CHAPTER IV.
DEFEATED AND WRONGED.
HE had walked a long way before he came to himself out of those whirling circles of thought in which the mind gets involved when it is suddenly stung by a great wrong, or startled by a poignant incident. With this strong pressure upon him, he had gone right away into the Strand, and along that busy line of streets into the din and crowds of the city, feeling, like a deaf man, that the noise around made it more possible to hear the voice of his own thoughts, and to endure the clangour of his heart beating in his ears. He walked fast, not turning to the right nor to the left, straight through the bewildering throng in which every man had his own little world of incident, of sentiment, and feeling undisturbed by the contact of others on every side.
At first it had been the keen tooth of that wrong, the undeserved disgrace that had fallen upon him, which had occupied all his sensations. But by degrees other thoughts came in. He had left Edgeley in haste to strike his blow for fortune and reputation, though he was so young, to qualify himself for a new phase of life, to put himself nearer at least to the level of Elly, to justify his own pretensions to her. The scene in Mrs. Egerton’s room suddenly flashed before him as he walked, adding another and yet sharper blow to that which he had already received. He had said that he would succeed, that he should be rich, that he had the ball at his foot. This morning when he came out of his lodgings he had felt the ball at his foot. How could it be otherwise? He knew the value of his own work. It was a work much wanted, upon which the comfort of a district, the value of the property in it, and the lives of its inhabitants might depend. And he felt convinced that he had hit upon the right way of remedying this fault of nature which had given so much trouble and cost so much suffering. What hours and hours he had thought of it and turned it over! What quires of paper he had covered with his calculations! It did not perhaps seem romantic work; but all the poetry in John’s nature had gone into it. It had been Elly’s work, too, though Elly could not have done one of all those endless mathematical exercises. It had occupied his mind for two at least of those early lovely years in which imagination is so sweet: and his imaginations had been sweet, though they had to do, you would have said, with things not lovely, cuttings and embankments, and drawings, and figures upon figures, armies of them, calculations without end. His very walks and the exercise he took, the boating which was his favourite recreation when he had any time, had all been inspired and accompanied by this. While he waited outside a lock, he was busy calculating its fall, and the weight and force of the water, and studying the banks high or low, for his purpose. He had grown learned in the formations of the district, in its geology and its productions with the same motive. He had marked unconsciously where wood could be got at and bricks made for the future works, and when his eye travelled over the river flats to the line of cottages with dull lines upon their lower storey, showing the flood-mark to which the water had risen, there rose in him a fine fervour as he thought that by-and-by all such dangers should come to an end. Thoughts frivolous and unworthy, the light and trifling mental dissipations that beguile young minds, and the insidious curiosities and temptations with which they play, were all crowded out by these imaginations, which were so practical, so professional, so enthusiastic, so full of the poetry of reality. This was the way in which many months had been occupied. And now——!
It was a long time before John had sufficiently calmed himself down, and got the mastery of those whirling circles of ever-recurring thought which almost maddened him at first, to face the situation as it now stood. At first, and for a long time, it appeared to him that ruin as complete as it was undeserved had overwhelmed him; his good fame seemed to be gone, and the bitterness of the thought that people who knew him, and knew him so well, and who had years of experience of his integrity and faithful service, should have at once believed him guilty of such treachery, seemed to drown him in a hopeless flood; for how should he convince strangers of his honour if they had no faith in it? or how attempt to clear himself professionally when two of the chief authorities in his profession believed him to have behaved so? Would it be the best way, the only way, to shake the dust from off his feet and rush away to the end of the world where a man could work, if it were the roughest navvy work, and be free from false accusation and the horror of seeing himself falsely condemned. But, then, Elly! John plunged again deeper than ever into that blackness of darkness. He had boasted in his self-confidence of the success which was awaiting him, of the certainty of his prospects. He remembered now how Mrs. Egerton had shaken her head. And now here he stood with his success turned into failure, his confidence into despair; the people who knew him best refusing to hear him. He had no fear that Elly would refuse to hear him; but who else would believe? They would not, indeed, believe that he had been treacherous, or played a villain’s part, as the Barretts did; but they would think that he had mistaken his own powers, that he was not what he imagined, that his account of himself was a boy’s brag, and not a sober estimate of what he knew he could do. And how convince them, how remedy the evil? Was it possible that any remedy would ever be found?
