Miracle Gold: A Novel (Vol. 2 of 3)

"The fact is, Dora," said he in a tone of deliberation and dissatisfaction, "I did not bring him here of my own free will. Indeed, I do not know how you could imagine I would invite such a man. I found him contemplating a paragraph for the papers, and he promised he would say nothing about what had occurred if I would introduce him to you. He seems to have conceived a romantic interest in you, because of your likeness to some one he knows." Later this evening he should tell her all about this "some one."

"I see," she said, her spirits declining. It was not out of good nature or generosity, but cowardice, moral cowardice, Jack had brought Leigh. The principle which had made Jack flee from Welbeck Place after sending Leigh for the cab, and then made him fly back there again when he learned that the little man knew their names, had forced him against his will to bring Leigh to her mother's At home. She was in the most indulgent and forgiving of humours, but-but-but-"Oh, Jack, I am so sorry!" was all she could think of saying. She was sorry for him, for John Hanbury, who either was not, or would not be, too big to be troubled by such paltry fears, and irritated by such paltry annoyances.

"Sorry! Sorry for what?" he cried. He gathered from her tone and manner that she was not speaking out fully. He could not guess what was in her mind. He had a little lecture or exhortation prepared to deliver her, and in addition to the unpleasantness of not knowing exactly what she meant when she said she was sorry, he had the confusing and exasperating sense of repression, of not being able to get on the ground he intended occupying.

She did not speak for a while. She was looking out into the dark blue air of the street. She had formed a high ideal of what he, her hero, ought to be, nearly was. But now and then, often, he did not reach the standard she had raised. Her ideal was the man of noble thought certainly, but he should still more be the man of noble action. She would have laid down her life freely in what she believed to be a good cause, and to her mind the noblest cause in which a woman could die would be for a noble man whom she loved. She believed the place of woman was by the side of man, not independent of man. She held that in all matters man and wife should be, to use words that had been employed in acts, to think of which rent her heart with agony, one and undivisible. She regarded strong-minded women as wrong-minded women. Strength and magnanimity were the attributes of men; love and gentleness of women. She wanted this man beside her to shine bright in the eyes of men by reason of his great and rare gifts. No one doubted his abilities as a man; she wanted him to treat his abilities as only the foundation of his character. She wanted not only to know that he possessed great gifts and precious powers, but to feel as well that he was fit to be a god. She yearned to pass her life by the side of a man who could force the world to listen to his words, and fill the one pedestal in her earthly temple. She wanted him to be a hero and a conqueror in the face of the world, and she wanted to give him the whole loyal worship of her woman's heart, that she might live always in the only attitude which rests a woman's spirit, the attitude of giving service of the hand and largess of the heart, and homage of the soul. She wanted to give this man all her heart and soul unceasingly. To give him everything that was hers to give, under Heaven.

It was necessary to make some reply, and she had none ready. In the pause she had not been thinking. She had been seeing visions, dreaming dreams, from which occupations thought is always absent.

He became still more uneasy. Her hand was in his. He pressed it slightly, to recall her attention to him, "What are you sorry for, Dora? What are you thinking of, dear? Are you angry with me still?"

She started without turning her eyes away from the blue duskness of the street, and in a tone of wonderful tenderness and sadness, said:

"I don't know exactly what I was thinking of, Jack. The evening is so fresh and still it is not necessary for one to think. Angry with you, dear! Oh, no! Oh, no! Angry with you for what?"

"About the harsh words I said of Leigh. It seems to me your manner changed the moment I mentioned his name. Let us not speak of him any more this evening."

He pressed her hand, and stole his arm round her waist. She returned the pressure of his hand, but did not turn her eyes inward from the still street.

"But why should we not speak of him, Jack?"

"Because, dear, we are here together, and we are much more interesting to one another than he can be to either."

"Yes, dear, in a way more interesting to one another than all the world besides; but in another way not nearly so interesting as this poor clockmaker," she said slowly, in a dreamy voice.

