CHAPTER II.

A RETROSPECTIVE SURVEY.

FROM the mediæval tranquillity of Villebrumeuse to the dreary desolation of Tilbury Crescent is a sorry change. Instead of the quaint peaked roofs and grand old churches, the verdant avenues and placid water, there are unfinished streets and terraces of raw-looking brick, half-built railway-arches, chasm-like cuttings newly made in the damp clay soil, and patches of rank greensward that mark the site of desolated fields. The sulphurous odours of a brickfield pervade the atmosphere about and around Tilbury Crescent. The din of a distant high-road, the roar of many wheels, and the clamour of excited costermongers, float in occasional gusts of sound upon the dismal stillness of the neighbourhood, where the shrill voices of children, playing hopscotch in an adjacent street, are painfully audible.

Decent poverty has set a seal upon this little labyrinth of streets and squares and crescents and terraces, before the builder’s men have left the newest of the houses, while there are still roofless skeletons at every corner, waiting till the speculator who began them shall have raised enough money to finish them. The neighbourhood lies northward, and the rents of those yellow-brick tenements are cheap. So decent poverty, in all its many guises, comes hitherward for shelter. Newly-married lawyers’ clerks take up their abode in the eight-roomed dwellings, and you shall divine, by the fashion of blinds and curtains, the trim propriety of doorsteps and tiny front gardens, whether the young householders have drawn prizes in the matrimonial lottery. Small tradesmen bring their wares to the little shops, which break out here and there at the corners of the streets, and struggle feebly for a livelihood. Patient young dressmakers exhibit fly-blown fashion-plates in parlour windows, and wait hopefully or despairingly, as the case may be, for custom and patronage. And in more windows than the chance pedestrian would care to count hangs the pasteboard announcement of apartments to let.

Eustace Thorburn came to Tilbury Crescent in the blazing July noontide. He had landed at St. Katherine’s Wharf, and had made his way to this northern suburb on foot. He was rich enough to have ridden in an omnibus, or to have enjoyed the luxury of a hansom, had he been so minded; but he was an ambitious young man, and had cultivated the nobler Spartan virtues from his earliest boyhood. The few pounds in his possession would have to serve him until he returned to the Parthenée, or obtained some new employment; so he had much need to be careful of shillings, and chary even of pence. The walk through the dirty bustling London streets seemed long and weary to him; but his thoughts were more weary than that pedestrian journey under the meridian sun, and the sad memories of his youth were a heavier burden than the carpet-bag he carried slung across his shoulder.

He knocked at the door of one of the shabbiest houses in the crescent, and was admitted by an elderly woman, who was slipshod and slovenly, but who had a good-natured face, which brightened as she recognized the traveller. In the next moment she remembered the sad occasion of his coming, and put on that conventional expression of profound sorrow which people assume so easily for the affliction of others.

“Ah, dear, dear, Mr. Thorburn!” she cried, “I never thought to see you come back like this, and she not here to bid you welcome, poor sweet lamb!”

The young man held up his hand to stay the torrent of sympathy. “Please, don’t talk to me about my mother,” he said, quietly; “I can’t bear it--yet.”

The honest woman looked at him wonderingly. She had been accustomed to deal with people who liked to talk of their griefs, and she did not understand this quiet way of putting aside a sorrow. The mourners whom she had encountered had worn their sackcloth and covered themselves with ashes in the face of the world, and here was a young man who had not so much as a band upon his hat, and who rejected her friendly sympathy!

“I can have my--the old rooms, for a week or so, I suppose, Mrs. Bane?”

“Yes, sir. I’ve took the liberty to put a bill up, thinking as perhaps you might not return from abroad; and if it’s for a week only, perhaps you’d allow the bill to remain? There are so many apartments about this neighbourhood, you see, sir, and people are that pushing now-a-days, that a poor widow-woman has scarcely a chance. It’s a hard thing to be left alone in the world, Mr. Thorburn.”

There was an open wound in the heart of Eustace Thorburn which ignorant hands were always striking.

