_ BOOK I CHAPTER XI
"D'ye stand amazed?--Look o'er thy head, Maximinian!
Look to the terror which overhangs thee."
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER: The Prophetess.
Phillip had been five weeks in his new home: in another week, he was to enter on his articles of apprenticeship. With a stern, unbending gloom of manner, he had commenced the duties of his novitiate. He submitted to all that was enjoined him. He seemed to have lost for ever the wild and unruly waywardness that had stamped his boyhood; but he was never seen to smile--he scarcely ever opened his lips. His very soul seemed to have quitted him with its faults; and he performed all the functions of his situation with the quiet listless regularity of a machine. Only when the work was done and the shop closed, instead of joining the family circle in the back parlour, he would stroll out in the dusk of the evening, away from the town, and not return till the hour at which the family retired to rest. Punctual in all he did, he never exceeded that hour. He had heard once a week from his mother; and only on the mornings in which he expected a letter, did he seem restless and agitated. Till the postman entered the shop, he was as pale as death--his hands trembling--his lips compressed. When he read the letter he became composed for Catherine sedulously concealed from her son the state of her health: she wrote cheerfully, besought him to content himself with the state into which he had fallen, and expressed her joy that in his letters he intimated that content; for the poor boy's letters were not less considerate than her own. On her return from her brother, she had so far silenced or concealed her misgivings as to express satisfaction at the home she had provided for Sidney; and she even held out hopes of some future when, their probation finished and their independence secured, she might reside with her sons alternately. These hopes redoubled Philip's assiduity, and he saved every shilling of his weekly stipend; and sighed as he thought that in another week his term of apprenticeship would commence, and the stipend cease.
Mr. Plaskwith could not but be pleased on the whole with the diligence of his assistant, but he was chafed and irritated by the sullenness of his manner. As for Mrs. Plaskwith, poor woman! she positively detested the taciturn and moody boy, who never mingled in the jokes of the circle, nor played with the children, nor complimented her, nor added, in short, anything to the sociability of the house. Mr. Plimmins, who had at first sought to condescend, next sought to bully; but the gaunt frame and savage eye of Philip awed the smirk youth, in spite of himself; and he confessed to Mrs. Plaskwith that he should not like to meet "the gipsy," alone, on a dark night; to which Mrs. Plaskwith replied, as usual, "that Mr. Plimmins always did say the best things in the world!"
One morning, Philip was sent a few miles into the country, to assist in cataloguing some books in the library of Sir Thomas Champerdown--that gentleman, who was a scholar, having requested that some one acquainted with the Greek character might be sent to him, and Philip being the only one in the shop who possessed such knowledge.
It was evening before he returned. Mr. and Mrs. Plaskwith were both in the shop as he entered--in fact, they had been employed in talking him over.
"I can't abide him!" cried Mrs. Plaskwith. "If you choose to take him for good, I sha'n't have an easy moment. I'm sure the 'prentice that cut his master's throat at Chatham, last week, was just like him."
"Pshaw! Mrs. P.," said the bookseller, taking a huge pinch of snuff, as usual, from his waistcoat pocket. "I myself was reserved when I was young; all reflective people are. I may observe, by the by, that it was the case with Napoleon Buonaparte: still, however, I must own he is a disagreeable youth, though he attends to his business."
"And how fond of money he is!" remarked Mrs. Plaskwith, "he won't buy himself a new pair of shoes!--quite disgraceful! And did you see what a look he gave Plimmins, when he joked about his indifference to his sole? Plimmins always does say such good things!"
"He is shabby, certainly," said the bookseller; "but the value of a book does not always depend on the binding."
"I hope he is honest!" observed Mrs. Plaskwith;--and here Philip entered.
"Hum," said Mr. Plaskwith; "you have had a long day's work: but I suppose it will take a week to finish?"
"I am to go again to-morrow morning, sir: two days more will conclude the task."
"There's a letter for you," cried Mrs. Plaskwith; "you owes me for it."
"A letter!" It was not his mother's hand--it was a strange writing--he gasped for breath as he broke the seal. It was the letter of the physician.
His mother, then, was ill-dying-wanting, perhaps, the necessaries of life. She would have concealed from him her illness and her poverty. His quick alarm exaggerated the last into utter want;--he uttered a cry that rang through the shop, and rushed to Mr. Plaskwith.
"Sir, sir! my mother is dying! She is poor, poor, perhaps starving;--money, money!--lend me money!--ten pounds!--five!--I will work for you all my life for nothing, but lend me the money!"
