousness than by its falseness. Her instinct, though she knew nothing of these abstract matters, told her that such philosophy was rotten at the core.‘The imitation of that note of hand was a false step I admit,’ continued the writer, ‘but it succeeded beyond my most sanguine expectations. It altered my relations with Mr. Erin entirely, which of itself encouraged me to new deceptions; but above all it became a basis on which to build my hopes of your becoming my wife. Hitherto I had loved you, Margaret, passionately, devotedly indeed, but with little hopes of ever winning you. When I obtained that promise from your dear lips in the garden at Shottery, it was not merely with the selfish intention of excluding for a few months from your heart the rival whom I feared; I believed, as I still believe, that my talents were of a high order, and I thought that at no distant date they would meet with public recognition; thatsome of that praise, in short, which I have gained under false pretences would have been accorded to my own legitimate efforts. The time during which you promised to keep yourself free for me, however, was now drawing to a close, and I felt that I had not advanced a single step on the road to either fame or fortune. I was madly in love with you. I felt that you were slipping out of the reach of my arms, and the terrible temptation suggested itself to secure you by the means that had already gained me so much in so unlooked-for a manner. If I could only make myself necessary to your uncle by ministering to his ruling passion, perhaps he would give his consent (which otherwise I well knew could never be obtained) to our immediate union. Not greed, I swear it, no, nor even the desire of recognition (though only as it were by proxy) for my genius, were my inducements to persevere in my course—Love only was my call,And if I lost thy love, I lost my all.’It was terrible to Margaret to read suchwords; they almost made her feel as though she had been a confederate in the delinquencies of this unhappy boy. Terrible, too, was the appearance, under dates, of his particular acts of forgery, each set down in a matter-of-fact and methodical manner, and concerning which the total absence of penitence and self-reprobation was less painful to her than the fallacious self-justification in which he had indulged elsewhere.‘Nov. 2nd.—Love-letter and verses to Anne Hathaway. Five stanzas and a braid of hair. Hair agage d’amourfrom a young playmate; the silk that bound it had attached the seals to some old deed. It was thickly woven and twisted in some peculiar manner, which I judged would suggest antiquity.‘Nov. 7th.—Playhouse receipts. String for them, some worsted thread taken out of some old tapestry in the waiting-room of the House of Lords, where I went to hear his Majesty’s speech with Mr. Erin.‘Dec. 2nd.—The Profession of Faith. My most ambitious performance (except the play).I solemnly affirm that but for the praises bestowed upon my good fortune (as it was held) on the previous occasions, I should have hesitated to compose this document. On the other hand, you know, Margaret, how earnestly desirous Mr. Erin always was that Shakespeare should be proved to have been a Protestant; if I could please him in this I thought that my way to his heart would be made easy indeed. Moreover, I had myself the most rooted objection to anything like bigotry or superstition. In penning the Profession I formed the twelve letters contained in the Christian and surname of Shakespeare as much as possible to resemble those in his original autographs, but as for the rest I was only careful to produce as many doubleyous and esses as possible. It was a most simple performance, and executed with so little prudence that (as you remember) the word “leffee“ was introduced instead of “leafless.” Nor did I take much more trouble with the composition itself. When, therefore, I heard Dr. Warton pronounce such an eulogiumupon it—”Sir, we have many fine things in our Church Service, and our Litany abounds with beauties; but here, sir, is a man who has distanced us all”—it is hardly to be wondered at that I was intoxicated with so unexpected a success. It corroborated very strongly the high estimation in which I had always held my talents, and I resolved, since the world would not recognise them in my proper person, to compel it to acknowledge them under another name. If I was not so great as Shakespeare—and indeed I have sometimes believed myself to be so—I had at all events a soul akin to him.’The inordinate and monstrous vanity of this remark did not escape Margaret’s notice, but it did not give her the pain that his other reflections had done; it even afforded some palliation of his deplorable conduct. The approbation of so many learned men, deceived by a great name, had been evidently taken by him as an involuntary recognition of his own genius, and in a manner turned his head. Shetried to persuade herself that he henceforth at least became in some degree irresponsible for his own actions.‘It was about this time,’ the confession continued, ‘that I was almost ruined by the treachery and malignity of Reginald Talbot, for it was he, you remember, who induced Mr. Albany Wallis to confront me with a genuine signature of John Hemynge. I look upon that as the most dangerous peril I had yet encountered, and, at the same time, the cause of my greatest triumph. It seemed incredible, and no wonder, that I should have produced within the space of one hour and a quarter (including the time spent in going and coming, as was supposed, to the Temple, but in reality to my own rooms at the New Inn), a facsimile of the other John Hemynge’s handwriting, unless it had been a genuine document. By that time I had become an adept in imitation, and could also retain in my recollection the form of letters in any autograph which I had once beheld. I brought back a deed sufficiently similar to the original to set all Mr. Wallis’sdoubts at rest. It did not, however, satisfy my own mind, and that very evening I executed another deed more carefully, which I substituted for the former one, and which stood the test of all future examinations. From that moment indeed, save those who had been my enemies from the first, and who probably never would have believed in the Shakespeare manuscripts, even though they had been really genuine, I had no serious opponent, with one exception, and for some reason or another of his own, he has never shown himself antagonistic to me.’There was much more of it; the whole composition of the ‘Vortigern’ was described, with Talbot’s connection with it, just as it had been narrated by Mrs. Jordan. But what chiefly engaged Margaret’s thoughts, and caused her to refer to it again and again, was that allusion of William Henry’s to that one person who, not belonging to the Malone faction, had all along discredited his statements, though, ‘for some reason or another of his own, he had not shown himself antagonistic.’ This wascertainly not Talbot, who had shown himself antagonistic enough, nor was it evidently any confidant of the unhappy boy’s. It could, therefore, only have been Frank Dennis; he had, she well remembered, always kept silence when the question of the manuscripts was mentioned, and had even incurred Mr. Erin’s indignation by doing so. But his nature was so frank and open that she could not understand how he could have tacitly countenanced such a fraud had he been really convinced that it was being enacted. It was curious, considering the great distress and perturbation of her mind, that a matter so comparatively small should have thus intruded itself; but it did so.Otherwise, as may well be imagined, her thoughts had bitter food enough provided for them. That whole night long Margaret never sought her couch. The revelation of the worthlessness of her lover, made by his own hand, and, what was worse, made in no spirit of penitence or remorse, put sleep far from her eyes, and filled her soul with wretchedness.If the thought that things might have been worse can afford consolation, that indeed she had, for William Henry might have married her. If the play had been successful, and if Reginald Talbot had held his tongue, and indeed if he had not held it—for she would never have disbelieved in her Willie had he not torn the mask from his face with his own hand—she might have become William Henry’s wife! The very idea of it chilled her blood. Bound to a liar, a cheat, a forger, by an indissoluble bond for life! Vowed to love, revere, and honour a man the baseness of whose nature she would have been certain to have discovered sooner or later, but in any case too late! She had been saved from that at least; and yet how terrible was the blow that had been inflicted upon her!Sad it is to be left alone with our dead, how much sadder to be left alone, after they have died, with the revelation of their baseness, to find our love has been wasted on an unworthy object, our reverence paid to a false god. In Margaret’s case matters were stillworse, for she could not even keep the revelation to herself; she had not the miserable satisfaction that some bereaved ones have when they chance upon the proof of a once loved one’s shame, of concealing it. It was necessary that she should tell Mr. Erin, and in revealing the fraud of which he had been the victim, what misery was she about to inflict upon him! How the whole fabric of the old man’s pride would be shattered to the dust, and how triumphantly would his enemies trample upon it.
THE FEET OF CLAY.
