Birds of Prey by M.E. Braddon

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Mr. Sheldon was a man of industrious habits,--fond indeed of work, and
distinguished by a persistent activity in the carrying out of any
labour he had planned for himself. He was not prone to the indulgence
of idle reveries or agreeable day-dreams. Thought with him was labour;
it was the "thinking out" of future work to be done, and it was an
operation as precise and mathematical as the actual labour that
resulted therefrom. The contents of his brain were as well kept as a
careful trader's ledger. He had his thoughts docketed and indexed, and
rarely wasted the smallest portion of his time in searching for an
idea. Tonight he sat thinking until he was interrupted by a loud double
knock, which was evidently familiar to him, for he muttered "George!"
pushed aside his desk, and took up his stand upon the hearthrug, ready
to receive the expected visitor.

There was the sound of a man's voice below,--very like Philip Sheldon's
own voice; then a quick firm tread on the stairs; and then the door was
opened, and a man, who himself was very like Philip Sheldon, came into
the room. This was the dentist's brother George, two years his junior.
The likeness between the two men was in no way marvellous, but it was
nevertheless very obvious. You could scarcely have mistaken one man for
the other, but you could hardly have failed to perceive that the two
men were brothers. They resembled each other more closely in form than
in face. They were of the same height--both tall and strongly built.
Both had black eyes with a hard brightness in them, black whiskers,
black hair, sinewy hands with prominent knuckles, square finger-tops,
and bony wrists. Each man seemed the personification of savage health
and vigour, smoothed and shapened in accordance with the prejudices of
civilised life. Looking at these two men for the first time, you might
approve or disapprove their appearance; they might impress you
favourably or unfavourably; but you could scarcely fail to be reminded
vaguely of strong, bright-eyed, savage creatures, beautiful and
graceful after their kind, but dangerous and fatal to man.

The brothers greeted each other with a friendly nod. They were a great
deal too practical to indulge in any sentimental display of fraternal
affection. They liked each other very well, and were useful to each
other, and took their pleasure together on those rare occasions when
they were weak enough to waste time upon unprofitable pleasure; but
neither of them would have comprehended the possibility of anything
beyond this.

"Well, old fellow," said George, "I'm glad you're back again. You're
looking rather seedy, though. I suppose you knocked about a good deal
down there?"

"I had a night or two of it with Halliday and the old set. He's going
it rather fast."

"Humph!" muttered Mr. Sheldon the younger; "it's a pity he doesn't go
it a little faster, and go off the hooks altogether, so that you might
marry Georgy."

"How do I know that Georgy would have me, if he did leave her a widow?"
asked Philip dubiously.

"O, she'd have you fast enough. She used to be very sweet upon you
before she married Tom; and even if she has forgotten all that, she'd
have you if you asked her. She'd be afraid to say no. She was always
more or less afraid of you, you know, Phil."

"I don't know about that. She was a nice little thing enough; but she
knew how to drop a poor sweetheart and take up with a rich one, in
spite of her simplicity."

"O, that was the old parties' doing. Georgy would have jumped into a
cauldron of boiling oil if her mother and father had told her she must
do it. Don't you remember when we were children together how afraid she
used to be of spoiling her frocks? I don't believe she married Tom
Halliday of her own free will, any more than she stood in the corner of
her own free will after she'd torn her frock, as I've seen her stand
twenty times. She stood in the corner because they told her she must;
and she married Tom for the same reason, and I don't suppose she's been
particularly happy with him."

"Well, that's her look-out," answered Philip gloomily; "I know I want a
rich wife badly enough. Things are about as bad with me as they can
be."

"I suppose they _are_ rather piscatorial. The elderly dowagers don't
come up to time, eh? Very few orders for the complete set at
ten-pound-ten?"

"I took about seventy pounds last year," said the dentist, "and my
expenses are something like five pounds a week. I've been making up the
deficiency out of the money I got for the Barlingford business,
thinking I should be able to stand out and make a connection; but the
connection gets more disconnected every year. I suppose people came to
me at first for the novelty of the thing, for I had a sprinkling of
decent patients for the first twelve months or so. But now I might as
well throw my money into the gutter as spend it on circulars or
advertisements."

"And a young woman with twenty thousand pounds and something amiss with
her jaw hasn't turned up yet!"

