Guy Livingstone Part 17

Had Guy spoken then, as he ought to have done, I believe all might have been amended; but an angry devil was busy within him, and would not let go his prey; he stood with his black brows downcast, and with folded arms, never seeming to notice the slender fingers that sought to touch his hand. True it is that nothing makes a man so unforgiving as the consciousness of having inflicted a bitter wrong. He heard a sigh, heavy and despairing as Francesca's when her dying prayer was spurned, a light shadow flitted across the streak of moonlit gra.s.s, and, when he raised his head, he was left alone, like Alp on the sea-sh.o.r.e, to judge the battle between a remorseful conscience and a hardened heart.

Livingstone was seen no more that night; Constance glided in alone, and her absence had been scarcely noticed. During the short time that she remained, no one could have guessed from her face that her heart was broken, any more than did Napoleon that the aid-de-camp who brought the news of Lannes' victory had been almost cut in two by a grape-shot.

I speak it diffidently, with the fear of the divine voice of the people before my eyes, as is but fitting in these equalizing days, when territories, the t.i.tle to which is possession immemorial, are being plucked away acre by acre, and hereditary privileges mined one by one; but it seems to me, in this, perhaps, solitary attribute, "the brave old houses" still keep their pre-eminence.

They are not better, nor wiser in their generation (forbid it, Manchester!), nor even more daring in confronting danger than the thousands whose grandsires are creations of a powerful fancy or of a complaisant king-at-arms. In that terrible charge which swept away the Russian cavalry at Eylau, three lengths in front of the best blood in France rode the innkeeper's son. The "First Grenadier" himself was not more splendidly reckless, though he was a La Tour d'Auvergne. But in pa.s.sive uncomplaining endurance, in the power of obliterating outward tokens of suffering, physical or mental, may we not still say, _n.o.blesse oblige_?

Hundreds of similar isolated instances may be quoted from the annals of the Third Estate; but, in the cla.s.s I speak of, this quality seems a sixth sense wholly independent of, and often contradicting the rest of the individual's disposition.

I remember meeting in France an old Italian refugee. He had not much principle and very little pride; he was ready _quidvis facere aut pati_ to get a five-franc piece, which he would incontinently stake and lose at baccarat or ecarte, as he had done aforetime with a large ancestral inheritance; but his quiet fort.i.tude under privations that were neither few nor light was worthy of Belisarius.

Very often, I am sure, his evening meal must have been eaten with the Barmecide; but his pale, handsome face, finished off so gracefully by the white, pointed beard, still met you, courteous and unruffled, the idea of an exiled doge, or a Rohan in disgrace. Once only I saw him moved--when the landlord of our inn, a vast bloated _bourgeois_, smote the Count familiarly on the shoulder, and bantered him pleasantly on the brilliant prospects of his eldest son. It was not unkindly meant, perhaps, but the old man shrunk away from the large fat hand as if it hurt him, and turned toward us a look piteously appealing, which was not lost on myself or Livingstone. When mine host, later in the evening, shook in his gouty slippers before an ebullition of Guy's wrath, excited by the most shadowy pretext, I wonder if he guessed at the remote cause of that outpouring of the vials? Count Ma.s.sa did, for he smiled intensely, as only an Italian can smile when amply revenged.

One instance more to close a long digression. I have read of a baron in the fifteenth century who once in his life said a good thing. He was a coa.r.s.e, brutal marauder, illiterate enough to have satisfied Earl Angus, and as unromantic as the Integral Calculus. He was mortally wounded in a skirmish; and when his men came back from the pursuit, he was bleeding to death, resting against a tree. When they lifted him up, they noticed his eyes fixed with a curious, complacent expression on the red stream that surged and gurgled out of his wound, just as a _gourmand_ looks at a b.u.mper of a rare vintage held up to the light. They heard him growl to himself, "_Qu'il coule rouge et fort, le bon vieux sang de Bourgogne_."

And then he fell back--dead.

O Publicola Thompson! Phosphor to the Tower Hamlets and Boanerges of the platform--will you not allow that, amid a wilderness of weeds, this one fair plant flourishes under "the cold shade?"

CHAPTER XXII.

"Shy she was, and I thought her cold; Thought her proud, and fled over the sea; Filled I was with folly and spite, When Ellen Adair was dying for me."

When I came to Livingstone's chambers on the following morning, I found him alone. His head was resting listlessly against the back of the vast easy-chair in which he was reclining, and his face, thrown out in relief against the crimson velvet, looked haggard and drawn. The calumet--not of peace--was between his lips, and the dense blue clouds were wreathing round him like a Scotch mist. On a table near lay a heap of gold and notes. He had finished the night at his club, where lansquenet had been raging till long after sunrise. Fortune had been more kind than usual, and the fruits of "pa.s.sing" eight times lay before me. An open liqueur-case close at his elbow showed that play was not the only counter-excitement to which he had resorted.

