Book: Lucretia, Volume 4.

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




"He is my cousin."

"Cousin!" repeated Percival, pouting a little; and again there was
silence.

"I don't know how it is," said Percival at last, and very gravely, as if
much perplexed by some abstruse thought, "but I feel as if I had known
you all my life. I never felt this for any one before."

There was something so irresistibly innocent in the boy's serious,
wondering tone as he said these words that a smile, in spite of herself,
broke out amongst the thousand dimples round Helen's charming lips.
Perhaps the little witch felt a touch of coquetry for the first time.

Percival, who was looking sidelong into her face, saw the smile, and
said, drawing up his head, and shaking back his jetty curls: "I dare say
you are laughing at me as a mere boy; but I am older than I look. I am
sure I am much older than you are. Let me see, you are seventeen, I
suppose?"

Helen, getting more and more at her ease, nodded playful assent.

"And I am not far from twenty-one. Ah, you may well look surprised, but
so it is. An hour ago I felt a mere boy; now I shall never feel a boy
again!"

Once more there was a long pause, and before it was broken, they had
gained the very spot in which Helen had lost her friend.

"Why, bless us and save us!" exclaimed a voice "loud as a trumpet," but
not "with a silver sound," "there you are, after all;" and Mrs. Mivers
(husband and umbrella both regained) planted herself full before them.

"Oh, a pretty fright I have been in! And now to see you coming along as
cool as if nothing had happened; as if the humbrella had not lost its
hivory 'andle,--it's quite purvoking. Dear, dear, what we have gone
through! And who is this young gentleman, pray?"

Helen whispered some hesitating explanation, which Mrs. Mivers did not
seem to receive as graciously as Percival, poor fellow, had a right to
expect. She stared him full in the face, and shook her head suspiciously
when she saw him a little confused by the survey. Then, tucking Helen
tightly under her arm, she walked back towards the Haymarket, merely
saying to Percival,--

"Much obligated, and good-night. I have a long journey to take to set
down this here young lady; and the best thing we can all do is to get
home as fast as we can, and have a refreshing cup of tea--that's my mind,
sir. Excuse me!"

Thus abruptly dismissed, poor Percival gazed wistfully on his Helen as
she was borne along, and was somewhat comforted at seeing her look back
with (as he thought) a touch of regret in her parting smile. Then
suddenly it flashed across him how sadly he had wasted his time. Novice
that he was, he had not even learned the name and address of his new
acquaintance. At that thought he hurried on through the crowd, but only
reached the object of his pursuit just in time to see her placed in a
coach, and to catch a full view of the luxuriant proportions of Mrs.
Mivers as she followed her into the vehicle.

As the lumbering conveyance (the only coach on the stand) heaved itself
into motion, Percival's eye fell on the sweeper, who was still leaning on
his broom, and who, in grateful recognition of the unwonted generosity
that had repaid his service, touched his ragged hat, and smiled drowsily
on his young customer. Love sharpens the wit and animates the timid; a
thought worthy of the most experienced inspired Percival St. John; he
hurried to the sweeper, laid his hand on his patchwork coat, and said
breathlessly,--

"You see that coach turning into the square? Follow it,--find out where
it sets down. There's a sovereign for you; another if you succeed. Call
and tell me your success. Number ---- Curzon Street! Off, like a shot!"

The sweeper nodded and grinned; it was possibly not his first commission
of a similar kind. He darted down the street; and Percival, following
him with equal speed, had the satisfaction to see him, as the coach
traversed St. James's Square, comfortably seated on the footboard.

Beck, dull clod, knew nothing, cared nothing, felt nothing as to the
motives or purpose of his employer. Honest love or selfish vice, it was
the same to him. He saw only the one sovereign which, with astounded
eyes, he still gazed at on his palm, and the vision of the sovereign that
was yet to come.

"Scandit aeratas vitiosa naves
Cura; nee turmas equitum relinquit."

It was the Selfishness of London, calm and stolid, whether on the track
of innocence or at the command of guile.

