At His Gates. Volume 3

He did not stop, as if this was anything consolatory; he kept moving up and down, painfully, with his lameness. 'And that scoundrel has got off,' he cried between his teeth – 'got off! and has the audacity to clear me.'

Poor Helen was disconcerted. She had forgotten her own fury of indignation when she first saw the accusation against him. She had long, long grown used to all that, and used to the reflection that nobody believed it whose opinion was worth anything. She had insisted upon Burton's confession and explanation, she scarcely knew why – more as a punishment to him than as a vindication of Robert. She was confused about it altogether, not quite knowing what she meant. And now, in the light of his indignation, she felt almost as if she had done her husband an injury – insulted him. She faltered, and looked at him wistfully, and did not know what to say. She had not lost the habit of love, but she had lost the habit of companionship; she had told her story wrongly; she did not know how to bring him to her state of feeling, or to transport herself into his. And this too was the fault of the man who had driven Robert to despair – the man whom she had saved.

'He has got off,' she said humbly, 'by my means. Robert, I tried revenge once, but I will never try it again. I could not give him up, however bad he had been, when he was in my power.'

The sound of trembling in her voice went to his heart. 'My poor Helen! my sweet Helen!' he cried, coming to her. 'Do you think I blame you? You could not have done otherwise. For you there was but one course – but if I had the chance now – '

Just then there was a commotion at the door, and sounds of many voices. A great many exclamations in French, with one or two broken questions in English, came to their ears. 'You has you papiers. Domm you papiers. You say you is Jean – Jean Smiff, et pas – '

'Je me fie à monsieur ici. Monsieur est-il chez lui? C'est un Anglais. Il nous expliquera tout ça,' said another voice. It was the voice of the maire, whom Robert had made friends with in his hunger for human companionship. The parley at the door went on for a few minutes longer, and then there entered a band of excited Frenchmen. One, a gendarme from St Malo, carried an open telegram in his hand; another, in a blouse, kept his hand upon the shoulder of a burly Englishman in a light coat. The maire brought up the rear. They seemed such a crowd of people as they entered the little, light room, that it was some moments before the three English people thus brought face to face recognised each other. Helen with difficulty suppressed a cry. Robert stood confronting the party with the flush of his indignation not yet subsided, with a wonder beyond words in his eyes. As for the other, he showed no sign of surprise. He was driven back to his last stronghold, forced to use all his strength to keep himself up and maintain his courage. His eye dilated and gave a flutter of wonder at the sight of Helen. It was evident that he did not recognise her companion. He kept his arms folded, as if for self-preservation, to keep within him all the warmth, all the courage possible, physically to keep up and support himself.

The three men rushed into explanation all at once. A telegram had been received at St Malo, describing an Englishman who was supposed to have gone there, and whose description, which the gendarme held out, in the telegram, corresponded exactly with that of the prisoner. The prisoner, however, called himself Smith. Smiff – or Smitt, as his pursuers pronounced it – and produced papers which were en règle; but he could not explain what he was doing here; he showed no inclination to be taken to the English consul. On the contrary, he had crossed to Dinard as soon as he heard that inquiries had been made about him at his hotel. While all this was being told the stranger stood immovable, with his arms folded; he did not understand half of it. His French was as deficient as the French of untravelled Englishmen usually is, and the tumult around him, at the same time, confused his mind and quickened his outward senses. He could not make out what his chances of liberation were; but his eyes were open to any possibility of escape. They were bloodshot and strained those eyes; now and then that flutter of wonder, of excitement, of watchfulness, came into them, but he showed no other sign of emotion. At such a terrible crisis all secondary sensations perish; he had no time to wonder what Helen, whom he had left behind him in England, should be doing here. Rather it was natural that everybody connected with his fate should be here, gathering round him silently to see the end.