"No, nor an old woman either. I wouldn't stick at the age, if the money
was all right," answered Mr. Sheldon bitterly.

The younger brother shrugged his shoulders and plunged his hands into
his trousers-pockets with a gesture of seriocomic despair. He was the
livelier of the two, and affected a slanginess of dress and talk and
manner, a certain "horsey" style, very different from his elder
brother's studied respectability of costume and bearing. His clothes
were of a loose sporting cut, and always odorous with stale tobacco. He
wore a good deal of finery in the shape of studs and pins and dangling
lockets and fusee-boxes; his whiskers were more obtrusive than his
brother's, and he wore a moustache in addition--a thick ragged black
moustache, which would have become a guerilla chieftain rather than a
dweller amidst the quiet courts and squares of Gray's Inn. His position
as a lawyer was not much better than that of Philip as a dentist; but
he had his own plans for making a fortune, and hoped to win for himself
a larger fortune than is, often made in the law. He was a hunter of
genealogies, a grubber-up of forgotten facts, a joiner of broken links,
a kind of legal resurrectionist, a digger in the dust and ashes of the
past; and he expected in due time to dig up a treasure rich enough to
reward the labour and patience of half a lifetime.

"I can afford to wait till I'm forty for my good luck," he said to his
brother sometimes in moments of expansion; "and then I shall have ten
years in which to enjoy myself, and twenty more in which I shall have
life enough left to eat good dinners and drink good wine, and grumble
about the degeneracy of things in general, after the manner of elderly
human nature."

The men stood one on each side of the hearth; George looking at his
brother, Philip looking down at the fire, with his eyes shaded by their
thick black lashes. The fire had become dull and hollow. George bent
down presently and stirred the coals impatiently.

"If there's one thing I hate more than, another--and I hate a good many
things--it's a bad fire," he said. "How's Barlingford--lively as ever,
I suppose?"

"Not much livelier than it was when we left it. Things have gone amiss
with me in London, and I've been more than once sorely tempted to make
an end of my difficulties with a razor or a few drops of prussic acid;
but when I saw the dull gray streets and the square gray houses, and
the empty market-place, and the Baptist chapel, and the Unitarian
chapel, and the big stony church, and heard the dreary bells
ding-donging for evening service, I wondered how I could ever have
existed a week in such a place. I had rather sweep a crossing in
London than occupy the best house in Barlingford, and I told Tom
Halliday so."

"And Tom is coming to London I understand by your letter."

"Yes, he has sold Hyley, and wants to find a place in the west of
England. The north doesn't suit his chest. He and Georgy are coming up
to town for a few weeks, so I've asked them to stay here. I may as well
make some use of the house, for it's very little good in a professional
sense."

"Humph!" muttered George; "I don't see your motive."

"I have no particular motive. Tom's a good fellow, and his company will
be better than an empty house. The visit won't cost me anything--
Halliday is to go shares in the housekeeping."

"Well, you may find it answer that way," replied Mr. Sheldon the
younger, who considered that every action of a man's life ought to be
made to "answer" in some way. "But I should think you would be rather
bored by the arrangement: Tom's a very good fellow in his way, and a
great friend of mine, but he's rather an empty-headed animal."

The subject dropped here, and the brothers went on talking of
Barlingford and Barlingford people--the few remaining kindred whose
existence made a kind of link between the two men and their native
town, and the boon companions of their early manhood. The dentist
produced the remnant of a bottle of whisky from the sideboard, and rang
for hot water and sugar, Wherewith to brew grog, for his own and his
brother's refreshment; but the conversation flagged nevertheless.
Philip Sheldon was dull and absent, answering his companion at random
every now and then, much to that gentleman's aggravation; and he owned
at last to being thoroughly tired and worn out.

"The journey from Barlingford in a slow train is no joke, you know,
George, and I couldn't afford the express," he said apologetically,
when his brother upbraided him for his distraction of manner.

"Then I should think you'd better go to bed," answered Mr. Sheldon the
younger, who had smoked a couple of cigars, and consumed the contents
of the whisky-bottle; "so I'll take myself off. I told you how
uncommonly seedy you were looking when I first came in. When do you
expect Tom and his wife?"

"At the beginning of next week."

"So soon! Well, good-night, old fellow; I shall see you before they
come, I daresay. You might as well drop in upon me at my place
to-morrow night. I'm hard at work on a job."

