CHAPTER IX.

BETWEEN EDEN AND EXILE.

ON the last night of Eustace Thorburn’s abode in his uncle’s lodgings, the two men sat very late, talking earnestly, the elder watching the face of the younger with more than usual tenderness.

“I dare say the future seems a little dark to you, dear lad,” he began, softly, after they had talked of all the things except that which was nearest to the hearts of both. “I won’t try to comfort you with the usual philosophical truisms about the foolishness of youthful fancies. I won’t preach the _vanitas vanitatum_ of worn-out middle age to hoping, dreaming, despairing youth. Keep the dream, boy, even if there is a bitter flavour of despair mingled with the sweetness of it. Keep the dream. Such dreams are the guardian angels of youth, the patron-saints of manhood. I have my patron-saint, and I pray to her sometimes, and confess my sins to her, and receive absolution, and am comforted. To my eyes Mademoiselle de Bergerac would most likely be only a pretty young person, with blue eyes--I think you said blue eyes--and a white muslin frock. But if she seem an angel to you, enthrone her in your heart of hearts. A man is all the better for carrying an angel about with him, even if it be only an angel of his own making.”

And then, after a pause, Daniel went on. “About your future career as a man of letters, I think you need have no misgiving. Those little verses which you submitted to me in such fear and trembling have made their mark. They have gone straight to the hearts of the people. The rising generation always elects its own poet. The students of the Quartier Latin knew Alfred de Musset’s verses by heart, and spouted and sang them, before they were reprinted from the magazine where they first appeared. M. de Lamartine thought very small things of the youngster, just as Byron thought very small things of Monsieur Lamartine himself. No, Eustace, I have no fear for your future. When you leave Greenlands, it shall not be for the smoke and riot of London. You must take a lodging at some pretty village by the river, and write your book or your poem as your guardian angel directs; and if your heart is broken, and you put it into your book, so much the better. Your heart can be patched up again by and by; and in the meantime the public likes a book with a genuine broken heart in it. Byron used to break his heart once a year, and send Murray the pieces.”

“I could not trade upon my sorrows as Byron did.”

“Because you are not Byron. He did not trade upon his sorrows. That is a true saying of Owen Meredith’s, ‘Genius is greater than man. Genius does what it must, and talent does what it can.’ I quote from memory. Byron’s was genius--the real fire; the super-natural force that is given to a man to use, but seldom given him to govern. Byron was the Ajax of poets,--abused, distraught, roaring like a bull in his mighty pain,--and a demi-god.”

After this there came a long and animated discourse upon Byron and his successors. Of all things, Eustace loved best to talk of poetry and poets, from Homer to Tennyson. What mortal creature does not like to talk “shop”? And then, when the two men had wearied themselves with the pleasant excitement of debate, there was a silence of some minutes, which was broken abruptly by Daniel Mayfield.

“I made a discovery the other day, Eustace,” he said. “I have had half a mind to tell you nothing about it; but perhaps it is as well you should be told.”

“What kind of discovery, Uncle Dan?”

“A discovery about--well--about the author of _Dion_.”

“What? Have you found out who he is?”

“No,” replied Daniel, very gravely; “I am no wiser as to his name and status; but I have found out that he was a villain, and is a villain still, if he lives, I dare say; for I don’t think so base a wretch as that would be likely to amend with age. I doubt if it will ever be any good to you to know more of your father than you knew when your poor mother died; but you have wished to be wiser, and I have humoured your wish. Do you remember what I said to you after I read _Dion_?

“I remember every word.”

“I told you then that the author of that book must have been the kind of man to fascinate such a girl as your mother. I have met with another book written by the same man, and have read it as carefully as I read the first. Eustace, I believe that man was your father.”

“You--you believe that?”

“Yes,” returned Daniel, earnestly. “There is a picture of your mother’s girlhood in the book I have been reading--a likeness too close to be accidental.”

“Let me see it, Uncle Dan! let me see that book! Let me only assure myself that the man who wrote it was----”

“What would you do if you were sure of that?”

“I would find him--or his grave.”

The young man had risen, and stood before his kinsman, breathless, eager, ready to confront the universe in his passionate desire to avenge the wrongs of the dead. Standing thus, he looked like a sculptor’s ideal image of righteous anger.

Daniel Mayfield looked up at him with a sad smile.

