It was a relief for ten minutes, as every catastrophe is; the terrible suspense is cut short—the worst at least is known. But after those ten minutes are over, when the reality suddenly seizes upon the sufferer—when all the vague speechless terrors which he had pushed off from him, with the hope that they might never come, arrive in a flood, and place themselves in one frightful circle round him, like furies, only not merciful enough to have a Medusa among them to freeze him into stone; when every shadowy, gloomy prevision of evil which ever flashed across his mind, to be put away with a shudder, returns with the right of fact, to remain; when not only that thing has happened which has been his dread by day and the horror of his dreams, but a host of other things, circumstances which penetrate to every detail of his life, and affect every creature and every thing he loves, have followed in its train—when all this rushes upon a man after the first tranquillising stupor of despair, who or what is there that can console him? Poor Drummond was helpless in the midst of this great crash of ruin; he was so helpless that the thunder-stricken shareholders and excited clerks who had fallen upon him at first as the only authority to be found, let him slip from among them, hopeless of any help from him. They had driven him wild with questions and appeals—him, a poor fellow who could explain nothing, who had never been of much use except to denude himself of everything he possessed, and pledge his humble name, and be swept into ruin; but they soon saw the uselessness of the appeal. As soon as he could disengage himself he stole away, drawing his hat over his eyes, feeling as if he were a criminal, with the sensation as of a hot fire burning in his heart, and buzzing and crackling in his ears. Was he a criminal? was it his doing? He was stunned by this terrible calamity; and yet, now that it had come, he felt that he had known it was coming, and everything about it, all his life. His whole existence had tended to this point since he was a boy; he knew it, he felt it, he even seemed to remember premonitions of it, which had come to him in his dreams from his earliest days. He went out into the streets in that dumb quiescent state which is so often the first consequence of a great calamity. He offered no remonstrance against his fate. He did not even say to himself that it was hard. He said nothing to himself, indeed, except to croon over, like a chorus, one endless refrain, 'I knew this was how it would be!'
He wandered along, not knowing where he went, till he came to the river, and paused there, looking over the bridge. He did not even know what made him pause, until all at once the fancy jumped into his brain that it would be best to stop there, and cut in one moment the knotted, tangled thread which it was certain no effort of his could ever unravel. He stopped, and the suggestion flashed across him (whether out of his own mind, whether thrown at him by some mocking demon, who could tell?), and then shook his head sadly. No; it was broad day, and there would be a commotion, and he would be rescued—or if not, he, at least his body, would be rescued and carried to Helen, giving her a last association with him which it was insupportable to think of. No, no, he said to himself with a shudder, not now. Just then a hand was laid upon his shoulder; he turned round with the start of a man who feels that nothing is impossible, that everything that is terrible has become likely. Had it been a policeman to arrest him for having murdered somebody he would scarcely have been surprised. But it was not a policeman: it was Mr Burton, fresh and clean and nicely dressed, newly come up from the country, in his light summer clothes, the image of prosperity, and comfort, and cleanliness, and self-satisfaction. A certain golden atmosphere surrounded the man of wealth, like the background on which early painters set a saint; but there was nothing saintly about that apparition. Poor Drummond fell back more than he would have done had it been an arrest for murder. He gave an involuntary glance at himself, feeling in contrast with Mr Burton, as if he must look to the external eye the beggar he was, as if he must be dirty, tattered, miserable, with holes in his shoes and rags at his elbows. Perhaps his woebegone, excited face startled the smooth Philistine at his side as much as if those outward signs of wretchedness had been there.
'Good God, what have you been doing with yourself?' he cried.
'Nothing,' said Drummond vaguely, and then by degrees his senses returned to him. 'If you had been in town yesterday you might have helped us; but it does not matter. Shenken in Liverpool stopped payment yesterday,' he went on, repeating drearily the dreary legend which he had heard at the bank. 'And Rivers's—has stopped payment too.'
