Book: Lucretia, Volume 4.

E >> Edward Bulwer Lytton >> Lucretia, Volume 4.




There was something noble and touching in the boy's low accents as he
said this; it gave the key to his unusual modesty and his frank,
healthful innocence of character.

The devil in Varney's lip sneered mockingly.

"My young friend, you have never loved yet. Do you think you ever
shall?"

"I have dreamed that I could love one day. But I can wait."

Varney was about to reply, when he was accosted abruptly by three men of
that exaggerated style of dress and manner which is implied by the vulgar
appellation of "Tigrish." Each of the three men had a cigar in his
mouth, each seemed flushed with wine. One wore long brass spurs and
immense mustaches; another was distinguished by an enormous surface of
black satin cravat, across which meandered a Pactolus of gold chain; a
third had his coat laced and braided a la Polonaise, and pinched and
padded a la Russe, with trousers shaped to the calf of a sinewy leg, and
a glass screwed into his right eye.

"Ah, Gabriel! ah, Varney! ah, prince of good fellows, well met! You sup
with us to-night at little Celeste's; we were just going in search of
you."

"Who's your friend,--one of us?" whispered a second. And the third
screwed his arm tight and lovingly into Varney's.

Gabriel, despite his habitual assurance, looked abashed foz a moment, and
would have extricated himself from cordialities not at that moment
welcome; but he saw that his friends were too far gone in their cups to
be easily shaken off, and he felt relieved when Percival, after a
dissatisfied glance at the three, said quietly: "I must detain you no
longer; I shall soon look in at your studio;" and without waiting for an
answer, slid off, and was lost among the crowd.

Varney walked on with his new-found friends, unheeding for some moments
their loose remarks and familiar banter. At length he shook off his
abstraction, and surrendering himself to the coarse humours of his
companions, soon eclipsed them all by the gusto of his slang and the
mocking profligacy of his sentiments; for here he no longer played a
part, or suppressed his grosser instincts. That uncurbed dominion of the
senses, to which his very boyhood had abandoned itself, found a willing
slave in the man. Even the talents themselves that he displayed came
from the cultivation of the sensual. His eye, studying externals, made
him a painter,--his ear, quick and practised, a musician. His wild,
prodigal fancy rioted on every excitement, and brought him in a vast
harvest of experience in knowledge of the frailties and the vices on
which it indulged its vagrant experiments. Men who over-cultivate the
art that connects itself with the senses, with little counterpoise from
the reason and pure intellect, are apt to be dissipated and irregular in
their lives. This is frequently noticeable in the biographies of
musicians, singers, and painters; less so in poets, because he who deals
with words, not signs and tones, must perpetually compare his senses with
the pure images of which the senses only see the appearances,--in a word,
he must employ his intellect, and his self-education must be large and
comprehensive. But with most real genius, however fed merely by the
senses,--most really great painters, singers, and musicians, however
easily led astray into temptation,--the richness of the soil throws up
abundant good qualities to countervail or redeem the evil; they are
usually compassionate, generous, sympathizing. That Varney had not such
beauties of soul and temperament it is unnecessary to add,--principally,
it is true, because of his nurture, education, parental example, the
utter corruption in which his childhood and youth had passed; partly
because he had no real genius,---it was a false apparition of the divine
spirit, reflected from the exquisite perfection of his frame (which
rendered all his senses so vigorous and acute) and his riotous fancy and
his fitful energy, which was capable at times of great application, but
not of definite purpose or earnest study. All about him was flashy and
hollow. He had not the natural subtlety and depth of mind that had
characterized his terrible father. The graft of the opera-dancer was
visible on the stock of the scholar; wholly without the habits of method
and order, without the patience, without the mathematical calculating
brain of Dalibard, he played wantonly with the horrible and loathsome
wickedness of which Olivier had made dark and solemn study. Extravagant
and lavish, he spent money as fast as he gained it; he threw away all
chances of eminence and career. In the midst of the direst plots of his
villany or the most energetic pursuit of his art, the poorest excitement,
the veriest bauble would draw him aside. His heart was with Falri in the
sty, his fancy with Aladdin in the palace. To make a show was his
darling object; he loved to create effect by his person, his talk, his
dress, as well as by his talents. Living from hand to mouth, crimes
through which it is not our intention to follow him had at times made him
rich to-day, for vices to make him poor again to-morrow. What he called
"luck," or "his star," had favoured him,--he was not hanged!--he lived;
and as the greater part of his unscrupulous career had been conducted in
foreign lands and under other names, in his own name and in his own
country, though something scarcely to be defined, but equivocal and
provocative of suspicion, made him displeasing to the prudent, and
vaguely alarmed the experience of the sober, still, no positive
accusation was attached to the general integrity of his character, and
the mere dissipation of his habits was naturally little known out of his
familiar circle. Hence he had the most presumptuous confidence in
himself,--a confidence native to his courage, and confirmed by his
experience. His conscience was so utterly obtuse that he might almost be
said to present the phenomenon of a man without conscience at all.
Unlike Conrad, he did not "know himself a villain;" all that he knew of
himself was that he was a remarkably clever fellow, without prejudice or
superstition. That, with all his gifts, he had not succeeded better in
life, he ascribed carelessly to the surpassing wisdom of his philosophy.
He could have done better if he had enjoyed himself less; but was not
enjoyment the be-all and end-all of this little life? More often,
indeed, in the moods of his bitter envy, he would lay the fault upon the
world. How great he could have been, if he had been rich and high-born!
Oh, he was made to spend, not to save,--to command, not to fawn! He was
not formed to plod through the dull mediocrities of fortune; he must toss
up for the All or the Nothing! It was no control over himself that made
Varney now turn his thoughts from certain grave designs on Percival St.
John to the brutal debauchery of his three companions,--rather, he then
yielded most to his natural self. And when the morning star rose over
the night he passed with low profligates and venal nymphs; when over the
fragments on the board and emptied bottles and drunken riot dawn gleamed
and saw him in all the pride of his magnificent organization and the
cynicism of his measured vice, fair, fresh, and blooming amidst those
maudlin eyes and flushed cheeks and reeling figures, laughing hideously
over the spectacle he had provoked, and kicking aside, with a devil's
scorn, the prostrate form of the favoured partner whose head had rested
on his bosom, as alone with a steady step, he passed the threshold and
walked into the fresh, healthful air,--Gabriel Varney enjoyed the fell
triumph of his hell-born vanity, and revelled in his sentiment of
superiority and power.

