Mannion! I had never suspected that the note shown to me at North
Villa might have come from him. And yet, the secrecy with which it had
been delivered; the person to whom it was addressed; the mystery
connected with it even in the servant's eyes, all pointed to the
discovery which I had so incomprehensibly failed to make. I had
suffered a letter, which might contain written proof of her guilt, to
be taken, from under my own eyes, to Margaret Sherwin! How had my
perceptions become thus strangely blinded? The confusion of my memory,
the listless incapacity of all my faculties, answered the question but
too readily, of themselves.
"Robert Mannion!" I could not take my eyes from that name: I still
held before me the crowded, closely-written lines of his writing, and
delayed to read them. Something of the horror which the presence of
the man himself would have inspired in me, was produced by the mere
sight of his letter, and that letter addressed to _me._ The vengeance
which my own hands had wreaked on him, he was, of all men the surest
to repay. Perhaps, in these lines, the dark future through which his
way and mine might lie, would be already shadowed forth. Margaret too!
Could he write so much, and not write of _her?_ not disclose the
mystery in which the motives of _her_ crime were still hidden? I
turned back again to the first page, and resolved to read the letter.
It began abruptly, in the following terms:--
"St. Helen's Hospital.
"You may look at the signature when you receive this, and may be
tempted to tear up my letter, and throw it from you unread. I warn you
to read what I have written, and to estimate, if you can, its
importance to yourself. Destroy these pages afterwards if you
like--they will have served their purpose.
"Do you know where I am, and what I suffer? I am one of the patients
of this hospital, hideously mutilated for life by your hand. If I
could have known certainly the day of my dismissal, I should have
waited to tell you with my own lips what I now write--but I am
ignorant of this. At the very point of recovery I have suffered a
relapse.
"You will silence any uneasy upbraidings of conscience, should you
feel them, by saying that I have deserved death at your hands. I will
tell you, in answer, what you deserve and shall receive at mine.
"But I will first assume that it was knowledge of your wife's guilt
which prompted your attack on me. I am well aware that she has
declared herself innocent, and that her father supports her
declaration. By the time you receive this letter (my injuries oblige
me to allow myself a whole fortnight to write it in), I shall have
taken measures which render further concealment unnecessary.
Therefore, if my confession avail you aught, you have it here:--She is
guilty: _willingly_ guilty, remember, whatever she may say to the
contrary. You may believe this, and believe all I write hereafter.
Deception between us two is at an end.
"I have told you Margaret Sherwin is guilty. Why was she guilty? What
was the secret of my influence over her?
"To make you comprehend what I have now to communicate, it is
necessary for me to speak of myself; and of my early life. To-morrow,
I will undertake this disclosure--to-day, I can neither hold the pen,
nor see the paper any longer. If you could look at my face, where I am
now laid, you would know why!"
-----
"When we met for the first time at North Villa, I had not been five
minutes in your presence before I detected your curiosity to know
something about me, and perceived that you doubted, from the first,
whether I was born and bred for such a situation as I held under Mr.
Sherwin. Failing--as I knew you would fail--to gain any information
about me from my employer or his family, you tried, at various times,
to draw me into familiarity, to get me to talk unreservedly to you;
and only gave up the attempt to penetrate my secret, whatever it might
be, when we parted after our interview at my house on the night of the
storm. On that night, I determined to baulk your curiosity, and yet to
gain your confidence; and I succeeded. You little thought, when you
bade me farewell at my own door, that you had given your hand and your
friendship to a man, who--long before you met with Margaret
Sherwin--had inherited the right to be the enemy of your father, and
of every descendant of your father's house.
"Does this declaration surprise you? Read on, and you will understand
it.
"I am the son of a gentleman. My father's means were miserably
limited, and his family was not an old family, like yours.
Nevertheless, he was a gentleman in anybody's sense of the word; he
knew it, and that knowledge was his ruin. He was a weak, kind,
careless man; a worshipper of conventionalities; and a great respecter
of the wide gaps which lay between social stations in his time. Thus,
he determined to live like a gentleman, by following a gentleman's
pursuit--a profession, as distinguished from a trade. Failing in this,
he failed to follow out his principle, and starve like a gentleman. He
died the death of a felon; leaving me no inheritance but the name of a
felon's son.
"While still a young man, he contrived to be introduced to a gentleman
of great family, great position, and great wealth. He interested, or
fancied he interested, this gentleman; and always looked on him as the
patron who was to make his fortune, by getting him the first
government sinecure (they were plenty enough in those days!) which
might fall vacant. In firm and foolish expectation of this, he lived
far beyond his little professional income--lived among rich people
without the courage to make use of them as a poor man. It was the old
story: debts and liabilities of all kinds pressed heavy on
him--creditors refused to wait--exposure and utter ruin threatened
him--and the prospect of the sinecure was still as far off as ever.
"Nevertheless he believed in the advent of this office; and all the
more resolutely now, because he looked to it as his salvation. He was
quite confident of the interest of his patron, and of its speedy
exertion in his behalf. Perhaps, that gentleman had overrated his own
political influence; perhaps, my father had been too sanguine, and had
misinterpreted polite general promises into special engagements.
However it was, the bailiffs came into his house one morning, while
help from a government situation, or any situation, was as
unattainable as ever--came to take him to prison: to seize everything,
in execution, even to the very bed on which my mother (then seriously
ill) was lying. The whole fabric of false prosperity which he had been
building up to make the world respect him, was menaced with instant
and shameful overthrow. He had not the courage to let it go; so he
took refuge from misfortune in a crime.
"He forged a bond, to prop up his credit for a little time longer. The
name he made use of was the name of his patron. In doing this, he
believed--as all men who commit crime believe--that he had the best
possible chance of escaping consequences. In the first place, he might
get the long-expected situation in time to repay the amount of the
bond before detection. In the second place, he had almost the
certainty of a legacy from a rich relative, old and in ill-health,
whose death might be fairly expected from day to day. If both these
prospects failed (and they _did_ fail), there was still a third
chance--the chance that his rich patron would rather pay the money
than appear against him. In those days they hung for forgery. My
father believed it to be impossible that a man at whose table he had
sat, whose relatives and friends he had amused and instructed by his
talents, would be the man to give evidence which should condemn him to
be hanged on the public scaffold.
