Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

self. She is horror-stricken; and, stripping off the glamour with which Pierre's declamations about liberty and revenge have invested the meditated crime, shows it to him in all its naked hideousness. Jaffier's purpose is shaken, and when in the next scene Renault bids the conspirators to shed blood enough, to spare neither sex nor age, name nor condition-such words, coming from the mouth of the man who has attempted his wife's honor, fill him with disgust and horror; and he hastily quits the assembly.

From that moment we can perceive that all are doomed. Urged by his wife's entreaties, that very night he, after first stipulating for the pardon of his friends, betrays the whole design to the Council of Ten. But the faithless senators, once possessed of the secret, in defiance of their pledges condemn all to death. And from this point until the end of the tragedy the scenes are in tragic power equal to anything, except the greatest of Shakespeare's plays, that English dramatic literature can boast. Pierre overwhelms the unfortunate Jaffier, who grovels before him in all the anguish of shame and grief, with scorn and contempt; then the desperate man turns upon her who has urged him to treachery, and in his madness raises his dagger against her breast. "Kill me!" she cries, leaping upon his neck

"While thus I cling about thy cruel neck, Kiss thy revengeful lips, and die in joys Greater than I can guess hereafter."

executioner is about to bind his prisoner, Jaffier plunges his dagger into his friend's breast, then stabs himself, and with a fierce curse upon the whole race of senators and a blessing upon Belvidera, falls dead. The death of Belvidera, raying mad, is the finish of this terribly sublime tragedy.

It is a pity that so noble a work should be blotted by the comic scenes between Antonio and Aquilina. The lecherous, silly, conceited old senator, it is said, was introduced by command of King Charles as a portrait of Shaftesbury. Although not without humor, its grossness can not fail to shock the modern reader. These scenes are omitted in all acting editions of the play. Written at the time of the supposed Popish plot, "Venice Preserved" is full of allusions to that craze, and read with this key many of the speeches have a double significance.

The last of Otway's works was another comedy, entitled "The Atheist; or, the Second Part of the Soldier's Fortune," in which most of the characters of the first part are continued. The faults that disfigure his other comedies are here equally apparent; it contains but one character, old Beaugard, which has any claim to originality, and revolting as it is there is considerable humor in the conception of this horrible old man, who is a very highly seasoned prototype of poor Charles Mathews's "Awful Dad."

And now to return once more to the poet's private life. The works which were destined to be a delight to posterity and to help make the

He throws away the weapon and clasps her in fortunes of generations of actors and actresses his arms, exclaiming :

"I can not longer bear a thought to harm thee."

Belvidera goes to her father and pleads to him for mercy for the doomed men, and her tears and eloquent appeals at last melt his heart. But when she returns to her husband he is again raging and desperate. Pierre has sent for him to come to the scaffold, to receive his forgiveness. In a scene of heart-rending pathos he bids Belvidera farewell for ever, and as the passing bell, that tells him the last hour has come, sounds in his ears he tears himself from her clinging arms, then pauses for one last look and to speak of their child. Once more he takes her to his heart, crying:

"Oh that my arms were riveted

yet unborn, brought but little to their creator; for "The Orphan " and "Venice Preserved" he received but one hundred pounds each, and for the copyright of the latter Jacob Tonson gave him fifteen pounds. His best friend, the Earl of Plymouth, died in 1680, in his twenty-second year; he was the only one of his aristocratic acquaintances from whom he seems to have derived much benefit. As Johnson points out, the courtiers of that time desired only to drink and laugh; their fondness was without benevolence, and their familiarity without friendship. “Men of wit," says one of Otway's biographers, “received at that time no favor from the great but to share their riots; from which they were dismissed again to their own narrow circumstances." And no monarch was ever more neglectful of genius than Charles II. Otway's life at this

Thus round thee ever! But my friends, my oath. period must have been a terrible one. Still un

This and no more."