Meanwhile, on quitting Varney young Percival strolled on as the whim
directed him. Turning down the Haymarket, he gained the colonnade of the
Opera House. The crowd there was so dense that his footsteps were
arrested, and he leaned against one of the columns in admiration of the
various galaxies in view. In front blazed the rival stars of the United
Service Club and the Athenaeum; to the left, the quaint and peculiar
device which lighted up Northumberland House; to the right, the anchors,
cannons, and bombs which typified ingeniously the martial attributes of
the Ordnance Office.

At that moment there were three persons connected with this narrative
within a few feet of each other, distinguished from the multitude by the
feelings with which each regarded the scene, and felt the jostle of the
crowd. Percival St. John, in whom the harmless sense of pleasure was yet
vivid and unsatiated, caught from the assemblage only that physical
hilarity which heightened his own spirits. If in a character as yet so
undeveloped, to which the large passions and stern ends of life were as
yet unknown, stirred some deeper and more musing thoughts and
speculations, giving gravity to the habitual smile on his rosy lip, and
steadying the play of his sparkling eyes, he would have been at a loss
himself to explain the dim sentiment and the vague desire.

Screened by another column from the pressure of the mob, with his arms
folded on his breast, a man some few years older in point of time,--many
years older in point of character,--gazed (with thoughts how turbulent,--
with ambition how profound!) upon the dense and dark masses that covered
space and street far as the eye could reach. He, indeed, could not have
said, with Varney, that he was "at home in a crowd." For a crowd did not
fill him with the sense of his own individual being and importance, but
grappled him to its mighty breast with the thousand tissues of a common
destiny. Who shall explain and disentangle those high and restless and
interwoven emotions with which intellectual ambition, honourable and
ardent, gazes upon that solemn thing with which, in which, for which it
lives and labours,--the Human Multitude? To that abstracted, solitary
man, the illumination, the festivity, the curiosity, the holiday, were
nothing, or but as fleeting phantoms and vain seemings. In his heart's
eye he saw before him but the PEOPLE, the shadow of an everlasting
audience,--audience at once and judge.

And literally touching him as he stood, the ragged sweeper, who had
returned in vain to devote a last care to his beloved charge, stood
arrested with the rest, gazing joylessly on the blazing lamps, dead as
the stones he heeded, to the young vivacity of the one man, the solemn
visions of the other. So, O London, amidst the universal holiday to
monarch and to mob, in those three souls lived the three elements which,
duly mingled and administered, make thy vice and thy virtue, thy glory
and thy shame, thy labour and thy luxury; pervading the palace and the
street, the hospital and the prison,--enjoyment, which is pleasure;
energy, which is action; torpor, which is want!




