What Will He Do with It? — Volume 03

"So," said the voice from above, "so we do meet at last, Jasper Losely! you are come!"

Drawing a loose kind of dressing-robe more closely round her, the mistress of the house now descended the stairs, rapidly, flittingly, with a step noiseless as a spectre's, and, grasping Losely firmly by the hand, led him into a chill, dank, sunless drawing-room, gazing into his face fixedly all the while.

He winced and writhed. "There, there, let us sit down, my dear Mrs.

Crane."

"And once I was called Bella."

"Ages ago! Basta! All things have their end. Do take those eyes of yours off my face; they were always so bright! and—really—now they are perfect burning-glasses! How close it is! Peuh! I am dead tired. May I ask for a glass of water; a drop of wine in it—or—brandy will do as well."

"Ho! you have come to brandy and morning drams, eh, Jasper?" said Mrs. Crane, with a strange, dreary accent. "I, too, once tried if fire could burn up thought, but it did not succeed with me; that is years ago; and- there—see the bottles are full still!"

While thus speaking, she had unlocked a chiffonniere of the shape usually found in "genteel lodgings," and taken out a leathern spirit-case containing four bottles, with a couple of wine-glasses. This case she placed on the table before Mr., Losely, and contemplated him at leisure while he helped himself to the raw spirits.

As she thus stood, an acute student of Lavater might have recognized, in her harsh and wasted countenance, signs of an original nature superior to that of her visitor; on her knitted brow, a sense higher in quality than on his smooth low forehead; on her straight stern lip, less cause for distrust than in the false good-humour which curved his handsome mouth into that smile of the fickle, which, responding to mirth but not to affection, is often lighted and never warmed. It is true that in that set pressure of her lip there might be cruelty, and, still more, the secretiveness which can harbour deceit; and yet, by the nervous workings of that lip, when relieved from such pressure, you would judge the woman to be rather by natural temperament passionate and impulsive than systematically cruel or deliberately-false,—false or cruel only as some predominating passion became the soul's absolute tyrant, and adopted the tyrant's vices. Above all, in those very lines destructive to beauty that had been ploughed, not by time, over her sallow cheeks, there was written the susceptibility to grief, to shame, to the sense of fall, which was not visible in the unreflective, reckless aspect of the sleek human animal before her.

In the room, too, there were some evidences of a cultivated taste. On the walls, book-shelves, containing volumes of a decorous and severe literature, such as careful parents allow to studious daughters,—the stately masterpieces of Fenelon and Racine; selections approved by boarding-schools from Tasso, Dante, Metastasio; amongst English authors, Addison, Johnson, Blair (his lectures as well as sermons); elementary works on such sciences as admit female neophytes into their porticos, if not into their penetralia,—botany, chemistry, astronomy. Prim as soldiers on parade stood the books,—not a gap in their ranks,—evidently never now displaced for recreation; well bound, yet faded, dusty; relics of a bygone life. Some of them might perhaps have been prizes at school, or birthday gifts from proud relations. There, too, on the table, near the spirit-case, lay open a once handsome workbox,—no silks now on the skeleton reels; discoloured, but not by use, in its nest of tarnished silk slept the golden thimble. There, too, in the corner, near a music- stand piled high with musical compositions of various schools and graduated complexity from "lessons for beginners" to the most arduous gamut of a German oratorio, slunk pathetically a poor lute-harp, the strings long since broken. There, too, by the window, hung a wire bird- cage, the bird long since dead. In a word, round the woman gazing on Jasper Losely, as he complacently drank his brandy, grouped the forlorn tokens of an early state,—the lost golden age of happy girlish studies, of harmless girlish tastes.

"Basta, eno'," said Mr. Losely, pushing aside the glass which he had twice filled and twice drained, "to business. Let me see the child: I feel up to it now."

A darker shade fell over Arabella Crane's face, as she said," The child! she is not here! I have disposed of her long ago."

"Eh!—disposed of her! what do you mean?"

"Do you ask as if you feared I had put her out of the world? No! Well, then,—you come to England to see the child? You miss—you love, the child of that—of that—" She paused, checked herself, and added in an altered voice, "of that honest, high-minded gentlewoman whose memory must be so dear to me,—you love that child; very natural, Jasper."

