Ernest Maltravers — Complete

The man of wealth was by no means well acquainted with the nature of the beast before him. He had heard from Mrs. Leslie (as we remember) the outline of Alice’s history, and ascertained that their joint protegee’s father was a great blackguard; but he expected to find Mr. Darvil a mere dull, brutish villain—a peasant-ruffian—a blunt serf, without brains, or their substitute, effrontery. But Luke Darvil was a clever, half-educated fellow: he did not sin from ignorance, but had wit enough to have bad principles, and he was as impudent as if he had lived all his life in the best society. He was not frightened at the banker’s drab breeches and imposing air—not he! The Duke of Wellington would not have frightened Luke Darvil, unless his grace had had the constables for his aides-de-camp.

The banker, to use a homely phrase, was “taken aback.”

“Look you here, Mr. What’s-your-name!” said Darvil, swallowing a glass of the raw alcohol as if it had been water—“look you now—you can’t humbug me. What the devil do you care about my daughter’s respectability or comfort, or anything else, grave old dog as you are! It is my daughter herself you are licking your brown old chaps at!—and, ‘faith, my Alley is a very pretty girl—very—but queer as moonshine. You’ll drive a much better bargain with me than with her.”

The banker coloured scarlet—he bit his lips and measured his companion from head to foot (while the latter lolled on the sofa), as if he were meditating the possibility of kicking him down-stairs. But Luke Darvil would have thrashed the banker and all his clerks into the bargain. His frame was like a trunk of thews and muscles, packed up by that careful dame, Nature, as tightly as possible; and a prizefighter would have thought twice before he had entered the ring against so awkward a customer. The banker was a man prudent to a fault, and he pushed his chair six inches back, as he concluded his survey.

“Sir,” then said he, very quietly, “do not let us misunderstand each other. Your daughter is safe from your control—if you molest her, the law will protect—”

“She is not of age,” said Darvil. “Your health, old boy.”

“Whether she is of age or not,” returned the banker, unheeding the courtesy conveyed in the last sentence, “I do not care three straws—I know enough of the law to know that if she have rich friends in this town, and you have none, she will be protected and you will go to the treadmill.”

“That is spoken like a sensible man,” said Darvil, for the first time with a show of respect in his manner; “you now take a practical view of matters, as we used to say at the spouting-club.”

“If I were in your situation, Mr. Darvil, I tell you what I would do. I would leave my daughter and this town to-morrow morning, and I would promise never to return, and never to molest her, on condition she allowed me a certain sum from her earnings, paid quarterly.”

“And if I preferred living with her?”

“In that case, I, as a magistrate of this town, would have you sent away as a vagrant, or apprehended—”

“Ha!”

“Apprehended on suspicion of stealing that gold chain and seals which you wear so ostentatiously.”

“By goles, but you’re a clever fellow,” said Darvil, involuntarily; “you know human natur.”

The banker smiled: strange to say, he was pleased with the compliment.

“But,” resumed Darvil, helping himself to another slice of beef, “you are in the wrong box—planted in Queer Street, as we say in London; for if you care a d—n about my daughter’s respectability, you will never muzzle her father on suspicion of theft—and so there’s tit for tat, my old gentleman!”

“I shall deny that you are her father, Mr. Darvil; and I think you will find it hard to prove the fact in any town where I am a magistrate.”

“By goles, what a good prig you would have made! You are as sharp as a gimlet. Surely you were brought up at the Old Bailey!”

“Mr. Darvil, be ruled. You seem a man not deaf to reason, and I ask you whether, in any town in this country, a poor man in suspicious circumstances can do anything against a rich man whose character is established? Perhaps you are right in the main: I have nothing to do with that. But I tell you that you shall quit this house in half an hour—that you shall never enter it again but at your peril; and if you do—within ten minutes from that time you shall be in the town gaol. It is no longer a contest between you and your defenceless daughter; it is a contest between—”

“A tramper in fustian, and a gemman as drives a coach,” interrupted Darvil, laughing bitterly, yet heartily. “Good—good!”

The banker rose. “I think you have made a very clever definition,” said he. “Half an hour—you recollect—good evening.”

