Percy Hetherington Fitzgerald

“ Lay that unction to your souls, my pious ladies—that hypocrisy won't do. You have not fallen, because your jaded hearts are indifferent, and so caked over with the cold crust of fashion and deceit, that you have lost even the warm feeling of temptation. So take no pride in that, and never fear, you will all be reckoned with, and in good time, and according to the weight of your responsibility. There is one who weighs all these things, in scales, to which the most accurate balance that jeweller could devise for his gold and gems, is as rude as a common weighing-machine. ”

“ Then the trains through the pleasant Belgian country; the odd faces, and that singular custom of the guard coming in so mysteriously at the door, when the train is at full speed. What things I shall have to tell and amuse darling Dora, whose name makes my heart low, only this excitement prevents me thinking of anything dismal. I shall write a book of travels, make a little money, and give it all to her. But this amazing and delicious capital! It is awe-striking—so solid and splendid—and the glorious cathedral! Such wealth, such gorgeousness to be in the world, which we do not dream of even. ”

“ How I hate the very cheerfulness and vapid hilarity of these morning fools who greet other so complacently, and clatter their nonsense about their "tumblers." I could not endure it. The band was now a damned, hellish, orchestra, hired by the demons who had ruined me! It seemed to thrill every nerve in my wretched system, and to send my heart in wild leaps and spasms dancing upwards. I could wish to fling myself away headlong, to get free—to escape—but I was bound fast, as if in a cell in a jail, and did not see how it was all to be resolved! ”

“ I see complete families pour in, and take up position in line, father, stout mother, pleasant daughters, and the conceited son. Then the dinner sets in like a torrent; all those pleasan German dishes. Those vegetables which we know not of in England, and best of all, those delicious fowls, wherewith arrives the late but welcome salad. It does seem to me that it arrives at the precise and fitting moment, with a pleasant sense of expectancy going before it, he and his friend, the fowl. My dear Dora will hardly think that this can be her old invalid that is speaking. ”

“ The day is sultry hot, but not so sultry as the furnaces inside here at my heart. The engine is working furiously, and will not let me rest a moment in one spot. I must go out, and out again, into the sun, into the raging sun. This morning is like a dull long night, and I seem to be tossing on a pillow. Go on, go on, move on! But there is stolid oppressive monotony about it. It is an hour yet from noon, when this gambling begins. ”

“ God, in his justice who has dealt so rigorously with me, may he deal with them, and not delay the reckoning too late!
. . . . As the place wakes up, I have come in again; but I cannot sit down or stop. I must be in motion. If I am not, my heart and soul begin their work again, and I shall die in agony. But I have my own plan for dying. The poor wretch that blew his brains out over their numbers, must have discomposed them sorely. It was not so bad a way to spite them. That blood should surely call to Heaven for vengeance. ”

“ Outside the window is a balcony, Venetian-like in its breadth, filled up with a whole garden of flowers, where there is a table, and where one can walk about. It recals an old and lost place in the country, before we were ruined, as they say. Overhead is an awning, and when the sun is less strong, I can go out, and walk up and down, and look into the street. If only Dora were here! No matter; one of these days she shall be, and better times will come; "one colour cannot always be turning up," as the maid said this morning. ”

“ I remember the night we were at the theatre, and heard the unhappy wretch. It seemed to be real life. O, sultry hours, advance, advance, and end all! They must have begun their play by this. Is it sinful to wish them one last curse, that may whelm them all together? But what have I to do with sinners or sinful? Then let the Judgment follow them, as it has followed me—sharp, swift, eternal!
What! a cab clattering to the door! Heavens! They are upon me at last! Light is breaking in the cloud. ”

