Leaving the House on that first night of my sitting, I received Temple"s congratulations outside, and, as though the sitting had exhausted every personal sentiment, I became filled with his; under totally new sensations, I enjoyed my distinction through the perception of my old comrade"s friendly jealousy.
"I"ll be there, too, some day," he said, moaning at the prospect of an extreme age before such honours would befall him.
The society of Eckart prevented me from urging him to puff me up with his talk as I should have wished, and after I had sent the German to be taken care of by Mrs. Waddy, I had grown so accustomed to the worldly view of my position that I was fearing for its stability. Threats of a pet.i.tion against me were abroad. Supposing the squire disinherited me, could I stand? An extraordinary appet.i.te for wealth, a novel appreciation of it--which was, in truth, a voluntary enlistment into the army of mankind, and the adoption of its pa.s.sions--p.r.i.c.ked me with an intensity of hope and dread concerning my dependence on my grandfather.
I lay sleepless all night, tossing from Riversley to Sarkeld, condemned, it seemed, to marry Janet and gain riches and power by renouncing my hope of the princess and the glory belonging to her, unless I should within a few hours obtain a show of figures at my bankers.
I had promised Etherell to breakfast with him. A note--a faint scream--despatched by Mrs. Waddy to Mr. Temple"s house informed me that "the men" were upon them. If so, they were the forerunners of a horde, and my father was as good as extinguished. He staked everything on success; consequently, he forfeited pity.
Good-bye to ambition, I thought, and ate heartily, considering robustly the while how far lower than the general level I might avoid falling.
The report of the debates in morning papers--doubtless, more flowing and, perhaps, more grammatical than such as I gave ear to overnight--had the odd effect on me of relieving me from the fit of subserviency into which the speakers had sunk me.
A conceit of towering superiority took its place, and as Etherell was kind enough to draw me out and compliment me, I was attacked by a tragic sense of contrast between my capacities and my probable fortunes. It was open to me to marry Janet. But this meant the loosening of myself with my own hand for ever from her who was my mentor and my glory, to gain whom I was in the very tideway. I could not submit to it, though the view was like that of a green field of the springs pa.s.sed by a climber up the crags. I went to Anna Penrhys to hear a woman"s voice, and partly told her of my troubles. She had heard Mr. Hipperdon express his confident opinion that he should oust me from my seat. Her indignation was at my service as a loan: it sprang up fiercely and spontaneously in allusions to something relating to my father, of which the Marquis of Edbury had been guilty. "How you can bear it!" she exclaimed, for I was not wordy. The exclamation, however, stung me to put pen to paper--the woman was not so remote in me as not to be roused by the woman. I wrote to Edbury, and to Heriot, bidding him call on the young n.o.bleman. Late at night I was at my father"s door to perform the act of duty of seeing him, and hearing how he had entertained Eckart, if he was still master of his liberty. I should have known him better: I expected silence and gloom. The windows were lighted brilliantly. As the hall-door opened, a band of stringed and wood instruments commenced an overture. Mrs. Waddy came to me in the hall; she was unintelligible. One thing had happened to him at one hour of the morning, and another at another hour. He was at one moment suffering the hands of the "officers" on his shoulder:
"And behold you, Mr. Harry! a knock, a letter from a messenger, and he conquers Government!" It struck me that the epitome of his life had been played in a day: I was quite incredulous of downright good fortune.
He had been giving a dinner followed by a concert, and the deafening strains of the music clashed with my acerb spirit, irritating me excessively. "Where are those men you spoke of?" I asked her. "Gone,"
she replied,"gone long ago!"
"Paid?" said I.
She was afraid to be precise, but repeated that they were long since gone.
I singled Jorian DeWitt from among the crowd of loungers on the stairs and landing between the drawing-rooms. "Oh, yes, Government has struck its flag to him," Jorian said. "Why weren"t you here to dine? Alphonse will never beat his achievement of to-day. Jenny and Carigny gave us a quarter-of-an-hour before dinner--a capital idea!--"VEUVE ET BACHELIER."
As if by inspiration. No preparation for it, no formal taking of seats.
It seized amazingly--floated small talk over the soup beautifully."
I questioned him again.
"Oh, dear, yes; there can"t be a doubt about it," he answered, airily.
"Roy Richmond has won his game."