“Stay,” said Darvil; “you are the first man I have seen for many a year that I can take a fancy to. Sit down—sit down, I say, and talk a bit, and we shall come to terms soon, I dare say;—that’s right. Lord! how I should like to have you on the roadside instead of within these four gimcrack walls. Ha! ha! the argufying would be all in my favour then.”

The banker was not a brave man, and his colour changed slightly at the intimation of this obliging wish. Darvil eyed him grimly and chucklingly.

The rich man resumed: “That may or may not be, Mr. Darvil, according as I might happen or not to have pistols about me. But to the point. Quit this house without further debate, without noise, without mentioning to any one else your claim upon its owner—”

“Well, and the return?”

“Ten guineas now, and the same sum quarterly, as long as the young lady lives in this town, and you never persecute her by word or letter.”

“That is forty guineas a year. I can’t live upon it.”

“You will cost less in the House of Correction, Mr. Darvil.”

“Come, make it a hundred: Alley is cheap at that.”

“Not a farthing more,” said the banker, buttoning up his breeches pockets with a determined air.

“Well, out with the shiners.”

“Do you promise or not?”

“I promise.”

“There are your ten guineas. If in half an hour you are not gone—why, then—”

“Then?”

“Why, then you have robbed me of ten guineas, and must take the usual consequences of robbery.”

Darvil started to his feet—his eyes glared—he grasped the carving-knife before him.

“You are a bold fellow,” said the banker, quietly; “but it won’t do. It is not worth your while to murder me; and I am a man sure to be missed.”

Darvil sank down, sullen and foiled. The respectable man was more than a match for the villain.

“Had you been as poor as I,—Gad! what a rogue you would have been!”

“I think not,” said the banker; “I believe roguery to be a very bad policy. Perhaps once I was almost as poor as you are, but I never turned rogue.”

“You never were in my circumstances,” returned Darvil, gloomily. “I was a gentleman’s son. Come, you shall hear my story. My father was well-born, but married a maid-servant when he was at college; his family disowned him, and left him to starve. He died in the struggle against a poverty he was not brought up to, and my dam went into service again; became housekeeper to an old bachelor—sent me to school—but mother had a family by the old bachelor, and I was taken from school and put to trade. All hated me—for I was ugly; damn them! Mother cut me—I wanted money—robbed the old bachelor—was sent to gaol, and learned there a lesson or two how to rob better in future. Mother died,—I was adrift on the world. The world was my foe—could not make it up with the world, so we went to war;—you understand, old boy? Married a poor woman and pretty;—wife made me jealous—had learned to suspect every one. Alice born—did not believe her mine: not like me—perhaps a gentleman’s child. I hate—I loathe gentlemen. Got drunk one night—kicked my wife in the stomach three weeks after her confinement. Wife died—tried for my life—got off. Went to another county—having had a sort of education, and being sharp eno’, got work as a mechanic. Hated work just as I hated gentlemen—for was I not by blood a gentleman? There was the curse. Alice grew up; never looked on her as my flesh and blood. Her mother was a w——! Why should not she be one? There, that’s enough. Plenty of excuse, I think, for all I have ever done. Curse the world—curse the rich—curse the handsome—curse—curse all!”

“You have been a very foolish man,” said the banker; “and seem to me to have had very good cards, if you had known how to play them. However, that is your lookout. It is not yet too late to repent; age is creeping on you.—Man, there is another world.”

The banker said the last words with a tone of solemn and even dignified adjuration.

“You think so—do you?” said Darvil, staring at him.

“From my soul I do.”

“Then you are not the sensible man I took you for,” replied Darvil, drily; “and I should like to talk to you on that subject.”

But our Dives, however sincere a believer, was by no means one

“At whose control Despair and anguish fled the struggling soul.”

He had words of comfort for the pious, but he had none for the sceptic—he could soothe, but he could not convert. It was not in his way; besides, he saw no credit in making a convert of Luke Darvil. Accordingly, he again rose with some quickness, and said:

“No, sir; that is useless, I fear, and I have no time to spare; and so once more good night to you.”

“But you have not arranged where my allowance is to be sent.”

“Ah! true; I will guarantee it. You will find my name sufficient security.”

“At least, it is the best I can get,” returned Darvil, carelessly; “and after all, it is not a bad chance day’s work. But I’m sure I can’t say where the money shall be sent. I don’t know a man who would not grab it.”

