Lucretia — Complete

CHAPTER XI. LOVE AND INNOCENCE

During this conference between these execrable and ravening birds of night and prey, Helen and her boy-lover were thus conversing in the garden; while the autumn sun—for it was in the second week of October—broke pleasantly through the yellowing leaves of the tranquil shrubs, and the flowers, which should have died with the gone summer, still fresh by tender care, despite the lateness of the season, smiled gratefully as their light footsteps passed.

“Yes, Helen,” said Percival,—“yes, you will love my mother, for she is one of those people who seem to attract love, as if it were a property belonging to them. Even my dog Beau (you know how fond Beau is of me!) always nestles at her feet when we are at home. I own she has pride, but it is a pride that never offended any one. You know there are some flowers that we call proud. The pride of the flower is not more harmless than my mother’s. But perhaps pride is not the right word,—it is rather the aversion to anything low or mean, the admiration for everything pure and high. Ah, how that very pride—if pride it be—will make her love you, my Helen!”

“You need not tell me,” said Helen, smiling seriously, “that I shall love your mother,—I love her already; nay, from the first moment you said you had a mother, my heart leaped to her. Your mother,—if ever you are really jealous, it must be of her! But that she should love me,—that is what I doubt and fear. For if you were my brother, Percival, I should be so ambitious for you. A nymph must rise from the stream, a sylphid from the rose, before I could allow another to steal you from my side. And if I think I should feel this only as your sister, what can be precious enough to satisfy a mother?”

“You, and you only,” answered Percival, with his blithesome laugh,—“you, my sweet Helen, much better than nymph or sylphid, about whom, between ourselves, I never cared three straws, even in a poem. How pleased you will be with Laughton! Do you know, I was lying awake all last night to consider what room you would like best for your own? And at last I have decided. Come, listen,—it opens from the music-gallery that overhangs the hall. From the window you overlook the southern side of the park, and catch a view of the lake beyond. There are two niches in the wall,—one for your piano, one for your favourite books. It is just large enough to hold four persons with ease,—our mother and myself, your aunt, whom by that time we shall have petted into good humour; and if we can coax Ardworth there,—the best good fellow that ever lived,—I think our party will be complete. By the way, I am uneasy about Ardworth, it is so long since we have seen him; I have called three times,—nay, five,—but his odd-looking clerk always swears he is not at home. Tell me, Helen, now you know him so well,—tell me how I can serve him? You know, I am so terribly rich (at least, I shall be in a month or two), I can never get through my money, unless my friends will help me. And is it not shocking that that noble fellow should be so poor, and yet suffer me to call him ‘friend,’ as if in friendship one man should want everything, and the other nothing? Still, I don’t know how to venture to propose. Come, you understand me, Helen; let us lay our wise heads together and make him well off, in spite of himself.”

It was in this loose boyish talk of Percival that he had found the way, not only to Helen’s heart, but to her soul. For in this she (grand, undeveloped poetess!) recognized a nobler poetry than we chain to rhythm,—the poetry of generous deeds. She yearned to kiss the warm hand she held, and drew nearer to his side as she answered: “And sometimes, dear, dear Percival, you wonder why I would rather listen to you than to all Mr. Varney’s bitter eloquence, or even to my dear cousin’s aspiring ambition. They talk well, but it is of themselves; while you—”

Percival blushed, and checked her.

“Well,” she said,—“well, to your question. Alas! you know little of my cousin if you think all our arts could decoy him out of his rugged independence; and much as I love him, I could not wish it. But do not fear for him; he is one of those who are born to succeed, and without help.”

“How do you know that, pretty prophetess?” said Percival, with the superior air of manhood. “I have seen more of the world than you have, and I cannot see why Ardworth should succeed, as you call it; or, if so, why he should succeed less if he swung his hammock in a better berth than that hole in Gray’s Inn, and would just let me keep him a cab and groom.”

Had Percival talked of keeping John Ardworth an elephant and a palaquin, Helen could not have been more amused. She clapped her little hands in a delight that provoked Percival, and laughed out loud. Then, seeing her boy-lover’s lip pouted petulantly, and his brow was overcast, she said, more seriously,—

“Do you not know what it is to feel convinced of something which you cannot explain? Well, I feel this as to my cousin’s fame and fortunes. Surely, too, you must feel it, you scarce know why, when he speaks of that future which seems so dim and so far to me, as of something that belonged to him.”