"He was wrong. The wealthy patron held strict principles of honour
which made no allowance for temptations and weaknesses; and was
moreover influenced by high-flown notions of his responsibilities as a
legislator (he was a member of Parliament) to the laws of his country.
He appeared accordingly, and gave evidence against the prisoner; who
was found guilty, and left for execution.
"Then, when it was too late, this man of pitiless honour thought
himself at last justified in leaning to the side of mercy, and
employed his utmost interest, in every direction, to obtain a
mitigation of the sentence to transportation for life. The application
failed; even a reprieve of a few days was denied. At the appointed
time, my father died on the scaffold by the hangman's hand.
"Have you suspected, while reading this part of my letter, who the
high-born gentleman was whose evidence hung him? If you have not, I
will tell you. That gentleman was _your father._ You will now wonder
no longer how I could have inherited the right to be his enemy, and
the enemy of all who are of his blood.
"The shock of her husband's horrible death deprived my mother of
reason. She lived a few months after his execution; but never
recovered her faculties. I was their only child; and was left
penniless to begin life as the son of a father who had been hanged,
and of a mother who had died in a public madhouse.
"More of myself to-morrow--my letter will be a long one: I must pause
often over it, as I pause to-day."
-----
"Well: I started in life with the hangman's mark on me--with the
parent's shame for the son's reputation. Wherever I went, whatever
friends I kept, whatever acquaintances I made--people knew how my
father had died: and showed that they knew it. Not so much by shunning
or staring at me (vile as human nature is, there were not many who did
that), as by insulting me with over-acted sympathy, and elaborate
anxiety to sham entire ignorance of my father's fate. The
gallows-brand was on my forehead; but they were too benevolently blind
to see it. The gallows-infamy was my inheritance; but they were too
resolutely generous to discover it! This was hard to bear. However, I
was strong-hearted even then, when my sensations were quick, and my
sympathies young: so I bore it.
"My only weakness was my father's weakness--the notion that I was born
to a station ready made for me, and that the great use of my life was
to live up to it. My station! I battled for that with the world for
years and years, before I discovered that the highest of all stations
is the station a man makes for himself: and the lowest, the station
that is made for him by others.
"At starting in life, your father wrote to make me offers of
assistance--assistance, after he had ruined me! Assistance to the
child, from hands which had tied the rope round the parent's neck! I
sent him back his letter. He knew that I was his enemy, his son's
enemy, and his son's son's enemy, as long as I lived. I never heard
from him again.
"Trusting boldly to myself to carve out my own way, and to live down
my undeserved ignominy; resolving in the pride of my integrity to
combat openly and fairly with misfortune, I shrank, at first, from
disowning my parentage and abandoning my father's name. Standing on my
own character, confiding in my intellect and my perseverance, I tried
pursuit after pursuit, and was beaten afresh at every new effort.
Whichever way I turned, the gallows still rose as the same immovable
obstacle between me and fortune, between me and station, between me
and my fellowmen. I was morbidly sensitive on this point. The
slightest references to my father's fate, however remote or
accidental, curdled my blood. I saw open insult, or humiliating
compassion, or forced forbearance, in the look and manner of every man
about me. So I broke off with old friends, and tried new; and, in
seeking fresh pursuits, sought fresh connections, where my father's
infamy might be unknown. Wherever I went, the old stain always broke
out afresh, just at the moment when I had deceived myself into the
belief that it was utterly effaced. I had a warm heart then--it was
some time before it turned to stone, and felt nothing. Those were the
days when failure and humiliation could still draw tears from me: that
epoch in my life is marked in my memory as the epoch when I could
weep.
"At last, I gave way before difficulty, and conceded the first step to
the calamity which had stood front to front with me so long. I left
the neighbourhood where I was known, and assumed the name of a
schoolfellow who had died. For some time this succeeded; but the curse
of my father's death followed me, though I saw it not. After various
employments--still, mind, the employments of a gentleman!--had first
supported, then failed me, I became an usher at a school. It was there
that my false name was detected, and my identity discovered again--I
never knew through whom. The exposure was effected by some enemy,
anonymously. For several days, I thought everybody in the school
treated me in an altered way. The cause came out, first in whispers,
then in reckless jests, while I was taking care of the boys in the
playground. In the fury of the moment I struck one of the most
insolent, and the eldest of them, and hurt him rather seriously. The
parents heard of it, and threatened me with prosecution; the whole
neighbourhood was aroused. I had to leave my situation secretly, by
night, or the mob would have pelted the felon's son out of the parish.
"I went back to London, bearing another assumed name; and tried, as a
last resource to save me from starvation, the resource of writing. I
served my apprenticeship to literature as a hack-author of the lowest
degree. Knowing I had talents which might be turned to account, I
tried to vindicate them by writing an original work. But my experience
of the world had made me unfit to dress my thoughts in popular
costume: I could only tell bitter truths bitterly; I exposed licenced
hypocrisies too openly; I saw the vicious side of many
respectabilities, and said I saw it--in short, I called things by
their right names; and no publisher would treat with me. So I stuck to
my low task-work; my penny-a lining in third-class newspapers; my
translating from Frenchmen and Germans, and plagiarising from dead
authors, to supply the raw material for bookmongering by more
accomplished bookmongers than I. In this life, there was one advantage
which compensated for much misery and meanness, and bitter, biting
disappointment: I could keep my identity securely concealed. Character
was of no consequence to me; nobody cared to know who I was, or to
inquire what I had been--the gallows-mark was smoothed out at last!