Itis a terrible thing to be left alone with one’s dead, and this might in some sort be said to have been Margaret’s case when Mrs. Jordan had departed. Her Willie had become as dead to her; all that was left of him was the shameful record that lay upon the table before her. Never more—save once—was she to see his face again in this life, nor did she desire to do so. She would have shrunk from his hand had he offered it to her, and the touch of his lips would have been contamination. He had obtained her kisses as it were under false pretences, and she flushed with shame when she thought of them. She did not conceal from herself that his behaviour up to the very last had been in keeping with his whole career.He should have come in person, whatever it had cost him, and confessed his guilt, and not have left her a prey to unfounded terrors. It was cowardly and base and selfish. Miserable as she had been on his account an hour ago, she was now infinitely more wretched. It was better to have thought him dead—and honest, than to know he was alive and a cheat. ‘He is only seventeen, remember,’ had been Mrs. Jordan’s words in appeal to her charity and pity, but they found no response in Margaret’s bosom. ‘One can forgive anything at seventeen,’ was her reflection, ‘save hypocrisy and deceit.’ She forgave him as a very charitable person might forgive a cardsharper; there was no malice nor hatred in her heart against him, but she could never take him to her heart again.
Was it possible, she wondered, that he could have been always base? When he had made that passionate protestation in Anne Hathaway’s garden, for example, and besought her only to keep her heart free for him for a little time, to give him a chance of provinghimself worthy of her; had he had this hateful plan of fraud and falsehood in his mind even then? If he was not to be believedthen, if what he said then was not the utterance of genuine love and honesty, what word of man was to be credited? And if he was honest then, when did he begin to lie?
It had been her intention not to read this hateful paper; to commit it to the flames; but a sort of terrible curiosity now urged her to peruse it. She had no expectation of finding in it any mitigation of her lost lover’s conduct; any plea for pardon or even for pity. She had no wish to hear what he had to say for himself; only a certain morbid interest in it.
Yet as she opened the manuscript and her eyes fell on the well-known handwriting, they filled with unbidden tears. Great heavens! how she had believed in him, how she had loved him! Nay, how she had sympathised unwittingly with his very frauds, and longed and prayed for their success.Prayedfor it—the thought of this especially appalled her. She found herself, for the first time, face toface with the mystery of life; with the difficulties of spiritual things. It is strange enough (what happens often enough), that we should fall on our knees and implore the divine assistance to avert misfortunes from our dear ones that (if we did but know) have already happened; but that we should implore it (if we did but know) on behalf of falsehood, fraud—with the intent to prosper wickedness! This man, among his other villanies, almost made her doubt of the goodness of God!
The manuscript was voluminous. It was written in the form of a diary, but interspersed with reflections and protestations.
‘I protest,’ it began, ‘that I had no premeditated design or the idea of any continued course of duplicity when my first error—the production of the Hemynge note of hand—was committed.’
‘He calls it “an error,”’ thought Margaret with a moan, and indeed the opening remark was the keynote of the whole composition, significant of all that was to come. He had been weak, it avowed, but never wicked; the victimnot so much of temptation, but of overwhelming circumstances. ‘You know, Margaret——’
This unexpected personal appeal came upon her like a thunderclap; it was as though in that solitary room and in that solemn hour when night and morning were about to meet, his very voice had addressed her. ‘You know, Margaret, what sort of relations existed at that time between Mr. Erin and myself: how, though he permitted me to pass as his son, he was far from having any paternal feelings towards me; that he had no sympathy with my tastes, no interest in my doings, and that he grudged me the cost of my very maintenance. Was it so very reprehensible that, having attempted in vain to gain his affection by the usual road to a father’s heart, by diligence and duty, that I looked about me for some other way? Knowing his passion for any reliques of Shakespeare, it struck me that I might conciliate him by affecting to discover that of which he was always in search. I do not seek to justify what I did, but there was surely some extenuation for it.
‘To show you how little of settled purpose there was in the matter, I took that note of hand, before presentation to your uncle, to Mr. Lavine, the bookseller, in New Inn Passage, and showed him the document for his opinion. He said it seemed to him to have been written a good many years ago (taking for granted that it was an imitation), but that the ink was not what it should be. He told me that he could give me a mixture much more like old ink if it was my humour to produce the semblance of antiquity, and immediately mixed together in a bottle three different liquids used by book-binders in marbling covers, and this I always henceforth used. I have applied to him again and again for more ink: a circumstance I mention not only to show the simplicity of the means employed in these so-called forgeries of mine, but also the everyday risks I ran of discovery. Do you think I could have endured such a position, had I been merely actuated by the motive I have mentioned? Could human nature have borne it? No, Margaret, I was sustained by a far higher ambition, for a manmay strive for a reward unworthily, and even though he is aware that he does not deserve it.’
The calmness of this reasoning appalled Margaret even more by its speciousness than by its falseness. Her instinct, though she knew nothing of these abstract matters, told her that such philosophy was rotten at the core.
‘The imitation of that note of hand was a false step I admit,’ continued the writer, ‘but it succeeded beyond my most sanguine expectations. It altered my relations with Mr. Erin entirely, which of itself encouraged me to new deceptions; but above all it became a basis on which to build my hopes of your becoming my wife. Hitherto I had loved you, Margaret, passionately, devotedly indeed, but with little hopes of ever winning you. When I obtained that promise from your dear lips in the garden at Shottery, it was not merely with the selfish intention of excluding for a few months from your heart the rival whom I feared; I believed, as I still believe, that my talents were of a high order, and I thought that at no distant date they would meet with public recognition; thatsome of that praise, in short, which I have gained under false pretences would have been accorded to my own legitimate efforts. The time during which you promised to keep yourself free for me, however, was now drawing to a close, and I felt that I had not advanced a single step on the road to either fame or fortune. I was madly in love with you. I felt that you were slipping out of the reach of my arms, and the terrible temptation suggested itself to secure you by the means that had already gained me so much in so unlooked-for a manner. If I could only make myself necessary to your uncle by ministering to his ruling passion, perhaps he would give his consent (which otherwise I well knew could never be obtained) to our immediate union. Not greed, I swear it, no, nor even the desire of recognition (though only as it were by proxy) for my genius, were my inducements to persevere in my course—
Love only was my call,And if I lost thy love, I lost my all.’
It was terrible to Margaret to read suchwords; they almost made her feel as though she had been a confederate in the delinquencies of this unhappy boy. Terrible, too, was the appearance, under dates, of his particular acts of forgery, each set down in a matter-of-fact and methodical manner, and concerning which the total absence of penitence and self-reprobation was less painful to her than the fallacious self-justification in which he had indulged elsewhere.
‘Nov. 2nd.—Love-letter and verses to Anne Hathaway. Five stanzas and a braid of hair. Hair agage d’amourfrom a young playmate; the silk that bound it had attached the seals to some old deed. It was thickly woven and twisted in some peculiar manner, which I judged would suggest antiquity.
‘Nov. 7th.—Playhouse receipts. String for them, some worsted thread taken out of some old tapestry in the waiting-room of the House of Lords, where I went to hear his Majesty’s speech with Mr. Erin.
‘Dec. 2nd.—The Profession of Faith. My most ambitious performance (except the play).I solemnly affirm that but for the praises bestowed upon my good fortune (as it was held) on the previous occasions, I should have hesitated to compose this document. On the other hand, you know, Margaret, how earnestly desirous Mr. Erin always was that Shakespeare should be proved to have been a Protestant; if I could please him in this I thought that my way to his heart would be made easy indeed. Moreover, I had myself the most rooted objection to anything like bigotry or superstition. In penning the Profession I formed the twelve letters contained in the Christian and surname of Shakespeare as much as possible to resemble those in his original autographs, but as for the rest I was only careful to produce as many doubleyous and esses as possible. It was a most simple performance, and executed with so little prudence that (as you remember) the word “leffee“ was introduced instead of “leafless.” Nor did I take much more trouble with the composition itself. When, therefore, I heard Dr. Warton pronounce such an eulogiumupon it—”Sir, we have many fine things in our Church Service, and our Litany abounds with beauties; but here, sir, is a man who has distanced us all”—it is hardly to be wondered at that I was intoxicated with so unexpected a success. It corroborated very strongly the high estimation in which I had always held my talents, and I resolved, since the world would not recognise them in my proper person, to compel it to acknowledge them under another name. If I was not so great as Shakespeare—and indeed I have sometimes believed myself to be so—I had at all events a soul akin to him.’
