CHAPTER III.

HARD HIT.

Lucius Davoren found himself curiously disturbed by the memory of that pretty face in his own rank of life—that glimpse of a fireside different from the common firesides of the Shadrack-Basin district—the fat and prosperous hearths, where the atmosphere was odorous with tea, shrimps, muffins, and gin-and-water; the barren hearth-stoves by which destitution hugged itself in its rags. He went about his daily work with his accustomed earnestness, was no whit the less tender to the little children, watched with the same anxious care by pauper sick beds, handled shattered limbs or loathsome sores with the same gentle touch; in a word, did his duty thoroughly, in this dismal, initiative stage of his career.

But he never passed Cedar House without a regretful sigh and a lingering gaze at its blank upper windows; which, showing no trace of the life within, had a wall-eyed look that was worse than the utter blindness of closed shutters. He sometimes went out of his way even, for the sake of passing those inexorable walls. He wasted a few minutes of his busy day loitering by the iron gate, hoping that by some kindly caprice of Fortune the pale sweet face of Lucille Sivewright would appear behind the rusty bars, the ponderous hinge would creak, and the girl who haunted his thoughts would emerge from her gloomy prison.

‘Does she never come out?’ he asked himself one fine winter day, when there was sunshine even in the realms of Shadrack. It was a month after his adventure with Homer Sivewright, and he had lingered by the gate a good many times. ‘Does she never breathe the free air of heaven, never see the faces of mankind? Is she a cloistered nun in all but the robe, and without the companionship which may make a convent tolerable?—without even the affection of that grim old grandfather? for how coldly he spoke of her! What a life!’

Lucius was full of pity for this girl, whom he had only known one brief hour. If any one had suggested that he was in love with her, he would have scorned the notion. Yet there are passions which endure for a lifetime; which defy death and blossom above a grave; though their history may be reckoned by rare hours of brightness, too easily reckoned in the dull sum of life.

‘Love at sight is but the fancy of poets and fools,’ thought Lucius; ‘but it would be strange if I were not sorry for a fair young life thus blighted.’

His violin had a new pathos for him now, in those occasional hours of leisure when he laid aside his books and opened the case which held that magician. His favourite sonatas breathed a languid melancholy, which sounded to him like the complaint of an imprisoned soul—that princess of fairy tale—the bric-à-brac dealer’s granddaughter. But to think of her thus, as he played dreamily by his lonely fireside, was only to feel a natural compassion for an oppressed fellow-creature.

This tendency to dwell upon one subject, and that a foolish one, since his pity could not be of the smallest service to its object, finally worried him not a little. Thus it was that, finding himself his own master an hour or so earlier than usual one January afternoon, he told himself that the wisest thing he could do would be to get away from the Shadrack-road atmosphere altogether.

‘The life I lead is too narrow, too completely monotonous,’ he thought. ‘No wonder I have taken to exaggerate the importance of trifles. Yes, I will refresh myself by a few hours’ liberty in a brighter world. I will go and hunt up Geoffrey Hossack.’

They were firm friends still, though their lives lay as wide apart as two rivers which have their source from the same watershed, and wander off by opposite ways to the sea, never to touch again. They had lost sight of each other for some time of late. Geoffrey, ever a peripatetic spirit, had been doing Norway, with an excursus into Lapland during the last two years; but a letter received just before Christmas had announced his return, and his sojourn at a manor-house in Yorkshire.

‘I shall begin the new year in the City of cities,’ he wrote; ‘and one of my first occupations will be to beat up your quarters in that queer world of yours beyond the Tower. But if you are kind enough to forestall me, you will find me in my old rooms at Philpott’s.—Yours, as per usual, G. H.’

The new year had begun, and had brought no sign from Geoffrey; so Lucius took advantage of his leisure to go westward in quest of his friend. He detested the slow tortures of an omnibus, and was too poor to afford himself a hansom; so he gave himself the luxury of a walk.

