CHAPTER XVIII
Hope, tells a flattering tale to Mr. Rugge. He is undeceived by a solicitor; and left to mourn; but in turn, though unconsciously, Mr. Rugge deceives the solicitor, and the solicitor deceives his client,—which is 6s. 8d. in the solicitor's pocket.
The next morning Arabella Crane was scarcely dressed before Mr. Rugge knocked at her door. On the previous day the detective had informed him that William and Sophy Waife were discovered to have sailed for America. Frantic, the unhappy manager hurried away to the steam-packet office, and was favoured by an inspection of the books, which confirmed the hateful tidings. As if in mockery of his bereaved and defrauded state, on returning home he found a polite note from Mr. Gotobed, requesting him to call at the office of that eminent solicitor, with reference to a young actress, named Sophy Waife, and hinting "that the visit might prove to his advantage!" Dreaming for a wild moment that Mr. Losely, conscience- stricken, might through his solicitor pay back his L100, he rushed incontinent to Mr. Gotobed's office, and was at once admitted into the presence of that stately practitioner.
"I beg your pardon, sir," said Mr. Gotobed, with formal politeness, "but I heard a day or two ago accidentally from my head clerk, who had learned it also accidentally from a sporting friend, that you were exhibiting at Humberston, during the race-week, a young actress, named on the play- bills (here is one) 'Juliet Araminta,' and whom, as I am informed, you had previously exhibited in Surrey and elsewhere; but she was supposed to have relinquished that earlier engagement, and left your stage with her grandfather, William Waife. I am instructed by a distinguished client, who is wealthy, and who from motives of mere benevolence interests himself in the said William and Sophy Waife, to discover their residence. Please, therefore, to render up the child to my charge, apprising me also of the address of her grandfather, if he be not with you; and without waiting for further instructions from my client, who is abroad, I will venture to say that any sacrifice in the loss of your juvenile actress will be most liberally compensated."
"Sir," cried the miserable and imprudent Rugge, "I paid L100 for that fiendish child,—a three years' engagement,—and I have been robbed. Restore me the L100, and I will tell you where she is, and her vile grandfather also."
At hearing so bad a character lavished upon objects recommended to his client's disinterested charity, the wary solicitor drew in his pecuniary horns.
"Mr. Rugge," said he, "I understand from your words that you cannot place the child Sophy, alias Juliet Araminta, in my hands. You ask L100 to inform me where she is. Have you a lawful claim on her?"
"Certainly, sir: she is my property."
"Then it is quite clear that though you may know where she is, you cannot get at her yourself, and cannot, therefore, place her in my hands. Perhaps she 's—in Heaven!"
"Confound her, sir! no—in America! or on the seas to it."
"Are you sure?"
"I have just come from the steam-packet office, and seen the names in their book. William and Sophy Waife sailed from Liverpool last Thursday week."
"And they formed an engagement with you, received your money; broke the one, absconded with the other. Bad characters indeed!"
"Bad! you may well say that,—a set of swindling scoundrels, the whole kit and kin. And the ingratitude!" continued Rugge; "I was more than a father to that child" (he began to whimper); "I had a babe of my own once; died of convulsions in teething. I thought that child would have supplied its place, and I dreamed of the York Theatre; but"—here his voice was lost in the folds of a marvellously dirty red pocket- handkerchief.
Mr. Gotobed having now, however, learned all that he cared to learn, and not being a soft-hearted man (first-rate solicitors rarely are), here pulled out his watch, and said,
"Sir, you have been very ill-treated, I perceive. I must wish you good- day; I have an engagement in the City. I cannot help you back to your L100, but accept this trifle (a L5 note) for your loss of time in calling" (ringing the bell violently). "Door,—show out this gentleman."
That evening Mr. Gotobed wrote at length to Guy Darrell, informing him that, after great pains and prolonged research, he had been so fortunate as to ascertain that the strolling player and the little girl whom Mr. Darrell had so benevolently requested him to look up were very bad characters, and had left the country for the United States, as happily for England bad characters were wont to do.
That letter reached Guy Darrell when he was far away, amidst the forlorn pomp of some old Italian city, and Lionel's tale of the little girl not very fresh in his gloomy thoughts. Naturally, he supposed that the boy had been duped by a pretty face and his own inexperienced kindly heart. And so, and so,—why, so end all the efforts of men who entrust to others the troublesome execution of humane intentions! The scales of earthly justice are poised in their quivering equilibrium, not by huge hundred- weights, but by infinitesimal grains, needing the most wary caution, the most considerate patience, the most delicate touch, to arrange or readjust. Few of our errors, national or individual, come from the design to be unjust; most of them from sloth, or incapacity to grapple with the difficulties of being just. Sins of commission may not, perhaps, shock the retrospect of conscience. Large and obtrusive to view we have confessed, mourned, repented, possibly atoned them. Sins of omission so veiled amidst our hourly emotions, blent, confused, unseen, in the conventional routine of existence,—alas! could these suddenly emerge from their shadow, group together in serried mass and accusing order,—alas, alas! would not the best of us then start in dismay, and would not the proudest humble himself at the Throne of Mercy?
CHAPTER XIX
Joy, nevertheless, does return to Mr. Rugge: and hope now inflicts herself on Mrs. Crane; a very fine-looking hope too,—six feet one, —strong as Achilles, and as fleet of foot!