"I own," he said testily, "I do not see the matter as you put it. How can he, a mere stranger, and a mere stranger who might have done us harm, be more interesting in any light than we are to one another?" He was a man, and thought as the average man thinks, of getting not giving. He was here alone with this beautiful girl who was to be his wife one day, and his chief concern was to get the most pleasure out of her presence by his side, the sound of her voice, the assurance of her love, the contemplation of their future happiness, the sense that she was his very own, that she would be bound to render him obedience which would, of course, never be exacted, and that he was about to lay before her his views of what her conduct ought to be, of where she had declined to accept his advice with regard to their walk of that day, and above all of his determination as to his future course, and the desirableness of their early marriage. He wanted in fact to get her disapproval of the expedition which had led to the unpleasantness of that day, her disapproval of her venturesome overruling of his judgment and her approval of all his plans for the future. He did not state his position thus. He simply wanted certain things, and never thought of referring his wants to any principle.

"In this way," she answered softly, "all about us is happy and assured. For ourselves we have everything that is necessary not only for mere life, but for enjoyment. The things we lack are only luxuries-"

"Luxuries!" he cried. "Do you consider the ardours of a public life luxuries? Do you not yet know me better than to believe I would lead an existence of idle pleasure? Why, a public man now-a-days works harder than a blacksmith, and generally without necessity or reward!" He spoke indignantly. She had attacked his class, she was showing indifference to the usefulness and disinterestedness of his order.

Neither his words nor his manner roused her. "I am not at all forgetting what you speak of. I am thinking, Jack dear, of things more common and essential than fame or the reputation of a benefactor to man. You know I hold that the first sphere of woman is her home. People like us are rarely grateful for food or shelter, or even health, and no people of any kind are grateful for the air they breathe." She paused and sighed. She did not finish her thought in words.

"Well," said he, withdrawing his arm from her waist and taking a chair opposite her in the window-place, "how does this apply? Of course, when you realize the fact that you could not live without air, you are grateful for it. I don't see what you are driving at."

"I cannot help thinking of the man and pitying him. He will go into his grave having missed nearly everything in the world."

"Why, the man has enough conceit to make a battalion of Guards happy. He is a greater man in his own opinion than the Premier, the Lord Chancellor and the Commander-in-Chief rolled into one."

"But even if he is, Jack, that is not all. The Premier and the Lord Chancellor and the Commander-in-Chief, over and above their great successes and fame, have the comforts ordinary men enjoy as well. They are not afflicted in their forms as he is. You say he is interested in me because I remind him of some one. How must it be with an ordinary human heart beating in such a body? Would it not be better for such a man to be born blind than to find his Pallas-Athena, as he calls her?"

The eyes of the girl could not be seen in the darkness of the room; they were full of tears and there were tears in her voice.

Hanbury started, he could not tell why. He exclaimed: "Good Heavens, Dora! you do not mean to tell me that you feel seriously concerned in the love affairs, if there are such things, of this man?"

"No, dear, but I am saddened when I think of them. However absurd it may seem, I cannot help believing this finding of his ideal must be a dreadful misfortune to him."

"Even if you yourself were the ideal, Dora?"

"Even so. But you tell me he had found it before he came here. Of course, dear, my mind is influenced only for the moment by the thought of him and his affairs; but ever since I heard him speak, grotesque as it may seem, my heart has been feeling for him with his poor deformed body and his elaborate gallantry of manner and his Pallas-Athena."

Now was the time to tell Dora of this Miss Grace, but it seemed to him the story was too long for so late an hour, and that it could be told with pleasanter effect when Dora was less exercised about the dwarf. The conversation was too sentimental for him. He had matters of practical moment to speak about, and this subject obstinately blocked the way. The best thing for him to do was to give the matter an every-day aspect at once. "Well, Dora, in any case, Leigh isn't in the first glory of youth, and if he ever does fall in love and marry, it will, I am sure, be no Pallas-Athena, but a barmaid, with practical views, and a notion of keeping an hotel, or something of that kind."

