CHAPTER VIII.
PORTENDS A DEED OF VENGEANCE.
The difficulty of getting up the evidence to support a charge of conspiracy, in the absence of Mr. Williamson, and Lieutenant Somerton’s unwillingness to prosecute, saved Gibbs from one of the perils which threatened him; and the other case which Mr. Bales had against him also fell through. But the ex-swell was reminded by the Court that he had had a narrow escape, and that his escape was rather owing to a technicality in the law than to any doubt of his guilt.
Gibbs had been falling lower and lower, as our readers will have seen, since the night of his expulsion from the Ashford Club. Now and then Fortune’s lamp had blazed up for a moment, but only to flicker down again, and tempt him into lower depths of degradation. From bad to worse, from fashionable gambling to swindling, from cheating at cards to forgery, Gibbs had run the gauntlet of vice and immorality. From a Stock Exchange bear to a money-lender’s cad; from an advertising sharper to a begging-letter writer; from haunting clubs to frequenting hotels; from hotels to taverns; from taverns to gin-shops; from gin-shops to the lowest night-houses, Shuffleton Gibbs had become a mean, shabby, out-of-elbows, unshaven outcast of society, who had twice been within a gaol, and seemed likely to die in the gutter.
There is no exaggeration in this rapid downward career—it is a common occurrence. We are not romancing, we are not sermonising, we do not believe in the Maine Law, we have no sympathy with trumpet-and-drum teetotal demagogues; but we are none the less sure in our belief that the first step aside from the straight path, unless at once retraced, will lead to misery if not to ruin, and that the man or woman who descends to “neat gin” is beyond human redemption. There is hope in beer, in wine, even in brandy; but the gin-drinker swallows a devilish elixir that destroys him body and soul. There is something heroic in brandy, something noble, the smack of the grape is there, the origin of the liquor has a glory in it; in gin there is debasement; the juniper berry has no classic history; who does not shudder, too, at the compound which the habitual gin tippler consumes—the fumetacious spirit, imbued with turpentine? Ugh! Whilst brandy fires the soul of the hero, the gin of the London stew stimulates the morbid passions of the thief and the murderer!
Shuffleton Gibbs had come down to gin and fog, to gin and darkness, to gin and the reeking night air; he was the habitué of the lowest night-houses, a shivering miserable wretch, and all the more dangerous to the man whom he hated with the low grovelling murderous hate of raw gin and poverty.
We have told the reader how Gibbs had applied for assistance to his early friend, Richard Tallant, and how he had been discarded and disowned. He made another effort still, a last effort, the effort of a miserable hungry beggar, in whose heart every spark of pride and honour has been drowned in juniper juice and turpentine.
“I have done with you, sir,” said the managing director of the Meter Works, “you are an impostor; I never saw you before.”
“Not at Oxford,” said the shivering beggar, “not when somebody wrote an epigram on the name of Tallant?”
“Never! This will be my answer always.”
“Not at Westminster, at the Ashford, at Madame ——”
“Never, sir!” exclaimed Richard, stopping Gibbs in his enumeration of the places on the highway of infamy where they had supped together. “I once knew a scoundrel who led astray a wealthy merchant’s son and broke the father’s heart; you are something like that aristocratic sneak, but you are not he. The man I mean was a swell, wore light kid gloves, and splendid shirts. They did say he wore stays, and thought himself a woman killer; you are not that man, but some blear-eyed, shambling vagabond who would impose upon a gentleman in order that he may give you a night’s lodging in the station house.”
“You infernal damned scoundrel,” said Gibbs, rushing towards the cool satirical friend of former days; “you miserable mushroom huxter!”
Richard Tallant was by far the strongest man of the two, and he felled Gibbs to the ground with ease.
“Now, shall I ring the bell and have you pitched into the street, or will you get up and go home to dinner, or go to your club and have devilled chops and champagne—eh?”
Gibbs gathered himself together and stood before his victor, clenching his hands and teeth, and trembling with passion.
“I will go,” he said, hissing out the words as if they scorched him. “The cat will mew; the dog will have his day.”
Mr. Tallant rang the bell. A servant came on the instant.
“Show this fellow to the door; if ever he presumes to make his appearance here again thrust him into the street and give him in charge of the police.”
“Yes, sir,” said the man, “this way.”
Gibbs followed his guide muttering, and nervously clutching his fingers.