That journey took him almost from one end of London to the other. The forest of spars, the ropewalk, the open gates of the docks, the perpetual procession of hogsheads, cotton bales, iron bars, packing-cases, and petroleum barrels, gave place to the crowded streets of the City, where all the operations of commerce seemed to be carried on quietly, by men who walked to and fro, carrying no merchandise, but buying and selling as it were by sign and countersign. Then came that borderland on the westward side of Temple Bar—that somewhat shabby and doubtful region where loom the churches of St. Clement and St. Mary, which seem to have been especially designed as perpetual standing impediments to the march of architectural progress in this quarter; then the brighter shop-windows and more holiday air of the western Strand; and then Charing-cross; and a little way farther on, hanging-on to the skirts of Pall Mall and the Clubs, behold Philpott’s or the Cosmopolitan Hotel, an old-fashioned house with a narrow façade in red-brick, pinched-in between its portlier neighbours—a house which looked small, but boasted of making up forty beds, and retaining all the year round a staff of thirty servants.

Mr. Hossack was at home. The waiter of whom Lucius asked the question brightened at the sound of his name, as if he had been a personal friend, and took Lucius under his protection on the instant.

‘This way, sir; the first-floor. Mr. Hossack has his own particular rooms here. We once refused them to a Cabinet Minister, because Mr. Hossack wanted them.’

‘A general favourite, I suppose.’

‘Lord bless you, sir, down to the vegetable maid, we worship him.’

The enthusiastic waiter opened a door, and ushered in the guest. There had been no question as to card or name. Geoffrey Hossack was accessible as the sunshine.

He was half buried in a low capacious chair, his head flung back on the cushions, a cigar between his lips, an open French novel flung face downwards on the carpet beside him, amongst a litter of newspapers. The winter dusk had almost deepened into night, and the room was unlighted save by the fire. Yet even in that fitful light Lucius saw that his friend’s countenance was moody; a fact so rare as to awaken curiosity, or even concern.

‘Geoff, old fellow!’

‘Why, Davoren!’ cried Geoffrey, starting up from his luxurious repose, and flinging the unfinished cigar into the fire. ‘How good of you! And I ought to have come to your place. I’ve been in London a fortnight.’

‘My dear old boy, one hardly expects Alcibiades beyond the Minories. I have been living at that dingy end of town until to come westward is a new sensation. When I saw Trafalgar-square and the lighted windows of yonder Club to-night, I felt like Columbus when he sighted the coast of San Salvador. I had a leisure afternoon, and thought I couldn’t spend it better than in looking you up. And now, Geoff, for your Norwegian and Laplandian experiences. You were looking uncommonly gloomy when I came in; as if your memories of the north were not of the brightest.’

‘My northern memories are pleasant enough,’ said the other, putting aside the question lightly, just in that old familiar way Lucius knew so well. ‘Come, Lucius, plant yourself there,’ rolling over another capacious chair, the last device of some satanic upholsterer for the propagation of slothful habits; ‘take one of those Havanas, and light up. I can never talk freely to a man till I can hardly see his face across the clouds of his tobacco—a native modesty of disposition, I suppose; or perhaps that disinclination to look my fellow-man straight in the face which is accounted one of the marks of a villanous character. Goodish weed, isn’t it? Do you remember British Columbia, Davoren, and the long days and nights when there was no tobacco?’

‘Do I remember?’ echoed the surgeon, looking at the fire. ‘Am I ever likely to forget?’

‘Of course not. The question was a mere _façon de parler_. There are things that no man can forget. Can I forget, for instance, how you saved my life? how through all those wearisome nights and days when I was lying rolled up in my buffalo skins raving like a lunatic, fancying myself in all sorts of places and among all sorts of people, you were at once doctor and sick-nurse, guardian and provider?’

‘Please don’t talk of that time, Geoff. There are some things better forgotten. I did no more for you than I’d have done for a stranger; except that my heart went with my service, and would have almost broken if you had died. Our sufferings and our peril at that time seem to me too bitter even for remembrance. I can’t endure to look back at them.’