“Very true, Helen,” said Percival; “he lays it out like the map of his estate. One can’t laugh when he says so carelessly: ‘At such an age I shall lead my circuit; at such an age I shall be rich; at such an age I shall enter parliament; and beyond that I shall look as yet—no farther.’ And, poor fellow, then he will be forty-three! And in the mean while to suffer such privations!”

“There are no privations to one who lives in the future,” said Helen, with that noble intuition into lofty natures which at times flashed from her childish simplicity, foreshadowing what, if Heaven spare her life, her maturer intellect may develop; “for Ardworth there is no such thing as poverty. He is as rich in his hopes as we are in—” She stopped short, blushed, and continued, with downcast looks: “As well might you pity me in these walks, so dreary without you. I do not live in them, I live in my thoughts of you.”

Her voice trembled with emotion in those last words. She slid from Percival’s arm, and timidly sat down (and he beside her) on a little mound under the single chestnut-tree, that threw its shade over the garden.

Both were silent for some moments,—Percival, with grateful ecstasy; Helen, with one of those sudden fits of mysterious melancholy to which her nature was so subjected.

He was the first to speak. “Helen,” he said gravely, “since I have known you, I feel as if life were a more solemn thing than I ever regarded it before. It seems to me as if a new and more arduous duty were added to those for which I was prepared,—a duty, Helen, to become worthy of you! Will you smile? No, you will not smile if I say I have had my brief moments of ambition. Sometimes as a boy, with Plutarch in my hand, stretched idly under the old cedar-trees at Laughton; sometimes as a sailor, when, becalmed on the Atlantic, and my ears freshly filled with tales of Collingwood and Nelson, I stole from my comrades and leaned musingly over the boundless sea. But when this ample heritage passed to me, when I had no more my own fortunes to make, my own rank to build up, such dreams became less and less frequent. Is it not true that wealth makes us contented to be obscure? Yes; I understand, while I speak, why poverty itself befriends, not cripples, Ardworth’s energies. But since I have known you, dearest Helen, those dreams return more vividly than ever. He who claims you should be—must be—something nobler than the crowd. Helen,”—and he rose by an irresistible and restless impulse,—“I shall not be contented till you are as proud of your choice as I of mine!”

It seemed, as Percival spoke and looked, as if boyhood were cast from him forever. The unusual weight and gravity of his words, to which his tone gave even eloquence; the steady flash of his dark eyes; his erect, elastic form,—all had the dignity of man. Helen gazed on him silently, and with a heart so full that words would not come, and tears overflowed instead.

That sight sobered him at once; he knelt down beside her, threw his arms around her,—it was his first embrace,—and kissed the tears away.

“How have I distressed you? Why do you weep?”

“Let me weep on, Percival, dear Percival! These tears are like prayers,—they speak to Heaven—and of you!”

A step came noiselessly over the grass, and between the lovers and the sunlight stood Gabriel Varney.

CHAPTER XII. SUDDEN CELEBRITY AND PATIENT HOPE

Percival was unusually gloomy and abstracted in his way to town that day, though Varney was his companion, and in the full play of those animal spirits which he owed to his unrivalled physical organization and the obtuseness of his conscience. Seeing, at length, that his gayety did not communicate itself to Percival, he paused, and looked at him suspiciously. A falling leaf startles the steed, and a shadow the guilty man.

“You are sad, Percival,” he said inquiringly. “What has disturbed you?”

“It is nothing,—or, at least, would seem nothing to you,” answered Percival, with an effort to smile, “for I have heard you laugh at the doctrine of presentiments. We sailors are more superstitious.”

“What presentiment can you possibly entertain?” asked Varney, more anxiously than Percival could have anticipated.

“Presentiments are not so easily defined, Varney. But, in truth, poor Helen has infected me. Have you not remarked that, gay as she habitually is, some shadow comes over her so suddenly that one cannot trace the cause?”

