"Yes, if this gentleman here, who is, I presume, your friend, will kindly add the £10. The expenses may stand."
Campbell could only grin at this strange conversation.
"Unwilling?" continued the messenger. "Ah, I see. It is strange that when I devote myself to a gentleman, his friends fly away. This is my misfortune. Well, there is no help for it. We must take a walk to the prison," addressing himself to his debtor. "You are a gentleman, and I shall be your servant in livery."
Dewhurst braced himself with a violent effort, like a spasm, and took his hat.
"Give me the £10," said Campbell. "It will make no difference now. There are no degrees in despair."
"I must take care of my master's money," said the officer, with an attempt at a smile; and without going the full length of imitating that most philanthropic of all executors of the law, Simpson, who patted his victims on the back while he adjusted the rope, he added, "And now, sir, I am at your humble service."
In a very short time after, the strange events of that day were terminated by the young man being placed in the debtor's prison of the Calton. Like other jail birds, he at first shunned his brethren in misfortune, fleeing to his room, and shrouding himself in solitude and partial darkness. The change from a life of gaiety, if not dissipation, to the experiences of prison squalor, had come upon him without preparation, if indeed preparation for evil ever diminishes or much ameliorates the inevitable effects of the visitation. Unfortunates exhibit wonderful diversities in their manifestations. Dewhurst became dejected, broken in spirits, sad, and remorseful. He scarcely stirred from the bed on which he had thrown himself when he entered; and his mind became a theatre where strange plays were acted, and strange personages performed strange parts, under the direction of stage managers over whom he had no control. Though some unhappy predecessor in the same cell had scribbled on the wall,
"A prison is a cannie place,
Though viewed with reprobation,
Where cheats and thieves, and scants o' grace,
Find time for cogitation,"
he did not find that he could properly cogitate or meditate, even if he had been, which he never was, a thinker. All his thoughts were reduced to a continued wild succession of burning images,—the mild face of his mother, so far away, as it smiled upon him when he ran about among the cane groves of the west; the negroes, with their "young massa" on their tongues, jabbering their affection; his father scowling upon him as undutiful; another, not so far away, in whose eyes—beautiful to him—love dwelt as his worshipper, looking all endearment, only the next moment to cast upon him the withering glance of her contempt, if not hatred; admirers, toadies, satellites, and sycophants, all there in groups and in succession, beslabbering him with praises, then exploding in peals of laughter. Nor was another awanting in these saturnalia—the form and face of her whose one word of sentence had been to him as a doom, and who fixed that doom in his soul by her red glance of reproof. Seemingly very indifferent objects assumed in the new lights of his spirit gigantic and affraying features,—the sea-gull, with its torn back, bleeding and quivering, and those diamond eyes so bright even in its looks of agony—an object low indeed in the scale of nature, but here elevated by some overruling power into the very heart of man's actions and destinies, as if to show out of what humble things the lightnings of retribution may come. Nay, these diamond eyes haunted him; they were everywhere in these saturnalian reveries, following every recurring image as an inevitable concomitant which he had no power to drive away, entering into the orbits of the personages, gleaming out of the heads of negroes, that of his father, that of his mother, even that of his mistress, imparting to the looks and glances of the latter a brilliancy which enhanced beauty, while it sharpened them into poignancy. But most of all were they in some way associated with the form of the unknown lady. She never appeared to him as the being on whom his destiny was suspended; but, sooner or later, her own comparatively lustreless orbs changed into those diamonds, which could fulminate scorn not less than they could beam out supplication.
For several days and nights he had scarcely any intervals of peace from these soul-penetrating fancies, and these moments were due to visits. But who came to visit? Not the writer to the signet, the brother of his affianced, whom he had expected to see first of all as a friend, if not as a relation, ready to extend the hand that would save him; not any of those with whom he had shared the folly of extravagance, if not dissipation, on whom he had lavished favours in the wildness of his generosity. The first was felicitating himself on his sister's escape; the latter received the lesson that teaches prudence a la distance. His only visitors were one or two heads of families where he had been received as a fashionable friend, and these came only to look and inquire. Their curiosity was satisfied when they got out of him the amount of his debt, and pleased when they considered that their daughters were at home, and under no chance of becoming allied to a prisoner. One or two old associates, too, paid their respects to him, but they were of those who had resisted his fascinations and found their pleasures in their studies. We seek for the virtues, but we do not always find them in the high places, where masks, copied from them and bearing their beautiful lineaments and their effulgence, are worn in their stead only to cover the vices which are their very antipodes. No: more often in lowlier regions, lying perdu behind vices, not voluntary, but often, as it were, inflicted and peering out, ashamed to be seen, because arrayed in the rags of poverty. A solitary female stole in to him. Who was she? One with whom he had formed a connection of not an honourable kind, only now interrupted by the walls of the prison? No. One whom he had long before cast off, only because the vice he had inoculated her with had cast off the beauty that had inflamed him. Nor did he know the meaning of that stealthy visit, which lasted only for a few minutes—so unexpected, for he had not seen her during many months, so singular, so unnatural, so unlike the world, returning gratitude for injury, benediction for infamy, until, after she had suddenly slipped away, he found by the side of the wall a small bottle of wine. That form and face, once more beautiful in his estimation than were those even now of his honourable affianced, entered among the imagery of his reveries; but the diamond eyes never displaced those of her gentle nature. He had wronged her, but they never filled with the fire of denunciation. She had looked her grief at him only through the tears he had raised in them, and had never attempted to dry. Yes, the diamond eyes entered everywhere, and into every form but that one where the red heat of revenge might have been expected to shrivel up and harden the issues of tears.