At half-past ten o'clock Percival St. John was seated in his room, and
the sweeper stood at the threshold. Wealth and penury seemed brought
into visible contact in the persons of the visitor and the host. The
dwelling is held by some to give an index to the character of the owner;
if so, Percival's apartments differed much from those generally favoured
by young men of rank and fortune. On the one hand, it had none of that
affectation of superior taste evinced in marqueterie and gilding, or the
more picturesque discomfort of high-backed chairs and mediaeval
curiosities which prevails in the daintier abodes of fastidious
bachelors; nor, on the other hand, had it the sporting character which
individualizes the ruder juveniles qui gaudent equis, betrayed by
engravings of racers and celebrated fox-hunts, relieved, perhaps, if the
Nimrod condescend to a cross of the Lovelace, with portraits of
figurantes, and ideals of French sentiment entitled, "Le Soir," or "La
Reveillee," "L'Espoir," or "L'Abandon." But the rooms had a physiognomy
of their own, from their exquisite neatness and cheerful simplicity. The
chintz draperies were lively with gay flowers; books filled up the
niches; here and there were small pictures, chiefly sea-pieces,--well
chosen, well placed.

There might, indeed, have been something almost effeminate in a certain
inexpressible purity of taste, and a cleanliness of detail that seemed
actually brilliant, had not the folding-doors allowed a glimpse of a
plainer apartment, with fencing-foils and boxing-gloves ranged on the
wall, and a cricket-bat resting carelessly in the corner. These gave a
redeeming air of manliness to the rooms; but it was the manliness of a
boy,--half-girl, if you please, in the purity of thought that pervaded
one room, all boy in the playful pursuits that were made manifest in the
other. Simple, however, as this abode really was, poor Beck had never
been admitted to the sight of anything half so fine. He stood at the
door for a moment, and stared about him, bewildered and dazzled. But his
natural torpor to things that concerned him not soon brought to him the
same stoicism that philosophy gives the strong; and after the first
surprise, his eye quietly settled on his employer. St. John rose eagerly
from the sofa, on which he had been contemplating the starlit treetops of
Chesterfield Gardens,--

"Well, well?" said Percival.

"Hold Brompton," said Beck, with a brevity of word and clearness of
perception worthy a Spartan.

"Old Brompton?" repeated Percival, thinking the reply the most natural in
the world.

"In a big 'ous by hisself," continued Beck, "with a 'igh vall in front."

"You would know it again?"

"In course; he's so wery peculiar."

"He,--who?"

"Vy, the 'ous. The young lady got out, and the hold folks driv back. I
did not go arter them!" and Beck looked sly.

"So! I must find out the name."

"I axed at the public," said Beck, proud of his diplomacy. "They keeps a
sarvant vot takes half a pint at her meals. The young lady's mabe a
foriner."

"A foreigner! Then she lives there with her mother?"

"So they s'pose at the public."

"And the name?"

Beck shook his head. "'T is a French 'un, your honour; but the sarvant's
is Martha."

"You must meet me at Brompton, near the turnpike, tomorrow, and show me
the house."

"Vy, I's in bizness all day, please your honour."

"In business?"'

"I's the place of the crossing," said Beck, with much dignity; "but arter
eight I goes vere I likes."

"To-morrow evening, then, at half-past eight, by the turnpike."

Beck pulled his forelock assentingly.

"There's the sovereign I promised you, my poor fellow; much good may it
do you. Perhaps you have some father or mother whose heart it will
glad."

"I never had no such thing," replied Beck, turning the coin in his hand.

"Well, don't spend it in drink."

"I never drinks nothing but svipes."

"Then," said Percival, laughingly, "what, my good friend, will you ever
do with your money?"

Beck put his finger to his nose, sunk his voice into a whisper, and
replied solemnly: "I 'as a mattris."

"A mistress," said Percival. "Oh, a sweetheart. Well, but if she's a
good girl, and loves you, she'll not let you spend your money on her."

"I haint such a ninny as that," said Beck, with majestic contempt. "I
'spises the flat that is done brown by the blowens. I 'as a mattris."

"A mattress! a mattress! Well, what has that to do with the money?"

"Vy, I lines it."

Percival looked puzzled. "Oh," said he, after a thoughtful pause, and in
a tone of considerable compassion, "I understand: you sew your money in
your mattress. My poor, poor lad, you can do better than that! There
are the savings banks."

