John Wilson Ross - "Tacitus and Bracciolini"

Theodor Storm - "Aquis Submersus"

M. E. Braddon - "Charlotte's Inheritance"

Henry Fielding - "The History of Tom Jones, a foundling"

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Birds of Prey by M.E. Braddon

M >> M.E. Braddon >> Birds of Prey




The shabbily-dressed girl was looking for some one. She watched her
father's play carefully--she marked her card with unfailing precision;
but she performed these duties with a mechanical air; and it was only
when she lifted her eyes to the great shining plate-glass doors which
opened into this dangerous Paradise, that any ray of feeling animated
her countenance. She was looking for some one, and the person watched
for was so long coming. Ah, how difficult for the arithmetician to
number the crushing disappointments, the bitter agonies that one woman
can endure in a single half-hour! This girl was so young--so young; and
already she had learnt to suffer.

The man played with the concentrated attention and the impassible
countenance of an experienced gamester, rarely lifting his eyes from
the green cloth, never looking back at the girl who stood behind him.
He was winning to-day, and he accepted his good fortune as quietly as
he had often accepted evil fortune at the same table. He seemed to be
playing on some system of his own; and neighbouring players looked at
him with envious eyes, as they saw the pile of gold grow larger under
his thin nervous hands. Ignorant gamesters, who stood aloof after
having lost two or three napoleons, contemplated the lucky Englishman
and wondered about him, while some touch of pity leavened the envy
excited by his wonderful fortune. He looked like a decayed gentleman--a
man who had been a military dandy in the days that were gone, and who
had all the old pretensions still, without the power to support them--a
Brummel languishing at Caen; a Nash wasting slowly at Bath.

At last the girl's face brightened suddenly as she glanced upwards; and
it would have been very easy for the observant traveller--if any such
person had existed--to construe aright that bright change in her
countenance. The some one she had been watching for had arrived.

The doors swung open to admit a man of about five-and-twenty, whose
darkly-handsome face and careless costume had something of that air
which was once wont to be associated with the person and the poetry of
George Gordon Lord Byron. The new-comer was just one of those men whom
very young women are apt to admire, and whom worldly-minded people are
prone to distrust. There was a perfume of Bohemianism, a flavour of the
Quartier Latin, about the loosely-tied cravat, the wide trousers, and
black-velvet morning coat, with which the young man outraged the
opinions of respectable visitors at Foretdechene. There was a
semi-poetic vagabondism in the half-indifferent, half-contemptuous
expression of his face, with its fierce moustache, and strongly-marked
eyebrows overshadowing sleepy gray eyes--eyes that were half hidden, by
their long dark lashes; as still pools of blue water lie sometimes
hidden among the rushes that nourish round them.

He was handsome, and he knew that he was handsome; but he affected to
despise the beauty of his proud dark face, as he affected to despise
all the brightest and most beautiful things upon earth: and yet there
was a vagabondish kind of foppery in his costume that contrasted
sharply with the gentlemanly dandyism of the shabby gamester sitting at
the table. There was a distance of nearly half a century between the
style of the Regency dandy and the Quartier-Latin lion.

The girl watched the new-comer with sad earnest eyes as he walked
slowly towards the table, and a faint blush kindled in her cheeks as he
came nearer to the spot where she stood. He went by her presently,
carrying an atmosphere of stale tobacco with him as he went; and he
gave her a friendly nod as he passed, and a "Good morning, Diana;" but
that was all. The faint blush faded and left her very pale: but she
resumed her weary task with the card and the pin; and if she had
endured any disappointment within those few moments, it seemed to be a
kind of disappointment that she was accustomed to suffer.

The young man walked round the table till he came to the only vacant
chair, in which he seated himself, and after watching the game for a
few minutes, began to play. From the moment in which he dropped into
that vacant seat to the moment in which he rose to leave the table,
three hours afterwards, he never lifted his eyes from the green cloth,
or seemed to be conscious of anything that was going on around or about
him. The girl watched him furtively for some little time after he had
taken his place at the table; but the stony mask of the professed
gambler is a profitless object for a woman's earnest scrutiny.