“My dear Percival,” said Varney, after a short pause, “what you say does not surprise me. It would be false kindness to conceal from you that I have heard Madame Dalibard say that her mother was, when about her age, threatened with consumptive symptoms; but she lived many years afterwards. Nay, nay, rally yourself; Helen’s appearance, despite the extreme purity of her complexion, is not that of one threatened by the terrible malady of our climate. The young are often haunted with the idea of early death. As we grow older, that thought is less cherished; in youth it is a sort of luxury. To this mournful idea (which you see you have remarked as well as I) we must attribute not only Helen’s occasional melancholy, but a generosity of forethought which I cannot deny myself the pleasure of communicating to you, though her delicacy would be shocked at my indiscretion. You know how helpless her aunt is. Well, Helen, who is entitled, when of age, to a moderate competence, has persuaded me to insure her life and accept a trust to hold the moneys (if ever unhappily due) for the benefit of my mother-in-law, so that Madame Dalibard may not be left destitute if her niece die before she is twenty-one. How like Helen, is it not?”

Percival was too overcome to answer.

Varney resumed: “I entreat you not to mention this to Helen; it would offend her modesty to have the secret of her good deeds thus betrayed by one to whom alone she confided them. I could not resist her entreaties, though, entre nous, it cripples me not a little to advance for her the necessary sums for the premiums. Apropos, this brings me to a point on which I feel, as the vulgar idiom goes, ‘very awkward,’—as I always do in these confounded money-matters. But you were good enough to ask me to paint you a couple of pictures for Laughton. Now, if you could let me have some portion of the sum, whatever it be (for I don’t price my paintings to you), it would very much oblige me.”

Percival turned away his face as he wrung Varney’s hand, and muttered, with a choked voice: “Let me have my share in Helen’s divine forethought. Good Heavens! she, so young, to look thus beyond the grave, always for others—for others!”

Callous as the wretch was, Percival’s emotion and his proposal struck Varney with a sentiment like compunction. He had designed to appropriate the lover’s gold as it was now offered; but that Percival himself should propose it, blind to the grave to which that gold paved the way, was a horror not counted in those to which his fell cupidity and his goading apprehensions had familiarized his conscience.

“No,” he said, with one of those wayward scruples to which the blackest criminals are sometimes susceptible,—“no. I have promised Helen to regard this as a loan to her, which she is to repay me when of age. What you may advance me is for the pictures. I have a right to do as I please with what is bought by my own labour. And the subjects of the pictures, what shall they be?”

“For one picture try and recall Helen’s aspect and attitude when you came to us in the garden, and entitle your subject: ‘The Foreboding.’”

“Hem!” said Varney, hesitatingly. “And the other subject?”

“Wait for that till the joy-bells at Laughton have welcomed a bride, and then—and then, Varney,” added Percival, with something of his natural joyous smile, “you must take the expression as you find it. Once under my care, and, please Heaven, the one picture shall laughingly upbraid the other!”

As this was said, the cabriolet stopped at Percival’s door. Varney dined with him that day; and if the conversation flagged, it did not revert to the subject which had so darkened the bright spirits of the host, and so tried the hypocrisy of the guest. When Varney left, which he did as soon as the dinner was concluded, Percival silently put a check into his hands, to a greater amount than Varney had anticipated even from his generosity.

“This is for four pictures, not two,” he said, shaking his head; and then, with his characteristic conceit, he added: “Well, some years hence the world shall not call them overpaid. Adieu, my Medici; a dozen such men, and Art would revive in England.”

When he was left alone, Percival sat down, and leaning his face on both hands, gave way to the gloom which his native manliness and the delicacy that belongs to true affection had made him struggle not to indulge in the presence of another. Never had he so loved Helen as in that hour; never had he so intimately and intensely felt her matchless worth. The image of her unselfish, quiet, melancholy consideration for that austere, uncaressing, unsympathizing relation, under whose shade her young heart must have withered, seemed to him filled with a celestial pathos. And he almost hated Varney that the cynic painter could have talked of it with that business-like phlegm. The evening deepened; the tranquil street grew still; the air seemed close; the solitude oppressed him; he rose abruptly, seized his hat, and went forth slowly, and still with a heavy heart.

As he entered Piccadilly, on the broad step of that house successively inhabited by the Duke of Queensberry and Lord Hertford,—on the step of that mansion up which so many footsteps light with wanton pleasure have gayly trod, Percival’s eye fell upon a wretched, squalid, ragged object, doubled up, as it were, in that last despondency which has ceased to beg, that has no care to steal, that has no wish to live. Percival halted, and touched the outcast.