"Love her! a child I have scarcely seen since she was born! do talk common-sense. No. But have I not told you that she ought to be money's worth to me; ay, and she shall be yet, despite that proud man's disdainful insolence."

"That proud man! what, you have ventured to address him—visit him—since your return to England?"

"Of course. That's what brought me over. I imagined the man would rejoice at what I told him, open his pursestrings, lavish blessings and bank-notes. And the brute would not even believe me; all because—"

"Because you had sold the right to be believed before. I told you, when I took the child, that you would never succeed there, that—I would never encourage you in the attempt. But you had sold the future as you sold your past,—too cheaply, it seems, Jasper."

"Too cheaply, indeed. Who could ever have supposed that I should have been fobbed off with such a pittance?"

"Who, indeed, Jasper! You were made to spend fortunes, and call them pittances when spent, Jasper! You should have been a prince, Jasper; such princely tastes! Trinkets and dress, horses and dice, and plenty of ladies to look and die! Such princely spirit too! bounding all return for loyal sacrifice to the honour you vouchsafed in accepting it!"

Uttering this embittered irony, which nevertheless seemed rather to please than to offend her guest, she kept moving about the room, and (whether from some drawer in the furniture, or from her own person, Losely's careless eye did not observe) she suddenly drew forth a miniature, and, placing it before him, exclaimed, "Ah, but you are altered from those days; see what you then were!"

Losely's gaze, thus abruptly invited, fixed itself on the effigies of a youth eminently handsome, and of that kind of beauty which, without being effeminate, approaches to the fineness and brilliancy of the female countenance,—a beauty which renders its possessor inconveniently conspicuous, and too often, by winning that ready admiration which it costs no effort to obtain, withdraws the desire of applause from successes to be achieved by labour, and hardens egotism by the excuses it lends to self-esteem. It is true that this handsome face had not the elevation bestowed by thoughtful expression but thoughtful expression is not the attribute a painter seeks to give to the abstract comeliness of early youth; and it is seldom to be acquired without that constitutional wear and tear which is injurious to mere physical beauty. And over the whole countenance was diffused a sunny light, the freshness of buxom health, of luxuriant vigour; so that even that arrogant vanity which an acute observer might have detected as the prevailing mental characteristic seemed but a glad exultation in the gifts of benignant Nature. Not there the look which, in the matured man gazing on the bright ghost of his former self, might have daunted the timid and warned the wise. "And I was like this! True! I remember well when it was taken, and no one called it flattering," said Mr. Losely, with pathetic self-condolence. "But I can't be very much changed," he added, with a half laugh. "At my age one may have a manlier look, yet—"

"Yet still be handsome, Jasper," said Mrs. Crane. "You are so. But look at me; what am I?"

"Oh, a very fine woman, my dear Crane,—always were. But you neglect yourself: you should not do that; keep it up to the last. Well, but to return to the child. You have disposed of her without my consent, without letting me know?"

"Letting you know! How many years is it since you even gave me your address! Never fear: she is in good hands."

"Whose? At all events I must see her."

"See her! What for?"

"What for! Hang it, it is natural that, now I am in England, I should at least wish to know what she is like. And I think it very strange that you should send her away, and then make all these difficulties. What's your object? I don't understand it."

"My object? What could be my object but to serve you? At your request I took, fed, reared a child, whom you could not expect me to love, at my own cost. Did I ever ask you for a shilling? Did I ever suffer you to give me one? Never! At last, hearing no more from you, and what little I heard of you making me think that, if anything happened to me (and I was very ill at the time), you could only find her a burden,—at last I say, the old man came to me,—you had given him my address,—and he offered to take her, and I consented. She is with him."

"The old man! She is with him! And where is he?"

"I don't know."

"Humph; how does he live? Can he have got any money?"

"I don't know."

"Did any old friends take him up?"

"Would he go to old friends?"

Mr. Losely tossed off two fresh glasses of brandy, one after the other, and, rising, walked to and fro the room, his hands buried in his pockets, and in no comfortable vein of reflection. At length he paused and said, "Well, upon the whole, I don't see what I could do with the girl just at present, though, of course, I ought to know where she is, and with whom. Tell me, Mrs. Crane, what is she like,—pretty or plain?"