"Hoity-toity!" said Mrs. Plaskwith, nudging her husband--"I told you what would come of it: it will be 'money or life' next time."
Philip did not heed or hear this address; but stood immediately before the bookseller, his hands clasped--wild impatience in his eyes. Mr. Plaskwith, somewhat stupefied, remained silent.
"Do you hear me?--are you human?" exclaimed Philip, his emotion revealing at once all the fire of his character. "I tell you my mother is dying; I must go to her! Shall I go empty-handed! Give me money!"
Mr. Plaskwith was not a bad-hearted man; but he was a formal man, and an irritable one. The tone his shopboy (for so he considered Philip) assumed to him, before his own wife too (examples are very dangerous), rather exasperated than moved him.
"That's not the way to speak to your master:--you forget yourself, young man!"
"Forget!--But, sir, if she has not necessaries-if she is starving?"
"Fudge!" said Plaskwith. "Mr. Morton writes me word that he has provided for your mother! Does he not, Hannah?"
"More fool he, I'm sure, with such a fine family of his own! Don't look at me in that way, young man; I won't take it--that I won't! I declare my blood friz to see you!"
"Will you advance me money?--five pounds--only five pounds, Mr. Plaskwith?"
"Not five shillings! Talk to me in this style!--not the man for it, sir!--highly improper. Come, shut up the shop, and recollect yourself; and, perhaps, when Sir Thomas's library is done, I may let you go to town. You can't go to-morrow. All a sham, perhaps; eh, Hannah?"
"Very likely! Consult Plimmins. Better come away now, Mr. P. He looks like a young tiger."
Mrs. Plaskwith quitted the shop for the parlour. Her husband, putting his hands behind his back, and throwing back his chin, was about to follow her. Philip, who had remained for the last moment mute and white as stone, turned abruptly; and his grief taking rather the tone of rage than supplication, he threw himself before his master, and, laying his hand on his shoulder, said:
"I leave you--do not let it be with a curse. I conjure you, have mercy on me!"
Mr. Plaskwith stopped; and had Philip then taken but a milder tone, all had been well. But, accustomed from childhood to command--all his fierce passions loose within him--despising the very man he thus implored--the boy ruined his own cause. Indignant at the silence of Mr. Plaskwith, and too blinded by his emotions to see that in that silence there was relenting, he suddenly shook the little man with a vehemence that almost overset him, and cried:
"You, who demand for five years my bones and blood--my body and soul--a slave to your vile trade--do you deny me bread for a mother's lips?"
Trembling with anger, and perhaps fear, Mr. Plaskwith extricated himself from the gripe of Philip, and, hurrying from the shop, said, as he banged the door:
"Beg my pardon for this to-night, or out you go to-morrow, neck and crop! Zounds! a pretty pass the world's come to! I don't believe a word about your mother. Baugh!"
Left alone, Philip remained for some moments struggling with his wrath and agony. He then seized his hat, which he had thrown off on entering--pressed it over his brows--turned to quit the shop--when his eye fell upon the till. Plaskwith had left it open, and the gleam of the coin struck his gaze--that deadly smile of the arch tempter. Intellect, reason, conscience--all, in that instant, were confusion and chaos. He cast a hurried glance round the solitary and darkening room--plunged his hand into the drawer, clutched he knew not what--silver or gold, as it came uppermost--and burst into a loud and bitter laugh. The laugh itself startled him--it did not sound like his own. His face fell, and his knees knocked together--his hair bristled--he felt as if the very fiend had uttered that yell of joy over a fallen soul.
"No--no--no!" he muttered; "no, my mother,--not even for thee!" And, dashing the money to the ground, he fled, like a maniac, from the house.
At a later hour that same evening, Mr. Robert Beaufort returned from his country mansion to Berkeley Square. He found his wife very uneasy and nervous about the non-appearance of their only son. Arthur had sent home his groom and horses about seven o'clock, with a hurried scroll, written in pencil on a blank page torn from his pocket-book, and containing only these words,--
"Don't wait dinner for me--I may not be home for some hours. I have met with a melancholy adventure. You will approve what I have done when we meet."
