Birds of Prey by M.E. Braddon

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"You said there were more than forty letters," I told him; "I remember
the phrase 'forty-odd,' which is a colloquialism one would scarcely
look for in Tillotson or in John Wesley, who cherished a prejudice in
favour of scholarship which does not distinguish all his followers. You
said there were forty-odd letters, and you have removed some of them
from the packet. I am quite aware that I have no legal remedy against
you, as our contract was a verbal one, made without witnesses; so I
must be content with what I get; but I do not wish you to flatter
yourself with the notion that you have hoodwinked a lawyer's clerk. You
are not clever enough to do that, Mr. Goodge, though you are knave
enough to cheat every attorney in the Law List."

"Young man, are you aware----?"

"As I have suffered by the absence of any witness to our negotiation, I
may as well profit by the absence of any witness to our interview. You
are a cheat and a trickster, Mr. Goodge, and I have the honour to wish
you good afternoon!" "Go forth, young man!" cried the infuriated Jonah
whose fat round face became beet-root colour with rage, and who
involuntarily extended his hand to the poker--for the purpose of
defence and not defiance, I believe. "Go forth, young man! I say unto
you, as Abimelech said unto Jedediah, go forth."

I am not quite clear as to the two scriptural proper names with which
the Rev. Jonah embellished his discourse on this occasion; but I know
that sort of man always has a leaning to the Abimelech and Jedediahs of
biblical history; solely, I believe, because the names have a sonorous
roll with them that is pleasant in the mouth of the charlatan.

As I was in the act of going forth--quite at my leisure, for I had no
fear of the clerical poker--my eye happened to alight on a small
side-table, covered with a chessboard-patterned cloth in gaudy colours,
and adorned with some of those sombre volumes which seem like an outward
evidence of the sober piety of their possessor. Among the sombre
volumes lay something which savoured of another hemisphere than that to
which those brown leather-bound books belonged. It was a glove--a
gentleman's glove, of pale lavender kid--small in size for a masculine
glove, and bearing upon it the evidence of the cleaner's art. Such
might be the glove of an exiled Brummel, but could never have encased
the squat paw of a Jonah Goodge. It was as if the _point d'Alencon_
ruffle of Chesterfield had been dropped in the study of John Wesley.

In a moment there flashed into my mind an idea which has haunted me
ever since. That glove had belonged to my respected patron, Horatio
Paget, and it was for his benefit the letters had been abstracted from
the packet. He had been with Jonah Goodge in the course of that day,
and had bought him over to cheat me.

And then I was obliged to go back to the old question, Was it possible
that the Captain could have any inkling of my business? Who could have
told him?

Who could have betrayed a secret which was known only to George Sheldon
and myself?

After all, are there not other people than Horatio Paget who wear
cleaned lavender gloves? But it always has been a habit with the
Captain to leave one loose glove behind him; and I daresay it was the
recollection of this which suggested the idea of his interference in
the Goodge business.

I devoted my evening to the perusal of Mrs. Rebecca Haygarth's letters.
The pale ink, the quaint cramped hand, the old-fashioned abbreviations,
and very doubtful orthography rendered the task laborious; but I stuck
to my work bravely, and the old clock in the market-place struck two as
I began the last letter. As I get deeper into this business I find my
interest in it growing day by day--an interest _sui generis_, apart
from all prospect of gain--apart even from the consideration that by
means of this investigation I am obtaining a living which is earned
_almost_ honestly; for if I tell an occasional falsehood or act an
occasional hypocrisy, I am no worse than a secretary of legation of an
Old Bailey barrister.

The pleasure which I now take in the progress of this research is a
pleasure that is new to me: it is the stimulus which makes a breakneck
gallop across dreary fields gridironed with dykes and stone walls so
delicious to the sportsman; it is the stimulus which makes the task of
the mathematician sweet to him when he devotes laborious days to the
solution of an abstruse problem; it is the stimulus that sustains the
Indian trapper against all the miseries of cold and hunger, foul
weather, and aching limbs; it is the fever of the chase--that
inextinguishable fire which, once lighted in the human breast, is not
to be quenched until the hunt is ended.

I should like to earn three thousand pounds; but if I were to be none
the richer for my trouble, I think, now that I am so deeply involved in
this business, I should still go on. I want to fathom the mystery of
that midnight interment at Dewsdale; I want to know the story of that
Mary Haygarth who lies under the old yew-tree at Spotswold, and for
whose loss some one sorrowed without hope of consolation.