'Good God!' said Mr Burton again. It was a shock to him, as every event is when it comes. But he was not surprised. As for Robert, it did not occur to him to consider whether the other was surprised or not, or to be curious how it affected him. He turned his head away and looked at the river again. What attraction there remained for him in this world seemed to lie there.
'Drummond,' said the merchant, looking at him with a certain alarm, 'are you sure you know what you are saying? My God! Rivers's stopped payment! if you had said there had been an earthquake in London it would scarcely be as bad as that.'
Robert did not make any reply. He nodded his head without looking round. What interested him was something black which kept appearing and disappearing in the middle of the turbid muddy stream. It was like a man's head, he thought, and almost felt that he might have taken the plunge without knowing it, and that it might be himself.
'I have felt this was coming,' said Burton. 'I warned Golden you were going on in the wildest way. What could be expected when you fellows who know nothing about money would interfere? Good heavens! to think what a business that was; and all ruined in three years! Drummond! are you mad? Can't you turn round and speak to me? I am one of the shareholders, and I have a right to be answered how it was.'
'Shall you lose much?' said Drummond dreamily, and he turned round without meaning anything and looked in his companion's face. His action was simply fantastical, one of those motiveless movements which the sick soul so often makes; but it was quite unexpected by the other, who fell a step back, and grew red all over, and faltered in his reply.
'Much? I—I—don't know—what you call much. Good heavens, Drummond! are you mad? have you been drinking? Where is Golden?—he at least must know what he is about!'
'Yes,' said the painter fiercely, 'Golden knows what he is about—he has gone off, out of reach of questions—and you—oh—hound!' He gave a sudden cry and made a step forward. A sudden light seemed to burst upon him. He gazed with his dilated bloodshot eyes at the flushed countenance which could not face him. The attitude of the two men was such that the bystanders took note of it; two or three lingered and looked round holding themselves in readiness to interfere. The slight figure of the painter, his ghastly pale face and trembling hand, made him no antagonist for the burly well-to-do merchant; but English sentiment is always on the side of the portly and respectable, and Mr Burton had an unmistakable air of fright upon his face. 'Now, Drummond!—now, Drummond!' he said, with a certain pleading tone. The painter stood still, feeling as if a horrible illumination had suddenly flashed upon the man before him, and the history of their intercourse. He did in that moment of his despair what he could not have done with his ordinary intelligence. He made a rapid summary of the whole and saw how it was. Had he been happy, he would have been too friendly, too charitable, too kind in his thoughts to have drawn such a conclusion. But at this moment he had no time for anything but the terrible truth.
'I see it all,' he said. 'I see it all! It was ruined when you gave it over to us. I see it in every line of your face. Oh, hound! hounds all of you! skulking, dastardly demons, that kill a crowd of honest men to save yourselves—your miserable selves. I see it all!'
'Drummond! I tell you you are mad!'
'Hound!' said Robert again between his clenched teeth. He stood looking at him for a moment with his hands clenched too, and a sombre fire in his eyes. Whether he might have been led into violence had he stood there a moment longer it would be impossible to say. But all the habits of his life were against it, and his very despair restrained him. When he had stood there for a second, he turned round suddenly on his heel without any warning, and almost knocking down a man who was keeping warily behind him ready for any emergency, went away in the opposite direction without saying a word. Burton stood still gazing after him with a mixture of consternation and concern, and something very like hatred. But his face changed when the spectators drew round him to wonder and question. 'Something wrong with that poor gentleman, I fear, sir,' said one. Mr Burton put on a look of regret, sighed deeply, put his hand to his forehead, shook his head, murmured—'Poor fellow!' and—walked away. What could he do? He was not his brother's keeper, much less was he responsible for his cousin's husband—the paltry painter-fellow she had preferred to him. What would Helen think of her bargain now? Mad or drunk, it did not matter which—a pleasant companion for a woman. He preferred to think of this for the moment, rather than of the other question, which was in reality so much more important. Rivers's! Thank heaven he was no money loser, no more than was respectable. He had seen what was coming. Even to himself, this was all that Mr Burton said. He hurried on, however, to learn what people were saying of it, with more anxiety in his mind than seemed necessary. He went to the bank itself with the air of a man going to a funeral. 'The place I have known so long!' he said to another mournful victim who had appeared on the field of the lost battle, but who was not mad like Robert. 'And to think that Golden should have betrayed your confidence! A man I have known since he was that height—a man I could have answered for with my life!'