"Your old kind of work?"

"O, yes. I don't get much work of any other kind."

"And I'm afraid you'll never get much good out of that."

"I don't know. A man who sits down to whist may have a run of ill-luck
before he gets a decent hand; but the good cards are sure to come if he
only sits long enough. Every man has his chance, depend upon it, Phil,
if he knows how to watch for it; but there are so many men who get
tired and go to sleep before their chances come to them. I've wasted a
good deal of time, and a good deal of labour; but the ace of trumps is
in the pack, and it must turn up sooner or later. Ta-ta."

George Sheldon nodded and departed, whistling gaily as he walked away
from his brother's door. Philip heard him, and turned his chair to the
fire with a movement of impatience.

"You may be uncommonly clever, my dear George," soliloquised the
dentist, "but you'll never make a fortune by reading wills and hunting
in parish-registers for heirs-at-law. A big lump of money is not very
likely to go a-begging while any one who can fudge up the faintest
pretence of a claim to it is above ground. No, no, my lad, you must
find a better way than that before you'll make your fortune."

The fire had burnt low again, and Mr. Sheldon sat staring gloomily at
the blackening coals. Things were very bad with him--he had not cared
to confess how bad they were, when he had discussed his affairs with
his brother. Those neighbours and passers-by who admired the trim
brightness of the dentist's abode had no suspicion that the master of
that respectable house was in the hands of the Jews, and that the
hearthstone which whitened his door-step was paid for out of
Israelitish coffers. The dentist's philosophy was all of this world,
and he knew that the soldier of fortune, who would fain be a conqueror
in the great battle, must needs keep his plumage undrabbled and the
golden facings of his uniform untarnished, let his wounds be never so
desperate.

Having found his attempt to establish a practice in Fitzgeorge-street
a failure, the only course open to Mr. Sheldon, as a man of the world,
was to transfer his failure to somebody else, with more or less profit
to himself. To this end he preserved the spotless purity of his muslin
curtains, though the starch that stiffened them and the bleaching-powder
that whitened them were bought with money for which he was to pay sixty
per cent. To this end he nursed that wan shadow of a practice, and
sustained that appearance of respectability which, in a world where
appearance stands for so much, is in itself a kind of capital. It
certainly was dull dreary work to hold the citadel of No. 14
Fitzgeorge-street, against the besieger Poverty; but the dentist
stood his ground pertinaciously, knowing that if he only waited long
enough, the dupe who was to be his victim would come, and knowing also
that there might arrive a day when it would be very useful for him to
be able to refer to four years' unblemished respectability as a
Bloomsbury householder. He had his lines set in several shady places
for that unhappy fish with a small capital, and he had been tantalised
by more than one nibble; but he made no open show of his desire to sell
his business--since a business that is obviously in the market seems
scarcely worth any man's purchase.

Things had of late grown worse with him every day; for every interval
of twenty-four hours sinks a man so much the deeper in the mire when
renewed accommodation-bills with his name upon them are ripening in the
iron safes of Judah. Philip Sheldon found himself sinking gradually and
almost imperceptibly into that bottomless pit of difficulty in whose
black depths the demon Insolvency holds his dreary court. While his
little capital lasted he had kept himself clear of debt, but that being
exhausted, and his practice growing worse day by day, he had been fain
to seek assistance from money-lenders; and now even the money-lenders
were tired of him. The chair in which he sat, the poker which he swung
slowly to and fro as he bent over his hearth, were not his own. One of
his Jewish creditors had a bill of sale on his furniture, and he might
come home any day to find the auctioneer's bills plastered against the
wall of his house, and the auctioneer's clerk busy with the catalogue
of his possessions. If the expected victim came now to buy his
practice, the sacrifice would be made too late to serve his interest.
The men who had lent him the money would be the sole gainers by the
bargain.

Seldom does a man find himself face to face with a blacker prospect
than that which lay before Philip Sheldon; and yet his manner to-night
was not the dull blank apathy of despair. It was the manner of a man
whose brain is occupied by busy thoughts; who has some elaborate scheme
to map out and arrange before he is called upon to carry his plans into
action.

"It would be a good business for me," he muttered, "if I had pluck
enough to carry it through."