Was that a widower's commonplace, I wonder, and did the unknown mourner
console himself ultimately with a new wife? Who knows? as my Italian
friends say when they discuss the future of France. Shall I ever
penetrate that mystery of the past? My task seems to me almost as
hopeless as if George Sheldon had set me to hunt up the descendants of
King Solomon's ninety-ninth wife. A hundred years ago seems as far
away, for all practical purposes, as if it were on the other side of
the flood.

The letters are worth very little. They are prim and measured epistles,
and they relate much more to spiritual matters than to temporal
business. Mrs. Rebecca seems to have been so much concerned for the
health of her soul that she had very little leisure to think of
anything so insignificant as the bodies of other people. The letters
are filled with discourses upon her own state of mind; and the tone of
them reveals not a little of that pride whose character it is to
simulate humility. Mrs. Rebecca is always casting ashes on her head;
but she takes care to let her friend and pastor know what a saintly
head it is notwithstanding.

I have laid aside three of the most secular letters, which I selected
after wading through unnumbered pages of bewailings in the strain of a
Wesleyan Madame Guyon. These throw some little light upon the character
of Matthew Haygarth, but do not afford much information of a tangible
kind. I have transcribed the letters verbatim, adhering even to certain
eccentricities of orthography which were by no means unusual in an age
when the Pretender to the crown of Great Britain wrote of his father as
_Gems_.

The first letter bears the date of August 30th, 1773, one week after
the marriage of the lady to our friend Matthew.

"REVERED FRIEND AND PASTOR,--On Monday sennite we arriv'd in London,
wich seems to me a mighty bigg citty, but of no more meritt or piety
than Babylon of old. My husband, who knows ye towne better than he
knows those things with wich it would more become him to be familiar,
was pleas'd to laugh mightily at that pious aversion wherewith I
regarded some of ye most notable sights in this place. We went t'other
night to a great garden called by some Spring Garden, by others
Vauxhall,--as having been at one time ye residence or estate of that
Arch Fiend and Papistical traitor Vaux, or Faux; but although I felt
obligated to my husband for ye desire to entertain me with a fine
sight, I could not but look with shame upon serious Christians
disporting themselves like children amongst coloured lamps, and
listening as if enraptured to profane music, when, at so much less cost
of money or of health, they might have been assembled together to
improve and edify one another.

"My obliging Mathew would have taken me to other places of the like
character; but inspir'd, as I hope and believe, by ye direction of ye
spirit, I took upon myself to tell him what vain trifling is all such
kind of pleasure. He argu'd with me stoutly, saying that ye King and
Queen, who are both shining examples of goodness and piety, do attend
Vauxhall and Ranelagh, and are to be seen there frequent, to the
delight of their subjects. On which I told him that, much as I esteemed
my sovereign and his respectable consort, I would compleat my existence
without having seen them rather than I would seek to encounter them in
a place of vain and frivolous diversion. He listen'd to my discoorse in
a kind and sober temper, but he was not convinc'd; for by and by he
falls of a sudden to sighing and groaning, and cries out, 'O, I went to
Vauxhall once when ye garden was not many years made, and O, how bright
ye lamps shone, like ye stars of heaven fallen among bushes! and O, how
sweet ye music sounded, like ye hymns of angels in ye dewy evening! but
that was nigh upon twenty years gone by, and all ye world is changed
since then.'

"You will conceive, Reverend Sir, that I was scandalised by such a
foolish rapsodie, and in plain words admonish'd my husband of his
folly. Whereupon he speedily became sober, and asked my pardon; but for
all that night continued of a gloomy countenance, ever and anon falling
to sighing and groning as before. Indeed, honour'd Sir, I have good
need of a patient sperrit in my dealings with him; for altho' at times
I think he is in a fair way to become a Christian, there are other
times when I doubt Satan has still a hold upon him, and that all my
prayers and admonitions have been in vaine.