CHAPTER II.

LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT.

Suddenly across the gaze of Percival St. John there flashed a face that
woke him from his abstraction, as a light awakes the sleeper. It was as
a recognition of something seen dimly before,--a truth coming out from a
dream. It was not the mere beauty of that face (and beautiful it was)
that arrested his eye and made his heart beat more quickly, it was rather
that nameless and inexplicable sympathy which constitutes love at first
sight,--a sort of impulse and instinct common to the dullest as the
quickest, the hardest reason as the liveliest fancy. Plain Cobbett,
seeing before the cottage-door, at her homeliest of house-work, the girl
of whom he said, "That girl should be my wife," and Dante, first thrilled
by the vision of Beatrice,--are alike true types of a common experience.
Whatever of love sinks the deepest is felt at first sight; it streams on
us abrupt from the cloud, a lightning flash,--a destiny revealed to us
face to face.

Now, there was nothing poetical in the place or the circumstance, still
less in the companionship in which this fair creature startled the virgin
heart of that careless boy; she was leaning on the arm of a stout, rosy-
faced matron in a puce-coloured gown, who was flanked on the other side
by a very small, very spare man, with a very wee face, the lower part of
which was enveloped in an immense belcher. Besides these two
incumbrances, the stout lady contrived to carry in her hands an umbrella,
a basket, and a pair of pattens.

In the midst of the strange, unfamiliar emotion which his eye conveyed to
his heart, Percival's ear was displeasingly jarred by the loud, bluff,
hearty voice of the girl's female companion--

"Gracious me! if that is not John Ardworth. Who'd have thought it? Why,
John,--I say, John!" and lifting her umbrella horizontally, she poked
aside two city clerks in front of her, wheeled round the little man on
her left, upon whom the clerks simultaneously bestowed the appellation of
"feller," and driving him, as being the sharpest and thinnest wedge at
hand, through a dense knot of some half-a-dozen gapers, while, following
his involuntary progress, she looked defiance on the malcontents, she
succeeded in clearing her way to the spot where stood the young man she
had discovered. The ambitious dreamer, for it was he, thus detected and
disturbed, looked embarrassed for a moment as the stout lady, touching
him with the umbrella, said,--

"Well, I declare if this is not too bad! You sent word that you should
not be able to come out with us to see the 'luminations, and here you are
as large as life!"

"I did not think, at the moment you wrote to me, that-"

"Oh, stuff!" interrupted the stout woman, with a significant, good-
humoured shake of her head; "I know what's what. Tell the truth, and
shame the gentleman who objects to showing his feet. You are a wild
fellow, John Ardworth, you are! You like looking after the pretty faces,
you do, you do--ha, ha, ha! very natural! So did you once,--did not you,
Mr. Mivers, did not you, eh? Men must be men,--they always are men, and
it's my belief that men they always will be!"

With this sage conjecture into the future, the lady turned to Mr. Mivers,
who, thus appealed to, extricated with some difficulty his chin from the
folds of his belcher, and putting up his small face, said, in a small
voice, "Yes, I was a wild fellow once; but you have tamed me, you have,
Mrs. M.!"

And therewith the chin sank again into the belcher, and the small voice
died into a small sigh.

The stout lady glanced benignly at her spouse, and then resuming her
address, to which Ardworth listened with a half-frown and a half-smile,
observed encouragingly,--

"Yes, there's nothing like a lawful wife to break a man in, as you will
find some day. Howsomever, your time's not come for the altar, so
suppose you give Helen your arm, and come with us."

"Do," said Helen, in a sweet, coaxing voice.

Ardworth bent down his rough, earnest face to Helen's, and an evident
pleasure relaxed its thoughtful lines. "I cannot resist you," he began,
and then he paused and frowned. "Pish!" he added, "I was talking folly;
but what head would not you turn? Resist you I must, for I am on my way
now to my drudgery. Ask me anything some years hence, when I have time
to be happy, and then see if I am the bear you now call me."

"Well," said Mrs. Mivers, emphatically, "are you coming, or are you not?
Don't stand there shilly-shally."