Beck looked frightened. "I 'opes your honour von't tell no vun. I 'opes
no vun von't go for to put my tin vere I shall know nothing vatsomever
about it. Now, I knows vere it is, and I lays on it."

"Do you sleep more soundly when you lie on your treasure?"

"No. It's hodd," said Beck, musingly, "but the more I lines it, the
vorse I sleeps."

Percival laughed, but there was melancholy in his laughter; something in
the forlorn, benighted, fatherless, squalid miser went to the core of his
open, generous heart.

"Do you ever read your Bible," said he, after a pause, "or even the
newspaper?"

"I does not read nothing; cos vy? I haint been made a scholard, like
swell Tim, as was lagged for a forgery."

"You go to church on a Sunday?"

"Yes; I 'as a weekly hingagement at the New Road."

"What do you mean?"

"To see arter the gig of a gemman vot comes from 'Igate."

Percival lifted his brilliant eyes, and they were moistened with a
heavenly dew, on the dull face of his fellow-creature. Beck made a
scrape, looked round, shambled back to the door, and ran home, through
the lamp-lit streets of the great mart of the Christian universe, to sew
the gold in his mattress.




CHAPTER III.

EARLY TRAINING FOR AN UPRIGHT GENTLEMAN.

Percival St. John had been brought up at home under the eye of his mother
and the care of an excellent man who had been tutor to himself and his
brothers. The tutor was not much of a classical scholar, for in great
measure he had educated himself; and he who does so, usually lacks the
polish and brilliancy of one whose footsteps have been led early to the
Temple of the Muses. In fact, Captain Greville was a gallant soldier,
with whom Vernon St. John had been acquainted in his own brief military
career, and whom circumstances had so reduced in life as to compel him to
sell his commission and live as he could. He had always been known in
his regiment as a reading man, and his authority looked up to in all the
disputes as to history and dates, and literary anecdotes, which might
occur at the mess-table. Vernon considered him the most learned man of
his acquaintance; and when, accidentally meeting him in London, he
learned his fallen fortunes, he congratulated himself on a very brilliant
idea when he suggested that Captain Greville should assist him in the
education of his boys and the management of his estate. At first, all
that Greville modestly undertook, with respect to the former, and,
indeed, was expected to do, was to prepare the young gentlemen for Eton,
to which Vernon, with the natural predilection of an Eton man, destined
his sons. But the sickly constitutions of the two elder justified Lady
Mary in her opposition to a public school; and Percival conceived early
so strong an affection for a sailor's life that the father's intentions
were frustrated. The two elder continued their education at home, and
Percival, at an earlier age than usual, went to sea. The last was
fortunate enough to have for his captain one of that new race of naval
officers who, well educated and accomplished, form a notable contrast to
the old heroes of Smollett. Percival, however, had not been long in the
service before the deaths of his two elder brothers, preceded by that of
his father, made him the head of his ancient house, and the sole prop of
his mother's earthly hopes. He conquered with a generous effort the
passion for his noble profession, which service had but confirmed, and
returned home with his fresh, childlike nature uncorrupted, his
constitution strengthened, his lively and impressionable mind braced by
the experience of danger and the habits of duty, and quietly resumed his
reading under Captain Greville, who moved from the Hall to a small house
in the village.

Now, the education he had received, from first to last, was less adapted
prematurely to quicken his intellect and excite his imagination than to
warm his heart and elevate, while it chastened, his moral qualities; for
in Lady Mary there was, amidst singular sweetness of temper, a high cast
of character and thought. She was not what is commonly called clever,
and her experience of the world was limited, compared to that of most
women of similar rank who pass their lives in the vast theatre of London.
But she became superior by a certain single-heartedness which made truth
so habitual to her that the light in which she lived rendered all objects
around her clear. One who is always true in the great duties of life is
nearly always wise. And Vernon, when he had fairly buried his faults,
had felt a noble shame for the excesses into which they had led him.
Gradually more and more wedded to his home, he dropped his old
companions. He set grave guard on his talk (his habits now required no
guard), lest any of the ancient levity should taint the ears of his
children. Nothing is more common in parents than their desire that their
children should escape their faults. We scarcely know ourselves till we
have children; and then, if we love them duly, we look narrowly into
failings that become vices, when they serve as examples to the young.