He had gained a little calm when he began to ask himself this question. Out of the whirl of painful thoughts and passionate entanglement of all the perplexities round him, he suddenly came to a clear spot from which he could look behind and after. He found himself on the bridge crossing the river, having got there he scarcely knew how, coming back in the direction of the office and of his lodgings after a feverish round through all the noise of London. As he walked across the bridge, there suddenly came to him a recollection of his first beginning—how he had paused there with the letter in his hand with which he had been sent to the Messrs. Barrett by his mother. He had paused, angry and wounded and sore, and looked down upon the outward-bound ships, and for a moment had thought of forsaking this cold, unkindly world in which he had no longer any home or anyone who loved him, of tossing the letter into the river and going his own way, and taking upon himself the responsibility of his own life. He had not carried out that wild resolution. He had swallowed all his repugnances, his pride, his rebellious feelings, and accepted the more dutiful way: and till now he had never repented that decision. He paused again, and before him lay the same great stream leading out into the unknown, the same ships ready to carry him thither, into a world all strange, where nobody would know John Sandford had ever been accused of falsehood. The repetition of this scene and suggestion gave him a certain shock, and brought him back sharply to himself. John Sandford, John May—he had not then been sure which he was—his heart had risen against the woman who was his mother, who had distrusted him and taken from him his father’s name. Now he was more or less ashamed of the boyish rashness which had set him against her decision in this respect. He was John Sandford now, beyond any question. What if, perhaps, this fever of indignation and despair which was in his veins might die down and pass away, as the other had done?
This brought him back to more particular questions. He had felt no doubt from the first moment as to what had really happened: that the man whom he had so foolishly trusted, whom he had no reason to trust, had played him false, and carried off the copy which John had given him to do, out of what had appeared to him pure benevolence, Christian charity—to the rival firm. That was perfectly clear to him, though in his indignation and fury he would not pause to explain. If it was explained ever so, it would not restore the scheme thus betrayed to its original importance, or place it, as he had intended, in all its novelty and originality and ingeniousness, in the hands best able to carry it out. In any case, his secret was broken, his ideas exposed to curious and eager competitors who might, and probably would, take instant advantage of them. John still felt that he was ruined, however it might turn out. And yet he might clear his honour at least, and show how he had been himself betrayed. He had begun to acknowledge this possibility, to breathe more freely, to feel the fumes of passion dispersing, and the real landscape, chilled and grey with all the rosy illusions of hope disappearing, yet still real and solid under his feet, once more coming into his sight, when he became suddenly aware of an approaching figure, very unwelcome, most undesirable to meet at such a moment, yet not to be ignored. Why should he turn up precisely now, that chance acquaintance to whom John had committed himself in the impatience of his boyhood, and with whom he had a sort of irregular, fictitious intercourse, more congenial to Montressor’s profession and ways than to his own? It brought a sort of ludicrous element into his trouble to meet this man, to whom he was not himself but another, a being who had never existed save for that one night on which he had enacted a sort of little single-scene tragic-comedy as John May. Montressor was not a person to be eluded: he came forward with his hands stretched out, his shiny hat bearing down over the heads of the other passengers upon John, as if it had been a flag carried aloft, with the directest and straightest impulse.
‘Me dear young friend,’ he said, ‘me brave boy! how glad I am to see ye.’
Montressor was a little better dressed than usual. The shiny hat was new, or almost new, though it had somehow caught the characteristics of the old one. His coat was good, his well-brushed aspect no longer giving so distinct an accentuation to his shabbiness. He put his arm within John’s in the fervour of having much to say.
‘Fate’s been good to me,’ he said, ‘and when it’s so in great things ’tis also in small. Here have I been watching for ye, wondering would ye pass hereabouts, to tell ye, me young friend, that once again good luck has come Montressor’s way.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said John; but what he felt was only a sort of dull half pang additional, a sense that good luck might now come in anyone’s way save his, which was closed to it for evermore.
‘That I’m sure of,’ said the actor, ‘it isn’t very much we’ve seen of ye, John May, and I don’t even know where to find ye. To tell the truth, in me shabbiness and me poverty I didn’t care to know: for meeting you in the street is one thing and pursuing you to your lodging is another. No. Montressor was not one to shame his friends, even though ’twas virtuous poverty. But rejoice with me, me young friend—that phase is over, never, I hope, to come me way again.’
‘Have you got an engagement?’ asked John, wondering and reflecting upon the shabbiness which was as pronounced as ever one short week before.
‘Better than that,’ said the actor. He put his hand to his eyes with a mixture of fiction yet reality. ‘Me eyes are full and so’s my heart. Pardon me, young man. Once you saved her life—never knowing that small thing was the future Rachel, the future Siddons. Me dear friend! it is Edie that has an engagement. Edie, me chyild!’