Two or three urgent men round a great gentleman were extracting his affable approbation of the admirable nature of the experiment of the Cha.s.sediane before dinner. I saw that Eckart was comfortably seated, and telling Jorian to provide for him in the matter of tobacco, I went to my room, confused beyond power of thought by the sensible command of fortune my father, fortune"s sport at times, seemed really to have.
His statement of the circ.u.mstances bewildered me even more. He was in no hurry to explain them; when we met next morning he waited for me to question him, and said, "Yes. I think we have beaten them so far!" His mind was pre-occupied, he informed me, concerning the defence of a lady much intrigued against, and resuming the subject: "Yes, we have beaten them up to a point, Richie. And that reminds me: would you have me go down to Riversley and show the squire the transfer paper? At any rate you can now start for Sarkeld, and you do, do you not? To-day: to-morrow at latest."
I insisted: "But how, and in what manner has this money been paid?" The idea struck me that he had succeeded in borrowing it.
"Transferred to me in the Bank, and intelligence of the fact sent to Dettermain and Newson, my lawyers," he replied. "Beyond that, I know as little as you, Richie, though indubitably I hoped to intimidate them.
If," he added, with a countenance perfectly simple and frank, "they expect me to take money for a sop, I am not responsible, as I by no means provoked it, for their mistake.
"I proceed. The money is useful to you, so I rejoice at it."
Five and twenty thousand pounds was the amount.
"No stipulation was attached to it?"
"None. Of course a stipulation was implied: but of that I am not bound to be cognizant."
"Absurd!" I cried: "it can"t have come from the quarter you suspect."
"Where else?" he asked.
I thought of the squire, Lady Edbury, my aunt, Lady Sampleman, Anna Penrhys, some one or other of his frantic female admirers. But the largeness of the amount, and the channel selected for the payment, precluded the notion that any single person had come to succour him in his imminent need, and, as it chanced, mine.
Observing that my speculations wavered, he cited numerous instances in his life of the special action of Providence in his favour, and was bold enough to speak of a star, which his natural acuteness would have checked his doing before me, if his imagination had not been seriously struck.
"You hand the money over to me, sir?" I said.
"Without a moment of hesitation, my dear boy," he melted me by answering.
"You believe you have received a bribe?"
"That is my entire belief--the sole conclusion I can arrive at. I will tell you, Richie: the old Marquis of Edbury once placed five thousand pounds to my account on a proviso that I should--neglect, is the better word, my Case. I inherited from him at his death; of course his demise cancelled the engagement. He had been the friend of personages implicated. He knew. I suspect he apprehended the unpleasant position of a witness."
"But what was the stipulation you presume was implied?" said I.
"Something that pa.s.sed between lawyers: I am not bound to be cognizant of it. Abandon my claims for a few thousands? Not for ten, not for ten hundred times the sum!"
To be free from his boisterous influence, which made my judgement as unsteady as the weather-gla.s.s in a hurricane, I left my house and went straight to Dettermain and Newson, who astonished me quite as much by a.s.suring me that the payment of the money was a fact. There was no mystery about it. The intelligence and transfer papers, they said, had not been communicated to them by the firm they were opposed to, but by a solicitor largely connected with the aristocracy; and his letter had briefly declared the unknown donator"s request that legal proceedings should forthwith be stopped. They offered no opinion of their own.
Suggestions of any kind, they seemed to think, had weight, and all of them an equal weight, to conclude from the value they a.s.signed to every idea of mine. The name of the solicitor in question was Charles Adolphus Bannerbridge. It was, indeed, my old, one of my oldest friends; the same by whom I had been led to a feast and an evening of fun when a little fellow starting in the London streets. Sure of learning the whole truth from old Mr. Bannerbridge, I walked to his office and heard that he had suddenly been taken ill. I strode on to his house, and entered a house of mourning. The kind old man, remembered by me so vividly, had died overnight. Miss Bannerbridge perceived that I had come on an errand, and with her gentle good breeding led me to speak of it. She knew nothing whatever of the sum of money. She was, however, aware that an annuity had been regularly paid through the intervention of her father. I was referred by her to a Mr. Richards, his recently-established partner.
This gentleman was ignorant of the whole transaction.
