Birds of Prey by M.E. Braddon

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It was a life which, taken with all its small hardships and petty
annoyances, should have been as the life of Paradise compared to that
which Diana had led with her father and Mr. Hawkehurst. Whether the
girl fully appreciated the change from the Bohemianism of her late
existence to the respectability of Hyde Lodge was a question which no
one had asked of her. She had fits of despondency now and then, even in
the midst of her duties, and was apt to fall into a sombre reverie over
one of the abridgments, whereby she was neglectful of her pupils'
aspirates, and allowed Henry the Second to be made the poorer by the
loss of an H, or Heliogabalus to be described by a name which that
individual himself would have failed to recognise.

There were times when, in the midst of that shrill Babel, the
schoolroom, Diana Paget heard the summer winds sighing in the
pine-woods above Foretdechene, and fancied herself standing once more
in that classic temple on whose plastered wall Valentine had once cut
her initials with his penknife in a fantastical monogram, surmounted by
a death's-head and encircled by a serpent. She thought of that familiar
companion very often, in spite of her juvenile pupils and the sewing-on
of tapes and buttons. He had seemed to her a perpetual enigma and
mystery when she was with him; and now that she was far away from him,
he was more than ever an inscrutable creature. Was he altogether vile,
she wondered, or was there some redeeming virtue in his nature? He had
taken trouble to secure her escape from shame and disgrace, and in
doing this he surely had performed a good action; but was it not just
possible that he had taken this opportunity of getting rid of her
because her presence was alike wearisome and inconvenient? She thought
very bitterly of her fellow Bohemian when this view of his conduct
presented itself to her; how heartlessly he had shuffled her off,--how
cruelly he had sent her out into the hard pitiless world, to find a
shelter as best she might!

"What would have become of me if Priscilla had refused to take me in?"
she asked herself. "I wonder whether Mr. Hawkehurst ever considered
that."

* * * * *

More than one letter had come to Diana from her old companion since her
flight from the little Belgian watering-place. The first letter told
her that her father had "tided over _that_ business, and was in better
feather than before the burst-up at the Hotel d'Orange." The letter was
dated from Paris, but gave no information as to the present
arrangements or future plans of the writer and his companion. Another
letter, dated from the same place, but not from the same address, came
to her six months afterwards, and anon another; and it was such a
wonderful thing for Captain Paget to inhabit the same city for twelve
months together, that Diana began to cherish faint hopes of some
amendment in the scheme of her father's life and of Valentine's, since
any improvement in her father's position would involve an improvement
in that of his _protege_.

Miss Paget's regard for her father was by no means an absorbing
affection. The Captain had never cared to conceal his indifference for
his only child, or pretended to think her anything but a nuisance and
an encumbrance--a superfluous piece of luggage more difficult to
dispose of than any other luggage, and altogether a stumbling-block in
the stony path of a man who has to live by his wits. So perhaps it is
scarcely strange that Diana did not think of her absent father with any
passionate tenderness or sad yearning love. She thought of him very
often; but her thoughts of him were painful and bitter. She thought
still more often of his companion; and her thoughts of him were even
more bitter.

The experiences of Diana Paget are not the experiences which mate a
pure or perfect woman. There are trials which chasten the heart and
elevate the mind; but it is doubtful whether it can be for the welfare
of any helpless, childish creature to be familiar with falsehood and
chicanery, with debt and dishonour, from the earliest awakening of the
intellect; to feel, from the age of six or seven, all the shame of a
creature who is always eating food that will not be paid for, and lying
on a bed out of which she may be turned at any moment with shrill
reproaches and upbraidings; to hear her father abused and vilified by
vulgar gossips over a tea-table, and to be reminded every day and every
hour that she is an unprofitable encumbrance, a consumer of the bread
of other people's children, an intruder in the household of poverty, a
child whose heritage is shame and dishonour. These things had hardened
the heart of Captain Paget's daughter. There had been no counteracting
influence--no fond, foolish loving creature near at hand to save the
girl from that perdition into which the child or woman who has never
known what it is to be loved is apt to fall. For thirteen years of
Diana's life all love and tenderness, endearing words, caressing
touches, fond admiring looks, had been utterly unknown to her. To sit
in a room with a father who was busy writing letters, and who was wont
to knit his brows peevishly if she stirred, or to mutter an oath if she
spoke; to be sent to a pawnbroker's in the gloaming with her father's
watch, and to be scolded and sworn at on her return if the money-lender
had advanced a less sum than was expected on that security--do not
compose the most delightful or improving experiences of a home life.
But Diana could remember little of a more pleasant character respecting
her existence during those brief periods when she was flung back upon
her father's hands, and while that gentleman was casting about for some
new victim on whom to plant her.