Thus this encounter had but little effect upon Burton; but it would be impossible to describe the effect it had upon the man who stood opposite to him, whom he had not recognised. Robert Drummond had suffered as few men ever suffered. He had died – he had come alive again – he had lived two separate lives. For some years up to this day his existence had been that of a man deprived of all the hopes and consolations of life – a man miserably alone, dead to every one belonging to him. Even the return to life which he had tried to realise this morning was no more than an experiment. He might never be able to conquer, to forget those seven ghosts which stood between him and his wife and child. He could not take up his life again where he left it – that was impossible. And all this had been done by the influence of the man before him, who was in his power, whom he might if he would give over to prison and trial and punishment. A gleam of fierce joy shot through Drummond's heart, and then —

They stood facing each other, with the Frenchmen grouped about them. But Burton had not, beyond the first glance, looked at his judge. His face confronted him, but his eyes did not; he had escaped as yet the knowledge who it was.

A thousand and a thousand thoughts whirled through Drummond's mind; he had only a moment to decide in; he had the past to satisfy, and the burning, fiery indignation of the present moment, in which for the first time he had identified and comprehended the past. Give him up! punish him! Should such a scoundrel get off, when innocent men had so bitterly suffered? Let him fall, and bring down in his train all who were concerned – all who made a prey of the ignorant and the poor! This wave of thought possessed him with a whirl and sweep like the rushing tide – and then there came the interval of silence, the moment when the waters fell back and all was still.

Revenge! 'I tried revenge, once, but I will never try it again!' Who was it that had said this close to him, so that the very air repeated and repeated it, whispering it in his ear? He had himself been dead, and he had come alive again. His new life, which had commenced this morning, was spotless as yet. He had to decide, decide, decide in a moment how it should be inaugurated, by mercy or by judgment – by the sin (was it not a sin?) of helping the escape of a criminal, or by the righteous deed (where was it said that this might be a sin too?) of handing him over to punishment. How his soul was tossed upon these waves! He stood as in the midst of a great battle, which raged round him. Fierce arrows tore his heart, coming from one side and another, he could not tell how. Give up the accursed thing – punish the unworthy soul – be just! be just! But then that other, 'Neither have I condemned thee; go, and sin no more.' And all had to be done in a minute, while those voluble explanations interlaced each other, and each man expounded his case. Drummond glanced at his wife for help, but she dared not look at him. She sat on the sofa against the light, with her hands tightly clasped in her lap. Was she praying? For so long, out of the depths of his hell, Dives, poor Dives, had not dared to pray.

He did not know what he said when at length he spoke; it was some commonplace, some nothing. But it attracted at once the attention of the prisoner. Burton turned round, and gazed at the man whom he thought dead. He did not recognise the voice, except that it was a voice he knew; he did not even recognise the face, which had grown prematurely old, framed in its white hair, at the first glance; but there crept over him a shudder of enlightenment, a gleam of perception. His senses were quickened by his own position. He shook where he stood as if with cold or palsy. He looked at Helen, he looked at the man by her side. Then an inarticulate cry came from him; terror of he knew not what deprived him, fortunately, of all power of speech. He fell back in his fear, and his attendants thought he meant to escape. They threw themselves between him and the door. It was then that Drummond spoke in his haste, scarcely knowing what he said.

'I know him,' he said in French. 'It is a long time since we have met, and he has just recognised me, you perceive. We are not friends, so you may trust me. His papers are quite right, and it is a mistake about the telegram. Look here; this is not his description. "Nez ordinaire;" why, he has a long nose. "Teint brun;" he is quite fresh-coloured, and his hair is grey. This is a great mistake. Monsieur le Maire, I know the man, and I will be responsible for him. You must let him go.'

'I thought so,' said the maire, pleased with his own discrimination. 'Je l'ai dit. Monsieur nous expliquera tout ça. Voilà que j'ai dit.'

'Mais, monsieur – ' began the gendarme.