“Very well, then—the best thing (I speak as a man of business) will be to draw on me for ten guineas quarterly. Wherever you are staying, any banker can effect this for you. But mind, if ever you overdraw the account stops.”

“I understand,” said Darvil; “and when I have finished the bottle I shall be off.”

“You had better,” replied the banker, as he opened the door.

The rich man returned home hurriedly. “So Alice, after all, has some gentle blood in her veins,” thought he. “But that father—no, it will never do. I wish he were hanged and nobody the wiser. I should very much like to arrange the matter without marrying; but then—scandal—scandal—scandal. After all, I had better give up all thoughts of her. She is monstrous handsome, and so—humph:—I shall never grow an old man.”

CHAPTER VIII

“Began to bend down his admiring eyes On all her touching looks and qualities, Turning their shapely sweetness every way Till ‘twas his food and habit day by day.” LEIGH HUNT.

THERE must have been a secret something about Alice Darvil singularly captivating, that (associated as she was with images of the most sordid and the vilest crimes) left her still pure and lovely alike in the eyes of a man as fastidious as Ernest Maltravers, and of a man as influenced by all the thoughts and theories of the world as the shrewd banker of C———. Amidst things foul and hateful had sprung up this beautiful flower, as if to preserve the inherent heavenliness and grace of human nature, and proclaim the handiwork of God in scenes where human nature had been most debased by the abuses of social art; and where the light of God Himself was most darkened and obscured. That such contrasts, though rarely and as by chance, are found, every one who has carefully examined the wastes and deserts of life must own. I have drawn Alice Darvil scrupulously from life, and I can declare that I have not exaggerated hue or lineament in the portrait. I do not suppose, with our good banker, that she owed anything, unless it might be a greater delicacy of form and feature, to whatever mixture of gentle blood was in her veins. But, somehow or other, in her original conformation there was the happy bias of the plantes towards the Pure and the Bright. For, despite Helvetius, a common experience teaches us that though education and circumstances may mould the mass, Nature herself sometimes forms the individual, and throws into the clay, or its spirit, so much of beauty or deformity, that nothing can utterly subdue the original elements of character. From sweets one draws poison—from poisons another extracts but sweets. But I, often deeply pondering over the psychological history of Alice Darvil, think that one principal cause why she escaped the early contaminations around her was in the slow and protracted development of her intellectual faculties. Whether or not the brutal violence of her father had in childhood acted through the nerves upon the brain, certain it is that until she knew Maltravers—until she loved—till she was cherished—her mind had seemed torpid and locked up. True, Darvil had taught her nothing, nor permitted her to be taught anything; but that mere ignorance would have been no preservation to a quick, observant mind. It was the bluntness of the senses themselves that operated tike an armour between her mind and the vile things around her. It was the rough, dull covering of the chrysalis, framed to bear rude contact and biting weather, that the butterfly might break forth, winged and glorious, in due season. Had Alice been a quick child, Alice would have probably grown up a depraved and dissolute woman; but she comprehended, she understood little or nothing, till she found an inspirer in that affection which inspires both beast and man; which makes the dog (in his natural state one of the meanest of the savage race) a companion, a guardian, a protector, and raises Instinct half-way to the height of Reason.

The banker had a strong regard for Alice; and when he reached home, he heard with great pain that she was in a high state of fever. She remained beneath his roof that night, and the elderly gentlewoman, his relation and gouvernante, attended her. The banker slept but little; and the next morning his countenance was unusually pale. Towards daybreak Alice had fallen into a sound and refreshing sleep; and when, on waking, she found, by a note from her host, that her father had left her house, and she might return in safety and without fear, a violent flood of tears, followed by long and grateful prayer, contributed to the restoration of her mind and nerves. Imperfect as this young woman’s notions of abstract right and wrong still were, she was yet sensible to the claims of a father (no matter how criminal) upon his child: for feelings with her were so good and true, that they supplied in a great measure the place of principles. She knew that she could not have lived under the same roof with her dreadful parent; but she still felt an uneasy remorse at thinking he had been driven from that roof in destitution and want. She hastened to dress herself and seek an audience with her protector; and the latter found with admiration and pleasure that he had anticipated her own instantaneous and involuntary design in the settlement made upon Darvil. He then communicated to Alice the compact he had already formed with her father, and she wept and kissed his hand when she heard, and secretly resolved that she would work hard to be enabled to increase the sum allowed. Oh, if her labours could serve to retrieve a parent from the necessity of darker resources for support! Alas! when crime has become a custom, it is like gaming or drinking—the excitement is wanting; and had Luke Darvil been suddenly made inheritor of the wealth of a Rothschild, he would either still have been a villain in one way or the other; or ennui would have awakened conscience, and he would have died of the change of habit.