“It’s a hard thing to be left alone in the world,” he thought, echoing the landlady’s lamentation. “_She_ was left alone in the world before I was born.”

The landlady repeated her question.

“Oh yes, you can leave the bill; but don’t let any one come to look at the rooms to-day. I am not likely to be here more than a week. Can I go upstairs at once?”

Mrs. Bane plunged her hand into a capacious pocket, and, after much searching the depths of that receptacle, produced a door-key, which she handed to Eustace.

“Mr. Mayfield told me to lock the door, sir, because of papers and such-like. The bedroom door is fastened on the inside.”

The young man nodded, and went upstairs with a brisk, rapid footstep, and not with that ponderous, solemn tread which Mrs. Bane would have considered appropriate to his bereaved condition.

“And I thought he would have took on dreadful!” she ejaculated, as she went back to her underground kitchen, where there was generally an atmosphere laden with the steam of boiling soap-suds, or an odour of singed ironing-blanket.

Eustace Thorburn unlocked the door, and went into the room which had so lately been inhabited by his mother. It was a dingy little sitting-room, opening into a bedroom that was still smaller. It was a lodging of the same pattern as a thousand other lodgings in newly-built suburbs. The personalty of the woman who had left it for a still narrower lodging would scarcely have realized twenty shillings under the auctioneer’s hammer; and yet to Eustace Thorburn the shabby room was eloquent of the dead. That dilapidated rosewood workbox--for which the auctioneer would have been ashamed to propose a starting bid of a shilling--conjured up the vision of a patient creature bending over her work. The little stand of books--cheap editions of the poets, in worn cloth binding--recalled _her_ sweet face, illumined by a transient splendour, as the inspired verses of her favourites lifted her above this earth and all her earthly sorrows. The valueless china inkstand, and worn blotting-book, had been used by her for more than four years. Eustace Thorburn took the things up one by one, and put them to his lips. There was something almost passionate in the kiss which he imprinted upon those lifeless objects--it was the kiss which he would have pressed upon her pale lips, had he been recalled in time to bid her farewell. He kissed the books which she had been wont to read, the pen with which she had written, and then cast himself suddenly into the low chair where he had so often seen her seated, and abandoned himself to his grief. Had Mrs. Bane, the landlady, heard these convulsive sobs, and seen the tears streaming between the fingers which the young man clasped before his eyes, she would have had no need to complain of Mr. Thorburn’s want of emotion. For a long time he sat in the same attitude, still weeping. But the passionate grief wore itself out at last. He dashed the tears from his eyes with an impatient gesture, and rose, pale and calm, to begin the work which he had set himself to do.

His love for his mother had been the ruling passion of his life. She was at rest now, and he could face the future calmly. He could go forth to meet his destiny with a spirit at once superior to hope and fear. It was for _her_ he had hoped; it was for her he had feared. He stood alone now; his breast was no longer a rampart to shield her from “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” The arrows might come thick and fast now; they could only wound him; and he already had suffered the deepest wound that evil fortune could inflict upon him. He had lost _her_.

The bitterest sting of all lay in the knowledge that she had never been happy. Her son had loved her with unspeakable tenderness. He had protected her and worked for her, and admired and adored her; but he had never been able to make her happy. That gentle, womanly heart had been too deeply wounded in the past. Eustace Thorburn had known this; and knowing this had been patient, because he would not trouble her mild spirit by any show of impatience. He had known that she had been wronged, and yet had never asked her the name of the wrong-doer. He, her natural champion and avenger, had never sought for vengeance upon the man whose treachery or unkindness had blighted her life. He had held his peace, because to question her would have been to pain her; and how could he give her pain? So he had been patient, in spite of a passionate desire for ever smouldering in his heart--the desire to avenge his mother’s wrongs.

She was at rest; and the time for vengeance had arrived. The same fatal influence which had destroyed her happiness had shortened her life. In the prime of womanhood, before a wrinkle had lined her forehead, or a silver thread appeared amidst her soft brown hair, she had gone to her grave, unutterably patient to the last, but broken-hearted from the very first.