"While I was living thus on the offal of literature, I met with a
woman of good birth, and fair fortune, whose sympathies or whose
curiosity I happened to interest. She and her father and mother
received me favourably, as a gentleman who had known better days, and
an author whom the public had undeservedly neglected. How I managed to
gain their confidence and esteem, without alluding to my parentage, it
is not worth while to stop to describe. That I did so you will easily
imagine, when I tell you that the woman to whom I refer, consented,
with her father's full approval, to become my wife.
"The very day of the marriage was fixed. I believed I had successfully
parried all perilous inquiries--but I was wrong. A relation of the
family, whom I had never seen, came to town a short time before the
wedding. We disliked each other on our first introduction. He was a
clever, resolute man of the world, and privately inquired about me to
much better purpose in a few days, than his family had done in several
months. Accident favoured him strangely, everything was
discovered--literally everything--and I was contemptuously dismissed
the house. Could a lady of respectability marry a man (no matter how
worthy in _her_ eyes) whose father had been hanged, whose mother had
died in a madhouse, who had lived under assumed names, who had been
driven from an excellent country neighbourhood, for cruelty to a
harmless school-boy? Impossible!
"With this event, my long strife and struggle with the world ended.
"My eyes opened to a new view of life, and the purpose of life. My
first aspirations to live up to my birth-right position, in spite of
adversity and dishonour, to make my name sweet enough in men's
nostrils, to cleanse away the infamy on my father's, were now no more.
The ambition which--whether I was a hack-author, a travelling
portrait-painter, or an usher at a school--had once whispered to me:
low down as you are in dark, miry ways, you are on the path which
leads upward to high places in the sunshine afar-off; you are not
working to scrape together wealth for another man; you are
independent, self-reliant, labouring in your own cause--the daring
ambition which had once counselled thus, sank dead within me at last.
The strong, stern spirit was beaten by spirits stronger and sterner
yet--Infamy and Want.
"I wrote to a man of character and wealth; one of my friends of early
days, who had ceased to hold communication with me, like other
friends, but, unlike them, had given me up in genuine sorrow: I wrote,
and asked him to meet me privately by night. I was too ragged to go to
his house, too sensitive still (even if I had gone and had been
admitted) to risk encountering people there, who either knew my
father, or knew how he had died. I wished to speak to my former
friend, unseen, and made the appointment accordingly. He kept it.
"When we met, I said to him:--I have a last favour to ask of you. When
we parted years ago, I had high hopes and brave resolutions--both are
worn out. I then believed that I could not only rise superior to my
misfortune, but could make that very misfortune the motive of my rise.
You told me I was too quick of temper, too morbidly sensitive about
the slightest reference to my father's death, too fierce and
changeable under undeserved trial and disappointment. This might have
been true then; but I am altered now: pride and ambition have been
persecuted and starved out of me. An obscure, monotonous life, in
which thought and spirit may be laid asleep, never to wake again, is
the only life I care for. Help me to lead it. I ask you, first, as a
beggar, to give me from your superfluity, apparel decent enough to
bear the daylight. I ask you next, to help me to some occupation which
will just give me my bread, my shelter, and my hour or two of solitude
in the evening. You have plenty of influence to do this, and you know
I am honest. You cannot choose me too humble and obscure an
employment; let me descend low enough to be lost to sight beneath the
world I have lived in; let me go among people who want to know that I
work honestly for them, and want to know nothing more. Get me a mean
hiding-place to conceal myself and my history in for ever, and then
neither attempt to see me nor communicate with me again. If former
friends chance to ask after me, tell them I am dead, or gone into
another country. The wisest life is the life the animals lead: I want,
like them, to serve my master for food, shelter, and liberty to lie
asleep now and then in the sunshine, without being driven away as a
pest or a trespasser. Do you believe in this resolution?--it is my
last.
"He _did_ believe in it; and he granted what I asked. Through his
interference and recommendation, I entered the service of Mr.
Sherwin.--
"I must stop here for to-day. To-morrow I shall come to disclosures of
vital interest to you. Have you been surprised that I, your enemy by
every cause of enmity that one man can have against another, should
write to you so fully about the secrets of my early life? I have done
so, because I wish the strife between us to be an open strife on my
side; because I desire that you should know thoroughly what you have
to expect from my character, after such a life as I have led. There
was purpose in my deceit, when I deceived you--there is purpose in my
frankness, when I now tell you all."
-----
"I began in Mr. Sherwin's employment, as the lowest clerk in his
office. Both the master and the men looked a little suspiciously on
me, at first. My account of myself was always the same--simple and
credible; I had entered the counting-house with the best possible
recommendation, and I acted up to it. These circumstances in my
favour, joined to a manner that never varied, and to a steadiness at
my work that never relaxed, soon produced their effect--all curiosity
about me gradually died away: I was left to pursue my avocations in
peace. The friend who had got me my situation, preserved my secret as
I had desired him; of all the people whom I had formerly known,
pitiless enemies and lukewarm adherents, not one ever suspected that
my hiding-place was the back office of a linen-draper's shop. For the
first time in my life, I felt that the secret of my father's
misfortune was mine, and mine only; that my security from exposure was
at length complete.
"Before long, I rose to the chief place in the counting-house. It was
no very difficult matter for me to discover, that my new master's
character had other elements besides that of the highest
respectability. In plain terms, I found him to be a pretty equal
compound by nature, of the fool, the tyrant, and the coward. There was
only one direction in which what grovelling sympathies he had, could
be touched to some purpose. Save him waste, or get him profit; and he
was really grateful. I succeeded in working both these marvels. His
managing man cheated him; I found it out; refused to be bribed to
collusion; and exposed the fraud to Mr. Sherwin. This got me his
confidence, and the place of chief clerk. In that position, I
discovered a means, which had never occurred to my employer, of
greatly enlarging his business and its profits, with the least
possible risk. He tried my plan, and it succeeded. This gained me his
warmest admiration, an increase of salary, and a firm footing in his
family circle. My projects were more than fulfilled: I had money
enough, and leisure enough; and spent my obscure existence exactly as
I had proposed.