The inordinate and monstrous vanity of this remark did not escape Margaret’s notice, but it did not give her the pain that his other reflections had done; it even afforded some palliation of his deplorable conduct. The approbation of so many learned men, deceived by a great name, had been evidently taken by him as an involuntary recognition of his own genius, and in a manner turned his head. Shetried to persuade herself that he henceforth at least became in some degree irresponsible for his own actions.
‘It was about this time,’ the confession continued, ‘that I was almost ruined by the treachery and malignity of Reginald Talbot, for it was he, you remember, who induced Mr. Albany Wallis to confront me with a genuine signature of John Hemynge. I look upon that as the most dangerous peril I had yet encountered, and, at the same time, the cause of my greatest triumph. It seemed incredible, and no wonder, that I should have produced within the space of one hour and a quarter (including the time spent in going and coming, as was supposed, to the Temple, but in reality to my own rooms at the New Inn), a facsimile of the other John Hemynge’s handwriting, unless it had been a genuine document. By that time I had become an adept in imitation, and could also retain in my recollection the form of letters in any autograph which I had once beheld. I brought back a deed sufficiently similar to the original to set all Mr. Wallis’sdoubts at rest. It did not, however, satisfy my own mind, and that very evening I executed another deed more carefully, which I substituted for the former one, and which stood the test of all future examinations. From that moment indeed, save those who had been my enemies from the first, and who probably never would have believed in the Shakespeare manuscripts, even though they had been really genuine, I had no serious opponent, with one exception, and for some reason or another of his own, he has never shown himself antagonistic to me.’
There was much more of it; the whole composition of the ‘Vortigern’ was described, with Talbot’s connection with it, just as it had been narrated by Mrs. Jordan. But what chiefly engaged Margaret’s thoughts, and caused her to refer to it again and again, was that allusion of William Henry’s to that one person who, not belonging to the Malone faction, had all along discredited his statements, though, ‘for some reason or another of his own, he had not shown himself antagonistic.’ This wascertainly not Talbot, who had shown himself antagonistic enough, nor was it evidently any confidant of the unhappy boy’s. It could, therefore, only have been Frank Dennis; he had, she well remembered, always kept silence when the question of the manuscripts was mentioned, and had even incurred Mr. Erin’s indignation by doing so. But his nature was so frank and open that she could not understand how he could have tacitly countenanced such a fraud had he been really convinced that it was being enacted. It was curious, considering the great distress and perturbation of her mind, that a matter so comparatively small should have thus intruded itself; but it did so.
Otherwise, as may well be imagined, her thoughts had bitter food enough provided for them. That whole night long Margaret never sought her couch. The revelation of the worthlessness of her lover, made by his own hand, and, what was worse, made in no spirit of penitence or remorse, put sleep far from her eyes, and filled her soul with wretchedness.If the thought that things might have been worse can afford consolation, that indeed she had, for William Henry might have married her. If the play had been successful, and if Reginald Talbot had held his tongue, and indeed if he had not held it—for she would never have disbelieved in her Willie had he not torn the mask from his face with his own hand—she might have become William Henry’s wife! The very idea of it chilled her blood. Bound to a liar, a cheat, a forger, by an indissoluble bond for life! Vowed to love, revere, and honour a man the baseness of whose nature she would have been certain to have discovered sooner or later, but in any case too late! She had been saved from that at least; and yet how terrible was the blow that had been inflicted upon her!
Sad it is to be left alone with our dead, how much sadder to be left alone, after they have died, with the revelation of their baseness, to find our love has been wasted on an unworthy object, our reverence paid to a false god. In Margaret’s case matters were stillworse, for she could not even keep the revelation to herself; she had not the miserable satisfaction that some bereaved ones have when they chance upon the proof of a once loved one’s shame, of concealing it. It was necessary that she should tell Mr. Erin, and in revealing the fraud of which he had been the victim, what misery was she about to inflict upon him! How the whole fabric of the old man’s pride would be shattered to the dust, and how triumphantly would his enemies trample upon it.
CHAPTER XXXIII.BREAKING IT.AsMargaret and her uncle sat at breakfast the next morning—later than usual, as was their wont on Sundays—scarce a word was interchanged between them. Her pale face and haggard eyes evoked no remark from him, who, indeed, himself looked pale and worn enough. If he had spoken upon the subject of the play it might have been made easier to her to tell him her dreadful tidings. But as it was, she felt herself unequal to the task; she could not break in upon his gloomy thoughts with such black news. She almost hoped, from his set lips and knitted brow, that he suspected something of the truth; otherwise surely, surely, she thought, he would express some anxiety concerning the continued absence of William Henry.She was, however, mistaken. Where affection is not concerned, even the catastrophes that happen to others (and much less the apprehensions of them) do not concern us so much as our own material interests.After a mere pretence of a meal, the antiquary produced pen and ink, and proceeded to make some calculations.In the middle of them arrived Mr. Albany Wallis. His face was even graver than usual, which his host, however, thought natural enough. He took it for granted that he had come upon business connected with the play, the failure of which was sufficient to account for his depression; or his melancholy, perhaps, might have been put on with a view of cheapening the terms that had been agreed upon with his employers. But Margaret felt, the first instant she caught sight of the visitor’s face, that he knew all, and did not need that dumb assurance of human sympathy, the close, lingering pressure of his hand, to convince her of it.‘This is a bad job,’ said Mr. Erin, with apretence of briskness. ‘I suppose Sheridan will not give the play another chance?’‘Certainly not,’ said Mr. Wallis decisively. ‘Almeyda is on the bill for to-morrow.’‘Then there is nothing for it but to settle, and have done with it. It is quite as great a disappointment to me as to the management, I do assure you, and eventually will be as great a loss. I have ordered the paper for the publication of the play, and must needs go on with it. I cannot break faith with the public.’‘You are a man of honour, I know,’ said Mr. Wallis gently; ‘but for that very reason you must not print this play.’‘And why not, sir?’‘Because it is spurious.’‘That was not your opinion yesterday, Mr. Wallis, nor is it mine to-day. What, because a few scoundrels have bespattered it, and done their best to make it a failure, and succeeded, you call it spurious!’‘Mr. Erin, I entreat you to be calm. I am as sorry for what has happened as you can be, though not, perhaps’ (here he stole atender look at Margaret), ‘for the same reason.’‘It needs no ghost from the grave to assure me of that much,’ replied the antiquary derisively. ‘You have your own interests, and those of your employers, to look to, and I have mine. You are here, as I conclude, to pay me the three hundred pounds agreed upon for the play and half the profits of the first night. The house was full enough, at all events.’‘Yes, it was a good house. Your share of the adventure is a hundred and five pounds exactly. I have therefore to pay you four hundred and five pounds.’‘Very good; I cannot permit any deductions. If it was worth while to discuss the matter, I might on my part reasonably make complaint of the manner in which the play was acted. Kemble never gave it a fair chance. At Covent Garden it would have had more justice done to it, and might have met with a better fate.’‘Then it would have met with a fate that it did not deserve, Mr. Erin.’‘I do not wish to discuss the subject,’ said the antiquary curtly. His reply would probably have been much less courteous but for the production of the bills—Mr. Sheridan paid everything in bills—for the amount in question. Bills and banknotes are the best ‘soft answers’ for the turning away of wrath.