‘Strange!’ exclaimed Geoffrey lightly. ‘To me they afford an unfailing source of satisfaction. I rarely order a dinner without thinking of the days when my vital powers were sustained—“sustained” is hardly the word, say rather “suspended”—by mouldy pemmican. I seldom open a new box of cigars without remembering those doleful hours in which I smoked dried grass, flavoured with the last scrapings of nicotine from my meerschaum. It is the converse of what somebody says about a sorrow’s crown of sorrow. The memory of past hardship sweetens the comfort of the present. But I do shudder sometimes when I remember awakening from _my_ delirium to find _you_ down with brain-fever, and poor little Schanck sitting awestricken by your side, like a man who had been holding converse with spirits. I don’t mean schnapps, but something uncanny. Thank God, those Canadian emigrants found us out soon afterwards, or He only knows how our story would have ended.’

‘Thank God!’ echoed Lucius solemnly. ‘I know nothing of my illness, can remember nothing till I found myself strapped like a bundle upon a horse’s back, riding through the snow.’

‘We moved you before you were quite right in your head,’ answered Geoffrey apologetically. ‘The Canadians wouldn’t wait any longer. It was our only chance of being put into the right track.’

‘You did a wise thing, Geoff. It was good for me to wake up far from that wretched log-hut.’

‘Come now, after all, we had some very jolly times there,’ said Geoffrey, with his habit of making the best of life; ‘sitting by the blazing pine-logs jawing away like old boots. It was only when our ’baccy ran out that existence became a burden. I give you my honour that sometimes when civilised life begins to hang heavy, I look back to the days when we crossed the Rocky Mountains with a regretful sigh. I almost envy that plucky little German sea-captain who left us at Victoria, and went on to San Francisco to dig for gold.’

‘I verily believe, Geoff, you would have contrived to be cheerful in the Black Hole at Calcutta, or on the middle passage. You have a limitless reserve fund of animal spirits.’

‘There you’re wrong. I believed as much myself till the other day. But I have lately discovered a latent faculty hitherto unsuspected even by myself; the capacity for being miserable.’

‘You have sustained some family affliction,—or you have taken to wearing tight boots?’

‘Neither. I wish you’d help yourself to some brandy-and-soda yonder,’ interjected Mr. Hossack, pointing to a side-table on which those refreshments were provided, and ringing the bell clamorously; ‘I’ll order dinner before I unbosom myself. George,’ to the enthusiastic waiter, who appeared in prompt answer to the noisy summons, ‘the best you can do for this gentleman and me, at seven sharp; and don’t come fidgeting in and out to lay the cloth until five minutes before you bring the soup tureen. By the way, we’ll begin with oysters and Montrachet, and you can give us a bottle of Yquem afterwards. No sparkling wine. We’ll wind up with Chambertin, if you’ve a bottle in good condition. But don’t bring it half-frozen out of the cellar, or muddled by hasty thawing. Exercise judgment, George; you have to deal with connoisseurs. Now,’ continued this epicurean youth, flinging himself back into the depths of his chair, ‘before I begin my egotistical prosing, let me hear what you’ve been doing all this time, my Lucius.’

‘That may be told in two words. Hard work.’

‘Poor old Davoren!’

‘Don’t take that simple statement as a complaint. It is work I like. I might have set up my Penates in what is called a genteel neighbourhood, and earned my crust a good deal more easily than I can earn it yonder. But I wanted wide experience—a complete initiation—and I went where humanity is thickest. The result has more than satisfied me. If ever I move westward it will be to Savile-row.’

The sybarite contemplated his friend admiringly, yet with a stifled yawn, as if the very contemplation of so much vital force were fatiguing.

‘Upon my word, I don’t know that I wouldn’t exchange my three-per-cents for your ambition, Lucius,’ he said. ‘To have something to achieve, something to win—that is the keenest rapture of the human mind, that makes the chief delight of the chase. Upon my honour, I envy you. I seem to awake to the conviction that it is a misfortune to be born with the proverbial silver spoon in one’s mouth.’

