Mechanically he walked up to his room and began to divest himself of his drenched clothing. He hardly noticed that they were soaking and that he was wet through; he was flushed and heated as if he had come straight from a hot room. How the blast roared and shrieked, beating against the cottage till it rocked like a ship at sea, and trying the windows till they cracked and groaned! It whistled through the chinks so that the flimsy red curtain fluttered as if the window had been open. Raymond pushed it aside and opened the shutters, and looked out. The night was inky black, above and below, except when a star flickered in and out like a gas-jet swept by the wind, and showed the river like a bit of steel, as it flashed and quivered under the pelting rain and hurried away into blacker distance. All this angry roar was better than music to Raymond. The fury of the elements seemed to comfort him. Nature was in sympathy with him. It was kind of her to be angry and disturbed when he was so distraught. Nature had more heart than his fellow-men. These were talking over his despair quietly enough now—mocking him, very likely; but the world around was shaken, and tossed, and driven in sympathy with him. A great gust came swelling up from the river, growing louder and heavier as it drew near, till, gathering itself up like a mountainous wave, it burst with a crash against the cottage. M. de la Bourbonias leaped back, and, with a sudden impulse of terror, flew out into the landing, and knocked at Angélique’s door; but the sonorous breathing of the old servant reassured him that all was right there and in the room beyond. It was pitch dark, but the reflection from his own open door showed Franceline’s standing wide open. He listened, but everything was silent there. He stole noiselessly back to his room and closed the door, without disturbing either of the sleepers.
The storm had reached its crisis, and gradually subsided after this, until the wind was spent and died away in long, low wails behind the woods, and the moon drifted above the tattered clouds that were sweeping toward the east, leaving a portion of the sky stainless, with stars flashing out brightly. Raymond put out his candle and went to bed.
Under ordinary circumstances he would probably have paid for the night’s adventure by an attack of bronchitis or rheumatic fever; but the mental fever that had been devouring him warded off every other, and when he came down next morning he was neither ill nor ailing.
Franceline, like her bonne, had slept through the storm, and they were quite astonished to hear what an awful night it had been, and to see the fields strewn with great branches in every direction, gates torn up, and other evidences of the night’s work. But they saw no traces of another tempest that was raging still in a human soul close by them. Nothing betrayed its existence, and they guessed nothing—so securely does this living wall of flesh screen the secrets of the spirit from every outside gaze! Passions rise up in hearts whose pulses we fondly imagine close and familiar to us as our own, and the winds blow and the waves run high and make wild havoc there, turning life into darkness and despair, or, at the whisper of the Master’s voice, illuminating it as suddenly with a flood of sunshine; and we are blind and deaf to these things, and remain as “a stranger to our brother.” And mercifully so. Many a battle is won that would have been lost if it had not been fought alone. We hinder each other by our pity, perhaps, as often as we help.
Sir Simon had very little appetite for his breakfast when he came down next morning, sick at heart after a sleepless night, and found the pleasant meal thoughtfully spread in his favorite room, the library, with the table wheeled close to his arm-chair on the right side of the hearth. It all looked the very picture of comfort and refinement and elegance. But the cup was doubly poisoned to him now; last night’s adventure had added the last drop of bitterness to it. He could not think of Raymond without a poignant pang. He suspected—and he was right—that Raymond was thinking of him, wondering whether it was really all over with him this time, and whether he was bankrupt and his estate in the fangs of the creditors; and whether he was driving away from the Court never to see it again; or whether once more, for the hundred and ninety-ninth time, he had weathered the storm and was still afloat—even though on a raft. Raymond would have scarcely believed it if any one had informed him that he had been the instrument of destroying Sir Simon’s one chance of escape; that he had snatched the last plank from him in his shipwreck. It may have been an imaginary one, and Sir Simon, after the fashion of drowning men, may have been catching at a straw; but now that it was snatched from him, he was more than ever convinced that it had been a solid plank which would have borne him securely to shore. He did not ask himself whether Mr. Plover would have entered into his plans, and whether, supposing he found it his interest to do so, his fortune would have been equal to the demand; he only considered what might have been, and what was not; and thinking of this, his indulgent pity for M. de la Bourbonais shrank in the bitter reflection that he had ruined not only himself but his friend irretrievably. They were pretty much in the same boat now.