At Hyde Lodge, for the first time, the girl knew what it was to be
loved. Bright, impulsive Charlotte Halliday took a fancy to her, as the
schoolgirl phrase goes, and clung to her with a fond confiding
affection. It may be that the softening influence came too late, or
that there was some touch of natural hardness and bitterness in Diana's
mind; for it is certain that Charlotte's affection did not soften the
girl's heart or lessen her bitter consciousness of the wide difference
between her own fortunes and those of the happier daughters whose
fathers paid their debts. The very contrast between Charlotte's
position and her own may have counteracted the good influence. It was
very easy for Charlotte to be generous and amiable. _She_ had never
been hounded from pillar to post by shrewish matrons who had no words
too bitter for their unprofitable charge. _She_ had never known what it
was to rise up in the morning uncertain where she should lie down at
night, or whether there would be any shelter at all for her hapless
head; for who could tell that her father would be found at the lodging
where he had last been heard of, and how should she obtain even
workhouse hospitality, whose original parish was unknown to herself or
her protector? To Charlotte these shameful experiences would have been
as incomprehensible as the most abstruse theories of a metaphysician.
Was it any wonder, then, if Charlotte was bright and womanly, and fond
and tender--Charlotte, who had never been humiliated by the shabbiness
of her clothes, and to whom the daily promenade had never been a shame
and a degradation by reason of obvious decay in the heels of her boots?

"If your father would dress you decently, and supply you with proper
boots, I could almost bring myself to keep you for nothing," Priscilla
had said to her reprobate kinsman's daughter; "but the more one does
for that man the less he will do himself; so the long and the short of
it is, that you will have to go back to him, for I cannot consent to
have such an expensive establishment as mine degraded by the shabbiness
of a relation."

Diana had been obliged to listen to such speeches as this very often
during her first residence at Hyde Lodge, and then, perhaps, within a
few minutes after Priscilla's lecture was concluded, Charlotte Halliday
would bound into the room, looking as fresh and bright as the morning,
and dressed in silk that rustled with newness and richness. Keenly as
Diana felt the difference between her friend's fortune and her own, she
did nevertheless in some manner return Charlotte's affection. Her
character was not to be altered all at once by this new atmosphere of
love and tenderness; but she loved her generous friend and companion
after her own fitful fashion, and defended her with passionate
indignation if any other girl dared to hint the faintest disparagement
of her graces or her virtues. She envied and loved her at the same
time. She would accept Charlotte's affection one day with unconcealed
pleasure, and revolt against it on the next day as a species of
patronage which stung her proud heart to the Quick.

"Keep your pity for people who ask you for it," she had exclaimed once
to poor bewildered Charlotte; "I am tired of being consoled and petted.
Go and talk to your prosperous friends, Miss Halliday; I am sick to
death of hearing about your new frocks, and your holidays, and the
presents your mamma is always bringing you."

And then when Charlotte looked at her friend with a sad perplexed face,
Diana relented, and declared that she was a wicked discontented
creature, unworthy of either pity or affection.

"I have had so much misery in my life, that I am very often inclined to
quarrel with happy people without rhyme or reason, or only because they
are happy," she said in explanation of her impatient temper.

"But who knows what happiness may be waiting for you in the future, Di?"
exclaimed Miss Halliday. "You will marry some rich man by-and-by, and
forget that you ever knew what poverty was."

"I wonder where the rich man is to come from who will marry Captain
Paget's daughter?" Diana asked contemptuously. "Never mind where he
comes from; he will come, depend upon it. The handsome young prince
with the palace by the Lake of Como will come to fall in love with my
beautiful Diana, and then she will go and live at Como; and desert her
faithful Charlotte, and live happy ever afterwards."