Buy we have left Mr. Rugge at Mrs. Crane's door; admit him. He bursts into her drawing-room wiping his brows. "Ma'am, they're off to America!"
"So I have heard. You are fairly entitled to the return of your money—"
"Entitled, of course, but—"
"There it is; restore to me the contract for the child's services."
Rugge gazed on a roll of bank-notes, and could scarcely believe his eyes.
He darted forth his hand,—the notes receded like the dagger in Macbeth.
"First the contract," said Mrs. Crane. Rugge drew out his greasy pocketbook, and extracted the worthless engagement.
"Henceforth, then," said Mrs. Crane, "you have no right to complain; and whether or not the girl ever again fall in your way, your claim over her ceases."
"The gods be praised! it does, ma'am, I have had quite enough of her. But you are every inch a lady, and allow me to add that I put you on my free list for life."
Rugge gone, Arabella Crane summoned Bridget to her presence.
"Lor', miss," cried Bridget, impulsively, "who'd think you'd been up all night raking! I have not seen you look so well this many a year."
"Ah," said Arabella Crane, "I will tell you why. I have done what for many a year I never thought I should do again,—a good action. That child,—that Sophy,—do you remember how cruelly I used her?"
"Oh, miss, don't go for to blame yourself; you fed her, you clothed her, when her own father, the villing, sent her away from hisself to you,—you of all people, you. How could you be caressing and fawning on his child,—their child?"
Mrs. Crane hung her head gloomily. "What is past is past. I have lived to save that child, and a curse seems lifted from my soul. Now listen. I shall leave London—England—probably this evening. You will keep this house; it will be ready for me any moment I return. The agent who collects my house-rents will give you money as you want it. Stint not yourself, Bridget. I have been saving and saving and saving for dreary years,—nothing else to interest me, and I am richer than I seem."
"But where are you going, miss?" said Bridget, slowly recovering from the stupefaction occasioned by her mistress's announcement.
"I don't know; I don't care."
"Oh, gracious stars! is it with that dreadful Jasper Losely?—it is, it is. You are crazed, you are bewitched, miss!"
"Possibly I am crazed,—possibly bewitched; but I take that man's life to mine as a penance for all the evil mine has ever known; and a day or two since I should have said, with rage and shame, 'I cannot help it; I loathe myself that I can care what becomes of him.' Now, without rage, without shame, I say, 'The man whom I once so loved shall not die on a gibbet if I can help it' and, please Heaven, help it I will."
The grim woman folded her arms on her breast, and raising her head to its full height, there was in her face and air a stern gloomy grandeur, which could not have been seen without a mixed sensation of compassion and awe.
"Go now, Bridget; I have said all. He will be here soon: he will come; he must come; he has no choice; and then—and then—" she closed her eyes, bowed her head, and shivered.
Arabella Crane was, as usual, right in her predictions. Before noon Jasper came,—came, not with his jocund swagger, but with that sidelong sinister look—of the man whom the world cuts—triumphantly restored to its former place in his visage. Madame Caumartin had been arrested; Poole had gone into the country with Uncle Sam; Jasper had seen a police- officer at the door of his own lodgings. He slunk away from the fashionable thoroughfares, slunk to the recesses of Podden Place, slunk into Arabella Crane's prim drawing-room, and said sullenly, "All is up; here I am!"
Three days afterwards, in a quiet street in a quiet town of Belgium,— wherein a sharper, striving to live by his profession, would soon become a skeleton,—in a commodious airy apartment, looking upon a magnificent street, the reverse of noisy, Jasper Losely sat secure, innocuous, and profoundly miserable. In another house, the windows of which—facing those of Jasper's sitting-room, from an upper story-commanded so good a view therein that it placed him under a surveillance akin to that designed by Mr. Bentham's reformatory Panopticon, sat Arabella Crane. Whatever her real feelings towards Jasper Losely (and what those feelings were no virile pen can presume authoritatively to define; for lived there ever a man who thoroughly understood a woman?), or whatever in earlier life might have been their reciprocated vows of eternal love,—not only from the day that Jasper, on his return to his native shores, presented himself in Podden Place, had their intimacy been restricted to the austerest bonds of friendship, but after Jasper had so rudely declined the hand which now fed him, Arabella Crane had probably perceived that her sole chance of retaining intellectual power over his lawless being necessitated the utter relinquishment of every hope or project that could expose her again to his contempt. Suiting appearances to reality, the decorum of a separate house was essential to the maintenance of that authority with which the rigid nature of their intercourse invested her. The additional cost strained her pecuniary resources, but she saved in her own accommodation in order to leave Jasper no cause to complain of any stinting in his. There, then, she sat by her window, herself unseen, eying him in his opposite solitude, accepting for her own life a barren sacrifice, but a jealous sentinel on his. Meditating as she sat and as she eyed him,—meditating what employment she could invent, with the bribe of emoluments to be paid furtively by her, for those strong hands that could have felled an ox, but were nerveless in turning an honest penny, and for that restless mind hungering for occupation, and with the digestion of an ostrich for dice and debauch, riot and fraud, but queasy as an exhausted dyspeptic at the reception of one innocent amusement, one honourable toil. But while that woman still schemes how to rescue from hulks or halter that execrable man, who shall say that he is without a chance? A chance he has: WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT?