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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
In "The Rogue's March," E. W. Hornung weaves a compelling narrative that intricately explores themes of moral ambiguity, character duality, and the subversion of societal norms. Set against the backdrop of a Victorian England grappling with the implications of crime and justice, the novel employs a keenly ironic tone and richly drawn characters that bring to life the tensions between propriety and rebellion. Hornung's mastery of prose shines through his vivid descriptions and engaging plot twists, offering readers a tantalizing glimpse into the world of rogues and runaways, as well as the psychological motivations behind their choices. E. W. Hornung, best known for his creation of the gentleman thief A. J. Raffles, was deeply influenced by his upbringing and experiences in literature that emphasized both crime and morality. His own life experiences, including a background in writing for periodicals and an enduring fascination with the underbelly of Victorian society, shaped his approach to storytelling in "The Rogue's March." This work reflects his understanding of the complexities surrounding human behavior and societal expectations, marking him as an insightful commentator of his time. Readers seeking a nuanced exploration of the darker aspects of human nature will find "The Rogue's March" an irresistible read. Hornung'Äôs adept ability to merge thrilling narratives with thought-provoking questions of justice makes this novel an essential addition to the canon of Victorian literature. Lovers of crime fiction and character-driven stories are invited to surrender to Hornung's world where every character's decision resonates with the tension of liberation and consequence.
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The Rogue's March
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 “Sudden Death”
The man was very fair and spare, but of a medium height. His hands and feet were notably small, the wrists and arms a little deceptive. These looked lean, but were made of muscle, and quickened with hot, keen blood.
He was very young; but though, as a fact, not five-and-twenty, the thin, sardonic, reckless face looked half as old again. An abiding bitterness had curled the full nostrils, deepening the lines thence to the sensitive red lips, and drawing the latter too habitually apart upon set teeth or a sneer. Nor was the bitterness of the kind sown in proud hearts by capricious circumstance and crushing but not dishonourable defeat. It was rather the Dead Sea fruit of wilful riot and a contemptible, impenitent remorse. And yet in the full brown eye and lifted chin, as in the ill-clad, well-carried figure, there was a lingering something that was gallant and fine and debonair; as if the makings of angel or of devil still lurked beneath that crumpled kerseymere waistcoat and those faded blue swallow-tails.
To this lost youth the door in Rolls Buildings was opened by a grey-haired woman who nodded knowingly in response to an inquiry for letters, and handed one over with an invitation to enter and read it within. But the kindly words fell on inattentive ears. Looking fondly and yet fearfully at the superscription—to Thomas Erichsen, Esquire, and the rest—the needy owner of that name suddenly pocketed his letter with unbroken seals. He was turning as abruptly away when the blank face of his former landlady led him to pause a moment.
“No; bless you, no! it’s not from him,” said Erichsen, grimly. “This is from a friend I met yesterday, who would insist on having my address. What was I to do? I thought you wouldn’t mind, so I gave my last.”
“Mind! It is your address, and might be your ‘ome if you wasn’t that ‘igh and ‘aughty. Dear, dear, dear! so you’ve not heard from that villain yet?”
“Not a line.”
“Nor of him?”
“Not a word. Give me time. If I don’t root him out by this day month—well, then he’s fled the country—like a sensible man.”
“But what if you do?” demanded the landlady, who was herself directly interested in the event.
“What if I do, Mrs. Adcock? Well, I shall probably half murder him, to begin with; he has wholly ruined me. Yes, it will be my money—and your money—or his life! He knows it, too, if he’s got my letters. Feel the weight of that!”
And he put in her hands a heavy ash stick, green and sinewy, with the knob still creamy from the knife.
“Lord save us!” cried the woman. “Is this the rod in pickle for him?”
“That’s the rod in pickle. Nice and heavy, isn’t it?”
“Too ‘eavy, Mr. Erichsen! Too ‘eavy by ‘alf. I’d show no mercy to thieves and swindlers, but I should be very careful what I did with that. I wouldn’t take the law into my own hands, if I were you!”
“You wouldn’t?” cried he. “Not if you’d been cleaned out as I have, by as blackguardly a dodge? By the Lord that made him, I’d break every bone in his infernal body; and will, too, if I find him and he won’t pay up. I’ll pay him! I grant you it was my own cursed fault in the beginning; but what about that last thirty pounds? Who got that? Why am I rotting and starving here? Who threw me on the mercy of kind good folks like you—yes, and made a sponge of me in my turn? Whose doing is it that I’ve got to pawn the clothes off my back, or beg my meals; to tramp the streets all day, to lie all night in the fields—”
“Your own!” exclaimed the woman, coming hastily down from the step upon which she had been standing all this time. “It’s your own fault, is that, however! You know well it isn’t mine. Our attic has been empty ever since you went; you’re welcome to it until it’s wanted again, if only you’ll come back. Nay, sir, I do assure you I’d rather have you for nothing than most of them that pays. Come back to-night, or I’m sure I sha’n’t sleep a wink for thinking of you; come in now, and I’ll get you some nice ‘ot breakfast. You look as if you hadn’t ‘ad any yet, I’m sure you do. So in you come!”
Erichsen held out his hand.
“No, no,” said he. “I owe you quite enough already, Mrs. Adcock; besides, I’m as strong as a horse, and doing much better than you think. But the world is full of kindness, after all! and God bless you for yours!”
And his dark eyes, that but now had flashed and burnt with bitter fires—that were the more striking always for a shock of almost flaxen hair—stood full of tears. He could say no more, but only wring the dry, chapped hand in his. Then he was gone; and might have been seen, a little later, hurrying with bent head towards Temple Bar; or, later yet, spread at full length in that green asylum of his homeless days, the southwest corner of St. James’s Park.—
And here he read the letter from his friend. It began on one side of the large white paper, and ended on the next. The girlish handwriting was pitifully tremulous, but yet instinct with a self-reliance then uncommon in young English ladies. The letter ran:—
“Avenue Lodge , “Regent's Park. “April 26th.