Helen sat against the light, seeing nothing, and closed her eyes, and clasped her hands in her lap. Burton, bewildered and terror-stricken, looked on without showing any emotion. Perhaps the passiveness of his face was his best safeguard. Five minutes of expostulation and explanation followed, and then gradually the Frenchmen edged themselves out of the room. Fortunately Monsieur le Maire had taken this view from the beginning; he had been sure it was a mistake. When they were got rid of at last, the three who were left behind looked at each other in a silence which was more significant than words. Burton dropped into a chair; he was not able to stand nor to speak, but kept gazing at Drummond with a pitiful wonder and terror. At last —

'Are you Robert Drummond?' he asked hoarsely. 'Have you come back from your grave – '

'I am Robert Drummond,' said the other; 'and you are – John Smith, who must be got out of here as soon as possible. Have you money?'

'Yes.'

'Then I advise you to go away at once. Go up to Dinan by the river-side, or walk to St Brieuc to get the train. In the one case you are on your way to Brest, where there are ships always sailing; by the other you can get to Paris or wherever you please. You may wait here till the evening, if you choose; but then go.'

'I will go to Brest,' he said humbly.

'I would rather not know where you went; but go you must. My wife and I met to-day for the first time for seven years; we do not wish for company, you may suppose.'

Drummond's voice was very stern. He had no compassion for the man who stood thus humbled and miserable before him; not for him had he done this. And Burton was too much stupefied, too much bewildered, to make any direct reply. He looked at Helen with dull wonder, and asked under his breath – '

'Did you know?'

'No,' she said. 'It came upon me almost as suddenly as upon you.'

Then he pulled some papers out of his pocket.

'These are English papers. I don't know if it is long since you have left. But you might like to see them.' When he had done this, he made a few steps towards the door, where the old French bonne was waiting to show him where to go. Then he paused, and turned round again, facing them. 'What a man says in my position is very little to anybody,' he said; 'but – I want to say to you, Forgive me. I have helped to do you dreadful harm; but I – I did not mean it. I never meant it. I meant to get gain myself; but I never wished to harm you.'

And then he disappeared, saved again, saved at his uttermost need – surely this time finally saved – and by those whom he had injured the most. When he reached the clean little room where he was to stay all day, it appeared to Reginald Burton that he must be in a dream. The same feeling had been in his mind ever since he escaped from England. All was strange to him; and strangest of all was the fact that he could no longer command or regulate matters by his own will, but was the sport of circumstances, driven about he knew not how. His bewilderment was so great that he was not able to think. Saved first by a helpless woman, whose powers he would have laughed at a month ago; saved now by a ghost out of the grave!

That night he left Dinard under cover of the darkness, and walked to St Brieuc, where he got the train for Brest. He arrived there in time to get on board of a vessel about to sail for America. And thus Reginald Burton escaped from the immediate penal consequences of his sins. From the other consequences no man ever escapes. The prison, the trial, the weary round of punishment he had eluded; but his life was over and ended, and everything that was worth having in the world had abandoned him. Love was not his to carry away with him; reputation, honour, wealth, even comfort were gone. He had to make a miserable new beginning, to shrink into poverty, obscurity, and dependence. It would be hard to say whether these were more or less easy to bear than the prison work, prison life, prison garb from which he had escaped.

