CHAPTER II.

“STILL FROM ONE SORROW TO ANOTHER THROWN.”

EUSTACE closed the book with a sigh--a sigh for the father he had never known, the father who had never known his birth; a sigh for the mother whose life had been sacrificed on so poor an altar. He had been reading for some hours with very little consciousness of the passage of time.

“You seem to be interested in that book, Mr. Thorburn,” said a familiar voice from the bank above him.

He started to his feet, dropped his book, turned, and looked up at the speaker. The voice was the voice of Harold Jerningham; and that gentleman was standing on the bank, pointing downward at the fallen book with the tip of his extended cane, as he might have pointed to some creature of the reptile tribe.

“You startled me a little, Mr. Jerningham,” said Eustace, as he stooped to pick up the book.

“Your study must have been deeply interesting to you, or you could scarcely have been so unconscious of my footsteps. Permit me.” He took the volume from the young man’s hand and turned the leaves listlessly. “One of your favourite dialogues, I suppose? No; an English novel. _Dion! Dion?_ I have some recollection of a book called _Dion_. What a very shabby person he looks after the lapse of years! Really, the authors of that time suffered some disadvantage at the hands of their publishers. What dismal gray binding! what meagre-looking type! The very paper has a musty odour. And you are deeply interested in _Dion_?”

“Yes; I am deeply interested.”

“The book strikes you as powerful?”

“No. The writer strikes me as a consummate scoundrel.”

Mr. Jerningham smiled, a faint smile. His smiles were for the most part faint and wan, like the smiles of a wandering spirit in the house of Hades.

“Do not be so energetic in your denunciation, Mr. Thorburn,” he said, quietly. “The man who wrote _Dion_ was as other men of his time--just a little selfish, perhaps, and anxious to travel on the sunny side of the great highway.”

“Did you know him?” asked Eustace, with sudden eagerness.

“Not the least in the world. But I know his book. People talked of it a little at the time, and there was some discussion about the authorship; all kinds of improbable persons were suggested. Yes; it all comes back to me as I look at the pages. A very poor book; stilted, affected, coxcombical. What a fool the man must have been to print such a piece of egotism!”

“Yes. It seems strange that any man could publish a book for the purpose of proclaiming himself a villain.”

“Not at all. But it is strange that a man can give his villany to the world in a _poor_ book--a book not containing one element of literary success; and that he should take the trouble of writing all this. Yes, it is very strange. An indolent kind of man, too--as one would imagine from the book. A very feeble book! I see a wrong tense here in a Latin quotation. The man did not even know his Catullus. Thanks.”

Mr. Jerningham returned the volume with a graceful listlessness and with a half-regretful sigh, as if it wearied him even to remember so feeble a book. He strolled away, leaving Eustace wondering that he should have fallen across a man who was familiar with his father’s book, and who in person resembled his father.

“If Mr. Jerningham had written his own biography, it might have been something like this book,” he said to himself. And then another IF--stupendous, terrible--presented itself to his mind.

But this he dismissed as an absurd and groundless fancy.

“What accident is more common than such a likeness as that between us two?” he asked of himself. “The world is full of such half-resemblances, to say nothing of the Lesurges and Debosques who are guillotined in mistake for one another.”

He left the seat on the river-bank, and strolled slowly homeward by a different path from that Mr. Jerningham had taken.

His reperusal of the book had been upon one point conclusive to him. The few details of the scene had told him at first that it had been laid in the British dominions. Reflection convinced him that Scotland was the locality of that solitary mountain habitation where his mother’s sad days had been spent.

_This_ had been Celia’s unknown power. This habitation upon Scottish soil was the hold which she had possessed over her lover. In the character of his wife he had brought her to Scotland, and there had made his domicile with her during a period of several months; and by the right of that Scottish home, that open acknowledgment, she _was_ his wife. She had fled from him, unconscious of this. But if she had been conscious of this power, her son told himself that she would have been too noble to use it; too proud to call herself a wife by favour of a legal quibble.

