“We are not placed in this world to be miserable,” continued Frere; “true, this life is a state of trial, and it would not be so if we had not many evils, temptations, and sorrows to endure; but by God’s help the evils may be borne, the temptations overcome, and the sorrow turned to joy, if we do not oppose our will to His; but if we do, sin lieth at the door, we league ourselves with the enemy of mankind, and misery must come of it. Do not misunderstand me,” he added kindly; “I do not seek to blame you, I can have no pleasure in so doing, but on the contrary deepest pain; still it is evident your mind is diseased, and if in probing the wound to discover the nature of the evil I hurt you, you must pardon me for the sake of the object I have in view. But! am talking at random, for want of a more clear insight into the cause of your present difficulty. Come, be frank and open with me; let us face the evil boldly, and between us devise some means of overcoming it.”
“What brought you here?” exclaimed Lewis, suddenly raising his head and fixing his piercing eyes full upon his friend’s countenance.
Frere smiled a melancholy smile. “Hot-headed, petulant, and jealous of interference yet!” he said. “My poor Lewis, I did not come to catechise you—affairs of quite another nature brought me here: I am trying to carry out an arrangement between my uncle Ashford and your ci-devant foe, Lord Bellefield.” As he mentioned Lord Bellefield’s name Lewis shuddered, and his eyes again sought the ground. “And now that I have cleared up this alarming doubt,” resumed Frere, “tell me what ails you, for that you are miserable, and that I mean to know wherefore, and do my best to render you otherwise, are two self-evident facts.”
“’Tis useless,” returned Lewis in a low voice; “the die is cast, and neither you nor any one else can help me. Would to Heaven you had come a day sooner and taken me away from this accursed place; as it is, my own mad passion has hurried me on, and my fate is fixed. Now,” he continued, glancing at the clock, which stood at a quarter to twelve, “I must ask you to leave me—we may meet to-morrow—or—if anything should prevent it—and if—if I have not an opportunity of telling you all you seek to know—my papers—that is, I will leave you a letter explaining everything—good-night.” Scarcely able to control his voice in this which Lewis felt might too probably be a last farewell, he hurried through the speech in a strange, almost incoherent manner.
Frere regarded him fixedly. “Unless you condescend to explain to me what you purpose doing within the next twenty-four hours,” he said, “I’ll not leave you till that time has expired. I tell you what it is, Lewis: I have not lived three-and-thirty years in the world without having learned to read men’s faces, and I read in yours that you are standing on the verge of some great folly, madness, or—crime; and now, what is it?”
Lewis paused for a moment in deep thought, and then said calmly, “Sit down, Frere; you are an Englishman, and a man of highly honourable feeling; moreover, you are my oldest, my most cherished friend. I am, as you say, maddened by circumstances and on the verge of a great crime; sit down, I will tell you all, and you shall judge between God and man, and me.”
Calmly, clearly, truthfully, in the deep silence of night, did Lewis recount to his friend the strange passages with which the reader is already acquainted; he related the simple facts, whether they told for or against him, just as they occurred; without entering into unnecessary detail he left nothing important unsaid, till Frere had conceived a clear idea of Lewis’s whole career from the hour he entered Broadhurst to the moment in which he was speaking.
“The upshot of all this is,” observed Lewis in conclusion, “that I am weary of life; littleness, brutality, and oppression in man, weakness and treachery in woman, and the tyranny of passion in oneself, render this world an incipient hell. To-morrow must end it one way or the other—either he will shoot me or I shall shoot him; the latter contingency I shall not long survive; such remorse as I should feel would be unendurable. To save myself from the guilt of suicide I shall volunteer into some fighting regiment engaged in these civil broils—Tyrian or Trojan, Austrian or Venetian, I care little; my sympathies side with one, my associations with the other, and with either I may obtain the only prize I covet—a soldier’s death.”
“Now listen to me, Lewis,” returned Frere gravely. “I once at your own request promised you that while we both lived I would never give you up, but would stand between you and your fiery passions, and I thank God who in his mercy has sent me here at this particular moment to enable me to fulfil my engagement. You have suffered, and are suffering deeply, and from my heart I pity you; but seeing, as I do only too clearly, the cause of all this misery, it would be no kindness in me to omit to point it out to you. Your two leading faults of character, pride and an overweaning degree of self-confidence, are at the bottom of it all. Pride made Lord Bellefield your enemy—when he offered money for the dog he never intended to insult you; your proud answer irritated his pride, and from that time forth he sought to injure you—evil produced evil, dislike grew to hatred, hatred begat revenge, revenge cherished only required opportunity to become developed into assault and murder; that opportunity has now arrived, you have been guilty of the first, you contemplate the second. So much for pride—now for self-confidence. You imagined nothing could tempt you to forget your dependent position in General Grant’s family (a position which your pride led you falsely to consider a degradation) so far as to forfeit your self-respect by loving Annie, so you permitted yourself to enjoy her society till your affections were beyond your own control—mistake number one. Then self-confidence whispered that it would be heroic to overcome this passion, so instead of avoiding the danger, you stayed to brave it till you had sacrificed your happiness, if not hers also—mistake number two. Still untaught by experience, in your own strength you endeavoured to crush out the memory of the past; still thinking only of self, you fled your country, recklessly severing ties and neglecting duties. Two years’ vain struggling have proved your boasted strength to be abject weakness, unable to save you from becoming the slave of your evil passions, and I arrive here to find you contemplating the sin of—well, if I call it murder you will deem that I exaggerate, so I will say the sin of gambling in a lottery of manslaughter, with every chance against you.” Lewis again raised his eyes to Frere’s face as he replied calmly, but in a cold, hard tone of voice—
“You have described my miserable career harshly indeed, but in the main truly. You profess yourself my friend—in making this painful recapitulation therefore I presume you to have some friendly object; what is it?”