‘Edie!’ cried John, and then he laughed aloud at the thought. Edie, that baby, to whom he had sent something the other day to buy a doll.
‘Indeed, ’tis Edie, no one else. Ye haven’t seen her for a great while. Ye don’t know that she’s sixteen or near it, and a genius. She has a right to it, sir. It’s hers by inheritance. My chyild, and her mother’s—who under the name of Ada Somerset took leading parts for years—I don’t grudge it to her, me dear May. She has had devoted care. She has had a training, me dear sir, that began in her cradle—and now!’ He laid his hand upon the heart that no doubt was as full of real emotion as if he had not had a word to say on the subject. ‘And she is a good girl, and the ball at her foot,’ he added, in a tremulous tone, with water standing in his eyes.
‘The ball at her foot,’ said John, with a harsh laugh. ‘So had I yesterday—or, at least, so I thought.’
‘There’s something happened to you, me brave boy?’
‘Nothing’s happened: at least, nothing that’s wonderful or out of the way. I’m supposed to have broken trust and disgraced myself. It’s like the things that happen in your stage plays. I’m condemned for something I never thought of, and robbed by one to whom I tried to be kind. Go home and take care of Edie. Never let her try to be kind to anyone,’ John said, ‘it’s fatal; it’s nothing less than ruin.’
‘Me dear boy, open your mind to me, and relieve it of that perilous stuff. It is the best way. Come, tell me. Montressor has but little in his power even now, but what he can do is always at his friends’ disposal; and, if there’s a villain to be hunted down, trust me, me brave boy—I’ll hunt him to the death!’
‘Why should I trouble you with my vexations?’ cried John. But in the end he yielded to the natural satisfaction of recounting all that had happened to a sympathetic—almost too sympathetic—ear. Montressor’s was no indifferent backing of his friend. He threw himself with his whole soul into the wrongs of the unfortunate young man. Indeed, so entirely did he enter into John’s case that John felt himself restored to hopeful life, half by the sympathy, and perhaps a little more than half by the genial absurdity that seemed to glide into everything from Montressor’s devoted zeal. The light came back to the skies more completely in this humorous way than if some happy incident had restored it. He began to see through the exaggeration of his friend’s feeling, that after all there was something laughable in his own despair, and that a man is not ruined in a moment in any such stagy and artificial way.
While this change began to operate, and while John poured forth his tale, he pursued the familiar way to his lodgings instinctively, leading the sympathetic Montressor with him without question asked. The actor had never before penetrated so far. It had not occurred to John to invite him, especially as he had never informed him of his real name. The fact that he had been so foolish as to call himself May to this early acquaintance had raised a barrier between them more effectual than any barrier of prudence or sense that such a friendship was not one to be cultivated. But in the fervour of his confidence, and in the enthusiasm of Montressor’s sympathy, the consolation of it and the ridicule of it, everything else was forgotten. And John found himself at his own door with his faithful sympathiser before he was aware. He had opened it and bidden his friend to enter when his eye was suddenly caught by a slouching figure on the opposite side of the street, which aroused another set of feelings altogether. John thrust Montressor in, calling on him to sit down and wait, and then turning with a bound rushed across the street in the direction of this lounger, who, suddenly taking fright, had turned too, and was hurrying along as fast as a wavering pair of legs would carry him. The legs were unsteady, and little to be depended upon, though sudden panic inspired them, and they were worth nothing in comparison with youth and hot indignation now suddenly set on their track. The chase lasted but a minute. John made up to the fluttering, retreating figure, and was just about, with outstretched hand, to seize him, when the pursued suddenly turned round, meeting him with a rueful, deprecating, yet woefully smiling face, in which the same ridicule which had been rising in John’s mind towards himself was blended with a sort of helpless despair and insinuating prayer for mercy.
‘Stop,’ cried his amanuensis, the traitor who had ruined him, with that rueful smile, ‘I’ll go with you anywhere—take me where you please. I—I can’t defend myself.’
‘What have you done with my papers?’ cried John, trembling with hurry and rage, yet subdued, he could not tell how.
‘I’ll tell you,’ said the other. ‘I’ll tell you everything. Take me somewhere and let me tell you.’
The young man laid his hand upon the old man’s arm, and led him back, feeling somehow his heart melt towards the unresistant sinner. Montressor stood at the door watching this pursuit and capture. He waited for them as they came forward, his face expressing a sort of stupefication of wonder. John only remembered the spectator when he reached the door with his prisoner, and found this startled countenance confronting him.
‘Why, May!’ cried he, turning from one to another. ‘Why, May!’