‘The man who begins life with a fortune starts ahead of the penniless struggler in the race for fame,’ answered the surgeon. ‘There is plenty of scope for your ambition, Geoff, in spite of the three-per-cents.’

‘What could I do?’

‘Try to make yourself famous.’

‘Not possible! Unless I took to a pea-green coat, like that rich young West Indian swell in the last generation. Fame! bah! for Brown, Jones, or Robinson to talk of making themselves famous is about as preposterous as it would be for Hampstead-hill to try and develop a volcano. Men born to fame have a special brand upon their foreheads, like the stamp on Veuve Clicquot’s champagne corks. I think I see it in the anxious lines that mark yours, Lucius.’

‘There is the senate,’ said Davoren; ‘the natural aim of an Englishman’s ambition.’

‘What! truckle to rural shopkeepers for the privilege of wasting the summer evenings and the spring tides in a stuffy manufactory of twaddle. _Pas si bête!_’

‘After all,’ returned Lucius, with a faint sigh, ‘you have something better than ambition, which is only life in the future—mere fetish worship, perhaps—or the adoration of a shadow which may never become a substance. You have youth, and the power to enjoy all youth’s pleasures; that is to say, life in the present.’

‘So I thought till very lately,’ answered Geoffrey, with another sigh; ‘but there is a new flavour of bitterness in the wine of life. Lucius, I’m going to ask you a serious question. Do you believe in love at first sight?’

A startling question at any rate, for it brought the blood into the surgeon’s toil-worn face. Happily they were still sitting in the fire-light, which just now waxed dim.

‘About as much as I believe in ghosts or spirit-rapping,’ he answered coldly.

‘Which means that you’ve never seen a ghost or had a message from spirit-land,’ answered Geoffrey. ‘Six months ago I should have called any one an ass who could love a woman of whom he knew no more than that her face was lovely and her voice divine. But as somebody—a baker’s daughter, wasn’t she?—observed, “We know what we are, but we know not what we may be.”’

‘You have fallen in love, Geoff?’

‘Descended into abysmal depths of folly, a million fathoms below the soundings of common sense. There’s nothing romantic in the business either, which of course makes it worse. It’s only foolish. I didn’t save the lady’s life; by stopping a pair of horses that were galloping to perdition with her; or by swimming out a mile or so to snatch her from the devouring jaws of an ebb tide. I have no excuse for my madness. The lady is a concert-singer, and I first saw her while dancing attendance upon some country cousins who were staying in town the other day, and led me like a victim to musical mornings and evening recitals, and so on. You know that I have not a passionate love of music.’

‘I know that you had a very moderate appreciation of my violin.’

‘All the tunes sounded so much alike. Want of taste on my part, of course. However, my cousins—Arabella and Jessie, nice girls, but domineering—insisted that I should go to concerts, so I went. They both sing and play, and wanted to improve their style, they said; selfishly ignoring the fact that I had no style to improve; and allowing me to pay for all the tickets. One morning—splendid weather for snowballing; I wished myself young again and at Winchester, as I looked at the streets—we went to a Recital, which took place in a dreary-looking house near Manchester-square, by the kind permission of the tenant. The concert people might as well have borrowed a roomy family vault. It would have been quite as cheerful. Well, we surrendered our tickets—parallelograms of sky-blue pasteboard, and uncommonly dear at half a guinea—to a shabby footman, who ushered us up-stairs over a threadbare stair carpet to a faded drawing-room, where we found some elderly ladies of the dowdy order, and a miscellaneous collection of antique gentlemen in well-worn coats of exploded cut. These I took to represent the musical nobility. It was not a cheerful concert. First came a quartette, in ever so many parts, like a dull sermon; a quartette for a piano, violoncello, and two fiddles, with firstly, and secondly, and thirdly. Every now and then, when the violoncello gave forth rather deeper groans than usual, or one of the fiddles prolonged a wire-drawn note, the musical nobility gave a little gasp, and looked at one another, and one of the old gentlemen tapped the lid of his snuffbox. After the quartette we had a pianoforte solo, to my unenlightened mind an arid waste of tuneless chords, and little meandering runs to nowhere in particular, a little less interesting than a problem in Euclid. I prefer my cousin Arabella’s hearty thumping, and frantic rushes up and down the keyboard, to this milk-and-water style, which is, I understand, classical. Number three was a vocal duet by Handel, which I won’t describe, as it lulled me into a placid slumber. When I reopened my eyes there was a gentle murmur of admiration floating in the atmosphere; and I beheld a lady dressed in black, with a sheet of music in her hand, waiting for the end of the symphony.’