The young man put his grief away from him, and set himself to consider the new business of his life.

The one desire of his mind was that of vengeance upon his mother’s nameless enemy; and the thought that this enemy was his own father was powerless to soften his heart in the smallest measure, or to hinder him for one single hour from the achievement of his purpose.

“I want to know who he is,” he said to himself. “My first business must be to discover his name; my next, to make him more ashamed of that name than I am of my namelessness.”

He went to the chimney-piece, where there was a letter waiting for him, sealed with a sprawling black seal, and addressed to him in the inscrutable penmanship of his uncle.

The envelope contained only a few lines, but enclosed in it there was a little bunch of keys, with every one of which the young man was familiar. He took them up with a sigh, and looked at them one by one, almost as tenderly as he had looked at the books. The commonest object in that chamber had its association for him,--and with every such association, the grief which he had tried so hard to put away from him took possession of him anew.

There was a ponderous, old-fashioned mahogany desk on a side-table, and it was in this desk that the lonely inhabitant of the room had been accustomed to keep her letters and papers, together with those few valueless relics--that pitiful jetsam and flotsam from the shipwreck of hope and happiness which are left to the most desolate creature.

Eustace unlocked and opened the desk as softly as if his mother had been sleeping near him. He had often seen her seated at this desk; he had once surprised her in tears, with a little packet of letters in her hand, but he had never seen the contents of any of those discoloured papers, tied with faded ribbons, and disfigured by obsolete postmarks. And now that she was gone, it was his duty to examine those papers,--or so he considered. Yet there was a shade of compunction in his mind as he touched the first packet, and he felt as if he had been committing a sacrilege.

The first packet was labelled “My Mother’s Letters,” and contained the epistles of some good womanly creature, written to a daughter who was away at boarding-school. They were full of allusions to a comfortable middle-class household--a tradesman’s household, as it seemed, for there were occasional references to events that had occurred in the shop, and to “my dear husband’s over-exerting himself in the business,” and to “Daniel’s unsettled ways and indisposition to take to his father’s occupation.”

Eustace smiled faintly as he read of poor Daniel, whose unsettled ways had been notorious before Sir Rowland Hill’s post-office amendments, and who remained unsettled in these latter days of electric telegraphy and labyrinthine railway cuttings.

The letters were very sweet, by reason of the tender motherly spirit which pervaded every line,--more or less ill-spelt here and there, and by no means well written, but over-flowing with affection. Again and again the writer implored her “dearest Sissy” not to fret, and to look forward to the holidays, which would come very soon, when Sissy would see her dear mother and father, whose household love she pined for in the great middle-class boarding-school, as it was evident by the tone of maternal letters which replied to lamentations from desolate home-sick Sissy. There were hampers for dearest Sissy, and little presents,--a coral necklace from father, a sash from mother, and once, a tinselled portrait of Mr. Edmund Kean in the character of Othello, with a tunic of real crimson satin let into the paper,--a tinselled portrait which had been poor unsettled Daniel’s labour of love in the long winter evenings, and which the mother dwelt on with evident pleasure.

Eustace knew that these letters had been written by his grandmother,--the grandmother who had never held him in her arms, or taken pride in his baby graces. He lingered lovingly over the old-fashioned sheets of letter-paper--he gazed fondly upon the stiffly-formed signature, “Elizabeth Mayfield,” and he dropped some few tears upon the worn yellow paper, which had been blotted with many tears before to-day. It was not possible that he could think of his mother in her innocent school-days without emotion.