Our banker always seemed more struck by Alice’s moral feelings than even by her physical beauty. Her love for her child, for instance, impressed him powerfully, and he always gazed upon her with softer eyes when he saw her caressing or nursing the little fatherless creature, whose health was now delicate and precarious. It is difficult to say whether he was absolutely in love with Alice; the phrase is too strong, perhaps, to be applied to a man past fifty, who had gone through emotions and trials enough to wear away freshness from his heart. His feelings altogether for Alice, the designs he entertained towards her, were of a very complicated nature; and it will be long, perhaps, before the reader can thoroughly comprehend them. He conducted Alice home that day; but he said little by the way, perhaps because his female relation, for appearance’ sake, accompanied them also. He, however, briefly cautioned Alice on no account to communicate to any one that it was her father who had been her visitor; and she still shuddered too much at the reminiscence to appear likely to converse on it. The banker also judged it advisable to be so far confidential with Alice’s servant as to take her aside, and tell her that the inauspicious stranger of the previous evening had been a very distant relation of Mrs. Butler, who, from a habit of drunkenness, had fallen into evil and disorderly courses. The banker added with a sanctified air that he trusted, by a little serious conversation, he had led the poor man to better notions, and that he had gone home with an altered mind to his family. “But, my good Hannah,” he concluded, “you know you are a superior person, and above the vulgar sin of indiscriminate gossip; therefore, mention what has occurred to no one; it can do no good to Mrs. Butler—it may hurt the man himself, who is well-to-do—better off than he seems; and who, I hope, with grace, may be a sincere penitent; and it will also—but that is nothing—very seriously displease me. By the by, Hannah, I shall be able to get your grandson into the Free School.”

The banker was shrewd enough to perceive that he had carried his point; and he was walking home, satisfied, on the whole, with the way matters had been arranged, when he was met by a brother magistrate.

“Ha!” said the latter, “and how are you, my good sir? Do you know that we have had the Bow Street officers here, in search of a notorious villain who has broken from prison? He is one of the most determined and dexterous burglars in all England, and the runners have hunted him into our town. His very robberies have tracked him by the way. He robbed a gentleman the day before yesterday of his watch, and left him for dead on the road—this was not thirty miles hence.”

“Bless me!” said the banker, with emotion; “and what is the wretch’s name?”

“Why, he has as many aliases as a Spanish grandee; but I believe the last name he has assumed is Peter Watts.”

“Oh!” said our friend, relieved,—“well, have the runners found him?”

“No, but they are on his scent. A fellow answering to his description was seen by the man at the toll-bar, at daybreak this morning, on the way to F———; the officers are after him.”

“I hope he may meet with his deserts—and crime is never unpunished even in this world. My best compliments to your lady:—and how is little Jack?—Well! glad to hear it—fine boy, little Jack! good day.”

“Good day, my dear sir. Worthy man, that!”

CHAPTER IX

“But who is this? thought he, a demon vile. With wicked meaning and a vulgar style; Hammond they call him—they can give the name Of man to devils. Why am I so tame? Why crush I not the viper? Fear replied, Watch him a while, and let his strength be tried.” CRABBE.

THE next morning, after breakfast, the banker took his horse—a crop-eared, fast-trotting hackney—and merely leaving word that he was going upon business into the country, and should not return to dinner, turned his back on the spires of C———.

He rode slowly, for the day was hot. The face of the country, which was fair and smiling, might have tempted others to linger by the way; but our hard and practical man of the world was more influenced by the weather than the loveliness of the scenery. He did not look upon Nature with the eye of imagination; perhaps a railroad, had it then and there existed, would have pleased him better than the hanging woods, the shadowy valleys, and the changeful river that from time to time beautified the landscape on either side the road. But, after all, there is a vast deal of hypocrisy in the affected admiration for Nature;—and I don’t think one person in a hundred cares for what lies by the side of a road, so long as the road itself is good, hills levelled, and turnpikes cheap.