“I will talk it over with Uncle Dan,” Eustace said to himself; “and if he and I are agreed upon the subject, I will go to Scotland and hunt out the scene, supposing that to be possible from so slight a clue as this book will give us.”

He knew that by the law of Scotland he was in all probability legitimatized; but not for the wealth of Scotland would he have sought to establish such a claim upon that nameless father, whom of all men that ever lived upon this earth he most despised.

“He abandoned her to lonely self-upbraiding, long, dreary days of remorse, humiliation, sorrow past all comfort--the thought of the sorrow her sin had wrought for those she loved. He let her bear this bitter burden without one effort to lighten or to share it. He deserted the woman he had destroyed, because--she did not amuse him. Is this what wealth, and polite letters, and civilization make of a man? God forbid! Such a man should have worn imperial purple, and died the imperator’s common death in the days of Rome’s decadence. He is an anachronism in a Christian age.”

He walked slowly back to the cottage, where he had but just time to dress for dinner. The evening passed quietly. Of the four people assembled in M. de Bergerac’s drawing room, three were singularly quiet and thoughtful.

The summer dusk favoured silent meditation. Mr. Jerningham sat apart in a garden-chair under the long, rustic verandah, half-curtained with trailing branches of clematis and honeysuckle; Eustace sat in the darkest corner of the low drawing-room, where Helen occupied herself in playing dreamy German melodies upon her piano. M. de Bergerac strolled up and down before the lawn, stopping every now and then to say something to his friend Harold Jerningham.

“How silent and thoughtful we are to-night!” he cried at last, after having received more than one random answer from the master of Greenlands. “One would think you had seen a ghost, Harold; your eyes are fixed, like the eyes of Brutus at Philippi, or of Agamemnon when the warning shade of Achilles appeared to him, before the sailing of the ship that was to take him home--to death. What is the phantom at which you gaze with eyes of gloom?”

“The ghost of the Past,” answered Mr. Jerningham, as he rose to join his friend. “Not to Lot’s wife alone is it fatal to look back. I have been looking back to-day, Theodore.”

Within, all was silent except the piano, softly touched by slow, gentle hands, that stole along the keys in a languid, legato movement.

The player wondered at the change which had come upon her companion and fellow-student, and wondered to find the change in him so keen a sorrow to herself.

Very gloomy were the thoughts of Eustace as he sat in his dark corner, with closed eyes, and hands clasped above his head.

“How dare I tell him who and what I am, and then ask for the hand of his only daughter? Can I hope that even his simplicity will pardon such a family history as that which I must tell?”

All through the dark hours of that midsummer night he lay awake, brooding over the pages he had read, and thinking of the stain upon his name. To an older man, steeped in the hard wisdom of the world, the stigma would have been a lesser agony. He would have counted over to himself the list of great names made by the men who bore them, and would have found for himself crumbs of comfort. But for Eustace there was none. He had set up his divinity, and it seemed to him that only the richest tribute could be offered upon a shrine so pure.

His thoughts deepened in gloom as the night waned, until the fever in his mind assumed the force of inspiration. Rash and impetuous as youth and poetry, he resolved that for him hope there was none, except far a-field of this Arcadian dwelling.

“Shall I offer myself, nameless, in order to be refused?” he asked. “No. I will leave this too dear home, and go out into the world to make myself a name among modern poets before I ask confession or promise of Helen de Bergerac.”

To make himself a name among modern poets! The dream was a bold one. But the dreamer told himself that the ladder of Fame is sometimes mounted with a rush, and that for the successful writer of magazine lyrics it needs but a year or so of isolation and concentrated labour, a year or so of fervent devotion in the temple of Apollo, a year or so of poetic quietism, to accomplish the one great work which shall transform the graceful singer of modern Horatian odes into the world-renowned poet.

“I will tear myself away from this place before the week is out,” he said, with resolution that made the words a vow; “’tis too bright, too beautiful, too happy, and is dangerous as Armida’s garden for the man who would fain serve apprenticeship to the Muses.”