"But my life was still not destined to be altogether devoid of an
animating purpose. When I first knew Margaret Sherwin, she was just
changing from childhood to girlhood. I marked the promise of future
beauty in her face and figure; and secretly formed the resolution
which you afterwards came forward to thwart, but which I have
executed, and will execute, in spite of you.
"The thoughts out of which that resolution sprang, counselled me more
calmly than you can suppose. I said within myself: 'The best years of
my life have been irrevocably wasted; misery and humiliation and
disaster have followed my steps from my youth; of all the pleasant
draughts which other men drink to sweeten existence, not one has
passed my lips. I will know happiness before I die; and this girl
shall confer it. She shall grow up to maturity for _me:_ I will
imperceptibly gain such a hold on her affections, while they are yet
young and impressible, that, when the time comes, and I speak the
word--though my years more than double hers, though I am dependent on
her father for the bread I eat, though parents' voice and lover's
voice unite to call her back--she shall still come to my side, and of
her own free will put her hand in mine, and follow me wherever I go;
my wife, my mistress, my servant, which I choose.
"This was my project. To execute it, time and opportunity were mine;
and I steadily and warily made use of them, hour by hour, day by day,
year by year. From first to last, the girl's father never suspected
me. Besides the security which he felt in my age, he had judged me by
his own small commercial standard, and had found me a model of
integrity. A man who had saved him from being cheated, who had so
enlarged and consolidated his business as to place him among the top
dignitaries of the trade; who was the first to come to the desk in the
morning, and the last to remain there in the evening; who had not only
never demanded, but had absolutely refused to take, a single
holiday--such a man as this was, morally and intellectually, a man in
ten thousand; a man to be admired and trusted in every relation of
life!
"His confidence in me knew no bounds. He was uneasy if I was not by to
advise him in the simplest matters. My ears were the first to which he
confided his insane ambition on the subject of his daughter--his
anxiety to see her marry above her station--his stupid resolution to
give her the false, flippant, fashionable education which she
subsequently received. I thwarted his plans in nothing,
openly--counteracted them in everything, secretly. The more I
strengthened my sources of influence over Margaret, the more pleased
he was. He was delighted to hear her constantly referring to me about
her home-lessons; to see her coming to me, evening after evening, to
learn new occupations and amusements. He suspected I had been a
gentleman; he had been told I spoke pure English; he felt sure I had
received a first-rate education--I was nearly as good for Margaret as
good society itself! When she grew older, and went to the fashionable
school, as her father had declared she should, my offer to keep up her
lessons in the holidays, and to examine what progress she had made,
when she came home regularly every fortnight for the Sunday, was
accepted with greedy readiness, and acknowledged with servile
gratitude. At this time, Mr. Sherwin's own estimate of me, among his
friends, was, that he had got me for half nothing, and that I was
worth more to him than a thousand a-year.
"But there was one member of the family who suspected my intentions
from the first. Mrs. Sherwin--the weak, timid, sickly woman, whose
opinion nobody regarded, whose character nobody understood--Mrs.
Sherwin, of all those who dwelt in the house, or came to the house,
was the only one whose looks, words, and manner kept me constantly on
my guard. The very first time we saw each other, that woman doubted
_me,_ as I doubted _her;_ and for ever afterwards, when we met, she
was on the watch. This mutual distrust, this antagonism of our two
natures, never openly proclaimed itself, and never wore away. My
chance of security lay, not so much in my own caution, and my perfect
command of look and action under all emergencies, as in the
self-distrust and timidity of her nature; in the helpless inferiority
of position to which her husband's want of affection, and her
daughter's want of respect, condemned her in her own house; and in the
influence of repulsion--at times, even of absolute terror--which my
presence had the power of communicating to her. Suspecting what I am
assured she suspected--incapable as she was of rendering her
suspicions certainties--knowing beforehand, as she must have known,
that no words she could speak would gain the smallest respect or
credit from her husband or her child--that woman's life, while I was
at North Villa, must have been a life of the direst mental suffering
to which any human being was ever condemned.
"As time passed, and Margaret grew older, her beauty both of face and
form approached nearer to perfection than I had foreseen, closely as I
watched her. But neither her mind nor her disposition kept pace with
her beauty. I studied her closely, with the same patient, penetrating
observation, which my experience of the world has made it a habit with
me to direct on every one with whom I am brought in contact--I studied
her, I say, intently; and found her worthy of nothing, not even of the
slave-destiny which I had in store for her.
"She had neither heart nor mind, in the higher sense of those words.
She had simply instincts--most of the bad instincts of an animal; none
of the good. The great motive power which really directed her, was
Deceit. I never met with any human being so inherently disingenuous,
so naturally incapable of candour even in the most trifling affairs of
life, as she was. The best training could never have wholly overcome
this vice in her: the education she actually got--an education under
false pretences--encouraged it. Everybody has read, some people have
known, of young girls who have committed the most extraordinary
impostures, or sustained the most infamous false accusations; their
chief motive being often the sheer enjoyment of practising deceit. Of
such characters was the character of Margaret Sherwin.
"She had strong passions, but not their frequent accompaniment--strong
will, and strong intellect. She had some obstinacy, but no firmness.
Appeal in the right way to her vanity, and you could make her do the
thing she had declared she would not do, the minute after she had made
the declaration. As for her mind, it was of the lowest schoolgirl
average. She had a certain knack at learning this thing, and
remembering that; but she understood nothing fairly, felt nothing
deeply. If I had not had my own motive in teaching her, I should have
shut the books again, the first time she and I opened them together,
and have given her up as a fool.
"All, however, that I discovered of bad in her character, never made
me pause in the prosecution of my design; I had carried it too far for
that, before I thoroughly knew her. Besides, what mattered her
duplicity to _me?_--I could see through it. Her strong passions?--I
could control them. Her obstinacy?--I could break it. Her poverty of
intellect?--I cared nothing about her intellect. What I wanted was
youth and beauty; she was young and beautiful and I was sure of her.
