Birds of Prey by M.E. Braddon

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

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37

When she outgrew the age of humble foster-mothers and cottages in the
dreariest of the outlying suburbs, the Captain sent his daughter to
school: and on this occasion he determined on patronising a person whom
he had once been too proud to remember among the list of his kindred.
There are poor and straggling branches upon every family tree; and the
Pagets of Thorpehaven had needy cousins who, in the mighty battle of
life, were compelled to fight amongst the rank and file. One of these
poor cousins was a Miss Priscilla Paget, who at an early age had
exhibited that affection for intellectual pursuits and that
carelessness as to the duties of the toilet which are supposed to
distinguish the predestined blue-stocking. Left quite alone in the
world, Priscilla put her educational capital to good use; and after
holding the position of principal governess for nearly twenty years in
a prosperous boarding-school at Brompton, she followed her late
employer to her grave with unaffected sorrow, and within a month of the
funeral invested her savings in the purchase of the business, and
established herself as mistress of the mansion. To this lady Captain
Paget confided his daughter's education; and in Priscilla Paget's house
Diana found a shelter that was almost like a home, until her kinswoman
became weary of promises that were never kept, and pitiful sums paid on
account of a debt that grew bigger every day--very weary likewise of
conciliatory hampers of game and barrels of oysters, and all the flimsy
devices of a debtor who is practised in the varied arts of the
gentlemanly swindler.

The day came when Miss Paget resolved to be rid of her profitless
charge; and once more Diana found herself delivered like a parcel of
unordered goods at the door of her father's lodging. Those are
precocious children who learn their first lessons in the school of
poverty; and the girl had been vaguely conscious of the degradation
involved in this process at the age of five. How much more keenly did
she feel the shame at the age of fifteen! Priscilla did her best to
lessen the pain of her pupil's departure.

"It isn't that I've any fault to find with you, Diana, though you must
remember that I have heard some complaints of your temper," she said,
with gentle gravity; "but your father is too trying. If he didn't make
me any promises, I should think better of him. If he told me frankly
that he couldn't pay me, and asked me to keep you out of charity,"--
Diana drew herself up with a little shiver at this word,--"why, I might
turn it over in my mind, and see if it could be done. But to be
deceived time after time, as I've been deceived--you know the solemn
language your father has used, Diana, for you have heard him--and to
rely on a sum of money on a certain date, as I have relied again and
again, after Horatio's assurance that I might depend upon him--it's too
bad, Diana; it's more than any one can endure. If you were two or three
years older, and further advanced in your education, I might manage to
do something for you by making you useful with the little ones; but I
can't afford to keep you and clothe you during the next three years for
nothing, and so I have no alternative but to send you home."

The "home" to which Diana Paget was taken upon this occasion was a
lodging over a toyshop in the Westminster-road, where the Captain lived
in considerable comfort on the proceeds of a Friendly and Philanthropic
Loan Society.

But no very cordial welcome awaited Diana in the gaudily-furnished
drawing-room over the toyshop. She found her father sleeping placidly
in his easy-chair, while a young man, who was a stranger to her, sat at
a table near the window writing letters. It was a dull November day--a
very dreary day on which to find one's self thrown suddenly on a still
drearier world; and in the Westminster-bridge-road the lamps were
already making yellow patches of sickly light amidst the afternoon fog.

The Captain twitched his silk handkerchief off his face with an
impatient gesture as Diana entered the room.

"Now, then, what is it?" he asked peevishly, without looking at the
intruder.

He recognised her in the next moment; but that first impatient
salutation was about as warm a welcome as any which Miss Paget received
from her father. In sad and bitter truth, he did not care for her. His
marriage with Mary Anne Kepp had been the one grateful impulse of his
life; and even the sentiment which had prompted that marriage had been
by no means free from the taint of selfishness. But he had been quite
unprepared to find that this grand sacrifice of his life should involve
another sacrifice in the maintenance of a daughter he did not want; and
he was very much inclined to quarrel with the destiny that had given
him this burden.

"If you had been a boy, I might have made you useful to me sooner or
later," the Captain said to his daughter when he found himself alone
with her late on the night of her return; "but what on earth am I to do
with a daughter, in the unsettled life I lead? However, since that old
harridan has sent you back, you must manage in the best way you can,"
concluded Captain Paget with a discontented sigh.

