Bernard Capes

“ I am strong, and a brute perhaps, and I am going to use my strength to rob your lips. They have insulted me often enough to deserve that toll. Scream if you like. It can hurt no one but yourself. Why did you think I made that remark about Johnny Dando? I myself hardly knew at the moment; but now I know. I was jealous—wickedly, horribly jealous. I had no right to be, I own—no right to think at all of you. But I do, Ira—I can’t help it; no more can you. I think of you, I am thinking of you now, in a way that would make you blush if you knew. Be quiet; it is useless your struggling. ”

“ I said softly. “If all surmise is justified, I am hounding to his doom the husband of my mother.”
“And she would wish it so, you believe?”
“I am bound to believe it.”
“O, Richard! is it not the most tragic thing of all that you should have wasted all your poor heart of love in pleading to a mother that was no mother to you, and, when the real one came, that you should have turned from her like a stranger?”
“It is the most tragic thing, Ira—and the worst that I cannot bring myself even now to look upon her as anything but Mrs Dalston.”
She sighed. “It is all a dreadful tangle. ”

“ I felt as if I were breathing a fuller, more intoxicating air. It was to be Ira and I at last, each for the other, against all the world. That seemed to simplify the issues; to make my task a less complicated one. Ira and I, foot to foot, side to side, to run the race together, and win if we might, or, if we lost, to sink no less breathless to our reward in the grass by the roadside. I pictured it thus. I could believe in my dear love still, thank God!
The mood had not left me when I came down over the snow to the old hawthorn in Hags Lane, and found her there awaiting me. ”

“ It had been awful to me to see that cold exclusive beauty writhing in the grip of such a scoundrel. I felt fouled, humiliated, ashamed. There and then I swore an oath that I would let Lady Skene understand, on the first reasonable opportunity, the nature of my claim on her—not to bleed her pocket but her heart.
And, in the meanwhile, how to engineer my discovery? Should I use it to my more crushing indictment of a guilty woman—a bludgeon in my already loaded hand? A gentle son! a human merciful spirit! To admit myself one in purpose with this vulgar conspirator? Never, never! ”

“ LADY SKENE KNEELS TO ME His that is just written passes as an entr’acte, the fooling of a clown before the curtain, the merry jigging of the fiddles. It ends; and the lights are down once more, the dark curtains heave and lift, waste glooms and sorrows repossess the stage—and only now, always in their deep midmost, travels a little bloody star, the soul of a murdered child.
Winter has gripped the land in earnest, and, screaming upon the heavy dawns, come winds and ashy flights of snow. They are like tempests of defiance, hissing down and heaping at my feet to dispute my way. ”

“ He knew somehow that she had been no widow when she had married Lord Skene; and, indeed, his next words proved the justice of my surmise.
“Compare our positions,” said he. “Here am I—as I have described. Here are you—started from exactly similar premises—the mistress of all, or nearly all, that your heart could desire—a fortune, a title, an unsullied reputation; the respect of a noble husband, the love of a beautiful child—born in wedlock, too, that holy institution, and destined in the future to regard his mother as the pure fount of honour.” ”

“ And yet it was a coincidence, as strange as any that the annals of villainy can record. But then Coincidence is the father of Luck.
This strange, strange letter! this old young voice from the clouds, dropping upon me all in an unexpected moment like a ghostly message from Thibet. It must have its meaning in the sequences of Fate—must have been meant to have. That the fellow should have been young Skene’s tutor—his monitor, great God! a vulgar intrigant, with a past, hardly past indeed, and caught, in despite of it, making eyes at “you-know-who”! You-know-who? ”

“ Vengeance is timeless. For all those twenty years of elsewise obliteration, the lust for it was as red in him at this day as when he had heard himself convicted on false evidence of a heinous offence, and had vainly striven, a foreigner and incoherent, to explain to the Court the real purport of a villain’s traducing. He could not believe for an instant that the God of his superstition had let the work of his legitimate hands be anticipated by another. No; the men remained to him somewhere. Only to find them!
I do not ask your sympathy for this Antonio Geoletti. ”

“ Evercreech lay back from the highroad between Footover and Market Grazing in north-west Hampshire—a wild and haunted country, sharing itself between dense woods and lonely downs. There were enough of both contained within the estate to serve a young solitary spirit for its ample wilderness—for day-long wanderings, and fantastic chancings by stream and thicket, and pretty pastorals won out of high folds on hillsides, and all the sting and honey of romance. There one might walk or ride, a squire of the Grael, and taste a county’s venture in an acre. ”

“ I should be thankful, on the contrary, for every crumb of condescension vouchsafed me—a feast, if I could only come to realise in it a sense of my own insignificance. She was always poking that in my teeth, viciously and by innuendo. I wondered even that Lady Skene could stand it, since it reflected upon herself; but she had truly no snobbism, and valued her creed above all earthly aggrandisements. The abominable child played up to this weakness, or strength, in her, and so secured her own position as prime favourite with the real head of the establishment. ”

“ I took that, not for myself, but—damn it! don’t you know that Lord Skene disapproves of your coming here? I told him you came by your own will, not mine; and if your will isn’t his, he can just look after his own. But you take the risk of any consequences if you come. I warn you, I’m master here, and I kiss or ill treat whom I choose. Do you understand? You’re a ‘unique young party’ according to him, and you’ve been kissed by the grandson of that old pottle-pot yonder. How do you like the thought? You’ve bound yourself slave to something worse than you expected, haven’t you! ”

