Bred in the Bone; Or, Like Father, Like Son: A Novel

by James Payn

CHAPTER XLIV.

STILL HUMAN.

Mr. Balfour atoned for his previous indifference to the wares of the news-boy by sending him next morning to the station for all the local papers. In each, as he expected, there was a paragraph headed Mysterious Disappearance, and as lengthened an account as professional ingenuity could devise of the unaccountable departure of Mr. Solomon Coe from his house at Gethin. The missing man was "much respected;" and, "as the prosperous owner of the Dunloppel mine, which had yielded so largely for so many years, he could certainly not have been pressed by pecuniary embarrassments, and therefore the idea of suicide was out of the question." Unlikely as it seemed in the case of one who knew the country so well, the most probable explanation of the affair was that the unfortunate gentleman, in taking a walk by night along the cliff top, must have slipped into the sea. The weather had been very rough of late and the wind blowing from off the land, which would have accounted—if this supposition was correct—for the body not having been washed ashore. "In the mean time an active search was going on."

Balfour had resolved not to return to London for at least ten days. Mrs. Coe and her son would, without doubt, be telegraphed for, and he could not repair to their house in their absence. The idea of being under the same roof alone with his mother was now repugnant to him. He felt that he could not trust himself in such a position. It had been hard and grievous, notwithstanding his resentment against her, to see her in company with others, and her absence of late from table had been a great relief to him. With his present feeling toward her it would be impossible to maintain his incognito; and, if that was lost, his future plans—to which he well knew she would oppose herself—would be rendered futile. He had seen with rage and bitter jealousy that both Harry and her boy, and especially the latter, were dear to her; and it was certain she would interfere to protect them, for their sake as well as for his own. He had other reasons also for not returning immediately to town. It might hereafter be expedient to show that he had really been to Midlandshire, where he had given out he had designed to go; and, moreover, though his purpose was relentless as respected Solomon, he did not perhaps care to be in a house where hourly suggestions would be dropped as to the whereabouts of his victim, or the fate that had happened to him. Harry and her son might even not have gone to Gethin, and in that case their apprehensions and surmises would have been insupportable.

Richard was more human than he would fain believe himself to be. Though he had gone to bed so inexorable of purpose, it had been somewhat shaken through the long hours of a night in which he had slept but little, and waked to think on what his feverish dreams had dwelt upon—the fate of his unhappy foe, perishing slowly beside his useless treasure. More than once, indeed, the impulse had been strong upon him that very morning to send word anonymously where Solomon was to be found to the police at Plymouth. Remorse had not as yet become chronic with him, but it seized him by fits and starts.

There had been a time when he had looked (through his prison bars) on all men with rage and hatred; but now he caught himself, as it were, at attempts at self-justification with respect to the retribution he had exacted even from his enemy. Had he not been rendered miserable, he argued, supremely wretched, for more than half his lifetime, through this man's agency? for it was certain that Solomon had sworn falsely, in the spirit if not in the letter, and caused him to be convicted of a crime which his rival was well aware he had not in intention committed. His conduct toward him on the occasion of his arrest had also been most brutal and insulting; while, after conviction had been obtained, this wretch's malice, as Mr. Dodge had stated, had known no cessation. In the arms of his young bride he had been deaf to the piteous cry of a mother beseeching for her only son.

But, on the other hand, had not he (Richard) deeply wronged this man in the first instance? Had he not robbed him—for so much at least must Solomon have known—of the love of his promised wife? If happiness from such an ill-assorted union was not to have been anticipated, still, had he not rendered it impossible? If their positions had been reversed, would not he have exacted expiation from such an offender to the uttermost? He would doubtless have scorned to twist the law as Solomon had done, and make it, as it were, the crooked instrument of his revenge. He would not, of course, have evoked its aid at all. But was that to be placed to his credit? He had put himself above the law throughout his life; he had never acknowledged any authority save that of his own selfish will; nay, he owned to himself that his bitterness against his unhappy victim had been caused not so much by the wrong he had suffered at his hands as by the contempt which he (Richard) had entertained for him. Without materials such as his father had possessed to back his pretensions he had imagined himself a sort of irresponsible and sovereign being. (Such infatuation is by no means rare, nor confined to despots and brigands, and when it exists in a poor man it is always fatal to himself.) His education, if it could be called such, had doubtless fostered this delusion; but Mr. Dodge was right; the Carew blood had been as poison in his veins, and had destroyed him.

All this might be true; but such philosophy could scarcely now obtain a hearing, while his enemy was dying of starvation in his living tomb. It was in vain for him to repeat mechanically that he had also suffered a sort of lingering death for twenty years. The present picture of his rival's torments presented itself in colors so lively and terrible that it blotted out the reminiscence of his own. The recollection of his wrongs was no longer sufficient for his vindication. He therefore strove to behold his victim in another light than as his private foe—as the murderer of his friend Balfour, the history of whose end may here be told.

On the night that Richard escaped from Lingmoor, it was Balfour, of course, who assisted him, and who was awaiting him in person at the foot of the prison wall. The old man's arms had received him as he slipped down the rope; and the object at which the sentry had fired had been two men, though in the misty night they had seemed but one. Balfour had been mortally wounded, and it was with the utmost difficulty that, laden with the burden of his dying friend, Richard had contrived to reach Bergen Wood. As his own footsteps were alone to be traced along the moor, the idea of another having accompanied his flight—though they knew there was complicity—had not occurred to the authorities. Balfour had hardly reached that wretched asylum when he expired, pressing Richard's hand, and bidding him remember Earl Street, Spitalfields. "What you find there is all yours, lad," was his dying testament and last words of farewell. And over his dead body Richard swore anew his vow of vengeance against the man that had thus, though indirectly, deprived him of his only friend. He had watched by the dead body, on its bed of rotten leaves, through that night and the whole of the next day; then, changing clothes with it, he had fled under cover of the ensuing darkness, and got away eventually to town.

He had found the house in Earl Street a wretched hovel, tenanted by a few abjects, whom the money found on Balfour—which he had received on leaving prison—was amply sufficient to buy out. Once alone in this tenement, he had easily possessed himself of the spoil so long secreted, and, furnished with it, he had hastened down to Crompton—the news of Carew's death having reached London on the very day that he found himself in a position to profit by it. The very plan which he had suggested to Balfour, whose name he also assumed, he himself put into execution. He made a private offer for the disused mine, which was gladly accepted by those who had the disposal of the property, acting under the advice of Parson Whymper. Trevethick, the only man that had attached any importance to the possession of it, was dead; and it was not likely that any one at the sale should bid one-half of the sum which this stranger was prepared to give for the mere gratification of his whim. The mine itself, indeed, had scarcely been mentioned in the transaction; it merely formed a portion in the lot comprising the few barren acres on which this capricious purchaser had expressed his fancy to build a home. "Disposed of by private contract" was the marginal note written in the auctioneer's catalogue which dashed Solomon's long-cherished hopes to the ground.