Meanwhile Drummond strayed on he knew not where. He went back into the City, into the depths of those lanes and narrow streets which he had left so lately, losing himself in a bewildering maze of warehouse walls and echoing traffic. Great waggons jammed him up against the side, loads dangled over his head that would have crushed him in a moment, open cellars yawned for his unsteady feet; but he walked as safe through all those perils as if he had borne a charmed life, though he neither looked nor cared where he was going. His meeting with Burton was forced out of his mind in a few minutes as if it had not been. For the moment it had startled him into mad excitement; but so strong was the stupor of his despair, that in five minutes it was as if it had never been. For hours he kept wandering round and round the scene of his ruin, coming and going in a circle, as if his feet were fast and he could not escape. It had been morning when he left his house. It was late afternoon when he got back. Oh why was it summer and the days so long? if only that scorching sun would have set and darkness fallen over the place. He stole in under cover of the lilac trees, which had grown so big and leafy, and managed to glide down the side-way to the garden and get to the studio door, which he could open with his key. He had been doing nothing but think—think—all the time; but 'now, at least, I shall have time to think,' he said to himself, as he threw himself down on a chair close to the door—the nearest seat—it no longer mattered where he placed himself or how. He sat huddled up against the wall as sometimes a poor model did, waiting wistfully to know if he was wanted,—some poor wretch to whom a shilling was salvation. This fancy, with a thousand others equally inappropriate, flashed across his mind as he sat there, still with his hat pulled down on his brows in the sunny luxurious warmth of the afternoon. The mere atmosphere, air, and sky, and sunshine would have been paradise to the artist in the poorest time he had ever known before, but they did not affect him now. He sat there in his stupor for perhaps an hour, not even able to rouse himself so far as to shut the door of communication into the conservatory, through which he heard now and then the softened stir of the household. He might have been restored to the sense of life and its necessities, might have been brought back out of the delirium of his ruin at that moment, had any one in the house known he was there. Helen was in the drawing-room, separated from him only by that flowery passage which he had made for her, to tempt her to visit him at his work. She was writing notes, inviting some half-dozen people to dinner, as had been arranged between them, but with a heavy and anxious heart, full of misgiving. She had risen from her writing table three or four times to go to the window and look out for her husband, wondering why he should be so long of coming—while he sat so near her. Mrs Drummond's heart was very heavy. She did not understand what he said to her in the morning—could not imagine how it could be. It must be a temporary cloud, a failure of some speculation, something unconnected with the ordinary course of life, she said to herself. Money!—he was not a business man—it could not be money. If it was only money, why that was nothing. Such was the course of her thoughts. And she paused over her invitations, wondering was it right to give them if Robert had been losing money. But they were old friends whom she was inviting—only half a dozen people—and it was for his birthday. She had just finished the last note, when Norah came dancing into the room, claiming her mother's promise to go out with her; and after another long gaze from her window, Helen made up her mind to go. It was her voice speaking to the maid which roused Robert. 'If Mr Drummond comes in before I return,' he heard her say, 'tell him I shall not be long. I am going with Miss Norah to the gardens for an hour, and then to ask for Mr Haldane; but I shall be back by half-past six.' He heard the message—he for whom it was intended—and rose up softly and went to his studio window, and peeped stealthily out to watch them as they went away. Norah came first, with a skip and gambol, and then Helen. His wife gave a wistful look back at the house as she opened the little gate under the leafy dusty lilacs. Was it with some premonition of what she should find when she came back? He hid himself so that he could not be seen, and gazed at the two, feeling as if that moment was all that life had yet to give him. It was his farewell look. His wife and child disappeared, and he could hear their footsteps outside on the pavement going farther and farther away on their harmless, unimportant walk, while he——He woke up as if it had been out of sleep or out of a trance. She would return by half-past six, and it was now approaching five. For all he had to do there was so little, so very little time.