"Yes; sure. Her showy person, showy accomplishments, and showy manners
dazzled all eyes but mine--Of all the people about her, I alone found
out what she really was; and in that lay the main secret of my
influence over her. I dreaded no rivalry. Her father, prompted by his
ambitious hopes, kept most young men of her class away from the house;
the few who did come were not dangerous; _they_ were as incapable of
inspiring, as _she_ was of feeling, real love. Her mother still
watched me, and still discovered nothing; still suspected me behind my
back, and still trembled before my face. Months passed on
monotonously, year succeeded to year; and I bided my time as
patiently, and kept my secret as cautiously as at the first. No change
occurred, nothing happened to weaken or alter my influence at North
Villa, until the day arrived when Margaret left school and came home
for good.
-----
"Exactly at the period to which I have referred, certain business
transactions of great importance required the presence of Mr. Sherwin,
or of some confidential person to represent him, at Lyons. Secretly
distrusting his own capabilities, he proposed to me to go; saying that
it would be a pleasant trip for me, and a good introduction to his
wealthy manufacturing correspondents. After some consideration, I
accepted his offer.
"I had never hinted a word of my intentions towards her to Margaret;
but she understood them well enough--I was certain of that, from many
indications which no man could mistake. For reasons which will
presently appear, I resolved not to explain myself until my return
from Lyons. My private object in going there, was to make interest
secretly with Mr. Sherwin's correspondents for a situation in their
house. I knew that when I made my proposals to Margaret, I must be
prepared to act on them on the instant; I knew that her father's fury
when he discovered that I had been helping to educate his daughter
only for myself, would lead him to any extremities; I knew that we
must fly to some foreign country; and, lastly, I knew the importance
of securing a provision for our maintenance, when we got there. I had
saved money, it is true--nearly two-thirds of my salary, every
year--but had not saved enough for two. Accordingly, I left England to
push my own interests, as well as my employer's; left it, confident
that my short absence would not weaken the result of years of steady
influence over Margaret. The sequel showed that, cautious and
calculating as I was, I had nevertheless overlooked the chances
against me, which my own experience of her vanity and duplicity ought
to have enabled me thoroughly to foresee.
"Well: I had been some time at Lyons; had managed my employer's
business (from first to last, I was faithful, as I had engaged to be,
to his commercial interests); and had arranged my own affairs securely
and privately. Already, I was looking forward, with sensations of
happiness which were new to me, to my return and to the achievement of
the one success, the solitary triumph of my long life of humiliation
and disaster, when a letter arrived from Mr. Sherwin. It contained the
news of your private marriage, and of the extraordinary conditions
that had been attached to it with your consent.
"Other people were in the room with me when I read that letter; but my
manner betrayed nothing to them. My hand never trembled when I folded
the sheet of paper again; I was not a minute late in attending a
business engagement which I had accepted; the slightest duties of
other kinds which I had to do, I rigidly fulfilled. Never did I more
thoroughly and fairly earn the evening's leisure by the morning's
work, than I earned it that day.
"Leaving the town at the close of afternoon, I walked on till I came
to a solitary place on the bank of the great river which runs near
Lyons. There I opened the letter for the second time, and read it
through again slowly, with no necessity now for self-control, because
no human being was near to look at me. There I read your name,
constantly repeated in every line of writing; and knew that the man
who, in my absence, had stepped between me and my prize--the man who,
in his insolence of youth, and birth, and fortune, had snatched from
me the one long-delayed reward for twenty years of misery, just as my
hands were stretched forth to grasp it, was the son of that honourable
and high-born gentleman who had given my father to the gallows, and
had made me the outcast of my social privileges for life.
"The sun was setting when I looked up from the letter; flashes of
rose-light leapt on the leaping river; the birds were winging nestward
to the distant trees, and the ghostly stillness of night was sailing
solemnly over earth and sky, as the first thought of the vengeance I
would have on father and son began to burn fiercely at my heart, to
move like a new life within me, to whisper to my spirit--Wait: be
patient; they are both in your power; you can now foul the father's
name as the father fouled yours--you can yet thwart the son, as the
son has thwarted _you._
"In the few minutes that passed, while I lingered in that lonely place
after reading the letter, I imagined the whole scheme which it
afterwards took a year to execute. I laid the whole plan against you
and your father, the first half of which, through the accident that
led you to your discovery, has alone been carried out. I believed
then, as I believe now, that I stood towards you both in the place of
an injured man, whose right it was, in self-defence and
self-assertion, to injure you. Judged by your ideas, this may read
wickedly; but to me, after having lived and suffered as I have, the
modern common-places current in the world are so many brazen images
which society impudently worships--like the Jews of old--in the face
of living Truth.
-----
"Let us get back to England.
"That evening, when we met for the first time, did you observe that
Margaret was unusually agitated before I came in? I detected some
change, the moment I saw her. Did you notice that I avoided speaking
to her, or looking at her? it was because I was afraid to do so. I saw
that, with my return, my old influence over her was coming back: and I
still believe that, hypocritical and heartless though she was, and
blinded though you were by your passion for her, she would
unconsciously have betrayed everything to you on that evening, if I
had not acted as I did. Her mother, too! how her mother watched me
from the moment when I came in!
"Afterwards, while you were trying hard to open, undetected, the
sealed history of my early life, I was warily discovering from
Margaret all that I desired to know. I say 'warily,' but the word
poorly expresses my consummate caution and patience, at that time. I
never put myself in her power, never risked offending, or frightening,
or revolting her; never lost an opportunity of bringing her back to
her old habits of familiarity; and, more than all, never gave her
mother a single opportunity of detecting me. This was the sum of what
I gathered up, bit by bit, from secret and scattered investigations,
persevered in through many weeks.
"Her vanity had been hurt, her expectations disappointed, at my having
left her for Lyons, with no other parting words than such as I might
have spoken to any other woman whom I looked on merely as a friend.
