Chapter Seven.
Her Letter.
Ay de mi! Un anno felice,
Parece un soplo ligero:
Perô sin dicha un instante,
Es un siglo de tormente.
”—And with mine eyes
I’ll drink the words you send, though ink be made of gall!”
It was broad daylight when I got home.
I did not go to bed; but, passed the weary morning hours in walking up and down my room, chewing the bitter cud of hopeless fancy, and in a state of excitement almost approaching to madness.
At last, the time arrived for me to start to town to my office.
“Hey, humph! what is the matter, Mr Lorton?”—growled old Smudge to me, as I proceeded to sign the attendance book before the fatal black line was drawn against the late comers—“Look ill, look ill! hey? Late hours, late hours, young man, young man; dissipation, and all the rest of it, hey? I know how it will end—same as the rest, same as the rest!”—and he chuckled to himself over some blue book in his corner, as if he had, in the most merry and unbending mood, “passed the time of day” with singular bonhomie!
I only gave him a gruff good-morning, however. I walked listlessly to my desk, where he presently also came, to take me to task about some account I had checked—so as to tone down any presumptuous feelings I might have in consequence of his graciousness:—the “balance” was, thus, “pretty square” between us.
I never found the office-work so tedious, my fellow-clerks so wearisome, nor the whole round of civil service life so dreadfully “flat, stale, and unprofitable,” as on that miserable day after the party!
The day seemed as if it would never come to an end.
The wretched hours lengthened themselves out, with such indiarubber-like elasticity, that, the interval between ten and four appeared a cycle of centuries!
I was longing to be free, in order to carry out a determination to which I had come.
I had resolved to see Mrs Clyde and plead my cause again with her; for, I had observed from Min’s manner, that it was not her objection to me personally, but, her promise to her mother which had prevented her from lending a favourable ear to my suit.
Four o’clock came at last—thank heaven!
I rushed out of the office; procured a hansom, with the fastest horse I was able to pick out in my hurry; and, set out homewards.
I arrived within the bounds of Saint Canon’s parish within the half-hour, thanks to the “pour boire” that I held out, in anticipation of hurry, to my Jehu.
A few minutes afterwards, I called at The Terrace.
The ladies were both out, the servant said.
I called again, later on.
Still “not at home,” I was told; although, I knew they were in. I had watched both Min and Mrs Clyde enter the house, shortly before my second visit. I was evidently intentionally denied!
I went back to my own home. I spent another hour or two, walking up and down my room in the same cheerful way in which I had passed the morning; and then—then, I thought I would write to Mrs Clyde.
Yes, that would be the best course.
I sat down and penned the most vivid sketch of my present grief, asking her to reconsider the former decision she had given against me. I was certain, I said, that it was only through her influence that Min had rejected me; and I earnestly besought her good will. I was now in a better position, I urged, than I had been the previous year, my income being nearly doubled—thanks to Government and what I was able to reap from my literary lucubrations:—what more could she require? Besides, my assets would increase, at the least, by the ten pound bonus which a grateful country annually aggregates to the salary of its victims each year—not to speak of the fortune I might make by my “connection with the press!” In fact, I said everything that I could, to colour my case and get judgment recorded in my favour.
But, my toil was all in vain!
I sent over my letter by a servant, with instructions to leave it at the door; while, I, waited in all the evening expecting an answer, in breathless suspense.
None came; but, next morning I received back my own despatch enclosed in another envelope, unopened, unread.
I went down to the office that day in quite a cheerful mood again, I can tell you!
How I did enjoy Brown’s balderdash; the witty sallies of Smith; Robinson’s repartees; Jones’ jocosities!
When, after my official labours, I returned again to Saint Canon’s that evening, I made another attempt to see Mrs Clyde.
No. The servant who answered the door, when I timidly called for the third time at the house, told me that instructions had been given to say “not at home” always to me.
Pleasant!
War had been declared:—a “guerre à outrance,” as I had anticipated; but, it was a struggle in which I was stretched on the ground at my adversary’s mercy, with her vengeful blade at my heart!
I then wrote to Min.
It was a long letter. I bewailed my hasty severance of the old relations between us, and asked her to have pity on my sad fate. I poured out all the flood of feeling which had deluged my breast since we had parted at the party. I begged, I implored her not to desert me at her mother’s bidding.
My letter I posted, so that it should not be stopped en route, and returned to me unread by my darling, whom I asked to write to me, if only one line, to tell me that she had really received my appeal safely—requesting her, also, to reply to me at my office that I might get her answer in the soonest possible time.
