CHAPTER X.

“L’OISEAU FUIT COMME LE BONHEUR.”

EUSTACE refrained from opening the parcel given to him by his uncle until he found himself in his own room, in the solemn quiet of a rural midnight. Then, and then only, did he feel himself at liberty to enter upon a task which had a certain sanctity. It was but a mixed record of truth and fiction, this book which his guilty father had given to the world; but some part of his mother’s life was interwoven with those pages; her brief dream of happiness was shut, as it were, between the leaves of the volumes, like flowers that have once been bright with colour and rich with perfume, and which one finds pale and scentless in a long-unopened book.

The book was called _The Disappointments of Dion: a Sequel to Dion, a Confession_. By the same Author. This preservation in the second book of the name that had figured in the first seemed to indicate the autobiographical nature of both works. The hero of the _Disappointments_ was the same being as the hero of the _Confession_--the same being, hardened and degraded by ten years of selfishness and dissipation. The Dion of the _Confession_ had the affectation of cynicism, the tone of an Alcibiades who apes the philosophy of Diogenes. The Dion of the _Disappointments_ was really cynical, and attempted to disguise his cynicism under an affectation of _bonhomie_.

Eustace sat till late into the night, reading--with unspeakable pain, with sorrow, anger, sympathy, mixed in his mind as he read. Yes, this book had been written by his father--there could be no doubt of that. The first volume contained his mother’s story. It fitted into the record of the letters, and to the story told by Mrs. Willows. Idealized and poetized by the fancy of the hero, he read the history of a girl’s day-dream, and recognized in this poetized heroine the woman whose pensive face had been wont to brighten when it looked upon his. The story of a young student’s passion for a tradesman’s daughter was told with a certain grace and poetry. It is but an old story at best. It is always more or less the legend of Faust and Gretchen, and it needs a Göthe to elevate so simple a fable from the commonplace to the sublime.

The author of _Dion_ described his Gretchen very prettily. It was a portrait by Greuse, with an occasional touch of Raphael.

To the study of this book Eustace Thorburn applied himself with intense earnestness of thought and purpose. The Sibylline volumes were not more precious to the sage who purchased them so dearly than was this egotistical composition to the man who had found a leaf from his mother’s life in the heart of the book.

How much written here was the plain, unvarnished truth? how much the mere exercise of a romantic fancy? That was the question upon which depended the whole value of the volumes.

On the one hand, it would seem scarcely likely that any man would publish to the world the story of his own wrong-doing, or anatomize his own heart for the pleasure of a novel-reading public. On the other hand, there was the fact that men have, in a perverted spirit of vanity, given to the press revelations of viler sins and more deliberate baseness than any transgression confessed by the author of _Dion_. Eustace remembered the Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau; and he told himself that there is no crime which the egotist does not think interesting when the criminal is himself. But the strongest evidence in support of the idea that this _Disappointments of Dion_ was throughout a narration of real events lay in the fact that those pages which described the author’s courtship of a tradesman’s daughter formed an exact transcript of his mother’s story, as Eustace had learned it. The quiet sea-coast town, gayer in those days than now; the bookseller’s shop; the stretch of yellow sand beyond the rocks; the dull, commonplace companion of the author’s “divine C.”; the time of year; the interval that elapsed between the brief courtship and the elopement--all corresponded exactly with the data of that sad history whose every detail was written upon Eustace Thorburn’s heart.

Throughout the book, places and persons were indicated only by initials; and this alone imparted somewhat of an obsolete and Minerva-Press appearance to the volumes. This circumstance also gave further ground for the idea that there was in this book very little of absolute invention.

Eustace read the two slender volumes from beginning to end at a sitting. He began to read before midnight. The broad summer sunlight shone upon him, and the birds were singing loud in the woodland, when he closed the second volume. For him every page had an all-absorbing interest. The reading of this book was like the autopsy of his father’s mind and heart; and there was something of the surgeon’s scientific scrutiny in the deliberate care with which he read.

If there were any good to be found in this book, he was prepared to set that good as a _per-contra_ in the dread account of debtor and creditor which he kept against his unknown father. But he wanted to fathom the depths of evil in the mind of that nameless enemy. He wanted to ascertain the uttermost wrong this man had done him in the person of that dearer part of himself, his dead mother.

He read the book steadily through, pausing only to mark the passages which seemed to tell Celia Mayfield’s story, and all passages which bore, however indirectly, upon that story.