She sighed presently, and laid her hand heavily on the chair behind
which she was standing. The action aroused the man who sat in it, and
he turned and looked at her for the first time.

"You are tired, Diana?"

"Yes, papa, I am very tired."

"Give me your card, then, and go away," the gamester answered
peevishly; "girls are always tired."

She gave him the mysteriously-perforated card, and left her post behind
his chair; and then, after roaming about the great saloon with a weary
listless air, and wandering from one open window to another to look
into the sunny quadrangle, where well-dressed people were sitting at
little tables eating ices or drinking lemonade, she went away
altogether, and roamed into another chamber where some children were
dancing to the sound of a feeble violin. She sat upon a velvet-covered
bench, and watched the children's lesson for some minutes, and then
rose and wandered to another open window that overlooked the same
quadrangle, where the well-dressed people were enjoying themselves in
the hot August sunshine.

"How extravagantly everybody dresses!" she thought, "and what a shabby
poverty-stricken creature one feels amongst them! And yet if I ask papa
to give me a couple of napoleons out of the money he won to-day, he
will only look at me from head to foot, and tell me I have a gown and a
cloak and a bonnet, and ask me what more I can want, in the name of all
that is unreasonable? And I see girls here whose fathers are so fond of
them and so proud of them--ugly girls, decked out in silks and muslins
and ribbons that have cost a small fortune--clumsy awkward girls, who
look at _me_ as if I were some new kind of wild animal."

The saloons at Foretdechene were rich in monster sheets of looking-glass;
and in wandering discontentedly about the room Diana Paget saw herself
reflected many times in all her shabbiness. It was only very lately she
had discovered that she had some pretension to good looks; for her
father, who could not or would not educate her decently or clothe her
creditably, took a very high tone of morality in his paternal teaching,
and, in the fear that she might one day grow vain of her beauty, had
taken care to impress upon her at an early age that she was the very
incarnation of all that is lean and sallow and awkward.




CHAPTER II.

THE EASY DESCENT


Amongst the many imprudences of which Horatio Paget--once a cornet in
a crack cavalry regiment, always a captain in his intercourse with the
world--had been guilty during the course of a long career, there was
none for which he so bitterly reproached himself as for a certain
foolish marriage which he had made late in his life. It was when he
had thrown away the last chance that an indulgent destiny had given
him, that the ruined fop of the Regency, the sometime member of the
Beef-steak Club, the man who in his earliest youth had worn a silver
gridiron at his button-hole, and played piquet in the gilded saloons of
Georgina of Devonshire, found himself laid on a bed of sickness in
dingy London lodgings, and nearer death than he bad ever been in the
course of his brief military career; so nearly gliding from life's
swift-flowing river into eternity's trackless ocean, that the warmest
thrill of gratitude which ever stirred the slow pulses of his cold
heart quickened its beating as he clasped the hand that had held him
back from the unknown region whose icy breath had chilled him with an
awful fear. Such men as Horatio Paget are apt to feel a strange terror
when the black night drops suddenly down upon them, and the "Gray
Boatman's" voice sounds hollow and mysterious in the darkness,
announcing that the ocean is near. The hand that held the ruined
spendthrift back when the current swept so swiftly oceanward was a
woman's tender hand; and Heaven only knows what patient watchfulness,
what careful administration of medicines and unwearying preparation of
broths and jellies and sagos and gruels, what untiring and devoted
slavery, had been necessary to save the faded rake who looked out upon
the world once more, a ghastly shadow of his former self, a penniless
helpless burden for any one who might choose to support him.

"Don't thank _me_," said the doctor, when his feeble patient whimpered
flourishing protestations of his gratitude, unabashed by the
consciousness that such grateful protestations were the sole coin with
which the medical man would be paid for his services; "thank that young
woman, if you want to thank anybody; for if it had not been for her you
wouldn't be here to talk about gratitude. And if ever you get such
another attack of inflammation on the lungs, you had better pray for
such another nurse, though I don't think you're likely to find one."

