Charlotte's Inheritance

by M. E. Braddon

"I should scarcely like being at Newhall, unless—you'll think me very foolish, Di—unless Valentine was with me. We were so happy there, you see, dear; and it was there he first told me he loved me. No, Di, I couldn't bear Newhall without him."

"Poor Aunt Dorothy, poor uncle Joe! feathers when weighed in the scale against a young man whom their niece has known less than a twelvemonth!"

No more was said about Charlotte's illness; Diana was too prudent to alarm her friend by any expression of uneasiness. She adopted a cheering tone, and the conversation drifted into other channels.

While Diana's concern for her friend's altered health was yet a new feeling, she found herself called upon to attend her father once more in the character of a ministering angel. And this time Captain Paget's illness was something more than gout. It was, according to his doctors—he had on this occasion two medical attendants—a general breaking up of the system. The poor old wanderer,—the weary Odysseus, hero of so many trickeries, such varied adventures,—laid himself down to rest, within view of the Promised Land for which his soul yearned.

He was very ill. Gustave Lenoble, who came back to London, did not conceal from Diana that the illness threatened to end fatally. At his instigation the Captain had been removed from Omega Street to pleasant lodgings at the back of Knightsbridge Road, overlooking Hyde Park. This was nearer Bayswater, and it was very pleasant for the fading old worldling. He could see the stream of fashion flowing past as he sat in his easy-chair, propped up with pillows, with the western sunlight on his face. He pointed out the liveries and armorial bearings; and told many scandalous and entertaining anecdotes of their past and present owners to Gustave Lenoble, who devoted much of his time to the solacement of the invalid. Everything that affection could do to smooth this dreary time was done for the tired Ulysses. Pleasant books were read to him; earnest thoughts were suggested by earnest words; hothouse flowers adorned his cheerful sitting-room; hothouse fruits gladdened his eye by their rich warmth of colour, and invited his parched lips to taste their cool ripeness. Gustave had a piano brought in, so that Diana might sing to her father in the dusky May evenings, when it should please him to hear her. Upon the last feeble footsteps of this old man, whose life had been very selfish and wicked, pity waited with a carefulness so fond and tender that he might well mistake it for love. Was it fair that his last days should be so peaceful and luxurious, when many a good man falls down to die in the streets, worn out with the life-long effort to bear the burden laid upon his weary shoulders? In the traditions of the Rabbins it is written that those are the elect of God who suffer His chastisement in the flesh. For the others, for those who on earth drain the goblet of pleasure, and riot in the raptures of sin, for them comes the dread retribution after death. They are plunged in the fire, and driven before the wind; they take the shape of loathsome reptiles, and ascend by infinitesimal degrees through all the grades of creation, until their storm-tost wearied degraded souls re-enter human semblance once more. But even then their old stand-point is not yet regained; their dread penance not yet performed. As men they are the lowest and worst of men; slaves toiling in the desert; dirt to be trampled under the feet of their prosperous brethren. Inch by inch the wretched soul regains its lost inheritance; cycles must elapse before the awful sentence is fulfilled.

Our Christian faith knows no such horrors. Even for the penitent of the eleventh hour there is promise of pardon. The most earnest desire of Diana's heart was that her father should enroll himself amongst those late penitents—those last among the last who crowd in to the marriage feast, half afraid to show their shame-darkened faces in that glorious company.

If we forgive all things to old age, so much the more surely do we forgive all injuries to the fading enemy. That she had suffered much cruelty and neglect at the hands of her father, was a fact that Diana could not forget, any more than she could forget the name which he had given her. It was a part of her life not to be put off or done away with. But in these last days, with all her heart she forgave and pitied him. She pitied him for the crooked paths into which his feet had wandered at the very outset of life, and from which so weak a soul could find no issue. She pitied him for that moral blindness which had kept him pleasantly unconscious of the supreme depth of his degradation—a social Laplander, who never having seen a western summer, had no knowledge that his own land was dark and benighted.

Happily for Diana and her generous lover, the Captain was not a difficult penitent. He was indeed a man who, having lost the capacity and the need for sin, took very kindly to penitence, as a species of sentimental luxury.

"Yes, my dear," he said complacently—for even in the hour of his penitence he insisted on regarding himself as a social martyr—"my life has been a very hard one. Fortune has not been kind to me. In the words of the immortal bard, my lines have not been set in pleasant places. I should have been glad if Providence had allowed me to be a better father to you, a better husband to your poor mother—a better Christian, in fact—and had spared me the repeated humiliation of going through the Insolvent Debtors' Court. It is not always easy to understand the justice of these things: and it has often appeared to me that something of the favouritism which is the bane of our governments on earth must needs obtain at a higher tribunal. One man enters life with an entailed estate worth seventy thousand a-year, while another finds himself in the hands of the Jews before he is twenty years of age. 'There's something in this world amiss shall be unriddled by-and-by,' as the poet observes. The circumstances of my own existence I have ever regarded as dark and enigmatic. And, indeed, the events of this life are altogether inexplicable, my love. There is that fellow Sheldon, now, who began life as a country dentist, a man without family or connections, who—well, I will not repine. If I am spared to behold my daughter mistress of a fine estate, although in a foreign country, I can depart in peace. But you must have a house in town, my dear. Yes, London must be your head-quarters. You must not be buried alive in Normandy. There is no place like London. Take the word of a man who has seen the finest Continental cities, and lived in them—that is the point, my love—lived in them. For a fine afternoon in the beginning of May, an apartment in the Champs Elysées, or the Boulevard, is an earthly paradise; but the Champs Elysées in a wet December—the Boulevard in a sweltering August! London is the only spot upon earth that is never intolerable. And your husband will be a rich man, my dear girl, a really wealthy man; and you must see that he makes a fitting use of his wealth, and does his duty to society. The parable of the Talents, which you were reading to me this afternoon, is a moral lesson your husband must not forget."

After this fashion did the invalid discourse. Gustave and Diana perceived that he still hoped to have his share in their future life, still looked to pleasant days to come in a world which he had loved, not wisely, but too well. Nor could they find it in their hearts to tell him that his journey was drawing to a close, and that on the very threshold of the peaceful home which his diplomatic arts had helped to secure, he was to abandon life's weary race.