“ I have nothing to look to now."
"I cannot tell you how this pains me, Grainger," I said, really distressed. "O, if my words could but have some little effect! Do—as you say the holy influence of the past is upon you—just for this night abstain. Even for Dora's sake, whom you once so loved, and who would rejoice to know that her name even had that little power left. If you knew its effect on me!"
A very curious look came into his face. He turned it off with a laugh. "Well, a night doesn't make much difference. I'm a fool, I know. There, we'll walk about instead." ”

“ Sweet morsels for them—stripping the young and the innocent—surely the vengeance of Heaven should overtake such wretches—fire should come down from heaven, or rather by a simpler process, it is no sin to wish that a common earthly conflagration would break out in the night and engulf their gaudy salons des jeux, their tables, rakes, devilish engines—and above all their ill-gotten pillage—their heaps of notes and stores of gold.
Of course a sharp friend, or the smooth dean, if he heard me, would remind me about those few bits of silver won the other night. ”

“ I shook myself free. "My luck, my old luck—the demoniac trap, just to get me away at the very moment I might be successful. Am I to be the only one robbed—every one to go off laughing and smiling, but me? It is the righteous dispensation the parsons preach."
"Oh, what folly, my friend, this is! I am ashamed of you."
"Then let there be one rule—let there be fairness, even in this villany. I won't be singled out for ruin, and despair, and death, and let every one else escape. I am not to be the only one robbed, while every one else gets their money——"
"Take your seats, gentlemen! Mount!" ”

“ How charming, how amusing, how interesting is your diary, dearest Alfred! I have read no novel that comes near to it for interest. So acute, so full of observation, such a knowledge of human character. It brings the whole scene before me; these dreadful people, and that terrible play, and what a picture! it comes back on me at nights in dreams, and I see their distorted faces, and the agonies of the poor creatures. And to think of these wicked, cruel, creatures fattening on the innocent! Such life and character, it is too graphic. ”

“ This devilish obstinacy, I would like to meet with obstinacy as fiendship. Then it for the first time struck me, even if this wonderful fortune occurred to me, what a beggarly return it would be—just thirty-five pieces, which would not near indemnify. A devilish obstinacy, I said again. I felt a sort of rage, and fury as devilish, and as I say an obstinacy, that would have made me put down everything, take a knife, gash my arm, let the blood stream out on their cursed board, if they wanted that! A soul's eternal fate—they would not care, for it is not to be made into money. ”

“ But I look round and try to make out Grainger. I wander from one table to the other. Certainly on this night of excitement there can be no such study as these human faces and expressions, especially at the moment the cards are being dealt. Not at chapel or church, if the Doctor Seraphicus himself were preaching, could we find five seconds of such absorbed expectancy and attention. The heart, soul, all, are in the faces. Suddenly, as the verdict sounds—light, positive light, drifts over some, and a positive shadow over others ”

“ Can those wise men, who are always preaching, or canting, in books, about waiting and putting your trust in something beyond this world, or who tell us that the darkest hour is the one before day—can they be inventing? Surely not. They must have known some instances. Who can tell or guess at the depths of arrogance and self-sufficiency? and the taste for instructing your inferiors may have blinded them to truth itself. However, it is a reprieve. The mere perverse eccentricity of human events may work out a remedy, just as it so often works out a disease. ”

“ The "gallery," as they call the people standing round, take different sides; and now steals up, as if from behind a tree, that methodist-looking inspector, whose skin is drawn so tight, and whose clothes are so brushed, by machinery I think. He quietly whispers Grainger, no one can learn what he says; but I see his head nodding like the bill of a sparrow. That man's soul, I suspect, is as tight as his skin and clothes. I suppose he is worth his six or seven hundred a year to the administration. ”

“ By wills and will-making hangs a cloud of the most intensely dramatic elements, and it is no wonder that so great a master of the human comedy as Balzac, should have played again and again on these disagreeable but seducing chords, and have loved to create misers, and hungry and greedy heirs. The philosophy and interest of the study is founded on the most absorbing and genuine situations; for the will-maker is put to a curious test, and must face his own meaner passions and interests. ”