And with this exordium, the rough-and-ready surgeon took his departure,
leaving Horatio Paget alone with the woman who had saved his life.

She was only his landlady's daughter; and his landlady was no
prosperous householder in Mayfair, thriving on the extravagance of
wealthy bachelors, but an honest widow, living in an obscure
little street leading out of the Old Kent-road, and letting a
meagrely-furnished little parlour and a still more meagrely-furnished
little bedroom to any single gentleman whom reverse of fortune might
lead into such a locality. Captain Paget had sunk very low in the
world when he took possession of that wretched parlour and laid
himself down to rest on the widow's flock-bed.

There is apt to be a dreary interval in the life of such a man--a
blank dismal interregnum, which divides the day in which he spends his
last shilling from the hour in which he begins to prey deliberately
upon the purses of other people. It was in that hopeless interval that
Horatio Paget established himself in the widow's parlour. But though he
slept in the Old Kent-road, he had not yet brought himself to endure
existence on that Surrey side of the water. He emerged from his lodging
every morning to hasten westward, resplendent in clean linen and
exquisitely-fitting gloves, and unquestionable overcoat, and varnished
boots.

The wardrobe has its Indian summer; and the glory of a first-rate
tailor's coat is like the splendour of a tropical sun--it is glorious
to the last, and sinks in a moment. Captain Paget's wardrobe was in its
Indian summer in these days; and when he felt how fatally near the
Bond-street pavement was to the soles of his feet, he could not refrain
from a fond admiration of the boots that were so beautiful in decay.

He walked the West-end for many weary hours every day during this
period of his decadence. He tried to live in an honest gentlemanly way,
by borrowing money of his friends, or discounting an accommodation-bill
obtained from some innocent acquaintance who was deluded by his
brilliant appearance and specious tongue into a belief in the transient
nature of his difficulties. He spent his days in hanging about the
halls and waiting-rooms of clubs--of some of which he had once been a
member; he walked weary miles between St James's and Mayfair,
Kensington Gore and Notting Hill, leaving little notes for men who were
not at home, or writing a little note in one room while the man to whom
he was writing hushed his breath in an adjoining chamber. People who
had once been Captain Paget's fast friends seemed to have
simultaneously decided upon spending their existence out of doors, as
it appeared to the impecunious Captain. The servants of his friends
were afflicted with a strange uncertainty as to their masters'
movements. At whatever hall-door Horatio Paget presented himself, it
seemed equally doubtful whether the proprietor of the mansion would be
home to dinner that day, or whether he would be at home any time next
day, or the day after that, or at the end of the week, or indeed
whether he would ever come home again. Sometimes the Captain, calling
in the evening dusk, in the faint hope of gaining admittance to some
friendly dwelling, saw the glimmer of light under a dining-room door,
and heard the clooping of corks and the pleasant jingling of glass and
silver in the innermost recesses of a butler's pantry; but still the
answer was--not at home, and not likely to be home. All the respectable
world was to be out henceforth for Horatio Paget. But now and then at
the clubs he met some young man, who had no wife at home to keep watch
upon his purse and to wail piteously over a five-pound note
ill-bestowed, and who took compassion on the fallen spendthrift, and
believed, or pretended to believe, his story of temporary embarrassment;
and then the Captain dined sumptuously at a little French restaurant
in Castle-street, Leicester-square, and took a half-bottle of chablis
with his oysters, and warmed himself with chambertin that was brought
to him in a dusty cobweb-shrouded bottle reposing in a wicker-basket.

But in these latter days such glimpses of sunshine very rarely
illumined the dull stream of the Captain's life. Failure and
disappointment had become the rule of his existence--success the rare
exception. Crossing the river now on his way westward, he was wont to
loiter a little on Waterloo Bridge, and to look dreamily down at the
water, wondering whether the time was near at hand when, under cover of
the evening dusk, he would pay his last halfpenny to the toll-keeper,
and never again know the need of an earthly coin.

