Henry Dunbar by M. E. Braddon

M >> M. E. Braddon >> Henry Dunbar

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The owner of the shop appeared, and looked sharply at his customer.

"Now, listen to me!" Joseph Wilmot said, slowly and deliberately. "I've
been down upon my luck for some time past, and I've just got a bit of
money. I've got it honestly, mind you; and I don't want to be questioned
by such a jackanapes as that shopboy of yours."

The languid youth folded his arms, and endeavoured to look ferocious in
his fiery indignation; but he drew a little way behind his master as he
did so.

The proprietor of the shop bowed and smiled.

"We shall be happy to wait upon you, sir," he said; "and I have no doubt
we shall be able to give you satisfaction. If my shopman has been
impertinent--"

"He has," interrupted Joseph; "but I don't want to make any palaver
about that. He's like the rest of the world, and he thinks if a man
wears a shabby coat, he must be a scoundrel; that's all. I forgive him."

The languid youth, very much in the background, and quite sheltered, by
his master, might have been heard murmuring faintly--

"Oh, indeed! Forgive, indeed! Do you really, now? Thank you for
nothing!" and other sentences of a derisive character.

"I want a complete rig-out," continued Joseph Wilmot; "a new suit of
clothes--hat, boots, umbrella, a carpet-bag, half-a-dozen shirts, brush
and comb, shaving tackle, and all the et-ceteras. Now, as you may be no
more inclined to trust me than that young whipper-snapper of yours, for
all you're so uncommon civil, I'll tell you what I'll do. I want this
beard of mine trimmed and altered. I'll go to a barber's and get that
done, and in the meantime you can make your mind easy about the
character of these gentlemen."

He handed the tradesman three of the Bank of England notes. The man
looked at them doubtfully.

"If you think they ain't genuine, send 'em round to one of your
neighbours, and get 'em changed," Joseph Wilmot said; "but be quick
about it. I shall be back here in half an hour."

He walked out of the shop, leaving the man still staring, with the three
notes in his hand.

The vagabond, with his hat slouched over his eyes, and big hands in his
pockets, strolled away from the High Street down to a barber's shop near
the docks.

Here he had his beard shaved off, his ragged moustache trimmed into the
most aristocratic shape, and his long, straggling grey hair cut and
arranged according to his own directions.

If he had been the vainest of men, bent on no higher object in life than
the embellishment of his person, he could not have been more particular
or more difficult to please.

When the barber had completed his work, Joseph Wilmot washed his face,
readjusted the hair upon his ample forehead, and looked at himself in a
little shaving-glass that hung against the wall.

So far as the man's head and face went, the transformation was perfect.
He was no longer a vagabond. He was a respectable, handsome-looking
gentleman, advanced in middle age. Not altogether
unaristocratic-looking.

The very expression of his face was altered. The defiant sneer was
changed into a haughty smile; the sullen scowl was now a thoughtful
frown.

Whether this change was natural to him, and merely brought about by the
alteration in his hair and beard, or whether it was an assumption of his
own, was only known to the man himself.

He put on his hat, still slouching the brim over his eyes, paid the
barber, and went away. He walked straight to the docks, and made
inquiries about the steamer _Electra_. She was not expected to arrive
until the next day, at the earliest. Having satisfied himself upon this
point, Joseph Wilmot went back to the outfitter's to choose his new
clothes.

This business occupied him for a long time; for in this he was as
difficult to please as he had been in the matter of his beard and hair.
No punctilious old bachelor, the best and brightest hours of whose life
had been devoted to the cares of the toilet, could have shown himself
more fastidious than this vagabond, who had been out-at-elbows for ten
years past, and who had worn a felon's dress for thirteen years at a
stretch in Norfolk Island.

But he evinced no bad taste in the selection of a costume. He chose no
gaudy colours, or flashily-cut vestments. On the contrary, the garb he
assumed was in perfect keeping with the style of his hair and moustache.
It was the dress of a middle-aged gentleman; fashionable, but
scrupulously simple, quiet alike in colour and in cut.

When his toilet was complete, from his twenty-one shilling hat to the
polished boots upon his well-shaped feet, he left the shady little
parlour in which he had changed his clothes, and came into the shop,
with a glove dangling loosely in one ungloved hand, and a cane in the
other.

The tradesman and his shopboy stared aghast.