"Mrs. Mivers," returned Ardworth, with a kind of sly humour, "I am sure
you would be very angry with your husband's excellent shopmen if that was
the way they spoke to your customers. If some unhappy dropper-in,--some
lady who came to buy a yard or so of Irish,--was suddenly dazzled, as I
am, by a luxury wholly unforeseen and eagerly coveted,--a splendid lace
veil, or a ravishing cashmere, or whatever else you ladies desiderate,--
and while she was balancing between prudence and temptation, your foreman
exclaimed: `Don't stand shilly-shally'--come, I put it to you."

"Stuff!" said Mrs. Mivers.

"Alas! unlike your imaginary customer (I hope so, at least, for the sake
of your till), prudence gets the better of me; unless," added Ardworth,
irresolutely, and glancing at Helen,--"unless, indeed, you are not
sufficiently protected, and--"

"Purtected!" exclaimed Mrs. Mivers, in an indignant tone of astonishment,
and agitating the formidable umbrella; "as if I was not enough, with the
help of this here domestic commodity, to purtect a dozen such.
Purtected, indeed!"

"John is right, Mrs. M.,--business is business," said Mr. Mivers. "Let
us move on; we stop the way, and those idle lads are listening to us, and
sniggering."

"Sniggering!" exclaimed the gentle helpmate. "I should like to see those
who presume for to snigger;" and as she spoke, she threw a look of
defiance around her. Then, having thus satisfied her resentment, she
prepared to obey, as no doubt she always did, her lord and master.
Suddenly, with a practised movement, she wheeled round Mr. Mivers, and
taking care to protrude before him the sharp point of the umbrella, cut
her way through the crowd like the scythed car of the Ancient Britons,
and was soon lost amidst the throng, although her way might be guessed by
a slight ripple of peculiar agitation along the general stream,
accompanied by a prolonged murmur of reproach or expostulation which
gradually died in the distance.

Ardworth gazed after the fair form of Helen with a look of regret; and
when it vanished, with a slight start and a suppressed sigh he turned
away, and with the long, steady stride of a strong man, cleared his path
through the Strand towards the printing-office of a journal on which he
was responsibly engaged.

But Percival, who had caught much of the conversation that took place so
near him,--Percival, happy child of idleness and whim,--had no motive of
labour and occupation to stay the free impulse of his heart, and his
heart drew him on, with magnetic attraction, in the track of the first
being that had ever touched the sweet instincts of youth.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Mivers was destined to learn--though perhaps the lesson
little availed her--that to get smoothly through this world it is
necessary to be supple as well as strong; and though, up to a certain
point, man or woman may force the way by poking umbrellas into people's
ribs and treading mercilessly upon people's toes, yet the endurance of
ribs and toes has its appointed limits.

Helen, half terrified, also half amused by her companion's robust
resolution of purpose, had in Mrs. Mivers's general courage and success
that confidence which the weak repose in the strong; and though whenever
she turned her eyes from the illuminations, she besought Mrs. Mivers to
be more gentle, yet, seeing that they had gone safely from St. Paul's to
St. James's, she had no distinct apprehension of any practically ill
results from the energies she was unable to mitigate. But now, having
just gained the end of St. James's Street, Mrs. Mivers at last found her
match. The crowd here halted, thick and serried, to gaze in peace upon
the brilliant vista which the shops and clubs of that street presented.
Coaches and carriages had paused in their line, and immediately before
Mrs. Mivers stood three very thin, small women, whose dress bespoke them
to be of the humblest class.

"Make way, there; make way, my good women, make way!" cried Mrs. Mivers,
equally disdainful of the size and the rank of the obstructing parties.

"Arrah, and what shall we make way for the like of you, you old
busybody?" said one of the dames, turning round, and presenting a very
formidable squint to the broad optics of Mrs. Mivers.

Without deigning a reply, Mrs. Mivers had recourse to her usual tactics.
Umbrella and husband went right between two of the feminine obstructives;
and to the inconceivable astonishment and horror of the assailant,
husband and umbrella instantly vanished. The three small furies had
pounced upon both. They were torn from their natural owner; they were
hurried away; the stream behind, long fretted at the path so abruptly
made amidst it, closed in, joyous, with a thousand waves. Mrs. Mivers
and Helen were borne forward in one way, the umbrella and the husband in
the other; in the distance a small voice was heard: "Don't you! don't!
Be quiet! Mrs.--Mrs. M.! Oh, oh, Mrs. M.!" At that last repetition of
the beloved and familiar initial, uttered in a tone of almost superhuman
anguish, the conjugal heart of Mrs. Mivers was afflicted beyond control.

