Miracle Gold: A Novel (Vol. 2 of 3)
The son smiled, and threw himself back in his chair. He felt greatly relieved. He knew his father had always shown a morbid horror of politics, and had always tried to impress upon him the emptiness of public honours and distinctions. Why, his father never said. The son distinctly remembered how tremulously excited the old and ailing man had been at every rumour of ambitious scheming abroad, particularly how he garrulously condemned the ceaseless scheming for the throne of France then perplexing the political world. He had often pointed out to his young son the folly of the Legitimists and the Orleanists and the Napoleons, until once John had said, "Why, sir, you are as emphatic to me in this matter as if I myself were a pretender!" Upon which his father had said, "Hush! Hush! my boy. You must not jest about such matters. Idle, the idlest, pretensions of the kind have often caused oceans of bloodshed." Upon which John had smiled in secret to note how his father's cherished horror had carried him so far as to caution him, John Hanbury, member of a simple English household, against aspiring to the kingly or imperial throne of the Tuileries!
"You do not think, mother," he said gaily, "that I am going to buy a tame eagle, and hire a fishing boat and take France?"
She smiled sadly, remembering her husband's dread of lofty aspirants. "No," she said, "I think, if your father were alive now, he would see as little need of cautioning you against becoming a pretender to the throne of France as of keeping out of dissipation. But he told me if ever you showed signs of plunging into politics I was to give you the paper. I left it in my room, thinking we might both sit there, not fancying we should have our chat here. I shall give it to you as you go to your room."
"And you have no clue to what the paper contains?" he asked pleasantly.
"No," she answered with hesitancy and a thoughtful lowering of her eyes. "You remember, at that time-I mean as a boy and lad-you were a fierce Radical."
"Oh, more than that! I was a Republican, a Socialist, a Nihilist, I think. A regular out-and-out Fire-eater, Iconoclast, Destructionist, I think," the young man laughed, throwing himself back in his chair and enjoying the memory of his youthful thoroughness.
"And your father took no part whatever in politics, seemed to dread the mention of them. He was at heart, I think, an aristocrat."
"And married the daughter of Sir Ralph Preston, whose family goes back centuries before the Plantagenets, and to whom a baronetcy is like a mere Brummagem medal on the breast of a Pharoah."
Mrs. Hanbury shook her head deprecatingly and smiled. "I am afraid you are as ardent in your estimate of my family pretensions to lineage as you were long ago in your hatred of kings and princes."
"But I have always been true to you, mother!" he said in that wonderful, irresistible, meltingly affectionate voice; he took her hand and kissed it reverentially.
"Yes, my son. Always." As his head was bent over her hand she laid her hand on his thick dark curly hair.
"My mother," he murmured, when he felt her touch.
Her eyes filled and shone with tears. She made an effort, commanded herself, and as her son sat back on his chair, went on: "You know when your father went into business there was no necessity of a money kind for his doing so. The Hanburys have had plenty of money always, never lands, as far as I know, but money always. They were not a very old family as far as I have heard. This was a point on which your father was reticent. At all events he went into business in the City, as you are aware, and there made a second fortune."
"Well, mother, I am not at all ashamed of our connection with business or the City," said the young man pleasantly.
"Nor am I, John, as you know. When I married your father, none of my people said, at all events to me, that I disgraced my family or degraded my blood. Your father was in business in Fenchurch Street then. My family had known your father all his life. Our marriage was one purely of inclination, and was most happy. Your father was a simple, intelligent, kind-hearted gentleman, John, and as good a husband and father as ever breathed."
"Indeed, mother, I am quite sure of that. I still feel raw and cold without him," said the young man gravely.