‘_The_ lady, I suppose,’ said Lucius, duly interested.

‘The lady. I won’t attempt to describe her; for after all what can one say of the loveliest woman except that she has a straight nose, fine eyes, a good complexion? And yet these constitute so small a part of Beauty. One may see them in the street every day. This one stood there like a statue in the cold wintry light, and seemed to me the most perfect being I had ever beheld. She appeared divinely unconscious of her beauty, as unconscious as Aphrodite must have been in that wild free world of newborn Greece, though all creation worshipped her. She didn’t look about her with a complacent smile, challenging admiration. Her dark-fringed eyelids drooped over the violet-gray eyes, as she looked downward at the music. Her dress was Quaker-like, a linen collar round the full firm throat, the perfect arm defined by the plain black sleeve. Art had done nothing to enhance or to detract from her beauty. She sang “Auld Robin Gray” in a voice that went to my inmost heart. The musical nobility sniffed and murmured rapturously. The old gentleman rapped his snuffbox, and said Bwava! and the song was re-demanded. She curtsied and began something about a blue bodice and Lubin, and in this there were bird-like trills, and a prolonged shake, clear and strong as the carol of a sky-lark. Lucius, I was such a demented ass at that moment, that if the restraints of civilisation hadn’t been uncommonly strong upon me, I should have wept like a schoolboy before a caning.’

‘Something in the _timbre_ of the voice,’ said Lucius, ‘simpatica.’

‘Sim-anybody you like; it knocked me over as if I’d been a skittle.’

‘Have you seen her since?’

‘Have I seen her! I have followed her from concert-room to concert-room, until my _sensorium_—that’s the word, isn’t it?—aches from the amount of classical music that has been inflicted upon it—the x minors and z majors, and so forth. Sometimes I hunted her down in some other aristocratic drawing-room, by the kind permission, &c.; sometimes I found her at the Hanover-square Rooms. Mitchell has a standing order to send me a ticket for every concert at which she sings. It’s deuced hard work. I’m due this time to-morrow at St. George’s Hall, Liverpool.’

‘But, my dear old Geoff, can anything be more foolish?’ expostulated Lucius, forgetful of that rusty old gate in the Shadrack-road, to which purest pity had so often led him.

‘I daresay not. But I can’t help myself.’

‘Do you know anything about the lady?’

‘All that a diligent process of private inquiry could discover; and yet very little. The lady is a widow—’

‘Disenchanting fact.’

‘Her name, Bertram.’

‘Assumed, no doubt.’

‘Very possibly. She has lodgings in Keppel-street, Russell-square, and lives a life of extreme seclusion with one little girl. I saw the child one morning, a seraph of seven or eight, with flowing flaxen hair, blue frock, and scarlet legs, like a tropical bird, or a picture by Millais.’

‘That sounds like respectability.’

‘Respectability!’ cried Geoffrey, flaming with indignation. ‘I would no more doubt her honour than I would question that of my dead mother. If you had heard her sing “Voi che sapéte,” the clear thrilling tones, now swelling into a flood of melody, now sinking to the tenderest whisper! Could such tones as those come from an impure heart? No, Lucius. I need no certificate of character to tell me that Jane Bertram is true.’