From this time Diana Paget had inhabited the nest of the vultures, and
every day had brought its new lesson of trickery and falsehood. There
are men--and bad men too--who would have tried to keep the secret of
their shifts and meannesses hidden from an only child; but Horatio
Paget believed himself the victim of man's ingratitude, and his
misdoings the necessity of an evil destiny. It is not easy for the
unsophisticated intellect to gauge those moral depths to which the man
who lives by his wits must sink before his career is finished, or to
understand how, with every step in the swindler's downward road,
the conscience grows tougher, the perception of shame blunter, the
savage selfishness of the animal nature stronger. Diana Paget had
discovered some of her father's weaknesses during her miserable childhood;
and in the days of her unpaid-for schooling she had known that his most
solemn promises were no more to be relied on than the capricious breath
of a summer breeze. So the revelations which awaited her under the
paternal roof were not utterly strange or entirely unexpected.
Day by day she grew more accustomed to that atmosphere of fraud and
falsehood. The sense of shame never left her; for there is a pride
that thrives amidst poverty and degradation, and of such pride Diana
Paget possessed no small share. She writhed under the consciousness
that she was the daughter of a man who had forfeited all right to the
esteem of his fellowmen. She valued the good opinion of others, and
would fain have been beloved and admired, trusted and respected; for
she was ambitious: and the though that she might one day do something
which should lift her above the vulgar level was the day-dream that
had consoled her in many an hour of humiliation and discomfort.
Diana Paget felt the Captain's shame as keenly as her mother had felt it;
but the remorse which had agonised gentle Mary Anne, the tender
compassion for others which had wrung that fond and faithful heart,
had no place in the breast of the Captain's daughter.

Diana felt so much compassion for herself, that she had none left to
bestow upon other people. Her father's victims might be miserable, but
was not she infinitely more wretched? The landlady who found her
apartments suddenly tenantless and her rent unpaid might complain of
the hardness of her fortune; but was it not harder for Diana, with the
sensitive feelings and keen pride of the Pagets, to endure all the
degradation involved in the stealthy carrying away of luggage and a
secret departure under cover of night?

At first Miss Paget had been inclined to feel aggrieved by the presence
of the young man whom she had seen writing letters in the gloomy dusk
of the November afternoon; but in due time she came to accept him as a
companion, and to feel that her joyless life would have been drearier
without him. He was the secretary of the Friendly and Philanthropic
Loan Society, and of any other society organised by the Captain. He was
Captain Paget's amanuensis and representative--Captain Paget's tool,
but not Captain Paget's dupe; for Valentine Hawkehurst was not of that
stuff of which dupes are made.

The man who lives by his wits has need of a faithful friend and
follower. The chief of the vultures must not be approached too easily.
There must be a preparatory ordeal, an outer chamber to be passed,
before the victim is introduced to the sanctuary which is irradiated by
the silver veil of the prophet. Captain Paget found an able coadjutor
in Valentine Hawkehurst, who answered one of those tempting
advertisements in which A. B.C. or X. Y. Z. was wont to offer a salary
of three hundred a year to any gentlemanly person capable of performing
the duties of secretary to a newly-established company. It was only
after responding to this promising offer that the applicant was
informed that he must possess one indispensable qualification in the
shape of a capital of five hundred pounds. Mr Hawkehurst laughed aloud
when the Captain imparted this condition with that suave and yet
dignified manner which was peculiar to him.

"I ought to have known it was a dodge of that kind," said the young man
coolly. "Those very good things--duties light and easy, hours from
twelve till four, speedy advancement certain for a conscientious and
gentlemanly person, and so on--are always of the genus _do_. Your
advertisement is very cleverly worded, my dear sir; only it's like the
rest of them, rather _too_ clever. It is so difficult for a clever man
not to be too clever. The prevailing weakness of the human intellect
seems to me to be exaggeration. However, as I haven't a five-pound note
in the world, or the chance of getting one, I'll wish you good morning,
Captain Paget."