So he said to himself, and yet when he said it he had no clear idea what he was going to do. He had not only to do it, whatever it was, but to make up his mind, all in an hour and a half; and for the first five minutes of that little interval he was like a man dreaming, stretching out his hands to catch any straw, trying to believe he might yet be saved. Could he leave them—those two who had just left the door—to struggle through the rest of life by themselves? Helen was just over thirty, and her daughter nearly twelve. It was a mature age for a woman; but yet for a woman who has been protected and taken care of all her life, how bitter a moment to be left alone!—the moment when life is at its fullest, demands most, feels most warmly, and has as yet given up nothing. Helen had had no training to teach her that happiness was not her right. She had felt it to be her right, and her whole soul rose up in rebellion against any infringement of that great necessity of being. How was she to live when all was taken from her, even the support of her husband's arm? Robert had never known so much of his wife's character before, but in this awful moment it became clear to him as by an inspiration. How was she to bear it? Credit, honour, money, living—and her husband, too, who could still work for her, shield her. He went to his easel and uncovered the half-finished picture on it, and gazed at it with something that was in reality a dumb appeal to the dumb canvas to help him. But it did not help him. On the contrary, it brought suddenly up before him his work of the past, his imperfect successes, and Helen's kind, veiled, hidden, but unconcealable dissatisfaction. The look of suppressed pain in her face, the subdued tone, the soft languid praise of some detail or accessory, the very look of her figure when she turned away from it, came all before him. Her habit was, when she turned away, to talk to him of other things. How clearly that oft-repeated scene came before him in his despair! She was dutiful, giving him her attention conscientiously as long as was needful; but when he fell back into the fond babble of the maker, and tried to interest her in some bit of drapery, or effect of light, or peculiarity of grouping, she would listen to him sweetly, and—change the subject as soon as possible. It all returned to him—he remembered even the trivial little words she had spoken, the languid air of half fatigue which would come over her. That—along with the meagrest poverty, the hardest homely struggles for daily bread. Could she bear to go back to it? She would lose everything, the house and all that was in it, everything that could be called hers or supposed hers. The only thing that could not be taken from her would be her £100 a year, her little fortune which was settled on her. 'They could live on that,' poor Drummond went on in his dreary miserable thoughts. 'They could exist, it is possible, better without me than with me. Would they be happier to have me in prison, disgraced, and dishonoured, a drag hanging about their neck—or to hear the worst at once, to know that everything was over, that at least their pittance would be theirs, and their peace respected? Everything would be over. Nobody could have any pretext for annoying her about it. They would be sorry for her—even they would be sorry for me. My policies would go to make up something—to clear my name a little. And they would let her alone. She could go to the country. She is so simple in her real tastes. They could live on what she has, if they were only rid of me.' A sigh that was almost a sob interrupted him in his musing. He was so worn out; and was it the grave-chill that was invading him already and making him shiver? He took the canvas on the easel and held it up to the light. 'The drawing is good enough,' he said to himself, 'it is not the drawing. She always owns that. It is—something else. And how can I tell after this that I could even draw? I could not now, if I were to try. My hand shakes like an old man's. I might fall ill like poor Haldane! Ah, my God!' The canvas fell out of his hands upon the floor—a sudden spasm contracted his heart. Haldane! It was the first time that day that he had thought of him. His ruin would be the ruin of his friend too—his friend who was helpless, sick, and yet the support of others. 'Oh, my God, my God!' he wailed with a cry of despair.