That she felt any genuine love for me I never have believed, and never
shall: but I had that practical ability, that firmness of will, that
obvious personal ascendancy over most of those with whom I came in
contact, which extorts the respect and admiration of women of all
characters, and even of women of no character at all. As far as her
senses, her instincts, and her pride could take her, I had won her
over to me but no farther--because no farther could she go. I mention
pride among her motives, advisedly. She was proud of being the object
of such attentions as I had now paid to her for years, because she
fancied that, through those attentions, I, who, more or less, ruled
everyone else in her sphere, had yielded to her the power of ruling
_me._ The manner of my departure from England showed her too plainly
that she had miscalculated her influence, and that the power, in her
case, as in the case of others, was all on my side. Hence the wound to
her vanity, to which I have alluded.
"It was while this wound was still fresh that you met her, and
appealed to her self-esteem in a new direction. You must have seen
clearly enough, that such proposals as yours far exceeded the most
ambitious expectations formed by her father. No man's alliance could
have lifted her much higher out of her own class: she knew this, and
from that knowledge married you--married you for your station, for
your name, for your great friends and connections, for your father's
money, and carriages, and fine houses; for everything, in short, but
yourself.
"Still, in spite of the temptations of youth, wealth, and birth which
your proposals held out to her, she accepted them at first (I made her
confess it herself) with a secret terror and misgiving, produced by
the remembrance of me. These sensations, however, she soon quelled, or
fancied she quelled; and these, it was now my last, best chance to
revive. I had a whole year for the work before me; and I felt certain
of success.
"On your side, you had immense advantages. You had social superiority;
you had her father's full approbation; and you were married to her. If
she had loved you for yourself, loved you for anything besides her own
sensual interests, her vulgar ambition, her reckless vanity, every
effort I could have made against you would have been defeated from the
first. But, setting this out of the question, in spite of the utter
heartlessness of her attachment to you, if you had not consented to
that condition of waiting a year for her after marriage; or,
consenting to it, if you had broken it long before the year was
out--knowing, as you should have known, that in most women's eyes a
man is not dishonoured by breaking his promise, so long as he breaks
it for a woman's sake--if, I say, you had taken either of these
courses, I should still have been powerless against you. But you
remained faithful to your promise, faithful to the condition, faithful
to the ill-directed modesty of your love; and that very fidelity put
you in my power. A pure-minded girl would have loved you a thousand
times better for acting as you did--but Margaret Sherwin was not a
pure-minded girl, not a maidenly girl: I have looked into her
thoughts, and I know it.
"Such were your chances against me; and such was the manner in which
you misused them. On _my_ side, I had indefatigable patience; personal
advantages equal, with the exception of birth and age, to yours:
long-established influence; freedom to be familiar; and more than all,
that stealthy, unflagging strength of purpose which only springs from
the desire of revenge. I first thoroughly tested your character, and
discovered on what points it was necessary for me to be on my guard
against you, when you took shelter under my roof from the storm. If
your father had been with you on that night, there were moments, while
the tempest was wrought to its full fury, when, if my voice could have
called the thunder down on the house to crush it and every one in it
to atoms, I would have spoken the word, and ended the strife for all
of us. The wind, the hail, and the lightning maddened my thoughts of
your father and you--I was nearly letting you see it, when that flash
came between us as we parted at my door.
"How I gained your confidence, you know; and you know also, how I
contrived to make you use me, afterwards, as the secret friend who
procured you privileges with Margaret which her father would not grant
at your own request. This, at the outset, secured me from suspicion on
your part; and I had only to leave it to your infatuation to do the
rest. With you my course was easy--with her it was beset by
difficulties; but I overcame them. Your fatal consent to wait through
a year of probation, furnished me with weapons against you, which I
employed to the most unscrupulous purpose. I can picture to myself
what would be your indignation and your horror, if I fully described
the use which I made of the position in which your compliance with her
father's conditions placed you towards Margaret. I spare you this
avowal--it would be useless now. Consider me what you please; denounce
my conduct in any terms you like: my justification will always be the
same. I was the injured man, you were the aggressor; I was righting
myself by getting back a possession of which you had robbed me, and
any means were sanctified by such an end as that.
"But my success, so far, was of little avail, in itself; against the
all-powerful counter-attraction which you possessed. Contemptible, or
not, you still had this superiority over me--you could make a fine
lady of her. From that fact sprang the ambition which all my
influence, dating as it did from her childhood, could not destroy.
There, was fastened the main-spring which regulated her selfish
devotion to you, and which it was next to impossible to snap asunder.
I never made the attempt.
"The scheme which I proposed to her, when she was fully prepared to
hear it, and to conceal that she had heard it, left her free to enjoy
all the social advantages which your alliance could bestow--free to
ride in her carriage, and go into her father's shop (that was one of
her ambitions!) as a new customer added to his aristocratic
connection--free even to become one of your family, unsuspected, in
case your rash marriage was forgiven. Your credulity rendered the
execution of this scheme easy. In what manner it was to be carried
out, and what object I proposed to myself in framing it, I abstain
from avowing; for the simple reason that the discovery at which you
arrived by following us on the night of the party, made my plan
abortive, and has obliged me since to renounce it. I need only say, in
this place, that it threatened your father as well as you, and that
Margaret recoiled from it at first--not from any horror of the
proposal, but through fear of discovery. Gradually, I overcame her
apprehensions: very gradually, for I was not thoroughly secure of her
devotion to my purpose, until your year of probation was nearly out.