“Darling,—What does it mean? I was picturing you in Calcutta when I saw you this afternoon in Piccadilly! I had been thinking about you just then—I always am—and there you were! Oh, my darling, what can it mean? Tell me quickly, or I shall go mad with anxiety, as I nearly did on the spot this afternoon.Come here,as you love me,and tell me all!“Darling, what can it be that has kept you here, and so silent all this time; or did you go out and come straight back? No, there has not been time. TheJumnasailed on the last day of September, and I have prayed for her safety all these months. I was so sure my love was on board!
“Oh, if only I dare have stopped to speak to you a few more seconds. The groom was so close behind. But, Tom, you seemed not to want to give me your address? I would not have left you without it; and now I shall come to you there unless you come to me. You looked so sad and ill, my sweetheart! I can see his poor face still!
“Come and tell me all, and let me help you, or my heart will break. You are in trouble. I know it, and must help you—it is my right. We are in the new Avenue Road; you will easily find it. The house isfar the largeston theright-handside as you comefromtown. There are fields behind, and our garden goes the farthest back; that is, we have a field of our own walled in with it, and there is agreen gate in the wall.It is kept locked, but I will be there atnine o’clocktomorrow (Thursday) night; and so must you. Be there for my sake, and tell me all.
“I have written the moment I got in. I will post it myself. Dear Tom, do not be hard on this girl if you think her over-bold; for she loves you! she loves you! and would give her life to make yours happy.
“Your own true “Claire.
“Twenty-eight mortal hours to wait. I shall hear my heart beating—as I hear it now—as I have heard it ever since I saw that sad, sad face—until I see it again!”
When Thomas Erichsen came to the end of this passionate, pure love-letter, he buried his face in the sweet spring grass, and lay immovable with a grief too great for tears. The sounds of London (louder then than now) boomed and rattled in his ears; the racket of unmuffled wheels upon street beyond street of cobbles; a coachman’s horn in Whitehall; a roll of drums from the barracks across Birdcage Walk; elsewhere a hurdy-gurdy; near at hand an altercation between two other hiveless drones; and in the middle-distance an errand-boy whistling “All Round My Hat.” Such were the sounds heard that April morning by Tom Erichsen’s outward ears; to those of his soul, a brave soft voice was whispering the last God-speed, while his own, the more broken of the two, was vowing not only eternal constancy, but eternal goodness and an honest life for her sake.
He could see the steady grey eyes filled with tears that never fell, and shining into his with the love that knew no shame; he must never look in them again, nor ever more defile with his the brave lips that had trembled, truly, but yet spoken comfortable words up to the end.
And here he lay, in culpable poverty and dishonourable rags; fallen already to an ultimate deep. So now, too late, as through the gates of hell, must come this message of angelic love!
He read it again, tore off the clean half-sheet, and, sitting cross-legged, wrote as follows in pencil upon his knee:—
“It means that I am a blackguard, and no longer worthy to be even your friend.
“TheJumnawas ten days behind her advertised time of sailing, and I was miserable. You might have pitied me then; I neither ask nor deserve any pity now. I had vile thoughts. Even if I made my fortune your father would hate my father’s son for ever—and I him—so it could never be. You would marry in due course. How could you help yourself? Those were my thoughts. And then I made a friend!
“He showed me the town. He helped me to forget. He won most of my money, and took the rest by fraud. I never even booked my passage. And now I only live to spill the fellow’s blood.
“But that’s all he did. He didn’t disgrace me. I disgraced myself, and broke all my promises to the noble girl of whom I never was worthy; and must therefore see her no more. It would be no good. Why should I insult you too? I have done so enough in coming to this. Simply forget me, for I am not worth your scorn. Forget me utterly. I am too ashamed to sign my name.”
This he folded up, addressed with his pencil, and sealed (in a fashion) with the wafers which had been used already: her lips had touched them before his! Then he sat where he was, and noted the other moral corpses stretched upon that daily battle-field, and wondered if any of them had wrecked their lives as wilfully as he his. And then he thought of his father’s white hairs, and thanked God they had won to the grave without this to bring them there.
Then he lay down again, and wrestled with hunger and anguish alternately and both together. It was evening when he left the park, heavy-laden with a fact remembered on the way. He lacked the price of a two-penny stamp! Not a farthing had he left, nor a thing to pawn, save his long silk purse so ignobly emptied, and that had been his father’s before him. It should not go, even for this; yet the letter must; then how?
He sat down again on a bench; for he was weak for want of food; and in his weakness came a temptation, that was indeed more like an inspiration, so luminous was its flash. He might take his letter and leave it himself in the key-hole of the garden-gate. Why not? Then she would get it at once—that evening.
Why not? He had already given the reasons in the letter itself. And see her he would—he must—if once he got as far as that garden-gate. So the reasons in the letter held very good indeed; and how weak to be himself the first to fly in their face! But then weakness was his present portion, whereas the temptation grew stronger and stronger: only to see her face once more; only to hear her voice, although it lashed him with the reproaches he so richly deserved! Yet he did not give in without a kind of struggle. He had become a gambler, and a gambler’s compromise occurred to him now.
This was when the yellow London sun was setting, a little after seven o’clock; about twenty minutes past, several of the better-favoured pedestrians in Pall Mall were accosted by a timid ragamuffin with a ghastly face, who begged the loan of a penny, and was rightly treated to deaf ears. But at length a dapper young man, in a long bottle-green coat, wheeled round with an oath and a twinkling eye.
“Lend you one!” cried he. “I like that! What d’ye mean by it, eh?”