I hoped to have found him in a repentant mood, but his first words undeceived me: "I start for Paris by this evening's train;" and then I remarked all about me the signs of immediate departure.

I only had a confused idea of what had happened, and was anxious to know the truth, but he was very brief in his answers: the particulars of what had pa.s.sed I learned long afterward.

"Can nothing be done?" I asked, when he had finished all he chose to tell me.

"Nothing!" replied Livingstone, decisively. "If excuse or explanation had been of any use, I think I should have tried them last night. You would not advise me to humiliate myself to no purpose, I suppose?"

There is a certain scene in aeschylus which came into my mind just then.

A group of elderly men, with grave, rather vacuous faces, and grizzled beards, stand in the court-yard of an ancient palace. On one side is the peristyle, with its square stunted pillars, looking as if the weight above crushed them, though it wearies them no more than the heavens do Atlas; on the other, a gateway, vast, low-browed, shadowy with Cyclopean stones. Somewhat apart is a strange weird figure, ever and anon starting up and tossing her arms wildly as she utters some new denunciation, and then cowering down again in a despairing weariness. There are traces yet in the thin, wan face of the beauty which enslaved Loxian Apollo, and of the pride which turned his great love into a greater hate: round it hang the black elf-locks, disheveled, that have never been braided since the gripe of Telamonian Ajax ruffled them so rudely. In her great, troubled eyes you read terrible memories, and a prescience of coming death--death, most grateful to the dishonored princess, but before which the frail womanhood can not but shudder and quail. No wonder that the reverend men glance at her uneasily, scarcely mustering courage enough sometimes to answer her with a pious plat.i.tude. Alas! alas! Ca.s.sandra.

While we gaze, forth from the recesses of the gynaeceum there breaks a cry, expressing rather wrath and surprise than mere pain. Then there comes another, more plaintive--the moan of a strong man in the death-throe.

We know that voice very well; we have heard it many times, calm and regal, above the wrangle of councils and the roar of battle; often it prayed for victory or for the people's weal, but it never yet called on earth or heaven to help Agamemnon. The Chorus hear it too; but they linger and palter, while each gives his grave sentence deliberately in his proper turn. One or two advise action and interference, and stand perfectly still. At last we hear a heavy, choking groan, and a great stillness follows. We know that all is over--we know that there is a stir already down there in Hades--we seem to catch a far-off murmur raised by a thousand weak, tremulous voices--the very ghost of a wail--as the shadows of those who died gallantly in their harness before Troy gather to meet their old leader, the mightiest Atride.

In the background of all we fancy a hideous Eidolon, from whose side even the d.a.m.ned recoil in loathing. There is a grin on the lips yet red and wet with the traces of the unholy banquet. Thyestes exalts over the fulfillment of another chapter in the inevitable curse.

Who has not grown savage over that scene? We hate the old drivelers less when, a few minutes later, they truckle and temporize with the awful shape, who comes forth with a splash of blood on her slender wrist, and a speck or two on her white, lofty forehead.

Just so helpless and useless I felt at that moment. I was standing by while a foul wrong was being wrought. I saw nothing but ruin for Guy, and desolate misery for Constance, in the black future. Yet I could think of no argument or counsel that would in the least avail. I felt sick at heart. It was some minutes before I answered his last question.

At last the words broke from me almost unconsciously: "Ah! how will you answer to G.o.d and man for last night's work?"

I forgot that I was quoting the cry of the Covenanter's widow when she knelt by her husband's corpse, and looked up into Claverhouse's face with those sad eyes that were ever dim and cloudy after the carbines flashed across them. But Guy remembered it, and answered instantly in the words of his favorite hero,

"I can answer it to man well enough, and I will take G.o.d in my own hand."

Years afterward we both recalled that fatal defiance, when the speaker lay helpless, at the mercy of the Omnipotence whose might he challenged.

Just then his servant, who was busily preparing for departure, entered the room.

Willis was a slight, under-sized man, of about fifty; his complexion was muddy and indefinite; his small whiskers, of a grayish red, were trimmed and pruned as accurately as a box border-edging, and the partial absence of eyebrows and eyelashes gave his face a sort of unfinished look. The expression natural to it was, I think, a low, vicious cunning; but his features and little green eyes were so rigidly disciplined that, as a rule, neither had any characteristic save utter vacuity. In his own line he was perfect. No commission that could be intrusted to him would draw from him a remark or a look of surprise. He executed precisely what he was told, and fulfilled the minutest duties of his station irreproachably, with a noiseless, feline activity. He was like the war-horse of the Douglas:

"Though somewhat old, Swift in his paces, cool, and bold."

