Those frozen letters of his mother’s! What a contrast they presented to the gushing epistles of poor old Smithwick, studded with notes of exclamation, bristling with terms of endearment, crammed with affectionate messages, touching reminiscences of happier days in dear, dear Paris, always underlined....
The prim sandaled feet of the poor old maiden were set in stony places since the death of the paralytic sister, to nurse whom she had returned to what she invariably termed her “native isle of Britain.”... Even to Hector’s inexperience those letters, in their very reticence upon the subject of poor Smithwick’s need, breathed of poverty. The straitness of his own means galled him horribly when he read in Smithwick’s neat, prim, ladylike calligraphy confessions such as these:
“The annuity originally secured to my beloved sister by purchase having ceased at her death, I am fain to seek employment in genteel families as a teacher of the French language, with which—no one knows better than my dearest Hector—I am thoroughly conversant. I would not willingly complain against the lot which Providence has appointed me. But so small are the emoluments to be gained from this profession, that I fear existence cannot be long supported upon the scant subsistence they afford.”
The pinch of poverty is never more acutely felt than by the open-handed. In Africa Dunoisse had been sensible of the gnawing tooth of poverty. In Paris it had claws as well as teeth.
To have had five thousand francs to send to poor old Smithwick! To have been able to invest a snug sum for her in some solid British concern—those Government Three per Cents, for instance, of which the poor lady had always spoken with such reverence and respect. Or to have bought her a bundle of shares in one of the English Railway Companies, whose steel spider-webs were beginning to spread over the United Kingdom about this time. What would her old pupil not have given! And—it could have been done so easily if only he could have brought himself to fill in one of those checks upon Rothschild. But the thing was impossible.
His gorge rose at it. His religious principles were too deeply rooted, his honor stood too high, or possibly the temptation was not strong enough? There was little of the primal Eve about poor old shabby Smithwick. When white hands, whose touch thrilled to the heart’s core, should be stretched out to him for some of that banked-up gold; when eyes whose luster tears discreetly shed only enhanced should be raised pleadingly to his; when an exquisite mouth should entreat, Hector was to find that one’s own oaths, no less than the oaths of one’s friends, are brittle things; and that in the heat of the passion that is kindled in a young and ardent man by the breath of a beautiful woman, Religion and Principle and Honor are but as wax in flame.
XIV
He scraped a few hundred francs together and sent them to poor old Smithwick, and received another letter of disproportionately-measured gratitude for the meager gift that might so easily have been a rich one, if....
He learned from a very little paragraph at the end of the grateful letter that his faithful old friend had broken down in health. That she had been seriously ill “from the effects of over-anxiety and a too strenuous battle with adversity,” ending with pious thanks to Providence—Smithwick was always curiously anxious to avoid references of a more sacred nature—that, “through the introduction and recommendation of a most generous friend,” she had obtained admission as an inmate of the Hospice for Sick Governesses in Cavendish Street, London, West, “a noble charity conducted upon the purest Christian principles, where I hope, D. V., to spend my closing days in peace.”
Were they so near, those closing days of the simple, honorable, upright life? Gratitude, respect, old association, a chivalrous pity for the woman, sick, and poor, and old, conspired to make the first step on the Road Perilous easier than her pupil would have imagined. He got upon his iron-gray Arab, Djelma, dearest and most valuable of the few possessions owned by this son of a millionaire, and rode to the Rue d’Artois with the leveled brows and cold, set face of a man who rides to dishonor.