He looked at life; but if life was less terrible than death, it was not less dreary. He looked forward with a shudder to see––what? Humiliation, disgrace, perhaps punishment,––life–long transportation, it may be; for this base conspiracy might be a criminal offence, amenable to criminal law. Or, escaping all this, what was there for him? What was there for this man even then? For forty years he had been steeped to the lips in poverty, and had endured his life. He looked back now, and wondered how it was that he had been patient; he wondered why he had not made an end of himself and his obscure troubles twenty years before this night. But after looking back a little longer, he saw the star which had illumined the darkness of that miserable and sordid existence, and he understood the reason of his endurance. He had hoped. Day after day he had got up to go through the same troubles, to endure the same humiliations: but every day, when his life had been hardest to him, he had said, "To–morrow I may be master of Marchmont Towers." But he could never hope this any more; he could not go back to watch and wait again, beguiled by the faint hope that Mary Arundel's son might die, and to hear by–and–by that other children were born to her to widen the great gulf betwixt him and fortune.
He looked back, and he saw that he had lived from day to day, from year to year, lured on by this one hope. He looked forward, and he saw that he could not live without it.
There had never been but this one road to good fortune open to him. He was a clever man, but his was not the cleverness which can transmute itself into solid cash. He could only paint indifferent pictures; and he had existed long enough by picture–painting to realise the utter hopelessness of success in that career.
He had borne his life while he was in it, but he could not bear to go back to it. He had been out of it, and had tasted another phase of existence; and he could see it all now plainly, as if he had been a spectator sitting in the boxes and watching a dreary play performed upon a stage before him. The performers in the remotest provincial theatre believe in the play they are acting. The omnipotence of passion creates dewy groves and moonlit atmospheres, ducal robes and beautiful women. But the metropolitan spectator, in whose mind the memory of better things is still fresh, sees that the moonlit trees are poor distemper daubs, pushed on by dirty carpenters, and the moon a green bottle borrowed from a druggist's shop, the ducal robes threadbare cotton velvet and tarnished tinsel, and the heroine of the drama old and ugly.
So Paul looked at the life he had endured, and wondered as he saw how horrible it was.
He could see the shabby lodging, the faded furniture, the miserable handful of fire struggling with the smoke in a shallow grate, that had been half–blocked up with bricks by some former tenant as badly off as himself. He could look back at that dismal room, with the ugly paper on the walls, the scanty curtains flapping in the wind which they pretended to shut out; the figure of his mother sitting near the fireplace, with that pale, anxious face, which was a perpetual complaint against hardship and discomfort. He could see his sister standing at the window in the dusky twilight, patching up some worn–out garment, and straining her eyes for the sake of economising in the matter of half an inch of candle. And the street below the window,––the shabby–genteel street, with a dingy shop breaking out here and there, and children playing on the doorsteps, and a muffin–bell jingling through the evening fog, and a melancholy Italian grinding "Home, sweet Home!" in the patch of lighted road opposite the pawnbroker's. He saw it all; and it was all alike––sordid, miserable, hopeless.
Paul Marchmont had never sunk so low as his cousin John. He had never descended so far in the social scale as to carry a banner at Drury Lane, or to live in one room in Oakley Street, Lambeth. But there had been times when to pay the rent of three rooms had been next kin to an impossibility to the artist, and when the honorarium of a shilling a night would have been very acceptable to him. He had drained the cup of poverty to the dregs; and now the cup was filled again, and the bitter draught was pushed once more into his unwilling hand.
He must drink that, or another potion,––a sleeping–draught, which is commonly called Death. He must die! But how? His coward heart sank as the awful alternative pressed closer upon him. He must die!––to–night,––at once,––in that house; so that when they came in the morning to eject him, they would have little trouble; they would only have to carry out a corpse.
He walked up and down the room, biting his finger–nails to the quick, but coming to no resolution, until he was interrupted by the ringing of the bell at the lobby–door. It was the messenger from his sister, no doubt. Paul drew his watch from his waistcoat–pocket, unfastened his chain, took a set of gold–studs from the breast of his shirt, and a signet–ring from his finger; then he sat down at a writing–table, and packed the watch and chain, the studs and signet–ring, and a bunch of keys, in a large envelope. He sealed this packet, and addressed it to his sister; then he took a candle, and went to the lobby. Mrs. Weston had sent a young man who was an assistant and pupil of her husband's––a good–tempered young fellow, who willingly served her in her hour of trouble. Paul gave this messenger the key of his dressing–case and packet.
"You will be sure and put that in my sister's hands," he said.