“And then,” he said; “and then--what then? If you find a grave, will you trample or spit upon it? Surely it would be but a sorry vengeance to insult the dead. And if you find this man in the flesh, what will you do to him? Your face tells me you would like to kill him. You look like Orestes newly come from the temple of Loxias Apollo, charged with his dreadful duty. But Orestes did not seem any the happier for having killed his mother. The primitive instinct must always be--kill; the thirst for blood. It is only human nature to want to kill the man who has offended you, and the modern horse-whipping is a feeble substitute for the exploded duel. But then Christianity comes in, with its law of sufferance and submission. No, dear lad, I cannot believe that any good could come of a meeting between you and your father, unless----”

“Unless what, Uncle Dan?” asked Eustace, when the other paused.

“Unless, by his affection for you, he could atone for his desertion of your mother.”

“Atone for that!” cried the young man. “Do you think any favours that man could bestow on me would blot out the remembrance of her wrongs? Do you think I could be so mean as to sell my heritage of vengeance for some mess of pottage in the shape of worldly advantage? No, Uncle Dan; she is dead, and there is no such thing as atonement. It is too late--too late! While she lived she was ready to forgive; nature made her to love and pardon. If he had come then, and she had forgiven him, I could have forgiven for her--with her. But she is gone. That man permitted her to die alone; and if I could forgive him the wrongs that blighted her life, I could not forgive him that last wrong--her lonely death-bed. And do you think he cares for my love or my forgiveness? The man who could leave my mother to her lonely fate for twenty years is not likely to be suddenly possessed with affection for her son.”

“The day may come when you will be a son whom any father would be proud to claim.”

“Let him claim me in that day, if he dare,” answered Eustace, with kindling eyes. “I belong to the dead. And now, Uncle Dan, tell me what this book is, and how you came by it.”

“That part of the business is commonplace enough. I told you I knew a handy scrub of a man, good at picking up any out-of-the-way book I may happen to want. I commissioned this man to hunt the second-hand booksellers for a copy of _Dion_--strange that neither you nor I ever speculated on the author of _Dion_ having written other books! My man hunted without result as regards _Dion_; but one morning he came to me with a couple of thin volumes, bound in gray paper-covered boards, and looking very dingy in comparison with the gaudy cloth and gilt lettering that obtains now-a-days. He had hunted in vain for _Dion_, he informed me; but in the course of his search he had come across this other book by the author of _Dion_. The book is yonder, in that parcel.--No,” cried Daniel, pushing the young man gently aside; “you shall not look at the book while you are with me. _That_ is a subject I do not care to talk about. Carry the parcel down to Greenlands with you, and read the book quietly--at night, in your own room. You will know little more of your father after you have read it than you know now. The book is a study in morbid anatomy; it is the revelation of an utterly selfish nature, and the writer is an unconscious moralist. _Vanitas vanitatum_ is the unwritten refrain of his song.”

“Was the book a success, like _Dion_?”

“It was not. I have taken the trouble to refer to the literary journals for the year in which this second book was published. In some it is passed over with a few cold words of approval, in others unnoticed; in one it forms the subject of what French critics call a _sanglant article_. The book wants all that is best in _Dion_--the freshness, the youth, the young romance that plays at bo-beep behind a mask of world-weariness. There is an interval of ten years between the two books. In the second the writer is really _blasé_. He is ten times more egotistical, more contemptuous and suspicious of his fellow-men--more everything that is bad. He has ceased to enjoy anything in life. He has no enjoyment even in his writing; indeed, he writes with the air of a man who knows he will only be read by inferior creatures, and one expects him at every moment to throw down the pen. One cannot read the book without yawning, for one feels that the man yawned while he was writing it.”

“And in this cold epitome of his selfish life he writes of my mother?”

“Yes.”

“And throughout the book you believe it is of himself he writes?”

“Of that I am certain. A man has a tone in writing of himself that he never has when his subject is only some figment of the brain. There is a passion, an acrimony, in genuine autobiography not to be mistaken. I do not say that this book is a plain narration of facts. There is no doubt considerable dressing-up and disguising of events; but the under-current of reality is obvious to the least experienced reader. There is one point that puzzles--I must own perplexes--me beyond measure. It was perhaps a mistaken delicacy which induced me to respect your mother’s silence about all things relating to that bad man. If I had found this book during her life-time, I should have broached this painful subject, and compelled her to tell me all.”

“But why--why?” Eustace asked, with breathless eagerness. “What had you to learn more than those letters tell us--that he was a villain, without heart or conscience, and that she was young and guileless, and loved him only too dearly?”