“What I say. I ask the loan of the smallest coin you’ve got—and your pardon for the liberty.”
“Pray when shall I see it again?”
“In half a minute.”
“Half a what? Well, you’re a rum ‘un, you are; here’s your brown.”
“Thank you,” said Erichsen, and balanced it on his right thumbnail. “Now you stand by and see fair play. Heads I go and tails I don’t; sudden death; let it fall clear!”
His beggar’s manners (such as these were) had been forgotten on the instant. The coin rang upon the paving-stone with his words.
“Heads it is!” cried the owner, on his haunches, with his fine long coat in the dust.
“Then I’m unspeakably obliged to you,” replied the fervent beggar, returning the penny. “I wish you goodnight, sir, with a thousand thanks!”
“No, no; hang it all! I’m a sportsman myself; you’re a man of my kidney, and you hadn’t even a brown to toss with! Oblige me by taking this yellow-boy; no, curse it, I beg your pardon—I might have seen! At least, sir, you will join me at the tavern, to show there’s no ill-feeling? A cut off the joint, I think, and a tankard of stout; what say you? I feel peckish myself. Come, come, or you’ll offend me!”
But the eyes which his miseries had left dry were dim again at the kindness of the world; and Tom Erichsen had not spoken because he could not. “May I live to repay this!” he muttered now. “It will be my first bite since yesterday.”
And in another hour it was a new man who was pushing forward, with such brisk steps, upon the high road to Avenue Lodge and his appointed fate.
Moreover, the currents of other lives than his had been deflected, for good or evil, by the spin of that borrowed coin.
Chapter 2 The Other Lives
The household at Avenue Lodge consisted at this period of Nicholas Harding, M. P., J. P. (also of Fish Street Hill, E. C., and Winwood Hall, Suffolk); his five daughters; his men-servants and maid-servants, and a certain stranger within his gates.
Nicholas Harding was fifty years of age, and a widower for the second time. He was a big, blond, jovial, loud, overbearing man, without a grey hair in his massive, reddish head, or a sign of sorrow upon his healthy, pink, domineering face. Yet private bereavement was not the only misfortune that had fallen to a lot otherwise enviable enough: since the last General Election, a little charge of flagrant bribery had found its way even to an assize court, where it had indeed broken down, but not in a fashion wholly satisfactory to the accused.
An important witness had refused to open his mouth, as some said because he was well paid by Mr. Harding to keep it shut and endure the penalty; in any event, the charge was not permitted to be withdrawn, but the action merely dismissed, to allow of a new trial of which nothing had been heard up to the present time. But a naked sword thus dangled over Nicholas Harding’s ruddy, hard head, whose true temper the situation served to prove. So far from resigning his seat, he returned to the House with a shrug and a half-smile; and in the whole matter continued to bear himself with such modest gallantry as to remove the prejudices of many who had at first sided with the enemy.
Among his own Suffolk constituents the popular sympathy had been his from the beginning; and in London itself the feeling gained ground that a judgment which neither convicted nor exonerated was a judgment to be repudiated by all fair-minded persons. Ex-Ministers said or wrote as much to Mr. Harding (who belonged to the fashionable Opposition) in as many words. Cockaded coachmen were once more directed to drive to his house. Invitations were received which were worth receiving; and thus encouraged, Mr. Harding sent out invitations in return. He had deemed it inexpedient to entertain much of late; and even now it was a very judicious selection of his friends that was bidden to quite a small dinner party on the last Wednesday in April; while his sister, Lady Starkie, was called up from Bath to play hostess for the occasion.
“On any other,” wrote her brother, “Claire would do very well. But the enemy may blaspheme the less if you are here. I want you to see Claire. She is greatly improved since you were with us last.”
“It is the enemy that hath done this thing,” replied Lady Starkie; “those wicked Radicals, how I should like to transport the whole crew! Of course I will come. Why isn’t Claire married? She must be getting on in years.”
She was not yet twenty-one. The only child of his first wife, Claire had never occupied the place of younger ones in her father’s affections; had been consistently repressed in childhood; but had since contrived to please that critic by her clever management of an enlarged establishment. Indeed, the girl had come home from school very capable and shrewd and self-possessed, with an admirable drawing-room manner, and even better qualities of which Mr. Harding would have thought less; so they were carefully hidden from his view; for Claire had also her faults, and was both secretive and politic in the home circle, as a result of that early repression and injustice. Given that cause and this effect, and some clandestine folly may be counted upon in nine cases out of ten, and Claire’s was not the tenth.
It came about at Winwood Hall, the Suffolk shooting-box where the family had spent the last three autumns. Nicholas Harding had begun there in characteristic fashion by quarrelling with the gentle, white-haired parson (who would yet be neither domineered nor overborne by an interloping Londoner), and by forbidding his daughters the church, glebe, rectory, or any communication with its inmates from that day forth. A week or two later he came full upon Claire and the rector’s idle son comparing notes in the lane; and a pretty scene ensued. Mr. Harding shook his stick at the lad, who snatched it from him and snapped it across his knee. Claire was imprisoned under lock and key for four-and-twenty hours, and young Erichsen shinned up the waterspout and sat on her window-sill while the rest were at dinner. But this and succeeding incidents never came to the ears of Nicholas Harding. And partly in revenge for the indignity to which she had been subjected, and partly by reason of those adventitious traits already touched upon, the motherless and then all but friendless Claire disobeyed and intrigued thenceforward without a qualm.