This note a little perplexed Mr. Beaufort; but, as he was very hungry, he turned a deaf ear both to his wife's conjectures and his own surmises, till he had refreshed himself; and then he sent for the groom, and learned that, after the accident to the blind man, Mr. Arthur had been left at a hosier's in H----. This seemed to him extremely mysterious; and, as hour after hour passed away, and still Arthur came not, he began to imbibe his wife's fears, which were now wound up almost to hysterics; and just at midnight he ordered his carriage, and taking with him the groom as a guide, set off to the suburban region. Mrs. Beaufort had wished to accompany him; but the husband observing that young men would be young men, and that there might possibly be a lady in the case, Mrs. Beaufort, after a pause of thought, passively agreed that, all things considered, she had better remain at home. No lady of proper decorum likes to run the risk of finding herself in a false position. Mr. Beaufort accordingly set out alone. Easy was the carriage--swift were the steeds--and luxuriously the wealthy man was whirled along. Not a suspicion of the true cause of Arthur's detention crossed him; but he thought of the snares of London--or artful females in distress; "a melancholy adventure" generally implies love for the adventure, and money for the melancholy; and Arthur was young--generous--with a heart and a pocket equally open to imposition. Such scrapes, however, do not terrify a father when he is a man of the world, so much as they do an anxious mother; and, with more curiosity than alarm, Mr. Beaufort, after a short doze, found himself before the shop indicated.
Notwithstanding the lateness of the hour, the door to the private entrance was ajar,--a circumstance which seemed very suspicious to Mr. Beaufort. He pushed it open with caution and timidity--a candle placed upon a chair in the narrow passage threw a sickly light over the flight of stairs, till swallowed up by the deep shadow from the sharp angle made by the ascent. Robert Beaufort stood a moment in some doubt whether to call, to knock, to recede, or to advance, when a step was heard upon the stairs above--it came nearer and nearer--a figure emerged from the shadow of the last landing-place, and Mr. Beaufort, to his great joy, recognised his son.
Arthur did not, however, seem to perceive his father; and was about to pass him, when Mr. Beaufort laid his hand on his arm.
"What means all this, Arthur? What place are you in? How you have alarmed us!"
Arthur cast a look upon his father of sadness and reproach.
"Father," he said, in a tone that sounded stern--almost commanding--"I will show you where I have been; follow me--nay, I say, follow."
He turned, without another word re-ascended the stairs; and Mr. Beaufort, surprised and awed into mechanical obedience, did as his son desired. At the landing-place of the second floor, another long-wicked, neglected, ghastly candle emitted its cheerless ray. It gleamed through the open door of a small bedroom to the left, through which Beaufort perceived the forms of two women. One (it was the kindly maidservant) was seated on a chair, and weeping bitterly; the other (it was a hireling nurse, in the first and last day of her attendance) was unpinning her dingy shawl before she lay down to take a nap. She turned her vacant, listless face upon the two men, put on a doleful smile, and decently closed the door.
"Where are we, I say, Arthur?" repeated Mr. Beaufort. Arthur took his father's hand-drew him into a room to the right--and taking up the candle, placed it on a small table beside a bell, and said, "Here, sir--in the presence of Death!"
Mr. Beaufort cast a hurried and fearful glance on the still, wan, serene face beneath his eyes, and recognised in that glance the features of the neglected and the once adored Catherine.
"Yes--she, whom your brother so loved--the mother of his children--died in this squalid room, and far from her sons, in poverty, in sorrow! died of a broken heart! Was that well, father? Have you in this nothing to repent?"
Conscience-stricken and appalled, the worldly man sank down on a seat beside the bed, and covered his face with his hands.
"Ay," continued Arthur, almost bitterly--"ay, we, his nearest of kin--we, who have inherited his lands and gold--we have been thus heedless of the great legacy your brother bequeathed to us:--the things dearest to him--the woman he loved--the children his death cast, nameless and branded, on the world. Ay, weep, father: and while you weep, think of the future, of reparation. I have sworn to that clay to befriend her sons; join you, who have all the power to fulfil the promise--join in that vow: and may Heaven not visit on us both the woes of this bed of death!"
"I did not know--I--I--" faltered Mr. Beaufort.
"But we should have known," interrupted Arthur, mournfully. "Ah, my dear father! do not harden your heart by false excuses. The dead still speaks to you, and commends to your care her children. My task here is done: O sir! yours is to come. I leave you alone with the dead."
So saying, the young man, whom the tragedy of the scene had worked into a passion and a dignity above his usual character, unwilling to trust himself farther to his emotions, turned abruptly from the room, fled rapidly down the stairs and left the house. As the carriage and liveries of his father met his eye, he groaned; for their evidences of comfort and wealth seemed a mockery to the deceased: he averted his face and walked on. Nor did he heed or even perceive a form that at that instant rushed by him--pale, haggard, breathless--towards the house which he had quitted, and the door of which he left open, as he had found it--open, as the physician had left it when hurrying, ten minutes before the arrival of Mr. Beaufort, from the spot where his skill was impotent. Wrapped in gloomy thought, alone, and on foot-at that dreary hour, and in that remote suburb--the heir of the Beauforts sought his splendid home. Anxious, fearful, hoping, the outcast orphan flew on to the death-room of his mother.