There are people whose blood would have been turned to ice by the stony
glare of indignation with which Horatio Paget regarded the man who had
dared to question his probity. But Mr. Hawkehurst had done with strong
impressions long before he met the Captain; and he listened to that
gentleman's freezing reproof with an admiring smile. Out of this very
unpromising beginning there arose a kind of friendship between the two
men. Horatio Paget had for some time been in need of a clever tool; and
in the young man whose cool insolence rose superior to his own dignity
he perceived the very individual whom he had long been seeking. The
young man who was unabashed by the indignation of a scion of Nugents
and Cromies and Pagets must be utterly impervious to the sense of awe;
and it was just such an impervious young man that the Captain wanted as
his coadjutor. Thus arose the alliance, which grew stronger every day,
until Valentine took up his abode under the roof of his employer and
patron, and made himself more thoroughly at home there than the
unwelcome daughter of the house.

The history of Valentine Hawkehurst's past existence was tolerably well
known to the Captain; but the only history of the young man's early
life ever heard by Diana was rather vague and fragmentary. She
discovered, little by little, that he was the son of a spendthrift
_litterateur_, who had passed the greater part of his career within the
rules of the King's Bench; that he had run away from home at the age of
fifteen, and had tried his fortune in all those professions which
require no educational ordeal, and which seem to offer themselves
invitingly to the scapegrace and adventurer. At fifteen Valentine
Hawkehurst had been errand-boy in a newspaper office; at seventeen a
penny-a-liner, whose flimsy was pretty sure of admission in the
lower class of Sunday papers. In the course of a very brief career
he had been a provincial actor, a _manege_ rider in a circus, a
billiard-marker, and a betting agent. It was after having exhausted
these liberal professions that he encountered Captain Paget.

Such was the man whom Horatio Paget admitted to companionship with his
only daughter. It can scarcely be pleaded in excuse for the Captain
that he might have admitted a worse man than Valentine Hawkehurst to
his family circle, for the Captain had never taken the trouble to sound
the depths of his coadjutor's nature. There is nothing so short-sighted
as selfishness; and beyond the narrow circle immediately surrounding
himself, there was no man more blind than Horatio Paget.

* * * * *

It was dusk when Diana grew tired of the lonely pathways among the
hills, where the harmonies of a band stationed in the valley were
wafted in gusts of music by the fitful summer breeze. The loneliness of
the place soothed the girl's feverish spirits; and, seated in a little
classic temple upon the summit of a hill, she looked pensively downward
through the purple mists at the newly-lighted lamps twinkling faintly
in the valley.

"One does not feel the sting of one's shabbiness here," thought Miss
Paget: "the trees are all dressed alike. Nature makes no distinction.
It is only Fortune who treats her children unfairly."

The Captain's daughter walked slowly back to the little town in the
deepening dusk. The lodging occupied by Horatio Paget and his household
consisted of four roomy chambers on the second story of a big rambling
house. The rooms were meanly furnished, and decorated with the tawdry
ornamentation dear to the continental mind; but there were long wide
windows and an iron balcony, on which Diana Paget was often pleased to
sit.

She found the sitting-room dark and empty. No dinner had been prepared;
for on lucky days the Captain and his _protege_ were wont to dine at
the _table d'hote_ of one of the hotels, or to feast sumptuously _a la
carte_, while on unlucky days they did not dine at all. Diana found a
roll and some cream cheese in a roomy old cupboard that was flavoured
with mice; and after making a very indifferent meal in the dusky
chamber, she went out upon the balcony, and sat there looking down upon
the lighted town.

She had been sitting there for nearly an hour in the same attitude,
when the door of the sitting-room was opened, and a footstep sounded
behind her. She knew the step; and although she did not lift her head,
her eyes took a new brightness in the summer dusk, and the listless
grace of her attitude changed to a statuesque rigidity, though there
was no change in the attitude itself.

She did not stir till a hand was laid softly on her shoulder, and a
voice said,--"Diana!"

The speaker was Valentine Hawkehurst, the young man whose entrance to
the golden temple had been so closely watched by Captain Paget's
daughter.

She rose as he spoke, and turned to him. "You have been losing, I
suppose, Mr. Hawkehurst," she said, "or you would not have come home?"