"I saw a fellow in the Morgue one day,--a poor wretch who had drowned
himself a week or two before. Great God, how horrible he looked! If
there was any certainty they would find one immediately, and bury one
decently, there'd be no particular horror in that kind of death. But to
be found _like that_, and to lie in some riverside deadhouse down by
Wapping, with a ghastly placard rotting on the rotting door, and
nothing but ooze and slime and rottenness round about one--waiting to
be identified! And who knows, after all, whether a dead man doesn't
_feel_ that sort of thing?"

It was after such musings as these had begun to be very common with
Horatio Paget that he caught the chill which resulted in a very
dangerous illness of many weeks. The late autumn was wet and cold and
dreary; but Captain Paget, although remarkably clever after a certain
fashion, had never been a lover of intellectual pursuits, and
imprisonment in Mrs. Kepp's shabby parlour was odious to him. When he
had read every page of the borrowed newspaper, and pished and pshawed
over the leaders, and groaned aloud at the announcement of some wealthy
marriage made by one of his quondam friends, or chuckled at the record
of another quondam friend's insolvency--when he had poked the fire
savagely half a dozen times in an hour, cursing the pinched grate and
the bad coals during every repetition of the operation--when he had
smoked his last cigar, and varnished his favourite boots, and looked
out of the window, and contemplated himself gloomily in the wretched
little glass over the narrow chimney-piece,--Captain Paget's
intellectual resources were exhausted, and an angry impatience took
possession of him. Then, in defiance of the pelting rain or the
lowering sky, he flung his slippers into the farthest corner--and the
farthest corner of Mrs. Kepp's parlour was not very remote from the
Captain's arm-chair--he drew on the stoutest of his varnished boots--
and there were none of them very stout now--buttoned his perfect
overcoat, adjusted his hat before the looking-glass, and sallied forth,
umbrella in hand, to make his way westward. Westward always, through
storm and shower, back to the haunts of his youth, went the wanderer
and outcast, to see the red glow of cheery fires reflected on the
plate-glass windows of his favourite clubs; to see the lamps in
spacious reading-rooms lit early in the autumn dusk, and to watch the
soft light glimmering on the rich bindings of the books, and losing
itself in the sombre depths of crimson draperies. To this poor worldly
creature the agony of banishment from those palaces of Pall Mall or St.
James's-street was as bitter as the pain of a fallen angel. It was the
dullest, deadest time of the year, and there were not many loungers in
those sumptuous reading-rooms, where the shaded lamps shed their
subdued light on the chaste splendour of the sanctuary; so Captain
Paget could haunt the scene of his departed youth without much fear of
recognition: but his wanderings in the West grew more hopeless and
purposeless every day. He began to understand how it was that people
were never at home when he assailed their doors with his fashionable
knock. He could no longer endure the humiliation of such repulses, for
he began to understand that the servants knew his errand as well as
their masters, and had their answers ready, let him present himself
before them when he would: so he besieged the doors of St. James's and
Mayfair, Kensington Gore and Netting Hill, no longer. He knew that the
bubble of his poor foolish life had burst, and that there was nothing
left for him but to die.

It seemed about this time as if the end of all was very near. Captain
Paget caught a chill one miserable evening on which he returned to his
lodging with his garments dripping, and his beautiful varnished boots
reduced to a kind of pulp; and the chill resulted in a violent
inflammation of the lungs. Then it was that a woman's hand was held out
to save him, and a woman's divine tenderness cared for him in his dire
extremity.