"Don't talk nonsense, Lotta," cried Miss Paget. "You know what kind of
fate lies before me as well as I do. I looked at myself this morning,
as I was plaiting my hair before the glass--you know how seldom one
gets a turn at the glass in the blue room--and I saw a dark, ugly,
evil-minded-looking creature, whose face frightened me. I have been
getting wicked and ugly ever since I was a child. An aquiline nose and
black eyes will not make a woman a beauty; she wants happiness, and
hope, and love, and all manner of things that I have never known,
before she can be pretty." "I have seen a beautiful woman sweeping a
crossing," said Charlotte doubtfully.

"Yes, but what sort of beauty was it?--a beauty that made you shudder.
Don't talk about these things, Charlotte; you only encourage me to be
bitter and discontented. I daresay I ought to be very happy, when I
remember that I have dinner every day, and shoes and stockings, and a
bed to lie down upon at night; and I am happier, now that I work for my
living, than I was in the old time, when my cousin was always grumbling
about her unpaid bills. But my life is very dreary and empty; and when
I look forward to the future, it seems like looking out upon some level
plain that leads nowhere, but across which I must tramp on for ever and
ever, until I drop down and die."

It was something in this fashion that Miss Paget talked, as she sat in
the garden with Charlotte Halliday at the close of the half-year. She
was going to lose her faithful friend--the girl who, so much richer,
and happier, and more amiable than herself, had yet clung to her so
fondly; she was going to lose this tender companion, and she was more
sorry for the loss than she cared to express.

"You must come and see us very often," Charlotte said for the hundredth
time; "mamma will be so glad to have you, for my sake; and my
stepfather never interferes with our arrangements. O, Di, how I wish
you would come and live with us altogether! Would you come, if I could
manage to arrange it?"

"How could I come? What Quixotic nonsense you talk, Lotta!"

"Not at all, dear; you could come as a sort of companion for me, or a
sort of companion for mamma. What does it matter how you come, if I can
only have you? My life will be so dreary in that dreadful new-looking
house, unless I have a companion I love. Will you come, Di?--only tell
me you will come! I am sure Mr. Sheldon would not refuse, if I asked
him to let you live with us. Will you come, dear?--yes or no. You would
be glad to come, if you loved me."

"And I do love you, Lotta, with all my heart," answered Miss Paget,
with unusual fervour; "but then the whole of my heart is not much. As
to coming to live with you, of course it would be a hundred thousand
times pleasanter than the life I lead here; but it is not to be
supposed that Mr. Sheldon will consent to have a stranger in his house
just because his impulsive stepdaughter chooses to take a fancy to a
schoolfellow who isn't worthy of half her affection."

"Let me be the judge of that. As to my stepfather, I am almost sure of
his consent. You don't know how indulgent he is to me; which shows what
a wicked creature I must be not to like him. You shall come to us,
Diana, and be my sister; and we will play and sing our pet duets
together, and be as happy as two birds in a cage, or a good deal
happier--for I never could quite understand the ecstatic delight of
perpetual hempseed and an occasional peck at a dirty lump of sugar."

After this there came all the bustle of packing and preparation for
departure, and a kind of saturnalia prevailed at Hyde Lodge--a
saturnalia which terminated with the breaking-up ball: and who among
the crowd of fair young dancers so bright as Charlotte Halliday,
dressed in the schoolgirl's festal robes of cloud-like muslin, and with
her white throat set off by a black ribbon and a gold locket?

Diana sat in a corner of the schoolroom towards the close of the
evening, very weary of her share in the festival, and watched her
friend, half in sadness, half in envy.

"Perhaps if I were like her, _he_ would love me," she thought.

CHAPTER III.

GEORGE SHELDON'S PROSPECTS.

For George Sheldon the passing years had brought very little
improvement of fortune. He occupied his old dingy chambers in Gray's
Inn, which had grown more dingy under the hand of Time; and he was wont
to sit in his second-floor window on sultry summer Sundays, smoking his
solitary cigar, and listening to the cawing of the rooks in the gardens
beneath him, mingled with the voices of rebellious children, and shrill
mothers threatening to "do for them," or to "flay them alive," in
Somebody's Rents below. The lawyer used to be quite meditative on those
Sunday afternoons, and would wonder what sort of a fellow Lord Bacon
was, and how he contrived to get into a mess about taking bribes, when
so many other fellows had done it quietly enough before the Lord of
Verulam's day, and even yet more quietly since--agreeably instigated
thereto by the casuistry of Escobar.