"But how do you think a man with his imagination, his Pallas-Athena, and his incomparable clock and his miracle gold-?"

"Which is nonsense, of course. You don't mean that you believe in transmutation in this end of the nineteenth century?" he said impatiently.

"I do not know. I am not scientific. I suppose more wonderful things have been done. If there ever was a time for making gold it is now. All the wonders that poets dreamed of long ago are coming true in prose to-day. Why not the great dream of the alchemists too? At all events, the fancies are bad for him. Suppose there is to be no Pallas-Athena or wonderful clock or miracle gold in his life, what is there left to him? It seems to me he is all the poorer for his delusions. Jack, I will not try to disguise it. I am intensely interested in this poor clockmaker, this mad visionary, if you prefer to call him that."

This was not at all the kind of preface Hanbury wanted to the communications he had to make to her. He felt disconcerted, clumsy, petulant. "I have been so unfortunate as to introduce the cause of all this anxiety to you. It would have been much better for every sake I had not gone back and met the man the second time, much better I should cut a ridiculous figure before all the town to-morrow!" He was growing angry as his speech went on. His own words were inflaming his mind by the implication of his wrongs.

She placed her hand gently on his, and said in a reproachful voice, a voice quite different from the meditative tones in which she had been speaking, "Jack, I did not mean that. You know I did not mean that. Why do you reproach me with thoughts you ought to know I could not harbour?" She had turned in from the window, and was looking at him opposite her in the dim darkness. She was now fully alive to his presence and everything around her.

"No doubt," he said bitterly, "I am ungenerous to you. I am unjust. I am afraid, Dora, I am but an ill-conditioned beast-"

"Jack, that is the most unjust thing you could possibly say to me. In saying it you seem to use words you fancy I would like to use, only I am not brave enough."

"I know you are brave enough for anything. I know it is I who am the coward."

"Jack! Oh, Jack!"

"You told me so yourself to-day. You cannot say I am putting that word into your mouth." He was taking fire.

"Have you no mercy for me, Jack; my Jack?"

"You told me with your own lips I had no thought but of my miserable self in the miserable thing that happened."

"Jack, have you no pity. My Jack, have you no pity for your own Dora." She seized his hands with both her own. There were no tears in her voice now, there was the blood of her heart.

"Ay, and when I, yielding to my cowardly heart-"

"Oh God!" She took her hands away from his and covered her face with them.

" – And brought that man here as the price of his silence, you-knowing the chicken-livered creature I am-absolutely asked him to come next week. To come here where his presence is to cure me of my cowardice or accustom me to the peril of ridicule which you know I hate worse than death!" He was blazing now.

"Good night."

"After this, how can I be sure that you may not consider it salutary to betray me yourself?" He was mad.

"Good bye, Jack. Oh God, my heart is broken!"

"I tell you-" He turned around. He was alone.

CHAPTER XIX

MRS. HANBURY

John Hanbury had reached the end of the street before he knew where he was. He had no memory of how he got out of the house. No doubt he had behaved like a madman, and he had been temporarily insane. He must have snatched his hat in the hall, but he was without his overcoat.

His heart was beating violently, and his head was burning hot. He must have run down the street. There was no one in view. He had only a whirling and flashing memory of the last few minutes with Dora. His temper had completely mastered him, and he must have spoken and behaved like a maniac. He must have behaved like a maniac in her presence-to her!

Now and then, in the heat of public speaking, he had been carried beyond himself, beyond the power of memory afterwards, but never in his life had impetuosity betrayed him in private life until now. What sort of a lunatic must he have been to sin for the first time before the only woman he ever cared for? The woman he had asked to be his wife?