"If that turn-out had cost you fifty pound, sir, instead of eighteen
pound, twelve, and elevenpence, it would be worth all the money to you;
for you look like a dook;" cried the tailor, with enthusiasm.

"I'm glad to hear it," Mr. Wilmot said, carelessly. He stood before the
cheval-glass, and twirled his moustache as he spoke, looking at himself
thoughtfully, with a smile upon his face. Then he took his change from
the tailor, counted it, and dropped the gold and silver into his
waistcoat-pocket.

The man's manner was as much altered as his person. He had entered the
shop at eight o'clock that morning a blackguard as well as a vagabond.
He left it now a gentleman; subdued in voice, easy and rather listless
in gait, haughty and self-possessed in tone.

"Oh, by the bye," he said, pausing upon the threshold of the door, "I'll
thank you to bundle all those old things of mine together into a sheet
of brown paper: tie them up tightly. I'll call for them after dark
to-night."

Having said this, very carelessly and indifferently, Mr. Wilmot left the
shop: but though he was now as well dressed and as gentlemanly-looking
as any man in Southampton, he turned into the first by-street, and
hurried away from the town to a lonely walk beside the water.

He walked along the shore until he came to a village near the river, and
about a couple of miles from Southampton. There he entered a low-roofed
little public-house, very quiet and unfrequented, ordered some brandy
and cold water of a girl who was seated at work behind the bar, and then
went into the parlour,--a low-ceilinged, wainscoted room, whose walls
were adorned here and there with auctioneers' announcements of coming
sales of live and dead stock, farm-houses, and farming implements,
interspersed with railway time-tables.

Mr. Joseph Wilmot had this room all to himself. He seated himself by the
open window, took up a country newspaper, and tried to read.

But that attempt was a most dismal failure. In the first place, there
was very little in the paper to read: and in the second, Joseph Wilmot
would have been unable to chain his attention to the page upon which his
eyes were fixed, though all the wisdom of the world had been
concentrated upon that one sheet of printed paper.

No; he could not read. He could only think. He could only think of this
strange chance which had come to him after five-and-thirty weary years.
He could only think of his probable meeting with Henry Dunbar.

He entered the village public-house at a little after one, and he stayed
there throughout the rest of the day, drinking brandy-and-water--not
immoderately: he was very careful and watchful of himself in that
matter--taking a snack of bread and cold meat for his dinner, and
thinking of Henry Dunbar.

In that he never varied, let him do what he would.

In the railway carriage, at the Basingstoke inn, at the station, through
the long sleepless night at the public-house by the water, in the
tailor's shop, even when he was most occupied by the choice of his
clothes, he had still thought of Henry Dunbar. From the time of his
meeting the old clerk at the Waterloo terminus, he had never ceased to
think of Henry Dunbar.

He never once thought of his brother: not so much even as to wonder
whether the stroke had been fatal,--whether the old man was yet dead. He
never thought of his daughter, or the anguish his prolonged absence
might cause her to suffer.

He had put away the past as if it had never been, and concentrated all
the force of his mind upon the one idea which possessed him like some
strong demon.

Sometimes a sudden terror seized him.

What if Henry Dunbar should have died upon the passage home? What if the
_Electra_ should bring nothing but a sealed leaden coffin, and a corpse
embalmed in spirit?

No, he could not imagine that! Fate, darkly brooding over these two men
throughout half a long lifetime, had held them asunder for
five-and-thirty years, to fling them mysteriously together now.

It seemed as if the old clerk's philosophy was not so very unsound,
after all. Sooner or later,--sooner or later,--the day of retribution
comes.

When it grew dusk, Joseph Wilmot left the little inn, and walked back to
Southampton. It was quite dark when he entered the High Street, and the
tailor's shop was closing.

"I thought you'd forgotten your parcel, sir," the man said; "I've had it
ready for you ever so long. Can I send it any where for you?"

"No, thank you; I'll take it myself."

With the brown-paper parcel--which was a very bulky one--under his arm,
Joseph Wilmot left the tailor's shop, and walked down to an open pier or
quay abutting on the water.

On his way along the river shore, between the village public-house and
the town of Southampton, he had filled his pockets with stones. He knelt
down now by the edge of the pier, and tied all these stones together in
an old cotton pocket-handkerchief.

When he had done this, carefully, compactly, and quickly, like a man
accustomed to do all sorts of strange things, he tied the handkerchief
full of stones to the whipcord that bound the brown-paper parcel, and
dropped both packages into the water.

