“Among them, I suppose, that affectionate ‘adopted mother,’ who would have kept you in such order.”
“Thousand thunders! I hope not. I am not a superstitious man, but I fear that woman as if she were a witch, and I believe she is one. You remember black Jean, whom we call Sansculotte. He would have filled a churchyard with his own brats for a five-franc piece; but he would not have crossed a churchyard alone at night for a thousand naps. Well, that woman to me is what a churchyard was to black Jean. No: if she is in London, I have but to go to her house and say, ‘Food, shelter, money;’ and I would rather ask Jack Ketch for a rope.”
“How do you account for it, General? She does not beat you; she is not your wife. I have seen many a stout fellow, who would stand fire without blinking, show the white feather at a scold’s tongue. But then he must be spliced to her—”
“Cutts, that Griffin does not scold: she preaches. She wants to make me spoony, Cutts: she talks of my young days, Cutts; she wants to blight me into what she calls an honest man, Cutts,—the virtuous dodge! She snubs and cows me, and frightens me out of my wits, Cutts; for I do believe that the witch is determined to have me, body and soul, and to marry me some day in spite of myself, Cutts; and if ever you see me about to be clutched in those horrible paws, poison me with ratsbane, or knock me on the head, Cutts.”
The little man laughed a little laugh, sharp and eldrich, at the strange cowardice of the stalwart dare-devil. But Jasper did not echo the laugh.
“Hush!” he said timidly, “and let me have a bed, if you can; I have not slept in one for a week, and my nerves are shaky.”
The imp lighted a candle-end at the gas-lamp, and conducted Losely up the stairs to his own sleeping-room, which was less comfortless than might be supposed. He resigned his bed to the wanderer, who flung himself on it, rags and all. But sleep was no more at his command than it is at a king’s.
“Why the —— did you talk of that witch?” he cried peevishly to Cutts, who was composing himself to rest on the floor. “I swear I fancy I feel her sitting on my chest like a nightmare.”
He turned with a vehemence which shook the walls, and wrapped the coverlet round him, plunging his head into its folds. Strange though it seem to the novice in human nature, to Jasper Losely the woman who had so long lived but for one object—namely, to save him from the gibbet—was as his evil genius, his haunting fiend. He had conceived a profound terror of her from the moment he perceived that she was resolutely bent upon making him honest. He had broken from her years ago, fled, resumed his evil courses, hid himself from her,—in vain. Wherever he went, there went she. He might baffle the police, not her. Hunger had often forced him to accept her aid. As soon as he received it, he hid from her again, burying himself deeper and deeper in the mud, like a persecuted tench. He associated her idea with all the ill-luck that had befallen him. Several times some villanous scheme on which he had counted to make his fortune had been baffled in the most mysterious way; and just when baffled, and there seemed no choice but to cut his own throat or some one else’s, up turned grim Arabella Crane, in the iron-gray gown, and with the iron-gray ringlets,—hatefully, awfully beneficent,—offering food, shelter, gold,—and some demoniacal, honourable work. Often had he been in imminent peril from watchful law or treacherous accomplice. She had warned and saved him, as she had saved him from the fell Gabrielle Desmarets, who, unable to bear the sentence of penal servitude, after a long process, defended with astonishing skill and enlisting the romantic sympathies of young France, had contrived to escape into another world by means of a subtle poison concealed about her distinguee person, and which she had prepared years ago with her own bloodless hands, and no doubt scientifically tested its effects on others. The cobra di capella is gone at last! “Souviens-toi de ta Gabrielle,” O Jasper Losely! But why Arabella Crane should thus continue to watch over him whom she no longer professed to love, how she should thus have acquired the gift of ubiquity and the power to save him, Jasper Losely could not conjecture. The whole thing seemed to him weird and supernatural. Most truly did he say that she had cowed him. He had often longed to strangle her; when absent from her, had often resolved upon that act of gratitude. The moment he came in sight of her stern, haggard face, her piercing lurid eyes; the moment he heard her slow, dry voice in some such sentences as these: “Again you come to me in your trouble, and ever shall. Am I not still as your mother, but with a wife’s fidelity, till death us do part? There’s the portrait of what you were: look at it, Jasper. Now turn to the glass: see what you are. Think of the fate of Gabrielle Desmarets! But for me, what, long since, had been your own? But I will save you: I have sworn it. You shall be wax in these hands at last,”—the moment that voice thus claimed and insisted on redeeming him, the ruffian felt a cold shudder, his courage oozed, he could no more have nerved his arm against her than a Thug would have lifted his against the dire goddess of his murderous superstition. Jasper could not resist a belief that the life of this dreadful protectress was, somehow or other, made essential to his; that, were she to die, he should perish in some ghastly and preternatural expiation. But for the last few months he had, at length, escaped from her; diving so low, so deep into the mud, that even her net could not mesh him. Hence, perhaps, the imminence of the perils from which he had so narrowly escaped, hence the utterness of his present destitution. But man, however vile, whatever his peril, whatever his destitution, was born free, and loves liberty. Liberty to go to Satan in his own way was to Jasper Losely a supreme blessing compared to that benignant compassionate espionage, with its relentless eye and restraining hand. Alas and alas! deem not this perversity unnatural in that headstrong self-destroyer! How many are there whom not a grim, hard-featured Arabella Crane, but the long-suffering, divine, omniscient, gentle Providence itself, seeks to warn, to aid, to save; and is shunned, and loathed, and fled from, as if it were an evil genius! How many are there who fear nothing so much as the being made good in spite of themselves?—how many? who can count them?