“What is the matter, my poor fellow? Take care; the policeman will not suffer you to rest here. Come, cheer up, I say! There is something to find you a better lodging!”

The silver fell unheeded on the stones. The thing of rags did not even raise its head, but a low, broken voice muttered,—

“It be too late now; let ‘em take me to prison, let ‘em send me ‘cross the sea to Buttany, let ‘em hang me, if they please. I be ‘s good for nothin’ now,—nothin’!”

Altered as the voice was, it struck Percival as familiar. He looked down and caught a view of the drooping face. “Up, man, up!” he said cheerily. “See, Providence sends you an old friend in need, to teach you never to despair again.”

The hearty accent, more than the words, touched and aroused the poor creature. He rose mechanically, and a sickly, grateful smile passed over his wasted features as he recognized St. John.

“Come! how is this? I have always understood that to keep a crossing was a flourishing trade nowadays.”

“I ‘as no crossin’. I ‘as sold her!” groaned Beck. “I be’s good for nothin’ now but to cadge about the streets, and steal, and filch, and hang like the rest on us! Thank you kindly, sir,” and Beck pulled his forelock, “but, please your honour, I vould rather make an ind on it!”

“Pooh, pooh! didn’t I tell you when you wanted a friend to come to me? Why did you doubt me, foolish fellow? Pick up those shillings; get a bed and a supper. Come and see me to-morrow at nine o’clock; you know where,—the same house in Curzon Street; you shall tell me then your whole story, and it shall go hard but I’ll buy you another crossing, or get you something just as good.”

Poor Beck swayed a moment or two on his slender legs like a drunken man, and then, suddenly falling on his knees, he kissed the hem of his benefactor’s garment, and fairly wept. Those tears relieved him; they seemed to wash the drought of despair from his heart.

“Hush, hush! or we shall have a crowd round us. You’ll not forget, my poor friend, No.—— Curzon Street,—nine to-morrow. Make haste now, and get food and rest; you look, indeed, as if you wanted them. Ah, would to Heaven all the poverty in this huge city stood here in thy person, and we could aid it as easily as I can thee!”

Percival had moved on as he said those last words, and looking back, he had the satisfaction to see that Beck was slowly crawling after him, and had escaped the grim question of a very portly policeman, who had no doubt expressed a natural indignation at the audacity of so ragged a skeleton not keeping itself respectably at home in its churchyard.

Entering one of the clubs in St. James’s Street, Percival found a small knot of politicians in eager conversation respecting a new book which had been published but a day or two before, but which had already seized the public attention with that strong grasp which constitutes always an era in an author’s life, sometimes an epoch in a nation’s literature. The newspapers were full of extracts from the work,—the gossips, of conjecture as to the authorship. We need scarcely say that a book which makes this kind of sensation must hit some popular feeling of the hour, supply some popular want. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, therefore, its character is political; it was so in the present instance. It may be remembered that that year parliament sat during great part of the month of October, that it was the year in which the Reform Bill was rejected by the House of Lords, and that public feeling in our time had never been so keenly excited. This work appeared during the short interval between the rejection of the Bill and the prorogation of parliament [Parliament was prorogued October 20th; the bill rejected by the Lords, October 8th]. And what made it more remarkable was, that while stamped with the passion of the time, there was a weight of calm and stern reasoning embodied in its vigorous periods, which gave to the arguments of the advocate something of the impartiality of the judge. Unusually abstracted and unsocial,—for, despite his youth and that peculiar bashfulness before noticed, he was generally alive enough to all that passed around him,—Percival paid little attention to the comments that circulated round the easy-chairs in his vicinity, till a subordinate in the administration, with whom he was slightly acquainted, pushed a small volume towards him and said,—“You have seen this, of course, St. John? Ten to one you do not guess the author. It is certainly not B——m, though the Lord Chancellor has energy enough for anything. R—— says it has a touch of S——r.”

“Could M——y have written it?” asked a young member of parliament, timidly.

“M——y! Very like his matchless style, to be sure! You can have read very little of M——y, I should think,” said the subordinate, with the true sneer of an official and a critic.