“ The honest creatures in their blouses, who till the soil here and bring in marketing, are asleep or just rousing themselves. The gaudy looking hotels are bathed in slumber. Then the sloping Kiesleffstrasse and the balcony in which I so often see the young and pretty girl, decoying the doves and sparrows with crumbs. There is the Victoria Hotel and the Russie and the Quatre Saisons, all shut and solemn as jails. There is the money-lender's, "a Bank," he calls himself, and the post which brings and carries misery, and agonised confessions home. ”

“ Ten o'clock.—O shame, humiliation! that I should have been such a dupe and fool! I could beat, lash myself. But I must write—write, if only to justify myself. That man did it on purpose, I know he did; and that I should have trusted him! . . . After they had gone, I somehow felt myself in great spirits—a sort of elation and a sense of happiness I have not known for a long time. Grainger comes up. I think he had been drinking a little.
"Every one," he says, "is talking of your great luck. There is no system going like yours." ”

“ The odious and plundering vice keeps up and pays for all, even for the innocent blessings of nature; and I doubt whether one is not accessory before the act to those results in accepting any benefit from so contaminated a source, and lending one's countenance in return to their doings. But this is too much refining, and my pet at home will smile at such scruples. I must not set up to be a saint, and I shall do more practical work if, by word or example, I can save some light and careless soul from the temptation. ”

“ At the bottom of the gardens and outside the terrace—those gardens which are kept up by these infernal decorators, and in which some of my lost gold will furnish wages for gardeners and flowers—I say, at the bottom of this devilish pasture runs the road, and on the other side of that, larger more retired walks and grounds, with the great view of the hills and the broad open country, opening out fresh and innocent, as if they did not, with the air, benefit by man's crimes and villanies. ”

“ The morning again! The delightful air, cool, refreshing; the trees and walks and groves. But, with their sham air of innocence, the taint of sin and temptation. To their leaves and branches cling the mutterings and despairing ejaculations of those wandering under them, who have lost peace and happiness for ever, and found ruin. There are the innocent, as it were, the titularly good—the young girls and their mammas, who, in a cowardly way, lend their sanction to these villanies, throwing the cloak of respectability over this den, and who pay no penalty. ”

“ The will, true to its character, seems to beget strange and exceptional spasms of inconsistency; in its mysterious presence men will delight to belie their own whole life, or steady course of love and affections. The annals of wills show that there is no security in a long course of love on one side, or of devotion on the other, between parent and child, husband or wife. The word "will" is suggestive; and, with a sort of devilish freak, all is reversed of a sudden, and at the moment of discovery the faithful and loving child finds herself defrauded and cast out. ”

“ Speech may be silvern, silence golden, but action is, after all, a diamond. Going in this night to the roulette table, I see an unusual crowd, and faces showing that stupid interest and admiration which is about as sincere as that of the crowd who stand gaping at the foolhardy Blondin, or the reckless Leotard. Fifty per cent of that crowd has a lingering and secret aspiration, that it might, if a catastrophe were to be, be only present to see it. ”

“ They hang men; they punish and imprison for far less crimes; but on the heads of these wretches is the ruin of thousands of bodies and souls, the spiritual death, and the actual corporeal death of thousands more, who have hung themselves to the fair trees planted in sweet bowers by the "administration," or stifled themselves with charcoal in front of this fatal palace, and who have actually dabbled with their brains over the vile green table on which they have lost all. ”

“ Since you, Dora, had been saved from him, all these troubles had come upon him. He had grown desperate; he was at least privileged to speak as he pleased, and have that slight consolation. I saw, too, that he was altered. At that time he was considered by the women a good-looking man, his face having a little of that rude gauntness which is not unpleasing. He had large eyes, and a black irregular beard and moustache. Now he had grown careless in his dress. I knew how much that portended, and felt a deep pity for him.
"Grainger," I said, "it was hard for you, for I know you loved her. ”