The inborn gentleman, with the native courage and spirit and horror of
trick and falsehood which belong to that chivalrous abstraction, survived
almost alone in Vernon St. John; and his boys sprang up in the atmosphere
of generous sentiments and transparent truth. The tutor was in harmony
with the parents,--a soldier every inch of him; not a mere
disciplinarian, yet with a profound sense of duty, and a knowledge that
duty is to be found in attention to details. In inculcating the habit of
subordination, so graceful to the young, he knew how to make himself
beloved, and what is harder still, to be understood. The soul of this
poor soldier was white and unstained, as the arms of a maiden knight; it
was full of suppressed but lofty enthusiasm. He had been ill used,
whether by Fate or the Horse Guards; his career had been a failure; but
he was as loyal as if his hand held the field-marshal's truncheon, and
the garter bound his knee. He was above all querulous discontent. From
him, no less than from his parents, Percival caught, not only a spirit of
honour worthy the antiqua fides of the poets, but that peculiar
cleanliness of thought, if the expression may be used, which belongs to
the ideal of youthful chivalry. In mere booklearning, Percival, as may
be supposed, was not very extensively read; but his mind, if not largely
stored, had a certain unity of culture, which gave it stability and
individualized its operations. Travels, voyages, narratives of heroic
adventure, biographies of great men, had made the favourite pasture of
his enthusiasm. To this was added the more stirring, and, perhaps, the
more genuine order of poets who make you feel and glow, rather than doubt
and ponder. He knew at least enough of Greek to enjoy old Homer; and if
he could have come but ill through a college examination into Aeschylus
and Sophocles, he had dwelt with fresh delight on the rushing storm of
spears in the "Seven before Thebes," and wept over the heroic calamities
of Antigone. In science, he was no adept; but his clear good sense and
quick appreciation of positive truths had led him easily through the
elementary mathematics, and his somewhat martial spirit had made him
delight in the old captain's lectures on military tactics. Had he
remained in the navy, Percival St. John would doubtless have been
distinguished. His talents fitted him for straightforward, manly action;
and he had a generous desire of distinction, vague, perhaps, the moment
he was taken from his profession, and curbed by his diffidence in himself
and his sense of deficiencies in the ordinary routine of purely classical
education. Still, he had in him all the elements of a true man,--a man
to go through life with a firm step and a clear conscience and a gallant
hope. Such a man may not win fame,--that is an accident; but he must
occupy no despicable place in the movement of the world.

It was at first intended to send Percival to Oxford; but for some reason
or other that design was abandoned. Perhaps Lady Mary, over cautious, as
mothers left alone sometimes are, feared the contagion to which a young
man of brilliant expectations and no studious turn is necessarily exposed
in all places of miscellaneous resort. So Percival was sent abroad for
two years, under the guardianship of Captain Greville. On his return, at
the age of nineteen, the great world lay before him, and he longed
ardently to enter. For a year Lady Mary's fears and fond anxieties
detained him at Laughton; but though his great tenderness for his mother
withheld Percival from opposing her wishes by his own, this interval of
inaction affected visibly his health and spirits. Captain Greville, a
man of the world, saw the cause sooner than Lady Mary, and one morning,
earlier than usual, he walked up to the Hall.

The captain, with all his deference to the sex, was a plain man enough
when business was to be done. Like his great commander, he came to the
point in a few words.

"My dear Lady Mary, our boy must go to London,--we are killing him here."

"Mr. Greville!" cried Lady Mary, turning pale and putting aside her
embroidery,--"killing him?"

"Killing the man in him. I don't mean to alarm you; I dare say his lungs
are sound enough, and that his heart would bear the stethoscope to the
satisfaction of the College of Surgeons. But, my dear ma'am, Percival is
to be a man; it is the man you are killing by keeping him tied to your
apron-string."

"Oh, Mr. Greville, I am sure you don't wish to wound me, but--"

"I beg ten thousand pardons. I am rough, but truth is rough sometimes."

"It is not for my sake," said the mother, warmly, and with tears in her
eyes, "that I have wished him to be here. If he is dull, can we not fill
the house for him?"

"Fill a thimble, my dear Lady Mary. Percival should have a plunge in the
ocean."