As Pierre mounts the scaffold Jaffier rushes on and again implores his forgiveness. He will grant it on one condition-he whispers in his ear. "I'll do it," is the reply. And just as the

der the spell of the siren who had bewitched him, and who at Rochester's death had passed to the arms of Sir George Etherege, his course became more and more reckless, and his days were passed between rioting and fasting, ranting jollity and abject penitence, carousing one week

with a lord, and then hiding from his creditors and starving a month with low company in an ale-house on Tower Hill. We can clearly picture what he became beneath the influence of this soul-destroying life; one by one his friends fell from him—if the term friend could be applied to such associates as he had chosen; the money gained by his pen was perhaps squandered in one night of gambling and wild debauchery; the days of rioting became fewer, of fasting more frequent; carousing with a lord became a rarity, starving with the ruffians of Tower Hill an everyday occurrence; debts continued to accumulate, and as his means grew more desperate and his noble patrons fell from him one by one, creditors grew more clamorous and merciless, until, no longer able to venture into the haunts of civilized life, he was hemmed in in some vile den, faced by two alternatives—either to give himself up to an imprisonment which he knew would be perpetual, or starve. For a time he chose the latter, until one day, goaded by famine, naked and wolflike, he crept out of his hole and begged alms. With the money thus obtained he rushed into a baker's shop, and clutching at a loaf crammed it into his mouth with wild-beast-like ravenousness; but want, disease, and debauchery had

done their work, and he fell dead, choked by the first mouthful.*

It has been the fashion with writers to point to Otway's terrible fate as a national disgrace; but with all my admiration for his genius, I can not concur in making society responsible for the catastrophe. To hear men angrily denouncing some vague and indefinite body of people for allowing a hopeless spendthrift like Goldsmith, who would have spent thousands as rapidly as he did hundreds, to live in poverty, or for suffering a half-mad debauchee like Otway to die of starvation, is illogical. Otway might have lived in comfort upon the proceeds of his pen had he been an ordinarily careful man. It was the curse of his destiny to be thrown in youth among men of superior birth and dissolute habits, to live under a society that, while it had no real respect for genius, pretended to be its patron; but above all it was his curse to be infatuated with a cruel, mercenary, soul-enthralling Delilah. Under these combined influences the moral nature of the man was wholly wrecked and shattered, and no efforts of humanity, of patronage, or of generous appreciation could have saved him from ultimate destruction.

Temple Bar.

T

THE

CHAPTER XIX.

HOW ALISON TOOK IT.

SEAM Y

gain time is generally the next best thing to gaining the victory. Alison had gained time. Gilbert threw himself into a hansom, and carried the good news faster than any that was ever brought into Ghent, to the house on Clapham Common.

“So far," he said, “we have been successful. Unless anything new turns up, letters of administration will not be granted for a year at least. During that time we shall have made out our own case. Courage, Alison!"

This was one of Alison's bad days. She had lost the old confident bearing, the insolence which sits so well on happy youth; she was dejected; the ready smile was gone; her lips were set and her eyes were hard. She was of those who have a quarrel with Fate. It is not unusual; sooner or later we all mistrust the unaccountable rulings of destiny, but it is sad when the quarrel begins so early in life.

VOL. VII.-26

SIDE.

"Thank you, Gilbert," she said, when he had delivered himself of his message and his prophecy of encouragement "thank you, Gilbert. You are all very kind about me. A year to wait, you say? Then I shall be of age, and I shall want no more guardians. Then I shall go to my uncle-no, I will write to him, because I can never see him again—and say, 'If it is only the money you want, take it, and leave my father's memory in peace.' I suppose he will do that; anything is better than this dragging of his dear name before the courts.”

"The application will be reported in the papers," said Gilbert. "A few people who know the name will read it: your own cousins will read it, no one else."

Gilbert reckoned without the special London correspondent who got hold of the story and retailed it, with additions of his own, for the benefit of the country papers. In fact, all England

* There is another story told in Spence's "Anecdotes" to the effect that he was seized with fever while in pur

suit of a man who had killed one of his friends, and that his death was caused by drinking water too copiously.