The excitement of the day had been too much for him, and he had broken down in the end. He had taken only one glass of wine at dinner, and only coffee after. Something must have gone wrong with his brain. Could it be this fainting which had overtaken him to-day, and twice before, indicated some flaw or weakness in the brain? It would have been better he had died in that accursed slum than come back to consciousness and done this. Then he had fainted like a woman, and behaved like a coward. Now he had acted like a cad! He had abused, reviled the woman he professed to love, and who he knew loved him! He dared say he had not struck her! It was, perhaps, a pity he had not struck her, for if he had he should be either now in the hands of the police, or shot by her father! It was a good job the girl had a father to shoot him. If he was called out he should fire in the air, and if Ashton demanded another shot and missed him, he should reserve his fire and blow his own brains out. When a man did a thing like this, there was only one reflection that could ease his intolerable agony of reproach-he could blow out his brains and rid the world of a cowardly cad.

From the moment he found himself at the end of Curzon Street until he reached his mother's house in Chester Square, he walked rapidly, mechanically, and without design. When he saw the door before him he was staggered for a moment.

"How did I come here?" he asked himself, as he opened it with a latch-key. He could not answer the question. He saw in a dim way that it would be interesting to imagine how a man in possession of his faculties walked a whole mile without knowing why he walked or remembering anything by the way. But at present-Pooh! pooh!

"Mrs. Hanbury wishes to see you, sir, in her own room, if you please," said a servant, who had heard him come in and appeared while he was hanging up his hat.

"Very well. Tell her I shall be with her in a few minutes."

His mother's room adjoined her sleeping chamber, and was opposite his own bed-room on the second floor.

He turned into the long dining-room to his right. There was here a dim light burning, the windows were wide open, the place cool and still.

He shut the door behind him and began pacing quickly up and down. It was necessary in some way to collect his mind before meeting his mother.

He shut his fists hard against his chest and breathed hard as he walked. By his breathing he judged he must have run part of the way from Curzon Street.

The perspiration was trickling down his forehead. He held his head up high; he felt as though there was a tight hand round his throat. He thrust his fingers inside his collar and tried to ease his neck.

"This is absurd," he said aloud at last. But what it was that he felt to be absurd he did not know.

"The heat is suffocating one!" he said in a short time, and tore again at his shirt, loosing his necktie and rumpling his collar.

"I am choking for air!" he cried, and tried to fling the windows higher up, but they were both as high as they could go.

"My throat is cracking!" he cried huskily, and looking round with blazing eyes through the dim room saw a caraffa on the side-board. He poured out a glass of water and swallowed the water at a draught. "Oh, that is much better," he said with a smile, and resumed his walk up and down the long room at a lessened rate. "Let me think," he said; "let me think if I can."

He clasped his hands behind his back and leaned his head on one side, his attitude when designing the plan of a speech or musing upon the parts of it.

The water he had swallowed and the slackened pace and the posture of reflection, tended to cool him and bring his mind into condition for harmonious working.

"Let me treat the matter," he whispered, "as though I were only a friend, and had come here to state my case and implore advice. How does the matter stand exactly? Let us look at the facts, the simple facts first."

His pace became slower and slower. His face ceased to work, and lost the flushed and wild appearance. Gradually his head rose erect and stood back upon his neck. His eyes lit up with the flashes of reason. They no longer blazed with the flame of chaotic despair. He unclasped his hands and began to gesticulate. He ceased to be the self-convicted culprit, and became the argumentative contender before the court. He had ceased to do his worst against the accused and was exercising all his faculties to compel an acquittal.

Presently his manner changed. He had adduced all his reasons and knit them together in his argument. Now he was beginning to appeal to the feelings of the man on the bench and the men in the box. His head was no longer erect, his gestures no longer combative. He was asking them to remember the circumstances of the case. He was painting a picture of himself. He appealed to their finer natures, and begged them not to contemn this young man, who by the nature of the great art, the noble art of oratory, to which he had devoted much study and in which he had had some successful practice, lived always in a state of exalted sentiment and sensations. This young man was more likely than others of his years to be overborne and carried away by emotions which would not disturb the equanimity of another man. His nature was excitable, and he had the ready, in this case the fatally ready, command of words belonging to men who had trained themselves for public speaking.