The callow pair had enough in common: the girl had suffered from a step-mother, the lad was suffering from one then. In his old age Mr. Erichsen had married a managing woman thirty years his junior; and the blackness by her embedded in Tom Erichsen’s heart had known no relief till Claire Harding lit up his life. Claire understood; she sympathised, she soothed, she softened. And though so stealthily employed, her influence was all for good. Tom put his soul in her keeping, and made a great effort to run straight at college for her sake; but was nevertheless rusticated in the spring; and was absent, penitently reading, all the autumn following, when they never met. A year later the rector was in his own churchyard, and Tom a broken-hearted lodger in the village. Mrs. Erichsen had gone her way; and Tom was going his, to India, where through her unlooked-for interest a berth had been obtained for him in a Calcutta counting-house. A hundred guineas for outfit and passage-money was his only picking from the good old man’s estate; and it was a loan.
Tom said his long good-bye to Winwood just three days after the Hardings arrived. But in those three days Claire and he made many noble vows, and parted in a storm of tears. And there ended the first chapter of their secret history.
The single page known to Nicholas Harding was a thing of the past in his mind. He never thought of it now, and for the best of reasons. He firmly believed that Claire intended to marry an entirely different person, of whom he himself most cordially approved; and it made him for the first time as cordially approve of Claire.
And Claire on a sudden divined it all, and saw (also for the first time) the false position in which she had placed herself; and yet never regretted it, but rather gloried in having the least little thing to suffer for Tom’s sake.
Now, the other man in her mind, and in Nicholas Harding’s too, was the Stranger within their Gates.
James Edward William, Sir Emilius Daintree’s son, and heir to the baronetcy and entailed estates, was a melancholy, brooding bachelor little worse than thirty years of age. Unlike Mr. Harding, however, he looked much older, with his swarthy, saturnine countenance, and the white threads in the coal-black whiskers that curled beneath his deep-set chin. His lines had fallen in very different places from those of Mr. Harding; he had spent most of his restless life abroad. His soul had been burdened with a very different temperament; he had that of a poet; and his manhood had been poisoned at the fount by one of those wretched family quarrels which redound to nobody’s credit, and of which the outside world never get the rights. It was only known that Sir Emilius and his son had not been on speaking terms for years.
Such sympathy as is felt in these matters was entirely on the side of the son. The present baronet was not a popular man. His character was eccentric, and his morals so notorious that in many quarters the quarrel was from the first considered creditable to young Daintree. When, however, after an absence of eight years, the latter came home on leave from New South Wales, where he was a magistrate and a man of some importance and more promise in the young colony; and when the old savage, his father, not only still refused a reconciliation, but publicly cut his son on every possible occasion, then—well, the indignation might have been greater had James Daintree been himself a more popular man. But the truth was, he had come home a morbid, sensitive misanthropist; and this treatment made him ten times worse. He was seldom seen by his old friends anywhere; but he happened to make a stanch new one in the person of Nicholas Harding, whose house, indeed, became the wanderer’s home.
Claire’s attitude will be readily apprehended. Daintree opened his bruised heart to her, and she considered his father the most abominable old man alive. It was at Avenue Lodge that a parcel of faded flowers arrived for Daintree, and drove him almost crazy with rage and grief. He had placed them a day or two before upon his mother’s grave. He burst into a storm of oaths and tears before the girl, who thought the worse of him for neither. Lady Daintree had died the year before; in fact it was her death that had brought the outcast home, for the reconciliation for which he pleaded in vain.
He had the sympathy of all who knew him; that of Claire was spontaneous and heartfelt and frank; but it never blinded her to Daintree’s faults, which were those of a warped, egotistical, but yet an ardent nature. She cured him of one or two. But he was a man with a weight upon his soul, and she could not cure him of that. She was not told enough. After all, too, her head and her heart were full of another. And thus she was slower to detect the new lover in the new friend than would or could have been the case in normal circumstances.
Indeed it might never have dawned upon her until he spoke, but for the calling in of Lady Starkie to lend her distinguished countenance to the first dinner-party given by Nicholas Harding after his late ordeal. Lady Starkie was a lieutenant-general’s widow, and at all events a shrewd woman of the world.
“My dear,” said she, after luncheon, “that young man never took his eyes off you once, and you never once looked him in the face. You are in love at last!—you both are!”
“Aunt Emily!” cried Claire, aghast but scarlet.
“Hoity-toity!” exclaimed the old lady; “nothing escapesme. My dear, you will do very well; a very interesting face and an admirable family,malgréthat atrocious Sir Emilius, who won’t live for ever. No, no, he can’t keep that pace up much longer at his age; and then every mortal thing will be this young man’s and yours!”
“But —aunt! indeed you are mistaken. I—I don’t love him one atom! Such a thing has never entered my head.”
“Then may I ask what kept you awake all night?” was the bland inquiry. “My dear, you have a tell-tale face! I remarked it instantly: you cannot have slept a wink till morning!”
It was true; she had not; but then she had seen Tom Erichsen near Hyde Park Corner when she pictured him in Calcutta. And that was not all. She had pressed him for his address, and then written him a letter which had made her feel hot or cold ever since. The glow was from conscious pride in her own full, free, selfless love; the shiver from a new-born doubt of his, begotten by haunting memories of his face. And the more Claire thought of it the less could she fathom his still being in London, and so shabby. And she had thought of it all night long.
“I had things on my mind,” she now confessed; “but Mr. Daintree wasn’t one of them.”
“Then it’s somebody else,” reflected Lady Starkie, with half-shut eyes upon the girl’s dry lips and burning cheeks. “Who is this Captain Blaydes I hear so much about?” she asked aloud.
“Another friend of papa’s.”
“Another new friend?”
“Newer than Mr. Daintree. He comes to see papa on business. But I have had him a good deal on my hands; too much, for my taste.”
“You don’t like him, then?”