Let us hope that this is the true one.

was interested in the destination of this vast fortune. Who would not be interested in the disposal of more than a quarter of a million of money? The mere mention of such a sum stimulates the imagination. What years of careful thought-what generations of success-what abilities—what prudence-what swiftness of vision, clearness of brain, sacrifice of present pleasure, are represented by so gigantic a pile! The vastness of the sum bewilders the poor wretch whose only hope is to be a little "before" the world, so that should that calamity, known as "anything," happen, his widow and the children may be hedged round by the resource of a few hundreds. So that the writers of the "London Letter," most of whom belong to the order of those who save little and spend little when they would gladly save much and spend more, seized upon the story and dressed it up. Happy Stephen! Unhappy Alison! Those who had rich relatives reflected with sorrow that there could never be any doubt about their marriage; those who had none built castles in the air, and speculated on the chance of unexpected legacies. Of all dreams which flesh is heir to, that of unexpected fortune is, I believe, the commonest. It is so much more pleasant to dream than to work; it is so much more delightful to look forward to an old age of comfort and ease than to one of hard work and collar to the end! I once knew an old gentleman, industrious, religious, moral to the highest point, an excellent father, a model husband, whose whole life proclaimed to the world his acquiescence with the Church catechism, and the state of life to which he was born. After his death it was discovered that for thirty years he had annually purchased a ticket in the Austrian lottery. He had no rich relations; he could not expect an accession of fortune from any source whatever, yet he dreamed of wealth and bought his ticket every year.

"You will not be allowed to throw away your fortune, Alison," Gilbert went on. "You owe it to yourself, to your father, to fight the battle out. But courage! Long before a year we shall have managed to get at the truth. Why, do you think that marriages are not registered, and that registers are not kept? If Stephen Hamblin has any reason to wish that the truth should not be discovered, I have every reason to make me work at its recovery. My dear"-he took her unresisting hand-"every hope of my life is bound up with it. It shall be found out. Consider, Alison, you must have had a mother somewhere. You must have been born somewhere, registered somewhere, christened somewhere. We know the date of your birth-that is something."

"Yes," said Alison, trying to respond to her lover's eagerness, "unless Mrs. Duncombe was

wrong, I was born twenty years ago, on the 5th day of June. There are two facts for you. Can you make anything out of them?"

"By themselves, very little. But I have thought how to use them. With the aid of the registers I can make everything out of them. Listen, Alison: we shall put our advertisements in the papers; we invite everybody-clergymen, and parish clerks, and country doctors-to look for a certain register of birth on such a day. When I have got that register, it will be time to consider what next. Perhaps your father married under an assumed name. We may, by the help of the register, get hold of that name. It will lead us to further discoveries. Why, those two facts, the year and the day, may prove invaluable. I think we may safely assume that the marriage took place in the south of England, probably in the neighborhood of London, because the diaries show clearly-and Mr. Augustus Hamblin distinctly recollects—that in the year of your birth, and the two years before that, your father was never far away from London. Thus, in the summer of your birth he went to Bournemouth by himself, and remained there three weeks-very likely on business connected with yourself. The year before that, he took a holiday early in the summer with his brother Stephen, and went fishing. For some weeks he wrote from Newbury. The year before that, he spent the whole summer with his mother, who was ill at the time, at Brighton. So you see, as Stephen Hamblin very clearly saw, there is no room in the page, so to speak, for him to have been married anywhere far away from London."

Alison sighed.

[ocr errors]

'You come to me, Gilbert, and you raise hopes in my mind which make me for the moment happy. Oh, if I could but clear my father's name! It is so dreadful to think that all the world is jeering and making merry over the accusation brought by his own brother-my dear father, so good, so kind, so noble! Why, I should have thought there was not a single creature of all who knew him in all the world, too low and degraded to acknowledge his goodness. It made other people good, while he lived, only to be with him and near him. It made me good, then."

"You are always good, Alison."
She shook her head sadly.

"I am always full of regrets, of wicked
thoughts, Gilbert. I used to be good, when you
That was the reason, I
fell in love with me.
suppose."

She would have no recognition of an engagement, and yet she spoke to her lover frankly. There was no doubt, at all events, in her own mind. Gilbert loved her. If she could, she

would marry him. She trusted and she distrusted with the same entire abandonment. To trust in full, to doubt and distrust in full, came from her Spanish blood. She was like the Señora, her grandmother, in mind as well as in face.