CHAPTER XIII

This was the end of Mr Burton of Dura – Mr Burton, of the great City firm, he who had been known as one of the greatest of commercial magnitudes, he who had ruined as many people as if he had been an emperor. For some time there was a very great deal about it in the newspapers, and his concerns were exposed to the light of day. He involved many others with him in his downfall, and some in his shame. If he had been taken, he would have joined in prison those men whom in our own day we have seen degraded from a high position in society down to the picking of oakum in gaol – men whom we all pour our loathing upon at the moment of their discovery, but of whom we say 'poor souls!' a few months after, when some clever newspaper correspondent has a peep at them, disguised in the prison garb, and known as numbers 300 and 301. Burton missed the prison and the pity; but he did not miss the punishment. In spite of various attempts that were made to stop it, the investigation of his affairs was very full and clear. It became apparent from his own private books, and that one of Rivers's which had been found in his safe, that the bank had been in reality all but ruined when it was made into a joint-stock company. Burton and his colleague had guaranteed the debts, and put the best face possible upon things generally; and Mr Golden's management, and an unexpected run of good luck, had all but carried the labouring concern into clear water. It was at this period that Burton, thanking his stars or his gods, withdrew from the share in the management which he had held nominally, and left it to Golden to complete the triumph of daring and good fortune. How this failed is already known to the reader. The mystery of the lost books was never cleared up; for Golden was out of the way, enjoying his honeymoon, when the private affairs of the other conspirator were thus thrown open to the light of day. But there was enough in the one book found among Mr Burton's to show how very inconvenient to him the finding of the others would have been. Thus daylight blazed upon all those tortuous, gloomy paths, and showed how the desire of self-interest guided the man through them, with an absolute indifference to the interests of others. He had not meant any harm, as he said; he had meant his own gain in the first place, his own recovery when his position was threatened, his own safety when danger came. He had not set out with a deliberate intention of ruining others; but this is a thing which nobody ever does; and he had not cared afterwards how many were ruined, so that he could hold on his way. Such cases happen now and then, and human justice cannot touch them; but most generally Nemesis comes sooner or later. Even at the worst, however, his material punishment was never so hard as that of some of his victims. The loss of the trust-money, which had been the immediate cause of his ruin, took the very bread out of the mouths of a family of orphans; but Mr Burton, at the lowest depths of his humiliation, had always bread enough, and to spare. He was never even thrown into such mental anxiety, such stress of painful calculation, as that into which the inhabitants of the Gatehouse were cast by his downfall. Miss Jane went painfully all over Dura, looking at the cottages, to see if by any means something could be found or contrived to suit Stephen; and her heart sank within her as she inspected the damp, low-roofed places, which were so very different from the warm old wainscoted rooms, the comfort of the Gatehouse. When the property was sold, however, it was found that the Gatehouse had been made into a separate lot, and had been bought, not by the rich descendant of the old Harcourts who had got Dura, but by some one whose name was unknown.

'Somebody who is going to live in the house himself, no doubt,' Miss Jane said, with a very long face; 'and I am sure I wish him well in it, whoever he may be,' she added with a struggle. 'But oh, Norah! what a thing it will be for us to go away!'

'If I knew him, I would go to him, and beg for your rooms for you. He never would have the heart to turn you out, if he was a good man,' cried Norah. 'For us it does not matter; but oh, Miss Jane, for you!'

'It cannot be helped, my dear,' said Miss Jane, drying her eyes. 'We have no right to it, you know. It does seem hard that we should be ruined by his prosperity, and then, as it were ruined again by his downfall. It seems hard; but it is not anybody's fault. Of course when we accepted it we knew the penalty. He might have turned us out at any time. No, Norah; we have no reason to complain.'

'That makes it worse,' cried impulsive Norah. 'It is always a comfort when one can think it is somebody's fault. And so it is – Mr Burton's fault. Oh, how much harm he has done! Oh, what a destroyer he has been! He has done as much harm as a war or a pestilence,' cried Norah. 'Think of poor – papa!'

She had always to make a pause before that name, not believing in it somehow, feeling it hurt her. By this time she had heard all about the meeting between her father and mother, and the day had been fixed when she was to join them; but still she had a sore, wounding, jealous sense that the new father was her rival – that he might be almost her enemy. Fathers on the whole seemed but an equivocal advantage to Norah. There was Mr Burton, who had ruined and shamed every one connected with him; and there was poor – papa, who might, for anything she knew, take all the gladness out of her own life.

'Oh, hush, my dear!' said Miss Jane. 'Mr Burton has been a bitter acquaintance to us; but he is Ned's father, and we must not complain.'