"You, who know the wildness and wickedness of his past life--so far as
that life was ever known to any but himself, who was ever of a secret
and silent disposition concerning his own doings in this city, tho'
free-spoken and frank in all common matters--you, honour'd sir, know
with how serious an intention I have taken upon myself the burden of
matrimony, hoping thereby to secure the compleat conversion of this
waywarde soul. You are aware how it was ye earnest desire of my late
respected father that Mathew Haygarth and I shou'd be man and wife, his
father and my father haveing bin friends and companions in ye days of
her most gracious majesty Queen Anne. You know how, after being lost to
all decent compary for many years, Mathew came back after his father's
death, and lived a sober and serious life, attending amongst our
community, and being seen to shed tears on more than one occasion while
listening to the discourse of our revered and inspired founder. And
you, my dear and honour'd pastor, will feel for me when I tell you how
I am tormented by ye fear of backsliding in this soul which I have
promised to restore to ye fold. It was but yesterday, when walking with
him near St. John's Gate at Clerkenwell, he came to a standstill all of
a sudden, and he cried in that impetuous manner which is even yet
natural to him, 'Look ye now, Becky, wouldst like to see the house in
which the happiest years of my life was spent?' And I making no answer,
as thinking it was but some sudden freak, he points out a black
dirty-looking dwelling-place, with overhanging windows and a wide
gabled roof. 'Yonder it stands, Becky,' he cries; 'number seven
John-street, Clerkenwell; a queer dingy box of four walls, my wench--a
tumble-down kennel, with a staircase that 'twould break your neck to
mount, being strange to it--and half a day's journey from the court-end
of town. But that house was once paradise to me; and to look at it even
now, though 'tis over eighteen years since I saw the inside of it, will
bring the tears into these poor old eyes of mine'. And then he walk'd on
so fast that I could scarce keep pace with him, till we came to
Smithfield; and then he began to tell me about Bartholomew-fair and the
brave sights he had seen; and must needs show me where had stood the
booth of one Fielding--since infamously notorious as the writer of some
trashy novels, the dulness whereof is only surpassed by their profligacy:
and then he talks of Fawkes the conjurer, who made a great fortune, and
of some humble person called 'Tiddy Doll,' a dealer in gingerbread and
such foolish wares. But he could tell me nothing of those early
preachings of our revered founder in Moorfields, which would have been
more pleasant to me than all this vain babble about drolls and jesters,
gingerbread bakers and showmen.

"When we had walked the round of the place, and it was time to take
coach for our lodging at Chelsea--he having brought me thus far to see
St. Paul's and the prison of Newgate, the Mint and Tower--the gloomy
fit came on him again, and all that evening he was dull and sorrowful,
though I read aloud to him from the printed sermons of a rising member
of our community. So you will see, honour'd sir, how difficult it is
for these children of Satan to withdraw themselves from that master
they have once served; since at the sober age of fifty-three yeares my
husband's weak heart yet yearns after profligate faires and foolish
gardens lighted by color'd lampes.

"And now no more, reverend friend, my paper being gone and it being
full time to reflect that y'r patience must be gone also. Service to
Mrs. Goodge. I have no more room but to assure you that y'r gayeties of
this foolish and erring citty have no power to withdraw y'r heart of
her whose chief privilege it is to subscribe herself,

"Your humble follower and servant."

"Rebecca Haygarth."

To my mind there seems just a shadowy hint of some bygone romance in
this letter. Why did the dingy house in John-street bring the tears
into Matthew's eyes? and why did the memory of Vauxhall and Bartholomew
fair seem so sweet to him? And then that sighing and groaning and
dolefulness of visage whenever the thought of the past came back to
him?

What did it all mean, I wonder? Was it only his vanished youth, which
poor, sobered, converted, Wesleyanised Matthew regretted? or were there
pensive memories of something even sweeter than youth associated with
the coloured lamps of Vauxhall and the dinginess of Clerkenwell? Who
shall sound the heart of a man who lived a hundred years ago? and where
is the fathom-line which shall plumb its mysteries? I should need a
stack of old letters before I could arrive at the secret of that man's
life.

The two other letters, which I have selected after some deliberation,
relate to the last few weeks of Matthew's existence; and in these again
I fancy I see the trace of some domestic mystery, some sorrowful secret
which this sober citizen kept hidden from his wife, but which he was on
several occasions half inclined to reveal to her.

Perhaps if the lady's piety--which seems to have been thoroughly
sincere and praiseworthy, by the bye--had been a little less cold and
pragmatical in its mode of expression, poor Matthew might have taken
heart of grace and made a clean breast of it.

That there was a secret in the man's life I feel convinced; but that
conviction goes very little way towards proving any one point of the
smallest value to George Sheldon.

I transcribe an extract from each of the two important letters; the
first written a month before Matthew's death, the second a fortnight
after that event.

