Sir Jasper Carew Part 32

Polly read the lines with a flas.h.i.+ng eye and heightened color, but never uttered a word.

"Speak, Polly, dearest, and relieve me of this terrible fear, if you can," cried my mother, pa.s.sionately.

"I understand what this means," said Polly, crus.h.i.+ng the note in her hand; "this is a question that requires explanation. You must leave it to me. I'll go up to town this evening, and before the end of the week I 'll be back with you. My father is mistaken,--that's all; and you have misunderstood him!"

And thus planning, and excusing and contradicting herself, she at last succeeded in allaying my mother's fears and a.s.suring her that it was a mere misapprehension, and that a few days would suffice to rectify it.

My mother insisted that Polly should not travel alone, and that Gabriac should be her companion,--an arrangement to which she acceded with comparative ease and willingness. Had Polly f.a.gan and Gabriac merely met as people meet in society, with no other opportunities of knowing each other than are presented by the ordinary intercourse with the world, the great likelihood is that they should have conceived for each other a rooted dislike. There was scarcely one single subject on which they thought in common. They differed in ideas of country and people. Their tastes, their prejudices, their ambitions, all took opposite directions; and yet such is the effect of intimacy, such the consequence of daily, hourly communion, that each not only learned to tolerate, but even to imbibe, some of the notions of the other; and an imperceptible compromise was at length entered into, by Which individuality became tempered down, and even the broad traits of nationality almost effaced.

The Count came to perceive that what he had at first regarded as coa.r.s.e and inelegant was in reality the evidence of only a bold and vigorous spirit, exulting in its own energy, and confident of its power; and Polly began to recognize that remarkable truth, that a c.o.xcomb need not necessarily be a coward, and that the most excessive puppyism can consort with even a chivalrous courage and daring. Of these qualities--the very first in Polly's estimation--he had given several proofs in their adventures by sea and land, and under circ.u.mstances, too, where the very novelty of the peril to be surmounted might have suggested some fear.

There is a generous impulse usually to exalt in our esteem those whom we had once held cheaply, when on nearer intimacy we discover that we had wronged them. We feel as if there was a debt of reparation due to them, and that we are unjust till we have acquitted it. It may chance that now and then this honorable sentiment may carry us beyond reasonable bounds, and that we are disposed to accord even more than is due to them.

I have no means of knowing if such were the case here: I can but surmise from other circ.u.mstances the causes which were in operation. It is enough, however, if I state that long before Gabriac had pa.s.sed the limit of admiration for Polly, she had conceived for him a strong sentiment of love; and while he was merely exerting those qualities which are amongst the common gifts of his cla.s.s and his country, she was becoming impressed with the notion of his vast superiority to all of those she had ever met in society. It must be taken into account that his manner towards her evinced a degree of respect and devotion which, though not overpa.s.sing the usual observance of good manners in France, contrasted very favorably with the kind of notice bestowed by country gentlemen upon "the Grinder's daughter." Those terrible traditions of exorbitant interest, those fatal compacts with usury, that had made f.a.gan's name so dreadfully notorious in Ireland, were all unknown to Gabriac. He only saw in Polly a very handsome girl, of a far more than common amount of intelligence, and with a spirit daringly ambitious. As the favored friend and companion of his cousin, he took it for granted that the peculiar customs of Ireland admitted such intimacies between those socially unequal, and that there was nothing strange or unusual in seeing her where she was. He therefore paid her every attention he would have bestowed on the most high-born damsel of his own court; he exhibited that deference which his own language denominated homage; and, in fact, long before he had touched her affections, he had flattered her pride and self-love by a courtesy to which she had never, in all her intercourse with the world, been habituated.

Perhaps my reader needs not one-half of the explanation to surmise why two young people--both good-looking, both attractive, and both idle--should, in the solitude of a country cottage, fall in love with each other. That they did so, at all events,--she first, and he afterwards,--is, however, the fact; and now, by the simple-hearted arrangement of my poor mother,--whose thoughts had never taken in such a casualty,--were they to set off together as fellow-travellers for Dublin. So far, indeed, from even suspecting such a possibility, it was only a few days previously that she had been deploring to Polly her cousin's fickleness in breaking off his proposed marriage in France, on the mere ground that his absence must necessarily have weakened the ties that bound him to his betrothed What secret hopes the revelation may have suggested to Polly's mind is matter that I cannot even speculate on.