Just then there was a knock at the door, and Ned himself came in. He came from town, as he did often, to spend the evening with his betrothed. Their days were running very short now, and their prospects were not encouraging. He had not even time to look for any employment for himself, so much was he occupied with his father's affairs; and Norah was going away, and when should they meet again? These evenings which they spent together were very sweet; but they were growing daily sadder as they approached more closely to the shadow of the farewell. But this time Ned came in with a flush of pleasure in his face. His eyes were so brightened by it, and his colour so much improved, that he looked 'quite handsome,' Miss Jane thought; and he walked in with something of the impulsive satisfaction of old days.

'My grandfather is a brick,' he said, 'after all. He has given me my fortune. He has helped me to do something I had set my heart on. Miss Jane, don't think any more of leaving the Gatehouse. So long as I live nobody can turn you out.'

'What do you mean, Ned?'

'I mean that dear old grandpapa has been awfully good to me,' said Ned, 'and the Gatehouse is mine. I love it, Miss Jane. Don't you say anything. You may think it will be bitter for me to come here after all that has passed; but I love it. Since ever I was a boy, I have thought this room the dearest place in the world – ever since Norah sat and talked rubbish, and frightened me out of my life. How well I remember that! She has forgotten years ago! but I shall never forget. What are you crying about, Miss Jane? Now this is very hard upon a fellow, I must say. I thought it was good news.'

'And so it is – blessed news, you dear, dear, kind boy!' cried Miss Jane. 'Oh, children! what can I say to you? God bless you! And God will bless you for thinking of the afflicted first, before yourselves.'

'I had nothing to do with it – I knew nothing about it,' cried Norah proudly; and all at once, without any warning, she threw herself upon Ned, and gave him a sudden kiss on his brown cheek. For five minutes after none of the three were very coherent; for to do a good action when you are young makes you feel very foolish, and ready to cry with any one who cares to cry. Ned told them all about it between laughing and sobbing – how his grandfather had given him his portion, and how it was the best possible investment to buy the Gatehouse. 'For you see,' said Ned, 'when Norah makes up her mind to marry, we shall have a house all ready. As for everybody here knowing what has happened, everybody all over the country knows,' he added, with a hot flush on his cheek; 'and at Dura people like me – a little, and would not be unkind, as in other places. And how could I let the place Norah had been brought up in – the place I love – go to other people? So, Miss Jane, be happy, and set your brother's mind at rest. Nobody shall disturb you here as long as I live; and if I should die, it would go to Norah.'

'Oh, Ned, hush!' cried Norah, putting up her hand to his lip.

And then they went out into the garden, and wandered about and talked. Nothing but this innocent and close association, with no one to think it might be improper or to call them to account, could have made exactly such a bond as that which existed between these two innocent young souls. They were lovers, and yet they were half brother and sister. They talked of their plans with the wistful certainty and uncertainty of those who feel that another will may come in to shatter all their purposes, though in themselves they are so unalterable and sure. There was this always hanging over them, like the sword in the fable, of which they were conscious, though they would not say a word about it. To-night their spirits were raised. The fact that this familiar place was theirs, that Ned was actually its master, that here they might spend their days together as man and wife, exhilarated them into childish delight.

'I always think of you as in that room,' he said to her, 'when I picture my Norah to myself; and there is never half an hour all day long that I don't do that. I always see the old curtains and the funny old furniture. And to think it is ours, Norah, and that we shall grow old here, too!'

'I never mean to grow old,' said Norah. 'Fancy, Ned, mamma is not old, and she is nineteen years older than me. Nineteen years – twenty years! It is as good as a century; it will never come to an end!'

'Or if it does come to an end,' said wise Ned, in the additional discretion of two years' additional age, 'at least we shall have had our day.'

With this chastened yet delightful consciousness of the life before them they parted that evening. But next time they met Ned was not equally bright. He had been very sorely tried by the newspapers, by the shame he had to bear, by the looks askance which were bestowed on 'Burton's son.'

'I never shall be able to stay there,' he said, pouring out his troubled heart to Norah. 'I cannot bear it. Fancy having to hear one's father insulted, and not being able to say a word. I cannot do it; oh, Norah, I cannot! We must give up the thought of living here. I must go abroad.'