"And I shall never get over his loss. I never forget it for one hour of any day. But I am growing talkative in my age like all old people," she said, drawing herself up and laughing faintly. "I am sure I have no reason for saying it, but I fancy the paper your father left with me for you, is in some way connected with the business, or the reason which made him go into business. He gave it to me a few days before he died, and when he knew he was dying. He gave it to me after saying a great deal to me about business, after arranging his other business affairs. He said he did not like you to take so much interest in politics, but that he supposed he must not try to foretell your future. That there was such a thing as going too far in any cause, and that if ever you showed any disposition to put your extreme views in practice, I was to give you this paper. 'In fact, Amy,' said he, 'if our dear boy goes into public life at the popular side, give him this paper; it may be the means of moderating his ardour; but do not give it to him until he is over twenty-one. He will have, I think, no need of it if he keeps quiet until he is thirty. If his mind takes the other bend and he shows any sympathy with any reactionary party in Europe, any party that wants to unsettle things as they now are, destroy this on your peril. If you think he is devoted only to English Radicalism, give him the paper; if he mixes himself up with any Republican party on the Continent, give him the paper. But if he shows sympathy with any pretender on the Continent, burn the paper, Amy, as you love your boy, and bury the ashes of it too.' Those were his very words. What they mean or refer to I do not know." Her face had grown paler.
"And you never read the paper?"
"No. Nor have I the least clue to its contents. I only know that your father was a sensible man, and attached great importance to it. If you come I will give it to you now."
They both rose and left the dining-room together. As they went up-stairs she said:
"I am aware for some time you have not been quite certain as to the side you would throw in your lot with. I don't think your father ever contemplated such a situation, and it seems to me that if this paper is to be of any use to you it must be of most use when you are wavering."
"But I am no longer wavering. I have decided to throw in my lot with the advanced party."
"When did you make up your mind?"
"To-day."
"Oh, you dined at Curzon Street. And have you arranged about your marriage with dear Dora? No new daughter was ever so welcome as she will be to me. Has the time been fixed?"
He started. "No, not exactly, mother." He had forgotten for the past quarter of an hour all about the quarrel or scene with Dora. He flushed crimson, and then grew dusky white. He seized the balustrade for a moment to steady himself. His mother was walking in front, and could not see the signs of his agitation.
He recovered himself instantly.
She judged by his tone that her question had not been well timed. With the intention of getting away as far as possible from the thought of Dora, or marriage, she said, turning round upon him with a smile as she opened her boudoir door, "By the way, who was that admirable paragon whose panegyric you were pronouncing in the dining-room when I came in?"
He laughed uneasily and did not meet her eyes. "An acquaintance of mine, a poor devil who has got himself into serious trouble."
"A friend of yours, John, in serious trouble."
"Not a friend, mother, an acquaintance of mine."
"Do I know him, John?"
"No, mother. Not in the least. I should be very sorry you did. I hope you may never know him."
For the second time in a minute Mrs. Hanbury felt that she had asked an ill-timed question.
She handed him the paper of which she had spoken. He said good-night to her, and as the clock on the lower lobby was striking midnight he entered his own room.
CHAPTER XX
JOHN HANBURY ALONE
When John Hanbury closed and locked the door of his own room and threw himself into an old easy chair, he felt first an overwhelming sense of relief. A day of many exciting and unpleasant events was over, and he was encompassed by the security of his home and environed closely by the privacy of his own sleeping chamber. No one uninvited would enter by the outer door of the house; no one could enter this room without his absolute permission. He was secure against the annoyance or intrusion of people. Here he could rest and be safe. Here he was protected against even himself, for he could not make himself ridiculous or commit himself when alone. All trials of great agony spring from what we conceive to be our relations with others. Beyond physical pains and pleasures, which are few and unimportant in life, we owe all our joys and sorrows to what others think or say of us. Even in the most abstracted spiritual natures the anger of Heaven is more intolerable to anticipate than the torture of Hell.
John Hanbury's room was in the back of the house. Here, as in the dining-room, the window was wide open. The stars were dull in the misty midsummer sky. Now and then came the muffled rattle of a distant cab, now and then the banging of doors, now and then the sounds of shooting locks and bolts as servants fastened up the rears of houses for the night. Beyond these sounds there was none, and these came so seldom and so dulled by distance, and with intervals so increasing in length that they seemed like the drowsy muttering of the vast city as it moved heavily seeking ease and sleep.