And there was no one near to hear him, no one to defend him from himself and from the devil, to lay hands upon him, to bid him live and hope and work, and help them to exist whom he had helped to ruin. He was left all alone in that moment of his agony. God, to whom he had appealed, was beyond the clouds, beyond that which is more unfathomable than any cloud, the serene, immeasurable, impenetrable blue, and held out no hand, sent no voice of comfort. The man fell down where his work had fallen, prone upon the ground, realising in a moment all the misery of the years that were to come. And it was his doing, his doing!—though consciously he would have given himself to be cut to pieces, would have toiled his life out, to make it up now to his friend,—how much more to his wife! What passed in his mind in that awful interval is not to be told. It was the supreme struggle between life and despair, and it was despair that won. When he rose up his face was like the face of an old man, haggard and furrowed with deep lines. He stood still for a moment, looking round him vaguely, and then made a little pilgrimage round the room, looking at everything, with a motive, without a motive, who can tell? his whole faculties absorbed in the exaltation, and bewildering, sombre excitement of such a crisis as can come but once to any man. Then he sat down at his writing-table, and sought out some letter-paper (there were so many scraps of drawing-paper that came first to hand), and slowly wrote a few lines. He had to search for a long time before he could find an envelope to enclose this, and his time was getting short. At last he put it up, and, after another pause, stole through the conservatory, walking stealthily like a thief, and placed the white envelope on a little crimson table, where it shone conspicuous to everybody who should enter. He did more than that; he went and bent over the chair which Helen had pushed away when she rose from it—the chair she always sat on—and kissed it. There was a little bright-coloured handkerchief lying on the sofa, which was Norah's. He took that up and kissed it too, and thrust it into his breast. Did he mean to carry it with him into the dark and silent country where he was going? God knows what was the thought in his mind. The pretty clock on the mantelpiece softly chimed the quarter as he did this, and he started like a thief. Then he took an old great-coat from the wall, an old travelling hat, which hung beside it, and went back to the studio. There was no more time for thought. He went out, leaving the door unlocked, brushing stealthily through the lilacs. The broad daylight played all around him, revealing him to every one, showing to the world how he stole away out of his own house. He had put up the collar of his coat and drawn his hat down over his brows to disguise himself in case he met any one he knew. Any one he knew! It was in case he met his wife, to whom he had just said farewell for ever, and his child, whose little kerchief he was going to take with him into this dismal ruin, into the undiscovered world.
All this might have been changed had he met them; and they were crossing the next street coming home, Helen growing more and more anxious as they approached the door. Had he been going out about some simple everyday business, of course they would have met; but not now, when it might have saved one life from destruction and another from despair. He had watched for a moment to make sure they were not in sight before he went out; and the servants had caught a glimpse of a man whom they did not recognise hiding among the bushes, and were frightened; so, it turned out afterwards, had various other passers-by. But Drummond saw no one—no one. The multitudes in the noisier streets upon which he emerged after a while, were nothing to him. They pushed against him, but he did not see them; the only two figures he could have seen were henceforward to be invisible to him for ever.
For ever! for ever! Was it for ever? Would this crime he was about to commit, this last act of supreme rebellion against the will of that God to whom he seemed to have appealed in vain, would it sever him from them not only in this world, but in the world to come? Should he have to gaze upward, like poor Dives, and see, in the far serene above him, these two walking in glory and splendour, who were no longer his? perhaps surrounded by angels, stately figures of the blessed, without a thought to spare in the midst of that glory for the poor soul who perished for love of them. Could that be true? Was it damnation as well as death he was going to face? Was it farewell for ever, and ever, and ever?
So the awful strain ran on, buzzing in his ears, drowning for him the voices of the crowd—for ever, for ever, for ever. Dives forlorn and far away—and up, up high in the heavens, blazing above him, like a star—
Like that star in the soft sky of the evening which came out first and shone down direct upon him in his wretchedness. How it shone! How she shone!—was it she?—as it grew darker drawing a silver line for him upon the face of the darkening water. Was that to be the spot? But it took years to get dark that night. He lived and grew old while he was waiting thus to die. At last there was gloom enough. He got a boat, and rowed it out to that white glistening line, the line that looked like a silver arrow, shining where the spot was—
The boat drifted ashore that night as the tide fell. In that last act, at least, Nature helped him to be honest, poor soul!