The ministering angel who comforted this helpless and broken-down
wayfarer was only a low-born ignorant girl called Mary Anne Kepp--a
girl who had waited upon the Captain during his residence in her
mother's house, but of whom he had taken about as much notice as he had
been wont to take of the coloured servants who tended him when he was
with his regiment in India. Horatio Paget had been a night-brawler and
a gamester, a duellist and a reprobate, in the glorious days that were
gone; but he had never been a profligate; and he did not know that the
girl who brought him his breakfast and staggered under the weight of
his coal-scuttle was one of the most beautiful women he had ever looked
upon.

The Captain was so essentially a creature of the West-end, that Beauty
without her glitter of diamonds and splendour of apparel was scarcely
Beauty for him. He waited for the groom of the chambers to announce her
name, and the low hum of well-bred approval to accompany her entrance,
before he bowed the knee and acknowledged her perfection. The Beauties
whom he remembered had received their patent from the Prince Regent,
and had graduated in the houses of Devonshire and Hertford. How should
the faded bachelor know that this girl, in a shabby cotton gown, with
unkempt hair dragged off her pale face, and with grimy smears from the
handles of saucepans and fire-irons imprinted upon her cheeks--how
should he know that she was beautiful? It was only during the slow
monotonous hours of his convalescence, when he lay upon the poor faded
little sofa in Mrs. Kepp's parlour--the sofa that was scarcely less
faded and feeble than himself--it was then, and then only, that he
discovered the loveliness of the face which had been so often bent over
him during his delirious wanderings.

"I have mistaken you for all manner of people, my dear," he said to his
landlady's daughter, who sat by the little Pembroke-table working,
while her mother dozed in a corner with a worsted stocking drawn over
her arm and a pair of spectacles resting upon her elderly nose. Mrs.
Kepp and her daughter were wont to spend their evenings in the lodger's
apartment now; for the invalid complained bitterly of "the horrors"
when they left him.

"I have taken you for all sorts of people, Mary Anne," pursued the
Captain dreamily. "Sometimes I have fancied you were the Countess of
Jersey, and I could see her smile as she looked at me when I was first
presented to her. I was very young in the beautiful Jersey's time; and
then there was the other one--whom I used to drink tea with at
Brighton. Ah me! what a dull world it seems nowadays! The King gone,
and everything changed--everything--everything! I am a very old man,
Mary Anne."

He was fifty-two years of age; he felt quite an old man. He had spent
all his money, he had outlived the best friends of his youth; for it
had been his fate to adorn a declining era, and he had been a youngster
among elderly patrons and associates. His patrons were dead and gone,
and the men he had patronised shut their doors upon him in the day of
his poverty. As for his relations, he had turned his back upon them
long ago, when first he followed in the shining wake of that gorgeous
vessel, the Royal George. In this hour of his penniless decline there
was none to help him. To have outlived every affection and every
pleasure is the chief bitterness of old age; and this bitterness
Horatio Paget suffered in all its fulness, though his years were but
fifty-two.

"I am a very old man, Mary Anne," he repeated plaintively. But Mary
Anne Kepp could not think him old. To her eyes he must for ever appear
the incarnation of all that is elegant and distinguished. He was the
first gentleman she had ever seen. Mrs. Kepp had given shelter to other
lodgers who had called themselves gentlemen, and who had been pompous
and grandiose of manner in their intercourse with the widow and her
daughter; but O, what pitiful lacquered counterfeits, what Brummagem
paste they had been, compared to the real gem! Mary Anne Kepp had seen
varnished boots before the humble flooring of her mother's dwelling was
honoured by the tread of Horatio Paget, but what clumsy vulgar boots,
and what awkward plebeian feet had worn them! The lodger's slim white
hands and arched instep, the patrician curve of his aquiline nose, the
perfect grace of his apparel, the high-bred modulation of his courteous
accents,--all these had impressed Mary Anne's tender little heart so
much the more because of his poverty and loneliness. That such a man
should be forgotten and deserted--that such a man should be poor and
lonely, seemed so cruel a chance to the simple maiden: and then when
illness overtook him, and invested him with a supreme claim upon her
tenderness and pity,--then the innocent girl lavished all the treasures
of a compassionate heart upon the ruined gentleman. She had no thought
of fee or reward; she knew that her mother's lodger was miserably poor,
and that his payments had become more and more irregular week by week
and month by month. She had no consciousness of the depth of feeling
that rendered her so gentle a nurse; for her life was a busy one, and
she had neither time nor inclination for any morbid brooding upon her
own feelings.