"Do you mean that I fell in love with you because you were good?" asked Gilbert, laughing. "No, it was not that. I do not think that a man asks himself, when he falls in love, whether the girl is very good; she seems good to her lover; he believes in her goodness; if he did not, he would persuade himself that he could make her good. I suppose that after marriage husbands like their wives to be good-tempered, at least. Before, it does not matter so much." "It is wonderful," said Alison, "how men ever fall in love with girls at all."

"Do not disparage your sex," said Gilbert. "Oh! we are weak. We can do nothing by ourselves; we take our ideas from men; we look to men for our religion, our manners, our thoughts. And yet men fall down at a woman's feet and worship her. As for me, there has been nothing good in me at all since the day when my uncle told me what he was pleased to call the truth. I think there will never any more be anything good in me at all. I am devoured by evil passions, and hatreds, and wicked thoughts. I find it difficult, sometimes, to believe in my father. Yet, if I can not believe in him, there is nothing. And I think of my uncle with a loathing which makes me sick."

"Faith, Alison! Have faith."

you."

along, that everybody is saying, 'There goes Miss Hamblin, as she calls herself, though she has no real right to bear the name.' Or else I hear them whisper as I pass-this jealousy of mine makes me hear the lowest whisper—‘That is Miss Hamblin, who was once so proud, and thought herself so rich, and held up her head so high above all the rest of us. Now she has been found out, and she is going to be turned into the street, without a penny to call her own, and not even a name to her back. What a come-down!' Even in church I am not free, but I think I feel the people's eyes on me when they ought to be on their books or on the clergyman in the pulpit. They are saying: 'That is Miss Hamblin. She was proud enough a year ago; she is humbled now, poor girl! She has no longer got anything to be proud of.' So, everywhere and all day long, I am watched, and mocked, and scorned."

Gilbert caught her hand, and kissed the unresisting fingers a hundred times. "No, child, no! There is no scorning of you. The world is better hearted than you think. There can be nothing but pity and respect for you."

"I know, I know," she replied, with tears in her eyes. "But, if the evil thoughts are in your own mind, you think they are in other people's, and my mind is full of mockery and scorn. Everything mocks at me: this garden, the very flowers, the house, even the furniture. They all have faces, and they all laugh and flout at me because I pretended to be the heiress, who am nothing at all but a nameless girl. They know me for an impostor."

What could Gilbert say in comfort? He muttered some commonplace. You might as well try to persuade a man with a gaping swordwound that he is not hurt. The girl wandered

"Ah! Gilbert, so long as you are here I find it easy to have faith. I feel strong and hopeful then. Your brave words encourage me. When you are gone I begin to doubt again, and if you are long away I begin to despair." "Poor child! I must come oftener to see restlessly to and fro upon the lawn. It was with her as she told her lover. She was haunted day and night by two ghosts, who never left her. One of them was the Shade of her former happiness, the other was the Shade of her present low estate. One was the ghost of a maiden, proud, defiant, self-reliant, looking out upon the future with the confidence of one for whom Fortune has nothing in store but her choicest gifts. She was dressed in silks and satins, this young princess; she rode a stately horse; at her feet the young men fell down, with adoring eyes, and knelt; as she passed, flowers grew up beside the way; only to look at her, she felt as she gazed upon this ghost, warmed the heart; the children ran after her, and shouted and laughed; the poor came out of their cottages and blessed her. She was like a benevolent fairy, who is not an old woman at all, but young and beautiful as the day, and not capricious or uncertain, but always