Sir Simon’s self-made delusions had cleared away wonderfully within the last forty-eight hours. He drew no comparison to his own advantage between Raymond’s actual position and his own. If M. de la Bourbonais was a thief in the technical sense of the word, he, Sir Simon, was a bankrupt; and a bankrupt, under certain conditions, may mean a swindler. He had been a swindler for years; his life had been a sham these twenty years, and he had not the excuse of circumstances to fall back on; he had been dishonest from extravagance and sheer want of principle. “Take it first and afford it afterwards” had been his theory, and he had lived up to it, and now the day of reckoning had arrived. Many a time he had said, half in jest, that Raymond was the richer man of the two. Raymond used to laugh mildly at the notion, but it was true. An ambitious, extravagant man and a contented poor one are pretty much on a level: the one possesses everything he does not want; the other wants everything he does not possess. The unprincipled spend-thrift and the high-minded, struggling man were then on an equality of fortune, or rather the latter was virtually the wealthier of the two. But now the distinction was washed out. The proud consciousness of unstained honor and innermost self-respect which had hitherto sustained M. de la Bourbonais and sweetened the cup of poverty to him was gone. He was a blighted man, who could never hold up his head again amongst his fellow-men.
“Good God! what delirium possessed him? How could he be so infatuated, so stupid!” broke out Sir Simon, giving vent to what was passing through his mind. “But,” he added presently, “he was not accountable. I believe grief and anxiety drove him mad.” Then he recalled that answer of Raymond’s, that had sounded so untrue at the time: “Yes, I can fancy myself giving way, if the temptation took a certain form, and if I were left to my own strength.” The words sounded now like a prophecy.
Of course we all know that, according to the canons of poetical justice, the brave, suffering man should have been in some unexpected way succored in his extremity; that some angel in visible or invisible form should have been sent to hold him up from slipping into the pit that despair had dug for him; and that, on the other hand, the wicked spendthrift should have been left to eat the bread of righteous retribution, and suffer the just penalty of his evil behavior. But poetical justice and the facts of real life do not always agree.
Sir Simon, after walking up and down the library, chewing the cud of bitter thoughts until he was sick of it, bethought himself that as breakfast was there he might as well try and eat it before it got cold. So he sat down and poured out his coffee, and then, by mere force of habit, and without the faintest glimmer of interest, began to turn over the bundle of letters piled up beside the Times on the table. One after another was tossed away contemptuously. The duns might cry till they were hoarse now; he need not trouble about them; he would be at least that much the gainer by his disgrace. Suddenly his eye lighted on an envelope that was not addressed in the well-known hand of the race of duns, but in Clide de Winton’s, and it bore the London postmark. The thought of Clide generally produced on Sir Simon the effect of a needle run through the left side; but he took up this letter with a strange thrill of expectation. He opened it, and a change came over his face; it was not joy—it was too uncertain, too tremulous yet for that. He must read it again before he trusted to the first impression; he must make sure that he was not dreaming, and the words that danced like a will-o’-the-wisp before his eyes were real, written with real ink, on real paper. At last he dropped the letter, and a heartier prayer than he had uttered since his childhood came from him: “My God, I thank thee! I have not deserved this mercy, but I will try to deserve it.”
He buried his face in his hands, and remained mute and motionless for some minutes. Then, starting up as if suddenly remembering something, he pulled out his watch. It wanted five minutes of ten. The law officer and the Jew creditor were to start by the train that left Charing Cross at a quarter past eleven. Sir Simon rang the bell sharply.