‘You misunderstand me altogether, Mr. Erin,’ continued the other with dignity. ‘I had no intention, as you seem to have apprehended, of disturbing your business arrangements with Mr. Sheridan, which may be taken as concluded. I am sorry to say I am come here upon a much more unpleasant errand. I am here at the request of your son, William Henry.’‘Ah! I see,’ broke in the antiquary with bitterness; ‘his professional adviser. He shall not have one penny more than the share—one-third of the profits—that has been agreed upon.’Then he turned to Margaret.‘So you have told him my determination of last night, have you, and he meets it by adeclaration of war? Let him do as he pleases; but I warn you, hussey, that if once you throw in your lot with his, I have done with you. The money that is his by rights is not much, as you will find, to keep house upon.’Margaret strove to speak, but her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth. It was shocking to see the old man’s rage, and none the less so because it was so misdirected. If his passion was so aroused by the mere opposition (as he supposed it to be) to his will, how would he take the destruction of his hopes, and the knowledge that he had been made a public laughing-stock? Whatever he had been to others, he had been kind to her; and, abhorrent to her as was the crime of ingratitude, she would have been willing to rest under its imputation if by so doing she could have spared him the revelation of the truth.‘Dear uncle,’ she presently murmured, with faltering voice, and laying her little hand upon the old man’s arm, ‘you wrong me in your thoughts; but that is nothing as compared with the wrong which has been done toyou.All between William Henry and me is over; for the rest of my life I will endeavour to supply his place with you, and to remedy, as far as in me lies, the evil that he has committed against you.’‘What is it? What is she saying? I do not understand,’ inquired the antiquary in trembling tones.‘She is telling you the truth, sir,’ said Mr. Wallis impressively. ‘Heaven send you the strength to bear it!’‘Dear uncle, you have been deceived,’ said Margaret with tender gravity. ‘From first to last you have been deceived, as we all have been. The Shakespeare manuscripts, of which you thought so much, are forgeries—every one of them. William Henry has confessed it.’‘You lie, you baggage, you lie!’ he cried with fury.‘I wish I did,’ sighed Margaret bitterly.He did not hear her; there was a singing in his ears that shut out all other sounds.‘So this is the last card you have to play,you two, is it? I am to be frightened into compliance with your wishes; frightened into annihilating common sense, and making two beggars happy! And you,you, sir!’ he added, turning to Mr. Wallis; ‘you are not ashamed to be a confederate in such a scheme as this? These two young fools think it is for their sake, but I know better. You are one of Malone’s creatures. Having already failed by fair means to disprove the genuineness of these manuscripts, you have bought over this ungrateful lad to your side. “If you will perjure yourself,“ you have said to him, “and admit yourself to be a forger, we will see that you do not lose by it; we will give you money—since the old man will not—upon which you and yours can subsist together.“ Oh, liars and villains!’It was pitiful to see and hear him. King Lear himself, deserted by his own flesh and blood and invoking heaven’s vengeance on them, could hardly have been a more dreadful spectacle.‘Mr. Erin,’ said Mr. Wallis gravely, ‘if yousee me in no way moved by the infamous accusation you have made against me, and even restraining a still more natural indignation at the dishonour your words have cast upon that innocent girl, it is not because I do not feel it; it is because I pity you from the bottom of my heart. That you have been duped and fooled by the falsehood of this unhappy young man is only what has happened to others, myself amongst them; but in your own case the reflection must be infinitely more bitter, since he who wrought the wrong was your own flesh and blood—one who has taken your bread, and bitten the hand that fed him. If you do not believe us, Miss Margaret has his own words for it in black and white.’Here Margaret drew the confession from her bosom, and laid it on the table beside her uncle; his fingers were grasping the arms of his chair, and his face was fixed full upon his visitor in hate and rage.‘If you will read it at your leisure,’ continued the lawyer gently, ‘you will at least have the satisfaction of knowing that, with one exception,no one has had any hand in this shameful fraud save the miserable lad himself; that your niece was as innocent of any knowledge in it, from first to last, as you were; so much even those who have been inclined to suspect you of any connivance in it must needs acknowledge when they read that paper——’Mr. Erin leaped from his chair, with an inarticulate cry of fury, and seizing the confession before him, tore it from left to right, and from right to left, into a hundred pieces.‘Begone,’ he cried, ‘begone, both of you! Take her with you, I say, lest I do her a mischief; take her to the Perjurer, send her to the devil for all I care; but never let me see her false face again!’With that he threw himself out of the room like one demented, and after the door had clanged behind him they heard his heavy step at first at a speed beyond his years, but presently with the tread of exhaustion and old age, creep up to his own room.‘Is it safe to leave him, think you?’ inquired Mr. Wallis in a hushed voice. ‘Onceconvinced of the truth, his reflections must be terrible. To be deceived by one’s own flesh and blood!’‘William Henry is not his son,’ said Margaret quietly; in a time of anguish and distress it is easy to speak of matters which under ordinary circumstances we should shrink from mentioning.‘Thank heaven for that!’ ejaculated the lawyer; ‘there is no fear, then, that he will not get over it. What I took for paternal resentment is partly, no doubt, exasperation at the exposure of his own credulity. The only reason for your remaining here after his express commandment to the contrary no longer therefore exists. Your doing so for the present at least will only remind him of his misfortune and aggravate its bitterness. I have a sister who keeps my house for me, and who will welcome you as a mother; I entreat you to accept of her hospitality, not only for your own sake, but for that of your uncle. Indeed, after the threat he has made use of, I must insist upon your accompanying me.’‘I am not afraid for myself; I am sure he will never harm me. Indeed, Mr. Wallis, I cannot leave him in his solitude and wretchedness.’‘He will not be solitary, Miss Margaret. I will drop a hint to Mr. Dennis, whose intention I know it is to call upon him this afternoon, to take up his quarters with him for a while.’At the mention of Frank Dennis’s name Margaret changed colour; the idea of meeting him had suddenly become intolerable.‘If your sister will give me an asylum for a few days,’ she hurriedly replied, ‘I think I will take advantage of your most kind offer.’In a few minutes she had made her preparations for departure; she trembled lest there should come a knock at the front door while she was yet in the house. She glanced apprehensively up the little street, as she sallied forth on Mr. Wallis’s arm, lest some one with eyes that spoke reproof, without intending it, should come across her before she had gained the shelter of another roof. Some one whom she had never estimated at his true worth, ortreated as he deserved; some one she had blamed for his coldness and incredulity, but who had suspected all along—she was as convinced of it as of the fraud itself—the deception which had been practised upon her, but whom the nobleness of a nature that shrank from the exposure of a rival had kept silent.
BREAKING IT.
AsMargaret and her uncle sat at breakfast the next morning—later than usual, as was their wont on Sundays—scarce a word was interchanged between them. Her pale face and haggard eyes evoked no remark from him, who, indeed, himself looked pale and worn enough. If he had spoken upon the subject of the play it might have been made easier to her to tell him her dreadful tidings. But as it was, she felt herself unequal to the task; she could not break in upon his gloomy thoughts with such black news. She almost hoped, from his set lips and knitted brow, that he suspected something of the truth; otherwise surely, surely, she thought, he would express some anxiety concerning the continued absence of William Henry.
She was, however, mistaken. Where affection is not concerned, even the catastrophes that happen to others (and much less the apprehensions of them) do not concern us so much as our own material interests.
After a mere pretence of a meal, the antiquary produced pen and ink, and proceeded to make some calculations.