It was half-past six when he read the last page; and half-past seven was M. de Bergerac’s breakfast-hour. Happily, Mr. Thorburn was at that privileged age when a man can do without sleep, and find as much refreshment in a few pails of cold water as ponderous middle age can derive from a long night’s rest. So he made his toilet, and went down-stairs to the bright, pretty breakfast-room, little the worse for the studious occupation of his night.

Mr. Jerningham had wandered down by the water-side after leaving the cottage, and had seen the light in the secretary’s window, and wondered what the young man was doing.

“In the throes of poetical composition, no doubt,” thought the master of Greenlands. “How pleased he seemed to come back to these people; and with what a smile _she_ welcomed him! And to think that if I were to offer every possession I have in this world, and my heart of hearts, and my pride, and my life into the bargain, I could not buy one such smile as that! I could have such smiles once for the asking; they shone upon me from the fairest faces, spontaneous and liberal as the sunlight; and I passed on, and did not cherish one of them to light my old age. Oh, surely there is some world in which we live our lives again, enlightened by the follies of the past; some Swedenborgian heaven, in which the shadows of the things we love here are presented to us, and we move amongst them regenerate and spiritualised, and redeem the mistakes and errors of our earthly existence!”

Helen de Bergerac came in from the garden, with an apronful of flowers, as Eustace Thorburn entered the breakfast-room. And then came the arrangement of the flowers in old Wedgwood vases and old Worcester bowls, the clipping of stems, the plucking of stray leaves, the selections of dewy roses and jasmine, honeysuckle and geranium,--the most dangerous of all occupations for two people who would fain hide that secret which these two were trying to conceal from each other.

These two, however, behaved with supreme discretion. There was a dull pain in the heart of Eustace which made him more silent than usual. He could not ask the playful, frivolous questions, about garden and poultry-yard, aviary and greenhouse, Greek verbs or Latin verse-making, the asking of which until now had been such an unfailing source of delight.

The long night-watching had saddened him; the brooding over his mother’s history had brought the sense of the irremoveable stigma upon his name home to his mind with a new bitterness.

“Would this girl’s father, with his Spanish pride of race and his pedigree of half a dozen centuries, ever bring himself to excuse that one shortcoming upon my part?” he asked himself. “If in all other respects I were the very suitor he would choose for his only child, could he forgive the bar-sinister which makes my shield unworthy to go side by side with his?”

And then the young poet remembered his poverty, and laughed at himself in very bitterness of heart for the folly which had permitted him to believe, even for one delusive moment, that Theodore de Bergerac would accept him for a son-in-law.

“Uncle Dan sees these things clearly,” he said to himself. “He has told me my duty, and I will do it.”

Helen saw the cloud upon his face, and wondered what could have changed him so suddenly. Only last night he had seemed so gay, so happy. This morning he was silent and thoughtful; and something told her that his thoughts were sad.

“I fear you heard some unpleasant news while you were in town,” she said, anxiously; “and yet last night you seemed so light-hearted.”

“Light-headed, perhaps! There is a kind of intoxication in pleasant talk about the things one loves and believes in; and last night the very atmosphere was intoxicating. The faint new moon, and the flowers, and the river,--those things mount to one’s brain. The morning is sacred to common-sense. Hope, faith, happiness, what are they but phantoms that vanish at cock-crow? Daylight ushers in the reign of worldly wisdom, and her rule is apt to seem hard.”

“Does she seem such a hard mistress to you, Mr. Thorburn?”

“Yes; she shows me cruel truths in a cold, pitiless way.”

Helen looked puzzled. She felt that the conversation was in some manner dangerous, and did not know whither any further question might drift her. So she wisely desisted from questioning, and fell back upon such safe subjects as the flowers and the birds. But every now and then she gave a little furtive look at Eustace Thorburn’s grave face; and those furtive glances convinced her that he was unhappy.

M. de Bergerac came from his library before the arrangement of the vases was quite concluded. He was the earliest riser in his household, and came to the breakfast-table always refreshed and invigorated by upwards of an hour’s hard reading.

“I have been looking over your note-books, Thorburn,” he said; “you have done wonders--those extracts from the old Venetian manuscripts will be invaluable to me. You must have worked very closely during your absence.”

“I did stick to my desk at the Museum pretty closely. But I am more than repaid if my extracts are likely to be useful.”

“They are of the most precious kind. Where should I get such another secretary? You will be able to finish my book some day.”

“Papa!” cried Helen, tenderly.