She protested warmly against the Captain's lamentation respecting his
age.

"The idear of any gentleman calling hisself old at fifty!" she said--
and Horatio shuddered at the supererogatory "r" and the "hisself,"
though they proceeded from the lips of his consoler;--"you've got
many, many years before you yet, sir, please God," she added piously;
"and there's good friends will come forward yet to help you, I make no
doubt."

Captain Paget shook his head peevishly.

"You talk as if you were telling my fortune with a pack of cards," he
said. "No, my girl, I shall have only one friend to rely upon, if ever
I am well enough to go outside this house; and that friend is myself. I
have spent the fortune my father left me; I have spent the price of my
commission; and I have parted with every object of any value that I
ever possessed--in vulgar parlance, I am cleaned out, Mary Anne. But
other men have spent every sixpence belonging to them, and have
contrived to live pleasantly enough for half a century afterwards; and
I daresay I can do as they have done. If the wind is tempered to the
shorn lamb, I suppose the hawks and vultures take care of themselves. I
have tried my luck as a shorn lamb, and the tempest has been very
bitter for me; so I have no alternative but to join the vultures."

Mary Anne Kepp stared wonderingly at her mother's lodger. She had some
notion that he had been saying something wicked and blasphemous; but
she was too ignorant and too innocent to follow his meaning.

"O, pray don't talk in that wild way, sir," she entreated. "It makes me
so unhappy to hear you go on like that."

"And why should anything that I say make you unhappy, Mary Anne?" asked
the lodger earnestly.

There was something in his tone that set her pale face on fire with
unwonted crimson, and she bent very low over her work to hide those
painful blushes. She did not know that the Captain's tone presaged a
serious address; she did not know that the grand crisis of her life was
close upon her.

If you think books have dumbed down …
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He wrote it in just three weeks, furiously and loudly tap-tap-tapping away on his typewriter on 12ft long reels of paper so that he did not have to stop, just writing writing writing fuelled only, he said, by coffee…

It became one of the most important American novels of the last century and yesterday the original manuscript - a scroll taped together with eight reels of paper - of Jack Kerouac's On The Road was unfurled in the UK for the first time.
Fifty years after the novel which more or less defined the Beat generation, was published in Britain, the Barber Institute in Birmingham is showing what is now one of the most valuable literary manuscripts in existence as part of its exhibition Jack Kerouac: Back On the Road.

The exhibition's curator Professor Dick Ellis said there had been a lot of competition to get the scroll which is itself spending a lot of time on the move, having toured a string of US cities and hitting the road to Rome once this show is over. "We're very excited indeed," he said. "This is an iconic manuscript. It is a record of the huge effort Kerouac put into composing it. It was 20 days of typing 6,500 words a day, flat out, in spontaneous composition. He wanted to record things with the most possible accuracy using the spontaneous technique. His typewriter became a compositional instrument.

"Truman Capote once accused Kerouac of typing rather than writing, I would say he was learning the ability of using the typewriter like a jazz instrument, like a saxophone. He also had an incredible memory. And he had great speed at typing, he became a lightning typist. He came to be able to use a typewriter in a way that has not been seen before or since. Kerouac said he wrote fast because the road was fast."

About 22 of the scroll's 120ft will be on display in a specially built cabinet and while visitors will have to slightly tilt their heads, Ellis believes they will get a much deeper knowledge of what Kerouac was all about. It comes to Birmingham courtesy of Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts, who bought it for $2.4m (£1.6m) in 2001 before agreeing to a tour. Of course, in the published novel, there are paragraph breaks but in the scroll, there are none. Kerouac did not have the time. The exhibition runs until January 28.

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