Throughout the day I strove to combat the pressure of evidence in favour of the idea that an acknowledgement of special claims had been wrested from the enemy. Temple hardly helped me, though his solid sense was dead against the notions entertained by my father and Jorian DeWitt, and others besides, our elders. The payment of the sum through the same channel which supplied the annuity, pointed distinctly to an admission of a claim, he inclined to think, and should be supposed to come from a personage having cause either to fear him or to a.s.sist him. He set my speculations astray by hinting that the request for the stopping of the case might be a blind. A gift of money, he said shrewdly, was a singularly weak method of inducing a man to stop the suit of a life-time. I thought of Lady Edbury; but her income was limited, and her expenditure was not of Lady Sampleman, but it was notorious that she loved her purse as well as my aunt Dorothy, and was even more, in the squire"s phrase, "a petticoated parsimony." Anna Penrhys appeared the likelier, except for the fact that the commencement of the annuity was long before our acquaintance with her. I tried her on the subject.
Her amazement was without a shadow of reserve. "It "s Welsh, it"s not English," she remarked. I knew no Welshwoman save Anna.
"Do you know the whole of his history?" said she. Possibly one of the dozen unknown episodes in it might have furnished the clue, I agreed with her.
The sight of twenty-one thousand pounds placed to my credit in the Funds a.s.suaged my restless spirit of investigation. Letters from the squire and my aunt Dorothy urged me to betake myself to Riversley, there finally to decide upon what my course should be.
"Now that you have the money, pray," St. Parsimony wrote,--"pray be careful of it. Do not let it be encroached on. Remember it is to serve one purpose. It should be guarded strictly against every appeal for aid," etc., with much underlining.
My grandfather returned the papers. His letter said "I shall not break my word. Please to come and see me before you take steps right or left."
So here was the dawn again.
I could in a day or two start for Sarkeld. Meanwhile, to give my father a lesson, I discharged a number of bills, and paid off the bond to which Edbury"s name was attached. My grandfather, I knew, was too sincerely and punctiliously a gentleman in practical conduct to demand a further inspection of my accounts. These things accomplished, I took the train for Riversley, and proceeded from the station to Durstan, where I knew Heriot to be staying. Had I gone straight to my grandfather, there would have been another story to tell.
CHAPTER XLV. WITHIN AN INCH OF MY LIFE
A single tent stood in a gully running from one of the gravel-pits of the heath, near an iron-red rillet, and a girl of Kiomi"s tribe leaned over the lazy water at half length, striking it with her handkerchief.
At a distance of about twice a stone"s-throw from the new carriage-road between Durstan and Bulsted, I fancied from old recollections she might be Kiomi herself. This was not the time for her people to be camping on Durstan. Besides, I feared it improbable that one would find her in any of the tracks of her people. The noise of the wheels brought the girl"s face round to me. She was one of those who were babies in the tents when I was a boy. We were too far apart for me to read her features. I lay back in the carriage, thinking that it would have been better for my poor little wild friend if I had never crossed the shadow of her tents.
A life caught out of its natural circle is as much in danger of being lost as a limb given to a wheel in spinning machinery; so it occurred to me, until I reflected that Prince Ernest might make the same remark, and deplore the damage done to the superior machinery likewise.
My movements appeared to interest the girl. She was up on a mound of the fast-purpling heath, shading her eyes to watch me, when I called at Bulsted lodge-gates to ask for a bed under Julia"s roof that night. Her bare legs twinkled in a nimble pace on the way to Durstan Hall, as if she was determined to keep me in sight. I waved my hand to her. She stopped. A gipsy"s girl"s figure is often as good an index to her mind as her face, and I perceived that she had not taken my greeting favourably; nor would she advance a step to my repeated beckonings; I tried hat, handkerchief, purse, in vain. My driver observed that she was taken with a fit of the obstinacy of "her lot." He shouted, "Silver,"
and then "Fortune." She stood looking. The fellow discoursed on the nature of gipsies. Foxes were kept for hunting, he said; there was reason in that. Why we kept gipsies none could tell. He once backed a gipsy prizefighter, who failed to keep his appointment. "Heart sunk too low below his belt, sir. You can"t reckon on them for performances. And that same man afterwards fought the gamest fight in the chronicles o"
the Ring! I knew he had it in him. But they"re like nothing better than the weather; you can"t put money on "em and feel safe." Consequently he saw no good in them.