"And indeed, honour'd sir, I have of late suffered much uneasinesse of
speritt concerning my husband. Those fits of ye mopes of w'h I informed
you some time back have again come upon him. For awhile I did hope that
these melancholic affections were ye fruit put forth by a regenerate
soul; but within this month last past it has been my sorrow to discover
that these gloomy disorders arise rather from ye promptings of the Evil
One. It has pleased Mr. Haygarthe of late to declare that his life is
nigh at an end; and indeed he affects a conviction that his days are
number'd. This profane and impertinent notion I take to be a direct
inspiration of Satan, of a like character to ye sudden and
unaccountable fitts of laughter which have seized upon many pious
Christians in the midst of earnest congregations; whereby much shame
and discomfiture has been brought upon our sect. Nor is there any
justification for this presumptuous certainty entertained by my
husband, inasmuch as his health is much as it has ordinarily been for
ye last ten years. He does acknowledge this with his own lips, and
immediately after cries out that his race is run, and ye hand of death
is upon him; which I cannot but take as ye voice of ye enemy speaking
through that weak mouth of ye flesh.

"On Sunday night last past, ye gloomy fitt being come upon him after
prayers, Mr. Haygarthe began all on a sudden, as it is his habit to do:

"'There is something I would fain tell ye, wench,' he cries out,
'something about those roistering days in London, which it might be
well for thee to know.'

"But I answered him directly, that I had no desire to hear of profane
roisterings, and that it would be better for him to keep his peace, and
listen reverently to the expounding of the Scriptures, which Humphrey
Bagot, our worthy pastor and friend, had promised to explain and
exemplify after supper. We was seated at ye time in ye blue parlour,
the table being spread for supper, and were awaiting our friend from
the village, a man of humble station, being but a poor chapman and
huckster, but of exalted mind and a most holy temper, and sells me the
same growth of Bohea as that drunk by our gracious queen at Windsor.
After I had thus reproved him--in no unkind speritt--" Mr. Haygarthe
fell to sighing; and then cries out all at once:

"'When I am on my death-bed, wife, I will tell thee something: be sure
thou askest me for it; or if death come upon me unawares, thou wouldst
do well to search in the old tulip-leaf bureau for a letter, since I
may tell thee that in a letter which I would not tell with these lips.'

"Before there was time to answer him in comes Mr. Bagot, and we to
supper; after which he did read the sixth chapter of Hebrews and
expound it at much length for our edifying; at the end whereof Satan
had obtained fast hold of Mr. Haygarthe, who was fallen asleep and
snoring heavily."

Here is plain allusion to some secret, which that pragmatical idiot,
Mrs. Rebecca, studiously endeavoured not to hear. The next extract is
from a letter written when the lips that had been fain to speak were
stilled for ever. Ah, Mistress Rebecca, you were but mortal woman,
although you were also a shining light amongst the followers of John
Wesley; and I wonder what you would have given for poor Matthew's
secret _then_.

"Some days being gone after this melancholic event, I bethought me of
that which my husband had said to me before I left Dewsdale for that
excursion to the love-feasts at Kemberton and Kesfield, Broppindean and
Dawnfold, from which I returned but two short weeks before my poor
Matthew's demise. I called to remembrance that discourse about
approaching death which in my poor human judgment I did esteem a
pestilent error of mind, but which I do now recognise as a spiritual
premonition; and I set myself earnestly to look for that letter which
Matthew told me he would leave in the tulip-leaf bureau. But though I
did search with great care and pains, my trouble was wasted, inasmuch
as there was no letter. Nor did I leave off to search until ev'ry nook
and crevvis had been examin'd. But in one of ye secret drawers, hidden
in an old dog's-eared book of prayers, I did find a lock of fair hair,
as if cut from the head of a child, entwin'd curiously with a long
plait of dark hair, which, by reason of ye length thereof, must needs
have been the hair of a woman, and with these the miniature of a girl's
face in a gold frame. I will not stain this paper, which is near come
to an end, by the relation of such suspicions as arose in my mind on
finding these curious treasures; nor will I be of so unchristian a
temper as to speak ill of the dead. My husband was in his latter days
exemplarily sober, and a humble acting Xtian. Ye secrets of his earlier
life will not now be showne to me on this side heaven. I have set aside
ye book, ye picture, and ye plaited hair in my desk for conveniency,
where I will show them to you when I am next rejoic'd by y'r improving
conversation. Until then, in grief or in happiness, in health and
sickness, I trust I shall ever continue, with y'r same sincerity,

"Your humble and obliged Servant and disciple

"REBECCA HAYGARTHE."