"I suppose the chit would be called pretty,—by some persons at least."

"Very pretty? handsome?" asked Losely, abruptly. "Handsome or not, what does it signify? what good comes of beauty? You had beauty enough; what have you done with it?"

At that question, Losely drew himself up with a sudden loftiness of look and gesture, which, though prompted but by offended vanity, improved the expression of the countenance, and restored to it much of its earlier character. Mrs. Crane gazed on him, startled into admiration, and it was in an altered voice, half reproachful, half bitter, that she continued,

"And now that you are satisfied about her, have you no questions to ask about me?—what I do? how I live?" "My dear Mrs. Crane, I know that you are comfortably off, and were never of a mercenary temper. I trust you are happy, and so forth: I wish I were; things don't prosper with me. If you could conveniently lend me a five-pound note—"

"You would borrow of me, Jasper? Ah! you come to me in your troubles. You shall have the money,—five pounds, ten pounds, what you please, but you will call again for it: you need me now; you will not utterly desert me now?"

"Best of creatures!—never!" He seized her hand and kissed it. She withdrew it quickly from his clasp, and, glancing over him from head to foot, said, "But are you really in want?—you are well-dressed, Jasper; that you always were."

"Not always; three days ago very much the reverse: but I have had a trifling aid, and—"

"Aid in England? from whom? where? Not from him whom you say you had the courage to seek?"

"From whom else? Have I no claim? A miserable alms flung to me. Curse him! I tell you that man's look and language so galled me,—so galled," echoed Losely, shifting his hold from the top of his switch to the centre, and bringing the murderous weight of the lead down on the palm of his other hand, "that, if his eye had quitted mine for a moment, I think I must have brained him, and been—"

"Hanged!" said Mrs. Crane.

"Of course, hanged," returned Losely, resuming the reckless voice and manner in which there was that peculiar levity which comes from hardness of heart, as from the steel's hardness comes the blade's play. "But if a man did not sometimes forget consequences, there would be an end of the gallows. I am glad that his eye never left mine." And the leaden head of the switch fell with a dull dumb sound on the floor.

Mrs. Crane made no immediate rejoinder, but fixed on her lawless visitor a gaze in which there was no womanly fear (though Losely's aspect and gesture might have sent a thrill through the nerves of many a hardy man), but which was not without womanly compassion, her countenance gradually softening more and more, as if under the influence of recollections mournful but not hostile. At length she said in a low voice, "Poor Jasper! Is all the vain ambition that made you so false shrunk into a ferocity that finds you so powerless? Would your existence, after all, have been harder, poorer, meaner, if your faith had been kept to me?"

Evidently disliking that turn in the conversation, but checking a reply which might have been rude had no visions of five pounds, ten pounds, loomed in the distance, Mr. Losely said, "Pshaw! Bella, pshaw! I was a fool, I dare say, and a sad dog, a very sad dog; but I had always the greatest regard for you, and always shall! Hillo, what's that? A knock at the door! Oh, by the by, a queer-looking man, in a white hat, called at the same time I did, to see you on private business, gave way to me, said he should come again; may I ask who he is?"

"I cannot guess; no one ever calls here on business except the tax- gatherer."

The old woman-servant now entered. "A gentleman, ma'am; says his name is Rugge."

"Rugge,—Rugge; let me think."

"I am here, Mrs. Crane," said the manager, striding in. "You don't, perhaps, call me to mind by name; but—oho! not gone, sir! Do I intrude prematurely?"

"No, I have done; good-day, my dear Mrs. Crane."

"Stay, Jasper. I remember you now, Mr. Rugge; take a chair."

She whispered a few words into Losely's ear, then turned to the manager, and said aloud, "I saw you at Mr. Waife's lodging, at the time he had that bad accident."

"And I had the honour to accompany you home, ma'am, and—but shall I speak out before this gentleman?"

"Certainly; you see he is listening to you with attention. This gentleman and I have no secrets from each other. What has become of that person? This gentleman wishes to know."

LOSELY.—"Yes, sir, I wish to know-particularly."

RUGGE.—"So do I; that is partly what I came about. You are aware, I think, ma'am, that I engaged him and Juliet Araminta, that is, Sophy."