“Now then, old ragamuffin,” said the servant when they were in the hall, “hoff yer go.”
Hunger, as Zimmermann says, is the mother of impatience and anger, and never had mother a more worthy son than Shuffleton Gibbs. It was hunger which had driven him to make that third application to his friend; hunger and thirst; hunger for money as much as hunger for food. He had neither money nor credit, even in the stews, where he had exhausted both, when he made this last appeal to Richard Tallant. But he got money somehow that night, and he swore an awful oath that he would wreak a terrible revenge on the head of this vile scoundrel. The red-eyed, low-browed, crouching gin drinkers who sat with him at the midnight orgie—even they noticed the satanic malignity of Gibbs’s countenance, as it worked and writhed under a passion too deep for words; they knew that, whatever it might import, that awful oath would not be broken. They fairly clanked their glasses and knocked their skinny knuckles upon the table to see Gibbs so much excited, and the women, with witch-like grimaces, pledged his “health” and wished him “luck.”
There is generally a weak point somewhere in the schemes of men who set right and virtue at naught, and who endeavour to build up wealth and fame upon false pretences. Religious sceptics will direct your attention to instances of undeserved poverty and sufferings borne through a whole lifetime; will show you persons dragging out wretched lives of penury and want, and prove to you that they are good, honest, honourable people. As companion pictures, they will show you men of wealth and station living luxuriously, and rejoicing in the highest state of worldly happiness. And then they ask you what sort of a sermon or essay you can write upon the text, “God is love.” But the sceptic-critic has little or nothing to say about real happiness, and how that is divided amongst the human family. If he had, perhaps he might puzzle a good many by pointing to the colliery districts, the factories, or the nail country, and showing you the hard, bitter life to which thousands of children are born daily. What a blessed thing to some of these people is the future, founded on true Christian faith! But our critic of the ways of Providence does not tell you of the miseries of keeping up appearances which are behind some of those marks of wealth; and he does not tell you how scores of the prosperous ones to whom he points come to grief at last, as they deserve. He fixes them before you in their full career of success, but he does not show you their disappointed hopes, their unfulfilled ambition, their social cuts and wounds, the grievances of their women, the social failures of their sons and daughters; and, what is more, he does not show you the end of the men whom he holds up as prosperous, happy, luxurious, revelling, wealthy villains.
Depend upon it, men such as Richard Tallant, who have trampled upon honour and honesty, and above all, upon parental kindness (however mistaken that kindness may have been), are punished in this world below, whatever may be their lot in that which is to come.
The weakest point in Richard Tallant’s policy was the want of a course of conciliation towards Shuffleton Gibbs. Fate would, no doubt, have met him with a just retribution in some other way had he escaped the result of this mistake; but it is no part of our business to consider what might have been, we who are considering the facts of Richard Tallant’s career; and as it has not been our purpose to be mysterious in this simple narration, we do not hesitate to tell you that Richard Tallant sealed his destiny when he resealed that letter of his former companion,—the last abandoned representative of a fallen line of gentlemen.
He little knew how often he was accompanied after this by a shadow more than his own. Once or twice, thinking he was being watched, he had turned round suddenly in the London streets to see a figure disappear as suddenly in some dark entry, or round an adjacent corner. He thought this was fancy at first; but finally beginning to fear, he armed himself. He had never thought of Shuffleton Gibbs at these times. A superstitious dread took possession of him at the outset, thoughts of his dead father haunted him, and occasionally sent him home hot, and feverish, and nervous. Latterly he rarely went out on foot; but still a mysterious figure occasionally flitted by as he alighted from his carriage. Sometimes it seemed as if an arm were upraised. That same figure would stand now and then in front of the great house where Mr. Tallant resided, and contemplate the lighted windows, and then disappear by crooked unfrequented ways, up dark alleys, along neglected streets, away city-wards, until it entered a dirty gin-shop or some wretched lodging-house, where it would assume the appearance of Shuffleton Gibbs, but sufficiently changed in feature to render disguise unnecessary.
Weird, restless, sunken eyes, sharp features, a nervous twitching of the mouth, and a continual watchfulness, like that of a man charged with some desperate mission of blood; it was a miserable wreck tossed about on the dark sea of criminal London without sail or rudder, bound for no port, without a name, without papers; and yet with a compass pointing its trembling finger unerringly in one direction, where the signal lights burnt red and murky on a dark and dreadful shore.