Mr. Gawtrey remained by the fire beating the devil’s tattoo upon the chimney-piece, and ever and anon turning his glance towards Lilburne, who seemed to have forgotten his existence.
Both these guests stayed till the party broke up; Mr. Gawtrey apparently wishing to outstay Lord Lilburne; for, when the last went down-stairs, Mr. Gawtrey, nodding to his comrade and giving a hurried bow to the host, descended also. As they passed the porter’s lodge, they found Lilburne on the step of his carriage; he turned his head abruptly, and again met Mr. Gawtrey’s eye; paused a moment, and whispered over his shoulder:
“So we remember each other, sir? Let us not meet again; and, on that condition, bygones are bygones.”
“Scoundrel!” muttered Gawtrey, clenching his fists; but the peer had sprung into his carriage with a lightness scarcely to be expected from his lameness, and the wheels whirled within an inch of the soi-disant doctor’s right pump.
Gawtrey walked on for some moments in great excitement; at length he turned to his companion,—
“Do you guess who Lord Lilburne is? I will tell you my first foe and Fanny’s grandfather! Now, note the justice of Fate: here is this man—mark well—this man who commenced life by putting his faults on my own shoulders! From that little boss has fungused out a terrible hump. This man who seduced my affianced bride, and then left her whole soul, once fair and blooming—I swear it—with its leaves fresh from the dews of heaven, one rank leprosy, this man who, rolling in riches, learned to cheat and pilfer as a boy learns to dance and play the fiddle, and (to damn me, whose happiness he had blasted) accused me to the world of his own crime!—here is this man who has not left off one vice, but added to those of his youth the bloodless craft of the veteran knave;—here is this man, flattered, courted, great, marching through lanes of bowing parasites to an illustrious epitaph and a marble tomb, and I, a rogue too, if you will, but rogue for my bread, dating from him my errors and my ruin! I—vagabond—outcast—skulking through tricks to avoid crime—why the difference? Because one is born rich and the other poor—because he has no excuse for crime, and therefore no one suspects him!”
The wretched man (for at that moment he was wretched) paused breathless from his passionate and rapid burst, and before him rose in its marble majesty, with the moon full upon its shining spires—the wonder of Gothic Italy—the Cathedral Church of Milan.
“Chafe not yourself at the universal fate,” said the young man, with a bitter smile on his lips and pointing to the cathedral; “I have not lived long, but I have learned already enough to know this,— he who could raise a pile like that, dedicated to Heaven, would be honoured as a saint; he who knelt to God by the roadside under a hedge would be sent to the house of correction as a vagabond. The difference between man and man is money, and will be, when you, the despised charlatan, and Lilburne, the honoured cheat, have not left as much dust behind you as will fill a snuff-box. Comfort yourself, you are in the majority.”