“Do not look at me so sadly, dear child! If I were to live to the age of Old Parr, the book would scarcely be finished. Thou knowest not how such a subject grows upon the writer--how he sees worlds on worlds opening before his dazzled eyes--ever distant, ever new--widening into infinity. Everywhere it is the wealth of man’s imagination which astounds, which terrifies him; and he asks himself with shame and humiliation, of the most profound, is it this which I have set myself to catalogue? Is it this that I think can be numbered and summarized in my short span? In the traditions of the Rabbins what a universe! In the faith of Zoroaster, what worlds unexplored--unexplorable! What fond fantastic dreams, what sublime depths of thought, what grandeur of faith, in the pious mysteries of Brahma and Buddha! Every race peoples invisible worlds; and in each new voyage into the realms of untutored fancy the shadow-world stretches wider before our gaze. Gods and demons, angels of good and of evil, assume shapes more gigantic, attributes more awful. Hell sinks to depths unfathomable. Heaven recedes from the weak grasp of mortal intellect. Stricken, distraught, the weak soul flees aghast before those barbaric wonders, and takes refuge in the haven of Christian faith. Ah, how simple, how beautiful, after the gigantic demonology of the East, seems the pure and perfect Redeemer of the West--beginning with the martyrdom of the magnanimous Prometheus, the bondage of the mythic Herakles, culminating in the Atonement of the Divine Christ!”

And here M. de Bergerac dilated upon one of his favourite theories, the dual gospel of Western Paganism and Christianity; and fought with Eustace Thorburn in support of his pet hypothesis, to the effect that Grecian fable was only a distortion of Bible-history, and the stories of Prometheus and Herakles mere rude fore-shadowings of the purer and holier story of man’s Redeemer.

They fought out the battle of comparative mythology; Eustace was of the two the more earnest Christian. M. de Bergerac went every Sunday to a pretty little Roman Catholic chapel, half hidden in a rustic garden, beyond Windsor; but his faith would scarcely have satisfied the requirements of an orthodox director. The younger man had passed dryshod through the boundless ocean of mythic lore to that haven of which his patron had spoken--that harbour of rest for the wandering soul, where passionate desire to solve the great enigma is exchanged for the simple faith of childhood. From his mother’s lips Eustace had learned that tender religion of the heart which Paganism tries in vain to match with the hard logic of a Plato, or the moral axioms of a Confucius. To this faith he had clung even more fondly since his mother’s death. If not for his own sake, for hers he must needs have been a believer. Where else could he find hope and comfort in the thought of her sad pilgrimage? Here her weak feet had travelled by hard and crooked ways--here the burden laid on her had been cruel and heavy. As an earthly destiny, with no hope of compensation beyond the regions of earth, Celia’s life would have seemed all bitterness--the vengeance decreed by a pitiless Nemesis, rather than the chastisement of a merciful God. But if beyond the sad end of that sorrowful journey the traveller found rest and forgiveness in regions unimaginable to the earth-burdened spirit, the pilgrimage seemed no longer hard, the burden no longer heavy; the enigma of all earthly sorrows received its answer.

This was the hope dear to the heart of Celia Mayfield’s son; and for this faith he fought sturdily in conversational battles with his patron, refusing to yield one inch of that ground on which the divinity of his Master’s mission rested. He would accept for that pure Teacher no first-cousinship with Buddha or Confucius--no misty resemblance to Zagreus or Dionysus, Prometheus or Herakles--no intellectual relationship with Zoroaster or Mahomet. For the truth and the whole truth of the gospel which he had read at his mother’s knee, he was resolute and unflinching.

If he had been the most jesuitical of schemers, he could not have better forwarded his cause with Helen de Bergerac than by this championship of the true faith. She too had learned her best and earliest lessons from a mother’s lips, and the philosophical breadth of view presented to her always in her father’s conversation had in nowise spoiled the simplicity of those first lessons. She heard her father’s rationalistic talk with unchanging regret; and hoped always for the day in which he should come to see these things in the same mysterious light which made them so sacred and beautiful to her.

To-day Eustace was more than usually earnest. Was he not about to make his first great sacrifice in proof of his faith? Not on the shrine of Pagan honour was he about to lay down his happiness, but on the altar of Christian duty.

He determined that there should be little time lost in the completion of that bitter sacrifice. The knife should be sharpened at once for the slaughter of Isaac. And in this case, there was, alas! no hope of Divine interposition.