The spot which he had chosen for this purpose was at the extreme end of
the pier, where the water was deepest.

He had done all this cautiously, taking care to make sure every now and
then that he was unobserved.

And when the parcel had sunk, he watched the widening circle upon the
surface of the water till it died away.

"So much for James Wentworth, and the clothes he wore," he said to
himself as he walked away.

He slept that night at the village inn where he had spent the day, and
the next morning walked into Southampton.

It was a little after nine o'clock when he entered the docks, and the
_Electra_ was visible to the naked eye, steaming through the blue water
under a cloudless summer sky.

CHAPTER VI.

CLEMENT AUSTIN'S DIARY.

"To-day I close a volume of the rough, careless, imperfect record which
I have kept of my life. As I run my fingers through the pages of the
limp morocco-covered volume, I almost wonder at my wasted labour;--the
random notes, jotted down now and then, sometimes with long intervals
between their dates, make such a mass of worthless literature. This
diary-keeping is a very foolish habit, after all. Why do I keep this
record of a most commonplace existence? For my own edification and
improvement? Scarcely, since I very rarely read these uninteresting
entries; and I very much doubt if posterity will care to know that I
went to the office at ten o'clock on Wednesday morning; that I couldn't
get a seat in the omnibus, and was compelled to take a Hansom, which
cost me two shillings; that I dined _tête-à-tête_ with my mother, and
finished the third volume of Carlyle's 'French Revolution' in the course
of the evening. _Is_ there any use in such a journal as mine? Will the
celebrated New Zealander, that is to be, discover the volumes amidst the
ruins of Clapham? and shall I be quoted as the Pepys of the nineteenth
century? But then I am by no means as racy as that worldly-minded little
government clerk; or perhaps it may be that the time in which I live
wants the spice and seasoning of that golden age of rascality in which
my Lady Castlemain's white petticoats were to be seen flaunting in the
wind by any frivolous-minded lounger who chose to take notes about those
garments.

"After all, it is a silly, old-fogeyish habit, this of diary-keeping;
and I think the renowned Pepys himself was only a bachelor spoiled. Just
now, however, I have something more than cab-drives, lost omnibuses, and
the perusal of a favourite book to jot down, inasmuch as my mother and
myself have lately had all our accustomed habits, in a manner,
disorganized by the advent of a lady.

"She is a very young lady, being, in point of fact, still at a remote
distance from an epoch to which she appears to look forward as a grand
and enviable period of existence. She has not yet entered what she calls
her 'teens,' and two years must elapse before she can enter them, as she
is only eleven years old. She is the only daughter of my only sister,
Marian Lester, and has been newly imported from Sydney, where my sister
Marian and her husband have been settled for the last twelve years. Miss
Elizabeth Lester became a member of our family upon the first of July,
and has since that time continued to make herself quite at home with my
mother and myself. She is rather a pretty little girl, with very auburn
plaits hanging in loops at the back of her head. (Will the New Zealander
and his countrymen care to know the mysteries of juvenile coiffures in
the nineteenth century?) She is a very good little girl, and my mother
adores her. As for myself, I am only gradually growing resigned to the
fact that I am three-and-thirty years of age, and the uncle of a
bouncing niece, who plays variations upon 'Non più mesta.'

"And 'Non più mesta' brings me to another strange figure in the narrow
circle of my acquaintance; a figure that had no place in the volume
which I have just closed, but which, in the six weeks' interval between
my last record and that which I begin to-day, has become almost as
familiar as the oldest friends of my youth. 'Non più mesta'--I hear my
niece strumming the notes I know so well in the parlour below my room,
as I write these lines, and the sound of the melody brings before me the
image of a sweet pale face and dove-like brown eyes.

"I never fully realized the number and extent of feminine requirements
until a hack cab deposited my niece and her deal travelling-cases at our
hall-door. Miss Elizabeth Lester seemed to want everything that it was
possible for the human mind to imagine or desire. She had grown during
the homeward voyage; her frocks were too short, her boots were too
small, her bonnets tumbled off her head and hung forlornly at the back
of her neck. She wanted parasols and hair-brushes, frilled and
furbelowed mysteries of muslin and lace, copybooks, penholders, and
pomatum, a backboard and a pair of gloves, drawing-pencils, dumb-bells,
geological specimens for the illustration of her studies, and a hundred
other items, whose very names are as a strange language to my masculine
comprehension; and, last of all, she wanted a musical governess. The
little girl was supposed to be very tolerably advanced in her study of
the piano, and my sister was anxious that she should continue that study
under the superintendence of a duly-qualified instructress, whose terms
should be moderate. My sister Marian underlined this last condition. The
buying and making of the new frocks and muslin furbelows seemed almost
to absorb my mother's mind, and she was fain to delegate to me the duty
of finding a musical governess for Miss Lester.