It was with a heavy heart my poor mother saw them drive from the door, and came back to sit down in solitude beside the cradle of her baby. It was a dark and rainy day of winter; the beating of the waves against the rocky sh.o.r.e, and the wailing winds, made sad chorus together; and without, as well as within, all was cheerless and depressing. Dark and gloomy as was the landscape, it was to the full as bright as the scene within her own heart; for now that she began to arrange facts and circ.u.mstances together, and to draw inferences from them, she saw that nothing but ruin lay before her. The very expressions of f.a.gan's letter, so opposite to the almost submissive courtesy of former times, showed her that he no longer hesitated to declare her the dependent on his bounty. "And yet," cried she, aloud, "are these the boasted laws of England? Is the widow left to starve?--is the orphan left houseless, except some formality or other be gone through? To whom descends the heritage of the father, while the son is still living?" From these thoughts, which no ingenuity of hers could pierce, she turned to others not less depressing. What had become of all those who once called themselves her husband's friends? She, it is true, had herself lived estranged and retired from the world; but Walter was everywhere,--all knew him, all professed to love him. Bitter as ingrat.i.tude will ever seem, all its poignancy is nothing compared to the smart it inflicts when practised towards those who have gone from us forever; we feel then as though treachery had been added to the wrong. "Oh!" cried she, in her anguish, "how have they repaid him whose heart and hand were ever open to them!" A flood of recollections, long dammed up by the habits of her daily life, and the little cares by which she was environed, now swept through her mind, and from her infancy and her childhood, in all its luxurious splendor, to her present dest.i.tution, each pa.s.sage of her existence seemed revealed before her. The solitude of the lonely cottage suggesting such utter desolation, and the wild and storm-lashed scene without adding its influence to her depression, she sat for some time still and unmoved, like one entranced; and then, springing to her feet, she rushed out into the beating rain, glad to exchange the conflict of the storm for that more terrible war that waged within her.

Like one flying from some terrific enemy, she ran with all her speed towards the sh.o.r.e. The sea was now breaking over the rocks with tremendous force, and sending vast clouds of spray high into the air, while whole sheets of foam were wildly tossed about by the wind. Through these she struggled on; now stumbling or falling, as her tender feet yielded to the sharp rocks, till she reached a little promontory over the sea, on which the waves struck with all their force; and there, with streaming hair and dripping garments, she sat braving the hurricane, and, in a wild paroxysm of imagined heroism, daring fortune to her worst.

Physical ills are as nothing to those that make the heart their dwelling-place; and to her there seemed an unspeakable relief in the thundering crash of the storm, as compared with the desolate silence of her lonely house.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Self-same spot]

The whole of that day saw her on the self-same spot; and there was she discovered at nightfall by some fishermen, propped up in a crevice of the rock, but cold, and scarcely conscious. They all knew her well, and with the tenderest care they carried her to her cottage. Even before they reached it, her mind began to wander, and wild and incoherent words dropped from her. That same night she was seized with fever; the benevolent but simple people about her knew not what to do; the nearest medical aid was many miles off; and when it did arrive, on the following morning, the malady had already attacked the brain.

The same sad, short series of events so many have witnessed, so many have stood by, with breaking hearts, now occurred. To wild delirium, with all its terrible excesses, succeeded the almost more dreadful stupor; and to that again the brief lucid moment of fast-ebbing life; and then came the sleep that knows no waking--and my mother was at rest!

CHAPTER XXII. THE VILLAGE OF REICHENAU.

I must now ask of my reader to clear at a bound both time and s.p.a.ce, and stand beside me some years later, and in a foreign land.