The fire went out as he sat swinging the poker backwards and forwards.
The clocks of Bloomsbury and St. Pancras struck twelve, and still
Philip Sheldon pondered and plotted by that dreary hearth. The servants
had retired at eleven, after a good deal of blundering with bars and
shutters, and unnecessary banging of doors. That unearthly silence
peculiar to houses after midnight reigned in Mr. Sheldon's domicile,
and he could hear the voices of distant roisterers, and the miauling of
neighbouring cats, with a painful distinctness as he sat brooding in
his silent room. The fact that a mahogany chiffonier in a corner gave
utterance to a faint groan occasionally, as of some feeble creature in
pain, afforded him no annoyance. He was superior to superstitious
fancies, and all the rappings and scratchings of spirit-land would have
failed to disturb his equanimity. He was a strictly practical man--one
of those men who are always ready, with a stump of lead-pencil and the
back of a letter, to reduce everything in creation to figures.

"I had better read up that business before they come," he said, when he
had to all appearance "thought out" the subject of his reverie. "No
time so good as this for doing it quietly. One never knows who is
spying about in the daytime." He looked at his watch, and then went to
a cupboard, where there were bundles of wood and matches and old
newspapers,--for it was his habit to light his own fire occasionally
when he worked unusually late at night or early in the morning. He
relighted his fire now as cleverly as any housemaid in Bloomsbury, and
stood watching it till it burned briskly. Then he lit a taper, and went
downstairs to the professional torture-chamber. The tall horsehair
chair looked unutterably awful in the dim glimmer of the taper, and a
nervous person could almost have fancied it occupied by the ghost of
some patient who had expired under the agony of the forceps. Mr.
Sheldon lighted the gas in a movable branch which he was in the habit
of turning almost into the mouths of the patients who consulted him at
night. There was a cupboard on each side of the mantelpiece, and it was
in these two cupboards that the dentist kept his professional library.
His books did not form a very valuable collection, but he kept the
cupboards constantly locked nevertheless.

He took the key from his waistcoat-pocket, opened one of the cupboards,
and selected a book from a row of dingy-looking volumes. He carried the
book to the room above, where he seated himself under the gas, and
opened the volume at a place in which there was a scrap of paper,
evidently left there as a mark. The book was a volume of the _Lancet_,
and in this book lie read with close attention until the Bloomsbury
clocks struck three.

CHAPTER III.

MR. AND MRS. HALLIDAY.

Mr. Sheldon's visitors arrived in due course. They were provincial
people of the middle class, accounted monstrously genteel in their own
neighbourhood, but in nowise resembling Londoners of the same rank.

Mr. Thomas Halliday was a big, loud-spoken, good-tempered Yorkshireman,
who had inherited a comfortable little estate from a plodding,
money-making father, and for whom life had been very easy. He was a
farmer, and nothing but a farmer; a man for whom the supremest pleasure
of existence was a cattle-show or a country horse-fair. The farm upon
which he had been born and brought up was situated about six miles from
Barlingford, and all the delights of his boyhood and youth were
associated with that small market town. He and the two Sheldons had
been schoolfellows, and afterwards boon companions, taking such
pleasure as was obtainable in Barlingford together; flirting with the
same provincial beauties at prim tea-parties in the winter, and getting
up friendly picnics in the summer--picnics at which eating and drinking
were the leading features of the day's entertainment. Mr. Halliday had
always regarded George and Philip Sheldon with that reverential
admiration which a stupid man, who is conscious of his own mental
inferiority, generally feels for a clever friend and companion. But he
was also fully aware of the advantage which a rich man possesses over a
poor one, and would not have exchanged the fertile acres of Hyley for
the intellectual gifts of his schoolfellows. He had found the
substantial value of his comfortably furnished house and well-stocked
farm when he and his friend Philip Sheldon became suitors for the hand
of Georgina Cradock, youngest daughter of a Barlingford attorney, who
lived next door to the Barlingford dentist, Philip Sheldon's father.
Philip and the girl had been playfellows in the long-walled gardens
behind the two houses, and there had been a brotherly and sisterly
intimacy between the juvenile members of the two families. But when
Philip and Georgina met at the Barlingford tea-parties in later years,
the parental powers frowned upon any renewal of that childish
friendship. Miss Cradock had no portion, and the worthy solicitor her
father was a prudent man, who was apt to look for the promise of
domestic happiness in the plate-basket and the linen-press, rather than
for such superficial qualifications as black whiskers and white teeth.
So poor Philip was "thrown over the bridge," as he said himself, and
Georgy Cradock married Mr. Halliday, with all attendant ceremony and
splendour, according to the "lights" of Barlingford gentry.