Here the scene became so real to his mind that unknown to himself he broke out into speech:

"Gentlemen, I know he, may not be excused wholly. I will not ask you to say he is not to blame. I will not dare to say I think he behaved as a considerate and thoughtful man. But, gentlemen, though you cannot approve his conduct, you will not, oh, I pray you, do not take away from him the reputation he holds dearer than life, the reputation of being a sincere man and a gentleman. Amerce him in any penalty you please short of denying him the reputation of being earnest and high-minded and-" He paused. Tears for the spectacle of himself were in his eyes. His voice was shaken by the intensity of his pity for himself.

"John," said a soft voice behind him.

He turned quickly round. A tall, slender woman, with calm, clear face and snow-white hair, was standing in the room.

"Mother! I did not hear you come in."

"I hope I did not break in disastrously. It is late. I wanted to see you for a few minutes before I went to bed. I did not like to speak until you stopped."

He had gone to her and put his arm round her waist and kissed her smooth white hair above her smooth, pure forehead. "Mother," he said, in a low, soft, musical and infinitely tender voice, "I am sorry I kept you waiting for me. I was going to you in a moment, dear."

There was none of the art of the orator in these words, or in the exquisitely tender flexions of the voice. But the heart of the man was in the tones of his voice for his mother.

She looked at him in the dim light and saw his disordered collar and tie, but put that down to excitement caused by his rehearsal.

He led her gently to a chair and took one in front of her by the side of the dining-table. He took her thin, white hand in both his own and looked into her calm, beautiful face, radiant with that tranquil light of maternal love justified and fulfilled.

"You have something to tell me, mother? Something pleasant, I hope, about yourself." He had never spoken in a voice of such unreckoning love to Dora in all their meetings and partings. It was the broad, rich, even sound of a river that is always flowing in one direction and always full, not the tinkle of a capricious fountain or the tempestuous rush of a torrent at the mercy of exhaustion or drought.

"I have, my son. It does not concern me, or if it does, but indirectly. Indeed, I do not know. It has to do with you, dear." They, like sweethearts, called one another "dear," because they were inexpressibly dear to one another.

"With me, mother? And how?" John Hanbury was not a handsome man, but when he smiled at his slender, grey-haired mother, and patted her delicate white thin hands with his own large and brown, there was more than physical beauty in his looks, there was a subjugating, an intoxicating radiance, and all-completed prostration of his soul before the mother he worshipped.

"I do not know exactly, John. Your father gave me in trust for you, as you know, a paper, which I was not to give to you except at some great crisis of your life. If no harm of any particular moment threatened you until you were thirty, you were never to see this paper."

"I know," he said. "I was only seventeen then-not launched in the world-and he thought I might, when I came of age, and got my two thousand a-year, plunge into dissipation, and take to racing or backing horses, or cards, or something of that kind. Well, mother, I hope you are not uneasy about me on those scores? This paper is no doubt one of extremely good advice from an excellent father to a young son. I am sure I will read the paper with all the respect I owe to any words he may have left for my guidance. You do not think, mother, I am now likely to give way to any of those temptations?"

She shook her small head gravely.

"I do not fear you will give way to the ordinary temptations of youth, John. I know you too well to dread anything of the kind. I don't think the paper your father left me for you refers to the ordinary danger in a young man's path."

"Then you must believe it has to do with unusual dangers, and you must believe I am now threatened by some unusual dangers?" said he with a start. He had been threatened by a very uncommon danger that day, the danger of being made a laughing stock for the whole town, but such a misfortune could never have been contemplated by his father. Compared with the importance of a message from his dead father, how poor and insignificant seemed his fears of the early part Of this day.

"I do not know. I am not sure. Something out of the common must be in your case, my dear child." What a luxury of pride and delight to think the tall, powerful, stalwart, clever man, was her child, had been a little helpless baby lying in her lap, pressed close to her heart! "When your father died you were in his opinion too young, I dare say, to be taken into his confidence. He often told me he would leave a paper for you, and that I was not to give it you until you were between twenty one and thirty (if I lived), and that I was only to give it to you in case you showed any very strong leaning towards politics or a public life."