Mr. Sheldon's prospects were by no means promising. From afar off he
beheld his brother's star shining steadily in the commercial firmament;
but, except for an occasional dinner, he was very little the better for
the stockbroker's existence. He had reminded his brother very often,
and very persistently, of that vague promise which the dentist had made
in the hour of his adversity--the promise to help his brother if ever
he did "drop into a good thing." But as it is difficult to prevent a
man who is disposed to shuffle from shuffling out of the closest
agreement that was ever made between Jones of the one part, and Smith
of the other part, duly signed, and witnessed, and stamped with the
sixpenny seal of infallibility, so is it still more difficult to obtain
the performance of loosely-worded promises, uttered in the confidential
intercourse of kinsmen.

In the first year of his married life Philip Sheldon gave his brother a
hundred pounds for the carrying out of some grand scheme which the
lawyer was then engaged in, and which, if successful, would secure for
him a much larger fortune than Georgy's thousands. Unhappily the grand
scheme was a failure; and the hundred pounds being gone, George applied
again to his brother, reminding him once more of that promise made in
Bloomsbury. But on this occasion Mr. Sheldon plainly told his kinsman
that he could do no more for him.

"You must fight your own battle, George," he said, "as I have fought
mine."

"Thank you, Philip," said the younger brother; "I would rather fight it
any other way."

And then the two men looked at each other, as they were in the habit of
doing sometimes, with a singularly intent gaze.

"You're very close-fisted with Tom Halliday's money," George said
presently. "If I'd asked poor old Tom himself, I'm sure he wouldn't
have refused to lend me two or three hundred."

"Then it's a pity you didn't ask him," Mr. Sheldon answered, with
supreme coolness.

"I should have done so fast enough, if I had thought he was going to
die so suddenly. It was a bad day for me, and for him too, when he came
to Fitzgeorge-street."

"What do you mean by that?" asked Mr. Sheldon sharply.

"You can pretty well guess my meaning, I should think," George answered
in a sulky tone.

"No, I can't; and what's more, I don't mean to try. I'll tell you what
it is, Master George; you've been treating me to a good many hints and
innuendoes lately; and you must know very little of me if you don't know
that I'm the last kind of man to stand that sort of thing from you, or
from any one else. You have tried to take the tone of a man who has
some kind of hold upon another. You had better understand at once that
such a tone won't answer with me. If you had any hold upon me, or any
power over me, you'd be quick enough to use it; and you ought to be
aware that I know that, and can see to the bottom of such a shallow
little game as yours."

Mr. Sheldon the younger looked at his brother with an expression of
surprise that was not entirely unmingled with admiration.

"Well, you _are_ a cool hand, Phil!" he said.

Here the conversation ended. The two brothers were very good friends
after this, and George presented himself at the gothic villa whenever
he received an invitation to dine there. The dinners were good, and the
men who ate them were men of solidity and standing in the commercial
world; and George was very glad to eat good dinners, and to meet eligible
men; but he never again asked his brother for the loan of odd hundreds.

He grubbed on, as best he might, in the dingy Gray's-Inn chambers. Be
had a little business--business which lay chiefly amongst men who
wanted to borrow money, or whose halting footsteps required guidance
through the quagmire of the Bankruptcy Court. He just contrived to keep
his head above water, and his name in the Law-list, by means of such
business; but the great scheme of his life remained as yet unripened,
an undeveloped shadow to which he had in vain attempted to give a
substance.

The leading idea of George Sheldon's life was the idea that there were
great fortunes in the world waiting for claimants; and that a share of
some such fortune was to be obtained by any man who had the talent to
dig it out of the obscurity in which it was hidden. He was a student of
old county histories, and a searcher of old newspapers; and his studies
in that line had made him familiar with many strange stories--stories
of field-labourers called away from the plough to be told they were the
rightful owners of forty thousand a year; stories of old white-haired
men starving to death in miserable garrets about Bethnal-green or
Spitalfields, who could have claimed lands and riches immeasurable, had
they known how to claim them; stories of half-crazy old women, who had
wandered about the world with reticules of discoloured papers
clamorously asserting their rights and wrongs unheeded and unbelieved,
until they encountered sharp-witted lawyers who took up their claims,
and carried them triumphantly into the ownership of illimitable wealth.