Mr. Beaufort, who had but imperfectly heard Arthur's parting accents, lost and bewildered by the strangeness of his situation, did not at first perceive that he was left alone. Surprised, and chilled by the sudden silence of the chamber, he rose, withdrew his hands from his face, and again he saw that countenance so mute and solemn. He cast his gaze round the dismal room for Arthur; he called his name--no answer came; a superstitious tremor seized upon him; his limbs shook; he sank once more on his seat, and closed his eyes: muttering, for the first time, perhaps, since his childhood, words of penitence and prayer. He was roused from this bitter self-abstraction by a deep groan. It seemed to come from the bed. Did his ears deceive him? Had the dead found a voice? He started up in an agony of dread, and saw opposite to him the livid countenance of Philip Morton: the Son of the Corpse had replaced the Son of the Living Man! The dim and solitary light fell upon that countenance. There, all the bloom and freshness natural to youth seemed blasted! There, on those wasted features, played all the terrible power and glare of precocious passions,--rage, woe, scorn, despair. Terrible is it to see upon the face of a boy the storm and whirlwind that should visit only the strong heart of man!
"She is dead!--dead! and in your presence!" shouted Philip, with his wild eyes fixed upon the cowering uncle; "dead with--care, perhaps with famine. And you have come to look upon your work!"
"Indeed," said Beaufort, deprecatingly, "I have but just arrived: I did not know she had been ill, or in want, upon my honour. This is all a--a--mistake: I--I--came in search of--of--another--"
"You did not, then, come to relieve her?" said Philip, very calmly. "You had not learned her suffering and distress, and flown hither in the hope that there was yet time to save her? You did not do this? Ha! ha!--why did I think it?"
"Did any one call, gentlemen?" said a whining voice at the door; and the nurse put in her head.
"Yes--yes--you may come in," said Beaufort, shaking with nameless and cowardly apprehension; but Philip had flown to the door, and, gazing on the nurse, said,
"She is a stranger! see, a stranger! The son now has assumed his post. Begone, woman!" And he pushed her away, and drew the bolt across the door.
And then there looked upon him, as there had looked upon his reluctant companion, calm and holy, the face of the peaceful corpse. He burst into tears, and fell on his knees so close to Beaufort that he touched him; he took up the heavy hand, and covered it with burning kisses.
"Mother! mother! do not leave me! wake, smile once more on your son! I would have brought you money, but I could not have asked for your blessing, then; mother, I ask it now!"
"If I had but known--if you had but written to me, my dear young gentleman--but my offers had been refused, and--"
"Offers of a hireling's pittance to her; to her for whom my father would have coined his heart's blood into gold! My father's wife!--his wife!--offers--"
He rose suddenly, folded his arms, and facing Beaufort, with a fierce determined brow, said:
"Mark me, you hold the wealth that I was trained from my cradle to consider my heritage. I have worked with these hands for bread, and never complained, except to my own heart and soul. I never hated, and never cursed you--robber as you were--yes, robber! For, even were there no marriage save in the sight of God, neither my father, nor Nature, nor Heaven, meant that you should seize all, and that there should be nothing due to the claims of affection and blood. He was not the less my father, even if the Church spoke not on my side. Despoiler of the orphan, and derider of human love, you are not the less a robber though the law fences you round, and men call you honest! But I did not hate you for this. Now, in the presence of my dead mother--dead, far from both her sons--now I abhor and curse you. You may think yourself safe when you quit this room-safe, and from my hatred you may be so but do not deceive yourself. The curse of the widow and the orphan shall pursue--it shall cling to you and yours--it shall gnaw your heart in the midst of splendour--it shall cleave to the heritage of your son! There shall be a deathbed yet, beside which you shall see the spectre of her, now so calm, rising for retribution from the grave! These words--no, you never shall forget them--years hence they shall ring in your ears, and freeze the marrow of your bones! And now begone, my father's brother--begone from my mother's corpse to your luxurious home!"
He opened the door, and pointed to the stairs. Beaufort, without a word, turned from the room and departed. He heard the door closed and locked as he descended the stairs; but he did not hear the deep groans and vehement sobs in which the desolate orphan gave vent to the anguish which succeeded to the less sacred paroxysm of revenge and wrath. _