Gibbs followed his guide muttering, and nervously clutching his fingers.
“Now then, old ragamuffin,” said the servant when they were in the hall, “hoff yer go.”
Hunger, as Zimmermann says, is the mother of impatience and anger, and never had mother a more worthy son than Shuffleton Gibbs. It was hunger which had driven him to make that third application to his friend; hunger and thirst; hunger for money as much as hunger for food. He had neither money nor credit, even in the stews, where he had exhausted both, when he made this last appeal to Richard Tallant. But he got money somehow that night, and he swore an awful oath that he would wreak a terrible revenge on the head of this vile scoundrel. The red-eyed, low-browed, crouching gin drinkers who sat with him at the midnight orgie—even they noticed the satanic malignity of Gibbs’s countenance, as it worked and writhed under a passion too deep for words; they knew that, whatever it might import, that awful oath would not be broken. They fairly clanked their glasses and knocked their skinny knuckles upon the table to see Gibbs so much excited, and the women, with witch-like grimaces, pledged his “health” and wished him “luck.”
There is generally a weak point somewhere in the schemes of men who set right and virtue at naught, and who endeavour to build up wealth and fame upon false pretences. Religious sceptics will direct your attention to instances of undeserved poverty and sufferings borne through a whole lifetime; will show you persons dragging out wretched lives of penury and want, and prove to you that they are good, honest, honourable people. As companion pictures, they will show you men of wealth and station living luxuriously, and rejoicing in the highest state of worldly happiness. And then they ask you what sort of a sermon or essay you can write upon the text, “God is love.” But the sceptic-critic has little or nothing to say about real happiness, and how that is divided amongst the human family. If he had, perhaps he might puzzle a good many by pointing to the colliery districts, the factories, or the nail country, and showing you the hard, bitter life to which thousands of children are born daily. What a blessed thing to some of these people is the future, founded on true Christian faith! But our critic of the ways of Providence does not tell you of the miseries of keeping up appearances which are behind some of those marks of wealth; and he does not tell you how scores of the prosperous ones to whom he points come to grief at last, as they deserve. He fixes them before you in their full career of success, but he does not show you their disappointed hopes, their unfulfilled ambition, their social cuts and wounds, the grievances of their women, the social failures of their sons and daughters; and, what is more, he does not show you the end of the men whom he holds up as prosperous, happy, luxurious, revelling, wealthy villains.
Depend upon it, men such as Richard Tallant, who have trampled upon honour and honesty, and above all, upon parental kindness (however mistaken that kindness may have been), are punished in this world below, whatever may be their lot in that which is to come.
The weakest point in Richard Tallant’s policy was the want of a course of conciliation towards Shuffleton Gibbs. Fate would, no doubt, have met him with a just retribution in some other way had he escaped the result of this mistake; but it is no part of our business to consider what might have been, we who are considering the facts of Richard Tallant’s career; and as it has not been our purpose to be mysterious in this simple narration, we do not hesitate to tell you that Richard Tallant sealed his destiny when he resealed that letter of his former companion,—the last abandoned representative of a fallen line of gentlemen.
He little knew how often he was accompanied after this by a shadow more than his own. Once or twice, thinking he was being watched, he had turned round suddenly in the London streets to see a figure disappear as suddenly in some dark entry, or round an adjacent corner. He thought this was fancy at first; but finally beginning to fear, he armed himself. He had never thought of Shuffleton Gibbs at these times. A superstitious dread took possession of him at the outset, thoughts of his dead father haunted him, and occasionally sent him home hot, and feverish, and nervous. Latterly he rarely went out on foot; but still a mysterious figure occasionally flitted by as he alighted from his carriage. Sometimes it seemed as if an arm were upraised. That same figure would stand now and then in front of the great house where Mr. Tallant resided, and contemplate the lighted windows, and then disappear by crooked unfrequented ways, up dark alleys, along neglected streets, away city-wards, until it entered a dirty gin-shop or some wretched lodging-house, where it would assume the appearance of Shuffleton Gibbs, but sufficiently changed in feature to render disguise unnecessary.
Weird, restless, sunken eyes, sharp features, a nervous twitching of the mouth, and a continual watchfulness, like that of a man charged with some desperate mission of blood; it was a miserable wreck tossed about on the dark sea of criminal London without sail or rudder, bound for no port, without a name, without papers; and yet with a compass pointing its trembling finger unerringly in one direction, where the signal lights burnt red and murky on a dark and dreadful shore.
CHAPTER IX.
GLANCES AT WILLIAMSON’S STORY, AND TERMINATES PAUL SOMERTON’S ADVENTURE.
It came at last, that story of Williamson’s life; it came in a heavy letter franked with foreign postage-stamps; and Paul Somerton read it with hot curiosity.