"Wait here a moment, my dear; I'll just give it them, that's all!" And in
another moment Mrs. Mivers was heard bustling, scolding, till all trace
of her whereabout was gone from the eyes of Helen. Thus left alone, in
exceeding shame and dismay, the poor girl cast a glance around. The
glance was caught by two young men, whose station, in these days when
dress is an equivocal designator of rank, could not be guessed by their
exterior. They might be dandies from the west,--they might be clerks
from the east.

"By Jove," exclaimed one, "that's a sweet pretty girl!" and, by a sudden
movement of the crowd, they both found themselves close to Helen.

"Are you alone, my dear?" said a voice rudely familiar. Helen made no
reply; the tone of the voice frightened her. A gap in the mob showed the
space towards Cleveland Row, which, leading to no illuminations, was
vacant and solitary. She instantly made towards this spot; the two men
followed her, the bolder and elder one occasionally trying to catch hold
of her arm. At last, as she passed the last house to the left, a house
then owned by one who, at once far-sighted and impetuous, affable and
haughty, characterized alike by solid virtues and brilliant faults,
would, but for hollow friends, have triumphed over countless foes, and
enjoyed at last that brief day of stormy power for which statesmen resign
the health of manhood and the hope of age,--as she passed that memorable
mansion, she suddenly perceived that the space before her had no
thoroughfare; and, while she paused in dismay, her pursuers blockaded her
escape.

One of them now fairly seized her hand. "Nay, pretty one, why so cruel?
But one kiss,--only one!" He endeavoured to pass his arm round her waist
while he spoke. Helen eluded him, and darted forward, to find her way
stopped by her persecutor's companion, when, to her astonishment, a third
person gently pushed aside the form that impeded her path, approached,
and looking mute defiance at the unchivalric molesters, offered her his
arm. Helen gave but one timid, hurrying glance to her unexpected
protector; something in his face, his air, his youth, appealed at once to
her confidence. Mechanically, and scarce knowing what she did, she laid
her trembling hand on the arm held out to her.

The two Lotharios looked foolish. One pulled up his shirt-collar, and
the other turned, with a forced laugh, on his heel. Boy as Percival
seemed, and little more than boy as he was, there was a dangerous fire in
his eye, and an expression of spirit and ready courage in his whole
countenance, which, if it did not awe his tall rivals, made them at least
unwilling to have a scene and provoke the interference of a policeman;
one of whom was now seen walking slowly up to the spot. They therefore
preserved a discomfited silence; and Percival St. John, with his heart
going ten knots a beat, sailed triumphantly off with his prize.

Scarcely knowing whither he went, certainly forgetful of Mr. Mivers, in
his anxiety to escape at least from the crowd, Percival walked on till he
found himself with his fair charge under the trees of St. James's Park.

Then Helen, recovering herself, paused, and said, alarmed: "But this is
not my way; I must go back to the street!"

"How foolish I am! That is true," said Percival, looking confused. "I--
I felt so happy to be with you, feel your hand on my arm, and think that
we were all by ourselves, that--that---But you have dropped your
flowers!"

And as a bouquet Helen wore, dislodged somehow or other, fell to the
ground, both stooped to pick it up, and their hands met. At that touch,
Percival felt a strange tremble, which perhaps communicated itself (for
such things are contagious) to his fair companion. Percival had got the
nosegay, and seemed willing to detain it; for he bent his face
lingeringly over the flowers. At length he turned his bright, ingenuous
eyes to Helen, and singling one rose from the rest, said beseechingly:
"May I keep this? See, it is not so fresh as the others."

"I am sure, sir," said Helen, colouring, and looking down, "I owe you so
much that I should be glad if a poor flower could repay it."

"A poor flower! You don't know what a prize this is to me!" Percival
placed the rose reverently in his bosom, and the two moved back slowly,
as if reluctant both, through the old palace-court into the street.

"Is that lady related to you?" asked Percival, looking another way, and
dreading the reply,--"not your mother, surely!"

"Oh, no! I have no mother!"

"Forgive me!" said Percival; for the tone of Helen's voice told him that
he had touched the spring of a household sorrow. "And," he added, with a
jealousy that he could scarcely restrain from making itself evident in
his accent, "that gentleman who spoke to you under the Colonnade,--I have
seen him before, but where I cannot remember. In fact, you have put
everything but yourself out of my head. Is he related to you?"

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