LOSELY.—"Sophy? engaged them, sir,—how?"

RUGGE.—"Theatrical line, sir,—Rugge's Exhibition; he was a great actor once, that fellow Waife."

LOSELY.—"Oh, actor! well, sir, go on."

RUGGE (who in the course of his address turns from the lady to the gentleman, from the gentleman to the lady, with appropriate gesture and appealing look).—"But he became a wreck, a block of a man; lost an eye and his voice too. How ever, to serve him, I took his grandchild and him too. He left me—shamefully, and ran off with his grandchild, sir. Now, ma'am, to be plain with you, that little girl I looked upon as my property,—a very valuable property. She is worth a great deal to me, and I have been done out of her. If you can help me to get her back, articled and engaged say for three years, I am willing and happy, ma'am, to pay something handsome,—uncommon handsome."

MRS. CRANE (loftily).—"Speak to that gentleman; he may treat with you."

LOSELY.—"What do you call uncommon handsome, Mr.—Mr. Tugge?"

RUGGE.—"Rugge! Sir; we sha'n't disagree, I hope, provided you have the power to get Waife to bind the girl to me."

LOSELY.—"I may have the power to transfer the young lady to your care— young lady is a more respectful phrase than girl—and possibly to dispense with Mr. Waife's consent to such arrangement. But excuse me if I say that I must know a little more of yourself, before I could promise to exert such a power on your behalf."

RUGGE.—"Sir, I shall be proud to improve our acquaintance. As to Waife, the old vagabond, he has injured and affronted me, sir. I don't bear malice, but I have a spirit: Britons have a spirit, sir. And you will remember, ma'am, that when I accompanied you home, I observed that Mr. Waife was a mysterious man, and had apparently known better days, and that when a man is mysterious, and falls into the sear and yellow leaf, ma'am, without that which should accompany old age, sir, one has a right to suspect that some time or other, he has done something or other, ma'am, which makes him fear lest the very stones prate of his whereabout, sir. And you did not deny, ma'am, that the mystery was suspicious; but you said, with uncommon good sense, that it was nothing to me what Mr. Waife had once been, so long as he was of use to me at that particular season. Since then, sir, he has ceased to be of use,—ceased, too, in the unhandsomest manner. And if you would, ma'am, from a sense of justice, just unravel the mystery, put me in possession of the secret, it might make that base man of use to me again, give me a handle over him, sir, so that I might awe him into restoring my property, as, morally speaking, Juliet Araminta most undoubtedly is. That's why I call,— leaving my company, to which I am a father, orphans for the present. But I have missed that little girl,—that young lady, sir. I called her a phenomenon, ma'am; missed her much: it is natural, sir, I appeal to you. No man can be done out of a valuable property and not feel it, if he has a heart in his bosom. And if I had her back safe, I should indulge ambition. I have always had ambition. The theatre at York, sir,—that is my ambition; I had it from a child, sir; dreamed of it three tunes, ma'am. If I had back my property in that phenomenon, I would go at the thing, slap-bang, take the York, and bring out the phenomenon with A CLAW!"

LOSELY (musingly).—"You say the young lady is a phenomenon, and for this phenomenon you are willing to pay something handsome,—a vague expression. Put it into L. s. d."

RUGGE.—"Sir, if she can be bound to me legally for three years, I would give L100. I did offer to Waife L50,—to you, sir, L100."

Losely's eyes flashed, and his hands opened restlessly. "But, confound it, where is she? Have you no clew?"

RUGGE.—"No, but we can easily find one; it was not worth my while to hunt them up before I was quite sure that, if I regained my property in that phenomenon, the law would protect it."

MRS. CRANE (moving to the door).—"Well, Jasper Losely, you will sell the young lady, I doubt not; and when you have sold her, let me know." She came back and whispered, "You will not perhaps now want money from me, but I shall see you again; for, if you would find the child, you will need my aid."

"Certainly, my dear friend, I will call again; honour bright."

Mrs. Crane here bowed to the gentlemen, and swept out of the room.

Thus left alone, Losely and Rugge looked at each other with a shy and yet cunning gaze,—Rugge's hands in his trouser's pockets, his head thrown back; Losely's hands in voluntarily expanded, his head bewitchingly bent forward, and a little on one side.