“There are passages in that book which have made me think that the relations between this man and my sister were something more than we have believed.”

“You think that he married my mother?”

“I am disposed to think so. But the marriage--if it took place--could hardly have been an ordinary marriage. His allusions to it are very vague; but it seems as if, whatever the ceremonial was, its legal importance was only known to this man himself.”

“Why do you think this?”

“From certain faint hints here and there. ‘If she only knew her legal hold upon me,’ he writes; ‘if she were a woman of the world, and knew her power.’ There is some hidden meaning in these half-sentences; I know not what. In a record of mixed reality and fiction, who is to say where reality ends and fiction begins? But you will read the book, and then judge for yourself.”

Eustace Thorburn went back to Greenlands, depressed, but not utterly disheartened. He knew that his uncle had urged upon him the only honourable course open to him in his relations with M. de Bergerac. It would have been sweet to him to live on for ever in that friendly companionship with the bright and gentle creature who had welcomed him to her home with such simple kindness. And now reflection had convinced him that it was necessary to resign the dear privilege of this innocent companionship, he felt more keenly than he had felt hitherto all the sweetness of his life at Greenlands, and the dreariness of any life that could come after it. His ambition would be left to him; that wonderful, radiant high-road which every young man believes in--the _via sacra_ that leads straight across the untrodden wilderness of the future to the Temple of Fame--would still await the coming of his eager feet. But even that sacred road would seem dreary and desolate if the pole-star of hope were darkened; or, in plainer words, it must seem to him but a poor thing to make his mark in the world of letters, if he were not to be blest with Helen de Bergerac’s love.

He returned to Greenlands by the same pathway which he had trodden just one year before, when he went a stranger to M. de Bergerac’s house. Ah, how unutterably beautiful the Berkshire landscape seemed to him in its ripe, rich midsummer loveliness! High tangled hedge, winding lane, distant hill, and woodland shone before him like a picture too divine for earth.

“And I am to leave all this, and to leave her!” he thought. “I am to be self-banished from a home that Horace might have loved, and from the tranquil life which is a poet’s best education. If such a sacrifice as this be duty, it is very hard.”

For the first time in his life this young man found himself before the altar on which he was to immolate his happiness. In the existence of every man there comes the hour in which he must needs sacrifice his first-born, or live inglorious, with the remorseful consciousness that he has shrunk from the performance of a duty. The altar is there, and Isaac, and the knife is given to him. Heaven help the weak wretch if his courage fail him in that awful moment, and he refuse to complete the propitiation!

Eustace Thorburn approached his altar resolute, but very sorrowful, and the voice of the tempter pleaded with the casuistry of an Escobar.

“Why not stop, at least, till the book is finished?” said the tempter. “You will be doing your kind employer a disservice by depriving him of your labour. Your mighty secret can do no harm so long as it is securely locked in your own breast, and are you so weak a fool that you must needs betray yourself?”

And hereupon the stern voice of Duty took up the argument.

“What warranty can you give for the preservation of your secret?” asked the cold, calm matron. “A word, a look from that foolish chit, Mademoiselle de Bergerac, and the story would be told. As for the great book, which is, no doubt, foredoomed to be the ruin of some too-confiding publisher, you may give M. de Bergerac almost as much assistance in London as you can give him in Berkshire.”

Eustace heard voices and gay laughter in the garden as he drew near the gate in the holly-hedge, and amongst other voices the low, gentlemanlike tones of Harold Jerningham. Hephæstus barked a noisy welcome as the young man opened the gate. M. de Bergerac and Mr. Jerningham were sitting by a tea-table under the chestnut-trees, deep in a learned dispute upon the history of Islamism; while Helen busied herself with the cups and saucers, and looked up every now and then to join in the argument, or to laugh at the acrimony of the disputants.

“So Mr. Jerningham has not left Berkshire, although he talked of starting for a yachting expedition to Norway last week,” thought Eustace, not too well pleased to see the master of Greenlands so completely at home in that dear abode which he was himself so soon to leave.

Helen started up from the tea-table with a little exclamation of delight as the returning traveller came across the lawn. She blushed as she welcomed him; but blushes at eighteen mean very little. Mr. Jerningham stopped in the middle of a sentence, and watched the young lady with attentive eyes as she shook hands with her father’s secretary.

“We are so pleased to see you back again, Mr. Thorburn,” she said. “We have missed you so much--haven’t we, papa?”