But this provincial bride's story was no passionate record of anguish
and tears. The Barlingford Juliet had liked Romeo as much as she was
capable of liking any one; but when Papa Capulet insisted on her union
with Paris, she accepted her destiny with decent resignation, and, in
the absence of any sympathetic father confessor, was fain to seek
consolation from a more mundane individual in the person of the
Barlingford milliner. Nor did Philip Sheldon give evidence of any
extravagant despair. His father was something of a doctor as well as a
dentist; and there were plenty of dark little phials lurking on the
shelves of his surgery in which the young man could have found "mortal
drugs" without the aid of the apothecary, had he been so minded.
Happily no such desperate idea ever occurred to him in connection with
his grief. He held himself sulkily aloof from Mr. and Mrs. Halliday for
some time after their marriage, and allowed people to see that he
considered himself very hardly used; but Prudence, which had always
been Philip Sheldon's counsellor, proved herself also his consoler in
this crisis of his life. A careful consideration of his own interests
led him to perceive that the successful result of his love-suit would
have been about the worst thing that could have happened to him.

Georgina had no money. All was said in that. As the young dentist's
worldly wisdom ripened with experience, he discovered that the worldly
ease of the best man in Barlingford was something like that of a
canary-bird who inhabits a clean cage and is supplied with abundant
seed and water. The cage is eminently comfortable, and the sleepy,
respectable, elderly bird sighs for no better abiding-place, no wider
prospect than that patch of the universe which he sees between the
bars. But now and then there is hatched a wild young fledgeling, which
beats its wings against the inexorable wires, and would fain soar away
into that wide outer world, to prosper or perish in its freedom.

Before Georgy had been married a year, her sometime lover had fully
resigned himself to the existing state of things, and was on the best
possible terms with his friend Tom. He could eat his dinner in the
comfortable house at Hyley with an excellent appetite; for there was a
gulf between him and his old love far wider than any that had been dug
by that ceremonial in the parish church of Barlingford. Philip Sheldon
had awakened to the consciousness that life in his native town was
little more than a kind of animal vegetation--the life of some pulpy
invertebrate creature, which sprawls helplessly upon the sands whereon
the wave has deposited it, and may be cloven in half without feeling
itself noticeably worse for the operation. He had awakened to the
knowledge that there was a wider and more agreeable world beyond that
little provincial borough, and that a handsome face and figure and a
vigorous intellect were commodities for which there must be some kind
of market.

Once convinced of the utter worthlessness of his prospects in
Barlingford, Mr. Sheldon turned his eyes Londonwards; and his father
happening at the same time very conveniently to depart this life,
Philip, the son and heir, disposed of the business to an aspiring young
practitioner, and came to the metropolis, where he made that futile
attempt to establish himself which has been described.

The dentist had wasted four years in London, and ten years had gone by
since Georgy's wedding; and now for the first time he had an
opportunity of witnessing the domestic happiness or the domestic misery
of the woman who had jilted him, and the man who had been his
successful rival. He set himself to watch them with the cool
deliberation of a social anatomist, and he experienced very little
difficulty in the performance of this moral dissection. They were
established under his roof, his companions at every meal; and they were
a kind of people who discuss their grievances and indulge in their
"little differences" with perfect freedom in the presence of a third,
or a fourth, or even a fifth party.

Mr. Sheldon was wise enough to preserve a strict neutrality. He would
take up a newspaper at the beginning of a little difference, and lay it
down when the little difference was finished, with the most perfect
assumption of unconsciousness; but it is doubtful whether the
matrimonial disputants were sufficiently appreciative of this good
breeding. They would have liked to have had Mr. Sheldon for a court of
appeal; and a little interference from him would have given zest to
their quarrels. Meanwhile Philip watched them slyly from the covert of
his newspaper, and formed his own conclusions about them. If he was
pleased to see that his false love's path was not entirely rose-bestrewn,
or if he rejoiced at beholding the occasional annoyance of his rival, he
allowed no evidence of his pleasure to appear in his face or manner.

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