"I do not know whether it is worse to be in the house or to be out of it. At home my aunt sits and watches me all day long, asking every half-hour if I feel better; and it seems as if I were having an operation performed, and they were watching curiously to see how I was bearing it. To be sure, the suspense is worse than any operation. Even the boy troubles me with his sympathy, his eagerness to do everything he can think of for me-he who was formerly so careless and selfish—and his delight in assuring me, whenever he can find an opportunity, of his protection. You see, the very things one used to laugh at and enjoy are become fresh causes of trouble to me. Poor Nicolas! He means so well, too. But that shows how wrong-headed these things have made me. If I go out, perhaps it is worse, because then I think, as I go

faithful, loyal, and true. And she was full of the most tender and precious Christian thoughts, this shadow. It seemed as if the things against which she prayed, just because it was her duty as a Christian, and enjoined by the Church-the evils of hatred, wrath, malice, and so forth-had no more to do with her than the gross impossibilities of drunkenness and the like. The contemplation of so much religion, pure and undefiled, in this perfection of a ghost filled Alison's heart with bitterness.

As for the other Shade, it presented a sad contrast. For this ghost was that of a mere beggar-girl. She went barefoot, and was clothed in nothing but old rags and duds, and odds and ends. She shook her head, and cried, with shame and rage, at her own misery. She moaned, and wept, and lamented, because she had nothing at all of her own. The poorest gypsy-girl had something, but she had nothing. The pitiless, unsympathizing children hooted at her as she went; the poor people came out of their cottages and jeered her, because she was so very poor and ragged; the wayfarers flouted her, because she was so very lonely and miserable. Every mocking gibe was like a knife that went straight to her heart. And that was not the worst of it -for this wretched, ragged girl, who was so poor in worldly goods, was stripped of all religion as well. She was full of hatred and wrath; she thought well of none; she suspected all; she was bitter and envious. In her heart there were none of the sweet blossoms of faith, hope, and charity, which flourish so well in the congenial soil of the heart of a happy English girl. Alison looked on this shadow with shuddering and loathing, as she looked on the other with envy and jealousy.

of an hour later she returned, the fit of passion over, calm and cold.

"Forgive me," she said, holding out her hand, "I do not often give way. To-day the thought of my case being pleaded in open court, my name being bandied about among all those people, maddened me. I will try to bear it. But, Gilbert, be wise; do not waste your precious time upon me. I am content to let all go, so that there be no further questioning."

"That is not the faith we want to see in you," said Gilbert. “Why, that would be treachery to the very name you want to see unsullied. Have confidence, dear Alison; we will carry the matter through, and we shall not fail to see the name of Anthony Hamblin pass through the ordeal triumphantly. Only have faith."

"I wish I could," she murmured.

Here they were joined by Alderney Codd. He had come down by the humbler conveyance the omnibus. His thin face was wreathed with smiles.

[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small]

"Why," said Alderney, planting himself firmly, "whenever I put on that coat which your Such as they were, they remained by her side, poor father lent me, and which I have retained and never left her.

"Courage, Alison!" said Gilbert. He had spoken to her half a dozen times, but she returned no answer, being occupied with these phantoms" courage, Alison! Think of brighter things."

out of respect to his memory, I feel a glow of gratitude more warming than a pint of port. Of course, I am ready to work for you. Outside the court"-he laughed at the recollection—“I met Stephen himself, looking his very blackest. It went to my heart to treat him so-my cousin and my oldest friend. But I thought of Anthony, and I cut him-dead. Jack Baker was with him. Ah! they've got my prospectus of the Great Glass Spoon Company. After thirty years' friendship, after so many good times as we have had together, it seemed hard; and to lose the Great Glass Spoon Company as well. But gratitude, Alison, gratitude stood between us. Gratitude said, 'You can not know any longer the man who is trying to rob your benefactor's orphan.'" "But," said Alison, "can you not even know She broke from him and ran, hiding her face my Uncle Stephen? must you break altogether with a gesture of shame, into the house. with him?"

"There are no brighter things," she cried bitterly. "There is nothing but misery and shame. Oh, Gilbert!" breaking into a passionate gesture," why trouble any more about me? Let me go away and be forgotten. Let them do what they like with the money; if you search any further, you may find out some secret more shameful than any that has been suspected-if that is possible; you may find out why my father hid away, and would tell to no one the story of my birth."

Gilbert remained in the garden. A quarter

"I must," said Alderney gloomily. "I can

« AnkstesnisTęsti »