The scene is at the foot of the Splugen Alps, in a little village begirt with mountains, every crag and eminence of which is surmounted by a ruined castle. There is a grandeur and solemnity in the whole landscape, not alone from its vast proportions, but from the character of impregnability suggested by those fastnesses and the gray, sad-colored tint of hill and verdure around.

There is barely s.p.a.ce for the# village in the narrow glen, which is traversed by two streams,--the one, yellow, turbid, and sluggish; the other, sparkling, bright, and impetuous. These are the Rhines, which, uniting below the village of Reichenau, form that n.o.ble river whose vine-clad cliffs and castled crags are lyrical in every land of Europe.

I scarcely know a spot throughout the whole Continent more typical of isolation and retirement than this. There is no entrance to it from the north, save by a wooden bridge over the torrent; towards the south it is only accessible by the winding zig-zag of the "Via Mala;" east and westward rise gigantic mountains untraversed by even the chamois-hunter; and yet there is no appearance of that poverty and dest.i.tution so usually observable in remote and unvisited tracts. Many of the houses are large and substantially built, some evince a little architectural pretension in the way of ornament, and one, which occupies a little terrace above the river, has somewhat the air of a chateau, and in its windowed roof and moated gardens shows that it aspired to the proud distinction of a seignorial residence.

It might be difficult to ascertain how an edifice of this size and pretension came to be built in such a place; at the time I speak of, it was a school, and a modest-looking little board affixed to a pear-tree at the gate announced, "The Academy of Monsieur Jost." In my boyish eyes, this chateau, its esplanade above the stream, the views it embraced, and the wild, luxuriant orchard by which it was begirt, comprised an amount of magnificence and beauty such as no stretch of imagination could surpa.s.s. In respect to its picturesque site, my error was probably not great: the mountain scene, in all its varied tints of season and sunlight, is still before me, nor can I remember one whose impression is more pleasing.

The chateau, for so it was called, lost nothing in my estimation by any familiarity with its details. I only knew of the large school-room with its three windows that opened on the terrace, the smaller chamber where the cla.s.sical teacher held his more select audience, and a little den, fitted up with cases of minerals, insects, and stuffed birds, which was denominated Monsieur Jost's cabinet, and where that worthy man sat, weeks, mouths, I believe years long, microscope in eye, examining the intricate anatomy of beetles, or poring over some singular provisions in the eyelids of moths. Save when "brought up" for punishment, we rarely saw him. Entirely engrossed with his own pursuits, he seldom bestowed a thought upon us; and when, by any untoward incident such as I have alluded to, we were thrust into his notice, the presence of a strange-looking b.u.t.terfly, a brilliant dragon-moth, a spider even, would be certain to divert his thoughts into a new channel, and ourselves and our derelictions be utterly forgotten. Need I say that no culprit ever appeared in the dock without some such recommendation to mercy, nor was there one of us ever unprepared with some specimen of the insect tribe, ready to be produced at any moment of emergency?

It is but fair to say that the other masters--there were but two--were singularly forbearing and indulgent. Monsieur Gervois, who "taught"

the little boys, was a quaint-looking, venerable old gentleman, with a queue, and who wore on fete-days a ribbon in his b.u.t.ton-hole. He was, it was said, originally a French n.o.ble of large fortune, but who had lost everything by the extravagance of an only son, and had sought out, in voluntary exile, this remote spot to end his days in. His manners were always marked with a tinge of proud reserve which none ever infringed upon, nor, out of school-hours, did any one ever presume to obtrude upon his retirement.

The cla.s.sical teacher was a foreigner, we knew not of what nation; we called him sometimes a Pole, now a Spaniard, now an Irishman,--for all these nationalities only to us expressed distant and unknown lands. He was small almost to dwarfishness, and uniformly dressed in a suit of peculiarly colored brown cloth; his age might have been fifty, sixty, or even more, for there was little means of deciphering the work of time in a face sad and careworn, but yet un wrinkled, and where sorrow had set its seal in early life, but without having worn the impress any deeper by time. Large spectacles of blue gla.s.s concealed his eyes, of which, the story ran, one was sightless; and his manner was uniformly quiet and patient,--extending to every one the utmost limit of forbearance, and accepting the slightest efforts to learn, as evidences of a n.o.ble ambition. To myself he was more than generous,--he was truly and deeply affectionate. I was too young to be one of his cla.s.s, but he came for me each morning to fetch me to the school; for I did not live at the chateau, but at a small two-storied house ab.u.t.ting against the base of the mountain. There we lived; and now let me explain who we were.