"Through all that year, daily visitor as you were at North Villa, you
never suspected either of us! And yet, had you been one whit less
infatuated, how many warnings you might have discovered, which, in
spite of her duplicity and my caution, would then have shown
themselves plainly enough to put you on your guard! Those abrupt
changes in her manner, those alternate fits of peevish silence and
capricious gaiety, which sometimes displayed themselves even in your
presence, had every one of them their meaning--though you could not
discern it. Sometimes, they meant fear of discovery, sometimes fear of
me: now, they might be traced back to hidden contempt; now, to
passions swelling under fancied outrage; now, to secret remembrance of
disclosures I had just made, or eager anticipation of disclosures I
had yet to reveal. There were times at which every step of the way
along which I was advancing was marked, faintly yet significantly, in
her manner and her speech, could you only have interpreted them
aright. My first renewal of my old influence over her, my first words
that degraded you in her eyes, my first successful pleading of my own
cause against yours, my first appeal to those passions in her which I
knew how to move, my first proposal to her of the whole scheme which I
had matured in solitude, in the foreign country, by the banks of the
great river--all these separate and gradual advances on my part
towards the end which I was vowed to achieve, were outwardly shadowed
forth in her, consummate as were her capacities for deceit, and
consummately as she learnt to use them against you.
"Do you remember noticing, on your return from the country, how ill
Margaret looked, and how ill I looked? We had some interviews during
your absence, at which I spoke such words to her as would have left
their mark on the face of a Jezebel, or a Messalina. Have you
forgotten how often, during the latter days of your year of
expectation, I abruptly left the room after you had called me in to
bear you company in your evening readings? My pretext was sudden
illness; and illness it was, but not of the body. As the time
approached, I felt less and less secure of my own caution and
patience. With you, indeed, I might still have considered myself safe:
it was the presence of Mrs. Sherwin that drove me from the room. Under
that woman's fatal eye I shrank, when the last days drew near--I, who
had defied her detection, and stood firmly on my guard against her
sleepless, silent, deadly vigilance, for months and months--gave way
as the end approached! I knew that she had once or twice spoken
strangely to you, and I dreaded lest her wandering, incoherent words
might yet take in time a recognisable direction, a palpable shape.
They did not; the instinct of terror bound her tongue to the last.
Perhaps, even if she had spoken plainly, you would not have believed
her; you would have been still true to yourself and to your confidence
in Margaret. Enemy as I am to you, enemy as I will be to the day of
your death, I will do you justice for the past:--Your love for that
girl was a love which even the purest and best of women could never
have thoroughly deserved.
-----
"My letter is nearly done: my retrospect is finished. I have brought
it down to the date of events, about which you know as much as I do.
Accident conducted you to a discovery which, otherwise, you might not
have made, perhaps for months, perhaps not at all, until I had led you
to it of my own accord. I say accident, positively; knowing that from
first to last I trusted no third person. What you know, you knew by
accident alone.
"But for that chance discovery, you would have seen me bring her back
to North Villa at the appointed time, in my care, just as she went
out. I had no dread of her meeting you. But enough of her! I shall
dispose of her future, as I had resolved to dispose of it years ago;
careless how she may be affected when she first sees the hideous
alteration which your attack has wrought in me. Enough, I say, of the
Sherwins--father, mother, and daughter--your destiny lies not with
_them,_ but with _me._
"Do you still exult in having deformed me in every feature, in having
given me a face to revolt every human being who looks at me? Do you
triumph in the remembrance of this atrocity, as you triumphed in the
acting of it--believing that you had destroyed my future with
Margaret, in destroying my very identity as a man? I tell you, that
with the hour when I leave this hospital your day of triumph will be
over, and your day of expiation will begin--never to end till the
death of one of us. You shall live--refined educated gentleman as you
are--to wish, like a ruffian, that you had killed me; and your father
shall live to wish it too.
"Am I trying to awe you with the fierce words of a boaster and a
bully? Test me, by looking back a little, and discovering what I have
abstained from for the sake of my purpose, since I have been here. A
word or two from my lips, in answer to the questions with which I have
been baited, day after day, by those about me, would have called you
before a magistrate to answer for an assault--a shocking and a savage
assault, even in this country, where hand to hand brutality is a
marketable commodity between the Prisoner and the Law. Your father's
name might have been publicly coupled with your dishonour, if I had
but spoken; and I was silent. I kept the secret--kept it, because to
avenge myself on you by a paltry scandal, which you and your family
(opposing to it wealth, position, previous character, and general
sympathy) would live down in a few days, was not my revenge: because
to be righted before magistrates and judges by a beggarman's
exhibition of physical injury, and a coward's confession of physical
defeat, was not my way of righting myself. I have a lifelong
retaliation in view, which laws and lawgivers are powerless either to
aid or to oppose--the retaliation which set a mark upon Cain (as I
will set a mark on you); and then made his life his punishment (as I
will make your life yours).
"How? Remember what my career has been; and know that I will make your
career like it. As my father's death by the hangman affected _my_
existence, so the events of that night when you followed me shall
affect _yours._ Your father shall see you living the life to which his
evidence against _my_ father condemned _me_--shall see the foul stain
of your disaster clinging to you wherever you go. The infamy with
which I am determined to pursue you, shall be your own infamy that you
cannot get quit of--for you shall never get quit of me, never get quit
of the wife who has dishonoured you. You may leave your home, and
leave England; you may make new friends, and seek new employments;
years and years may pass away--and still, you shall not escape us:
still, you shall never know when we are near, or when we are distant;
when we are ready to appear before you, or when we are sure to keep
out of your sight. My deformed face and her fatal beauty shall hunt
you through the world. The terrible secret of your dishonour, and of
the atrocity by which you avenged it, shall ooze out through strange
channels, in vague shapes, by tortuous intangible processes; ever
changing in the manner of its exposure, never remediable by your own
resistance, and always directed to the same end--your isolation as a
marked man, in every fresh sphere, among every new community to which
you retreat.