“ And the next moment she is prostrate at my feet.
“Richard! I will be poor—O, I will be poor!”
Hush! Who is this come suddenly upon us from the shadows, where Ira, hearing my step, had hidden her?
“Will you make my burden, Richard, more than I can bear?”
I turn in amazement. It is Lady Skene.
“I have dared much to come to you—to her,” she says, in a low agitated voice. “I knew from my husband that you could never win—not there—not in that Court. But here, Richard? O, it is great to be generous in triumph, but greater in defeat.”
“Generous! What have I left to give in all the world?” ”

“ When, by-and-by, we reassembled in the hall, Valombroso’s instant utterance spoke, I think, the common feeling:
“God of mercy, signore! there is only one way to penetrate the secrets of this house—and that is to pull it down.”
He wiped his white face with a ball of handkerchief. Inspector Jannaway’s appeared the only composed countenance amongst us. But even his answered with a momentary pallor to the shock of a sudden screech of laughter uttered hard by. It came, or seemed to come, from the room where we had left Mrs Dalston. ”

“ Did not Sir Maurice Carnac call me by his name?”
He bit his lip.
“O! I daresay Charlie was no Joseph,” he said.
“O!” I answered, much enlightened; “I beg your pardon. Very blind of me, to be sure. I may be a bastard none the less, you mean? Well, it is in the reckoning; but, for all your assumption, sir, you seem to dread the test more than I do.”
“Well, frankly, I think I do,” he said. “Truth, you see, is often a confoundedly unwelcome sort of visitor—like a poor relation—very upsetting to the conveniences. I notice, by the way, her name’s pretty familiar on your tongue. ”

“ Then, wandering on blindly in the snow, she had suddenly awakened to the knowledge that she was lost, and very cold, and that the wind and rushing flakes seemed all at once to have become things of animate wickedness, shutting her round and in, and barring every exit with spears of ice.
“You must have been thinking very deeply, Ira, to have come so far without noticing. I wonder what about?”
“Yes, Richard. When—when we think a good deal of something, I suppose something is a good deal in our thoughts, isn’t it?” ”

“ It might be thought that Lady Skene would have wished to exalt her own, especially as she bore her husband no family. She was indifferent to me, however, and so I could not but be to her. We were not kindred spirits, and were antipathetic to one another. Her soul inhabited a chapel; mine the woods and mountains of a roaming fancy. I never felt “at home” with her; and I think she had writ me down early for one of the unelect. Predestination is a comfortable creed for those who would eschew parental responsibilities. It is vain carving a brand that is destined for the burning. ”

“ Now, if for twenty years Mr Churton’s mouth had remained sealed from terror, why should that terror become suddenly inoperative in the twenty-first year? It is just the contempt for providing against such unforeseen contingencies which constitutes the flaws. But it would have been quite possible to close Mr Churton’s mouth at once and for ever at the beginning of things. Casual concessions to humanity are the weaknesses of all but Napoleonic criminals. Mr Dalston, then, it would appear, was not a Napoleonic criminal. He attached too much value, perhaps, to the mere terror of his personality. ”

“ I REVISIT MOTHER CAREY The last of the snow was gurgling itself away into the black drain-traps, and the face of the town was smeared like a sweep’s under a dreary drizzle, when Mr Shapter, and I, and a certain hard-faced gentleman, with a habit of rubbing his jaw grittily under reflection, came down to the grimy little tenement in Old Paradise Street. At the door, the hard-faced gentleman, motioning us to one side and bending to the keyhole, gave a call like an itinerant potman’s. ”

“ The repinings of misunderstood youth appeal, I think, much more sentimentally to the kind observer than they deserve. A thousand compensations of wonder and expectation are always at the service of the most oppressed young manhood. I found plenty for myself in that strange solitary life—the knowledge of woods at dawn; the intimacy of venturesome birds; the cosy lamp-lit room, my own, and shelves of glistening books. I owed most of the last to the good-natured kindness of Lord Skene, who had sent me down a small library of volumes at the latter end of my furnishing. ”

“ Yet I was sorry that Fate had imposed on Lady Skene so vulgar a confederate; for I could not but think the man vulgar, ordained priest as he was, and quite sincere, I believe, in his evangelicism. But, apart from him, and her subscription to his ugly phraseologic cant, she was so lovelily one of those presences whom age cannot wither (the rest of the quotation hardly applied to her) ; so perpetual a provocation—and aggravation—to the worshipper of beauty; so serene a thing, so coldly tantalising, so refinedly a figure for the sweet altitudes of romance! ”

“ The Jury, equal to Inspector Jannaway’s faith in them, had brought in a verdict of Justifiable felo de se; and, with the snap of that final spark, the curtain had fallen, committing me to a profound gloom.
That, in its essence, no doubt, was fruit of the inevitable reaction from long nervous tension. In the exhaustion following any such prolonged struggle, one is always apt to make a selfish grievance of one’s state—to resent the self-imposition of one’s burden as a duty enforced upon one by the callous egotism of one’s fellows. ”