In the middle of them arrived Mr. Albany Wallis. His face was even graver than usual, which his host, however, thought natural enough. He took it for granted that he had come upon business connected with the play, the failure of which was sufficient to account for his depression; or his melancholy, perhaps, might have been put on with a view of cheapening the terms that had been agreed upon with his employers. But Margaret felt, the first instant she caught sight of the visitor’s face, that he knew all, and did not need that dumb assurance of human sympathy, the close, lingering pressure of his hand, to convince her of it.
‘This is a bad job,’ said Mr. Erin, with apretence of briskness. ‘I suppose Sheridan will not give the play another chance?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Mr. Wallis decisively. ‘Almeyda is on the bill for to-morrow.’
‘Then there is nothing for it but to settle, and have done with it. It is quite as great a disappointment to me as to the management, I do assure you, and eventually will be as great a loss. I have ordered the paper for the publication of the play, and must needs go on with it. I cannot break faith with the public.’
‘You are a man of honour, I know,’ said Mr. Wallis gently; ‘but for that very reason you must not print this play.’
‘And why not, sir?’
‘Because it is spurious.’
‘That was not your opinion yesterday, Mr. Wallis, nor is it mine to-day. What, because a few scoundrels have bespattered it, and done their best to make it a failure, and succeeded, you call it spurious!’
‘Mr. Erin, I entreat you to be calm. I am as sorry for what has happened as you can be, though not, perhaps’ (here he stole atender look at Margaret), ‘for the same reason.’
‘It needs no ghost from the grave to assure me of that much,’ replied the antiquary derisively. ‘You have your own interests, and those of your employers, to look to, and I have mine. You are here, as I conclude, to pay me the three hundred pounds agreed upon for the play and half the profits of the first night. The house was full enough, at all events.’
‘Yes, it was a good house. Your share of the adventure is a hundred and five pounds exactly. I have therefore to pay you four hundred and five pounds.’
‘Very good; I cannot permit any deductions. If it was worth while to discuss the matter, I might on my part reasonably make complaint of the manner in which the play was acted. Kemble never gave it a fair chance. At Covent Garden it would have had more justice done to it, and might have met with a better fate.’
‘Then it would have met with a fate that it did not deserve, Mr. Erin.’
‘I do not wish to discuss the subject,’ said the antiquary curtly. His reply would probably have been much less courteous but for the production of the bills—Mr. Sheridan paid everything in bills—for the amount in question. Bills and banknotes are the best ‘soft answers’ for the turning away of wrath.
‘You misunderstand me altogether, Mr. Erin,’ continued the other with dignity. ‘I had no intention, as you seem to have apprehended, of disturbing your business arrangements with Mr. Sheridan, which may be taken as concluded. I am sorry to say I am come here upon a much more unpleasant errand. I am here at the request of your son, William Henry.’
‘Ah! I see,’ broke in the antiquary with bitterness; ‘his professional adviser. He shall not have one penny more than the share—one-third of the profits—that has been agreed upon.’
Then he turned to Margaret.
‘So you have told him my determination of last night, have you, and he meets it by adeclaration of war? Let him do as he pleases; but I warn you, hussey, that if once you throw in your lot with his, I have done with you. The money that is his by rights is not much, as you will find, to keep house upon.’
Margaret strove to speak, but her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth. It was shocking to see the old man’s rage, and none the less so because it was so misdirected. If his passion was so aroused by the mere opposition (as he supposed it to be) to his will, how would he take the destruction of his hopes, and the knowledge that he had been made a public laughing-stock? Whatever he had been to others, he had been kind to her; and, abhorrent to her as was the crime of ingratitude, she would have been willing to rest under its imputation if by so doing she could have spared him the revelation of the truth.
‘Dear uncle,’ she presently murmured, with faltering voice, and laying her little hand upon the old man’s arm, ‘you wrong me in your thoughts; but that is nothing as compared with the wrong which has been done toyou.All between William Henry and me is over; for the rest of my life I will endeavour to supply his place with you, and to remedy, as far as in me lies, the evil that he has committed against you.’
‘What is it? What is she saying? I do not understand,’ inquired the antiquary in trembling tones.
‘She is telling you the truth, sir,’ said Mr. Wallis impressively. ‘Heaven send you the strength to bear it!’
‘Dear uncle, you have been deceived,’ said Margaret with tender gravity. ‘From first to last you have been deceived, as we all have been. The Shakespeare manuscripts, of which you thought so much, are forgeries—every one of them. William Henry has confessed it.’
‘You lie, you baggage, you lie!’ he cried with fury.
‘I wish I did,’ sighed Margaret bitterly.
He did not hear her; there was a singing in his ears that shut out all other sounds.
‘So this is the last card you have to play,you two, is it? I am to be frightened into compliance with your wishes; frightened into annihilating common sense, and making two beggars happy! And you,you, sir!’ he added, turning to Mr. Wallis; ‘you are not ashamed to be a confederate in such a scheme as this? These two young fools think it is for their sake, but I know better. You are one of Malone’s creatures. Having already failed by fair means to disprove the genuineness of these manuscripts, you have bought over this ungrateful lad to your side. “If you will perjure yourself,“ you have said to him, “and admit yourself to be a forger, we will see that you do not lose by it; we will give you money—since the old man will not—upon which you and yours can subsist together.“ Oh, liars and villains!’
It was pitiful to see and hear him. King Lear himself, deserted by his own flesh and blood and invoking heaven’s vengeance on them, could hardly have been a more dreadful spectacle.
‘Mr. Erin,’ said Mr. Wallis gravely, ‘if yousee me in no way moved by the infamous accusation you have made against me, and even restraining a still more natural indignation at the dishonour your words have cast upon that innocent girl, it is not because I do not feel it; it is because I pity you from the bottom of my heart. That you have been duped and fooled by the falsehood of this unhappy young man is only what has happened to others, myself amongst them; but in your own case the reflection must be infinitely more bitter, since he who wrought the wrong was your own flesh and blood—one who has taken your bread, and bitten the hand that fed him. If you do not believe us, Miss Margaret has his own words for it in black and white.’
Here Margaret drew the confession from her bosom, and laid it on the table beside her uncle; his fingers were grasping the arms of his chair, and his face was fixed full upon his visitor in hate and rage.
‘If you will read it at your leisure,’ continued the lawyer gently, ‘you will at least have the satisfaction of knowing that, with one exception,no one has had any hand in this shameful fraud save the miserable lad himself; that your niece was as innocent of any knowledge in it, from first to last, as you were; so much even those who have been inclined to suspect you of any connivance in it must needs acknowledge when they read that paper——’
Mr. Erin leaped from his chair, with an inarticulate cry of fury, and seizing the confession before him, tore it from left to right, and from right to left, into a hundred pieces.
‘Begone,’ he cried, ‘begone, both of you! Take her with you, I say, lest I do her a mischief; take her to the Perjurer, send her to the devil for all I care; but never let me see her false face again!’
With that he threw himself out of the room like one demented, and after the door had clanged behind him they heard his heavy step at first at a speed beyond his years, but presently with the tread of exhaustion and old age, creep up to his own room.
‘Is it safe to leave him, think you?’ inquired Mr. Wallis in a hushed voice. ‘Onceconvinced of the truth, his reflections must be terrible. To be deceived by one’s own flesh and blood!’
‘William Henry is not his son,’ said Margaret quietly; in a time of anguish and distress it is easy to speak of matters which under ordinary circumstances we should shrink from mentioning.
‘Thank heaven for that!’ ejaculated the lawyer; ‘there is no fear, then, that he will not get over it. What I took for paternal resentment is partly, no doubt, exasperation at the exposure of his own credulity. The only reason for your remaining here after his express commandment to the contrary no longer therefore exists. Your doing so for the present at least will only remind him of his misfortune and aggravate its bitterness. I have a sister who keeps my house for me, and who will welcome you as a mother; I entreat you to accept of her hospitality, not only for your own sake, but for that of your uncle. Indeed, after the threat he has made use of, I must insist upon your accompanying me.’