George Sheldon had read of these things until it had seemed to him that
there must be some such chance for any man who would have patience to
watch and wait for it. He had taken up several cases, and had fitted
link after link together with extreme labour, and had hunted in parish
registers until the cold mouldy atmosphere of vestries was as familiar
to him as the air of Gray's Inn. But the cases had all broken down at
more or less advanced stages; and after infinite patience and trouble,
a good deal of money spent upon travelling and small fees to all manner
of small people, and an incalculable number of hours wasted in
listening to the rambling discourse of parish-clerks and oldest
inhabitants, Mr. Sheldon had been compelled to abandon his hopes time
after time, until a man with less firmly rooted ideas would have given
up the hunting of registers and grubbing up of genealogies as a
delusion and a snare.

George Sheldon's ideas were very firmly rooted, and he stuck to them
with that dogged persistency which so often achieves great ends, that
it seems a kind of genius. He saw his brother's success, and
contemplated the grandeurs of the gothic villa in a cynical rather than
an envious spirit. How long would it all last? How long would the
stockbroker float triumphantly onward upon that wonderful tide which is
constituted by the rise and fall of the money-market?

"That sort of thing is all very well while a man keeps his head cool
and clear," thought George; "but somehow or other men always seem to
lose their heads on the Stock Exchange before they have done with it,
and I daresay my wise brother will drop into a nice mess sooner or
later. Setting aside all other considerations, I think I would rather
have my chances than his; for I speculate very little more than my time
and trouble, and I stand in to win a bigger sum than he will ever get
in his line, let stocks rise and fall as they may."

During that summer in which Miss Halliday bade farewell to Hyde Lodge
and her school-days, George Sheldon was occupied with the early steps
in a search which he hoped would end in the discovery of a prize rich
enough to reward him for all his wasted time and labour.

Very early in the previous year there had appeared the following brief
notice in the _Observer_:--

"The Rev. John Haygarth, late vicar of Tilford Haven, Kent, died lately,
without a will, or relation to claim his property, 100.000 pounds. The
Crown therefore claimed it. And last court-day the Prerogative Court of
Canterbury decreed letters of Administration to Mr. Paul, the nominee
of the Crown."

Some months after this an advertisement had been inserted in the
_Times_ newspaper to the following effect:--

"NEXT OF KIN.--If the relatives or next of kin of the Rev. John
Haygarth, late vicar of Tilford Haven, in the county of Kent, clerk,
deceased, who has left property of the value of one hundred thousand
pounds, will apply, either personally or by letter, to Stephen Paul,
Esq., solicitor for the affairs of Her Majesty's Treasury, at the
Treasury Chambers, Whitehall, London, they may hear of something to
their advantage. The late Rev. John Haygarth is supposed to have been
the son of Matthew Haygarth, late of the parish of St. Judith,
Ullerton, and Rebecca his wife, formerly Rebecca Caulfield, spinster,
late of the same parish; both long since deceased."

Upon the strength of this advertisement George Sheldon began his
search. His theory was that there always existed an heir-at-law
somewhere, if people would only have the patience to hunt him or her
out; and he attributed his past failures rather to a want of endurance
on his own part than to the breaking down of his pet theory.

On this occasion he began his work with more than usual determination.

"This is the biggest chance I've ever had," he said to himself, "and I
should be something worse than a fool if I let it slip through my
fingers."

The work was very dry and dreary, involving interminable hunting of
registers, and questioning of oldest inhabitants. And the oldest
inhabitants were so stupid, and the records of the registers so
bewildering. One after another Mr. Sheldon set himself to examine the
lines of the intestate's kindred and ancestors; his father's only
sister, his grandfather's brothers and sisters, and even to the
brothers and sisters of his great-grandfather. At that point the
Haygarth family melted away into the impenetrable darkness of the past.
They were no high and haughty race of soldiers and scholars, churchmen
and lawyers, or the tracing of them would have been a much easier
matter. Burke would have told of them. There would have been old
country houses filled with portraits, and garrulous old housekeepers
learned in the traditions of the past. There would have been mouldering
tombs and tarnished brasses in quiet country churches, with descriptive
epitaphs, and many escutcheons. There would have been crumbling
parchments recording the prowess of Sir Reginald, knight, or the
learning of Sir Rupert, counsellor and judge. The Haygarths were a race
of provincial tradesmen, and had left no better record of their
jog-trot journey through this world than the registry of births,
marriages, and deaths in obscure churches, or an occasional entry in
the fly-leaf of a family Bible.

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