For a while Hanbury sat without stirring. He still held in his hand the paper his mother had given him. He knew he had not escaped the battle. He was merely reposing between the fights. He sat with his head drooped low upon his chest, his arms lying listlessly by his side, his legs stretched out. This was the first rest of body or mind he had had that day, but, as in a sleep obtained from narcotics, while it gave him physical relief his mind was gaining no freshness.
At length Hanbury shook himself, shuddered, and rose. The light was not fully up. He left his window open from the bottom all night. He went to it, pulled up the blind and sat down on the low window-frame. He put his hand on the stone window sill, and leaning forward looked below.
Here the silence was not so deep or monotonous as in the room with the blind down. There arose sounds, faint sounds of music from the backs of houses where entertainments were being given, now and then voices and laughter could be heard indistinctly. In many of the windows shone lights. No suggestion of tumult or trouble came from any side or from the sky above. On earth spread a peaceful heaven of man's making and man's keeping; above a peaceful heaven of God's will.
Here was the largest, and richest, and most powerful, and most civilized city of all time, lying round the feet of a stupendous goddess of liberty, whose statue had been reared by wisdom borrowed from all the ages of the history of man. This was the heart of the colossal nation whose vital blood flowed in every clime.
Here were powers capable of beneficent application lying ready to the hand of every strength. To be here and able was to have the key-board of the most gigantic organ ever devised by human mind open to one's touch.
Here all creeds were free, all thoughts were free, all words were free, all men were free. There was no slavery of the soul or the person. Here, the leader of the people was the ruler of the state. The people made the laws, and the King saw that the laws were obeyed.
Each man of the people was a monarch who deputed his regal powers to the King.
An hereditary sovereign was the best, better a thousand times than elected King.
In this country were no plots and schemings about succession. Here the King's son came to the throne under the will of the people. This country was never disturbed by struggles to get a good ruler. This country always had a good ruler, that is the will of the people.
What a miserable spectacle France, great France, chivalric France presented now! How many pretenders were there to the throne? – to the presidential chair? There were the Legitimists, and the Orleanists, and the Napoleons, two branches of Napoleons, and a dozen aspirants to the presidency! How miserable! What waste of vigour and dignity.
Yes, he was glad he had made up his mind. He would devote himself, body and soul, to the sovereign people under the constitutional sovereign.
He would be as advanced as any man short of revolution, short of violence. His motto should be All things for the people under the people's King.
No doubt his mother's talk to him in the dining-room had set him off on such currents of thought. His mother's talk in the dining-room-by the way, he had not yet looked at the paper she had given him.
He pulled down the blind, turned up the lights over the mantel, and standing with his back to the chimney-piece, examined the packet in his hand.
It was a large envelope, tied in a very elaborate manner, and the string was sealed in three places at the back. On the front, under the string, he read his own name in his father's well-known large legible writing. He cut the string and the envelope, and drew out of the latter a long narrow parcel. This he opened, and found to consist of half-a-dozen sheets of brief-paper closely covered on both sides with the large legible writing of his father. The paper was secured at the left hand corner by a loop of red tape. He saw at a glance that the document took the form of a letter to him. It began, "My dear and only son, John," and finished with "Your most affectionate and anxious father, William Hanbury." The young man turned over the sheets slowly, glancing at each in turn. This long letter was not, from first to finish, broken in any way. There were no general heading, or divisions into sections, or even paragraphs. From beginning to end no break appeared. The wide margin bore not a single scratch. There was no mark from the address to the signature to attract attention.
He glanced at the opening words of this long letter. From them it was plain his father meant him to read them quietly and deliberately in the sequence in which they ran. The first sentence was this:
"It is of the greatest importance to the object I have in view that the facts I am about to disclose to you should reach your mind in the order I have here put them; otherwise the main fact in the revelation might have a pernicious effect upon you, my son."