“Hate him!” said the girl, with sudden vehemence, her mind for once detaching itself from Tom. “There, it’s out: I never said it to anybody else, but it’s what I feel. Last week when Mr. Daintree wasn’t with us, Captain Blaydes was, and had his room. Aunt Emily, I want you to know about him; he was a horrid guest— insolent to the servants—forward with me—and more presuming with papa than any man I have ever seen. Yet papa vowed he was the best of fellows—and looked miserable all the week! And I was told to be civil to him or to leave the house myself. I want to know what it all means: no good, I’ll be bound. What should you say, Aunt Emily? We have had trouble enough lately; heaven knows, we want no more. And yet I had the strongest instinct about this man— that he was here for no good!”
“He is not coming to-night, I hope?”
“Yes, he is; but luckily not until after dinner. He could not get here in time. The Bury St. Edmunds coach—”
“He is coming from there!” cried Lady Starkie. “Then, my dear, you may be sure he has had some hand in that wretched election business! It is not over yet, Claire; you must endure such people until it is. But why have him to-night?”
“You may well ask! Papa expects him.”
“Well, it is a pity. Indeed, in my opinion, this dinner-party is a little premature— considering everything. However, let us only make it a success!”
Chapter 3 The New Lover
A success it proved to be—the dinner-party—but it was neither Claire nor yet Lady Starkie who made it one. It was Nicholas Harding himself. His laugh was louder and more infectious than ever, his face an even healthier pink, and his little jokes were both felicitous and incessant, even when he was busy carving the haunch. He cracked several at the expense of Ministers, and two or three at his own.
“I only hope one thing,” said he, pausing in those obsolete labours. “I only hope they send me to Botany Bay! My friend Daintree has promised to give me another chance there as chief butler in his establishment. And so I may hope—ha! ha! —to carve my way back to decent society—ha! ha! ha!”
The spirit of such jests made up for the letter. The party had been so carefully chosen that nothing offended or fell flat, and the general good-humour never flagged. Even Claire had light-hearted moments during dinner. Daintree had taken her in, and he talked to her so much about his lovely, lonely home on Port Jackson’s shores (once the subject was started) that he quite forgot to carve the fowls which had been placed in front of him, and a reprimand from the head of the table set everybody laughing. Daintree joined in with what grace he might; he was too self-conscious to enter into the spirit of such chaff, and very soon he was once more edifying Claire by talking entirely about himself in his deep, confidential, serious voice. The girl struck him as less sympathetic than he had ever known her. Of course, her wits were all at nine o’clock and the meadow gate. But Daintree put his own construction upon her altered manner, and tore his nails beneath the table-cloth, and made up his sombre mind to a bold, immediate course.
So when Claire had left a drawing-roomful of ladies under her aunt’s providential wing, and had set a first trembling foot upon the lawn behind the house, a long swift stride overtook her, and there was Daintree at her side—with the night’s wine-bibbing but just begun.
“Mr. Daintree!” she exclaimed aghast.
“Yes! I also have escaped,” he said. “I made my excuses. The room was hot, but your father understood. I wanted to talk to you.”
“To me? Why, you have been talking to me for the last two hours!”
And, emboldened by very nervousness, she looked up at him with a shake of her ringlets unwittingly coquettish; and he down on her with all the devouring desire of his gloomy, passionate soul. Upon the lawn there was no light save that from a dozen of brilliant windows; and Claire’s face was to it, and Daintree’s back. Yet it might have been the other way about, for her emotion he never saw, while his was but too apparent to her keener woman’s eye.
“You came out for a breath of air,” said he. “Let me come with you.”
“I was going to the arbour,” she replied. “I left a book there this afternoon.”
It was true enough; but the arbour was on the way to the paddock gate; she had left her book there for a cunning excuse against some such need as this. And now he was coming with her; she could not prevent it; and Tom already at the gate!
They walked in silence across the smooth damp grass.
It was a summer night come a month too soon, and with the greater fragrance from the porous earth. The stars were white and bright, and the air so mild and sweet that the Southern Cross might have twinkled with the rest. Daintree stood aside at the arbour steps, then followed Claire and filled the doorway with his powerful frame.
“I wanted to speak to you,” he repeated pointedly, as she found her book. “I say your father understood. I had spoken to him already. Claire—Claire—will you be my wife?”
The book dropped.
“Mr. Daintree!” she gasped, and took a terrified step towards the obstructed doorway.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, entering immediately.
“There, you are free to run away. Yet I think you will hear me out. Your attention, at all events, I may claim without presumption!”
“Oh, yes,” said Claire. “I will listen—I will listen.” She knew that touchy tone of his so well; but it was dropped now in a moment.
“God bless you for that,” he broke out, hoarsely—“even for that! Only listen to me; that is all I ask. I know I am not a likely sort of man for a young girl like you. I am years older than you are. I look older still—I’m a hundred at heart—but you would make a new man of me. I should be born again. Oh, listen, for pity’s sake, and let me speak my heart! It has been bursting with love of you so long! Whatever your answer, you must hear me out. Claire, I am not a bad man—I really am not; but I have never been myself all these years. My life has been all bitterness, my very soul is steeped in it. Everything has been disappointment, disillusion, disgust, and distrust! You know the sort of life I have led—a wanderer, an exile like Byron, an outcast from my own home. It has spoiled me. I know that well enough. I have never had a chance; but you would give me one. You would make the man I might have been before this. I have talent—perhaps something more—I may say so freely to you. I spoke of Byron. I am nearer him than any man alive. There are those who do not put me second. But all my powers have been wasted, like my life; how that had been wasted I never knew until I met you. Claire—my darling!—you have made a new man of me as it is. I am no longer the bitter fellow I was when first God brought you into my life. You have changed me; you have changed all life and all the world. You are the one thing left in either that is all good, all pure, all noble; and I want you, I want you, I want you with all my heart and soul and being! Come to me, and by your help I may still leave the world the better and the richer for my presence; leave me lonely, and I am lost and ruined both here and in the world to come!”