"I am compelled to admit that you are right in your premise, Miss
Paget, and your deduction is scarcely worth discussion. I _have_ been
losing--confoundedly; and as they don't give credit at the board of
green cloth yonder, there was no excuse for my staying. Your father has
not been holding his own within the last hour or two; but when I left
the rooms he was going to the Hotel d'Orange with some French fellows
for a quiet game of _ecarte_. Our friend the Captain is a great card,
Miss Paget, and has a delightful talent for picking up distinguished
acquaintance."

There are few daughters who would have cared to hear a father spoken of
in this free-and-easy manner; but Diana Paget was quite unmoved. She
had resumed her old attitude, and sat looking towards the lighted
windows of the Kursaal, while Mr. Hawkehurst lounged against the angle
of the window with his hands in his pockets and a cigar in his mouth.

For three years Valentine Hawkehurst had lived in constant
companionship with the Captain's daughter; and in that time his manner
to her had undergone considerable variation. Of late it had been
something in the manner of an elder brother, whose fraternal breast is
impervious to the influence of a sister's loveliness or a sister's
fascination. If Diana Paget had been a snub-nosed young person with red
hair and white eyelashes, Mr. Hawkehurst could scarcely have treated
her with a more friendly indifference, a more brotherly familiarity.

Unhappily this line of conduct, which is perhaps the wisest and most
honourable plan that a man can pursue when he finds himself thrown into
a dangerously familiar association with a beautiful and unprotected
woman, is the very line of proceeding which a beautiful woman can never
bring herself to forgive. A chivalrous stiffness, a melancholy dignity,
a frozen frigidity, which suggest the fiery bubbling of the lava flood
beneath the icy surface,--these are delightful to the female mind. But
friendly indifference and fraternal cordiality constitute the worst
insult that can be offered to her beauty, the most bitter outrage upon
the majesty of her sex.

"I suppose it will be midnight before papa comes home, Mr. Hawkehurst,"
Diana said abruptly, when her companion had finished his cigar, and had
thrown the end of it over the balcony.

"Past midnight more likely, Miss Paget. May I ask how I have become Mr.
Hawkehurst all of a sudden, when for the last three years I have been
usually known as Valentine--or Val?"

The girl turned her head with a gesture in which the carelessness of
his own manner was imitated. She stole a rapid look at him as she
answered, "What does it matter whether I call you by one name or
another?"

"What does anything matter? I believe Mr. Toots was an unconscious
philosopher. There is nothing in the world of any consequence, except
money. Go and look at those poor devils yonder, and you will see what
that is worth," he cried, pointing to the lighted Kursaal; "there you
behold the one great truth of the universe in action. There is nothing
but money, and men are the slaves of money, and life is only another
name for the pursuit of money. Go and look at beauty yonder fading in
the light and heat; at youth that changes to age before your eyes; at
friendship which turns to hate when the chances of the game are with my
friend and against me. The Kursaal is the world in little, Diana; and
this great globe of ours is nothing but a gigantic gaming-table--a
mighty temple for the worship of the golden calf."

"Why do you imitate those people yonder, if you despise them so
heartily?"

"Because I am like them and of them. I tell you that money is the
beginning and end of all things. Why am I here, and why is my life made
up of baseness and lies? Because my father was an improvident
scoundrel, and did not leave me five hundred a year. I wonder what I
should have been like, by the bye, if I had been blest with five
hundred a year?"

"Honest and happy," answered the girl earnestly. She forgot her
simulated indifference, and looked at him with sad earnest eyes. He met
the glance, and the expression of his own face changed from its cynical
smile to a thoughtful sadness.

"Honest perhaps; and yet I almost doubt if anything under five thousand
a year would have kept me honest. Decidedly not happy; the men who can
be happy on five hundred a year are made of a duller stuff than the
clay which serves for a Hawkehurst."

"You talk about not being happy with five hundred a year!" Diana
exclaimed impatiently. "Surely any decent existence would be happiness
to you compared to the miserable life you lead,--the shameful, degraded
life which shuts you out of the society of respectable people and
reduces you to the level of a thief. If you had any pride, Valentine,
you would feel it as bitterly as I do."

"But I haven't any pride. As for my life,--well, I suppose it is
shameful and degraded, and I know that it's often miserable; but it
suits me better than jog-trot respectability, I can dine one day on
truffled turkey and champagne, another day upon bread and cheese and
small beer; but I couldn't eat beef and mutton always. That's what
kills people of my temperament. There are born scamps in the world,
Diana, and I am one of them. My name is Robert Macaire, and I was
created for the life I lead. Keep clear of me if you have any hankering
after better things; but don't try to change my nature, for it is
wasted labour."