"But he is so young yet,--that horrid London; such temptations,--
fatherless, too!"

"I have no fear of the result if Percival goes now, while his principles
are strong and his imagination is not inflamed; but if we keep him here
much longer against his bent, he will learn to brood and to muse, write
bad poetry perhaps, and think the world withheld from him a thousand
times more delightful than it is. This very dread of temptation will
provoke his curiosity, irritate his fancy, make him imagine the
temptation must be a very delightful thing. For the first time in my
life, ma'am, I have caught him sighing over fashionable novels, and
subscribing to the Southampton Circulating Library. Take my word for it,
it is time that Percival should begin life, and swim without corks."

Lady Mary had a profound confidence in Greville's judgment and affection
for Percival, and, like a sensible woman, she was aware of her own
weakness. She remained silent for a few moments, and then said, with an
effort,--

"You know how hateful London is to me now,--how unfit I am to return to
the hollow forms of its society; still, if you think it right, I will
take a house for the season, and Percival can still be under our eye."

"No, ma'am,--pardon me,--that will be the surest way to make him either
discontented or hypocritical. A young man of his prospects and temper
can hardly be expected to chime in with all our sober, old-fashioned
habits. You will impose on him--if he is to conform to our hours and
notions and quiet set--a thousand irksome restraints; and what will be
the consequence? In a year he will be of age, and can throw us off
altogether, if he pleases. I know the boy; don't seem to distrust him,--
he may be trusted. You place the true restraint on temptation when you
say to him: 'We confide to you our dearest treasure,--your honour, your
morals, your conscience, yourself!'"

"But at least you will go with him, if it must be so," said Lady Mary,
after a few timid arguments, from which, one by one, she was driven.

"I! What for? To be a jest of the young puppies he must know; to make
him ashamed of himself and me,--himself as a milksop, and me as a dry
nurse?"

"But this was not so abroad."

"Abroad, ma'am, I gave him full swing I promise you; and when we went
abroad he was two years younger."

"But he is a mere child still."

"Child, Lady Mary! At his age I had gone through two sieges. There are
younger faces than his at a mess-room. Come, come! I know what you
fear,--he may commit some follies; very likely. He may be taken in, and
lose some money,--he can afford it, and he will get experience in return.
Vices he has none. I have seen him,--ay, with the vicious. Send him out
against the world like a saint of old, with his Bible in his hand, and no
spot on his robe. Let him see fairly what is, not stay here to dream of
what is not. And when he's of age, ma'am, we must get him an object, a
pursuit; start him for the county, and make him serve the State. He will
understand that business pretty well. Tush! tush! what is there to cry
at?"

The captain prevailed. We don't say that his advice would have been
equally judicious for all youths of Percival's age; but he knew well the
nature to which he confided; he knew well how strong was that young heart
in its healthful simplicity and instinctive rectitude; and he appreciated
his manliness not too highly when he felt that all evident props and aids
would be but irritating tokens of distrust.

And thus, armed only with letters of introduction, his mother's tearful
admonitions, and Greville's experienced warnings, Percival St. John was
launched into London life. After the first month or so, Greville came up
to visit him, do him sundry kind, invisible offices amongst his old
friends, help him to equip his apartments, and mount his stud; and wholly
satisfied with the result of his experiment, returned in high spirits,
with flattering reports, to the anxious mother.

But, indeed, the tone of Percival's letters would have been sufficient to
allay even maternal anxiety. He did not write, as sons are apt to do,
short excuses for not writing more at length, unsatisfactory compressions
of details (exciting worlds of conjecture) into a hurried sentence.
Frank and overflowing, those delightful epistles gave accounts fresh from
the first impressions of all he saw and did. There was a racy, wholesome
gusto in his enjoyment of novelty and independence. His balls and his
dinners and his cricket at Lord's, his partners and his companions, his
general gayety, his occasional ennui, furnisbed ample materials to one
who felt he was corresponding with another heart, and had nothing to fear
or to conceal.