He ceased; and Claire heard him shaking all over in a palsy of passionate desire. His passion frightened her, and yet won somewhat of her respect without for a moment blinding her to its glaring egotism. It was none the less genuine on that account; on the contrary, there was a convincing honesty in the utter absence of altruistic pretensions; and, for the rest, Claire did feel herself the possessor of a certain power for good over this man. But that power could only go out from her with her love.
And that love belonged already to a spirit as wild as Daintree’s, but lighter, brighter, and if not incomparably braver and manlier, then changed indeed.
She rose and laid a hand upon the trembling arm, and very gently said: “You have paid me the greatest compliment, Mr. Daintree, which they say a man can pay a woman. You know that I like you. Indeed there is no one for whom I feel a heartier sympathy. But love you I do not—it is best to be perfectly frank.”
“You do not!” he only said.
“And I never can.”—
“Why never?” he cried irritably. “What do you mean by saying that? Is my family not good enough for you? Am I not clever enough?” In the midst of his love-making he had lost his temper, but Claire was at once too proud and too kind to rebuke this ebullition; and presently he continued in a merely injured tone, “It isn’t as if I was obliged to go back to New South Wales. Why should I? It would be a wretched place for you, and I am sick of it. I thought I could never bear this cruel old country again; but I could—I can—with you!” He would not see that he had got his answer. An overweening vanity was among his salient faults.
“It can never be,” repeated Claire, decidedly.
“But why never? That’s what I can’t fathom. There is no one else, is there?”
“There —is.”
In an instant he dropped the hand which he had just taken, and which she had not the heart to withdraw. His trembling ceased. She heard him breathing hard and through his teeth.
“I might have known it!” he said bitterly at length; and that was all.
“You could not—” she was beginning penitently, but he cut her short.
“I could!” he cried. “It has been so all my life; disappointment has been my daily bread. No doubt it was ordained and is all for the best! Anything else might turn my brain!”
“I am very sorry,” murmured poor Claire. “I am more sorry than I can ever say.”
“You may be,” was the quick retort. “You had this and that to gain.”
The girl’s blood was up at last; her lips parted and her eyes flashed; but she could not condescend to his weapons. “I am going back to the house,” was all she said, as she caught up her rustling skirts. “Excuse me, Mr. Daintree.”
“No, I shall not excuse you!” he answered, barring her way. “It is you who must excuse me first. God forgive me, I never meant to say such things! I hardly know what Iamsaying. I am wild and mad for love of you, Claire. And I shall win you yet—I shall win you yet—even if I have to wait a lifetime! You were made for me. I refuse to do without you.Heshall not have you, whoever he is! And you must forgive me for that, too,” he added, with sudden humility, and he stood aside. “But it is none the less a fact!” he hissed as suddenly through his teeth.
They were his last words; she did not heed them, but gave him her warm soft hand in the kindest manner imaginable.
“We will forgive each other,” she said gently, “as we pray to be forgiven ourselves!”
And so she left him on the arbour steps—a pillar of vain and gloomy passion— indistinct in the starlight, but quivering again—all six feet and fifteen stone of him—with the grievous burden of his stubborn love.
Chapter 4 The Old Love
The garden was the ordinary narrow one, but with top-heavy additions beyond and behind its neighbour on either side. And the arbour was (so to speak) in the bottle’s neck: there was no getting to the meadow without passing within a yard or two of its rustic portal.
There was, however, a shallow shrubbery down either wall of the original garden; and when Daintree had been alone about a minute, the laurels on his left began a risky rustle in the still evening air. Luckily, he was already in too deep a contemplation of his last and angriest wound to hear aught but the girl’s voice and his own still ringing through the arbour. But as for Claire, one moment she held her breath in horrid certainty that he had heard; in another she was satisfied that he had not; and had forgotten his existence the next. Indeed, by the time she looked upon the meadow, asleep beneath its soft grey coverlet of dew, the wide world contained but one live man, and he was at the gate upon the farther side.
Yet was he? Round the meadow ran a gravel path, upon which she thought her feet pattered loud enough for all the world to hear. Then she dropped the key in reaching it from its accustomed crevice and it rang upon the gravel, and in her nervousness she was an age fumbling at the lock. Yet no sound of hers brought a word of greeting from the other side. He had not come! As she pulled the gate open she felt certain of it; and then beheld and heard him, advancing shyly through the sibilant grass, with some white thing in his hand, and a young moon just risen over Primrose Hill.
“Tom!” she cried softly. “You are come! Oh, thank God! I have kept you—”
The words failed upon her parted lips. He stood askance before her, shamefaced and never noticing her tremulous, outstretched hands. His own held out to her a folded note.
“Read that,” he said hoarsely. “I am only here because I had not money for the stamp!”
A great chill struck to the girl’s loyal heart. It was the doubt that had kept her awake; now a doubt no more. Her trembling ceased; she turned her back on Erichsen, and read by the moonlight the candid words that he had written in St. James’s Park.
He watched her with scarce a breath. His eyes lived upon her while they might. Her face had been turned away before he had the courage to raise his; but there was the white neck tapering to the nut-brown hair, the little ears half-hidden by ringlets, the thoughtful poise of the lithe, light body, all just as he had them by heart. The white arms struck him as a little thin, but then he had never before seen her in full evening dress. She was wearing pink crêpe over white satin, high Venetian sleeves, and feathery fringes of pink and white satin rouleau; it was one more picture of her, and he thought the sweetest of all, to hang with the many already in his mind.
Meanwhile she had never turned her head; but now it drooped a little; and those snowy shoulders were heaving with suppressed sobs.
In an instant he was at her side; the next, she had turned to him with shining eyes and yearning arms.
“My own poor boy!” she whispered through her tears. “Oh, thank heaven you had no money for those stamps!”