‘I am not afraid for myself; I am sure he will never harm me. Indeed, Mr. Wallis, I cannot leave him in his solitude and wretchedness.’
‘He will not be solitary, Miss Margaret. I will drop a hint to Mr. Dennis, whose intention I know it is to call upon him this afternoon, to take up his quarters with him for a while.’
At the mention of Frank Dennis’s name Margaret changed colour; the idea of meeting him had suddenly become intolerable.
‘If your sister will give me an asylum for a few days,’ she hurriedly replied, ‘I think I will take advantage of your most kind offer.’
In a few minutes she had made her preparations for departure; she trembled lest there should come a knock at the front door while she was yet in the house. She glanced apprehensively up the little street, as she sallied forth on Mr. Wallis’s arm, lest some one with eyes that spoke reproof, without intending it, should come across her before she had gained the shelter of another roof. Some one whom she had never estimated at his true worth, ortreated as he deserved; some one she had blamed for his coldness and incredulity, but who had suspected all along—she was as convinced of it as of the fraud itself—the deception which had been practised upon her, but whom the nobleness of a nature that shrank from the exposure of a rival had kept silent.
CHAPTER XXXIV.A COMFORTER.Thereis nothing more astonishing in the history of mankind than the high estimation in which credulity—under the form of belief—has been held by all nations who have had the least claim to be civilised. Yet the vast majority of the human race, mere slaves as they are to custom and convention, imbibing their faith with their mother’s milk, and as disinclined to change as a wheel that has found its rut, are absolutely unable to be sceptical. This is probably why persecution has been so lightly permitted—even among Christians, whose connivance at it is otherwise unintelligible; those who suffered for their scepticism were comparatively so few that their martyrdom was disregarded. It is an immense recommendation to a creed, that the merefact of accepting it is accounted the highest virtue, since ninety-nine persons out of a hundred who have been brought up in it, find no sort of difficulty in fulfilling its chief obligation. With the same ease with which the doctrines of Mahomet or of Buddha are embraced by their disciples, had the story of the discovery of the Shakespeare manuscripts been accepted by Mr. Samuel Erin. Nay, he had not been only a disciple but a devotee. He had been looking forward all his life to some revelation of a similar kind, and it had been manifested under circumstances that not only corroborated his views, but flattered hisamour propre. A member of his own house had been the discoverer of the MSS., and he himself their apostle and exponent. To confess, even to himself, that he had been preaching a false faith, and been the dupe of a lying boy, seemed impossible. The very idea of it was wormwood to him. Even the discovery that Margaret had taken him at his word and left his roof did not at first shake him. It even strengthened his suspicion that the whole affairwas a trick to catch his consent to her marriage with William Henry. It was only done to frighten him into submission.But as the solitary hours went by, this obstinate conviction began to slacken; as his indignation grew and grew against the author of his calamity, he began to admit that such a scoundrel might be capable of anything, even sacrilege. It was the affront to the Immortal Bard that he put first, and the offence to himself afterwards. Perhaps William Henry was aware that he was not his son, but he was also aware of the greatness of Shakespeare. And yet, what rankled more, was the consciousness that his own intelligence had been trifled with—that he had been made a fool of. It was a subject terrible to think about, and worse to talk about, and yet he longed for sympathy; the solitude of his own thoughts was intolerable to him.In the afternoon, at the same time he had been wont to appear in the days that seemed to be long past, Frank Dennis arrived. The antiquary seized his hand with a warmth that hehad never before exhibited, though he had loved him well, and bade him be seated. The only thing that had ever come between them was this man’s disinclination to accept the very facts which he himself was beginning to doubt, and at first this rendered the meeting embarrassing; on the other hand, when once the ice was broken, it smoothed matters.‘Have you heard the new story about William Henry?’ he asked in hesitating tones.‘Yes; I wish I could think of it as I did of the old story. It is true, sir, every word of it.’‘You think so?’ returned the antiquary with a forced smile of incredulity.‘I am sure of it,’ was the quiet reply.There was a long silence.‘What proof have you to substantiate your assertion?’The irony of fate had caused this question to be asked in the very room where proof used to be so constantly in view, and on the wall of which the ‘certificate’ of the believers in the Shakespeare documents still hung suspended.It was met by another question. ‘Have you not seen his confession?’Mr. Erin pointed to the carpet on which the fragments of the document still remained. ‘It was placed in my hands,’ said he in a hoarse dry voice, ‘but I never read it.’‘No matter; it would only have given you pain. I have seen the unhappy lad and heard the truth from his own lips.’‘The truth!’ echoed the old man bitterly.‘Yes, the truth at last. Here is a copy of an affidavit it is his intention to make to-morrow morning before a magistrate. There are things in it which one regrets; the tone of it is unsatisfactory. He does not seem so penetrated with the sense of his misconduct as would be becoming, but at all events he is careful to absolve everyone from complicity in his crime, and particularly yourself. “I solemnly declare,” he says, “that my father was totally unacquainted with the whole affair, believing most firmly the papers to be productions of Shakespeare.”’The antiquary’s brow grew very dark. ‘Iwill never see that young man’s face if I can help it,’ he said solemnly, ‘or speak one word to him again, so help me Heaven!’‘He does not expect it,’ answered the other quietly. ‘Henceforward he will take his own way in the world. After “expressing regret for any offence he may have given the world or any individual, trusting at the same time they will deem the whole the act of a boy without any evil intention, but hurried on by vanity and the praise of others,“ he goes on to say, “Should I attempt any other play, or work of imagination, I shall hope the public will lay aside all prejudice my conduct may have deserved, and grant me their indulgence.” I suppose, therefore, he intends to live by his pen.’‘You mean to starve by it,’ answered the old man bitterly. The style of the composition he had just heard struck him as fustian: he had heard it before and expressed another opinion of it, but then the circumstances were different. In Art and Literature the views of most people are less affected by the work itselfthan by the name under which it is presented to their notice.There was a long pause. As in a reservoir, when once its contents have begun to percolate drop by drop through the dam, the drops soon become a stream, and the stream a torrent, and the dam is swept away, so it was with Mr. Erin’s obstinacy. The dam was gone by this time, and the bitter waters of conviction rolled in upon his mind like a flood. There was no longer a dry place on it to afford a perch for the mocking-bird of incredulity.‘When was it, Frank,’ he inquired in an altered voice, ‘when you yourself began to suspect this—this infamous deception?’‘From the very first. You remember giving me the document with the seals attached, that had the quintin upon them? It accidentally fell from my hands, when a portion of the back of one of the seals broke off, and disclosed the inside, which was made of new wax! The—the forger—though he had contrived to cut the old seal without breaking, found it had lost its moisture, so that the slip of parchmentwhich he had introduced into it could only be held by new wax. The next day I perceived that the two parts had been bound together by black silk, which, if anyone had given himself the trouble to untwist, would have made him as wise as I.’‘And yet you held your peace, Dennis,’ groaned the old man reproachfully.‘In the first place you would have disbelieved had the proofs of imposture been twice as strong; and secondly—well, there were other reasons into which it is not necessary now to enter. You are quite aware that I never lent my countenance to the deception, and believe me, Mr. Erin, if I could have saved you from your present humiliation—with honour—I would have done so. It was not possible. I am come here to-day to make what amends are in my power for the wrong my silence may have done you. William Henry’s affidavit will acquit you of all blame in this matter in the eyes of unprejudiced persons, but you have your enemies, and many persons who were your friends,’ he pointed to thecertificate, ‘will now join their ranks. For some time, at least, residence in London must needs be painful to you. I had taken a cottage near Bath, intending for the present to dwell there; but circumstances’ (here the colour came into the young man’s cheeks) ‘have altered my intention. I shall now reside in town, and my little country home is at your service; there, out of the reach of malicious tongues, you may reside in peace and quiet as long as you think proper.’For the first time throughout the interview something like satisfaction came into the old man’s face. The notion of escaping from the flouts and jeers of his acquaintances, and from their equally galling silence, was very welcome to him.