It was midnoon, and many miles had been passed, when the banker turned down a green lane and quickened his pace. At the end of about three-quarters of an hour, he arrived at a little solitary inn, called “The Angler,”—put up his horse, ordered his dinner at six o’clock—begged to borrow a basket to hold his fish—and it was then apparent that a longish cane he had carried with him was capable of being extended into a fishing-rod. He fitted in the various joints with care, as if to be sure no accident had happened to the implement by the journey—pried anxiously into the contents of a black case of lines and flies—slung the basket behind his back, and while his horse was putting down his nose and whisking about his tail, in the course of those nameless coquetries that horses carry on with hostlers—our worthy brother of the rod strode rapidly through some green fields, gained the riverside, and began fishing with much semblance of earnest interest in the sport. He had caught one trout, seemingly by accident—for the astonished fish was hooked up on the outside of its jaw—probably while in the act, not of biting, but of gazing at, the bait, when he grew discontented with the spot he had selected; and, after looking round as if to convince himself that he was not liable to be disturbed or observed (a thought hateful to the fishing fraternity), he stole quickly along the margin, and finally quitting the riverside altogether, struck into a path that, after a sharp walk of nearly all hour, brought him to the door of a cottage. He knocked twice, and then entered of his own accord—nor was it till the summer sun was near its decline that the banker regained his inn. His simple dinner, which they had delayed in wonder at the protracted absence of the angler, and in expectation of the fishes he was to bring back to be fried, was soon despatched; his horse was ordered to the door, and the red clouds in the west already betokened the lapse of another day, as he spurred from the spot on the fast-trotting hackney, fourteen miles an hour.

“That ‘ere gemman has a nice bit of blood,” said the hostler, scratching his ear.

“Oiy,—who be he?” said a hanger-on of the stables.

“I dooan’t know. He has been here twice afoar, and he never cautches anything to sinnify—he be mighty fond of fishing, surely.”

Meanwhile, away sped the banker—milestone on milestone glided by—and still, scarce turning a hair, trotted gallantly out the good hackney. But the evening grew darker, and it began to rain; a drizzling, persevering rain, that wets a man through ere he is aware of it. After his fiftieth year, a gentleman who has a tender regard for himself does not like to get wet; and the rain inspired the banker, who was subject to rheumatism, with the resolution to take a short cut along the fields. There were one or two low hedges by this short way, but the banker had been there in the spring, and knew every inch of the ground. The hackney leaped easily—and the rider had a tolerably practised seat—and two miles saved might just prevent the menaced rheumatism: accordingly, our friend opened a white gate, and scoured along the fields without any misgivings as to the prudence of his choice. He arrived at his first leap—there was the hedge, its summit just discernible in the dim light. On the other side, to the right was a haystack, and close by this haystack seemed the most eligible place for clearing the obstacle. Now since the banker had visited this place, a deep ditch, that served as a drain, had been dug at the opposite base of the hedge, of which neither horse nor man was aware, so that the leap was far more perilous than was anticipated. Unconscious of this additional obstacle, the rider set off in a canter. The banker was high in air, his loins bent back, his rein slackened, his right hand raised knowingly—when the horse took fright at an object crouched by the haystack—swerved, plunged midway into the ditch, and pitched its rider two or three yards over its head. The banker recovered himself sooner than might have been expected; and, finding himself, though bruised and shaken, still whole and sound, hastened to his horse. But the poor animal had not fared so well as its master, and its off-shoulder was either put out or dreadfully sprained. It had scrambled its way out of the ditch, and there it stood disconsolate by the hedge, as lame as one of the trees that, at irregular intervals, broke the symmetry of the barrier. On ascertaining the extent of his misfortune, the banker became seriously uneasy; the rain increased—he was several miles yet from home—he was in the midst of houseless fields, with another leap before him—the leap he had just passed behind—and no other egress that he knew of into the main road. While these thoughts passed through his brain, he became suddenly aware that he was not alone. The dark object that had frightened his horse rose slowly from the snug corner it had occupied by the haystack, and a gruff voice that made the banker thrill to the marrow of his bones, cried, “Holla, who the devil are you?”