“Claire!” he gasped, falling back; “do not speak to me like that. I am not worthy—you don’t understand. You should go your way and never think of me again.”
“There is somebody else,” said the girl, calmly.
“That I love? No, indeed!”
“You are not married?”
“God forbid.”
“Then you have changed your mind. Well, if it makes you happier, dear, I can bear that too. I love you well enough—”
“Hush!” he said hoarsely, “it is not that. I love you, too, my darling—ah! God knows how truly now! Yet I have come to contemptible grief; I have been everything that’s bad. What value can there be in such a love?”
“I don’t know—still less care! It is all the love I want—it’s good enough for me!” she whispered; and with a deep, sweet sigh she hid her face against his shabby shoulder. He touched the dainty head with his hand, but not his lips. His eyes were fixed upon the moon, that was like a golden curl astray in night’s tresses; and his handsome, haggard face was discoloured and deformed with this the quintessence of his discreditable woes.
“Good enough for you—of all women!” he bitterly repeated. “My love for you! Didn’t I tell you I was no longer worthy of even your friendship? That was the truth; every word in my letter is the literal truth. I have never looked at anybody else—to love them—but oh! oh! my love for you has been a poor thing. It didn’t prevent me from going to the bad. You loved me; and yet I came to this!”
He groaned again. She said nothing, but caught his hand and pressed it. The pressure he returned.
“Oh, Claire,” he cried, “it was madness, I think! I was mad at leaving you and Old England, perhaps for ever. And the ship wouldn’t sail, Claire, the ship wouldn’t sail! When I went to the office, thinking I had about three days, they told me she would be three weeks. I walked out of that office swearing I’d find some other; but all I found was the road to the bad. Drink and dice and cards! You asked me to tell you all. I tell you all I can. I tell it you to set you against me and make you hate me for ever. That is the kindest thing.... Claire, Claire, why don’t you strike me? Why don’t you scorn me and leave me to my fate? Oh, oh, I could bear it better than this!”
Her warm arms were about him. They clasped him tight. He could hear her heart and his own beating close together.
Suddenly she stood apart from him, with small clenched fists glittering with rings. He held his breath.
“The man who is at the bottom of all this,” said she: “who is he? How was it? You speak of him in your letter: tell me more.”
Tom shrugged his shoulders.
“What is the use? The thing is done; it’s past mending; and it was my own miserable fault. Most of my money went in fair play and—riot! He only relieved me of the residue. Yet I tell you, Claire” (with sudden fury), “I’d go contentedly to my account if I could only kick him along in front of me the whole way! Yes, I’d hang for the hound, and think the satisfaction cheap at the price!”
“What is his name?” demanded Claire.
“Blaydes!” said Tom; “B-l-a-y-d-e-s. Captain Blaydes, forsooth, on half-pay! Blaydes of the Guards, who disgraced themselves for all time by not—”
He broke off and stood looking at the girl.
“By not what?” whispered Claire, who had glanced involuntarily through the gate towards the distant lighted windows, and who was now trembling again, with a new and dreadful agitation.
“By not cashieringyour friendCaptain Blaydes!”
“He is no friend of mine.”
“But I see you know him.”
“Yes —I just know him.”
“He is at your house to-night!” cried Erichsen, with uncontrolled excitement.
“No —he is not. We have had a dinner-party, but he was not there. I slipped out afterwards—I dare not stay long.” This to explain that incriminating backward glance.
“Then give me his address!”
“Tom —I cannot.”
“You cannot? You who said you would do anything in your power to help me? And this is all I ask—this villain’s address! Oh, Claire, he is not fit for you to speak to! Tell me where you met him—what you think of him—and then I will tell you what I know. Oh, if I had him here!”
Claire answered with deliberate reservations. Her duty was clear as the stars. Tom and Blaydes must be kept apart—that night at all events. Then many things must be done, but quietly, and with due forethought. Above all, no fresh fuel must be added to the vindictive fires now smouldering in her lover’s speaking eyes. So Claire decided to keep to herself her own opinion of Captain Blaydes.
She had noticed without comment the heavy stick lying in the grass; she turned faint at the thought of her fiery Tom encountering the Captain so armed and so aggrieved. But she insisted on his telling her of his wrong; at first he refused.
“Very well,” he said at last, “I’ll tell you, so that you may see how I have been cheated; then I think you won’t refuse to help me lay hands upon the cheat. It’s a long story, but I’ll cut it as short as I can. He had rooked me down to the last five-pound note. With that I had a little luck. I had won back five-and-thirty before we stopped playing, and Blaydes had lost more to the others than to me. He paid them in ready money. He said they were only acquaintances—his confederates!—while I was his friend. So we went back to our lodgings, and he wrote me a cheque for thirty-five pounds, with which I could have gone out to India after all, quite as comfortably as I deserved. But in the morning he had bad news, and had to go into the country, and he begged me not to cash the cheque till the end of the month; he was hard up himself. And I was loyal to the blackguard; and I needn’t tell you what happened when time was up. His cheque was a dummy; he had never had a penny in the bank it was drawn on! So I wrote to his club again and again, and used to go there and watch for him, till the porters had me moved on by the police. The month was last October. I have heard and seen nothing of him from that day to this. And to think he is in London, and you know both him and his address! You’ll give it to me now, Claire, I know!”
She steadfastly refused, and gave her reasons; then he promised not to seek an interview with Blaydes for two clear days, and not to harm him then; and on this understanding she at last confessed that the Captain had taken rooms for the summer in the village of West End—a bare mile from where they stood.
But first she wanted him to give her the flash cheque, and let her fight his battle with Blaydes; and this she still intended to do—that very night.
They had finished with Blaydes, however, and were beginning to say good-bye, when Claire started, and vowed she heard a rustle at the gate. At that instant there came a breath of wind; the gate shut with a clean metallic click; she was locked out, for on this side there was only the key-hole, and the key was within.