But a peep within our humble sitting-room will save both of us much time. I have called it humble,--I might have used a stronger word; for it was poor almost to dest.i.tution. The wooden chairs and tables; the tiled floor; the hearth, on which some soaked branches of larch are smoking; the curtainless window; as well as the utter absence of even the very cheapest appliances of comfort,--all show indigence; while a glance at the worn form and hollow cheek of her who now bends over the embroidery-frame attests that actual want of sustenance is there written. Haggard and thin as the features are, it needs no effort to believe that they once const.i.tuted beauty of a high order. The eye, now sunken and almost colorless, was once flas.h.i.+ng in its brilliancy; and that lip, indrawn and bloodless, was full and rounded like that of a Grecian statue. Even yet, amidst all the disfigurement of a coa.r.s.e dress, the form is graceful, and every motion and gesture indicate a culture that must have been imbibed in a very different sphere.

How I have her before me at this instant, as, hearing my childish footstep at the door, she pulls the string to admit me, and then, turning from her frame, kneels down to kiss me! Monsieur Joseph, for so is the Latin master called, stands just within the doorway, as if waiting to be invited to come further.

"And how has he been to-day,--a good boy?" asks she.

Monsieur Joseph smiles, and nods his head.

"I'm glad of it; Jasper will always behave well. He will know that to do right is a duty, and a duty fulfilled is a blessing. What says Monsieur Gervois,--is he content too?"

"Quite so," I reply. "He said I knew my hymn perfectly, and that if I learned the two pages that he showed me, off by heart, I should be made 'elite' of my cla.s.s."

"And what will that be?"

"I shall be above them all, and they must salute me when we meet out of school and in play-hours."

"Let them do so in affection, but not for coercion, Jasper; he who is cleverer than his fellows ought to be humbler, if he would be as happy."

"Quite true, Polly, quite true; you never said anything more just. The conscious power of intellect tells its possessor of his weakness as well as of his strength. Jasper, my child, be humble."

"But when I said humble," broke in she again, "I meant in self-esteem; for there is a kind of pride that sustains and elevates us."

Monsieur Joseph only sighed gently, but never spoke.

After a few words like these, I was usually dismissed to my play-room, a little corner eked out of an old tower which had been accidentally joined to the house after it was built, but which to me was a boon unspeakable, for it was all my own; but can I revel in the delight of that isolation which each afternoon saw me enjoy? I would briefly tell my reader, if so be that he need the information, that she who in that worn attire bends over her task is Polly f.a.gan, and that Monsieur Joseph is no other than our old acquaintance Joe Raper!

De Gabriac had married Polly secretly, Joe Raper alone being admitted to their confidence. For months long they had watched for some favorable opportunity of breaking the event to the old man; and at last, worn out by care and anxiety, Polly could refrain no longer, but made the avowal herself, and, in a few brief words, told her fault and her sorrow.

The Grinder heard her with the stern impa.s.siveness that he ever could summon in any dread emergency. He had that species of courage that can surmount every peril, only let its full extent be known; and although it was true that the announcement of the loss of all he was worth in the world would have been lighter tidings than those he now listened to, he heard her to the end without interruption. There was that in his calm, cold face which smote her to the very heart; the very way he drew back his hand, as she tried to grasp it in her own, was a shock to her; and ere she finished her sad story, her voice was broken, and her lips tremulous.

Terrible conflict was it between father and child! between two natures each proud as the other,--each bold, stern, and unforgiving!

"The date of this event?" asked he, as she concluded.

"The ninth of October."

"Where?"

"At a chapel in Cullenswood Avenue."

"Who witnessed it?"

"Raper."

"Any other?"

"No other."