BELGRAVIA

MARCH 1868

DEAD-SEA FRUIT

A Nobel

BY THE AUTHOR OF "LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET," ETC.

CHAPTER XXIII. BETWEEN EDEN AND EXILE

N the last night of Eustace Thorburn's abode in his uncle's lodgings the two men sat even longer than ordinary talking, the elder watching the face of the younger with more than usual tenderness.

"I daresay the future seems a little dark to you, dear lad," he began softly, after they had talked of all things except that which was nearest to the hearts of both. "I won't try to comfort you with the usual philosophical truisms about the foolishness of youthful fancies. I won't preach the vanitas vanitatum of worn-out middle age to hoping, dreaming, despairing youth. Keep the dream, boy, even if there is a bitter flavour of despair mingled with the sweetness of it. Keep the dream. Such dreams are the guardian angels of youth, the patron saints of manhood. I have my patron saint, and I pray to her sometimes, and confess my sins to her, and receive absolution, and am comforted. To my eyes Mademoiselle de Bergerac would most likely be only a pretty young person with blue eyes-I think you said blue eyes -and a white muslin frock. But if she seem an angel to you, enthrone her in your heart of hearts. A man is all the better for carrying an angel about with him, even if it be only an angel of his own making."

And then, after a pause, Daniel went on. "About your future career as a man of letters I think you need have no misgiving. Those little verses which you submitted to me in such fear and trembling have made their mark. They have gone straight to the hearts of the people. The rising generation always elects its own poet. The students of the Quartier Latin knew Alfred de Musset's verses by heart, and spouted and sang them, before they were reprinted from the magazine where they first appeared. M. de Lamartine thought very small things

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of the youngster, just as Byron thought very small things of Monsieur Lamartine himself; for since the world of letters began, the public has had a way of choosing its own favourites, and has been ever indulgent to faithful servants. No, Eustace, I have no fear for your future. When you leave Greenlands, it shall not be for the smoke and riot of London. You must take a lodging at some pretty village by the river, and write your book or your poem as your guardian angel directs; and if your heart is broken, and you put it into your book, so much the better. Your heart can be patched up again by and by; and in the mean time the public likes a book with a genuine broken heart in it. Byron used to break his heart once a year, and send Murray the pieces."

"I could not trade upon my sorrows as Byron did.”

"Because you are not Byron. He did not trade upon his sorrows. That is a true saying of Owen Meredith's, 'Genius is greater than man. Genius does what it must, and talent does what it can.' I quote from memory. Byron's was genius-the real fire; the supernatural force that is given to a man to use, but seldom given to him to govern. Byron was the Ajax of poets,-abused, distraught, roaring like a bull in his mighty pain,-and a demigod."

After this there came a long and animated discourse upon Byron and his successors. Of all things Eustace loved best to talk of poetry and poets, from Homer to Tennyson. What mortal creature does not like to talk "shop"? And then, when the two men had wearied themselves with the pleasant excitement of debate, there was a silence of some minutes, which was broken abruptly by Daniel Mayfield.

"I made a discovery the other day, Eustace," he said. "I have had half a mind to tell you nothing about it; but perhaps it is as well you should be told."

"What kind of discovery, uncle Dan ?"

"A discovery about-well-about the author of Dion." "What? Have you found out who he is?"

"No," replied Daniel very gravely; "I am no wiser as to his name and status; but I have found out that he was a villain, and is a villain still if he lives, I daresay; for I don't think so base a wretch as that would be likely to mend with age. I doubt if it will ever be any good to you to know more of your father than you knew when your poor mother died; but you have wished to be wiser, and I have humoured your wish. Do you remember what I said to you after I read Dion?” "I remember every word."

"I told you then that the author of that book must have been the kind of man to fascinate such a girl as your mother. I have met with another book written by the same man, and have read it as carefully as I read the first. Eustace, I believe that man was your father."

"You-you believe that ?"

"Yes," returned Daniel earnestly. "There is a picture of your

mother's girlhood in the book I have been reading, a likeness too close to be accidental."

"Let me see it, uncle Dan! let me see that book! Let me only assure myself that the man who wrote it was-"

"What would you do if you were sure of that ?”

"I would find him—or his grave."

The young man had risen, and stood before his kinsman breathless, eager, ready to confront the universe in his passionate desire to avenge the wrongs of the dead. Standing thus, he looked like a sculptor's ideal image of righteous anger.

Daniel Mayfield looked up at him with a sad smile.

"And then," he said; "and then-what then? If you find a grave, will you trample or spit upon it? Surely it would be but a sorry vengeance to insult the dead. And if you find this man in the flesh, what will you do to him? Your face tells me you would like to kill him. You look like Orestes newly come from the temple of the Eumenides, charged with his dreadful duty. But Orestes did not seem any the happier for having killed his mother. The primitive instinct must always be-kill; the thirst for blood. It is only human nature to want to kill the man who has offended you, and the modern horsewhipping is a feeble substitute for the exploded duel. But then Christianity comes in with its law of sufferance and submission. No, dear lad, I cannot believe that any good could come of a meeting between you and your father, unless—”

"Unless what, uncle Dan?" asked Eustace, when the other paused. "Unless, by his affection for you, he could atone for his desertion of your mother."