The second packet contained only three letters, addressed to dearest Sissy at home, when she had ceased to be a school-girl, and these were in a hand not altogether unfamiliar to Eustace. It was a youthful modification of Daniel Mayfield’s inscrutable calligraphy; and again Eustace Thorburn smiled with the same faint smile. The letters were written from a lawyer’s office where the lad was articled; for Daniel had persisted in his aversion to his father’s business, and had declared himself unfitted for anything upon earth except the law, for which he was assured he had a special vocation. They were pleasant, boyish letters, and full of the slang of the day--such locutions as “Flare up!” and “What a shocking bad hat!” and “There you go with your eye out!” and other conversational embellishments peculiar to the period. But through all the slang and young-mannish affectations there was an undercurrent of genuine affection for the writer’s “dear little dark-eyed Sissy.” He knew no end of pretty girls in London, he told her, but not one worthy to be compared with his darling Celia. “And when I am on the Rolls, with slap-up chambers of my own in the Fields, and a first-rate business, you shall come and keep house for me, Sissy; and we’ll have a little cottage at Putney, and a wherry, and I’ll row you up the river every evening after business; and while my sentimental little sister sits in the stern reading a novel, her faithful Daniel will get himself into training for a sculling-match.”

The first two letters were full of hopeful allusions to the writer’s prospects. The young man seemed to fancy he was going to make a royal progress through the different grades of his profession, and there was scarcely any limit to the pleasant things which he promised his only sister. But, in the third letter, written after an interval of six months, all this was changed. The life of an articled clerk was a slavery, compared to which the existence of a negro in the West Indian sugar-plantations must be one perpetual delight. Daniel was tired of his profession, and informed his dearest Sissy, in strict confidence, that no power on earth would ever make a lawyer of him.

“It isn’t me, my dear Celia,” he wrote; “your impetuous Dan is not fashioned out of the stuff which makes an attorney. I’ve tried to take to the law, just as I tried to take to the circulating-library and fancy-stationery business, to please poor father and mother; but it’s no use. You mustn’t say anything to the dear old dad, for he’d begin to be unhappy about the money he wasted on my articles; and before he discovers that I don’t take to the law, I shall have taken to something which will make me a rich man, and I shall be able to give him back his money three times over.”

And then Daniel Mayfield went on to give a flourishing description of a very bright and splendid castle-in-the-air which he had lately erected. He had found a Pactolus in his inkstand, and something better than a landed estate in a quire of foolscap. He was a genius. The divine _afflatus_ had descended upon him, and Coke and Blackstone might go hang. He was a poet, an essayist, an historian, a novelist, a playwright--anything you like. He had been a scribbler from the days of his childhood, and of late had scribbled more than ever. And after the innumerable failures and disappointments which constitute that Slough of Despond through which every literary aspirant must pass, he had succeeded in getting an article inserted in one of those coarsely-written and poorly-illustrated comic periodicals from the ashes whereof arose that bright Phoenix, _Punch_. And the editor of the periodical had promised to take further contributions from the same lively pen, Daniel informed his sister. He had received two guineas sterling coin of the realm for his lucubration, “thrown off in half an hour,” he told dear Sissy. And thereupon he entered into a calculation of his future income, at the rate of four guineas an hour for all the working-hours in the day. “Messrs. Screwem and Swindleton don’t get as much for their time, in spite of their genius for running up the six-and-eightpences,” wrote Daniel.

There was a mournful smile upon Eustace Thorburn’s face as he read the letters. He knew the writer so well, and knew into what a poor, imperfect, dilapidated habitation that air-built castle had resolved itself. The young man had not deceived himself as to his own powers; he had only wasted them. The talents had been his, and he had scattered the precious gifts here and there with a reckless hand--too rich to fear poverty, too strong to apprehend exhaustion. He had thrown his pearls before swine, and had allowed his diamonds to be set in worthless crowns of brass and tinsel. The flower of his youth had faded, while he, who might have achieved greatness--and that which seems a deal more difficult for genius to achieve, respectability--was only Dan Mayfield, a newspaper hack, one of a modern Jacob Tonson’s “clever hands,” a lounger in taverns, a penniless Bohemian, with flowing hair, which time was beginning to thin, and eyes at whose corners the crow had set the ineffaceable print of his feet.

Eustace replaced the letters with a respectful hand. Was he not tampering with the ashes of his mother’s youth, and was not every paper in that desk sanctified by the tears of the dead?

“Poor Uncle Dan!” he murmured, gently; “poor, kind, sanguine Uncle Dan!”