Thus end my excerpts from the correspondence of Mrs. Haygarthe. They
are very interesting to me, as containing the vague shadow of a
vanished existence; but whether they will ever be worth setting forth
in an affidavit is extremely uncertain. Doubtless that miniature of an
unknown girl which caused so much consternation in the mind of sober
Mrs. Rebecca was no other than the "Molly" whose gray eyes reminded me
of Charlotte Halliday.

As I copied Mrs. Rebecca's quaint epistles, in the midnight stillness,
the things of which I was writing arose before me like a picture. I
could see the blue parlour that Sunday evening; the sober couple seated
primly opposite to each other; the china monsters on the high
chimneypiece; the blue-and-white Dutch tiles, with queer squat figures
of Flemish citizens on foot and on horseback; the candles burning dimly
on the spindle-legged table--two poor pale flames reflected ghastly in
the dark polished panels of the wainscot; the big open Bible on an
adjacent table; the old silver tankard, and buckhorn-handled knives and
forks set out for supper; the solemn eight-day clock, ticking drearily
in the corner; and amid all that sombre old-fashioned comfort,
gray-haired Matthew sighing and lamenting for his vanished youth.

I have grown strangely romantic since I have fallen in love with
Charlotte Halliday. The time was when I should have felt nothing but a
flippant ignorant contempt for poor Haygarth's feeble sighings and
lamentings; but now I think of him with a sorrowful tenderness, and am
more interested in his poor commonplace life, that picture, and those
two locks of hair, than in the most powerful romance that ever emanated
from mortal genius. It has been truly said, that truth is stranger than
fiction: may it not as justly be said, that truth has a power to touch
the human heart which is lacking in the most sublime flights of a
Shakespeare, or the grandest imaginings of an Aeschylus? One is sorry
for the fate of Agamemnon; but one is infinitely more sorrowful for the
cruel death of that English Richard in the dungeon at Pomfret, who was
a very insignificant person as compared to the king of men and of
ships.

CHAPTER III.

HUNTING THE JUDSONS.

_Oct. 10th_. Yesterday and the day before were blank days. On Saturday
I read Mrs. Rebecca's letters a second time after a late breakfast, and
spent a lazy morning in the endeavour to pick up any stray crumbs of
information which I might have overlooked the previous night. There was
nothing to be found, however; and, estimable as I have always
considered the founder of the Wesleyan fraternity, I felt just a little
weary of his virtues and his discourses, his journeyings from place to
place, his love-feasts and his prayer-meetings, before I had finished
with Mrs. Haygarth's correspondence. In the afternoon I strolled about
the town; made inquiries at several inns, with a view to discover
whether Captain Paget was peradventure an inmate thereof; looked in at
the railway-station, and watched the departure of a train; dawdled away
half an hour at the best tobacconist's shop in the town on the chance
of encountering my accomplished patron, who indulges in two of the
choicest obtainable cigars per diem, and might possibly repair thither
to make a purchase, if he were in the place. Whether he is still in
Ullerton or not I cannot tell; but he did not come to the
tobacconist's; and I was fain to go back to my inn, having wasted a
day. Yet I do not think that George Sheldon will have cause to complain
of me, since I have worked very closely for my twenty shillings per
week, and have devoted myself to the business in hand with an amount of
enthusiasm which I did not think it possible for me to experience
--except for--

I went to church on Sunday morning, and was more devoutly inclined than
it has been my habit to feel; for although a man who lives by his wits
must not necessarily be a heathen or an atheist, it is very difficult
for him to be anything like a Christian. Even my devotion yesterday was
not worth much, for my thoughts went vagabondising off to Charlotte
Halliday in the midst of a very sensible practical sermon.

In the afternoon I read the papers, and dozed by the fire in the
coffee-room--two-thirds coke by the way, and alternating from the
fierceness of a furnace to the dreary blackness of an exhausted
coal-mine--still thinking of Charlotte.

Late in the evening I walked the streets of the town, and thought what
a lonely wretch I was. The desert of Sahara is somewhat dismal, I
daresay; but in its dismality there is at least a flavour of romance, a
smack of adventure. O, the hopeless dulness, the unutterable blankness
of a provincial town late on a Sunday night, as it presents itself to
the contemplation of a friendless young man without a sixpence in his
pocket, or one bright hope to tempt him to forgetfulness of the past in
pleasant dreaming of the future!

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