"Atone for that!" cried the young man. "Do you think any favours that man could bestow on me would blot out the remembrance of her wrongs? Do you think I could be so mean as to sell my heritage of vengeance for some mess of pottage in the shape of worldly advantage? No, uncle Dan; she is dead, and there is no such thing as atonement. It is too late-too late. While she lived she was ready to forgive; nature made her to love and pardon. If he had come then, and she had forgiven, I could have forgiven for her with her. But she is gone. That man permitted her to die alone; and if I could forgive him the wrongs that blighted her life, I could not forgive him that last wrong-her lonely deathbed. And do you think he cares for my love or my forgiveness? The man who could leave my mother to her lonely fate for twenty years is not likely to be suddenly possessed with affection for her son."

"The day may come when you will be a son whom any father would be proud to claim."

"Let him claim me in that day, if he dare," answered Eustace with kindling eyes. "I belong to the dead.-And now, uncle Dan, tell me what this book is, and how you came by it."

“That part of the business is commonplace enough. I told you I knew a handy scrub of a man good at picking up any out-of-the-way book I may happen to want. I commissioned this man to hunt the second-hand booksellers for a copy of Dion-strange that neither you nor I ever speculated on the author of Dion having written other books. My man hunted without result as regards Dion; but one morning he came to me with a couple of thin volumes, bound in gray paper-covered boards, and looking very dingy in comparison with the gaudy cloth and gilt lettering that obtains nowadays. He had hunted in vain for Dion, he informed me; but in the course of his search he had come across this other book by the author of Dion. The book is yonder, in that parcel.-No," cried Daniel, pushing the young man gently aside; "you shall not look at the book while you are with me. That is a subject I do not care to talk about. Carry the parcel down to Greenlands with you, and read the book quietly-at night, in your own room. You will know little more of your father after you have read it than you know now. The book is a study in morbid anatomy; it is the revelation of an utterly selfish nature, and the writer is an unconscious moralist. Vanitas vanitatum is the unwritten refrain of his song."

"Was the book a success, like Dion?"

"It was not. I have taken the trouble to refer to the literary journals for the year in which this second book was published. In some it is passed over with a few cold words of approval, in others unnoticed; in one it forms the subject of what French critics call a sanglant article. The book wants all that is best in Dion-the freshness, the youth, the young romance that plays at bo-peep behind a mask of world-weariness. There is an interval of ten years between the two books. In the second the writer is really blasé. He is ten times more egotistical, more contemptuous and suspicious of his fellowmen-more everything that is bad. He has ceased to enjoy anything in life. He has no enjoyment even in his writing; indeed, he writes with the air of a man who knows he will only be read by inferior creatures, and one expects him at every moment to throw down the pen. One cannot read the book without yawning, for one feels that the man yawned while he was writing it."

"And in this cold epitome of his selfish life he writes of my mother?"

"Yes."

"And throughout the book you believe it is of himself be writes?" "Of that I am certain. A man has a tone in writing of himself that he never has when his subject is only some figment of the brain. There is a passion, an acrimony, in genuine autobiography not to be mistaken. I do not say that this book is a plain narration of facts. There is no doubt considerable dressing-up and disguising of events; but the undercurrent of reality is obvious to the least experienced reader. There is one point that puzzles-I must own perplexes-me

beyond measure. It was perhaps a mistaken delicacy which induced me to respect your mother's silence about all things relating to that bad man. If I had found this book during her lifetime, I should have broached this painful subject, and compelled her to tell me all."

"But why-why?" Eustace asked with breathless eagerness. "What had you to learn more than those letters tell us that he was a villain without heart or conscience, and that she was young and guileless, and loved him only too dearly?"

"There are passages in that book which have made me think that the relations between this man and my sister were something more than we have believed."

"You think that he married my mother?"

"I am disposed to think so. But the marriage--if it took placecould hardly have been an ordinary marriage. His allusions to it are very vague; but it seems as if, whatever the ceremonial was, its legal importance was only known to this man himself."

"Why do you think this?"

"From certain faint hints here and there. If she only knew her legal hold upon me,' he writes; if she were a woman of the world and knew her power.' There is some hidden meaning in these half sentences; I know not what. In a record of mixed reality and fiction, who is to say where reality ends and fiction begins? But you will read the book, and then judge for yourself."

Eustace Thorburn went back to Greenlands, depressed, but not utterly disheartened. He knew that his uncle had urged upon him the only honourable course open to him in his relations with M. de Bergerac. It would have been sweet to him to live on for ever in that friendly companionship with the bright and gentle creature who had welcomed him to her home with such simple kindness. And now reflection had convinced him that it was necessary to resign the dear privilege of this innocent companionship, he felt more keenly than he had felt hitherto all the sweetness of his life at Greenlands, and the dreariness of any life that could come after it. His ambition would be left to him; that wonderful, radiant high-road which every young man believes in—the via sacra that leads straight across the untrodden wilderness of the future to the Temple of Fame-would still await the coming of his eager feet. But even that sacred road would seem dreary and desolate if the pole-star of hope were darkened; or in plainer words, it must seem to him but a poor thing to make his mark in the world of letters, if he was not to be blest with Helen de Bergerac's love.

He returned to Greenlands by the same pathway which he had trodden just one year before, when he went a stranger to M. de Bergerac's house. Ah, how unutterably beautiful the Berkshire landscape seemed to him in its ripe, rich midsummer loveliness! High tangled