I dreamt of her subsequently, the whole night through:—it was a horrible dream!
A third day of torture in my governmental mill. Six mortal hours more of dreary misery; and, helpless boredom at the hands of Smith, Brown, Jones, and Robinson!
And, then, I got my reply.
It was “only a line.” Very short, very sweet, very bitter, very pointed; and yet, I value that little letter so highly that I would not exchange it for the world! The words are stained with tear-drops that, I know, fell from loving, grey eyes; while, its sense, though painful, is sweet to me from its outspoken truthfulness:—I value it so highly, that I could not deem it more precious, if it were written on a golden tablet in characters set with diamonds—were it the longest letter maiden ever wrote, the sweetest billet lover ever received!
“Frank! I cannot, I must not grant your request. Do not wring my heart by writing to me again, or speaking to me; for, I have promised, and we are not to see each other any more. I am breaking my word in writing to you now, but, oh! do not think badly of me. Indeed, indeed, I am not heartless, Frank. It has not been my fault, believe me. I shall pray for you always, always! I must not say any more.
“Minnie Clyde.”
That was all the little note contained; but, it was quite enough.
Was it not?
When I had read it and read it, over and over again, I was almost beside myself,—with a grief that was mixed up with feelings of intense anger and rage against her whom I looked upon as the author of my sufferings—Mrs Clyde.
Min had been again sent down to the country, the very day on which I received her heart-breaking letter. This I heard from my old friend, dear little Miss Pimpernell, who tried vainly to console me. She endeavoured to make me believe that “all would come right in the end,” as she had prophesied before; but, I refused to be comforted. I could not share her faith. I would not be sanguine any more; no, never any more!
I saw Mrs Clyde at church the very next Sunday. I went there in the hope that my darling might have returned, and that I would see her—not from any religious feeling.
There was only her mother there, however.
I waited to accost her at the church door after the service was over.
“Oh, Mrs Clyde,” I said, “do not be my enemy!”
But, she took no notice of me:—she cut me dead.
I was convinced that all was lost now.
It was of no use my longer attempting to fight against fate:—I gave up hope completely;—and then—and then—
I went to the devil!
Rochefoucauld says in his pointed “Maxims” that—
“There is nothing so catching as example; nor is there ever great good or ill done that does not produce its like. We imitate good actions through emulation, and bad ones through the malignity of our nature, which shame restrains and example emancipates.”
That was my case now.
I suppose I had had it in me all along—the “black drop,” as the Irish peasants call it, of evil; and, that shame had hitherto prevented me from plunging into the whirlpool of sinful indulgence that now drew me, a willing victim, down into its yawning gulf of ruin and degradation. That bar removed, however, I made rapid progress towards the beckoning devil, who was waiting to receive me with open arms. I hastened along that path, “where,”—as Byron has described from his own painful experience—
”—In a moment, we may plunge our years
In fatal penitence, and in the blight
Of our own soul, turn all our blood to tears,
And colour things to come with hues of night!”
I declare to you, that when I look back on this period of my life—life! death, rather I should say, for it was a moral death—I am quite unable to comprehend the motives that led me to take such a course. My eyes were not blinded. I must have seen that each stride placed me further and further away from my darling, erecting a fresh obstacle between us; still, some irresistible impulse appeared to hurry me on—although, I could not but have known how vain it would be for me to recover my lost footsteps: how hard a matter to change my direction, and look upwards to light and happiness once more! Glancing back at this period—as I do now with horror—I cannot understand myself, I say.
I went from bad to worse, plunging deeper and deeper into every wickedness that Satan could suggest, or flesh hanker after—until I seemed to lose all sense of shame and self-reproach.
My connection with officialdom was soon terminated.
I got later and later in my attendance; so that, old Smudge’s prediction was shortly fulfilled, for, I became no better than the rest, in respect of early hours.
One day the chief spoke to me on the subject, and I answered him unguardedly.
I was not thinking of him at the time, to tell the truth; and when he said, “Mr Lorton, late again, late again! This won’t do, you know, won’t do!” I quite forgot myself; and, in speaking to him, called him by the nickname under which he was known to us, instead of by his proper appellation.
“Very sorry, Smudge,” said I, “very sorry; won’t be so again, I promise you, sir!”
He nearly got a fit, I assure you; while, all the other fellows were splitting with laughter at my slip!