But about two months before this portion of our narrative opens with the
coronation, Lady Mary's favourite sister, who had never married, and who,
by the death of her parents, was left alone in the worse than widowhood
of an old maid, had been ordered to Pisa for a complaint that betrayed
pulmonary symptoms; and Lady Mary, with her usual unselfishness,
conquered both her aversion to movement and her wish to be in reach of
her son, to accompany abroad this beloved and solitary relative. Captain
Greville was pressed into service as their joint cavalier. And thus
Percival's habitual intercourse with his two principal correspondents
received a temporary check.




CHAPTER IV.

JOHN ARDWORTH.

At noon the next day Beck, restored to his grandeur, was at the helm of
his state; Percival was vainly trying to be amused by the talk of two or
three loungers who did him the honour to smoke a cigar in his rooms; and
John Ardworth sat in his dingy cell in Gray's Inn, with a pile of law
books on the table, and the daily newspapers carpeting a footstool of
Hansard's Debates upon the floor,--no unusual combination of studies
amongst the poorer and more ardent students of the law, who often owe
their earliest, nor perhaps their least noble, earnings to employment in
the empire of the Press. By the power of a mind habituated to labour,
and backed by a frame of remarkable strength and endurance, Ardworth
grappled with his arid studies not the less manfully for a night mainly
spent in a printer's office, and stinted to less than four hours' actual
sleep. But that sleep was profound and refreshing as a peasant's. The
nights thus devoted to the Press (he was employed in the sub-editing of a
daily journal), the mornings to the law, he kept distinct the two
separate callings with a stern subdivision of labour which in itself
proved the vigour of his energy and the resolution of his will. Early
compelled to shift for himself and carve out his own way, he had obtained
a small fellowship at the small college in which he had passed his
academic career. Previous to his arrival in London, by contributions to
political periodicals and a high reputation at that noble debating
society in Cambridge which has trained some of the most eminent of living
public men [Amongst those whom the "Union" almost contemporaneously
prepared for public life, and whose distinction has kept the promise of
their youth, we may mention the eminent barristers, Messrs. Austin and
Cockburn; and amongst statesmen, Lord Grey, Mr. C. Buller, Mr. Charles
Villiers, and Mr. Macaulay. Nor ought we to forget those brilliant
competitors for the prizes of the University, Dr. Kennedy (now head-
master of Shrewsbury School) and the late Winthrop M. Praed.], he had
established a name which was immediately useful to him in obtaining
employment on the Press. Like most young men of practical ability, he
was an eager politician. The popular passion of the day kindled his
enthusiasm and stirred the depths of his soul with magnificent, though
exaggerated, hopes in the destiny of his race. He identified himself
with the people; his stout heart beat loud in their stormy cause. His
compositions, if they wanted that knowledge of men, that subtle
comprehension of the true state of parties, that happy temperance in
which the crowning wisdom of statesmen must consist,--qualities which
experience alone can give,--excited considerable attention by their bold
eloquence and hardy logic. They were suited to the time. But John
Ardworth had that solidity of understanding which betokens more than
talent, and which is the usual substratum of genius. He would not depend
alone on the precarious and often unhonoured toils of polemical
literature for that distinction on which he had fixed his steadfast
heart. Patiently he plodded on through the formal drudgeries of his new
profession, lighting up dulness by his own acute comprehension, weaving
complexities into simple system by the grasp of an intellect inured to
generalize, and learning to love even what was most distasteful, by the
sense of difficulty overcome, and the clearer vision which every step
through the mists and up the hill gave of the land beyond. Of what the
superficial are apt to consider genius, John Ardworth had but little. He
had some imagination (for a true thinker is never without that), but he
had a very slight share of fancy. He did not flirt with the Muses; on
the granite of his mind few flowers could spring. His style, rushing and
earnest, admitted at times of a humour not without delicacy,--though less
delicate than forcible and deep,--but it was little adorned with wit, and
still less with poetry. Yet Ardworth had genius, and genius ample and
magnificent. There was genius in that industrious energy so patient in
the conquest of detail, so triumphant in the perception of results.
There was genius in that kindly sympathy with mankind; genius in that
stubborn determination to succeed; genius in that vivid comprehension of
affairs, and the large interests of the world; genius fed in the labours
of the closet, and evinced the instant he was brought into contact with
men,--evinced in readiness of thought, grasp of memory, even in a rough,
imperious nature, which showed him born to speak strong truths, and in
their name to struggle and command.

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