"Do you call this a very madness of malignity and revenge? It is the
only occupation in life for which your mutilation of me has left me
fit; and I accept it, as work worthy of my deformity. In the prospect
of watching how you bear this hunting through life, that never quite
hunts you down; how long you resist the poison-influence, as slow as
it is sure, of a crafty tongue that cannot be silenced, of a
denouncing presence that cannot be fled, of a damning secret torn from
you and exposed afresh each time you have hidden it--there is the
promise of a nameless delight which it sometimes fevers, sometimes
chills my blood to think of. Lying in this place at night, in those
hours of darkness and stillness when the surrounding atmosphere of
human misery presses heavy on me in my heavy sleep, prophecies of
dread things to come between us, trouble my spirit in dreams. At those
times, I know, and shudder in knowing, that there is something besides
the motive of retaliation, something less earthly and apparent than
that, which urges me horribly and supernaturally to link myself to you
for life; which makes me feel as the bearer of a curse that shall
follow you; as the instrument of a fatality pronounced against you
long ere we met--a fatality beginning before our fathers were parted
by the hangman; perpetuating itself in you and me; ending who shall
say how, or when?
"Beware of comforting yourself with a false security, by despising my
words, as the wild words of a madman, dreaming of the perpetration of
impossible crimes. Throughout this letter I have warned you of what
you may expect; because I will not assail you at disadvantage, as you
assailed me; because it is my pleasure to ruin you, openly resisting
me at every step. I have given you fair play, as the huntsmen give
fair play at starting to the animal they are about to run down. Be
warned against seeking a false hope in the belief that my faculties
are shaken, and that my resolves are visionary--false, because such a
hope is only despair in disguise.
"I have done. The time is not far distant when my words will become
deeds. They cure fast in a public hospital: we shall meet soon!
"ROBERT MANNION."
"We shall meet soon!"
How? Where? I looked back at the last page of writing. But my
attention wandered strangely; I confused one paragraph with another;
the longer I read, the less I was able to grasp the meaning, not of
sentences merely, but even of the simplest words.
From the first lines to the last, the letter had produced no distinct
impressions on my mind. So utterly was I worn out by the previous
events of the day, that even those earlier portions of Mannion's
confession, which revealed the connection between my father and his,
and the terrible manner of their separation, hardly roused me to more
than a momentary astonishment. I just called to remembrance that I had
never heard the subject mentioned at home, except once or twice in
vague hints dropped mysteriously by an old servant, and little
regarded by me at the time, as referring to matters which had happened
before I was born. I just reflected thus briefly and languidly on the
narrative at the commencement of the letter; and then mechanically
read on. Except the passages which contained the exposure of
Margaret's real character, and those which described the origin and
progress of Mannion's infamous plot, nothing in the letter impressed
me, as I was afterwards destined to be impressed by it, on a second
reading. The lethargy of all feeling into which I had now sunk, seemed
a very lethargy of death.
I tried to clear and concentrate my faculties by thinking of other
subjects; but without success. All that I had heard and seen since the
morning, now recurred to me more and more vaguely and confusedly. I
could form no plan either for the present or the future. I knew as
little how to meet Mr. Sherwin's last threat of forcing me to
acknowledge his guilty daughter, as how to defend myself against the
life-long hostility with which I was menaced by Mannion. A feeling of
awe and apprehension, which I could trace to no distinct cause, stole
irresistibly and mysteriously over me. A horror of the searching
brightness of daylight, a suspicion of the loneliness of the place to
which I had retreated, a yearning to be among my fellow-creatures
again, to live where there was life--the busy life of London--overcame
me. I turned hastily, and walked back from the suburbs to the city.
It was growing towards evening as I gained one of the great
thoroughfares. Seeing some of the inhabitants of the houses, as I
walked along, sitting at their open windows to enjoy the evening air,
the thought came to me for the first time that day:--where shall I lay
my head tonight? Home I had none. Friends who would have gladly
received me were not wanting; but to go to them would oblige me to
explain myself; to disclose something of the secret of my calamity;
and this I was determined to keep concealed, as I had told my father I
would keep it. My last-left consolation was my knowledge of still
preserving that resolution, of still honourably holding by it at all
hazards, cost what it might.
So I thought no more of succour or sympathy from any one of my
friends. As a stranger I had been driven from my home, and as a
stranger I was resigned to live, until I had learnt how to conquer my
misfortune by my own vigour and endurance. Firm in this determination,
though firm in nothing else, I now looked around me for the first
shelter I could purchase from strangers--the humbler the better.
I happened to be in the poorest part, and on the poorest side of the
great street along which I was walking--among the inferior shops, and
the houses of few stories. A room to let was not hard to find here. I
took the first I saw; escaped questions about names and references by
paying my week's rent in advance; and then found myself left in
possession of the one little room which I must be resigned to look on
for the future--perhaps for a long future!--as my home.
Home! A dear and a mournful remembrance was revived in the reflections
suggested by that simple word. Through the darkness that thickened
over my mind, there now passed one faint ray of light which gave
promise of the morning--the light of the calm face that I had last
looked on when it was resting on my father's breast.
Clara! My parting words to her, when I had unclasped from my neck
those kind arms which would fain have held me to home for ever, had
expressed a promise that was yet unfulfilled. I trembled as I now
thought on my sister's situation. Not knowing whither I had turned my
steps on leaving home; uncertain to what extremities my despair might
hurry me; absolutely ignorant even whether she might ever see me
again--it was terrible to reflect on the suspense under which she
might be suffering, at this very moment, on my account. My promise to
write to her, was of all promises the most vitally important, and the
first that should be fulfilled.
My letter was very short. I communicated to her the address of the
house in which I was living (well knowing that nothing but positive
information on this point would effectually relieve her anxiety)--I
asked her to write in reply, and let me hear some news of her, the
best that she could give--and I entreated her to believe implicitly in
my patience and courage under every disaster; and to feel assured
that, whatever happened, I should never lose the hope of soon meeting
her again. Of the perils that beset me, of the wrong and injury I
might yet be condemned to endure, I said nothing. Those were truths
which I was determined to conceal from her, to the last. She had
suffered for me more than I dared think of, already!
I sent my letter by hand, so as to ensure its immediate delivery. In
writing those few simple lines, I had no suspicion of the important
results which they were destined to produce. In thinking of to-morrow,
and of all the events which to-morrow might bring with it, I little
thought whose voice would be the first to greet me the next day, whose
hand would be held out to me as the helping hand of a friend.