“Mr Lorton, I will report you, sir!” was all he said to me directly; but, as he shuffled off to his desk, with the attendance book recording my misdeeds under his arm and his face purple with passion, we all could hear him muttering pretty loudly to himself. “Smudge! Smudge!”—he was repeating;—“I’ll Smudge him, the impudent rascal! I wonder what the dooce he meant by it! What the dooce did he mean by it?—mean by it?”
I begged his pardon off-hand, immediately, of course, although I would not give him the written apology he peremptorily demanded.
Do you know, I did not like to deprive him of the extreme pleasure it would give him to submit his case against me—in clerkly, cut-and-dried statement—to the chief commissioner, under-secretary, first lord, or whoever else occupied the lofty pedestal of “the board,” that controlled the occasionally-peculiar proceedings of the Obstructor General’s Department.
I knew with what intense relish he would expatiate on the wrong which “the service” had sustained in his person at my hands—the “frightful example” I presented, of insubordination and defiance to constitutional authority; and how, he would draw up the most elaborate document, detailing all this, in flowing but strictly official language, on carefully-folded, quarter-margined foolscap, of the regular, authorised dimensions!
What a pity, I thought, it would be to interfere with such neat arrangements by submitting to a Nolle Prosequi—as I would have done, had I tendered the recantation of my error that he insisted on!
At the same time, however, I checkmated his triumph, by forwarding to the people in high places the resignation of that position as a clerk of the tertiary formation, which I had, been nominated to, examined in respect of, and competed for, under the auspices of Her Majesty’s Polite Letter Writer Commissioners; and which I had been duly appointed to—all in proper official sequence—but one short year before, plus a few additional months, which were of no great consequence to any one.
My withdrawal left, at any rate, one place vacant for some member of Parliament’s constituent’s son, who would, probably, be much more worthy in every way for the honours and duties of the situation—which, really, I do not think I ever estimated at their proper value!
This was some satisfaction to me, I assure you; and, combined with the sum of one hundred and ten pounds sterling—less income-tax on one-fourth part of the said amount, or thereabouts: I like to be correct—was all the benefit I ever received from my connection with “Government.”
My year’s probation was, I may say without any great exaggeration, thrown away; for, the knowledge I gained was not of a character to advance my interests in any other walk in life, professional or mercantile. Still, I bear no malice to officialdom, if officialdom cares to obtain my assurance to that effect. The few words—far between, too—which I have dropped to you, anent the combination of the ill-used servants of the country in opposition to their grievances, have been more intended to redress the wrongs of those hard-worked, poor-paid sufferers in question, than meant as a covert attack on the noble authorities of the great, lumbering institution they belong to—the spokes of whose broadly-tired wheels they may be said to form.
For my part, I adore governmental departments, looking on all of them with a wide admiration that is tempered with wholesome awe; and, believing them to be so many concentrations of virtue and merit, which are none the less real because they are imperceptible.
The giving up of my appointment was the finish of my mad career.
I awoke now to a consciousness of all my foolishness and wickedness; the revelation of the misery, present and future alike, which my conduct had prepared for me, coming to mind, with a sudden, sharp stroke of painful distinctness that prostrated me into an abyss of self-torture and repentance.
Ah! There is no use in repining, unless one mends matters by deeds, not words. Repentance is worth little if it be not followed up by reformation. But, how many of us rush madly, headlong to destruction, without a thought of what they are doing; never mindful of their course, till that dreadful refrain, “Too late!” rings in their ears.
As the poetical author of the ode to the “Plump Head Waiter at The Cock,” has philosophically sung,—and, as many a weather-beaten sufferer has cruelly proven,—
“So fares it since the years began,
Till they be gather’d up;
The truth, that flies the flowing can,
Will haunt the empty cup:
And others’ follies teach us not,
Nor much their wisdom teaches;
And most, of sterling worth, is what
Our own experience preaches!”