The young man lowered the manuscript and mused a moment. It was obvious to him that no matter what he should think of the contents of this document his father had considered them of first-rate importance, and likely to influence his own mind and actions in no ordinary way. His father's sense and judgment! had never been called in question by any of his father's oldest and closest friends, and those who knew him most intimately never saw reason to account him liable to exaggerated estimates of the influence of ideas, except in his morbid sensitiveness to anything like popular revolutions or dynastic intrigues.
John Hanbury raised the document and recommenced where he had left off. That first sentence was cautionary: the second sentence took away the breath of the young man, by reason of the large field it opened to view, and the strange and intense personal interest it at once aroused. It ran thus:
"About the middle of the last century, when George the Second sat on the throne of England, and the usurper, Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, on the throne of Russia, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams was appointed our ambassador to Russia. To Sir Charles Hanbury Williams you and I owe our name, although a drop of his blood does not flow in our veins, nor are we in any way that I know of related to him or his."
Again the young man lowered the manuscript from before his eyes. His face suddenly flushed, his eyes contracted, he thrust his head forward as though listening intently. What could be coming? He strained his hearing to catch sounds and voices muttering and mumbling on the limits of his thoughts. He was at sea, gazing with wild eagerness into the haze ahead, trying to determine whether what he saw was sea-smoke or cloud or land. Why these great chords in the prelude? What meant these muffled trumpets, telling of ambassadors and courts and kingdoms and empires? What concords were these preluding? What stately themes and regal confluences of harmony? Were these words the first taps of the kettle drums in his march upon some soul-expanding knowledge? What should he now see with his eyes and hear with his ears and touch with his hands? Upon what marvellous scenes of the undisclosed past was the curtain about to rise? Were some mighty engines that had wrought in the world's history about to be exhibited to his eyes? What mysteries of councils and of courts was he destined to witness and understand? Who was he? Of whom was he? Whence was he? Hanbury and yet no Hanbury. How came it he owned the middle and not the final name of the diplomatist and poet of the days of George the Second?
God of Heaven, could it be there was the blood of a shameful woman in his veins?
His face suddenly blanched. The thick dark veins of his temples and forehead lay down flat and then sank hollow. His swarthy rough skin shrank and puckered. His lips drew backward thinned and livid. His clenched white teeth shone out, and his breath came though them with a hissing noise. He drew himself up to his full height, and for a moment looked round defiantly.
All at once the blood flew back to his cheeks, his forehead, his neck. He covered his face with his bent arm and sank into a chair, crying: "Not that! Oh God, not that! Anything but that!"
He remained for a long time motionless, with his face covered by his arm, and the hand of that arm holding the paper against his shoulder. At first no thoughts passed through his mind. He was no longer trying to see or hear or divine. He felt overwhelmed, and if he had the power to do it he would there and then have ceased to think, have annihilated the power of thought for ever. To his sensitive and highly-wrought mind, base blood of even four or five generations back would have forbidden him any part in public life, and, worse than that a thousand times, have destroyed his personal interest and pride in himself for ever.
"I would rather," he moaned, when his mind became more orderly, "carry the hump upon the withered, distorted legs of that man, Oscar Leigh, than a bend sinister. A noble woman may fall, but no noble woman who has fallen would take money for her sin. It is not the sin that would hurt me, but the hire of the sin, the notion that I had the blood of shame in my veins, and the price of shame in my pocket. Bah! I would die of fever if it were so. My blood, the blood in my veins would ferment and stew my flesh. I should rot from within."
He dropped his arm and looked around him. The sight of the familiar room and well-known objects allayed the agony of despair. He drew a deep breath and sat up.