"Valentine, it is so cruel of you to talk like that."

"Cruel to whom?"

"To--those--who care for you."

It was quite dark now; but even in the darkness Diana Paget's head
drooped a little as she said this. Mr. Hawkehurst laughed aloud.

"Those who care for me!" he cried; "no such people ever lived. My
father was a drunken scoundrel, who suffered his children to grow up
about him as he would have suffered a litter of puppies to sprawl upon
his hearth, only because there was less trouble in letting them lie
there than in kicking them out. My mother was a good woman in the
beginning, I know; but she must have been something more than a mortal
woman if she had not lost some of her goodness in twelve years of such
a life as she led with my father. I believe she was fond of me, poor
soul; but she died six months before I ran away from a lodging in the
Rules, which it is the bitterest irony to speak of as my home. Since
then I have been Robert Macaire, and have about as many friends as such
a man usually has."

"You can scarcely wonder if you have few friends," said Miss Paget,
"since there is no one in the world whom you love."

She watched him through the darkness after saying this, watched him
closely, though it was too dark for her to see the expression of his
face, and any emotion to which her words might have given rise could be
betrayed only by some gesture or change of attitude. She watched him in
vain, for he did not stir. But after a pause of some minutes he said
slowly,--

"Such a man as I cannot afford to love any one. What have I to offer to
the woman I might pretend to love? Truth, or honour, or honesty, or
constancy? Those are commodities I have never dealt in. If I know what
they are, and that I have never possessed them, it is about as much as
I do know of them. If I have any redeeming grace, Diana Paget, it lies
in the fact that I know what a worthless wretch I am. Your father
thinks he is a great man, a noble suffering creature, and that the
world has ill-used him. I know that I am a scoundrel, and that let my
fellow-men treat me as badly as they please, they can never give me
worse usage than I deserve. And am I a man to talk about love, or to
ask a woman to share my life? Good God, what a noble partner I should
offer her! what a happy existence I could assure her!"

"But if the woman loved you, she would only love you better for being
unfortunate."

"Yes, if she was very young and foolish and romantic. But don't you
think I should be a villain if I traded on her girlish folly? She would
love me for a year or two perhaps, and bear all the changes of my
temper; but the day would come when she would awake from her delusion,
and know that she had been cheated. She would see other women--less
gifted than herself, probably--and would see the market they had made
of their charms; would see them rich and honoured and happy, and would
stand aside in the muddy streets to be splashed by the dirt from their
carriage-wheels. And then she would consider the price for which she
had bartered her youth and her beauty, and would hate the man who had
cheated her. No, Diana, I am not such a villain as the world may think
me. I am down in the dirt myself, and I'm used to it. I won't drag a
woman into the gutter just because I may happen to love her."

There was a long silence after this--a silence during which Diana Paget
sat looking down at the twinkling lights of the Kursaal. Valentine
lighted a second cigar and smoked it out, still in silence. The clocks
struck eleven as he threw the end of his cigar away; a tiny, luminous
speck, which shot through the misty atmosphere below the balcony like a
falling star.

"I may as well go and see how your father is getting on yonder," he
said, as the spark of light vanished in the darkness below. "Good
night, Diana. Don't sit too long in the cold night air; and don't sit
up for your father--there's no knowing when he may be home."

The girl did not answer him. She listened to the shutting of the door
as it closed behind him, and then folded her arms upon the iron rail of
the balcony, laid her head upon them, and wept silently. Her life was
very dreary, and it seemed to her as if the last hope which had
sustained her against an unnatural despair had been taken away from her
to-night.

Twelve o'clock sounded with a feeble little _carillon_ from one of the
steeples, and still she sat with her head resting upon her folded arms.
Her eyes were quite dry by this time, for with her tears were very
rare, and the passion which occasioned them must needs be intense. The
night air grew chill and damp; but although she shivered now and then
beneath that creeping, penetrating cold which is peculiar to night air,
she did not stir from her place in the balcony till she was startled by
the opening of the door in the room behind her.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37