"I began my task in the simplest possible way by consulting the daily
newspapers, where I found so many advertisements emanating from ladies
who declared themselves proficients in the art of music, that I was
confused and embarrassed by the wealth of my resources: but I took the
ladies singly, and called upon them in the pleasant summer evenings
after office hours, sometimes with my mother, sometimes alone.

"It may be that the seal of old-bachelorhood is already set upon me, and
that I am that odious and hyper-sensitive creature commonly called a
'fidget;' but somehow I could not find a governess whom I really felt
inclined to choose for my little Lizzie. Some of the ladies were elderly
and stern; others were young and frivolous; some of them were uncertain
as to the distribution of the letter _h_. One young lady declared that
she was fonder of music than anything in the world. Some were a great
deal too enthusiastic, and were prepared to adore my little niece at a
moment's notice. Many, who seemed otherwise eligible, demanded a higher
rate of remuneration than we were prepared to give. So, somehow or
other, the business languished, and after the researches of a week we
found ourselves no nearer a decision than when first I looked at the
advertisements in the _Times_ supplement.

"Had our resources been reduced, we should most likely have been much
easier to please; but my mother said, that as there were so many people
to be had, we should do well to deliberate before we came to any
decision. So it happened that, when I went out for a walk one evening,
at the end of the second week in July, Miss Lester was still without a
governess. She was still without a governess: but I was tired of
catechizing the fair advertisers as to their qualifications, and went
out on this particular evening for a solitary ramble amongst the quiet
Surrey suburbs, in any lonely lanes or scraps of common-land where the
speculating builder had not yet set his hateful foot. It was a lovely
evening; and I, who am so much a Cockney as to believe that a London
sunset is one of the grandest spectacles in the universe, set my face
towards the yellow light in the west, and walked across Wandsworth
Common, where faint wreaths of purple mist were rising from the hollows,
and a deserted donkey was breaking the twilight stillness with a
plaintive braying. Wandsworth Common was as lonely this evening as a
patch of sand in the centre of Africa; and being something of a
day-dreamer, I liked the place because of its stillness and solitude.

"Something of a dreamer: and yet I had so little to dream about. My
thoughts were pleasant, as I walked across the common in the sunset; and
yet, looking back now, I wonder what I thought of, and what image there
was in my mind that could make my fancies pleasant to me. I know what I
thought of, as I went home in the dim light of the newly-risen moon, the
pale crescent that glimmered high in a cloudless heaven.

"I went into the little town of Wandsworth, the queer old-fashioned High
Street, the dear old street, which seems to me like a town in a Dutch
picture, where all the tints are of a sombre brown, yet in which there
is, nevertheless, so much light and warmth. The lights were beginning to
twinkle here and there in the windows; and upon this July evening there
seemed to be flowers blooming in every casement. I loitered idly through
the street, staring at the shop-windows, in utter absence of mind while
I thought--

"What could I have thought of that evening? and how was it that I did
not think the world blank and empty?

"While I was looking idly in at one of those shop-windows--it was a
fancy-shop and stationer's--a kind of bazaar, in its humble way--my eye
was attracted by the word 'Music;' and on a little card hung in the
window I read that a lady would be happy to give lessons on the
piano-forte, at the residences of her pupils, or at her own residence,
on very moderate terms. The word 'very' was underscored. I thought it
had a pitiful look somehow, that underscoring of the adverb, and seemed
almost an appeal for employment. The inscription on the card was in a
woman's hand, and a very pretty hand--elegant but not illegible, firm
and yet feminine. I was in a very idle frame of mind, ready to be driven
by any chance wind; and I thought I might just as well turn my evening
walk to some account by calling upon the proprietress of the card. She
was not likely to suit my ideas of perfection, any more than the other
ladies I had seen; but I should at least be able to return home with the
consciousness of having made another effort to find an instructress for
my niece.

