We were at St. John"s then; you were right above me--in a different world altogether. You were a leader amongst the best of them, and I was a hanger-on amongst the worst. You were in with the gentlemen set and the reading set. Neither of them would have anything to do with me--and they were quite right. I was what they thought me--a cad. I"d no head for work, and no taste for anything worth doing, and I wasn"t a gentleman, and hadn"t sense to behave like one. I"d no right to have been at the University at all, but my poor old dad would have me go.
He had an idea that he could make a gentleman of me. It was a mistake!"
Matravers moved slightly in his chair,--he was suffering tortures.
"Is it worth while recalling all these things?" he asked quietly.
"Life cannot be a success for all of us; yet it is the future, and not the past."
"I have no future," the man interrupted doggedly; "no future here, or in any other place. I have got my deserts. I wanted to remind you of that night when you came to see me in my rooms, after I"d been sent down for being drunk. I suppose you were the first gentleman who had ever crossed my threshold, and I remember wondering what on earth you"d come for! You didn"t lecture me, and you didn"t preach. You came and sat down and smoked one of my cigars, and talked just as though we were friends, and tried to make me see what a fool I was. It didn"t do much good in the end--but I never forgot it. You shook hands with me when you left, and for once in my life I was ashamed of myself."
"I am sorry," Matravers said with an effort, "that I did not go to see you oftener."
Drage shook his head.
"It was too late then! I was done for,--done for as far as Oxford was concerned. But that was only the beginning. I might easily have picked up if I"d had the pluck! The dad forgave me, and made me a partner in the business before he died. I was a rich man, and I might have been a millionaire; instead of that I was a d.a.m.ned fool! I can"t help swearing! you mustn"t mind, sir! Remember what I am! I don"t swear when Freddy"s in the room, if I can help it. I went the pace, drank, kept women, and all the rest of it. My wife found me out and went away. I ain"t saying a word against her. She was a good woman, and I was a bad man, and she left me! She was right enough! I wasn"t fit for a decent woman to live with. All the same, I missed her; and it was another kick down h.e.l.lward for me when she went. I got desperate then; I took to drink worse than ever, and I began to let my business go and speculate. You wouldn"t know anything of the city, sir; but I can tell you this, when a cool chap with all his wits about him starts speculating outside his business, it"s touch and go with him; when a chap in the state I was in goes for it, you can spell the result in four letters! It"s RUIN, ruin! That"s what it meant for me. I lost two hundred thousand pounds in three years, and my business went to pot too. Then I had this cursed stroke, and here I am! I may stick on for years, but I shall never be able to earn a penny again. Where Freddy"s schooling is to come from, or how we are to live, I don"t know!"
"I am very sorry," Matravers said gently. "Have you no friends then, or relations who will help you?"
"Not a d.a.m.ned one," growled the man on the couch. "I had plenty of pals once, only too glad to count themselves John Drage"s friends; but where they are now I don"t know. They seem to have melted away.
There"s never a one comes near me. I could do without their money or their help, somehow, but it"s d.a.m.ned hard to lie here for ever and have not one of "em drop in just now and then for a bit of a talk and a cheering word. That"s what gives me the blues! I always was fond of company; I hated being alone, and it"s like h.e.l.l to lie here day after day and see no one but a cross landlady and a miserable servant girl.
Lately, I can"t bear to be alone with Freddy. He"s so d.a.m.ned like his mother, you know. It brings a lump in my throat. I wouldn"t mind so much if it were only myself. I"ve had my cake! But it"s rough on the boy!"
"It is rough on the boy, and it is rough on you," Matravers said kindly. "I wonder you have never thought of sending him to his mother!
She would surely like to have him!"
The man"s face grew black.
"Not till I"m dead," he said doggedly. "I don"t want him set against me! He"s all I"ve got! I"m going to keep him for a bit. It ought not to be so difficult for us to live. If only I could get down to the city for a few hours!"
"Could not a friend there do some good for you?" Matravers asked.
"Of course he could," Mr. Drage answered eagerly; "but I haven"t got a friend. See here!"
He took a little account book from under his pillow, and with trembling fingers thrust it before his visitor.
"You see all these amounts. They are all owing to me from those people--money lent, and one thing and another. There is an envelope with bills and I O U"s. They belong to me, you understand," he said, with a sudden touch of dignity. "I never failed! My business was stopped when I was taken ill, but there was enough to pay everybody.
Now some of these amounts have never been collected. If I could see these people myself, they would pay, or if I could get a friend whom I could trust! But there isn"t a man comes near me!"
"I--am not a business man," Matravers said slowly; "but if you cared to explain things to me, I would go into the city and see what I could do."
The man raised himself on his elbow and gazed at his visitor open-mouthed.
"You mean this!" he cried thickly. "Say it again,--quick! You mean it!"
"Certainly," Matravers answered. "I will do what I can."
John Drage did not doubt his good fortune for a moment. No one ever looked into Matravers" face and failed to believe him.
"I--I"ll thank you some day," he murmured. "You"ve done me up! Will you--shake hands?"
He held out a thin white hand. Matravers took it between his own.