Lucius smiled—the slow smile of worldly wisdom—and then breathed a faint regretful sigh for his friend’s delusion.

‘My dear Geoff,’ he said, ‘I daresay the conclusion you arrive at is natural to the unsophisticated mind. A great orator addresses us like a demigod; ergo, he must be by nature godlike. Yet his life may be no better than Thurlow’s or Wilkes’s. A woman is divinely beautiful; and we argue that her soul, too, must be divine. The history of the musical stage tells us that in days gone by there were women who sang like angels, yet were by no means perfect as women. For God’s sake, dear old friend, beware of music. Of all man’s ensnarers the siren with lyre and voice is the most dangerous. Of all woman’s tempters he who breathes his earthly desires in heavenly-sounding melody is the most fatal. In my own family there has been a wretched example of this nature. I speak with all the bitterness that comes from bitter experience.’

‘That may be so,’ returned the other, unconvinced; ‘but there are instincts which cannot lie. My belief in Jane Bertram is fixed as the sun in heaven.’

‘Did you contrive to obtain an introduction?’

‘No. I found that impossible. She knows no one, goes nowhere, except for her professional engagements. Even the people who engage her—music publishers, and what not—know nothing about her; except that she sings better than five out of six sopranos of established reputation, and that she has struggled into her present modest position out of obscurity and hard work. She was only a teacher of music until very lately. She would do wonders if she went on the stage, my informant told me; and such a course was suggested to her; but she peremptorily declined to entertain the idea. She earns, in the season, about five pounds a week. What a pittance for a goddess!’

‘And who was Mr. Bertram?’

‘I was not curious upon that subject; enough for me to know that he is in his grave. But had I been ever so inquisitive my curiosity must have gone unsatisfied. The people who know so little about her know still less about her late husband. He has been dead some years. That is all they could tell me.’

‘And you positively go down to Liverpool to hear her sing!’

‘As I would go back to the shores of the Red River for the same purpose. Ay, live again on mouldy pemmican, and hear again the howling of the wolves at sunset.’

‘And is this kind of thing to go on indefinitely?’

‘It will go on until circumstances favour my passion, until I can win my way to her friendship, to her confidence; until I can say to her, without fear of repulse or discouragement, “Jane, I love you.” I am quite content to serve a longish apprenticeship, even to classical music, for the sake of that reward.’

Lucius stretched out his hand, and the two men’s broad palms met in the grasp of friendship.

‘Upon my honour, Geoffrey, I admire you,’ said the surgeon. ‘I won’t preach any more. Granted that your passion is foolish, at least it’s thorough. I honour a man who can say to himself, “That woman I will marry, and no other; that woman I will follow, through honour and dishonour, evil report and good report—”’

‘Stop,’ cried Geoffrey; ‘let there be no mention of dishonour in the same breath with her name. If I did not believe in her truth and purity, I would pluck this passion out of my breast—as the Carthusian prior in the mediæval legend plucked deadly sin out of the entrails of St. Hugo of Lincoln—though I cut my heart open to do it. I love her, and I believe in her.’

‘And if you ceased to believe in her, you would cease to love her?’

‘Yes,’ answered Geoffrey Hossack firmly.

He had risen from his seat by the hearth, and was pacing the dusky chamber, where the street lamps without and the red fire within made a curious half-light. Truly had his friend called him thorough. Intense, passionate, and impulsive was this generous nature—a nature which had never been spoiled by that hard school in which all men must learn whose first necessity is to get their living, that dreary breadwinner’s academical career to which God condemned Adam as the direst punishment of his disobedience and deceit. ‘No longer shalt thou wander careless in these flowery vales and groves, where generous emotions and affectionate impulses and noble thoughts might bud and blossom in the happy idlesse. For thee, sinner, the daily round of toil, the constant hurry, the ever-goading pressure of sordid necessities, which shall make thee selfish and hard and remorseless, with no leisure in which to be kind to thy brother strugglers, with hardly a pause in which to remember thy God!’