"The address on the card was, 'No. 3, Godolphin Cottages.' I asked the
first person I met to direct me to Godolphin Cottages, and was told to
take the second turning on my right. The second turning on my right took
me into a kind of lane or by-road, where there were some old-fashioned,
semi-detached cottages, sheltered by a row of sycamores, and shut in by
wooden palings. I opened the low gate before the third cottage, and went
into the garden,--a primly-kept little garden, with a grass-plat and
miniature gravel-walks, and with a grotto of shells and moss and craggy
blocks of stone in a corner. Under a laburnum-tree there was a green
rustic bench; and here I found a young lady sitting reading by the dying
light. She started at the sound of my footsteps on the crisp gravel, and
rose, blushing like one of the cabbage-roses that grew near her. The
blush was all the more becoming to her inasmuch as she was naturally
very pale. I saw this almost immediately, for the bright colour faded
out of her face while I was speaking to her.

"'I have come to inquire for a lady who teaches music,' I said; 'I saw a
card, just now, in the High Street, and as I am searching for an
instructress for my little niece, I took the opportunity of calling. But
I fear I have chosen an inconvenient time for my visit.'

"I scarcely know why I made this apology, since I had omitted to
apologize to the other ladies, on whom I had ventured to intrude at
abnormal hours. I fear that I was weak enough to feel bewildered by the
pensive loveliness of the face at which I looked, and that my confidence
ebbed away under the influence of those grave hazel eyes.

"The face is so beautiful,--as beautiful now that I have learned the
trick of every feature, though even now I cannot learn all the varying
changes of expression which make it ever new to me, as it was that
evening when it beamed on me for the first time. Shall I describe
her,--the woman whom I have only known four weeks, and who seems to fill
all the universe when I think of her?--and when do I not think of her?
Shall I describe her for the New Zealander, when the best description
must fall so far below the bright reality, and when the very act of
reducing her beauty into hard commonplace words seems in some manner a
sacrilege against the sanctity of that beauty? Yes, I will describe her;
not for the sake of the New Zealander, who may have new and
extraordinary ideas as to female loveliness, and may require a blue nose
or pea-green tresses in the lady he elects as the only type of beautiful
womanhood. I will describe her because it is sweet to me to dwell upon
her image, and to translate that dear image, no matter how poorly, into
words. Were I a painter, I should be like Claude Melnotte, and paint no
face but hers. Were I a poet, I should cover reams of paper with wild
rhapsodies about her beauty. Being only a cashier in a bank, I can do
nothing but enshrine her in the commonplace pages of my diary.

"I have said that she is pale. Hers is that ivory pallor which sometimes
accompanies hazel eyes and hazel-brown hair. Her eyes are of that rare
hazel, that soft golden brown, so rarely seen, so beautiful wherever
they are seen. These eyes are unvarying in their colour; it is only the
expression of them that varies with every emotion, but in repose they
have a mournful earnestness in their look, a pensive gravity that seems
to tell of a life in which there has been much shadow. The hair, parted
above the most beautiful brow I ever looked upon, is of exactly the same
colour as the eyes, and has a natural ripple in it. For the rest of the
features I must refer my New Zealander to the pictures of the old
Italian masters--of which I trust he may retain a handsome
collection;--for only on the canvases of Signori Raffaello Sanzio
d'Urbino, Titian, and the pupils who emulated them, will he find that
exquisite harmony, that purity of form and tender softness of outline,
which I beheld that summer evening in the features of Margaret
Wentworth.

"Margaret Wentworth,--that is her name. She told it me presently, when I
had explained to her, in some awkward vague manner, who I was, and how
it was I wanted to engage her services. Throughout that interview, I
think I must have been intoxicated by her presence, as by some subtle
and mysterious influence, stronger than the fumes of opium, or the juice
of lotus flowers. I only know that after ten minutes' conversation,
during which she was perfectly self-possessed, I opened the little
garden-gate again, very much embarrassed by the latch on one hand, and
my hat on the other, and went back out of that little paradise of twenty
feet square into the dusty lane.

"I went home in triumph to my mother, and told her that I had succeeded
at last in engaging a lady who was in every way suitable, and that she
was coming the following morning at eleven o'clock to give her first
lesson. But I was somewhat embarrassed when my mother asked if I had
heard the lady play; if I had inquired her terms; if I had asked for
references as to respectability, capability, and so forth.

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