He held a miniature-case in his hand as he entered. "Am I to put this in, sir?" he asked, in the slow, measured voice that was habitual to him.

His master gazed sharply at him, as if trying to detect a covert sneer--it would have been safer to have stroked a rattlesnake's crest than to have trifled with Livingstone just then--but Willis's face was as innocent of any expression as a dead wall.

"Put it down, and go on with your packing; you have no time to spare."

The man laid the case on a marble table near, and went out.

Guy took the miniature and regarded it steadfastly for some moments, then he looked up and caught my eye. Perhaps there was an eager appeal there (for I knew well whose likeness lay before him) which displeased and provoked his sullen temper; for he frowned darkly, and then his clenched hand fell with the cras.h.i.+ng weight of a steam-hammer. Nothing but a heap of s.h.i.+vered wood, gla.s.s, and ivory remained of what had been the life-like image of Constance Brandon.

A thrill of horror shot through me icily, and a low cry burst from my lips. I felt at that moment as if the blow had fallen, not on the portrait, but on the original.

But I kept silence. The dark hour was on Saul, and I knew no spell to chase the evil spirit away.

Guy spoke at last. His manner was unusually chill and constrained.

"I expect to meet Mohun in Paris, and we shall probably go on to Vienna.

I hardly like troubling you with commissions, but I must. Listen. I leave my own name--and another person's--in your keeping. I wish it to be clearly understood that the engagement was broken off by Miss Brandon, not by me. If you hear any man speak disparagingly of her in connection with what has pa.s.sed, you can insult him on my behalf as grossly as you please. I will be here, as fast as steam can bring me, to back what you may have said or done. This is the only point in which I hope you will guard my honor. As for blaming _me_, they may say what they please. Do you quite understand? And will you promise?"

I did promise; and so, after a few more last words, we parted, more coldly than we had ever done in all the years through which we had been intimate.

Guy left England the same evening, and descended like a thunder-clap on the joyous little _menage_ in the Rue de la Madeleine, where Forrester and his bride were still fluttering their wings in the honeymoon-s.h.i.+ne of post-nuptial spring.

They were miraculously happy, those two. Indeed, they seemed to have only one taste between them, and that was Charley's. If he felt inclined, which was not seldom, to utter inaction, his wife encouraged him in his laziness, sitting contentedly for hours on her footstool, with her silky hair just within reach of his indolent hand. If, after dinner, he suggested the "Italiens," or the "Bouffes," it was always precisely that theatre that she had been thinking of all the morning.

She was in the seventh heaven when he won a hurdle-race in the Champ de Mars.

They made excursions into the _banlieue_, and farther afield yet, like a couple of the _Pays Latin_ in their first loves. The cabinets of Bercy and St. Cloud knew them; so did the arbors of Asnieres, where, in oilskin and _vareuse_, muster for their Sabbat the ancient mariners of the Seine. Nay, it has been whispered that more than once--close veiled and clinging tightly to her husband's arm--Isabel witnessed at _Mabille_ and the _Chaumiere_ the ch.o.r.egraphic triumphs of _Frisette_, _Pomare_, and _Mogador_.

My hand trembles while I record such enormities and backslidings. O Brougham-girls of Belgravia, who "never gave your mothers a moment's uneasiness"--stars of the Western hemisphere, who can be trusted any where without fear of your wandering from your orbits--think on this lost Pleiad, once your companion, and be warned. Men are deceivers ever, even when they mean matrimony; and the tender mercies of the Light Dragoon are cruel.

Isabel was dreadfully startled at the sudden appearance of her cousin.

Her notions of his power were quite unlimited and irrational, and I believe her first thought was that he had changed his mind about the propriety of her marriage, and was come to carry her back into the house of her bondage with the strong hand.

When his curt sentences told her the facts, sorry as she was, it certainly was rather a relief to her. Charley was full of compa.s.sion too, but he only confided this to his wife. He knew better than to try condolence with Guy, and felt instantly that the case was far beyond his simple powers of healing.

They did not see much of him. The contrast of their happiness with his own state must have grated on his feelings. His grim presence chilled and clouded their little banquets at the Trois Freres or the Cafe de Paris. He sat there among the bright lamps and flowers like a statue of dark marble that it is impossible to light up, drinking all the while, moodily, of the strongest wines to that portentous extent that it made Isabel nervous and her husband grave.