In a few moments they were absorbed in figures and explanations.
Finally the book was pa.s.sed over to Matravers" keeping.
"I will see what I can do," he said quietly. "Some of these accounts should certainly be recovered. I will come down and let you know how I have got on."
[Ill.u.s.tration: "You mean this!" he cried thickly. "Say it again--quick!"]
"If you would! If you don"t mind! And, I wonder,--do you take a morning paper? If so, will you bring it when you"ve done with it, or an old one will do? I can"t read anything but newspapers; and lately I haven"t dared to spend a penny,--because of Freddy, you know! It"s so cursed lonely!"
"I will come, and I will bring you something to read," Matravers promised. "I must go now!"
John Drage held out his hand wistfully.
"Good-by," he said. "You"re a good man! I wish I"d been like you. It"s an odd thing for me to say, but--G.o.d bless you, sir."
Matravers stood on the doorstep with his watch in his hand. It was half-past three. There was just time to catch the four-thirty from Waterloo! For a moment the little street faded away from before his eyes! He saw himself at his journey"s end! Berenice was there to meet him! A breath of the country came to him on the breeze--a breath of sweet-smelling flowers, and fresh moorland air, and the low murmur of the blue sea. Yes, there was Berenice, with her dark hair blowing in the wind, and that look of pa.s.sionate peace in her pale, tired face!
Her arms were open, wide open! She had been weary so long! The struggle had been so hard! and he, too, was weary----
He started! He was still on the doorstep! Freddy was drumming on the pane, and behind, there was a man lying on the couch, with his face buried in his hands. He waved his hand and descended the steps firmly.
"Back to my rooms, 147, Piccadilly," he told the cabman. "I shall not be going away to-day."
CHAPTER XIV
A man wrote it, from his little room in the heart of London, whilst night faded into morning. He wrote it with leaden heart and unwilling mechanical effort--wrote it as a man might write his own doom. Every fresh sentence, which stared up at him from the closely written sheets seemed like another landmark in his sad descent from the pinnacles of his late wonderful happiness down into the black waters of despair.
When he had finished, and the pen slipped from his stiff, nerveless fingers, there were lines and marks in his face which had never been there before, and which could never altogether pa.s.s away.
... A woman read it, seated on a shelving slant of moorland with the blue sky overhead, and the soft murmur of the sea in her ears, and the sunlight streaming around her. When she had finished, and the letter had fallen to her side, crushed into a shapeless ma.s.s, the light had died out of the sky and the air, and the song of the birds had changed into a wail. And this was what the man had said to the woman:--
"Berenice, I have had a dream! I dreamed that I was coming to you, that you and I were together somewhere in a new world, where the men were G.o.ds and the women were saints, where the sun always shone, and nothing that was not pure and beautiful had any place! And now I am awake, and I know that there is no such world.
"You and I are standing on opposite sides of a deep, dark precipice. I may not come to you! You must not come to me.
"I have thought over this matter with all the seriousness which befits it. You will never know how great and how fierce the struggle has been. I am feeling an older and a tired man. But now that is all over! I have crossed the Rubicon! The mists have rolled away, and the truth is very clear indeed to me! I shudder when I think to what misery I might have brought you, if I had yielded to that sweetest and most fascinating impulse of my life, which bade me accept your sacrifice and come to you. Berenice, you are very young yet, and you have woven some new and very beautiful fancies which you have put into a book, and which the world has found amusing! To you alone they have become the essence of your life: they have become by constant contemplation a part of yourself. Out of the greatness of your heart you do not fear to put them into practice! But, dear, you must find a new world to fit your fancies, for the one in which we are forced to dwell, the world which, in theory, finds them delightful, would find another and an uglier world if we should venture upon their embodiment!
After all we are creatures of this world, and by this world"s laws we shall be judged. The things which are right are right, and the things which are pure are pure. Love is the greatest power in the world, but it cannot alter things which are unalterable.
"Once when I was climbing with a friend of mine in the Engadine, we saw a white flower growing virtually out of a cleft in the rocks, high above our heads. My friend was a botanist, and he would have that flower! I lay on my back and watched him struggle to reach it, watched him often slipping backwards, but gradually crawling nearer and nearer, until at last, breathless, with torn clothes and bleeding hands, he grasped the tiny blossom, and held it out to me in triumph! Together we admired it ceaselessly as we retraced our steps. But as we left the high alt.i.tudes and descended into the valley, a change took place in the flower. Its petals drooped, its leaves shrank and faded.
White became grey, the freshness which had been its chief beauty faded away with every step we took. My friend kept it, but he kept it with sorrow! It was no longer a beautiful flower.
"Berenice, you are that flower! You are beautiful, and pure, and strong! You think that you are strong enough to live in the lowlands, but you are not! No love of mine, changeless and whole as it must ever be, could keep your soul from withering in the nether land of sin! For it would be sin!
In these days when you are young, when the fires of your enthusiasm are newly kindled, and the wings of your imagination have not been shorn, you may say to yourself that it is not sin! You may say that love is the only true and sweet shrine before which we need keep our lives holy and pure, and that the time for regrets would never come!