I remembered now having come across a passage in Massillon’s Petit Carême, some two or three years before, during a varied course of French reading at the library of the British Museum,—an old haunt of mine long previously to my ever knowing Min; and this passage occurred to me in my present condition, expressing a want I had long felt, and which I was now all the more bitterly conscious of. It is in one of the sermons which the seventeenth century divine probably preached in the presence of the Grand Monarque. It is entitled “Sur la Destinée de l’Homme;” and might, for its practical point and thorough insightedness into human nature, be expounded to-morrow by any of our large-hearted, Broad Church ministers. In its truth, I’m sure, it is catholic enough to suit any creed:—
“Si tout doit finir avec nous, si l’homme ne doit rien attendre après cette vie, et que ce soit ici notre patrie, notre origine, et la seul félicité que nous pouvons nous promettre, pourquoi n’y sommes-nous pas heureux? Si nous ne naissons que pour les plaisirs des sens, pourquoi ne peuvent-ils nous satisfaire, et laissent-ils toujours un fond d’ennui et de tristesse dans notre coeur? Si l’homme n’a rien au-dessus de la bête, que ne coule-t-il ses jours comme elle, sans souci, sans inquiétude, sans dégout, sans tristesse, dans la félicité des sens et de la chair?”
Because he can not!
The pleasures of life, however varied, and grateful though they may be at the time, soon wither on the palate; and then, when we appreciate at last the knowledge of their dust and ashes, their Dead Sea-apple constituency, we must turn to something better, something higher—the joys of which are more lasting and whose flavour proceeds from some less evanescent substance.
Such were my reflections now; and, in my abasement and craving for “the one good thing,” I thought of the kind vicar.
During all the time of my rioting and sin, I had never been near either him or Miss Pimpernell. I would not have profaned the sanctuary of their dwelling with my presence!
Both had tried to see me—in vain; for, I had separated myself entirely from all my former friends and acquaintances, burying the early associations of my previous life in the slough of the Bohemian-boon-companionship, into which I had thrown myself in London.
The kind vicar had written to me a long, earnest, touching letter, which did not reproach me in the least but invited me to confide in him all my troubles; and, the dear old lady, also, had sent me many an appeal that she might be allowed to cheer me. But, I had not taken notice of their pleadings, persevering still in evil and shutting my ears to friendly counsels—as I likewise did to the voice of reason speaking in my inner heart.
Now, however, in my misery, I bethought me of these friends. I went shame-faced and mentally-naked, like the prodigal son, once more to the vicarage.
And how did they receive me?
With the pharisaical philosophy of Miss Spight’s school, looking on me as a “goat,” with whom they had nothing to do:—“a lost soul,” without the pale of their pity and almost below the par of their contempt?
Not so!
Dear little Miss Pimpernell got up from her arm-chair in the corner, and kissed me—the first time she had done such a thing since I was a little fellow and had sat upon her knee; while, the vicar shook me as cordially by the hand as he had ever done.
“Dear Frank!” exclaimed the former. “Here you are at last. I thought you were never coming to us again!”
That was all the allusion she made to the past.
“My boy,” said the vicar, “I am glad to see you.”
That was all he said; but, his speech was not mere empty verbiage. He meant it!
I shall not tell you how they both talked to me: so tenderly, so kindly. It would not interest you. It only concerned myself.
By-and-by, after a long interview, in which I laid all my troubles before these comforters, the vicar asked me what I thought of doing.
“I shall go away,”—I said.—“I have exhausted London.—‘I have lived and loved,’ as Theckla says; and there is no hope of my getting on here! I would think that everybody would recall my past life, whenever they saw me, and throw it all back in my teeth.”
“But, you can live all that down, my boy,” said the vicar.—“The world is not half so censorious as you think now, in your awakening; and, remember, Frank, what Shakspeare says, ‘There is no time so miserable, but a man may be true!’”
“Besides,” I went on,—“I want change of scene. All these old places would recall the past. I could never be happy here again.”
“Well, well, my boy!” he answered sadly. “But, we shall be sorry to lose you, Frank, all the same, although it may be for your good.”
I had thought of America already, and told him that I intended going there. Not from any wide-seated admiration of the Great Republic and its citizens; but, from its being a place within easy reach—where I might separate myself entirely from all that would recall home thoughts and home associations:—so I then believed.
“I shall go there,” I said, bitterly.—“At all events, I shall be unknown; and, can bury myself and my misery—a fitting end to a bad life!”
“My boy, my boy!”—said the vicar, with emotion.—“It grieves me to the heart to hear you speak so. Know, that repentance brings us always once more beneath the shelter of divine love! You will think of this by-and-by, Frank:—you may carve out a new life for yourself in the new world, and return to us successful. Be comforted, my boy! Do not forget David’s spirit-stirring words of promise,—‘They that sow in tears, shall reap in joy; and he that now goeth on his way weeping, and beareth forth good seed, shall doubtless come again with joy, and bring his sheaves with him!’”