“What shall I do?” she cried. “Oh, what shall I do?”
“Have courage,” he answered, “and a little patience.” He was over the wall and back at her side within the minute. She was trembling terribly. All her nerve seemed gone. She must fly—she must fly—but he would come again the next evening? And again she was looking up divinely in his eyes, his right hand clasped in both of hers; and again the burden of past weakness bowed him down; but this time there was a counterpoise of hope and high resolve, a vision of atonement and self-respect regained, that gave to his voice a clearer, manlier note, and to Claire, in the thin moonlight, a first and last glimpse of the Tom Erichsen of Winwood uplands and red autumn afternoons. But it was now her turn to be refused.
“No, Claire,” he said, “I am coming back no more. You have put it in my power not only to have my little own again, but to redeem the past, and I must set to work at once. If I don’t get that thirty-five pounds now, you may hear of me next in Horsemonger Lane! If I do, there’s an Indiaman—theJean— sailing on Monday; and I sail in her if there’s a steerage berth still going. At all events my debts here will be paid and done with; there may even be a few pounds over to make me decent when I land; and if that firm won’t have me now, some other may. You shall hear of me from there. There are not going to be two false starts. And one day, Claire, I am coming back a better man than I go away; and it will all be thanks to you! Oh, thank you for your noble letter! It has saved me on the brink, little as I deserved it. I shall never stoop or sink —like this—again. That I promise you. But you should think no more of me! I was never worthy of you—I never can be that! It is best to forget me, dear; you must not spoil your life by waiting for a man—”
Her palm sealed his lips.
“For the only man I want,” she whispered through her tears. “Darling I could wait for ever!”
“I will write and tell you about the thirty-five pounds,” he continued, regaining control of his voice. “It will be all your doing, my own brave Claire. No! no! not my own! never that any more!”
“For ever, darling! For ever, and ever, and ever!”
“No! no! Only be happy yourself, and forgive me for all I made you suffer. I shall never forgive myself. Good-bye, beloved. Oh, good-bye, good-bye!”
He strained her to his breast, but left no kiss upon those pleading, praying, upturned lips. He was not worthy to touch them with his. He remembered this up to the end.
She leaned against the cold wall as he darted from her. The last thing she saw him do was to pick up the thick stick she had noticed lying in the grass; and that sinister final act struck a chill to her heart that was felt at the time, not afterwards imagined. That he could think of such a thing in such an hour! And she locked the gate and hurried down the gravel walks with eyes suddenly dried and a heart already at war with its own warmth. But when she came in sight of the arbour, and had to skulk once more behind the leaves, all in a moment she sounded the depth of her love and found it fathomless; for since the last like manœuvre the thought of Daintree had never once crossed her mind. Indeed he was recalled now chiefly by the smell of a particular cheroot which he smoked incessantly. He was smoking one at this moment in the arbour, where he had remained ever since she left him.
The other gentlemen were still at their wine—in those days they would sit over it till midnight—and Claire went first to her own room, which she gained unobserved. Here she changed her slippers for a precisely similar pair; also her stockings, which were wet to the ankles. Then she rang for her maid.
A pallid young woman, with black eyes set close together beneath a stunted brow, knocked promptly at the door, and entered with a downcast glance which swept straight to her mistress’s feet.
“Has Captain Blaydes arrived?”
The black eyes gleamed. “I haven’t heard, miss; shall I see?”
“Be so good, Hannah.”
In a minute Hannah returned.
“No, miss, he has not.”
“Thank you, Hannah, that will do.”
And Claire returned to the drawing-room after a truant hour, which, however, Daintree’s simultaneous absence from the dining-table explained satisfactorily enough to Lady Starkie and Mr. Harding. On her way Claire met the latter face to face in the hall. He was stark sober; indeed, his fresh face had lost colour, which was never the case in his cups.
“Seen anything of Blaydes?” he cried out to Claire, who started at the question, and then at her father’s face.—
“Nothing, papa: indeed, I hear he has not come.”
“So do I. That’s just it; that’s just it!” repeated Mr. Harding, looking at his watch; and his hand was as unsteady as his voice was clear.
“I think he cannot be coming at all,” remarked Claire, innocently; and she never knew why her father turned so abruptly upon his heel; but his face was still ghastly when he rejoined his gentlemen, and the bumper of port which he tossed off left it ghastlier yet.
It was twenty minutes past ten by the ormolu clock upon the chimney-piece when Claire Harding re-entered the drawing-room.
It was twenty minutes past ten by Captain Blaydes’s gold repeater when through the window of a hackney-coach, creeping all too slowly along the Finchley Road, the Captain recognised a wayfarer who also recognised him, and thrust his iron-grey head through the opposite window to curse the coachman and bid him drive faster.
As he pulled it in again Tom Erichsen scrambled into the coach upon the other side, an unpleasant smile upon his set face and his thick stick in his hand. He had not promised to avoid Blaydes if chance threw them together, and chance had done so, for Tom was on his way to make his bed once more in the fields.
“You infernal ruffian,” roared the Captain. “Hi! coachman, the police!”
“You miserable swindler,” retorted Tom, “if you don’t stop the coach at once and step outside with me you’re a ruined man. I’ll go on to the Hardings with you and expose you—”
“The Hardings!”
“Yes; you see, I know all your little plans.”
“Little plans!!”
The Captain gasped and stopped the coach.
Chapter 5 A Bloodless Victory
The half-pay officer was a thick-set, youngish man, with a smooth, sly, yellow face, and hair like spun steel. He walked with a chronic limp and a stout, gold-headed cane, and was seldom without the genial, flattering smile that had tempted Tom Erichsen, and other young flies before him, into a parlour from which no pocket returned intact.