"Sir," said Rugge, at length, "what do you say to a chop and a pint of wine? Perhaps we could talk more at our ease elsewhere. I am only in town for a day; left my company thirty miles off,—orphans, as I said before."

"Mr. Rugge," said Losely, "I have no desire to stay in London, or indeed in England; and the sooner we can settle this matter the better. Grant that we find the young lady, you provide for her board and lodging; teach her your honourable profession; behave, of course, kindly to her."

"Like a father."

"And give to me the sum of L100?"

"That is, if you can legally make her over to me. But, sir, may I inquire by what authority you would act in this matter?"

"On that head it will be easy to satisfy you; meanwhile I accept your proposal of an early dinner. Let us adjourn; is it to your house?"

"I have no exact private house in London; but I know a public one, —commodious."

"Be it so. After you, sir."

As they descended the stairs, the old woman-servant stood at the street door. Rugge went out first; the woman detained Losely. "Do you find her altered?"

"Whom? Mrs. Crane?—why, years will tell. But you seem to have known me; I don't remember you."

"Not Bridget Greggs?"

"Is it possible? I left you a middle-aged, rosy-faced woman. True, I recognize you now. There's a crown for you. I wish I had more to spare!"

Bridget pushed back the silver.

"No; I dare not! Take money from you, Jasper Losely! Mistress would not forgive me!"

Losely, not unreluctantly, restored the crown to his pocket; and, with a snort rather than sigh of relief, stepped into open daylight. As he crossed the street to join Rugge, who was waiting for him on the shady side, he mechanically turned to look back at the house, and, at the open window of an upper story, he beheld again those shining eyes which had glared down on him from the stairs. He tried to smile, and waved his hand feebly. The eyes seemed to return the smile; and as he walked down the street, arm-in-arm with the ruffian manager, slowly recovering his springy step, and in the gloss of the new garments that set forth his still symmetrical proportions, the eyes followed him watchfully, steadfastly, till his form had vanished, and the dull street was once more a solitude.

Then Arabella Crane turned from the window. Putting her hand to her heart, "How it beats!" she muttered; "if in love or in hate, in scorn or in pity, beats once more with a human emotion. He will come again; whether for money or for woman's wit, what care I?—he will come. I will hold, I will cling to him, no more to part; for better for worse, as it should have been once at the altar. And the child?" she paused; was it in compunction? "The child!" she continued fiercely, and as if lashing herself into rage, "the child of that treacherous, hateful mother,—yes! I will help him to sell her back as a stage-show,—help him in all that does not lift her to a state from which she may look down with disdain on me. Revenge on her, on that cruel house: revenge is sweet. Oh! that it were revenge alone that bids me cling to him who deserves revenge the most." She closed her burning eyes, and sat down droopingly, rocking herself to and fro like one in pain.

CHAPTER XVII

In life it is difficult to say who do you the most mischief—enemies with the worst intentions, or friends with the best.

The conference between Mr. Rugge and Mr. Losely terminated in an appointment to meet, the next day, at the village in which this story opened. Meanwhile Mr. Rugge would return to his "orphans," and arrange performances in which for some days they might dispense with a father's part. Losely, on his side, undertook to devote the intervening hours to consultation with a solicitor to whom Mr. Rugge recommended him as to the prompt obtaining of legal powers to enforce the authority he asserted himself to possess. He would also persuade Mrs. Crane to accompany him to the village and aid in the requisite investigations; entertaining a tacit but instinctive belief in the superiority of her acuteness. "Set a female to catch a female," quoth Mr. Rugge.

On the day and in the place thus fixed the three hunters opened their chase. They threw off at the Cobbler's stall. They soon caught the same scent which had been followed by the lawyer's clerk. They arrived at Mrs. Saunders's; there the two men would have been at fault like their predecessor. But the female was more astute. To drop the metaphor Mrs. Saunders could not stand the sharp cross-examination of one of her own sex. "That woman deceives us," said Mrs. Crane on leaving the house." They have not gone to London. What could they do there? Any man with a few stage juggling tricks can get on in country villages but would be lost in cities. Perhaps, as it seems he has got a dog,—we have found out that from Mrs. Saunders,—he will make use of it for an itinerant puppet-show."