“Yes, my dear, I have been very much at a loss for my kind assistant,” answered M. de Bergerac. “Would you imagine it possible, Thorburn, that any man can pretend to doubt the original genius and creative power of Mahomet?”

And hereupon M. de Bergerac entered upon a long disquisition on the subject that was dearest to his heart, and Eustace had to listen in reverential silence, while he was languishing to tell Helen about the little commissions he had executed for her in town, or to inquire into the health of her song-birds, or the economy of the poultry-yard to which she devoted so much care. He wanted some excuse for looking at her sweet face and hearing her beloved voice, and all the poetry of Mohammedanism seemed dull and prosaic to him when compared with the magical charm of the commonest observation this young lady could utter. It is given to youth and beauty to drop pearls and diamonds from her lips unconsciously--pearls and diamonds invisible to common eyes, it is true, but the most precious of all gems for that one person to whom the speaker seems at once an angel and a goddess.

For that one evening Eustace Thorburn permitted himself to be unutterably happy. So magical a light does true love shed on the scene it illumines, that the lover’s eye is blinded for the moment to all that lies beyond the region thus glorified. The future scarcely existed for the mind of Eustace Thorburn that happy midsummer evening. He lived in the present; and this quaint old garden, these chestnut-trees, this white-robed maiden seated under the shadow, dim and ghostlike in the twilight, constituted the world. The great canopy of heaven, and the young moon, and all the stars, the murmuring river, and shadowy woods and distant hills, had been created for those two. She was Eve, and he was Adam, and this was Paradise. The tones of the two sages disputing about the Sheeahs and the Soonnees might have been the murmurings of the west wind for any consciousness that Eustace had of their neighbourhood when once he was released from the duty of listening to M. de Bergerac, and free to converse with Helen.

And yet, in the breast of one of the sages there beat a heart from which the pains and passions of youth had not yet been banished--a heart that ached with a keen anguish as its owner watched those two figures seated in the shadow of the chestnut-tree. Mr. Jerningham had lived in society, and had learned the difficult art of conducting one argument with skill and judgment while another argument was being silently debated in his heart. He talked about Islamism, and did battle for his own convictions, and missed no chance of putting his opponent in the wrong; and yet all the time the inner voice was debating that other question.

“If I had been as free as this young man, could I have won that girl, with him for my rival?” he asked himself. “What gift has he that I do not possess--except youth? And is there really a charm in youth more divine than any grace of mind or polish of manner that belongs to a riper age? Is it only a physical charm--the charm of a smoother cheek or brighter eyes--or is it an indefinable freshness of mind and heart that constitutes the superiority? I do not think Helen de Bergerac the kind of woman to like a man less because there are a few lines across his forehead and a few silver threads in his hair; but I know that there is a sympathy between her and this young man that does not exist between her and me. And yet I doubt if any ambitious youth of five-and-twenty can love as devotedly as a man of my age. It is only when he has proved the hollowness of everything else in life that a man is free to surrender himself entirely to the woman he loves.”

Again and again during the six months of his lingering at Greenlands, Mr. Jerningham had told himself that his case would have been utterly hopeless, even if he had been free to woo his old friend’s daughter. And yet he pined for his freedom; and there were times when he felt somewhat unkindly disposed towards the harmless lady at Hampton.

“What are we to each other but an incumbrance?” he asked himself. “If she had been more guilty, we might be free; she to marry Desmond, and I----”

And then Mr. Jerningham reflected upon the Continental manner of marrying and giving in marriage. If he had been at liberty to ask for Helen’s hand, what more likely than that the priceless boon would have been granted by the friend who loved him and believed in him? Theodore de Bergerac was of all men the most likely to bestow his daughter on a husband of mature age, since he himself had married a woman twenty years his junior, and had found perfect happiness in that union.

Mr. Jerningham fancied himself blest with this fair young wife, and pictured to himself the calm and blameless existence which he might have led with so sweet a companion. Oh, what a tranquil haven would this have been, after the storms he had tempted, the lightnings he had invited and defied!

“Of thorns men do not gather figs, nor of a bramble-bush gather they grapes,” said the Divine Teacher. Mr. Jerningham remembered that solemn sentence. There are some precepts of Holy Writ that a man cannot put out of his memory, though he may have outlived by a quarter of a century his faith in the creed they teach.

“I suppose I had my chance of perfect happiness at some moment of my life, and forfeited it,” he said to himself. “Destiny is a bitter schoolmistress, and has no pity on the mistakes of her scholars.”