‘I thank you,’ he said, ‘with all my heart, Dennis.’‘There is only one condition, sir,’ hesitated the other. ‘I think the proposition would be more acceptable to—to Miss Margaret—if she did not know that she was accepting any hospitalityof mine. You will be so good as to conceal from her that fact.’‘Yes, yes,’ assented the old man. He did not like to confess that Margaret was elsewhere; that she had been driven from his roof by his own insensate anger. His companion’s offer had touched him and turned the current of his thoughts from their accustomed groove—himself and his own affairs—into other channels. He recognised the patience and forbearance of this young fellow, and the temptation to unmask a rival which he had resisted and left to other hands to do. He was curious to know the full extent to which this self-sacrifice would have extended.‘But suppose matters had gone still further, Dennis? If the play had been successful, and its genuineness acknowledged, and Margaret——?’‘It was not possible,’ broke in the other, with a flush. ‘No one could have read the “Vortigern”—I mean could have seen it acted,’ he added, hurriedly, ‘and believed it to be aplay of William Shakespeare’s. I felt confident of that.’‘Still, some of us were deceived,’ insisted the antiquary, with a melancholy smile, ‘and why not more? Suppose the play had succeeded, the contingency on which, as you know, my niece’s marriage with this scoundrel depended, what would you have done then?’‘I should have still kept silence. I only suspected, remember. I was not quite sure. Moreover, Margaret herself might have been spared the knowledge of the truth, and it was not for me to undeceive her.’‘You would have permitted her, then, for a delicate scruple, to entrust her happiness to a scoundrel?’‘You press me hard, sir, though I do not say you have not a right to do so,’ replied Dennis, greatly agitated. ‘I have thought of this a thousand times; it has cost me days and nights of misery, Heaven knows. But on the whole I have satisfied my conscience. When one has lost all hope in a matter that has once concerned one to the uttermost, one takes aclear view of it. The young man of whom you speak has, doubtless, many faults; he is weak and vain, and greedy of applause, however gained; he is to some extent unprincipled, he has even committed a serious crime; but he is not altogether what you have called him, a scoundrel. He is not unkind; under less adverse circumstances than those in which, from the very first, he has been placed, he would have shown himself a better man. An exceptional temptation assailed him, and he succumbed to it. He would not necessarily—or I have tried to think so—have made a bad husband.’This speech was uttered with grave deliberation, and the manner of it was most impressive; the speaker might have stood for some personification of Justice, weighing his words with equal hand. Indeed this man was more than just, he was magnanimous.The antiquary could not withhold his admiration from his companion, though with his sentiments he was wholly unable to sympathise.‘You are throwing good feeling away,Frank Dennis,’ he said, ‘upon a thankless cur. If you think to move me to compassion for him, you are pleading to deaf ears. He is henceforth as a dead man to me and mine.’‘You will act as you think right, no doubt,’ said the young man quietly, ‘and I am only doing the same.’He felt that whatever his own wrongs had been, the wrongs of his companion were far greater. Cajoled, deceived, and stricken in years, his reputation smirched, if not destroyed; humiliated in his own eyes, degraded in those of others; if he did not do well to be angry, it could hardly be said, being human, that he did ill.Dennis gave the antiquary the address of his cottage, and the necessary information for reaching the spot, and bade him adieu with much emotion.‘But you will not desert us?’ said Mr. Erin imploringly. ‘If you stand apart from us——’ His voice trembled and he left the sentence unfinished. He not only, as the other guessed, meant to imply that in such a casethey would be friendless indeed, but that Dennis’s withdrawal from his society would be construed as condemnation.‘If you write to me to come,’ he answered, ‘if you are quite sure that my presence will be acceptable to you and yours——’ and in his turn he hesitated.‘I understand,’ said the antiquary gently. ‘I shall think of others for the future, as well as of myself, if only’ (here he gave a mournful smile) ‘to distract my thoughts from what is painful.’‘There is sunshine still behind the clouds,’ said Dennis, as he shook hands.‘True, true,’ replied the other; then added to himself with a deep sigh as he closed the door after his visitor, ‘foryou, but not for me.’
A COMFORTER.
Thereis nothing more astonishing in the history of mankind than the high estimation in which credulity—under the form of belief—has been held by all nations who have had the least claim to be civilised. Yet the vast majority of the human race, mere slaves as they are to custom and convention, imbibing their faith with their mother’s milk, and as disinclined to change as a wheel that has found its rut, are absolutely unable to be sceptical. This is probably why persecution has been so lightly permitted—even among Christians, whose connivance at it is otherwise unintelligible; those who suffered for their scepticism were comparatively so few that their martyrdom was disregarded. It is an immense recommendation to a creed, that the merefact of accepting it is accounted the highest virtue, since ninety-nine persons out of a hundred who have been brought up in it, find no sort of difficulty in fulfilling its chief obligation. With the same ease with which the doctrines of Mahomet or of Buddha are embraced by their disciples, had the story of the discovery of the Shakespeare manuscripts been accepted by Mr. Samuel Erin. Nay, he had not been only a disciple but a devotee. He had been looking forward all his life to some revelation of a similar kind, and it had been manifested under circumstances that not only corroborated his views, but flattered hisamour propre. A member of his own house had been the discoverer of the MSS., and he himself their apostle and exponent. To confess, even to himself, that he had been preaching a false faith, and been the dupe of a lying boy, seemed impossible. The very idea of it was wormwood to him. Even the discovery that Margaret had taken him at his word and left his roof did not at first shake him. It even strengthened his suspicion that the whole affairwas a trick to catch his consent to her marriage with William Henry. It was only done to frighten him into submission.
But as the solitary hours went by, this obstinate conviction began to slacken; as his indignation grew and grew against the author of his calamity, he began to admit that such a scoundrel might be capable of anything, even sacrilege. It was the affront to the Immortal Bard that he put first, and the offence to himself afterwards. Perhaps William Henry was aware that he was not his son, but he was also aware of the greatness of Shakespeare. And yet, what rankled more, was the consciousness that his own intelligence had been trifled with—that he had been made a fool of. It was a subject terrible to think about, and worse to talk about, and yet he longed for sympathy; the solitude of his own thoughts was intolerable to him.
In the afternoon, at the same time he had been wont to appear in the days that seemed to be long past, Frank Dennis arrived. The antiquary seized his hand with a warmth that hehad never before exhibited, though he had loved him well, and bade him be seated. The only thing that had ever come between them was this man’s disinclination to accept the very facts which he himself was beginning to doubt, and at first this rendered the meeting embarrassing; on the other hand, when once the ice was broken, it smoothed matters.
‘Have you heard the new story about William Henry?’ he asked in hesitating tones.
‘Yes; I wish I could think of it as I did of the old story. It is true, sir, every word of it.’
‘You think so?’ returned the antiquary with a forced smile of incredulity.
‘I am sure of it,’ was the quiet reply.
There was a long silence.
‘What proof have you to substantiate your assertion?’
The irony of fate had caused this question to be asked in the very room where proof used to be so constantly in view, and on the wall of which the ‘certificate’ of the believers in the Shakespeare documents still hung suspended.
It was met by another question. ‘Have you not seen his confession?’
Mr. Erin pointed to the carpet on which the fragments of the document still remained. ‘It was placed in my hands,’ said he in a hoarse dry voice, ‘but I never read it.’