"I have been terrifying myself with shadows, with less than shadows, with absolute blanks; nay, I have been terrifying myself with less than nothing! I have been trying to change the absolute and manifest, and vouched sunlight into gloom and the people of gloom, phantoms. The only evidence before me is evidence against my fears. Instead of an intangible horror, there is an affirmed and ponderable assurance that although my name is Hanbury, and I got that name from Sir Hanbury Williams, not a drop of his blood is in my veins! Why, I am more like a girl with her first love-letter, trying to guess its contents from the outside, than a man with a business document in his hand! Let me read this thing through now as I discussed another matter awhile ago, as if it were a brief put into my hands as a counsel. It is exactly, or almost exactly like a brief." He tossed the sheets carelessly in his hand. "Let us see what the case is."
He sat himself back deliberately in his chair, thrust out his legs before him, and holding the manuscript in both hands began it again.
With contracted brows and face of stern attention he read on. He betrayed no more excitement than if he held in his hand a bluebook which he desired to master for some routine speech. Now and then he cleared his throat softly, imperfectly, indifferent to the result; for all other sound he made he might have been fashioned of marble. Now and then he turned the leaves and moved slightly from side to side; for all other motion he made he might have been dead.
At last he came to the final line, to his father's signature. He read all and then allowing the manuscript to fall from his hands and his arms to drop to his side, sat in the chair motionless, staring into vacancy.
For an hour he remained thus. Beyond the heaving of his chest and his calm regular respiration, he was perfectly still. At length he sighed profoundly, not from sadness, but deep musing, shook himself, shuddered, looked round him as though he had just waked from sleeping in a strange place.
He rose slowly and going to the window drew up the blind.
No lights were now to be seen in the rear of any of the houses, and complete silence filled the windless air.
"How peaceful," he whispered, "how calm. All the loyal subjects of Her Majesty Queen Victoria are now sleeping in calm security. What a contrast! Here the person of the subject is as sacred as the person of the sovereign. Good heavens, what a contrast! Gracedieu in Derbyshire. I seem to have heard of that place before, but I cannot recollect, when or where. Gracedieu must be a very small place, for my father says it is near the village of Castleton. I don't know where Castleton is, beyond the fact that it is in Derbyshire. Gracedieu-Gracedieu-Gracedieu. The name seems familiar enough, but joined with what or whom I cannot think. It is a common name. There must be many places of the name in England. My memory of it must be connected with some circumstance or people, for I am sure I have never been in the place myself or in Castleton either; or in Derbyshire at all, for the matter of that, except passing through. I don't think I can be familiar with the name in connection with the Peak. My only knowledge of the Peak and its neighbourhood is from some written description, and my only memory of the name Gracedieu is one of the ear, not of the eye.
"I am sure my memory of it is of the ear, and that it is a pleasant memory too! but I can get no further now. To-morrow I shall go and see the place for myself. This whole history is astounding. I am too much stunned by it to think about it yet.
"There's two o'clock striking. I must not wake my mother to tell her. I feel as if my reason were a little disturbed. I feel choked and smothered up-as if I could not breathe. I am worn out and weak. The day has been too much for me. I will go to bed. I am sure I shall sleep. I am half asleep as it is."
He drew back from the window and stretched up his hand for the cord.
"The Queen of England sleeps secure, with all her subjects secure around her-and I-" He did not finish the sentence. He shook his head and pulled down the blind.
Suddenly he struck his thigh with his clenched fist, calling out in a whisper: "Of course, I now remember where I heard of Gracedieu. What a stupid fool I have been not to recall it at once! It's the place that beautiful girl the dwarf introduced me to comes from! My head must be dull not to remember that! His Pallas-Athena, and I-"
He turned out the lights, and began undressing in the dim twilight; there were already faint blue premonitions of dawn upon the blind.
"I wonder," he muttered in the twilight, "will his figures of time include Cophetua and the Beggar Maid! Ha-ha-ha. I am half asleep.
"That old story I read this night was not unlike Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, only-I must not think of it now, I am too dazed and stunned and stupid."
He was in bed, and in a few minutes was asleep. On a sudden he woke up at the sound of his own voice, crying out loud in the profound peace of the early dawn: -
"Thieves! Thieves! Kosciusko to the rescue. The king is on your side!"