‘No matter; it would only have given you pain. I have seen the unhappy lad and heard the truth from his own lips.’
‘The truth!’ echoed the old man bitterly.
‘Yes, the truth at last. Here is a copy of an affidavit it is his intention to make to-morrow morning before a magistrate. There are things in it which one regrets; the tone of it is unsatisfactory. He does not seem so penetrated with the sense of his misconduct as would be becoming, but at all events he is careful to absolve everyone from complicity in his crime, and particularly yourself. “I solemnly declare,” he says, “that my father was totally unacquainted with the whole affair, believing most firmly the papers to be productions of Shakespeare.”’
The antiquary’s brow grew very dark. ‘Iwill never see that young man’s face if I can help it,’ he said solemnly, ‘or speak one word to him again, so help me Heaven!’
‘He does not expect it,’ answered the other quietly. ‘Henceforward he will take his own way in the world. After “expressing regret for any offence he may have given the world or any individual, trusting at the same time they will deem the whole the act of a boy without any evil intention, but hurried on by vanity and the praise of others,“ he goes on to say, “Should I attempt any other play, or work of imagination, I shall hope the public will lay aside all prejudice my conduct may have deserved, and grant me their indulgence.” I suppose, therefore, he intends to live by his pen.’
‘You mean to starve by it,’ answered the old man bitterly. The style of the composition he had just heard struck him as fustian: he had heard it before and expressed another opinion of it, but then the circumstances were different. In Art and Literature the views of most people are less affected by the work itselfthan by the name under which it is presented to their notice.
There was a long pause. As in a reservoir, when once its contents have begun to percolate drop by drop through the dam, the drops soon become a stream, and the stream a torrent, and the dam is swept away, so it was with Mr. Erin’s obstinacy. The dam was gone by this time, and the bitter waters of conviction rolled in upon his mind like a flood. There was no longer a dry place on it to afford a perch for the mocking-bird of incredulity.
‘When was it, Frank,’ he inquired in an altered voice, ‘when you yourself began to suspect this—this infamous deception?’
‘From the very first. You remember giving me the document with the seals attached, that had the quintin upon them? It accidentally fell from my hands, when a portion of the back of one of the seals broke off, and disclosed the inside, which was made of new wax! The—the forger—though he had contrived to cut the old seal without breaking, found it had lost its moisture, so that the slip of parchmentwhich he had introduced into it could only be held by new wax. The next day I perceived that the two parts had been bound together by black silk, which, if anyone had given himself the trouble to untwist, would have made him as wise as I.’
‘And yet you held your peace, Dennis,’ groaned the old man reproachfully.
‘In the first place you would have disbelieved had the proofs of imposture been twice as strong; and secondly—well, there were other reasons into which it is not necessary now to enter. You are quite aware that I never lent my countenance to the deception, and believe me, Mr. Erin, if I could have saved you from your present humiliation—with honour—I would have done so. It was not possible. I am come here to-day to make what amends are in my power for the wrong my silence may have done you. William Henry’s affidavit will acquit you of all blame in this matter in the eyes of unprejudiced persons, but you have your enemies, and many persons who were your friends,’ he pointed to thecertificate, ‘will now join their ranks. For some time, at least, residence in London must needs be painful to you. I had taken a cottage near Bath, intending for the present to dwell there; but circumstances’ (here the colour came into the young man’s cheeks) ‘have altered my intention. I shall now reside in town, and my little country home is at your service; there, out of the reach of malicious tongues, you may reside in peace and quiet as long as you think proper.’
For the first time throughout the interview something like satisfaction came into the old man’s face. The notion of escaping from the flouts and jeers of his acquaintances, and from their equally galling silence, was very welcome to him.
‘I thank you,’ he said, ‘with all my heart, Dennis.’
‘There is only one condition, sir,’ hesitated the other. ‘I think the proposition would be more acceptable to—to Miss Margaret—if she did not know that she was accepting any hospitalityof mine. You will be so good as to conceal from her that fact.’
‘Yes, yes,’ assented the old man. He did not like to confess that Margaret was elsewhere; that she had been driven from his roof by his own insensate anger. His companion’s offer had touched him and turned the current of his thoughts from their accustomed groove—himself and his own affairs—into other channels. He recognised the patience and forbearance of this young fellow, and the temptation to unmask a rival which he had resisted and left to other hands to do. He was curious to know the full extent to which this self-sacrifice would have extended.
‘But suppose matters had gone still further, Dennis? If the play had been successful, and its genuineness acknowledged, and Margaret——?’
‘It was not possible,’ broke in the other, with a flush. ‘No one could have read the “Vortigern”—I mean could have seen it acted,’ he added, hurriedly, ‘and believed it to be aplay of William Shakespeare’s. I felt confident of that.’
‘Still, some of us were deceived,’ insisted the antiquary, with a melancholy smile, ‘and why not more? Suppose the play had succeeded, the contingency on which, as you know, my niece’s marriage with this scoundrel depended, what would you have done then?’
‘I should have still kept silence. I only suspected, remember. I was not quite sure. Moreover, Margaret herself might have been spared the knowledge of the truth, and it was not for me to undeceive her.’
‘You would have permitted her, then, for a delicate scruple, to entrust her happiness to a scoundrel?’
‘You press me hard, sir, though I do not say you have not a right to do so,’ replied Dennis, greatly agitated. ‘I have thought of this a thousand times; it has cost me days and nights of misery, Heaven knows. But on the whole I have satisfied my conscience. When one has lost all hope in a matter that has once concerned one to the uttermost, one takes aclear view of it. The young man of whom you speak has, doubtless, many faults; he is weak and vain, and greedy of applause, however gained; he is to some extent unprincipled, he has even committed a serious crime; but he is not altogether what you have called him, a scoundrel. He is not unkind; under less adverse circumstances than those in which, from the very first, he has been placed, he would have shown himself a better man. An exceptional temptation assailed him, and he succumbed to it. He would not necessarily—or I have tried to think so—have made a bad husband.’
This speech was uttered with grave deliberation, and the manner of it was most impressive; the speaker might have stood for some personification of Justice, weighing his words with equal hand. Indeed this man was more than just, he was magnanimous.
The antiquary could not withhold his admiration from his companion, though with his sentiments he was wholly unable to sympathise.
‘You are throwing good feeling away,Frank Dennis,’ he said, ‘upon a thankless cur. If you think to move me to compassion for him, you are pleading to deaf ears. He is henceforth as a dead man to me and mine.’
‘You will act as you think right, no doubt,’ said the young man quietly, ‘and I am only doing the same.’
He felt that whatever his own wrongs had been, the wrongs of his companion were far greater. Cajoled, deceived, and stricken in years, his reputation smirched, if not destroyed; humiliated in his own eyes, degraded in those of others; if he did not do well to be angry, it could hardly be said, being human, that he did ill.
Dennis gave the antiquary the address of his cottage, and the necessary information for reaching the spot, and bade him adieu with much emotion.
‘But you will not desert us?’ said Mr. Erin imploringly. ‘If you stand apart from us——’ His voice trembled and he left the sentence unfinished. He not only, as the other guessed, meant to imply that in such a casethey would be friendless indeed, but that Dennis’s withdrawal from his society would be construed as condemnation.
‘If you write to me to come,’ he answered, ‘if you are quite sure that my presence will be acceptable to you and yours——’ and in his turn he hesitated.
‘I understand,’ said the antiquary gently. ‘I shall think of others for the future, as well as of myself, if only’ (here he gave a mournful smile) ‘to distract my thoughts from what is painful.’
‘There is sunshine still behind the clouds,’ said Dennis, as he shook hands.
‘True, true,’ replied the other; then added to himself with a deep sigh as he closed the door after his visitor, ‘foryou, but not for me.’